Arctic Monkeys - Cornerstone

Track Review
Pitchfork
November 13, 2009
Link
8

Everything reminds Alex Turner of her. Who exactly she might be, however, is anyone's guess. Where much of the Arctic Monkeys' Josh Homme-produced third album, Humbug, lumbers along with ill-fitting machismo, "Cornerstone" stands tall from first listen, an impeccable case for songcraft and subtlety. Turner packs his usual vivid lyrical observations into this lovelorn tale, but he's learning that withholding them can be just as effective.

When the narrator on "Cornerstone" sees someone who looks to him like his lost love, if only ever so slightly, he starts kissing her. This usually seems to work out better than you'd think. At least until he asks if he can call the new girls the old one's name. As Turner rattles off real or imagined watering holes, his backing's organ-swaying nostalgia recalls another record named after a meeting place: Richard Hawley's Coles Corner (which coincidentally lost the 2006 Mercury Prize to the first Arctics LP). Turner's rich wordplay brings his fancifully poignant subject matter to life, but it's far from clear how seriously to take all this. No less so after watching the Richard Ayoade-directed video, which adds Morrissey-like gesticulations to the recording's resonantly Mozzy phrasing, but does little to resolve the song's central ambiguities. "I'm beginning to think I've imagined you all along," Turner sings about halfway through. A hint? Possibly. Or else one step in the grieving process en route to the ever-popular "making out with your ex's sister" phase.

God Help the Girl - Stills EP

Album Review
Pitchfork
November 12, 2009
Link
6.3

Belle and Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch keeps putting out music from his planned musical film before anyone has seen the movie. This is a tricky proposition. And, so far, a successful one. This summer's self-titled debut album from the Glaswegian singer and songwriter's God Help the Girl project brought together a fine cast of female vocalists, led by Catherine Ireton, for girl group- and musical theater-leaning songs centered around some longtime B&S preoccupations: sex, religion, pop. The five-song Stills EP, as its name and format suggest, plays more like a collection of scattered moments than a full-length motion picture.

The best of these snapshots comes with the EP's heartbroken title track and centerpiece. As on much of God Help the Girl's LP, we're in Anne Murray or Karen Carpenter territory here-- the kind of soft, melodic, adult pop once derided as "Happy Housewives' Music"-- and there's nothing wrong with that. Relying on little more than minor-key piano, strings, and a wonderfully pent-up female vocal, this is a hell of a torch song, full of a level of vulnerability, tunefulness, and lyrical detail that's a lot less common, and a lot more controversial, in underground circles than supposedly more avant-garde approaches. Multiple listens reveal subtle shades of humor: "I'm getting a lot of work done/ I smoke two packs a day." Nice work if you can get it.

The four other songs may manage to captivate on film, but here they can come off sounding like relatively slight genre exercises-- well-constructed and well-sung, yes, but inessential. "I'm in Love With the City" has a swinging, jazz-standard feel as Ireton worries about her "cat's chance in hell" in a love triangle. Better than an ice cube's chance, anyway. Murdoch takes the lead on "He's a Loving Kind of Boy", which plays nicely with the old "chip on his shoulder" cliché, though mariachi-tinged horns add a distracting, novelty element. On the smoldering, bluesy "Baby's Just Waiting", multiple female vocalists wait on their boy to come of age, get it, then complain about losing "the kid who was eager to please." Finale "The Psychiatrist Is In", with clattering hand percussion and a whiff of Roy Orbison-style rock'n'roll balladry, builds on this theme of maturation, but Green Day did the whole shrink/whore thing more succinctly 15 years ago.

Murdoch recently scheduled a few God Help the Girl live shows. Available video evidence suggests the songs from the album come across even better in concert than they do as 1s and 0s, and that will no doubt be the case with the Stills EP material, as well. Still-- "Stills" aside-- though this release is now available on iTunes, it often feels like what it originally was: a 10" vinyl issue for the diehards who signed up to receive Murdoch's God Help the Girl subscription series. Then again, if subscribers get to find out more about the story behind all this music before the rest of us, membership may indeed have its privileges.

Bottin - Horror Disco

Album Review
Pitchfork
November 9, 2009
Link
6.1

Almost three years ago, Justice sampled Italian prog band Goblin on their second single, "Phantom". If the French-house headbangers wanted to show they could weld metal's gothic nightmarishness onto disco's giddy dancefloor excess, they could hardly have made a better symbolic choice. After creating classic film soundtracks for horror auteur Dario Argento with Goblin starting in the mid-1970s, keyboard player Claudio Simonetti went on to help pioneer what is now lovingly known as Italo disco. Horror, disco-- okay, you've met.

If cinematic scariness and electronic dance music were ever strange bedfellows, they certainly aren't anymore. Since "Phantom", Justice-style floor pummelers from Kavinsky to CFCF have acknowledged Goblin's influence. The band itself reunited for European live shows and a new album in recent years. And the guys behind German house and techno label Kompakt just started a new imprint, Fright, citing Goblin's Simonetti and Halloween film-scorer John Carpenter as touchstones. Within this burgeoning micro-movement, Venice's William Bottin has shown moments of demonic mastery, but his full-length debut, Horror Disco, rarely makes you jump out of your seat.

Wielding a Farfisa Syntorchestra synth like a slasher-movie villain brandishing a murder weapon, Bottin comes up with an album that is more about a spooky mood and quirky sonics than hypnotically pristine repetitions. No surprise, then, that excellent single "No Static" first emerged on darkly atmospheric New Jersey label Italians Do It Better; spacey arpeggios interlap and unfold seamlessly, subtle cries of "don't stop" and "can do it" giving this the feel of a contender for Nike's "Run" series. "Sciarando El Scuro" is the most ear-catching track after "No Static", its chirpy hook less poltergeist than poultry-geist.

From there, Horror Disco remains deeply reverent of horror and retro-futurist film music, with plenty of solid grooves to offer DJs, but not quite enough personality to make for a completely satisfying home listen. The stuttering rhythms and horn fanfares of "Venezia Violenta", the Halloween-esque repetitions of ominous finale "Endless Mother", and the creepy vocoder warnings of "Slashdance" are never unpleasant, but they're not exactly thrilling, either. Underscoring Horror Disco's revivalist tendencies is "Disco for the Devil", which features matter-of-fact mayhem from Douglas Meakin, who sang for some of Simonetti's Italo disco projects.

As (dig the name) Black Devil Disco Club have shown, nu-disco doesn't have to be novel to be good, but it should usually be entertaining. Horror Disco proves Bottin knows his craft, and the standout tracks are worthwhile even for Italo disco noobs, but there's too much dull drift here to let me recommend it unreservedly for your 2010 Halloween party-- especially with so much similarly minded disco spookiness out there. After all, at 78 minutes, Horror Disco is already eight minutes longer than the Flaming Lips' sprawling new double-album. As great as Embryonic is, that's still a little scary.
  

A Sunny Day in Glasgow - Close Chorus

Track Reviews
Pitchfork
November 6, 2009
Link
8 ["best new music"]

If you hadn't noticed this was the standout on A Sunny Day in Glasgow's triumphant-despite-adversity sophomore album, Ashes Grammar, you're forgiven. When it's working, the Philadelphia band's diaphanous dream-pop washes over you like an "ambient slipstream," to borrow a nicely evocative phrase from the BBC. With 22 tracks flowing by in a little more than an hour, Ashes Grammar makes picking favorites even more difficult. Some tracks pass in a matter of seconds, mere interludes; others glide toward an infinite horizon.

I hadn't noticed "Close Chorus" was my most-played track from Ashes Grammar (well, tied with the 11-second intro) until my fellow staffers started saying how great it was. After the psychedelic clang of the Panda Bear-like "Failure", "Close Chorus" is only the album's second track that even resembles a conventional song. Make that songs: By around three minutes in, the bass line's quasi-techno bounce could almost be coming from a different piece altogether from the Cocteau Twins-haunted female vocals, effects-drenched guitar strums, and indeterminately warped hum. "Close Chorus" undergoes plenty of other metamorphoses, too-- drum machines trading off with live rock drumming, a few snippets of lyrics comprehensible here and there ("it's hard to believe..." "I just want to be happy")-- until, before you know it, shoegaze guitars start dropping like dying seagulls. You definitely won't notice that Ben Daniels recorded the song without founding singer Lauren Daniels (grad school) and mostly without bass player Brice Hickey (broken leg) and sibling singer Robin (looking after Brice).

I'm probably the only one who'll notice how one of the melodies vaguely recalls the chorus from the Offspring's "Gone Away", but why not listen again?

Pants Yell - Received Pronunciation

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
November 4, 2009
Link
7.3

Who gives a fuck about Oxford English? Pants Yell! have named their fifth album after, basically, the Queen's accent. If the title of last year's Alison Statton placed the Boston trio in the less-is-more lineage of Young Marble Giants, then Received Pronunciation acknowledges what they still more or less are: indie pop formalists, mastering a given dialect rather than inventing unknown tongues. The band's latest does away with the horns and strings of its predecessor, following a bit more conservatively in the tradition of wordy, tuneful, earnest underdogs from Small Factory and the Trashcan Sinatras to the Lucksmiths.

What Received Pronunciation loses in variety-- my kingdom for another "Two French Sisters"!-- it largely makes up for with increasingly accomplished songcraft. Since when has subtlety been supposed to call attention to itself, anyway? You're probably not going to like Received Pronunciation unless you occasionally enjoy breezy, midtempo songs with jangling/shimmering (choose one) rhythm guitar, slinky lead guitar lines, bustling drum fills, warm bass, and shy vocals, but the appeal of Pants Yell! is less about a particular sound than about lyrics and melodies. It also probably helps if you tend to appreciate understated storytelling and unexpected rhymes, though a line like, "I remember your white sunglasses/ And the way the sun just went right past us," is a little more Billy Bragg than Upper West Side soweto.

Received Pronunciation won't close you out like new slang; Pants Yell! would rather you make yourself at home, look around the place. First single "Cold Hands" sounds more inviting on each listen, with its "First of the Gang to Die" bounce, relationship anxiety, and wordplay that works without coming across like its singer needs a pat on the head. Parisian postcard "Rue de la Paix" luxuriates in detail, as singer Andrew Churchman declares, "I remember every little thing." But the songs more often show only what's needed: It's up to the listener to puzzle out the hungover unease of measured opener "Frank and Sandy"; "Not Wrong", in which the narrator admits he can't tie a tie, has to be one of the most peaceful songs ever about getting into a fight. Underneath the polite surfaces is seething coming-of-age pathos: "Does that asshole ever tell you that he still thinks of Megan?" Churchman demands on "Got to Stop". The biggest misstep is "Spider", a 50-second bit of sympathy for the arachnid in winter. You can be too understated.

"What's the point of all this living?" Churchman sings on accusatory finale "To Take", adding, "Living's all I ever do." He has told Swedish magazine Devotion that Received Pronunciation will be the final Pants Yell! album. They want to go the way of Huggy Bear and Felt rather than grow old and predictable. Too bad, because Received Pronunciation isn't my favorite Pants Yell! album, nor the most varied. If a recent Guardian column by critic Simon Reynolds is right, though, and what makes the Beatles, Motown, and great synthpop all immortal is not necessarily revolution, but "melody and emotion," then Pants Yell! definitely have the ingredients to last forever-- if only for a faithful few who speak their language.

Wild Nothing - Confirmation

Track Review
Pitchfork
October 30, 2009
Link
7

Art needs something to push against. With Bush-Cheney now in the rearview mirror (Jesus, drive faster!), and the technological possibilities for creating and distributing new music almost too vast to think about, bedroom track-makers are finding their constraints in the mediums of the past. From lo-fi to glo-fi to, um, Sleigh Bells, rising artists are experimenting with recording effects-- analogue hiss, cassette warping, red-line distortion-- that highlight their own recorded-ness, their own fakeness, the fact you're hearing anything but a flesh-and-blood live band standing across the room. In doing so, they're occasionally breaking free of the bounds of actual 1960s garage-rock, actual 80s synth-pop. We may look back at all this stuff and laugh someday. Right now, these feel like pretty heady times.

Which brings us to Wild Nothing. Blacksburg, Virginia-based Jack Tatum records under a couple of different guises-- Abe Vigoda-y tropical-punk band Facepaint, ramshackle singer/songwriter project Jack and the Whale-- but his (maybe surprisingly) impressive cover of Kate Bush's "Cloudbusting" made clear this one was something different. While the ghost of the Cure's synth-pop hits haunts the trebly guitar riff and frail vocals of Wild Nothing original "Confirmation", Tatum's heartache is shrouded in neon haze. A voice way up in Passion Pit range will deter some, especially because it's often off-key. But don't let such flaws kill it for you. Comics critic Sean T. Collins has described "a way of doing things that is not intended to look or sound effortless, that draws attention to its own construction, but which--with every pixelization and artifact, with every crayolafied visual and left-in glitch, with every burbly synth and sky-bright color--pushes against that construction and springs out into something wild and wonderful." Isn't that something?
 

Shrag - Rabbit Kids

Track Review
Pitchfork
October 28, 2009
Link
7

Brighton, UK-based quintet Shrag, like many of their 1970s indie-punk forebears, are one of those bands whose tunes and natural charisma could easily endear them to a wider audience, but whom the vagaries of record release dates, hype cycles, and airline prices have so far conspired to keep a well-loved secret. The shouty, synth-charged group's "Punk Grammar", from a compilation for a local club night, first appeared on our own Matthew Perpetua's Fluxblog way back in 2004. Two years later, breakup ballad "Hopelessly Wasted" made its way onto a couple of Pitchfork contributors' year-end lists. Shrag's 2009 self-titled debut LP, drawing mostly from prior 7" and mp3 releases, proved they had in them a whole album's worth of songs at nearly that high level.

New single "Rabbit Kids", due in December, is another fine chance to get acquainted with the band's charms. The oblique title and muffled production-- or is that just my mp3?-- again suggest the early English DIY movement. The surging boy-girl chorus and exposed nerves could almost entice you to visit MySpace again. We don't hear the full story, but the scene is one of painful departure: "Why don't you just stay?/ It's hard to see you fall apart that way." Little details-- "The hand in palm/ The coral dawn"-- help what sounds like personal heartache resonate for a wider world. It doesn't hurt that the song is bright, scrappy, and exuberantly melodic enough to rank alongside tracks by Love Is All, the Long Blondes, or early Los Campesinos!. A few more like this, and Shrag might break through yet, though you get the sense they're happy just playing in a band with their friends.
 

Various Artists - The Twilight Saga: New Moon OST

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
October 26, 2009
Link
5.4

Sensitive young men who avoid sunlight and the gloomy misfit young women who adore them: For all the gasps that greeted Twilight author Stephanie Meyer's recent embrace of indie rock, the parallels between the two are obvious enough. On different scales, each has seen its financial fortunes rise the past few years as well. The music industry's troubles are widely known, but indie's stock continues to climb. Phoenix and Animal Collective are two of the year's breakout bands. Jay-Z endorsed Grizzly Bear. Sonic Youth went on "Gossip Girl". As reverse indicators of indie rock's increasing popularity, there's the backlash: Slate recently slamming NPR and praising Creed, or recent underground interest in commercial dead ends like lo-fi and glo-fi.

Hollywood has hit up Brooklyn before. New Moon's soundtrack is melancholy and nocturnal, as befits the book where Edward leaves protagonist Bella for her own good, but it repeats some mistakes from past indie OST close-ups. Yeah, of course, indie rock is "just" pop music, but the companion CDs to Garden State, and TV shows such as "The O.C.", "Gossip Girl", and "Grey's Anatomy" (all at one time helmed by New Moon music supervisor Alexandra Patsavas) over-emphasized indie's adult-contemporary streak. By contrast, the Slumdog Millionaire, I'm Not There, and Sofia Coppola film soundtracks work partly because they share the same restless disregard for boundaries that indie listeners-- ideally, at least-- aspire toward.

Despite being the soundtrack to a young adult drama, the New Moon album alas leans toward the adult contemporary. It's packed with indie-friendly royalty, but hardly anybody here sounds anything better than pleasant. As usual, Thom Yorke fares best: The jittery synth-rock of the Radiohead frontman's "Hearing Damage" shows more of the heart he moved to his sleeve this year on gorgeous cover "All for the Best", and then an atmospheric outro steals it away again. Grizzly Bear's "Slow Life", with Beach House singer Victoria Legrand, and Bon Iver's "Roslyn", with St. Vincent-- both welcome collaborations on paper-- unfortunately fade into ethereal acoustic wallpaper: vaguely pretty, too unremarkable to have noteworthy flaws.

In the battle of the potential radio anthems, Death Cab for Cutie's chiming rocker "Meet Me on the Equinox", with its propulsive Narrow Stairs bass and hugely obvious "everything ends" chorus, beats the nonsensical baroque-pop of the Killers' "A White Demon Love Song". Lykke Li's feedback-streaked piano ballad "Possibility" is a relative bright spot, but like the rest of the tracks here, it pales in comparison to the work on her own records.

Elsewhere, Editors could finally rid themselves of Interpol comparisons with oppressively maudlin cabaret crooner "No Sound But the Wind", but you'll only wish there were no sound. A New Moon remix of Muse's histrionic "I Belong to You" mercifully cuts the pain of the six-minute album version in half, with few other apparent improvements. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's smoky acoustic lament "Done All Wrong" is probably too hard on itself. The few uptempo tracks here-- the chord-crunching "Monsters", by former Longwave frontman Steve Schiltz's Hurricane Bells, or the wobbly Saddle Creek-ishness of L.A. band Sea Wolf's "The Violet Hour"-- are as overly familiar as they are toe-tapping.

The New Moon OST has all the touchstones of what is considered, by many who consider themselves cognoscenti, "good" music-- from Yorke to Grizzly Bear to the more populist Death Cab, Killers, and Muse-- but it uses its tastefulness to solidify the borders of what is acceptable, not to broaden them. Even New Moon's most adventurous musicians rarely do anything catchy, startling, or moving enough here not to blend into mostly forgettable gothic-romance slurry. Strange as it may seem, not blending in is what some people want. Catchy is what pretty much everybody wants. So indie boys and vampires may have in common their unhealthy pallor, their emotional sensitivity, and their romantic clumsiness, but they're not the same, after all. Believe it or not: Indie kids have souls.

Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (Remix Collection)

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
October 21, 2009
Link
6.0

 

The past few years have given us not only a shit ton of remixes, but also of remix compilations. Looking back, remix collections have usually tended to draw on songs from multiple albums, whether we're talking about the Beatles' Love, Madonna's You Can Dance, or Blur's Bustin' + Dronin'. These days, everybody's pulling from the Further Down the Spiral playbook: Bloc Party have released not one, but two remixed versions of individual albums, LCD Soundsystem recently gave us 45:33 Remixes, and Mariah Carey is already said to be working on a remixed version of her latest, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel.

When you compile even the best remixes from one album, rather than an entire career, there's going to be more bloat. It's just inevitable. And bloat of any kind is anathema to a group like Phoenix, whose suave electro-rock is nothing if not streamlined. "I think it was Lord Byron who said at some point that there were too many books for a human being to read," lead singer Thomas Mars told a recent interviewer from Webcuts Music. "You know it's the same now: There are too many remixes! There's no time to hear them, technically in a lifetime."

You could almost say the same thing about new Phoenix remixes alone. The French four-piece's triumphant 2009 album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, has been helping drive HypeMachine traffic for months, in part because the group shared the instrumental "stems" for first single "1901" at the same time they posted the original mp3. (If that wasn't enough, the band has also streamed demos and acoustic tracks from the album.) So Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (Remix Collection) was probably inevitable. Its source material is impeccable. Its remixers are Internet-nerd A-list. And a few of the remixes are actually pretty fucking good.

As an album, the digital-only Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (Remix Collection) is also kind of frustratingly odd. I doubt even Sofia Coppola will feel the need to listen to the whole thing, straight through, very many times. As for DJs, you can probably guess from the fact that only one of the compilation's 15 tracks exceeds six minutes this isn't one of those remix CDs that makes all the originals more dance-friendly. Nor is it a remixed version of the entire album: The whole thing is built from only eight underlying songs. If you're listening at home, and you want to hear "Fences" five times in a little more than an hour, plus "1901" and "Lisztomania" a couple of times apiece, and you're tired of simply putting Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix's first three tracks on repeat, then this is the album for you.

It's hard to stay annoyed with any of that, though, when so many of the individual tracks are so strong. Phoenix albums are typically (gloriously) front-loaded; this one feels back-loaded by comparison. Subtitled "Deakin's Jam", Animal Collective's take on the Tangerine Dream-y space-out of "Love Like a Sunset" deserves to be mentioned alongside both group's best efforts this year, drone-drowned and ecstatic. While the original "Rome" burns with white-hot cigarette-ash guitar distortion, a remix credited to "Neighbours with Devendra Banhart" fiddles (quite nicely) with piano and acoustic guitar, creating a gentle, atmospheric space for the loveless narrator to get his shit sorted out.

Other high-profile remixers' work here is consistently above-average, if rarely on par with the originals a lot of us pretty much know by heart by now. Passion Pit's "1901 Bo Flex'd" tweak goes deeper into John Hughes movies, with hugely romantic synths, but its clickety-clackety arrangement is disappointingly cluttered. Yacht does the farty bass thing with "Armistice", to so-so effect (when Mars sings, "Look what you wasted," it sounds almost accusatory). San Diego ex-Muslims the Soft Pack steal the show with a scuzzy, garage-rocking quasi-cover of "Fences".

The rest of the compilation definitely won't blow your hair back like the first time you heard Phoenix, but it probably won't make you get up and adjust the iPod boombox, either. UK indie-dance trio Friendly Fires' piano-house remix of "Fences" could use a little personality, but it's a fine idea skillfully executed; same with Brooklyn dream-pop band Chairlift's haze-ification of the same track. Turzi's "Love Like a Sunset" has nothing on Deakin's jam, but the French five-piece do a decent job of raising the original's Krautrock-psych quotient. England's Alex Metric and France's Boombass offer up some pounding potential Ed Banger or Kitsuné material. Speaking of: Where's that dreamy "Lisztomania" remix by L.A. duo Classixx that appeared on Kitsuné Maison 7? Or that Don Diablo "99 Fences" Jay-Z mash-up? (OK, copyright law, got it.)

Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix has made Phoenix, deservingly, one of the year's biggest indie-rock success stories. They've appeared on "Saturday Night Live", sold more than 135,000 copies, and landed a spot in a widely viewed Cadillac commercial. If the album has anything to do with the battle between Phoenix's inner Mozart and the group's inner Franz Liszt, though-- referring to the 19th-century musician who gives "Lisztomania" its name-- then Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (Remix Collection) has more in common with whichever one suffered a momentary lapse of editing skills. Your move, Mariah.

Kings of Convenience - Declaration of Dependence

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
October 19, 2009
Link
7.9

 

Kings of Convenience made headlines last month. No, wait, Leslie Feist did. It's been an eventful five years since the Norwegian duo's previous album, Riot on an Empty Street, featured the Canadian songstress on two tracks. After Erlend Øye and Eirik Glambæk Bøe's recent New York show, that a surprise Feist guest appearance got top media billing underscores just how eventful. Sorry, guys, I guess royalty isn't what it used to be.

No longer does Quiet Is the New Loud, the title of Øye and Bøe's 2001 Astralwerks debut, sound like such an appealing mantra. The hushed politeness that Kings of Convenience and, earlier, Belle and Sebastian reintroduced to indie listeners around the turn of the millennium must've lost its fresh feeling somewhere between Natalie Portman big-upping the Shins and the Decemberists doing a prog-folk rock opera. Then there's the more than 400,000 copies Riot sold in Europe, a number that looks virtually impossible for a group of such modest stature today. Throw in Øye's two mostly solid albums fronting dance-poppers the Whitest Boy Alive, and, well, what do Kings of Convenience have left to say?

"Quieter is the new quiet," apparently. Despite calls for the whisper-folk pair to make Øye's house and techno background more apparent, Declaration of Dependence doubles down on hushed Scandinavian understatement. No drums, unless you count slapped fretboards or squeaking fingers: just two voices, two acoustic guitars, and occasional cello, viola, or one-finger piano plinks. Along with sharper songwriting focus, this go-for-broke softness makes for the most durable, rewarding Kings of Convenience album yet-- a Pink Moon to past efforts' Five Leaves Left. Barring a last-minute José González surprise, it's also probably the best new full-length of its style you'll hear this year.

The songs on Declaration of Dependence reveal everyday tensions with a cool, undemonstrative reserve. You can hear the spare but descriptive verses as about romance, the band itself, or global politics, depending on your preference. Where Riot opener "Homesick" offered the suggestive image of "two soft voices blended in perfection," the new album's first track, tender "24-25", declares, "What we build is bigger than the sum of two." Slowly shuffling "Renegade" uses bold, vivid brush strokes to carry out that old maxim, "If you love something, let it go"; "Why are you whispering when the bombs are falling?" a solitary voice asks, between slightly dissonant strums. "Riot on an Empty Street", a holdover since years before the album of that same name, finds a traveling singer lost for words, but not for delicate melodies.

Rather than become more electronic, Kings of Convenience here choose simply to apply dance music's minimalism and sense of texture more fully to their chosen acoustic-pop form. Bittersweet single "Mrs. Cold" has been compared to Jack Johnson, probably because both use percussive hand slapping, but the popular surfer-turned-singer has never recorded anything so perfectly poised, so deceptively depressing; a ringing lead guitar line repeats like a looped sample. "Boat Behind", a single in other countries, floats a melancholy violin line over a tangled tale about reuniting with someone but never belonging to them, sounding almost like another lost Arthur Russell demo. "Rule My World", which follows Sweden's González into forceful denunciations of theocratic zealotry, has the bouncy upswing of French house. Øye's smoky falsetto fills in for the absent Feist on songs like "Freedom and Its Owner". "Power of Not Knowing" neatly echoes Simon & Garfunkel's "April Come She Will".

Both halves of the duo now live back home in Bergen, Norway, after a multi-year absence by the Whitest Boy Alive singer. Whether inspired by lovers, each other, or the warmongers of the world, Kings of Convenience's latest is ultimately just what its title says: a bold and beautiful assertion that we are better off together than apart. Or, as "My Ship Isn't Pretty" wonderfully puts it: a series of "quiet protests against loneliness." If the album cover had you expecting 2009's umpteenth nu-Balearic cruise, be glad we got this eloquent message in a bottle instead.

The Crayon Fields - All the Pleasures of the World

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
October 14, 2009
Link
7.8

 

New indie development: Tweemo wimps are getting some now. Joseph Gordon-Levitt has morphed from dorky supporting character who can't even throw his own punches in 10 Things I Hate About You to... dorky leading man fooling around with Zooey Deschanel in this summer's (kinda great!) (500) Days of Summer. Jim and Pam from "The Office" not only got hitched, they're already expecting. It's gotten to the point where I feel bad about my teenage cousin's romantic prospects because he started looking less like Michael Cera.

The Crayon Fields negotiate the transition from virginal boys to men with rickety chamber-pop aplomb on sophomore LP All the Pleasures of the World. On predecessor Animal Bells, which introduced the Melbourne four-piece's winningly wispy take on Zombies-Byrds harmonies and Elephant 6 ramshackleness, frontman Geoff O'Connor sang, "I want to be famous, gee." All the Pleasures of the World ditches the childishness of the debut and the obliqueness of the side project without losing sweetness or nuance. Adding strings and a new-relationship glow, it's the kind of album that could make the Crayon Fields downright lovable.

Reference points: the Crayon Fields covered heartbreaking New England folkie Kath Bloom as a recent B-side, and current fellow Down Under-er Jens Lekman is DJing an upcoming album release party. So on opening track "Mirror Ball", released on 7" last year, the object of our narrator's affection reduces him to "a virgin in a dancehall"; where the Velvet Underground and Nico promised "I'll Be Your Mirror", O'Connor reflects, "You are still my mirror ball," Pavement scrawl intersecting bashful 1960s teen-pop sway. Second single "Voice of Paradise" starts off closer to vintage Syd Barrett spaciness, then recycles one of the previous album's lyrics, like a bedsit Kurt Vile-- all to let O'Connor's beloved know how "lucky" he feels. You won't gag, I promise.

But you may get that feeling in your stomach like you just drove over a dip in the highway. All the Pleasures of the World is, in some ways, a celebration of hovering between two worlds. On the title track (and upcoming third single), O'Connor is too young to love, so he just loves everything. On slightly too long string-backed love epic "Lucky Again", which captures the embarrassing hyperbole of freshly requited adoration more accurately than I've seen outside indie romcoms, he's too young to lie about his age, but old enough to forget. And, on "Celebrate": "Surely we're old enough to have plenty to celebrate/ And young enough to have more if we wait/ But let's not today." Not a girl, not yet a woman; the innocence of classic pop, the messiness of the recent indie past.

In a song title: "Timeless", almost. This is the one the kids who believe said romcoms will be putting on mixes for new girlfriends and boyfriends. Bells and bird chirps make it easy to picture the dawn-lit scene as O'Connor murmurs, "When I wake up next to you, I forget I have a day to be dressed for." The Crayon Fields could've left this one a Nick Drake strings-and-acoustic ballad. But they don't. All the Pleasures of the World is an album for people who listen to the Clientele while reading the Sunday newspaper and making tea, and it's an album for people who listen to Camera Obscura while sighing wistfully, and most of all it's an album for people overjoyed with finding themselves, suddenly, rapturously, between hello and goodbye. "There are so many things I should've felt long ago that I'm just feeling now," O'Connor confesses on "Graceless". Hey, you know who used to sleep under a Peter Pan poster? Bruce Springsteen, that's who. Look it up.

Neon Indian - Psychic Chasms

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
October 13, 2009
Link
8.6

 











"Borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered 80s." Those words, when James Murphy over-enunciated them on what's still arguably the decade's best piece of music-as-music-criticism-- LCD Soundsystem's 2002 debut single, "Losing My Edge"-- had the decisive feel of a gauntlet being thrown down. One 1980s baby struck back with a Nintendo Power Glove. Just a guess: Probably not what Murphy had in mind.

Of course, cheaply copied reminiscences of a blurrily imagined decade are basically their own genre now, cloudy and proud. The sound has many names, but none of them seem to fit just right. Dream-beat, chillwave, glo-fi, hypnagogic pop, even hipster-gogic pop-- all are imperfect phrases for describing a psychedelic music that's generally one or all of the following: synth-based, homemade-sounding, 80s-referencing, cassette-oriented, sun-baked, laid-back, warped, hazy, emotionally distant, slightly out of focus. Washed Out. Memory Tapes. Ducktails. Ah-woo-ooh.

For Alan Palomo, reflecting on the music of the Reagan era has a personal component. The Texas-reared Mexico native's dad, Jorge, was a bit of a Spanish-language pop star in the late 1970s and early 80s. The analog electronics of that bygone period echo throughout the younger Palomo's increasingly promising previous recordings, whether with former band Ghosthustler (he wore the Power Glove in the video for their "Parking Lot Nights") or, more recently, on VEGA's Well Known Pleasures EP. Finally, working with Brooklyn-based visual collaborator Alicia Scardetta as Neon Indian, Palomo has brought all the best of 2009's summer sounds-- bedroom production, borrowed nostalgia, unresolved sadness, deceptively agile popcraft-- together on a single album.

Whatever they owe to the past, the memories on Psychic Chasms are Palomo's and ours. Soft vocals recalling You Made Me Realise-era Kevin Shields. Italo-disco synth arpeggios. Hall & Oates drum sounds. Divebombing video-game effects. Brittle guitar distortion. Manipulated tapes that bend the notes the way Shields' "glide guitar" did, the way bluesmen's fret fingers did. Field recordings of birds. Oohing and ahhing backing vocals. And samples, on at least two songs, of the elder Palomo, whose electro-rock approach was quite similar. All combine on eight or nine unforgettable songs and a few tantalizingly brief interludes, indelibly capturing the glamor and bleary malaise of being young and horny as an empire devours itself.

Like a low-rent Daft Punk, Palomo takes what 1990s rock fans probably would've considered cheesy-- LinnDrum and Oberheim rhythms, Chromeo-plated electro-funk Korg riffs, processed party-vocal samples-- and not only makes them part of a distinct artistic vision, but also keeps them fun. Quick opener "(AM)" is rife with detail, as an indecipherable tenor floats over a mock-dramatic drum fill and 8-bit star cruisers do battle against twinkling fairy dust. Another sub-minute interstitial track, "(If I Knew, I'd Tell You)", keeps its secrets to itself, letting multiple melodic synth lines hint at a gulf-sized pool of melancholy over a tape-altered rhythm track. "Laughing Gas", at slightly more than a lyric-less minute and a half, is the one that ruins my attempted distinction between songs and interludes, with bongo drums, robot vocal samples, and euphoric giggles straight out of those Air France kids' dreams. The cumulative result is a meltdown-deadened but deliriously inventive perspective on pop.

"I really hope the medium by which someone writes a song isn't the only thing the song has going for it," Palomo told our own Ryan Dombal in a recent interview. With Psychic Chasms, Palomo doesn't need to worry. "Deadbeat Summer" and "Should Have Taken Acid With You" are two views of the same non-endless season-- one mind-expandingly lazy and the other too lazy for mind expansion, both undeniably catchy, both earning doctorates in The Graduate school of coming-of-age ennui. The Italo-alluding title track, the New Order-throbbing "Local Joke", and the visceral funk alarums of "Ephemeral Artery" are beautiful bummers, tracks with lyrics the faithful are sure to puzzle out the way kids used to with the first couple of Weezer CDs. "Living this way held by a single strand/ But you wouldn't understand," worries "6669 (I Don't Know If You Know)", which comes back, refracted again, as 56-second finale "7000 (Reprise)". If you want to destroy his sweater, hold this thread as he walks away.

Overall, Psychic Chasms is something like a dream collaboration between the Tough Alliance and Atlas Sound, the latter of whose Internet-only Weekend EP shares a delinquent theme with one of Psychic Chasms' best songs. After barely a half hour, the whole thing is over, but there's enough going on in the layered electronics and enigmatic longing to make this one of the year's most replayable albums. Consider "Terminally Chill", which has more vocal and instrumental hooks than the average Top 40 song, but also the immediately recognizable stamp of an impressive young talent. Palomo's gear was stolen last month while on tour with VEGA, but a recent FADER video suggests he could launch a decently credible alternate "career" as an acoustic troubadour doing Mexican traditional songs. For various mundane personal reasons, this cassette-focused album is one of the actual CDs I've listened to most since I actually listened to CDs. A new generation's borrowed nostalgia? High time.

Neon Indian - Psychic Chasms

Video / Album Review
ABC News
Link
Oct. 12, 2009

Múm - Sing Along to Songs You Don't Know

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
September 29, 2009
Link
3.9

 

Múm's fifth album starts off kind of like Tim Hardin's 1966 hit for Bobby Darin, "If I Were a Carpenter". Except instead of imagining themselves as Joe the Woodworker (and you as a lady), the Icelandic collective are singing about-- well, the title's "If I Were a Fish". It'd almost definitely be making a geyser out of a lyrical plankton-fart to observe that the world's most famous carpenter also happened to be the world's most famous recruiter of fishermen. Shit, just a few lines later, Múm are a bumblebee, drowning in "your soggy eyeballs," which, hmm.

But uhh, few bands outside 1980s bedsit-indie circles would be better suited to rep the Beatitudes' "blessed are the meek" rap than Múm. That's as true as ever on Sing Along to Songs You Don't Know. Already one transitional LP (2007's Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy) removed from singer Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir's departure to go make backwards recordings with Avey Tare, Múm remain pretty obsessed with the kind of childlike innocence that drove people nuts about Valtýsdóttir's impish persona, let alone her voice. Artists like Japan's Lullatone and Tenniscoats have used similar naïve-folk ramshackle wispiness toward their own ambitious, endearing ends, tickling and prodding cuteness toward its avant-garde extremes.

Múm's latest can be childish, but it isn't cute, and despite some (relatively) inventive arrangements, this time it's a bit of a slog on a purely musical level. Sing Along to Songs You Don't Know still melds electronic and organic elements, as the band have been doing since their early-millennium breakthrough, cramming in male-female harmonies, lo-fi percussion, rhapsodically blue strings, prepared piano, hammered dulcimer, marimbas, ukuleles, and even a parakeet alongside guitars and synths. Billed as a response to the recent unrest in Múm's native country, it's an entirely peaceful, largely melancholy, and clearly well-meaning record. Unfortunately, it's also filled with bewildering decision after bewildering decision.

With arguably one exception, the most enjoyable aspect of the album is Múm's ongoing apprecation for sonic detail, though that can get tiresome fast when such details are attached to cringeworthy songs. You might hear a music box being wound up, or an acoustic guitar string buzzing imperfectly, or what seems to be a didgeridoo. "The Smell of Today Is Sweet Like the Breastmilk in the Wind" uses not only chintzy electronics and vaguely disco-punk percussion, but also sloping strings, guitars with the trebly chime of the Afropop-influenced stuff that has been popular lately, and, oh yeah, Belle and Sebastian-style harmonies that become a liability when most of those instruments drop out-- no Stuart Murdoch literary mien here. Busy hi-hats and rough-hewn handclaps give "Kay-Ray-Kú-Kú-Kó-Kex" a retro-soul tone... if the Residents were a retro-soul band.

The previously mentioned exception is "Húllabbalabbalúú". It's the poppiest song on the album-- not because it mimics existing styles or flashes fashionable r&b influences, but because it brings together plenty of Múm's eccentricities in the service of a triumphant feeling. It helps that the singers get to chant syllables that sound like nonsense to American ears, adding, perhaps tellingly: "In these words we drown." In any event, the song has some of the album's most successful vocals, horn fanfares, and a structure that ebbs and flows.

Two minor problems: The songs are generally slow, samey, and sleep-inducing, and the lyrics, any language differences notwithstanding, are hard to take seriously, even for a guy who raved about I'm From Barcelona. "If you must cry with grief/ Blow your nose right on my sleeve," elfin voices urge on "Blow Your Nose", backed only by slow-motion strings and marimba. "A River Don't Stop to Breathe" has lovely string and percussion parts, with a poignantly rising refrain, but it's a dragging, preachy song overall, less than the sum. Tranquil finale "Ladies of the New Century" spreads out its plodding piano plinks as far as they can go, but offers little to retain all but the most devoted fans' attention between them.

It's probably another one of those coincidences, but Pitchfork's Mark Richardson once heard echoes of "Heart and Soul" in a Múm song, adding, "I'm not suggesting they stole the melody-- I doubt the band has even heard it." In addition to the "If I Were a Carpenter" similarity, there's a line on quasi-title track "Sing Along" that recalls "You Are My Sunshine", in melody and lyrics: "You'll never know," Múm sing, and I want them to add, "...dear", you know? It's enough to make me half-wonder if the album has more of these little references, like a band singing along to songs they don't know-- kind of like the Dirty Projectors' Rise Above, only with half-remembered tunes from childhood instead of a Black Flag album. "You are so beautiful to us," Múm sing more than once, coming on a little strong. "We want to keep you as our pets." Ha?

Washed Out - Life of Leisure EP

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
September 16, 2009
Link
8.0

 

Did our parents give us too much self-esteem? Not that long ago, message boarders could diss and dismiss boring new bands (insert your least favorite post-punk revivalists here) for sounding like "a copy of a copy of a copy." Fast forward just a few years, and that's exactly what some of the most exciting new bands sound like.

Pastiche and intertextuality are as ancient as postmodernism-- not to mention disco, hip-hop, and the remix-- but childhood memories, in particular, are present now like never before. Today's blockbuster movies are based on yesterday's beloved toys; today's wars and political battles are sequels, too. It isn't surprising that music would reflect the zeitgeist. What's striking is how an international cohort of rising artists has successfully translated this culture of watery VCR transfers and Fisher-Price cassette rips into 1980s-inspired psychedelic music.

Names like Ducktails, Reading Rainbow, VEGA, Pocahaunted, and, especially, Memory Tapes tell you a lot about where these disparate reminiscers are coming from. Arguably, more than genre tags like "glo-fi" or The Wire critic David Keenan's "hypnagogic pop," but those labels can be useful, too. Washed Out, the solo project of Georgia (via South Carolina) multi-instrumentalist Ernest Greene, fits in almost too well with the balmy lo-fi synth atmospherics of peers like Neon Indian, Toro Y Moi, Small Black, the higher-fi jj, or the darker, heavier SALEM, as well as the more guitar-based Real Estate, Best Coast, and Pearl Harbour. Washed Out's debut Life of Leisure EP, out digitally now and on 12" early next month (another release, the cassette-only High Times, arrived September 15), isn't at the top of its class, but Greene so far is one of this fledgling aesthetic's most gifted students.

Focusing on romantic nostalgia and homespun textures, Life of Leisure does with 80s soft rock and synth-pop what Glass Candy and Chromatics did with Italo disco a couple of years ago, only Washed Out evokes summer afternoons indoors rather than the Italians Do It Better crew's early-a.m. urban stalking. Out-of-sync PBS-theme synths and videogame lasers meet funky horn breaks on opener "Get Up", as Greene's slurry vocals suggest deep pain. A sampled sax sighs mournfully behind a chopped-up voice, Cut Copy-pasteable beats, and some more indistinct singing on "Lately". Life of Leisure's six tracks, whether poppier and more approachable like "New Theory", or moody and alarming like "Hold Out", tend to cut off suddenly, which gives the EP an appealing, unfinished quality. Like hearing a work in progress: Greene has only been making music under his current moniker for a couple of months, so don't come flaming me if his live shows suck or his Dave Fridmann-produced sophomore album flops in 2013.

More than some contemporaries, though, Washed Out submerges a sense of intense feeling within its 80s-fantasy electronic ether. Greene's "copy of a copy" distance, then, comes across as a form of emotional repression. The yearning-in-utero effect is strongest on woozy centerpiece "Feel It All Around". With blurry singing, cheap-sounding synths, and a humid, syrupy flow, the track suggests an 80s synth pop hit that won't come straight out and cop to itself-- or a young man in love, too tongue-tied (or too stoned?) to admit it. "You feel it all around yourself," Greene echoes. As for what "it" is, the song never says.

If this review itself reads like a "memory of a memory" (to sample another phrase from Keenan), blame "Feel It All Around". Days after the filing of a final draft packed with trenchant insights drawn from the similarities between the track's choral drone and 10cc's 1975 hit "I'm Not in Love", it came to light that Washed Out's signature tune is actually based around a loop from Gary Low's 1983 single "I Want You". The words you're reading changed; the rating didn't. "You're soooooo... fine," it sounds like Greene's finally able to bring himself to say on finale "You'll See It", one of the EP's loveliest and most tuneful tracks; "Don't you fight it." OK, I have to go fast-forward through NutraSweet and Sylvania commercials to watch the TV movie of Alice in Wonderland with Ringo Starr as the Mock Turtle now.

Scarlett Johansson / Pete Yorn - Break Up

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
September 11, 2009
Link
4.7

Scarlett Johansson, the musician, has a way of getting herself into impossible situations. Like, I dunno, making her official recording debut with a version of jazz standard "Summertime". Joining a reunited Jesus and Mary Chain onstage at Coachella. Taking on the Tom Waits songbook. Covering Jeff Buckley's "Last Goodbye" for a romantic comedy based on a self-help book. Or owning the lips that inspired Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl". Um, I guess that last one isn't really Johansson's fault.

Add to the list: Putting out an album inspired by the 1960s duets of Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot. Especially when the unkempt male in question is Pete Yorn, who had an unfairly panned sleeper of a debut album back in the David Gray era, then followed it with the kind of blandly forgettable slump that made a lot of people wonder why they ever liked either of those guys in the first place. On last year's Anywhere I Lay My Head, Waits' songs and producer David Sitek's woozy 4AD-style majesty would've made for an intriguing listen even if Johansson had been awful (she totes wasn't). Break Up, by contrast, resembles a Yorn album: nine tracks of tastefully beige, electronics-brushed roots-rock. Suddenly, Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward's collaboration as She & Him sounds like The Velvet Underground & Nico.

In a way, it's a shame Yorn ever started making comparisons to classic "guy-girl" duos at all. If you take Break Up for what it is-- a low-key project recorded with little preparation in a couple of afternoons three years ago-- then the set has its charms. First single "Relator", for one, with its buzzing instrumental hook and breezy acoustic shuffle, is engagingly playful Rushmore fodder, only a White Stripes credit away from a spot on way too many year-end lists. When Yorn goes uptempo again, with the weeping guitar fills and crisp drum machines of "Blackie's Dead", he comes up with more of the blankly catchy hooks that propelled him to stardom. The song even ends with a mildly satisfying twist: "Darlin', you're forgiven/ I don't like what's goin' on."

That's right: In case you couldn't tell from the name, Break Up is about two characters who gradually find themselves in an impossible situation of their own. This conceit means just that much more extra-musical baggage for the skeptics out there to overlook. But as you might expect, it happens to suit Johansson. When she's able to sing closer to her natural, deeper range, as on a vaguely futuristic cover of late Big Star member Chris Bell's 1978 single "I Am the Cosmos", the husky creak in her voice would demand attention even if you didn't know her from Kirsten Dunst. But the same song is also one of the main instances where Quincy Jones grandson Sunny Levine's generally background-friendly production starts to get in the way, all vwerping bass and annoying tick-tocks. On predictable country-rocker "I Don't Know What to Do", complete with honky-tonk piano, how much fun Johansson is having beams right through lyrics clouded with confusion and doubt.

It's nobody's fault that She & Him's fine Volume One came out first, but the girl-next-door quality, like the usually higher vocal register, suits the glamorous Johansson less than it would the more approachable Deschanel. And that's when Johansson isn't buried in the mix: On banjo-rock plodder "Wear and Tear", she gets in barely a few backing words, while on bossa nova-tinged "Shampoo", Levine's stereo-panned electronic sounds-- twinkling in one channel, crunching in the other-- communicate the couple's disconnect better than anything in their dull dialogue (Johansson: "Run away"; Yorn: "I'd go anywhere with you"). Even on "Relator", Johansson's voice is crammed into the same kind of telephone-style filter that Yorn used to more memorable effect on 2001 single "Life on a Chain".

Yorn's story really isn't as different from Johansson's as you might think. His first big break came through the movies, too, when "Strange Condition" (later re-recorded with R.E.M.'s Peter Buck) landed on the soundtrack to 2000 Farrelly Brothers film Me, Myself & Irene. Nor is Break Up Yorn's first collaboration with a female singer. He previously worked with the Dixie Chicks' Natalie Maines on "The Man", an otherwise pretty typical Yorn midtempo strummer from his rock-leaning 2006 album, Nightcrawler. More recently, Yorn-- like Johansson-- has turned to veterans from the world of indie rock, working with Saddle Creek producer Mike Mogis on this year's cleverly titled Back and Fourth.

Still, "Relator" aside, there's little about this duo's chemistry that lives up to Matt and Kim, let alone Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra. "The memory fades away," Yorn sings in that faded Ryan Adams whisper on Break Up's sorrowful finale, "Someday". Their album is better than the knee-jerk beauty haters will tell you, but it rarely has the tunes or emotional impact to make it one of those rare impossible situations you'll actually want to remember. Breaking up shouldn't be this hard to do.

Taken by Trees - East of Eden

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
September 4, 2009
Link
8.1

 

Feels so unnatural-- Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, too. The late qawwali legend has earned the admiration of singers as different as Jeff Buckley, Eddie Vedder, and Devendra Banhart. On 1989's The Last Temptation of Christ soundtrack, he also worked with Peter Gabriel, who ended up releasing six of Khan's albums on his own Real World label. With so much indie culture these past few years stuck in the 1980s, Gabe fave raves Vampire Weekend are simply the most collegiate of recent bands returning to Toto's "Africa" for inspiration. Khan's native Pakistan has been comparatively overlooked.

Victoria Bergsman's recorded output to date is almost quintessentially Swedish. With the Concretes, she introduced Diana Ross shimmy to Mazzy Star haze, staying tuneful enough to soundtrack TV commercials. Lending her shy detachment to Peter Bjorn and John's world-conquering "Young Folks", she participated in a moment likely to define Swedish pop for many casual listeners the way Ace of Base or ABBA used to serve as shorthand for the peace-loving nation's catchiest export. Bergsman's debut album as Taken by Trees, 2007's Open Field, uses the full expanse of PB&J-er Björn Yttling's production (plus a songwriting credit from Camera Obscura's Tracyanne Campbell) to evoke a gorgeously austere northern landscape, the kind of place where you appreciate the sun all the more because it shines so sparingly.

So it's tempting to be skeptical of Bergsman's trip to Pakistan to record a follow-up-- all the more so given an accompanying National Geographic mini-documentary's whiff of cultural condescension. Thankfully, East of Eden suits Taken by Trees the way a shift from folk-pop to terrifying avant-classical suited oft-mentioned German antecedent Nico. Bergsman's plaintive purr can't match Khan's multi-octave ululations, and unlike the late Buckley, she doesn't try. Instead, she and accompanist Andreas Söderström-- working with local musicians who've played alongside the maestro-- embrace the ecstatic peacefulness of this Sufi musical tradition's rhythms and instrumentation. Production from Studio's Dan Lissvik gives the nine-song, half-hour set an ascetic grace, sort of like secular devotional music. How very Scandinavian.

In truth, Taken by Trees' debut already had a similar religious quality, albeit owing more to the introspective folk of Nick Drake; excellent remixes by the Tough Alliance and Air France showed how much those songs could gain by leaving Europe. On East of Eden, sinuous woodwind and rippling hand percussion help give plainspoken love songs like "Day by Day" or "Watch the Waves" an eternal resonance, which Bergsman's understated poise only deepens. Söderström's dusty classical guitar should please Studio devotees on haunting opener "To Lose Someone", while from out of the swaying call and response of "Greyest Love of All" rises a perfect prayer for our time of endless Web 2.0 connectivity and ever-shortening attention spans: "I hope you'll find some peace of mind."

Noah Lennox, aka Animal Collective's Panda Bear, is no stranger to prayerfulness, field recordings, or non-rock influences; that he and Bergsman would develop a mutual affinity is only fitting. After the fashion of Studio, TTA, Air France, and some of Gothenburg, Sweden's other musicians, who like to retitle and reimagine the songs they interpret, Taken by Trees transforms Merriweather Post Pavilion highlight "My Girls" into intimate, harmonium-humming "My Boys". It's a little paradoxical, recording an ode to simple domesticity in a region where religious fundamentalism led men to consider the unmarried Bergsman "everyone's property," but as with any great hymn, this spirited meditation on indie-style puritanism should have the power to move even non-believers. Lennox, in turn, adds his incantatory vocals to the nylon-stringed regret of "Anna", where having "way too much tonight" can mean alcohol, fighting, or both.

If you go straight long enough, somebody once said, you'll end up where you were. East of Eden, in that sense, isn't so far from Studio's West Coast: a masterful, hypnotic album that draws on a world of influences but is ultimately limited by none. So the most distracting misstep is "Wapas Karna", essentially a field recording fronted by a qawwali singer rather than Bergsman herself, while two other less immediate tracks are compelling mostly for their impulse toward cultural merger: the sparsely adorned, Swedish-language melancholy of "Tidens Gång", which melts into ambient chirps in under two minutes, or the closing drone of "Bekännelse", apparently a setting of a poem by (German) writer Herman Hesse that reflects some of Bergsman's liberal guilt. "If you know what you want to create and are determined, you can do it wherever you are," Bergsman recently told London's The Independent. "I'd rather live in sunny California." This must be the place.

The Temper Trap - Conditions

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
August 24, 2009
Link
4.6

 

The Temper Trap didn't come out of nowhere. But even in an age of instant global communication, Australia is still pretty far away from most of the rest of us. So when this Melbourne rock foursome with stadium-sized ambitions first landed in my inbox last October, it was a modest revelation. Curtis Vodka, Alaska's remixer extraordinaire, was pushing all the right tech-textural buttons on an epic reworking of "Sweet Disposition", a majestic anthem which, if annoyingly derivative, had "mainstream hit" written all over it. Listeners who Shazam'd the original after hearing it in ads for Sky Sports TV in the UK-- or, stateside, on the trailer and soundtrack to alt-emo romcom (500) Days of Summer-- probably know the feeling.

Hemispheric differences may have given the Temper Trap room to develop their radio-friendly sound without getting pushed prematurely into the spotlight (for real: sorry, Black Kids), but otherwise their debut album could've been made just about anywhere. Conditions is one for the Coldplay set-- all tightly executed grandiosity and U2 pedals, generally with pounding drums, soaring vocals about steadfastness or mortality or whatever, one rumbling bass note per arpeggiated guitar chord, and a modest drizzling of synths. Unfortunately, when you adopt the trappings of revolutionary significance without showing much interest in advancing beyond the revolutions of 20 years ago, you sound ridiculous. Southern conservatives are super concerned about racial discrimination now, you guys.

Defined by almost any measure except musical creativity or lyrical ingenuity, the Temper Trap are a lot better than I'm making them sound. Dougie Mandagi's virtuosic falsetto is the kind of instrument that should come with a money-back Jeff-Buckley-comparison guarantee. When Mandagi comes in, over ecclesiastical keyboard stabs and handclaps on opener "Love Lost", there's a brief glimmer of hope Conditions will end up being more like TV on the Radio, with all that New York group's restless adventurousness, than, um, whichever band we gave that "U.2" rating. His bandmates are no slouches, either, as instrumental finale "Drum Song" shows. If its jagged rhythmic attack owes something to Arctic Monkeys, then it's no coincidence-- producer Jim Abbiss also helmed the brainy Brits' fateful debut, along with albums for Kasabian, Adele, and others.

What the Temper Trap do devastatingly well is drape post-office-party mistake-hookup tackiness in the lofty imagery of global struggle. You can just picture Mandagi standing on a mountaintop for "Sweet Disposition", his hair blowing in Bono's wind, but remember, ladies: Some insincere sketchball with limited imagination is going to use this to try to get you to have sex with him. "Just stay there/ 'Cause I'll be coming over," Mandagi booms. "Won't stop to surrender." Well, love is a battlefield, right?

Elsewhere, the Temper Trap's pairing of sweeping portentousness with mundane douchebaggery is trickier to overlook. "I pledge myself allegiance to a battle not to sleep at home," Mandagi clarifies on another single, the reasonably catchy uptempo electro-rocker "Fader". Synth-dripping slow jam "Fools" adds, "I want it, I want it, I want it," amid rebukes to unnamed, uhh, fools. Cold War Kids-ish indie nod "Down River" pulls out all the orchestral, choral, and vaguely baptismal flourishes in Neon Bible's book to repeat, "Go, don't stop." And remember "Love Lost"? It adapts a line from "Amazing Grace" into a request to "flash your heart." Yeah, open up your shirt and-- ohhh. One more in the name of love: Latest UK single "Science of Fear" samples Robert F. Kennedy's famous remarks on the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. I take it Mandagi still hasn't found what he's looking for.

It's telling to learn where, in fact, the Temper Trap did come from. The first thing producer Abbiss apparently heard from the band was a demo of "Soldier On", Conditions' Muse-rific nadir. Mandagi tells the BBC, "His wife really liked it so apparently they had a moment together and out of obedience to his wife Jim decided to record us." The six-minute track moves from Grace-ful guitar and falsetto into gnashing prog-rock bombast, until Mandagi is seriously howling at "death." I'm gonna assume he means the little one-- what the French call "la petite mort."

Smith Westerns - Smith Westerns

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
August 7, 2009
Link
7.7

 

Girls know what boys want. But a little subterfuge can still go a long way. On his hit single, 22-year-old singer/rapper Drake insists, "This one's for you," then cops some "gray sweatpants, no makeup" sweet talk en route to envisioning himself "all up in your slot." He recently admitted to MTV that "it's not the most heartfelt song." Where Drake talks dirty and sounds Auto-Tune clean, the Smith Westerns take the opposite approach. Like the Beatles, though, these four Chicago teenagers don't want to hold your hand-- they want to do more.

Don't let the Fab Four mention throw you: From this young Windy City group, retro-rock doesn't feel like a history class. Rummaging through 1970s glam, Phil Spector teen-pop, and Nuggets garage-punk with the youthful abandon of kids finding new toys in the attic, the Smith Westerns' self-titled debut exudes an earnestness almost as pure as its recording levels are deafening. Their simple, sweet choruses about boys and girls in love could spike the punch at a 1970s TV show (OK, "Freaks & Geeks"/"That '70s Show") school dance. Parent chaperones would be none the wiser.

When singing guitarist Cullen Omori, his bassist brother Cameron, second guitarist Max Kakacek, and a drummer known to Google only as Hal have the tunes to make themselves heard over their vintage aesthetic, The Smith Westerns' teenage kicks are hard to beat. Take string-swept glam ballad "Be My Girl", which softly punctuates one of the year's most wrenchingly innocent hooks with somewhat pervier pick-up lines. There's less lyrical subtext, but no less raunchy production, on the glam-rock boogie of "Girl in Love", a come-on cursorily addressing the fleetingness of youth. It's only fitting that in a year-old YouTube video featuring scratchy sockhop swooner "Tonight", the Smith Westerns both look and sound like the Black Lips' good-bad not-evil twins.

These guys are sort of literally true to their school-- garage-rocker Miss Alex White is a fellow Northside College Prep magnet-school alum-- and their time on the road with the likes of Jay Reatard and Nobunny is evident on fine 60s-style frat-rocker "Gimme Some Time". With fuzzed-out xylophone, frenetic opener "Dreams" suggests the group's most recent tour with Girls and Los Campesinos! might serve them better for a follow-up. "Diamond Boys" almost earns its piano on the strength of its adolescent grandiosity, but "We Stay Out" lets lo-fi become the end rather than the means, with a guitar line that sounds like a bee buzzing underwater.

Japandroids, another loud punkish group concerned with youth and girls, ask a cathartic question on Post-Nothing's "The Boys Are Leaving Town". DFA signees Free Energy channel Thin Lizzy's "The Boys Are Back in Town" on their recent "Dream City" single. The Smith Westerns turn to lighthearted psych-folk for their own declaration: "Boys Are Fine". Then, on blithely woo-oohing fuzz-popper "The Glam Goddess", they actually go and say it: "I wanna hold your hand." Boys will be boys.

Delorean - Ayrton Senna EP

Album Reviews
Pitchfork
July 28, 2009
Link
8.4

 

Man, that Wavves "meltdown" really bummed me out. Not because a rising lo-fi rocker acted stupidly-- who doesn't sometimes?-- but because I'd always imagined being on ecstasy in Barcelona would be a lot more fun. After all, some of the most rewarding music from the last couple of years basically promised as much. Or was Swedish imprint Sincerely Yours being insincere? How about U.S. labels True Panther and Underwater Peoples? From Oslo to Melbourne, from indie rockers to club kids, sunny electronic euphoria has been one of the late-2000s pop underground's richest musical nodes.

Just as that endless blissed-out summery vibe unites everyone from Panda Bear to Todd Terje, Barcelona electro-pop four-piece Delorean pull up at the intersection between several disparate and exciting movements. Start with their remixes: In the U.S., the bedroom pop of Glasser and disco-punk of Lemonade; in the UK, the NME-approved guitar rock of the Big Pink and Mystery Jets; and, right in Delorean's hometown, the sample-heavy tropical psych of El Guincho. They can be as airy and suave as Air France or Phoenix, but their unremitting beats are also plenty huge enough to convert fans of Cut Copy or MGMT. John Talabot, a Barcelona DJ who's released cosmic disco grooves for Munich label Permanent Vacation, lends a house remix to the group's current EP, Ayrton Senna.

The third release on Fool House, the new label from French indie-dance blog Fluo Kids, Ayrton Senna represents a similar kind of convergence. In the early 2000s, Delorean originally set out to be something like Jimmy Eat World crossed with Elliott Smith, keyboardist Unai Lazcano confided to The Pop Manifesto magazine last summer. By the time of their promising Transatlantic KK album a couple of years ago, Delorean had absorbed the synth-pop sleekness of New Order and the echoey guitar spikes of post-punk revivalists like !!! or the Rapture, with one transcendent moment: so-called "breakhop" finale "Apocalypse Ghetto Blast". On the Ayrton Senna EP, the group's burgeoning dance-pop savvy comes into bloom with three unstoppable summer bangers, the Talabot remix, and a digital-only bonus cut.

Despite their rock roots, Delorean do tracks, not songs. Singer/bassist Ekhi Lopetegi is a Ph.D. candidate with a background in philosophy, but Delorean use his Factory-ready yelp more as just another element to loop than as a vehicle for delivering lyrical content. "Seasun" is the best example of Delorean's layered approach to composition, methodically building 1990s piano-house keyboards, disembodied female vocals, Baltimore club-ready handclaps, and a ringing guitar line into the ultimate beach house (not Beach House). But "Deli", with its breakbeats and youthful enthusiasm, and "Moonson", all 90s-house liberation and anthem-rock yearning, are almost as thrilling. Talabot's "Kids & Drum" remix of "Seasun" could well hold up after even more listens than the original version, its hand-percussion samples reaching closer to the islands but its vast, clean lines stretching out toward space.

Prior to Ayrton Senna, arguably Delorean's most compelling release was its remix for oft-misunderstood electro-pop Serge Gainsbourgs the Teenagers. On last year's occasionally brilliant Reality Check, the French band's "Love No" is a hilarious, sleazy, and brutally scathing snipe at a nagging girlfriend who disapproves of the narrator's self-absorbed internet stonerdom. Delorean's bass-heavy "No Love" version-- like Studio's "Possible" rework of the Shout Out Louds' "Impossible", only more dramatic-- strips away all the negative lyrics, ditching a chorus of "I'm not in love" and instead repeating the big question: "Are you in love?" Well, that's a hell of a thing for a pop song to ask. The track promises dancefloor absolution, only to nag at the heart in a way the Teenagers' lame girlfriend never could.

Summer always ends too soon, and before long I'm sure beachy dance music will sound as cloying as rock fans considered the Beach Boys by the late 1960s. Like Wavves in Barcelona, Delorean recognize there's a dark side to their ecstatic vision, the aching truth that utopia-- literally, "no place"-- can never totally be fulfilled. As equally impressive bonus track "Big Dipper" puts it: "Babe, if you want to we could run away up into the sun/ But we would only fade from black to black." Delorean's similarities to other "sunny", "shimmering" new artists, ultimately, are far less important than their similarities to other practitioners of well-crafted and instantly gripping pop.

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.