{"id":3306,"date":"2014-04-14T11:16:53","date_gmt":"2014-04-14T15:16:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=3306"},"modified":"2014-06-20T10:51:23","modified_gmt":"2014-06-20T14:51:23","slug":"kaiser-chiefs-and-cloud-nothings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2014\/04\/14\/kaiser-chiefs-and-cloud-nothings\/","title":{"rendered":"Kaiser Chiefs and Cloud Nothings."},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Kaiser Chiefs’ second-ever single, 2004’s \u201cI Predict a Riot,\u201d was a global hit and one of my favorite songs of the first decade of the 2000s<\/a>. Their second album had one solid single, \u201cRuby,\u201d but since that point the bad seemed to hit new lows with each release; their 2012 album Start the Revolution Without Me<\/i> was so bad I never bothered to review it. <\/p>\n

That devolution makes this year’s Education, Education, Education & War<\/a><\/i> (also on iTunes<\/a>) 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 \u201cRiot,\u201d 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, \u201cCannons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Education<\/i> opens with a statement of purpose, \u201cThe Factory Gates,\u201d a morbidly witty elegy to the dead-end job of the factory worker \u2013 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: \u201cI’m a shopworn sales campaign\/Trapped behind yellow cellophane… \u201d That leads into the first single, the downtempo \u201cComing Home,\u201d before the album’s first stumble in \u201cMisery Company,\u201d where a hackneyed bit of wordplay and overplayed cackling line after the chorus sound like someone’s trying too hard to get airplay. <\/p>\n

The Chiefs’ strongest moments have always come when they infuse their songs with high-energy riffs, and other than the slower \u201cComing Home,\u201d the same applies on Education<\/i>, including \u201cFactory Gates,\u201d the stomping \u201cRuffians on Parade,\u201d and the quartet of songs that starts with \u201cOne More Last Song\u201d and concludes with the anti-war song \u201cCannons.\u201d I don’t think there’s anything new to be said on the whole \u201cwar is bad\u201d theme, but the Chiefs work in some clever imagery \u2013 \u201cthey treat us like we’re extras in an epic\u201d \u2013 without resorting to cheap humor, all above the album’s best earworm, the \u201cwe’re gonna need a lot more cannons\/if you want to be home by Christmas\u201d couplet that opens the chorus. That song dissolves into the two-minute poem read by Nighy, penned by Chiefs songwriter Ricky Wilson, about \u201cthe occupation of Damnation Eternal\u201d 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<\/i> without losing interest.<\/p>\n

Lyrical cleverness is great but hardly sells me on an album; where Education, Education, Education & War<\/i> 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 \u201cMeanwhile Up in Heaven\u201d and \u201cRoses\u201d depleting the energy the band has built up through preceding songs, and \u201cMisery Company\u201d 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 \u201cand war\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

* Part of why I’ve dithered on posting any album reviews is that I kept listening to Here and Nowhere Else<\/a>\"\"<\/i> (also on iTunes<\/a>), 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/i>, 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 \u201cI’m Not Part of Me\u201d and opener \u201cNow Hear In,\u201d 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, \u201cPattern Walks,\u201d 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<\/i> sounds like a good band in stasis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cI Predict a Riot,\u201d was a global hit and one of my favorite songs of the first decade of the 2000s. Their second album […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[779,748,778,167,852],"class_list":["post-3306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2014-in-music","tag-british-music","tag-garage-rock","tag-indie","tag-music","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3306"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3310,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3306\/revisions\/3310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}