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By Robin Smith, January 19, 2012 10:00 am

Guided By Voices – Let’s Go Eat The Factory

Guided By Voices Inc. 2012

Rating: 3/10

In a decade or two of very awesome ideas in indie rock, one of the best also has the least to do with music. It’s chronicled in the to-do list of Stephen Malkmus, and if it turns out that he doesn’t have one, I’m fairly sure these are the bullet-points: firstly, write some music. There’s no outlet better for a guy who still speaks in riddles after all these years. Secondly, don’t release another Pavement album. The live reunion, yes, that’s inevitable for such a legendary band, but Malkmus recognises his riddles are no longer Crooked Rain riddles, not by a long way: you have to write as if you don’t really care about writing to make “Range Life,” backhanded even if it was immaculately crafted. His lack of temptation to do it again- to be the casual genius only unlocked by Pavement- is kinda commendable in my eyes. He’s not arguing against how much he bloody well was Pavement. He’s just aware there’s no need to assert that anymore, because, well, being one thing doesn’t necessarily mean being it forever.

Robert Pollard is not Stephen Malkmus, sadly.

I’m not bringing this up to start a band vs. band argument, especially as Guided by Voices occupy that favourite band hall of fame in my sweet little head. But as far as reunions go, here’s one that shouldn’t have happened, and here’s the exact reason Stephen Malkmus got it right. Robert Pollard has billed Let’s Go Eat The Factory as a reunion album, a new era straight from the old era, one that brings the ‘classic line-up’ back together like a doting indie commune. What it is in reality, however, is far from that beautiful hippy image: this is just another moment of self-indulgence from a man with too much of his own stuff going on in his life anyway, all of it music. This is an album that marginalizes its most exciting aspect, the return of Pollard’s long-time companion Tobin Sprout, and ignores the return of old friends Mitch Mitchell and Greg Demos entirely. This isn’t a reunion album anymore than tacking the name on with four different guys would be. Rather, it’s Pollard’s declaration that this band is, through it all, his own. And god, what a mistake that is.

Because you have to wonder what happened to tear apart Pollard and Sprout here, why exactly their connection has gone so wrong. It’s not a partnership anymore, and I guess that’s another thing on this long list of inevitabilities I don’t want to face. That’s all Guided By Voices really are on this record- a band of crappy lists, a competing arena for a Pollard counting wins off of songs. It’s a game only Uncle Bob is playing, of course, and whatever little flag of jangle-pop pride Sprout is proudly waving on Let’s Go Eat The Factory is burnt to a crisp by the misguided leadership of his friend the jock. It’s a record in which Pollard trades personalities with himself obsessively, back and forth between the days when he was obnoxious as hell- the award goes to any number of his solo records- and those where he was just plain tedious. Sprout will remember fewer of those days than the line-up that informed Pollard’s late GBV records, of course, and so with him having a firm grasp on one of the band’s records for the first time in years, he shows up his dull and blocky counterpart a hundred times over.

In fact, for ten tiny minutes, Sprout finds a way to kick the ass out of Let’s Go Eat The Factory. He still has a Peter Gabriel quality (which, fittingly, would make Pollard Phil Collins in this particular Greek tragedy) that gets him to making a track as creepy and nostalgia-manipulative as “Old Bones.” He can also still write the odd R.E.M. throwback track- the advantage here being that these are consequentially worthy GBV throwbacks- and so “Waves” propels ever forward like a sweet, twee moment amidst the joylessness of Robert Pollard’s falling over and getting up again. Those ten minutes are a welcome distraction, but they’re hampered regardless by the time Pollard spends on Let’s Go Eat The Factory stumbling over himself. He starts doing it literally enough by the time “Cyclone Utilities” has bumped by, but the dents in the road Pollard prides himself in are no longer the warped fantasies they were. I guess, really, it’s as simple as it not being 1993 anymore. “Go Rolling Home” and “The Room Taking Shape,” are typical GBV snippet songs, dedicated to using the hook once lest it be overused. It’s only that the hook doesn’t emerge for those thirty seconds, and as I get all clingy over indie rock for the umpteenth time, I just wish I could be moved by this.

As he stumbles from place to place thirty seconds at a time, I can’t help but feel Pollard is to blame for the devastating, non tear-jerker, non-anything of an album Let’s Go Eat The Factory ends up being. It looks into endless possibilities and takes twenty-one left turns in all, moving unexplained from eerie spoken word to dissonant piano play, and yet it plays out so predictable that Mitchell and Demos- surely innocent parties in all of this- are probably wondering when “Chicken Blows” is going to crack up the room. To be this predictable while moving with such stylistic abandon seems impossible. Hell, it was Guided By Voices who made it seem impossible in the first place; who could be boring with so much going on? On Let’s Go Eat The Factory, each stylistic move feels like a cheap gimmick, something Pollard would give over to an unexciting, unsurprising solo album. “The Big Hat and Toy Show” might sound like nothing else on Let’s Go Eat The Factory, but that does not make its inclusion worthy or daring. It makes the album feel like it was made in the dark with no understanding of how Bee Thousand got moody or how Alien Lanes embraced its flaws. Instead, the mood is uninterested and the flaw is shitty basslines.

I’m aware, of course, that Let’s Go Eat The Factory will be awesome and explainable to other GBV nerds, or if it isn’t- which is more likely- it won’t matter anyway. You can’t tarnish a legacy set in stone on its own merits (or in this band’s world, on quirks), a fact that Pollard has well enough proved without this record. I hated Space City Kicks, but it didn’t detract from my belief that Pollard is some brand of mad-scientist genius. And so all this might not speak with as much praise to Malkmus’ decision, because he might have fun with another Pavement record. That’s all Pollard is doing at the end of all this, even if it just seems like one ridiculous tease to the rest of us: to get the gang back together, to release your cult indie band’s first record in eight years, all of it for belly laughs aplenty. The LP comeback of Guided By Voices makes no difference, it won’t make any difference in the summer, and so it’s not on the scale of music’s biggest mistakes. It’s not a Metal Machine Music, but only because it’s too unremarkable. It’s not Chelsea Girl ruined by flutes, because Pollard wanted all those awful guitar noises. Here, instead, is a bad album not doomed to be one in history. It’s just a sludgy, grumpy record from a band who once knew pop music needed whimsy. Is it the classic line-up’s fault they aren’t all that classic anymore? Mainly, it’s just Pollard’s, Pollard with his grump on, stomping angrily on the status quo as Sprout outshines him in his ten minute segment. How dull, Bob. What a boring record, and what an indie mistake.

Guided By Voices – “Waves”

See larger image Let's Go Eat the Factory (Audio CD) List Price: $19.98 USD New From: $12.25 In Stock Used from: $23.90 In Stock Release date January 17, 2012.

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By Robin Smith, November 16, 2011 10:00 am

Atlas Sound – Parallax

4AD Records 2011

Rating: 6/10

Bradford Cox is more comfortable with the lights off. Parallax is proof of that; on the cover of Logos he was pictured faceless, but here he’s in the dark. It feels like a big statement to make- here is a man and his microphone, literally clutching to music- but it also seems like a resoundingly ambiguous one: is this image of Cox stepping out of the shadow, shedding the discomfort that’s put weight on songs like “Agoraphobia,” or is he hiding in it?

For all the ambiguity, Parallax feels like another hiding place. He circulates the happy piano notes of “Te Amo” as some whacky detour from the horrible conversation he is having with himself. Talk about misdirection: “you’re always down.” In a way, “Te Amo” is much like the angriest of Bob Dylan songs, a “Positively Fourth Street” or “Rolling Stone,” in how much of a contradiction it is. Like those songs, it’s practically glowing, the noises moving in a dreamy, euphoric sequence but the lyrics out of step, their delivery chilling and hell, even the distracting album artwork putting the lights out.

The fact that Cox can make a song like this is a testament to how intriguing his career is. Deerhunter could lend themselves Strokes comparisons and little else if it weren’t for the way Cox writes music as conflict. It’s hard to remember Halcyon Digest, a year on, in the way I thought of it then; thinking it was a ‘celebration’ sums up how easy it is to forget the depth in any of Cox’s Deerhunter songs, no matter how comfortable they feel as pop songs. “Coronado” was another one that glowed, but behind the slick sax solos there was a confused man of so many questions and so few answers. That’s the kind of thing that draws you in to the “catchy” Microcastle and Halcyon Digest- the little conflicts- and so how can we not be drawn into the dark spaces in Parallax?

And I certainly am drawn to Parallax. I find it impossible to stop coming back to “Te Amo” and its bittersweet flips of the coin, but at the same time I’m completely intrigued by how impossible Cox makes it to grasp at his intentions on “Modern Aquatic Nightsongs.” The difference, though, is split: “Te Amo” is a working pop song, but I’m not sure Cox wants that so much this time around. Logos had a melodic bent and exciting features that made every adoring indie fan giddy (Panda Bear, say no more), but Parallax is made in some sort of endless vacuum of nothing but Cox.

As a result, it might feel more like a proper album, and maybe even the “comfortable” album we’ve been waiting for Cox to make. But this is only an album in how impossible it is to appreciate out of its context. No “Angel is Broken,” no point in the comedown that follows it in “Terra Incognita.” As for the comfort Cox may have finally found in Parallax, he only finds it in the obscure, the impossible to describe, and the ever-moving. Parallax never stays in one place for too long, regardless of how pretty it remains throughout its entire run. There is no revealing the world behind “Praying Man” or “Parallax” in the same way “Coronado” revealed more than simply a pop genius. Instead, Parallax comes with its own set of intentions, and few of them feel for us.

And for that reason, that lack of inclusion, there’s no rating I can find to do Parallax justice. It feels like a wholly unique masterpiece in ways, perhaps because it is simply impossible to shut off- there’s no turning away from this aching, mysterious music, and even the most basic tracks feel justified by the ominous things happening around the corners. But coming off the open Halcyon Digest, Bradford Cox has turned sharply on his heels for a different type of honesty. And by no means think that because Cox obscures himself he must be disingenuous. That’s never been his problem. But Parallax, unrealised masterpiece or not, sounds like the man in his bedroom with a thousand songs to leave unexplained.

Atlas Sound – “Te Amo”

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By Robin Smith, November 1, 2011 10:00 am

Coldplay – Mylo Xyloto

Parlophone 2011

Rating: 8/10

Mylo Xyloto is perfectly designed to blow up in your face. Eleven proper songs, all named after the biggest and the best, like landmarks tumbling side by side: holy lands, flames, princesses, waterfalls and uh, Charlie Brown? Each song hits some sort of ridiculous climactic hotspot that seemed impossible the second before it happened. Just listen to “Every Teardrop is a Waterfall” the moment the drums kick in for real. It seems completely implausible that a song that started so big could become any bigger. It sounds like the exact Coldplay song that you want to get made over and over again, and for Mylo Xyloto, it finally gets made. It’s Coldplay at heart. Nothing strung together by flimsy concepts; no X axis and no Y axis, no violent Spanish conquests. It’s just huge.

In that sense, the record feels like “Fix You” eleven times, exploding from all sides. There’s something about that song that can easily hit at the gut, and it’s more about when that moment comes in than how, the organ-like sounds shuffling off stage for a climax made glorious by Will Champion’s drum-kit. On Mylo Xyloto, however, Coldplay don’t dedicate much time wondering when their songs will hit their glorious peaks, for this time they appear confidently boisterous, at large when they go in and larger when the drumbeat kicks. It’s a powerful thing, hearing a band this way, so it’s a moment such as “U.F.O.” that kills the record’s infinite momentum, putting a band that seems energized at all corners into a state of contemplation too reserved for the bright colours they’re splashing their graffiti with. Mylo Xyloto was not a record made by a subdued band, and so when this acoustic number creeps in- along with the restrictively controlled beats of “Up in Flames”- it feels like too much thought and not enough waterfall.

To hell with the contemplation; what makes this record so good is the complete abandonment of making Coldplay a leftfield band. Viva La Vida might have had us begging them to take us back- our very own Adam Downer complimented Coldplay for their ‘balls’, and later their guts- but Mylo Xyloto completely refuses the listener a moment alone with their brain in that way. There’s no time to be surprised by any experimental balls when “Hurts Like Heaven” strikes full force, no time to ponder where Eno weighs in on this one. Interludes aside, every song is designed to bash you over the head rather than to let you use it. Mylo Xyloto is a big, broad album, with songs founded on themes no less than the greatest conceivable. And who doesn’t fall for that Coldplay? I mean, it hurts like heaven? It’s us against the world? This is a Coldplay in their very own world. It’s huge and relentless, and they’re wrapped up in it.

It makes perfect sense, too, that they’re so wrapped up in it. Chris Martin can sing that every teardrop is a waterfall on any track he likes, and so when those lyrics come on “Paradise” for the first time, it doesn’t feel one bit phony. If anything, the lyrics flow; just as Arcade Fire could engross every song on The Suburbs in its theme- the same words for the same problems- Martin’s newest record (and first since his favourite band’s third) is a successfully didactic and direct body of work. The lyrical themes that circulate like a broken record on Mylo Xyloto may be the first poetic success of Martin’s; on any other Coldplay record, it might be hard to take a line like “you use your heart like a weapon / and it hurts like heaven” into the gut, but Mylo Xyloto isn’t trying to get under the surface. It’s just searching for the biggest reaction and the most fantastic feeling. Everything Martin says here, whether or not he says it over and over again, is justified by how every song on Mylo Xyloto pushes the same buttons. Every song aims to make a waterfall of a teardrop, so why can’t he say it over and over again?

It’s kind of great how at ease I find myself with a Coldplay that can be this repetitive and use the same trick a hundred times over. To hear Rihanna’s absolutely stunning performance on “Princess of China” isn’t a surprise because it simply bolsters the style Coldplay are playing with on this record. Her spot amplifies a song to heights it wasn’t already at, and that’s what Mylo Xyloto seeks in every move it makes forward. This is a Coldplay that wants to build and build to a point like “Fix You” over and over again, a Chris Martin who only cites influence in ideas as ambitious as graffiti and The Wire. The results don’t have to be the same as those things, and so it’s hard to get caught up in the trippy, colourful artwork that the record tries to reflect. Instead, we just bask in “Every Teardrop is a Waterfall,” a song splitting at the sides, huge from start to finish. “Turn the music up!” is Chris Martin’s command on Mylo Xyloto, and it’s probably the only lyric he’ll ever get us nodding to.

Coldplay – “Charlie Brown”

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By Robin Smith, September 13, 2011 10:00 am

St. Vincent – Strange Mercy

4AD 2011

Rating: 9/10

Since Annie Clark is such a one for contradictions, how about this one? Strange Mercy is, at the same time, her most shocking and most unsurprising record. I mean, it’s like she put the thing through a blender, but of course it’s like she put it through a blender. Who are we talking about? This is St. Vincent’s career, which has thus far has developed into a glowing success without daring adhere to the normal structure of indie pop. It’s much more sinister than that- Actor, as she put it herself, was influenced by fairy tales, but only in the wholly ***ed-up, completely backwards Hans Christian Andersen way that fairy tales get told. That’s what made “Black Rainbow” sound as if she was travelling the Yellow Brick Road backwards, arriving at the hurricane for her final scene. So yes, it’s shocking to hear her send the structure of a song a little awol, to watch as she twists a purdy scene into a terrifying one (“What Me Worry,” my goodness), but don’t tell me you aren’t waiting for Strange Mercy to hit that sludgy, disastrous moment.

I guess St. Vincent likes the little disasters as much as we do. I found myself doing a fair amount of eye-rolling the first time I played Strange Mercy, because you’re not waiting for long. In fact, Strange Mercy self-destructs within seconds; “Chloe In the Afternoon” is deliberately off-centre, its swampy guitar work giving more texture than melody (that’s a guitar?!) and Clark flat-out refusing to resolve her voice with the song’s rhythm, putting her words a literal second or two early, or maybe late. It’s hard to tell when the song ends sounding so completely whole. You can be just as well astonished by the same trick played on “Northern Lights,” where she pulls back the song, ready to thrust into full gear, for a kind of non-solo in which her guitar simply circulates a disgusting noise for a little while before releasing the song for a climax played straight. It’s one of those on-paper things, really: these little noises should be nothing more than plain ugly diversions from otherwise irresistible pop songs, but thrown into the middle of a song as simple as “Northern Lights,” doesn’t that sludgy patch sound sort of assured? It’s like a signature, that squiggly, atonal moment of nothing, whether it stands out as surreally as it does here, or whether it marks the heavy chorus of “Cheerleader.”

Even if Strange Mercy is like a blender with its top blown off, it’s undeniable how convincing St. Vincent has become. Actor was produced to be almost suffocating, and as a result had songs that felt compressed in sound and time. Her third record feels like an attempt to remould Actor with all the space in the world. It continues to merge together two atmospheres, one eerie and the other distinctly vintage, and as a result songs like “Surgeon” ooze with the confidence of a musician who knows her own game. The intro of “Surgeon” echoes Nancy Sinatra’s ‘60s Bond tune, “You Only Live Twice,” but is only there long enough for the song to become too warped for this pleasant nostalgia (“best find a surgeon / come cut me open”). It’s a testament to Clark’s songwriting skills how we are forced to note both of these atmospheres colliding.

For a record that’s so deliberately messy, it’s nice to note that Strange Mercy says that nothing’s so cut up it can’t be fixed. “Strange Mercy,” the record’s title track, is as scattered as the record itself, the drum beat a little out of the way, but it feels like one of the most sincere pieces of music in St. Vincent’s short career. It’s devoid of any theatrics and awarded more space than she has given to any other song, only indulging a climax for seconds where a lesser musician would need minutes. The song reaches, of course, the moment it has to reach- it has to be contradictory, as unsettling as it is beautiful- but I like to think there’s no line in Clark’s career that can be as brilliantly sweet as this one. “If I ever meet the dirty policeman who roughed you up / I don’t know what.” Not that it even ends up meaning anything, but it acts as a summation of what Strange Mercy is concerned with- both the shocking and the comforting, always at the same time, always nothing less than beautiful, even if things have to get a little ugly.

St. Vincent – “Cheerleader”

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By Robin Smith, August 10, 2011 10:00 am

The War on Drugs – Slave Ambient

Secretly Canadian 2011

Rating: 9/10

I can call Slave Ambient rain music and not feel bad about it. Unlike the kind of music you’d usually tag for the rain, the sad stuff, it is a completely drenched record, taking its worn lyrics and pouring down on them. The War on Drugs has, in this sense, always been an intriguing band, able to do more than simply complement their lyrics with music. As musicians, they know the themes they sing inside-out, ready to take the Americana influences they have and invert them with all things “shoegaze.” They add in harmonica for good measure, but be it one genre or the other, The War on Drugs, and Slave Ambient in particular, is the work of a band already perfectly in control of itself, and so early in their career. They know how their music sounds, and I guess it sounds like it’s pouring.

Still, beyond that, it’s hard to write about this band. And I guess that’s because there’s no “angle” to write from. In one corner, they have a master-class lyricist, able to reflect with the pen as jumpily and worryingly as “wondering where my friends are going / and wondering why they didn’t take me” and then throw the line away. Granduciel’s lyrics always carry an indescribable kind of tone which can only really be called self-kicking, but even if this kind of lyric seems simple, no one else could write it, or sing it, in the way he does. He waves away the deprecating lyrics of “Brothers” so easily, and the music around it- the album’s second corner- refuses to play in any higher ground. The music on Slave Ambient moulds songs to feel perfectly for an atmosphere that plays on a hundred little details at once. That’s why there are only eight actual songs on this album, because the guys in the War on Drugs are so obsessed with the details and so ready to leave them their space.

I could talk about both the lyrics and music separately, of course, because they’re both such brilliant aspects for one band to have, but what would be the use in that? There’s no moment in Slave Ambient better than the opener “Best Night” to prove the point that without one the other wouldn’t exist: without the music tracing the words around it, the guitar notes copying Granduciel’s singing, the distortion drenching every moment, there would be nothing that makes the War on Drugs as brilliant as they are. You listen to every moment of Slave Ambient, the part where he sings “wondering where my friends are going” and every noise, big and small, that deals with the thought.

As a result, Slave Ambient is an album you play loud. The War on Drugs have, until now, been a very meandering band, with songs such as “A Pile of Trees” moving through eight minutes of what felt like improvisation, or else “Arms Like Boulders” mouthing off to cover a half-constructed song. Here, there’s a pattern set. And it’s a pattern so strong that every tiny moment counts: a song such as “My Love Is Calling Your Name” is impossible to appreciate quiet because of the layers the War on Drugs now lace it with, nearly all of them created with an assortment of clashing guitar noises. It is impossible to be distracted from the music by Granduciel’s lyrical mumblings either, so where the ambiance would take the centre-stage before this album, or, if not the ambiance, the lyrics, Slave Ambient moves the song with the pattern. As a result, “My Love Is Calling Your Name” feels connected with a song twenty minutes away from it. The flow is that good; sometimes I forget if I’m listening to “The Animator” or its actual song counterpart, “Come To the City.” And then things get going. Granduciel’s lyrics start thrusting the song forward. The noises twist the Americana around and around.

It’s so strange to think of this record as the band’s second. Slave Ambient is the work of a confident band and an articulate lyricist, both who always seemed so on their first record but never really cared. Here, they seem to know where everything goes, and it’s as if they always did but never really felt the need for things to fit. Now they’re ready to put it all together. The melodies on Slave Ambient know when it’s their turn. So does the noise. Granduciel knows where to kick himself. Slave Ambient is the work of a band making us listen for every piece of them. And it drizzled a little while I wrote this. So I played it loud. And I heard everything.

The War on Drugs – “Best Night”

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By Robin Smith, June 27, 2011 11:00 am

Alvarius B. – Baroque Primitiva

Abduction Records 2011

Rating: 7/10

Last year, the Sun City Girls name was respectfully put to bed by the Bishop brothers by the way of Funeral Mariachi, a record of material pulled from an archive so big that it reaches beyond whatever planet it might turn out the trio were channelling. It felt fitting that this material was taken from work done with member Charles Goscher before his early passing, but it serves as a reminder of this trio as the unstoppable force of the avant-garde, not only when they existed- Funeral Mariachi itself weird as ever, a crossover record of film tributes, world guitar music and language games- but also beyond. The experimental treasures to be found in the ridiculous amount of their recordings will live on, embodied in that final record, and while bands such as King Crimson may live in their different setups forever, Sun City Girls will remain the Bishops and their friend Goscher, immortal in their ability to fuck with the minds of those who let them and immortal for the depths of exploration they did in their thirty odd years. It was weird, cultish and mystical- at times, it was disgusting poetry, at others it was world music played as if by aliens. Most of the time it was a lot of fun and all of the time it was really freaky. And boy was it endless.

But while Sun City Girls were either musically demented or poetically disturbing on any given day, Baroque Primitiva, the second record of Alan Bishop’s Alvarius B., takes the alien nature out of the world-music tribute and strips down the lyric to no more than the noises you can make with your tongue. So “Naturally Absolute” feels a lot less avant-garde while still being layered beyond belief and constructed of complex guitar patterns that would’ve messed with your head if they were on, oh, say, 330, 003 Crossdressers From Beyond the Rig Veda. Here, they’re welcoming, and the track at least sounds stripped to its core, leaving it meditative and listenable as an emotional piece for the less weird moments in life. The dah-dums might take you by surprise, which is not to say that Sun City Girls weren’t a laugh riot in their time- they mucked around with the avant-garde music they would later become heralded for, and as a result there wasn’t a second where Torch of the Mystics was gloomy- but the Alvarius B. project is the closest a member of the band has come to opening a dialogue with its listener. Bishop’s still fucking around, but as with “Naturally Absolute,” the music is softer, more reflective, and at the end of the day, nothing more than Alan Bishop playing chords on an acoustic guitar.

That, of course, fails to tell the whole story of Baroque Primitiva, which explores a whole lot of world music avenues. “Humor Police” is quickly paced psychedelic folk, and opening cover “Dinner Party” is a short exhibition of Spanish music. Both play in that slightly warped Sun City Girls way; the guitars are bent a little to the side in “Humor Police” and Bishop’s voice warbles unapologetically, but both still shed a little more joy than is to be expected. And where Baroque Primitiva really lets its guard down is on “God Only Be Without You,” a Beach Boys cover that finally gives indie fans the chance to apply the phrase “Beach Boys harmonies” to a band that wrote an album called Horse Cock Phepner. It is as it should be, warped beyond belief and with dissonance covering the little acoustic act of tribute below it. But regardless of the horns that eventually start blaring over Brian Wilson’s love song, it ends Baroque Primitiva as sweet and silly even when it puts up its avant-garde disguise. And what about that James Bond cover? This Sun City Girl is having a lot of fun writing three minute acoustic songs and reinterpreting the classics into a world setting, and while it’s coming across a lot more accessible to its audience here, it’s heartening that Sun City Girls remain forever a force, immortal beyond their name. And it’s nice that they give us a smile now and then.

Alvarius B. – “The Dinner Party”

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By Robin Smith, June 14, 2011 12:00 pm

Okkervil River – I Am Very Far

Jagjaguwar 2011

Rating: 8/10

It’s not healthy listening to Okkervil River. We can heap all the praise we want on them for their lyrical depth, we can crown Will Sheff as the wordsmith and world-weary analyst he most certainly is, but at the end of the day you’re listening to some fucked up stuff. A track like “Westfall,” featured on what is essentially a break-up album from a man of literature, cuts through the treacle of silly words like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and instead just says “when I killed her / it was so easy that I wanted to kill her again,” with a horrible shrug to its audience. And it’s not that he always writes tracks with the same shrug, nor the same psychotic theme, but they always come with the same damaging, scary obsession. The suicide of Tim Hardin, chronicled in the dark spaces of Black Sheep Boy, is a terrifying look at Sheff reflecting how his hero has messed him up, and that the record starts with a cover of Hardin’s famous folk loner-anthem is enough to take the myth and make it real, the album concluded with a song just as bottomless as painful in “A Glow,” but coming from Sheff himself. That’s why it’s bizarre to call these records ‘concept albums’ when Sheff is deconstructing his themes so horribly, as if they weren’t so much concepts as Sheff’s reality. It’s the same with The Stage Namesand The Stand-Ins, supposed twin albums that don’t pretend to be from our world but become just as human when Sheff demystifies all the actors, all the porn-stars and pop rockers in the world and kicks them off their pedestal. But what’s scariest about Black Sheep Boy, about The Stand-Ins and so on, is that Sheff dives at these tragic themes and legends like he needs them- “I need a myth,” indeed. Tim Hardin and all the rock stars on rockaway beach are myths made real. Hasn’t he always needed one?

But I Am Very Far is more our myth than his. Sheff stated upon the records announcement that he was apprehensive to tell us what those four words meant for fear of taking what was mysterious out of his record. He told us that he wasn’t making music to please but rather taking it down any route that best interested him. And that explains a lot of why the avenues of I Am Very Far are so perplexing; the record isn’t the kind of thing you crack, and not just at first; I’ve spent a good month trying to work out what I make of these eleven songs, and even with a hundred listens there’s little reveal. It feels harder than ever to tell what Sheff is thinking, more so than on his most fucked up travels: “Westfall” was a disturbing track, but it was distinctly obvious what Sheff was saying because it was storytelling. Here, however, Sheff’s music feels a hundred times veiled, comprised of abstract non-stories told by a hundred characters making not one moment of sense. That’s probably why “Piratess” takes an old fan-favourite, “Murderess,” and recreates it as some sexy disco song, taking whatever Big Star folk vibe it had and simply murdering it. “Piratess” now twinkles with electric guitar riffs, moves with the pulse of a bass guitar, and plays with a completely different Sheff at its centre, no longer wailing like a man lost at his pirate-laden sea. It no longer feels like a story at all, focused on its weirder groove, with its obsession to be what Sheff called the “sexiest Okkervil River song ever.” There are hand-claps. Hand-claps!

This is very much the way of I Am Very Far. It packs an astonishing amount of things unheard of in an Okkervil River album. “We Need a Myth” feels lyrically impossible to grasp at, Sheff fending off listeners with his big-band to the left and right, forty nylon string guitars in as many hands. But it’s kind of glorious watching the rise and fall of these theatrics. No track in Okkervil River’s discography has ever quite been captured like any of the eleven here, none go off the deep end as much as “We Need a Myth” does in every second of its existence, dressed up as it may be. It bears down on us in a way that this band never used to do as a folk or rock outfit, but you’ve never heard Sheff care as much as he does here. “Hanging Like a Hit” starts clashing together with a similar indescribable need for something that simply becomes documented by noise. Stories that Sheff just started throwing filing cabinets across the room as he recorded don’t feel unfounded at all: it’s all explosions on I Am Very Far. They’re what translate the record named on an expression we don’t understand. It’s the huge, amplified moments in “Wake and Be Fine,” and the chaotic, Arcade Fire-big “White Shadow Waltz” that makes I Am Very Far. It’s the last fifty seconds of “Lay of the Last Survivor” that is everything about this record, with Sheff singing every word like it’s escaping from his gut. I Am Very Far is huge, but not because it disguises itself like “Piratess” might have you think. It feels like a complete emotional release, and even if we understand zero of it, Sheff’s not hiding.

In fact, for those of us waiting for Sheff’s moment as himself rather than the archivist, as someone who just writes the typically personal singer-songwriter album, we surely have it in I Am Very Far. This is the record where Will Sheff stops talking about all of the rock stars he wanted to talk about before, regardless of the odd cryptic lyric, and talks in the first person. And to get that, you need this big-band Okkervil River- it’s not about forgetting how emblazed everything sounds or forgetting the big-band theatrics booming on the twenty-billionth stanza of “We Need a Myth.” These things all feel crucial to how Sheff would write his manic version of For Emma, Forever Ago. He works backwards, brings in ten times the number he needs and creates a record that pummels us to pieces on every note. With more people than ever factoring into his work, Sheff creates the record that feels the most wholly his own.

On “Show Yourself,” a track that supposedly meandered for eight minutes in its first incarnation, Sheff uses all the song’s twists and turns to anchor himself at the centre, eventually shedding the songs unfathomably huge build to fall into the record’s most revealing (and most poetic) moment: “There is no one there to help you there is no one there to hold you / let it go. I’ve felt enough, can’t really feel it anymore.” At this point it feels obvious what I Am Very Far is about: it lets go of the smoky barrooms other people got drunk in and Sheff wrote about and creates something that looks inward. Regardless of who it is we’re looking inward at, Sheff has taken away what was grounded in his older personal songs such as “Calling and Not Calling My Ex” and instead created something impenetrable and abstract. That, I feel, is what Sheff was hitting at when he said he was making music he was interested in without a care for accessibility and understanding in the world. I Am Very Far is a record by a folk musician but without folk. It’s by a storyteller telling no stories. And yet it stands to be the material most reflective of its artist, an album that in years will surely be seen as his most personal and most misunderstood, because what is there to understand in this record? I Am Very Far is Okkervil River’s most mysterious moment, just as fucked up as Black Sheep Boy or The Stage Names but not chasing after another name. I Am Very Far indeed, whatever that means.

Okkervil River – “Piratess”

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By Robin Smith, June 2, 2011 11:00 am

Chad VanGaalen – Diaper Island

Sub Pop 2011

Rating: 8/10

Chad VanGaalen comes to us with an air of mystery. His hand in producing Women’s Public Strain helped disguise a record of conflict we only got revealed when the lyrics jumped out of line, and in his career as a composer his music has been no easier to take in. “Willow Tree,” a track that dealt with dark metaphors of death and the afterlife, was played jubilantly on banjo and sung halfway between melancholy and joy: “And when I die / I’ll hang my head beside the willow tree.” It remains perhaps his most beautiful achievement in song writing, but it makes an example of a lot of the quirks found in VanGaalen: he haunts us, dazzles us, jokes with us, and at the end of the day can’t sacrifice any of those things for the other. Hence “Shave My Pussy,” right? It sounds like a joke, but if that track didn’t haunt and dazzle in equal measure, it wouldn’t be the closer to Diaper Island.

But while VanGaalen has always been brilliantly diverse like that, able to take “Willow Tree” and make it horrifically bittersweet, what is so confrontational about Diaper Island (aside from that it’s called Diaper Island) is his ability to compress his diversity into this one little style. By creating an album that revolves around nothing more than coarse, often tuneless guitar work and those hopeless lyrics, VanGaalen has every song carry the weight of “Heavy Stones” or “Sara,” or even the whacky “Can You Believe it!?” Creating such a tightly-knit record is a simple style a myriad of singer-songwriters have lived by, and in that sense Diaper Island feels just as uncompromising, if in a different way, as the equally miserable Blood on the Tracks.

There’s a lot to be said of the ugliness that plays through Diaper Island, a record that VanGaalen seems to have designed around angularity. Whereas Infiniheart and Soft Airplane sprawled through folk touchstones and warped electronic sounds at the same time, his fourth record feels constantly tied to its gritty atmosphere, able to rock out on “Freedom for a Policeman” with the same tone of bitterness that comes on a track as bare and miserable as “Heavy Stones.” And a little more on “Heavy Stones,” a track that sounds like both a surf-rock b-side for Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” and a tensely obscured Public Strain number: it takes the angular nature of Diaper Island and says something that doesn’t even sound sweet in a tragic singer-songwriter way. The lyrics, instead, are shapeless: “lately, you’ve been some other thing.” Strange, then, that lines this vague could contribute to the least mysterious Chad VanGaalen record yet, a record able to look directly to its audience in spite of its burial in guitar noise and lo-fi production.

“Shave My Pussy” stands to be misunderstood as both an outrageous suggestion and a dumb joke, but what it carries with it is the same weight “Heavy Stones” did earlier on: “maybe if I shave my pussy then you’ll love me, baby will you love me? / I’m really feeling ugly.” The line is, against all odds, more heart-breaking than hilarious. It’s another declaration like the one on “Sara” to not be left behind, or the lament that he’s been waiting forever on “Wandering Spirits.” Diaper Island isn’t about taking these moments and pointing at them for how bizarre they are, hence why VanGaalen sings the lines of “Shave My Pussy” so straight-faced, and for that reason his fourth record isn’t ugly itself. It certainly thinks about ugliness and waits on it with all the honesty with which VanGaalen can deliver lines about his hypothetical pussy, but the music VanGaalen makes isn’t as ugly as it feels it is, is only vague if vagueness can touch you, and is only ghostly if we’re all having the same warped hallucinations our songwriter is. Diaper Island is a very open wound, and those who listen won’t have to seek it out.

Chad VanGaalen – “Sara”

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By Robin Smith, May 5, 2011 10:00 am

The Dodos – No Color

Frenchkiss 2011

Rating: 9/10

As far as titles go, No Color really sucks. Who wants to see the Dodos in black and white and grey? The Dodos are all about the beating of the drum and the slips and tangles they get us lost in, so to take away that vibrancy, that spring in their step, is to create something out of the space this duo occupy. Even if you locked these guys in a room and set them to task with a strict slow-jams policy, you’d get the hung-up, devastatingly sad sounds of the Dodos- a track as crushing as “Winter” is a product of its band, a product of Visiter, a track in which Kroeber thumps at his kit like he’s teasing his other half to put more into it. Which, by the way, he actually is: there’s life and colour enough even for a track as cold as “Winter,” and it ends up as a minor moment played fast and loose. So it kind of feels like there’s no place for a Dodos who dress in gothic shades when they can do it all playing their own game. Which is all the colours of the rainbow, or something.

But really No Color suggests a different incarnation of the same band behind Visiter. That album really was ridiculous, which is where a lot of its appeal lies: it carried great emotional weight on its back (“Undeclared,” obviously), and it explored it so intensely that everything came out. At fourteen songs, Visiter was the Dodos in pursuit of every little thing, and it suited a band so frantic. It was a real rabbit-chase of an album, moving from one moment into the next completely unrelated one, from the quickie in “Eyelids” to “Fools,” from the album’s most chaotic track (“Joe’s Waltz,” chock full of dissonant piano and folk-punk duets) to, well, “Winter.” It was a mess from a band without an editor, and how could it have been any other way? Most bands would’ve realised that two songs as heavy-hearted as their last couple on that album shouldn’t sit together, but Long and Kroeber seemed to know exactly where the peaks and valleys of Visiter should’ve been.

And man was it wild, so where do the Dodos go from there? Their next two records have been nine tracks a piece, which seems both a statement of shortness and a wish to fragment things just a little less. It’s an album length so abrupt it sort of harkens back to how mad the whole Visiter thing was. And what is so great about No Color is that it unravels the crazy patterns in the Dodos’ sound in a completely different way. It allows them to discover what they can do with their songs rather than what their songs can do to their album. That’s what’s so supposedly uncolored about this cheekily titled album: it’s the same Dodos, silly, but one treating every song like its own moment, which is why even if “Black Night” flows into “Going Under” as well as anything on a prog-rock album, the explosion between the two isn’t laboured over. Nor is it some crazy transition- instead we can talk about what the songs do. “Black Night” feels as pushy as any Dodos track, moving from its steady tempo into a sudden twist in pace that opens the album with a fresh energy. “Going Under” sounds more than ever like the band trying to glue two different songs together, but it makes sense to have these moments together because emotionally, they’re within touching distance. And a nine-track Dodos album with “Good” on it? I guess this structure frees up the band in ways we never knew, because those guitar riffs fume forward out of the indie-folk and thrust the band ever forward through their song.

It saddens me to hear it said that No Color throws itself in with Time To Die and rests firmly on the laurels that the Dodos have earned. We can accuse the duo of playing the same card a hundred times over, or that this sound comes with its territory (you can only bang on a drum so many times), but No Color goes deep into emotional places the Dodos have never expressed so well. Much in the same vein as the sad-saps behind that new Fleet Foxes record, tracks jump out that sound wholly new for the Dodos because they look at a different feeling. It seems hard to think that the Dodos could pull of a track with all the desperation “Hunting Season” carries in 2008, with this crafty, silly musical style they play. Nor do I think it’s possible that we’ve seen them repeat a thing with “Companions,” a track that refuses to sacrifice that same style but is somehow the most downbeat we’ll ever see it. More so than “Winter” for sure, because it doesn’t give us the band upfront. And there’s something to be said of the record’s centrepiece, “Don’t Try And Hide it,” which brings indie superstar Neko Case aboard for a folksy anthem in-between that doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. It’s complex stuff for a band who used to simply express themselves, and do so a lot- it’s Long and Kroeber looking at everything in a little more depth, and giving everything a little more time. And so once more, the Dodos feel fresh, a little bit more thoughtful, and every bit as happy to get us tangled up in ourselves. Of course there’s color to No Color. It’s just this time there’s black and white and grey as well- colors they’ve never used before.

The Dodos – “Black Night”

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By Robin Smith, April 12, 2011 8:00 am

Vivian Girls – Share the Joy

Polyvinyl 2011

Rating: 8/10

With the rest of Share the Joy still to come, “The Other Girls” raises some serious questions about Vivian Girls. Or maybe it just makes us smirk- a line as forward as “I don’t wanna be like the other girls” spouted first-thing on the newest record from one of many fuzz-pop, all-female bands is gonna do just that, isn’t it? It feels sort of like a direct nod to all the stuff that went down last year in this genre, whether it was Dum Dum Girls, Best Coast or the ever-boyish Wavves, like an adamant refusal to be tagged in a genre where it’s becoming all too easy to be one or another.

It reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend who asked me, “why Vivian Girls? They’re women!” and, well, you can imagine how I rose my all too indie eyebrow and responded no, Women released Public Strain. Not that I lent that record to explain, but this outburst of geekery is the sad truth; all this fuzzy stuff got more and more diluted to the point where we forgot where Vivian Girls stood. Their last studio album surfaced just as the fuzz-revival craze well and truly hit off, and with that little teasing line kick-starting their time in 2011, it feels foolish to forget how Vivian Girls are kind of seniors in this genre. As much as one can be a senior after three years of records, right?

Even if, in all honesty, they don’t act like seniors. Nor do they seem to dislike any of the bands around them the way “The Other Girls” might imply on paper. The song is nothing but pleasant, and more so because it doesn’t have any of the biting noise we’d get with Vivian Girls or Everything Goes Wrong. It sounds as it should: a nice way of the trio announcing that there can be a song like “Where Do You Run To” without the stigma that surrounds it. “The Other Girls” is a relief to anyone who couldn’t quite get to grips with Vivian Girls in 2008/9 respectively, because it takes what we always knew about them- that they love girl group pop and punk, and know how to play both- but doesn’t force us to extract from the fuzz.

Share the Joy is all about taking those albums and fleshing them out into a classic one- they can jam for three minutes in the middle of this song and keep us happily engaged in the record because it’s giving us breathing space. It’s still carried by its insistence, something the Vivian Girls have always had in their music on their first two records- that belief that they’re making whatever noisy songs they want and you can decipher the pop hooks if you must- but this time it comes from melody rather than disguise. It may have taken us our sweet time to hear how well the voices of Cassie Ramone and Katy Goodman complemented each other on “Such a Joke,” but here their interplay is instantly brilliant and something to keep. On “The Other Girls” they work together perfectly, and they always have, but now we have their voices upfront. And that’s to say nothing of that opening line in “I Heard You Say.”

Not that ditching this side of themselves does any disrespect to fellow lo-fi-beach-pop-what-have-you-punk bands, and in a way Vivian Girls do a bit of catching up on Share the Joy. It’s great to see the trio open and bookend this record with the two longest tracks ever to grace a Vivian Girls studio album, “The Other Girls” loose and with none of the claustrophobia the trio’s lightning pace brings, and “The Light in Your Eyes” which propels the record outward in grand fashion. But through it all Vivian Girls retain what is raw in their music and reinforce that their signature sound is recognisable for more than just bedroom fidelity. These tracks are inherently Vivian Girls even within the record’s newfound structure; “Dance (If You Wanna),” so light-hearted it may well be the indie Safety Dance cover, and “Lake House,” an old live number, so brilliantly pushy with its punchy verses and Campbell’s forward-motion drumming. Vivian Girls have lost nothing of what made them pop stars of static two years ago- they haven’t lost the grunge in their guitar, they can still hand out sweet dating advice- they’ve just lost the static.

I can see a whole lot of dejected indie fans turning off “The Other Girls” before its first sixteen seconds fade away. With six minutes of this song still to come, the pocket of useless noise feels taunting- like a tongue-in-cheek response to the less tongue-in-cheek cry of “not this again!” when someone hears a band recommended in lieu of Crazy For You or Rip It Off. Or worse yet, it might feel like Vivian Girls are just picking up straight where they left off the rumbling ending of Everything Goes Wrong two years ago- they sound ready to go full circle with another round of noisy pop shorts. But if you get past this wall of noise, only bothering to burden Share the Joy for a freaky sixteen seconds, you’ll find a record contained within its little motto, the noise dropped, the joy shared tenfold, the delightful “Dance (If You Wanna)” circling our heads, encouraging us with a smile. “The Other Girls,” no, Share the Joy is about remembering all things Vivian Girls, passionate as ever, more themselves than they’ve ever been.

Vivian Girls – “Dance (If You Wanna)”

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By Robin Smith, March 17, 2011 11:37 am

The Strokes – Angles

RCA 2011

Rating: 6/10

Let’s just look at this whole “angles” thing for a second. The big idea circling this record is its totally collaborative nature: this is the most boldly Julian Casablancas has stressed that he is not the Stroke but one of five, to the point where the album has even been named after its group mentality and the guy to explain that to us was Albert Hammond, Jr., who until now sort of felt like Casablanca’s second-in-command simply because he had two solo albums and a jewfro under his belt. And I guess, also, because he was the second Stroke to get a writing credit with “Automatic Stop,” a track that slotted right into the band’s canon on Room on Fire, shuffling along unnoticed after “Reptillia” injected some venom into the aftermath of their debut. Angles, however, is said by Hammond to come “from five different people,” and while Hammond’s a good start, that’s a whole lot of writing credits.

But those of us who haven’t recognised the song-writing assets of these other Strokes understate how much Casablancas has, perhaps less pointedly, welcomed his friends in the past. Valensi, Fraiture and Moretti all had their own places on the latter half of First Impressions of Earth, and the record went downhill for it: critics told us “Ask Me Anything” was the Strokes’ worst song ever, bemoaned the repetitive, gloomy “Killing Lies” and sort of just downright ignored “Evening Sun.” Instead they talked about the songs that frontloaded the record, three singles in all, and made the point that the spirit waned as Casablancas did. So it’s kind of admirable that Angles brings these guys back, one record after that ‘disaster’, one by one, five approaches in all.

So Angles is very much an album made for a story. First Impressions of Earth dangled The Strokes off the edge in a way that Room on Fire refused to do and its reception was lukewarm in a way that you wouldn’t normally expect from fans and critics alike- no cheering for their ambitious moment, instead cries that this wasn’t where the Strokes should go (or, rather, they shouldn’t go too far from Is This It?) with their music. Angles, then, not only has to apologise for First Impressions, it also has to do it by being inherently characteristic of the Strokes. All five of them.

And in that way, it fails: this isn’t just ‘a return to basics’ because it is pointed so many different ways, and the Strokes only used to point towards one. Is This It? offered eleven near-identical tracks of garage-pop, a few chords thrown into each one for rhythm and an occasional smoky solo to break up the choruses. Angles is so-called because it carries five people’s worth of ideas. Compare Valensi’s “Machu Picchu,” which sounds like the Clash should’ve in the ‘80s, with Fraiture’s grungy, sinister “You’re So Right,” the exact song you’d expect the guy behind “Killing Lies” to create: it has none of what we’d recognise from the Strokes, none of the guitar interplay which Hammond and Valensi would normally cook up together, which is why it takes us aback as much as it does. And then look at “Metabolism,” a track more suited to the evil fucks behind “Heart In A Cage.” And then remember that “Games,” electro-pop as cute as anything from Casablanca’s smooth solo album, also features. Nope, this isn’t “Last Nite” another ten times.

That might get you down. Angles might well be the same old Strokes on the inside, but it’s the shine on the outside that makes them almost unrecognisable at times. This is the first time the Strokes feel really, truly impenetrable. They come from a distance on “Two Kinds of Happiness,” which feels obscure, produced in such a way that makes it kind of hard to grasp at the guys who made it: it fades in and out, builds to momentous, ever-building choruses, and plays that trick to its death. “Games,” too, feels like a Strokes number specifically deconstructed into the opposite, the guitar replaced for a synthesized sound that does the same job, but without that home comfort, without those chords, with efficient drum machines instead of the slick Moretti. That last guitar bit just reminds us who it is we’re listening to, and how at home they usually make us feel. Not that it’s bad for these guys to challenge us, but Angles is so diverse that “Games” is almost a mistake rectified by the uncompromisingly Strokes-y “Gratisfaction.”

For those of us sort of wondering if the Strokes would still be for us ten years on, it plays heavily on what we saw in them anyway. Did we see five guys in jackets who made those bouncy songs that were probably about sex (as if we were listening to lyrics)? Or did we see a little more in them than that, be it the music or the words or just the sadder tones they carried with the weight of growing up? In short, what the hell is Angles to us- is it the first/second record or the third?

To which the answer is all of the above and more. There’s obviously no room for “Games” on any of those records, because the Strokes never wrote the soundtrack to Q-Bert before now. But there’s obviously a place for “Under Cover of Darkness” to rest on Is This It?, a track that rolls about with the persona of a showy, silly rock-group just like the Strokes were at the turn of the millennium. It’s an achievement, eleven years on, that each member is on the same page, perhaps not in terms of what music they like (as the record as a whole is, yeah, it’s out of whack at its best), but in terms of how well they know each other. “Under Cover of Darkness” is seamless work from its collaborators and boundless fun for the fans who’ll love it for its hooks and embrace it for what Casablanca calls its “cheesy” storyline. There’s a lot of fun to be had with Angles, be it as a throwback or as the jump off the edge where First Impressions was too scared.

And, then, in final breath moment, there’s “Life Is Simple in the Moonlight,” a track penned by Casablancas in solidarity, which throws us straight off again. If anything, this track takes up the foundations First Impressions left, making a full product of the drunken, late-night “15 Minutes,” treading the same waters in which Casablancas battles sadness with celebration. Neither is definitive: the record finishes with those rollicking, playful cries of “don’t try and stop me!” but the build-up is so pensive, so First Impression Strokes. With “Life Is Simple,” Angles ends in a horribly frustrating manner, with none of the assurance of “Take it or Leave It” or “Red Light.” No, Angles, even in ending with its strongest song, dies the way it lived: in sheer ambiguity. Forget the ‘return to basics’: the promise the Strokes made true on was that whole “angles” thing. Vintage Strokes, newer Strokes, Strokes from the future, and each member of the Strokes. And so the question really remains, among all this confusion: which angle do you like best?

The Strokes – “Gratisfaction”

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By Robin Smith, February 24, 2011 8:00 am

Julianna Barwick – The Magic Place

Asthmatic Kitty 2011

Rating: 8/10

The Magic Place does little to take back Julianna Barwick’s sound as it was on Sanguine and Florine- it’s still very much a story told by her voice- but here it sounds closer to us and in a way, more serious. It’s easy to see a criticism of The Magic Place will be that it seems out of Barwick’s control most of the time, or that she lets her choral work drone beyond its end, but really, it’s the first of her records to lay down markers. That’s to do no disrespect to the beauty ofSanguine, a record that reflected the strengths in her (reverb-drenched) a’capella, but a record as endless as that became less about giving her ideas space and more about using all of them- “Scary Cat,” a freak out worthy of Animal Collective, came out of no where and took away what was so powerful about hearing this voice. This time around, however, Barwick’s music always hits. “White Flag,” the records centrepiece, not only feels like the highpoint of Barwick’s career in terms of composition and structure, but also benefits emotionally from it; the warm bass tones that shake around her voice add feeling through control. The song becomes bigger with these markers because Barwick is let loose better when her voice has something to react to, and it does- the layered vocals become thicker, more passionate, and this warmth fills your speakers.

That’s something that would’ve escaped her before, perhaps, but as The Magic Place moves onward, Barwick seems to know where her warmth comes from and never attempts to re-create it. Instead, she lets her voice feel and flow as it so wishes while her newfound ability to construct fills the edges around this ambience. The balance never tips one way or the other, with “Vow,” the instant fallout from “White Flag,” one example. The best of the album is here accepted in “White Flag,” and so her layered vocals continue to act as a focus, descending from the record’s peak with sprinkled piano notes and the continued comfort of that thick bass. And perhaps that’s what’s so recognisable about The Magic Place, that by making “White Flag” her focus, Barwick has found a professional side, one where a record is created to consciously engage with its listener, building in its heady emotion for its first four tracks and bowing out just as touchingly with its other half. “Vow,” “Bob in Your Gait” and “Prizewinning” all hold their own as pieces, with the latter even exploding before the record’s end, but they share pattern that recognises the gorgeous record Barwick is trying to make around “White Flag,” her cornerstone. The rise and fall of The Magic Place feels patient and planned.

Still, it feels a little silly to say all this of The Magic Place when it’s really a record about a voice. It’s Barwick’s most evocative instrument, one that sparkly piano notes can only help fill the room for, and one with which she diminishes too many comparisons to Panda Bear and other leftfield pop musicians. The voice she’s spoken of as being at one with “church music” carries the record, resonating in each layer she adds; at times she’ll puncture with it (“Keep Up The Good Work”) and at others she’ll use it as something anthemic, recognising the beauty her chorus makes in (to say yet more of the record’s masterpiece) “White Flag.” On the record’s final track, “Flown,” she returns to the basics, letting her voice alone carry The Magic Place to its end. And that about sums up what this record does best: it allows us to celebrate Barwick’s voice from all corners, using its structure and professionalism to keep her greatest instrument doing what it does best. At its loudest and quietest, The Magic Place uses Barwick’s voice as the great emotional vehicle it is.

Julianna Barwick – “White Flag”