Posts Tagged ‘ Windsor For The Derby ’

Album Reviews – July 2010

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.

2010
08/03
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Reviews: October 2009

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.

2009
10/30
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Reviews: August 2005

THE HELLACOPTERS
Rock & Roll Is Dead (Psychout/Universal)

These shred-heavy Swedes seem to have taken a few steps back in time with their 10th album. Still wailing and flailing with their guitars, there’s a noticeable smoothing off of ragged edges of old and obviously more attention to the overall feel of these 13 songs.

The Hellacopters are almost a genre unto themselves, their sound is so distinct, giving you everything you’d expect. The Blue Oyster Cult rock’n’roll vibe that’s woven into the songs is present from the outset, but there’s also the same kind of swing that fuelled Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard or The Who. Whether it’s opener ‘Before The Fall’, ‘Monkeyboy’ or ‘Murder On My Mind’ the songs display a simplicity that comes out of the speakers as a vibrant, distilled new chapter to their music and extinguishes any validity to the album title’s claim.

 

THE FEATURES
Exhibit A (Universal)

This debut album by The Features leaps at you in the same way as The Kinks’ ‘My Sherona’. Melding a bop poppyness with steamrolling rock riffs, these four boys from Tennessee are all hooks and shaggable mod revisions.

Landing in the same recent ballpark as The Caesars, songs such as ‘Me & The Skirts’, ‘Exhibit A’ and ‘There’s A Million Ways…’ fuse rollicking organ with jumpstart guitars and a propelled backbeat that will far too easily move your hips right out of your chair.

Some songs unfortunately hark back to the best bits of bands such as Weezer or Fountains Of Wayne in a less than subtle way (‘Blow It Out’, ‘Leave It All Behind’), which takes some of the sheen off the album’s longevity. Still, with all its saccharine pop-rock qualities, it’s great fun for an immediate hip-swingin’ fix.

 

KINSKI
Alpine Static (Sub Pop/Stomp)

For their newest outing, Kinski have again veered off into a grand void. The more ethereal elements and sweeping grandiose waves of guitars present on Airs Above Your Station have been force-fed a heavy dose of distortion and made totally guttural.

Possibly it’s the recent time spent with Acid Mothers Temple and Comets On Fire that has infused their music with a malignant sense of chaos, which it has to be said is only a good thing. ‘The Party…’ is a perfect example of the heaviness of their guitars and the even heavier weight that comes from their silence, Think of the dawning years of Krautrock being fed intravenously into the blood of 60s Sabbath and Cold War paranoia.

This is psych-rock, but rather than the lofty interstellar explorations of the 60s, this trip has you blindfolded at top speed through the asteroid field, where it’s plausible that at any moment everything could disintegrate into a million pieces.

 

AVEO
Battery (Barsuk/Stomp)

Melding an ear for jangly guitar melody and brooding rock, Seattle’s AVEO have extracted an intoxicating mix of whimsical British pop of the 80s with the American indie of now. This second album provides a superb urban soundtrack made up of as many layers as there are lives in a housing estate apartment block.

‘Awkward At The Knees’ takes the vocals and guitars of William Wilson and harnesses the same yearning that swam between the notes of The Smiths’ songs. ‘Haley’ on the other hand takes you deeper than a diving bell, its watery guitars building throughout the song with ever greater pressure.

All of this is counterbalanced with a buoyancy (‘Hypochondria…’) that never lets the album sound too self-absorbed and in the end it feels as though you really have taken something of a journey, and we’re not talking about a Sunday drive in the country.

 

PORCUPINE TREE
Deadwing (Lava/Warner)

Sincerity is often the most difficult element of progressive guitar music to recognise and translate. It’s being this element that Porcupine Tree and specifically its nucleus, Steven Wilson, have been trying to perfect for more than a decade now – album number 12 even further refining the delicate balance.

Whereas contemporary progressive rock is more like bad jazz for art school guitarists, Porcupine Tree draw a much straighter line between their two extremes, from the sheer metallic edge of ‘Shallow’ to the more subtle ‘Arriving Somewhere…’. The latter’s 10-minute voyage through both acoustic and electric realms is entirely captivating and emotionally disarming.

The guest inclusion of King Crimson’s Adrian Belew provides not only two unsurprisingly exploratory guitar solos but also some of the least interesting parts of this album. The only real kindred spirit to this band, album and in particular ‘Start Of Something Beautiful’ would be Tool – minus the apocalyptic overtones, of course.

 

MALCOLM MIDDLETON
Loneliness Shines & No Modest Bear (Chemikal Underground/Stomp)

There is a vibrancy in these two songs that is instantly striking, an energy that is totally in opposition to that which exists in Middleton’s day job as half of Arab Strap. ‘Loneliness Shines’ excites with its shimmering and crackling organ, while ‘No Modest Bear’ squelches and lurches, drums and Moog-sounding keys expanding in anticipation of something just out of reach.

 

AMINA
AminanimA EP (Speak N Spell)

Both part of the unique sound of Iceland’s Sigur Ros and a string quartet in their own right, the four women of Amina have finally ventured out on their own with this debut EP. Comprising mainly viola, violin and cello, the additional use of mallet instrumentation anchoring these four songs, the overall affect something like being lost in a remote forest.

Closer to the campfire than to the celestial stars, AminaminA is a strikingly beautiful addition to Iceland’s rich tapestry of music.

 

DAFT PUNK
Technologic (Virgin/EMI)

The latest single off this French duo’s new album is either a hypnotically droned-out dance gem or a really monotone, out of place commentary on a world out of control. Personally, the jury is still out. A looped list of hi-tech tasks preformed by most of us daily rides over a squelched trademark Daft Punk house beat. The three remixes that back it up simply add more static, dot-matrix printer or in Peaches’ case, dumb the song down even more.

 

GANG GANG DANCE
God’s Money (Social Registry/Smash)

This New York quartet has clearly gone beyond the melding of genres or styles. They are even beyond melding cultures, this second album utilising a synergy of civilisations – from ancient to futuristic – to forge a unique cacophony of sound.

With what sounds like a car-yard of drums and percussion, the songs’ rhythms, melodies and multiple counter melodies interweave with synthesisers and triggered sounds. This musical concoction has astoundingly hypnotic qualities – made more so because of its live execution. Songs such as ‘Glory In Itself’ and ‘Before My Voice Fails’ are as long as a pop song but as deep and as mind-boggling as a black hole. God’s Money, while tribal in many different ways, is in fact a musical future plugged into our time of information overload.

 

WINDSOR FOR THE DERBY
Giving Up The Ghost (Secretly Canadian)

A lot has changed since previous album We Fight Till Death, W.F.T.D. growing from the original duo of Dan Matz and Jason McNeely to a four-piece, the addition of keys, bass and drums now apparent within almost all of the songs. Plus whereas WFTD was previously two people at opposite ends of America, now it’s four folks holed up in Philadelphia.

So it comes as little surprise to find this album holding more continuity and a more complete world of sounds. Their atmospheric and moody lo-fi pop again dredges up folk-sounding pasts (‘Giving Up’), foggy almost forgotten memories (‘The Front’) and a crackling and splintered guitar pop (‘Gathering’). Think of Blonde Redhead, but instead of being lost in a musical Renaissance, being lost within a void of information and cultural definition, where the failing human condition is given sounds and, as is here, songs.

 

SLOAN
A Sides Win (Singles 1992-2005) (Reverberation)

Covering the whole expanse of their career, this compilation displays Canadian quartet Sloan’s ability to craft a finely woven power-pop cloth. It has to be said though that like last year’s or last decade’s fashion, these songs don’t glow with the same vibrancy that they possibly once did.

Placed within their original albums, the songs definitely shone brightly as wonderful and whimsical tunes but gathering together all these little shining stars has unfortunately created one not-so-bright light. ‘Underwhelmed’, ‘Coax Me’, ‘The Lines You Amend’, ‘Losing California’ and ‘If It Feels Good Do It’ still stand out as some of their finest, but as a whole these 16 tracks (and more than two hours of bonus DVD footage including documentaries and every video they’ve made) serve simply as a time capsule of a band that sadly went almost unnoticed in their time.

 

THE TEARS
Here Come The Tears (FMR/Independiente)

Upon first listen the essence that was within the 1992 debut album by Suede is immediately present here on the debut album by The Tears, the core of both being the singer/songwriter combo of Bernard Butler and Brett Anderson.

The years together and apart have taken the edge off both individuals, Butler’s guitars rippling and grandiose but minus the metallic coarseness of the past. Anderson on the other hand still croons, his voice drifting from a pretentious falsetto to a sombre tenor, not as wrought with emotion as in his last band but definitely just as absorbed. There are moments of great songwriting like ‘Co-Star’ with its Depeche Mode undertones or ‘Brave New Century’ with its snake-like guitar; these unfortunately sharing the stage with decidedly average moments.

A more mature and refined band, in some ways mediocre compared to the trail they once blazed but hopefully just a group finding the brilliant stride they definitely possess.

 

FRANK BLACK
Honeycomb (Cooking Vinyl/Shock)

For a while there it looked as though Mr Black could be mellowing out in his old age, but the reformation of The Pixies and the continuation of their rock squall proved that untrue. So what then of Honeycomb, the new “mellowed-out” album? Well, it’s the first truly solo album he’s written since 1996’s Cult Of Ray and while not faultless, it now seems clear that this is the avenue in which the eclectic, poppy and angst-less Frank Black wishes to dwell.

Laid-back, almost country but still multi-coloured, ‘I Burn Today’ revives a beautiful Byrds mood. ‘Another Velvet Nightmare’ has an almost Tom Waits jazz-bar vibe and ‘Go Find Your Saint’ is entirely blue-collar Springsteen. ‘Dark End Of The Street’ could be a Van Morrison cover, if the liner notes didn’t prove otherwise.

A man of many names and faces, some Black, some Frank, some Francis; this one is of beautiful pop maturity and unquestionable songwriting craft.

 

THE DIRTBOMBS
If You Don’t Already Have A Look (In The Red/In-Fidelity)

Sensory overload, rock’n’roll overload… in fact, everything about this Detroit garage band is based on pushing it all into the red and leaving it there to writhe. Covering the ridiculous output of 7” singles, covers, compilation tracks and one-off experiments that have occurred over their 10-year career, this two-disc, 52-song (!!!!!) collection is quite simply one of the finest garage/soul/rock’n’roll documents stuck onto a piece of round plastic.

Disc one is mostly made up of the bazillion 7” singles the band has put out (clearly the finest R’n’R format). Every song is awesome and with 29 in a row it really is quite intimidating. Disc two is all covers, from the expected garage and soul luminaries of the past to the some surprising additions (including Elliot Smith, Adult, ESG).

At the band’s epicentre is mastermind Mick Collins who, like Iggy and Kramer, finally deserves a place in rock’s pantheon, this collection of songs putting The Dirtbombs squarely beside The Stooges and MC5 as supreme rulers of garage rock rebellion.

 

CURL UP AND DIE
The One Above All, The End Of All That Is (Revelation)

Their latest album sees Las Vegas’s Curl Up And Die lay down a collection of songs that see-saw from over-wrought mid tempo behemoths to messy full-bore hardcore.

Over 33-minutes, these 11 songs knee jerk along, seeming more overblown with each chapter. ‘Instrumental’ and ‘Back Out’ are two slower tunes that hark back to some demonic slow burning black metal from the 80’s while ‘There Is Never Enough Time To Do Nothing’ and ‘Blood Mosh Hips Hair Lips Pills Fuck Death’ are simply over-wrought, flailing and fail to connect. Above all this are the vocals of Mike Minnick, who just seems to choke and strain on his words, his thin croak never capable of a full-blown roar or scream. Can’t someone please just get him a lozenge?

 

REGURGITATOR
Pretty Girls Swear (Valve)

Unsung chameleons – that’s what Regurgitator are. This five-track EP is the latest document to prove Regurgitator’s uncompromising originality. Stripping away the noodling, ‘Pretty Girls Swear’ is damn close to the band’s beginnings, simply rocked hard and wearing a good-time grin. From there, things morph into the down tempo and eerie ‘Sent By God’, the tense sonic tug-of-war of ‘The Rock’ and totally glitched-out Akira-esque sounds of the 30-minute ambient avant-garde ‘Pillowhead Orchestra’. This shit is truly out there… w… a… y… out there.

 

CAITLIN CARY & THAD COCKRELL
Begonias (Yep Rock/Didgeridoo)

Whereas her past collaborator Ryan Adams sounds nothing like when they were both in Whiskeytown, Cary’s country twang still holds true now, and there there’s something about how her voice plays out when matched with that of a male’s tenor – in this case, that of Thad Cockrell.

These 11 duets comprise the hurt and bruised style of classic country, one that pines for happiness but finds a much rockier road. Their voices sometimes play wistfully together (‘Something Less…’) and sometimes in painful crossfire (‘Please Break My Heart’). Drifting beneath this is beautifully accompanying beds of pedal steel, clear and crisp twang guitar and shuffled brushes.

While not wanting to draw too much of a comparison with Cary’s days in Whiskeytown, Begonias has an air that is undeniably similar to the beautiful and brittle torch songs of that group and, maybe because it’s Cary, perfectly fill the hole they left that Adams has not been able to fill.

 

BABY SHAMBLES
Fuck Forever (Rough Trade/Shock)

Man, it’s really hard to wade through the shit and notoriety that surrounds frontman Pete Doherty and reach the actual music. That said, the ex-Libertine still obviously has the knack to pen a tune so infectious it will leave you swearing out loud in the streets. ‘Fuck Forever’ is then backed with another four fine tunes and, for all their ramshackle sounds, there’s something within these songs that we all can hook onto.

 

MAGIC DIRT
Locket (Warner)

Back with big balls-out rock chords and the saccharin sweet voice of Adalita, Magic Dirt’s first single has all the elements that have made them so much fun on the past. But for all their similarity, these four tracks are all really quite different, from the stomp turned squall of ‘Sucker Love’ (and feedback not heard since ‘Ice’) to forlorn ballad ‘Gap’ and heartbreaking ‘1 Thru 5’. This is a band definitely not to be forgotten about.

 

GENTLE BEN & HIS SENSITIVE SIDE
Dogs Of Valparaiso (Spooky Records)

Once local enigmatic crooner Gentle Ben has over the last few years morphed from crazed hick to softly spoken lady-killer to now emitting some coarse-voiced, whisky-fuelled squall. ‘Dogs Of Valparaiso’ has none of the hallmarks that made Corbett so alluring. The B-side, a cover of Wall Of Voodoo’s ‘Don’t Spill My Courage’, is sped up, missing its mark. Gentle Ben & His Sensitive Side are a great band, but unfortunately that case can’t be proven here.

 

AKRON/FAMILY
Self-titled (Young Gods/Spunk)

Like finding a strange, foreign but totally beautiful radio transmission in the distant night, Akron/Family comes into view like a passing satellite burning in the atmosphere.

Delicate voices emanate from almost random pulsing sounds while static clatter and picked guitars interweave, particularly throughout ‘Before and Again’ and ‘Suchness’. These lulling songs are bookended by intermittent static bursts. Turning rural and ambient but with a brooding darkness (‘Italy’), you can hear a real kinship between these four fellows and their labelmates Angels Of Light or a more acoustic Flaming Lips. The album’s later tracks hold at their core a sombre, rustic psychedelica.

Everything about Akron/Family has an air of dreaming about it, and as twisted as dreams can be, there is also nothing obvious about this, an album to live with, enjoy and slowly understand over time.

 

THE FUZZ
100 Demons (Reverberation)

Backing up two blistering EPs, Perth’s The Fuzz are the latest of a long line of rock bands to stick it to the east coast. Sounding as though they’re trying to cut themselves from the same cloth as Joan Jett or Susie Quattro, these 12 tunes are a half-hour slab of big rock chords, flailing solos and guttural attitude.

Songs such as ‘S.O.B.’ and ‘Long Wheel Base Blues’ shine for their stomp and groove, but the flurry of Hellacopters-style chords that fill most of the tracks actually take the shine off the band’s sound and at times leave them sounding like a whole lot of Oz bands. Certainly better than most of what’s littered round the country and made better by the moments when vocalist Abbe May lets wail, but unfortunately 100 Demons is just lacking that final sucker punch.

 

PAJO
Self-titled (Drag City/Spunk)

A musical chameleon over the past few years, swapping his time between rock group Zwan, a post rock Slint reformation and his solo on-the-road EPs, this is the first full musical statement from Dave Pajo since 2001’s amazing Whatever, Mortal.

Again based around the acoustic, almost country guitar of Pajo and his airy sombre voice, this latest collection of songs veers between the lonely, rural sounds of ‘Ten More Days’ and ‘Mary of the Wild Moor’ and the more adventurous and electronically abstract ‘War is Dead’ and ‘Baby Please Come Home’.

Truly a brilliant and wandering troubadour, Pajo’s solo career over the last decade – while not as celebrated as his name-swapping friend Will Oldham – needs to be recognised as being just as unique and alluring for many, adding to a still unclassified arm of contemporary modern folk/country music.

 

Richard Young – River Through Howling Sky (Jagjaguwar)

Inhabiting some kind of twilight world where the shadows are long and vision gets hazy, Youngs latest album recorded in his hometown of Glasgow, is painfully sparse but dense with emotion and mood.

Recalling scraps of Ed Kuepper’s soulful voice with parallels to David Sylvian’s avant electronics of recent years, these four tracks, stretching over __ minutes have the same air of patience that defined Nick drake’s brooding genius. All blending with percussion and electric guitar that crackles like a fire.

Not an album for the background, it is only upon immersing yourself in tracks like the 20-minute ‘Red Cloud Singular’ that the full world of sounds becomes apparent and the songs journey begins.

 

UNCUT
Those Who Were Hung Hang Here (Paper Bag/Shiny)

It’s hard not to cop out and simply reference the surface similarities these Canadians have with a bunch of other ‘popular right now’ bands. But this album deserves more than associations, Uncut evolving into a more sophisticated beast as their debut album unfurls.

The first track, ‘Understanding The New Violence’, has all the hallmarks of what currently propels bands from obscurity to the cover of NME. Pass the brooding guitars, though, that makes you dance as much as rock, and you’ll find a classic pop songwriting style that in ‘Copilot’ and ‘Taken In Sleep’ don’t stale after two weeks. This pop element stands in stark contrast to an almost clinical-sounding edge that’s usually associated with electronic dance – here combating the warmth of the guitars with a cold structure.

After listening to this album for 11 months (it’s only now been released locally), Those Who Were Hung… is definitely a stayer, energised with punk and tempered with style.

 

NECRO
AKA The Sexorcist (Psycho+Logical/Shock)

If any publicity is good publicity then this album probably shouldn’t be written about, ’cause Necro is definitely the biggest waste of space rapper in the history of the genre.

It’s understandable that this self-described “extremist” rapper would release his records on his own label ’cause no-one else would ever tolerate this barrage of inbred mentality. For his latest tirade, he presents 22 rhymes about deviant sex, all of which are completely about deriving pleasure from the extreme degradation of women. It includes tracks endorsing the rape and sadistic murder of underage girls – these are ideas that in any other artistic format would see Necro getting arrested and his work banned.

As distasteful as it is to listen to, it’s even worse to think that someone would actually enjoy this. And, chances are, anyone who’s into it probably has a few screws loose.

 

RICHARD YOUNGS
The Naïve Shaman (Jagjaguwar)

Not since Scott Walker’s Tilt or Michael Gira’s Drainland has an album or artist created such a frighteningly beautiful descent through the darkness. Somewhere between haunting and spiritual, The Naïve Shaman finds Youngs carrying a world’s weight of abstract sound on his voice, a rumbling throbbing bass the only constant throughout this strange 50-minute journey.

Youngs’ angelic turn of phrase wafts and whips through the speakers, building to echoed chants and lulling to simple whispers. Manipulated guitars, squirbly electronics and glitch sound housing an intimidating mood, and while this is spread throughout five songs it comes across as one winding whole. ‘Life On A Beam’ and ‘Sonar In My Soul’ are two chapters that it’s impossible to wrestle your attention from.

This album is remarkable for not only it’s beauty, but Youngs’ ability to capture what sounds like lost souls.

 

MATTHEW HERBERT
Plat Du Jour (Accidental)

While Matthew Herbert might have left the big band jazz behind for now, it’s that same stylistic perspective and attention to detail that fills this, his umpteenth album. The progressions and interplay of sounds, whether it’s soloing samples or old-school ebbs and flows of mood – place this album as the 21st Century’s electronic equivalent to the Chicago jazz of the 60s.

Conceptually based around the social and political act of human food consumption, Herbert veers from a dub-fuelled, chicken-filled opening track to eerie glitch and plonk (‘These Branded Waters’). Always exhibiting an element of loose restraint, never do the tracks fill to cacophonies of sound, like say Aphex Twin would, or allow the interplay to produce the tension he previously has possessed under other guises.

Acutely akin to Matmos’s To Cut…, Plat Du Jour is heavily sampled with life’s little morsels and grand feasts, a beautifully truncated work, like a window to somewhere expansive that hopefully Herbert will let us see more of in the future.

 

CURSIVE
The Difference Between Houses And Homes (Saddle Creek/Stomp)

Angsty rockers Cursive have filled the gaps in for you, the devoted fan who for whatever reason never got all those rare 7” singles from back in the day, these 10 tunes covering the band’s little plastic catalogue from 1995 to 2001.

They’re also nice enough to add two previously unreleased tracks – that way if you’re dedicated enough to have all the vinyl, then you’ll just have to buy this too.

Still reading? It must mean you’re not running down to the store to snap this up and really, I find it difficult to see a reason to do so – while these tracks work as singles, here they sound overblown and without any flow, making this a more painful than enjoyable ride. Most tracks, like ‘Sucker & Dry’ from ’97 come across as well-recorded demos, Tim Kasher’s vocals usually horribly out of tune.

This lacks the finesse of the band’s albums, too much effort having gone into making this jagged collection work, and that’s why it doesn’t.

 

CHAD VANGAALEN
Infiniheart (Sub Pop/Stomp)

Whether it’s delicate acoustic pop or crunchy indie rock guitar, the songs of VanGaalen have a curious nature about them, songs translating as quizzical questions that engage rather than stories to simply receive.

Varying from beat-programmed pop in the vein of Postal Service (‘Kill Me In My Sleep’, ‘J.C.’s Head…’) to swaths of bristling guitar a la Built To Spill (‘Clinically Dead’, ‘Red Blood’) and the occasional homemade violin (‘Blood Machine’), these elements are just the surface to the 16 songs here. This one-man project encompasses a lot more sound and subtlety interwoven in a way that only becomes apparent after wearing Infiniheart in.

If VanGaalen’s music makes it out from under the radar, then whole scenes of indie pop kids will swoon, hearts a-flutter with the blips, vulnerable falsetto and beauty that is throughout this unique album.

 

THE VANDAS
Didn’t Come Here To Be Alone (Liberation)

The Vandas project an air of sophistication that after a few listens ends up sounding all too adult-contemporary. Their urban country-tinged pop is immaculately executed with the vocals of Chris Altmann coming across as a not entirely fulfilled copy of Tom Petty. The tracks ‘Silence’ and ‘Capsule’ have a catchy clip-clop rumble to them, but in the end it’s hard to find anything that’s memorable.

(CS)

2005
08/31
CATEGORY
Music Reviews
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