→ March 1, 2016
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February 2016 music update.

I wrote up my thoughts on the Ian Desmond contract for Insiders. I also have a recap of this year’s new boardgame offerings at Toyfair over at Paste.

Not a great month for new music, although we did get the School of Seven Bells album, a comeback from Lush, an amazing new single from FKA Twigs, and two extreme metal tracks worth including.

The Jezabels – Come Alive. An Australian act that’s been around since 2007, the Jezabels create serious drama with the steady crescendo and bombastic finish to “Come Alive,” the lead single from their just-released third album Synthia. Unfortunately, the group just had to cancel their 2016 tour as their keyboardist undergoes urgent treatment for ovarian cancer, which does not sound good at all.

Lush – Out of Control. I loved Lush’s music back in the mid-1990s, especially when they transitioned from shoegaze to more straight-up Britpop with “Ladykillers” and “Single Girl” before disbanding. They reformed last year and have gone back to the sound that first put them on the map in the early 1990s, with the sort of shimmering, fuzzy guitar lines that got them lumped in with Ride, Swervedriver, and MBV. Lush was always a little more pop-informed than those other acts – perhaps a function of having a lead singer with a pretty voice that didn’t pair well with the waves of distortion that characterize true shoegaze.

FKA twigs – Good to Love. I was not a fan of FKA Twigs’ first full-length album, with praise that seemed more about who she was than about the quality of her music, but this is a remarkable song, showing off her voice and her vocal restraint, in a sparsely arranged ballad that’s radiates emotion.

Grace Mitchell – White Iverson. I’d never heard of Mitchell or this song before last week, and I’m only half pleased about this, because I went back and heard the original song, by yet another white pseudo-rapper appropriating black culture for profit, and it is truly atrocious. Mitchell’s cover turns it into a sinuous trip-hop track that suffers only for the ridiculousness of its lyrics.

Animal Collective – Golden Gal. Animal Collective got a little less weird on their new album, Painting With, which is why 1) I’ve listed two of its songs on monthly playlists and 2) you’re hearing their songs on the radio a little more than ever. Weird and experimental is great, but I’m not going to want to listen to it repeatedly if there isn’t some kind of hook.

Clairity – Don’t Panic. Another cover, this of one of the better yet less-known songs from Coldplay’s debut album, Parachutes. (For those of you rolling your eyes because you think of Coldplay as the atrocious pop band they are now, I promise, they weren’t always like this.) I love the new arrangement, but can’t fathom Claire Wilkinson’s bizarre pronunciation of the long ‘o’ sound throughout the track.

Bleached – Wednesday Night Melody. I always get a little Joan Jett vibe out of this trio, with big, simple riffs, although Jett’s stuff didn’t have the surfer vibe that informs a lot of Bleached’s music.

Bear Hands – 2 AM. You know, they’re right: Nothing good happens past 2 a.m.

Astronautalis – Papillion. And right on cue, here’s a white rapper, although the appeal of this song is the spacey music rather than the rhyming, where Astronautalis boasts good rhythm but generic lyrics.

Wild Nothing – Life of Pause. I’m a little disappointed in Wild Nothing’s latest album after the huge success of Nocturne, as he seems to be taking fewer risks and chasing more ’70s soft-rock sounds (when he isn’t ripping off Talk Talk as he did on the first single). This was probably my second-favorite track on the record.

Minor Victories – A Hundred Ropes. Is it a supergroup if the members come from groups that aren’t very popular in their own right? With members from Editors, Mogwai, and Slowdive, the band’s lead single sounds … well, a lot like what you’d get if you mixed Editors, Mogwai, and Slowdive. It’s good, though.

Spirit Animal – World War IV (To the Floor). If you’ve heard “Regular World,” which is way too douchebro for me to tolerate for more than a few seconds, put it out of your minds and listen to the rest of their EP, which is far less sneering and childish and brings some better riffs that bring in a few elements of funk to a hard-rock foundation.

Run River North – Pretender. The Korean-American sextet seems to have ditched the soft folk-rock style of their debut album for electric guitars and angry lyrics, perhaps not to the better, as the strongest appeal of their debut album was the harmonies that brought one or both of the two female members into the vocals.

Kero Kero Bonito – Lipslap. Their 2015 song “Picture This” should have been a huge crossover pop hit, but never caught on, so it appears the group has now gone back to their previous style, a little harder-edged J-pop with lead singer Sarah Midori Perry rapping in Japanese and English.

White Lung – Hungry. The lead single from this punk band’s upcoming album Paradise marks a big step forward in songwriting from their previous efforts, which resembled early punk rock in their semi-controlled anarchy. This is still hard-edged, but it’s also a pop song with a clearly identifiable hook, and puts Paradise on the list of albums to look forward to this spring.

School Of Seven Bells – This Is Our Time. The emotional closer to SVIIB, which I reviewed here last week.

Omnium Gatherum – Skyline. It’s been a while since I included any metal tracks on a monthly playlist, but this time we have two. This Finnish melodic death metal band employs growled vocals, but the tempo isn’t as extreme as straight-up death metal and you can pick out individual guitar lines (sometimes rather intricate) and even understand the occasional word or two. Their newest album, Grey Heavens, is a good example of the Finnish flavor of MDM, with fretwork that wouldn’t be out of place in more commercial songs.

Entombed A.D. – The Winner Has Lost. The progenitors of the death-n-roll subgenre are back, sort of, with their second album under their slightly revised name. (Hey, anything’s better than Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe.) The newish band’s sound is definitely a little heavier and less bluesy than Wolverine Blues, but the tradeoff is substantially better production values and cleaner guitar riffs, similar to what they brought on 2014’s Back to the Front.

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→ February 26, 2016
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SVIIB.

School of Seven Bells were working on their third album when member Ben Curtis, who was half of the group along with Alehandra Deheza, was diagnosed with T-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma; ten months after announcing the diagnosis, he died of the disease in December of 2013, leaving behind much of the music that has now appeared on the group’s final album, SVIIB (amazon • iTunes). Deheza, who was both Curtis’ musical partner and his former romantic partner, has done a number of interviews about the difficulty of revisiting this material and completing the album, which she did with the help of Curtis’ brother Brandon (of The Secret Machines) and producer Justin Meldal-Johnson, after taking a break from music to grieve. The resulting record is a gorgeous elegy to her late partner and their life and work together, bringing the same ethereal post-new wave style of music but with a new lyrical direction and, of course, the subtext of Curtis’ death underpinning the entire album.

The opener, “Ablaze,” is probably the most recognizably SVIIB song, teetering on the edge of upbeat dream-pop and their more traditional soundscape musical style, but when Deheza appears with the opening line, “How could I have known/the god of my youth/would come crashing down on my heart?” it’s clear that we are no longer in typical lyrical territory for the duo. It is impossible to hear Deheza singing (or sing-talking, as she does on several tracks) without thinking everything is directed at Curtis or is merely about him, whether it’s the references on “Ablaze” to Curtis relighting the spark in her life when she “had sunk into the black,” or the dual meanings on “Open Your Eyes,” one of which is directed at the partner whose eyes will never open again.

School of Seven Bells’ best tracks from their first three albums combined strong pop hooks built on layers of synthesizers and drum machines, a huge shift from Curtis’ work with his brother in The Secret Machines or as drummer for Tripping Daisy, but better built to take advantage of Deheza’s lower registers and the smoky quality to her voice. They seemed like the spiritual descendants of early Lush, but with cleaner sounds than shoegaze acts from twenty years ago, so that you could easily distinguish between the layers of music and could understand the lyrics. The first seven tracks on SVIIB all follow a similar template, most of them very successful as alternative/pop songs; “A Thousand Times More” could be a HAERTS track, while “Signals” meanders more into Chairlift/Grimes territory, but with richer textures, with a deluge of sound in the intense chorus.

And then we get to the final two tracks, “Confusion” and “This is Our Time,” where the tempo slows to match the mood of the lyrics, from elegy to eulogy, songs drenched in loss and grief. What we lose in melody we gain in emotional power as Deheza sings to Curtis’ memory over the album’s sparsest musical arrangements. She opens the latter track’s chorus with “Our time is indestructible,” but with Curtis’ passing she can only be referring to her memories of their time together, and how those can carry her forward despite her grief. I felt that the transition from seven mostly uptempo tracks to what is essentially a two-part closer with a slower pace and more funereal feel was sudden, but there’s no smarter way to organize the nine songs on the album, and pairing these two at the end makes clear the album’s dual purpose and the finality of its subject.

There are still missteps, like the lyrics to “On My Heart,” a shimmering pop song where Deheza trips herself up by eschewing the more poetic, image-laden words on the rest of the album, and her sing-talking technique starts to slip off-key. I’d much rather hear Deheza sing, even though her style is more finesse than power, given her voice’s airy, sensual quality, but it also seems like she had so much to say on some of SVIIB‘s tracks that singing the lyrics might not have left her enough time to get it all on the record. The album was probably going to receive praise anyway, because who’s going to trash an album recorded by a deceased musician and his grieving partner, but it turns out that School of Seven Bells’ swansong is their finest work to date, deserving of all the accolades it’s receiving and likely to end 2016 as one of the year’s best albums.

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→ January 31, 2016
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January 2016 music update.

My analysis of Arizona’s trade for Jean Segura is up for Insiders.

It was a huge month for new music, but it wasn’t all good – we got very disappointing albums from St. Lucia, Wet, Bloc Party, and Megadeth, among others, but some excellent albums from With Lions, Savages, Daughter, Hinds, Chairlift, and more, plus a few surprise singles from Bob Mould, the Last Shadow Puppets, Cullen Omori (ex-Smith Westerns), and HAERTS. And I haven’t even gotten to the latest from Suede, Dream Theater, or Tricky. I’ve got some work to do, but in the meantime, here are 22 songs to keep your ears busy.

With Lions – Down We Go. This Tennessee-based blues-rock trio first released this song via Soundcloud last year, but it just appeared on Spotify with the release of their newest album, the grooving, hypnotic Fast Luck (amazon • iTunes).

Yeasayer – I Am Chemistry. Yep, same band that gave us the 2010 hit “O.N.E.” but nothing quite so catchy since then, at least not until this track, which sort of sounds like Yeasayer trying to impersonate Imagine Dragons or A Silent Film … but with positive results, although I’m a sucker for a song full of scientific references to poisons, from sarin to acrylonitrile to oleander.

School Of Seven Bells – Ablaze. SVIIB’s fourth and final album, just titled SVIIB, is due out February 26th, and the advance singles are incredibly promising. It’s their final album because Benjamin Curtis, who made up half the group, passed away in December 2013 at age 35 of T-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma. He had previously been in the Secret Machines with his brother Brandon. I’ve always found vocalist Alejandra Deheza’s voice to be haunting and melancholy, and the context of this record will only make it more so.

Bob Mould – Voices in My Head. Does Bob Mould just wake up in the morning and spit out six great melodies while brushing his teeth? “Voices in My Head” would fit in just fine on Black Sheets of Rain, and that’s high praise indeed. There are some artists whose sounds should never change, and Mould is high on that list.

The Last Shadow Puppets – Bad Habits. TLSP appeared to be a one-time side project for Arctic Monkeys’ lead singer/songwriter Alex Turner, with one great album, 2008’s The Age of the Understatement, serving as a deliberately anachronistic homage to a lost era of pop music. This lead single from their second album, due out April 1st, seems to herald a big shift in direction towards a more abrasive, harder sound. It’s very insistent, but it’s not as catchy as the better songs from their debut. In Alex we trust, though.

Courtney Barnett – Three Packs a Day. Anything by Barnett, the best lyricist in contemporary music, is an automatic add to my playlists. This is kind of midrange for her, not as dirgey as “Depreston,” not as rousing as “Pedestrian at Best.” Of course, I adore her ode to umami, “That MSG tastes good to me/I disagree with all your warnings.”

Chairlift – Moth to the Flame. I haven’t spent enough time with Moth (amazon • iTunes), the duo’s first LP since 2012, but have loved several of the lead singles, including “Ch-Ching,” which made my top 10 songs of 2015, and “Romeo.” This is another very strong synth-pop single, so much smarter than what passes for pop music these days, boosted by Caroline Polachek’s lovely, acrobatic vocals.

Cullen Omori – Cinnamon. I actually did not know that the Smith Westerns had broken up (they did in 2014) until I got a press release about lead singer Omori’s first solo album, New Misery, which comes out on March 18th. This lead single isn’t SW material – it’s brighter, almost jangle-pop, heavy on reverb, and more memorable than anything SW produced.

Porches – Be Apart. Porches (the nom de tune of Aaron Maine) usually delivers dark, synth-heavy music, like someone who just listened to a little too much Bauhaus as a kid, so this song seems almost bright and sunny compared to some of their other stuff, but it still has that hint of shadow to keep things from getting too chummy.

White Denim – Holda You (I’m Pyscho). A surprisingly taut, concise track from these jazz-rock experimentalists, whose next album, Stiff, is due out in late March.

Savages – Adore. Savages’ first album, the amazing Silence Yourself, was full of short, potent, angry post-punk tracks, and flopped whenever the quartet tried to change the tempo; their second album, Adore Life (amazon • iTunes), which came out on January 22nd, features longer tracks and more successful ventures into slower material. Of course, they’re still at their best when they sound pissed off, but I’m not sure that formula would have lasted more than two albums before wearing out. I owe this LP a review, but my early opinion is very positive.

Wild Nothing – Reichpop. References to Hitler’s era are in now, don’t you know? (Phil Anselmo can really go fuck himself, by the way.) I’m not sure what to make of Wild Nothing’s new material; lead single “To Know You” wasn’t shy about, er, borrowing from Talk Talk’s “It’s My Life,” and now we get this lush single that sounds for all the world like a lost Oingo Boingo track. These are great influences to have, but has Jack Tatum lost the originality that made Nocturne such a great album?

Sunflower Bean – Easier Said. I liked “Wall Watcher” a bit more, primarily because it had such a weird chorus, but this is probably the more radio-friendly track.

Hinds – Castigadas En El Granero. This quartet of Barcelona teen girls has been getting hype for what seems like two full years now, so it’s almost anticlimactic to hear an actual full-length album from the band, but Leave Me Alone (amazon • iTunes) did indeed drop early in January. It’s just what you’d expect if you heard any of their EPs and singles, but perhaps a little toned-down. Their first few singles were joyously cacophanous, like they’d just picked up guitars and started strumming at random and were shouting out vocals on top of each other in this endearing, messy style. That’s lost a bit now that the ladies have better production at their disposal, but you can still get glimpses of that style in earlier singles like “Bamboo” and “Garden,” included on the album, as well as this track.

Lucius – Madness. This five-member band from Brooklyn really is the ne plus ultra of hipster bands, and I’ll admit it’s turned me off a lot of their music. (Just look at this picture of the group and tell me you think it’s a band and not some new company pretending to sell you bean-to-bar chocolate out of a disused warehouse.) The chorus on this song is very, very strong, though.

Lemaitre featuring Mark Johns – Stepping Stone. I’ve been singing Lemaitre’s praises around these parts for about two years now, and this collaboration with Mark Johns – who is a female singer from Singapore named Naomie who normally records for Skrillex’s imprint OWSLA – might be their most commercially-ready single yet.

Mass Gothic – Every Night You’ve Got to Save Me. Noel Heroux – why not just record under that name, which is great, instead of the pseudonym Mass Gothic? – used to be in Hooray for Earth, which definitely appeared on one of my 2014 playlists, but broke that band up to start a new solo project as Mass Gothic. This track is certainly unexpected – it feels like it fell out of the late 1950s, but with some more modern instrumentation, driven by a huge, hooky chorus.

The Joy Formidable – The Last Thing On My Mind. This Welsh outfit’s third full-length album, Hitch, dedicated entirely to the Will Smith/Kevin James movie (I just made that up), will be out on March 26th. I’ve liked their sound more than their songs in the past, as they’ve struggled to come up with good enough melodies to bring me back to any of their songs, so this track, with its sultry chorus, is easily my favorite to date.

Nevermen – Dark Ear. Supergroups are always groups but seldom super; Nevermen, which comprises Mike Patton (Faith No More), Tunde Adebimpe (TV on the Radio), and rapper/producer Doseone, is indeed less than the sum of its parts. “Dark Ear” shows what could have been, with the layered and almost competing lyrics, huge guitars, sonic shifts, and just a general sense of seismic unease throughout, but much of the album feels like unfinished experimentation.

Diiv – Is the Is Are. Every DIIV song sounds the same to me. But they’re mostly okay, so here’s the title track from their upcoming second LP, due out on Friday.

Boss Selection – Flip and Rewind (feat. Rashida Jones). Included primarily because that’s Ann Perkins on vocals.

HAERTS – Eva. Well, this was definitely the surprise release of the month: a three-song EP that still isn’t even mentioned on HAERTS’ official site, led by this nearly eight-minute epic that serves as a wonderful showcase for Nini Fabi’s voice and an introduction to HAERTS’ entire sound. I generally dislike songs of this length outside of the metal genre, where you get actual movements or time signature changes to keep things moving, but I didn’t even realize how long I’d been listening to “Eva” until it was well past the six-minute mark.

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→ January 20, 2016
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Not to Disappear.

Daughter, one of an increasing number of alternative artists determined to come up with the least Google-friendly name possible, first hit my radar late last year with the release of “Numbers,” the second single from their sophomore album, Not To Disappear (also on iTunes), which was just released on this past Friday. (Their debut album, If You Leave, came out in 2013 and missed my notice completely at the time, even though it peaked at #97 on the Billboard albums chart.) The English trio’s new album features ten tracks filled with spacey melodies that bring in elements of a diverse group of influences, from the Sugarcubes to alt-J to some vocal similarities to Sarah McLachlan, with musical twists that elevate some rather overwrought lyrics.

Daughter’s songs are all sparse; the band’s three members include a vocalist, a guitarist, and a drummer, with a lot of production effects to give the album that ethereal (I guess some listeners might say “stoned”) sound. The band compensates for the minimalist arrangements with major in-song shifts in texture and volume, such as the sudden tempo upshift that powers “Numbers” or the My Bloody Valentine-tinged wall of guitar in “How.” There’s a Madchester-inspired passage in “Not to Belong” that lasts less than thirty seconds, but elevates the whole song because it breaks up the spaceyness – Daughter never give us space rock (thank goodness) or ambient music, but omitting these tempo shifts would have left an album with a sedative effect, rather than the impact that Not to Disappear ends up having. The one passage that might give you some prog-rock pause, the extended outro on the seven-minute track “Fossa,” ends before it wears out any welcome – and we don’t get any excessive guitar-noodline – but it sets up the last track, the tenebrous “Made of Stone,” to be a bit of a letdown because it’s so much slower and softer than what precedes it.

The one real dud on the album, “Alone/With You,” returns to some of the flaws that plagued their first album, including lyrics best left on the cutting-room floor (“I hate living alone/Talking to myself is boring conversation … I hate walking alone/I should get a dog or something”) and a sense that the music behind the track was never properly finished. It’s a weird mid-album break, going from the worst track to the fastest and shortest song on the album, the Wire-like “No Care,” certainly one of Daughter’s best songs – the one that reminded me most of peak Sugarcubes – but an outlier in tempo and feel on an album that otherwise veers toward the mellow and contemplative.

“Numbers,” which features a little wordplay between the title and the repeated lines that begin “I feel numb,” is still the standout track here, one of two songs here that seem strongly influenced by alt-J’s debut album. (There’s a passage in “New Ways” that sounds extremely similar to the last movement of alt-J’s “Bloodflood.”) But it’s a different sound from most of the acts getting alternative airplay right now, even the surfeit of female-singer/male-band acts who seem like they’re coming right off the hipster assembly line, with this unique blend of influences producing such an interesting – I mean that in a good way – result. Not to Disappear remains an imperfect album, but with enough improvement over their earlier work that it seems to be building toward a substantial breakout in the near future.

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