While Lorde's debut hit single may not, strictly speaking, be my thing, I respect it. It's a concerted effort to do and be different, and to make something good and distinct. It follows along the thread of recent years that saw Florence and Lana del Rey emerge, proving the market for female singers who succeed purely on vocal talent and songcraft, without as much fidelity to traditional instrumentation as an Amy Winehouse or Adele. (The threads are related but different.)
The song was just on the brink of being done for me, when something odd happened. I heard it out in the world. I was sitting in a waiting room, with the muffled sound of a Top 40 radio station playing elsewhere in the building. I was hearing some pop song or other - I think it was the one Ellie Goulding did with Calvin Harris but I'm not sure. I think Ellie's got a fine voice, but that song is not much for me. And then this one came on after it and I felt myself nodding my head... yes. It had gotten into my skin to where I could go without hearing it again ever and be very happy, but to hear it out there in the world (as opposed to at work, where it plays every 6 hours on schedule) was so palate-cleansing.
That's when I realized the value of songs like these, songs that are clearly different from run-of-the-mill pop songs, but become grating after a while anyway. At the very least, they break that monotony, and they sound way better because of it. I will never reach for Lorde over the new Arcade Fire album, but waiting to go into an office, amongst a string of otherwise undistinguished tunes, it's a welcome respite.
This doesn't exactly sound like a veteran's album, although there aren't many who have been around the pop game longer than McCartney so I guess he's setting the pace about how good you can be 50 years into your career. You expect sappy old man music, but this isn't it by a long shot. The litmus test I have applied to New is, "What if this were the debut album from some other artist?" Discounting the defensive-reflective "Early Days," you could almost buy into it. And this hypothetical artist would be onto something. He would be lauded for getting to a Paul McCartney-like sound while also adding something new into the mix: as someone with an advanced knowledge of pop songcraft and the way things used to be/ought to be, but with their own spin and atmosphere. That's what gets me. There is a safe way to "do Paul McCartney," a certain way we expect our rock vets to comport themselves. And maybe there's some of that here: a good-natured safeness creeps in at times...but by and large it's almost daring how nakedly poppy it is. We're talking full-bodied, all-rhythm, hooky wall-of-sound classic pop. Not in a cloying way, either, but a real brassy one.
Paul McCartney has not reinvented himself by any stretch. When you've been around this long, and have done that much that is so varied, it's really just a question of which aspects of your style are you going to present at any given time? What you don't really expect, at least not right out of the gate, is an opening track like "Save Us," a buzzy, bracing, breakneck rocker that reminds us that yeah, "Cut Me Some Slack" happened. He's well aware of his toolkit, and he's not afraid to mix and match that kind of growling guitar with his quirky self-harmonizing on "Alligator." There are tracks like the Brian Wilson-like title track or "Early Days" that celebrate and acknowledge the past, and then there are ones like "Queenie Eye," which are just fun. There's an abundance of songs that sound like a way forward, like the thumping electronic "Appreciate," the grooving "I Can Bet" or "Road," which sounds lightly Arcade Fiery. Whether your enjoy this album or not, you can't accuse it of trying too hard to rehash past successes. It wins or loses on its own merits, here and now. The win column, though, for me goes on and on. "Everybody Out There," sounds like a mid-era Beatles tune covered by a modern band. "Looking At Her" is just nuts.
It announces right up front that Paul McCartney is not just interested in putting us through the paces of "being Paul McCartney." He wants you to remember that he is Paul fucking McCartney, and he has forgotten more about writing awesome music than most people ever learn. Every single type of song conceivable, he's already done. Even amidst today's diverse and experimental crop of indie popsters, one of the biggest compliments you could level is still "Hey, that sounds like something Paul McCartney did." So presented here, to take or leave, is what Paul McCartney is doing. Writing Paul McCartney music for 2013. He manages to avoid being stuck in his ways, while showing the virtues of the first principles. There are flaws if you look hard enough for them, and sometimes it feels like the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, for the most part it works within his strengths, and it's nothing I wouldn't forgive when I'm having a good time. Believe me, I'm no blind devotee: I wasn't going to like this album just because it existed and applaud Paul for just getting up in the morning. I had no intention of even checking it out until I started reading the reviews.
Albums like these are fascinating cases to write about. It's won't win new fans, and it's not designed to appeal to old ones per se, just to wake them up, to test them and see if there's room in their hearts to grow along with him. Maybe, in fact, it's for me, the 26-year-old avowed lifelong Beatlemaniac and music nerd, who wants to see what the old fella has left in him. I return to my original premise. As a Paul McCartney album in his overall discography, it's somewhere in the middle, sure. As a Paul McCartney album in 2013, it's great. If it were the same album by a new 26-year-old artist, you'd think he was a damn genius. So there's that.
This is just to remark on the difference between Phoenix's 2008 album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix and their 2013 effort, Bankrupt. I was slow to come around on Wolfgang Amadeus... it was one of my first reviews and I was still sussing out my voice as a critic, so I was more reticent to give it praise, and more keen to take it down for minor flaws. It's one of many pieces of writing I've done that I consider embarrassing to have written. My current opinion of that album is that there's a real beauty to it, a humanity that evades a lot of synth-based music (usually by design,) a certain nuance and icy poetry. Every little bit has its place, and there's a soft touch to it. When I was younger I thought they were maybe aiming too high and missing, but as I've gotten more experienced I've learned that they were right on target. I like just about every track on that album very much.
The follow-up, Bankrupt!, is a different creation. It's much bolder and brasher, noisier, in the mold of Foster the People or Passion Pit. They've filed all those fine points down, and filled in the gaps with, well, whatever sounds. I object to it, in the sense that I liked the earlier product much better, but it's clear they're trying something different. And sometimes it works. Not enough to get a thumbs up from me, but I can adjust my head, I think, to say "Okay, they did this, and assuming it came out like they wanted, it is what it is." There are moments on Bankrupt that really do think are great, like "Oblique City," the closing track, which feels like a good midpoint between the two modes. They are good enough at being a big, hooky band, as on "Entertainment," and "Trying To Be Cool," that they deserve continued success, and they still have ideas as on "S.O.S. In Bel Air" and "Bourgeois," that make the album into a fairly consistent product. I just think they excelled on the previous album.
Another album that I reviewed early on was White Lies' second album, Ritual. I found it such a serious, stiff affair, a bit silly and oversized. But there's a charm to that, the deadly melodrama of the musical backdrop and the severity of the delivery, the way the singer just can't seem to loosen up, like your college roommate who's really into New Order. Unlike with Phoenix, who made a conscious alteration to their sound, White Lies appear to have merely ironed out some of the kinks in theirs for 2013's Big TV. They've found a balance of all the attributes in their sound that appeals to people. Everything about this album seems to have leveled up, in conception and execution. It just clicks more.
And I think, objectively, it's a better album, but I miss that weird stilted stuffiness of the earlier one. It's one of those quirks of personal taste, that I prefer the one that is a bit gangly and lumpy, compared to the slick post-success affair. There was a life to it, if a neurotic, utterly mannered one. It was nakedly itself. I would recommend Big TV first, to a new listener, but I'll listen to Ritual more often on my own.
These cases reminded me of each other, so I sandwiched them together in this article. In both cases, I liked the predecessors more, but that doesn't invalidate the later album. There are always questions in situations like this: Is it a response to success, an attempt to paly to the audience, or merely what happens sometimes after you've recorded one album: you want to record something that sounds a bit different? I can't say authoritatively in any direction, and I'm wary of people who presume to. Mine isn't to suggest why Bankrupt! or Big TV sound the way they do, after Wolfgang Amadeus and Rituals. Mine is just to listen, if I like them, and see if I can bring them to others who might.
So here's the bottom line: Phoenix and White Lies are both bands that use a synth-heavy approach rooted in 80s pop music. Whereas Phoenix's is hooky and intended for the dancefloor, White Lies' is contemplative and in its way, romantic. Both albums feature some solid hooks and really well-done tracks, although both bands have recorded albums I like better. Sometimes, you've just got to lay your stance bare.
One of my little pet peeves in other reviews is when the critic simply cannot get over their opinion of the earlier CD enough to judge the new one on its own merits. And that may in fact be the case here, but I'm willing to cop to it. I like Wolfgang Amadeus a lot, and this is a different thing that I don't like so much. But hey, I didn't always like Wolfgang Amadeus that much, so maybe in time I'll come around.
Heck of a year for returning bands. My Bloody Valentine dropped their first in two decades on us, the Pixies have an EP, the Replacements are touring again, even David Bowie came out of semi-retirement. Mazzy Star's legacy may not be as bombastic as those heroes, but they have their place, their niche neatly carved out, with the gentle, soft-focus guitar of David Roback and the sweet, whispery vocals of Hope Sandoval. Their new album, Seasons of Your Day is just a really lovely 50 minutes of that. It'll sit nicely on my shelf with recent releases from the xx and Feist, and classics from the likes of Nick Drake and Richard & Linda Thompson. It's power might be the exact thing that people who like Lana Del Rey's music get from her. It's a thing of measured beauty, subtle and low-key, restful and relaxed. Sandoval's cooing voice carries a distant, enigmatic sweetness. The slight instrumentation - full of instruments, but with everything operating at the lower end of the power gauge - takes you in and wraps the whole affair around you. Dusky steel slide blues guitars add weight, a shamanistic feel here and there.
There's a real human spirit at work here. It suggests itself, rather than taking a concrete, knowable form, leaves us to ponder and interpret and to take from it what we can, depending on what we brought in. Personally, tonight, I needed something with this distant glow. This introspective comedown.
I was talking with an aunt tonight about meditation, and about "being present." For all the talk one might sling about putting on an album like this and "drifting away," the question remains where you drift to: deeper inside yourself, it seems. You listen to an album like this and you are forced to just sit there with yourself and take it all in. Think about yourself, think about the world around you, and the one inside.
Safe to say, 70s-flavoured retro-rock is an increasingly prominent part of the great musical tapestry. For a long time now, there's no shortage of bands in their 20s who grew up listening to music from before they were born and learning from that. I've expounded before on how good it is that these bands exist. They crystallize everything that holds up about Led Zeppelin, Bad Company, Foghat, et al, and remove it from context. Meaning, I'm guessing bands didn't have much of a conception that they were doing "70s rock" at the time, they were just trying to find the way forward from what had been done in the 60s, and what was popular at the time. Now it becomes a conscious decision, a statement of identity. And we've seen enough of it that it's not enough for it to be a novelty or a gimmick. You have to live it.
Rival Sons are a band whose work I am always quick to steer people toward if they're looking for something fresh but familiar. I'm thinking of calling it "New Old," and it goes in a category with The Sheepdogs and Monster Truck. On Head Down, they hit all the major hallmarks of a classic rock album, to the point where no classic album might actually sound just like this. There are pummeling party anthems like "Until The Sun Comes" and "Wild Animal," soaring anthems like "Run From The Revelation," and George Thorogood-like bar rock like "All The Way." Beyond being competent imitators, they find their way to some of the more eccentric corners of their chosen era, like "The Heist," which has the most classic of choruses, the Led Zeppelin III style campfire psych jam "TRUE" or my personal favourite track on the album, "Jordan," which calls up the kind of spirituality not typically used in rock music anymore and almost on its own validates the whole deal. An album like this at first feels comfortable and recognizable, then it's impressive that they got it "so right," then at last it just has all the same pleasures as the actual old music. It strikes that balance between repetitive/consistent and wild/energetic.
There's a difference between, say, a 70s-influenced band like Queens of the Stone Age or Foo Fighters, and a real retro-rocker like Rival Sons. The former camp takes the old ways as a starting point and then moves forward, tracing rock back to a certain point and then taking off from there. QOTSA's new album is very much a 2013 affair, offering an alternative representation of rock from what is typically offered to the Top 40 (as if there's any rock on the Top 40.) Their music is loaded with stylistic decisions that are informed by both decades of nostalgia and a generation of experimentation. It has classic appeal and modern sheen. It takes chances that may in fact alienate fans of the old ways, simply by being modern. That's the downside. The upside is that you get the freshness, the inventiveness of a defined artistic voice. If it scares people off who are looking for comfort, so much the better, because the people who prefer it will like it more. For instance, "The Vampyre of Time and Memory" sounds like something that could have been recorded in the 70s, but doesn't sound exactly like something we know of that was recorded in the 70s. This is the rock that is dedicated to pushing the form forward, or at least keeping it alive in the now. They're not just paying tribute, they are taking up a cause. For shit sakes, Elton John appears ("You need an actual queen on the record!") on the awesomely proggy "Fairweather Friends."
The common denominator to both these albums is that they cut the bullshit that's piled up in rock over the last few decades: the accumulated cultural memory of hair metal, post-grunge, and rap-metal. They use pulverizing riffs and power-fantasy lyrics to assert a huge sound that is completely carefree and escapist. This is headbanger paradise.
I'll admit that I'm not overly familiar with the Pete Doherty songbook... The Libertines are one of those bands that I "get," and appeals to me, but I want to like a bit more than I do. That said, the songs I've heard off this Babyshambles album have really hit the spot for me. It's like Vampire Weekend's instruments being played by Cage the Elephant, or Joe Strummer covering the Gin Blossoms (or... Pete Doherty covering the Gin Blossoms.) It's not overly sophisticated stuff, power-pop chords and a real messy delivery. Absorbing stuff here. It rocks.
Nicki Bluhm and her band evoke plenty of rustic-polished acts from across the generations: Sheryl Crowe, the Eagles, the Band, Eva Cassidy, Fleetwood Mac, Dawes, Band of Horses... basically, if you are my dad, you'll probably like this album. In fact, I dig it myself, it's a thoroughly clean good time with just enough rock and soul, and they find enough routes into their sound to keep the album interesting track after track.
Franz Ferdinand's new album comes to me as a breath of fresh of air. It actively excites me. It carries a verve and spirit that sets it apart from the current crop of rock acts. I say this because this is my third draft of this review and in the previous two I was driven to tangents complaining breathlessly about things I don't like about other bands. But none of that's important because what I do like is this album.
Franz has concocted an effective new batch of their particularly dance-tinged, kinetic rock music. It feels right to me, like they didn't need to study up on how to sound like themselves, or work too hard to infuse their music with obvious hooks. Working too hard is the enemy of rock music. You can get bogged down. Instead, this music contains a lot, does a lot, has a lot of ideas, but is never overworked or overly tidy. It's messy and beautifully imperfect: Alex Kapranos' voice sounds a bit thinner and wavers more, almost like a karaoke singer who's had a few. I feel like if you isolated the vocal track to this album you would be mostly unimpressed with the efforts. But he's from the David Byrne school of histrionics, and its his energy that really sells it, definitely matching the overall calamitous musical atmosphere. Altogether, the band plays with an unstudied ease that would be at home in any era: they retain the timeless immediacy of their earlier singles. It takes balls to be this unpolished. It retains a character and humour about itself, while never getting tripped up and leaving the moment behind. "Right Action" is one of the bassiest, self-assured singles I've heard this year.
It all comes out thrillingly because they know the difference between "a fun pattern" and "mind-numbingly repetitive." There are enough change-ups, as in the melancholic "Stand on the Horizon," the easy-breezy croon of "Fresh Strawberries," and the motor-mouthed "Bullet," which all come one after another. Some of the intros kid the listener, but gradually unfold the song to reveal how it works with the rest of the album. It all adds up to a really consistent listen. You can put this whole album on a loop at your next party and never have the energy falter. I just love this energy. You can't teach this. You can't fake it. You can only hope it comes out the way it's meant to when you're done making it.
I'll confess, I'm not even sure I love this. There's not always certainty to the "Does it Rock" series, although I usually end up in the affirmative. I listened to the first 30 seconds of this thinking "Hm, this is a good start, I hope they don't squander it." I've been disappointed before. But no, they make all the right moves: it's mannered enough to hit the charts but rocky enough to please jaded folks like me. I grow more anhedonic and tough to please by the day, and yet it's also telling that anything that's just a little good seems laudable to me. It seems like it would be a "middle of the pack" late 90s rock single, but in the context of 2013 it just seems refreshing and fun to hear. It cheers me up.
Here we have a nice, crisp, clean and wholly addictive pop rock song. The sound is subtle and restrained, yet catchy and classic. The YouTube comments pitch endless comparisons, and I'd throw in my own as Huey Lewis and the News, or maybe Hall & Oates, some good workable pop. Here's some legit stuff: off the beaten path of what everyone else is doing, and yet familiar and instantly classic. Compulsively re-playable. Have a great weekend.
As this site will attest, I am a huge, huge admirer of the first two Arctic Monkeys albums. I still enjoy listening to their later stuff, but I get less crazy about it. Whether they lost their way or simply became something that interested me less, I can't say. (And the fact that I'm not willing to say explains why I am not yet being paid for my opinions.) But I believe, fundamentally, they are a good band, and can turn out a good song whenever called upon.
The debut single from their upcoming album hits the spot for me. Again, it's not a return to "I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor." The motormouthed brattiness has aged into contemplative, unwinding statements that seem tempered by recreational pot rather than amphetamines (whether Alex Turner uses drugs, I don't know, but that's my metaphor.) The riff on this reminds me of Elbow's "Grounds For Divorce," which is fine because that song isn't really what Elbow sounds like anyway. This is a good slow groove, and instead of hitting you with a crash bang dynamite chorus, it works its way into your skin insidiously, begs repeat listens, tempts and teases.
Is the current permutation of the Arctic Monkeys, which has proven to be the band's lasting creative interest, more mature? More thoughtful, intelligent, savvy? Maybe but maybe not, maybe it's just slower and deeper and that gives it the illusion of learnedness. If so, it's an illusion I can buy into. Which is helpful, because even though this is not the Arctic Monkeys sound I fell for at first, it's one I can come to appreciate.
One of the things that has happened, since I've opened this site up a bit, is that I feel free to write about things that I might not otherwise have targeted. I really like the Mowgli's, and I feel like they would be worthy of the site's full length review treatment (if I ever do that again) except there's half a chance that the charm of their frothy, high-energy pop rock approach might wear off this jaded old 20something by then.
This is probably going to appeal most to teens, people who have seen enough to know what they like but still able to be impressed by something novel. It's unrelentingly peppy and positive (even in the acoustic or intimate numbers) and a lot of the songs feel like giant communal singalongs. There are hooks, pounding drums, playful synths... this is music that hasn't been tainted by cynicism or irony. It's also not bland or shrill in its earnestness. It's easy to keep listening as they play through their tricks one at a time, then layer them over each other in different ways. It's sometimes grandiose, sometimes intimate, sometimes tightly assembled and sometimes loose. It's explorational.
This is just really fun to listen to, youthful and vibrant. I can see people who have been around longer than the intended audience, or me, being quite unimpressed, but I think that "been there done that" attitude is death for music criticism because every time is someone's first. There will be people who hear this CD - 15, 16 year olds - and it's the first "good" thing they heard. Nobody is born a Bowie fan, you know?
This review slash write-up slash random bullshit comes with a full disclaimer that you have absolutely no reason to take my opinion of any hip hop album seriously ever. Ever. It dominates so much of the musical landscape but it's a form that I have yet to truly adapt my head to. Left to my own devices I'd just listen to David Bowie and Hollerado all day every day, but Yeezy gets people in my store, despite having an audience that should be willing and able to download.
As for the album itself, well, I admire it a bit. I might never even listen to it again, but I like it more than what I heard of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It's a hardass record and he does some daring shit on it, making abrasive clashing sounds on it, speaking hard truths and making no effort to contrive a hit out of it. It's the testament to his cult of personality that it is allowed to simply be, and to be whatever he wills it, because he wields that power. That cache. He's reached an artistic state of grace, where he wags the dog, and now he has the daunting task of keeping ahead of himself. Which is a good problem to have. The stunts he does attempt, like bringing in a sample of "Strange Fruit" for "Blood on the Leaves," manage to come off successfully. Kanye is many things, but not someone who reaches for the middle, and I respect that wherever it's found.
I mean, look. I'm not the authority. My blind spot for hip hop music is one of the dozens of reasons nobody will ever pay me to write about music for a living, I'm just trying to get better at it. Well, get better, or just get content, since Yeezus is dominating the dialog this week and Magna Carta will be dominating the dialog next week. It has my approval, for whatever that might be worth to you. It's a risky, almost dangerous thing, that really accounts for itself.
What even is Vampire Weekend's music? Whimsical, creative, cutesy, unpredictable... they can throw any trick or twist on any song and turn it instantly memorable. And yet that same quality, rightly, keeps a lot of people away from them. Sometimes I am just not in the mood for their shit. Sometimes excessive quirk is a turnoff. There are reasons music generally takes the forms it does, and while the Vamp Wknd (as nobody probably calls them) takes that for their backbone - at its core the music is eminent pop rock - they lay on so much extraneous chicanery that every few tracks I need to hit pause, rest my ears, maybe listen to something that I "get" more. At its worst, its best qualities are shrill, annoying, frustrating, confusing, distracting, irritating. Hipness is kind of a shell game in that way: keep it moving so they never figure you out, never label you. Stay ahead of your audience so they never get over you. Maybe, they'll think, they just don't get it. (By they, I mean me.)
Maybe you really love Vampire Weekend! Maybe you're never not in the mood for them. Good for you! I can totally see that. Personally I don't have the energy to keep pace with their relentlessly changing sound. Are they innovators, imitators, curators of the weird? I don't know. I'm actually kind of glad they do what they do, and can safely recommend this album to anyone who's of that mindset. Personally, I'm not, but I get it. Kind of. Maybe. What I do know is that very few things that have a chance of being great are for everybody.
One of the things I've realized since starting this site is that there are a lot of different ways to enjoy music. Sometimes it's as an old favourite, something that you've known your whole life and enjoy because it it's familiar and it calls up fond memories, even if it was "before your time." Sometimes it takes the form of a new fixation: something that, when you discover it, you need to know as much of it as possible. A new favourite singer or band can do this, something that impresses you on every level, from songwriting to performance. I've been blessed, since starting this site, to find a lot of great items for that latter category, from Hollerado to the Hold Steady, Arctic Monkeys to Arcade Fire. Things that I can feel like I can love, but I didn't know about before 2010.
But you can't love everything. Everything can't be excellent, anymore than everything can be terrible. There are a million billion songs floating around the atmosphere right now, and there are reasons all of them got made, but sometimes that reason is just to make music. It becomes the music that fills the background of our everyday lives, that we don't think much about, that is pleasant enough when it's on but maybe not worth obsessing over, but that we still like to hear. I love the Foster the People album, but I don't think much about it when I'm not listening to it. Same with Phoenix. Imagine Dragons is a capable band, I don't need to listen to them when I get home from work but I haven't gotten to the point of turning them off if I hear them. This may also explain the appeal of Mumford & Sons, the Lumineers, Of Monsters and Men and the dozens of bands following that path, to those who aren't into it.
Not everything needs to be a 10/10 to be "good." I don't even have to recommend buying it for it to be good. That may sound, on the face of it, to be a shitty, cynical thing to say, but it's a realistic way to reconcile the fact that there are things you love and things you don't. I don't love Atlas Genius, but I like that it's floating around out there. I think this is perfectly fine music for a summer afternoon, and it will probably be blaring from car windows all summer, so I might as well.
I bought this album. I haven't unwrapped it yet, and I feel like if I do, I won't end up saying much more about it than I already have here. It's a passive pleasure. Some music is just like that, and it isn't the same for everyone, but I think we can all agree it exists. And that's not a bad thing.
If you're the type of person who is worried that excessive praise will turn them off from listening to an album, I will save you some time: White Paint by Hollerado is very good and you should buy it. You can skip the rest of the post. Have a great day. For the rest of us...
Well, between you and me, I have come to feel, in the three years since I first heard their debut, Record in a Bag, that Hollerado is one of the best things going. That's just a an unqualified fact. They rock harder than most contemporary rock acts and seem to have a lot more fun doing it. They are are as smart about their music as any art group to hit the scene, writing lyrics that are not only insanely catchy and memorable, but thought-provoking and original. The lyrics on this record take you from a scrap picker in Fresno to the Pinta Island home of the late Lonesome George, from the occupation of The Netherlands in World War II to the deepest chambers of the human heart, and it begins and ends, in a sense, in deep space. Not only do they have ideas about promotion and packaging (hand painting the entire pressing run so that each case is unique) they have a lot of ideas about their music, and they all work.
The music takes the form of sweet, raggedy garage power pop, putting Hollerado in the tradition of Weezer, Sloan, The Replacements, Hüsker Dü and Big Star. They sound like guys who just love music so much and want it to always be good: "Desire 126" sets a peppy, Cars-like riff against a lyric "Desire / Is just a chemical / It goes and it goes and it goes... / Desire, sometimes it's good enough..." acknowledging, dismissing or even celebrating the sad contradiction of that statement. Likewise, "Thanks for the Venom," declares "You were my friend, but you are a rattlesnake / Thanks for the venom!" The whole album seems to be gloriously built out of the contradictions inside us. "Too Much to Handle" is a great piece of hyperkinetic danceable rock that really shows off their skills in coming up with, then pulling off, musical tricks no other band would even dare attempt.
The band has also always shown a flair for the dramatic. The spacey first track, "Wonder, Velocity, Charlie and Me" blends into "Don't Think" to create a mini epic that includes phrases like "Levitation is made out of jet fuel and patience" and "I remember the time we went to the museum, slow, I said dinosaurs look said, you said just some thinking." The lyrics in the liner notes, unlineated, seem like the inspired ravings of a lunatic. 90% of the verbiage on here would never appear on another band's album. Then there's "Lonesome George," the tribute to the late Galapagos tortoise, in the way this band often writes, doesn't specifically refer to its subject but opens it up to make a grander statement, with its somber tone and great lyric: "You got no way to break my heart ... walk over me."
Everything in Holleradoland is a potential song. A while ago they posted the story behind "So It Goes" on their Facebook page, which is about uncommon kindness shown by a German soldier to one of the bandmember's grandfathers. It would be an exceptionally dynamic song even without that dimension. They also really flex their muscles on "Fresno Chunk," a spellbinding darkened funk rocker with bizarre, colourful lyrics, portraits of desperate people making due with what they can scrape together by picking through junk piles.
But probably the finest moment of the disc comes in the form of "I Want My Medicine," one of the finest odes to the devotion to music I have ever heard. In another band's hands, it simply would not have worked, but they sell it and imbue it with heart and pathos and grandiosity that is uncommon - seemingly impossible - from a guitar group in 2013, but here we are. You would hardly even know what the song was really about if you weren't following along, but when you start catching stray details in the lyrics, you put it together, and it becomes the most gorgeous, tragic thing. That phrase: "I want my medicine" is one of the heaviest, most honest things I have ever heard in my time reviewing for this site, because it's just such a concrete statement that emphasizes the gravity of the situation. I do not often get choked up when I listen to music, but I will freely admit when something gets to me and buddy, that hit hard. It's all in the execution. And then, before you collapse from the strain, the song comes to its end, and you get a little buffer in the form of the rollicking "Pure Emotion." Love it.
The album wraps up with "Pick Me Up," which is a wild power pop gem that sums up everything that is great about this band, not only their great music, but their worldview: We are young and in love / We are twirling through space / On the luckiest rock, in the loneliest place.
The sound of the album is polished, with clean bouncy hooks and grand production, but it still carries a "live off the floor" quality, a willingness to be imperfect or weird. It's exemplified by the often angular guitars and Menno Versteeg's unpolished rocker-next-door vocals. Some of the lead vox are handled by Nixon Boyd, whose deliveries are marked by reckless abandon compared to Versteeg's earnestness.
I love this band. They give so much value for your record-buying dollar. They convey, through their music, a curiosity and wonder at the universe and the people and things that fill it, the stories that every person, every animal, every item carries inside it, and the belief that people are good and things can get better, without seeming blindly optimistic about it.
More than that, they care about their music. They seem to put a lot of work and a lot of themselves into every lyric, every riff, every drumbeat. It resembles a lot of things but stands out as its own.
Hollerado has made two albums that belong up there with any two albums from any band ever. I really think that. Both Record in a Bag and White Paint bring such life and spirit to a listening experience that their quality simply cannot be denied. When I listen to music, all I want is to be taken out of my life, the world I think I know, for forty minutes or so, and shown something amazing. Hollerado does that with joy.
What am I supposed to say? What does it matter? Last week, My Bloody Valentine King-Of-Limbsed us with a new album. I don't know if there was any advance press for its release, I didn't hear it was happening until it was suddenly available for download, and then I downloaded it and suddenly I was listening to it. I did not know when I woke up that morning that I was going to end the day by listening to the first album this band has done in 22 years. Twenty-two years. That's a long time for expectations to build up. A lot of people have a lot of themselves tangled up in that previous My Bloody Valentine album, including me. I've listened to it many times in the past few years. I even wrote about it sometime early in this blog's run. And I was then and still am without a perfect expression for how much I love that album. It's spacy and distant and imposing and yet raw and personal and up-close. It seemed almost impenetrable, and then one day I got it. Maybe I don't understand it, but I get it. But this isn't Loveless we're talking about. This is what happens after an album like Loveless. 22 years after. Maybe that entails a certain amount of baggage, and if that keeps you from enjoying the new album, m b v, then I guess I can understand that but I don't agree. If anything, the years have improved this album for me, because it helps avoid the context, trimming the fat away from the usual expectations of a follow-up. It may have two decades of anticipation, but its arrival may have given it amnesty.
I think if they had come out with a new album within two or five years of Loveless, a lot of people would have had their ideas about what MBV should have done. What directions form Loveless were worth pursuing further, what should be discarded, what new avenues were or weren't worth pursuing. There's a lot that can go wrong with a follow-up project, especially something whose appeal is so nebulous yet all-consuming as Loveless's. People think that it belongs to them, that their interpretation of it, their idea of it is the correct one, and the follow up is a perversion of that. It's a no-win scenario so for years we got used to the idea that there would never be another My Bloody Valentine album. Then suddenly there is one. And you guys, it's really, really good.
It has that distance, that rawness, that coldness yet warmth, that slow-spinning hurricane of everythingness sounds, it has sounds that Loveless did not have and it lacks sounds that Loveless did have. At times it feels more rhythmic and maybe even more structured, but it also has "nothing is" which is a churning, mechanical sample for 3:34 very unpleasant-to-listen-to minutes but for some reason I keep letting it play instead of skipping, because it is part of the set and sitting at the end of this album it feels somehow earned. There are bits on this album that I love more instantly and completely than bits of Loveless, like that sad, staggering riff in "only tomorrow," which sounds like exhausted glee, excitement about being depressed, the million contradictions that MBV's music seems to inhabit. Delicate and brutal. "new you" is almost the pitch perfect MBV song you didn't know you were missing.
My Bloody Valentine has a monopoly on a certain sound... scarcely imitated and even more rarely duplicated. That they can play around within it, still sounding faithful and fresh, is very exciting. They took their time and were able to labor over this one for two decades -- okay I do not know how much of that time was spent literally working on music, but my point is they were given breathing room to decide exactly how an MBV album sounds and this is it. This is one. They are the makers of this music that I still don't fully understand but will revisit time and again to experience, to be in awe of the choices they made in creating it, the particular ways the guitars warp and drums chunk and vocals mutter.
Few things account for themselves as well as this band, these records. I have absolutely no business telling My Bloody Valentine how to make their records, nor telling people they should be into MBV. Quite honestly, not everybody has to. As much as it feels nice to be in this club, the point is that it definitely does not need to be for everybody. It's different from other things and as enjoyable as the only other albums by this band, which is what matters to me. It's a matter of taste and this satisfies mine, far above and beyond the call of duty.
My only gripe is that they didn't wait a couple of weeks to release it on My Bloody Valentine's Day. But if that means I got to hear it sooner so be it.
Of course it rocks. It's David Bowie, you piece of...
Okay, maybe it's not quite right to take the quality of a David Bowie recording for granted like that. A couple of days ago when this clip was released, I played through the Best of Bowie, and while there's surely a lot not included on that disc, I've never quite heard a song from him as gorgeous, as forthright-sounding and uncloaked in identities and styles as this. It definitely sounds like the work of a 66-year-old artist and it demonstrates why that's not a bad thing. The way it swells toward the end and grows in intensity are not quite notes a younger man could hope to hit so genuinely. His voice lilts tenderly, vulnerably, the music swells, and we wonder if after all these years we're finally getting a real look at this often distant, disguised figure. Not a full picture, but at least a scrap.
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