Heartache With Hard Work

The Rat – The Walkmen

Digging back through the vaults a little bit for this one. I never mustered all that much enthusiasm for anything else from The Walkmen, but this song is absolutely stunning. It opens with a blistering guitar that’s joined by some drumming that would make Animal from the Muppets swell with jealousy. This is drumming that could singlehandedly violate the CTBT.

And it only gets more impressive when the vocals kick in. It’s a tightly-controlled fury, shaking with such force that the walls themselves begin to crumble in on top of you. For a while you wonder if the very fabric of reality is going to be torn asunder. But then, before you lose your mind a suffocating darkness envelops you. All that rage is enclosed, transformed into a stifling self-pity (“When I used to go out, I would know everyone that I saw. Now I go out alone if I go out at all”). And just as you’ve grown accustomed, the drums kick back in and blow apart the walls of the cage.

The final result is as venomous as it is striking. The sort of song that leaves you tense, expectant of some oncoming apocalypse.

Bows + Arrows came out the same year as Funeral which naturally invited some comparison. For a brief time I was claiming that the former was the better record. Looking back it seems obvious that the Arcade Fire are the superior band and Funeral a much more significant achievement. But there was just something about this song that tore down all my defenses in a way that’s still hard to fully explain.

Anime Eyes – The Awkward Stage

There is something unsettling, yet strangely appealing about anime eyes, isn’t there? The Awkward Stage sure agree, and provide all the trumpets, bells, whistles, and verse-chorus-verse magic to prove it.

Their sophomore record is out next week. It’s called Slimming Mirrors, Flattering Lights, and it’s got a little smattering of pretty much any sound you might like. A little bit of punk, glittery pop, a singer-songwriter attitude, and a country groove. This is the kind of pop that doesn’t leave you feeling guilty.

Photographs Are Not Memories – Victor Bermon

It beckons you back to sleep, lifting you gently with a light tendrils of jazz-tinged electronic folk. And then thing that you can sense more than anything is the perfection in Bermon’s sense of structure: the loping beat, a glitch here, the delicate touch of each instrument as it passes through. Somehow he builds an entire song that exists only in the spaces between atoms. It’s a wall of sound, but entirely ethereal. You step toward it, you reach up to feel its textures, and suddenly realize, without knowing exactly how, you’ve simply come out on the other side. You stare back, slightly bewildered as it dissipates like smoke on the wind.

It’s that time, five minutes after you wake up, when you suddenly realize the dream which seemed indelibly scratched into your memory has dissipated into nothing. All that’s left is a vague recollection: of a stranger with the eyes of a childhood friend, of languid motion, of a swirl of colors.

Asking for Flowers – Kathleen Edwards

I find myself incapable of writing about Kathleen Edwards without falling back into easy cliches. But sometimes lazy writing is still sufficient to fully convey what’s here, and I think this is one of those cases. Her new record Asking For Flowers sounds like all the really nice, mellow stuff from a Whiskeytown record, with lonely steel guitars, harmonicas, and a voice which gives everything you might expect from a good Lucina Williams song: the appropriate flashes of dusty roads and lonely nights, the requisite gritty tales of broken hearts and faded memories, a yearning for something left unstated.

Or, to give you another perspective, I could just point out that her backup band includes the keyboardist for Tom Petty, a guy who drummed for the Wallflowers, and a guy who played guitar for Sheryl Crow and Wilco. And it absolutely sounds that way. In my book, that’s a good thing, but if that doesn’t sound appealing you’re probably not going to be surprised by anything here.

I keep a running playlist that (roughly) consists of all the songs I’ve heard in the past 4 or 5 months interesting enough to make me want to give them a few more listens but which fail to immediately grab me. I often listen to it on random, leading to some weird experiences. Sometimes a song will come on and I’ll think what in the world was I thinking? This is terrible. Other times it’ll be the sixth or seventh listen before I realize it’s fantastic. For instance, I probably listened to “I Am John” by Loney, Dear 15 or 20 times over the course of a few months last year before it occurred to me in a flash that I absolutely adored it.

The Age of Understatement – The Last Shadow Puppets

And then there’s times like today. This song came on and my thought process was the following:
1. Hey, this isn’t bad
2. It really sounds like the Arctic Monkeys.
3. Well, musically, not really. It’s like, more dancey, and macabre, and vaguely disco. It’s just…the singer is a dead ringer for the Monkeys.
4. That’s a shame. This sounds like a pretty interesting band, actually. Why would they have the singer so obviously mimic them? Sure it’s an easy way to sell some records but you need to carve out your own place, y’know?
[checks internet]
5. [Sheepishly] I’m an idiot.

They’ve got a full album out called The Age of Understatement.

You Can Have It All – Ginger Ninja

Their myspace cryptically is headed by three words: “Idol / Chinese pop / Freestyle.” As far as I can tell, they are none of these, but neither is any so far off to be clearly ironic. I mean, what does freestyle Chinese pop Idol music sound like anyways? I sure don’t know.

Anyways, setting all those questions aside, I can tell you what Ginger Ninja sound like to me – glittery guitar pop, most clearly evidenced by this ridiculously catchy track.

It’s also appropriate given that Manchester United, and their Ginger Ninja (Paul Scholes) won the Champions League final today. All predictions to the contrary it turned out to be a pretty great game, bigger on tension than demonstrations of skill perhaps. But still, it almost lived up to all the hype.

And for folks who say soccer can’t make it big in this country, tell that to the 100+ people who crammed into a room to watch this game. Here’s a picture from my vantage point, which looked less like a typical Fenway seat for most of the game (i.e. -when people were sitting down, I actually had a relatively unobstructed view).

Okay, it’s been all long posts for a while here. Time to switch things up with a few days of quick hits.

Umbrella Folds – The Ruling Class

I picked up this one from a post at Hits In The Car a few days ago. And I have to completely agree with his assessment of it as sounding like a long-lost Stone Roses track. And hey, there’s nothing wrong with wearing your influences so clearly on your sleeve when they’re this good, right? It’s just heavenly.

Check out The Ruling Class at Shelflife Records.

So I’ve been going through some good but slightly underwhelming releases from bands who have released some of my favorite records of the decade. I’ve covered the #1’s from 07 and 06, but since we’re still waiting on Sufjan to bring us a new state, I can’t cover the #1 from 2005. But I can do almost the next best thing and talk about the new record from British Sea Power whose Open Season was my #5 record of that year.

The provocatively named Do You Like Rock Music? is certainly not shy as the title should make apparent. Unfortunately, while the album does feature a number of components that live up perfectly to the promise of the title, including some blistering guitars and sterling drumwork, it also suffers from two cardinal sins. And paradoxically, they run in almost completely opposite currents. The first is too much attachment to a style of stadium-rock that you’d expect from some of the lesser numbers at a u2 show. The second is an overindulgence in art-rock pastiche – effects for the sake of effects, which seriously distract from the music.

It’s especially a drag because there’s nothing inherently problematic about the underlying impulses with either. In fact, their most successful songs are perfect marriages of the two. The trouble is on the weaker tracks where one takes over completely. The result is an album of three distinct parts.

First, the bookends: tracks that are all texture and no substance, full of crackling energy and windswept plains but completely lacking in melody or hooks. “All In It” kicks things off reasonably well: establishing the mood and scope of the record. But when it returns in a reworked form for “We Close Our Eyes” at the end, things go more than a bit astray. Where the opener was a short two minutes, the reprise takes all of eight minutes to drag itself to a conclusion. And while I appreciate the effort to draw connections through the record, the reprise is just too disconnected and pretentious to work for me. I can’t help but think it might have been better and more cohesive as a 10-song rock album.

Second, there’s the squishy middle, most notably “No Lucifer,” “Down on the Ground” and “A Trip Out” which try hard to inspire fist-pumps, but end up feeling flat. They’re going for an all-out cataclysm but all I’m seeing are fireworks. Nice, but still a letdown. I also relegate the duller-than-dull “No Need to Cry” and the pleasant but not-quite-filling dreaminess of “Open the Door” to this group. The defining characteristic here is a failure of ambition, of dulled edges.

However, there’s also a third category, where the problems of the first two encounter each other, and like matter and anti-matter colliding, unleash an explosion that dwarfs anything felt elsewhere. The pinnacle example is “Lights Out For Darker Skies” which is easily their best song to date. It’s epic, explosive, beautiful, and clear demonstration British Sea Power are at their best when they drop some of the reverb and let the notes shine through with piercing clarity. The guitar ns this song is so bursting with life you almost expect it to leap out of the speakers and, as the song says “dance like sparks in a muzzle” right in front of your eyes.

Other standouts include “Waving Flags” and “Canvey Island,” each of which would have sounded very at home on their last album. The former is an almost perfect offspring of post-punk timbre with a New Wave melody – with a hook that knocks you over and layers upon layers of textured sound. The latter is far smoother until the final minute when the reverb hits like a storm, washing away everything in its path – a suiting representation of the flood the song is about.

And then there’s the instrumental “The Great Skua” – the calm after the storm, when the clouds break and you remember to breathe.

But the final stunner is “Atom.” If there is one song that characterizes this record, in all its parts, and which invites an emphatic yes! to the album’s title, it is this one. The spacious atmospherics remain, but are captured, restrained, left to build up force until they breach the walls and burst like a tornado past your eardrums. It sidles up quietly, with a minute-long preface that lulls you gently until you’re knocked to the ground by a gale-force wind.

Lights Out For Darker Skies – British Sea Power
Atom – British Sea Power

The theme this week is my favorite records of the year. My last review was of the follow-up to my favorite record of 2007, so I figured today was a good time to tackle the sophomore release from The Submarines, whose debut record was my favorite of 2006.

If Declare a New State was about redemption, Honeysuckle Weeks is about the time afterwards when the more mundane issues seep back into your life. There are plenty of moments of sheer wonder, but those are infused with a widespread sense of easy comfort.

This is both good and bad. It’s good because it provides a nice staging ground for them to build on their sound and explore new directions that emerge naturally. There are no radical departures but neither is it simply a re-tread. Unfortunately, the downside to the less emotionally raw follow-up (as is so often the case) is that without the hook of a deep pain, the music loses a bit of focus.

Declare a New State hit me so hard because it came from someplace dark and terrifying. In one sense, it was about hope and the power of love, but to be more accurate you might say it was about the fear that hope wouldn’t be enough and that love was a broken promise. All those conflicting emotions created a powerful sense of urgency in every song that is simply lacking this time around. This means that some songs contain nice ideas but are left to drift.

“The Wake Up Song” for example is so close to something special. You want it to fly, to sing, to break all constraints and leap off the page, but it never quite satisfies. Instead, your stuck in a loop – knowing full well that pure bliss lies just beyond your grasp. The same goes with “Maybe,” which is pretty but entirely insubstantial. I like these songs fine, but there’s just not enough melody to sustain them all by itself, and not enough going on beneath the surface to keep my interest.

Even some of the stronger tracks suffer from variations on this problem. The opening combination of “Sub Symphonika” and “Thorny Thicket” strikes me like a New England spring. You smile so broadly at that first day of the warm sun, and all it hearkens about summer. But before you have a chance to really get comfortable the clouds return and you’re stuck with a week of dreary cold. Musically, both of these suffer from a case of moderate over-production. They are just a bit too choppy to really strike me. I want them to glide and instead they rattle. There are nice songs living inside here, but they aren’t given the space to breathe.

The final weakness of the record is the two efforts at a more atmospheric sound. “1940” is surely the first true mistake in their oeuvre. They go for something moody, dark, jazzy, but it ends up just being a bit of a bore. Less troubling, but still a bit of a mis-step is “Fern Beard” which is a very mature song that just doesn’t work for me. Here, at least, the old-timeyness doesn’t feel forced, though I’m not entirely sure they stick the metaphor.

It’s hard to complain too much about these tracks though. It’s all too easy to stick with a sound that works, and you have to reward bands who make the effort to explore new avenues. So while I find these tracks a bit too dour, I appreciate the motivation.

However, in terms of expanding their sound, I think some of their more upbeat efforts work far more successfully. Most obviously, there’s the lead single “You, Me, and the Bourgeoisie” which is an absolute romp. It’s got some oomph, but they still display all of the deftness that made Declare a New State so empathetic. It’s clever, has a foot-stomping beat, and proves they are anything but a one-trick pony.

Along the same lines is “Xavia” which is probably their best effort at outfitting their standard fare of dreamy pop with a more straightforward uptempo beat that makes you want to get up and dance. And the part where Blake joins the waves of guitars with “I don’t wanna be your favorite enemy” is just sublime. Unfortunately, I’m not particularly enamored by the minute of loops and effects tacked onto the end.

Other extremely strong tracks include “Swimming Pool” which is the only one on the record that, to my ear, would have slotted effortlessly into the last record. It proves they haven’t lost the touch and reminds me of all the reasons why I instantly fell in love with this band.

Finally, there’s the last track “Brightest Hour” – almost certainly their most restrained song to date, and probably their most classically beautiful. It’s a perfect closer, with a down-to-earth optimism that feels entirely unforced.

So, the answers to the obvious questions. No, it’s not as good as their debut. Yes, sometimes it is true that the most genuine and affecting music comes from tragedy and is whitewashed by happy times. Yes, it’s still an absolutely wonderful record that comes with my full endorsement.

You, Me, and the Bourgeoisie – The Submarines
Brightest Hour – The Submarines

Well, I just declared the new Frightened Rabbit album my favorite of the year so far. So now it’s time to talk about some records that I was highly anticipating but which (for one reason or another) didn’t quite make the cut. First on the list is the follow-up to my #1 from last year. And that right there might tell you a little something about what went wrong on this one.

The Meaning of 8 from Cloud Cult was stunning, expansive, emotional. It dragged me through the coals and showed me things I had never seen before. To try and turn around from something like that and put out a new record in less than 12 months is tough work unless your name is Lennon or McCartney.

Feel Good Ghosts is by no means a bad record. But it does fall a little bit flat, working with many of the same themes and sonic textures, but without nearly the same emotional resonance. The deep layering of vocals becomes far more of a distraction this time around. Same thing with Craig Minowa’s slight lisp. Where these both combined to produce some absolutely beautiful harmonic resonances on 8, this time the dissonance takes over in some unfortunate moments. This is most clear on the otherwise lovely “No One Said It Would Be Easy” which, with slightly different production decisions, could have easily stood out as one of the best songs of the year.

Thematically, they mine common territory: the bizarreness of our everyday lives, the universality of suffering, our attempts to find meaning in the chaos, and the way everything we thought we had left behind stays with us in the most unexpected ways. That final point is the underlying motif for the whole record, with its constant references to ghosts, figurative and literal.

These are important subjects, and they treat them with great care and delicacy for the most part. But this only makes the occasional mis-step stick out all the more. It’s very easy when talking about “life, the universe, and everything” to veer into lyrics that skip over incredibly difficult questions with trite references to hope and dreams. What made songs like “Chemicals Collide” and “Thanks” work was their obliqueness. There were answers somewhere in there, but you had to work for them.

I don’t feel like the same care is evident this time around. “Journey of the Featherless,” for example, features one of the most gorgeous melodies they’ve ever created, but is marred by clunky references to Ebay and cell phones and lines that sound like cliches from the moment they’re uttered (“I say that’s it’s worth dreaming, just for the dream of it”). The concepts are there, but the subtlety is not.

By far the worst offender is the album closer “Love You All” which consists entirely of Minowa repeating a single line: “I love my father. I love my mother. And when it’s my time to go, I want you to know, I love you all.” What aims for a childish simplicity comes off as sickly sweet. Once again, this is in large part because of the production choices. First and most significantly, the inexplicable decision to run his voice through some kind of vocoder that makes it all sound like some kind of 80s reject of a song. This, combined with stretching the song out to 5+ minutes, the strings, and the supporting chorus turns what could have been have been an incredibly affecting coda into a piece of cotton candy: delicious but ultimately without much substance.

If “Love You All” is the macro example of this phenomenon, there’s a number of micro ones as well. Witness the unbearable line from “Hurricane and Fire Survival Guide”that demolishes an otherwise perfectly balanced tone: “I’m sick of all of this poop that brings me down.” I mean, c’mon. How can I be expected to take the rest of it seriously after that?

The thing about all of this is that I really like every song I’ve talked about so far, and plenty of others, too. This is in many respects a fantastic record. The melodies are stunning. To listen to “Journey of the Featherless” is, to quote Sam Gamgee, like being inside a rainbow. “When Water Comes to Life” is a perfect description of how the song sounds – the strings ebb and flow like liquid. The technique of slow buildups that lead inexorably into a final cacophony is deployed to stunning effect on a number of tracks (“When Water Comes to Life” and “No One Said It Would Be Easy” to name a couple).

“The Will of a Volcano” put me off on the first few listens, as something far less easy on the ear than what I traditionally like from them. But the more I hear, the more it strikes me as a great example of where they could have gone. For a band with such an ear for harmonies, it is all to easy to dish out sugary melodies, but they also have many other talents, which only get a full chance to shine when they push their boundaries, as here.

This all means that comparative throwaways (like “Story of the Grandson of Jesus” which comes off as the wilted b-side to “Alien Christ,” or “The Ghost inside Our House” which only sounds halfway complete) still have a lot to recommend them.

And that’s the real devil of it. This band is talented enough that even critically flawed songs like “Love You All” can still inspire listen after listen. And if I didn’t have past evidence that they could fit all the pieces together in such a perfect way, I would probably gush about this record, flaws and all.

As it is, I’m left writing a mostly negative review of a record that could easily be one of my 10 favorites for the year. Whether that’s more a comment on the album or on me personally, you can decide for yourself.

Journey of the Featherless – Cloud Cult
No One Said It Would Be Easy – Cloud Cult