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Album Review: Shout Out Louds, Work
Shout Out Louds
Work
(Merge. 2010)
In the Scandanavian Pop Smackdown (“No, my melodies are the most melodic,” whines Jens Lekman. “No, my guitars are the sparkliest,” counters Sondre Lerche), Swedish quintet Shout Out Louds have always politely held their ground directly in the middle. While this has stopped them from buzzing too loud and burning out too soon, it has also kept them from selling millions of records. Now with their second release for their hip new home Merge, they are at last making a push to be the “most” at something.
Work is the third full-length for the Shout Out Louds, and it comes after a slightly long wait since their last saccharine opus, Our Ill Wills. In the three years since Our Ill Wills, SOLs split to far corners of the globe to decompress, with Olenius decamping to Melbourne to write Work. The songs were gelled remotely. The result is their most fully formed album of the trio, which serves to reason that the “putting oceans between them” methodology worked.
Songs like “Walls”, “1999”, and “Fall Hard” are not only pleasant and toe-tappy—something that has basically been true of every SOLs song ever—but also memorable and catchy, something I have long felt was missing from their work. Though they brought on Seattle producer Phil Ek (he of Shins, Band of Horses, and Fleet Foxes fame), his mark isn’t terribly noticeable, although the shiny, forward-moving production on “Walls” has Ek all over it to a delightful effect.
Album Review: Wolf People, Tidings
Wolf People
Tidings
(Jagjaguwar, 2010)
Do you love steely, noodly psychedelic guitars? Do you like getting your ears injected with brain-altering disharmony but also love the glockenspiel? Do you miss the British accents and Renaissance vocal influences of ’70s rock? What about sitar? Do you love tape hiss? If you say yes to all of these questions, well, have I got an album for you!
Tidings, the first full-length from Jagjaguwar’s new UK discovery Wolf People, is pretty damn awesome. It’s a total throwback, but no one should mind, because it never apes trippy ’70s rock the way most throwback bands do, getting more into the vest-no-shirt attitude than the actual musicianship and experimentation.
I should warn that Tidings doesn’t exactly rock. Unless you turn it up really loud. More like it rolls. It’s a sweeping tide of constantly moving instrumentation, strutting guitars, flitting flutes, swampy harmonicas, vocals that march alongside the instruments rather than shouting above them. Many of the songs hover around the one-minute range and act as interludes between the “actual songs,” but they all blend together so well that it’s not terribly easy to tell where the songs begin and end unless you are looking at your player as it’s happening. Some of these interludes are actually labeled “Interlude” and some take the form of serials—album opener “Season Pt. 1” and closer “Season Pt. 2.”
Album Review: Hot Chip, One Life Stand
Hot Chip
One Life Stand
(Astralwerks, 2010)
There is something sincere and authentic about London synth-poppers Hot Chip, staying true as an electronic band, but one with higher musical aspirations. Their live instrumentation includes flugelhorn in addition to the steel drum, and their studio instrumentation for One Life Stand, brought to life by 10 different musicians, included real drums and bass, and even cello. Hot Chip is a band that manages to live in two worlds simultaneously—the murky electronic underworld and the more cerebral indie scene.
The album’s posthumous first single is a killer dance track with a catchy pop melody, the perfect musical storm that is Hot Chip’s trademark. The song’s theme is that a one-night stand can become something to base a life on (the lyrics say playfully “I only wanna be your one night stand” and later “I only wanna be your one life stand”). Fun synth riffs dart in and out, keeping the momentum moving forward, and eventually helping to bring the track to a close. read more
Album Review: Yeasayer, Odd Blood
Yeasayer
Odd Blood
(Secretly Canadian, 2010)
When the three members of Brooklyn’s Yeasayer moved into the idyllic upstate New York house cum studio that would become their home for the three months of recording, they were surprised to find an enormous gift from the rock gods waiting for them there. The house’s owner, a rock drummer with impressive credentials, turned out to also be a collector of rare, vintage, and very sophisticated synthesizers. Not only did he not mind if Yeasayer members Chris Keating, Ira Wolf Tuton, and Anand Wilder used the gear, he also had no rules dictating in what manner they could use them. In fact, as soon as the fellas arrived, he split.
So they moved the synths all over the house, particularly in front of windows so that they could look out on nature while they recorded, and completely embraced the new directions that the unexpected gear took them in. The result, Odd Blood, is exactly the sort of record that should follow a debut as hyped and lauded as Yeasayer’s 2007 All Hour Cymbals. It sounds like Yeasayer, but it doesn’t sound like anything Yeasayer has done to date.
The Magnetic Fields: Realism
The Magnetic Fields
Realism
(Nonesuch, 2010)
Autoharp. The word “hootenanny.” Finger-picked banjo. Sing-alongs. All these elements of Realism differ fundamentally, both in sound and theme, from the Magnetic Fields’ last effort, the much-lauded, crunchy power-pop album Distortion—although, frontman Stephen Merritt considers the two albums a pair. While Distortion spoke to the Boston native-band’s early ’90s roots, Realism speaks to their longevity with an experimental and sardonic tone, which is exactly the thing that keeps the Magnetic Fields continually significant after more than 20 years as a band.
Realism is a full-album jab at American folk music. At its best moments, it invokes the insanity of the romance between batty, one-hit folksters played by Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara in A Mighty Wind. In that film’s affectionate folk bashing, the two characters, a couple act called “Mitch and Mickey,” ape classic duettists like Ian and Sylvia and Jim and Jean, breaking up and falling back in love over goofy lyrics and stage acting that becomes their reality. read more
The Side Projects of Jack White and Josh Homme
Over the past couple of years, my inbox has teemed with press releases making ample use of the word “supergroup.” It seemed that 2008-09 were to bands what 1978-79 were to marriage—indie artists worth their salt need to partner swap to stay with it. Sticking the tour van keys into a bowl at the beginning of the party, M. Ward and Jim James pulled out Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis’ to form Monsters of Folk, while James Iha and Adam Schlesinger got Taylor Hanson and Bun E. Carlos to form the weirdest generational mash up ever, Tinted Windows. But a couple of greedy gents dipped their mitts in twice, forming bands on the side of their side bands, and only one will be allowed to get away with it.
Jack White and Josh Homme are both reigning kings of the retro-rock scene: The former for founding two-piece garage-rock machine the White Stripes, and the latter for leading the rowdy riff rock of Queens of the Stone Age. White got a jump on the supergroup trend when, in 2005, he formed the Raconteurs with Brendan Benson and Greenhorns members Patrick Keeler and Jack Lawrence, and then doubled down in 2009, sliding behind the drum set and bringing Jack Lawrence along to form the Dead Weather with the Kills’ Alison Mosshart and QOTSA’s Dean Fertita. Homme’s first side project—Eagles of Death Metal,which started in 1998, with its first album released in 2004—avoids the supergroup label, as its main lineup contains only Homme and friend Jesse “The Devil” Hughes, while his 2009 collaboration with Dave Grohl and legendary Led Zepplin bassist John Paul Jones is the textbook definition of the supergroup cliché, bringing together three rock powerhouses.
Surfer Blood: Astro Coast
Surfer Blood
Astro Coast
(Kanine, 2010)
Yes, they are from an ocean town—West Palm Beach, Florida, in fact. But despite their beachy pedigree and marine-themed nomenclature, Surfer Blood are more than a mere soundtrack for a modern day Endless Summer (it helps that none of the band’s five members surf). And because this is the case, January is the perfect time to release their stunning debut, Astro Coast. Rather than being lost in the swirl of pre-labeled “summery jams” that end up permanently attached to mental images of your two-month fling, Astro Coast will hopefully benefit from our state of wintry introspect and get the thoughtful attention it deserves. read more
How 2005 Musically Defined the Aughts
I am embarrassed to admit that my days as a newly minted, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, cliché-loving music journalist began not very long ago… in the middle of our current decade. I spent the later part of 2005 in a glorified closet jamming promotional recent-release CDs into envelopes bound for new subscribers to Magnet magazine. I had been writing humiliatingly gushy zine articles about local Philadelphia bands for a little while, and got the mother lode of burned demos out at shows every night, but my voluntary slave labor at Magnet was the first time I had ever had access to such a haul of new music that actually came from a distributor.
While I peeled self-adhesive envelope flaps and nursed my paper cuts, I would slap one disc after another into the sticker-covered Kmart CD player in the mailroom: Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods, Spoon’s Gimme Fiction, the New Pornographers’ Twin Cinema, Antony and the Johnsons’ I Am a Bird Now, Nada Surf’s The Weight Is a Gift, Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois, Devendra Banhart’s Cripple Crow. And when I asked the editors for recommendations, they handed me Alligator by the National and My Morning Jacket’s Z. My boyfriend at the time played the Mountain Goats’ The Sunset Tree so many times that, had it not been a totally awesome record, I might have killed him. I even lingered for 30 minutes in the Hitchcock section of the local independent video store because Eels’ Blinking Lights and Other Revelations was playing and I was transfixed. You couldn’t spit without hitting great independent music that year. read more
Animal Collective: Fall Be Kind
Animal Collective
Fall Be Kind
(Domino, 2009)
If the bouncy, hypnotic refrain from “My Girls” isn’t still stuck in your head, then the only thing I can surmise is that you never heard Animal Collective’s epic Merriweather Post Pavilion, which ushered in 2009 with a sonic bang. The only possible way you’d have forgotten how incredible the album is by now is if you never heard it at all. In the very unlikely event that the perfection of Merriweather Post Pavilion escaped you, Animal Collective is sneaking in just before the holidays with a little EP reminder of how spectacular they are, titled Fall Be Kind.
If your gift recipient didn’t already snag the digital version on November 23rd, Fall Be Kind on CD or, even better, 12-inch vinyl, is the perfect present for the indie-rock obsessive on your list. It’s the light, fun companion to Merriweather Post Pavilion’s layered heft, filled with giddy unison singing and sugary sounds.
Fall Be Kind started in February of 2008 at a session with Ben Allen at Sweet Tea in Oxford, MS, and was finally completed more than a year later at Mission Sound in the band’s hometown of Brooklyn. The EP includes tracks Animal Collective fans have been loving live: “Graze”, “What Would I Want? Sky”, and three other new jams, “Bleed”, “On a Highway”, and “I Think I Can.”
Album Review: The Whigs, In the Dark
by: Lavinia Jones Wright
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.”
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by: Lavinia Jones Wright
published: March 10, 2010
in column: Reviews, What Goes On
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