splitting my review output from the last six months – not just for allmusic but also my newest outlet, the funky-fresh new cowbell magazine – into two portions. this batch covers mostly rock, folk, pop, songwritery stuff, etc. – "music with guitars," for want of a better catch-all shorthand (even though it's not even always true.) music with (more) synthesizers up next. these are more or less in (descending) order of how much i like them:
Returning to the album game three years after the charmingly curious Youth Novels, Lykke Li Zachrisson has grown up and moved away a little bit from the rather timid, waifish, precocious young woman of her debut. She hasn't entirely let go of her girlish sweetness, and she certainly hasn't lost her way with a melodic hook, but she's largely outgrown the more cloyingly precious, occasionally clumsy tendencies that sometimes plagued her debut, and her singing voice, while still appealingly personable and distinctive, has gotten considerably more forceful. Indeed, despite its vulnerable title, Wounded Rhymes practically oozes confidence, barreling out of the gate with the swaggering, rabble-rousing "Youth Knows No Pain," all in-the-red handclaps, hip-shaking drums and tambourines, and downright nasty, psych-damaged organ, as Li sneeringly exhorts us to "C'mon honey, blow yourself to pieces." Even with a roughly even ratio of ballads to rockers, and a fair complement of woebegone lyrics, there's a similar sense of toughness throughout. But it's a fleshy, lived-in toughness, equally unabashed about declarations of love (the deeply romantic "I Follow Rivers," the powerfully passionate "Love out of Lust," and the borderline obsessive "Jerome"), and provocations like the fierce, sexually aggressive "Get Some." Musically, Li and returning producer/co-writer Bjorn Yttling (of Peter Bjorn and John) use the bare-bones, rhythmically oriented textures of Youth Novels (and of his band's 2009 album Living Thing) as a springboard, keeping starkly intimate vocals, clattering drums, and all manner of oddball percussion sounds at the forefront (check "Rivers"' fetchingly wonky, detuned xylophone riff), but they flesh things out somewhat with guitars and organs, frequently multiplying Li's voice to create an ad hoc backup choir, resulting in a considerably fuller-sounding effort that still feels grittily immediate and raw. Rhymes also reveals, and revels in, Li's fondness for '50s and '60s rock and pop, hearkening equally to classic girl group sounds and harder-edged garage rock. In fact, she and Yttling pull out just about every time-worn trick in the throwback pop playbook: doo wop arpeggios and "shoo-wop shoo-wop" backups on the gentle "Unrequited Love," a thunderous Bo Diddley beat and tremulous spy/surf guitar on "Get Some," seedy "96 Tears"-derived organ on "Rich Kid Blues," and "Be My Baby" drums, and Spector-ian orchestra bells on the big ballad centerpiece "Sadness Is a Blessing." But despite that plethora of knowing musical allusions, this is by no means a stale, cut-and-dried retro affair. On the contrary: it's an inspired, rugged, smart, emotive, coolly modern piece of indie pop, and an improvement on Lykke Li's debut in just about every respect.
Fred Cornog's seventh album of slow, sad home-recorded pop songs does not, when you get down to it, sound all that different from the first six. There are subtle changes: whether because of upgrades to his home studio gear over the years -- he recently traded in his trusty old Tascam 388 for a Korg D1600 mini-studio -- or his increased mastery of it, his music has evolved to the point that it can hardly be described as lo-fi any longer. We Live in Rented Rooms feels positively lush; despite the familiar, humble drum machines and no-frills strumming, it's brimming with warm, comforting keyboards and quietly meticulous arrangements, projecting a calm, unassuming stateliness. If anything, these songs are even slower than ever -- nothing exceeds a modest, amiable lope, and several numbers are so leisurely they barely seem to move at all. They also just might be the slightest bit less sad, or at least less self-loathing, although nothing remotely approaches cheerful (unless a line like "When you were doing cocaine/You never slept alone" qualifies). Certainly, in the five years since the last East River Pipe opus, the hard-luck stories and workaday misery that have always typified Cornog's songs have grown sadly all the more commonplace, which by design or circumstance makes Rented Rooms that much more poignant and topical. It's not hard, for example, to see the political resonance of a song like "Backroom Deals," which sketches, in a few simple lines, a sharp portrait of lifelong drudgery, hard-earned cynicism, and bitter complacency. The hymnlike, heartbreakingly beautiful "Three Ships," meanwhile, essentially allegorizes all of American history through the eyes of a Native who watches three European ships appear, only to depart leaving nothing but "highways and silicon deserts." Elsewhere, Cornog shows us individuals for whom creativity is hopelessly fraught (in "Tommy Made a Movie," whose titular figure is too psychologically self-crippling -- and too distracted by online porn -- to actualize his cinematic daydreams) and romance is inevitably compromised if not doomed to failure (the wistful "Summer Boy"; the wry standout "Payback Time"). With a few exceptions, it's usually ambiguous how directly personal these songs are for Cornog -- when he's drawing specifically from his own notoriously troubled life experiences and when he's looking further outside himself -- but it's ultimately insignificant. What matters is that this is some of the most economical and effective songwriting of his career, bolstered as always by his appealingly understated delivery and gorgeously crafted musical settings. In short: another astounding, resounding East River Pipe triumph.
Baby Dee is one of the most enchanting and idiosyncratic figures in modern music, and even if her (quite inimitable) literal voice appears relatively little on this largely instrumental set, her distinctive personality – a blend of sentimentality, humor, quirky theatricality and a profound, big-hearted sense of wonder – shines marvelously throughout. Staking out largely new territory from the frequently dark, confessional cabaret of her past work, Regifted Light presents a series of brief, thematically-linked chamber pieces, oddly reminiscent of Aaron Copland at his most populist, variously incorporating strings, horn, glockenspiel, bassoon, temple blocks and more, but always featuring Dee's deliciously crisp piano playing (on Andrew WK's old Steinway, no less.) The four interspersed vocal numbers – particularly the magnificently silly "Pie Song" – are among the highlights, but the album plays as a cohesive suite, and despite (or maybe because of) its brevity and resounding lightheartedness, it's as powerful and affecting, in its way, as anything she's done, and probably all the more readily enjoyable.
"Deep" is a good adjective for the third album by the inimitable, unfathomable Joan Wasser. So are: thick, loose, rich, raw, murky, dangerous and, without a doubt, sexy. Also, patient. It's not nearly as immediate as her immaculate, crystalline debut, Real Life – tellingly, with just as many songs, it's twenty minutes longer. Gone are the achingly spare piano ballads; in their place is another sort of ache, the kind that sprawls out over gritty, slow-boiling funk and organ-drenched soul or, in the case of "Flash," eight minutes of pensive, amniotic floating. Nothing's under four minutes; the shortest cut, first single "Magic," is taut and buoyant enough to scan as pop, but much of Field veers far from conventional singer/songwriter fare. This is a songwriter's record – indeed, it's a powerfully frank treatise on love, lust and positivity – but it's also an astonishing vocal showcase, a rapturous mood piece and a killer blowing session. Wasser's versatility and fearlessness call to mind another Joan – the likewise underheralded Armatrading – but what she's concocted here is something entirely her own.
The aptly named Kort is a collaboration between Kurt Wagner and Cortney Tidwell, two Nashville musicians whose credentials lie well outside the Music City mainstream: Wagner fronts the long-running Lambchop; Tidwell has released a couple of electronic art-pop records. Invariable Heartache is their heartfelt, albeit idiosyncratic, tribute to their hometown's venerable tradition of commercially oriented country music. More specifically, it finds the duo, along with a crack ensemble of local players (most of them members of Lambchop and/or Tidwell's band) laying down a set of obscure cover tunes primarily drawn from the '60s and '70s catalog of Chart records, the label run by Tidwell's grandfather, A&R'd by her dad, and for which her late mother recorded. The material spans slick, tuneful country-pop, plenty of soulful ballads, a bit of '50s-ish R&B ("Yours Forever"), playful semi-novelty songs (the good-naturedly bawdy "Wild Mountain Berries"), and one truly bizarre oddity ("Penetration," which sounds like the group having some sort of post-modern laugh but was apparently the most scrupulously reverent arrangement here; one wonders if that includes Tony Crow's haunted, abstract, minute-long piano intro.) Though there's a definite tendency toward endearingly formulaic schmaltz, many of the selections offer some sort of ear-catching quirk or lyrical distinction, be it hokey wordplay -- as with "I Can't Sleep With You" [...On My Mind]" -- or an especially heart-rending sentiment, like the self-explanatory "Incredibly Lonely," which provides the album's more-accurate-than-not title. Crucially, the band brings just the right touch to these performances, their obvious fondness and reverence for the material never getting in the way of a loose, expressive feel, with some very fine bits of soloing and lots of enjoyably breezy ensemble playing. That's doubly true of the vocals, which in some ways could have been this project's most hit-or-miss element. As it turns out, Wagner's characteristically laconic, crotchety-sounding, hyper-articulated delivery pairs beautifully with Tidwell's versatile but generally sweet-as-pie pipes. Certainly, they generate enough of a rapport to make one wish that more than half of the tunes were proper duets; while Tidwell can manage an effortless, spine-tingling Patsy Cline evocation, her five vocal features (Wagner only gets one, sounding pitifully dour on the legitimately poetic "April's Fool") tend to be the record's weaker links. The exception there is the closer, and sole non-chart inclusion (her mother sang it for ABC/Dunhill), "Who's Gonna Love Me Now," which is about as immaculately devastating as you could wish.
Start and Complete was recorded in a single day and mixed in three, with compositions that the players – a Brit alt/out panoply whose credits include This Heat, Spiritualized and Derek Bailey – had minimal time to learn. So listeners may be surprised to find that, far from a free improv excursion – a lá the group's first, eponymous outing for the Treader label – this is an album of heartfelt, blue-eyed bedsit soul. The extemporaneous working method absolutely translates into a wonderfully congenial looseness and immediacy, but notwithstanding the undeniably masterful ensemble-based musicianship on display, what it's really about this time is the inimitable singing and songwriting of Hot Chip's Alexis Taylor. Continuing in the tender, comforting vein of his band's triumphant One Life Stand, Taylor sets his croon on swoon and unleashes a dozen new heart-melters and bad-love ballads (plus one roiling, eleven-minute funk-workout cover) doused in warm Wurlitzers and swirling organs, til resistance is just about hopeless.
Zoey Van Goey are a Glasgow indie pop group with connections to local legends like Belle & Sebastian and the Delgados. And while that's worth mentioning to provide a rough frame of reference for their sound, it should be stressed that they've gleaned at least as much from those two bands' adventurousness and idiosyncratic vision as they have any particular elements of musical style. They may belong to a proud tradition of scruffy Glaswegian pop bands, but they can hardly be pegged and dismissed as reverent genre traditionalists. Indeed, part of what makes their eminently likable second album, Propeller Versus Wings, initially tricky to pin down is that it refuses to stay in one place for long, skipping blithely from the dulcet, autumnal tones of "Mountain on Fire" and "Little Islands" to brisk, spiky pop bursts like the quirky, catchy "The Cake and Eating It," and flirting along the way with warbling cabaret-jazz ("My Aviator"), herky-jerky kiddie punk ("Robot Tyrannosaur"), and a smidge of country ("Extremities"). But the band has a strong enough voice that these peregrinations never feel like faceless genre exercises, or eclecticism for the sake of eclecticism. At least after a few listens to let it all sink in, the album's myriad modes hang together to present a coherent sensibility, the varied but complementary sides of the same sparkling personality: goofy at times, definitely a little geeky, but also sweet, sensitive, thoughtful, and often boldly romantic. Lyrically, Propeller touches on aspects of love, dreams, flying, and such painfully twee situations as buying 8-tracks in second-hand shops -- as well as helicopter crashes, fire-breathing monsters, and robotic dinosaurs -- but also more sobering topics like heartache, depression, and suicide. Apart from their commendable versatility, ZVG's chief calling card is their highly personable singing, especially Kim Moore's girlishly sweet soprano (recalling Kathryn Calder of the New Pornographers and Immaculate Machine -- incidentally, two other salient musical reference points) and Matt Brennan's warm, rich baritone. They're even better when they join vocal forces, especially on the album's spunkier, rockier moments. Chief among these is "You Told the Drunks I Knew Karate," an adorably dorky romp through Glasgow and a triumphant testament to young love and recklessness (with the excellent refrain: "I do the dumbest things for you") reminiscent of Los Campesinos!, with a touch of the Mountain Goats at their scrappiest. While it would be easy enough to continue lobbing apt but imprecise comparisons at them (the Magnetic Fields and Regina Spektor also come up frequently), Propeller Versus Wings shows Zoey Van Goey are capable of flying quite well on the strength of their own personality.
The King is Dead is, unquestionably, The Decemberists' most ordinary record. Markedly less ambitious – outwardly, anyway – than the byzantine story-songs and old-fangled, concept-driven folderol that reached an apogee on the thorny, toilsome Hazards of Love, these ten relatively straightforward songs, surveying a range of resolutely rootsy American rock and folk styles, present some artistic hazards of their own. There's an easily bungled subtlety, after all, to what troubadour-in-chief Colin Meloy calls "the complexity of simple songs." But while Meloy's distinctive dictionary-thumbing diction sticks out occasionally (and you kinda want to hug him for it), he and his band, with a few well-chosen confederates, pull off the gambit admirably. "Don't Carry It All" trades Picaresque's scene-setting shofar for a gloriously shrill harmonica, kicking off a rousing, full-throttle Americana anthem (complete with Gillian Welch, the indie generation's Emmylou Harris), while the superb, driving "Calamity Song" manages to both luxuriate in and transcend its blatant (and roundly, rightly reckoned) R.E.M.-iniscent qualities – Peter Buck's presence aside, it also emphasizes Meloy's Stipe-ian timbre and capacity for lyrical obfuscation (in this case, dreaming up the end of the world as we know it.) The album's other pleasures are often subtler: the gentle, moving "Rise to Me" (partially addressed to Meloy's young son); the pair of sweetly breezy seasonal "Hymns," recalling the calm clarity of the band's earliest days. There's no denying the familiarity of certain sounds here, but it's always resoundingly, recognizably the Decemberists, which, given their tendency toward stilted theatricality, feels surprisingly natural and comfortable. And if it occasionally gets a little bit dull – well, such are the perils of normalcy.
Meticulously detailed yet poetically cryptic songs crammed full of emphatic imperatives, lists of objects, place names, photographic and cinematic imagery, ambiguously metaphorical melodrama, and elliptically sketched characters doomed to lives of regret, despair, terror or worse... yep, it's another Mountain Goats album. The fourteenth, depending how you count, though the first on Merge Records, an indie stalwart which has lately been building up an impressive roster of indie artists. John Darnielle is such a distinctive and prolific songwriter that it's easy to feel like he's repeating himself, and, sure, listeners who are comfortable with the amount of Mountain Goats already on their shelves probably needn't bother making space for what is essentially more of the same. But the man's also tremendously consistent; he's never offered up a less-than-intriguing set of tunes, and the 13 cuts on All Eternals Deck can stand alongside his finest: another baker's dozen of richly realized vignettes, some more narratively lucid than others, but none without at least a handful of wry, expressive, elegant, or otherwise worthy lines. There's no readily discernible theme or concept this time out, apart from a general (and hardly new) tendency toward darkness and dread, with occasional reference to the occult: songs mentioning vampires and ghosts; a title alluding to an apocryphal, and possibly invented, tarot deck. The album this most resembles is 2008's Heretic Pride, which was a similar grab bag lyrically, as well as, to some extent, musically. Sticking with the increasingly poised and polished full-band sound of the last several Mountain Goats releases -- plenty of piano, several lovely string arrangements, and fine work throughout from Darnielle's bandmates Peter Hughes (bass) and Jon Wurster (drums) -- much of All Eternals Deck sounds warm and relaxed, even lush. Outliers (and standouts) include the guardedly optimistic "Never Quite Free," with its breezy pedal steel, the spectral "High Hawk Season," which enlists a trio of male choristers who come across perhaps more like affably drowsy barbershop ghosts than the "spirit throngs" of the lyrics, and a couple of bona fide rockers: "Prowl Great Cain" (an account of unconscionable remorse which may or may not be about its biblical namesake), and especially the ripping "Estate Sale Sign," which surveys the detritus of a disastrously failed relationship (with distinct shades of Darnielle's old "Alpha Couple") in the nearest we get to an anthem on the level of "This Year" or "No Children." Nothing here's likely to attract new converts quite the way those tunes did, but this is still a very easy Mountain Goats album to like and to recommend, whether it's your first or fourteenth.
Five years after an archetypically difficult third album that yielded middling reviews and a surprising degree of indifference (even though, from this distance, its purported "experiments" sound like nothing more or less than energetic, inventively crafted rock songs), the five men once hailed as rock'n'roll's sainted saviors have both a lot to live up to and, somehow, strangely little to lose. Angles, outwardly, reverts to the tightly streamlined form of the first two Strokes LPs – 10 tracks, 34 minutes; minimal margin for excess. But the way they pack that dense half-hour betrays hardly any hint of backpedaling. Full of stylistic curveballs, compositional left turns, screwy sonics, skewed '80s pop pastiche and fantastically scrawly soloing, this is easily the wildest and weirdest they've ever sounded; if not exactly sloppy then certainly gleefully uncalculated. True, slap-happy loss leader "Under Cover of Darkness" overtly evokes their era-defining early singles (albeit with the menace replaced by vaguely Footloose-ish forced mirth), but nothing else sounds remotely like the output of a formula. Hence, while the sneaky syncopations and power-pop goodies of "Machu Picchu" and "Taken for a Fool" feel very nearly irresistible, it's likely most listeners' mileage will vary track by track, particularly in the slippery second half. The trademark tenseness (and tinniness) of the band's younger days are still around, especially on the jagged, tightly-wound "You're So Right" and "Metabolism," but Angles also manifests a newfound looseness, most palpably on "Gratisfaction," a breezy, Stones-y good-times shuffle. That freewheeling spirit, alongside all the kitchen-sink tinkering and a brightly trashy, plastic-pop aural aesthetic, occasionally comes at the expense of the band's habitual melodic elegance (both vocal and instrumental), but more than not it translates into a whole lot of inspired, bristly rock'n'roll fun.
Anybody who was hoping the second Lenka album would be a dark, moody, sober, edgy, or in any way downcast affair is, first of all, probably not a very realistic person and, secondly, gearing up for a serious disappointment. Otherwise, it's hard to imagine anybody being disappointed by the Australian sparkle-pop princess' sophomore outing, which is every bit as lovably bright and sunny as her debut. (Unless, of course, the listener in question doesn't have the stomach for this sort of frothy, sugary-sweet musical confection to begin with -- which is certainly understandable, though still a darn shame.) That said, Two definitely does have a bit more bite than its predecessor, and a slightly more modern sound, tending away from Lenka's lavish, Hollywood-style orchestrations toward lightly embellished small-group arrangements and, occasionally, sleek electro-pop. The major exception is first single "Roll with the Punches," a big, buoyant creampuff of a tune that revisits the singsong cadence of Lenka's breakout hit "The Show," with all the requisite layers of strings, trumpets, organs, and backing vocals. But the other similarly "vintage"-styled swing numbers here -- the bouncy "Everything's Okay" and cutie-pie nursery rhyme "Everything at Once" -- keep things relatively simple and piano-based. Meanwhile, the title cut shows Lenka at her leanest and meanest, with a stripped-down kicks'n'claps beat and a funky acoustic guitar/fuzz-toned synth bass riff. "Blinded by Love" and "Here to Stay" are classically styled pop/rock ballads that go easy on the instrumental theatrics, instead gleaning their emotional power from Lenka's increasingly impressive singing and songcraft. And the slinky "You Will Be Mine" shows that she could hack it as a competent (if somewhat faceless) seductive indie electro diva, although the sparkly, effervescent "Shocked Me into Love" is a far more gratifying synth pop foray, sounding not unlike a young Kylie Minogue at her bubbliest, and just a remix away from serious dance chart potential. It's a considerable stylistic range for one album, but Lenka pulls it off and keeps it cohesive, thanks to an unerring gift for melody and a subtly sophisticated understanding of pop poetics. She knows how these things can work in reverse -- "Sing me a sad song and make me feel better/Sing me a happy song and I might start to cry," she croons on the deceptively titled "Sad Song" -- which might explain why perhaps the sweetest number here is about the apocalypse: "The End of the World," which plays as sort of an inverse of a Skeeter Davis classic. All told, Two is just as wonderfully winning as its predecessor, fully deserving a spot alongside it (and alongside Regina Spektor, Marit Larsen, and the Bird and the Bee) on the top shelf of shiny-smart, retro-contemporary happy pop.
For a collaboration between a couple of noted songwriters, it's striking that the songs are often the least interesting thing about Thao & Mirah. There are a handful which stand out on their own merits -- Thao Nguyen's singsongy "How Dare You," an R&B-tinged call-and-response that's the only proper duet here; Mirah Zeitlyn's characteristically hushed, thoughtful "Hallelujah," which dares to brush against the deathless Leonard Cohen classic and fares impressively well, considering. But by and large, the album is more notable and enjoyable as an exploration of sounds and textures (both instrumental and vocal) than as a collection of melodies and lyrics. The tip-off comes early, with the joyfully dense, clattering opener "Eleven," an energetic if loosely structured three-way collision with Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs, who provides not only the simple, lusty vocal hook (tellingly, and perhaps a little troublingly, the most memorable one here) but also a hefty dose of her band's percussion-heavy, chant-friendly, loopy D.I.Y. spirit. Garbus also co-produced the album and contributes instrumentally or vocally to all but one song (that's two more than Nguyen, who sits out on three of Zeitlyn's five solo compositions), and it's tempting to imagine what they might work up together as a fully collaborative trio -- Mirah, Thao & Merrill, which might have been a more accurate title here anyway. Nothing else bears Garbus' influence quite so overtly, though it's not hard to hear her fingerprints on, for instance, Zeitlyn's breathily sultry "Rubies and Rocks," whose simmering, Afro-tinged groove and swirling horn riffs eventually develop into a full-on jazz-funk blowout. Of course, there's also plenty of room for the distinct and notably divergent voices of the much-loved marquee duo. And they manage a more successful and satisfying merger than on their previous collaborative venture, a joint 2010 tour wherein Thao's livelier, rockier numbers alternated incongruously and sometimes disruptively with Mirah's softer acoustic folk. Here the pair find a wide-ranging middle ground, with some fruitful artistic stretching on both sides -- Thao trading rangy rock for tender prettiness on "Teeth" and "Folks" (but letting it out on the scrappy, screwball slide-fest "Squareneck"); Mirah taking a playfully bluesy turn on "Sugar and Plastic" (and saving her habitual solemnity for the oddly humorless sci-fi oddity "Spaced Out Orbit" ). It's not an especially coherent album, nor a very revealing one, offering surprisingly little insight into Thao & Mirah's relationship either as musical or romantic partners. But it does sound like they're having fun, and that counts for a good deal.
The fascinating decentralization of African music dissemination proceeds with Thrill Jockey's second Malian release of the year, one that's worlds from the rustic desert folk-blues of Sidi Touré. Hitherto little-known in the West, the orphaned Sorry Bamba defied his noble birth caste to become one of the recently independent Mali's most prominent bandleaders, competing successfully in multiple National Biennial celebrations during the period showcased here. As befits a state-endorsed post-colonial cultural effort, these selections (compiled by Extra Golden's Alex Minoff and Ian Eagleson with input from an enthusiastic 73-year-old Bamba) find a deft balance between heritage and modernization, with a mixture of populist originals and folk songs (representing three distinct ethnic groups); traditional percussion combined with spry electric guitars, horns and the occasional psych-dappled synthesizer (plus Bamba's piercing flute and vigorous vocals), and swirling, lavishly hypnotic grooves that, while not as dense or forceful as Fela's afrobeat, display some palpably Western soul and funk influences – and, on "Astan Kelly," the unmistakable rhythms of Cuban salsa. Speaking of unexpected borrowings, the sweetly harmonized "Aïssé" is distinctly reminiscent of another "Bamba": the familiar Son Jarocho made famous by Ritchie Valens.
The dreamy, fuzz-loving Swedes of the Radio Dept. built up an impressive amount of critical respect and a small but devoted following over the course of a career that often seemed as hazy, understated, discreet, and ephemeral as their music typically feels. Issued in the wake of 2010's well-received Clinging to a Scheme, which earned the band their highest profile to date, this fittingly titled collection takes a somewhat selective approach to the A-sides-plus-B-sides singles-comp strategy. The Radio Dept. are great candidates for this treatment: like any indie pop outfit worth their salt, they've amassed a considerable catalog of 7" singles, EPs, and stray digital tracks, alongside their leisurely paced (three in eight years) album output. Especially since much of that material is at least as strong as the stuff that made it to the albums, this collection will be just as worthwhile for newcomers to the band as for all but the most obsessively completist fans: true completists might, conceivably, already have most or all of these tracks, but more casual fans will be happy to note that, of the 14 A-sides on the first disc, only a mere six overlap with the albums. Those six -- sterling dream pop nuggets all -- are clear highlights here, naturally enough, but there's also plenty else of interest: the lusciously depressive "This Past Week," the late-2010 internet single "The New Improved Hypocrisy," whose melody is as sharp as its politics, and, curiously, an early cover of the Scottish folk song "Annie Laurie." The second disc of B-sides (which, incidentally, includes nothing from the group's two standalone EPs) may not host as many immediately obvious standouts, though there are a few definite keepers toward the end, including the tremendously sweet and tender "On Your Side," but it's arguably an equally strong listening experience, one which emphasizes the band's overwhelming preoccupation with texture (particularly on the several instrumentals, and songs with vocals so muffled they might as well be instrumentals). Since the As and Bs are segregated, but both sequenced chronologically, the two discs present more or less parallel arcs tracing how that approach to texture developed over the years: an essentially linear progression from rougher, guitar-based noise-pop to a more refined, more electronically oriented, cleaner -- though no less hazy -- sound (along with the occasional reggae flirtation.) It wasn't necessarily all that great of a stylistic distance to traverse, but it's certainly been a pleasurable journey. And while there are quite a few extant non-album cuts that might have found space on a more slavishly inclusive comp, what is included here is pretty close to perfect.
In several sometimes perplexing ways, Cass McCombs' fifth full-length outing, Wit's End, veers moderately but decisively away from the appealingly direct, rootsy indie folk of its predecessor, Catacombs. In its place is a stark, occasionally stifling collection of dark, literary, chamber folk, melodramatic piano balladry, and one sterling piece of country-pop classicism. Album-opener "County Line" is a quiet stunner: a mellow-grooving country-soul burner so achingly smooth you'd swear it was a turn-of-the-'70s chestnut from the L.A. soft rock scene -- a stray cut from the vaults of Asylum Records, perhaps, or maybe a particularly glossy tune by the Band -- complete with that iconic Fender Rhodes twinkle. (Its restrained melancholy and vintage-styled craftsmanship also call to mind Beck's Sea Change.) But it's hardly an accurate indication of what's to come, at least musically: although several songs feature a similar instrumental palette, and the moody, subdued tone persists throughout, nothing else here is nearly as warm or winningly melodic. Lyrically, "County Line"'s tale of loss and rueful homecoming (seemingly about a hometown transformed by new development, rather than a doomed romantic relationship, though it could be both) is just a taste of the darkness and desperation that, as the album's title hints at, pervade these eight songs. Elsewhere, we get the desolate, jilted lover of the maudlin "Saturday Song," the chilling "Buried Alive" (whose title is evidently not metaphorical), and the wracked "Hermit's Cave," which plays like a gloomier variation on the Beach Boys' "That's Not Me" with an added dose of mysticism. When McCombs' often heavily stylized, antiquarian verse is paired with a suitably intriguing arrangement (as on "Memory Stain," a forlorn piano waltz that gets some much-needed color and lift via accordion, bass clarinet, and a few well-placed castanets) or a decently forward-moving melody ("Buried Alive," which is both tender and almost delightfully macabre), the results can be effective, if not exactly inviting. On the other hand, no amount of celeste can save "The Lonely Doll," an overly precious fable set to a maddeningly harmonically static waltz -- with the title phrase repeated after every awkward couplet -- from being utterly insufferable. The album's most ambitious -- and, possibly excepting the incongruous "County Line," most successful -- moment comes with nine-minute closer "A Knock Upon the Door," a rambling narrative ballad and yet another waltz, this time with a rustic, old world lilt spiced up with a coolly sinister backing combo of banjo, bass clarinet, organ, chalumeau (a Baroque relative of the recorder), and found-sound percussion. It's the most potent and captivating expression of the gothic sensibility that runs through Wit's End, and one of a few potentially promising directions suggested by this odd, somewhat bewildering, and perhaps hopefully transitional effort.
Rearrange Beds wasn't exactly the most spectacular or innovative debut in indie rock history, but it introduced An Horse as an immensely likable band, getting plenty of mileage out of sheer, nervy energy, an old-fashioned allegiance to a certain loud-and-proud indie/punk ethos, and the scrappy interplay between Damon Cox's fiery drumming, Kate Cooper's churning guitar work, and her breathlessly ardent (and endearingly accented) vocals. (The duo's fresh-faced, spunky blond looks didn't hurt either.) Well, the first words out of Cooper's mouth on Walls are as follows: "I have nothing new to tell you since the last time I wrote." Sure enough, the Aussie twosome mostly stick to a tried-and-true approach for album number two, which should come as good news to those already in sway to their considerable charms. The album's front end, in particular, serves notice that not too much has changed: there may not be a standout here that comes close to the poppily anthemic "Camp Out," but "Dressed Sharply" and the driving "Trains and Tracks" are reasonably serviceable substitutes, and there's plenty more tunefully gritty rock where those came from. But there's also a slightly frustrating sense of stagnancy which isn't necessarily helped by the occasional signs of musical growth. The duo's playing has gotten tighter and more refined, with Cox in particular unleashing some impeccably precise bursts of ferocity behind the kit: check the fireballing "Trains" and his merciless snare work on the tightly wound "Leave Me." But Cooper's songs don't always match that energy; the title track's acoustic guitars and group harmonies make for a nice change of pace, but much of the album's latter half feels overly restrained, and even uncharacteristically subdued. So while Walls generally finds An Horse treading water, enjoyably enough for the most part, it also suggests that they've arrived at a slight impasse as to how to proceed from here; how to balance artistic development and expansion with the youthful urgency and directness that has marked their best moments, at least so far. It's a classic, all-too-familiar sophomore-album quandary, and it's somehow reassuring, even endearing, to know that An Horse are sticking to the script.
There's an unshakable, perhaps not unsuitable taint of novelty about any one-off ukulele record, and the discrepancy between Eddie Vedder's notorious earnestness and the instrument's frivolous associations make this one seem especially punchline-worthy. But it doesn't sound that way, even if that tension is subtly evident throughout. Vedder has his sweetness; the uke has its quiet integrity, and the two find a way to make it work; the singer tempering his tremulous baritone to meet the instrument's cheery brightness halfway. He's not half playful enough for this to truly feel like a lark, but he's smart enough to keep the stakes small, devoting over a third of the disc to perennial standards – "Dream a Little Dream," "More Than You Know," the Everly Brothers' classic "Sleepless Nights" and perhaps the ultimate uke tune, "Tonight You Belong To Me" – inviting his buddies Glenn and Chan to duet on the latter two. And while Vedder's originals falter when they venture into rockier terrain, and (of course) can't compete with the genuine golden oldies, he does just fine when he sticks to the ukelele's proper métier: sweet, simple love songs.
By the time of Flora, Fredrik's third full-length, the Malmö, Sweden-based outfit expanded into a trio with the inclusion of an additional multi-instrumentalist/vocalist, Anna Moberg. But relatively little changed in terms of their music, which remains highly tactile, atmospheric, gently surreal folk-pop, although that genre tag hardly does justice to the idiosyncratic particulars of their sound, as they continue to wander gradually further from anything readily recognizable as either folk or pop. Meanwhile, their careful attention to intimate, intricate sonic detail has only deepened, with a new profusion of curious, clattering, enchanted, and occasionally haunted soundscapes; instruments listed in the credits this time include balalaika, zither, alto horn, music box, glass objects, owl whistles, and "tree trunk kalimba," but it can sometimes be hard to envision how music this murky and mystical could even be of human origin. Tonally and energetically, Flora falls somewhere in between its two predecessors: there's a greater sense of activity and a more pronounced rhythmic drive than on the largely subdued, often somber Trilogi (particularly on the pounding "Chrome Cavities" and the polyrhythmic, cowbell-led instrumental "The North Greatern," though it's true throughout), but Flora never quite recaptures the clarity and brightness that made certain moments of their debut, Na Na Ni, so utterly captivating. Song for song, none of Flora's seven vocal numbers (there are four brief instrumentals) announces itself with the melodic charm and arresting simplicity of "Black Fur" or "1986," or even Trilogi standout "Flax," although the sweetly tuneful "Inventress of Ill" is in the same general ballpark. But by this point in their career it's clear that Fredrik are less interested in creating immediate, hummable stand-alone numbers than they are in crafting an expansive, evocative listening experience. They haven't lost the ability to pen strong, simple melody lines -- there is still a handful of them here -- but the often dense, mesmeric layers of sound surrounding them, combined with Fredrik Hultin's typically hushed, understated vocal delivery, render them far less prominent. Still, it's hard to deny that their music has grown richer as it's gotten subtler, and in keeping with that tendency Flora is their lushest, dreamiest, most sonically and texturally abundant exploration to date.
Just less than a year on from Pigeons, a sophomore album that found Here We Go Magic simultaneously expanding their personnel, stylistic scope, and mainline indie rock critical profile, the Brooklyn quintet returned with the inexplicably titled January EP. (Perhaps they decided to split the difference between the May release date and the Halloween-ish cover art.) Pigeons already felt like a somewhat less than coherent grab bag of odds and ends, so the prospect of six holdovers from the time of its recording isn't overwhelmingly enticing. But January acquits itself surprisingly well, often offering a sharper sense of focus than its parent album. Not that anything here is a major departure from Pigeons' hazy, lazy psychedelia, but tunes like the gently pretty, Shins-ish "Hands in the Sky" and the jaunty, slightly goofy "Backwards Time" arguably boast sharper, clearer melodies than anything included there. The brightly woozy five-beat psych-popper "Tulip" and the gorgeously lilting "Song in Three" (which is actually in six) also manage to make more out of less, highlighting the band's gift for unobtrusively subtle rhythmic complexity, while the brief "Hollywood" is an enjoyably eerie bit of sparse, spectral choral folk. That leaves only one truly negligible cut, making this EP a definite keeper for fans and worth a listen for the curious. Even if the primary common characteristic of this stuff is how exceedingly pleasant it all is, there's always a place for that, regardless of what month it is.
18 June 2011
AMG + Cowbell review mega-round-up, volume XXIV: 2011 first half, vol. I [guitars]
19 July 2010
AMG review round-up, volume XXI: 2010 second quarter (misses), plus bonus strays
three more from second quarter '10 - decided non-favorites, which didn't make the last batch due to per-post label character limits (wha?) - then six pretty great ones from 2009, reviewed this year (incl. one reviewed for citypaper) - then three more recent-ish AMG reviews of even older things, including one of my very favorite albums of the decade (well, ok, #96 according to my list. still pretty fave.) and this, i am pretty sure, brings me completely up to date in terms of reposting all of my review output here (!!) for the first time in maybe ever. except for the two reviews i wrote last week. so stay tuned...
-------2010
L.A. art freaks We Are the World make no bones about the fact that they are not really a band -- they prefer the term "outfit," which seems vague enough to encompass an undertaking whose modes of operation include choreography, elaborate costuming, video, and all-around immersive visual spectacle in addition to their music. In any case, it's clear that the fullest expression of the group's project is to be found in the aesthetically adventurous, quasi-political performance art of their live shows, rather than on a piece of plastic or some digital files. That makes it difficult to know how to properly assess this debut album, which by the same token is clearly meant as more than a mere soundtrack or souvenir. Taken unto itself, divorced from its visual/experiential counterpart, Clay Stones still delivers plenty of visceral intensity: it's a breathless 45 minutes of violently propulsive electronic rhythms and stark, eerie atmospherics. Engaging but hardly easy listening, it's melodically minimal (beyond the throbbing bass, blank-eyed vocals, and scattered twitchy synth lines, harmonic content is typically scant) and emotionally monochromatic (even when the kinetic energy slackens, the mood remains relentlessly dark and edgy) but far from monotonous: primary musical instigator Robbie Williamson wrests an impressive textural and polyrhythmic array from a palette of black and grey, culling his constantly shifting sounds from industrial, minimal house, electro-clash (fellow techno-visual spectacularists Fischerspooner come readily to mind), and the twisted synth pop of the Knife. One frustrating weak point: Megan Gold is not by any means a tremendous vocal presence -- she adds a nicely bluesy, sub-Polly Harvey yowl to the pummeling title track and the glam-thrash stomp of "Goya Monster," but her vapid singsonging elsewhere (and flimsy nursery-rhyme rapping on "Fight Song") tends to detract somewhat from the album's dramatic drive where a more commanding vocalist could have helped transform it into something truly remarkable. Despite a promising start (the insistent yet inscrutable rallying cries of the first few tracks) and some inspired programming throughout (check the jittery tech-funk instrumental "Sweet Things Are So Hard"), Clay Stones remains conceptually intriguing and admirably sculpted, but a bit too stony to fully embrace on its own terms -- though it's easy and enticing to imagine how this could be tremendously effective stuff in person.
Suburban Stockholm's Söderberg sisters put their best foot forward on this, their first full-length outing as First Aid Kit: the album opens nearly a cappella, with a few slow strums and then a full minute of nothing but the haunting close harmonies that are the duo's strongest and most distinctive musical asset. In the 40-odd minutes that follow, the sisters' simplistic, repetitious song structures may start to grow stale, and their fine but unfussy folk instrumentalism may seem less than inspiring, but those harmonies are never far from hand, ensuring that The Big Black and the Blue is never less than an entirely pleasant listening experience. And it has potential to be much more than that -- taken individually, many and even most of these tunes have ample charms to offer, among them the sweetly melodic "Waltz for Richard," the wistful "Heavy Storm," and the intriguing "I Met Up with the King" (which bears a striking resemblance to Neko Case). Taken as a whole album, though, the songs lose a lot of their distinctiveness, and the uninterrupted loveliness can start to feel oddly dreary. The Big Black certainly doesn't dash the promise suggested by the duo's Drunken Trees EP (which in its final form was only four songs and 14 minutes shorter than this album) -- although that release's mild, playful experimentalism and small inklings of stylistic range are scrapped here for a more sober-minded American folk traditionalism that's perhaps commendable but not altogether compelling -- but it leaves that promise yet to be completely fulfilled. It feels entirely probable that they'll get there: the Söderbergs are still (astonishingly) young -- 20 and 17 at the time of this album's release -- and they've shown clear evidence of their raw talent and artistry. Their level of engagement is admirable: in addition to their genuinely prodigious vocal gifts and their more than competent handling all of the varied instrumentation here, save for the drums on several tracks, the sisters are credited with co-production and mixing, and they're also responsible for album's stunning, antiquarian-styled artwork. If they want to secure their place in this young century's burgeoning classicist folk wave (see also: Laura Marling, the Tallest Man on Earth), they'll merely need to come up with some songs that can truly make good on their otherwise considerably distinguished overall package.
Here We Go Magic made waves in early 2009 with an eponymous debut that was the one-man home recording project of indie folker Luke Temple; a curious, sonically hazy album essentially divided between sketchy ambient noise instrumentals and simple, tuneful, loosely tribal-feeling folk-pop nuggets. A little more than a year later, HWGM is now a full-fledged five-piece band with extensive touring behind them and a deal with big-league indie Secretly Canadian, but while their follow-up effort, Pigeons, varies from its predecessor in plenty of ways, the band's musical approach remains puzzlingly, if not unpleasantly, undefined. The most substantial through-line from the first album is one of sound, which remains dirty, dreamy, psychedelic, and swirling -- produced and recorded by the band in a house in the Catskills, Pigeons offers no substantial increase in recording fidelity, which turns out to be a good thing. More surprisingly, this album essentially jettisons both of the primary stylistic modes explored on the debut: the white-noise instrumentals are gone (and scarcely missed) but, with a few exceptions, so are the ambiguously ethnic, gentle world-pop vibes and much of the mantra-like melodic minimalism that contributed so much to the first album's appeal. Opener "Hibernation" floats fragmentary vocals atop a dense, stuttering Afro-beat lope, while the final two tracks, the circular chant "Vegetable or Native" and wordless, herky-jerky "Herbie I Love You," are built on layers of skeletal, intriguingly polyrhythmic percussion -- but that's about the extent of this album's global grooving. The eight intervening tracks form a motley, unfocused assemblage of eclectic indie pop, sometimes with a worked-up rhythmic drive -- the jaunty single "Collector" and the submerged-feeling "Moon" suggest either the mechanistic intensity of Krautrock or, less charitably, tepidly frenetic, warmed-over post-punk -- sometimes more ethereally floating. "Bottom Feeder" is vaguely countryish, making fine use of Temple's thin, overstrained pipes (shades of Neil Young reediness), while the curiously carnivalistic "Old World United," definitely the oddest thing on here, recalls the debut's old-timey waltz "Everything's Big." There's nothing particularly wrong with any of this, but despite this expanded stylistic and instrumental palette (and some notably lush, lovely vocal harmonies), it's hard to escape the sense that this album is, ironically, even more of an indulgently dabbling affair than its home four-tracked predecessor, which at least had an appealing simplicity and directness of approach. In the words of this album's prettiest tune: "it's casual, not mindshaking." And that's just OK.
-------2009
No points for guessing what this well-named Montreal threesome thinks about life -- at least assuming that listeners can judge from the sound of this humbly hewn but highly enjoyable sophomore album, the band's outlook and overall aesthetic are unmistakably vibrant, messy, enthusiastic, and riotously colorful. At their best, Think About Life marry the sort of hyperactive, upbeat kitchen-sink pop purveyed by the likes of Junior Senior and the Go! Team to a more guitar-centric indie rock foundation, occasionally bringing a muscular, dance-punky edge to the proceedings. With live drums carrying the groove on every track but one (the New Order-ish electro-pop of "Nueva Nueva"), Family maintains a loose, live, almost ramshackle vibe throughout, although the band also makes fairly prominent use of electronics, with all manner of buzzy keyboards and a handful of cleverly integrated samples. There are flirtations with Afro-pop and Motown (the lovely, laid-back "The Veldt," whose chorus interpolates "My Girl"), a splash of hip-hop (the opening moments of "Set You on Fire," before it settles into more of a pedestrian indie-dance jam), and some frenzied neo-new wave ("The Wizzzard"), several of which come with a curious midsong breakdown of some sort. The grooves are typically on point, Martin Cesar's throaty vocals -- split between impassioned midrange warbles and a Princely falsetto with strong shades of TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe -- are pleasantly distinctive, and the whole album feels comfortably crammed with ear-catching trinkets and inventive arranging ideas, even if the band can't always come up with the melodic goods to make its sonic concoctions fully stick. The first four tracks form the most consistent stretch, with top marks going to the slinky disco strut and touching teenage love soap of "Sweet Sixteen" and the herky-jerky, horn-assisted funk-rock of "Johanna," which features a particularly gritty, determined vocal turn from Cesar as well as a brief, unexpected detour into polyrhythmic trombone Dixie. While the rest of Family doesn't always stand up to those high points, it does always sound like the bandmembers are enjoying themselves, and for the most part that sense of fun is infectious. And sure, it can also grow tiresome and overly familiar at times -- as with so many things, it's mostly a question of perspective. But if Family doesn't make you think about life, at the very least it ought to make you think about dancing.
An Horse's tuneful, classically crunchy two-person indie rock fits in well alongside engagingly personable contemporaries like Wye Oak, Mates of State, and their sometime tourmates Tegan and Sara (who were largely responsible for introducing the band to American audiences), but it also owes a great deal to the meatier old-guard indie duos of the 1990s, groups like the Spinanes, Quasi, and Royal Trux. Like most if not all of these acts, An Horse derive a certain scrappy urgency and directness from their stripped-down, no-frills lineup: it's just Kate Cooper on guitar and lead vocals, Damon Cox on drums and backgrounds, but their limited numbers don't stop them from kicking up plenty of racket. The approach -- gritty and muscular but too melodic to come off as especially tough -- is wonderfully well-suited to the frank, up-front songwriting on their debut, packing a wallop of nervous energy that mirrors the emotional immediacy of Cooper's heart-sleeved relationship confessionals while moving briskly enough from hook to hook to preclude too much wallowing in earnestness. (The few exceptions, "Listen" and "Little Lungs," wherein the pace momentarily slackens, function just fine -- and even explicitly -- as breathers.) Opening shot "Camp Out" is the clear highlight, a bouncy four-chord jumble of sexual angst and exultantly hopeful confusion that builds to anthemic proportions, but the remainder of the album, which follows in a largely similar vein, is nearly up to that level. Ultimately, it's the sound as much as the songs that make Rearrange Beds so thoroughly enjoyable, that warmly familiar, tried but true indie rock buzz that An Horse seem to have offhandedly mastered, capturing all the necessary torment and jubilation of adolescence and rock & roll, and almost always coming out smiling on the other side.
Javelin: Javelin review
This limited-edition 12" EP -- packaged in screen-printed, re-purposed thrift-store LP sleeves -- distills the irrepressibly fun-loving, sample-based shenanigans that Javelin unleashed on their self-issued Jamz 'n' Jemz CD-R (and would soon extend to their Luaka Bop debut, No Más) into a highly concentrated five-track party. There are vocals here -- disembodied snatches of throaty R&B interjected into the bass-popping slo-mo funk of "Unforgettable Super Lady"; a brattily incanted schoolyard rhyme and a fluttery bit of goofball rapping buried in "Soda Popinski"'s 8-bit hip-hop hoe-down; even a full-fledged sung melody on the half-baked "Radio" -- but it's really all about the grooves, which are fairly bursting with kaleidoscopic cut-n-paste charm all on their own. In fact, it's probably just as well that the preposterously named "Lindsey Brohan" (a holdover from Jamz) is instrumental; its sugary day-glo electro cake could hardly handle any more frosting. Snatch it fast.
Joe Goddard's solo debut, recorded for his own Greco-Roman imprint, is a largely instrumental, wholly electronic set that finds the chipper Hot Chipper displaying much the same affable good humor and nifty, nuanced knob-twiddling that he brings to his main band. The album's fruit-based titling scheme is an apt one: alongside their generally frisky, frivolous feel, these tracks have an analog warmth and inbred musicality that make them far juicier and more flavorful than your typical faceless techno fare, even sticking within a fairly limited, simple, and at times rather tinny-sounding sonic range. Hot Chip fans looking for an extra serving of the group's full-spectrum emotional electro-pop may find it wanting -- the only proper vocal song, "Lemons and Lime (Home Time)," is likably lush and croony, and makes a nice palate-cleanser in context, but it's fairly slight by the band's standards -- but Harvest Festival offers plenty of its own delights, with its nicely balanced track list spanning fully club-appropriate material and several mellower and/or murkier pieces. "Apple Bobbing" opens the album somewhere in the middle of that range and is an instant highlight, gradually layering one sweetly burbling synth melody over another as a classically styled Chicago house drum track jacks slinkily in the background. The grooves deepen through the disc's dancy first half, nodding to dubstep's woozy bass wobble and twitchy syncopations as they build toward the full-on thumping goofiness of the Biggie-biting "Go Bananas." The back half of the album is more abstract (i.e., not particularly danceable) and moodier, if not necessarily less playful, with a tendency to feel slightly unformed and unfinished -- though "Sour Grapes," with its serene churchy organ figures atop a rolling sea of dubbed-out liquid clicks, is headed in an intriguing direction. Nothing here suggests Goddard ought to consider leaving his day job, but it's a worthy diversion that should please most fans and onlookers curious enough to seek it out.
Endless Bummer is the second album-length Pink Skull release, but even though it has plenty in common with the woolly, chameleonic onslaught of 2008's Zeppelin 3 -- lots of percussion-happy, mainly instrumental disco-rock workouts, a pronounced psychedelic bent, nutty non sequitur track titles -- it feels somehow less like a straightforward follow-up than its own discrete venture, or even something of a reset. Perhaps that's due to Pink Skull's fluidity as a musical entity (live band/DJ collective/recording project), which has veered more in the full band direction in the intervening year and a half, or to the D.I.Y., project-like distinctness of each of their releases. (This one, for instance, was issued only on MP3 and vinyl, with an initial run of 1,000 copies in unique handmade letterpressed sleeves each emblazoned with a different "bummer" -- "Ingrown Toenail," "Fake Orgasm," "Ethnic Cleansing," "Emo," etc.) Arguably even less accurately named than Zeppelin 3, Endless Bummer is in fact both relatively concise and a considerably more positive-spirited and agreeable affair than its predecessor, with markedly less electronic wankery and only one true foray into all-out inscrutability (the noodly "Fast Forward to Bolivia"). Opener "Peter Cushing" is about the closest thing imaginable to a Pink Skull pop single, foregrounding Julian Grefe's self-harmonized vocals and a cheery flute riff with a simple sprightly beat and rubbery bassline harking back to the heyday of dance-punk. Predictably, things get a bit weirder and more expansive from there on out, but the basic template of organically fluid, disco-infused live-band grooves -- best exemplified by the hard-driving title track -- remains fairly constant, with just enough variety (skronking sax and chipper scatted doo wop vocals on "Chicken Dream Inside Egg"; glitchy electronic interjections on "The Inconsiderate Neighbor...") to keep things interesting. The flip side to this approach -- the album's other primary mode -- is the spacy, beatless synth exploration assayed on "Wheet" and "Fired So Fired," and on the two longer, more preposterously named bonus tracks, which achieve true ambient restfulness (another first for these guys) with no small debt to '70s kosmische musik. Pink Skull may not be doing anything all that new, but it's still a delight to hear the confidence and openness they've achieved here, settling into a groove without losing their appealing looseness and devilish sense of fun. If Zeppelin 3's itchy, dizzying eclecticism seemed desperate to make a statement and wound up barely skirting incoherence, Endless Bummer feels like it has less at stake but, paradoxically, something more to say.
Back in 1997: Cornershop felt like real envelope-pushers with their simmering Anglo-Indian curry of breakbeat chop-ups, Filmi-flavored funk and sunny guitar pop. Back to basics: After a seven-year recording hiatus, they're staunch Brit-pop old-guardists, lacing their reincarnated riffs with sacred cowbell, goopy gospel singers and scads of sitar (which is pretty darn classic rock when you think about it), and covering both the Kinks and Manfred Mann (who knew "The Mighty Quinn" sounded so much like "Brimful of Asha"?) Back in business: Still sounding most fundamentally like themselves, with quirks sanded down only slightly, the 'Shop can still churn out an unbeatable summer soundtrack.
-------2008
As singular and imposing as their name foretells, U.K. trio A Mountain of One wholeheartedly embody the spirit of transcendent psychedelia, with all the beauty, lushness, grandiosity, pomposity, and ridiculosity that entails. The cosmic forefathers conjured in these grooves -- Tangerine Dream, Pink Floyd, Ash Ra Tempel -- may be fairly oft-cited as influences, but rarely have they been echoed with such solemn, magisterial fervor. The group's links to the space-case electronic purveyors of the Scandinavian neo-Balearic wave (artists like Lindstrøm, Low Motion Disco, Meanderthals, and, in particular, balmy noodle-meisters Studio, who've remixed their "Brown Piano") are readily evident as well, but despite the burbling disco grooves lazily coursing through many of these cuts, and the synth-kissed cover of Ginny's 1985 Italo-disco slow burn "Can't Be Serious," Mountain of One aren't exactly a dance act. It doesn't seem quite right to call them a full-fledged rock band, either (for one thing, all three core members are credited with programming in addition to various live instruments), but perhaps that's because moody, spacious synth odysseys, epically extended guitar explorations, and somberly intoned, quasi-spiritual vocals just aren't the sorts of things we expect from rock bands anymore. The "works" collected here -- two five-track EPs and a pair of new songs -- span driving, flamenco-assisted Latin-psych bombast ("Ride"), unabashedly soppy soft pop schmaltzballs ("Your Love Over Gold"), hypnotically free-floating flights of cosmic fancy ("Warping of the Clocks," "Arc of Abraham"), and even a few properly vocal-driven songs (the beatless, blearily blissed-out "Freefall" and the sublimely soaring "Innocent Line," whose gossamer disco-rock amble is stretched out to more than double its length with the Air-ish instrumental reprise) whose potently simple melodies slowly wend their way into your skull. Whether this is just the stuff to fuel your personal rocketship, or whether you find it all a bit too bloated and overbearing to handle, ultimately comes down to a question of taste -- not, clearly, these dudes' chief preoccupation -- but for those willing to climb aboard, Collected Works makes for a spectacularly smooth ride. Either way, it's hard to deny that A Mountain of One are an exceptional band, working with a level of ambition that doesn't come along nearly often enough and -- equally rare -- the chops and the commitment to see it fully realized.
A covers album of a particularly personal stripe, Adem Ilhan's third solo record has all the intimacy and hand-crafted charm of a beloved mixtape, bringing the warmth of spirit and imaginative acoustic palette of his earlier works to bear on a handful of his favorite songs from the formative period (for Adem himself and for indie music in general) between 1992 and 2001. Anyone who was an ardent follower of the burgeoning "alternative" scene during these years should find something to smile at among Adem's song choices, which cover many of the era's big names (Smashing Pumpkins, PJ Harvey, Björk) but steer clear of familiar hits in favor of more obscure single sides and album tracks. Despite a fair breadth of source material (given the constraints of time and milieu), Takes functions quite cohesively on its own terms, and there's plenty to enjoy here whether or not listeners are familiar with the original versions. Many of the picks play to Adem's strengths in obvious (and thoroughly effective) ways -- the fluid, melodic guitar lines of Pinback ("Loro") and Bedhead ("Bedside Table") translate naturally to his layered acoustic picking style, while the spare, serenely transcendent emotionalism of Low's "Laser Beam" and Yo La Tengo's "Tears Are in Your Eyes" make a fine fit for his achingly rich, just-slightly-gritty voice (which, if anything, is perhaps a tad forceful for these utterly delicate songs.) Other selections involve a bit more reinvention -- it's no surprise to see Tortoise on the track listing, given Adem's post-rock backstory with Fridge, but he twists the lengthy rarity "Gamera" to his own unexpected ends, using the original track's introductory guitar figure as a launch-pad for a fast-and-loose free-folk excursion. Most intriguing, and perhaps the album's standout moment, is his Aphex Twin homage, which combines two tracks off The Richard D. James Album, smoothing out the freakish vocals of "To Cure a Weakling Child" and grafting them onto an impressively detailed acoustic transcription of "Girl/Boy Song," with surprisingly mellow, cheerful results. Elsewhere, dEUS ("Hotellounge") and the Breeders ("Invisible Man") get stripped of their rougher, grungier elements in favor of lusciously thick arrangements replete with glockenspiel, harmonium, piano, and an array of plucked string instruments -- all of which, along with dulcimer, Autoharp, violin, and assorted found percussion, make up the bountiful sonic trick bag from which Adem draws intuitively and judiciously throughout the album. Not an especially consequential offering, but a tremendously lovable one, Takes may be aptly and cleverly titled (punning on at least three senses of the word), but it's absolutely an act of giving on multiple levels as well: a showcase for the considerable musical gifts of its creator, a sincere token of tribute to his inspirations, and a generous treat for his listeners.
-------2005
There were some glimmers of articulate clarity and likably wry charm amid the mumblings and meanderings of Why?'s first full-length, Oaklandazulasylum, but they hardly anticipated the dramatic leap forward into approachability that marked their second. ("Their" because, between the two albums, Why? had mutated from an arty quasi-rap solo project alias to a full-fledged if hardly conventional indie rock band) Though still far from easily digestible, the challenges Elephant Eyelash presents aren't so much about trying to piece together a head-scratchingly oblique, willfully incomplete puzzle as simply taking the time to process and integrate its veritable flood of musical and, especially, lyrical content, an outpouring suggestive of a long-withdrawn, self-absorbed introvert who's suddenly become desperate to communicate with the world. What gets communicated -- in essence, the manifold nooks and crannies of Yoni Wolf's psyche -- is by turns playful, philosophical, insecure, morbid, and sentimental, and while that communication is still happening on Wolf's own terms -- which means reams of voluble verbiage peppered with nerdy absurdities, cleverly convoluted wordplay, and free-associative filigree, usually delivered in a nasal, over-articulated singsong that was really his only viable remaining link to hip-hop (and a pretty tenuous one at that) -- the upshot is a singularly striking set of images and insights well worth the scrutiny. Somewhere between intimate journal entries and free-form poetry, these songs float from factual, anecdotal snapshots -- like a vivid depiction (in the opening verse of "Sand Dollars") of watching a water-based graffito dissolve in the rain, or the casual specificity of "Yo Yo Bye Bye"'s scene-setting opening lines: "I was walking through San Antonio before soundcheck/looking for some pole to do pull-ups on" -- to probing meditations on aging and mortality (brooding closers "Act Five" and "Light Leaves"), inscrutable phantasmagoric whimsy ("The Hoofs"), and coded but no-less-heartfelt ruminations on love, loss, memory, and the alarming intensity of human connection (perhaps most affectingly on the wonderfully imagistic "Gemini (Birthday Song)." The subject matter can get fairly weighty, sure, but it's tempered by Wolf's deft balance of wit and sincerity, and by the delicately skewed indie pop backing of his bandmates. Indeed, Elephant Eyelash's music is nearly as remarkable and distinctive as its words; wispy, crunchy, structurally off-kilter compositions that are difficult to classify but favor a certain ramshackle charm and melodic sweetness, and in a few cases -- among them "Rubber Traits," "Gemini," and especially "Sanddollars" -- wind up feeling oddly, downright anthemic.
