Marc Hogan: June 2011

Monday, June 27, 2011

The Verve - Urban Hymns

Album Review
eMusic
May 18, 2011

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A messianic sense of purpose has driven Richard Ashcroft throughout his career. During the Verve's early years, he led the band through improvisational epics that combined shoegaze shimmer with Glimmer Twins swagger. On 1997's Urban Hymns, better songwriting helped "Mad Richard" make good on his globe-conquering ambitions; to date, the Verve's third album has sold more than 8 million copies worldwide. Most responsible for the record's success was "Bitter Sweet Symphony," an overpowering anthem that sweetens its disenchanted brooding with a majestic string sample from a forgotten orchestral version of the Rolling Stones' "The Last Time." After legal wrangling, Stones manager Allen Klein would receive all songwriting royalties for the track, but Urban Hymns had moments no less bittersweet: twangy, string-draped ballads "The Drugs Don't Work," "Sonnet" and "Lucky Man," plus turbulent psych excursions like "Catching the Butterfly" and "Come On." Guitarist Nick McCabe, whom Ashcroft enticed to rejoin the Verve in time to finish Urban Hymns, would quit during the band's 1998 U.S. tour, and the band split a year later. Still believing in his own shamanic powers, Ashcroft has continued to release solo albums, and reunited the Verve for a brief tour followed by 2008 album Forth. Still, although some will argue for 1995 sophomore effort A Northern Soul, Urban Hymns was where Ashcroft's spacey dreams became reality.

courtesy of eMusic.com, Inc., © 2011 eMusic.com

Mazzy Star - So Tonight That I Might See

Album Review
eMusic
May 18, 2011

Link

Mazzy Star's second album was a sleeper hit in more ways than one. Roughly a year after the record's release in the fall of 1993, sumptuous opener "Fade Into You" cracked Billboard's Hot 100. Pairing singer Hope Sandoval's distant sighs and guitarist/producer David Roback's languorous pedal steel in a David Lynchian roadhouse waltz, it was the finest moment of a core duo that sounded perpetually on the brink of unconsciousness.

In another way, though, Mazzy Star's unlikely breakthrough had taken even longer. After all, So Tonight That I Might See barely modifies a signature style the band had defined on its 1990 debut: narcotic slow jams, haphazardly chasing the dark psychedelia of the Velvet Underground and the Doors into the desert night. Fragile, violin-accented Arthur Lee cover "Five String Serenade" evocatively addresses the group's occasional lack of memorable tunes, while "Mary of Silence" adds distorted freakouts over descending organ chords, and the guitar-grinding title track drones until dawn.

It was a sound also very much in keeping with Roback's prior work in California's Paisley Underground scene, as well as with the loose, rambling dream-pop of contemporaries like Galaxie 500, Slowdive and Cocteau Twins. "We don't have much to say," Sandoval murmurs on shaky acoustic reminiscence "Unreflected," then says less: "We don't have much." It was enough; the album's hazy echoes have lived drowsily on in 2000s acts as varied as Lisa Germano, the Concretes, Beach House, Grouper and Tamaryn.

courtesy of eMusic.com, Inc., © 2011 eMusic.com

Death Cab for Cutie - Codes and Keys

Album Review
eMusic
May 17, 2011

Link

Somewhere along the line, Death Cab for Cutie got huge. The unassuming rockers from Bellingham, Washington, went platinum with 2005's Plans (a milestone even Arcade Fire haven't matched), topped the charts with 2008's Narrow Stairs, and even contributed the lead single (over Thom Yorke, the Killers and Muse) to the Twilight Saga: New Moon soundtrack. Oh, and Ben Gibbard, the group's lovelorn boy-next-door frontman, married actress/She & Him singer Zooey Deschanel a couple years ago.

It turns out hugeness becomes them. On Codes and Keys, the instinctively self-effacing band appears, for the first time, at ease with their steady, organic success; the result is the best Death Cab record since 2003's Transatlanticism. Where the bleak Narrow Stairs telegraphed its gestures toward adventurousness too obviously, here atmospheric electronics and foreboding bass lines lock together seamlessly in songs that find indie rock's quintessential Smart, Sensitive Guy finally coming to terms with everything he's secretly been afraid of: domesticity, comfort, Los Angeles.

A lot of that is thanks to the band's guitarist and longtime producer, Chris Walla, who — with mixing help from alt-rock luminary Alan Moulder — has created a space for Gibbard's melodies that's as vast and conflicted as Southern California. When Gibbard played a stalker over motorik propulsion on Narrow Stairs' eight-minute first single, "I Will Possess Your Heart," he was stepping out of his comfort zone, and it didn't entirely work. When this still-recent honeymooner rejects womanizing on potential future single "Some Boys," tweaking the Rolling Stones' "Some Girls" while subtly incorporating elements of 1970s art-rock, he's playing to his strengths. It's a refreshing change.

Gibbard sounds most at home on joyful finale "Stay Young, Go Dancing," where he giddily embraces waltzing the years away with his wife in a city he once dubbed "the belly of the beast." The lyrics have a casualness that rings true — a touching contrast from the cloying self-deprecation of Narrow Stairs love song "You Can Do Better Than Me." There's even a quick nod to the Supremes in the line "When she sings, I hear a symphony."

Gibbard's lyrics will always make or break the deal for many listeners, but what distinguishes Codes and Keys is its Walla-led emphasis on electronics. An extended keyboard meditation opens album centerpiece "Unobstructed Views"; on the penultimate "St. Peter's Cathedral," Gibbard murmurs over a minimal whir, with bum-bum backing vocals replacing a guitar line. Both songs do a good job of setting the concept of home life within an existential context: No God, no afterlife, only love. Love and song. An album obsessed with the concept of home, Codes and Keys sees Death Cab sounding at home within itself. On the title track, Gibbard repeats "We are one/ We are alive," through rickety keyboard and aching strings. It's unclear whether he's addressing his wife, the band, the listener, or all of the above. Till-death-do-us-part rock: It could be huge.

courtesy of eMusic.com, Inc., © 2011 eMusic.com

Hooray for Earth - True Loves

Album Review
eMusic
April 19, 2011

Link

"Rock 'n' roll" is how Noel Heroux described one of these eMusic Selects alums' songs at a recent Brooklyn show captured by NYCTaper. The Hooray for Earth frontman's choice of words was counterintuitive; ever since forming in Boston six years ago, this now-New York-based band has actually been moving away from what's typically considered rock music, downplaying the grungy guitars found on their early releases in favor of warm, woozy synths. Last year's fine Momo EP was a case in point. And on their debut LP, True Loves, Hooray for Earth's metamorphosis from mere rockers-with-synths achieves its fullest realization yet.

As the likes of MGMT, Passion Pit and Yeasayer have shown, electronics-inflected psych-pop has become the starting point for rock 'n' roll with crossover appeal these days. True Loves steps right to the edge of that festival-friendly movement, setting the chillwave microgenre's washed-out keys and mournful vocals atop pounding, clattering percussion and rumbling bass. Though the lyrics are often indistinct, what sets True Loves apart are its soaring melodic hooks, some of which are bolstered by sister duo Zambri. The title track has a reggae lilt, "No Love" blasts horn samples and "Sails" dons goth lipstick, but each of them could inspire fist-pumping multitudes. Plus, if these guys ever get the girl in an '80s movie, the triumphantly cheesy love anthem "Bring Us Closer Together" could play over the end credits.

courtesy of eMusic.com, Inc., © 2011 eMusic.com

Little Dragon - Ritual Union

Album Reviews
SPIN
June 2011
Link TK
7/10

And yet another slab of great Scandinavian pop

Since this Swedish electro-soul quartet's slinky 2009 album, Machine Dreams, singer Yukimi Nagano has emerged as a Nicki Minaj for pop's smart set, stealing the scene with various guest spots (Gorillaz, Raphael Saadiq, Maximum Balloon). Little Dragon's third full-length deepens the group's down-tempo mix of icy techno and smoldering R&B. If Ritual Union does moody ambiguity better than meaningful hooks ("Wonderin' of a white dress"? Me, too!), well, Nagano's smoky, pillow-soft purr speaks volumes.

Bank Boards Demanding More of Risk Function: Survey

News Analysis
Agenda
June 20, 2011
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HP Shuffles Veteran Exec Livermore to Board Seat

News Analysis
Agenda
June 20, 2011
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Auditor Rotation, Data Protection Laws, Singapore Governance

News Analysis
Agenda
June 20, 2011
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Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Danish Punks Iceage Slay in U.S. Debut

Live Reviews
SPIN.com
June 20, 2011
Link

The number of minutes that Iceage's set lasted Friday night at Brooklyn's Public Assembly was greater than the ages of any of the quartet's members, but only barely. In just about 22 minutes, the hotly tipped Copenhagen quartet made sure their first American show was one of shrill, brutal efficiency: They played, they saw, they conquered.

In recent weeks, Iceage have become one of the most passionately talked-about bands in the online music press, largely on the strength of their full-length debut, New Brigade (which gets a proper U.S. release June 18 via What's Your Rupture?). "I'm not going to be playing when I'm old," singer and guitarist Bender Ronnenfelt told The New York Times on Friday. "I don't know any bands that have careers we envy."

Drawing heavily on the darker, more discordant sides of punk, post-punk, and their noisy stepchildren, Iceage were in good company at Public Assembly's international showcase, joining such similarly bleak-minded acts as Prurient, the Men, the Cult of Youth, and the Lost Tribe. Playing before a sweatily packed crowd at the 450-capacity venue, with onlookers tweeting from outside the windows, the young group stayed true to a less-is-more live aesthetic; Ronnenfelt limited his stage banter to a few casual, tough-to-decipher asides, while shedding his guitar and lifting his mic stand were as close as he came to stage tricks, aside from a quick plunge into the audience. (One or more members of the crowd, however, clambered onto the stage and then tumbled back down again.)

But the songs sounded every bit as rousing as on record. Dan Kjaer Nielsen's furious drumming stood out even more, particularly during a whirling break on "Broken Bone," one New Brigade track rapidly making the MP3-blog rounds. By the end of opener "White Rune," an apocalypse of lacerating, uptempo angst, at least one couple by the bar were making out frantically, which continued throughout the set.

The album's finale, "You're Blessed," was also the show's closer, and the moment its introductory guitar chords hit, the air filled with raised fists, and there was no doubting this band's potential reach, which extends not only to music obsessives who know their Killing Joke from their Joy Division, but also to any dude-bro who enjoys a testosterone-soaked guitar anthem.

Yes, Iceage is helping to teach more than a few indie kids how to mosh again -- "It's getting kind of claustrophobic in here," one guy was overheard saying on his way out -- but if you came expecting the sort of live-show brutality documented on the group's blog, you would have been disappointed. With Ronnenfelt in a blue polo shirt, and the rest of the band -- Johan Wieth on guitar and Jakob Tvilling Pless on bass -- wearing standard band T-shirts, Iceage looked every bit like what they are: Young men who just graduated from high school (or, in Ronnenfelt's case, not quite yet), playing in an awesomely loud band, just like so many others in every way except for the devastating precision of their attack.

And the music does feel like an "attack," no matter how fresh-faced the personnel playing it. On New Brigade's title track, there's a moment when all the other instruments fall completely silent, and the guitar bashes out a vaguely martial melody. Those notes hung in the humid air Friday night -- technically, Saturday morning -- like jagged descendents of a military bugle. By the time Iceage returns to New York, August 20 at Manhattan's Cake Shop and August 21 at Brooklyn's Secret Project Robot, expect a small army ready to serve.

Buzzcocks - A Different Compilation

Album Review
Pitchfork
June 10, 2011
Link
6.5

Buzzcocks were a different kind of punk rock band. Though inspired by the savage fury of Sex Pistols, the Manchester-based quartet founded by Pete Shelley and future Magazine leader Howard Devoto directed that energy toward explosively melodic songs that located their punk politics not in universal slogans or transgressive gestures but in personal anxieties. And Buzzcocks are still different today. The buzzsaw-sharp songs from the band's late-1970s peak have aged better than most, continuing to influence new generations of musicians. The group's more recent reunion albums and tours, moreover, have done nothing to diminish that formidable legacy.

A Different Compilation, which brings together new studio recordings of 24 of Buzzcocks' most vital songs, can be seen generously as another example of the band's willingness to stand apart. "The original records now sound like demos," Shelley explains in the press materials. "These new versions, honed by years on the road, showcase the songs as we know they should be, the way we know audiences love to hear them." On the other hand, there's a reason the originals have grown so beloved, and anyone unfamiliar with the band would still be better off starting with 1979 classic Singles Going Steady; diehard fans wanting to hear newer recordings of the old songs, meanwhile, might already be content with 2007's 30 or other Buzzcocks live albums. Plus, there's a whole mixed history of artists re-recording their hits, from the unfortunate K-Tel oldies remakes to Bonnie "Prince" Billy's more imaginative Greatest Palace Music. Just in 2008, also on Cooking Vinyl, college rockers Camper Van Beethoven had to re-record a few songs for a best-of compilation due to label conflicts.

Hand-wringing aside, this is a well-chosen set of compelling songs, and if new recordings can probably never match the charm of Buzzcocks' originals, there's still a certain modest appeal to hearing one of punk's most celebrated catalogs given a brawny, contemporary treatment. Where Singles sets out iconic singles like "Orgasm Addict" and "Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've)" next to their B-sides, A Different Compilation also delves into Buzzcocks' often-underrated album tracks, from Ralph Nader-nodding Another Music in a Different Kitchen opener "Fast Cars" (here shorn of its introduction quoting the 1977 Spiral Scratch EP's "Boredom", ostensibly because that track now precedes it) to guitarist Steve Diggle's Dookie-predicting "When Love Turns Around", originally from 1993's Trade Test Transmissions.

Then again, though these hard-hitting versions of such memorable punk-era nuggets as "Harmony in My Head" and "Why Can't I Touch It?" start from only the strongest source material, A Different Compilation lacks the adventurous spirit that helped make the band so worth compiling in the first place. Buzzcocks are often credited with inventing punk-pop, but that genre's modern-day conventions weren't so solidified then-- think of the difference between early disco records and the disco of Village People and Saturday Night Fever-- and there's little here musically you might not hear from some of the band's lesser descendants. And, too, it's not exactly as if there's a huge audience clamoring for re-recordings of late-70s and early-80s Martin Hannett productions (Joy Division, New Order), which is what we're given here in the form of "Boredom", fellow Spiral Scratch track "Breakdown", and Diggle-fronted former B-side "Why She's a Girl From the Chainstore".

So while A Different Compilation definitely isn't a starting point for newcomers to Buzzcocks, it's nothing more or less than a novel document from one of punk's defining bands-- and one of the few from punk's first wave that's still a going concern, at that. "When people put punk rock records on in 1976, 77, they had to rethink their whole lives," Diggle told Pitchfork's Patrick Sisson in a January 2009 interview. "It changed your consciousness, the way you looked at the world, just like powerful records should." This latest compilation probably won't do that, but it might help point you back to the records that did-- and could again.

The Beta Band - The Three EP's

Album Review
eMusic
May 2011

Link

Nothing could suit the Beta Band's music better than the truth that their greatest album isn't an "album" at all. The Scottish group's defining characteristic was its overabundance of ideas, and if some of them were half baked, well, that was still a contrast to the stultifying conservatism of late-'90s rock radio. Compiling a trio of four-song records issued over 1997 and 1998, The Three E.P.'s brilliantly establishes the Beta Band's initial sound: a genre-blending hodgepodge of dusty breakbeats, pastoral guitars, monk-like chants, cosmic grooves and oddball instrumentation.

Arriving a year after Beck's Odelay, with endorsements from Oasis, Radiohead and the Beastie Boys, The Three E.P.'s did something still nearly impossible: unite fans of Britpop, indie rock, electronica and jam. Despite a member devoted to turntables and samplers, these guys were at their best when their loping rhythms and hazy textures were met with equally compelling melodies and lyrical concepts — see the twangy, trumpet-kissed reassurance anthem "Dry the Rain," or the didgeridoo-based swell of psych-pop love song "She's the One." Encompassing ramshackle folk-pop, ambient abstraction and even goofy rap, The Three E.P.'s raised the stakes for what pop could be, whether or not the group could ever live up to that potential. For these indulgently generous 78 minutes, they almost did.

courtesy of eMusic.com, Inc., © 2011 eMusic.com

Massive Attack - Blue Lines

Album Review
eMusic
May 2011

Link

Released several years before critics coined the term "trip-hop," Massive Attack's 1991 debut is a classic late-night album — part of a long line of records that reconfigured boisterous, uptempo styles into restrained, introspective headphone listens. Where a younger group like the xx transforms the club-friendly strains of funky house into an intimate indie-pop dialogue, Blue Lines conjured its heady atmosphere from vintage hip-hop breaks, laid-back dub rhythms, brassy soul-diva vocals, noir-ish film scores and drawling, English-accented rapping.

As for how this all fits into the scene Blue Lines helped spark, trip-hop isn't necessarily a bad phrase to convey the blunted B-boy sensibility on display here — it's just too limiting. "Unfinished Sympathy," in particular, stands apart from any specific historical context, with its tear-jerking strings and Shara Nelson's delicately powerful vocals recalling the orchestral soul of Isaac Hayes and Gamble and Huff. The free-association dialogue between 3D and Tricky (then known as Tricky Kid) on "Daydreaming" would be just as casually hypnotic even if it hadn't preceded Snoop Dogg's blazed nonchalance on Dr. Dre's The Chronic by more than a year, and the Streets' U.K. rap landmark Original Pirate Material by more than a decade. Reggae singer Horace Andy's supple tenor adds a further timeless quality to loping songs like "One Love" and the dub-driven "Five Man Army."

There are a few reasons we're still talking about Massive Attack and not, say, Faithless or Groove Armada, and Blue Lines is one of the biggest.

courtesy of eMusic.com, Inc., © 2011 eMusic.com