→ September 9, 2014
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The Kooks’ Listen.

The Kooks’ fourth album, Listen, comes after a three-year hiatus that saw lead singer and songwriter Luke Pritchard traveling to the U.S. and collaborating with other songwriters for the first time. The resulting album from their reunion sounds a lot like the old Kooks, just with more pronounced percussion lines. There are some great singles here, with sort of a second-wave Britpop feel that might not play as well in the United States, but it doesn’t have the impact I was hoping for given the layoff and the band’s discussion of a new direction for the disc.

“Down,” the lead single from the album, is the perfect example of a solid pop-rock song that would play much better in London than Los Angeles. Pritchard always sounds like he’s singing with a head cold, but the opening lines are only missing Peter Sellers following them up with “I wish I could sing like that.” The vocals overshadow the unconventional percussion lines, heavy on cymbals and hand-claps, that make the song otherwise compelling, and probably the best pure pop song on the album, even if the chorus’s silly “down-down-diggety-down” pattern desperately needs a modulation to another key.

“Forgive and Forget” does a better job of melding the influences Pritchard wanted to incorporate in the album, a neo-soul approach that reflected his time in the U.S., here mixing the drums to the front of the chorus (with Motown-style backup vocals) and driving the song on a set of funky guitar lines – with the funk sound coming from the strumming pattern rather than just the notes. The song comes off as a celebration, emphasized by the brief drum fill right before the 3-minute mark that raises the intensity right before the endless chorus that closes the track. “Bad Habit,” the current single, bears similar influences but mixes them into the album’s most conventional rock format, with guitar lines derived from blues-rock standards and drums that nod back to John Bonham after each chorus.

There’s plenty of experimentation on this album, at least relative to previous Kooks efforts, but it’s a mixed bag of results. The psychedelic “Dreams” pairs the Kooks’ best lyrical imagery of the disc with a faux-Arab rhythm and fuzzed-out keyboard line, all of which has the wisdom to get out after three minutes before the clever gambit turns stale. “Are We Electric” shifts back to sunny pop, one of a few moments on the album where the Kooks come off as the smarter, less overproduced OneRepublic. (I can’t stand OneRepublic, but I have to concede that they craft some strong pop hooks.) And if I just play the first fifteen seconds of “It Was London” for you, you’re going to assume it’s from Spoon’s latest album. But when Pritchard turns more introspective, we get the maudlin “See Me Now,” a song to the father Pritchard lost at age three, and the perfunctory “Westside,” with a boring drum-machine kickoff (a possible nod to The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me”) and lyrics that I want to believe are somehow meant to be ironic (“Oh we can settle down/start a family/you’re still my best friend/and you’re so good to me”). If that’s “love song number 23,” I’d rather not hear numbers one to twenty-two.

If the Kooks’ goal on Listen was to expand their musical boundaries, I’m not sure we can call it a success. There’s a lot here that’s been done before, either by the Kooks themselves or by a host of other bands, mostly based in the U.S., that have infused soul or funk elements into indie-rock. If instead we evaluate Listen on its own merits, however, it’s one of the strongest collections of pop-rock singles of the year, with at least four songs that merit airplay on alternative and pop outlets. If we can just get Pritchard a decongestant, the Kooks might really have something here.

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→ September 7, 2014
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Royal Blood and Opeth.

Royal Blood put out one of my favorite songs of the first half of this year, but their self-titled debut album didn’t come out until the very end of August, a long wait from the hype and airplay they received from “Out of the Black” in the first few months of 2014. Royal Blood delivers on the promise of that first track with a compact half-hour of loud, hard, hook-filled tracks, nothing that breaks new ground, just heavy earworms for folks who like rock that rocks.

“Out of the Black” is one of the best songs of 2014, an huge, heavy bass-and-drum track that comes in so loud and hard that you would swear it was multiple guitars, not the work of a two-piece band that recorded everything without overdubs or multiple instruments. The synchronized drum and machine-gun bass riff that opens the song follows up with a vast, distorted sonic boom that, here, announces the entire album’s arrival – this is loud, heavy, unapologetic rock music. It’s produced in a different way, but the aural effect is familiar.

The best tracks on Royal Blood remind me a lot of one of my favorite under-the-radar albums of late last year, the self-titled debut from Drenge, another UK-based two-piece rock. The initial riff to “Come on Over,” maybe the album’s second-best track after the opener, could easily have come from Drenge. Where Drenge stayed in the post-punk lane, Royal Blood runs more with the blues-rock aesthetic of 1970s hard rock and British Heavy Metal. With huge riffs and frequent stops and starts, most of the tracks on Royal Blood would fit in on Ozzy’s Boneyard on Sirius XM in between songs from Iron Maiden and Saxon.

That bluesy feel – it’s not really “blues” in the traditional sense – comes out more when they turn the amps down slightly, as on “You Can Be So Cruel,” which sacrifices none of the heaviness of the rest of the album but drives more than it thumps. It’s also a great example of how bassist Mike Kerr manages to create a full sound just with his bass and heavy distortion, music that you would otherwise swear had come from two six-string guitars working in tandem. His technique is more apparent on “Blood Hands” because he moderates his picking slightly to make some of the individual notes clearer and less distorted.

They’re also going to get a lot of Jack White comparisons because of Kerr’s vocal style and their shared use of heavily distorted guitar lines played in isolation or just over a drum beat. The interstitial riffs on “Careless” feel ripped straight from a great Jack White or White Stripes track – and I can’t figure out how he can produce notes that high on a traditional bass guitar., while the descending staircase vocals of “Figure It Out” also bring White’s voice and songwriting to mind. But there are little allusions to other genres that White wouldn’t incorporate into his straight-up rockers – like the syncopated, funk-tinged riffs of “Ten-Tonne Skeleton” or the hints at early doom on “You Can Be So Cruel.”

Royal Blood‘s brief 32 minutes don’t allow the duo much time to introduce anything new or innovative, although I don’t think that was part of their mission statement. They had a bunch of hooks, and a new kind of sound they wanted to introduce, two counts on which they were successful. At some point, they’ll have to expand the formula; for now, a half-hour that rocks works just fine.

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I also missed the release of Opeth’s latest album, Pale Communion, their second in their new incarnation as a prog-rock outfit. It’s hard to believe this is the same band that produced the watershed progressive death-metal album Blackwater Park, which combined death-growl doom-metal vocals with classical music influences and Gothenburg-style riffing in epic tracks that could run 10-12 minutes. Pale Communion sounds more like King Crimson or Marillion than it does like At the Gates or In Flames, with clean, sometimes harmonized vocals, intricate song structures (the one real holdover from their earlier output), and influences that range as far afield as folk and jazz. Opener “Eternal Rains Will Come” is pure 1970s prog-rock with some gorgeous instrumental passages, while “Cusp of Eternity” incorporates more hard-rock elements with a huge classic-rock guitar solo before the Hammond organ – which practically defines this album – returns.

It’s still brilliant, the kind of intelligent songwriting you can easily recognize, but it’s also a challenging listen because of the unconventional structure and lack of clear hooks. I don’t agree with Pitchfork’s review, which savaged the album mostly because it’s not the old Opeth, but I do agree with the reviewer’s specific criticism that the album doesn’t feel like its musical ideas are new, only its structures and arrangements. Opeth was so groundbreaking in their death-metal phase, defying conventions of even the adventurous melodic death metal movements of Gothenburg and Finland, that it’s a little odd to hear them as a prog-rock outfit that doesn’t seem to bring many new ideas or energies. Pale Communion is still among the best albums of the year, because of its ambition and sheer intelligence; I just want a band that has historically been so full of ideas to bring that same creativity to their new sound.

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→ September 2, 2014
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August music update.

Today’s Insider column covers notable September callups.

I held this back until after the holiday weekend, both to make sure more of you would see it and because I was hoping we’d get some new singles out on Tuesday, which worked out with songs from HAERTS and TV on the Radio released this morning. I’ve created another Spotify playlist with all of this month’s songs.

alt-J – “Every Other Freckle.” Their sophomore album, This is All Yours, drops on September 22nd, and the the third single released from it is the best and most alt-J-ish one yet, a precise, rapidly-shifting track that seamlessly combines genres while boasting some of the band’s trademark double-edged lyrics: “I’m gonna bed into you like a cat beds into a beanbag/Turn you inside out, and lick you like a crisp packet.” I can’t wait for the album to see how all of these songs work together, given how cohesive An Awesome Wave was. Speaking of which, the Mercury Prize shortlist announcement is just eight days away.

Faded Paper Figures – “Real Lies.” I think Spotify suggested FPF to me because I’ve listened to alt-J, but they’re not similar beyond a shared interest in electro-pop sounds. Where alt-J is surgically precise, FPF is free-flowing; where alt-J is musically understated, FPF is bold and poppy. They do both engage in a fair amount of wordplay, as the Figures do here, singing “real lies” as you’d pronounce “realize,” and opening a song about reality and illusion with a reference to “the broken I.”

The Rentals – “Thought Of Sound.” Hard to believe their novelty/cult hit “Friends of P” came out 19 years ago next month; in the interim, they released another album, broke up, reformed, released several mini-albums on their own, then signed with Polyvinyl for the album Lost in Alphaville, which just came out last week. The band’s founder, Matt Sharp, started out as the bassist for Weezer, and I think the Rentals sound more like the original Weezer than current Weezer does. “Thought of Sound” fits that rubric: it’s not overtly poppy or catchy, but comes at you more subtly, with a balance of atmospheric and slightly dark music with the more optimistic lyrics.

Interpol – “All The Rage Back Home.” This sounds like vintage Interpol. I think that’s a good thing, but then again, I really like Joy Division.

Echosmith – “Cool Kids.” My daughter’s favorite new song of the summer is actually a pretty strong track overall, not bad for a group of four siblings, three of them still teenagers. I particularly like their use of silence when it would be almost instinctive to fill all of that space with more sound; the starkness underscores the isolation of the lyrics’ speakers.

Twerps – “Heavy Hands.” This Australian act’s influences are largely from that country and less familiar to my ears, at least, bands like the Clean and the Go-Betweens who never crossed over to U.S. radio. Their new 8-song EP, Underlay, continues their exploration of mellow jangle-pop textures, with a couple of songs under two minutes as the band has one idea, gets after it, and gets out. “Heavy Hands” is my favorite track from the album, deceptively upbeat, reminiscent of the earliest output by the Cure or New Order before their sounds expanded with bigger recording budgets.

Wild Beasts – “Wanderlust.” Radiohead meets alt-J meets … I don’t even know, the Dazz Band? It doesn’t always work, often coming off as weird for weirdness’ sake, but this track is the album’s best, fluid and abstract musically, punctuated by the singer’s refrain of “Don’t confuse me with someone who gives a fuck.” I won’t – I promise.

Bear in Heaven – “Autumn.” I’ve got their latest, Time is Over One Day Old, on the to-listen list. “Autumn,” the second single from the album, is dark, pulsing, almost menacing in its combination of intensity and the stark keyboard lines.

Royal Blood – “Figure It Out.” I’ll review their debut album later this week; nothing on it can match the standout “Out of the Black,” one of my favorite songs of the year, but the second single is solid, more classic blues-rock than the heavier sound of their first hit.

Strand of Oaks – “Goshen ’97.” A reader recommendation, and a pretty good one. The album’s uneven but this nostalgia-tinged rocker – can we already feel nostalgic about 1997? God have mercy on us all – brings back memories not just of grunge but of the Replacements and similar loose garage-rock artists of the 1980s. I didn’t need to know about the porn and menthols under his bed, though.

Phantogram – “Black Out Days.” I’ve been remiss in omitting this song from the last two lists, as the song has been all over XMU/Alt Nation since the spring. Singer Sarah Barthels elevates this song beyond the electronic-rock norm with her hypnotic Cocteau Twins-esque vocals.

The Kooks – “Bad Habit.” The British rock quartet’s fourth album, Listen, came out today in the U.K. and is due next Tuesday here; “Bad Habit” is the second single released, after April’s “Down,” and it sounds a lot like a Kooks song – catchy, riffing heavily on classic-rock influences, less Britpop and a little more Arctic Monkeys.

Ryan Adams – “Gimme Something Good.” His best song since “Cuts Like a Knife” back in ’83.

Glass Animals – “Pools.” “Gooey” was their big alternative hit this summer, but I’m not a fan of the song itself or the production that seems to melt the lyrics back into the music. “Pools” has far more energy, driven by a jungle/tropical rhythm that’s a better contrast to the breathy low-baritone vocals.

Milky Chance – “Stolen Dance.” You’ve probably heard this by now – 77 million plays on Spotify can’t be wrong, can they? (Answer: Of course they can.) I don’t rate the song quite that highly, but it doesn’t sound like anything else out there right now, and, as Rakim might say, the beat is fresh.

HAERTS – “Giving Up.” Their debut album is due by year-end, after a slew of promising singles, including this one, released today, a bright slice of indie-pop driven by singer Nini Fabi’s strong, sultry vocals. If you liked Haim, this is a million times better than anything they released.

TV on the Radio – “Happy Idiot.” Also released today, “Happy Idiot” previews the band’s upcoming album Seeds, due November 18th. (It won’t include last year’s amazing “Mercy,” however, which was my #4 song of 2013.) Shifting into serious new wave territory with the drum machine and staccato guitar line, “Happy Idiot” has a subtler hook than “Mercy” but builds tension through layering of guitars as the song crescendoes toward the end of its three minutes. Stereogum called it TV on the Radio’s best song since Pure Science; I disagree, since “Mercy” was one of their best two or three tracks ever. Instead, I’ll just say that “Happy Idiot” is a hopeful preview of their upcoming album.

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→ August 29, 2014
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Brill Bruisers.

Today’s Klawchat transcript includes a lot of Kyle Schwarber talk and other baseball stuff.

The New Pornographers get the “supergroup” label a little too easily – I think of a supergroup as a group that includes a couple of artists who are well-known for their solo work, but among the half-dozen members of the New Pornographers the only solo artist who might qualify for that term is Neko Case. The characterization of the group as a collection of solo artists seems to me to diminish the work they do together, which has often been critically acclaimed but hasn’t broken out of the indie/alternative category on the commercial side. Their latest album, Brill Bruisers, is garnering more positive reviews, but it’s also their most overtly pop work yet – a power-pop showcase that bursts with energy beneath the band’s obscure lyrics.

The album opens with the title track and first single, which refers to the Brill Building era and style of songwriting, also apparent in the melody and backing harmoanies to the song. It’s a bouncy, exuberant track that sends a strong opening signal that we’re going to hear big pop sounds that reach back as far as the 1950s for musical inspiration. Bandleader A.C. Newman wrote about 3/4 of the tracks – Dan Bejar (of Destroyer) wrote the rest – pairing his stark lyrics with these huge major-chord hooks. “Fantasy Fools,” which is not actually about Eric Karabell and Nate Ravitz, is an even higher-energy ride with the explosions into the crescendoing harmony – one of the strongest uses on the album of the group’s mixed-gender vocals. The second track, “Champions of Red Wine,” has a space-age bachelor bad feel mixed with a Fleetwood Mac guitar line and vocals from both Case and Katherine Calder, while the album’s soft middle section leads into a rousing finish with three of the four final tracks, including the stomping closer “You Tell Me Where.”

Bejar’s best contribution brings the electricity too, but in a more frenzied fashion, particularly on the album’s second single, “War on the East Coast,” which opens with a staccato guitar riff that careens into the big chorus, only for Bejar to take a strange detour into a drunken harmonica solo. He falls short with “Spidyr,” a slower and more precious number that takes far too long to get to the huge drum incursion that powers the song’s final minute – a whole track like that might have been overkill, but it would have been preferable to Bejar’s too-close vocal style without much of any music behind him. Amber Webber of Black Mountain and Lightning Dust adds her vocals to Bejar’s other addition to the album, “Born With a Sound,” a song that would have fit in beautifully on Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs musically and with Bejar and Webber’s back-and-forth.

The band gets too mired in some of its past references, like “Backstairs” quaffing too deeply on the ’70s, and the lyrics are often inscrutable and/or pretentious, like the raucous “Dancehall Domine,” detracting from the album’s most glorious song with a weird, obsolete word in the title. Most of Newman’s songs have few lyrics and don’t tell a story or even paint a still image, so while they include some clever wordplay there isn’t much substance there. Brill Bruisers is foremost a record of great music, clipped and concise pop gems with strong support on keyboards from Calder and Blaine Thurier, with influences from about four decades of music yet without ever sounding derivative of any of them.

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→ August 5, 2014
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They Want My Soul.

I wrote about the Javier Baez callup today for Insider, and will chat at noon ET.

Spoon’s 2010 album Transference departed from the tightly-crafted, sparse rock of their previous albums, with abrupt transitions and less fluidity than Gimme Fiction or Ga Ga Ga & a few more Ga’s showed. Devout Spoon fans weren’t enamored of the change, but their newest album, They Want My Soul, should assuage their ire: It’s very Spoon, for mostly better and a little worse, with plenty of hooks and the same tight sound as their earlier works.

During the band’s layoff, lead singer Britt Daniel started up a side project, the Divine Fits, which included Dan Boeckner of Wolf Parade as co-lead guitarist. The Fits were even more of a straight-up rock band than Spoon, although with Daniel on lead vocals it was hard for them to sound like anyone but Spoon. Some of that experience appears to have leaked back into They Want My Soul, because the album feels less expansive than anything previous from Spoon – but in a positive sense, as they seem more comfortable within their zone, more focused in a narrower range of styles, so that what was once experimentation now reads more as command. If the album lacks a song as immediate as “I Turn My Camera On” or “The Underdog,” that doesn’t detract at all from its maturity and depth of compelling tracks.

The best song is the opener, “Rent I Pay,” with Daniel’s staccato vocals over a throbbing guitar-and-drum line, along with one of those sharp silences that marked Spoon’s last album and another jarring curtain-drop ending. Starting the album with a hard indie-rock anthem may mislead you into expecting a return to the garage, but Spoon shifts directions multiple times, only returning to this style on a few tracks. Instead, we get the same sort of punctualism applied to different canvases, from the Roxy Music-inflected closer “New York Kiss” to the trancelike “Knock Knock Knock” (with a guitar riff sampled in to sound like a buzzsaw tearing through the sheet music). That track features the kind of layering and precise production I associate with alt-J’s An Awesome Wave, an album where every note and every sound effect seemed perfectly and deliberately placed; here Spoon use the technique to create a dark canopy over the paranoid lyrics.

Where Transference could feel deliberately weird, or at least overreaching, They Want My Soul is enjoyably quirky like Spoon’s previous work – indie-rock that doesn’t hew to any particular formula or obey any externally-imposed boundaries. “Let Me Be Mine” has Daniel repeating the lines “Auction off what you love/it will come back some time” over a shuffling off-beat rhythm with their typical sudden stops and restarts, a familiar execution of the Spoon formula that avoids sounding tired. (I could do without Daniel’s attempt at a Dick Van Dyke version of a cockney accent, though.) The aptly-named “Outlier” might be a Charlatans UK cover with its Madchester drums and keyboards, but then the steel acoustic guitar drops in to push the song even further into psychedelic territory. Even the cover of Ann-Marget’s “I Just Don’t Understand,” a dark waltz that stands out for its time signature and the match between the subject matter and Daniel’s raspy Kelly Jones-esque deilvery, manages to sound like a Spoon song even though it’s a cover of a track made famous by the Beatles.

“Do You,” the lead single, is a disappointing choice to push out to radio – it’s a good Spoon song, and I mean that in a good way, but it’s not a great one. It’s energetic and powered by the earnestness of Daniel’s voice, but not a track I walked away wanting to hear again and again. The lone dud on the album, “Inside Out,” might be the one track where Daniel et al try to break out of their genre, instead tossing out a failed trip-hop experiment that sounds cheaply produced and lacks any discernible hook.

I saw Divine Fits live in LA at the Fonda Theater, the last stop on their tour, and the one cover they mixed into the set was the Rolling Stones’ “Sway,” a slow, bluesy track allegedly written by Mick Taylor rather than Keith Richards. It’s a telling choice because it doesn’t sound much like the Stones, except when Mick Jagger’s voice comes in and you know it couldn’t be any other band. They Want My Soul carries that same aesthetic through its brief, fantastic 37-minute run – ten songs that sound little like each other, but all sound very much like Spoon.

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→ August 4, 2014
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July music update.

All my trade writeups from last week are up for Insiders. I skipped some of the smaller deals because of my TV commitments that evening.

It’s turning out to be a good year for new music after a pretty slow start, and that’s before we get to a spate of promising fall album releases, none more exciting (to me, at least) than the alt-J album dropping on September 22nd, with Interpol, Ryan Adams, and the Kooks also on the watchlist. I spent a little more time than usual trolling for new music once we got out of the All-Star Break, so this month’s update is longer than normal. The Spotify playlist also includes tracks from albums I’ve reviewed since the last monthly post.

Cymbals – “Erosion.” This British quartet produces modern darkwave tracks that seem to take the whole ’80s thing a little too seriously, right down to understated production and lyrics that speak of anomie and disaffection. It’s a good song anyway.

Jungle – “Busy Earnin’.” This new soul “collective” draws more from the ’70s and its funk and disco movements than from traditional soul or Motown, adding twists like unusual percussion lines and instruments to establish their sound as something new. It’s not a genre of music I typically enjoy, but I’ve liked what I’ve heard from Jungle because it’s different from anything else I’ve heard in this vein.

Little Daylight – “Overdose.” My daughter might have this electro-pop nugget as her favorite song of the year, although it gets strong competition from Ingrid Michaelson’s “Girls Chase Boys.” The Little Daylight album sounds a lot like a lightweight Naked & Famous disc, more upbeat and less trancey, with “Overdose” far and away the best song.

alt-J – “Left Hand Free.” The A&R man said he didn’t hear a single, so the boys whipped up this very un-alt-J-sounding track, although even when trying to sabotage themselves they can’t help slipping in a few flourishes of their own. I actually like the track despite its unholy origin.

Golden Coast – “Break My Fall.” A suggestion from Paul Boyé (rap name: Chef Boyé D) when I pointed out that he’d recommended four albums in one tweet, one more likely than the next to send you for the liquor cabinet. Paul’s got pretty good taste other than his inexplicable love of St. Vincent’s music; this Golden Coast track strikes a good balance between pop and alternative, perhaps falling a bit short (pun intended) because it’s not built around a single hook, but provides a more consistent, energetic vibe throughout.

Spoon – “Rent I Pay.” I’ll have a review of their album, They Want My Soul, up tomorrow when it’s released. Preview: I like the album, and this is its best song.

Colony House – “Silhouettes.” A hesitant recommendation, because this sounds like every other one-hit indie-pop wonder I’ve come across in the last few years, a lot like Knox Hamilton’s “Work It Out” in that regard. It’s pretty catchy, but the wordplay in the chorus gets old given how often he repeats the line. The song is free right now through that amazon link.

Movie – “Ads.” I can’t be the only one who hears strains of Blur’s “There’s No Other Way” here in the bouncy guitar intro, can I? “Ads” has more of a quixotic funk vibe than Blur’s psychedelic-tinged early work, providing a darkly comical contrast to the anti-commercialist message of the lyrics.

Doss – “Softpretty.” I sense there’s some irony in the song’s title, as the brief lyrics present a harder edge than the bubbly electronic music beneath them. It’s not even clear who Doss is – her bios are brief and weird by design – but I think she’s a sleeper prospect.

White Lung – “Down It Goes.” A female-fronted punk band that would have been tabbed “riot grrrls” by the mainstream press twenty years ago, White Lung got a boost when one of their main influences, Courtney Love, proclaimed herself a fan of their music. It’s punk, not post-punk, and there’s a strong melodic element that makes it play nice with more pop-oriented artists without surrendering the ferocity of their core sound.

The Raveonettes – “Killer in the Streets.” This Danish duo released a new album last month without any advance warning, and it’s … well, it’s just okay, definitely not quite what I was hoping for, lighter on hooks and less distinctive than I expected. This song was the best of the bunch for me due to the layered sound, with guitar tracks that appear to head in different directions and a compulsive drum loop reminiscent of the Madchester scene of two decades ago.

Ages & Ages – “Divisionary (Do The Right Thing).” The song is good, but the video is wonderful, an actual story told in four minutes. They might get lumped in with the new folk-rock movement, but I think they have more in common with groups like the Mowgli’s, with big coed harmonies driving the song toward the big finish.

Dotan – “Home.” I don’t even know if I like this song, but I think it’s going to become a huge hit. It reached #2 in his native Netherlands and #6 in Belgium, with a very Bastille vibe about the song thanks to an earworm chorus.

Twin Peaks – “Flavor.” This song is also free on amazon through that link. Think the Orwells – slightly obnoxious, vigorous pop-rock, with this track built on an off-beat chorus and a completely unexpected acoustic guitar interlude in lieu of a screeching solo.

Jenny Lewis – “Just One Of The Guys.” I’m sure you’ve heard it by now, a very lizphairian track between the lyrics’ feminist lament and the sunny folk-rock vibe of the music. You’ll be hearing covers of this in coffeehouses from now until the end of time.

New Pornographers – “Brill Bruisers.” The title track from the band’s forthcoming album is their most promising song in years, effusive and ebullient and still very much out of the mainstream without ever sounding obtuse. I’m not a big NP fan, neither their work together or any of the members’ solo work (Neko Case and “Destroyer” Dan Bejar are the best-known), but this track has me very optimistic.

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→ July 29, 2014
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Run River North.

I wrote a guest piece for Stigma Fighters on my experiences living with anxiety disorder. I also have a new Insider post on some Royals, White Sox, Mets, and O’s prospects up.

Run River North first came to mainstream attention when a music video they filmed themselves in a Honda car caught the attention of the car manufacturer and led to an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Their self-titled debut album came out earlier this year, earning them a “new band of the week” nod from the Guardian but little other press, and the album barely charted – just one week on the Billboard 200 – before disappearing. That’s a bit surprising, as the disc fits right in with the recent wave of folk-rock acts that have followed on the heels of Mumford & Sons and Of Monsters & Men to find commercial if not critical success, and RRN has the raw ingredients to surpass other similar yet uninspiring acts like the Lumineers or American Authors.

The Of Monsters & Men comparison is the most apt here, as Run River North is also a sextet with male and female vocalists, although RRN only features a male lead, and they previously went by the moniker Monsters Calling Home before, I presume, someone pointed out that that hit a little too close to the mark. Where OM&M are exuberant and bold, however, RRN too often opt for subdued and precious, even though their best songs are bursting with energy and emotion from fear to anger to regret. I liked the album overall, but I found myself wanting to hear lead singer Alex Hwang just let it go and show a rough edge or two. Don’t tell me you’ve got the feels; sing it.

RunRiverNorthCoverThe standouts on the disc bring Hwang closer to that precipice, including “Beetle” and “Excuses,” the latter of which shifts the balance more toward rock than anything else on the album. I almost wonder if Hwang’s diction is too perfect for that kind of song; he’s enunciating every word like Eliza Doolittle going cup-cup-cup-cup of-of-of-of when the lyrics depict a man “acting like a fool” rather than show his true feelings. “Beetle,” my favorite track on the album, is the one time where their Of Monsters & Men impression clicks on all cylinders, building on a core image of someone “running from the ghost on top of the hill” and shifting energies and tempos like a car pulling a series of hairpin turns. “In the Water” dips into a minor key and uses an undulating percussion line to mimic the feeling of rocking on a boat in a swift current … until it slams to a stop for a pretty but incongruous violin line.

The new sounds here are swamped by more derivative tracks where Run River North seem to be paying homage to their influences with imitation rather than innovation. “Fight to Keep” feels culled from the discards off Mumford & Sons’ Babel, while the opener, “Monsters Calling Home,” could easily be from the next Of Monsters & Men record, with the same formula of sing-along “oh-oh-oh-oh” bridges between verses. But where OM&M can feel a little sloppy with their arrangements, giving the music an organic feel that I hope they don’t lose as their success leads to better production, Run River North is too clean and precise, which contributes to the feeling that this is synthetic rock – music by checklist, not by emotion. Just listen to the intro to “Lying Beast,” a song with a title that might lead you to expect a guttural scream to kick out the jam, but that begins instead with quiet parallel vocal that aims for plaintive and comes off as twee.

I think Run River North need to decide who they want to be – another fauxlk-rock act of the kind that are currently flooding the market, or a unique contribution to the field that takes elements of folk or traditional country in a new direction. The band members are all Korean-Americans and sing often of the immigrant experience, with frequent references to “home” as an abstract concept and “name” as a metaphor for identity, so they have something different to say from other artists, many of whom have appropriated these intrinsically American styles of music and merged them with traditions from their own countries. The challenge for Run River North is to turn their technical prowess into more compelling, authentic songs that stand out from the surfeit of similar acts on the scene.

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→ July 26, 2014
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Entombed A.D.’s Back to the Front.

My breakdown of the Peavy trade is up now for Insiders.

Entombed was one of the most important bands in the history of heavy metal, a death metal act that veered hard back toward the mainstream with their epic 1993 album Wolverine Blues, which featured substantially slower tempos, fewer blast beats, and somewhat more comprehensible lyrics. The band didn’t eschew its detuned guitar sounds or heavy riffs, but the newer style drew more from classic dark metal acts like Black Sabbath and Slayer, rather than the straight-on (and in my opinion unlistenable) early Nordic death metal pioneers like Mayhem or Emperor. Their new style earned the moniker “death-and-roll,” although that sounds pejorative to me rather than recognizing that what they were doing was ingenious.

Personnel disagreements splintered the band, however, and founding vocalist LG Petrov has split off with three later members of the band to form Entombed A.D., whose debut album Back to the Front is set to drop on August 5th. It’s not Wolverine Blues, but it’s very much in that vein, with huge, heavy, almost bluesy metal riffs reminiscent of British Steel-era Judas Priest, along with unmistakeable death-metal elements like growled vocals and faster percussion. The album is uneven, but fans of Entombed’s work with its classic lineup should be interested in the new output.

Back to the Front couldn’t start off any better, with the menacing “Kill to Live” driving forward on thick buzzsaw guitar riffs, leaving the rapid-fire drumming just to brief passages that punctuate the heaviness of the verses and chorus rather than overpowering the music. “Second to None” employs a similar mix of elements, like a sludgier, bluesier track left off of Pantera’s A Vulgar Display of Power. (I’m not a Pantera fan, though, as the whole “groove metal” movement left me cold.) The closer, “Soldier of No Fortune,” sees Entombed stretching out into more melodic territory, a nearly seven-minute opus with multiple segments and tempo shifts, but which never loses the force or heaviness of Entombed’s signature sound.

The album veers back and forth from the Entombed death-and-roll sound to some more conventional death-metal numbers, and the quality of the songwriting rises and falls at the same time. “The Underminer” opens with a incredible rapid-fire guitar riff, but the whole thing is, er, undermined by the blast beats that follow and wipe out the guitar sound. “Bait and Bleed” has a similar problem, starting with a pair of overlaid guitar lines that would appear to promise more complexity, but by the chorus we’ve drifted into more cliched death-metal territory and lost the plot of the opener. Even “Bedlam Attack,” which has some tempo shifts later in the song, loses me with the fastball before we get to the changeup because it’s so repetitive.

I said on Twitter last week that this album isn’t as good as Wolverine Blues, but it’s a solid add to the Entombed canon. The more I’ve listened to Back to the Front, however, the less positive I feel about it. There’s too much here that I think I’ve heard before, from Entombed’s early/mid-90s output to the groove metal movement to earlier touchstones like Motorhead, Sabbath, and Slayer. If you’re a longtime Entombed fan, Entombed A.D. won’t disappoint you, but I don’t think it’ll stay in my own rotation for long.

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→ July 22, 2014
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Midnight Masses’ Departures.

I ranked the top five farm systems right now for ESPN, and broke down the Headley trade. I also reviewed the Spiel des Jahres-nominated boardgame Splendor for Paste, giving it a rating of 9/10.

I’ve never been more than a casual fan of … And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead fan, although I love contorting their fantastic band name to mock arm-shredding coaches and managers. Their music defies categorization beyond “alternative” or “indie rock,” as they moved from noise-rock in the late 1990s to the less aggressive and more nuanced sound of 2002’s Source Tags & Codes, earning the band universal acclaim but not commercial success. It’s a solid album, but I concede I didn’t share the priapistic enthusiasm of so many music critics of the time.

In 2008, founding member Jason Reece formed a side project with Autry Fulbright II, who is now the bassist for Trail of Dead as well, called Midnight Masses, with Fulbright the project leader and a number of mostly NYC-based musicians rotating through the other spots in the lineup. Their debut album, Departures (amazon • iTunes), came out on Tuesday of this week, and only bears a passing resemblance to Trail of Dead’s music, more in structure than in sound. Where Trail of Dead are guitar-heavy and deeply rooted in rock, Midnight Masses is spacey, ethereal, built on percussion and bass lines that lull you into a trance-like state when they work … and might put you to sleep when they don’t.

Departures opens strongly with two of the album’s best tracks – a trend I’ve noticed recently that I suspect has something to do with the rise of album streaming, so listeners get hooked right away and don’t have to go six songs deep to get to The Hit. “Golden Age” epitomizes Midnight Masses’ blend of throbbing drums and waves of keyboards, giving the impression of languor at the tempo of a typical rock song, before a confused drum loop kicks in around the three-minute mark behind heavily reverbed vocals to enhance the song’s mimicry of a chemical high. Lead single “Am I A Nomad” is the catchiest song on the album, with the rhythm of a traditional march but reverb and delay on the drum lines, destroying the sense of order that tempo might evoke, replacing it with an impression of disorder. Later in the album, the two-minute “Clap Your Hands” provides a needed respite from the melancholy of the album’s midsection, with a syncopated drum/guitar riff that wouldn’t be out of place on a Motown record aside from the guitar’s repetition of dissonant chords, culminating in a brilliant descending staircase in the brief chorus – and it’s the perfect example of a songwriter getting in, having his say, and getting out just in time. “Be Still” also marries sparse instrumentation with intense percussion to build a spooky, psychedelic framework around Fulbright’s lyrics, a little reminiscent of Syd Barrett-era Floyd.

Midnight Masses came about after the death of Fulbright’s father, and much of the album takes on the tenebrous tenor of a funeral, including the barely-there “If I Knew” and the anti-ballad “All Goes Black,” songs that desperately needed any kind of sonic or textural contrast to break the cafard that overwhelms those tracks. The formula works better on the closer, “There Goes Our Man,” where the morose vocals take on a gospelly quality thanks to more uptempo drum lines and piano lines, alluding to earlier tracks while also suiting the more spiritual lyrics. A similar attempt to merge two contrasting lines falls short on “Broken Mirror,” largely because the production creates a seething mass of unfriendly sounds between the various keyboard lines and the insistent drums, none of which sufficiently lifts the tempo, only providing relief when the noise stops in the final minute and guest vocalist Haley Dekle (of Dirty Projectors) can actually be heard again. And the title track just completely lost me, between more underproduced vocals and music that made me think I was trapped in a bad planetarium show.

I’d prefer not to consider Departures as a collection of singles, which is how I approach every album I hear, but as a single if disjointed experiment in undefinable alternative music. I haven’t heard much that sounds like this, and Midnight Masses is certainly creative even if only some of the attempts are successful. It’s also an album that grew on me through repeated listens, perhaps because it’s so quiet in places that it was easy for me to zone out and miss some of its subtler points – but that’s not to say the album is soft, merely a different approach from that of Fulbright and Reece’s other band.

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→ June 20, 2014
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Music update, June 2014.

I’ve hit a few minor-league games this past week, and have written posts about each one:
* Scouting notes from the California-Carolina Leagues All-Star Game, held in my backyard this year in Wilmington.
* Notes on Yankees/Orioles AA prospects, including lefties Manny Banuelos and Eddie Rodriguez.
* More notes, this time on the Ike Davis trade, some Lakewood/Hickory prospects, and Daniel Carbonell.
* This week’s Klawchat.

I’m a little overdue for a music update, with the draft sort of getting in the way of things earlier this month, but I think I’m back on track for now with this post, which covers a dozen songs to come out in the last few weeks or months that I’ve enjoyed. The new Spotify playlist below includes some other songs I’ve mentioned in previous music posts but haven’t put on a playlist before. As always, links on song titles go to amazon.

alt-J – “Hunger of the Pine.” I would have been disappointed if the first single from alt-J’s upcoming album was anything but weird, but as with An Awesome Wave, I had an immediate “WTF” reaction to this song, especially the presence of a sample from Miley Cyrus’ “4×4” in lieu of a traditional chorus. But as with everything I’ve ever heard from alt-J, the song’s complexity and precision becomes more and more apparent with each listen, and now I’m fired up again for the full release in September.

The Holidays – “Tongue Talk.” My pick for the top song of the year’s second quarter, “Tongue Talk” melds the Madchester sound with the musical experimentation of Beck, the best song I’ve heard so far from the Australian indie-pop act’s sophomore album, Real Feel. The first single from the LP, “All-Time High,” is lighter and poppier and apparently more indicative of their overall sound; I prefer the hints of darkness and tempo shifts of “Tongue Talk” for its greater balance.

Future Islands – “Seasons (Waiting On You).” It’s a good song, but I think it’s been boosted by their performance on the David Letterman show, featuring the lead singer’s mesmerizing dance. Without that, it might have just been set aside as a solid pop song drawing on 1970s soft-rock tropes.

Young Rising Sons – “High.” From nearby Red Bank, NJ, the band just signed with Interscope Records and I presume there will be an album somewhere in their near future. Good luck getting this one out of your head – my daughter latched on to this one right away.

The Horrors – “So Now You Know.” Hard to believe this is the same group that debuted with the shock-rock “Sheena Was a Parasite,” and I think to some extent they’ve sold out for more airplay by shifting into psychedlic-tinged indie rock. That doesn’t make this a bad song, just not what you’d expect if you liked The Horrors’ earlier work. Of course, every time I see this song title I start singing “…who gets mystifiiiiiiiied.”

Creases – “Static Lines.” If you liked the Libertines, I think you’ll like this, mostly because it sounds like a remastered Libertines track, but with less sloppy guitars.

Hundred Waters – “Xtalk.” I received a review copy of this album, but it’s not to my tastes at all, too slow and spacey, with breathy vocals that grated on me before I got halfway through it. There are a few more promising moments from this experimental group, who are touring with alt-J this summer, led by this track, driven by a plaintive synth line over the record’s most uptempo beat, as well as “[Animal],” which features a quiet drum-machine line that picks up volume as the song goes along and morphs into a techno track by the three-quarters mark.

The Bleachers – “I Wanna Get Better.” On the one hand, it’s the dopey sing-along song of the summer, and if the keyboard sample doesn’t make you think of Len’s “Steal My Sunshine” you’re probably under the age of 18. On the other hand, the lyrics have several strong images and make heavy use of assonance with what I think is a spot-on message about dealing with depression or similar mental illnesses. My daughter would tab this as one of her top three rocks songs for the summer.

Foster the People – “Are You What You Wanna Be?” The lead track from their newest album, Supermodel, also serves as the transition music for Baseball Tonight this year, and it’s the best song on the album, with a loud, catchy chorus interspersed with Afro-Caribbean percussion lines and vocals that descend and climb stairs with unexpected rapidity. Foster tried for more experimentation outside of the two singles from the album so far, and this song is where he struck the perfect balance between art and mass appeal.

Sleeper Agent – “Waves.” I admit I’m getting a little sick of this song already, but it’s very catchy and probably going to cross over to the pop side soon enough.

Tove Lo – “Habits (Stay High).” Pronounced like the name of the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu and not as a rhyme with “stove low,” Tove Lo is a Swedish singer whose pop rhythms belie the raw imagery in her lyrics. My daughter loves this song, probably her favorite song of the spring/summer, and fortunately she hasn’t asked me what “then I go to sex clubs/watching freaky people/gettin’ it on” means yet.

Knox Hamilton – “Work It Out.” A little lightweight but never twee, “Work It Out” is drive by the meandering twelve-note melody in its verses that feels like you’re wandering down an open-air staircase, with old-school soul influences and jangle-pop guitar lines behind the chorus.

Jack White – “Lazaretto.” I feel like White’s moment has passed, as there’s a broad backlash against his music and his behavior now, but that doesn’t affect what I think about his output, and the live jam-band feel of this first single from his newest album adds a new twist to his deep 1970s guitar lines. By the way, I had no idea what a lazaretto was – it sounds like a kind of Italian sports car – but ran across the word while reading Les Misérables and looked it up: “An isolation hospital for people with infectious diseases, especially leprosy or plague.” Oh.

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