I do like me some Radio Control, and here's two more flinty blasts of frenetic, carefree garage punk. The Waiting Game in particular delivers great, soaring riffs and perfectly-balanced vocals. There's a subtle production trick at play here, where the vocals echo quickly and harshly, as if off of cinder blocks and dirt and pipes, giving the songs the spontaneous energy of a batshit basement show.
Rabbit Troupe prove a savvy choice for this split EP, bringing a similar live energy, opting for near-shoegaze levels of guiar pileups and reverb, but stopping short of becoming another '10's everynote tragedy.
This is good rock and roll, offering nothing stunningly inventive but delivering what it promises with heart and energy and soul 4/5
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Monday, November 12, 2012
#641 The Coup - Sorry to Bother You
The Coup are potentially pretty brilliant.
The first half of the album is a broadside of obnoxious, indie-party rap, sporting hard-edged Outkast-via-Oakland rhyming over drunken synth loops, buzzy bass guitar, and huge clipped beats, landing somewhere between Spank Rock and Andrew WK. It's fun, in its fucked up way, but it comes on so strong you might be tempted to turn it off and never come back.
Don't. First of all, it'll grow on you. Second of all, you'd miss one of the strangest, most perfectly executed second-half about-faces I've heard in a while. One moment you're listening to the minimal-maximal stomp and chant of Land of 7 Billion Dances, and you've barely notice that its tone's changed as it burbles itself to sleep. Then lithe strings come in, unexpected but natural, and a heartfelt, beautiful little spoken word serenade emerges, complete with perfectly-delivered female backing. It's something straight out of Broken Social Scene circa You Forgot it in People.
Its like waking after the party where you partied way too hard for the third night in a row. Not the morning after, when you're hung over and swearing never to do this again. That day is awful. This is like skipping that day and waking up the morning after that, when you wake up feeling great, and knowing you mean it this time, and maybe things will change. After Violet's dulcet tones waft off This Year rides upbeat Go Team! ready motivation horns and "all rights!" and We've Got a Lot to Teach You Cassius Green delivers a bizarre, sincerely parable of identity.
Then there's Long Island Iced Tea Neat, which is just my goddamn jam, the perfect bass riff, the perfect clattering beat, the perfect flippant fuck-you delivery. I walk faster just thinking about it.
Usually a fun album is superficial: you know what you're getting and what to do with it right out of the gate. This is a rare, richer album that demands a bit of listening before you realize what an interesting playground it's built for you 4.5/5
The first half of the album is a broadside of obnoxious, indie-party rap, sporting hard-edged Outkast-via-Oakland rhyming over drunken synth loops, buzzy bass guitar, and huge clipped beats, landing somewhere between Spank Rock and Andrew WK. It's fun, in its fucked up way, but it comes on so strong you might be tempted to turn it off and never come back.
Don't. First of all, it'll grow on you. Second of all, you'd miss one of the strangest, most perfectly executed second-half about-faces I've heard in a while. One moment you're listening to the minimal-maximal stomp and chant of Land of 7 Billion Dances, and you've barely notice that its tone's changed as it burbles itself to sleep. Then lithe strings come in, unexpected but natural, and a heartfelt, beautiful little spoken word serenade emerges, complete with perfectly-delivered female backing. It's something straight out of Broken Social Scene circa You Forgot it in People.
Its like waking after the party where you partied way too hard for the third night in a row. Not the morning after, when you're hung over and swearing never to do this again. That day is awful. This is like skipping that day and waking up the morning after that, when you wake up feeling great, and knowing you mean it this time, and maybe things will change. After Violet's dulcet tones waft off This Year rides upbeat Go Team! ready motivation horns and "all rights!" and We've Got a Lot to Teach You Cassius Green delivers a bizarre, sincerely parable of identity.
Then there's Long Island Iced Tea Neat, which is just my goddamn jam, the perfect bass riff, the perfect clattering beat, the perfect flippant fuck-you delivery. I walk faster just thinking about it.
Usually a fun album is superficial: you know what you're getting and what to do with it right out of the gate. This is a rare, richer album that demands a bit of listening before you realize what an interesting playground it's built for you 4.5/5
#640 Neil Young - Le Noise
Neil Young IN SPACE. Just Young and his Guitar, echoing and repeating in phases outside of echo, swirling around, looping and tripping on loops.
Which is to say, this isn't Neil Young and his guitar in the way you might expect. Not in like the Muddy-Waters-and-his-guitar way, not in the purest form of stripped down rock kind of way. This is heavily produced in that production-as-an-instrument kind of way.
The result is a strange, rounded unclear thing, sounding silverey and out of time, but mostly compelling. The production is subtle and rarely makes itself known, feeling like an organic jam between Neil Young and future Neil Young and bizarro Neil Young, singing with one voice in a poorly synched qunatum resonance chamber. Pretty sci-fi shit for a crunchy, no-frills rockanroll man. Young is angry and resigned and scared and lost, and it will infect you, and leave you feeling much the same 4/5
Which is to say, this isn't Neil Young and his guitar in the way you might expect. Not in like the Muddy-Waters-and-his-guitar way, not in the purest form of stripped down rock kind of way. This is heavily produced in that production-as-an-instrument kind of way.
The result is a strange, rounded unclear thing, sounding silverey and out of time, but mostly compelling. The production is subtle and rarely makes itself known, feeling like an organic jam between Neil Young and future Neil Young and bizarro Neil Young, singing with one voice in a poorly synched qunatum resonance chamber. Pretty sci-fi shit for a crunchy, no-frills rockanroll man. Young is angry and resigned and scared and lost, and it will infect you, and leave you feeling much the same 4/5
#639 Neil Young with Crazy Horse - Psychadelic Pill
You'd never guess the dude could still put an album this solid out there, but here it is, epic in scope, stuffed with good guitar solos, adventurous within the space it outlines for itself. There's crunch and bluster straight off of Everybody Knows this is Nowhere, with resigned ackonwledgement and dismissal of the times and the ways they are a-changin'. Scarcely a step's been lost.
The three epic-length songs are the highlights, giving themselves room to breathe, wielding repetition and evolution to build expansive spaces, Walk Like a Giant and Drifting Back laying claim to huge tracts of space and time, respectively. Despite the length of the songs and the album itself, the listening experience rarely drags - the band is tight and they know what they're doing. They're indulgent, but not self-indulgent. They're indulging you.
Of course there's still Young's voice at the heart of it all, and if you didn't like it 40 years ago you won't like it now; it's changed surprisingly little. For me, it's a miss a lot of the time, just too reedy and strained, but I can suffer it in the name of some vintage jams 4/5
The three epic-length songs are the highlights, giving themselves room to breathe, wielding repetition and evolution to build expansive spaces, Walk Like a Giant and Drifting Back laying claim to huge tracts of space and time, respectively. Despite the length of the songs and the album itself, the listening experience rarely drags - the band is tight and they know what they're doing. They're indulgent, but not self-indulgent. They're indulging you.
Of course there's still Young's voice at the heart of it all, and if you didn't like it 40 years ago you won't like it now; it's changed surprisingly little. For me, it's a miss a lot of the time, just too reedy and strained, but I can suffer it in the name of some vintage jams 4/5
Thursday, November 8, 2012
#638 Streight Angular - Everyone is Synchopated EP
Love these guys to death, one of my favorite local bands, but this EP does little to showcase what they're really about. The title track is the highlight, but the power it wields live just isn't captured here, and the other songs just aren't particularly memorable. There's some clever combinations of rock styles, sure, but there's a lack of punch in the performance and the production that hamstrings their energy. If I'd never heard Streight Angular live I can't say this would inspire me to check them out, but you should. That's where they bring the heat 2.5/5
#637 Mouse on Mars - Parastrophics
Mouse on Mars has always been a tease, for every Actionist Respoke there was an album's worth of stuff that was chopped and noisy and adventurous in its way, but that just wasn't any actual fun to listen to.
This hits a good balance though, with great energy and strangeness, but convinced to dance, all elliptical movement, all lightcycling ahead, sounding prefuse chopped and dubstep bent and lcd thumping and aphex vulnerable and glitch spare, all in turn, inventive and colorful and fun.
It's still pretty annoying at times, downright stressful in most cases, reasonably awful actually, but when you hit that sweet spot, when you find the right way of listening, let the right parts of your brain turn off, it's a jagged limegreen pin jammed in your pleasure center 3.5/5
This hits a good balance though, with great energy and strangeness, but convinced to dance, all elliptical movement, all lightcycling ahead, sounding prefuse chopped and dubstep bent and lcd thumping and aphex vulnerable and glitch spare, all in turn, inventive and colorful and fun.
It's still pretty annoying at times, downright stressful in most cases, reasonably awful actually, but when you hit that sweet spot, when you find the right way of listening, let the right parts of your brain turn off, it's a jagged limegreen pin jammed in your pleasure center 3.5/5
#636 Prins Thomas - Prins Thomas
Hypnotic, krautey music that lies somewhere between spacy post-rock and trancy electronica. Thomas describes his music as Space Disco, which is a nice way to describe the overlap of Air-like astral elements and dancepunk basslines that form the album's backbone. As with Krautrock, this is music best suited to motion, to drawing the eye to passing rhythms, to providing atmosphere multipliers to atmospheric situations, lending timeless weight to your everyday journey. Take a long walk while it snows, or a drive past where the houses are, and the world shimmers with a little something extra 3.5/5
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