The Boy Least Likely To - The Best B Sides Ever

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
July 23, 2009
Link
7.4

"Our last album was meant to be our 'angry' album," the Boy Least Likely To announced in a recent tweet. For guys who introduced themselves to the world by asking us to be gentle with them, "angry" is a relative term. The story of the UK indie pop duo's wonderfully ramshackle 2005 debut, The Best Party Ever, is something like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah without the New York media glare or square-baiting obliqueness: from homemade 7"s to Oscar-night soda commercials, all in a few short years. 2009's The Law of the Playground adds depth, if little breadth, to their near-perfectly realized birthday-party aesthetic, while among the professionally hip, admitting your own insecurities remains as frowned upon as ever.

When your entire band concept is based around identifying with the sensitive but neurotic outcasts, your B-sides better damn well bring your A-game. The Best B Sides Ever doesn't disappoint. Originally bundled with Rough Trade Shop pre-orders for The Law of the Playground, and now available only at independent record stores, this slight but almost wholly satisfying disc is well worth any TBLLT fan's recession-pinched dollar. With two revealing covers and originals that at times rival their A-sides, singer/vocalist Jof Owen and multi-instrumentalist/composer Pete Hobbs keep their hearts precariously on their sleeve and their production colorfully ramshackle. Yup: acoustic guitar, banjo, synths, recorder, xylophone, stuffed-animals-on-parade drums, and whispery singing. Dudes who hate this shit and anything else that smacks of wimpiness, you can buy two and say it's for your sister. Deep down, you're one of us, too.

The covers aren't far from TBLLT's usual territory, but they're expertly enfolded in the group's deceptively childlike universe. Where Limp Bizkit made George Michael's "Faith" safe for the moshers, this version emphasizes the song's simple emotions and gold-plated pop craft. There's jauntiness to spare, sure, but little trace of irony. If this "Faith" turns chart-pop into twee-pop, then the disc's spare, faithful cover of the Field Mice's "Between Hello and Goodbye" could just as easily introduce Sarah Records to the charts. You don't need a tattered collection of 1980s NMEs to enjoy simple guitar, heartfelt vocals, twinkling percussion, and a beautifully aching romantic ballad, just ambiguous enough to reward listen after listen. (You do need the Field Mice, though, for your personal enjoyment.)

Elsewhere, the originals shed new light on an established persona, with results that range from the exceptional to the "mediocre for the Boy Least Likely To". With a bottom made out of rubber, a top-end made out of snips and snails and puppy-dog tails, "Oddballs" falls closer to the latter category, suggesting a name for the CD artwork's fine fuzzy wuzzies but breaking little new ground. Closer "Cuddle Me", meanwhile, at first seems like an almost too-literal encapsulation of the group's softer side. Within those watery sound effects and faraway rum-pum-pums, however, is an overwhelming vulnerability that should still be a treat for core indie-pop fans. "I hurt the things I love/ Because it stops them hurting me," Owen sings. If you can relate, you can spend a rainy afternoon daydreaming to this.

The Best B-Sides Ever is best when it's tinged with nostalgia. It's a kind of nostalgia that works both ways: Lost childhood becomes a metaphor for lost love on midtempo banjo-synth reminiscence "Every Grubby Little Memory", but "When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Boy Again" hopes to find the past in the future. While the guitar underneath the latter song's outer-space synth burbles comes perilously close to Sixpence None the Richer's "Kiss Me", the vivid imagery of felt-tip pens and first-snow excitement easily wins out. Similarly, "Rock Upon a Porch With You"-- one of TBLLT's best-ever songs-- looks forward to growing not-so-dignified and old together with a loved one, puttering around "on the front steps of our sweet retirement home," remembering when they still had their own teeth. Don't make these guys get angry.

jj - jj n° 2

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
July 17, 2009
Link
8.6

 

0101, 0103, 0107, 0108, 0113, and 0115. Since all jj choose to show of themselves is their music, video, and occasional blood-spattered merch, then those Sincerely Yours catalogue numbers represent the sum total of what we know about them. Hell, we wouldn't even know jj were a "them" had the group's Gothenburg, Sweden-based, Tough Alliance-owned label not confirmed that. So... they're mysterious-- but not inscrutable: Despite a brief discography that's already geekily byzantine enough for anybody who ever bought into the legend of Factory Records, jj's full-length debut is as easy to enjoy as whatever the last CD was you brought home with a giant cannabis leaf on the cover. They're as naive as they are cynical-- or is it the other stupid way around?-- and they manage to be pretty, touching, funny, and motivating, in different ways, in all the right places, for nine songs lasting 28 minutes.

You don't need me to tell you for the 128th time (320th if you're at CD quality) how digital file distribution has spread sounds and ideas across the globe during the current decade, and jj have earned a place among the current wave of pop globalization, sharing both the island sounds and sticky-fingered irreverence of their labelmates the Tough Alliance, Air France, and the Honeydrips. Sure, jj still carry traces of iconic twee label Sarah Records, but they celebrate a broader definition of "pop". Sometimes, as on "Lollipop"-biting slo-mo raver "Ecstasy", jj do this by borrowing from global hip-hop culture. But they also participate. Never by straight-up rapping, but by expanding the reach of ambient music-- defined expansively, as Brian Eno once did, as music that "suggests, a place, a landscape, a soundworld which you inhabit"-- to include a whole new kind of swagger. "Of course there is people out to get me," a female vocalist sings on "My Hopes and Dreams" as hand percussion evokes the Avalanches' beach blowouts, hypnotic guitar recalls German Kosmiche Muzik, and gusts of winds whistle over high-noon Ennio Morricone strings.

Then again, on the same song, jj's singer just wants "someone to share my hopes and dreams with"-- a humbler goal to be sure, but jj excel just as much at strummy intimacy as they do at lavish blissouts. The lo-fi hooks on "Tell It to My Heart"-biting closer "Me & Dean" suggests TTA's aching teen-pop cover "Lucky", only done as an original this time. The pisstake-y giggles also make you wonder if you're hearing their mixtape outro.

When jj drift closer to early-1990s ambient-house, they still allow emotion to flood through the textures, and they never start repeating themselves. Opener "Things Will Never Be the Same Again" sets almost new-agey strings and Enya-esque sailing imagery to a bouncy Caribbean rhythm: "I close my eyes and remember/ A place in the sun where we used to live." For all the flickering synths and rainforest percussion of "Masterplan", we also get Top Gun guitar rocketry, faux-innocent-as-Disney sing-song, and that reporter guy from YouTube going, "I'm dyin' in this fucking country-ass fucked-up town." jj n° 2 may be easy on the ears, but it isn't wallpaper.

At their most ideal, ambient, hip-hop, punk, and the most crassly commercial pop all have in common an "anything goes" approach. Like any ideal, this usually gets fucked up pretty fast. "New Age" harnesses ambient's chill-out pleasantness to eco-politics and yuppie mysticism; old rappers start dissing younger rappers for not following in their footsteps or being more socially conscious; the punk and indie traditions become as idol-worshiping as the classic-rockers they sought to displace. jj obliterate that bullshit and get back to a place where Lil Wayne can be ambient, and Enya can show up on an album with a pot leaf on the cover.

Free mp3 "From Africa to Málaga", on some days my favorite track on the album, is almost as suited for a cruise-ship commercial as Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life". But it also faces Important Ideas like death and art with the clear-eyed precocity of an adolescent, riding in on trade winds with a message that could speak to middle-school cheerleaders and middle-aged soccer moms and middlebrow-loathing former punks alike: "The thought that you found/ Takes you to town/ Smashes your face/ Burns out your heart/ Then you go home and turn it into art." Pop's just fine, too, thanks.

VEGA - Well Known Pleasures EP

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
July 10 2009
Link
6.0

Alan Palomo was wearing a Michael Jackson T-shirt in publicity photos before TMZ told us the King of Pop had left the building. Earlier, as frontman for Denton, Texas, electro-funkateers Ghosthustler, Palomo appealed to Nintendo Power Glove nostalgia in a memorable video by director Pete Ohs. Now based in Austin and leading VEGA, Palomo has moved closer to the "dream" side of the "dreamwave" descriptor coined for his acts, but he's still refashioning the past with the loving dedication of so many VHS-to-YouTube archivists.

Palomo may have his Power Glove in a few too many young-urban-retro-futuristic pies. Lefse Records has just announced a release date for the upcoming debut album by Neon Indian, Palomo's project with video artist Alicia Scardetta; at their best, the group's synth-dripping bedroom-pop hypnotism rivals some of Deerhunter-er Bradford Cox's Atlas Sound home recordings. Meanwhile, in Ghosthustler, Palomo made head-banging dance-pop with the twiddly synths of Chromeo and the aggressive distortion of then-ascendant French house labels Ed Banger and Kitsuné. VEGA's Joy Division-referencing debut EP, Well Known Pleasures-- originally slated for May release, and finally out digitally this month-- blasts that basic sound into more cosmic-disco-influenced frontiers, with pillowy electronic drifts and proggy solos.

Given the evolution in band logos, it's tempting to see VEGA as Sega to Ghosthustler's N.E.S.: same computing power, more of a "cult" appeal. Except Well Known Pleasures has a couple of tracks that seem a bit more immediately crowd-pleasing than anything I heard from Ghosthustler. Opener "No Reasons", with its chopped-up vocals and laser squiggles, is a fine piece of French-touched synth-pop that ought to win over some fans of Cut Copy. And the title track, described by Discobelle as a "smooth synthy pop track with a nice housey feeling," is basically just that, though the still-developing vocals and lyrics shouldn't keep Phoenix up nights.

In other places, despite taking a celestial name that most music fans probably associate with Suzanne ("Tom's Diner", "Luka") or Alan (Suicide), VEGA could almost score the credits of a vintage episode of PBS's "Nova". Slow, dramatic arpeggios float out from high-sustain synths on space-disco power ballad "Fondly", which ends with the type of noodling prog-isms you'd expect on a Lindstrøm epic. Closing synth lullaby "Other End" is over and forgotten in barely a minute and a half. But "Kyoto Gardens" is the only spot where VEGA really fall flat, stumbling over the same well-worn lyrical material as Little Boots' "New in Town" with a by now familiar formula of 80s electro, turn-of-the-millennium French house, and late-2000s spacey expansiveness.

All that adds up to two pretty good tracks and three somewhat satisfying but generally unremarkable ones, in less than 30 minutes. If you're as focused on VEGA's particular niche as they are, then Well Known Pleasures might well be a pleasure. That's still a long way from the all-embracing pop of the guy on the T-shirt. I'm more excited for Palomo's future-- retro or otherwise.

Various Artists - A Psychedelic Guide to Monsterism Island

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
June 26, 2009
Link
6.0

Monsters, in general, are pretty hard to ignore. So it is with the visual creations of Welsh artist and toymaker Pete Fowler. Readers of this review will most likely know Fowler from the space aliens and other strange cartoonish beasties he has drawn for the covers of every Super Furry Animals album since 1997 except for one (2007's Hey Venus!, created by Japan's Keiichi Tanaami). Love 'em or hate 'em, Fowler's fanciful, bulbous images have helped SFA establish a visual aesthetic every bit as distinctive as their music, with a shared spirit of childlike mischief and spaced-out merriment.

A Psychedelic Guide to Monsterism Island-- the follow-up to 2005's impossibly scarce The Sounds of Monsterism Island, Vol. 1-- is basically a soundtrack to the lovingly detailed dreamworld inhabited by Fowler's characters. In film terms, though, it works more like a score than a hit-crammed blockbuster soundtrack, conjuring its woozy and whimsical mood out of 20 mostly instrumental tracks of folk, prog, cosmic disco, and hazy Moog rock. In other words, it's uncharacteristically easy to ignore, floating almost at the edge of perception. As with the like-minded psychedelia on London label Ghost Music, however, you shouldn't necessarily hold that against it. This can be transportative stuff.

Even if the compilation isn't always mind-blowing, psych nerds and obscurity-seekers should be able to find a few choice tracks to spin or sample. Super Furries frontman Gruff Rhys' "Wild Robots Power Up" sounds like its title, all chintzy electronic beats and hypnotic power-station drones. The Future Sound of London, appearing under their Amorphous Androgynous alias, go in for woolly psych-rock that's as bubbly as Fowler's creations. Inclusions from Luke Vibert, Beyond the Wizard Sleeve (aka Richard Norris), Circulus, and Belbury Poly range from sine-wave workouts to ominous grooves and even hobbit-ready lute-folk. The bright strums of Brazilian DJ/producer duo "Magic Morning" on "Monsters at Work" are quietly revelatory, inhabiting a universe not far from Quiet Village or recent nu-Balearic.

The disc's biggest flaw lies in apparently assuming we've already made the trip to Monsterism Island rather than gently guiding us there. The krautrock repetitions of Marc Shearer's "Magma on My Mind" or the Southern-fried electric guitar noodling of Wolf People's "Village Strollin'" are enjoyable enough on their own, but as compiled here, it all starts to blend together. Many listeners will find themselves drifting off-- losing themselves not in Monsterism Island, but in the late-2000s' many realtime distractions. The spoken-word interludes are a cute affectation, and they could take on more meaning if Fowler's talked-about children's TV show ever gets off the ground, but you won't find yourself wanting to listen to them very often.

Still, every time my head starts nodding, A Psychedelic Guide to Monsterism Island jolts me back to attentiveness with moments of Fowlerian wryness. Take the Advisory Circle's "Lair of the Grolfax", which sounds like "You Only Live Twice" covered as intergalactic lounge music by Air. "What a strange dream," a monster's deep, gruff voice intones on the closing track, summing up the whole collection. "It ebbs from my mind like treacle." Monster treacle?

God Help the Girl - God Help the Girl

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
June 23, 2009
Link
7.5

 

"Girl singer needed for autumnal recording project," the ad in the paper said. "Autumnal," of course, being the Queen's-- and the critics'-- preferred English for, uh, "fall-like." You know that song where, when people talk about the fall, Jens Lekman thinks they're talking about Mark E. Smith? Stuart Murdoch probably thinks they're talking about the Garden of Eden.

After all, the main character in God Help the Girl-- a new album of songs from the Belle and Sebastian singer/songwriter's planned musical-film project-- is called Eve. She's voiced angelically by Catherine Ireton, cover girl for the Scottish septet's "White Collar Boy" single and one half of a sleepy acoustic pop duo called the Go Away Birds. Ireton is one of nine singers (incuding the Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon) joining members of Belle and Sebastian for the recording, and her Irish-Zooey-Deschanel-next-door vocals have ended up gracing 10 of the set's 14 songs. But not until after an internet-wide sing-off. "The competition was me showing a startling lack of faith in what was right in front of me, but I had to see what was out there," Murdoch recently told London's Guardian.

From the humble school project that became 1996 debut Tigermilk to the professional pop majesty of The Life Pursuit a decade later, the Scottish pop savant's work has been almost one leap of faith after another. Murdoch lands on solid ground again with God Help the Girl, which has catchy, jangling girl-group ditties aplenty, a little theatrical flourish thanks to Belle and Sebastian trumpeter Mick Cooke's orchestral arrangements, and at least one typically Murdoch-esque character, Eve. The imagery is always vivid, even when the plot isn't. From what I can tell, Ireton's bookish ingenue gives herself to the Holy Trinity: sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll. God love 'er.

Always one for evocative character sketches, Murdoch clearly relishes his role as demiurge of God Help the Girl's self-contained universe. First single "Come Monday Night" is a good preview, with the wispy lilt of early Camera Obscura and a way of lingering on "the gray of ordinariness" long enough to show how it's lined with silvery subtleties. Like, that restless first evening between a disappointing weekend and another drab workday. The way sleep leaves a face "crumpled and creased." And the full rundown of Eve obsessing over some guy she likes ("Please stop me there, I'm even boring myself!"). At times, Murdoch's realistically elaborate fiction points to its own phoniness. "Life could be musical comedy," suggests "Hiding Neath My Umbrella", a bittersweet Murdoch-Ireton duet over waltzing piano and swelling strings.

God Help the Girl opens with a delicate new version of The Life Pursuit centerpiece "Act of the Apostle II". Switched from "senior year" to "senior ward," and re-titled simply "Act of the Apostle", the song also drops its last verse-- making the whole thing more prologue-like-- and gains a bit of Andrews Sisters swing. For all the specifics about a sick narrator and fighting parents, "Act of the Apostle" is still essentially a pop kid's update of the Velvet Underground's "Rock and Roll": "My Damascan road's my transistor radio." Her life was saved by girl groups.

Or was it? The nuance-rich Murdoch is characteristically coy when it comes to certain details. He's mentioned musicals such as Jesus Christ Superstar or the original Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory film as inspirations; my fellow 1980s babies may remember Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act, where all those awesome Motown songs turned out to make real nice hymns if you did the ol' Christian rock trick and replaced "him" with "Him". So The Life Pursuit's "Funny Little Frog", sung here by Internet contest winner Brittany Stallings, might not work as a soul song, but just think: a soul song. About someone who is everywhere, but you don't think of in a physical way. Someone you might go and visit on rainy Sundays.

"She was into S&M and Bible studies," Murdoch once sang. Eve's first romantic experience is creepy, Murdoch offering to rub and scrub her during the ironically formal strings and piano of "Pretty Eve in the Tub". No wonder she winds up in the arms of Hannon's hammy rake on "Perfection as a Hipster", asking for haircare tips even as she wastes away from lack of nutrition. Asya, of Seattle teen keyboard-drums trio Smoosh, may have an even more girlish voice than Ireton's, but on "I Just Want Your Jeans", she's looking for boys to make her "go, 'Ouch!'"-- heck, she's "open to dark surprises." And somewhere in there I just skipped a couple of totally skippable instrumentals.

The last two songs are among the album's most inspired. "I'll Have to Dance With Cassie" suggests Eve has returned to the church of rock'n'roll; now that she knows her "dream boy" doesn't exist, she's shimmying with a girl friend like they're a pair of boxing kangaroos. On closing number "A Down and Dusky Blonde", having "fried" her head-- another double entendre?-- Eve joins an entire sisterhood of female singers. She hasn't been getting her apple a day, so a doctor counsels, "A woman does not live by the printed word/ Forgive yourself, and eat." How about it, Eve?

"I need a friend and I choose you," the final song continues, with a vow to "forget the kiss and feel." Hmm. God Help the Girl is a spirited expansion of some of Murdoch's best ideas, but until the film finishes shooting-- set to start next year-- we'll probably just have wild-ass guesses like mine as to the real story. "I feel like I have God for a pal because no one else would have me," Murdoch writes in an online journal entry. "Maybe that's the basis for a lot of religion. He's the invisible friend that it's OK to have as an adult." Tell you this much, He's in the details.

God Help the Girl - God Help the Girl

Video / Album Review
ABC News
Link
June 23, 2009

Little Boots - Hands

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
June 18, 2009
Link
5.9

 

"Pop" is easy to write and even easier to say, but it's not so easy to pull off successfully. Victoria "Little Boots" Hesketh has been outspoken in embracing the term. "A pop song is just this three-and-a-half-minute nugget, but it can be so powerful," the synth-toting songstress from Blackpool, England, told Carson Daly the night of her first L.A. show. "My problem with a lot of mainstream pop artists-- I love the songs, and I think they're great songs a lot of the time, but they don't have enough character for me."

A musician since childhood, Hesketh once got rejected in the opening rounds of the UK's "Pop Idol". She went on to play in a jazz trio, a big band, and, by 2005, a punk-charged synth group called Dead Disco. That's around when L.A. session mainstay Greg Kurstin (one half of jazzy electropop duo the Bird and the Bee; previously of 1990s one-hit wonders Geggy Tah) started prodding Hesketh to focus on writing pop songs. From there, it's almost too good to be true: One minute she's covering Human League on YouTube in her pajamas, the next she's partying with Kanye West and Brandon Flowers. If you're a former "TRL" host, that's a refreshing do-it-yourself tale. If you're a more skeptical sort, you check the price tag of the Japanese electronic instrument she has helped publicize, and you wonder.

Little Boots' debut album, then, is a mainstream pop effort with an indie-friendly narrative. It's a savvy approach, effectively bridging the gap between poptimism and alt snobbery. One three-and-a-half-minute nugget comes after another, with the directness of Madonna and the fashion sense, too: There's blog-house distortion, Italo-disco sweep, and the dayglo tranceyness of recent electronic-based pop-rap hits. The hooks, however, tend to be more Hard Candy than The Immaculate Collection. I really like one song, and I think they're decent enough songs a lot of the time, but all too often Hands is as lacking in character as the music Hesketh criticizes.

Hands' most distinguishing characteristic is an unusual level of meta-pop self-awareness. Kind of clever the first time: "Stuck on Repeat", produced by Hot Chip's Joe Goddard and co-written with Goddard and Kurstin, still throbs like a Kylie Minogue crush. But then there's latest single "New in Town", a glammy going-out song that also doubles as an artist introduction-- she wants to take us out tonight, and she wants to make us feel all right, but staying in sounds good, too. On "Remedy", producer/co-writer RedOne (Akon, Lady Gaga) lends generic club-rap swagger but can't convince that this "music is the cure"; bittersweet soft-rocker "Tune Into My Heart", co-written with accomplished Belgian producer/songwriter Pascal Gabriel (New Order's "Regret", Dido), asks what's the frequency and never quite finds its signal.

Even the songs that aren't commenting on themselves lyrically sound like they're commenting on themselves musically. Despite radio-ready production and commercial hooks that tell us we're hearing pop, it can take some hours of intense listening before most of these tunes ever stick in the head, and there's little to no emotional investment. "Symmetry" has the Human League's Phil Oakey, and "Mathematics" has a metaphor inspired by Sylvia Plath's "Love Is a Parallax", but their by-the-numbers synth-pop is more science than art. "I'm like a moth into the flame," Hesketh coos on "Hearts Collide", a sultry Minogue-vogue spacewalk. We all have someone we like with trite lyrics or an average voice, but what makes the best pop songs successful is that they have some quality uniquely their own, and that's mostly absent here.

Paradoxically, Hands works best as pop when Hesketh taps indie-famous collaborators. The second-best song is also the second single, "Meddle", where the production and songwriting team from "Stuck on Repeat" turn toward rock's angst and propulsion. Simian Mobile Disco's Jas Shaw lends his skills to a pair of solid if lyrically dismal tracks: the spacious "Click" ("I thought you were a condition/ That no one else could treat") and the pattering "Ghosts", which has a deftly pirouetting melody that helps make it one of the only songs here that doesn't sound like Hesketh is trying to be someone else, someone more mundane.

A few years ago, I wrote a column suggesting that the ideal pop star of today is someone like Robyn: polished chart-pop sound, still writes her own songs. Then along came Lily Allen. Now even in country, a genre not traditionally given to valuing singer/songwriters, you find people praising Taylor Swift because she writes her own songs and records for an "indie" label. So Little Boots, with her unabashed love of pop and her honest-to-goodness instrumental ability-- check the piano-driven hidden track-- has the right package for the current moment, and if Lady Gaga and La Roux can click with the public, maybe she will, too. Then again, calling yourself pop isn't guaranteed to bring you popularity. Songs don't get stuck on repeat unless people can't get them out of their heads.

Client - Command

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
June 16, 2009
Link
5.2

 

Great poetry, it's been said, contains more information than political speeches. Because in a really creative poem, you never know what's coming next. So like, a film by Orson Welles contains more information than other films of its day, because nobody else would shoot their scenes in exactly the same way. Sad to say, Client are not their generation's chilly UK electro-pop version of Orson Welles.

In fact, Client have basically defined themselves by withholding information-- from their anti-image image to their repetive, generic, but nonetheless well-constructed and hooky music. Core duo Kate Holmes and Sarah Blackwood originally took on the code names Client A and Client B because they didn't want to be known as, respectively, the wife of former Creation Records chief Alan McGee and the former singer for 1990s British act Dubstar. That's understandable. On fourth album Command, Client race toward goth night at your local disco, with Killing Joke's Youth (fresh off a collaboration with Sir Paul McCartney) and the Sneaker Pimps' Joe Wilson splitting production duties. Look at the cover art, though: The uniform has changed, but Client are still proudly faceless.

That's understandable, too-- not for nothing did Client cover Adam and the Ants' cynical post-punk side "Zerox" on 2007's slightly more rocking Heartland-- but their lack of a discrete identity also makes for pretty forgettable albums. Vague lyrics continue to be a sticking point, and it doesn't help that they repeat what few lyrics they have over and over again. Why, the screeching "Satisfaction" and faster, more dancefloor-ready "Blackheart" even use their first verses twice. That the lyrics consist of phrases like "junkie love, junkie love", on opener "Your Love Is Like Petrol", or "fucked-up music sounds so fresh", on next track "Can You Feel"-- and that they're often spoken unexpressively rather than sung-- probably won't attract many new fans.

Whatever makes Client so lacking in personality isn't just the lyrics, however. When they cover Curtis Mayfield's "Make Me Believe in You", the words are still fairly rote-- "You are my temptation/ Show me inspiration"-- but the frosty Eurodisco rendition doesn't give you much reason to seek this one out instead of Amerie's faithful 2007 cover, let alone Patti Jo's Tom Moulton-remixed 1973 soul jam. (Is it better than Duffy's awfully similar neo-soul hit "Mercy", though? Maybe.) Still, the problem can't be the craftsmanship, which is consistently excellent, whether in the glam stomp of "Son of a Gun" or woozy dream-pop of "In My Mind". Chugging, midtempo tracks like "Don't Run Away" and "Ghosts", arguably the catchiest songs here, recall the slick mid-1990s electro-rock of Butch Vig's Garbage, for better and worse.

Biggest bummer of all: The timing was right for a late-career breakthrough. Client were never as glamorous as Goldfrapp, never as shrill and willing to experiment as Adult., never as shoegaze-indebted and affecting as Ladytron. But when it comes to contemporary peers like Little Boots and La Roux, Command's minimalist songwriting and high-end production don't put them far behind. It's just that, once again, Client's fondness for anonymity threatens to keep them that way. If I'm repeating past reviews here, well, does this look like great poetry?

So Cow - So Cow

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
June 15, 2009
Link
7.7

Nine times outta 10, "noise pop" is a misnomer. Guitars sound like crap? No discernible emotional content? Pass the bowl, maan-- that's not music for a pop audience, that's a self-esteem boost for guys who like to hit on tortured girls with Cramps tattoos in record shops. I mean, sure: Plenty of bands, from the Jesus and Mary Chain to the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, really do make noise-drenched pop music. It's just that you can find plenty more bands who make noise-drenched art music, records that reaffirm their buyers' superiority over the unsophisticated rabble (often, without actually being superior). Now, don't get me wrong-- I like a lotta that stuff, too!-- but if you think your average lo-fi/shitgaze scenesters have anything to say to the broader 21st Century Breakdown-buying, "American Idol"-watching public, you've been living in Greenpoint too long. And you should sign me to your label.

"I aim to sum up something so neatly that my friend Muiris will go, 'Ah, nicely said,'" So Cow main man Brian Kelly told the blog Hi-Fi Popcorn last year. "I like the idea of someone listening and going, 'Ah, that's what I thought!" If you've ever been young and unlucky in love, the Irish multi-instrumentalist has a song that will strike exactly that kind of emotional chord. Like Television Personalities or the Clean at their most engaging, Kelly plays rickety guitar-pop that sounds homemade without feeling insular. So Cow compiles the best of Kelly's singles and self-released CDs so far, remastered by underground rock luminary Bob Weston. Sing-along hooks and scruffy charm abound.

First, though, you'll have to tear yourself away from the best few songs. "Shackleton" would be equally perfect for Death Cab fans' mixtapes, Belle and Sebastian fans' weddings, and closing-credit sequences for Chuck Palahniuk film adapations; here Kelly updates the ol' love-songs-about-love-songs trope (cf. the Divine Comedy's "Perfect Lovesong", the Lucksmiths' "Sunlight in a Jar", Elton John's "Your Song") as near-perfectly imperfect organ-and-drum-machine swoon-pop: "One day I'll write the song you require/ Until then, la la la." He turns out to be similarly adept at extended adolescence on the off-kilter "Halcyon Days", at droney bitching about his life's lack of resemblance to Hollywood romance on "Casablanca", and at tender non sequiturs on Pinkerton-style acoustic finale "To-Do List" ("a one, a two, a one to-do list..."). You might not know Korean pop star Moon Geun Young, but if you can't relate to the eponymous So Cow song's red-lining tale of an awkward breakup beneath a smiling billboard, well-- such sweet sorrow, I guess.

Kelly already has put out two full-length So Cow CDs himself, plus an EP and the occasional single, so it's hard to fault him for wanting to overload his proper debut LP. But for all the easy wit and superabundance of ideas bursting from doomed-love punk-popper "Greetings" or wobbly-synth duel "So Cow vs. the Future", So Cow would be a more cohesive listen without its few underwhelming moments-- breakup thrasher "Normalcy", maybe, or breakdown ramble "Exclamation Mark". And I know Kelly recorded a lot of these songs while living in South Korea, but his lyrics are so sharp that the couple of Korean-language tracks just don't put So Cow's best foot-- hoof? (sorry!)-- forward. Then again, the dreamier "Ping Pong Rock", which drops more band names than this review without ever losing sight of a bright melody, shows one way Kelly could get more textural without going all abstract.

Listen, nobody understands better than me the impulse to wanna set yourself apart from people who can't see the greatness of, say, Deerhoof or Kirsty MacColl, both of whom So Cow has covered. You know the old punk single "Whole Wide World" by Wreckless Eric? Whether you first heard it through John Peel or from that one Will Ferrell movie, So Cow might give you the same type of feeling-- and if you hate this music, at least you won't have to put up with being told you "don't get it." That's the art of pop.

The Curious Mystery - Rotting Slowly

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
June 12, 2009
Link
5.7

Oh man, I could really go for some Tex-Mex right about now. New York's mostly meh burrito situation and my still eating 'em all the time anyway aside, when you're a dutiful digital audio consumer, sometimes you've gotta run for the border. Round these parts that usually means Calexico, a Tejano-tinged indie rock group as picturesquely perfect for their fine Tucson, Ariz., as a Saguaro cactus in rosy sunset silhouette. But you can go back as far as you want: If you believe Lester Bangs, Ritchie Valens' "La Bamba" begat every punk rock song ever. If you believe fellow critic Chuck Eddy, Babe Ruth's "The Mexican" begat every disco song ever. And if you believe rock, punk, disco, all that stuff exists to be contrary, to take people's expectations and give 'em a good poke in the eyeball-- to the point where it's almost not contrary to be contrary anymore-- then you shouldn't even be surprised. Of course, rock would thrive in the desert. Whadda punk.

The Curious Mystery aren't from the desert. They're from Seattle. Doesn't matter. As soon as Shana Cleveland starts in with that smoky drawl-- "If I go blind/ Hangin' out by a riverside/ Just stay with me"-- we're at the base of a rusty gorge with Cat Power on a Mazzy Star-ry night. (By the time Cleveland breaks off for an enigmatic chuckle, 10 tracks in, you're wondering whether she's really a safe person to stay with alone by a riverside on a night such as this.) Nicolas Gonzalez is a javelina-charmer on electric guitar and homemade Theremin. Add drummer Faustine B. Hudson and bass player Bradford Button, and you've got a four-piece doing unhurried psych-blues, autoharp ghost songs, and Area 51 garage-Americana, with plenty of that old frontier promise. Their debut LP might not be exactly what Kurdt Cobain used to expect from K Records-- you noticed the title's Rotting Slowly, right?-- but the Curious Mystery are well within the spirit of former Come frontwoman Thalia Zedek's unsentimental smolder. And when you get right down to it, who's the bigger outlaw: Calvin Johnson, or some schmo who can't drive just 55? Why is Sammy Hagar the one with his own brand of tequila?

Nobody ever tells the Grand Canyon to get to the damn point, and at times the Curious Mystery's slow-burning expansiveness helps set a nice acid-Western mood. Instrumentals undergo shifts both rhythmic and dynamic, showcasing Gonzalez's stormy leads, while even at Rotting Slowly's most lyrical, on vivid and forceful standout "Black Sand" or the tenderly wasted "Go Forth and Gather", the Curious Mystery are rarely far from Beach House's druggy languour. "You are the type that only moves slowly/ And I am the same," Cleveland murmurs on spindly epic "Outta California". When she isn't singing, though, these cowboy-junkie dirges tend to drift. And watch out for occasional clumsy overseriousness-- on the Gonzalez-sung "Strong Swimmers", with its Sonic Youth dissonance, two people are unlike everybody else in that they can swim, except it turns out they actually can't swim (see, a metaphor can bloom in the desert!). The Curious Mystery have the Southwestern scenery down pretty well. Now they just need to improve the accomodations for us city slickers. A guy can't live on Cabo Wabo alone. ...Or can I?

Various Artists - Kitsuné Maison 7: The Lucky One

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
June 12, 2009
Link
7.3

 

So Kitsuné has an iPhone app now. Some of the groups from previous Kitsuné Maison compilations have started playing live together under the tagline "Kitsuné En Vrai!" ("Kitsuné for Real!"). The influential French dance imprint has even taken to holding promotional contests: Your face could be on the next comp's crazy cover collage! As trend pieces about blogs give way to trend pieces about Twitter, the ragtag style of electronic music most memorably-- if least descriptively-- lumped together as "blog house" has become, almost literally, yesterday's news.

And Kitsuné, after seven of these things, has long since lost its element of surprise. That's sort of what happens when you help launch the careers of Bloc Party, Hot Chip, Simian Mobile Disco, Klaxons, Crystal Castles, and basically every fashionably trashy electro-punk act that isn't Justice. This is good, of course, but ascendancy can breed complacency. One way to look at last year's Kitsuné Maison 6: The Melodic One is as a victim of the series' success, largely playing it safe with glossed-up but less-great takes on the kind of banging rock-meets-dance hybrids these guys have been championing since the first half of the decade. Even so, there were still left turns (a ballad!) and blogworthy newcomers (Heartsrevolution, Ted & Francis).

Kitsuné Maison 7 is a slight but welcome improvement over its predecessor. Bright guitar pop and mellow psych-outs now go with the usual French Touch-ed electro-house thumps. The type of slow and spaced-out disco lately repopularized by Lindstrøm, Studio, and others fields its biggest Kitsuné Maison representation yet. Sure, with 19 tracks (plus a 20-second "encore" break), the album still sometimes errs toward the generically danceable instead of the truly memorable. But the best cuts easily reconfirm the label's ear for promising talent.

Not that you need Kitsuné to tell you Phoenix are fucking awesome, but a remix by L.A. duo Classixx gives Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix's "Lisztomania" a gorgeously pillowy synth-disco framework, sort of like Simian Mobile Disco's "I Believe" or Friendly Fires' "Paris (Aeroplane Remix)". Also graceful is Prins Thomas' "Sneaky Edit" of London folktronica singer/songwriter James Yuill's "This Sweet Love", with its feathery acoustic guitar and house beats suggesting a cosmic disco re-edit of José González-- or Matthew Sweet. Northern Ireland's Two Door Cinema Club open the comp with breezy pop, like a bubblegum Phoenix with Vampire Weekend on chirruping lead guitar. To give you an idea how mellow this disc can be: L.A.'s Heartsrevolution, last seen making croaky basement electro-punk the Crystal Castles way, are back this time with a woozy music-box commencement lullaby (and a neat The Little Prince-inspired video).

Other choice selections include more predictable Kitsuné jams. New York blog darlings the Golden Filter stick to their Glass Candy-glazed nu-disco on "Favorite Things", which happy-birthday-Mr.-Presidents its target demo's turn-ons: "Paris, London, sweet girls, cute boys, vodka, whiskey, cameras, pictures." Nobody on Lookbook.nu listens to Coltrane? And new act Maybb, widely rumored to be an alias for big-time Eurohouse DJ/producer Benny Benassi, hits all the right Daft Punk buttons with "Touring in NY (Short Tour Edit)". Elsewhere, Manchester's Delphic flash promise on a euphoric house remix of their single "Counterpoint", all blinking synths and Underworld-echoing vocals.

Even the inessential tracks are still likely to sound good out, though they're less fun around the house. Chew Lips' "Solo" has the misfortune of sounding like Yeah Yeah Yeahs gone electro-pop in a year when Yeah Yeah Yeahs kind of went electro-pop. And you can tell the one with former Le Tigre members (Men's "Make It Reverse") by the jagged post-punk bass lines, the defiant vocals. French group Chateau Marmont's "Beagle" is space disco in the original 1980s sense, with vocoders and galloping Moroder synths; also not far from the unremembered 80s is Chromeo-plated electro-funk from Beni and "Blue Monday" gloom-marching from La Roux. Other tracks, like We Have Band's "Time After Time", sound like they're trying to do too much: Eastern European spoken-word? "We'll be alone forever," a voice repeats on Crystal Fighters' "Xtatic Truth (Xtra Loud Mix)". Nah, just until Kitsuné starts following us all on Twitter.

Miike Snow - Miike Snow

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
June 11, 2009
Link
5.0

Even the most dependable producers tend to stumble when they step out from behind the curtain. Timbaland's Shock Value sold more than a milli, nothing to sneeze Creatine at, but its distillation of the hip-hop heavyweight's sci-fi primitivism still sounds more like a victory lap than an actual victory. Swizz Beatz had at least one solid artist album in him, but he's no rapper, as the wait for a follow-up underscores. And N.E.R.D.? Um, you've heard those guys' other stuff, right? Pop's biggest producer-to-artist success stories, such as Kanye West, have become exceptions thanks in part to their outsize personalities.

That's where Miike Snow start to fall short. And not just because they briefly cloaked themselves in the whole "ooh we're anonymous, who could we be?" promotional trend that's been sweeping the blogs. True, you expect good things from Swedish producers Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg, who as Bloodshy & Avant produced Britney Spear's indie-kid-converting 2004 single "Toxic", among other tracks for the likes of Spears, Kylie Minogue, Madonna, Rachel Stevens, and Sugababes. But Scandinavia's recent indie-pop leadership notwithstanding, "Swedish producers" doesn't exactly scream "would be interesting to hear by themselves at album-length." Enter Downtown Recordings production regular Andrew Wyatt, of anthemic New York electro-rockers Fires of Rome (and previously of Black Beetle, with Jeff Buckley cohorts Joan Wasser and Michael Tighe).

Miike Snow is about as exciting as all those biographical details would indicate. The debut album by these producers-turned-trio comes after blog-bait remixes galore, including a nice enough Postal Service-ish Vampire Weekend makeover, but there's little of those fine young Columbians' infectious exuberance here. Biggest surprise? Miike Snow largely trade in brash pop immediacy for low-key, piano-laden melancholy. Decent bummer of a first single "Burial", with its fluttery synths, tricky rhythms, and a couple of those vaguely exotic yelps currently de riguer in commercials for lime-flavored beer, is sort of like crying your eyes out to Phil Collins on a beach. Also like that, it's a bit nonsensical: "This empathy is overrated/ Like a snapshot when you've lost the game." Stop overrating those snapshots, people! The sunny West Coast harmonies of "Faker" and the oceanic calmness of "Sans Soleil" similarly suffice without quite standing out.

Miike Snow are better when they're more starlet-ready, though even then they could use an actual starlet. The thickly textured buzz-strut of "Plastic Jungle" is pretty close to Britney's "Womanizer", but instead of femme-bot purrs there's a whispery guy who wants to "get slain." Whether in the kiddie-pop lilt of opener "Animal", the Field-minding hypnotism of "In Search Of", or the glimmering electro-house thump of "Silvia" and the yearning "A Horse Is Not a Home" (no, not even in this real-estate market), the disc is rarely less than professional-grade. Faint praise, sigh.

So Miike Snow aren't half as potentially infuriating as a Kanye or a Timbaland, but they aren't half as lovable, either. More promisingly, the album's "Black & Blue" splits the difference between Prince and piano-pop, only to underwhelm as a whole. The best track, the one with the Dirty Projectors-like flickering guitars, perfect for summer driving mixes: "Song for No One". Hello, is it me you're looking for?

Axa exit sparks questions for others

News Article
Financial Times
June 7, 2009
Link

Axa Investment Managers is the most recent player to leave the exchange traded funds business, but industry experts say it probably will not be the last.

Axa IM’s withdrawal from EasyETF, its joint venture with BNP Paribas Asset Management, announced last month, comes as others are looking to increase their share of the ETF market. The reasoning behind Axa IM’s decision, however, may have a familiar ring for some existing ETF shops.

Elénore Lesueur at the firm says: “We are convinced our ability to create value for clients will be maximised by refocusing on our active management activities. Maintaining a presence in the trackers market does not correspond to our strategic priorities and would not have constituted a good allocation of our resources.”

EasyETF is the fifth biggest ETF provider in Europe, ranked by assets. As at April 30, it had $151.4bn (£93bn, €107bn) under management in 58 funds, for a 3 per cent market share, according to Barclays Global Investors.

“The impression I got was that [Axa] wanted to be a niche player [in the ETF market] concentrating on the French market and offering products on alternative markets,” says one ETF industry executive speaking on condition of anonymity. “It looks like they’ve taken the business as far as they can and it will be interesting to see the approach taken by BNP – stay niche or become broad market.”

For its part, BNPP AM is “committed” to the ETF arena, says Guillaume Dolisi, head of the EasyETF platform for BNP Paribas.

“It does not really change the overall strategy,” Mr Dolisi says of the Axa IM withdrawal. Rather than decide between niche and broad market products, EasyETF does both, according to Mr Dolisi. It provides the big benchmarks to clients but was also the first to provide access to the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, he says. Future plans include products covering agribusiness, waste management and water.

Axa IM’s decision to pull out of the ETF business was not unique, points out Scott Burns, director of ETF analysis at Morningstar. Northern Trust also recently abandoned ETFs in the US to focus on its core strengths.

“A lot of people who don’t really have a robust trading platform or index business, people who aren’t really committed to ETFs, have found that this is a nice business, but it is a bit of a distraction,” Mr Burns says. “There’s a real first-mover advantage.”

Some question how many firms have profitable ETF operations, particularly after the financial crisis.

“Keep in mind that not only are long-term assets still down 30 to 40 per cent from their highs, there are some doubts about the viability of profits from securities lending,” says Ben Poor, director at Cerulli Associates. “After Lehman, there is more concern about counterparty risk, and ethical considerations – particularly for pension funds, but also for fund houses.”

Mr Poor adds that the best buyers for iShares, BGI’s ETF business which is currently up for sale, or any other ETF operation need to have “quality distribution and existing ETF scale”. Management fees for passive products are lower than on the active side, so scale is key. Strategic Insight global consulting head Daniel Enskat divides ETF providers into three groups.

First are traditional ETF providers, index-orientated companies that have a brand based around ETFs. Second, he points to firms such as Pimco, active managers that see a strategic opportunity to use ETFs to enhance their mutual fund businesses. The third group, Mr Enskat says, consists of “companies that have jumped on the bandwagon in the last couple of years, especially in Europe, and are rethinking it now”.

He adds: “Axa is interesting because it’s probably one of the first European firms to say: ‘We looked at this, we did this, we actually established a brand, but we don’t think this is part of who we are at our core’.

“It’s probably a first mover in that direction to withdraw, and that might spur some questions for other companies in Europe as well.”

Deerhunter - Rainwater Cassette Exchange

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
May 21, 2009
Link
7.5

 

Everybody's dying just to get the disease. Confidential to the celebs in surgical masks: If there's a real pandemic, we're all already born with it. No, not swine flu, bird flu, monkey pox, SARS, or West Nile virus. Not even anthrax, that post-9/11, pre-Iraq War worry most people appeared to forget overnight. The names of the diseases may change, but the panics they generate all represent the same thing: We're gonna die. And we couldn't be more terrified.

It isn't clear whether My Bloody Valentine will get their long-delayed reissues out before the CD dies; if current patterns hold though, Loveless lovers Deerhunter will have released more than enough spaced-out dominance. Many of their songs change drastically from online demo to final incarnation, but Atlanta's noise-pop lightning rods put it all out there. As with Lil Wayne and his workload, it's as if they sense their time here is limited. Please god, nobody mention Ryan Adams.

Although the total output by Deerhunter and various side projects can be uneven, the full band's official Kranky releases have rarely been less than face-melting. Rainwater Cassette Exchange is the fourth Deerhunter-related release on the label since October-- including last year's Microcastle/Weird Era Cont. album pairing plus guitarist Lockett Pundt's recent debut as Lotus Plaza, The Floodlight Collective-- and it's also maybe the slightest to bear the Deerhunter name. Now you hear it, now you don't. What was I just listening to again?

Except, justifiably, Deerhunter have a pretty big name to live up to at this point. And the more you listen to their latest release, the more it rewards you. Rainwater Cassette Exchange is nothing more-- and nothing less-- than five songs, lasting a total of just more than 15 minutes. Ranging from translucent psych-pop to pummeling garage-rock, they're alternately assured and vulnerable, direct and subtle, light and dark. Their repetitions toe the band's usual thin line between hooks and hypnotism. Through it all, we're haunted by disease and, ultimately, our own inevitable death. So many useless bodies.

As the Fluorescent Grey EP was to Cryptograms, so Rainwater Cassette Exchange is to Microcastle. Most of these songs would make sense packaged as a third piece of vinyl alongside Microcastle/Weird Era Cont., though they have less in common with Weird Era's vast sprawl. Like Microcastle, the new EP-- available digitally now, on CD and vinyl June 22-- was recorded with producer Nicolas Vernhes at Brooklyn's Rare Book Room. Also like Microcastle, Rainwater Cassette Exchange shifts between delicate 1960s-pop tunefulness and fist-pumping dopamine surges.

"I wanted Microcastle and Weird Era to be a Fall/Winter record," Bradford Cox once wrote in a blog post that has since been deleted. Among the last sounds you'll hear on the current EP is a child's cry of "trick or treat." Whether it's lilting melodies, some new-and-improved vocal harmonies, or Strokes-cum-Magazine stately clangor, Rainwater Cassette Exchange makes with the treats first. Then, as much as Cox likes to downplay the band's lyrics, you notice the ghostly stuff, the warnings of impending mortality. Autumnal material, yeah, but its bleak truths resonate all the more against the budding spring weather outside.

First, the treats. The title track opens the EP with girl-group sugar that helps the reverb-heavy overdrive go down. "Do-oooh-oooh you believe in love at first sight?" Cox sings, his voice beatific, his lyric Beatles-y ("With a Little Help From My Friends", last verse, first line). Three songs-- "Disappearing Ink", "Famous Last Words", and "Circulation"-- are propulsive garage-rock anthems in the style of Microcastle marquee moment "Nothing Ever Happened". The only other track, the lonesome "Game of Diamonds", started life on Deerhunter's blog, where it was drenched in shoegaze distortion. Here it gets a softer arrangement featuring piano and acoustic guitar-- all the better to hear Cox's uniquely engaging vocals, clear and frail and fricative.

It all sounds so harmless, it's a treat to find out we're actually getting tricked. "Rainwater Cassette Exchange" is sort of like Microcastle's "Agoraphobia", had that song's erotically asphyxiated protagonist already been dead, or its arrangement paradoxically sprightlier. "Famous Last Words" opens with a lyric about "your brother bleeding" on the sidewalk, while a wobbly Theremin adds to the eerie October mood. Despite putting an Everly Brothers-esque vocal duet over distorted guitar lines, "Circulation" is about "bad" circulation, and Cox has a heart condition. "Hands reach for my light when it gets dark," it sounds like he's saying, right before the song veers off into two minutes of bittersweet sound collage around where the live version becomes draped with ethereal vocal loops.

If Rainwater Cassette Exchange sounded evanescent to me on first listens, well, so are we. "Time never meant that much to me," Cox sings on "Game of Diamonds", but that's belied not only by Deerhunter's work ethic, but also by words that Cox's emotionally isolated narrator-- Jens Lekman's "It Was a Strange Time in My Life" comes to mind-- repeats elsewhere in the song: "I've counted every grain of sand." Like, our endless numbered days. When Cox sings about lying drunk on the Bowery, it's hard for me not to think of that night he rambled endlessly and flouted New York's smoking laws at the Bowery Ballroom. That stuff'll kill ya, you know.

So what do you think is gonna happen to us now? Are we gonna get younger, happier, prettier? "Nothing can be changed," goes "Famous Last Words", but that isn't exactly true. Consider "Disappearing Ink" a metaphor for the temporariness of it all, and for what's permanent: "Disappearing ink, but the words still sting." After you play a good song, it's gone in the air, but you can still feel it. After you type something stupid on the internet, you can try to delete it, but you can't take it back. That means you and I are gonna live forever. Now those would be famous last words.

 

Jeffrey Lewis - 'Em Are I

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
May 19, 2009
Link
6.3

Jonathan Richman put out a single called "You Can Have a Cell Phone That's Okay But Not Me" as a bonus 7" with the vinyl edition of last year's Because Her Beauty Is Raw and Wild. You could make the same criticisms of it that guys like me tend to make of Jeffrey Lewis-- the recording is almost entirely a delivery system for the words, it's hard to imagine anyone listening to it just for the sounds, and his voice mostly sticks to one or two notes-- but it also happens to be one of my favorite tracks of 2008. Music doesn't have to be about pure sound; used to be it was about emotional connection, too.

"I still don't have a cell phone/ But this seashell gets reception," Lewis sings on "To Be Objectified", a surf-splashed meditation from the neurotic New York singer/songwriter's latest album, 'Em Are I. Like Richman, Lewis is a sharp firsthand observer of what passes for urban bohemia, but one who still puts warts-and-all sincerity before hipster chic. It's an approach that can lead to uneven results, including Lewis' grossly misguided 12 Crass Songs covers disc in 2007. If you're reading this far, though, then Lewis (also, incidentally, an accomplished cartoonist) probably has at least a few songs that will resonate with you.

As on 2006's City & Eastern Songs, Lewis' fourth album of original material again connects best through lyrical details. For instance, Lewis describes the way "a rolled sweatshirt makes the window soft" on "Roll Bus Roll", the album's lush, loping ramshackle-folk reverie about having too much past and leaving the city behind. Wesley Willis never had a Greyhound bus ride like this. The garage-rockers aren't far behind, whether Lewis is mustering up an unusual degree of self-confidence on opener "Slogans" ("Everyone you meet is not better than you") or extending a sadomasochistic but evocative relationship metaphor on "Broken Broken Broken Heart". If the arrangements aren't special in their own right, "Well, it's hard to get too bored/ When you pick the right two chords," as Lewis murmurs on "If Life Exists (?)", before discovering that no number of girlfriends will make him happier.

But graveyard hoedown "Whistle Past the Graveyard" almost ruins some relatively droll commentary about the afterlife with bah-ing backing vocals. Barnyard themes also sink the Pearls Before Swine in-joke on "Good Old Pig, Gone to Avalon". Eight-minute jazz-noise freakout "The Upside-Down Cross" eventually gets to lyrics about traveling with various women, but it's not worth the trip; finale "Mini-Theme = Moocher From the Future" mistakes "yesterday to no-terday" for a clever pun. So 'Em Are I is a frontloaded album. But anyone who ever bought a Sebadoh record despite really liking only Lou Barlow's songs should still consider checking it out. (You can prefer Eric Gaffney's songs, that's okay, but not me.)

Graham Coxon - The Spinning Top

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
May 18, 2009
Link
4.7

 

"It was just like college, only it was a nicer guitar and a nicer lunch," Blur bassist Alex James writes at the end of his 2007 memoir. James is describing his first meeting "in a couple of years" with Graham Coxon, the woohooing Britpop survivors' then-estranged guitarist. That passage was yet another reason for dedicated followers of the band to keep betting on a full Blur reunion, now official. It also gives you a pretty good idea what you can expect from Coxon's seventh solo album: same bittersweet bundle of misery, posher palate.

Coxon is not normally a guy you turn to for easy cubicle listening. In Blur, he was the punkish pedal-stomper with the noisy American indie-rock collection and skateboarding hobby. After Parklife turned the group into pop idols, Coxon was the one who reacted with Kurt Cobain-ish dismay. As a solo artist, he has alternated between post-punk squall and folkie plaintiveness starting with 1998's extremely lo-fi Sky Is Too High-- like so many of the records he would've heard on John Peel's radio show, it was self-released. Longtime Blur producer Stephen Street has helped steer Coxon toward more broadly accessible power-pop on recent albums, most successfully 2004's Happiness in Magazines, without ever quite going middle of the road.

The Spinning Top crashes into the median, and it barely budges for almost 70 trudging minutes. Blur are doing what every once-profitable band does these days-- hi, Led Zeppelin!-- and getting back together. Coxon is doing what so many other formerly fun musicians end up doing once they've exhausted their Satan-bestowed allotment of decent melodies and lyrics: Yes, it's some kind of concept album, apparently telling the story of a man's life from birth to death, though you wouldn't necessarily know it. Street produces again, and Robyn Hitchcock is among the guests, but even they can't make up for repetitive, one-dimensional songs-- mostly sleepy folk, occasionally fuzzy psych. If the sound quality is more consistent than in Coxon's rough early work, that just means when he stretches threadbare ideas past the breaking point, he'll be less likely to wake you.

One thing intact: Coxon's guitar-playing. If his nuanced and head-smackingly emotive fretwork with Blur hasn't already convinced you he's among his generation's great guitarists, the sinuous finger-picking on otherwise fairly forgettable first single "Sorrow's Army" should send you back to "This Is a Low", "Sing", or "Bugman" with fresh ears. Coxon recently told Uncut he's a big fan of English folk guitar gods Bert Jansch, Davy Graham, and Martin Carthy, and he's certainly playing in their style here. On "Perfect Love", Coxon's folk-filigreed acoustic figure joins various Indian instruments to back double-tracked doggerel lyrics vaguely reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee". "Tripping Over" is an interminable lullaby, but that electric guitar is sure purdy for the last minute or two.

Listeners who've heard only Coxon's last couple of rockers, including 2006's Love Travels at Illegal Speeds, might not've been aware of his folkie streak, but it's been almost as much of an open secret as the fact Blur were eventually gonna reunite. "I wish I could bring Nick Drake back to life," Coxon sang on his first non-Blur single, "I Wish". At least back then he had enough faith in his own lo-fi vision not actually to bite the late English folkie-- he left that to Beck. It's hard to imagine the Coxon of a decade ago singing phrases like "baybay" over rootsy verses in between ornamented choruses that get all Bryter Layter about the rain (except in jest, a la Blur B-side "Rednecks"). Likewise, opener "Look Into the Light" is nice enough, emphasizing the guitar's droning harmonics, but I can't decide if I just like it because the melody reminds me of Drake's "Cello Song". Joined by upright bass and piano on tracks like "Feel Alright", which is as bland as its title, The Spinning Top comes closer to Van Morrison, specifically Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl. In that case, the slow-motion classical guitar licks on "Far From Everything" are "Beside You" all by its lonesome.

Coxon's main Blur songs, "You're So Great" and "Coffee & TV", could go as long as six minutes without a single wasted note. The Spinning Top keeps spinning its wheels. Second single "In the Morning" sounds like the Beatles' "Blackbird" if it had gone on for eight minutes and if Paul had let George arrange-- not just because Coxon mentions a blackbird, either. "If a diamond hangs in every tree and a life is lost for every leaf can a bird still sing?" he asks. Beats me. Even when the Blur guitarist reminds us that he knows where Syd Barrett lives, as on "Caspian Sea", it's not much more fun than bashing your head against the wall repeating geographical terms until every now and then you see stars. "It's oh so serious/ It's oh so lame," Coxon repeats throughout "If You Want Me", occasionally breaking into Pixies-ish distortion-- serious or not, it is kind of lame.

Blur couldn't really be Blur without Coxon. His guitar helps make Modern Life Is Rubbish modern, keeps 13 from collapsing under its own Donald Duck noises, and steals the show during its one appearance on Think Tank. No Blur without him, either. But it's Damon Albarn who has had the band's most successful solo career, outselling Blur with Gorillaz and going on to even more artistically impressive work with the Good, the Bad & the Queen and then Monkey. James has been writing a weekly newspaper column; drummer Dave Rowntree went into politics. It's probably no coincidence that the song here most worthy of Coxon's past work is called "Humble Man". As James's memoir puts it, Coxon is "brilliantly artistic, but vulnerable." He's still my favorite Blur.

Dananananaykroyd - Hey Everyone!

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
May 14, 2009
Link
7.4

The Denver Westword recently asked Los Campesinos! musical mastermind Tom Campesinos! whether it frustrates him to see reviews that describe his expansively punk-wracked Welsh septet's guitar-and-xylophone pop as "twee." He said it doesn't, explaining, "One of the most important things about any sort of art is an element of humor, and not to take yourself too seriously." Same goes for art appreciation, not that you'd know it most days from us stuffy critics.

Let Marty McFly tell you: The future is heavy. U.S. producer Machine, probably best known for his work with metal musos Lamb of God, has been getting fine work out of bands that make melodic indie rock similar to LC!'s, only... less twee. First up was Birmingham, England's Johnny Foreigner, whose excellent 2008 Waited Up 'Til It Was Light had macho muscle to match its endearing boy-girl singalongs. Now Glaswegian sextet Dananananaykroyd, also under Machine's oversight, follow with another debut liable to unite moshers and librarians. The two aren't mutually exclusive, you know.

On Hey Everyone!, Dananananaykroyd's chopsy dual-drummer approach goes for wrecking-ball guitar leads before fatal LiveJournal entries; your standard, spindly UK indie always meets with something heavier. On "The Greater Than Symbol and the Dash", guitarists Duncan Robertson and David Roy dive from piercing feedback to downers-dosed metal lurch; a pair of cascading drum fills make way for a throat-curdler from the singer (Calum Gunn and co-drummer John Baille Junior share lead duties), who sounds raw and bestial where his peers might come off shrill. "1993" is another scream, splitting time between hardcore thrash and contemplative instrumental passages that recall the 1990s emo likes of Mineral and Sunny Day Real Estate. Throughout, Dananananaykroyd fuck with time signatures the way indie-famouser Glaswegians play with words.

Um, then again, there's really no ignoring that ridiculous band name. Which I'm starting to think is as brilliant as I originally thought it was dumb-- another set of not-really-opposites. On the same song, Dananananaykroyd (thanks, Command-V! And thank you, Elwood Blues!) make a defiant mantra out of a decidedly twee-ass phrase: "Turn your hissy fits into sissy hits." Good advice, that, and it works multiple could-be-hit wonders. With its jagged surge and shouts of "say it!", "Pink Sabbath" is less Ozzy, more Mclusky. "Black Wax" makes room in its beautiful-and-stoned Pavement jangle for dramatic backing vocals and agonized yells; the galloping rhythms and rapidfire guitar hooks of first self-effacing "Totally Bone" and then Beatles-citing finale "Song One Puzzle" had me thinking Modest Mouse until they had me thinking, almost, Mastodon. Sissy hit: anti-pep-rally shoutalongs.

For as awesome as Dananananaykroyd are at blasting the bejesus out of some of my favorite bands-- hey, they can even play their instruments!-- it's less clear what they're all about. Hey Everyone! doesn't wear its heart on its sleeve like sloppier Mclusky-ites Japandroids, doesn't reflect every nuance of its scene with the observational acuity of LC!, isn't Mclusky Do Dallas. But in its own combustive way, it's weirdly memorable. The track that initially drew me in, "Infinity Milk", uses ragged sprawl to set off call-and-response vocals about napalm. "These are the days of our fucking lives," exults "Hey James". We used to dream; now we've learned to stop worrying and love the firebomb.

Art Brut - Art Brut vs. Satan

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
April 21, 2009
Link
7.7

 

Spoiler alert: Art Brut lose. Of course they do. Tramps like former Art Brut tourmates Hold Steady were born to run around wearing baseball jerseys in front of Counting Crows fans (and good for them!). Art Brut were born to lose: How could they ever improve on the clumsy meta-punk rush of their first single, "Formed a Band"? They arrived almost fully formed. They never got to play "Top of the Pops". When they miraculously came up with another 11 songs just about as good-- or, in the case of "Emily Kane", arguably better-- on their brilliant 2005 debut album, Bang Bang Rock & Roll, it only added sting to their inevitable defeat. They were even losers at being losers. I loved them for it.

That's partly why it's so strange now to read reviews that lump Art Brut in with more commercially successful UK bands such as Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand. At live shows, lead not-quite-singer Eddie Argos used to change "I can't stand the sound of the Velvet Underground" to "I can't stand the sound of Gang of Four," and I always assumed his targets were obvious (hint: neither the Velvet Underground nor Gang of Four). Full of fist-pumping but self-mocking bar-punk about obsessive fandom and romantic awkwardness, Bang Bang Rock & Roll was the closest our decade has come to The Modern Lovers. Art Brut's true peers are lyrical music geeks like John Darnielle, Jeffrey Lewis, Jens Lekman, Los Campesinos!, the Tough Alliance, and, most recently, Nodzzz. It's not irony; it's self-aware sincerity.

Good news for people who love losers: Art Brut's third album is on what Kanye might call "some Benjamin Buttons shit." Gone is the slight maturation of their good-- but, sadly, not great-- sophomore album, 2007's It's a Bit Complicated, which tried to win by the attractive-people rules of polished production; the songs were still warm, witty, and alive, but they just didn't have the original's "I've seen her naked-- TWICE!" brashness. Recorded on the fly with fellow Jonathan Richman acolyte Frank Black, Art Brut vs. Satan is a scrappy, romantic, and painfully hilarious return to loserdom. Coldplay will always be more popular. So what? I hate those guys!

Art Brut probably do, too. If they can't topple vague, pasty, barely breathing background rock from the charts, at least they can sing gloriously doomed songs about it. "Cool your warm jets, Brian Eno," Argos jibes on "Slap Dash for No Cash", teasing shiny U2 clones the way he previously skewered vapid post-punk revivalists. Argos champions instead the records where you can hear not only the crack of the singer's voice, or the squeak of the guitarist's fingers, but also (as on a Gorky's Zygotic Mynci B-side, apparently) their parents complaining about the volume-- not because those records are more artistically valid, or more authentic or whatever, but for a more important reason: "Those are the records I like."

Black gets the Art Brut spirit down on record better than anyone has before, with the blazing pop-metal vainglory of Weezer, the scruffy cheekiness of early Rough Trade bands, and lots of enthusiastic backing vocals. Fun for them, fun for us. "Demons Out!" shifts the Smiths' "Panic!" from hanging DJs to denying record buyers suffrage, but don't mistake it for a Death Cab for Cutie-like manifesto against U.S. Auto-Tune pop; more accurately, it's an ideal rebuke against the endless Travis Kooks Kaiser Chiefs Razorlight blandness of UK "science museum" rock. So too "The Replacements", which melds the Mats' "Alex Chilton" and the Brut's "My Little Brother" into a clamorous endorsement of used CDs and deluxe reissues. Extending the prior album's trend toward sacrilegious song titles, "Twist and Shout" may not have you accidentally repeating its off-key la-la-las in public, like the song's narrator, but you'll probably know exactly how he feels. Not that Satan gives a damn about songs that communicate aspects of everyday life with clarity and human charm.

Art Brut remain ever the underdog when they're singing about arrested development and girls, too. "DC Comics and Chocolate Milkshake" is a cereal-eaters' song as universal as Jerry Seinfeld, with a nicely echoing bridge, while perfectly sloppy public-transportation anthem "The Passenger" rewrites Iggy Pop from the perspective of a guy who can't drive. "Summer Job", with its Vampire Weekend-whooping intro vocal, is the album's only concession to conventional melody, and its summertime-blues-curing slackerdom could hardly be more enjoyably juvenile. Like a bizarro "Rusted Guns of Milan", "What a Rush" fumbles for morning-after Beatles vs. Stones meaning-- and socks. Add to vocab: "Sober...ish?". Slowing down but not going ballad, "Am I Normal?" is a preview of the kind of shy neurotic who might go on to write "Emily Kane".

Art Brut Vs. Satan begins and ends with a hungover Argos trying to remember what he did the night before. Frantically buzzing opener "Alcoholics Unanimous" finds Argos sending apologetic mass texts; he's been concerned about what he's been up to, and with good reason. On epic finale "Mysterious Bruises", which I didn't even notice was seven minutes until I looked it up later, Argos proclaims: "I fought the floor and the floor won." Satan always wins. The beautiful people and their sycophants will always outnumber lovable losers. But this is a record I like.

Super Furry Animals - Dark Days/Light Years

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
April 20, 2009
Link
8.3

 

Once you've communicated what you want to say so many ways, there's always the groove. Not that Super Furry Animals were the ones who needed to get theirs back, exactly. I mean, sure, 2007's Hey Venus! wasn't so much "speaker blowing"-- lead singer Gruff Rhys' advertisement-- as "hey, SFA still don't suck yet." But before that, 2005's Love Kraft was a multi-layered psych-funk-folk-samba epic about love, war, and "no more romantic comedies." Since then, the Welsh quintet's offbeat side projects-- such as Rhys's Delorean-themed Neon Neon partnership with Boom Bip, or keyboardist Cian Ciárán's electronic-leaning Acid Casuals-- have kept the Super Furry faithful well-supplied.

Dark days? Uhh, have you picked up a newspaper lately? Me neither, which I assume is part of the problem. "People that go out and murder people don't read The Wall Street Journal," New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg told CNN's Wolf Blitzer the other day, on whether the shitty economy added to gun violence. And yet all of a sudden a lot of liberal-arts-damaged hipsters seem to know a hell of a lot about the financial sector. Call it a capital infusion: SFA's ninth album in almost two decades as a band, Dark Days/Light Years, is also their most playful since 2001's Rings Around the World. Full of paradoxes and loving parodies, honeyed psych-pop harmonies and shaggy vamps, it's just the sci-fi groove-rock mindfuck to shake us out of our no-fun times.

First, the grooves: SFA assembled Dark Days/Light Years-- nine years in the making, 40 days in the recording-- largely out of riffs and ideas that for one reason or another had gone unused. The results are as free-wheeling and inspired as the group has sounded in years-- Super-er and Furrier. Heavy blooz schoolgirl-ballers from Grand Funk Railroad to Eric Burdon can keep their puds and their guts squeezed tight into their bellbottoms after opener "Crazy Naked Girls", a three-part song that reclaims wah wah and a whole lotta lovin'. Groove turns to stomp on Ciárán-fronted "Mt.", which places Donovan folk mysticism over glam-rock schaffel.

Then, when the machines groove, it's motorik. The Super Furries meet the ensuing depression with... more wryness. "Let us make the best of a difficult situation," Rhys intones on first single "Inaugural Trams", the album's top stand-alone track. In a utopian universe where it would've been politically feasible for President Obama to announce, upon his inauguration, a plan to reduce emissions ("by 75!") and restore the economy through a public-transportation moon race, "Inaugural Trams"-- with Franz Ferdinand's Nick McCarthy rapping some of the only German words I know that aren't "Kraftwerk" or "hefeweizen"-- would be the summer jam. If "Inaugural Trams" is "the definitive krautrock song about railcars," as New York magazine's Vulture blog wondered recently, it's only in the way Rings Around the World's "Juxtaposed With U" was the definitive Philly soul sexx jam. In other words, it's something else.

And it's not alone. Lester Bangs once recommended a young punk band call their album The Monkees' Greatest Hits; the biggest disappointment here is that the Super Furries didn't make "The Very Best of Neil Diamond" the title track. The song's ancient licks and sweaty percussion might suggest early 00s R&B, or some kind of Eastern thing, but far from it: The chorus of "trust but verify" swipes a favorite Cold War catchphrase of Ronald Reagan. Somewhere before the guitar-gnashing bridge, I guess there's also this narrative about a Neil Diamond tape playing in the aftermath of an apocalypse. (And I'm told you can hear quotes from Vivaldi and Beethoven in Metal Machine Music, too...) Right after "The Very Best of Neil Diamond" takes us to "Sweet Caroline" and back, "Helium Hearts" drops us off in Eden. With perfect hippie-dippie non sequiturs about wedding rings, togetherness, and vegemite, it's probably the closest SFA's latest comes to the swooning, ELO-lite psych-pop of past highlights like 1996's "Something 4 the Weekend".

Just because a band sticks to the old-fashioned idea of an album as a cohesive piece of work doesn't mean it has to get all stuffy about it: Dark Days/Light Years begins with casual chatter and ends, after the "Beat It" meets "Livin' on a Prayer" bass lines and burbling vocal nonsense of Ciárán-penned quasi-instrumental "Pric", with three minutes of droning electronic tones. (SFA have played this kind of prank before, burying career highlights on hidden tracks or non-album singles.) Guitarist Huw Bunford's "White Socks/Flip Flops" makes up in wet synths, blistering guitars, and taut rhythms what it lacks in fashion sense; fuzzed bass-guitar duel "Inconvenience"-- not an Au Pairs cover-- goes from "what the fuck?" to jihad and pirate ships (timely!). Even the least exceptional tracks here, twinned songs "Where Do You Wanna Go?" and "Lliwiau Llachar", still offer raucous drumming and catchy Welsh-language vocals.

Remember when columnists predicted the death of irony after 9/11? Didn't happen, but between the whole everybody-losing-their-jobs thing and having an actual well-meaning grown-up in the White House, deadly seriousness is more of a threat now than ever. At least there's Glenn Beck. In the meantime, Dark Days/Light Years brings some good vibes for everyone "from middle-aged sophisticates to stone-aged reprobates," to borrow a line from the rhythmically restrained, Spoon-like "Moped Eyes". It used to be called "Hot Nuts".

Thieves Like Us - Play Music

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
April 10, 2009
Link
5.6

Sensitive clubbers of the world, unite. Thieves Like Us singer Andy Grier, an American, met keyboardist Björn Berglund and drummer Pontus Berghe, both Swedes, when they all lived in Berlin. The Tron-loving filter-house electro-poppers now call Paris home, and French label Kitsuné picked up their big single, the euphoric but also melancholic downtown-metro ride "Drugs in My Body". Debut album Play Music was variously conceived and created in Berlin, Vienna, New York, London, Rio de Janeiro, and Stockholm.

Finally getting a belated U.S. release, the disc justifies some but not all of its carbon footprint. New Order's 1984 hit "Thieves Like Us" exemplified how those UK synth-pop icons could take something "so uncool"-- like love of tech gadgetry-- and give it a certain expensively wasted glamor. "Drugs in My Body" adapts this strategy for our post-Daft Punk ears. It's hyper-urban strobe-pop, with aching vocals and a tightly coiled Durutti Column sample that could appeal not only to don't-call-it-blog-house LastNightsPartyers, but also to Factory-worshiping indie bedwetters like me. The full album should be an okay soundtrack for a hoverbus tour of some retrofuturistic metropolis, but it's somewhere just outside of track 3 when the Dramamine starts to kick in.

Play Music slows down more often than your Justice Mobile Digitalisms, and when it does it tends to lose some focus. Unfortunately, the horn-haunted nighttime cityscape of "An Easy Tonight" sounds less like the City of Lights than the City That Makes Me Kinda Sleepy; the solid but unremarkable kosmische of "Lady" needs something a little more distinctive alongside its tasteful woundedness. Most of the singing was recorded at home, which helps it sound sincere, but also helps it sound like a specific, time-fixed notion of sincerity (won't anyone just let Ian Curtis rest in peace?). Shoulda-been instrumental "Program of the Second Part" suggests, "Sing along to Suicide."

Of course, smuggling open-hearted vocal frailness into ecstatic electronic dance-pop can still have thrilling results, as New Order showed, and the likes of the Tough Alliance continue to demonstrate. Thieves Like Us are usually best when they're giving us a spoonful of sugar to help the miserabilia go down-- feeling low at a higher tempo on "Your Heart Feels", for example, or daydreaming about David and Angela Bowie on the similarly faster-paced "Miss You". "Drugs in My Body" B-side "Fass" also does all right despite meh meta lyrics about crossing "scene lines." But the second-best thing here actually has to be finale "Sugar and Song", a sure-enough slow breakup ballad that's as depressive as so much good Spiritualized. Although Play Music drags more than I would've hoped, it's still a reasonably lustrous place to be sad now and then-- without drugs in my body, but not without "Drugs in My Body".

The Coathangers - Scramble

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
April 6, 2009
Link
7.2

 

If the only good reason to overturn apple carts is for the fun of it, how 'bout them apples? Like Athens' Pylon before them, all-grrl Atlanta quartet the Coathangers are making sure the revolution will not be such a drag. On a rough 'n' rowdy self-titled 2007 debut via local label Rob's House Records, they swapped "Suck My Left One" for "Nestle in My Boobies", "Oh Bondage, Up Yours!" for "Shut the Fuck Up", hating Margaret Thatcher for sympathizing with "Tonya Harding". Word is their ramshackle live shows-- alongside the likes of Deerhunter, Black Lips, Jay Reatard, and, next month, Calvin Johnson-- have included loogies and My Little Pony.  Cue the premature backlash.

The Coathangers keep the back-alley post-punk party going strong on a scratchy, shrieky, foul-mouthed sophomore album, Scramble, their first for Seattle-based Suicide Squeeze. The call-and-response vocals-- split between guitarist Julia Kugel, drummer Stephanie Luke, keyboard player Candice Jones, and Meredith Franco on bass-- are shrill. The politics aren't, even though technically everything-- from their beyond Fucked Up name to their overall fuck-you we're-not-the-Donnas stance-- is kind of political. Nope, the Coathangers aren't ones to let good intentions stand in for a good time.

As with fellow Georgians the B-52s, their best songs play like should-be novelty hits. The Coathanger with the chirpy Snow White voice sings lead on a couple of the catchiest, including upstairs-neighbor rant "Stop Stomp Stompin'" and unrequited-love-at-first-sight song "143", both of which have enough quotidian sloganeering and goofy-but-true detail for UK shouters Art Brut. Pretty sure it's the same band member who threatens to break our "fucking face" on caterwauling garage-rocker "Gettin' Mad and Pumpin' Iron", too. But the Coathangers can also drop the tempo-- slow dancing with a dude who "ain't no sissy" on "Dreamboat", or missing a boy from outer space on keyboard-driven "Sonic You". There's even one for the olds: "Arthritis Sux". There's even one for tUne-YarDs: sloppy sound-effect collage "Bobby Knows Best".

Put together enough novelty hits, and you have a pretty solid album. If off-kilter percussion can't quite overcome the whispery false ending on "Pussywillow", or "Time Passing" gets a little lost up its own indecipherable sci-fi squall, there's always the scuzzy pink frost of "Toomerhead" (he ain't an asshole, he's just sick), or the get-off-my-back hoarseness of "Bury Me". Particularly given the neanderthal sexual politics of much of the current indie music scene-- looking at you, Brooklyn Vegan comments section-- it's good politics when a girl group can declare, as a deeper-voiced Coathanger does on "Cheap Cheap", "You can just go fuck yourself." It's good entertainment when they can make us pretend they're not talking to us-- and that's probably smarter politics, too. As the Long Blondes once sang, you could have both.