People have been tinkering with the hybrid of electronica and indie rock for a decade, but it took a metal band to perfect the formula. Weilheim, Germany-based band The Notwist released two albums of hardcore and metal in 1989 and 1992. By 1995, however, they had transformed into an indie rock unit that incorporated the experimental electronica of Oval with 12, a prophetic album that anticipated the blip-pop of Schneider TM and Arto Lindsay's shimmering electro-folk fusions. Meanwhile, the infatigueable Markus Acher honed his electronica chops with Valerie Trebeljahr in Lali Puna, and formed the electro-jazz fusion ensemble Tied & Tickled Trio with brother and Notwist mate Micha. The Notwist's fifth album, Neon Golden is the sparkling result of everything they've learned in the flurry of activity. The album begins unassumingly on "One Step Inside Doesn't Mean You Understand" with plucked and bowed strings, and Markus' understated, serenely plaintive voice. Soon a whole slew of acoustic instruments are introduced, from clarinets, saxophones to exotic percussive instruments, along with electronic sounds, while still managing to sound spare and delicate. "Pilot" uses a more traditional indie-pop structure, the sort employed by New Order or The Sea And Cake. The catchy chorus and electrified beats are deceptively simple -- close listening reveals layers of subtle details that make repeated listens endlessly rewarding. "Pick Up The Phone" features another winning vocal melody, this time with crunchy glitch pops and loops, the woodwinds sounding as if they were underwater. "Trashing Days" introduces a banjo of all things, and it somehow works with the judiciously placed Stereolab-like vocal chorus. "This Room" is another stunner, featuring pounding rhythms from Martin Gretschmann (Console), and a nod to Radiohead with vocals occasionally cut-up into a staccato riff. "Solitaire" gives plenty of space between the instruments and beats to focus on Markus' enigmatically melancholy lyrics, his inventive phrasing keeping you hanging on every word. The songs just get better and better. "One With The Freaks" actually builds into a rocking anthem that compels you to shake your fists and sing along to the chorus, "Have you ever/Have you ever been all messed up, have you ever?" Guided By Voices should cover this in their encores. The album rides the peak with the more meditative "Neon Golden" a brilliant, gentle clash between Eastern rhythms and Kraftwerk. The lovely "Off The Rails" glides the album gracefully earthbound, concluding with another surprise, an honest-to-goodness love ballad. "Consequence" is driven by a simple piano melody and hip-hop inspired beats. It's a perfectly beautiful song, leaving you, as the lyrics say, paralyzed, hypnotized, and in love with "the colour, the movement and the spin." Forget the redundancy of "electro-clash," Neon Golden shows how electro-pop can still sound utterly fresh, challenging and accessible.
A concept album based on the love affair of a creature from Greek mythology -- sounds like a descent into prog rock hell worse than anything Dante could dream up. Yet while 24 year-old Parisian Robin Couder (aka Rob) had dabbled in Pink Floyd-ish progressive rock on 2001's Don't Kill, Satyred Love is an entirely different sort of shiny beast. It's a pop song cycle is closer in sound to Air, in spirit to Hall & Oates, and accomplishes what the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds failed to. Really. Like the fabled Satyrs that played flutes for Dionysus, Satyred Love is full of Satyr-like lasciviousness and riot. However, unlike the Satyrs, who are beyond the cares and sorrows of mortal life, Rob digs deep into doubt, heartbreak and misery. On "Introducing A Satyred Love," Rob narrates, his spoken voice sounding uncannily like Serge Gainsbourg. "Godspeed" is a vocoderized prayer asking for protection as the Satyr goes forth into the cold, cruel world of . . . dating, mwa ha haa. Rob sounds like a cross between Depeche Mode and Gary Numan on the synth pop "You & I & My Song." Things truly take off with the appropriately seductive "King Lover," featuring an unforgettable chorus that will most likely stick in your brain for the rest of your life -- "Rock hard in a dirty place/I'll make you someone else/'Cause I'm a king and a lover." Seeds of doubt enter in the pop gem "Never Enough" -- "You say I'll leave you first/Well you're probably right." "The Wedding Day" repeats the question, "Shall I know if I love you the wedding day?" in the form of an anguished hymnal, and the most achingly gorgeous 5:15 of symphonic pop so far this century. "Mermaid Deluxe" is a meditation on temptation, it's ironic innocence and doo-wop choruses evoking Robert Wyatt. "Love Bizarre" is a chilly instrumental as emotionally convincing as anything by Sigur Rós or Godspeed You! Black Emperor. With a rubbery P-Funk synth riff, "Do You Mind If I Keep On Watching You" pulls off the estimable task of being sexy, creepy and playful all at once -- "Do you mind if I keep on watching you, while your legs' up my shoulder?" The love affair ends with "Unilarme," and "Angels cry for you and me." Indeed, the strings and guitar outro of "Godspeed Reprise" does sound like angels weeping. Pan, the most famous Satyr, who also lost his own beloved, Syrinx, once competed with his pipes against Apollo and his lyre in a musical contest. Despite moral support from Midas, Pan lost. Had he Rob's talent for melody and storytelling, things might have turned out differently.
Perhaps the reason the are still relatively few artists making daring innovations with world music is that they're afraid. Aware of the legacy of colonialism and appropriation, most artists would prefer to leave it alone rather than risk offending entire cultures and religions. Not so with Boston-bred, Barcelona-residing DJ /rupture, who takes samples from Middle Eastern, African and Caribbean artists, paints them in the neon glitter of artless pop like Foxy Brown, Aaliyah and Roberta Flack, bends 'em over the couch and has his way with them, cutting, splicing, spanking with punishing breakbeats. I love it. Each track is a dizzying clash between pop, world beat, and avant-garde, where fellow Tigerbeat6 labelmates Kid 606, DAT Politics and Cex intermingle with Nina Simone and Donna Summer. Agit-pop hip-hoppers Dead Prez, instrumental post-rock stars Cul De Sac and Egyptian percussionist Mahmoud Fadl make notable appearances. Many of the tracks feature dancehall reggae-style toasting over the manic fusions of bhangra, drum 'n' bass and dub rhythms. At times, the narrative thread resembles a bird's nest, as the chaotic din threatens to overwhelm. But Minesweeper Suite manages to effectively space out the bombs with moments of respite, a little jazz riff, or some soulful singing. DJ /rupture's intentions might be similar to Thievery Corporation, but his jagged mixes are far more stimulating than their more processed, yuppie lounge and coffeehouse-friendly style. By being brave enough to abuse the music properly, DJ /rupture ends up paying far more respect to it than anyone who would rather let it suffocate in a glass museum display case. Let's hope this is the blueprint for the future -- battling future shock with shockingly disparate weaves of cultures and genres.
When most hip-hop artists were pretty underwhelming in a live context, The Roots were a breath of fresh air, blowing competition away with their stunning display of musicianship, all with acoustic instruments, a human beatbox, scratching but no sampling. Yet at a time when music was giddy with possibilities in electronica and fusing genres, The Roots were coming across as fairly conservative, their brooding third album, 1996's Illadelph Halflife was even kind of a drag. On Phrenology The Roots set out to break all their self-imposed rules by attempting everything they never would have imagined doing a few years back -- employing sampling, tackling hardcore punk, rock, soul, a prog epic and even pure pop. The result arguably surpasses their critical highwater mark, 1999's Things Fall Apart. "Sacrifice" features a seductive, lazy beat, and the even more alluring Nelly Furtado. "Break You Off" is also startlingly poppy with another mainstream guest star, Musiq. However, it's Black Thought's relentlessly demanding lyrics and emceeing that anchors even the most frivolous moments. "Thought @ Work" is his biggest showcase, where his urgent flow is backed by a funky track worthy of the Bomb Squad. The biggest departure is also the best track on the album, "The Seed (2.0)," featuring a Keith Richards-style rhythm guitar, and an exquisitely melodic Cody ChestnuTT, sounding like the rebirth of Marvin Gaye and Sam Cooke. "Water" is a three-part opus weighing in at 10:24. It starts out innocuously enough with handclaps and rapping, and halfway in gets freaky with ambient noise, a moog, theramin and guitar by no-wave/jazz legend James Blood Ulmer. The album uses two ordinary tracks, "Quills" and "Pussy Galore" to recover. The two hidden tracks are as good as anything on the album, with human beat box Rahzel pulling off the amazing feat of imitating techno on "Something To See." Aside from a couple patience-testing indulgences (Amiri Baraka's poetry slam on "Something in The Way Of Things"), The Roots have finally become not just a group you can admire, but one you can enjoy.
The Walkmen are comprised of ex-members of The Recoys and Jonathan Fire*Eater, a much-hyped New York band that was burned by high expectations and a mismatched relationship with a major label that couldn't have marketed them beyond their cult following if they tried. Older and wiser, The Walkmen focus on what's really important -- the music. Having built their own recording studio with remaining JFE money, they were to take their time and experiment and develop a completely new, unique voice. The teasingly short opener "They're Winning" starts out like it might become a glorious Pogues tune, but stops just as it begins to build up. "Wake Up" establishes the essence of The Walkmen's sound -- spare drums, brittle-to-chiming guitars, muted piano, and Hamilton Leithauser's strong voice, which evokes alternatively Bono circa-October, or Iggy Pop. The rest of the album relentlessly tweaks this formula with dazzling results, starting with the anthemic title track, with an ambient drone, kinetic drums and a soaring vocal melody. "Revenge Wears No Wristwatch" is even better, the simple two-chord guitar gives an unassuming base for more of Letihauser's breathtaking melodies. Briefly, the energy reverts back to the guitar, creating a burst of Wedding Present fury. "The Blizzard Of '96" focuses on the piano and a variety of percussion, giving it the melancholy yet magical feel of being snowed in. "We've Been Had" continues the effect, but with more forceful hooks and melodies, making it single-worthy in an alt-universe. Every song reveals it's own specific, well-written treasures that it's difficult to agree what the best tracks are. Which makes it one of the most consistent albums this year. Other New York bands like Interpol may be more accessible, Radio 4 more blustery and The Liars unruly, but The Walkmen appear to be the most deeply talented, and destined for great things. Keep this fantastic, wintry album on heavy rotation 'til Spring, or when the Nick Cave album comes out, whichever comes first.
I haven't heard a heavily 60s-influenced album as fun as The Coral since The Dukes Of Stratosphere's 1985 album 25 O' Clock. Unlike XTC's alter-ego, however, The Coral are not an established group of geezers taking a break from their "serious" albums. Instead, they're a bunch of 19-21 year-olds who are desperately serious. Their honest-to-goodness rock 'n' roll spirit is utterly convincing when most bands would only come across as genre tourists. The Coral's secret weapon is frontman James Skelly, one of the better new voices in rock, whose powerful pipes recall The Animals' Eric Burdon, The Original Sins' J.T. and The La's Lee Mayers. Coming from the seaside village of Hoylake, it's appropriate that they start off with the sea shanty "Spanish Main," -- "We've set sail again!/We're heading for the Spanish Main!" -- setting out to pillage and cherrypick the best aspects of music that peaked twenty years before they were born. "Shadows Fall" is a reggae waltz that recalls Lee Perry's obsession with spaghetti westerns, while "Dreaming Of You" is a flawless moment of teenage lust Merseybeat. "Simon Diamond" is another highlight, a psychedelic story rich with bizarre imagery, swooping harmonies and odd time signatures. "Skeleton Key" continues the mariner imagery, re-imagining Captain Beefheart's Magic Band circa 1967 as coked-up pirates. "Wild Fire" is only slightly less crazed, adding a tinge of melancholy to The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. "Waiting For The Heartaches" grows with repeated listens -- here Skelly sounding like Ian McCulloch as a mod soulman. The closest thing to a misstep is "Bad Man," which oddly sounds like David Lee Roth. Nevertheless, it's all great fun. Pillaging the Nuggets collections is not the most original idea, yet somehow, miraculously, The Coral make it all sound fresh and exciting again. Best stop wondering why or how, and just enjoy for now.
As the first instrumental hip-hop album to be released on Def Jux, there was much anticipation and hype built up about Rjd2's Deadringer, the flames fanned by label honcho El-P who claimed it'll change the world. Based on the grimy, dissonant worlds of Aesop Rock, Cannibal Ox and El-P, one might expect a frightening beast of an album to perhaps rival Amon Tobin. Not quite. In fact, the unfulfilled expectations may be a blessing, as much of the Def Jux roster is sometimes more easily admired than enjoyed. Deadringer begins menacingly enough with "The Horror," recalling both the horror-funk of Gravediggaz and the underrated Never Is Now by DJ Swamp, though the cheesy synth evokes Dr. Who more than The Exorcist. Its use of spoken vocal clips is as ingenious as last year's "Frontier Psychologist" by the Avalanches. "Smoke & Mirrors" sets the general tone for the rest of the album, which is heavily influenced by DJ Shadow's Endtroducing, and surprisingly, the more downbeat, melancholy moments of Moby's Play. This isn't a bad thing once you remember how good that album sounded before its soul was sold to score every commercial aired in 2000-01. What sets Rjd2 apart from DJ Shadow and Moby are his wisely chosen vocal samples, which are never repeated too often, like the enigmatic "Who knows what tomorrow will bring/Maybe sunshine, maybe rain/Maybe it'll bring my love to me." Samples of acoustic guitars, pianos, and big brassy horns provide a warm, soulful, bluesy tone to cuts like the standout "Ghostwriter," with "mmm hmms" and "aaahs" seemingly coming from the ghosts of a gospel choir from the turn of the century, but with a funky James Brown "Mother Popcorn"snare beat. Three MCs - Blueprint, Jakki and Copywrite - each guest on a cut. All three are strong, but Copywrite's "June" comes out on top. It starts with some fairly ordinary rapping, but quickly slips into a sublime reverie with gorgeous classical acoustic guitar. "Work" ends the album on another peak, with a haunting piano loop and expertly integrated jazz guitar and a gritty soul vocal that sounds like an amazing hybrid of Ray Charles and Otis Redding, singing "Something you got babe/Make me work all day…make me bring you all of my things." Yet there's more -- a bonus track with another jewel of a vocal that this time recalls Sam Cooke, repeating a phrase of haiku-like simplicity about yearning for his missing lover over strings, horns and the subtle psychedelic touch of a sitar. More nudging things forward than blazing trails, Deadringer may not be the revolutionary album Def Jux heads hoped for, but it's by far the most satisfying, offering far more satisfying poetic magic than the latest by Prefuse 73, Mr. Scruff, Boom Bip, and even DJ Shadow.
The nearly oppressive massiveness of Out From Out Where brings to mind not so much anything currently coming from the electronica/turntablist scene as the coming of H.P. Lovecraft's terrifying Cthulu. It's easy to imagine such a beast coming from the unfathomable mind of an alien creature rather than a relatively unassuming kid from Brazil who first made his name in the British drum 'n' bass scene under the nom de plume, Cujo. 1996's Adventures In Foam introduced the fire of be-bop and free jazz into the genre so skillfully that by the time Tobin released his beat-crazy albums Bricolage (1997) and Permutation (1998) under his own name, he was being invited to perform at jazz festivals. No mere jazz-junglist, Tobin leapfrogged over contemporaries like Alex Reece, u-Ziq, Autechre and Squarepusher by incorporating Brazilian music, classical, psychedelia, metal and god knows what else into a brilliant, seamless whole, all with analog samples. Out From Out Where minces the samples even more finely so that it's virtually impossible to trace the source of any one sound. The result is Tobin's most thematically cohesive work, a cold, black marble monolith of astral funk. While the pieces aren't as charming and easily enjoyable as those on 2000's Supermodified, its invocation of epic dread is awe-inspiring. Taking cues from the cyber-dub of Techno Animal, the menacing "El Wraith" and dinosaur stomping "Rosies" feature "When The Levee Breaks" drums deep enough to make you feel the back of your eyeballs vibrate. But the overall heaviness is conveyed through sonic density more than bludgeoning beats. That's not to say every moment is heavy-handed. "Verbal" out-does Prefuse 73 in its nimble treatment of spliced vocals. Above the skittering beats and bleeps of "Chronic Tronic" floats an ethereal melody, handled with subtlety that could only be matched by perhaps Mouse On Mars. "Mighty Micro People" is delicate like a flower that, upon closer examination is made of fibers of wire and scrap metal. "Proper Hoodidge" sounds as if you're eavesdropping on an ancient Egyptian funeral ritual as giant aliens supervise the construction of pyramids in the background. Whispers of ancient Arabic Indian classical melodies squirm just below the surface throughout the album, particularly in the multi-layered "Searchers." "Triple Science" exudes that particular claustrophobia of space madness -- you know the kind, when the navigator robot is humping your leg and the mutant guinea pig is driving the ship towards a nearby black hole. With such a singular mood, the album may not get as much play as something more emotionally diverse and satisfying as DJ Shadow's Endtroducing, and will not appeal to everyone. But the genius of Out From Out Where is that it is so is richly evocative of different panoplies of images every few seconds. Forget John Williams and Danny Elfman, any director planning their magnum opus space-horror opera would be an idiot not to go directly to Amon Tobin, the 21st century virtuoso sound designer against whom all else will be measured.
Despite the unexceptional name, My Computer is the latest victory in the campaign to humanize electronica. As artists like Daft Punk, know, it's a difficult thing to achieve and avoid the blahs of conventional songwriting. It helps if you're a duo from the currently chic working class industrial town of Manchester, with physics geek Dave Luke programming beats that are original yet sound familiar. Then there's that voice. Lazy sods will compare Andy Chesters's (former One Lady Owner) uncommonly high quaver to Jeff Buckley, but more astute ears might also hear Feargal Sharkey, Green Gartside from Scritti Politti, and Tahiti 80's Xavier Boyer. From squirming between the sheets ("Fill My Cup") to dodging trouble in the streets ("Majic Flat," "No More Dealing"), My Computer cover similar lyrical territory to Mike Skinner/The Streets' dole life and rave nostalgia. Sonically eclectic, the songs continue to astound after repeated listening. The nine-plus minute opener "All I Ever Really Wanted Was A Good Time" delivers by morphing from a vocoderized voice to bubbly synth pop, acoustic strumming, a furious junglist breakdown, bluesy "Sister Ray" organ and back to the voice -- a journey all the more remarkable for its cohesiveness. One ballsy epic down, and the album only gets better. "More To Life" enters with some baroque classical piano before kicking in with breakbeats laced with delicately plucked flamenco guitar, and Chester's songbird voice dramatically enters clear and strong. "Rope" and "Vulnerabilia" are blissful synth pop tunes frosted with soulful melodies and bluesy arpeggios. The production is warped with a slight sheen of shimmering psychedelia, making the tunes more enduring. When "For Somebody Else" threaten to float away in bliss-out, it jars you back to reality with punishing industrial beats. "No More Dealing" plays like a religious hymnal, a 21st century junkie's prayer. "There Are Ways" is Vulnerabilia's gorgeous, melodic apex. The skittering "I Don't Care How You Treat Me" sounds like the masochistic answer to Super Furry Animals' sadistic "No Sympathy." The album ends perfectly with the over-the-top Disney cheeseball lullaby of "If You Dare." Exquisite.
Liam Hayes has been simmering just under the surface of the music world for a decade, contributing to recordings of Will Oldham's Palace Songs and Bobby Conn's 1998 imaginary Jesus Christ Superfly musical Rise Up!, while producing teasers of his creative genius in the lushly produced chamber pop single "Found A Little Baby" (1994) and the surprisingly spare piano ballads of More You Becomes You (1998) under the Plush moniker. Fed is the ambitious masterpiece Hayes has been rumored to be working on for the past eight years. Laying low, possibly going mad, presumed missing until spotted playing piano in High Fidelity, Hayes deserves more than cult notoriety. More accomplished than the Curtis Mayfield-inspired symphonic soul of fellow Chicagoan Neal Rosario's National Trust, Fed measures up to the best seventies arrangements with the assistance of arranger Tom Tom MMLXXXIV (Tyrone Davis, Earth Wind & Fire). The sheer scope of talent involved on this album is astounding, from jazz drummer Morris Jennings, John McEntire (Tortoise, Sea And Cake), to a cast of dozens contributing congas, tablas, choirs, horns, winds and strings. Hell may have just frozen over, because these sessions were partly engineered by the notoriously anti-lushness Steve Albini. It turns out to be a wise choice. In any other recording situation, the bombastic extravagance could easily collapse under its own weight. Without unnecessary production effects cluttering the recording, these songs sparkle rather than sag. While composers like Brian Wilson, Jim Webb, Laura Nyro, Harry Nilsson, Van Dyke Parks and even George Harrison provide some precedent, Fed is no mere genre period exercise. Muscular chord changes and daring twists of keys keep you on edge for every tune, establishing Haye's original, slightly off-kilter style. The opening number "Whose Blues" has at least three surprising turns, going from a lonesome, bluesy guitar to a hard-hitting R&B horn section, a downbeat bridge and chorus Lennon would be proud of, and a soaring orchestral false-ending, interrupted by rapping and eventually wailing. It's a mighty satisfying, total knockout first track. "Greyhound Bus Station" is easily the catchiest song, and not surprisingly the most straightforwardly melodic. From sublime Bacharach-type ballads to pop gems and symphonic barnstormers, there's simply too much going on in this album to give a complete description. Suffice it to say it deserves far better distribution and promotion than the Japanese-based After Hours label can give it. This album is far too great to be merely talked about. It belongs in the stocking of every lover of cleverly composed, meticulously arranged, beautiful sung music.
A couple years into the new-new wave/no wave/post-punk revival, now referred to ridiculously as "electroclash," a band has finally measured up to original inspirations like P.i.L., ESG, Liquid Liquid, 23 Skidoo, and Adrian Sherwood's dub explorations. In fact, the six-year old Out Hud, formerly from Sacramento, now in Brooklyn, have even managed to, as The Streets' Mike Skinner says, push things forward. The sometimes members of !!! (Chik Chik Chik) have managed to take elements of early 80s electro-funk and created something unique. The long vocal-less tracks all feature some sort of danceable beat, but not in the boring 4-4 house-style club automatrons are used to. Swirling in between the funk, dub, and hip-hop style breakbeats are finely textured elements acknowledging the post-rock 'n' prog excursions of Disco Inferno and Tortoise, cut 'n' click electronica, and even the monochromatic guitars of Factory Records pioneers The Durutti Column. The album's centerpiece is the 12:19 minute "The L Train Is A Swell Train And I Don't Want To Hear You Indies Complain," which near the end pays homage to Tortoise's equally ambitious "Djed" with its lovely organ and strings near the end. The shorter but no-less stunning "Hair Dude, You're Stepping On My Mystique," is a haunting death disco with scratching, staccato strings and eerie minor-chord guitars, laced with flashes of noise. "Dad, There's A Little Phrase Called Too Much Information" also incorporates controlled bursts of static noise to its gnarly skeleton. While S.T.R.E.E.T. D.A.D. incorporates some noise elements, it less jarring and more accessible than, say, Kid 606 or Black Dice. "This Bum's Paid" features an echoing, James Blood Ulmer-style harmolodic guitar on a bed of nocturnal drones and, of course, a funky beat. These are well-constructed songs that move from point A to B rather than meander aimlessly, holding up well under the scrutiny of headphones, as background music, and dance music. I imagine Out Hud's live show could turn the most uptighty of arm-folding indie cognoscenti into foolishly tail-shaking robo-bunnies on the dancefloor. It would be a great idea if Out Hud shared their rhythmic and atmospheric innovations with other artists like a 21st century house band à la The Meters, The M.G.'s, The Bar-Kays and The J.B.'s. No offense to the Neptunes or Timbaland, but the next pop start to upstage Missy Elliott needs Out Hud on their side. It's about time music starts sounding like it's the 21st century.
In one of the more startling metamorphoses in recent memory, Dirk Dresselhaus's Schneider TM went from the vocal-less blip-pop pioneer on 1998's Moist to a post-electronica crooner hearthrob. The momentous event was on the 2000 Binokular EP, where he and collaborator Kpt.Michi.Gan boiled down The Smith's "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" to its glittering, twee, vocoderized essence as "The Light 3000." Glitchtronica finally found a heart. Five out of the eight songs on Zoomer feature well-written, heartfelt lyrics that outperform Beck's "Sea Change" for heart-wrenching effect. Particularly on "Abyss," on which Dresselhaus sings in a remarkably Beckian voice, "Better not discover/the secrets of your lover/the abyss of your lover." "Frogtoise" sounds like a combination of Beck and Sparklehorse, complete with graphic zoomorphic imagery ("I had a dream/I cut a frog in half/and a turtle too/…to plant the top/of the tortoise on/the poor frogs base"). "Reality Check" is the real stunner, packing as much emotional whallop as "The Light 3000," singing in a similar vocodor-treated voice over folky, treated guitars, "beware of the matrix/and keep a warm heart inside/don't jump off the train/there's still a long way to ride." The music remains electronic, done in the Schneider TM style that is just as glowingly, glisteningly elegant as Björk's Vespertine. "DJ Guy?" is an entrancing Kraftwerkian track that repeats one line over and over. "Turn On" is the biggest departure, featuring Kool Keith meets UK garage-style rapping by Max Turner. It sounds slightly out of place amidst the teutonic pop, but is quite good, suggesting that Dresselhaus could make some even more fascinating collaborations with, say, an R&B singer. "Hunger" and "999" are state-of-the-art blip pop, bristling and jolting, buzzing and scratching with microscopic details like electrified hairs on the back of your hand. Zoomer closes with its second best highlight, the lovely, mournful "Cuba TM." More substantial than Air, less experimental than Oval or Amon Tobin, Schneider TM is electronica's next worthy shining pop ambassador.
It's been far too long since the last Portishead album, and a crime to keep the talents of chanteuse Beth Gibbons away from the public ears for that long. Fortunately, she had made a lasting impression on former Talk Talker Paul Webb (aka Rustin' Man) when she auditioned for his post-rock band O'Rang in 1990. Out Of Season has little in common with Portishead or O'Rang. The instrumentation is brittle, spare chamber music, focusing on Gibbons' remarkably versatile vocals which evoke, among others, Sandy Denny, Joni Mitchell ("Show"), and Billie Holiday ("Romance"). The album starts with the aching, fragile lullaby of "Mysteries." Background vocals softly coo alongside a gingerly picked acoustic guitar. A deceptively slight beauty, it might be the best song on the album. "Tom The Model" is by far the showiest tune, with Gibbons belting out a chorus over a bevy of horns. A somber piano, flute and unobtrusive cello propels "Show," and Gibbons' quietly devastating vocal performance. "Sand River" brings to mind Nick Drake's autumnal folk ballads, while "Drake" directly pays tribute to him. While on the surface Out Of Season is a folk album, it also evokes timeless music from nearly every decade, from Frank Sinatra to Chet Baker and Nina Simone. Hm, folk that transcends folk. That would put it in the league of Tim Buckley and Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, no kidding.
Sigur Rós' second album, 2000's Ágaetis Bryjun was a stunningly original breath of fresh air. There's been much anticipation for ( ) and it might be unclear at first listen whether it's a success. On one hand, it's different than its predecessor, in that the compositions are less dynamic and bombastic. This can be a good thing, as some of Ágaetis Bryjun's drama was too much. However, it's not THAT different. Jonsi Thor Birgisson still sings in that made-up "Hopelandic" tongue, and this time it sounds like he's in a bit of a rut, as it sounds like he's repeating something that sounds like "you so" or "you saw the light" in dozens of minutely different ways. There are no major changes in instrumentation besides less reliance on strings. Ironically, the major focus has been the lack of the album's title and song titles, which were supposedly to force listeners to focus on the music more, and to add their own creative input. Yet it seems to have done just the opposite -- distract from the music. Newflash -- most non-musician listeners don't want to give creative input. They want the artist to tell them what the art is called, to have at least some hint as to what it means. To that end, I will refer to the songs by the names that were originally given them during live shows and early recording sessions. The album starts off nicely with the hymnal-sounding "Vaka." In fact, much of the album sounds like hushed religious music. Think of it as an alternative soundtrack to The Last Temptation Of Christ, or an atmospheric holiday album, or a ceremony for out-of-body travel. In this respect, ( ) is decidedly more delicate and pretty than the predecessor. Reports that this album would be rawer and rougher are completely unfounded. "Samskeyti" (track 3) has some nice piano and strings and builds to a modest peak before fading away like a comet's tail. "Njósnavélin" (track 4) features Kjartan Sveinsson's chiming guitar that's similar to some of U2's Daniel Lanois/Brian Eno-produced work, or Tim Buckley's Starsailor-era Lee Underwood. The sonic terrain is nothing new, but it's the best distillation of Sigur Rós' formula. "Alafoss" (track 5) ever-so-slowly builds to yet another subtle climax, a bit reminiscent of Godspeed You Black Emperor, this time focusing on a churchy organ. "E-bow" (track 6) focuses on said instrument, with Birgisson's vocals reaching a high falsetto. The best and longest tracks come at the end, with the 12:59 minute "Dauðalagið (The Death Song)" (track 7), which releases an album's worth of pounding hellfire and fury right at 10:30. The closer, "Popplagið (The Pop Song)" is hardly pop, but a sad waterfall of emotion that again climaxes into a furious percussive assault and howling banshee wails. It would sound quite nice amplified with a city's worth of electricity in a large canyon. While overall not as appealing as fellow Icelanders Múm's latest, ultimately ( ) more than makes up for its few shortcomings with sheer force of passion and beauty. Think of ( ) as the Amnesiac to Ágaetis Bryjun's Kid A, one of two essential sides of a brilliantly shiny coin.
The Black Heart Procession's first three albums contain some of the most uncompromisingly, deliciously grim music you'll ever hear. One step closer to the abyss could send them tripping into the void, or at least falling flat into self-parody. Fortunately, they have circumvented that dilemma by coming up with a wonderfully entertaining concept album, a richly orchestrated noir murder mystery. Borrowing from Nick Cave's brilliant storytelling and Gallon Drunk's lushly produced recent work, Amore Del Tropico attempts to tell an Elmore Leonard-type crime story. The lyrics fail to do so (they completely lack character development, for example), at least in comparison to Tom Waits albums like Frank's Wild Years, The Black Rider and Blood Money. It does work in the more traditional role as a soundtrack. In fact, a DVD is reportedly due to come out with a film to go with each song. "Tropics Of Love" is a brilliant Calexico-style bossa nova/Cuban mambo fusion. Paulo Zappoli (aka Pal Jenkins) expands his vocal repertoire beyond his normal wails to some soft balladry and even some melody. "Broken World" sets the scene with an affair ending in paranoia ("I know that you want to get rid of me/I know that you have a plan for me"). "Why I Stay" maintains a country-mex flavor, but savors it at a slower tempo. "The Invitation," "Did You Wonder" and "Sympathy Crime" establish the action with some of the Procession's most solid tunes, effectively suggesting the settings that the stories convey. "The Visitor" and "The Waiter #4" hark back to the dirges of the band's earlier work, but with more elaborate arrangements. "A Cry For Love" is a particularly provocative, foreboding piece that does a dance of death to a tango/waltz rhythm. "Only One Way" ups the pace to a trot if not full gallop, "Fingerprints" is a clever string-driven ditty, and the album closes with the ballad of regret, "The One Who Has Disappeared." One mystery may or may not be solved, but the answers to the enigma of love and broken hearts are left open and bleeding, as they should be.
What's so strange about listening to The Aluminum Group is that they sound like one of those timeless, hugely popular 80s pop bands that everyone knows. Yet rather than being bigger than the Pet Shop Boys, brothers John and Frank Navin are practically unknown, even in their native Chicago. Already on their fifth album with Happyness, the brothers are at a peak, seamlessly integrating Love, Steely Dan, Style Council, Bacharach, The Divine Comedy, Magnetic Fields and many other influences into clean, shiny new constructions, not unlike the Ray Eames furniture line the band took their name from. Self produced and engineered by Tortoise's John McEntire, Happyness is somewhere between the ambitious orchestral pop of the Jim O'Rourke-produced Pedals (1999) and the electronica-heavy John Herndon produced Pelo (2000). With assistance from members of Chicago's Tortoise, The Sea And Cake and Rebecca Gates, The Aluminum Group move from strength to strength in the spare electro pop of "Tiny Decision" the synthetic popcorn percussion and muted horns of "I Blow You Kisses" and sweet harmonies in "Pop" that Prince would die for. Succinctly witty, often wryly funny lyrics, impeccable arrangements, infectious melodies, hooks galore, a soothing production sheen, there's much to like here. Planned as the first part of a trilogy, god only knows if their audience will have caught up to this brilliant pop band by their eighth album.
The Flaming Stars are a real garage band. Not in the sense of that generic, vaguely post-mod, Nuggets style that is so popular right now. We're talking garage steeped in the Americana of 50s Elvis, western soundtracks, surf rock, The Velvet Underground and The Cramps. On their fifth album, former Gallon Drunk Max Décharné has taken tighter reigns on the songwriting after the somewhat slicker experiments on Walk on the Wired Side (2001). There's still plenty of nourish gloom and romantic tragedy, but the overall sound is more stripped down. Sunset & Void features two particularly delicate ballads in "Mansion House Blues" and "Five For The Road." But even the rockers are fairly low key. "Midnight Train" and "Killer In The Rain" simmer like Elvis with a dose of gothic dread. The maracas, marimba and harpsichord on "Mexican Roulette" recall the desert-baked mariachis of Calexico. The band takes the opportunity to rave on their surfabilly chops on "Baby Steps," which favors a shreddingly distorted guitar amidst tinkling ivories and acoustic accompaniment, and "Killjoy." "The Long Walk Home" is particularly impressive mood piece, with pounding bass and drums, menacing piano and handclaps. More mannered than their Songs from the Bar Room Floor (1996) and two singles collections, Sunset & Void is an enjoyably dark, gritty mood piece. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds fans who are impatient waiting for the band to get back to rocking are well advised to check out The Flaming Stars.
Once deemed as the most powerful live band on the planet, Godspeed You! Black Emperor has much to live up to with their third full-length album. And like Sigur Rós, it's hard to say for sure if those expectations were met or not, or surpassed. At 75 minutes and no distractions like tape loops, it's certainly a long, intense ride. It's by far a more difficult listening experience than any previous GY!BE album. Engineered by Steve Albini, it sounds like he encouraged clarity if not brevity. Whereas their music is generally quite dramatic, the changes on Yanqui U.X.O> don't happen as much as they evolve, glacially, like plate tectonics only slightly quicker. The sixteen-and-a-half minute "09-15-00" starts out in familiar territory, achieving a noticeable buildup and climax of chords and quickened rhythms. The second, shorter part is all freefall afterglow. It's as if it can only be appreciated if you meditate and slow your pulse down to the pace of the song. If you manage it without passing out, the reward might be akin to catching a comet on video and getting to watch it in slo-mo. "Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls" has a plucking guitar that borrows fairly obviously from a Beethoven fugue, which is eventually obscured by strings and cacophonous noise, fading into a classical woodwind interlude and another slightly less noisy, orchestral reprise. After that slightly confounding twenty-minute piece, the heart and soul of GY!BE finally gel in "motherfucker=redeemer." Like the best moments on Sigur Rós' ( ), we're taken to church in a grandiloquent display of energy, from furiously sawing strings to dazzlingly swirling, interlacing guitars. The beautiful moment ends all too soon, though the ten-minute aftermath is sufficiently engaging to retain the rush. The second part feels less necessary, though it manages to reach one more decent climax. This high-tension music is not recommended as background music, so it might be difficult to take the time to absorb it and appreciate it at an appropriately loud volume. Hard core devotees who invest the time should be pleased. Everyone else should refer to earlier albums. Given the band's lack of lyrics, it seems their political agenda is fairly irrelevant, though the illustrated sleevenotes are fairly interesting. Amidst arrows connecting the major media conglomerates to giant arms-dealing corporations, it explains that U.X.O. is an unexploded ordinance, and that Yanqui represents the multinational corporate oligarchy/post-colonial-imperialist-police state. Cool.
Boom Bip is a Cincinnati-based hip-hop artist who has collaborated with rapper Dose One and remixed for electronica artists Four Tet. Recently signed to the Warp-affiliated hip-hop label Lex, Boom Bip is cleverly negotiating the terrain between hip-hop and electronica. While this type of crossover isn't entirely unprecedented, with Kid Koala, DJ Shadow, Prefuse 73, Boom Bip has already developed a highly unique style, combining scratching with a passion for organic samples. Three vocalists contribute, including "Dose One" ("Mannequin Hand Trapdoor I Remember"), Buck65 ("The Unthinkable") and Nacky Koma's spoken word ("Popsicle"). However, the best moments of Seed To Sun come from Bip's surprisingly gorgeous melodies and soundscapes, such as the serenely lunar "Pulse All Over" and the Boards Of Canada-like "Closed Shoulders." "The Use Of Unacceptable Colors In Nature" incorporates percussion and organ loops to hypnotic effect. Seed To Sun is an extremely promising debut from an artist who's future work just may reach the caliber of DJ Shadow.
Fans of Odelay and Midnight Vultures may be disconcerted by the plaintive breakup album that is Sea Change. It's not that the album doesn't have any fancy cut 'n' paste production. Mutations was fairly simple, yet it made sense as a Beck album. It's more the fact that this time, despite his lip service about Nick Drake and Tim Buckley, Beck sounds at times more like 70s MOR soft rock titans James Taylor and (ew) Gordon Lightfoot. Sea Change seems to have producer Nigel Godrich and Beck's father David Campbell to thank for keeping it from sinking into mediocrity. Godrich provides a shimmering vibe that keeps even the underwhelming "Guess I'm Doing Fine" afloat sonically. Campbell's string arrangements on "Paper Tiger" and "Lonesome Tears" really make the songs come alive. "Paper Tiger" particularly is an enjoyable homage to Serge Gainsbourg. What better way to recover from a broken heart than to take solace with a notoriously womanizing pimp daddy. The middle of the album ("Lost Cause," "End Of The Day," "It's All In Your Mind"), with Beck's dragging, somnambulist vocals, sags a bit. But things pick up at "Round The Bend," a spare haiku that does manage to finally evoke Nick Drake. "Already Dead" sounds like Beck imitating Beth Orton imitating Joni Mitchell, and it's quite good. "Setting Son's" subtle psychedelia and digital tables locks down the appeal of Sea Change. If you think of it as a hazy, lazy drift in the clouds rather than a gut-wrenching anthem of angst, it works much better. The songs are generally fairly original sounding, which is a tribute to Beck's songwriting ability. But let's not go crazy here, they're not his best, nor are they as good as Dylan's Blood On The Tracks, harumph. I'll take clever, inventive wordplay and risky arrangements over clichéd earnestness any day. So buck up Beck -- be a good pop star, date some supermodels and you'll be good as new . . . and be sure to finish that collaboration with Dan "The Automator" Nakamura!
The last thing one would expect the Fat Cat label, home of such original artists as Sigur Rós, Múm, and Mice Parade, to do would be to sign a guitar-based band. The fact that the band is from Oita, Japan and combines distorted loops like Suicide, distorted guitars like My Bloody Valentine and Jesus And Mary Chain ("Kyoro"), and savage static like Merzbow and Aphex Twin makes more sense. Add some sample-ridden synth ("Amaryllis"), Einsturzende Neubauten/Throbbing Gristle-era industrial ("You Died in the Sea"), and you have a hint at the chaotic, eclectic mix of Xinlisupreme's sound. "All You Need Is Love Was Not True" buzzes with a low-tuned droning guitar and an insistent beat, with buried, unintelligible vocals, and some gorgeous guitar on top. "I Drew A Picture Of Myself" recalls the buzzsaw guitars and throbbing bass of The Birthday Party, were they hacked to bits in metal shop. While many of the noisy tunes would be a bit low-fi for some tastes, they hold a lot of promise. Were they to attempt something more produced and coherent, perhaps they'll come up with something to rival some of the recent, stunning work by The Boredoms.
Why is Queens Of The Stone Age the best hard rock band on the planet? Let me count the ways. They assimilate countless disparate influences like Black Sabbath, Hawkwind, Neu!, the Ramones, Black Flag, The Butthole Surfers, The Cows and The Screaming Trees, while sounding like no one else. They avoid the boring clichés of standard aggro-rock, nü metal and stoner rock (Fu Manchu, Monster Magnet, Nebula) and instead unpretentiously describe themselves as psychedelic pop and "robot-rock" (referring to their hypnotic, rhythmic riffing). Rock's best baritone, Mark Lanegan is a member. One of rock's best drummers, Dave Grohl, recorded and toured with them. Each album is better than the last. On their third, Songs For The Deaf, QOTSA expand their already rich, deep, wide palate into a collection of songs so diverse that they felt they needed goofy Who Sells Out style skits to tie the album together, simulating a drive from L.A. along Highway 62 to Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri's hometown of Palm Desert. With or without the skits, the album flows beautifully between blistering punk to gloriously mesmerizing psychedelia, pop and even a sort of Flamenco. Moving from strength to strength, "No One Knows" manages to merge, screaming and karate-chopping, Wire with ZZ Top. In addition to his standard unhinged noise-rock screamers, Oliveri also contributes two of the shockingly catchiest pop songs in "Gonna Leave You" and the downright Monkeys-like "Another Love Song." Lanegan handles lead on two brilliant slices of desolate intensity, "Song For The Dead" and "Hangin' Tree," wandering through the land of the dead, teetering between redemption and damnation. Both rival his stunning highlight of R's "In The Fade." The best songs are Homme's "First It Giveth," "The Sky Is Fallin'," "Go With The Flow" (possibly the best track, though it changes at every listen), the T. Rex glam-stomper "Do It Again," "God Is In The Radio" and the multi-part "Song For The Deaf," certain moments of which evoke the other Queen. Songs For The Deaf features some of the tightest, most accomplished ensemble playing you'll hear this year. Strong songwriting, impeccable sense of dynamics, surprising twists and turns, QOTSA are at the top of their game. Never apologetic about its hedonism, QOTSA nevertheless exude focus and restraint, intent on securing its status as a band that matters, promising to rock us for years to come.
True to its pyrotechnic name, The Fire Show burned brightly and disappeared before hardly anyone noticed. Like This Heat, The Birthday Party, Mission Of Burma and The Pop Group, The Fire Show had their say within three albums or less, destined to be largely ignored at the time only to be deservedly revered later on. They are romantics, believing passionately that art should be expressed in everyday life, not cheapened by commerce and lifestyle marketing. On their website they pay homage to Guy Debord, founder of the Situationist International, and the post-punk "Spirit of '79." Yet they were not part of the recent post-punk revival that includes The Liars, The Rapture, Radio 4, Erase Errata, The Seconds, Ex Models and Life Without Buildings. Rather than mimicking the form, The Fire Show were inspired by the spirit. Sure, there's the occasional hint of Rowland S. Howard (Birthday Party) and Keith Levene's (PiL) buzzsaw guitars, but other than isolated bits, The Fire Show sounds like no one. While the Fire Show existed for only just over two years, the band is actually a culmination of a decade-long creative partnership between Olias Nil and M. Resplendent, who formed the more straightforward indie rock of Number One Cup. Their last album, the taut, stripped-down People, People, Why Are We Fighting? (1999) showed hints at the duo's future with it's Wire and Gang Of Four influences. For The Fire Show, drummer Michael Lenzi stepped out from behind the drumkit to become M. Resplendent, a volatile and electrifying front man. The Fire Show (2000) was a superb debut, summarizing the band's dark, savage live set. Number One Cup quickly seemed like a lifetime away. Above The Volcano Of Flowers (2001), with its blank cardboard sleeve (do-it-yourself cover art was provided via the website) suggested a work in progress, with five long tracks that sound like they were created by improvisation. Called release 1.5, it held up on its own as a satisfying album, with increased use of electronics and sampling. It showed the band was unafraid to experiment, risking failure and delving into ugly sounds along with the beautiful to get their message across.
Saint The Fire Show is even more boldly uncompromising. It starts out a-capella, with "The Making Of Dead Hollow," with Resplendent reciting his poetry, eventually joined by atonal violins and various percussive sounds. The cadence of his delivery and the occasional pan crashes recall Captain Beefheart's "The Dust Blows Forward" and "Well" from Trout Mask Replica. The effect can be disconcerting and uncomfortable, with some relief and release offered in the last couple minutes when the band kicks in and the guitar teases with just a shade of lyrical beauty. "The Rabbit Of My Soul Is The King Of His Ghost" is more beat-driven, with slashing guitar that draws inspiration from the same dark corners as Duane Denison (The Jesus Lizard), with multiple vocal tracks that criss-cross in various states of dissonance. "Brittlebones" is an inspired underwater dub fever dream. "Deviator Feel Like Crook" turns the cliché'd build-and-release dynamic backwards by exploding out of the gate with jagged, crunching aggression and slowly cools like molten lava into a throbbing bass and finally a startlingly lovely acoustic outro. "Dollar And Cent Supplicants" continues the chilly beauty, with gentle, falsetto vocals, subdued instrumentation and piano, while a warped sample of what sounds like an opera singer send shivers shooting up your spine for strikingly original, eerie effect. "The Godforsaken Angels Of Epistemology" and the next three tracks offer a myriad of rewarding surprises that I could fill pages describing. "Magellan Was A Felon" is the most riveting highlight among many, expanding into a wonderful space odyssey that would have Hendrix looking down, smoking his celestial spliff and smiling --finally someone understood where "Third Stone From The Sun" was getting at. Yet the band is economical in the tools they use, with an extremely modest recording budget with which Radiohead would only be able to complete a single bass track. Another surprise is the subdued, brooding cover of "You Are My Sunshine." It's a shock that album is over already, because while some albums make you think everything's already been done, The Fire Show demonstrate there are still infinite possibilities from guitar, bass, drums and sampler, just as there are with say, a paintbrush or word processor. Those lucky enough to see The Fire Show's final tour witnessed the band, stripped down to the core duo, accomplish the most amazing things, starting on the rhythm instruments, sampling and looping, and following their muse. Too difficult and prickly to be absorbed and spit out by any trend, The Fire Show's legacy is destined to be discovered in its ashes by future artists, it's spirit an inspiration for continued creativity and artistic bravery rather than mimicry.
Cutting her musical teeth as a punk rock drummer, Neko Case became a leading light in the alternative country scene with her solo albums The Virginian (1997) and Furnace Room Lullaby (2000). As good as those albums were, something big happened in the last couple years. Whether it was hard touring or she went to the crossroads and sold her soul to the devil, Case has blossomed into a world class songwriter and singer, totally in the league of Patsy Cline, Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn. It's hard to believe this is the same woman who blended in innocuously in the last New Pornographers tour. The songs on Blacklisted range from amazing to devastating. Many of the songs have an added weight of brooding, gothic dread, perhaps rubbed off from Nick Cave when she opened for him. The production makes the album sound like it could have been recorded in the sixties, as if Owen Bradley was at the controls. Except that frankly nothing in the sixties sounded quite this rich and frightening. It was actually recorded in Tuscon with Giant Sand. There are touches of Ennio Morricone's Western desolation, and Wanda Jackson's rockabilly. It's nearly impossible to pick the gems from the jewels, but "Deep Red Bells" is guaranteed to make you melt at its beauty and vivid sensory imagery ("It looks a lot like engine oil, and tastes like being poor and small/And Popsicles in summer"). "Tightly" shimmers like the moonlight in a country pond ("When I'm walking under trees I'm free to covet all I please/New moon's in the alley and it's madness…If I meet you in the night you're free to covet all you like/Don't you try and stop me I cling tightly, to this life.") "Look For Me (I'll Be Around)" covers the same creepy, noirish territory that Eleni Mandell has done so well, but is even more convincingly menacing. "Pretty Girls" even tops it. With its powerful feminist message, it's too bad Patsy Cline didn't live to get a taste of this strength. "I Wish I Was The Moon" wins out as the album's loveliest ballad, while the ferocity of Case's cover of "Runnin' Out Of Fools" gives Aretha Franklin a run for her money, with a soulfully angelic chorus of Kelly Hogan and Mary Margaret O'Hara not far behind. Between the tears and shivers, Blacklisted quite simply blows every country and countryish album out of the water from the past half decade. You know what to do.
Until now, Sleater-Kinney has never had an entire album that has fully measured up to their reputation of greatness. The best songs from their first five albums certainly make for a killer compilation, but now their sixth, One Beat, will force you to expand your best-of to two discs, because there's not a single dud in the batch. "One Beat" stuns within the first verse, Corin Tucker singing with the most explosive conviction she's ever done -- "I'm a bubble in a sound wave/A sonic push for energy/Exploding like the sun/A flash of clean light hope." Here she's the feminized version of Iggy Pop's "streetwalkin' cheetah with a pocketful of napalm," an angry force of nature ready to take over the boys and their phallic war toys ("Should I come outside and run your cars/Should I run your rockets to the stars…Could I turn this place all upside down/And shake you and your fossils out/If I'm to run the future/You've got to let the old world go"). Anger is an energy, and "One Beat" packs one big emotional whallop. "Far Away" more specifically addresses the September 11 terror, Corin nurses her baby, turns on the T.V. and watches "the world explode in flames." The last verse sums it all up with "And the president hides/while working men rush in to give their lives/I look to the sky/And ask it not to rain on my family tonight." "Oh!" changes direction into relationships, sensuality and some really unique harmonizing. On songs like "The Remainder" and "Light-Rail Coyote," the band rocks harder than ever, thanks partly to Janet Weiss, who sounds like she's upgraded her drumsticks to tree trunks, not unlike, dare I say, Led Zeppelin's John Bonham. Other elements like the slightly Middle-Eastern sounding strings also recall Led Zep. "Step Aside" features some Stax-like horns, and on "Combat Rock" Tucker hiccups her way back to politics, providing much-needed skepticism, a sharp relief from all the nauseating flag-waving in the past year -- "Hey look it's time to pledge allegiance/Oh god I love my dirty Uncle Sam…Dissent's not treason but they talk like it's the same." Throughout the album, Carrie and Corin have demonstrated an added level of sophistication in their guitar playing. On the fantastically creepy "Funeral Song," (complete with theramin!) it seems they have absorbed the brilliantly serpentine minor-chord innovations that Mary Timony developed while in Helium. The album closes on another killer, "Sympathy," featuring a bluesy slide guitar, and a nod to the Stones' classic with a "woo woooo" chorus. Here Tucker really lets loose. When she sings "And I'm so sorry/for those who didn't make it/and for the mommies who are left with their heart breaking" you can imagine her whole body quaking, channeling the sad, angry spirit of Janis Joplin. Sleater Kinney's best album, One Beat is not the best they can do. Combine their more accomplished, fuller sound with more heart-wrenching, melodic classics like "Good Things" and "Dance Song '97" and they'd certainly be the world's best rock band rather than "merely" contenders.
The more conservative fans of Austin, TX's Spoon would have you believe that their peak was their second album, 1998's uneven A Series Of Sneaks, it's charms boiled down into the 1:30 "Car Radio." Don't believe a word. Spoon gets better with each album. Last year's acclaimed Girls Can Tell pared down their sound to show off its stronger songwriting. Much like The Dismemberment Plan, Spoon eschews guaranteed crowd-pleasers on their new album, Kill The Moonlight to instead forge ahead and develop their own unique sound. While its melodic charms are not as immediate, it's by far their best album. Their arrangements are wound up so taut and spare, that the few points of comparison are Wire's Pink Flag, The Cure's Boys Don't Cry, and Young Marble Giants' Colossal Youth. And perhaps' Prince's "Kiss." "Small Stakes" starts with a muffled, compressed drumbeat, a tambourine and then a keyboard. Its lyrical buildup suggests a stripped-down Who-like mod anthem. "The Way We Get By" features piano, handclaps, tambourine, and a thick bassline. Soon the drums kick in and the simple piano melody has your head bobbing as you realize this is a stellar Revolver-era Beatles quality tune. "Something To Look Forward To" and "Stay Don't Go" feature enticing melodies that are not overdone and don't overstay their welcome, leaving you hungry for more. The latter is driven by a human beatbox rhythm track, along with other more subtle experiments. "Jonathan Fisk" is the only song that sounds much like older Spoon, with it's insistent rhythm guitar, it's tension expertly built up with drums and an additional guitar. The haunting "Paper Tiger" features a processed, rubbery drum beat, rim shots, a stalking keyboard, dub echoes and jittery strings. It's simple words, "I will be there with you when you turn out the light" are brilliantly affecting. "Someone Something" is memorably catchy, "All The Pretty Girls Go To The City" has some nice falsetto choruses, "You Gotta Feel It" adds horns, and "Back To The Life" strangely rips off the stomp-and-clap of Led Zeppelin's "Boogie With Stu." The brief (34:57) album ends with the lightly psychedelic "Vittorio E," possibly a hint at Spoon's next departure? In the meantime, Spoon's stature will continue to grow as the significance of this album grows over time. A modest masterpiece.
Interpol is a NYC (well, half-British) group of young, privileged, sharp-dressed boys who blatantly draw their influences from one specific era. Sound familiar? The difference is that the scene cognoscenti still seem open to liking them, partly because the hype has not yet risen to hysterical levels, partly because they have such damn good taste in what they plunder. Even better, aside from "Say Hello To The Angels"'s rip-off of The Smiths' "This Charming Man," Interpol manage to carve a (somewhat shallow) niche of their own sound, and it's gorgeous. Joy Division is most often the band cited, mainly because most people (at least the Yanks) aren't really familiar with The Sound, The Chameleons, Teardrop Explodes or Josef K. I'm willing to bet these guys are. The album starts strong with the scintillating "Untitled," with impressive drumming worthy of Radiohead's Phil Selway. On the tense "Obstacle 1," Paul Banks' singing verges on the brink of sobbing, as he seethes with frustration and rage. The floaty and atmospheric "NYC" would fit nicely on Echo & The Bunnymen's Ocean Rain. It's that good. "Stella Was A Diver And She Was Always Down" spells out the requisite doomed relationship with the ultra-depressed girlfriend, but despite the seemingly glib title, the band pulls it off with sincerity, tenderness and passion. Like Joy Division, Interpol could be unfairly pegged as gaudy gloom merchants, when in reality they feature a wide range of powerful emotions, all linked by their intensity. The album winds down with the almost Pixies-ish guitars of "The New," and the elegiac "Leif Erikson." Turn on the Bright Lights is a far better debut by such a young band than anyone could expect since, well, The Strokes. It'll be fascinating to watch them evolve.
Fans of Sixteen Horsepower's powerful Joy Division/Nick Cave brand of gothic country might initially be disappointed by this short effort, which consists of only four originals, and six covers. Much like Nick Cave's Murder Ballads, Sixteen Horsepower seamlessly mix their own songs with old bluegrass and country songs (so old that four of them are traditional, with no specific songwriter given credit), giving them a very contemporary feel in their unique style. Rather than rock out, the band gives the songs a darkly European folk feel (despite its Colorado base, two-thirds of the trio is French). It's the traditional songs that get the most revered treatment, like the epic "Outlaw Song," which evokes the vastness of the foreboding vastness of the 19th century Western frontier. Hank Williams' doomed romance "Alone And Forsaken" is given an appropriately apocalyptic treatment, while The Carter Family's "Single Girl" is shockingly peppy. "Horse Head Fiddle" is given a thoroughly unique arrangement, somewhere between an Indian raga and a Tibetan monk hymn. The album ends with the French waltz, "La Robe A Parasol," confirming Sixteen Horsepower's privileged position, alongside Tom Waits and The Walkabouts, as masterful interpreters and original creators of both Americana and European folk.
In the mid-nineties it seemed certain that Primal Scream was doomed to be remembered as the band who briefly hit at the right time with the house-inspired Screamadelica. 90s post-rave decadence seemed to drag them down to a parody of a Black Crowes cover band, until they awoke from their bad trip with 1997's chaotic yet inspired dub-trash excursion, Vanishing Point. Now into their seventeenth year as a band and settling into family life, it's nice to see artists like Primal Scream and Tom Waits resist slipping into soggy sentimentality. While not as reckless and political as 2000's Xtrmntr's "Swastika Eyes" (the controversial "Bomb The Pentagon" was reworked into "Rise"), Evil Heat remains sharp-edged and feisty. Reuniting with Screamadelica collaborator Andrew Weatherall, Primal Scream are also at their most consistently enjoyable since that album. "Deep Hit Of Morning Sun" is as pleasurable as the title suggests, a light tab of acidized techno laced with sweet harmonies. On the disco-on-steroids "Miss Lucifer" Bobby Gillespie swaggers and leers at his "Panther girl" to give him "evil heat all night long." "Autobahn 66" is an overtly obvious tribute to the space-motorik rhythms of Krafwerk and Neu! that feels more like a segue than a stand-alone piece. Gillespie's former bandmate Jim Reid (The Jesus & Mary Chain) contributes sulky vocals to "Detroit," ironically more a homage to the German proto-industrial D.A.F. than anything from the Motor City. Instead, "The Lord Is My Shotgun" evokes The Stooges' bluesy "Penetration," while "City" mates Bowie's "Suffragette City" with Iggy Pop's "Kill City" with shit-hot rocking results. The slightly depoliticized "Rise" still manages to rant about the government, CNN and "genetically engineered ultraviolence…are you collateral damage or a legitimate target?" to a PiL drone/Stones rhythm, peaking with a symphonic cacophony that could only have been created by the knobs of newest member Kevin Shields (My Bloody Valentine). "Some Velvet Morning" is a surprisingly unironic Lee Hazelwood cover, with breathy choruses by Kate Moss, who's voice is as pretty as the rest of her. "Skull X" manages to marry The Velvet Underground's "Foggy Notion" with My Bloody Valentine to spectacular results. Weatherall's Philip K. Dick-inspired instrumental "A Scanner Darkly" is a tad too similar to "Autobahn 66," but still enjoyable. The album bows out with the gospel ballad "Space Blues #2," referring to Felt's "Space Blues," with that band's Martin Duffy as guest vocalist. Unapologetic about their influences, most of the songs work well because no matter how many bands are blended and microwaved into them (Cabaret Voltaire, A Certain Ratio, Can) they still manage to bear the recognizable stamp of Primal Scream. Noisy, fun, a bit short, Evil Heat is only as revolutionary and explosive as a bomb pop on a hot summer day -- a cool treat rather than a fiery manifesto. Best enjoyed before it melts into a sticky pool on the sidewalk.
Back in the late eighties, it's doubtful that anyone predicted that the shambling Flaming Lips would outlast most of their contemporaries to become venerable art rockers. What sets them apart from fellow indie-statesmen Yo La Tengo and Sonic Youth, is how remarkably the band was initially when it first started in 1983. As much-beloved live performers, the Lips' shows consisted of nearly incoherently psychedelic originals and sloppy, intensely noisy covers of bands like Led Zeppelin. Their evolution was so gradual and smooth, no one blinked an eye when 1999's The Soft Bulletin not only incorporated homages to late sixties Beach Boys, but also Yes' Close to The Edge. More sonic architects than rock band now, The Lips have nevertheless rounded out their revolutionary arc by eschewing an impenetrable, convoluted version of Tales Of Topographic Oceans and have instead produced a more modest, emotional album. Not quite as ambitious and groundbreaking as The Soft Bulletin, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots may ultimately get more playtime than its predecessor, at least here at F 'n' B. Loosely tied together by the band's connections to Japan via culture and friendship, the catalyst for Yoshimi was the unexpected and mysterious death of a friend in Osaka, and their attempt in "It's Summertime" to console her surviving sisters. The result is a Manga-like heroine with a name borrowed from Yoshimi P-We, the drummer of cosmic noise rockers The Boredoms. The songs are less a story than an allegory of mortality, love and friendship, bringing …Bulletin's bleakly existentialist cosmic musings down to earth. The sonic experimentation is still here -- innovative beats and wobbly tones warped by electronica -- but they are so subtly integrated that it's the songs rather than the sounds that stand out. "Fight Test" begins with gladiatorial combat, featuring one of the most infectious melodies The Lips have ever created. "One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21" is just as wonderful, a hypnotic electronic movement with weedy, warbling vocals so warm and earnest that only Wayne Coyne (and perhaps Neil Young) can pull off, convincing us that the robot programmed to kill seems to fall in love with its adversary "'cause it's hard to say what's real- when you know the way you feel." The battle culminates in "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots pt. 2," consisting of repetitive rising and falling electronic bleeps and screeching war cries, ultimately the least satisfying track on the album. The achingly gorgeous, orchestral "In The Morning of the Magicians" more than makes up for it as it ruminates on the relationship of love and hate. To some the sentimentality and optimism in "It's Summertime (Throbbing Orange Pallbearers)," "Do You Realize?" ("that everyone you know will someday die - and instead of saying all of your goodbyes - let them know you realize that life goes fast its hard to make the good things last") may seem glib, but really it shows the band bravely avoiding a cynical façade and simply letting pure emotion wash over them. The extraordinarily uplifting latter song and transcendental "All We Have Is Now" prove how great songwriting can be as powerful and healing as anything. Yoshimi may not bend your mind, but it'll move your soul.
At first listen, Cousteau sounded like a band that aims for the cinematic mood of the Tindersticks and wounded melancholy of Scott Walker, but ends up a bit of the smarmier side of Chris Isaak. It's difficult to believe this slick-sounding, thirty-something, well-dressed, good-looking, MTV (or VH1)-ready band's sad-sack songs of heartbreak and yearning. They seem like the kind of smooth chaps who will have dates lined up with mid-range movie stars. And for sure, after seeing their audience at a live show, the ladies love, LOVE Cousteau. They do fill a somewhat vacant niche of sensitive male crooners of torch ballads. And given a closer look, there just might be something more to them. There's a nice consistency between the blue satin and gold cover art that suggests underwater treasures, and the lushly aquatic imagery of the songs. Australian Davey Ray Moor writes all the songs, and the Irish Liam McKahey, with heavily tattooed arms, a weathered face and mysterious past involving addiction and interior decorating, sings 'em. Every song is impeccably arranged with pianos, strings, stand-up bass. Always tasteful and silky, when the songs work ("Nothing So Bad," "Talking To Myself," "Salome"), they have at least as much sensual and emotional impact as anything by Bryan Ferry or David Bowie. But after a while, the songs bleed into each other and sound too similar. They need a bit more variety, perhaps some whiskey-soaked grit of some seventies Tom Waits, or Nick Cave's darker lyricism. But then again, after all, it is for the ladies. Keep it around and program the best tracks before easing into Al Green, Tim/Jeff Buckley and Jacques Brel.
Arto Lindsay is a national treasure whose music is doomed to be under-appreciated until god knows when. From the pioneering no-wave of DNA to the evocative jazz-noise-funk hybrid trilogy (Envy, Greed, Lust) in Ambitious Lovers, Lindsay was already an underground legend by the early nineties. Invoke is the fifth installment a brilliant series of albums that pay tribute to the fertile creativity of Brazil, where the long time New York resident grew up. Much more than an ambassador/historian of Brazilian bossa nova and Tropicália, Lindsay pushes the boundaries by building on the past with more contemporary influences, and creating a sound that is uniquely identifiable as his own. Invoke is a departure from its bossa nova-oriented predecessors, incorporating a wider variety of rhythms and sounds. "Predigo" is a collaboration with Lindsay's favorite contemporary Brazilian band, Nação Zumbi, whose charismatic leader Chico Science was killed in a car crash in 1997. The track is a dizzying mix of Mahavishnu Orchestra-style jazz fusion, hip-hop, funk, distorted guitars and the maracatu rhythm native to the band's home in Pernambuco, where Lindsay coincidentally also lived. The track follows one of the logical conclusions (or beginnings) hinted at with Lindsay's work in Ambitious Lovers. "In The City That Reads" is the other big departure. It's also a collaboration, with a New York group called Animal Collective (Avey Tare and Panda Bear), who contribute ambient sounds and percussion. The invigorating experimentation aside, overall Invoke is much more direct and easier to listen to than recent albums. Rather than covering Prince and Al Green, in "Illuminated" and "Over/Run" Lindsay subtly incorporates some of the production techniques by mainstream hip hop/soul producers like Timbaland. "Invoke" and "You Decide" buzz and percolate with micro-electronic sound affects, reflecting the glitchy electronica innovations of artists like Matmos (who recently collaborated with Bjork). The rhythm in "You Decide" takes you on a complex, herky-jerky carnival ride that is utterly addictive, so long as you don't get woozy. "Uma" is based on a sample of tribal drums from the Bahia region, co-written with Brazilian rising star Lucas Santtana. "Clemency" sees Lindsay at his funkiest, and the minor chord string-led "Unseen" at his most menacing. The album closes with a breezy acoustic cover of the 60 year-old "Beija-me." Invoke takes more risks and is more diverse, and inevitably seems less perfect, particularly compared to the seamless Noon Chill. But by no means is it a disappointment. It's a step forward and over, with harder edges and a weathered soul. An essential addition to a subtle body of work by an important songwriter at the top of his game.
As elderly statesmen of avant-indie rock, Sonic Youth are always welcome in my overflowing CD racks. But to be honest, they had not really gotten my heart racing, aside from "Diamond Sea" on 1995's Washing Machine, since 1988's Daydream Nation. The albums were good enough not to damage their status as one of America's best bands, but A Thousand Leaves ('98) and NYC Ghosts & Flowers ('00) did get a bit dour and dull at times. A few things happened to invigorate the band. They recorded a series of experimental sides released on their independent SYR label, culminating in the breathtaking tribute to modern classical composers, Goodbye 20th Century. Every single one of their guitars that were preset to the various odd tunings they've developed over the years, were stolen. Production and avant-guitar guru Jim O'Rourke became a full-fledged member. And their practice space on Murray Street was destroyed on September 11. And so from loss and change and destruction comes renewed passion and energy. The songs on Murray Street are shimmering, emotional powerhouses. The instrumentation is unusually spare and clean, melodic and direct, leaving the few forays into feedback all the more captivating. "The Empty Page" starts things off with some of Thurston Moore's most expressive singing in years, rekindling the excitement that had been smouldering since the firestarter "Teenage Riot." The three-guitar freakout is short and to the point, and the song tapers off with a singular, chiming guitar. "Disconnection Notice" is more sprawling, but equally sensual and sonorous. "Rain On Tin" starts with their most menacing, minor-key chords since 1985's Bad Moon Rising and evolves into an epic guitar showcase, reaching a breathtaking crescendo, settling into a rhythmic cascade. It's no less than one of the few songs of the last 25 years to successfully follow-up on Television's glorious masterpiece, "Marquee Moon." After three winners, you'd think these old-timers would let up for a breather, yet "Karen Revisited" is just as captivating, with Lee Renaldo's vocals dualing with a snakey guitar riff that expands gradually until you're bathed in stardust and experiencing some sort of cosmic rebirth a lá 2001 A Space Odyssey. "Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style" and "Plastic Sun" are more down-to-earth rockers turn down the intensity, but still noticeably benefit from O'Rourke's production and guitar contributions. The album closes with its longest cut, the 12+ minute "Sympathy for the Strawberry." It's perhaps their biggest departure, with Kim Gordan purring and rubbing up against a slinky, insistent Al Jackson (Al Green) sexbeat, while a tremulous guitar breeds and multiplies into a viscous symphony. While paying tribute to a place, Sonic Youth have fallen in love with sound again. It sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? Hear for yourself.
Gemma Hayes is an inspiration to teenage girls who cringe at the prospect of finding inspiration in successful pop stars like Britney Spears. As a teenage My Bloody Valentine fan in Tipperary, Ireland, Hayes started playing her sister's acoustic guitar. With a few years, little taste, a lot of talent and even more luck, she found herself signed to the French Source label based on a demo she made with no accompanying information. On the strength of the 4:35 AM EP, Mark Linkous (Sparklehorse), Mark Eitzel and David Gray fawned over her and invited her on their tours. Wisely choosing Flaming Lips/Mercury Rev/Ed Harcourt producer-shaman Dave Fridmann to assist with her debut, Hayes has kicked off a very promising career at the tender age of 23. Night On My Side reveals her precocious songwriting talent and surprisingly mature voice, with a distinctly country-Americana lilt. Her pretty voice is almost too mannered and polished -- it could easily blend into an MOR format. But thankfully she avoids the pitfalls of cloying cuteness and annoying histrionics, modulating her voice like a pro while injecting the music with the necessary amount of indie-rock adrenaline. "Day One" is a short, shambolic starter that recalls the rustic forlornness of Sparklehorse. With guitar riffs that drive and sparkle, "Hanging Around" could have been an early 90s Blake Babies tune, while on "Back Of My Hand" a New Order bassline sets the tone for a mood piece of profuse aching and longing. "Over Over" continues the doomed romance theme with more heartfelt earnestness and a caressing string section. Maria McKee might have pulled off something this affecting had she not disappeared. Moving on to regret, "Let A Good Thing Go" shows that Hayes not only studied My Bloody Valentine, but also the underrated heart-squishing capacity of J. Mascis' mournful guitar solos in Dinosaur Jr. "Ran For Miles" and "What A Day" gently segue to a respite of uplifting tranquility before descending back into the maelstrom, peaking in massive layers of distorted guitars, squeaks and squeals in "Lucky One (Bird Of Casadaga)." "My God" might be her strongest song, a spare, brittle study of world-weariness that is utterly, succinctly moving, and will no doubt someday inspire many covers. Night On My Side ends with its title track, a melancholy country-tinged lullaby. With a handful of songs that measure up to the mature work of Joni Mitchell and Lucinda Williams, Gemma Hayes should have a brilliant career to look forward to.
Former Coctails leader, comic artist and member of The Sea And Cake Archer Prewitt is already a bona fide music veteran, with over a dozen albums in his vitae. Yet it seems his truly lasting musical legacy is just beginning. While his first two solo albums were clever, tuneful and thoughtful, there was always a nagging feeling that they were just academic studies in pop, in which he sounded more detached than brooding. On his third album, it seems Prewitt has finally wholeheartedly thrown himself into the creative vortex, immersing himself in the music, and emerging with his most accomplished arrangements and some absolutely deadly tunes. Three kicks off with "Over The Line," a sunny 70s pop gem with organs and harmonica setting the tone for Prewitt's more warm-blooded, emotionally direct approach. "Tear Me All Away" and "When I'm With You" continue the uptempo 70s pop feel, along with layers of subtle psychedelia, Beatles-ish harmonies, and hooks galore. Prewitt's inspirations are too numerous and tightly integrated to try to keep track of. This is a good sign that he's developed his own recognizable sound, though he does seem to share certain tastes in symphonic soul and British folkie Roy Harper with musical soul/label mates Bobby Conn, Jim O'Rourke and Neil Rosario (National Trust). Yet it's Prewitt who has the most potential to connect with a wider audience, with several compelling songs that would be on heavy rotation in Top 40 radio were it a just world. The first is "I'm Coming Over," which features the catchiest, lilting, chiming guitar melody since Johnny Marr's heydey. "Gifts Of Love" increases the pace with more infectious string-fueled melodies that match the best of Lloyd Cole & The Commotions. "Atmosphere" eases into a slower stroll, and stuns with the kind of heart-swelling chorus that Paul McCartney hasn't been able to muster for thirty years. "Sister Ice" continues his hot streak with a fabulous chorus by Kelly Hogan and Nora O'Connor (on loan from Andrew Bird's Bowl Of Fire). Aside from the highlights, the rest of the tracks are nearly as strong, well-crafted pop tunes. This may be sacrilege, but it would do a lot of people a world of good if they stopped hoping for anything of relevance to leak out of the noggins of burned out geezers like Elvis Costello and start noticing the embarrassment of riches that are growing right in their backyards. Catch Archer Prewitt at a bar near you before you have to wait in line for stadium tickets.
Remember when Guided By Voices sounded like they had the potential to truly be rock gods? You know, rather than just emulate, pay tribute, or remind you of rock gods? For me, that was about when Bee Thousand ('94) came out, when a handful of tracks sounded like Pollard had the Kinks held prisoner in his basement 4-track studio, feeding them lysergic acid. Seeing them play that year in a medium-sized bar made me imagine what it was like to see The High Numbers (The Who) during their weekly residency at the Railway Hotel in 1964. But then came the string of mediocre, disposable albums. Last year's hard rocking and catchy Isolation Drills ended their losing streak, and their major label stint. Back on Matador, the new album sounds like the quirky, sad, brilliant and tuneful Guided By Voices of old, but better. These days, that's as close to a rock god anyone is going to get. After trying their hand at slick commercial production, the band is back to producing themselves, with highly satisfying results. The sound is looser than recent albums, but far fuller than their early twee lo-fi efforts. "Wire Greyhounds" sets the tone, a 35 second teaser of melodic brilliance. "Skin Parade" has an acoustic intro that leads into a Slade-like stomper that recalls tunes on Vampire On Titus ('93). "Zap" is another short, pretty acoustic tune, and you can just tell we're approaching a real corker. Indeed, "Christian Animation Torch Carriers" is a classic. It begins slow and mournful, and gradually builds into a transcendent rocker, takes a few meandering twists and turns before returning to an uplifting chorus. "Cheyenne" is a sparkling, jangly sort of pop song that bands like The Shins have been striving for. "Back To The Lake" is by far my favorite track. It's the kind of song you wait breathlessly for at the show and scream and jump when they tear into it. It's a bittersweet breakup song that will be immortalized on many a mix CD. It might even be the kind of song where you recall exactly what was happening in your life in 2002 when you hear it in 2012. "Love 1" is pure, succinct poetry worthy of e.e. cummings. The brooding, contemplative "Storm Vibrations" lacks the immediate hooks, but it's obvious that Robert Pollard is at a revelatory crossroads. His lyrics recall Dylan's revelation of mature mixed emotions of still feeling love after a hard breakup on Blood On The Tracks -- "Confusing emotions - deliberately/Does it hurt you?/To love, I mean?" "Everywhere With Helicopter" overflows with classic powerchords, and guitar solos. "Car Language" is an impressively weighty slab of darkness, something about erotica with heavy machinery, with a dirgy beat that bumps and grinds, bathing itself in a shower of feedback sparks. The album winds up with a few shards of songs that could have been great were the Led Zeppelin acoustica of "The Ids Are Alright" and Bydsian whimsy of "Universal Truths And Cycles" were fleshed out. But what's a Guided By Voices album without some tasty scraps to leave you frustrated and wanting more? Most importantly, this album is the first GBV album to consistently pack emotional impact. Which I reckon makes Universal Truths And Cycles their best, don't you?
While the suits at Elektra have probably already pulled the plug on promoting the new Breeders album, Title TK, and are scheming how to get rid of them, it's the perfect follow-up to their 1992 Safari EP, as if Last Splash ('93) never happened. While that album had some great songs, its slick production was at times positively gaudy next to the exquisitely beautiful minimalism of their 1990 debut Pod and the heartbreaking melancholy of the aforementioned EP, which seemed to have been inspired by the breakup of Kim Deal's marriage to John Murphy, who ironically contributed lyrics to "Don't Call Home." Whatever happened during the years of The Breeders' brief stint as rockstars, and their nine years of writer's block, there's plenty more sadness to go around. Title TK is like that term paper that you procrastinate until the night before, then burn through it on all cylinders all night and end up with something that is inspired, if somewhat ragged. Good enough for an A-minus. "Little Fury" kicks things off with a slow tempo, resonating with much more feeling and even sensuality than those rushed, peppy songs on Last Splash that were so damn eager to please. If anything, the extra breathing room lend more impact to those special Deal-sisters harmonies. "Off You" is a spare, heartbreaking ballad with an almost imperceptible guitar, making the not-quite-a capella performance recall Mo Tucker's turns on the mic in The Velvet Underground. "The She" features a droning krautrock organ like a stripped-down Stereolab. Taking a break from the gloom and drones are "Too Alive" and "Son Of Three" with up-tempo major key hooks that show they still know how to write good pop songs, even if they refuse to drown them in six coats of laquer. "Full On Idle" an Amps remake that sounds more like a welcome Pixies-ish romp, while "Forced To Drive" reaches another highpoint, and coincidentally, another Velvets-circa-1969 moment. The album concludes with the compact, single-worthy "Huffer," a fitting oh-oh goodbye. Title TK is a modest anti-epic that was still worth the wait. Rather than cheapen their legacy by churning out garbage, The Breeders held back until they were ready, making this rare offering all the more special.
Once upon a time Silkworm were a crunchy post-punk band that added raw drama to their indie rock (see 1994's In The West and Libertine. Then sadsack songwriter Joel Phelps departed, and seemingly took the band's heart with him. Through their next four albums, they fleshed out their sound while managing to come across as dreary and bloodless. With Italian Platinum, it seems they finally grew a new organ and the lifeblood flows once more. On nearly every song they seem more emotionally invested, with a handful of unexpected innovations that finally make them sound like more than just an Steve Albini-endorsed second cousin of Pavement. "(I Hope U) Don't Survive" features Neil Young-like guitar lines and harmonies straight from Buffalo Springfield, albeit over a bashing rhythm section reminiscent of The Jesus Lizard. "The Brain" is assisted by keyboards and female "la-bah-la-bah" baking vocals, and "White Lightening" winds up with a nice piano outro. Most surprisingly, Chicago country chanteuse Kelly Hogan takes the lead vocals on the piano-driven power ballad "Young." "A Cockfight of Feelings" ends the album with fabulous big riffs, their best effort in eight years. Settling in Chicago and into normal working life was apparently rejuvenating for the band. By ending their hard-touring, make-it-or-break-it phase, it looks like they'll be enjoying a creative renaissance much like Eleventh Dream Day.
Iceland's rockists turned organica magicians Múm formed in 1997 when Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason was wooed away from his guitars by the electronica of Aphex Twin. After collaborating with other artists, including Icelandic poet Andri Snaer Magnason , they released the U.K.-only 2000 debut Yesterday Was Dramatic - Today Is OK, a masterpiece of moody ambience and toy instrument symphonies, combining the acoustic and analog post-rock instrumentation of bands like Fridge and Pram with the glitchy digital experiments of Oval and Autechre. The effect on that album and the new Finally We Are No One is that of gauzy dreams of a distant childhood, similar to The Boards Of Canada but with occasional singing by twin sisters Gyða and Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir. Their fey vocals tingle and shiver, like The Cocteau Twins and My Bloody Valentine if they were child-ghosts. What's striking about this music is how they manage to create such seductive melodies that sneak up on you. You'll be floating in a placid stream and in imperceptible increments you find yourself embroiled in an oceanic storm, whipping up sheets of drama to rival Björk and Sigur Rós. It's difficult to address specific tracks, as it all flows as a singular piece. Múm combine seemingly disparate elements into a seamless, iridescently beautiful whole in a way that is frankly much more listenable than Sigur Rós' more cumbersomely bombastic moments. Inevitably someone else will learn how to milk their more obvious charms for popular consumption, while they drift in semi-obscurity with Autechre and their ilk. No matter, the quiet innovators will get their recognition (if not their drugs and groupies) some day. In the meantime, seek out their essential import and keep both discs handy for your next astral trip.
It's ironic that a fan of such elaborately produced British music like Bowie, King Crimson, Genesis and XTC would write a paean to low-fi recording. It makes more sense knowing that after Vanderslice's experimental pop band MK Ultra broke up, he was inspired by Neutral Milk Hotel's richly layered music recorded with modest equipment. Vanderslice is on a creative roll, producing his third solo album in less than three years. Like last year's Time Travel Is Lonely, The Life And Death Of An American Fourtracker is loosely based on a theme inspired in equal parts by William Blake, contemporary fiction by Steven Millhouser, with additional lyrics by John Darnielle (Mountain Goats). Here the tortured, romantic child prodigy struggles with his instability and ends up drowning himself in the ocean while still a teenager. It's a familiar story about the torture of artistic inspiration, drugs and suicide, but co-starring, um, recording equipment. Leave it to the owner of Tiny Telephone recording studios to come up with that modern twist -- there's even a love song called "Me and My 424." To my ears it beats the hell out of Tommy. With help from members of Spoon, Death Cab for Cutie, Mates Of State and Beulah, Vanderslice's sound is richer than ever, his voice stronger and less quirky. His arrangements deftly segue from spare acoustic moments to full-blown orchestral bombast on tracks like "The Mansion," with horns blaring with a nicely booming Led Zeppelin/Flaming Lips drum sound. While the protagonist is a failure, the music is a love-suite about the amazing possibilities of sounds. It helps that it also features some of Vanderslice's best songwriting, every track piled with infectious hooks, melodies and emotion putting him on par with fellow eccentric mad geniuses Hawksley Workman, Eels and Sparklehorse.
In all the 90s hoo-ha about women in rock, Mary Timony was strangely overlooked. An underrated guitar virtuoso, she led Boston's brilliant Helium, an indie guitar band with subversively snaky prog rhythms and Eastern melodies. By 1997's The Magic City, Helium had become even more eccentric, single-mindedly focusing on Timony's obsession with a gothic fairytale netherworld of witches, dragons and faeries like a combination of the Grimm Brothers and Alice In Wonderland. Her 2000 solo debut Mountains dug a little too deep into the fantasy and forgot about good songwriting. The Golden Dove is a tuneful return to form, with some of Timony's most inspired, enigmatic work yet. Produced by Sparklehorse's Mark Linkous, the phantasmagoric songs are rooted in more substantial, detailed sound that complement's Timony far better than the poorly recorded Mountains. The song structures remain slippery, and there are few obvious hooks to be found (the chorus on "Blood Tree" is a nice exception), but songs like "Ant's Dance" and "Musik and Charming Melodee" rival Stereolab at their scintillating best. Traces of psychedelic pop, folk and space-rock can be detected. Timony's meandering melodies and eclectic instrumentation recall the spooky, nightmare-lullabies of Pram, but remain her own sound that she should patent -- pretty and prickly, a carnivorous flower. The delicately skulking "Dr. Cat" exemplifies Timony at her best -- sly, complex, sexy and creepy.
There are two ways to listen to The Private Press. One can listen to it as the follow-up to DJ Shadow, aka Josh Davis' genre-defining 1996 album Endtroducing, or simply as an album on its own terms. Endtroducing revolutionized the art of sampling by assembling a collage into a seamless, cohesive whole that packed as much emotional whallop as any classically conceived music. In that sense, The Private Press takes a half-step back, a stylistic hodgepodge that could have pre-dated Endtroducing. Ironically, the biggest points of departure are the vocal samples on cuts like "Six Days," which is indebted to Moby's Play, and "Walkie Talkie," which cleverly splices up the vocals, something that's been done more impressively by Prefuse 73. The shift from melancholy to wacky is somewhat jarring on "Mashin' On The Motorway," a cartoonish road-rage skit by Lateef. Shadow purists who expected the new set to be scratches from the mountain, laying out music's future path may be bitterly disappointed. But it's hard not to like these tracks once the pesky expectations wither away. "Right Thing/GDMFSOB" showboats Shadow's wild side, with a head-spinning array of dance-based samples that even gives a wink to an early Daft Punk sample. And there are certainly plenty of woozy, downbeat epics, from the eerie "Giving Up The Ghost," which would fit comfortably on Radiohead's Kid A, to the concisely haunting "…Meets His Maker," and the nine minute centerpiece "Blood On The Highway," built around hypnotic piano. "You Can't Go Home Again" is even more impressive, taking 80s electro beats, rubberizing and dubbifying them so that even when the cheesy synths come in, it evokes nostalgia without actually sounding retro. The Private Press begins and ends with samples from a 1951 homemade record. It's an interesting concept, one that Shadow didn't really do much with. Though he doesn't make any great leaps, he does remind us that recycled sounds can still express the primordial mess of the human soul.
Nina Nastasia's sophomore album is most likely the first you've heard from her. Her debut Dogs (2000) was released in a small batch of handmade editions on the tiny indie Socialist label, and was good enough to melt even the hard, black heart of Steve Albini, who hasn't been seen so speechlessly smitten over a female solo artist since PJ Harvey nearly a decade ago. Like Dogs, The Blackened Air was recorded by Albini, featuring a skeletal folk structures with chamber-like arrangements of accordian, cello, viola, mandolin and saw. The atmosphere recalls Cat Power's (Chan Marshall) haunting Moon Pix recorded with The Dirty Three, and Touch And Go labelmate Shannon Wright's eerie echoes of vaudeville cabaret. Her voice at first sounds deceptively girly and soft. Once you are drawn in and comfortable, cracks appear in the tunes' fabric, and seemingly innocent folk songs come crashing down in terrifying cacophony. The songs are surprisingly short for how much they accomplish. For example, In "I Go With Him," Nastasia begins with some lovely guitar picking worthy of Nick Drake and Richard Thompson, tosses off two stanzas of earthy, biblical perfection that Will Oldham would envy, and peaks and fades in orchestral creepiness like Paris 1919 era John Cale, all in 1:54. "This Is What It Is" is pure gothic menace, with an accordian drone, marching strings, the lyrics a Zen riddle -- "Take it out/Start again/Close it up/Be the one/You are beautiful/I couldn't take a bigger bite of it…Lose your head/It's always there/It's full of it." "Oh My Stars" brilliantly makes use of far Eastern melodies to timelessly elegant effect. "All For You" takes the form of more traditional country-folk, but it's just as moving as she sings to a wonderful melody, "I can see the stars above/I can give it all up/Up to you/All for you." In "So Little" and "Desert Fly," Nastasia's no-frills voice steps it up a notch, soaring and lilting, totally carrying the songs. "In The Graveyard" she really belts it out, a heart-wrenching funeral lament, a shadow of strength hiding behind doubt and fear. "Ocean" is the album's climactic peak in which Nastasia's stature swells with her passion, protesting a dying relationship -- "'Don't run away from me!,' I tell you/My eyes are black as iron/I'm toppling houses, trees and towns,/My crying makes everybody drown." So powerful and compelling is Nina Nastasia's artistry, we can only hope to go along with its flow, keeping our heads above the floodwaters so that we may survive and listen to her again, and again, and again. Fucking awesome.
Tom Waits' 1999 Mule Variations comeback tour (after about a dozen year absence) must have left him in a good mood. In three relatively short years, he's rewarded us with not one, but two albums, in top form no less. Most intriguing is Alice, the legendary lost masterpiece that never really existed. Alice was originally a stage production written by Paul Schmidt and produced by Texan dramatist Robert Wilson, with whom Waits and wife Kathleen Brennan collaborated with on The Black Rider. Premiering in Hamburg, Germany's Thalia Theatre in 1992, Alice was inspired by Charles Dobson/Lewis Carroll's Lolita-like obsession with young Alice Liddell, demonstrated in the opiate-fueled hallucinatory books Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass. The music for the "avant-garde opera" was written by Waits and Brennan, and performed by the cast along with an orchestra directed by Waits. The bootleg album that subsequently made its rounds, with Waits devotees proclaiming it in hushed tones as his best material yet, was merely a live recording of the performance. Nearly a decade later, after he had begun work on Blood Money, Waits decided to finally record the songs himself. The final product nearly measures up to its myth, though the edgy brilliance of 1992's concurrent Bone Machine still retains the edge as his best work. Having proven his mastery of all forms of Americana, Waits tackles the daunting history of European folk ballads. Like The Black Rider, Alice recalls Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's darkly witty collaborations. While The Black Rider was the spooky, German folktale of devils and murder, Alice presents a more sweetly melancholy mood. With the exception of the rollicking, phlegm-spraying punk of "Kommienezuspadt," the music skips the Beefheartian rhythms and junkyard found-sounds Waits has become known for, instead using a pared down chamber orchestra. "Alice" is a smoky lover's lament, sung delicately to a jazz quartet that proves he can still smooth out his ravaged voice and hearken back to his classic 70s balladry. "But I must be insane/To go skating on your name/And by tracing it twice/I fell through the ice/Of Alice." Here we fall through the looking glass into a man's internal fantasy/nightmare of desire and regret. Next we board a haunted carnival train in "Everything You Can Think," a surreal dreamlog with images of red flamingos, sleeping babies in shoes, "your teeth are buildings with yellow doors." The dream imagery continues in "Flower's Grave," "Someday the silver moon and I/Will got to Dreamland." While they might recall children's fairytales, we are reminded of the bad turns our fever dreams used to take when we were children, with morbid visions of death. "Poor Edward" tells the chilling story of a man cursed with the face of his female devil twin on the back of his head, who whispered evil things to him at night until he hung himself. "Lost In The Harbour" epitomizes the verging-on-tears ballads, ("The roses are frightened to bloom") that avoid crossing into melodrama at the last precise moment. A rare instance of treading water, Waits catches a breather on "We're All Mad Here" practically a lyrical greatest-hits of his imagery as it crosses the line into cliché -- crows, hats, devils, bones, worms, eyeballs, fish, a decomposing train and more bones. Yet I still can't help but hang on every line. "Watch Her Disappear" is a creepy, spoken tone-poem of sexual obsession in which he spies on his object of desire as she undresses. "The air is wet with sound/The faraway yelping of a wounded dog and the ground is drinking a slow faucet leak/Your house is so soft and fading as it soaks the black summer heat…" "I'm Still Here" is wrapped around a piano melody that recalls a particularly forlorn song from a Charlie Brown cartoon. The album often recalls music from Disney films, particularly in the closing instrumental lullabye "Fawn," in which one can imagine the marimba and violin duet played by Jiminy Cricket. Like its original source, Alice is a sublimely hallucinatory experience that ends by drifting off and dreaming within a dream.
Blood Money comes out of Waits and Brennan's third and most recent work with Robert Wilson, Woyzeck which debuted in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2000 (and comes to New York and Los Angeles this fall). It's based on German poet Georg Büchner's 1837 play about the true story of a soldier in the Prussian army who murdered his unfaithful wife after being subjected to strange army experiments. It is highly appropriate that Waits would provide the music for Woyzeck, a classic example of Romanticism's melancholy and gallows humor, anticipating existentialism and expressionism. Waits and Brennan have arguably taken the reigns as the 20th/21st century masters of just about every dark mood in music. The fantasy and sadness of Alice is replaced by earthly madness here, with Waits unleashing some particularly unhinged, darkly humorous performances. On "Misery Is The River Of The World," he sounds like a deranged muppet, singing "Everybody Row! Everybody Row!," his enunciation becoming more slack and exaggerated as the song progresses. "Everything Goes To Hell" and "God's Away On Business" continues the misanthropic fatalism that recalls songs from Bone Machine -- "I don't believe you go to heaven when you're good/Everything goes to hell, anyway…" More diverse and frenetic than Alice, Blood Money jumps from crunching rants to soothing lullabies ("Lullaby"). The instrumentals revisit the expressive, haunting effects of The Black Rider -- "Knife Chase" conjures visions of a man running for his life from an army of possessed skeletons, while "Calliope" uses a 1929 pneumatic calliope with 57 whistles used by circuses because the sound can be heard for miles. "Starving In The Belly Of A Whale" is an instant classic driven by propulsive guitar picking by Waits himself. "The Part You Throw Away" is another highlight, subtly evoking the roots of Portuguese fado, Spanish flamenco and Argentinean tango with delicately plucked violins. The album ends with "A Good Man Is Hard To Find," the murdered wife bidding farewell with the words "Only strangers sleep in my bed/My favorite words are good-bye/And my favorite color is red." While the imagination and emotional impact is more devastating on Alice, Blood Music is nearly as evocative, effectively transporting us to another time and place. Few artists achieve such an effect in an entire lifetime, and Tom Waits has done it twice in one try. Bravo.
There are two contradictory discourses about British music that both overstate their case. One is that Britpop is dead and there are no more great bands from the U.K. (bollocks), the other that relative newcomers like Travis, Embrace, Coldplay, Starsailor and South are doing something new and exciting (pish posh). In between the piles of hyperbole reside Doves, a Manchester band whose 2000 debut Lost Souls caused critics to hyperventilate in heaping praise upon it, while largely ignored in the U.S. While they were credited (or blamed) for returning to "big eighties music" like U2 and Echo & the Bunnymen, the reality was that the album was a bit monochromatic and dreary. That problem has been solved with the diverse new collection, The Last Broadcast. On "Words" they harmonize like Ride amidst swirling electronics and glockenspiel, employing a stately circular rhythm that recalls The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony," which practically defined the English zeitgeist of summer '97. "There Goes The Fear" starts with a glistening, cascading melody reminiscent of early James, and through its seven-plus minutes takes a percussive journey that tips its hat to New Order and The Stone Roses as it sails off on its paisley-print magic carpet, eventually landing in a Caribbean carnaval. "M62 Song" is acoustic psych gentle as hovering fireflies which may very well be UFOs in disguise (hello, Flying Saucer Attack reworks King Crimson's "Moonchild"). The celestial instrumental "Where We're Calling From" segues into the Mercury Rev-style rave-up "N.Y." peaking with a deliciously noisy, fading din. Moving from strength to strength, "Satellites" is another epic cut that stops just sort of overwhelming bombast, using gospel elements much like Spiritualized and Blur's "Tender." "Friday's Dust" integrate acoustic guitar, strings, oboe to a powerful, sonically glorious effect. Per it's title, "Pounding" charms with less subtle tactics that will make it a predictable, yet welcome, choice for a single. The remaining tracks cover similar melancholy territory as their first album and fellow Mancunians Elbow. With not a single bum track, The Last Broadcast is a mildly adventurous, surprisingly uplifting, often spine-tingling album that Doves' peers will be hard pressed to top this year save for a revolutionary giant step on the scale of Radiohead.
It's mind-bending how an album like Blackalicious' accomplished 2000 debut Nia could have been so incredibly overlooked while bozos like Jay-Z and Eminem get all the attention. After more than ten years in the underground scene, the duo of Chief Xcel and The Gift of Gab have finally signed to a major label. To the dullards who whine about them selling out, I say, where the hell were you when Nia should have made them as big as De La Soul? Blazing Arrow continues with the earthy, soulful, tuneful Native Tongues style hip-hop that Blackalicious is keeping fresh, leading a West Coast contingent that includes Dilated Peoples and Jurassic 5, members of whom guest on "Passion" and "4,000 Miles". Fans of Gift Of Gab's mile-a-minute verbal athletics like "Alphabet Aerobics," "Deep In The Jungle," "Rhyme Like A Nut" and "A2G" will be thrilled with the dizzying standout "Paragraph President," but disappointed by "Chemical Calisthenics," a heroic attempt at rapping the periodic table of elements, but just doesn't flow very well. Kudos to them for being unafraid to geek out. Perhaps they'll be commissioned to do a hip-hop update of the Schoolhouse Rock cartoon shorts. Pleasurable moments abound in tracks like "Aural Pleasure" which starts with Fela afrobeat horns and a jumping reggae beat; catchy choruses in "Sky Is Falling" and "Make You Feel That Way," and the clever bubbling water sample of the title track. "Passion" is the hardest hitting track with an assist from Rakaa and Babu of Dilated Peoples. Blazing Arrowis a masterful demonstration of old-school hip-hop skills and lyricism. Yet up-and-coming artists who use the inspired production madness of Outkast and Cannibal Ox as their blueprint may soon make Blackalicious sound a bit old fashioned. Enjoy until the next revolution.
Peter Murphy ranks as one of a small handful of aging artists (David Byrne, David Sylvian and, um, er…) from the post-punk era who manages not only to avoid embarrassing themselves, but remain relevant. Dust is his first full album of new tunes since 1995's Cascade. The traces of Middle Eastern influences in Cascade have expanded into a full-blown exploration of the genre, particularly of the trance music of Turkey, which has reportedly been Murphy's adopted home for some time. Turkish musicians mix bows, kanuns, uds, and tablas with Western musicians, including Michael Brook, who has collaborated with the great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Those looking for catchy pop songs like "Cuts You Up" or "I'll Fall With Your Knife" will be disappointed. Aside from opening track "Things To Remember," there are no obvious, memorable hooks, melodies or choruses. The nine songs have an average length of seven minutes. Those patient enough to appreciate the more meandering structures of Peter Gabriel's Arabic-influenced work and David Sylvian's Dead Bees On A Cake might enjoy the layered atmospherics and polyrhythms here. Mercan Dede mixes in sampled electronic sounds on cuts like "Girlchild Aglow" and "Your Face," keeping it from sounding like a generic world beat excursion, although Brian Eno did a much more interesting job over 20 years ago on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. Even those who don't appreciate the exotic instrumentation can make use of its overall beauty as the post-goth mash album to have this year.
Elf Power are the beleaguered middle child of the Elephant Six family, including Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel and Apples In Stereo. With four previous albums under their belts, they have yet to receive the acclaim of the rest of the collective. Creatures should go a long way in evening that score. Ironically, this time around the band has kept the sound modest, passing up Dave Fridmann's studio magic from 2000's The Winter Is Coming for a sound less Flaming Lips and more pared-down jangly folk. With more room to breathe, the songwriting has taken a leap in improvement. "Let The Serpents Sleep" sounds like a late eighties Feelie