As a career retrospective and unreleased/rarities compilation, you couldn’t do much better than Keep An Eye On The Sky, Rhino Records’ long-anticipated Big Star boxed set. The band’s canonical albums are few—two polished releases and a post-mortem assemblage that never made it to a final draft—but what Big Star lacked in released product, it more than made up for in depth and scope, and that long historical reach provides the context for this packed four-disc set. Keep An Eye opens with pre-Big Star recordings from Alex Chilton and Chris Bell, tracking the folksy/psychedelic origins of the band’s earliest recordings, including a rudimentary version of Bell’s exquisite “Try Again” under the Rock City sobriquet. The first three discs follow a sensible division, grouping demos, alternate takes and mixes and album versions of songs from the #1 Record, Radio City and Third/Sister Lovers sessions. Though there’s nothing here in the way of a holy grail—Big Star burned hot, but too quickly to leave a lot of material behind—the unreleased music is always interesting and frequently revelatory. The demo material from Third/Sister Lovers, in particular, is a treasure trove of early drafts and alternate performances that reveal the melodic roots of what later became notoriously shambolic sessions; to listen to the demo of “Downs” beside the album version is to hear how astonishingly prescient and fearless a band Big Star had become by 1973. The fourth disc offers a pristine live recording, taped at Lafayette’s Music Room in Memphis, from the period between the release of #1 Record and Radio City. It’s a passionate performance, and yet this final disc is as poignant as it is energetic. In the pauses between songs, the audience’s indifference to the music they’re hearing is palpable. Listless applause and polite silence hang in the gaps, and the criminal lack of success Big Star faced in its own lifetime becomes a part of the official transcript. We knew that already, of course, and yet to hear it so plainly on the final disc still hurts, a bit. Lush photographs and detailed liner notes, most notably a deep critical assessment by Memphis-based journalist Bob Mehr, complement the music and render Keep An Eye On The Sky a fully satisfying archival project. The albums are still the place for novices to begin, but anyone with a desire to dig deeper will find this box a worthwhile purchase indeed. [Rhino]
—Eric Waggoner
“It’s Enough To Leave You” is the opening track on Dim The Aurora, and it packs about a quarter-century of alt-rock reference points into its four-minute running time. From the awkwardly soaring chorus and the chunky, quirky, handclaps-and-piano rhythm line to the dynamic buildup that goes nowhere but is expansive and elegant getting there, “It’s Enough To Leave You” manages to subtly point fingers at everyone from Michael Stipe to Spoon to the Hold Steady, all while managing to sound quite unique. To these ears, however, Austin’s Monahans evoke nothing as much as the rambling sonic winsomeness of their Lone Star neighbor Will Johnson, although the 11 tracks on Dim The Aurora are decidedly more put-together and structurally sound than anything Johnson has ever done. Monahans graft singer/songwriter-type warbling and classic-rock guitar figures onto messy and gratifying beds of sound that incorporate regular instrumentation in highly irregular ways. There’s a definite sense that the sprawling guitars on cuts like “I Run To You” and the catchy, melancholy title track want to stretch out even further and that the buzz and howl of the three instrumental songs are a clarion signal as to the group’s real intent. In the same way that Johnson makes deceptively dense music that only seems simple and straightforward, Monahans have made an album that’s richly rooted in American rock traditionalism but also lurching noisily forward into something far more intriguing. [Misra]
—Jason Ferguson
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Although it might be difficult to comprehend now, the Jesus And Mary Chain was a total revelation when it appeared amid the ocean of dull-yet-worthy indie pop that made up so much of the mid-’80s British music scene. Initially greeted with hate and bile, 1985 debut Psychocandy wasn’t so much a breath of fresh air as it was a speed- and booze-addled belch of intent.
Looking back, brothers Jim and William Reid had it all: great name, great look, a truckload of attitude and, most important, a sound that’s been ripped off and assimilated by a thousand other less-talented bands. But what a sound: the Velvet Underground, Suicide, the Stooges, ’60s girl groups, Phil Spector and the Beach Boys, all mixed up and seemingly recorded in a tin can on a budget of $3.50 by a studio engineer under the influence of wine and animal tranquilizers, then swamped by white noise and migraine-inducing shards of feedback. It wasn’t especially clever, it certainly wasn’t pretty, but by God, it was effective.
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The fourth LP from Longwave manages to be a great big sprawl of an album that never sounds too ambitious for its own good. It’s as if the Brooklyn band and co-producer Peter Katis (Interpol, the National) constantly worked to add sound and space to each track, until Secrets Are Sinister seemed as packed as a Phil Spector wall-of-sound project. As a result, Secrets Are Sinister sounds a little anachronistic until you pay attention to the smaller touches that provide the interesting center for each song: the insistent, rattling percussion and prickly guitar solos of “The Devil & The Liar,” the contrast between the thudding bass lines and fragile, unguarded declarations of love on “Eyes Like Headlights.” Most of the lyrical content deals with missed connections and miscommunications, making the unrestrained instrumental accompaniment seem both ambitious and oddly fruitless; all this bombastic noise, and still we can’t seem to connect. But Secrets Are Sinister’s unflagging energy keeps it from sounding tragic, as if with a few more tries, its narrators and subjects might be able to bridge the gap between them. [www.originalsignalrecordings.com]
—Eric Waggoner
Mascott is the art project of Manhattanite Kendall Jane Meade, a seraph-voiced singer and sometime Off-Broadway songwriter. Conversely, Art Project could rightly be read as her mascot: Its nine songs (many less than three minutes long) are both short and endlessly sweet, and its vibe is simultaneously downtown-sleek and small-town-simple. Over jingling bells and plinking synths, Meade sings of hours floating and of something growing, of how sleeping dogs lie and wanting to make it all right. It’s nothing earth-shattering, but there’s an airy charm in her childlike delivery and a blessed practicality to her untangled arrangements, most notably in the easy cadence of early highlight “4th Of July.” The exceptions to this rule on Mascott’s third album are also interesting, even if they feel somewhat forced. Her spoken-word vocals on “Like Letting Go Of The Sun” creepily straddle a Beatlesque, “Because”-borrowed arpeggio, while painstaking ballad “Red Flowers” lacks the conviction of, say, Jennifer O’Connor, who provides backup vocals on two Art Project tracks. But all of that is forgotten on honey-dripping closer “Wildwood Flower,” a strummy number that T-Bone Burnett ought to be eyeing for his next O Brother, Where Art Thou? hoedown. It’s Meade’s most affecting tune on Mascott’s most affectionate and tuneful collection. [www.redpandarecords.com]
—Noah Bonaparte Pais
Nothing golden can stay, but from 1996 to 2001, Belle And Sebastian were bronzed gods of indie pop. Stuart Murdoch’s troupe was above it all: immune to such mundane concerns as interviews and photo shoots, imbued with their own creation myth at Glasgow’s Stow College and so peerless that people forgot about the Smiths for a while. So it’s with some nostalgia that The BBC Sessions—live in-studio performances of songs mostly culled from the group’s first three albums—arrives as a snapshot of the years when B&S ruled the school. Among the highlights here are the spare, narrative-style (and homosexually suggestive) “The State I Am In” and “The Stars Of Track And Field,” with Murdoch’s storytelling vocals finely attuned to the rhythm of guitarist Stevie Jackson’s reverb and jangle. The band rarely strays from the album versions of songs (sometimes to a frustrating degree; would it have killed B&S to record a version of “Sleep The Clock Around” without the annoyingly long fade-in?), but such faithful rendering doesn’t make the material predictable; rather, it shows the band at the top of its delicate game. Bonus material: Four unreleased tracks recorded in 2001 are added to the canon. They’re historically important as the last songs to feature singer/cellist Isobel Campbell, who provides lead vocals to the wonderfully melancholy “Nothing In The Silence,” but the remainder don’t live up to the promise of clever titles such as “(My Girl’s Got) Miraculous Technique.” Initial copies of The BBC Sessions contain an 11-song bonus disc of a 2001 Christmas concert in Belfast. [www.matadorrecords.com]
—Matthew Fritch
FREDRIK Na Na Ni [The Kora]
The debut by this Malmö, Sweden, six-piece comes on like typical Scandinavian folk pop. It’s cashmere-soft, endlessly lilting and more polite than a game of backgammon between Kings Of Convenience and Jens Lekman. A side project from first-name-only songwriters Fredrik and Lindefelt of pop duo the LK, Na Na Ni has its autumnal charms. Tenderly played acoustic guitars, glockenspiel and cello frame the melodic, wallflower vocals. Things get interesting, however, during Japanese-tinged, koto-music interlude “Hei Hei” and the nearly all-instrumental second half of the album. Soon enough, Na Na Ni descends into a rabbit hole with the kind of mystical, pastoral tunes last heard on records by Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and Fairport Convention. It’s a pleasantly weird turn of events for such an otherwise well-adjusted indie-pop album. [www.thekorarecords.com]
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End Of The World singer/drummer Stefan Marolachakis sounds so much like the Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser that you’d be forgiven for wondering if they’ve ever been seen together in the same New York bar. Like Leithauser, Marolachakis elongates his vowels, often past the end of a line, and he likes to shift and slur into his upper register in the middle of a word. It’s a sound simultaneously sober and drunken, and it’s effective coming from both vocalists. French Exit is the second album from Marolachakis and guitarist Benjamin Smith (they’ve lost several bandmates since 2006’s You’re Making It Come Alive, which might explain the new album’s title, a term that means leaving without saying goodbye). It would be too easy, and unjust, to dismiss French Exit as ersatz Walkmen: Once the shock of similarity passes, the solid songwriting and anthemic performances stand on their own merits. While the sound is big and favors layers of reverberating chords and tumbling, martial drums on “Jody” and “Railroad Living,” French Exit also ventures into punk rock on “Section House,” helping the End Of The World to avoid sounding pretentious or bloated. Walkmen-like? Definitely. Walkmen-lite? Not at all. [www.flameshovel.com]
—Steve Klinge
Ask for Englishman Roy Harper’s references and you’ll get pages of popular and semi-popular names that span decades. Led Zeppelin sang a song about him, and Pink Floyd had him sing one of theirs; Kate Bush, Pete Townshend and Jim O’Rourke have given him a public thumbs-up. Even so, after a 43-year career, the man is a cult figure, partly because his authenticity is the sort that makes people uncomfortable. Harper is an uncompromising social critic, quite willing to follow his muse to places people really don’t want to go; for a taste, visit the May 2006 entry in his online diary and read his thoughts on organized religion. His unswerving devotion to driving his point home manifests in songs such as “I Hate The White Man” (from Flat Baroque And Berserk), which holds England accountable for the racism that was the flip side of what was then a still much-missed empire, and “Twentieth Century Man” (from Jugula), which is an explicitly detailed chronicle of carnality vanquishing civility.
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After the breakout success of 2007’s Cryptograms, Deerhunter has expanded its sonic palette without sacrificing the innovation or excitement that’s polarized a small cross-section of the listening public. Building upon the melodic leanings of the Fluorescent Grey EP (also from 2007), the sweeping soundscapes on Microcastle show the Atlanta band embracing its grandiose ambitions, although never to the extent of being overstuffed or ostentatious. Rather, Deerhunter creates intimate moments that swell into something that feels much larger. “Agoraphobia” finds its narrator in a panic, whispering desperate pleas for a salvation that won’t ever come. Rather than accentuate paranoia and confusion with rage, singer/wunderkind Bradford Cox bellows his appeals with a detachment that’s equal parts ennui and hopelessness. Cox has utilized a similarly ethereal, stream-of-consciousness delivery under his Atlas Sound moniker, burying soft melodies in a bedroom aesthetic of hazy tape loops and samples. The constant fluidity here makes the album’s unpredictability seem grounded and cohesive instead of erratic. Here’s hoping Microcastle is the sound of a band just scratching the surface. [www.kranky.net]
—Matt Siblo
The Velvet Underground’s first album ranks among the most plagiarized of all time: Its strident melodies, dark subject matter and cloaks of reverb have crept into songs by Patti Smith, Television and Sonic Youth. The fact that those three called New York home is also no coincidence since Gotham continues to inspire crisp, anxious, lo-fi rock ensembles, each unabashedly paying homage to the Velvets. Brooklyn’s Vivian Girls are most conspicuously the product of their claimed influences: the Wipers, Nirvana and the Shangri-Las. More appropriate, though, the jangling guitars and charmingly off-key vocals traipsing through the female trio’s self-titled debut would’ve fit perfectly between post-punk titans like the Raincoats and Delta 5 on a Rough Trade compilation. And like their English ancestors, the Girls deal almost exclusively in exuberance and wonderment, making found squalls and rattles sound like their own. But that might have more to do with the copious amounts of reverb echoing through the album’s best songs (the ponderous “Where Do You Run To,” the punky “Never See Me Again”). They would noisily fall apart were it not for a steady beat. Read More »
Female singer/songwriters are an easily maligned bunch. It is nothing, after all, to lump one in with two dozen others and think of them en masse as nothing much. There are people who defy that pigeonholing—Jenny Lewis and Martha Wainwright, to name two contemporary examples—and Ariel Abshire could fall on either side of the great divide. On Exclamation Love, Abshire wails and croons like a far less embattled Wainwright (their voices are quite alike) while relying, at times, too much on the saccharine and repetitive, as in the chorus of the title track. The saving grace, and the thing that will make the album that follows Exclamation Love a watershed moment for Abshire, is that she has an undeniable cleverness running through her songs. “Goddamn New Mexico,” with its expletive-laden disdain of geography’s questionable effect on the goodness or badness of people, “I Didn’t Know People Could Do That” and “Thin Skin” are lyrically satisfying, witty and endearing. But other tracks, such as “Unknown Encounter,” fight the bigger demons of Exclamation Love with the better angels of Abshire’s songwriting, and it’s a constant struggle where neither comes out victorious. Abshire’s lyrical wit and unadorned-yet-beautiful voice, though, compel the ears to like Exclamation Love more for what it suggests about her future than her present. [www.darla.com]
—Pat Hipp
For every Eagles Of Death Metal devotee letting loose the devil horns, there’s usually a dumbfounded friend using those same digits to scratch his head. What’s so polarizing about a pair of sex-obsessed, former high-school pals getting their teenage garage-rocks off, anyway? Perhaps it has something to do with the notion that one of said pals, drummer Josh Homme, saves his “real” art for Queens Of The Stone Age. Or maybe it’s the sheer audacity of singer/guitarist Jesse Hughes’ porn-star mustache. Nevertheless, the duo’s third LP won’t reconcile the two camps; in fact, Heart On may be the first EODM album to really make the detractors’ case. Chugging riffs and falsetto vocals abound on these 12 tracks, but instead of indulging whatever black magic that kept 2004’s Peace Love Death Metal and 2006’s Death By Sexy from devolving into jokey karaoke, Hughes and Homme decide to play it mostly straight. The one stab at reclaimed cock rock, “High Voltage,” can’t get it up, while “Now I’m A Fool,” with its ooh-la-la-la harmonies and salient solos, verges on the balladic. It’s obvious that these Eagles don’t care to be thought of as a mere novelty act. Less obvious is whether they should aim to be anything more. [www.downtownrecordings.com]
—Noah Bonaparte Pais
If 2007’s Mapmaker was created a palpable buzz for Parts & Labor, Receivers should raise the noise to a distorted howl. The Brooklyn band’s sound has been deftly evolving with each release, with Mapmaker its first to directly embrace its current predilection for bombastic anthems buried beneath the rubble of screeching synthesizer. Receivers has the same sonic hallmarks: twitchy, knob-turning electronics amid lumbering distortion and lyrics foretelling vague apocalyptic threats. The difference here can be found in the sequencing, which at only eight tracks makes the songs feel more fluid and less cumbersome than its predecessor, whose full-steam approach petered out toward its end. The band allows most songs to careen past five minutes, often times longer, indulging every swelling melody in the process. The album’s title nods to Parts & Labor’s semi-novel approach of conducting an open call for audio samples and field recordings, all of which are said to be found somewhere within Receivers. While Parts & Labor’s grinding wall of noise seems to invite this kind of egalitarianism, the experiment never seems gimmicky or extraneous. Instead, it becomes virtually impossible to distinguish what sounds do or do not belong. It all comes together in one glorious racket. [www.jagjaguwar.com]
—Matt Siblo
“‘I have watched you all these years,’ said the Moon to me, ‘But when you are gone for good, I will still be here, on the other side,’” sings Peter Adams on the picture-perfect “Conversation With The Moon.” Delivered in an angelic, Jeff Buckley-like tone—pitched somewhere between the childlike reverie of a bedtime story and the faintly backlit clack-a-tap of a midnight blog entry—how does one begin to critique such a magically conceived line? I Woke With Planets In My Face is the second bedsit masterpiece from this DIY wunderkind with the classical-music background. Comparing Adams’ music to others’ is a loser’s game; his flights of fancy aren’t as improvisational as Buckley’s or Syd Barrett’s (his compositions, such as the Eastern-stringed “Ziggurat,” are far too structured and precise), and his affection for the psychedelic chaos of Neutral Milk Hotel and the Flaming Lips is channeled through layers of orchestration rather than guitar feedback. It may seem a ridiculous overstatement, but perhaps the best analogue for Adams’ talent is someone like Paul McCartney circa Ram: a guy brave enough to celebrate both small pleasures and big melodies, splashing it all on the canvas without so much as a glance over his shoulder. [www.peteradamsmusic.com]
—Corey duBrowa
For whatever cosmic reason, both of these discs from the post-Royal Trux outfits of Jennifer Herrema and Neil Michael Hagerty sound like a distillation of what they’ve wrung from their separate muses since 2000. But they also mark the point at which the rate of return starts to diminish. Herrema’s goofily earnest sleaze rock, right down to the study-hall notebook doodling of RTX’s CD-packaging art, comes off predictably loud and snotty on third studio album JJ Got Live RaTX. But apart from a couple of fun flourishes (an opening space-funk guitar solo that recalls Eddie Hazel’s gritty Funkadelic workouts, a gleeful cover of garage-rock linchpins the Barbarians’ “Are You A Boy Or Are You A Girl”), RTX’s riff begins to sound a little rote. Even the more playful tracks toward the end of the album, after Herrema has worked out her Ratt and Lita Ford urges, begin to slip past without registering.
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You thought Woody Allen’s coital exploits were icky? Welcome to Skeletal Lamping, which could’ve been titled Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Kevin Barnes’ Sex Life (And Should Be Afraid To Find Out). Barnes’ Of Montreal albums have fast become elaborately constructed confessional booths, to the point where it will be no great surprise if the lyrics on his next platter reveal PIN numbers or medical records. His last, and best, offering, 2007’s Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, disclosed intimate details about everything from Barnes’ stormy domestic life (“dodging lamps and vegetables”) to his stalled neurotransmitters (“come on, chemicals!”). Skeletal Lamping zeroes in on his bedroom—in spirit, anyway. Recounted love acts also occur in his kitchen (“ass against the sink”), and be forewarned: Once you learn certain things about Barnes’ pleasure palace, you won’t be able to un-learn them. Yet, between musings about black condoms and black shemales, he manages to keep the mood light. The album’s sound is a more intricate remix of Fauna’s futurama, another hyperbaric disco chamber filled with technoodling beats backing pop operettas, while the lyrics sometimes do that magnum opus one better. “I’m so sick of suckin’ the dick of this cruel, cruel city,” he begins “St. Exquisite’s Confessions.” Saintly it ain’t, but a more exquisite confession you’re not likely to find. [www.polyvinylrecords.com]
—Noah Bonaparte Pais
Long before there was a small army of people on Craigslist available at your fingertips for a potential midnight kiss (or at least a grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of Two Buck Chuck), you had to work things out for yourself. Or, as in the case of Sleeping In The Aviary, you could let your interpersonal relationship fester like that last eye-watering bag of half-eaten pork tenderloin and cat-box scrapings that makes it so difficult to even raise the lid of the garbage can. That’s when the only options left in life seem to involve kicking down a door and breaking your big toe, throwing the iron through the front window onto the lawn and scaring the hell out of the neighbor’s cat, or running head-first into the medicine cabinet and writing your goodbye note in blood on the cracked mirror. As neurotically intense as the bad-dream vibe of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, the 11 ultra-lo-fi songs on SITA’s second album offer an agonizing litany of painful blind dates, awkward encounters and domestic partners as mismatched as the last two socks left in your bureau drawer. Expensive Vomit In A Cheap Hotel is the unshaven, drug-addled, untold misery those good-looking, blissful-idiot couples who’ve found their perfect soulmates on eHarmony have never even dreamed about. With a disturbed, ranting style that points out the barely controlled rage common to the early work of fellow Minnesota/ Wisconsin natives Bob Dylan and Violent Femmes, the members of Sleeping In The Aviary are as obsessed here with love gone bad as notoriously demented cartoonist Robert Crumb under a heavy deadline, with a houseful of screaming kids and a car in the driveway with a dead battery. [www.scienceofsound.com]
—Jud Cost
Eric Bachmann’s post-Archers Of Loaf outfit makes music in an unpredictable mix of styles, from 2000’s woozy, strings-laden self-titled debut to 2005’s Spanish-inflected song cycle Dignity And Shame. Forfeit/Fortune finds Bachmann’s muse on a shorter leash, and though fans of his tendency toward noise and sprawl might have reservations about its poppier tone, Crooked Fingers’ fifth LP is the band’s most upbeat release. For all its guest appearances (Neko Case, Silver Jews’ Brian Kotzur and Devotchka’s Tom Hagerman), the album’s overall sound is tight and consistent. This is largely due to Bachmann’s indulgence in Latin rhythms and instrumentation. Songs about desperate times and looming danger (“Phony Revolutions,” “Sinisteria”) are shot through with growling brass and carried on minor-chord melodies. Though Forfeit/Fortune is bookended by its most accessible tracks, the whole is uneasy and gritty enough that the closer, the tough, catchy “Your Control” (on which Bachmann duets with an all-stops-out Case), sounds absolutely right. It’s an album-capping moment that indulges in sweet harmonies and rueful observations (“You say you want resolution/I say you want your control”) at the same time. [www.constantartists.com]
—Eric Waggoner
When Ivan Howard and Kelly Crisp debuted as the Rosebuds in 2003, they were cut from classic indie-pop cloth: spare yet spangly and cautiously exuberant. Within two years, they were a full-on “rock” band boasting dark, foreboding arrangements and complex production. By the time of 2007’s Night Of The Furies, they’d gone synth/disco pop in the service of—pomposity alert!—a concept record. The quest for artistic growth is rarely an easy road to travel, and for Life Like, Howard and Crisp are on the move again, only this time it’s a case of a few steps forward, a few backward and a few sideways. It’s tempting to call this their shoegaze record, as indelible images of Slowdive (the dreamy washes of keyboards and reverbed guitars), Lush (the vocal harmonies) and Ride (the teeth-rattling energy) abound, particularly on “Another Way In,” which overlays all three templates to breathtaking effect. Typecasting is risky, though: What to make of the acoustic-guitar/upright-piano-powered Americana of “Nice Fox,” the gloomy, Church-meets-R.E.M. title track or the Brit-bouncy C86 janglefest that is “Bow To The Middle”? By drawing from their past and crafting intriguing sonic hybrids rather than self-consciously aiming for some dubious new turf, the Rosebuds have, accidentally or not, wound up with their most satisfying album yet. [www.mergerecords.com]
—Fred Mills
Kurt Wagner has finally admitted what’s been true all along: No matter how many dozens of Nashville musicians play on his records, Lambchop is a solo project, one growing more intimate by the moment. He’s now winnowed the tootling, banging and strumming masses down to a septet, a move that’s brought new focus and coherence to Wagner’s increasingly soft songwriting and dry, unmistakable sing-speak. “I’m such a bad enunciator/ Understanding me is hard,” he sings on “A Hold Of You,” but the emotional tenor on Lambchop’s 10th LP is hard to miss. Not that there’s anything wrong with being touchy and tender, but the calm, spare arrangements on OH (ohio) can only be described as pretty. The temperature rises on the midtempo “National Talk Like A Pirate Day” and near rocker “Sharing A Gibson With Martin Luther King, Jr.”; elsewhere, tasteful horns (often a Lambchop strength) return. On 2006’s aptly titled Damaged, Wagner had just survived a health scare and was elegiac and emotionally fragile. That mood continues here on the quiet, bossa-nova-tinged “Ohio,” whose chorus lyric is “Green doesn’t matter when you’re blue.” OH is like listening to one long, quiet conversation where Wagner tells us his secrets. [www.mergerecords.com]
—Robert Baird
With its aptly titled fourth album, Dungen has put the stoner-rock community on notice. No longer will the Sabbath-worshipping decibel peddlers have the blighted neighborhood all to themselves. These psychedelic Swedes are moving in and gentrifying things with their beautiful instrumentals full of piano, strings and—what in the name of Tony Iommi?—flute. 4 features understated guitar jams that wouldn’t sound out of place on the Allmans’ At Fillmore East, unhinged drumming that leans more toward hard bop than hard rock and glowing melodies you’ll sing along to even though the lyrics are in Swedish. Dungen’s first three albums were impressive, to be sure. But by keeping the songs a little shorter, and by bandleader Gustav Ejstes not being such a musical ball hog this time around (he’s shifted from playing practically all of the instruments to focusing on piano, giving his bandmates much bigger roles), Dungen has made a record that’s far more sophisticated musically and melodically. It’s not just a vibe; the band has achieved a manna-from-psych-rock-heaven style that’s firmly here and now, even though it sounds like it was recorded in 1971. It’s trippy-go-bananas rock (“Sätt Att Se”), it’s soul-leaning instrumentals (“Fredag”), and it’s mellow pop bliss (“Det Tar Tid”). It’s the future of stoner rock. [www.kemado.com]
—Patrick Berkery
God, this is depressing. And no, we’re not talking depressing as in mood or tone, but that a band such as Mercury Rev could release something as wretchedly insipid as Snowflake Midnight. (Even the title causes involuntary nausea.) Forever destined to be looked down upon as the Flaming Lips’ wayward cosmic cousins from the Catskills, this is a band that gave the world the frazzled brilliance of 1991’s Yerself Is Steam, the freewheeling, boundary-breaking psych-pop thrills of 1995’s See You On The Other Side, not to mention the Jack Nitzsche-conducts-choirs-of-angels wonderment of 1998’s Deserter’s Songs. So what happened? Mercury Rev has talked about reinvention and veering away from its comfort zone, which is only to be commended, but the band has really fallen flat on its face here. It’s all just too polite. Guitars have been largely abandoned for interminable washes of insipid synths and vapid, ’90s-style techno-lite beats. It’s as if some third-rate Ibiza-based chillout DJ (or, god forbid, Moby) has been handed the reins and decided to bland them out of existence. There are moments of brilliance and wide-eyed lysergic madness, and frontman Jonathan Donahue remains a Charles Adams character made real, but ultimately, Snowflake Midnight is one long, disheartening comedown. [www.yeproc.com]
—Neil Ferguson
The Yardbirds in the mid-’60s. The Jam in the late ‘70s. The Hoodoo Gurus in the early ’80s. Guided By Voices in the early ’90s. Architects, all, of some of rock’s most tuneful, punk-fueled triumphs. It would be foolhardy to add North Carolina’s Sammies to such a pantheon prematurely, but the whiff of rock ’n’ roll majesty, in all its unruly brawn and beauty, is undeniably present on their sophomore platter. With a swagger in their hips and a snap to their step, they conjure Who/U2 anthemism, Brian Wilson-esque sunshine vibes, Nuggets-worthy jangle garage, new-wave dance parties, wistful Ray Davies-styled pop, even ’70s riff rock so boneheadedly brazen (“Treat Her Like A Queen” is pure Billy Squier) that you unapologetically reach for your Bic. Hometown pride being what it is—blind—I’m also reluctant to call the Sammies 2008’s rock saviors or anything like that. But guitarist/vocalist Frank Backgammon and drummer Donnie Yale (a.k.a. brothers Will and Joe Huntley) grew up in the same tiny Southern town as me (Wadesboro, N.C.), so the fan in me wants to cheer all the louder. For the rest of you: From Oasis-like arena-rock opener “Sleep In My Clothes” to the dreamy, “Layla”-tilting denouement of closing number “Saw Your Mother,” this Sandwich is nothing less than a feast. [www.morisen.com]
—Fred Mills
Chances are, you’ve heard something similar to Tracy Shedd before. Surrounded by guitar tones that vary from stark to stratospheric (depending on the mood), Shedd sings in a unprepossessing, hushed voice that recalls everyone from Mazzy Star and Lush to just about half of early-’90s Britain. But for all the comforting pangs of nostalgia bubbling to the surface, the energy and craft found in her road-ready songs keep Cigarettes & Smoke Machines firmly grounded in the present. There’s simply no resisting the Missouri River-wide hook of opener “Never Too Late,” where an initially grim atmosphere melts away with Shedd’s double-tracked voice in a sunnily anthemic chorus. Elsewhere, the Tucson, Ariz., transplant shows her new home’s influence with “Not Giving Up,” a dry acoustic shuffle with big-sky guitar that hints at Calexico (whose frontman, Joey Burns, appears as a guest musician). Cigarettes & Smoke Machines falters when Shedd drifts into monochromatic balladry, as with the pretty-yet-meandering “Paris” and the brief, nondescript “Valentine,” but such lapses are quickly forgotten in the face of its brightest moments, particularly “Won Past Ten.” Powered by a bubbling guitar figure and a gleam of youthful innocence, Shedd indirectly answers any possible criticism with the question, “When was the last time that you felt like you were 17?” Point taken. [www.teenbeat.net]
—Chris Barton
Recording in a New Mexican mesa using only solar power, Brightblack Morning Light is happy to retreat from apocalyptic dread and collapsing economies into a cocoon of its own opiate utopia. “Nobody wants oppression/We don’t need oppression,” sing keyboardist Rachael Hughes and guitarist Nathan Shineywater. Set to a featherweight, time-stretched melody, it sounds like “oppression” could be something as simple as a harsh buzz, never mind suicide bombers and food riots. What they’re getting at with song titles such as “When Beads Spell Power Leaf” is anyone’s guess. But the problem on Motion To Rejoin isn’t that they’re laid-back hippies; it’s that the bottom has fallen out of the magical sound of 2006’s self-titled sophomore LP. Gone are the quietly insistent tom drums, shakers and cymbal swells that provided an essential pulse and tethered Hughes and Shineywater to earth. The traces of muscular gospel and blues have also dissipated, leaving only ghostly voices adrift on waves upon waves of reverb-heavy Rhodes pianos set to maximum vibrato—all of which starts inducing nausea after prolonged exposure. Brightblack Morning Light has always been a druggie band; this time, however, the drug of choice is Dramamine. [www.matadorrecords.com]
—Michael Barclay
Along with ruining the harmonica for every modern-day rocker, Bob Dylan’s influence on other people’s music often comes across as subtle as a sledgehammer. The Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser seems stuck in a never-ending audition for I’m Still Not There, and Blitzen Trapper singer/guitarist Eric Earley does the pinched-nose, protracted-vowel routine as well as anyone not named Cate Blanchett. Witness the title track from the Portland, Ore., band’s fourth full-length, which hums along on a six-string’s plaintive strum, a tambourine’s gentle jangle and, true to form, a harmonica’s whistling wheeze. It’s not the only quality song on Furr to suffer from such a comparison—and not only to Dylan, either. “Black River Killer” is a fantastically detailed, first-person murder ballad that takes a few too many cues from Tom Petty’s “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” while two other tracks reanimate the Allman Brothers’ Southern-rockin’ guitar solos. Enjoying Furr, then, depends entirely on your ability (or willingness) to ignore the heavy footprints of familiar musicians. Try to appreciate the highly infectious boogie-woogie of “Saturday Nite” without hearing Jerry Garcia or the hellfire screeching of “Love U” without having to block out Jet. Do that, and the craftsmanship on Furr has a good shot at overshadowing its undeniable derivation. [www.subpop.com]
—Noah Bonaparte Pais
Time sure has coarsened All Girl Summer Fun Band. On Looking Into It, the Portland, Ore., group’s first album since 2003’s 2, the tweeful, mash-note cotton candy has turned jawbreaker, power-pop hard. The first few tunes here suggest that drummer/bassist Kathy Foster, guitarist Jen Sbragia and guitarist/keyboardist Kim Baxter (all three sing) haven’t outgrown girlish cares, even though they’re operating in a realm where the High Water Marks’ fuzzed-out guitar-pedal bliss and Weezer’s crisp, melodic mawkishness are equally influential. “Oh No” drifts from blossoming devotion to woe-is-me anxiety on a wave of chugga-chugga guitars and handclaps, while the pastel-crunchy “Not The One For Me” makes a case for letting your significant other go find another soulmate. But the second half of Looking Into It hints, however timidly, at a newfound maturity. “Rewind,” a tribute to Sbragia’s deceased father, slows to a glacial tempo. The cutesy veneer surrounding “Plastic Toy Dream” appears to be one of puerile whimsy, until you slice through the power-puff distortion and realize that the band is castigating sweatshop managers. [www.agsfb.com]
—Raymond Cummings
If you’ve lost touch with the band’s work, something new from Mogwai almost demands a barefoot run through the bountiful legacy of these psychedelic master painters from Glasgow, just to see if they’ve still got what it takes. Rest easy, the group that makes you wish you’d gone to film school so you could’ve built a movie around its expansive instrumentals—works that seem to come rumbling from the molten core of the earth itself—hasn’t changed much from the glory days of early albums such as 1997’s Young Team. Two minutes into “I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead,” and it’s just like returning to the familiar smells and dog-eared menu of a favorite restaurant after a long absence. It’s amazing what Mogwai can do with a few simple ingredients. From a solitary piano and a few electric-guitar chords reverberating quietly in somebody’s basement, the song builds in intensity until it becomes a thundering river of lava with a glockenspiel precariously riding the floodtide. Consumer tip: If your house needs shingle-replacement, “The Precipice” at maximum volume might accomplish the demolition of the old roof at a fraction of the cost. [www.matadorrecords.com]
—Jud Cost
At least two of the following mildewed factoids seem mandatory in any Robert Pollard review: “used to be a teacher,” “sings in a fake British accent,” “takes the occasional drink” and “needs an editor.” Given the tepid reaction to some of Pollard’s recent efforts, “return to form” might be added to the lexicon of staleness when discussing the debut LP by Pollard’s latest incarnation, Boston Spaceships. (Late-period Guided By Voices bassist Chris Slusarenko on guitar and other instruments and Decemberists drummer John Moen fill out this new power trio.) Fanboys (“Return to form? Everything’s always been great!”) and naysayers (“Why does he have to release every song he writes?”) will never settle their differences. Though I generally partake in the Kool-Aid, some of Pollard’s post-GBV stuff has admittedly either gone over my head or missed the sweet spot. Brown Submarine’s pleasures, however, are inarguable. Swaggering opener “Winston’s Atomic Bird” evokes GBV circa Devil Between My Toes, while the pretty, pastoral folk pop of “Two Girl Area” conjures Every Picture Tells A Story-era Rod Stewart. The bouncy “Ready To Pop” is aptly descriptive, and the equally catchy “Andy Playboy” succinctly tells a wannabe band frontman’s story in a mere minute and a half. Boasting sharp lyrics and plenty of strong songwriting, Brown Submarine may be Pollard’s most entertaining start-to-finish record since 2006’s double-whammy of From A Compound Eye and Blues And Boogie Shoes. On or off the Pollard bandwagon, all aboard this Submarine. [www.bostonspaceships.com]
—Matt Hickey
When the members of Dead Confederate got together in 1997, it was as a jam band called Redbelly, playing 30-minute songs that hovered between Neil Young and Pink Floyd. A couple of name changes later, the Athens, Ga., group has shoved aside its old, free-floating post-psych for the barbed, bruising Southern grunge of Wrecking Ball. There’s no shortage of calculation in the transition, especially in Dead Confederate’s unwavering devotion to Nirvana, but for all its familiarity, this debut is absolutely merciless. Wrecking Ball is a lumbering, angst-driven assault that’s simultaneously ear-splitting and as comfortable as an old flannel shirt. On its strongest cuts (“Heavy Petting,” “The Rat”), the band splatters noise in every direction, retooling its Floyd fascination into aggression and reinvigorating the boneheadedness of Skynyrd for maximum 21st-century effect. Even on the weaker songs, when the chord changes come secondhand and the influences arrive undigested, Wrecking Ball remains an ugly slab of guitar sludge that’s well worth the pain. [www.deadconfederate.com]
—Kenny Berkowitz
Every big city has one: the band that should’ve made it, the act that, through whatever combination of bad luck, worse advice and blinding self-destructiveness, never quite broke out of its hometown. In Miami in the 1980s, that band was Charlie Pickett And The Eggs. Proficient in genres from cowpunk to Stones-y bar rock, Pickett made a record co-produced by the Velvet Underground’s Moe Tucker and suffered the usual malaise of low record sales and ruinous touring. Bar Band Americanus (Bloodshot) collects tracks from 1982-87, and the range of material is impressive, from the slide-guitar blues of “Penny Instead” to the overtly Keith Richards guitar riff that drives “On Horseback.”
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A year removed from 2007’s blog-tastically acclaimed The Stage Names, Okkervil River is back with its sequel, a collection of songs drawn from the same recording sessions. Think of it as a lit-rock Use Your Illusion II. While The Stage Names jettisoned much of Okkervil River’s former folk and orchestral-pop leanings, The Stand Ins leaves the door open to its roots, from now-former member Jonathan Meiburg’s ringing banjo opening “Lost Coastlines” to the appropriately Highway 61-leaning “Singer Songwriter,” a biting and brilliant takedown of the artistic leisure class. Such vintage touches mesh nicely with leader Will Sheff’s earnest vocal delivery, but elsewhere, Okkervil River’s less-adventurous approach reveals some songs for what they are: perfectly capable if unmemorable vehicles for Sheff’s lyric novellas. “Blue Tulip” meanders too long before falling into a cathartic finish, and the wordy “Pop Lie” finds Sheff indulging his fascination with his own vocation. The latter track, a rocked-out confessional, dares to close with a straight-faced recitation of the song’s “dedicated to” note, a move that feels both audacious and staggeringly precious. Okkervil River can deliver terrific songs when ambitions are kept in balance, but this uneven record is in dire need of an editor. [www.jagjaguwar.com]
—Chris Barton
Matt and Bubba Kadane have never been in much of a hurry to do anything, neither with their beloved ’90s outfit Bedhead nor with their current gig, the New Year. So it’s no surprise that the follow-up to 2004’s The End Is Near took the brothers more than four years. “Folios” unfolds at the same snail-on-muscle-relaxants pace that made Bedhead so maddening and sneakily rewarding—little more than a repeated guitar chord and a tapped snare—before one of the interchangeably low-singing Kadanes ends the song with an amusing confession: “I don’t think the good years I’ve got can wait.” With that, they get right to it. This self-titled third album is, by these guys’ standards, quite the rush. Thanks to a typically front-and-center drum mix by engineer Steve Albini, walkabout pacesetters “X Off Days” and “The Door Opens” feel more like a mad dash. The unrushed songs are equally appealing, gussied up with elegant guitar and piano accents and spiked with disarming lines (“camping and orgies” are whispered among other soon-to-be-unmissed pleasures on deathbed missive “MMV”). If it takes the Kadanes another half-decade to match this half-hour of sublime music, the waiting will be the hardest part, indeed. [www.touchandgorecords.com]
—Noah Bonaparte Pais
Indie icon, folk troubadour, pop medium. Mac McCaughan has assumed many musical guises for his Portastatic project, which has existed almost as long as Superchunk, that other band he fronts. There’s a telling photo of stacks of unmixed four-track cassettes, dating as far back as Christmas 1989, inside the two-CD Some Small History. Disc one of this best-of/outtakes compilation begins with Portastatic’s roughly produced first single, “Starter” (originally released by WFMU radio host and Monk scriptwriter Tom Scharpling). What follows isn’t in chronological order, but both discs present a strong argument that McCaughan has been hoarding some of his best work for Portastatic. A 1994 seven-inch version of “San Andreas Crouch,” which later appeared on 1995’s Slow Note For A Sinking Ship, shows the sparse foundations for one of McCaughan’s best songs, and a 2003 full-band take of that album’s “Skinny Glasses Girl” improves on the original. Two discs may seem excessive, but moments like these keep Some Small History from growing stale. Bonus material: A variety of demos, acoustic versions and covers of songs by the Magnetic Fields, Hot Chip and Bob Dylan, among others. [www.mergerecords.com]
—Kory Grow
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