COOKIES - 1990s1990s are an indie rock three-piece band from Glasgow. They were signed to Rough Trade when they were spotted at only their sixth gig - a first for Rough Trade. Lead singer Jackie (nee John) McKeown and bassist, Jamie McMorrow, were the founding members of Scottish Indie band The Yummy Fur. The line-up of the Yummy Fur over the years changed on numerous occasions. At one point, both Franz Ferdinand singer Alex Kapranos and drummer Paul Thomson were members of the group. The 1990s drummer, Michael McGaughrin, was also in Glasgow band V-Twin before the 1990s were formed. 1990s have supported Babyshambles and Franz Ferdinand, as well as releasing their debut single, "You Made Me Like It/Arcade Precinct" on limited edition vinyl. 1990s went on tour in October 2006 with The Long Blondes, and with CSS in November. According to the band, they play music "like a blonde gets out of a car".
!!!
MYTH TAKES – !!!Whatever monosyllabic clacking sound repeated thrice this band goes by (though no one really calls them anything other than Chk Chk Chk), they’re tough to quantify in the usual terms. They're undoubtedly a rock group, but they're signed to Warp, a label defined by unflinching affiliations with the electronic music community. Their releases span the divide from skeletal post-punk to indie-funk to melodically anemic jams, equal parts Can and Liquid Liquid. They’re responsible for two of the greatest singles of the last five years: the first ("Me & Guiliani"), a complex, multi-layered "song" with at least four discernible movements; the latter ("Take Ecstasy With Me" / "Get Up"), a double A-side that squeezes the Moby Grapejuice out of both Magnetic Fields and Nate Dogg. Their three full-length releases sound almost nothing alike, yet all are unmistakably the work of the same band.
This is all well and good. None of it, however, really prepares the average listener for Myth Takes. Sure, Nic Offer still sings like he's somewhat embarrassed but totally turned-on to be singing for a real live rock band, the bass/drums/rhythm-guitar combo still dominate the proceedings, and all eight of them would need a thorough grooming before attempting the sartorial elegance of the Next Big Thing. But nearly all of the excess fat of their earlier efforts has been ruthlessly trimmed here. Ten songs coming in shy of fifty minutes might not be a world-beater for your average emo band, but for a bunch of guys whose last single weighed in at more than a third of that, it's like John Holmes reborn as a castrato.
The first and title track is immediately engaging, grooving in a reverb-soaked alternate universe, one where the Cramps and A Certain Ratio can get down and boogie. "All My Heroes Are Weirdos" ratchets up the frenetic pogoing a notch, yet all the time-signature shifting is really just prog garnish gracing the classic indie dish of fast-and-slow, swimming in a sauce of distorted guitars and urbane "tribal" drumming. "Must Be the Moon" rattles along with an unmissable booty-commanding bassline, "A New Name" and "Heart of Hearts" are the sound of !!! integrating side project Out Hud into the corpus of the "real" band.
There's only one real gaffe on Myth Takes, and it arrives right at midpoint. "Sweet Life" is a pairing of unappealing partners, squiggly psych-rock mated with ham-fisted progressions and overvocalizing that could easily be mistaken for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Thankfully, everything afterwards is gravy.
Less cohesive than your usual masterpiece but with a sense of unclouded enjoyment that most of those efforts often can't muster, Myth Takes is ultimately the kind of thing that's loads more fun to listen to than talk about, but nevertheless, talk; people will.
ADAMS, RYAN
EASY TIGER – Ryan AdamsResisting his recent habit of dividing different sounds amongst different albums, Adams runs the gamut on Easy Tiger, giving his Grateful Dead fascination just as much room to breathe as his pop skills and country roots (although this LP leans toward the latter just a little). Unlike some previous efforts, the production isn't flashy at all. The vocals are way up in the front of the mix and they sound crystal clear. The studio versions of the songs are reasonably faithful to the live versions he's been playing on tour, but with less wanky guitar parts and more thoughtful lyrics. Songwriting is the name of the game, and it takes center stage here. No failed flamenco experiments abound, and Adams comes off as focused and feisty. It sounds a bit like what Cold Roses would have been like, if he had written it at the age of 40 instead of 30. He's tapped into his gigantic vault of unreleased material and resurrected a whole song as well as a bridge from one of Suicide Handbook's better ballads.
Easy Tiger looks like it might be the only Ryan Adams record released this year, and by disarming the army of critics who swear that he needs an editor, Adams songwriting prowess will come under the spotlight and win back some hearts.
AKRON/FAMILY
LOVE IS SIMPLE - Akron/FamilySince their inception, Akron/Family have seemed to enjoy playing in the shadows. As the backing band for Angels of Light, the shadow personality is former Swans frontman Michael Gira. Yet, on their own records, it's a variation of folk music and electronics that hide out in the darkened corners. Love Is Simple, their latest release on Gira's Young God label, seems designed to change all that.
An absurd and occasionally awkward celebration of the natural world, Love Is Simple is Akron/Family's bold, unvarnished paean to discovering nature, through a fusion of drum-circle bliss and classic rock. The best introduction to this new style comes four tracks into the record, with the joyous "I've Got Some Friends". Initially evoking the Mothers of Invention's We're Only in It for the Money with its unhinged lo-fi folk-rock opening, the song soon segues into a hillbilly country greeting that reflects the album's sunny disposition.
The often hammy results of unmitigated hippie gaiety is sure to alienate some fans; the vaguely Phishy early cut "Ed is a Portal" is the first test for cynics, finding shape in a tribal chant and cyclical guitar figure, but the briefly discernible lyric "shamanistic Shaker spells" nicely summarizes what the band is aiming for.
The album draws largely from late 1960s/early 70s rock, with its most traditionally structured songs owing inspiration to a few of John Lennon's guises. The Mellotron-accompanied "Don't Be Afraid, You're Already Dead" contains the "All You Need Is Love"-style sing-along refrain that gives the record its name, and first single "Phenomena" oscillates somewhere between "Across the Universe" and Plastic Ono Band's "I Found Out". Appropriately, the latter's lyrics are a series of enigmatic, most likely meaningless metaphysical paradoxes, like "Things are not what they seem to be/ Nor are they otherwise."
The 15-minute-plus duo of "Lake Song/New Ceremonial Music for Moms" and "There's So Many Colors" are the album's climax, as well as its creative centerpiece. "Lake Song"'s eerie, minor-key vocal incantations open with a hazy vibe that gives way to a throbbing, incantatory drum-circle frenzy in the mold of the Boredoms' Vision Creation Newsun. The chanted first half of "Colors" is intermission entertainment, gradually swallowed by a shaggy, threadbare verse and torrential guitar outro somewhere between Neil Young & Crazy Horse's Zuma and the fiery denouement of Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Effigy".
Simple's greatest success might be that it holds together as a single work despite the general senselessness of its basic narrative. Don't try to sort it out, just dig it: As the band themselves repeat when trying in song to find a perspectival spot on the horizon: "No point exists."
ALPHABEAT
THIS IS ALPHABEAT - AlphabeatFew songs in recent memory have proved quite as polarising as 'Fascination'. Combining equal parts 'Footloose', 'Modern Love' and Danish six-piece Alphabeat's own brand of sunshine pop, 'Fascination' is - depending on whom you ask - either some sort of second coming of Pop-with-a-capital-'P' or the most irritatingly banal Top 10 single of 2008. The song was certainly defiantly mainstream but it ended up on the playlists of the nation's radiowaves.
The good news for those who enjoyed 'Fascination' is that there is plenty on This Is Alphabeat to match that song's appeal, and the good news for those who found themselves yelling at the radio is that while This Is Alphabeat is not exactly an album aimed at taking the Led Zeppelin fanbase by storm, there's plenty to extend the band's sound across a variety of styles taking in electronica, disco and new wave. There's even a curious cover of PiL's 'Public Image'.
This Is Alphabeat was first released in Denmark in 2007, where it went platinum. A small gig in London in spring 2008 came as the band were taken on by Mika's manager, who signed them to EMI imprint Charisma. Lengthy tours, the band regrouping in east London and a limited release for the benefit of 'cool' taste-makers gave the band some distance from the hyper-pop sounds that pepper this album.
However, Alphabeat's music, headed up with tag-team vocals from Anders SG and Stine Bramsen, is in another league. These are songs about love and loss and all the bits in between, made by adults for adults; pop music which also just happens to appeal outside the band's peer group. It's how pop used to work, once upon a time, before the genre became synonymous with fobbing children off with total rubbish.
This retro approach is perhaps no accident, as songwriter and guitarist Anders B wears his classic influences on his sleeve, notably on the brilliant new single '10,000 Nights' which references both 'Wuthering Heights' and 'The Safety Dance'. 'Go-Go', added to the album since its Danish release, is a homage to Chic with added disco zapping noises, while the pumped-up 'Boyfriend' and its battle cry of 'don't you touch my boyfriend, he's not your boyfriend, he's mine' is in severe danger of becoming the soundtrack to rowdy nights out across the country. As the album ends with 'Nothing But My Baby' and a snatch of polite feedback, This Is Alphabeat feels like the story of a band having embarked on an ambitious experiment in classic pop, having pulled it off, and having turned in something of a modern pop masterpiece to boot.
It's pop for blaring out when the sun has its hat firmly on.
ANDERSON, BRETT
BRETT ANDERSON - Brett AndersonJust as Cosmo tells women everywhere that it is natural for men to experience a drastic decline in their sex drive as a consequence of aging, this is basically also what Brett Anderson tells me with the release of his first solo record. Granted, in the pantheon of Britpop-era sex gods (there's a scary visual), the Suede frontman seemed the most impotent of the bunch; witness his now-famous quip about being a bisexual who'd never had a homosexual experience. Nonetheless, there was a time where Anderson's sexuality was his main currency, and it was powerful enough-- even in its messiness-- to provide the charge for two, maybe even three, great albums.
Issued on the heels of Anderson and former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler's underwhelming reunion album as the Tears, this eponymous record marks the singer's first solo release, and demonstrates handily why its taken him this long to do something on his own.
Aside from a lot of filler and a few genuinely horrendous/hilarious missteps ("The More We Possess the Less We Own Ourselves" makes Anne Geddes look like a master of nuance), a few things here are worth sampling. Despite a characteristically silly lyric, "The Infinite Kiss" does a reasonable job recalling the epic, lovelorn thing that used to be Suede's stock in trade; "One Lazy Morning" is a sweet enough Sunday-morning ballad; and opening track and lead single "Love Is Dead" constitutes a nice little comeback moment. "Nothing ever flows in my life," sighs Anderson. It's clear he should stick to writing songs with Butler, but on his own he's not half bad.
ANIMAL COLLECTIVE
STRAWBERRY JAM - Animal CollectiveIn March, Animal Collective's Panda Bear (aka Noah Lennox) had his breakout moment with the release of Person Pitch. It was his first solo album that didn't sound like what we'd previously heard from Animal Collective; sample-heavy and based on loops, the album's songwriting devices favored expansion and contraction over conventional chord changes. Person Pitch reflected Panda's interest in dance music-- even when it veered toward the angelic pop innocence forever associated with the harmony-drenched hits of the 1960s and 70s. Both the album and its transcendent centerpiece, "Bros", are deservedly being widely considered among the year's best.
On Strawberry Jam, the new album from Animal Collective, it's Avey Tare's turn. It's not that Strawberry Jam resembles a solo album, or that Avey (aka Dave Portner) seems to dominate to an unusual degree-- Panda Bear is unmistakably present too, along with sound processor Geologist (aka Brian Weitz) and guitarist Deakin (aka Josh Dibb). But the specifics of who's doing what have been shuffled, and the members' respective contributions-- including who's singing at any given moment-- aren't always easy to single out. The story of this record for me, though, is the strength of Avey Tare's voice, and how his singing anchors these songs, invigorates the band's idiosyncratic melodies, and offers a clear portal into Animal Collective's utopian dreamworld.
Avey Tare's tone has never been as aching and pure as Panda Bear's, but his is the more versatile instrument. Wild intervallic leaps-- jumping up and down full octaves, or going from a full-throated howl to a piercing shriek-- have long been his trademark, and it's something that bugs a lot of people. That makes sense: His vocal style is peculiar, and could easily strike some as affected. But the way he negotiates a song like the fourth track here, "For Reverend Green", shows just how well he can adapt his singing to fit the needs of the song.
Over a repeating guitar delay that sounds a little like the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?" and an organ seemingly pulled from the midway of a county fair, Avey follows the contours of "For Revered Green"'s sing-song melody but never seems bound by it. He explodes with a scream every line or two for emphasis-- not to highlight a word, but to convey the idea of feelings spilling over the edges of the song's expansive container. It's a sound and point-of-view associated now with only one band. A backing of "whoo-oo-oo" vocals working in counterpart to the main melody only reinforce how distinctive Animal Collective's sound has become. Here, more than on any record yet, they own that sound completely.
"For Reverend Green" fades into the structurally similar but tonally different "Fireworks", arguably forming the greatest back-to-back in the Animal Collective's catalog. "Fireworks" is about the pleasure of simple things, but also about how hard they can be to appreciate: "A sacred night where we'll watch the fireworks/ The frightened babies poo/ They've got two flashing eyes and they're colored why/ They make me feel that I'm only all I see sometimes."
Animal Collective are never a band I listened to for lyrics-- on those early records, they were pretty hard to make out-- but the words in "Fireworks" match perfectly the song's complex mood: There's a romantic sense of longing, an air of celebration, but also tinges of doubt, loss, and acceptance. That it's all rendered so beautifully, with tempered banshee vocals, some spacey dub elements to kick off the middle break, and one of the band's best melodies-- and layered and varied enough to have had two or three good songs built from it-- reveals the band's mastery of complex, experimental pop songcraft.
The galloping opener "Peacebone" sets the scene; Animal Collective don't seem exactly like a rock band on Strawberry Jam. There are odd sounds of indeterminate origin, and textures vaguely associated with circus music crop up regularly. Here, the melodic buoyancy and junk-shop keyboards stomping along behind Avey Tare's voice create a ramshackle backdrop for a story of a monster in a maze, strange fossils in a natural history museum, and plenty of other stuff (when Avey gets rolling, he's pretty verbose).
The only thing expected from an Animal Collective record that's never quite delivered on Strawberry Jam is the long, dreamy, droney builder. The album's second half is slightly more abstract than the catchy pop that precedes it, but these moments are tempered, causing the record to feel more focused. "#1" opens with a repeating Terry Riley-esque pattern on what sounds like an early-70s synth, but this is a cleaner, simpler sort of experiment for Animal Collective. The lead vocal is pitched down and vaguely eerie, but Panda's bright backing vocals really carry the piece, which seems happy to drift along without going any place in particular. The track's lack of momentum differentiates it from, say, the songs on the looser second half of Feels, but it's got its own vibe and it works.
The record culminates with the thunderous "Cuckoo Cuckoo", its most explosive track, shifting between lyrical piano bits (not a lot of those on past Animal Collective records) to in-the-red surges of drums, guitar, and noisemakers. And then, after so many great Avey-fronted songs, Strawberry Jam closes with the folk-like "Derek", sung by Panda. The song begins with some lightly strummed guitar and water sounds and ends with crashing percussion and a refrain that sounds like a West African pop tune (a quality also present on the Panda-sung "Chores") merging with a Phil Spector-produced instrumental single. The sound is huge, but the song is a simple ode to being needed, about the pleasure in caring for something, whether a child or family pet ("Derek never woke up at night/ And in the morning he's ready to go/ And he never had a voice like you/ To scream when he wanted something"). In other words, it's about accepting responsibility and most of all about growing up, which is something Animal Collective seem to be doing brilliantly, with their creativity and adventurous spirit intact.
ANNUALS
BE HE ME by AnnualsAdam Baker is the architect of this attempt at the recorded equivalent of a building by Gaudi, and the North Carolinian's not but 20 years old. Wow. Refreshingly unconcerned with perpetuating cool, Annuals' attack is fundamentally escapist: Baker seems to prefer living inside his ever-aburst music, and listeners will be lured by the world it creates. However it may not be for everyone; it's also been described as abstract, plain inaccessible and weird.
Stick with it though, because Be He Me is a crowd, packed with songs that whorl and dimple, digressively executing competent-to-astonishing arrangements in a manner that would seem spazzy if they weren't so polished. "Carry Around" invokes what Beck was supposed to be perfecting by now. The disco-waltz "Complete or Completing" submerges into a Steely Dan tide, then locks into a chant-groove that is triumphantly resumed on album closer "Sway", which dips the last few years of indie-rock's most-soiled dishes into a Ladysmith Black Mambazo rinse. 'Later with Jools Holland' anyone? "Brother" is the album's riotous, massive standout, but almost everything's impressive: The purposeful shuffle of "Mama", the blurping bits of "Ida, My". The album's tragic flaw is that, despite the candyland ampedness and the toffee-like thickness of the best tracks, Be He Me doesn't offer the listener's active, rational mind much to chew on. At the beginning of "Carry Around", Baker warns us that he's got "magic crying out my ass"; let's hope he invests in a filter for magic dust and not in a buttplug.
ARCADE FIRE
NEON BIBLE by Arcade FireSharing its title with a John Kennedy Toole novel, the Arcade Fire's second album is markedly different from its more cloistered predecessor. On Neon Bible, the band looks outward not inward; their concerns more worldly than familial, and their sound more malevolent than cathartic. Angry, embittered, and paranoid, but often generously empathetic in their points of view, they target the government, the church, the military, the entertainment industry, and even the basest instincts of the common man. With Neon Bible, the Arcade Fire have streamlined the raw, large sound of it's predecessor Funeral into something that achieves the same magnitudinous scale through by more economical means. Propelled by inventive guitar work and steady drums, the group pares back anything that might curb the controlled forward thrust of songs like "Black Mirror", "Keep the Car Running", or "The Well and the Lighthouse". These songs don't erupt, but gradually crescendo and intensify. Unlike the cathartic Funeral, Neon Bible operates on spring-loaded tension and measured release. As such, it could strike some listeners as a disappointing follow-up, but the record's mix of newfound discipline and passion will likely imbue it with a long shelf-life.
These changes aren't drastic, but they are significant. The influences most commonly associated with Funeral were David Byrne and Bowie, but on Neon Bible, it's early Springsteen who appears not only in the wordy songs and aggressive shuffle, but in the compression of so many styles and sounds into one messy, exciting burst. Even "No Cars Go", which originally appeared on their self-titled debut EP, sounds more powerful here than it did in its previous incarnation. As stand-alone tracks, these songs don't make much sense, which partly explains why those early leaks were so uninspiring.
ARCTIC MONKEYS
FAVOURITE WORST NIGHTMARE by Arctic MonkeysIn comparison to the band's debut album Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, the album has been described as very, very fast and very, very loud, being seen as "more ambitious, heavier...and with a fiercely bright production". The band's love of classic films also influences their new style. For example, the organ at the beginning of the album's final track, "505" is taken directly from Ennio Morricone's soundtrack for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (where Angel Eyes enters before the final standoff). The album title, "Favourite Worst Nightmare", comes from the song "D is for Dangerous", the third song featured on the album. The band said they also considered naming it Lesbian Wednesdays or Gordon Brown.
"Do Me a Favour" was originally supposed to appear on the "Who the F*ck Are Arctic Monkeys?" EP, though the band kept it, possibly because they didn't want to waste it as a B-side. In an interview with NME, Nick O'Malley announced several titles including "D Is for Dangerous" and "Balaclava". The tracks "The Bakery" and "Plastic Tramp" also mentioned in the NME interview did not make it onto the album, but were later released as B-sides on the "Fluorescent Adolescent" single.
ATHLETE
BEYOND THE NEIGHBOURHOOD - AthleteLet's be fair, ‘Beyond The Neighbourhood’ is not an instant classic; it’s far from perfect. Starting off with a tone-setting but somewhat ill-advised piece of ambient acoustic electronica, the record soon segues into lead single ‘Hurricane’, an uptempo improvement on the formula of previous LP ‘Tourist’, which leans more toward Bloc Party than Embrace. ‘Tokyo’ is where Athlete go angular – got to sell this record to the Franz Ferdinand fans too, after all.
‘Airport Disco’ resorts to drippy lyrics about a "beautiful world" and is closer in tone to their previous record, albeit with the ambient electronic sheen the rest of this album has been given. ‘The Outsiders’ is the only real turkey here, but it does provide the only laugh of the set; anyone who thinks Athlete have are in any way outsiders has been listening to far too much XFM. The songwriting is solid throughout, and is nowhere near as cloying as some of the more sentimental moments on ‘Tourist’ – generally, ‘Beyond The Neighbourhood’ shows a lot of promise. However it’s hard to shake the feeling that this band are a bit too opportunistic, and a little too willing to mimic the zeitgeist. I saw them live at South by Southwest in Austin, TX. None of their gear had arrived, so they begged and borrowed from many of the other bands and even the BBC production unit. And despite the unfamiliarity of the instruments, they were on fine form. Watching them with me were Snow Patrol, Doves and Tom McRae - not a bad pedigree of fans. I'm not sure they've yet managed to capture on disc, the raw energy that their live shows have. If they can discover their own voices for album number four, and still keep the quality of the tunes high, then they could produce something really special.
BAND OF HORSES
CEASE TO BEGIN - Band Of HorsesFollowing the success of their debut Everything All the Time and the subsequent departure of founding member Mat Brooke, the remaining members of Band of Horses moved from Seattle to Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, and set to recording their follow-up, Cease to Begin. Thousands of land-locked miles across the Great Salt Lake, this cross-country change of scenery is subtly apparent: If Everything All the Time was a Pacific Northwest indie album with flourishes of country and Southern rock, then Cease to Begin reverses the equation. Even putting a different regional spin on their tender-hearted indie rock, it doesn't change the sound too much - the guitars still churn and crest majestically, Bridwell's vocals still echo with grandiose reverb - it simply creates an atmosphere evocative of something like autumn in a small town.
This geographical move and musical development both seem like logical progressions for Band of Horses, and not just because Bridwell originally hails from the South. The trio sounds more at home on Cease to Begin, and more confident writing about this specific neck of the woods. As a result, they shed many of the comparisons that dogged Everything All the Time last year: Every review had to mention the Shins, My Morning Jacket, or the Flaming Lips (me: guilty). Cease to Begin finds them opening up their sound, drawing in more ideas and giving the music the loping quality of a long walk down a dirt road.
As crunchy guitars give way to light strings on "Ode to LRC", Bridwell sings about a stray dog and a "town so small how could anybody not look you in the eye or wave as I drive by." He's one of few indie artists who can sell a line like "the world is such a wonderful place" or get away with singing "la-dee-da" with open-hearted amazement. On "Detlef Schrempf", for example, he sings, with heartfelt gravity, "Watch how you treat every living soul," and still somehow sounds bold and genuine.
On the other hand, Cease to Begin's looser vibe preempts the big moments that gave Everything All the Time its gravity. These songs go for texture and shade over size and scale, an admirable shift even if Band of Horses don't always pull it off. On "Cigarettes Wedding Band", they can't churn up enough bile to convey Bridwell's bitter lyrics; instead of contrasting the album's sweet-tea tone, the song simply reflects it, revealing the limits of their range. Still, Bridwell does accomplish the nifty trick of turning an accusation into a formidable pop hook: "While they lied-dee-die! Lah-dee-dah! While they lied!"
As they move southeasterly, Band of Horses may bear some derision as dad-rock at best, or as granola at worst. And yes, there are moments here that support those stereotypes: The sequencing of two downtempo ballads ("No One's Gonna Love You", "Detlef Schrempf") slows the album's first half almost to a halt. But even if Cease to Begin is a little creaky and uneven, and even if it never finds the resting spot the album title promises, Band of Horses do guitar-based indie very well. Well enough, at least, that the next generation of American indie bands may bear comparisons to them. The album closes with "Window Blues", a slow, aching number that fades into a simple "Rainbow Connection" banjo outro that gives the album a snowglobe quality, despite the warmer Carolina climate. These songs depict a personal world in great detail, contained within a small space. Sure, Band of Horses could stand to shake it up a bit, but for now Bridwell seems content just to enjoy the view.
BAND OF HORSES
EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME – Band Of HorsesTurning despondency into indie majesty is a major talent of Band of Horses; their music is carefully balanced to evoke specific emotional responses while allowing space for personal projection. More elemental than the lush dream-pop of Bridwell and Mat Brooke's former band Carissa's Wierd (the duo played all the instruments here before fleshing out the band with backing musicians), Band of Horses' sound will be immediately, invitingly familiar to anyone familiar with Sub Pop bands. Their guitar-heavy sound and Bridwell's echo-y vocals invite specific comparisons to labelmates the Shins as well as My Morning Jacket, and more general similarities can be noted with forebears such as Neil Young and the Ocean Blue. While apt, these comparisons seem restrictive and reductive, but their limitations can be illuminating. On quieter songs such as "St. Augustine", Bridwell recalls Jim James' reverb-heavy vocals, but he lacks the defining regional drawl; as a result, Band of Horses seem placeless. Where the Shins coil their songs tightly to spring out at the choruses, Bridwell and Brooke's tracks sprawl languorously-- more atmospheric than hooky, but nevertheless too structured and targeted to be considered jammy.
Band of Horses' alternately lucid and obscure songwriting remains life-size, even as their guitars swell beyond the everyday. Album centerpiece "The Great Salt Lake" begins with a jangly guitar that suggests early R.E.M., lying low to the ground during the verses until the chorus takes off. They also successfully work that contrast between earthbound and airborne on "The Funeral" and "Monsters", with its rickety banjo carving a rough path for a climactic finale.
Of course, if the entire album strove for such catharsis, the repetition of builds and releases would become tedious and cheap. Wisely, Band of Horses show off a much broader dynamic, peppering the album with rangier numbers like "The First Song" and the churning, catchy "Wicked Gil". "Weed Party", the album's most upbeat track, even begins with what sounds like a spontaneous and genially goofy "yeee-haw!" Still, every element and track on Everything contributes to the album's wistful, twilit atmosphere, from its first cascading guitar chords to its final rueful strums. And instead of closing with the slow crescendo of "Monsters", they go out on a quieter note with "St. Augustine", a gently ebbing tune featuring both Horses singing together, Bridwell's higher-pitched voice anchored by Brooke's low whisper.
Although Band of Horses aren't likely to be heralded as trailblazers, they do sound quietly innovative and genuinely refreshing over the course of these 10 sweeping, heart-on-sleeve anthems. Ultimately, the band's most winning trait is its delicate balance of elements-- between gloom and promise, quiet and loud, epic and ordinary, familiar and new, direct and elliptical, artist and listener. Each of these aspects makes the others sound stronger and more complex, making Everything All the Time an album that's easy to get lost in and even easier to love.
BAT FOR LASHES
FUR AND GOLD - Bat For LashesThink "bat" as in both the flirty verb and the gothy noun. Fur & Gold is often a dark and atmospheric record, but it remains playful and self-aware enough to pull itself back every time it inches towards self-parody. Largely structured around the vocals of the Pakistani-born Brit Natasha Khan, Fur & Gold shows a band quite good at giving their songs room to breathe and evolve, allowing the songs to expand out before snapping back into focus on Khan's expressive voice.
Opener "Horse and I" skirts Renaissance Faire silliness, but proves musically intriguing enough to push past any hokey aesthetic choices. Yes, Khan can come off as a bit dramatic, but her best songs fit the part. "Trophy" is perhaps the album's finest track, plodding along elegantly like a darker and slicker Lavender Diamond. "Tahiti" is the sonic standout, but suffers from some jarringly awkward phrasing in its chorus. "Sad Eyes" never quite fulfills the emotional potential generated by Khan's voice and some sparse piano chords, and it also illustrates a wider point that uncomplicated and vaguely mystical lyrics generally make sense here, but Khan occasionally sings like she's not really sure what she's saying. An unexpected "Come and spend the night" halfway through "Sad Eyes" might as well be "I'd like a burrito."
Many of the album's biggest disappointments come simply because the band's potential is so palpable, especially during more restrained and focused moments. But as strong as Fur & Gold's individual tracks can be, the record as a whole is frustratingly dilute. Khan is a great singer, and her band is undoubtedly competent and capable, but the record sounds like it wants to be more than it is. Khan stops just short of the boldness that can make this kind of record great - imagine Björk wearing a fur coat rather than a dead swan or Siouxsie Sioux wearing a peasant dress rather than a Nazi uniform. Bat For Lashes dip their feet in some difficult waters, but often seem too preoccupied with their reflection to jump in.
BEARSUIT
OH:IO - BearsuitThere’s a vocal riot going on, with frantic activity on guitars, keyboards and brass. If you puke you might miss the rollercoaster, novelty sandwich toaster of an album opener ‘Jupiter Force [recruitment video]’. Big band Bearsuit sure know how to entertain, and this is their third long player. Five out of the six members of this band take a turn in vocal duties; it’s just drummer Matt Hutchings left to his own devices. All the other zombies, bears and band-standers in the group are multi-instrumentalists, whipping up an over-the-top celebration of musical misrule.
And the feeling runs deep: three of Bearsuit’s line-up, Lisa Horton, Cerian Hutchings and Jan Robertson, also have a keytar-only project called Keytarded. Also in the past they have aptly toured with their Norwich neighbours KaitO, and the much-loved Deerhoof.
Bearsuit’s songs cover a smorgasbord of subject matters, covering issues that range from the search for tangible proof of a soul on steamrolling latest single ‘More Soul than a Wigan Casino’; lizard loving on the shoutily harmonious ‘Dinosaur Heart’; evil gangs of tiny kids on the Melt Banana-like ‘Hark! The Feral Children’; colonising of the solar system on ‘Mission IO Must Not Fail’, which again makes evident a male vocal at work, one which summons the spirit of Graham Coxon. And then there’s love. Yes, even Bearsuit are prone to a bit of romance on ‘The Love Will Never Find You’. If that all sounds a bit much for you, then there is always time for a slow song with sweet trumpet sounds called ‘Look A Bleached Coral Faced Crow With Jewels For Eyes’.
But Bearsuit are at their very best when the ride is fast and scary, like a psycho-killer ghost train ride. Or, the sound of the track ‘Shh Get It Out’. So this lot, then: they’ve got it all. Creative instinct, male and female vocals, and a plethora of instruments and themes. All they need now is your ears.
BEIRUT
GULAG ORKESTAR - BeirutIt starts, as all things should, with fanfare. A piano rumbles, a trumpet screeches, and they rise until, as all things do, they fall. Rumble turns to moan, screech to mewl, small victory to even smaller defeat. Notes go rotten and fall off the vine, to decay and reemerge as their own eulogy. A kick stomps slowly, as the piano, accordion, and horns line up behind it; a pallbearer's march. A young man leads, crooning “They call it 'mine', and I call it mine” to anyone listening who might understand. But soon the grief turns, as it must, to muted celebration; the horns raise their muzzles in salute, shouting a herald toward the sky. What falls must also rise again.
The enormous and outsized will always get attention - nothing like a raging, screamed chorus or a gaseous explosion for simple catharsis - but nothing beats quotidian human drama, something straightforward and lived-in. It can be joyous and heartfelt, brutal and unbearable, and above all true, even if it's completely false.
Zach Condon throws around a lot of very exotic, and very loaded, imagery for a guy from the desert southwest of the United States, things and places that I'm guessing he, like most of us, has only read about. Much has been made of Gulag's component parts - its assimilations from French peasantry and those thieving Romany, for instance - but that misses the point. The sound, like the imagery, is second-hand, swiped from the Schwarzwald gypsy folk-via-Tin Pan Alley twirl of Kurt Weill, in spirit if not in actuality, and Condon and his cohort (including Neutral Milk Hotelier Jeremy Barnes and A Hawk and a Hacksaw's Heather Trost) take it a step further, sanding down those long, drifting melodic passages into the simple sucker-punch of modern pop. At its base, the unusual instrumentation - accordion, violin, trumpet, ukulele, drums, and vocals - are less genre signposts than an outline of the specific nature of the play; just an inversion of guitar-bass-drums, playing a fundamentally similar music to, say, guitar pop, but of a wholly unique character.
Songs like “Postcards From Italy,” “Brandenberg,” and “The Bunker,” despite all their instrumental eccentricity and echoes of melancholy, are deeply easy-going, just one little four-note hook piled on another, placed just so; little pocket symphonies, equal parts Brian Wilson (“The times we had /Oh, when the wind would blow with rain and snow”) and Lech Walesa (“In my good times /There were always golden rocks to throw”). Even at its most openly foreign - “Prenzlaurberg,” named for an upscale bohemian section of Berlin, hews closer to a waltz-time sea shanty than anything else I can think of. “Scenic World” and its goofy little Fisher Price calypso retains a wealth of charm, and makes me giggle a little every time.
It's the simplicity that's the key; this could have been yet another pseudo-orchestral globe-straddling “epic” with every instrument on Earth thrown in just because. But instead it's tightly focused, beautifully written, and totally without filler. It also could have been an air-tight bubble, too edited, too perfect, but everything is allowed to hang loose, to be a little ramshackle, to just breathe. It manages an open, unapologetic prettiness while never seeming delicate, like it will break in your hands or blow away; Condon's warbly tenor has a full-throated authority even at its wispiest, and Barnes often sounds like he's hitting the snare with a closed fist. Young Master Condon seems to have an almost savant's ear for this stuff, like he just sits down and breezes through 11 of these things in just the time it takes to play them, like he's been at it forever, but he's just a kid - all of 19 or 20 - and may well have even better in front of him. But for now, I guess, we'll just have to live with this lovely, unusual, and beguiling little pop record. It'll do nicely.
BEIRUT
THE FLYING CLUB CUP - BeirutOK, one more Beirut album. The previous review was for old album Gulag Orkestar. Now to their new album.
Surprisingly, Zach Condon's horn remains in Brooklyn for the bulk of this sophomore album, The Flying Club Cup. Condon himself returns to France - the place where he was first exposed to the Balkan music that colored much of this debut, Gulag Orkestar. It's reflected here, with both Gallic brass and accordion and song titles that reference French cities and locations. Crucially, however, Flying Club Cup would be a triumph even with those layers stripped away; that's not to say that the cultural patina obscures the "real" songs underneath, but its removal allows us to sidestep mind-numbing questions about authenticity and intention.
Flying Club Cup deftly showcases Condon's gifts: "Nantes" sounds exotic without directly referencing a particular era or feeling, and "A Sunday Smile" - despite being about specific people and places-- evokes universal sensations such as sleepiness and warmth. "Un Dernier Verre (Pour la Route)" and "Guyamas Sonora" show off Condon's increased love of piano-driven pop songcraft - as well his band's frequent trick of introducing the best part of the song (here, the way the lithe percussion and ukulele contrast with the heavy accordion and his vocal layering) three-quarters of the way through. "In the Mausoleum" begins with some "Come On! Feel the Illinois!"-ish piano (Sufjan Stevens playing the U.S. cultural cannibal to Condon's worldly connoisseur), but what I like best is the violins, arranged by Final Fantasy's Owen Pallett (in conjunction with Beirut's violinist Kristin Ferebee), which are strong throughout the record and provide a perfect, light-as-lashes counter to Condon's thick instrumentation.
Vocal layering is another Beirut gift, but it also weighs heavily on each track, which is appropriate when nearly every song is about feeling weary or old beyond your years. But despite the well-traveled themes, Condon's vocal melodies, as on standout "Cliquot", are still dangerously romantic, veering closely to musical theater. Condon also does well by "Forks and Knives (Le Fête)", where the instruments hold back to give him more room to sing. And here, once you get past this spent-cigarette, empty-hotel story he's selling, it's obvious that what Condon lacks in lyrical ability, he more than makes up for in prosody. He has an impressive flow, a delicate glide that perfectly compliments the oft-commented-upon exoticism that tends to divide Beirut listeners. On The Flying Cup Club, and maybe on all of Beirut's records, this exoticism takes the form not of alienation but of a search for a familiar place within what seems (or sounds) unfamiliar, difficult, or repulsive. It's the process of searching that untethers the record from any limiting sense of place, be it an Arrondissement in Paris or a village in the Balkans.
BESNARD LAKES
VOLUME 1 - Besnard LakesTo gauge what kind of a year the Besnard Lakes have had, you need only consider that the Montreal band was virtually unknown when they released their latest album, The Besnard Lakes Are the Dark Horse, nine months ago, and now they've already earned their first reissue. Originally released on the band's own Break Glass imprint in 2003, Volume 1 was a patient, languid counterpoint to the frantic, anthemic pop that would soon make Montreal famous, and as such, the album did not reverberate far beyond the band's immediate circle. While their peers in Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade and the Unicorns were reshaping the city's musical landscape, the Besnards sounded more in tune with another time-honored Quebecois passion: Floydian prog-rock. As their friends embarked on North American tours, Besnards co-founders Jace Lacek and Olga Goreas had to content themselves with playing the roles of supportive parents seeing their kids off to college and holding down the fort back home (specifically, at Lacek's increasingly busy Break Glass studios).
The critical success of Dark Horse, however, has changed their stature considerably, scoring the band a Polaris Prize nomination in Canada, and an upcoming tour with Peter Bjorn and John. In light of that album's time-lapsed grandeur and swooning choruses, the title of Volume 1 now feels especially appropriate - not just because it's the band's first album, but because it underscores the album's formative, work-in-progress feel.
Volume 1 is also notable for showing the paths that the Besnards have since chosen not to follow, namely with the urgent, agitated Breeders-style distorto-pop of "Thomasina," driven by Goreas' "Cannonball"-sized bass groove. But if Volume 1 sounds very much like a debut effort, both in its streamlined mid-fi production and exploratory, sometimes directionless drift, its closing track spells out the Besnards' future: "Life Rarely Begins With the Tungsten Film #1" may be a mouthful, but its space-bound guitar charge and dreamily ascending melody show the way to the Besnards' second volume.
BIFFY CLYRO
PUZZLE - Biffy ClyroPuzzle is the fourth album by Scottish band Biffy Clyro, and the band's first album release since leaving Beggars Banquet. The album was recorded in Canada, and produced/mixed in New York. The band said that they had 40 tracks to choose from, and that they had been recording with composer Graeme Revell and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra whilst making the album. Puzzle is noted for its departure from quirky and sometimes unconventional songs as on their past albums, and has a far more straight-forward, mainstream sound.
BIRD, ANDREW
ARMCHAIR APOCRYPHA - Andrew BirdArmchair Apocrypha is Andrew Bird's first studio album since the critically acclaimed The Mysterious Production of Eggs (2005). The album features more electric guitars, a change from the more acoustic-oriented Eggs, though the songs are similar in character if slightly more straightforward.
"Simple X" is a track started by collaborator Dosh, who supplied the drum track on the final version, with Bird adding lyrics. The track "Imitosis" is an expansion of the song "I" (also called "Capital I" live) on his 2003 album Weather Systems. The song "Dark Matter" is also a rehash of the song "Sweetbreads", which can be found on the live EPs Fingerlings 1 & Fingerlings 2.
BJORK
VOLTA - BjorkHere’s a mark of just how special Bjork is, how defined her artistic character: she can invite any amount of guests into the studio – African junk-percussion groups, futurist hip-hop producers, improv drummers, emotive torch-singers, Warp Records techno heads – and still come out with an album that sounds like no one but herself. The Icelandic vocalist’s sixth solo studio album, Volta, is both a work of extraordinary, driven experimentation and glorious, singalong pop – outsider sounds carried into the mainstream through Bjork’s sheer sense of vision.
The opening '’Earth Intruders’' sets the tone for Volta’s multi-faceted, guest-heavy approach. Produced by Timbaland and featuring percussion from collaboration-happy improv drummer Chris Corsano and Konono No.1, a Congolese shanty-town collective who build a polyrhythmic shuffle out of makeshift percussion and electric thumb-pianos, it’s an ecstatic, bounding war march, Bjork chanting ‘We are the earth intruders/We are the paratroopers/Stampede of sharpshooters’. There’s more evidence on Volta that Bjork’s in a percussive kind of mood – Corsano pops up on another track, ‘I See Who You Are’, while another freeform drummer, Brian Chippendale of experimental duo Lightning Bolt adds a distant, chaotic rumble to the Antony Hegarty duet, ‘’The Dull Flame Of Desire’’. But just as common is jarring techno beats, the warm horns of an Icelandic brass section, or the twang of the African kora.
Ultimately, then, it’s easiest to understand Volta through the precocious personality of Bjork herself. Here, she sounds energised and politicised - ‘’Hope’’ is a philosophical tract about suicide bombers, while ‘’Declare Independence’’ finds her chanting ‘Start your own currency/Make your own stamp/Protect your language/Declare independence’ over robust electronic beats and glitches. But also, Volta is shot through with a very immediate, live-for-the-moment passion. On ‘’I See Who You Are’’, Bjork celebrates her lover’s body before aging and death takes its toll: ‘Let’s celebrate now/All this flesh on our bones/Let me push you up against me tightly/And enjoy every bit of you.’ Joyful, expressive, brave, intelligent: in short, another great Bjork album.
BLACK MOUNTAIN
IN THE FUTURE - Black MountainBlack Mountain's previous self-titled debut had frontman Steve McBean showcasing numerous local Vancouver talents, along with his own grab bag of music sensibilities. To further up the ante, the band made little effort to shroud their classic rock fanaticism. Whatever you want to call them - revivalists, re-interpreters, or even rock fundamentalists - that first record provided an engaging snapshot of late 1960s/early 70s AOR. With that in mind, the follow-up In the Future faces the challenge of holding our attention amidst all these Guitar Hero games and Led Zeppelin reunions without puffing itself up to the ridiculous levels of more mainstream retro-stoners like Wolfmother and the Mars Volta.
Thanks to the emergence of side projects Blood Meridian and Lightning Dust, the curtain's been lifted, and suddenly Black Mountain sounds more complicated and conflicted than the bleary-eyed grin their debut flashed. The Debbie Downer pathos of Amber Webber, who until now had sounded like an afterthought on the band's recordings, spills over from her sobering Lightning Dust material, recorded with fellow Mountaineer Joshua Wells. Coupled with Blood Meridian exposing the bluesy id of bassist Matt Camirand, Black Mountain had no choice but to make room for these burgeoning personalities. While the debut grooved on a countercultural us v. them moral trip, Future raises the stakes considerably, leaving the band's musical talents to play catch-up with their new material's epic-sized dimensions.
Simply juxtaposing Future opener "Stormy High" with the debut's first track "Modern Music" suggests that the band's more profound than playing Nintendo while high, but not entirely immune to "J.R. Tokin'" jokes. Tolkein, get it? Oh well. Starting with a lugubrious, "Hell's Bells"-style arpeggio before launching into stoner-metal chanty, McBean repeatedly belts the song's title as Wells's banshee howls in the background, foretelling McBean's lyric about "witches on your trail." A fitting way to kick off the album, "Stormy High" gently eases the listener into Black Mountain's increasingly fantastical world. The eight-minute "Tyrants," on the other hand, sounds like a Middle Earth baptism by fire. With its sprawling sections and gauntlet of brain-numbing riffs, the best analog for “Tyrants” would probably be "Don't Run Our Hearts Around." However, where the latter dims for hushed verses of traditional blues bellyaching, the former's eerie, calmer moments wrench the soul just as violently as the louder ax assaults.
In The Future provides a wide spotlight, and Wells gets a chance to shine, when she's better suited for the part. "Queens Will Play" essentially beefs up Lightning Dust's threadbare palette of organ and guitar, changing a simple church house hymn into a menacing cathedral dirge. She even gets to carry the torch to the finish line with closer "Night Walks", a dreamy ballad that offers spiritual replenishment after a mystically taxing hour of dense music.
But, Future's hardly a smooth ride. Whether verified or not, drug use has always gone hand-in-hand with these guys, but here they either smoked too much and lost focus on some of these winding mini-sagas or remained painfully sober and sacrificed much of their debut's mind-freeing vibe. Black Mountain's strategic sequencing of long-track/short-track managed to keep listeners locked on, particularly for its dazzling first half. Fortunately, buried in this massive time capsule you find some succinct nuggets, particularly the Tom Petty-esque swagger of "Angels" and crying-into-beer lurch of "Wild Wind". Ultimately, Future can't compete with the classic rock divinity that's been worshipped in countless high school parking lots and shag carpeted basements for the last 40 years, but you gotta love them for trying. After all, in a time when four rock gods reuniting for a one-off concert becomes the music story of the year, what can any of us mortals do?
BLONDE REDHEAD
23 - Blonde Redhead23 finds Blonde Redhead at their beauteous best, on the sort of form that saw the trio produce one of the finest LPs to date, 2004’s Misery Is A Butterfly. It’s a record that sinks in deep, from the very offset; an album that enriches the heart and mind and leaves the first-timer flabbergasted at just how fantastically otherworldly a single album can sound. Those wanting absolute succinctness at the earliest possible juncture, this is what you need to know: 23 is the next LP you have to buy.
Mysterious and magical, the New York-based trio have always been a complex puzzle of a band – experimental to a degree yet able to harness the rawest, purest pop hooks, the brothers Pace and vocalist Kazu Makino craft compositions that defy conventional classification. Indie-rock is one catchall that could be applied, but it’s ill-fitting given the three-piece’s penchant for exploring alternative routes to a song’s climax. Often what begins elementary takes a turn for the advanced, for the contradictory; here, ‘SW’ begins its journey under a heavy curtain of chimes and shimmers, trebly percussion and chant-like vocals, but by the midpoint of its allotted four-and-a-half it’s shifted gears courtesy of some superbly unexpected, wonderfully embellishing trumpeteering. It’s just one of 23’s many highlights – a song that strays from the norm enough to sate those with an appetite for the unusual, but does so in a way so affecting that even absolute beginners will be thoroughly intoxicated.
The opening title track, too, tosses an early curve: its introduction is pure eighties alternative rock, all drifting drones and blooded bombast – a comparison to the always referenced My Bloody Valentine would not be misplaced. Yet the song’s not designed for those with their eyes firmly on their laces; it’s a celebratory gambit, a gorgeous slice of alien soundscaping that’s somehow of this earth but utterly inhuman of design. It’s too perfect to be the product of fallible men, and that feeling, that Blonde Redhead have found a previously shrouded secret formula for songwriting, runs the length and breadth of 23.
It seems strange that a band so full of sound would lift their moniker from a no-wave group from a couple of decades ago, but in Blonde Redhead’s case the contradictory has always made a perverse sense. 23 offers no answers as to how Blonde Redhead should be appreciated, generically; all it does is remind the listener that few bands today are quite so perfect at their chosen art form.
If you missed it earlier, this is the next record you have to buy. Absolutely. Unequivocally. It’s better than Misery Is A Butterfly. Seriously. Do it.
BRAVERY
THE SUN AND THE MOON - The BraveryClever lads, the Bravery. To represent the title "The Sun and the Moon," they made half the album jacket one colour (gold for the sun) and the other half another (blue for the moon). Fortunately, the music isn’t as fractured. In fact, it’s another major step forward for the New York-based band. The boys keep the best of their ’80s-style, new wave rock sound but add more classic guitar rock touches under famed producer Brendan O’Brien. Singer Sam Endicott still sounds like a cross between Ray Davies of the Kinks and an earnest Morrissey. Many of the songs carry an increased seriousness but they're framed by irresistible melodies that turn Endicott’s soulsearching into compelling dance rock. The Bravery is still throwing a party, but it’s a thinking-man's party. This easily ranks among the top rock records of the year.
The Bravery released their 2005 neo-new-wave debut in the wake of a virtual dance-rock armada (see: the Killers, the Rapture), grafting beats onto steroidal guitar riffs. Labeled copycats, they quickly became persona non grata among the hipsterati. But The Sun and the Moon shows them weeding out the pogo-stick synth loops, favoring mid-'90s Britpop and early-'00s Strokes. The propulsive energy (and navel-gazing) is still there, channeled into stadium-size anthems and heartrending ballads. Too sappy for the cool kids, sure, but still a fine pop record.
BRIGHT EYES
CASSADAGA - Bright EyesAt 27, Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst already has enough career behind him to establish a trajectory. As his lyrical themes broaden, his music is following suit. Cassadaga, taking its name from a spiritualist camp in Florida where Oberst spent some time, is a logical continuation of his evolution from haunted lo-fi auteur to country-folk traditionalist, and with it comes the slickest production of any Bright Eyes album to date. Oberst, while retaining the feverish quaver that's become his calling card, finds more mannered ways to express emotion here than sliding in and out of key. The arrangements are unapologetically grand, laden with strings, blaring guitar, and mournful pedal steel. Even the record's packaging seems to declare it an event-- the "spectral decoder" included with the disc translates the artwork's squiggly gray lines into all sorts of pictures and text.
The ambitious arrangements strike just the right balance on some songs: The orchestral work on old-fashioned ballad "Make a Plan to Love Me" never overburdens the song's pliant lilt, while the marching strings in the last verse of "Hot Knives", and the organs that eventually sweep in on the barren "No One Would Riot for Less", provide an acute sense of drama. However it's not all good news. Elsewhere, Oberst's arrangements overreach: "Four Winds", with its squealing guitars and fiddles, sounds like a honky-tonk version of "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town. It's still worth a punt though, and I for one enjoy listening to it's crooning melodies and brazen arrangements on a lazy Sunday afternoon whilst trying to inject some snippets of brilliance into this blog page.
BRITISH SEA POWER
DO YOU LIKE ROCK MUSIC? - British Sea PowerBritish Sea Power have been an ambitious band from the start. From their first guitar scribbles on 2003 debut, The Decline of British Sea Power, through the more streamlined songwriting on the 2005 follow-up, Open Season, the Brighton band have pushed themselves and their craft beyond simply re-creating rock music - the band perform dressed in vintage military uniforms on stages decorated with foliage, yet they never come off as ironic. Their approach is playful yet cerebral, like a logic puzzle. So, although the title of their third album, Do You Like Rock Music? might seem overly straightforward for such an elusive group, it’s inquisitiveness is crucial: British Sea Power would like us to abandon our genres, subgenres, and microgenres. To hell with indie, post-punk, lo-fi and new wave; for British Sea Power, all of these fall under the rock rubric.
To this rock-critical end, the band recorded Do You Like Rock Music? around the world - in a Czech forest, in a crumbling fort in Cornwall, and most tellingly, in Montreal with the Arcade Fire's Howard Bilerman and Godpseed You Black Emperor's Efrim Menuck. This is a band going for broke by going global. They inflate the plaintive guitar pop of Open Season to monumental proportions, amplifying every element until it sounds enormous and overwhelming. The epic choruses and chiming guitars on "Waving Flags" and "Down on the Ground" sound immodest, as if the overzealous band wants to convert all you nonbelievers: You don't just like rock music, you love it, you need it, you worship it. Rock music has a wonderful plan for your life.
That's a huge undertaking for any artist, and not surprisingly British Sea Power come up just a tad short. Do You Like Rock Music? doesn't fail miserably, but disappoints gently. Where formerly they made glancing references to bands like the Pixies and the Psychedelic Furs (singer Yan still sounds studiously like Richard Butler), the primary touchstone on Do You Like Rock Music? is U2. And not politico-rock 1980s U2, sell-out 2000s U2. Let me get one thing straight, I am a fan of British Sea Power, but too often the drama sounds painstakingly deliberate, rising and falling expectedly. "No Lucifer" even bullies you into chanting along with its shouted refrain "Easy! Easy! Easy!" but offers no cathartic reward or explanation for what will seem like an esoteric repetition. If you’ve not been brought-up on 70’s wrestling with Dickie Davies, then you’ll not get the Big Daddy reference.
The recording work by producer Bilerman, along with Menuck and Graham Sutton (of Bark Psychosis), sounds often impersonal. A quick-moving guitar winds through the first measures of "Lights Out for Darker Skies", but the band's wall of sound violently overtakes it. Later, the scrappy guitars on "A Trip Out" sustain the song from start to finish before "Open the Door" dials it back for a surprisingly tender folk-pop chorus and a strong, short guitar solo. But "Canvey Island" weighs down the album's middle section with its hesitant pace and expository lyrics: "Like Canvey Island 1953/Where many lives were lost/and the records of a football team." This type of matter-of-factness forestalls any real wonder at the serendipity of nature and history (the song references a fatal flood), which British Sea Power conveyed so eloquently on previous albums.
Despite the implications of the band name, British Sea Power don't work as well at this size and scope. They're in danger of becoming the Alarm to the Arcade Fire's U2. Curiously, these stadium-sized songs channel less passion, anger, or awe than their earlier work. Granted, emotion has never been the band's strong suit, but here, British Sea Power speak the language of big feelings with little to back it up. Unfortunately Do You Like Rock Music? sounds empty at its core, with a rock where its heart should be.
BROWN, IAN
THE WORLD IS YOURS - Ian BrownIan Brown is now nearly 10 years into his post-Stone Roses solo career, and he is borrowing emotional audio signifiers from his proto-Britpop and placing them alongside lyrics that balance arrogance and politics. On this, his fifth solo outing (apart from a remix disc and a "best of"), he's stuck with the previous formula of tracks soaked in strings.
He's titled the album The World Is Yours, by which he really means "the world is mine," as related on the opening title track. The song begins with some noodling strings and Brown enters with the lines, "As a young boy/Daddy used to tell me stories," the payoff being that his father always told him, "the world is yours," and that he came to believe it. Ahh, nice.
"Sweet Children" centers on Brown's wish that he had a house with 10million rooms that he could open to the "street children" before going all Vivaldi with fluttering strings in the middle. It's great that Brown wants to save the children, but the sophomoric lyrics read like the diary entry of an 8th grade girl the night after her social studies class discussed Darfur. Is this the same Ian Brown we all know and love. Hmmm, I know he's better than this.
On "Illegal Attacks," Brown addresses Iraq and Afghanistan, but he diminishes the impact of what he's saying by using oversimplifications like, "These are commercial crusades/They used a terror charade to get paid," and pleading for "soldiers [to] come home." The song does have the most interesting string part on the album, though, using the cellos to good rhythmic effect.
The album sounds good, but Brown's a little detached at times. To put it another way, this is an album I wouldn't feel compelled to turn off if it was playing, but it's also not the first one of his I'd reach for.
BUFFALO TOM
THREE EASY PIECES – Buffalo TomOf all the what-might've-beens of the grunge era, Buffalo Tom may be the most fondly remembered, because little about the band was divisive. They wrote solid rock 'n' roll songs, performed with vigor and, especially toward the second half of its decade-long run, possessed accessibility. The band's biggest problem was that it hit its commercial stride after recording its best album, Let Me Come Over. Buffalo Tom never had material quite that strong again. Until now.
Three Easy Pieces is a stone-faced ringer for Buffalo Tom’s heyday, but it’s by no means a retread of the past. The dizzying punch of the band’s younger years still exists in uptempo songs like “Bottom of the Rain”, “September Shirt”, and the charging title track; however, the group’s existential weight has grown with time, evidenced by the aching “Bad Phone Call”, the forlorn “Lost Downtown”, and near-epic “Hearts of Palm”. Buffalo Tom has always had a flair for injecting emotional heft into unsuspecting pop form, but here, on songs like “Thrown”, “Pendleton”, and “CC and Callas”, the sincerity digs itself even deeper into the skeletons of the songs.
BULAT, BASIA
OH, MY DARLING - Basia BulatThe cover image of Basia Bulat's debut record tells you all you need to know about what's contained inside. Then again, maybe it doesn't tell you anything. Bulat is starkly front and center, donning a floppy hat and a youthful Mona Lisa expression, the sort onto which one might project any number of emotions, feelings, or personalities. A sense of aloof confidence is present, butting up against a naïve cuteness. The music on the disc under the picture shape-shifts as much, at times offering up a neo-madrigal folkie or a muted soul whisperer; elsewhere, a lavender-colored soft-folk puree-blender shows up - you get the picture! Bulat further vacillates, like her countrywoman Feist, between little-girl sweetness and womanly wisdom, yet her specific blend of the two sensibilities more closely recalls Lilith Fair than Let it Die.
Bulat's voice is a soft, smoky coffeeshop flutter, most prominently recalling mid-Nineties AAA queens Natalie Merchant and Sarah McLachlan. Ergo, much of Oh, My Darling rings with the same sort of baroque femininity those women mastered. Several songs are coated in a thick lacquer of piano and bowed strings, most prominently "Snakes and Ladders", an attractive admixture of aristocratic lilt and snapping rhythm which rates as one of this year's most soundtrack-ready singles. Within the current atmosphere of music promotion, I guess that equates to "radio-friendly".
On occasion, however, Bulat's tunes rely a bit too much on ambience, with a couple of Darling's songs falling back into a billowing, wispy pastiche. Darling's most memorable moments, however, come when the frippery is most restrained, and the romantic sentiment follows suit. The timorous "Little Waltz" ("I learned how to dance/but I never showed it to you") only allows its string quartet to enter after the first verse, without chewing much scenery. "I Was A Daughter", which starts out with droplets of piano and "Sinnerman"-style handclaps before blossoming into a gentle torrent of violins and rapid-fire drumming, then recedes and reappears, is another example of Bulat's knack for curious and surprising arrangements.
She's keen with the folky minimalism, as well; the title track is simple, unadorned feeling, escorted by only acoustic guitar, some multi-tracked harmonies, and eventually a harmonica. The too-short stage-setter "Before I Knew" is Darling's best moment: handclaps, a ukulele, and some luxuriant harmonies surround Bulat, inching toward a folksy recollection of the Concretes' or El Perro del Mar's tranquil melodicism. It's gone, in just over a minute, and just like "Darling" - is simple, beguiling, and hopefully a sign of what's to come from this promising songwriter in the future.
BURIAL
UNTRUE - BurialIf you know the true identity of London dubstep artist Burial, consider yourself a member of a very exclusive circle. Steve Goodman, who runs London's Hyperdub label, knows-- he cuts Burial's royalty cheques, after all-- but if anyone else does, no one has yet had the temerity to out Burial's inner Peter Parker. Read an interview or two with the artist himself, and you'll quickly figure out why he's chosen to remain anonymous. Burial's decision not to let a backstory be a part of the music doesn't come across as a strategy calculated to maximize hype, but just the opposite: a means of keeping the music pure, faceless, answerable only to itself-- a closed system.
The critical success of Burial's self-titled first album threatened to derail the project's mystery, however. A collection of tunes recorded at home on a low-tech setup over the course of many years, Burial-- moody, brooding, by turns supple and sullen-- shot to the top of many critics' best-of lists last year. To judge from a recent interview with Burial posted on the Hyperdub website, the attention was more distracting than gratifying. "The first [album] got slightly out of where it belonged," he says, "and I found it a bit difficult to just block things out and make tunes in a low key way again, and it took time to just get back to doing that, and liking it, and doing it fast, and not trying to be a perfectionist. Just trying to dream up tunes again without worrying what people were going to think."
But if it's the reclusive life that Burial seeks, he might just be his own worst enemy, because his new album, Untrue, bests Burial's fans' wildest hopes for the followup. Burial was a worthy, sometimes thrilling record-- an impressive debut-- but it sometimes lost focus, particularly when it attempted to carve out something closer to "proper," clubwise dubstep. But Untrue maintains the style and the vibe of the first album and yet does it better. It's a deeper album-- richer, more complex, more enveloping. The irony is that almost nothing has changed. Burial still makes his beats (at least, so he claims) with relatively lo-fi audio editing software, eschewing the comfort of sequencers and MIDI clocks. His string sounds, which on Burial let many a critic to call his music "cinematic," sound as unabashedly canned as they did last time, and his manipulated vocals-- warped, time-stretched, pitch-corrected-- are just as unabashedly emotive.
Like Burial, Untrue is a homage to UK garage, or two-step-- a short-lived, oft-mourned fusion of breakbeats and house music that peaked in the late 90s before morphing into offshoots dubstep, grime, and bassline house. Thus Burial's beats swing wildly, as though flitting between two tempos in the space of a single bar; jittery hi-hat patterns flash like knives being sharpened, and tooth-cracking rimshots invariably fall on the third beat, dividing time in odd ways. His beats seem to rush, trying to catch up with their own out-of-control forward motion, and then-- crack!-- having caught up, they simply hang there, as though unsure what to do with the remaining time left in the measure. It's a relay race marked not by starter's pistols, but stopper's pistols, leaving an impression at once rigid and woozy.
But what Burial gets wrong is at least as interesting as what he gets right. Where two-step was marked by its precision-- staccato sub-bass, nimble cadences, rapid-fire vocal shots-- Burial smears everything until the songs' moving parts are all but indistinguishable. In "Ghost Hardware", what sounds like the creaking of a swingset grates in the background, as if attempting to tug the music out of its planned arc. On "Shell of Light", piano and strings eddy to a crawl as rain drizzles over muted, multi-tracked vocals. There's nothing on Untrue that's likely to work in the dance club, but that's beside the point. Top-heavy with sad string passages and mournful vocal loops, Untrue is an album meant to be heard at home, in the car, on headphones-- his songs feel almost like beautiful secrets being whispered to a listener.
Thanks to Burial's use of vocals, Untrue is overflowing with earworms, its spongy terrain pocked and pitted until the ground threatens to give way with every step. It's not a pop album, at least not by Top 40 standards, but his voices-- male, female, and ambiguous-- wriggle deep into the listener's consciousness. They're just intelligible enough to stick-- I'm pretty sure that the refrain to "Near Dark" runs, "I can see why I love you"-- and unintelligible enough to resist dislodging. Occasionally paired with scraps of what might be movie dialogue, they recall the haunted intimacy of Luomo's Vocalcity; like that record, they toy with r&b's conventions, heavy with breath and rippling with trills and melisma, some of it digitally imposed.
Like everything in Burial's music, the vocals are supercharged with emotion: Loaded with distance, they often sound like they've been recorded several rooms away from their source. Burial isn't afraid of sidling up next to cheesiness, practically flirting with bathos-- his string sounds are uniformly synthetic and his voices seem expressed in miniature; like Thom Yorke, he raises affect almost to the level of fetish. Burial's all-permeating use of reverb could be a crutch if it didn't work so well. The haze works in his favor, leaving a level of plausible deniability-- you can never be entirely sure that what you're hearing is really there in the track, creating a wonderfully unfinished feeling to the record.
"Sometimes you just want music to stay where it is from," says Burial in his Hyperdub interview. "I love drum & bass, jungle, hardcore, garage, dubstep, and always will till I die, and I don't want the music I love to be a global samplepack music. I like underground tunes that are true and mongrel and you see people trying to break that down, alter its nature. Underground music should have its back turned, it needs to be gone, untrackable, unreadable, just a distant light." Untrue is just that. It quivers like a hissing lightbulb, one that illuminates the tracks scattered around it-- garage, dubstep, soul-- and in doing so smears them into unique shapes. Untrue shows the hunched, unreadable form of Burial's refusenik stance-- back turned, hands shoved in pockets-- and practically commands you to follow.
CARIBOU
ANDORRA – CaribouDan Snaith's Caribou project, to borrow a line from another Canadian songwriter, has been a zigzagging journey through the past. He was most entrenched in the present moment on his 2001 debut Start Breaking My Heart, but even that record's soft-focus, post-Aphex Twin electronica seemed pulled from two or three years earlier. By 2003's Up in Flames he began glancing at psychedelia, but through a distinctly 90s lens, mixing the cracked sensibility of Mercury Rev with the ecstatic come-together crescendos of big beat. Milk of Human Kindness from 2005 was connected closely to its predecessor, but it added the unblinking rhythms and tidy instrumental efficiency of 70s krautrock. And now, with his latest album Andorra, Snaith finally and fully inhabits the 1960s, specifically the branch of sun-kissed pop that was aware of psychedelia but chose not to abandon the pillow-soft pleasures of AM radio, of the Zombies, Free Design, the Mamas & Papas, and, of course, the Beach Boys.
The significant factor in Snaith's transformation from his instrumental beginnings is his increased confidence as a singer. On Up in Flames, the voice was another sound to be fed into the computer, a way to reference the idea of songs rather than actually sing them. From there, it's been an unsteady trajectory pointing toward songwriting proper, and with Andorra, Snaith seems to be paying attention to chords and melodic progression first. He may have even titled a song to commemorate the new development: "Melody Day", Andorra's first track and lead single, is the most tuneful of the bunch, with Snaith's high tenor sitting squarely in the center of the rolling drums, sleigh bells, flute, and what sound like vintage synths.
"Melody Day" is also significant for being the only track to fully embrace what has become a Caribou trademark: the brief pause at the end of a bar which explodes into an enormous volley of percussion. The album as a whole is a touch more subdued; these "big" moments-- which were at risk of becoming a cliché, anyway-- appear sporadically, and generally with less intensity. Instead, in Andorra's more song-oriented first half, Snaith creates tracks that startle with their lightness of touch and joyous evocation of honeyed late-60s guitar pop. A half-decade after the Elephant 6 movement first started to fade, Snaith's move can be seen as risky, but it succeeds, oddly enough, in part because of the one-man-band nature of his project. He still works essentially alone, playing and sampling instruments and building tracks with a computer, and his music, with its loops and thick production, retains the markers of his process. He's also not aiming his music at any sort of radio; the mid-range is jammed full, distortion pops up regularly without apology, and weird sounds appear from nowhere and zoom between the speakers.
The sunshine daydream reaches peak intensity five songs in with "Desiree", whose very title dates it perfectly: we know from her name that this girl might trip down the streets to the tune of Windy by The Association, perhaps looking for kicks or waiting for Mary to come along. There's barely any percussion to speak of, just swells of synthetic strings, bits of flute, zooming harp runs, and chiming guitar leading to a big chorus that's all Snaith's multi-layered voice. Then there's "Sandy" and "Irene", also names more likely in 2007 to belong to grandmothers. The former is Andorra's most dynamic track aside from "Melody Day", and also has the most interesting vocal arrangement, its highly reverbed streaks of harmony suggesting of a pop-minded church choir. It hints that Snaith might also be taking lyrical inspiration from a earlier time: "Sometimes in her eyes I see forever/ I can't believe what we've found." The words here are not always intelligible-- there's often a lot going on, so they're easy to miss-- but it's safe to say that the music carries the bulk of the emotional meaning.
Andorra takes an odd detour over its final three songs. "Sundialing" returns to the repetitious Neu!-isms of Milk of Human Kindness but dresses up the steady rhythm with Day-Glo swirls. "Irene" is a short mid-tempo ballad that is instrumental through its first half, and even then the only sound is essentially a drum machine. The tune in its second half is vague, suggesting a more fleshed-out song sitting somewhere else that's never quite articulated. The eight-minute closer "Niobe" builds from bubbling, acidic synths and folds in tightly sequenced, Orb-like pulses, an extended slow-burn that occasionally threatens a big climax with a sampled drum fill but never quite goes there.
Considering its length and placement at the end of the record, "Niobe" is a tad disappointing, never quite acquiring the momentum its structure would seem to suggest. Still, it's also an encouraging sign that Snaith is thinking in these more open-ended terms, that's he's not confining himself to the retro pop explosion that, as he demonstrates here, he has essentially mastered. Andorra will undoubtedly win Caribou a lot of new fans and rightfully so; it's a big, bold, tuneful collection that impresses with its ambition and meticulous arrangement. But it's also nice to think that Caribou's course is not fixed, that the future might hold a few more surprises than what's found here.
CHEMICAL BROTHERS
WE ARE THE NIGHT - Chemical BrothersIt's going to take another few years, a lot of nostalgia, and even more critical evangelism for the Chemical Brothers to be recognized as one of the most all-around consistent acts of the 1990s. More than a decade after the release of their debut album, 1995's Exit Planet Dust, they remain inextricably tied to Big Beat electronica, a genre that had already fallen out of fashion by the time the tech bubble burst. Since most of America's hopes for so-called "electronica" were pinned on a cynically marketed next-big-thingism, its chart failure has tended to overshadow everything else-- including a fair critical appraisal, as Salon's Michelle Goldberg demonstrated in a pan of the Chemical Brothers' 2002 album Come With Us: "Commercially, the mid-to-late-90s conceit that electronic music would wrest the airwaves from guitar rock dinosaurs has proved as fanciful as the idea that online video rental could be a billion-dollar business."
You don't need to have the Chemicals' Singles 93-03 video compilation in your Netflix queue to question the relevance of that statement: Electronica was a failure as a mass-culture lifestyle trend. But it was successful, too, in one important area: producing memorable pop records. Even in the post-crash doldrums of the early 2000s, the Chemical Brothers sustained their creative stride more effectively than most other artists clogging up the modern rock charts 30 notches above them. Albums like Come With Us and 2005's Push the Button were more pacekeepers than trendsetters, sure, but there was a cohesive freedom to them, a sort of universal dance music catchall vibe that cross-evolved through acid house, electro, hip-hop, and whatever else they could layer big, explosive bass over. Even as their returns began to diminish the further they got from the staggering peak of Dig Your Own Hole, the mild creative downturn wasn't significant enough to damage the overall feeling of optimistic, psychedelic egalitarianism embedded in their music.
This, though, this We Are the Night-- no, come on, not now. Not after Fatboy Slim's Palookaville and the Prodigy's Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned and Orbital's The Blue Album and Daft Punk's Human After All and the last two Moby records. Just because Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons are falling off the cliff a few years later than most of the other once-great hopes of 90s dance music doesn't make the plummet any less frustrating or embarrassing. Not even the low points on Push the Button suggested they were about to tank this hard.
On We Are the Night, the Chemical Brothers have switched from integrators to imitators: Where 1999's Surrender opened with "Music: Response", expertly streamlining the cutting-edge electro-funk of early Timbaland, "Do It Again" sounds like a public domain version of a FutureSex/LoveSounds beat, with perky synths and an aloof radio-dance churn gutlessly approximating the elements that make those tracks work. Guest singer Ali Love turns in a mediocre Timberlake impression-- although even JT himself couldn't pull off a dippy couplet like "got a brain like bubblegum/ Blowing up my cranium."
The album's title track attempts to weave the duo's euphoric buildups and breakdowns into warmed-over Krautrock, but with a beat that never crests, its dynamics are left to a weakly kitschy Perrey-Kingsley melody, damning the track to 6 1/2 minutes of a rickety retro-future parody of the 360-degree treadmill from 2001. "Das Speigel" is an ill-advised stab at minimal house-- have the Chems ever even attempted to pull off minimal anything? -- and after layering on enough electronic giggles, squeals, melodicas, guitars, and extraneous sound effects to a briefly-promising groove, it turns out sounding like something from side 6 of Booka Shade's Sandinista!.
Other autopsies of this album might pin its weaker moments on the guest spots, but those mostly just make an already-bad situation moderately worse. "All Rights Reversed" would still sound like groggy emo if they got somebody besides the Klaxons to mutter close-harmony vocals over its inflated theatricality. It's probably for the best that "Battle Scars" wasn't given to a better singer than Willy Mason: His head-trauma Gordon Lightfoot vocals and the sub-Rod McKuen lyrics ("There's a line in the sand/ Put there by man/ By man whose children built up castles made of stone") are perfectly suited to the track's tedious, xylophone-laden indie sleepwalk. And while there's been a well-earned avalanche of derision aimed at Fatlip's dopey nature-doc rap "The Salmon Dance", he had to work with the beat the Chemicals gave him; most MCs, faced with the prospect of rhyming over something Arthur Baker might have concocted after an afternoon of gorging on vanilla-frosted hash brownies and Spongebob reruns, would probably rap about dancing like a fish on crack, too.
The Chemical Brothers' descent into ineptitude is at least accompanied by a few brief highlights: "Saturate" plays like one of Surrender's acid house throwbacks, complete with Bill Ward-size drums, while "A Modern Midnight Conversation"-- based on a whipcrack cowbell beat and the bassline from Crystal Grass' 1974 psych-disco classic "Crystal World"-- is as euphoric as anything they've done this decade short of "Star Guitar." But those flashes of effortless dancefloor-filling greatness used to be the norm for the Chemical Brothers; as exceptions on an album of colossal blunders, they can only serve as fleeting reminders. I once found it hard to fathom that Dig Your Own Hole was released ten years ago; it's easier to believe now.
CLAP YOUR HANDS SAY YEAH
SOME LOUD THUNDER - Clap Your Hands Say YeahTwo things stood against Clap Your Hands Say Yeah when they first emerged at the tail end of 2005. One was the ridiculous amount of hype that accompanied the band. The other was singer Alec Ounsworth's voice - a reedy, startled yelp that often resembled the unhinged warblings of a PCP-raddled drunk - and that, on first listen, made you curse evolution for providing you with ears. Little over a year later they're back with album number two, minus the initial hype, but with a frontman still resolute in his abstinence of what, in musical parlance, is known as 'being in tune'. But then again, Ian Brown had the very same affliction.
Listening to the opening track and you might think Clap Your Hands’ second album will be a retread of the first. But once the rag-tag Beach Boy-ish ambition of 'Emily Jean Stock' and the arpeggiated intricacies of 'Goodbye To The Mother And The Cov'e have worked their magic, it’s apparent that they’re a lot more ambitious than that. At their best, on 'Yankee Go Home' and 'Five Easy Pieces', their sound becomes less indie rock than ecstatic chanting. Oddly reassuring amid all this change is that singer Alec Ounsworth still sounds like David Byrne falling into icy water.
CORAL
ROOTS & ECHOES - The CoralYes, it's a knowing title, acknowledging the Coral's propensity for digging deep into the past and assimilating the findings into their own music. The calendar on the wall on Roots and Echoes stands at 1967, the dial on the radio set between breezy West Coast pop and glowering psych-rock - imagine Jan and Dean perched on one shoulder as Charles Manson hovers on the other. The push and pull between light and dark has always defined the group, but Roots and Echoes is a brighter, considerably more settled record than previous outings, less inclined to meander skittishly into dub, mariachi and sea shanties. It sounds like the work of a band harnessing their strengths, intent on packing a heavyweight punch after losing focus on 2005's misfiring The Invisible Invasion
With 'Roots & Echoes' The Coral reaffirm that they're one of the few white-boy guitar bands who can rock and roll, doing unfailingly interesting things with rhythm while at the same time being unafraid of A Good Tune. 'Put the Sun Back' is a glorious song of lost innocence - filled with parks, cinder paths, alleyways and 'schoolyard eyes', its emotional, geographical and musical terrain evokes Van Morrison circa the late Sixties. It's also one of those rare songs that touchingly confronts the inadequacy of language in the face of love ('I can't explain/ You know what I mean') rather than attempting to sidestep the issue via fancy verbal footwork. 'Who's Gonna Find Me', meanwhile, is the Doors-meets-the Isley Brothers' 'Summer Breeze': the kind of opener that compels you to skip back and drink it in one more time before moving on.
The darkness remains, but a happy balance is struck. On 'In the Rain' James Skelly defines himself as 'a stranger in this life/ Haunted by yesterday's desires'. Before you get snagged contemplating just what a heavy lyric that is for a 26-year-old, 'Cobwebs' takes the record on an engaging, light-hearted detour into shuffling tuxedo country, a Merseybeat take on 'Gentle on My Mind'.
The fear after The Invisible Invasion was that the Coral might end up like Gomez: another group of young, talented, retro-inclined over-achievers who rather faded in the face of their own over-experimental tendencies. Fear not. The stirring Roots and Echoes sets the Coral firmly back on course.
CRIBS
MEN'S NEEDS, WOMEN'S NEEDS, WHATEVER - The CribsThe Cribs' 2005 breakthrough single "Hey Scenesters!" was a curious thing: A pointed piss-take of the only demographic who would probably care to buy their records. But instead of distancing the Yorkshire trio from the striped-shirt/black-jeaned plebes, it left you wondering: If these guys hate the scene so much, why do they seem so eager to join it by giving themselves a just-another-The-band name and pumping out standard-issue student-disco fare? That the band namedrop indie iconoclasts like Calvin Johnson and Bobby Conn in their bio while sounding like their record collection begins with Is This It and ends with Up the Bracket only makes the gesture seem more misguided.
Well the lads are nothing if not tenacious, opening their new album with another meta-missive-- albeit this one's directed at the herd-like masses. But the smug self-satisfaction of "Hey Scenesters!" has been displaced by the more sobering realization that the only way to rise above indie insularity is "to impress our bovine public." And so Men's Needs, Women's Needs, Whatever spares no expense in making sure the cows come home: The Cribs' major-label debut was helmed by Franz Ferdinand's Alex Kapranos (who assumes the famous-Scottish-producer role filled by Edwyn Collins on 2005's The New Fellas), mixed by alt-rock heavyweight Andy Wallace, and features perhaps the unlikeliest indie-celeb cameo since Laetitia Sadier showed up on a Common album.
But all the marquee names in the world wouldn't mean a thing if the Cribs didn't step up in the songwriting department, and the trio answer Kapranos' ready-for-prime-time production with chart-gazing tunes. In contrast to The New Fellas' rough-sketch pub-rock slop, there's a marked increase in passion and precision-- it would appear Kapranos has taught frontman Ryan Jarman a thing or two about projecting his voice to the back rows. Opening trifecta "Our Bovine Public", "Girls Like Mystery", and "Men's Needs" charge out of the gate brandishing a familiar arsenal of morse-code guitar riffs, new-waved drumbeats and thick-accented shout-speak, but like the Futureheads on their first album (and unlike the Futureheads on their second), the Cribs have found a way to translate their twitchy tension into compact, exciting pop songs where the bridges are sturdy enough to be choruses.
Though "Men's Needs" is answered later on by the Pixies-pinching "Women's Needs", the "Whatever" in the album title ultimately sums up the half-hearted attempt at conceptual narrative. And that's probably for the best, as the Cribs don't provide any probing insights into the mysteries of gender politics (in case you haven't heard: men are selfish pricks). And besides, Jarman's more charismatic when pointing the finger at himself: "I'm a realist/ I'm a romantic," he sings on "I'm a Realist", before drawing attention to that admission's inherent contradiction: "I'm an indecisive piece of shit."
But the lyrics are ultimately secondary to the album's spirited momentum, which maintains a steady clip until being derailed by the late-game curveball of "Be Safe", featuring a surprising, spoken-word appearance from Lee Ranaldo (though his past production work with You Am I suggests a certain soft spot for fledgling power-pop bands). But rather than running wild with his patented sci-fi/beat-poet spiel, Ranaldo narrates this lugubrious power ballad with a trite, anti-consumerist screed that could've been ripped straight from the diary of one of the Cribs' more depressed 16-year-old fans; Jarman's climactic, emo-kid chorus confirms the song's status as a second-rate knock-off of Nada Surf's "Popular". It's an unnecessary incongruity on a record that had already done well to fulfill its loftier ambitions, and the Cribs seem to know it-- is it a coincidence that the album closes with a humbling acoustic ballad called "Shoot the Poets"?
CRYSTAL CASTLES
CRYSTAL CASTLES - Crystal CastlesWith all of the turmoil surrounding Toronto-based, electronic pop duo Crystal Castles and their dispute with artist Trevor Brown, it’s easy to hang a cloud over their music. Apparently, the two parties are dead-locked in a legal issue regarding the band’s illegal or legal use (depends on who you ask) of one of his paintings. Surprisingly, the digipak album comes with a small poster of the questioned painting at hand — oh the things you learn when you purchase music instead of downloading everything! Well, that’s another topic for another day. Through all of this, it is worth noting that with their self-titled debut, Ethan Kath and Alice Glass have concocted one of the best electronic albums of the year.
The album is filled with soft and mellow songs like “Magic Spells” that are utterly captivating. Sampling Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s classic song, “The Message,” the way Kath manipulates the sounds is astounding. Other songs like the abrasive and edgy “Alice Practice” are nice offerings of punk rock music. The story is that this song was a complete accident as Kath recorded Glass one day when she was warming up, laid it to some frenetic video game sounds and hyper beats and mashed everything together. The fruition is a loud and screeching song that adds dimension to the album’s overall electronic sound.
The band take their name from the fictional castle in the “She-Ra” animated series and are notorious for combining a fresh mix of grimy beats, melodic undertones, punk and rock music and video game sounds. The band placed an Atari 5200 sound chip inside one of their keyboards to help in creating these distinctive and interesting tones.
There are plenty of fantastic songs all over this album and any of them could be easily hand-picked as front-lining singles. “Air War” bristles with Glass’ incoherent ramblings and Kath’s repetitive Atari sounds and blurps before the bouncy melody jumps in. “Vanished” has some of the album’s gloomier music; Kath samples both the melody and vocal from Van She’s “Sex City” to produce one of the sadder songs on the album.
What really holds the album together is the way it is stylishly sequenced. Change of paces happen and come in at just the right times. After the water-bubble sounds of “Knights,” the next song, “Love and Caring,” features the catchiest drum beat on the album along with Glass’ shrieking vocals and yes, more video game sounds! And the bookends are brilliant choices: “Untrust Us” begins with an infectious melody line and encompasses some of Glass’ prettiest vocals; “Tell Me What to Swallow” ends the album with showcasing a human side to the band as they strip everything down and get away from all of the machines to create a somber and gentle, ethereal ending. Glass practically whispers the words and the music is lifting and placid.
Whatever ends up happening with the Castles’ legal issues, we shouldn’t overlook what a strong album this is. With Crystal Castles’ infectious, eclectic music, this is easily one of the highlights of the year and a great addition to the super-genre that is electronic music.
CUOMO, RIVERS
ALONE: THE HOME RECORDINGS - Rivers CuomoSomewhere along the way, someone told Rivers Cuomo that he needed to rein it in. To the world's dismay, he listened, and made three records of faceless, predictable approximations of what the public supposedly wanted his band Weezer to be. Demo collection Alone does the opposite, collecting all sorts of goofy and indulgent ideas-- robot voices, barbershop-quartet harmonies, over-emoting, an Ice Cube cover-- reminding us why we fell for dorks with horn-rimmed glasses and flying-V guitars in the first place. Casual fans and/or haters might wonder what, after three records that were stagnant at best, could be possibly left in the vaults; the superfans know exactly what he's holding back. The inside cover shows off a crammed collection of cassette tapes, their spines promising untold treasures-- Songs From the Black Hole is there, as well as previously unheard of titles and bandnames-waiting-to-happen like Psoriasis Babies and Angst Muffins. As far as basement tapes go, Alone ranges wildly in fidelity and style while still hanging together as a surprisingly cohesive whole. Its liner notes have detailed histories and inspirations for each song-- with lyrics, even-- and photos that exhibit a disconcerting lack of shame. (Bearded Basoon-playing Rivers, Despondent Glam Rivers, collect 'em all!) Best of all: More than two-thirds of the material here was recorded before 1996. As for the rest... we'll get to that.
A lost Weezer record it isn't, even if fans have been waiting on one. Songs From the Black Hole was reportedly a full concept album meant to follow the "Blue Album" that was scrapped completely before recording what would become Pinkerton. Its story arc follows a five-person (plus one mechanoid) crew of a spaceship on an important mission, our noble protagonist Jonas (hmm...) is given a meaty role while crewmates Wuan and Dondo (seriously, it's in the liners) are one-dimensional avatars for womanizing and partying. That only sort of matters in "Blast Off!", the collection's crown jewel and such a fleeting rush of distortion-driven joy that the edges of the supposed dialogue are entirely blurred, and are hardly essential to enjoy it.
Not so when it segues directly into "Who You Callin' Bitch?", the lament of the unfairly maligned female spaceship cook, whom Cuomo brings to life with some fairly operatic solo vocal moments. More narrative confusion and dick references follow in the cheery a cappella "Dude, We're Finally Landing" and the twee-cranked-to-11 of "Superfriend", which is at least on par with Pinkerton's stellar B-sides (many of which would have made up this "lost" album). If it sounds silly on paper, go over the lyrics to your favorite Weezer song in your mind for a moment, and then take into account that these were written with the help of painkillers as Cuomo healed from leg surgery. These hopelessly corny, irrepressibly infectious songs are the stuff that Weezer freaks are forged in.
The rest of the songs come from more familiar territory. "Lemonade" borrows its paunchy low-end straight from the Blue Album, while more introspective tracks like the would-be teen-flick soundtrack cut "Wanda (You're My Only Love)" and piano ballad "Longtime Sunshine" will satisfy the Pinkerton lover on your Christmas list. There's only one previously released Weezer song in the bunch, however. While its plodding tempo nearly turns it into a dirge, "Buddy Holly" still sounds pretty great in any incarnation, but doesn't reveal much in demo form besides some silly keyboard presets; it's not as if a Weezer song has ever been ruined by over-production. It does show that Cuomo has his compositions nearly finalized before they get to the band, right down to the falsetto harmonies and lightning-quick licks tucked into the verses.
There are more unexpected pleasures as well, like hearing Cuomo moonlighting as frontman for the band Sloan on a strutting cover of oldie "Little Diane". Even the compilation's rough spots reveal something: The choked angst of "The World We Love So Much" is intimate enough to cause embarrassment by proxy, but it's worth noting that it's a Gregg Alexander cover (yes, the guy from the New Radicals). It divulges an unexpectedly modern influence, and from a relative peer of Cuomo's at that; either could have switched career trajectories if the cards had fallen just a bit differently. And yet, the biggest surprise is that Weezer's latest material is not the bottom of the barrel, and that crossover smash "Beverly Hills" only hinted at the depths Cuomo has yet to plumb. Recorded in 2007, "This Is the Way" is a stab at MOR urban pop, with what are likely his least inspired lyrics yet. He rhymes "love" with "heaven above" over a track that, even for a demo, makes old Jon Secada look like old Timbaland, finally indulging in the supposed funk influence he once so studiously avoided. The chorus: "This is the way a man loves his lady." It's as if "Beverly Hills" was a black hole, and this was the extra-dimensional hell on the other end.
But more than being adrift in an unfamiliar genre, "This Is the Way" is crippled by the same thing that drags down "I Was Made for You", a 2004 demo that closes the compilation. The mostly chronological track list of Alone exposes the same drawbacks of Weezer's later records by the end: By chasing down broad notions of universality in his lyrics and melodies, Cuomo's songs have become increasingly impersonal and vacuous, even when they're as pretty as "I Was Made For You". There's nothing about angst-ridden singer-songwriters, forgotten power-poppers, or rappers that we can't all relate to; nor do songs that draw inspirations from science fiction or Madame Butterfly necessarily appeal to a niche audience. It's frustrating that Cuomo has sidelined these weirder, often endearing influences. If nothing else, Alone reminds us that a lot of those over-ambitious, silly-on-paper ideas often blossomed in Cuomo's hands, and there was more to Weezer in their early days than just crisp power-pop and cute videos
CUT COPY
IN GHOST COLOURS - Cut CopyIn Ghost Colours announces itself, calmly but majestically, with a wash of hazy voices and fluttering keyboards giving way to crystal-clear acoustic strums, languid indie pop vocals, a sturdy dance-rock groove, pulsating electro-disco synths, swirling Caribou-style psychedelics, and an ethereal, vocoded chorus melody. Squeezing all of that into one song — the effervescent "Feel the Love" — is an ambitious move: in most hands it would come out sounding like a bewildering mess, or at least a hammy, hyperactive pastiche, but Cut Copy manage to keep it light, breezy, and utterly ebullient. Even more impressive is that they're able to replicate the trick repeatedly across this remarkably assured sophomore album. Colours boasts at least a half-dozen potential summer anthems for dancefloors and headphones alike, seamlessly strung together with subdued interstitial mood pieces that help make it more of a nuanced work than a straightforward collection of relentlessly upbeat dance jams. Undeniably, though, the dance jams are at the throbbing heart of the album, from the unstoppably glittery opening trio (leading up to the anthemic slow-burn disco of single "Lights and Music") to the rough-edged rock drive of "So Haunted" to the pure synth pop bliss of "Far Away." Indeed, this is in many ways a perfect summation of the dynamic, multifaceted, hipster-associated independent dance music of the 2000s, a motley interweaving of pop, rock, and electronic dance elements into a kaleidoscopic array of interconnected styles, some strands of which have been summarily, imprecisely tagged ("disco-punk," "electro-house," "new rave,") but which as a whole remain resolutely, gloriously nebulous and undefined. (Though nevertheless undeniably prevalent, and never more so than in 2008, following triumphant runs by LCD Soundsystem, Justice, and Simian Mobile Disco; the months just preceding In Ghost Colours' release saw eminently enjoyable new albums by Hot Chip, Hercules and Love Affair, Neon Neon, and Does It Offend You, Yeah?, to name a few.)
Cut Copy's music bears all the prominent hallmarks of its era: giddily omnivorous stylistic appropriation, a sensuous, sybaritic (though not, in their case, seedy) demeanor, and the distinct evocation of bygone decades, most palpably the ubiquitous post-punk/post-disco '80s, without succumbing to the pitfalls of overzealous eclecticism, empty hedonism, sugary glut, and blatant derivativeness. Or rather, they do show traces of all of these things, but they play each one off as a strength, always in moderation, and never to the detriment of the music. The eclecticism is there but it's fluid and cohesive rather than distractingly showy; their influence-dogging plays like affectionate homage rather than pointless mimicry; there's an abundance of gleaming, even gaudy surfaces, but they're just too rapturously enticing to entertain qualms about superficiality. It surely helps that they have one of the primary architects of this sprawling scene, the DFA's Tim Goldsworthy, on board as a producer and mixer. More importantly though, beneath its perfectly formed surfaces this is truly an album of songs — a surprisingly rare thing in this milieu — with simple but resonant melodies, carried by Dan Whitford's appealingly casual delivery, which help alleviate a slight tendency toward sonic sameness. This is evident not only on the gentler guitar-based numbers, like the loping "Unforgettable Season" and the oddly country-inflected "Strangers in the Wind," which temporarily scale back the dancefloor euphorics, but the out-and-out burners as well, combining with the peppy basslines and nagging chorus hooks to create something all the more transcendent. To be sure, In Ghost Colours is a triumph of craftsmanship rather than vision — a synthesis and refinement of existing sounds rather than anything dramatically new and original — but it is an unalloyed triumph nonetheless, and one of the finest albums of its kind.
DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE
NARROW STAIRS - Death Cab For CutieDeath Cab For Cutie multi-instrumentalist and producer Chris Walla sounded the alarm just after New Year's: In one interview, he described Narrow Stairs as a "total curve ball" and a "really polarizing record" that's "got some teeth." To drive the message home, the band designated the eight-minute "I Will Possess Your Heart" as the album's first single, albeit in truncated radio form.
But change is always relative. For a generally fey band like Death Cab, a darker, more abrasive approach has produced simply its most rock 'n' roll album to date. "Bixby Canyon Bridge" opens the album in typical Death Cab fashion, with a ghostly guitar and Ben Gibbard's voice. Bass and a second guitar come in intermittently, and a hi-hat ticks quietly. But when drummer Jason McGerr comes down hard on his toms, the guitars distort, and the airiness of the song's first minute gives way to the immediacy of a rock club.
Those moments are more common on Narrow Stairs than on its predecessors: "No Sunlight," "Long Division," and the end of "Pity And Fear" all have that rock-band urgency. They're nicely complemented by the sunny '60s pop of "You Can Do Better Than Me," the chilly slowness of "The Ice Is Getting Thinner," and "Cath…," which sounds like an unreleased track from 2000's We Have The Facts And We're Voting Yes. Narrow Stairs finds Death Cab comfortable with all aspects of its musical personality—and on top of them all.
The first single from the new Death Cab for Cutie album begins with a long wordless groove. It's practically prog, this swarm of shimmering keyboards, throbbing bass notes, and wandering guitars, and the sound builds, disarmingly, to a measured and chilling peak. At the 4 1/2-minute mark, when most rock tunes would have already come and gone, Ben Gibbard starts to sing.
"You gotta spend some time with me," enthuses the stalker - a tenor! - to his prey on "I Will Possess Your Heart," "and I know that you'll find love."
It's a perverse analogy, but Gibbard could be cajoling Death Cab's audience with those words, and with the quartet's seductive sprawl of a sixth studio album. "Narrow Stairs," out next Tuesday, is more than an artistic gesture. It's a statement of purpose from a onetime college-town indie band that is well on its way to becoming a real rarity in pop: an intrepid major-label rock group that demands autonomy and has the creative vision to back it up.
On 2005's "Plans," Death Cab, which headlines the WFNX Best Music Poll concert at Bank of America Pavilion tomorrow, took some sly risks that produced unexpected moments of real drama - closing a lush tune with a blunt piano plink or signaling the end of summer with a stiff marching drum.
This time out the musical gambles are bolder and the outcome proportionally more dramatic. And the sweeping twists and turns don't feel calculated; on the contrary. Where "Plans" was an elaborately constructed production, "Narrow Stairs" - the band's sophomore effort for Atlantic Records - feels intuitive and visceral.
Gibbard has always been a dark, literate songwriter. Here he details crushed hopes and dead-end relationships with painterly precision, and guitarist Chris Walla - once again seated in the producer's chair - presides over a gorgeously rattled phalanx of churning strings, thrashing rhythms, swirling keys, and winsome melodies.
The most adventurous songs court a collision between texture and structure, tension and beauty, that evokes Radiohead. With no conventional pattern to settle into, "Bixby Canyon Bridge" is a one-way ticket to oblivion; the song erupts and vanishes like the protagonist's dashed dreams. "Pity and Fear," a sinuous slice of tabla-fueled paranoia, is a shape-shifting monster that grows fuzzed-up tentacles and sprouts quivering beats as the measures pile up.
But "Narrow Stairs" isn't an exercise in experimentation. For all of its fresh ideas, Death Cab is still in thrall to classic songcraft, the prettier and more disconsolate the better. "No Sunlight" is a bouncy pop-rocker about the death of optimism. "Cath. . .," a big-hearted anthem, deftly sketches a bride on the first day of her ill-fated marriage: "And as the flashbulbs burst, she holds a smile/ Like someone would hold a crying child."
An angelic choir of voices and celestial organ frame the penetrating images of "Grapevine Fires," where a man, his lover, and her child drive to a cemetery to picnic with prime views of a wildfire. "A wake-up call to a rented room sounded like an alarm of impending doom/ To warn us it's only a matter of time/ Before we all burn," Gibbard sings. That sentiment echoes throughout the album, but don't let it get you down. The end is near, but the little girl in the song dances on graves while the flames spread, and so, in his way, does Gibbard
DIRTY PROJECTORS
RISE ABOVE - Dirty ProjectorsDave Longstreth, like a lot of visionaries, is so full of bright ideas he can barely keep his shit together. Part of the problem is that he's indiscriminate about what he devours: Gustav Mahler, reggaetón, Malian guitar music, Cole Porter, band members. He's helmed a different roster of musicians for each Dirty Projectors album, and each one has had its own agenda. "Jolly Jolly Jolly Ego", from 2005's The Getty Address, plays like a parade of his fetishes: dissonant folk, looped bassoons, a rhythm track sounding like it was lifted from an R. Kelly record, and Longstreth in the middle, throttling his poor falsetto with vibrations violent enough to knock a drinking glass off a table.
After five or so years of cherrypicking from large groups of musicians, he's streamlined to a rock quartet, and they actually seem to matter to him in ways he can't shake: touring guitarist Amber Coffman and drummer Brian McOmber play on Rise Above; bassist and vocalist Angel Deradoorian hadn't joined yet, but has since been filling the parts played here by Nat Baldwin and Susanna Waiche. Hearing the band rip through material from last year's New Attitude EP on a recent Daytrotter session was like watching the glass slipper slide on.
While Longstreth's initial albums were mostly string-backed folk, he's now given himself up to rhythm - in his words, his compositions have become more "horizontal" than "vertical." The horizontal's great for dancing - an opportunity that arises a few times here - but verticality is still the source of the songs' tensions. Coffman and Waiche's coos stack harmonies with Longstreth's bleat like little car wrecks, and even though the guitars move like a West African dance band, the songs seem propelled by the constant resolutions of notes rather than the beats themselves.
Then again, it's the combo - a synthesis of heavy rhythms with an addiction to delicacy and ornament - that makes Longstreth an innovative, paradoxical writer. "Spray Paint (The Walls)" is half-Soundgarden, half-Outkast. Some of this record sounds like Phish and some of it sounds like the Police. There's a verse in Esperanto. When Longstreth strides into the singer-songwriter spotlight, he's so determined to express himself he forgets the idea is to share, instead employing melisma that's so brutal it's almost embarrassing. And he sounds like he's having fun! And that's scary. Rise Above is serious, somewhat inhuman stuff, which is possibly why the band never smiles onstage: Longstreth, wide-eyed and focused, hair like wild grass; Deradoorian and Coffman looking eerily cornfed, as blank as backup singers in Mullholland Drive, their hands responsible for a completely different set of rhythms than their voices; McOmber a pair of arms occasionally rising above the wall.
Rise Above will drop plenty of jaws, and, like Deerhoof, Dirty Projectors are restructuring rock on a compositional level rather than a sonic one. To murder a cliché, whatever unfurls from Longstreth's brain next isn't anyone's guess. Rise Above, for all its fastidiousness and minor drawbacks, finally displays the perfect counterargument to the portrait of him as another nutso college dropout: it displays a pattern.
EDITORS
AN END HAS A START - EditorsSomehow, despite shifting post-punk in platinum-selling quantities to both Europe and the U.S., Birmingham's Editors have kept a low profile throughout indie's revivalist witch hunt. While the mere mention of the Killers, Kaiser Chiefs, or the Bravery incites your average post-punk/New Wave purists to grab their torches and pitchforks, Editors' widespread fame and genre piggybacking is often met with a sigh and shrugged shoulders, an odd moment of tolerance and civility amidst the Lord of the Flies behavioral patterns that are exhibited towards their contemporaries.
Frontman Tom Smith still channels Ian Curtis' dour spirit pretty shamelessly, but on songs like "Bones" or the title track he manages the occasional hook to raise up the crumbling wall of sound erected by his bandmates. Don't get me wrong, I like a bit of Curtis melancholy, and I like this record, but I just wish they'd sound as rich on record as they do live.
On "The Weight of the World", perhaps the album's histrionic pinnacle, Smith resorts to the sort of sweet nothings found in a prom's closing song: "There are tears in my eyes/ Love replaces fear/ Every little piece in your life/ Will add up to one/ Every little piece in your life/ Will mean something to someone."
An End contains its share of bright spots. However, that "weight" Smith is feeling probably stems from a sudden need to bolster the band's sound proportionately with their massive fame, a move that a group like the Arcade Fire could pull off on a follow-up album, but Editors just fail to achieve. Rather than set the world alight this record grows on you. I just wish it was recorded live so you could experience the deep, rich, velvety sound of their gigs. One for the fans... but then again, I am one.
ELBOW
THE SELDOM SEEN KID - ElbowIf 2005’s ‘Leaders Of The Free World’ was Elbow’s on-tour love letter to Manchester, this is the sound of them returning and re-evaluating their relationship with the city. Mancunians have a curiously tempestuous relationship with their hometown that renders them both partisan and pessimistic and it’s an emotional conflict that Guy Garvey wrestled with during the conception of this fourth Elbow record. It was a tumultuous two years that saw the band marooned without a record contract and dealing with the death of their friend Bryan Glancy, a local singer-songwriter and the ‘seldom seen kid’ of the album’s title.
“I’ve been working on a cocktail called grounds for divorce”, asserts Garvey of his hometown on the brilliant Zeppelin-ish lead single ‘Grounds For Divorce’ – and it’s this sense of emotional upheaval that permeates the entire album. A semi-comic duet with Richard Hawley (‘The Fix’) aside, it’s their darkest record in years – ‘Some Riot’, for example, is a return to the claustrophobia of 2001 debut ‘Asleep In The Back’ – but also one with euphoric peaks at every turn. Lush epics such as ‘Starlings’ and ‘Mirrorball’ dominate the landscape and none more so than ‘One Day Like This’ – a seven-minute gospel-tinged masterpiece built for a chorus of thousands at Glastonbury this summer.
‘The Loneliness Of A Tower Crane Driver’ is the jaw-dropping centrepiece, however: a majestic orchestral lollop that details the pitfalls of success and which sounds like a dinosaur learning to ice-skate. Like almost everything here it’s an awe-inspiring labour of love that both soothes and swells the soul.In spite of the turmoil of its conception, ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’ is a stunning record, a career-best from a band whose consistency has seldom been matched by any British indie band this decade.
ELECTRELANE
NO SHOUTS, NO CALLS - ElectrelaneVictims of many a lazy finger-wag for their heavy Stereolab borrowings, Electrelane have spent almost a decade refining their thick-set guitar ballads without really gaining much ground. On their latest album, No Shouts, No Calls, the all-female group displays a production-free grittiness that makes it sound less of this era, but closely adjacent to it. It looks backward, disdainful of the current indie picture-- particularly England's, where buzzsaw guitars and post-Strokes poses remain bewilderingly en vogue.
It's a relief, then, that organ showcase "Tram 21" shows no ambition to transform the band's sound into something more immediate or trendy-- say, shiny production, domineering vocals, or an untested instrumental formula. Since 2004's dark and deeply affecting The Power Out, the group has abandoned French lyrics in favor of singing in English or just plain keeping their mouths shut-- 2005's Axes was largely instrumental. On No Shouts, No Calls, the Krautrock-esque sonics of the band's last album have been fused with The Power Out's flair for continental pop, but it's the guitars that sing loudest: Each of the album's tepidly sung but passionately orchestrated songs is a raucous, quietly impressive guitar overture with garnishes of organ and keyboard.
"In Berlin" blends four harmonies-- vocals, guitar, bass, and violin-- to craft a resolution-free dirge accompanied by nearly unintelligible lyrics. Indeed, on much of the album, the vocals work more as a separate instrument or additional melodic line than any sort of verbal communication. On "Between the Wolf and the Dog" the band is happy to revive its instrumental beginnings with a metal-inspired interlude, highly repetitive and stretched to epic length. It's one of the album's strongest tracks, defying structural logic with a long intro and a surprising, cheery chorus at odds with the song's frenetic, Fugazi-like sound. Ghostly vocals are a perfect addition to another torrential but hygienically precise jam session, "Five", but again, they serve as a tinselly bit of color, much as the strings, keyboard, or farfisa do on other tracks.
Oddly, a banjo makes an appearance on "Cut and Run", one glimmer of the band embracing new ideas. The group also embraces the cute chorus on "Between the Wolf and the Dog" and makes an entire beachy ballad of it: The guitars stay quiet; the dry, hollow vocals sound as if recorded in a closet; and punchy drums and tambourine obediently steer clear of the urgency displayed elsewhere. "The Lighthouse" is the most magical moment on this album. Its frantically circling keyboard arpeggio (the track repeats the same melody at both rapid and slow speeds) perfectly captures the band's energy, best displaying how this album-- and this group-- distinguishes itself in a stubbornly crowded field.
ENON
GRASS GEYSERS... CARBON CLOUDS - EnonSeven years into Enon's career, fans know to expect the unexpected - which is in this case, the completely expectable. So then, frothy pop & big guitars, done well. After a four-year gap between records, Enon seem radio and arena-ready, and that's probably where they'd sound best.
Grass Geysers is full of sleek pop, but with more concentration on the equivalent of textures and accents. Case in points are; the pervasive handclaps of "Mirror on You"; the interlude of chirping birds on the otherwise lean "Colette"; the low electric gurgle of bass on "Dr. Freeze"; and the woozy robot growl of "Law of Johnny Dolittle".
The album's centerpieces, and most straightforward rockers, are "Pigeneration" and "Mr. Ratatatatat". The former opens with a drumbeat reminiscent of "Sunday Bloody Sunday" before Yasuda coos a few words over Schmersal's glistening, echoing chords. The latter is a tag-team between Yasuda and Schmersal that moves from dissonant guitar crunch to big-rock bluster.
Still, it might be the record's final third that's the most rewarding-- even if it doesn't contain any out-and-out crowd-pleasers. "Paperweights" marries stormy percussion to B-movie keyboards that never repeat the same tone twice. The scratchy drum loop that opens "Labyrinth" grabs just as much attention as the jagged scrape of guitar strings, and "Ashish" has Yasuda pleading over a dub-like throb and minimal atmosphere of early Cure records. Even with the more straightforward tracks before it, it says something that Grass Geysers... still seems like a seamless record throughout.
FEIST
THE REMINDER - FeistThe Reminder is the third full-length album by indie rock artist Leslie Feist. In March 2006, Feist rented a 200-year-old manor house outside of Paris for two weeks, where the bulk of the album was completed, although some subsequent recording took place in Toronto.
It’s funny, because I was actually starting to get a little bit sick of Feist. Everytime we went to anybody’s house, “Let It Die” was playing over the speakers. “Mushaboom” was getting killed on mainstream radio, and her music just seemed to follow me around everywhere I went. However, listening to “The Reminder” has rekindled my liking. She may just have the most unique female voice in indie-rock at the moment (well, at least until Neko Case releases another one). The album opens with the breathtaking “I’m Sorry”, which takes off from where “Let It Die” ended. It has an acoustic French-pop style to it, designed to immediately calm the savage beast that the working week may have bred. The next cut has Feist rocking out ever-so-slightly with “I Feel It All,” a jumpy little number, complete with chimes and harmonies. “The Park” is especially for those who still are not sold on her amazing voice. If the vocals towards the end of this song don’t induce chills, then, in the words of Harrison Ford, you may just be the world’s only living heart donor. “Intuition” is another very moving number that has surfaced on a bootleg or two in the past already, but is finally here in its completed version. And “1,2,3,4” just proves again that Feist’s remarkable abilities as a singer, songwriter, tunesmith, etc obviously comes very naturally to her. Everything she does seems effortless, and if that’s the case, in the next few years she will no doubt be considered a Canadian music legend.
Incidentally, track 6 of the album, "Sealion", is an adaptation of a song by Nina Simone. The original title was "See line woman" (a reference to sealions was never intended), and refers to the life of an upper class prostitute.
FIELD MUSIC
TONES OF TOWN – Field MusicThe Sunderland trio have a knack for crafting absurdly clever, yet intrinsically simple, pop songs. From the chiming intro and joyous guitar riff of opener ‘Give It Lose It Take It’ right through to album closer ‘She Can Do What She Wants’ with its constantly changing style, bold brassy bass, and sweet as candy vocals. There simply isn’t a bad song on this album.
Field Music are never afraid to try something different – ‘Sit Tight’ features wailing screams at the beginning and beat-boxing at the end, hemming in call-to-arms drums, constantly shifting melodies and a feeling of dark paranoia. The title track is crammed full of strange noises and multilayered vocals, with instruments appearing and disappearing all over the place so you’re never quite sure what it is you’re listening to. Rather than sounding confused or too busy, this approach serves to make you listen harder, straining to discern the marimba or vibraphone or strings or bizarre percussion, and it’s thoroughly charming.
The album has a solid theme of home – beginning with ‘Tones Of Town’ and continuing with a chunk of four songs dedicated to being away from home or feeling dislocated from it. ‘A House Is Not A Home’ has great bouncy guitars and delicate strings (“What’s the use in going home again/when it’s always the same”), which segues seamlessly into ‘Kingston’, dealing with displacement and disillusionment (“You work hard you get paid/but what’s the sense/it really makes no difference”). Then ‘Working To Work’ runs with this feeling, declaring “You’re working to work/and you pay to play” over a sprightly, upbeat melody and catchy, sing-along refrains. ‘In Context’ is explicit in its subject matter – “You’re a long way from home/all of the thoughts you have are not your own” – as the meandering guitar lines, rippling bass and joyous whooping at the end makes you want to dance along.
Although this album is chock full of musical gems, ‘A Gap Has Appeared’ is a particular highlight. With its soft, muted vocal style, multi-layered harmonies and lush strings, it’s so completely enchanting it’d still be perfect without any vocal accompaniment. ‘Closer At Hand’ is a personal favourite – the song seems to suddenly appear, closely segued with the previous track, and simply delights from the very first chord. Chiming guitars, perfect keyboards, lovely little touches like the do-do-do rhythm and a keyboard that sounds like sighing vocals make the song instantly catchy. Always lyrically stunning, they really excel here, and the chorus is mind-blowingly ace: “Don’t you say no/‘cause the longer we go/the closer at hand/I want you still and we are closer at hand”. It doesn’t make any sense written down but I defy anyone to listen to this song and not leap about like a fool with a shit-eating grin their face.
The album is unpredictable, ridiculously clever, catchy as hell and as perfect a pop album as you’re ever likely to hear.
FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS
FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS - Flight Of The ConchordsI knew what to expect, but still, those lyrics... “Je suis enchante/ Ou est la biblioteque/ Voila mon passport/ Ahh, Gerard Depardieu/ Baguette”. Sounds like one of those French language tapes you had at school.
The Flight of the Conchords’ Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement have already done a comedic radio show for the BBC. They’re working on the second season of a hilarious television series for HBO. And they’ve made the whole world LOL. What’s left but to follow up their EP with a full-length that further immortalizes some of their funniest songs recorded? Part of this collection’s genius is the way the two Kiwis effortlessly weave between musical genres—past and present—while celebrating the catchiest and most instantly recognizable clichés of each.
On the Pet Shop Boys ode “Inner City Pressure,” Clement and McKenzie slip into their most flamboyant British accents to sing about lower-middle-class urban poverty and the confusion that goes along with it. Background synthesizers evoke the ’80s while McKenzie sings, “You don’t know where you’re going / You cross the street / You don’t know why you did / You walk back across the street.” The deadpan delivery and ridiculous wordplay of “No one cares, no one sympathizes / You just stay home and play synthesizers” elicits an audible chuckle on even the fourth listen.
The sonic quality of the disc is absolutely impeccable thanks to McKenzie and Clement’s exceptional musicianship and the production of Micky Petralia (Beck, John Cale). The music essentially acts as the “straight man,” and because the instrumental performances are so faithful to their source-material inspirations, the playfulness of the lyrics tickles the funny bone with extra precision. If the quiet-storm funk of “Business Time” and lyrics like “I remove my clothes very, very clumsily, stripping sensuously over my pants” don’t get you, the sing-along chorus will undoubtedly win you over. As for the “Bowie” track... I swear if they did a bit more practice on the accent, Ziggy himself would swear it was a studio outtake lost track. Pastiche? Oui, certainment. Mais, tres jolie.
FOALS
ANTIDOTES - FoalsThe first single, “Cassius” is an upbeat, toe-tapping tune. The guitars are slick and jumpy and the drums have a lot of snare flourishes with steady hi-hat; the horns are also a nice touch. The song is exactly what you could hope for in a single—catchy and danceable. The band has claimed that they began making music because they “wanted to make music that was very technical...but at the same you could dance to it.” And this is prevalent here because the music is well-thought out and stylishly orchestrated.
This isn’t just your run of the mill, hyped, indie rock album. Reasonable chunks of the music are instrumental breakdowns where the band displays their fine musicianship. “Red Socks Pugie” begins with a jazzy drum pattern, Yannis Philippakis’ singing and few atmospheric touches before a great guitar and bass breakdown come in. The music rides to a swift tempo of pure dance rock; it’s so enjoyable, I defy you to not at least tap your foot.
And now, the issue on the David Sitek (of TV on the Radio fame) production. The liner notes do state that album was produced Sitek; however, multiple sources have stated that the band ditched his production and re-produced it themselves because they were unhappy with the results. The first thank you in the liner notes also goes out to Sitek but the music sounds clear, lively and polished so read into it what you will.
The music is diversified and multi-dimensional because the band covers a lot of aspects. “Two Steps Twice” begins with a guitar instrumental before the usual suspects arrive. The song transitions into a great combination of a repetitive guitar line, Philippakis’ yelping and those great drum patterns. The music cuts out again and it allows the instruments to shine before the band starts chanting, “Pa pa-ra, pa pa-ra, pa pa-ra, pa paaa.” The music hits a climax as the entire band unites to close out a terrific song.
And this album is chock-full of songs like the aforementioned. The majestic stick-tapping and pretty guitar at the beginning of “Big Big Love (Fig. 2),” the pounding bass line on “Electric Bloom” or even the video-game like electronics on the fittingly titled album closer, “Tron.” This is certainly much more than just a “dance rock” album and it is one remarkable listen. Foals certainly have a sound all to their own: unique vocal layering and harmonies, intricate guitar and drum playing, selective instrumentation and a knack for melodies. They have crafted a terrific debut album and are prime to make a dent in the indie community.
FOO FIGHTERS
ECHOES, SILENCE, PATIENCE AND GRACE - Foo FightersIn early 2007, RCA released a 10th anniversary edition of the Foo Fighters' The Colour and the Shape, a reminder of the days when the group wrote big songs that were both catchy and palatable. The nostalgia trip continues on the band's latest album, Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace, which reunites the Foos with Colour producer Gil Norton (who has since worked with Jimmy Eat World, Maxïmo Park, and Morningwood, among others). The result, however, feels like a retread, a shame for a band that - as one of the few late 1990s/early 2000s modern rock groups to enjoy a long run of success - has practically become a walking metonym for alt-rock in the same way Kleenex has for tissues.
Album opener and first single "The Pretender" goes through the same motions as early, successful anthemic rawkers "I'll Stick Around" or "Monkey Wrench", and packing plenty of clever ideas and fist-pumping firepower, it's the most interesting song the band's released in quite a while. But deploying that same vitriol proves clumsy on hard-rocking post-relationship bummers like "Let It Die" (featuring the infinitely repeated plea "Why'd you have to go and let it die?") and "Long Road to Ruin". Even "Erase/Replace", sporting the album's catchiest chorus, can't atone for its hackneyed heartache and Fugazi-lite riffs.
On The Colour and the Shape, Norton brushed up the already passé grunge sound of the Foos' debut, applying a sleeker, arena-sized version of the loud/quiet dynamic he famously produced on the final three Pixies albums. While Norton's touch often sounded hyperbolic (see: Colour's "Enough Space" and "Up in Arms"), he was merely an accessory to a band that was ready for its close-up. Now, with the Foos (or is it the Fighters, or maybe even the Effs?) being full-fledged rock stars, Norton's presence takes a backseat to the band's heightened technical skill, which has grown exponentially since the addition of dexterous guitarist Chris Shiflett in 1999. The band hardly rallies around Grohl's ear-grabbing melodies and complementary guitar lines anymore, opting instead for a vanilla classic rock sound where vocals do their bit and showy solos or overly complicated riffs fill in the empty spaces. Bent on striking the right big rock pose at the right time, these potentially simple and endearing three-minute pop songs sound cold and detached compared to heart-wrenching Foo pop gems like "Big Me" or "Everlong".
For the past decade, the Foo Fighters have used acoustic numbers as placeholders to fill out their albums, a trick gone too far on 2006's unplugged record Skin and Bones. Several campus-lawn ballads on Echoes trigger nightmarish flashbacks from that live album, most notably "Stranger Things Have Happened" and "But, Honestly". Grohl's split-personality of happy-go-lucky punk-prankster and teary-eyed balladeer has never felt more dissonant than on these heart-on-sleeve pieces, and unfortunately, a quarter of the album succumbs to this schmaltz. Echoes does attempt to forge new ground, as Grohl's longtime affinity for Tom Petty sounds very apparent on the Americana-faded "Statues" and "Summer's End", though the novelty quickly wears off, the coyote-howl of the guitars lacking the necessary power to mask the drab melodies.
Echoes' most telling slip-up comes during "Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners", an instrumental track dedicated to the Tasmania coal mine victims that clashes the band's magnanimous intentions with an awkward musical direction. Sounding like a Led Zeppelin III outtake, the track highlights the Foo Fighters' unsolicited willingness to be everything to everybody all the time. Consequently, they're sounding less and less relatable, leaving us pining not just for the days of a little grunge trio from Seattle, but for the relentlessly catchy and charismatic Dave Grohl of the Foos' still-fantastic self-titled debut and the better half of The Colour and the Shape. One for the FF collection, but perhaps not their finest hour.
FUTURE OF THE LEFT
CURSES! - Future Of The LeftWe keep posthumously lavishing praise on Mclusky, but their appeal is deeper and less immediate than it might seem: More than just being meaner and louder than their peers, they dropped brilliant non-sequiturs and generous dollops of hometown hate within perfectly twisted punk anthems. The proper names, liars, and criminals that made up their lyrics were like a world we only wished we could fully relate to. Which was fine by them: Whatever you were doing, they wanted no part of it. Jarcrew graduated from Wales' underground around the same time as Mclusky, but they lacked the more well-known band's swagger and nonchalance. They were the brilliant, creative, genre-defying geeks who tried a bit too hard-- Mclusky were off pulling fire alarms while the Jarcrew were writing screenplays in the computer lab after hours.
Future of the Left is the mutually beneficial pact between the two camps, with guitarist/vocalist Andy Falkous and drummer Jack Egglestone from Mclusky joining forces with the singer-turned-bassist of Jarcrew-- stripping down, geeking out, emoting earnestly for at least a few seconds at a time, and indulging several silly ideas that almost always come together in the end. Is it possible for musicians to show growth and maturity while singing about pretty pussycats and couples who eat sausage on a stick? Curses, the band's debut, makes a compelling argument for "yes."
The big difference between FOTL and their predecessors is the use of keyboards, but skeptical fans will be pleased to learn that the keys are wielded like broken toys with the pointy bits leveled squarely at the audience. The oscillating whine of "Suddenly It's a Folk Song" sounds like an infant's mobile set to "seizure," yet somehow makes for a stunning slacker anthem, while the guitarless "Manchasm" is just a platform to lampoon one Mark Foley (no, not the former U.S. congressman, the co-owner of a Cardiff studio). Once you've gotten used to the idea, the neanderthal new wave of "Team:Seed" and "Manchasm" are particularly gratifying.
There are familiar textures here, certainly, but they're a bit more detached about the grind. "The Lord Hates a Coward" is impressively ugly, but almost clinical in its odd harmonics and precise punches. "Plague of Onces" follows up with a quick shot of tempo, adrenaline, and judicious screaming from Falkous, and it probably benefits from being more stripped-down and arch, leaving all it's rhythmic twists and purple bass tones barer and more jagged. Even "Small Bones Small Bodies", the most Mcluskyish of the bunch, is much more syncopated and nervous, barring the queasy middle eight that could have been ripped from Incesticide.
By the time they do get loud and stupid on "adeadenemyalwayssmellsgood", it seems almost plain in comparison. There are moments that sound a little more like exercises than songs, like the circular structures of "My Gymnastic Past" and "Fuck the Countryside Alliance", but you'll grow to love-- or maybe be calloused by-- the group's sharp edges, fitting better with quirkier lyrics and increased variation from song to song. (I'd certainly never guess they'd add glammy piano rolls to "Real Men Hunt in Packs", coming off like Jesus Lizard taking on Elton John.)
There's a surprising focus on the vocals here, but Falkous proves himself more than up to the task. The wall-of-harmonies on "Fingers Become Thumbs!" or "Suddenly It's a Folk Song" that are unexpected and inspired, while his fey and mocking inflections dropped in the hardest tracks like "Plague of Onces" and "Small Bones Small Bodies" make them that much more appealing. These songs also veer from baiting and bilious to tender in small bounds: The lyrics of "Manchasm" move from "Colin is a pussy" to "Colin is a very pretty pussycat," while the self-deprecating lyrical fragments of "Suddenly It's a Folk Song" end on the line, "Now we are not burdened by love."
With tracks like "Small Bones Small Bodies" and "Plague of Onces", it'd be understandable if you walked away wishing Curses put the pedal down a bit more often. However, toning it down just a bit shows that Falkous was more multi-faceted than many might have surmised, only because Mclusky's thrash was so potent it was easy to overlook. It's doesn't sustain tension like Mclusky Do Dallas, but not much else does. Curses retains all the bile, all the laughs, and adds enough musicality to remind you that-- even after changing the program somewhat-- they're still unmatched at balancing equal parts humor and spite with a tune.
GO! TEAM
PROOF OF YOUTH - The Go! TeamFor every artist that starts out with a solo home-recording project, hitting the road circuit can present a problem: It necessitates the recruitment of other musicians, a reworking of overdubs and sample-laden material for live performance, and a general shift away from the original plot. After a couple of hundred shows and radio sets, these adjustments can become part of the artist's musical DNA, redirecting all future work away from those lonely, antisocial earlier days, and towards a crowd-pleasing, stage-translatable compromise.
The Go! Team know this challenge well: After Thunder, Lightning, Strike became a surprise hit on both sides of the Atlantic, auteur Ian Parton found himself with a demand for a live version of his kitchen-sink project. By the end of 2006, he'd played every festival from Austin to Australia with his merry crew, slowly evolving from shy, nervous rookies to seasoned party-rock veterans, with the multimedia backdrop and headbands to prove it. When Parton found himself ready to record album #2, he likely discovered that his band was nothing like where he'd left it on his debut; for one, there were a lot more people in it.
In reaction, Parton seems to have overcompensated for these changes, turning Proof of Youth into more of a sequel that replays the Thunder, Lightning, Strike formula rather than allowing the new personnel to push the Go! Team mission in a new or different direction. That decision brings both pros and cons with it: On one hand, the Go! Team sound remains a pretty singular blend of unlikely sonic companions, but revisisting that approach risks hitting the bottom of the creative well.
First single "Grip Like a Vice" is the thesis statement to Proof of Youth's copycat philosophy: It instant-replays the template of "The Power Is On", staccato playground chants and roller-rink organ building to sports-highlight fanfare and caustic guitar peaks. It's a relief, at least, to hear that the addition of non-sampled vocals-- most courtesy of rapper Ninja-- hasn't changed Parton's approach to production: Her words are still low and faded in the mix, as if he recorded her, pressed it to vinyl, and then sampled it just to maintain his aesthetic. "Grip Like a Vice" isn't the only "Power" clone, though it's probably the best: "Titanic Vandalism" and "Keys to the City" find diminishing returns as the novelty of the approach wears thin.
The other welcome news is that the guest-star buddies that the Go! Team have accumulated don't do much to break up the gameplan either, as appearances by Bonde do Role's Marina Ribatski, the Rapper's Delight Club kids, and the Double Dutch Divas fade right into the grainy mix. Only Chuck D stands out: "Flashlight Fight"'s paranoid sirens and clattering drums hearken back to the Bomb Squad's urgent soundscapes.
While the kid-chants-as-hip-hop-maneuver bit starts to show signs of staleness on Proof of Youth-- even in spite of the album's guests-- other aspects of the Go! Team's philosophy provide more replayable highlights. "Fake ID" is less old-school rap pastiche than twee indie-pop given a supercharged engine, with glockenspiel and child-like vocals propelled by fuzz bass and Parton's voluminous drums. "Doing It Right" shuffles those poppier elements into the jump-rope rhyming and horns template, intercutting the proto-rap with a dreamy chorus. But would it kill the band to include a few more instrumental interludes like the Alan Parker cover "My World", which offer a welcome relief from the frenetic pace while sucker-punching memories of Sesame Street Super-8 interludes and weird Morricone-knockoff cartoon scores?
Those quieter moments may have been the necessary sacrifice to the Go! Team's new extrovert status, and if so, it's a fair but troubling tradeoff. Proof of Youth mostly recaptures the enthusiasm and unique sensibility of Thunder, Lightning, Strike, further filling that niche for lo-fi sample-based old-school-noise-rap we never knew we needed filling. But in retracing his earlier steps, Parton is beginning to flirt with the dangerous point where a thrilling new sound becomes a one-trick pony, allowing the band to drift more towards exclusively making the kind of music that plays big on stage.
GOOD SHOES
THINK BEFORE YOU SPEAK - Good ShoesSouth London's Good Shoes venture into the crowded market of post-punk with a more streamlined take on new wave herky-jerky - like an earnest young Buzzcocks to their rivals' the Clash, the Jam, or XTC.
Good Shoes sweeten their spiky guitars, the attack/release choruses, and hiccupping vocals with some straightforward songwriting about boys in bands (and the girls who love them). If the Arctic Monkeys' success established a new template for UK teen idoldom (realistic diaries of underage drinking and nervous romantic conquests), then Good Shoes paint between the same lines with broader brushstrokes. Extra polish on the debut Think Before You Speak helps this group of barely twentysomethings realise the promise shown in about two years' worth of 7"s, EPs, and demos.
Still fundamentally a singles band, Good Shoes give us plenty of potential iPod-commercial fodder here. Several album tracks sound like potential singles, too. Likely live favorite "Sophia" ("all the pretty girls are screaming, 'Take off your pants!'") again evokes the Arctics with its mention of our underage narrator being tossed from a bar, while "Everybody's Talking" enthusiastically tries out the Futureheads' call-and-response guitar intricacies. "Does it really matter?" Jones calls at the track's glowing conclusion. As welcome as new sounds would be, Good Shoes at least clean up the old ones for potentially new ears.
GOOD, THE BAD AND THE QUEEN
THE GOOD THE BAD & THE QUEEN – The Good The Bad & The QueenThis is a collaboration between Damon Albarn (Blur, Gorillaz), Paul Simonon (The Clash), Simon Tong (The Verve) and Tony Allen (Fela Kuti), qualifying them as a supergroup? The Good the Bad and the Queen is in one sense a concept album, as it’s songs are all themed around modern life in London. It was described by Albarn as "a song cycle that's also a mystery play about London". And as if to add the proverbial cherry, it was all produced by the ubiquitous Danger Mouse.
The band, which formed in 2006, released their first single, "Herculean" in October 2006. Three interestingly located warm-up gigs in East Prawle at the Pig's Nose Inn, Ilfracombe’s Marlboro Club and The Exeter Cavern Club preceded their gig on the BBC's Electric Proms, where the entire album was performed in order, with two other songs inserted, "Intermission Jam" and "Mr. Whippy"; the latter was a B-side for "Herculean".
Albarn is still partial to his "Feel Good" vocal effect from Gorillaz days, and some tracks are definitely reminiscent of his Demon Days with Danger, but everything from Allen's deep pocket drumming to the haunting and hypnotic backdrop of Tong’s and Simonon’s guitars make this album rife with great songs.
In April 2007, The Good, the Bad and the Queen became the first EMI album to be made available for download in the new DRM-free, high quality MP3 format (320 kbit/s). It was also the first EMI record to be released DRM-free on iTunes.
GRAND NATIONAL
A DRINK & A QUICK DECISION - Grand NationalBeing a straight-up pop band like Grand National is a tricky business these days. With all the subgenre and the sub-subgenre tags, all the hype and counterhype and anti-counterhype flying around like so much confetti, well, it's getting awfully tough to actually celebrate. 2004's Kicking the National Habit gave us a great start, with almost supernaturally catchy tunes and cozy beats that worked on speakers as well as dancefloors. And A Drink And A Quick Decision is a pill every bit as sweet as its predecessor, mining similar terrain to achieve equally sexy results.
If anything characterizes the group, it's a willingness to craft lean, elegant songs that absorb their influences, rather than flaunt them. So what would those influences be? There's a definite connection with the buoyant melodic line of British rock-grounded pop bands: the Beatles, the Kinks, Blur. There's a frosty coating of mid-period new wave slickness and production values, and a foundation of tasteful dance-grounded beats (think Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, New Order). Those mistaking obnoxiousness or tunelessness for stylistic innovation will be quick to describe Grand National as "derivative," but they're merely the odd batch of traditionalists in the ideological war zone that is independent rock, where sounding like an old Coil b-side is somehow more progressive than writing a solid pop tune. If nothing here offends, well, maybe we should ask ourselves exactly when and how offending became such a virtue.
What really sets Grand National apart and allows them to navigate these tender zones with impunity, however, is their ability to pull all kinds of textural rabbits out of stylistic hats without ever sounding like they're genre-hopping. The choppy acoustic guitar and electrical static backdrop of "Tongue," the house kickdrum and lightly-flanged Cure-esque lead of "Close Approximation," the pastoral dreaminess of "Weird Ideas at Work," the wicked ska-not-ska of "Going to Switch the Light On," all these somehow make for perfect settings for the songwriting team of Rudd and partner Rupert Lyddon. And when their collaboration exceeds the merely excellent, it produces truly sublime fruit—first single "By the Time I Get Home...," the moody-yet-epic "Animal Sounds," and "Joker and Clown," which unashamedly stakes a claim on being one of 2007's best ballads, with a stark acoustic guitar strummed against a smart pair of rhythmic backdrops. Within that alternation lies the simple secret to Grand National's limber popcraft: it's nothing more than another update on the classic one-two of euphoria and melancholy. When was that ever a bad thing?
GRINDERMAN
GRINDERMAN - GrindermanFor decades, Nick Cave, ringmaster of his own rock'n'roll circus, has been an unlikely paragon of routine. Not routine music, per se, but music made as part of a routine. Check in to the office, check out of the office. Repeat. Don't wait for your muse to come to you. Go to her first and demand she appear. Contrary to his reputation as a bit of a wild man, by his own account Cave's spent the past several years a man of discipline, with rules right down to what rules need be discarded, and when.
Grinderman, then, is Cave's considered decision to set aside those rules and make a sideways move into the realm of stripped down (but far from mellow) rock. Inspired by the creation of the most recent Bad Seeds release, Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, Cave took his cohorts Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey, and Jim Sclavunos into the studio to slash and burn their way through new ideas until they'd amassed enough for an album. Unlike Abattoir/Lyre however, Cave kept the remaining Bad Seeds on the sidelines and, rather than flesh out the results, left them raw and stinging, setting aside his piano in favor of guitar.
By doing so Cave has predictably invited comparisons to his first claim to fame, the Birthday Party - and not without reason. Grinderman reveals Cave has rediscovered (or at least re-embraced) the possibilities of the theatrical punk dirge, with arrangements that threaten to fly right off the rails.
But the Cave of the Birthday Party and the Cave of Grinderman are totally different beasts, and for that we can thank Cave's (yes) discipline - as a writer, singer and as a bandleader. Grinderman are an indulgent study in excess, sure, but the twist is that at every turn Cave keeps the chaos carefully in check, emphasizing messiness when need be, but also showcasing the deceptively precise playing of his band as well as his loose, and at times, gloriously silly lyrics.
Grinderman may be intended as a somewhat goofy reassertion of punk vigor and virility, but the disc is no laughing matter. "Get It On" starts the album in tease-mode, all build-up and no pay-off that nonetheless introduces the arsenal at hand: fuzzed out guitar, insistent rhythms, warts and all takes, oozing with animalistic sex and sleaze.
The many pleasures of "No Pussy Blues" have been praised for months, and rightly so: The song is hilarious, with Cave's pleas for sex growing stronger and stronger until he practically creams himself with indignation when his increasingly desperate romantic overtures go roundly rebuffed. It flirts with camp, especially with its typewriter intro, but who can complain when Cave and crew are clearly having so much fun?
Songs like this show why Grinderman probably wouldn't have worked as a full-fledged Bad Seeds project. It's just too concertedly unhinged, and despite the modest ranks of the reduced band there's hardly any room for anything else. The title track is a thick slab of Gothic VU blues, as perverse and insidious as any of Cave's other character pieces, its tortured guitar coda like twisting metal. "Go Tell the Women" proudly takes the piss as it revels in its own primitive stupidity - it's self-parody and salacious blues tribute all in one. "Honey Bee (Let's Fly to Mars)" is Cave and crew's stab at a woozy, wobbly garage stomper, like many of the other Grinderman songs both a call to arms and a come-on. "Won't somebody touch me?" Cave demands as the world falls apart around him.
The exceptions serve as little breathers, breaks from the onslaught. "Electric Alice" is unlucky enough to follow "No Pussy Blues", so it would probably sound like a throw-away experiment in psychedelic loops and textures even it weren't a throw-away experiment in psychedelic loops and textures. The measured soul of "(I Don't Need You to) Set Me Free" and the familiar melodrama of "Man in the Moon" and "When My Love Comes Down" are prime Cave, but each marks a slight deviation from the Grinderman aesthetic. They're just a little too classy, too neat, despite the roaring undercurrent of musical violence in the last, which picks up right before the song cuts off.
That leaves the somewhat anticlimactic "Love Bomb", nonetheless a much better approximation of the death of the 60s fin de siecle vibe than anything on the embarrassing Stooges reunion disc. Yes, the lyrics split the difference between 21st century Doors portent and Iggy's own current pop-culture citing missteps. The difference is that Cave's winking delivery implies he recognizes that dumb is just a state of mind, and he's more than willing to subsume his smarts for the sake of the music. By taking one for the team and donning a Stooge-worthy dunce cap, Cave in turn gives us so much more, and frees up his Id to wreak glorious havoc.
HARD-FI
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST - Hard-FiWhen they first appeared on our radar in late 2004, the talk was of a 21st-century Clash, who had something significant to say about Modern Day Britain, whatever that entails. Nearly three years on, and Hard-Fi are no longer Staines' second-most famous export.
This is something Richard Archer and co attempt to address before 'Once Upon A Time In The West' even begins - but the less said about the abysmal, try-hard attempt at subversive 'rule-breaking' that constitutes the album's cover, the better.
The album opens with lead single 'Suburban Knights' (which, incidentally, has an even worse cover) and with the unwavering certainty of a morning commuter train, normal service is resumed. Based around a terrace chant that'll be soundtracking goal of the month montages on Match of The Day very soon.
'Tonight', a sort of sombre reimagining of Springsteen's 'Thunder Road' for satellite-dwellers, with ghostly strings and another of those chant choruses, lends creedence to Archer's vague tale of two lovers "getting out of" what we can only assume is a lower middle-class housing estate and heading for the bright lights of the city, or something.
Some critics have lazilly suggested that 'Once Upon A Time...' is about as lyrically savvy as a Hollyoaks script, with the only real exception being the genuinely affecting 'Help Me Please', a simple and haunting piano ballad about the death of Archer's mum, with scant pretensions to suburban discontent. They have a point.
Once you accept the fact that most of the lyrics are paper-thin, however, there's much fun to be had. 'Television' is pure brass-balled '80s pop with a chorus that must kick itself for missing the festival season by a measly month, and that will win even the most sour-faced of doubters over. But it's 'Can't Get Along' that hints at genuine - and much welcome - progression. Accompanied by bombastic garlands of symphonic Motown brass and the cocksure swagger that marked 'Stars Of CCTV''s best moments, it has a few characteristic lyrical faux pas - "I picked fights with men twice my size/I picked fights, they punched out my lights" indeed - but coasts by on force of melody alone. The same applies for 'We Need Love', a slinky, Specials-indebted call to arms of the nation's city centres, that again tantalisingly suggests at what 'Once Upon A Time...' wants to be when it grows up.
HAWLEY, RICHARD
LADY'S BRIDGE - Richard HawleyRichard Hawley's 2005 album Coles Corner was refreshingly and, in many ways, reassuringly retro. The album exuded romance in every sense, set to a gorgeous backdrop redolent of the classic Sun Records rockabilly sound and classy post-WWII pop. The record was one big beautiful swoon from start to finish. It is also not the sort of disc that's easy to follow up. By default, Hawley was forced to take one of two routes: Either stray from his stylistic path or stick with the tried and true. With Lady's Bridge he chose the latter.
Like the title of its predecessor, Lady's Bridge is a reference to Hawley's hometown, Sheffield. More specifically, the town's oldest bridge, located in the center of the city. The album, too, is right in the middle, an echo of Coles Corner without quite as much of that disc's lonely late-night impact. Hawley has an astute sense of craft, and when the acoustic strum of opener "Valentine" gives way to a lush, fully orchestrated swell, it's hard not to be taken aback by his earnest appropriation of a bygone sound.
Hawley peps things up with "Serious" and opening single "Tonight the Streets Are Ours", but rather disappointingly wimpers to a pause. Perhaps Lady's Bridge could do with a bit more pizzazz, and there's plenty of room to do that, as witnessed in the way Hawley's friend and cohort Jarvis Cocker applies his own croon. Lady's Bridge instead hones so rigidly to Hawley's established template that even such pretty tracks as "The Sea Calls" come across as anti-climactic.
Even as the disc winds down with the setting-sunisms of "Our Darkness" and "The Sun Refused to Shine", Lady's Bridge's mellow conclusion doesn't sound terribly unlike its mellow start or mellow middle. There's been no journey, no emotional progress, and little emotional payoff. For an album and artist so otherwise focused, the effect winds up more soporific than satisfying, however stylish and serene. It's like listening to a faded photo album, albeit one that's well thumbed and loved.
I had such big hopes for this record, and maybe my expectations were too high. It would be remiss to consider this album not worthy of your attention, especially if it leads to further investment in Hawley's other works, Low Edges and Coles Corner.
HELIO SEQUENCE
KEEP YOUR EYES AHEAD - The Helio SequenceThe Helio Sequence had been hitting the campaign trail hard, spending much of 2004 journeying through the US and Europe with Blonde Redhead, Modest Mouse and Kings of Leon, attempting to get the good word out about their sumptuous Sub Pop debut, Love and Distance. That their endeavours would see them elected to music’s high-table seemed a formality. It wasn’t. The relentless gigging eventually caught up with singer Brandon Summers and extracted a severe physical toll. Vocal chords shot to shit, he was forced to take a virtual vow of silence. For The Helio Sequence, it seemed it might be over before it ever truly began.
However, Summers was determined it wouldn’t end that way. He stopped self-medicating with whiskey and started a regimen of vocal exercise and mic’ technique. And now at last, the protracted silence is broken by the surging scream of Keep Your Eyes Ahead, an album that feels as vital as the first, gulping breath of the near drowned. What this record means to Summers and partner Benjamin Weikel is apparent in the intense force of feeling.
The emotional shrapnel of ‘Lately’ cannot fail to pierce even the most cynical of souls, the difference between what is said and what is felt, is immediately striking, “Lately I don’t think of you at all/Wonder what you’re up to, or how you’re getting on”. There is a futility to these attempted self-deceptions, our narrator all too aware that he can’t stop clinging to a love that’s long gone. The keys chirrup brightly, defiantly almost, but the haunting guitar line exposes the sham.
It isn’t only love that lies. ‘Can’t Say No’ questions the veracity of the printed word, of adverts that order us to “live well, but die fast”. It’s part of the modern condition, of living in a world that bombards us relentlessly with fact and fantasy, where all is instantly known, instantly available and kids’ heads filled with “download brainwaves”. But, even when expressing such profound dissatisfaction, such sadness, The Helio Sequence make it sound like the sweetest thing in the world, the hazy electronics meshing perfectly with drums and guitar to create dream pop.
This blessed-out state of being is evidenced elsewhere on ‘You Can Come To Me’, beats falling as satisfying as a thousand domino run, and ‘Hallelujah’, a night sky of staccato rhythms and twisted guitar spangled with celestial keys. Departing from lo-fi indie-electronica, ‘Shed Your Love’ and ‘Broken Afternoon’ are folk inflected tracks that rely on simplicity of songwriting to captivate. Smeared in bittersweet nostalgia the former is a finger-picking delicacy, whilst the latter is a twanging paean to the human condition.
‘No Regrets’ makes for a compelling final act, it's ramshackle melody and Dylan-esque harmonica quite unlike anything else on the pristine ten tracks that comprise Keep Your Eyes Ahead, an album whose deep felt emotion and effortless execution proves that there’s nothing like a little trial and tribulation to get the artistic synapses firing.
HOLLOWAYS
SO THIS IS GREAT BRITAIN? - The HollowaysSo this is Great Britain, is it? ASBOs, Burberry headgear, empty wallets, cheesy chat-up lines in crappy night clubs, smack-addled prostitutes in Kings Cross station and drunken middle-aged men on park benches. According to The Holloways it is, and while they may not be far from the truth, Britain isn't twinned with Hades just yet.
The Holloways borrow a lot of their musical allegiances from The Clash, although in a purely second-handed manner as they are quite clearly a bi-product of The Libertines. What makes them slightly more distinctive is the vocal harmonising between Alfie Jackson and Rob Skipper, which depending on which part of the fence you sit could either bring back visions of late 70s terrace hooligans or the stilton-tinged cock-er-nee knees-ups of Chas And Dave.
What's surprising, though, is that a good half of So This Is Great Britain? is actually quite pleasant, in a jaunty, getting-ready-for-a-big-night-out sort of way. 'Two Left Feet' and 'Generator' are without doubt two of the most exciting singles - it's no surprise that these two songs stand head and shoulders above the rest of the record. Closing track 'Fuck Ups', with its story about a 40-something who lost it all and ended up a wino, actually has one or two lyrical couplets that would see the most sour-faced and fun-hating miserablist struggle not to raise a chuckle at, while 'Happiness And Penniless' and 'Most Lonely Face' also exhibit the band's competence at completely different ends of the musical spectrum, from two-minute power pop to five-minute ballads.
Although this is a fresh-faced debut record, there is a certain clumsiness in a lot of the wordplay and some would say rather too much filler. It loses a bit in the middle few tracks, but overall, well worth a listen.
HOOSIERS
TRICK TO LIFE - HoosiersIt is the truly wonderful and uplifting ‘Goodbye Mr A’ - their second single that made up my mind about taking a chance on this cd. I say chance, because these types of albums are very hit and miss. This comes in four different coloured artwork covers. I got the yellow one.
On first play, I was very pleasantly surprised. It was instant enjoyment - and hit home straight away. Their sound is like a cross between the Feeling and the Kooks or ELO and 10cc (depending on the decade) and has a lot of bouncy keyboard and bass playing on it, with plenty of hooks and melodies to enjoy. There are also more quirky influences on this, such as: The Cure and Sparks. So far, apart from the two earliest singles (including ‘Worried About Ray’), I’m really enjoying ‘Worst Case Scenario’, ‘Run Rabbit Run’ and ‘Cops And Robbers’, but no doubt over time I’ll have more favourites.
So to sum up, this is utterly charming stuff, that does exactly what it says on the tin, and judging by this album’s healthy dose of infectious pop, there’s definitely no need to worry about Ray anymore.
HOT CHIP
MADE IN THE DARK - Hot ChipEnglish dance-rockers Hot Chip have always seemed like the kind of nice boys who you might feel comfortable bringing home to Mom, provided that your mom likes coke-bottle glasses, calculus, and Prince. Sure, the title track of their breakthrough album, The Warning, suggested that "Hot Chip will break your legs/Snap off your head," but the song was so coy and burbly that it never really sounded threatening, evoking a nerd's under-breath schoolyard mutterings more than actual violence. Made in the Dark, on the other hand, means its menace.
When teaser single "Shake a Fist" introduces a sample of Todd Rundgren intoning, "If you have a pair of headphones, you better get 'em out and get 'em cranked up, 'cause they're really gonna help you," it doesn't come off as wimpy or campy, because the very next sound is a value-sized synthesizer riff so mind-melting that Daft Punk is probably considering legal action. The track is the closest to peak-time raving that the band has ever come, complete with big buzzy bass waves and the kind of lyrics that don't matter because it is Time To Rock. Vocalists Alexis Taylor (the falsetto) and Joe Goddard (the dude) barely even sound dweeby because the sound is so colossally metal.
Hot Chip have made much ado about how they crafted this latest album with the utilitarian purpose of their live show in mind. Showily, three tracks—including the sublime lead single "Ready for the Floor," which single-handedly absolves nü-rave of even its basest sins—are said to have been recorded live in one take. "Shake a Fist" bears all the room-crushing characteristics of something created for encores, and in a way, it's strange that the band sequences it second here, after the surging, joyous robot surf-rock of "Out at the Pictures."
Sequencing is actually the biggest issue here, as the band attempts to square its outsize floor-filling ambition with its previously established skill for intimate moments. The contrast between these two album-defining modes is sometimes awkward. Then again, when all the constituent parts are as solid as they are, it's a lot easier to gloss over a clunky transition.
And the hits do keep coming. "One Pure Thought," in particular, holds down the back nine with a forceful glide that makes it a fitting heir to the graceful pop tradition established by last album's "…Boy From School," albeit with wailing guitars and a fleeting mention of the Macarena. And "Hold On," which was also impressively recorded live, may be the Hot Chip track that most evokes the native motorik pulse of sister band LCD Soundsystem. Frankly, if you don't consider that to be a compliment, you might as well get off this ride.
Lest you think that our sweet little chemistry buffs have wholly traded in their pocket protectors for pugilism, don't fret! Made in the Dark features no fewer than four immaculately modern takes on blue-eyed soul. (Five, if you count "Wrestlers," the gorgeous piano figure of which brings Christopher Cross to mind, but it's pretty funky and its lyrics compare love to wrestling, rather explicitly). The best of the lot, "We're Looking for a Lot of Love," rides a mournful organ and shivery low-key congas all the way to quiet-storm Hymnville.
All of which is to say, sour-grapes sequencing issues aside, whatever you call a homerun in cricket, this is one. Having already conquered the sensitive hearts and stiff but yearning hips of indie kids everywhere, Hot Chip boldly expand and louden up their sound significantly here, while admirably retaining full command of the forms they've already mastered. You can still take Hot Chip home to Mom, but it's now unlikely that they'll be frightened away by Dad's hot temper and gun collection.
HOT HOT HEAT
HAPPINESS LTD - Hot Hot HeatIn 2002, Hot Hot Hot Heat's 'Make Up The Breakdown' bounded into the world's lap like a giddy terrier, but 2005's 'Elevator' stalled. On their fifth album, partly produced by Green Day and MCR Midas-toucher Rob Cavallo, the message is clear: pop is back. Big hooks and cresting balladry are shamelessly in-season ('Outta Heart') and call-and-response choruses are bigger than ever ('Give Up?'). The trademark tempo jiggery remains and it's all threaded together with airy production that underlines rather than overwhelms. And while there's nothing here as incendiary as 'Bandages', there remains a sense of flow that previous albums have lacked. Hot Hot Heat are not the freewheeling scamps they once were. Thankfully, rather than mature into 'serious' musicians, they've rejuvenated themselves with the elixir of a purer pop.
INTERPOL
OUR LOVE TO ADMIRE - Interpol"I live my life in cocaine/Just a rage and three types of yes/I've made stairways such scenes for things to regret" -Rest My Chemistry. Yep, we've all been there. Ice chinks in the fifth Chivas Regal and you're hitting on the wrong girl again and she's just staring at your nosebleed and all you can think about is the dry cleaning bill for your switchblade-sharp Agnes B suit and shirt combo. Or maybe not.
Okay, some background. Interpol are 4 New York City draculas who sport cufflinks, oversized shades and hip tiepins and make darker-than-the-black death post rock with a thumping core of rainswept romance at the centre. In short they're cooler than an ice pick dipped in liquid nitrogen and stabbed into your ink-black heart.
This is their third album and basically it's the perfect wingman to the other two. More layers, more washy keyboards, more engulfing, chiming reverb soaked guitars and yep, more of the same.
As usual singer Paul Banks sings loads of cool, cryptic lines about time and love and the corruption inside him, in his otherworldly baritone, and the band pound and tinkle and sweep with more elegance and expression than ever before.
Okay so there are a couple of boring bits, and nothing quite as good as "Public Pervert", from Antics, or "PDA", from Turn On The Bright Lights, but what do you want, blood? This band have gotten better - they're tighter than a laser-guided smart bomb, the beats are more swingy, and Carlos D's bass and keys are even more expressive and swooning.
Buy this, sit on a bus in the rain and imagine you're on your fifth Chivas and there's blood on your tiepin.
IRON AND WINE
THE SHEPHERD'S DOG - Iron And WineSam Beam's first two full-lengths under the name Iron & Wine were bare-bones, hushed affairs full of rich imagery, whispery falsettos, rhythmic finger-picking, and not much else. In the time since, Beam has gradually moved in other directions, expanding his palette on both the excellent Woman King EP - which featured more percussion and fleshed-out arrangements - and 2005's full-band collaboration with Calexico, In the Reins.
Beam has also toured with a group of musicians for some time now, so it makes sense that his new album would complete his gradual journey away from lo-fi home recordings. The album even teases you at its start - it begins with a snatch of scratchy black-and-white guitar and percussion before jumping to Technicolor when the bass and drums dive in. The rest of opener "Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car" is surprising as well, at once sleek and full of clattering Americana signifiers like steel guitar, acoustic slide guitar, and tack piano.
Despite these new sounds, the core of Iron & Wine remains Beam's voice, guitar, and songwriting, which is still more suggestive than concrete, and is built mostly around strophic verse/verse/verse forms rather than leaning on choruses. Beam and producer Brian Deck deftly build on that foundation, venturing into dub, blues, and West African music (among other styles), creating a series of interstitial passages that cushion the transitions between songs. Beam also experiments with his voice, layering himself heavily on several songs.
Perhaps the most stunning arrangement is the West African juju casting of "House by the Sea", which builds from an abstract soundscape into a snaky groove led by a frenetic bass and a strangely employed baritone sax. Guitars dance atop the rhythm as Beam harmonizes with his sister Sarah on the chorus - one of the few on the album. The album's foray into dub and reggae, "Wolves (Song of the Shepherd's Dog)", could have been a disaster if it hadn't been done so subtly, with an ear toward the musical elements that define reggae rather than the sonic character that defines it-- it's not a pastiche or a genre exercise in the least.
For an Iron & Wine album, The Shepherd's Dog is so varied that it takes several listens for everything to fully sink in, but the individual details-- such as the dramatic steel guitar at the end of "Love Song of the Buzzard" or the cascade of banjo in the middle of "Innocent Bones" - are nearly as rewarding as the overall sound of the album. The sequencing is also well-considered, setting contrasting songs against each other and ending on the stunning and starkly emotional "Flightless Bird, American Mouth". The vocal harmony as it rises into the chorus is shiver-inducing, and the song finally delivers the sense of resolution that much of the album purposely holds back.
The Shepherd's Dog is Iron & Wine's most diverse and progressive album yet, a deft transition to a very different sound that explores new territory while preserving the best aspects of Beam's earlier recordings. It's the kind of record that just keeps pulling you back with its dreamlike flow and attention to detail: The first time I listened to it, I played it straight though again when it ended, and I can't think of a higher compliment than that.
JUSTICE
CROSS - JusticeEveryone should be wary of using the following two statements, and yet they fit Justice like a pair of $500 jeans: 1) If it's too loud, you're too old, and 2) Age ain't nothin' but a number. Given the hilariously horrified reaction that many in the dance music community have when confronted with the music of French duo Justice, you'd think they were two 300-pound rampaging Huns who sacked Berlin's Panorama Bar and made off with Ricardo Villalobos and Ellen Allien over their shoulders. Instead, Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay-- high school kids when Daft Punk's Homework dropped over a decade ago-- grew up, like many a young Parisian, filtering hard rock (never a French strong suit) through disco until it sounded more Judas Priest circa 1983 than Stardust circa 1998. Their "new French touch," as the genre's being termed, actually feels like the caress of a sledgehammer.
Throughout †, Justice takes the history of the French rave era and blows it away by embracing 21st-century stadium-rock production. They squeeze everything into a mid-range frequency band so loud that the riffs on tracks like "Let There Be Light" and "Stress" practically bitch-slap you in the face. The drums on "Let There Be Light" and their big breakthrough single "Waters of Nazareth" are the rat-a-tat rhythms of electro scraping like Freddie Krueger's fingertips. That's it-- engorged electronic riffs, dizzying astringent strings, vocal samples torqued to all hell, and nasty metallic drums. It's astoundingly unsubtle stuff and bracing as fuck, a decade's worth of French electronic music stripped down like a Peugeot parked overnight in a bad neighborhood.
Of course, if that's all † was, it would be unbearable for a full hour, and Justice's critics might have half a point. But the album's more varied than most give it credit for. "D.A.N.C.E." is the album's slightly incongruous, Schoolhouse Rock-esque filter-disco track, and Justice's only obvious stab at a capital-P pop crossover hit.
Cheekily disregarding so many things that good dance music is "supposed" to have - especially, you know, bass - they've somehow managed to split dance music into a brother-against-brother battle, turning message boards into minefields and blog posts into mini-manifestos. Not sure this record is for everyone, but it's a journey you won't forget in a hurry.
KILLERS
SAWDUST - KillersWhat separates the Killers from contemporaries such as the Bravery and Panic! at the Disco-- and what will ensure an audience when those bands have fully fossilized-- is that the Vegas quartet can learn and adapt. While they evolved out of the Strokes' 1970s guitar strut and a flyover approximation of that band's New York-centric sense of style, the Killers have since managed to move up the evolutionary ladder, developing actual tools and displaying the capacity for reason. Sam's Town, their second rung, predicted opposable thumbs and verbal language in the band's future. The band used Springsteen to poke out even more drama from new wave, cross-breeding two very different species-- the Boss' concentrated working-class rock with effete British new wave. Surprise: It sometimes worked.
On their way forward, the Killers offer a glance backward with Sawdust, a hodgepodge of everything they've tried in the past as well as a few things they'll no doubt try again in the future. With its vague title and ludicrous artwork, this catch-all gathers outtakes, B-sides, covers, Jacques Lu Cont's Thin White Duke remix of "Mr. Brightside", and a dorky hidden track that reveals their debt to Stone Temple Pilots. What the Killers haven't learned is how to dial it back: These songs, just like the albums they were recorded for, are busy with sounds and effects, as if they are aiming to deploy every studio knob or realize all of their harebrained ideas at once. Opener "Tranquilize" sounds weighted with stuff-- the typical drum-bass-guitar, of course, but also more guitars, synths both ominous and light, a children's choir, Lou Reed-- all in service to trite lyrics and bombastic melodies. Likewise, their cover of Joy Division's "Shadowplay" shoots for epic, losing the minimalist menace of the original in a maelstrom of garishly climactic instrumentation.
The Killers' clunky more-is-more aesthetic derives from stadium bands like Depeche Mode, whose music had to sound good in an arena as well as on headphones. But Depeche Mode had the good sense to streamline their songs, making you listen deeply, not broadly. In this sense, Sawdust is musically dense but superficial, with seemingly no grand plan for all those sounds beyond having all those sounds. Songs like "All the Pretty Faces" and the too-wry "Glamorous Indie Rock and Roll" ramble on long after the band has spent that particular nickel, and even shorter tracks like "Under the Gun" and "Show You How" never feel concise like three-minute pop songs-- the not-so-bright side of ambition. Even the "Mr. Brightside" remix, which breaks the song down just to build it up again, reconstructs with the wrong elements and loses most of what made the original so enjoyable in the first place.
On the other hand, boneheaded bombast is what the Killers do best, and they know enough not to grasp for subtlety. Because it's not a proper album and therefore not a big statement, Sawdust may actually be the Killers' loosest collection to date. Whenever listening becomes a trudge, there's a relatively off-the-cuff track like their cover of the Mel Tillis-penned, Kenny Rogers-popularized "Ruby Don't Take Your Love to Town". Buried in the back half of the album, it sounds like they recorded in a practice room, with only a few instruments at their disposal. Of course nothing the Killers do is that spontaneous, but nevertheless, they do right by the song, powered by Ronnie Vannucci's rolling beat and Brandon Flowers' slight reimagining of the chorus. Similarly, they downplay Dire Straits' "Romeo & Juliet", delivering it like a song instead of a community-theater monologue. Following in Mark Knopfler's footsteps, Flowers refuses to emote, which has wrecked other covers, and the band's understatement is appreciated.
Overall, there's a strong sense of exploration on Sawdust; if the Killers don't seem to have much intuitive understanding of balance and songcraft, the overproduction at least suggests a strong musical curiosity underlying their obvious career ambitions. To date, the Killers' greatest accomplishment has been keeping their possibilities wide open, which few acts have managed to do without coming across as timid or aimless. If they can keep that up and actually go to unexpected places, regardless of the results, they'll be walking upright while other groups are still dragging their knuckles.
KINGS OF LEON
BECAUSE OF THE TIMES – Kings Of Leon"I don't care what nobody says", croaks Caleb Followill gently over the opening chords of 'Knocked Up', "we're gonna have a baby". Meandering in at over seven minutes long and with nothing that could realistically be mistaken for a chorus, it's a dark, downbeat introduction to the band's third album. Indeed, it could almost have been taken from Springsteen's bleaker-than-bleak 'Nebraska', and like many others on the album, it works perfectly.
Take 'Charmer', for example - driven by Jared's plodding, Kim Deal-esque bassline, it's a howling, primal, downright unsettling listen, that'll have the terminally short of patience reaching to reload 'Molly's Chambers', and sharpish. Same goes for 'McFearless'. Cut from the same oily, sulphate-stained cloth, it's a million miles away from the Creedence Clearwater Regurgitated sound many would have expected them to return to after the experimentation of 'Aha...', and it demands perseverance before it pays off. Radical New Direction is a bit strong, but it's clear that KOL, along with long-time producer Ethan Johns, have been striving to add a new dimension to a band previously accused of having all the depth of a puddle.
Not that everyone's favourite doyens of prostate-endangering denim have gone all po-faced on us. After all, being in Kings Of Leon is a fucking riot, as shown by the shuffly-veering-on-violent funk of 'My Party', in which Caleb - rather hilariously for a man who appears to weigh no more than the average paperweight - threatens to "Flip you upside down and mop this place". And on the rather fantastic 'Fans' - a semi-acoustic anthem-in-waiting that is perhaps the closest this record gets to old-school KOL - he's even forced to admit that London's "Rainy days, they ain't so bad when you're the King/The King they want to be".
Yet these dalliances are brief, as this is an album all about growing up and moving on - Jared's almost old enough to buy his own drinks these days, after all. And so you get a triumvirate of truly special moments, from 'True Love Way''s epic, stadia-filling self-reflection, to 'The Runner''s ghostly Overlook Hotel-esque waltz, in which Caleb concedes that "I talk to Jesus every day", to the sublime, slow-burning 'Arizona', which brings things to a suitably huge close. Boasting all the wide open space of U2's 'The Joshua Tree' without any of the overblown pomp to spoil it, it's without doubt the best thing the band have ever recorded. It's good to have them back.
KISSAWAY TRAIL
THE KISSAWAY TRAIL – The Kissaway TrailLast year, the consistently excellent Bella Union label gave us Howling Bells and Midlake. Now, we get their treasure of 2007. Named as one of NME's 10 favourite new bands at the 2007 South By Southwest festival in Austin, The Kissaway Trail are an all-male five-piece from Odense, Denmark who have a penchant for wearing pink cravats onstage - never a bad thing. They also make a savagely beautiful noise that recalls The Flaming Lips on the joyous pop of 'La La Song' and the late, lamented Grandaddy on 'Tracy'. And the most obvious comparison is saved 'til last, but The Kissaway Trail really do evoke the spirit of Arcade Fire at times, especially on the savagely beautiful 'Smother + Evil = Hurt', which is the equal of anything on 'Neon Bible'. If you're a fan of that record, you'd do well to check out these great Danes.
KLAXONS
MYTHS OF THE NEAR FUTURE - KlaxonsThe singles that built Klaxons' rep overseas, re-recorded here in slightly more cluttered form, make no shortage of dancefloor gestures. The chorus of Klaxons' two-part, falsetto-sweetened "Gravity's Rainbow" belies its high Pynchon brow, instead popping some pills that !!! (chk, chk, chk) forgot to leave in Giuliani's schoolhouse only for Bloc Party to pick up after their recent Washington Heights stop.
On "Atlantis to Interzone", the literal "klaxon" warning bleats that give the song its "nu-rave" cachet. "Golden Skans", which alludes to the album's eponymous story collection by British author J.G. Ballard, floats on keyboards not at all ill-suited for future stadium rocking shows. Fact is, Klaxons are turning techno cognoscenti onto UK indie rock much more than vice versa. Klaxons' lyrical pretensions, alas, can be a reminder why the best house and trance music often emphasizes atmosphere over meaning. Jamie Reynolds % co. prefer to sing of Cyclopes, unicorns, and seven-volume Marcel Proust masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu, in addition to many other literary references.
Myths is a reminder that although the UK rock press relationship with dance music can be Byzantine, hyberbolic, and endlessly offputting, plenty of young UK bands continue to record fine pop songs.
KOOKS
KONK - KooksThe Kooks' debut album, Inside In/Inside Out, was a sleeper success story, going on to sell a whopping two million copies. It was a fabulous set, but their follow-up, Konk, wipes the floor with it. The title takes its name from Ray Davies' studio, where the quartet recorded most of the set. This direct connection to Britain's past obviously inspired the band to new heights, because the Kooks and this album are positively electrifying. Across a dozen songs (plus a hidden track), the quartet explores pop and rock in all their glory, with every number set apart from its neighbor in sound and feel. The Kooks wanted each song to be "its own little world," and they've succeeded brilliantly. Singer and rhythm guitarist Luke Pritchard is on fire throughout, a bundle of barely contained emotional energy. Vocally he's an amorphous mass of influences — Phil Lynott, Steve Marriott, Brett Anderson, David Bowie, even Van Morrison among them — but bar the occasional inflection, he rarely channels any of them directly, capturing instead their spirit and soul. Musically, his guitar adds a decided bounce to everything he plays, even on the most downbeat numbers. His performances are magnificent, but even so, Konk belongs to lead guitarist Hugh Harris, who swaggers like an epic hero right across this set. He struts out like Achilles onto the plains of Troy on the infectious '60s pop/rocking album-opener, "See the Sun." His leads are absolutely incendiary on "Do You Wanna" while adding subtle shades of color to the crash-and-bash "Always Where I Need to Be," and they're positively joyous on the bright, bouncy Beatlesque "Mr. Maker" and utterly irrepressible on the pop/rock perfection of "Down to the Market." Harris' show-stopper, though, is "Shine On," a midtempo '60s-tinged number that pushes the band into new territory, and Pritchard to new heights as well. The guitarist's work on the power ballad "Sway" is equally superb, and showcases his most emotive work. The members of the band's rhythm section are no slackers either — drummer Paul Garred brings to mind a more disciplined Keith Moon, while bassist Max Rafferty is the Kooks' linchpin with his wonderfully understated work. The album sounds phenomenal, with producer Tony Hoffer giving the entire set a warm glow that heightens the band's retro elements. That glow turns luminous on "One Last Time," an acoustic-styled ballad with all the majesty of Green Day's "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)," and burns just as brightly on the sway-along "Stormy Weather." Everything about this album shouts masterpiece, a set that will thrill listeners for years, nay decades, to come.
LCD SOUNDSYSTEM
SOUND OF SILVER – LCD SoundsystemSound of Silver isn't far removed from LCD Soundsystem's eponymous 2005 debut. While it makes no bones about James Murphy's well-known appreciation of Brian Eno's pop vocal affectations ("Get Innocuous", "Sound of Silver"), the Velvet Underground ("New York I Love You"), or new-wave ("Watch the Tapes"), it never feels like a paste job, but rather just the well considered work of someone connecting the dots between the past and the present.
There's not a single weak track here, and many more already feel classic. "Sound of Silver" is a seven-minute suite that morphs from a rumbling, ice-cold, no-wave groove into a liquefied jumble of kalimbas, pianos, and fizzy synths. "All My Friends" begins with a piano riff that sounds not unlike a speeding train (or, at least, Steve Reich's approximation of one) and rolls downhill into fireworks. And then there's the song that precedes it, and with which it combines to form the record's center. A sleek, delicate, and effortlessly melodic sliver of electro, "Someone Great" is one of my favorite songs of the year so far, and constitutes new ground for Murphy both in terms of prettiness and poignancy. It's about loss, but the lyric remains tantalizingly ambiguous. As with most great songs, its best lines buzz around the edges of the story: "The worst is all the lovely weather/ I'm stunned it's not raining/ The coffee isn't even bitter/ Because, what's the difference."
Murphy used to court spontaneity by refusing to pre-write any of his lyrics before going into the vocal booth, claiming in interviews that they were all ad-libbed. It's a strategy he's evidently abandoned on Sound of Silver, and the record is much better for it. On "All My Friends", for instance, he tackles a favorite subject (getting older) from the wrong end of an all-nighter: "You spend the first five years trying to get with the plan/ And the next five years trying to be with your friends again." On "North American Scum", he tackles continental divide with straight deadpan: "Well I don't know, I don't know where to begin/ we are North American/ And for those of you who still think we're from England / we're like... 'No.'"
When it's all said and done, Murphy's real legacy to dance music will be his production sense. He's an analog obsessive with a general aversion to software, and Sound of Silver reflects that. Far removed from the compressed, trebly, and overmastered paradigm that's gripped electronic music in the last decade, Sound of Silver sounds deep, rich, and full-blooded. (Like, um, an old vinyl record or a nice bottle of Rioja.) It's an absolute joy to listen to, for every possible reason, not the least of which is because, these days, those epiphanies feel like they're coming fewer and farther between. And I like Rioja.
LEKMAN, JENS
NIGHT FALLS OVER KORTEDALA - Jens LekmanJens Lekman, the sample-happy Swedish singer-songwriter with the boyfriendable baritone, isn't an artist who changes much from record to record. On his second proper full-length, Night Falls Over Kortedala, Lekman's deadpan style of singing sunny melodies and wittily lovelorn lyrics are a lot like what he's been doing since 2004 debut LP When I Said I Wanted to Be Your Dog, and on the EPs compiled on 2005's Oh You're So Silent Jens. "So if you liked that, you'll love this," Jonathan Richman once wrote. Lekman quotes the phrase on his blog.
On the other hand, Jens Lekman isn't quite Jens Lekman anymore. He logged out of MySpace for the last time in February last year, dissatisfied with the impersonality of the medium.
It all goes to show: Pop's true meaning is whatever we construct for it ourselves. Not just critics or obsessive music lovers, but you, me, and anyone to whom a song means anything. Lekman's stunning Night Falls Over Kortedala embraces this idea more fully than any release of the past few years - more even than Girl Talk with his memory-pricking laptop references, Kanye West with his canny reuse of classic hooks from Curtis Mayfield and Daft Punk, or mash-up artists with their many one-trick tracks. Like the Avalanches if they sang their own tunes, Lekman borrows liberally from his memories and surroundings, then uses them to create a lush and romantic world worth misinterpreting again and again.
It's a world set mostly within the confines of a Gothenburg, Sweden neighborhood called Kortedala. For this, Lekman has called the album a failure; he'd intended to traverse more ambitious terrain. Whether through samples, stylistic appropriations, or simply lyrics, Kortedala is a globe-conquering record regardless. Its vinyl-crackling arrangements span the baroque pop of Scott Walker, the upbeat rhythms and bright harmonies of Northern soul, and the beach-party disco of fellow Swedish artists Air France, Studio, and the Tough Alliance. Along with wry, sometimes melancholic observations worthy of Richman or the Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt, these elements make for Lekman's best record, one likely to captivate even those who were skeptical of his previous releases.
The new album introduces Lekman draped in timpani, strings, and horns on "And I Remember Every Kiss", which samples classical violinist (and gatefold-sleeve inventor) Enoch Light. While recalling late-1960s Walker, the majestic opening also picks up where the Blueboy-sampled orchestration of When I Said... finale "A Higher Power" left off. "I would never kiss anyone/Who doesn't burn me like the sun," Lekman proclaims here. A track later, though, he admits to sometimes nearly regretting his first kiss: "I see myself on my deathbed, saying, 'I wish I would have loved less.'" But that's when Willie Rosario's orchestral cover of Jimmy Webb's "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" - also used by the Avalanches - hits, in all its blissful glory. Love can lead to anguish and shame, but in "Sipping on the Sweet Nectar", the feeling is worth it.
With that, the voyage begins. Single "The Opposite of Hallelujah" visits 1960s Motown by way of Glasgow chamber-pop; beats sampled from the Tough Alliance take the harp-twinkled melancholy of "I'm Leaving You Because I Don't Love You" to a club in the tropics. "Shirin" brings up the Iraq war as fact, not just political issue; it tells of an immigrant hairdresser at Kortedala Beauty Center (also the name of Lekman's home studio). On the slower "It Was a Strange Time in My Life", a portrait of the artist as a shy and self-loathing young man, a sample of an infant Lekman leads flute and chiming electric guitar into the not-so-distant past. "I had a good time at the party when everyone had left," Lekman sings; throughout the album, backing vocals by El Perro del Mar's Sarah Assbring and Frida Hyvönen ensure his loneliness never overwhelms his charms.
And these are considerable. If rock'n'roll is "the art of making the commonplace revelatory", as critic Greil Marcus once wrote, this fey crooner is a rock'n'roller on par with the Streets' Mike Skinner. Lekman can sing about asthma inhalers, avocados, and a heart "beating like Ringo"; on the aching standout "A Postcard to Nina", he describes an awkward conversation with a girl's stern father who makes clumsy jokes about lie detectors. All of it works. Over sampled a cappella doowop on "Kanske Ar Jag Kar I Dig" (Swedish for "Maybe I'm In Love With You"), Lekman just rambles for a while about something stupid he saw on TV. "This has of course nothing to do with anything/I just get so nervous when talking with you," he finally admits.
Though not twee exactly, Kortedala may require an appetite for schmaltz - another way Lekman makes "the commonplace revelatory." If his Four Seasons falsetto on "Shirin" sounds suddenly chic thanks to this year's great Pilooski re-edit of Frankie Valli's "Beggin'", then the unabashedly sentimental "Your Arms Around Me" might be the stumbling block for some listeners. (The ukulele riff has already been compared to Hanson's "MMMBop".) It really doesn't matter; based on the Situationist concept of détournement, Lekman's song about an unfortunate kitchen mishap is a subversion of any bland source material. Besides, none of us can escape what's least cool about our past - no matter what influences we list on our MySpace pages, it all informs our experience of pop. No one gets to know about my Dire Straits records. or at least they didn't until now. Or I could just be misinterpreting again.
Admittedly, no individual moment here quite rises to the heights of early single "Maple Leaves", which hinged on a mistake of its own: "She said that we were just make believe, but I thought she said maple leaves." As an album, however, Kortedala represents the most cohesive statement yet from an immensely talented artist whose early EPs once made him seem like a rebel against the LP form altogether. It's a record about moments (and kisses) we take with us - moments that we (or Lekman) may never have experienced: Our own Kortedala.
LIGHTSPEED CHAMPION
FALLING OFF THE LAVENDER BRIDGE - Lightspeed ChampionComparing bands is pretty much unavoidable when you're trying to classify or keep straight hundreds or even thousands of artists that fall beneath the banner of indie rock. Hence, Vampire Weekend gets likened to Graceland even if the resemblance is slight rather than exact, while thanks to the nasally pipes of Alec Ounsworth, assessors of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah will probably always evoke Talking Heads regardless of where the former group draws its inspiration. Associations with better and more established artists may add pressure to musical up-and-comers, but it also piques the interest of said artists' fans and admirers, and at least put these listeners in a positive frame of mind when putting the record on. Then again, it can work just as easily in opposition when the point of reference leaves you cold.
The potential side effects of prejudicing a listener's first impressions is something I've been thinking about since encountering Lightspeed Champion. Lightspeed is the current project of Devonte Hynes, most notably a member of now-defunct dance-punks Test Icicles. A head-spinning 180-degree turn from his previous group's beat-fueled mayhem, the new project finds Hynes assuming the role of a florid troubadour, dewily emoting over well-manicured strings and acoustic guitars.
Because Lightspeed Champion has toured with Bright Eyes (Conor Oberst), and because longtime BE collaborator and go-to Saddle Creek producer Mike Mogis helmed this record, Hynes' latest effort has earned him a slew of misleading comparisons to Oberst's acclaimed-yet-divisive outfit - an association that not only misrepresents Hynes' positive attributes, but his shortcomings, too. Oberst has an awkward way of shoehorning twang into his unchecked poetic rambling, but on Falling Off the Lavender Bridge, Hynes offers a comfortable (and more interesting) marriage of lush Brit-pop and Omaha-flavored country-rock.
On the other hand, Hynes' lyrics aren't quite up to par with his tourmate Oberst. And while Hynes' voice isn't as carefully spotlighted as Conor's, you can unfortunately still make out what he's saying. A precocious young man himself, Hynes has an awful predilection towards the kind of "transgressive" lyricism that's less shocking than just plain silly. Pick your poison: "I'm sick in your mouth," "Wake up, smell the semen," or something that certainly sounds like "until they cum down his throat."
Given the way Hynes has transitioned from disco-thrash to roots-pop, I suppose it's possible his next record might be hair metal laced with r&b or punk-rock opera. If he's patient enough to dig deeper into his current terrain, though, he could cultivate a sound distinctive enough for other artists to begin garnering ill-fitting comparisons to him instead. Just don't bother with the guttermouth lyrics.
LONEY, DEAR
LONEY, NOIR - Loney, DearMuch has been made of the Canadian music scene in recent years. For a population a mere tenth of that of its southern neighbors, the country has contributed a bounty of artists to the independent music community. Arcade Fire, Tokyo Police Club, Broken Social Scene, Feist, Wolf Parade… the list goes on. It’s hard to say why Canada has such a vibrant independent music scene, and arguments range from better public programs for the arts to the embrace of multiculturalism to that indefinable “something in the water.” But whatever it is, Sweden has concentrated it, because frankly, with a population just over the 9 million mark their remarkable creative prowess may have the Canadians beat. Peter Bjorn and John, Jose Gonzales, The Knife, Jens Lekman, I’m From Barcelona and Love is All are just some of the Swedish-based acts that have made waves worldwide in the past year. This, of course, isn’t taking into consideration their vibrant rock and roll scene or considering the lasting impact of ABBA and the Cardigans still have.
While the debate on cultural significance can be as lengthy as it would be pointless, for those who wish to engage in that battle, another notch under Sweden can be added with Loney, Dear, the working name of multi-instrumentalist Emil Svanangen. Much like fellow Swede Lekman, Svanangen made his name by self-recording and self-distributing his own albums on CD-Rs. With a few thousand sold and growing attention by the mainstream press in Sweden, America and more specifically, Sub Pop came knocking. Originally released in 2005, Loney, Noir is an elegant album of earnest indie pop that will make you wonder where Svanangen has been all your life.
Bearing your heart, in plain language, in a pop format can be devilishly tricky. At worst, you come off sounding like a bad poet, espousing clichés that ring with more insincerity than truth. And thought it’s hard to tell what exactly makes the words out of one artist’s mouth sound more genuine than if they came out of someone else’s, there is nothing that Svanangen is singing that doesn’t seem be coming from experience or honesty. To be sure, his subject matter isn’t original in the least. Focusing almost exclusively on relationships, Svanangen navigates loss, love, and hope with piercing straightforwardness. Through these songs, it comes clear that Svanangen is a lover and a fighter, describing a sensitivity that is tempered by the strength of risking everything.
Likewise, the music is delicate, building to momentous peaks and accented by sturdy hooks. The key to these songs are gentle arrangements that build organically from the guitar based centers. Horns, reeds, organs, and careful backing vocals never overpower the songs but are used like curtains around a window. The disc opens with the one-two punch of “Sinister in a State of Hope” and “I Am John”. The former is slow builder, a graceful trot to its mini-orchestrated finish. The latter was chosen as the disc’s lead single and it’s hard not to see why. It’s almost relentlessly upbeat but the real magic doesn’t come until the latter third, when the vocals kick up an octave (eat your heart out Mariah) and with Svanangen singing “I want your arms around me, and I’m never gonna let you down” you want to reach out to the person nearest to you and squeeze them as hard as you can. While the disc pretty much sticks with its formula, the songs are so winning and the album so brief (at just over a half hour) you hardly notice.
As I type this, winter is ending in Montreal, with the coldest weather hopefully behind us, and with spring right around the corner, Loney, Dear has arrived at the right time. And it’s the kind of music perfect for those unexpected days in March when you can wear a t-shirt during the day, but in the evening you need to wrap up in a favorite sweater. This is the smell of a new season, when the snow is melting and that first crack of early sunlight is waking you up. This is the goosebumps when a lover sneaks up from behind and covers your eyes. In other words, this is essential.
LOW
DRUMS AND GUNS - LowMany bands maintain longevity through versatility-- shifting, maturing, or updating their sounds as years and trends pass. Low couldn't have been more unlikely candidates for a lengthy career when they appeared in 1993, but several years of their single-minded adherence to patience and grace was a welcome reaction to the louder, heavier music dominating the early 90s rock charts and airwaves. It's understandable if that sound defines the group for its dedicated fans; aside from personal attachment, it recalls a time when mediocre rock radio was all we had to rebel against.
But for Low, in 2007, there's so much more at stake. The title itself sounds like a call to arms, but the band has skirted the idea that Drums and Guns is a political record; most of its key lyrics are ambiguous enough to stand in for personal torment as well as social unrest. It's a little easier to assign the former to Drums and Guns, knowing that since The Great Destroyer (a critically divisive and uncharacteristic record for the band in its own right), Low lost their longtime bassist Zak Sally, and their frontman, Alan Sparhawk, has had a nervous breakdown, recorded a vocal-less solo record that's wildly experimental compared to Low, and spent a goodly chunk of time fronting the far more rock-oriented Retribution Gospel Choir (sometimes partnered with Red House Painters' Mark Kozelek).
Considering the mixed reception to the rocking The Great Destroyer, you'd think the band would return to their signature sound. You'd be wrong. Hardcore fans have heard more than half of Drums and Guns' songs played in Retribution Gospel Choir's guitar-driven context (as well as the understated "Dragonfly" in the band's recent live sets, and "Murderer" from a rare 10" single), and would assume these songs lean further in the direction of that side project and Great Destroyer; they'd be wrong as well. Drums and Guns tears at these already road-tested songs, leaving them as nothing but spine and sinew, with only the barest traces of what made them Low in the first place-- namely, the fragile and beautiful two-part harmonies. A promo sticker came with this record, saying, "I'm sick to death of LOW." It's easy to picture those words coming directly from Sparhawk.
But there's more career summation here than you'd think, from the nihilism and legacy-toying of Great Destroyer, to the brave production on their Songs for a Dead Pilot EP, to even weirder corners of the catalog: "Belarus" sounds like something from Low's oft-ignored remix record, with a lovely harmony that highlights Mimi Parker's vocals while simple bells, chimes and sampled strings burrow in the background-- enchanting, but about as far from Low as you can imagine. Drums and Guns even bears influence from Sparhawk's recent Solo Guitar record: "Pretty People" buzzes ominously, as Sparhawk wails some fairly obvious warnings before ending abruptly once a drum hits and a guitar chord sounds. "Dragonfly" has barely any instrumentation, just a clanging feedback loop; with its slow-burning swooning vocals about pills and shortened life cycles, it'd be a difficult song to tarnish in any cast. The track brings the same brutal chills of the highlights from Trust, but gets there only on the drama from Sparhawk's sour vocal turn and Parker's gentle accompaniment, and without the band's trademark perpetual reverb.
Mostly, the record is marked by a preponderance of basic, almost flimsy drum loops. Oh my, are there loops on this record. Songs like "Breaker" build from a basic beat to nothing more than handclaps and a one-finger organ drones, with a pinched multi-tracked harmony from Sparhawk who laments "our bodies break/ And the blood just spills and spills," and "there's gotta be an end to that." It's one of the most glaring examples on Drums and Guns of hard-panned vocals located almost entirely in the right channel, but after hearing the track enough times, it ceases to be a distraction, and it ends up one of the most striking examples of their stripped-down approach.
I doubt Low fans who've held on this long will rebel against these new textures, more the way they're employed-- the band has added an almost disconcerting levity, and subtracted the gentleness. The less said about the jaunty funk bass and busier loops of "Always Fade" and "Hatchet" the better; the latter is at least a mid-record palette-cleanser. It's this mode of Low that's the hardest to get used to; they sounding less sparse and more glib and underdeveloped, lost in uncharted territory. Parker, thankfully more present here than on recent records, gets "Dust on the Window" to herself, and its dusky balladry is a high point in a difficult middle section. Sequencing does threaten to kill this record, though there's ropes to old fans and frustrated listeners later in the album. "Take Your Time" is a dip into the pathos of previous Low records, even using church bells to further dampen the dirge. Should this not be enough for alienated fans, try to take comfort in the seven other albums that came before. There's a point at which a consistent sound is no longer a virtue. "Your Poison" shows us what Low would sound like as Guided By Voices; we don't need it. Once you're approaching double digits in album output, your records should actually do something to change status quo and justify their release, or at the very least spark some shred of interest in new listeners with the band's back catalog.
Should those listeners make it to the re-recorded "Murderer", then Drums and Guns will have accomplished both. The original EP from which "Murderer" was taken was Low at their most stark and dramatic; this version stands up ably to the first (as opposed to the unfortunate recut of "Silver Rider" from Great Destroyer), adding an insistent 4/4 bass pulse as well as a subtle guitar loop that works as an effective earworm, and a martial drumbeat that underlines the lyrics and serves the album's theme. The same goosebumps arise as the lyrics move from creepy insinuation to a protagonist's sneering confrontation with his maker ("Don't act so innocent/ I've seen you pound your fist into the Earth/ And I've read your books"), though this time with a new, understated urgency instead of just straining melodrama.
Drums and Guns ends on "Violent Past", beginning with another particularly ambiguous lyric: "All I can do is fight, even if I know you're right." It could be a call to arms or a mantra for struggling with personal demons-- either way, it sounds almost futile among the organs that bleed distortion and clamoring percussion, with the lyrics pondering how we've come this far before deciding with a shrug, "maybe it's your violent past." You could call the whole of the album resigned, but it still sounds determinedly so, the voice of one band against the world-- not too far off from where Low started.
MACCABEES
COLOUR IT IN – The MaccabeesMuch like recent records by Bloc Party or The Rakes, this is an early-twenties crisis album - articulating that particular sense of ennui and struggle for identity that hits between the last day of school and the first proper paycheck. It's about dancing and drinking and getting your heart broken for the first time, and looking back to childhood with a bittersweet wistfulness. 'Lego' opens with the lines "Mum said no/To Disneyland" and complains how hard it is to build castles with chewed-up Lego bricks, while 'Precious Time' references pre-PlayStation kids' racing game Scalextric. All this nostalgia is either heart-warmingly familiar and sweetly affecting or insufferably twee, depending on your point of view, but Orlando Weeks' eye for detail is matched only by his honesty and the size of his heart - 'About Your Dress' details a nightmare first date, in which he is almost sick on the unfortunate object of his affections, while 'O.A.V.I.P' is a tender tribute to his ailing grandmother.
Still, even if you do find the lyrics a little grating, fact is, the music's just plain great. It may now be practically a legal requirement for all slightly off-kilter British art-rock bands to rope in former Smiths producer Stephen Street, but here he transforms the coiled-spring guitars and staccato vocals of the band's self-released debut single 'X-Ray', filling them with a genuine sense of tension. He also teases out sly choruses and buries nifty detail such as the harmonica at the start of 'Latchmere' under crisp, post-punk drum rumbling, making each listen a minor revelation.
It's not all furrowed-brow guitars and sincere lyrics, though - closing track 'Toothpaste Kisses' is a sweet 1930s-sounding ballad played on a thousand tiny mandolins, while Hawaiian guitars waft gently and crickets rub their knees together in the background to keep time. Mould-breakers, hopeless romantics, unlikeliest of riot-starters? We should all just be glad that albums like this are being made while the sun's shining outside and we're alive to enjoy them. Long may The Maccabees keep on swimming against the wave machine's tide.
MAGIC NUMBERS
THOSE THE BROKES - Magic NumbersIn Those The Brokes, you'll hear several solid-to-excellent songs that extend the rootsy trajectory of the Magic Numbers' fine first outing, making up in winsome intensity what they lack as far as edginess or sex appeal.
First UK single "Take a Chance" encourages us to risk our pride for love. The burnished harmonies of the group's two sibling pairs-- Trinidad natives Romeo and Michele Stodart along with London-born duo Angela and Sean Gannon-- make it easy to overlook any risks the cheery power-pop arrangement declines to take itself. Despite the apparent obviousness of the title, "This Is A Song" is a song against itself-- as broken-hearted as it is upbeat and catchy. ("Don't wanna hear it," comes a backing vocal.) The questioning "Let Somebody In" and comparatively muscular "You Never Had It" each glide by on the kind of inchoate magic that in more credulous days used to be called "soul".
Notwithstanding the good tunes, this release remains a modest record. There are too many fillers amongst the pearls. "Keep It in the Pocket", started life as a 2005 B-side; its breezy enthusiasm exhibits confidence if not transcendence, but it hails from a previous life. On 'Those the Brokes', the Magic Numbers have yet to shape their middlebrow yearning into a masterpiece on par with those of influences the Mamas and the Papas or the Band. Let's hope Astralwerks keeps letting them try.
MANIC STREET PREACHERS
SEND AWAY THE TIGERS - Manic Street PreachersSend Away the Tigers is the 8th studio album from the Welsh rock group. Eighth. E-I-G-H-T-H. I don't mean anything by it, I just think that the word eighth never looks like it's spelled correctly. The album itself is a veritable feast for journos worth their salt. The title 'Send Away the Tigers' refers to something comedian Tony Hancock used to say when drinking alcohol to 'chase the demons away'. The photos used on the sleeve are taken from the photography book Monika Monster Future First Woman On Mars by Valerie Philips. The album sleeve features a quotation from Wyndham Lewis, here misspelled as 'Wyndam Lewis'. Nina Persson from The Cardigans shares vocals on "Your Love Alone Is Not Enough", the first proper single from the album. The song "Rendition" concerns the act of extraordinary rendition, which has been described as a global system of human rights violations. The song is partly inspired by the academy award-winning 1982 film Missing starring Jack Lemmon.
"I'm Just a Patsy" is a direct quotation from Lee Harvey Oswald - who is referenced in the song - upon his public denial of the murder of JFK.
The album is widely seen as a return to the more harder-edged sound of their earlier releases: the band itself has described it as a mixture of Generation Terrorists and Everything Must Go. The album was mixed by Chris Lord-Alge, whose brother Tom provided the US mix of The Holy Bible.
MAPS
WE CAN CREATE - MapsUntil now, the reputation of Northamptonshire home-recorder James Chapman has rested upon a couple of singles, "Start Something" b/w "To the Sky" and "Lost My Soul" b/w "Sparks in the Snow". The singles evoked a simpler version of Caribou, with their sorta-hip-hop beats and kinda-psychedelic pop trappings; reminiscent of M83, with their swooping and unapologetically grand keyboards; and perhaps akin to the Postal Service, albeit one cured of the hiccups. But because Chapman forewent the use of computers in favor of recording straight to 16-track, the singles lacked the imposing stature of these digitally-inclined touchstones. For all of its luxuriant majesty, Chapman's music sounds somewhat aloof; the tape onto which it was recorded acts as a thin but palpable barrier between the music and the listener. This is not an unpleasant quality; in fact, the analog warmth of Chapman's compositions is among their most charming aspects.
As if realizing he'd found a winning formula on these early releases, Chapman opted to make them over and over again to flesh out his debut LP, We Can Create. As a result, the album - which includes both "To the Sky" and "Lost My Soul" - contains no real duds, and almost any song on it would make a fine single. Taken together, however, the homogeneity of their construction dilutes their appeal. Track after track drops melodic and tonal variations into the same inflexible stencil - one that's invariably linear, with a transparent, bar-by-bar approach to dynamic shifts. The drums, in particular, beg for some discrepancy - virtually the same skittering smack pushes along the surging keyboards on each song.
Not that this formula doesn't produce some winners. "So High, So Low" is a perfect summertime confection, despite being the most formulaic song on the album - it is, in fact, transcendently formulaic. Its title aptly summarizes its dynamics - alternating between a lean, fuzzy synth throb and sweeping, overdriven ahs, its bright pastel contrasts and unforgettable melody elevate it above its peers. "You Don't Know Her Name" is almost as good, adhering to the same template in more intricate detail, but by "Elouise", with its buzzy synth wash and straightforward churn, one gets the sinking feeling that all else is preordained. The telegraphic urgency of "It Will Find You", with its trip-hop density and spaghetti-synths, provides a welcome contrast to the album proper's exaggerated sway, as does the vanishing and beatless "Glory Verse". There's a lot to recommend in Chapman's as-the-crow-flies approach to songwriting, but one wishes he'd occasionally slow down and take the scenic route instead.
MARS VOLTA
THE BEDLAM IN GOLIATH - Mars VoltaIt can't come as a surprise that the Mars Volta's fourth album opens with a bang — sonic terrorism is one of the only things listeners can count on from the band — but it's genuinely novel that The Bedlam in Goliath never lets go of its momentum, not even after a full hour's worth of unrelenting war on silence, the wrapping paper for a concept album about the power of the occult. On their first three proper albums, Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez played games of quiet-loud-quiet (or loud-quiet-loud), sneaking around stealthily for minutes at a time before detonating another blast of thrash metal riffing and piercing screams. The Bedlam in Goliath is simply loud-loud-loud, virtually every song played at maximum volume and tempo. But, in fact, instead of being wearisome or exhausting, it's an oddly refreshing album. The band gets closer to its roots in thrash and funk-metal than ever before, avoids using electronics except where they can make a big impact, and finally lets semi-permanent guest John Frusciante occupy a readily discernible role. The "Goliath" of the album title is the name given to a spirit conjured by a Ouija board that Rodriguez-Lopez bought in Jerusalem; the band used the board heavily while on tour, and it supposedly brought bad luck to the entire recording process — including reports of computer poltergeists, flooded studios, and a nervous breakdown for the album's first engineer (who may have simply been driven over the edge by the band's musical extremism). Musically, it's the funkiest work the band has ever done. No one's going to confuse them with James Brown (or even Red Hot Chili Peppers), but in a ten-minute streak that runs from the end of the third track, "Ilyena," through the single "Wax Simulacra," and to the end of "Goliath," an eight-minute extravaganza, the Mars Volta finally seize the mantle held by Rage Against the Machine for a dozen years (thanks in large part to Frusciante, as well as new drummer Thomas Pridgen). The band also exhibits more patience on The Bedlam in Goliath than it has in the past. No one who cares about the band should be interested in hearing a "maturing" Mars Volta — you might as well ask for a sun that wasn't as hot — but the band has shown the ability to mature in all the ways they can without losing what makes them unique. The album is as dynamic as ever (it seems to live perpetually on a knife's edge of tension), but it's more closely composed than Amputechture or even Frances the Mute. This should have been the album where the Mars Volta either wore their formula down to nothing or abruptly turned in a different direction, but instead the band created an album that nearly perfects what they've been working toward.
MAXIMO PARK
OUR EARTHLY PLEASURES – Maximo ParkWith his guileless Geordie accent intact, Paul Smith may be the most likeable frontman among his immediate contemporaries (sorry, Kele). He's traded-in the signature comb-over for a sharp bowler hat, but the spastic singer is still neurotically consumed by unfulfilling relationships. On early single "Apply More Pressure", he sang, "I hope that I will live to see you undress," to a potential partner. But now that he's seen her naked, it seems, she's gone away.
From the ominous unpacking tale "Books From Boxes" ("You have to leave, I appreciate that/ But I hate when conversation slips out of our grasp") to the anxious aftermath of "By the Monument" ("Posterity has hold of us now/ Am I just waiting for the next chapter?") to the Before Sunset nostalgia of "Parisian Skies" ("I don't think she knew how much I loved her"), Smith chronicles a particularly harsh long-distance split in a style that's part Stipe-ian oblique and part emo confessional. He's prone to the occasional distracting Word of the Day ("I wonder how we tessellate/ It would have been much wiser to allow these feelings to abate," he enunciates on "Your Urge") and his flashes of Cocker-style wit come too few and far between, but the singer finds an affecting comfort zone somewhere between sentimental and nonsensical. And while the optimistic stand-out "A Fortnight's Time" veers from Pleasures' sad script, the hook is a winning example of Smith's quirky expertise: "Would you like to go on a date with me?/ And I know it's old-fashioned to say so/ Five time five equals twenty-five/ Don't you know your times tables by now?" (He may or may not be hitting on jailbait?)
Maxïmo Park's first album featured a hazy, spoken-word anomaly called "Acrobat" that sounded like nothing else on the LP. The song was ballsy and beautiful, and it hinted at an untapped adventurousness, but still fell quite short. There's nothing like "Acrobat" on Our Earthly Pleasures. With their new album, Maxïmo Park avoid both utter disaster and absolute success by playing it safe. Nice and safe.
McCOMBS, CASS
DROPPING THE WRIT - Cass McCombsCass McCombs sings and writes songs, but he's not a singer-songwriter in the conventional sense. Always willing to play the angles, McCombs sounded more like a spotlight-friendly frontman than a singular songsmith on 2005's dense, multi-layered PREfection, hiding behind walls of reverb and a hodgepodge of musical stylings rather than crooning directly into the mic. Even on threadbare debut A, McCombs cross-pollinated folksy shuffles with art-pop tropes, daring listeners to earnestly connect with his gorgeous yet arcane ballads. A less challenging artist with the same skill set set would probably be polishing his mound of gold records right now, but McCombs revels in ambiguity, not accessibility.
While two quality full-lengths and an EP haven't reserved him a spot on indie's marquee yet, McCombs still possesses a prodigal glow. Named after the parliamentary procedure in which the head of government requests a dissolution of parliament, Dropping the Writ suggests a reinvention for McCombs both in its title and the fact it's his first release on Domino. Of course, McCombs doesn't know the meaning of the word "sell-out," so any jitters surrounding his label promotion should be allayed. This is, after all, the same nut who only disclosed his debut's lyrics if fans were willing to personally mail him a stamped SAE. Still, although the gussied up Writ doesn't find him morphing into a more indie-appealing form like Josh Ritter or Spoon, it's hard not noticing some edge has been taken off the curio's sound and mystique.
From "AIDS in Africa" to "Equinox"'s infamous line "Silverfish quilting testicle/ Despotic owl conducts the wolves," McCombs has beckoned listeners to dissect his oblique lyrics with the rigor of a piece of high literature. Hell, the guy could even pass for a Faulkner or Steinbeck in recent press pics. Writ, by comparison, feels lyrically straightforward, with the occasional idiosyncratic line thrown in merely for flavor. Opener and origin story "Lionkiller" sets a rare tone for McCombs-- he's content to talk about himself. "I was born in a hospital" he sings, echoing A opener "I Went to the Hospital", before unveiling other self-mythologized details of his upbringing over a rolling "Rawhide"-style riff.
The lyrical elucidation here extends to the music, as McCombs whittles PREfection's overgrown genre exploration down to easily digestible folk, chalk full of the Americanisms you'd expect from an acoustic-toting Yank. His Smiths and Cure tics have all but vanished, and even on McCartney-esque tracks like "Pregnant Pause" or "Full Moon or Infinity," the cheery anglo pop's undercut by the sort of detached dreariness typically reserved for Elliott Smith tunes. For the most part though, McCombs is content to lean back and strum away, gazing at the stars rather than his shoes. Yes, a couple unorthodox moments occur, such as the squawky melismatic "No me-e-eans yes!" chorus of "Petrified Forest" or the arpeggiating falsetto on "Deseret", but Writ mostly avoids conspicuous ideas. Maybe McCombs is trying to prove he's not dependent on eyebrow-furrowing eccentricities, but Writ, with its cut and dry approach, lacks the replay value of his previous releases. While this album may help broaden McCombs's close-knit circle of music-hungry fans, the indie renegade aspect of his music is sorely missed, even if his remarkable raw talent keeps this effort comfortably afloat.
MGMT
ORACULAR SPECTACULAR - MGMTOn the first song on their debut record, MGMT let us know how they got here. The rock song-as-origin myth is nothing new, and "Time to Pretend" situates itself in that canon. Emerging initially from a viscous electronic fluid, the song quickly takes shape as a bombastic electro-glam number about rock star dreams. Accordingly, it's cheesy and clichéd, but also thick with sarcasm: Before the first chorus, MGMT sing nostalgically about having models for wives, moving to Paris, and shooting heroin. The kicker, though, is in the title itself. Knowing that the Almost Famous notion of stardom doesn't exist anymore (if it ever did), the duo of Andrew Vanwyngarden and Ben Goldwasser realise they're "fated to pretend." On Oracular Spectacular, they not only accept their playacting destiny, they demonstrate that, just maybe, it's a path more people should take.
MGMT find kindred spirits in Muse and Mew by dressing their melodies in the fanciful trappings of 1970s British prog, but unlike their contemporaries the duo also weaves in lessons from disco, new-wave synth-pop, and early 90s Britpop. The understanding that youthful innocence is a potent force - a theme first established in "Time to Pretend" - continues throughout the record. Instead of the "Knights of Cydonia", though, MGMT fights "Weekend Wars", ostensibly an ode to the fictionalized childhood battles that treat backyards as independent colonies in need of conquering. The gentle, chiming melody and effete vocals of "The Youth" recall Sparks or Queen at their most restrained moments, and "Kids" comes across as an inspirational dance anthem for playgrounders.
Most impressive on Spectacular is Vanwyngarden and Goldwasser's ability to dabble, with the shared understanding that whatever they do is Big. "Pieces of What" is an unexpected acoustic guitar piece, but it's delivered like an outtake from Suede's Dog Man Star. "4th Dimensional Transition" augments its cavernous psychedelic vocals with a jacked-up BPM count, and on "Electric Feel", MGMT pull off lithe, falsetto electro-funk surprisingly well. There's not much to the song aside from a Barry Gibb vocal and limber bassline, but within the context of the rest of Spectacular, it makes perfect sense. They're still young, of course; they've got plenty of time to figure everything out.
MIA
KALA - M.I.A.Given the hundreds of thousands of words hunted and pecked in the service of M.I.A.'s 2005 debut Arular, the odds on her delivering more grist for the mill with her follow-up were probably somewhere between slim and Amy Winehouse. Sure, Arular ultimately didn't seem to make much of an impact on the public at large, but the bountiful texts woven into its rich backstory worked like so much muso-critic catnip; momentarily setting aside the problem of M.I.A.'s own hazily defined personal politics, that album had the effect of nudging the critical forum back towards the kind of issues it doesn't grapple with nearly enough. Issues that feel more important than ever as our traditional notions of genre and geography melt away, namely: How we square our desire for freshness and fun with the ugly politics of cultural tourism, or whether we bother at all; how the internet works like a hall of mirrors on identity and meaning; whether there's really any such thing as an empty visceral gesture.
If Arular provided a platform to discuss those things, Kala certainly invites us to continue the conversation. For all the scrutiny and cynicism aimed at her in the past 18 months, M.I.A. hasn't dialed herself down in the slightest. If anything, Kala finds her puffing out her chest and asserting herself more strenuously than ever, half-baked agit-prop and all. When she boasts on the stomping, Bollywood-sampling opener "Bamboo Banga" that she's "coming back with power/POWER" you get the sense that by ‘power’ she means ‘courage of conviction.’ Regardless of how you square with her politics, her willingness to continue the muckraking is admirable, if not dimension-adding. Don't forget, she's rubbing elbows with the likes of Interscope and Timbaland now; for all the choices she might have made and the audiences she might have aimed at, the fresh-sounding, adventurous, and not-exactly-accessible Kala is the kind of record that obviously demanded a defined personal vision. Taken in concert with her understandable blasting of the media for perpetuating the male-led ingenue myth, this campaign's single biggest revelation is turning out to be M.I.A. herself.
On paper, M.I.A.'s politics still register as conflicted as ever. She is as enamoured with her own empty sloganeering as she is disapproving of the western world's, and as likely to remind us that AK47s cost $20 apiece in Africa ("20 Dollar") as she is to adorn the chorus of her summer songs with cash register ch-chings and gunfire clatter ("Paper Planes"). An easy hybrid of island patois and Westernized slang, most of her lyrics register as being primarily in service of their rhythms, anyway; as with Arular, the things M.I.A. insinuates are often more rewarding than those she actually says. For example, bits and pieces of standard whitebread indie rock tunes turn up like front lawn moles all throughout Kala. "Bamboo Banga" pinches a verse from Jonathan Richman's 1976 driving anthem "Roadrunner" only to flip the metaphor from cars to desert animals; "20 Dollar" knowingly pilfers the bassline to New Order's "Blue Monday" before throwing in a lyrical nod to Pixies; even the island-tinged nursery rhyme of "Paper Planes" borrows from the Clash's "Straight to Hell". Whether we're meant to infer anything larger (perhaps about colonization and cultural re-appropriation) from these little morsels is, of course, entirely up to us. But at the very least, it tells us that M.I.A.'s intuition always leads her to interesting places.
Even more interesting than how an artist acquires a listenership, is what they do once they have it. With Kala, M.I.A.'s made it abundantly obvious where her interests lie, and it's not in playing it safe and toppling the record sales of her debut. Who dares call her an opportunist now?
MIDLAKE
THE TRIALS OF VAN OCCUPANTHER - MidlakeThe future ain't what it used to be, so these days the past can seem like a thing of the future. To wit: The second LP by Texas-based rock group Midlake opened at #14 on the UK indie charts more than a month before gracing its sullen native shores. Similarly, Midlake take a step back from the synth-age psychedelia of their solid 2004 debut Bamnan and Slivercork on the follow-up The Trials of Van Occupanther, an encouraging but ultimately disappointing contemplation of time's ceaselessness, love's promise, and Harvest-era Neil Young.
Speaking of time, Midlake waste little at first. Opener "Roscoe" keeps getting compared to Fleetwood Mac but actually comes closer to the pristine, high-concept chug of the Alan Parsons Project's paranoid 1982 hit "Eye in the Sky" (in a good way, gang) or the similarly anxious space-rock of the late Grandaddy. "Whenever I was a child, I wondered/What if my name had changed into something more productive like Roscoe/Been born in 1891, waiting with my Aunt Rosaline," whispers frontman Tim Smith, his phrasing elusive, his grassy tenor warming into multi-part harmonies after one of the year's most casually compelling pop moments.
Alas, little else here comes close: A fuzzy guitar solo on the legitimately Mac-like "Head Home"; single "Young Bride" chases ramshackle dance beats and skittery violins through a haunted and hookless forest; and "Bandits" pairs anachronistic wit ("Do you want to be overrun by bandits?") with mild woodwinds, an acoustic intro recalling "Mother Nature's Son", and bland Coldplay piano.
Throughout the album, the desperation for meaningful human contact glimpsed in the record's lonesome centerpiece "Van Occupanther" underpins images of mountaineers, stonecutters, and frozen pines. The album's second most affecting track, horn-sprouting "Branches", further illuminates the protagonist's heartbreak through ominous minor sevenths, "Exit Music (for a Film)" triad-inversion segues, and a canny reference to the Jackson Browne-penned classic "These Days". "It's hard for me but I'm trying," Smith delicately repeats, his voice falling between Young's woozy falsetto and the sinuous timbres of Thom Yorke.
Unfortunately the second half of the disc drags, amid bell-like vintage synths, pastoral singer/songwriter strums, and a stolid mountain of midtempo melancholy. "On a clear day I can see my old house and my wife," intones Smith, still struggling against the passing seasons for an irrecoverable romance. It's a shame that the album didn't finish quite so brightly as it ended. On tour Midlake are less affected in their stage presence than on record. Listen to Occupanther, go see them and then go back to the record. You may find something in the last few tracks I didn't. "We'll pass by for the last time," the disc concludes, but surely a band this promising will be back for more.
MIRACLE FORTRESS
FIVE ROSES - Miracle FortressIt's telling that the title track here is an instrumental. As a member of wacky Montreal popsters Think About Life, Miracle Fortress' Graham Van Pelt has already demonstrated his ear for keyboard textures (and a gung-ho live show). On his debut album as Miracle Fortress, Van Pelt plays all the instruments (though he's since recruited a touring band that includes Sunset Rubdown's Jordan Robson-Cramer), and he embraces sonic textures as the defining element of a sunny auteur-pop aesthetic.
Amid the post-Smile hoopla of 2004, critics nervously predicted a Beach Boys backlash. Of course, they couldn't have been more wrong: Panda Bear's everywhere-praised Person Pitch might be trippier, or the Crayon Fields' Animal Bells more charming, but Five Roses is as upfront as either about its debt to 2007's oft-name-checked Brian Wilson. Most overt is "Maybe Lately", which plays off the angelic verse melody of "Don't Worry Baby" before dissolving into shiny electronics. "And maybe when we're older I'll be less afraid/and maybe when it gets colder you can come to stay," Van Pelt sings in a near-falsetto. Layers of high-pitched vocal harmonies likewise give a Pet Sounds nod to polished midtempo pop-rockers "Hold Your Secrets to Your Heart" and "Have You Seen in Your Dreams"; the sparkling arpeggios on "Beach Baby" could almost be a slowed-down recreation of the opening guitar chimes of "Wouldn't It Be Nice". You know, pleasant vibrations.
Miracle Fortress' tracks can sound as much like cybernetic love songs as teenage symphonies, suggesting another influence on Van Pelt's studio exercise: fellow texture-lover Brian Eno. Van Pelt's washes of dreamy synths and synth-like guitar leads over straight-ahead strums on opener "Whirrs" or the atmospheric "Little Trees" recall the way Eno achieved like-minded combinations during his 70s peak.
Five Roses reveals Van Pelt as a talented producer who knows his way around summery pop songs. Still, the album at times indulges Van Pelt's ear for textures a bit much. Miracle Fortress' use of traditionally nonmusical sound effects - cats meowing, birds chirping, or, on the title track, a propeller-like whir - can end up being more memorable than the songs such noises adorn. In a perverse move, Van Pelt saves the strongest track, "This Thing About You", for last; bouncy tambourine and a gauze of effects-laden guitars put life into old love-song lyrical tropes. Like Eno, like Wilson, Miracle Fortress sounds best when the productions serve the songs.
MOBILE
TOMORROW STARTS TODAY - MobileCanadians will often tell you "Hey, they're from Canada you know", even if has no relevance. The fact that Mobile are from Canada really makes no difference to the music, they don’t sound typical Canadian (i.e. Nickleback/Simple Plan) - that’s a joke by the way Sarah. The band did win a Juno award in Canada for “New Group of the Year” which is apparently a big deal, so maybe it was worth mentioning after all.
“Tomorrow Starts Today” begins with a quiet type of fuzz – almost shoegaze-ish, but when the hook hits, singer Mat Joly sounds like Ash’s Timothy Wheeler at his most brash and bold. “Out Of My Head” then borders on a darker slant of dance-rock, from which another sharp turn is taken to reach “See Right Through Me,” which is an irrefutable highlight of the album. With crackling percussion driving a wailing array of keys, the music sets the tone for a huge track, but Joly really hits it home. Displaying brilliant vocal dynamics on verses, and then going full bore on the chorus, he ends up sounding like Noel Gallagher in his finest (Definitely Maybe and What's The Story Morning Glory?)days. The song, along with the equally bombastic “Scars” (where Joly does his best young Bono), gives a concise summary of why people should take note of this band.
While the rest of Tomorrow Starts Today cannot quite match the ultimate success of these main cuts, there is still a lot of top shelf material on the record. Whether it be the pensive euro-balladry of “Dusting Down the Stars,” the chunky riffs/massive hooks of “New York Minute,” or the ‘80s drive of “Lookin’ Out” – there is plenty to come back for. And there is certainly enough to help brush off the album’s few stumbling blocks. Plus, if it is not enough for fence-sitters to stack the pros and cons against each other and decide in turn, the patient majesty of the Rubyhose-esque closer (“Bleeding Words”) should convert even the most indecisive.
In the end, Mobile are one hell of a band, and it is amazing that they have gone unnoticed for so long in the states, when they are but a border away, yet get good coverage as far as Malaysia. Enjoy.
MODEST MOUSE
WE WERE DEAD BEFORE THE SHIP EVEN SANK – Modest MouseMuch has been made of the fact that the Mouse (The Mice?) have been forerunners in the move of so-called 'indie' into the mainstream arena, having scored a very palpable major label hit with Float On from 2004’s Good News For People Who Like Bad News, after ten years of cult-status. Yet maybe the fuss should be about how Isaac Brock’s band of merry men managed this without tarnishing their credentials. We Were Dead… shows everyone how to do it. It’s wonderfully mangled and yet massively accomplished at the same time. Some trick.
With serial collaborator Johnny Marr, onboard to add a touch of jangly Mancunian magic to the Issaquah band, the rough edges of MM’s earlier indie racket have been smoothed to a chart-friendly sheen. This often involves the current trend of cramming in as much as possible; brass sections, accordions, massed backing vocals etc. But this rodent wins over the rest of the ratpack by dint of vertiginous arrangements and an irrepressible bounce.
There are still issues surrounding Brock’s voice. His adopted shout/squeal/growl/rant is an acquired taste that is often at odds with the lush surroundings, but the amusingly wry lyrics and plainly hummable tunes mean that We Were…should yield at least a couple of chart-worrying singles. First single, ‘’Dashboard’’, is a fine example of this. All Talking Heads stuttering guitars, over-excited vocals and yet still with an eye towards the more avant garde end of contemporary math-rock. Even bringing to mind current cutting edge darlings, Battles.
James Mercer of the Shins, another band to push maverick tendencies back towards the mainstream, turns up top harmonise on three tracks; notably the edgy and witty “We’ve Got Everything” which even manages to sound like 80s-period Yes in places. Again it’s a remarkable balancing act that manages to simultaneously take chances while daring you to sing along. It’s a breathtakingly audacious ruse, and works on about 70 percent of this glittering, slightly surreal album. This is the Mouse that roars…
MOONEY SUZUKI
HAVE MERCY - Mooney SuzukiAfter a recent stretch that has included lineup changes, an ill-fated stab at major-label success and the folding of their most recent label, the Mooney Suzuki could have been forgiven for throwing up their hands and crying "Uncle!"
Instead, the New York garage-rockers emerge, bloodied but unbowed, with "Have Mercy." The Mooney's last album, 2004's "Alive & Amplified," was a too-slick affair (courtesy of Avril Lavigne's old production team The Matrix) that garnered little more than derision. "Have Mercy," by contrast, is an honest, humble, rootsy record that shows the band maturing. Opener "99%" sounds like the Black Crowes gone garage and much of the album ("Ashes," "This Broke Heart Of Mine") hews to that simpler sound. New sonic flourishes for the band, such as flute on "Adam and Eve," sound lived-in, not show-offy. Meanwhile, on the glockenspiel-aided "Rock 'n' Roller Girl," singer Sammy James Jr. notes, "We may be growing older" - an admission that would never have appeared on an earlier Mooney Suzuki album.
They're not totally grown up and serious, though: James spends six minutes celebrating booze on the twangy "Good Ol' Alcohol," possibly the best song the Supersuckers never wrote. For one of the best bands in the neo-garage scene, "Have Mercy" is a welcome return to form.
MUMM-RA
THESE THINGS MOVE IN THREES - Mumm-RaMUMM-RA are often credited with being indie eccentrics (especially since their name originates from the main villain of the 1980s cartoon, Thundercats). But they’ve quickly emerged as one of the most exciting bands of the moment, having cut their teeth and even emerged from the shadow of bands such as The Automatic, The View and The Horrors while taking part in the 2007 NME Awards Indie Rock Tour.
Opening salvo Now Or Never lulls you into a false sense of security, featuring James “Noo” New’s vocals over an acoustic guitar being lazily strummed, before suddenly exploding into beautiful, epic life at about the 40-second mark. Former single Out of The Question follows, complete with swirling keyboard melodies, a driving bassline and euphoric vocals from New that really get your feet tapping. Next up is title track These Things Move In Threes which confidently delivers more livewire electronics over the top of some really appealing guitar riffs.
By the time you’ve reached She’s Got You High, Mumm-Ra should have you addicted. It has all the hallmarks of classic indie-rock material, beginning with a soft and deeply melodic guitar riff and then building emphatically towards a rousing chorus and some Beach Boys-style vocal layering. Thereafter, the tunes are belted out in style and seldom miss a beat.
Starlight is another instant hit, a rousing blend of handclap beats, wailing guitars and sing-along choruses. And so to the epic final track Down, Down, Down, surely the album’s crowning achievement – a seven-minute opus that slow-builds moodily and magnificently to deliver one of the most mature and ambitious songs on the LP. It’s a magnificent end to a brilliant debut album and one which will leave you totally smitten.
MURPHY, ROÍSÍN
OVERPOWERED - Roísín MurphyRoísín Murphy casts a wide net: Avant-pop aesthetes fell for Moloko's screwball trip-hop; Ibizan disco bunnies made "Sing It Back" a pop anthem; nightcrawlers found a postergirl in the booze-hound sleeve of Statues; style-mag fantasists never tire of her covers. Even Sky Sports succumbed, making "The Time Is Now" the unofficial anthem of 21st century soccer.
So why isn't she a huge star? It's a question that has likely been taxing the minds of EMI, who, to their credit, have taken a punt on Murphy after her 2005 solo debut tanked. Recorded with tech-jazz savant Matthew Herbert, Ruby Blue was a brilliantly inventive collection of cut-up pop that confounded her label and failed to find an audience. According to her new bosses, Murphy has got all that self-indulgence out of her system, and is now stepping up to the plate to make a "career record." She has the potential, they claim, to be a kind of beloved entertainer on the level of another investment of theirs, Robbie Williams.
In truth, Murphy is closer in spirit to the late Associates singer Billy Mackenzie, another maverick celtic diva torn between the arthouse, the punk club, and the disco. Mackenzie could never quite knuckle down to the career frequently promised him; one suspects Murphy won't fare any better. Her position is perfectly illustrated in Scott King's artwork for the album and singles, setting Murphy on the streets of east London, having evidently just beamed down from the planet Gaultier-- a pop peacock out of place and time in the mundane Kate Nash-ville of British pop 2007.
The record itself finds Murphy on her best behaviour, however-- wearing its natural wildness and eccentricity lightly, Overpowered is focused solely on the dancefloor. Her collaborators, from Bugz in the Attic and Groove Armada, have constructed a gleaming shrine to the spirit of Bobby O and Giorgio Moroder: The lead single and title track borrows a primordial bassline squelch from the dawn of cosmic disco-- La Bionda's "I Wanna Be Your Lover"-- and the follow-up, "Let Me Know", shamelessly plunders the chorus of Tracy Weber's 1981 classic "Sure Shot".
Murphy is the singer that the mid-00s British nu-pop of Richard X and Xenomania has so dearly missed: A dramatic yet unshowy singer, versatile enough to take in the regal hauteur of "Primitive", the cerebral chill of "Dear Miami", the randy glee of "Footprints", the chutzpah and grace of "You Know Me Better". She's funny, clever, heartbreaking, and strident, the kind of disco singer Dusty Springfield never quite had the abandon to become. At times, however, she's almost too willing to play it straight. "Movie Star" laces itself a little too tighly into Alison Goldfrapp's glam pop corset, while "Cry Baby" is stuffed to the gills with syndrums and cowhorns to the exclusion of much else. And the dubby song for her dad, "Scarlet Ribbons", is sweet but feels a little out of place. But these are quibbles. In a year of low-stakes disappointment for European pop, Overpowered is a triumph.
NASH, KATE
MADE OF BRICKS - Kate NashKate Nash is the girl who used Lily Allen to prop up her own MySpace success only to criticize comparisons of the two London singers as "lazy journalism." But why compare when you can contrast: If Lily Allen is the plainspoken wiseass chick all the guys love to hang around, Kate Nash is the plainspoken piano geek who simultaneously loves Lily Allen and is also a little bit jealous of her social prowess. Nash is coy and neurotic-- instead of tossing a deadbeat boyfriend and laughing at his tears, she can't help but wallow in a crumbling relationship. And, leading up to this LP, her rotating quartet of mostly humble, quiet MySpace tracks offered canny scenes of young love-- tiny romantic comedies that could affect even the snobbiest art-house connoisseur. Too bad, then, that Made of Bricks is a rushed, glossed-over misfire that almost trips over itself to hide the reasons why Nash became such a web phenom in the first place.
Instead of allowing Nash to simply clean-up the homey demos early fans knew and loved, many songs are completely made over in seemingly random styles that emphasize hot shit producer Paul Epworth's studio expertise more than Nash's natural warmth. "Birds", originally an acoustic guitar stunner about an inarticulate, bird-obsessed dude and his perplexed girlfriend, is remade as a faux-country farce that seeps away the song's naïve appeal with a novelty cowboy hat and a wink. "We Get On" is transformed from a crushingly self-conscious diary entry backed only by Nash's careful piano plinks into a goofy, roller-rink trifle that undermines the songwriter's nuanced heartbreak. Then there's the album's shameless filler; instead of allowing Nash the time to craft enough real-life pop songs to fill out an LP, the internet opportunists behind Made of Bricks try to cover-up obvious non-starters like "Play", "Dickhead", and "Shit Song" with knob-twirling nonsense and gratuitous instrumentation. Considering reckless moves like these, this debut full-length can be viewed as cautionary case of too many friends too soon.
After one listen to her UK hit "Foundations", it becomes obvious Kate Nash has a gift for communicating confusing romance with a keen eye for detail and scene-stealing turns of phrase. The single-- along with just-a-girl power-pop blast "Mouthwash" and sex-not-love big-beat bouncer "Pumpkin Soup"-- is one of the few Made of Bricks tracks that finds Nash's acutely enunciated words complimented with just the right amount of swirling sonic accoutrements. "My fingertips are holding onto the cracks in our foundation/ I know that I should let go but I can't," she sings. Made of Bricks too often tries to smooth over the emotional cracks, breaks and fissures that happen to be Kate Nash's distinguishing hallmark. Without them, she may as well be any other London newcomer in a bright dress and matching trainers.
NATIONAL
BOXER - The NationalAmong critics and fans, the National's third album Alligator has become synonymous with the term grower. Released to minor acclaim early in 2005, the album has since quietly and steadily built up a large, avid listenership. Matt Berninger's lyrics - initially off-putting and seemingly obtuse in their non sequiturs and stray details - proved unpretentiously poetic over time. His sober baritone and dogged repetition of phrases and passages made it sound like he was trying to figure the songs out in tandem with the listener. The band, meanwhile, played around the hooks instead of hard-selling them, so that in a sense, despite two previous albums and a killer EP, we all pretty much learned how to listen to the National on Alligator, eventually finding deeper shades of meanings in the words, sympathizing with Berninger's anxieties, laughing at his grim jokes, and tapping out the band's complex rhythms on desktops and steering wheels.
It's a testament to the good will engendered by Alligator that fans are now likewise calling the National's follow-up, Boxer, a grower. Despite the scrutiny greeting its release (brought on by the inevitable leaks), many listeners seem to be approaching these songs patiently, giving Boxer the space and time to reveal its dark, asymmetrical passageways. In a sense, the album demands it. The same elements that kept listeners returning to Alligator (Berninger's clever turns of phrase, the band's dramatic intensity) are present on Boxer, but are now more restrained and controlled.
From the first piano chords on opener "Fake Empire", the National create a late-night, empty-city-street mood, slightly menacing but mostly isolated. The 10 tracks that follow sustain and even amplify that feeling, revealing the band's range as they play close to the vest. Aaron and Bryce Dessner's twin guitars don't so much battle one another as create a unified layer that acts as a full backdrop for the other instruments, while touring member Padma Newsome's string and horn arrangements infuse songs like "Mistaken for Strangers" and the stand-out "Ada" (featuring Sufjan Stevens on piano) with subtle drama. But Boxer is a drummer's album: Bryan Devendorf becomes a main player here, never merely keeping time but actively pushing the songs around. With machine precision, his fluttering tom rhythms add a heartbeat to "Squalor Victoria" and give "Brainy" its stalker tension. In fact, the title Boxer could conceivably be a reference to the way his rhythms casually spar with Berninger's vocal melodies, jabbing and swinging at the singer's empathies and emotions.
Despite this implied violence, Boxer doesn't have the same aggressive self-reckoning and psychological damage assessment of Alligator. Here, Berninger sounds like he's able to look outward from that mental space instead of further inward. He observes the people around him-- friends, lovers, passersby-- alternately addressing them directly and imagining himself in their minds. Or, as he sings on "Green Gloves", "Get inside their clothes with my green gloves/ Watch their videos, in their chairs." He sounds more genuinely empathetic than previously (the accusatory you from the first two albums is thankfully absent), toying with ambiguity and backing away from outright satire. Certain themes continue to prevail: He maintains a fear of white-collar assimilation, addressing "Squalor Victoria" and "Racing Like a Pro" to upwardly mobile hipster-yuppies ("Underline everything/ I'm a professional/ In my beloved white shirt"), and clings to his American angst ("We're half awake in a fake empire"), as though recognizing the world's craziness makes him more sane.
Better even than these songs are the three mid-album tracks that toy with a love = war metaphor that miraculously avoids the obviousness that implies. On "Slow Show", over background guitar drones and a piano theme that echoes U2's "New Year's Day", he daydreams, "I want to hurry home to you/ Put on a slow dumb show for you/ Crack you up." But the capper is in the coda: "You know I dreamed about you for 29 years before I saw you." That hard-won contentment begins to crumble in "Apartment Story", in which the world invades the couple's shared space, and in "Start a War", where the possibility of loss looms threateningly. "Walk away now and you're gonna start a war," Berninger sings against the band's simple, uncomfortably insistent rhythm, his concrete fears giving the song the extra heft of the personal.
Obviously, it's pretty easy to read a lot into the National's music and especially into Berninger's lyrics, but that shouldn't imply that Boxer is a willfully difficult or overly academic work. Like those on their last album, these songs reveal themselves gradually but surely, building to the inevitable moment when they hit you in the gut. It's the rare album that gives back whatever you put into it.
NEW PORNOGRAPHERS
CHALLENGERS - The New PornographersIf previous New Pornographers albums are the musical equivalent of Corporate Cola, then Challengers is the caffeine-free diet version: less sugary, more mature, initially not as invigorating, but ultimately just as addictive. It's the inevitable response to 2005's Twin Cinema, a benchmark that culminated the Canadian power-poppers' hyperactive "three hooks for every song" phase. In contrast, Challengers' songs are given room to stretch out and breathe, to reveal their gooey centers at a (relatively) leisurely pace, rather than jumping frantically out of the speakers. Challengers might not grab listeners right away—it's definitely a grower—but a little patience will help reveal the most consistent Pornos album yet.
The title track gets one of Newman's prettiest melodies, making it a natural showcase for Neko Case's subdued, vulnerable vocal. But Newman saves the saddest song—"Unguided"—for himself, letting it slowly swell into his best sing-along since "The Bleeding Heart Show." Dan Bejar of Destroyer is still playing the role of eccentric jester, and his three contributions—"Myriad Harbour," "Entering White Cecilia," and "The Spirit Of Giving"—drip with perverse charm, as always. But The New Pornographers is unmistakably a vehicle for Newman's songwriting, which is pure pop genius even with half the sweetness.
NEW YOUNG PONY CLUB
FANTASTIC PLAYROOM – New Young Pony ClubRegardless of what you think of the new rave youthquake, you have to agree that cramming a range of bands under one musical umbrella - even if it has a big smiley face on it - diminishes the impact of their individual sound.
And of all the so-called new ravers, New Young Pony Club don't need any glow-schtick to bathe them in luminescence. Their celestial synths, heavenly hooks and spike-heeled attitude should give them all the attention they need.
The heavy based electro-robotics of their breakthrough single ‘'Ice Cream'’ are as arresting now as they were on first release a year and a prominent TV ad campaign ago. Does the rest of the album live up to the majesty of the aforementioned? You bet your sweet little disco-punk sensibility it can. ''Get Lucky'' works the frosted Ice Cream formula - an aloof, pouting verse, leading to an ecstatically climactic chorus. ''The Bomb'' takes on some B52-styled harmonies with a cocky, 21st century twist. ''Jerk Me'' snarls a masochistic lyric against neon-lit Numan-esque synths, while '‘Talking Talking'' whispers and slinks its way into secret ambient places.
Where the amphetamine rush of rave replaces the need for other kinds of bodily pleasures, Fantastic Playroom is all about creeping, seductive builds, delayed gratification, playful, provocative lyrics and explosive pay-offs. Tahita Bulmer's vocals, falling somewhere between dominatrix and breathy temptress, couple with the cold electro-sounds in something close to perfection.
Sitting prettily with your CSS, LCD Soundsystem and Le Tigre albums and making lyrical reference to Talking Heads, Fantastic Playroom teases, but ultimately delivers the promise of lasting pleasure.
OF MONTREAL
HISSING FAUNA, ARE YOU THE DESTROYER? - Of MontrealThe breakup album is a familiar pop music trope - countless artists have harnessed the emotional fallout of a relationship to fuel their songwriting efforts. The less imaginative practitioners wind up churning out acoustic self-pity or overdriven spite and angst, while the most effective have draped heartbreak in a clever disguise (like the high-gloss domestic dispute of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours), or rendered personal pain as the most important event in human history (like the symphonic catharsis of ABC's The Lexicon of Love).
Despite a soft spot for concept albums, Of Montreal would seem an unlikely participant in this arena, having spent much of their career eschewing confessional introspection for escapist fantasy. Even amidst the notebook-doodle psychedelia society of Elephant 6, Kevin Barnes and his compatriots stood apart for their day-glo Nickelodeon world, full of bizarre characters with alliterative names and toy-box, sugar-high arrangements. While there's always been a dark streak running through Of Montreal's cartoon universe - and Barnes' chipmunk-shrill voice sometimes tips disturbingly from childlike to desperate - few would look to the Athens, Geo., band to accurately depict love's gory aftermath.
Yet in the past year, storm clouds have intruded upon the band's rainbow domain as Barnes went through a separation (he and his wife have since reconciled); concurrently, the band's sound has been slowly molting off the giddy pop of its early days, using its past couple of albums to test the waters of a more sinister combination of synth-pop and glam without abandoning its steakhouse jingle-worthy melodies. These two plot threads intertwine at Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, an astonishingly good late-period record from Of Montreal that's as uncomfortably savage in its depiction of breakup psychology as it is relentlessly catchy.
The emotional accuracy of the record lies in Of Montreal's unwillingness, or perhaps inability, to settle for "woe is me" moping. Barnes resists the urge to cry into an acoustic guitar, instead portraying the full-spectrum manic mood-swings of the brokenhearted: desperately seeking distraction in drugs or religion, imagining himself as a cynical-minded lothario, and even considering violence. When Barnes does directly give in to his despair, it produces the monolithic 12-minute centerpiece of "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal", a gutwrenching soundtrack provided by an unrelenting bassline and a synth solo that sounds like an angry flying saucer.
The rest of Hissing Fauna is an endless supply of off-kilter but instantly appealing melodies intact over the band's newly robotic sound. The focus throughout is on mechanized rhythms and synthesizer swirls, though the tempos are no less hyperactive, and the attention span of the arrangements is only a shade longer. Occasionally, the bright synthesizers appear to mock Barnes' shadowy feelings, like the roller-skate organ riff that flits about the pleading drug-use of "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse", or the Christmas carol exterior of depression saga "A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger".
Of Montreal's full embrace of this new sound works best in the record's second half, as after the soul-purge of "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal", Barnes tries to slut away the pain through a series of sex jams no less memorable for being completely unconvincing. "Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider" finds the singer sauntering through the club brushing off sexual advances from both women and men and boasting of "soul power," while "Faberge Falls for Shuggie" struts over a bassline funkier than I ever could have imagined the group capable of producing. Throughout, Barnes multi-tracks several lascivious voices, making bizarre double entendres out of parachutes and interiors. It's not the direction many of their fans might've imagined they'd take, but it's that very attribute that makes it so ceaselessly fascinating and inexhaustibly replayable.
PANDA BEAR
PERSON PITCH - Panda BearInside the booklet included with Panda Bear's third solo album, Person Pitch, is a list of artists. The first four named are microhouse artists Basic Channel, Luomo, Dettinger, and Wolfgang Voigt. Maybe Noah Lennox, the man behind the Panda Bear, began this influence-naming exercise in a minimal techno state of mind. On the other hand, the inclusion of these four at the top could be significant. We always knew that the guys from his main band, Animal Collective, had an ear out for electronic music, but with Panda Bear, the impact of the DJ seems to run deeper. The music on Person Pitch sounds nothing like proper dance music, but the basic structure-- the use of dynamics, and above all, the sense of repetition-- draws heavily from that context. Which is particularly interesting considering what else is going on.
The Beach Boys always come up when talking about Panda Bear, and not just because he shares their fondness for certain melodic turns: When he allows the reverb to blanch his voice, Lennox can sound uncannily like Brian Wilson. This tunefulness gives Person Pitch an appeal that extends beyond just Animal Collective fans, but the way the songs are put together also gives them an unusual twist. Producers in Brian Wilson's era never worked like this, sampling old songs and instruments and spinning them in wheels of sound that seem like they could go forever. Most of this record consists of intricately constructed, heavily layered, and highly repetitive loops on top of which Lennox sings oddly familiar and touching melodies. But despite its grounding in guitar pop, Person Pitch isn't likely to be mistaken for the work of a band. It sounds like what it is: one guy alone in his bedroom trolling through music history, picking and choosing bits to make something deeply personal and all his own.
The repetition of the music here, though probably engendered by computer, has a strange analog quality. You can almost see the turntables rotating on the opening "Comfy in Nautica", which loops Lennox's sung "ah"'s and handclaps to evoke ritual campfire music, while the deep reverb on his voice puts us in the same liturgical headspace found on his very different acoustic record Young Prayer from 2004. "Take Pills" repeats a tambourine and twangy guitar during its slower opening section while industrial samples that sound like car parts being followed down an assembly line fill in the vast spaces. The field recordings take an aquatic turn on the track's second half, as Lennox picks up his acoustic guitar and moves the party to the beach, singing "I don't want for us to take pills anymore" to the kind of effortlessly melodic line that once expressed thoughts like "da doo ron ron."
Given the presence of such tremendously catchy pop moments on Person Pitch, the record's indulgences feel completely earned. The flurry of tabla that opens the extended "Good Girl/Carrots" sticks out at first but makes sense once Lennox gets the hectic dub chaos out of his system and settles into the second section's hypnotic tune. When the song edges become wispy and shapeless on "I'm Not", which blends Lennox's voice with an indistinct droning synth, the mood and thrust of the album gives the track the appropriate context. "Search for Delicious", reminiscent of the glowing ambient drift of Lennox's side project Jane, won't leave the drone alone, repeatedly knocking Lennox's singing off track like a clumsy but well-meaning drunk. Music of such warped processing would be a specialist's item, but as a breather here, before the simple and childlike music-box closer "Ponytail", it feels right.
I still haven't talked about the 12-and-a-half-minute "Bros", the astonishing track that serves as the album's centerpiece. It's here that Person Pitch's repetition and DJ's sense of timing are most apparent, while Lennox's songwriting hits a melodic peak. The first few bars turn to the golden age of 60s and 70s radio, with some rattling percussion chipped from Phil Spector's Wall of Sound and a chiming acoustic guitar that could be pulled from the Beach Boys' "Girl Don't Tell Me". But as the loops pass on "Bros", the song begins to seem like a glorious travelogue, a journey along a path where all the music's influences are visible along the roadside: the Wilson Brothers in their pinstripe shirts, or the queasy phasing and random sound effects-- a subway, people on a roller coaster, a baby crying-- of Lee "Scratch" Perry. When Panda begins to chant halfway through, we hear an echo of his main band, and when the neo-Latin piano comes in during the latter portion, transforming the track from internally-focused meditation to outwardly-beaming celebration, we get an image of Derrick May's classic techno anthem "Strings of Life" busting into a DJ set to make everyone go crazy.
Person Pitch as a whole-- and "Bros" in particular-- evokes the sunshine of Lennox's adopted Lisbon, Portugal home. But it's the kind of light best experienced with eyes closed-- with the rays filtered through eyelids, turning the world into various shades of red and orange. You can feel the warmth pouring out of the music and see abstractions of its inspirations-- that whole long list and more-- as they cycle around again and again and again. Five of these seven songs have been released in various forms on singles and 12"s previously, so the exceptionally high quality of this music isn't a surprise to those who have been following Panda Bear closely. Still, hearing it all together in one place and listening to it all at one time is both overwhelming and inspirational.
PARAMORE
RIOT! - ParamoreRiot! is immediately appealing because it focuses on sounds that have been neglected by the genre’s frontrunners. This is an uncomplicated album comprising of strikingly uncomplicated music, entirely lacking in 15 word song titles, Jay-Z guest appearances, and theatrical meta-concepts about performing in a rock band (“Misery Business” concerns a rival for a man, not the music industry). It’s far from a dull retread for old fans who have failed to keep up with a rapidly changing scene, though; Paramore attacks its music with infectious enthusiasm, too straightforward to have such contrived purposes. The youthful surety of “Miracle” is bracing in its clarity; compared to hits about scenes and arms races, “I’m gonna start over tonight, beginning with you and I” is refreshingly direct.
“For a Pessimist, I’m Pretty Optimistic” contains barely a hint of pessimism. The band has no time to dwell on negatives as it charges through glimmering, blissful verses and a gigantic chorus. (Williams is an endearingly terrible cynic; on “That’s What You Get” she wonders, “Why do we like to hurt so much,” sounding anything but despairing.) That relentless assault of sugar-sweet riffs and soaring choruses dominates the first half of the album and beyond, only easing off for the mid-tempo pulse of “When It Rains,” which has the light touch and gentle throb of a Belinda Carlisle hit. While Paramore shares its predecessors’ unabashed sincerity, its music notably omits much of the neurotic self-examination. It’s easy to imagine Williams singing a Jimmy Eat World line like “If you don’t know, honey, then you don’t,” but harder to imagine her uttering it with Jim Adkins’ plaintive vulnerability. Riot! doesn’t suffer for its lack of subtlety, but if the band should develop some later in its career, the results could be even more spectacular.
Impatient power chords and irrepressible power pop aren’t a new combination and at times, Riot! connects the dots so transparently it would seem cynical if the band’s approach weren’t so earnest. A tactic like dropping the guitar out for a triumphant refrain (“Born for This”), for instance, is so familiar its use is nearly traditional. And just when the album strings enough high-tempo rock songs together to suggest a contemplative piano-driven ballad is around the corner, “We Are Broken” arrives with gentle keys and a plaintive chorus, building to a gratifyingly teary climax. Rather than the predictability growing dull, however, Paramore realizes the punk-pop formula with such guileless fervor that it becomes entertaining in itself. The album stumbles only when it’s forced outside its comfort zone; the jaunty acoustic strum of “Fences” isn’t awful, but it’s a misstep on a mostly adroit record.
Punk and its derivatives have always had a not-so subtle affinity for pop music, from the Ramones’ girl group fascination, through the Clash’s disco dabbling and beyond Blink-182’s radio sheen. Trading distortion and dissonance for clarity and melodic precision irritates the purists, but it illuminates an ever-present pop center. Paramore is reminiscent of turn of the century acts on the Vagrant and Drive Thru labels, but, at a time when young pop stars are embracing naked emotionalism and bright guitars, there isn’t a whole lot of difference between Riot! and the better songs from Kelly Clarkson or Avril Lavigne. As punk more extravagantly flirts with pop and pop explores short, sharp rock songs, Paramore finds a comfortable place between the two. That Rites of Spring’s descendants affirm the worth of Jimmy Eat World as well as Ashlee Simpson suggests the lineage is as healthy as ever.
PEÑATE, JACK
MATINÉE - Jack PeñateWith enough exuberance to illuminate his native London, singer/songwriter Jack Peñate sounds as if he'd be overjoyed to lead a Hall & Oates cover band. However, the lad crafts his own radiant brand of pop: Don't even try to resist "Run for Your Life" or "Second, Minute or Hour," featuring the immortal rhyme "I act stupid / Due to Cupid." Occasionally, you wish Peñate would just calm down already -- even the ballads feel a little rushed -- but his ordinarybloke vocals and eager hooks never fail to please. Note to Lily Allen: Please cover "Have I Been a Fool?"
We live in troubled times. There are wars going on, death and disease, and there’s a Conservative government looming into view. Most people feel this cold La Fin du Monde breeze gently swirling round them at all times.
Except, of course, fans of Jack Peñate. And, probably, the man himself. The last time that there was such a plausibly deathly sense of humanity it was the early 1980s, and Jack Peñate was around then, too. Back then he went by the names of Rick Astley and Shakin’ Stevens. It’s rather like the way that Lucifer has gone through different names throughout the ages. Actually, perhaps Beelzebub went under the nom de chanteuse of Rick Astley at the time.
The level of unmitigated, lobotomised jollity that pervades throughout Matinée is enough to send anyone to the trenches. When it’s done by way of a variety of songs that really rather ‘coincidentally’ sound like lots of other people’s songs, then it seems that we should be sending Peñate himself off to the nearest front. Or simply Iran. Just before the Bush ‘parting gift to America’ air strike.
Thusly, ‘Spit At Stars’ appears to be a twin brother of Kenickie’s Punka’ – at least he had the decency to change the lyrics, though. ‘Torn At The Platform’ comes rather too close to that bastion of thoughtful ‘80s pop, ‘Happy Hour’ by The Housemartins – an act to which Peñate is constantly reminiscent of – but without the wit, politics and promise of a bright career to come. London 0 Hull 4. Again. ‘Got My Favourite’ is fecund breezy summer pop with a strangulated calypso feel, but ultimately sounds like a Wham! cast-off. ‘Second, Minute or Hour’, meanwhile, sounds like The Jam channelling the spirit of premature middle age.
The entire record slides towards a dreary pop nadir, making it as suitable to the coffee tables of self-satisfied twenty-somethings as it is confusingly enticing to the swarm of teenagers attending his shows. It’s the sort of record you imagine Badly Drawn Boy creating in another ten years, after he’s squeezed the last vestiges of imagination from his soul.
It’s not just the sounds: it’s also the words. Lyrically, things grate from the off, with cringe-worthy and rudimentary rhyming couplets being Peñate’s irritating stock in trade. By the end, everything has blended into a graceless, jaunty melange of up-down guitar strokes, bellowed vocals and mid-tempo skanks.
You get the impression that Peñate would love to be seen as some sort of post-millennium Elvis Costello, but it took the Twickenham songsmith 30 years to write something as inane and vacuously dreary as Matinée.
Unfortunately for Jack, the comparisons to Astley and Stevens cut a lot closer to the bone.
PETER BJORN AND JOHN
WRITER’S BLOCK – Peter Bjorn And JohnWriter's Block's sonic textures demand attention: odd synths, overdriven bass, dreamy harmonies, rolling drums, pink streaks of guitar noise, or a foot tapping in soft focus. But ultimately, the album is just as notable for the way it captures both the electric first moments of a deep relationship and the bleary aftermath of post-breakup malaise. The infectious, lazily whistled hook and playful bongo drums of first single "Young Folks" are immediately inviting, but the song's second layer, the coy chemistry between Peter Morén and ex-Concretes singer Victoria Bergsman, adds depth, as the song's two hopeful strangers discover each other by chance: "All we care about is talking/ Talking only me and you."
As an album, Writer's Block shares these new lovers' singular focus. "Paris 2004" is a classical guitar-tinged traveler's ballad; "Start to Melt" flickers with amazed adoration; and "Objects of My Affection" combines the dramatic flair of an uncharacteristically upbeat Morrissey with the nasal vocals and ringing acoustic guitars of a post-Loveless "Like a Rolling Stone".
Amid the simplistic percussion and glassy chorus of "Amsterdam", Bjorn Yttling mopes over his loneliness during a lover's vacation, before John Erikkson's starry-eyed "Up Against the Wall" pictures a relationship at the precipice. "It's almost that I wish we hadn't met at all," sings Erikkson against a crystalline rhythm that could pack a John Hughes prom.
And at last, Yttling's big-screen "Roll the Credits" pictures an escape, but as usual on Writer's Block, the romance fills the frame: "It's between me and her now/ Can't separate at all/ Let's put the cards back in the sleeve." Only droning closer "Poor Cow" kills the mood, like the George Harrison sitar song contrarians might revisit when the rest of the album grows overly familiar.
If lyric poetry is, as Czech novelist Milan Kundera wrote, "the most exemplary incarnation of man dazzled by his own soul and the desire to make it heard," surely the pop song is the highest incarnation of all-consuming love and its fundamental need to be shared. Writer's Block, indeed.
PIGEON DETECTIVES
WAIT FOR ME – The Pigeon DetectivesWait For Me is chock full of smart, snappy indie pop anthems that confront the rigours of youth, its anxieties, its petty squabbles and its hedonsim and sexuality. But aren't they all?, I hear you say. My only bad comment is that despite some excellent tunes, some songs blur into one another and struggle to emerge as anything other than album fillers. It’s a shame, given the potential displayed in its very best moments.
If Romantic Type kicks things off with some crash, bang, wallop drums and sharp guitar riffs to deliver a sparkling indie pop romp, and I Found Out follows seamlessly with more catchy punk-inflicted hooks (think Buzzcocks) and chanty, shout-along backing vocals (think Kaiser Chiefs), then they're merely setting things up for the long haul.
Don’t Know How To Say Goodbye is a cheeky nod to young infatuation and drink that thrives on some spunky hooks but it’s followed by another in the same mould, Caught In Your Trap – ie, similar theme, similar delivery, similar catchiness…
There’s a moment during the opening bars of Can’t Control Myself that you think “aah, slower number” and relish the prospect of a maturer, more reflective offering – but come the minute mark, the guitars kick in and we’re off at breakneck pace again. The song pretty much encapsulates all that’s good and bad about the album. Don’t get me wrong, I like it (sometimes very much) but come the riotous final track I’m Always Right you might be craving a little more layering, a little more substance and a little something to prevent them being, erm, pigeon holed.
That said, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt – this is a debut album after all – and further recommend tracks like the melody-strewn You Know I Love You and title track Wait For Me.
PORTISHEAD
THIRD - PortisheadWithout warning, bands can and do often up and say, “and now for something completely different.” History is swimming with such examples. So, with an excruciating ten-year, unofficial hiatus separating Third and the eponymous second Portishead studio release, one should naturally expect massive change.
Dummy, a Mercury Prize winner, and the self-titled second LP were respectively released in 1994 and 1997. They were both prime examples of the trip-hop fusion of hip-hop and ethereal downtempo, and remain seminal works of the genre. Coincidentally, ‘94 to ‘97 marks the peak and sad decline of trip-hop, so expecting a return to an all but dead form would purely be wishful thinking on the listener’s behalf. For reasons beyond the grasp of mere mortals, trip-hop is not coming back, nor its bastard cousin illbient. Light a candle if you must.
As such, a first listen to the unimaginatively titled Third can be a little confusing or even off-putting. The static laden samples and sluggish scratching are gone, and most electronic effects have been pushed into a warmly analog Moog and Theremin role. However, patience and a little faith reveal Portishead third LP to be a work of sublime subtlety and dynamic depression easily on par with its critically adored predecessors. Building on the second album, this is their most “live” studio work yet, as well as being their most obviously diverse effort.
Despite its minute and a half length, “Deep Water” immediately sticks out. All there is to it is a ukulele, the always-sorrowful voice of Beth Gibbons, and a little bit of barbershop backup vocalizing. It’s not one of the album’s best tracks, but I’ve listened to their two studio albums and watched the live DVD a hundred times and I’ve never heard anything remotely like it. That’s about the definition of putting it all out there—they’re not playing it safe by any means.
“The Rip” is a fine piece, starting off with a humble Theremin howl and a finger-picked acoustic guitar. Gibbon’s vocals come in almost immediately and continue till about halfway. Then, a forceful drum track and moog bassline harmonizing with the acoustic fade in, as Gibbons’ sigh becomes electronically extended. Imagine Goldfrapp fronting Numbers and you’re close. Following that, “Plastic” is probably most like the mid-’90s Portishead we came to worship. It’s based in creepy organ and vocal sorrow, but with an erratic, choppy rhythm section snippet and warbling knock on wood sample that pine for the old days.
“We Carry On” has an up-tempo, tribal beat and steady moaning keyboard. The whine doubles up about two and a half minutes in, cueing a righteous guitar solo that punctuates the verses. It’s like post-drone-rock, only more cool than that looks on paper. Going for the other end of the spectrum, “Magic Doors” is cut from a pure classic rock cloth. Starting from the dead TV channel tone, it has a punchy Bonham beat, an eerie accordion sound, a nice round bassline, and a moving piano that underscores the chorus. Surprisingly, it also has more cowbell, with an almost Chambers Brothers “Time Has Come Today” reverb. Bruce Dickenson would put his pants on for that one.
Overall, Third appears to give jazz guitarist Adrian Utley more reign in songwriting, while turntablist producer Geoff Barrow has put his coffin away in lieu of outboard analog gear. Yet, as always, the unsettling lounge singer stylings of Beth Gibbons is the focal point. As witnessed by the slightly off Out Of Season collaboration with Paul “Rustin’ Man” Webb of Talk Talk, Gibbons’ terribly unique tones don’t tend to work all that well over sweetly organic instrumentals. She needs a little abrupt weirdness in her music or she stands out for the wrong reasons. Repeated exposure to “Deep Water” will reveal that to you, sure enough (in context, it works… just imagine a whole album of that).
So, on their third studio album, Portishead have succeeded in striking the careful balance between progressing their sound to where it should be 11 years later and retaining the esoteric creepiness that makes them tick. I don’t hear much in the way of clear, winning singles, not like the first two albums, but that seems to work in the album’s favor. Third is a complete work of art to fully immerse yourself in, listened to start to finish. It will be a little awkward initially, like Garth’s feeling towards putting on new underwear. After a while, it will become a part of you. History will eventually see it rank on par with the rest of their legendary works.
QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE
ERA VULGARIS - Queens Of The Stone AgeIt may seem cheap to bring up the departure of Nick Oliveri three years and two albums after he was fired from Queens of the Stone Age, but the more I listen to Era Vulgaris, the more I think his presence is sorely missed. I'm not advocating the guy's return, but the tradeoff between Josh Homme's reserved cool and Olivieri's crazy-go-nuts screaming was one of the group's strengths in their heyday; years later, someone for Homme to play off would still be a welcome addition to the band.
Queens of the Stone Age has been mostly Homme's show ever since, and it's been a mixed bag so far. Lullabies to Paralyze was quality, a chance for QOTSA v2.0 to retrench and carve out their own niche, even if those who were less enamored with the album's glowering charms, saw that niche as a rut-- an example of what Oliveri's loss actually meant to the group. If Era Vulgaris is any indication, the group felt the same way: This album tries its best to be everything all at once (often within one track), and in attempting to cover too much ground, the band loses focus and direction.
It's not so much that the songs themselves are weak, just that many of the choices made in them are. For instance, "Sick, Sick, Sick" would be better off simply sticking with Homme's motor-mouthed singing and riffing; instead, the song bellyflops into a flat chorus where everyone sings like they're scared of their own voices. (Since the Strokes' Julian Casablancas guests on this song, let's blame him. Why not?) Elsewhere, Homme spreads his falsetto all over "Misfit Love", where it'd be more effective in shorter bursts, while the obnoxious bridge on album closer "Run Pig Run" (it pops up twice!) kills any chance it might've had for worthy inclusion on a future edition of Guitar Hero. (Note to Activision: I am totally cool with requisite QOTSA singles "No One Knows" or "3's and 7's" bringing the rock fury and carpal tunnel.)
The most enjoyable moments on Era Vulgaris come when the band treads off the beaten path. One of the album's standout tracks, "Make It Wit Chu", is a straight-forward blues-rock number plucked from the last Desert Sessions disc. And the album's gentler digressions, like the guitar-weeping "Into the Hollow" and the mournful "Suture Up Your Future", reveal Homme has a surprisingly palatable softer side. "Turning on the Screw" and "I'm Designer" aren't exactly groundbreaking departures from the QOTSA's usual fare, but Homme's lyrical bent adds an interesting wrinkle. No one's going to confuse him with Bob Dylan any time this century, but you could put much worse in your mouth than lines like, "My generation's for sale/ Beats a steady job/ How much have you got?" or, "You can't lose it if you never had it/ Disappear man, do some magic." It's at points like these when Era Vulgaris truly comes to life. Unfortunately for listeners, those moments are few and far between, leaving fans to trudge back to older Queens records for the fix they crave.
RACONTEURS
CONSOLERS OF THE LONELY - The RaconteursOn the occasion of their second album, the Raconteurs offer some advice about relationships that is equally applicable to their own artistic inspiration: "Take it as it comes/ And be thankful when it's done/ There's so many ways to act/ And there's many shades of black." Jack White, whose day job is lead singer of the White Stripes, initiated the Raconteurs as a lark that proved he could act the part of straightforward tunesmith after working with the Stripes' bare-bones blues. 2006's "Broken Boy Soldiers" was workmanlike and catchy, but "Consolers of the Lonely" is something entirely different. White is running full-speed as a Raconteur as well, and other musicians should be thankful when it's done. "Consolers" is terrifyingly tuneful, its power-pop stylings encompassing everything from the Southern-fried soul of "Carolina Drama" on to Elton John piano rock on "You Don't Understand Me." Not content to merely shake up the music industry by releasing "Consolers" with only one week's advance notice, the Raconteurs have also had the nerve to drop a near-classic album.
RADIOHEAD
IN RAINBOWS - RadioheadThe brilliant In Rainbows represents a very different kind of Radiohead record. Liberated from their self-imposed pressure to be innovative, they sound-- for the first time in ages-- user-friendly; the glacial distance that characterized their previous records melted away by dollops of reverb, strings, and melody.
Singer Thom Yorke’s recent solo career has become a separate avenue for the electronic material he used to shoehorn onto Radiohead albums, and thankfully Radiohead now sound like a full band again. Opener "15 Step" and it’s mulched-up drum intro represents the album's only dip into Kid A-style electronics; but from the moment Jonny Greenwood's zestful guitar line takes over at about 40 seconds, In Rainbows becomes resolutely a five-man show. "15 Step" gives way to "Bodysnatchers", which, like much of In Rainbows, eschews verse/chorus/verse structure in favour of a gradual build. Structured around a sludgy riff, it skronks along noisily until about the two-minute mark, when the band veers left with a sudden acoustic interlude. By now, Radiohead are experts at tearing into the fabric of their own songs for added effect, and In Rainbows is awash in those moments.
The band's big-hearted resurrection of "Nude" follows. The subject of fervent speculation for more than a decade, its keening melodies and immutable prettiness had left it languishing behind Kid A's front door. Despite seeming ambivalent about the song even after resurrecting it for last year's tour, this album version finds Yorke wrenching as much sweetness out of it as he possibly can. Another fan favourite, "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi" brandishes new drums behind its drain-circling arpeggios, but sounds every bit as massive in crescendo as its live renditions suggested it might. "All I Need", meanwhile, begins as a skeletal rhythm section in cavernous swaths of glockenspiel, synths, pianos, and white noise. With its finger-picked acoustic guitars and syrupy strings, "Faust Arp" begs comparisons to some of the Beatles' sweetest two-minute interludes, while the stunning "Reckoner" takes care of any lingering doubt about Radiohead's softer frame of mind: Once a violent rocker worthy of its title, this version finds Yorke's slinky, elongated falsetto backed by frosty, clanging percussion and a meandering guitar line, onto which the band pile a chorus of backing harmonies, pianos, and-- again-- swooping strings. It may not be the most immediate track on the album, but over the course of several listens, it reveals itself to be among the most woozily beautiful things the band has ever recorded.
With its lethargic, chipped-at guitar chords, "House of Cards" is a slow, R.E.M.-shaped ballad pulled under by waves of reverbed feedback. While it's arguably the one weak link in the album's chain, it provides a perfect lead-in to the spry guitar workout of "Jigsaw Falling Into Place". Like "Bodysnatchers" and "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi" before it, "Jigsaw" begins briskly and builds into a breakneck conclusion, this time with Yorke upshifting from low to high register to supply a breathless closing rant.
Finally, the closer. Another fan favorite, Yorke's solo versions of "Videotape" suggested another "Pyramid Song" in the making. Given the spirit of In Rainbows, you'd be forgiven for assuming its studio counterpart might comprise some sort of epic finale, but to the disappointment of fans, it wasn't to be. Instead, we get a circling piano coda and a bassline that seems to promise a climax that never comes. "This is one for the good days/ And I have it all here on red, blue, green," Yorke sings. It's an affecting sentiment that conjures up images of the lead singer, now a father of two, home filming his kids. A rickety drum beat and shuddering percussions work against the melody, trying clumsily to throw it off, but Yorke sings against it: "You are my center when I spin away/ Out of control on videotape."
As the real life drums give way to a barely distinguishable electronic counterpart, Yorke trails off, his piano gently uncoils, and the song ends with a whimper. The whole thing is an extended metaphor, of course, and, this being Radiohead, it's heavy-handed in its way, but it's also a fitting close to such a human album. In the end, that which we feared came true: In Rainbows represents the sound of Radiohead coming back to earth. Luckily, as it turns out, that's nothing to be afraid of at all.
RAVEONETTES
LUST LUST LUST - Raveonettes"I fell out of Heaven to be with you in Hell" is an example of the dark, rather sinister lyrics that The Raveonettes provide on their third album Lust Lust Lust. When sung by the beautiful and soft vocals from Sune Rose Wagner and Sharen Foo, a fierce and effective juxtaposition leers from below the murky waters where the music lies.
The Raveonettes' effortless musical style reminds of Metric in their approach to music but not in a way that it appears copied or unoriginal; instead it is a signature style that is to be loved or to be hated with each song covered in a film of white noise.
The juxtaposing aspect of the music production extends into the songs on the album. Whilst opening track 'Aly, Walk with Me' is mellow and dark and foreboding enough to be a nineties Garbage production, Wagner and Foo manage to use this same formula to conjure love songs that have an upbeat approach that have a perhaps surprising toe-tapping quality. 'You Want the Candy' is something perhaps a darker version of The Pipettes would have written if they had spent their school years disliking their parents and purchasing Emily the Strange merchandise. Likewise, 'The Beat Dies' reveals "I'm in love" to provide a softness to the already varied album.
Each song is barely over three minutes and whilst certain songs such as 'Lust Lust Lust', the band’s first release from the album, leave you feeling that you could have continued listening, others, such as the murky and unsatisfied 'Expelled from Love' find you relieved that the CD has moved on.
Yet, it is an album who's schizophrenic nature makes it almost beautiful. Maybe it is the soft Emily Haines-esque vocals of the band or the blurred and confused sound that acts as a paradox to this, but the combination creates an almost three-dimensional sounding album that it is impossible not to submerge yourself within.
R.E.M.
ACCELERATE - R.E.M.R.E.M.'s last album, Around the Sun, stays on my shelf only for the sake of catalog completeness; it's been freed once or twice since 2004 to be dusted off and quickly reassessed: Did a band this important really release something so incomprehensibly dull and unrelentingly bored with itself? Well, they did. And Michael Stipe -- the one singing and wearing raccoon eye shadow lately -- even acknowledged the misstep, admitting that the group had lost focus, and that he, guitarist Peter Buck, and bassist Mike Mills "didn't talk… for a couple of records." The slow-moving, keyboard-heavy, adult-contemporary-leaning Sun felt like a sputtering roadside breakdown for a band that was running on fumes. But the critical and commercial shrugs that met the album seem to have had one overwhelmingly positive effect: They gave R.E.M. something to prove.
Nothing to do, then, but hit the gas and hope for the best, a method Accelerate -- R.E.M.'s 14th studio album -- establishes right there in the title. Whether inspired by their own stagnation, market forces, or producer Jacknife Lee, the decision to lift the rock restraining order worked wonders: Accelerate corrals 35 minutes of the fastest songs Stipe and Co. have written in decades, all performed with a sense of joyous purpose that clearly comes from a "Fuck it, let's just do this" attitude. They haven't sounded this surprised with themselves since 1998's Up, haven't made an album this consistent since 1992's Automatic for the People, and haven't redlined so engagingly since 1986's Lifes Rich Pageant, whose terrific "These Days" lives on in spirit here.
And though populated almost exclusively by snarling guitars and hell-bent drums, Accelerate doesn't suffer any whiffs of desperation like 1994's half-decent, glam-rock youth grab, Monster. Instead, here's a band rediscovering the shadings and strengths of rock'n'roll elementalism. Sure, album bookends "Living Well Is the Best Revenge" and "I'm Gonna DJ" share the same basic ingredients and roughly the same tempo, but the former looks lovingly at R.E.M.'s distant rockin' past, while the near-ecstatic latter ("Death is pretty final / I'm collecting vinyl / I'm gonna DJ at the end of the world!") offers conclusive proof they haven't lost their inspiration completely in recent years.
More than just velocity lifts Accelerate: It slows for the requisite Important Ballad ("Until the Day Is Done"), a political brooder more akin to "Drive" than "Everybody Hurts," and the terrific, mid-tempo "Hollow Man," with the most satisfying R.E.M. chorus in eons. Still, Accelerate will be rightfully championed as the defibrillator that shocked a once-great band back to its senses. However, R.E.M. lay no claim to being the biggest rock group on earth -- leave that empty title to their contemporary U2 -- but if they need an award, here's one that fits: Most Improved.
REVEREND AND THE MAKERS
THE STATE OF THINGS - Reverend And The MakersAn indie-techno blast combining sonic storm synths and foot stomping bludgeoning beats. At last Ladles and Gentlespoons, we present Reverend And The Makers.
It's a feisty uplifting record set to send perplexed skinny-tied kids into a ferocious swing across the country. The Reverend, Jon McClure, has waited for the correct moment amongst a busy local scene to unleash this menace of a debut album - binding his time as the Monkeys phenomena settled down.
Like most music from the Steel City these days, we can't escape the Arctic Monkeys link. Jon has previously been in two other bands, the first named Judan Suki along with Alex Turner. The second - 1984, is referred to in the famous Monkeys lyrics "dancing to electro-pop like a robot from 1984". But despite these strong connections, this album is evidence of an added independent dimension to the Sheffield sound.
It's dripping with potential anthems such as 'The State Of Things' and 'Heavyweight Champion Of The World'. Whilst 'The Machine' is one of many tunes that'll send you fidgeting like a futuristic automaton android to every beat. Performing live, Jon can't help himself as his lanky awkward posture shifts like a certain Peter Crouch.
Then there's 'Sex With The Ex' which nicely divides the album up with a slower, reflective track about the most difficult of situations. "Although you left him bitter/he still fancies you/although he's been round a bit since/no-one does it like you do." So poetic, so beautiful. Well not quite, but the crude cunning statement sums up the Reverends' craft of putting things in a way we can all relate.
The vocals of Jon's girlfriend, Laura Manuel, provide occasional balanced purity to the main mans harsh constructive verbal rants. This particularly applies to latest single 'He Said He Loved Me' with a shimmering duet telling the story of a heartbroken teenager who's been dumped by an older man. It works well, even if it's a bit Essex-girl in parts.
The most pleasing element of the album is that those earlier demos floating around the internet, have for once been well produced. Songs such as 'Bandits' now have an added edge with more strength, depth and substance to the original foundations.
As an updated take on the Specials' equal disgust and infatuation with urban life, it's impressive. "I am the Reverend/I'll tell you about the state of things." This is the word according to Jon.
RICE, DAMIEN
9 - Damien RiceDamien Rice is fast becoming the vanguard of the avant-garde: a Bladerunner-snazzy digital billboard beckoning toward a brave, new, post-emo future.
Look, you've heard of the non-denial denial, right? "I have no recollection of that." OK, good, because more recently, the non-apology apology has been sweeping the globe: "I will apologize to insert name here, if I am wrong."
And now Rice, a confessional singer/songwriter, alone in the whole world except for fellow avant-gardist, come (ahem) author O.J. Simpson, has pioneered the next communications vogue: The non-confession confession. Simpson's book, If I Did It, was scuttled by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. just days before its expected street date; Rice's sophomore album, 9, is already out and changes everything.
The confessional singer/songwriter's main charge has always been, tautology of tautologies, to confess. His tales of woe may be tragically real (Elliott Smith) or borne out of a self-mythologized folkie past (early Bob Dylan), but the broken-heart-on-bloodied-sleeve breed of performer exists to make you feel his pain, babe. Still, no professional fink has ever been so explicit as to begin a record with a song called "9 Crimes" - nor ever kept so fuzzy about what those crimes actually are. Yes, on 9, Rice makes a lot of mellow noise about being a liar, a cheat, and an all-around gloomy Gus, but his disclosures are usually too trite, his offenses too vague, ever to really ring true, and the songs' assembly-line construction subverts any emotional impact. It's as if Rice has conjured up every cliché from the genre's past, only to immolate them all in a tepid MOR bonfire. Far fucking out.
A somber duet with band member Lisa Hannigan, "9 Crimes" doesn't just conveniently explain the album's title. It also introduces Rice's bland template: First, intone a few faded metaphors so unrelentingly bleak they must be sincere; rotate through a few ghostly arpeggios, either on piano or acoustic guitar (every few songs, actually strum!); build from faltering Jeff Buckley whispers to cathartic Jeff Buckley caterwauls; let the strings swell, and...Congratulations, you're on satellite radio. Rice murmurs, "It's a small crime, and I got no excuse," then adds something about a loaded gun. First time I heard this was in a movie theater before Borat.
No bears in ice cream vans here. Rice mostly keeps this Lexus LS 400 in cruise control. Oh, occasionally he'll wax meta - from "You asked me to write you a pleasant song" to "What's the point of this song?" in just two tracks-- and sometimes he gets deep: "Nothing is lost/It is just frozen in frost." Mostly, though, he's unremittingly melancholy, making sure never to use the word "end" when "die" will do. "9 Crimes" has already been tapped for Grey's Anatomy, but the closest Rice comes to a future sleeper hit is the laid-back "Dogs", with an agrammatical, non-rhyming chorus about "the girl that does yoga/when we come over" and an overall sense of Dave Matthewsy lasciviousness. Whenever Rice risks truly touching us emotionally - say, when he's asking a former lover, "Do you brush your teeth before you kiss?" on "Accidental Babies" - he undercuts himself with go-nowhere melodies and formulaic arrangements.
There are a few times throughout 9 when Rice boldly ignores the fact that his chain-ready inoffensiveness is a major reason for his appeal. "I am lately horny," Rice bellows on the meandering "Elephant" after hissing like Thom Yorke at the end of an old "Creep" acoustic version. And that's only the start. With usual soft/loud dynamic, "Rootless Tree" drifts from middle-aged guitar harmonics (a dozing Keller Williams?) to adolescent alterna-angst: "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you," goes the lazy chorus, a funhouse-mirror obliteration of all that was affecting in Ani DiFranco's confessional singer/songwriter standard, "Untouchable Face". Rice assaults his coffeehouse milieu aurally, as well as lyrically: With its "my god!" squeals and sadistic, quasi-arty distortion, "Me, My Yoke, and I" is a break from the Rice mold-- and helped me finally identify with The Passion of the Christ. Forgive him, dudes, for he know not what he do.
Now, OK, you're saying, but didn't Rice actually do all this before on O, the award-winning 2002 debut that went platinum in Ireland and has soundtracked stateside TV dramas ever since? Not quite. Sure, O was a study in earnestness-by-numbers so unimaginative it could've been self-parody, but it did offer a few resolutely tuneful moments: ubiquitous first single "The Blower's Daughter", bedroom cello ember "Volcano", or the keening but catchy "Cannonball" and its adult-alternative remix. Like the Juice's If I Did It, Rice's 9 renders past transgressions merely hypothetical. This album promises nine crimes, but at 10 tracks, it's actually a bargain. Hints, allegations, and things left unsaid.
RILO KILEY
UNDER THE BLACKLIGHT - Rilo KileyIt’s an intraband breakup album, a public reading of private diaries in the tradition of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. It’s also a perils-of-L.A. postcard. In addition, it’s a cocky bid for mass popularity from a band that passed quickly through four different indie labels. That’s a whole lot of heritage and ambition to pack into 37 minutes.
Miraculously, the different aspects of Under the Blacklight only compliment one another. Creamy and precise, every coo and arpeggio blows through your ear buds like the ruffle of crisp bills; Mike Elizondo, the West Coast rap producer who bolsters the band’s guitar pop with big, confident beats, is like a location scout, moving the tawdry action from a Bel Air mansion to a Los Feliz bungalow. The warm smell of colitas rises up through the digital air.
And, crucially, the perspective is female: Jenny Lewis has wrenched control of the group from guitarist and ex-boyfriend Blake Sennett. “I never felt so wicked/As when I willed our love to die,” she sings in a celebration of singleness that verges on a taunt. With a soft, poised voice that favors bittersweet notes, she explores female power in different guises—a girl who’s shaking her “moneymaker” to a ’70s funk beat; a tank-top temptress frolicking, braless, in a club; a precocious teen with a “developing body” who is “down for almost anything.”
What she finds, of course, is danger. To Lewis, women are born into trouble—and escape by flirting, feigning submission or going home with men they don’t know. The songs are full of sex (as well as the lure of money, like any great L.A. album). But the only real delight comes from hurting someone: The bursting “Breakin’ Up” (cowritten by Lewis and Sennett) makes revenge feel like a great new dance.
Incessantly catchy and well-made, the CD swaps indie quirks for familiarity: The sexy “Smoke Detector” builds off a generic British Invasion guitar, and “The Moneymaker” snatches a melody from the Cars’ “Moving in Stereo.” This isn’t an art-house film; it’s a suspenseful popcorn flick: Lewis never says what happens to that restless 15-year-old, but you can tell it won’t end well.
RONSON, MARK
VERSION - Mark RonsonI'm sure Mark Ronson's a real talented DJ, a kickass producer, and a formidable music connoisseur, with or without the rock'n'roll silver spoon inherited from his step-daddy, Foreigner co-founder Mick Jones. Hell, even his block party of a debut, 2003's star-studded Here Comes the Fuzz, had its share of interesting musical ideas. However, it's hard to look at Version-- a guest artist-boosted showcase that comes on the heels of Ronson's production work for Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse-- as anything but a cash-grab. Not that cover albums can't be eclectic, but there's little-to-no coherence between the songs chosen here except for the fact that the artists who wrote them are UK chart mainstays.
While song selection seems suspect on Version, it's not the deal-breaker. Ronson is a phenomenal multi-instrumentalist, but someone's gotta cut him off at a certain number of horn and string sections. For example, hearing a moody, standoffish anthem like the Smiths' "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before" (its presence here a cheeky nod to critics who'd call this entire album superfluous) get dusted off and given the Pygmalion treatment smacks of indie blasphemy, the canned strings and Daniel Merriweather's schmaltzy croon clumsily converting Morrissey into a blaxploitation theme.
To Ronson's credit, what should be the most egregious track on the album, a cover of Radiohead's "Just", is actually a standout. Nicked from last year's abysmal Radiohead tribute album Exit Music: Songs With Radio Heads [review], the track finds Phantom Planet's Alex Greenwald adding a playful dose of white-boy funk, and is one of the few instances where Ronson's hip-hop proclivities come in handy. Still, slapping a brand new bag on these pasty-white-dude tunes more often bombs than not. Maxïmo Park's "Apply Some Pressure"-- re-interpreted here with help from MP singer Paul Smith-- loses its jagged post-punk edge amidst the lush horns and thin symphonic outro, and the Zutons' "Valerie" gets mauled by Amy Winehouse, bent and twisted until it sounds like a spare part of "Rehab".
What this all boils down to is that Ronson probably would've been better off remixing these songs than dolling them up with droves of big-name mercenaries and genre-fucking. Most of Version's tracks have little replay value, shaking your attention before you can say, "So that's what 'God Put a Smile Upon Your Face' would sound like played by a high school marching band." And of course, a handful of the originals just weren't that great to begin with. Maybe I'm giving Ronson more credit than he deserves, but the guy's too talented to smash square pegs into readymade round holes and abet the ongoing implosion of pop music as we know it.
RUMBLE STRIPS
GIRLS AND WEATHER - The Rumble StripsOK, anyone who has read anything about them, seen them live, glanced at a photo of them, walked past them in the street or heard more than a three-second snippet of their music, will know that The Rumble Strips really, really, reeeeeally sound like Dexys Midnight Runners. If you don’t know Dexys, they’re the band who did wedding reception staple ‘Come On Eileen’ and whose singer Kevin Rowland went on to perform in a tackle-revealing wedding dress at the 1999 Reading Festival. Yeah, sounds about as appealing as french kissing Pete Doherty after he’s had a toke on the ol’ crack pipe, but if you don’t own their street-urchin soul classic ‘Searching For The Young Soul Rebels’ go out and buy it tomorrow.
There are some who dismiss The Rumble Strips as a Dexys cover band. These are the same people who think you shouldn’t listen to The Libertines when there’s a perfectly good Jam greatest hits CD available. But the truth is, to follow Dexys with any success at all is as easy as beating Amy Winehouse in a sambuca-downing contest. There are few who could carry their brass-weighted soul into the 21st century without coming out looking like a prize bunch of turkeys. Step forward Strips singer Charles Waller. Blessed with a dagger-eyed intensity, a gift for melody, a collection of polo shirts to die for and a blue-eyed soul voice so richly raw it suggests he’s been gargling molten trumpets since birth.
It’s Waller’s voice – one that proved too powerful an entity for his former band, Vincent Vincent And The Villains – that stops The Rumble Strips from being mere Dexys copyists. Take ‘Alarm Clock’: a melted trumpet-fuelled rollock with a warble-pop chorus that blasts away your cobwebs with wind-tunnel force. ‘Girls And Boys In Love’ is the kind of sun-bolstered ditty that could be the only three enjoyable minutes of some Richard Curtis romcom (it’s actually being used in Simon Pegg flick Run, Fat Boy, Run) and ‘Oh Creole’ shows that Waller can do hungover brass soul too. Relative oldie ‘Motorcycle’, meanwhile, is pure Grease-style musical stupidity, seeing Waller envisaging his rickety old bike sprouting wings and morphing into a sky-soaring motorbike.It’s very Andrew Lloyd Webber: a description I also read in NME, so it must be true.
This cheesy, into-the-sunset fantasy is just another indication of Waller’s total detachment from the current grot-rock set, just as he’s detached from the cretins who brand him a Dexy’s photocopier. Tell you what: in a year’s time, if The Rumble Strips haven’t proved them all wrong, I’ll climb on the Reading festival stage in a tackle-revealing wedding dress and play the national anthem through a trombone.
SANTOGOLD
SANTOGOLD - Santogold"Me, I'm a creator / thrill is to make it up / the rules I break got me a place up on the radar." Those lyrics—from the M.I.A.-aping track "Creator," off of Santogold's self-titled debut—smack of wearisome indie-hop posturing. But when nestled amid songs that liberally pluck bits from new wave, indie rock, dub, post-punk, and a host of other influences, the boast rings true, and validates Santogold's next-big-thing status. Santogold (a.k.a. songwriter Santi White, who has worked as a hired gun for popsters Lily Allen and Ashlee Simpson) manages to weave together a strange amalgam of tracks that sound almost nothing alike, yet are unmistakably part of the same whole. Credit goes in part to her distinctive voice and ace production from collaborator John Hill, plus a sprinkling of hotshot knob-turners like Diplo and Switch, but Santogold's relentless disregard for genre boundaries in the service of a stellar pop song is the real glue that holds the album together. Though at times it threatens to become overbearing in its eclecticism, Santogold's solid lyricism and pop sensibility keep the album from disappearing up its own ass. Her concern lies more with party-starting than cred-boosting.
SCHOOL OF LANGUAGE
SEA FROM SHORE - School Of LanguageField Music's Tones of Town was a highlight of 2007, and the group's star seemed to be on the rise. But when the Sunderland band played the Empty Bottle in Chicago last spring, something didn't quite seem right. The music sounded perfectly fine, but the trio, flitting between instruments, didn't appear to be taking any real pleasure or satisfaction from it. At one point David Brewis even announced, apologetically, that the only way to get the "real" Field Music experience was via its meticulously composed recordings.
Granted, the group preceded the tour by announcing it would be followed by an extended hiatus, during which Field Music's three members would explore other projects, so as far as the crowd (clearly enjoying what Brewis considered somehow substandard) knew, Tones of Town was the last they'd hear from Field Music. The faithful needn't fret though, as Brewis' debut as School of Language, Sea From Shore, should satisfy fans of tightly wound pop. Recorded mostly solo, with some scattered help from a couple of fellow Mackems in the Futureheads, Sea From Shore is a lot like taking a peek at a talented someone's sketch book.
The disc begins with the intriguingly titled "Rockist Part 1" and "Rockist Part 2" (parts 3 and 4 bookend the disc), though neither overtly relates to any sort of loaded "rockist" (or anti-rockist) ideology. "Part 1" is built around a stereo loop of what sounds like Brewis enunciating a series of vowels, on top of which Brewis layers buoyant bass, simple drums and a charming little guitar pattern that both bolsters and plays against his wistful vocal melody. "Part 2" works almost like a dramatically discordant deconstruction of "Part 1".
"Disappointment '99" features Futurehead David Craig on vocals, and were the track not so willfully dirty and distorted, all of Craig's and Brewis' new-wave affectations would be right at the fore. "Poor Boy" similarly benefits from a considered anti-perfectionist streak, with Brewis subverting the sharp arrangement and catchy melody with an almost devil may care casualness.
Next, the initially acoustic rumination "Keep Your Water" finally downshifts a little until School of Language's pop-prog affectations again rear their head. "Marine Life" and "Ships" find some middle ground between XTC's Andy Partridge and a more pacific songwriter like Robert Wyatt, willfully weird but far from placid. Indeed, the twisted "This Is No Fun" belies its title with an utterly nuts arrangement, while the dueling pitter patter of percussion percolates as counterpart to the outer-reaches explorations of "Extended Holiday".
"Rockist Part 3 (Aposiopesis)"-- it means to break off mid-sentence-- brings back a variation of the pulsing vocal loop from "Part 1" and "Part 2," here invoked as a more traditional underpinning to a just slightly left of traditional art-rock track. "Rockist Part 4", on the other hand, recognizes that the quirky hooks of "Part 1" were too good to fully part with, working as both reprise and conceptual closer, right down to the drawn out guitar freak-out that ends the track and album.
Admittedly, for anyone wondering if School of Language rises above the level of side project, there's still the matter of that pesky "Field Music production" tag, which implies Brewis himself sees School of Language as somewhat peripheral. But the relatively quick turnaround between Tones of Town and Sea From Shore implies Brewis was serious about opening wide the creative tap and seeing what flows out. If everything he (or his once and future bandmates) releases stays at this level, that enigmatic Field Music hiatus might just stretch on a little longer.
SEA AND CAKE
EVERYBODY - The Sea And CakeI've never seen the Sea and Cake play, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did so with their backs to the crowd. Their albums are not unapproachable - most of the time, in fact, they're pretty and inviting. They have great ears for rhythm, borrowing from bossa nova and Afro-pop, and they've a charming vocalist in Sam Prekop. And yet they can come off as stuffy and cerebral - the kind of band categorized as "pop" by default, the way you'd use the word to describe Stereolab or their neighbors and contemporaries Tortoise. These qualities became even more prominent with the keyboards and electronic dalliances on albums beginning in 1997 with The Fawn up through 2003's One Bedroom. So I picture them on stage interpreting some fluttering theme over bongos and layers of analog keyboards, their brows furrowed over nailing a sound rather than playing a song.
Whether ethnic or electronic, whatever the Sea and Cake runs through their eccentric filter winds up sounding slightly "off," either from the space and ambiguity in their compositions. Yet even a more direct, backyard-BBQ-ready album like Everybody still works. In fact, it may fit the band's idiosyncrasies even better. In moving a little closer to the middle-of-the-road, they start exuding something long absent from the group: warmth. The band that once cultivated abstraction and aloofness now, as elder statesmen of Chicago post-rock, stuffs its liners with pictures of their hometown next to guitar tablatures spelling out the chords for their songs. The Sea and Cake want to be your friends, all of a sudden.
"Up on Crutches" quickly sets the tone with a sparkling, insistent strum, a typical rock pattern from the drums, and Prekop sounding breathlessly nonchalant while the rhythm builds. "Too Strong" has the typically effete melody you'd expect from the band, though it's far more immediate and has a stunning slow jangle of a chorus, deft and breathtaking in its quiet appeal. Not to make him self-conscious, but age suits Prekop well, as he creaks earnestly and sounds wizened and authoritative no matter what he's singing about. This is especially noticeable in "Middlenight", where he pines about a possible "return to better days" while pedal steel guitar warms the soles of listeners basking in its gorgeous mid-tempo strumming.
Everybody picks up the pace in more than one spot, however: "Crossing Line" is one of their best pop songs, hummable and slick with a buzzing single-note guitar tearing through Prekop's cheery "doot-doo-doo"' and simple requests ("All I need's a little smile"). There's some syncopation in "Exact to Me" that recalls their love for the bossa nova beat, though it's far too straightforward and sinewy to fit in with their earlier work. Likewise with the monotone pluck of "Lightning", with a rhythm so tricky it'd sound like a CD skipping if not for the calming consistency of Prekop's crooning.
It's a shame that adjectives like "pleasant" wind up sounding backhanded or inadequate; maybe "playful" is a better word for Everybody. That it still sounds mischievous and human through the band's studious chops and omnivorous listening habits is no small feat, as these qualities have eluded them for quite a while. It's been four years since their last album, and Chicago's post-rock heyday has past, but the Sea and Cake remain relevant simply by becoming more transparent. They're still in the business of being a pop band, and this might be their most direct pop record.
SHINS
WINCING THE NIGHT AWAY - ShinsWhile indie rock has embraced grander and more elaborate productions, the Shins have remained unlikely champions of uncertainty and understatement. Unlike many of their meteorically successful indie peers, the Shins don't want to change your life-- and that's a good thing, because the band's biggest strength is an uncanny gift for conjuring a deep, vivid, and palpable sense of the familiar. Many of the Shins' best songs evoke a feeling of comfort and closeness that's immediately recognizable but rarely experienced-- intimacy is the band's best weapon, amplifying the subtle ebbs and flows of their music so that the slightest injection of unease or melancholy hits with remarkable force.
On their third Sub Pop full-length, Wincing the Night Away, the Shins take a decisive but wobbly step out of their comfort zone, and in doing so sacrifice much of this musical/emotional proximity effect. While the band has taken a good deal of criticism for sounding "too average" or "boring," the ill-suited sonic punch of Wincing the Night Away throws the singular strengths of their previous work into stark relief. The almost-live sounding Chutes Too Narrow left plenty of room for singer James Mercer's excellent vocals to guide its songs both melodically and rhythmically. But on Wincing, too-loud drums and bass distract not only from the elegant movement of Mercer's melodies, but from the delicate harmonic tensions that underlie them.
That said, the first four tracks of Wincing are unerringly solid. Echoing the striking contrast of Chutes Too Narrow opener "Kissing the Lipless", Wincing's lead track, "Sleeping Lessons", builds from sparse, muffled arpeggios to full-on rock'n'roll. While slick and robust production doesn't flatter much of the record, it works well as a counterpoint to the song's quiet initial moments. "Australia" is a peppy rocker in the spirit of Chutes' best, elevated by a newfound confidence and expressive range in Mercer's voice. Single "Phantom Limb" is pure, lush pop, boasting a chorus that plays like the aural equivalent of that optical illusion where a staircase appears to ascend indefinitely.
With the exception of the excellent "Red Rabbits", the more noticeable aesthetic departures on Wincing don't fare as well. "Sea Legs", with its intrusive synthesized drum beat and lackluster arrangement, brings to mind that unfortunate Eve 6 song about putting your heart in a blender, while "Spilt Needles" comes off as sterile and overcalculated, despite its strong chorus. Still, the album finishes strong: "Girl Sailor" surpasses "Phantom Limb" in lyrics and overall structure, making it a likely contender for the album's second single, and "A Comet Appears" is beautifully orchestrated, if not terribly memorable, making it an appropriate closer for a record that often emphasizes texture over form.
There's a time-honored imperative to encourage bands for attempting to develop and expand, and the Shins could certainly take their music in many different directions with great success. But it's hard not to notice that the least adventurous tracks on Wincing the Night Away are generally the most rewarding. In many cases, the album's more experimental touches seem at odds with the natural elegance of Mercer's songwriting, making it hard to read the album as a shoddy blueprint of what a more "difficult" Shins record might sound like. Instead, Wincing the Night Away is a lovely and well-executed album and-- for the first time in the band's career-- nothing more.
SHOUT OUT LOUDS
OUR ILL WILLS - Shout Out LoudsLead singer Adam Olenius' Robert Smith-like anguished vocals mean the Cure's most streamlined pop album, 1985's The Head on the Door, is still as apt a reference point as it was for Shout Out Louds' prior album Howl Howl Gaff Gaff, although sharper hooks and emotionally richer songwriting ensure Our Ill Wills improves upon its predecessor.
Bjorn Yttling's (Peter Bjorn and John) cinematic production wouldn't be enough without a set of strong tunes. Our Ill Wills shakes with the pain of loves lost and unrequited. For all the bright synth-strings and acoustic guitar of excellent first single "Tonight I Have to Leave It", what matters most is the feeling Olenius is leaving behind: "I just want to be bothered with real love," he sighs. The album's second single, seven-minute "Impossible", finds Olenius wanting what he can't have, and not wanting nearly everything else. No amount of cheery woodblock percussion can mitigate that gnawing paradox. It's surely with some bitter irony that he imagines the now-unattainable object of his affection finding true love of her own: "I know it could happen to you," he concludes.
Olenius' sobbing vocals might grate if he spent the entire album whining about girls, so it's satisfying when the album explores other themes: a tragic accident on "Time Left for Love", tricks of memory on "Your Parents Livingroom", or calls to the police and vague worries about "when she will get her child" on "You Are Dreaming", with its indelible "don't come back to Stockholm" chorus. On "Normandie", Olenius can't escape his old flame's memory. Over tropical acoustic guitars on "South America", he gets stupidly jealous at the sudden thought she might fall for someone else "in the bright nightclub light"; it's an embarrassingly realistic male moment. Multi-instrumentalist Bebban Stenborg takes the lead for a female perspective on despair-drenched "Blue Headlights", her breathy vocals not undeserving of the inevitable comparisons to The Concrete's Bergsman.
If the songs can't all hold up to those of inspirations like the Cure, well, few can. "I haven't said too much, have I?/ There are things you should keep to yourself," Olenius frets, on a guitar-pop album full of what can sound like another person's aching secrets: a fellow traveler's pursuit of what might almost seem impossible, until it happens to you. On the strength of Our Ill Wills, Sweden looks poised to win a few more hearts, minds, and sensitive souls.
SILVERSUN PICKUPS
PIKUL - Silversun PickupsPikul frequently finds the band in a far more laid back mood than on Carnavas. Indeed rather than the fairly straight forward approach adopted for their debut album, Pikul is moody throughout and hints at a more experimental edge to the band than perhaps Carnavas let on.
Opening with Kissing Families, things are as you might expect from Silversun Pickups; it's not too far removed from Lazy Eye. That said, where Lazy Eye sounds almost perky, Kissing Families is verging on somnambulant. Brian Aubert's vocals drift in and out of consciousness before kicking in with some real grit for the last verse.
When it comes to dynamics Silversun Pickups are virtually faultless and on Kissing Families, mood shifts are executed with expert precision. The song's early sense of unease merely hints at violence, when it explodes with strangulated vocals right at the very end there is little to match it in terms of catharsis.
Much has been made of Aubert's vocal resemblance to Billy Corgan, and indeed the band's similarity to the early output of Smashing Pumpkins, but to simply discredit them as soundalikes would be doing them a grand disservice. A cursory listen to Pikul will hint at myriad influences, all of whom Silversun Pickups magnificently manage to adopt into their own sound. Booksmart Devil has hints of Slint about it while The Fuzz takes Kevin Shield's original blueprint for My Bloody Valentine and completely rewires it.
Pikul shows a band that is very much at their best when gazing avidly at their shoes. Carnavas may have provided a much more immediate hit in terms of production and arrangements, but this EP is a slow burning little gem that shows a band very much on top of their game. If Silversun Pickups can revisit some of the beautiful haunting sounds they explored on this EP, their next album will find them hitting the heights they so obviously deserve.
SMITH, ELLIOTT
NEW MOON – Elliott SmithBefore his untimely death in 2003 there were moments when Elliott Smith seriously looked like becoming the Neil Young of his generation. Nowadays it feels rather like he's been hard done by. Is it wrong to suspect that had he looked a bit more like Jeff Buckley and rather less like a particularly unhappy lumberjack things would be different?
Elliott Smith gave the impression of having become famous by mistake, that he was just too precious for this cruel world and the very titles of the songs here on New Moon add to this feeling. "Miss Misery" "Fear City," "See How Things Are Hard," and my particular favourite "Going Nowhere," come alarmingly close to being a parody of the sensitive singer songwriter. There are no 'hello sky, hello sunshine' songs here.
However if the titles are depressing the music definitely isn't. The vibe may be fragile and sensitive but the overall feeling is one of melancholy rather than misery, which is a whole different experience. His deceptively delicate voice hovers somewhere between Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel's and has a very real power which stays with you long after the songs are over.
However New Moon is a collection for people who are fans already. These songs may have been recorded during his peak years in the mid to late nineties but frankly the albums Either/Or and Xo, recorded at the same period, are far better and if you aren't aware of Smith's work start there. For the already initiated though, New Moon is a delight which can only add to the growing legend of a special talent.
SPOON
GA GA GA GA GA - SpoonPrior to the release of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, online buzz suggested Spoon's sixth record was a grower, a distinction also conferred upon the Austin band's two previous albums, each more experimental (and at times alienating) than its predecessor. That optimistic adjective-- which incorporates both the listener's failure to quickly grasp a record as well as a hope to eventually do so-- feels exceedingly appropriate for Spoon, who have cultivated an intense fan base while continuing to experiment (the frequent comparisons to Wilco are indeed apt in this case).
A large contingent of Spoon's following has come from Britt Daniel's continual knack for, as he sang on 1998's "Metal Detektor", making "the sound of getting kicked when you're down." If any song were to be the quintessential Spoon pop single, then, the radiant, Jon Brion-produced "The Underdog", a Cliff's Notes encapsulation of Spoon's earnest compassion for the fucked-over, is it. With a three-piece brass fanfare, "Underdog" is a battle cry against succumbing to mediocrity masquerading as a middle finger to the standard-bearers: The lyric "Get free from the middle man" could also read: "Get free from the middle, man." Likewise, the slinky "Don't You Evah" (a cover of an unreleased song by former tourmates the Natural History) affirms Spoon's trend toward emotional trusses for the fairer sex, recalling Gimme Fiction's "They Never Got You" and Kill the Moonlight's "Don't Let It Get You Down". A different directive occurs on opener "Don't Make Me a Target", however, which revisits the obscurantist personal politicizing that many thought marked Fiction's "My Mathematical Mind". With a few well-chosen phrases-- "Here come a man from the star...Beating his drum...Nuclear dicks with their dialect drawls," both victim and perpetrator become crystal clear.
Ga Ga travels past in a flash-- at 36 minutes, it returns to the brief runtime that Fiction well surpassed-- but leaves plenty of reasons to revisit. Daniel and drummer Jim Eno's tendencies toward studio-based devilry come full-flower here, each listen revealing craftsmen reveling in detail. What in lesser hands could be extra-textual gobbledygook instead feels the product of studio freestyling, something to which the murky mixing-board wizardry of Jamaican dub is an obvious precursor. Penultimate song "Finer Feelings" is one bit of proof, its wide-open guitars-- straight from Sandinista!-- augmented with a sampled toast from (Clash collaborator) Mikey Dread's "Industrial Spy". With the addition of echoed ambiance from a Brussels fair field recording, "Feelings" acquires the aura of a surreal Kingston sound system.
Earlier, "Evah"'s introduction dips into the self-referentiality the band flirted with on Fiction, featuring a diced-up, looped Daniel asking Eno to record his studio talkback. Two songs later, all manner of discordance enters and exits the reverb-heavy mix of the appropriately titled "Eddie's Ragga", which developed from a jam session with Eddie Robert of Daniel-produced Austinites I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness. Ga Ga's most intriguing sonic creation, however, is the song which takes the dub influence in the furthest direction: "The Ghost of You Lingers". A return to Moonlight's spooky sonic variegation, "Ghost"'s pounding, echoed piano feels like a merged memory of the jabbed guitar from "Small Stakes" with "Paper Tiger"'s moody expressionism. Daniel's unmistakable voice is a distant, gothic wail here, as he mourns his missing love with characteristic jargon: "We put on a clinic/ If you were here would you calm me down or settle the score."
Daniel's gift for non-mawkish romanticism results in both Ga Ga's best moments, and three of the best songs the band has yet create. Especially on Girls Can Tell, Spoon's always flirted with straight-up blue-eyed soul, and "You Got Yr Cherry Bomb" is their full-on take-off of Elvis Costello's Motown M.O. on Get Happy! (perhaps purposefully, then, the album's bonus disc is titled Get Nice!). Backed by an irresistible Holland-Dozier-Holland gospel-pop-stomp, "Cherry Bomb" re-imagines the heart/sleeve cliché as a vivid bicep tattoo, as Daniel implores his love to three-point-turn and chill out. Ga Ga's real bang happens at its close, however, with the one-two send-off of "Feelings" and "Black Like Me". The former, which ostensibly documents a Memphis-based isolation, features a handclap-accompanied chorus as energized and unremittingly hopeful as Daniel's ever been: "Sometimes I think that I'll find a love/ One that's gonna change my heart/ I'll find it in Commercial Appeal/ And then this heartache'll get chased away."
"Black"'s melodic melancholy-- backed by a weeping piano/guitar motif that recalls Let it Bleed-- is simply gorgeous. Has Daniel ever written a lyric more crushing in its confused simplicity than "I'm in need of someone to take care of me tonight"? Rather than attempt to relate with someone who's already taken leave, he splits, and so, apparently, does his mind. During the internalized call-and-response that follows, he appeals: "All the weird kids up front/ Tell me what you know you want." Thus, at the end of his emotional rope, he crosses the fourth wall and reveals the aching coda as a mutually lived performance.
With Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Spoon have once again found a gray area between the poles of pop accessibility and untested studio theorizing, modifying a formula that has grown to feel familiar even as it wanders, and refusing to square the circle while doing so. Through whatever process they use, the band has also managed to create yet another wonderfully singular indie rock record, unafraid of unfettered passion or self-sabotage, and which affirms a shrouded, hybrid style as unquestionably theirs. Perhaps it is fitting to refer to Ga Ga, and Spoon albums on the whole, as growers, then, but with a different definition: one that takes into account the bands continual, and continually rewarding, approach to creative maturation.
STARS OF TRACK AND FIELD
CENTURIES BEFORE LOVE AND WAR - Stars Of Track And FieldThis was one of the ‘Staff Picks’ in HMV in Singapore and I couldn't be more impressed.
Hailing from the soggy town of Portland, Oregon, SOTAF have come of age with an album that fuses the crystalline pop of the Postal Service with gritty texture and an honest emotional edge. Hype or no, these guys are worth checking out. This album is at times mellow, moody, surprising and beautiful – a veritable multifaceted record, perfect for the cold. Centuries doesn’t just stand up to repeat listens, in fact, like the best albums out there, it has grown richer with each listen. The songs grow on you like a spring blossom, and remain open, ever changing, ever deepening. I expect to still be enjoying the album this time next year and beyond. A true perennial.
With Centuries, SOTAF have added electronic textures to their broody, Byron-like sound. But unlike most bands adding beeps and bloops, they have also learned to let their tunes soar. From the first track of the album, "Centuries," to the last (and most intimate), "Fantastic," the guitar/vocal interplay on the album is epic in ways reminiscent of alternative stadium rock.
Listening to SOTAF is reminiscent of living in London as a student, when the rain would accumulate outside. From the window’s view, a moist city would take on a serene and slightly nostalgic aura - and inside, nothing but music to sooth the savage beast of revision. Perfect.
Highlights include the atmospheric "With You," which has a harmonized chorus unlike any other, and manages to be driving without every actually going very fast, probably due to the twinkly, rhythmic guitar that colors the background. Another strong track is "Real Time," where a moogish sound gives, somehow, a mellow vibe. "Birds, watching form the line/while your heart beats one thousand times." Then the song builds, and builds and builds...
I was unfamiliar with SOTAF prior to hearing some SXSW stuff (www.sxsw.com) and opting to take up the HMV tip, yet they remind me of so many lo-fi/easy listening bands around at the moment. But the big shocker is… Simon and Garfunkel. Yeah, that's right. The vocals reminded me a lot of classic S&G harmonies. If you like good songs, done well, then with SOTAF you are Homeward Bound. Hello Darkness, my new friend.
STEREOPHONICS
PULL THE PIN - StereophonicsThe Stereophonics' decade-long music career has been somewhat of a rollercoaster ride, going from being hailed as one of Britain's premier rock bands to be critically mauled for the acoustic flavour of 2001's "Just Enough Education to Perform" album. However, this turned out to be their biggest selling record and while 2005's "Language. Sex. Violence. Other?" was met with positive reviews; it didn't match up it turns of sales figures, just going to show how strange the music business is. Having previewed new material back in spring, this is their sixth studio release and was supported with a UK arena tour in November. The sound of a news report and wailing siren begins "Soldiers Make Good Targets" before a monstrous metal riff comes rolling in, swiftly followed Javier Weyler's pounding drums. A mid-paced number, it gets cranked up at the chorus and is aided by a twisted solo, all of which firmly announces the band's return. With a bouncier vibe is "Pass The Buck", destined to become a live favourite with its killer hook and featuring a big Kelly Jones rant. Lead single "It Means Nothing" drops the tempo for a ballad inspired by the London underground bombings, as the band take a philosophical look at what really matters in life. It is saved from being drippy by a crescendo of guitars, before the trio again up the tempo for the previously available download taster "Bank Holiday Monday". With shades of Oasis' "Bring It On Down", the frenetic pace and spiralling guitars has already seen it become a favourite with fans.
It is often claimed that Stereophonics' success meant that Kelly Jones was no longer able to draw inspiration from the 'small town life' that coloured much of their debut, "Word Gets Around". Perhaps for the first time since that era, he has penned a narrative number that is precise in detail and utterly engaging. "Daisy Lane" is the tender tale of a schoolboy who was stabbed for his mobile phone on the street on which Jones lives. The gentle acoustic backing gives his voice prominence on what is a standout moment of the record. The brooding "Stone" follows it up, lit by a chorus of epic proportions, before the mood is lightened by the upbeat and poppy tones of "My Friends". Describing how he'd like a "girl down on me in the theatre", "I Could Lose Ya" is a sleazy track of simple, choppy guitars that and the type of chorus that quickly gets in your mind. More fitting of Jones recent solo record, "Bright Red Star" simply features the vocalist and an acoustic guitar for a sweet ditty that proves a respite until the crunching distorted chords that introduce "Lady Luck". Darker in mood than previous tracks, the verses are rhythm based before the guitars kick in again for a mammoth chorus. "Crush" is a stomping track that should delight audiences as a pulsating sing-along and the album is ended with the climatic "Drowning", which wouldn't have felt out of place on the previous 'phonics record. Slow and patiently developed, it is a satisfying conclusion to the record and thankfully isn't overblown or overdrawn. It also provides balance to a collection of songs which sees the band take the best parts of their previous work and bring them together for a record that is consistently pleasing.
SUPER FURRY ANIMALS
HEY VENUS! - Super Furry AnimalsEight albums in, Super Furry Animals have been around long enough for reviews to start out by saying how long they've been around. When the Welsh psych-pop band first played the main stage at the UK's Reading Festival in 1996, the headliners were Black Grape, the Prodigy, and the Stone Roses in their catastrophic last performance, sans guitarist John Squire. Of those groups, only the Prodigy have put out new music in this millennium-- and even that was too much.
Wrongly pigeonholed at first as a Welsh Britpop band, the Super Furries have lived forever by comparison. They're still releasing albums at a steady clip while their erstwhile contemporaries have either fallen silent (Radiohead), gone on hiatus (Blur), turned to dogshit (Oasis), or gone on hiatus, turned to dogshit, and then reunited (the Verve). Including side projects, B-sides, and other extras, the SFA catalogue is sprawling but rewarding, topped only by Damon Albarn among UK artists from that earlier period (Jarvis Cocker isn't prolific enough). Not even devotees can hope to memorize every nuance. Some of the best bits are sung in Welsh!
Aside from the excellent singles compilation Songbook, which shows some of the band's breadth (if only some of their depth), the best place to start with the Super Furries has traditionally been their latest album. Hey Venus!, the band's worthwhile Rough Trade debut, doesn't quite measure up to that standard-- it has to contend with frontman Gruff Rhys' Pitchfork-recommended Candylion, which hit the U.S. in March. That record indulged Rhys' eccentricities within a basic, acoustic guitar-oriented setting; Hey Venus! broadens that instrumental palette for a set of a shiny (not necessarily happy) rock, pop, and country-rock songs that consolidate the band's pre-Love Kraft explorations. Broken Social Scene's David Newfeld is behind the album's clear-sounding production (as he was on the excellent EP by countryfolk Los Campesinos!), and the High Llamas' Sean O'Hagan again proves an immaculate string arranger.
First impressions of Hey Venus! may label it a retreat, but that isn't quite right. It's just that a group I've complimented for their sublime gimmickry focus more on songcraft here than stagecraft; as Rhys recently told Pitchfork, reports suggesting a "concept album" were greatly exaggerated. Spector-walled "Run-Away" does away with the previous album's "no more romantic comedies" brainstorm, to deviously swooning effect. The Zombies-esque orchestral pop of first single "Show Your Hand" and the falsetto-laden quiet storm of "The Gift That Keeps Giving" have more historical precedent than some SFA escapades, but they enchant even in such a broader context. Keyboardist Cian Ciarán might not bring as much of the techno influence he contributed to previous albums, except the electronic bleeps on explosively catchy "Into the Night" (which gives the album its title and features a Turkish electric saz) or punky "Neo Consumer". However, Ciaran's recent doowop obsession shows through on his majestic composition "Carbon Dating"-- almost on par with the still-bowling-me-over "Bowl Me Over", from Ciaran's Acid Casuals project.
The Furries can't only write beaming melodies, deck them out with sparkling instrumentation and harmonies, and not also have a little fun. Too many people seem to have wrongly assumed that because Love Kraft had gloomy cover art and slower songs it was dead serious. It wasn't, and neither is Hey Venus!. "Suckers!" lives up to its punctuation (a Welsh trend?) with anthemic acoustic guitar strums and fuzzed-out lead guitar fills like on Radiator's "Demons", plus hammer dulcimer and lyrics that give the almost-guiltily decadent arrangement the band's old Situationist bite: "Suckers playing stadiums, filling them to the rafters, singing power-ballad songs," goes this stadium-ready power ballad, but there's a sucker born every line. Guitarist Huw "Bunf" Bunford's "Battersea Odyssey" takes a whimsical, horn-fronted trip to inner city London. His ambulance-siren vocals on "Baby Ate My Eight Ball" help make up a track weird enough for any SFA album since 1996 debut Fuzzy Logic.
It's fair to say the songs lack the epic sweep of the last couple of albums, but there's still little about Hey Venus! to fault beyond the faint whiff of musical conservatism ("Hey, this almost reminds me of a niche-marketable Super Furry Animals!"). While the pun underlying quick-hit opener "Gateway Song" is dated, it remains relevant and lively: "It brings us up nicely to the harder stuff," Rhys brags. Finale "Let the Wolves Howl at the Moon" can't really add much to the Byrdsian twang SFA perfected on Rings Around the World's "Run! Christian, Run!", but its more compact, yearning lyrics also recall Belle and Sebastian's dazzling The Life Pursuit closer "Mornington Crescent".
Hey Venus! concludes on a disturbing note for an album by such a long-running band: "The end, it comes so soon," Rhys sings. On "Suckers!", though, he seems to clarify, "It's over, but we've just begun." Here's hoping for the latter. If the Super Furries can't keep coming along to baffle us a few times every couple of years, then the terrorists will have won. The headliners at this year's Reading and Leeds Festivals were Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Razorlight, so clearly, the Man don't give a f*ck.
SWITCHES
HEART TUNED TO D.E.A.D. - SwitchesIn a nutshell, jaunty, multi-influenced, retro, modern. Que? This the Switches' first album, and cheekily rips off the title from the Super Furry Animals' Bass Tuned to D.E.A.D., but as they say, imitation is often the sincerest form of flattery. The Surrey Uni grads have already had singles from the album in the charts - Drama Queen and Lay Down the Law - with the latter having been slightly polished since the single.
Whilst not a tribute or even a kitsch album, there is certainly a theme running through it that owes a lot to 90s Britpop and 70s glamrock, coupled with the usual more mellow, 'heartfelt' kind of tracks.
The band's influences, from 10cc, David Bowie, Muse, The Beach Boys, Supergrass, Beck, Super Furry Animals, Marc Bolan and more, means that the album offers a trainspotter notepad's worth of opportunities to tick off references throughout. From the glamrock in Coming Down, through to Testify, which sounds like Beck has crashed the studio during recording, each track seems to hark back to an earlier era. Yet while Message From Yuz could have been a smash hit in the 90s, overall the band steers clear of going down that whole Scissor Sisters or The Darkness route by keeping to a retro sound that is, as with Lay Down the Law, nevertheless a modern track.
Heart Tuned to D.E.A.D. has a good mix of the radio-play and indie disco friendly singles along with the more mellow numbers, so it's likely to garner some attention for the band in the coming months. If you think you can handle twelve musical trips down memory lane without cringing, you'll find an album heaving with good tunes and good times - it's worth it. A stylistically schizophrenic debut…
THRILLS
TEENAGER - The ThrillsLike barmen at your favourite Ibiza cocktail dive, The Thrills are back; familiar, comforting and with a couple of years' worth of new stories to tell. Conor's lovelorn croak is as adorable as ever, Daniel Ryan's guitars twangle dreamily, Kevin Horan's keyboards have finally been proved by DNA testing to be descended from the piano that Brian Wilson wrote 'California Girls' on, and there's still a banjo player hunkered around a bonfire in some distant corner of the studio. No alarms, no surprises - 'Teenager' is simply more wonderful, bittersweet laze-pop of a hue at which The Thrills have become grand masters. 'The Midnight Choir' adds backwards guitars and a classical harpsichord tint that's almost Meat Loafian, the barrelling pop aceness of 'This Year' seems to have hijacked Bob Dylan's touring harmonica truck and 'I'm So Sorry' couldn't be more 'Born To Run' if it got itself a motorbike and a job in a New Jersey steelworks.
Where The Thrills have moved on is lyrically. Debut album 'So Much For The City' was a musical Rough Guide to the coastal resorts of southern California and 'Let's Bottle Bohemia' was a stained sepia image of a forgotten urban Dublin; 'Teenager', as the title suggests, finds Conor lost in the reveries of his youth. It starts celebratory - jaunty pop janglers 'I Came All This Way' and single 'Nothing Changes Round Here' are full of "backseat fumblings" and lurid first-time confessions. But by the end of the record Conor's in far more mournful a mood, repeatedly sighing "I envy your youth" through the maudlin 'Should've Known Better' and yearning for lost teenage kicks in the torch song title track - "You remember being beautiful?/Regrets, regrets, regrets!". It smacks of glories faded and high times sorrowfully remembered, yet its mother album tells a different story, of a band striding confidently into countryfied maturity at the peak of their powers. And you know what? A little faith, a bit of luck and maybe a Keane support tour and this really could be The Thrills' year.
TOKYO POLICE CLUB
ELEPHANT SHELL - Tokyo Police ClubWhen the band first emerged in 2006 full of startlingly brief songs and an ace EP, it appeared a second act might have been tough for Tokyo Police Club. Luckily, the songs on "Elephant Shell" are a sensible progression from the Strokes-like hooks of earlier material, showing an increasing sophistication. As with before, the brilliance is in the brevity. Even on a 28-minute album, the band does manage to shift gears, such as on "The Harrowing Adventures Of?," with its strings, xylophone melody and lyrical hook of "two wrongs make him right." The hook-and-hand-clap-laden "Tessellate" and opener "Centennial" also thrill, but with an album this brief, it's hard not to walk away wanting more
Canadian yelpers Tokyo Police Club map out the crucial difference between cursory and terse on their debut full length, Elephant Shell. The whole shebang clocks in at several minutes shy of half an hour, and it might seem cheap if its brevity wasn't so full of wit. These songs are as complex as they are short, and they're riddled with well-conceived zigs and zags. The first six, in particular, whiz past as a paradoxically memorable blur of sharp guitar figures and precision-cut rhythms. The album's first half is so tight that it's difficult to parse; even after dozens of spins, every song sounds like a single. Actual singles "In a Cave" and "Tessellate" feature wry keening and densely knotted melodies, just like the songs at their shoulders; "Juno" distinguishes itself with a slower pace and some mordantly tense piano chords, but its effect is no more or less incisive.
Of course, excellence this uniform risks monotony. So, from a pacing perspective, "The Harrowing Adventures Of…," this song cycle's slow dance, sort of makes sense. Sort of. It's a chiming, contemplative number, embellished with a string section and possessed of a softness that's actually amplified by a stompy backbeat. It would have made for a perfectly pretty closer, but as an album centerpiece it's deceiving, since the party isn't actually over. "Nursery, Academy" and early single "Your English Is Good" return to the first half's cannily realized angularity with an energy that shouldn't seem half as abrupt as it does.
If that sounds like splitting hairs, it is. And you know what's also only slightly relevant? Tokyo Police Club's reliance on sounds and forms, namely the borderline hackneyed tropes of the 21st century's neat-freak take on post-punk, that can all be found elsewhere. Bands rarely combine ingredients this stale into something this fresh.
TWANG
LOVE IT WHEN I FEEL LIKE THIS – The TwangThe Brummy lads are a misunderstood band. Tagged as an outfit pitched somewhere between The Beano's Bash Street Kids and the cast of Scum, you can't help feeling that if they'd hailed from, say, Tunbridge Wells, nobody would have bothered sharing tales involving the misuse of samurai swords. Perhaps it's the irritating, unjust and oft-peddled myth that the working classes are incapable of being able to transgress the denomination of oik. Yeah, co-singer Martin Saunders may have only recently quit his job as a packer in Solihull's HP Sauce factory, and yes, Etheridge might not be Dostoevsky, but consider the lead-off single 'Wide Awake' and its refrain of "And the sun's gone down and I'd love it to rise/Lets me know that I've survived" - you'd be hard pushed to say that this is a band devoid of ambition, let alone soul.
And it's where the band play up their intelligence, their romantic streak - heck, their soppiness - that 'Love It When I Feel Like This' excels. Take the single 'Either Way', for example, it is one of the greatest love songs ever written. It sounds like the Streets remixing the Roses, and Etheridge's broad Brummie "I loov yowww" is one of the most aorta-swelling moments delivered within the context of a pop song.
Likewise, the magnificent 'Push The Ghosts' - a chest-swelling ode to friendship and unquenchable optimism - is equipped with a verse that's genuinely edgy, and a verse that is scrumptiously uplifting.
Yet, sadly, 'Love It When I Feel Like This' is a record as flawed as it is fabulous. It has to be said that there's at least three songs that are utter dogshit - 'Loosely Dancing' is essentially a frivolous, looped chorus tainted with the misjudged use of a parping harmonica; 'Cloudy Room' would be a bad song no matter how many twists and turns of cod reggae are tagged on the end; and 'The Neighbour' reaffirms the worst excesses of the band's faux thuggishness outlined previously. It's a song about beating up a nuisance neighbour. Coming from the man who pours his heart out on excellent jangly Smiths-styled ballad 'Two Lovers' (witness Etheridge's dewy vocal and experience your spine shake), well, it's pathetic.
Fundamentally, the problem is this: 'Love It...' is a record constructed by confused auteurs. It's a record not worth being called a cunt for, but certainly worth a rummage. The moments on this album, when they are true to themselves, are scrumptious - a collection of songs to believe in, and it's depressing that the crud that surrounds these moments suggests that, in the transition from bright new hopes to the band baring fruit before us, The Twang have not only lost much of what made them special, but an actual grasp on who they truly are. They may think playing the role of larging-it geezers will catapult them to the upper echelons of rock infamy, but no one is looking for thugs, just hugs.
VAMPIRE WEEKEND
VAMPIRE WEEKEND - Vampire WeekendIf there's anything the happy New York kids in this band have learned from listening to African music, it's the difference between "pop" and "rock": Vampire Weekend's debut album announces straight off that it's the former. The first sound on the first song, "Mansard Roof", comes from Rostam Batmanglij's keyboard, set to a perky, almost piping tone - the kind of sunny sound you'd hear in old west-African pop. Same goes for Ezra Koenig's guitar, which never takes up too much space; it's that clean, natural tone you'd get on a record from Senegal or South Africa. Chris Baio's bass pulses and slides and steps with light feet, and most of all there's Chris Tomson, who plays like a percussionist as often as he does a rock drummer, tapping out rhythms and counter-accents on a couple of drums in the back of the room. And yet they play it all like indie kids on a college lawn, because they're not hung up on Africa in the least - a lot of these songs work more like those on the Strokes' debut, Is This It?, if you scraped off all the scuzzy rock'n'roll signifiers, leaving behind nothing but clean-cut pop and preppy new wave, tucked-in shirts and English-lit courses.
This Afro/preppy/new-wave (*you heard it here first folks!) combination has a history - Brits like Orange Juice, Americans like Talking Heads. For now, though, it's one of the most deservedly buzzed-about things around: People have been chattering over Vampire Weekend ever since a CD-R demo of three of these songs started circulating last year.
The excitement isn't hard to fathom. People spend a lot of time poking around for the edgy new underground thing, convinced that plain old pop songs have been done to death. But Vampire Weekend come along like Belle & Sebastian and the Strokes each did, sounding refreshingly laidback and uncomplicated, and with simple set-ups that make good songs sound exceedingly easy. The result being not "this is mind-blowing," or "this is catchy," but moreover "I have listened to this, straight through, four times a day for the past month".
No surprise, then, that their first hit mp3 would be a song called "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa", which is sly, quiet, and casual in a way that blows away so many other bands who actively try to get your attention. Their label seems to have understood this effect, and so they've left these demos sounding as natural as they were: This release just fiddles with the mastering, switches out a few takes, in ways you wouldn't much notice, plays with the sequencing, relegates one song to a B-side, and adds a couple of great ones that you can nonetheless understand being omitted the first time.
Most of the credit will wind up going to Koenig, who's the star presence here. By the second song, "Oxford Comma", the band is ticking along on little touches of keyboard and the tap of a snare drum, and he's still keeping the empty space captivating: There's a little indie yelp to his voice, but mostly he's relaxed, conversational, and wry. The person who'll probably never get enough credit turns out to be Batmanglij, whose pat, classicist keyboard arpeggios lead the way through tempo shifts and transitions, occasionally locking in with some sprightly violin parts. It all comes off as simple, jaunty, and homespun, but there's a lot of precision lurking beneath - exactly what happens when you combine a music major and indie-pop.
Koenig is smart and lucky, in that he gets to play the preppy angle both ways: Like a guy who's read a lot of Cheever, he can summon up the atmosphere of kids whose parents use "summer" as a verb and give it all the hairy eyeball at the same time. "Oxford Comma" is spent picking on someone who brags too much about money: "Why would you lie about how much coal you have?/Why would you lie about something dumb like that?".
Of course, while Vampire Weekend have certainly benefited from our new music world of internet buzz, plenty of people have found reasons to hate Vampire Weekend from the first note, many of them having to do with their prep aesthetic and Ivy League educations - Oxford shirts, boat shoes, Columbia University. But it just so happens that we're in a moment where such things matter to people: As interest grows in clean-cut, clever indie-pop (We Are Scientists anyone?), plenty of folks would like to hear things get dirtier, riskier, less collegiate - and in a lot of corners of the indie landscape, they thankfully are. But here's another odd parallel with that first Strokes record: Vampire Weekend have the same knack for grabbing those haters and winning them over. Bring any baggage you want to this record, and it still returns nothing but warm, airy, low-gimmick pop, peppy, clever, and yes, unpretentious - four guys who listened to some Afro-pop records, picked up a few nice ideas, and then set about making one of the most refreshing and replayable indie records in recent years. And not one mention of holy water, garlic or crosses.
VIEW
HATS OFF TO THE BUSKERS – The ViewThey are a young, scrappy band enjoying swift success, but some would say they come too close to being a Libertines tribute band. True, the influences are there, but The View have grown into a sound of their own. It's as if grot'n'roll has been on an Albion-length recruitment march up the M6 and, two years later, wound up off its cakehole in a squat in Dundee.
Certainly 'Hats Off To The Buskers' takes the Doherty waster aesthetic and gives it a distinctly Caledonian spin, from the housing-scheme hoedown of 'Gran's For Tea' to the pig latin Rab C Nesbitt-speak of 'Wasted Little DJs' ("Astedwae ittlae ejaysdae"). On 'Wasteland', there's even the first ever recorded attempt at Scottish ska. So we're well within our rights to take one look at 'Hats Off...', see 'Whatever You Say I Am...' gone ned, type the words 'Dirty Kilty Things' and go back to sucking the rave juice out of our glowsticks, right? Well no actually.
Fittingly, for a record gatecrashing the urch-rock party near dawn, it opens with a raucous downer. 'Comin' Down' is a scabrous slice of Stooges stodge-rock more in tune with 22-20s, The Datsuns or er, Jet than their gypsydelic contemporaries such as Larrikin Love or The Holloways, only rescued from shameless retro-ism by Kyle's luscious Celtic yelp that you can imagine bellowing out a request for 12 fish suppers across a deserted tenement. But it's the glam-pop Cheeky Girl of 'Superstar Tradesman' where 'Hats Off...' really blasts off in a blaze of Undertones twangles and girlband handclaps. The tale of a young brickie swapping mortar board for fretboard and (sniff) Never Giving Up On His Dreams, it's this generation's 'Teenage Kicks' and The View's signature sentiment: "What would you do/If I asked you/To sail away with me and see some sights?" Kyle wails as only a working class Highlands teenager desperate for escape and adventure ever could. From here 'Hats Off...' freewheels for 25 minutes. 'Same Jeans' - the filthy/gorgeous stop-out - is a harmonica folk wonder, part-La's, part-Holloways, part-Babyshambles learning to play their instruments, part-Kings Of Leon going hog-bastard mental in a kebab shop ceilidh on deep-fried amphetamines. 'Don't Tell Me' and 'The Don' lollop along like Larrikin Love doing Chas & Dave; the Doherty-esque 'Skag Trendy' finds Kyle exploring Scottish junkie street life while his tonsils attempt to somersault out of his mouth; and the Kooksian 'Face For The Radio' (despite being about an ugly, Trainspotting-obsessed scrounger) lullabies us delightfully up to the rabble riot of 'Wasted Little DJs' - the brilliance of which you'll know unless you've been unconscious under a set of decks since last July. If there is any downside it’s that, bar the sweet, jazzy croon of 'Claudia', 'Hats Off...' descends into innocuous filler. 'Dance Into The Night' is bog-standard jig-pop and the ploddy 'Street Lights' could have dropped off any of the last three Oasis albums
All comparisons aside, one thing that’s very much their own, is being banned from every Travelodge in the UK, after apparently causing £7000 worth of damage to the Liverpool branch after a Primal Scream support slot at the Liverpool Academy!
VON SUDENFED
TROMATIC REFLEXXIONS - Von SudenfedIt comes as something of a surprise to know that Mouse on Mars and Smith apparently found the "Wipe That Sound" 12-inch collaboration in 2004 inspiring enough to record an entire album together. Tromatic Reflexxions, their (first?) full-length, reflects the general tenor of that original collaboration, even featuring one of the "Wipe That Sound" remixes in a slightly different form, and retitled "That Sound Wiped". Somehow, even though "That Sound Wiped" sounds just OK, the ideas presented actually gain some cumulative force as they're hammered at again and again over 48 minutes. In this way, the record operates something like a Fall album, wearing you down with its relentless energy.
Some have noted that Von Südenfed occasionally sounds like Smith is knocking back at the early LCD Soundsystem singles, on which he'd been such a clear influence, and opening track "Can't Get Enough" is probably the reason for the comparison. St. Werner and Toma have crafted a crunchy, bouncy beat with a bassline not terribly far from "Losing My Edge", and of course, Smith carries on like the scenester-baiting O.G. that he is. It's a solid kickoff that also lays out the project's tight parameters: Its grooves are harsh and noisy, often stuttering about in strange ways, and they strike a strong contrast to the accessible pop tendencies of Mouse on Mars' clubbier recent material. Meanwhile, Smith's voice is slathered in reverb, EQ'd to give it midrange-only bite, and occasionally chopped into bits and inserted where its abrasion can be best felt - the sonic equivalent of a pebble in a shoe.
The first eight songs stick closely to this template with slight variations, like a catchy chorus hook ("The Rhinohead") or a ridiculously broken beat that seems to bypass your hearing entirely and head straight for the fragile equilibrium maintained by your inner ear ("Serious Brainskin"). It's a weird stretch of music, sometimes exciting, but also oddly monotonous - especially considering the tightly packed and maximal approach to sound - and ultimately a little draining.
They finally decide to mix things up a bit during the album's last quarter. "Chicken Yiamas" begins with acoustic guitars playing some mutant blues. Smith says something about a yardbird and how he has two bones, but there must be something about those drumsticks because he ululates wildly, sounding more energized than at any other moment on the record. "Jbak Lois Lane" is mostly just a goof, a field recording dominated by a lawnmower as Smith speaks to someone only partly coherently in the middle distance. This leads to a bubbling tune with a vaguely West African guitar line and plenty of slide. Smith sounds like he's having a lot of fun by now, and his rhythmic feel is completely on as he negotiates the groove with strategically elongated vowels. How did we get here? What does this all add up to? Hard to say. Tromatic Reflexxions sounds like three guys having a great time ignoring whoever might be asking these questions. Smith is completely hatstand, but it doesn't matter to him.
VOXTROT
VOXTROT - VoxtrotFor the last few years, fans of Austin, TX indie band Voxtrot have been bracing for disappointment. On a series of mini-CDs and vinyl singles the band revealed a knack for fervent little masterpieces, as well as a debt to a string of British forebears (comparisons to Belle & Sebastian, Housemartins or Wedding Present are the most often). Each release raised the stakes, all but ensuring that Voxtrot’s debut album would be a letdown.
Maybe it all paid off because Voxtrot’s self-titled debut album is marvelous: a collection of 11 tightly coiled songs, loud and fast and sweet. Mr. Srivastava is an unapologetic overwriter, cramming stanzas full of details and songs full of stanzas. In “Ghost,” he dashes through 12 quatrains, ricocheting from a plainspoken confession (“I don’t ever want to be alone like this”) to a cryptic vow (“I have no choice but to be vicious on my feet/I never sleep, I never eat”).
The band sounds pretty vicious, too, in a wimpy sort of way. It’s bigger and louder than before; agitated strumming still pushes the songs forward, but now strings and horns add bursts of harmony and noise. And Mr. Srivastava never stops wriggling, as if that were the only way to keep pressure and expectation at bay. In “Firecracker,” even the catchy chorus becomes a contortion: “Oh, did you turn your back on me?/Or did. I. Turn. My. Self./Oh, against myself, oh?” One fears — well, hopes — that Mr. Srivastava is already tying himself in knots, trying to figure out how on earth his band will top this.
WAINWRIGHT, RUFUS
POSES - Rufus WainwrightRufus Wainwright has quite the life. After he cut his first demo with producer Pierre Marchand, his father, Canadian folk giant Loudon Wainwright III, passed it on to legendary arranger Van Dyke Parks, who in turn saw that it found its way to Dreamworks executive Lenny Waronker. With a simple glance at the Dreamworks logo on the back of Poses, I trust you can connect the dots for yourself. If only it could be that easy for everyone, right?
No, wait. I forgot to mention that Rufus Wainwright deserves it. On his 1998 self-titled debut, Wainwright managed to pull together myriad strands and meld them into a grand, cohesive vision. And now, with Poses, he takes that vision and refines it, resulting in an epic album that speaks with grand gestures and a refined eloquence rare in young songwriters.
Of course, it never hurts to have a killer cast of collaborators to help you achieve your vision, and Wainwright has certainly assembled one for this record. Drummer Jim Keltner (Elvis Costello, Ry Cooder) returns on the traps, trading off spots with Victor Indrizzo (Chris Cornell, Redd Kross). Paul Weller cohort Pete Wilson mans the bass, and Dennis Farias (Burt Bacharach) provides colorful trumpet accents. Propellerhead Alex Gifford, Ethan Johns (Ryan Adams, Robyn Hitchcock), and Damian LeGassick (Blur) combine for production that veers effortlessly from the dark strings of "Evil Angel" to the beat-infused "Tower of Learning," and widely across a lot of terrain in between.
Poses opens and closes with the Tin Pan Alley tribute "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk," recalling some of the Divine Comedy's more playful moments with its ode to subtle addictions and the way our compulsions rule our lives ("If I should buy jellybeans/ I have to eat them all in just one sitting"). In between, we get everything from a Ouija board session with the ghost of Jeff Buckley ("The Consort") to the faithful and endearing cover of Loudon's classic "One Man Guy" that proves Rufus has at least a touch of dad's folk roots in him.
The album's title track stands as one of Wainwright's finest songs, with an aching melody and Spartan piano backing. It also illustrates how far his voice has come since his debut. He's become far more expressive in the last few years and his voice is a bit less of an acquired taste than it used to be. The funky "Shadows" is coated in thickly layered vocal harmonies that betray a definite debt to vocal jazz, although the swelling strings might sound a little more at home on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. Still, it's pretty fantastic stuff, and Rufus takes pains to breathe life into his Frankensteins, never letting them degenerate into limp genre exercises.
"Tower of Learning" is more impressive still, opening wide up in the second verse over programmed beats in an arrangement that looms over the rest of the album. Barring the reprise of "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk," Poses is closed on a somber note with the beautifully simple "In a Graveyard," a soulful reflection on moribund themes that momentarily leaves the oboes and strings at the door for a direct heart-to-heart with the listener.
It's always refreshing to see a recording this singular find its way out the door of a major label, and it's heartening to know that Wainwright probably has a secure home at Dreamworks. With Poses, he proves that he's swinging for the big leagues, and that he has every right to be there.
WEST, KANYE
GRADUATION - Kanye WestFor all the pageantry of the 50 Cent vs Kanye media hype, the most substantial takeaway from Kanye's new album is the realization that he might actually deserve the legendary status he constantly ascribes to himself. Though it doesn't quite match College Dropout or Late Registration in pleasure-center overload, West's third album in four years is both his most consistent and most enterprising yet. It also caps off an incredible (maybe even unprecedented) run: In terms of consistency, prolificness, and general all-around ability, it's hard to find anyone in mainstream rap who can touch what he's achieved within the same timeframe.
Graduation finds him settling into the pocket; instead of looking inside for answers, he's looking out to the world. When he raps "I shop so much I can speak Italian" on "Champion", it's obvious he's holding up worldliness as a point of pride. His production choices reinforce that belief: Here, Kanye splices his well-articulated production style with a brand new set of influences - most of them European. What he ends up with is a record that splits the difference between two distinctive styles: his familiar strings and brass, helium vocal samples, and warm soul samples on one side; corroded rave stabs, vinegary synth patches, and weirdly modulated electronic noises on the other.
While Graduation is far from the electro-house record some fans predicted when the Daft Punk-sampling "Stronger" first leaked, Kanye's interest in French house and rave extend beyond that one track. The stunning "I Wonder" combines a gentlemanly, piano-led sample (courtesy of 70s folk/jazz artist Labi Siffre) with a frizzy synth lead and alien-sounding keys, only to drown it all out with a massive swoop of strings; the weirdly dystopian club track "Drunk and Hot Girls" lurches along at a snail's pace, mixing Can's "Sing Swan Song" with a blend of gypsy music and detuned electronics for maximum queasiness; and the string-led "Flashing Lights" marries a Bond-worthy coda to staccato sounds and cut-up vocal samples. Where lesser producers have tried to bridge this gap only to wind up with beats that sound like bad mashups, West and co-producer DJ Toomp (T.I., "What You Know") make the juxapositions feel utterly natural. Combined with some other familiar source material ("Champion", for example, nicks from Steely Dan), that undercurrent of experimentation puts Kanye's talents to good use.
And that's barely scratching the surface. Aside from the patchy "Barry Bonds" (on which an inspired West confounds the odds by drastically outsmarting an uncharacteristically lazy Lil Wayne on the mic), nearly everything here feels tight and inventive. The aforementioned "I Wonder" and "Flashing Lights" are immediate highlights, as is the old-school gospel rave-up of "The Glory" and future smash "Good Life", which features T-Pain pitting his autotuned hooks against a bed of summery, squealing synths. Previous singles "Can't Tell Me Nothing" and "Stronger" somehow take on new life in context of the record, and even the Chris Martin-aided "Homecoming" feels like it hits the right notes.
Lyrically, West is magnanimous, corny, self-aggrandizing, and likeable in the all the usual ways. The difference here is that he's dialed down his inner conflict. The neurotic inner monologues of his most engaging verses are virtually absent here. If there's one criticism to be made of Graduation, it's that in striving for universality, he's sacrificed a more personal dimension of himself. The only time we even really get close to the mental hand-wringing of his early albums is on the closing "Big Brother", where he details his lifelong admiration for Jay-Z and hints at the post-Dropout turbulence between the two, before riffing on his own chorus to conclude: "My big brother was Big's brother/So here's a few words from ya kid brother/If you admire somebody you should go head and tell 'em/People never get the flowers while they can still smell 'em".
Of course, West's true genius has always come out in his production work, and hearing him find natural ways of fitting these disparate elements together is worth the increased number of Louis Vee brags. While it might not be as substantial a record as we're used to hearing from him, it is his greatest leap forward, and further proof that few are as skilled at tracing out the complicated contours of pride, success and ambition as he is.
WHITE STRIPES
ICKY THUMP – White StripesThe title is Northern, the songs are Scottish, the cover is Cockney... the result is incredible.
That much, of course, is evident from the title track, which by now you're surely familiar with? Prefixed by an ominous synthesizer march that sounds as if it's being played by a man with stumps instead of hands, 'Icky Thump' is, from the off, a downright weird song. Formed from a stream-of-consciousness verse about hangovers, redheaded señoritas and white America ("Nothing better to do?/Why don't you kick yourself out?/You're an immigrant too") clumsily welded onto a Jimmy Page riff of leviathan proportion - which appears to have no idea what it's doing or why it's there - it's not the most obvious single you'll ever hear, but it gradually wins you round, to the point where you'll find yourself actually looking forward to the bit that sounds like a Dalek committing suicide, instead of having to pop two Valium to cope with the insanity of it all.
Much of what follows is like this - and we haven't even started on the backwards bagpipes yet. But 'Icky Thump''s little idiosyncracies never get in the way of the actual songs, which, predictably enough, are brilliant. 'You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)' is a case in point, showcasing White's peculiar knack of writing songs so instantly and maddeningly familiar, you have to check twice to make sure someone didn't already beat him to it. A plea from Jack to a female friend to get out of a failing relationship, declaring that "Until you see that you deserve better/I'm gonna lay right in to you", it's unabashedly commercial country rock, powered by almighty stabs of Hammond organ and a chorus you'll learn word-for-word before you even get there. You'll understand when you hear it.
Then there's '300 MPH Torrential Outpour Blues', which starts off quietly and meditatively with Jack "getting hard on myself/In my easy chair", and ruminating how "I'm breaking my teeth off/Trying to bite my lip/There's all kinds of redheaded women/That I ain't supposed to kiss" over a taut, folky guitar riff, before the distortion pedal makes its appearance around the two-and-a-half-minute mark, and everything goes apeshit. From here, things get... well, interesting. 'Conquest', an old and largely forgotten song by the dead and largely forgotten Corky Robbins (it was briefly popularised in the '50s by country singer Patti Page), is re-imagined as a furious heavy metal flamenco duel, all screaming mariachi horns, and hollering, Tarzan-esque calls of "COAANQUEEST!". It's certifiable, but it's also pretty effing amazing, especially when Meg starts the galloping tribal chase that drives the verse's tale of a serial seducer having the tables turned on him. 'Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn' meanwhile, is Jack's love letter to his ancestral Scottish homeland. Amid a haze of bagpipes (not actually as annoying as you might think), handclaps and li-de-li'ing, he plucks a lovelorn lament to the thistle from his mandolin. It's an oddity, but it's one that sucks you in before morphing into 'St Andrew (This Battle Is In The Air)', a song which is surely a contender for the weirdest thing The White Stripes have ever recorded. Against a background of psychedelic bagpipes, Meg's frantic, spoken-word oration - "I'm not in my home/Where are the angels?/St Andrew, I've been true/The children are crying" - is a Celtic mindfuck reminiscent of The Velvet Underground's 'Heroin' being played backwards by a pipe band. 'Rag And Bone' is the best of the (none too shabby) following bunch, a darkly comical ditty that recasts Jack and Meg as wandering rag-and-bone collectors, based around a relentless blues riff and the pair's back-and-forth bonhomie. The wild-eyed, primordial 'Catch Hell Blues' isn't far behind and 'Little Cream Soda' is no slouch, either.
'Icky Thump' is brilliant, there's no way around that. We've come to expect nothing less from The White Stripes, but it still sends a jolt down the spine when you hear them at the very apex of their abilities. Some might consider this record a little too eclectic, zipping as it does between genres and styles like a red-and-white magpie, but it'll take a monumental effort by any of the new bands on the scene to knock out something as good as this when they’ve reached their sixth album and are stumped for ideas.
WOMBATS
A GUIDE TO LOVE, LOSS AND DESPERATION - The WombatsWhat a very… serious musical age we live in today. Back in the day, The Beatles used to get away with structuring choruses no more complicated than repeating the word “yeah” over and over, or extolling the virtues of grasping a girl’s hand over three glorious pop-filled minutes. They were rewarded with worldwide adulation and the unchallenged consensus that they were amazing – not simply four men who could write a sweet tune about quite fancying someone.
Fast-forward to your average indie club circa 2007 and our staple booty-wigglers seem rather more po-faced than the beloved perma-grinning Scousers originally intended pop music to be. Razorlight, Hard-Fi, The Killers – these are the chief churners of our dancefloor hits and, Jesus, where’s the fun? You’ve drunkenly shuffled to ‘Cash Machine’ but can you honestly spray Stella joyously as Richard Archer spews his ditch-water social commentary about the struggles of living on the Staines breadline? Can you manically groove to ‘America’ while Borrell’s godlier-than-thou global observations retch from his gob? Do you really think Brandon Flowers – a man who sports the kind of moustache only usually spied in the pages of The Chap magazine without a whisker of irony – celebrated recording ‘Mr Brightside’ by chugging back a can of beer, loosening his contraceptive neck tie and moonwalking to the bar for a refill?
If you think this intro is some kind of laboured drum-roll to justify the fact that The Wombats make lobotomy rock about as serious and considered as Jade Goody’s post-Celebrity Big Brother trip to India, you’re wrong. The fact that their frenetic, thumping indie package appears to be gurningly stupid and painted with the kind of lyrics normally found on the inside covers of GCSE notebooks is both a blessing and a curse for the Liverpool-based trio.
First off, it totally ruins what is potentially their best song, ‘Kill The Director’. Full of exhilarating punk-funk derived from Dan ‘The Rat’ Haggis’ octopus-limbed drumming, a chest-burst chorus and plenty of singalong “whoo-oo, whoo-oo”s, the song should be an absolute treat. However, its chorus – “If this is a rom-com, kill the director” with “This is no! Bridget Jones!” repeated to infinity – ensures feet are kept from dancing by the fact that toes are too curled from the cringeworthy lyrics to allow any kind of movement.
‘Moving To New York’, however, is where they get the balance exactly right. It’s a big, dumb, unashamed dancefloor snarer with brush-past-your-ears lyrics about, you guessed it, moving to New York. Unscrew your forehead, check your brain at the cloakroom and there’s serious fun to be had with this one, as many of you can testify first-hand, having witnessed its excellence on their recent tour with The Enemy and Lethal Bizzle.
However, we’re in danger of painting The Wombats as vacuum-headed, if brilliantly fun, lunk-rockers, with nothing more to offer. And, while you won’t catch them posting cryptic codes on their website for fans to decipher just yet, this is a bit unfair. While ‘Kill The Director’ might come across as moronically wasteful, elsewhere there’s a knowing wink to the naffness of it all. In abstraction, ‘Let’s Dance To Joy Division’ seems to be born of shrug-it-off quirkiness. But the order to “celebrate the irony” of writing a song about the morbid pulse-punk forefathers that’s as uplifting as a lunchbox full of Prozac shows enough in-on-the-joke awareness to allow you to enjoy it for what it is: a cracking bluster of a rock song neither weighted by Borrell’s worthiness or Peñate-like mundanity. Elsewhere, the platformed “whoo-oohs” wrapping ‘Lost In The Post’, as well as ‘Kill The Director’ and ‘Party In A Forest (Where’s Laura?)’, threaten to develop into a trademark Wombat sound as distinctive and crowd-pleasing as the Kaiser Chiefs’ “Whoooooooaaaaaah!” A good thing? Damn right!
It’s not all frantic “whoo”-rock mind. Opener ‘Tales Of Girls, Boys And Marsupials’ proves that the band possess ambition beyond the desire to soundtrack your beer-swilling. A screwy a cappella Housemartins-esque hand-clapper, it shows that a) the band really can’t sing and b) they really don’t care. It’s as cuddly as their stuffed Wombat mascot Cherub and great, great fun.
So, there’s more to The Wombats than just knuckle-headed indie-by-numbers. By total accident they seem to have stumbled upon the perfect formula for the indie-rock disco anthem, and for this they should be lauded. We suggest you enjoy The Wombats – because they are sure as hell going to be around for a while yet.
YACHT
I BELIEVE IN YOU, YOUR MAGIC IS REAL - YachtIt's hard to believe in this age of exhaustive and exhausting music coverage, but there are still times when albums that could someday be hugely important slip through the cracks and all too quickly out of people's minds. The most glaring example of this injustice I can think of is Max Tundra's 2002 record Mastered by Guy at the Exchange, an album me and a small pocket of the Pitchfork hivemind are viciously in support of, even half a decade later. An absurdly inventive and manic piece of computerized composition, MBGATE seemed to be fanfare for the future of pop music, or at least the indie-prefixed strain thereof, where modern technology met playfully skewed catchiness. Yet the sound of lap-pop veered instead towards recapitulating synth-pop tropes and rutting in melancholy, and nobody seemed to notice Max Tundra's valiant efforts.
Jona Bechtolt, who records as all-caps YACHT when he's not half of the Blow, appears to have noticed, even if it took him until his third recording under the moniker to let it show. YACHT's first two albums, MEGA and Super Warren MMIV, were both middling endeavors of laptop navel-gazing, the kind of home-beat experimentation that has glutted the market for much of the mid-aughts. But on I Believe in You, Your Magic Is Real, Bechtolt appears to have remembered the MBGATE lesson that home computer music and poppy fun need not be mutually exclusive entities, freeing himself to produce an album that strives for, and fleetingly reaches, the unpredictable yet lovable heights of its ancestor.
Bechtolt isn't totally unfamiliar with the concept of injecting some computer embellishment into indie-ish songwriting, having performed similar duties as IT Guy for the Blow. But I Believe in You is another step beyond merely adding programming to Khaela Maricich's relatively straightforward tunes, occupying the same beat-prankster territory as Tundra while not drifting too far into the abrasiveness of breakcore. "We're Always Waiting" is a prime example, first toying with an 8-bit version of the "Time Is Tight" vamp, pausing mid-song for a tongue-in-cheek materialist cheerleader chant, and climaxing with a proggy astral synth being henpecked by ringtones and presets. "It's Coming to Get You" runs a similar path with a primal-punk drum foundation and cutesy woah-oh-oh backing vocals, while "See a Penny (Pick It Up)" puts Jamie Lidell-style falsetto faux-soul singing and a chugging guitar riff against a musical backdrop that changes every 30 seconds, finally exploding in a skittering-beat orgy.
All these experiments could easily sink under heavy pretensions (as one might argue the instrumental "If Music Could Cure All That Ails You" does), but Bechtolt lightens his ballast with a sense of humor throughout. It doesn't always work; introducing fellow laptoppers Eats Tapes for a "solo" halfway through "It's All the Same Price" is pretty funny, the chopped-and-screwed outro to "Drawing in the Dark" not so much. Occasionally Bechtolt's jokes don't just fizzle, they cross the line into outright annoyance, like the meta-aware "The Magic Beat" (basically Bechtolt singing about how awesome he is over a loop too busy to claim perfection) or the Kanye-esque shout-out speech of "Your Magic Is Real". But even the missteps are indicative of a playfulness lacking on previous YACHT efforts, a charismatic goofiness that pervades the music as well as the lyrics and interjections.
While I Believe in You, Your Magic Is Real doesn't approach the future-thrill that MBGATE gave a small portion of us five years back, it does at least thrive in its shadow, bursting with unique and catchy lap-pop with the best of intentions. Even its merely above-average success rate draws renewed attention to the promise of a true indie-pop/electronic hybrid, presenting both a rock-based sound with deemphasized guitar and fewer tired post-punk influences, and an electronic adventurism that doesn't come too unmoored from conventional song structure while retaining a playful unpredictability. YACHT may not be the innovative and distinctive force that Max Tundra proved himself to be, but as a willing disciple, he's wise enough to harvest in Tundra's fertile territory.
YEASAYER
ALL HOUR CYMBALS - YeasayerOver the past few years, a few of the most talked-about indie bands have been those making music with an ahistorical sense of mythic drama. TV on the Radio, Celebration, Grizzly Bear, and Animal Collective, among others, have been variously and inventively appropriating rock'n'roll's roots in ritualistic sounds, working toward individual aesthetics that merge mutual appreciations for surface and tradition. By and large, they draw upon ideas of the pre-modern (multi-part harmonies and chants drawn from religious rites, a fixation on the unseen power of the natural world), and express them through ultra-modern forms (synthesizers, electronic textures, heavy echo).
Perhaps unconsciously, these groups are working in the shadow cast by the late 1970s and early 80s collaborations between Brian Eno and David Byrne, primarily My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and the Talking Heads albums Fear of Music and Remain in Light. By surrounding Byrne's rural preacher impression on "Once in a Lifetime" with angelic new age synthesizers and ethereal harmonies, for instance, the duo pulled an affective charge from seemingly incompatible elements. The co-presence of Byrne's anxious sermonizing, a West African rhythm section and Eno's stylish ornamentation signified not only the spiritual transformation of Byrne's character, but also an important shift in pop’s approach toward its own past along with non-Western forms of music.
Brooklyn's Yeasayer are the latest entry to this group of Byrne disciples, and one of the better bands to put a new spin on his polyrhythmic convulsing. The band gained recognition earlier this year for their fantastic first single "2080", possibly because of its sonic similarities to Midlake's buzzed-about 2006 single "Roscoe". Both share a woozy, woodsy ambience, but where "Roscoe", set in 1891, was nostalgic for a rustic world, Yeasayer gazes ahead-- and not optimistically. "I can't sleep when I think about the times we're living in," Chris Keating sings, continuing, "I can't sleep when I think about the future I was born into." After two preternaturally smooth choruses, the band lives up to its name. All new age elements temporarily vanish, and the group breaks through into communalism. The sudden, fervent "yeah yeah!" pulls from the same crowded Anglo-ethnic trough as the Arcade Fire, Animal Collective, and Danielson, and establishes the band's own link between the ritualistic and the futuristic.
All Hour Cymbals, the band's LP debut, is packed with similar moments of pan-ethnic spiritualism, filtered through walls of echo and layers of gossamer synth. The album opens on "Sunrise" with a gospel-tinged a cappella vocal that wouldn't sound out of place coming from TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe and adds handclaps and austere piano. The mix is gently, gradually taken over by a droning synthetic ambience and Keating's vocals, which express his desire to merge with nature. The song's falsettoed chorus is then fleshed out with a vague Far Eastern vibe, that same sense of foreign tension reappearing later in "Worms".
This sense of apprehension lends the album a dramatic flair, best realized in "Forgiveness", which-- while reclaiming the synthetic handclap and keystroke incantation for the band's unnatural revival meeting-- calls into question the time-honored tendency to appropriate religion for personal gain. Guitarist Anand Wilder sings: "I've come to beg for forgiveness/ So forgive me," yet after pleading that "I've tried to teach by my doing, your undoing" he admits, "But my time will be your ruin." Elsewhere, "Germs" augments its earthly paranoia ("What's hurting me when I breathe/ Perhaps it's just the mold on the ceiling") with a sonic mood somewhere between Celtic and Balkan, and "No Need to Worry" is a buzzing cathedral of dread, its title only serving as an attempted calming influence.
The peak of All Hour Cymbals' tangible sense of unease, the pummeling "Wait for the Wintertime", is Yeasayer's Black Sabbath moment, transforming their chants into a dark, persistent march. Although it's not clear whether the song is the band's own origin myth, about the apocalypse, or both, the lyric, "On a cold day, you can walk forever/ On a cold day, nothing's gonna stop us," is charged with dread, only bolstered by the atonal saxophones in its climax. There and elsewhere, Yeasayer channel both a dystopian science-fiction sensibility and deep appreciation for the natural world, employing a wide, international range of sounds. The result is a unique form of indie rock world music that resists stepping into the essentialist, ethnocentric traps consistently tripped by high-minded hipsters.
YOUNG KNIVES
ARE DEAD... AND SOME - Young KnivesThe Young Knives didn’t just walk out of a branch of Barbour & Sons and into our lives in 2005. By then they�d already spent several years honing their craft, recording this mini-album for Oxford label Shifty Disco in 2002. All the quirks we have come to love from the tweed-clad trio are in evidence here: tetchy rhythms, yelped harmonies, false endings and bristling basslines that drill their way into your cortex. The influence of US art-rock bands Pere Ubu and Sonic Youth is more pronounced than on the Mercury-nominated “Voices Of Animals And Men”, culminating in the magnificently brooding Pavement-esque epic “Diamonds In The West”. The lack of an ear-spearing epiphany in the vein of “The Decision” is tempered here by the bonus inclusion of 2003 single “Rollerskater”, an unexpectedly frothy electro-pop diversion.
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