Alex's opinion and documents of music

BEACH FOSSILS
Self-titled
(Captured Tracks/Pop Frenzy)
Beach Fossils are a band that wash up upon many a distant shore. Maybe they’re British castaways in the Atlantic searching for the timeless sounds that break upon Californian shores? Whatever it may be that Beach Fossils are dreaming of, that’s exactly what fills this debut album.
So many of bands of this ilk at the moment seem to come from a sole creator and in this case it’s a fellow named Dustin Payseur who before there was even a band had written, played and recorded everything that makes up these 11 songs. Like the surf and Gidget films of yore that always seemed to follow the same basic script, the twangy, pop jangle that encompasses this album is instantly familiar and pleasantly faded like your favourite Polaroids. Most of the songs here have just enough percussion to keep the song on track with Payseur’s elastic bass lines treating the sparkling guitars like children on a trampoline – countermelodies bounding about with glee and abandon, as in ‘Twelve Roses’.
Shadowed in hollow and roving vocals and filled with graduating melodies, you know what you’re going to get by the second or third song and you can be satisfied that Beach Fossils will not disappoint. There’s something altogether proper that fills the dishevelled haze – like working class elbow patches and pressed slacks – that will easily appeal to the traditional Flying Nun set as well as those smitten with more recent discoveries like Wild Nothing and Odawas. However, let it be known that in amongst all the whimsical wanderings, you’ll find no new musical ground, just chartered waters and seashells filled with happy new homedwellers.

EPITHETS
Self-titled
(In Finland)
Obviously not content with the simply articulated musings that often encompass indie pop, Epithets is a person come group who have complicated the music that makes up this debut album in wonderful and disarming ways – so much so that it’s hard to even think of this as the indie pop it probably started life as.
All the sounds and songs here orbit around a fellow named Nick Smethurst and his trump card is an earnest and unfettered narrative that reads like a lover’s uncovered diary – painfully honest and because of that, full of unquestionable truths. It’s clear that in the never-ending food chain of music, the gestation of musicians such as Jason Molina, Mark Kozelek and the carney of folks who live in Canada’s constellations have nourished the music here to great effect. With a carousel of friends bringing ripples of percussion and the sweeping brevity of violin, cello and accordion in and out of focus, the majority of the 13 songs here having an unsettling feel of unfinished business as they cease quite suddenly and often too soon.
What is not easily audible but crucial to the magic of Epithets is the secrets within the guitar-work of these songs – similar sounds articulated that can be found living on the fringes of hardcore music. The heavily intricate playing spins an intoxicating web akin to Raein or Daniel Striped Tiger, but stripped of edifice and translated here into something more likely to attract the listener.
If Epithets is a project or band with the focus to last, then the many moments of beauty here could only blossom in the future. Sadly though (as is indicated in the album’s liner notes) this album seems to be the end of a long, hard road for Smethurst and his friends with this bruised music the obituary of their youth.

NEST
Retold
(Serein)
In the modern age we seem habitually obsessed with soundtracking our world with music. This isn’t such a bad thing except the body of sound often holds nothing but the reflective noise of our cities and our bustling life. Nest are the duo of Otto Tolland and Huw Roberts, two individuals who are deft at soundtracking a much more serene and inviting world – the kind that’s filled with the landscapes we dream of escaping to and the places that still seem free from our collective man-handling.
Taking a limited six-track EP from 2007 and combining it with five more recent tracks, Retold is exactly that. The electro-acoustic music that makes up this album often emanates from the core of treated and organic piano, sparsely undulating in the style of Arvo Pärt. Surrounding this is the ambience of drifting strings, harp and vanquished horns – all sewn into the fabric of the songs in subtle and sometimes almost unrecognisable ways.
While this album consists of 11 separate pieces of music, it’s hard not to think of it as 11 chapters of one story – such is the seamless way in which Retold plays out. And like any journey across vast terrain, there are graceful and untroubled moments and there are also periods of ominous portent, in particular ‘Cad Goddeu (Revisited)’ and ‘Trans Siberian’, that while softly spoken are filled with a harsh bitterness of the elements biting against your skin.
Much of this album is reminiscent of the music on Tolland’s Type record label, with artists like Tape in particular coming to mind. Also, the piano that binds everything here has the rare fluidity of artists such as Domenico DeClario but still with a distinctly measured voice of its own. Retold is not a story for you to listen to, but a tale for you to furnish as your own.

DEVO
Something For Everybody
(Warner)
Where do the forefathers of electro-pop fit into the future they predicted and helped to create? For starters, they don’t. Both Devo and their latest album are quite simply 20th Century nostalgia, but who dare deny the devolved the satisfaction and spoils of the synthesised world they wished and worked towards making a virtual reality?
There are equal amounts of airbrushing on both these 12 tunes and the band, but like embryonic electronics of peers like Kraftwerk and Sparks, the essence of what makes Devo… Devo is still firmly intact here, bright and bold and for that reason alone, that original, naive utopia continues to spark the circuitry of this band.
‘Fresh’, ‘Don’t Shoot (I’m A Man)’ and ‘Later Is Now’ are all exemplary takes on classic Devo themes because they possess the archetypal kernels of Devo irony. Poking fun and holding a mirror to the absurdities of what we love has always been the greatest strength of Devo and it’s what, one suspects, keeps us in their orbit. Apart from that and curious additions like the musically polygamous Josh Freese on drumming duties the band synth, shake, rattle and roll their electric instruments in strident and unchallenging ways. When the band attempts to crack their own mould, such as in ‘No Place Like Home’, it doesn’t serve them well.
The object of Devo’s dreams was the future and Devo’s future is already our musical past and with that comes five men out of step and cast adrift from their evolutionary destination. You can’t help but think that the band already knows all this – the knowing shrug of ‘What We Do’ says it all and just like The Pet Shop Boys, if this band keeps the costumes and caricatures intact then that will be enough to keep their devolution a satellite across the night sky.

OLAN MILL
Pine
(Serein)
When smoke leaves a fire, it winds, wafts and makes its own path with what seems like a random dance through the air – but it’s us moving our hands, interrupting the winds that flick and dissipate the smoke until it’s invisible to the world. Olan Mill treat sound the very same way. Capturing the organic and luscious echoes of piano, violin, pipe organ and guitar, the duo of Alex Smalley and Svitlana Samoylenko leave it hanging, curling and echoing into the distance like the hum of the world brought into focus.
Olan Mill themselves float between definable areas of music, the 10 songs that make up this debut album starting life in the realm of classical minimalism but once caught in the net of Smalley and Samolylenko, dissolve from discernable instruments into layers of sound as thick as fog. As everything ceases to be what it originally was, the experience of listening to Pine becomes one of adventurous searching, as you listen to hear not only the undulating melodies but also what may be making them – what could be violin in ‘Spare Smoke Template’ sounds decidedly like a soprano’s timbre in ‘An Obedient Ear’.
Thankfully this playful mirage of structure and semaphore-like interpretation never undermines the few key sounds that guide you through – like jazz musicians sharing around solos, the songs here often allow one key instrument to come to the fore to bask a while only to drift back into the decaying layers of untroubled sounds.
Somewhere between the hazy ambience of Lawrence English and the secret, broken melodies of Labradford come the kernels of Olan Mill – Pine is an album immersed in biotic sounds, absorbed and brought flickering to life, until nothing but ashes of anything recognisable remains.

AUTECHRE
Move Of Ten
(Warp/Inertia)
Autechre are like mathematics… either you’re into it or your not. And just like mathematicians, the really good ones boggle our tiny minds with their equations and strange abstract languages. Sean Booth and Rob Brown make music more foreign than a distant country, they’ve been doing so for almost 20 years and it’s easy to say that the group’s 11th album is an intricately articulated paradigm of familiarities and opposites still to be given a dialect.
With a reputation this abstract, songs act like a tug of war – with some definition present in ‘y7’ and ‘M62’ – deep subs erratically beating like an arrhythmia while acidic, scratched electronics skirt across the upper ranges of our hearing. It’s what we know from this group and it’s what we vehemently love about them. That same air of menace that often fills an Autechre album is again found here in ‘Pce Freeze 2.8i’, but along with it comes the unsettling purpose of recognisable structure. In fact, the second Autechre album to be released this year finds the duo revisiting structure in a way that has seen them court new listeners over many albums. And whether it be familiarity or new frontiers, the myriad sounds that dwell in the tempered chaos here continue to make them one of electronic music’s best existentialist outfits.
Autechre are a group that for years have sat on the brink of what we even call music, let alone the futurist electronics that so many others get heralded with. But unlike dance or hip-hop, concrete or most other idioms, Move Of Ten sounds like a future yet to arrive without trying to soundtrack it. It’s the architecture of Panacea or Squarepusher, but it allows both beauty and light to inform its phrasing as much as the mistaken identity of nihilism.

TIRED PONY
The Place We Ran From
(Fiction/Shock)
The group called Tired Pony is in fact Gary Lightbody and these are his 10 songs. After many years of writing, recording and touring with his band Snow Patrol, there were songs that started to form in his head that belonged to a different, at the time imaginary band – those unanchored thoughts and songs have pitched their claim in the sun-soaked prairies of Tired Pony.
Early in the piece though, Lightbody realised he was going to need the help of many hands and so called in REM’s Peter Buck, Belle & Sebastian’s Richard Colburn, M.Ward and the multi-talented Jacknife Lee. Heavily soaked in acoustic stylings, the songs swell, wherever possible, with the subtle and softer sounds laid bare as opposed to holding any electrified pretentions.
You can’t directly hear it all that often, but Lightbody’s obvious love of the American gothic country of Palace, Lambchop and Wilco bleeds into many of these songs. Lightbody assumes a lilting Roger McGuinn-styled voice, calmly wafting through the country-tinged embers of ‘Point Me To Lost Islands’. And the Lambchop-styled ensemble is most prominent in ‘Held In The Arms Of Your Words’ with its 15 musicians making Lightbody’s most Scottish of songwriting styles sound intuitively and beautifully Nashville. It’s the scattering of lap steel, mandolin, dobro, organ and even bowed saw that turn an interesting excursion into a completely absorbing experience. It’s only the addition of the stoic voice of The Editors’ Tom Smith in ‘The Good Book’ and the cataclysmic guitars that close the album that ever break the spell that Lightbody successfully weaves.
Tired Pony is surprisingly unobtrusive, unlike what his more bombastic, stadium-filling group has become. For the most part, these songs would sound perfectly at home in half-empty bars, soothing weary and bruised hearts.

JAILL
This Is How We Burn
(Sub Pop/Stomp)
Milwaukee’s Jaill have are an instantaneous kind of band, whether it be the elasticity of their guitars or the chiming countermelodies – there’s no faffing about getting to the sweet spot of the songs on offer here.
The band’s second album smothers that familiar, edgy Jam pop sound with a cruising psych-pop that sounds dredged from a Nuggets comp of old. In fact, the band has a deft ability to cherry-pick elements of so many other sounds just enough to create something that’s still remarkably new and original – and that’s possibly the key to these 11 songs being more than a pile of top-notch facsimiles. Take the Jonathan Richman post-punk flavoured ‘Thank Us Later’, the first-time-sober acoustics of Greg Cartwright in ‘Summer Mess’ or the Duane Eddy upstart surf twang of ‘She’s My Baby’ – it’s that tightrope act of variety and originality that’s intriguing here.
However, the flipside is the desire to hear the band do something more than once, which often doesn’t occur. The impetus of the album’s opening track ‘The Stroller’ is in itself enough to make you head straight to the checkout, but you only ever get the slightest glimpses of that over the rest of the 32 minutes and, really, that’s mildly frustrating. Such vexations though are hard to hold onto with the glistening guitar work of ‘Demon’ and ‘Baby I’ nothing less than mesmerising – the vitality of these songs comes like huge gulps of pure oxygen into your bloodstream.
And let’s leave some space for Vincent Kircher, whose sneering vocals have such snotty-nosed disdain one moment and then, as he stretches his words over as many chords as possible, a completely disarming charm.
Jaill seem to be the best of so much of the past from the birth of garage to lo-fi pop, set alight like a bonfire to act as a beacon.

THE ROOTS
How I Got Over
(Def Jam/Universal)
In the time of soul there was once a promised land called Motown where the best music came from. Today’s flock are quick to reference such hallowed ground, but not many link what soul gave birth to with the sounds and inhabitants that make up hip-hop today. In fact, there’s plenty of bluster but very, very little soul.
The Roots though are the bridge linking parted oceans, the group with the ability to give hip-hop its soul back. There’s a palpable vulnerability, steadfast organics and versatility of delivery that both defines the seven musicians of The Roots and sets them very much apart.
Building upon the eight albums before, How I Got Over is a masterwork. Built around ?uestLove, now legendary drummer and bandleader of The Roots, who with bassist Owen Biddle bring all the funky subtlety you’d expect from a James Brown rhythm section but with a 21st Century twist of technology and a vast breadth of sampling that includes Joanna Newsom (‘Right On’) and The Monsters Of Folk (‘Dear God 2.0’).
More than ever, The Roots sound paradoxically out of step with popular hip-hop on this album, while sounding more hip-hop than any of the young bucks weighing themselves down with diamonds. The album’s title track, with its solid gold Al Green heartbeat, is absolutely inspiring and delivered with an impressive vocal dexterity from Dice Raw, who features heavily over these 13 tunes.
Whether it’s reworking (and bettering) John Legend’s ‘The Fire’ or letting an angelic choir of voices fill the album’s opening strains, The Roots seem devoid of any limitations. In the end, it’s not the sounds that make this album great, it’s the temperament of the music here – sentiment’s got to count for something and it’s what makes great music sound so, not just today but decades from now.

LAURIE ANDERSON
Homeland
(Nonesuch/Warner)
Before punk’s sneering howl, before the challenging, fist-shaking words that came from the pages of the beats, before the din of jazz whose hedonism would destroy us all, there existed in art that eternal kernel of rebellion. Today, where are those voices that don’t just accuse us, but challenge our notions of how we see what we assume to know? They’re hard to find and in many ways they’re not to be found in our youth, but in our elders.
Laurie Anderson has been around forever, a fringe dweller from the paradox called New York City. She’s been quiet for the past decade, but has returned with her words and voice as comforting as a mother’s breast and her violin as dissonant as the wind’s howl. Homeland is the insanity of what we love, the despair of what’s been lost and the beauty of all that we eternally long for, wrapped into 12 songs.
Anderson comes at you with the same veracity as Patti Smith, turning poetry into philosophy and found sounds into reclaimed memories. Her music pines for a time without turbulence – instruments such as her violin are manipulated, rarely sounding conventional with its daunting ambience present throughout these songs. And when help is needed, musicians such as Lou Reed, John Zorn, Kieran Hebden and Tuvan Throat singers contribute their remarkable talents. The Scott Walker-like manipulation of pop into avant garde is heartbreaking in ‘Transitory Life’, nurturing in ‘The Lake’ and, while slightly disconcerting (in a Grace Jones kind of way), frightfully poignant in ‘Only An Expert’.
Homeland is an experience that peels away the onion-like layers of your expectations until your eyes are left stinging and your ears left resonating with an indelible truth. We should listen to our elders – we have much to learn from them in how to change the world!

WINDSOR FOR THE DERBY
Against Love
(Secretly Canadian)
The rural folk that has scored this (now) quartet’s albums over the years has for Against Love lifted like heat shimmering off the parched soil. Sparse and contemplative melodies have been enveloped in the hazy drawl of a Galaxy 500 psych-pop vibe that is really the first great shift in mood the band has undertaken in years – and it’s a wonderful thing.
There are still links to the band’s past that could easily fool you into thinking that for a bunch of Philadelphians , the band’s core songwriting duo of Dan Matz and Jason McNeeley had staked a plot out on some luscious British heath – ‘Our Love’s A Calamity’ exemplifying this infusion of the English folk tradition with a Grant Lee Phillips turn of phrase. Still, they never stay landlocked to a time and place – the moments of simplicity (‘Dull Knives’) are just outposts of much of what surrounds. The lost guitars, loping melodies and intertwined, seductive vocals are an intoxicating mix that descends like a heavy and gentle fog. From the album’s title track opener to the wisp of ‘Autumn Song’ and torpor of ‘Hips’, all the way to the closing frames of ‘Tropical Depression’, the dreaminess that defines these 12 songs washes over you, inducing a serenity that in itself is worth every moment of the 37 minutes here.
With a mirage of the most imperturbable sounds coalesced to make music too pretty to be sidelined within the indie-rock genre, Against Love is an enriching album that doesn’t have to lift or dissipate but could happily keep you cocooned for as long as you wish.

DANGER MOUSE AND SPARKLEHORSE
(Presents Dark Night Of The Soul)
(Lex/EMI)
What should have been a glorious collaboration of much of modern music’s exemplary talent has due to the decisions of a faceless few become a somewhat saddened affair. Already an articulation of murky visions, Dark Night Of The Soul is now haunted and inhabited by ghosts.
This album is about more than just Mark Linkous, but in the time between the record company refusing to release it in 2008 and its unveiling now, the dark souls sung about here consumed Linkous, who took his own life earlier this year. A primary collaboration between auteurs Danger Mouse, David Lynch and Linkous, now these 13 songs just sound… different.
The instrumentation is rustic and the mood throughout sombre, with Danger Mouse’s contribution immense but often atmospheric as droll beats and samples furnish the peeling melodies – it’s easy to see that Sparklehorse was steering this project. This is not an electronic or hip-hop album and it’s nigh on indie, but what makes this album something really special are the album’s vocalists, with Wayne Coyne, Black Francis, Jason Lytle, James Mercer, Nina Persson, Iggy Pop, Suzanne Vega, Vic Chesnutt, Julian Casablancas adding to Linkous’s musings.
And still this album sounds like the shapeshifting facets of one single dream. In fact, if it’s possible, in many of the songs’ tormented moments, this album sounds like a David Lynch film – as unsettling as it is affirming. There’s a scraped knees grittiness in Black Francis’s and Iggy’s contributions (‘Angel’s Harp’ and ‘Pain’), a velvet sleaze from Lytle’s ‘Everytime I’m With You’ and fevered chaos pulling on Jason Mercer’s ‘Insane Lullaby’.
But sadly, it all just keeps coming back to Linkous. This album needs to be lauded, not scoured for explanations – something that’s difficult to do. Dark Night Of The Soul’s painful beauty is made more so by its questionable and posthumous release.