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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]
This Week’s Record Releases
So, I’ve gathered that those of you out there in San Francisco are probably still somewhat consumed with Noise Pop, and the good news is that even should you wind up spending the next six days recovering, you won’t really be missing much in the way of new records. It’s a fairly light week for releases, but it’s not without highlights. Behold:
Peter Gabriel — Scratch My Back
I don’t really want to talk shit about Peter Gabriel, because in an ideal world, everyone would just sort of have a passing respect for him, while being extremely grateful that he green-lit the “In Your Eyes” scene in Say Anything. But sadly, this new collection of covers he’s put together is solely for the olds. Because you know what you don’t need? You don’t need to hear anyone doing really over-produced, melodramatic versions of songs by your favorite non-old bands: Radiohead, Magnetic Fields, Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, Regina Spektor. It’s admirable that he knows who those people even are, but it should have exactly zero bearing on your life, assuming you already know things.
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
Clogs — The Creatures in the Garden of Lady Walton
Clogs is a now long-running project featuring, most notably, the National guitarist Bryce Dessner and multi-instrumentalist Padma Newsome. They’ve spent their career writing starkly beautiful, mostly instrumental stuff that has its roots in classical music but is made considerably more interesting by their familiarity with the weird, wide world of post-rock. On this new album, though, they invited My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden, as well as Sufjan Stevens and the National’s Matt Berninger, along to contribute vocals. The results are surprisingly disappointing: Even with the considerable nuanced skills of these vocalists, they ultimately serve as an unwanted distraction from the music.
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
Rogue Wave — Permalight
I’ve always felt like Rogue Wave got the short end of the stick in way, having first come on the scene when the Shins were changing lives and taking names or whatever. Rogue Wave couldn’t go 15 minutes without someone saying they sounded like them, when in actuality, they just sounded like all the same sunny, smart pop influences that they shared with the Shins. Permalight is the band’s first full-length since 2007’s overlooked Asleep at Heaven’s Gate, and their first without bassist Evan Farrell, who died in a fire over two years ago. It’s not much of a departure from their previous work: The company line is something about it being more visceral, which—and this is by no means a complaint—I’m not really hearing.
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
This Week’s Record Releases
Remember how last week you cared about the Olympics and stuff? Yeah, that kind of stopped, didn’t it? And to make matters worse, you still have another week before all the Thursday night NBC shows come back on. But there is hope for your week yet: New records, including some that you could be seeing on year-end lists when the time comes.
Joanna Newsom – Have One on Me
The week basically belongs to Ms. Newsom, whose Have One on Me, the follow-up to 2007’s beautiful and perplexing Ys, hits shelves tomorrow. It’s a mega ambitious, sprawling triple album—a far cry from the relatively compact Ys, which, despite clocking in at over 50 minutes, only contained five songs. There’s been a refreshingly old-school feel to the way Have One on Me is being released—it was announced less than a month ago, and the label managed to keep it under wraps long enough that it was a real event each of the three times they revealed songs from it. Promo copies were sent out very late, and even then they were hard to come by; it finally leaked in its entirety at the end of last week, just days before its official release—an impressive feat for any record in this day and age, let alone one as highly anticipated as this one. So anyway, the record is very much still sinking in, but here are some notes: Her voice is still an acquired taste if ever there were such a thing. She’s tended to fall back on what sounds like a Bjork impersonation, but she’s capable of much, much more, and she’s brings it all to the table here, including a handful of the most irritating/endearing vocal ticks you’ll ever hear. The harp plays a central role again this time around, but the accompaniment seems a bit more elaborate. She’s one of the most steadfastly strange songwriters America has produced in a long, long time, and the work she does demands more time than any of us have been able to give it at this point. Perhaps we’ll revisit next week—for now, you should just go get it.
Listen: “‘81” [at youtube.com]
This Week’s Record Releases
So, hopefully you’re still working your way through last week’s releases, because real talk: There’s not a whole hell of a lot going on this week, unless you’ve been anxiously awaiting the arrival of the Legacy edition of Santana’s Supernatural, which of course you have not because you are better than that. But if you’re in desperate need of new, non-terrible music, you are not entirely without options. Behold:
Local Natives — Gorilla Manor
I’ve been slacking a bit on this one, but rumor has it this LA band’s debut full-length is the must-buy record of the week. I’ve only heard a few songs so far, but I definitely understand why it’s impossible to read so much as a paragraph about these guys without seeing them compared to Fleet Foxes. They’re seemingly less reliant upon vocal harmonies, more of a full band thing, but the similarities are there.
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com] read more
This Week’s Record Releases
Yeasayer get upbeat with "Odd Blood", due out Feb. 9
Happy Monday, you guys. We’re two weeks away from one of the biggest release dates of this young year, but even now, there’s no shortage of things that are very much worth your time. “Oh, like the Who’s new Greatest Hits thing?” Jesus Christ, no, not like the Who’s new Greatest Hits thing at all. Like these:
Yeasayer — Odd Blood
This Brooklyn band first entered the consciousness of the indie-rock world back in 2008 with their promising but flawed debut, All Hour Cymbals. The blogs fell head over heels for their particular and peculiar take on hazy, global psych-folk. At its best, the rhythms were off-kilter and engaging, while lushly harmonized vocals carried the weight of the melodies. Some of those were better than others, and some of them were practically nonexistent. This time out, they’ve cleaned things up a bit in terms of production, and they’ve shifted their focus toward upbeat, dancier tracks. It’s bordering on an Event Record, so make sure you check it out, for at least long enough that you don’t sound stupid when everyone starts talking about it at the bar tonight.
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com] read more
This Week’s Record Releases
Midlake release "The Courage of Others" on Feb. 2nd
Hello there, my name is Mike. I’m the guy who, for the past… god, two years, I guess, brought you the Cheat Sheet, a monthly column going over the biggest news stories and record releases of the previous month. It was meant to serve as a one-stop shop for anyone whose eyes maybe weren’t glued to their computer screen looking for music news at all times.
Funny thing, though: Those people don’t actually exist. Everyone knows everything as soon as it happens, and they need to be told what to think about it immediately. So they turn to the blogs, who are competing with one another for page views, which you need about a gazillion of in order to sell an ad anyone. Then blogs do something called Search Engine Optimization in hopes that when some sad sack loser Googles “I like Lady Gaga’s hilarious costumes,” their blog will be the first site that shows up. So then the blogs start covering really stupid things because people are generally really stupid and perform internet searches for really stupid things. So it’s a race, basically, to see who can cover the dumbest thing the fastest, on a site that’s most conducive to search engines. You know, journalism.
Anyway—and this is not to bitterly imply that what I was doing had anything to do with journalism—no more Cheat Sheet. But! Now, every Monday, I’ll tell you about all the records being released that week. Because in 2010, nothing matters more than release dates, since records never leak and are never available months before they’re officially available to be purchased.
So without further ado, this weeks releases! Which happen to be not all that exciting! read more
Your Handy Guide to the Month in Music
Do you guys remember November? It was a long time ago, I know, and it probably seems even longer now that you’re presumably deep in the throes of holiday shopping or holiday drinking or holiday weeping or whatever other holiday traditions you observe. But even so, it’s important that we look back on the events that shook the pop culture landscape to its very core during my second-favorite month of the year, or at least the very small handful of events that seemed to have registered at all. So real quick, let’s talk November. Then you can feel free to get back to shopping/drinking/weeping. (God, I’m going to start doing all three of those things at the same time.)
This Month’s Most Notable News Stories
Good Morning America Hates Gay People, Cancels on Adam Lambert
This is a really, really tricky situation. Adam Lambert’s much-hyped, first televised performance since he finished in second place behind boring, white, male extraordinaire Kris Allen on the last season of American Idol took place at the very end of the American Music Awards. He did his first single, “For Your Entertainment”, and it’s a fucking miserable song—high school theater schlock that only the most tasteless and clueless among us could possibly even tolerate, let alone enjoy.
And as I’m sure you’ve heard, the performance featured a bunch of sexually suggestive gestures: Rubbing a man’s face in his crotch, leading another man around on a leash, grabbing a woman’s crotch, and, most famously, kissing a male member of his band. There was outrage from all corners: He’d acted differently than he had in rehearsals, so he was wrong on that front. He presented homosexuality as a form of rebellion, so he was wrong there, too.
Your Handy Guide to the Month in Music
Wow, you guys, it’s already the time of year when people start saying things like, “Omigod, can you believe it’s already November?!?! This year has just flown by!” I never say things like that because I simply cannot fucking believe how time just crawls and crawls and crawls, but whatever. At least we have a new Vampire Weekend single, right? Happy Thanksgiving.
This Month’s Most Notable News Stories
Kanye West and Lady Gaga Cancel “Fame Kills” Tour
Just a couple weeks after pulling his most idiotic stunt yet, interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for Best Female Video at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards to point out that, actually, Beyoncé probably should have won the award, and losing a pretty substantial number of the fans he still had left, word came that Kanye West and Lady Gaga had cancelled the “Fame Kills” tour that was planned to run from November through January. No official reason was ever given, but it seems unlikely that it wasn’t a direct result of the VMAs incident. I even like to think Lady Gaga pulled the plug on it herself, out of fear that public association with Kanye would be detrimental to her career (it would), which has been exploding of late. This has nothing to do with anything, but you guys should really watch her performance from Saturday Night Live a few weeks ago. Shit was bananas, and it’s becoming impossible not to like her.
Your Handy Guide to the Month in Music
Well, finally. After an entire summer spent twiddling my thumbs and waiting for some halfway decent shit to start happening, it finally has. Kanye, Taylor Swift, the Beatles, Jay-Z, Girls… Ellen DeGeneres! September has come and gone, people, but it was good to us while it was here. Let’s look back on it.
This Month’s Most Notable News Stories
Kanye West Hates Taylor Swift or Whatever
For those of you still fighting the urge to fully give yourself over to the whims of the biggest stars from the world of popular music and culture, there were probably bigger news stories during September. But for the rest of us, there was no such thing. The moment Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift as she received the VMA for Best Female Video, we knew we were going to be in for an amazing week. First, the Twitter universe went crazy, and then it went a little crazier. By the next morning, all the major news outlets—and all the minor ones, too—chimed in, and that following night, Kanye appeared on the premiere of Jay Leno’s new 10pm talk show. Not a day later, the internet was overrun with “Imma let you finish” parodies, and that went on for a pretty long time. It was awesome, then less awesome, then not awesome at all. As for fallout from the incident, who knows? Kanye just cancelled an upcoming tour with Lady Gaga for no apparent reason, so something could definitely be going on there. And my mom thinks he’s a jerk now, so that can’t bode well for him either.
This Week’s Record Releases
by: Mike Conklin
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]
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by: Mike Conklin
published: March 15, 2010
in column: Reviews, What Goes On
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