Don't Fear The Reaper

The top 10 albums of the '00s: No. 1

2011-02-12T18:54:00.001-08:00

Sigur Rós
Ágaetis Byrjun

Ágaetis Byrjun is born in reverse: Drummer Agust's stuttering snare swishes in space; Georg Holm's bass hums like a vintage pedal synth; Kjartan Sveinsson's piano tones bleed and blip; and Jónsi, the instantly memorable voice, swirls in the cosmos. Something roars in the distance, like far-off rocket engines billowing, and then, softly ... ping ... ping ... ping. A call across the void. There's a brief moment of fuzz, then everything snaps into place. Sveinsson's organ tones are slow and meditative, the ping keeping time like breath. Jónsi runs his rosin-coated cello bow across his guitar, and a whole world spills out, as if articulating a life's worth of radiance and suffering in one transcendent groan. The track ends with the snow of a radio transmission followed by a heart beating faster and faster, another touch of flesh-and-blood on an album that so often feels celestial in origin. Slipping the bonds of his native Icelandic, Jónsi also sings in glossolalia -- Hopelandic, as the band calls it -- proving that all you really need is sound. Sound bridges cultures even as it leaves words behind. Even when we can't decipher what he's saying, we understand the emotions and identify with them. Throughout Ágaetis Byrjun, songs graze the sky and tumble to earth. They rise from incalculable trenches and crest into second sunrises. "Viõrar Vel Til Loftárasa" unfolds with elegant piano and strings, guitar shimmering like pedal steel, and ultimately cedes to the freedom of disharmony as the orchestra members play differing passages, all approaching some kind of rapture in the clash. By comparison, "Olsen Olsen" unites its brass section and piper with a full choir for a jubilant sing-along. When the murky keys of "Avalon" skulk in and we hear a clacking like the guts of a piano being plucked, it is then that we can see the other side of Ágaetis Byrjun's circle as it closes in and pulls us into the darkness.

The top 10 albums of the '00s: No. 2

2011-02-06T17:15:00.000-08:00

Death Cab for Cutie
Transatlanticism

After Transatlanticism, there was no way Death Cab for Cutie weren't going to break into the mainstream. Besides the stellar songwriting and instrumentation, it had all the subtle indicators of a classic album, from the pacing to the running order to the transitions and right down to the evocative cover art. A man who knows his way around the picket fence, Ben Gibbard essays suburban dramas --- where a broken vase means so much more than a spill to clean up --- and he doesn't spare himself when wielding the lens. "We Looked Like Giants" communicates its gnawing angst in the opening dull tone from Nick Harmer's bass, with piano cautiously moving in before --- crash! --- the band streak out in a burst. Jason McGerr's snare cracks and the fulminating guitars of Gibbard and Chris Walla yank us from the aerial view to arm's length. We can see the gray subcompact. We can smell the cold mountain air. We can feel the emotions churning in his stomach as he approaches real intimacy with the woman in the backseat. And yet ... there's always that distance. In the epic title track, he equates it to the Atlantic Ocean: "too far for me to row." McGerr gradually boosts the intensity of his playing, and the others follow suit, Walla repeating the central guitar riff and Gibbard calling across the sea, "I need you so much closer. I need you so much closer." They come back stronger every sequence and join in a chorus of "Come Onnnnnnnn! Come Onnnnnnnnn!" until the music is crashing down upon us, a monolithic force of passion and ambition. The distance doesn't matter. We know he'll get there.

The top 10 albums of the '00s: No. 3

2011-02-06T16:55:00.000-08:00

Cat Power
The Greatest

This could have been Chan Marshall's final album. It nearly was. Ground in by her own heel, after years of personal turmoil, she was ready to disappear into the abyss. The album was cut and only two weeks from release. Something snapped, and she retreated to her apartment, where, as she later related in interviews, she turned off her phone, stopped eating and sleeping, and tried to drink it all away. A friend from New York who feared she was in trouble flew down to Miami and found Marshall crazed and unwashed. The friend took her to a treatment center. Marshall has since rebounded to become more comfortable with herself and with the stage. She's not necessarily at home --- she might never reach that state --- but she says she's doing better. If we examine The Greatest in the frame of a would-be suicide note, there is the glaring, Cobain-esque plea "I hate myself and want to die" ("Hate") and the title track, in which she's preparing herself to be buried (metaphorically or otherwise). Yet the album ends on a charged note, with her connecting with a loved one. Although sorrow is the defining emotion in Cat Power's music, The Greatest is the warmest and lushest of her catalog, the result of her backing band at the time, who included Al Green collaborators Leroy Hodges and Mabon "Teenie" Hodges. Together, they made an album that courses with life even as it brushes by death.

The top 10 albums of the '00s: No. 4

2011-02-02T22:49:00.001-08:00

Deftones
White Pony

If you want a shortcut to understanding Deftones, you can jump to 2:43 on "Pink Maggit," the moment when the slow, emotion-choked groans of Stephen Carpenter's ESP are about to reverberate out of earshot. That's when the band explode with a throbbing wound of guitar vehemence, and they burn it in over the next three minutes like they're blanching the earth.

White Pony, the band's third album, came riding in strong and bold, showing them refining their songcraft while branching out in new directions. "Teenager," a soft, pouty song, exercises the turntable talents of then-new member Frank Delgado, while "Elite" points a flamethrower of hardcore metal at the haughty people who exhibit the vanity of royalty without even possessing the fame.

Chino Moreno unleashes an incredible vocal performance in "Digital Bath," maintaining the tunefulness of melody even while pushing his voice past the point where singing ends and screaming begins. In similar territory, the murky "Knife Prty" makes blood run cold with guest singer Rodleen's contributions, which begin as woozy intonations and advance to dog-whistle shrieks. The mixing and the layering are so skilled here that even her most piercing moments move in stride with the musical storm.

When Maynard James Keenan of Tool shows up, he and Moreno trade lines on a slick, menacing California drive in that damp window between the moon and the dawn. Ever discerning, the singers tantalize us with clues as to the nature of the drive, and leave the rest to imagination and interpretation: "Roll the windows down / this cool night air is curious / let the whole world look in / who cares who sees anything." It's J. G. Ballard meets David Lynch, and scenic drives are as valuable as shortcuts.

The top 10 albums of the '00s: No. 5

2011-02-02T22:24:00.000-08:00

The Pipettes
We Are the Pipettes

[U.K. edition]

The Pipettes are in danger of sharing the fate of so many '60s bands -- the ones who put out a remarkable album or EP, broke up, and then were forgotten within 10 years. The U.K. edition of We Are the Pipettes was never issued here, so if you want the physical CD, you'll have to look for the import, and it will likely be hard to find. Mystifyingly, the album released in the U.S. was remixed by a pop producer who kind of missed the point. As I wrote in my review of that album, "It's counterintuitive that a band birthed from '60s nostalgia would benefit from a modernistic recording instead of one in the tradition of Phil Spector, which is what the British version follows." Although cursory listeners probably wouldn't notice much of a difference, the original edition sets the standard. Joy is alive here: every chime sparkling, every chorus brimming with enthusiasm. It's not all just harmonies, either: Listen to the way Gwenno, Rosay and RiotBecki interplay on "One Night Stand," structuring their vocals to ping-pong off one another, perfectly timed. The union of these talents lasted for but one album, with Rosay and RiotBecki moving on to other pursuits in 2008. At least they left us this memento.

The top 10 albums of the '00s: No. 6

2011-01-31T02:19:00.000-08:00

Madvillain
Madvillainy

MF Doom had a clutch of underground-rap classics under his belt when he teamed up with producer and Stones Throw cohort Madlib for the Madvillain project. The duo was indeed dynamic, spiraling out vignettes that crackled with comic book whimsy and intrigue. Madvillainy's beats, rhymes, skits and samples blend seamlessly, as if the racing thoughts of a mad genius.

The supervillain theme plays right into Doom's hands, and he takes on the varying roles with gusto, whether shining in the glare of a club spotlight ("Rhinestone Cowboy") or presiding over the imaginary opulence of the "Madvillain Bistro Bed & Breakfast Bar & Grill Cafe-Lounge on the water" ("Bistro"). His gobs of pop culture references dovetail with the scraps of dialogue mined from old TV shows and radio broadcasts, begetting a vortex where the expression "egads" sidles up to "true that."

Humor abounds, with the emcee taking on halitosis in "Operation Lifesaver Aka Mint Test" (choice line: "Fellas don't fess / some of 'em just need to eat the whole thing of Crest"). Madlib, playing his Quasimoto character, gets in on the vocal action, fostering some friendly competition on "America's Most Blunted."

Given the overall zaniness, Madvillainy's crystallization of romantic betrayal on "Fancy Clown" is unexpected and stirring. Having first weathered the blow of being cheated on, the supervillian feels burning embarrassment when word makes it around on the street, and his reaction is a mixture of lashing out at his lover and, believe it or not, blaming himself. It's a moment that rounds the cartoonish characters, pulling back the mask to show a mortal man beneath.

The top 10 albums of the '00s: No. 7

2011-01-31T02:12:00.000-08:00

Radiohead
Amnesiac

Kid A will always be cited as the more important album, for it was the first one bearing Radiohead's stylistic shift to chilly electronics. And there can be only one first. But the overlooked jewel of Radiohead's '00s output was Amnesiac, Kid A's snakier, arcane cousin, which dropped only months before 9/11, and whose cryptic messages we digested during those anxious times.

"Pyramid Song" wafted out with Thom Yorke's eerie oooos, somehow eternal. Like sand. "Knives Out" belied its jazzy tempo, a sunken-faced rogue of a song beneath. The somber sighs of brass and chirruping clarinets of "Life in a Glasshouse" harked back to the 1930s, and its reference to lynching swung a pointer to Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" as a possible ancestor.

On the more technological side, "Like Spinning Plates" gasped, with Yorke's vocals threatening to splinter under strain. Going further, there was no voice at all in "Hunting Bears," two haunting passages of Jonny Greenwood's electric guitar. Played twice over a nodding synth and faded out. "I Might Be Wrong" lathed its synth drone while the blunted drum pops and rhythm guitar wriggled forward and snapped back, like limbs removed from a body but still psychically attached.

And of course there was the limited-edition packaging (which can also be seen on the album's cover): a frayed red hardcover book suggesting secrets it could not reveal.

The top 10 albums of the '00s: No. 8

2011-01-31T02:01:00.000-08:00

Coldplay
Parachutes

Before Apple. Before Gwyneth. Before all those Make Trade Fair gestures. Chris Martin was just a student playing with Will Champion, Jonny Buckland and Guy Berryman, unconsciously exploring his vulnerability as he sang a paean to a woman ("Yellow"), wished she would notice him ("Shiver"), and longed, in one respect or another, for connection. He was someone more like us.

On this concise monument to young adulthood, Martin's appeal for love and togetherness is part quaver, part croon. The tender sway of "Sparks" could have served as the soundtrack to much dorm-room necking, but Parachutes wasn't focused on the sex. Intimacy was the goal. If only it wasn't so hard to reach ...

"Trouble" starts out with stately piano and a confident guitar riff, but then, like anxiety creeping up, they fade out, and in comes Martin's opening: "Oh, no / I see / a spider web is tangled up with me." This idea of being trapped also comes up on "High Speed" ("We been living life inside a bubble"), and the dour, largely acoustic "We Never Change" sees him stuck repeating his mistakes, unable to move forward and achieve what he wishes.

"Don't panic," that hoary air of reassurance, seems like something Martin would have heard a few times amid his fretfulness, and "Don't Panic" bookends with "Everything's Not Lost," the album's last track. While "Everything's Not Lost" bursts with jubilance, having made it to the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, "Don't Panic" finds Martin with a chorus of "We live in a beautiful world." He sings it with something less than certainty: He sings it as if trying to convince himself it's true.

The top 10 albums of the '00s: No. 9

2011-01-30T23:29:00.000-08:00

Beck
Sea Change

There's a scene in the movie "Adventureland" where the main character, a highbrow college grad stuck doing summer work at a carnival, introduces his foxy co-worker to his "bummer tape." "These are my favorite bummer songs," he tells her. "They're truly miserable, pit-of-despair-type songs. I think you'll love it." Later on, when they're in her car, she plays it. As they drive, the cassette fills the space between them as he stares at her, needing her. They stop by a bridge in Pittsburgh, where he overtakes her with an intense kiss. But the relationship they embark on is not an easy one.

In 2002, after nine years together, Beck Hansen and his longtime girlfriend split up. In his wreckage, the stylistic vagabond became a bard of the brokenhearted. He strums in a shell-shocked funk on Sea Change, an apt description of his retreat from the whirling, fluorescent Jell-O shots atmosphere of 1999's Midnite Vultures. Sea Change is a part of Beck's chameleon cloak, and with Midnite Vultures preceding it, the albums must've looked like a bipolar breakdown. Seen another way, Midnite Vultures fits the giddy, carefree highs of stock market euphoria, and Sea Change is the burst bubble, the goo running out.

It's an album of resignation ("I'm tired of fighting / tired of fighting / fighting for a lost cause"), wounded confessions ("It's nothing that I haven't seen before / but it still kills me, like it did before") and crippled composure ("'Cause it feels like I'm watching something dyyyyyyin'"). There's even the emotional scavenging of "Round the Bend," in which he achieves an eerie Nick Drake-level of desolation, the strings curling and eddying like wind pushing fog over a moor.

Naturally, he'd do a 180 again, but this was his moment alone, outside. Adrift. This was his bummer tape.

The top 10 albums of the '00s: No. 10

2011-01-30T22:12:00.000-08:00

Norah Jones
Come Away With Me

Though its ubiquity after the 2003 Grammys spawned a backlash that exists to this day --- that of deriding Norah Jones' music as bland or corporate or insignificant --- Come Away With Me, if anything, puts the lie to all those charges. It's undeniably significant in terms of sales and awards, and it likewise rocketed Jones from obscurity, changing her life and basically giving her a blank check as to her artistic career. But let's not get too technical. Come Away With Me showcases Jones' tremendous appeal as a singer, and it introduces us to her fruitful collaboration with guitarist and songwriter Jesse Harris, which resulted in her best-known song, "Don't Know Why," along with almost half the album's originals. The covers, no less significant, show her to be adept at assimilating country ("Cold Cold Heart") and FDR-era pop ("The Nearness of You"). She's so cozy with the material that her take on J.D. Loudermilk's "Turn Me On" (which she may have heard by way of Nina Simone), from the '60s, and the Carmichael-Washington composition "The Nearness of You," from the '30s, don't feel like dusty relics. There's no stiffness or uncertainty in her delivery, only a deep love and understanding of the music, which she internalizes and passes on to us in her warm, maple syrup tones.

Update

2011-01-30T21:32:00.000-08:00

It's with some chagrin that I return, slinking in with my best-of-the-decade picks when we're already a year into, well, whatever this post-aughts decade ends up being called. On the upside, I haven't felt any regrets about these best-of picks, so they have already stood the test of time.

I'd like to say I'll be posting more reviews soon after this list, but my job situation changed last year and has been contributing to my shiftlessness. So, if you see a long gap in my publishing, check back, but don't check back as often.

For the curious

2010-03-06T01:13:00.000-08:00

These are the albums I heard in full last year, and here's how they rank, relative to one another:

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart- The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

Nite Jewel- Good Evening

Grizzly Bear- Veckatimest

Speck Mountain- Some Sweet Relief

The Flaming Lips- Embryonic

Crocodiles- Summer of Hate

The Raveonettes- In and Out of Control

Mulatu Astatke and the Heliocentrics- Inspiration Information, Vol. 3

Mastodon- Crack the Skye

The Bird and the Bee- Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future

Depeche Mode- Sounds of the Universe

Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions- Through the Devil Softly

Yo La Tengo- Popular Songs

Prefuse 73- Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian

Built to Spill- There Is No Enemy

M. Ward- Hold Time

Wilco- Wilco (the Album)

Gun Outfit- Dim Light

Jay-Z- The Blueprint 3

Kid Cudi- Man on the Moon: The End of Day

Doves- Kingdom of Rust

Major Lazer- Guns Don't Kill People ... Lazers Do

Mason Jennings- Blood of Man

Animal Collective- Merriweather Post Pavilion

N.A.S.A.- The Spirit of Apollo

Au Revoir Simone- Still Night, Still Light

Norah Jones- The Fall

Eels- Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs of Desire

Asobi Seksu- Hush

Dirty Projectors- Bitte Orca

VAST- Me and You

Dan Deacon- Bromst

Flipper- Love

La Roux- La Roux

Bat for Lashes- Two Suns

The Dead Weather- Horehound

Camera Obscura- My Maudlin Career

St. Vincent- Actor

Neko Case- Middle Cyclone

Zero 7- Yeah Ghost

Doom- Born Like This

Yeah Yeah Yeahs- It's Blitz!

Chris Cornell- Scream

Morrissey- Years of Refusal

Air- Love 2

John Mayer- Battle Studies

Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson- Summer of Fear

K'Naan- Troubadour

Imogen Heap- Ellipse

Green Day- 21st Century Breakdown

The Prodigy- Invaders Must Die

Lady Sovereign- Jigsaw

Amy Speace- The Killer in Me

Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band- Outer South

Passion Pit- Manners

David Bazan- Curse Your Branches

Royksopp- Junior

Sonic Youth- The Eternal

Moby- Wait for Me

Erin McKeown- Hundreds of Lions

Basement Jaxx- Scars

Girls- Album

Super Furry Animals- Dark Days/Light Years

Mos Def- The Ecstatic

BlakRoc- BlakRoc

Dinosaur Jr.- Farm

The Mars Volta- Octahedron

Simian Mobile Disco- Temporary Pleasure

Amadou & Mariam- Welcome to Mali

Felix da Housecat- He Was King

Sufjan Stevens- The BQE

Maxwell- BLACKsummers'night

The Big Pink- A Brief History of Love

The Church- Untitled 23

Kings of Convenience- Declaration of Dependence

Cake- Motorcade of Generosity

U2- No Line on the Horizon

Crystal Stilts- Alight of Night

Dolores O'Riordan- No Baggage

Viva Voce- Rose City

Al B. Sure!- Honey I'm Home

Mariah Carey- Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel

Paramore- Brand New Eyes

Peter Bjorn and John- Living Thing

Jadakiss- The Last Kiss

Metric- Fantasies

Weezer- Raditude

Sunn 0)))- Monoliths & Dimensions

Rodrigo y Gabriela- 11:11

Porcupine Tree- The Incident

Wolfmother- Cosmic Egg

Shakira- She Wolf

Echo & the Bunnymen- The Fountain

Flight of the Conchords- I Told You I Was Freaky

Maps- Turning the Mind

Franz Ferdinand- Tonight

Cracker- Sunrise in the Land of Milk and Honey

Patterson Hood- Murdering Oscar (And Other Love Songs)

Whitney Houston- I Look to You

Silversun Pickups- Swoon

The Crystal Method- Divided by Night

Tinted Windows- Tinted Windows

Better Than Ezra- Paper Empire

Trans-Siberian Orchestra- Night Castle

Wyclef Jean- From the Hut, to the Projects, to the Mansion

Soundtrack of Our Lives- Communion

MSTRKRFT- Fist of God

Meat Puppets- Sewn Together

Scarlett Johansson and Pete Yorn- Break Up

Lionel Richie- Just Go

Os Mutantes- Haih...Ou Amortecedor...

2009 albums I heard in full after the cutoff date:

The xx- xx

Health- Get Color

Tegan and Sara- Sainthood

Clipse- Til the Casket Drops

Devendra Banhart- What Will We Be

R. Kelly- Untitled

Lil Wayne- Rebirth

2009 albums I heard most of but not quite all of:

The Avett Brothers- I and Love and You

Bebel Gilberto- All in One

Pink Martini- Splendor in the Grass

A Fine Frenzy- Bomb in a Birdcage

The Phenomenal Handclap Band- The Phenomenal Handclap Band

Our Lady Peace- Burn Burn

Mario- D.N.A.

The top 10 albums of 2009: No. 1

2010-03-06T00:55:00.000-08:00

The Pains of Being

Pure at Heart
The Pains of Being

Pure at Heart

In what plays like a love note to mid- to late-'80s jangle pop and shoegazer distortion, the debut album by New York foursome The Pains of Being Pure at Heart skips and zips, chirps and chimes, altogether chipper and defiantly alive. With élan that verges on delusion, their bright-eyed melodies defend a heroin casualty and a brother-sister tryst, as well as relate more familiar youthful pursuits, like the raging impulse to lock lips and hips.

Such urges fuel anticipation and impatience in "Come Saturday," sprinting drum rolls and a tumbling guitar rush playing the role of the firing-on-all-cylinders adrenal glands. The library, such a testament to the pent-up, the potential, is one place where desires erupt and give the microfiche something to stare at, in the cheekily titled "Young Adult Friction." The male-female vocal blending of guitarist Kip Berman and keyboardist Peggy Wang-East fosters the Romeo-and-Juliet overtones.

True to Shakespeare, there is tragedy, though you probably wouldn't know it before you read the lyrics. A plucky snare-and-kick-drum beat and a guitar line evoking the piano hook of David Bowie's "Modern Love" open "A Teenager in Love," belying the fact that Alli, the teenager in question, has died, most likely as a direct consequence of her lust for life, which happened to involve heroin. When someone impugns Alli as being "dead all along," Berman scornfully tells the heavens (or quite possibly her gravestone), "He hadn't lived a day / the way you lived in your final days."

Murkier --- or what would be murkier if Berman and Wang-East didn't sound so chaste --- are the apparent tale of incest in "This Love Is Fucking Right!" (blithely unrepentant) and the not-necessarily-consensual couplings in "The Tenure Itch" ("These late night sessions, he's master still / Just one more lesson leaves you twisting to his will.")

But the album's brilliant melodies and endearing optimism bathe everything in a radiant, innocent light. It's all too easy to get lost in the sweet alliance of burbling bass, frisky drums, jangling guitar and singing keyboard. So pure at heart, so high on life.

The top 10 albums of 2009: No. 2

2010-02-18T22:11:00.000-08:00

Nite Jewel
Good Evening

When we're first introduced to Ramona Gonzalez's voice, on "Bottom Rung," it's buried; perhaps it is the rung.

And yet it's all around us, enfolding the sanctuary- or pagoda-suited keyboard, as if she's pulling a curtain of raindrop beads.

Read my review of Good Evening here.

The top 10 albums of 2009: No. 3

2010-02-14T00:54:00.000-08:00

Grizzly Bear
Veckatimest

On Grizzly Bear's follow-up to the much-praised Yellow House, they again draw inspiration from setting. This time the title is a little island off Massachusetts that isn't even recognized by the Census Bureau. But that's only the start of the mystique.

Read my review of Veckatimest here.

The top 10 albums of 2009: No. 4

2010-02-14T00:12:00.000-08:00

Speck Mountain
Some Sweet Relief

The sophomore album from Chicago's Speck Mountain is infused with a spiritual energy. Just don't expect mitres and pulpits.

Read my review of Some Sweet Relief here.

The top 10 albums of 2009: No. 5

2010-02-09T02:04:00.000-08:00

The Flaming Lips
Embryonic

Listening to Embryonic, I can't help but think it was meant to be experienced in a format other than CD. Vinyl, maybe: spread out over two or three records. Or perhaps on cassette, giving it an A side and a B side. Or maybe its songs were meant to be beamed directly into your brain and arranged to match your mood, care of some device to be invented decades from now.

Of course, this is the same band that released Zaireeka, a four-disc curiosity intended to be consumed simultaneously. (In other words, you'd need four different stereos.) Unlike The Soft Bulletin (1999), which came two years after Zaireeka, and unlike Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002) or At War With the Mystics (2006), Embryonic scales back the pop melodies and indulges in atmosphere. This atmosphere vacillates from frenetic and clattering ("Aquarius Sabotage," "Scorpio Sword") to peaceful and drifting ("The Impulse").

"Gemini Syringes" is trance-inducing space rock: As German mathematician Thorsten Wörmann deliberates on an equation, the slow throb of Michael Ivins' bass sways us into a haze. And there's an intermittent clacking, too. It sounds reptilian (but is later revealed to be ... Karen O[!]).

In quiet ballads "Evil" and "If," which could be parts I & II of the same song, Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd examine the good-vs.-evil duality of human nature. They show considerable sensitivity in these, Coyne wanting in the former to spare someone pain, and in the latter Drozd weighing which human motivation is stronger. Bad news: They conclude it's evil, although they do preface that by implying we have more than a small choice in the matter. Drozd sings, "They can be gentle, too / if they decide."

In that spirit, Coyne and Karen O collaborate, almost flirtatiously, on "I Can Be a Frog," with her providing imitations of whatever animal he mentions. There are moments when the two nearly break out in laughter, but Coyne's sincerity sells it. You can bet that even as he throws O a loop, like tossing in "helicopter" before "wolf," he has the underlying message in mind, which is that the woman in the song can be anything she wants to be. (Perhaps coincidentally, O did the soundtrack for the 2009 big-screen adaptation of "Where the Wild Things Are.") It's remarkable how tickled and carefree she is here, given how cold she can come across in her Yeah Yeah Yeahs material.

With another cameo --- this one an uncredited David Bowie (or if not, an amazing likeness) --- Coyne picks up the thread of good and evil and loops it around the stargazing theme. After Bowie/pseudo-Bowie counts up to 10 (signifying blast-off?), he gives voice to the dark side ("Free to eat the fruit / from the evil tree"). Also, it seems that those sticky-palmed heathens grant their bodies and/or their souls to "the silver machine" in exchange.

Planets and stars, whether astronomy or astrology in nature, fit the Lips' proclivities; after all, they did spend the better part of the past decade working on their eccentric sci-fi venture, the film "Christmas to Mars." Yet there's a Pink Floyd-esque vastness about Embryonic. Wonder how it would sync up to "The Wizard of Oz." Or would "2001: A Space Odyssey" be more appropriate?

The top 10 albums of 2009: No. 6

2010-01-30T06:19:00.000-08:00

Crocodiles
Summer of Hate

When I write poetry, I most commonly do it as a form of exorcism. I have feelings I need to vent, whether frightful or painful or thoughtful, and writing them down allows me to process them, or to make sense of them, or to move past them. This has the side benefit of allowing me to create something out of a raw experience. Sometimes I end up with something beautiful, even if all I started out with was something troubling.

I suspect musicians do this, too. Certainly not all the time, but it's wonderful when their irrepressible impulse to share love or humor or angst or despair culminates in a great piece of music. Think of all the breakups and setbacks and breakthroughs they survived or overcame or championed. And it might never have been, had they chose to, say, go watch TV.

Crocodiles, a band from San Diego, have funneled their throbbing temples and clenched teeth and aching hearts and wistful stares into a 34-minute nerve net of emotion. Merging tremeloed guitar with drum programming and '60s pop sensibility, Brandon Welchez and Charles Rowell capture the tender as well as the brutal.

Some tracks spurt confrontational energy. "Refuse Angels" lashes out with rapid-fire rimshots. "Flash of Light," which begins with swing and swagger, disintegrates into a full minute of caustic, repellent shooshing effects, like an aural strobe gone haywire. In the latter song, Welchez sings, "Tonight I'm gonna set my house on fire. ... Gonna rewrite my life."

The title track and "I Wanna Kill" would seem similarly inclined, although "I Wanna Kill" displays a gallows humor. Featuring a riff that could have been cribbed from The Crystals' "Then He Kissed Me," the song links a man's meager beginnings to his present frustration. It's the poppiest song on the album, with a back-and-forth chorus that includes "all the kids sing swan songs / all the kids sing along with me." This is somewhat more disturbing when you take into account that Welchez is a teacher by day.

Often, the message might be one of struggle, but the mood is anything but oppressive. "Sleeping With the Lord" assembles majestic vibratoed synths, almost like a take on Vangelis' classic theme "Chariots of Fire."

The CD, containing no liner notes, is scrawled "lovingly dedicated to Willy Graves." Graves was their bassist in a previous band, The Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower. He died in autumn 2008 at the age of 28. So it's reasonable to assume his passing informed or influenced the tone of at least some these songs. Death and the afterlife is a recurring theme, with religious imagery popping up in several songs.

Summer of Hate has many highlights, but "Here Comes the Sky" is something extra special. Rowell's tremolo really shines here, shimmering amid a wavering synth that flows over it like an aura. There's something crushing about this track's tenderness, in the same way that some of Brian Wilson's songs go for that lump in your throat. Welchez tells us that his love has departed --- nothing special there --- but when he confesses, "In your absence, my heart's overflowed," it's such a powerful and unusual statement. He's not mad at her (or him, I suppose, although he equates her/him to a rose, which is a pretty strong feminine symbol); he actually has so much in his heart that it pours out. Continuing the metaphor, he says, together, they could grow to the sky, "where the weeds who are after us dry up and die."

It's so fanciful, so preposterous: a garden in the sky! And yet he's so unfaltering in his delivery, there's no denying that this is a deep avowal. Core-deep. It's a hope that we know is a dream. An impossible dream.

And Rowell's guitar gently weeps.

The top 10 albums of 2009: No. 7

2010-01-30T06:17:00.000-08:00

The Raveonettes
In and Out of Control

Bang!

Read my review of In and Out of Control here.

The top 10 albums of 2009: No. 8

2010-01-23T17:10:00.000-08:00

Mulatu Astatke

and the Heliocentrics
Inspiration Information, Vol. 3

Contrary to what you might expect from the title, this is the first album made by Mulatu Astatke and the Heliocentrics. Together, that is. He's an Ethiopian jazz master, and they're a young U.K. band with worldly tastes (which is to say that their talents encompass instruments beyond the standard, Anglo-centric array of guitar, bass, drums, piano and keyboard). Their pairing was facilitated by the Strut record label of London for its Inspiration Information series, an influential-veteran-meets-hotshot-newcomer arrangement.

The two have chemistry, for sure. Ghostly Moog whines in "Dewel" give way to a chorus of horns, the sax, trumpet and trombone pattering in common conversation. Waiting in the bass groove, Astatke emerges with twinkles of vibraphone. Then the horns chatter anew.

The bulk of the songs were composed by Heliocentrics members, who number Malcolm Catto (drums), Jake Ferguson (bass), Oliver Parfitt (keys and synths), Adrian Owusu (guitar), Jack Yglesias (flute and percussion), Tom Hodges (theremin and saw), Dan Keane (cello), Kat Arney (harp), James Arben (clarinet and sax), Shabaka Hutchings (tenor sax) and James Allsop (bass clarinet). It's a full house.

Mulatu Astatke (piano, percussion) seems more mentor than bandleader here, although the tracks are bent toward traditional Ethiopian arrangements rather than new age eclecticism. Some guest players bring in washint, krar, begena and masenqo, instruments little-heard in Western music. Dawit Gebreab plays washint on "An Epic Story," the flute tones offset against a synth wind. It would seem befit for a warrior, one surveying his future kingdom from atop a bluff, perhaps at the cusp of daybreak.

The players save the best for last, though. "Anglo Ethio Suite" unfolds with suspense, a deliberately paced composition with a solemn and recurring cello theme. Malcolm Catto's kit skittering opens the piece, and Kat Arney dusts the scene with harp before Jake Ferguson's combo of bass and begena establishes the hypnotic groove. Astatke, at the piano, darts out, then retreats. Dan Keane's thin, high strings squeak out, and from there the track narrows in on cello and flute, as if the two are trapped in the face of impending tumult. The strings worry and scurry, then scrabble feverishly. A clarinet squeals. The end is near. Literally.

The top 10 albums of 2009: No. 9

2010-01-16T00:35:00.000-08:00

Mastodon
Crack the Skye

With Crack the Skye, Mastodon have charged into the realm of accessibility. Sung vocals, avoided by some metalheads like a strain of the pox, are in steady supply here. Throughout, the Atlanta metal quartet's musicianship remains enviable: They tear through savage riffs and runs, pulling tempo change-ups on a dime, an equilibrium of ferocity and control. Sabbath would be proud.

Read my review of Crack the Skye here.

The top 10 albums of 2009: No. 10

2010-01-13T04:29:00.000-08:00

The Bird and the Bee
Ray Guns Are Not
Just the Future

Just to be sure, this is not a children's album. And yet it's uncanny how Ray Guns could fit the form, so gentle and good-natured and parental. Despite what Inara George (the Bird) twitters on "What's in the Middle" --- "If you say it all the time, a dirty word will get a cleaning" --- you won't find any cursing here. That's a bit of a change from The Bird and the Bee's debut full-length (The Bird and the Bee, 2007), which included their buzzed-about track "F*cking Boyfriend," complete with a coy little asterisk. (The song was later picked up for the "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" soundtrack.) Of course, their profanity was never profuse or controversial by rock 'n' roll standards; "tame" would be more precise. These days, however, everything comes kissed with congeniality. For instance, when George chides a scoundrely beau, she says, "You're a cad" --- even though the tongues of most would be more likely to say, "You're an asshole."

Greg Kurstin (the Bee) outfits the tale with an accordion for the rogue --- or rapscallion, by the Gallic air of the wheeze --- along with a flouncy beat and banana peel sound effect. The latter in particular aims to conjure comical high jinks. The combination strays close to cheesy, but it's endearing in the context of the album.

Plus, who could predict the poignant performance that follows? "Witch" is a Bond-theme doppelgänger about a femme fatale realizing her powers have fizzled. George's vocal performance is remarkable for the vulnerability it communicates. Here a temptress falls in love and essentially has the spell turned on her. "How could I haunt you," she sings, "keep you close / when you can see the seams, the fraying of my dress? / I am defenseless."

Just as effective, but back on the carefree side of things, is "Diamond Dave," a re-examination of her schoolgirl crush on the flashy, hedonistic lead singer of Van Halen, David Lee Roth. She concludes, "No one can hold a candle," and she dovetails that with a revelation of her continued attraction: "I still carry such a flame." The song's bleeps and bloops create a carnival atmosphere, joining prancing drums and nicely timed chimes. Strings flit like nylon cords zipping from an invisible pulley.

Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future makes a case for Kurstin being the Willy Wonka of effects. He's quick to include a whimsical keyboard flourish, whether it's the "ooo" pulse on "Ray Gun" or the hammered dulcimer on "My Love" or the accordion on "You're a Cad."

At least some of it is motivated by humor. "Phil" is a wink: The song, just 10 seconds long, is simply a drum fill, which serves as an intro to "Polite Dance Song," itself a lark. "Polite Dance Song" pokes fun at automatic rock-show requests --- "Put your hands in the air," "Give it up," "Clap your hands" and so on --- and it does this by phrasing them to be excessively gracious, becoming sillier as the requests get randier. Of course, the album as a whole is exceedingly polite, so "Polite Dance Song" is also a self-parody, in a way.

Humor and whimsy tend to be more common in children's music, not because children don't suffer, too, but because ... well, there could be a lot of reasons. The rugrats aren't out there cutting records and commiserating with their peers over spilled milk and gas pains. And parents are the ones buying the music, so it's natural that they'd want their kids to laugh rather than cry. (If your kids enjoy Mudhoney's "Touch Me I'm Sick," maybe they'll grow up to be mentally disturbed. Then again, maybe they just dig rock music.)

In the end, perhaps the Bird and the Bee's tender turn was prophetic. After all, Inara George is pregnant now.

So long, 2009

2009-12-30T22:34:00.000-08:00

What a dismal ending to the decade: mass unemployment, lost benefits, winnowed savings, dying publications, resurgent terrorist threats. When I step outside, the bite of the cold wind seems too cinematic to be real. But, of course, December always brings that bite, in good years and bad ones. And it's nearly time to look back on the year -- and on the decade -- and remember the best of it. Feel free to share your bests, too. We're all in this together.

Candy with a dark center

2009-11-24T18:51:00.000-08:00

The Raveonettes
In and Out of Control
Score: 8

With a surfeit of pop hooks and a greater emphasis on the chorus, Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo have wrought a compulsively listenable album. On the surface, In and Out of Control breezes along, all lightness and brevity and fuh-fuh-fun. But the candy coating encases some heavy subjects. Gang rape, suicide and domestic violence feature, along with The Raveonettes' staple, drugs. How they sing about these things makes all the difference.

In the most striking juxtaposition, "Boys Who Rape (Should All Be Destroyed)," Wagner and Foo and overlay their vocals and stagger them, somewhere between an echo and a call-and-response pattern. They start the song with the chorus (the entirety of which appears in the song title), then go verse 1, chorus, abbreviated verse 1, chorus, instrumental bridge, and they repeat the chorus while fading in an a cappella version of it whose stuttering is more bubblegum than doo wop. The song's lyrics are bleak, with a girl forever haunted by rape, but by putting it in the mold of a catchy, happier song, The Raveonettes are accomplishing a few things: They're making sure the song's message gets heard and they're increasing the likelihood of it sinking in through repeated plays. And the multiple vocal tracks of Sharin Foo could be seen as representing feminine solidarity, almost like a support group.

That sympathetic tone appears again on "Suicide," which follows a "little runaway girl" whose life at work and at home has left her desperate to escape. The verse goes from one receding strum of surf guitar to a full-blast chorus of pounding snare, multiple electric guitars, bass and layered vocals, personifying the girl bolting out the door.

But the sympathy ends in "Break Up Girls!" Marrying squalling guitar carnage to an orgasm of distortion, the album's penultimate track introduces itself with two minutes of breakneck terror, before easing into the lyrics. Targeting "bunny girls" and the men who abuse them, Foo and Wagner implore the ladies to LEAVE. "Break up, girls," they urge, "You might like it."

Still, is there a wrinkle of hypocrisy on In and Out of Control? Or perhaps songwriters with slightly different stands on rough trade? Wagner, who wrote "Break Up Girls!," claims, "Sadistic girls, I don't get you" (even though he obviously means masochistic), yet in opening track "Bang!," co-written with producer Thomas Troelsen, he says, "Bang! When you whip me, baby / Bang! When I scream now, baby / Bang! You know I love it all the time."

Of course, the album would function just as well if lyrics were changed. "D.R.U.G.S.," which Foo and Wagner spell out in the eighth track, gets its wings from the incursions of reverbed uh-oooh-wha-uhts and ooo-wooing.

This food for thought doubles as dessert.

Now Scything: Doom, Al B. Sure!, Trans-Siberian Orchestra

2009-11-24T17:27:00.000-08:00

Doom
Born Like This
Score: 6

The man behind the iron mask (or whatever metal it's made of), has always been a jester, turning lyrical somersaults through subject matter that had little potential for menace. Food, cartoons and comic books, all underrepresented topics in hip-hop, served as frequent inspirations. So it's disappointing to hear him strike such a hard tone on Born Like This, injecting cynicism from a Charles Bukowski reading and otherwise letting the fun whoosh out like air from an untied balloon. "Yessir!," one of two songs with a Wu-Tang Clan guest (in this case, Raekwon), throws in some gunshots, symbolic of his passage from busting a gut to busting a cap. His collaboration with Ghostface Killah, "Angelz," which luxuriates in spy movie horns and strings, clutters the escapade with unnecessary beats, and both emcees gave a superior delivery of the song on the 2006 Nature Sounds comp "Natural Selection." On one level, "Batty Boys" is gay-bashing out of left field; on the other, it could be seen as a dis track (and a meta one, at that): Doom the "supervillian" rapper (patterned after Marvel Comics' Doctor Doom character) stepping into the world of the superhero Batman, a flagship star of the rival DC Comics brand. Hope it's just a bad joke.

Al B. Sure!
Honey I'm Home
Score: 5

Now here's a guy who might have some idea how Portishead felt. Al B. Sure! stepped away for 17 years, focusing on business and recovering from a car accident. He's a different man now, natch, but it's a shame that he no longer carries the virile spark of yesteryear. His voice is pleasantly creamy, aged delicately, but there's a bit of a Rip Van Winkle-ism here, as he covers both Michael Jackson's "Lady in My Life" (1982) and Sting's "Fragile" (1987) -- and remains faithful to the original versions of each -- almost as if they were little-known and contemporary compositions. Both songs are near-standards by now, so a faithful approach was an unpropitious road for him to take. The result is better than karaoke, but his renditions don't improve the album. In fact, the tightness and inherent hooks of those songs help to point out where Honey I'm Home's originals are lacking.

Trans-Siberian Orchestra
Night Castle
Score: 4

Night Castle is PG-rated symphonic metal that seems all Europe, yet it came from New York. Also, it's 120 minutes long!! Save yourself! (Kidding. Kind of.) This double album has riffs, Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, a bugler's requiem, "Nut Rocker," "O Fortuna," a children's choir, pseudo mook rock and Broadway theatrics. It's like an all-you-can-eat buffet thrown into a 50-foot blender.

Now Scything: Flipper,Tinted Windows, Felix da Housecat

2009-10-25T12:20:00.000-07:00

Flipper
Love
Score: 6

Like sardines with an impossibly distant expiration date, Flipper's first studio album in 16 years is grungy goodness straight from the tin. With Krist Novoselic on bass and Jack Endino producing, there are even moments reminiscent of Nirvana's Bleach, albeit without Kurt Cobain's songcraft. (Check out the opening of "Triple Mass," in which the bass burbles up and the guitar materializes out of feedback.) Former bassist Bruce Loose has stepped up to the mike, rasping and snarling over the blunt-force dredge 'n' roll supplied by Novoselic, drummer Steve DePace and guitarist Ted Falconi. "Old Graves," the album's plodding highlight, recounts a car plowing through a children's stick ball game. The foreshadowing is wonderful, with Flipper enacting a wordless grind for two-and-a-half minutes before Loose comes in. His voice numb, he hints at the tragedy by pointing out objects that passersby would take for granted, ones that blend into the background of life: "A piece of chalk / laying on the ground / broken on the sidewalk / The old frayed knot / moldy with rot / once was a jump rope / on the tree trunk." Chilling.

Tinted Windows
Tinted Windows
Score: 4

The lineup was intriguing enough to set imaginations in motion: What would you get with a combination of Cheap Trick (Bun E. Carlos), Fountains of Wayne (Adam Schlesinger), The Smashing Pumpkins (James Iha) and Hanson (Taylor Hanson)? It turns out, not much worth imagining. Tinted Windows' debut endeavors to propel us on a sugar-addled spree, to have us bobbing along to fizzy pop-rock love songs sprayed out in a sheen of onomatopoeic choruses. ("Uh oh / uh oh / uh oh / woah woah woah," goes the one from lead-off cut "Kind of a Girl"). Yet the set hurtles beyond radio-friendly, threatening to fall into Radio Disney land. And while it's true that Hanson could be seen as precursors to the Jonas Brothers, Hanson made fluff, not drivel. Tinted Windows have more talent among them than a whole army of Jonas Brothers, but would they gain much comfort from that categorization? Schlesinger was the chief songwriter here, but banal has replaced his standard clever, and the riffs and lyrics allegedly inspired by that never-run-dry stand-by, love, feel more like well-meaning fakery than true-to-life ardor.

Felix da Housecat
He Was King
Score: 5

Repetition is fine until it turns into redundancy -- which makes electronic dance music perhaps the most subjective genre to hold to those terms, since it's built on repetition. He Was King has plenty of promising moments, such as the dubstep-style "Kickdrum," which blows out the instrument and features a menacing spot from M.I.A. warning of its carnal power. Yet these moments are often squandered. "Kickdrum" soon shows its hand, revealing itself to be little more than level-adjusting and knob-twiddling over her vocal loop. Similarly, "Elvi$" starts with an immediately grabbing sparkly synth line but then has it cascade over a static beat and robotic murmuring, without change, for 39 seconds. Any novelty or exhilaration that synth line possessed bleeds out as it rapidly devolves from exciting to tiresome. Felix engineers an engine-like rise and begins to develop the track, but the synth line is more handicap than foreplay. He Was King peaks early, with an ode to Prince that borrows his mojo. If only Felix had also applied it to the songs in need.

Unlike that Disturbed guy, I am not down with the sickness

2009-10-23T13:41:00.000-07:00

The flu tried to kill me off, but I prevailed. I can't tell you if it was H1N1, though in most people, that's supposed to cause milder symptoms. So I suspect this was the bad ol' traditional flu bug. What's up with it hitting in October? That's ridiculously early. Be careful out there!

Big empty

2009-10-03T21:30:00.000-07:00

VAST
Me and You
Score: 6

Over the past decade and a half, VAST have migrated from heavy, deftly programmed rock whirling with monk-chant samples to the comparative humility of unplugged instruments. Throughout, founder Jon Crosby has remained enamored with orchestras, and cello and violin embellish the traditionally structured rock of Me and You, implying human frailty in "She Found Out" and cushioning the knock of hand drums on the somber reflection "Here's to All the People I Have Lost." Harmonica, too, flecks some songs, adding a melancholy breeze to the plucked acoustic guitar of "You Are the One." Me and You doesn't forgo electric guitar, but the instrument isn't dominating the proceedings either.

Although hampered by several trite lines --- "It's Not You (It's Me)" slaps its groaner right in the chorus and title --- Me and You delivers Crosby's strongest songwriting in years. In what could be a loose concept album, the tracks outline a dysfunctional romance (or more than one), complete with resentment, obsession, fear, lies and infidelity. There's a voyeuristic quality to it, as if Crosby were exposing private sex scandals.

The waltzing "I'm Afraid of You" goes Freudian, suggesting that toxic braids in a couple's lineage set them up to make bad choices romantically. "You have a degree in photography," Crosby rumbles, "and you take it out on me." Details follow in the next song, "You're the Same": "She takes pictures of herself / with nothing on / She wants to hurt me."

"You're the Same" is not a waltz. It uses its brooding background of acoustic guitar to impale us with stark pronouncements: "She reaches into me / with hands I cannot feel." "She wants to leave me."

"How can I lose something I never had?" Crosby asks in anguished disbelief.

The bitter "You Destroy Me" locks in its hold with gentle, tom-centric drumming and the clap of a tambourine. The gliding electric guitar lines resonate the ache of forever wishing for consummation and being cursed to never have it. Crosby sings, "You destroy me / when you walk into the room / You destroy me / and you always will."

And when you can't obtain the devastating beauty, who do you go to? "Hotel Song" puts our faces up to the peephole to catch a liaison, likely with a mistress. Whether the place was a four-star or a no-star, the sign out front might as well have read BIG EMPTY, for the man takes little consolation in the meeting. As he puts it, "Tonight I'm yours, and / you're kinda mine."

We know there won't be a feel-good ending. The violin and cello bear that out. "She Found Out" is the pitiful plea of the wretched, perhaps from the rumpled bed of the hotel room. Crosby's voice is meek here as it rises up from some frightened place. "Wait / wait with me," the man implores his companion, knowing that his indiscretions have been discovered, that his partnership will shatter imminently. He knows that. He knows he's going to lose everything. What scares him most is facing that end alone.

At very least, he has the strings.

Precious tones

2009-09-03T16:58:00.000-07:00

Nite Jewel
Good Evening
Score: 9

As Nite Jewel, L.A. artist Ramona Gonzalez creates an enveloping array of sounds through her analog synths, electronic percussion and ethereal vocals. Good Evening, her debut album, is humid and exotic, with ties to dream pop and alt-disco, yet its identity stretches farther than that.

Perhaps due in part to its 8-track genesis, Good Evening has a wide depth of field between its elements. Gonzalez's voice, pliant and cottoned with reverb, usually ripples out from a submerged or lateral position, passing through permeable keyboard lines until dispersing into the atmosphere.

Obscuring vocals is a risky move and can be a cover for lackluster lyrics. But, as with the Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser, the stretches of unintelligibility can also enhance the atmosphere and add to the exoticism. It causes the listener to focus on the emotion flowing from the tones rather than on the words. In this regard, Gonzalez is quite skilled, favoring slow-to-midtempo notes that communicate tranquility, yearning, uncertainty and sensuality.

When we're first introduced to Gonzalez's voice, on "Bottom Rung," it's buried; perhaps it is the rung. And yet it's all around us, enfolding the sanctuary- or pagoda-suited keyboard, as if she's pulling a curtain of raindrop beads. Her voice emerges a bit more after the second song, "Suburbia."

Gonzalez's types of keys and drum programming, which often provide a non-Western feel, imply that some of the inspiration for Good Evening came from other cultures. "Heart Won't Start" pipes in flute that evokes the Middle East, while "Let's Go (The Two of Us Together)" gains Latin overtones from wood block, shaker and syncopation. "Universal Mind" is lush and immersive, like a secret garden unfolding, with a trickle of conga and a whispery hiss redolent of tiny flying fauna.

Her cover of Roxy Music's "Lover," which she slows down and makes into a languid dedication, wiggles out beats that seem to cross Ferry-Manzanera with Mtume. That funkiness extends to "Chimera," a track with an Afrofuturistic bassline that pairs great with the synth-claps and keyboard accents while the hi-hat sputters its puck-tss, puck-tss, puck-tss, puck-tss. "You see me show my teeth," Gonzalez sings, and it comes across as a statement of empowerment. Possibly in the form of a smile.

Now Scything: Sunn 0))), Eels, Prefuse 73

2009-08-23T14:03:00.000-07:00

Sunn 0)))
Monoliths & Dimensions
Score: 5

Monoliths & Dimensions involves a lot of spoken word --- or more precisely, words slowly croaked up from the gullet and dribbled out. It's not a common trait to Sunn 0)))'s work, especially since their standard, downtuned feedback drones recede into the background for six minutes on album opener "Aghartha," effectively granting center stage to the gutteralizing. The voice belongs to Attila Csihar of the black metal band Mayhem, and the second thing Sunn 0))) do in the liner notes, after introducing themselves, is list him and guitarist-percussionist Oren Ambarchi as "key players." The two have worked with founders Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson, in varying combinations, in other bands. In comparison to the somewhat tedious "Aghartha," "Big Church" is attention-grabbing, with a quasi-angelic choir set against the antimatter drones. Each section or set of verses is split up by the kong of tubular bells. Is this heaven vs. hell? Who's winning? Well, Csihar is back for "Hunting & Gathering (Cydonia)," but no angels. Doesn't look good. "Alice" finally retires him and brings in harp, strings, alto flute and French horn, but the potentially intriguing accents they provide are arranged in a way that doesn't make their presence felt until almost the 12-minute mark. Still, we shouldn't put too much weight on Monoliths & Dimensions, because Sunn 0))) are given to experiment. All these developments could very well be expunged before the next album.

Eels
Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs of Desire
Score: 6

Meaning "Wolfman" in English, the latest studio album by Eels chronicles feelings primal and wistful, the two almost split squarely into odds and evens. The wistful side is familiar: softly chiming guitar, simple percussion, frontman E's gentle hoarseness. But the primal part is probably where the title springs from, and the band push forth with a comparatively raw approach on songs like "What's a Fella Gotta Do" and the swaggering "Tremendous Dynamite." E unveils a convincing bluster and whoop, assimilating garage-rock characteristics pretty well, although his in-the-red vocals are overdone and showy. You can see this wistful-primal divide as man phase and wolf phase, if you like; and without some fur flying, the groveling might have become tiresome. It's recharging to hit "Fresh Blood" midway through the album, the stalking toms and the wary guitar peeps working with E's measured delivery to wind up the tension for the inevitable release. In true lupine fashion (Howlin' Wolf, Wolfman Jack, Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs), he's just howlin' for his dawlin'.

Prefuse 73
Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian
Score: 7

A mosaic of microtracks built from vocal fragments, percussive loops and brief, manipulated samples, Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian is the fruit of Guillermo Scott Herren's labors with Ampex analog tape. The 29 tracks unfold like channel-surfing dream sequences, but with their internal vignettes, you'd be forgiven for thinking the album held 40 or 50. Though beats and loops tie Ampexian to hip-hop, Herren's approach has more in common with experimental electronic music; he's on Warp, but he'd also be at home on the Ninja Tune label. The melange that Herren draws from was at one point funk, soul, jazz, rock, exotica and electronica, but the genres are so mutated and treated here that they seem more mechanized than human-created. If "Preperation's Kids Choir" was originally kids singing, it's now a helium whine. That might have been a kazoo in "No Lights Still Rock," but it's now the shrill tra-la-las of a robot gone haywire. Ever heard a piano turn into an ice cream truck? You can in "Fountains of Spring."

Seductive shadows

2009-08-15T14:05:00.000-07:00

Depeche Mode
Sounds of the Universe
Score: 8

Ever since 1993, Depeche Mode have been on the four-year plan when it comes to albums, and with Sounds of the Universe, it feels like they've completed a grand circle, returning to the days of Violator. Sleek, lithe and subtle, the album dispenses with the louder, more-spacious sound of 2005's Playing the Angel and indulges in synthesizers and programming. The atmosphere is shadowy and velveteen, a seductive combination that invites you to come in, sit down and soak up the secrets. Just be careful not to spill your own.

You see, for every choice, there is a consequence. The man in the opening song, "In Chains," met someone. Now he's obsessed. "The way you move / has left me burning," Dave Gahan sings. "I know you know what you're doing to me / I know my hands will never be free / I know what it's like to be / in chains." As a cymbal simulates the rhythmic cracking of whip, his vocals twist and writhe, but never in agony. Because this is an S&M song. Depeche Mode have many. They may as well control the traffic lights at the intersection of lust and power. By the album's end, in fact, Gahan is voicing the opposite side. "I could corrupt you / in a heartbeat," he boasts to a temptress over the squirmy synth line. One could imagine her taunting response and his growling rebuttal: Her: "Is that a threat?" Him: "No, it's a promise."

Gahan, of course, would never use such an overheated cliche, nor would Martin Gore, the band's chief songwriter. Both are in fine form on Sounds of the Universe, crafting melodies that massage and stimulate. The guitars are used mainly as accents; brief and often sheathed in wah-wah, they never call undue attention to themselves. The percussion moves with padded paws. And the lyrics flourish in this environment.

"Wrong," which is impressive even bare on the page, repeats that title like a rueful head shaking back and forth, as Gahan details a litany of bad choices, including, "I was marching to the wrong drum / with the wrong scum / pissing out the wrong energy." The line "The wrong questions / with the wrong replies" is befitting of a poem by Anne Sexton, "Wanting to Die," specifically these lines: "But suicides have a special language. / Like carpenters, they want to know which tools. / They never ask why build." Sexton, who might've been a Depeche Mode fan if she'd been born 40 years later, ending up taking her life. Gahan himself nearly died by his own hand in 1995, and the theme of suicide has come up in the band's work, notably in the hit "Blasphemous Rumours," wherein a 16-year-old girl slashes her wrists but survives. (The same method as Gahan, coincidentally.)

Moody creepers "Little Soul" and "Jezebel" are like a midnight rendezvous in the spirit of "Violator," the synths a jet-black sheen. "Jezebel" is a bit flowery: It's hard to imagine a place today where people would refer to anyone as a "Jezebel"; plus, it's closely followed by the phrase "wanton acts of sin." But why not err on the bookish side? Settings are harder to recognize in darkness anyway. Gore's intimate tenor handles "Jezebel," another tale of irresistible attraction. In this one, her suitor believes he knows how she really feels, despite people saying she'll never care for him. What's the consequence of his choice? The last line of the song is "Jezebel!" But it is encased in robotic processing, warping it and making it unclear whether it's the suitor's realization or just the scornful cries of the onlookers.

In other words, it's a cliffhanger.

Now Scything: The Dead Weather, Doves, Asobi Seksu

2009-07-22T01:16:00.000-07:00

The Dead Weather
Horehound
Score: 6

Not sated by being the backbone of two bands concurrently, Jack White managed to start a third. In The Dead Weather, he sets his ax aside and gets behind the drum kit, letting Alison Mosshart of The Kills sing lead. Still, you'll hear plenty of him on Horehound. There are a few reasons for this: 1) Much of the album involves backing vocals, which he is supplying; 2) His voice tends to cut through hers when they sing in unison; 3) They both have backgrounds in bluesy garage rock, so their singing styles are similar (which makes it easier for his vocals to sneak to the front). Dean Fertita of Queens of the Stone Age (guitar, keyboard) and Jack Lawrence of The Raconteurs (bass) fill out the lineup, and Fertita's organ runs lend a '70s feel. Dark boogie blues are the focus of Horehound, which teems with seedy characters and outlaws. There's even a pony named Lucifer. Whether it's the grinding buzz of first single "Hang You From the Heavens" or the scrabble of sticks in "60 Feet Tall," Horehound delights in its seaminess and foreboding. On "So Far From Your Weapon," Mosshart groans out, "I tried to give you whiskey, but it never did work / suddenly you're begging me to do so much worse." White echoes the lines, clearly feeding on the suspense. Now, has he had his fill, or are The Dead Weather just whetting his appetite?

Doves
Kingdom of Rust
Score: 7

The fourth album by Manchester trio Doves amalgamates their distant past, near-present and ... parallel universe past? Sci-fi excursion "Jetstream," an homage to Vangelis and the 1982 film "Blade Runner," evokes Kraftwerk with its atmospheric synths and shooshing hi-hat patter, drummer Andy Williams striking with metronomic efficiency. "We always wanted to write an imaginary song for the closing credits," the band wrote on their Web site in late January when they gave away the song as a prerelease. "Jetstream" doesn't really fit with the rest of the album, though Kingdom of Rust is their most varied one to date. "Compulsion," with bass flapping like baggy pants, is the kind of song they used to bust out in the early '90s as Sub Sub, their pre-Doves incarnation. 'Course, one difference is that in those days, anthems weren't their calling card. Kingdom of Rust, like each Doves album before it, finds consistency and strength in Jimi Goodwin's vocal melodies, which soar conspicuously through every track. Even though they never would've worked for "Blade Runner."

Asobi Seksu
Hush
Score: 6

Hush doesn't possess the verve of 2006's Citrus, but at least Asobi Seksu were up front about that. Instead, it gives their chiming guitar pop a slightly mild tenor that takes a few listens to appreciate. "Layers," chaste and dainty in its glimmering, is the clear standout, and a faster approach likely would have unspooled it. Overall, Hush is very similar to Citrus in dynamics and song structure, so anyone who enjoyed it would almost certainly find Hush appealing. The main difference between the releases, aside from the obvious fact that they're comprised of different songs, is that Hush seems to have a diaphanous film over it, whereas everything on Citrus snapped with crisp and masterful reverb. This production choice might help unify the album, but it does slightly restrain uptempo moments and crescendo passages. When Yuki Chikudate is oh-oh-whoaing to infinity on "Transparence" and the drum kit is taking a beating and James Hanna's guitar is surging ... it never quite takes off. The track's still lovely, but after tasting the sky, you don't feel the same way about the ground.

Piece it together, then pull it apart

2009-07-15T23:03:00.000-07:00

Grizzly Bear
Veckatimest
Score: 8

Altogether more complex than its nearest predecessor, Veckatimest pulls Grizzly Bear out of the Yellow House and into a larger setting. New environments can open the body to bombardments of stimuli, and this album feels like a representation of that.

Melancholy has the edge, although the chipper "Two Weeks" --- chortling Rhodes, irrepressible high notes, glorious harmonizing --- is apt to temporarily blind you with cheer and fool the memory banks into believing it carries more weight than a single song. The title confirms the band's continued intimate relationship with place: in this case, an island off the southeastern coast of Massachusetts. And while they didn't record the album there, they did do some recording in nearby Cape Cod.

The word "veckatimest," previously unknown to most of the band's audience, imparts some mystery. The island is not listed in the 2008 U.S. Census; the band says it's uninhabited. But if a terrain is uninhabited, can it really be known? Veckatimest, with its tangle of moods, poses the same question.

Grizzly Bear have their range pitched somewhere between peaceful and pensive, sliding forward and back, but with occasional eruptions of acidity. In "Fine for Now," which begins
a cappella with the guys blending notes, the guitar flitters restlessly. A minute in, it booms its presence, foreshadowing the weighty show of force to come. The song ends with half a minute of roiling: cymbals crashing, bass shuddering, a guitar ordered to trench like grunge never died.

Even with the smaller temblors earlier in the song, the display is unexpected, and halting at first. Swats between rounds of pretty warbling. Similarly surprising, the lusty sax that cries out before the first chorus of "I Live With You" delivers a beguiling smacker before it scoots out the door. The tone here is part plea, part lament. "And they'll try," Dan Rossen sings, "they'll try. They'll try / to keep us apart." He later shifts from "they" to "you," as though he's putting a face on an enemy. And there's a warning embedded: "You brought us this far / We'll do what we can." Duo crashes of guitar and cymbals unshroud the resentment in the lyrics, and the noisy contractions imply both internal flagellation and a stifled anger breaking free.

It's tempting to think of Veckatimest as a puzzle, but a 3-D
one, so that the innocent "Cheerleader," featuring the Brooklyn Youth Choir, could occupy the same space and never have to see the torment on the shadowed side. Surely, with its cautious gait, tottering drums and bass, and demure vocals, it would be scarred for life if exposed to such paroxysms.

Founder Ed Droste speaks of a pattern on "Foreground," but as the delicate piano prepares the guestroom for the choir, the shape of Veckatimest remains equivocal: "Take on another shift / Palms in the middle, hands in the middle / Work out another rift / Something is muffled, another juggle / This is a foreground / It is a foreground." Somewhere in there, there's a background, too.

Boom and bust

2009-07-07T23:43:00.000-07:00

The Crystal Method
Divided by Night
Score: 4

The Prodigy
Invaders Must Die
Score: 5

Back in 1997, the tide was high for big beat. The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim and The Crystal Method had infiltrated commercial rock radio, and contemporaries of lesser stripes, like Apollo Four Forty and Propellerheads, were gaining word of mouth. Electronica was going to be the next big thing. With Portishead, Massive Attack, Tricky and techno having crashed the gate for electronica a few years before, it was reasonable to see big beat's successes as a prelude to a mainstream takeover in America.

Instead, the next two years spurned the forecasters, as the rise of teen pop and nu metal eclipsed whatever gains big beat was making, and, in short time, each staked a stronger claim to the term "takeover."

Stubborn in their longevity, big beat's big four have persevered to this day, with The Crystal Method's Divided by Night the latest shot across the bow. In a sign of solidarity (or coincidence), the Los Angeles band have followed in the footsteps of their transatlantic Brothers, making an album that not only brings aboard plenty of guest vocalists, but that places its nocturnal declaration squarely in the title. But where the Chemical Bros' most recent album, We Are the Night, had litheness (and some lighthearted humor in "The Salmon Dance"), Divided by Night is a bulkier customer. The title track and "Dirty Thirty" start the album with an appealing robo-workout, synths sidewinding and squelching, respectively. "Drown in the Now," though, usurps their role, arguing with its lengthy build that it is in fact the rightful album opener. And the tracks that follow wouldn't seem to object, all hewing to a formula that de-emphasizes the DJ and gives the floor to the guest vocalist.

Of course, the drawback to this approach is that if the vocalist doesn't carry the track, the beats and synths aren't likely to, because they've been assigned a less active role.

Matisyahu can be an impressive performer, as 2005's Live at Stubb's showed, but surely "Drown in the Now" must've looked a mess even on paper: Middle Eastern chants; fast, reggae-inflected rap; Sting-like callouts; big beat's humping and thumping. Justin Warfield's collaboration, "Kling to the Wreckage," doesn't come out any better. The Crystal Method hook the She Wants Revenge singer up with an overly busy palette of whizzing synths that clashes with the morbid quiver inherent to his voice.

"Sine Language," a collaboration with fellow producer-DJs LMFAO, hits a sweet spot, maybe because The Crystal Method are more skilled at cutting loose than inspiring contemplation. LMFAO turn in a humorous performance outfitted with impressive lines ("I got five dollars, but I feel like a million") and terrible ones ("At the club, the line is long / about as long as my dingalidong").

The Prodigy, always the most forceful of big beat's big four, bring high-octane pummeling on Invaders Must Die, from the rally cries of "Colours" to the spasmodic warnings of "Piranha." Fat of the Land fans will recognize nods to "Smack My Bitch Up" in "Thunder" and "Invaders Must Die," and "World's on Fire" could be the aftermath of "Firestarter": Keith Flint keeps spitting, "The world's on fire / the world's on fire / and it's about to expire."

The album's prize cut, "Warrior's Dance," starts off with the whistles of an evil sax, as we, like snakes roused from woven baskets, surrender to the sound, transfixed. Summoned. Murky synths churn in the background, and a pitched-up house diva issues an invitation: "Come with me to the dance floor / you and me, 'cause that's what it's for / show me now what it is / we got to be doin' / and the music in the house / and the music in the house." WHOOM! The set crumbles away and we find ourselves in a superclub, shaking it like we've just been elasticized and snapped into motion.

"Warrior's Dance" gives Invaders Must Die a surge that carries into the next few tracks, making Flint's typical exhortations in "Run With the Wolves" and "World's on Fire" more meaningful than they deserve to be. For the most part, the album's heft is false, an illusion perpetrated by the production, which confuses simple loudness for power. Despite tracks coursing with aggression, Liam Howlett captures little feeling of risk or danger.

Invaders Must Die charges along, changing course only for the finale, "Stand Up." The celebratory, house-party vibe brings to mind a victory feast after the battle, the proud horn section blaring away in triumph. The Prodigy have survived to fight another day. Now, what about that American takeover?

Go tell it

2009-06-17T22:01:00.000-07:00

Speck Mountain
Some Sweet Relief
Score: 9

Sin and souls, fire and water, night and day, shame and glory: These recurring themes mark the second album by Chicago band Speck Mountain. Some Sweet Relief, at the nexus of space rock and gospel, is riddled with religious signifiers, yet it carries the mystique of the implicit. You'll find no shouts of "hallelujah!" here. The oomph of gospel bursts out in lead singer Marie-Claire Balabanian's drawn-out notes --- the ooooohs and the ohhhhhs and the i-iii-iiiiiis --- and in the throaty affirmations of multi-instrumentalist Kate Walsh's saxophone.

Mostly, though, there's a sense of patience and perseverance in the music and in the pace at which Balabanian sings. It's not quite tranquility, because these are songs of internal conflict and struggle, as well as of reflection, but there's a constancy to her voice. Even when she's singing about "this worried mind," she sounds supernaturally reassured.

Organ, electric piano and layered backing vocals provide overtones of reverence, while the former also supply the drone and flutter that make up the general haziness customary to space rock. "Angela," one of two instrumental or near-instrumental songs, repeats the woman's name like an incantation: "Angela / oh Angela / Angela / oh Angela."

Some Sweet Relief traffics in atmosphere. Its power is one that slowly builds over the course of its 39 minutes. The organ's swirl is enveloping; the electric piano tingles and twitches; the bass purrs with warmth; the dual guitar lines are resonant and tenderly probing.

Balabanian and multi-instrumentalist Karl Briedrick wrote the songs, which all seem to spring from a deep, personal place illuminated by intense examination. In that place they found disgrace and infidelity, but strength and righteousness, too.

The title track details a plea for mercy: "There was a day / oh how that sun did shine / I know that day / it's no longer mine / some sweet relief / lay your hand on me." In "Backslider" --- that's preacher parlance for returning to your sinful ways --- Balabanian tells of her partner's unfaithfulness. "My guy's got a wanderin' eye," she confesses. But "I Feel Eternal," by comparison, testifies of an inner fortitude, one borne of no less than the soul.

In a time when organized religion is on the downfall but spirituality is thriving, this album captures the zeitgeist. In a poll published in April, Newsweek found in a survey of 1,003 Americans that 30 percent describe themselves as "spiritual" rather than "religious," an increase of 6 percent since 2005.

The American Religious Identification Survey, conducted last year and involving more than 54,000 respondents, showed a hemorrhaging of mainline Christian churches.

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, a project of the Pew Research Center, noted in its U.S. Religious Landscape Study that there was a significant rise in the number of unaffiliated people, hitting 16.1 percent. The study, conducted in 2007, involved more than 35,000 Americans.

This album is not worship music, but it feels like holy music. The symbology of Some Sweet Relief --- the use of rivers, sunshine and flame, rather than crosses and pulpits and churches --- lends the album a free and open identity that suggests an earlier, noninstitutionalized faith, one as pure as the elements.

As Speck Mountain strive for communion with the divine, we may be joining them.

A joint mission

2009-06-08T22:14:00.001-07:00

N.A.S.A.
The Spirit of Apollo
Score: 6

Squeak E. Clean and DJ Zegon, repping North America and South America between them, aim to bring people together under a banner of hip-hop and humanity. As N.A.S.A., they've made quite a start: There are 40 or so guests on The Spirit of Apollo.

Seeing the wide and varied cast --- Santigold, Karen O, Ghostface Killah, Tom Waits, Gift of Gab, David Byrne, George Clinton, to name a few --- is all-around impressive. But the reality is that sometimes less is more, and the Apollo architects run the risk of a megasized muddle. Even with most guests limited to one track, that still means that two or three or more guests will have to share that space, and these folks ain't sidemen.

Perhaps N.A.S.A. were jugglers in a previous life, because most of the collaborations come off smooth. It's understandable that some songs might not be as strong and as chiseled as they could be with fewer artists at work, but the album is, overall, a fun ride with occasional thrills.

"The People Tree" produces some shining moments through the rapid back-and-forth verses of Chali 2Na and Gift of Gab, with Chali as God and Gab as a believer asking life's big questions. David Byrne, perhaps embodying some prehistoric carnivorous plant, comes in on the pre-chorus and chorus, his vacillating pitch delivering loopiness like "tasty little human beings / I grow them on the people tree." When he sticks around for the next track, it's akin to an actor sneaking onto the set next door: In this case, it's a Chuck D historical drama about money, with a supporting cast of Ras Congo, Seu Jorge and Z-Trip. Byrne sticks out. Although the sloganeering chorus allows for everyone to jump in, it's a rather weak one: "Money! Money, money, money, money, money, money / Money is the root of all evil!"

"Hip Hop" is a rote ode to its subject (as if hip-hop didn't have enough of them already), and "O Pato" needlessly perverts Donald Duck, but the big-banging "N.A.S.A. Music," which unites E-40, Method Man and DJ Swamp, could serve as The Spirit of Apollo's theme song. "Strange Enough" similarly strikes gold with a slate of Ol' Dirty Bastard, Fatlip and Karen O. Her crack-up in the penultimate chorus points to the lightness of the mood and shows that she had no preconceptions about how the finished song would sound. (Also, she's evidently not magisterial outside the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.) The most-talked-about combo, Tom Waits and Kool Keith, for "Spacious Thoughts," is suitably strange, with the rapper's free association giving way to the growler's barreling portents.

"Gifted," the best argument for an Apollo 2, makes Kanye West, Santigold and Lykke Li sound inseparable, with West and Santigold trading off the main verses and she and Li handling the chorus and popping in elsewhere. A blipping solar babble drops into a tubby synth revving, setting the stage for West's marquee performance. Mixing levity with audacity in his own special way, he earns a chuckle with the opening, "Hey eh / I'm known for runnin' my mouth," as we all nod in agreement --- and he then immediately proceeds to run his mouth for the rest of his appearance! But West has reached a point where the boasts roll like a gag reel, and he seems alternately aware of this and oblivious to it. Here, he one-ups himself after each one: "While y'all on ten, I'm on eleven / Imma make the news, be on at seven / matter fact I'm on this very second / I'm in first and y'all in second."

Bolstering the album's "We are the world" premise, and adding a space theme, are photos (care of the other NASA) and samples mentioning the Earth or the Apollo shuttle. The album ender (before the inevitable hidden tracks) features part of an old speech by Richard Nixon, who waxes sanguine about the moon landing as a transcendent, community-building force.

Nixon --- certainly not the first person to come to mind amid themes of tolerance and cooperation --- is an odd fit, to be sure. He'd probably brand the whole Spirit of Apollo production as a communist conspiracy. But there's another side to using Nixon: The spirit of Apollo means peace and partying, even for those outside your circle. It's a commitment to work together.

Now Scything: M. Ward, MSTRKRFT, Crystal Stilts

2009-05-27T23:09:00.001-07:00

M. Ward
Hold Time
Score: 7

M. Ward has a reputation for crafting songs that sound much older than they are. Well, look at some of his sources of inspiration for his sixth album: Buddy Holly ("Rave On"), Frank Sinatra ("Outro [I'm a Fool to Want You]"), William Blake ("Blake's View"), the stars ("Stars of Leo"). Plus, he has that groggy, scratchy tenor taking us back to days of oil lamps and handmade goods. Hold Time gives us 14 opportunities to take that trip, from the strummer "One Hundred Million Years" to the smoldering Lucinda Williams duet "Oh Lonesome Me." She & Him partner Zooey Deschanel appears on the upbeat "Never Had Nobody Like You" and on the cover "Rave On." The title track has a beautiful drama to it, care of the moody strings, a reminder of M. Ward's talent as an arranger. "To Save Me" and "Stars of Leo" pack bombastic midsections with lots of percussion, but "To Save Me" is the one you really need to hear: An overdubbing of Bright Eyes member Mike Mogis' ebullient mandolin takes it to dizzying heights.

MSTRKRFT
Fist of God
Score: 3

Clearly, the god at work here is a vengeful one intent on denying us the pleasure of a fatuous party album. (The fist was a tip-off.) Bizarre title aside; and gaudy, atrocious cover aside; and hideous-blob-of-naked-bodies art aside, and --- my, we have a lot of asides here --- the second release from MSTRKRFT does not, in fact, get the party started. Distancing themselves slightly from robot-rock luminaries Daft Punk, the Toronto duo team up with rappers, but hardly anyone benefits from the collaboration. The electro passes over E-40's rhymes like a static jet stream. MSTRKRFT tempt us with a Ghostface Killah cameo, then squander the opportunity by turning it into a sophomoric cut-up sure to exhaust even those who at first thought it amusing. Freeway's crudeness in the last track, "1000 Cigarettes," will jolt anyone out of boredom, assuming they're still playing the album. Fist of God really should have been a single, with "Breakaway" and "Heartbreaker" on it. "Heartbreaker" devilishly mimics the piano opening of Sara Bareilles' big radio hit, "Love Song," while "Breakaway" spotlights the Romanthony-like club-singer chops of Jahmal of The Carps.

Crystal Stilts
Alight of Night
Score: 5

The cavernous reverb of Crystal Stilts' debut album is striking, but it loses its novelty a few songs in and ultimately becomes too much. There's definitely an allure to lead singer Brad Hargett's half-intelligible ghostly keening; the trick is to frame it in ways that keep it interesting. Alight of Night indicates that Crystal Stilts excel when playing at the extremes: The placid, stripped-down "The City in the Sea" allows his voice to coast by, as if blown on the breeze, swirling in and out of caves and harbors. "Departure" worships at Joy Division's obsidian throne, the busy bass mixing with a constant tom-thumping- and snare-thwack pattern. Meshed with Hargett's wafting vocals, the result is an ominous, jerky swinging, much like Ian Curtis' epileptic swiveling and thrashing. Most of the time, though, the pace is midtempo and the atmosphere prevails at the expense of the songs. Overall, the echo-chamber approach works best when Hargett's vocals are either slower or not competing with electric guitars.

Less bounce to the ounce

2009-05-20T04:34:00.000-07:00

Lady Sovereign
Jigsaw
Score: 5

Once a gum-smacking, smack-talking Super Ball, rap's "biggest midget in the game" has taken a few licks since her full-length debut three years ago. Or so Jigsaw would lead us to believe. The slower material, the lean toward pop, the scattered ideas --- it's safe to say Lady Sovereign is suffering from a classic case of second album-itis. Possible causes: introspection, relationship drama and jadedness with fame.

Let's lay it right out at the start: Her heart is the titular jigsaw puzzle. "Pick it up and fix it for me," she implores less than 10 minutes into the album. In a similar vein, the glum hook of "Guitar" is Lady Sov as Eeyore, trudging through a day of interviews, photos, promotions. The nicely arranged strings carry a dignified air, as if emblematic of the dutiful, success-minded musician --- perhaps a violinist in a big-city orchestra --- someone whose work ethic Lady Sovereign might envy as she wrestles with motivation. She confesses, "I feel a little tired, I feel like cryin' / I feel like lyin', I feel like not tryin' to do / what I'm supposed to do today."

"Student Union," supported by crisp synths, describes her experience at a college bash her friend took her to. As a high school dropout, she finds it hard to relate, and the "fuddy-duddying" drives her batty. The quasi-drunken sing-along here surely comes from the same rum bottle as Todd Rundgren's "Bang on the Drum All Day," a song which, unfortunately, is about as much fun as being clonked in the noggin with a coconut.

"So Human," by contrast, is a playful experiment, with Lady Sovereign recasting The Cure's "Close to Me" as a tour diary. The brisk pace implies a whirlwind itinerary; her fleet-footed raps imply she's keeping up. Still, dissatisfaction seeps in: "Anyway things change always / like the hotel hallways / I'll be gone again in four days." There's a hint of Auto-Tune on the chorus, a warning sign. Sure enough, it returns, bigger and badder, spritzing its goo all over "I Got You Dancing ...," signaling that the pandemic continues unabated in hip-hop.

But other vocal effects are at work, too, and they serve the curious function of erasing her thick cockney accent. Her voice is pulled deep into male range in "Pennies," with its chopped-and-screwed feel; "Food Play" makes her sound alien. Her helium squeaks follow a Barry White-esque rumble from a guest named Joey Benjamin. "Food Play," about incorporating grub into foreplay (and possibly beyond), isn't a chocolate-and-strawberries R&B seduction. It's more like a disturbing dream. "Check out my diet tips," she says, "you don't need to eat that burger, so let's just rub it 'round your lips."

There are moments where her arch side shines through, as on "Pennies" when she reminds all the "futhamuckas" out there what her name is, and then turns her name into a weather report ("it's Sover-raining"). But the way she wielded her power with glee three years ago --- the way she snapped, "love me or hate me, it's still an obsession / love me or hate me, that is the question" --- that's absent.

"I Got the Goods!!" wraps up Jigsaw, popping in almost as an afterthought, as if she's reminding us that, yes, she can bring it. If she feels like it.

Are we not beasts?

2009-05-12T23:53:00.000-07:00

Mastodon
Crack the Skye
Score: 9

Animal Collective
Merriweather Post Pavilion
Score: 6

Accessibility, as we know from top 40 stations, isn't necessarily a determinant of quality. However, when a band is disposed to full-throated roars or puttering around like demented Smurfs, added accessibility is welcome.

For Mastodon, that comes in the forms of singing and song structures amenable to sung vocals. The Atlanta band have been cultivating a following beyond metaldom for several years, but Crack the Skye has the potential to go wide. 2006's Blood Mountain split time between singing and barks and shouts, but their latest seems to look to Tool and Black Sabbath, metal bands with strong singers.

Combined with chops that have never been fiercer, Mastodon sound hungry. For what, is less certain. Fame? Fortune? Perhaps, but the menacing riffs from guitarist Bill Kelliher on the album opener, "Oblivion," suggest something more immediate. Something like ... blood. Drummer Bränn Dailor follows the riff, commanding a march of toms that promises to take us to a place more beast than man. With a crash of his cymbals, the band churn, then break into a chugging tempo as he and bassist Troy Sanders trade off sung vocals amid lead guitarist Brent Hinds' growls, reverb dripping from their jowls.

Awaking even greater wild fervor, "Divinations" begins with Hinds strumming a banjo --- until the banjo drops its disguise, revealing that it was just a pawn in the electric-guitar ambush.

The slower pacing of "The Czar," split into the passages "Usurper," "Escape, "Martyr" and "Spiral," suits the dirgey singing. The vocals, perhaps colored by the reverb, at times recall Layne Staley's doomed cries; Ozzy Osbourne is the other nearest link.

Animal Collective don't have Mastodon's ferocity, though on some past songs, their yawps and whoops might have given you the impression they were raised by wolves. On their sixth studio album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, Animal Collective provide evidence to the contrary.

These compositions are more focused than their previous ones, and when the chants wear thin, at least there are hooks. "My Girls" is an earworm, thanks to a trickling keyboard that, in a parallel universe, would have lent its services to Eurythmics. "Bluish," the album's finest moment, rolls in on shimmering synth waves and lets Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) show off a Beach Boys vocal move on the chorus.

The initially sleepy vibe of "In the Flowers" conjures fields of poppies, but the lyrics make the blossoms in question more likely to be lavender. It's the national flower of Portugal, where Panda Bear lives with his wife, fashion designer Fernanda Pereira, and their young daughter. He describes meeting a dancer in a field and being entranced by her connection to her body's movement, while wishing he was capable of being so uninhibited. "If I could just leave my body for the night / Then we could be dancing / No more missing you while I'm gone," he sings. (His wife's Web site provides subtext with its motto: "Influenced by everything that moves.")

Merriweather Post Pavilion definitely doesn't sit still. A thicket of electronic insects click and chirrup away as Panda Bear and Avey Tare (David Porter) traipse through the flora, Avey the vocal yang to Panda's yin. Geologist (Brian Weitz), meanwhile, sets more of the sampler critters a-chatter. Organ pinwheels on "Daily Routine." Maracas (or their digital equivalent) rattle over shrill bleeps on "Brother Sport" as Panda Bear implores, "Open up your throat."

Not so loud, dude -- Mastodon might hear you.

As you've never heard him before ...

2009-04-30T04:04:00.000-07:00

Chris Cornell
Scream
Score: 5

Last time around, Chris Cornell covered Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean." This time, he steps into some springy and contemporary R&B that might befit another Chris: Chris Brown, who, along with Ne-Yo, has been eying Jackson's mantle, long cold as it is. But those young hot-trotters bob and weave and with an inborn agility; for them, an album of Timbaland-produced tracks would be second nature. For Chris Cornell, who was howling across grunge stages before Ne-Yo hit puberty and before Chris Brown learned to walk, it's a different story.

Scream feels like a "Dancing With the Stars" experiment, Cornell in his clodhoppers, Timbaland walking him through some moves:

Tim: "Now, lemme see some bounce."

Chris: "Like this?"

Tim: "Naw, loosen up a bit more. Shake your shoulders."

Chris: "Shake my shoulders?"

Tim: "Yeah, it'll loosen you up. There, that's better. But you gotta get rid of those boots, man."

As surprising a pairing as it is, Cornell and Timbaland at least sound as if they practiced for a while before committing to an album. Cornell sings with conviction and adopts some of the techniques more common to dance-focused R&B, such as short vocal phrases delivered rapidly. This is evident on "Sweet Revenge," which also employs Auto-Tune. But the single most-abused production toy today actually works in this case. It pairs well with the synths and the manipulated backing vocals, and, for the most part, stays in the chorus, rather than dripping all over, as in T-Pain's "Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin')" or Rihanna's "Disturbia." This is perhaps the fastest Cornell has sung before, and it's a style far removed from his usual approach, the soaring calls of rock 'n' roll. Even when he was headbanging through "Cochise" with Audioslave, he held his notes about twice as long.

Now, the idea of combining Timbaland, hit-making producer extraordinaire, with Chris Cornell, grunge legend, was not a bad one. Scream does, however, bring into being some moments of rarefied cheese.

Like the album's opening. (Sheesh.) Here, renaissance-fair trumpeting precedes a spoken-word introduction by Gollum or his closest associate. It's so over-the-top and amateurish that it has the potential to make Scream a guilty pleasure down the road. Less flagrant, but more comical, is when Cornell -- perhaps a little too loosened up -- utters over the organ runs in "Time," "Make a little love / make a little war," as if he's riffing on KC & the Sunshine Band.

Although those moments are brief, they do affect how a listener will view the album, and they can be instructive in how to assess the work as a whole. Is it a lighthearted romp? Is it a focused plunge into new territory? Is it an irredeemable mess?

Cornell and Timbaland are savvy guys. The medieval opening seems like a joke somebody cooked up to bug out first-time listeners. A fake intro for laughs. Like, "OK, now here's the real album."

The music of Scream has no shortage of bounce: Programmed and live drums keep things hoppin', with loads of studio effects blipping in and out. Cheeky synths flounce about over the chugging of guitars on "Enemy"; they turn backward on "Get Up." A chubby electronic pulse gyrates on "Part of Me." Auto-Tune resurfaces on "Get Up." "Take Me Alive" throws in tribal beats and sitar. (It works, but you could argue that it belongs on another album entirely.)

The sheer oddity of Scream, taken in conjunction with the reputations of its creators, makes it a curiosity to consider rather than forget. Still, the title track, the album's single, a rock-structured song ensconced in Timbaland's studio-club sonics, is probably destined to be the only one included in the inevitable Chris Cornell greatest-hits package; a mere note in the historical record, a reminder of that kooky time when he got loose with Timbaland.

As if to signal that he's already moving back to tradition, the hidden track finds Cornell in a bluesy setting --- breaking out harmonica, even --- and being "two drinks away from crying." At least Timbaland's buying the next round. Right?

The top 10 albums of 2008: No. 1

2009-02-11T01:41:00.000-08:00

The Long Blondes
Couples

Life is short. Life is shorter
if you're a band.

The Long Blondes played
their first gig in 2003. They released their first single in 2004. They released their first album in 2006. They played their first Seattle gig on May 28, 2008. It was their last Seattle gig.

I was lucky to see it, because 12 days later, Dorian Cox, their lead guitarist and songwriter, had a stroke. He was 27. I'm 27. Twenty-seven-year-olds don't have strokes. But sometimes, sadly, they do.

Cox was hospitalized for more than a month. When it became apparent that he might never be able to play guitar again, they agreed to break up the band. On Oct. 19, Cox announced on their Web site, "We have decided to call it a day."

Couples, their second album, is fact sleeping with fiction: It's the photographs of couples the band stuck on a wall while recording; it's the romantic ghosts of Cox and guitarist-keyboardist Emma Chaplin, and those of drummer Screech Louder and bassist Reenie Hollis -- both real onetime couples -- and of those who came before, and of exaggeration, and of imagination.

Couples is a capstone, a headstone and a stone crashing through the windows of fantasy. It's a fairytale punctured by reality, "Sleeping Beauty" with a wall of brambles threatening to stretch forever.

Read my review of Couples here.

The top 10 albums of 2008: No. 2

2009-02-10T04:26:00.000-08:00

Crystal Castles
Crystal Castles

Who are Crystal Castles?

Yeah, they're a band, but who are they really? Are they thieves? Geniuses? Thieving geniuses?

Producer Ethan Kath and singer Alice Glass met in Toronto while performing community service. Why they were doing that --- reading to the blind --- varies with the publication. Billboard reported it as being a high school requirement. Spin implied it was court-ordered, saying that Glass had been busted for living in a squat and that Kath was clearing his record of an undisclosed offense.

In any case, they bonded over noise rock and began collaborating. They initially had friends give fake interviews, resulting in a stream of misinformation. (BTW, one of their labels is Lies Records. Uncanny!) Kath does interviews now, but the facts can change. He has maintained that he's often misquoted. He was quoted, however, in a 2007 interview by the now-defunct blog sparks vs space as saying, "Sometimes I'll just agree with whatever an interviewer is saying because I'm exhausted and I want the interview to be over. They always set up interviews after I've been up all night making tracks or after flying overnight from a show. I'll say anything so that I can go back to sleep. I usually don't even remember giving them because I'm half asleep."

Of his attempt to talk with the band (which, indeed, involved a sleepy Kath), Louis Pattison of Plan B magazine says, "Interviewing Crystal Castles feels oddly counterintuitive: the more you ask, the less you feel you know."

Crystal Castles courted controversy left and right in 2008, accused by chiptune musicians of Creative Commons violations and copyright infringement, and accused by a visual artist of stealing artwork (of Madonna with a shiner) for T-shirts and their "Alice Practice" single. Artist Trevor Brown eventually agreed to a settlement, but the chiptune dispute festers. Though Kath has said Crystal Castles weren't involved in the chiptune community, he was quoted in Spin's piece (from last September) as saying "there should be no limitations on art."

That sense of rebellious creation, naturally, extends to their self-titled debut album. The anarchic, provocative methods --- shrieks, circuit bending, legally questionable samples --- have been impressively honed into songs that prick and throb and challenge and excite. Transgressive art at its best.

Read my review of Crystal Castles here.

The top 10 albums of 2008: No. 3

2009-02-02T00:02:00.000-08:00

My Morning Jacket
Evil Urges

It's not easy to evolve. Some bands try but fail. Some bands try, and they succeed, only to lose fans who preferred their earlier sound. The best bands try -- and they succeed -- often, growing with each couple of albums: broadening their technical abilities; working toward synergy; magnetizing styles and pulling them close; planting their flag on more and more musical territory; making more sounds into THEIR sound.

In putting together Evil Urges, My Morning Jacket made some big decisions:

1) Extracting Jim James from the reverb chamber, which had been a hallmark of their sound their entire career. He used the opportunity to nurture his burgeoning soul-man side.

2) Goofing on metal and schlock rock in the track "Highly Suspicious." Peanut butter pudding surprise?! (If this rock thing falls through, there's always Duncan Hines ...)

3) Bringing guitarist Carl Broemel and keyboardist Bo Koster into the vocal fold. Nothing radical, like singing lead, but their additions complement James and point to greater trust and cohesion in the band.

4) Pursuing a highly varied album. The first six songs alone are distinct enough to have come from six different bands. The greater the variation on an album, the harder it is to make everything stick. But they did it.

What's next? I can't wait.

Read my review of Evil Urges here.

The top 10 albums of 2008: No. 4

2009-01-28T04:21:00.001-08:00

Erykah Badu
New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War)

Deep, heady and dense, New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War) is just about as immense as its title indicates. Erykah Badu has become a vortex, sucking in genres and fusing them. Funk, jazz, neo-soul and hip-hop are a single shape-shifting compound under her command.

The world war noted in the title might well be the fight for our minds. Or the fight for our lives. Or our souls. Or all of the above. "Twinkle" and "The Cell" bemoan the generational struggles of drugs and poverty, a festering combination that boils over in acts of desperation. "They end up in prisons / they end up in blood," Badu states with balefulness, her watchful eye taking in the heaving of the hood. Reporting? Prophesying? They're the same thing here.

"Master Teacher" and "The Healer" can be seen as her responses to the vicious cycle. The former, more contemplative than prescriptive, finds her weighing the troubles in her mind, searching for solutions, allowing the turbulence to keep her up at night; consciousness (though the word itself isn't used) carries a double meaning here, as did "The Cell," which drew a line from DNA to R.I.P. "The Healer," a dialogue between its title character and "the children," suggests that hip-hop, "bigger than religion," could have the power to save them, and that people need to press their own personal reset button in order break free.

New Amerykah parallels various present-day struggles in American society, but its futuristic touches keep you guessing as to what time period this Amerykah exists in (though obviously post-WWIII). "The Cell" skirts along on jazz synths and free-roaming bass, the drummer thumping out a restless beat that gains steam and depth from the hand drums behind it. The contrasts of speed --- vigorous percussion, detached synths --- and structure --- the wandering bass compared to the stationary instruments --- create a feeling of anti-gravity. In "My People," a persistent blip plink-plonk-plink-plonks like some kind of drivers signal, while the thick and enveloping digi-beats give the track a darkness through which pass the natural elements: the chanting Erykah Badus and the rustle of shell-like chimes. Static cuts the track with a hiss, a technique that occurs several times on the album and implies that the song segments, or some of them, are transmissions, and perhaps ones that we survivors are hearing years later.

Put the CD player on shuffle and "Amerykahn Promise" could be the perversely preserved commercial break. It opens like a movie trailer, with an announcer's bellows interspersed with sound effects: "More action." (Bam! Pow!) "More excitement." (Zap, zap, zap, zap!) "More everything."

The song rides the back of '70s lost classic "The American Promise" by jazz-funk greats RAMP, ushering it out of obscurity. Then the '70s crop up again: After the swampy beats of "Twinkle" dissipate and an eerie synth line moves in to fill the vacuum, guest Bilal delivers a reworking of the "I'm mad as hell" speech from the movie "Network." "Recession" has replaced "depression," and now there's mention of flat-screens, 20-inch wheels and higher crime figures, but the rest is pretty much the same.

Just how far in the future is Amerykah?

The top 10 albums of 2008: No. 5

2009-01-24T02:36:00.000-08:00

She & Him
Volume One

With Volume One, Zooey Deschanel shows that she's a natural songwriter, putting together a bouquet of countrypolitian, '60s pop and girl-group harmonies that's as wholesome as a sock-hop slow dance. She has a voice full of emotion, whether she's buoyant with possibility or biting her lip to keep her composure. A hint of twang sticks out here and there, and, affected or authentic, it's a nice touch.

But Volume One might have turned out differently if not for Him. The actress' savvy bandmate, M. Ward, helps make her songs all they can be, from providing guitar, keys and vocals to arranging the strings and being her mentor. As producer, he's the rootsy sage to her raw talent.

It's some talent she has: Her songs bump up comfortably to standards by Smokey Robinson and Lennon/McCartney, quite a feat for just about any artist, let alone an actress who professes that she started recording demos as a way to kill downtime. Yet her words reveal that it was a distraction with some dedication behind it.

"As an actor, you have a lot of free time," she told the Los Angeles Times last spring. "There's so much waiting around in hotel rooms and trailers. I was doing a movie a few years ago in a place where I didn't really know anyone, and I ended up recording these really elaborate demos of all these songs on my computer. Someone would be like, 'They're ready for you on set,' and I was like, 'I gotta finish these backing vocals!'"

Read my review of Volume One here.

The top 10 albums of 2008: No. 6

2009-01-19T23:47:00.000-08:00

Chairlift
Does You Inspire You

If Chairlift strike you as being concerned about the future, consider this: They're stuck with it one way or another. And they're young, so they presumably have a lot of it to see.

The Brooklyn trio of Caroline Polachek, Aaron Pfenning and Patrick Wimberly, all twentysomethings, explore space and texture on their incisive and inventive debut album.

A sense of unease pervades Does You Inspire You, whether it be from mounting trash ("Garbage"), shared living quarters ("Territory"), or the unknown and, possibly, insects ("Earwig Town"). Often there's a feeling of displacement, too, caused by uncommon combinations of sound.

In "Planet Health," for instance, birdsong, gong and koto join sparkling keyboard and an R&B bass so funky it could have been raided from Bootsy Collins' living room. Lead singer Polachek arrives with her voice soaked in reverb, a quality that enhances the duality of the piece: She could be looking back on what she learned in health class, but she tells it from a perspective that could pass for an alien visitor's. Health is Planet Health. The food pyramid is a place to sightsee. Want to learn how to make a baby? They'll show you how.

The chorus of "we're feeling great tonight" isn't as convincing as it reads, Polachek's overlapping vocals communicating a listlessness that becomes more apparent in tandem with Pfenning's part, the flatly spoken "we're feeling great." This contributes to the alienlike overtones.

Two overt pop songs make Chairlift more difficult to pin down. "Evident Utensil" plinks and plonks with all kinds of synth gewgaws, and Polachek introduces us to a rickety falsetto. The focus here is on rhyme, resulting in lyrics that might at first strike listeners as juvenile or ill-considered. But the kookiness of the song, along with Pfenning's comically affected deep-voiced enunciation, gives reason to believe that it's played for laughs and might be a lampoon of pop itself. Earlier in the album, "Bruises" grabs hold with a bass line reminiscent of The Cure's "Close to Me" and paints an ostensibly sweet tale of young love, Polachek playing the part of the girl who banged up her body while attempting handstands, Pfenning's boy responding by fetching frozen strawberries to "ice your bruisy knees." Once again, however, the band have written the song cleverly enough to allow for more than face-value interpretation. In a MySpace blog post, they suggest, with morbid humor, that the cutesy-wootsy tune is actually a tragic case involving a strawberry allergy and anaphylactic shock.

Polachek shows off her lilt in "Bruises" and yodel in "Earwig Town," both of which align her with the vocal techniques of Dolores O'Riordan of The Cranberries, perhaps an unconscious influence. Throughout the album, Polachek's vocal flexibility and subtle expressiveness make the songs more interesting.

"Garbage," the lead-off track, scorns society's wastefulness. "So much garbage will never ever decay," Polachek sings. Here, her tone is straightforward and slightly weary, perhaps because it's her generation that is inheriting the toxic mess. But a quiet contempt can also be heard, and she adds, "dark and silent it waits for you."

What does that mean? Well, you're headed for the grave. It's headed for the landfill. You're both going down to decompose. But your obituary in that buried newspaper will still be legible long after you're nothing but bones.

The top 10 albums of 2008: No. 7

2009-01-16T01:52:00.001-08:00

The Dead Science
Villainaire

In Marvel Comics, there was a long-running series called What If, and each of these comic books would present a hypothetical scenario and follow it to its logical conclusion, i.e. "What if someone else besides Spider-Man had been bitten by the radioactive spider?"

Consider Seattle band The Dead Science to be this one: What if a group of musicians were just as inspired by comic books as they were by Wu-Tang Clan?

The beautiful thing about inspiration is that it's a starting point, not a fixed path. The Dead Science are not rappers. They don't have nine members. They don't sound like Wu-Tang. But they HAVE absorbed the essence, and that essence went through a lot of mutations as it circulated in the bodies of Sam Mickens, Jherek Bischoff and Nick Tamburro. Like Wu-Tang, The Dead Science plot a course of high drama, depicting the protagonists as supervillains. This dovetails with the concept of superpowers, the mark of Marvel and D.C. comics. You can see their influences intertwining in the Villainaire crest: a phoenix (an X-Men reference) that resembles the Wu-Tang's W but could pass for a fancy V.

Despite being a rock band, The Dead Science celebrated Villainaire's impending release by putting out a mixtape, a tactic seen mostly in the hip-hop community. School of Villainy served as a sort of companion piece to the album, with remixes, other nonalbum tracks and, amusingly, a phone call -- possibly a cold call -- to the RZA (choice line: "Who goes this?").

Villainaire, their third album, plays as if its battles and inner turmoil are occurring on a giant stage, the audience members uncertain if they should applaud or run for their lives. A stringed twitching becomes frenzied on "Throne of Blood (The Jump Off)," and Tamburro reinforces that by mirroring it on his snare and cymbals. "Tonight I feel there's something in the air," Mickens sings in his distinct, wavery warble. He convulses as "The Dancing Destroyer" opens, the frantic guitar suggesting the throes of madness.

Appropriate for an album whose dark streets crawl with menace. "Holliston," casting its spell with a brooding piano figure, tours areas of squalor, giving us glimpses of the boyhood home and present-day haunts of the title villain. "The filth grew to be my cape and cowl," Mickens relays, later alluding to why that might be: "At night, outside, shined Batsymbol flashlight up into the sky / Nothing came, nothing came." In a place forsaken by heroes, the villain is his own hero.

The Dead Science, like the Sinister Six or other Marvel villains they might have admired, know how to collaborate. The gains (while probably not ill-gotten) include mellifluous harp, swirling strings and the top brass of The Horns of Orkestar Zirkonium. These often augment the band's theatricality, jazz leanings and atypical time signatures. "Monster Island Czars," surging out of its gates with crashing guitar and a neurotic cello, leads into a barrage of tom rumbling, then, with a blast of horns, the players stop. Except for a single viola, shivering in place.

The juxtaposition parallels the intriguing paradox that presents itself whenever Mickens opens his mouth: If this character is a supervillain, how can he be so fragile? Even the track where he exerts carnal power over a woman on a boat, "Wife You," is not the ode to thugdom or masculinity that its title might suggest. Rather, it sounds warped. Tormented. Mickens quavers as a guitar line and an electronic pulse invoke rocking and the lap of water against the hull. "I want my violence to make you satisfied," he tells her, his voice rising to near-shriek as he repeats "satisfied."

Good thing there's no Batman. How would he deal with that, too?

The top 10 albums of 2008: No. 8

2009-01-09T23:38:00.000-08:00

The Ruby Suns
Sea Lion

Certainly not every adventure needs the stereotypical adventure soundtrack treatment: the booming drums, the power chords, the adrenaline and triumph poured on like a cologne shower. Sure, there are moments like that, but there are also slow days, and boring days, and days when you get lost, and days when monkeys steal your food, and days when snakes invade your camp, and days when you get really homesick.

So it's nice to have an adventure album that captures a more realistic range of emotions. Sea Lion, the second by New Zealanders The Ruby Suns, has its roots in frontman Ryan McPhun's intercontinental travels.

Full of chants, hand drums, clapping and clacking, as well as standard rock instrumentation, Sea Lion pairs Western styles with African ones. On the jubilant "Tane Mahuta," McPhun conveys the communal aspect of the chants, welcoming a chorus of voices. As he writes in the liner notes, "a lot of people sang on Tane Mahuta -- too many to list."

This is definitely his journey, though. For much of the album, he alone sings, and the echoey overdubs magnify his wistfulness. It might do Brian Wilson proud, particularly "Remember," which even uses some beach iconography: "Imagine yourself on a wave / riding all the way in / imagine yourself in a dream / seeing all your old friends."

Was one of those friends an elephant? "Ole Rinka" stirs from its nest of bells, the murmur of field recordings and twitter of tropical birds giving way to a simple chorus in awe of nature, "The elephant eats the leaves / the elephant eats the leaves." What follows can only be pure and wordless emotion: "Oh-aaah-ahh-ahh / oh-oh-ahh-ahhh."

Several of Sea Lion's songs include sections distinct from what each began with, as if split into parts. "Adventure Tour" zings with autoharp as McPhun recalls driving through a rainstorm. A change-up of guitar signals the end of that chapter, introducing a new tempo, but this lasts no more than a minute. The song ostensibly ends, dissolving into pops and suction, but wait -- a swell of voices fills the air, bleeding into the next song.

In this way, the songs imitate memories themselves: blurring with time, even if time makes them fonder.

The top 10 albums of 2008: No. 9

2009-01-05T22:31:00.000-08:00

The Magnetic Fields
Distortion

Tips for distortion: Rewrite the Beach Boys' "California Girls" as a salvo against "The Hills" and its ilk; bemoan mistletoe at Christmas and hit the booze; take a walk in a nun's shoes -- are those stilettos? -- and make mama cry; have sex with a zombie (yes, a zombie); have someone drive you around; envy the courtesans and their unbreakable, gold-plated hearts. And don't forget to throw everything into a giant cochlea with tinnitus.

Read my review of Distortion here.

The top 10 albums of 2008: No. 10

2009-01-01T20:36:00.000-08:00

Nik Bärtsch's Ronin
Holon

Operating as an avant-garde jazz quintet under Swiss composer Nik Bärtsch, Ronin craft tight, deliberate instrumentals, achieving through repetition a kind of ritualized hypnosis.

Their modus operandi is the modul, a lengthy meditation of song bound to frustrate the impatient. The shortest track is the first, "Modul 42," and it's more than six minutes.

It begins with the chimes of a piano, Bärtsch playing a series of notes that might score a pensive moment in a film, like gray dawn breaking on the day of a trial. Kaspar Rast, the drummer, then taps a cymbal and they're off: Rast focusing on hi-hat and the rim of his snare, brass man Sha adding accents, and bassist Bjorn Meyer coloring the scene with a foreboding that matches Bärtsch's now-darker notes. Percussionist Andi Pupato works subtly, skulking around in the background, jingling here and trickling there, possibly using a drain pipe at one point.

"Modul 41_17" develops slower. The opening piano is muffled, its tones sounding more akin to the shallow twang of a rubber band than to the standard resonance of hammers on strings. Meyer comes in, playing variations of a sequence, then roaming as Bärtsch's instrument regains its voice. Ronin burst forth at 5:22 and 6:56, with rimshots, puffs of alto sax and a conviction in Bärtsch's fingers, and the rest of the piece is devoted to the band expanding on an indefatigable loop by Meyer.

One thing that stands out, aside from Ronin's obvious technical prowess, is how restrained they are. Not only is nobody showboating, but most of the time no one player strays from the pack. If there are solos, they are masked rather than spotlighted. It fits Bärtsch's expressed path of asceticism, or self-denial. Moreover, the pace at which the tracks evolve can be seen as its own form of denial: the antithesis of instant gratification.

Yet Bärtsch's credo, which he details in the liner notes, is that "an ecstatic groove and an ascetic awareness of form and sound in composed music are not mutually exclusive." In other words, asceticism doesn't have to be bland, boring and sexless.

So let's test that with "Modul 45." Meyer sticks to a rigid bass pattern, but it's a funky one. The hinge-like whine of Sha's saxophone adds some heat, and Bärtsch's piano circles around it before they lock step. Meyer breaks pattern and throbs deeply, leading to a delicate passage from Bärtsch. And then -- kablammo! -- a florid blare from Sha's hot, hot sax.

Case closed.

Change of venue

2008-12-24T20:28:00.000-08:00

So I have moved once again and am now operating out of Seattle. I really hope things work out and that I can stay awhile. Moving is so much work! I'll be rolling out my top 10 soon. Just a few more days left in the year. When I start posting them, go ahead and share your top 10 in the comments area, if you want. Here's to a better year (and to Obama)!

Sourer times

2008-11-17T03:35:00.000-08:00

Portishead
Third
Score: 6

The release came at the worst possible time seasonally: spring. Flowers blossoming, sun shining, dewdrops sparkling --- and Third, a bitter cry coughed up in a wasteland.

And yet the album doesn't make a good hibernating companion, either, even with winter threatening an early visit.

Displaying its birth order in its name, Third represents Portishead's return after a decade of inactivity. That time span also saw little in the way of side projects, Beth Gibbons' 2002 collaboration with Rustin Man, Out of Season, being the lone pursuit to bear LP fruit (not counting albums on which Geoff Barrow or Adrian Utley served as producer, and there weren't even many of those).

Perhaps more crucially, Portishead became legends in that time, recognized as trip-hop architects, canonized by critics, and later revered by Gnarls Barkley and others, who cited the band as an influence. Though they hadn't broken up, the hiatus began to cement itself as it stretched year after year, making it easier to view Portishead's work with the same finality accorded to bands long gone, rather than as a current, unfolding creative endeavor.

So it's understandable that Portishead might elect to make significant changes before delivering their first album of the new millennium. It's just disappointing that their new direction plays against their strengths.

The haunting beauty of Portishead, and of Dummy especially, has been jettisoned, and any remnants of it remember only the haunting part. Gibbons' voice, which moved with liquidity around those chilled-out beatscapes, now contends with a punishing, militaristic presence that shrivels it.

First single "Machine Gun" unleashes a pummeling of pom-pom-pom-poms, each vicious enough to be a whip snap, as Gibbons despairs, unable to connect with "a savior come my way." "We Carry On" conducts a forced march with a synth loop and a martial snare, repeating like a mantra of negation. The quiet acoustic guitar plaint that opens "Small" gives way to the contortions of a demented organ.

"Third" is a gnarled skin of loose ends: the fragile, would-be hymn of "Deep Water," complete with ukulele and barbershop-esque guest backing vocals, is flotsam bobbing up awkwardly between the electronic rough trade of "Machine Gun" and "We Carry On." "Silence" cuts off prematurely, yanking us out of its hypnotic rhythm and into the chime that starts off the much slower "Hunter." Gibbons' acoustic moments recall the dark folk of Out of Season but are undigested asides, insufficiently incorporated.

Highlights "The Rip" and "Magic Doors" show that in the 21st century, Portishead still have the power to transfix. "The Rip" lays its delicate Iz-like acoustic picking over a low, alien whirring, and as it grabs Gibbons' last pre-bridge lyric and draws it out over the next minute, the track builds with toms and an electronic pulse, until she re-enters with the next verse. The hurdy gurdy-outfitted "Magic Doors" wobbles at first, but Portishead nail the piece together with perfectly timed Rhodes piano. It's a resounding clangor of safety in a disquieting world.

Bit torrents

2008-10-31T02:49:00.000-07:00

Crystal Castles
Crystal Castles
Score: 9

If you grew up in the late '70s or in the '80s, chances are you spent a fair amount of time playing video games. And as you exercised your thumbs --- or your wrists, if you had a joystick --- your brain soaked up all that repetitive theme music.

As Crystal Castles, Ethan Kath and Alice Glass of Toronto take an experimental approach to music making, one of their tools being sounds from a modified Atari. It's a key launch point for whatever strikes their fancy. On their first full-length, that's a compelling agglomeration of rock freakouts, ambient techno, pitch-shifted vocals and creative samples.

Kath, who does the music, employs synths, sequencers and circuit bending. Glass, the singer, revels in the emotional purge of a shriek. Kath's manipulation enables Crystal Castles to change and rearrange those bleeps and blips and burbles, marshaling them into something greater than the sum of their parts. Witness his chopping and splicing on "Untrust Us" (sampling Death From Above 1979) and "Crimewave" (sampling Health).

In the frantic "Xxzxcuzx Me," Glass excoriates the mike over machine-gun beats as circuitry spasms around her. "Knights," which begins with a deep synth bassline and a metronomic clicking, drenches its druggy vocal line with distorted keys. "Untrust Us" builds its humming chant over a pattern of synth bloops, bringing in a faint buzzing in advance of the chorus. The buzzing, like a garage band at only a hundredth the volume, is nearly subliminal. Until the end of the song, that is, when it kicks into the foreground at full volume.

More than the half the tracks on Crystal Castles are uptempo numbers indebted to house, techno and electro-pop. "1991" palpitates with binary beats, fervidly pulsing before sliding into "Vanished," a relative breather. The vocals you hear on "Vanished" come not from Kath but from an extended sample of Australian band Van She. The instrumentals and songs with sampled vocals buffer the acid in Glass' strangled yelps and cries, providing variety and lending stability.

But just when you think you've sized them up, Crystal Castles reveal the surprise among surprises, "Tell Me What to Swallow." All vapor and gossamer, it shows that Glass can sing -- like an angel even, when she's awash in overdubs. Profane, meet sacred.

Now Scything: Kaki King, Beach House, Gavin Rossdale

2008-10-14T00:28:00.000-07:00

Kaki King
Dreaming of Revenge
Score: 6

When Kaki King lets her fingers do the talking, it's easy to listen. The guitar mag perennial can handle plenty of instruments, and in addition to her weapon of choice, she wields bass and percussion here. Her voice, on the other hand, is a different body, comparable to a foreign medium through which she passes gingerly. Her slight, colorless vocals distract the listener and seem to pull her from her stringed world. When spoken in short bursts, as on "Pull Me Out Alive," they work better with her tapping technique; drawn out, as on the plaintive "Life Being What It Is," they steer the focus onto her weakest element. Smartly, Dreaming of Revenge is largely an instrumental album, with seven of its 11 tracks vocal-free. Take in the scrabbling and snapping of "Bone Chaos in the Castle" and the way King caresses sighs out of lap steel and electric alike on "Montreal," and you might see what the guitar magazines have been going on about.

Beach House
Devotion
Score: 5

If you're jonesing for a feel-good song, don't turn to Beach House. (That'd be the Beach BOYS you're looking for.) No, the Baltimore duo of Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally pretty much stick to ... well, they don't really do sad songs, either. Devotion, like their self-titled debut two years earlier, wanders a perpetually socked-in soundscape of keyboards, reverb and organ thrum. If it could take shape, it would definitely be a plateau. There's a sense of depression to Legrand's songs of domestic life, as if she experienced sadness once but is numb to it now and is trying to reclaim it. In "All the Years," for instance, she describes "sitting on a rock, just / waiting for a key / to sleep inside the house / of old serenity." Devotion's mixing job plays up the band's haziness, but that doesn't flatter the material. Scally's guitar rarely rises above murk level. Legrand's vocals are difficult to pick out even when they aren't vying with a lot of instruments, and the lyrics are often opaque. "Astronaut," a somewhat psychedelic liaison, is really the only reason to read the liner notes. The mantralike chorus of "Gila" provides a much-needed hook; outside that, there's not much to latch onto.

Gavin Rossdale
Wanderlust
Score: 4

Fellow Brit Mike Skinner of The Streets once declared, "I make bangers, not anthems." Gavin Rossdale does the opposite. Post-Bush and post-Institute, he shoots for the stadiums. Virtually every song on his solo debut tries to make grand statements (or at least big sounds) out of whatever's on his mind. Those things, regrettably, come out dressed in generic lyrics and verse-chorus-verse structures, which betray the effort Rossdale puts into his vocals. The imbalance between action and emotion culminates in a chorus that goes, in part, "Better get in my car and drive." It doesn't help that the phrase is preceded by "caught in a landslide," 'cause if you're caught in a landslide, you can't very well drive, though we can presume it's a metaphor (or maybe both are metaphors). Dave Stewart of Eurythmics worked with Rossdale in writing three songs ("Future World," "Another Night in the Hills," "Beauty in the Beast"), and Shirley Manson and Katy Perry contribute backing vocals, but their collective influence barely registers. If there's a sophomore slump in Rossdale's future, he won't have far to fall.

Follow them into the dark

2008-10-05T00:42:00.000-07:00

Death Cab for Cutie
Narrow Stairs
Score: 7

Ben Gibbard writes drama, not comedy. But even with that in mind, the songs on Death Cab for Cutie's sixth album run notably darker than those on Narrow Stairs' nearest predecessor, 2005's Plans. And with fewer melodic entry points, the album isn't easy to get into.

Now four years removed from their indie-label days with Barsuk and enjoying a higher profile than ever before, Death Cab took a minor risk by making a less accessible album. Of course, it's obvious they weren't weren't too concerned with its commercial appeal, judging by the length of the first single, "I Will Possess Your Heart." Giving commercial radio stations an eight-minute-plus song is a good way to get ignored. Yet the single found a strong radio presence, even if many stations evaded the time commitment by playing an abbreviated version.

"I Will Possess Your Heart" showcases a lesser-known talent of Death Cab: the long song. Back in 2002, the steadfast trudge of the Stability EP's title track --- likely influenced by slowcore pioneers Codeine, for whom Gibbard has expressed admiration --- demonstrated that the band could lock in a mood and keep a song interesting even in lengthy instrumental passages. The plangent title track to Transatlanticism and an extended version of "We Looked Like Giants" on the The John Byrd E.P. proved this was no fluke.

At first, "I Will Possess Your Heart" seems to fit with Gibbard's other portraits of bittersweet romance: It's just a fellow following his heart, hoping for the best, eager to please and earnest to prove. But the second verse exposes the man as more than persistent, beginning with "there are days when outside your window / I see my reflection as I slowly pass." The way this development creeps up on the listener pairs well with the night-driving groove of Nick Harmer's bass and the canter of Jason McGerr's drums in the 4 1/2-minute instrumental opening section, almost as if they're a harbinger of the window-peeping to come. In retrospect, the title itself hints at the character's intentions. He's not going to win your heart; he's going to possess your heart. This guy's not taking no for an answer. He's going to get what he wants, possibly by force, if it comes to that.

Though this drift into seaminess is probably the only moment that will make some younger Death Cab fans squirm, Narrow Stairs has plenty of cobwebs in its corners. If they were about the same person, "Cath" and "You Can Do Better Than Me" could be successive chapters following a meek lonelyheart: "You can do better than me -- hey, wait, Cath! I'm better than that guy!" And the brooding guitars of "Talking Bird" and feedback that hangs in "Bixby Canyon Bridge" convey definite friction.

Musically, "No Sunlight" is deceptively bright, with a surf guitar prancing and with piano highlights that glisten like dewy pie cherries. It's Gibbard's youth, all footloose and fancy-free. Until the clouds roll in. "The optimist died inside of me," he declares, even as the track remains happily upbeat. It's akin to Transatlanticism's "The Sound of Settling," a giddy sing-along that began, improbably, with the lyrics "I've got a hunger / twisting my stomach into knots." "Long Division," farther along Narrow Stairs, keeps similar company. Building itself on bass throbs and an oblong chord progression, the hooky Photo Album throwback is likely to join "Baba O'Riley" and "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" in the hall of mistaken song titles, thanks to a repetitive chorus involving the word "remainder."

Still, the darkness has brought some stumbles. Tabla proves an odd fit (go figure) with Gibbard's vocals and the band's standard instrumental toolbox, disabling "Pity and Fear," though the Indian percussion works better for them when it's largely covered up by electric guitars. Puzzlingly, the track spikes in volume, then immediately cuts off, followed only a second later by the deliberate guitar tones of the last song, "The Ice Is Getting Thinner." The album has good pacing and logical sequencing up to this point, making it that much more frustrating of a decision.

The album closer leaves us on a pensive note. Returning to nature metaphors, Gibbard tells how two people have grown apart with time, not unlike ice floes. "We're not the same, dear, as we used to be / the seasons have changed and so have we."

The same holds true for Death Cab.

As the Crow flies

2008-09-30T02:39:00.000-07:00

Sheryl Crow
Detours
Score: 5

Somewhere between the
time Sheryl Crow went
from mold-scraping and french toast-serving to
Kid Rock-dating (and dumping), her earth went fallow. Conflict and passion leached, she sang a could-be ode to tanning. 2005's glossy and conventional Wildflower didn't help matters. This time around, she comes armed with some serious fodder, namely a broken-off engagement, a recovery from cancer, and an adopted son. Yet for all the creative possibility these topics offer, Crow often proves unable to convert that to a powerful performance.

In "Make It Go Away (Radiation Song)," for instance, her exam-table entreaties are fairly flat despite the gravity of the situation, and when her multitracked voice is used for an overlapping effect, the result doesn't resemble mortal pleading, but surface-level whining.

"Diamond Ring" is a small improvement: Over the stagger of a kick-snare beat, Crow recalls how her push to get married was the catalyst in dissolving a relationship (with Lance Armstrong, in all likelihood). An organ churns for the chorus as Crow tests her pipes. It's a rare instance of her singing forcefully and reaching for high notes, and it's one of the better songs she's written this decade. Unfortunately, it seems as if she's concentrating on hitting her notes rather than conveying the emotion that she clearly must feel. As a result, she can't quite pull off the pathos. The raw song itself, however, is good enough to become a standard. Assuming Crow's plight is common enough to invite feelings of solidarity, it will be interesting to hear what other artists bring to "Diamond Ring" in the future.

The life change that does produce a solid performance is "Lullaby for Wyatt," a tender tribute to her baby son, in which she expresses premature worries along with the standard pledges of parental caring. "How do I keep you from losing your way?" she wonders, "Hope you'll go out and you'll come back someday." What could have been a treacle cradlesong instead achieves a rounder quality, more representative of the sweep of emotions brought on by new parenthood.

In general, the sparer the song on Detours, the better Crow fares, and vice versa. The title track and "Drunk with the Thought of You," both largely acoustic numbers, whisper their wings with Beatle dust, hinting at Crow's Fab Four appreciation (she covered "Mother Nature's Son" for the "I Am Sam" soundtrack and "Here Comes the Sun" for the "Bee Movie" soundtrack). By contrast, the hippie-dippy "Out of Our Heads" grafts a torpid Euro house beat to slide guitar and accordion, and the percussion for "Love Is All There Is" sounds too canned.

From the beginning, when the loud, pro-studio "Shine Over Babylon" rudely tailgates the pretty, lo-fi folk of "God Bless This Mess," it's apparent that Detours is muddled. But the album's not without its moments.

Burning the book of love

2008-09-06T03:38:00.000-07:00

The Long Blondes
Couples
Score: 10

Romantic strife is The Long Blondes' stock-in-trade, but Couples affords the topic an inflamed sense of urgency, writhing as if dunked in turpentine. Kate Jackson, the album's principal voice, bounds through tales of curdled love, yowling here, sashaying there, as the rest of the band shake the dust off new wave and disco, assimilating them into their tightly wound rock 'n' roll.

The lyrics, nearly all written by lead guitarist Dorian Cox, examine the intrigue inherent in affairs: the emotional twisting and turning that upends lives and turns people into marionettes.

"Too Clever by Half" swivels to an R&B rhythm and outlines a "Closer"-style web of betrayal: "You both planned to leave your lovers and run off with each other / and leave us to look like fools." Jackson delivers the lines seductively, her character's coquettishness meant to draw the cheater close. Clearly possessing the upper hand and knowing it, she savors the moment, her words exposing themselves as a taunt. Then she sticks the knife in: "When you and her were out, I would go 'round to his house / and I don't have to tell you what we did next."

The roles are somewhat reversed in "Round the Hairpin," which throws a rented car into the equation. He's at the wheel. She's at his mercy. A keyboard lurches and buoys, combining with drummer Screech Louder's snare taps to lock in the trajectory, weaving back and forth, back and forth. When the taps give way to crashes, it's the terror pounding in the passenger's head. "Don't let me die," she pleads (possibly a last-minute ad-lib by Jackson, since the phrase isn't listed in the liner notes for the song). The driver's response, spoken by Cox and barely audible over the now-screaming guitars, is a chilling ramble, complete with, "If I can't have you, I don't want nobody / If I can't have you, I don't want to live."

Similarly, the woman at the pub in "The Couples" feels that failed love has sucked the life out of her. Now jaded, she clings to her self-pity as she watches the guys and gals. "People have the nerve to tell me that they're lonely," she moans to herself, "You're not lonely --- I am, baby."

All of this is heavy stuff, but Couples is a hemorrhage you can dance to. The slinky bass line of "Too Clever by Half" invites you to strut, and "Guilt" demands more, its disco-indebted beat and humming keyboards poppy enough to be a floor-filler. When it comes to vocals, bassist Reenie Hollis and guitarist-keyboardist Emma Chaplin add to the variety, providing the shouted chorus on "Here Comes the Serious Bit" and backing vocals elsewhere.

The final track, "I'm Going to Hell," is a towering inferno of a rock song -- huge enough to be a Broadway production -- with piano pounding worthy of at least a few puffs of "Great Balls of Fire." "I don't watch soap operas," one of the cheaters confesses, "maybe I should / I need to know if being the bad guy's any good." Everything about the song goes for broke: musically, vocally, thematically. It goes for the throat and hits the heart instead.

Soul sides

2008-08-13T03:52:00.000-07:00

My Morning Jacket
Evil Urges
Score: 10

A brave step into uncertain territory, Evil Urges proves, first and foremost, that Jim James can sound great even without the echo that has swathed and reinforced his voice on previous albums. It also proves that My Morning Jacket have legs beyond their rollicking jams, delivering song after song of accessible, well-crafted, traditionally styled rock.

From the get-go, Evil Urges indicates that it will be a far different listen than its predecessors. The soul style that James dabbled in on 2005's Z now takes center stage, with him heavily favoring his upper register on the first three songs. The change is all the more drastic because his voice is no longer echo-drenched. It's odd to hear to his notes without sustain; it gives a feeling of directness, and it might be an attempt to achieve a new level of intimacy, putting the listener in the room with James rather than on the other end of a grain silo. On the ballad "Thank You Too!," James tells a loved one, "you really saw my naked heart / you really brought out the 'naked' part." He could just as easily have been talking about his voice.

"Highly Suspicious" shows us another side. Like a kid who suddenly discovers he can holler, James has a ball with his falsetto, swooping around and climbing. He even cackles, the closest approximation being the witch in Michael Jackson's "Off the Wall." And though James' vocals in the title track suggest Smokey Robinson, Jackson might be the nearest influence to James' burgeoning soul-man side (go back and listen to him "hoo!" on Z's "Wordless Chorus").

That opening trio --- "Evil Urges," "Touch Me I'm Going to Scream Pt. 1" and "Highly Suspicious" --- is the biggest surprise, but My Morning Jacket don't shift into their standard structure until later; "I'm Amazed" seems like a long-lost Lynyrd Skynyrd cousin, and "Thank You Too!" covets the power ballads of the '70s. "Sec Walkin," the first to resemble their past work, breaks out the Rhodes for a droopy excursion. But about when James' sentiment nears moping, on the hunt for "eyes that hypnotize and sparkle," a voice behind him repeats "sparkle" and begins to shadow him or harmonize with him periodically.

It's one of the signs on Evil Urges that the role of James' bandmates is expanding. Not only do bassist Two-Tone Tommy, drummer Patrick Hallahan, guitarist Carl Broemel and keyboardist Bo Koster play their parts masterfully and help shape James' songs, but Koster and Broemel also lay down backing vocals on more than a few cuts. Those vary from the bright additions to "Sec Walkin" to an affected, comical gruffness on "Highly Suspicious" to more-traditional accompaniment elsewhere. This development increases My Morning Jacket's repertoire and opens the door to even more options in the future.

So where will they head next? One possibility could be greater experimentation with song structures and narrative threads, as hinted by "Touch Me I'm Going to Scream Pt. 1" and its companion piece. Both concern a craving for human connection, and the second side of the song proceeds past the longing glances of the first, to a precipice. Despite the song being about the thrill of new love, James isn't so much basking in it as he is hanging on for dear life. The chorus is a dual expression of joy and fear: "Ohhhhhhhh! This feeling, it is wonderful! Don't you ever turn it ahh-a-ahh-a-ahhhhhff!"

If his love was guaranteed, there'd be no need to plead for it.

Now Scything: She & Him, Counting Crows, N.E.R.D.

2008-07-31T02:14:00.000-07:00

She & Him
Volume One
Score: 9

These days, when an actress decides to dive into singing and songwriting, often the best you can hope for is collective amnesia. But unlike Ashlee Simpson, Juliette Lewis, Hilary Duff, Lindsay Lohan or Scarlett Johansson, Zooey Deschanel has tapped into a vein of musical talent. Collaborating with M. Ward (but you can call him Him), Deschanel demonstrates a keen ear for melody and a knack for country-tinged pop delivered in the style of Patsy Cline. Whether covering "You Really Got a Hold on Me" or chirping her way through originals, Deschanel sings with a purity of spirit that recalls a bygone era. (The whistling on "I Thought I Saw Your Face Today" is more likely to evoke "The Andy Griffith Show" than Peter Bjorn and John -- not that PB&J aren't pure themselves.) On "Black Hole," for example, Deschanel lays out her melancholy simply: "I'm alone on a bicycle for two." And "I Was Made for You" shows that, with some smart multitracking, she can pull off nimble harmonies worthy of The Angels (of "My Boyfriend's Back" fame). M. Ward, who produced the succinct Volume One and contributed guitar and vocals, doubtlessly played a big role in achieving the album's vintage sound. The warm and dusty overtones might as well be sunbeams shining in from an attic window.

Counting Crows
Saturday Nights
& Sunday Mornings
Score: 5

Thanks to pop culture, we know Saturday night's all right for fighting, drinking, carousing, canoodling and otherwise blowing off steam. And Sunday's the day of regret and hangover and phone-checking. Between the seven of them, the members of Counting Crows no doubt had plenty of personal experience to draw from in creating Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings. For a while, it looked as if Counting Crows were winding down, having released a greatest-hits collection in 2003, Films About Ghosts: The Best Of, and a concert disc in 2006, New Amsterdam: Live at Heineken Music Hall, which was compiled from shows performed more than three years earlier. Yet here they are. Naturally, Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings speaks to both sides of its title, loading the first half with rock bluster and the second half with quieter fare. (Turn off the amps, break out the banjo and the piano.) The album would have been right at home when cassettes were the order of the day. It's brave to lead off with a song that references Christopher Columbus and borrows from a mnemonic device about him sailing "the ocean blue," but Adam Duritz has kept good care of his voice, and he sells "1492" with his earnestness. He also has a hit in the resigned "You Can't Count on Me," care of a catchy chorus. Given the time that's passed since Counting Crows' last studio album, 2002's Hard Candy, it's remarkable how little has changed stylistically, though the caliber of their songs in general started to sag before the new millennium. Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings works as a quasi-concept album, but you won't necessarily want it to serve as your soundtrack to Saturday night or Sunday morning.

N.E.R.D.
Seeing Sounds
Score: 7

In one of their many farces, comedy band Flight of the Conchords had their way
with a song style praised
the world over: the sex jam. But if "Business Time" took away any of the style's mojo, even for just a few minutes, consider it taken back. N.E.R.D.'s "Time for Some Action" is a lust-not-love instant classic, or would be if it weren't attached to an intro of Pharrell Williams talking about a supernatural ability he discovered in the shower (see album title). In an odd but effective pairing, The Hives supply the bassy bump 'n' grind and the deep, throaty hook as Williams indulges his inner lothario. Seeing Sounds, though, has more than that to offer. The second half is a garden of delights, from the Red Hot Chili Pepper-ish funk metal of "Kill Joy" to the extended chorus and guitar heroics of "Sooner or Later." Turn down the bed, but save some energy for the rest of the show.

He loves the '80s

2008-07-30T22:33:00.000-07:00

M83
Saturdays=Youth
Score: 5

A song called "Teen Angst" appeared on Anthony Gonzalez's last nonseries album, the masterwork
Before the Dawn Heals Us;
this time around, the topic carries a lot more weight. Saturdays=Youth is Gonzalez's homage to the '80s, particularly to synthesizer-heavy British rock.

"Graveyard Girl" bears the unmistakable influence of New Order, guitars chiming over synth strings and a brisk tempo. But the bridge goes overboard, yielding the floor to the title character, who, with a school bell ringing in the background, proceeds to drown us in melodrama:

"I'm gonna jump the walls and run. I wonder if they'll miss me. I won't miss them. The cemetery is my home; I want to be a part of it, invisible even to the night. Then I'll read poetry to the stones. Maybe one day I could be one of them: wise and silent, waiting for someone to love me, waiting for someone to kiss me. I'm 15 years old, and I feel it's already too late to live. Don't you?"

The monologue reduces her to a stereotypically irrational teenager, removing any intrigue from her graveyard fascination. It's precisely the sort of move that's at odds with Gonzalez's wistfulness, making him seem more of a patronizing adult than the kindred spirit he means to be.

Many of the vocals come courtesy of Morgan Kibby, a classically trained Los Angeles-based musician with whom he's collaborating. Also on hand is brother Yann, who helps with the songwriting, and drummer Loic Maurin in an expanded role, also contributing guitar, bass and keyboards this time around.

Saturdays=Youth continues Gonzalez's retreat from his early instrumental works, as well as his movement toward conventional song structures. Gone are the choirs of Before the Dawn Heals Us. Gone, too, are the noisy jaunts, leaving Saturdays=Youth fairly homogeneous.

As on past M83 releases, the final track is of epic length: 11-plus minutes. The problem is that there's too little variation in "Midnight Souls Still Remain" to support its runtime. The moody synth drone, registering somewhere between Brian Eno and Angelo Badalamenti, doesn't function as a climax; it simply stretches on for what seems like an arbitrarily long time, then drops off.

Also frustrating is the album's cover, a tableau of characters with uncanny resemblance to those featured in coming-of-age movies set in the '80s. Ever seen "The Breakfast Club"? Even if you've seen the box, you'll get it. Ever seen "Donnie Darko"? Really, a guy in skeleton pajamas?! The only way that could be more obvious is to have the dude with the neck chain appear as a giant menacing rabbit.

Gonzalez would have done better to try subtlety. His nostalgia for the '80s is genuine, and his mimicry of some of the decade's British rock touchstones (Tears for Fears, Kate Bush) is skilled, but his heavy-handed approach doesn't do justice to him or his inspirations.

Victims of excess

2008-06-10T14:56:00.000-07:00

The Gutter Twins
Saturnalia
Score: 5

Hearing a name like the Gutter Twins, you'd be forgiven if you pictured two grizzled dirtbags sitting at the bar, doing shots of whatever burned the most. And you wouldn't be far off. Now, "dirtbag" isn't necessarily a term befitting Greg Dulli or Mark Lanegan, but both have played the role on their albums, and their choice of words here plays up that image. (A "saturnalia," for instance, is equivalent to a bacchanalia, which is basically a drunken orgy.)

As far as team-ups go, they make an intriguing pair: Dulli, the self-immolating womanizer; Lanegan, the haunted rogue. Dulli, the alabaster-soul smoothie; Lanegan, the craggy baritone.

"The Stations" starts out promising, with Lanegan singing lead and with Dulli's backing vocal coming in after the first verse. But right before the one-minute mark, Dulli joins Lanegan at the forefront. And as the track piles on --- a cello, a second electric guitar part, harder snare-playing, harder cymbal-playing, a louder string part --- Dulli and Lanegan belt out their lines as if playing a game of chicken.

Maybe it's because they've spent so much time as frontmen over their careers, but when they sing lead simultaneously, they clash more often than they mesh. The big-and-loud arrangements exacerbate this, making Saturnalia overbearing. This is a shame, because many of the songs have pleasant melodies and had potential. If given a different setting, or with a few tweaks to the vocal parts, some could be quite good.

It brings to mind Lanegan's work with Isobel Campbell. If 2006's Ballad of the Broken Seas had spent its time crashing and booming, their intricate balance of masculinity and femininity would have been lost amid the din.

Whenever Dulli and Lanegan dial it down, as on "The Body," their voices blend better, imparting a spirit of cooperation rather than competition. Likewise, the tracks with more modest accompaniment ("Seven Stories Underground," "Who Will Lead Us?") keep the focus on the album's main appeal: the Twins' interplay.

With two strong personalities, there's no need for heaps of bombast; it simply becomes a distraction.

Music from or inspired by ...

2008-05-27T03:45:00.000-07:00

Moby
Last Night
Score: 5

Moby has already had what could be considered a full life cycle, going from obscurity to club fixture to cult figure to household name to household name that never comes up.

Last Night attempts to step back to his early '90s club days, but it lacks the hyperkinetic energy of "Drop a Beat" or "Electricity." His female vocalists, too, are more subdued. Compare "The Stars" to "Ah Ah" or "Go," both on his 1992 self-titled release. "The Stars," somewhat of a combination of those tracks, uses a quick cut of a crowd cheering (playing the role of the "Go!" chant) and replaces the quasi-gospel "Ah ah" with the quasi-gospel "I see the stars." Near the end of its midsection, vaguely eerie synths --- not unlike the "Twin Peaks" ones he sampled to great effect in "Go" --- sneak in.

The main sample of "257.Zero" should be so lucky. A woman, possibly an air-traffic controller, intones, "Two, five, seven." Then, "Two, five, seven." And again, "Two, five, seven." And finally ... "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, zero."

Maybe there's a cool dance Moby could do with it and an audience, but it's dead on record.

"Everyday It's 1989" is one of the few tracks that does justice to his earlier works. The piano run and the crisp beats build each other up as a diva hollers and the synth layers beam in like lasers.

By contrast, "Alice" and "I Love to Move in Here" don't resemble what he's done before. Instead they point, perhaps, to Moby's next creative stage. Both are collaborations. "I Love to Move in Here" shimmies with a Brazilian rhythm, and versatile session vocalist Chrissi Poland provides Reddi Wip-light coos that flank an underwhelming appearance by Grandmaster Caz, whose old-school detour lasts for all of 40 seconds. "Alice," a foray into hard-edged territory, bristles with bass feedback and features the show-stealing flow of MC Aynzli of Nigerian group 419 Squad.

Moby's smart to pass the mike to his guests. Hotel foundered in part because he sang lead on almost every track. Although he can carry punk rock-styled songs, like Play's "Machete" and Animal Rights' "That's When I Reach for My Revolver," his voice remains the weakest of his attributes. His strongest might be his strings. Moby's strings have always kissed the sky.

In the liner notes, Moby writes that Last Night is about two things: "trying to take 24 years of going out in nyc and condensing it into a 65 minute record" and "trying to condense an 8 hour night into just over an hour of music."

On the first count, the album misses by a mile. In no way does it approach the variety and scope his statement implies. New York City birthed whole archetypes of music that aren't represented here. Of course, this is Moby's album, and he can interpret that 24-year orgy of sounds as he sees fit. He comes closer to his second goal, as Last Night holds to the basic structure of a dance mix, building up the tempo, then bearing down or easing back, depending on whether it's time for a breather (although its last third locks you in the chillout room). Again, though, it's in Moby's hands how that hour plays out, and considering that Last Night is on the New Releases shelf, there's a good chance this is exactly how he wanted it to sound.

But the theme seems like window dressing when you consider that all those years and styles and nights and venues, when boiled down and shaped into songs, all come out sounding like Moby. Whether it's the mystérieux intrigue of "Hyenas" or the stately contemplation of "Mothers of the Night," there's no way you'd mistake the songs for anyone else. Then again, maybe that's the point.

Archives at your fingertips

2008-05-27T03:35:00.000-07:00

I wasn't completely satisfied with Blogger's archiving system, so I created an easier way for you to access past reviews. Now you can check out any you missed the first time around, or any you want to revisit, or any that catch your eye.

New tricks (and new hoes) for an old Dogg

2008-05-15T04:46:00.000-07:00

Snoop Dogg
Ego Trippin'
Score: 6

Big Snoopy's gettin' long in the toothy. Outlasting gangstas and canines alike, Snoop Dogg asserts his longevity on his ninth album proper. Over 21 tracks and nearly 80 minutes, he shows that, if anything, he still has lots of energy.

Ego Trippin' runs the gamut, from the house-party bass bumpin' of "Sets Up" to the chipmunk soul of "Those Gurlz"; from the piano clank of "Deez Hollywood Nights" to the back-porch acoustic strum of the Everlast-assisted "My Medicine." "Cool" is a dead ringer for Prince, all synth vamps and drum machine. Snoop and a crew of producers traffic in familiar templates, but they do it with considerable skill, making Ego Trippin' a relatively streamlined grab bag.

Rumor was, Snoop was going to sing on this one, and while his parts aren't unmistakable --- he's not trying to outdo Ne-Yo here --- he does occasionally rest his rap to play with vocoder and some studio treatments. And you can hear his naked voice behind the cabaret chorus line in "Deez Hollywood Nights."

'Course, with his smooth, blunted flow and his outsize personality, it's not like he needed any new tricks up his sleeve. But we'll take 'em. It's fun to hear his Prince, since both have such a special connection to the bedroom. Snoop decides to go the extra mile for his partner, devoting a track to ... well, it's called "Sexual Eruption."

Overall, though, it's clear Snoop hasn't gone soft (so to speak). His No. 1 concern is still Snoop D-O-Double-G, and most women don't advance beyond the status of playthings.

It seems a bit incongruous that he details his sexual exploits with the hoes, then dedicates a song or two to the wife. He even refers to her by name on "One Chance (Make It Good)": "Shante, what more can I say? / But, baby, look at us today / Your husband's a boss, the kids is cute / The king of the coast with a gang of loot."

In "Gangsta Like Me," which blares cinematic horns for drama, he tells of a fan inspired by "my nasty video," otherwise known as his Hustler film "Snoop Dogg's Doggystyle." He doesn't turn her down, but he makes sure to note, "We can do our thing, but you can't be wifey."

Did the encounter really happen? There's Snoop the person, and there's Snoop the persona. There's fact, and there's fiction. But with this album, the line is all blurry. Within the first minute of Ego Trippin', Snoop alludes to his TV show, "Snoop Dogg's Father Hood." "Neva Have 2 Worry" gives us the CliffsNotes version of his career. In "Deez Hollywood Nights," he says of Jessica Alba, Jessica Simpson and Jessica Biel, "I let 'em all come to my back table / Roll up and lick the paper if they able." And that wily Leonardo Di Caprio "slide me new hoes everywhere we go."

Regardless of whether that's true, the expansion of Snoop's fame through the years has made more of his boasts plausible. His real life now competes with his larger-than-life character in the way of extravagance. Snoop has appeared in "Training Day" with Denzel Washington. He has his own line of hot dogs. On the Showtime hit "Weeds," he's played himself. (Is that even acting anymore? Their script would be tied to your reality!) He's made it as a rapper, an actor, a TV star and a porn director. The memoirs can't be far behind.

No, wait: They already came out. Nine years ago.

Now Scything: Mike Doughty, The Raveonettes, Goldfrapp

2008-05-08T04:50:00.000-07:00

Mike Doughty
Golden Delicious
Score: 5

Relax, James Van Der Beek, you're off the hook. Ex-Soul Coughing frontman Mike Doughty isn't busting up a Starbucks this time around. But aside from that, Golden Delicious could be Part II of Haughty Melodic. It's another round of sunny pop melodies with a liberal helping of quirkiness and acoustic guitar. Doughty hasn't forgotten the days of El Oso, throwing in Spanish ("Wednesday [No Se Apoye]") and quasi-rap ("More Bacon Than the Pan Can Handle"). And his favorite triumvirate --- women, cars and food --- remains intact. Soul Coughing fans will probably miss the inventive musicianship, but Doughty's moved on. He's mellowed out, favoring the schoolhouse nostalgia of "27 Jennifers" over the rumpled brio of "I Miss the Girl." If you want it black, you'll have to go somewhere else.

The Raveonettes
Lust Lust Lust
Score: 7

Lust Lust Lust expands the playbook of Danish duo Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo, if only slightly. Their Jesus and Mary Chain idolatry continues full-tilt, but on a few occasions the Raveonettes use conspicuous beats to punch up their songs. Lead-off track "Aly, Walk with Me" doesn't so much walk as swaggers, the kick-kick-snare rhythm giving it body. Overall, though, this album, like their others, is all about guitar. The Raveonettes work on two levels: fuzzy and fuzzier. Usually they favor a gentle approach, relying greatly on reverb to construct their sound net. But in "Aly, Walk with Me," they unleash torrents of distortion. The aggression is a welcome constrast to the rut of similarity they can sometimes trap themselves in. The album's real treat is "You Want the Candy," a sparkling euphoria of chimes over surf-rock guitar. Each chorus delivers another rush of Pixy Stix rapture. Of course, it's not as innocent as it comes on, with "I hooked myself on you" and "I plowed my way through hell" being a good indication that when the Raveonettes sing, "Gimme some C," the C doesn't stand for chocolate.

Goldfrapp
Seventh Tree
Score: 4

Restless as always, Goldfrapp make their fourth album another transformation. They shed their Supernature nightclub gear, take the back door, and step straight into a field of dewy wheat stalks. Wait a minute: Where'd the field come from? In the holodeck world of Seventh Tree, images are transitory. Sounds, too. Forgettable, in other words. Principally soft and airy, Seventh Tree whiles away its 40-some minutes drifting through a pastoral landscape. But the easy-listening strings and acoustic guitars can't shake the electronic touches that peek through like cracks in the simulation.

Introducing ... Now Scything

2008-05-08T04:21:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to announce a new feature today, Now Scything. Now Scything will be comprised of condensed reviews, and it will run less frequently than my standard reviews. This will provide a greater variety in review form, and it will allow me to cover more albums.

Doing the twist

2008-05-01T00:35:00.000-07:00

The Magnetic Fields
Distortion
Score: 7

Distortion takes many forms on The Magnetic Fields' follow-up to 2004's i. Naturally, there's the noise component: reverb, feedback, collision, convergence. But there's also ideological distortion.

On "California Girls," and on many other memory-teasing pop songs, band leader Stephin Merritt scoops out the messages we thought we knew and pours in his own. Merritt rejects the Beach Boys' portrayal of California girls as beings worthy of lust and fascination, and he channels his contempt for their carefree lives into a song designed to evoke idyllic, early-'60s surf rock. Manipulating that fun-in-the-sun vibe, he assails California girls as vapid, cruel, social climbers embodying plastic perfection.

Though he wrote the song, collaborator Shirley Simms sings it, a gender switch that obfuscates the writer's identity and intent. It's no longer a man bashing women; it's a woman bashing women. Or is it? We never find out the character's gender. In any case, Simms' sweetness disguises the bitter lyrics, making the chorus, "I hate California girls," as inviting as a piece of cherry pie. And because of that, when the song enters "Scream" territory, implying the use of "battle ax" literally as well as figuratively, it doesn't jolt us.

Merritt uses these tactics throughout Distortion. For "Too Drunk to Dream," he turns what could have been a Saturday night party song into a bludgeoning night of drug abuse.

It's catchy.

Lyrically, though, it describes a vacuum of self-destruction. Similarly, "Drive On, Driver" soars on an REO Speedwagon-esque melody, despite being about a character crushed to learn that his inamorata (or her inamorata) has stood him (or her) up. The sexual ambiguity echoes the album cover, a symbol of a man attached to a background of hot pink, a symbolically feminine color.

Merritt is shrewd to alternate vocal duties with Simms, keeping his sepulchral bass from overwhelming the album's balance. His dour croak on "Old Fools" would be a heavy weight to bear if not for Simms' chipper foil on "The Nun's Litany." In that song, a nun has thoughts that would make her sisters run for confession. She says she longs for a life as, among other things, a topless waitress, a go-go dancer, a dominatrix and a porn star.

The fact that the longings of the nun were written by an openly gay man and routed out the mouth of a woman puts a number of twists on the song, and it opens the way for questions about gender politics and suppression in the name of religion. We gain perspective on the nun's wish to be a brothel worker when she adds, "I've always been treated like one."

Like the movie "Far from Heaven," Merritt's songs pull back history's whitewashed curtain to reveal all sorts of repressed realities: homosexuality, depression, loneliness, animal sacrifice.

Who knew they sounded so good together?

Shotgun!

2008-04-16T05:19:00.000-07:00

Drive-By Truckers
Brighter Than Creation's Dark
Score: 7

Those Truckers sure can spin a tale. Split up into four "sides," Brighter Than Creation's Dark fills its more than 75 minutes with characters from smalltown America. Meet Lisa, the party girl who keeps turning 21. Meet Bob, the middle-age misfit who cares for his "mess" of a mother. Meet soldier Tony's worried wife. Nobody has it easy.

In a place where there's more dust than money, these folks and others grapple with circumstance and personal demons. "Daddy Needs a Drink" peels away a layer each time Patterson Hood rasps a reason why Daddy needs one, exposing the fact that Daddy's always drinking.

Bassist Shonna Tucker takes the mike for "The Purgatory Line," about waiting and waiting and waiting to find Mr. Right. The barest accompaniment gives the song texture and dimension. A few chimes from Spooner Oldham's Rhodes totter into a great expanse, a drone and a muffled kick drum its only guides. "This ain't exactly hell," Tucker sings, "It sure as hell ain't heaven."

On the side farther from heaven would be "You and Your Crystal Meth," a tale of an all-consuming addiction. Family ties and a friendship, like brain cells, disintegrate and slough away as the character becomes more dead than alive, going without food and sleep. Hood tells it from the point of view of a former friend who condemns the junkie.

"The Purgatory Line" and "You and Your Crystal Meth" stray from the band's reliable mix of Southern rock, alt-country and traditional country, creating soundscapes notable for their restraint. The latter uses just a treated piano and pedal steel to support Hood's vocals. Both tracks indicate the Truckers' willingness to carve out more room to roam, and go a long way toward keeping the album unpredictable.

Of course, their specialty involves riffage, and the three-guitar shred attack of "That Man I Shot" makes it the album's de facto centerpiece. The "I" in the song, a man in a foreign land (likely a soldier or a peacekeeper), finds himself haunted after killing an assailant in self-defense. Long after the adrenaline has subsided, the scene replays in the survivor's mind. He grapples with his actions. Did that guy have a family, too? Was he just protecting his turf? "Maybe I was in his yard," he ponders. Merely a pawn in a war, he struggles to reconcile his conscience --- even questioning his sanity --- and finds the big picture to be an unacceptable shade of gray.

In another guitar-driven song worthy of discussion, "The Righteous Path," Hood tells of two men, lifelong friends. One is successful but faces serious financial problems. The other is a walking disaster: ex-wives, abandoned kids, trouble with the law. Both believe they're on the right track. And though the successful one says his friend isn't even close, he believes there's only "a thin thin line" between their situations.

When the road of life involves going "80 miles an hour with a worn-out map," it's easy to see why.

Exploring the space

2008-04-01T23:00:00.000-07:00

Sia
Some People Have
Real Problems
Score: 6

The third full-length from Sia shows that she's progressing as a solo artist. The Australian singer, now probably most notable for her hit "Breathe Me," anchored some of the best songs on Zero 7's early albums. When she's away from her electronica collaborators, she's free to explore the space beyond their chillout framework. Sometimes that leads to unexpected pleasures. Sometimes it leads to pitfalls. Some People Have Real Problems has some of both.

In many cases, Sia pushes herself vocally, pulling off brassy bellows and soaring melodies in addition to the easy-and-deliberate style that is her hallmark. It's a surprise, considering the aural yarn that is her standard range, always soft and lightly frayed.

She rises to the challenge delivered by the opening of "Day Too Soon," a gentle lope put forth by her rhythm section of bassist Sam Dixon, drummer Joey Waronker, guitarist Gus Seyffert, and keyboardists Ed Stevens and Larry Goldings. It calls for some heat, and Sia brings a warmth that, while not quite soul, is closer to neo-soul than to pop. This carries into the next track, "You Have Been Loved," a slow-burner that Sia squeezes even more feeling out of.

"Electric Bird" and "Beautiful Calm Driving" similarly find her testing the waters, both having choruses requiring plenty of lung power. "Electric Bird" likewise features a bevy of horns that adds vigor and boldness to Sia's feathered symbolism.

Other songs, it's clear, were no sweat. "Little Black Sandals" harkens back to her Zero 7 contributions, and the bass line and drum tempo could have been lifted from any one of their albums. "Lullaby" turns down the lights with its guitar and piano parts played ever so delicately. The way Sia's voice wavers on a few verses fits the Kinks cover "I Go to Sleep," and the string section is a nice touch.

Throughout the album, though, Sia gives up ground here and there. "Playground" has a fidgety chorus. "Death by Chocolate" goes overboard (the line "tears on your pillow" is an early warning) as Sia and a choir have a Celine Dion flashback, which isn't bad per se, but the song isn't dramatic enough to merit it, nor is it melodramatic enough to be boosted into the realm of camp. Still, it's better than "Academia," a jumble of mixed metaphors ("And if you are a number, you're infinity plus one / And if I am four words, then I am 'Needing of your love'").

Clearly, ambition doesn't guarantee good songs, but it does help a singer grow. And Sia has definitely grown.

Crystal chandeliers in the ceiling and holes in the bloody floor

2008-03-24T04:33:00.000-07:00

Kate Nash
Made of Bricks
Score: 4

Kate Nash, a 20-year-old British singer-songwriter, projects that she's an ordinary girl fascinated by the world. Her small world, that is.

She frets about boys. She analyzes herself. She watches "CSI." No detail is too insignificant, no anecdote too inconsequential to mention. In "Mouthwash," she feels obligated to tell us, "I use mouthwash / Sometimes I floss / I've got a family / And I drink cups of tea." She's obviously self-absorbed.

Is the average British girl-next-door type self-absorbed? Maybe. But the trivialities of Nash's life are a lot more interesting to her than to, probably, anybody else. "We Get On" shares a pulled-from-a-diary account of how she used to swallow her tongue around this guy because he was so amazing, and how she shook his hand once and how she felt a spark but she couldn't ask him for his phone number and then she saw him at a party but he was kissing this other girl and so she cried and got drunk and cried some more.

"We Get On" tells a common enough tale (she's common, remember?), and it displays Nash's main stylistic traits. Her vocals lie somewhere between Feist's warbling and Lily Allen's speak-singing, and she frequently ramps up her speech or slows it down, either cramming in more verses than the tempo would dictate or stretching out each note. Usually, there's no thematic reason for this, so it just comes off as capricious. ("We Get On," despite its shortcomings, is one of the few instances that her delivery complements the subject matter.) The accompaniment tends to be a chipper piano loop joined by live and programmed instruments. Many sound keyboard-produced, giving Made of Bricks a made-in-your-bedroom quality even though the production is anything but lo-fi.

Along with this, the album often feels juvenile and self-indulgent, due in large part to Nash's choice of words and lack of restraint. In "Mariella," she rattles off her faults, starting with "I'm heavy-handed, to say the least." When she follows that with "I'm far too loud," she yells "loud," unintentionally making the first of her criticisms ring true. Later, when the song's piano plod turns to a jig, she mimics the chant of Mariella, a girl who glued her lips together: "Yeah, I'm neva-eva-eva-eva-eva-eva-eva-
eva-eva-eva-eva-eva-eva / Yeah, I'm neva-eva-eva-eva-eva-
eva-eva-eva-eva-eva-eva-eva-eva / Yeah, I'm neva-eva-eva-
eva-eva-eva-eva-eva-eva-eva-eva-eva-eva / Gonna unglue my lips from bein' together." And on the chant goes.

Nash also seems delighted to pepper her speech with unnecessary vulgarities, as though she's just learned to curse and is eager for a reaction. Even if all you did was scan the song titles on Made of Bricks, you might get that impression. The chorus of "Dickhead" is as follows: "Why you bein' a dickhead for? / Stop bein' a dickhead / Why you bein' a dickhead for? / You're just fuckin' up situations."

When Nash chooses to express herself in more grown-up ways, she succeeds in creating some worthy pop songs. "Foundations," about the ways she and her beau pick at each other, glistens as it piles acoustic and electric guitar atop handclaps, piano and a metronome. "Pumpkin Soup" hits a sweet spot, with a big hook abetted by smartly sampled beats and horn blares. "Merry Happy," while a bit longer than it needs to be, packs an enjoyable da-doot-do chorus. And the violin-accented "Nicest Thing" unfurls a disarming honesty when, after describing nearly a dozen wishes relating to a crush, Nash says, "Basically ... I wish that you loved me."

Still, all those songs but "Merry Happy" were co-written, whereas Nash wrote the rest of Made of Bricks herself. If we can assume this isn't a coincidence, then she would benefit greatly from more time collaborating and less time working solo. Why watch "CSI" alone?

The sound of settling in

2008-03-18T23:22:00.000-07:00

Cat Power
Jukebox
Score: 7

As she did on The Covers Record, Chan Marshall is back to reinterpreting and personalizing others' songs. And like The Covers Record, she doesn't exempt her own material.

With the Memphis Rhythm Band out (though Mabon "Teenie" Hodges guests), Marshall collaborates with Judah Bauer on guitar, Erik Paparazzi on bass, Jim White on drums and Gregg Foreman on piano and organ. Among the guests are Matt Sweeney (Zwan, Chavez) and organist Spooner Oldham.

Jukebox has a looser feel than previous Cat Power albums, partly because many songs sound almost live and partly because Marshall demonstrates fewer despondent moments. At the beginning of "Aretha, Sing One for Me," she can even be heard in the studio saying "It's rolling" in response to someone whistling. She also appears to have ceded more control to her bandmates, being credited on the album only for vocals and some arrangements. Perhaps allowing them to take care of the instruments has allowed her to relax a bit.

Of course, you wouldn't know it by the first track. In "New York," she refashions the ode to the Big Apple that Frank Sinatra made famous. Now it's a pensive statement. Instead of a horn section cheering, a keyboard paces around. Instead of punctuating the syllables and lines, Marshall sidles through them. Sinatra took his time, soaking up the spotlight; Marshall doesn't linger.

Two minutes later, she's slipping into something more comfortable: "Ramblin' (Wo)man," a tweak of the Hank Williams standard, and a slower tempo that she seems to welcome. Since the instrumentation changes little from "New York" to "Ramblin' (Wo)man" and the switch between them is so fast, the unsuspecting listener might confuse the two for the same song. Given the quickness of the shift, that might have been the band's intent. The combo is akin to a two-part rock song without being one.

Marshall's take on George Jackson's "Aretha, Sing One for Me" and Bob Dylan's "I Believe in You" don't go over as well. Both are brisker and louder than the songs around them, which isn't by itself a bad thing. In fact, their placement on Jukebox, as No. 5 and No. 8, is a prudent sequencing move. The trouble is that Marshall's hoarse wisp of a voice isn't enough to carry the bigger sounds. The punch of guitar and drums on "I Believe in You" proves too forceful, overpowering her vocals rather than amplifying them. "Aretha, Sing One for Me" mismatches her fairly stiff delivery with a wriggling organ straight out of the Stax catalog. Since Marshall doesn't play off it, or otherwise demonstrate soul, the song falls flat. (She fares better with a stripped-down treatment of James Brown's "Lost Someone.")

As usual, the quiet realm is where Marshall's most-penetrating songs reside. "Metal Heart" and "Song to Bobby," both originals, find her dealing with internal conflicts. "Metal Heart," which in itself incorporates two lines from the hymn "Amazing Grace," previously appeared on Moon Pix. Here, it's unsheathed from its aimless guitar shuffle and muddy multitracked vocals, and it shines anew as a piano-driven piece. When Marshall sings, "Metal heart, you're not hiding / metal heart, you're not worth a thing," it's almost anthemic.

"Song to Bobby," about finally professing an undying love, finds Marshall, who contributed to the I'm Not There soundtrack, in full-on Dylan mode. Along with his inflection, she rolls out lyrics like this:

"Oh how I wanted to tell you
That I was just only 400 miles away
Who could believe that you were calling?
I was in deceit: I was 400 miles behind"

And doing another folk icon proud, she and the band add a different dimension to Joni Mitchell's "Blue." The clarity in the original is replaced by a drift through moral ambiguity. Key to this version, besides Marshall's languid delivery, are the murky synths, which imply a clouded mind. Their haze envelopes Marshall as she stares at hedonism's bloated underbelly of "acid, booze, and ass / needles, guns, and grass."

All right, she's not going there. She's just having a look around.

Change of venue

2008-03-13T03:55:00.000-07:00

Don't Fear The Reaper is officially operating out of Kent now. Yep, I moved north and will soon be diving into this thing called 2008 (which has been getting mixed reviews but which I have high hopes for).

Leap years are good by default. What did you do with your extra 24 hours?

The top 10 albums of 2007: No. 1

2008-02-19T06:40:00.000-08:00

Mono in VCF
Mono in VCF

Darkly beautiful, the music of Mono in VCF melds baroque pop with shoegazer and psychedelic ventures, always with a cosmopolitan appreciation for style and nuance.

On their debut album, the Tacoma, Wash.-based band explore a swirl of love, loss, melancholy and death. The clipped guitar, wet bass plucks and undulations of Moog synthesizer set the tone in opener "Escape City Scrapers" as singer Kim Miller imagines liberating herself from rainclouds and concrete. The mood is cool but sensuous and unhurried, like a lucid dream unfolding.

This mood permeates the next two tracks, "Spider Rotation" and "Masha." In the plaintive "Masha," Miller sings, "I thought I felt a feeling / but my daydream hit the ceiling."

The words sprang from the mind of Hunter Lea, the band's principal songwriter. Lea leaves the vocals to Miller, except for on "In Los Angeles," a Nancy-and-Lee-style ballad in which he duets with her. The other male voice, which appears on two songs, belongs to Terry Jacks, who co-founded the '70s band the Poppy Family. Mono in VCF pay tribute to him by covering his song "There's No Blood in Bone," the album's midpoint.

The sequencing on Mono in VCF enhances the song cycle, moving from synths to acoustic guitar and back, taking into account tempo and texture. "In Los Angeles" scuffs out a groove. "There's No Blood in Bone" whips up a froth. And the majesty of "Chanteuse" calms it down before the dire kismet of "Death of a Spark" sets in.

Standout "The Only One" is built to captivate, with its bass tones and a music-box-style piano ascending and descending like Escher's famous stairway image.

"If you wanna rip my heart out, go ahead
Go, get on, get it over with
If the sight of blood should make you sick
I'll do my best to bleed under my skin"

The way Miller's seductive vocals glide through torture suggests a gallows humor, and the lyrics reinforce the track's circularity. In the first chorus, it's "I know you're not the only one for me"; but in the second chorus, that changes to "You know you're not the only one for me." This opens a range of possibilities.

Perhaps it's a lover confronted with infidelity, or a different kind of betrayal. Perhaps the second chorus is her response. Perhaps the first chorus is a discovery or a personal revelation and the second chorus signifies a transference of knowledge. Perhaps she told him; perhaps he came to the conclusion on his own. Perhaps the betrayal is double-sided.

The final chorus is even more provocative:

I know I'm not the only one
I know you're not the only one
You know you're not the only one
for me

It's like a movie with a scene lost on the cutting-room floor.

And all the better for it.

The top 10 albums of 2007: No. 2

2008-02-12T05:39:00.000-08:00

The Pipettes
We Are the Pipettes
[International version]

It was a match made in Britain.

Solo artist and promoter Monster Bobby (Bobby Barry) paired singers and musicians from the Brighton scene, hoping to tap into clubgoers' lasting affection for '60s girl-group pop. He ended up with star attractions the Pipettes and a backing band for them, the Cassette.

After a bit of lineup shifting in the early days --- to be expected in any large group --- the Pipettes number Gwenno (Gwenno Saunders), Rosay (Rose Dougall) and RiotBecki (Becki Stephens), and the Cassette consist of Monster Bobby on guitar, Jon (Jon Falcone) on bass, Jason (Jason Adelinia) on drums and Seb (Seb Falcone) on keyboards. Together they write songs that recapture the energy, charm, innocence and moxie of groups like the Ronettes and the Crystals.

"Pull Shapes," for instance, extols the virtue of dancing. "Dance with me and we'll be alright," Gwenno sings, with Rosay and RiotBecki providing harmonies. Their enthusiastic delivery, combined with the steady arm of the Cassette, builds up a feeling of euphoria until it sounds like the string section is doing pirouettes.

"Pull Shapes," in essence, is the mission statement of We Are the Pipettes, an album filled with references to dancing. And the music is designed to get you moving. Out of 16 tracks, 13 are uptempo; three are midtempo. All are catchy and hook-laden, beaming the kind of joy that only love could touch.

Love, naturally, is the album's other major theme. Whether it's two wallflowers finding each other ("A Winter's Sky") or getting fed up enough to cut a guy loose ("Your Kisses Are Wasted on Me"), the emotion shows many of its expressions. In "Tell Me What You Want," RiotBecki scolds a boy for making eyes at her, but only because she prefers people to be upfront rather than mysterious. Her take: If you're going to stare, at least come talk to me. "You could be mine," she teases.

Oh yes, they can and do flirt. It's one of many talents in the Pipettes' arsenal. Gwenno, RiotBecki and Rosay have a chemistry that belies their short time together. The skill and ease of their vocal interplay adds sparkle to every song on We Are the Pipettes.

Strangely, the album underwent a remixing job and repackaging before being distributed internationally in 2007. Greg Wells, who specializes in slick, processed pop, did the mixing job and produced two bonus tracks for the release.

While not on the level of the Beatles' Let It Be and Let It Be ... Naked, the differences in the British version and the international version of We Are the Pipettes are numerous and give each a distinct character. Honestly, the covers tell you a lot about the music inside: The British version is proper and graceful. The international version is bigger and louder.

It's counterintuitive that a band birthed from '60s nostalgia would benefit from a modernistic recording instead of one in the tradition of Phil Spector, which is what the British version follows. Nevertheless, Wells' version has its pleasures. "Judy," a tale about befriending a rebellious girl, benefits from Wells' emphasis on bass and percussion. The horns, too, come across as more robust. "ABC" also gets a shot in the arm from his treatment.

The drawback to Wells' mix job is that Seb's keyboards are significantly muffled and many of the background flourishes are buried. You'll have a harder time hearing the crowd effect on "Pull Shapes" and Gwenno's ba-bop-bop-ba backing vocals in "Dirty Mind," though you can hear both distinctly on the British version. When the Pipettes use a lot of backing vocals in quick succession, the extra compression on the international version smooshes them together. That means if you're listening to "One Night Stand" on the British version, the vocals will have good definition, but if you're listening to the international version, it's tougher to make out the phrases.

Ultimately, however, songcraft and personality are what carry this album. When Rosay sings "I woke up with a smile / Oh, I nearly started screaming / That I love you," the exhilaration is contagious. We Are the Pipettes radiates delight regardless of the version.

Buy them both.

The top 10 albums of 2007: No. 3

2008-02-07T00:59:00.000-08:00

Radiohead
In Rainbows

Just as it takes sun and rain to make a rainbow, it took The Bends and Hail to the Thief to make In Rainbows.

Integrating their live instrumentation with their programmables, Radiohead focus on refinement this time around rather than pioneering. After all, the business model was trailblazing enough.

In Rainbows is lean and brisk, clocking in at just over 40 minutes, and Phil Selway's live drums inject the album with a spryness not matched since their formative years. Whether it's the top-notch snare playing of "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi" or the cymbals-and-shakers treatment of "Reckoner," he makes his presence felt. On the symbolic album-opener "15 Step," he shares the stage with the sampler, abetting its plips and plops, but by the end of the song, the sampler is overpowered, just one element in a multilayered force.

Here and there within those layers, you'll find breadcrumbs leading to the past. The programming in "15 Step" recalls that of Hail to the Thief's "Backdrifts," although the former jumps around more and the latter had that tunnel-vision synth. "Bodysnatchers" revels in the rawness and guitar skronk of "My Iron Lung." "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi" lays slow vocals by Thom Yorke over a fast rhythm in the style of "Where I End and You Begin."

Radiohead's approach on In Rainbows hews more to the straightforward songwriting of the Bends era than to the experimentation of their recent years. There's even a love song or two. "I don't want to be your friend / I just want to be your lover," Yorke sings on the spare "House of Cards," encouraging a woman to put her worries to bed (and climb in with him). It's a surprising sentiment from a man long cast as distant and distracted. Kid A certainly heightened that impression. As Radiohead journeyed into the world of computers, they --- and Yorke, especially --- picked up an asexual frost. "House of Cards" feels like the thaw.

Like "House of Cards," "All I Need" concerns a romantic pursuit, although the warped piano tones warn from the start that this one isn't as benign. Over trip-hop beats, Yorke voices his cravings: You. You. You! But there are signs of peril everywhere, from the classic moth-flame analogy to his second-guessing that "It’s all wrong / It’s all right / It’s all wrong / It’s all right."

Even if In Rainbows has a lighter feel overall than most of its predecessors, its conclusion comes draped in a funeral cloak. "Videotape" takes its inspiration from two places: people's treasured memories and people's widespread fear of death. Or, if you apply them to sayings, it might be a combination of "If the Lord took me tomorrow, I'd die a happy man" and "If you're watching this tape, then I'm already dead."

As piano keys tremble, Yorke plays the role of a dying man who records his final words for someone to witness later, for, as he says, "I can't do it face to face." Backward drum rolls and a chorus of ghostly Yorkes ratchet up the tension. The drum rolls, in particular, add an eerieness to the track, sounding more like a shoe tumbling off a dresser than sticks hitting the skins. But "Videotape" is a complicated thing, for in this dark place the doomed man focuses on what has just passed, "the most perfect day I've ever seen."

Not that any of this fear-and-death stuff should come as a surprise. It is Radiohead. Look how they ended The Bends and Hail to the Thief.

The top 10 albums of 2007: No. 4

2008-02-05T00:01:00.000-08:00

The Arcade Fire
Neon Bible

Can I get a witness?!

The top 10 albums of 2007: No. 5

2008-01-31T23:52:00.000-08:00

Lily Allen
Alright, Still

479,895 MySpace fans can't be wrong.

(OK, they could be, but they're not.)

Alright, Still is a creative, good-humored debut with a summery splash, and Lily Allen comes across as a firecracker, a brat and a well-meaning sister. But she's a lovable protagonist
to root for in any form.

In "Knock 'Em Out," she's a social commentator. She jokes about a common plight for ladies in pubs and clubs: unwanted advances from guys who just can't take a hint. As a breezy piano run intermixes with sax honks and busy electro beats, Allen explains the song's premise in a monologue, almost as if "Knock 'Em Out" were a blurb in a women's magazine. Switching her point of view, she creates a scenario and jumps in and out of the scene, adding asides and the peeved woman's inner thoughts. She starts to rattle off sample excuses but cracks up at "my house is on fire."

"Knock 'Em Out" wins points for pulling off exposition and snap shifts in perspective, but it's also comedic. I mean, what can you do when the pest won't go away? The fact that the consideration of knocking someone out even enters her mind is hilarious, because it's totally not based in reality. And the consideration of walking away is the second thing to come to her!

Allen's other song set in a club, "Friday Night," is equally impressive. The backbeat of "Friday Night" sounds like what you'd hear outside a club: that heavy, lub-dub bass thump. In this one, Allen goes out for a night on the town, and nothing goes as planned. The wait's long. She gets hassled by a girl on the guest list. She gets hassled by security.

"Look me
up and down
I don't
make a sound"

Allen's backing vocals correspond to the action described in the song, climbing and descending. You can just picture her standing there: lips tightly pursed, eyes locked forward, seething somewhere deep inside.

So, naturally, when she gets into the club, it's not a fun, carefree experience. One thing after another gets under her skin, and when some girls try to push by her, she pushes back, ready to rumble. In "Knock 'Em Out," the mention of violence was outlandish and played for laughs; here it hints at her volatile emotional state.

That could be due to the suite of songs on Alright, Still referencing a breakup that unleashed a whorl of feelings. Anger is a big one.

"Not Big" disses Mr. Ex, impugning his manhood and chalking up his shortcomings. Though glockenspiel and Allen's sing-song chorus imply only that mischief is afoot, "Not Big" aims to hurt, particularly when she threatens, "Let's see how you feel in a couple of weeks / when I work my way through your mates." Similarly, the reggae-inflected "Smile" harbors a vindictive kernel under its sunny exterior.

"Littlest Things," though, takes Allen back to the good times, long before the breakup. Alas, the memories bring with them a fresh zing of heartache, the wistful strings fleshing that out. "Sometimes I find myself sittin' back and reminiscin'," she confesses, "especially when I have to watch other people kissin'."

Ouch.

The top 10 albums of 2007: No. 6

2008-01-28T01:40:00.000-08:00

M.I.A.
Kala

"You think it's tough now? Come to Africa." The words of M.I.A. tourmate Afrikan Boy burn a hole through our middling concerns.

A little overweight?

Africa has famine.

Looming recession?

Africa has widespread poverty.

Mortgage market mess?

Africa has slums, million-person slums.

The war in Iraq?

Africa has lots of wars. Take your pick.

"You can't touch me, like leprosy."

Africa has leprosy.

The guest rap on "Hussel" is a fragment of what's going on on Kala, M.I.A.'s second album. Kala takes the Earth and covers it in highlighter. India, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Burma, Angola, Somalia and Mozambique get shout-outs. M.I.A. recorded songs on four continents, and she draws from hip-hop, rock 'n' roll, Bollywood, the Middle East and aboriginal music. In this way, the album is a celebration of culture, a bridge to the unfamiliar. Through Kala, a hip-hop fan might discover world music, and an M.I.A. fan might discover the Pixies, whose "Where Is My Mind?" lyrics she adapts in "20 Dollar."

Organic and synthetic collide. Shouts and didgeridoo meet synths and samplers. "Bird Flu" explodes in a clatter of percussion, clucking and children's voices. Auwwwk!! Auwwwk!! The chickens are everywhere as people hassle M.I.A. about her credentials.

Met with so much chaos and hardship, "Jimmy" is joyous escapism, pairing waltzing strings with a percolating disco beat and Hindi-inspired singing. A woman pines for the desirable Jimmy Aaja, though her whimpers at the end indicate that her love will go unrequited.

Like "Jimmy," "The Turn" also could be considered escapist, but it wields a different kind of dissociative power. It brings on vertigo with woozy synths, scattershot hand drums and a disembodied rap posse.

The world of Kala is the Third World, the First World and the world of M.I.A. The three interweave, as does the theme of money. In perhaps all worlds, money is a thing to covet and to loathe, to kill for and to die for. "20 Dollar" tells us that $20 is the going rate for AK-47s in Africa. In "Hussel," the character does terrible things to get money, which she then sends to her far-away family. "I hate money 'cause it makes me numb," she says.

Guns, the unofficial fundraisers, burst out of the lyrics and into the music. Cocking adds tension to the chant "Hands up, guns out!" in "World Town," about destitute people pushed to the brink. "Paper Planes" takes the technique further, filling the choruses with gunshots.

But "Paper Planes," patterned after the ruthlessness of gangsta rap, says something deeper. In the context of Kala, it subverts the braggadocio of thug life to show that, no matter the country, it's still bullets and blood, just different faces falling lifeless to the ground.

There's no glamour in the slaughter. It's not about power; it's about powerlessness.

The top 10 albums of 2007: No. 7

2008-01-21T05:40:00.000-08:00

Rilo Kiley
Under the Blacklight

In Under the Blacklight, Rilo Kiley is Fleetwood Mac. Jenny Lewis is Stevie Nicks. Blake Sennett is Lindsey Buckingham. California is California, as sunny and as seedy as it was in the '70s.

With romantic friction and a power struggle at play, Lewis and Sennett pull Rilo Kiley away from their plainer, somewhat rangy beginnings and toward the streamlined, studio-polished pop-rock that their parents might have listened to. "Dreamworld," in particular, would sound right at home sandwiched between Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt. The Lewis-Sennett vocal interplay, along with the steady beat and easy wash of electric guitar, recalls Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams." (Perhaps the title itself is an homage.)

Lewis, consciously or unconsciously, has picked up Nicks' vocal characteristics. That's apparent on "Close Call," in which her post-chorus flourishes fall somewhere between a coo and a yodel. The stylistic fusion adds impact and catchiness to Rilo Kiley's sound.

Like any number of classic California albums, Under the Blacklight has enough shine to give you a tan. "Silver Lining" finds its chirpy guitar in another '70s touchstone, George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord." The island-flavored "Dejalo" breaks out the steel drums. "Breakin' Up" and "Give a Little Love" skip along to synth and chime.

And when the sun goes down, the action's just getting started. Lewis' vocals squirm as the rhythm section thrusts on "The Moneymaker," about people selling their bodies for cash. A little later, the title track guides us through the valley (probably the San Fernando Valley), where the moon and the night sky make that black light at the club look like nothin'. "15" and its swell of horns bring a teen girl into the picture. She's a knockout. And a man "deep like a graveyard" who gets tangled up with her finds out that she's only ... well, you know. Then again, he might have had an inkling of her age, as Lewis characterizes him as "a spider on the web."

For casual listeners nodding along to the music, learning of tension between Lewis and Sennett might come as a surprise. But there are plenty of hints of strife in the lyrics, as there were in some Fleetwood Mac recordings. Nicks and Buckingham quit the band twice and returned twice, along with making solo albums and handling other business during full-band hiatuses.

Like Nicks and Buckingham, Lewis and Sennett have spent time apart, working on albums where they call the shots (and maybe try to outdo each other). Lewis collaborated with the Watson Twins on Rabbit Fur Coat, released in 2006. Sennett led The Elected in the creation of 2004's Me First and 2006's Sun, Sun, Sun.

So although the implications are twofold when Lewis sings, "Are we breakin' up?", the question shouldn't be that scary. Because even if Rilo Kiley do break up, chances are they'll get back together.

Assuming, of course, that they're still Fleetwood Mac.

The top 10 albums of 2007: No. 8

2008-01-16T07:21:00.000-08:00

Menomena
Friend and Foe

Friend and Foe is not an album that benefits from first impressions. It introduces itself as a challenging, if not outright difficult, listen. The principal vocalist favors a squawking falsetto. The instrumentation jumps around so quickly and frequently that it can feel arbitrary.

Then its framework and loops start to become familiar. The melodies take root in the brain. The falsetto ingratiates itself. Before long, it seems that they were always this way, that there was never a time when everything didn't fit just so.

Much like its busy cover, the songs on Friend and Foe are complicated creations that need time to digest and process. All three members of the Portland-based band sing, arrange and write songs. Justin Harris plays bass, saxophones and guitar; Brent Knopf handles keyboards and guitar; Danny Seim mans the drums. Yet it's not the number of elements that gives Friend and Foe its bustle; it's how those elements are arranged.

"The Pelican," for example, begins with two piano tones: one low, one high. Harris comes in with his falsetto: "Take it! When I'm not looking!" A guitar goes live after the first verse, its sharp twang resounding as Seim's sticks scrabble across his kit. The guitar breaks free of the melee for a moment, then it supports a stack of backing vocals as they aim for the sky. As Harris returns, abetted by the backing vocals and a different guitar part, Seim makes sure all four of his limbs are in motion.

Such rapid-fire substitutions and the way they are truncated but repeated bring to mind the chopping and splicing of tape loops, which might be why Menomena have had their creative methodology misunderstood on occasion. In brainstorming sessions, they employ a computer program called the Digital Looping Recorder, or Deeler. It's basically a glorified sampler, but the words "computer program" and "looping" gave birth to a mistaken impression that Deeler takes care of the arrangements. The band does that.

The visual component is a different story. For it, Menomena turned to the ink of graphic novelist Craig Thompson, who then drew a world swarming with activity and embedded with key phrases from the songs. The pandemonium of his scenes goes hand in hand with Friend and Foe's tumultuous abundance. You get jingle bells. You get saxophone. You get bombast.

You also get plenty of quirkiness, including cow samples on "Running." The ditty certainly evokes all things bovine, with a galumphing bass line and lyrics like "It's safe to say / if we don't find food soon / we won't make it through winter."

The whistling that opens "Boyscout'n" replaces that cow image with a scout march: a bunch of pure-hearted little souls who've never felt the sting of rejection or betrayal --- which, incidentally, are all over Friend and Foe. Fair-weather friends ("Weird"), lies ("Ghostship"), fatigue ("Muscle'n Flo") and more struggles

add a grim shade of reality to the album's whimsy.

Just don't expect to take it all in at once.

The top 10 albums of 2007: No. 9

2008-01-12T00:57:00.000-08:00

Amy Winehouse
Back to Black

They say art imitates life, but in Amy Winehouse's case, it could be the other way around. The besieged heroine of Back to Black has become her public face.

"They tried to make me go to rehab"

In August, Winehouse did a stint in rehab and postponed a tour of the U.S. and Canada.

"I told ya I was troubled"

In late August, Britain's Daily Mail published photos of her and husband Blake Fielder-Civil bruised and bleeding. Winehouse blamed herself for their scrap and said he had saved her life. She also made it a point to defend Fielder-Civil in a series of text messages with celebrity blogger Perez Hilton. In one that the newspaper obtained, Winehouse was quoted as saying, "I was cutting myself after he found me in our room about to do drugs with a call girl."

"I cheated myself
Like I knew I would"

Winehouse started November off with a disastrous performance of "Back To Black" at MTV's Europe Music Awards in Munich, Germany, preceded by a baffling acceptance speech.

Later that month, she bombed in Birmingham and in London. In the former show, she stumbled around and cursed and threatened audience members booing her. A music critic from the Birmingham Mail wrote that he saw "a supremely talented artist reduced to tears, stumbling around the stage and, unforgivably, swearing at the audience." In the latter show, at the capital's Hammersmith Apollo, NME reported that she took the stage 45 minutes late, appeared trashed, frequently left the stage and ditched the show in the middle of the encore. Many concertgoers booed, walked out or demanded their money back.

"You love blow, and I love puff"

Citing cocaine use (along with crack and heroin), Giles Fielder-Civil, Blake's old man, called out Winehouse and his son in late August, telling BBC radio, "Clearly, they are addicts."

In mid-October, Winehouse, Blake Fielder-Civil and a third person were arrested in Norway after a tip to police that they were toting marijuana. They each paid a fine of $715 and were released. Now Winehouse is appealing the fine.

"If my man was fighting
Some unholy war
I would be behind him"

In November, a London judge ordered Blake Fielder-Civil held in jail on charges of witness tampering in his forthcoming trial. He's accused of assaulting a bar owner in June, then trying to pay the man to keep quiet about it. With him in jail, Winehouse canceled all live and promotional appearances for the year.

In mid-December, Winehouse joined him in police custody, allowing herself to be placed under arrest on suspicion of attempting to interfere in his case. She soon was free on bail, with a hearing scheduled for March.

In my review of Back to Black, I likened the album to a Greek tragedy, with Amy Winehouse in the lead role. But that would be mere art.

The top 10 albums of 2007: No. 10

2008-01-08T06:26:00.000-08:00

Bat for Lashes
Fur and Gold

The magical and the mystical inhabit Fur and Gold, the full-length debut of Bat for Lashes and, more importantly, of Natasha Khan, a Brighton-based British singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist with bewitching power.

Though technically a band, Bat for Lashes come across as a loose collective, primarily an outlet for Khan's fertile imagination and impressive talents. Khan wrote the songs on Fur and Gold, performed lead vocals on every track, played most of the music and contributed album artwork. In interviews and photo shoots, she's the voice and face of Bat for Lashes.

In those photos, she's inevitably painted or dusted or glittered up to look like a pixie, which is probably the first image of her that pops into people's heads when they hear Fur and Gold and enter its realm of beasts and folklore.

With harpsichord galloping away, "Horse and I" ushers us into the first of many nocturnal pursuits. "There is no turning back," Khan sings, and sure enough, we've plunged headlong through the looking glass, the throbbing bass of "Trophy" a seductive, encroaching darkness. Is that you over there, Moby?! No, those haunting backing vocals belong to Texas native Josh T. Pearson, whose guitar twinges and shivers intermittently.

Nestled in this night is the tremendous "What's a Girl to Do?," which features a spoken-word introduction a la The Angels' "My Boyfriend's Back." The spaciousness of the live drums takes the track out under the stars, where Khan laments a dying love, likening her heart to a bat that wants to fly away. The keyboard and sampler provide a modern, bobbing groove, while Khan's vocal performance provides a retro feel, drawing from '60s girl groups. The combination is otherworldly. Moreover, it works thematically in altering the perception of time, as any emotional watershed can do.

But more surprises await. About two-thirds of the way through the sparse, piano-driven ballads "Sad Eyes" and "Bat's Mouth," Khan's slow, doleful melodies climax out of nowhere, breaking the verse-chorus-verse structure to soar like a phoenix. She also covers Bruce Springsteen's "I'm on Fire," the spinnerets of a zither helping to soften it from a lustful declaration to a longing, pliant, feminine expression.

For the most part, Fur and Gold chronicles characters: sometimes human, sometimes animal. "Trophy" mentions queens and court jesters. "Seal's Jubilee," a placid tune with echoes and vibraphone, paints an ocean scene thriving with birds, sharks, a whale, a dog, trees, swans and, of course, seals. Then "teachers and travelers" arrive and lay waste to the land. Khan's choice of words are chilling: "And black snow came and black snow stayed."

"Sarah," no less dark, reflects on the life of an atheist who met an untimely end. And despite the fact she had been "going nowhere," the narrator confesses, "You know sometimes, I want to love like you / Sarah / so I know how it feels not to feel."

You'd think "The Wizard" would be self-explanatory, but the allusions to sex and possession --- what with the blood-drinking and the pledges of subservience and the "hands that drink my body" --- muddy the waters. I mean, is this a song about a wizard or an orgasm?

'Cause either way, it rules.

Pure West

2007-11-20T02:30:00.000-08:00

Kanye West
Graduation
Score: 7

Ego is a double-edged sword for Kanye West. On one hand, it compels him to push himself further in craft, commercialism, performance and influence. Yet it can push people away, into the "haters" camp.

West has a reputation for overreacting when things don't go his way. At the MTV Europe Music Awards last year, he stormed the stage to protest his loss in the Best Video category. He argued that "Touch the Sky" deserved the honor because it "cost a million dollars, Pamela Anderson was in it. I was jumping across canyons." Desperate to make people underSTAND, he said, "If I don't win, the awards show loses credibility."

To be sure, West is a man of passion. He works hard, and he demands compensation for that work in the form of recognition, be it awards, special treatment, flattery, respect, privileges, money or sex. When he doesn't get it, that fire inside him blazes hotter, and he vows to prove he's worthy.

The pattern plays itself out on Graduation, his third studio album. Unlike on The College Dropout or Late Registration, he allows the schoolhouse concept to quickly unravel, forgoing the skits as well as the Voice of Authority that opened those albums. Instead, Graduation reveals itself to be a chronicle of the rapper's ups and downs in the world of fame.

"The Good Life" finds him in a celebratory mood. Over a buoyant banger abetted by T-Pain and a Michael Jackson sample, he hails the pleasures of the high rollers: the stacks of bills, the bottles of liquor, the blowjob at 30,000 feet, the Ferrari, Vegas, the chick-magnet status.

But there's a downside to this fame thing. Now the paparazzi's all over him ("Flashing Lights"), and people dis him out of jealousy ("The Glory," "Everything I Am"). To make matters worse, his hook-ups haven't gone according to plan ("Drunk and Hot Girls"). He fears he's cursed to pick up the same type of woman, the one who downs drink after drink on his dime, then dances with her girlfriends but not with him, then makes him drive them all home, then persuades him to stop at the drive-through, then distracts him with her queasiness to the point that he almost crashes the car. Still, he declares, "That that don't kill me / Can only make me stronger" ("Stronger").

Now, West isn't the greatest rapper in the world, and his shortcomings in that department are more evident on Graduation than on any of his previous albums. He even recycles his Klondike rhyme from Late Registration. But he compensates for his weaker points --- though he might claim to have none --- by loading the album with samples and guests. This, in effect, gives it the feeling of an all-star cast. "Homecoming" features Chris Martin of Coldplay, "Barry Bonds" has Lil Wayne, "Drunk and Hot Girls" taps Mos Def, "Good Life" trots out T-Pain and gets an extra shot of pep from Michael Jackson's "P.Y.T."

Additionally, West is first and foremost a producer (Common's Be, John Legend's Get Lifted), so everything outside the lyrics sounds fantastic. The samples are deftly employed, often with West's distinctive pitch shifting, which assimilates them into the whole. Elton John and Mountain are just two squares on the same quilt.

"Stronger," built on the back of Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger," provides a good example of some recurring elements on Graduation: clockwork beats, pitch shifting, heavily manipulated vocals, a robotic sheen of synthesizers, beautiful cohesion. It adds up to a compulsively listenable sound.

You don't need to tell that to West, though. Even in the arena of hip-hop, where braggadocio is often part of the game, he stands out. In "Barry Bonds," he does more than liken his steady stream of hits to the towering home runs of the maligned (and now indicted) slugger; he identifies with the man himself: Bonds, a superstar at the top of his game, someone with power and longevity who's openly scorned because of his attitude. Bonds steps up to the plate, slams one over the fence and receives no more respect than he did before. West knows what that's like.

Appropriately, the song features Lil Wayne, who displayed some swollen pride of his own when he declared himself the best rapper alive after Jay-Z's retirement in 2003 but before his return in 2006.

Fortunately, West is not a man without humor, which makes it easier to accept his ego. In "Barry Bonds," for instance, when he claims that he's among the top five MCs, he tempers his boasting by poking fun at himself: "You could get behind me / But my head's so big you can't sit behind me."

It's common for rappers to pay tribute to a fallen MC; it's less common when the MC's living. West recognizes this and dedicates "Big Brother" to Jay-Z. The ode bumps with a beefy guitar riff, handclaps, strings and dramatic synths. As if turning pages in a photo album, West pinpoints moments in their shared past: hanging out at the mall, him too shy (shy!) to show his idol the beats he made; playing his "lil' songs" for Jay-Z, who bobs his head and says proudly, "That's you?"; reveling in sold-out shows; feeling held back when he's blocked from joining Jay-Z at Madison Square Garden; burning with determination, the hunger steeling his voice even as he comes to the present day.

He calls it sibling rivalry, always reaching for the bar Jay-Z set, always finding a higher bar above it. He recalls a day when he was sure he'd topped his mentor: "I told Jay-Z I did a song with Coldplay / Next thing I know, he got a song with Coldplay / Back of my mind, I'm like, 'Damn, no way.' "

What shines through "Big Brother" --- and the rest of Graduation, for that matter --- is the honest emotion. "If you admire somebody, you should go ahead an' tell 'em," he raps, "people never get the flowers while they can still smell 'em."

He might broadcast arrogance, but a lot comes with it.

There's no going back

2007-10-01T02:27:00.000-07:00

The Smashing Pumpkins
Zeitgeist
Score: *

The only way to reconcile the embarrassment that is Zeitgeist is to disavow it: It's not a real Smashing Pumpkins album. It's quasi-Smashing Pumpkins. It's Smashing Pumpkins 2.0. It's Smashing Pumpkins with an asterisk.

From its shakier songs to its mystifying production jiggery, Zeitgeist proves about as comfortable as a cattle prod. The only protection the Pumpkins' sterling legacy has from Zeitgeist is that asterisk. If you remove it, then the legacy is dented by mistakes compounding mistakes.

Mistake No. 1:

The name. Much pain could have been avoided if Billy Corgan had just left the name alone. Buried it and moved on. Instead, he dredged it up, half-decomposed and in pieces, and tried to resuscitate it.

In 2005, he announced in a full-page ad in the Chicago Tribune that he wanted "my band back." Except that it was never his --- it was theirs. Together they were The Smashing Pumpkins; alone he was Billy Corgan. And guitarist James Iha and bassist D'Arcy Wretzky wanted no part of the reunion.

Perhaps smarting over the outcome of his post-Pumpkins projects --- the short-lived Zwan, which broke up acrimoniously; his foray into poetry; a solo album that failed to catch fire --- Corgan decided he would do whatever it took to reform the Pumpkins.

So he turned his back on Iha and Wretzky, forsaking a musical partnership that lasted more than 12 years, one that he likened in interviews to that of a family, or a band of brothers in the trenches. He cryptically announced the band's reformation and went into the studio with drummer Jimmy Chamberlin.

Mistake No. 2:

Zeitgeist abandons the approach that made the Pumpkins' music consistently enthralling. The Pumpkins were progressive and calculating. They shifted their sound based on internal dynamics, changes in the musical landscape and a zest for exploration. They were ahead of the curve. They moved from the psychedelic swirl of Gish to the grunge-meets-classic-rock crash of Cherub Rock; from the epic scope of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness to the dark, ornate tapestry of Adore, and beyond. Corgan's lyrical skill and conceptual powers seemed to grow with almost every release.

Zeitgeist, by contrast, is regressive. It's out of step. It ignores the trajectory of the Pumpkins' career. It doesn't use Machina/The Machines of God and Machina II/The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music as reference points. Corgan seems to have lost his compass.

"7 Shades of Black" is a tepid rewrite of "Bodies." "United States" starts out promising, with surging electric guitars building up Chamberlin's tom attack. But come the five-minute mark, it plunders from the back catalog, recycling music from live renditions of "Silverfuck."

Mistake No. 3:

Zeitgeist doesn't know what it wants to be. Judging from the opening salvo of "Doomsday Clock" and the many towers of overdubbed guitars, Zeitgeist was meant to be a thunderous affirmation of the Pumpkins' continued ability to rock. But the production works against it. Like a screen, it muffles what it shouldn't, namely the big-and-noisy parts. Yet in "Starz," when Corgan softly sings, "We are stars," the volume jumps. Whether melodic, like high point "That's the Way (My Love Is)," or bombastic, like "Bring the Light," all songs suffer. Two producers assisted with Zeitgeist: Roy Thomas Baker (Queen, The Cars) and Terry Date (Pantera, Soundgarden). Each, however, handled fewer tracks than Corgan and Chamberlin. And Corgan and Chamberlin also are credited as co-producers on everything, so they have to bear responsibility.

Mistake No. 4:

Assuming rocking out was the focus of Zeitgeist, why lard the album's imagery with platitudes? The inside art features Paris Hilton, banks of televisions, the grim reaper flanked by politicians, a Trojan warrior with an automatic weapon, and the queen of England at a memorial. The queen is weeping for a heart with a Smashing Pumpkins logo on it.

All part of the confounding premise. "Zeitgeist" roughly means "the spirit of the age." So is it the zeitgeist of 2007 to get back on the circuit? To be riffmongers? Is it the zeitgeist of 2007 to protest U.S. affairs? The whole assemblage feels cheap, easy and thrown-together. It's nothing like the craft and thoughtfulness of previous albums.

Mistake No. 5:

Zeitgeist was issued in four forms, with Target, Best Buy and iTunes each selling a version that featured an extra track and a different tracklisting. Now, there isn't anything shocking or unusual about limited-edition bonus tracks; labels have played this marketing game a million times in the past.

The main problem with this arrangement is that it sends dangerous message: Shop at the big-box store instead of the independent. Yes, it's a moot point if everyone acquires the tracks through file-sharing services or otherwise finds a way to beat the system, but not everyone will have the knowledge, resources or persistence to do so.

The other problem is that it endorses commercialism at the expense of art. The running order of an album means something. When you tack on bonus tracks or rearrange the sequence to accommodate them, it's a significant change. The shrewdest artists release bonus tracks on a separate CD, or via a reissue, or in some other way that doesn't undermine the album as a unified statement. By releasing multiple versions of Zeitgeist, the Pumpkins are basically saying the tracklisting doesn't matter.

Mistake No. 6:

As if Corgan's appropriation of the band name wasn't rude enough, he coughs up an old bone of contention. An oft-repeated tale holds that Siamese Dream, the album that made the Pumpkins megastars, was basically a Corgan solo effort, with him playing all or most of his bandmates' parts (excluding the drum tracks). Some saw this as evidence of a runaway ego or his need to hog the credit.

In Zeitgeist, the liner notes defiantly read:

songs by WILLIAM PATRICK CORGAN
performed artfully by
JIMMY CHAMBERLIN: DRUMS / BILLY CORGAN: ALL THE REST

This is the equivalent of saying, "In your face, everyone!"

And such connections to the past simply illuminate the steepness of the fall. Before the Pumpkins broke up near the end of 2000, they were a juggernaut. Mellon Collie continued a long streak of impressive sales and critical and popular acclaim. Adore and Machina, while being far from rallying points at the time, have become considerably more appreciated since their respective 1998 and 2000 releases.

Zeitgeist will not go down in history as the first Smashing Pumpkins album with an asterisk. (That distinction belongs to Machina II, which the band gave away in September 2000 to fans, instructing them to share it with anyone.)

No, Zeitgeist will be remembered as the first Smashing Pumpkins album that didn't sound like a Smashing Pumpkins album.

Warm-blooded killers?

2007-08-23T23:48:00.000-07:00

Low
Drums and Guns
Score: 8

Like a series of aftershocks, the percussive loops on Drums and Guns follow the earthquake that was The Great Destroyer.

Low, long known for their glacial tempos and imposing sparseness, underwent a dramatic change in 2005, moving in a more conventional rock direction. They included more riffage, and they played harder, louder and faster. Where there had once been negative space, on The Great Destroyer there was a tough skin of discord.

That dynamic shake-up continues to play itself out. This time Low drop the bristly electric guitars in exchange for repeating rhythms. They've retained the brisker tempos, however, and that alone gives the album a different character than much of the band's previous work. Tellingly, Drums and Guns contains just two tracks that reach beyond the four-minute mark, and then only slightly. Most are about three minutes, and a few are considerably shorter than that. Compared to 1997's Songs for a Dead Pilot EP, which featured a 13-minute-plus song sandwiched between ones well-exceeding four minutes, this feels like a revelation, like the research proclaiming that the cold-blooded dinosaurs we all thought we knew as children were actually warm-blooded creatures, springing onto their prey with alarming speed. Or something like that.

But while the songs are quicker, the subject matter isn't likely to make people jump up and dance. Over a hornetlike buzz of guitars, opening track "Pretty People" levels a hard truth at the listener: You're gonna die. Just like the poets and the soldiers, you're gonna die. Those little babies? Yeah, they're gonna die. We're all gonna die. The only question is when. The kick drum shudders with the gravity of a public execution.

Mortality is everywhere on Drums and Guns. "Sandinista" asks, "Where would you go if the gun fell in your hands? / Home to the kids or to sympathetic friends?" It posits that a person can be fated to kill, much as death is predestined. "Breaker" is a few steps ahead, already at the funeral, organ pealing heavenward. At this particular funeral, the clergymen might also be the Neptunes, as handclaps and a programmed beat make a good case for finger-drumming on the pews.

Overtly rhythmic looping carries over to the box-top rapping and tapping of "Always Fade," though the message changes from activism to defeatism. A similar depressive ribbon entwines "Dust on the Window," probably the closest relative to Low's ice-age material. Gradually fading in with Mimi Parker's skeletal snare, it finds her drifting "one day closer / One sunset further behind." Through a veil of cryptic lines --- "breaking my arm that won't heal" is another --- Parker conveys a muted despair in her only solo appearance singing lead.

Drums and Guns, then, follows The Great Destroyer in its masculine spirit, with Alan Sparhawk being the dominant vocal force. But Parker does harmonize with him on most songs, so the shift is subtle. A highlight of their vocal interplay is "Your Poison," which arranges their harmonies in the style of a gospel choir and overlays them with Sparhawk and Parker in the foreground. This technique shows Low experimenting with filling the space they once reserved for haunting echoes. On "Take Your Time," they layer ghostly harmonies with a chime, a metronomic beat, a piano, Matt Livingston's bass and other elements.

There are a few corners of the album that escape the penetrating gloom, as on the playful "Hatchet," which bounds along with its bass run, sweetly suggesting, "Let's bury the hatchet like / the Beatles and the Stones." Mostly, though, it cycles like the looping percussion, lending a circular feeling to Drums and Guns. The final song, "Violent Past," could be a response to "Pretty People," answering its death knell with, "All I can do is fight / Even if I know you're right."

Still, Sparhawk sounds a lot less resigned on the cut before it, "Murderer," calling out the Man Upstairs ("Don't act so innocent / I've seen you pound your fist into the earth") and making him a proposition --- to do his "dirty work."

Rumble, rumble.

Another version of Trent

2007-07-15T01:35:00.000-07:00

Nine Inch Nails
Year Zero
Score: 6

What happens when the man who famously yelped, "Help me get away from myself," finally gets comfortable with himself?

Torment and art have intertwined for ages, whether in painting, poetry or music. But for Trent Reznor --- who essentially built a career off his angst, mainstreaming the industrial genre in the process --- that braid is everything. Isn't it?

In a 2005 interview with Spin magazine, Reznor revealed that he went into a drugs-and-booze tailspin after The Fragile's release, shortly before the new millennium. "It was very clear to me that I was trying to kill myself," he said.

Reznor got help, and it showed (though it didn't necessarily help his music). Signs of his personal transformation flashed on 2005's With Teeth, from its looser structure to its desertion of past triumphs. Gone were the kinks and coils of Pretty Hate Machine, the blowtorch rage of The Downward Spiral, the labyrinthine corridors of The Fragile.

In its place were --- with a few notable exceptions --- straightforward rockers. Among the exceptions, standout track "Only" appropriated the early-'90s bass and synth sounds of Pretty Hate Machine and referenced the "tiny little dot" from "Down in It." Except instead of succumbing to it, as he did then, Reznor stood up to it. And with his newfound insight ("Now I know why / Things aren't as pretty on the inside"), he chose to rise above, snarling a defiant affirmation: "There is no you / There is only me."

But no sooner did he reclaim control than he found new grist for his songs. Ideas came to him on tour. Not even waiting until he returned to the studio, he tweaked them on his laptop.

Now, at Year Zero, Reznor has shifted from the personal to the political, and from the confessional to the fictional. He's pulled himself out of the downward spiral and found a world that disturbs him. A world that, with a few broad strokes of the imagination, becomes an Orwellian nightmare: one nation under the thumb of the U.S. Bureau of Morality, the result of a military-ecclesiastical complex stamping out dissent in the year 2022.

Part allegory, part rock opera, Year Zero is Reznor's first concept album. In keeping with this new direction, he adopts persona after persona, and he contorts his vocals more than on any other studio album, likely aiming to disappear into his characters. In "Capital G," a right-winger spouts his views on war, the poor and global warming. "The Warning" introduces us to The Presence, a giant hand that appears to extend from the heavens. It might be a hallucination, or an alien, or none of the above. "Vessel" follows the user of a powerful drug, by turns experiencing exhilaration, fear, clarity and megalomania. "The Great Destroyer" exposes a rebel's thoughts of "the limitless potential / living inside of me / to murder everything."

Clearly an ambitious project, Year Zero extends far beyond the album. Reznor and a group of specialists carefully plotted their viral marketing scheme, employing T-shirts, USB drives, online message boards and more. There's even a network of Wikipedia-like pages devoted to the album's concepts, www.ninwiki.com. Basically, Team Reznor created a Matrix for fans to escape into.

So if you feel like the music sometimes takes a back seat to the grand concept, it's not just you. For starters, there are no great songs on Year Zero. No "Head Like a Hole." No "Hurt." No "Closer." And while the album has better cohesion than With Teeth, its songs are less memorable.

Part of this could be a focus on rhythm at the expense of melody. Nowhere is this more apparent than on "Survivalism," the album's first single. It opens with a buzzy guitar riff, a drum machine snare and an ambient techno burble, all looped. Reznor sings a verse, and waspy sound effects fly in. Then he launches into an odd guttural chant for the chorus, the first line being "I got my propaganda I got revisionism." It sounds remarkably like, "I guh muh prupa-na I guh ruh-vishin-nuh."

Rhythm chains together the next three songs, always repeating elements in a tight loop. In "The Good Soldier," they're a bass line and a handclap. "Me, I'm Not" puts the beats in an airplane hangar. Synths take over on "Vessel," beaming lasers and blowing raspberries until noise hijacks the track in a fusillade of caustic riffage, feedback loops, beeps and blips, rat-a-tat-tating percussion and some kind of wind chime.

While these rhythms make the album interesting (and are among the most salient examples), they don't make it particularly memorable. This is not to say that albums heavy on rhythm and light on melody cannot be good albums. If that were true, Tortoise would never have enjoyed acclaim. Yet Year Zero's songs don't resonate the way previous Nine Inch Nails songs have.

Reznor's departure from personal experience plays a significant role here. Serving as omniscient narrator to his imaginary soundtrack or script, he cuts from one character to the next with minimal development, making it hard to care about their lives and situations. If Year Zero were a screenplay, it would be an action movie, perhaps in the survival-horror genre. Lots of explosions, little dialogue.

Rumor is, there will be a sequel. Look for it in 17 months or less; Bush leaves office in January of 2009.

That's a tight deadline, Trent. Better practice your Orwell.

The revolution will not be amplified

2007-07-09T03:12:00.000-07:00

The Nightwatchman
One Man Revolution
Score: 4

Setting aside his greatest asset --- his bomb-rocking, gut-socking ax --- Tom Morello quietly picks up an acoustic guitar. For this is to be an old-fashioned protest. And while it will be old-fashioned, do not misconstrue "old-fashioned" to mean "wimpy" or "hippie." With his voice, those taut strings and a small posse of other instruments (even if it is producer Brendan O'Brien who plays them), Morello wields plenty of power.

Whether he knows what to do with it is another thing.

One Man Revolution, the Rage Against the Machine veteran's first solo album, under the alias the Nightwatchman, teeters on a mound of quality lines and clunkers, of heart and half-wittedness.

At times, Morello approaches profundity. In the title track, he declares, "In my nightmares, the streets are flame / and in my dreams, it's much the same." He offers a similarly deep phrase in "Maximum Firepower": "The skin you're in / makes choices for you."

Highlight "Let Freedom Ring" celebrates freedom with the kind of passion not native to people born into it. With a chiming piano and Morello's solemn sincerity, the song hits all the right notes. His voice boasts a compelling confidence, the kind that comes when you know you're right. This adds to the song's dignified and respectful air, and Morello never strays into overly sentimental territory.

If only he had an album's worth of those songs in him. More often than not, the discipline seems loose and the material amateurish. An excessive repetition of lines and a reliance on devices contribute to One Man Revolution's rudimentary feel. While it's true that many classic protest songs use repetition as a way to 1) Make a song easier to remember, and 2) Drive home a point, no one would mistake Morello's lyrics for Bob Dylan's, even though "The Dark Clouds Above" adopts the structure (and use of meteorological metaphor) of "Blowin' in the Wind."

Throughout the album, Morello clings to another device: numbers. Though used to good effect on the solidarity pledge "Until the End," which counts down from 10 to one, the presence elsewhere of the same technique, albeit in abbreviated form, diminishes its power. On "Flesh Shapes the Day," Morello includes the lines "ten letters I am writing" and "nine circles I am drawing." That's in addition to the album's "seven summits" and "seven seas" and "forty days in the wilderness" and "forty sleepless nights" and "one man revolution" and "two steps toward you" and "twelve fine friends" and "three more seconds" and a patridge in that tree with the yellow ribbon (maybe).

These grievances alone could not quite derail the album, particularly with the strong work in "Let Freedom Ring" and "No One Left," a requiem for fallen soldiers. But "Flesh Shapes the Day" proves up to the task. What begins as merely a substandard, generalized diatribe turns laughable about a minute in, when Morello starts hooting, growls "mic check," then follows with another round of hooting. Ruling out momentary insanity, this happens again later on. It's the chorus.

Such decisions endanger the credibility of One Man Revolution, making it border on campfire sing-along rather than well-conceived studio recording. Which is unfortunate, because the album deserves to be heard --- if only to prove the man can hold a tune. Morello's vocals, scratchy and radio-friendly, fall somewhere between those of Jakob Dylan and Everlast.

If there's anybody who can relate to Morello's situation, it's Everlast. When House of Pain, the sole source of his success, disbanded in 1996, he found his way to an acoustic guitar. The resulting album, Whitey Ford Sings the Blues, was a smash. It launched Everlast to heights he and House of Pain had never known. Suddenly he was recording a duet with Carlos Santana, then picking up a Grammy (whatever that's worth these days) for that collaboration.

But the chain of events was due in large part to the crossover appeal of Whitey Ford Sings the Blues. One Man Revolution doesn't span a lot of genres, so the chance of it following such a path seems beyond remote. If Carlos Santana likes it enough, though, maybe there's hope --- of a guitar duel. That would be pretty cool.

Plugged in, of course.

Dude, what happened?

2007-07-05T03:10:00.000-07:00

OK, so illness and several projects kept me from posting for a while, but more reviews are coming soon.

XXXplicit

2007-05-17T02:57:00.000-07:00

Devin the Dude
Waitin' to Inhale
Score: 6

Met with a title like Waitin' to Inhale, you might think Devin the Dude's interests include smoking weed, smoking more weed and ... uhhh, what was that other thing?

But what Devin really wants is sex. All the time. Even while you're reading this sentence. With you, even --- assuming you're a chick, and one who won't charge too high a price.

Devin's conquests fill much of the album's first half, and his delight in dishing the juicy details might make some people blush.

And it might make others abort the CD entirely.

"She Want That Money" will provide the first test. An uncompromising introduction to his pro-prostitution platform, it finds him having his way with a hooker on a big brass bed. "She Want That Money" has more bite than most tracks, though. In general, Devin's songs are light-hearted, meant to crack smiles, not grimaces.

He scores with his use of absurdity in "Broccoli & Cheese." When he tries to move his date's hand to his crotch --- because "it's the third time we've been together" --- she pulls away, worried about venereal disease. (Perhaps she heard some of his other songs.) Devin, clearly indignant, tells her, "Girl, this dick is so clean / that you can serve it with some lima beans."

Deep in his subconscious, however, doubt stirs. Amid a succession of skin dives, he says the situation's "gettin' ridiculous / I hope I don't get sick of this." And he's serious. Because if casual sex suddenly failed to thrill him, what could? The line hints at an emptiness behind his boasting. Here, a minor-key piano creep serves as a nagging reminder that such a development is not only possible, it's probable.

"Hope I Don't Get Sick-A-This" exemplifies the quality of the instrumentation on Waitin' to Inhale. Symbolizing the quest that Devin and his many producers take up, a recurring skit involves an engineer searching for a particular kind of "boom."

No doubt it's on "She Useta Be," a tale of "elegant to elephant." Over a sleepy sax riff and a rubbery beat that could've come from ToeJam & Earl's Funkotron, Devin recounts a surprise meeting at the grocery store: His boyhood crush --- the one who always turned down his advances in high school --- finally has the hots for him 10 years later.

Except now she's morbidly obese. "Seems like everything on her body just melted together," he says.

Surely, some will chalk it up to misogyny, and throughout the other tracks Devin and his guests don't offer much evidence to the contrary.

But when Devin reveals a moving vulnerability on the D'Angelo-esque "Don't Wanna Be Alone"; when he moans "Don't say goodbye / unless you wanna see a grown man cry, girl," it's hard to believe he misses her body alone.

Besides, if that was the case, he'd just buy a blow-up doll.

Goes down easy

2007-05-07T22:44:00.000-07:00

Amy Winehouse
Back to Black
Score: 8

Back to Black might as well be a Greek tragedy. Embodying the ill-fated heroine, Amy Winehouse pinballs from bed to bed, from bar to hotel, aware of her mistakes but destined to repeat them. Her Achilles' heel swells with every bottle downed and every belt slithering to the ground.

"You Know I'm No Good," propelled by a shuffling snare and kick drum, finds her flitting between two men, thinking of her beau as she pleasures her ex. She ultimately realizes that, through her infidelity, she has cheated herself out of happiness.

But what's so intriguing about Winehouse is that her songs front like they're lost classics from the '60s. From her delivery to the musicians' Motown-indebted grooves, Back to Black plants at least one foot in the past. If "Tears Dry on Their Own" sounds familiar, it's because it rides an interpolation of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough."

On the beautifully orchestrated title track, Winehouse channels the drama of Dusty Springfield's "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me," albeit through a saltier mouth. Sniffling over a man who left her for a former flame, she sings, "He left no time to regret / Kept his dick wet / With his same old safe bet." Winehouse favors bluntness.

And she doesn't do euphemisms, so vulgarities turn up in places throughout the album that even casual listeners could pick out. What makes this approach novel is that it runs counter to the conventions followed by Springfield and her peers, as well contemporary female artists influenced by their style. Certainly, the practice of keeping it clean in Springfield's day had a lot to do with social norms and radio broadcasting rules, yet the tendency of singers to sanitize lyrics still exists today. You don't hear Tracy Chapman or Natalie Merchant dropping F-bombs.

Winehouse, despite working with people obviously gunning for heavy airplay, chooses to go against the grain. She chooses words that suit her and suit the situation, and if they happen to be crude, then bring on the parental advisory sticker. (Although, curiously, some profanities in the liner notes use asterisks and some don't, despite being the same profanity.)

Even the decency police at the FCC would have a hard time not swaying to "Me & Mr. Jones," the song in which she most pushes the envelope. There and elsewhere, Back to Black's many saxophones impart a nightclub feel, nourishing Winehouse's torch songs, which thrive in darkness. "Some Unholy War" gets its moon tan on, with bass, drums and bells mingling on the dance floor. "Love Is a Losing Game" and "Tears Dry on Their Own," meanwhile, ooze with pessimism. The former's title alone could be the album's credo, while the latter prophesizes doom: Winehouse, kissing a lover goodbye, admits, "Even if I stop wanting you / And perspective pushes thru / I'll be some next man's other woman soon." Self-medication from a bottle no doubt ensues.

"Rehab," the album's percussive first single, squares with the modern-day parade of young starlets in and out of treatment centers, their troubles thrown up on tabloids everywhere. Yet it, too, has ties to the past, referencing "Ray" and "Mr. Hathaway," both of whom spent time in clinics. "Rehab" also has that Ray Charles roll; it's easy to picture Charles singing it, the Raylettes providing the handclaps and chanting "no, no, no."

Only Winehouse can prevent her downfall. But her tragic flaws prevent her from taking action, and she rattles off excuses: "I ain't got the time," "I just need a friend," "There's nothing you can teach me."

And so she goes back.

M.C. Lite

2007-04-29T04:03:00.000-07:00

Joss Stone
Introducing Joss Stone
Score: 5

If the intro feels heavy-handed, maybe it's because the Juggernaut's doing it.

That's right, the first voice on Introducing Joss Stone comes not from the singer but from tough-guy actor Vinnie Jones. And he can't wait to tell you that this album is all about change, dispensing such pearls of wisdom as "although the players change / the song remains the same" and "you gotta have the balls to change."

Thanks, dude. See you in "X:4." Now where's Joss Stone?

Oh, there she is: covered in body paint, ostensibly naked, writhing against a brick wall.

It's safe to say Stone has spent some time updating her image since 2004's Mind, Body & Soul. She's also done a lot of growing. She's made some mistakes ("What Were We Thinking"), caught the touring blues ("Arms of My Baby"), lost someone she cared about ("Bruised But Not Broken") and fallen in love several times.

Vocally, she seems to be reinventing herself as Mariah Lite. Diva squeals show up all over the assertive, turntable-tasting "Put Your Hands on Me." Such straining makes the smoothness of "Fell in Love with a Boy," from 2003's The Soul Sessions, even more appreciated in retrospect.

Stone handles the mellow songs better. On "Tell Me What We're Gonna Do Now," she settles into a comfortable groove and leaves it sunny-side up for Common, who contributes his winning positivity: "When we combine it's like good food / and wine / flavorful yet refined."

The Lauren Hill-abetted "Music" comes off best, though. Stone, cruising along in midrange over a thick beat, harmonizes with the backing vocals in a way that recalls Destiny's Child. And that's an interesting coincidence, seeing as how Mariah Carey looked a lot like Beyoncé on the cover of her comeback album, 2005's The Emancipation of Mimi.

Stone's inner diva re-emerges to finish off "Arms of My Baby" with extra melisma. Then she encores on the funky "Bad Habit" --- a song that would've fit in nicely with the uptempo material from Carey's 1991 debut --- before full-on commandeering the hook from Donna Summer's "Love to Love You Baby." But she's not done yet. "What Were We Thinking" opens with oversinging that approaches "American Idol" territory.

Carey can get away with similar things because she has The Voice. Having five octaves to work with is practically a license to go overboard, because even the crashes will be spectacular. Stone does not have The Voice. She forces her vocals to go where they can't. She's so focused on reintroducing herself to the public as Joss Stone, Diva Supreme, that she sometimes loses sight of her strengths. In her efforts to change, she simply tries too hard.

Couldn't she just call herself Mimi or something?