Cut Copy - Zonoscope: Dumber than a sack of hammers, Cut Copy make dance music roughly one hundred million times better than Barry Gordy's relatives. New Order would have killed to make some of these tracks. Standout track "Need You Now" is pharmaceutical grade disco.
EMA - Past Lives Martyred Saints: I'm a proud supporter of Sad Bastard music, especially the strain that draws inspiration from Suicide and Nick Cave as opposed to Nick Drake and Elliot Smith. EMA echos some of the Birthday Party's no wave sensibilities without all that Flannery O'Connor Southern Gothic stuff. There's more than a hint of "16" Gold Blade" in standout track "Butterfly Knife": "Only God can make it right/ in the desert underneath the light/ 20 kisses with a butterfly knife," which is frankly an awesome thing to sing in a song.
Fucked Up - The Life of David: The Life of David is very long (19 tracks over 1 hour and 21 minutes) very loud (punishingly so), very ambitious (It is a concept album - nay, it a ROCK OPERA, with an incomprehensible plot line with 80's anarchists blowing up light bulb factories), very baroque (some of these songs have pretty dense structures for pop songs - intro, verse, bridge, chorus, verse, verse, bridge, callback to an earlier song, chorus, solo, chorus, coda), and sometimes very grating (lead singer Pink Eye is an oldskool hardcore screamer, and he's not bad at it, but there's a LOT of incomprehensible screaming going on here). Still, it's pretty fucking great.
Jay-Z & Kayne West - The Three Great Songs on Watch The Throne: "No Church in the Wild." "N*ggers in Paris." "Otis." Those are some freaking great songs. Otherwise, eh.
Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring For My Halo (with bonus addition of War on Drugs - Slave Ambient): Kurt Vile's got
Radiohead - The King of Limbs: No one cares what I think about Radiohead's last record, but I will tell you that I like it. If Neu! had continued to make music after Neu! ‘75 (and if one of the two dudes wasn’t dead), “The King of Limbs” is what I’d imagine they would sound like today.
The Rural Alberta Advantage - Departings: There’s something upsetting and addictive about the Rural Alberta Advantage’s second record - a collection of propulsive anthems about young love and small town ennui, subjects I thought I had no need to hear sung about ever again. The bleating voice of lead singer Nils Edenloff has some of the nasal urgency of Jeff Mangum, as most reviewers have observed, but his songwriting doesn’t have the same holy resonance or mystical overtones of Neutral Milk Hotel, which may be good for Nils and his mental health, but which renders all NMH comparisons moot. No, these songs are the kind of things one wants to shout along to at some 500 person capacity venue no matter how dirt stupid it makes one look. The reason any of this works is because the drumming is something like 400 times better than your average indie-rock band. That’s my theory, anyway. All I know is that I could not stop listening to this record. “Under the Knife” and “Tornado of ‘87” are under my skin, repeated endlessly while I’m on my excercycle (is that a thing real people use, or is it just something I say to amuse myself because it sounds preposterous? I don’t really need to know). I also know I’m actively mad at how much I like those songs, because it feels like something a 15 year old should love, and I am not 15.
EMA - Past Lives Martyred Saints: I'm a proud supporter of Sad Bastard music, especially the strain that draws inspiration from Suicide and Nick Cave as opposed to Nick Drake and Elliot Smith. EMA echos some of the Birthday Party's no wave sensibilities without all that Flannery O'Connor Southern Gothic stuff. There's more than a hint of "16" Gold Blade" in standout track "Butterfly Knife": "Only God can make it right/ in the desert underneath the light/ 20 kisses with a butterfly knife," which is frankly an awesome thing to sing in a song.
Fucked Up - The Life of David: The Life of David is very long (19 tracks over 1 hour and 21 minutes) very loud (punishingly so), very ambitious (It is a concept album - nay, it a ROCK OPERA, with an incomprehensible plot line with 80's anarchists blowing up light bulb factories), very baroque (some of these songs have pretty dense structures for pop songs - intro, verse, bridge, chorus, verse, verse, bridge, callback to an earlier song, chorus, solo, chorus, coda), and sometimes very grating (lead singer Pink Eye is an oldskool hardcore screamer, and he's not bad at it, but there's a LOT of incomprehensible screaming going on here). Still, it's pretty fucking great.
Jay-Z & Kayne West - The Three Great Songs on Watch The Throne: "No Church in the Wild." "N*ggers in Paris." "Otis." Those are some freaking great songs. Otherwise, eh.
Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring For My Halo (with bonus addition of War on Drugs - Slave Ambient): Kurt Vile's got
Radiohead - The King of Limbs: No one cares what I think about Radiohead's last record, but I will tell you that I like it. If Neu! had continued to make music after Neu! ‘75 (and if one of the two dudes wasn’t dead), “The King of Limbs” is what I’d imagine they would sound like today.
The Rural Alberta Advantage - Departings: There’s something upsetting and addictive about the Rural Alberta Advantage’s second record - a collection of propulsive anthems about young love and small town ennui, subjects I thought I had no need to hear sung about ever again. The bleating voice of lead singer Nils Edenloff has some of the nasal urgency of Jeff Mangum, as most reviewers have observed, but his songwriting doesn’t have the same holy resonance or mystical overtones of Neutral Milk Hotel, which may be good for Nils and his mental health, but which renders all NMH comparisons moot. No, these songs are the kind of things one wants to shout along to at some 500 person capacity venue no matter how dirt stupid it makes one look. The reason any of this works is because the drumming is something like 400 times better than your average indie-rock band. That’s my theory, anyway. All I know is that I could not stop listening to this record. “Under the Knife” and “Tornado of ‘87” are under my skin, repeated endlessly while I’m on my excercycle (is that a thing real people use, or is it just something I say to amuse myself because it sounds preposterous? I don’t really need to know). I also know I’m actively mad at how much I like those songs, because it feels like something a 15 year old should love, and I am not 15.
No comments:
Post a Comment