As we dive headlong into our second full year of the second decade of the new century, it seems as if we need a new shortname for the decade that we’re so haphazardly blazing into. We struggled to figure out how we would shorten our year names in the beginning of The Oughts. We seemed to refer to the year 2000 as simply two thousand for the better part of 365 days, though that may have been only because Double Ought had too many syllables. This decade is a bit more confusing though. Do we call it the teens? The tens? I’m sure we’ll figure out a universal name for our current decade before we settle into the purring ‘20s. While you ponder upon that thought, here is a mind numbing collection of album reviews for some music that was released in the first year of The Teens. This edition of CD Impressions features experimental prog rockers the Ben Levin Group, the prog pysch pop band Mystery Jets, noise rockers No Age, Nashville hard rockers Blackwater James, Swedish dream pop group The Radio Dept, and Nick Cave's second go around with Grinderman.
Clinging to a Scheme
Artist: The Radio Dept.
Label: Labrador
Release Date: 4/19/10
8 out of 10
Frequently slipping in and out of comfortably numb slumber, Sweden’s the Radio Dept. usually finds ways to bury their considerable pop inclinations with somnambulant haze (to be slightly less imitative, the reverb is less guitar than electronic). Fittingly sad and wistful, they have the sort of sound that inspires zealous adoration from the cult and indifference (or unawareness) from the rest. Which makes it clear that Clinging to a Scheme is the group’s closest—but still likely unintentional—stab yet at commercial success; take that as you like. They’ll never have a hit following up Usher or Katy Perry on radio station rotation, but tunes like “Never Follow Suit,” “Heaven’s on Fire,” “Memory Loss” and “David” (and several others) are all single-friendly, warmly melancholic caresses of Madchester and chamber pop snuggled by wool. The latter begins like something not far removed from Billy Idol’s “Dancing with Myself” and the cheery, delicate keys comprising “Heaven’s on Fire”’s clearest hook melts in the ears. There are even hints of trip hop and IDM in the beats scattered throughout the entire record. It’s not all in the songwriting—with crisper, cleaner production, the words and subtle hooks emerge from the fog, but never to the point where you stop recognizing who’s performing them. More stately and refined than one comes to expect from shoegaze, more snappish and piquant than one comes to expect from dream pop, the Radio Dept. has managed to create a brief but rounded excuse for clarity even as they aim for the snowy drifts their homeland has in no shortage. (Matt Medlock)
Pulse of a Nation
Artist: Ben Levin Group
Label: Self-Released
Release Date: 12/6/10
5 out of 10
There comes a time, no matter what the chosen medium, when an art can be too ambitious. Whether it's a movie or novel with too many convoluted story arcs, an arduous and subjectless painting, or a progressive rock album with an overly expansive apocalyptic theme, it's not always best to go for broke on a work of art. Though there are plenty of great, sprawling concept albums, Ben Levin's Pulse of a Nation doesn’t quite have enough interesting moments to qualify as such. The premise of Pulse of a Nation is that mankind is facing its final days on earth, and the music of Pulse plays out this narrative with few words and a lot of guitar riffs. I’ve actually always enjoyed those who have tried to narrate a story with music instead of words, but Pulse is just too sporadic and uneven to be able to get Levin’s epic told efficiently. When taken out of context, certain songs on Pulse are worthy prog rockers though. The middle of the album, specifically the song “Ill From the Poisons of Our Young,” is a well-paced and very likable track on its own. When placed in the middle of the album though, the song just seems to be apart of the overly long conceptual story. The album comes with an opening track that is in essence the entire album without breaks, though the unabridged opener does feature a muffled audio byte that sets the stage for the rest of the story. The album then follows with each part of the record broken into separate tracks. This obviously makes it hard to listen to the album in its entirety seeing as how it features the same quarter hour long epic twice. Though Levin and company seem like adept musicians, taking a stab at such an unrelatable and somewhat pretentious concept makes listening to Pulse of a Nation a toilsome effort. (Tyler Barlass)
Serotonin
Artist: Mystery Jets
Label: Rough Trade
Release Date: 7/5/10
5 out of 10
Once an intriguingly proggy psych pop band with loads of promise, Mystery Jets settled in a comfort zone way too quickly. Their latest, Serotonin, isn’t quite as moribund as Twenty One, which, aside from the Laura Marling guest appearance, was so forgettable that I had to check my collection to make sure I had even listened to it. Serotonin is somewhat livelier, considerably catchier, and chockfull of even more routine but appealing hooks that should keep the listener nodding along gently. Listen to “The Girl Is Gone”—entirely unremarkable, with a jovial bounce that does little better than “drift,” but in its mild winsomeness, provides a decent enough outing. Ditto the flashy 80s synth riff of the title track and the faux-island rhythms bubbling under boilerplate flash melodies on “Dreaming of Another World.” Unfortunately, dim lyrics (“I'm weak at the knees and the air that I breathe/So thick you could cut with a knife”), the repetitive nature of nearly every refrain simply repeating the title again and again, and too much emphasis on lackluster Beach Boys-esque harmonies and extraneous back-ups dull what little charms rest in each song. Passable and inoffensive; if you’re unfamiliar with the pop playbook clichés, perhaps even faintly enjoyable. (Matt Medlock)
Everything In Between
Artist: No Age
Label: Sub Pop
Release Date: 9/28/10
7 out of 10
Losing focus rarely seemed so promising. After the rightly-praised Nouns landed in ‘08, everyone frothed wildly about No Age (resulting in the inevitable backlash), yet all but the most glowing notices couldn’t avoid noting the realization that their attack plan was even more limited than the typical slovenly hot starter that fails to conquer the world (most obvious example: the Strokes). Whether foggy or rampaging, there were lots of squalid guitar tones and roughshod stomp, and their energy spent itself in bursts somewhere between the Minutemen and Wire. But here comes Everything in Between, which appears to reference the small surprises and opportunities discovered in the daily drudgery of life but might as well describe what No Age discovered in their curtained-off aesthetic. They’re still plenty noisy, rangy, rambunctious, beaten-at-the-corners on the outside and rock-solid on the inside. Shifting down a gear or two in immediacy and supplanting recognizable enthusiasm for idiosyncratic aimlessness at several junctures is a noticeable debit, but a soft one, and likely the sort of maneuver that will open doors for those who deemed them too bereft of innovation.
While managing songs as warmly appealing as “Valley Hump Crash” and “Glitter” almost seem like accidents, the off-balance sync between beat and vocal on “Sorts” feels intentional, largely because that’s what I’ve come to expect from the band and lo-fi noise punk scene in general. Similar curlicue hooks dominate both “Chem Trails” and “Fever Dreaming,” but one’s Isn’t Anything-era My Bloody Valentine while the other is Loveless-era My Bloody Valentine. Missing the frustrated tempos and frantic urgency of their earlier material makes Everything the toughest vote yet in their LP canon, which, naturally, is frustrating since this is also their most “pop” record. Shortcomings aside, my own vote: give it all the time it needs. (Matt Medlock)
Vol. 1
Artist: Blackwater James
Label: Self-Released
Release Date: 11/30/10
4 out of 10
Just a year after the release of the band's full length debut album, Blackwater James has released a 6 song EP titled Vol. 1. The title of the EP suggests that there will indeed be additional trite, unoriginal, garish rock music from Blackwater James released in bite size nuggets in the near future. For now though we're lucky enough to only have the first volume in circulation. On Vol. 1 you never see a tender or slowed down side to Blackwater James, rather the songs featured here are all in-your-face hard rock music and little else. The extreme lack of variety is just one factor that brings down this collection of songs. Each track on Vol. 1 is stuffed with predictable guitar riffs, unexciting solos, lead singer Chris James singing sophomoric lines and the rest of the band shouting out clichéd phrases like “Burn this city down!” “Come on, come on!” and “She’s so ready!” The one thing that allows Blackwater James to stand out ever so slightly from their hard rock peers is the impassioned, ranging vocal ability of frontman James, who also happens to be the band’s namesake. Even an adept vocalist can't save the mediocre, run of the mill music raging behind him though. Each song on Vol. 1 is about as predictable as a collection of rock songs can be. That being said, I think we know what’s in store when Vol. 2 comes around. (Tyler Barlass)
Grinderman 2
Artist: Grinderman
Label: Mute / Anti-
Release Date: 9/13/10
8 out of 10
Nick Cave doesn’t really age; he ferments. Busy writing scripts, scoring films, and surging with recent top-shelf releases both with the Bad Seeds and Grinderman, some might be inclined to call it a latter-career resurgence, but Cave never went away. He’s just kept pounding out ferocious, feral and frightening rock music for some three decades straight, as gothic as the Southern blues he rasps and as blistering as the vast Outback of his homeland. The second Grinderman record, appropriately titled Grinderman 2, is less more of the same than the next step—the garage-punk edge has unfolded its sinewy arms for something more primitive in dusky underbite but beyond the curve in its implementation of various avant, noise and psychedelic elements.
It never quite recovers from the feverish high of opener “Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man,” but there are so few missteps on its wheezing tour of his thematic highlight reel that there’s no need for restarts. “Worm Tamer” pins caustic violin seizures to scorching guitar rock while the epic stage show sleaze of “When My Baby Comes” starts out like a droning, drugged-out dream before the foreground erupts with night terrors, punished by cruel, bedraggled distortion. “Evil” is the song name we’ve all been waiting for from Cave, and while it might not be as sizably stunning in his words (more amusing than upsetting), it does contain a monstrous crunch of a riff that will tempt even the most hardened metalheads to flash the devil horns. Closing it all out is “Bellringer Blues,” as piss-drunk a sound one could make without ripping off the elders of experimentation, following a distinctive stoner rock vibe while the instruments lurch and lapse in backmasked loops over the rattling beat, as Cave declares that the book “makes slaves of all womankind and corpses of men.” No other musician has ever made damnation sound so bone-deep a part of the human race. (Matt Medlock)
