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By Robin Smith, May 15, 2012 10:00 am

mewithYou – Ten Stories

Pine Street 2012

Rating: 8/10

To start at the end of all stories, “All Circles” carries a quintessential mewithoutYou lyric executed like one of James Blake’s; it is a singular thought captured out of time, with its significance deemed only by itself. “All circles presuppose they’ll end where they begin but only in their leaving can they ever come back around, all circles presuppose.” That’s the kind of lyric that would be a connective piece amidst the narrative of any other mewithoutYou track, like something that jumps out half way through the story but sort of inadvertently lives in the shadow of the rest of the song. We’ve seen this in Weiss’ song writing over and over, in the bags of marijuana he left out on the track, or the money he gave reluctantly to the track, and all your favourites that seemed to fall out of line in their tracks only to be repaired later on. As a lyricist as obsessed with stories and fables as Weiss is, every lyric walks freely into the other and ties itself onto it in a moment of hypocrite bastadry, and yet what “All Circles” does with its words- the most “my brother and my sister don’t speak to me” of all lines- is have them in orbit for three minutes of repetition to create one of ten stories without ever telling it. As the music grows and grows before its simple climax, Weiss seems to be creating a song meant for a listen as instinctive as it is poetic.

“All Circles” may be my favourite mewithoutYou track of all time, which fills me with a shitonne of guilt because it replaces a song as contrastingly made as “The King Beetle On A Coconut Estate,” which is a descriptive song that delves the deepest Weiss has into storytelling. Regardless, “All Circles” is sold to me the way any track in the band’s career is; it’s a lyric that sounds placed above the melody, actually moving entirely to it. This is the only impulse I have to go on when it comes to mewithoutYou- the construction of their songs, with Weiss playing the narrator as the constant through what has become an expertly diverse career of punk-cores and psych folk- but no amount of time I pour into having an epiphany over the themes of Ten Stories, it will still seem, in many ways, the most at ease the band has been, even if it isn’t necessarily the happiest they’ve been. It flows between its stories with the confidence a band five albums in can afford, with the raucous “Grist For The Malady Mill” going tactful into the moody, crisp “East Enders Wives.” Or, if you’d prefer, “Nine Stories” and “Bears Vision” seem the same story separated for air. Whatever connection these songs make for you, it feels done so easily that an album could simply fall out of these guys.

Moments of this ease produce slabs of indie-rock proper for mewithoutYou, which is a first. “Cardiff Giant” is a twinkly alt-rock track, one entirely made out of guitar riffs and a conventional rock set-up, and it finds its way on the album neatly. And yet the confidence we hear on these new, simpler layers seem to do nothing to demystify Ten Stories, an album much like “All Circles”: never overtly explained, because you’d have to seek out the liner notes to know, really know, that a song on this album acts as an open dialogue about an owl and a walrus, with both parts read by Weiss. Ten Stories regains something cryptic through its words, which is what I’d guess it really shares with Catch For Us The Foxes. For another comparison, it feels as fabled as It’s All Crazy! but with its themes laid with less explicitly for the animal community: “Allah, Allah, Allah” is a very different look at religion from “Nine Stories,” which captures a desperation rather than the universal clarity of insisting “it’s alright!” in the face of spirituality. “Jacob knows a ladder you can climb” is not a lyric sang for joy, but for a different kind of impulse is captured entirely. Our own Channing Freeman noted that this album’s predecessor carried a solution to its own campfire problem: sing along, be happy, two things this album don’t quite entail in the same way- this is, I feel, a dark record, the stories in which Weiss’ animal kingdom gets put in trial and sentenced to hanging- but it remains the work of a band free of inhibition amidst all the soul-searching. In a moment of levity, however, Weiss draws his own comparison between this and the album that came before it, which is that the band will say what it wants to say, basically: “we’ll knead a bit of dough to get by.” Indeed? Ten Stories is at ease with its ambiguity and style-shifting.

And let’s not forget just how much a feat that is for a song writer who has been helplessly searching since day one. While I think I’ll never quite understand the madcap story behind Ten Stories, beyond the animals and the circus clown chilling in the corner, I don’t think I’ll ever forget just how circular mewithoutYou are being with it, right down to that amazing meta-inducing ending. “Only in their leaving can they ever come back ‘round” is a little line of self-help for Ten Stories, as it closes its album by going back to the start and thinking it all through again. Continuity is very much on the mind of this band through their albums, whether it lingers within the broad lyrical aphorisms- you’ll remember “I do not exist” in Brother Sister- or from album to album. You can call “February 1878” a whole song of its own, separate from “January 1979,” but both linger within the other. On Ten Stories, I think, there’s another chapter bring written about death from the breakdown on the railroad tracks; Weiss wonders if he’s “already died” on this album and doesn’t know, though some do, “no certainty exists.” What lingers in all mewithoutYou albums, and in the continuity of these two connective songs, is uncertainty, the thinking things through and coming back around. The way a thought changes in time: “sometimes I think all our thoughts are just things and then sometimes all our things are then thoughts.” And so yes, this is rather a traditional mewithoutYou album, because hasn’t that term moved beyond what musical styles they play in by now? It makes sense that “All Circles” is how it all closes out, with Weiss, as ever, instinctively working his way towards a thought, and with such absurd confidence that we would think he’d already arrived there. One would think he rather suits the concept-album. He kneads a good adventure, after all.

See larger image Ten Stories (Audio CD) List Price: $12.99 USD New From: $8.45 In Stock Used from: $9.78 In Stock Release date May 15, 2012.

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By Robin Smith, May 8, 2012 10:00 am

Best Coast – The Only Place

Mexican Summer 2012

Rating: 3/10

No matter how many times you say fun I still can’t have it. The Only Place feels like the greying out of Bethany Cosentino, the same sentiments she’s been pushing just rolling on to the next page, blowing through the streets, always the streets of California, like an endless gust of weed smoke. It is talking to the same people from the same couch as trashy TV rolls quietly and insignificantly in the background, thinking about fixing the same problems but clinging to them like little nuggets of meaning, pining over the same guy and being too lazy to do anything about it. We’re still supposed to take it to the beach and get high to it and take pictures of our cat to go on a clip reel with it. We’re right where we left off: “when I’m with you,” when we’re together, “I have fun.”

Okay. Either this record is boring, or I am. Don’t tell me. The way Crazy For You ended epitomized that record, because it held up a mirror to its mad dependence. All the weed was taken out of the skull-fucking boredom of waiting for your prospective boyfriend to not come ‘round; going half out of your mind and talking to your pet was a replacement act and saying the same thing over and over and over again was to calm the thoughts that consumed. The distractions only lasted minutes. Minutes? Perfect! Write a pop song. “When I’m With You” was a fitting conclusion of all these little anxieties, because what is an album about ‘weed and my cat and being lazy a lot’ without the fun you could be having? I guess it’s nothing. The Only Place is kind of nothing.

In its nothingness, everyone will tell me, “it sounds like every Best Coast album” and point back to Crazy For You as being as simple as what follows it. It will reinforce a lyric like “I wish my cat could talk,” a line that is pretty much the holy grail of simple lyrics. Give me a simple lyric any day, for all the obvious reasons: it’s honest, or it speaks to an experience we’re probably all having, or maybe it’s just easier to connect with someone over having a bad day than it is to grasp for meaning in it. When I hear a simple lyric of Cosentino’s, though, it’s simple because she has nothing to say and no experience to share with anyone but the dude she’s talking to. This would be James Last’s surf pop muzak if not for the elongating of words like “fun” and “life” and the constant repetition of that nothingness refusing to dig through the surface. All Cosentino has to write about on The Only Place is the distractions, and last time around that nothingness, played on a purely upbeat note, lasted the summer and died out as fast as the weather did.

And so the most hideous crime The Only Place commits is that, yes, it is an “emo” record, just like Cosentino said she wanted- emo not for the guitars twinkling or the skramz screaming, but for the gloomy, plodding place it exists in. It comes from exactly the same place that the sun shone on for Crazy For You, but with the grey shading. That doesn’t refer to the inevitable move away from being a lo-fi band, either- it barely factors. Again we’re at home with Cosentino on the couch, listening to her music the way it was lazily written, and lazy isn’t an insult: it’s like a badge a Best Coast record proudly pins on itself. Everyone is out somewhere with something to do and The Only Place is at home with the curtains pulled over.

The result of darkening the room by the beachside is this: the drab distractions of fun and the sad twee ballads all move The Only Place at a precisely made, sluggish speed through half an hour of Cosentino’s white lies about being unhappy and pissed off with friends. It’s all held up through jangle pop played in a major key, but in this even Cosentino seems unsympathetic towards her character- the melancholy is only ever piled on a happy melody and the never-ending sadness, as on the guitar-chugged “Last Year,” seems like a red herring played for the hell of it (again: nothingness). That’s why the song indulges in the surface of lyrics rather than the words on the inside, and why Cosentino becomes more entertaining when she expresses her “la de das” instead of the problems she seems little interested in. “What a year this day has been” is a lyric that reflects the grungy, uncaring nature of this track, but any venting on The Only Place remains simply that on this is an album of surface- nothing goes any deeper, because nothing can come from nothing.

What The Only Place entails is a list of reasons to not be having fun, but the description is unsympathetic, and not only in Cosentino’s lyrics: the music feels entirely out of step with the record’s moody facade, like eleven new versions of the impassioned, irony-smacked “Positively Fourth Street” but intending none of the scorn Dylan did in his music. And this is just how Cosentino writes; her dad-rock-surf-pop guitar music sounds nothing but sincere in its airy and carefree construction, and as a result it means as little as her lyrics do, just in the complete opposite way. What results is a bizarre record of contrasting base material, a bittersweet record without any of the force behind what make those words sting. The Only Place becomes a record that is suggesting everything but giving none of it, and what sucks the most is that this badge of laziness is entirely of Cosentino’s choosing. She neutralises these two parts into some sort of post-beachcore album that cynically rhymes words like “fun” with themselves, just to point to as it was last time around.

So it’s fitting that the best moment here is “Up All Night,” a song entirely about feel: it’s long and gloomy, but dedicated to its story for more than four minutes, ditching the superficial twee brevity for a little focus on what’s upsetting Cosentino and how a pop song of little guitar riffing can speak for that. This side of Cosentino feels none forced as the band rollicks through guitar licks and percussive snaps that dot together the bitter with the sweet in a more palliative way: Cosentino is wistful on this closer, and the music actually reflects that, without a smile. Best Coast’s style feels fully connected here, rather than just presenting the description, the “emo,” as an afterthought. It’s as if the saving grace to Cosentino’s sadness is the time dedicated, which makes sense for this album of nothing; there’s something buried under “Up All Night,” finally. But until this moment, I’m not having fun with The Only Place, and when it’s down and out I’m not not having fun with it. All I feel towards this record is some sort of angry indifference, which feels like the exact empty feeling that it impacts on us; like nothing matters as long as I hear the same words and the same chords over and over until all I can say about this record is nothing, over and over. This is an empty record, and the exact opposite of what it means to write classic music, because through all its forced smiles and fake problems, it’s an album that means absolutely nothing to me.

Best Coast – “The Only Place”

See larger image The Only Place (Audio CD) List Price: $12.98 USD New From: $7.99 In Stock Used from: $6.72 In Stock Release date May 15, 2012.

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By Rudy Klapper, April 25, 2012 10:00 am

Jack White – Blunderbuss

Columbia 2012

Rating: 8/10

It’s a bit surprising to think that Blunderbuss is Jack White’s first proper solo album, coming as it does at an age where people start to think less of what’s coming next and more of what’s been left behind, especially given White’s indisputable figurehead status. Few would consider acts like the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather as bands that just happen to have Jack White in them, and fewer still would associate the White Stripes with Meg. Yet here Mr. White is, at age thirty-six, releasing an album that turns that iconic, rock-god-on-a-pedestal status on its head and in the process unshackles him emotionally in a way that has to be incredibly freeing and, for his audience, particularly engaging. Throughout White’s career arc, from his role in pushing garage rock back into the mainstream conversation to becoming one of rock’s most enduring purists to becoming the type of distinctive, singular personality that marks the transition from rebel to institution, he’s always sounded detached to me – I could always appreciate what White brought to the table, but it rarely spoke to me on an intimate level. Blunderbuss has no problems hitting a visceral note again and again: it’s his freest record, musically speaking, and in its bloodstained lyrics, which run the gamut from cautionary to vindictive to self-loathing, it opens up a side of White that previously has been impenetrable, wrapped up in his own self-mythologizing persona as he was.

There’s nothing opaque about opener “Missing Pieces,” which starts off with White realizing he has a nosebleed and wondering if he has a disease within the first few couplets and only gets worse from there. “I woke up and my hands were gone, yeah / I looked down and my legs were long gone / I fell forward with my shoulder, but there’s nobody there,” White howls, and if it’s a bit of an obvious metaphor for the loss of a relationship, then Blunderbuss is perhaps the most straightforward break-up record in recent memory. “Someone controls everything about you / and when they tell you that they just can’t live without you / they ain’t lyin’, they’ll take pieces of you,” White sings near the end of “Missing Pieces,” and it’s as good of a thesis for this record as any.

White is in full take-no-prisoners mode here: at one point he equates love to twisting a knife in his guts (“Love Interruption”); at another, he tells off a lover and leaves no room for an argument: “you broke your tongue talking trash, and now you try to bring your garbage to me / I got some words for your ass, you better find someone else off the street” (“Trash Tongue Talker”) – you can almost see the sneer on his face as he spits into the microphone. There’s the recent divorce from singer/model Karen Elson and the early retirement of Meg White, easy signposts to point to here, yet Blunderbuss is more universal than any of White’s personal problems. “No responsibility, no guilt or morals cloud her judgment,” White describes an unidentified female on “Freedom at 21,” and this is the warning that Blunderbuss so liberally dispenses – Beware the Siren, Beware the Heartbreaker. Yet wrapped up all of this is White’s own guilt: his headstrong, irrepressible desire; how he wants “love to walk right up and bite me” on “Love Interruption;” how he ends up “throwing up, a lifesaver down my throat” on “Sixteen Saltines.” White remains eternally complicit in his own angst. It’s the typical two sides of the coin, his unflinching look at his own romantic failures adding a fulfilling dimension to the warding off of the she-devil that White seems perpetually engaged in, and it’s one anyone whose had a relationship turn on them can sympathize with.

It’s an intimacy that is bolstered by Blunderbuss’ forays into R&B and boogie-woogie shuffling amid the usual touchstones of blues and classicist rock ‘n roll. A song like the playful, jaunty “Hip (Eponymous) Poor Boy” rightfully sounds more like the product of his fellow Raconteur Brendan Benson, yet White sounds comfortably at home in the carnival-esque tinkling of the keys and the jostling bar room atmosphere the song conjures. In its thinly veiled lyrical takedown of Meg, it continues a theme of Blunderbuss in shifting moods and amorphous soundtracks, adding another emotional layer to a highly emotional album. While “Hip (Eponymous) Poor Boy” is undoubtedly retaliatory, that festive mood those bouncy keys create cements the song as a celebration, not just mean-spirited revenge: “And you’ll be watching me girl, takin’ over the world,” White croons, defiantly getting in the last word. Other songs are more direct, like first single “Sixteen Saltines,” whose trashy stomp is perfect for the “lipstick, eyelash, broke mirror, broken home” characterization of its female antagonist. Through it all, White doesn’t waste a note, and his dexterity is something to marvel at.

That wonderfully halting lurch of a solo in “Weep Themselves to Sleep” – could it fit in any better with the song’s triumphantly ascending piano melody? Could the wistful titular track be placed anywhere other than where it is on the track listing, providing just the needed breather between the low boil of “Love Interruption” and the strong, major-key piano of “Hypocritical Kiss?” Could Jack White have released a record that so better encapsulates his diverse talents than Blunderbuss, one that deftly handles an archaic cover (“I’m Shakin’”) as easily as it does the schizophrenic nature of final track “Take Me With You When You Go”? That last track is a fitting end for the album – it starts off as a beseeching two-step, lightly accented with backing vocals and careful drum brushes before doing a 180 on its apology with an insistent riff and a bone-rattling guitar solo. It’s a nice little capsule review of what’s come before, uneasy and raw and slightly unhinged, and it’s just what White has always been: hard to pin down. That final refrain, though, where White begs “take me with you when you go, girl / take me anywhere you go,” is disarmingly forward and even has a touch of the hopelessly romantic, continuing the lyrical unveiling of the man behind the curtain. White has always stood for a certain ideal, a reminder of rock’s history and the careful construction of a persona that has always gone hand-in-glove with a proper Rock Star. On Blunderbuss, it’s as bewitchingly difficult as it’s always been to tell where White is going, but Jack White the person has never been as close to his audience as he is here.

Jack White – “Take Me With You When You Go”

See larger image Blunderbuss (Audio CD) List Price: $11.98 USD New From: $5.99 In Stock Used from: $8.29 In Stock Release date April 24, 2012.

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By Robin Smith, April 24, 2012 10:00 am

Maps & Atlases – Beware and Be Grateful

Barsuk 2012

Rating: 8/10

My whole experience of Maps & Atlases reads like an off-base rockumentary cliché, but anyway: I understand that Maps & Atlases are not the band they once were. This seems like an absolutely ridiculous statement to make of a band that has done little more to their sound than nuance it; the guitar tapping is still present, muffled under the song though it may be, and the experiments have just been restricted to compact boxes to move about in. The band hasn’t split itself down its side like it may seem, rather it’s just suppressed the big and the bold into the background to make room for (sure, go ahead and use the word) a “pop” song. It’s the toning down of it all, though, that makes it so criminal, and so when they nuance, they nuance hard. Maps & Atlases were once something of an imposing band, which means they were in your face and clever and they did these things to you; their second and most noted EP was aggressive and progressive, trying a whole lot at raucous speeds. Now, Maps & Atlases are a band able; namely, they are “danceable,” the band that sat around and listened to Prince a shit-tonne. Beyond the immaculate construction of their record, we do what we want with Maps & Atlases these days; the fans who claim they’ve given up on this band but for a live show are just as righteous fans as those of us who embrace this new band who made “Winter,” the band with supposedly funky choruses. Whatever the result is, I recognise the lame cliché on this one: it’s like listening to two different bands.

Cliché number two: that side of Maps & Atlases that died (by being quieter than usual) has made Maps & Atlases the band I was always hoping they would evolve into. There were moments on Perch Patchwork where a very bright light shone down: songs as showy as “Pigeon” suddenly sounded like warm home recordings, even in their cerebral nature; it felt like listening to a band making the greatest equation on how to party. Awful math rock jokes aside, there’s something of a super-group to be had of a Maps & Atlases who can make a visceral impact rather than just construct one. People have said you can dance to Beware and Be Grateful, which essentially means you can feel things as you listen to it; you can hear the patterns of the saddest moments, like Davison’s ‘I, I, I’ repeating as an endless transmission in “Remote and Dark Years.” Yes, it’s not something you need to read in a review, but Beware and Be Grateful is even more a warm, touching record than the ones made before it. As Davison loses it on the guitar-crackling “Old Ash” and lets his voice loudly preach and then crumble in a heap, a new vision of Maps & Atlases comes beaming out. It’s a passionate band standing on the top of all their wacky, wonderful architecture and caring profoundly about it.

These aren’t ferocious songs and they aren’t always playing with everything on the forefront, and it’s compelling to see that; the band has rounded up the edges of their songs and put them into the ground, so that “Fever” is as many times as complex as “Everyplace Is A House” but comes out as a song with a very conventional beauty to it: no guitar noodling, maybe, but so many little things going on within it that constitute bro-y complexity, just in a better way: so many guitar patterns and little programmed noises to be followed. Beware and Be Grateful is easy to dismiss as too easy, or not the band we once knew, but it feels to me like the band that finally found themselves saying what they want to say and in the way they want to. Which is why, chief among all clichés, I consider this somehow representative of the band as a whole, no matter how different it’s all gotten: a band showing off as a secondary objective, playing songs with immense warmth and love. We can speak of the impossibility of reconciling version one of this band to version two, but for me, Beware and Be Grateful is just a band growing. Growth, at its most disgustingly ordinary and clichéd. Heartfelt geniuses that these guys are, they sell it.

Maps & Atlases – “Silver Self”

See larger image Beware & Be Grateful (Audio CD) List Price: $13.99 USD New From: $9.02 In Stock Used from: $4.15 In Stock Release date April 17, 2012.

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By Rudy Klapper, April 11, 2012 10:00 am

M. Ward – A Wasteland Companion

Merge 2012

Rating: 6/10

For those only familiar with Matthew Ward’s work as the Him in Zooey Deschanel’s pastiche to ‘60s pop and aw-shucks charm in She & Him, A Wasteland Companion opener “Clean Slate (For Alex & El Goodo)” is probably a bit of a curveball. Yet after years of working behind the curtain in both She & Him and with more outspoken rock revivalists Conor Oberst, Jim James and Mike Mogis in the Monsters of Folk, this is the M. Ward longtime fans will be delighted to hear – Ward’s husky, ashen voice ruminating over barely there acoustic strumming, losing itself in the simple campfire pleasures of storytelling and the barely there hiss of an AM radio. Ward’s production talents really started to shine through with his last solo effort, 2009’s Hold Time, and the aforementioned work with She & Him and his more esteemed partners in Monsters of Folk hit on familiar Ward touchstones: Brill Building pop, Chuck Berry homage, and dyed-in-the-wool ‘60s Americana. A Wasteland Companion, Ward’s seventh album, continues to touch on all of these influences at one point or another. “Clean Slate” is where Ward’s heart belongs though, resting in the shadowy period between the blues and British Invasion pop, a time when recording on more than one track was a studio trick in itself. The sparse tribute to Big Star is striking in its simplicity, and although A Wasteland Companion goes to great lengths to show Ward’s dexterity as a producer, few artists can transport a listener as easily as Ward does on “Clean Slate” with just an acoustic and that inimitable voice.

The first half of A Wasteland Companion suffers from Ward’s seeming desire to do everything at once – from the contemplative folk of “Clean Slate” he rushes into the heady “Primitive Folk,” which, with its ivory pounding and lovelorn attitude, comes off as strangely tossed off, the kind of song Ward could write in his sleep. That near flawless acoustic interlude seguing into the foreboding “Me and My Shadow,” however, is just the kind of sleight-of-hand musicianship that Ward can make seem effortless. While “Primitive Girl” and “Me and My Shadow” ostensibly seem quite different, in both tone and structure, they nevertheless hail from that same sepia-toned early ‘60s soundscape that Ward has been worshipping for years. Yet where the former arrives as a pale imitation of his best homages, “Me and My Shadow” is at times threatening and alive in a way “Primitive Girl” only hints at, something the sexy, ragged guitar mini-solo certainly contributes to.  Yet from there Ward throws in the requisite Deschanel duet (Daniel Johnston cover “Sweetheart,” which comes off as a wannabe She & Him B-side) and a strangely jaunty, incredibly out of place Louis Armstrong cover (“I Get Ideas”).

So A Wasteland Companion, at least initially, seems determined to continue the ideal of Ward as a new classicist in American pop music, deconstructing the sounds of the past and re-imagining them in the present to create something fresh. This works well with the pointedly nostalgic She & Him and the one-off mission of Monsters of Folk, but in the context of Ward’s own discography it’s unnecessary, as the second half of the record proves. Ward is still the same classicist he’s always been on a song like “The First Time I Ran Away,” a student of Guthrie and Holly and well-traveled dirt roads, but “The First Time I Ran Away” feels indubitably organic whereas “Primitive Girl” sounds like a cover. That lovely strumming, the insistent bass drum beat echoing in the background, a touch of synths – it all accentuates an atmosphere Ward painstakingly crafts to sound like all his favorite old records, yet imbues with his own feeling and straightforward lyrical narratives. The twanginess of the title track increases in direct proportion to the distant background sounds of a crowd Ward interposes over the hum of strings, and it’s nostalgic and affecting, but it touches something more primal and natural than the candy-coated pop hooks of the first half.

Ward’s disparate influences will always have a huge pull on him, along with his continually growing production experience, but the beauty in his solo work has always been his take on this lesser known tangent of Americana. Not the pop foundations he mastered and made famous with She & Him, but the shuffling acoustic ramblings of “Wild Goose” and the gospel-tinged blues worship in “Pure Joy” – the frayed, graying tones of what people first loved about rock ‘n roll, not the rose-colored hues of She & Him but the grit of country blues and the haze of static. A Wasteland Companion at first seems unsure of what it wants to be or where it wants to go, vacillating between various genre exercises rooted in a common retro theme, but by the end it reaffirms what those who’ve loved Ward’s old work have always known – there’s plenty of poignancy in just a guitar pick.

M. Ward – “Me and My Shadow (ft. Zooey Deschanel)”

See larger image A Wasteland Companion (Audio CD) List Price: $15.98 USD New From: $8.80 In Stock Used from: $8.97 In Stock Release date April 10, 2012.

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By Rudy Klapper, April 4, 2012 10:00 am

Lost in the Trees – A Church That Fits Our Needs

ANTI- 2012

Rating: 8/10

While still an album obsessed with death and what may come after, A Church That Fits Our Needs is strangely hopeful even while it relates to the deepest parts of grief, a contemplation of past and present rather than a tear-stained farewell. Frontman and main creative force Ari Picker wrote this after his cancer-stricken mother killed herself shortly after his wedding in 2009, and, yes, A Church That Fits Our Needs is a hard listen. But it’s a triumphant one, celebrating the muse on the cover as often as it mourns her passing. Picker has stated that he wanted to provide his mother, an artist, “a space, in the music, to be, and to become all the things she didn’t get a chance to be when she was alive.” It’s less a funeral march than a memorial, finally arriving at the lush intersection of folk, pop and classical music that Picker has been threatening to master for years. Stuck in a sort of creative stasis with the release and re-release of his debut EP and LP over the past few years, perhaps it was this life changing event that was what Picker really needed to discover himself as his own artist. A Church That Fits Our Needs realizes all the potential that All Alone In An Empty House promised, and Picker, a Berklee College of Music graduate whose has written first orchestral work was for the North Carolina Symphony, melds all the various threads of his influences into a cohesive, heartbreaking whole.

There’s shades of the loss that permeated Arcade Fire’s Funeral here, a tinge of Radiohead’s chilly baroque arrangements, and the kind of orchestral finessing that Jonsi could appreciate; there’s also a heavy Stravinsky influence and the sweeping cinematic quality of film scorers like Nino Rota. In Picker’s arrangements, though, there’s a distinctly American quality – the sound of rushing rivers, the hushed crack of leaves in a wintry forest. The gentle finger picking and dramatic strings paint a chromatic, vivid picture in songs like the stately, melancholy “Icy River,” where Picker’s crystal clear tenor completes everything: “Icy river / put your arms around my mother / I burned her body in the furnace / till all that’s left was her glory.” Picker’s lyrics dabble in the crushingly intimate as well as the darkly fantastical – veiled lyrics about dead birds and golden eyelids, with nature imagery and archetypal discussions about heart and the hereafter predominating. It’s a soundscape that seems to revel in life rather than death, and it’s this verve and melodic enthusiasm that prevents A Church That Fits Our Needs from becoming a one-note lamentation.

Though it’s Picker’s lyrics that provide the emotional punch, it’s his superb technical skills that make A Church That Fits Our Needs so much more than a simple outpouring of grief. Picker enjoys playing around with meter, and his complex use of strings and use of fellow vocalist Emma Nadeau’s airy whisper dabbles in dissonance but always somehow manages to return to a resolving major lift. “As you close your eyes from the water / a golden light wanders with the birds / where have you been, what have you seen / all the peace when you come following / I’ll tell you it’s worth it all,” Picker sings on “Golden Eyelids,” and there’s the major key surge, an optimistic murmur, but there’s also a hidden tension in the taut, haunting strings that threaten in the background, swirling up in a gusty ostinato. For much of The Church That Fits Our Needs, there’s that struggle to find peace, to reconcile the lessons and traits he’s inherited from his mother with her untimely, senseless death. “My song can try / but there are things that songs can’t say,” Picker sings with more than a touch of sad finality on the closing lines of “Vines,” his voice close to breaking on the last couplet: “Am I hopeless? I trust you, but where are we walking to?”

It’s an appropriate theme for the record, where the loss of a loved one is not just something that can never be found again but is also an opportunity to reflect and cherish. It’s a theme that is also not necessarily resolved by the time “Vines” ends, although the harrowing gut-punch combo that is the tender ballad “This Dead Bird is Beautiful,” and the cleansing stomp of “Garden” comes closest. The former is the kind of bare acoustic piece that leaves no room for subtlety, Picker defiantly reminding himself that he’ll “always have her eyes,” while the latter picks up all the tense and pensive wonderings of the past eight songs and brings them crashing down in a cathartic wave of emotion, apocalyptic strings and percussion. It’s an exhausting listen, but what A Church That Fits Our Needs does so well is how it makes this loss palatable – the grief is real and heartfelt and sometimes overwhelming, but in its honesty and the warm instrumentation that Picker has mastered, it’s thoughtful and all too easy to get lost in. Even when there seems to be nothing left, there’s still simple beauty in life, Picker seems to say on “An Artist’s Song;” “So sing out your hymn of faith / cause I have none / your song is my armor.” It’s an odd sort of comfort, but it’s a comfort nonetheless, and if nothing else A Church That Fits Our Needs provides something to hang on to: memories. In that respect, it’s a fitting monument to Picker’s mother as she was, not how she ended, and it’s a touching, affirming milestone in his own career.

Lost in the Trees – “Golden Eyelids”

See larger image A Church That Fits Our Needs (Audio CD) List Price: $15.98 USD New From: $8.25 In Stock Used from: $3.75 In Stock Release date March 20, 2012.

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By Rudy Klapper, March 20, 2012 10:00 am

The Shins – Port of Morrow

Columbia 2012

Rating: 6/10

For all the press lauding this as the comeback of one of modern indie’s more venerable acts, Port of Morrow sounds strangely suspended in time, caught in between the ghosts of its past and a far more promising future. Ostensibly it’s an album that showcases everything that made the Shins great; maybe not change-your-life amazing, but certainly one of the defining acts of the ‘00s, workmanlike indie pushed over the top by frontman James Mercer’s distinctive tenor and his remarkable melodic talents. Yet the James Mercer who was beginning to emerge on 2007’s underrated Wincing the Night Away does not always sound like the James Mercer in rare indie pop form on Port of Morrow, except perhaps in the slinky, sexy titular closer, which is so distinct from the rest of the material here that it almost seems like a tacked on bonus track. “Simple Song” has been derided for being just that – with the punchy guitars, Mercer’s trademark shift to a higher register, and clever wordplay, it seems like a Shins song concocted in some hellishly cheery, Zach Braff-run indie pop factory via carefully worded specifications (insert backing vocals here, add a dash of piano throughout). “Simple Song” is near flawless as a pop song, but it’s that inevitable feeling of déjà vu that makes it and much of Port of Morrow predictable rather than truly stirring.

Mercer’s more recent work with Danger Mouse in Broken Bells and even much of Wincing the Night Away foreshadowed an accomplished songwriter finally stepping out from his own considerable shadow. A song like “Red Rabbits” or “Sea Legs” from the latter reveled in different textures and a more experimental take on indie pop, and in doing so it revealed a Mercer who was comfortable in growing as a songwriter, still an ace with those hooks and a pristinely recorded guitar but more interested in seeing where these studio explorations would take him. His later remarks that he had felt stifled working in the Shins, recruitment of an entirely new backing band, and enlistment of producer Greg Kurstin (of fellow indie poppers The Bird and the Bee) pointed to a continuance of that more expansive direction, but for the most part, Port of Morrow slips in neatly between Oh, Inverted World and Chutes Too Narrow on the CD rack. This is not a bad thing when Mercer is able to recapture the intimate spirit of those records, as he does on the lovely “September,” which, for all of “Simple Song’s” inherent craft, is the most quintessentially Shins song here. The light strum of Mercer’s acoustic guitar and the dreamy haze that drifts around the song like a summer dew gives it a nakedly honest feeling of newfound romance that “New Slang” nailed so perfectly, a feeling summed up in a classic Mercer line: “love is the ink in the well when her body writes” (Braff would love that!).

“September” is quiet and thoughtful, and in the context of the rest of Port of Morrow it jumps out at you for precisely that reason. The flip side of Mercer’s studio proficiency is the double-edged sword of perfectionism, which was never a problem when Mercer was laying down a couple backing vocals and a guitar track but tends to overwhelm on MOR-fluff like the schmaltzy “For A Fool” or the even cheesier “It’s Only Life,” which features lyrics that drip clichés and a short guitar solo that can be seen coming from miles away. It’s hard to fault Kurstin here for doing what he does best, and combining his production skills with Mercer’s songwriting is bound to lead to some stunners – opener “The Rifle’s Spiral,” for instance, is just the kind of stomping pop that Kurstin does so well, an incessant guitar riff and some bouncy drumming pushing one of Mercer’s better melodies forward. Where “The Rifle’s Spiral” surges, however, other songs merely sound exceedingly well produced; the cheerful, ringing guitar on “No Way Down” and the festive percussion and funky guitar on “Bait and Switch” are all well and good, with polished hooks and a production sheen that practically sparkles in the higher tones and kicks hard and cleanly in the lower. Yet, whether it’s because of Mercer’s so-consistent-it’s-almost-boring vocal excellence or the fact that the hooks tend to blend into one another after a series of up tempo, vaguely rocking pop master classes, Kurstin’s focus on a glossy, slick aesthetic rarely serves to enhance Mercer’s songs.

Then again, this is James Mercer, and these songs are nevertheless uniformly outstanding, another ten Exhibit As (in a long line of them) in the case for Mercer as one of the best songwriters of his generation. For all its AM dial affinity, “40 Mark Strasse” has the kind of soaring, overwhelming chorus that one can’t help but smile at, even if the idea of soft rock makes one sort of queasy. And that title track is a necessary revelation that Port of Morrow takes too long in getting to – in its ghostly synth work and the delightfully weird effect on Mercer’s falsetto throughout, it’s the logical heir to Wincing the Night Away’s oddball moments and Broken Bells more chromatic hues. Yet Port of Morrow seems much more a step sideways than forward for Mercer, not so much a dramatic comeback but more a compilation of greatest hits masquerading as new songs. We already knew Mercer could write a great Shins album – the question now is if he can ever become more than just the Shins.

The Shins – “September”

See larger image Port of Morrow (Audio CD) List Price: $11.98 USD New From: $5.85 In Stock Used from: $5.79 In Stock Release date March 20, 2012.

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By Rudy Klapper, February 27, 2012 10:00 am

School of Seven Bells – Ghostory

Vagrant Records 2012

Rating: 8/10

The concept surrounding Ghostory is flimsy at best – the running narrative of a girl named Lafaye and all the ghosts that one would expect to surround a girl with such a Victorian name. The loss of Claudia Deheza robs School of Seven Bells of one of their most distinctive characteristics, the angelic, unearthly harmonizing between Claudia and twin sister Alejandra. Yet Ghostory, the band’s third record and their first as a duo, is uncommonly strong and surefooted, a remarkable transformation of their gossamer-thin dream pop into something vigorous and visceral. Where 2010’s lackluster Disconnect from Desire was all style and little substance, Ghostory is surprisingly forceful and direct in its message, one that melds almost seamlessly the sublime drone of My Bloody Valentine with the nostalgia of M83. It’s dreamy and hopelessly untethered from straightforward pop, like School of Seven Bells have always been, yet for the first time Ghostory sounds like the work of an organic, spontaneous band, rather than the determined sculptors of hypnotic, icy shoegaze they had seemed content to remain.

Ghostory carries with it connotations of magic and spirituality, and if there’s an ideal word to describe Alejandra Deheza’s vocals, a good place to start would be “otherworldly.” Hers is a voice that prefers to soar rather than coo, speeding along through a storm of synths or layering on top of itself many times over, a more ethereal Florence Welch or a druggier Natasha Khan. At times it seems fragile, like on the soft, sprawling “Reappear,” shimmering above waves of reverb, but that’s an illusion – Deheza has never sounded as confident yet so tempestuous, more in touch with what she’s singing than ever before. School of Seven Bells have always tended to focus on the trees rather than the forest – as a result, the music they crafted was, more often than not, opulent but uncomfortably empty, something beautiful that could be admired but never touched. Opener “The Night” swiftly puts that notion to sleep: “our meeting lit a fuse in my heart / devoured me, devoured me,” Deheza sings, and it’s lovely and airy, as she always is, yet there’s a passion and a sensuality here that has been hard to find with this band.

The music seems effortless, which is an accomplishment in itself given just how complicated School of Seven Bells makes things. There’s a veritable blizzard of effects here, washing tones out while they brighten others, coalescing in misty bursts of guitar and mesmerizing drum attacks, a steady, mutating bass line bubbling constantly underneath. Benjamin Curtis’ former work as a member of The Secret Machines informs every aspect of the production here – that space-rock trio specialized in widescreen, full surround sound operas, the proggiest of the prog. That love of expanse, of wide open sound filling every space and constant shifts into lulls and crescendos, is what defines Ghostory. Deheza’s vocals are the driving force, of course, but the way Curtis makes the music dive into your headphones – at points rolling to an ecstatic high on the frantic “White Wind,” at others reducing things to a narcotic lull on “Show Me Love” – is pure feeling. There’s a heavy goth influence on things here, even as sparkling and lush as the production gets, and the drone of Cocteau Twins and the haunting new wave of Siouxsie and the Banshees, not to mention the hazy landscapes of My Bloody Valentine, are much in evidence throughout. Atmosphere is the priority here, yet it’s a testament to Curtis’ work and Deheza’s renewed fire that the songs on Ghostory stand well enough on their own. “The Night” might be the best track the duo have penned to date, concise by their own standards yet voluminous in its sound, with a hook that is as compelling as any in the band’s catalog. “Lafaye,” meanwhile, is haunting and vaguely foreboding; its melody calls to mind Florence’s “What The Water Gave Me,” but its chorus and the unexpected tonal shift are, simply put, enchanting.

It’s hard to explain what kind of emotions these songs engender, and I can imagine it will be different for everyone – that’s the beauty of this kind of dreamy canvas, where the words are much less important than the spirit of the vocals and the nebulous music. There’s the general ghost story conceit, of course, but that’s as much a smokescreen as it is a real narrative. At times I hear Alejandra talking to her twin, and there’s loss and regret, while at others, most noticeably the triumphant closer “When You Sing,” there is a simple catharsis, the culmination of a relentless drum pattern and a blizzard of instruments, not the least of which is Deheza’s vocals spinning wondrously out into a psychedelic haze. It reminds me a bit of M83’s latest, where lyrics were second to the vital, intense feelings the music offered up. It’s also incredibly hard to pin down without resorting to an embarrassing array of adjectives and metaphors. Dream pop, goth, shoegaze – call it what you want, but what School of Seven Bells have ended up with is a genuinely gorgeous record by any standard.

School of Seven Bells – “Lafaye”

See larger image Ghostory (Audio CD) List Price: $10.99 USD New From: $8.89 In Stock Used from: $6.10 In Stock Release date February 28, 2012.

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By Robin Smith, February 21, 2012 10:00 am

Cate Le Bon – Cyrk

The Control Group 2012

Rating: 7/10

On my absolutely wishy-washy but definitely noble search for as many singer plus guitar albums I could find, it was in Vashti Bunyan’s Just Another Diamond Day I was able to make a home- preferably a log cabin- to crawl up in. Not that this is a review of that (though if I can petition someone to write a glowing 5 for it, yes please), but it is the warmth in that album that startled me. Even if it isn’t the perfect acoustic album- there’s more to it around the edges than that, shout out to the album’s obscure fiddle player – Bunyan’s assurance on a song such as “Love Song” speaks volumes of how to make an album that carries guitar and voice to its core. It’s not her gorgeous voice we will wax lyrical about forever unless it goes hand in hand with the guitar below it, and the rest is a fill-in. There, in Diamond Day, lies a classic album built on a steady foundation.

This mini-review, of course, fails to point back at the actual make-up of CYRK, an album driven by a musician and her band - drums, organs and such, they’re definitely a mark on this album, curse ‘em- but it’s in sheer strength of will that Cate Le Bon comes across like the room’s been cleared out. To me, it’s an album of vocal and guitar, too dressed-up in places like “Greta,” maybe, for that assertion to be actually true, but transparent enough to hold those two fundamentals at its centre. It’s the guitar-work that compels Le Bon to the shade of herself that is punk, but it’s the same instrument she falls back on for her less acidic moments. At the risk of being caught out by someone else in their boxy bedroom who knows I have nothing to say about CYRK beyond “cool music” or worse still, “sounds like Nico,” allow me to distract the conversation to Le Bon’s startling live show: as support for St. Vincent, she was the living, breathing definition of sparseness, which is the most fabulous of endorsements for Annie Clark’s supplement, in a strange way. Her live show presented that unsettling singer-songwriter style nuanced into its purest form, something most would call nothing more than “a lady and a guitar.” I prefer to think of it as a lady and some ridiculous chord changes, liberated by her small-time status enough to push through the intense experiments she’d been purveying. An expert fit, I’m sure you’ll agree, to St. Vincent, but Le Bon didn’t fill the stage as a band-leader. This was a pastoral (whatever that really means anymore) take on her peer’s quiet debut Marry Me, tampered with so little that even if I knew none of the songs, I was hearing them as if getting their inaugural play-through.

That lovely, simple magic doesn’t feel lost on CYRK, even when the shuffling drums roll over “Fold The Cloth” or the keys try to get some authority over it, and how they try: even mixed in louder, they’re still somehow kinda unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Even then, the base of this album feels sprinkled on by the band around it. Those twinkling effects on “Puts Me To Work” are put on top like the most awesome of supplementary essays, further explaining the character and zest of CYRK but not taking away from Cate Le Bon’s simple image. The character of this album is in its fine lines- again, reminiscent of Annie Clark as she plays on the borders of comfort and its sinister, opposite number- and those, laid bare, are simply given marking points by all this stuff. The organs, the drums, and such, are going to lend Le Bon a certain amount of comparison, but it’s in the guitar we keep falling in with Stephen Malkmus and her voice we so desperately want to connect to Chelsea Girl. Not that there are any gosh-darn flutes in this album, but “Fold The Cloth” gets its power from those wandering guitar-lines at 1:24. If anything, CYRK is more the work of someone working in Kurt Vile’s discipline, chilling from the couch as she makes an album of two great talents. Le Bon is doodling, but as she refines it, CYRK becomes a clear piece of work with a well-clarified core.

Even if, once in a while, she’s all up for dismantling her world, dusting it off and putting it back together in some new ridiculous layout. “Greta” seems to stress a particular breaking point for the album, but neither side is radically different from the other. It stands, in this warped little interlude, one which will put the easily horrified among us off brass instruments forever, that Le Bon is as much of experiment as she is of constructing songs, and in its creepy-as-hell last gasp, “Greta” is consciously laying down the deliberately fragmenting sound of Le Bon, one that she tampers with for nothing more than the delight of it. And so the disorientating final seconds of CYRK are indicative of the musician behind them in many ways, which is almost frustrating in light of part one of the inverted “Ploughing Out.” Le Bon is playing beautiful chords for the first round, and if it’s not that which sooths, one can point to the earnestness of everything: the softness of drums and the cooing vocal enveloping the headphones is the album I’m constantly searching for. That’s a story, I’ll bite, that lends itself to about half of CYRK (and half of my life), but to me it’s in Le Bon’s guitar-work she finds her innate strength, that which demolishes with about the same dedication it helps her sparkle bright. This album sits in the comfort of a pastoral tune and its strong-willed, angular resolution. The twist in “Ploughing Out” moves entirely in chords, treacling down to the next movement like the rough patch needn’t have words, needn’t have a reason; it’s just Le Bon’s electric guitar, now near-autonomous, causing the scene. Now leading some semblance of a band towards singer-songwriter paradise, it’s just a startling achievement to see a musician command her music so well. No wonder her audience got her stepping onto that tiny stage alone: that’s a really cool guitar, after all.

Cate Le Bon – “Puts Me To Work”

See larger image Cyrk (Audio CD) List Price: $13.98 USD New From: $9.44 In Stock Used from: $11.54 In Stock Release date January 17, 2012.

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By Rudy Klapper, February 15, 2012 10:00 am

Islands – A Sleep And A Forgetting

ANTI- 2012

Rating: 8/10

As a Break-Up Record, A Sleep & A Forgetting checks off all the boxes quite nicely. The story has been written a thousand times before, but trust Nick Thorburn to inject some high drama into it: A Sleep & A Forgetting comes after Thorburn endured a messy end to a relationship last Valentine’s Day and spent much of the past year in the care of a wealthy older patron (a woman, natch), who gave him a place to stay and a piano to pontificate on, the modern-day Romantic come to translate his tears to the ivories. It’s a record that wallows in clichés, be it in its release date or in its backstory or in its straight-to-the-gut lyrical matter, and for a band that’s always been the indie pop standard-bearer of bombast and glam, it all feels oh so very tragic and more than a little contrived. Yet for maybe the first time, A Sleep & A Forgetting gets at the heart of an artist who, over years of project changes and name switches, has remained frustratingly opaque.

Thorburn has always been a hard guy to pin down, but on Islands’ 2008 triumph Arm’s Way, it was this creative shiftiness that made his genre-mashing experiments work so well. Here, Thorburn is as direct as he’s ever been: “Sounds forming words / from the well spring of concern / while my boat in that ocean turned / on the hull I watched the city burn,” Thorburn whispers on opener “In A Dream It Seemed Real,” and it’s this portrait of a shattered relationship that is possibly the most heartfelt song of Thorburn’s career. Looking back on Islands’ discography, it has always been his music that managed to connect with me on a fundamental level – it wasn’t until the music itself became unremarkable that I really took to Thorburn the lyricist. And that’s what the music on A Sleep & A Forgetting is, for the most part; shades of grey and greyer, a muted palette of piano, guitar, drums and bass that pales in comparison to the vibrant canvas fans of Islands have become accustomed to. It’s a bleak picture of melancholy that doesn’t want to end, and it makes the occasional gasps of air all the more rewarding: the flippant barroom piano on “Hallways” that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on that Mister Heavenly record is a particularly nice touch, as are the carnival keys on “Can’t Feel My Face.”

Those are the exceptions that prove the rule, however; A Sleep & A Forgetting is a depressing album through and through, with all the subtlety and vitriol of the recently dispossessed yet none of the verve of Islands. “I loved a girl and I will never love again,” Thorburn moans, and yes, this is upsetting and occasionally cringe-worthy in the same way reading an old Livejournal is, but for once there is no artifice to Thorburn, no Nick Diamonds clogging up the lanes with thirty string and horn parts and lyrics about blood diamonds. Something is lost there, certainly, that manic energy and excitement that Islands always seemed to have no problem bringing, but there’s something found here, too. “Oh Maria” is the only track where Thorburn works from a third-person viewpoint, telling the story of Buddy Holly’s widow and her dreams of him, and it’s this frail, inconsequential lullaby that seems to be the only place where Thorburn can find a way to see past today and look to tomorrow: “Now that you’re all alone, do you remember that song / just think of me when you’re falling asleep / when you wake up / you’ll be able to dream.” It’s a sweet sentiment, one that resolves itself in a satisfying swell and that wrenching final line, and in its brittleness and fragile sense of loss showcases a side of Islands many will have never expected. This is the kind of raw yet hopeful vulnerability that A Sleep & A Forgetting tends to miss in favor of more blunt emotions, and for the purposes of this record, perhaps that’s okay; everyone needs to get their demons out once in a while. Whether Thorburn can maintain this kind of shockingly honest songwriting, whether he can combine this fragmented, broken singer with the wild, carefree bandleader of the Unicorns and Arm’s Way, will determine whether Islands will remain a going concern.

Islands – “Oh Maria”

See larger image A Sleep & A Forgetting (Audio CD) List Price: $15.98 USD New From: $5.84 In Stock Used from: $1.24 In Stock Release date February 14, 2012.

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By Rudy Klapper, February 8, 2012 10:00 am

of Montreal – Paralytic Stalks

Polyvinyl 2012

Rating: 7/10

It was sometime around the third or fourth extended coda, amidst buzzsaw guitar riffs, cheesy sci-fi space effects, the jarring tonal shifts and the occasional burst of fire alarm noise, that I resigned myself to a particular fact: Kevin Barnes is never going to change. Or, to put it another way – he’s always going to change, usually with a middle finger aimed in the general direction of his last record. And really, there’s no incentive for him to rein himself in: ever since The Sunlandic Twins of Montreal has become a one-man show, and certainly no one is holding their breath waiting for Polyvinyl to edit their biggest draw. So it is that we get an album like Paralytic Stalks, one that is as sprawling, egomaniacal and batshit insane as any Barnes has put down.  This lack of an editor is what leads to a song like the divisive “Exorcismic Breeding Knife,” a song so obviously anti-commercial and contrary to what of Montreal have built their sound on that it’s less an actual song and more a referendum on just how far Barnes can go nowadays before people bat an eye. Chances are this one won’t be on an Outback commercial anytime soon.

Make no mistake – this is nothing new for Barnes. Sure, he has been talking up 20^th century minimalism in interviews – Penderecki, Ives, Schoenberg – but those are just convenient touchstones for an increasingly out-there experimentalism that has been a recurring theme in late-period of Montreal: Hissing Fauna’s “The Past is a Grotesque Animal;” “You Do Mutilate” off of 2010’s False Priest; the scattershot framework of Skeletal Lamping. The difference between those songs and “Exorcismic Breeding Knife,” though, is the latter’s utter lack of purpose. It’s simply there, a seven-and-a-half minute-long burst of atonality and spoken word nightmares, which creates quite the atmosphere but begs the question: why? It’s cold and it’s clinical, all feelings Barnes was probably going for, but in the context of Paralytic Stalks, an album predicated on Barnes being more heart-on-his-sleeve than he’s ever been before, it’s worse than pointless.

It’s a shame, because, for much of Paralytic Stalk’s first half and even for most of the more unhinged second act, Kevin Barnes strikes a near-perfect balance between pop mastery and a delightful sort of weird. This, of course, has a lot to do with Barnes’ famously acerbic lyrics, which take a turn for the better here despite his propensity for using language only an English professor could love.  He hasn’t sounded this engaged since Hissing Fauna, nor have his vocals ever sounded quite so strained. That’s the good thing about Paralytic Stalks  – even when you can’t really understand what Barnes is saying, between the deranged yelps and those easily understood tidbits (“It’s fucking sad / that we need a tragedy / to gain a fresh perspective in our lives” goes one stomach-punch of an opening), you can generally get the feeling that this is coming from a dark and deeply personal place. Nothing is ever going to stop Barnes from naming a song “Malefic Dowery” or writing lyrics like “naturally I want to help you invoke the architect of salutary memes / our heads are pregnant with divine mechanics but, oh, how we’re tyrannized / by tentacles of their ferine stupidity.” But occasionally a gem will pop up like “once more I turn to my crotch for counsel,” or Barnes will descend back down to the tongue of humans for a moment and speak with touching frankness (“I spend my waking hours haunting my life / I made the one I love start crying tonight” goes the weeping refrain from “Spiteful Intervention”). It’s a reminder that of Montreal is, first and foremost, a vehicle for Barnes to express his innermost grievances and joys, and given the embarrassingly bare-bones style and narcissist bent, you have to admire just how plainly he lays all his cards out on the table.

Where Paralytic Stalks really shines, however, is through its hooks. The sequence from “Spiteful Intervention” through “Ye, Renew the Plaintiff” is Barnes’ strongest since Hissing Fauna, and it’s blissfully unaware of the existential baggage it has to carry. “We Will Commit Wolf Murder” and “Malefic Dowery” are probably two of the most “traditional” of Montreal songs here; the former a catchy pop-rock number with a muscular bass line and an out-of-left-field vamp in the outro, while the latter calls to mind the sweeter melodies of the Elephant 6 days and one of the more pleasantly lush productions on the record. “Ye, Renew the Plaintiff,” meanwhile, might be the best track here, not only for its surprisingly jagged guitar solo and propulsive chorus but also for the way it perfectly bridges Paralytic Stalk’s quite disparate halves. “I can think of nothing but getting my revenge / make those fuckers pay,” Barnes screams, and that’s where the guitar really goes off, spiraling up into a glorious distortion before abruptly tailing off into the song’s second half, where things rapidly go from angry to weird. Here, though, it’s all according to plan: the way the song builds itself back up and around a driving piano beat and discordant saxophone; increasingly random bits of noise splicing in here and there, but eventually coming to rest right where they should; a major-key payoff musically and emotionally.

Things get less and less coherent as Barnes builds on this deconstruction of a pop song through “Wintered Debts” and the aforementioned “Exorcismic Breeding Knife,” to the point where Barnes has squandered any goodwill and murdered the record’s momentum by the time “Authentic Pyrrhic Remission” rolls around. It’s a shame, because if any song could point to what Barnes can accomplish as an avant-garde musician, it’s this one. The first half of the song is an old-school of Montreal classic in its own right, all sticky-sweet melodies and swinging hooks, yet when the expected shift comes to a blistering array of electronics and a downtempo move to horror-film strings, it flows logically rather than bashing the listener over the head with dissonance. The way Barnes slowly tones down the fuzz, segueing into the lovely wisp of a piano ballad that closes out the last two minutes, is a striking example of restraint from a man not usually blessed with that particular faculty. This is minimalism with a purpose, one that enhances the song and, with its gradual descent, provides a sort of comedown from the rest of the album as well.  “Our illumination is complete,” Barnes sings at the close, and it’s an overdramatic statement for a typically overdramatic guy, but it’s also one with a bit of hope for the future. Paralytic Stalks is most assuredly not the type of record that is going to get of Montreal a mainstream breakthrough a la The Sunlandic Twins, but for those of us who have been frustrated with his inconsistency and general unwillingness to stay in any one place, it just might be the twinkling of a light at the end of the tunnel.

of Montreal – “Malefic Dowery”

See larger image Paralytic Stalks (Audio CD) List Price: $13.98 USD New From: $8.16 In Stock Used from: $3.74 In Stock Release date February 7, 2012.

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By Rudy Klapper, January 25, 2012 10:00 am

Nada Surf – The Stars are Indifferent to Astronomy

Barsuk 2012

Rating: 6/10

It’s a bit counterintuitive, but early 40-somethings Nada Surf seem to be growing less and less jaded and cynical as the years wind by. They were big once, properly alternative-rock-radio big with 1996’s snarky hit “Popular,” and the only place it got them was the one-hit wonder section in your local FYE’s bargain bin. That is so often the problem with novelty hits, which the spoken-word, eminently contemptuous “Popular” obviously was, and Nada Surf have since made a career out of being the most earnest band in indie. In the hands of another group a painfully wide-eyed title like The Stars are Indifferent to Astronomy would likely be the setup to a contradictory punch line – under the direction of the same band who named a song “Always Love” without a hint of artifice, it’s just another example of the kind of unfeigned sincerity these aging optimists do so well.

For most of The Stars are Indifferent to Astronomy, Nada Surf are a blur of high-energy power chords and a hard-charging rhythm section in bassist Daniel Lorca and drummer Ira Elliot that plays in a remarkable lockstep with each other. Aside from first single “When I Was Young,” which slows things down to focus on predictably cringe-inducing lyrical nostalgia, everything is tight and focused, polished clean and dashed with a healthy bit of punk-influenced crunch courtesy of producer Chris Shaw. Vocalist Matthew Caws still has that flawless alto that gives his vocals an eternally youthful vigor, and Shaw’s work in focusing the mix on his inimitable voice while maintaining a strong focus on the power of Caws’ guitar gives The Stars are Indifferent to Astronomy a pleasantly gutsy live feel. It’s the right call for an album that is filled to the brim with enthusiastic statements like “it’s never too late for teenage dreams” and other assorted feel-good credos. Caws may be approaching middle age, but he has rarely sounded as conflicted and/or hopelessly romantic as he does here, one minute lamenting the expectations of youth on “When I Was Young” and the next sounding utterly pleased at the results on “Teenage Dreams” – “sometimes I ask the wrong questions, but I get the right answers.”

It’s par for the course for Caws, who has made a career out of that ageless yelp and a decision to not worry too much about what he’s saying, instead focusing on how he says it. Caws’ energy is infectious – it’s impossible not to sing along with the sweet clichés he leaves hovering over raucous tunes like “Clear Eye Clouded Mind” or “No Snow on the Mountain.” Even when he’s wallowing in sap, you still get the feeling that he honestly just wants to let you know how he’s feeling, as directly and artlessly as possible. For all of “When I Was Young’s” oppressive sentimentality and cloying acoustic vibe, when Caws sings, “when I was young, I didn’t know if I was better off asleep or up / now I’ve grown up, I wonder what was that world I was dreaming of,” his frankness is enough to tug at the heartstrings of even the most jaded 9-to-5ers. Caws’ shock at the end of the album that he “can’t believe the future’s happening to me” is another likely touchstone for Nada Surf fans, particularly those who have stuck with the band for the long haul and are likely approaching that age where “Popular” is as anachronistic to them as the rest of those cloudy teenage years. Luckily for them, Nada Surf is proof that growing old doesn’t have to be full of regrets and missed opportunities – if their career arc proves anything, it’s that it’s never too late to reinvent yourself. They have kept going largely on an indefatigable attitude and a firm grasp of the finer points of the three-minute pop song, and few bands can regularly write the kind of hooks that The Stars are Indifferent to Astronomy builds itself around. Improbable but true; as these ten mostly filler-free tracks prove, Nada Surf only look to be growing more confident in their old age.

Nada Surf – “Clear Eye Clouded Mind”

See larger image The Stars Are Indifferent to Astronomy (Audio CD) List Price: $13.99 USD New From: $8.42 In Stock Used from: $8.92 In Stock Release date January 24, 2012.