Music Bonanza (PART 11)

British Sea Power - The National - Of Montreal - Helio Sequence
- Iron And Wine - Bearsuit - Cass McCombs - Beirut


DO YOU LIKE ROCK MUSIC? - British Sea Power
British 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.

Download: British Sea Power - DO YOU LIKE ROCK MUSIC?
(available for 7 days from date of post)


BOXER - The National
Among 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.

Download: The National - BOXER
(available for 7 days from date of post)


HISSING FAUNA, ARE YOU THE DESTROYER? - Of Montreal
The 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.

Download: Of Montreal - HISSING FAUNA, ARE YOU THE DESTROYER?
(available for 7 days from date of post)


KEEP YOUR EYES AHEAD - The Helio Sequence
The 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.

Download: The Helio Sequence - KEEP YOUR EYES AHEAD
(available for 7 days from date of post)


THE SHEPHERD'S DOG - Iron And Wine
Sam 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.

Download: Iron And Wine - THE SHEPHERD'S DOG
(available for 7 days from date of post)


OH:IO - Bearsuit
There’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.

Download: Bearsuit - OH:IO
(available for 7 days from date of post)


DROPPING THE WRIT - Cass McCombs
Cass 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.

Download: Cass McCombs - DROPPING THE WRIT
(available for 7 days from date of post)


THE FLYING CLUB CUP - Beirut
OK, one more Beirut album. The review in Part 10 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.

Download: Beirut - THE FLYING CLUB CUP
(available for 7 days from date of post)

Music Bonanza (PART 10)

Bat For Lashes - Black Mountain - Stars Of Track & Field
- 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
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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
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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
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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)