- Maps - Miracle Fortress - Beirut - Vampire Weekend - MIA
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FUR AND GOLD - Bat For Lashes
Think "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.
Download: Bat For Lashes - FUR AND GOLD
(available for 7 days from date of post)
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IN THE FUTURE - Black Mountain
Black 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?
Download: Black Mountain - IN THE FUTURE
(available for 7 days from date of post)
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CENTURIES BEFORE LOVE AND WAR - Stars Of Track And Field
This 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.
Download: Stars Of Track And Field - CENTURIES BEFORE LOVE AND WAR
(available for 7 days from date of post)
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WE CAN CREATE - Maps
Until 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.
Download: Maps - WE CAN CREATE
(available for 7 days from date of post)
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FIVE ROSES - Miracle Fortress
It'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.
Download: Miracle Fortress - FIVE ROSES
(available for 7 days from date of post)
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GULAG ORKESTAR - Beirut
It 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.
Download: Beirut - GULAG ORKESTAR
(available for 7 days from date of post)
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VAMPIRE WEEKEND - Vampire Weekend
If 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.
Download: Vampire Weekend - VAMPIRE WEEKEND
(available for 7 days from date of post)
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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?
Download: M.I.A. - KALA
(available for 7 days from date of post)
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