Results tagged “albumreview”

Sound is in love with Regina Spektor. There’s nothing it won’t let her do. She’s made her mouth into a synthesizer, morphed her lips into a kazoo-trumpet hybrid, made heartbeats and drumsticks their own instruments, rocked hard with an unamped electric guitar, and put a piano bridge in the middle of a punk song. At first, you might not recognize that adventurous spirit on Spektor’s most recent album, Far. Listen again.

Nowadays we’re so used to the ubiquitous warmed-over nod to past pop forms that Swift’s out-and-out motown or vaudeville sounds can be bracing, especially encountered back-to-back as they are laid out here. But they are also transporting, straight lines back to Abbey Road and Tin Pan Alley. Even under the perhaps unfair impression that Richard Swift is merely playing Dr. Frankenstein on this album, we want to hear more from the monster he’s sewn together using lost limbs of disparate pop genres.

The pressure’s been building behind Dave Longstreth’s meandering Dirty Projectors project for the last few years, and 2007’s excellent if somewhat mystifying Black Flag covers/“reimaginations” album Rise Above brought listener intrigue to a new high—could it be that idiosyncratic oddball and Yale dropout Longstreth was growing nearer to accessibility? It seems so, and, really, the career trajectory here is not at all unlike that of fellow 2009 darlings Animal Collective, in that both started out hyper-obscure and intentionally abrasive, with an emphasis on willful experimentation and defiance of gratification, only to slowly but surely move towards a refined confidence in heightened normalcy. And that’s not to suggest that either outfit has shirked their uniqueness; they instead have learned to channel their innovation in a way that produces complete songs that human beings will actually enjoy, rather than just fragmentary attacks on musical reason. For Dirty Projectors, that turning point is embodied in the sparkling Bitte Orca.

Steve Garcia has a reputation in town, but not in the skanky sense - he's a familiar face at your local I Luv Video, and he has already made a name for himself rock-wise in the apparently defunct Black Lipstick. Stepping into the spotlight with Diagonals, Garcia has traded up from the catchy but often transparent licks of his past project and into a full-force psychedelic machine.

Throughout its thirty-nine minutes, Actor demonstrates a continued development of depth and breadth for Annie Clark, as these songs are meaty in comparison to previous work. Also, the apparent disconnect between the sweetness of her purposely-exposed face (plastering it on the cover of an album is a good way for people to know what you look like, jsyk) and the often dark and foreboding subject matter is more present than ever—rarely does a song go by without something at least mildly disturbing to pull from the lyrics. Add on top of that a full-band willingness to rock out, with even occasional hints of Kraut to boot, and songs like the brutal “Marrow” and the propulsive “Actor Out of Work” are for the first time possible. But the big thing here is that asking a half dozen people which song on the album is their favorite may very well result in a half dozen different answers.

Peter Bjorn and John, blessed as they can be, have for a while appeared to be dodging accountability for the unexpected leap into international fame caused by “Young Folks,” and that song’s ubiquity (think radio, think television, think McDonald’s, think JC Penny), put the somewhat awkward north-Euros into a spotlight their personalities weren’t quite prepared for. To PB&J’s benefit, they haven’t fallen asleep at the experimental wheel, as their clever post-Writer’s Block misdirection Seaside Rock (a slight make-up for Peter Moren’s hideously bland solo album) wandered through instrumental and field recording reels, thus refusing to whet the appetite of a legion of pop-fanatics desperate for another tune to whistle into the ground. But now, with Living Thing, it's time to pay up.

There's something surely intriguing when the star-crossed "supergroup" label becomes affixed to three guys who just a decade ago would have found it nearly impossible to develop a following in the first place, let alone such independent fan bases that when they get together to screw off in the studio it elicits all sorts of anticipatory glee-shouts. Yet in these internet times, musicians such as Spencer Krug, Carey Mercer, and Dan Bejar do have a niche in which to survivably produce some of the most intricate and conceptually demanding albums of the last few years, and even afford themselves the spare time to work on the Swan Lake project, a project best described as what happens when three mad scientists meet at a mad scientist convention and decide to be mad scientists together.

Marissa Nadler’s built a nice little scaffolding of critical acclaim from her last couple albums, and during this time she’s admirably filled the gap between the likes of Josephine Foster and Joanna Newsom on the ethereal side, and St. Vincent and Feist on the populist side. Her airy, controlled approach is on display once again with Little Hells, the excellently titled follow-up to 2007’s Songs III: Bird on the Water.

Mirah surely still has that stunning voice: alternately coy and seductive, delightfully expressive, and always captivating. And it works very, very well here when she’s not cribbing melodies from her earlier albums, and is utilizing the strengths—bombast, playfulness, youthful energy, a variety of influences, and big production—that made her other albums so eminently replayable. If only those strengths weren’t so often forgotten here, only to be replaced with something a little too coffee shop to satisfy.

The album starts off with a couple stunners: “Pieces of You” builds a meditative dirge, a la early Akron/Family, from a nicely woven tapestry of repetitive percussion, and truly, while the entire song is almost absent of variation off its initial theme, it probably could have gone on for a couple more minutes without much complaint. “Fangela,” on the other hand, uses a more standard song structure and is almost strikingly poppy, while still confounding the listener a bit with interpretive possibility, and it’s these two tone-setting tracks plus first single “Tunnelvision” (which may or may not be the album’s best track), that make Here We Go Magic seem destined to take people’s minds off Grizzly Bear and Animal Collective for one godforsaken minute.

After leading off somewhat inauspiciously, the album kicks into gear with the continuously enjoyable “I Want Some More,” a clattering, fuzzy, Doors-y joyride that plays best played loud, and it’s only then that it becomes clear that something more than a toss-off solo album is at hand. And really, it’s as if someone has blown new life into Auerbach, as the freedom to explore beyond the confines of the two-piece liberates him to return to what made him a talent in the first place: rugged vocals, entrancing guitar work, and an ability to write a memorable tune.

Carey Mercer's Blackout Beach project gives him the opportunity to go, without checks and balances, absolutely apeshit. And that’s exactly what he does with Skin of Evil, a deliciously murky concept album built around Donna, the notion of the perfect woman, and her past and present lovers, most of them woefully scorned, yet loving her nonetheless—on a scaffolding of chiming but stark guitar and otherwise complementary instrumentation and backup vocals, rarely is an album elevated so greatly via a close inspection of the lyric sheet. Listen after listen, it’s astounding that a man could make such a romantic album seem so utterly startling.

While Ward's recent career trajectory culminated in a back seat position behind Zooey Deschanel’s recognizable face for much of the past year, Hold Time sees Ward again taking the front of the stage, and one listen to the album demonstrates that while all the hullabaloo may have changed others’ impression of him, his approach remains comfortably much the same. And in terms of his career, that means Hold Time is a pretty solid listen.

It seems like a bad idea to acknowledge to a potential significant other, right up front, that you are, in fact, the backup and not the starter—after all, shouldn’t you let your personality pave the way for you, and not your second-bestness? But Team B didn’t allow their sometimes charming nature to act as a bridge into the band, instead labeling themselves effectively subordinate as the second stringers, Team B’s lineup of bit players from Broken Social Scene, Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, and Beirut besides. But hey, at least they didn’t name the album Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, Beirut, and Broken Social Scene Present Team B. That would have just been too much.

This isn’t the type of thing that’s going to get every smirking college student buying into the hype, with its amalgam of funk grooves, big-ass instrumentation, and a distinct lack of lyrics you can sensibly sing along to, but that’s not to say that every smirking college student has impeccable taste. After all, Amadou and Mariam have been around the block with this music thing for about thirty years, and Welcome to Mali represents not an unaware headfirst dive into West African experimentation but rather the embodiment of a lifetime of refinement. Think The Rolling Stones if only The Rolling Stones were still making music anyone wanted to hear.

Over the past couple weeks it’s become increasingly more difficult to discuss with any semblance of sense the latest release from Animal Collective.

Midori Hirano feels like what happens when all the nerds in school get together and try to make pop music. It might not always be pretty, sometimes it’s just plain awkward, there are instances of pleasant surprise, but in the end, at least they’re giving it their best shot. And Klo: Yuri, Midori Hirano’s sophomore release, feels like the progressive culmination of all this, as its gathering of music theory books and computer savvy results in an academic and sometimes brutally modernist approach to post-classical music.

There is a really great album dying, just dying, to escape from this 53-minute minefield. Because, sure enough, excellent sounds abound here, and perhaps even enough for an LP, but, unfortunately, they are burdened by a slew of headache-inducing sonic experiments no less than difficult to tolerate, let alone enjoy.

Is all his crooning like an inebriated and discernibly less talented Jens Lekman, all his singing about a formidable cast of losers ranging from college town hangers-on to the unimpeachably woman-rejected to the despondently intoxicated, just part of a master plan to make people smile when listening to music, rather than wallow in the effluvious well of their own bourbonized misery?

So when the name Mia Vigar scooted across the musical landscape under headlines of Newsom-ness, I braced myself for the slim possibility of being very pleasantly surprised, and the great likelihood that this new artist would find her music subject to the same shortcomings of virtuosity and intellect that have plagued others aiming to attain the mantle.

Mellow Owl, released November 14 on Whiskey and Apples Records