→ April 19, 2014
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Manchester Orchestra’s Cope.

Manchester Orchestra’s newest album, Cope, has the biggest guitar sound I can remember hearing on any record, gigantic, immersive riffs that I’d love to hear when I plug my own axe into an amplifier. Hell, I want these chords to play any time I enter a room. If Sam Cassell pretended to hold guitar riffs instead of his balls after making a big play, he’d be holding the riffs from Cope.

MO layers these riffs over lugubrious rhythms that derive more from doom metal (acts like Trouble or Cathedral) than from any subgenre in the indie or alternative rock worlds, a formula that produces an uneven album but that works more often than it doesn’t, especially given the naturally despairing tone of Andy Hull’s voice. Album opener and first single “Top Notch” best demonstrates this combination of left- and right-hand paths, with an enormous crunch to open the track that evokes early Black Sabbath both in its force and in the use of sudden transitions from high-intensity riffs to slow, quiet passages beneath the lyrics, the strongest on the disc. The lyrical yearning pairs with the tantalizing pause and buildup into each chorus; the quick stops after each riff leave you standing at the edge of a crumbling cliff, waiting for the next giant crunch to arrive, only to have it come a beat later than you expected.

When MO utilize that set of contrasts – loud/quiet, staccato finishes/tentative restarts – they provide Cope with its strongest tracks, including the opener, “The Mansion,” the 6/4 track “The Ocean,” and “Trees,” the last of which has an opening lick that could have come off a recent Black Keys album. The plaintive riff that opens the waltz “All That I Really Wanted” prop up the generic expressions of regret in the verses – Cope isn’t Hull’s strongest work as a lyricist – in a track that might have served as a better closer than the title track. “The Mansion” is more straightforward, at least in tone and time signature, but another dramatic shift into the chorus punctuates the rather morbid verses that precede each one.

However, when the pace picks up, the music becomes a little one-note – the harmonies sound overproduced, the tension is lacking, and the weaker lyrics become more noticeable. “Girl Harbor” sounds like an aborted attempt at a straight pop song, lacking not only the huge riffs that distinguish the album as a whole but even missing any kind of dissonant or contrasting note to tone down the saccharine lyrics. “Every Stone” is similarly upbeat without balance; that’s not who Manchester Orchestra is, and it’s certainly not what they do best, so when they head in this direction, the harsh or heavy elements are notable by their absence. Those vocal harmonies work so well in the midst of a song that otherwise borders on hard rock or metal, but they risk coming too close to OneRepublic when they indulge in those harmonies without that note of acidity to create a more complete dish.

Cope represents a step forward again for Manchester Orchestra, whose critically-acclaimed 2011 release Simple Math dwelled too much on insular, tenebrous sounds and didn’t have anywhere near the aural appeal of this album. Some listeners may not appreciate the shift from indie-rock quirkiness (like Simple Math‘s “Pensacola”) to full-on metal-tinged rock, but of all of the stylistic dialects the band has tried, this one suits Andy Hull’s voice and lyrics the best, even with some inconsistencies in their transition to this kind of sound.

—

I take a fair amount of time to review albums, giving them as many listens as I think necessary to write up a proper review, which means I won’t usually have a review out the day an album’s released (only if I have a promo copy), and I won’t review every album I hear. I’m hoping to write up at least three more recent releases before draft season starts to overwhelm me – Band of Skulls’ Himalayan, Jimi Goodwin’s Odludek, and The War on Drugs’ Lost in the Dream.

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→ April 14, 2014
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Kaiser Chiefs and Cloud Nothings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ March 6, 2014
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Music update, March 2014.

I’m in Florida this week, trying to skirt the weather and see some prospects, with posts filed so far on the Astros and the Tigers and Pirates.

I thought the year got off to a poor start for new music, but the pace picked up very quickly in February and I felt like I had to post something before the sheer volume of new tracks worth discussing overwhelmed me. The songs here aren’t listed in any order, and as usual, I’ve thrown the tracks available on Spotify into a playlist.

* I reviewed the self-titled debut album by Drenge in October, but it’s still not out in the U.S. They did release a digital single with two of the album’s better tracks, “Bloodsports / Dogmeat,” in January, so that’s something. “Bloodsports” was my favorite song from the album and was #14 on my ranking of the top 100 songs of 2013.

On to truly new stuff…

* Favorite song so far this year is a toss-up between “Out of the Black” by Royal Blood and “Queen Of Hearts” by Darlia, both British acts that combine hard rock and alternative sounds but with very different results. Royal Blood are a two-piece act, guitar and drum, with a lot of both of them, bringing a menacing, harsh approach that here is driven by an off-beat riff that opens the song, followed by a deep plunging chord that takes forever to come back up for air. Darlia mines more commercial territory, earning some Nirvana comparisons but with a far more melodic and less dissonant approach than Cobain’s best moments.

* Manchester Orchestra’s new single, “Top Notch,” isn’t too far behind, with enormous, bottomless chords that fill the speakers with walls of desperation, giving way to Andy Hull’s similarly despairing vocals. When these guys are at their best, they manage to convey hopelessness without sacrificing melody. Their new album comes out April 1st, which is a huge day for new releases, bringing new full-length discs from Cloud Nothings, Band of Skulls, and Kaiser Chiefs.

* Dum Dum Girls’ “Rimbaud Eyes” has my favorite song title of the year, albeit from a band with maybe the worst band name I’ve heard since Night Terrors of 1927. Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet and famous libertine who, per Wikipedia, was described by a friend as having eyes “pale blue irradiated with dark blue—the loveliest eyes I’ve seen.” The double-D girls – that can’t be an intended double entendre, can it? – borrowed all of the lyrics to this ethereal, new-New Wave song from Rimbaud’s poems as well.

* Primal Scream – “It’s Alright, It’s OK.” The Screamers have been churning out the same songs for nigh on twenty years now, but to their credit, when they nail one, as they did here and with their first hit single, the Rolling Stones knockoff hit “Rocks,” it’s incredibly hooky. The lyrics here are dopey, but good luck evading the big hooks in the chorus. (The album was released in 2013, if you’re one of those people who absolutely has to correct these things if I don’t mention them.)

* Big Data – “Dangerous.” I think half of this duo went to my alma mater, but there’s no favoritism here. This bouncy electro-pop song is all over alternative radio, but for me this is a pop hit through and through, nothing “alternative” other than the fact that it hasn’t crossed over yet. (By the way, I’m amused by the sudden reapperance of The 1975’s “Chocolate” on pop radio and Sirius XM’s The Pulse, which I predicted last April.)

* White Lies – “There Goes Our Love Again.” I whiffed on this one; the album came out in August, the single a few months after, and I just flat-out missed it, hearing it for the first time in late January. If you like Joy Division, or their illegitimate love child with Depeche Mode known as Interpol, you’ll like White Lies.

* Waylayers – “Magnets.” They call their music “widescreen indie-pop” and I have no idea what that means. Their newest single is “Medicine,” but this track, first released in 2012 and released again on an EP in the fall which means it’ll be released for a third time whenever Waylayers put out a full album, is their best so far. It’s synth-pop, like an upbeat, sharper Coldplay song, not least because of the similarity between their vocalist and Chris Martin.

* High Highs – “A Real Hero.” I’m not sure we needed yet another cover of College’s modest hit from the soundtrack to the movie Drive, but High Highs does a solid job. It’s a bonus track on their new album, Open Season.

* Broken Bells – “After the Disco.” The new album is fine, good, maybe a 55, but I can’t say it’s blown me away so far. The first single, “Holding on for Life,” #65 on my list of the top 2013 songs, and this track are the two standouts for me through a couple of listens.

* Hospitality – “I Miss Your Bones.” Now this is an alternative act, minimalist, like someone tried to take the Dogme 95 principles and apply them to music. Everything sounds spare, and while the album as a whole tends toward more somber pieces, the raw energy of this lead single, which has gotten some airplay on XMU, stands out.

* Prides – “The Seeds You Sow.” I don’t know how much attention this Glaswegian trio will get here, but this rousing synth-heavy stomper should be a big hit. It’s not on Spotify nor is it out yet in the U.S. but you can hear the song on their site. If you’re in the UK, the band’s EP, called The Seeds You Sow EP, is already out.

* Kaiser Chiefs – “Coming Home.” Best song the band, which seemed lost at sea a few years ago, has put out since 2007’s “Ruby.” The song isn’t on Spotify yet, but the album (as mentioned above) comes out on April 1st.

* Sir Sly – “Gold.” Kind of a cousin to Cage the Elephant, with the vocalist’s odd intonation and the bombastic chorus and final bridge. I can’t say I love the piano line’s similarity to the fake piano line in Linkin Park’s “In the End.”

* Dr. Dog – “Broken Heart.” And another act that seems to draw some inspiration from Cage, with the deliberate sloppiness of a jam band, like they’re just having too good of a time to make sure everyone is playing the same song.

* Foster the People – “Coming of Age.” I was surprised by this, the lead single from the band’s upcoming album Supermodel, because it’s so … conventional. “Coming of Age” is a quality pop single, but there’s nothing we haven’t heard before in here, and it’s less daring than “Helena Beat” or “Don’t Stop,” neither of which was groundbreaking but at least brought some new textures. Hey, at least it’s better than the Damn Yankees song.

* Yellow Ostrich – “Shades.” Saw these guys two years ago in Tempe when they opened for Of Monsters & Men, and it seems like their sound has matured substantially since the album on which they were touring in 2012. The hooks are stronger, the production is cleaner, and the balance here on “Shades” between the big guitar riff and the vocals is spot on.

* Bestfriends – “Lakeshore” and “The Way I Feel.” The first song isn’t out anywhere yet, but I received both on a promotional sampler; these guys could be the next electro-pop breakthrough act, along the lines of Foster the People and Passion Pit, right down to the falsettos and occasional guitar line to break up all the synthesizers.

* And hot off the presses, Lykke Li’s “Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone,” just released on March 4th. I’m not even sure what I think of it yet, other than it’s so stark it feels soul-bearing.

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→ December 18, 2013
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Top 100 songs of 2013.

Last year I discovered (for myself, that is) enough good new music to do my first serious annual music ranking, listing my top 40 songs of 2012, a list that I originally intended to just go to 20 titles but that kept expanding as I kept writing and exploring. This year, I started the exploring a little sooner, and also ended up on a few promotional lists that exposed me to even more new stuff, so by midyear it was very clear to me that I’d have more than enough songs to get to 100. I had over 150 candidates if you count all of the album tracks I liked enough to consider, but forced it down to 100 (which didn’t work out that well, as you’ll see shortly).

As with my list of the top albums of 2013, this list is my personal preference. If I don’t like a song, it’s not here. That wipes out some critically-acclaimed artists entirely, including Daft Punk, Haim, Vampire Weekend, Deafheaven (and please, people, death metal and black metal are not the same thing), Rhye, the Lumineers (more like Ho Hum), American Authors, James Blake, Foxygen, Majikal Cloudz, Phosphorescent, Jason Isbell (I just do not like country music), and My Bloody Valentine. Other folks liked that stuff. I didn’t.

Some songs that were among the last ones I cut from my list, in no particular order, looking just at artists that didn’t make it: Birds of Tokyo – “Lanterns;” Midlake – “Antiphon;” Harrison Hudson – “Curious;” Cumulus – “Do You Remember;” Young Galaxy – “Pretty Boy;” The 1975 – “Chocolate;” Blondfire – “Waves.” The last two got the axe for lyrics too stupid for me to abide. I’ve mentioned several other songs I liked, but not enough to get them into the top 100, within the comments below.

I’m going to start with two extra tracks that were the final two cuts from the list, ones I actually wrote up at first before realizing I’d forgotten two other tracks that belonged on here.

Wild Nothing – Dancing Shell. One of my biggest misses from my 2012 list was Wild Nothing’s Nocturne, which I picked up in January on the recommendations of several readers and loved for its dream-pop leanings with experimental twists – but with more guitar than most bands in this subgenre employ. “Dancing Shell” is more dance/electronic than straight-ahead rock but showcases the creativity of Jack Tatum, who records all of Wild Nothing’s music himself, with other members joining him just for live shows. His 2013 EP wasn’t as good as Nocturne but including this song lets me mention again how badly I whiffed by not including the album on my list from last year.

Ejecta – Jeremiah (The Denier). A side project for Neon Indian’s keyboardist Leanne Macomber, Ejecta offers spacey electro-pop, although I think they’ve received more press for their debut album’s cover, which features a nude Macomber posing as if one of the great Renaissance masters was about to paint her. That might just be overshadowing the music, which has the early-80s New Wave leanings of most electro-pop but pairs it with Macomber’s languorous, breathy vocals to temper its brightness. “It’s Only Love” is also worth checking out.

And now, to the top 100. This entire list, including both of those bonus tracks, is available as a Spotify playlist, in order. Amazon and iTunes links go to full albums, where you can just buy the specific song I mentioned (this reduced the number of links I had to create).
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→ December 17, 2013
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Top 13 albums of 2013.

This year was so fertile for new music that, for the first time, I felt like I heard enough records I liked to put together a ranking of my favorite albums of the year. The expansion of Spotify’s catalog didn’t hurt, as now I didn’t have to own every album (or pirate them, which I won’t do) to review them, and I’ve received a few of these via publicists or record labels, including the albums at 4, 5, and 6.

This list represents my personal preferences. The omission of some critically-acclaimed albums, like those from the National, Vampire Tweekend, Daft Punk, and Haim, is deliberate. I don’t like ’em, ergo, they’re not here. The same goes for Mercury Prize winner James Blake, who wasn’t even the best solo male artist nominated for the award this year. If you’re looking for alt-J’s An Awesome Wave, that was my favorite album of 2012, as it was released in the U.S. last September.

I’ll post my top 100 songs of the year on Thursday, and mention in each review how many tracks from that album will appear on that list.

13. Teeth of the Sea – Master. (amazon • iTunes)Part of me isn’t even sure why I’m putting a record I don’t even fully understand on this list; like Field of Reeds from These New Puritans, Master is aiming for something well beyond the scope of what I enjoy and appreciate in modern music. While plenty of electronic acts earned airplay and mainstream plaudits in 2013, I don’t think anyone produced anything as ambitious within that subgenre as Teeth of the Sea did here, creating a dark, immersive record that at times seemed to draw more inspiration from symphonic death metal (like a vocal-free Hollenthon) than it did from the heart of current electronica. The record placed one song on my top 100, but that’s in part of a function of the album working better as a whole than in singles.

12. Frank Turner – Tape Deck Heart. (amazon • iTunes)Turner’s brand of punk-folk, or whatever it is, is incredibly endearing mostly because he seems to cram more lyrics into each minute than Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell spat out in His Girl Friday. It’s the kind of album that should be enjoyed along with two fingers of your favorite distilled spirit, or a pint of a good, not-too-cold Irish or English beer, even though the album’s best song is about the difficulty of drying oneself out. Turner hides nothing, and his writing skills lie in his ability to translate sadness and hurt into darkly humorous lyrics. The album placed one song on my top 100.

11. Wooden Shjips – Back to Land. (amazon • iTunes)Can I just pronounce this “Wooden Shyips?” Because that’s what I want to do every time I see their name. Like Teeth of the Sea, Wooden Shjips are better consumed as a whole disc than as individual singles, here because everything is good and nothing stands out in a huge way from the album’s mean. They get the “psychedelic” tag a lot, although I think some of that is just because they use a Hammond organ, but it’s guitar-driven rock with extended song structures and maybe a little too much reverb in the vocals. It might be more fair to think of them as a jam band that keeps things tight on record. It didn’t place any songs on my top 100, with “Ruins” my favorite track because it sounds like a party’s about to break out in the studio.

10. Carcass – Surgical Steel. (amazon • iTunes) I actually don’t listen to much metal, let alone extreme metal variations, with the exception of melodic death metal – very fast, heavy music with lyrics that are often screamed rather than sung, but with tremendous technical musicianship and actual melodies that require a little work to find but that provide balance for music that can be brutal and intense. Carcass was probably the progenitor of the subgenre but hadn’t released any new material since 1996’s disappointing Swansong, but their comeback album this year, Surgical Steel, is a true return to form but with a newer maturity, including tighter song structures and lots of allusions to their heyday as grindcore pioneers. Other metal albums I liked from 2013: Children of Bodom’s Halo of Blood, Trivium’s Vengeance Falls, Born of Osiris’ Tomorrow We Die Δlive, and Týr’s Valkyrja.

9. Naked and Famous – In Rolling Waves. (amazon • iTunes) The sophomore album from this New Zealand act is more lush than their debut, giving lead signer Alisa Xayalith more room to sing rather than shouting vocals over louder, heavier music as she had to do on their first two hits, “Young Blood” and “Punching in a Dream.” It’s a more serious album, with slower builds and more modest payoffs, weaving textures rather than building off giant hooks – if anything, the catchier tracks are among the album’s weaker ones, except for lead single “Hearts Like Ours” and the duet “The Mess.” I don’t award points for a band making progress per se, but the result here of the band maturing from a shorter singles-oriented sound to a more ambitious overall sound made it among the year’s best discs. The album placed one song on my top 100.

8. Arcade Fire – Reflektor. (iTunes • iTunes) I’ve had multiple readers ask me if I’ve changed my mind on this album since giving it a middling review about a week after its release, which I find strange mostly because … well, is it that important that I like the album? I don’t pretend my opinion means anything beyond giving you guys something to read and talk about, so I don’t think the fact that I found this album disappointing is such a big deal. I loved The Suburbs, but Reflektor went so far in the opposite direction – bloated song times, pretentious lyrics, too few musical ideas – that I couldn’t help but feel let down. LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, himself known for songs about twice as long as they needed to be, produced the album, and he was probably the wrong choice for a band that can’t rein itself in. This was a good album relative to other releases this year, but it could have been so much better. The album placed three tracks on my top 100.

7. Jake Bugg – Shangri La. (amazon • iTunes) I whiffed on Bugg’s self-titled debut album for last year’s list; the album came out last October and I didn’t hear anything of it until well into 2013. I’ve caught up now, as Bugg’s second album came out in November and features more of the same Dylanesque sound, but better, including the punkish “What Doesn’t Kill You?,” the rockabilly opener “There’s a Beast and We All Feed It,” and the shuffling ballad “Me and You,” itself a late cut from my top 100. Bugg is just 19 and has only begun to scratch the surface of what could be an enormous career as Dylan’s spiritual heir. The album placed one track on my top 100.

6. Polvo – Siberia. (amazon • iTunes)The second post-breakup (and post-reunion) album from these 1990s noise-rock cult heroes might be their best effort yet, packing plenty of weirdness into its eight tracks but never losing the plot. It’s heavy on twin guitars, even though they often sound like they might not be playing the same song, and the lyrics are trippy if you like them and nonsense if you don’t. I particularly like how the album feels heavy without being loud or extreme, an example of where modern metal often goes wrong; you don’t need to sing like Cookie Monster to create the impression of weight. The album placed two tracks on my top 100.

5. St. Lucia – When the Night. (amazon • iTunes) One of the best debut albums of the year and one of its best pure-pop records, When the Night is the first effort from the South African-born New York native Jean-Philip Grobler, who has remixed many better-known artists and produced the debut album from HAERTS. St. Lucia’s sound is sweet synth-pop with global influences in the rhythm and percussion sections, along with a detour into darker electronic sounds on one of the album’s best tracks, “September.” Grobler occasionally veers too far into twee territory but the album has more than enough moments of balance, placing three tracks on my top 100.

4. Drenge – Drenge. The self-titled debut from these two English brothers actually isn’t out yet in the U.S., which is one of the stupidest policies left in the digital age. Why would any movie, record, or book publisher stagger release dates internationally? Ones and zeroes know nothing of your national borders. If you don’t want to encourage piracy, release everything on the same day across the world. Drenge’s album is on Spotify and I received a promo copy in November, so you can listen to it before its early 2014 release here, and it’s well worth it, with a slew of high-energy guitar/drum songs that show influences from each of the last four decades, going back to early Black Sabbath and running up through the White Stripes. The record placed three tracks on my top 100.

3. Savages – Silence Yourself. (amazon • iTunes) This was my album of the year until September, when the two albums higher on this list both came out, and still wins the prize of the year’s angriest album. The all-female quartet known as Savages have produced a short eleven-track masterpiece of seething and indignation, led by French singer Jehnny Beth’s punctuated style that has her practically spitting the words at the undeserving audience. The music is post-punk in its original sense – Suicide, Television, Gang of Four – not pop, even though songs like “She Will,” “Shut Up,” and “Strife” boast strong hooks. The album placed two tracks on my top 100.

2. CHVRCHES – The Bones of What You Believe. (amazon • iTunes) The debut of the year was a little uneven in spots but so exultant during most of its length that it feels captious to point out its flaws. Singer Lauren Mayberry is an emerging star, one whose future probably goes beyond the electro-pop confines of this record and perhaps the band in general, but for now the Scottish trio has crafted the year’s best pop record, with five tracks on my top 100 and one that was in the set that just missed.

1. Arctic Monkeys – AM. (amazon • iTunes)Their best album since their debut, but with all that several years of maturity and musical meandering incorporated into a disc that brings an enormous range of influences to produce the year’s most compelling and most complete experience. Turner has long been one of rock’s most clever wordsmiths, but took his form of snarky-witty modern beat poetry to new heights on AM. The album placed five songs on my top 100 and could have placed two more, plus one track, “R U Mine?” that appeared on the 2012 list because it was released as a one-off single.

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→ November 20, 2013
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Drenge & These New Puritans.

My analysis of the Josh Johnson and David Murphy signings is up for Insiders.

Drenge is a duo act comprising brothers from Derbyshire, England, whose self-titled debut album dropped in the United Kingdom in mid-August and will come out here in January. First recommended to me by one of you, a promo copy Drenge came across my desk this week (figuratively, since it was via email), and it’s promising if uneven, an intriguing blend of rock styles from post-punk to grunge to garage with at least three standout tracks. (If you’re in the U.K. you can buy the album via amazon. Otherwise, you can stream it on Spotify below.)

Although the White Stripes have set the standard for guitar-and-drum rock duos, Drenge have a little more in common with Jeff the Brotherhood, another sibling act that opts for heavier riffs and a chunkier sound for the guitar, without Jack White’s peripatetic musical style. Guitarist Eion Loveless’ rhythm lines are loud and aggressive, with abrupt tempo changes and shifts from the cleaner post-punk of Gang of Four to the fuzzier sounds of early Soundgarden or vintage Mudhoney. You can even hear bits of darkwave in some of the slower tracks, like the latter half of “Nothing” or nearly all of the eight-minute non sequitur closer “Let’s Pretend,” which might also be the result of distant influences from Black Sabbath or Angel Witch.

Where Drenge separates itself from similarly lo-fi/garage acts is in the five-song stretch from the album’s second track, the grim “Dogmeat” (which reminds me of a slowed-down take on Shed Seven’s “Dolphin”), through the pleasantly annoying “Face Like a Skull.” That quintet includes the album’s first single and best track, “Bloodsports,” where the brothers Loveless start to borrow more heavily from UK superstars the Arctic Monkeys in sound and melodic strength. The energy on “Bloodsports” starts with the fast-paced guitar line behind the verses, a la the intro to Nirvana’s “Breed,” but kicks up another gear with the drum-less riff right after the chorus, a trick Jack White has long used to great effect. “Backwaters” is the disc’s closest thing to a pop track, like Radiohead’s “I Might Be Wrong” tidied up for mass consumption yet still sinister enough to deliver lines like “I never seen blood or milk mix so divine/I never seen such beauty so malign,” a line followed by a riff so heavy you think the boys are shifting into mid-80s thrash mode. “Gun Crazy” turns the tempo back up to punk speed, a song to make Mark Arm proud for its first half that adds some complexity with off-beat staccato strumming in its final thirty-second coda.

The remainder of the album is far less consistent, including “Let’s Pretend,” which feels out of place and thoroughly bombastic for clocking in at twice the length of the next-longest song, “Fuckabout,” which is about as intellectually or aurally pleasing as the title indicates. “I Wanna Break You in Half” works as a suitably obnoxious fast-paced sub-two-minute track, but the same conceit flops on the unfunny “I Don’t Wanna Make Love to You” or the opener “People In Love Make Me Feel Yuck.” Eoin seems capable of lyrical subtletly, but too often settles for a sledgehammer to the forehead with a joke that feels like we’ve heard it a dozen times before. That can improve with experience and maturity, but Drenge’s ability to craft memorable hooks and evoke so many different eras in songs typically just two to three minutes long is already plus.

–

I also received a copy of the new album Field of Reeds by another English act, These New Puritans, which comprises twin brothers plus a third member, although the disc includes prominent contributions from over thirty-eight session musicians (per Wikipedia). I’ve previously mentioned the lead single, “Fragment Two,” which is also by far the album’s most conventional track in song structure, although even its music rarely follows the rules of modern rock music. I feel underqualified to talk about the album, given its experimental and highly artistic nature, with only Talk Talk’s Laughing Stalk coming to mind as a reference point (and I wouldn’t even say I know that album that well). The overwhelming sense I got from Field of Reeds was one of vastness, of the attempts to fill enormous ranges of space with haunting sounds that expanded upon release but never managed to reach the area’s borders. There are moments on the album of beauty, and just as many moments where it appears the band is trying to create a form of anti-music. As someone who tends to choose singles over albums, and gravitates towards melody over sonic textures, however, I found myself coming back to “Fragment Two” and the hynpotic “Organ Eternal,” the album’s two most accessible tracks. Field of Reeds is for mature listeners only.

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→ November 5, 2013
→ By

Tuesday links.

  • This year’s ranking of the top 50 free agents is now online for Insiders. We’ve flagged players who received Qualifying Offers, and in most comments I try to give a rough idea of what I’d be willing to pay each player. There’s a full explanation in the intro.
  • I also held a Tuesday Klawchat today. There will not be a Thursday chat, but Behind the Dish will come out that day.
  • I’ll be doing some freelance game reviews for Paste magazine, and my first piece, a column on the market shift toward tablet boardgame apps, went up today.
  • I know several of you were looking for my review of Arcade Fire’s Reflektor today – it went up here on the dish yesterday.
  • Two singles that hit my playlist in October but didn’t make yesterday’s piece: “Let Go” by RAC featuring Kele (of Bloc Party) and MNDR, the best dance song I’ve heard in 2013; and “Stay Young” by Okkervil River, a fun jangle-pop track from the indie-rock stalwarts who just had their first top-ten album in the U.S.

    [soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/116010883″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

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  • Finally, this Sesame Street parody of “Homeland” is just brilliant. It first aired on the Thursday episode that subtly paid tribute to Jerry Nelson, the original Muppeteer behind (or under) Fat Blue, Herry Monster, Sherlock Hemlock, Mumford … and Count von Count. Nelson passed away in August of 2012, and the opening tribute was sweet, but it was “Homelamb” that ended up stealing the show.
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→ November 4, 2013
→ By

Arcade Fire’s Reflektor.

Arcade Fire’s last album, the 2010 Grammy-winning The Suburbs, remains one of the best albums I’ve ever heard, a cohesive collection of musically strong songs that offers a profound exploration of a serious theme without sacrificing the hooks and melodies that make a record commercially viable. The band took over three years to release its follow-up, the double album Reflektor, released on October 29th, working with producer James Murphy, better known as LCD Soundsystem. (No word on whether the furniture is still in the garage.) The resulting opus is ambitious and expansive, freewheeling where The Suburbs was tight, yet still carrying musical motifs across multiple tracks. It’s also frequently repetitive, often pretentious, and overall shockingly boring.

While the first disc begins with the hit disco-inflected single “Reflektor,” the best track on either half of the album, Arcade Fire immediately downshifts into slower-tempo material, as they did early on The Suburbs, but this time around they struggle to recapture any of the sense of urgency established in the opener. “Flashbulb Eyes” begins with the embarrassing couplet “What if the camera really do/take your soul?” (Is he mocking the speech of Africans who do or did once believe that about photography?), with a backing track with hints of Afro-Caribbean rhythms that move out front for “Here Comes the Night Time,” with cringeworthy steel drums that sound more like a parody of Carnival music. (Win Butler has said that the 1959 film Black Orpheus, which takes that Greek character’s myth and adapts it to a modern setting in Brazil during Carnival, was a major inspiration for this album.) By the time the album’s pace begins to pick back up with the garage-rocker “Normal Person,” over 15 minutes have passed since the opener and all of that energy has long dissipated.

Track length is a major problem here, as it was in Murphy’s solo work with LCD Soundsystem. No single track on The Suburbs ran past 5:25, yet nine of Reflektor‘s thirteen tracks exceed that length – and the two shortest tracks are throwaway interstitials rather than fully realized songs. An artist can succeed even with songs in the six to eight-minute range, but the songs have to be more complex, with different passages or movements to sustain the listener; this, for me, was always LCD Soundsystem’s major flaw, as an eight-bar drum-and-bass loop repeated for seven minutes and 27 seconds is just going to make me change the station before I even reach the halfway point. Here Arcade Fire try just that, extending ideas that would have worked well inside of four minutes into six-minute frameworks they can’t fill. “Porno” is a monstrosity, a lyrical and musical excrescence that should have been deleted from the studio’s hard drive, but “We Exist,” “Awful Sound,” and “Afterlife” all would have worked better in a shorter format, although none has the hook to rank among the album’s stronger tracks.

And there are strong tracks here, scattered throughout the album. “Normal Person” brings to mind influences from Pavement to Wire, with a cheerfully dissonant guitar riff in the chorus that comes crashing in like an early stem engine. “It’s Never Over (Hey Orpheus)” is the best of the rambling tracks on disc two, with its Savages-like guitar line and something resembling a tempo change after the midpoint. “You Already Know” is reminiscent of the highs on The Suburbs and even Funeral with a revival chorus, although the peculiar pronunciation of the “d” in “already” – in phonetics terms, taking it from voiced to voiceless – was an unnecessary distraction.

Those distractions are the other fatal flaw in Reflektor, and why the dangerous word “pretentious” applies here, even though its stain can be difficult for any artist to remove. Using film or literary references is laudable, but calling such attention to them by using subtitles (in and of itself a bit pretentious) like “(Hey Orpheus)” and “(Oh Eurydice)” is too clever by half, and risks alienating listeners who don’t get the allusions and are now aware that they didn’t get them. Singer Régine Chassagne has always been one of the band’s biggest weaknesses – while she’s a talented musician and songwriter, her voice is thin and hollow – and having her sing in her native French on an album that is almost entirely in English seems pointless. It makes the lyrics less clear to the vast majority of listeners who don’t speak French, and the French lines are often shoehorned into the existing meter, like her “Jeanne d’Arc, oh” in the rollicking “Joan of Arc,” which I imagine will have a few non-Francophones wondering who “Jean Dachau” is. French is a beautiful language, but inserting it into an English song is almost automatically pretentious*, and it only detracts from Reflektor when Arcade Fire resorts to it.

* Never more true than in Electric Light Orchestra’s “Hold On Tight,” one of the worst songs ever recorded. Not only did they use French and overpronounce their guttural rhotics, but the French verse is just a bad translation of the English verse, so they were lazy as well.

The Suburbs was such a rousing success, even earning the most unlikely Album of the Year in Grammy history, that it raised expectations for Reflektor to a level that I concede may have been unfair. This would be a strong album for many artists, but given what Arcade Fire has shown itself capable of, Reflektor sounds like it’s caught between an ambition unachieved and a band that needed an editor but instead found an enabler. A good idea over four minutes may not play as well over six, and there are ideas on Reflektor that probably should have been cut entirely. The highlights here are among Arcade Fire’s best – the title track, “Normal Person,” “Joan of Arc,” and “It’s Never Over (Hey Orpheus)” – but there’s too much filler around them, so much that the album never establishes a consistent pace or feel and it is reduced to a collection of singles that fall short of whatever lofty aspirations the band may have had for the record.

—

When The Night, the debut album from South African-born musician Jean-Philip Grobler, who performs under the name St. Lucia, came across my desk in early October. Grobler’s music yearns back for the synth-pop heyday of the 1980s, an era before his birth, but marries it to tropical beats and rhythms and that avoid turning it into an anachronistic stumble down memory lane.

Grobler appears to bear no shame for his love of sunny, accessible pop music, and he has crafted a number of indelible hooks to express that affection for a style of music that, while current when I was a preteen, borders on the twee at this point. When the Night threatens to tumble off the cliff into saccharine nonsense at many points, but that incorporation of new backing lines, like the synthesized Caribbean pipes behind the single “Elevate,” means the songs are fresh if not exactly weighty. When St. Lucia turns up the guitars, as on the opener “The Night Comes Again,” or keeps the synths down in the mix so they don’t take over a track, like in the pulsating “All Eyes on You,” we’re at least getting something new even if the songs remain a little too sweet.

The album’s standout track, however, is “September,” where Grobler pushes out the walls around the rest of the album, creating layers of sound to produce an immersive and musically darker song that repeatedly runs you toward the edge of the crevasse before pulling you back to safety. Synth-heavy music like this always runs the risk of getting a little too “Jizz in My Pants,” but the varied percussion lines and the (presumably synthesized) horns give it just enough of a contemporary note to escape the Eurotrash bin. If Grobler can extend this darker ambient feel to the rest of his songs, even a poppier gem like “Elevate,” he’ll really be on to something.

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–

If you’re into extreme metal at all – and I can hardly blame you if you’re not – September saw the return of genre pioneers Carcass. Among the earliest practicioners of grindcore, once touring with grindcore founders Napalm Death along with Bolt Thrower and the awful American act Morbid Angel, Carcass evolved into the first true melodic death metal band, peaking with the greatest extreme metal album of all time, 1994’s Heartwork. Their new disc, Surgical Steel, their first since 1996, is close to a return to a form, remarkable for a band that’s been apart for so long, so while it doesn’t bring much new to the table, it’s a welcome addition to the Carcass canon and also shows how little the subgenre has advanced during their hiatus.

While singer Jeff Walker appears to shred his vocal cords on every track, Carcass’ music is intricate and very tightly rendered, a fusion of the classic sounds of Iron Maiden or Judas Priest with the increased speed of thrash and death metal acts like Slayer, Death, or Exodus. “Cadaver Pounch Conveyor System” has the album’s strongest riff, a dual-guitar line of incredible precision, followed by machine-gun riffing under the song’s bridge. You can actually understand most of the words, too, which is a good thing, as Walker hides extremely intelligent and literate musings behind mock-gory titles that allude to the band’s earlier albums, where their lyrics were in fact anatomically accurate descriptions of mutilation and evisceration. (It’s not the only allusion to early Carcass on the album; the cover art itself is a nod to their early EP Tools of the Trade, but cleaned up this time, just as the band seems to be.)

The slowed tempo on “A Congealed Clot of Blood” – itself a condemnation of jihadist terrorism – leads to a repetition of the chorus’ lyrics but over another rapid-fire guitar line, while “Granulating Dark Satanic Mills” is just a faster New Wave of British Heavy Metal track with growled vocals and a William Blake reference. Carcass do get a little silly at times, with the insanely fast “Captive Bolt Pistol” (Anton Chigurh’s weapon of choice), or the track “Noncompliance to ASTM F 899-12 Standard,” with a title referring to the international standard for the chemical requirements for stainless steel used in surgical instruments but lyrics that mock the prosy decline of the genre, which Walker derides as “dearth metal.”

The album even closes with an eight-minute mini-suite, “Mount of Execution,” almost all at normal speeds, relying on deep bass lines and staccato picking to create that sense of heaviness. This ain’t for everyone, but if you like modern melodeth acts like Children of Bodom, Wintersun, or Amon Amarth, it’s worth checking out.

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→ October 2, 2013
→ By

Polvo’s Siberia and a new music update.

Top Chef judge and acclaimed Georgia chef Hugh Acheson joined me on yesterday’s Behind the Dish podcast, talking about the show but also about growing up an Expos fan, the decline of the stolen base, and the rise of coffee culture in America. Acheson’s first cookbook, A New Turn in the South, came out in 2011, with more to come next year.

On to the music… The North Carolina-based band Polvo were part of the underground noise-rock scene in the 1990s, along with Helium, Steel Pole Bath Tub, Superchunk, and other similarly out-there groups that would likely have found wider commercial acceptance if they were recording today. Polvo’s music was intricate and layered, earning the label “math rock” according to the All Music Guide (although I don’t think I ever heard that term when it was current), with lengthy tracks, shifting time signatures, and songs that included different movements as you might find in classical compositions – different enough that you think you’re listening to a different song only to find you’re five and a half minutes into the last one.

After a long hiatus, Polvo reformed for a comeback album in 2008, took another long break, and released their sixth album, Siberia, this Tuesday. It’s more focused than 2008’s In Prism without losing the sprawling sensibility that has always marked their sound, a more mature approach that brings more melodic elements to the album’s best tracks without losing its experimental feel or the densely layered style that has always marked Polvo’s work.

* Full disclosure: I received a review copy of Siberia from Merge Records a few weeks ago.

Although regular readers among you know that I’m a little bit of a short-attention span listener, I found Siberia‘s longest tracks its most memorable, especially the 6:24 opener “Total Immersion” and the centerpiece, “The Water Wheel,” which might as well be two or three songs in one. “Total Immersion” marries a heavy guitar sound with low-register vocals to create an aural experience to match the song’s title, almost drowning the listener in a wall of noise that would make most thrash artists jealous. “The Water Wheel” manages to change direction at least twice within its eight minutes, while also making the best use of the two-pronged guitar attack that Polvo makes anywhere on the album – the two axes work together even when they seem to be the on verge of outright conflict. If Sonic Youth had morphed into a jam band, this is the kind of song they would have churned out.

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Those aren’t the only strong tracks on Siberia, although they’re my favorites. The album’s shortest track “Changed” still manages to pack in several tempos, from a dissonant, Sonic Youth-like (or early Weezer) jangly guitar riff giving way to a chunkier sound behind the song’s sort-of-chorus and an outro that sounds like later Led Zeppelin. “Light, Raking” winks back at the early-90s grunge period (more Mudhoney than Pearl Jam, though) before the surprise addition of a keyboard line behind the chorus, which is followed by a flat-out weird bridge where it sounds like someone is detuning the guitars as they’re being played. Polvo even seems to work in a slight shade of country-rock on the meandering “Blues is Loss,” where their past affection for Middle Eastern and South Asian sounds also makes a brief appearance.

Siberia still isn’t a commercial record, as that’s just not something you’re ever likely to find on a noise-rock record unless the band makes a wilful turn toward the mass market. It’s challenging music because it rewards your attention with its complexity and frequent changes of direction,

* I mentioned Superchunk, who are back with, I Hate Music ($5 there via amazon), just their second album since 2004, featuring what I think is their best single since 1995’s “Hyper Enough,” the musically upbeat “Me & You & Jackie Mittoo,” which opens with a much darker sentiment than the music would lead you to expect: “I hate music – what is it worth?/Can’t bring anyone back to this earth.”

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* I don’t have much to say about Lorde’s hit “Royals” other than that it’s remarkable that a 16-year-old could write better lyrics, with more imagery, than nearly every adult songwriter working in American pop music today. I don’t even love the song for its music, but I love the creativity it shows – and after CHVRCHES this is my daughter’s favorite alternative/pop track right now.

* Wild Cub’s “Thunder Clatter” wins the award for “song I didn’t want to like, but can’t help myself.” It’s too damn catchy.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/44690361″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

* Heavy English’s “21 Flights” is a focus track right now on Sirius XM’s Alt Nation/XMU, which does trigger my inherent skepticism of anything the music industry wants to push on us … but it’s actually a pretty good song, the first single from a band that rose from the ashes of Envy on the Coast. Marrying the staccato guitar style of late-70s punk/art bands like Gang of Four with neo-soul choruses you might associate more with Fitz and the Tantrums, “21 Flights” is a rousing stomper that forges a different kind of indie-rock aesthetic.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/100112755″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

* Speedy Ortiz’s “Tiger Tank” (currently free to download from amazon) reminds me quite a bit of Helium, whom I mentioned earlier – Polvo’s lead guitarist eventually joined Helium while he was dating lead singer Mary Timony. Speedy Ortiz also has a female lead singer and intentionally dissonant guitar lines. I think Pavement comparisons are also inevitable, thanks to Sadie Dupuis’ off-kilter vocals style, where she sings the verses like she’s about to fall down a flight of stairs.

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* Washed Out’s “All I Know” is a major improvement over his first single, “It All Feels Right,” which felt like it went on for fifteen minutes with no purpose. It’s amazing what a faster tempo and a keyboard sample can do.

* Terraplane Sun’s “Get Me Golden” fell out of the 1960s into 2013 with its handclaps, rising vocal harmonies, and Hammond organ. I get a similar vibe from Temples’ music, especially their one minor hit, “Shelter Song,” but Terraplane Sun does that revivalist sound better.

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* The band-of-brothers (three of them, to be precise) Ceremonies releases their debut EP next week, but lead single “Land of Gathering” has been out since the spring. It’s a curious mix of heartfelt, folkish verses with high-flying Beach Boys-style choruses, over a rapid two-step drumbeat that gives way to a slower, tribal percussion pattern that backs up those verses. It’s like a new, new New Wave.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/74190996″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

* Dirty Projectors – “Gun Has No Trigger.” So retro it should be played on an 8-track.

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* Regina Spektor – “You’ve Got Time.” I can’t be the only one who saw her name and assumed she was related to Crazy Phil, right? Anyway, the singer of the theme to the series Orange is the New Black is actually a Russian emigre, no relation to the Wall-of-Sound guy, and she’s been recording music for a decade but is just now breaking out on the strength of this stop-and-go energy rush of a single.

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* The Colourist’s “Little Games” reminds me a lot of another of my favorite alternative-pop tracks of the year, Smallpools’ “Dreaming,” pairing sunny vocals with tightly-produced guitar and keyboard lines. “Little Games” opens up its production behind the chorus with more reverb to the rhythm guitars to add texture to the overly-polished vocals.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/81933195″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

* I hated the Orwells’ “Mallrats,” but their newest song, “Who Needs You” (from the EP of the same title), puts their snotty-rock approach to better use, ditching the most annoying elements and allowing the inherent pop songcraft to make its mark.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/98741180″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

* I received a review copy of Panama’s three-song EP Always, which will be released later this week. The Australian quintet produces electronic-pop music that shows off lead singer Jarrah McCleary’s background in classical piano, with a sound similar to Yeasayer but a slower, more soulful vibe. The title track should show up quickly on alternative radio thanks to the catchy chorus and the little piano flourish that follows it.

* Wikipedia – which is never wrong – describes the Faeroese band Týr as “folk-metal,” although to my ears their sound is more melodic death metal (“melodeth”), sung without the silly screaming or growling that ruins a lot of extreme metal for my ears. I hear way more Iron Maiden, early Metallica, or thrash-era Testament here than any more modern influences, and while I might ordinarily scoff at these Viking-hero lyrics, when you’re from the Faeroe Islands you get a free pass. “Blood of Heroes” is the lead track from their latest album and would likely make Eddie the Head proud of what he’s wrought.

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* Havok’s “Give Me Liberty … Or Give Me Death” is such a close homage to early punk-thrash efforts like Agent Orange, Sacred Reich, or Corrosion of Conformity that when I first heard it I assumed it was some deep track from the mid-1980s I’d never heard before. I enjoy throwbacks like this, although they can get old quickly because the formula is too familiar.

* Stuff I already reviewed: CHVRCHES’ The Bones of What You Believe and Arctic Monkeys’ AM. Still to come: new Arcade Fire.

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→ September 12, 2013
→ By

AM.

Today’s Klawchat is starting as I post this, so the transcript will be at that link once it’s over.

Arctic Monkeys have been superstars in the UK since prior to the release of their debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, but have seen little breakthrough here in the U.S. other than having HGTV rip off their song “Fluorescent Adolescent” for the theme music to the show “Income Property.” Their first album was smart, often obnoxious, and punchy, a nod to old-fashioned rock-and-roll values but with more thoughtful and clever lyrics than their influences could ever deliver. Lead singer Alex Turner showed an innate sense for melody and drama, which he developed further over the Monkeys’ next three albums as well as with the baroque-pop side project The Last Shadow Puppets, but the band’s overall sound seemed directionless as they moved further from what made them instant stars in the first place.

Their fifth album, AM, released earlier this week, represents the band’s first clear, deliberate step forward since their debut, an evolutionary shift that regains the immediacy of Whatever People Say I Am… while introducing heavier elements, larger influences from the soul and funk genres, and ever-sharper lyrics. It’s their best album yet and worthy of the Mercury Prize nomination it earned the day after its release.

AM begins with the seductive “Do I Wanna Know?,” the first single released in advance of the album, with a Bonhamesque percussion line mimicking a heartbeat beneath Turner’s trademark wit and wordplay, even messing with meter on couplets like “So have you got the guts?/Been wondering if your heart’s still open and if so I wanna know what time it shuts.” That slower yet more intense drum-and-bass aesthetic permeates the entire album, with greatest effect on the mid-tempo tracks like the opener and “Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?”

Track two, the 2012 one-off single “R U Mine?” (which made my top 40 songs of 2012), fits remarkably well into the new sound of this album, pairing a vintage Turner guitar riff – tuned down and turned up for 2013 – with a heavier but slower drum line, backing up vocals where Turner again plays with rhythm and meter in slightly unusual ways. That heavy feeling hits hardest on my favorite song from the disc, “Arabella,” which borrows the signature two-note guitar riff from Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” for its chorus even though the song is an ode to a woman with “a ’70s head” whose “lips are like the galaxy’s edge,” picking up the pace for the dramatic rush to the coda. Turner’s natural feel for irony and contrast works best on this track, where it falls short on songs like the morose “No. 1 Party Anthem” or the just slightly more upbeat “Mad Sounds.”

AM‘s back half, after that two-song lull, brings in different influences from the first half, starting with the Last Shadow Puppets-esque “Fireside” as well as the rousing call-and-response “Snap Out of It,” both of which wink at the earliest decades of rock music, where the genre was almost synonymous with pop. That latter track highlights Turner’s obsession with creating contrast between his music – here a mostly sunny jangle-pop track – and his lyrics, here telling an ex-lover to snap out of her delusions before life passes her by. I’ve also long admired Turner’s use of imagery where most pop lyricists rely on the same trite phrases and references to intangible feelings, from rhyming Tabasco with rascal on “Fluorescent Adolescent” to pairing “sky blue Lacoste” with “knee socks” on AM‘s penultimate track. Turner refuses to talk down to the listener regardless of the theme, an incredibly welcome attitude when so few bands, even alternative ones, seem to put the same effort into their words as they do into their sounds.

The influence of Turner’s friendship with Josh Homme – Turner appeared on Queens of the Stone Age’s 2013 album …Like Clockwork, and Homme appears on two tracks here – is evident throughout the album, as the Monkeys have borrowed a bit of QotSA’s blend of melodic sludge rock on tracks like “Arabella,” “Do I Wanna Know?,” and “One for the Road,” with Homme singing background vocals on the last one of those. The key to QotSA’s popularity has always been that Homme has the heart of a pop songwriter, and has the ability to translate that sensibility into other genres, like the stoner metal of Kyuss or the bar-blues of Eagles of Death Metal. Turner showed he could branch out with The Last Shadow Puppets, whose underappreciated album was like a lost 12-inch from the age of mono, but now he’s bringing that broader songcraft back home with an album that is heavy and slow, sinuous, and eloquent. It’s his best work yet, more mature and confident without ever seeming cocky, functioning as a complete work as well as a collection of great singles. If America doesn’t catch on to the Arctic Monkeys now, they likely never will.

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