Based on what I can verify through rudimentary research... median age of Charly Bliss: 25. Median age of Big Thief: 29. Median age of the National: 43. Median age of Ezra Koenig: 35.
The Mountain Goats: In League with Dragons (Merge) [r]
Unless I'm too unschooled on tabletop RPGs to know what I'm talking about, which is quite likely, John Darnielle seems to have given up on making this a concept album about
Dungeons & Dragons past the cover and title, with the songs as varied and rich in subject matter as on the relatively concept-free
Heretic Pride -- people operating past their prime are a recurring motif, but then, aren't they always. (I thought
All Eternals Deck, which this record's title cut would have been at home on, was also an album with no overarching theme and embarrassingly said so in print, but now I believe it's overwhelmingly fixated on death.) They're also slicker and more full-sounding than ever thanks to producer Owen Pallett, who occasionally takes things a little too far; "Sicilian Crest" carries its canned fake triumph all the way to a bad adult contemporary station, while a few cuts, especially piano power ballad "Possum by Night" (which is about exactly that) and the Ozzy Osbourne tribute "Passaic 1975," fall into an uncomfortable blandness that lamentably has become somewhat routine on the Goats' Merge albums. However, for the most part, these are fine distinctions and this is Darnielle being Darnielle -- and, increasingly, Jon Wurster being Jon Wurster ("Done Bleeding" and "Younger" both center him gloriously) -- and the songs uncover themselves effortlessly with time. Darnielle somehow continues to evolve as a singer long after most rockers, especially indie rockers, give that up: the gaming chronicle "Younger" plays with a tone of simultaneous peace and insistence, as befitting someone who is doing something relaxing to them that they're nevertheless extremely competitive about, and the melodic "Clemency for the Wizard King" has him playing intriguingly with a hushed tone that has an entirely different emotional essence than the one he exhibited on
Get Lonely; this is followed on with palpable, narratively telling detachment on the verbose, mournful "An Antidote for Strychnine"... but all of these are incremental and faint progressions on things the band has done before. The wildly engaging "Going Invisible 2" sounds actually new thanks to Pallett's spare treatment of what amounts to an assertion and rejection of creative identity in a thrillingly anthemic format, in which Darnielle finds a wavering but explosive strength in his voice we haven't heard in this capacity before.
Pallett's other main utility is emphasizing the full band's rock-steady, increasingly polished arrangements; "Younger" is so full of disparate elements -- piano hook, propulsive guitar, slick backing vocals, saxophone solo -- it becomes amusing how fans once thought "Autoclave" (2008) was as busy and studio-bound as the group was ever going to get. And while subtler, "Done Bleeding" isn't much more direct, with the producer making so much of its simple hook and pleasing buildup. Two jaunty songs, one whose title invokes Waylon Jennings, even bring in pedal steel; and "Doc Godden" boasts Spanish guitar and sounds as lovably out of place as "Shelved" did on
Goths. The emphasis on the individual elements and interplay of an unerringly solid band ensures that the record is great fun to listen to even when its songs hang back a bit, though it's still kind of a relief when everything gets stripped away enough to return to the roots of a dark, rollicking, oddly catchy number about something exceptionally unpleasant: a
Forensic Files-evocative crime scene functioning as the same sort of oblique simile as weapon-lugging trucks on the border between Greece and Albania, all with the inspirational chorus "Bring in the cadaver sniffing dog." Ladies and gentlemen: the Mountain Goats.
Aldous Harding: Designer (4AD) [r]
New Zealand native's third album will get short shrift in indie-folk world thanks to its release in close proximity with the similarly bare-sounding and pretty Big Thief album (below), but Harding's voice is a bit more upfront and assertive; "Fixture Picture" sets the tone with its faint catchiness and considerable dignity, while the title track brings things around to more versatile territory with its appealingly lush sound and unexpected horns. The guitar playing is frequently exquisite ("The Barrel," which also adds a pleasing low-toned male-female interplay on the vocal a la "Past the Mission") and the songwriting engages for the most part; there's a bit of a Sufjan Stevens melody on the piano-driven "Treasure." It eventually gets a bit repetitive, and her voice doesn't have the same appeal at the range she explores on songs like "Damn," which suffers from a lackluster piano centerpiece but does get redeemed by some lazy New Orleans horns. But it stays transfixing at least through the midpoint.
Kevin Morby: Oh My God (Dead Oceans) [c]
Morby's never been interesting and now that he's doing M. Ward nursery rhymes he's become ridiculous, rhyming "moat" with "boat" and channeling Everclear in a maudlin sound collage of children and women thanking God, and the record feels comically overlong despite coming in under fifty minutes. By track ten or so I'm in disbelief that he's still fucking going, and there's quite a bit left at that point! Respect for setting
this to music, though.
The Tallest Man on Earth: I Love You. It's a Fever Dream. (Rivers/Birds)
I heard "Kids on the Run" (2010) a few days ago and suddenly realized, that extreme outlier from Kristian Matsson's second album set the tone for what's now his entire career: soupy balladry and war-torn vocals, and a mostly sidelined or absent guitar. There are enough good songs and performances on his fifth LP to make it an improvement on the Boss-like
Dark Bird Is Home, but nearly every time there's a touch of the stark, unadorned mystery of his early work -- usually a little broad and obvious melodically (title track) but occasionally fine even in that department -- something adulterated and disruptive comes in: a damn orchestra, a power chord-flaunting rock band, even the revenge of the "Kids on the Run" piano. So it's all acceptable but anonymous, slowed down too much into placid old age -- he's six months older than me so I guess this is life now? -- and even when he's running through some basically classic folk ("There's a Girl"), the material is still thin and I feel like I'm, I dunno, listening to the radio in the garage. It's Saturday afternoon homeowner rock; "memories of being young," indeed. One exception to all this is "Waiting for My Ghost," on which the integration of harmonica actually sits peaceably with one of his better new songs. Even then, the biggest problem of low-tempo sluggishness never disappears except on "I'm a Stranger Now," which could have easily been a song from one of his first three albums and doesn't get around to fucking it up. I guess it's ominous in a way that I'm already in the position of telling an artist my age that he's past his prime except when he evokes the old stuff. Life goes on...
Big Thief: U.F.O.F. (4AD) [hr]
The least New York-sounding New York band of our time, this folk troupe tapers down their crowd-pleasing impulses and ironically ends up crafting their most distinctive and accessible album yet, marked by the same general hushed intensity as before but accompanied by thrilling spaciousness and detail as well as a vocal sweetness that borders on
harsh, confronting where the old records shrank. Adrianne Lenker carves out a presence with a truly eccentric voice that's difficult to grasp in the aural space at first until its language becomes clear and it starts to weave around you seductively, magically. Her and Buck Meek's intertwining guitars ring, chime and grind through a litany of stark riffs while producer Andrew Sario wants to establish a sense of place, and does so as adeptly as a Stax or Sun single, or the Beatles'
Please Please Me or Great Lake Swimmers' debut: for all its intimacy, the sound can feel remarkably limitless, or it can be airless and claustrophobic ("Terminal Paradise"). Still, the record forges its identity through melodies that tease and deny (the watery, dreamlike title cut) and its repeated challenges to complacency; opener "Contact" settles into its own calm bleakness before breaking into a series of bloodcurdling screams and intrusively sharp guitars like the Police's "A Kind of Loving." (That's the only real sign of the "rock" half of folk-rock apart from the memorably freaky and circular "Jenni" and the slightly less successful, mood-breaking "Strange.") You can fall over yourself proclaiming vocal comparisons to Joni Mitchell or Kate Bush or Meg Baird but even on the most explicitly Mitchell-like "Orange," Lenker still comes off as an original, her emotional delivery both hauntingly delicate in its affect and unerringly tough in its directness; actually, I'm reminded a bit of Jeff Mangum on the scattered new songs he played on Neutral Milk Hotel's
Aeroplane tour. She has that same instinct to strip songs down to their wounded, almost primitive essence ("From") but doesn't shy away from the unpredictable nooks and crannies of something like "Betsy." This enchanting craftiness peaks with the gorgeous and mysterious "Cattails," which almost feels like a lost Carter Family number; you can all but see the Great Lakes scene she takes pains to set in her lyric. The record ends a little abruptly; "Magic Dealer" seems anticlimactic and sputters out into silence, but almost everything before it is so striking and shockingly vivid it doesn't really matter.
Vampire Weekend: Father of the Bride (Sony)
What's left of this once-zeitgeisty unit on the occasion of its major label debut, following the departure of musical backbone Rostam Batmanglij, throws the entire kitchen sink at a distant dartboard. It's an assaultive approach to reinvention, a double album (more like albummer, right guys?) that's not so much bloated as... overstimulating. The tone is confused, the attitude is weird, there's sunny-side-up pop but also strangely mournful country, and it may or may not essentially just be Ezra Koenig on the process of growing up, losing your band, getting married, having kids. He talks about shirking lyrical obscurity but the title alone invites almost endless questions about purpose and thematics: is the father of the bride Quincy Jones? Spencer Tracy? Ezra himself (in the James Whale sense)? With the sheer volume of material, there's a lot of difficulty getting a handle on how to even think about this music, aside from one common denominator: it all suffers from too much studio tweaking, on tunes that finally don't feel like much of an evolution or the work of much of a band. Rostam's aural busyness was baked into the songs. The random orch hits, awkward layering of noises, between-verse sounds of puttering around in the studio, and pointless augmentation of Jenny Lewis autotune, for a few examples, communicate a certain wrongheaded desperation to entertain; it makes the simpler songs, particularly the three country duets with Danielle Haim, suffer badly because they end up sounding so slight you grow suspicious of what their skeletal, plaintive lyrics are
really getting at. There's a certain freedom Koenig understandably finds when he strips everything away like this, like Paul McCartney crooning away on "The Lovely Linda," but there's also an audible, slavish reverence to domesticated convention and infuriating cutesiness ("We Belong Together," bizarrely cowritten with Batmanglij, on which pots and pans are predestined to make a go of it but alas cannot coexist), like Paul... well, you know.
The thing is, whereas McCartney thumbed his nose at the outside world (ex-bandmates inclusive) upon finding his private bliss and then got lost in the trite, happier-than-thou trappings of trying to communicate it, Koenig's instincts serve him better, and his popcraft hasn't left him either. The ideal modern Vampire Weekend song may indeed be the Wings-like "Bambina," which runs under two minutes but is complicated and memorable; and speaking more generally, his lyrics remain good, grown up, scared and interesting. Even on the swooning opener "Hold You Now," there's something haunting about the story he's telling us: of romance spanning a lifetime but still hitting a wall, of the endless labyrinthine stories we tell of our own lives. And he continues to pile references to references on top of references to try and explain a worldview in progress, this time including references to Vampire Weekend itself which are at least less clumsy than Arcade Fire's invocation of
Funeral on "Creature Comfort": he reprises the key line "I don't want to live like this, but I don't want to die" from "Fingerback," a moment that despite myself I almost never could resist belting out along with him, and I'm mildly annoyed that it gets recycled into a celebratory chorus all its own on "Harmony Hall," yet 27 million Spotify plays can't be wrong. Though its upturned guitar sound is sweet, "This Life" struggles with his tendency to make ordinary sentiments sound like they're hiding something, until they collapse under their own emptiness and -- especially -- Ariel Rechtshaid's fussy production, which places too much emphasis on every awkward moment. "How Long" has lots of hooks and goes for imitation Rostam. And those are the sanctioned
iconic moments on this thing! Actual progression shows up here and there: the stronger, more unresolved melody on "Unbearably White" is welcome; and while "Sympathy" has the feel of an afterthought, its Latin-derived sound also breaks some of the monotony. "My Mistake" is shapeless but actually enigmatic and, when divorced from context, reveals itself as a standout, and even its closing saxophone break is well-placed. The two Steve Lacy guest shots, "Sunflower" (a rewrite of the
Inspector Gadget theme song) and "Flower Moon," use jam bands as their basis and deserve some attention for being actively different and more unabashedly pop, though the former does blather on a bit in its scat-singing interlude. Most of the final quarter, alas, is depressingly forgettable, though they never did really know how to end albums; it's all so Normie even when it's decent, and the filler tracks on the first half -- the slackening "Rich Man" making very clear the band's inability to locate the strength and passion of something like "Taxi Cab" again -- wouldn't be so offensive if one got the sense that there was any credible reason for the band to overload the marketplace with so much
stuff. There's something poignant about Koenig trying so hard to keep this beloved brand going, but the degree to which it really is now a (highly bougie) brand, and how they're finally upholding all the accusations leveled against them when they surfaced a dedcade ago, is mildly disturbing.
Charly Bliss: Young Enough (Barsuk) [hr]
This is a joyous occasion even if you were fully sold on them already thanks to the irreverent, addictive
Guppy two years ago: it is punk rock growing up in all the right ways. Taking cues from various bands they loved in high school that could never dream of recording anything so delightful in their lives (Fountains of Wayne, Weezer, Panic! at the Disco), they add a lot of texture and moodiness to their raw, bashed-out sound while retaining their basic fast-and-loud dynamism. From the start with the instantly iconic "Blown to Bits," the stage is set by huge riffs, giant hooks, audibly increased confidence on the part of the entire band, who seem at last to be catching up with the unpredictable, well-controlled emotional arcs of singer-guitarist Eva Hendricks, who can't be denied as the spotlight hog of the century here, and I doubt the band would disagree with me that she merits every bit of the attention. To hear her impeccably expressed, universal angst laid against these lovable pop constructions is to feel something like young again, easily as much as
Surfer Girl or "Hot Fun in the Summertime." (Jealous, too; all my generation got was, like, Len. And LFO.) As fiercely pleasurable as this music is -- going so far as to evoke the Cars on the smartly syncopated "Chatroom" -- it's also tough-minded and relentless, with compelling stories ("Camera"), elegant simplicity that never stoops to pandering or unintelligence (the circular "Hurt Me"), and unexpected grace notes that can be roaring, dramatic and brief like "Fighting the Dark," or sprawled-out and grown up and hurting like "Young Enough," all cases in which they remain utterly credible and inviting. In an alternate universe, "Hard to Believe" would've been the biggest rock radio hit of the year. In any universe including ours, this wonderful album reasserts that rock & roll will always be a young person's game, and thank heavens for that.
Ciara: Beauty Marks (s/r)
Regular readers know I sincerely love Ciara and tend to enjoy even her mediocre music so it's never great fun to slam it, and this latest record, liberated from WMG, actually contains a genuine hit ("Level Up"), though one that's already a year old. It does sound slicker than she has in a while, and there are a few buoyant pop songs ("Thinkin' Bout You" and the bubbly "Freak Me") and odd evocations of "Tom's Diner" and Depeche Mode's "Dangerous"... but there's also lots of somewhat generic club empowerment, and a Macklemore guest verse (ugggggh) so it's kind of a wash. The material is surprisingly stale given how convicted she was about moving out, but I maintain she's still an infallibly engaging vocalist and I wouldn't kick "Trust Myself" out of bed, bath or motor vehicle.
Jamila Woods: LEGACY! LEGACY! (Jagjaguwar) [r]
Woods has grown a lot since
HEAVN, which was a free Soundcloud release and sounded like it. By contrast, this largely sounds like something that would have played on a very expensive hi-fi fifty or sixty years ago. It's a name game that comes out swinging, stylish and sensitive on "Betty" and "Zora" and drowns out the Kamasi Washington lite-FM style on the credibly hot "Giovanni," then gradually leans into the less beautiful but no less engaging forms of hi-NRG, trip hop ("Octavia")... and eventually more generic dance music, but nothing we hear is ever less than solid. It's Woods' voice that threads through it, and occupies a room you don't particularly want to leave, with subtle Baduizms here and there on "Sonia" and synth textures that add a touch of menace to an often airtight endeavor. The moments of profanity and cutting loose end up feeling like a relief -- so I look forward to more of that in the future.
The National: I Am Easy to Find (4AD) [r]
Like
Sleep Well Beast, this musically is the pretty-and-bleak-as-ever National sound with bonus electronics and even (on the otherwise draggy "Hey Rosey") a bit of trip hop. Unfortunately, its litany of guest vocals by women, despite lending an interesting relief to the band's normally unbroken sensitive maleness, gives it the feel of being a side project rather than a studio album -- something that might be mitigated if it wasn't so
long and overbearing that its occasional loveliness gets drowned out. The best song, "Where Is Her Head," sounds like Arcade Fire; the worst one, "The Pull of You," is cluttered with chitchat -- who are they, Vampire Weekend? -- and the rest are generally fine. "Not in Kansas" lovingly references R.E.M.'s
Lifes Rich Pageant in a way that feels reverent and genuine, but the Mike Mills serving as producer is not that band's bassist but the writer-director of
20th Century Women, a film everyone reading this should see; as a knob-spinner, though, he's a little too enchanted with John Williams-like choirs for my taste. The lyrics are fine, mostly. The baseline sound remains largely irresistible (see "Oblivions") but with an hour-plus of material it all sounds the same after a while despite the variances in pace and tempo, and you feel like this isn't a band exploring their limits so much as finding them.
Tyler, the Creator: IGOR (Columbia) [hr]
So I won't eat up your evening speculating on whether this is more "mature" or accomplished than
Flower Boy, nor will I try and parse out how it sits with an overall career I used to disdainfully ignore, but let's take one look in the mirror and say this: you're an idiot at this point if you don't kneel at the altar of Tyler as a producer if nothing else. "I Think" makes every other futile gesture toward oldschool Kanye soul soundscapes a joke, and it's not Solange that sells that, it's the artist's own totally unassuming matter-of-fact ingenuity, in which he repeatedly -- not just here but across the whole album -- mixes himself into vibrant sonic wallpaper in a way that's both more pointed and more profound than Matt Berninger turning away from his microphone. He sings sometimes, he rambles repetitively other times; he writes pop but not like on the last record. The songs double back on themselves and deny full-on release like all the best jazz and alternative recordings. I don't claim to be an expert on anyone's psyche and won't try to box in what's mostly just a a pleasurable collection of little earthquakes with overbearing hooks, deliberately strained California vibes and smartly judged samples ("Gone, Gone"). At the same time, though, this
is about something, and it permeates much more than his lyrics which tend toward sidestepping it anyway. Why the old-fashioned horror movie tropes on the title and cover? Because more than some grunting Screaming Lord Sutch of hip hop, he's a self-lacerating George Romero character whose artistry comes at the price of exposing his own humility and doubt, and it's only by falling back on generosity and examining his own issues and fears, and treating his own sense of self with respect and a distinct lack of bombast, that he's come gradually to
be himself: the mild self-criticism and lost voice is baked into who he is right now. And I don't know, maybe it's because I feel like I get that on a personal level, but his snarling, unassuming delivery has become nuanced and deeply engaging and that makes this a head-spinning miniature chronicle of the day to day that it absolutely didn't have to be. But also, just listen to the fucking
sounds, to the alarmingly otherworldly and just as alarmingly sensitive "Thank You," or to the delirious irony and idiosyncrasy of "Are We Still Friends?" and you'll find enough that's personal, true and vital to fill plenty of deep thoughts and dark nights.
Slowthai: Nothing Great About Britain (s/r)
Northampton rapper with an uneasy, messy debut album, basically par for the course in terms of personal statements but boasts at least one cut, "Doorman," with serious punk momentum, a few that constitute obvious noble failures, and lots of padded out material... especially on the streaming sites where it adds six interminable bonus cuts I didn't know weren't part of the album till I checked Wikipedia; after Tyler's 39 minutes it was making me extremely antsy, and I normally wouldn't mention this but I have to get this risible witticism out of my system: "This one's for the ladies / cause they have our babies / and they drive us crazy." The most representative song on the proper LP is "Missing," which is draggy and aggressive and muddy in a particularly English way while feeling a bit too slick to be full-on grime, more like an early 2000s rap rock band's benignly ominous approximation of same. "Peace of Mind" boasts an iPhone alarm and Sid Vicious, but it's on "Toaster" that Tyron Frampton is on to something, contrasting unhinged powerhouse delivery with a calm lush beat; not a new idea, but laid against his voice when it's that off the rails, it keenly suggests the influence of Kendrick Lamar's various laid-on personas while also breaking the mold that sets across the rest of the album, which as on so many modern albums makes a really palpable difference.
ALSO RECOMMENDED:
Jayda G: Significant Changes (Ninja Tune) [the whales' average age was nineteen; "Orca's Reprise"/"Leave Room 2 Breathe"/"Renewal"]
Ex Hex: it's real (Merge) [lost slasher movie soundtrack; "Another Dimension"/"Good Times"]
Quelle Chris: Guns (Mello Music) ["step out daddy long legs, Cab Calloway stride / make a rapper freeze up like I was Zack in Bayside"; "Obamacare"/"You, Me & Nobody Else"/"Straight Shot"]
Elva: Winter Sun (Tapete) [some of her songs still sound like back-of-the-notebook music with front-of-the-notebook words, but one big score on Allo Darlin' here is that the songs the dude sings are actually good too; "Athens"/"Tailwind"]
Orville Peck: Pony (Sub Pop) [goth swagger; "Roses Are Falling"]
Avey Tare: Cows on Hourglass Pond (Domino) [columnated cows domino]
Lee Fields & the Expressions: It Rains Love (Big Crown) ["Will I Get Off Easy"]
Priests: The Seduction of Kansas (Sister Polygon) [lumbering post-punk glory; "The Seduction of Kansas"/"Texas Instruments"]
Anderson. Paak: Ventura (Aftermath) [adorable; "Make It Better"]
ALSO RECOMMENDED FOR THE AMBIENT FILES:
Mary Lattimore & Mac McCaughan: New Rain Duets (Three Lobed) [nice way to calm down]
FURTHER INVESTIGATION TO COME:
* Ezra Collective:
You Can't Steal My Joy
* The Cranberries:
In the End
* L7:
Scatter the Rats
* Rosie Lowe:
Yu
* Laurence Pike:
Holy Spring
Mdou Moctar:
Ilana (The Creator)
Kelsey Lu:
Blood
SOAK:
Grim Town
P!nk:
Hurts 2B Human
Kedr Livanskiy:
Your Need
Haelos:
Any Random Kindness
Tim Hecker:
Anoyo
Carlton Jumel Smith:
1634 Lexington Avenue
Olden Yolk:
Living Theatre
Carly Rae Jepsen:
Dedicated
Megan Thee Stallion:
Fever
Injury Reserve
REJECTS:
W.H. Lung:
Incidental Music
BTS:
Map of the Soul - Persona
Rozi Plain:
What a Boost
The Budos Band:
V
Bibio:
Ribbons
Shovel & Rope:
By Blood
Stealing Sheep:
Big Wows [NYIM]
Local Natives:
Violet Street
Craig Finn:
I Need a New War [NYIM]
Tacocat:
This Mess Is a Place
Drahla:
Useless Coordinates [NYIM]
Bad Religion:
Age of Unreason
Rhiannon Giddens:
There Is No Other
Paula Temple:
Edge of Everything
Caroline Spence:
Mint Condition [NYIM]
The Felice Brothers:
Undress
A.A. Bondy:
Enderness [NYIM]
Alex Lahey:
The Best of Luck Club [NYIM]
Rahsaan Patterson:
Heroes & Gods [NYIM]
ORPHAN TUNES:
Stealing Sheep "Girl" [Big Wows]
ARCHIVAL GRADE CHANGES:
Love Is All:
Two Thousand and Ten Injuries (Polyvinyl 2010) [hr] -> [A+]