Covers That Beat the Originals

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eMusic
July 27, 2011
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Grace Jones, “Walking in the Rain” (Flash and the Pan)
Grace Jones called her 1981-82 world tour “A One Man Show.” That sly nod to her androgynous appearance and multi-faceted persona was rarely more appropriate than on this opening cut from 1981′s Nightclubbing. For her post-disco breakout album, Jones returned to the ace rhythm section of Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, plus another set of covers (Iggy Pop, Brian Ferry) as impeccably chic as the ones on 1980′s Warm Leatherette. And then there was “Walking in the Rain.” Applying a slick dub-funk makeover to not the Ronettes, not Love Unlimited, not even old Johnny Ray, but Australian new-wavers Flash and the Pan, Jones speaks the words, “Feeling like a woman/ Looking like a man,” and they’re transformed. She forgets to add, “Sounding fabulous.”



Wilson Pickett, “Hey Jude” (The Beatles)
Before “Hey Jude,” Duane Allman was an occasional session man so obscure the credits list him as David Allman. Afterward, he was a full-time Muscle Shoals mainstay, recording with the likes of Aretha Franklin; by the end of 1969, the Allman Brothers Band was playing New York’s legendary Fillmore East. Allman’s career-launching solo is a big part of this cover’s appeal, but equally important is Pickett’s stirring vocal, peaking with a raspy howl that makes Paul McCartney’s screaming original sound like his inside voice. Take a British pop song, change it into soul, change that into guitar-blazing Southern rock — and make it better.



Saint Etienne, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” (Neil Young)
If it’s true Neil Young wrote “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” for Graham Nash — who’d recently broken up with Joni Mitchell — then it’s no wonder someone else would make the tender folk-rock ballad their own. On Saint Etienne’s 1990 debut single, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs turn the slowly waltzing original into a 4/4 dance-pop number driven by splashy piano, dub bass, and early singer Moira Lambert, whose fragile delivery has an innocence that eventual replacement Sarah Cracknell’s knowing sophistication could never quite share. “I was always thinking/ Games that I was playing,” Lambert repeats. If you want her, she’ll be in the club.

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2011's Overlooked Gems

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eMusic
July 29, 2011
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Killer Mike, Pl3dge

Though Killer Mike got his break as a tough-guy OutKast guest, he has increasingly established himself as the favorite political rapper of people who hate political rappers. The blunt-spoken Atlanta MC’s stylish, impassioned outrage culminates on Pl3dge, which samples a wrestler’s boasts one moment, calls out Jay-Z for obscuring the huge power gulf between himself and the billionaires who actually run our world the next, and never forgets to balance its pox-on-both-parties vitriol with equally furious entertainment. That it only spent one week on Billboard’s Top 200 list — at No. 115 — just reinforces Mike’s righteousness.




No Joy, Ghost Blonde

This Montreal quartet’s sumptuously shrill wall-of-noise debut came out too late in November to have a chance at most year-end lists. Coincidentally, the title of an earlier 2010 sleeper, labelmate Tamaryn’s The Waves, applies here just as well: Singer-guitarists Jasmine White-Glulz and Laura Lloyd summon up crest after dizzying crest of churning distortion, their incantatory vocals half-submerged, as elements of 1960s girl groups clash with the brutal dissonance of the ’90s rock underground. “You Girls Smoke Cigarettes?” is a cool blast; the title track a warm bath. Either way, there’s no rush surfacing.

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Death Cab’s Chris Walla On UGGs, Nine Inch Nails, and Bacon as the New Vegan

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eMusic
May 31, 2011
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Chris Walla is best known as the guitarist for Death Cab for Cutie, but the Pacific Northwest musician is also a solo artist and veteran producer in his own right. But while Walla produced Codes & Keys, Death Cab’s first album since 2009′s chart-topping Narrow Stairs, he delegated the mixing duties to someone else: Alan Moulder, whose name has appeared in the liner notes to many of the greatest alternative-rock albums from the past 25 years (Depeche Mode,Smashing Pumpkins and My Bloody Valentine, to name a few).

Shortly before the release of Codes & Keys, eMusic’s Marc Hogan got on the phone with Walla during a brief tour stop in Edmonton, Canada, ahead of the band’s headlining slot at the Sasquatch Music Festival.

Who Are...Cults

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eMusic
June 6, 2011
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File under: Girl-group pop, refracted through an eerie, contemporary lens

From: New York, San Diego

Personae: Madeline Follin (vocals), Brian Oblivion (beats, guitar, vocals)

If people join cults to escape adulthood, what Madeline Follin and Brian Oblivion started looks like an exception. A little more than a year ago, the Cults leaders — who met when both lived in San Diego and then, later, moved to New York — were just a couple of 21-year-old film students haphazardly posting a few demos online. Now they’re major-label artists promoting a hotly-anticipated album, with all the grown-up demands that entails: constant travel (SXSW! Coachella! Buffalo, NY!), innumerable phone calls (um, guilty) and precious little free time.

But Follin, whose stepfather co-founded White Zombie, knows it’s nice work if you can get it. “I feel so much more free than when I was going to school and I would go to a party and people would be like, ‘Oh, so what are you doing after college?’ and I would be like, “I have no idea — still trying to figure that out!’” she explains. “But you know, don’t really have to deal with that anymore. We’re really lucky.”

That spirit of freedom extends to Cults’ self-titled debut. Like the initial demos, Cults is a rare mixture: There’s sunny indie pop with the heart-grabbing hooks of ’60s girl groups, sure, but it’s all built meticulously, from the beats up, with a note of darkness at the edge of every silver lining.

eMusic’s Marc Hogan reached Follin — who, boyfriend Oblivion has joked, “is quickly becoming the Nicki Minaj of indie rock” because of her numerous guest appearances (DOM, Fucked Up, Guards) — at a rest stop in Ontario, at the height of Cults’ first-ever headlining tour.

Cults - Cults

Album Review
eMusic
May 23, 2011

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Cults aren't the first group to rise from anonymity to buzz-band status, and they certainly won't be the last. More remarkable than how Madeline Follin and Brian Oblivion crashed the major-label party, however, is the distinctive neo-retro pop style they've brought along with them. Born partly out of a youth spent listening to an especially eclectic oldies station and a nine-hour drive bonding as a couple over an iPod stacked with Lesley Gore, Jay-Z and Justin Timberlake, Cults' aesthetic is one of the most refreshing developments in pop music since the aggro-bubblegum of Brooklyn's own Sleigh Bells a year ago. Put simply: Nothing else sounds quite like this.

Self-produced with only minor polish from engineer Shane Stoneback — who worked with Sleigh Bells, and with Vampire Weekend, too — these 11 songs make good on the substantial promise of last year's sole single, "Go Outside." Follin's lilting, girlish voice soars over blithely chiming glockenspiel, trebly guitar, shimmery synth, funk bass and computer-sculpted beats, a slight patina of lo-fi haze still intact throughout. Equally integral are the sampled quotes, which include disturbingly resonant words from cult leaders and psycho killers.

Stylized samples aside, though, Cults can always fall back on songs that effortlessly capture a rich palette of coming-of-age feelings. The previously released material still sparkles: "Go Outside" embodies millennial ambivalence about offline existence; "Oh My God" longs for a life less humdrum and "Most Wanted" explores why we crave what hurts us. The new songs match the quality of their predecessors, from Stockholm syndrome romance "Abducted" to "Walk at Night," which is "Killing Moon"-bleak, on through to "Bumper," a lovers' duet that's something like the "Give Him a Great Big Kiss" by way of "Irreplaceable" by way of "Young Folks."

"So fuck you," Follin enthuses cheerfully, rejecting self-improvement advice amid a squall of shoegaze guitar noise on "Never Heal Myself." Running away from other people's expectations leads Cults someplace wonderfully their own.


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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

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eMusic
May 18, 2011

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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.

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Death Cab for Cutie - Codes and Keys

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eMusic
May 17, 2011

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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

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"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

The Beta Band - The Three EP's

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eMusic
May 2011

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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

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eMusic
May 2011

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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

Sonny & the Sunsets - Hit After Hit

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eMusic
April 2011Link














Truth in advertising, and they just might stop to check you out


"Girls, don't despair, 'cause soon, I'll be there," Sonny Smith sighs almost exactly halfway through Hit After Hit. It's an apt midpoint for the San Francisco singer-songwriter's second casually stunning album with his band, the Sunsets. Filtering non-specific 1950s and 60s beach-party rock 'n' roll through the so-hip-they're-square minimalism of Jonathan Richman, early B-52s or Violent Femmes, these 11 tracks artfully plumb the teenage libido submerged just below every movie sock hop ever.

Though Hit After Hit lacks an obvious standout like last year's "Too Young to Burn," it lives up to its title with a cadre of songs that operate at nearly that same high level. There are songs about girls who are confusing ("She Plays Yoyo With My Mind"), girls who leave with some other dude ("Don't Act Dumb"), girls from the past ("Reflections on Youth"), girls who are up for a one-night stand ("Heart of Sadness"), and the scary tough guys who may be competition for girls ("Teenage Thugs"). Whether a heart-tugging ballad ("Pretend You Love Me") or a stormy instrumental ("The Bad Energy From L.A. Is Killing Me"), Sonny & the Sunsets nail it all with wry charm, never schmaltz or coldness. "I wanna do it," goes the hook from the first single. Girls' response: "Oh, yeah."

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

Lenka - Two

Album Review
eMusic
April 2011

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Cutely catchy Aussie finds love, doubles her fun


For pop songwriter Lenka Kripac, former singer and keyboardist with Sydney post-rock band Decoder Ring, good things really do come in pairs. On her second solo album, the recently-engaged Brooklyn resident savors couplehood, with enough sweetly hooky tunes to please fans of Kate Nash, Regina Spektor or even Adele.

Not that Two is just a lovey-dovey rehash of Lenka's self-titled debut. That album's big song was "The Show," a Broadway-ready production that compared life to a performance. By contrast, first Two single "Heart Skips a Beat" uses robotic vocal shadings to wrestle with a new love's anxieties. Lenka's latest not only ditches its predecessor's mild melancholy, it also sheds most of its theatricality, embracing electronics like a beaming fiancé. If Lenka was meant for the stage, Two feels like it was meant for the radio.

Lenka's Australian-accented voice still chirps winsomely over jaunty ivories, and sometimes the strings do stretch toward Phil Spector's Wall of Sound. But the production team here — which includes guys who've overseen albums for Bat for Lashes and Björk — rarely shies away from sleekly emotive electro-pop. Take late-album highlight "You Will Be Mine," harp-inflected Eurodance halfway between Saint Etienne and Britney Spears. For sure, Lenka's lyrics have little on her countrymen — and past collaborators — Darren Hanlon or the Lucksmiths. And she's hardly breaking new ground. As bubblegum-tinted pop goes, though, Two is pure Doublemint.


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Label Profile: Fat Possum Records

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eMusic
March 2011
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Who Are...Fergus & Geronimo

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eMusic
January 2011
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File under: '60s garage-pop laced with slacker irony
For fans of: The Fresh & Onlys, the Beets, Harlem, Box Elders, Strange Boys, Eat Skull, the Dead Milkmen, the Troggs
Personae: Jason Kelly and Andrew Savage (vocals, guitars, bass, drums, organ), with guests Elyse Schrock (vocal), Casey Carpenter (flute), Monet Robbins (saxophone)
From: Denton, Texas; now living in Brooklyn

"The rock 'n' roll business is pretty absurd, but the world of serious music is much worse," Frank Zappa once told a bemused interviewer. Fergus & Geronimo started with the premise of "Motown by way of Mothers of Invention," and the Texas-bred, Brooklyn-based duo clearly shares Zappa's mischievously sardonic outlook. Unlearn, the band's full-length debut for the Sub Pop imprint Hardly Art, is at once more musically polished and more lyrically caustic than the group's promising run of singles on well-regarded indies Woodsist, Transparent and Tic Tac Totally!. Right before Kelly and Savage left their apartment to pick up a new four-track machine Savage had just bought off Craigslist, they spoke with eMusic's Marc Hogan about Top 40 production values, a Super Bowl bet gone wrong and why networking is really, really important.

Fergus & Geronimo - Unlearn

Album Review
eMusic
January 2011
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Legend has it quintessential punk-rock prototypes the Troggs took their name from an unkempt tribe of British kids who stripped off their clothes and lived in caves. That idea would probably suit Fergus & Geronimo just fine. The Brooklyn-via-Texas duo's debut is a painstakingly sloppy, hilariously deadpan exercise in juvenile regression from wiseacres who love their Motown as much as their Mothers of Invention.

Unlearn's schizophrenic adventures in doo-wop, jangly British Invasion pop and '90s-style indie rock cohere thanks to an overall ramshackle looseness. But don't mistake this record for lo-fi: Significantly polished from the band's early singles, the songs here never muffle their attacks on phonies of all stripes. Successfully skewered targets include loveless yuppies, sanctimonious oldsters and, yes, trend-spotting music journalists.

The Shangri-Las-inspired title track best sums up this group's m.o.: "You can unlearn what you know/ You can escape all the lies." And recurring, cinematic sing-song fragment "Could You Deliver" bears bad news for Mom and Dad: "Tell them I ran away to join some damn punk rock band." But it's on "Powerful Lovin'," a soulful breakup belter recalling Captain Beefheart circa Safe as Milk, where Fergus & Geronimo really get back to where the wild things are.

Fergus & Geronimo Unlearn review, courtesy of eMusic.com, Inc., © 2011 eMusic.com