March 24th, 2009 1:08pm
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The latest Listen@MBV full-album stream is the new record from Hank, a Toronto-based band led by songwriter Cab Williamson. The Luck of the Singers is their first album in four years and though it took nearly as long to write and record, its sound is rather immediate and un-fussy. As on their acclaimed previous record How To Prosper in the Coming Bad Years, the songs have a distinct out-of-time quality that uproots the music from chronology, and leaves much of the material sounding as though it could be an authentic artifact from any year from the past five decades. Williamson’s deep, droll voice and witty lyrics anchor most of the songs, but he’s often joined by the lovely voices of his female bandmates, whose high, pretty tones complement and balance out his hyper-masculine style. The Luck of the Singers is stylistically varied, but aesthetically consistent, and so it’s very much the sort of record that’s best heard in one sitting.
March 24th, 2009 8:22am
There is a terror at the core of Karin Dreijer Andersson’s music as Fever Ray that is so potent and visceral that I find it difficult to listen to album with any sort of regularity. This is notable, because there was no shortage of darkness and paranoia in the Knife’s Silent Shout record, and that did not keep me from spending much of 2006 playing “We Share Our Mothers’ Health” and “Forest Families” on repeat. The difference between the Knife and Fever Ray is a matter of degree and intensity — whereas the Silent Shout songs allow for space and catharsis, the selections on Fever Ray feel extremely contained and inert, putting the listener in the uncomfortable headspace of a person who seems to be suffering from simultaneous claustrophobia and agoraphobia. Fever Ray is an album of nonspecific dread and domestic restlessness, and even “Seven,” its most pop-oriented song, offers no relief from its relentless unease. Though it starts off as a recollection of connection and friendship, it’s essentially a song about profound loneliness. The lyrics in the chorus allude to a mysterious “box to open up with light and sound,” which seem to hint at her career in art and music, but in context, it comes across more like a horrible curse than a blessing or salvation.
March 23rd, 2009 5:25am
Morrissey @ Bowery Ballroom 3/21/2009
This Charming Man / Billy Budd / Black Cloud / How Soon Is Now? / Irish Blood, English Heart / Let Me Kiss You / I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris / How Can Anybody Possibly Know How I Feel? / Seasick, Yet Still Docked / The Loop / I Keep Mine Hidden / The World Is Full of Crashing Bores / Why Don’t You Find Out for Yourself? / Ask / Best Friend on the Payroll / Sorry Doesn’t Help / Something Is Squeezing My Skull / I’m OK By Myself // First of the Gang to Die
Something that becomes very obvious upon seeing a Morrissey concert is that he and his band need not engage in any sort of theatrics on stage, and that it hardly even matters what they play, or if the songs are sequenced in a particularly dramatic order. Morrissey is the spectacle, to the point that anything that would distract the audience from focusing their attention on him would be jarring and wrong. Really, this isn’t much different from the songs themselves — aside from the old Smiths tunes, the music for most of the numbers would be fairly nondescript were it not for Morrissey’s dominating presence. It is probably true that he is coasting on the passion of his audience, but that just feeds into one the most entertaining aspects of his shtick: Despite the fact that he is among the most intensely beloved cult figures in pop culture, he insists that he is under-appreciated, and demands yet more love from his fans. In other words, he’s basically Miss Piggy with a pompadour. It’s brilliant.
Morrissey seems extremely comfortable in his skin these days, often coming across on stage and in the excellent covers of his three most recent albums as though he has waited his entire life to be exactly as old as he is right now. He wears his age very well, and it provides him with a bit of gravitas that serves him well, particularly when he sings his most petulant lyrics. His sex appeal now is actually quite similar to that of 30 Rock-era Alec Baldwin. Both men have a handsome, bearish quality, with substantial yet lean bodies capable of surprising grace. They both have very strong presences, and when you look at them, it’s hard not to picture a younger, softer version of their face buried just beneath the heavy masculinity of their adult visage. Maybe it’s an Irish thing?
March 20th, 2009 8:47am
The original mix of Shontelle’s single “T-Shirt” is pleasant but generic, basically the kind of song that provides either a functional sort of pleasure, or a neutral non-response when heard in passing. This largely comes down to the way it seems designed to sound like a half-dozen overly familiar pop hits from the past few years, resulting in something that comes off, at best, as being a severely watered-down version of Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable.” Crazy Cousinz’ mix salvages the best elements from the original, and changes the mood, tempo, and arrangement significantly by flipping the ho-hum melancholy of the source material into a rather celebratory Latin-tinged dance number. Their arrangement is a funky, dynamic piece of music that evokes a powerful feeling of joy while at the same time feeling slick, cool, and relaxed. This is a wonderful example of the remix as aesthetic surgery — one can imagine the original song limping and wheezing its way into the OR, and just hours later prancing around cheerfully to its new and improved beat.
March 19th, 2009 7:53am
The Lotus Plaza album comes out in stores next week, but I’ve had a copy for months now. I’m not saying this to brag — in this era of leaked records, who could possibly care? — but to explain that I’ve been living with this music for a while now, to the point that I’ve already got nostalgic memories attached to the songs. The cd arrived in the mail on a snow day, and not long after, I remember walking around in Brooklyn at night in late December. It wasn’t quite a blizzard, but it snowing, windy, and bitter cold. My vision was blurred, everything seemed slow, and I felt perfectly in synch with the general vibe of Lockett Pundt’s solo tunes. Maybe he wasn’t going for snow per se, but I’m sure he had some form of disorientation in mind when he wrote this material.
Lotus Plaza isn’t a far cry from what Lockett does in Deerhunter, but the balance of hookiness and haziness is adjusted much more in favor of the latter. His best compositions foreground a particular bit of instrumental melody and texture while the rest of the track blurs out, sorta like a musical version of rack focus. The effect is a bit like trying to remember something, but only being able to fully recall seemingly minor details and sensations with any sort of vividness. It seems right that this music would end up associated with exactly this sort of memory in my mind — I can perfectly visualize glimpses of particular street corners as seen through wet glasses, but I kinda struggle to recall much more of the context.
March 18th, 2009 8:36am
For the first couple minutes of “Mr. Yeah,” The-Dream sounds smooth and confident. Or, perhaps more accurately, smug and cocky. He’s singing to an ex who is still getting with him on the side, and from his perspective this means exactly one thing: Her subsequent boyfriends are fools, and he’s the only one who can do her right. Maybe that is true, but there has got to be a reason why he’s the ex, right? He’s barely even thinking about that. As the song progresses, his cockiness fades a bit, but only to be replaced by neediness — his resentment of her current man becomes more obvious, and he openly states his desire to return to full-time boyfriend status in a shaky but certain phone-voice. After that point, the song shifts from bouncy flirtation to sentimental slow jam, sort of the audio equivalent of seamlessly transitioning from a playful club strut to getting down on bended knee in a room decorated with candles and rose petals. Thankfully, The-Dream defuses the sudden seriousness of the song’s conclusion with a boyish punchline: “Can we fuck now?”
March 17th, 2009 8:34am
A.C. Newman @ Bowery Ballroom 3/15/2009
There Are Maybe Ten Or Twelve / Miracle Drug / Like A Hitman, Like A Dancer / Prophets / Secretarial / The Heartbreak Rides / The Cloud Prayer / The Palace At 4 A.M. / All Of My Days & All Of My Days Off / Young Atlantis / Drink To Me, Babe, Then / The Collected Works / Changeling (Get Guilty) / Submarines of Stockholm / On The Table // There Was A War [Leonard Cohen] / The Town Halo
Even when he’s touring in support of his solo material, Carl Newman can’t help but to put himself at the center of a large ensemble band. To a certain extent, this is just what is demanded of his material — even his relatively quiet material requires a richness of sound, and many of his songs are just better with the collective oomph of gang vocals. Even if it takes three female back up singers to come close to matching the power of Neko Case, the band assembled for this tour compare favorably to the New Pornographers, particularly when it comes to the drumming. Jon Wurster’s approach to drumming for Newman is not far off from Kurt Dahle’s work in the New Pornographers — brisk and powerful, but with plenty of nimble, detailed fills that mirror and emphasize the graceful melodic turns within the songs. Wurster’s style tends to fall into a tighter pocket, which provides a bit more negative space than Dahle, leaving the songs feeling a bit lighter and more open. This was particularly flattering for some of the more recent up-tempo numbers, such as “Changeling (Get Guilty),” “All Of My Days & All Of My Days Off,” and “The Palace At 4 A.M.,” all of which easily eclipsed the quality of the studio recordings.
Newman’s output in this decade has been so consistently strong that it can be easy to take his songwriting gifts for granted, especially as he becomes more focused on structure and nuance. Still, his taste for bombast comes through in even his quietest tunes, nearly always in the form of an emotional crescendo in the second half of a composition. “The Heartbreak Rides,” the loveliest song on Get Guilty, follows this pattern, gradually progressing from a gentle groove and gorgeous melody on the verses to an understated chorus, and eventually to a dramatic resolution that somehow does not feel incongruous or unearned.
March 16th, 2009 7:50am
Fight Like Apes @ Mercury Lounge 3/13/2009
You Are The Hat / Do You Karate? / Digifucker / Jake Summers / I’m Beginning To Think You Prefer Beverly Hills 90210 To Me / Tie Me Up With Jackets / Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues / Lend Me Your Face (featuring Nick Minichino) / Megameanie / Battlestations
Even when they’re worn out from travel and their singer has a scratchy throat from exposure to Aer Lingus air conditioning germs, Fight Like Apes rock out with a tuneful intensity matched by very few new, contemporary bands in the best of health. For one thing, they’re quite good at making their job seem fun — they thrash and writhe about, smash keyboard stands before the third song is through, and goof off whenever they are not preoccupied with nailing their dynamic, visceral hooks. Near the end of their abbreviated set, just after belting out a rather skull-rattling version of McLusky’s “Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues,” MayKay recruited good ol’ Nick Minichino to sing the chorus of “Lend Me Your Face,” mainly on account of his highly enthusiastic dancing in the front row. He did a great job, but I still want to hear her do it. Not that I really needed another good reason to want to see this band again, but you know.
Given the current state of the global economy, it is perhaps bad form to take so much delight in a song about people getting fired. But then again, a lot of the pleasure comes from the fact that the band themselves are doing the firing, and the listener gets to feel the vicarious thrill of being in the position to sack a person, particularly one who has wronged them. Even though the song concludes with the group shouting “you’re so fired!” in rounds, there’s a lightness in the music — the waltz beat, the colorful synth tones, the smiling vocals — that keeps it from sounding too bitter and mean-spirited.
March 13th, 2009 7:46am
I’d previously compared the Golden Silvers to the Clash, particularly for the way Gwylim Gold’s charismatic rasp fits so smoothly into his band’s stark, fluid grooves, and here they go foregrounding all that by going full-on “Magnificent Seven” with their latest single. It’s not just a Clash rip, though. “True Romance” also bears some resemblance to David Bowie’s classic single “Let’s Dance,” not to mention traces of Duran Duran, Liquid Liquid, and the Human League. Even in spite of their obvious debts to old school post-punk floor-fillers, the band sidestep hollow imitation and soulless retro affectation by feeling like the real deal in all the ways that matter — the bass and drums lock into a tight pocket, the synths sound simultaneously trashy and glamorous, and Gold hits the right balance of intimidating toughness and sly flirtatiousness. The Golden Silvers are good enough to have fit in perfectly with their icons from the early 80s had they existed back in those days, but we’re lucky enough to have them be fresh and new in our time.
March 12th, 2009 9:35am
There is an anthemic quality to the chorus of “Stockton Gala Days,” but where others may have sung that part with joyous abandon, Natalie Merchant played it down, opting instead to sing her words with an emphatic yet measured yearning implying that her expression was only a faint shadow of a powerful, overcoming emotion buried deep inside. It’s appropriate to the subject matter of the song, which primarily deals with emotional repression. In the verses, Merchant flashes back to her character’s wild, idyllic youth, but in the chorus she sings about her accommodating, compromising adult life: “How I’ve learned to please / to doubt myself in need / you’ll never know.” There is a terrific ambiguity to those words, or at least there is up until the end, when she clarifies that her selflessness has come at a terrible cost to herself, and that her kindness to the people she loves has made it so that she can never be fully honest with them. The music in the verses is bright and sunny, led by what sounds like the tinny strum of a mandolin approximating the treble-scratch rhythm of a Holland/Dozier/Holland composition, but after the chorus, the mood darkens considerably during an instrumental refrain that hints at the depths of the character’s hidden melancholy and loneliness.
March 11th, 2009 10:03am
Dan Boeckner has the sort of rock and roll voice that many strive to emulate, but few possess. He’s capable of a perfect, unfussy balance of raw passion and aloof coolness, and he effortlessly conveys a sense of being fully present in the moment, and selling the notion that every moment he sings is enormously consequential. A lot of the drama in his Handsome Furs songs comes down to his chemistry to his wife and partner, Alexei Perry. Whereas the full intensity of Boeckner’s voice can seem lost in the busy arrangements of his Wolf Parade material, Perry’s simple, urgent drum programming and atmospheric keyboards provide a stark, grim backdrop ideally suited to his tone of anguish and desperation. As with most every track on the duo’s second album Face Control, “I’m Confused” feels incredibly urgent and almost inexplicably momentous, as if it was written and performed under duress. In every passing second there is a mounting tension, and by the halfway mark, it seems as though it could break out into sex, violence, or violent sex at any moment.
March 10th, 2009 8:50am
There’s not a lot of love in Ahu’s voice. She sings with a cold, severe affect that makes her sound removed and defensive, as though she’s trying to dress herself up in some sort of emotional armor. The tone of the track is similarly harsh and distant — the song is built upon a tense, sexy groove, but the arrangement feels almost excessively paranoid and claustrophobic, as if to suggest that she’s secretly hoping that the answer to the question “Can We Call It Love?” is an emphatic NO. I hear a lot of emotions mixed up in this song — fear, exasperation, bitterness, pride, regret — but barely a trace of affection, despite some words implying a bond between the singer and the person she is addressing. Whatever it going on between them, the feelings are intense, but it certainly doesn’t doesn’t seem pleasant.
March 9th, 2009 8:09am
Micachu’s music tends to be rough and jumpy, but her voice is cool and calm, providing a smooth center for arrangements that tend to emphasize odd textural contrasts and jagged edges. This isn’t to say that she seems aloof or distant. More often than not, her vocals come across as polite but informal, and rather intimate in the context of production values that can err on the side of sounding like inspired demos sprung fully formed from her unconscious mind. “Calculator,” one of the most immediately ingratiating and pop-oriented tracks on her debut the Shapes, is built upon a nervous, jaunty rhythm, but her amiable, androgynous voice evens out the tone so that the anxiety is downplayed in favor of emphasizing the tune’s more jovial and level-headed qualities. The song feels mature and self-assured, but not in a dull sort of way — if anything, Micachu has a way of making emotional stability sound complicated and exciting, perhaps because the music always has a tension implying that it could all come falling apart with one false move.
March 6th, 2009 7:46am
A lot of women have beautiful voices and many of them can sing with great authority, but still, there’s something extraordinary and distinct about Neko Case’s voice and the way it can convey even the smallest, sweet emotion with an assertiveness on par with the forces of nature. Her boldness lends itself to a variety of styles, but whether she’s the vocal equivalent of a fuzz pedal in Carl Newman’s New Pornographers tunes or singing a quiet ballad, she invests lyrics with an emphatic earthiness that makes them seem like immutable facts: This is how I feel; this is how things are. It’s hard to imagine her singing anything at all and having it come out feeling like a lie.
In other words, Neko Case sounds like a tornado that loves you.
In this song, Case’s voice is accompanied by guitar parts that seem to hover and spin like wind storms in the distance. We sense a form, but know there’s no solid thing there, only pressure and chaos that could spin out and destroy us if we’re not lucky. Maybe it’s like being in the eye of a storm, or it could be the solace of feeling a brisk wind when you could just as easily get hit with devastating gust. As much as the song can feel enormous and intimidating, there is also a sense of lucidity and grace to the sound of it all, not unlike what can be felt in many of the best songs by 10,000 Maniacs. Natalie Merchant may be considered horribly unfashionable now, but despite her occasionally prissy vibe, she’s really one of the few singers I’ve heard that shares many of Neko’s most remarkable qualities, and can communicate a similar balance of the gentle and the mighty.
March 5th, 2009 10:27am
Roxy Music’s “Do The Strand” was already a very campy song, but the Scissor Sisters have gone and pushed that campiness to a glorious extreme, even by their own standards. Though the essence of the song remains the same, the Scissor Sisters version strips out the original’s glam rock boogie-woogie in favor of a delirious quasi-Italo disco arrangement that showcases Jake Shears’ signature falsetto, resulting in an odd collision of goofiness and serious sensuality. Whereas the Roxy Music version has a bit of a smirk to it, the Sisters version has a touch of genuine sincerity that infuses the silly, unapologetic fun of the song with a gentle tug of poignancy and intensity, even when it starts to sound a bit like a gay disco jingle for New York City’s most beloved used book store.
March 4th, 2009 9:44am
I’m not sure if “Get Yourself Together” is the right title for this song. That phrase implies that the singer is issuing some sort of ultimatum, whereas the actual sentiment of his words is a lot more passive, even when his language comes across as a demand. Basically, Chaz Jankel is singing about not understanding his lover, and the confusion that comes from not being able to anticipate — much less comprehend — their mood swings. In some cases, this is a surefire sign of a self-absorbed person who can’t handle the inconvenience of other people’s emotions, but in the context of Jankel’s sweet falsetto and Andrew Butler’s lush yet subtly anxious disco arrangement, it’s easy to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s genuinely trying to please and understand the person he is addressing.
March 3rd, 2009 9:16am
People have been referring to electric guitars as ‘axes’ for who knows how long now, but I don’t feel like I actually hear enough music in which guitars actually swing and slash in the manner of a big ol’ medieval battle ax. “Cave Mouth” does just that, and it’s rather specific. It’s not the sound of a knife or a sword; the particular tone and the velocity of attack imply the weight and the pendulous motion of a big fuck-off ax wielded with strength and grace. It’s pretty rad, and I’m not even the type of person to get excited about medieval weaponry. My impression of this is greatly influenced by the way Clues are (inadvertently?) combining the aesthetics of three bands I love in an unexpected way: The sharp, cutting chords of Chavez, the fantasy novel vibe of late-period Helium, and the oddball drama of the Danielson Famile. They’ve got the menace and violence, but the tone is not dark or serious — the genre of this song is adventure, not horror.
March 2nd, 2009 9:13am
These Are Powers specialize in making pleasurable music that nonetheless feels a bit sickly and gross. In some tracks, particularly their earlier work, their percussive grooves and metallic tones evoked dull, persistent headaches, or the stinging-eye sensation of going just a bit too long without sleep. On their debut full-length album, the music feels more like an upset stomach. Just listen to “Double Double Yolk” — it’s all churning rhythms and gurgling synthesizers, vertigo and nervous acid. It’s severely disorienting, but somehow it still reads as being a bit pop. The vocals probably help, as least in as much as they sound a bit sexy in the context of some seriously icky sonic textures, and that they feel somewhat level and grounded in a composition that seems to float on a stormy sea of gastric juices.
February 27th, 2009 7:59am
I suppose that if you’re going to have a song title that doubles as the name of your band, it ought to be the ultimate expression of what you’re all about. This is certainly the case for “Those Dancing Days” by Those Dancing Days, an incredibly lively number about fun, music, dancing, and romance that encapsulates the group’s charming mixture of youthful enthusiasm and wistful nostalgia for moments that have not yet passed. That slight undertow of melancholy mostly comes through in the cool, understated soulfulness of Linnea Jönsson’s vocals, but the rest of the arrangement is focused on conveying excitement and pleasure. There’s a particularly cheery tone in the organ that carries much of the song’s melody, but the recording’s giddy vibe is mainly a direct result of the rapid-fire drum fills that provide a jolt of energy every few measures.
February 26th, 2009 7:00am
One of the most remarkable things about Gui Boratto’s music is how well he can evoke a state of contentment, and make that feeling urgent and visceral, implying a full awareness and presence within a particular magical moment. In “No Turning Back,” he creates an overwhelming sensation of romance, comfort, and a very mild melancholy that builds gradually before reaching an emotional plateau during its vocal sections. The lyrics and vocals ground the song in pop music and provide a useful bit of context, but the piece seems most articulate when the sound takes over and carry us through its most turbulent and placid moments with equal measures of grace.
