Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
18.1.11
Nas Talking Cassettes
Great video of Nas talking cassettes. Brings back a lot of memories of trying to record my favorite songs from the radio.
17.1.11
Activity
Hello and thank you for reading. I realize I haven't updated this space since the end of last year, but I have a pretty large caché of articles I plan on uploading over the next few months, most of them on Mexico.
In the meantime, I've been regularly updating my Suite 101 and Bleacher Report sites with articles on English Premier League soccer, if anyone is interested in checking that out. It's a revenue share site, so the more people that read it and click on the ads, the more I get paid. The more I get paid by them, the less I work for the less interesting sites I write for, the more time I can spend with this blog.
Anyway, thank you for reading, hope everyone had a nice New Year and that good things are lurking in 2011.
If anyone's looking for music recommendations, I've been listening to a lot of early Floridian and Swedish Death Metal, and would say Death's Human, Entombed's Clandestine and Grave's Into the Grave are phenomenal and skull crushing records.
More soon...
27.11.10
Senses Fail Interview Outtakes
Hello and long time no post. Many apologies for anyone out there who stops by regularly.
I recently interview Senses Fail for College Gentleman magazine. For those unfamiliar with the group, they're a punk/emo/hardcore hybrid from northern New Jersey who are, in my not particularly humble opinion, the most consistent, earnest, passionate, and legit band to come out of the early 2000's emo explosion. They came up with groups like Thursday, Finch, My Chemical Romance, and Poison the Well, and have put out four records, each of which is better than the last. So, check 'em out if you're unfamiliar.
Below, I've posted the outtakes from the interview, for fun and for fans of the band who might get a kick out of reading the moments during which our conversation derailed. Many thanks to the band, who were incredibly accommodating and forthcoming. It was their second interview of the day, it was very cold and windy, they had just come off along drive, and were in a pretty desolate section of a city (Omaha) they aren't really familiar with. They could've been curt, they could've been stand offish, but they were friendly, relaxed, and excited to talk about their new (and best) record, The Fire. You can see the entire interview here, check out The Fire here, and see my review of the album here.
Sense Fail Interview Outtakes
Dramatis Personae
Buddy: Lead Singer
Jason: Bassist extrordinaire
Dude with Mustache: Guitarist Zack Roach.
Zablocki: Lead guitar.
(from left: Drummer Dan Trapp, Buddy, Zablocki, Jason)
Conversating about hardcore and Jersey.
Buddy: …I listen to a lot of H20.
CG: Is their new record good? I loved them in high school.
Buddy: It’s great.
Jason: The new record is fuckin’ awesome. Nothing to Prove…it’s real good.
CG: So now I have a couple of New Jersey questions. On your blog you wrote: “See, in New Jersey, we're very limited and short with our communication amongst each other. We basically speak in a sophisticated form of clicks and whistles, but instead we use insults and original explicative phrases to show love and disapproval.” I find that that gets me in trouble, living in Omaha. I went for coffee this morning, and the woman told me it sounded like I was grunting, and not speaking…
Buddy: [laughs] I get it, I get it. “Stop asking me about all this goddamn shit, just get me the coffee.”
CG: When you’re on tour, do you have problems with that?
Buddy: Yes, absolutely. I have problems in general just answering questions. Like in an interview, I’m in the mentality that I’m going from point A to point B, and if you’re in my fucking way…get out of my way. I’m gonna use my horn.
CG: People don’t beep here when they drive.
Buddy: Nope.
CG: I’m like, he-llo!
Buddy: Right? It’s there, and that’s my car voice.
Jason: That’s all I’ve got right now.
Buddy: So…I don’t know. I find that people think if you’re very straight forward…they don’t necessarily understand it. Like, if people just you if you’re havin’ a bad day, and you’re like, yeah, I’m havin’ a fuckin’ bad day, people around here would like, whoa…
Discussing South Jersey and Philadelphia…
Buddy: But if you’ve ever been to Pennsylvania, it’s got nothing to do with the rest of Pennsylvania…
CG: It’s all Amish people.
Jason: And Pittsburgh, which is just a bunch of Steeler’s fans.
Buddy: Yep, Steeler’s fans and Penguins fans, and that’s it. They don’t…
Jason: They eat rocks.
On the state of the music industry/extended finale…
Buddy: We gotta, fuckin’, just…find a new way to do things that’s efficient for us. And every band, too. It’s not getting any better, the music industry…
Jason: Like, one day people will get up and decide ‘Yeah, I’ll buy a record.’
Buddy: It’s only gonna get worse. You gotta find the best way to operate.
CG: I actually went to Best Buy yesterday to get the record and it was sold out.
Jason: We’ve actually been hearing that a lot. But it’s because…
CG: Because they had like three copies to begin with.
Jason: [laughs] Yep.
Buddy: I think it’s that nobody would buy enough copies for them to distribute…that’s the problem.
Jason: Yeah, the problem is starting at the stores. They don’t order records anymore, so it just stays that way.
Buddy: But Best Buy got a little too fuckin’ “buy shit” happy…
Jason: And Hot Topic.
Buddy: …and their DVD and CD sections were like massive, and it’s like…
Jason: You can’t maintain that.
Guy with Mustache: DVDs still do well.
Jason: Do they?
CG: Netflix buys a shitload of DVDs. Somebody’s making money off of that.
Jason: Oh yeah. Uh huh.
Dude with Mustache: They’ve got Blu-ray burners now that are super fast and real cheap, no shit.
Buddy: Dude, I’ve been downloading movies on torrent sites. Fuck it. I’m not paying anyone for any artistic shit cause no one’s paying me. I’m stealing records. But I’ll go to the show. For free.
Jason: [laughs]
Buddy: But I’ll buy a shirt. That’s my contribution. Buying merch.
CG: That goes right to the band, yeah?
Jason: Sometimes. Unless they sign a 360 deal. Ha ha ha! Wahn-wahn. And then they have to steal money from themselves.
Buddy: Then you gotta hide your money.
Jason: Hide your wife, hide your kids.
CG: I guess this doesn’t really apply to the guy in the Atlanta hat, but was it a bummer to be on tour and have the Yankees go out of the play offs?
Buddy: It’s kinda really hard to follow the play offs when you’re on tour. I knew they weren’t gonna win it. I said that six months ago. They didn’t have it, so. I mean, it’s a bummer, but they’ve won so many times, but I can handle them not winning with grace.
Zablocki: Did you see Girardi signed a three year extension today?
Buddy: Yeah.
5.10.10
Thoughts on Things - Music
A Guide to Some Upcoming Records That May Suck
With the summer pop blockbusters out of the way, record companies are beginning to churn out the albums they hope America will buy in enormous quantities to stuff stockings, exchange during Hanukkah ceremonies, and grace with the tag “Thnx 4 the Dinosaur Dick, XO Ms. Clause”. October offers music fans a number of classic reissues, some very promising hip hop releases, cult favorites, and metal madness. Get down with it.
October 5th
Despite one of them being deceased, both members of Houston hip hop crew UGK drop solo records in 2010. Bun B, the superior of the two, put out Trill OG, and Pimp C releases his first posthumous record The Naked Soul of Sweet Jones, October 5th. Two cult favorites, multifaceted composer Tricky, and college rock mainstays Guster, both release new efforts on October 5th. Finally, in honor of John Lennon’s would-be 70th birthday, six of his remastered records will be released, alongside the Gimme Some Truth box set.
October 12th
Nutso tongue-in-cheek South African hip hop crew Die Antwoord--it means The Answer in Afrikaans--will release a re-recorded, stripped down version of their self-released debut album, $0$, via CherryTree/Interscope Records. Japanese post-hardcore titans Envy, who combine the expansive soundscapes of Mogwai with the epic hardcore of Converge, will release their fifth full-length record, Recitation. Lil Wayne releases the physical version of I Am Not a Human Being, which was released digitally last week. Intronaut, a band of jazz musicians who traffic in a very technical and riff heavy brand of metal, release In the Valley of Smoke, which features a guest spot from Tool’s bassist.
October 19th
October 19th is a big day for fans of one of the 20th century’s best songwriters. Bob Dylan is set to release The Whitmark Demos, a series of more than 50 recordings put to tape between 1962 and 1964, and mono remasters of his first eight records; everything from Bob Dylan to Jon Wesley Harding. This is the first time any of these records will have been available in mono since the original vinyl pressings.
Any fan of contemporary blues-rock groups like The White Stripes needs to get down with Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. JSBX’s indie-rock-meets-Led-Zeppelin madness comes back to glorious life with remastered rereleases of Orange and Acme. Lastly, one of the very few genuine big rock bands alive and kicking, Kings of Leon, will release Come Around Sundown, follow up to their breakthrough record Only By the Night.
October 26th
Consistently bright, catchy, and quality emo quartet Senses Fail unleashes its latest effort, The Fire, on the world this October 26th. In the world of epic riffs and bong hits, both Monster Magnet and Kylesea are due to drop records the last Tuesday in October. Down, more epic, riffy, and bong-oriented than those two bands together, and comprised of members of southern metal greats Pantera, Crowbar, and Corrosion of Conformity, release a live CD and DVD packaged, entitled Diary of a Mad Band. Bluesman Buddy Guy will release Living Proof, and Georgia’s favorite sons who aren’t named 3K and Big Boi, R.E.M., will release the Live From Austin DVD.
25.9.10
Thoughts on Things - Music
The Thing About Flats
Flats are a young English hardcore punk band with a logo that looks a good deal like Crass’ crossed-out cross and a sound somewhere between Black Flag and The Exploited. The band’s songs are rarely more than two minutes long and stick to one or two basic chord progressions for their short, furious stays on Earth. The band has recently been profiled on the NME website, has garnered itself opening slots for UK indie heavyweights The Klaxons, and was added to the fall NME Radar Tour. Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis, Spritualized’s J Spaceman, and Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine were all spotted at Flats show. Ok, fair enough.
But listening to Flats, you can’t help but think, what’s the big deal? So: Are they good at what they do? Yes. Are they exemplary? No, not really. Flats’ music is appropriately chaotic and furious, but it’s not any different than what hundreds of hardcore bands across the United States do on a daily basis. A shortlist of bands doing what this group does, and doing it much better, would include Outbreak, Ceremony, Blacklisted, and even Agnostic Front, who were doing what Flats does in the early 80’s, long before the members of flats were born. And let’s not forget to mention Gallows, Flats’ London peers, and one of the most exciting and original hardcore bands to appear in a long while.
And yet maybe that’s the point. Maybe the reason people are flocking to Flats, why a luminary like J Mascis would take it upon himself to fly to England to see this band is nostalgia. It’s all well and good for Flats frontman Dan Devine to say “Bloc Party and Franz was five years ago and people still think it’s acceptable to trot out an angular guitar riff and a disco beat. It makes me fucking sick,” but, well, apparently English teenagers still think it’s ok to trot out three-chord riffs and strangled shouts, and that’s been going on for near 30 years at this point. Maybe the reason Mascis and Spaceman and Shields got together to see flats is that a trio of middle aged guys thought it would be a gas to relive teenage years spent in sweaty basements rocking out to the first wave of hardcore.
Flats: Doing what they do live.
So that’s one reason people might be going gaga for this band. Another reason might be that the UK has no healthy hardcore or punk scene to speak of. This may be why Gallows were touted as being the next big thing a few years ago. Yet unlike Flats, Gallows actually are the real thing. Full of real rage, with a progressive sound that marries tradition punk with more contemporary influences will maintaining the DIY attitude and rage evident in first-wave hardcore. Gallows have a live energy and intensity few bands can match. Flats, meanwhile, sound like they should be playing town halls to twenty angry kids. But if don’t have a hardcore scene, any band that pops up will draw the attention of the national media.
Let’s look at it like this: Flats played their first show in March of 2010. As of August 2010, the band has released one 7” and has plans to put out an EP, though according the Flats’ Myspace, the band is currently unsigned. Now this could mean that the band is going to self-release it’s EP, but you don’t get an opening slot for The Klaxons without some kind of managerial staff working mighty transactions behind closed doors. But in a scene bereft of proliferation, it only takes one band to make a splash.
Whatever is really going on here—nostalgia, lack of competition, or even the time honored hype machine of the British music press—a band that is very much less interesting than its many contemporaries on this side of the pond has somehow managed to drum up a furor in the UK. Meanwhile, workhorses like the American hardcore bands mentioned above tour incessantly while working menial jobs to pay the rent. Well, life’s not fair. But it’s certainly interesting watching things like this pan out.
Check out the video of Gallows live below for a comparison point:
14.9.10
Don't Sleep on Bad Newsz Greatest
Long time no update. My bad. I have a pretty lenght piece I'll be throwing up this weekend, about the real estate boom in Bangladesh, and what that says about false images of capitalism and demcracy as propogated by western nations. It's about 3000 words, and should keep you busy for a bit.
But before that comes, I had to spread the word on this. My man Bad Newsz Greatest released the DRUGS mixtape earlier this year, and I'll say with no reservation that its far and away better than any commercially released record to hit in 2010, hip hop or no. Bad is part of the new hip hop vanguard, and represents the next step in the evolution of hip hop that began with Kanye's first three records.
I did a pretty extensive interview with Bad Newsz that will be appearing in print or online pretty soon, though where it's gonna go up I'm not 100% sure yet. I'm shopping it around right now to publications that are taking their sweet time getting back to me.
In the meantime, ya'll can download DRUGS for free over on Dat Piff. I'm attempting to embed the download, but I'm not a technical expert, so it may well become a debacle. In the even that I fail miserably at this task, you can head over to Dat Piff and grab the mixtape.
But before that comes, I had to spread the word on this. My man Bad Newsz Greatest released the DRUGS mixtape earlier this year, and I'll say with no reservation that its far and away better than any commercially released record to hit in 2010, hip hop or no. Bad is part of the new hip hop vanguard, and represents the next step in the evolution of hip hop that began with Kanye's first three records.
I did a pretty extensive interview with Bad Newsz that will be appearing in print or online pretty soon, though where it's gonna go up I'm not 100% sure yet. I'm shopping it around right now to publications that are taking their sweet time getting back to me.
In the meantime, ya'll can download DRUGS for free over on Dat Piff. I'm attempting to embed the download, but I'm not a technical expert, so it may well become a debacle. In the even that I fail miserably at this task, you can head over to Dat Piff and grab the mixtape.
15.8.10
Thoughts on Things: Music
This is a short piece I wrote for a magazine that was deemed a little too obscure to grace the publication's website. If the references in the intro paragraph to other articles intrigue you, head over to College Gentleman's website to sate your curiosity. Otherwise, enjoy. It's sort of a "who's who of underground metal" for college students just discovering the genre.
Metal Bands You Need to Know
In tandem with our review of Howl and Coliseum in this week’s Listen Up, and Kenneth Lee’s riff-heavy Best Albums of 2010 So Far, we at College Gentleman give you spring chickens a list of some of history’s best, most important, and somewhat overlooked metal bands. Below find groups who revolutionized heavy music, influenced all of the bands you listen to, and made great records who are, well into their 30’s and 40’s, still kicking ass and taking names.
Melvins. After Sabbath, Iron Maiden, and Metallica, Melvins are the most influential metal band of all time. Throughout their 25-year career, Melvins have created a pioneering body of work in stoner, sludge, doom, drone, and even grunge. By slowing down the epic riffs of Sabbath and Black Flag, the early work of Melvins spawned the careers of countless plodding sonic experimentalists. Drummer Dale Crover and guitarist/vocalist King Buzzo created the template for the pummeling drums and mountainous riffs of a slew of underground metal genres, the echoes of which are everywhere in 2010.
Where to Start: Houdini
See Also: Eyehategod, Boris, Electric Wizard, Sleep
Napalm Death. It’s hard to overestimate the importance of Napalm Death in extreme metal. As the first grindcore band, they introduced extreme metal staples such as blast beats, unintelligible beast-like growling, and incredibly short songs. If you like metal that doesn’t fuck around with solos, melody, complex structures, and clean vocals, you owe your life to Napalm Death. Their debut, 1987’s Scum, is frighteningly brutal, and its unbridled aggression and scathing sociopolitical lyrical content has rarely been equaled. Bow before the altar of a band that will gladly fuck your ear holes until they bleed.
Where to Start: Scum
See Also: Carcass, Dying Fetus, Pig Destroyer
Entombed. In five years, Entombed managed to create the blueprint for one genre and completely invent another. Recorded while the band members were still teenagers, their 1989 debut Left Hand Path laid the foundation for countless death metal acts to follow. Integrating the heaviness of death metal, aggression of grindcore, and musical precision of thrash, Entombed upended extreme metal by adding whiplash tempo changes and crushing grooves. With 1993’s Wolverine Blues, the band invented the Death n Roll genre by blending the heaviness of death metal with the structures, riffs, and (gasp!) melody of rock n roll. The result is one of the great metal albums of all time.
Where to Start: Wolverine Blues
See Also: At the Gates, Kataklysm, Disfear, Hatebreed
Coalesce. Coalesce created severe abrasiveness from silence. By loading their music with sudden changes, stop-start riffs whose jagged cadence owe as much to James Brown as to hardcore, and the dub-esque tendency to bring instruments in and out of the mix unexpectedly, the band created one of the most unique sounds in metalcore. Coalesce managed to so thoroughly blend hardcore, metal, and math rock, it’s hard to call them anything but scary. In their heyday, Coalesce were one of the most harsh and difficult bands in heavy music, whose sound laid the groundwork for a new aesthetic in underground metal.
Where to Start: Functioning on Impatience
See Also: Botch, Burnt by the Sun, Architect
Metal Bands You Need to Know
In tandem with our review of Howl and Coliseum in this week’s Listen Up, and Kenneth Lee’s riff-heavy Best Albums of 2010 So Far, we at College Gentleman give you spring chickens a list of some of history’s best, most important, and somewhat overlooked metal bands. Below find groups who revolutionized heavy music, influenced all of the bands you listen to, and made great records who are, well into their 30’s and 40’s, still kicking ass and taking names.
Melvins. After Sabbath, Iron Maiden, and Metallica, Melvins are the most influential metal band of all time. Throughout their 25-year career, Melvins have created a pioneering body of work in stoner, sludge, doom, drone, and even grunge. By slowing down the epic riffs of Sabbath and Black Flag, the early work of Melvins spawned the careers of countless plodding sonic experimentalists. Drummer Dale Crover and guitarist/vocalist King Buzzo created the template for the pummeling drums and mountainous riffs of a slew of underground metal genres, the echoes of which are everywhere in 2010.
Where to Start: Houdini
See Also: Eyehategod, Boris, Electric Wizard, Sleep
Napalm Death. It’s hard to overestimate the importance of Napalm Death in extreme metal. As the first grindcore band, they introduced extreme metal staples such as blast beats, unintelligible beast-like growling, and incredibly short songs. If you like metal that doesn’t fuck around with solos, melody, complex structures, and clean vocals, you owe your life to Napalm Death. Their debut, 1987’s Scum, is frighteningly brutal, and its unbridled aggression and scathing sociopolitical lyrical content has rarely been equaled. Bow before the altar of a band that will gladly fuck your ear holes until they bleed.
Where to Start: Scum
See Also: Carcass, Dying Fetus, Pig Destroyer
Entombed. In five years, Entombed managed to create the blueprint for one genre and completely invent another. Recorded while the band members were still teenagers, their 1989 debut Left Hand Path laid the foundation for countless death metal acts to follow. Integrating the heaviness of death metal, aggression of grindcore, and musical precision of thrash, Entombed upended extreme metal by adding whiplash tempo changes and crushing grooves. With 1993’s Wolverine Blues, the band invented the Death n Roll genre by blending the heaviness of death metal with the structures, riffs, and (gasp!) melody of rock n roll. The result is one of the great metal albums of all time.
Where to Start: Wolverine Blues
See Also: At the Gates, Kataklysm, Disfear, Hatebreed
Coalesce. Coalesce created severe abrasiveness from silence. By loading their music with sudden changes, stop-start riffs whose jagged cadence owe as much to James Brown as to hardcore, and the dub-esque tendency to bring instruments in and out of the mix unexpectedly, the band created one of the most unique sounds in metalcore. Coalesce managed to so thoroughly blend hardcore, metal, and math rock, it’s hard to call them anything but scary. In their heyday, Coalesce were one of the most harsh and difficult bands in heavy music, whose sound laid the groundwork for a new aesthetic in underground metal.
Where to Start: Functioning on Impatience
See Also: Botch, Burnt by the Sun, Architect
19.4.10
Interview: Bulletproof Mirror
He’s not exactly what you’d expect. Petite and goofy, Bulletproof Mirror frontman Eric Trucco is also articulate, passionate, and possessed by his desire to change his world through music. There’s no arguing with his intelligence: Trucco is trilingual, and holds two Masters Degrees. And yet, miles from being bookish, he’s more driven by emotion than intellect.
Bulletproof Mirror formed in 2005. Since then, the band has released an album on Japanese indie label Theory and Practice Records, and played countless shows in Tokyo and throughout Japan. Their first record, (a few) Drops of Innocence, is an aggressive mix of the best of early post-hardcore melodicism and 90’s guitar rock. Trucco’s powerful voice drives the songs, which are complemented by Hiro’s upper register lead guitar work, Yuki’s fusion of 5-string melody and rhythm on the bass, and Taka’s tight, powerful drumming.
The band’s sound is defined by Trucco’s songwriting hallmarks, many of which he carried over from his previous acoustic rock and pop band, Spybeef. Both Eric and BM’s style is marked by melodic arpeggios, big choruses, personal lyrics, and twisty, often whiplash dynamics. Most of (a few) Drops of Innocence’s tracks adhere to chugging, tension-building verses and wide-open choruses, not unlike U2 funneled through the complex currents of early 90’s angst, from Nirvana’s melancholic melodies to Smashing Pumpkins’ riff-tempered Dream Pop.
After making a snow-specked video for the album’s lead single, Gravity – a lovely lullaby of a song, featuring sweet moments of falsetto and floating arpeggios – Bulletproof Mirror embarked on a guerilla tour of Japan, playing cities from Osaka to Nagano. Returning to Tokyo, the band gigged regularly, though spent time on their personal lives as well.
Now two years on from their debut, Bulletproof Mirror have made the difficult decision to split with their label. Though roughing it can be a bitch, the band is ultimately pleased with their newfound independence. Crossroads, Mirror’s new EP, explodes with new life. The band has kicked off all the doubt and darkness of their first record, and are brimming with confidence and energy. The anthemic songs on Crossroads soar and spit, imbued with swagger and melody, taking on a hostile world as much as (a few) Drops of Innocence retreated from it.
Though the bands biggest influences, from Thursday to Foor Fighters, can still be heard throughout the new material, there’s something timeless about tracks like pounding punk anthem Soul for Rent and the massive Crossroads. The title track is an epic, nearly seven minutes of defiant, optimistic guitar rock reminiscent of the best moments on Radiohead’s guitar anthems, from Stop Whispering, Start Shouting to The Bends, but with foot tapping, heading nodding, shameless love of roaring guitars and throat shredding vocals Yorke and crew never had. The skyscraping finale layers lead guitar interplay in a musical cloudburst not unlike Explosions in the Sky. It is, without doubt, the band’s best song to date.
The band will be playing shows throughout Tokyo in support of the new EP, giving out copies of Crossroads at the venues. For now, the Bulletproof Mirror find themselves in a comfortable space with a modest goal. Says Trucco: “I think we really want one thing: that people dig our music. That's it. Pretty simple, right?”
Clockwise from top left (A)Bulletproof Mirror on some stairs (B) Eric in Tokyo (C) BM live (D) Spybeef's second demo
Here’s what Trucco had to say to us:
1. What draws you to music?
At first, like many, I'm sure, it was a way to funnel teenage angst; fears and what-not. I guess it was more a means than a goal at that time, and it probably still is to a certain extent. I mean, it's not because you are getting older, and supposedly wiser, that you can't feel outraged by what you see around, or feel deeply hurt by others' behaviour... or sometimes your very own as well. So I guess what draws me to music is really that need to express my feelings. And looking cool, obviously. [laughs]
2. Why did you choose to be a songwriter, rather than a guitarist or singer?
Well, when I started, I really wanted to play the guitar. Then I tried to sing while playing along, and it kinda worked. So you take it a step further, you put some lame chords together, you combine it with stupid lyrics and bam! I became a songwriter. Seriously though, it has never been a conscious choice, anyone can become a songwriter anyway. Becoming a good songwriter, that is the real challenge, and I sure don't know if I am up to the task!
3. Who are some of your biggest influences as a (A) vocalist (B) guitarist and (C) songwriter?
For all of them, I have to say the Smashing Pumpkins. While I am not trying to imitate Billy Corgan's signature vocals or songwriting, I have been told several times that you can definitely hear his influence in my songs. I mean, I used to worship that band, so you gotta find bits and pieces of their songs somewhere in mine. Generally speaking though, I really like 90's rock, such as Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Rage Against the Machine, or more acoustic stuff like Jewel, Counting Crows. If you are willing to go more recent, I would say Thursday, Jimmy Eat World, 65 days of Static. I basically look for music that conveys authenticity and sincerity, music from the heart, as opposed to all that shit we hear on TV or on the radio. Pardon my French [Editorial Comment: Ho!]. Oh, and Linkin Park too. I seriously worship Chester Bennington for his work in Linkin, the way he sings is fucking visceral.
4. What are your lyrical inspirations? Do you look to comment on particular subjects or do you go with your gut?
Definitely gut. That would explain why my lyrics are sometimes redundant, I feel I am writing on the same subject many, many times. ‘Cos it's really like a therapy of sorts, you go down deep in your world of hurt, you take the worst of it, expose it to the world, and if you are still not healed, well you just do it again. And again. I mean, if you go to the shrink, you don't just go once, right? Same here. That being said, while some of the songs I write are really dark, especially in our first album (a few) drops of Innocence, I have the feeling that the new songs we have been working on are definitely more positive. Maybe it is just me getting older [laughs]. But to go back to your question, my process is actually very egoistic. I comment on what I feel towards love, society, life in general. Instead of going third-person and trying to imagine someone else's experience. How pretentious is that, by the way?
I prefer to talk about what I know. Or if society makes me sick for instance, then I would express how I wish I had the guts to burn down all I have, rather than being populist and say something like "let's start a revolution brothers". I try to stay true to myself, and I hope people listening to my music feel a connection with what I am trying to express.
5. What’s the process of writing lyrics in your second language like?
It is like trying to eat rice with chopsticks, grain by grain... I do feel some frustration when I cannot find the proper word for what I am trying to say, or the rhyme that would make the hook work. But it is still better than singing in French!
6. Where did the name Bulletproof Mirror come from?
It is the idea that it doesn't matter how much you hate your own image, you just can't break it. You see yourself in the mirror, you want to break it so that you don't have to look at yourself anymore. But that mirror is bulletproof, so you have to live with yourself. Does this make sense? [laughs] In a nutshell, you cannot change what you are, so you might as well live with it.
7. How did you meet the other guys in the band, and how has their playing style influenced your writing and helped shape the band’s sound?
I met Taka [drums] through a magazine. His band was looking for a vocalist, so I joined... only to quit the band with Taka a couple of months later. Taka then recruited Hiro [guitar] and Yuki [bass] on the internet.
In terms of writing, most of my songs are created on my acoustic guitar. So the framework itself has probably not been influenced that much by the guys. But then we arrange the song for the band, and everyone brings something different to the song. That is where MY song becomes OUR song, and sometimes the original acoustic version is very far from the final thing. Actually, we included the acoustic version of A Shadow in my Heart as a bonus track in the album, because we thought it was interesting to have the two very different flavors.
8. Are you currently recording? What are you future recording and touring plans?
Yep, we have recorded a couple of songs in a studio, and put it in an EP, along with two other homemade songs. We are self-produced now, so we have the liberty to sell our records or give them away if we want to. One of the new songs, Soul for Rent, is actually available on iTunes worldwide. And we give away our EP to people coming to our gigs in Japan. We will record a couple more songs around the summer I think, but no tour per se, since I am a business man now... so we are officially a week-end band, and it is hard for us to tour like we did before.
9. What’s your ultimate goal with the group?
Goal or dream? If we are talking dream, of course it would be living of our music, and hopefully have a lot of fans. Realistically speaking though, the goal right now is to create a fan base in Japan that would come to our gigs and appreciate our music. I think we really want one thing: that people dig our music. That's it. Pretty simple, right? But in Japan, not that easy...
10. What was your record label, Theory and Practice Records, like?
We are thankful to the label for allowing us to make our first real studio record, it was a great opportunity. But the label was not able to promote us at all, so we do have some regrets concerning our first album.
11. How has your previous band, Spybeef, affected your current project?
Definitely the work on the background vocals. Spybeef was amazing in the sense that Paul and I have voices that really match, and we spent countless hours trying to take advantage of that. I think we did a pretty good job in terms of vocal harmonies, and all that work turned out to be extremely valuable even now with Bulletproor Mirror.
12. Where did your inspiration for the album art come from?
It was the idea mentioned earlier, the mirror that reflect your image and you just cannot break it. The mirror in the album art is broken, but for the centerpiece where the face is reflected. I had that image in my mind, but I am terrible at drawing, so I asked my very talented friend Yoshimi to draw for us.
13. You have a career with a large, multinational entity. How does this affect your songwriting and attitude toward art?
I don't think it changed significantly, to be honest. If anything, it made me realize what you do is not as important who you do it with.
14. You have two Masters degrees. How did your choice to play music figure into your academic decisions, and do you feel that having a successful career has helped your art in that you don’t have to worry about where the money is coming from?
Well, my decision to get a second Masters degree, here in Japan, was definitely influenced by my desire to play with my band and try to make it as a pro. If I had not gone to school a little longer than most, I couldn't have stayed in Japan and it would have been the end of Bulletproof Mirror. We don't want that, do we? [laughs].
Now in terms of money, the most significant change is that I have finally been able to buy the guitar I have been dreaming for, my beloved Navigator Les Paul that I got just in time to record the second song in our new EP, Crossroads!
15. Being French, what made you choose Tokyo as your home and artistic environment?
You know, there are a variety of things that brought me here in the first place, and that make me want to stay, in a much broader scale, than just music. So let's just say that Life brought me here, or that I just happen to be here - pick one! [laughs]
16. How does being a gaijin in a Japanese band affect the reception and perception of your work?
Yeah, it is not as easy as some could think. I have been influenced by US and UK rock for decades, while Hiro, Taka and Yuki have been influenced deeply by Japanese Rock, such as X-Japan for example. Fortunately, they also love the Western scene, more than their own actually, so we always reach an understanding on the direction of our songs.
That being said, I feel our work is not well understood or perceived here in Japan. I mean, you just have to go around and hear what the locals are listening, and believe me, that's fucking scary. I mean, the French pop is lame, but J-Pop, it is probably the worst thing on Earth, ever! Not to mention all those pathetic boys-bands…or are they girls? [laughs] So you see that, you look at what you've been writing, and you think there is no way it's gonna sell here! There is no rock culture common to everyone, such as what you can find in the States or the UK. And if rock bands do sell a lot here too, it is mostly because they are super big abroad, and benefit from a huge promotion.
17. Do you feel accepted as a part of the Tokyo music scene or is there the sense that you’re an outsider?
You know, even if you've lived in Japan for many years, speak the language and embrace the customs, you will always feel as an outsider. Japanese people are very kind in nature, but they will always interact with you in such a way that you will feel you're not from here. I am talking about random people you meet, not your friends, of course. So when you meet an audience, I am certain they see you as the gaijin with a band in Japan, which is fine, since I sing in English anyway! [laughs]
But seriously, audience's expectation is really different as well. The audience here wants to see a performance, they seem more interested in what the band does on stage in terms of entertainment show, rather than its music. I seriously doubt Radiohead would have made it big if they had started here as an Indie band, for example. So there was a lot of debate inside the band at some point, since I honestly didn't give a shit about the "performance" as opposed to our music. And I guess the consensus now is that I still don't give a shit, but I just got more comfortable on stage, so I can have more fun doing some stupid moves. [laughs]. We are musicians, not entertainers. If you wanna see rough feelings conveyed by some hard guitars and scorched throats, come to our gigs. If you wanna see people dressed up or jumping around in rhythm, I think you got the wrong address, dude!
18. Though your music is most recognizably influenced by the post-hardcore of bands like Thursday, there are undercurrents of groups like Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana in your chord progressions and song structures, and echoes of the post-rock of Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky in your employment of arpeggio and crescendo. Is this amalgam and intentional stylistic choice, or do you organically integrate your influences without thinking?
Yeah, I kinda touched on that your previous question I guess. It is mostly amalgam, with no conscious choice. That being said, a song we are working on right now had its main riff sort of influenced by Thursday, and its progression by Jimmy Eat World. That influence soon vanished though, but it was there in the first place, and can still be felt I guess. Another song vocal line was inspired by Chester from Linkin Park. I just had the song, and imagined Chester singing it, and it was awesome! [laughs]. Unfortunately, I don't have his voice, so I am pretty sure it is not that easy to see that influence in the song anymore. The acoustic version of that song is included in our EP, it is called Can you hear the pieces falling down (in Harmony)? and you can grab a copy at our gigs!
18. Is it annoying when pretentious journalists ask you complicated questions in your second language?
[laughs] I honestly enjoyed your questions, mostly because I am a pretentious musician with complicated answers.
Listen:
Find Bulletproof Mirror Online:
Facebook
Myspace
Spybeef Myspace
Bulletproof Mirror formed in 2005. Since then, the band has released an album on Japanese indie label Theory and Practice Records, and played countless shows in Tokyo and throughout Japan. Their first record, (a few) Drops of Innocence, is an aggressive mix of the best of early post-hardcore melodicism and 90’s guitar rock. Trucco’s powerful voice drives the songs, which are complemented by Hiro’s upper register lead guitar work, Yuki’s fusion of 5-string melody and rhythm on the bass, and Taka’s tight, powerful drumming.
The band’s sound is defined by Trucco’s songwriting hallmarks, many of which he carried over from his previous acoustic rock and pop band, Spybeef. Both Eric and BM’s style is marked by melodic arpeggios, big choruses, personal lyrics, and twisty, often whiplash dynamics. Most of (a few) Drops of Innocence’s tracks adhere to chugging, tension-building verses and wide-open choruses, not unlike U2 funneled through the complex currents of early 90’s angst, from Nirvana’s melancholic melodies to Smashing Pumpkins’ riff-tempered Dream Pop.
After making a snow-specked video for the album’s lead single, Gravity – a lovely lullaby of a song, featuring sweet moments of falsetto and floating arpeggios – Bulletproof Mirror embarked on a guerilla tour of Japan, playing cities from Osaka to Nagano. Returning to Tokyo, the band gigged regularly, though spent time on their personal lives as well.
Now two years on from their debut, Bulletproof Mirror have made the difficult decision to split with their label. Though roughing it can be a bitch, the band is ultimately pleased with their newfound independence. Crossroads, Mirror’s new EP, explodes with new life. The band has kicked off all the doubt and darkness of their first record, and are brimming with confidence and energy. The anthemic songs on Crossroads soar and spit, imbued with swagger and melody, taking on a hostile world as much as (a few) Drops of Innocence retreated from it.
Though the bands biggest influences, from Thursday to Foor Fighters, can still be heard throughout the new material, there’s something timeless about tracks like pounding punk anthem Soul for Rent and the massive Crossroads. The title track is an epic, nearly seven minutes of defiant, optimistic guitar rock reminiscent of the best moments on Radiohead’s guitar anthems, from Stop Whispering, Start Shouting to The Bends, but with foot tapping, heading nodding, shameless love of roaring guitars and throat shredding vocals Yorke and crew never had. The skyscraping finale layers lead guitar interplay in a musical cloudburst not unlike Explosions in the Sky. It is, without doubt, the band’s best song to date.
The band will be playing shows throughout Tokyo in support of the new EP, giving out copies of Crossroads at the venues. For now, the Bulletproof Mirror find themselves in a comfortable space with a modest goal. Says Trucco: “I think we really want one thing: that people dig our music. That's it. Pretty simple, right?”
Clockwise from top left (A)Bulletproof Mirror on some stairs (B) Eric in Tokyo (C) BM live (D) Spybeef's second demo
Here’s what Trucco had to say to us:
1. What draws you to music?
At first, like many, I'm sure, it was a way to funnel teenage angst; fears and what-not. I guess it was more a means than a goal at that time, and it probably still is to a certain extent. I mean, it's not because you are getting older, and supposedly wiser, that you can't feel outraged by what you see around, or feel deeply hurt by others' behaviour... or sometimes your very own as well. So I guess what draws me to music is really that need to express my feelings. And looking cool, obviously. [laughs]
2. Why did you choose to be a songwriter, rather than a guitarist or singer?
Well, when I started, I really wanted to play the guitar. Then I tried to sing while playing along, and it kinda worked. So you take it a step further, you put some lame chords together, you combine it with stupid lyrics and bam! I became a songwriter. Seriously though, it has never been a conscious choice, anyone can become a songwriter anyway. Becoming a good songwriter, that is the real challenge, and I sure don't know if I am up to the task!
3. Who are some of your biggest influences as a (A) vocalist (B) guitarist and (C) songwriter?
For all of them, I have to say the Smashing Pumpkins. While I am not trying to imitate Billy Corgan's signature vocals or songwriting, I have been told several times that you can definitely hear his influence in my songs. I mean, I used to worship that band, so you gotta find bits and pieces of their songs somewhere in mine. Generally speaking though, I really like 90's rock, such as Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Rage Against the Machine, or more acoustic stuff like Jewel, Counting Crows. If you are willing to go more recent, I would say Thursday, Jimmy Eat World, 65 days of Static. I basically look for music that conveys authenticity and sincerity, music from the heart, as opposed to all that shit we hear on TV or on the radio. Pardon my French [Editorial Comment: Ho!]. Oh, and Linkin Park too. I seriously worship Chester Bennington for his work in Linkin, the way he sings is fucking visceral.
4. What are your lyrical inspirations? Do you look to comment on particular subjects or do you go with your gut?
Definitely gut. That would explain why my lyrics are sometimes redundant, I feel I am writing on the same subject many, many times. ‘Cos it's really like a therapy of sorts, you go down deep in your world of hurt, you take the worst of it, expose it to the world, and if you are still not healed, well you just do it again. And again. I mean, if you go to the shrink, you don't just go once, right? Same here. That being said, while some of the songs I write are really dark, especially in our first album (a few) drops of Innocence, I have the feeling that the new songs we have been working on are definitely more positive. Maybe it is just me getting older [laughs]. But to go back to your question, my process is actually very egoistic. I comment on what I feel towards love, society, life in general. Instead of going third-person and trying to imagine someone else's experience. How pretentious is that, by the way?
I prefer to talk about what I know. Or if society makes me sick for instance, then I would express how I wish I had the guts to burn down all I have, rather than being populist and say something like "let's start a revolution brothers". I try to stay true to myself, and I hope people listening to my music feel a connection with what I am trying to express.
5. What’s the process of writing lyrics in your second language like?
It is like trying to eat rice with chopsticks, grain by grain... I do feel some frustration when I cannot find the proper word for what I am trying to say, or the rhyme that would make the hook work. But it is still better than singing in French!
6. Where did the name Bulletproof Mirror come from?
It is the idea that it doesn't matter how much you hate your own image, you just can't break it. You see yourself in the mirror, you want to break it so that you don't have to look at yourself anymore. But that mirror is bulletproof, so you have to live with yourself. Does this make sense? [laughs] In a nutshell, you cannot change what you are, so you might as well live with it.
7. How did you meet the other guys in the band, and how has their playing style influenced your writing and helped shape the band’s sound?
I met Taka [drums] through a magazine. His band was looking for a vocalist, so I joined... only to quit the band with Taka a couple of months later. Taka then recruited Hiro [guitar] and Yuki [bass] on the internet.
In terms of writing, most of my songs are created on my acoustic guitar. So the framework itself has probably not been influenced that much by the guys. But then we arrange the song for the band, and everyone brings something different to the song. That is where MY song becomes OUR song, and sometimes the original acoustic version is very far from the final thing. Actually, we included the acoustic version of A Shadow in my Heart as a bonus track in the album, because we thought it was interesting to have the two very different flavors.
8. Are you currently recording? What are you future recording and touring plans?
Yep, we have recorded a couple of songs in a studio, and put it in an EP, along with two other homemade songs. We are self-produced now, so we have the liberty to sell our records or give them away if we want to. One of the new songs, Soul for Rent, is actually available on iTunes worldwide. And we give away our EP to people coming to our gigs in Japan. We will record a couple more songs around the summer I think, but no tour per se, since I am a business man now... so we are officially a week-end band, and it is hard for us to tour like we did before.
9. What’s your ultimate goal with the group?
Goal or dream? If we are talking dream, of course it would be living of our music, and hopefully have a lot of fans. Realistically speaking though, the goal right now is to create a fan base in Japan that would come to our gigs and appreciate our music. I think we really want one thing: that people dig our music. That's it. Pretty simple, right? But in Japan, not that easy...
10. What was your record label, Theory and Practice Records, like?
We are thankful to the label for allowing us to make our first real studio record, it was a great opportunity. But the label was not able to promote us at all, so we do have some regrets concerning our first album.
11. How has your previous band, Spybeef, affected your current project?
Definitely the work on the background vocals. Spybeef was amazing in the sense that Paul and I have voices that really match, and we spent countless hours trying to take advantage of that. I think we did a pretty good job in terms of vocal harmonies, and all that work turned out to be extremely valuable even now with Bulletproor Mirror.
12. Where did your inspiration for the album art come from?
It was the idea mentioned earlier, the mirror that reflect your image and you just cannot break it. The mirror in the album art is broken, but for the centerpiece where the face is reflected. I had that image in my mind, but I am terrible at drawing, so I asked my very talented friend Yoshimi to draw for us.
13. You have a career with a large, multinational entity. How does this affect your songwriting and attitude toward art?
I don't think it changed significantly, to be honest. If anything, it made me realize what you do is not as important who you do it with.
14. You have two Masters degrees. How did your choice to play music figure into your academic decisions, and do you feel that having a successful career has helped your art in that you don’t have to worry about where the money is coming from?
Well, my decision to get a second Masters degree, here in Japan, was definitely influenced by my desire to play with my band and try to make it as a pro. If I had not gone to school a little longer than most, I couldn't have stayed in Japan and it would have been the end of Bulletproof Mirror. We don't want that, do we? [laughs].
Now in terms of money, the most significant change is that I have finally been able to buy the guitar I have been dreaming for, my beloved Navigator Les Paul that I got just in time to record the second song in our new EP, Crossroads!
15. Being French, what made you choose Tokyo as your home and artistic environment?
You know, there are a variety of things that brought me here in the first place, and that make me want to stay, in a much broader scale, than just music. So let's just say that Life brought me here, or that I just happen to be here - pick one! [laughs]
16. How does being a gaijin in a Japanese band affect the reception and perception of your work?
Yeah, it is not as easy as some could think. I have been influenced by US and UK rock for decades, while Hiro, Taka and Yuki have been influenced deeply by Japanese Rock, such as X-Japan for example. Fortunately, they also love the Western scene, more than their own actually, so we always reach an understanding on the direction of our songs.
That being said, I feel our work is not well understood or perceived here in Japan. I mean, you just have to go around and hear what the locals are listening, and believe me, that's fucking scary. I mean, the French pop is lame, but J-Pop, it is probably the worst thing on Earth, ever! Not to mention all those pathetic boys-bands…or are they girls? [laughs] So you see that, you look at what you've been writing, and you think there is no way it's gonna sell here! There is no rock culture common to everyone, such as what you can find in the States or the UK. And if rock bands do sell a lot here too, it is mostly because they are super big abroad, and benefit from a huge promotion.
17. Do you feel accepted as a part of the Tokyo music scene or is there the sense that you’re an outsider?
You know, even if you've lived in Japan for many years, speak the language and embrace the customs, you will always feel as an outsider. Japanese people are very kind in nature, but they will always interact with you in such a way that you will feel you're not from here. I am talking about random people you meet, not your friends, of course. So when you meet an audience, I am certain they see you as the gaijin with a band in Japan, which is fine, since I sing in English anyway! [laughs]
But seriously, audience's expectation is really different as well. The audience here wants to see a performance, they seem more interested in what the band does on stage in terms of entertainment show, rather than its music. I seriously doubt Radiohead would have made it big if they had started here as an Indie band, for example. So there was a lot of debate inside the band at some point, since I honestly didn't give a shit about the "performance" as opposed to our music. And I guess the consensus now is that I still don't give a shit, but I just got more comfortable on stage, so I can have more fun doing some stupid moves. [laughs]. We are musicians, not entertainers. If you wanna see rough feelings conveyed by some hard guitars and scorched throats, come to our gigs. If you wanna see people dressed up or jumping around in rhythm, I think you got the wrong address, dude!
18. Though your music is most recognizably influenced by the post-hardcore of bands like Thursday, there are undercurrents of groups like Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana in your chord progressions and song structures, and echoes of the post-rock of Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky in your employment of arpeggio and crescendo. Is this amalgam and intentional stylistic choice, or do you organically integrate your influences without thinking?
Yeah, I kinda touched on that your previous question I guess. It is mostly amalgam, with no conscious choice. That being said, a song we are working on right now had its main riff sort of influenced by Thursday, and its progression by Jimmy Eat World. That influence soon vanished though, but it was there in the first place, and can still be felt I guess. Another song vocal line was inspired by Chester from Linkin Park. I just had the song, and imagined Chester singing it, and it was awesome! [laughs]. Unfortunately, I don't have his voice, so I am pretty sure it is not that easy to see that influence in the song anymore. The acoustic version of that song is included in our EP, it is called Can you hear the pieces falling down (in Harmony)? and you can grab a copy at our gigs!
18. Is it annoying when pretentious journalists ask you complicated questions in your second language?
[laughs] I honestly enjoyed your questions, mostly because I am a pretentious musician with complicated answers.
Listen:
Find Bulletproof Mirror Online:
Myspace
Spybeef Myspace
15.4.10
Thoughts on Things - Music
The Thing About Surfer Blood
Floridian power poppers Surfer Blood, only a year into their existence, have been getting a heaps of good press. Pitchfork gave their debut album, Astro Coast, a phenomenally high rating (8.2 out of 10), stating, “first and foremost it's a great guitar album”. The notoriously hyperbolic Brit weekly NME labeled Astro Coast a “superb debut” and the band “excellent”, concluding “we like ‘em a lot.” Jumping on the bandwagon, Rolling Stone has published their name countless times, covering the band for the “Breaking”, “New Music Report, and “Hype Monitor” sections. NPR has reviewed Surfer Blood’s live show, and online indie distro giant Insound decided to launch its new “Studio Sessions” section with a live performance from the band. After all the hoopla, I couldn’t help but feel it was my duty to listen to these guys, given how much I love melodic guitar rock.
Power Pop Lineage: (clockwise from top left) Cheap Trick; Weezer; Surfer Blood
When I listen to Surfer Blood, I hear Cheap Trick, The Cars, Boston, Weezer, the sunnier side of Ride, some Pixies, some Pavement,The Beach Boys, and even a little Oasis. Swim, the first single from Astro Coast is an infectious, silly pop song. It sounds a little like Rick Springfield, a little like Weezer, a little like Vampire Weekend, and a lot like the Cars.
But that’s the thing: it’s just a pop song. I nod my head. I hum it for a minute or two after hearing it. I might tap my foot. But. I’ve listened to it dozens of times, waiting for some magical point of penetration, some insight to justify the hype. And nothing. So there are three places we can go from here. (A) The music press is completely bats. (B) The deficit of great mainstream guitar records has left us desperate for some good, old-fashioned power pop. (C) There’s a problem with my perception of guitar rock and pop music.
So let’s start with A. It’s been suggested time and again that the music press is, in fact, nuts. Really, probably, this is true. It’s happened time and again that bands show up, are hyped within an inch of their lives, and turn out to be completely forgettable. Off the top of my head, there’s The Vines, The Darkness, Damian Rice, and even blockbuster snooze fests like Snow Patrol (admittedly, I think Final Straw is a fantastic record. I could take or leave the rest.) and The Killers.
However, a good deal of bands bolstered by the press as “The Next Big Thing” have actually earned their hype, not just on a single record, but over the course of a career. I’m thinking Oasis, The White Stripes, Arctic Monkeys and, if we go back far enough, groups like U2, Dinosaur Jr., and R.E.M.. So then maybe the press really just likes Surfer Blood, and this is the start of something special that I just don’t get yet. The band is new enough that the situation could go either way, but to write them off simply because of hype is unfair.
Let’s look at the charts right now. As of 4/13/10, the top twenty is, with the notable exception of Ludacris’ new record, Meth, Ghost, and Rae’s Wu-Massacre, and country mainstay Alan Jackson, all pop, faux-R&B, and dance music, most of it synth heavy. Lady Gaga has both an LP and an EP up there (admittedly, I like Lady Gaga, but still), the most recent heap of Black Eyed Peas refuse is still going strong, teen pop sensation Justin Bieber appears twice, pop compilation Now 33 has the third spot, and Usher sits at number one.
On the singles chart, apart from an Irish pop band called The Script I’d never heard of until about three minutes ago, there’s not a guitar-and-acoustic-drumset-based group on there. It’s all heavily synthesized, heavily affected, auto-tuned to hell and back glam pop (again, apart from Luda, who somehow has managed two singles in the top 20). And really, other than U2 and Coldplay, neither one of whom would know a power chord if it hit them in the face, Kings of Leon have been the only rock band to make much of a splash in the past year.
The State of Pop, 2010: (A) Lady Gaga (B) Usher with protegee Justin Beiber (C) Kanye West (D) Taylor Swift
There seems, however, to be a sea change in the making. Indie favorites Vampire Weekend debuted at number one on the billboard charts not long ago, while the soundtrack for New Moon (that's the second Twilight movie) featured Grizzly Bear, Bon Iver, and Death Cab for Cutie. More and more pop stars are wearing skinny jeans, thrift store tops, and retro Nikes. In the middle of all of this, Surfer Blood (let’s not forget that’s who we’re discoursing on right now) show up.
They’re indie enough to be part of this new revolution, catchy enough to be mainstream, and, in a climate of one over produced synth anthem after another, refreshingly simple; guitars, amps, drums, hooks, some reverb. Their 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s influences make them an across-the-board attraction for older generations, while their association with the proliferating DIY indie scene makes them perfect for the kids these days.
So the hype might be a bit much, but can we really blame Surfer Blood for hitting the zeitgeist? It’s not their fault anymore than it was Nirvana’s fault for putting out Smells Like Teen Spirit as the 80’s underground punk-Sabbath-Beatles fusion thing was reaching the mainstream and Hair Metal was nailing it’s own coffin shut with horrid self-parody.
In addition to the Surfer Blood’s context, as I dutiful writer I must also exam my own context. When I read that Astro Coast is “a great guitar album”, my pulse quickens. I think maybe a new band has popped up that will allow me to put away Siamese Dream and You’re Living All Over Me for a few months and dig on something different. Yet already I’ve done Surfer Blood a disservice, by comparing them, before I’ve heard a lick of their music, to two of the great guitar records of all time. Or, if you disagree with that assessment, I’ve set myself up for disappointment by hoping that a debut record from a year-old band will compare to two of my favorite albums of all time.
Everything is relative. When I first listened to Weezer’s Blue Album (on cassette, on my walkman, after buying it at Sam Goodie), my mind was completely blown. What was this wild new amalgam of power chords and pop hooks? When my dad heard it, he thought it sounded like Cheap Trick, to which my immediate response was: What the fuck is Cheap Trick?
Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness changed my perception of reality. When I played it for my dad, a devotee of The Beatles, The Who, The Clash, and Hendrix, he asked why there were so many guitar overdubs. But, my taste having veritably been formed by the sound of the Pumpkins, I couldn’t fathom a great guitar record without 10,000 overdubs. Listening to Dinosaur Jr, my dad told me he liked the chord changes, that it reminded him of Neil Young. By which of course I was revolted, because who who’s worth their salt listens to that old crap?
Everything's Relative (A) Hendrix (B) Journey (C) Surfer Blood (D) Smashing Pumpkins in a Box
Now, of course, when I listen to a new band like Surfers Blood, I think: Wow, they sound like Weezer. But to some 13 year old kid in Vermont who’s never heard Weezer and reads about Astro Coast on Pitchfork in the school computer lab or in Rolling Stone at the local library, and runs to pick up the record (or, more likely, download it), Surfer Blood may very well be a life changing experience.
When I look back to the 90’s guitar rock renaissance, I can’t help but think that it was the last great pop music epoch. Pearl Jam. The Chili Peppers. Nirvana. Smashing Pumpkins. Rancid. Soundgarden. Radiohead. Even groups like Hum and Deftones were moving units. And from the UK: Oasis. Blur. Ash. Supergrass. Ride. But what were those bands to people who’d lived through the 80’s? Who had Dinosaur Jr, R.E.M., The Pixies, Melvins, and Mudhoney? Or, on the otherside of the pond, Jesus and Mary Chain, The Cure, and The Smiths?
And what was the music of the 70’s to my dad, who had grown up with The Stones, Cream, The Kinks, and The Byrds? How could Rancid and the rest of the 90’s punk resurgence impress someone who had seen The Clash in 1978? More than anything, it’s the relativity of my own musical ideas and taste that make me think that maybe a band like Surfer Blood is just another rock band, and doesn’t deserve the hype. And I guess that makes me, at the ripe old age of 27, a crotchety old man.
So Surfer Blood, at just a year into their career, have been hyped to hell and back. And maybe they deserve it. After writing these last few paragraphs, I go back to Swim and I think: Damn, this a pretty good song. Especially in the context of contemporary pop music. Especially to a wide-eyed kid with a brand new guitar and some skinny jeans who doesn’t have the endless parade of music references to pull from the trunk that I’ve accumulated over the years. Maybe I’m just being cynical. Maybe Astro Coast is a damn good album, and it’ll keep the youth boogieing the way Weezer did for me. Good for Sufer Blood. I think I like these guys. A lot.
Floridian power poppers Surfer Blood, only a year into their existence, have been getting a heaps of good press. Pitchfork gave their debut album, Astro Coast, a phenomenally high rating (8.2 out of 10), stating, “first and foremost it's a great guitar album”. The notoriously hyperbolic Brit weekly NME labeled Astro Coast a “superb debut” and the band “excellent”, concluding “we like ‘em a lot.” Jumping on the bandwagon, Rolling Stone has published their name countless times, covering the band for the “Breaking”, “New Music Report, and “Hype Monitor” sections. NPR has reviewed Surfer Blood’s live show, and online indie distro giant Insound decided to launch its new “Studio Sessions” section with a live performance from the band. After all the hoopla, I couldn’t help but feel it was my duty to listen to these guys, given how much I love melodic guitar rock.
Power Pop Lineage: (clockwise from top left) Cheap Trick; Weezer; Surfer Blood
When I listen to Surfer Blood, I hear Cheap Trick, The Cars, Boston, Weezer, the sunnier side of Ride, some Pixies, some Pavement,The Beach Boys, and even a little Oasis. Swim, the first single from Astro Coast is an infectious, silly pop song. It sounds a little like Rick Springfield, a little like Weezer, a little like Vampire Weekend, and a lot like the Cars.
But that’s the thing: it’s just a pop song. I nod my head. I hum it for a minute or two after hearing it. I might tap my foot. But. I’ve listened to it dozens of times, waiting for some magical point of penetration, some insight to justify the hype. And nothing. So there are three places we can go from here. (A) The music press is completely bats. (B) The deficit of great mainstream guitar records has left us desperate for some good, old-fashioned power pop. (C) There’s a problem with my perception of guitar rock and pop music.
So let’s start with A. It’s been suggested time and again that the music press is, in fact, nuts. Really, probably, this is true. It’s happened time and again that bands show up, are hyped within an inch of their lives, and turn out to be completely forgettable. Off the top of my head, there’s The Vines, The Darkness, Damian Rice, and even blockbuster snooze fests like Snow Patrol (admittedly, I think Final Straw is a fantastic record. I could take or leave the rest.) and The Killers.
However, a good deal of bands bolstered by the press as “The Next Big Thing” have actually earned their hype, not just on a single record, but over the course of a career. I’m thinking Oasis, The White Stripes, Arctic Monkeys and, if we go back far enough, groups like U2, Dinosaur Jr., and R.E.M.. So then maybe the press really just likes Surfer Blood, and this is the start of something special that I just don’t get yet. The band is new enough that the situation could go either way, but to write them off simply because of hype is unfair.
Let’s look at the charts right now. As of 4/13/10, the top twenty is, with the notable exception of Ludacris’ new record, Meth, Ghost, and Rae’s Wu-Massacre, and country mainstay Alan Jackson, all pop, faux-R&B, and dance music, most of it synth heavy. Lady Gaga has both an LP and an EP up there (admittedly, I like Lady Gaga, but still), the most recent heap of Black Eyed Peas refuse is still going strong, teen pop sensation Justin Bieber appears twice, pop compilation Now 33 has the third spot, and Usher sits at number one.
On the singles chart, apart from an Irish pop band called The Script I’d never heard of until about three minutes ago, there’s not a guitar-and-acoustic-drumset-based group on there. It’s all heavily synthesized, heavily affected, auto-tuned to hell and back glam pop (again, apart from Luda, who somehow has managed two singles in the top 20). And really, other than U2 and Coldplay, neither one of whom would know a power chord if it hit them in the face, Kings of Leon have been the only rock band to make much of a splash in the past year.
The State of Pop, 2010: (A) Lady Gaga (B) Usher with protegee Justin Beiber (C) Kanye West (D) Taylor Swift
There seems, however, to be a sea change in the making. Indie favorites Vampire Weekend debuted at number one on the billboard charts not long ago, while the soundtrack for New Moon (that's the second Twilight movie) featured Grizzly Bear, Bon Iver, and Death Cab for Cutie. More and more pop stars are wearing skinny jeans, thrift store tops, and retro Nikes. In the middle of all of this, Surfer Blood (let’s not forget that’s who we’re discoursing on right now) show up.
They’re indie enough to be part of this new revolution, catchy enough to be mainstream, and, in a climate of one over produced synth anthem after another, refreshingly simple; guitars, amps, drums, hooks, some reverb. Their 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s influences make them an across-the-board attraction for older generations, while their association with the proliferating DIY indie scene makes them perfect for the kids these days.
So the hype might be a bit much, but can we really blame Surfer Blood for hitting the zeitgeist? It’s not their fault anymore than it was Nirvana’s fault for putting out Smells Like Teen Spirit as the 80’s underground punk-Sabbath-Beatles fusion thing was reaching the mainstream and Hair Metal was nailing it’s own coffin shut with horrid self-parody.
In addition to the Surfer Blood’s context, as I dutiful writer I must also exam my own context. When I read that Astro Coast is “a great guitar album”, my pulse quickens. I think maybe a new band has popped up that will allow me to put away Siamese Dream and You’re Living All Over Me for a few months and dig on something different. Yet already I’ve done Surfer Blood a disservice, by comparing them, before I’ve heard a lick of their music, to two of the great guitar records of all time. Or, if you disagree with that assessment, I’ve set myself up for disappointment by hoping that a debut record from a year-old band will compare to two of my favorite albums of all time.
Everything is relative. When I first listened to Weezer’s Blue Album (on cassette, on my walkman, after buying it at Sam Goodie), my mind was completely blown. What was this wild new amalgam of power chords and pop hooks? When my dad heard it, he thought it sounded like Cheap Trick, to which my immediate response was: What the fuck is Cheap Trick?
Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness changed my perception of reality. When I played it for my dad, a devotee of The Beatles, The Who, The Clash, and Hendrix, he asked why there were so many guitar overdubs. But, my taste having veritably been formed by the sound of the Pumpkins, I couldn’t fathom a great guitar record without 10,000 overdubs. Listening to Dinosaur Jr, my dad told me he liked the chord changes, that it reminded him of Neil Young. By which of course I was revolted, because who who’s worth their salt listens to that old crap?
Everything's Relative (A) Hendrix (B) Journey (C) Surfer Blood (D) Smashing Pumpkins in a Box
Now, of course, when I listen to a new band like Surfers Blood, I think: Wow, they sound like Weezer. But to some 13 year old kid in Vermont who’s never heard Weezer and reads about Astro Coast on Pitchfork in the school computer lab or in Rolling Stone at the local library, and runs to pick up the record (or, more likely, download it), Surfer Blood may very well be a life changing experience.
When I look back to the 90’s guitar rock renaissance, I can’t help but think that it was the last great pop music epoch. Pearl Jam. The Chili Peppers. Nirvana. Smashing Pumpkins. Rancid. Soundgarden. Radiohead. Even groups like Hum and Deftones were moving units. And from the UK: Oasis. Blur. Ash. Supergrass. Ride. But what were those bands to people who’d lived through the 80’s? Who had Dinosaur Jr, R.E.M., The Pixies, Melvins, and Mudhoney? Or, on the otherside of the pond, Jesus and Mary Chain, The Cure, and The Smiths?
And what was the music of the 70’s to my dad, who had grown up with The Stones, Cream, The Kinks, and The Byrds? How could Rancid and the rest of the 90’s punk resurgence impress someone who had seen The Clash in 1978? More than anything, it’s the relativity of my own musical ideas and taste that make me think that maybe a band like Surfer Blood is just another rock band, and doesn’t deserve the hype. And I guess that makes me, at the ripe old age of 27, a crotchety old man.
So Surfer Blood, at just a year into their career, have been hyped to hell and back. And maybe they deserve it. After writing these last few paragraphs, I go back to Swim and I think: Damn, this a pretty good song. Especially in the context of contemporary pop music. Especially to a wide-eyed kid with a brand new guitar and some skinny jeans who doesn’t have the endless parade of music references to pull from the trunk that I’ve accumulated over the years. Maybe I’m just being cynical. Maybe Astro Coast is a damn good album, and it’ll keep the youth boogieing the way Weezer did for me. Good for Sufer Blood. I think I like these guys. A lot.
17.3.10
Akira Kosemura and Things to Come
I recently discovered Japanese ambient piano composer Akira Kosemura (recently as in like basically about an hour ago) and am totally loving his new record Polaroid Paino. I'm gonna try to put a player in this post so that you can listen to one of his new tracks, though honestly I'm a little technologically inept and I'm not sure that it'll work.
I've decided that this week (since it's a Wed. really what I mean by that is the next seven days) will be picture and poetry week. What that means is I'll be posting small sets of ten or so photos of places here in Mexico based on a certain theme, and breaking them up with some poems I've been writing. Hopefully that will appeal to you all.
If in the meantime you can't help yourself and just need to read some more of my articles, please head over to Gloobbi and check out what I've written for them.
Thanks very much for reading. Fingers crossed that the mp3 player shows up...
I've decided that this week (since it's a Wed. really what I mean by that is the next seven days) will be picture and poetry week. What that means is I'll be posting small sets of ten or so photos of places here in Mexico based on a certain theme, and breaking them up with some poems I've been writing. Hopefully that will appeal to you all.
If in the meantime you can't help yourself and just need to read some more of my articles, please head over to Gloobbi and check out what I've written for them.
Thanks very much for reading. Fingers crossed that the mp3 player shows up...
| Akira Kosemura - Catnap .mp3 | ||
 | ||
 | Found at bee mp3 search engine |  |
28.1.10
Thoughts on Things - Music
Top Ten Albums of 2009
I’m a bit late on getting to this, partly because I’ve been living in Mexico, where I don’t have access to a lot of the records that appear on this list. So I had to hump it back to the states for xmas, where some very generous donors allowed me to acquire I guess about half of these records.
Albums are listed chronologically. It was too hard for me to make a hierarchy.
1. Glasvegas – s/t. (Jan 6th) One of the things that makes Glasvegas’ debut record so damn good (and it is that damn good, despite what you may have heard) is how singular and coherent it is. The record sounds cavernous; unlike many other young bands, who struggle with finding an identity, Glasvegas is all Glasvegas, from the Jesus & Mary Chain-aping bass drumless setup to the crushingly emotive vocals (the Scottish brogue adds near-bottomless depths to anything, much like the way anyone speaking French sounds like a poet), the album takes you into its world and holds you there until the last note.
The first three tracks are a one-two-three punch no album this year, or in recent memory, can match: Flowers & Football Tops, Geraldine, and It’s My Own Cheating Heart that Makes Me Cry are three of the best songs of 2009. Elsewhere, the anthemic “Here We Fucking Go” of Go Square Go, the colossal build of Polmont on My Mind, the heartbreaking honesty of Daddy’s Gone, and the ambient melancholy of S.A.D. Light & Ice Cream Van’s closing duo make a near-perfect sequence. The unquestionable awfulness of Stabbed (singer James Allan giving a very detailed account of being stabbed over Moonlight Sonata. Seriously) makes the album even better, for making it ragged and a little bizarre. Their live performance reassures their status as a great new promise: they recreate the world of the record perfectly and far more powerfully, Allan so completely involved in the performance he seems to be coming from another planet. It doesn’t hurt that the band looks exactly like The Clash ca. 1976. More to the point, it doesn’t hurt that Allan’s complete absorption and dedication mirrors Joe Strummer’s.
2. Ida Maria – Fortress Around My Heart (April 14th) Ida Maria exploded out of Norway (via Sweden) with the passion of punk, the directness of Springsteen, and a catchy, incredibly tight musical attack. Even more tightly-wound live, the group does something very rare: they create pop music that is damn good, and damn good fun, without sacrificing their integrity or personality. The titular front woman began putting together the songs comprising the album as a young woman of 16 living in the middle of nowhere, Scandinavia. She discovered Rock and Roll through the record collection of a family friend and never looked back. Her delivery is uncompromising, defining the band's sound. She sings as though every song, every note, even, is the first and last she will ever sing. The watertight rhythm section adds volumes (and substantial volume) to each song, turning what might in less-capable hands be rote pop numbers into fierce, melodic beasts, like The Beatles by way of Post Punk. As with Glasvegas, their live show makes good on their promise, as they inject the album’s cuts with even more intensity and passion than on record. A very promising debut from a group that looks to improve with age.
3. Idlewild – Post-Electric Blues (June) Scottish stalwarts Idlewild found themselves labeless after mergers and buyouts reshuffled the structure and roster of the indie (Sanctuary Records) they had recorded just one record for (the stellar Make Another World). Looking to In Rainbows for inspiration, they decided to make an album on their own. They set up a pre-order on their website, allowing fans to get in on the ground floor. The deal: you pay for the record in advance, we use the money to record the album, we put your name in the liner notes and send it only to those who have prepaid once we’ve recorded and manufactured. Being a diehard and long-time fan, I signed right up.
Six months later, I got a little package from the British Isles. This record took me back to more innocent times, before the internet, when an album’s release was something highly anticipated. When I would run to the record store after school with my allowance, having heard the single a handful of times and seen the artwork maybe once or twice in the record store window, and pick up the cassette (I switched to CDs when I was 15 or so). I’d tare it open, put it in my walkman, and be taken into a new world.
I had heard only thirty or so unmixed, vocalless seconds of Post-Electric Blues when I first put it on. The experience of the album was completely transporting. Idlewild have managed to re-find themselves yet again, injecting the folk of Warnings/Promises with the rock of The Remote Part and a very gleeful, mischievous, newfound pop sensibility. The songs bounce and roll with abandon like children rolling down a hill. Roddy Woomble’s lyrics, always a highlight of a new Idlewild record, are in brilliant form. He turns phrases on their heads like no other vocalist, tossing out double negatives and trickily worded couplets and choruses that never mean what they seem to on first impression. A band for the ages, Idlewild manage to continually change while remaining very distinctly themselves. A phenomenal record that helped reminded me why I loved albums so much in the first place.
4. Rancid – Let the Dominoes Fall (June 2nd) Rancid took seven years to release this record. They are undoubtedly the definitive post-70’s punk band, and the album follows-up Indestructible, something of a defining statement for the band. In the interim period, many changes have taken place in camp Rancid, most notably the departure of founding drummer Brett Reed. Not long after its release, the record found it was into my hands on subsequently my stereo.
Full disclosure: Rancid’s …And Out Come the Wolves was the first CD I bought, at age 12 (my first album, on cassette, was Use Your Illusion I, Guns N Roses, when I was seven). They have been one of my favorite bands for more than half of my life. There is no way I can give Let the Dominoes Fall an even-handed critical write up. That said, it’s a record that I adore, and one that disappointed me at first.
I familiarized myself with Let the Dominoes Fall walking around New York City in the rain. It’s an album of punk anthems, ska tracks, and a few acoustic numbers, similar in pacing and song content to Out Come the Wolves and Let’s Go. This was what initially threw me off. If nothing else, Rancid is a band that with each record moves forward. From the dirty street punk of the first two records, they moved to the more classicist sound of Wolves, then three years on came out with a bizarre, ska-heavy, and fantastic Life Won’t Wait. Two years after that, they produced a 38 minute record with 22 songs, a paint peeling blast of early 80’s hardcore and crust punk. Then came Indestructible, an album that managed to bring together their many disparate styles. To hear a Rancid record that sounded like an older phase of Rancid caught me off guard, and initially put me off to the album.
As I’ve come back to the album some months on from its initial release, I’ve learned that it lives up to the sole promise of every Rancid record, all expectations aside: it’s an album filled with great songs and very little pretense. The songs are short, catchy, and expertly executed. The group’s vocals are strong as ever, and Armstrong’s lyrics in particular are intelligent, blunt, defiant observations of the world we live in. Though they are most often (and annoyingly) compared to The Clash, it seems as though Rancid are much closer kin to Pearl Jam.: they probably won’t ever re-ascend to their previous commercial peaks, but they probably don’t really care. What’s truly important to them is saying what they want to say, how they want to say it, while writing damn good songs.
5. Dinosaur Jr. – Farm (June 23rd) Listening to Dinosaur Jr.’s Bug, it’s hard not to hear every guitar rock album that came out between ’91 and ’97. To take it further, the track The Post packs every 90’s guitar rock staple into three minutes and thirty nine seconds: the sludgy, slow, bass-heavy verse; the melodic, bright, guitar-heavy chorus; the post-chorus epic riff; the squealing guitar solo; it’s all there, and more. Though Mascis and his shifting cast of backing players put out some great post Bug records, it was never quite the same.
When the original Dinosaur trio announced some shows for the release of their remastered records (Dinosaur, You’re Living All Over Me – for this guy’s money, the best record of the 80’s – and aforementioned Bug), an album didn’t seem in the cards. Then, all of a sudden, there it was – Beyond, a startlingly good album that managed to combine everything great about old Dinosaur while bringing a newfound maturity and laid back joy to their songs. Two years on from the that, the question was: where could they possibly go from here?
The answer? They could get even better. Farm is You’re Living All Over Me’s near equal, a seamless blend of epic 70’s rock, melodic punk, sludgy metal, pop melodiousness, and ridiculous guitar solos. The band’s confidence and ability is on full display. From the first note of Pieces to the last chord of Imagination Blind, the trio are locked into an unbreakable groove. Murph hits harder and more dynamically than ever, possibly freed from the rhythmic dictums of Mascis after all these years. Lou strums chords and hammers notes like the bastard child of McCartney’s unparalleled melodiousness and Lemmy’s relentless, bludgeoning inertia. Jay’s voice has after all these years settled into a very beautiful and easy space. His lyrics are sweet and his melodies fit the songs perfectly.
But of course, with any Dinosaur record, it’s the guitars that rule the roost. Layered like sediment, the density and clarity of them is astounding. I Want You to Know packs as many rhythm and lead lines in its riffs and chords as anything on Hendrix’s First Rays of the New Rising Sun. The tender, soaring solos of the quiet numbers befit their bright melancholy, and the wailing of the rock tracks takes them to unparalleled heights. The album's high point (and year’s best track) is the near-nine-minute I Don’t Wanna Go There, a song that sounds equal parts vintage Dinosaur and Neil Young. Four and a half minutes in, after an astounding breakdown that sounds oddly like Sabbath playing a Birds lick, the solo kicks in, and it doesn’t wind down until long after the eight-minute mark. The beastly track highlights everything that’s wonderful about the album, and the band.
Farm is, flat out, front to back, a fantastic record, one of the great guitar albums of the past decade. It won’t be leaving my heavy-rotation pile for a long time yet.
6. We Were Promised Jetpacks – These Four Walls (July 7th) It’s been a damn good year for the Scots. Glasvegas started the party on a wonderful note. Idlewild tried something new and knocked it out of the park. We Were Promised Jetpacks snuck in largely under the radar this summer, which is a shame, because they’re brilliant debut, These Four Walls, is so defiantly bursting at the seems with energy, joy, and fantastic songs, it feels like it’s flying around the room on a kite, not pumping from stereo speakers.
The four (very) young lads in WWPJ began playing together in high school. Like Muse, who appears also on this list, their first gig was a high school talent show, and they walked away with the top prize. The band continued to hone their sound and musicianship (which is phenomenally tight and reminiscent of the coiled blitzkrieg of the first Arctic Monkeys record) through countless gigs over the years. Coming to the attention of Fat Cat records via fellow Scots’ Frightened Rabbit’s myspace page, the Edinburgh quartet found themselves a record deal.
Their sound is nothing but youthful exuberance and the joy of music and life. Though the lyrics can err to the enigmatic and dour, they’re sung with such anthemic passion they become mantras of life and love. Anthemic is certainly the key word for this record: the band’s sound is a mix of the tightly-coiled post-punk of early Bloc Party, the explosive, beautiful instrumental interplay of Explosions in the Sky (with a drummer on par with EITS’; no small feat) and the fist pumping, punk-infused this-music-will-save-your-life passion of early U2.
Each of the album’s eleven tracks, save an instrumental interlude and an acoustic denouement, is a crashing wave of music. A few chords, some picked notes build to dizzying washes of groove. The rhythm section perfectly times their driving elements: tight, funky, melodic bass and colossal, rising, falling, rolling drums, carve dynamics from very basic progressions and riffs like expert sculptors. Each song is a sermon, growing in fervor until it explodes with passion at its zenith. Some wind down, others burn out, but each track pushes itself to its logical extreme, the band playing like their hearts might give out at any second. More than any debut this year, These Four Walls is the sound of a band that might very well take over the world, if they weren’t so modest. But then again, four (very) young lads from the British Isles were similarly impassioned and humble about thirty years ago…
7. The Antlers – Hospice (Aug 18th) The Antlers, a former solo project from frontman Peter Silberman, expanded to a full band on Hospice. More than the membership expansion, it’s the epic expansion of the band’s sound and focus that makes this record one of the most heartbreaking revelations in recent years.
In taking on death and illness, The Antlers have accomplished something many lesser bands have failed to do: they very accurately bore into to the shattered lives of those who have lost loved ones. Steering completely clear of the cartoonish, morbid, exploitative tone records on death usually take, Hospice is front to back a crushing, emotionally destructive account of the little details of death and loss. The very direct, simple lyrics, coupled with a melancholy sonic template reminiscent of the post-rock of Sigur Ros and Silver Mount Zion (moments on this record are eerily reminiscent of SMZ’s similarly melancholy He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace the Corners of Our Rooms), and the weepy, plaintive song writing of Glen Hansard/Markéta Irglová and (hipsters recoil) Rush of Blood to the Head-era Coldplay, are enough to level an attentive listener. At times, Hospice, which is ultimately a very beautiful and cathartic record, is so sad and universal it’s hard to listen to.
The Antlers have managed something very difficult in music, and art of all mediums, for that matter. They have created a beautifully coherent and personal work that perfectly compliments its subject. In focusing on the intimate, Hospice becomes the universal. It is a very rare accomplishment, and a wonderful, if sometimes difficult to bare, album.
8. Arctic Monkeys – Humbug (Aug 25th) By now we’re all very familiar with the tale of the Arctic Monkeys: Four lads from Sheffield start a band. They’re good friends, they like a pint and a night at the disco. Inspired by Roots Manuva and a British pop wit-lyricism that stretches from the Kinks to Blur, Alex Turner spins cheeky tales of working class boredom and frustration over tight, energetic punk anthems. The group records, puts tracks on myspace, gives out CDRs for free at their shows. A few months later, their first record becomes the fastest selling debut in British history, toppling giants Oasis.
Two albums later, the Arctic Monkeys, now in their early-to-mid 20’s, are a very different band. On Humbug, they’ve relaxed, uncoiled, and found a very different groove. The album was recorded in the Joshua Tree desert with Queens of the Stoneage frontman Josh Holme, and sounds very much a product of four Northern Englishmen in a very different landscape, drinking beer, taking mushrooms, and letting themselves go to the mind-altering expanse of the desert.
Though the riffs on Humbug are similar in pattern and progression to those on their previous records, they’re looser and heavier. Songs plod, bounce, veer, and stomp in very unexpected ways. The addition of organs and haunting background vocals enrich and deepen the Monkeys’ sound in subtle, eerie ways. In stopping to smell the roses (or take psychedelics in the desert), the Arctic Monkeys have created a record that cements much of the promise of the first two albums while taking the band to new places, hinting at an even more exciting future for the group.
9. Muse – Uprising (Sept 15th) With each new Muse record, the question is: What can they possibly do that they haven’t done before? (The second question being of course: Can this band get anymore ridiculous? the answer to which is yes). Uprising answers that question with symphonies, choirs, clarinet solos, excerpted French operas, paeans to the Eurasian super continent, and a few rousing rock/dance numbers.
Continuing in the vein of Blackholes and Revelations, Uprising presents a collection of very cohesive songs in a very coherent sequence. The band is very much focused on creating a seamless series of tracks that incorporates all of their disparate influences. That they succeed in chucking a ridiculous number with multi-tracked vocals to rival Queen and Chopin nocturne as an outro next to a fist-pumping synth ballad next to a barreling hard rock track with a two-minute plus, fuzz-bass driven, organ drenched, Pink Floyd-esque midsection, attests to their staggering songwriting talent, not to mention their balls of steel.
The virtuosic ability of the band is on full display. Chris Wolstenholme’s bass lines veer from upper-register finger-picked melodies to funky five-string slapping without ever sounding ostentatious or out-of-place. Dominic Howard drives the band, expertly dictating the tracks' dynamics with his fills, dance beats, and newly added programming (the track Undisclosed Desires, programmed entirely by Howard, is a fantastic dance/R&B single reminiscent of both Prince and Timbaland). And of course there is Bellamy. Continuing the trend set forth on Blackholes, he’s reined the falsetto in a bit, in favor a rich, multi-tracked mid-range (expect when they decide to bust out the ridiculous harmonies, which does happen) that perfectly compliments the song-writing decisions of the record.
Of course, one of Muse’s best assets is their ability to write incredibly passionate, driving, emotionally rich songs with a sense of humor. Look no further than Guiding Light, a colossal power ballad with the emotional depth of the best of U2’s pop moments and a guitar solo straight off a Van Halen record. The solo is completely absurd--the album’s bonus DVD, which is, as previous Muse DVD tie-ins have been, fantastic, shows side-by-side via split screen Bellamy recording then listening back to the solo. Recording, he’s all technique and attentiveness. During playback, he dissolves into hysterics at the ridiculousness of his solo--and hilarious, though is a small enough part of the track not to ruin its punch.
All said and done, Uprising is another fantastic collection of songs that, due to the band’s prodigious talent and attention to detail, cohere into an even better album. The concluding thirteen minute, three-part symphony is a hauntingly beautiful, surprisingly restrained (as symphonies go, at least) culmination to a great record. Naysayers need to keep waiting, for Muse have yet to fall flat on their faces due to the weight of their own ambitions.
10. Converge – Axe to Fall (Oct 20th) Converge has built a career on surprising listeners. After three flat out classic metal records (Jane Doe, You Fail Me, No Heroes), each of which is sonically and stylistically unique, how can they continue to surprise us?
The answer presented by Axe to Fall is incredibly simple: by punching us in the throat. Album opener Dark Horse begins with a stampeding bass line, typically overwhelming Converge drumming, and a classic metal lead. When the chorus hits, we realize Converge has learned a new trick; with Jacob Bannon’s vocals a restrained, half-sung shout during the verse, and the guitar playing an up-high lead, the full force of the band isn’t totally present. All of it crashes in during a horrifyingly heaving chant-chorus with a brutal double-kick drum assault.
After the second chorus, the track slows into unexpected territory, building quickly into a head-crushing breakdown. All of this happens in less than two minutes. The breakdown carries the song to the two and a half minute mark, it kicks back into the opening stampede, and then a quick blizzard of feedback.
Axe to Fall brings us D-beat (complete with lead guitar and backing vocals from Uffe Cedurlund of Entombed and Disfear), thrash, flashes of doom, a title track with a break down big enough to topple buildings, intricately timed post-hardcore, and, the coup d’etat, a closing duo of nearly all-acoustic Tom Waits homage with Neurosis frontman Steve Von Till on vocals, and an epic seven-minute finale with melodic vocals, electronic textures (compliments of the members of Genghis Tron), and shades of Neurosis and Isis that is somehow classic Converge and something completely new.
Guitarist Kurt Ballou is undoubtedly the best producer in heavy music. His work on Axe to Fall serves to reiterate his position. The album amalgamates the rawness of the previous two records with the devastating low end of Jane Doe. The bass and bass drum occupy a very intense and large piece of the aural pie, the rest filled in with guitars that are warm and brutal, something between the sound of a classic tube amp and Entombed's soul crushing heaviness.
All-in-all, Converge have outdone themselves yet again. By taking a more streamlined approach to songwriting, they leave their indelible mark on myriad genres, without the record sounding like a hodgepodge. The addition of a slew of guest players (members of Genghis Tron, Neurosis, Entombed, The Red Chord, Blacklisted, former Converge bassist and Cave-In leader Steven Brodsky, among others) adds flavor to the record without it ever sounding like someone else’s project. Converge has produced their best album since Jane Doe, redefining what the genre is capable of yet again.
An Alternate Opinion
Enough records have come to my attention in the aftermath of writing this piece--mostly because I am no longer living in Mexico, and have access to a number of albums I couldn't get my hands on south of the border--to merit an alternate cast of characters. Here are seven records that didn't make the cut, but should haven (and for the record these are in no order at all):
1. Mos Def – The Ecstatic. The Ecstatic is a number of things, though first and foremost it's the great post-Black on Both sides record we thought we might never get. After the aimless wandering of The New Danger and unlistenable trash of True Magic, Mos reconnected with everything that made him love hip hop in the first place. The results are astonishing.
Another thing that The Ecstatic is is everything Blueprint III is not. Jay Z attempted to create a canonical hip hop record that incorporated everything from psyche rock to 80's pop to Golden Area rap. He was reaching for a defining statement, and he failed miserably. Mos, however, has taken that same template, and flown high. There are horn driver stompers, Middle Eastern samples, wild psyche guitars; pretty much everything but the kitchen sink. And it's almost always successful.
Lyrically, Mos is back on top of his game as well. Front to back, apart from the pretty awful No Hay Nada Mas, in which he raps in one of the worst Spanish accents in recent memory, the record is filled with eye-opening lyrical turns and typically brilliant metaphors. One of the best: "The windows on the ave look like sad eyes."
The Ecstatic is a remarkable return to form, and a great hip hop album.
2. Mastodon – Crack the Skye. Though Mastodon perpetuate the stereotype that metal bands can't spell, they break down enough musical barriers that it doesn't really matter.
Crack the Skye is less a logical progression from Blood Mountain than an understandable quantum leap. Though album opener Oblivion begins with a familiar riff, it quickly shifts into a thrash boogie around which Brann Dailor's drums wind and warp. Through the rest of the record's seven tracks, Mastodon keep the wallop to a minimum, working instead on building dizzying structures from their prodigious musical interplay.
Mastodon have developed a great knack for building hypnotic patterns that break into whiplash changes in key and tempo and unexpected moments. The heavy riffs pack a greater wallop in this template, as do the band's dynamics in general.
With Crack the Skye, Mastodon have managed to produce an album that is at once prog and metal without sacrificing the integrity of either genre.
3. Jonsí and Alex - Riceboy Sleeps Riceboy Sleeps is one of the best albums in the Stars of the Lid catalog, and I mean that as the most sincere praise. Though the record is unmistakably touched by the Sigur Rós frontman's signature sounds, it is also a superb example of a sublimated ego.
Not that Jonsí is much known for his ego. However, his ability to completely remove himself from the music and allow the beautiful ambient textures of the record to speak for themselves is powerful and welcome. Unlike a number of other high-profile musicians, Jonsí does not use this side project, created with his partner and fellow musician and artist Alex Somers, to further his career or any other narcissistic aesthetic.
Riceboy Sleeps is a lovely and fleeting album that walks a fine and brilliant line between contemporary ambient drone and classical string quartet composition.
4. Biffy Clyro - Only Revolutions Yes yes, I know. Another Scottish band. Though Biffy Clyro fans from the days of yore aren't particularly pleased that the band followed up their psuedo-break through Puzzle with an even poppier album, Only Revolutions is very much a consolidation of the band's strengths.
The basic template for the record is incredibly simple: heavy riffs, mid tempo grooves, and enormous choruses tempered with some left-field time signatures and instrumental choices (opener Captain has both a horn section and a church organ). The closest kin to Only Revolutions is Muse's absolution, though unlike Muse, who always had the stadium pomp lurking in their songs, Biffy Clyro are very much a band reared on punk and rock--three chords, drums, bass, guitar, and lots of passion.
In many ways, Only Revolutions sounds a good deal like what Nirvana could have been if Cobain had gotten over himself. Oblique lyrics, colossal guitars, and catchy pop songs drenched in distortion and loaded with hooks.
5. Poison the Well - The Tropic Rot Poison the Well ultimately sabotaged their own career by being as good as they are. The band managed to produced two of the defining records of the early 00's metalcore explosion before ditching the drum trigger and Slayer riffs for a more abrasiveness heaviness and indie-rock melodiousness.
What all of this means is that, while fans of extreme metal wrote them off for their emocore songs, fans of emocore wrote them off for becoming too extreme. Fans of alternative metal and the odd indie rock kid who has some Melvins and Mastodon records associated the band with douche bags in basketball shorts and Shai Hulud t-shirts, and PTW found themselves in a difficult position.
But they continued to produce some of the most brutal and original metal of the century so far. The Tropic Rot consolidates the pure, unadulterated abrasiveness of You Come Before You and the experimental, indie-rock heavy sounds of Versions. The album charges forward on a backbone of thrashy hardcore riffs, finding a punishing heaviness in epic, mid tempo power chord progressions not dissimilar to Boris. Unlike many vocalists in heavy music, Jeff Moreira manages to sound less like a petulant child and more like a man with enough pent up fury to be genuinely frightening.
More than any band in the post-Converge metalcore landscape, Poison the Well have managed to find their own sound that is built upon the warmth of tube amps and hair-raising aggression and unexpected melodies of Moreira.
Whether or not former guitarist Derek Miller's new project, Sleigh Bells, brings any indie credibility to PTW is irrelevant; with Tropic Rot, they prove once more that they are an essential metal band.
6. La Roux - La Roux La Roux is a great pop group. A male-female, vocalist-songwriter duo, the pair apes the formula championed by the Eurythmics to great effect.
La Roux often come under fire for having a cold sound, and though the sterile production of their record certainly stifles warmth, it's hard to find such cosmetic nitpicking relevant with a record that's as catchy and entertaining as this one.
Certainly, you shouldn't come to this album expecting it to change your life, but any fan of the grand tradition of electro pop that spans the generations from classic groups like Soft Cell to contemporary masters The Knife will find lots to love in this album, as will fans of innocuous, hella catchy pop in general.
7. Lady Gaga - Fame Monster Lady Gaga can do no wrong. Everything she touches turns to gold. The singer-songwriter/oversexualized performance artist has an unparalleled ear for pop hooks, dance beats, and simple chord progressions, and an inimitable ability to make all of these incredibly rote musical staples sound fresh time and again.
Much like her most obvious touchstone, Madonna, Gaga is able to make pop music that is pure, musical, fun, and worthy of all praise once the tit-mounted machine guns, soda-can hair dos, and lesbian-prison fantasy videos have been stripped away.
Gaga is posited by her label as some sort of avant-garde in the world of pop, and yet despite her incredibly contemporary sound and style, she couldn't be further from this: she is nothing more or less than a classic pop artist.
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I’m a bit late on getting to this, partly because I’ve been living in Mexico, where I don’t have access to a lot of the records that appear on this list. So I had to hump it back to the states for xmas, where some very generous donors allowed me to acquire I guess about half of these records.
Albums are listed chronologically. It was too hard for me to make a hierarchy.
1. Glasvegas – s/t. (Jan 6th) One of the things that makes Glasvegas’ debut record so damn good (and it is that damn good, despite what you may have heard) is how singular and coherent it is. The record sounds cavernous; unlike many other young bands, who struggle with finding an identity, Glasvegas is all Glasvegas, from the Jesus & Mary Chain-aping bass drumless setup to the crushingly emotive vocals (the Scottish brogue adds near-bottomless depths to anything, much like the way anyone speaking French sounds like a poet), the album takes you into its world and holds you there until the last note.
The first three tracks are a one-two-three punch no album this year, or in recent memory, can match: Flowers & Football Tops, Geraldine, and It’s My Own Cheating Heart that Makes Me Cry are three of the best songs of 2009. Elsewhere, the anthemic “Here We Fucking Go” of Go Square Go, the colossal build of Polmont on My Mind, the heartbreaking honesty of Daddy’s Gone, and the ambient melancholy of S.A.D. Light & Ice Cream Van’s closing duo make a near-perfect sequence. The unquestionable awfulness of Stabbed (singer James Allan giving a very detailed account of being stabbed over Moonlight Sonata. Seriously) makes the album even better, for making it ragged and a little bizarre. Their live performance reassures their status as a great new promise: they recreate the world of the record perfectly and far more powerfully, Allan so completely involved in the performance he seems to be coming from another planet. It doesn’t hurt that the band looks exactly like The Clash ca. 1976. More to the point, it doesn’t hurt that Allan’s complete absorption and dedication mirrors Joe Strummer’s.
2. Ida Maria – Fortress Around My Heart (April 14th) Ida Maria exploded out of Norway (via Sweden) with the passion of punk, the directness of Springsteen, and a catchy, incredibly tight musical attack. Even more tightly-wound live, the group does something very rare: they create pop music that is damn good, and damn good fun, without sacrificing their integrity or personality. The titular front woman began putting together the songs comprising the album as a young woman of 16 living in the middle of nowhere, Scandinavia. She discovered Rock and Roll through the record collection of a family friend and never looked back. Her delivery is uncompromising, defining the band's sound. She sings as though every song, every note, even, is the first and last she will ever sing. The watertight rhythm section adds volumes (and substantial volume) to each song, turning what might in less-capable hands be rote pop numbers into fierce, melodic beasts, like The Beatles by way of Post Punk. As with Glasvegas, their live show makes good on their promise, as they inject the album’s cuts with even more intensity and passion than on record. A very promising debut from a group that looks to improve with age.
3. Idlewild – Post-Electric Blues (June) Scottish stalwarts Idlewild found themselves labeless after mergers and buyouts reshuffled the structure and roster of the indie (Sanctuary Records) they had recorded just one record for (the stellar Make Another World). Looking to In Rainbows for inspiration, they decided to make an album on their own. They set up a pre-order on their website, allowing fans to get in on the ground floor. The deal: you pay for the record in advance, we use the money to record the album, we put your name in the liner notes and send it only to those who have prepaid once we’ve recorded and manufactured. Being a diehard and long-time fan, I signed right up.
Six months later, I got a little package from the British Isles. This record took me back to more innocent times, before the internet, when an album’s release was something highly anticipated. When I would run to the record store after school with my allowance, having heard the single a handful of times and seen the artwork maybe once or twice in the record store window, and pick up the cassette (I switched to CDs when I was 15 or so). I’d tare it open, put it in my walkman, and be taken into a new world.
I had heard only thirty or so unmixed, vocalless seconds of Post-Electric Blues when I first put it on. The experience of the album was completely transporting. Idlewild have managed to re-find themselves yet again, injecting the folk of Warnings/Promises with the rock of The Remote Part and a very gleeful, mischievous, newfound pop sensibility. The songs bounce and roll with abandon like children rolling down a hill. Roddy Woomble’s lyrics, always a highlight of a new Idlewild record, are in brilliant form. He turns phrases on their heads like no other vocalist, tossing out double negatives and trickily worded couplets and choruses that never mean what they seem to on first impression. A band for the ages, Idlewild manage to continually change while remaining very distinctly themselves. A phenomenal record that helped reminded me why I loved albums so much in the first place.
4. Rancid – Let the Dominoes Fall (June 2nd) Rancid took seven years to release this record. They are undoubtedly the definitive post-70’s punk band, and the album follows-up Indestructible, something of a defining statement for the band. In the interim period, many changes have taken place in camp Rancid, most notably the departure of founding drummer Brett Reed. Not long after its release, the record found it was into my hands on subsequently my stereo.
Full disclosure: Rancid’s …And Out Come the Wolves was the first CD I bought, at age 12 (my first album, on cassette, was Use Your Illusion I, Guns N Roses, when I was seven). They have been one of my favorite bands for more than half of my life. There is no way I can give Let the Dominoes Fall an even-handed critical write up. That said, it’s a record that I adore, and one that disappointed me at first.
I familiarized myself with Let the Dominoes Fall walking around New York City in the rain. It’s an album of punk anthems, ska tracks, and a few acoustic numbers, similar in pacing and song content to Out Come the Wolves and Let’s Go. This was what initially threw me off. If nothing else, Rancid is a band that with each record moves forward. From the dirty street punk of the first two records, they moved to the more classicist sound of Wolves, then three years on came out with a bizarre, ska-heavy, and fantastic Life Won’t Wait. Two years after that, they produced a 38 minute record with 22 songs, a paint peeling blast of early 80’s hardcore and crust punk. Then came Indestructible, an album that managed to bring together their many disparate styles. To hear a Rancid record that sounded like an older phase of Rancid caught me off guard, and initially put me off to the album.
As I’ve come back to the album some months on from its initial release, I’ve learned that it lives up to the sole promise of every Rancid record, all expectations aside: it’s an album filled with great songs and very little pretense. The songs are short, catchy, and expertly executed. The group’s vocals are strong as ever, and Armstrong’s lyrics in particular are intelligent, blunt, defiant observations of the world we live in. Though they are most often (and annoyingly) compared to The Clash, it seems as though Rancid are much closer kin to Pearl Jam.: they probably won’t ever re-ascend to their previous commercial peaks, but they probably don’t really care. What’s truly important to them is saying what they want to say, how they want to say it, while writing damn good songs.
5. Dinosaur Jr. – Farm (June 23rd) Listening to Dinosaur Jr.’s Bug, it’s hard not to hear every guitar rock album that came out between ’91 and ’97. To take it further, the track The Post packs every 90’s guitar rock staple into three minutes and thirty nine seconds: the sludgy, slow, bass-heavy verse; the melodic, bright, guitar-heavy chorus; the post-chorus epic riff; the squealing guitar solo; it’s all there, and more. Though Mascis and his shifting cast of backing players put out some great post Bug records, it was never quite the same.
When the original Dinosaur trio announced some shows for the release of their remastered records (Dinosaur, You’re Living All Over Me – for this guy’s money, the best record of the 80’s – and aforementioned Bug), an album didn’t seem in the cards. Then, all of a sudden, there it was – Beyond, a startlingly good album that managed to combine everything great about old Dinosaur while bringing a newfound maturity and laid back joy to their songs. Two years on from the that, the question was: where could they possibly go from here?
The answer? They could get even better. Farm is You’re Living All Over Me’s near equal, a seamless blend of epic 70’s rock, melodic punk, sludgy metal, pop melodiousness, and ridiculous guitar solos. The band’s confidence and ability is on full display. From the first note of Pieces to the last chord of Imagination Blind, the trio are locked into an unbreakable groove. Murph hits harder and more dynamically than ever, possibly freed from the rhythmic dictums of Mascis after all these years. Lou strums chords and hammers notes like the bastard child of McCartney’s unparalleled melodiousness and Lemmy’s relentless, bludgeoning inertia. Jay’s voice has after all these years settled into a very beautiful and easy space. His lyrics are sweet and his melodies fit the songs perfectly.
But of course, with any Dinosaur record, it’s the guitars that rule the roost. Layered like sediment, the density and clarity of them is astounding. I Want You to Know packs as many rhythm and lead lines in its riffs and chords as anything on Hendrix’s First Rays of the New Rising Sun. The tender, soaring solos of the quiet numbers befit their bright melancholy, and the wailing of the rock tracks takes them to unparalleled heights. The album's high point (and year’s best track) is the near-nine-minute I Don’t Wanna Go There, a song that sounds equal parts vintage Dinosaur and Neil Young. Four and a half minutes in, after an astounding breakdown that sounds oddly like Sabbath playing a Birds lick, the solo kicks in, and it doesn’t wind down until long after the eight-minute mark. The beastly track highlights everything that’s wonderful about the album, and the band.
Farm is, flat out, front to back, a fantastic record, one of the great guitar albums of the past decade. It won’t be leaving my heavy-rotation pile for a long time yet.
6. We Were Promised Jetpacks – These Four Walls (July 7th) It’s been a damn good year for the Scots. Glasvegas started the party on a wonderful note. Idlewild tried something new and knocked it out of the park. We Were Promised Jetpacks snuck in largely under the radar this summer, which is a shame, because they’re brilliant debut, These Four Walls, is so defiantly bursting at the seems with energy, joy, and fantastic songs, it feels like it’s flying around the room on a kite, not pumping from stereo speakers.
The four (very) young lads in WWPJ began playing together in high school. Like Muse, who appears also on this list, their first gig was a high school talent show, and they walked away with the top prize. The band continued to hone their sound and musicianship (which is phenomenally tight and reminiscent of the coiled blitzkrieg of the first Arctic Monkeys record) through countless gigs over the years. Coming to the attention of Fat Cat records via fellow Scots’ Frightened Rabbit’s myspace page, the Edinburgh quartet found themselves a record deal.
Their sound is nothing but youthful exuberance and the joy of music and life. Though the lyrics can err to the enigmatic and dour, they’re sung with such anthemic passion they become mantras of life and love. Anthemic is certainly the key word for this record: the band’s sound is a mix of the tightly-coiled post-punk of early Bloc Party, the explosive, beautiful instrumental interplay of Explosions in the Sky (with a drummer on par with EITS’; no small feat) and the fist pumping, punk-infused this-music-will-save-your-life passion of early U2.
Each of the album’s eleven tracks, save an instrumental interlude and an acoustic denouement, is a crashing wave of music. A few chords, some picked notes build to dizzying washes of groove. The rhythm section perfectly times their driving elements: tight, funky, melodic bass and colossal, rising, falling, rolling drums, carve dynamics from very basic progressions and riffs like expert sculptors. Each song is a sermon, growing in fervor until it explodes with passion at its zenith. Some wind down, others burn out, but each track pushes itself to its logical extreme, the band playing like their hearts might give out at any second. More than any debut this year, These Four Walls is the sound of a band that might very well take over the world, if they weren’t so modest. But then again, four (very) young lads from the British Isles were similarly impassioned and humble about thirty years ago…
7. The Antlers – Hospice (Aug 18th) The Antlers, a former solo project from frontman Peter Silberman, expanded to a full band on Hospice. More than the membership expansion, it’s the epic expansion of the band’s sound and focus that makes this record one of the most heartbreaking revelations in recent years.
In taking on death and illness, The Antlers have accomplished something many lesser bands have failed to do: they very accurately bore into to the shattered lives of those who have lost loved ones. Steering completely clear of the cartoonish, morbid, exploitative tone records on death usually take, Hospice is front to back a crushing, emotionally destructive account of the little details of death and loss. The very direct, simple lyrics, coupled with a melancholy sonic template reminiscent of the post-rock of Sigur Ros and Silver Mount Zion (moments on this record are eerily reminiscent of SMZ’s similarly melancholy He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace the Corners of Our Rooms), and the weepy, plaintive song writing of Glen Hansard/Markéta Irglová and (hipsters recoil) Rush of Blood to the Head-era Coldplay, are enough to level an attentive listener. At times, Hospice, which is ultimately a very beautiful and cathartic record, is so sad and universal it’s hard to listen to.
The Antlers have managed something very difficult in music, and art of all mediums, for that matter. They have created a beautifully coherent and personal work that perfectly compliments its subject. In focusing on the intimate, Hospice becomes the universal. It is a very rare accomplishment, and a wonderful, if sometimes difficult to bare, album.
8. Arctic Monkeys – Humbug (Aug 25th) By now we’re all very familiar with the tale of the Arctic Monkeys: Four lads from Sheffield start a band. They’re good friends, they like a pint and a night at the disco. Inspired by Roots Manuva and a British pop wit-lyricism that stretches from the Kinks to Blur, Alex Turner spins cheeky tales of working class boredom and frustration over tight, energetic punk anthems. The group records, puts tracks on myspace, gives out CDRs for free at their shows. A few months later, their first record becomes the fastest selling debut in British history, toppling giants Oasis.
Two albums later, the Arctic Monkeys, now in their early-to-mid 20’s, are a very different band. On Humbug, they’ve relaxed, uncoiled, and found a very different groove. The album was recorded in the Joshua Tree desert with Queens of the Stoneage frontman Josh Holme, and sounds very much a product of four Northern Englishmen in a very different landscape, drinking beer, taking mushrooms, and letting themselves go to the mind-altering expanse of the desert.
Though the riffs on Humbug are similar in pattern and progression to those on their previous records, they’re looser and heavier. Songs plod, bounce, veer, and stomp in very unexpected ways. The addition of organs and haunting background vocals enrich and deepen the Monkeys’ sound in subtle, eerie ways. In stopping to smell the roses (or take psychedelics in the desert), the Arctic Monkeys have created a record that cements much of the promise of the first two albums while taking the band to new places, hinting at an even more exciting future for the group.
9. Muse – Uprising (Sept 15th) With each new Muse record, the question is: What can they possibly do that they haven’t done before? (The second question being of course: Can this band get anymore ridiculous? the answer to which is yes). Uprising answers that question with symphonies, choirs, clarinet solos, excerpted French operas, paeans to the Eurasian super continent, and a few rousing rock/dance numbers.
Continuing in the vein of Blackholes and Revelations, Uprising presents a collection of very cohesive songs in a very coherent sequence. The band is very much focused on creating a seamless series of tracks that incorporates all of their disparate influences. That they succeed in chucking a ridiculous number with multi-tracked vocals to rival Queen and Chopin nocturne as an outro next to a fist-pumping synth ballad next to a barreling hard rock track with a two-minute plus, fuzz-bass driven, organ drenched, Pink Floyd-esque midsection, attests to their staggering songwriting talent, not to mention their balls of steel.
The virtuosic ability of the band is on full display. Chris Wolstenholme’s bass lines veer from upper-register finger-picked melodies to funky five-string slapping without ever sounding ostentatious or out-of-place. Dominic Howard drives the band, expertly dictating the tracks' dynamics with his fills, dance beats, and newly added programming (the track Undisclosed Desires, programmed entirely by Howard, is a fantastic dance/R&B single reminiscent of both Prince and Timbaland). And of course there is Bellamy. Continuing the trend set forth on Blackholes, he’s reined the falsetto in a bit, in favor a rich, multi-tracked mid-range (expect when they decide to bust out the ridiculous harmonies, which does happen) that perfectly compliments the song-writing decisions of the record.
Of course, one of Muse’s best assets is their ability to write incredibly passionate, driving, emotionally rich songs with a sense of humor. Look no further than Guiding Light, a colossal power ballad with the emotional depth of the best of U2’s pop moments and a guitar solo straight off a Van Halen record. The solo is completely absurd--the album’s bonus DVD, which is, as previous Muse DVD tie-ins have been, fantastic, shows side-by-side via split screen Bellamy recording then listening back to the solo. Recording, he’s all technique and attentiveness. During playback, he dissolves into hysterics at the ridiculousness of his solo--and hilarious, though is a small enough part of the track not to ruin its punch.
All said and done, Uprising is another fantastic collection of songs that, due to the band’s prodigious talent and attention to detail, cohere into an even better album. The concluding thirteen minute, three-part symphony is a hauntingly beautiful, surprisingly restrained (as symphonies go, at least) culmination to a great record. Naysayers need to keep waiting, for Muse have yet to fall flat on their faces due to the weight of their own ambitions.
10. Converge – Axe to Fall (Oct 20th) Converge has built a career on surprising listeners. After three flat out classic metal records (Jane Doe, You Fail Me, No Heroes), each of which is sonically and stylistically unique, how can they continue to surprise us?
The answer presented by Axe to Fall is incredibly simple: by punching us in the throat. Album opener Dark Horse begins with a stampeding bass line, typically overwhelming Converge drumming, and a classic metal lead. When the chorus hits, we realize Converge has learned a new trick; with Jacob Bannon’s vocals a restrained, half-sung shout during the verse, and the guitar playing an up-high lead, the full force of the band isn’t totally present. All of it crashes in during a horrifyingly heaving chant-chorus with a brutal double-kick drum assault.
After the second chorus, the track slows into unexpected territory, building quickly into a head-crushing breakdown. All of this happens in less than two minutes. The breakdown carries the song to the two and a half minute mark, it kicks back into the opening stampede, and then a quick blizzard of feedback.
Axe to Fall brings us D-beat (complete with lead guitar and backing vocals from Uffe Cedurlund of Entombed and Disfear), thrash, flashes of doom, a title track with a break down big enough to topple buildings, intricately timed post-hardcore, and, the coup d’etat, a closing duo of nearly all-acoustic Tom Waits homage with Neurosis frontman Steve Von Till on vocals, and an epic seven-minute finale with melodic vocals, electronic textures (compliments of the members of Genghis Tron), and shades of Neurosis and Isis that is somehow classic Converge and something completely new.
Guitarist Kurt Ballou is undoubtedly the best producer in heavy music. His work on Axe to Fall serves to reiterate his position. The album amalgamates the rawness of the previous two records with the devastating low end of Jane Doe. The bass and bass drum occupy a very intense and large piece of the aural pie, the rest filled in with guitars that are warm and brutal, something between the sound of a classic tube amp and Entombed's soul crushing heaviness.
All-in-all, Converge have outdone themselves yet again. By taking a more streamlined approach to songwriting, they leave their indelible mark on myriad genres, without the record sounding like a hodgepodge. The addition of a slew of guest players (members of Genghis Tron, Neurosis, Entombed, The Red Chord, Blacklisted, former Converge bassist and Cave-In leader Steven Brodsky, among others) adds flavor to the record without it ever sounding like someone else’s project. Converge has produced their best album since Jane Doe, redefining what the genre is capable of yet again.
An Alternate Opinion
Enough records have come to my attention in the aftermath of writing this piece--mostly because I am no longer living in Mexico, and have access to a number of albums I couldn't get my hands on south of the border--to merit an alternate cast of characters. Here are seven records that didn't make the cut, but should haven (and for the record these are in no order at all):
1. Mos Def – The Ecstatic. The Ecstatic is a number of things, though first and foremost it's the great post-Black on Both sides record we thought we might never get. After the aimless wandering of The New Danger and unlistenable trash of True Magic, Mos reconnected with everything that made him love hip hop in the first place. The results are astonishing.
Another thing that The Ecstatic is is everything Blueprint III is not. Jay Z attempted to create a canonical hip hop record that incorporated everything from psyche rock to 80's pop to Golden Area rap. He was reaching for a defining statement, and he failed miserably. Mos, however, has taken that same template, and flown high. There are horn driver stompers, Middle Eastern samples, wild psyche guitars; pretty much everything but the kitchen sink. And it's almost always successful.
Lyrically, Mos is back on top of his game as well. Front to back, apart from the pretty awful No Hay Nada Mas, in which he raps in one of the worst Spanish accents in recent memory, the record is filled with eye-opening lyrical turns and typically brilliant metaphors. One of the best: "The windows on the ave look like sad eyes."
The Ecstatic is a remarkable return to form, and a great hip hop album.
2. Mastodon – Crack the Skye. Though Mastodon perpetuate the stereotype that metal bands can't spell, they break down enough musical barriers that it doesn't really matter.
Crack the Skye is less a logical progression from Blood Mountain than an understandable quantum leap. Though album opener Oblivion begins with a familiar riff, it quickly shifts into a thrash boogie around which Brann Dailor's drums wind and warp. Through the rest of the record's seven tracks, Mastodon keep the wallop to a minimum, working instead on building dizzying structures from their prodigious musical interplay.
Mastodon have developed a great knack for building hypnotic patterns that break into whiplash changes in key and tempo and unexpected moments. The heavy riffs pack a greater wallop in this template, as do the band's dynamics in general.
With Crack the Skye, Mastodon have managed to produce an album that is at once prog and metal without sacrificing the integrity of either genre.
3. Jonsí and Alex - Riceboy Sleeps Riceboy Sleeps is one of the best albums in the Stars of the Lid catalog, and I mean that as the most sincere praise. Though the record is unmistakably touched by the Sigur Rós frontman's signature sounds, it is also a superb example of a sublimated ego.
Not that Jonsí is much known for his ego. However, his ability to completely remove himself from the music and allow the beautiful ambient textures of the record to speak for themselves is powerful and welcome. Unlike a number of other high-profile musicians, Jonsí does not use this side project, created with his partner and fellow musician and artist Alex Somers, to further his career or any other narcissistic aesthetic.
Riceboy Sleeps is a lovely and fleeting album that walks a fine and brilliant line between contemporary ambient drone and classical string quartet composition.
4. Biffy Clyro - Only Revolutions Yes yes, I know. Another Scottish band. Though Biffy Clyro fans from the days of yore aren't particularly pleased that the band followed up their psuedo-break through Puzzle with an even poppier album, Only Revolutions is very much a consolidation of the band's strengths.
The basic template for the record is incredibly simple: heavy riffs, mid tempo grooves, and enormous choruses tempered with some left-field time signatures and instrumental choices (opener Captain has both a horn section and a church organ). The closest kin to Only Revolutions is Muse's absolution, though unlike Muse, who always had the stadium pomp lurking in their songs, Biffy Clyro are very much a band reared on punk and rock--three chords, drums, bass, guitar, and lots of passion.
In many ways, Only Revolutions sounds a good deal like what Nirvana could have been if Cobain had gotten over himself. Oblique lyrics, colossal guitars, and catchy pop songs drenched in distortion and loaded with hooks.
5. Poison the Well - The Tropic Rot Poison the Well ultimately sabotaged their own career by being as good as they are. The band managed to produced two of the defining records of the early 00's metalcore explosion before ditching the drum trigger and Slayer riffs for a more abrasiveness heaviness and indie-rock melodiousness.
What all of this means is that, while fans of extreme metal wrote them off for their emocore songs, fans of emocore wrote them off for becoming too extreme. Fans of alternative metal and the odd indie rock kid who has some Melvins and Mastodon records associated the band with douche bags in basketball shorts and Shai Hulud t-shirts, and PTW found themselves in a difficult position.
But they continued to produce some of the most brutal and original metal of the century so far. The Tropic Rot consolidates the pure, unadulterated abrasiveness of You Come Before You and the experimental, indie-rock heavy sounds of Versions. The album charges forward on a backbone of thrashy hardcore riffs, finding a punishing heaviness in epic, mid tempo power chord progressions not dissimilar to Boris. Unlike many vocalists in heavy music, Jeff Moreira manages to sound less like a petulant child and more like a man with enough pent up fury to be genuinely frightening.
More than any band in the post-Converge metalcore landscape, Poison the Well have managed to find their own sound that is built upon the warmth of tube amps and hair-raising aggression and unexpected melodies of Moreira.
Whether or not former guitarist Derek Miller's new project, Sleigh Bells, brings any indie credibility to PTW is irrelevant; with Tropic Rot, they prove once more that they are an essential metal band.
6. La Roux - La Roux La Roux is a great pop group. A male-female, vocalist-songwriter duo, the pair apes the formula championed by the Eurythmics to great effect.
La Roux often come under fire for having a cold sound, and though the sterile production of their record certainly stifles warmth, it's hard to find such cosmetic nitpicking relevant with a record that's as catchy and entertaining as this one.
Certainly, you shouldn't come to this album expecting it to change your life, but any fan of the grand tradition of electro pop that spans the generations from classic groups like Soft Cell to contemporary masters The Knife will find lots to love in this album, as will fans of innocuous, hella catchy pop in general.
7. Lady Gaga - Fame Monster Lady Gaga can do no wrong. Everything she touches turns to gold. The singer-songwriter/oversexualized performance artist has an unparalleled ear for pop hooks, dance beats, and simple chord progressions, and an inimitable ability to make all of these incredibly rote musical staples sound fresh time and again.
Much like her most obvious touchstone, Madonna, Gaga is able to make pop music that is pure, musical, fun, and worthy of all praise once the tit-mounted machine guns, soda-can hair dos, and lesbian-prison fantasy videos have been stripped away.
Gaga is posited by her label as some sort of avant-garde in the world of pop, and yet despite her incredibly contemporary sound and style, she couldn't be further from this: she is nothing more or less than a classic pop artist.
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