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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 19, 2012 10:00 am

Brendan Benson is releasing the digital version of his fifth studio album What Kind of World early, exclusively on his website: http://whatkindofworld.brendanbenson.com/shop. The album is now slated to drop April 21, his son’s second birthday. Benson is taking things into his own hands nowadays with his record label Readymade, and What Kind of World is defiantly Benson – power pop, with influences decades old and repurposed for a new audience, that eternally youthful voice keeping things steady. “Light of Day” is vintage Benson, with a nice double-guitar riff and the kind of sugary chorus Benson has made his trademark. If you dig it, check out first single “Bad for Me” for a slower, more lush angle.

*removed by label – check out http://brendanbenson.com/ to support the artist*

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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: $8.85 In Stock Used from: $8.97 In Stock Release date April 10, 2012.

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By Rudy Klapper, April 5, 2012 10:00 am

Matt Ward’s eighth album and his first one after receiving some mainstream attention with Zooey Deschanel in She & Him, A Wasteland Companion is a tale of two Wards; the ’50s rock, retro tones that he’s mastered with She & Him, the pop influence emphasized and the production beefed up (in this respect, it’s an outgrowth from his work with Conor Oberst and Jim James in Monsters of Folk); and the whispery AM folk of his earlier work, the shadow of static drifting over everything. “Pure Joy” is an example of that latter sort, and hearkens back to some of his great past albums like 2005′s Transistor Radio. Old school, simple, and timeless.

M. Ward – “Pure Joy”

See larger image A Wasteland Companion (Audio CD) List Price: $15.98 USD New From: $8.85 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: $2.99 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: $7.99 In Stock Release date March 20, 2012.

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By Rudy Klapper, February 29, 2012 10:00 am

It’s been nearly three years, but fans of Regina Spektor finally got a taste of new material with the studio version of “All The Rowboats” dropping this past Tuesday. It’s the first single from her upcoming album What We Saw From The Cheap Seats, her sixth release and tentatively scheduled for a May date. Spektor has performed this song live for years, but with Mike Elizondo behind the boards again as he was on Far, it has been fleshed out with a skittering drum pattern and the paranoid piano melody sounds better than ever. Far might have been my favorite all-around Spektor release due to the bigger production and her growth as a songwriter; hopefully What We Saw From The Cheap Seats continues this progressive arc for Spektor.

Regina Spektor – “All The Rowboats”

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By Rudy Klapper, February 23, 2012 10:00 am

It’s nice to see Brendan Benson back in the game. One of my favorite artists (you might know him better as Jack White’s foil in the Raconteurs), Benson is planning on releasing his fifth solo record, What Kind of World this coming April, with “Bad for Me” the first taste just out yesterday. Benson is a peerless songwriter in the pop-rock vein, and his classic production and arrangements (best exemplified in 2005′s stellar The Alternative to Love) is really what sets him apart from similar power-pop artists. “Bad For Me” is a perfect example – a lush ballad bolstered by a melancholy piano line and an expansive chorus. What Kind of World was produced by Benson and recorded entirely in analog, and suffice to say, I am pretty damn excited.

Brendan Benson – “Bad For Me”

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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: $9.45 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 9, 2012 10:00 am

Alexa Borden is a 17-year-old (!) self-taught (!!) pianist and singer-songwriter from Alberta up in the Great White North, with a soulful voice that’s more mid-20s than late teens. She’s already working on her second LP, entitled The Cherry Bomb Tree, and as someone with lots of musical ambition yet the creativity of an earthworm myself, I have to say this is pretty stellar stuff for such a young artist. Check it out if you like piano-based singer-songwriter loveliness with a surprisingly experienced studio awareness, similar to Bats for Lashes, Sara Bareilles, and Florence and the Machine. Support independent music and grab her debut below if you enjoy it.

Alexa Borden – “I Want To Be Near To You”

http://itunes.apple.com/ca/album/speck-in-the-universe/id424700996

https://www.facebook.com/alexabordenmusic

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By Rudy Klapper, February 2, 2012 10:00 am

The lovely Cate Le Bon is an English/Welsh singer-songwriter whose been around since 2008, most notably in support of Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys, but it’s her sophomore record Cyrk that is just starting to get some attention stateside. It came out January 17 and is a wispy bit of Nico-influenced dark pop with a tinge of St. Vincent. RIYL: indie pop, accents.

Cate Le Bon – “Puts Me To Work”