→ December 4, 2018
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Music update, November 2018.

My last monthly playlist before I write up my annual top 100 list – some time after next week’s winter meetings – has twenty-two new tracks, including a handful of brand-new (to me) artists likely to appear on that year-end ranking, plus three metal acts who were big when I was still in high school. You can access the Spotify playlist here if you can’t see the widget below.

Jade Bird – Love Has All Been Done Before. This 21-year-old English singer-songwriter has a powerful voice in both meanings of the term, reminding me quite a bit of the similarly-named Jake Bugg. (If they collaborated, would they go by Bird & Bugg?) It’s folk-rock with a dash of Janis Joplin in her all-out singing style. I haven’t been able to stop listening to this song since I first heard it.

Sunflower Bean – Come For Me. This New York trio released second album, Twentytwo in Blue, in March, but they’re already back with a new EP due out in late January, headlined by this rocker that I think makes better use of singer Julia Cumming’s voice.

Piroshka – Everlastingly Yours. Lush broke up for good two years ago, but singer/guitarist Miki Berenyi is back with this supergroup of ’90s alternative figures, with members of Modern English, Moose, and Elastica along for the ride. This first single is wonderfully anachronistic, like we’re back in 1995 and Britpop is still a thing.

The Wombats – Oceans. The second bonus track on the deluxe edition of the Wombats’ album Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life, along with “Bee-Sting,” is among the best tracks from the record; I was lukewarm on the album as a whole before these two new songs came out, but now there are at least a half-dozen great tracks to recommend from the LP.

Sundara Karma – One Last Night On This Earth. This English indie-pop band, which gets a lot of U2 comparisons (I don’t hear it myself), is set to release its sophomore album, Ulfilas’ Alphabet, in March, with this the lead single, boasting a strong melodic hook and their now-familiar, slightly rough around the edges sort of sound.

YONAKA – Creature. The title track from this British act’s latest EP is a little slower and sultrier than some of their harder and more obnoxious (in a good way) songs like “Wouldn’t Wanna Be Ya,” but the driving guitars, which are all over this four-track EP, still really work even shifted down a gear.

Darlingside – Singularity. Darlingside has been around for a few years but are new to me, at least, with their new album Extralife. There’s an Americana element here like we get from the Avett Brothers, the soft harmonies of Fleet Foxes, and a bit of the sampling of multiple genres from the first Mumford & Sons album.

Acid Dad – Living with a Creature. Psychedelic dance-rock that’s heavier on the guitars, boosted by the effects on the vocals that give the whole track a trippy vibe. Their self-titled debut album dropped in March.

Drenge – Bonfire of the City Boys. I keep hoping these singles are pointing towards a new album from the brothers Loveless, with this the third solid one this year, seeing Eoin speaking rather than singing over a droning, heavy bass line.

Preoccupations – Pontiac 87. Preoccupations are touring with Protomartyr, so they released a cover of Protomartyr’s 2015 track “Pontiac 87,” from the latter’s album The Agent Intellect, giving it more stuttering, frenetic percussion, and a spacier vocal line.

Radkey – Junes. Radkey seem to have hit a stride with their last few singles after their 2016 album lost a little momentum from their debut; these tracks have all been a little harder and more uptempo. I feel like they would have been huge in the late 1990s.

Bob Mould – What Do You Want Me To Do. Shouldn’t this be called “What Dü You Want Me to Dü?”

Anteros – Call Your Mother. I loved Anteros’ “Cherry Drop” from last year, but since then they’ve released just two singles, with this the catcher of the two but definitely downshifted from that favorite of mine from 2017.

Swervedriver – Drone Lover. If Pavement released a shoegaze track in 1993, this would be it.

Black Honey – Teenager. A great new track from the deluxe edition of their self-titled debut album, which now includes “Somebody Better,” my favorite of their pre-album singles that didn’t appear on the initial release, and “All My Pride” too.

Body Type – Palms. This is my favorite single so far from this Australian quartet (all women), with the quick pace and the interlaced vocals contributing to the sense of unease permeating the entire track.

Ten Fé – No Night Lasts Forever. I am running out of things to say about Ten Fé, who have figured out what sort of song they write well and then keep churning out catchy songs in that vein.

The Twilight Sad – VTr. The Scottish indie-rockers, who bear an undeniable similarity to other bands that revel in depression like Joy Division and Interpol, will drop their fifth album, It Won/t Be Like This All the Time, on January 19th.

Myrkur – Juniper. Danish chanteuse Amalie Bruun is back with her symphonic/folk/black metal project Myrkur, with this track focusing more on the former elements as well as her ethereal voice, with less of the pure metal elements that sometimes appear in her music.

Flotsam & Jetsam – Recover. The last three tracks on my playlist this month are all from thrash bands whose commercial peaks came in the 1980s and are still producing the same kind of music they did 30 years ago, with this F&J track my favorite of the three. Their 13th studio album, The End of Chaos, will drop in January, but it sounds like they haven’t lost a step or bowed at all to the commercial shift towards the genres that descended from thrash.

Metal Church – Out of Balance. There’s a great riff and generally strong guitarwork here, with really dopey lyrics that lead to an annoyingly catchy chorus.

Sodom – Partisan. Sodom is one of the ‘big four’ of German thrash, along with Kreator and Destruction, both of whom have appeared on my lists before, as well as Tankard. Only one original member of Sodom, bassist and lead screamer Thomas “Angelripper” Such, remains, but this track is still a throwback to the sort of early, heavier thrash that put Sodom at the vanguard of the genre and influenced the first wave of Nordic black metal bands as well. That said, this track itself isn’t that great, more of a curiosity from a band of historical importance whose sound hasn’t aged that well.

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→ November 5, 2018
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Madeline’s Madeline.

I’d never so much as heard of director Josephine Decker’s film Madeline’s Madeline (available on amazon & iTunes) until the Gotham Independent Film Project’s award nominations came out about two weeks ago. Honoring – you guessed it – the best in independent film of the year, the movie earned one of the five nominations for Best Feature Film (along with First Reformed and the upcoming If Beale Street Could Talk), while its star, Helena Howard, earned a nod for Breakthrough Star. It’s very much an indie film, nonlinear, highly metaphorical (the first line of the film tells you this), and often inscrutable, but Howard delivers one of the best performances by a teenaged actor I can remember seeing.

The movie is very, very weird, which is why it’s regularly called “experimental,” although in this case I’m not sure what’s experimental about it beyond just the nonlinear storytelling. Howard plays Madeline, a 16-year-old actress, who has recently found her calling with a local theatrical troupe (or interpretive dance troupe), and has a deeply troubled relationship with her mother Regina (Miranda July). Madeline suffers from some serious mental illness, may have injured her mother before, and has an eating disorder and self-mutilation habits. The troupe is led by Evangeline (Molly Parker), who at first appears just like a director/writer consumed with her art, but her actual role and motivations are not so clear. She sees in Madeline both an incredible talent and a rich story of mental illness; her drive to get Madeline to open up and provide the subject for their performance lead Evangeline into a toxic relationship with Madeline that threatens the girl’s fragile tie with her mother and the integrity of the troupe itself.

Howard gives a virtuoso performance for a tyro – this is her first screen credit, film or TV – as a complex, difficult character prone to massive mood swings and primal behavior (yelling, screaming, using her body beyond simple gestures). The film depends entirely on the ability of the actress in that role, and Howard is strong from the beginning, only to get better as the film progresses and the script asks more of her. There’s a climactic scene where she imitates her mother that feels like the “that’s the scene that won her the X Award” moment in the film, but even in smaller scenes she excels at pushing the borders of the screen with those sudden shifts in mien or tone.

The script itself leaves a hundred questions along the way, resolving nothing. Foremost among them is whether Madeline is actually acting or dissociating; her most intense performances with the troupe seem to come from somewhere deeper within herself than most people can readily access, and that climactic scene ends with everyone reacting while she briefly goes catatonic. Related to that question is how much of what she tells us about her relationship with her mother is real; we see a little bit of her home life, and Regina is certainly not winning Mother of the Year given her extreme neuroses and how she takes those out on her daughter, but is it all true? For one example that comes up at the start of the movie: did Madeline actually burn her mother with an iron – or herself? Madeline’s father is mentioned but never appears; he seems to have left the family, but is discussed as if he’s present, and the most we learn about him comes when Madeline and some friends go in her basement and explore her father’s stash of porn. Why he left, and if he had any role in creating Madeline’s maladies, are both left unanswered.

The theatrical troupe is also … well, not quite right, to the point that it appears that the troupe may really be a cult, led by Evangeline, who sees a perfect recruit in Madeline, only to see the ingenue later threaten her control of the entire enterprise. The rhythmic breathing and humming, the all-black outfits, the masks (really, are you dancers, or are you Slipknot?), the often affectless way they greet each other all speak to some kind of relationship beyond members of the same dance ensemble.

I’m assuming the choices of the three main characters’ names were deliberate here, as two of them in particular have strong biblical connotations that seem to apply to the story. Madeline is derived from the same way we get the name Mary Magdalene, whom Jesus is said to have driven out “seven devils” – likely a reference to mental illness – according to the Gospel of Luke. Evangeline means the bringer of a gospel or good news, ironic since Evangeline is nothing but bad news for Madeline and her family but is unable to see anything beyond her own needs.

The story itself ends up a muddle without any clear here to there – often it wasn’t apparent whether we’d jumped back in time – and there is no answer to anything posed here. The final sequence of the script is powerful visually, and I thought reinforced the idea that this might be a cult, but I can’t say I know where we went on that journey or what the screenwriter was trying to say. That said, if you can watch a film just to see one character’s tremendous performance – not to mention to see someone throw up a 2012 Bryce Harper sort of debut – Madeline’s Madeline is worth the time just for Howard’s performance. This, it turns out, is how a star is born.

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→ October 31, 2018
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Music update, October 2018.

Huge month for new tracks – thirty strong this time around, ranging from indie rock to dance to metal to two tracks that are somewhere in the country/folk range. As always, if you can’t see the playlist below you can access the Spotify playlist here.

Joy Williams – Canary. The former member of the Civil Wars has a new album, Front Porch, due out early next year, with this the A-side of a new single (with “The Trouble With Wanting” the B-side), featuring a strong melody and her always amazing voice.

HAERTS – Fighter. Now a duo, HAERTS released their long-awaited second album, New Compassion, on October 5th to very little fanfare or attention, but it’s almost as good as their debut – the sound is similar but it doesn’t quite have the standout tracks of their self-titled first album.

Hatchie – Adored. One of two songs on this playlist from Adult Swim’s series of singles is the latest from Aussie singer-songwriter Hatchie, who continues to occupy this ethereal space that recalls early Lush and the Cranberries.

Radkey – Rock & Roll Homeschool. I’ve been waiting for this trio to put out another rocker like this since 2013’s “Cat and Mouse.” More of this, please.

Drenge – Autonomy. The title track from this duo’s new four-song EP that also features the song “Outside,” which appeared on my September playlist. I assume there’s another album coming soon, since their last came out in 2015.

The Struts – Fire (Part 1). A guilty pleasure of mine, although I recently told a friend I thought the Struts were just the Discount Arctic Monkeys. This is the best song on their latest album, which tends too much to the bombastic side of alternative pop for me.

Khruangbin – Maria También. If this sounds familiar, it’s the opening music to the Crimetown podcast series. Khruangbin avoid labels for their music but it’s definitely some sort of indie rock/funk with influences from various world music genres.

Port Noir – Old Fashioned. I don’t know what to make of this song, which veers a little close to rap-metal for me, but the chorus is tremendous and I love the dark tone of the music throughout the track.

Speedy Ortiz – DTMFA. The other Adult Swim single on this list is probably 95% of typical Speedy Ortiz but that’s still good enough for me.

Django Django – Sand Dunes. Django Django put out an album, Marble Skies, back in January, but they’ve since released a six-track EP of songs recorded before (or maybe during?) those sessions, including this mid-tempo track that really would have fit quite well on the longer album.

Ian Brown – First World Problems. New single from the Stone Roses’ lead singer, not his best but definitely featuring his typically snarky lyrics.

Ten Fé – Won’t Happen. The lead single from the soft-rock band’s upcoming sophomore album, Future Perfect, Present Tense (due out in March), is more of the same as their first album provided – and that’s good.

Swervedriver – Mary Winter. Swervedriver returned in 2015 with their first album in 17 years – the same hiatus that Ride and Slowdive took, in fact – but it was unremarkable without any strong hooks or remotely memorable songs. This new single has that certain something, and I think it’s their best song since the title track from their last pre-breakup album 99th Dream.

The London Suede – As One. I didn’t love The Blue Hour, their latest album, because it was overrun with dirge-like tracks, but this wildly dramatic song is one of the few standouts for me.

Maisie Peters – Details. I have no idea why this 18-year-old British singer/songwriter hasn’t become a global star. Her voice is adorable, her lyrics clever, her melodies catchy.

Keuning – Restless Legs. That’s Dave Keuning, founding guitarist of the Killers, with his first solo track. He’s announced his first solo album, Prismism, will come out next year.

Arkells – Hand Me Downs. Arkells, like the Struts, are a bit too pop-oriented for me overall but occasionally hit enough of a melodic high point for me to overlook the commercial production. “Relentless” is the best track on the new album; this would be my second-favorite.

The Beths – You Wouldn’t Like Me. New Zealand quartet The Beths dropped their first full-length album, Future Me Hates Me, in August, featuring this very ’90s punk-inflected power pop single.

Christine and the Queens – 5 dollars. The French singer/songwriter Héloïse Letissier has received universal praise for her latest album, Chris, which is certainly one of the smartest and most inventive pop records of the year. If there’s a US hit single to be had here, this is it.

White Lies – Believe It. Much better than anything off White Lies’ last album, comparable to my favorite track from them, 2013’s “There Goes Our Love Again.”

Hinds – British Mind. I’ll include anything this Spanish quartet releases, obviously. I don’t think any band sounds like they’re having as much fun as these four women do.

Allie X – Little Things. Allie X had posted an older song called “Sculpture,” which was on this playlist earlier in the month but has since disappeared from Spotify and isn’t on the EP she just released last week, Super Sunset. That does include this track; “Science,” one of my favorite songs from the summer, and the solid “Girl of the Year,” which I just find a little hard to listen to because of the chorus.

Longwave – Stay With Me. I was totally unfamiliar with Longwave, who put out four albums between 1999 and 2008, until hearing this song, which appears to be their first new single since they reunited, but this song has a great ’80s new wave vibe at its core, like the best work of White Lies.

TVAM – Porsche Majeure. TVAM’s album Psychic Data is probably going to end up on my top albums of the year list, featuring multiple strong mostly-instrumental tracks like this one, with Joe Oxley creating swirling electronic hooks that evoke all manner of emotions – this track feels especially menacing to me.

Greta Van Fleet – Lover, Leaver. Everyone compares Greta Van Fleet to Led Zeppelin, but I think the better comp is Kingdom Come – it’s derivative rather than paying homage, still occasionally catchy or interesting enough to merit further listens (as on this song or “When the Curtain Falls”), but on the whole it’s nothing we haven’t heard a hundred times before.

Cloud Nothings – Another Way Of Life. I’d grown a bit tired of Cloud Nothings’ sound, which never seemed to evolve, but this closer to the band’s short new album (35 minutes, with one track accounting for almost a third of that) seems to point to at least some small change in their style.

Toundra – Cobra. Instrumental, progressive metal from Madrid, musically similar to early Opeth but without vocals.

Haken – Puzzle Box. I’ve known of Haken for years but never put them on a playlist before this track, which I think gives us the prog metal band’s strongest melody to date.

High On Fire – Spewn From The Earth. You kind of know what to expect from High on Fire at this point, I think.

Behemoth – Bartzabel. I’ve always thought of Behemoth as a bit of a joke – the music was fine, but they so thoroughly covered themselves in the juvenile trappings of black metal that they verged on self-parody … but I have to admit this song is quite good if you can get past the death growls.

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→ November 17, 2015
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Art Angels.

My column on my NL Rookie of the Year ballot is up for Insiders.

Grimes’ Art Angels (buy on amazon or iTunes) is the best album of 2015, and the best album I’ve heard since alt-J’s 2012 debut An Awesome Wave. Canadian singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Claire Boucher, who records under the pseudonym Grimes, has created a masterful indie-pop performance that transcends genres and incorporates wildly diverse sounds into a cohesive, intelligent offering that never lets up from the ninety-second opener to the final song’s declaration of independence.

Grimes’ third album, 2012’s Visions, brought her substantial critical acclaim, notably for the singles “Genesis” and “Oblivion,” which received plenty of airplay on alternative radio and led to multiple recommendations from many of you, but I couldn’t get past the juvenile sound of her high-register vocals and the electropop leanings of the music. Grimes has ditched GarageBand, which she used to record much of that last album, for more sophisticated digital audio workstation software, and it is reflected in the worldliness of the music itself. The maturation process from there to Art Angels was, by all accounts, arduous, including an entire album that Grimes scrapped, the one-off single “Go” (rejected by Rihanna’s people, because I guess her people are idiots), and the song “REALiTi,” which survived the trashing of the lost album and reappears here in a more polished form. This is the Grimes album with vision, delivering rather than promising, with marked increases in the sophistication of her music and her lyrics.

After that brief intro track, Grimes delivers the first of many surprises on the album with “California,” a sunny track that gives off the illusion of an acoustic or folk-rock song, but is largely electronic and hides a dark, cynical take on the record industry through a metonymical use of the state to represent the entertainment industry. (Grimes has spoken publicly before about how the mainstream record industry does not, in her view, treat indie artists well.) From that luminous track we downshift into the album’s darkest song, “Scream,” with all lyrics courtesy of the female Taiwanese rapper Aristophanes, who raps entirely in Mandarin with a menacing, breathy delivery that matches the funereal music beneath her. If you’ve survived this hairpin turn, you’ve gotten the hang of Art Angels, which refuses to choose a single direction yet manages to squeeze a panoply of styles into a single tent.

Lead single “Flesh Without Blood” is the most traditional song on the record in both its structure and the melodic nature of the vocals, but would still jar listeners to straight pop stations if it came on after the latest four minutes’ hate from OneRepublic. “Kill v. Maim” and “Venus Fly” both show Grimes asserting her individuality and particular brand of feminism, with the former seeing her voice as high as it gets on the album, which is fine with me as I think she starts to sound very young at the top end of her range, although here it also seems like an allusion to J-pop traditions and is interspersed with the occasional death-metal scream. “Venus Fly” features vocals from Janelle Monáe, who will appear on your album if you just remember to include a self-addressed stamped envelope, in an articulate rant about how women in music are judged on their appearances, with a number of lines that sound like they should end in “boy” if you’ve been reared on vapid, modern pop music.

The title track is a real sleeper, the kind of song Daft Punk tried and failed to craft on their Grammy-winning album Random Access Memories, between the funk-guitar riff and the layered synthesized drum lines, with lyrics that express her love for her adopted home city of Montréal. I might be alone in preferring the raw demo version of “REALiTi” we got back in the spring, where her vocals were more seductive even when she veered on the edge of falsetto; although the current version maintains the basic hook of the original, her vocals are honed to a finer point, excising the demo’s dreamlike quality.

Grimes’ lyrics have improved enormously over the last three years, with greater use of metaphor and new phrasings, with very few lines that clunk enough to detract from the songs as a whole. (“California” does have a line about how certain music “sounds just like my soul;” I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a song lyric using the word “soul” in a secular or metaphorical sense that didn’t sound like something from a teenager’s poetry notebook.) She’s covering a ton of thematic ground here, but they’re all tied together under the banner of the experiences of a woman in a male-dominated industry that is rife with sexism, harassment, and superficial judgments. When the slightly saccharine closer, “Butterfly,” concludes with Grimes’ assertion that she’ll “never be your dream girl,” it’s clear she’s both refusing to bend herself to be what someone else wants and saying that the song’s target isn’t worthy of her time. It’s a compulsive listen without a dud to be found, with so many changes in musical direction that she grabs your attention from the start and holds it, rapt, until she tells you to kiss off in the closing track. It’s an album that demands repeated listening.

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→ April 17, 2015
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Strange Trails.

Lord Huron’s first full-length album, 2012’s Lonesome Dreams, spawned a minor crossover hit in the single “Time to Run,” a folk/alt-country song that I put at #35 on my list of my top 100 songs of 2013. That song stood out on the album for its upbeat tempo and shuffling guitar pattern that is in itself a foundational element of the group’s second album, Strange Trails, which came out on April 7th.

The album begins in more subdued fashion, almost like (dare I say it) a Mumford and Sons “let’s have a slow bit, then a faster bit, then a slow bit again” track, “Love Like Ghosts,” a song with big sounds that seem designed to fill an arena without surrendering that syncopation that is such an essential part of the group’s sound. The same rhythm works more effectively when the pace picks up on “Until the Night Turns,” the swirling “Hurricane,” and “Meet Me in the Woods,” with a melody very reminiscent of that of the War on Drugs’ “Red Eyes.”

I frequently see Lord Huron pegged as indie-folk or folk-rock or just alternative, but this album is much more country than any of those labels would lead you to believe, although on some level it’s all just marketing copy. It’s guitar-driven, shuffling, yearning music that probably draws as much from rockabilly and the Bakersfield sound as it does from any folk or indie-rock tradition. It isn’t as sentimental as its musical progenitors, which were more products of their time in lyrical tone and in a production style that forced the twang of the guitars to the forefront, yet maintains a strong connection to its roots through shared rhythms and motifs. That makes Strainge Trails‘ strength also its main drawback: there’s little variation from the group’s fundamental sound, just alterations in pacing. That’s part of why “The World Ender” stands out to me as the album’s best track: the music is similar to everything else on the record, but the lyrics are darker, so it’s more Johnny Cash than Buck Owens and the Buckaroos.

That revivalist mantle might fit Lord Huron better, as they seem to revel in long-forgotten sounds that haven’t been popular since the death of the border blasters. The album closes with the mid-tempo “Louisa,” a love song with an arpeggiated rhythm guitar line, and “The Night We Met,” which recycles the main melodic line from the opening track – a nod back to a nod back. There’s nothing wrong (in my mind, at least) with a band committing itself to a retro sound, especially when it’s one to which so much of rock, folk, and country owes a debt. I would like to see more experimentation or modern flourishes within that sound, however; it’s an album you’ll like if you liked the first Lord Huron record, but I hope their next album covers new ground.

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→ February 18, 2015
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Range Anxiety.

My review of the boardgame Evolution went up on Tuesday over at Paste. I’ll hold my first Klawchat of February on Thursday at 1 pm ET.

The Twerps hail from Australia, where weird indie music seems to be quite readily accepted as normal. I described them recently as pleasantly annoying, which is much better than annoyingly pleasant, and that phrase fits their second album Range Anxiety (in addition to their eight-song 2014 EP Underlay, which included “Heavy Hands,” #42 on my list of the top 100 songs of last year) as well as everything that came before. The quartet craft short, catchy jangle-pop songs around a single hook each, and their singing styles are the polar opposite of the sanitized auto-tuned music that fills American pop radio playlists – to a fault, sometimes, as the Twerps don’t care if they’re a bit off key.

The Twerps frequently cite Australian indie heroes the Go-Betweens and Dunedin Sound propagators The Clean as major influences, both quite obvious in their music, which also reminded me of American jangle-pop act Let’s Active and perhaps even early Aztec Camera – all of it from another era of alternative music entirely. Their own sound is a bit more stripped-down than even their earliest influences, minimal without becoming experimental, which fits their one-hook-per-song formula, a formula that works best when the Twerps keep things to about three minutes – true of all but two songs on the album, with one of those exceptions the lead single, “I Don’t Mind,” one of the worst tracks on Range Anxiety and not at all representative of what the band is capable of producing.

I’ll direct your attention instead to “Back to You,” a more upbeat, jangly tune in line with “Heavy Hands” that introduces its point straight off with the line “Somebody out there is doing better than me.” The song has one riff, and about enough humor in the lyrics to sustain it for two and a half minutes – another thirty seconds and the song would have felt overlong. Julia McFarlane takes over lead vocals for the Sambassadeur-like “Stranger,” another three-minute gem that leads into “New Moves,” which sounds a bit like another Aussie indie-pop band, the Darling Buds, with a sunny guitar riff that contrasts with the muted vocal medley. McFarlane returns to the lead later in the album on the waltz “Shoulders,” the most successful downtempo track on the album – primarily because of the strength of her strong yet understated vocals. “Cheap Education” thrives off a simple guitar riff that gave me the sense that the whole song was spinning in circles, which I’d like to think was the whole point given the wordplay in the lyrics.

The annoying part of their sound does take over from time to time, in large part because the male vocalists don’t like to stay on key very well, such as the positively irritating “Love at First Sight,” where I can only assume the band was trying to create some irony by layering fingernails-on-blackboard vocals over a pretty if slightly standard ballad. “Adrenaline” has the same problem – you should almost expect a Twerps song with that title to be more like a dirge – while closer “Empty Road” runs about two minutes longer than it should have; although their attempt to build a song with multiple hooks and layers is admirable, it just doesn’t work out over five full minutes.

Range Anxiety truly isn’t for everyone – it’s the kind of album I would probably have rejected on first listen a decade ago, when I was much more closed-minded about music in general (I knew what I liked and didn’t see much reason to listen to anything else). It’s an album that rewards a little patience and the willingness to overlook the moments when the Twerps outfox themselves by overdoing the irony or singing out of tune, with solid payoffs in a half-dozen tracks that are minor pop jewels.

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→ January 21, 2015
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No Cities to Love.

Just a reminder that the top 100 prospects package will appear on ESPN.com next week for Insiders, running from January 28th to the 30th. I’ll chat on the 29th (but not this week), the day that the top 100 itself goes up.

Regardless of the actual quality of the album, Sleater-Kinney’s No Cities To Love (also on iTunes) was going to garner rave reviews from critics and fans who were just happy that the trio was back after a nine-year absence from recording. It didn’t matter whether their sound had changed, whether they could still write great hooks, whether Corin Tucker could still sing, as long as they were still Sleater-Kinney, because that band and that name stood for something, although for what it stood probably depended on where you were standing – independent music, anti-corporatism, feminism, LGBT issues, sometimes stuff the band themselves never openly espoused. They never experienced commercial success commensurate with their critical standing, perhaps in part because of Tucker’s deliberately abrasive vocal style, but also because they never did much to court it. Their breakup in 2006 and move into other projects, notably Carrie Brownstein’s career as an actress (co-creating Portlandia with Fred Armisen – go Thinkers!), only served to heighten their legend, with Brooklyn Vegan promising to play a Sleater-Kinney track on its Sirius XMU show each week until the band reunited. By 2014, Sleater-Kinney was an idea rather than a pretty good, defunct punk band.

That makes it all the more gratifying that their album No Cities to Love, released on Tuesday on Sub Pop, is such a tight, sophisticated, hook-filled record, sophisticated without becoming staid, more of a second take on the Sleater-Kinney sound than more of the same they gave us through their first half-dozen albums. There’s a cleaner sound throughout the record, better production quality combined with less distortion on the guitars (Sleater-Kinney has never used a bass guitar, ironic since that’s often what the token girl plays in male-fronted rock bands), which means the songs are carried by memorable riffs, layered vocals, and non-traditional (for them) drum patterns. Tucker’s vocals are just as intense and emotional as ever, but it’s a lot easier to pick up what she’s saying and to distinguish each vocal or guitar track within a song.

Lead single “Bury Our Friends,” my #12 song of 2014, gave a strong preview of this slight shift in Sleater-Kinney’s direction – angst-ridden yet hopeful, stomping through the chorus (“exhume our idols/bury our friends”), driven both by one of Brownstein’s strongest riffs ever and some intricate drumwork from Janet Weiss. Weiss’ role on the album may be the most pleasant surprise, as she’s expanded her style and is mixed more toward the front; “Fangless,” which opens almost like a prog-rock track that’s made a small withdrawal from the jazz machine, would go nowhere without Weiss’ syncopated percussion lines. You can hear throughout Cities why Weiss has been in such demand from other indie rock acts during Sleater-Kinney’s hiatus.

Album opener “Price Tag” serves both as one of the album’s best tracks and a transitional song to reintroduce old listeners to the band’s slight shift in direction while bringing new fans immediately into the fold, building up a store of potential energy in the verses before exploding into a chorus where Tucker sounds like she’s still holding a little piece of rage in reserve for future use. “Surface Envy” completes the opening troika by paradoxically turning a descending scale into a memorable riff, I think primarily because of how it ends in a crash between Brownstein’s power chords and Weiss’s pulsating drums, an aural waterfall hitting the rocks and splashing everywhere. “No Anthems” borrows a little from stoner rock to underlie Tucker’s introspective lyrics, evincing some nostalgia for the band’s former, reluctant role as standard-bearers for the riot grrl movement. The album’s only real stumble, “Hey Darling,” a stab at power-pop that sounds wrong coming from Tucker’s lungs, gives way quickly to the melancholy closer “Fade,” which alludes to pre-grunge sounds from Mudhoney and Soundgarden in the first movement, after which Weiss powershifts into a march for the bridge, leading into Brownstein’s pedal-point riff that drives the reprise of the first third to close out the song and the album. It’s the most ornate song on Cities, the right way to finish an album that would otherwise have been split in two by its complexity amidst a run of tighter, faster tracks.

I was never fully on board with the hype around Sleater-Kinney, because I thought they were more of A Really Important Thing than a producer of great tracks, which may color my impression of No Cities to Love … but it’s my favorite album by the band, by a huge margin. This is the kind of album we would hope middle-aged punks could produce after some time away from their main act, but that very few artists are capable of pulling off.

If you’re a fan of Sleater-Kinney, I highly recommend this Pitchfork feature story on the band, with many enlightening comments from the band members on the direction of this latest album. I also suggest you check out the 2013 album Silence Yourself by Savages, who walk the same paths first plowed by bands like Sleater-Kinney, Babes in Toyland, and 7 Year Bitch.

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→ November 3, 2014
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Haerts.

HAERTS – yeah, I’m not big on the deliberately-misspelled band names trend either – put out a strong EP late last year as a teaser for their full-length debut; “All the Days” made my top 100 songs of 2013, “Wings” would have made my top songs of 2012 had I heard it when it was released, and I liked their overall sound and lead singer Nini Fabi’s powerful, slightly smoky voice. Their self-titled debut album came out last Tuesday, including three of the four songs from last year’s EP along with six new tracks that follow the same general aesthetic – indie-pop, a little new wavish but never retro, all buttressed by Fabi’s tremendous vocals.

Produced by Jean-Philip Grobler, who records his own music under the moniker St. Lucia, Haerts isn’t as bright as his own work but features the same kind of lush, layered sounds that made his album When the Night (which made my top albums of 2013 list) so compelling. Haerts’ songs work best when Fabi is at the front, as on lead single “Giving Up,” where she begins singing just over a repeating keyboard line, after which her vocals are doubled before we get the remainder of the band involved. Like “Wings” and “All the Days,” there’s a relentlessness in the backing key and guitar lines, like a haertbeat beneath the voice that gives the album’s best songs their energy.

That’s lacking when the pace slows, as on “Call My Name,” the intro to which is way too similar to Chris Deburgh’s “The Lady in Red” (good luck unhearing that now); Fabi gets to belt it out during the chorus, but by that point I’d lost some interest, and the formula doesn’t work any better on “Lights Out,” which sounds a bit like a mediocre ’80s ballad and doesn’t let Fabi show off at all. Haerts sound best when they hit the gas from the first measure and leave the cruise control on for the whole four minutes – even deep tracks like “Be the One” (with the perhaps unintentional double entendre “can you show it/when you go down?” in the bridge) and opener “Heart” cast a spell with solid hooks and Fabi’s performance. I understand the desire to vary their sound and tempo across the 40 minutes of a full album, but their style doesn’t work as well at ballad speed.

Those songs from last year’s Hemiplegia EP are the strongest, though – the two I mentioned above plus the title track – with mesmerizing vocals and richly textured synth-bass-drum combinations that grow as each track progresses. “Hemiplegia” might be the unlikeliest title for a pure pop song, but it’s a remarkably crafted track that recalls the best moments from When the Night as it adds layers (like the guitar riff at 2:20) to increase its complexity without losing its hookiness. “Wings” is the only track on the album that feels driven by percussion, but the strength of the beat contrasts beautifully with the flow of Fabi’s vocals, but when everything drops out behind her at the halfway point, she hits this series of notes that mark the highest point of the entire album. There’s enough consistency on this album to make it well worth the purchase, as long as you didn’t buy the EP last year; it’s among the year’s best albums, on the strength of those three songs and one of the best new voices in alternative music.

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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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