i hate the sound of guitars » song of the week

Song of the Week: The Broken Family Band, “Salivating”

guitarlover — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 11:37:20 +0000

The lead single from Please and Thank You manges to be simultaneously sweet, creepy, and poignant in a character portrait of uncommon economy. The song’s narrator is moving in with his sweetie. If we take him at his word, he’s literally drooling at the thought of a live-in friend-with-privileges, which is at least a little icky. But the enthusiasm he’s mustering for the new arrangement is touching. I don’t give the couple good odds, though: it’s not a great sign that he needs to “get [his] shit together” in order to “head out for some breakfast,” and it’s even more worrisome that he only really commits to the move in the shower, pondering his finances. I foresee him spending a lot of days on the couch too hungover to be employable, while his breadwinning partner’s resentment gradually simmers. But I hope I’m wrong.

“Salivating” was the first thing I heard from The Broken Family Band, but they’ve been around for a handful of years/albums, and I’m gradually exploring their back catalogue. They apparently started out as a sort of British take on Americana, with some identifiably country-ish traits, but now they’re producing straightforward rock with no particular genre signifiers. “Salivating,” with its bouncy bassline, simple-but-hooky verse riff, and energetically strummed chorus, sounds a little like a distant cousin of The Godfathers circa Birth, School, Work, Death.

Please and Thank You has several more strong songs, and a quarter of the way through 2009, it’s my current candidate for year’s best album.

At the moment you can listen to Salivating at The Broken Family Band’s official website.

Song of the Week: Nanobots, “Spontaneous Combustion”

guitarlover — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 10:37:52 +0000

Glasgow’s Nanobots sound pretty much like they could have fallen through a time warp from the very early 80’s — before New Wave got slick and commercial (or even sharply differentiated from punk). It makes perfect sense that they’ve been opening lately for the current edition of the Rezillos, and I didn’t need to hear the cover of “Uncontrollable Urge” that’s currently on the Nanobots MySpace page to discern their love for Devo.

The trick an unabashedly retro act needs to pull off is to craft songs worthy of the obvious influences. Nanobots deliver the goods with “Spontaneous Combustion.” It features an arresting, octave-hopping, staccato, guitar-masquerades-as-keyboard riff and outstandingly geeky (and hooky) co-ed call-and-response chorus (”No chemical/Spontaneous!/Accelerant/Spontaneous!”).

Nanobots have been active almost four years, but so far have left little recorded evidence — I’ve only tracked down a pair of (digital) singles. “Spontaneous Combustion” is only available in a live version on the one from Simbiotic Recordings that hints at, but doesn’t fully realize the song’s potential — the sound is a little murky and the performance is not quite as tight as you might expect from a studio recording. But Nanobots’ energy and enthusiasm carry the day, as far as I’m concerned, and if they can put together an album with a few more songs this good it will be a year’s best shortlist shoe-in.

If they make it to Boston (and I hope they do), they’d fit perfectly sandwiched on a bill between two Beantown acts: the similarly retro Miskatonic, and the similarly twitchy Ho-Ag.

Song of the Week: S-S-S-Spectres, “Witches vs. Wolves”

guitarlover — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:26:46 +0000

I show no signs of getting tired of bands that worship at the temple of The Fall’s early days: ungainly lurch, quirky lyrics, atonal-but-strangely-catchy — I can’t get enough. S-S-S-Spectres’ “Witches vs. Wolves” might sound like a runner-up in a fake Fall album/song-title contest, but it made me say “what the heck?” in the its first few seconds, a lugubrious chant of “None will survive” punctuated by a solitary snare. From there it’s on to an unruly bassline and scritchy-scratchy guitar that eventually settles into a propulsive buzzsaw riff. The overlapping male/female vocals describe a witch/wolf conflict that’s perhaps both memetic (”engaged in a secret war/to become to the dominant metaphor,” which manages to sound kinda sexy) and literal (”we will win the day/we’re claiming victory/none will survive”). With its intro, a noisy bridge, and a coda section in addition to verses and choruses, it’s got almost enough textural shifts to fuel a prog epic, but it does all its damage in just a shade over 2 minutes. I can play it 3 or 4 times in a row before I want to move on.

You can check out “Witches vs. Wolves” at New York Night Train Recordings, and there are more links from there. S-S-S-Spectres EP Sea Potentia Divina is also available from eMusic and iTunes.

I’m way late to the party with this one. All the hip Brooklyn music blogs cooed over this back in 2007, and the band has already broken up. Sigh.

I have gone all completist about S-S-S-Spectres, and there’s evidence on the Internets that people have listened to tracks — notably “Magic Mountain Reference” and “Your Hands Are Missing Mine” — that I haven’t yet been able to track down. If you can help me listen to those, please get in touch.