Reviews
Top 10 Albums for 2007
10. S/T – The Good, The Bad, & The Queen (Because Paul Simonon is playing bass again.)
9. The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Dreaming – Club 8 (Because I wasn’t expecting an album by them.)
8. From Here We Go Sublime – The Field (Because I can get lost to the beats when I’m out running.)
7. Prinzhorn Dance School – Prinzhorn Dance School (Because they are probably the first band to ever ask in a song, “Do you know your butcher?”)
6. White Chalk – PJ Harvey (Because it’s haunting.)
5. Pocket Symphony – Air (Because it makes me want to go to Japan.)
4. Boxer – The National (Because it is heartbreakingly sinister, just like the suburbs.)
3. Sky Blue Sky – Wilco (Because Nels Cline plays some amazing guitar solos.)
2. Migration – Sambassadeur (Because it’s a pop masterpiece.)
1. Sound of Silver – LCD Soundsystem (Because I’m an aging hipster. Plus I can’t get Someone Great out of my head.)
Here's a short list of some albums likely to make my Top 10 2006 list:
Live a Little - Pernice Brothers (Joe Pernice writes some of the most literate yet sadly sweet and melodic pop songs on Earth, and he keeps getting better and better.)
The Life Pursuit - Belle and Sebastian (Who would have thought Belle and Sebastian would be able to top If You're Feeling Sinister?)
World Waits - Jeremy Enigk (An extremely honest album.)
Through the Windowpane - The Guillemots (A glorious mess of a debut, but possibly the best debut in 2006.)
Writer's Bloc - Peter, Bjorn and John (Damn Swedes keep churning out pop perfection.)
So This Is Goodbye - Junior Boys (Electronic music with soul.)
Orchestra of Bubbles - Apparat & Ellen Allien (Electronic music with heart.)
Cannibal Sea - The Essex Green (Pristine pop songs with just the right amount of heft.)
Fox Confessor Brings the Flood - Neko Case (Some day when I have children I'll let them fall asleep to the stories on this album.)
Puzzles Like You - Mojave 3 (My favorite British band.)
I haven't written a proper review in nearly two years. Why? It's time consuming, and I can be lazy. At some point, when time allows, I'd like to start writing reviews again. Until that time this page will not be updated.
Here's my Top 10 Singles for 2004 (One of which wasn't a single, but I absolutely love the song and decided that it should have been a single).
10. Chewing Gum - Annie (If I had one guilty pleasure in 2004 it was driving around listening to Chewing Gum on endless repeat.)
09. Stay - Asobi Seksu (The one non-single on the list. Reminds me of Lush and the whole shoegazer scene in the early 90's but only for a brief moment. Brilliant piece of longing and desire encapsulated in a five minute song.)
08. Walk Idiot Walk - The Hives (Kick ass and irony free pop perfection with sleigh bells and hand claps. This is what Rock & Roll is supposed to sound like.)
07. Hey Girl - The Delays (Always a sucker for the chiming of a 12 string Rickenbacker. A blissful love song that should have been a hit.)
06. Send Me Shivers - Mouse on Mars (Mouse on Mars are one of the few bands that make me want to dance, and I hate dancing. All the usual Mouse on Mars elements are to be found on Send Me Shivers, but less abstract than they usually are.)
05. Formed A Band - Art Brut (No words can begin to describe the brilliance of this song. Not since The Smiths have a British band sounded so disgusted with English culture.)
04. This Fire - Franz Ferdinand (Nothing new going on with this Scottish quartet that hasn't already been done but This Fire is a fantastic single and itheir debut is an incredible album. What I love so much about this band is how every song on the album was written as a potential single. It's rare for a band to actually care about the listener.)
03. Seventeen Years - Ratatat (Sure, the album didn't really live up to this single, but like I wrote before, and I quote myself, "Dope as fuck.")
02. The Power Is On - The Go! Team (Cheerleader chants, big beats, smashing piano chords, and 70's styled cop drama television show horn hits. What more could you ask for in a song?)
01. Heartbeat - Annie (I heart Annie. None of my friends can figure out why, and I can't either. Pure pop bliss.)
The 2004 Retrospective Year-In-Music box set is complete. It's 10 CDs with a total of 172 songs, and just over 11 hours of music. You can view the complete tracklisting here. Good stuff. 2004 was a spectacular year for music.
Album title: Wire Post to Wire
Artist: The Standard
Rating: 7.0 out of 10
Quick review: Post-rock anthems for the literate, elephants, unicorns, chemicals, a dash of prog art rock, and some occasional twinkling pianos, need I write any more? Really, the only thing that drags this album down is singer Tim Putman's warbling slightly paranoid voice.
Single: Chewing Gum
Artist: Annie
Rating: 10.0 out of 10
Quick review: Tightly crisp electro beats, sweat drenched keyboards, and sexual innuendos aside, Chewing Gum is a disgustingly sweet pop confection that may seem as disposable as its metaphorical subject matter but with
each repeated listen the layers and depth of this mischevious piece of musical
perfection become more apparent. Sure, we all know Annie is gleefully winking
at us when she sings, "Hey Annie how is it so, you'e always got a new bubble to blow?" but who cares? Single of the year? Absolutely!
Album title: A Girl Called Eddy
Artist: A Girl Called Eddy
Rating: 9.0 out of 10
Quick review: Channeling an intimate blend of Chrissy Hynde with Burt Bacharach while maintaining her own deeply melodic and lyrical voice, A Girl Called Eddy's, aka Erin Moran, first full length album, following
her 2001 EP, is a sublime collection of melancholy anthems for the lonely
and romantically disenchanted. Produced to perfection by Richard Hawley,
former Longpigs and Pulp guitarist, as well as solo performer, A Girl Called Eddy is steeped in an understated elegance. Moran crafts gorgeously sophisticated and hopelessly romantic pop songs for the brokenhearted. Each of the eleven tracks found on the album is punctuated with a universal and timeless quality. Songs are filled with tear stained streets, long empty nights spent looking at the moon, and lovers wondering why love was lost and when, if ever, it will be found.
Album title: Books - EP
Artist: Belle & Sebastian
Rating: 4.0 out of 10
Quick review: Oh Belle and Sebastian, why must you tease us so? Why must you dally and dance with amorous brilliance and then waltz moments later as with two left feet? Belle and Sebastian's latest EP, the follow-up to last year's disappointingly dull full length Dear Catastrophe Waitress, finds the band barely keeping their momentum going. The EP's six minute opener, Your Cover's Blown, is an empty exercise in faux disco strutting funk that feels about as tossed off and affectionless as a hooker's $5 hand job. Wrapped Up In Books is classic B&S that calls to mind the literary EP days between Tigermilk and If You're Feeling Sinister, when B&S were more concerned with substance over their recent stylized affectations. Your Secrets, while not as flat as the tracks on DCW, sounds like a leftover track from the DCW recording sessions. The EP closes lazily with Cover, primarily an abbreviated instrumental retread of Your Covers Blown, that feels more like a tacked on postscript than a proper ending.
Album title: The Futureheads
Artist: The Futureheads
Rating: 8.0 out of 10
Quick review: While not as overtly urgent, charismatic and sexual as say Franz Ferdinand, The Futureheads' self-titled debut, produced by Andy Gill of Gang Of Four fame, strangely, yet satisfyingly, blends barbershop harmonies and choir boy counter melodic shouts with precise blasts of Wire, Television Personalities, The Soft Boys and The Clash influenced pogo friendly staccato pop. While that's a formula that may sound quite awkward in theory, The Futureheads' sound manages to work in every way that it should fail. The Futureheads keep their songs succinct, with the longest track, He Knows, lasting a brusque 3 minutes and 14 seconds. Amazingly The Futureheads are able to cram nuggets of straightforward intelligence and instantly humable melody into their brief and explosive songs. What The Futureheads may lack in brazen charisma and sexual swagger they make up for in something that seems to be missing in large quantities these days, musical integrity.
Album title: Modern Apprentice
Artist: Ikara Colt
Rating: 7.5 out of 10
Quick review: Sounding like a youthful, yet more spastically urgent and rhythmically abrasive, Sonic Youth before they became a jam band for the indie rock crowd, Ikara Colt waste no time in laying down their own discordant and slightly angular musical plan on their sophomore release Modern Apprentice. Composed of twelve songs, and clocking in at roughly 34 minutes, Modern Apprentice is an economically taut nihilistic blast of English art school punk.
Album title: Devin Dazzle & The Neon Fever
Artist: Felix da Housecat
Rating: 9.5 out of 10
Quick review: Moments earlier I had a party of one going on in my AOR (Area of Responsibility aka my work cube). The spotlight was on me, well really just a desk lamp that sits perched above my crappy and archaic work PC, as I pulled out all my 80's dance moves and slinked around my cube wishing I was all goofed up on some dangerously fun and hedonistic concoction of club drugs and booze. I was all set to do the moon walk when my manager stopped by and asked, "Can you turn that down? Your music cuts right through into my cube." In my mind I laughed and said to myself, "Okay, but next time you talk on the phone all morning long about Shrek 2 I'm going to ask you to use your inside voice because, well, it cuts through my AOR." I reached over to my Powerbook, the only source of joy in these otherwise joyless and drab office surroundings, and clicked the music down a few notches. Now I'm left trying to decipher the storyline to Felix da Housecat's electrotastic drenched in robot funk concept album Devin Dazzle & The Neon Fever.
Album title: Summer Make Good
Artist: Múm
Rating: 7.5 out of 10
Quick review: Recorded in two adjacent lighthouses off the coast of Iceland, Múm's third long player Summer Make Good is a natural progression following their 2001 release Finally We Are No One. Like German duo Mouse on Mars, Múm are one of the few electronic based bands capable of adding warmth to their digitally humming machinery. However, Summer Make Good, finds Múm replacing their densely layered, yet simply melodic cascading and rhythmically skipping keyboards, laptops and electro drum loops with natural acoustic instruments, drums, xylophones and assorted clanking found sound. There's a new found emphasis on vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir's delicately sung and fragile vocal melodies. Some might find fault with the album's focus on Valtýsdóttir's breathy and youthful school girl choir melodies, but therein lies the charm of Summer Make Good. Valtýsdóttir's melodies add an overall intimacy that demand the attention of the listener.
With Summer Make Good Múm have crafted an album of quiet songs meant to be played even quieter through headphones or tiny speakers. Summer Make Good is the sound of a band discovering their own heartbeat in solitude.
Album title: Ratatat
Artist: Ratatat
Rating: 8.0 out of 10
Quick review: Dope as fuck. Wielding guitars and dance beats the size of Jupiter this duo crafted an album bound to make even the most stubborn indie rock kid get on their feet and shake their skinny ass.
The album's opener and first single, Seventeen Years, lays out Ratatat's simple agenda of throbbing kick drum beats, thick and slinky keyboards, AC/DC-esque crunching power chord riffs, and occasional guitar shredding theatrics. None of which should work together, but does. So far Ratatat win album cover of the year for 2004. If only Daft Punk were this cool, or if Trans Am would just lose their sense of irony.
Highlight(s): Seventeen Years, El Pico, Crips (Hell the whole album is a highlight.)
Lately I've been thinking quite a bit about the songs that have had some impact on my life. Over the past few days I've been compiling a rather extensive and exhaustive list of songs. Over the next few weeks I'll discuss one song from the list. Here's the list as it stands today, and there will be additions as time moves forward. Glancing over the list now I notice some glaring omissions (not ranked, and probably will not include jazz, although it probably should as jazz has had a huge impact on how I listen to music):
1. I've Been a Mess - American Music Club
2. God Only Knows - The Beach Boys
3. Help! - The Beatles
4. The Fox in the Snow - Belle and Sebastian
5. Accident Waiting to Happen - Billy Bragg
6. Heart of Glass - Blondie
7. A Minor Place - Bonnie Prince Billy
8. St. Elmo's Fire - Brian Eno
9. The Only One I Know - The Charlatans
10. Don't Dream It's Over - Crowded House
11. Boys Don't Cry - The Cure
12. Life on Mars - David Bowie
13. Dummy Discards a Heart - Deerhoof
14. The Killing Moon - Echo & the Bunnymen
15. Accidents Will Happen - Elvis Costello & the Attractions
16. Waitin' For Superman - The Flaming Lips
17. Undertow - Joe Pernice
18. Bird of a Wire - Leonard Cohen
19. Alone Again Or - Love
20. Can You See - Mark Eitzel
21. You're Beautiful - Mojave 3
22. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea - Neutral Milk Hotel
23. Temptation - New Order
24. The Ship Song - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
25. Pink Moon - Nick Drake
26. These Days - Nico
27. Here - Pavement
28. Broken Face - Pixies
29. All is Full of Love - Bjork (Plaid Remix)
30. Common People - Pulp
31. Exit (Music For a Film) - Radiohead
32. Blitzkrieg Bop - The Ramones
33. Mistress (Piano Version) - Red House Painters
34. Like a Motorway - Saint Etienne
35. This is to Mother You - Sinead O'conner
36. Catch the Breeze - Slowdive
37. This Charming Man - The Smiths
38. Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space - Spiritualized
39. Cybele's Reverie - Stereolab
40. I Wanna Be Adored - The Stone Roses
41. Fair Play - Van Morrison
42. Sunken Treasure - Wilco
43. Big Day Coming - Yo La Tengo
Here are my picks for singles of the year. I tried to be faithful by picking true singles, not songs that I think would have made great singles if they were only released as such.
10. Kennedy - Kill Hannah. Great pop song. Should have catapulted them to fame.
09. I Believe in a Thing Called Love - The Darkness. Irony? Who cares. Dan introduced me to this fine British band. While I didn't pick up the album I downloaded this gem of a track from iTunes.
08. The Sea and the Rhythm - Iron & Wine. If Nick Drake was from the south...
07. Sweet Song - Blur. This song is beautiful. I had this song on repeat a lot. For friends that disappear.
06. Pendulum - Broadcast. Heaviest single of the year. Brilliant stuff.
05. Anthem For a Seventeen Year Old Girl - Broken Social Scene. I talked trash about the album, but this is such a wonderful song filled with longing.
04. Me and Giuliani Down By the Schoolyard (A True Story) - !!!. 2003 was the year the indie kids embraced dance. This is the result.
03. Such Great Heights - Postal Service. Makes me wish...
02. The Drinks We Drank Last Night - Azure Ray. I heart this song.
01. Crazy in Love - Beyonce. This is the song that started the Chicago Half Marathon in September. Brilliant single.
The 2003 year end box set is complete. It's 8 CDs with 117 songs, and about 7.5 hours of music. It took two days to compile. Hopefully I didn't leave anything off. If anybody is interested in a single cd compilation of the truly best songs from 2003, email me and I'll get something out to you. View the tracklist here.
I've been slack with my reviews. Blame this time of the year with Christmas and all. No, blame me for working on and writing new music and learning Pro Tools.
So, I keep getting asked for my top 10 albums of the year. Top 10? I can only pick 10? Yes. 2003, no matter what some people seem to think, was a pretty damn good year. Glancing at my list I notice that everything on it is from an indie label. So I guess I'm a music snob. Nothing new. So here's the list. Staring next week, or maybe this weekend I'll review each album and tell you why I think it deserves to be in the top 10 (Some albums have already been reviewed).
10. The Decline of the British Sea Power - British Sea Power
09. Pig Lib - Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks
08. Lowedges - Richard Hawley
07. Chutes Too Narrow - The Shins
06. Late - Donna Regina
05. Catalpa - Jolie Holland
04. Apple O - Deerhoof
03. Lemon of Pink - The Books
02. More Parts Per Million - The Thermals
01. Yours, Mine & Ours - The Pernice Brothers
Other important albums of note:
Greetings From Michigan - Sufjan Stevens (I'm listening to this as I type. I ordered it last week from Other Music out of NYC. It arrived yesterday. This probably deserves to be on the list, but I haven't spent too much time with it.)
Not Going Anywhere - Keren Ann (This is Keren's first album in English as she usually sings in French. I adore her first two albums. This one is stunning, and absolutely beautiful. It arrived in the mail yesterday too. Nice to be able to understand her as her lyrics are really great.)
Parsley Sounds - Parsley Sound
Disappointments of 2003:
Dear Catastrophe Waitress - Belle and Sebastian (This is the sound of a band falling apart.)
Amazing Grace - Spiritualized (Maybe, just maybe if J. Spaceman believed...)
S/T - Buzzcocks (Better than every awful punk band played on MTV, but the lyrics just aren't good. The album cover kicks ass.)
Phantom Power - Super Furry Animals (Awful album cover, and a complete bore to listen to.)
Album title: Modern
Artist: Ogurusu Norihide
Rating: 7.0 out of 10
Quick review: On Modern Japanese laptop folk instrumentalist and Shinto Priest in training Ogursu Norihide creates simple and sparse musical meditations. Using primarily piano, acoustic guitar, and the tiniest of electronic pulses and pops, Norihide populates his songs with a sense of melodic innocence that is selfless and pure.
Songs on Modern often start with a simple and singular musical statement of purpose that repeats and reflects back upon itself. Once the musical theme is established Norihide modulates the theme and then offers up slight variations that move the theme forward in new directions.
Modern is a warm, delicate and inviting album. If you listen intently to the space between the notes you can hear Norihide's heart beat ever so softly.
Highlight(s): 7:07, 5:02, 8:25, 1:04
Album title: The Sand and the Stars
Artist: Movietone
Rating: 6.8 out of 10
Quick review: Movitone deal in quiet, almost ghostly and pale in nature, tones. The songs found on The Sand and the Stars drift past, and like transparent strands of gossamer that form between tree branches on calm and clear Spring days, they leave only the slightest reminder of their brief existence.
The album's opening track "The Sand and the Stars" begins with a delicately plucked nylon string guitar, slight touches of piano, and singer Kate Wright gently whispering, "You said the sand and the stars were waiting / It's time to leave the house and walk with me / And the birds on the rooftops were calling / Sing out, sing out to me." As the song progresses it flirts with the briefest of tension, but never crests like an ocean wave before it crashes into shore.
Most of the tracks on The Sand and the Stars were recorded outside, under a blanket of stars, by the sea, on beach in England, against a backdrop of undulating surf. On "Beach Samba," a loose, mournful samba that only slightly resembles a samba, you can briefly feel the cool wet sand between your toes, and taste the damp salty sea air on your lips, as if you were walking alone by the sea. And if you listen close enough to "Marconi's Hut" you can make out the faintest outline of a lighthouse in the hazy distance.
Highlight(s): The Sand and the Stars. We Rode On, Red Earth, Beach Samba
Album title: Ha Ha Sound
Artist: Broadcast
Rating: 7.5 out of 10
Quick review: England's Broadcast are often compared, however unjustifiably so, to Stereolab. While both bands may share a penchant for avant-garde experimentation, they share little else in terms of sound. Broadcast have more in common with Simon & Garfunkle, The Free Design, and The Mamas and the Papas, than they do with Stereolab's Socialist kitschy Teutonic pop.
Ha Ha Sound's album cover is deceiving as Broadcast don't deal in black and white. While the album's opener "Colour Me In" finds singer Trish Keenan singing over a waltzing calliope cloud of dense seemingly incongruous found sound "I am gray, still on the page, oh colour me in / Just an outline, sketchy but fine, oh color me in," the atmosphere is every color possible but black, white, or gray. Ha Ha Sound is a swirling cacophony of colours colliding into one another creating new, and unheard of hues.
Ha Ha Sound is a universe filled with fractured nursery rhyme tone poems bursting with Broadcast's new found sense of rhythmic propulsion. "Pendulum," the album's first single, is built upon a manic and throbbing groove that thrusts Broadcast into new and heavier directions in rhythm. "Man is Not a Bird" contains some of the most rhythmically complex polyrhythmic percussion parts combined with a true pop sensibility rarely heard in pop music. While on "Minim" skittering abstract jazz rhythms creep in and send the listener closer toward aural bliss.
Highlight(s): Pendulum, Man is Not a Bird, Lunch Hour Pops, The Little Bell, Winter Now.
Album title: You Forget It In People
Artist: Broken Social Scene
Rating: 6.0 out of 10
Quick review: The other night I was driving back from somewhere with a friend and I hit button six on the car stereo and some band began to play. My friend asked, "Who's this?" I replied, "I don't know. It'll come to me in a second." But it didn't. After I dropped my friend off I frantically fast forwarded through each track trying to place who was playing. As I did so I concocted this crazy and totally implausible story about how some kids must have broken into my car, taken one of my cds, and replaced it with some band I didn't know.
When I got home I popped the cd changer out from the trunk of my car and found out I had been listening to Broken Social Scene's You Forget It In People.
Why didn't remember the music on this album? I remembered purchasing the album, and listening to it a bunch of times, but that was it. The songs didn't stay with me. Why, how can that be?
Broken Social Scene play satisfying enough pop music with touches of a post-rock sensibility. But there's nothing memorable, a lack of something. You Forget It In People lacks a heart, a center, something to hold on to. There's no sense of gravity.
Highlight(s): Anthems For a Seventeen-year Old Girl, Lover's Spit
Album title: The Decline of British Sea Power
Artist: British Sea Power
Rating: 8.5 out of 10
Quick review: British Sea Power are needed more now than ever, and not just musically. The empire is in shambles, and for good reason. And I'm not just talking about the British Empire. American imperialism, oh wait, capitalism isn't doing to well either.... Just turn on CNN.
The Decline of British Sea Power makes me yearn for youthful days, of hours of conversations past and forgotten, bottomless pits of black coffee, and days spent buried in Nausea. But as Yan, lead vocalist of British Sea Power sings ever so persuasively in the epic "Lately," "The past is a foreign country."
British Sea Power are the urgent sound of things falling apart and collapsing. British Sea Power capture the emptiness of hope. Their sound is a whisper of history decaying, a wasteland of dead culture.
The Decline of British Sea Power is a stunning euphoric tribute to the power of and bravery of myth. Right now, at this moment in time, we need myths. Myths are sometimes the only means of making sense out of the unexplainable nothingness of life.
Highlight(s): Something Wicked, Fear of Drowning, The Lonely, Carrion, Blackout, A Wooden Horse
Album title: Sunshine Hit Me
Artist: A Band of Bees
Rating: 6.5 out of 10
Quick review: While not being one of the most essential releases of 2003, A Band of Bees' debut Sunshine Hit Me is a sugary sun saturated pop affair best suited for sitting by the seaside sipping slurpies on sluggish summer days.
Sunshine Hit Me is filled with lazy, yet playful grooves, cavernous organs, Fender Rhodes drenched in reverb, hints of dancehall reggae, twinkling pianos, Bacharach-esque horn arrangements, and saccharine melodies.
Highlight(s): No Trophy, Sunshine, This Town, Zia, Sky Holds the Sun
Album title: Late
Artist: Donna Regina
Rating: 8.0 out of 10
Quick review: On Donna Regina's 2002 release Northern Classic singer Donna Janssen implored on the languid and slowly bubbling over dub influenced opening track, "Let the world hurry and rush around us. We'll take time, we'll try to flow." Like American transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau's appeal in Walden for a simple, more meaningful life, Jannssen's request packs even more subtle urgency as life becomes increasingly more complex, accelerated, and fleeting.
Late finds the Cologne, Germany based duo of Donna Jannssen and Günther Janssen, building on, and refining similar themes found on their sophomore release Nothern Classic. Late, their third album on Germany's Karaoke Kalk imprint, strips away the layers of sound and beats found on earlier releases and replaces them with the most essential, minimal and concise auditory pop accouterments.
Late is a heartbreaking album that explores growth, transition, loneliness, the passing of time, and the glorious impermanence of life. On the album's closing track, "Driftwood," Jannsen sums up all the themes found throughout the album as she sings, "Driftwood and tumbleweeds, guess I vanish in the clouds. Driftwood and tumbleweeds, I'm not here for good. Maybe love is all I need."
Highlight(s): Late, Rain, Blue of the Pool, You Better Believe, Driftwood
Album title: Parsley Sounds
Artist: Parsley Sound
Rating: 8.5 out of 10
Quick review: Like a lo-fi version of Air that focuses more on substance over style, Parsley Sound's debut Parsley Sounds is a lush and verdant album equivalent to a quiet and quaint English countryside.
Parsley Sound build on the English pastoral songwriting tradition of artists such as Nick Drake or Vashti Bunyan, but add subtle electronic pulses, beats and cascading beds of filtered synthesizers. Parsley Sounds also blends lo-fi four-track recording aesthetics of indie bands like Pavement or even Ween, while keeping the Syd Barrett-esque psychedelics nicely in check.
Each song on Parsley Sounds is its own small and fragile pop universe. Parsley Sounds is a blissed out melodic treat and a stellar debut.
Highlight(s): Ease Yourself and Glide, Spring Is Near, Ocean House, Candle Mice
Album title: Negatif
Artist: Benjamin Biolay
Rating: 8.0 out of 10
Quick review: Negatif is the follow-up to Benjamin Biolay's debut concept album about the tragic Kennedy family, Rose Kennedy. On Negatif Biolay creates simple and elegant yet expansive cinematic landscapes and narratives that blend bits of country rock, Anglo pop, jazz, electronics, and sweeping orchestral arrangments in the tradition of French pop artists such as Serge Gainsburg and Jacques Bruel.
With the exception of a sampled country and western song that serves as the chorus to "Little Darlin," Negatif is sung entirly in French. Not being able to understand the lyrics adds to the mystery that surrounds the songs. and a timeless melody is timeless regardless of language.
Biolay's gift is his stunning sense of melodic melodrama. Biolay sings in a deep rich tenor, similar to that of Nick Cave with a slight touch of Leonard Cohen. Without comprehending the lyrics the listener can still understand the emotional complexities that make up Negatif's song cycle.
Negatif deserves to be heard by a larger audience, especially an American audience.
Highlight(s): Nuits Blanches, Chaise A Tokyo, Little Darlin, Des Lendemains Qui Chantent, Negatif
Album title: Passionoia
Artist: Black Box Recorder
Rating: 7.0 out of 10
Quick review: Not much has changed with Black Box Recorder since releasing their fantastic, charming yet often accusatory debut, England Made Me. On Passionoia Black Box Recorder continue to catalog class, cultural, and societal issues plaguing a culturally stagnant modern day England. And, like a true black box recorder discovered after a plane crash, Black Box Recorder offer up no solutions, only evidence of what might have caused the accident, and in their case, the fall of England.
Still mixing a dark pop sensibility with disdain and causticity, Passionia is Black Box Recorder's dance album. They've always hinted at moving toward a dancier, more beat oriented direction, and on Passionoia they deliver. Guitars are traded in for sequenced keyboards and drum machines. On "Adrew Ridgley," an ode to second fiddler of 80's pop group Wham! Andrew Ridgley, singer Sarah Nixey admits, "I grew up with the sound of the synthesizer. I learned to dance to the beat of electronic drums."
Black Box Recorder are one of the few bands who make disgust, contempt, and ennui sound so thrilling and beautiful.
Highlight(s): These Are the Things, Andrew Ridgley, When Britain Refused to Sing
Album title: A Guide For The Daylight Hours
Artist: Ballboy
Rating: 7.0 out of 10
Quick review: The other day a coworker and I were driving out to get some lunch. On the stereo was Ballboy. As we pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant my coworker, who is probably twenty some odd years older than me, said, "Well these are quite interesting lyrics," referring to the brilliantly thinking out loud titled "I Wonder if You're Drunk Enough to Sleep With Me Tonight."
A Guide For The Daylight Hours, a follow-up to their 2002 collection of EPs Club Anthems, is Ballboy's proper debut album.
Scotland's Ballboy don't rely on gimmicks, pyrotechnics, studio trickery, or overly complex arrangements. Instead they play fairly straight up guitar based pop songs that balance youthful and literate wit, intelligence, sarcasm, and vibrancy.
Highlight(s): I Lost You, But I found Country Music, A Europewide Search For Love, Sex is Boring, Meet Me at the Shooting Range
Album title: The Lemon of Pink
Artist: The Books
Rating: 9.5 out of 10
Quick review: Strip away all the glitchpop laptop electronic manipulations, witchcraft. and all around sonic fuckery and The Lemon of Pink is one of the most engaging, cohesive, and important folk albums of the last fifty years. By no means is this the coffee house Greenwich Village folk of the 60's. The Books are closer in spirit to Woody Guthrie, folk guitar improviser and innovator John Fahey or traditional folk blues artists like Muddy Waters, Lead Belly, or Mississippi John Hurt.
The Books, comprised of Nick Willscher Zammuto and Paul de Jong, create their sonically dense folk sound from an exhaustive library of field recordings, voice, acoustic guitar, banjo, cello, and all other forms of found sound. Zammuto and de Jong explore, with a sense of purity, playfulness, awe and wonder, the limitless possibilities of fractured and layered sound, especially the joys found in phonetics and the sounds made by the human voice.
"Don't Even Sing About It," is a simple and delicate acoustic folk blues track about the sorrows of a life spent working a joyless job and getting nowhere that contains the simple repeated mantra, "You get used to hanging if you hang long enough."
Other tracks, like "That Shit Ain't Right," "S Is For Evrysing," and "There Is No Time" are more political in nature. "S Is For Evrysing" is a cello heavy pastoral ode to the disappearance of the American farmer. "That Shit Ain't Right" opens with a solitary and incendiary voice proclaiming "Independence! Indepence!"
The Lemon of Pink is one of 2003's most playfully challenging, yet richly rewarding recordings.
Highlight(s): The Lemon of Pink pt.1, There Is No Time, S Is For Evrysing, Take Time, A True Story Of A True Love
Album title: Yoko
Artist: Beulah
Rating: 8.5 out of 10
Quick review: Beulah are at war. Beulah are at war with bad music. Beulah are at war with love. Beulah are at war with heartache. Beulah are at war with you. All are causes worth fighting for. With Yoko Beulah win. And to think they almost called it quits.
If comparisons must be made, and they must, Yoko is Beulah's Blood On The Tracks. Yoko's lyrical wasteland is littered with self doubt, insecurity, resignation, vitriol, loss, and longing. When the guitars arrive on the album's opening track "A Man Like Me" they serve only one purpose, to systematically slice and gouge deeper to ensure scarring and trauma.
Beulah still operate in a post-E6 pop landscape, but with Yoko the focus isn't on ornate orchestral and horn arrangements. Each instrument functions to emphasize the mood of the lyrics, be it the brief, yet heavyhearted and slowly plucked banjo on "Fooled With the Wrong Guy," or the floating piano of "Hovering."
Highlight(s): A Man Like Me, Hovering, Fooled With The Wrong Guy, and Your Mother Loves You Son
Album title: Dragging Wonder Lake
Artist: Janet Bean & The Concertina Wire
Rating: 6.0 out of 10
Quick review: When I was 16 a record store clerk introduced me to Chicago's Eleventh Dream Day, of which Janet Bean is a founding member. They had just signed to Atlantic records, and their debut album Beet, which I purchased on cassette, opened up a new universe of overdriven rock that was the antithesis of heavy metal and a precursor to the grunge scene that followed two years later. Eleventh Dream Day should have been huge, bigger than the Smashing Pumpkins. Their second album on Atlantic, Lived to Tell is one of the great, yet sadly unsung, recordings of the early 90's, my favorite songs being the Bean sung "You Know What It Is," and the waltzing along "Daedlus" with Bean singing at the end, "All I want is to fall asleep and dream."
Bean's debut, Dragging Wonder Lake, is an amalgamation of goth tinged alt-country off-Broadway show tunes, that at times remind me of a more focused, less improvisational, and less grating, Grateful Dead. Dragging Wonder Lake is a complex, and dark allegorical song cycle that's difficult to listen to from start to finish in one sitting. It's an album that demands the attention of the listener. Attention I will admit I don't always have.
Highlight(s): Suddenly and My Little Brigadoon
Album title: Circles
Artist: The Autumn Defense
Rating: 7.5 out of 10
Quick review: Released well over a year after Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, The Autumn Defense's sophomore album Circles is the best Wilco related side-project out of the string of post-Foxtrot release. Circles puts to shame Bennet and Burche's disappointment of an album, The Palace at 4AM. The Autumn Defense, consisting of core members John Stirratt of Wilco, and muti-instrmentalist Pat Sansone, successfully blend their love of classic 70's AM radio melody and production while allowing only minor flourishes of their influences, like Burt Bacharach, The Beach Boys, George Harrison, and Big Star into the mix. Circles, while being a mostly melancholy affair, is the perfect soundtrack for a Fall Sunday morning.
The album's closer, "Circles," is the closest track musically and sonically similar to anything on YHT as it opens with delicate piano piano chords atop a soft bed of keyboards and flickering ambient sounds.
Highlight(s): The World (Will Soon Turn Our Way), Some Kind of Fool, Circles
Album title: Dear Catastrophe Waitress
Artist: Belle and Sebastian
Rating: 3 out of 10
Quick review: Slick. That's the first word that comes to mind with the new Belle and Sebastian album, Dear Catastrophe Waitress. Then disappointment. Where's Stuart, and why does the album open with a jaunty little shuffle of a song dealing with the not so jaunty topic of sexual harassment? Dear Catastrophe Waitress lacks the simplicity, innocence, wonder, and joy found in Belle and Sebastian's early recordings. Part of the blame rests with Trevor Horn's poor production. Much of the album's focus is on drab string and horn arrangements with little focus on the quality of the songwriting, or in the case of the album, lack thereof, which would explain a focus on overall production.
More importantly, Dear Catastrophe Waitress lacks memorable songs. The album feels like an homage to Stuart's influences. Gone are Stuart's Scottish lisp, wit and voice. There's a bit of The Smiths, Forever Changes era Love, and gasp, an entire song, "I'm Cuckoo," that's an ode to Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy. Soon enough the hipster twee-pop intelligentsia will rush out to pick up copies of the Thin Lizzy classic Jailbreak.
The only highlight comes at the close of the album with Stay Loose. Belle and Sebastian should have taken their own advice, as Stay Loose is one of the best Farfisa fueled, and loosest tracks they've written to date. Maybe it's time to put the book back on the shelf. Overall, Dear Catastrophe Waitress is a dour disappointment of an album.
Highlight(s): Stay Loose
Album title: The World of Lady A
Artist: Anjali
Rating: 6.5 out of 10
Quick review: Big beats, blazing sitars, a bit of downtempo, lush cinematic sixties styled spy film pop a la James Bond meets Bollywood with one of Bond's girls trying to seductively purr atop sweeping strings and muted horn hit arrangements. Ear candy, but lacks any real depth or substance.
Highlight(s): Rainy Day
Album title: Hold On Love
Artist: Azure Ray
Rating: 8 out of 10
Quick review: Hold On Love, the third outing from this Athens, Georgia duo finds Maria Taylor and Orenda Fink allowing in a bit of hope with the possibility of sunshine into their mix of usually sad yet tender hearted songs about all things lost and gone. Once again they've teamed with Eric Bachman, formally of Archers of Loaf, and now Crooked Fingers, for production. There's a new found sense of warmth and confidence, and at times sensuality, in the duo's voices that is lacking in their previous albums. On Hold On Love they capture longing and desire in a way that few artists are able to do well. One of the strongest releases of 2003. In a more perfect world "The Drinks We Drank Last Night" might very well make single of the year.
Highlight(s): New Resolution, The Drinks We Drank Last Nights, If You Fall, These White Lights Will Bend To Make Blue
S/T - Stellastar*
4.0/10.0
A number of years back a friend and I watched the Miss America pageant. One of the song and dance segments featured a tune with the chorus of, "Everything old is new again." I'll admit, it was quite catchy, and from time-to-time I find myself singing it, especially when I come across fashion trends that ape the old and pretend that the old is new, or even worse that the old never existed. Is everything old being new again supposed to ring true? Does recycling past trends equal honesty? I view everything old being new again as a lie we are sold via product and fashion. It's a hollow sentiment. Cheap nostalgia. I admit, I too am guilty of buying into the lie. I drive a Beetle, and I wear shoes that look all 1970. To a certain extent it's unavoidable. We all mistakenly romanticize eras past, eras before we were either born, or even sometimes too young to remember. Is it possible that we are starved for times that appear to be simpler, especially those times when we were children and the world didn't seem so frighteningly complex?
With Stellastar* everything old is new again. Their blend of late 70's new wave art school theatrics, mid-80's influenced British pop, and a touch of early 90's alterna-rock, is overrated sloppily played cheap nostalgia. I've heard this band before, but only better. I've listened to these songs a hundred times. Not them specifically, but the originals by Echo and the Bunnymen, The Pixies, The Cure, B-52's, The Talking Heads, and early U2. After spinning the Stellastar* debut countless times I can't really say what the real Stellastar* sound like, only who they sound like.
However, the album does open with at least a few moments, although brief, of promising material. The first track, In the Walls, is the closest Stellastar* sounds like Stellastar*. Over a simple bed of echo-plexed and delayed guitar, singer Shawn Christensen paints a picture of a suburban ennui, filled with unpromising shopping malls. The song builds gloriously and by the end of the track I believe Stellastar* when they tell me that I'm not alone. Although, Bowie did it more convincingly.
The first few tracks are fine enough, and better than the most average band on the radio these days. I'd have even been willing to overlook their hero worship if the album ended after the fifth track, No Weather. I'm almost of the opinion that those five tracks would have made for a worthwhile EP.
The final group of songs that close out the album feel like half finished ideas created in the studio out of necessity to fill up forty minutes of music. Moongirls' psychedelics meander for minutes before the melody-less tremolo-processed vocals enter into the song and then drift off again. Untitled? is a big hair acoustic power ballad. The closing track, Pulp Song, makes me question why the band even bothered to write it as they sing, "We're lying, we lied to you, we lied to make out point of view." I'm not too sure of their point. I guess I prefer musical honesty to lies and imitation.