Reviews: October 2003
Stereo Total – Party Anticonformiste (Valve/Mgm)
Binding together the best of their first four albums, trashy punk disco is the fortae of this boy/girl French/German duo of Francoise Cactus and Brezel Goring. Filled to the brim with thirty tracks these songs bounce in, cheer you up and then making way for the next instalment. Its all quite exotic, never knowing what language the next track may come in or what strange flavour the music might morph into – its like some kind of ice-cream emporium in the height of summer.
Tracks like Supergirl and Furore come across like Serge Gainsbourg on a sugar rush, Comme Un Garcon and Aua have a downright punk pop trash sound a la Letigre while Sous La Douche and Nauvelle Vague could have been born from to much fun on an exotic beach in Barcelona
Using their combined musical heritage, Stereo Total produces entirely creative and infectious music that is like a trans-Europe tour of fun.
Spiritualized – Amazing Grace (Spaceman/Sanctuary/Shock)
Amazing Grace is the blood that pumps through J Spaceman’s veins, messy, unbridled raw and entirely electrifying. Gone is the sweeping chorus of strings and in their place are washes of feedback, Over 43 minutes we have 11 songs that at times lift you off your feet, but more often simply punch you in the head.
Drop the grace from the title and you have the album perfectly summed up. Lying within we find keys hit with the spirit of Jerry Lee Lewis, guitars flailing in unbridled, timeless yet somehow completely reinvented spaceman fashion (‘Never going back’) and songs sounding like they were laid down in one-take in someone’s garage.
Punctuated with moments of calm and choir (‘Oh Baby’) we still see room for trumpet’s (‘Rated X’), harmonica (‘Hold On’) and the odd violin attempting to soothe the tortured soul
After many years of wayward travel, Spiritualizaed may have finally found their redemption.
The Fire Theft – Self Titled (Ryko/Stomp)
Leaving all they had behind and starting fresh in name and sound we find three quarters of the original Sunny Day Real Estate (Nate Mendel, William Goldsmith and Jeremy Enigk) reborn as The Fire Theft.
Some things can’t be changed and some demons will always stir, and so we find Jeremy Enigk’s voice, now as it was some ten years ago, heart breakingly pained and calling out for salvation. The difference here, lies in the music, in trying to shake any emo pretensions their previous incarnation had we see them not move forward but draw more from the past. Shades of classic Neil Young and Syd Barret era Pink Floyd creating a dynamic that is quite overwhelming for simply three guys, guitar, drums and bass.
Powerful in its strongest and softest moments, The Fire Theft deliver music made by both the light of angels and the darkness of men.
The Double Agents – Friends In Low Places (Spooky)
Like kids that grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, these five from Melbourne play an old kind of rock n roll, a down south Memphis sound. Distilled on equal doses of honky-tonk, country and jukebox rock, they following a path the Rolling Stones travelled some 30 years earlier.
Bottom Line kicks thing off in a rollicking fashion, the title track sounding like a sultrier feminine version of our own Sixfthick, the vocals of Kim Walvish and Sharon MacLean beckoning you in. Walk Away inhabits the same dark underbelly Rowland S. Howard usually hides within. From there the album continues further down towards the bottom of the glass, doses of keys, lap-steel, forlorn words and guitars filled with sorrow making the trip worthwhile. Final track the Thrill Has Gone breaks out of its own torpor with guitars flailing leaving us with demons stirred and hearts just trying to mend.
Modey Lemon – Thunder + Lightning (Birdman/In-Fidelity)
Remember this: for every two-piece rock band that you know of, there are another 20 flanked just behind them. Some better than those you already know.
Doing with two people what bands like the Datsuns do with four, this Pittsburgh duo bash out 11 ramshackle tunes, giving us buzzing guitars, drums pummelled like sheet metal, noise, fuzz and even the dirt between their toes.
Modey Lemon seems to have only two setting: one or eleven, with most of this album lying in blues ridden overdrive, with the needle in the red – like Evil Kinevil off the edge of a cliff. Add a little moog into the mix and these songs feels like something created in a bygone era, hidden until the world was ready.
Like the Sonics in their day, these guys wouldn’t know convention if it bit them on the ass and thank god because this kind of bastard noise never sounded so good.
Enon – Hocus-Pocus (Touch n Go/Spunk)
With its members having a history in bands like Blonde Redhead and Braniac, you know from the outset that this is going to be a schizophrenic roller-coaster ride of an album
Switching from casio pop (‘Shave’) to guitar crunch (‘Utz’) to meandering acoustics (‘Hocus-Pocus’) these 13 songs shift like car gears, hugging the twists and turns with complete disregard for the road rules.
This latest album provides a prolific as well as eclectic sound that only this Brooklyn trio could create. High points include ‘Murder Sounds’ which has a slightly more manic Girls Against Boys feel while ‘Starcastic’ is akin to Shonen Knife’s sugar dosed sounds.
The energy is hard to hold over the 40-minute duration with as many mellow dips as energetic peaks, leaving you possibly wanting to program the best bits depending on your mood.
Broadway Project – The Vessel (Memphis Industries/Inertia)
From the mind of Dan Berridge comes this, his second album and first enlisting the help of Richard Palmer. It’s one that inhabits a world of soft edges and blurred focus, songs not told as stories but more like snapshots of time for you to delve into. Every sound is underscored with the subtlety of an overcast day. Some songs come in a mixture of strings and sounds usually found inhabiting back alleys (1) while others hold a more fluid dub sounds soaked with torch song vocals (2,3). Guitars, piano, beats as well as drums all seamlessly binding to form yearnings of unrequited emotion and salvation in loss.
Like the sorrow found in Goreki’s symphonies, this album is as disturbing as it is beautiful for the eye it casts over the world’s open wounds.
The Drones – Bird In A Church / Slamming On The Brakes (In-Fidelity/Spooky)
Very Limited 7” Single from this Melbourne group holds true to the ramshackle kamikaze rock found on their debut album of last year. New track ‘Bird in A Church’ is frenzied like a voodoo curse whilst Slamming on the brakes, a Spencer P. Jones cover takes the tension of the original and adds The Drones own unbridled aggression.
Libertines – Don’t Look Back Into The Sun (Rough Trade/Spunk)
Off the cuff single with four non album tracks and two demo’s showing that they can still get away with sounding like a now version of The Jam. Fun and clean jangly guitar hooks with that boppy urgent sound. A perfect addition to your Nu Rock collection.
The Swords Project – Entertainment Is Over If You Want It (Arrco/Ryko/Stomp)
In a world where new music is more and more a hybrid of genres, The Swords Project has gone about bringing together industrial-styled electronics, pop melodies, pounding garage drumming and a polarising use of guitars. All of this creates an engulfing whirlpool of sounds.
At the centre are six people from Portland, Oregon creating songs that are at times lovely like Death Cab For Cutie and at times permeating a tension usually associated with Mogwai. The songs all start off unassumingly, some continuing to brood (MD11) while others burst at the seams (‘New Shapes’).
Somehow incorporating two drummers, two guitarists, keyboards, violin, accordion, bass and a real knack for melody, this debut takes time to explore but stays out of post-rock territory, creating more of a world of post-pop/pre-rock.
Kevin Welch & The Flood – Live Down Here On Earth (Shock)
Recorded last spring at The Basement in Sydney and backed by Australian band The Flood, this live recording brings together songs from Welch’s solo albums, his album with Kieran Kane and even a Van Morrison classic.
Welch’s open highway country songs are reworked here, with ‘Beneath My Wheels’, ‘Eight More Miles’ and ‘Happy Ever After’ given more of a carnival feel, all seven musicians adding their own flavour. Sometimes this works for the better and sometimes it does not leave enough room for the intimacy that is usually found in Welch’s music.
The humble Welch even hands over the stage to The Flood for a couple of songs showing that while the two parties are from different countries, they share the same musical heritage.
For a bunch of guys who had only been playing together for one week, this is an impressive document and only bettered by actually being there on the night.
Via Tania – Under A Different Sky (Chocolate Industries/Trifekta)
Via Tania is Tania Mary Bowers, a woman who has a lot of friends. On this, her debut album, we see people such as Chris Brokaw, Howe Gelb, her husband Casey Rice, Prefuse-73 and several members of Tortoise adding a wide range of live instrumentation, resulting in music both eclectic and moody.
Grounded in electronics that seem to repel as much as bind to each other, tracks swim within trip-hop, dub and downbeat electro, with glitch and acoustic sounds also finding room to breathe. Some of the songs are like Bowers’ voice: wispy and almost without emotion, a sound mixing with all the other sounds. Given that Bowers has written all the songs, it is of note that she is absent from at least three of them, letting others flesh out her creations.
Both absorbing and slightly foreign, this album exists in its own playful psychedelic world.
The Bronx – Self-titled (White Dope/Shock)
Meshing together the kind of live-fast, die-young influences that can only come from the City of Angels, these newbies have after only existing for 12 months coughed up a debut that straddles Snapcase-styled punk/hardcore and Motörhead-come-Hellacopters rock.
With 11 tracks that seem to relentlessly grow with intensity over its 31 minutes, the album starts with what seems like straightforward rock (‘False Alarm’). But each outburst of guitars seems to build on the last and the drums just pound heavier and heavier, vocalist Matt Caughthran pushing his voice from singing (‘Strobe Life’) to screaming to pained, incomprehensible howls (‘Kill My Friends’). Their roots are openly declared with the album closing on a cover of X’s ‘Los Angeles’.
This debut is sure to be mistakenly lumped into the “Oh look, another new rock band to compare to the Strokes” category, but rest assured, these guys live in a much different darker realm.
Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros – Streetcore (Hellcat/Epitaph/Shock)
Drawing on the music and styles he loved – reggae, rock and punk – this final chapter is just as defiant and engaging as any in Strummer’s career.
Maybe not entirely finished before his death but possibly better for it, many songs are bare with their own beauty while the Mescaleros, fulfilling some of Strummer’s original visions for the album, have dressed up others. Some hold smatterings of electronics (‘All In A Day’); others are more trademark rock (‘Arms Aloft In Aberdeen’).
‘The Long Shadow’ equals Dylan at his best – just one guitar and voice. It is here that the strength and soul of his music really shines, peaking with Strummer’s heart-wrenching cover of Bob Marley’s ‘Redemption Song’.
‘Midnight Jam’ is predominately instrumental with contribution by reggae originator Mr U-Roy and Strummer’s vocals dropped in like snippets of radio broadcasts, an epilogue of sorts from the Mescalleros.
A strong testament, not to his last days but a life lived to the fullest and an inspiration to entire generations, now and to follow.
Oneida – Secret Wars (Jagjaguwar)
Out in the hot sun, hammering pegs into the railroad track, strike after repetitive strike, these three fellows from Brooklyn bash the music out of their instruments with the forced rhythm of a chain gang.
Opening track ‘Treasure Planet’ comes across as a more electrified, less stoned Sebadoh. From there the songs shift from a slower, more absorbing Krautrock (‘Caesar’s Column’) to a hyped-up, spazzed-out psych-rock (‘$50 Tea’).‘The Last Act, Every Time’ inhabits a strange baroque world of its own with the addition of Hawaiian ukuleles and tinkering piano.
Culminating in a 13-minute guitar meltdown with the final track ‘Changes In The City’ – a mixture of pulverising guitar, bass, drums and organ – Secret Wars is heavy enough to buckle those railway tracks and derail anyone’s rock n roll train.
Spokane – Measurement (Jagjaguwar)
For their fourth album, Rick Alverson, Courtney Bowles and Robert Donne draw their strength not from the music but the hollowed spaces between the sounds. “There’s something you’re not saying”, the main refrain from ‘Addition’, makes clear the album’s sentiment, drawing you in and holding you throughout.
At times soothing (‘Caution’) but also holding moments of antipathy (‘Protocol’), the sounds have a blurred focus and softened edges, hanging in the air weightless, with only their emotion giving them presence. A naiveté and hidden innocence strips any pretensions from ‘An Ideal History’, with the only truly audible sound that of a music box.
Existing in the same realm as Low or The Rachels, Spokane create music filled with longing while also resisting the grandiose crescendos so frequent in contemporary post-rock orchestral music.
Erase Errata – At Crystal Palace (Blast First/Mute/EMI)
Reminiscent of when The Slits first injected jazz into punk, Erase Errata’s second album is another under 30-minute dose of borderless mayhem.
Unconfined by genre, these four women meld electronics and trumpets to 13 tracks of already erratic bass, drums and guitar combinations. ‘Ca. Viewing’ recalls Nina Hagan in her heyday while ‘The White Horse Is Bucking’ aligns itself more with Le Tigre’s current rebellious sounds. From the artwork to the outro, this album is a middle finger to convention.
Further cementing their post-punk aesthetic, little linear thinking can be attributed to the lyrics – like the music, they’re pieced together from polar opposites and add to the fun, free and frantic vibe. Like jazz gone bad, or simply when genius borderlines mad, this album is begging for a riot on the dancefloor. On a par with Other Animals, reissued simultaneously by Blast First.
Estradasphere – Quadropus (Web Of Mimicry)
This is world music only in the sense that over 65 minutes these four fellows from Santa Cruz cover all four corners of the musical world, from ethnic gypsy music to funk wah jams, pummelling thrash guitar and a cappella breakbeat. This inhabits similar realms to The Secret Chiefs 3, Mr Bungle and John Zorn.
Starting off with a traditional Greek number, the excursion takes in Sufi vocals (‘Dubway’), double kick jazz-metal spy themes (‘King Krab Battle’) and 50s Chuck Berry-style rock’n’roll (‘Crystal Blue’). Centring around guitar, double bass, saxophone, violin and a whole host of guests, there are some strange juxtapositions – like Beach Boys harmonies standing side by side with black metal. But for those with an open mind there’s a lot to embrace; every composition is tackled with maximum musicianship and zero bombast.
Balancing the light and the dark, this is essentially quite serious and intense music, but that’s never at the expense of a good time.
Thursday – War All The Time (Victory/Island/Universal)
It’s nothing new for some artists to document what sounds like a nervous breakdown in progress. Thursday, however, are making a career out of unhinged emotional outbursts.
Album number three solidifies their sound of rhythmic hardcore, bursts of guitars cleanly building and cutting out, the spaces creating the impact. But the music is only half the equation – the howls, screams and cries of Geoff Rickly and Tucker Rule are the key to this band’s appeal, communicating relentless frustration with things either in or outside of their control.
If you’ve heard Thursday before, this album holds nothing new and is disappointing for it. Like a child having a tantrum for the attention rather than trying to fix a problem, every song makes the screams sound less convincing and more contrived.
If you need to get upset and require a soundtrack for it (and sometimes we all do) then try Full Collapse first because War All The Time shows that anguish does not always equal art.
Stereolab – Instant O In The Universe (Warner Bro.)
Upbeat and playful melodies meld with frolicking guitar lines and vibrant electronics showing a vitality not present in previous recent releases. This five track maxi-single, is a precursor to the soon to be released ‘Margerine Eclipse’ album, the first track ‘Sudden Stars’ coming off the album with the other four tracks exclusive to this release. Given all that has happened, their beauty and resolve remains intact and a tribute to all for it.
Yo La Tengo – Today Is The Day! (Matador/Inertia)
This Ep brings together three exclusive tracks from the Summer Sun sessions, two extras from 1999 and as a special acoustic version of ‘Cherry Chapstick’ recorded live on JJJ during their 2000 Australian tour. The first three tracks show the rock side of Yo La Tengo flourishing (including the crazy horn on ‘Outsmatener’) while the fourth beautifully covers the classic 60’s folk tune ‘Needle Of Death’ by ‘Bert Jansch’ and the fifth, a snappy pop instrumental.
John Auer / Ken Stringfellow – Private Sides (Arena Rock Recording Company/Stomp)
This split Ep brings together three tracks from each artist, the first track that each provides is a folk-styled acoustic ballad (Strings melding with his hushed tones and delicate strumming) then each follows the same pattern progressing into jaunty pop rock. Auer holds a slightly heavier sound but their pop sensibilities are clearly intertwined and at the core of their talents. Stringfellow is also joined on a cover of ‘Ask Me No Questions’ by Jill Sobule.
Matchbook Romance – Stories and Alibis (Epitaph / Shock)
The clever deception of the opening introduction is a world of subtle intertwined melodies and electronics, only for the music to back-flip into the punchy title track showing a rumbling, crunching punk rock sound that the band brands as its own.
These four New York natives run the same gauntlet that has brought bands like The Atari’s and ‘The Get Up Kids’ so much adoration. The mix of soaring / screaming vocals, tinkering keyboards and unrelenting guitars and drumming add up to songs highly infectious (‘Promise’) and full of pained emotion (‘Shadows Like Statues’).
Mixing in an acoustic number (‘Tiger Lily’) halfway through the album shows a band as earnest as it is angry. But the rawkus noise prevails, the songs becoming more anthemic and culminating with ‘The Greatest Fall’. Distilling down the popular punk of the last ten years this debut provides everything that has made the genre huge.
The Weakerthans – Reconstruction Site (Shock)
For their fourth album, we find a band completely comfortable within their pop rock world – happy to chug along, dipping, weaving and skirting cliché and tradition.
Without needing to mellow down into a torpor of enrage themselves into a hyperactive fit, Reconstruction Site, is a rare record in its ability to observe and assess in an entirely accepting way, producing a happy and carefree fun. Not one ounce of indi rock cynicism or snide disdain is to be found, singer, John Samson’s voice recalling the same quirky matter-of-fact tones as The Mountain Goats.
Rock declarations (‘Uncorrected Proof’), meld with country styling (‘A New Name For Everything’), at times using acoustics’ (‘One Great City’) and for others relishing jangly guitar melodies (‘Time’s Arrow’). This is a brilliant album to wash away your cares, dance around the lounge room and enjoy the moments of life that we often wish would last forever.
Feedbacker 
No trackbacks yet.