forkcast tracks

Monday, June 29, 2009

"Be My Girl"

The Smith Westerns
"Be My Girl"

[Hozac]

8
 

The Smith Westerns are an anomaly: a bunch of garage-rockin' teens singing about how badly they want to get laid. Sure, it's a cliché, but the way these guys do it you'd think it was 1965, when romantic yearning over power chords was still fresh and exciting. "Oh girl, I wanna take you home," lead S-Dub Cullen Omori croons earnestly over a wistfully swaying guitar line. He's vulnerable, yet confident: young, and with nothing to lose. The idea sums up their existence as a band, too, cranking out songs and having some fun, letting the chips fall where they may. And with the help of fellow Chicago Northside College Prep alum Miss Alex White, local imprint HoZac records (who just dropped their debut LP), and trashy rabbit-masked cult hero Nobunny, who invited them to play backup on a recent tour, those chips have been falling in all the right places. Which isn't to say the SWs have merely gotten lucky-- with melodies as strong as these, you'd think they'd been writing songs for years (though by then they'd probably lose that youthful gusto, so readily evinced here). "You keep runnin' through my dreams," Omori whispers as the music fades to an urgent drumbeat, before raucously exploding into a simple, powerfully focused request: "Just be my girl." It's a great show of maturity from the guys who once used "you're my wank fantasy" as a come-on. This time, it'll probably be a lot harder for her to say no-- and should they succeed, luck won't have had anything to do with it.

— Sean Redmond

"Never Tell"

Drug Rug
"Never Tell"

[Black and Greene]

6

This Cambridge, Mass., couple's press sheet accurately touted their debut as "Joanna Newsom jamming with Keith Richards," others may think of Fleetwood Mac. But I call Drug Rug the East Coast's answer to Blitzen Trapper, filling 4-tracks with shambolic roots-rock louding up the basement and sacrificing the technical virtuosity of the Fiery Furnaces for more stable tunes. "Never Tell", from Drug Rug's upcoming sophomore effort Paint the Fence Invisible, is more catchy and wound-up than anything on the debut and adds some crucial Jason Lytle-esque touches for color-- check out that (electronic?) metallophone glistening through the refrain. But they're not nearly as psych-driven as their name suggests. Hippies don't make obtuse Lou Reed-style complaints like "California love songs making it so hard to breathe," especially not hippies in love. On the bright side, a spike of bitterness keeps the whimsical duo from lapsing into twee hypoglycemia, as do Sarah Cronin's pinched, Newsom-esque vocals, even when they're subdued in harmony with her partner Tommy as they are here.

— Dan Weiss

"Shining Down" [ft. Matthew Santos]

Lupe Fiasco
"Shining Down" [ft. Matthew Santos]

[1st & 15th/Atlantic]

5

If summer is in fact hip-hop's most crucial season, 2009 is looking pretty rough so far. First Wale goes off and cheats on us with Lady Gaga, then the Thornton brothers hit us with a certified clunker, and now this? No wonder Lupe Fiasco was so pissed about the leak. Unfortunately, "Shining Down" is a bland refix of The Cool's first single "Superstar" also with Matthew Santos on chorus detail (who somehow doesn't seem to notice that this world probably doesn't need two Adam Levines). But this one retains none of "Superstar"'s wonderful cheekiness, opting for a doleful elaboration on nothing in particular. None of Lupe's effervescent wit or flow is present, setting the tone and pace for "Shining Down" by kicking off the first verse with a "Well, well" that actually sounds like a sad trombone, à la Debbie Downer. Certainly this gifted MC has to know that groaners like, "Your attention put back on the flow like the department of water" aren't going to fool us. The vague menace of the guitar loops and synths kind of reminds me of the politically-firebranded brilliance of earlier stuff like "American Terrorist", but it's too thin a commendation for something this rote. Lupe is starting to sound more like the guy who really wants to retire and less like the guy who just gets off on telling people he's going to.

— Zach Kelly

Friday, June 26, 2009

"Tunguska"

Cymbals Eat Guitars
"Tunguska"

[Transparent]

8
 

"Tunguska", the first new track to emerge from Staten Island's Cymbals Eat Guitars since this year's Why There Are Mountains, does not stray too far from the band's taste for sprawling, dramatic indie rock, but its tone is relatively mellow and muted. As the song opens, Joseph D'Agostino strums a slow, gorgeous chord progression evoking lazy afternoons in wet summer hair, and sings earnestly enough to push his delicate, mildly raspy voice to the point of cracking. The sound is endearingly fragile, but the overall feeling of the composition is loose and breezy, particularly as it gains momentum and shifts into a more up-tempo passage. Though the influence of 1990s indie icons such as Built to Spill, Modest Mouse, and Pavement is still very evident in the band's style, traces of 70s radio rock are also noticeable as D'Agostino's guitar work faintly echoes that of Lindsey Buckingham and Todd Rundgren. This bodes well for the group's future, suggesting that they can maintain their rawness and bombast while continuing to integrate touches of sophistication and elegance.

— Matthew Perpetua

"My Heart"

Castanets
"My Heart"

[Asthmatic Kitty]

7

"Raymond Raposa tested out of high school at the age of 15 and traveled the U.S. via Greyhound bus off and on for the next four years," an oft-paraphrased passage from an early Castanets press release reminds us of the band's anchor, a peripatetic sort who hit the road early, maybe bound for glory or, at the very least, experience. Raposa has long downplayed that episode to reporters, telling one inquirer in 2005 that such biography barely mattered. "I'm not speaking for any greater populace or anything," he put it dismissively.

Alas, Raposa has always seemed unsettled and unsatisfied on record, surrounding his folk song cores with discursive sonic ideas-- a drone or improvisation here, a beat or noise blast there. He's seemed like a wanderer, passing through and picking up ideas quickly, grafting them to his own even if he's not sure how they really work. Maybe dilettante's too strong a word, but Raposa has unapologetically wrestled with ideas that are a bit too big for him. Sometimes, he's lost.

But "My Heart", the economically arranged highlight from Castanets' latest, Texas Rose, the Thaw, and the Beasts, feels a lot like a homestead: Using only guitars, bass, drums, and voice, Raposa washes into a low cloud of reverb, a second, slight layer of vocals chasing after his own. Impeccably timed, the song builds layer by layer, the drums rising only as the third verse collapses, pushing tension to a short-lived pinnacle. "My tongue is forming new words for you/ My lungs are calling like birds for you," Raposa offers for the climax, offering the best of his body to someone intent on using all of him. Considering this may be the most quintessential Castanets song to date, it'd simply be didactic to spell out the metaphor.


— Grayson Currin

"Make You Sweat"

T.I.
"Make You Sweat"

[Self-Released]

7

So. You're one of the biggest rap stars in the world, and you're about to go to prison for a year. And even though your lawyers managed to land you maybe the greatest celebrity sweetheart deal of all time, it's still prison for a year. Now you've got to crank out as much new material as possible so the world doesn't forget about you when you're in lockup.

If T.I. is feeling any sense of dread or desperation, it's not coming through in his music. It's just not. Not only does T.I. not get all emo on this brisk little mixtape banger, he taps into a confidence he hasn't displayed on wax since a couple of years back. "Make You Sweat" finds Tip spitting the vicious gun-talk shit he completely left off of Paper Trail, staying calm and steady-handed no matter how nasty how threats get: "Beretta 40 Cal leave you dead like Freddy/ Bet this lead bust your head like a young bitch cherry." (There's also a line about "as fast as Tom Petty" that I don't quite get. "Runnin' Down a Dream" reference? Or is he thinking of Richard?) The Zep-sampling beat is a bubbling electro thing that doesn't sacrifice depth for speed, exactly the sort of thing T.I. should be rapping over when he's in this kind of mood. Tip's output will probably barely slow while he's away, and we're all better off for that.

— Tom Breihan

Thursday, June 25, 2009

"One More Chance"

Bloc Party
"One More Chance"

[Wichita]

6

Is my mind playing tricks, like Scarface and Bushwick? Nope-- somehow the increasingly prolific and popular Bloc Party manage to distance themselves even further from Silent Alarm with new single "One More Chance", and not only that, even Intimacy and its donor child remix come off like a blip in the rearview. Fuck the past, let's dwell on that piano line that loops ovah and ovah-- are these guys leaving behind their futurist ideals for the original pirate material of old-school house?

At the very least, "Give me one more chance to love you" works as a better hands-inna-the-air mantra than "My mercury's in retrograde" or "You told me you wanted to eat up my sandwich" (that's what I always heard on "This Modern Love", anyway). But is Kele's voice really suited for this sort of thing? Neither unhinged enough for Luke Jenner-style ecstacy or contoured enough to handle the melody, "One More Chance" just falls shy of nailing the melody; and then when it when it comes to sex, Bloc Party has always been something like Magilla Gorilla-- encased and mostly harmless. Hell, Silent Alarm's earned them a lifetime of chances, but "Like Eating Glass"? "Better Than Heaven"? Just another Bloc Party single where they're so excited by a new sound that they hardly feel compelled to let it emerge into a good song.

— Ian Cohen

"Sunday Morning"

Beck
"Sunday Morning"

[Self-Released]

7

It's a novel idea, but certainly not a new one-- Dutch label Konkurrent's In the Fishtank series has for some time been marrying artists and giving them only 48 hours to record an album and see what sticks. Beck's less-creatively titled Record Club project works similarly, allowing Mr. Hansen and co. (in this installment, Nigel Godrich and, uh, Giovanni Ribisi) only 24 hours, a mere Earth day, to choose an album to be "reinterpreted and used as a framework" and then cut the thing. This time it's The Velvet Underground & Nico, and the first taste is opener "Sunday Morning".

The initial choice for an album seems a bit uninspired (also, if you hit the 22-hour mark and you haven't even started work on "European Son", does it end up sounding like shit?), but "Sunday Morning" is surprisingly engaging. Beck seems to be scratching at that old Sea Change itch, employing a somberness that his original music hasn't seen in a while. "Sunday Morning"'s lovely little rainy-day waltz is now filled with soft tambourines, beatific xylophone twinkles, and Beck channeling Reed in a respectfully honest way. So for now, I'll can my naysaying and just wait for my man.

— Zach Kelly

"Green River"

Real Estate
"Green River"

[Half Machine]

7

Long the home of outtakes, remixes, and material generally seen as secondary to the featured A, B-sides don't always get their due. But record geeks know the neglected B is also the best place to look for hidden gems, and "Green River", the flipside to New Jersey beach lovers Real Estate's recent "Fake Blues" 7", is proof of that. Following closely on the heels of the (quite good) Underwater Peoples Records Showcase (on which Real Estate are featured) and a handful of EPs and singles by the band, the crusty coastal boogie of "Green River" is one of the more accomplished individual tracks so far from the cluster of bands trafficking in this nascent lo-fi beach-pop aesthetic. At just under two minutes, the song gracefully shifts tempo from sparkly surf-guitar strumming to swirly atmospherics before a more forceful coda sweeps in at the finish. Its scruffiness, the lo-fi coloring that seems so ubiquitous these days, feels spot-on, adding warmth and texture rather than coming across as cloying or of-the-moment. And there's a real urgency here. You might expect a track like this to stretch itself out, to luxuriate in its UV rays for five or six minutes, but the brevity-- alluding to the fleeting, never-quite-long-enough nature of summer, I'm guessing-- is really what makes it work. Like the season itself, it's over before you've had the chance to truly enjoy it.

MP3:> Real Estate: "Green River"

— Joe Colly

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

"Beggar's Bowl"

Polvo
"Beggar's Bowl"

[Merge]

8
 

Between the fawning over the new Dinosaur Jr. and attention paid to Trent Reznor's personal dealings, it's conceivable that Polvo might have just thawed out and haven't yet realized what year this is. They hit the snooze and went to the studio in business-as-usual, time-to-release-our-next-record-cuz-it's-1995 mode. That's when their Chapel Hill brethren were clamoring to be on labels like Merge, and labels like Merge weren't making commemorative DVDs. And aghast, rock was still getting held back in math class year after year. But these early warriors of let-x-equal-x reappear in a time where something called doom metal not only exists but is maxing out its credit options over choir-vs.-orchestra dilemmas formerly reserved for like, Live. Polvo used to sound like Drive Like Jehu or Les Savy Fav or least one of those groups whose riffs zing-zang into a wall and then crawl up the ceiling rather than banging into it over and over. These days, they'll apparently settle for banging. With higher production values now easier to attain, Ash Bowie and Dave Brylawski up the dynamics and reach for a new metallic crunch. The punishing "Beggar's Bowl" has clean, echoing tones laid on top of the heaviness, and here, vocals are less essential than the drums or guitar overdubs. They may not give a reunion like Mission of Burma a run for its money, but if Polvo occupy a weird space nowadays, it's because they still sound so much like themselves.

MP3:> Polvo: "Beggar's Bowl"

— Dan Weiss

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