THE GRATES
Gravity Won’t Get You High (Dew Process/UMA)
It’s with a hint of sadness that Brisbane finally receives this album. No longer ours, these three rapscallions from the Redlands have since gone on to conquer the world – these 14 songs providing the necessary rocket fuel to propel them even further skyward.
That aside, put on your dancing shoes, ’cause this trio are jiving to the finest hip-swingin’ beat of a drum heard in a long time. No longer stuck in the back shed, songs like ‘19 20 20’, ‘Howl’ and ‘Trampoline’ are light years from EPs of the past. Imagine a Lovecats-era Cure doing the twist with a ‘Head On’-styled Jesus and Mary Chain. The greatest jewels to find though are the damaged and tender tunes, like ‘Rock Boys’ and ‘Feels Like Pain’ – singer Patience Hodgson’s voice strong enough to splinter the hardest heart.
Proving themselves to be leopards of many spots (and colours), it’s hard not to be swept up in the euphoria that seems to exude from the band’s every pore… and every note here.
YEAH YEAH YEAHS
Show Your Bones (Modular/UMA)
Fever To Tell really did bring the party and the rock to the dancefloor, but in the end there’s more to life than just that and it’s the first thing to be noted about Show Your Bones.
There’s a depth and a light of day to these 11 songs that differs from their debut, the New York trio still using all the same base ingredients of Karen O’s howling voice, Nick Zinner’s dissonant guitar and Brian Chase’s heavy backbeat. This time though there’s recurring acoustic guitar, piano interludes (‘Fancy’), distortion-filled nursery rhymes (‘Dudley’) and a horribly wounded ballad (‘Warrior’) to flesh out this rock skeleton. For those hungry for the mirrorball, there are still morsels to savour with the tongue-in-cheek ‘Phenomena’ (LL Cool J anyone?) and ‘Honeybear’.
More grey than black and white, more down-beat than disco-beat, the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s still simmer with a knowing wink – it’s just that now you get to see that there’s something besides the outfits.
KILLING JOKE
Hosannas From The Basements Of Hell (Cooking Vinyl)
In the 28 years that England’s Killing Joke have existed, they have always walked a fine line of entertainment through aggression and insanity. Their 13th album sparks both the embers that existed in those early albums and a naked hostility prevalent in their sound today.
Hosannas… is all but industrial in many of its songs and a hell of a lot heavier than the likes of Tool or NIN, these so-called songs of god kindling for the band’s pagan inferno.
The guitars in ‘Implosion’ and ‘Walking With Gods’ rage like sheets of lightning in an oral tug of war with the growling vocals of Jaz Coleman. That savage, unbridled sound that propels bands like Wire is executed here to similar effect.
The very visuals of a surrealist hell on earth that grace the cover are the hell on earth that unfurls with these nine songs – their once war-ravaged predictions from the past have now become for the band cruel documents of today.
WILDERNESS
Vessel States (Jagjaguwar)
After taking 10 years to create and release their debut, Baltimore’s Wilderness have followed it up in what is a matter of months with an equally impressive album of shimmering dark guitar pop.
James Johnson’s voice beckons something just beyond reach, his words swallowed in the sheer sense of yearning that fills the air in between the often stark instrumentation (‘The Blood Is On The Wall’, ‘Monumental’). Brooding in the same beautiful way that Mogwai do, the difference with these post-rock songs is that it’s a building storm that never breaks – moods shift and tension ebbs and flows (‘Emergency’, Towered’) but these nine songs never really loosen their menacing white knuckle grasp.
If subtlety is the key to creating mood then Vessel States creates an almost physical one, like every ounce of air being sucked from the room.
PARTS AND LABOR
Stay Afraid (Jagjaguwar)
Upon hitting play, you could be mistaken for thinking your speakers have blown, as guitar noise cuts the air but that’s just the sheer brute force that this Brooklyn trio propel.
It takes time to come to terms with the thickness of sound encompassing the songs, but fear not, there are wonderful melodies hidden just below the surface – that’s if the music doesn’t spontaneously combust first. Songs like ‘Drastic Measures’ and ‘A Pleasant Stay’ come across like Mclusky tearing the back catalogue of Guided By Voices apart and that’s in the accessible parts. ‘New Buildings’ and ‘Timeline’ border on Lightning Bolt territory, only they’re slightly more musical.
This half-hour noise-rock tour de force is blistering, like an irate and wounded animal that’s just as likely to rip your throat out as much as just want its wounds licked clean.
OCEAN
Aeolian (Metal Blade)
Firstly, buyers beware: there is more than one metal group with the name Ocean, and one is of brooding post-metal ambience, the other unrelenting, post-metal brutality.
Aeolian is a creation by the latter, an almost amorphous and crushing world of guitars, white noise and bludgeoning crescendos that never fully let you go – an aural equivalent of asphyxiation upon said Ocean’s floor.
The key to Aeolian’s unique variety lies in its revolving door of seven vocalists. Wraith-like vocals in one refrain soon switch to a bottomless growl in the next, only for the hollering and shrieks to consistently slice through the music at different intervals. As their name suggests, there is no space, no air to gasp and no end to the cascading ferocity. In the Ocean’s world there is no sun to set on its horizon.
GARY NUMAN
Jagged (Mortal/Shock)
Gary Numan has always been travelling down the same darkwave/industrial pop road, it’s just that for the best part of the last 15 to 20 years most people haven’t been taking much notice.
And so, 28 years on from his Tubeway Army debut, the Numan of today dwells more than eve in a cold, dark and desolate musical world. Many of the 11 tracks here take on a soft/loud approach to their structure, but this stylistic device is constructed out of a crunching industrial noise and electronic ambience that Numan’s barren voice can then lie upon. The cold, joyless landscape of ‘Fold’, ‘In A Dark Place’ and ‘Blind’ are actually as draining as entertaining given that Numan has refined his disdain-soaked sounds down to a fine ice-picked point… and then repeated them too many times.
With no anger or true vengeful release (a la NIN, Rammstein) it’s a dark, forgotten forest that a dark, almost forgotten Gary Numan now forever stalks.
ABACUS ROOLZ
The Northern Summer (Tactile)
Rural isn’t just a sound found in the Americana strain of music. We too have groups out in the hills that are mixing a leisurely Wilco come Lou Barlow type of acoustic country pop.
The thing is that the wafting surrealist melodies of Abacus Roolz are so all encompassing and intoxicating that it doesn’t show that this debut album is in fact a worldly concoction, created in France, the UK and Sydney. Tracks like ‘Porch Hop’ and ‘Closer’ hark to times in small towns and sunny afternoons in sweeping open fields of western countryside – this imagery compiled from solemn guitars, yearning voices and forlorn electronics. Maybe the band’s physical separation from such a landscape is what makes their imaginative visions so vivid – the whole album is like a series of 10 aural polaroids of holidays you wish you could call your own.
AUGIE MARCH
One Crowded Hour (Sony BMG)
There is really only one problem with this five-track single and that’s its B-sides… the problem being that they’re too good. When you follow the title track with acoustic versions of ‘There Is No Such Place’ and ‘Sleep In Perfection’, all of a sudden the new songs just don’t stand up. Still good, it’s just hard not to wonder if Augie March are repeating a beautiful set of sounds from their own past.
TENDER FOREVER
The Soft and The Hardcore (K/Pop Frenzy)
Imagine if you were to take the mellow electro-glitch styling of Aphex Twin and slide it into a nice twee Cat Power-labelled angora jumper, maybe while in front of a cosy fireplace with some nice furry slippers on? This is Tender Forever and its solo heart of Melanie Valera.
This debut is like discovering a girl’s unlocked diary and scanning its lovelorn pages for what it is that she wishes for, Valera singing and whispering her unabashed secrets and desires (‘Take It Off’, ‘Make Out’, ‘Hot’). Its saccharin overtones and revealing nature at times reach saturation point, but if you’re in need of a nice hot chocolate and some comforting pop then this is sure to help keep you warm.
LAWRENCE ARMS
Oh! Calcutta (Fat Wreck Chords/Shock)
Slowly building up a front to infect change in people more than in any system, Lawrence Arms stand side by side with Against Me, NoFx and Anti Flag in punk and the meaningful movement of amplified sound through minds.
With a forked tongue and blistering oi chorus lines, this three-piece take their fifth album and prod it up the ass of their so-called punk brethren (‘Jumping The Shark’, ‘Warped Summer…’), failed dreams (‘Like A Record Player’) and most importantly, themselves.
What makes this album truly work is that there is nothing groundbreakingly new and nothing stale here – using all the ingredients you know, the 13 songs here all seem unique and original, but as much part of something as well as standing on their own.
The abundance of breakneck hooks and melodies will no doubt lose as many as they attract, but punk’s one tradition that these guys show is not yet just a useless commodity.
THE CHURCH
Block (Cooking Vinyl)
The Church have really hit a point where it adds nothing to enquire as to the relevance or current sounds of their art. There lies within their music a timeless quality that’s a constant, an essence that makes them good and defines them – guitars that build from yearning to straight out howling and Kilbey’s empirical phrasing that never entirely makes sense. This four-track EP has all these things and more if you take the time to let it soak in… ’cause there’s nothing immediate about The Church.
CLAP YOUR HANDS AND SAY YEAH
Self-titled (Wichita/WMA)
Once upon a time this kind of flippant, fairy-floss type of indie pop rock would have been sidelined into cult obscurity. But no! Not now. Now, we offer up this music and this band as the unique saviours of music eclecticism.
From their ever so Residents-esque opening tracks, these five upstarts shudder and shake their way into your hearts. Off-kilter sounds from the pop, rock, twee and avant realms all coagulate into a surprisingly endearing end product – similar to the way that Talking Heads’ genius vision both confused and made complete sense all in the blink of an eye. It’s almost like they’re poking their tongues out and making fun as toy pianos and tambourine fill ‘Sunshine and Clouds’ – but it’s all part of their grand plan, one that doesn’t unfurl easily or quickly, but eventually, into a kaleidoscope of aural wonder (‘The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teeth’). Soak it up!
CLOR
Self-titled (EMI)
With bands like The Knife blowing up left, right and centre, it’s worth raising the flag for this British five-piece. Having conquered England and Europe over the last two years with their mix of Gary Numan-style electro-pop, futuristic blend of guitars and a Prince-like vibrancy, their debut of last year is finally reaching our far-off ears.
What starts off unassumingly as some fun, bouncy, candy-coated treats (‘Good Stuff’, ‘Love+Pain’) soon escalates into a full-blown dancefloor-filling extravaganza. Never falling too heavily into one sound or another, tracks like ‘Dangerzone’ and ‘Making You All Mine’ have fully incubated, infectious beats, the squelch and buzz of electronics sending their melodies soaring skyward. Raw, live, slick and amorphous, this is one the finest albums of its kind to surface in a very long time.
FIERY FURNACES
Bitter Tea (Rough Trade/Shock)
Well, it looks like someone fell down the rabbit hole or maybe climbed the beanstalk. Either way, it’s an interstellar exploration for the Fiery Furnaces third album.
Still at the nucleus of the band is husband and wife Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger – only where previously there might have been some sort of backwoods vibe to the songs, there’s now the air of the inventor’s laboratory, piecing together Frankenstein’s musical monster.
Remember the movie Time Machine where the fellow goes back in time only to go into the future? There’s that same sense of travel in the 13 songs here, from the Renaissance-sounding harpsichord in ‘Bitter Tea’ to the deep-space exploratory sci-fi sounds in ‘Black-Hearted Boy’. ‘I’m In No Mood’ sees Eleanor Friedberger take a Kate Bush pill while human beatboxing and electronic squelch fill ‘Waiting To Know You’.
Every rewound voice, squerble and kooky mini-climax of this epic journey has propelled them out of their little pop niche and into something a lot more enjoyably avant garde.
PRETTY GIRLS MAKE GRAVES
Elan Vital (Matador/Remote Control)
Album number two for this Seattle five-piece comes across more like the shrouded potential of their stage shows. The initial raw impact of this band’s debut is looking to be a hard act to follow.
It’s a smouldering feel of mild intensity that lies within Elan Vital (heightened by an additional permanent keyboardist). Shards and sparks of something vital flick and shoot off at various points (‘The Number’, ‘Selling The Wind’, ‘Pictures Of A Night Scene’), catching your ear and bringing with it a sense of anticipation. These moments are only fleeting though, the shimmering guitars and yearning voice of Andrea Zollo dampened and snuffed out by a slick sheen and almost monotone melodies of songs unfulfilled in their potential (‘Parade’, ‘Wildcat’).
There is definitely something great within this band, but making it all add up to something more still seems just beyond their reach.
XIU XIU
Australia New Zealand Tour EP (Popfrenzy)
This collection is great reminder of the frenzied brilliance of their recent live shows, the eight tracks here coming from a variety of 7” singles as well as their most recent La Forêt album. An additional two remixes and two covers range from sheer break-core noise (‘Clowne Towne’) to the bare bones howl of Nick Cave’s ‘Jack The Ripper’. A great if not collectable souvenir of fringe genius.
MAZARIN
We’re Already There (I And Ear/Remote Control)
There’s a sparkling vibrancy to the music of this Philadelphian four-piece, a momentum that beguiles their fragile pop beauty and criss-crossing, almost Beach Boys melodies.
For their third album, the band has taken their psychedelic aura and beautifully flavoured their songs, concentrating on little quirks and shifts in tempo to trick you and take you off into pop bliss. Songs like ‘Another One Goes By’ and ‘I’ll See You…’ recall 90s indies like Superchunk let loose in Wonka’s Oompa Loompa Wonderland while ‘At 12 To 6’ takes The Brian Jonestown sound and casts its net far wider than the 60s.
The second half of the album does fall into a paisley slipstream, but never do the rose-coloured glasses get in the way of the songs’ gritty low-fi immediacy (‘Schroed(er)/inger’, ‘I’m With You And The Constellations’). We’re Already There is as psychedelic as it is futuristic and all in all not of this time.
SATYRICON
Now, Diabolical (Roadrunner)
There’s something about fringe music that’s extremely funny. What is a rule of law to those within can look a bit silly to those outside.
With that said, the latest album by Norwegian black metallers Satyricon is possibly one of the funniest albums released this year. Wearing more make-up than a cosmetics counter assistant, this dour-faced duo of Satyr on guitar and growls and Frost on battery (that’s drums to the rest of us) have made a good album that isn’t the least bit heavy!
From the mildly demonic Dungeons & Dragons of ‘King’ and the opening title track, there is a straight rock feel to the songs – sure the guitar buzzes and Satyr has that asthmatic growl to his voice, but by the time you get to ‘The Pentagram Burns’ with its disco-beat any chance of taking this group seriously is totally lost.
It almost gets heavy in ‘A New Enemy’ but, ultimately, they’re a decent rock band and not the boogiemen that they obviously wish they were. Points for effort ’cause it takes more muscles to frown than smile.
VETIVER
To Find Me Gone (DiCristina)
In the same hazy hippy folk dream that engulfs Devandra Banhart you’ll find his best friend and regular band-mate Andy Cabic – who, when on his own, goes under the Vetiver title.
But unlike Banhart’s lost pixie, psychedelic troubadour style, Cabic and his friends here have a more energetic and focused sound, sticking to an elegant, more traditional style of old British folk for this, his second album. There’s rollicking stomp in ‘You May Be Blue’, sombre embellishments of strings and finger-picking in ‘No One Word’ and the introspectively ramshackle frolicking of ‘Idle Ties’.
A pleasant and relaxed air permeates everything he does and every sound that wisps through the air. This is music to take you away from all the noise and bustle – sometimes beautifully simple is the most enduring.
YOUNG PEOPLE
All At Once (Too Pure/Remote Control)
Stripped bare with an esoteric air interwoven into its almost ritualistic rhythms, this L.A. duo has created a strange but alluring musical document.
Recalling Royal Trux but minus the guitar squall, this leaves you with Jarrett Silberman’s pulsing and primal percussion, Katie Eastburn’s howling voice and smatterings of discordant guitar and bass. ‘Your Grave’ takes the sparse beauty of, say, Hope Sandoval’s sound and strips it of the make up and gloss, leaving lost souls swimming in lost sounds. ‘Slow Moving Storm’, on the other hand, is a displaced and galloping mass of crescendos all sewn together with a soulful Billy Holiday-styled vocal melody.
In a place where mood and space are as important as melody and sound, All At Once is the beauty that lies within deep, dark and sometimes mysterious waters.
URSULA 1000
Here Comes Tomorrow (ESL/Shock)
The generally slick and stylised world of today’s dance and electronica is as dissimilar as familiar to the world of 50s/60s exotica – and sometimes attempts to meld those worlds into one is not a marriage made in sweet shagpile.
This is the case for Ursula 1000’s third album. Having gained attention through the rise of new exotica, he’s torn-up any blueprints and taken broad brushstrokes of rock, glam and beat-heavy electronica (‘Let’s Go To A Disco’, ‘Electrik Boogie’ and ‘Boop’), creating not so much a bold statement as a confusing one.
It’s as if an overabundance of ideas has left Ursula with a hotchpotch of sometimes groovy, sometimes zany tunes that lse the subtlety necessary to make the whole thing work. There are sublime and swingin’ moments such as ‘Two Tone Rocka’, but in the end an over-zealous appetite leaves the whole feeling a little too… Austin Powers.
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