Best New Albums
- Wavves: Wavvves
- Dark Was the Night
- The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
- Antony and the Johnsons: The Crying Light
- Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion
- The Very Best: Esau Mwamwaya and Radioclit are the Very Best
- Deerhunter: Microcastle / Weird Era Cont.
- DJ /rupture: Uproot
- Fucked Up: The Chemistry of Common Life
- Mount Eerie With Julie Doiron and Fred Squire: Lost Wisdom
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Email LinkIt's hard for artists to teeter on the fence of change between albums-- between refining your sound and getting stuck in stasis, between growth and overreach. Unless you're Phoenix, in which case you make it look really, really easy, and crank out more effortless pop-rock. While there are more pronounced synths on this preview of their upcoming album, "1901" sounds like a logical extension of It's Never Been Like That, and is just as smooth and spirited and dementedly catchy as any of their best singles. That last record endeared them to many, and it's worth noting that they don't sound especially daunted by following up their last big success. Whatever new touches are added here-- the singeing keyboard chords that dominate the first few bars before taking a backseat to that clean guitar, or the percussive marble-down-the-drain echo-- it takes effort to pick them out, as this track is as seamless as the top of the peanut butter when you first open the jar. Remember "12:51"? Me neither.
MP3:> Phoenix: "1901"
— Jason Crock
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Scripture quotes! Split personalities! Gothy art-rock climaxes! From Fur & Gold to "Glass", Bat for Lashes haven't gotten much more transparent. But the Brighton, England-based band's Scott Walker-ft.ing Two Suns has an ambitiously ornate opener-- you could almost say it's crystalline, if you're not sick of crystal bands yet. Main woman Natasha Khan's voice is the first thing we hear, slow and haunting as she recites from the biblical Song of Solomon. "I will rise now," she intones, and she does, hitting eerily high notes on the chorus as she describes a dream of being made out of glass.
Split-panned percussion helps introduce the album's dualistic conceit. Maybe I've been listening too much to the new Fever Ray album, but I can hear a resemblance in the frosty rhythms and chilly, wordless harmonies. Organ peals, guitars strum shimmering minor chords, and a methodical fuzz bass line holds it all aloft-- this is moody, atmospheric concept music. There's also something about an "emerald city", so when the whole thing comes out I'm gonna NetFlix The Wizard of Oz; we've been to The Dark Side of the Moon, but Two Suns is some Star Wars shit (speaking of hallowed texts).
— Marc Hogan
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Japandroids are two guys from Vancouver who make distortion-cranked garage-rock anthems about fleeting youth: the boys leaving town, drinking, hurting, French kissing some French girls, and then quitting girls altogether. Their debut album, Post-Nothing, was originally going to be self-released last fall, but now it's set to come out this spring, in Canada only, on Unfamiliar. "Young Hearts Spark Fire" is just one of the raggedly emotive standouts on the record, young hearts igniting the duo's stripped-down drums-and-guitar setup into an explosive thing, equal parts insolence and grandeur.
"We used to dream/ Now we worry about dying," members Brian King and David Prowse cry out, in the kind of doomed-romantic instant quotable we used to get from fellow Canadians the Constantines. The whole song hinges on this contrast between innocence and destruction. It's tuneful and universal enough to have been produced as a radio-ready pop-punk single, but it has the kind of volatile churn you'd expect from a band known to cover Mclusky's "To Hell With Good Intentions", which helps to make all its conflicted emotions sound-- for lack of a less controversial word-- real. "I don't wanna worry about dying/ I just wanna worry about those sunshine girls," Japandroids conclude. "Only the Good Die Young" was bullshit-- these guys are too young, and too good, to burn out just yet.
MP3:> Japandroids: "Young Hearts Spark Fire"
— Marc Hogan
Monday, March 2, 2009
There's a certain strain of indie rock that excels at exuberance. From Built to Spill's "In the Morning" to Modest Mouse's "Doin' the Cockroach" to Pavement's "Stereo", you can get some serious uplift from chiming guitars, a ramshackle rhythm section, quiet/loud dynamics, and a dude who's ready to put it all out there vocally, even if he's not Jeff Buckley.
New York's Cymbals Eat Guitars, whose remarkably assured debut album Why There Are Mountains came out digitally recently, understand something about the infectious spirit of that era. Mountains' "Wind Phoenix" is just a bit over five minutes long, but it feels like three great songs climbing all over each other that somehow manage to exceed the sum of their parts. Opening with a jubilant horn refrain, it skips along on a tuneful melody, slows down, ramps up to a climax, sticks with it for a while, and then crashes back down to its opening section. It's breathless, forceful, loose but not sloppy, and brimming with a sense of joy. Singer Joseph Ferocious says something about an "Ikea finery" and watching Notre Dame; the details aren't all clear, but you get a sense of someone fighting hard to get it all in. With so many ideas and feelings spilling out at once, there's not a song built that can quite contain them.
MP3:> Cymbals Eat Guitars: "Wind Phoenix"
— Mark Richardson
Friday, February 27, 2009
So, yeah, the new Animal Collective album Merriweather Post Pavilion is incredibly good. For me, "My Girls", the danceable and insanely catchy ode to the bonds of family sung by Panda Bear, was the record's first "I need to play this song 10 times in a row right now" moment.
— Mark Richardson
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Few took notice when Kath Bloom retreated from the New York folk scene in the 1980s. Her disappearance is neither as romantic as Vashti Bunyan's bucolic sojourn nor as storied as Cat Stevens' conversion: After falling upon hard times, Bloom moved to rural New England to raise her sons. Two decades later, Australian label Chapter Music has reissued the bulk of her catalogue, including two albums with Loren Connors, Finally in 2005, and the gorgeous Terror in 2008. A tribute album seems like an obvious epilogue to that back-in-print campaign: Loving Takes This Course features testimonial covers by Devendra Banhart, the Concretes, Mark Kozelek, Marianne Dissard, and the Dodos.
The standout track may be Bill Callahan's cover of "The Breeze/My Baby Cries", a devastating medley from her 1982 album with Connors, Sing the Children Over. Bloom sounds so weary on the original-- exhausted by the simple act of living-- and Callahan knows he can't re-create that fragility. Instead, over a simple guitar theme, barely-there percussion, and mood-setting keyboard accompaniment, his self-reflection is more stoic, yet just as emotionally precarious, and his line readings make Bloom's lyrics starkly ominous. There's an entire break-up (mental or romantic, you choose) in the opening lines "I'd like to touch you, but I don't know how," and his insistence that "the breeze will kill me" sounds genuinely haunted and resigned. "The Breeze/My Baby Cries" is that rare find: a cover that adds depth to the original and a tribute album track that sounds absolutely essential.
— Stephen M. Deusner
Everything's coming up Jersey. Real Estate have roots in the Garden State and they're led by singer/guitarist Martin Courtney and feature guitarist Matthew Mondanile (the latter known to some for his work in Ducktails). They've played shows with both Vivian Girls and Titus Andronicus, but "Black Lake", from their debut 7", doesn't sound much like either of those bands (who also don't much sound like each other). Instead, it's a fuzzy, sweetly simple sea chantey (or in this case, I guess a "lake chantey") that reminds you of how awesome that last bonfire of the summer was, until the cops showed up and you had to run for your life. The song wafts in on a slinky bassline playing all by its lonesome, and then a sleepwalking slide guitar (ready for a couples-only dance on prom night), tapping cymbals, and Courtney's reverbed voice complete the picture, leaving plenty of open space to stick your head inside of. "Black Lake" is a jangly, hazy slice of nostalgia for those of us who still have love for America's forgotten playground.
— Zach Kelly
Monday, February 23, 2009
Over a jazzy drum loop and intermittent bass, tUnE-YaRds' Merrill Garbus sings a lilting chorus worthy of the song's title. Her birdlike voice-- "Look at me-me-me in the picture," she murmurs-- and the fragmentary nature of the song bring to mind a Slabco-signed Deerhoof, with disembodied stabs of brittle guitar or ukulele joined by the occasional exotic vocal sample.
MP3:> tUnE-yArDs: "Sunlight"
— Marc Hogan
Thursday, January 15, 2009
David Byrne and Dirty Projectors keep their vocal affectations on the right side of awesome on "Knotty Pine", a bright and well-arranged pairing of two like-minded acts. Based around sprightly acoustic guitars, the track winds its way between soaring, melodically intricate female vocals and the former Talking Head's familiar burr. Taken from the Dark Was the Night Compilation.
MP3:> Dirty Projectors and David Byrne: "Knotty Pine"
— Pitchfork
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