Totally Not Weekly Recent Release Round-Up: Colin Stetson, Valleys, Fear of Men, Hanni El Khatib, Life Coach, No Joy

More recent release reviews at THIS PAGE.

Colin Stetson: New History of Warefare Vol. 3: To See More Light — Well, this is either the end or the beginning for Stetson. Can he take his Philip Glassy cascading solo saxophone arpeggios anywhere beyond what he’s done with these three volumes? Probably—he’s clearly an amazing fellow—but this set feels pretty refined and perfected. Epic, deep, expansive, apocalyptic, emotive… perfection. Time to move on. Perhaps the clue is in the surprisingly fruitful collaborations with Justin Vernon (save perhaps “What Are They Doing In Heaven Today?“). With the right small ensemble, Stetson could wreak some pretty awesome havoc. In the mean time, this is a gorgeous and harrowing post-every-genre release.

4.875 Saxophones of the Apocalypse out of 5 Epic trilogies

Valleys: Are You Gonna Stand There And Talk Weird All Night? — Well, Valleys win the “Best Album Title of the Year” award in my books. Otherwise this is your (above/below/perfectly) average vaguely retro moody, breathy, dreamy, synth-gaze/indie-rock album. Very pleasant, if not a tad gloomy. Sort of like a really bummed-out M83. Nothing is ever quite bold enough to be terrible which means there’s nothing particularly memorable on here either—though it is growing on me pretty hard. The strength of the album is in the mood and atmosphere (David Lynch meets 90210?) which they do quite well. Think of this as soundtrack music for an imaginary Ryan Gosling movie.

4 Teenage dreams out of 5 Neon-lit ’80s nightmares

Hanni El Khatib: Head In The Dirt — Overall a less rough’n'tumble affair than the promising Will The Guns Come Out. A plus is that all the songs boast a full band where a few tracks on the previous album (that should have been balls-out rockers) El Khatib frustratingly performed solo. Unfortunately this full band is headed by Dan Auerbach (of The Black Keys) who’s sort of become the punk blues version of Pat Boone. Every thing is a little too polished and too in-the-pocket without any real danger and ramshackle excitement. The addition of The Beat-esque ska and reggae textures is a refreshing surprise though does make things sound a little bit like new wave revival pop-punk at times (or let’s say Elvis Costello if we want to be more generous). If, like me, you wished Souljacker by The Eels was full of fuzzy three-chord ravers like the title track, Head In The Dirt might be your perfect album. If, like me, you wished Pussy Galore had been El Khatib’s backing band on Will The Guns Come Out, this might not be your album.

3.375 TV soundtrack-ready pop-rock safety nets out of 5 Potentially devastating Blues Explosions

Fear of Men: Early Fragments — Another decent dream-pop/post-punk release in what’s been a half-decade long string of decent dream-pop/post-punk releases. Good stuff. Some pretty strong hooks delivered with some pretty believable passion/disenchantment. Maybe the hooks aren’t quite as big and the passion (and disenchantment) isn’t as deep as you’ll find on records by first-generation UK bands doing this kind of thing (The Sundays, The Smiths, Pale Saints, etc) that have stood the test of time but… well, at this point I’m just a broken record on the subject .

(Derivative = awesome) – (derivative ≠ authentic) + (authentic ≠ awesome) x Everything was better when I was 20 = ???

Simply put, I like this kind of thing a lot (on a not very objective level) and feel pretty comfortable saying if you like this kind of thing just for the sake of it continuing to exist, you probably will like it too. Sigh… I just don’t know anymore.

4.375 (-/+ .25) Young joyless idols out of 5 Rainbow prisms bleeding wax

Life Coach: Alphawaves — I was never able to quite enjoy Phil Manley‘s supposedly “post-rock” ’90s band Trans Am. I put post-rock in quotes because they were not post rock or post anything else. They either sounded like Kraftwerk or Gang of Four or a Frankenstein of the two plus a kitchen sink. Always very “pre” and still very “rock”. I liked their more Krautrock moments but those were never as prevalent as I hoped and the band was just… kind of shitty in my opinion. Like they only got some attention because no one else was doing the retro electronic/new-wave and punk-funk thing quite yet (the indie sound of 2002-04). Anyway, Life Coach is kind of like a good version Trans Am. More properly Krautrock and, ergo, in an ironic twist, more post-rock too. There’s still something a little too tongue-in-cheek about the whole thing in the same way the Logan’s Sanctuary fake OST album was—that oh so ’90s meticulous but ironically-retro instead of reverently-retro approach. So Life Coach falls between a not-as-good Neu and a not-as-good Follakzoid. Not really bad, just maybe not as good as I’d like.

3.25 Hey look it’s retro, that’s funny rights? out of 5 Real deals

No Joy: Wait To Pleasure — In my 2012 list I said about their Negaverse EP: One of the better so-called “nu-gaze” bands returns with another one of the better dream-pop/shoegaze EPs of last the decade or so. Other than the fact it rivals the best work of Slowdive and Black Tambourine, there’s absolutely zero to say about Negaverse.

I could pretty much repeat those words for their second full-length. Perhaps replace Black Tambourine with Cocteau Twins as a reference point as things are bit more shimmery and breezy in spots this time—though enough harsh distortion still shines through as well. Also, despite a knee-jerk desire to do so, I can’t criticize them for aping the sounds of shoegazers past since if they weren’t doing it so well I wouldn’t like them nearly as much as I do.

I will say, however, that the high-pitched vocal hook in “Lunar Phobia” feels like it crosses the line from aping to outright plagiarism. Though I can’t place from what song or who it’s by (it’s an effin’ great song, regardless!). Ultimately, as with even the best shoegaze revival albums, such as this one, it’s only great in the sense that you haven’t played it to death like you have your Slowdive, Ride and MBV records and it adds a little variety to your shoegaze day. But if I lost my copy tomorrow I wouldn’t exactly feel the loss.

4 Shoes out of 5 Gazers

Daft Punk: Random Access Memories (2013) semi-pointless track-by-track review

Roll: N/A

Album: Daft Punk: Random Access Memories

This is the only album on this site I haven’t purchased. Having purchased an album, I feel like that gives me free-reign to crap all over it if I want. Also, if I bought it and it’s stayed in my collection long enough to end up on this site, that probably means I like it. Anyway, I’m only reviewing Random Access Memories now because yesterday I was being pressured to listen to the pre-release iTunes stream by a Facebook friend.

He said, “You’re not going to listen to it. Come on.”

I said, “The track I heard from it was a pale shadow of their former selves. Also, that PR campaign was irritating.”

He said, “If by irritating you actually mean brilliant, then yes.”

A day later, curiosity has gotten the better of me and I’m listening to the stream. So far, two tracks in, I haven’t shaken my impression that Daft Punk are past their prime and have kind of been shark-jumped by their own image.

“Give Life Back To Music” is sort of okay dance music but there’s not much oomph here. The kick drum should be crunching more. The melodies are begging me to find them alluring but they seem a bit shallow for all their glitter. Also, is vocoder going to be used on every song? I suspect they recorded “The Game of Love” without a vocoder and realized it’s one of the most tuneless pop-songs ever written. The vocoder evokes Discovery nicely but at this point in their career the gimmick feels like treading water.

The Fall: Hex Enduction Hour (1982)

Roll: 3-2-9
Album: The Fall, Hex Enduction Hour

My earliest memory of The Fall dates back to 1991, the fall semester of my first year in college.

This tall, rail-thin, mop-haired guy in my drawing class, who looked a bit like Johnathan Richman or William Reid (but with Shane MacGowan‘s unfortunate dentistry) said, “Do you listen to The Fall?”

In an uncharacteristic display of honesty in the face of complete ignorance I said, “I’ve never listened to their stuff.”

“You should listen to The Fall,” he said, a statement of fact more than a friendly suggestion.

In the years since, I’ve noticed this evangelistic attitude in fans of The Fall. They seem to feel the need to spread the gospel. Have you accepted Mark E. Smith into your heart?

Psychic Ills: Dins (2005)

Roll: 5-1-9
Album: Psychic Ills, Dins

It was 2009′s droney “Sister Ray“-by-way-of-Faust-on-a-bender Mirror Eye (2009) album more so than Dins (2005) that first got me excited about Psychic Ills. I’d somehow developed the impression they were part of the chillwave movement or some vacuous, crappy Brooklyn synth-rock scene. I think I was also offended by the colour-treated Xerox image on the cover which I felt was a shameless riff on Hüsker Dü‘s classic Zen Arcade graphics. I guess it made me feel old and like I wanted trust-fund hipsters from Brooklyn to get off my lawn. Regardless, I pretty much ignored Dins upon release. What a mistake.

Luckily, I’ve since gotten over these erroneous negative notions as the Ills are one of the best and most consistent psychedelic outfits operating in the last ten years. While their latest release, the slightly Kraut-informed and trance-inducing garage rocker One Track Mind, takes them into almost commercially viable territory (in an alternate universe where Spacemen 3 were somehow commercially viable), their older material can get as freaky as you’d ever desire.

Mirror Eye was a deliciously droned-out journey into a cosmic desert and Early Violence (2004) was textbook example of artsy-fartsy psych-primitivism. Dins falls somewhere in between those early titles and their more recent material with loft-party ragas like “East” fading into ambient noise freak-outs like “Untitled” then onto proper songs like the dreamily chugging “January Rain” and underground murk of the velvety noise-rocker “I Know My Name“.

There are times Psychic Ills might come off as being a little aloof or too-cool-for-school, taking themselves a little too seriously. But it’s no more of a detriment than Anton Newcombe not taking things seriously enough with The Brian Jonestown Massacre. In fact, they are sort of a BJM without the tongue-in-cheek winking that harshes the mellow and makes you feel like a fool for following Anton on the trip.

The humourlessness of Dins can get a bit heavy by the end. But then, this is heavy music for heavy times when you’re in a heavy mood. Just chill out and let these heavy vibes crush you, man.

Not quite weekly round-up of recent releases: Nick Cave, Breakbot, X-TG, Arborea, Anika

More recent release reviews at THIS PAGE.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: Push The Sky Away (deluxe version) / Animal X — Probably the best thing about Grinderman was it got all the claustrophobic bombast out of the way. Abattoir Blues left you feeling all the air had been sucked out of the room and with Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! it felt like for the first time Nick Cave had no idea what he wanted to do. Clearly he wanted to strip things back and play rock’n’roll for a few years. So it seems Grinderman was an effective reset button for The Bad Seeds. Sheer beauty aside, Push The Sky Away is the first perfectly focused artistic statement from Cave since No More Shall We Part. And probably the most restrained album of his career. He’s done “gentle” many times, but never with this sense of comfortable ease. Even his quietest ballads always had a histrionic theatricality to them but on Push there’s a genuine tenderness and subtlety to the almost spoken-word delivery. The organic, restrained performances of The Bad Seeds create the perfect, complementary backdrop for his poetry instead of fighting against it as they have in the past (could be because there’s about 5 fewer Seeds on hand this time around). The tracks from the bonus DVD, “Needle Boy” and “Lightning Bolt“, and the Record Store Day single, “Animal X” are slightly different beasts. Purely spoken word performances of Cave’s stream of consciousness poem/stories with minimal but intense and gristly backdrops by The Seeds. They really don’t fit the mood of the album, but they sure whet the appetite for a full-length of this material. Though, in truth, it might get a little exhausting after thirty minutes or so. Combined, these recordings make up the album everyone tried to convince themselves that Scott Walker‘s Bish Bosh actually was (or that Leonard Cohen would make again).

5 Poet laureates of rock out of 5 Master songwriters

Sigur Rós: Laugardalshollin (live bootleg)

Roll: 5-6-7
Album: Sigur Rós, Laugardalshollin, 8/28/99, Reykjavik Iceland (live bootleg)

In the past decade there’s been many words written about how illegal downloading has harmed the record industry. It certainly has. I’ve first hand seen it close stores. But one sub-segment of the industry that’s never mentioned, and has been completely decimated by downloading, is the live bootleg CD market. You just don’t see them anymore. Instead of burning and distributing CD-Rs, people just throw their live recordings up online somewhere.

Unlike artists, pressing plants, stores and labels, it’s hard to feel sorry for the bootleggers. They were never, ethically speaking, more than maybe one step above file-sharing sites. But at least they were selling recordings that weren’t otherwise available. And if the bootleg was issued on vinyl, at least someone made some money pressing it.

Sometimes just charging money for the terrible audio quality was their biggest crime. At some point in every punk’s early teens they ended up with at least one Sex Pistols bootleg that sounded like it was recorded on a telephone answering machine at the bottom of water tank. Unconscionable. Almost a hate crime against music.

But the audio quality of this Sigur Rós set from August 1999 is actually pretty great. It must have been recorded for a radio broadcast or something because it sounds more or less on par with their officially released live albums such as the 2CD/DVD Inni (2011). And it’s just as boring.

Now, at least. Upon release, Laugardalshollin had new songs from their yet-unreleased () album, the much anticipated follow-up to Ágætis Byrjun (1999). I certainly jumped on it at the time, crazy as anyone else for anything new by this Icelandic, epic prog-gaze/post-rock band, but it’s all old news by now. Super fans could probably note differences in arrangements and track lengths to the finished product but… meh. I just don’t care.

The problem with Sigur Rós live recordings is (unless they’re “unplugged” as on Heim) they sound pretty much exactly the same as their studio counterparts. And even if they are in fact radically different, they sound exactly alike. There’s not a lot of stage banter, no discernible jamming, no unexpected covers and very rarely anything that isn’t already on an album. Inni actually works better as greatest hits album than a live document.

And the same goes for Laugardalshollin though it only covers material from Ágætis Byrjun and (). The track titled “Duet” might in fact be an unreleased song. But it might also be a work-in-progress from () that ended up with a different title. And again… meh. I just don’t care.

That said, it’s well worth owning if you’re a hardcore Sigur Rós fan. And since it turns out I’m not as much as fan as I thought, you might find my copy of this in a used record store soon. Pick it up. Help them stay in business.

The Raveonettes: A Touch of Black (2005)

Roll: 5-2-11
Album: The Raveonettes: A Touch of Black (Promo EP)

At some point I decided I should be more or less devoted to The Raveonettes. Something about their perpetual pop music underdog status and their unquenchable, almost irrational determination that they should be the biggest band on the planet. Or that they always have been but no one noticed. To me they’re the physical manifestation of a Springsteen song where they protagonists fight against overwhelming odds only have victory elude them at the last minute.

I’m not sure why I have this impression about the Danish noise-pop duo, or if it’s at all accurate,  but I like a band with a touch of myth and mystique about them. They remind me of the ’80s. Not because of the oft-noted Jesus and Mary Chain textures in their music, but because they hearken back to a time when rock stars felt like rock stars; like alien beings or demi-gods instead of just people doing a job like any other working schlub.

What happened? What happened to rock stars? We used to call Prince, Madonna and even a working schlub like Bruce Springsteen rock stars because stars are high above us, unreachable, untouchable. For all her glitz and bizarre costumes, I’ve never been able to see Lady Gaga as more than a rock person, not a “star” at all. Maybe it was all those “humanizing” interviews she did where she seemed be trying too hard to be aloof and quirky. Just an average kid playing a role.

Were the rock stars of my youth like that too? Duran Duran and Boy George always seemed so much larger than life. Heck, David Bowie was literally from Mars. But, of course, they’re always just ordinary people sitting on extraordinary pedestals.

Do we just realize this now because the Internet has brought musicians and their fans together on a more intimate level than ever before? Have too many tour blogs and back-stage videos going out of their way to say, “See, I’m just like you!” shown us that rock stars are human after all? Or do kids these days see Katy Perry and Chris Martin as ambassadors from a magical video wonderland?

Probably they do. I think probably I just grew up.