Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Los Campesinos! - All's Well That Ends EP

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
August 16, 2010
Link
7.6













Los Campesinos! say they're not breaking up, and that's good enough for me. There's no denying, however, that the innocently energetic indie kids who banded together four years ago at the University of Cardiff, in Wales, are no more. Oh, they're still hilarious, still capable of thrilling a packed room, but this year's glorious, enigmatic Romance Is Boring-- like don't-call-it-an-album We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed two years ago-- isn't so much twee as grotesque. The group members still perform under the Campesinos! surname, but in recent months two have left: singer/keyboardist Aleksandra, in a long-planned move, and drummer Ollie, under somewhat mysterious circumstances.

Now, in the form of a stopgap EP, comes another about-face. Los Campesinos! lyricist/shouter Gareth has let it be known that he hates acoustic performances. But All's Well That Ends-- available digitally or as a hard-to-find 10"-- is made up of pretty much those, pulling together acoustic versions of four Romance Is Boring tracks in roughly the style of the band's NPR "Tiny Desk Concerts" appearance early last month. By its nature, the release is for fans only, particularly in its expensive physical edition. That said, Los Campesinos! are hardly trying to fool anybody here, and devotees have plenty of reasons to be pleased. Like the most contemplative moments from the last two records, All's Well That Ends points a potential way forward for this constantly evolving band. It offers an early glimpse of the new lineup and sheds clearer light on some of the group's most bewilderingly complex songs, without sacrificing intricacy or exposing too many shortcomings.

I say "too many," of course, because exposing shortcomings is sort of Gareth's forte. If Romance Is Boring is in some ways the most cerebral Los Campesinos! record, it's also their most physical. Gareth is obsessed with bodies, and these new arrangements make it easier to notice the beautifully overwrought Roald Dahl vividness with which he describes them. There's a Hypercolor bruise, kept "like a pet, a private joke/ They told no others." There's a comparison of flabby bellies, an "ear to the door/ Listening to the landing floorboards" to figure out when the coast is clear to scamper from bed to bathroom. There's also a wonderfully, morbidly evocative image of a corpse dropped from a plane, so that it leaves a chalk outline capable, like something out of a children's game, of determining "the initial of who you'll marry"-- and here's a crucial difference from the kids' stuff-- "...now I'm not around." It's worth letting yourself get past the sublime, Andrew Bujalski-level awkwardness of Gareth's sexual declarations about "phallic cake" or post-rock to get to these gorgeously expressive details.

All's Well That Ends helps by showing there's more to these songs musically than the messy maximalism of their album renditions. The stripped-down arrangements suggest that violinist Harriet is probably the most underrated Campesinos!; her prickly pizzicato or melancholy bowing repeatedly add emotional heft to Gareth's conversational vocals. Tom, the guitarist, writes the bulk of the compositions, and he often keeps himself busy this time with more than the standard acoustic strums; there's even some slide guitar on lust-not-love advance mp3 "Romance Is Boring (Princess Version)" (all the songs here are subtly retitled from their album versions). Other mildly revelatory change-ups include a deep, Nico-ish lead vocal to start the most dramatically different track, "Letters From Me to Charlotte (RSVP)"-- presumably by new keyboardist Kim-- and a deeper, Silver Jews-ish backing vocal by another new member, Rob, right when Gareth is enunciating the most embarrassing lyrics on wryly hooky break-up anthem "Straight in at 101/ It's Never Enough". Two guys singing about not getting any play might be funnier than one.

There's a moment on the album version of "In Medias Res" where the lyrics become completely incomprehensible, hidden behind electronic cacophony. That's important, because it shows a band whose appeal has largely relied on Gareth's way with words really making a case for themselves as noise-makers, too. On the EP's "(All's Well That Ends) In Medias Res", however, we hear some new lines, over rickety piano and Harriet's violin: "You know I'd sooner go down in a ball of flames/ Than I would lay here and be bored to death/ All's well that ends." Surely Los Campesinos! don't believe that, but they know what it's like to feel it, and it's fun when they can make you feel it, too. It's a way to get the emotional release of mythologized self-destruction without the atavistic dumbness.

A new report this month from Nielsen says MySpace now accounts for only 5.6% of people's online social-networking time. Meanwhile, Los Campesinos!-- who made their name through and originally sounded like products of that Web 2.0 site-- have gone from the little hobby of some UK college students to a seasoned band playing mid-size U.S. venues and late-night network TV. If they've succeeded where Rupert Murdoch couldn't, it's because they've grown and adapted without losing sight of what made them Internet sensations in the first place. The All's Well That Ends EP may not be the end for Los Campesinos!, but it's definitely the end of the beginning.

Cloud Cult - Light Chasers

Album Review
Pitchfork
August 11, 2010
Link
5.4













There's no statute of limitations on grieving the loss of an infant child. For Craig and Connie Minowa, the 2002 death of two-year-old son Kaidin was enough to force a year-long separation. This bereavement also fueled the most cathartic moments of the Cloud Cult albums Craig would later record, in a geothermal-powered studio, at the couple's small, northern Minnesota organic farm. Happily, the Minowas are now celebrating a new addition to the growing Cloud Cult family-- baby boy Nova-- and their band is experiencing something of a rebirth, too.

Cloud Cult's eighth proper album follows the No One Said It Would Be Easy band-doc DVD last year and three recent reissues of this self-released collective's early-2000s output, including 2004's staggeringly expansive Aurora Borealis. Any fan who knows those releases won't be surprised by Light Chasers, which stretches Cloud Cult's hippie-Arcade-Fire sprawl into "a concept album that interweaves stories focused on the exploration of the mysteries of the universe, life and death." Many of you will probably stop reading at this point; the rest of you should know that Light Chasers improves on 2008's Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes) by focusing on what Cloud Cult do best, though it lacks the colorful songwriting and hooky inventiveness of the band's most endearing songs. It'll still probably be fun live.

Cloud Cult's usual combination of wiry guitars, earnest yawps, swaying orchestration, bustling drums, and occasional keyboards or electronics returns on Light Chasers, with the addition of ex-Tapes 'n Tapes-er Shawn Neary on bass. Unfortunately, all this overwroughtness-- overwroughtitude?-- has come to feel slightly rote: Note extended song titles like "The Contact (Journey to the Light p. 5)" (the exact track listing varies between the back of the CD case, liner notes, and CDDB online data). Still, this combination of the building blocks for epic, millennial indie rock remains fairly potent in Cloud Cult's hands, particularly on multiple-personality piano stomper "Room Full of People in Your Head". Unplugging it a little, "The Baby (You Were Born)" is a wide-eyed acoustic ballad that, like John Lennon's "Beautiful Boy" before it, can seem moving or saccharine depending on your frame of mind. With no breaks between songs, you have to wade through various interludes and self-help asides to find this stuff, but that's part of the fun of a Cloud Cult record. These guys have always been a little different.

In fact, like jam bands or certain dance music, Cloud Cult's music is ultimately almost ceremonial in nature. Note subtitles like "The Invocation p. 1 (You'll Be Bright)" or "The Lessons (Exploding People)", for crissakes, or the Rapture-ous (and not even the band!) cover art. So if the howls and panting that open advance mp3 "Running With the Wolves" strike you as a little too on the nose, the judgment-day prophecy of "The Acceptance (Responsible)" as too preachy, or the (unfortunately) robot-voiced aphorisms of "The Surrender (Guessing Game)" as too, um, robotically aphoristic, then try to imagine the fervor of the live experience. There, the swirl of ecstatic sound-- and the presence of two live painters-- can be powerful, a sort of live secular devotional music that is ambitiously off in its own world. Anybody who releases an Earth Day EP or pays extra to have their CD packaging made out of recycled material probably isn't in it only for the money, but they're not exactly pure aesthetes, either. Give them your 10 bucks, you won't feel bad about it, just buy their back catalog first.

Cats on Fire - Dealing in Antiques

Album Review
Pitchfork
August 2, 2010
Link
6.5
















In a typewritten note tucked within each copy of the first White Town 7", self-released in 1990, leader Jyoti Mishra is very specific about his aims. "We want to create music that will make you want to dance, cry, sing, laugh, music that elevates, depresses, and declaims," he wrote. "Not just some form of aural wallpaper or something to try and impress your friends, but something you understand and that understands you." Setting aside any questions about a record's powers of comprehension, that modest manifesto sounds a lot like the goals of plenty of indie pop today, too.

Cats on Fire cover White Town's fluke 1997 hit, "Your Woman", to open the 20-track odds-and-sods compilation Dealing in Antiques. By the time White Town released the track, Mishra was working solo, and his bedroom-produced gender-bender was recognizable in part by a horn sample that some people used to guess (wrongly) came from the Star Wars theme. These four Finns do it the way Mishra & co. might have a few years earlier, stripping the dancefloor-friendly arrangement down to sun-splashed post-C86 guitars, bass, and drums. Dapper Cats on Fire frontman Mattias Björkas' drowsy, eternally Mozzy warble barely resembles Mishra's field-mouse hush, and it's a deftly executed cover, but beyond that, it can't really do better than the original at making people dance, cry, sing, or laugh, at elevating, depressing, or declaiming. And that's the point, isn't it?

Dealing in Antiques is rewarding and disappointing in much the same ways as its first track. Coming after 2007 debut The Province Complains and 2009 follow-up Our Temperance Movement, each warmly received in indie-pop circles, the current collection reaches as far back as a 2002 demo, bringing together out-of-print B-sides and EP cuts as well as unreleased material from the intervening years. The tracks show that Cats on Fire's jangling style has been in place since early on, that the intimacy of a home recording suits their bedsit songwriting, and that they perform their songs with precision. If you like Felt, Orange Juice, or the Orchids, you'll probably like the sound of this. In that sense, it's a shame New York City Popfest had its The New York Times moment in 2010 rather than last year or the year before, when Cats on Fire were there.

On Dealing in Antiques, however, no matter how tasteful or well-played, the songs eventually start to blur together-- it'd make exquisite aural wallpaper, no kidding, but as indie pop, the compilation leaves some room for improvement. Björkas is prone to cramming ill-fitting syllables into his verses to make awkward rhymes work (see "Crooked Paper Clip", especially, or "Stars"). And the occasional jaunty uptempo number, piano part, or female backing vocal amid all the minor-key strums does little to separate the bookish-pop wheat from its chaff here. Then again, as with American contemporaries Pants Yell!, Cats on Fire are all about subtle understatement, and devotees will surely lose themselves in the ambiguities of like-not-love song "Never Land Here", the ironic twists of snob send-ups "On His Right Side" and "The Smell of an Artist", the shy neurosis of "Something Happened", the nuanced doublespeak of "Solid Work", the funny romantic near-miss of "Your Treasure".

Besides "Your Woman", the only other new recording here is "The Hague", and even that one originally appeared earlier this year on The Matinée Grand Prix label comp. "These are my ideals," Björkas croons, over a delicately pretty acoustic guitar with walking bass lines. "If you don't like them, I might have to change them." If Cats on Fire's ideals are at all like White Town's 20 years ago, Dealing in Antiques shows the group is well on its way to achieving them, but they'll have to move further beyond nostalgia-- and, dare I say, bring their charms higher up out of the 1980s-scented decor-- in order to get all the way there.

Antarctica Takes It! - Constellations

Album Review
Pitchfork
July 29, 2010
Link
5.8













In 2006, Santa Cruz, Calif.-based singer/multi-instrumentalist Dylan McKeever released the first Antarctica Takes It! album. Recorded through the internal microphone on a friend's laptop, The Penguin League's intimacy rendered the youthful exuberance of its overstuffed chamber-pop songs more clearly than radio-ready production ever could've. McKeever & co. sold the CD-R for $6 via their MySpace page and eventually caught the ear of the label arm of London-based club night How Does It Feel to Be Loved?, which gave the album a gently remastered reissue in early 2008.


With a little help from an online fundraising drive, Constellations sees Antarctica Takes It! returning as a comparatively polished indie pop outfit, sharing UK stages this summer alongside the Primitives, Love Is All, Allo Darlin', Shrag, and Tender Trap. This sophomore album adds musical complexity, including the occasional prickle of tropical guitar, while keeping the focus on 1950s-minded ditties built from ukulele, piano, and quirky percussion. Lyrically, the record rejoices in music itself, or else frets over romantic anxieties-- hell, multiple songs compare a romantic interest to music-- although with a rhyming-dictionary plainness that sadly keeps Antarctica Takes It! from matching their peers just yet.

McKeever is an astute student of his genre, and he knows how to put together charming, twee-inclined tracks. That's true whether he's stripping down to the glockenspiel and ukulele of "Bossa", which in its esquisitely minimal cutness sharply resembles Japan-based duo Lullatone's avant-twee touchstone "Bedroom Bossa Band", or layering his vocals for the endless-summer harmonies of coastal excursion "Voices". On the piano-rollicking "C&F", McKeever's bookish, lispy voice takes on an enjoyably showy hiccup, the kind of thing descended from Jerry Lee Lewis. More than once, McKeever ends a song with voice-over narration, which works better as a sonic element than it does lyrically; in a few places he's also joined, quite capably, by a pair of similarly understated female vocalists, Maria Schoettler and Rachel Fannan, who bring to mind Stuart Murdoch's God Help the Girl project.

For all of Constellations' homespun craft, it's still a mild disappointment, particularly coming so soon after Allo Darlin' reminded us that there are still great twee-pop songs left unwritten. The dueling strings and crashing sound effects on sock-hop throwback "Spirit of Love" are appealingly constructed, but here's a sample lyric: "I shuddered and shook/ 'Cause into your eyes I could not look." Sure, the album never gets quite this clumsy again, but nearly every rhyme is as emptily obvious as matching "birds of a feather" with "weather" (and "together," and "ever"...). The closest this disc comes to the sharp wit or deep insight of its genre's greats is when McKeever keeps "thinking everything's a sign/ Misread the stars to make you mine," on San Francisco love song "Straight to Your Heart". The Penguin League was a promising, good-hearted debut, but it was certainly no TigermilkConstellations is a lot closer to recent indie-pop near-misses by Princeton and Lucky Soul than it is to If You're Feeling Sinister.

Paulson's Ucits push one of many: experts

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Ignites Europe
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