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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: Sam Amidon, I See the Sign
Sam Amidon
I See the Sign
(Bedroom Community, 2010)
Sam Amidon plays traditional folk music almost free of context. He comes along after not only folk’s moment but a good several years since Bob Dylan’s own elder statesman “comeback” period began, long after “authenticity” returned to the ‘80s and MTV Unplugged and No Depression and the alt-country movement and “anti-folk” and “freak-folk.” Here comes a guy who plays the tunes because he knows them, because he likes them, because he thinks you might like them, too. That’s how Amidon sings: He mumbles, out of the side of his mouth, as though he didn’t know someone would be listening. The songs he chooses (nothing on his fourth album was written by him) are circular, small melodies he might’ve whistled while flipping a coin waiting for a train. You won’t learn any of his convictions listening to I See the Sign, but he doesn’t sound sensitive either. He doesn’t sound like he cares; he doesn’t sound like he doesn’t care. “Passive” is the word that comes to mind and yet it slights him—if these performances are passive, they’re passively beautiful, combed-over, thought-out, and then re-remembered fondly, wistfully.
Yet that passivity is the key to the earnest openness that makes Amidon’s new album transcend. How else could entrancing opener “How Come That Blood” snake in on a subtly techno gallop that malfunctions with feedback at the end, and not give off a wheeze of calculation? Somehow Amidon’s calm stage-setting keeps the electronics from distracting any more than the insistent banjo clicks or dervish-like string fills. The next two songs are the most tuneful here, a slowly engrossing “Way Go, Lily” that’s minimalist the way The Velvet Underground was, and the best version of “You Better Mind” I’ve ever heard, as a duet with Beth Orton(!), in her canniest form since the Chemical Brothers’ classic “Where Do I Begin.” Later on, the stark “Rain and Snow” is Amidon’s best attempt at lifting an almost-emotional vocal from his consistently almost-hypnotic mutter.
Wussy? What the Hell Kind of Sissy Name Is That?
Take their name literally at your own peril: America’s best rock band is signed to a record store and makes a living in stone masonry. The lead singers are in love. And they’ve been favorably touted by Rolling Stone, Spin, Blender, and Village Voice (plus, you know, Crawdaddy!). So why haven’t you heard of Wussy?
Crawdaddy!: Has it been detrimental or beneficial to be known as a band with a couple? Are you comfortable with lyrics skewed to be “about you?”
Lisa Walker: I think that people are always gonna read into a song what they put into it themselves, so I think whether or not you’re writing about your significant other or something from your past or maybe something a friend told you, I feel like, if it’s a good song, I feel good if people can get something from it. I don’t really mind how they interpret it, I just feel really good if something resonates and that people would care enough to wonder what it’s about.
Chuck Cleaver: People sometimes, I think, have a hard time separating fact from fiction too… when a novelist writes a work of fiction, I don’t think anybody ever questions that some of it, if not almost all of it, has nothing to do with his real life. Whereas some people think that songwriters specifically have to write about things that always happen to them and that’s not really necessarily true. I mean, yeah, we are in the songs, but at the same time, there might be incidents in that particular song that never happened between us. If it’s out there, we’re usually okay with it. [Laughs]
Crawdaddy!: How did you and Lisa first get together—musically—in the first place?
Cleaver: I had to sing a solo show, some kind of awards show, in Cincinnati. I’d been in a band previously [Ass Ponys] and they wanted me to sing… and I don’t do that a whole lot, so I was kind of weirded out, a little nervous. And [me and Lisa] knew each other vaguely, and she said, “Hey, have you ever thought about singing with anybody else?” and we gave it a try. It wasn’t really rehearsed. I wrote some words out on a napkin, she sang, and it was pretty immediate, I think, just like “Wow, I really like the way this sounds.” She’s just an amazing harmony singer… she could sing with anybody, really. Why she picked my caterwaul, I have no idea.
Crawdaddy!: Well, the contrast.
Walker: I love that.
Cleaver: So we were playing out, the two of us on our own. And we knew Mark, who could play just about any instrument.
Walker: So he picked the one he didn’t know how to play yet, to play with us.
Massive Attack: Heligoland
Massive Attack
Heligoland
(Virgin, 2010)
I love Protection, its even juicier, sprawling partner No Protection, and the oddly-slick-sounding-in-retrospect Blue Lines as much as anything. But let’s be real: Massive Attack weren’t innovators any more than Nate Dogg or Neneh Cherry or Eek-a-Mouse, all of whom managed to get their respective forms of non-rapped vocals onto rap beats either before or just as Blue Lines “broke ground” by carefully grinding up reggae, R&B, and hip-hop into papers, licking the ends, and lighting up. Their inventions proved replaceable by 1996 or so, when Sneaker Pimps, Primitive Radio Gods, and even Butthole Surfers managed to slow down beats to a crank and variegate their typical alt-rock tunes with found sounds and subtle polyphonics previously unheard outside the hip-hop stratosphere. And the real beat constructionists, homemade studio rats like DJ Shadow, Tricky, and Portishead, were already embroiled elsewhere, having made their mark on the soundscape world, working with horn arrangements or rappers or rock bands. Massive Attack kind of stayed where they were, which yielded beguiling results on the darker Mezzanine and blander ones on 100th Window following the departure of first Mushroom and then Daddy G.
But even with G back in the fold, where does that leave Heligoland? Though it’s not a disappointing album, Heligoland doesn’t go anywhere new, from its ’90s reject album art to its hip roundup of guest vocalists (from TV on the Radio, Elbow, and Blur). But I’m not even sure who’s to blame. As a “collective” that, until recently, was down to one member, did 3-D mail Damon Albarn and Martina Topley-Bird digital transfer tapes to put the finishing touches on his middlebrow explorations of Blade soundtrack warm-overs? Or did they collaborate directly in the studio? Did he invite them to bring their own songs to him? Should the blame for mediocrity lie solely with the name artist or the guest auteur? There’s not much to tell from these songs, other than they sound like outtakes.
The icky, revolving-door approach is hard to get past, like Santana calling in a star struck Rob Thomas to do him a chart favor. And though the approach has worked before, even with Brit techno—New Order and the Chemical Brothers have turned out surprisingly thought-out records past their supposed relevance, keyed to fellow dinosaurs Billy Corgan and Q-Tip, respectively—it’s always been hard to tell where the “what” and “who” comes from in Massive Attack in the first place. We previously ignored this because we didn’t care, as long as they brought an excellent product. But without that excellent product, they’re more anonymous than ever, though it’s not hard to want to hear Albarn’s stirring, pleading “Saturday Come Slow” or the organ-hooked coda “Atlas Air” twice. I don’t hold it against 3-D and Daddy G for not being innovators, it’s just that they used to synthesize so beautifully—juggling guest vocalists, samples, reggae, symphonies, covers of the Doors and William DeVaughn, even making Horace Andy and Tracey Thorn arguably stronger than their own careers did. But compared to, say, the newly-energized Portishead, their soulless collective anonymity just looks bad.
Four Tet: There Is Love in You
Four Tet
There Is Love in You
(Domino, 2010)
The best thing about Kieran Hebden’s first full album as Four Tet in five years is that it gets better. This is a seemingly simple achievement, but a lot of techno released under the minimalist/artsy/austere umbrella frequently fumbles. Sorting out one “folktronica” act from another is such an exercise in subtlety that for some it borders on masochistic. With so much music being released these days, and so much of it created, produced, and mass-marketed via the internet, we’re not supposed to just settle for nice sounds. Nice sounds aren’t hard to formulate or wring or sample anymore. 2005’s cut-up, pitch-scrambled “Smile Around the Face” wasn’t in a commercial, but Passion Pit’s friendlier 2009 copycat riff “Sleepyhead” was—ideas get bounced back and forth. So when geniuses like Hebden or his sometime collaborator Will Bevan, aka Burial, are churning out richly overflowing, abstract sonics, it’s rather hard for us dabblers to take the more minimal stuff seriously. read more
Yo La Tengo: Summer Sun
Yo La Tengo
Summer Sun
(Matador, 2003)
Just a guess, really: I think Summer Sun made people sigh because it starts with a song called “Beach Party Tonight” that tricked folks into thinking they were anticipating a pop record when what fell out was actually an ambient wash. Or maybe they got frustrated at the lack of a “Sugarcube” or “Cherry Chapstick” and gave it a head-shaking once-over. But the only people I’m positive who have given Yo La Tengo’s most inexplicably maligned album a spin in the past six years as much as me—at least once a week—are my ex-girlfriends.
I used to grouse why the equally quiet predecessor And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out racked up all the plaudits in 2000 while its follow-up languished in relative obscurity with mixed reviews. Then it hit me. Inside-Out was an ambient record of the intense variety, more Eno/Hassell than Music for Airports. It gathered up descriptors like “haunting,” “stirring,” and “gentle.” No beef there. But the idea of a “happy” ambient record doesn’t really fit into record-reviewer compartmentalization.
Laura Veirs: July Flame
Laura Veirs
July Flame
(Raven Marching Band, 2010)
Let’s discuss singer-songwriter pop music for a moment. All the way back to ’80s power-pop obscurities the dB’s or Big Star or even Pet Sounds, there was “pop” music being made that wasn’t necessarily “popular.” Just the same, mere talent and sincerity will no longer pluck up a Suzanne Vega or Tracy Chapman (or blech, Jewel) from a coffeehouse and sling them into stardom, or even cultdom, anymore. Consider an audience that’s too cool for John Mayer and willing to seek out lesser-sung heroes, and finds singer-songwriter havens Paste or No Depression to be prime outlets for their brand of music. read more
Fucked Up: Couple Tracks: Singles 2002-2009
Fucked Up
Couple Tracks: Singles 2002-2009
(Matador, 2010)
Fucked Up is a hardcore band that wins awards. Let that process for a minute. The biggest punk rock hype in years obsesses over mortality, father and son, and—despite the tossed-off, sophomoric/generic name—their image. The members have given themselves names like Pink Eyes, and they lie to the press. They’re principled enough to sue Camel for using their name in an ad but not too punk for an undisclosed settlement. They signed to indie-typecast Matador for an even more indie-typecast album featuring Vivian Girls, and singer (yeller?) Pink Eyes is a guest from time to time on the even more unfathomably-typecast Fox News.
But with a band this anomalous, the biggest surprise to this admitted hardcore dilettante is that Matador’s new 2xCD compilation Couple Tracks: Singles 2002-2009 is actually much better than last year’s supposedly dilettante-friendly The Chemistry of Common Life. It’s not often that a non-hardcore fan would accuse a universally acclaimed hardcore album of being too slow, but I’m not just being cheeky; compare this album’s “No Epiphany (Fast Version)” to Chemistry’s and it doesn’t take the heaviest-trained ear to tell that even with Vivian Girls’ cooing and the Kevin Shields-esque shoegaze intro excised, the result isn’t just faster but more melodic, with a radio-friendly guitar hook coming off the coils à la Superchunk’s “Hyper Enough.”
The Avett Brothers: I and Love and You
The Avett Brothers
I and Love and You
(American, 2009)
As a decade full of innovations and advances and regressions and, uh, glo-fi comes to a close, I want to thank Seth and Scott Avett for not sucking. Yes, the great twist of the long-running Avett Brothers is working in (what I feel are) suckable fields—grassroots folk-rock, impossibly earnest ballads, naming their albums sappy things like Emotionalism, the “brothers” gimmick—and succeeding extraordinarily well. There is nothing new to be found on I and Love and You, not even the sudden “A Day in the Life”-style wrinkle in the middle of the “The Perfect Space.” The brothers’ gift is in tastefully bringing off tunes called “I and Love and You” and “Kick Drum Heart” and making it sound so easy.
Call me a cynic for not expecting songs that begin with the lyrics “Love writes a letter and sends it to hate” to be beautiful; sometimes the most sincere artists don’t seem to have much of a knack for melody these days. To put another band on the chopping block whose fans could become Avettheads, Dave Matthews Band’s songs are, by contrast, too fancy, supposedly qualifying the sap of the lyrics by laying them between eight-minute instrumental excursions proving what virtuosos they are. But the Avetts have enough faith in their own melodies to not have to show off—if a song has banjo in it, it’s there for space and arrangement and not Americana authenticity points.
Album Review: Titus Andronicus, The Monitor
by: Dan Weiss
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.
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by: Dan Weiss
published: March 12, 2010
in column: Reviews, What Goes On
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