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Column: Reviews
This Week’s Record Releases
There are a few weeks over the course of a year when you really just don’t want to schedule a record release. Because everyone’s on vacation, the entire month of August is sort of a bad idea, as are the last two weeks of December and the first week of January, because everyone’s doing holidayish things and reading year-end lists. The reason may be a little less obvious, but this week isn’t exactly ideal either—with the entire music world headed to Austin for South By Southwest, basically no one’s around to talk about your record. A couple weeks before? Yes. A couple weeks after? Even better. But during? Not unless you like the sound of crickets.
Freelance Whales – Weathervanes
If you’d put a gun to my head and forced me to tell you when I thought this record came out, I would have cried, and blurted out, “December of last year, maybe?!” It seems like it’s been at least that long since this Queens, NY-based band first came on the scene with their heavily orchestrated, rickety brand of indie-pop, but I suppose that’s just on the internet, which apparently is still different form the outside world. Anyway, this record is super adorable hooky, perfect for Passion Pit fans who want to start listening to things that aren’t shitty, or for fans of Belle and Sebastian who think they need something even wimpier to add to their collection. Shit-tons of people will roll their eyes at this, but those people are the worst. Be sure to check out “Hannah”, which is one of my favorite songs of the year so far.
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
The White Stripes – Under Great White Northern Lights
Have you ever tried to get a screener of a White Stripes tour documentary? Yeah, it ain’t easy, and as such, I still haven’t gotten a chance to see Under Great White Northern Lights, a new film documenting an unusual 2007 tour of Canada, which took the band from small town to small town, to venues like bowling alleys and YMCAs. I haven’t exactly liked a White Stripes record since White Blood Cells, and I haven’t, by any definition, liked any of the other projects Jack White has been a part of. But I remain a sucker for the interaction between him and White Stripes drummer Meg White. They’re polar opposites in pretty much every way: he’s showy and attention-grabbing, she’s incredibly, uncomfortably shy, and to say she tries to avoid the spotlight would be an understatement. The differences pop up musically, too: He’s the preternaturally skilled guitarist, the guy who was supposed to save rock ‘n’ roll, the blues, hell, popular music in general. And, frankly, she can barely keep time. The tour documented here was cut short when the band announced that “acute anxiety” had forced them to take some time off. Almost three years later, they’re still taking time off. I guess now we’ll find out what really happened.
Watch: The trailer [at youtube.com]
Album Review: Titus Andronicus, The Monitor
Titus Andronicus
The Monitor
(XL Records, 2010)
“You can’t make it on merit, not on merit and merit alone,” Patrick Stickles yelps in “A Pot in Which to Piss.” And on his triumphant second go-round, he’s as good as his word. Titus Andronicus fans knew what an improvement The Monitor was going to be before it was even announced. 2008’s raucous debut for the Glen Rock, NJ rockers, The Airing of Grievances, was easy to like but marred by the production values of a half-finished basement. It’s likely that if the song titles weren’t eyebrow raisers like “Upon Viewing Brueghel’s ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’” and “No Future, Pt. 2: The Day After No Future”, most people would’ve taken the thrashy mix of Celtic folk and Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray” noise-racket at face value. But the band’s dynamite live show made sure that nearly arena-like gestures—like the Pogues-like oompah twists of “Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ”—rang out clear as a bell and made you want to learn the lyrics.
So with the clarity problem aside and the band’s live power surviving the transfer to tape and now prominently on display, they present a new challenge altogether: Crazy long songs, and—uh-oh—a concept. But it’s a good one, and if anyone’s prepared to execute a civil war song cycle with contemporary-subject inroads (one’s called “Theme from ‘Cheers’”), it’s Titus Andronicus, with Stickles’ synthesis of Conor Oberst’s strep throat with the Hold Steady’s tumbling anthem.
Live Show Review: The Big Pink at Great American Music Hall, SF
The Big Pink, A Place to Bury Strangers, and 10 Echo
March 10th at Great American Music Hall, San Francisco
Last night’s show at Great American Music Hall was a display of shoegaze, circa 2010. Opener, Los Angeles’ I0 Echo, brews thick, stormy, guitar-heavy music behind the vocals of the female singer (who goes by the name I0), which resulted in loud, atmospheric noise that aptly set the tone for even louder, more atmospheric noise as delivered by supporting act A Place to Bury Strangers. Once (still?) hailed as the “loudest band in New York,” ABTBS projects a deafening roar of apocalyptic sound, reliant on the effects from the thumping strobe lights on the crowd and the wall and themselves to induce that feeling of being caught, suspended, by the pull of a performance. This band grabbed my attention a few years back with their self-titled debut, on which they crafted industrialist noise rock in a way that is accessible and surprisingly always very listenable. For a band that relies on the abrasive, they don’t neglect melody in their songs, no matter how high the decibel may be set. The noisy chaos of their live show has never failed to catch me rapt among the audience, standing in the path of their volatile shoegaze, always reaching for my earplugs within the first few minutes, which, of course, I forgot to bring last night. Ouch.
Album Review: Liars, Sisterworld
Liars
Sisterworld
(Mute, 2010)
If you haven’t seen the video for “Scissor“, the lead-off track from Liars’ new album, Sisterworld, you’re denying yourself the privilege of viewing the best music video to come out (so far) this year. Artfully shot, well conceived, scary, brutal, and darkly funny, “Scissor” is an excellent taste of what Sisterworld offers.
Liars consistently elude genres. Some people call them an art-rock band, but Sisterworld merely dabbles in “rock”. Shadowy, unsettling, and oozing with a dark, viscous fluidity, the album is truly a world apart.
It can be described in extremes: juxtaposing dynamics and slippery rhythms that debase comfort zones and defy predictability. Musically and lyrically, Sisterworld sounds fixated on challenging established motifs and values. Naturally, the album is noisiest and loudest where the gauntlet is thrown hardest.
Album Review: The Whigs, In the Dark
The Whigs
In the Dark
(ATO, 2010)
We’ve seen it so many times before that it’s almost lost its stigma, and maybe even so much that we’ve grown to expect it. Lots of bands start out with an edge and see it produced away under the guise of “artistic development.” It’s almost understandable in a way, because everyone says you need to evolve from record to record—although some of the most prolific and long-lasting bands out there hang on by doing exactly the opposite.
Had that happened to the Whigs I think my heart would have broken, since their early 2008 album Mission Control really struck a chord with me. And I know I wasn’t the only one. It wasn’t the first release by the Athens, GA trio—they self-released Give ‘Em All A Big Fat Lip in 2005—but it was the first to hit a wider audience. Mission Control was clean, the songs were simple and catchy, it was loud, it was dark. It would have been so easy to fuck it up with their next album; all they would have had to do was get fancy. Thankfully, they didn’t.
In the Dark opens with “Hundred/Million”, a loud, fuzzy rocker with chanted verses that turns anthemic at the chorus. It’s a strong start, proof right out front that In the Dark will be lacking none of the vitality and shit-kicking Southern energy that made Mission Control so great. The forward momentum continues unchecked from there through “Black Lotus” and “Kill Me Carolyne”, songs with combustion engines. They slow for a moment to a dirge-like, sultry march on “Someone’s Daughter” and then speed it back up for “So Lonely.”
Album Review: Broken Bells, Broken Bells
Broken Bells
Broken Bells
(Columbia, 2010)
There’s a moment of déjà vu in the bridge of Broken Bells’ “Your Head Is on Fire” where an airy synth pad floats in an exciting direction I can only describe to the non-instrument-playing crowd as a two-parter. An inviting, slight melody calls and waits for what would be a clever minor-key response, and it never comes. But why should I expect it to, who put that idea in my head? The answer actually, is James Mercer, who happens to be the man behind Broken Bells. (Well, the man in front—the man behind is erstwhile melody softener Danger Mouse—but we’ll get to him later.) Once it hits me that Mercer is repeating himself, that I experienced that same half-melody the first time I heard the Shins’ (his other band, they changed your life, remember?) “Saint Simon” seven years ago, I got kind of mad. Not for copying himself—the man’s a pop genius whose arsenal of clever chord changes borders on distended, no wonder he’s run out—but for Xeroxing a rather faded, incomplete version of himself. The same thing happened when I put on Broken Bells and the drifting funk of “The High Road” recalled not just the Shins’ not-great experiment “Sea Legs”, but a ballad off Chinese Democracy as well.
New perfectionists like Mercer appear to have trouble breaking the mold of “perfect pop.” After two flawless efforts, Mercer’s own troubled Wincing the Night Away wielded three great songs (“Australia”, “Phantom Limb”, and “Girl Sailor”) and a lot of halfsies. Suddenly when the perfection runs out they appear to question if there’s any point to making songs at all. Then they meet texture.
Album Review: The Morning Benders, Big Echo
The Morning Benders
Big Echo
(Rough Trade, 2010)
In 2008, when I still lived in San Francisco, I took a trip up the coast one April to check out a small music festival in the seaside town of Point Arena. Day one of the two-night, second-annual, so-called Awesome Fest featured a line up that was decidedly local, intensely talented, and musically disparate: Girls, Thee Oh Sees, Port O’Brien and this band, the Morning Benders.
That night wasn’t the first time I’d seen the Morning Benders, but it was an important turning point in my appreciation of their sound. Up until then, I’d thought of them as playing this mildly throwback, Spectoresque pop that felt shiny and new, but didn’t have a lot of presence. But under the high ceilings of the Arena Theatre, something changed. The sound got bigger, fuller. There was a suspiciously pleasing spatial dimension to it, an echo that took front man Chris Chu’s tinny telecaster and suave croon and made them huge.
I can’t say it was the genesis of the Morning Benders’ transformation, but when I heard Big Echo, I immediately thought of that moment. In a way, the album is like a giant shout unleashed when encountered with natural sublimity: a roar of exuberance on the edge of a precipice by the crashing sea, or an endless, grassy, summer meadow under wide open blue skies. That wildness gives Big Echo a big beating heart, but it’s clear from the very first listen that it’s the head that’s in control here. Actually, make that two heads: Chu and Chris Taylor of Grizzly Bear co-produced the album.
This Week’s Record Releases
Tomorrow, March 9, is the kind of day you live for if you’re a serious music nerd: The slate of new releases is so strong that even the most hardened, shameless file-sharing apologist will probably want to head over to a (local, independent) record store and shell out some actual cash—or I assume they will, anyway. I have no idea if that kind of day even exists for people under a certain age, but I figure if we just keep saying that it does, maybe it actually will. Maybe?
Pavement – Quarantine the Past
I don’t really know what to tell you about this one. It seems likely that you already know full well if you’re the type of person who needs to own a Pavement Greatest Hits compilation. If you never liked the band you don’t, obviously. If you sort of liked them, I think you should probably get it, because the songs they chose for this thing are crazy-good, and I have a feeling you’ll wind up liking them a bit more than you did just last week. If you, like me, were one of them loony-ass Pavement fanatics, I guess it’s a little trickier: You already have all the songs, obviously, and if you wanted to make the ultimate Pavement playlist, well, you could do that any day of the week in iTunes. But then again, you might be among the nerdiest, most elite groups of fans, the completists, in which case, sorry, but you’re gonna have to buy it. On vinyl. And on CD too, I’m afraid. (It just occurred to me that it’s possible you don’t fit into any of those groups, and that you’ve actually just never heard them, in which case 1) Jesus Christ, shame on you, and 2) Stop reading and go to the store right now. You’ll thank me, then you’ll curse me for making you realize that, fuck, the phrase “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” even applies to the fucking ’90s now.)
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
Titus Andronicus – The Monitor
If we’re talking about songs that were written this decade, then my pick for the week is the new one by Brooklyn-based, Jersey-bred punks Titus Andronicus. Their debut made a bit of a splash when it was released a couple years ago, but it pales in comparison to The Monitor, a sprawling, ambitious concept album that uses the Civil War as a metaphor for the struggles inherent in living a life outside the mainstream. It’s as energetic as anything you’ve heard all year, full of squealing guitars, rousing choruses, but also plaintive piano balladry and playful faux-country, all recorded in a way that’s endearingly lo-fi without being grating. This is one you’ll really want to sink your teeth into, and your feelings about it may vary greatly depending where you’re at in your own life, but it sure is hard to resist a record, and a band, that manages to turn a chant of “You’ll always be a loser” into a celebration rather than a condemnation.
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
Album Review: Johnny Cash, American VI, Ain’t No Grave
Johnny Cash
American VI, Ain’t No Grave
(Lost Highway, 2010)
When the organ lifts behind sparse guitar and Johnny Cash sings, “There is a train that’s heading straight to heaven’s gate, to heaven’s gate / And on the way child and man and woman wait / Watch and wait for redemption day” on the second track of his latest posthumous album, American VI, Ain’t No Grave, it’s a powerful moment. That song, “Redemption Day”, is just one of 10 included on this Rick Rubin produced collection, and like others in the American Recordings series, this album showcases a range of hand-selected covers reworked through Cash’s singular, striking baritone.
It’s his delivery that never fails to touch me, that voice worn but always defiant. Johnny Cash helped put a name and a face to Outlaw Country and singlehandedly opened my ears to the “real” country movement, the one of authenticity, of real life cowboys and honky tonks and the Grand Ole Opry. The movement that found their singers in prison or drinking their woes away in a small town on the outskirts, capturing the feel of hard living and harder loving on record and bringing it back to us listeners in our suburbs and coastal cities. The outlaw country movement and with it Johnny Cash defines authenticity.
At the time of me writing this review, the record’s been out a week, coming out on what would have been Cash’s 78th birthday, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. But despite the fact that the album, according to a press release, debuted at Number 3 in the States and in the Top 10 elsewhere in the world, it still presents Johnny Cash in way that’s removed from any care of expectations, in a way that when you listen to it, lacks any external significance, any posthumous attachment. Cash’s comes from the soul, is about soul, and is for the soul… I find it easy to forget that I share him with the rest of the world when I hear him sing. He makes me feel like I’m the only person within earshot.
Album Review: Free Energy, Stuck on Nothing
by: Mark Asch
Stuck on Nothing
(DFA, 2010)
Everybody likes T-Rex, of course, but it’s hard to credibly claim them as an influence: Marc Bolan’s dickswinging power-chord swagger and earnest hippie-dippie fairy mysticism are two elements not usually found in solution these days. Hell, they were barely found in solution then, even at a time when punk bands played in lipstick and platforms. Think about the churning music and saccharine lyrics of “Children of the Universe”, say, or “20th Century Boy.” “I wanna be your toy,” Bolan sang, boldly objectifying himself, like Mick Jagger pouting and flirting with his audience before he lost his looks, or lost interest, or fashion changed.
The Philly five-piece Free Energy’s debut record Stuck on Nothing is just out from DFA records and producer James Murphy—having done what they set out to do with disco, I guess, he’s moved on to reviving another somewhat disreputable ‘70s genre. There’s not really an album’s worth of good material here, but it hardly matters: Glammy, skuzzy, preening, boozy, Free Energy at its best puts the crotch bulge back in skinny jeans.
The album peaks early, with the band’s first two singles and (by far) best songs to date, “Free Energy” and “Dream City.” The titles alone should prove my point—or else the first five seconds of the band’s self-titled lead-off track, which begins with a spat-out guitar lick from cofounder Scott Wells, and frontman Paul Sprangers proclaiming, “We’re breaking out this time / We’re making out with the wind.” Yes. Making out with the wind. In the opening seconds of his band’s lead single. An ode to being “young and still alive,” in which everything is happening “tonight” and “right now, when every thought is electrical,” the song is an ode to golden youth, people fair with sky in their hair, declaimed over stroke-off squiggly fretwork and a shit-ton of handclaps.
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by: Mark Asch
published: March 16, 2010
in column: Reviews, What Goes On
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