→ August 4, 2014
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July music update.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ July 29, 2014
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Run River North.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ July 22, 2014
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Midnight Masses’ Departures.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ May 1, 2014
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Wye Oak’s Shriek.

I’ve got a chat today at 1 pm ET, and my one column this week was on the Nationals’ mishandling of Bryce Harper.

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Indie-folk duo Wye Oak overhauled their entire sound with their latest album, Shriek, released earlier this week on Merge Records to strong reviews (Pitchfork and AV Club both raved about it, while Consequence of Sound was more guarded). Ditching the jangly guitars of their earlier work, Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack have stripped everything down to a synth-drum-and-bass sound that sounds like a search for something that the pair weren’t truly able to find.

Shriek starts off with a grand announcement that this is no longer the Wye Oak of Civilian, with a throwaway keyboard line that goes on, without any backing, for about 15 seconds too long, before we get the potent bass line (one of the album’s strengths is Wasner’s bass work throughout) and the half-a-drum loop, resulting in a dreary if atmospheric dirge that will likely feel like a letdown to anyone who enjoyed Wye Oak’s earlier work. The first three songs, including the title track and the abysmally cheap-sounding “The Tower,” all share that maudlin feel, with Wasner’s vocals and bass somewhat wasted over insufficient percussion and synth lines, and tempos that left me waiting for someone to pick up the pace.

“Glory” finally finds Wye Oak veering more into electro-pop territory, not as bright and sunny as CHVRCHES or St. Lucia, thanks to Wasner’s smoky vocals and the sudden stop at the end of each four-beat drum loop. The result is a darker, more seductive sound that still finds Wye Oak in unfamiliar territory compared to the preceding trio of songs. “Sick Talk” is more overtly CHVRCHES-like with the spare synth-and-drum riff behind Wasner’s higher-pitched, ethereal vocals – reminiscent of the Cocteau Twins, especially since I can’t make out much of what she’s saying – while “Schools of Eyes” starts to wind the tempo back down; it’s not quite as languorous as what comes afterwards, built on a brushed drum pattern and the application of reverb to Wasner’s vocals that give the song a richer texture than most of Shriek‘s other material.

The final four tracks harken back to the opening triad, with slower pacing, starker production, and amateurish synth lines that I’ve always found irritating for the way they seem to emphasize the instrument’s artificality. “Paradise” at least makes its synth riff a dissonant one, and the texture provided by multiple layers of percussion and a vocal that is set off from the primary rhythm of the song by about a half-beat makes the song compelling despite the lack of a clear melody, similar to Bjork’s less poppy work from her last few albums. It’s the last great moment on the album, however, a disc that ends with the whimper of “Logic of Color,” which sounds like it was recorded on a $99 Casio synthesizer from 1988, beneath the weakest lyrics on the album as well. Wye Oak’s decision to abandon guitars for keyboards was a radical shift, but one that could have worked better if they had maintained portions of their old sound rather than producing a record that, around a few standout tracks, sounds like the debut record from a new artist.

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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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→ January 29, 2013
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Safety Not Guaranteed.

The 2012 indie comedy Safety Not Guaranteed takes a famous ad from someone looking for a companion on a time-travel expedition – claiming he’s “only” done it once before – and builds it into a cute, clever story about quirky characters in search of something more than what they’ve gotten out of life, all for different yet interconnected reasons. At about 80 minutes of actual content, it’s briskly paced with smart and witty dialogue, and sets up so well that the ultimate question of whether the time travelers actually travel in time becomes irrelevant. Call it a movie rule: If the story is crafted properly, and the characters are well developed, then the film’s ending doesn’t matter.

(UPDATE: It’s the iTunes $0.99 Movie of the Week as an HD rental. So you really have no excuse.)

Safety stars Aubrey Plaza, better known as April Ludgate on Parks and Recreation, as Darius, a recent college graduate in an unglamorous, unpaid internship for an alternative weekly paper in Seattle. Bored with basically everything life has thrown her and in a persistent depression since her mom died eight years earlier, Darius volunteers to go with the cocky staff writer Jeff to investigate the man behind the time-travel ad (which, in reality, appeared in Backwoods Home magazine in 1997 as a joke by a staff member), with Jeff figuring he’ll get a portrait of a harmless crazy person … except that Jeff really just wants to go hook up with an old girlfriend, with Darius and fellow intern Arnau, the film’s one stock character, doing all of the work.

The man who placed the ad, Kenneth, played by Mark Duplass, turns out to be completely earnest about the endeavor, definitely harmless, mostly a goofball, but also quite real – at home with his weirdness, with one exception I won’t spoil, totally focussed on this time-travel project so he can go back and prevent one thing from happening. He’s living in the present so that he can relive the past, with an intensity that resonates with the aimless Darius, who poses as a potential partner for Kenneth, going through “training” with him while Jeff hooks up with his ex and Arnau … does nothing all day, apparently, because they never finished writing his character.

Duplass’ character should be the centerpiece as the amiable dork whose passion for his project just sucks you into the story, but Plaza owns every scene she’s in, especially the ones she shares with Duplass, where she plays a character within a character, trying to manipulate Kenneth just to the point where he’ll accept her as a potential partner, but never with the contempt Jeff shows in his own abortive attempts to get the gig. Plaza’s character on Parks has morphed from the satiricial I-hate-everything girl to a more nuanced, more conflicted I-hate-that-I-like-things woman (and wife!) who appears to be hiding her inner Darius – a woman looking to just enjoy the present instead of feeling like the time is out of joint. April pretends she’s not sweet; Darius is sweet (but not saccharine) and wants someone, the right someone, to notice it. Kenneth is a little slow on the uptake there, since he is pretty locked in to the whole time-travel thing, but their relationship feels far more organic for how slowly it develops.

Duplass delivers a strong showing as Kenneth, playing the goofball as a serious goofball, not a wacko or a mentally ill or unstable person, just someone who’s looking backwards because what he sees forwards doesn’t give him much hope. Jake Johnson is appropriately annoying as the man-child Jeff, himself still unable to let go of a failed, long-dead relationship, yet aware enough of it that he can counsel Darius and especially Arnau to enjoy their early-20s primes. Both men are having midlife crises that don’t involve buying Porsches (which they can’t afford) or leaving wives (which they don’t have), instead doing, well, other somewhat stupid things, or doing smart things and screwing them up because they haven’t grown up enough yet. Arnau’s subplot is the one thread that comes through as an afterthought, and his best part in the film is his reaction in the final scene.

The conclusion is ambiguous, because Derek Connolly’s script handles the the Kenneth and Darius storyline so well that it doesn’t actually matter whether they get to travel back in time. Connolly even manages to sidestep the myriad reasons why time travel is impossible, simply having Kenneth treat it as real and moving forward from there, with its feasibility tangential to the main plot. He also granted Darius most of the film’s great lines, largely in response to Kenneth’s sincere nuttiness, with their dialogues, unusually thoughtful and long for a contemporary film, making up most of Safety Not Guaranteed‘s best moments. The movie only showed on a few hundred screens last year – I’m not even sure where it played near me, or exactly when – and made just over $4 million at the box office, which is a shame given how sweet and funny it is, without ever talking down to us (except with Arnau, a little). Perhaps it’s Aubrey Plaza’s curse to star in great vehicles that mainstream audiences just don’t watch.

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→ October 30, 2012
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Babel and An Awesome Wave.

Mumford and Sons’ second album, Babel, is a little better than more-of-the-same – not that that would be the worst thing in the world, since their debut, Sigh No More, was both good and commercially successful – but it doesn’t break much new ground, at least not musically. It’s not exactly predictable, but it feels very expected, evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and likely, given its huge initial sales, to continue to spawn more bands attempting to mimic their fusion of country, bluegrass, and folk traditions with modern-rock production values.

Babel does vary from its predecessor in one specific way – the album’s music is more upbeat, feeling more like what you’d expect from a live concert experience, without as many of the funereal tracks that populated the first album. Sigh No More‘s high points were largely found in songs that picked up the pace, in whole or in part, with “White Blank Page” the main exception. Babel starts out with the title-track, a slightly formulaic barn-raiser that at least announces that this album will be more energetic than their previous disc, although it also lacks the strong hook that made singles like “Little Lion Man” and “Cave” into big radio hits.

It’s the third track and lead single, “I Will Wait,” that gets Babel going in earnest, an exemplar of what Mr. Carey Mulligan and company can do when they hit all their strengths – tempo changes, heavy bluegrass influences, strong harmonies, and concrete imagery (including the album’s first mention of eyes, which becomes a recurring metaphor through the rest of the disc). The song is as radio-ready as it gets on the disc, without sounding excessively commercial beyond the upgraded production quality. The song begins a five-track run of highlights, including “Ghosts in the Dark,” which veers about as close to straight American country as Mumford & Sons get due to the heavy use of finger-picking; and “Lover of the Light,” which combines several memorable hooks with an off-beat lyrical melody over a repeated piano riff that leaves the listener slightly askew before shifting to more conventional structure in the second half, in by far their longest track yet as well as one of their most layered. Even the later track “Hopeless Wanderer” manages to transcend the slow-fast-slow cliché from their first disc with more abrupt transitions between sections and the tempo contrast between the lyrics and the horse-race feel of the fast guitar riff behind the chorus.

Mumford himself shows some lyrical growth here, avoiding some of the stumbles of the first album and developing some consistent themes across the entire disc, without falling too badly into the sort of fake-profundity that characterizes far too much contemporary music. Several images are repeated across different songs in different context, especially eyes/vision and buildings/walls, while he also exhibits more of the spiritual yearning from the first album, such as a reference to the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich’s views of sin. He also gets five thousand bonus points for successfully using one of my favorite words in the language, sanguine, in a phrase on “Lover of the Light” that has two meanings, both of which work in context.

“Whisper in the Dark,” the second track on the album, feels like filler material to me, and breaks the flow between the title track and “I Will Wait.” “Broken Crown” might have been the second- or third-best song on the disc, seething with rage the way that “Dust Bowl Dance” did at the close of Sigh No More, but instead comes off as a calculated move to replicate the success of “Little Lion Man” through the unexpected use of the f-word – yet where “Little Lion Man” used it to maximum effect, here it’s awkward and even immature, turning a vicious attack into a teenager’s angry yearbook inscription. (Besides, that word alone didn’t make “Little Lion Man” great – it just made it greater.)

I’ll take this album as progress over the first disc, but I’d also like to see these four musicians push themselves further, maybe incorporating more genres, or perhaps continuing their experiments with song structures as they did with “Lover of the Light.” They’re going to sell plenty of albums no matter what at this point, and I have little doubt they can continue to produce memorable hooks, so they have the intellectual and commercial freedom to play around if they want to. I hope the next album goes more in those directions.

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If you want experimental indie-pop, another British band, alt-J, might be on the verge of an xx-style breakout, perhaps after they win the Mercury Prize on Thursday, as they’re considered the odds-on favorites to do so. The product of five years of songwriting, and two years of recording, their debut album An Awesome Wave (just $5.99 to download) is a bizarre, textured, trippy perambulation across a broad swath of modern music styles. It might be genius.

alt-J, whose actual name, Δ, is produced on a Mac by pressing the Alt and J keys, draw on a wide tableau of influences that seems to span decades. Each listen to An Awesome Wave brought some other reference to mind, from Nine Inch Nails to Massive Attack to Television to Bollywood soundtracks, with hard swerves in style from track to track. Comparisons to the xx, who won the Mercury Prize two years ago, will be inevitable, since both albums tend toward quieter sounds and minimalist production, but alt-J is Faulkner to the xx’s Hemingway, rewarding multiple listens with greater complexity, crafting all-consuming soundscapes that suck you in with surprisingly catchy hooks.

The album contains three interludes and a short intro, but it’s track 3, “Tessellate,” that announces the band’s presence, with a haunting piano line quickly accompanied by a Tricky-like syncopated drum line, later joined by a disjointed base line that give a tremendous sense of movement and flow. “Something Good” begins with another off-beat drum pattern, joined by a sinister guitar and bass combination that belie the song’s title, only to have the whole thing stop for a Muse-like piano interpolation … and then we’re hearing Turin Brakes over the guitar before we return to the drumline of the opener. “Dissolve Me” fools you with a poppy synth intro that hints at the current new-wave revival, but the heavy, distorted bass line tramples over that sunny feeling like a drunken tuba player. And “Taro” follows its verse and chorus with a percussion and string (perhaps ukulele) line straight out of a Bollywood movie, yet one that fits perfectly in the song’s broader structure.

The biggest single from the album, “Breezeblocks,” remains among my least favorite tracks, with a J-Pop kind of lyrical repetition as well as a vocal delivery that sounds like a parent talking to a infant who’s just found her feet for the first time, although that’s the song that was stuck in my head when I woke up this morning. The lead singer’s style often makes the lyrics tough to decipher, but they are worth the effort, exposing a deeply intellectual and literary bent behind much of their songwriting. One song, “Matilda,” is about the film Léon (a.k.a The Professional), while another, “Fitzpleasure,” deals with one of the most brutal scenes from the scandalous book Last Exit to Brooklyn. The songs drip with clever imagery that will almost certainly leave you pondering hidden meanings and literary or film allusions.

Before this week, I would have tabbed Of Monsters and Men’s debut album, My Head Is An Animal, as the best new release of the year, but as amazing as that album is, it can’t rival An Awesome Wave‘s sheer ambition, packaged in shockingly tight songwriting and enough nods to melody to make this more than mere experimental music. It’s mind-expanding.

And, so I can justify reviewing these two albums together, here’s Mumford and Sons covering alt-J’s “Tessellate:”

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→ February 17, 2008
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Waitress.

Waitress is sort of a smart date movie, a romantic comedy with a heavy dose of realism (well, until the end), or a sad portrait of rural American life with some dark comedy and a positive outcome.

The film revolves around Jenna (Keri Russell), a waitress in a pie shop in a small Southern town, who discovers she’s pregnant and is not happy about it. Her husband, Earl – good luck watching the rejuvenated Law & Order after watching Jeremy Sisto in this movie – is a colossal jackass, abusive, controlling, and dumb as a post. (He’s the one real stock character in the film.) She ends up having an affair with the town’s new gynecologist (Nathan Fillion), a married transplant from Connecticut. Jenna is surrounded by characters at the pie shop, from her two waitress co-workers to the gruff head chef to the 80-year-old owner, Joe, played to the hilt by Andy Griffith as a grumpy old man, who gives everyone (including Jenna) a hard time about everything, but also fills the slightly hackneyed wise-old-man role.

The movie is alternately funny and painful. Jenna has a talent for making up new pie recipes, but gives some of them silly names based on what’s going on in her life, like “I Don’t Want to be Pregnant with Earl’s Baby Pie.” (Her co-worker Dawn: “I don’t think we can put that on the menu board, huh?”) Yet aside from the rare moments of pleasure she gets at the pie shop, Jenna is miserable. She’s trying to save up to leave her husband, but is repeatedly stymied. She’s afraid the baby will trap her in a bad marriage forever. She makes a connection with her doctor, but there’s no future in that while both are married. It’s a black comedy in the sense that the underlying life we see is so grim, with Jenna trying to find a way to start her life over but unable to create the opportunity; in fact, she gets her chance through an external source, which sort of makes up for the way that the opportunities she creates are stymied one by one.

Waitress succeeds because the droll humor and the film’s obvious sympathy for Jenna (and thus ours) overcome its flaws. The turning point at the film’s end is a bit too perfect, but writer Adrienne Shelly did set it up throughout the movie. Earl is a one-note character, perfectly defined by the fact that when he comes to the diner to pick Jenna up, he starts beeping his horn before he’s even pulled up to the front door; I found myself averting my eyes almost every time he came on screen because his treatment of his wife was so dated and misogynistic. I suppose such people exist, but Earl seemed too sharply defined and exaggerated. There was something a little too creepy about Dawn ending up dating her “stalker elf,” Okie, even if the point was to provide an example to Jenna. And perhaps the movie’s biggest sin in my mind is the pie-making -pouring cooked custards into unbaked pie shells (you have to blind-bake them), laying the horizontal strips of a lattice top over the vertical ones (they should be woven), and mashing fillings after they’ve been poured into the crust (the juices would turn the bottom crust into mush).

These hiccups don’t interrupt the movie’s undeniable charm, driven by some witty writing and a fantastic performance by Russell in the lead role. It’s a date movie with brains, or perhaps an indie take on the romantic comedy genre, or a film that just defies easy categorization. We could use a few more of those, come to think of it. I’ve been debating offering some sort of easy rating system, but if I had one, this would get my highest mark.

As an aside, no review of Waitress would be complete without a mention of its tragic backstory. After the movie was completed but before it was accepted to the 2007 Sundance festival, writer/director Adrienne Shelly, who also played Jenna’s unlucky-in-love co-worker Dawn, was murdered in her Manhattan office-apartment by an illegal immigrant construction worker whom she caught stealing money from her purse. It’s an artistic loss, as Shelly clearly had a lot of promise as a writer, and a terrible personal loss for her family: Waitress was written a few years earlier as a love-letter to her then-unborn daughter, who appears at the end of the film as Jenna’s daughter as a toddler.

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