Reviews: March 2007
CRIME IN CHIOR
Trumpery Metier (Gold Standard Labs)
Hit play and within moments you will be transported to a world where the BBC Radiophonic Workshop is god and the tardus is the preferred mode of transportation.
It’s no coincidence that Crime In Choir’s third album has come out on Mars Volta’s personal label, what with it’s prog/jazz/rock mood swings. There’s a jazz/sci-fi virtuosity to the playing in these nine songs that fans of Trans Am will already be quite familiar with. Traditional rock instrumentation underpins flailing horns and rampant moog/synth keyboard runs in what fast becomes some kind of instrumental tour-de-force. But this interstellar excursion is about all that you’ll have boarding tickets for as the mood never deviates from some kind of operatic 70s Jean Michel Jarre re-enactment. Prog Rock IS alive and well in the blood of our youth!
AEREOGRAMME
My Heart Has A Wish That You Would Not Go (Chemikal Underground/Stomp)
Previously it was the tectonic shifts in guitar squall that drove the dynamics and emotion of this Scottish group but after falling off the map some four years ago, they have returned with their fourth album and a dramatic shift in focus.
My Heart… finds the music still ebbing and flowing with guitar layers and epic undertones but the emotive force this time around is squarely cantered on the vocals of Craig B. His aching and yearning voice driving and reigning in these 10 songs. In fact, given the power of their previous releases, you could say that musically these songs are interesting (this time with added strings, keys, marimba etc) but not uncharted territory for this quartet. Vocally though, gone are the pained screams and replaced with beautifully articulated emotions of loss and desire – enough so to make their post-rock and all it’s hidden complexities something special.
SINCABEZA
Edit Sur Passage Avant Fin Ou Montee D’Instrument (Distile)
The joy of instrumental rock music is its ability to tell a very different story to a conventional song. The pitfall is a reliance on almost mathematical twists and turns, and therefore the risk of losing the listener in a maze of chord changes and different tempos.
Luckily for this French trio, their tightrope walk of innovation is beautifully balanced so as not to fall into stupid noodling. With the inventiveness that surrounded early Don Caballero albums (‘Sucre Ma Bete’) but with a Storm And Stress-styled looseness to the arrangements (‘Bandit Manchot’), Edit Sur Passage… is a 45-minute ride that’s almost topographical. There’s a real linear thread throughout these eight songs that, while being comprised of the bass/guitar/drums combo, still manages to groove, jerk and even flail with fresh sounds and songs. From the molten crunch that opens ‘…Ni Les Equations’ to the hyper-kinetic riffage that ends it, Sincabeza have reinjected real heart into their unspoken art.
MONO
You Are There (Human Highway/Sensory Projects)
The cover art of Mono’s fourth album depicts flecks of snow gently falling over a forest, but in reality the swarms of sounds that collect and drive these six songs are much more like being caught in the most fearsome of blizzards.
Those familiar with this Japanese quartet will rejoice in the knowledge that their epic/cataclysmic instrumentals are more beautiful than anything they’ve previously released. Whereas bands such as Mogwai seem to have settled down with the wife and kids, on songs such as ‘The Flames Beyond The Cold Mountain’ or ‘Yearning’ Mono take notes and sounds and multiply them like cells, simple and sparse arrangements cradling you, keeping you oblivious to the impending doom that awaits. It’s a doom that sounds almost like the siren’s call, beautiful and alluring but ear piercing and all consuming.
You Are There is defiantly one for the headphones (and I don’t mean on a crowded bus), one to get lost within and a story told over time.
KES
The Grey Gooose Wing (Mistletone)
Kes is somewhat of an anomaly in the Australian underground, not a card-carrying member of the folk community and not angst enough to be indie – Kes is outside our categorisation – this being just one of the many reasons why you should sit up and take notice.
With 16 esoteric songs that seep out of a similar air to guitar-savant John Frusciante, this Melbourne lad feeds off of the strange and sublime sounds from his guitar, his equally unique voice skipping above the morphed and twisted melodies. Even when backed by a band, it’s really only ever Kes and his guitar you hear in ‘Paper+Pen’, ‘Limit Me’ and especially ‘Only When Asked’ – a stripped back psychedelica flooding your imagination.
Like being lost in the Octopus’s garden, The Grey Goose Wing probably won’t bring him out into the light but it is this album of secrets that are probably some of fringe music’s most special.
AEREOGRAMME
Barriers (Chemikal Underground/Stomp)
Possibly vanishing into the Scottish highlands, it’s been along time between drinks for these Glaswegian post-rockers, this first single rekindling the fire. More than four years since their last album and these two tracks show less blind aggression and more subtlety and vulnerability. Still living outside the modus operandi of verse-chorus-verse, it’s a different kind of exploration that draws you in, holds you and captures your imagination.
INTERNATIONAL KARATE
More Of What We’ve Heard Before, Than We’ve Ever Heard Before (Sensory Projects)
It’s ok for instrumental rock to not say anything to you, as long as it makes you feel things and this is a craft that these melbournites have continued to refine over three albums now.
Their lush sprawling post-rock tracks aren’t as clichéd or angst ridden as in their early days, now shifting moods and drawing you in with smatterings of vocals (‘Only Good Will Come Of This’ and ‘Falling Water’ featuring Laura Jean). Things take a much more British styled post-punk feel for ‘A Shadow Told Me’ while ‘Future’s Not What It Used To Be’ is filled with familiar layers of shimmering guitars giving you grounding and staving off fears of a complete about face from the band.
The albums title really does say everything you need to know about this album only it’s more than we’ve ever heard before… and then some.
BRAKES
The Beautific Visions (Rough Trade/Shock)
This is not album of the year! Sorry, NME readers.
What this is, is lightweight… even for pop music. There’s lyrics like “Mobile communication let me down again” – you know, we’re all really sorry for that, but so what? And a song like ‘Do The Spring Chicken’ might work in the hands of The Cramps, but in a bunch of post-pop Brits it just sounds stupid – as stupid as screaming “porcupine of pineapple”. By the time the band finally gets to ‘Isobel’, it’s like a godsend – its updated 60s boy band bubblegum sound hitting the mark via a good dose of Mathew Sweet jangle. ‘Cease And Desist’ has guts, but it simply comes too late.
It’s not to say that there’s nothing here to savour, but sometimes a band can be so lauded that everyone forgets that they’re really idiotic. The Beatific Visions is right on one part: someone here is sure having visions and unfortunately we have to put up with the absurdity of them.
RTX
Western Exterminator (Spunk/EMI)
It wouldn’t be Jennifer Herrema if it wasn’t rough as guts, but for her latest RTX incarnation she switches between sounding like a drowned rat and a strangulated cat (you decide if this is an improvement or not).
It’s actually less about her shitty frontwoman persona and dire vocals – this time around, it’s the Sunset Strip hair metallers that make up her backing band that give this album any worth. We’re talking about some kind of vomit-fuelled 5am gutter mix of Def Leppard and Skid Row! This is Uzi Suicide Gunner’s all over again and 20 years too bloody late.
RTX is the skin and bone of Royal Trux and while Herrema continues to bank on the name, it will always be music missing the blood and muscle that was Neil Hagerty – the main thing that made it all worthwhile. Still if denim, Krokus and regurgitated bourbon is your thing, then the dream’s still alive…
LOVE OF DIAGRAMS
Mosaic (Matador/Remote Control)
You could say that this is where Melbourne’s Love Of Diagrams hit the big time, going from the underground of their hometown to now being part of the prestigious Matador Records stable. It’s with this, their second album, that we find the music as conceptually defined as the three-piece.
It’s music that actually doesn’t get interesting until a good halfway into the album, with ‘Ms V Export’ and later ‘All The Time’ the only tracks with any energy or tension to their tight chords and pained vocals. And it’s the lacklustre and tuneless singing that has seen this three-piece go from a unique, exciting and primarily instrumental band a few years back to what is now just another indie/slacker-sounding band. The music’s dynamics lack spark and, while tightly wound, never actually engage the listener.
While you can’t to fault the playing or the apparent conviction in these 12 songs, it’s arguable that Love Of Diagrams in 2007 could simply be a love of nothing in particular.
BLACK PONY EXPRESS
Love In A Cold Place (Bang)
Whether it’s our own rugged landscape or that of the imagination, it’s certainly a desolate and unforgiving terrain that Melbourne’s Black Pony Express take us to.
The sweeping country pop that makes up Love In A Cold Place is exactly that – but it’s music to warm and shelter you from the harshness of what’s out there. These 10 tracks are often sparse and in a Tindersticks vein while dreaming up the same kind of imagery that made early Black Eyed Susans albums so alluring. Violins and organ in ‘Nocturne’ and ‘Where Is The Love?’ add colour and depth to these songs that places Black Pony Express up there with bands like The Drones as true representatives of a real Australian type of music.
LAURA VEIRS
Don’t Lose Yourself (Nonesuch/WMA)
Laura Veirs’ indietronica takes full flight with her latest single, the piano drawing equal measure with the clicks and cuts of electronics. Still, it’s her elegant voice wafting above it all that creates real warmth that will most likely draw you into the album …if it hasn’t already.
BLOC PARTY
I Still Remember (Wichita/Shock)
The big nightclub single is swiftly followed up with this, the crossover anthem that will have millions around the world screaming and crying “you should have asked me for it!” The fact is that this romantic little pop hit is really undeniably good – if it were any catchier it could possibly empty all life out of the ocean.
TEENAGER
Alone Again (Timberyard)
To their credit, this Sydney duo have a lot of sounds in their arsenal, but this – their third single – is the most poignant amalgamation of their Cure come Jesus & Mary Chain come My Bloody Valentine sound. But this is a good thing, making ‘Alone Again’ instantly familiar and its intoxicating, abstract pop beauty easily enjoyable. The Van She Tech remix though simply tears the guts out of the song and replaces it with a Roland 808.
BORN RUFFIANS
This Sentence Will Ruin/Save Your Life (XL/Remote Control)
There’s a playful, if not light-hearted air that surrounds these six songs – these four Brits playing with a more jaunty, briskly-paced, fun pop’n’roll take on the Modest Mouse style. Add to this a series of Unicorns-style twists and turns that will either hook you or leave you behind in the toilets at the last truck stop.
MONEY MARK
Brand New By Tomorrow (Brushfire/UMA)
Money Mark makes music for the morning after, music for summers down by the beach, music for 70’s LA movies.
The main man behind the Wurlitzer and keys for the Beastie Boys for more than a decade now has with his own albums gone from a kooky, Beck-styled pop to something much more refined and subtle. Brand New By Tomorrow is essentially an album of smooth ballads, an album mixed with forlorn break-up songs (‘Summer Blue’, ‘Everyday I Die A Little’) and smooth, almost cocktail lounge tunes (‘Radiate Nothing’, ‘Black Butterfly’). The real danger is that everything here is so Rat Pack smooth that it’s almost on the bland side of a Jack Johnson duet (‘Pick Up The Pieces’).
Money Mark no longer just bashes the keys, he writes beautifully sophisticated songs, songs that soothe and waft through the air. I guess we all need a break-up album every now and then.
PARTS & LABOR
Mapmaker (Jagjaguwar/Brah)
Erratic, cacophonic and cathartic – that’s Brooklyn’s Parts & Labor in a nutshell.
Returning with their second album, it’s still a shit-storm of guitar noise, electronic squabbles and brakecore drumming. This time around though there seems to be less of a grandiose vision for their fire and brimstone sound, with more focus on the melodies and the songs’ structure actually making it through the volume and brute force.
Given the time, tracks like ‘Vision Of Repair’ and ‘Gold We’re Digging’ will get stuck in your head, and become something you can sing along to. Their re-invention of the Minutemen’s ‘King Of The Hill’ is also something that defies accurate description – it’s light-years beyond what its originators had in mind.
This album is certainly a creation that comes from the same wild-eyed brethren as bands like Japanther and Lightning Bolt.
RICHARD SWIFT
Dressed Up For The Letdown (Secretly Canadian/Spunk)
This might sound kind of daft, but Richard Swift makes the kind of introspective pop that brings to mind the outcome of putting Radiohead and a whole lot of ragtime instruments in the middle of a town hall CWA meeting.
But this most unlikely of styles – encapsulated in the title track, ‘Most Of What I Know’ and ‘Million Dollar Baby’ – is only half of Swift’s repertoire. When he does decide to bop (‘Songs Of National Freedom’, ‘It All Falls Down’), it’s with a Beatles Rubber Soul underfoot, piano stirring up the jig. References aside though, there’s a lost-in-time quality that in these 10 songs and, depending on your mood, this could be Tin Pan Alley, this could be psych-pop, this could be nu-folk but, in essence, it’s none of these. It’s classic, quality songwriting… something harder to find these days than even the most obscure genre.
TRACEY THORN
Out Of The Woods (Virgin/EMI)
Layered and swimming in electronics, as warm and inviting as the arms of a lover, but shrouded in the cold harsh reality of what’s out there. Out Of The Woods is effectively Tracey Thorn’s hall of mirrors – one person with 11 songs all her own, but no two ever looking the same.
All the finest parts of Thorn’s career have been given a second helping here, from the soft electronica of ‘A-Z’ to the brash 80s pop of ‘It’s All True’ and raw balladry of ‘Hands Up To The Ceiling’. But regardless of how the shapes and sounds shift, it all comes down to her voice, of which these songs would be nothing without. There’s a longing that she gives to the words, it makes the emotions something you grow to crave – all the while the beats and melodies calling to the dancefloor or just the bedroom mirror.
Out Of The Woods is the pop album someone like Madonna wishes they could make if only they still had any integrity or creativity left – luckily Thorn still has an ocean-sized amount of it lapping at her feet.
GRUFF RHYS
Candylion (Rough Trade/Shock)
I can almost imagine our Super Furry Animals lead singer being held down – tethered if you will – by his band-mates, like a bundle of balloons to the ground, fearing that if left alone his weird pop ideas would shoot off across the sky. Well, finally left to his own devices, Rhys has set about making his technicolour visions a reality.
Understated in its orchestration and as unintelligible as always given the heavy Welsh accent, Rhys has created an extremely beautiful collection of 12 tunes, bearing a vibrancy and mood that revisits the exploratory pop of the 60s. ‘Lonesome Words’ and ‘Cycle Of Violence’ have their own joyous propulsion that belie the gravity of the words held within, while the acoustic backbone of ‘Beacon In The Darkness’ could almost find Rhys happily lost in Nashville.
The colour of The Super Furries is very much here, but it’s minus the candour of volume that encompasses their rock’n’roll. The more mellow approach throughout Candylion allows the colours to soak into the speakers and happily drench your ears.
VARIOUS ARTISTS
SC100 (Secretly Canadian)
This could just be another “look how far we’ve come” collection of tunes, but nooooo… the folk at Indiana label Secretly Canadian are so much more interesting and inventive than that. Instead, they’ve taken various parts that make up their back-catalogue and paired them together – kinda like all those kids who lined the walls of the school dance.
Over 63 minutes we’re treated to 18 different Secretly Canadian artists covering other Secretly Canadian artists. There’s a billion brilliant moments, but it’s impossible not to note Jens Lekman re-inventing Scout Niblett, Songs: Ohia adding even more death to Nikki Sudden, Danielson orchestrating Dave Fishcoff, Damian Jurado stripping bare The Early Day Miners and The Panopoly Academy twisting Impossible Shapes into just that!
It’s labels like Secretly Canadian that re-instil faith that truly new, interesting and life-changing music might still be out there for us to find and give thanks for.
GOLDRUSH
The Heart Is The Place (Truck/Low Transit Industries)
If there were a world where The Flaming Lips ruled supreme, then Goldrush would be apprentices of the highest order. Having learned their craft, gathered a vast array of musical tools to create beautiful sweeping melodies and spun tales that were filled with yearning, they would become knights that many came to love and respect. Their rulers would look down and be proud. These knights that would be known to many as Goldrush would gather together tales of their adventures out among the people, tales that were earthed in common language and sounds that would warm the hearts of many. One day they may even themselves come to rule over their kingdom, but for now they are content to dream – dreaming dreams where ‘Heaven’s My Destination’, where ‘We Will Not Be Machines’ and where above all ‘The Heart Is The Place’.
THE SPECIMENS
Jazz Brutus (Low transit Industries)
Classic songwriting can definitely sit side by side with balls-out rock’n’roll. You can be Guided By Voices, Hellacopters and Radio Birdman… well, at least if you’re this four-piece from Melbourne.
We’re not talking about reinventing rock’n’roll. We’re just talking about having fun with it, making it your own and keeping the shit separated from the good stuff. If anything, it’s the catchiness of these 10 songs that paste them like wallpaper to the inside of your skull – ‘Hollywood’, ‘I’m A Believer’ and ‘Parasitic Head’ are filled with that classic ‘Steve & Danno’ amplified freedom – and a little Turbonegro middle finger. This is as good as any we’ve got in this country… and a hell of a lot better than those topping the charts.
NEW ESTATE
Is It Real? (Low Transit Industries)
It’s like New Estate have the right blueprints; they even have the right tools, but as they say… a house is not always a home.
There’s nothing wrong with the 13 songs here and that’s part of the problem because their plinky pop just seems to lack any real drive or poignant emotional connection. With melodies that swell with the flippancy of Pavement (‘Let Somebody Down’, ‘Kidnapped’) or the wafting loveliness of Rilo Kiley (‘While You Were Talking’, ‘On The Bay’) – Is It Real? comes off like a high school theatre class doing a walk-through of a Bright Eyes album. Sometimes having all the parts in the right place doesn’t immediately mean that magic is going to fill the room.
ALEX DELIVERY
Star Destroyer (Jagjaguwar)
Krautrock really is something associated with dazed delivery of ancient icons like Can and Faust, but in far off pockets there are still groups of people meshing, merging and bringing Kraut grooving and squirming into the 21st Century.
Twisting, contorting and embracing such an open-ended sound by the scruff of the neck, Alex Delivery are five folk from New York who with this debut take a rich tradition and make it all their own. Live instrumentation blends with shards of harsh electronics at a crossroads of groove and shudder – this combination given the necessary time to graft and blossom creative new strains, as witnessed in ‘Rainbows’ and ‘Milan’.
Tortoise touch on it, Out Hud do it really well and so do Alex Delivery – but on Star Destroyer it’s with the aim of reinventing a wider, more colourful horizon in mind.
ANDREW BIRD
Armchair Apocrypha (Fat Possum/Spunk)
Not since Grant Lee Buffalo has someone made music so familiar and earthed, but so refreshingly new. Andrew Bird’s past use of violin and glockenspiel to create timeless pop has with Armchair Apocryph been all but totally updated to sound right here and now even though there still lingers that classic balladry that defies classification.
Aided with a band and in particular, drummer and Anticon stalwart Dosh, tracks like ‘Simple X’ and ‘Scyhian Empires’ have that ‘other’ quality that also fills the songs of David Byrne – not that you’ll find music of a hybrid nature – it’s pure, simple sounds that Bird fills with emotion.
These 12 tracks are all about subtlety, the refinement in common things (like the simple act of whistling) and a romanticism that, luckily, is not totally lost on us yet.
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