→ April 19, 2024
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All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade.

I was lukewarm on the Libertines in their brief, drug-addled heyday, and largely oblivious to the drama around their self-titled second album, which looked for a decade like it might be their last, as the band broke up and Pete Doherty was in and out of rehab (and legal trouble). The likely lads returned in 2015 with a third album, Anthem for Doomed Youth, which had one great song (“Gunga Din”) but a lot of tepid material that couldn’t come close to the energy of their first two records. Even if you didn’t love their songs, those albums crackled with the thrill of a band that always felt like it was teetering on the edge of disaster – much like Oasis did at its peak, and in both cases it seemed to fuel greater creativity as well.

Over the last twenty years I’ve come to appreciate the Libertines even more. “Time for Heroes” has long been my favorite of their songs, and “Can’t Stand Me Now” is another banger that also has one of the best album intro passages I can remember hearing, but, taken together, their 2003-04 output feels like they captured a specific moment in British music history. They came along just a few years after the implosion of Britpop, owing something to that genre’s melodic instincts, but their playing was messier, almost dirtier, and they paired it with wry, witty lyrics, bringing some obvious Stones influence along with elements of punk and even …

The Libertines returned just this month with their fourth album, their first in nine years, All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade, and I think it’s the best thing they’ve ever done. It’s certainly the most interesting new album I’ve heard this year, mixing in styles and sounds we haven’t heard from Carl Barât and Doherty before with that same reckless energy that made their first two LPs so exciting. (I’m not ignoring Cowboy Carter, which was nothing if not interesting, but I was shocked by how un-catchy much of that album is.) All Quiet is the album that they should have come back with in 2015. It’s a statement record, and just happens to be full of incredible hooks.

The album opens with one of the lead singles, the incredibly catchy “Run Run Run,” with its winking earworm chorus: “You’d better run, run, run/Faster than the past” might just refer to the band’s own sordid history, one would think. It’s a strong choice to start the record, setting the stage for the mostly uptempo songs to come while still sounding very much like the Libertines right from the introductory drum line. It’s one of four tracks on the record that connect this album to the first two, along with “Oh Shit, “I Have a Friend,” and “Be Young,” all of which are, to use the technical term, bangers.

Those tracks buy some goodwill for the lads to experiment a little, and fortunately this time around the experiments mostly land. “The Night of the Hunter” interpolates a bit of “Swan Lake,” of all things, while managing to sound like it came from the soundtrack to The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. “Oh Shit” starts with a guitar lick that sounds so familiar – an inverted version of the main riff from “Boys Don’t Cry?” – and never takes its foot off the gas. “Shiver” is not a cover of the Coldplay song, but instead is a swirling, psychedelic track that’s unique in their catalog for its melding of that ‘70s psychedelia with some of the 1990s Britpop that paved the way for their initial success, and hearing the lads sing about “Reasons to stay alive/Not to die at 25” should certainly bring to mind the unlikeliness of this band still being intact twenty years on.

I couldn’t totally get on board with the closer, “Songs They Never Play on the Radio,” although the fact that the Libertines utilized a backing chorus on several tracks also marks some of the band’s progression into this older, wiser status. “Man With the Melody” is just a miss, one where I can’t even see the vision in what feels like a throwaway track in both music and lyrics, and “Baron’s Claw” also kills some of the momentum built up by the prior two tracks. “Merry Old England,” however, shows the Libertines slowing down the tempo while still managing to incorporate a strong hook, with some of their best lyrics ever, appropriating the language of the xenophobic right – even stealing a headline from The Sun about “illegals” – to cover the plight of migrants coming to England in search of a better life, only to receive “a B&B and vouchers for three square.”

The Libertines have now scored their second #1 album in the UK with All Quiet…, after their self-titled sophomore album did the same in 2004, but their commercial success has been limited to Britain and they’ve barely made a dent in the U.S. It contributes to an underrating of the band’s importance in music history, as they were critical in the resurgence of rock music after the death of Britpop in the late 1990s ushered in an era of more commercial pop and less rock-oriented indie pop acts like Coldplay and Travis. Without the Libertines, do we get the Arctic Monkeys, who have a very similar sound but cleaner production and playing, and take Doherty & Barât’s witty lyrical style to another level? Or Franz Ferdinand, the Wombats, Jamie T, the Rills, or Sports Team? The Libertines’ original two albums were part of a brief revival of garage-rock – often mislabeled as post-punk because they kind of played fast – that opened the doors for multiple waves of Brit-rock after their initial breakup. Let’s hope that this album gets them their due beyond the shores of merry old England.

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→ May 12, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 5/12/18.

This week brought the return of the redraft columns, where I go back ten years and ‘redraft’ the first round with full hindsight. This year’s edition redrafted the first round of 2008, led by Buster Posey and with several guys taken after the tenth round (one in the 42nd!) making the final 30; as well as an accompanying look at the 20 first-rounders who didn’t pan out. Both are Insider pieces, as is my column of scouting notes on Yankees, Phillies, Nats, and Royals prospects.

My review of the new Civilization board game is up at Paste this week. Civilization: A New Dawn takes the theme of the legendary Sid Meier video game franchise and simplifies it to play in about an hour to an hour and a half, but I felt like some of the better world-building aspects were lost in the streamlining.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I’ll be at DC’s famed bookstore Politics & Prose on July 14th to flaunt the fruits of noble birth and, perhaps, sign copies of the book. I’m also working on a signing in greater Boston for later that month, so stay tuned for details. Also, please consider signing up for my free email newsletter.

I also wanted to mention a few new baseball books by folks I know that have come out in the last six weeks: Russell Carleton’s The Shift: The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking, which I think goes well with my own book without covering much of the same ground; and two books on the Dodgers, Michael Schiavone’s The Dodgers: 60 Years in Los Angeles and Jon Weisman’s Brothers in Arms: Koufax, Kershaw, and the Dodgers’ Extraordinary Pitching Tradition, even though Jon liked the movie Moneyball and therefore was wrong about it.

And now, the links…

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→ May 11, 2018
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Not Dead Yet.

I came of age as a music fan right around 1980, thanks in part to some of those old K-Tel pop hits collections (on vinyl!) that my parents bought me as gifts, one of which included Genesis’ hit “Abacab.” I loved the song right away, despite having no idea what it was about (still don’t), and it made me a quick fan of Genesis, and, by extension, Phil Collins’ solo material, which at that point already included “In the Air Tonight.” I’d say I continued as a fan of both until the early 1990s, when Genesis released their self-immolating We Can’t Dance (an atrocious, boring pop record) and Collins’ own solo work became similarly formulaic and dull. It was only well after the fact that I heard any of the first phase of Genesis, where Peter Gabriel was still in the band and their music was progressive art rock that featured adventurous writing and technical proficiency.

Collins’ memoir, Not Dead Yet, details the history of the band through his eyes as well as a look at his solo career and his tangled personal life, some of which made tabloid headlines, leading up to his inadvertent effort at drinking himself to death just a few years ago. The book seems open about many aspects of Collins’ life, including mistreatment of his three wives and his children (mostly by choosing work over his familial duties) and his refusal to accept that he had a substance-abuse problem, but there’s also a strain of self-justification for much of his behavior that I found offputting.

From a narrative sense, the book’s high point is too close to the beginning: When Collins was just starting out in the English music scene, his path intersected with numerous musicians who’d later become superstars and some of whom would be his friends and/or writing partners later in life, including Eric Clapton, Robert Plant, and George Harrison. The Sing Street-ish feel to those chapters is so charming I wondered how much was really accurate, but Collins does at least depict himself as a star struck kid encountering some of his heroes while he’s still learning his craft as a drummer. I also didn’t know Collins was a child actor, even taking a few significant stage roles in London, before his voice broke and he switched to music as a full-time vocation.

The Genesis chapters feel a little Behind the Music, but they’re fairly cordial overall – Collins doesn’t dish on his ex-mates and if anything seems at pains to depict Gabriel as a good bandmate and friend whose vision happened to grow beyond what the band was willing or able to achieve. It’s the stuff on Collins’ personal life that really starts to grate: He talks about being a terrible husband and father, but there’s enough equivocation in his writing (often quite erudite, even though he didn’t finish high school) to suggest that he isn’t taking full responsibility for his actions. He cheated on two wives, he ignored their wishes that he devote more time to his family, and he seems to have harassed the woman half his age (he was 44, she 22) who became his third wife and mother of the last two of his five kids.

It’s also hard to reconcile Collins’ comments on his own songwriting, both on solo records and in later word for Disney films and Broadway shows, with the inferior quality of most of his lyrics. Collins’ strengths were his voice, his sense of melody, and of course his work on the drums. His lyrics often left a lot to be desired, and their quality, never high, merely declined as he became more popular. Even his last #1 song in the U.S., “Another Day in Paradise,” is a mawkish take on the same subject covered more sensitively in “The Way It Is” and a dozen other songs on visible poverty in a developed, wealthy economy.

Since that’s all I have to say on the book, I’ll tell one random Collins-related story. When I was in high school, MTV briefly had an afternoon show called the Heavy Metal Half-Hour, which they later retitled the Hard 30. It was hair metal, so not really very heavy by an objective standard, but harder rock than what they played the rest of the time. One day during the Hard 30 run, they played … Phil Collins’ cover of “You Can’t Hurry Love.” I’m convinced this wasn’t an accident, but a test to see if anyone was watching. The show was cancelled a few weeks later.

Next up: I’m about halfway through Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning novel Oscar and Lucinda, later turned into a movie with a very young Voldemort and Queen Elizabeth.

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→ April 5, 2016
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March 2016 music update.

Well, March turned out to be a tough month for me to blog much, but it was a great month for new music – I originally had over 30 tracks on this playlist and had to fight just to get it down to 23, including the four metal tracks at the end, which is the most I’ve ever included on one of these updates. We even got surprise (to me, at least) tracks from Broods, Royal Blood, and Corinne Bailey Rae. The April list may be a big shorter because I added some songs here that came out last Friday, but I didn’t want to wait another month to put them on a list.

Bob Mould – The End of Things. The former Husker Du lead singer is back with his best solo effort since Black Sheets of Rain, showing some of the same old ferocity that characterized his best power-pop work from two decades ago.

Royal Blood – Where Are You Now. Royal Blood had my #1 song of 2014, “Out of the Black,” and their sound hasn’t changed at all on this single from the critically-panned HBO series Vinyl.

The Kills – Doing It To Death. My list of the top 100 songs of the first decade of the 2000s missed the Kills’ 2008 song “Sour Cherry,” which I didn’t hear for the first time until about a year ago. Anyway, this is the sultry lead single from their album Ash & Ice, due out June 3rd.

The Struts – Kiss This. So my friend Pete, whom I’ve known since the sixth grade, and I have long had a huge overlap in our musical tastes, and we’ve both stayed into music into our dotage, so when we talk we nearly always end up chatting about what we’ve heard lately. I had dinner with Pete and another friend from high school on Friday night, and I mentioned some of the bands on this month’s playlist. When I mentioned the Struts without a ton of enthusiasm, because I like this song but recognize it’s kind of cliched and familiar, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “yeah.” That’s about right.

Bleached – Sour Candy. Bleached, now a trio, seems like they might be on the verge of a breakout with the first two singles from their sophomore album Welcome the Worms, which just came out on Friday. Their sense of melody is more in the front of things on this record, so it’s less hard-edged although still punk-influenced.

The Last Shadow Puppets – Aviation. I’m a little concerned this LSP album isn’t going to live up to expectations, as Alex Turner’s incredible ability to craft sharp hooks hasn’t been evident enough on the first three singles. “Miracle Aligner,” the third, is probably the worst LSP song I’ve heard. This song is somewhere in the middle; the sound is right, but where’s the big catchy melody?

Jake Bugg – Gimme The Love. This seems more like the Jake Bugg of Shangri-La, with clever, fast-sung lyrics and a solid riff, although it doesn’t quite rock like “What Doesn’t Kill You” or hypnotize like “Lighning Bolt.” His third album drops on June 17th.

Broods – Free. This brother/sister duo had one of my favorite albums of 2014, and they’re incorporating more electronic sounds into their sophomore album, expected later this year. This lead single has the electronic drum beat behind Georgia Nott’s voice, but she’s showcased as well as ever here – and that’s key, since her voice is by far their strongest asset.

Corinne Bailey Rae – Stop Where You Are. Bailey Rae is releasing her first album of new music in six years, The Heart Speaks in Whispers, on May 13th, only her third album overall and second since the overdose of her first husband, Jason Rae, in 2008. (She has since remarried.) The Grammy-winning singer’s voice remains in top form on this lead single, so while I’ve never loved the smooth-jazz style of her music, I could listen to her sing all day.

Ten Fé – Elodie. This British duo has released several singles of meditative, dreamy indie-pop that reminds me a bit of The War on Drugs if you dialed down the Dylan a bit.

The Boxer Rebellion – Big Ideas. I like the Boxer Rebellion’s sound, but their music often seems to lack big hooks, outside of their outstanding 2013 single “Diamonds.” This song isn’t quite as catchy but does offer some early U2 nods in the chorus.

HÆLOS – Separate Lives. This London trio’s sound reminds me of the mid/early 1990s trip-hop scene if you crossed it with some of the vocal styles of more classic R&B; the contrast between the sparseness of the verses and the lush textures of the chorus is the song’s greatest appeal even without a single huge hook.

The War On Drugs – Touch of Grey. Speaking of TWOD, the amazing thing about this cover of the Grateful Dead’s only pop hit is that vocalist/guitarist Adam Granduciel manages to make it sound like it was always a War on Drugs song and not something written by a band with its own distinctive sound.

D.A.R.K. – Curvy. This is a bad band name. Comprising Cranberries lead singer Dolores O’Riordan and Smiths bassist Andy Rourke, the group will release its debut album, Science Agrees, in late May, and this lead single sounds less like either of their original acts than it does like a New Order track.

Black Honey – All My Pride. Psychedelic power-pop. I actually know nothing about the group other than this song.

Autolux – Brainwasher. I mean, I knew Autolux was weird, but this song sounds like someone falling down a flight of stairs, and the new album is called Pussy’s Dead, so it’s as if they’re trying to prove they’re even weirder than we thought.

Mourn – Storyteller. Hinds get all the indie love right now, but they’re not the only important band coming out of Barcelona, as Mourn – three girls and one guy, as opposed to Hinds’ all-female roster – have a similar dissonant, jangly, post-punk sound, but with better musicianship. I do like Hinds, but there’s almost a sense that they’re still learning to play and write music, whereas Mourn are much further along as musicians.

White Lung – Kiss Me When I Bleed. This Canadian punk quartet also looks primed for a breakout this year, between the strength of this single and the January release “Hungry.” It’s heavy, fast, and very catchy.

Thrice – Blood On The Sand. That is indeed Riley Breckenridge of the Productive Outs podcast on drums; the post-punk icons’ ninth album is due out later this year.

Anup Sastry – Enigma. A progressive-metal drummer who’s part of Monuments and has also been a member Skyharbor and Intervals, Sastry has released a five-track EP of instrumental “groove metal” or djent or whatever you want to call it. I happen to like this style when it’s not ruined by aggro vocals.

Voivod – Post Society. Voivod hasn’t been the same band for me since the 2005 death of founding guitarist Denis “Piggy” d’Amour, given how critical his songwriting was to their peak albums Nothingface and Dimension Hatross, but this six-minute track from the February EP of the same title offers a strong facsimile of their late ’80s transitional sound as they were moving from straight thrash to the progressive metal sound of Nothingface.

Prong – Cut And Dry. Prong’s 1990 major-label debut, Beg to Differ, remains one of the best metal albums I’ve ever heard, an accessible hybrid of thrash and hardcore styles that brings out the best elements of both genres. They went into a steady decline from there, and their output since their 2003 return has been generally disappointing, but as with the Voivod track above, “Cut and Dry” at least brings back some memories of Prong’s early-1990s peak.

Amon Amarth featuring Doro Pesch – A Dream That Cannot Be. This isn’t actually my favorite track from Amon Amarth’s Viking-themed death metal album Jomsviking, but it’s the only track on the album to feature former Warlock vocalist Doro Pesch.

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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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→ September 28, 2015
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Every Open Eye.

CHVRCHES’ 2013 debut album, The Bones of What You Believe, was my #2 album of 2013, an upbeat electro-pop album that put five songs on my top 100 for that year and turned singer Lauren Mayberry into a minor star. The singles leading up to their second album Every Open Eye (iTunes), released on Friday, showed tremendous promise that this disc would be more of the same but better, and it is undeniably so; the album is a direct descendant of Prince’s Purple Rain with its layered synthesizers and R&B-influenced rhythms, to say nothing of the album’s unending stream of great pop hooks.

Every Open Eye begins with the two lead singles, “Never Ending Circles” and “Leave a Trace,” both among the best tracks of the year, showcasing the group’s signature sounds while adding more complex production and instrumentation behind Mayberry’s vocals. She sings like a 5’10” power hitter – her voice is strong for its size – and while lyrics aren’t quite a strength they’re also clearly improved from the first album. Indeed, the opening quintet of tracks all seem like they could have been authored by Prince in his synth-R&B heyday, which is unsurprising from a band that once included a cover of “I Would Die 4 U” in its setlists and drew inspiration from the 1980s without quaffing too deeply on the new wave music of that era. When CHVRCHES does put a keyboard line at the front of a track, as on “Make Them Gold,” that line still makes way for Mayberry to provide the primary melody, in this case in the song that most directly reminded me of the Purple Rain soundtrack.

The most remarkable part of Every Open Eye is the sheer variety of melodic lines the trio carve out of what would appear to be a single block of marble: the eight strong tracks (of eleven) are all variations on a central musical motif, yet they’ve crafted distinct tracks with small changes in the layering of their synth lines and with Mayberry shifting registers or altering a few notes in each chorus. I might have thought they’d run out of room for growth within this particular sound after one album, but through two albums they’ve shown no signs whatsoever of doing so. You won’t mistake a CHVRCHES song for anyone else, but the way the group can carve uplifting chanters like “Bury It” and driving angst-filled songs like “Empty Threat” from the same stone is their greatest strength.

The slips on EOE mirror those from the band’s debut: when Mayberry isn’t singing, or when the group slows the tempo. Mayberry only takes one song off from singing, here on the soulful “High Enough to Carry You Over,” but without her vocal power or charisma it falls horribly flat. That charisma is also notably absent on the slowest tracks on the album, “Down Side of Me” and the dismal closer “Afterglow,” which deviate from the formula that has made CHVRCHES cross-over successes even with their inherently British sound (including Mayberry’s Scottish brogue). The deluxe edition of Every Open Eye includes three bonus tracks, including “Get Away” (#46 on my top songs of 2014) from the re-scoring of the film Drive; the forgettable “Follow You,” sung by Martin Doherty; and “Bow Down,” which sounds more like a B-side due to the lack of a strong central melody.

I imagine the first couplet on the album, “Throw me no more bones/and I will tell you no lies,” was a nod to their debut’s title and an indication that they wanted to shift direction with this release, but they truly haven’t done so: EOE is the clear successor to their first record, but an evolution rather than a change in direction, and that’s the best possible outcome for listeners. For the second time in their short careers, CHVRCHES have churned out one of the year’s best albums, a little light on experimentation but incredibly deep in compelling hooks.

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→ September 15, 2015
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The Book of Souls.

My latest piece for Insiders names my 2015 Prospect of the Year, along with a bunch of other “nominees” and the 2015 draftees with the best pro debuts.

Until a couple of weeks ago, I assumed Iron Maiden was finished as a band after 2010’s forgettable The Final Frontier, as the band members are mostly in their late 50s and have started to encounter health problems, most notably lead singer Bruce Dickinson’s bout with a cancerous tumor on his tongue earlier this year. The mere existence of their new album, The Book Of Souls, was thus a surprise, as was its length – a 90-minute double album in an era where the entire idea of an album is losing its relevance – but there was no greater shock than the fact that the album, while uneven, is pretty damn good overall.

Most of the eleven songs on the record are prog-rock in length, three clocking in beyond the ten-minute mark, but without most of the masturbatory prog-rock noodling that has forever sworn me off the likes of King Crimson or Marillion; only one track comes in under five minutes and it is by far the worst song on the album. Instead of overly complex solos or time-signature shifts, Maiden – primarily bassist and main songwriter Steve Harris – give us driving guitar riffs highly reminiscent of their peak era from The Number of the Beast through Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, as well as Harris’ signature galloping bass lines. Maiden’s best material combined a strong melodic sense with the heavy major-key riffing that inspired a generation of metal bands, many of whom were overwhelmed by or assimilated into the hair-metal scourge of the late 1980s. (Queensrÿche remains, for me, the strongest of the post-Maiden acts, although they too went off the rails with Empire after Operation: Mindcrime earned far more critical acclaim than commercial success.

Because Harris didn’t write all the material on Book of Souls, there are clear stylistic differences across the various tracks, and the lead single, “Speed of Light,” written by Dickinson and Adrian Smith, is tighter and shorter than Harris’ writings. It’s worthy of comparison to the band’s best singles from the 1980s (“Wasted Years,” “The Number of the Beast,” and “Run to the Hills”), although it’s one of the songs that overtaxes Dickinson’s voice to a distressing degree. Harris keeps things to about six and a half minutes on “The Great Unknown,” providing tremendous contrast with an extended, dark acoustic outro that seems inspired by Black Sabbath and that leads perfectly into the similarly tenebrous intro to the thirteen-minute epic “The Red and the Black,” which quickly gives way to a riff very similar to the main line from “Hallowed Be Thy Name.” (I was a little disappointed that the song isn’t in any way connected to the novel of that name by Stendhal.) That song has a lengthy guitar solo that never devolves into mindless shredding, repeating an outstanding if short melodic lead guitar line, leading into a second instrumental section with two lead guitars playing parallel lines, with its only misstep in the final minute with a too-abrupt shift to the outro. “When the River Runs Deep” returns to somewhat radio-friendly length, an unabashed throwback to the period of Maiden that, in hindsight, appears to have directly influenced the rise of early thrash metal.

The album’s two great weaknesses are Dickinson’s voice, which can no longer hit the higher registers that marked him as one of the great vocalists of early metal, and the lack of ideas at the back of the last quarter or so of the release. The lyrics of “Tears of a Clown,” a tribute to Robin Williams, are embarrassingly mawkish, riddled with platitudes like “Maybe it’s all just for the best/Lay his weary head to rest.” The music sounds as if Harris had been trying to write something that might appear on the singles charts, which Maiden hasn’t pulled off since the bizarre trip to #1 in the UK of Dickinson’s “Bring Your Daughter … to the Slaughter,” an absolute low point in the band’s history.

The 18-minute closer, “Empire of the Clouds,” marks the longest track in Maiden’s history, surpassing “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” from Powerslave, which quoted pieces of Coleridge’s epic poem and has become one of their most enduring hits. The comparisons are inevitable, and inevitably unfavorable, especially as it’s nearly impossible to record a rock song of nearly twenty minutes that doesn’t fall short at multiple points, and “Empire” never seems to get going in the first place; Dickinson’s operatic aspirations don’t translate at all well to the format, and the first truly memorable piece of music in the track is the two-measure guitar riff that pops up after seven-plus minutes have elapsed, by which point I assume most listeners would have abandoned ship.

That criticism may be specious in a double album that runs an hour and a half and provides plenty of music above replacement, including numerous tracks that do work as singles, including “Speed of Light,” “Death or Glory,” “When the River Runs Deep,” and lengthy opener “If Eternity Should Fail,” penned by Smith and Dickinson but more true to the spirit of Harris’ songwriting than even some of his own tracks. When “Shadows of the Valley” opens up with a lick that has to be a nod to the monumental line that starts “Wasted Years,” it’s more than enough of a statement that Harris, Smith, and Dickinson remain capable of producing songs that are worlds ahead of the artists that have long tried to emulate them.

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→ April 21, 2015
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Undertow (Drenge album).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ February 3, 2015
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Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance.

Is there anything quite so Belle & Sebastian as a song titled “Enter Sylvia Plath?” The veteran Scottish indie-folk-rock-whatever group, known as much for their low profile as for their music, have always enjoyed great critical acclaim but never much commercial success, which I believe is the result of their refusal to sound un-British and their use of song titles and lyrics that range from abstruse to sinister, too cerebral for mass appeal even though much of their music is blatantly pop in nature. They’ve had a few gold records in the UK, but have had very little sales traction outside of Britain, not even in Australia, often the most receptive market for distinctly British acts.

“Enter Sylvia Plath” encapsulates the paradox of B&S, as it’s a 131 bpm electronic dance song that name-drops a poet/author who produced depressing material that matched her tragic biography. It’s part of the soft middle of the band’s new album, Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, their first since 2010’s quiet, underappreciated Write About Love. The new album kicks off with a quartet of effusive pop songs that would fit as well on any pop/top 40 station as on independent or alternative radio, including the lead single “The Party Line” (#3 on my list of the top songs of 2014), enough to buoy almost any album on to a year-end best-of list. Beyond the initial promise the boys (and girl) can’t sustain the energy that drove the opening chapter, with music that’s more pleasant background listening rather than the hook-laden stuff that demands your full attention, more intriguing lyrically than musically.

Ah, but that opening tetrad is something else. “Nobody’s Empire” begins with a swirling piano riff and softly thumping bass drum before lead singer/songwriter Stuart Murdoch introduces a sunny melody that goes back to 1960s pop, belying the lyrics describing Murdoch’s own experiences with the debilitating chronic fatigue syndrome, along with the first of many wonderful quotes from the record – “Marching with the crowd singing dirty and loud/For the people’s emancipation” (Shouldn’t all protest songs be dirty and loud?) “Allie” plays like a sly, sinister detective story describing a woman fighting some kind of mental illness that puts her through delusions and desires for self-harm, over the album’s best hook, a shuffling minor-chord blues pattern that refuses to let you catch your balance any more than the song’s subject can. “The Party Line” might be the best pure pop song Belle & Sebastian have ever recorded, replete with Murdoch’s typical wordplay (he’s calling you to the dance floor more than to a partisan debate). “The Power of Three” at least starts to downshift the listener before the softer middle third of the album, moving towards a glammier ’70s vibe with the tinny synth riff that powers the bridges after each chorus, although by the end of its four minutes they’ve dissipated much of the energy that powered the first trio of tracks.

The middle of the album drags both due to the drop in tempo and the length of several of its songs, with “The Cat with the Cream” a sedative to bring everyone down from the high of the start of the album, leading into “Enter Sylvia Plath” almost with a whisper. “The Everlasting Muse” dips into a musical allusion to Russian folk dances for an incongruous middle movement, certainly true to the band’s roots in folk music but less subtle than their best work. The pace doesn’t pick back up until the seven-minute opus “Play for Today,” featuring Dum Dum Girls singer/songwriter Dee Dee Penny sharing vocal duties with Murdoch in a song laced with mid-80s new wave trappings that seems to run far shorter than its actual length thanks to the shared vocal duties. That song sets up “The Book of You,” with Sarah Martin taking over lead vocals on another banger that builds up to an old-fashioned rock guitar solo, but the newfound momentum collapses with the dirge-like closer “Today (This Army’s for Peace.”

For a band that’s been around for nearly twenty years now, releasing nine albums, Belle & Sebastian manage to sound new at several points on Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, never more so than when they live up the album’s title by producing songs that combine great hooks with beats and rhythms suited for the dance floor. The album is surprisingly incoherent for a group whose songwriting and production always feel so meticulous, almost like it’s two half-albums mashed together without a thought to sequencing. The portion that finds Belle & Sebastian feeling the urge to get up and dance is the revelation here, a new dimension from a group that, while talented, seemed to have fallen into its own set ways.

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→ May 19, 2014
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Odludek.

Jimi Goodwin, lead singer and bassist for the popular British rock band Doves, recently released his first solo album, Odludek, while the group is on an indefinite hiatus. I was a longtime Doves fan for their eclectic approach to each album, use of heavily textured music that often recalled their brief time as an electronic act called Sub Sub, including the landmark The Last Broadcast, which hit #1 in the UK and produced a top ten hit in “There Goes the Fear.” Doves never found much traction in the U.S. – Broadcast peaked at #83 here and none of their singles charted – but that hasn’t deterred Goodwin from making a Doves-like album, even weirder on some songs than the most experimental Doves material, but far less even than his old band’s best releases.

Goodwin crosses many genres on Odludek, from ’70s funk-inflected tracks like the opener “Terracotta Warrior” to the electronic influences of “Live Like a River.” Oddly enough, however, the strongest moments on Odludek are when Goodwin goes acoustic, borrowing from the same source material that drives artists like Mumford and Sons and even underlies the sanitized Irish folk songs of Celtic Woman. “Hope,” “Oh Whiskey,” and the brilliant closer “Panic Tree” are all built on familiar acoustic guitar rhythms, each bringing a different twist to the format to avoid the “I’ve heard this before” feeling of the various knockoff acts sailing in the wake of Mumford’s first album (and I’d include their second album in that category). “Oh Whiskey” comes along like a drinking song, a plea to a different kind of spirit to bring him patience or empathy – but not the blues. “Hope” finds Goodwin singing beyond his range to begin the song, but gains intensity with the deep harmonies behind the chorus reminiscent of Negro spirituals. “Panic Tree” tells a family history of anxiety via the metaphor of, yes, a tree growing in the yard for generations, a serious subject treated with humor over music that sounds like it’s lifted from a nursery rhyme or a Raffi album.

The common thread tying the album together is a sense of musical exploration, grafting sounds on to each other even though the immediate connection isn’t apparent. That supports some of the weaker tracks where Goodwin cranks up the distortion and the tempo, as on “Terracotta Warrior,” which has horn-heavy breaks in between the heavily strummed guitar lines. Unfortunately Goodwin’s songwriting suffers as he tries to ramp up the complexity; “Lonely at the Drop,” an acoustic/electric track with lyrics that offer a bitter attack on Christianity, opens with a guitar riff we’ve heard a thousand times before and moves like a car that’s driving without a destination. “Man V Dingo,” the album’s most eccentric track, rides a dissonant riff too long – a tritone just begs for a resolution at some point – and comes across like an attempt to mimic freeform jazz in a rock format. The slowest tracks, “Keep My Soul in Song” and “Didsbury Girl,” pass by without making any impact, musical neutrinos that don’t showcase any melody or technical skill.

Doves may not return to the studio any time soon – the band hasn’t officially broken up, but it sounds like it’ll be a while before we get new material, if at all – and I was hoping a great Goodwin solo album would tide me over, but Odludek falls short of the mark. While the three strong acoustic tracks show off his sense of melody and make better use of his wry lyrical voice, the remainder of the album doesn’t have the hooks to justify the experimentation, and the lack of consistency across the ten tracks only seems to emphasize its lack of strong melodic elements.

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I won’t give Courtney Barnett’s The Double Ep: A Sea of Split Peas a full review, but there are two standout tracks on the album, which features brilliant (if weird) lyrics set to some pretty simple music. Most of the time Barnett seems to be sing-talking over her guitar, but “Avant Gardener” (available free on amazon right now) and “History Eraser” have actual melodies to go along with the insane stories she’s telling. “Avant Gardener” turns a routine afternoon going outside, picking weeds and preparing to plant a garden, into an asthma attack that sends her to the hospital; on the way she observes that the parademic “thinks I’m clever because I play guitar/I think she’s clever ’cause she stops people dying.” Meanwhile, “History Eraser” tells of a drunken evening in a style that mimics the meandering, stream-of-consciousness thinking of an inebriated person, but with tons of wordplay, assonance, and allusions that you’d have a hard time conceiving if you were sloshed. She’s one to watch if those two songs are any indicator of what she’s capable of writing.

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