→ April 21, 2015
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Undertow (Drenge album).

The debut album from British rock duo Drenge was one of my favorite albums of 2013, and remains one of my favorite of the decade so far, an unabashed sneering post-punk cataclysm that took the now-common guitar-and-drum format to a logical extreme. They were more Gang of Four than White Stripes, with lyrics that focused on sex, violence, and self-loathing, yet the album was full of strong hooks that sustained the mostly two to three minute tracks and extended them beyond mere guitar/drum demo material.

The album didn’t make a dent in the U.S. at all – it wasn’t even released here until about six months after its UK release – and for their sophomore set, Undertow, Drenge have changed their approach, incorporating more hard-rock sounds while largely relegating their angry punk influences to the background. The results are strong but a little bittersweet; it’s a very good album, one that shows substantial musical growth, but if you liked Drenge and were hoping for more of the same, it’s a serious departure from their initial sound.

The change is noticeable right away in the first proper track, “Running Wild,” with multiple layers, an actual bass line, and reverb that makes the track sound like Richard Butler brought the Psychedelic Furs back together to be a hard-rock band. There’s still a distinctive guitar riff in the transition from verse to verse, but I wonder if someone told the brothers that they needed to sound a little more like fellow UK duo Royal Blood, whose sound is heavier and slower, drawing more from mid-70s metal than late-70s new wave. “Never Awake” comes from similar territory as the first album’s “Face Like a Skull,” but the opening drum riff is exponentially more intricate, and that same muted, reverb-heavy production quality feels like we’re referring back to pre-grunge Soundgarden or Nirvana.

The new-wave stylings aren’t limited to Gang of Four/Wire influences, as there’s a groove element to several songs here that, while not quite dance-able, at least sit in that shaded area where the post-punk portion of new wave overlapped with bands like Blondie who adapted that sound into something that did work on the dance floor. The main guitar riff in “The Snake” slithers low and mid-tempo, with an actual harmony in the song’s vocals and a drum pattern that departs from anything the brothers tried on their first album. “Side by Side” scared me at first with a hand-clap pattern that might make Imagine Dragons proud, but the song evolves into an irreducible complexity shortly thereafter with a two-tone guitar riff and percussion lines that are probably drummer Rory Loveless’s best work to date, swirling in a way that refuses to let the listener get comfortable with the pattern.

Drenge haven’t eschewed punk entirely on Undertow, as “We Can Do What We Want” sits somewhere between classic punk and modern punk-pop variants like the Vaccines’ “Teenage Icon,” opening with a very Drenge-ish image of a “balaclava on my boyfriend’s head.” (The melody reminded me, inexplicably, of “Kids in America.”) “Favourite Son” is by far the song most comparable to the core tracks from Drenge (“Backwaters,” “Bloodsports,” “Gun Crazy”), hard and fast and sparse, with quickly-sung, rage-filled lyrics delivered without apparent irony or concern for your opinions.

I don’t know if the album’s title is in any way a nod to Tool’s album of the same name, itself a seminal work of dark, progressive metal that created a new subgenre and led to a number of bands that, for better or worse, tried new song structures and greater musical experimentation that weren’t typically found outside of technical or extreme metal. That album took the brooding standard in grunge and alternative rock at the time to a new level of angst, a sound that struck me as self-parodic but that evidently appealed to a broad cross-section of listeners looking for something more serious about its seriousness. Drenge aren’t serious or even as pissed off as they were on their first album; they’ve lightened up and expanded their sound rather than merely refining it. I didn’t see any connection to Tool until I reached the final track on Undertow, “Have You Forgotten My Name?,” which begins with a heavy, deep guitar-bass-drum section that wouldn’t have been out of place on Ænima, although Tool would have had the song go on for eight more minutes. The wrath of Drenge is now resigned submission, and while it’s not what I wanted from them after such a phenomenal debut, it’s a clear step forward for a band worthy of more more attention from American audiences.

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→ April 18, 2015
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Saturday five, 4/18/15.

My Insider post this week covered seven prospect-laden minor league rosters, which went up after Eric Longenhagen identified the Opening Day assignments for all 300 prospects in my thirty team top 10s. This week’s Klawchat transcript, full of “small sample size” questions, is up as well.

And now, the links…

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→ April 17, 2015
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Strange Trails.

Lord Huron’s first full-length album, 2012’s Lonesome Dreams, spawned a minor crossover hit in the single “Time to Run,” a folk/alt-country song that I put at #35 on my list of my top 100 songs of 2013. That song stood out on the album for its upbeat tempo and shuffling guitar pattern that is in itself a foundational element of the group’s second album, Strange Trails, which came out on April 7th.

The album begins in more subdued fashion, almost like (dare I say it) a Mumford and Sons “let’s have a slow bit, then a faster bit, then a slow bit again” track, “Love Like Ghosts,” a song with big sounds that seem designed to fill an arena without surrendering that syncopation that is such an essential part of the group’s sound. The same rhythm works more effectively when the pace picks up on “Until the Night Turns,” the swirling “Hurricane,” and “Meet Me in the Woods,” with a melody very reminiscent of that of the War on Drugs’ “Red Eyes.”

I frequently see Lord Huron pegged as indie-folk or folk-rock or just alternative, but this album is much more country than any of those labels would lead you to believe, although on some level it’s all just marketing copy. It’s guitar-driven, shuffling, yearning music that probably draws as much from rockabilly and the Bakersfield sound as it does from any folk or indie-rock tradition. It isn’t as sentimental as its musical progenitors, which were more products of their time in lyrical tone and in a production style that forced the twang of the guitars to the forefront, yet maintains a strong connection to its roots through shared rhythms and motifs. That makes Strainge Trails‘ strength also its main drawback: there’s little variation from the group’s fundamental sound, just alterations in pacing. That’s part of why “The World Ender” stands out to me as the album’s best track: the music is similar to everything else on the record, but the lyrics are darker, so it’s more Johnny Cash than Buck Owens and the Buckaroos.

That revivalist mantle might fit Lord Huron better, as they seem to revel in long-forgotten sounds that haven’t been popular since the death of the border blasters. The album closes with the mid-tempo “Louisa,” a love song with an arpeggiated rhythm guitar line, and “The Night We Met,” which recycles the main melodic line from the opening track – a nod back to a nod back. There’s nothing wrong (in my mind, at least) with a band committing itself to a retro sound, especially when it’s one to which so much of rock, folk, and country owes a debt. I would like to see more experimentation or modern flourishes within that sound, however; it’s an album you’ll like if you liked the first Lord Huron record, but I hope their next album covers new ground.

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→ April 16, 2015
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Cloud Atlas.

Klawchat today at 1 pm ET. My list of the most prospect-laden minor league rosters is up for Insiders.

David Mitchell told the Guardian in a 2010 book club post that he was inspired to write Cloud Atlas by one of my all-time favorite novels, Italo Calvino’s metafiction masterpiece If on a winter’s night a traveler, in which Calvino alternates between chapters of author-reader “dialogue” and opening chapters to stories he never completes. Mitchell takes that idea in a different direction in Cloud Atlas, giving us the openings to five novellas, followed by a sixth complete story and then the second halves to the initial five. All of his stories are linked through explicit and implicit relationships among characters and archetypes, even while Mitchell dances across genres from the picaresque to the dystopian to the modern detective thriller.

The six stories move forward through time, beginning with the journal of an American notary on a merchant ship traveling the Pacific in the 1850s, with the fifth and sixth stories taking place after our present day in a dystopian world on the brink of environmental disaster and a postapocalyptic Hawai’i that is one of the last bastions of humanity. Mitchell shifts deftly across the various narrative voices required for the task, nailing the tones of the dissolute composer/amanuensis Robert Frobisher and the third-person narrator of the “first” Luisa Rey mystery with equal precision. The two stories set in the future were the least effective narratives, especially the one set in a world where North Korea has become one of the few remaining powers on a planet increasingly covered by “deadlands;” Mitchell tells this story via an interview between a graduate student and a clone sentenced to death for attempting to incite a revolution, a dry method made harder to accept by his use of one of the world’s least sustainable regimes as the last man standing. Yet the Luisa Rey mystery, a conspiracy-theory thriller where the eponymous reporter stumbles on a massive corporate cover-up of safety risks at a nuclear power plant – with executives willing to kill to keep those violations secret – reads like a James M. Cain noir classic, but with the pacing of a Hammett novel because Mitchell has to wrap up the story in about 100 pages. It’s remarkable that Mitchell can do that voice so effectively while also mimicking Dickens or Smollett (or even John Barth, who himself imitated the picaresque in The Sot-Weed Factor) in the opening passage, and then switching to the pansexual Frobisher’s egotistical, anguished tone in letters to his friend Sixsmith (who appears directly in the Luisa Rey mystery) as if these were the works of different authors entirely. Even Timothy Cavendish, the vanity publisher who inadvertently (and rather comically) ends up with a bestseller on his hands, jumps off the page as a three-dimensional character who struggles to stay out of trouble only to end up in more of it.

That characterization is what elevates Cloud Atlas beyond the mere storycraft evident in the half-dozen novellas that constitute the book. The shorter the story, the harder it becomes for the author to gain the reader’s investment in its outcome by creating compelling characters. Mitchell varies his techniques across each section; we know Luisa Rey is going to come out all right, since it’s titled the “first” Luisa Rey mystery and protagonists in such books always win in the end, but we have no reason to expect any specific outcome for Frobisher or Cavendish, and the clone at the heart of the fifth story is already doomed, just for reasons we don’t understand until her story is over. Only the middle story, the one of the six told without interruption, dragged, but that was more a function of Mitchell’s use of a pidgin English that was intended to show regression in the language and reflect the race’s loss of knowledge through catastrophe and isolation.

My struggle with Cloud Atlas comes from my search for a unifying theme; Mitchell indicates in that Guardian interview that he tried to depict some fundamental aspects of human nature on both the individual and the global levels, but beyond, perhaps, a pessimistic worldview that mankind is so driven by myopic greed that we are bent on self-destruction, I didn’t get that sense of thematic unity across the various stories. The shared or related details across stories, often tucked away like Easter Eggs, were more effective at forging connections across the different settings, although I was looking for a stronger link in the common birthmark that Mitchell used for a character in each story than the explanation he ultimately gave – each character is the literary reincarnation of the same ‘soul.’ Mitchell even hints at spiritual underpinnings with the ends of several stories, including the augury that saves the savage and the humanist in the sixth story – the pivot in the novel – but never fully explores that themes either. The resulting novel is clever and compelling, but only intermittently insightful, a tremendous work of invention yet a bit short of a literary masterpiece.

–

I also recently finished Silent House, from Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk. The Turkish author takes Tolstoy’s aphorism about every unhappy family being unhappy in its own way to heart, presenting three generations of a Turkish family rent by alcoholism, infidelity, and death into a split structure where a 90-year-old widow employs her late husband’s illegitimate little-person son as a servant, who then ends up also waiting on her three grandchildren when they make their annual visit. The characters themselves, including the widow’s late husband, all come across as two-dimensional representations of various aspects of a broader cultural battle within Turkey, a country that is split in both geographical and metaphorical senses between west and east, humanism and religion, history and modernity. The narrative technique, with five different characters alternating their turn at the microphone, adds perspective, but the story itself seemed stale and predictable. I assume this wasn’t the best choice for someone looking for a single example of Pamuk’s work.

Next up: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, which was shortlisted for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, a prize Adichie won in 2007 for Half of a Yellow Sun, her amazing saga of five people trying to survive the Nigerian-Biafran civil war.

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→ April 13, 2015
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Atlanta eats, 2015 edition.

My Atlanta trip was much better for food than it was for scouting, with a washout on Friday and one of the players I went to see drawing three walks in four times up to the plate. As for food, though, I couldn’t have done much better: I met Hugh Acheson at Empire State South; saw my friend Eli Kirshtein at his new spot, the Luminary; met a reader and diehard baseball fan, Kaleb, behind the bar at Holeman & Finch; and went to one of Bon Appetit’s Best New Restaurants of 2014, Lusca.

I went to Empire State South once for lunch and twice for breakfast and coffee; if there’s a better coffee spot in Atlanta, I’d love to hear about it, as ESS uses beans from some of the best roasters in the country, including Counter Culture and 49th Parallel. They usually have three options for coffee brewed via Chemex – barista (and coffee sommelier of sorts) Dale Donchey treated me to a pair of coffees from the same mountain in Colombia but different roasters – and they do excellent espressos. Their breakfast menu is strong, with healthful options (their house-made granola with yogurt and honey is excellent) and less healthful ones (fried chicken on a biscuit with bacon and egg and OH MY GOD), and various pastries that seem to change daily. For lunch, I had the pork belly sandwich you saw on my Instagram feed, with just the right amount of pork, balanced by a very lightly spicy salsa de arbol and what amounts to a slaw of cabbage, radish, and cilantro with “crema” (which had the texture of mayo but a thinner consistency), served on a roll that had a texture like English muffin bread. I’ve now had four meals at ESS, including breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and have never had anything but outstanding food and service.

My lunch was better than yours: pork belly sandwich at @essouth

A photo posted by Keith Law (@mrkeithlaw) on

The Luminary is Kirshtein’s new place, open less than a year, mimicking the food and feel of a French brasserie. (If Eli’s name isn’t familiar, he was a contestant on season 6 of Top Chef along with the Voltaggio brothers, and you can see him with his hand up a dead fish in Richard Blais’ Try This at Home.) It’s located in the very cool Krog Market space along with other restaurants, food stands, and shops; on Wednesday night around 9 pm the place was still buzzing. I let Eli order for me and went with four small plates rather than a main. Three were outstanding, especially the catfish brandade, which read to me like a twist on southern fish fritters that also put them to shame. A brandade usually contains a mixture of bacalhao (dried salt cod) and olive oil, whipped to an emulsion, then mixed with or served on bread or potatoes. The Luminary’s version whips the catfish into whipped potatoes, then breads it tempura-style and fries it. Where fritters tend to be dense, heavy, and greasy, these were much lighter and smoother, without any grease; if I had a complaint it’s that they held their heat too well, so the last one was still steaming when I broke into it. (Not an actual complaint.) The seared octopus with fava beans is so new it hasn’t made their online menu yet; octopus is one of the few proteins I avoid, just because bad octopus is like galvanized rubber and most octopus I’ve had has been bad octopus, but this was not at all like that. The sear from the plancha gave it a depth of flavor I haven’t had on octopus before. The gnocchi came with cheese curds and a mixture of wild local mushrooms, giving the sauce a rich, earthy flavor (disclaimer: I fucking love mushrooms) that contrasted well with the light, airy texture of the pasta. The only dish I wouldn’t call plus was the crispy pig ears, which were just a little thicker than I like them, so they had more chew and less crunch than the ears I’ve had at crudo in Phoenix or the Purple Pig in Chicago. (That’s a dish I will always, always order when I see it.) I had to forgo dessert because I was over-full by that point, and that’s without finishing the pig ears or the gnocchi plate, although the Queen Batch – a twist on a gin and tonic that adds Campari and dill – probably didn’t help matters either.

Holeman & Finch is famous for their burgers, in part because it was once a scarce item: they’d make just two dozen a night, and when they were gone, they were gone. That gimmick is over, but the burger remains a staple of the menu: two patties with a slice of cheese on each, bread and butter pickles, steamed onions, and a soft (I’m guessing milk-based) bun. In texture and flavor it is a lot like a Shake Shack burger, cooked a little more than I like, on the medium side of medium well; it held together much better than Shake Shack’s burgers do (with a better bun), and H&F’s fries are hand-cut and fried till deep golden brown, as fries should be. I don’t see what the cheese added, but I also don’t like cheese on a hamburger in general. Kaleb made an off-menu cocktail for me that he calls the Rebirth of Slick, with rum, Foro (an Italian amaro), lime juice, dry orange bitters, and a spray of rosemary essence. Full disclosure: I did not pay full price for this meal, dinner at the Luminary, or the lunch at ESS. As always, there was no quid quo pro or expectation of a positive writeup or any writeup at all.

Lusca is a weird place: There’s a raw bar and they serve sashimi, but otherwise the cuisine is modern Italian, not Japanese or Asian or even seafood-centric. The best thing I ate didn’t have any seafood at all: a braised lamb neck starter with olives, chilis, and a thick slice of grilled sourdough. The meat itself had the texture of perfectly cooked short ribs, maybe even a little more tender, and while I would call lamb my least favorite animal protein, this was superb and didn’t have that odd gamy taste that put me off lamb several years ago. For a main dish, I had their house-made cavatelli with clams, mushrooms, tiny square lardons of bacon, and shallots; the pasta was perfectly al dente, even toothsome, and the mushrooms and bacon balanced out the clams so the latter didn’t overwhelm the dish. I was also amazed at how tender the clams were as, like octopus, they are often overcooked. Dessert was a chocolate tart with a layer of salted caramel under the dark chocolate custard or pudding, with chopped pistachios on top; the flavors were there but the presentation was a little off, as the custard was so soft that it started to slide out of the thin tart crust when I broke into it.

I met up with my former colleague and frequent partner-in-food-crime Kiley McDaniel for lunch at Leon’s Full Service, a suggestion from Kaleb, in fact, and a good one at that. Located right near Cakes & Ale in Decatur, Leon’s is located in a former service station and at least some of the staff had attendant-like uniforms. The sandwich menu has two staples (a burger and a brisket sandwich) while the remainder are subject to change; I had a fantastic cornmeal-crusted trout sandwich with a cabbage slaw and a side of Brussels sprout hash (bacon, apples, and cider vinegar) on the side, while Kiley went the lamb burger and kale salad with cotija, although really it was obvious he was jealous that I out-ordered him. We split the chocolate-nutella candy bar with toasted hazelnuts and sea salt, and thank God we did because eating that whole thing might have killed me.

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→ April 11, 2015
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Saturday five, 4/10/15.

My ranking of the top 50 prospects in this year’s draft class went up on Friday for Insiders; I also had a draft blog post specifically on Nate Kirby and Kyle Funkhouser, and I broke down the Craig Kimbrel/Melvin Upton trade. I held my regular Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the excellent baseball-themed deckbuilder Baseball Highlights: 2045, which is currently $32 over at amazon. My daughter, who doesn’t have much interest in the actual baseball thing, even asked me last night if we could play it again this weekend.

Amazon is having a huge sale on strategy games today in honor of International Tabletop Day, with almost half off Splendor, 7 Wonders, Five Tribes, and King of Tokyo.

And now, the links:

  • A repost from my social media accounts this week: Why the “Food Babe” is full of shit. The shame is that she could marshal her small group of followers to make meaningful changes to our food supply, like pressuring vendors to stop buying meat from animals raised with antibiotics, but instead propagates ignorance and anti-science sentiment.
  • More on the FraudBabe: A post from September on the harm such pseudoscience quacks can cause in their followers. And followers they are, much like those of a cult leader.
  • One baseball link, from my colleague Stephania Bell: What we’ve missed about Tommy John surgery, with a focus on why some pitchers require a second transplant surgery soon after their first one.
  • Longread of the week: Vanity Fair delves into the deterioration of NBC’s news department that culminated in the Brian Williams debacle. Shorter version: This was the end of a long decline.
  • The health of our bodies is related to the health of the trillions of bacteria that live in our GI tracts; one gene in the mother may affect the composition of bacteria in a newborn’s gut.
  • Children with maple syrup urine disease, an organic acidemia similar to the one my daughter and I have (3-MCC), can only be cured via a liver transplant. Now their discarded livers can be transplanted into other patients who might not qualify for a liver from a “healthy” (meaning dead but not diseased) donor.
  • This excerpt from Masha Gessen’s The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy on the death of one of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s friends at the hands of the FBI poses some uncomfortable questions about the nature of policing in an endless war against terror.
  • Cops are much more likely to stop black drivers than white drivers for investigatory (that is, non-safety) reasons. And that’s how you get situations like the murder of Walter Scott. (Confession: When I saw #WalterScott trending, I started thinking of Waverley jokes or something I could tweet in Scott’s variety of the Scottish dialect, only to discover what the trend was about and stop myself from being horribly insensitive.)
  • Daniel Vaughn, aka @BBQSnob aka Texas Monthly‘s barbecue writer/editor, went to Phoenix’s Little Miss BBQ and loved it. I feel validated by this. I like the slaw more than he did, and I’ve had better sausage there than he got, but otherwise we’re on the same page.
  • Vice has some ominous news for almost everyone on the Internet: Your porn is watching you, or, more specifically, it would be rather easy for someone to reveal any online porn viewer’s habits if they were to compromise any major site’s server logs. There’s some skepticism, but I think the larger point about our lack of privacy online (porn or not-porn) is valid.
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→ April 10, 2015
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The Benson Murder Case.

My ranking of the top 50 prospects in this year’s draft class went up on Friday for Insiders; I also held my regular Klawchat on Thursday. My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the excellent baseball-themed deckbuilder Baseball Highlights: 2045.

I don’t know how or when I came across Philo Vance, the crime-solver at the heart of a dozen mysteries written by art critic Willard Huntington Wright under the psuedonym S.S. Van Dine, although I suspect it came about when I was researching J.K. Rowling’s favorite detective novels as she did press around the releases of her two Cormoran Strike books. I grabbed the first Vance novel, The Benson Murder Case, because it’s just $1.99 for the Kindle (and for iBooks too), and at that price it seemed a sure bet to be, as Paddington might put it, very good value. I knocked it out on the flight from Philly to Orlando last month because Van Dine managed to create a ripping dialogue-heavy format, where the brilliant Vance solves the crime in the first chapter via abductive reasoning but waits for the investigating officer to come to the truth via standard deduction (and a lot of dead ends). Vance is maddening in his arrogance and clipped speech, but also very witty and well-suited to a format where the reader is also encouraged in a sense to play along with the lead officer to try to solve the crime.

The Benson Murder Case appears to be very similar to the famous locked-door mysteries of classic fiction; the victim of the book’s title is found shot in his favorite chair, apparently by someone he knew, with no signs of forced entry or any struggle and no direct evidence that anyone else was even in the room. Many people had good, obvious reasons to want him dead, and the lack of evidence pointing to one person being on site effectively opens up the possibility that any of the suspects were there. Vance takes one look at the scene, asks a few questions that don’t even seem to be germane to the crime, and announces shortly thereafter that he’s solved the case – but won’t tell the officer investigating it, stating (correctly, I’d argue) that the detective has to come to the solution himself to believe it, given how much Vance’s own answer relies on logic and how little it depends on physical evidence (which he openly disdains).

Vance’s diction reminded me a bit of Lord Peter Wimsey, the debonair star of eleven novels and a handful of short stories by Dorothy Sayers; Wimsey engages in more direct investigation, but his own peculiar manner of speech contradicts his high birth and education at Eton and Oxford. Wismey’s speech patterns and pronunciation made reading his dialogue unnecessarily difficult, whereas Vance’s is subtle enough that it was more mild annoyance than out-and-out distraction. That allowed me to focus more on trying to backtrace Vance’s thinking, while avoiding straying too far down the path of the obvious (where Van Dine is only too happy to lead you). So while I never went back for more of Sayers’ work (perhaps unfairly so) after reading her first novel, I’ll keep rolling with Vance, especially since the next two novels are available for Kindle at the same price.

I also read Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum recently, a dreadful account of war in China across three generations, told with horrifying detail of the violence perpetrating by the Japanese invaders on Chinese civilians and soldiers, and by Chinese fighters on each other during the same period. One scene depicts the flaying of a Chinese fighter in eerily similar fashion to the flaying scene in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but Murakami’s works have a breadth of tone and emotion that Red Sorghum lacks. The horrors of war are real, but that doesn’t mean they make for fun reading.

Next up: I’ll review David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas in the next few days, and have just started Orhan Pamuk’s Silent House.

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→ April 6, 2015
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March 2015 music update.

My breakdown of the Craig Kimbrel/Melvin Upton trade is up for Insiders, as are my (for entertainment purposes only) standings and awards predictions for 2015.

My apologies for the delay on this month’s playlist, but I was on the move most of last week and didn’t have much writing time. This list is heavy on tracks from albums that came out in March, which was a fertile month for new releases from major alternative acts.

Lord Huron – The World Ender. Lord Huron’s new album, Strange Trails, comes out on the 7th; I have an advance copy and have enjoyed it, although it doesn’t have a cross-over hit like “Time to Run.” This track’s dark, shuffling rhythm matches the macabre lyrics perfectly, and it’s the style I’d like to see vocalist/guitarist Ben Schneider employ more frequently.

Of Montreal – Bassem Sabry. Of Montreal are actually of Athens, Georgia, and defy any easy characterization as their sound changes from album to album and sometimes from track to track. Their thirteenth album, Aureate Gloom, came out in early March, and returns the band to their rock roots, with some psychedelic-rock inflections that seem to come from the 1970s.

Purity Ring – stranger than earth. The Canadian duo’s second album, another eternity, also came out in March, and was stronger overall than their debut, lyrically and musically, although I wish the band didn’t push Megan James’s vocals through the effects board so frequently, as they make her otherwise gorgeous voice sound tinny and shrill.

Young Fathers – Shame. Winners of the 2014 Mercury Prize, Young Fathers will put out their second proper full-length, White Men Are Black Men Too, on Tuesday the 7th. I can’t vouch for the title’s accuracy, but this lead single continues their trend of combining electronic sounds and world-music rhythms with sparse lyrics, some rapped and some sung, so that characterizing them strictly as a hip-hop group seems to fall well short of the mark.

San Cisco – RUN. Their 2013 track “Awkward” was my #18 song of that year, and released a full-length album, Gracetown, early last month. The disc is solid with a number of upbeat, Aussie-pop gems, including this track and “Too Much Time Together,” yet another band leading the giant wave of great indie-pop acts from down under.

Modest Mouse – The Ground Walks, with Time in a Box. I was disappointed in Modest Mouse’s album, Strangers to Ourselves which finds them kind of stuck in neutral, maybe even sliding backwards without Johnny Marr’s pop-rock sensibilities to keep Issac Brock from veering on to the shoulder. When the tempo’s up and Brock’s lyrics come at you like a deluge from an open fire hydrant, Modest Mouse’s music becomes fascinatingly bizarre, as in this track, which seems to be constantly spinning rather than moving in the typical linear fashion of a pop/rock song, running six solid minutes of strangeness.

Death Cab for Cutie – Ingenue. Death Cab’s latest album, Kintsugi, marks their first album since guitarist/producer Chris Walla left the band, although his work appears on the album. The sound is different, however, more distinctly a Ben Gibbard record, with Gibbard’s trademark earnest lyrics and delivery but lacking something – a little acidity, or a pinch of salt – to balance out the preciousness he can emote when his voice is mixed to the front of a track. The flip side is that the album feels more accessible, perhaps even a bit more commercial, because Gibbard’s hooks stand out so much more.

Of Monsters And Men – Crystals. The new album is due June 9th. I can’t wait, but I’m also concerned we might just get more of the same, the way Mumford & Sons underwhelmed with their second album.

Black Rivers – The Ship. The other two-thirds of Doves have formed their own group, and their sound is more like that of their original band than the solo work of singer/bassist Jimi Goodwin. The Williams brothers bring some electronic elements into their music, more than we ever got on any Doves album, but whichever brother is singing isn’t quite up to the task.

Courtney Barnett – Elevator Operator. I reviewed her amazing debut album last week, and this opening track is one of my favorites, both for the story she tells in the lyrics and the way the music announces the shift in her style to a heavier, more rock-base dsound.

Lower Dens – Société Anonyme. Pitchfork loved this album, Julia from Sirius XM loves this album, but I do not love this album. It’s pleasant but tame, too light on hooks. “To Die in L.A.,” the lead single, is its best track (with its most memorable riff); this song, the final track on the album, was my second favorite.

Tame Impala – Let It Happen. Good song, but really, Kevin, seven freaking minutes? Who do you think you are, Opeth?

Grimes – REALiTi (Demo). It doesn’t have The Drop of her dubstep hit from last year, “Go,” but Grimes seems to have learned how best to deploy her childlike soprano over the electronic eclectica of most of her discography. This song is a demo from her fourth album, which she has reportedly scrapped but might still release some day. She should, if this song is any indication of what it’s like.

Westkust – Swirl. Pitchfork comped Westkust to shoegaze, but the vocals are way too clear for that comparison to hold much water, and there’s more of a California tinge to their melancholy than the Oxonian sound of Swervedriver or Ride. The Swedish band’s debut album is due here in the U.S. in “early summer.”

Speedy Ortiz – The Graduates. I’ve reached the point where Speedy Ortiz could release a cover of John Cage’s “4’33″” and I’d put it on a playlist.

Joy Williams – Woman (Oh Mama). Williams was the singing half of The Civil Wars, and also the attractive half, but that group dissolved in apparent acrimony (you’d think the name would have tipped them off) last summer. Williams was a solo Christian contemporary artist before going alt-country in the Civil Wars, but this lead single from her album Venus is more like smart pop, a feminist anthem just waiting to be discovered.

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→ April 4, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 4/4/15.

My predictions for 2015 are now up for Insiders. Earlier this week, Eric Longenhagen and I put together a lengthy post of prospect notes from spring training, covering players from Houston, Atlanta, the Yankees, San Francisco, the Cubs, and Texas. My top 50 prospects update went up earlier in the week, with very modest changes other than the addition of Yoan Moncada.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the tile-laying game NanoBot Battle Arena, a quick family-strategy game with a high interactive (read: screw your opponents) component.

saturdayfiveI’ve got fewer links than normal this week due to endless travel; at this point I’m just relieved spring training is over and I can regain some kind of control over my whereabouts.

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→ April 2, 2015
→ By

Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers NanoBot Battle Arena. I also have an updated top 50 prospects ranking up for Insiders.

Courtney Barnett’s two singles from 2014, “Avant Gardener” and “History Eraser,” were both on my top 100 tracks of the year primarily for her clever, witty lyrics, which told complete stories with inventive wordplay and a willingness to break out of standard meters and rhyme schemes. Her first true full-length album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit, more than delivers on the promise of those earlier songs, with better hooks and more upbeat rock sounds while maintaining the high standard of wordsmithing she’d already set for herself.

Led by two stomping tracks, “Elevator Operator” and lead single “Pedestrian at Best,” Sometimes I Sit… is a tour de force of finding humor in despair and setting it to a guitar-rich soundtrack; it harkens back to the halcyon days of the Smiths, where Johnny Marr could get you off the couch and Morrissey would send you to the therapist’s. The opener tells the story of a disaffected white-collar worker who has had enough of cubicle life and reveals that all he ever wanted was to be an elevator operator; the second track comes at you like a shouted-word (rather than spoken-) statement of purpose, with a chorus that candidly offers, “Put me on a pedestal and I’ll only disappoint you/Tell me I’m exceptional and I promise to exploit you.” Barnett has no use for the typical tropes of the female pop artist, and instead asserts herself in juxtaposition with statements of insecurity or even occasional self-loathing.

Barnett is too young to remember the ’80s but there are hints of that decade’s strain of British new wave artists who built their hooks around guitars rather than synths and employed wry irony that often went over listeners’ heads throughout the album. “Debbie Downer” sounds like the descendant of an Aztec Camera tune, shockingly upbeat for its title (where, indeed, she’s told by a somewhat older woman to quit frowning, only to inform her target, “Don’t stop listening, I’m not finished yet”). “Aqua Profunda!” revisits a common theme in Barnett’s lyrics, that of the embarrassing incident, this one where she’s swimming in a lap pool, notices the guy in the next lane, and tries to impress him, only to have the whole thing go awry. “Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go to the Party” is true.

Barnett’s slower songs have always fallen short of the mark for me because she’s not a singer; she talk-sings, and her lyrics would largely work as spoken-word offerings anyway, but without solid music behind her the unmusical nature of her voice is exposed. Sometimes I Sit has two long, meandering bluesy tracks, “Small Poppies” and “Kim’s Caravan,” that clock in at just about seven minutes apiece and couldn’t hold my attention that long. When she reduces the tempo, it works better with more storytelling; “Depreston” starts out as an ennui-scented trip to buy a house in the suburbs, only to turn dark when she sees signs of the previous owner’s life in some of the house’s features and décor. The story evolves so that the languid pace of the song never becomes an obstacle for the listener. Plus she points out in the lyrics that by making coffee at home she’s saving $23 a week; we should all admire such thrift. “Dead Fox” is one of the album’s catchier songs, but it’s a rare case of Barnett’s lyrics – a critique of consumerism (including the feel-good variety) – feeling forced.

Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit is the best debut album I’ve heard so far this year, and one of maybe a half-dozen albums I can think of so far this decade that I’d recommend on the basis of its lyrics alone. Barnett’s ideas threaten to spill out of the speakers, and the quality of her music is already improving. She’s probably destined to remain on alternative stations because of her quirky delivery and too-cerebral lyrics (you have to pay attention to them), but she deserves a wide enough audience to keep her producing this kind of art for many more albums.

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