→ November 4, 2014
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Ex Hex’s Rips.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents (with capsules on each one) is now up for Insiders, along with the first of six buyers’ guides, this one on starting pitchers.

Ex Hex is the new project for longtime alt-rock guitarist Mary Timony, who first rose to prominence in the very out-there Helium in the early 1990s (where her cherubic face clashed with their love of dissonant sounds) and more recently surfaced in the one-and-done supergroup Wild Flag, which also featured Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein. (And boy do I love Sleater-Kinney’s newest song, “Bury Our Friends.” Welcome back.) Timony’s newest project, Ex Hex, is probably her poppiest one yet, a power trio writing simple, punk-tinged, mostly upbeat songs that never sniff four minutes. Their debut album, Rips (iTunes), is basic, and a little surprising from a former Helium member, but very catchy, to the point where it would have been great summer listening – there’s a definite Beach Boys vibe to the vocals – had it come out a few months earlier.

Ex Hex’s formula is pretty simple: One hook per song, with a big chorus, lots of power chords, and some high-gain guitar riffs for accents. You could split the album into two parts – the uptempo power pop tracks that hint back to early post-punk acts like the Slits, and the slower tracks that expose the lack of technical difficulty in the guitar lines. Fortunately, there are very few of the latter, because Ex Hex’s real appeal on Rips is when they just let ‘er rip like a high school garage punk act, just with better production. Opener “Don’t Wanna Lose” comes in with a bang and hits on all cylinders, banging drums and reverbed-up guitars, before the power chords arrive like a souped-up “Mama Kin,” but with a dash of riot grrl in the lyrics. “New Kid” gets in and out inside of three minutes and never lets up its pace, even when it’s just Timony over the drums and hand-claps, leading into one of the album’s best choruses, full of roll-the-windows-down-and-hit-the-gas energy from start to end. “Waterfall” has the same kind of electricity, built on a basic blues shuffle compressed into four bars, although it has some of the album’s more insipid lyrics (“You took me to a party and you/hid behind the door/then you stole my wallet and passed out/on the kitchen floor”), certainly Rips‘ biggest weakness.

When Ex Hex slows things down, it sounds like demo territory, stuff that probably should have been left on the cutting room floor. “Outro” closes the album in contrary fashion – we just rocked out for most of the last thirty minutes, so now you give us a slow-dance number to end it? “Hot and Cold,” the first single from the album, borrows its main riff from Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Crimson and Clover” and follows the mopey chorus with huge guitar bends that seem lifted from “My Sharona.” The Knack might be a good point of comparison for Ex Hex, skinny ties aside; Ex Hex has that kind of intensity when they let it rock, but part of why “My Sharona” was a hit was that it was all hooks and no slack. Timony and company may have wanted to vary their output a bit, but simply slowing down the same three-power-chords and a chorus framework doesn’t work.

Ex Hex’s Rips doesn’t fit with the rest of Timony’s history, opting for simpler, more commercial sounds, but doing so successfully thanks to strong hooks and tight song structures. Her ex-boyfriend, Ash Bowie, got his old band Polvo back together a few years ago, releasing Siberia, an album as relentlessly complex as their pre-work, last autumn. We all get older in our own ways.

–

I’m heading out on vacation on Wednesday, which will make posting here sparse and my presence on social media sparser. I’ll still try to get a Top Chef recap up later this week, and there will be a new ESPN Insider column from me almost every day while I’m gone.

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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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→ November 1, 2014
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…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead’s IX.

I wrote about the Giants and Royals hitting on high draft picks for Insider, as well as a look at the top 30 prospects for the 2015 draft (with Chris Crawford). This week’s Klawchat will have to tide you over for two weeks, since I’m heading off on vacation on Wednesday.

My October playlist is up on Spotify now, featuring tracks from Ben Howard, Sleater-Kinney, Soundgarden, Ásgeir;, HAERTS, Belle & Sebastian, To Kill a King, and Wytches.

There’s also a new CHVRCHES track out, but it’s not on Spotify yet.

…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead have one of my favorite band names ever, but despite my occasional references to them, I don’t have a lot of history with their music. I thought Source Tags & Codes, one of the most critically acclaimed albums of the last twenty years, was much less memorable than the glowing reviews indicated. It was a landmark album of the “emo” subgenre of alternative rock, a point where their earlier noise-rock inclinations found balance with more ambitious song structures and lyrics. Pitchfork even gave it a perfect 10/10 rating, which means some editor there fell down on the job by allowing such a score to be applied to a record that’s this accessible. But because I didn’t come to their subsequent work from the perspective that Source Tags was their magnum opus, I never held the view that they were a band in decline that seems to have affected views of their next four albums.

Coming to their latest release, simply titled IX, rather fresh probably helped me get into the album as quickly as I did – or maybe it’s just one of their more hook-laden records, with five or six tracks that boast strong melodies on top of their usual walls of distorted guitars. What sets this album apart in particular is the tremendous percussion work by Jason Reece and Jamie Miller; the drums drive nearly all of the album’s best tracks through tempo shifts and time signature changes, and they’re mixed towards the front the way John Bonham’s drums were on vintage Zeppelin albums. It’s a new dimension for the band as they continue to evolve within their particular niche of alternative rock.

The new emphasis on heavy, layered percussion work starts up with the first track, “The Doomsday Book,” where the rich drums and cymbal crashes set the tone for the guitars rather than the converse; it feels like a race where no one else can let up for a second because of the pace set by the drums. The track bleeds directly into “Jaded Apostles,” which I think is the album’s best shot at a successful single, starting with a hypnotic, rotating guitar line that subtly changes shape when the drums arrive with a tropical-accented rhythm that pulses through nearly the whole song. (It must be exhausting to play the drums for for these guys.) “Lie Without a Liar” is the first appearance of truly guitar-driven music, with a jangly lead line contrasting with the quicker rhythm section until the wave crashes in the chorus; it’s their best use of textural shifts anywhere on the album, moving from quiet to loud, slow to quick, appearing to peter out after the second chorus before the solo and wall of noise return before the final verse.

There’s some bloat on the disc, especially in the midsection, with two songs crossing the six-minute mark (and becoming tedious strictly due to their length) as well a pair of instrumentals that suffer from the lack of lyrics, which would have forced a more elaborate structure on to each song. The second one, “Like Summer Tempests Came His Tears,” starts out as a piano-and-strings song before the guitars kick in about halfway through, but it’s only effective as a prelude for the album’s closer, “Sound of the Silk,” which has the complexity of a ten-minute track in half that length. “Sound” starts with a two-minute mini-song that, by Trail of Dead standards, is practically a pop tune, although with an unconventional time signature, but then it ends abruptly with a drum breakdown (with a lot of bongos and Caribbean drumming patterns), which itself seems to peter out before we get a spoken-word passage over a guitar fill that crescendoes through the entire poem until reaching its apex in the last thirty seconds with a final chorus that alludes to the earliest part of the track without repeating it. That’s all in 5:13, by the way, and it’s masterful, even if it’s about as uncommercial as any track on the album.

I’m not qualified to say if IX, which is already out in Europe and comes out here on November 11th, is a “comeback” album for …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, because I’m just not familiar enough with their catalog and don’t line enough with the consensus on their earliest work. IX is better than mere “emo” – a term I always thought was pejorative anyway – with art-rock leanings, complex structures, and among the band’s best hooks ever.

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→ October 1, 2014
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September 2014 music update.

September was a heavy month for new releases, but a light month for good new tracks. I reviewed the new alt-J album, the best release of the month, earlier and haven’t included them here. Here’s the newest Spotify playlist, which includes all of the tracks I listed here but two:

Superhumanoids – “Come Say Hello”/”Hey Big Bang.” I was remiss in omitting these tracks from the August playlist. Sarah Chernoff’s vocals are just incredible, a true soprano soaring over two memorable dream-pop backing tracks.

Snakehips ft. Sinead Harnett – “Days With You.” A soulful trip-hoppy track with unforgettable vocals from Harnett that I first mentioned back in June but that wasn’t released until the very end of August.

The Kooks – “Forgive & Forget.” Maybe the best track from their newest album, reviewed here.

Strand of Oaks – “For Me.” I found their new album to be wildly uneven, often far too low-key given their overall sound, but when Tim Showalter cranks up the tempo just a little bit he finds a sweet spot where the contrast between the guitars’ distortion and his lyrical laments is perfectly balanced.

Broods – “Mother & Father” Not quite as good as their first single, the amazing “Bridges,” but boasting a similar combination of a strong melody and Georgia Nott’s ethereal vocals. This is listed on Spotify but the song isn’t playing for me right now, so it may no longer be available.

Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness – “Cecilia And The Satellite.” Modern synth-pop, reminiscent of the Hooters (perhaps because that band had a minor hit called “Satellite” too) with earnest vocals at the front of the mix.

Tweedy – “Low Key.” Mostly included just so I can link to the video, directed by Nick Offerman and starring, among many others, John Hodgman and Michael Shannon.

Max Jury – “Black Metal.” A bit precious, perhaps, but I got a laugh out of the lyrics and video, and the chorus is rather catchy. The 21-year-old singer-songwriter from Iowa draws on folk and country influences in his better tracks, but at other times veers off towards faux-jazz territory, which I’d say is the wrong direction for him or anyone else who wants to maintain his self-respect.

Cold War Kids – “All This Could Be Yours.” I’ve always found their music to be a little histrionic, mostly the result of Nathan Willett’s vocal style but also found in their dramatic piano/drum riffs. Sometimes it works really well, sometimes less so, with this song, released in July as the first single off their forthcoming album, somewhere in between those two points.

Death from Above 1979 – “Trainwreck 1979.” It seems like a lot of music critics/writers are making of a big deal about this group’s reunion ten years after their apparently one-and-done debut album, of which I have absolutely no recollection whatsoever. For electro-rock, it’s not bad, but I’m a little confused by all the hype; it seems like there are a few dozen U.K. acts putting out similar music right now.

Ex Hex – “Beast.” A new trio led by Mary Timony, former lead singer of noise-rockers Helium and member of Wild Flag, Ex Hex just released their debut album yesterday and it’s full of tight, power-pop tracks that betray Timony’s post-punk roots but are among the most melodic things she’s ever put out.

Animals as Leaders – “Tooth and Claw.” I think I mentioned these guys a few months ago, and I recognize this is pretty out there even for me, but Animals as Leaders’ highly experimental, technically precise brand of instrumental metal is totally riveting for me as a longtime guitar player and occasional fan of melodic death metal – which this resembles, just without the growled or screamed vocals.

Opeth – “Eternal Rains Will Come.” I left this track and “Tooth and Claw” at the end since they’re so unlike everything else on the playlist, moving way into the progressive realm right down to the Hammond organs and psychedelic harmonies. If you only know Opeth from their death-metal past, give this track a listen with fresh ears.

Tracks not on Spotify:

Ty Segall – “Tall Man Skinny Lady.” Getting a ton of play on Sirius XM right now, this song is one of seventeen on Segall’s latest album, with a simple guitar riff over a two-step percussion line that repeats incessantly throughout the song. I don’t know why they ran Segall’s vocals through reverb, which makes it sound like he recorded them from out in the hallway, but otherwise it’s a strong slice of psychedelic rock with an anarchic guitar solo.

Telegram – “Regatta.” An obnoxiously British-sounding act, from the Libertines influences in the music to the lead singer’s almost indecipherable Welsh accent, so the result sounds like a bit like the Arctic Monkeys replaced Alex Turner with Gruff Rhys. The video features the band’s members wandering around Tokyo.

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→ September 23, 2014
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This is All Yours.

alt-J’s 2012 debut album An Awesome Wave, winner of that fall’s Mercury Prize, remains my favorite album released since the turn of the century, a hypnotic, hypercreative, genre-bending masterwork that plays with sounds, tempos, and tension to subvert typical rock song structures without every losing sight of the critical elements of melody and rhythm. The album featured stunning production that offered clear, precise sounds in a minimalist framework, while the then-quartet carried lyrical and musical themes across multiple tracks to present the listener with a diverse yet cohesive whole. The Mercury Prize doesn’t always go to the most deserving album – last year’s snoozer would be a perfect example – but alt-J deserved it as much as any other winner ever had. (Of course, Pitchfork trashed the album, shocking no one.)

That means that expectations, mine and the music world’s, have run very high with the long crescendo to today’s release of This Is All Yours, the sophomore album from alt-J, now a trio after the departure of bassist Gwil Sainsbury. The new disc moves the band in a direct I didn’t anticipate, opting for slower tempos and brighter sounds, creating a more melancholy record overall, one with fewer standout melodies than An Awesome Wave and a muddled production quality that contrasts with the precision of its predecessor’s. It is every bit as bizarre a record as you’d expect from a band that named itself after a keyboard combination (their name is technically Δ) and that produced an album as weird as their debut. It is less consistent than their first record, but it is never, ever dull.

The three singles released from This is All Yours showcase the album’s brilliance alongside its inconsistency. “Hunger of the Pine” works from a trip-hop foundation, layers guitarist Joe Newman’s languorous, high-pitched vocals – occasionally delivering entire lines without changing the note – over keyboardist Gus Unger-Hamilton’s baritone, only to throw in a sample of Miley Cyrus incongruously singing “I’m a female rebel” in the chorus. “Left Hand Free,” a song the boys have acknowledged they wrote because their label’s A&R man said he didn’t hear a single from the album, listens like a deadpan parody of American indie or jangle-pop, with suitably ridiculous lyrics that still manage to slip in the kind of literary allusions that they used so well on An Awesome Wave. The third single, “Every Other Freckle,” is the album’s best song, bridging the gap between those first two songs in a way that recalls their first album’s highest points, shifting gears suddenly between tempos or even genres, with lyrical flourishes that offer competing interpretations (the transition from touching to creepy in “I wanna bed into you, like a cat beds into a beanbag/Turn you inside out, and lick you like a crisp packet” is a highlight of their career) and perfectly timed hard-stops before the next miniature movement begins. The three songs don’t really sound at all like they’d come from the same band, with an almost anti-commercial song in “Hunger of the Pine” alongside the disposable “Left Hand Free,” diversity without the explosive creativity of the band’s first record.

Instead, the trio appear to have channeled their creativity into crafting lush soundscapes like the gorgeous acoustic track “Warm Foothills,” which features vocals from no fewer than four guest singers, including Lianne La Havas, whom alt-J beat out for the Mercury Prize two years ago. The vocals are stitched together to give you odd transitions before we get our payoff in beautiful harmonies – although there’s no big finish or massive textural shift as you might have expected on An Awesome Wave. The lyrics of the Alien-inspired “The Gospel of John Hurt” blend that film’s mythology (it doesn’t go well for Hurt’s character) with the Book of Jeremiah, over a tripartite backing track, starting with a xylophone-heavy introductory passage, leading to a sluggish passage where we get the band spelling out a key word (as on “Fitzpleasure” and “Bloodflood”) before the guitar moves to the front in the final, cathartic movement. How that song can be followed with the throwaway acoustic track “Pusher” is one of the most puzzling aspects of the disc; I could have done without “Pusher” entirely, but after one of This is All Yours‘ strongest, most intense songs, it dissolves the momentum the band has just built up with the previous song.

alt-J have always been fond of referring back to their own songs, and do so explicitly with “Bloodflood pt. II,” which brings back both “Bloodflood” and “Fitzpleasure” from their first album, reusing certain lyrics and musical themes but reworking them into new settings while carrying over the violence implicit in “Fitzpleasure,” which itself drew from the book and film Last Exit to Brooklyn. They’re also big on unusual covers, and the album’s bonus track completely deconstructs Bill Withers’ classic soul song “Lovely Day” and builds it back up with multiple flows of shimmering keyboard lines that move over you like fluids of varying viscosities – to the point where you might only recognize the original track by the lyrics.

The brief review by the Guardian compared This is All Yours to Radiohead’s Kid A for their shared abandonment of the traditional rock format in favor of playing with sounds and textures, but Radiohead’s departure was far more shocking – here was one of the greatest straight-up rock bands in history, coming off an album that should have won every award for which it could possibly have been eligible, metaphorically lighting its guitars on fire to play with keyboards and other synthetic sounds. alt-J had no such sound to abandon, so their capacity to shock us more than their debut already did so is muted.

This is All Yours includes repetition of themes and imagery in its lyrics, just as their first album did, here with recurring ruminations on loss and dependence in relationships, and several songs refer to the African quelea, a nomadic passerine bird of African that travels in large flocks, or other flying creatures; as well as to lungs, to waves, or to the sea. Their lyrics are more cryptic and less narrative this time around; most songs on An Awesome Wave told a story somewhere, while the songs on This is All Yours have fewer lyrics overall and none tells a complete story from beginning to end. That may be the most shocking shift of the album, rather than the change in music – the way that alt-J thinks about crafting a single song, or an album as a collection of songs, seems to have changed, as if they couldn’t or wouldn’t reproduce the style of their first album, which was five years in the making. This is All Yours comes out only two years and a few months after their debut, but in many ways feels more ambitious and bold. It is uneven compared to their debut, and presents a less immersive listening experience, but also shows a group unwilling or unable to rest on their laurels, for whom an effort that doesn’t match their best work can still be among the most important and impressive albums of the year.

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→ September 15, 2014
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Puig Destroyer, FKA Twigs, and other new albums.

Puig Destroyer started out as something of a joke (their name alludes to American grindcore act Pig Destroyer) among a few baseball-loving musicians, including Riley Breckenridge and Ian Miller of the Productive Outs podcast, but they’ve now morphed into a real if virtual hardcore punk band that performs loud, fast, short songs about baseball topics – including one song I can honestly claim to have inspired, “Umpshow.” Their first full-length album, Puig Destroyer, includes twenty songs, none over 2:06, with the best song titles anyone’s produced since Seth Putnam died, including “Three True Outcomes,” “Trumbomb,” and the entirely truthful “No One Cares About Your Fantasy Team.” This kind of post-hardcore isn’t for everyone – I’ve seen them described as grindcore, but Puig Destroyer isn’t in Napalm Death territory – with blast beats, shouted vocals, and heavy bass lines, but it’s tightly produced and you can hear the strong musicianship underlying the jokes about sabermetrics and ligament reconstruction surgery. The album is available for preorder for $7 now through that link, and you get an immediate download of the song “Mike Trout.” (Full disclosure: I’ve met Ian, been on the Productive Outs podcast, and received a digital review copy of the album.)

* Meanwhile, longtime hardcore stalwarts Sick of It All are about to release The Last Act of Defiance, their first album in four years, one that shows a band in steep decline. Not only are the fourteen tracks generic and tired, but the song “2061” sees the group espousing 9/11 conspiracy-theory nonsense, claiming that the U.S. government is hiding the “truth” about the attacks until confidential documents are made public in the year of the song’s title. That kind of “truther” bullshit is an intelligence test, and Sick of It All just failed.

* In Flames’ newest album, Siren Charms, continues in the vein of their more recent work, where they try to straddle the space between their melodic death metal roots and more radio-friendly American metalcore, which produces a very unsatisfying end result. In Flames’ signature twin guitar leads are present all over the album, but aren’t front and center on enough tracks for fans of their work or, in my case, fans of that particular brand of extreme-metal riffing.

* FKA twigs (née Tahliah Debrett Barnett) might suffocate under the weight of all of the positive reviews of her debut album LP1, including a nomination for this year’s Mercury Prize. While Barnett shows beauty in her emotional, restrained style of singing, I can’t add to the effusive plaudits thrown her way because the severely understated trip-hop style where she plies her musical trade strikes me as little more than background music. There’s almost nothing here to praise or critique; it’s barely music, an unstable foundation for Barnett’s impressive vocal acrobatics, unable to hold my attention for even the length of a song. She may very well win the Mercury Prize, which alt-J took home two years ago for An Awesome Wave, given the critical acclaim LP1 has received; I’m just not hearing what everyone else is.

* English hard-rock band Amplifier draws influence from about three decades of rock and metal, from the ’70s (notably Pink Floyd, with hints of Black Sabbath) to the ’90s (Nirvana, Soundgarden), but the result on their forthcoming album Mystoria is surprisingly tame. I certainly expected more experimentation based on their reviews and press clippings, but after the opening pair of tracks, we get some generic album-oriented rock tracks made marginally more interesting with heavy use of effects pedals. The instrumental opener, “Magic Carpet,” and second track, “Black Rainbow,” are the only standouts here, with the off-beat percussion line in the latter track giving it the experimental feel that the guitar riff lacks.

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→ September 9, 2014
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The Kooks’ Listen.

The Kooks’ fourth album, Listen, comes after a three-year hiatus that saw lead singer and songwriter Luke Pritchard traveling to the U.S. and collaborating with other songwriters for the first time. The resulting album from their reunion sounds a lot like the old Kooks, just with more pronounced percussion lines. There are some great singles here, with sort of a second-wave Britpop feel that might not play as well in the United States, but it doesn’t have the impact I was hoping for given the layoff and the band’s discussion of a new direction for the disc.

“Down,” the lead single from the album, is the perfect example of a solid pop-rock song that would play much better in London than Los Angeles. Pritchard always sounds like he’s singing with a head cold, but the opening lines are only missing Peter Sellers following them up with “I wish I could sing like that.” The vocals overshadow the unconventional percussion lines, heavy on cymbals and hand-claps, that make the song otherwise compelling, and probably the best pure pop song on the album, even if the chorus’s silly “down-down-diggety-down” pattern desperately needs a modulation to another key.

“Forgive and Forget” does a better job of melding the influences Pritchard wanted to incorporate in the album, a neo-soul approach that reflected his time in the U.S., here mixing the drums to the front of the chorus (with Motown-style backup vocals) and driving the song on a set of funky guitar lines – with the funk sound coming from the strumming pattern rather than just the notes. The song comes off as a celebration, emphasized by the brief drum fill right before the 3-minute mark that raises the intensity right before the endless chorus that closes the track. “Bad Habit,” the current single, bears similar influences but mixes them into the album’s most conventional rock format, with guitar lines derived from blues-rock standards and drums that nod back to John Bonham after each chorus.

There’s plenty of experimentation on this album, at least relative to previous Kooks efforts, but it’s a mixed bag of results. The psychedelic “Dreams” pairs the Kooks’ best lyrical imagery of the disc with a faux-Arab rhythm and fuzzed-out keyboard line, all of which has the wisdom to get out after three minutes before the clever gambit turns stale. “Are We Electric” shifts back to sunny pop, one of a few moments on the album where the Kooks come off as the smarter, less overproduced OneRepublic. (I can’t stand OneRepublic, but I have to concede that they craft some strong pop hooks.) And if I just play the first fifteen seconds of “It Was London” for you, you’re going to assume it’s from Spoon’s latest album. But when Pritchard turns more introspective, we get the maudlin “See Me Now,” a song to the father Pritchard lost at age three, and the perfunctory “Westside,” with a boring drum-machine kickoff (a possible nod to The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me”) and lyrics that I want to believe are somehow meant to be ironic (“Oh we can settle down/start a family/you’re still my best friend/and you’re so good to me”). If that’s “love song number 23,” I’d rather not hear numbers one to twenty-two.

If the Kooks’ goal on Listen was to expand their musical boundaries, I’m not sure we can call it a success. There’s a lot here that’s been done before, either by the Kooks themselves or by a host of other bands, mostly based in the U.S., that have infused soul or funk elements into indie-rock. If instead we evaluate Listen on its own merits, however, it’s one of the strongest collections of pop-rock singles of the year, with at least four songs that merit airplay on alternative and pop outlets. If we can just get Pritchard a decongestant, the Kooks might really have something here.

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→ September 2, 2014
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August music update.

Today’s Insider column covers notable September callups.

I held this back until after the holiday weekend, both to make sure more of you would see it and because I was hoping we’d get some new singles out on Tuesday, which worked out with songs from HAERTS and TV on the Radio released this morning. I’ve created another Spotify playlist with all of this month’s songs.

alt-J – “Every Other Freckle.” Their sophomore album, This is All Yours, drops on September 22nd, and the the third single released from it is the best and most alt-J-ish one yet, a precise, rapidly-shifting track that seamlessly combines genres while boasting some of the band’s trademark double-edged lyrics: “I’m gonna bed into you like a cat beds into a beanbag/Turn you inside out, and lick you like a crisp packet.” I can’t wait for the album to see how all of these songs work together, given how cohesive An Awesome Wave was. Speaking of which, the Mercury Prize shortlist announcement is just eight days away.

Faded Paper Figures – “Real Lies.” I think Spotify suggested FPF to me because I’ve listened to alt-J, but they’re not similar beyond a shared interest in electro-pop sounds. Where alt-J is surgically precise, FPF is free-flowing; where alt-J is musically understated, FPF is bold and poppy. They do both engage in a fair amount of wordplay, as the Figures do here, singing “real lies” as you’d pronounce “realize,” and opening a song about reality and illusion with a reference to “the broken I.”

The Rentals – “Thought Of Sound.” Hard to believe their novelty/cult hit “Friends of P” came out 19 years ago next month; in the interim, they released another album, broke up, reformed, released several mini-albums on their own, then signed with Polyvinyl for the album Lost in Alphaville, which just came out last week. The band’s founder, Matt Sharp, started out as the bassist for Weezer, and I think the Rentals sound more like the original Weezer than current Weezer does. “Thought of Sound” fits that rubric: it’s not overtly poppy or catchy, but comes at you more subtly, with a balance of atmospheric and slightly dark music with the more optimistic lyrics.

Interpol – “All The Rage Back Home.” This sounds like vintage Interpol. I think that’s a good thing, but then again, I really like Joy Division.

Echosmith – “Cool Kids.” My daughter’s favorite new song of the summer is actually a pretty strong track overall, not bad for a group of four siblings, three of them still teenagers. I particularly like their use of silence when it would be almost instinctive to fill all of that space with more sound; the starkness underscores the isolation of the lyrics’ speakers.

Twerps – “Heavy Hands.” This Australian act’s influences are largely from that country and less familiar to my ears, at least, bands like the Clean and the Go-Betweens who never crossed over to U.S. radio. Their new 8-song EP, Underlay, continues their exploration of mellow jangle-pop textures, with a couple of songs under two minutes as the band has one idea, gets after it, and gets out. “Heavy Hands” is my favorite track from the album, deceptively upbeat, reminiscent of the earliest output by the Cure or New Order before their sounds expanded with bigger recording budgets.

Wild Beasts – “Wanderlust.” Radiohead meets alt-J meets … I don’t even know, the Dazz Band? It doesn’t always work, often coming off as weird for weirdness’ sake, but this track is the album’s best, fluid and abstract musically, punctuated by the singer’s refrain of “Don’t confuse me with someone who gives a fuck.” I won’t – I promise.

Bear in Heaven – “Autumn.” I’ve got their latest, Time is Over One Day Old, on the to-listen list. “Autumn,” the second single from the album, is dark, pulsing, almost menacing in its combination of intensity and the stark keyboard lines.

Royal Blood – “Figure It Out.” I’ll review their debut album later this week; nothing on it can match the standout “Out of the Black,” one of my favorite songs of the year, but the second single is solid, more classic blues-rock than the heavier sound of their first hit.

Strand of Oaks – “Goshen ’97.” A reader recommendation, and a pretty good one. The album’s uneven but this nostalgia-tinged rocker – can we already feel nostalgic about 1997? God have mercy on us all – brings back memories not just of grunge but of the Replacements and similar loose garage-rock artists of the 1980s. I didn’t need to know about the porn and menthols under his bed, though.

Phantogram – “Black Out Days.” I’ve been remiss in omitting this song from the last two lists, as the song has been all over XMU/Alt Nation since the spring. Singer Sarah Barthels elevates this song beyond the electronic-rock norm with her hypnotic Cocteau Twins-esque vocals.

The Kooks – “Bad Habit.” The British rock quartet’s fourth album, Listen, came out today in the U.K. and is due next Tuesday here; “Bad Habit” is the second single released, after April’s “Down,” and it sounds a lot like a Kooks song – catchy, riffing heavily on classic-rock influences, less Britpop and a little more Arctic Monkeys.

Ryan Adams – “Gimme Something Good.” His best song since “Cuts Like a Knife” back in ’83.

Glass Animals – “Pools.” “Gooey” was their big alternative hit this summer, but I’m not a fan of the song itself or the production that seems to melt the lyrics back into the music. “Pools” has far more energy, driven by a jungle/tropical rhythm that’s a better contrast to the breathy low-baritone vocals.

Milky Chance – “Stolen Dance.” You’ve probably heard this by now – 77 million plays on Spotify can’t be wrong, can they? (Answer: Of course they can.) I don’t rate the song quite that highly, but it doesn’t sound like anything else out there right now, and, as Rakim might say, the beat is fresh.

HAERTS – “Giving Up.” Their debut album is due by year-end, after a slew of promising singles, including this one, released today, a bright slice of indie-pop driven by singer Nini Fabi’s strong, sultry vocals. If you liked Haim, this is a million times better than anything they released.

TV on the Radio – “Happy Idiot.” Also released today, “Happy Idiot” previews the band’s upcoming album Seeds, due November 18th. (It won’t include last year’s amazing “Mercy,” however, which was my #4 song of 2013.) Shifting into serious new wave territory with the drum machine and staccato guitar line, “Happy Idiot” has a subtler hook than “Mercy” but builds tension through layering of guitars as the song crescendoes toward the end of its three minutes. Stereogum called it TV on the Radio’s best song since Pure Science; I disagree, since “Mercy” was one of their best two or three tracks ever. Instead, I’ll just say that “Happy Idiot” is a hopeful preview of their upcoming album.

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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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