I'm From Barcelona - Forever Today

Album Review
Pitchfork
May 2, 2011
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6.1














One of the guys in I'm From Barcelona's latest video is wearing an A Place to Bury Strangers T-shirt. To anyone familiar with either the sunny Swedish collective or the gnashing Brooklyn pedal-mongers, this juxtaposition ought to be a little strange, maybe even funny. Sure, A Place to Bury Strangers issued their bleakly pummeling debut the same summer Emanuel Lundgren and his beaming band of Swedes were charming the crowds at their first-ever Lollapalooza, which proves-- actually, it proves absolutely nothing. But just making the comparison underscores how much has changed since 2007.

I'm From Barcelona, to their credit, have tried to change, too-- no easy task for a group peaking at 29 members. On the probably inevitable sophomore slump, Who Killed Harry Houdini?, they added nuance, melancholy, and an orchestral-pop epic finale that begins with a "giant silver labrador" and ends with Lundgren achingly insisting, "In my heart, I'm still a kid." Limited to 200 vinyl-only copies, 2010 triple-LP 27 Songs From Barcelona flipped the group's communal script on its head, giving each band member a song to sing solo, resulting in a wider variety of styles.

The band's third proper album, their second for the storied Mute label, generally shines with much the same chorus-of-your-pals friendliness as the debut. If you didn't like I'm From Barcelona when they first introduced themselves, probably no use catching up with them now. For listeners who saw in the group's Broadway-sized tweeness a way to convey indie pop's intimacy on a massive sing-along scale-- to teach the world to sing "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding" in perfect social-democratic harmony-- well, there's good news and there's bad news.

Taken on its own terms, Forever Today offers plenty of upbeat, jingle-ready tunes with universal themes and a now 27-member band's worth of voices, handclaps, strings, horns, guitars, keyboards, bass, and so on; think Ra Ra Riot with some extra Swedish polish. The album grooves a bit more than before, particularly on the synth-poppy first single "Get in Line" (paradoxically, a sing-along about anti-conformity) and the "Heart of Glass"-shuffling "Skipping a Beat". And there's more insight into the music that makes these guys tick: a song that lists off different types of birds is named after maybe the greatest Bird of them all, "Charlie Parker", while "Dr. Landy" frets to a shrink about how Rubber Soul and "Be My Baby" changed the narrator's life. In a festival context, with such an unusual group (the Polyphonic Spree and Danielson are both different; so's Broken Social Scene), this stuff should still be enough to turn a few heads.

What's ultimately confounding about the album is how one-note its euphoria can be. The songs are almost interchangeable; the lyrics rarely stray beyond the easy cliché ("You gotta stay true to your heart" may be nice advice, but it's dull). Worse, I'm From Barcelona appear to be subtly shifting from artists who illuminate the problems of growing up by using childhood as a metaphor to artists who sing songs that might be best loved by, well, children. Then there's the fact that where I'm From Barcelona, the Boy Least Likely To, and others typically emphasize cuteness and sing about a protracted childhood, some of the most compelling voices on deferred adulthood in recent years have sampled hazily remembered 1980s pop and sung about a sort of protracted adolescence. But evolving trends aren't really the problem here: Younger acts like Cults, for one, definitely haven't been shy about brandishing their glockenspiels. "Do what you do, and do it all the way," sing I'm from Barcelona on Forever Today's closing title track. Again, a pretty good recommendation, but sometimes it still won't be quite enough to please everybody.

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Various Artists - Benefit for the Recovery in Japan

Album Review
Pitchfork
April 21, 2011
Link
7.7














On March 11, a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, killing at least 13,000 people and spawning an ongoing nuclear crisis. In the month-plus since that tragedy, musicians worldwide have been trying to help. Along with benefit concerts, charity auctions, and other fundraisers, the music world's Japanese relief efforts have also included a few compilation albums, including the classical-oriented Classics for Japan - Music for Healing and hit-parading Songs for Japan.

Benefit for the Recovery in Japan is a different kind of benefit compilation. Clocking in at nearly five hours, this sprawling 64-track set sees no contradiction between disaster relief and musical adventurousness. Credit Antiopic label co-heads David Daniell and James Elliott, experimental electronic musicians who picked the album's tracks with help from Regina Greene (whose Front Porch Productions books shows for many of these artists), fellow electronic experimentalist Greg Davis, and Thrill Jockey founder Bettina Richards. Their choices span ambient drone, fleet-fingered folk, and leftfield rock, with an artist lineup that should have many a music nerd drooling on their tattered back issues of The Wire.

Every cent of the $15 you spend on Benefit will go to Civic Force, a Japanese nonprofit emergency responder, so the cause is clearly worthy. At less than a quarter per track, this mp3-only album offers pretty good value for the money, too, and if you're skeptical you can stream the whole thing. As for musical enjoyment, I definitely don't recommend trying to digest it all in one sitting, and the collection sometimes lapses toward seemingly aimless minimalist exercises more likely to please formally educated musicians than typical music listeners. But if you're looking for a thoughtfully conceived survey of the avant-garde underground, please, look no further.

A somber electroacoustic instrumental from Austrian composer/producer Christian Fennesz opens the compilation, which gives you a pretty good indication of what's to follow. These are thickly textured tracks, sometimes orchestral in scale, which often achieve their emotional effects more through their incredibly detailed sonic palettes than through anything you can transcribe in a songbook. It's a lot to take in, but give it time and the best part about this release is how it allows you to stumble into so many different, miniature sonic worlds, one after the other: the hypnotically layered vocals and bass-heavy pulse of School of Seven Bells, the barely there piano and whispery singing of Grouper, the heavily fucked-with 1980s soft-rock vibes of Matthewdavid, the squalling lushness of Lawrence English, the icier hum of Ben Frost, the articulately jagged punk of the Ex, and the shaggy improv of Jackie-O Motherfucker. Benefit is an appropriately cosmopolitan affair.

The names perhaps most familiar from the indie rock festival circuit are not necessarily the ones responsible for Benefit's most rewarding tracks. An arty contribution from TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe, working with Stars Like Fleas' Ryan Sawyer under the cheeky moniker Stabbing Eastwood, is probably best left for completists (and fans of hilarious growling). Deerhunter/Atlas Sound man Bradford Cox, collaborating with White Rainbow's Adam Forkner as Bradley & Geofrey, gives Das Racist fodder for some future update of their reggae-voice satire "Fake Patois"; you get the sense Cox has a hard drive full of casual little experiments like this he could post on his blog. Then again, there's an appealing frailty to the Arthur Russell-ish chamber-pop of "In the Hollows", by Dirty Projectors bassist Nat Baldwin. Akron/Family's "Deep Kazoo" does, indeed, get in deep with kazoo; Bear in Heaven's tenderly plainspoken "The Days We Have" is a glistening electro-folk pleasure that could warrant a Cornelius remix.

But Benefit isn't really about cherry-picking hits. There are other compilations for that. It's best if you let this one wash over you, accepting the breadth and depth of its varied sonic experiences with, yeah, an open mind and open ears. Plenty of listeners could get their first exposure to luminaries like Rhys Chatham (who closes the set's first half on an ambient, meditative note), Sam Prekop (though the Sea and Cake frontman's blips and bloops here are certainly no Oui), or the Boredoms (leader Shinji Masuko's airy, ethereal "Botsuon"). Or they could be introduced to much-loved younger talents, from the densely intricate guitar playing of James Blackshaw to the hauntingly immersive sound fields of Tim Hecker to the spaced-out electronic innovations of Oneohtrix Point Never. Look, I'm dubious about benefit compilations in general, and the wanky wind-chimes avant-garde scene in particular. But if good things can ever come out of horrible events, what Antiopic has accomplished here is surely worth getting behind.

Holy Ghost! - Holy Ghost!

Album Review
SPIN
May 2011
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6/10











New York scenesters debut with smooth anticlimax

The birth of the extended disco mix, legendary producer Tom Moulton recalled recently, came when he wondered if he could keep a song "going up and up and up." Like Moulton, Brooklyn's Alex Frankel and Nick Millhiser are hot-shit remixers (MGMT, Moby, Phoenix) who often keep their analog synths pulsing past the six-minute mark. They also seem to have peaked early with 2007's eerie Italo stunner "Hold On"; the duo's debut full-length boasts top-shelf guests (Michael McDonald!), but its cut-copied hooks and sleekly pleasant grooves mostly stay earthbound.

Guillemots - Walk the River

Album Review
Pitchfork
April 20, 2011
Link
5.9














In a recent video, Guillemots lead singer Fyfe Dangerfield and drummer Greig Stewart play live "in a little woodland, by a disused railway line" in north London. Wrens and robins chirp. Standing against a graffiti-emblazoned gray brick wall, the scruffily bearded Dangerfield strums an acoustic guitar casually, almost haphazardly. Stewart, wearing a pair of white-rimmed shades you might see on one of Biff's henchmen in Back to the Future, runs his drumstick along the bars of an iron gate-- gently, almost tenderly. Dangerfield's formidable falsetto soars through the space's cavernous reverb, dexterously communicating heartache. If you're in the right mood, it can be powerful stuff: an affecting mix of traditional earnestness and experimental impulses.

This uneasy balance between balladeer sentimentality and avant-garde adventurousness runs through the Guillemots' discography. On 2006 debut Through the Windowpane, which earned the four-piece a Mercury Music Prize nomination, these competing urges resolved themselves gloriously in songs like fragile opener "Little Bear", romantic ode "Made-Up Lovesong #43", and northern soul shimmy "Trains to Brazil". But 2008's Red meandered through ambitious yet unremarkable Britpop. And Dangerfield's 2009 solo nod, Fly Yellow Moon, suggested the band's schmaltzy side had conquered all. Never mind that Billy Joel cover: Walk the River shows Guillemots still have a few eccentricities up their sleeves, though they remain a long way from their mid-2000s peak.

Guillemots' third album is mournful, lushly arranged, and conflicted as ever about whether it wants to be singer-songwriter comfort food or forward-thinking pop. The song from the video, "I Don't Feel Amazing Now", feels overdone, muddling its unspectacular, melancholy lyrics with the full studio gamut of strings and choral backing vocals. But first single "The Basket" is a lot more effective, simultaneously a cryptic love song ("You knock me over/ Come on and do it again") and a propulsive, kaleidoscopic assault on a culture where there's "a masterpiece that no one bothered painting/ Everybody's too busy with those baskets of theirs." Think of a grown-up Supergrass (there's theremin). The ominously ornamented title track is a sample-ready testament of survival, while the electronic sunshine of "I Must Be a Lover" offers a needed break from all the gloom.

For a band that once stood out for its too-much-ness, Walk the River now gives us too much of the wrong things: too many midtempo songs, too many minor-key acoustic strums, too many codas that outstay their welcome without really connecting. But Stewart's bustling drum work, MC Lord Magrão's rippling guitar, and Aristazabal Hawkes' sensuous bass-- even Dangerfield's supple voice, which might suit the band's namesake seabird-- ensure there's something interesting happening beneath even the most mawkish sentiment or the baggiest quasi-epic. Just not always something particularly new or vital, the way Through the Windowpane and its predecessor EP felt. That woodland video comes closest so far, so maybe the fresh air will do them some good.

Gruff Rhys - Hotel Shampoo

Album Review
SPIN
May 2011
Link 
7/10










Pop prankster turns travel-size suds into mellow gold.

This madcap Welshman collected 15 years of complimentary cosmetics, displayed them in an art gallery, and then released a companion album of whimsically rewarding, mildly schizophrenic psych-pop. Of course he did: Whether driving a military tank through Glastonbury or recording a synth-pop tribute to playboy '80s auto mogul John Delorean, Super Furry Animals' frontman makes the gimmicky sublime. Pilfering lounge, folk, and Tropicália, Rhys sumptuously accommodates Swedish songstress El Perro Del Mar and -- metaphorically, at least -- "Christopher Columbus."

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Label Profile: Fat Possum Records

Feature
eMusic
March 2011
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