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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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→ 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.

–

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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→ April 14, 2014
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Kaiser Chiefs and Cloud Nothings.

My latest post at ESPN is on the draft blog, discussing Carlos Rodon’s pitch counts and scouting some draft prospects, including Luke Weaver and Max Pentecost.

Kaiser Chiefs’ second-ever single, 2004’s “I Predict a Riot,” was a global hit and one of my favorite songs of the first decade of the 2000s. Their second album had one solid single, “Ruby,” but since that point the bad seemed to hit new lows with each release; their 2012 album Start the Revolution Without Me was so bad I never bothered to review it.

That devolution makes this year’s Education, Education, Education & War (also on iTunes) all the more fantastic: It’s the best album of the band’s career, packed with blue-collar anthems, still melodic but with a new lyrical maturity and more consistent hooks from start to finish. No track stands out quite like “Riot,” but there are a half-dozen songs on here that would hold up well as singles, and fewer filler tracks than any of their previous full-lengths. The album even gets bonus points for a cameo by the wonderful actor Bill Nighy, narrating a brief poem at the end of the disc’s best song, “Cannons.”

Education opens with a statement of purpose, “The Factory Gates,” a morbidly witty elegy to the dead-end job of the factory worker – ineffective as any kind of protest song, but more profound as a statement of despair at a career that no longer offers any kind of upward mobility: “I’m a shopworn sales campaign/Trapped behind yellow cellophane… ” That leads into the first single, the downtempo “Coming Home,” before the album’s first stumble in “Misery Company,” where a hackneyed bit of wordplay and overplayed cackling line after the chorus sound like someone’s trying too hard to get airplay.

The Chiefs’ strongest moments have always come when they infuse their songs with high-energy riffs, and other than the slower “Coming Home,” the same applies on Education, including “Factory Gates,” the stomping “Ruffians on Parade,” and the quartet of songs that starts with “One More Last Song” and concludes with the anti-war song “Cannons.” I don’t think there’s anything new to be said on the whole “war is bad” theme, but the Chiefs work in some clever imagery – “they treat us like we’re extras in an epic” – without resorting to cheap humor, all above the album’s best earworm, the “we’re gonna need a lot more cannons/if you want to be home by Christmas” couplet that opens the chorus. That song dissolves into the two-minute poem read by Nighy, penned by Chiefs songwriter Ricky Wilson, about “the occupation of Damnation Eternal” by an unnamed superpower, a strange interlude for the middle of a rock album, although I could probably listen to Nighy narrate the unabridged War and Peace without losing interest.

Lyrical cleverness is great but hardly sells me on an album; where Education, Education, Education & War succeeds and its predecessors failed is in the music. Something clicked back into place for the Chiefs, perhaps related to the departure of lead songwriter and drummer Nick Hodgson, so this album is packed with more memorable riffs than their last three discs combined, many of which are just begging to be played live. It’s a choppy experience, with tracks like “Meanwhile Up in Heaven” and “Roses” depleting the energy the band has built up through preceding songs, and “Misery Company” inducing some cringes with the same bad puns that Soul Asylum used 15 years ago. The album’s title comes from a famous (in the UK) 1997 speech by Tony Blair, where he may not have used the “and war” part of the quote, and there’s a clear nod back to the Blur camp of the mid-1990s Britpop divide. That melodic sensibility breathes new life into the Chiefs, a band that appeared to have wound itself down as recently as two years ago.

* Part of why I’ve dithered on posting any album reviews is that I kept listening to Here and Nowhere Else (also on iTunes), the latest release from Cloud Nothings, and found myself failing to draw anything resembling a conclusion about it. After two more listens during my trip to Atlanta, I’m ready to say it: It’s not that great.

Cloud Nothings are primarily the brainchild of Dylan Baldi, a Cleveland-born singer-songwriter who wrote and recorded their entire first album in 2011, since which point the solo project has morphed into an actual band. Baldi et al tend to write their songs quickly, and it shows on Here and Nowhere Else, an eight-song, 30-minute album where each track sounds like nothing so much as the ones before and after it. There are a few more melodic songs, notably lead single “I’m Not Part of Me” and opener “Now Hear In,” but there seems to be an almost deliberate desire to recreate the kind of simple bang-on-a-can ethos of teenaged garage bands that, recorded professionally by seasoned musicians, can come off as repetitive. When Baldi stretches out on the album’s one long track, “Pattern Walks,” he starts screaming the lyrics as if to recapture the listener’s attention, which has wandered after the previous six tracks of pleasant sameness. There’s nothing inherently bad about the album, but I keep waiting for something truly new from Baldi, while instead, Here and Nowhere Else sounds like a good band in stasis.

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