→ 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 26, 2014
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Entombed A.D.’s Back to the Front.

My breakdown of the Peavy trade is up now for Insiders.

Entombed was one of the most important bands in the history of heavy metal, a death metal act that veered hard back toward the mainstream with their epic 1993 album Wolverine Blues, which featured substantially slower tempos, fewer blast beats, and somewhat more comprehensible lyrics. The band didn’t eschew its detuned guitar sounds or heavy riffs, but the newer style drew more from classic dark metal acts like Black Sabbath and Slayer, rather than the straight-on (and in my opinion unlistenable) early Nordic death metal pioneers like Mayhem or Emperor. Their new style earned the moniker “death-and-roll,” although that sounds pejorative to me rather than recognizing that what they were doing was ingenious.

Personnel disagreements splintered the band, however, and founding vocalist LG Petrov has split off with three later members of the band to form Entombed A.D., whose debut album Back to the Front is set to drop on August 5th. It’s not Wolverine Blues, but it’s very much in that vein, with huge, heavy, almost bluesy metal riffs reminiscent of British Steel-era Judas Priest, along with unmistakeable death-metal elements like growled vocals and faster percussion. The album is uneven, but fans of Entombed’s work with its classic lineup should be interested in the new output.

Back to the Front couldn’t start off any better, with the menacing “Kill to Live” driving forward on thick buzzsaw guitar riffs, leaving the rapid-fire drumming just to brief passages that punctuate the heaviness of the verses and chorus rather than overpowering the music. “Second to None” employs a similar mix of elements, like a sludgier, bluesier track left off of Pantera’s A Vulgar Display of Power. (I’m not a Pantera fan, though, as the whole “groove metal” movement left me cold.) The closer, “Soldier of No Fortune,” sees Entombed stretching out into more melodic territory, a nearly seven-minute opus with multiple segments and tempo shifts, but which never loses the force or heaviness of Entombed’s signature sound.

The album veers back and forth from the Entombed death-and-roll sound to some more conventional death-metal numbers, and the quality of the songwriting rises and falls at the same time. “The Underminer” opens with a incredible rapid-fire guitar riff, but the whole thing is, er, undermined by the blast beats that follow and wipe out the guitar sound. “Bait and Bleed” has a similar problem, starting with a pair of overlaid guitar lines that would appear to promise more complexity, but by the chorus we’ve drifted into more cliched death-metal territory and lost the plot of the opener. Even “Bedlam Attack,” which has some tempo shifts later in the song, loses me with the fastball before we get to the changeup because it’s so repetitive.

I said on Twitter last week that this album isn’t as good as Wolverine Blues, but it’s a solid add to the Entombed canon. The more I’ve listened to Back to the Front, however, the less positive I feel about it. There’s too much here that I think I’ve heard before, from Entombed’s early/mid-90s output to the groove metal movement to earlier touchstones like Motorhead, Sabbath, and Slayer. If you’re a longtime Entombed fan, Entombed A.D. won’t disappoint you, but I don’t think it’ll stay in my own rotation for long.

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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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→ June 20, 2014
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Music update, June 2014.

I’ve hit a few minor-league games this past week, and have written posts about each one:
* Scouting notes from the California-Carolina Leagues All-Star Game, held in my backyard this year in Wilmington.
* Notes on Yankees/Orioles AA prospects, including lefties Manny Banuelos and Eddie Rodriguez.
* More notes, this time on the Ike Davis trade, some Lakewood/Hickory prospects, and Daniel Carbonell.
* This week’s Klawchat.

I’m a little overdue for a music update, with the draft sort of getting in the way of things earlier this month, but I think I’m back on track for now with this post, which covers a dozen songs to come out in the last few weeks or months that I’ve enjoyed. The new Spotify playlist below includes some other songs I’ve mentioned in previous music posts but haven’t put on a playlist before. As always, links on song titles go to amazon.

alt-J – “Hunger of the Pine.” I would have been disappointed if the first single from alt-J’s upcoming album was anything but weird, but as with An Awesome Wave, I had an immediate “WTF” reaction to this song, especially the presence of a sample from Miley Cyrus’ “4×4” in lieu of a traditional chorus. But as with everything I’ve ever heard from alt-J, the song’s complexity and precision becomes more and more apparent with each listen, and now I’m fired up again for the full release in September.

The Holidays – “Tongue Talk.” My pick for the top song of the year’s second quarter, “Tongue Talk” melds the Madchester sound with the musical experimentation of Beck, the best song I’ve heard so far from the Australian indie-pop act’s sophomore album, Real Feel. The first single from the LP, “All-Time High,” is lighter and poppier and apparently more indicative of their overall sound; I prefer the hints of darkness and tempo shifts of “Tongue Talk” for its greater balance.

Future Islands – “Seasons (Waiting On You).” It’s a good song, but I think it’s been boosted by their performance on the David Letterman show, featuring the lead singer’s mesmerizing dance. Without that, it might have just been set aside as a solid pop song drawing on 1970s soft-rock tropes.

Young Rising Sons – “High.” From nearby Red Bank, NJ, the band just signed with Interscope Records and I presume there will be an album somewhere in their near future. Good luck getting this one out of your head – my daughter latched on to this one right away.

The Horrors – “So Now You Know.” Hard to believe this is the same group that debuted with the shock-rock “Sheena Was a Parasite,” and I think to some extent they’ve sold out for more airplay by shifting into psychedlic-tinged indie rock. That doesn’t make this a bad song, just not what you’d expect if you liked The Horrors’ earlier work. Of course, every time I see this song title I start singing “…who gets mystifiiiiiiiied.”

Creases – “Static Lines.” If you liked the Libertines, I think you’ll like this, mostly because it sounds like a remastered Libertines track, but with less sloppy guitars.

Hundred Waters – “Xtalk.” I received a review copy of this album, but it’s not to my tastes at all, too slow and spacey, with breathy vocals that grated on me before I got halfway through it. There are a few more promising moments from this experimental group, who are touring with alt-J this summer, led by this track, driven by a plaintive synth line over the record’s most uptempo beat, as well as “[Animal],” which features a quiet drum-machine line that picks up volume as the song goes along and morphs into a techno track by the three-quarters mark.

The Bleachers – “I Wanna Get Better.” On the one hand, it’s the dopey sing-along song of the summer, and if the keyboard sample doesn’t make you think of Len’s “Steal My Sunshine” you’re probably under the age of 18. On the other hand, the lyrics have several strong images and make heavy use of assonance with what I think is a spot-on message about dealing with depression or similar mental illnesses. My daughter would tab this as one of her top three rocks songs for the summer.

Foster the People – “Are You What You Wanna Be?” The lead track from their newest album, Supermodel, also serves as the transition music for Baseball Tonight this year, and it’s the best song on the album, with a loud, catchy chorus interspersed with Afro-Caribbean percussion lines and vocals that descend and climb stairs with unexpected rapidity. Foster tried for more experimentation outside of the two singles from the album so far, and this song is where he struck the perfect balance between art and mass appeal.

Sleeper Agent – “Waves.” I admit I’m getting a little sick of this song already, but it’s very catchy and probably going to cross over to the pop side soon enough.

Tove Lo – “Habits (Stay High).” Pronounced like the name of the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu and not as a rhyme with “stove low,” Tove Lo is a Swedish singer whose pop rhythms belie the raw imagery in her lyrics. My daughter loves this song, probably her favorite song of the spring/summer, and fortunately she hasn’t asked me what “then I go to sex clubs/watching freaky people/gettin’ it on” means yet.

Knox Hamilton – “Work It Out.” A little lightweight but never twee, “Work It Out” is drive by the meandering twelve-note melody in its verses that feels like you’re wandering down an open-air staircase, with old-school soul influences and jangle-pop guitar lines behind the chorus.

Jack White – “Lazaretto.” I feel like White’s moment has passed, as there’s a broad backlash against his music and his behavior now, but that doesn’t affect what I think about his output, and the live jam-band feel of this first single from his newest album adds a new twist to his deep 1970s guitar lines. By the way, I had no idea what a lazaretto was – it sounds like a kind of Italian sports car – but ran across the word while reading Les Misérables and looked it up: “An isolation hospital for people with infectious diseases, especially leprosy or plague.” Oh.

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→ May 31, 2014
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War Eternal.

Arch Enemy’s upcoming release War Eternal (due out June 10th) is the Swedish melodic death metal band’s first with new lead growler … I mean, singer Alissa White-Gluz, their tenth album over a now 19-year-career. Arch Enemy has always been among the most accessible acts in the melodeth subgenre, producing fast and heavy but, other than their debut album, not brutal tracks with clear melodic elements, technically sound guitar work, and solid vocals that didn’t distract from the underlying material. War Eternal has several tracks with the same musical strengths, but White-Gluz’s vocals and lyrics are a big step back from the band’s previous work, and sometimes it seems as if the vocalist change may have spurred a change in musical direction toward less adventurous material.

War Eternal opens somewhat promisingly, with a brief instrumental (in F minor, as the title tells us) before we get to two of its strongest tracks, the muscular “Never Forgive, Never Forget” and the raging title track. “Never Forgive” is driven by a simple six-note guitar riff repeated throughout the song that breaks apart the high-tempo verses and the staccato-plucked interludes, and the shredding in its two-part solo is probably the album’s strongest for pure technical skill. “War Eternal” opens with a marching pattern at machine-gun speed before downshifting into a pattern that seems drawn from classic ’80s thrash acts like Testament or Exodus, adding sophisticated melodic twists before each chorus to distinguish the song. It’s a shame that it’s brought down by its simple-minded lyrics (“Friend or foe/There’s no way to know” … this is the best they could come up with to open the song?), something that plagues much of the disc.

There’s a lull mid-album, including the cloddish “As the Pages Burn,” where War Eternal loses some steam, but a second instrumental, the glam metal-inspired “Graveyard of Dreams,” serves as a bit of a reset button before the furious strumming that opens “Stolen Life,” the track that should most satisfy fans of Arch Enemy’s previous work. The album needed a song like this: a taut, straightforward three-minutes of speed metal, with riffs to make Dave Mustaine proud (if he could stop patting himself on the back for a few moments). That combination of songs gives the listener a chance to breathe before the last standout on the album, the five-minute opus “Time is Black,” a theatrical and sometimes bombastic song with several tempo shifts and classical elements better integrated here than on “Avalanche,” which has “trying too hard” written all over it. It might have been better to follow “Time is Black” with “Down to Nothing,” which opens with a heavy grindcore pattern that reminded me of vintage Carcass – unsurprising, as Arch Enemy was founded by former Carcass guitarist Michael Amott, who worked on their landmark album, Heartwork, the album that did the most to establish melodic death metal as a viable style.

The main drawback in White-Gluz’s vocals is her style of growling, where she’s reaching so far down to get that gutteral sound that she sounds like she’s retching, and she rarely varies this style so the listener never gets a break. Extreme metal already has a sort of built-in bias against female vocalists because of the genre’s preference for these Cookie Monster vocals, rather than the kind of operatic singing associated with British metal of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the sing-talking of 1980s speed metal, or the death-screeches of Chuck Schuldiner (of Death) or Jeff Walker (of Carcass). White-Gluz’s predecessor, Angela Glossow, found an adequate medium with a higher-pitched growl than male death-metal vocalists employ, but White-Gluz is aiming for a lower register and it doesn’t work for me. She also is far too prone to employ the most cliched move in extreme metal, roaring at maximum volume over the opening riffs. (Note to aspiring death-metal vocalists: Don’t do this.)

War Eternal also suffers from a lack of ambition, outside of “Time is Black” and perhaps “Avalanche,” sticking mostly to straightforward thrash with death-metal vocals and blast beats, when they’re at a point in their career where you’d expect more experimentation. I prefer metal with progressive or technical elements, such as on Insomnium’s Shadows of a Dying Sun, but if you’re interested in Arch Enemy I’d suggest starting with 2003’s Anthems of Rebellion.

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→ May 20, 2014
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Insomnium’s Shadows of a Dying Sun.

I have two new posts up for ESPN.com Insiders today – my 2004 redraft and my review of 2004 first-rounders who didn’t pan out.

Finnish melodic death metal band Insomnium have one of the broadest wingspans of any artist in that subgenre, incorporating theatrical and symphonic elements without eschewing the heaviness and rapid riffing that keep one foot firmly planted in the death-metal sphere. Their latest release, Shadows of the Dying Sun, continues that tradition and then some, veering from over-the-top extreme/speed metal to operatic tracks that you might even call death-metal ballads.

Melodic death metal generally includes two major elements: technically proficient, hook-laden guitar lines, and screamed or growled vocals. Insomnium adds many other twists to their particular flavor, with strings, pianos, acoustic guitar lines, and vocal harmonies (sung in normal voices) in choruses. It hasn’t been a straight line from the genre’s originators like Celtic Frost and Carcass, but the result is a more accessible brand of “melodeth” that should appeal to fans of everything from contemporary extreme metal to the earliest waves of speed and thrash.

Shadows of the Dying Sun starts innocuously enough with “The Primeval Dark,” a slow-building doom track that clocks in at barely over three minutes, a sign that Insomnium aren’t trying to pummel the listener with unnavigable ten-minute songs, and the song is just the teaser for the tremendous “While We Sleep,” into which it leads without a break. The lead guitar line is joined by a second axe for some parallel riffing before we get an actual sung verse, musical motifs that continue even as the song shifts tempo and direction multiple times. It’s among the most overtly listener-friendly death metal tracks I’ve ever heard: melodic, theatrical, even bombastic, and far more coherent than I’d expect from a six-minute snog of this complexity.

The abrupt tempo shifts of “While We Sleep” are a recurring musical theme for Insomnium, driving other tracks as well. “Revelation” opens with a straightforward European speed metal riff, then drops the pace by more than half for the funereal verses, picking back up in the bridge to the initial tempo, then finding the middle ground for what passes for a chorus here. “Ephemeral” is similarly catchy, an abject lesson to pop acts that try to appropriate punk or metal for commercial airplay, thanks to memorable guitar lines and a growl-along chorus that play well with the heavy rhythm lines and the rapid percussion that marks this clearly as death metal, while also playing around with timing and rhythm. Meanwhile, “Collapsing Words” dispenses with those velocity changes – the song drives in with a rapid-fire pedal-point sixteen-beat riff that evokes 1980s European speed metal and even its predecessors like Iron Maiden and Diamond Head, although it’s probably the one track that would have most benefited from a traditionally-sung vocal.

The album’s centerpiece track is the eight-minute opus “The River,” comprising several movements, including the juxtaposition of slow-changing guitar lines over blast beats, as well as an acoustic intro where lead singer Niilo Sevänen actually sings – although the lines sound more effete than he likely intended because of his accented English. The track builds from the slow intro into multiple swells of machine-gun drumming and fast-picked guitar leads, but the bridges between the choruses are major-chord interludes with clear and compelling melodies. That song and “Lose to Night,” which I’d call a ballad if I didn’t think that would be offensive to Insomnium fans, show both growth in Insommium’s songcraft and breadth in their musical interests – you don’t write this kind of song if you only listen to metal and hard rock.

There are misses here; “Black Heart Rebellion” is just a giant blast-beat, a sop to the portion of the crowd that just wants it faster and louder and more annoying, while “The Promethean Song” would have worked better at about half its 6:40 running time. Even the title track suffers from the same issue of bloat – and as the tenth song on the album, it ran into my own fatigue by the time I’d reach it on straight listens through the disc because of its length and languorous pace. That’s also a function of the overall ambition of Shadows of a Dying Sun, which, at 70 minutes, is almost double the length of some recent indie releases, and has appropriately high musical aspirations without forgoing Insomnium’s sense of melody and even commercial appeal. It’s the best new melodeth album since Carcass’ Surgical Steel, although with Arch Enemy and At the Gates coming out with new albums soon, it’ll be an epic summer for fans of the genre.

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→ May 19, 2014
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Odludek.

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

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

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

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

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

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→ May 3, 2014
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Saturday five, 5/3/14.

My two bits of content from ESPN.com this week:

* The mishandling of Bryce Harper
* Klawchat

I’ll have an updated top 100 ranking for this year’s rule 4 draft up on Thursday, May 8th, followed by a projected first round (aka a “mock”) on the 15th.

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Now, in keeping with the original idea for the Saturday five posts, here are five songs I’ve been listening to lately, outside of the albums I’ve been reviewing:

* The War on Drugs – “Red Eyes.” Everyone seems to love their latest album, Lost In The Dream, but after multiple listens no song has grabbed me like “Red Eyes,” which is the only track on the album that doesn’t sound like a band trying to imitate Bob Dylan. “Red Eyes” reminds me more of Lord Huron or the Head & the Heart, bands that also draw inspiration from Dylan and other folk-rock artists but without coming off as in any way derivative of their influences.

* Thumpers – “Unkinder (A Tougher Love).” Yet another heavily New Wave-inspired English synth/rock act … but the offbeat rhythm of all of the vocals, both verses and chorus, sets the song apart from the dozens of similar tracks that have been coming out of the UK over the last few years. Their debut album, Galore, came out in February.

* Broods – “Bridges.” My daughter loves this song, so here’s her review: “I like the way she sings, and the words sort of, but I mostly like the way she sings.” Works for me. For all the raves Grimes got for her 2012 album Visions, Broods mines similar high-pitched territory but with a far more pleasant vocal style. Their debut EP Broods came out in January.

* Gap Dream – “Fantastic Sam.” The song reminds me of Django Django’s last album, but with a more melancholy, hypnotic tone, and less interesting lyrics (which even my daughter picked up on). Their debut album, Shine Your Light, came out in November.

* La Sera – “Losing to the Dark.” The solo project from former Vivian Girls member Katy Goodman, La Sera put out this lead single earlier this spring, and it’s a near-perfect tranche of bright punk-pop to contrast with its downtrodden lyrics. Her third album, Hour Of The Dawn, comes out on the 13th, and it’s probably my most-anticipated album of the month.

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And now, this week’s five links, heavier on science this week…

Also, two bonus links this week that may be relevant to your interests, since you’re here… My ESPN colleague Ramona Shelburne wrote an amazing, thorough story on the Donald Sterling imbroglio from inside the Clippers’ organization. Also, fellow Parks and Recreation fans will enjoy Alan Sepinwall’s post-season-six interview with Michael Schur, covering everything from the changes ahead for season seven to the evolution of the running Cones of Dunshire gag. I’m convinced part of Parks & Rec‘s success came from embracing the show’s essential nerdiness, both the eccentricity of its central characters and the writers’ willingness to make references (like Settlers of Catan) that wouldn’t normally appear in a network series aimed at a mass audience. Or maybe it’s just that they let Chris Pratt do more dead falls. Those work too.

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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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