→ March 1, 2017
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Music update, February 2017.

Big month for new tracks, enough that I started out with 30 songs here and couldn’t cut any lower than 24 without taking out something I liked. I’ve got five metal tracks and two rap songs at the end, but before that we have returns from a bunch of my favorite artists, several appearing in new projects.

If you can’t see the Spotify widget below you can go directly to the playlist here.

WATERS – Hiccups. Friend of the dish Van Pierzalowski returns with the first new single from WATERS in almost a year and a half, and true to form it’s an upbeat indie-pop track with a big hook, definitely something to be sung by ten thousand people in an arena with the volume turned up to 11. (Because it’s one louder than 10.) WATERS’ third album, Something More!, is due out May 19th.

MisterWives – Machine. This NYC indie-pop outfit appears to be channeling Shakira with this funky, swirling, brass-heavy, stomp-along track that feels lush and intricate below the vocals. I think there’s real crossover potential here. The lyrics are a bit of a weak spot here, though, like rhymes from a teenager’s Poetry notebook: “Maybe I’m a dying breed/But I believe in individuality.” Yeah, no one else believes in that any more, it’s just you.

Johnossi – Hands. I heard this track, with lyrics about police profiling of African-Americans, and assumed Johnossi was an American singer of color … only to find out it’s a Norwegian duo singing rather well about an issue that I associated mostly with the United States. It should be a hit if for no other reason than the closing couplet “fuck them haters, we don’t care/put your hands up in the air.”

White Reaper – Judy French. White Reaper rocks your lame ass. Their second album, The World’s Best American Band, is due out April 7th.

Love Thy Brother featuring Ariel Beesley – Love Me Better. This actually came out last year, and I just whiffed on it because on first listen I couldn’t get past the singer’s weird pronunciations. The Montreal duo, actually brothers, teamed up with model/singer Beesley for a very catchy electronic track with an undeniable groove behind the verses, although I think when the music drops behind the choruses the song loses some momentum.

Ten Fé – In the Air. I think I’ve exhausted songs worth sharing from Ten Fé’s debut album, called Hit the Light, which has been my favorite new record of 2017 to date. (It’ll be surpassed shortly, with some big releases coming up this month and next.) Most of the songs I’ve liked from Ten Fé have had heavy new wave influences, but this one is just a straight pop song, something you might have heard on the radio as easily in 1980 as today.

Beach Slang – Bored Teenagers. These Philly punks supposedly broke up during a concert last year, then got back together and fired some members … I don’t know, I’m just here for the music. I do think it’s important that bands with “Beach” in their name deliver on that promise by playing punk or garage or even surf rock, as opposed to Beach House, who are basically just false advertising.

Bleached – Can You Deal?. They’ve doubled their membership over the last two years, adding a bassist and a drummer, and are about to release a new EP, with this punk-pop tune as the title track. It’s a bit of a slow starter, but when they hit the gas in around the midpoint it finally sounds more like a Bleached song.

Future Islands – Ran. I suppose they’ll never top their performance of “Seasons” on Letterman, but this is a good fascimile of that track, with the same pronounced bass line and ’70s soft-rock feel over a contemporary drum beat.

Depeche Mode – Where’s the Revolution. I’m a longtime DM fan, especially of their more goth-rock late ’80s heyday (think “Never Let Me Down Again,” not “Just Can’t Get Enough”), so any new single from them would make my list, but this felt a little soft for a lead single, like we got an album track instead of the song to make you want to run out and get the album.

Coast Modern – Comb My Hair. This LA duo reminds me a lot of WATERS and a little of Best Coast, with a dash of post-Pinkerton Weezer thrown in, which, uh, waters down the sound a bit. They could do with a little more complexity here, but from the handful of singles Coast Modern has put out to date I think it’s clear they have the ability to craft some solid hooks in the California indie vein.

Space Above – Let It Still. Space Above are a side project for The Naked & Famous keyboardist Aaron Short to do more experimental keyboard-driven songs, but there’s still a clear melody at work on this mesmerizing, textured single. The group’s debut album, Still, dropped on February 17th.

Strand of Oaks – Radio Kids. Timothy Showalter, who records as Strand of Oaks, seems to be at his best when writing nostalgic tunes about being a kid and listening to music. This psychedelic rock track, from his newest record Hard Love. reminds me of “Goshen ’97,” the best song off his previous album.

Mew – 85 Videos. This Danish group, whose singer calls their music “indie stadium,” is about to release its seventh album in late April, with “85 Videos” the lead single. The band has dropped the progressive trappings of its early career in favor of a more dream-pop approach with immaculate production and great technical skills, but without forsaking a good melody that wouldn’t be out of place in ’85.

Sarah Chernoff – Warm Nights. This solo debut from the lead singer of Superhumanoids shows off Chernoff’s incredible voice in a different milieu, over a bass-heavy, almost jazzy groove that’s evocative of a dark club or some sort of intimate venue for a concert. I’ll list just about anything she does on these updates.

Ride – Home Is A Feeling. Shoegaze has come back around again. Slowdive is back, Ride is back, Lush is back … I’m waiting for the Swervedriver/Catherine Wheel double bill. Ride hasn’t released a proper album since 1996, but have put out two singles in the last month – this and “Charm Assault” – presaging an album due out this summer.

Aristophanes – Humans Become Machines. Aristophanes (born Pan Wei-Ju) was introduced to the west on Grimes’ Art Angels album, where the Taiwanese rapper took the lead on the track “Scream.” It’s definitely disorienting to hear a high-pitched female voice rapping in Chinese, but Grimes produced this track, which is good enough for me.

Joey Bada$$ – Victory. The lead single from Bada$$’s upcoming second album is an ode to the NBA, which doesn’t do much for me itself, but his flow really stands out to me, even above other more popular “alternative” rappers like Kendrick Lamar or J. Cole.

CyHi The Prynce – Nu Africa. I’m not trying to change the world, I’m not looking for a nu Africa … wait, that’s the wrong song. CyHi, a frequent collaborator with Kanye West, is playing wordgames here as he tries to squeeze a slew of African country names into the lyrics (I counted 22), but there’s also a very old-school Native Tongues sort of Afrocentrism here, with an argument that black Americans should do more to help develop the “motherland.”

King Woman – Shame. You don’t see many women singing on doom metal tracks, but this is Kristina Esfandiari’s band and she is the dominant presence on this song, although I wish her vocals were produced more towards the front of the mix. It’s like Diamanda Galas doing guest vocals for Pallbearer.

Sleep – The Clarity. I didn’t realize this seminal stoner-rock act, best known for the single-track 2003 album Dopesmoker, had recorded any new material since that record, but this song first appeared on a compilation in 2014 and showed up on Spotify this week. It’s a nearly ten-minute dirge of vintage stoner metal, veering towards doom.

Ignea – Petrichor. A female-fronted symphonic/folk metal band from Ukraine, formerly known as Parallax, Ignea just released their debut album under this name, although several of these songs (including this one) have appeared previously. Their sound is fascinating, and also taught me a new word: the OED defines “petrichor” as “a pleasant smell that frequently accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather.”

Havok – Intention to Deceive. Havok are an old-school thrash outfit that draws heavily on 1980s influences like Overkill and Vio-lence, the latter of whom could easily have recorded this song – which has very timely lyrics about authorities distracting the public with trivial controversies while greater ones go unreported.

Mastodon – Show Yourself. This might be the poppiest song I’ve ever heard from Mastodon, and I don’t mean that as an insult. It’s the shortest track from the band’s upcoming album, Emperor of Sand, which comes out at the end of the month, and still has progressive/technical elements but rides on a strong vocal hook that introduces the song.

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→ August 12, 2010
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Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs.

I wouldn’t have characterized myself as a huge Arcade Fire fan before last week – I’d heard several singles, liked most of them, but never ran out to download one of their albums or thought of them as one of my favorite artists. When Amazon.com ran a $3.99 promotion on mp3 downloads of their new album, The Suburbs (now $7.99), I bought it just on the assumption that there would be four or five songs worth having, more than justifying the cost. As it turns out, the album blew away my modest expectations, even with some unevenness, a 64-minute story of regret and frustrated hopes set to a pastiche of references and nods to new wave, post-punk, and alternative music from the 1980s.

After an introductory track that sent me for the fast-forward button, “Ready to Start” showed the Arcade Fire I know from their best prior singles, such as “Keep the Car Running” or “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out),” a foot-stomper with a driving bass line behind an understated vocal that mixes the yearning for an independent artistic life in a culture that seems (in Win Butler’s eyes) to reward the corporate life instead. “Empty Room” starts with a crazy violin intro – which continues behind the wave of guitars, creating an effect that reminded me of My Bloody Valentine, but without the latter’s excessive distortion; both that song and “Month of May” give the album its highest-energy moments to sustain the listener through the more subtle (and occasionally soporific) songs that dig more deeply into the decline of culture in the suburban sprawl.

The slower-tempo tricks are more of a mixed bag, but offer the album’s best overall songwriting. “Half Light II (No Celebration)” calls to mind New Order, or even Joy Division, with an anthemic lament with a lush arrangement behind dark, defeated vocals about the loss of nature and open space, while “Modern Man” channels Roxy Music, although the latter’s cliched moaning about the people in line behind him “can’t understand” typifies the song’s lack of concrete imagery.

“Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” is the final full track (there’s a 90-second reprise of the opening song after it), and one of the most devastatingly complete songs on the record, building to a crescendo that never quite arrives while growing into a sprawling (pun intended) homage to the classic new wave/synth-pop songs of the mid-1980s. I don’t care for Regine Chassagne’s voice, but her delivery of the song’s critique of the sprawl of the song’s title, that uniquely American creation of suburbs that go on forever, with “dead shopping malls” that “rise like mountains beyond mountains,” bringing excesses of light (I keep picturing car dealerships at night, sucking down energy to light up football fields of metal boxes) but lacking the edginess or openness of urban culture.

But the song I keep coming back to again and again is the spare, slightly uptempo yet haunting “City with No Children,” the title line itself (“Feel like I’ve been living in/a city with no children in it”) evoking images of deathly quiet, or even destruction – it brought to my mind the scene from The Road where they see “the little boy” in the window of a building in an otherwise abandoned city. The hand-claps stand in place of almost all typical percussion, while the predominant guitar riff is dampened, as if it was played through a pillow, creating a stunning contrast between the song’s pace and its melancholy production.

The Suburbs is far from a perfect album – there are too many “skip” tracks for me to slap an 80 on it, including the dirge-like “Wasted Hours,” “The Suburbs,” and “Sprawl I (Flatland),” and the slow rocker “Rococo,” with a staccato vocal line I just found irritating – but it’s far more than the standard three-singles-and-some-filler album template, a style that should be long dead in an era where the album is finally unbundled for consumers to purchase individual tracks. It’s the kind of album that would earn Grammy nominations if the Grammy Awards weren’t still based on wins, saves, and RBI.

–

Amazon.com has another 1000 albums available for $5 apiece as mp3 downloads through the end of the month. Two I’ll recommend: Mumford and Sons’ Sigh No More, which I reviewed (glowingly) back in April; and Radiohead’s OK Computer, one of the five or ten best albums in the history of rock.

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→ March 17, 2009
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Forgotten songs, part one.

This may or may not be a recurring feature here: songs I really like and never stopped liking but that, for one reason or another, were never huge hits in their times and have since been gathering dust on the music world’s shelves. I haven’t listed anything too obscure – I think everything here received radio airplay in the U.S. – and most are available for download via amazon.com. I started out with a list of over twenty candidates but pared it down to something more manageable. If you’ve got a forgotten classic of your own to nominate, throw it in the comments alongside your adulation of these tracks.

Love Spit Love – “Am I Wrong” (video)

I hated the Psychedelic Furs while they were peaking – I think it was because the name was too weird; my music preferences during childhood were often predicated on ridiculous things like that – only to discover afterwards that they produced some pretty amazing stuff. Half the band re-formed as Love Spit Love, who had a minor hit with this atmospheric, melancholy ballad. They’re probably better known now for their cover of the Smiths’ “How Soon is Now,” which became the theme song for the TV show Charmed, but that’s a perfunctory money-grab compared to “Am I Wrong.”

Moloko – “Fun For Me” (video)

I first heard this on WFNX in 1997 when it was playing as my alarm went off one morning, and despite not hearing it again for years, I remembered enough of the lyrics to track it down during what one might call the Napster era. It sticks in your head like treacle – and I know it’s not just my head, because everyone for whom I’ve played this song hasn’t just loved it, but become a little obsessed with it, regardless of what type(s) of music they typically liked. Which makes some sense, since I’m not sure how you could assign any genre to “Fun for Me.” But perhaps that’s why it never become any sort of hit in the U.S., given our tendency toward narrowcasting even on mainstream radio stations.

Pigeonhed feat. Lo Fidelity All-Stars – “Battleflag” (video)

I first heard this during my summer in Seattle in 1998 while pulling into the parking lot of the Safeway on Queen Anne Ave., and I sat in the car until the damn thing was over because I was riveted to the seat. It’s sort of like Prince meets … well, some other side of Prince, yet the end product doesn’t really sound that much like Prince but more like something by a couple of guys who really like Prince but also like overdubs and drum/bass samples and that ubiquitous handclap. There are a couple of versions around, but the best remix is the one found on MTV’s AMP 2.

Susanna Hoffs – “All I Want” (video)

Susanna Hoffs turned 50 in January, which I find horrifying, since I doubt I had a bigger crush on any celebrity during my formative years. I’m pleased, however, to discover that she still looks damn good. Hoffs released two solo albums in the 1990s between the Bangles’ breakup and inevitable reunion, neither of which did much on the charts, but her second effort included a fantastic cover of the Lightning Seeds’ “All I Want,” taking out the twee and turning into more of a folk-rock song. Sadly, the album is out of print and isn’t available for download. (Why wouldn’t a record label just push all of its songs out as mp3s? Is there some hidden cost of which I’m unaware? I imagine it would just be free revenue every time a song sells. And why post the video on Youtube if you don’t intend to sell the song?)

Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth – “They Reminisce Over You” (video)

As far as I’m concerned, the Bad Boy era killed hip-hop after an incredibly prolific decade of high-quality hip-hop songs, from the Golden Age of Rap coming out of New York to the short-lived jazz-rap movement (Digable Planets, anyone?) to southern California G-Funk in the early ’90s. (Warren G doesn’t qualify, sorry.) Producer Pete Rock was part of the jazz-rap movement, sticking with jazz and jazzy samples and lots of horn solos behind the, uh, smooth rhymes of C.L. Smooth. “T.R.O.Y.,” named as an homage to the late Troy Dixon of Heavy D and the Boyz, was easily their finest moment, built on a bass/horn riff from jazz saxophonist Tom Scott with fluid lyrics from C.L. Smooth.

Stone Roses – “Love Spreads” (video)

The opening 30 seconds constitute my main ring tone. If you like great guitar riffs, the entire album from which “Love Spreads” comes (Second Coming) will be right up your alley; guitarist John Squire wrote some enormous hooks and fills just about every available space with memorable licks. I still have no idea why this song, the first single from Second Coming, wasn’t at least a huge hit on “mainstream rock” stations, given the big guitar sounds and the catchy ad-infinitum chorus at the end. Also recommended: The Stone Roses’ guitarist’s post-breakup project, Seahorses, recorded one incredible song called “Love is the Law” (video) featuring awesome guitar work and the priceless line “Strap-on Sally/Chased us down the alley/We feared for our behinds.” Incidentally, the Stone Roses are going on tour this summer after more than a decade of “when hell freezes over” responses to reunion rumors.

Mansun – “Wide Open Space” (video – live version)

“Wide Open Spaces” garnered some modern-rock and mainstream-rock radio play when the album came out in 1996, but nothing else from the album broke through and their follow-up work wasn’t very good at all. (Incidentally, the album’s opening track, “The Chad Who Loved Me,” should have been all over the place in the fall of 2000, right?) There’s a lot of ’70s epic/arena rock to this song, but with this great underlying tension from that repeated two-note guitar riff. “Wide Open Spaces” would also rate highly on my list of “Songs I wish I had the range to sing.” Even solo, in the car, it’s a stretch.

Monster Magnet – “Negasonic Teenage Warhead” (video)

I know, they were completely ridiculous, a pastiche of stoner rock, New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and even a little bit of glam thrown in, but before the bombastic (if catchy) “Space Lord,” Monster Magnet threw down this straight-out rocker that will have you shouting “I will deny you!” for days. I wonder how much singer/songwriter Dave Wyndorf thinks he owes to Guns N Roses or White Zombie. It’s one of sleaze rock’s finest hours – or four-and-a-half minutes.

Catherine Wheel – “Waydown” (video)

This song wasn’t a great example of the Catherine Wheel’s music – “Black Metallic” and “Heal 2” are probably their signature songs – but it’s easily my favorite song by the group, still bringing that faint My Bloody Valentine influence to a much more polished finished product. The music is all energy and tension even as the lyrics describe a rapid, willful descent. It wasn’t quite grunge enough for its era but was harder and heavier than the hair-metal that grunge replaced.

Peter Murphy – “Cuts You Up” (video)

Murphy was the lead singer of the goth/arthouse band Bauhaus, which spawned the better-known Love and Rockets after its breakup. While “Cuts You Up” didn’t reach the commercial heights of L&R’s “So Alive,” it’s a seductive hook-laden Roxy Music-esque track that’s almost too sophisticated for its own commercial ambitions. Murphy tried to recreate the formula with “The Sweetest Drop” on his next album, but missed the mark somewhat painfully.

Say Trickle – “It Doesn’t Count” (video)

I know I promised nothing too obscure, but I’m making an exception to my own rule for this little-known British pop/rock band that sort of got caught between the Madchester craze in the early ’90s and the Britpop revival of a few years later. If they had a hit, this was it, although it just scraped the lower reaches of the modern rock charts and didn’t chart at all on Billboard‘s Hot 100. Unfortunately, Say Trickle’s only record is long out of print, but at least the video survives on Youtube.

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