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Gettin’ my thug on with the 5th (!) single from Big Boi’s offensively good new album, Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty. Tangerines truly are the American Dream. Flying back from my NYC vacation tomorrow so more frequent updates on the way (hey Robin how bout you post something).
It’s kind of sad, but I don’t think I have any opinions. Or, at least, I don’t think I have any that belong to me. I can’t think of a book I’ve read that I haven’t asked of others its worth or its literary relevance. I can’t think of a political opinion I didn’t steal from my brother. I can’t think of a musical obsession I had that wasn’t born from hype. I can’t help but feel a little useless about the whole thing because, quite simply, I don’t think I’ve made up my own mind about anything.
And that is why I’m so glad Neon Bible exists. Butler’s rock opera is just that: profoundly and devastatingly useless. Neon Bible waves a white flag in the air; the Arcade Fire is outraged in the realisation that its very last ounces of significance have been stripped away, and all they can do is scream out at those who hold claims on the truth. Butler’s lyrics declare himself and all of us powerless, not just over the world we are fighting over to change, but also the rights and wrongs in our head and our control over them. Butler gives up on that control. He gives up on religion, in the now and in the afterlife (“Heaven is only in my head”). He gives up on society and preachers who will sacrifice anything for their scheme, including their most sacred trait, spirituality (“Tell me lord / am I the antichrist?”). Most importantly, though, he lets go. Whether or not you flick through the themes of Neon Bible and agree to disagree, the album’s debt is to uncertainty and, most importantly, acceptance of that uncertainty. Neon Biblepresents a city of the brainwashed and determined, doing anything for something, be it putting daughters on the stage or selling souls to the church. And the album doesn’t end with some beautiful release from it all, either – nope, Neon Bible keeps its citizens trapped forever.
That white flag isn’t waved with weary arms, though. No matter how resigned Butler is to all of this, he and his followers surrender with nothing but passion.Neon Bible shows violence and while it does not indulge in the aggression that runs through its forty-six minutes, it uses it as a means of statement. Butler’s vocals, most notably, sparkle with melodrama. When as loud as he is on “Intervention”, his voice universalises what he is saying and no matter how hopeless his descriptions are, he makes his words monumental. On “Intervention” he dooms his protagonists to fear and the end of love and friendships, but he does so with such immediacy and drama that the song could spew from the world’s most tragic pantomime – hyperbole reigns over this record. It’s the only thing other than darkness.
And here’s the thing about Neon Bible. It’s a record controlled and surrounded by darkness, and maybe the group even focus in upon it and create the record around that absence of light. It certainly feels like it. “Keep The Car Running” tells the story of a man waiting in the dead of night to be taken away, but the conspiracy ultimately turns internally to his fears. “No Cars Go” is a run-away rock opera set in the dead of night with the thrill of escapism. And “Antichrist Television Blues” paints us a metropolis at midnight, with the reverberating guitars only shining artificial light on the buildings downtown. In this sense, Neon Bible is so unlike Funeral and just as worthy for its differences: it shows a second shot of Butler and Chassange, and it’s a paranoid one. What’s even more triumphant about Neon Bible is how this mood is never lost through the orchestral side of the Arcade Fire, in fact it enhances it. Musically, Neon Bible brings an empty landscape to life, and it is far bigger than the box it is put into. We’ve got flutes, church organs, accordions and thunder effects, and we become cramped into what is a supposedly a dead scene. If anything, Arcade Fire get lost further in their entanglement with baroque pop and their dated sound, and it makes a horror-flick of Neon Bible twice over.
People will argue against that, and scoff at Butler and co. for creating a record too grandiose for its own good, but in a sense, isn’t that the point? Where Funeral looks into the personal loss of the band with reservation and respect, its successor is external, making a social spokesman of Butler and creating something that speaks to everyone regardless of inward experience. He never quite becomes an activist and the anger he shows bubbles on the surface of Neon Bible, but the passion seeps through every piano note, every choir of voices and every church organ. This record is cyclical with this passion for fear, and where Butler opens his tragedy by warning us that all words will lose their meaning, he closes it with a revelation: that he’s living with us in an age of fear and self-doubt. That fear and self-doubt is what puts Butler’s music at its peak. It’s what puts it at its most intense. And it’s how he keeps us in line: by creating an album for us, the kids who squirm at gore and close their eyes until the scary part is over. But for Butler, it never ends. “World War III, when are you coming for me?”
Arcade Fire – “Antichrist Television Blues”
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Mark Kozelek has always been a sparse kind of songwriter, preferring to let his gentle fingerpicking and weathered vocals do all the heartbreaking and storytelling for him, and damn any bells and whistles. His fourth album under the Sun Kil Moon, Admiral Fell Promises, might be his simplest yet – just Kozelek and his guitar, spinning multiple tales of woe. Whether you can take all of it over the course of an entire album is up to your personal preference for the man, but it’s undeniable that this track is one of his most heartfelt and accessible.
/\/\ /\ Y /\ (or just Maya) is rapper/entertainer/crazy M.I.A.’s third record, and the glitchy, tight beat of “Teqkilla” is one of its best tunes. Dubstep artist Rusko and DJ Switch help produce. Like a certain fine south-of-the-border spirit, “Teqkilla” is the kind of thing that becomes more agreeable with each spin, glitchy beats and tribal drums propelling a ferocious beat.
Daily Klap
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M.I.A., MAYA, Nicki Minaj, Rusko, Switch, Tekquilla
School of Seven Bells are kind of like that girl(s) at your high school who prided herself on her looks and demeanor above everything else, becoming such a monument to beauty and unrequited love that she was more an object to be discussed rather than interacted with. It never helped that more often than not these were the same girls whose looks were matched only by their prudishness and arrogance, and it’s these unfortunate characteristics that Benjamin Curtis (formerly of Secret Machines) and identical twin vocalists Alejandra and Claudia Deheza have adopted with their sophomore effort. Everything about Disconnect from Desire is painstakingly pristine, from its layered production to the Deheza’s dreamy vocals to even the title itself, which seems to reinforce the idea that, while this is undoubtedly beautiful music, it’s a beauty that nonetheless exists in a vacuum. The melodies are there, intricate stratums of shimmering harmonies and lilting lyrics that complement each other nicely; any sort of emotional feeling, however, is strangely absent.
Alpinisms was the sort of debut that treated the tired shoegaze genre with the eye of someone who normally spent his time writing space-rock epics – accordingly, it was a refreshing affair, one that combined odd tribal rhythms and theatrical choruses into something exciting. That novel sound has been completely stamped out here, Curtis instead seemingly content to pump up the synths like a bad M83 imitation and crank the vocoders and drum machines to the max. It makes what was probably intended to sound more like Kate Bush instead turn out like an ‘80s novelty group that grew up listening to only Stereolab records. At first, things are appropriately shoegaze-y and, like those girls at first look, unerringly gorgeous. “Windstorm” is the obvious highlight, really one of the few songs that surges ahead rather than relishing in its own glow. It’s also the only song under four minutes, a fact that only contributes to the feeling that one really feels the time start to pass as the record flows on, more than happy to stroll leisurely at its own pace thank you very much.
This album is lush; this album is impeccably produced; this album has two very potent female singers who know how to embellish each other. But something is missing in these hallowed halls of dream pop, where a crisp, hypnotic sound is more desirable than actual feeling. The constant stacking of effects, the intertwining of synths and melodies and vocals, combines for a wall of sound that is annoying on some songs and practically impenetrable on others. Alejandra and Claudia sound absolutely lovely on a song like “ILU” or “Dial,” but the problem is understanding what exactly they’re getting at under all those vocoder layers. As the record goes on and nothing seems to change, beside the odd jungle rhythm here (“Dust Devil”) or chintzy keyboard effect there (“Camarilla”), things blur and melt together, creating a morass of shoegaze that is as boring as it is interminable. Rarely is a song title as unfortunately accurate as Disconnect from Desire’s closer, “The Wait” – by the end of its nearly seven minutes of slow buildup, barely-there brush strokes and stately vocals, one could be forgiven for thinking the wait would never end. It’s a little sad, actually, as the amount of work that has clearly gone into the production of this album is impressive, but it’s like Curtis and the Deheza sisters would rather build a magnificent mansion with absolutely nothing inside it. All the window dressing in the world can’t hide what Disconnect from Desire is at its heart – icy, shallow and hopelessly empty.
School of Seven Bells – “Windstorm”
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A sexy vinyl re-release of blink-182′s best album comes out tomorrow – buy it here. For old time’s sake, and because it’s a killer summer tune…
I think what gets me leaping over clouds about Perch Patchwork is how it peels away the components of Maps and Atlases and lets them lie where they fall. The illusion of what Maps and Atlases “is” has irked me ever since I became entangled with Trees, Swallows, Houses because it felt like I’d had my newest discovery pinned into a corner. It seemed everyone had this vision of the band who could only produce toe-tapping guitar lines, who would sooner die than sacrifice their ‘math rock’ definition and who would keep their borderline wobbly vocalist as yet another constant through any change. And hey, when You, Me and The Mountain, entered the canon of their EPs, I felt even more adamant at the backlash I had probably invented: the musical shift was a non-dramatic and entirely subtle act, but I felt the band had chopped something out of itself without me thinking any different of it – “Artichokes” didn’t meander through insane guitar taps nearly as much as “The Most Trustworthy Tin Cans” would’ve done in its shoes, but did I notice? Did I care? That’s one rhetorical question Perch Patchwork – the band’s first ever LP – can answer for you, and I can see these qualms of moving beyond the ‘guitar-tap’, beyond the ‘odd’ time signatures and the compulsive drumming disappearing with every adoring repeat of “Solid Ground.” This is a Maps and Atlases who aren’t anything in particular, but rather a celebration of all the quirky influences they ever listed. Chop out that sound or chop in this one, and Maps and Atlases aren’t any different a thing to your ears. Except better.
This Maps and Atlases record is the most universal yet, but I’ll admit I’m a sucker for one thing rather than the other and the sound I heard festering under their earlier EPs was a psychedelic form of folk, with the jubilant crackling of guitars on “The Ongoing Horrible” made all the more a tease by its short length. Now that I’ve basically gotten what I wanted in places – Maps and Atlases wearing Six Organs of Admittance on their sleeves – I want nothing more than to call this their ‘folk’ album. For me, it walks and talks with that persona even if it can’t be tagged with it, and it is incredible because of it: as soon as “Will” begins we are given this stripped down Maps and Atlases, acoustic percussion and guitars slotted under the primitive-sounding chants of David Davison. Even the production readies my appetite with the chimes and guitar plucking sounding as far away from me as possible, as if they do indeed intend to play the album on top of the coast its art depicts. Even better, Davison’s voice is still as manic as it ever was, trembling between the highest and lowest pitches as the record moves into “The Charm” (and what a seamless transition, too), and the band are just as manic with the marching beats they temporarily exchange their guitars for. In a sense, it’s the same old in aesthetic, but this new folk invasion picks up the album from its other sounds wherever it is poised. The joyous “Israeli Caves” moves listeners out of a moodier passage of Perch Patchwork and the album is finished with a colourful conclusion in its title track, where there is an abundance of wood instruments and little else. It’s almost childish, “Perch Patchwork,” with each cello and violin synchronised into a storybook march. Of course, Maps and Atlases tell the best fairytales.
In a sense, the album is so universal because the band gives its control over to the fans without really doing any such thing. Just as soon as the record has settled into something entirely different and started to sound like a huge and daring ‘fuck you’ to loyalists, Maps and Atlases turns on its heels and throws us a “Living Decorations” or a “Carrying the Wet Wood,” and suddenly we’re reminded that every member of this Chicago outfit is totally non-threatening, loveable and more likely to be issuing a small and humble ‘sorry guys’ than anything else. “Living Decorations” especially zips up old-school crowd, promptly paced for its injection of math rock and relieving due to its whereabouts on the album as a whole; the imprint of this loud and jingly number, heavily drenched in guitar riffs is – after two tracks that have burned through the albums beginning at a comparative snail’s pace – almost a sign of the band trying to appease its diehards. “Carrying the Wood,” too, strays away from the character of the album without being out of context, having the tone fans will have familiarised with most since 2005 and Trees, Swallows, Houses. It sounds welcome on that EP: Davison’s cries of “Why/did/you/tell me/oh why/that there was nothing left to climb” sound as structured and technical as anything from that album (as do the riffs, which roll ever onward) and yet there is some barrier stopping them from that hypothetical situation where they could sit by the comparatively robotic “Everyplace is a House.”
That barrier is the best thing that happens to Perch Patchwork. An uncanny presence dominates the record’s entirety, making it their best effort yet and proof that they can write albums better even than they can EPs. It’s the presence of things both small and big that can never be heard in the foreground because of our familiarisation with the Maps and Atlases of math rock rather than the Maps and Atlases of any thing else. We are so engrossed with these textures that we let any other additives drift to obscurity, but even if we forget the sounds, they abolish any technicality, any forced complexity that was left in the mix and that played foul upon our ears. It’s enjoyed with repeated listens of the album that take away the initial awkwardness of Perch Patchwork: on “Pigeon,” brass instruments curve the song playfully with distinct Caribbean spirit – ludicrous, when given the band we’re talking about, but it somehow it works. It counterbalances the mechanics of the song. Hell, it simply loosens up the band that has always needed loosening up.
My favourite example though is the delightful “Solid Ground,” a track fans had the pleasure of stewing over for the long months before the album’s availability. If this track was supposed to be an indicator, it did its job and then some; here of all places Perch Patchwork sounds like a Maps and Atlases who did away with the lab and went running through the wilderness. Or maybe they just set up their lab in that wilderness, because “Solid Ground” – and the 2010 album it belongs to – is a mix of the sound I so want my new favourite band to be and the remnants of the one I so adored in them already. I mentioned the folksy, one-man Six Organs of Admittance, but truthfully Perch Patchwork sounds more like if he invaded Don Caballero’s territory and stirred things up – and above all, the members of Maps and Atlases celebrating everything about each other, these influences included, is what makes their first ever record such a gem. They’ve taken cues from their grandest experimental peers to create yet more of the best pop. There’s a description out there that describes the band as “wrestlers” of the “intricate and organic,” and while we could debate back and forth which of the former or latter we see in them more, who are we to impose our favourite genres upon these guys? It’s time to stop speculating over what Maps and Atlases should do and just hope they do more.
Maps & Atlases – “Solid Ground”
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Vancouver punk duo Japandroids have been working on a project that sees them releasing a series of 7-inch singles over the course of the year – “Younger Us” (along with a cover of X’s “Sex and Dying in High Society”) being the second. If you want a copy, you better hurry, as there’s only 2500 clear vinyl copies available (buy here). As for the song, it’s sort of a bizarro version of “Young Hearts Spark Fire,” with a similar guitar part and surging drums, all wrapped loosely around Brian King’s lusty, nostalgic lyrics. In other words, it’s Japandroids, and it rocks.
Latest pair of tracks from British house new wavers Jack Beats, both of which absolutely slay.
“Windstorm” is the opening track from School of Seven Bells‘ sophomore record, Disconnected From Desire, which drops next week. It’s spacey, 80s-influenced dream pop from Benjamin Curtis (formerly of space-rockers Secret Machines) and identical twins Alejandra and Claudia Deheza. Wispy female vocals, crisp melodies, ethereal sounds – pretty well-done dream pop, in other words. We’ll see how a whole album of it works out…
I could say how Russian DJ Proxy is turning the electro house movement on its head and injecting his own ruthless brand of post-Soviet aggression into it; how a song like “Vibrate” truly meshes with his desire to find more “punishing” sounds; how this man’s set at Coachella might have been the most terrifying of my life and how I’m all the better for it. “Vibrate” says it all for me, though – if you like the sounds of heavy machinery and sadistic synths, you’ll fall in love.
I couldn’t resist: Proxy – “Who Are You”
Lately I’ve been wondering whether it’s possible for me to like music as much as I used to years ago, when everything seemed so fresh and new and I was hearing so many bands for the first time and loving it all. So many of those bands that really came to define my tastes put out later albums that, for whatever reason, just never hit me with the same impact. The Decemberists’ Hazards of Love was damn good and I adored it, but am I still listening to it nowadays? No, but I can definitely say that I regularly throw on Picaresque or Her Majesty on an occasional basis, still with the same vigor I had back in high school. It makes me wonder: am I honestly just not into certain bands as much as I used to be, or am I imagining a decline in quality because nothing will match that certain nostalgic feeling I get from listening to old favorites?
When I first heard Expo 86 a little under a month ago, I hated it. I thought it was Wolf Parade, a band I absolutely fell in love with after their brilliant debut, playing it safe and close to the chest, typical structures matching typical Wolf Parade lyrics formatted in typical Wolf Parade songwriting (you know, that slightly herky-jerky, everything’s-about-to-fall-apart-but-never-actually-does musical style). It wasn’t Apologies to the Queen Mary, and, apart from occasional flashes, it wasn’t really that close, and that pissed me off. But it wasn’t At Mt. Zoomer, a bloated mess of an album if ever there was one, so I gave it another chance. And another, and another, and I began to realize something – this is a distinctly Wolf Parade record, one that is decidedly separate from either Apologies or Zoomer and entirely the better for it. It’s different from both those records, both in the strength of its songwriting (something that took me many listens to appreciate) and the way it somehow combines two increasingly divergent personalities in Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner into something definitely double-sided but still uniform.
Fans of the band will definitely be able to tell who wrote opener “Cloud Shadow on the Mountain,” what with its paranoid vocal line, spindly guitar work and frantic rhythm (Krug), just as they’ll be able to tell who’s responsible for “Palm Road,” with its more swelling melody and cavernous sounds (Boeckner). But Expo 86, more than any work in the band’s catalog, shows a band working together to create something arguably as strong as anything they’ve done before, something I never would have thought possible considering the amount of time both songwriters were putting into more creatively satisfying side projects. Krug’s overlying weirdness is still evident, particularly on the opener and the wild closer “Cave-o-Sapien,” but he seems to be more influenced by Boeckner in putting more of a pop bent on things, focusing on crafting one of the record’s most gorgeous yet straightforward melodies on “Oh You, Old Thing” or taking a page from Boeckner’s guitar style with the slinky “What Did My Lover Say? (It Always Had To Go This Way).” Combine songs like these with Boeckner’s expectedly superb, if more reserved, pop offerings like the stick-in-your-head chorus to “Ghost Pressure, ”the anthemic “Little Golden Age” and even more Krugian mini-epics like “Pobody’s Nerfect,” and Expo 86 comes across as maybe the best synthesis of the band’s schizoid sounds yet.
It’s not that Krug has tamed his more out-of-left-field impulses in favor of a more shackled sound, or that Boeckner hasn’t expanded his horizons – it’s that the songwriting is so rock solid and the songs themselves so genuinely fresh that it sounds like the band is almost starting anew, throwing away the experimental stench that torpedoed At Mt. Zoomer and going back to what really made them great. “Yulia” is the kind of wrenching love song I never thought I’d hear from Wolf Parade; “Oh You, Old Thing” is a shimmering break-up tune that I’d never expect from a lyrical oddball like Krug; hell, all the songs here are so atypically direct and so great it’s hard not to fall in love. It’s not as delightfully jagged around the edges as Apologies, but perhaps the band needed to move away from that sound and into more traditional indie rock territory. Expo 86 proves that Krug and Boeckner still can do what’s always been most important, namely writing songs that still kick ass at every available opportunity. And while this isn’t as immediately satisfying as Apologies still is to me . . . maybe in a couple of years it will be.
Wolf Parade – “Little Golden Age”
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