Cokemachineglow

Records / Deerhunter: Monomania

Thu, 16 May 2013 10:05:58 -0700

It’s important to attend to beginnings. Most people met Deerhunter around the time of Cryptograms (2007) or the beloved Microcastle (2008), but their first static-wreathed transmission to the world was an aggressively amelodic cacophony affectionately known as Turn It Up Faggot (2005). If you haven’t heard it, you’re not alone. Spotify’s otherwise exhaustive Deerhunter inventory excludes it, and the band themselves rarely draw from it for concerts. Even the title is spurious: the album was printed under the name Deerhunter, and the nickname, according to Bradford Cox, came from a common heckler refrain hurled at the band. As with every word that comes out of Cox’s mouth, I find this a bit curious. One thing the album isn’t is quiet. Deerhunter is known even now for their noisy and often protracted live improvisation, and given that Turn It Up Faggot was already their most abrasive record to begin with, it’s hard to imagine early concertgoers complaining about a lack of volume. Then there’s the slur. It’s well-known that Cox has a thing for performing in dresses and toying with perceptions of his sexuality, and he does come from the American south. The pieces fit. But even if the hecklers did so heckle, the important point is that only Bradford Cox could have adopted the slogan for his own music, effectively rewriting the first moment of his career via public proxy.

Cox didn’t need to be a freak. The internet buzz about his personal life, which continues unabated to this day, has been particularly irritating insofar as it rarely acknowledges its own culpability. (After years of breathless “news” stories about Cox’s eccentricities, Pitchfork recently published an interview under the blithe heading, “Are his antics overshadowing his art?”) But it would be wrong to lay all the blame on the media—after all, it was Cox and co. who made the decision to rename their first album. From the very beginning, Cox has shown himself to be an unparalleled manipulator of public perception. He is something we just don’t see anymore in the increasingly lifeless and pallid world of indie rock: a genuine personality. He is something like our generation’s Morrissey: a spectacle nurturing a spectacle. But unlike Morrissey, whose sad-sack lyrics weren’t always congruent with his passionate denunciations of…whatever, Cox’s musical evolution reflects his character in a most fascinating way.

Turn It Up Faggot was the statement of a songwriter utterly uninterested in accommodating the world. Even as Cox invited anyone interested into his public world, his art began as an unsophisticated architecture of exclusion. It wasn’t until the last third of Cryptograms that the band finally crawled out from their bunker and showed their faces to the sun. The brilliance of that record was how it set up the emergence. After leading us into an expertly constructed wasteland of lifeless static and numbing repetition, Cox surprised the hell out of everyone by dropping a handful of enormously affecting pop songs at the end. Microcastle found the band mostly forgoing the distortion, but maintaining their distance through a different palette of techniques: ambient drift, disaffection, and cavernous reverb.

The same dialectic continued: Cox’s notoriety continued to grow along with the band’s fame, but all the while Deerhunter maintained their miniature castle walls using increasingly sophisticated materials. So when Halcyon Digest (2010) arrived, it quickly distinguished itself as the band’s crowning achievement because it found them not just fully exposed to the light, but—for the first time—in full command of it. The techniques that had previously been used for obfuscation were repurposed for refraction. In a year many will only remember for a man named Kanye, Deerhunter and Women managed to make indie rock seem like it actually mattered again.

Three years later, that feeling has faded a bit. And it’s hard not to hear “He Would Have Laughed,” Halcyon Digest’s showstopping closer, as a kind of eulogy. The track was a tribute to Jay Reatard, but it tapped into universal shit that most never find the breath to say: “Only bored as I get older / Find new ways to spend my time.” For the first time in his career, Cox’s lyrics were as naked as his persona. And yet “He Would Have Laughed” and “Helicopter,” Halcyon’s other powerhouse, were concerned with people who were not Bradford Cox. The pure emotional force that had eluded him as long as he tried to shield himself was set loose when Cox simply forgot about himself altogether. On Monomania, he’s remembered. He had already captured the essence of lonely desperation, but here the loneliness is his own. And it’s on full display.

Monomania brings us a new, unhidden Deerhunter. The band throws up no barriers here, and although they make a lot of noise on “Leather Jackets II” and “Monomania,” the clamor is presented for its own sake. There are no more ambient interludes or prolonged outros. The wooziness of Microcastle and Halcyon’s slower tracks is gone, replaced by a workmanlike grit and sense of purpose. And most surprisingly, the songcraft is quite traditional: “Back to the Middle” is an honest-to-God power-pop anthem. Only the title track throws any sand at the listener, but even there Cox’s meltdown transpires against a well-structured backdrop. For all these reasons, many fans I’ve talked to have, in one friend’s words, lamented Deerhunter’s “departure from what made them so great.” And it’s true enough that the album is a departure. It doesn’t cast the same spell that Deerhunter had fans under from late Cryptograms to the last seconds of Halcyon Digest. But it would be a mistake to write it off for this reason.

Monomania is the sound of a healthy and aware group of musicians who have experimented with artifice and ultimately moved beyond it. Rather than warding us off or shifting the focus, Cox now wants to work through life with us: “I’ve been looking for some harmonies / Some words to sing that could really bring / The lonely-hearted some company / All the people that were just like me, yeah.” Like many of the sentiments on Monomania, this one is straightforward and borderline sentimental. It could be preachy or condescending, but it comes off as simply friendly. And Cox is no less personable elsewhere. “T.H.M.” relates a tragedy about his brother with neither irony nor drama, letting the force of a tragic 3 AM phone call slip through mournful arpeggios. But even as he’s gotten more candid, Cox has learned how to introduce just the right edge of abstraction into his lyrics, as on “Blue Light”: “I’m a blue light, I’m a crippled coward / Shining out in the night / The sky is clearer now that I’m filled with fright.” Cox has never been a poet, but he’s more relatable than a thousand anonymous sad strummers because—freak or no—he feels like a real person.

In order to give voice to that reality, Cox continues to stray ever farther from his roots. The band had already integrated classic rock influences on Halcyon Digest, and Monomania continues this gradual shift away from the indie trappings of their earlier albums. Cox has noted in interviews that his inspirations for Monomania weren’t Kraftwerk and Kevin Shields, but Hank Williams and Howling Wolf. He is concerned with “Finding ancient language in the blood / Fading a little more each day.” It’s this influence that led the band to record the album in an especially quick-and-dirty session, and is sonically most evident in the Delta swing of “Pensacola.” More deeply, it’s apparent in Cox’s basic concern with facing the tedious shit of life head-on and using his art to make something tolerable out of it. The concern, as Cox puts it in the first line of the album, with “finding the fluorescence in the junk.”

But he doesn’t find it alone. Like most people who write about this band, I’m guilty of devoting a disproportional amount of this space to Bradford Cox. It’s hard not to. But Morissey, for all his eccentric brilliance, wouldn’t have made it anywhere without Johnny Marr. And if a quiet guitarist named Lockett Pundt hadn’t joined Deerhunter in time for Cryptograms, Bradford Cox might still be wearing dresses in empty Atlanta basements and fending off slurs from uninterested drunks.

Pundt has been the band’s secret weapon ever since he joined. Not just for penning some of their most enduring tracks—“Desire Lines” and “Agoraphobia,” to begin with—but for bringing grace to Cox’s gnarled scuzz when there was none and gravity where there wasn’t enough. Pundt’s sole credit on Monomania is for “The Missing,” an uplifting anthem which is almost certainly the best thing on the record. But even if his voice isn’t heard as much as some of us would like, his spiderlike guitar work and micro-melodies sing throughout. If last year’s excellent Spooky Action At A Distance is any indication, Pundt seems to be only now entering his prime. This bodes well for a band that already ranks among the most consistent and successful of their time. By their sixth album, most groups are already beginning to wither; having gracefully weathered, Deerhunter sound like they’re only now beginning.

CMGcasts / CXXVIII

Mon, 13 May 2013 11:05:01 -0700

Records / Lower Plenty: Hard Rubbish

Thu, 09 May 2013 08:05:36 -0700

Droll, casual, immaculate, Melbourne outfit Lower Plenty’s debut Hard Rubbish seems to base its paradigm on oxymorons, to the extent that it’d probably be an oxymoron to call the record oxymoronical. The issue is that it’s both an incredibly easy and impossibly difficult album to categorize and define, which is probably the aim of a lot of musicians when it comes to how they want to be received—but where most strive and fail, Lower Plenty achieve this quality rather effortlessly, organically. I’m tempted to invoke Nick Drake comparisons when hearing that equal parts quaint/melancholic guitar figure that slowly drives “Friends Wait, “ but singer Al Montfort (or Jensen Tjhung, not sure which) croaks more than croons, and yet if it’s a croak it’s a croon of a croak. Call it a croan. Sarah Heyward also contributes a lot of vocals to the record and somehow does so rather atonally while still sweet and neatly on pitch; her percussion loops (from what the band calls a “psych station”) and Daniel Twomey’s drums combine for a rhythmic effect on the record that’s ramshackle yet understated and precise, if that makes any sense. Which it probably doesn’t.

I think to the casual listener Hard Rubbish would probably qualify as a massive bore, or a drag, or any number of things that aren’t true because people sometimes don’t hear with their ears, they hear with their preconceptions. As someone spent on indie rock and who’s a dilettante of folk and country, I nonetheless find myself rapt at the dialogue that Lower Plenty so half-heartedly yet brilliantly initiate with this project. The band members are culled together from harsher, edgier Aussie groups to come together around a kitchen table, to “jam” single takes at an 8-track with just vocals, percussion, and a couple guitars (and sometimes not even all of that) into a record that sounds rich and fulsome through its ambiance and quiet confidence, to put to tape what overcast Sunday afternoons and ever so slightly downcast spirits and the last fifth of gin sound like, perfectly—as if these idioms were really just magnetic signals all along and this, finally, was the band to figure out how to record them. Hard Rubbish reminds me of when I liked Smog records but, unlike Callahan’s lyrical conceits, Lower Plenty never try too hard to draw me in or, conversely, shut me out. They basically just let me sit at the kitchen table, too.

Low fidelity and guy-girl vocals tempt twee descriptors, but here all the cuteness is stripped away without losing an ounce of humor—in fact, the sense of humor is just that much more real and potent for it. And not that you’ll be laughing so much as caught up in a chuckling empathy for something you don’t even understand, which is essentially what is described by a lyric on the opener. It’s as if you are listening to strangers talk about their inner and outer lives in a way that’s both matter-of-fact and oblique, a continuance of a conversation filled with specifics and references that give you absolutely no in…and it doesn’t matter. The words are literate, off-handed, and, in a way, priceless for their blatant disregard for the listener as audience. Because in this unwillingness to explain Lower Plenty achieve an utter lack of condescension. When sentiments are expressed, such as in the titular lyric of “How Low Can a Punk Get,” they feel simultaneously universal and obtuse. I mean, I both do and don’t know what these guys are talking about when they say they’re dancing with a “Strange Beast.” As the record drifts further into abstraction on “White Walls” and then the Low-esque closer, “Close Enough,” it hits not like a growth in pretense but like the hollow clunk of the bottom of the empty gin bottle smacking the table, the band now mumbling about something you really don’t understand…but feel more than ever. It is the record’s emotional core and it is—appropriately, powerfully—inscrutable.

Sometimes it takes a record like this to remind you that pathos can be mundane, bleak, and funny and that artistry can rightfully be a careless craft when it has the balls to believe in its intuitions. Hard Rubbish is warmly prim in its aesthetic and expressive reserve while within that restraint it streams like jazz, both accomplished and impulsive. If it cuts with a dull blade it knows exactly how, for it is no less the incisive for it. The point I’m trying to get across is this: simple, charming, indirect—these are all symptoms of the essential musicality of Hard Rubbish, as if “real music” were actually a thing that could be separated from the imitations, and then few better examples would there be than that of this record compared to all the lazy, amateurish lo-fi folk pretenders that could claim to be contemporaries and categorical cousins. So, to the un-jaded, yes, boring, but to these well-worn ears, Lower Plenty drop some serious knowledge.

Records / Waxahatchee: Cerulean Salt

Wed, 08 May 2013 08:05:31 -0700

Katie Crutchfield has a way with words. Lyrics that might seem overwrought in another context are, on a Waxahatchee record, just the right words at the right time. Crutchfield is young—only twenty-four—but her songs, though they dwell on the subjects most near and dear to those in their mid-twenties (loss of innocence, relationships, alcohol and drugs, and self-loathing), are wise, earnest, and desperately literary in the most engaging way. In the moment, the importance she gives these personal battles seems just right. Take this searing example, from “Misery Over Dispute”: “If I claim a sole regret / I loved only enough to accept / I’ll be spineless and sick in your eyes until / Death or the dragging of time.”

It is the great strength of Cerulean Salt, Crutchfield’s second album as Waxahatchee (the first being last year’s wonderfully lo-fi American Weekend), this stealthy way she has of wringing out the minutiae of twenty-something internal life. It’s well-worn indie rock territory, but Crutchfield’s light touch renders the accompanying emotions—confusion, grief, regret, and even happiness—totally valid. It helps that Cerulean Salt is one of those records that just effortlessly works, the songs coming together in such a brilliant way that it’s difficult to single just a few out for praise. From the simple opener “Hollow Bedroom” (“We are late / We are loud”) to the intense, Jeff Mangum-esque closer “You’re Damaged,” Crutchfield seems to get in a groove and ride it to the end—tired and depleted maybe, but catharsis achieved.

Crutchfield has been open about her ’90s alt-rock influences: Jenny Lewis, Cat Power, and Liz Phair, who in particular can be heard all over this record, but Crutchfield makes it her own. It’s all in the sound: the tone of her cracked, textured voice, from low and vibrato-less to high, whispering and edgy; the bluntly strummed bedroom electric guitar, the trembling, heartbeat bass sound (especially effective on “Brother Bryan” and “Swan Dive”). Cerulean Salt, however, has very little of Phair’s tough-girl bravado. Crutchfield, to her credit, stays firmly lost in her own thoughts, true to the perspective and voice that seemed to jump so candidly out of Waxahatchee’s debut American Weekend: the quiet observer, the morning-after neurotic, the girl who is at once part of the crowd and separate from it.

The pain of growing up and reflecting on childhood is the central theme of Cerulean Salt, and it is on this subject that Crutchfield produces some of her most arresting writing. “Lively,” a eulogy for a friendship lost to drugs, sums it up with “I’m longing for my youth / You were lively then too,” as does the powerful “You’re Damaged”: “You are 11, 1997 / God is implicit, your luck is consistent.” And “Swan Dive” may just be the highlight of the entire record, with its eloquent, sobering proclamation of “And I will grow out of all the / Empty bottles in my closet / And you’ll quit having dreams / About a swan dive to the hard asphalt.”

There are many, many other beautiful moments on Cerulean Salt—far too many to mention in this review. It’s a humble record, yet one with the timeless appeal to become a classic in league with the work of Waxahathee’s influences. Most impressive in its urgency, Cerulean Salt at times captures that feeling of waking up in the middle of the night with regrets suddenly weighty and stifling. It’s a record that broods, giving its listeners a chance to do so as well and, even for those of us out of our twenties, it’s nearly impossible to resist the opportunity.

Records / The Flaming Lips: The Terror

Mon, 06 May 2013 02:05:12 -0700

Of the myriad things Wayne Coyne has said in the press tour behind The Terror, the Flaming Lips’ thirteenth album in thirty years, one rings most true: “I don’t know if it’s dark,” he told DIY, “Or it’s just not light. There is a difference.” Indeed, and that difference lies in the type of acute detachment that the band’s moony affirmation of life too often and too easily averts: the process of actually stepping back and realizing that life has no lightness or darkness to it, things just happen and we assign them value for the sake of sanity. Bleak is a better word than dark to describe The Terror, and frank better still: this record quietly and calmly observes the as-is world beneath such alien whirring and colorless noise that it seems the band is intercepting radio waves or dystopian government broadcasts instead of consciously recording sound, the same bells and whistles typically wielded to abet its sunny messages now out of its hands. The result is a wondrously singular and Sisyphean effort—structured loosely but conceptually tight—that when viewed through the right lens shows the band at its most brutally alive, if also its least lively.

Decoding why the Lips made this record is certainly a game, the potential explanations many. Perhaps it’s an art of scaling down, especially after the intriguing but fatiguing Embryonic (2009), and a subliminal reaction to the fact that the band’s overblown spectacle—lights, confetti, furries, and fumes—has been shamelessly adopted and aggrandized by the EDM scene (among others), whose music manufactures the same highs that the Lips are more prone to organically celebrate. It’s just as appropriate as the band’s first record of Obama’s second term—symbolic hope buckling beneath the grit of reality and consequence—and maybe more pointed a critique than “Every time you state your case / The more I want to punch your face.” The Terror could also be a confessional record born of Coyne’s romantic split and Steven Drodz’s relapse, rare brooding from a band that’s previously used cartoon characters and bug metaphors to write personal drama out of their music. Or, most probably, this is just what happens when a bunch of weird-to-begin-with old pros record an album exclusively in wee and sleepless overtime hours, content along the way to “make shit up as we go”—another Coyne chestnut from the DIY interview—and historically incapable of doing much of anything but to its extreme. In any case, The Terror has an echo to its shock, more so for the unclear mechanisms behind it.

Much of the record’s strength, ironically enough, draws from a consistent sense of powerlessness. Lyrically, Wayne Coyne seems shrunk to the size he was in second grade, presenting naive commentary and the sorts of eternal questions whose weight a child can barely comprehend at the time of asking. “What will love us?”, he asks at one point; “Is love the god that we control?” at another. He mentions the sun on more than half the songs here, maintaining primitive fascination with the fantastical orb that regulates life, and his melodies—slow, repetitive, and sung in an upper register like peculiar little sing-alongs—are whispered or faded to the point of incomprehensibility, specific words and phrases washed over by the arrangements. The impression is that whatever universe the Lips have hacked into on The Terror is indifferent to petty nitpicking over its design; Coyne, wide-eyed and feeble, raises infinite questions of his world and is offered in the place of answers an unsympathetic shrug.

The music, then, is what defines this record—another strange irony given how unmusical it is. Take “The Terror”: the rattling beat channels party music aboard the Prometheus, a near-bhangra drum line dueling against buzzing chimes and android insects. Its chorus is a repeated two-note dirge not unlike a colossal doorbell drawn out and distorted. Other recurring noises include the countdown-to-self-destruct tone, which underscores both the bizarre meditation of “You Are Alone” and “Try to Explain,” the most gorgeous Flaming Lips song since “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate,” as well as the mechanical scratching in “Look…The Sun is Rising” and “Butterfly, How Long It Takes to Die”—a sound like robots approximating syncopated funk guitars based on some old vinyl they unearthed. “You Lust,” perhaps the track structured most traditionally, is also most polarizing: at thirteen minutes, based primarily on a hypnotic synth groove that openly references Pink Floyd’s “Young Lust,” it weathers your patience while seeming to recruit for a futuristic military outfit, indecipherable propaganda-babble included. All in all, the album maneuvers on one vast and demanding texture, sexless and soulless and grey. It doesn’t score such heights as the band’s meditative mid-career opuses, but the neutered and droning soundscape endows The Terror with the undeniable quality of being ageless.

Across a set of lyrics that reads like apocalyptic newspaper clippings, Coyne works a particular gem into “You Are Alone,” barely audible over the song’s rustling aural creep: “I’ll have to live beyond reality’s dream.” Cosmic bandleader that he’s become, one element of his power is the uncanny ability to construct a porcelain existence, one that separates him as an artist from the grind, and on this album you can almost hear tricolored walls crashing down to reveal the same exact environment—sun, stars, and all—persisting nonetheless. Such an uncaring world can be crushing to someone who’s worked so hard toward euphoria, yet these compact and exploratory songs still steer shy of misery or outright depression. More accurately, The Terror is an unselfish view of a world free of human manipulation, and as such is a staggering listen to fans accustomed to the Lips’ sheeny pop orchestra and, before that, their lo-fi quirk. It’s the sound as the band notices and narrates a massive shadow while unable to see what’s cast it.

Records / Justin Timberlake: The 20/20 Experience

Wed, 01 May 2013 08:05:24 -0700

A note, to begin, on the outros. Because they’re where this album lives or dies, at least in the public consciousness. I’m a fan, for reasons I’ll get to later, but the point is that this is the dirty secret of Justin Timberlake’s career: we never quite think he can pull this shit off. And we love that about him, for the most part. It’s not even that he started off in a boy band, which is a tired narrative but certainly part of the reason why we balk at the eight-minute tracks here. It’s just that everything he does seems like it’s the most ambitious thing he’s ever done, even if it isn’t. Celebrity (2001) was a concept album; Futuresex (2006) was a concept album; Justified (2002) was probably more high-minded than any of it, a sort of doctoral thesis on Virginia Beach’s influence on milennial pop. Justified posited “hip pop” as not a term to spit disdainfully in mid-album Talib Kweli skits but the natural evolution of hip-hop on its path toward global assimilation.

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of Timbaland to this narrative arc. With “Cry Me A River” he found a melancholy sweet spot that simultaneously played off of and expanded the public perception of Justin Timberlake, Star, and in its aftermath Justin Timberlake stepped into a role which had previously been held by Missy Elliot and, before that, Aaliyah. Timbaland always worked best behind someone else (with Magoo, he briefly tried a sidekick); Timberlake always wanted, well, a good producer (shots fired @ Wade Robson). On “River” they locked eyes, on Futuresex they fell in love, and on The 20/20 Experience they make a beautiful baby, perfectly of both of them. 20/20 was reportedly recorded in a couple weeks, and even as produced as it sounds this “couple weeks” theory holds water. The whole thing has the feel of a creative burst. When Timberlake coos that his spaceship coupe only has room for two, don’t get your hopes up: that’s Timbaland beat-boxing in the passenger seat.

At a svelte ten tracks—which is a glorious, almost holy quantity for an R&B album—there is only room for both artists at their absolute best. At first, you will be forgiven for thinking the album Timbaland’s triumph. In sheer sonic magnificence, the album rivals Watch the Throne (2011), but its aims are warmer, more human. You are being asked, in other words, to dance, but Timbaland will not make that unagreeable. He will, right at the outset, pop you with gigantic D’Angelo neo-soul (“Pusher Love Girl”), then with glorious James Brown disco (“Suit & Tie”), then, on “Don’t Hold the Wall,” he will slyly sound a lot like circa-2003 Timbaland, and it will sound incredible; it’s almost like Timbaland is making a case for his own greatness by setting his own musical signatures into a canonical context (check the alien percussion switch-ups in the fourth measures, the minor-key found sound samples). The result would be encyclopedia-thumbing pastiche if it weren’t all so carefully curated, and if the production wasn’t so intricately, lavishly produced that as each track stretches into the fifth or sixth or eighth minute it was not still revealing permutations, secrets, strange little surprises.

What holds all of this disparate influence-spotting together (we hear 2010 Kanye or primo Aaliyah on “Tunnel Vision,” 2001 Bjork or actualized Imogen Heap on “Blue Ocean Floor,” etc.), is, of course, our endearing host from Memphis, Tennessee. The record’s obsession with JT’s wifey has been well-parsed elsewhere, but it sounds like bona-fide inspiration and it unifies the record with gusto. Timberlake’s no Marvin Gaye, so it’s perfect that his Janis Hunter is big sister from 7th Heaven. Then, vocally, JT’s always been criticised for the thinness with which he tries to loverman croon, but as big as these arrangements get, they leave plenty of room for him to operate. Sonic elements are chosen with care: of all the components on “Strawberry Bubblegum,” for example, the majority is careful ornamentation. The beat itself is almost austere. (Conversely, “Mirrors” is the album’s sole misstep for this exact reason. It’s an arena-rock song on a nightclub album—but, oh wait, damn, here comes the outro, nightclub death swoon resplendent). More importantly, though, is the way Timberlake finds the pocket on each of these grooves such that that thinness doesn’t matter: the kid is rapping in honey-coated melodies. After that opening on “Suit & Tie,” which is just pretty much Timbaland farting, Timberlake locks into the 2 and 4 and makes the most of every drop the beat provides him like he’s fucking OJ Da Juiceman. So ably does he keep finding new entry points that, when Jiggaman shows up on his own switched-up beat, he sounds dumpy and out-of-sorts, struggling to catch up.

The Jiggaman should not have touched the mic, is what I’m getting at. Really, the only rappers that have managed to guest alongside Timberlake admirably were Malice and T.I., dudes who sort of specialize in finding room for themselves. Making Hova sound like a tubby forty-year-old trying to do a layup was probably not the idea when they locked him into the first single, but it does prove the point here: that there is not room for other people when Tim and Tim are operating. The triumph across the ten tracks here is that of a hip-hop producer and a pop star merging their visions into something that is both completely wonderful and also completely non-revolutionary. It is a paean to the glories of listenability. What we hear in the outros, then, is their creators simply enjoying this. It is them holding on, unwilling to relent, whether it’s the sanguine understated half-minute that closes “That Girl” or the breathless burnout of “Tunnel Vision,” the sly metamorphosis of “Strawberry Bubblegum” or a Lionel Richie lullabye on “Let the Groove Get In.” On the outros we hear something rare in pop music these days: musicians enjoying themselves. We are invited to, too.

Tracks / Cannibal Ox:

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 08:04:20 -0700

“Gotham” is something of an event. My Bloody Valentine might have had an extra decade and a great deal more exposure on their side, but for a certain niche of hip-hop fans, The Cold Vein (2001) is a landmark every bit as momentous—and daunting—as Loveless (1990). It was the kind of record released in such circumstances that it was all but guaranteed to be unreplicable: two singular young MCs at the absolute top of their game teamed with one of independent rap’s greatest producers inaugurating the launch of El-P’s Def Jux label. It was an articulate, bold statement of purpose for hip-hop in the midst of Def Jam’s shiny suit era, one whose intelligence and overall craftsmanship has rarely been equaled in independent rap since. That it happened to feature some of the most astonishing beats ever laid to tape was only one reason among many that its creators have been understandably trepidatious to release a proper follow up.

With “Gotham (Ox City),” at last, Can Ox have started to move in that direction. And the results, somewhat shockingly, are very, very good. El-P no longer produces for the duo, but Bill Cosmiq’s beat plays as if beamed in from the same distant constellation, all mechanized drums, retro-futuristic synth chords, and clarion octave jumps sounding sirens. The beat sounds like a natural place for Can Ox to renew their charge, and Vast and Vordul bring the momentum. They also, of course, bring the cheesy jokes: no one familiar with the juvenile humor that leavened The Cold Vein here and there is going to be too surprised to hear an effects-laden Vast Aire tell us that we “are now tuned in to the adventures of Assman and Goblin.” Nor will they be surprised that the cheese is just a setup for the cutting knife.

Vordul Mega cuts first. He may be a little less sharp than he was a decade ago, but if the rumors are at all true (we’ve heard talk of a depressed Vordul sleeping on the streets, scrounging for food) then it’s something of a miracle he sounds as good as he does. His style has always felt like someone perpetually on the brink of tripping, catching his step as he catches his breath. It’s disarming in the best way. But it’s Vast who really makes the strong impression here. His trademark charm and wit are on full display, but he also brings to “Gotham” a darker growl that speaks of hard experience and earned authority. That he feels the need to drop Cold Vein signifiers here and there is understandable, given the context, but it feels less like he’s trying to recapture that record’s fire than lighting a fresh one as a torch to navigate a new decade’s version of “the city sublime.” That city, Vast Aire tells us on this track, belongs to Can Ox; who would I be to argue?

► “Gotham (Ox City)”

Records / Rilo Kiley: RKives

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 08:04:26 -0700

Rilo Kiley’s RKives acts as a sort of conclusion to the career of a band whose break up never really felt definitive (and luckily, whose members are all still making music). But instead of the obvious “greatest hits” disc, RKives is something more substantial: a collection of B-sides and rarities that subtly tell the band’s story; the musical equivalent of going through old photo albums. A carefully curated yet ragged group of leftovers both offbeat and expected, RKives is for fans who feel like we know Jenny, Blake, Pierre, and Jason (and even Dave). It’s for those of us who, for one, want to hear just a little more from them, but it also affords us the chance to remember who they were, and who we were, before we all became something else. RKives does provide a new discovery here and there, but mostly it succeeds due to this feeling of intimacy, and it’s a bittersweet yet fitting goodbye.

One of the nicest aspects of RKives is its order, though it seems head-scratching at first. The album ostensibly plunges backwards into Rilo Kiley’s career more or less chronologically (though “Dejalo” juts into the middle like a sore thumb), beginning with “new” single “Let Me Back In” and ending with the song that introduced many of us to the band: 1998’s “The Frug,” from the soundtrack to the long-forgotten Kate Hudson vehicle Desert Blue. “The Frug” is one of their simpler compositions, and bears a certain ’90s Juliana Hatfield-type cuteness, but it’s nonetheless beguiling; clearly Lewis was already developing her signature brand of half-smiling ennui. Though two songs are not enough to sum up a band’s evolution, compare “The Frug” with “Let Me Back In” and you come close. While “The Frug” is a catchy song that hints at greater depth, “Let Me Back In” shows a band that has grown in self-assurance and songcraft. It’s instantly affecting and unique, with its echoing beach-y guitar, Lewis’s commanding voice, and a tap-dance-y interlude that should be silly but, layered with strings, sort of makes a person want to cry. On RKives, “Let Me Back In,” a song about leaving and returning home to L.A., says goodbye first thing rather than wait, a decision that charges the entire record with poignancy.

Most of the songs on RKives lack the power of “Let Me Back In,” but everything included is solid enough. (Though I must join the chorus of petulant RK fans whining about the inclusion of a “Dejalo” remix, featuring Jenny Lewis sort-of-rapping alongside Too $hort. It’s…not really them.) Like the band’s career, the best part of RKives is the middle, with the songs on either end sounding alternately half-baked (“About the Moon”) or overwrought (the emo-ish “It’ll Get You There”). I had hoped the band might include at least a few tracks from the perpetually out-of-print Initial Friend EP, an early self-release, but “The Frug” is the one and only. It’s interesting to hear Lewis’s evolution as a singer; on early tracks like the charming “American Wife” she’s downright twee and whispery, and on the pretty “Draggin’ Around,” she’s holding her own as a full-on torch singer. Her voice is the glue that holds many of these songs together, strengthening through the years and, like her lyrics, always engaging.

RKives settles into a nice groove with “All the Drugs” and “Bury, Bury, Bury Another,” the standout here, a country lament in the vein of “More Adventurous.” It’s the sort of magical, warm song we haven’t heard from Lewis in a while. She ambles around in her comfort zone, keeping it simple and sad, singing about working and growing old and losing family. Ever since Rabbit Fur Coat (2006) Lewis has been moving into different genres, sometimes successfully, but at the expense of her naturally lived-in, effervescent sound. It’s a treat to hear her looseness on these tracks with lower stakes, some the band probably never intended to release, and “Bury, Bury, Bury Another” is Lewis at her absolute best.

Blake Sennett, on the other hand, is the Rilo Kiley member who seems to provoke the most derision. He has only two solo vocal contributions here: “Well, You Left” and “Rest of My Life,” two unremarkable yet comfortably Sennett-y studies in whispering Elliott Smith-style folk and lovelorn passive-aggression. This is no slight; it’s simply consistent with Sennett’s contributions over the band’s four albums. What Sennett detractors often forget is that he is co-author of some of the band’s best songs, even here: “Let Me Back In,” “I Remember You,” and the satisfyingly Execution of All Things (2002)-esque “Emotional.” In fact, RKives reminds of the way that Lewis and Sennett could often make each other better; combining styles to confidently walk the line between Sennett’s indie-emo (and later disco) leanings and Lewis’s affinity for the country-tinged torch song.

“I Remember You” clearly has Sennett’s fingerprints on it to the extent that it could be a lost cut from the Elected’s Bury Me in My Rings (2011), though with Lewis singing. With its indie movie romance premise and breathless chorus, “I Remember You” is the best straight-up pop song I’ve heard this year, more interesting and fun than much of the similarly-styled Under the Blacklight (2007). Lewis duets with the rasp-voiced singer-songwriter Benji Hughes in a charming Human League-style duet about two strangers who meet and reconnect: “May old acquaintance be forgot / But I remember you.” It doesn’t sound much like the Rilo Kiley we remember, but rather reveals their surprising hidden talent for bubblegum radio pop.

When RKives begins, with Lewis singing slowly and steadily, “Let it be printed, let it be known / I’m leaving you, I’m going home / And all you can do is just / Watch me go,” it’s like the act of sitting someone down and bracing them for bad news. Rilo Kiley as a band is no more, but they’re kind enough to reassure their fans, like a parent to a child saying, “it’s not your fault; we still love you.” RKives is the band giving us an opportunity to watch them go. It’s not the best work they’ve done, together or separately, but that’s not the intent. The intent is to look back on a band and wonder at the way they worked, at the way each element came together, as on The Execution of All Things, to make great, lasting music. “I’m sorry for leaving,” Lewis sings, but she doesn’t sound sad. “Let Me Back In” is, like RKives as a whole, hopeful and appreciative above all else, a way for the band and the fans to celebrate what they had one last time before returning to the present, to careers already well into the next phase.

Records / Marnie Stern: The Chronicles of Marnia

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 08:04:53 -0700

History tells us that artists with an experimental lean tend to topple toward the middle over time, losing a once-unique edge in an effort to curb artistic stagnation or simply as a means of courting a wider listenership. At first blush, the career of Marnie Stern would seem to bear out this trajectory. The treble-voiced, finger-tapping, endearingly self-deprecating New York-based guitar hero has moved breathlessly across a trio of albums with nary a pause for traditional considerations such as melody or structure. That she’s gathered both in intermittent fits of inspiration over the years certainly speaks to her natural talent, yet both have, up to now, felt more like natural by-products of her process rather than premeditated goals. Which is more than fine: each of Stern’s records have provided more than their share of thrills and heart-stopping flourishes, and as a technician she may be the most naturally gifted guitar player of her generation. Nevertheless, she seemed to be exhausting her formula a bit on her 2011 self-titled album. The less defined, more freewheeling moments in her past work were easy to forgive for an artist still presumably finding her footing. But more recently these same feats of strength had begun to feel less like displays of unchecked passion and more like a crutch.

Which is what makes Stern’s amazingly titled new album The Chronicles of Marnia such a refreshing listen. Not so much a change of pace as a consolidation and careful re-allotment of her powers, Chronicles is unique in that it doesn’t represent a stylistic 180 or drastic overhaul of Stern’s sound, but instead finds her integrating her unique ingredients into fresh, streamlined concoctions. Working with Oneida drummer Kid Millions after years battling against the currents of torrential fury whipped up by Zach Hill (now of Death Grips infamy), Stern has finally found a running-mate rather than a foil. Granted, much of the excitement generated by the band’s prior set-up was a direct result of the tension spark by Stern’s guitar reacting unpredictably to Hill’s free-assault percussion. Millions may be more of a finesse player (though compared to Hill, nearly every drummer can sound dainty), but he’s far more equipped at harnessing a groove without sacrificing the momentum so essential to Stern’s headlong fury. What they’ve emerged with is Stern’s first collection of songs, ten carefully plotted tracks with an emphasis on craft and internal harmonization.

Lest one think Stern is following the path established by that of her many forebears, Chronicles is frontloaded with a handful of her most dizzying yet immediately satisfying tracks to date. In fact, the opening volley of songs might each be what one might refer to as—depending on how liberal your definition—jams. Opener “Year of the Glad” announces itself auspiciously, with Stern wordlessly yelping atop Millions’ galloping beat. “Everything’s starting now,” Stern chirps between successful attempts at turning monkey noises into a hook, and in less than four minutes she’s ran through a verse, a chorus, and a bridge without breaking much of sweat. Her guitar bends like taffy throughout “You Don’t Turn Down,” scurrying from colossal, power-chorded peaks through naked, strummed valleys, her lyrics about emotional congestion mirroring her and Millions’ dynamic gait. “Noonan” similarly trots with confidence as Stern sings, “Don’t you want to be somebody,” as if she’s now fully found her voice and is offering encouragement to those inspired by her fearless evolution. “Nothing is Easy” and “Immortals” are a closer approximation of what we’ve come to expect from Stern, mantra-like and slightly mannered, but with a continued air of the inspirational (“You don’t need a sledgehammer to walk in my shoes” goes the former; “I’ll come and find ya,” the latter).

The second half of the record sees the duo losing a bit of the momentum built up by the opening gambit. The title track promises a continuation of the chiseled, energetic outbursts of the proceeding side but instead has to play as a shot of adrenaline to last for the next fifteen minutes or so. “Still Moving” doesn’t quite live up to its title, loosening the grip on the more structured principles employed earlier, while “East Side Glory” finds Stern delivering her most conventional riff alongside a sing-song melody that (perhaps intentionally) lacks the conviction of her more demonstrative work. And then “Proof of Life” rumbles to life on the back of storm-gathering percussion and (…wait for it) concentrated piano chords. Thankfully Stern and Millions mostly come through on the drama, building to an emotional and musical climax by simply flashing rather than overextending their chops. Stern’s repeated request of “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon” on closer “Hell Yes,” then, works as both reestablishment and reminder of her most efficient gear: “All I’ve got is time,” Stern defiantly proclaims as her guitar careens alongside Millions’ advancing army of a beat. And hopefully with a little more, Stern and her new partner will learn to spread this restless spirit evenly across the length of a collaboration.

Records / Dan Friel: Total Folklore

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 12:04:12 -0700

Total Folklore isn’t so much a collection of songs as it is a blunt instrument. It can be used for things. If your upstairs neighbors and their beautiful two children can find nothing better to do with their days then run in circles wearing clodhoppers and dropping heavy shit all over the floor, just hit play on twelve-minute opening anthem “Ulysses” and revel in the fact that, for the length of this track, you are undoubtedly giving them way more grief and having a lot more fun doing it than they can manage with those little hellions. Or if you find yourself with a momentary lack of energy, put this puppy on a good set of speakers and get right up close to the subwoofers like Jesse Pinkman, losing your broken shit in that glorious wall of noise. Total Folklore can be used to blow out those speakers, and probably your eardrums as well. It can be used to scare insects from your walls, and to ward off curious spring-roaming cats. Or, I guess, you can just enjoy it as an exceptionally well-crafted piece of instrumental noise rock. If that’s more your thing.

If you don’t know Dan Friel by name, you might perhaps remember him as a founding member of the better-known Parts and Labor, who played their farewell show last year after a decade of activity. Parts and Labor were extremely successful at doing something that a great many bands from their Brooklyn turf have tried and failed to do, which is to combine abrasion and distortion with sugar-coated melodies in an organic way. They were punk as fuck, but they were also, in their best moments, pretty as fuck. And despite a string of great drummers (including Christopher R. Weingarten, now better known as a prickly rock critic for Spin) and B.J. Warshaw’s consistently righteous guitar work, Friel was always the band’s secret weapon.

Friel’s basic trick is to run crisp but low-fi keyboard leads through a hot mess of distortion and other effects, ending up with something grimier than much guitar-based noise music but more linear and sonically insistent at the same time. Simply put, you just cannot ignore the melodies of tracks like “Landslide” or “Thumper.” Friel’s keyboards seem to be actually talking to you, all boisterous like happy dogs too caught up in communicating their own joy to worry about the language barrier between you. Sometimes they sing together, as on “Velocipede,” and sometimes (“Scavengers”) one line howls on its lonesome in a bright harsh landscape. In every case, they feel startlingly alive.

Whereas Friel’s keys in Parts and Labor were used for stirring hooks and color contrast, Total Folklore demonstrates that they are entirely at home in the focus of the track as well. More than on either of his previous solo efforts, in fact, Friel seems to let his melodic side govern every aspect of Total Folklore. The result is his most engaging work yet outside of Parts and Labor. It’s as though, having said farewell to his day job, Friel still wanted to write songs rather than engage further in the elliptical experiments of Ghost Town (2008). The result is a collection of great, hard-driving tracks that feel poppier than any of the long-winding snores on that new Justin Timberlake album and don’t ask you to call them “Daddy.”