Alex's opinion and documents of music

UH HUH HER
Common Reaction
(Nettwerk/Shock)

You can’t name yourself after one of rock’s all-time leading ladies’ more recent albums and expect not to be under the spotlight of a little comparison. And so it’s with some disappointment that the female duo of actress Leisha Hailey and multi-instrumentalist Camila Grey have served up as their first course a lukewarm album of electro-pop that bears no resemblance whatsoever to any part of Ms. Harvey’s career – but this turns out to be a good thing (at least for PJ Harvey fans).

In the vein of The Killers fronted by The Veronicas, we get some weak guitars buried in amongst thin banks of synths and of course the main hook here of Grey’s sultry vocals. Think VHS vs Beta and you’re near the proximity of these songs – in particular the mood of the title track and ‘So Long’ recalls those nocturnal impulses that seem to sound right at the time, but in the cold light of day just can’t sustain you.

All these ingredients though should be enough to still make the boys and girls swoon, but this is not the case here due the distinct lack of musical substance within the songs. Everything hinges on the yearning and pained vocals, if Grey (and to a lesser extent Hailey) were whispering these words in your ear then maybe you’d fall under her spell but she’s not in your room, she’s just on an album and what’s here isn’t enough to bring her to life.

For a debut album where the stylist and hairdresser get equal billing in the credits alongside the programmers and musicians, it’s hard to not see this as a pop fodder for those rebounding into and out of this week’s romantic interlude.

SUBTLE
Exiting Arms
(Lex/Inertia)

The metamorphosis continues for Dose One and his band of merry pranksters with Exiting Arm, Subtle’s second foray into the musical stratosphere.

Leaving his hip-hop foundations far behind him, Dose has steered his ship towards a funkier and more oblique mash of melodies where rather than spitting phrases in rapid fire over a cascade of beats, you get mood and shapeshifting instrumentation. ‘Day Dangerous’ is a surrealist excursion that could be trip-hop were it not so colourful, but it does frame what lies further round the bend – the staccato make-up of ‘The No’ and nervous-tick percussion that ripples through ‘Hollow Hollered’, leaving this band as unclassifiable as ever before. Even when the band does get block-rockin’ throughout ‘Unlikely Rock Shock’ it’s such a dirty mash-up that you’ll need a new pair of Air Force One’s at the end of it!

With the majority of the songs splayed out with equal amounts of live instrumentation and programming and beats, getting a foothold in this music takes effort. It’s 11 songs that are not nearly as avant as the band’s debut, but still the amorphous figures that adorn the album’s cover could well be the sign posts to the music itself – a freeform flow doing away with verse-chorus-verse prerequisites.

But still I implore you to dig! Dig further and dig deeper because Subtle are a band of five individuals trapped in a Dada dream world of futurist emotions. It’s a million times more interesting than drivel by chart-topping outfits such as Nerd and even if a few words here can’t cover the breadth of what makes Exiting Arms, let it be a signpost directing you to a future electronica made by real hands, real hearts and very strange minds indeed.

POLARKREIS 18
Self-titled
(Motor/Music connection)

In a monochrome landscape of chart-topping pulp, this Dresden five-piece emerge with a debut of beautifully wondrous pop music fuelled by complexity and modernity that engulfs your senses.

With the opening track you’re struck wondering if this group is an electronic band with massive guitar crunch or a guitar band rounded out by a plethora of pulses and bleeps. In the end it has to be a draw, as they create a perfect balance between their disparate elements and the subsequent landscape of expansive sounds that encompass these 11 tracks (plus two bonus ones). ‘Dreamdancer’ parallels the beauty of Sigur Ros while somehow containing that within a four-minute pop song; ‘Someday Sundays’ and ‘Look’ are as sultry as anything served up by The Knife, although it could just be that entirely captivating and exotic accent; and ‘After All He Was Sad’ is a bed of strings that could cushion any fall.

The whole scope of this band could possibly be summed up by ‘Crystal Lake’, which starts off with an unassuming acoustic guitar hooking itself onto your ear only to, over the course of five minutes, invite a cacophony of instruments, sounds and strings along for the ride. This culminates in a crescendo that is devastatingly powerful as waves of electronics lock into a tidal surge with a groundswell of distorted guitars.

There is no sound here unnaturally grafted – every note and melody comes across so naturally that you could think it penned by Gershwin. But it’s not the songcraft that makes this album; it’s the emotion and the soaring drive pulsing through every note. This is music as electrifying as The Knife, but also as forlorn as Blonde Redhead, as dramatic as Kate Bush and as confident as Radiohead – definitely the most exceptional pop album of 2008.

BEN ELY’S RADIO 5
Transcending Reality
(Valve/MGM)

A punk rocker at heart, Ben Ely’s Radio 5 is the instinctive mashing of punk, garage and a future-pop vision. Think the 80s underground of Husker Dü or The Descendents blasted into the future through the portal of Trans Am – and that’s a good swath of the 14 songs here.

The problem facing Ben Ely is that he has lived in the shadow of one Quan Yeomans for too many years, both being songwriters and the dynamic duo at the core of Regurgitator. It’s hard to think of Ely without holding up the sensibilities of his buddy Yeomans as comparison. This however does Ely no favours because nothing here is sugar-coated… so let’s just leave his other musical pursuits out of this. Ely – with the help of his two friends Steve Bourke and Marihuzka Larenas-Esquivel – is making punk rock like it’s 1982, punk rock that’s raw like The Ramones and filled with just as many mangled hooks. In ‘Nightmare Kid’ it’s just like Devo’s punk rock, in ‘Slam Dance’ it’s the kind of catchy pop that Thrasher Mag would endorse and ‘You’re Hot’ is garage rock that reminds you why Suzie Quattro looked so damn good in those tight leather pants.

There’s something about Ben Ely’s Radio 5 that really makes me want to wipe the cobwebs off my skateboard and go grind the local bowl – there’s nothing fancy about these songs (for better or worse) but there sure is a lot about them that’s plenty of fun (and a little silly towards the end) and really, that’s more than enough to keep reality well out of the picture!

THE TALLEST MAN ON EARTH
Shallow Grave
(Gravitation/Spunk)

Anyone who has kept a watchful eye over Sydney independent label Spunk over the past few years will have come to know that these folk certainly have a good ear and a healthy appetite for country. The same label that’s given us albums by Will Oldham, Connor Oberst, Dave Pajo and Jack Ladder now holds in its proud hands The Tallest Man On Earth.

While very little details surround this musician or his debut, you could certainly conjure up the image that this gent has wandered down from the Appalachian Mountains, given the turkey-neck drawl that croons and crows over his acoustic guitar and banjo. Predominantly finger-picked tunes that are raw and unabashed, songs such as ‘Pistol Dreams’ and ‘Where Do My Bluebird Fly’ could very well be Bright Eyes making tracks through corn fields with The Soggy Bottom Boys, whereas ‘The Gardener’ and ‘This Wind’ can’t be heard without a Guthrie or two coming to mind.

There’s a richness to the songs here that is impressive considering it’s all just one voice, one set of hands and the tapping of a heel on a hardwood floor. ‘The Sparrow And The Medicine’ is a truly heart-warming sonnet to someone’s special love. ‘Into The Stream’ is entrancing with its John Fahey picked lines swooping and soaring within its couplets.

In no way flashy or concerned with bothersome trends, these 10 songs require words such as ‘timeless’ and ‘enduring’ to be used, where the music’s beauty is ever present and its authenticity unquestionable. For now, we can’t verify or deny whether this fellow is actually the tallest man on earth, but we can sure as hell hope that this album is as close as he’s gonna come to being three feet under.

MARY TREMBLES
Borrowed Ears, Borrowed Eyes
(Plus One)

Rock is an amorphous beast that is so many things to so many people that it’s hard to ascertain what it is that makes it so captivating and what makes the sound that belongs in the stadium any different from what resides in basements across the land.

The above conundrum is a small part of the equation with this Brisbane three-piece, this debut album leaving an instantaneous impression of cavernous arenas filled with the soaring melodies and cathartic releases of rage washing over masses of people. And why? Because these 11 songs are completely flawless! That’s right, there’s not one note that shouldn’t be there or one chorus that won’t rouse you inside – every song on Borrowed Ears, Borrowed Eyes is perfect!

And again, that’s what makes this recorded document different from the live experience, for whilst the songs are immaculate and the sharp dressed individuals on time every time, there’s grit on stage that’s missing from this album. It’s beautiful rock music with its fingernails kept clean and, while strange at first, there’s every chance that same grit would probably detract were it present here.

This is music that could not only stand side-to-side with that of bands like the Foo Fighters, but easily betters the last 10 years of their recorded career. The unique caterwauling of singer/guitarist Skritch is both compelling and convincing – the impassioned screams in ‘Jump Like You Wanted To’ is like a triple-hook into your ear, while the explosive guitar throughout ‘Grand Central’ is dam-busting and Tanzie’s bass sucks ‘Molasses’ straight down into Kyuss territory.

There’s some strange and awesome shadows cast by songs such as ‘Ugly Song’, with its frenzied and distorted Nirvana-esque mood or the repressed beauty of ‘Eating Through The Debauchery’, but ultimately an album brimming with this much confidence and skill can hardly be believed to be a debut.

HAWNEY TROOF
Islands Of Ayle
(Valve)

Less than 12 months since unleashing his double album Dollar And Deed, the one-man, beat-heavy, sampleholic Vice Cooler returns with a another 30 minutes of hyperbolic electronic mayhem.

Building even further upon his rough-and-ready teen styles, Cooler has over recent extensive tours acquired an assortment of vintage synth and electronic sounds that have thankfully not been mashed into a syrupy pulp but utilised to retain a healthy dose of melody and structure. Still furiously rapping over the top of it all, Cooler’s overly sexualised torrents of verse (‘Underneath The Ocean’, ‘Connection’) come off like a rampant pubescent overdosing on classic Coldcut – the pace of the beats and samples never letting up from the starting block to the all-too-soon-to-arrive finish line.

Some chapters in this haywire futureworld are hard to penetrate – ‘Water’ is more like a rapid ride where the samples and sounds act like a swarm of bees attacking your senses. This is balanced out by tunes such as ‘Venus Venus Piper’, which for its rapid-fire delivery is a big beat soufflé of dancefloor fun. Add to the mix guests such as Randy Randall of No Age, Jenny Hoyston of Erase Errata and Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu and even Cooler’s extensive pallette is ramped up a few notches.

And so is Hawney Troof someone you’d want to invite into your home to rummage through your cupboards and drink all your beers? Well, I’ve been living with the Islands Of Ayle for a while now and it still makes very little sense! Energising, erratic and cut from the same cloth as Peaches and Spod, Hawney Troof is unlikely to vomit on your cat or try to have his way with it, but that doesn’t mean this man and his music isn’t to be taken lightly: he’s definitely the fuel to ignite any fire.

CHAD VANGAALEN
Soft Airplane
(Sub Pop/Stomp)

Like an oasis out in the desert, like a plaintive Neil Young calling through the dust and tumbleweeds, the aching voice of Canada’s Chad VanGaalen is compelling, powerful and uninhibited by a world while seemingly weary from fights fought.

Cross-pollinating the sounds of pop, country and indie into his songs, VanGaalen’s simplicity just makes the colours here that much brighter, whether it’s the shimmering guitars in ‘Cries Of The Dead’ or the high-noon fear in ‘Molten Light’. Just like The Flaming Lips make everything possible in one glorious pop note, VanGaalen too has that knack to be anything your imagination can dream up, only it’s on a so much more subtle level of delivery. There’s no yelling or screaming, no discordant distortion ringing out; his power lies in an effortless ability to use the myriad of instruments lying around his lounge-room, feed it all into an old tape machine and transform it into something instantly epic and glorious.

But again, it’s the spirit of Neil Young that often walks through the room, the Young we haven’t heard from for 30 years and can’t help but welcome back into our lives. There are a few off ramps and ring roads dispersed throughout Soft Airplane too. ‘Bare Feet On Griptape’ echoes The Replacements and ‘Phantom Anthills’ and ‘TMNT Mask’, with their casio percussion and playful whistling, allow VanGaalen to break any moulds the earlier songs hint at.

As dreamy as so much of this album is, it’s the uplifting mood and sleight of hand humour that leaves you feeling on a high as it all draws to a close. Chad VanGaalen’s third album is as easily as diverse as previous efforts, but a greater sense of scope is realised. The after-effects of wonderment will draw you to make this album very much part of your days.

CALEXICO
Carried To Dust
(Quarterstick/Spunk)

Some bands are instantly identifiable, while some bands blow in off the wind and take no form that fits any one category. Calexico are such a band, straddling country, Tex-Mex mariachi and pop while never settling long enough to be housed within any one term. Their sixth album highlights not so much a linear progression but an elegant evolution.

Once this band was very clearly from the soil beneath their feet but these days their songs could be anyone’s stories and tribulations. Literary borders fall away while allowing the music to still retain the rich cultural vein that has long been the band’s bedrock – ‘Man Made Lake’ is the perfect example of the former, while ‘Inspiracion’ with its punctuated brass and Spanish duet balances out the latter.

Carried To Dust doesn’t try to map out uncharted land but, if it’s possible to be so subjective, is more beautiful than anything they have done before. The duets – in particular ‘Slowness’ with Pieta Brown – simmer like those of the long-ago songs of Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons. Calexico are aware that you can’t know where you are if you don’t know where you’ve come from: ‘El Gatillo’ revisits The Black Light’s centrepiece ‘Trigger’ and doesn’t end the story; it simply adds the next chapter.

In a lot of ways, Carried To Dust takes all that wonderfully developed and beautiful orchestration and walks it out of the urban landscapes of Garden Ruin and Feast Of Wire, leaving it at the crossroads just on the outskirts of town. This though, is music in no hurry to get anywhere – it’s got all day and it wants you to have the same, so take a load off and let the sun set in the west. Don’t worry about reloading that gun until the morning…

YOU AM I
Dilettantes
(EMI)

For a while now, a new You Am I record has seemed like a life or death scenario. What if this one was a stinker? Would that be the final straw, the death-throe that sent the band spiralling into sad solo careers and promises never fulfilled? We don’t need another Hi-Fi Way or Hourly Daily, just a record as good as this band can be, one where they finally get their proper dues.

Kicking off album number eight in unassuming fashion, the title track finds Timmy

the troubadour manning his acoustic guitar while strings and lavishly adorned melodies usher in a brooding mood. This builds with ‘Disappearing’ and ‘Beau Geste’, the band showing so much restraint that a strange tension slowly builds. For those wanting the rock, sweat and swagger that the band tried to make the lifeblood of Convicts, well, it’s delivered here in carefully measured doses. The You Am I of 2008 are about the elegance of the songwriter craft as much as electrifying power chords.

‘Frightfully Moderne’ clicks its Cuban heels while still wearing a Terry Sullivan. ‘Wankers’ may have been penned by Rogers, but it screams of the mod styling of Russell Hopkinson and Davey Lane. Halfway through it finally sinks in that You Am I have actually created something that still smells of four lads from Sydney, but sounds completely new and fresh.

It’d be proper to shower hyperbole on all 12 tracks, but there’s just not enough space to cover all the surprises here. This is a band in full control of their music and their deep well of talent. Don’t let the dishevelled photos fool you: this album is proof positive of the band’s humour, continually refined vitality and the gaping hole that’d exist were they no longer here, knocking our socks off!

DAVID BYRNE
Big Love: Hymnal
(HBO/Shock)

There have been recent songs and albums by David Byrne that have taken on spiritual and contemplative themes – songs such as ‘Like Humans Do’ and ‘Walk On Water’ from Look Into The Eyeball or the soundtrack to Lead Us Not Into Temptation quickly come to mind. So it should come as little surprise to find that Byrne spent a large portion of 2006 and 2007 scoring the television series Big Love, of which Hymnal is the summary audio document.

Given that this album… well, isn’t an album or a soundtrack per se, its 21 tracks are mostly short interludes and mood pieces strung together. All orchestrated, played and produced by Byrne himself, the sensibility and air that has defined his songwriting is instantly recognisable here – but that’s also where the similarities end. Byrne has a penchant for the overt, soaring melody and that’s usually not what underpins tele-dramas, so while you’re going to find that Byrne has brought some strings in here and there, the majority of what’s here is small on structure and narrative. Most tunes scarcely make it to two minutes and Byrne himself doesn’t even sing until the very last track.

If you’re a regular viewer of Big Love then this might be a nice reminder of the peaks, dramas and tragedies in the second series. If you’re unfamiliar with the soap then there’s definitely going to be a hint of background elevator music to what’s here. Long-time David Byrne fans will enjoy its quirks and regal mood, but for the Talking Heads fans out there, save your pennies for the next jaw-droppingly amazing pop statement that Byrne is sure to have hidden somewhere up his sleeve.

THE FAUVES
When Good Times Go Good
(Shock)

Do you wonder how all those Kingswood cars keep driving by, how after decades they still seem to chug along, their drivers frozen in time and oblivious? Well, there are many facets of Australian culture that refuse to go away or update themselves – The Fauves are such a creature, out of step with trends and belligerently frozen in their own superb pop-rock indie world.

Andy Cox’s nasal call sounds instantly familiar and well-worn, although now this quartet sound more instinctive with their whimsical melodies and circa ’87 Sonic Youth guitar lines – ‘Back To Being Me’ and ‘Sunday Drive’ take the mundane and make it sound special through well spun wordplay. They might still “shop for clothes at Best and Less”, as eloquently stated in ‘Fight Me I’m 40’, but everything here sounds tailor-made.

These 12 songs are more poppy and less rocky than the last few albums, sounding effortless and refined – this is definitely the successful articulation of what they have been trying to do but only hinting at in recent times. There are some elements to this band that have always stayed strong and the main one is the lack of gloss applied to their music – sounding dynamic and wonderfully produced by Jim Moginie and Wayne Connelly, the band simply have the knack at making everything sound homespun, this most prominent in the downtrodden ‘Get Me Through The Night’ and ‘Out On Your Own’.

Maybe at the end of the day The Fauves are just four nerds making gloriously nerdy pop-rock. If they were from the big smoke then maybe we’d have them and not Weezer adorning our glossy mags, but they seem happy down on the Mornington Peninsula and through them, suburban slacker life is still sounding pretty damn good.

LYKKE LI
Youth Novels
(LL/Warner)

“Love is a symphony” is one of the opening lines of Lykke Li’s debut and it goes a long way to defining this album. These songs are built upon emotions delicately and elaborately orchestrated, 14 tunes that are many faceted and yet still fragile in their depiction.

Li shares the same musical sphere as artists such as Tujiko Noriko or Goldfrapp (minus the dancefloor), a house of electronic cards built and kept sturdy by wide-eyed melodies and the angelic falsetto of Li’s voice. Essentially, these could be electro-pop tunes of a curious order, but there’s something amiss for that to be the case, and that’s laziness. Li’s tunes swing and gallop, her words cascade and scatter themselves across songs such as ‘I’m Good, I’m Gone’ and ‘Let It Fall’ – and it’s unusual enough to be totally captivating but not off-putting.

The sweeping grandiosity of ‘My Love’ conjures up images of Tracy Thorn manipulating The Beach Boys, the song’s live instrumentation, cavernous percussion and brass sounding so bold. This is accentuated by the next track (and one of the finest moments here), the strings and wafting electronics of ‘Tonight’ leaving Li’s yearning Scandinavian English calling out for you to let her have her way, regardless of the consequences.

This album is completely spellbinding, one moment filled with a sensual mood and flirtatious nature, the next moment vulnerable and on the verge of breakdown. And it doesn’t matter if it’s beautiful storytelling or if it’s straight from Li’s heart because Youth Novels draws you in like the sirens of Capri and these are intoxicating sounds you’ll want to get drunk on.

LAMBCHOP
OH (Ohio)
(City Slang/Shock)

For some 20 years Lambchop have lived on the other side of the tracks, down that dusty dirt road that the established country elite of Nashville has not cared to wander. This has aided and allowed the band to flourish with their music: sublime and quirky, at times largely orchestrated, other times refined, but usually with as many friends in the collective mix as possible. Album number 10 finds refinement in different ways, no longer hiding behind a squillion musicians, Kurt Wagner has come to settle on a permanent, stripped-back band of seven and has created possibly the most carefree album of Lambchop’s career.

Those who have loved and followed the band for a long time will be greeted here with the flourishes and themes that have made the ride worthwhile. For those just jumping aboard, it’s definitely at high tide. Wagner’s warm, inviting voice and his delicately strummed guitar sit at the centre of this album; around him, everything is so subtly furnished it recalls those classic country-pop ballads of the 50s and 60s. It can’t be overstated how seamless and comforting these songs are; not a stitch is shown, not an instrument isolated or a word hollered. This also means that no song is actually any better than another, these 11 tunes mapping out places you’ve never been or people you’ve never seen, but have almost certainly thought of in happy times.

But it’s with a wink and wily smirk that songs such as ‘I’m Thinking Of A Number (Between 1 and 2)’, ‘National Talk Like A Pirate Day’ and ‘Sharing A Gibson With Martin Luther King Jr’ are delivered. OH (Ohio) is as strong as any album they’ve made, but it’s one that Wagner and Co have had to work for decades to make this effortlessly beautiful.

AWESOME COLOUR
Electric Aborigines
(Ecstatic Peace/High Spot)

This album certainly pushes buttons! Pressing play is not all that different to pressing flush on your toilet… the ensuing sound a shit-storm of guitar noise and car-crashing cymbals. This Brooklyn trio name-drop The Stooges like they’re chucking pennies in a wishing well of greatness, this second album improving their chances at creating (like the Detroit legends) as many rabid fans as vehement enemies. That same legendary, embryonic backwoods rock’n’roll is here, resuscitated and infused with 20,000 volts of psych guitar goodness.

Let’s not, however, confuse these boys with other shit-hot psych revivalists such as Comets On Fire. Awesome Colour, for all their similarities, are cut from a very different cloth: the latter are hand-woven with youth angst, punk and skate culture, and the former a penchant for bad-trip music. Kicking off with the explosive ‘Eyes Of Light’, the album swings like a pendulum between fully fuzzed-out guitar-squall and the more ruminating dirges of ‘Come And Dance’ and ‘Taste It’. Add to the mix the sensory-sucking ‘Outside Tonight’ and it’s impossible to tell if these lads are lost in time or just making psychedelic black holes out of it.

A lot of what’s on offer here however isn’t easily deciphered (the title is definitely one of those) – these 10 songs (+ four bonus tracks) are for your sense and your loins. Leave the judicial cross-examination for other bands – Awesome Colour want to blind you, deafen you and leave in an inferno of awesome sound!

MERCURY REV
Snowflake Midnight
(V2/Shock)

Mercury Rev have always been a band with one foot in the dreamy twilight of melody and verse, which has come to be the major underpinning of their success and longevity. Some 17 years since their inception, their seventh album finds the trio of Jonathan Donahue, Grasshopper and Jeff Mercel deafly leaping feet first into and tearing apart the opaque dreamworld of their own sound.

No longer embellishing their music with the odd piano interlude or electronic accentuation, Snowflake Midnight is a fast-paced rollercoaster ride of electronic mayhem, with disorientating, sleight of hand vocals and a whole new take on the classic pop sound that the band has long held tight against their chest. What is hinted at and given brief exposure in the form of loops and atmospherics in the first two tracks is unleashed in ‘Senses On Fire’ and explodes in ‘People Are So Unpredictable’ – the nought to 10 eruption of the song halfway through the most jarring moment of the band’s whole career. The second half of the album only gets darker, the aura of Depeche Mode hanging over the chaos of ‘Runaway Raindrop’ and aggressive beats unsettling in ‘Dream Of A Young Girl As A Flower’.

So while it would be easy to call this album a reinvention for the band, it’s more a bold odyssey of sounds and spaces not yet mapped – the band’s strengths are simply the starting point from which this album casts itself adrift and finds magic in its own unknown. Snowflake Midnight holds as many nightmares as it does lullabies and daydreams, and it’s invigorating to hear so much renewed life coming from this band.