Sister Suvi: Now I Am Champion (Common Cloud 2009)
Lone album of the Montreal trio that included Merrill Garbus before tUnE-yArDs became a full-time project; this came out about two months ahead of BiRd-BrAiNs and, unlike that record, is clearly professionally recorded and doesn't sound at all lo-fi. Her ukulele can be heard throughout the record in addition to her voice, including leads on several tunes that sound like low-tier tUnE-yArDs b-sides ("low-tier" because what little non-LP t-y material that exists, like the "Real Live Flesh" 7", has mostly been very good); the rest is decidedly ordinary, surprisingly prog-leaning but fitfully engaging alt-rock. It's clearly an example of a group that just didn't get off the ground far enough to explore their potential -- their website sits as a 2009 time capsule, and their first release (a self-issued EP that features none other than Nate Brenner on bass) dates from just two years earlier -- and unfortunately primary singer Patrick Gregoire sounds often like Mike Love covering Joy Division songs.
Ciara: Fantasy Ride (Jive 2009)
The triumphant entrance "Ciara to the Stage" has the ego and generosity to stand up to her best work, but the Timberlake hit "Love Sex Magic" quickly derails the record, which thereafter settles for generic except when it decides to be truly bizarre ("High Price," with Ciara and Ludacris defiantly refusing to compensate for the gulf between their voices) or outright awful ("Pucker Up," "G Is for Girl"). She gamely gives all her energy to whatever is thrown at her by producers and guests (which also include Young Jeezy, The-Dream, Chris Brown and Missy Elliott, and ironically only the last one doesn't sound like a time capsule relic already) but the record never offers any reason for its existence beyond simple marketplace presence.
Pet Shop Boys: Fundamental (Rhino 2005)
The troupe's most workmanlike, time-killing effort to date; fans will find something in most of the songs -- "Luna Park" has that tasty melodramatic piano hook, the lackluster opener "Psychological" hides decently witty lyrics, and the keyboards on "Twentieth Century" redeem Neil's feigned sentimentality -- to appreciate except any sense that the duo are putting any real passion or effort in. At worst it's disturbingly smarmy and empty, causing the worst moments of Nightlife to seem comparatively bright; "The Sodom and Gomorrah Show" is bad, thinly produced self-parody and not even b-side worthy, an over-the-top burlesque of "It's a Sin" and "Shameless" that seems even more phoned-in than the instantly dated single "I'm with Stupid," about the buddy-buddy courtship of Tony Blair and George W. Bush. What these songs share, along with the Stephin Merritt-like, goofily arranged "Casanova in Hell" and excessively arid and intellectual "Indefinite Leave to Remain" and the been-there-done-that "Integral," is not only uninspired songcraft but terribly on-the-nose "satirical" lyrics that, like so much of the group's political or statement-making material, seem to sacrifice musical coherence to try and put their weak verbal ideas at center stage. There is a very good three-song stretch toward the beginning in which the pair surrenders to their pop instincts; "I Made My Excuses and Left" is slightly maudlin but heartfelt, "Minimal" is easily their most relentless (and surprisingly beautiful) dance song between Nightlife and Electric, and "Numb" proves they are still capable of striking a proper balance between smart, acerbic melancholy, irresistible melody and stark production. Thankfully this was just a bump in the road, and they've rarely failed to demonstrate their virtuosity since.
Janelle Monáe: Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase) (Bad Boy EP 2007) [r]
Monáe's brief, striking first release was intended as the first of seven suites in her chronicle of the android Cindi Mayweather, which continued with The ArchAndroid and describes a sort of funked-up variant on the plot of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, hence the title here. This seventeen-minute opus introduces the concept and characters but its chief attraction, as with all of Monáe's work, is musical; the record's so quick and restless it's hard for it to make a complete, profound impression, all storytelling and wild, broad orchestration, but there's no denying that right from the beginning, Monáe sounds like no one else in her peer group. After a breathless series of spy-film bouncers suggestive of the wild, relentless pacing on her debut album three years later, the disc peaks with its finale "Sincerely, Jane," a soulful-chanteuse showstopper evocative of Henry Mancini, whose strong melody and vocal snap into focus and point the way forward directly to Monáe's future, not to mention Cindi's.

It seems weird that I missed this at the time, dyed-in-the-wool alternative rock kid that I was, except how much can the National really be characterized as alternative? If not for their lyrical abstraction and resistance to pure catharsis, they'd be a pretty traditional high-drama rock band; and it would take a professional bullshitter to define why they're not good old fashioned FM radio disciples, except it's all in the nervousness and dread under the surface, how they permit a little hope but snarl at it like Lou Reed. There's a narrative to the National's discography, whereby an early urgency gradually seeps out into resignation and a simultaneous surrender to and distrust of routine; it's also significant that, like few other bands, their sound answers only to itself, each album seemingly strictly influenced and informed by the last one. I've heard Boxer a number of times since I did start listening to this band in 2010, and I think of it as real prom night stuff, a little long, and 2007 itself as a time is so indelible to me that I can retroactively contemplate it as a part of that landscape, but hearing it today -- especially in tandem with the music they've released since then -- it now seems like a stark preview of indescribable loss. The curtain opens on Matt Berninger stumbling around against a piano; eventually the band falls in behind him with a surprisingly complex shuffle but he stays consistent and lovelorn, and then there are sweet, lilting horns, but then it's over. Skeptical as always of the very grandiosity at which they excel, they offer some signature songs -- "Mistaken for Strangers" (misterioso guitar, punk-rock singing, the last traces of kicking out against the dregs of impending maturity), the unmoored and wonderful "Slow Show," and of course "Apartment Story," which flirts with pure pop and ends up a singalong -- but by the end of the sequence they just sound dejected. The intricate "Ada" could be Leonard Cohen, and they're well aware of the implications of naming a song "Start a War" in 2007, but the toughness is a mask, the little moments of celebration and beauty ("Green Gloves") are a temporary salve, and when the record slows down and starts to wind back in on itself, it sounds like they learned before any of us that the escape we sought for ourselves back then wouldn't arrive and couldn't rescue us. High Violet, Trouble Will Find Me and Sleep Well Beast enrich the sound and lift it up, by both comparison and contrast, but all three have more to say to us because they don't even try to convince us there's a way out.
Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba: Segu Blue (Out Here 2007) [r]
The first full-length album by one of the best bands in the world. Hallowed ground, though their later, angrier (and, frankly, more feminine) records do more for me personally.

Kathleen Hanna seemingly does not consider this obscure, long-out of print recording the debut album of her current rock band, the Julie Ruin (note article), more like her McCartney-like retreat from Bikini Kill; but whatever its pedigree, it's among the richest and most satisfying bedroom pop albums I can name, a wonderfully insular examination of a great singer and writer's tics, impulses, preoccupations. As abrasive and confrontational at times as her best, loudest work with either of her bands, it's also atypically direct and weird, nodding to a head-spinning array of sources from the Kinks to Orbital to the (cleverly sampled) Clash. And its homespun quality does not equate to a modesty in ambition or form; the peak statement of purpose "The Punk Singer" is all rock & roll, but everything else is below it only by degrees. "Stay Monkey" gives the argument that this is the band that would eventually record Run Fast (Hanna's sensibility is that strong, that distinctive), and suddenly on "Apt. #5" there's kalimba or a keyboard in a slow-burn that's nevertheless never anything but fast and furious. And even when the record makes the most of its slapdash edict, on "Aerobicide," it's with a liberating kind of playfulness, the thrill that comes from feeling like we're not really meant to hear it. Its screaming and bold riffs sound like they're being made up as it goes; as on "Tania," it's beauty that folds back on itself, refuses its own elegance. In the very best and least forced manner, it doesn't care what you think of it, which makes it all seem totally out of time and unaffected, and for me at least, irresistible.
Kendrick Lamar: Overly Dedicated (Top Dawg mixtape 2010) [r]
Lamar luxuriously resting on his laurels before he even had the clout -- before his A$AP Rocky verse, even -- and there's something about this fucking guy: I like him better when he's fucking off. This early mixtape, his first under his own name, has better flow ("Barbed Wire") and better tracks than his actual debut album Section 80. He's already killing it on verses -- when he feels like it -- but this breezy hour is rife with surprising hooks and shy anthems for when the windows are rolled up with the top down. "Alien Girl" and "P&P 1.5" are polite lust with a good feeling to them, though the former will probably now seem too silly for kids reared on To Pimp a Butterfly. There's a dumb song about Michael Jordan that sounds like a sea shanty. There's a badly sung take on the entire Bobby Caldwell verse sampled in Common's "The Light" almost a decade before Jay-Z pulled out a whole verse of the Common song itself. There's the microphone left on for a long run of "woop de woo, blasé blah, he say she say" that features the MC still clearly enamored of his own voice and the tape it's getting laid down on; how can this only be eight years ago? Yeah, it's best when he's a little more "regular" than usual at this point, as his higher-minded ambitions to "everyday music" are clearly a little ahead of him here -- the dropping of the guard and amping up of the cultural criticism starting in 2012 needed work to seem as natural as they did -- but the high-level fuckery on "Cut You Off" and the overstuffed anti-smoking treatise (??) "H.O.C." are youthful and willing to misstep in a way that totally charms, especially because at his goofiest he can pull out "we hurt people that love us, love people that hurt us" and the crack in his voice already makes it.

Confession time: I didn't start regularly listening to Fiona Apple until after I met my wife, but I'd hidden my adoration of this album's lead single, "Fast as You Can," and the earlier "Sleep to Dream," from friends and ex-lovers out of pressure due to her being viewed as a laughable poseur back then. When "Fast as You Can" came on the radio I used to stand up while it was on, just to participate in it somehow, always paranoid that somehow I'd be seen. Its sense of dynamic, playful drama, its unexpected debt to musical theater, and its sheer inexhaustibility as a lyrical and melodic work (it shattered whatever else was a big hit on alt-rock radio in late '99, shortly before I pretty much gave up on "alt-rock radio") and the slowed-down bridge mark it as much an erotic awakening -- a shared one between artist and listener, not a voyeuristic one like the "Criminal" video -- as a Bowie or Billie Holiday record.
At any rate, of course now that I'm older I know the entire record is a gift from the gods, with Jon Brion's subtly electro-weird production an asset, underlining the lush pleasure of the music, that's failed to age like so many once-slick records of the period. The main thing is how much fun Apple is clearly having with writing and singing and playing -- you can tell she's someone for whom the private act of creation is the essence and the reason she pays the price of enduring all the bullshit of a world's worth of overanalysis -- and her utter command in all three categories. Every cut is a big gift filled with smaller gifts. One's a public-domain seafaring anthem? One's a rock & roll riff-job transferred to piano. Several are angry but in a way that brings you completely to her corner ("I never did anything to you, man"; god, imagine her saying that to you!). Near the end they're all lovely chaos. They're all incredibly blunt for all their poetry ("he don't give a shit about me"), none more than the perverted, slinky "A Mistake" in which she announces she's gonna do it on purpose, she's gonna fuck it up again. And what excuse do I have for giving my 1999 money to Ben Folds? As "Paper Bag" says, I thought I was a man but I was just a little boy.
Saint Etienne: London Conversations (PIAS compilation 2009) [r]
In the old days of radio songs and compact discs, days for which this band is unapologetically nostalgic, if I was interested in an artist with a lengthy history my first step was to pick up a good greatest-hits compilation and familiarize myself with all the different parts of the catalog. So it goes that after falling in love with the two latest Saint Etienne albums and the scattered singles I'd heard, I decided to dive further into the first disc of this set, sent to me by my friend Ryan, before kicking off a more systematic look at their individual albums. The only reason I'm not highly recommending it is that the second disc is comprised of b-sides, and I don't really want to pass judgment on those before I've listened to all the canon records. At any rate, this collection is like a burst of empathetic, witty sunshine. The pre-Sarah Cracknell dance version of Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" has been a favorite ever since I found the 12" shoved in the further reaches of a rack somewhere, but the majority of what's after that is new to me, and nearly all of it is lovely. Seductive grooves, retro synthesizers, triumph and propulsion, the occasional touch of the exotic ("Join Our Club"), gentle sweetness ("Side Streets"), insistent and beautiful dance music ("He's on the Phone," "Like a Motorway"), and dimly lit club dreams ("Heart Failed"). Plus of course, sheer catchiness, with hooks and melodies that simmer and get under your skin, and various totally unexpected moments of smart weirdness: the percussion on "Sylvie," the shot of Latin pop on "Pale Movie," and an interpolation of the Beach Boys' "Do It Again" on "Action." My favorite cut is another cover, but one I don't know: the stunning pure pop of Candlewick Green's "Who Do You Think You Are," a British novelty hit from 1973. The only dud is a soppy ballad called "Hobart Paving" that nonetheless has great lyrics. Both are on an album called So Tough, another Beach Boys reference, so you see, they're nerds like us, but people you want badly to get to know -- theirs is impossibly catchy music with an irresistible warmth.
Saint Etienne: Tales from Turnpike House (Sanctuary 2005) [r]
A concept record of short bites of suburban fiction on a London block, with an attendant smorgasboard of styles and sounds: the Tears for Fears-Beach Boys clashing of opener "Sun in My Morning," the Smile-like "Milk Bottle Symphony," the nod to Madonna on "Stars Above Us." The record does slow down a lot after its opening salvo, beholden like too many albums of its nature to logic over thought. Sometimes the matter of stage-setting and narrative makes it tougher to appreciate the eclecticism we get here, though Cracknell's lyrics are vital and touching as usual (her namedrops of Go Kart Mozart and M83 mean more than the ones of James Spader and Brad Pitt), and the chameleon gesture allows them to go for broke with a giant glam groove like "Oh My" or a classic rock riff on "Last Orders." Which brings us to another issue with this: infuriatingly, it has a different tracklist seemingly everywhere it shows up, so I can't even be sure what the hell I'm reviewing, though it seems that the Spotify version is the 2011 reissue, but c'mon -- consistency please. All versions appear to contain the electro-lovely "I'm Falling," the just plain lovely "Goodnight," and the calmly stated farewell "Teenage Winter." So you get the essence of the story... but it shouldn't be this difficult to ensure you're getting all of it.

Young, hip, weird and already stoned out of their damn minds, Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally impose discordant lullabies of sex in suspended animation on their truly terrific debut album, the best of their early works because its basic tone is so consistent, distinct and matter-of-fact. You could argue that the entire Beach House tale is getting told, plus or minus some keyboard overdubs and production slickness, on the lovably atonal "Tokyo Witch." Really, the thing here is that these songs are actually less likely to shy away from their own pure beauty ("House on the Hill," the sweetly lilting "Lovelier Girl") than anything on Teen Dream, which I guess may be a demerit in some quarters, but nobody with a weakness for those lazy hazy crazy days of summer is gonna get away from this one totally unseduced. "Master of None" is a straight-ahead pop song, at least if you pare it down to Legrand's vocal melody; and "Auburn and Ivory" is so haunting and hypnotic you can almost see somebody charging "Black Car," a decade and change later, with belaboring the point. Almost. But these aren't just any architects of a maddeningly constant kind of buzzing, pillowy noise, they're our architects of a maddeningly constant kind of buzzing, pillowy noise, and I don't care what you think of me if I start needing to hear this in order to relax enough to sleep.
Leonard Cohen: Ten New Songs (Columbia 2001) [r]
Leonard Cohen hadn't released a new album since 1992's The Future, and no new music at all since he added a couple of new songs to a 1997 best-of, and this very matter-of-factly titled record, his tenth, marked his celebrated reemergence. It's really a direct collaboration with singer-songwriter and previous collaborator Sharon Robinson, whose face adorns the cover along with Cohen's, whose programming and production defines the sound of the record, who cowrote all ten songs, and whose voice is audible on every cut, sometimes singing lead along with Cohen. Having spent much of the previous decade at a Zen monastery, Cohen emerged with a glut of written material, a lot of which would find its way into his next record Dear Heather. In this case, Robinson took lyrics that Cohen gave to her and wrote and recorded synthesized music with a laid-back adult contemporary influence around it; Cohen had wanted for years to avoid actual studios, and in this case he managed it by completing the record entirely digitally at Robinson's home. Given the impeccable quality of Robinson's previous songs with Cohen, "Everybody Knows" and "Waiting for the Miracle," the often repetitive and bland nature of this music is slightly disappointing, though the first track completed, "In My Secret Life," is an instant classic -- a brilliant, incisive, impeccably drawn portrait of loneliness wherein Cohen is as emotive and acerbic as ever in his wounded vision of a life of solitude and irrelevance ("I smile when I'm angry, I cheat and I lie / I do what I have to do to get by / but I know what is wrong, and I know what is right / and I'd die for the truth in my secret life," that's it, he could've retired right then), matched beautifully by Robinson's arrangement and vocals.
The other marker of genius within "In My Secret Life" is Cohen's voice -- it's obviously aged since '92 but his intonations are more sensitive, controlled, complicated than perhaps ever before; it's bewitching, calling Isaac Hayes to mind more than any of Cohen's former folk-rock "peers." For the rest of the songs, however, Cohen tends to outrun Robinson, his lyrics considerably more sophisticated than the music and less well-fitted to the framework she provides. "Alexandra Leaving," based on a Constantine Cavafy poem, and the Robinson-dominated "Here It Is" come off best in their romantic generosity and full-color reflectiveness, while "By the Rivers Dark" shows Robinson admirably stretching out to craft something larger in scope than one might think possible from the rest of these almost primitive electronic sound-beds. The rest ("That Don't Make It Junk," "Love Itself," the gently grooving "Boogie Street") has a decently mellow feeling about it, but that doesn't always seem to reflect the darkness and despair of Cohen's mood over the previous several years that his lyrics document. Yes, there's the serenity of a resurrection after some time away, but there's also "You win a while and then it's done, your little winning streak / and summoned now to deal with your invincible defeat / you live your life as if it's real, a thousand kisses deep." This getting delivered with synth-fed cheerfulness is a strange, though not unpleasant, sensation, but the schism becomes clearest on the biting "Land of Plenty," a skeptical sequel to "Democracy," when the two collaborators seem to be in totally different headspaces. Still, as returns from lengthy hiatus periods go, this is a solid album if upstaged by the four remaining ones Cohen was destined to record.
Das Racist: Shut Up, Dude (s/r mixtape 2010) [r]
The Sex Pistols of blog-rap, Das Racist "went viral" in 2008 with "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell," a stoned consumerism satire that gave no hint to the actual raw talent within Heems and Kool A.D., though it did suggest their self-described deconstructionist approach toward hip hop. However, fuck the idea that this defines them -- "Rainbow in the Dark," which mocks it, is their real signature -- the best parts of both their mixtapes, of which this is the most iconic but not the superior, are those that center much more on the pair's batshit genius as wordsmiths and MCs in a very classic sense; what made them powerful was the unassuming modesty with which they deployed their rapid-fire wit and flow, and their unmistakable lack of concern for how they came off, setting the table for a movement of viciously nonconformist, sub-mainstream rap music that never really happened. This tape comes out swinging with the Tribe-sampling banger (and source of the decade's greatest music video), "Who's That? Brooown!" which introduces the basic goodness of their groove and casual delivery as well as their effortlessly provocative social commentary; also, you can tell it's on a free tape because it's so badly mastered, clipping on every set of speakers I'm presently able to access. The best of their early tracks, "You Oughta Know," launches improbably from a Billy Joel sample and rants prophetically of "arguin' with white dudes on the internet." It manages to totally define Heems' personality ("I get around like a vinyl / all sales final / Lionel / Richie") in his haphazard keeping of the chorus beat. "Nutmeg" totally defines both of them with its urgent delivery of wildly frenetic free association ("fuck a George Harrison / embarrassing / sitars no comparison"; "Get Smart Again / it's a cardigan / play the race card again") and a very New York backing track provided by a Ghostface sample, uncleared because it's a mixtape and also because they don't know if they're BMI or ASCAP. Even better, maybe: "Shorty Said," a laundry list of what a girl said the members of Das Racist look like: Slash with no hat on, Devandra Banhart, Egyptian Lover, a chubby Jake Gyllenhaal, Takashi Murakami (whose name Kool can't remember), Ritchie Valens (whose name Heems can't remember), etc. Like "Black cop black cop black cop / you don't even get paid a whole lot," this is a great example of the group's satirical approach to racism, which even they couldn't sustain as through what should have been the Decade of Das Racist, American society only grew more and more brazenly racist; and white critics who actually bothered to take DR seriously started leaning too heavily on them as prophets or professors on the subject.
Intelligent though it is, "Fake Patois" suggests their future proficiency as architects of genuine dance music that people were determined to interpret ironically. This kind of becomes the general tenor of the second half of the tape, with production mostly overwhelming the more impressive elements of the group, namely the lyrics and the extremely personality-heavy delivery of them. The sound lets them down and drowns out some of their cleverest rhymes and funniest interludes ("wowwwwww, this is silly dumb shit") though there's something to be said for the drugged-out Old School-isms of "Hugo Chavez," the Relax-predicting "Coochie Dip City," the Swet Shop Boys-predicting "Ek Shaneesh," and the serious shit "I Don't Want to Deal with Those Monsters," which calls out R. Kelly before it was cool. Hell, R. Kelly headlined the Pitchfork festival well after Pitchfork broke Das Racist up. [Note: I wrote this before it came out that Kool A.D. is apparently a creep who has historically been awful to women, which makes the Kelly call-out a lot less impressive; my points otherwise stand.]

Shabazz Palaces: Of Light (Templar EP 2009) [hr]
Of Light is the winner here -- truly weird, forward-looking funk as strong and probing and oddly warm in its "alternative rap" strangeness as any of Ishmael Butler et al.'s subsequent albums under this name. But both add a welcome precedent to their already formidable discography of jazzy, restless hip hop records too defiant in their avant garde leanings to be dismissable as mere hipster stuff, even though Butler's bonafides in that department are considerable. To this longtime Digable Planets fan, it's all a confounding pleasure, an addictively hard-to-pin-down sound matched well with wizened lyrical confrontation. It's serious business, but it slaps, and the quest for that winning conflation (see "Sparkles" and "Blastit"), and the internal conflict thereby implied, has informed all of Butler's career, enough so that it all qualifies by now as something of a canon, and one we'd all do well to appreciate more.
Atlas Sound: Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel (4AD 2008) [r]
Bradford Cox at his most stubbornly droning and experimental, with the songs bleeding indiscriminately into one another and bearing down on prolonged waves of noise with childlike glee. The record boasts some of Cox's most confessional lyrics, almost uncomfortably so, devoting his energy to cascading memories of a tempered romance with a fellow musician (Deerhunter's Lockett Pundt). Because it's such a bath of sound, you can hear past it, but if you do listen for the frank, highly exposed sentiments at its core, it's a relief in a sense considering how much Cox has shied away from open emotional expression of open-hearted pain in latter-day Deerhunter music.
PJ Harvey: White Chalk (Island 2007) [r]
Have to confess I never warmed to Harvey's music in the '90s, loved some of Stories from the City and then tuned out in the 2000s, then Let England Shake blew me away in 2011 -- so Backmasking for this particular artist will be a huge education for me, and I'll be especially interested in whether I'll now have started to turn around on her classic works. At any rate, this record's baroque-goth atmospheres serve as a precursor to her work in the current decade, with all the evocative folky paranoia, but unlike her two most recent LPs, this one is extremely front-loaded, though what remarkable gifts she gives us at the outset with "The Devil," "Dear Darkness" (lovely piano trill, and a tension that evokes the sound of distant music emanating from somewhere in another room of a very old house), "Grow Grow Grow" (with her lovely vocal sound jinxed by ominous backing harmonies), and the title track with all its ghostly, beautiful sounds (dear lord, the banjo) has me transfixed every time. She could wipe the floor with people she isn't even trying to compete with -- like, I dunno, Great Lake Swimmers? Gillian Welch? But I maintain she refined this sound with greater command on Let England Shake and The Hope Six Demolition Project, despite the very different range of subject matter on those albums. This remains a lovely album and I'm glad I've caught up with it.
Cut Copy: Bright Like Neon Love (Modular 2004) [r]
Dan Whitford, songwriter, singer, synthesizer architect, dominates Cut Copy's first release, which must have sounded truly out-there at the time -- throwback, yeah, but also utter disco sincerity in an indie rock field not yet rocked by the earnestness of Funeral. Personally I'm confused; the whole thing is delightful, especially the opening triad of "Time Stands Still," "Future" (which they still play at most shows) and the magnificent Cars-like "Saturdays," all sounding slick but never arid or lifeless, but having now gotten to know it at last it challenges my perception of the great linear Cut Copy narrative. Because while three fourths of the band is in trad rock & roll configuration (Mitchell Scott on drums, Bennett Foddy on bass, Tim Hoey on guitar), this is a synthpop record through and through. They didn't come about their fearlessly unapologetic dance music spirit gradually after all -- it's baked in to everything they've done. Makes me wonder if I got it wrong thinking In Ghost Colours was too tentative; regardless, conventional wisdom be damned, Whitford has only improved as a writer since those first two records (while beautiful and heartfelt, these songs don't soar, nor do they have the knowing smirk of some of the band's peers, which is part of what I admire about them but also opens them up for charges of being undistinguished), but combine the best parts of both and I think CC would have four near-classics under their belt so far. I hope they keep doing exactly what they're doing for as long as it stimulates them.
Titus Andronicus: The Airing of Grievances (Troubleman 2008)
This is all right and changes none of my sincere love for this band, but heard today it really just sounds like a dry run for The Monitor, filtered through interminable levels of distortion, especially on the vocals; the songs often build up to agreeable moments of anthemic glory (or anti-anthemic glory, on the oddly titled "Titus Andronicus") but it feels like you're canoeing through muck to get to them. All of Patrick Stickles' punk fury is already directed inward, and even more than later on, it feels very much like a private affair.
Deerhunter: Weird Era Cont. (4AD 2008) [r]
The most interesting aspect of this record is its perverse release history, which says a lot about the dissemination of indie rock circa 2008, whereby it was issued simultaneously with Microcastle in compensation for that album being leaked... but was then itself leaked, prompting much indignation from Bradford Cox. How young we all were. Taking it on its own terms, the record is less polished than Microcastle but also has them sounding more like their fellow favorite sons R.E.M. than ever, droning and flowing and jangling and at times sounding less like a rock band than an installation at a museum that only mutates by degrees depending on how far away you stand. These guys are nothing if not experts at immersion; you can sink and fall into this for probably hours -- can even loop it inoffensively -- but okay, it's all a little indulgent. But say this for them: they could've just thrown anything out there as a "bonus" for patient fans who didn't pirate their canon release, just a crop of rarities or goofy asides or some such. Instead they didn't merely put in the effort to compose and construct a whole new Deerhunter album, they essentially created what amounts to the mathematical average of Deerhunter albums. It's all so lovely, and I never seem to remember it after it's over -- except for the doo wop bump and grind "Slow Swords," which neatly points the way ahead to what remains their most inspired album.
***
Expect semi-regular full-length reviews of Backmasked albums to resume in a few weeks, followed eventually by another post like this!