new year / new music

cibo matto - stereo type a

amazing record from start to finish. some real "moments" in here that are haunting, mature, childish and revelatory. i can't say a bad thing about it and it'll probably be your "i didn't think i'd like this" record of the bunch.

from amazon:
It wasn't so long ago that New York-based Japanese duo Cibo Matto (Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda) were simply a fun, gimmicky East Village outfit who performed on Casio keyboards and sang almost exclusively about their favorite foods. As such, the band's major-label debut album Viva! La Woman was sugary, but not really substantive--a clear-cut example of Eastern culture endearingly misinterpreting Western music. But Cibo Matto has come a long way since penning songs like "Know Your Chicken," "Beef Jerky," and "Birthday Cake." Stereotype A is a mature, instrumentally rich album that sees the group break the novelty mold and achieve recognition for compelling songwriting and interesting arrangements. On Stereotype Cibo Matto incorporates such styles as electropop, bossa nova, soul, hip-hop, and butt-waggling funk, expressing a dizzying range of influences that include TLC, Ice Cube, Luscious Jackson, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and Isaac Hayes. In the process of becoming musically legit, however, Cibo Matto has lost some of their former charm, which is probably fine with Hatori and Honda, who would no doubt rather be seen as credible than cute. --Jon Wiederhorn


iron and wine/calexico - in the reins

excellent stuff. downtempo but great singing and songwriting

from pitchfork:
Why didn't somebody think of this sooner? It's not a fair question, but it's an easy one to ask once you've heard the seven-track In the Reins, the first in what, if we're all very lucky, will be a series of collaborations between Iron & Wine and Calexico.

Iron & Wine's Beam and Calexico's Joey Burns sound heavenly harmonizing with each other, especially when guest vocalist Natalie Wyants joins them. Neither is an exceptional vocalist on his own, both occasionally lapsing to a whisper, but those hushed, gently melodic cords singing in unison make magic. Beam is the principle songwriter and vocalist on the album, and he's written some A material for the record, admirably putting his all into it instead of offering up some throwaway stuff and hoping Calexico can do something with it.

What ultimately ends up happening is Calexico's sense of cinematic grandeur and eclecticism imbues Beam's melodies and lyrics with an expansiveness that his humid Floridian folk doesn't usually have. Shades of jazz and country creep in, and they even tackle straightahead California pop on "History of Lovers". The only ingredients from Calexico's usual recipe that are absent are dub and mariachi, but they employ their arsenal so sympathetically to Beam's vision that an unschooled listener might never guess that this wasn't a proper, working band.

Calexico are no strangers to backing other singers-- Burns and drummer John Convertino began playing together as Howe Gelb's rhythm section in Giant Sand, and they've contributed to dozens of LPs by other artists over the years. The core duo of Calexico brings along most of the collective of Southwestern musicians that enlivens their own albums-- Paul Niehaus's lap steel, in particular, helps to shape the sound of the album. "Prison on Route 41" and "16, Maybe Less" both traffic in hushed country 'n' western tones, but are arranged in such a way that vocals give way to instrumental passages so smoothly that the solos don't feel at all like showcases.

There isn't a disappointing song on the EP (mini-album might actually be a better word for it), but it's worth noting a couple of stand-outs. Opener "He Lays in the Reins" is a subtle waltz stuffed with flourishes of acoustic guitar and brushed drums that almost two minutes in introduces the operatic Spanish vocals of Salvador Duran, a complete leftfield move that proves as inspired on subsequent listens as it does jarring on the first listen. But the real highlight is also the biggest shock: "History of Lovers" is what Fleetwood Mac's Rumours might have sounded like if it had been recorded in Memphis, complete with steel guitar trim and a great horn arrangement to go with some stunning harmonies and an unbelievable vocal melody.

Whether or not Iron & Wine and Calexico ever choose to follow this up with another collaboration (fingers crossed), it's clear that both acts are stronger for having worked with the other. It'll be interesting to see what comes next for Iron & Wine and Calexico and how this affects their work apart from each other. In the meantime, we can hope that this isn't a one-time-only engagement.

-Joe Tangari, September 14, 2005


iron and wine - the creek drank the cradle

yeah. more iron and wine.

from pitchfork:
I sometimes wonder if musicians like Samuel Beam (aka Iron & Wine), envy contemporary "artists" such as Britney Spears or Linkin Park-- and not for reasons of fame or money. Spears and Linkin Park, after all, make decidedly contemporary music that, while tangentially owing debt to earlier music periods, puts little pressure on them to legitimize their backgrounds. Spears was once a teen who liked Madonna; Linkin Park were once teens who liked angst. That's about all anyone asks of them.

Not so for Sam "Jim" Beam. He makes bare-bones music that constantly nods to musical periods long since passed, perhaps the earliest being the 1920s of Blind Lemon Jefferson. In short, Beam makes roots music with southern themes, though to end there would do him a disservice. But now knowing this, you may be wondering: What are his qualifications? Is this guy authentic?

Where you come from, of course, can automatically grant you authenticity. Perhaps the best current example of this is Detroit; if The White Stripes and Eminem grew up in the most miserable city in the States, they must be for real! Beam, however, hails from the Miami area, which is not exactly backwoods Mississippi. Moreover, he teaches cinematography at a local college (an academic!) and was recently signed to Sub Pop, of all labels.

Of course, issues of authenticity plagued Bob Dylan at first. Plus, isn't Neil Young a Canadian? In other words, if you exhibit enough talent, then the critics will look past whatever your background may be, and time-- the greatest critic of all-- will erase any petty misgivings. While Beam has a long way to go before joining these visionaries, The Creek Drank the Cradle is a good enough start to make you forget anything you ever knew about the man. The music speaks for itself, and for Beam's talent.

The gentle acoustic plucking that ushers in the opener, "Lion's Mane", may not grab your attention, but Beam's delicate, hushed vocals sure will. His lyrics, meanwhile, tread familiar territory without sounding too familiar. He even tackles love through metaphor without seeming like a high school poet: "Love is a tired symphony you hum when you're awake/ Love is a crying baby mama warned you not to shake."

As with the rest of the album, slide guitar and banjo appear throughout the first track. The folksy sound sometimes recalls Nick Drake-- that is, if the British troubadour were from the bayou instead. In the lolling "Bird Stealing Bread", Beam's voice then takes on a Drake-ian resemblance, as he sings, "Did his hand in your hair feel a lot like a thing you believed in?/ Or a bit like a bird stealing bread out from under your nose?"

By the time "Faded from the Winter" arrives, the album has its hooks in you. Beam's overdubbed harmonies, delivered in a repetitive cadence, are spooky without being forbidding, bringing Low's early work to mind, if only in pace and tone. On songs like this one, Beam feels like an artist working in different hues of the same color-- blue, perhaps, or brown.

But the changes keep coming, subtle though they are. "The Rooster Moans", with its layered banjos and talk of riding a rusty train to the Devil, could sit firmly in the middle of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack and no one would blink an eye. The southern themes continue on "Upward Over the Mountain", in which the narrator kills a snake in a creekbed, but Beam's vocal harmonies are nearer to Simon and Garfunkel than Ralph Stanley. "Southern Anthem", meanwhile, brings to mind Crosby, Stills and Nash.

But any potential writhing or wincing is soon dissolved by "Weary Memory", the album's simplest and perhaps strongest track. Here, Beam's voice is all his, as he stretches out his vocal cords and displays a greater range than he had led the listener to believe he possessed. As the song peaks, all guitars but one drop out for a brief respite. "Found a photo of when we were married," Beam sings, breaking the last word into two. "Leaning back on a broken willow tree/ That's one memory I choose to carry/ Weary memory I can always see," and he takes that "see" soaring skyward.

The Creek Drank the Cradle is made of small epiphanies such as this. There are few guitar solos, if they can even be called that. Beam rarely gets adventurous with his voice, and the songs, for the most part, are of the same pace, tone, lyrical content. Written and performed to tape by Beam alone, the album could easily be lumped in with other home-recording talents such as John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats. But the music here has such deeps roots in a vast swath of Americana that the bedroom image just wouldn't suit Beam.

And please don't be fooled by the label. Sub Pop may not be the foremost purveyors of roots music, but they've proven before-- in the case of former Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan-- that they at least know good old-time country and blues music when they hear it. If indeed The Creek Drank the Cradle is only half of the material Beam submitted to the label, then hopefully there's some more Iron & Wine on the way. It sure beats more mud and honey.

-Ryan Kearney, October 2nd, 2002


iron and wine - our endless numbered days

yeah. even more iron and wine. i have listened to his album, in all of its incredibly dense and soul-destroyingly depressing lyrical content, about 4000 times. its good.

from pitchfork:
There's an intimacy to Sam Beam's voice that makes it shamefully easy to imagine him curled up in the corner of your futon, slurping tea from a chipped mug, absent-mindedly fiddling with an old acoustic guitar and scribbling words into a coverless notebook. He is always chewing on a pencil, and when he talks, his words come slow.

Shake it off. While the idea of Sam Beam tugging at your afghan might seem perfectly inviting, it's actually just dangerous: the traditions and artists of the American south have long been fetishized and vilified with equal fervor, and, perhaps appropriately, both the region and its inhabitants are starting to assume near-cartoonish proportions in print and onscreen. Unsurprisingly, Iron and Wine's grubby campfire hymns are subject to the very same kind of blind, moonlight-heavy romanticizing-- which might make swallowing a new, gently-buffed Iron and Wine album doubly difficult. Picture crisp, fuzz-free vocals and gently brushed snares shooting like darts, incisive and stinging, each chiseled tip dipped in hot studio poison: This is not the Iron and Wine of yesteryear.

When The Creek Drank the Cradle puttered quietly out of Sub Pop's warehouse in 2002, it was stupidly easy to be tugged into the quasi-escapist, heavily idealized portrait of Beam-as-basement-troubadour-- a bearded, southern, "down home" father of two with a cardboard box full of shitty equipment and an unassuming shoulder shrug. The whimsical inadvertence of Beam's debut-- and the vague sense that the composition and realization of Creek were just as profound and accidental as the record's eventual distribution-- lent Beam's work a dangerous edge of serendipity. Listening to The Creek Drank the Cradle felt like accidentally digging up a diamond, clutching it briefly in a soil-streaked palm, and then shoving it deep into your front pocket, eyes shooting around suspiciously. Nobody who found it ever wanted to give it up.

Last year's The Sea and the Rhythm EP, which featured five previously unreleased Creek tracks, saw Iron and Wine maintaining his four-track sigh, bringing his hissing home-studio work to a glorious, satisfying end. For Our Endless Numbered Days, Beam darted out of his basement and into Chicago's Engine Studios, and the resulting record sees Beam taking a satisfying break from air-conditioner-as-rhythm-section: Producer Brian Deck (Califone, Fruit Bats, Holopaw) folds in twittering percussive bits, while sister Sarah Beam coos sweet harmonies and bandmates Jonathan Bradley, EJ Holowicki, Jeff McGriff, and Patrick McKinney provide ample backing. Our Endless Numbered Days is cleaner, more diverse, and generally sparser than its predecessor, and, given the apparent limits of Beam's former setup, it's also an astoundingly progressive record: Beam has successfully transgressed his cultural pigeonhole without sacrificing any of his dusty allure.

Opener "On Your Wings" mixes Beam's pert guitar picks with rolling slide; scraps of percussion gradually fold in, vocals fall off, and the band somersaults into a comparably raucous mini-jam. In "Naked as We Came", Beam nods to the album's enigmatic title, softly lamenting mortality ("One of us will die inside these arms/ Eyes wide open, naked as we came/ One of us will spread our ashes around the yard") over Creek-ish acoustic strums, while Sarah whispers along, her barely audible murmurs more haunting for their delicacy. "Each Coming Night" is instantly moving, perfectly hinged on a bubblegum melody, while "Sodom, South Georgia" nails gothic disquiet both on and off the page ("All dead white boys say, 'God is good'/ White tongues hang out, 'God is good'").

Studio tweaking aside, there's another, more subtle tonal flip here: Beam's lyrics, once dribbling over with issues of faith and fidelity, are distinctly more guarded, a switch which seems inextricably linked to the relative (and unexpected) ubiquity of his debut. Creek was full of gently whispered secrets, each tiny, grinning confession or perverse admission only adding to the record's furtive charms. A sizable audience might not have been part of Beam's songwriting equation before, but it is now-- and while Our Endless Numbered Days' lacquered cuts might seem slightly more transparent at first, their lyrics are infinitely more obscured, heavy with their own predestined publicity. Now, Beam juggles bits of dialogue (over half of these tracks feature extra speakers; "Naked as We Came" and "Each Coming Night" both focus almost exclusively on clips of conversation), painstakingly easing himself out of the narrator's chair, and voicing what would otherwise be some wincingly maudlin bits (see "I want your flowers like babies want God's love").

Obviously, none of this makes Beam any less of a poet; if anything, Beam's freshly veiled lyrics have simply pushed Iron and Wine toward more subversive levels of storytelling. The song-as-poem critical course has been applied to Beam before, but the accuracy of the analogy never wanes: Beam and Deck toy with syntax and meter, using shaky bits of percussion, volume shifts, and tempo changes to mimic the twitchy movement of the best epic poetry. In the past, Beam's lyrics have proved his linguistic prowess, but it's the eerie lyricism of the instrumentation that ultimately pushes Our Endless Numbered Days deep into the canon of American verse.

Slavic poet Charles Simic talks about poetry as "a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one's walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph." And it's in this sense that Beam is, above all else, a poet: His tabletops are littered with gritty little snapshots of life well-lived, strewn with tender acoustic strums, pictures of the ocean, shaken maracas, mothers, fathers, arms. It's a beautiful display.

-Amanda Petrusich, March 29th, 2004


iron and wine - woman king ep

boom!!!!! fucking great stuff.

from pitchfork:
There are a lot of ways to describe Iron & Wine's dark, woozy folk songs: writers and fans scramble to find the appropriate modifiers, the correct verbs, the variations on "hushed." We make references to babies and jokes about his beard, launching sweeping comparisons to bedroom poets past, yapping happily about Beam's "quietude" and "grace." And now, for the very first time, "loud" can be added to that arsenal of adjectives: the six-song Woman King EP, a follow-up to 2004's Our Endless Numbered Days, opens with relentlessly click-clacking pieces of wood and a brash slide riff, booming out in all directions. And we haven't even gotten to the electric guitar yet-- or the distortion.

Over the course of two full-lengths (and their accompanying EPs), Sam Beam has tweaked and re-imagined Iron & Wine's whisper-folk imprint to include a much broader palette of sound-- anxious and intense, Woman King inches Beam even farther away from his scratchy lo-fi origins without sacrificing any of the microphone-eating intimacy that made his work so appealing to begin with. Woman King was recorded at producer Brian Deck's Engine Music Studios in Chicago (under identical circumstances, but separate from the Our Endless Numbered Days sessions) and features Deck's trademark mix of grainy, untreated percussion and spare-but-layered production (not atypically, Deck is also credited as a band member). Somehow, each step Beam takes feels organic, proper, true-- Woman King (much like Our Endless Numbered Days) is different, but fundamentally linked to its predecessors.

Iron & Wine's album titles are almost always prophetic (2002's The Creek Drank the Cradle dealt with fizzled innocence, 2004's Our Endless Numbered Days tackled human mortality) and Woman King is, for the most part, about girls-- fallen, absent, beloved, virginal, and nefarious.

Thwarted religion has always provided prime lyric fodder for Beam, and the stunning "Jezebel" recounts the rise and fall of the Bible's most infamous Phoenician princess, a pagan follower who becomes involved in a political marriage to Ahab, the crown prince of Israel. According to the Bible, Jezebel caused loads of trouble for Israel until Jehu, the head of a company formed to overthrow the house of Ahab, has her snatched and tossed from a window. Her blood splatters the palace wall; Jehu, on horse and chariot, charges across the body. Later, when palace servants return to recover Jezebel's corpse for burial, all that's left is her skull, her feet, and the palms of her hands. Jehu announces that Jezebel was chewed up by a pack of dogs, fulfilling the divine prophet Elijah's earlier prediction that "the dogs shall eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel."

Beam gently acknowledges Jezebel's brutal end ("The window was wide/ She could see the dogs come running"), but doesn't necessarily swallow the Bible's cautionary bent: Jezebel is typically read as villainous (with decent reason: she falsely accuses citizens of blasphemy and treason, and orders them stoned to death), but recent feminist re-interpretations of her story have questioned whether or not that vilification can simply be chalked up to the threat she posed to ancient patriarchal orders. Beam plays with his words (a glance at the lyric sheet reveals that he's actually singing "wholly Jezebel," but, you know, say it out loud), and laments how Jezebel was "gone" before he ever got to say "Lay here my love/ You're the only shape I'll pray to, Jezebel." Ultimately, Beam casts Jezebel as more of a heroine (or an object of worship, even) than a righteously fallen pagan, turning "Jezebel" into a perfectly chilling ode to potentially misunderstood women.

A stripped-down version of "Jezebel" can be heard on the officially unreleased (but slipped under many pillows) bootleg 9/20/02 Home Recordings, a collection of demos largely believed to be the Iron & Wine songs Sub Pop opted not to use for Beam's debut. Still, the studio take of "Jezebel" is far fleshier, with Beam's classic guitar and banjo strums backed up by tinkling piano and tiny dulcimer swats-- a dizzying, wispy haze of strings and high, falsetto-coos that hold up well against Beam's very best work.

"Freedom Hangs Like Heaven", while no less religiously charged ("Ain't nobody knows what the newborn holds/ But his mama says he'll walk on water and wander back home"), is a boisterous, slide-fueled throwdown, perfectly acceptable for barn-dancing or open-armed room stomping. "Gray Stables" shows off Beam's knack for harmony (while singing with sister Sarah), "My Lady's House" is vintage Iron & Wine, all acoustic guitar, slight piano, and lovelorn laments, while closer "Evening on the Ground (Lilith's Song)" is a tense, distorted ode to dark garden trysts (interpret "We were born to fuck each other/ One way or another" however you like), complete with spider bites and broken locks and urgent, throaty vocals.

Woman King will provide eager Iron & Wine fans a welcome holdover between proper albums, but the EP also serves a larger developmental purpose, marking one more evolutionary hop for Sam Beam, and christening a new genre-- post-basement.

-Amanda Petrusich, February 21, 2005


cat power - you are free

interesting. "free" is the song that will win you over.

from pitchfork:
Liz Phair was a grifter. Using sexuality as a weapon, she turned the tables on obsessive boys and set their hearts aflutter with brazen lyrics, from the flagellant lust of "Flower" to her dead-to-the-world praise for doin' it doggie-style, "That way we can fuck and watch TV." Yet, forgiving a few heartfelt ballads like "Explain It to Me", Phair was in many ways a coy tease, partying and watching porn with guys she'd never date, despite their lust for her.

Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power) was never such fun, never crude or masculine; she's the opposite fantasy, the porcelain art-school doll whose blissful confusion you could never hold in your hands. She's the girl that never called you back, that made you lose your cool and leave two messages. Every time you see her on the street, or a mutual friend tells you, "Yeah, I saw her at Cokie's, she's dating the guy from so and so," it ruins your weekend.

The cagiest of modern songbirds, Chan has a famously fragile ego and skittish countenance. She's wrestled with the consequences of baring a relentlessly observant soul to the world, and bagged on any number of shows when heckled or simply "not feeling it." What fame she currently enjoys is due in large part to the fallout from those freakouts, the reputation of being "crazy," and it's absolute bullshit. The Problem With Music doesn't have as much to do with the influence of corporations or digital piracy as it does the delirious desire to be spat upon or condescended to by seemingly unflappable, fuck-everything rebels, projecting a confidence their sycophantic fans wish they could muster. Kids want to see their dreams onstage-- which used to be harmless-- but cool, cold fantasies about credibility, cash and chaos have given rise to an increasingly cocksure collection of unserious dopes with store-bought sticky-up hair. It's a solid indication that pose is still prose to the uneducated, and that nothing has really changed in fifty years.

Unlike most celebrities-- evidence her fall 2001 fashion spread in New York magazine-- Chan Marshall is unrecognizable from one photo to the next. One moment she's a giddy fourteen year-old; the next, she's withdrawn, wary and wise, the music world's Juliette Binoche. Recently, she's Nico. Whether anxiety, insecurity, substance abuse or all three are to blame, few artists have gone through as much physical change without plastic surgery. In person, Marshall's face undulates with each syllable, conveying a vast range of emotions in a single inflection. When she's singing, however, it's an entirely different story: Ms. Power is a siren on stage, a shepherdess, gently coaxing words across indefinite miles of memory before tenderly putting them to pasture, or unleashing whatever betrayal they carry in tow. She's a representative for all manner of loss and regret, and serves us in good stead on You Are Free.

1998's Moon Pix set the stage for a hugely promising follow-up, but Chan missed the side of that barn: The Covers Record was a dashed off, carefree run through the classics, a placeholder for creativity she was unable to channel. In hindsight, it's a good thing she didn't record any new material after the mostly disastrous Moon Pix tour. There's an overt irony to The Covers Record insofar as Chan hid under them for a few years.

Those days-- the sad days, the manic, childish days-- seem very long gone, as Cat Power reclaims her history, potential and allure in this collection of impressionist vignettes, hampered by a few flat numbers and some awkwardly totemic (though entirely expected) nods to Joni Mitchell. "I Don't Blame You" is one of the latter, Chan's pining letter to Kurt Cobain that also serves as a third-person apology to self, the sort of thing addicts and those new to therapy pen on admission. She uses the opening slot as a mostly disconnected salvo, only slipping into this sort of nudity once more, on the brutal "Names", which is either a public service announcement against child abuse or an honest recollection of tragedies Chan Marshall witnessed growing up.

"He War" enjoyed most of the advance praise for this album, posted in digital preview form on her record label's website. This pounding centerpiece is second only to PJ Harvey's "Big Exit" in the canon of Heart tributes, but it carries in tow the stilted tempo and clean electric guitars dominating indie rock since Guided by Voices came on the scene. Beyond nominally decrying the Quixotic male impulse that fuels her oeuvre, "He War" underscores how remarkable Marshall's voice is, turning an otherwise pedestrian, technically amateur tune into an assured rock anthem draped in sonorous, shrill wails. The tune proves a worthy successor to the detached, bemused innocence of "Cross Bones Style", whose referentially genius video broke Cat Power to a wider audience.

Marshall scribbles a Crayola-colored, daydreamt recollection of the phony-tough cock-rock that ruled the radios of her youth on "Free", a moment of stylistic daring that incorporates a deadened drum machine snare with urgent (think Foreigner here) strumming. It's the sound of a more attuned, sensitive kid finding her way in the dark, and the only song on You Are Free to risk disaster, openly toying with SK-1 keys and a guitar lead unintentionally pinched from the Talking Heads' tongue-in-cheek "Wild Wild Life". The gamble pays off, and just two songs into the album, it's clear that Chan's taken its title to heart.

The Cat Power we've come to know, love, and predict finally delivers that glistening, trebly rasp on "Good Woman", a ballad backed by Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis, as well as a compressed chorale of soprano vocal doubling. Eddie Vedder's presence on You Are Free is both appropriate and gentle given his unmistakable coo. You'll recognize it-- and for anyone still mired in divisive squabbling, his breathy moan could ruin the record-- but the two duets with Vedder are the strongest of too many funereally morose dirges that bind the album.

"Speak for Me" transports anyone who lived through Pavement's ascendancy back to the breathless expectancy in advance of Wowee Zowee, something Cat Power also felt: she's covered "We Dance" since just after that record came out. The playful backbeat chorus and toy pianos of "Speak for Me" are partnered with another throwback, this time to Chan's low-fidelity roots. Her cover of Michael Hurley's two-chord country blues number "Werewolf" is abbreviated from rambling, epic versions you may have heard in concert, and though it's aided by David Campbell's string arrangements (reminiscent of Carter Burwell's soundtrack work), it could lay in next to anything from Marshall's earlier Myra Lee LP. "Fool" makes a perfect counterpoint to "Werewolf", in terms of Chan's maturation where songwriting, production and subject matter are concerned. Her disdain is getting personal, her subject matter less ephemeral, as she scolds rich Americans driven by wanderlust and entitlement. With haunting harmonies and a teasing pause, the chorus tugs at the heartstrings of twenty-something confusion.

For the stunning variety and intrigue of its first eight songs, the second half of You Are Free is spotty, and a draining letdown. As the old adage goes, ten songs is an album, and in this case, fourteen is a few too many. Some of the closing tracks should have been kept back for B-sides; the overwrought, repetitive "Half of You" is a less meaningful pastiche than the searing Western blues heard earlier on the record, and "Maybe Not" is basically an alternate piano take on "Fool".

Chan's been playing the frayed Joni Mitchell card in advance of You Are Free, and it's starting to wear thin. The two real missteps here are "Baby Doll", a too-simple nylon guitar plod, and a fantastic but hiss-coated cover of John Lee Hooker's "Crawlin' Black Spider" (reappropriated as "Keep on Runnin'", surely as a stab at her former lover, Smog's Bill Callahan). Again, this cover is outstanding on its own merits, but interrupts the album, forestalling the icy chill of its stupendous finale, "Evolution".

The monotonous, glacial insistence of You Are Free's last track-- Cat Power's proper duet with Eddie Vedder-- is as out of place as its opener, a perfect bookend and resolution to a record that almost effortlessly shifts between incongruous styles. Vedder appears in hushed baritone, nicely meshing with the piano line and allowing Chan's tongue-tied, sedated lilt to sit on top. "Evolution" is as poetic a retelling of moral apocalypse as you're likely to come by, insofar as it ignores melodramatic conviction and the temporal impulse to wax politic. This is pure Hemingway.

You Are Free is full of arresting, serene beauty, but as an album-- as that quantifiable object-- it has composite failings. Sans a handful of lesser inclusions and tributes, the imaginary, shorter version of You Are Free is flawless. An unknown singer would take the apologist underground by storm with a record like this, but fame brings expectation and accountability, and certain people are going to be disappointed for the wrong reasons. You Are Free is not a perfect record, but it contains one, detailing the sound of American regret with a singular voice, scrutinized only because of its owner.

-Chris Ott, February 18th, 2003


air - the virgin suicides

from pitchfork:
Since their humble beginnings on Premiers Symptomes, their 1997 debut EP, Air haven't striven for much more than to bring a French flavor to spacy electronic pop. Even back then, this was by no means an original concept. Hundreds of bands-- Stereolab, Dimitri from Paris, Komeda, etc.-- preceded Air with Bacharachian melodies and Moog hisses scattered throughout their albums like trademark logos. But while their predecessors carried themselves on kitsch value and band-of-the-moment media praise, Air seemed somehow more serious about their music.

Is the world really interested in another Air release, though? Premiers Symptomes and Moon Safari, while intriguing albums for their genre, were somewhat similar in mood and direction. Both showed a band whose intent was to create instrumental French space-pop, and not much else. And with the "French space-pop revolution" pretty much over and done with, what could a new Air record possibly offer that the duo hasn't already accomplished?

Well, from the sound of The Virgin Suicides, the score to Sofia Coppola's directorial debut, Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel have a bit more to achieve before their 15 seconds tick to a close. Though the record does aim for the same kind of prog-rock atmospherics as their earlier releases, Air have managed to alter their sound this time out, drawing from a wider array of rock influences, instead of limiting their scope to Perrey and Kingsley.

Godin and Dunckel have a larger arsenal of instruments here. The bulk of the equipment implemented still seems to be a diverse assortment of analog keyboards, but Air also incorporate those dependable traditional rock instruments, guitar and bass. It's a marked improvement from the synth surplus of their previous material. The band also seems more influenced by the melodic psychedelic rock of the late 60's and early 70's than before. There are distinct nods to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and especially the Beatles' Abbey Road. The Beatles' influence is most notable on "Bathroom Girl," "Cemetary Party," and "Highschool Lover (Theme from 'The Virgin Suicides')," during which several of the drum fills and guitar squalls sound almost directly snatched from Abbey Road.

Of course, The Virgin Suicides has its dry moments, but surprisingly, they're few and far between. For the most part, the album showcases Godin and Dunckel's dramatically improved songwriting skills. The majority of these 13 tracks actually feature a true rarity for rock music these days-- unpredictable chord progressions. And the album undeniably serves its purpose: it's a film score. The fact that it holds your attention, despite being created solely as incidental music, says something about the guys playing it. Whether we want to admit it or not, Air are pretty good at what they do. Still, the backlash is well underway at this point, and it seems doubtful they'll hold up quite as well by the time their "official" follow-up to Moon Safari sees release later this year.

-Ryan Schreiber



air - moon safari

from pitchfork:
Analog, aquatic, bulbous, blue, breathy, cloudscraper, crystal, casio, dewy, deliquescent, dulcet, ethereal, effervescent, elastic, French, floating, grassy, gravity, groove, hotel, holograph, Holland, indiglo, Iceland, ingenuous, Japanese, jingle, juicy, kitsch, kitchen, kissing, lounge, lazy, liquid, moog, mood, martini, naughty, nylon, nymph, organic, oval, plastic, pompous, Parisian, quasar, quondam, quixotic, retro, rococo, robot, synthetic, synth, sylvan, terrycloth, tinsel, tea-time, underwear, underground, universe, viscous, vaporous, velvety, wet, wanton, waterfall, xylophone, xenogenic, X-chromosome, young-eyed, yacht, yester, zipper, zestful, zodiac rock drips like sugary dew and melted cheese from every second of Moon Safari. Close your eyes on an Antonini film and open them on "2001."

Air is the perfect background music for minimalist architecture design, shagging up against a tree in a field of sunflowers, waiting in line for "Space Mountain," drinking gin upstairs in a 747 (circa 1974), and '60s Swedish industrial documentaries. This disc is a bit too cheeky for daily consumption, but fits in nicely next to your Stereolab, and Pizzicato Five CDs. Play this on Valentine's Day for your sweetie and go to work Monday with band-aids on your back.

-Brent DiCrescenzo, 1998


air - everbody hertz

from pop matters:
The video on this enhanced extended-play CD comes from the street action surrounding Air's performance in Los Angeles last summer. It's okay footage --all digitally dislocated and treated and what not. What's interesting to me is that J.B. Dunckel and Nicholas Godin's Air is trying to get an edge.

It's been a long time -- at least since the acclaimed Moon Safari, 1998 -- since J.B. Dunckel and Nicholas Godin made lush bachelor pad music for melancholiacs. Their electric piano and string synthesizer made such a good match for the hazy afternoon gloom and doom in their score for Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides that is where the music decided to stay. 10,000 Hz Legend was constructed from the same materials as the soundtrack, basically averaging three synthesizer chords per tune, a few notes to chant or moan, and everything else just bulges out around the tunes like jelly poking out of a donut. Just as tasty, too, in limited doses.

There's no point in ignoring the obvious flaw in this whole release: what you'd call near useless product. Everybody Hertz contains remix cycles of three songs from 10,000 Hz Legend. Just three songs, programmed so that "Don't Be Light" runs between each version of "How Does It Make You Feel", and "People in the City". Plus one new one to grow on, true -- "The Way You Look Tonight" -- and an enhanced CD video from a live performance. But it's reasonable to question of the whole idea of a remix collection anyway; I for one rarely ever learn anything new about music I know from more than one or two DJs at a time. Just about the only collection that worked for me was a High Llamas tribute called Lollo Russo (V2, 1997), because Sean O'Hagan's thick melodies and harmonies got some good scuffing by the mixers. With Air, it's beyond perfectly reasonable to assume that the remixers will remake 10,000 Hz Legend into 10,000 Hz Anecdotes. It isn't just a matter of altering music but of breaking up that pre-club-early-evening mood the duo lives and breathes by. Didn't the Premieres Symptomes EP (2000) demonstrate just how tepid their idea of a beat really was?

So a consumer disservice it is. Dunckel and Godin have previously managed to compose around the usual clichés of today's easy-listening pop by inventing their own -- by giving medium-slow and mid-tempos their own specific gravity, by deepening the string synthesizer textures, by giving Dunckel's bass some room to slide, by letting the chorales swell up behind the keyboards; everything-in-its-place is a compliment this time. Sure, Air's approach is fairly predictable but on their own terms. 'Til now tastefulness hasn't hurt them. Now Dunckel and Godin have permitted other artists to put back the tackiness that they eschewed.

The title pun is a good, tacky start, though. Some the remixed music is pretty good. The nicest version of "How Does It Make You Feel?" comes from dub impresario Adrian Sherwood of On-U Sound, who piles on with his own dub sci-fi, with Junior Delgado's vocal in the chorus no doubt contributed on the fly. But the spaciness turns the humor of the distorted pillow talk that runs over the music into mere weirdness. The Neptunes play around with the same tune by adding jazzy chord changes, flattening the rhythms an unyielding machine beat, and putting all their crosschat in the behind a curtain of echo. "People in the City" is already so catchy it almost doesn't matter that Lahana's remix sounds both thin and obnoxiously hyper, as if German synth-poppers Laid Back were doing up The Baha Men's "Who Let the Dogs Out?" and forgot to bring a bass, of all things. And even if Lahana's kind of vulgarity really constitutes the music of city lights, Modjo's lounge-jazz version is more satisfying because it's light on its feet, even with horns and swishing cymbals and crooning vocals and other sappy stuff not to be found on Air's original. Typically, Air's own edit of "How Does It Make You Feel" makes a little recessiveness sound alluring. On the other hand, Thomas Bangalter's edit of "Don't Be Light" is easily the most striking music here -- he brings out the electric guitar solo, heightens the vocals to give the lyrics some space of their own.

Still, they're simply attractive alternatives rather than improvements on the originals, so maybe "striking" is the wrong word. "Relief" might be better, since the remaining remixes are plain old vulgar -- the tick-tock syndrums of Mr. Oizo's and Roger Manning a/k/a Malibu interpretations of "Don't Be Light" might as well be rewrites of Laid Back's 1984 hit "White Horse". Most annoying, even the good ones use throwaway bad-words, as if they're trying to prove something about Air's music to Air's audience, with Air's encouragement. The line "I want to taste your pussy" in the Neptunes' otherwise loveable "Don't Be Light" to Jack Lahana's "People in the City", featuring some shout-outs from girls who chant "Bitches in the City". My, how edgy. This being 2002, it's time to note that without some sort of context (beyond rhythmic placement) this kind of dropped-in cussing-for-cussing's-sake is tiresome. It's hard to believe that these whiffs of sulphur are going to fill any of Air's arena shows.

— 4 June 2002



air - 10,000hz legend

from pitchfork:
I wouldn't say she was a lost cause, but my girlfriend needed a music doctor like I needed, well, a girlfriend. That is, desperately. Call it a perfect match. She'd spent too many years clubbing to have more than a passing knowledge of non-techno music, and I'd spent too many years shucking to have more than a passing knowledge of monogamous sex. The results have been fast, effective, and largely painless. She's taken to the Pixies, and I've taken to, um, lots of sex.

Air's debut, 1998's Moon Safari, is not only a pop classic of retro-futurism; it also provides a damn fine soundtrack to the otherworldly act of sex. Needless to say, we became well acquainted with the album, which both of us were already fond of to begin with. Their soundtrack to Sofia Coppola's directorial debut, 2000's The Virgin Suicides, was a similarly fluid pour of analog synths, but the album was a less pop-oriented, more minor-key affair. And if you've seen the movie, you can understand why I wouldn't want to do "the beast with two backs" while listening to its irrevocably-linked score.

So would Air's official follow-up to Moon Safari be a return to coital form? I'll let my girlfriend do the talking:

"Weird."

That would be the opener, "Electronic Performers." She wasn't necessarily turned off by the deep bass thumps that rip into electronic handclaps. Or the occasional heavy rapping, like the landlord at your door a day after the rent's due. And it definitely wasn't the radar beeps or the fluctuating machinations of the keyboard. I think it was the vocals. Accompanied by a natural piano, a distorted voice sings, "We are the synchronizers/ Send messages through time code." And it is weird, like something Dean and Gene Ween would come up with. But with lines such as, "We need to use envelope filters/ To say how we feel," the track is also an oddly beautiful lament.

"The Radiohead voice!"

Yes, a whispery version of the fitter, happier Macintalk voice makes an appearance on the love song, "How Does It Make You Feel?" But a real voice-- resident keyboardist Roger Joseph Manning Jr.-- sings the ELO-inspired chorus. The beat, meanwhile, is cut from the exact same mold as The Virgin Suicides-- from the dark, ambling pace all the way down to the angelic voices coalescing in the background. But whereas that album-- and "the Radiohead voice," for that matter-- remain serious to the end, this song concludes with a funny moment. After listing off his feelings, the male computerized voice receives an abrupt retort from a female computerized voice: "Well, I really think you should quit smoking."

"It's like rock-n-roll."

"The Vagabond" makes you wish for a full-length Beck/Air collaboration. But at first, it's all Beck: a harmonica solo, folky acoustic strumming, Beck's distinctive, marble-mouthed vocals, and tolls ringing in the background. You'd think he donated a b-side from Mutations. That's when Air's laser-gun atmospherics shoot forth. The drums that kick in midway are also decidedly more similar to Air's previous work. Beck even ends the number with his trademark falsetto and a cackling laugh a la "Hollywood Freaks," so yes, she's right: this is rock-n-roll. But then again, a moment later she said, "Honey, isn't rock-n-roll a weird name?"

"Is this the same album?"

By the halfway mark, "Lucky and Unhappy," the poor girl had been thrown for more than one loop-- not to mention "Radian," Air's most overwrought Bacharach-inspired track to date. And now here was this untraceable throbbing, this eerie computerized whirring, voices of different distortions, and an acoustic guitar to ground it all; then a skittering beat and a swirling orchestra; and even later, static popping and off-key keyboards.

Songs from the album's second half provided little relief. "Sex Born Poison" pairs a vocoderized voice with the Japanese vocals of Buffalo Daughter; then, for good measure, adds what sounds like digital Ping-Pong-- or maybe the noises "Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!" makes while Little Mac is popping King Hippo in the gut and mouth. After opening with a thick electro-pulse and digi-congos, the chantey "People in the City" reaches a simple acoustic epiphany-- think the Beta Band's "Dry the Rain"-- before descending into muddled feedback and heavy electronic gurgling. And the final number, "Caramel Prisoner," is an ambient come-down-- kind of like a rollercoaster coming to rest with a bloody, broken-nosed Fabio aboard.

"I like it, but it's kind of all over the place."

I'm a little scared to admit it, but we're on the same page here. The barely cohesive 10,000 Hz Legend is both a concern and a relief. There's only one truly catchy song-- the Low-era Bowie-esque "Radio #1"-- but it doesn't have quite the same bounce (not to mention single potential) as "Sexy Boy." So you probably won't hear any of these songs on the radio, and I can say with absolute certainty that this won't be Details' album of the year, as Moon Safari was. I don't say this because it matters, but rather to indicate that Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel have steadfastly refused to be pigeonholed. For better or worse, this is not Moon Safari Redux.

The obvious comparison that my girlfriend should have made is to the Chemical Brothers, who took a similar stylistic leap on their last album, 1999's Surrender, even though staying the big-beat course would have been the easier and more profitable thing to do. But for some reason Spike Lee's work also comes to mind: there are plenty of hits and misses, but the experience is worth it for the invigorating knowledge that this critically established artist isn't afraid to take his art in new directions. Plus, my girlfriend and I love that Spike always slips a hot sex scene into his films.

-Ryan Kearney, May 29th, 2001


the black keys - the big come-up

Rubber City Meets the Crossroad
The Black Keys' The Big Come Up
by Chuck Klosterman


For four years, I lived in Akron, Ohio. These four years were fascinating, because Akron somehow manages to be completely bizarre and profoundly archetypal at the same time; I am 95 percent certain it was the inspiration for the community of Springfield on The Simpsons (and I have proof of this). However, the aspect I always found most striking was the degree to which Akronians adore their local music scene. The reason this is so striking is because the music scene they adore does not currently exist. Unless you inexplicably count Warrant, the last important band to hail from Akron was Devo, and that was 25 years ago. Oh sure, Chrissie Hynde is technically from Akron (though she had to move to England to get famous), and so is Joseph Arthur (though his relationship to the city isn't even as compelling as the fact that Jeffrey Dahmer used to live there, too). These are minor details. What Akronite hipsters cherish most is their unyielding nostalgia for the Carter administration: They have built an entire philosophical identity on the premise that Seattle in 1992 and Chapel Hill in 1994 should have been northeast Ohio in 1979, which is partially true but mostly irrelevant. In Akron, the present is still the past.

Quite suddenly, however, Akron has spawned the most compelling two-piece, hyper-primitive, blues-based rock band of the last five years. Well, OK, not quite; I guess there's at least one band from Detroit that's kind of like that, and they're also pretty decent. But Akron's version of that sonic formula—the Black Keys—are almost as interesting as their red-and-white forerunners, and they've made a debut record as cool and jagged as anything that's come out all year. It still sounds like the past, I suppose, but at least that past is now the future.
First Choice Movie Club

The Big Come Up is what would have happened if Jack White had liked Mountain's Climbing more than Led Zeppelin II, and if he thought Randy California and Stevie Winwood were better singers than Bob Dylan and Dolly Parton. Now, I realize that equation sounds horrific. But something here translates. The Black Keys are relentlessly heavy (way heavier than the White Stripes), but their reinvention of the blues never surrenders into the temptations of metal. What frontman Dan Auerbach does is make Leslie West seem like an underrated genius. Moreover, Auerbach has an intriguing vocal delivery: Instead of sounding like a white dude trying to sing like a black guy, he sounds like a white dude trying to sing like some other white dude who's trying to sing like a black guy. Here again, I'm not sure how this became desirable.

Cagily produced by untrained drummer (i.e., former guitar player) Patrick Carney, The Big Come Up can essentially be defined by its four strongest songs: "I'll Be Your Man" (sort of a pseudo-sexy mid-tempo Otis Redding homage), "The Breaks" (sort of a Boss Hog number, I think), "Leavin' Trunk" (sort of "Mississippi Queen," minus the sort of), and a better-than-solid Beatles cover ("She Said, She Said"). So I suppose nobody is ever gonna accuse these rubber city rebels of being overly creative (it doesn't help that they've picked a name for their band that starts with the word "The" and follows with the name of a color). But right now, that's as irrelevant as the memory of 1979; this is one of the five best records of 2002, and bass players everywhere should continue to grow nervous.


the bravery

i like this stuff. i don't care what anybody says.

from pitchfork:
The Bravery will tell you they don't know of any nu-rock revival. They just happen to like wearing leather jackets and having their gaunt faces photographed in elevators. Their idea to combine new wave, garage rock, and dance music just popped into their head, because, hey, what if rock bands started doing that? The Bravery aren't fooling anybody: They fit the post-new wave blueprint so immaculately, they're one power chord away from securing a gig at the 2005 VMA's between their rivals the Killers and Razorlight. So here come the Bravery-- hi-hats, synthesizers, mop-tops, ennui, and all.

The Bravery try to resuscitate worn-out 80s pop progressions with squeaky-clean production, wrapping their chord changes with layers of synthesizer and power-pop guitar until something sounds interesting. The results are forgivable but disappointing nonetheless. "Swollen Summer" sorely lacks a jaw-dropping melody to complement its Go-Go's power chords. Other tracks can't quite get their basslines off the ground, partially due to frontman Sam Endicott's inability to go anywhere with the song's one melodic hook.

Endicott is perhaps the most egregious new wave conglomerate around. Shifting through imitations of Robert Smith, Simon Le Bon, and Julian Casablancas, Endicott exercises little subtlety when borrowing from his influences. He reaches into the somber bowels of Disintegration for the haunting vocals on "No Brakes", yet apes Casablancas's sanguine croon on "The Ring Song". Resembling other singers isn't a dealbreaker, but when this likeness occurs multiple times across the course of an album-- and with such disparate singing styles-- it raises a red flag. Throw in a propensity for self-deprecation, and Endicott is a walking Cliff's Notes for new wave revivalists; on "Out of Line" he's "a liar, but not a cheat," on "Unconditional", a "beggar, and...a chooser," and on "Tyrant" he's "stuck just like a pig". The titles alone beat his whole "helpless subjection" bit to death.

Occasionally, these squirrels do stumble across a nut. The chorus of "An Honest Mistake" contains one of the few sassy moments on the album, with Endicott mockingly singing in falsetto "Don't look at me that way/ It was an honest mistake." Also, when you pour three synthesizers into each song, you're bound to find a cool hook, like the one in the verse of "Tyrant". Despite these highlights, though, this is still rock made on an assembly line-- predictable, economically efficient, and about as dynamic as a Model T.

-Adam Moerder, April 19, 2005


bob mould - body of song

bobby is back. its a great record and hearing him scream "fucked underneath days" is a toss back to the angst and anger of old. i love it. there's a few mellow clunkers on here though.

from pitchfork:
Time to face facts: The architect of the sound and voice that launched a thousand moshpits (and as many bands) hasn't been making that noise for over 15 years. Despite a brief return as a pop noisenik/Kevin Shields fanboy with Sugar, the majority of Bob Mould's recorded work has done more to move past this legacy than actively further it. If you're a teenager, you're primed to have your head popped off by Zen Arcade or New Day Rising. If you're inching towards 30, then you're more likely to hear Mould's music introduce "The Daily Show" or segue into an NPR news story. And if you're Bob Mould, you're probably splitting time spinning records at DC-area clubs and getting ready to tour behind your supposedly guitar-heavy full-band album, Body of Song.

If you're looking for "Another Good Idea" (or, God help you, "Another Celebrated Summer"), then you're better served giving your "Remaster the SST Catalog" letter-writing campaign another go. If Body of Song is anything, it's a look back on the neglected portion of Mould's musical career. As Mould phrases it in "Best Thing"-- "This would be/ The sound of me/ Looking for some kind of closure."

Of course, if you put an electric guitar in Bob Mould's hands, what gets put to tape will invariably be a rock-like substance. And having Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty in tow definitely helps. "Always Tomorrow" actually resembles the sort of slinky, groove-laden, bass-heavy stuff available on recent Fugazi albums, and the storms kicked up by "Underneath Days" and "Beating Heart the Prize" give Canty a chance to bang to his heart's content. However, when Mould opts to rock out the way he used to-- as on Sugar-lite stuff like "I Am Vision, I Am Sound" and "Missing You"-- the results are less favorable. And, of course, this being a Bob Mould solo album, there are ballads that ably mix Mould's awkward nasal voice with impassioned strumming and sometimes clunky lyricism.

"Days of Rain" features a few clunkers-- "If you make it clear/ Doubt will surely disappear"-- but it gets the job done, building gradually to a satisfying rock outro (with the requisite Mould guitar heroics). The disarming "Gauze of Friendship" is a more successful endeavor, with Mould keeping the music simple (acoustic guitar, drums, and some cello offered by DC-area musician Amy Domingues) and cutting the fat from his words-- "He reminds you of a boy you dated once or twice/ Just about the same size /Just about the same eyes/ The only difference being the cadence of his voice."

For the most part, Body of Song offers the expected mix of rock tracks and balladry that one would expect from a Bob Mould solo record. There is one notable exception. "(Shine Your) Light Love Hope" is, for all intents and purposes, a dance track. Atop layered guitars and Canty's fervent Saturday night fever, Mould makes like a vocodered disco diva, chanting the song's title in a dreamy, wispy voice. It's unlike anything else in Mould's rock catalog, more reminiscent of the unexpected deviations that peppered his Hüsker-era output (cf. "99 Ways to Skin a Cat", "Reoccurring Dreams"). It's also one of the highlights of his post-Hüsker career, and I don't doubt that Mould agrees-- on the limited-edition bonus disc included with preorders of this album, there are two remixes of "Light Love Hope".

Longtime fans of the Flying V and the sonic boom could be outraged at Mould betraying his legacy with what they'll perceive as a techno version of "I Was Made For Loving You". But no doubt Mould would answer this indignant outrage by telling these so-called fans when and how to kiss his distortion pedals. Press kits and biographies will impress upon readers that Mould's lasting legacy is his part in founding and shaping the fast hard rules of the alternative rock nation, giving voice to a thousand grudging young would-be millionaires that have long since disappeared into cut-out bins. Nearly two decades removed from those iconic days, Mould has amassed a body of work that proves there's something to be said for running a slow and steady race.

-David Raposa, July 26, 2005


the olivia tremor control - music from the unrealized film "dusk at the cubist castle"

who wrote this? the beatles? who gives a fuck. its awesome.

from pitchfork (9.7!?)
The world will never know just how many potentially great pop albums have been lost to misguided attempts at innovation. Though the implementation of unexpected song structures and ostensibly experimental sounds can make music quite a bit more interesting, it can also render it sterile, flat and emotionless. In many cases, the finest pop songs are those that transcend their form entirely-- songs so instinctually graceful that listening to them feels like a creative act in and of itself. Indeed, the best pop songs are often the most difficult to discuss rationally, those indispensable not for their formal inventiveness but for their ability to tap directly into the intangible realm of human memory and emotion.

In the mid-to-late 90s, Athens, Georgia's Elephant Six collective established themselves as a group of artists with a shared interest in expressing the inexpressible through pop music. The Olivia Tremor Control, fronted by singer/songwriters Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss, encapsulated both the collective's unabashed love for both classic pop and psychedelic music, and its sincere interest in experimental music and sounds. This, the band's debut album, represents their most fundamental integration of these two impulses-- never does the record's sonic palette seem like an afterthought to the songs, nor do the songs themselves seem like haphazard carriers for carefully chosen sounds. For an album with so much going on, Dusk at Cubist Castle is strikingly holistic, its diverse elements held together by an uncanny awareness of what they can evoke and represent.

The Elephant Six Collective is known largely for their reverence towards classic pop music, and Dusk at Cubist Castle inevitably draws comparisons to The Beatles and Beach Boys. But the influence of these seminal pop groups seems to be evident in the Olivia Tremor Control's approach as much as their aesthetic. One imagines Hart and Doss not simply admiring Sgt. Pepper and Pet Sounds, but utterly internalizing them-- appreciating them not only for specific melodies and sounds, but also for how affecting those melodies and sounds could be. Though the bouncy basslines and rich vocal harmonies of Dusk often bring to mind Paul McCartney or Brian Wilson, nothing sounds like the result of shallow imitation, as much as reverence and profound understanding.

Nowhere is this clearer than on Dusk's near-flawless first half. "Jumping Fences", one of the finest songs ever penned by Hart and Doss, conjures an air of introspective melancholy without ever approaching languor. At just under two minutes, "Jumping Fences" barely repeats itself at all, instead subtly building upon a beautiful, catchy melody with layered vocal harmonies, pianos and guitars. "No Growing (Exegesis)" follows a similar path, this time incorporating dramatic horn blasts into a climactic chorus.

The second half of Dusk at Cubist Castle is a decidedly more abstract affair, anchored by the 10-track "Green Typewriters" suite. It's here that the experimental undertones of Dusk at Cubist Castle begin to bleed through more noticeably. The fifth "Green Typewriters" track is a brief, unsettling, rhythmically insistent drone piece that foreshadows the extended ambience of "Green Typewriters" number eight. In part nine, the first discernible vocal melody for about ten minutes simply utters "how much longer can I wait," ushering in a majestic guitar solo that immediately plunges into a swirl of backwards sounds, whooshing cymbals and fuzzed-out chords. After the final installment of "Green Typewriters", Dusk at Cubist Castle returns to a slightly more stripped-down and fragmented variation on its first half, finally closing with the ghost-in-the-four-track noises of "NYC-25", one of their most affecting pop songs.

Aside from granting the album an air of timelessness, Dusk's saturated 4-track production always leaves me with the feeling that there's more to this album than can possibly be heard. And sure enough, eight years after its initial release, Dusk at Cubist Castle still somehow surprises me every time I listen to it. As its title suggests, there's something intensely cinematic about the record, and also something perpetually incomplete-- the images and ideas evoked stay with you much longer than the album itself. It's the masterful translation of these images and ideas that makes Dusk at Cubist Castle such a unique and unforgettable record.

-Matt LeMay, February 4th, 2004


matt pond pa - several arrows later

listen, whether this guy likes it or not, i LOVE this fucking record. its one of the best of the year. LOVE. IT.

from pitchfork:
Matt Pond PA rarely fail to fail to surprise and at first blush Several Arrows Later is unsurprisingly unsurprising. Like a teetotaler's Pete Yorn, Pond and his PAs here dour up the mid-Atlantic with the type of mature, restrained, polished yup-pop that ultimately made Tracks make tracks. Sure, MPPA's latest may seem like something a newly savvy freshperson might gladly play in Dad's Lexus RX that first Thanksgiving home, but somewhere beneath their grown-up cellos, glistening vibes, and tenderly yearning vocals, surely there lurks a drooling gonzo freak who isn't playing with a full quiver. Please?

If Pond has a dark side, the first clue would be his 2003 move from Philadelphia, cradle of liberty and Cheez Whiz, to Brooklyn, home of feculence and chicanery and irony's much-feted fetid corpse. But ostensibly NYC-inspired fare like "City Song" and "Brooklyn Stars" proves devoid of all gothic Gotham horror: The former is a strums-and-strings soft-rock ballad; the latter a mellow midtempo plodder with a White Ladder electronic intro. Then again, perhaps Pond's vocals employ some sort of sinister code: "In complete dark-NESS/ I lose ba-LANCE," he somehow rhymes, shortly thereafter referring to "mor-NING." And just try playing it backwards!

"Heard it's modern to be stupid," Pond intones on opener "Halloween". Modernly, on the subsequent "So Much Trouble", he adds, "I don't think I wanna think about it." All the while, his eminently competent band's glossy four-four thrum could just as easily back the newest from Josh Rouse or Joe Pernice. "Concepts are embarrassing," Pond intones with pinched throat over staccato guitars. But whoa-oh-oh, sleepy "Is It Safe" dips a toe into the topic of, could it be, sex: "We'd slip behind the pool and go with nature/ We'd lie beside the chlorine bottles." Um, OK?

So maybe Pond really is just another ordinary-guy exemplar of the ongoing post-Coldplay adult contemporarization of indie, as his ordinary arrangements and ordinarier songs would attest. The catchiest among them is the wistful title track, on which Pond tells himself, "I told myself not to remind me." While "Emblems" scores classic rock points for possessing the title of the previous album, all you really need to know about Several Arrows Later is finale "Devil in the Water". Yup, this is the type of disc that would close with a hushed duet and ponderous "it's over" refrain. Creepy.

-Marc Hogan, November 4, 2005


deep dish - george is on

excellent and its got beats!

bbc review:
2005 could well be Deep Dish's most successful year yet. The Grammy Award winners belatedly following Junk Science, their acclaimed 1998 debut, with a collection of songs that owe much to dance music's current obsession with rocky guitar riffs. Although, to be fair, Ali 'Dubfire' Shirazinia and Sharam Tayebi, the uncompromising Iranian duo, are pretty much responsible for that trend following their breakout pop smash "Flashdance".

"Say Hello", with vocalist Anousheh Khalili's ethereal delivery is set against a backdrop of classical piano chords has further fuelled their chart statue, while the forthcoming re-issue of their top 10 production of De'Lacy's "Hide Away" will further stoke their coffers.

Despite initially being pigeonholed as deep-house producers, the Washington-based duo have never allowed their music to be dictated by fads or trends; their sound now encompassing a multitude of genres similarly reflecting their varied multi-faceted tastes.

From the rocky "Sacramento" with Richard Morel, via the electro fuelled "Everybody's Wearing My Head" to the twisted house of "Dub Shepherd" complete with the Celeda-esque charms of Janis Leahy. There's even folksy beats ("Awake Enough"), melancholic interstellar ambience ("In Love With A Friend"), and cinematic soundscapes ("Sergio's Theme").

Elsewhere a timely guest appearance from Stevie Nicks on a stirring cover of "Dreams" - this album's Tracey Thorn and "Future Of The Future (Stay Gold)" - will appeal to Radio 2 listeners as much as ardent Ibiza clubbers.

While most of Dubfire and Sharam's productions have an epic, grandiose feeling, the duo's knack for tight programming and genre blending has carried them above many of their dance-chart compatriots. As with their debut, Deep Dish have made and succeeded in their conscious effort to move forward musically with a consistent album that's anything but a collection of club tunes.