i hate the sound of guitars

Every new release I listened to in February (35)

• Andrew Jackson Jihad – Candy Cigarettes, Capguns, Issue Problems! and Such (Reissue) – prickly folk punk (17.feb.2011)
• Nicole Atkins – Mondo Amore – Neko Case and Lucinda Williams are the comparisons that come to mind. Strong, soulful vocals, mix of styles. Production/arrangement a bit more lush than I strictly prefer, but pretty good. (I like “You Were the Devil” best.)
• The Back Pockets – “Bulla” (EP) – More focused, even conventionally rock-bandish than last year’s tentative and often charming Blissters N Basements. I think it would ring an E6 chord even without the horns, but the horns seal the deal for sure. Free download from Double Phantom at bandcamp
• The Baseball Project – Volume 2: High and Inside – More baseball tunes from McCaughey and Wynn’s project; no sophomore slump (19.feb.2011)
• Bright Eyes – The People’s Key – It’s been so long since I checked in with an Oberst project that I don’t know how much of a departure this is or isn’t. I have to skip over the spoken word bits — hippiesh spiritualism, yuck — but most of what’s left is dark, moody, acoustic-rooted indie rock that I like. (I suspect close attention to the lyrics might not increase my enjoyment, though.) Oberst’s vocals are bit more restrained than in the Fevers and Mirrors days — a plus.
• Candi and the Strangers – 10th of Always – Smooth, slightly trippy, female-fronted electropop; pleasant, but doesn’t really grab me. I do love the song title “The Weather is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful,” though.
• Cowboy Junkies – Demons – another band I haven’t checked in with lately. Some of these songs are more muscular than I remember the Junkies being, with a few Neil Youngish moments in guitar breaks.
• Cowboy Racer – Love Stationary – densely layered indie pop from ex-Swallow/Salad duo (12.feb.2011)
• The Dears – Degeneration Street – Big songs, big topics. I hate to say it, but I get more than a bit of a Pink Floyd vibe from “Galactic Tides,” with all those massed oohs and ahs.
• Dream Diary – You are the Beat – Latterday jangle. The main singer dude’s tenor is a bit on the wispy side and what I can make out of the subject matter seems similarly insubstantial. There’s no Autotune on the female singer’s backing vocals, which is as it should be, but they could be a little tighter without rubbing me the wrong way. If the tunes were louder, faster, or even just a smidge shorter I could totally love this, but it’s a little too languid to hit my sweet spot.
• Alex Flanigan – “Believe” (EP) – This EP offers two polished pop tunes with unspecifically lovelorn lyrics, big hooky choruses and a few country signifiers (pedal steel, banjo), one country-rock story-song, and one ballad. The way the dynamic ramps up into the choruses reminds me of Kelly Clarkson (that’s praise, not a dig). But it’s a bit low on distinctive personality.
• Gang of Four – Content – respectable effort from punk/funk pioneers (15.feb.2011)
• Glee Cast – (a buncha singles) – The Bieber tunes are inane, sure, but hooky. Was I writing better songs when I was 16? I was not. “Tik Tok” is spookily close to Ke$ha’s original.
• The Dirtbombs – Party Store – Garage punk band covers some (local, for them) club hits sans irony. I expected to dig this, but found it more interesting in concept than execution — there’s a big gulf between what I like about garage punk, and what I like in dance music, and this record doesn’t wind up with enough of either to command repeated listens.
• Esben and the Witch – Violet Cries – Overwrought goth-y indie, long on atmosphere and intense delivery, short on hooks or grooves. Some cheesy arrangement touches (e.g., “spooky” sound effects) don’t help. Singer Rachel Davies reminds me a bit of Elysian Fields’ Jennifer Charles, a comparison that doesn’t do this band too many favors. Kinda bewildered by the next big thing hype. Maybe they’re great live; maybe the people who say the LP didn’t live up to the EP are right.
• The Go! Team – Rolling Blackouts – Go! Team don’t mess much with the (complicated) formula for the 3rd LP: cut & paste assemblage/hip-hop/indie rock/bubble gum/funk/retro kitsch, probably a few more I’m forgetting. Usually at least two genres per song. I love “Buy Nothing Day” (even though the event annoys me) and the title track, which are both toward the indie rock side of things. This might be their strongest record to date.
• The Hampdens – The Last Party – An unspiky album from a self-consciously (but not obnoxiously so) literary band that would be a perfect soundtrack to a film of Tanya Egan Gibson’s How to Buy a Love of Reading.
• Darren Hayman – January Songs – Ex-Hefner frontman’s song-a-day project. A winner. (28.jan.2011)
• Lifeguards – Waving at the Astronauts – Pollard plus Gillard. This is the “prog” project, which worried me a bit, but not, you’ll note, enough to stop me buying it. Every now and then again this pushes my “whoah, too proggy!” button for a few bars, but mostly Gillard’s unruly and tasteful guitar silences my objections before they’re raised. And Pollard unleashes some characteristically indelible power-pop hooks. Most importantly, it sounds like they had big fun making this record.
• Over the Rhine – The Long Surrender – The core husband/wife team of Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist have been crafting carefully arranged melodic rock (with some folk, country, and blues elements) for about twenty years now. They’ve gotten pretty good at it. “Infamous Love Songs” sounded enough like a classic Tom Waits tune to me that I had to look it up to make sure it wasn’t.
• Radiohead – The King of Limbs – The first thing that strikes me is subtlety and attention to detail. This is built, from the ground up, to be a record you listen to over and over, and that reveals new things to you with successive listens. The next two thoughts: kind of amazing how thoroughly this sounds like something that fits within the Radiohead catalog without sounding much like anything else in it; and what other bands at this point in their career do you expect to produce work this challenging and creative? Strong early album-of-year contender.
• The Reaganomics – Lower the Bar – Snotty pop punk (08.feb.2011)
• Rick Rizzo & Tara Key – Double Star – The guitarists from Eleventh Dream Day and Anteitam sound absolutely nothing like their main bands on this second instrumental collaboration. Stylistic variety and the sophisticated interplay one hopes for from seasoned musicians are both in ample evidence.
• Shipbuilding Co. – Radios and Flying Birds – I wanted to like this indie/chamber pop homebrew effort more: it’s smart, assembled with evident care, and has a killer backstory. But for me it’s too wispy, too eager to demonstrate its braininess (e.g., song title “You Tunguskaed My Heart”) and not hooky enough to compensate.
• Sister Crayon – Bellow – spooky, mostly laid-back electro-pop with lots of layered vocals, substantially enlivened by Nicholas Suhr’s real drums.
• Snowblink – Long Live – Folky indie/chamber-pop prettily, but breathily, sung by the memorably named Daniela Gesundheit.
• Sonic Youth – Simon Werner a Disparu – although this is billed as a soundtrack and some of the tracks titles indicate that they are character “themes,” this mostly sounds to me like SY in loose, improvisational mode. Not that I think that’s a problem.
• Standard Fare/One Happy Island – “Standard Fare on One Happy Island” EP – from each band, one new song, one cover of the other band. Standard Fare speeds- and muscles-up OHI’s “Kudzu Girlfriend,” adds some snarly guitar, and it sounds like one of theirs. One Happy Island unspools and downshifts “Nuit Avec Une Amie” into a ukulele and brushed-drums affair, adds a trumpet/kazoo bridge, and suddenly it could be their own composition. Each band’s own song plays to their strengths, and somehow the whole makes me like both acts even more.
• Telekinesis – 12 Desperate Straight Lines – Hard to put a finger on what makes this rocking little album work so well — when I focus in on individual elements, they don’t seem amazing (except maybe the backward drums on “Please Ask for Help”) but the gestalt kinda is.
• Wicked Little Things – Porn for Romantics – brash guitars and some nice rough/sweet co-ed vocal interplay brighten this straight ahead rock effort
• The Wiggly Tendrils – “Tendrils in Space” (EP) – Eight typically eclectic astro-themed indie pop nuggets from assorted configurations of the Wiggly Tendrils collective. Free download at the Wiggly Tendrils bandcamp page.
• Young Galaxy – Shapeshifting – The song topics are still grandiose (”The Angels Are Surely Weeping”) and sometimes this album reminds me obscurely, of Prefab Sprout at their most ambitious (Jordan: The Comeback, say). But there’s much more disco and less rock in the mix than on prior albums.
• Young Prisms – Friends for Now – Frustrating. I feel like there are both some good pop moments and shoegazey guitar explorations buried in here. I kind of dig the gauzy backing vocals as they are, and sometimes the monochromatic sound of this record is cool — the instrumental break “In Your Room” is like the sonic equivalent staring at the line where you can’t tell sky from sea. but mostly this fetishizes lo-fi unproductively. Why do so many hip youngsters want the drums to sound like they were played in a neighbor’s backyard shed?
• Yuck – Yuck – The 90’s in a blender. More “yum,” than “yuck,” actually.
• Zoey Van Goey – Propeller Versus Wings – Indie-pop with co-ed vocals that flirts with, but doesn’t peg, my “too cute” meter with tracks like “Robot Tyrannosaur.” I’m not the first to observe that “You Told the Drunks I Knew Karate” sounds almost like John Darnielle could’ve written it.