→ November 20, 2013
→ By

Drenge & These New Puritans.

My analysis of the Josh Johnson and David Murphy signings is up for Insiders.

Drenge is a duo act comprising brothers from Derbyshire, England, whose self-titled debut album dropped in the United Kingdom in mid-August and will come out here in January. First recommended to me by one of you, a promo copy Drenge came across my desk this week (figuratively, since it was via email), and it’s promising if uneven, an intriguing blend of rock styles from post-punk to grunge to garage with at least three standout tracks. (If you’re in the U.K. you can buy the album via amazon. Otherwise, you can stream it on Spotify below.)

Although the White Stripes have set the standard for guitar-and-drum rock duos, Drenge have a little more in common with Jeff the Brotherhood, another sibling act that opts for heavier riffs and a chunkier sound for the guitar, without Jack White’s peripatetic musical style. Guitarist Eion Loveless’ rhythm lines are loud and aggressive, with abrupt tempo changes and shifts from the cleaner post-punk of Gang of Four to the fuzzier sounds of early Soundgarden or vintage Mudhoney. You can even hear bits of darkwave in some of the slower tracks, like the latter half of “Nothing” or nearly all of the eight-minute non sequitur closer “Let’s Pretend,” which might also be the result of distant influences from Black Sabbath or Angel Witch.

Where Drenge separates itself from similarly lo-fi/garage acts is in the five-song stretch from the album’s second track, the grim “Dogmeat” (which reminds me of a slowed-down take on Shed Seven’s “Dolphin”), through the pleasantly annoying “Face Like a Skull.” That quintet includes the album’s first single and best track, “Bloodsports,” where the brothers Loveless start to borrow more heavily from UK superstars the Arctic Monkeys in sound and melodic strength. The energy on “Bloodsports” starts with the fast-paced guitar line behind the verses, a la the intro to Nirvana’s “Breed,” but kicks up another gear with the drum-less riff right after the chorus, a trick Jack White has long used to great effect. “Backwaters” is the disc’s closest thing to a pop track, like Radiohead’s “I Might Be Wrong” tidied up for mass consumption yet still sinister enough to deliver lines like “I never seen blood or milk mix so divine/I never seen such beauty so malign,” a line followed by a riff so heavy you think the boys are shifting into mid-80s thrash mode. “Gun Crazy” turns the tempo back up to punk speed, a song to make Mark Arm proud for its first half that adds some complexity with off-beat staccato strumming in its final thirty-second coda.

The remainder of the album is far less consistent, including “Let’s Pretend,” which feels out of place and thoroughly bombastic for clocking in at twice the length of the next-longest song, “Fuckabout,” which is about as intellectually or aurally pleasing as the title indicates. “I Wanna Break You in Half” works as a suitably obnoxious fast-paced sub-two-minute track, but the same conceit flops on the unfunny “I Don’t Wanna Make Love to You” or the opener “People In Love Make Me Feel Yuck.” Eoin seems capable of lyrical subtletly, but too often settles for a sledgehammer to the forehead with a joke that feels like we’ve heard it a dozen times before. That can improve with experience and maturity, but Drenge’s ability to craft memorable hooks and evoke so many different eras in songs typically just two to three minutes long is already plus.

–

I also received a copy of the new album Field of Reeds by another English act, These New Puritans, which comprises twin brothers plus a third member, although the disc includes prominent contributions from over thirty-eight session musicians (per Wikipedia). I’ve previously mentioned the lead single, “Fragment Two,” which is also by far the album’s most conventional track in song structure, although even its music rarely follows the rules of modern rock music. I feel underqualified to talk about the album, given its experimental and highly artistic nature, with only Talk Talk’s Laughing Stalk coming to mind as a reference point (and I wouldn’t even say I know that album that well). The overwhelming sense I got from Field of Reeds was one of vastness, of the attempts to fill enormous ranges of space with haunting sounds that expanded upon release but never managed to reach the area’s borders. There are moments on the album of beauty, and just as many moments where it appears the band is trying to create a form of anti-music. As someone who tends to choose singles over albums, and gravitates towards melody over sonic textures, however, I found myself coming back to “Fragment Two” and the hynpotic “Organ Eternal,” the album’s two most accessible tracks. Field of Reeds is for mature listeners only.

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→ November 4, 2013
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Arcade Fire’s Reflektor.

Arcade Fire’s last album, the 2010 Grammy-winning The Suburbs, remains one of the best albums I’ve ever heard, a cohesive collection of musically strong songs that offers a profound exploration of a serious theme without sacrificing the hooks and melodies that make a record commercially viable. The band took over three years to release its follow-up, the double album Reflektor, released on October 29th, working with producer James Murphy, better known as LCD Soundsystem. (No word on whether the furniture is still in the garage.) The resulting opus is ambitious and expansive, freewheeling where The Suburbs was tight, yet still carrying musical motifs across multiple tracks. It’s also frequently repetitive, often pretentious, and overall shockingly boring.

While the first disc begins with the hit disco-inflected single “Reflektor,” the best track on either half of the album, Arcade Fire immediately downshifts into slower-tempo material, as they did early on The Suburbs, but this time around they struggle to recapture any of the sense of urgency established in the opener. “Flashbulb Eyes” begins with the embarrassing couplet “What if the camera really do/take your soul?” (Is he mocking the speech of Africans who do or did once believe that about photography?), with a backing track with hints of Afro-Caribbean rhythms that move out front for “Here Comes the Night Time,” with cringeworthy steel drums that sound more like a parody of Carnival music. (Win Butler has said that the 1959 film Black Orpheus, which takes that Greek character’s myth and adapts it to a modern setting in Brazil during Carnival, was a major inspiration for this album.) By the time the album’s pace begins to pick back up with the garage-rocker “Normal Person,” over 15 minutes have passed since the opener and all of that energy has long dissipated.

Track length is a major problem here, as it was in Murphy’s solo work with LCD Soundsystem. No single track on The Suburbs ran past 5:25, yet nine of Reflektor‘s thirteen tracks exceed that length – and the two shortest tracks are throwaway interstitials rather than fully realized songs. An artist can succeed even with songs in the six to eight-minute range, but the songs have to be more complex, with different passages or movements to sustain the listener; this, for me, was always LCD Soundsystem’s major flaw, as an eight-bar drum-and-bass loop repeated for seven minutes and 27 seconds is just going to make me change the station before I even reach the halfway point. Here Arcade Fire try just that, extending ideas that would have worked well inside of four minutes into six-minute frameworks they can’t fill. “Porno” is a monstrosity, a lyrical and musical excrescence that should have been deleted from the studio’s hard drive, but “We Exist,” “Awful Sound,” and “Afterlife” all would have worked better in a shorter format, although none has the hook to rank among the album’s stronger tracks.

And there are strong tracks here, scattered throughout the album. “Normal Person” brings to mind influences from Pavement to Wire, with a cheerfully dissonant guitar riff in the chorus that comes crashing in like an early stem engine. “It’s Never Over (Hey Orpheus)” is the best of the rambling tracks on disc two, with its Savages-like guitar line and something resembling a tempo change after the midpoint. “You Already Know” is reminiscent of the highs on The Suburbs and even Funeral with a revival chorus, although the peculiar pronunciation of the “d” in “already” – in phonetics terms, taking it from voiced to voiceless – was an unnecessary distraction.

Those distractions are the other fatal flaw in Reflektor, and why the dangerous word “pretentious” applies here, even though its stain can be difficult for any artist to remove. Using film or literary references is laudable, but calling such attention to them by using subtitles (in and of itself a bit pretentious) like “(Hey Orpheus)” and “(Oh Eurydice)” is too clever by half, and risks alienating listeners who don’t get the allusions and are now aware that they didn’t get them. Singer Régine Chassagne has always been one of the band’s biggest weaknesses – while she’s a talented musician and songwriter, her voice is thin and hollow – and having her sing in her native French on an album that is almost entirely in English seems pointless. It makes the lyrics less clear to the vast majority of listeners who don’t speak French, and the French lines are often shoehorned into the existing meter, like her “Jeanne d’Arc, oh” in the rollicking “Joan of Arc,” which I imagine will have a few non-Francophones wondering who “Jean Dachau” is. French is a beautiful language, but inserting it into an English song is almost automatically pretentious*, and it only detracts from Reflektor when Arcade Fire resorts to it.

* Never more true than in Electric Light Orchestra’s “Hold On Tight,” one of the worst songs ever recorded. Not only did they use French and overpronounce their guttural rhotics, but the French verse is just a bad translation of the English verse, so they were lazy as well.

The Suburbs was such a rousing success, even earning the most unlikely Album of the Year in Grammy history, that it raised expectations for Reflektor to a level that I concede may have been unfair. This would be a strong album for many artists, but given what Arcade Fire has shown itself capable of, Reflektor sounds like it’s caught between an ambition unachieved and a band that needed an editor but instead found an enabler. A good idea over four minutes may not play as well over six, and there are ideas on Reflektor that probably should have been cut entirely. The highlights here are among Arcade Fire’s best – the title track, “Normal Person,” “Joan of Arc,” and “It’s Never Over (Hey Orpheus)” – but there’s too much filler around them, so much that the album never establishes a consistent pace or feel and it is reduced to a collection of singles that fall short of whatever lofty aspirations the band may have had for the record.

—

When The Night, the debut album from South African-born musician Jean-Philip Grobler, who performs under the name St. Lucia, came across my desk in early October. Grobler’s music yearns back for the synth-pop heyday of the 1980s, an era before his birth, but marries it to tropical beats and rhythms and that avoid turning it into an anachronistic stumble down memory lane.

Grobler appears to bear no shame for his love of sunny, accessible pop music, and he has crafted a number of indelible hooks to express that affection for a style of music that, while current when I was a preteen, borders on the twee at this point. When the Night threatens to tumble off the cliff into saccharine nonsense at many points, but that incorporation of new backing lines, like the synthesized Caribbean pipes behind the single “Elevate,” means the songs are fresh if not exactly weighty. When St. Lucia turns up the guitars, as on the opener “The Night Comes Again,” or keeps the synths down in the mix so they don’t take over a track, like in the pulsating “All Eyes on You,” we’re at least getting something new even if the songs remain a little too sweet.

The album’s standout track, however, is “September,” where Grobler pushes out the walls around the rest of the album, creating layers of sound to produce an immersive and musically darker song that repeatedly runs you toward the edge of the crevasse before pulling you back to safety. Synth-heavy music like this always runs the risk of getting a little too “Jizz in My Pants,” but the varied percussion lines and the (presumably synthesized) horns give it just enough of a contemporary note to escape the Eurotrash bin. If Grobler can extend this darker ambient feel to the rest of his songs, even a poppier gem like “Elevate,” he’ll really be on to something.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/100513059″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/60540731″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

–

If you’re into extreme metal at all – and I can hardly blame you if you’re not – September saw the return of genre pioneers Carcass. Among the earliest practicioners of grindcore, once touring with grindcore founders Napalm Death along with Bolt Thrower and the awful American act Morbid Angel, Carcass evolved into the first true melodic death metal band, peaking with the greatest extreme metal album of all time, 1994’s Heartwork. Their new disc, Surgical Steel, their first since 1996, is close to a return to a form, remarkable for a band that’s been apart for so long, so while it doesn’t bring much new to the table, it’s a welcome addition to the Carcass canon and also shows how little the subgenre has advanced during their hiatus.

While singer Jeff Walker appears to shred his vocal cords on every track, Carcass’ music is intricate and very tightly rendered, a fusion of the classic sounds of Iron Maiden or Judas Priest with the increased speed of thrash and death metal acts like Slayer, Death, or Exodus. “Cadaver Pounch Conveyor System” has the album’s strongest riff, a dual-guitar line of incredible precision, followed by machine-gun riffing under the song’s bridge. You can actually understand most of the words, too, which is a good thing, as Walker hides extremely intelligent and literate musings behind mock-gory titles that allude to the band’s earlier albums, where their lyrics were in fact anatomically accurate descriptions of mutilation and evisceration. (It’s not the only allusion to early Carcass on the album; the cover art itself is a nod to their early EP Tools of the Trade, but cleaned up this time, just as the band seems to be.)

The slowed tempo on “A Congealed Clot of Blood” – itself a condemnation of jihadist terrorism – leads to a repetition of the chorus’ lyrics but over another rapid-fire guitar line, while “Granulating Dark Satanic Mills” is just a faster New Wave of British Heavy Metal track with growled vocals and a William Blake reference. Carcass do get a little silly at times, with the insanely fast “Captive Bolt Pistol” (Anton Chigurh’s weapon of choice), or the track “Noncompliance to ASTM F 899-12 Standard,” with a title referring to the international standard for the chemical requirements for stainless steel used in surgical instruments but lyrics that mock the prosy decline of the genre, which Walker derides as “dearth metal.”

The album even closes with an eight-minute mini-suite, “Mount of Execution,” almost all at normal speeds, relying on deep bass lines and staccato picking to create that sense of heaviness. This ain’t for everyone, but if you like modern melodeth acts like Children of Bodom, Wintersun, or Amon Amarth, it’s worth checking out.

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→ September 24, 2013
→ By

The Bones of What You Believe.

The Bones Of What You Believe (iTunes link), the debut album from the Scottish electro-pop act CHVRCHES, dropped today, over a year after their first single came out and a good eight months after I first encountered them on a promotional sampler from a publicity firm the band no longer uses. Three of the album’s tracks have received heavy airplay this year on alternative radio, including Sirius XMU and Alt Nation, so much of what’s on the new album is familiar, but the deeper tracks show greater breadth than you’d get from just listening to the singles, with many harbingers of more promising material down the road.

CHVRCHES is, by and large, the Lauren Mayberry Project, as the 26-year-old singer and erstwhile music journalist dominates the record (and their live shows) with her piercing vocals and impassioned delivery. Singing largely in the first person – more on that in a moment – Mayberry projects a variety of personae across the ten tracks where she handles the lead vocals, occasionally coquettish but more often strong and fearsome, sometimes even stalkerish (“We Sink” has a chorus that starts with “I’ll be a thorn in your side/Till you die” … all righty then), in contrast to her diminutive stature and high register. She elevates some of the filler songs to a different level, and the half-dozen radio-worthy tracks all stand out in large part because of what her vocal style brings to the table.

The band’s music draws heavily from early 80s new-wave influences, particularly Yaz, the short-lived project involving Vince Clarke between his tenures in Depeche Mode and Erasure, but drawing from other sources as diverse as Kate Bush and Prince (whose “I Would Die for U” they used to cover during live shows). CHVRCHES love their synths and they’re not ashamed to put the keyboards front and center of nearly every song, without filling the space between the melodic synth lines and the drum/bass with layers of added noise, meaning that Mayberry’s vocals and the lead keyboard lines are the stars of every track where she sings. That’s most pronounced in “Gun,” the most recently released single from the album, where the counterpoint between Mayberry’s top-register vocals and the descending keyboard lines underpins the conflict she’s describing in the song’s lyrics (where the gun is, fortunately, of the metaphorical variety). When they try a little more layering, like adding reverb to Mayberry’s vocal lines on “Lungs,” the melody remains strong but her voice and charisma are blunted, to the detriment of the overall track.

The album’s lyrics lean heavily toward first-person narratives, which Mayberry makes more powerful with a style that makes it sound like she’s singing directly to the listener, whether she’s threatening you as she does on “We Sink” or is proclaiming herself to be the “Night Sky.” The strongest track lyrically, as well as musically, is the single “The Mother We Share,” which careens to and fro with tempo and volume changes to match the chaotic anti-romance of the lyrics, where Mayberry describes being “in misery/where you can seem/as old as your omens.” Several songs here are built around a single compelling image or metaphor, like “Gun” or “We Sink.” Others run too short and lack that tangible center, such as the catchy “Recover” or the lesser track “Tether,” where the lyrics don’t stand up as well – although Mayberry’s Scottish pronunciation of “don’t” in the chorus of “Recover” is incredibly endearing.

Mayberry cedes vocal duties on two tracks, which robs them of the urgency she brings to the other ten, and was made worse in concert when Martin Doherty took over lead vocals for a song and was off key (as he was when providing backing vocals behind Mayberry). The show I saw, at Union Transfer in Philadelphia, was otherwise outstanding, although it was odd to hear Mayberry’s chatter between songs, almost sounding nervous and dropping f-bombs as if she was trying to show the crowd that, despite her pixie-like appearance, she was fierce. When you sing with a passion that could damascene steel, you don’t need to act fierce. Fierce will list you as a reference.

The Bones of What You Believe is a deep, intense pop experience that doesn’t demean its audience, but at the end of its twelve tracks, I was also left with the feeling that this was more of a coming out party for Mayberry than for the band as a whole. Her presence overwhelms sections where the music feels unfinished or even amateurish, a contrast that was even more stark when I saw them live. Whether the music catches up to the force of her character or she leaves the group for greener pastures, she’s destined for bigger things than this otherwise very solid debut album.

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→ September 12, 2013
→ By

AM.

Today’s Klawchat is starting as I post this, so the transcript will be at that link once it’s over.

Arctic Monkeys have been superstars in the UK since prior to the release of their debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, but have seen little breakthrough here in the U.S. other than having HGTV rip off their song “Fluorescent Adolescent” for the theme music to the show “Income Property.” Their first album was smart, often obnoxious, and punchy, a nod to old-fashioned rock-and-roll values but with more thoughtful and clever lyrics than their influences could ever deliver. Lead singer Alex Turner showed an innate sense for melody and drama, which he developed further over the Monkeys’ next three albums as well as with the baroque-pop side project The Last Shadow Puppets, but the band’s overall sound seemed directionless as they moved further from what made them instant stars in the first place.

Their fifth album, AM, released earlier this week, represents the band’s first clear, deliberate step forward since their debut, an evolutionary shift that regains the immediacy of Whatever People Say I Am… while introducing heavier elements, larger influences from the soul and funk genres, and ever-sharper lyrics. It’s their best album yet and worthy of the Mercury Prize nomination it earned the day after its release.

AM begins with the seductive “Do I Wanna Know?,” the first single released in advance of the album, with a Bonhamesque percussion line mimicking a heartbeat beneath Turner’s trademark wit and wordplay, even messing with meter on couplets like “So have you got the guts?/Been wondering if your heart’s still open and if so I wanna know what time it shuts.” That slower yet more intense drum-and-bass aesthetic permeates the entire album, with greatest effect on the mid-tempo tracks like the opener and “Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?”

Track two, the 2012 one-off single “R U Mine?” (which made my top 40 songs of 2012), fits remarkably well into the new sound of this album, pairing a vintage Turner guitar riff – tuned down and turned up for 2013 – with a heavier but slower drum line, backing up vocals where Turner again plays with rhythm and meter in slightly unusual ways. That heavy feeling hits hardest on my favorite song from the disc, “Arabella,” which borrows the signature two-note guitar riff from Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” for its chorus even though the song is an ode to a woman with “a ’70s head” whose “lips are like the galaxy’s edge,” picking up the pace for the dramatic rush to the coda. Turner’s natural feel for irony and contrast works best on this track, where it falls short on songs like the morose “No. 1 Party Anthem” or the just slightly more upbeat “Mad Sounds.”

AM‘s back half, after that two-song lull, brings in different influences from the first half, starting with the Last Shadow Puppets-esque “Fireside” as well as the rousing call-and-response “Snap Out of It,” both of which wink at the earliest decades of rock music, where the genre was almost synonymous with pop. That latter track highlights Turner’s obsession with creating contrast between his music – here a mostly sunny jangle-pop track – and his lyrics, here telling an ex-lover to snap out of her delusions before life passes her by. I’ve also long admired Turner’s use of imagery where most pop lyricists rely on the same trite phrases and references to intangible feelings, from rhyming Tabasco with rascal on “Fluorescent Adolescent” to pairing “sky blue Lacoste” with “knee socks” on AM‘s penultimate track. Turner refuses to talk down to the listener regardless of the theme, an incredibly welcome attitude when so few bands, even alternative ones, seem to put the same effort into their words as they do into their sounds.

The influence of Turner’s friendship with Josh Homme – Turner appeared on Queens of the Stone Age’s 2013 album …Like Clockwork, and Homme appears on two tracks here – is evident throughout the album, as the Monkeys have borrowed a bit of QotSA’s blend of melodic sludge rock on tracks like “Arabella,” “Do I Wanna Know?,” and “One for the Road,” with Homme singing background vocals on the last one of those. The key to QotSA’s popularity has always been that Homme has the heart of a pop songwriter, and has the ability to translate that sensibility into other genres, like the stoner metal of Kyuss or the bar-blues of Eagles of Death Metal. Turner showed he could branch out with The Last Shadow Puppets, whose underappreciated album was like a lost 12-inch from the age of mono, but now he’s bringing that broader songcraft back home with an album that is heavy and slow, sinuous, and eloquent. It’s his best work yet, more mature and confident without ever seeming cocky, functioning as a complete work as well as a collection of great singles. If America doesn’t catch on to the Arctic Monkeys now, they likely never will.

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→ August 19, 2013
→ By

Music update, August 2013.

It’s been four months since my last omnibus music post, and a year that had started strongly for alternative rock has just gotten stronger since then, with even more to come this fall. Maybe some of this is just me feeling better this year and more willing to spend time looking for and listening to great new music, but I think we’re just trending upwards for new bands and sounds getting at least enough exposure to reach my ears even if they’re not breaking all the way through to the mainstream.

As always, song titles are linked to their amazon mp3 pages. I’ve included Soundcloud links for the first time, as an experiment; for most of these songs you can play the track directly, with a few that require going to Soundcloud instead. Suggestions for other songs or artists you think I might like are always welcome.

New Politics – “Harlem.” I mentioned this in a chat a month or so ago, but this might be the song of the year for me, mixing clever imagery, a tremendous hook, and enough musical twists to make it fit better on the alternative charts than on the pop charts, although a crossover feels inevitable. It’s just too catchy to remain on the fringes, and yet combines enough elements from different subgenres to feel fresh yet familiar at heart.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/73495214″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

Arctic Monkeys – “Do I Wanna Know?.” I can’t wait for this album to drop in September, especially with how promising this song is, as well as last year’s one-off single “R U Mine?” This one has to be the best slow-tempo songs the Monkeys have ever released, but without giving up Alex Turner’s trademark sneer or wordplay like “Been wondering if your heart’s still open/and if so I wanna know what time it shuts.”

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/100381545″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

Boxer Rebellion – “Diamonds.” I absolutely love this song, which reminds me of The National but with a vocalist who actually wants you to hear what he’s saying. The rest of the album doesn’t quite measure up, unfortunately, making for better background listening as atmospheric rock (not emo, but atmo?) that lacks the bright definition of “Diamonds.”

Boxer Rebellion’s ”Diamonds” on Soundcloud

Cayucas – “High School Lover.” Also on the short list of the best pop songs of the year, or at least the summer, although its potential for airplay was rather hampered by a superfluous f-bomb in the middle of the second verse. I don’t care if you want to curse on your records, but if you choose to do so, don’t throw them away – make them count. Anyway, the subject matter is silly and fun, just what the title implies, with a twinge of bitterness given the past tense of the lyrics, while the music bounces you along like you’re riding on the back of some guy’s (or girl’s) bicycle.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/88611033″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

Atlas Genius – “If So.” Final candidate for song of the year from this batch (on top of a few tracks from the April post). Is smart-pop a genre? If so – see what I did there? – this Aussie duo may define it.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/77185677″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

The National – “Don’t Swallow the Cap.” I just want to mention that I think this is a gorgeous pop song, ruined by the fact that the lead singer mumbles his way through the vocals. Dude, if you can’t get up for this song, why the hell should I? It’s begging for a cover version with a singer who lets it out. (The track is available free through that link.)

Savages – Silence Yourself. Album of the year so far. I reviewed this earlier in the week.

Fitz & the Tantrums – More Than Just A Dream (album). Overall, I was disappointing in Fitz’s sophomore effort. It’s not as punchy as their debut, and I don’t think it has the breakout potential of that disc’s lead single, “Moneygrabber,” and has one very radio-friendly song in “Out of My League” that’s a little too poppy for me. Their lyrical subject matter really needs to extend beyond thinly-told tales of romance and heartbreak. The sleeper track on the album is the more uptempo “Spark,” which is one of the few songs where co-singer Noelle Scaggs gets at least equal time with Fitz himself; I’d also check out “Break the Walls” and “MerryGoRound” if you liked their first disc and want something more along those lines.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/89650241″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

Kid Astray – “The Mess.” (video) She will never/answer your calls, babe/just let it go now. I’m not even sure what to call this song, where the chorus, the verse, and the … um, other verse don’t quite seem to fit together, even though each stands on its own merits. The band is Norwegian and describes themselves as “indie-pop,” but there’s far more of an electronic underpinning here than in what generally gets the indie-pop label here in the U.S.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/84995851″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

Bastille – “Pompeii.” Kind of an updated Erasure with vocals more along the lines of Violator-era Depeche Mode. The song has been all over Sirius XM’s Alt Nation, and has been a hit all over Europe and in Australia, making it seem inevitable it’ll cross over here at least to some extent. It’s just a very good electronic/pop song, with an effervescent synth backing behind rising and falling vocals that include the line you won’t get out of your head, “How am I gonna be an optimist about this?”

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/74223398″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

Beware of Darkness – “Howl.” The PA folks at Petco played the first few bars of this track during the PG All-American Classic, which just about knocked me out of my seat given how under-the-radar and out-of-date this band’s blues-heavy hard-rock sound is. They’re edgier and rougher than their hair metal predecessors, but it wouldn’t be insane to call the song the result of a lab experiment to cross Whitesnake and the Black Crowes. Also, it rocks.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/105639841″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

Franz Ferdinand – “Love Illumination.” They just turn out 2-3 pop gems like this on every album, don’t they? The album comes out on the 27th of this month. I’d rate this track ahead of “No You Girls,” but behind “The Fallen,” “The Dark of the Matinee,” or “Ulysses.” It’s more of Franz Ferdinand’s version of a great highway driving song.

Haim – I can’t stand Haim. Go away already.

Rogue Wave – Nightingale Floors (album). First two tracks, “No Magnatone” (in 3/4 time, a Rogue Wave staple that once ended up with the Dancing With the Stars band massacring “Lake Michigan” during a waltz) and “College” are standouts. I could make a case for the closer, “Everyone Wants to Be You,” but it goes on far too long for me to stick with it till the end. Everything in between is filler, some bland, some outright soporific. The deluxe version, linked here, also has a half-hearted cover of one of my favorite tracks from the 1990s, Screaming Trees’ “Nearly Lost You.”

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/85173035″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

CHVRCHES – “Gun.” Album drops September 23rd. I can’t wait.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/94123129″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

Children of Bodom – “Transference.” Death metal song of the year so far, although the upcoming Carcass release may change that. The screaming-and-growling thing feels very silly to me – you sound like Cookie Monster and are as threatening as Prairie Dawn – but the music underneath the vocals here is tight and intense, a rare bit of evolution in the post-thrash/grindcore environment.

Transference video on Youtube

Smallpools – “Dreaming.” More synth-pop, with a heavier feel than Bastille but just as strong of a hook and better overall energy. It’s amazing to me to hear so much of the synth-heavy sound of early ’80s New Wave come back around, but with tighter production and less obvious pop-radio pandering. I also like Smallpools’ use of a story, or at least the shell of a story, of being trapped somewhere and under attack, while refusing to surrender, to back up the energy of the guitar and keyboard lines.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/92381431″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

These New Puritans – “Fragment Two.” I want to call this jazz, but it’s more jazz in philosophy than in practice. There’s an experimental feel to this, with offbeat piano lines, aposiopetic stops, and internal references to earlier parts of the track. It’s way out there for me.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/91094104″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

Queens of the Stone Age – “My God is the Sun.” Three listens to their new album, …Like Clockwork, still didn’t sell me on it, but at least we have this lead track, a throwback to Kyussian slow-jam headbanger days, to keep QotSA alive in our hearts. Or something. I concede this album probably demands more time from me. The track is free through that amazon link.

Beach Fossils – “Clash the Truth.” Less lo-fi than early post-punk/new wave to my ears, a little disinterested vocally (not quite as much as The National), and not as exciting as DIIV, formed by former Beach Fossils member Zachary Cole Smith, just subtle and concise and pulsing with a sort of compulsive negative energy.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/3623478″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

Phoenix – “Entertainment.” I know I’m not supposed to say this, but I thought Bankrupt! was a huge disappointment, barely building at all on their last disc, the Grammy-winning Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. “Entertainment,” the lead single, at least boosts the sound from their previous album with a stomping energy, like a song from the soundtrack to a Cirque du Soleil show.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/79784563″
params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

Blondfire – “Waves.” The music frames a perfect pop song, undone by lyrics that turn the band into a bad blonde joke: “Waves/picking you up/pushing you down/they’re always around.” Like, deep, man.

Blondfire’s “Waves” on Soundcloud

Bleached – “Dead in Your Head.” Inevitable comps to the Go-Gos and the Runaways abound, although I think they’re probably going to end up staring up at the Savages more than anyone else. “Dead in Your Head” stays low in the zone, with a sludgy feeling and lethargic pace under a superficial story of the emotional costs of regret.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/91133757″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

Mona – “Goons (Baby, I Need It All).” I get a little “Chelsea Dagger” out of this track, a sort of grimy yet lambent confection that clocks in at 3:13 and would feel too long at 3:30. Sometimes you can just hear a band gunning for more airplay within the confines of their existing sound; this song pretends to machismo, but when Mona drops the “hey hey hey-ey-ey-eh,” they’re quietly hoping you sing along.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/101637882″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

Jagwar Ma – “Come Save Me.” I’ve been of the general opinion that the Brits do intelligent, accessible rock music better than we do for years, but Australia is starting to gain on us as well, with Jagwar Ma following the Cut Copy path. There’s a distinctive Aussie-rock sound here, with lo-fi production, stomping percussion, and choruses that feel like they’re holding something back to maintain the tension into the next verse. The track is currently free through that link.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/28678096″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

Lord Huron – “Time To Run.” We draw some funny lines around songs and artists, pigeonholing them into specific genres so we know what stations are and aren’t allowed to play them. “Time to Run” finds itself boxed in as alternative music, or folk-rock, when it’s more country than anything else – think David Gray doing country, without the whole my-tractor’s-sexy nonsense that has reduced contemporary country music to antiseptic idiocy.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/53903681″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

The Head and the Heart – “Shake.” Similar to Lord Huron with a country-folk-crossover vibe, less overtly country than “Time to Run,” a definite step up from H&H’s last album. Their new disc drops on October 15th.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/103616868″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

Youngblood Hawke – “We Come Running.” A straight-up pop song that never crossed over from alternative radio. Solid, better than what you’ll hear on pop radio these days, but not as good as the other songs I cover here.

YBH’s “We Come Running” on Soundcloud

Walk Off the Earth – “Red Hands.” Worth a listen, mostly for the chorus, although the harmonies have been overproduced to the point that the individual voices are flattened beyond recognition, like someone in marketing figured they’d get more airplay on soft-rock stations that way.

”Red Hands” on Soundcloud

Wild Nothing – “A Dancing Shell.” I loved their last album, Nocturne, which I discovered thanks to recommendations from several of you. This song doesn’t quite hit the mark for me, mostly because of the walking keyboard line that turns a dreamy alternative track into a slightly twee space-pop song. If they just took that one part out, it would be tremendous.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/89089573″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

TV on the Radio – “Mercy.” Their best track since “Wolf Like Me” from their 2006 Return to Cookie Mountain album, “Mercy” is a fierce, fast-paced rocker with clever, alliterative lyrics. It seems to be a one-off single for now, with no announcement about a forthcoming album, unfortunately.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/103156502″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

Disclosure – “When A Fire Starts To Burn.” This one song is better than the entire Daft Punk album put together. Yeah, the repetitive vocal sample thing isn’t my thing – it’s been fifteen years or so since that appeared on mainstream tracks, so maybe we could try something new? – but that bass line is tremendous, and if you’re only going to have four lines of lyrics, these are good choices.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/93555520″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

Still listening to: new albums from Royal Teeth and Braids. Looking forward to: Arcade Fire, Janelle Monae, Islands, The Naked and Famous. It’s been some kind of year for music.

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→ April 14, 2013
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Top songs of 2013, so far.

I’ve got a new post up on some Yankees and Giants prospects in A-ball, including Jose Vicente Campos, and a draft blog post on Jacksonville RHP Chris Anderson. I’ll write up my look at prep catcher Nick Ciuffo later this week.

So far 2013 is shaping up to be a pretty good year for music, or at least the kind of music I tend to like. I don’t want to do a ranking this early in the year, but I’ve heard so many great songs already that I also didn’t want to wait until the midpoint or until December to start talking about them. I discuss my favorite song of the year first, but after that they’re not in any real order.

Everything Everything – “Cough Cough.” (video)The best song I’ve heard this year, first brought to my attention in January by reader Paul Boyé (aka @Phrontiersman), who said he thought their new album would fit my taste in music and absolutely nailed it. (The song provided the epigram at the start of my most recent Klawchat, too.) Everything Everything remind me of alt-J in their high level of experimentalism, with unusual song structures and frequent key and tempo changes, but where alt-J is meditative and minimalist, Everything Everything is effusive and layered. “Cough Cough” is the best track of the five on their U.S. EP release*, but I also love “Kemosabe” (video), slower-paced but just as dramatic, and “MY KZ UR BF” (video), a track from their first album featuring off-beat lyrics (literally and figuratively) and transitions from tumbling verses to the catchier chorus. I love how “Undrowned” references (and rhymes) Falklands and Balkans. Even “Torso of the Week” has its moments, something that can happen when you don’t limit each song to a single hook or motif. If you generally like my music recs – like alt-J or Of Monsters & Men – you should buy this EP.

* Is anything more anachronistic in the world of media than staggered release dates for music? Isn’t that just inviting piracy? I could sort of understand it in the era of physical releases, but we’re way past that point. The idea of the album itself is nearly dead (and, I still maintain, a violation of anti-trust laws prohibiting bundling), and making the songs available for digital downloads bears very little cost to the label.

Little Green Cars – “Harper Lee.” (a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHwMDr6dMHI >video) This Irish quintet  will inevitably get comps to Mumford & Sons, because that’s who everyone with an acoustic guitar and a harmony gets compared to these days, but I hear far more of the Decemberists here, mixed with a dose of the Mamas and the Papas.

Leagues – “You Belong Here” and “Spotlight.” (video) The latter track is the one getting airplay on XM right now, but the former is strong as well, and it’s free on amazon right now. Their music has sunny vocal lines, Motown elements underneath, with a hard edge to the guitar sound, giving the whole package a retro 60s/70s feel. This feels to me like the band everyone pretends the Black Keys are.

Wavves – “Sail To The Sun.” (video) I received a promotional download of their new album when it came out, and have been pleasantly surprised by its mix of melodic post-punk tracks like this one or “Demon to Lean On” and atmospheric tracks like “Everything is My Fault.” I prefer the faster-paced songs myself, but a full album of that would get old very quickly, and they’re smart to keep the punk-lite tracks on the short side.

The Mowgli’s – “San Francisco.” (video) Shame on America if we don’t make this the feel-good cross-over hit of the summer. It’s a shout-along piece of alt-pop silliness that seems destined to be overplayed before we hit Labor Day, and I mean that as a compliment. I picked up their entire EP, which is on sale for $4 on amazon; this is by far the best track, with “The Great Divide” and “Slowly, Slowly” also worth a listen, bearing the same everyone-sing-real-loud approach, but not nearly as hooky as this one.

San Cisco – “Awkward.” (video)I say it’s brilliant; my wife says it’s annoying and I need to stop singing it around the house. A call-and-response track about a first date where the two participants came away with rather different impressions of how it went, it’s the rare humorous song that can survive past the point where you’ve grown tired of the joke.

The 1975 – “Chocolate.” (video) I don’t love the Mancunian singer’s affected vocal style, but the catchiness of the pizzicato lick that drives the song and the “we’re never gonna quit” chorus (later clarified with “if you don’t stop smokin’ it,” undermining the song’s apparent exhortation to persevere). It’s getting airtime on alternative stations, but this is a straight-up pop song by a band that just isn’t mainstream yet.

The Neighbourhood – “Female Robbery.” (video) A little overplayed on XMU/Alt Nation, this one reminds me of a lot of the alternative tracks coming from Britain in the mid-90s that blended electronic elements with deliveries that were half-sung, half-rapped – Moloko, White Town, Space, etc.

Suede – “Barriers.” (video) A strong comeback track from the Britpop darlings of the early ’90s, fueled by a plaintive six-note guitar riff replayed through most of the song. I loved their first album, and the first track off their second album (after the departure of guitarist Bernard Butler), but after that they seemed to lose their aptitude for crafting post-glam pop masterpieces and disappeared from my view. Even if it’s just this one song, it’s good to see a glimpse of the old Suede again. (Also, this needs to be Brett Anderson’s warmup music, right?)

Foals – “Inhaler.” (video) I guess Foals’ typical music is less heavy and more dance-oriented, but the loud, dense guitar riff during and behind the chorus sold me on this one right away. Even the sharply picked lines before that seem menacing, foreshadowing the giant crunch that comes once the song hits the bridge.

Lemaitre – “Iron Pyrite.” (video) Self-described “discodudes” from Norway, using a ’70s-style funk riff (I assume it’s a sample) over a modern drum track, made successful by the staccato-picked guitar line that repeats throughout the song. I received a promo download of their EP as well, but this was the only track that stood out to me.

CHVRCHES – “The Mother We Share.” (video) A Scottish electropop group, CHVRCHES won a prize for the best “developing” non-U.S. act at SXSW this year, with this track and “Recover” both seeing some airplay on XM now.

Royal Teeth – “Wild.” (video) Released last summer, but just receiving airplay over the last few months, it’s got a great Foster the People/Naked and Famous vibe to it, with two vocalists over a pseudo African/tribal beat.

PAPA – “Put Me to Work.” (video) Another SXSW hit, PAPA, featuring the former drummer for Girls, tries to blend the sounds of early British punk acts (notably the Clash) and Americana/rock artists like Bruce Springsteen, with some hints of folk and R&B as well. I heard a little of the Hold Steady here, but like this better than anything I’ve heard from THS … and I won’t even get into how I’m not a Springsteen fan.

Young Rebel Set – “Measure of A Man.” (video) I tweeted a link to this song’s video the other day, suggesting it as a track Mumford and Sons fans would likely enjoy. The song was first released in the UK in 2011 but didn’t come to my ears until it appeared on a promotional sampler I got about a month ago, so I guess it’s getting a second push stateside. It could easily have come off either of Mumford’s albums, aside from the vocal style, which is more Irish-drinking-song than Mumford’s British-country-howl.

I’m also looking forward to new albums from Phoenix (April 22nd), Fitz and the Tantrums (May 7th), and, all on June 4th, Queens of the Stone Age, Rogue Wave, and Portugal. The Man. All that before the All-Star Break adds up to a pretty strong year.

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