Alex's opinion and documents of music

THE MOUNTAIN GOATS
The Life Of The World To Come
(4AD/Remote Control)

Scanning the song titles of The Mountain Goats umpteenth album, you can’t help but notice ‘Psalms 40:2’, ‘Genesis 30:3’, ‘John 4:16’, ‘Mathew 25:21’ and ‘Ezekiel 7’ – first inclinations point towards some kind of awakening in ringleader John Darnielle, but fear not!

Surrounding himself with bassist Peter Hughes and drummer John Wurster, Darnielle is a truly gifted storyteller and lyricist whose songs this time around aren’t carved from destructive characters dreamt up to destroy one another. Here his songs are filled with snake-oil salesmen hocking salvation, folks wandering lost and hearts beaten to death. Really though, it could be songs about cardboard and somehow they’d make it spellbinding, such is the intimacy and warmth that pervades every word and strummed string. You won’t even find a sing-along, raise-your-dumb-beer-in-the-chorus type song on this more sombre than usual album.

When you’re met with lines like “lord send me a mechanic if I’m not beyond repair” you can’t help but laugh and sigh simultaneously – and it’s not just a funny line, it’s a kind of truth that lies in different literary ways in all the songs here. It’s gotten to the point where no Mountain Goats album is better than another. They all exude obscured wisdom and lift you up beyond the pale smog on the horizon. They’re pop and indie-rock and folk in an all too natural rollercoaster ride of emotions that make human frailty strong and beautiful!

Unlike the hot air that comes from the ordained preaching to the converted, this is an album full of stories of belief in yourself, the good and bad of others, and of our bottomless chances to redeem ourselves. This is Darnielle preaching in song to folks who could probably do well to hear them and maybe listen.

DAMON & NAOMI
The Sub Pop Years
(20|20|20)

Wandering out of the late 80s/early 90s slowcore dream that was Galaxie 500, the rhythm section of Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang turned their attention to a much sparser landscape with Damon & Naomi. An intoxicating mixture of lost guitars, loping melodies and intertwined, siren-like vocals, the duo somehow wiped away all the static sound of their previous band to make music that was using so much less but in some ways achieved so much more.

This collection comprises the highlights of the duo’s seven years on the Sub Pop label, a period where along with labelmates like Codeine, a mirage of the most imperturbable sounds coalesced to make the slowcore side of the indie-rock genres an enriching, if all too brief, period of music.

Whereas artists such as Will Oldham exude a rural sense of space, Damon & Naomi shared spacious similarities but were never so landlocked to a time and place. The songs here shift from the electric guitar silt of ‘I’m Yours’ to the passionately acoustic (and here, captured live) ‘New York City’. Never associated with the by-numbers intimacy of folk music, there was always something overwhelmingly exotic and just out of reach about the songs that made up albums like Playback Singer and …With Ghosts – ‘Eye Of The Storm’ one example that finds Naomi stoic while guitars swirl ever so aimlessly back and forth around her.

Graceful and elegant isn’t how you describe the 15 songs here – it’s where you start on a journey into music that’s hasn’t aged at all. Somehow this duo took all that was sonically overwhelming about shoegazing’s way of speaking and brought it down to a whisper – all the while injecting an emotive force into their songs that easily eclipsed anything you could do with pedals and amplification.

NOUVELLE VAGUE
3
(Filter/Shock)

I’ll be the first one to put my hand in the air and say the first Police Academy film was funny. By the third or fourth or whatever it was, those same five jokes had worn thin and that’s the scenario we’ve got here with Nouvelle Vague 3 – a quirky concept that was really cool the first time around.

For our third instalment, these 16 songs picked from the over-ripe orchard of the 80s have been transformed from brash multicoloured pop hits into sombre, dullish, faux-French ballads. Depeche Mode’s ‘Master and Servant’… pandering on the placid. Violent Femmes’ ‘Blister In The Sun’… engaging as faded curtains. Talking Heads’ ‘Road To Nowhere’… it’s actually agitating that a song with such buoyancy is pureed into something resembling a whispered shopping list.

There’s nothing wrong with a little reinvention and we all spend at least some time hanging out in cafés so there’s a time and place for everything. It’s that these songs sound so drab. Not subdued, not sensual or sexy – just K-Tel versions of something Gainsbourg might have done decades ago. There is respite in the fact that if you’re not aware of the originals or what they sound like, if names like Soft Cell, Psychedelic Furs, Plastic Bertrand, The Stranglers or Talk Talk don’t mean much to you, then there’s actually some laidback tunes here to while away summer days. However, it’s a joke without a punch line to not know these covers and knowing these covers loses any appeal in this album.

God save the Queen from The Sex Pistols and somebody save the rest of us from a folked-up French version of the same song. Imagine what would happen if you were stuck in this elevator.

RAIN MACHINE
Self-titled
(Anti/Shock)

Weaselling his way out of TV On The Raidio just long enough to whistle his way into a solo collection of songs, Kyp Malone is Rain Machine and these 11 tunes are quite clearly the stockpiled contents of his brain.

As eclectic as anything he’s laid his hands upon over the years, the music here is a manic mish-mash of punked-out hooks, funked-up rhythms and attention-seeking caterwauling. It needs to be declared nice and early that while there are clear shades and similarities to TVOTR, this is an altogether different manifestation. Malone comes off here much more subdued. In ‘New Last Name’ he’s like a Tom Waits upstart from upstate New York, full of gusto and grit, but with a heart of gold, fully intact.

There’s considerably less gloss, sheen and, dare I say it… disco to be found here. Take ‘Smiling Black Faces’ – you can hear Springsteen’s youth just beneath the words and a sincerity that all too often gets lost in the mix of Malone’s main musical project, most prominent in ‘Love Won’t Save You’, all wide-eyed and laid bare. Banjo and keyboards keep the campfire lights burning bright as the mood burns down the embers throughout ‘Driftwood Heart’. A hidden John Fahey guitar dances about the opening moments of ‘Desperate Bitch’ only to be left by the roadside for the carefree indie pop that keeps the top down out on the open highway.

Meet Kyp Malone the storyteller. A man who’s tapped into a rich vein of musical history. Meet Kyp Malone the chameleon. Rain Machine is the vibrant colour scheme he was yesterday; today though, he’s most likely hidden from view amongst his next vibrant batch of ideas.

FUCK BUTTONS
Tarot Sport
(ATP Recordings/Inertia)

Fuck Buttons are Nirvana. Fuck Buttons are Nine Inch Nails. Fuck Buttons are The Chemical Brothers. Fuck Buttons are the goddamn Rolling Stones!

You see, Fuck Buttons aren’t doing anything that hasn’t been done before – in fact, this stuff was being done 30 years ago by a bunch of pissed off Brits calling themselves Throbbing Gristle. But (and it’s a pretty bloody big but) they’ve taken something marginal – in this case, static noise – as music and they’ve made indie kids, dance kids and the uninitiated love it! So whether or not they’re any good is absolutely, totally irrelevant!

The spoils go not to the originators, no. The spoils go to the crossovers who make everyone revel with a heady mix of the new and the rebelliously unfashionable. Who cares if this is found sound, white noise and looped toy instruments? It might as well be these two lads from Britain hitting a trashcan with a stick because what they do makes you want to dance your ass off to it and it makes you feel vicariously good. Tarot Sport is the second round of Fuck Buttons and it’s easily as good as their first, Street Horrrsing, with essentially the same blueprint, only you can add Andrew Weatherall to the mix here. Oh, and add some mid-60s San Francisco Kool Aid acid tests, only right here in 2009 because that’s the kind of exploratory renaissance that’s at work here.

If you love the sound of squirrels being chained to amps (being felled by sonar) and forced to screech in time to a thudding backbeat… you’re gonna love this album! (RSPCA, please ignore this last sentence. Thank you).

I HEART HIROSHIMA
The Rip
(Valve)

This local trio’s debut was a thoroughly enjoyable jaunt that gave indie rock a good name both here and abroad. It’s great to see that I Heart Hiroshima have backed up that debut with another swath of instantly infectious tunes, fully armed with that distinctive twin guitar attack. There is something though, that was apparent but not altogether obvious the first time around, something that is unmistakable from the moment the trio skip out of your speakers – there is no-one, anywhere, making music that sounds quite like this.

Under our noses for so long now, Susie, Matt and Cameron aren’t tossing off pop or wringing the neck of youthful experience. These songs are filled with cryptic but considered lyrics, obviously lived in and delivered in tunes like ‘Old Tree’ by Matt Sommers with only a hint of desperation. ‘The Corner’ is another tune strung up by glassy guitars, but not strung out by any thinness in their sound that might have lingered within their debut (thanks here to Andy Gill). Here, it’s not about one person’s presence, a drummer’s exuberance, a guitarist’s static electricity – this is one sound, one creative force, this is music that it definitely takes a band hundreds of shared hours together to even get close to.

Heartfelt, if not a little bashful, agitated by its own sense of urgency, gleeful and completely unreserved, these forces don’t make easy hits – they do however make music that lasts and The Rip is an all but faultless musical creation. Usually we think of rock as a visceral affair but quality and craftsmanship, making so much with so little, can’t be denied here. I Heart Hiroshima have overcome the biggest hurdle any guitar-based band anywhere have… they’ve made music that’s imaginative, vibrant, accessible and arresting to one and all.

WHITE DENIM
Fits
(Downtown/Inertia)

Genres are dead dude! It’s all post-modernism now… sounds swirling around in the cosmic soup. A little bit of boogie at the feet of Parliament, some blazing upon the guitar scales of Skynyrd, or some dirge dropped down from a Melvins blowout – all delivered to a 3am disco dancefloor.

Does that sound enticing or a little big grotesque? Well, White Denim are definitely a little bit grotesque and more than their fair share of enticing! Where they’ve come from is meaningless because they don’t sound like anything tied to a locale, their stop/start, palpitated rhythms scream in five directions at once from the outset of ‘Radio Milk’. These boys sound like they’re ready to save us, kind of like how Whirlwind Heat came to save a few years ago, got distracted by themselves and then, poof, vanished.

Bit-sized portions of mayhem and chaos spurt and splutter across ‘Say What You Want’ – but be patient, listen carefully, very carefully, can you hear that? Hidden deep, I swear that was a groove, something southern, maybe a Mooney Suzuki trip. By ‘El Hard Attack’ and ‘I Start To Run’ the whoopee cushion combustion wanes, Lenny Kravitiz has snuck into their amps and changed the tubes – from here on in it’s a heavy groove man, it’s deep brother, just check the dub-psych bliss of ‘Sex Prayer’.

This band are everything that’s great and fucked-up about music, the search for an original voice and statement that has led us well and truly into a valley where anything is possible, nothing is forbidden and confusion reigns supreme. There sound is original and their messages are probably no longer than 140 characters. They’re the feel-good freakout wave that Animal Collective hijacked, only these guys are gonna rock your soul to the bosom of…

A PLACE TO BURY STRANGERS
Exploding Head
(Mute/EMI)

Shoegazing: staring at one’s Converse sneakers while making loud, rambling, pop-tinged guitar music.

A Place To Bury Strangers: staring at one’s high-speed ice-skates while making loud pseudoephedrine-soaked guitar-pop music!

This is a band that from the first moments of their  second album to the closing cacophony, sounds loud. You can imagine walls of amps pushing sound to suffocating levels and you can imagine permanent hearing loss. Cherrypicking the 80s underground, Exploding Head is an album that careers from the most blatant and obvious reference point of MBV through to Cabaret Voltaire industrial darkness with ‘In Your Heart’ and Cramps/Deadbolt-styled surf-swamp psychosis with ‘Deadbeat’.

But all this bawling and shrieking of guitars is not in spite of, or due to, a lack of melody – this music is as catchy as hell. Pop vibrancy has a bit part in the spotlight with ‘Keep Slipping Away’, the band getting all Ride on us. Moments later though, we’re dumped into hometown New York for a heady Suicide trip that leaves nothing to the imagination but is still an emotionally potent and engaging slice of narcissism regardless. This world tour in 20 minutes brings us back to 17 seconds of watery Cure bass-lines with the album’s title track.

This band has to be given some kudos for their ability to so blatantly pilfer so much from so many and make it sound like a cohesive whole. With the advantage of a few decades between archetype and apprentice, these 43 minutes are, for many, going to come across as an original snapshot at the altar of the pedal-melting guitar trip.

Fun on record and potentially combustible live, A Place To Bury Strangers are holding an ear-splitting mantle aloft here that does no harm to modern music, just your ability to hear anything else after this.

LOU BARLOW
Goodnight Unknown
(Domino/EMI)

Unstoppable, unbendable, unbreakable and dependable! That’s what folks like Bob Pollard, Beat Happening, Daniel Johnston and our dear Lou Barlow are. On the back of the reinvigorated high of Dinosaur Jr., Barlow has again found some time to reignite the Barlow/Sebadoh/Sentridoh lo-fi flame with these 14 tunes.

This album could have been recorded at Abbey Road with gold-plated microphones, but somehow Barlow makes it sound like another sojourn down to his basement, guitar in one hand and four-track in another. Lou Barlow makes weird, introverted indie-pop sound effortless. It’s not like he invented lo-fi or anything… he’s just a master at the warts-and-all folk-rock that’s put food on his table for almost two decades now. Barlow breaks out of the stables with ‘Sharing’, a pure Bakesale slice of highly propelled pop. That, however, is a polar opposite to the acoustic intimacy that soon follows with ‘Faith In Your Heartbeat’ and ‘The One I Call’. You get the idea, it’s all a bit ’94 Sebadoh, even earlier Sentridoh and, dare we say it, some nice, clean Folk Implosion-sounding fun with ‘The Right’.

It’s of note that Barlow isn’t on his own here – flanked by bass, drums and keys care of friends like Imaad Wasif and Dale Crover, what’s here is definitely a rough diamond buffed just enough to glint in your eye. Will both Lou Barlow and Goodnight Unknown set your world on fire? No, he’s too weirded out and stoned to do that. But as said at the outset, Lou Barlow is dependable and therefore you already know what this album is going to sound like and if you’ve ever loved him before, well, open your arms and welcome him back because this is an album that doesn’t deserve to be alone.

SECRET BIRDS
Asleep On The Dragon
(Valve)

Anyone who’s seen Secret Birds live will easily be able to attest that they’re Brisbane’s best psych rock band and it’s this debut album that, thankfully, validates that very same claim. Secret Birds, at the heart of things, revolve around guitarist D.Black, a man who has steadfastly (with the aid and contribution of almost 30 other musicians) steered the band from humble solo, avant-folk beginnings to the monolith of psych, Kraut, noise and stoned-out doom rock that it so proudly is now.

In some ways defined by their constantly revolving line-ups as much as their music, this 46-minute journey is a gloriously linear maturation of melody, sound and mood. Opening with the heavy and inert doom of ‘Zone In’, these six tracks are some of the many faces that make up this town’s most multi-faceted musical creation.

There’s the ethereal cosmic lullaby that is ‘Lame Child’, the Lee Renaldo-styled dissonance that sits beneath six organs of acoustic guitar within the album’s title track. At the molten core of this album though, are ‘Solar Plane Invocator’ and ‘The Minch’, odes if ever there were to the mind-melting explorations of bands such as Comets On Fire – not in sounds borrowed but in the creation of proud musical progeny.

There’s so much that could be on this album that isn’t and that’s a good thing. So many chaotic and behemoth songs experienced live that leaves this album a wonderful distillation of flaming stars and static clouds of deep-space transmissions.

The worst crime that this band could ever commit is leaving this as their only document. There is so much in this debut that could easily flourish in the future that Asleep On The Dragon should be a statement of intent and just the start of their own interstellar arkestra.

CONVERGE
Axe To Fall
(Epitaph/Shock)

Fifteen feet down in thick, turgid, muddy water. Struggling and gasping for air that isn’t there. Not even able to pull yourself up as your limbs and senses are jammed down into the choking silt… That’s Converge!

The most challenging part to Axe To Fall is that this is entertainment, such is the ferocious aggression of this quartet – a band that can be as entertaining as war photography. Mixed within the chaos of their sound however is an unbinding sense of catharsis. Converge are not something you fight against, should you choose to engage them – you have to give over to it.

There are genre names for this kind of music, but Boston’s finest don’t seem to adhere to any set paradigms – the band’s sixth album continues to mix the most sanguinary musical attitude with technical proficiency and hard-fought moments of writhing melody. Apart from the band’s trademark attitude to boundary-pushing and tempestuously extreme music, which makes up the vast sum of these 13 songs, the closest stone you could throw at their back catalogue are those desperate, torpid passages from You Fail Me that rise again throughout ‘Worms Will Feed / Rats Will Feast’ and ‘Cruel Bloom’ featuring Steve Von Till from Neurosis.

You see, Converge are at their best when they ever so slightly loosen their grip on you. When there’s nothing but the constant suffocation that was Jane Doe, after a while your senses are dulled to the details. Given the space to suck up those brief pockets of air, the ever-ominous barrage of guttural bass, sinuous guitars and inconceivably incessant hail of percussion is borne to a much greater intensity.

Axe To Fall is an album that tears strips off you. One part inconceivable nightmare, one part prophetic musical future, and every part a 43-minute purgative sensory experience.

ROLAND S. HOWARD
Pop Crimes
(Liberation)

A true enigma in the realm of Australian music, the dark musings of Rowland S Howard have been too few – it’s been some 10 years since his last album Teenage Snuff Film. This is a lean and seedy collection of tunes that sound all the more foreign as they become familiar – dredged up from another time and place, from a world more black and white than our own.

Brooding, sombre and eloquently affecting, these eight songs are Howard’s trademark sound – but even with his pedigree, one of the most striking things about Pop Crimes is the life and vitality that saunter from the doom and gloom. The classic Sinatra/Hazelwood country-pop sound opens the album, ‘A Girl Called Johnny’ lovingly aired with Jonnine Standish providing the sultry female lead role.

It’s an album with many subtle surprises. Talk Talk’s ‘Life’s What You Make’ is definitely one of them – somewhat poignant with the rocky and wayward road travelled by Howard, it’s a song he easily makes his own. The album’s title track is classic film noir in song form, with words spat out like accusations – you can just see the song’s protagonists slipping into the shadows to make their getaway – that is, until the impossible escape of the album’s explosive final chapter, ‘The Golden Age Of Bloodshed’.

Howard surrounds himself with his longtime band of brothers, Mick Harvey, Brian Hooper and J.P. Shilo, and this is the kind of music that has been in their blood for many years – seeping out of their pores and into the air, hanging heavy between the sparse notes and baritone ruminations, never more so than in ‘Avé Maria’.

Roland S Howard clearly has long revelled in the supple darkness of the human soul, but there’s absolutely nothing dour or depressing about what permeates Pop Crimes – easily one of his finest musical statements.

DINOSAUR JR.
Farm
(Pias/Liberator)

It’s a big call to declare the sound of Dinosaur Jr. timeless, but within seconds of opening tune ‘Pieces’ taking flight J Mascis’s guitar flailing freely, you’d swear the band had never parted ways or even downed tools over the last 20 years – such is the perfect chemistry throughout Farm. Maybe it’s not that the music’s timeless, maybe it’s just that the entire career of the band isn’t anchored to anything other than its own dreamy, indie rock, guitar eden.

Speaking of timeless guitar-wielding musicians, Farm has a really laid-back (even for Mascis and Co.), mellow groove that’s akin to late 70s Neil Young – so much so, it sounds like J has happily borrowed a few chords from ‘Cortez The Killer’ to massage out the spaces of ‘Plans’. The album’s first actual surprise however is ‘Your Weather’ – from the moment the song’s opening melody latches onto your brain you know it’s a Lou Barlow tune, and it’s easily Barlow at his gleaming, hook-filled Sebadoh best.

But let’s be clear, age has not wearied our trio of J, Lou and Murf – ‘Friend’ is the perfect example of the kind of gleaming pop hit that would make a killer single, were singles still a going concern.

And one can’t think of Dinosaur Jr. or J Mascis without thinking of the woolly mammoth-sized guitar solo – unkempt and unbridled, soaring and majestic, heart-wrenching and strung out – and there’s so much here that this album could easily be the greatest hits of Dinosaur Jr., wrapped up in 12 entirely new tunes.

Dinosaur Jr. are one of the only indie slacker bands filled with older gents who have a legitimate business to still be around with their amps cranked to 11. If this album is one thing, it’s all hit and no miss!

THE SOUND OF ANIMALS FIGHTING
The Ocean And The Sun
(Epitaph/Shock)

This is a band as confusing as their members are mysterious. Thinly veiled behind animal names and masks, this quartet of hardcore luminaries seems to make music as polarising as their album title suggests!

Kicking off with guest female vocals, it’s a jazzy electronica vibe that characterises the initial mood. From here, it’s definitely a journey devoid of signposts and clichés , the band drawing parallels with futurists such as The Mars Volta, where anything is possible and nothing is prohibited. ‘Another Leather Lung’ is the first of many attempts at genre assassination, as math/indie rock contorts beneath rousing male vocals (which hold a striking resemblance to The Hold Steady frontman). All this soon soars to confounding heights of falsetto as the intertwining of the band’s two vocalists (The Nightingale and The Skunk) becomes overwhelmingly operatic. In fact, with only drums and guitar credited to the band (The Lynx and The Walrus) and no less than six guest vocalists, you get the idea of where the focus of this album lies.

Very little of this music makes much sense at all and what does shapeshifts soon after categorisation – it all plays out like a Tarantino script where you wish you could figure out what comes next. It’s during the album’s fourth instalment we finally get to the core of this band as the pace steps up, the singing shifts into a shrill succession of howling screams and the math hits hardcore bpm, like that of a pressure cooker in the red – it’s more a release though than an outburst.

Part rollercoaster-ride (‘Uzbekistan’), part mash-up (‘On The Occasion…’), part headache-inducing – I think it’s about time we utilised the political conundrum of postmodernism as a musical genre unto itself and made these guys its pin-up kids because this is music that incorporates the use of everything except rational understanding!

STEVE EARLE
Townes
(New West)

It’s probably fair to say that Earle has been waiting decades to make this album and rightfully so. Were it not for Townes Van Zandt, there’s every likelihood that we wouldn’t have Steve Earle or his beautiful music.

Townes is Steve Earle’s tribute to Townes Van Zandt, an album of 15 tunes that isn’t just a covers album but that natural, age-old tradition of the handing down of stories and songs from one generation to the next. Earle hasn’t jazzed up or in any real way messed with Van Zandt’s songs, but given the strong personality that Earle is, they can’t be dismissed as the same songs they once were.

‘Pancho and Lefty’ opens the album and anyone who saw Earle at The Tivoli last year will need no more convincing than that moment to search out this record. While the album has a variety of musicians, including wife Alison Moorer and son Justin, it’s the stripped down tunes or those that find Earle alone with his guitar that resonate the most – ‘Colorado Girl’, ‘No Place To Fall’ and ‘Rake’ are filled with pangs of pain and as much emotion as you can fit inside six strings and a fiddle.

The bright lights of Nashville will always shine on the horizon but this will always be the true country music – hard fought (‘Brand New Companion’, ‘Mr. Mudd And Mr. Gold’) and hiding bruised hearts (‘Marie’, ‘Don’t Take It Too Bad’). The songs alone make this album undeniably good. Songs eternally made for a man like Steve Earle are done justice here and you need to look no further than Steve’s son Justin Townes Earle to see the devotion he must have to the man and an album like this – educational as much as inspirational.

WINDSOR FOR THE DERBY
How We Lost
(Secretly Canadian)

Ahhh, but for those with the time and patience to brood… how lucky they are. Those with the power to make such contemplative sounds seep from their fingers. Those who with their calming and considered sounds help us to also slow down a little and take the time to pause. It’s for these reasons and many more that I feel the need to not critique but thank bands like Windsor For The Derby. Their latest album being the perfect counterpoint in your day to running for the bus, being cut off in traffic, not meeting that deadline or spilling that rushed take-away coffee down your shirt.

The rural folk that underpinned 2005’s Giving Up The Ghost is but the starting point for this album, a more celebrity tone signposting these 10 songs. Opener ‘Let Go’ is the perfect self-explanatory start to enjoying what’s here, ‘Maladies’ a joyous eruption of melody and sound, and ‘Fallen Off The Earth’ swirling with that 80s underground mood of echoed vocals and swirling and formless guitars.

The opening line of ‘Hold On’ might as well be the only description required for this whole album, “Let’s go to a secret place, a simple place” saying so much more about what you can hope to gain from spending time with this dreamy music than any long-winded deconstruction. Windsor For The Derby aren’t going to come to you; they’re more than happy to sit out there on the horizon and should you decide (even for a short while) to leave the rat race, then they most certainly will welcome your company.

PEARL JAM
Backspacer
(Monkeywrench/UMA)

Pearl Jam – hard-rock, radio-friendly baby-boomers of that distant memory called grunge who won’t relinquish their power over the masses, won’t go away but forever sit on our radio dials, atop of somebody’s sales chart and hidden amongst shuffled playlists.

A band that’s clearly long left its rebellious youth behind, paid its debt to the man and is happily settling into middle age is exactly the kind of band that’s going to make music this unfettered. Beyond the awful, animated surrealism of its cover art, this famous five-piece are making some of the highest quality, impeccably distilled… middle of the road rock music around today.

Opening with an initial spate of tracks inundated in medicinal references, it’s not until a song about a wily girlfriend-stealing guitar player named Johnny that Vedder starts to make any sense whatsoever. Everyone gets a moment in the sun – Mike McCready’s bloated classic-rock guitar soloing in ‘Amongst The Waves’ flies the flag at half-mast to the band’s ability to be anything original. ‘Unthought Known’ blips on the radar screen, a brief spark of something interesting, or maybe just a distant memory of Vitalogy or No Code bubbling to the surface.

Making rock that’s so at ease with life is probably good for some bands, but barroom blues-rock jams like ‘Supersonic’ easily leave you craving some meat to bite into, some blood to swell through the limp sinew… but alas. Pearl Jam are part of the fraternity, and the fraternity love this album. In the fresh-frozen age of mediocrity, this is a band describing the marvels of nature in the language of economics! The craziness of life and the wonders of love are all wrapped up in these 37 minutes of music, but there’s no heat in these flames, colours that might as well be painted on by rich blind men.

THE DANDY WARHOLS
…Are Sound
(Beat The World/Capitol)

You’d have to call this album ‘pre-mixed’ rather than remixed. Or maybe this is ‘the director’s cut’? Either way, if you’re a little confused by what is essentially the same album as 2002’s Welcome To The Monkey House being released in 2009, well, you have every right to be.

So, the story goes that the band made an album, found their favourite dude to mix and finish up the songs and then handed their baby to Capitol Records. The label boffins gave it the thumbs down, went and remixed, re-tracked and mastered the album, re-titled it Welcome To The Monkey House and presented it to the world. End of story…

…Well, for whatever reason, seven years later, the Dandys have convinced the label to put out the band’s version and you know what? …Are Sound is pretty lightweight and underwhelming. Gone are the crunch, the bombast and the dynamics that made songs like ‘We Used To Be Friends’ and ‘I Am A Scientist’ jump from the stereo and grip you until you hummed yourself dry. Sure, a good song is a good song regardless and there’s still plenty here. But that hippy, hazy drug trip that’s a big part of the Dandy’s sound – sauntering along, unfocused with its head in the clouds – just tips the scales far too far to one side here.

Welcome To The Monkey House when it was released was like “Welcome To The Party, let’s get it on”. The Dandy Warhols Are Sound is like the prescribed comedown from said party where your body lays limp and your mind picks up its pieces. As hard as it is to believe, it sounds like the record boffins actually got it right the first (or is it second?) time around.

ODAWAS
The Blue Depths
(Jagjaguwar/Rouge)

There’s a lush sensuality to this duo, sophisticated in the same way the Flaming Lips can be – irreverent, aloof but strikingly beautiful.

The band’s third album might be beautiful but it is certainly not in an obvious way as drum machines and thick syrupy layers of synthesizers coagulate themselves into songs with the haziness of a dream just remembered. Unlike the rollercoaster ride of their pervious albums, The Blue Depths are eight strangely connected lullabies – Regal like Mercury Rev but pencilled out like Lou Barlow creations.

As the album slowly unfurls a narrative comes to the surface, one of lovers, their hurdles and their discourse. It’s hard to tell if there’s a happy ending at the close but kind of doesn’t matter because the echoed and otherworldly vocals that tell the story simply float along unrestrained like lilies on a rippling stream of electronics, organs, harmonica and shapeless guitar melodies. In fact you won’t find one sharp edge, course word of forced instrument throughout these 37 minutes – every moment undulating and entirely unflustered.

With such expansive passages of song, Odawa’s ability to keep a very pop structure, as in ‘Moonlight/Twilight’ allows the music to retain a prettiness that beguiles its amorphic tendencies. These tendencies do however eventually seal the album’s swan-song ‘Boy In The Yard’ but by then you’re happy to watch it all drift into the sunset.

Had this album surfaced in the 80s then it’s likely that it would have gone out with the tide completely unnoticed and unknown but given today’s landscape, The Blue Depths is a very unique sounding creation that sits adrift from not only everything else on its eclectic Jagjaguwar label but most music out there in the aether.

THE DRUMS
Summertime
(Pop Frenzy)

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there were four fellows, they could sing and they could dance, and they were called The Wiggles. Like all good boys they had to eventually grow up and when they did grow up they learned to swear and so they had to move out of their homes and travel far, far away to Manchester. There they decided to form a band and call it The Drums!

OK, so maybe the bit above is a blatant lie, but it’s sure a lot more interesting than the truth upon listening to Summertime. The Drums are actually four lads from New York who have taken their potty mouths and filled them with cheerful music while underpinning it with the most dullish songwriting. Creating seven songs and a remix as thin as a Strokes demo, this band are adept at putting a sunny, summery guitar riff over the top of a plodding Cure come New Order bass line and a whining Morrissey-style vocal along with it all. When they do sound reminiscent of the past, it’s just because ‘Make You Mine’ sounds like a pure rip-off of Burt Bacharach’s ‘I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself’.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with this music – it’s pleasant… kind of like a takeaway salad sandwich – but nothing more. It does its job distracting you for 28 minutes, but inspiring it is most definitely not! In ‘Let’s Go Surfing’ (the original and remix) these boys declare that they “want to go surfing, I don’t care about nothing” and it shows. Maybe they should put their instruments down, give Japanese Motors a call and all go get some sun on their pasty-looking faces.

LIGHTNING BOLT
Earthly Delights
(Load/Stomp)

When you’re a one-trick pony, fuckin’ milk it, man! Use it, chew it up, swallow it, regurgitate it, spit it out and make sure you’re the best there ever was at that one damn thing!

Lightning Bolt are such a pony, and their trick is sickeningly loud aural anarchy, otherwise known as noise-rock and delivered to you at a speed that leaves most metal bands sounding like they’re playing ‘Mull of Kintyre’. One thing that makes this shit-storm of sound so compelling is that it comes from only four hands, that of bassist Brian Gibson and octopedal drummer extraordinaire Brian Chippendale.

Lightning Bolt are a real-time, real-live mash-up. A concoction of song, high-grade adrenalin with a penchant for incomprehensible white noise – all tossed into a blender of no less than 20 amplifiers and then tossed into a cement mixer of drums and a knife-fight of cymbals. If you’ve heard their excellent Hypermagic Mountain from a few years ago, then step up for another helping with Earthly Delights. The first couple of tracks career and crash before you’ve even gotten your seatbelt on. ‘Colossus’ is the album’s only gasp of melody and space, slowly pummelling out a beat only to unceremoniously build to a flashpoint that kills the song at its germination.

From here, it’s more gut-rumbling über-distorted vocals, a cacophony of bass that sounds like a really bad dose of tandoori curry dancing in your gut. But there’s a punchline that puts this duo outside of almost every other band making heavy music… Anyone can be loud, punishing and push the boundaries, but there are scant few that do it and elicit such a feeling of jubilation. This is thrilling, joyous music that celebrates chaos. This is music that brings the happy-mosh, that’ll leave you slam-dancing with the biggest of smiles until your speakers blow!

YOKO ONO PLASTIC ONO BAND
Between My Head And The Sky
(Chimera Music/Stomp)

How does one judge Yoko Ono? Do we judge her as we would other musicians? No! No, we don’t because she is an arteeest, a walking, talking concept piece held aloft for you to react against, for you to feed off and to simply existentially exist. Here… she just happens to be backed by a bunch of musicians making this the latest of numerous, unique musical outings.

Yoko Ono might be one of the 20th Century’s ultimate cultural epitaphs still around today, beyond reproach and sacred to almost all of modern Western culture. Here, however, she is the weakest link in the chain. Whether it’s three minutes of Diamanda Galas-styled barking in the album’s opener ‘Waiting For The D Train’ or her incessant panting in ‘The Sun Is Down’, Yoko Ono at face value here is elevated to no more than a lost and wandering beat poet, exclaiming random statements and really not making much sense whatsoever.

Now, let’s get to why this album is really quite vividly wonderful and completely engrossing. Work your way past Ono and who shall you find in the engine room? Sean Lennon as bandleader and Keigo Oyamada (otherwise known as Cornelius) in the role of all-round musical chameleon. Add to this Cibo Matto’s Yuka Honda and a various array of the New York jazz scene’s improvisational best and you’ve got a recipe for some of the most eclectic, subtly beautiful pop and avant-jazz you could imagine.

This album springboards from early slices of beat-heavy, brilliant pop to mind-bending Boredoms-styled space jams in ‘Moving Mountains’ and the skittering, discordant pop-rock of ‘Calling’ (again with more pained, incoherent wailing). Obviously this album wouldn’t exist without Yoko Ono, but unfortunately its brilliance is difficult to appreciate because of her.