Month:
June
2010

Earlier in the year London’s Mumford & Sons released their debut album Sigh No More in the United States. I put it on for a listen, intrigued by the title track and ‘The Cave’, and I was delighted to find one of those rare albums that you can listen to on loop 3-4 times in a go. Reading that, it sounds a little absurd, but in all honesty that’s how taken I was with this album upon first listen.

The sound is folk-based, to be sure, but much harder than any folk music I’d previously been exposed to. It’s a surprisingly loud record for the most part, with a handful of calmer tracks to slow the pace down where needed. Some tracks are so fast I think it would even be fair to characterize them as “frantic,” albeit positively so. The best example would have to be ‘Little Lion Man‘, which has seen a ton of success on Australian charts, and is even getting fairly heavy rotation on my local radio station.

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‘Little Lion Man’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

It’s a little unfair to post that song first, because it is the climax of the album. The two tracks leading up to it (the melancholy, urgent, ‘White Blank Page’ and the song ‘I Gave You All’ that builds from quiet regret to seething rage) are fantastic precursors to ‘Little Lion Man’, which tells a tragic tale of cowardice and regret. The guitars are fast, and the banjos faster, and Marcus Mumford and company really shine on this larger-than-life song.

Tracks like ‘Winter Winds’ and the title track are perhaps a little more fair representation of the record. ‘Sigh No More’ begins with a wandering, plodding sound, until some switch is tripped at around the halfway mark, launching into an emphatic folk-explosion in defense of

the beauty of love, as it was meant to be

The weakest track is ‘Timshel’, which wastes too much time in a lilting, boring place, and never really takes off to any emotional or lyrical point of interest. ‘Thistle & Weeds’ is a fairly dramatic track for how late it occurs in the album, having a nice counterpart in the gritty, soulful, confessional of ‘Dustbowl Dance’.

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‘Thistle & Weeds’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

Rounding out the record is ‘After the Storm’, which aptly comes after a turbulent set of tracks that go fast, go slow, get excited, become furious… calling it a “storm” isn’t that far of a stretch. The tune is a really pretty bookend to ‘Sigh No More’, and it shows Mumford and Sons in a rare moment of complete control (as opposed to the folk-rock tears that are exactly why this album is so good), and it pays off.

Sigh No More is a terrific debut album from passionate group of musicians who seem earnest and passionate about their work.

Mumford and Sons – Sigh No More

A Brief Aside: I usually page through reviews of an album before I decide to invest time in listening to it, as well as after, to see how my experience compared. In this case, it was curious to see that reviewers either loved the album, or harshly slapped it with some term roughly equivalent to “derivative.” The comparison that comes up most often is to the Fleet Foxes.

Comparing the two isn’t unfair so much as it is useless. If I’m missing something here, though, feel free to let me know via comment.

One of my most anticipated records of the year, Together lives up to the quality work I’ve come to expect from the New Pornographers.

Since my college roommate first gave me a copy of Twin Cinema the nearly-orchestral compositions as well as the knockout vocals of Neko Case and Carl Newman (both products of the New Pornographer’s “Indie Super-Group” classification) of the group have kept me hooked. Their catalog both before and after Cinema has been laudable.

The singles that preceded this particular record, ‘Your Hands (Together)’ and ‘Crash Years‘, are the driving forces which carry the effort. They follow, as a pair, the opening track ‘Moves’, whose gutsy string section marks a departure from past records where they seldom played a staring role, instead backing the more traditional guitar/piano solo lines. Simply throwing strings on a section in and of itself is not as impressive as how they’re used, and it’s here that you can really hear the level of sophistication the band has reached.

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‘Crash Years’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

Similarly, the brass on ‘A Bite Out of My Bed‘ gives this album a layer of texture that, though it was not really missed previously, had been missing. It helps alleviate one of the few legitimate criticisms of the New Pornographers I ascribe to, which is that many of the tracks can bleed together, sounding too similar. Even still, after 10-15 listens, a couple of the middle tracks (‘My Shepherd’, ‘If You Can’t see My Mirrors’) don’t really grab me like the earlier ones do (‘Moves’, the singles, ‘Jenny Silver Dollar’, ‘Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk’).

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‘A Bite Out of My Bed’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

The closer, ‘We End Up Together’, is a great companion track to ‘Your Hands (Together)’. Minimalist at first, it layers on some strings and the playful

Mah mah mah mah
We end up together

chorus evokes a surprisingly sentimental “awwwww” in me, beautifully rounding out these 12 new tracks. I should expect no less.

The New Pornographers – Together

An Aside: The snowglobe-esque album art is also worth a closer look; I like it a lot.

If LCD Soundsystem has taught me one thing, it is the value of patience. Their previous record, Sound of Silver, is counted among the highest echelons of indie canon, but I never cared for it that much. I think that’s partially because I didn’t really “get it.” The band’s MO is writing songs that are double, if not triple, the length of your typical track; these slowly build by layering samples and beats up, breaking them down, rearranging them, sometimes multiple times. It’s music that requires both time and attention, and when I heard that This Is Happening was coming out, I resolved to give it enough of both.

The payoff is totally worth it. The opening track, ‘Dance Yrself Clean‘, is quiet for the first three minutes, with a diminished pitter-patter percussion line, and James Murphy’s hilarious lyrics:

Ah aaaaah present company
Excluded every time
Ah aaaaaah present company
The best that you can find

Talking like a jerk
Except you are an actual jerk
And living proof that sometimes friends are mean

…and then it explodes with thick bass and punching rhythms, and no shortage of synth. The change is so violent it can catch you off guard at first, but when you know its coming, the release is a masterful example of how effective this group can be when they bide their time.

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‘Dance Yrself Clean’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

Another favorite of mine is ‘I Can Change‘, which focus more on lyrical wordplay than radical variations in volume levels, but every bit as fun of a song:

This is the time the very best time
So give me a line and take me home
Take me over

But dashing the hopes, dashing the hopes
And smashing the pride
The morning’s got you on the ropes
And love is a murderer , love is a murderer
But if she calls you tonight
Everything is all right
Yeah, we know

And love is a curse shoved in a hearse
Love is an open book to a verse of your bad poetry
And this is coming from me

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‘I Can Change’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

While it is not as technically entrancing as the lyrics of Isaac Brock (Modest Mouse), Murphy certainly gives him a run for his money, and it is effort well spent (as can be seen also particularly well on ‘Pow Pow’). All of the songs come off as playful, direct, and honest, each of which the band conveys through the unlikely medium of indie-electronica. The meta anti-song ‘You Wanted A Hit’ is laughable almost a priori because the song is nine minutes long; the scary part being that it’s so catchy they may have made one on accident.

In a rare moment, ‘Somebody’s Calling Me’ lacks the texture and variation of the other tracks to a fault. It’s slow, drudging beat makes it feel that the song is much longer than it is, because the whole thing is so boring. Fortunately, the closer ‘Home’ brings things back where they ought to be, leaving you at the inescapable conclusion that LCD Soundsystem is undoubtedly at the top of their game, pushing the envelope of how much fun you can fit into a single record.

LCD Soundsystem – This Is Happening

Last summer the guys of Spoon were kind enough to drop the single ‘Got Nuffin’‘ in advance of January’s Transference. The single was a gutsy declaration complete with all the punch of the band’s previous work. The album lives up to the high bar set by its forerunner, and is a modest improvement over the bands previous effort (which is no small thing!).

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‘Got Nuffin’’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

One of my favorite things about this album is the structure. As mentioned above, ‘Got Nuffin” is fantastic, and so all the better that it is reserved as the penultimate song. Leading up to that, the album roughly alternates between faster songs (‘Trouble Comes Running’, ‘Is Love Forever’) and more slowly paced ones (‘The Mystery Zone’, ‘Who Makes Your Money’, ‘Goodnight Laura’).

At first this kinda confused me, because it feels like all of the momentum of the “bigger” songs like ‘Written In Reverse‘ grinds to a halt at the immediate track. In time, however, this seems less stop-and-go, and more like a macroscopic analog of any given Spoon song. There is always a real sense of diligence with these guys: they never go for the cheap thrill at the cost of losing control of a song. This is made even more apparent when juxtaposed with the seemingly under-produced sound of the album (which the listener should know better than to be fooled into thinking this was in any way accidental).

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‘Written In Reverse’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

While perhaps not as instantly lovable as Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Spoon’s Transference has a fascinating number of layers to it, and is as interesting today after six months of listening as it was the first time I put on the album.

Spoon – Transference

I was totally pumped for this album to come out after listening to the tracks that preceded it, and I wasn’t disappointed in the slightest. It took me a few listens to really fall in love with it, but that’s the case for any really good record: each time you take it in, you find something new that you like.

High Violet is a wonderful set of songs in the band’s signature style, ranging from the despair-laden ‘Sorrow’ to the ringing anthem of ‘Bloodbuzz Ohio‘. I recall hearing the band comment a while ago that “this is not a happy record,” or something to that effect, and it’s true. You won’t find anything remotely like ‘Fake Empire’; Berninger doesn’t even get the chance to tear off on a ‘November’-esque scream track. This effort is more controlled, and its subject matter appreciably darker than that of its predecessors.

We’ve already talked about how much I love ‘Terrible Love’ and despite the album cut not being my favorite it does not disappoint in opening the record. That said, ‘Ohio’ might be the strongest, most powerful piece of music on the album. It is the peak that the first five tracks build to, and that which the next five tracks spend recovering from.

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‘Bloodbuzz Ohio’
[ mp3 ♫ ]

A surprise for me was ‘Conversation 16′, the urgency and pace of the track wakes you up from the rather involved tracks in ‘Lemonworld’ and ‘Runaway.’ One of my favorite moments of the entire record is the drum riff going into the first iteration of the chorus, followed by the lyric “I’m a confident liar…” The timing of the song as well as strange content of the chorus really shines.

At the end of the day, there’s not a bad track on the album. The National has taken their craft to a new level, creating less frantic, more textured songs than we saw on on Boxer, harnessing that raw energy into something more complex and mature.

The National – High Violet