Really dig this one. Had to let the over-hype die down before I could enjoy it. I could use a lyric sheet though because I haven't a clue what their singer is singing hidden by the Aussie accent and reverb.

LOVE the Tame Impala album. I'd say right now it's probably top 3 for me.

I think I mentioned that somewhere else, go see them live if you have the chance.

same here.

Rangda - False Flag

I still love a good instrumental rock album especially if it manages to do something distinctive and interesting with regular old rock instruments. Rangda is an indie/underground supergroup of sorts composed of guitarist Sir Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls), guitarist Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance, Comets on Fire), and drummer Chris Corsano (Sunburned Hand of the Man + a bunch of other stuff) that cranks out fiery, knotty, and sometimes beautiful free-form rock. The more intense moments recall another indie supergroup of recent years, Original Silence, that I also enjoyed greatly. The quieter, folkier moments are more reminiscent of Chasny's main project, Six Organs of Admittance. Frankly, I'm really happy that both Chasny and Corsano have finally done something exciting together because I haven't really been too impressed with their previous collaborations in Six Organs. For Bishop as well, it's cool to hear a veteran guy do something that sounds so youthful and energetic at this point in his career.

Unlike Original Silence, Rangda don't pummel you endlessly with unrelenting skronk and chaos on tracks that extend upwards of the twenty- or even forty-minute mark. The album as a whole is barely longer than that, and it's no endurance test to make it through any part of it. In fact, for what it is, I think it's reasonably accessible. (My perception of that may admittedly be pretty warped, though.) The highlight for me is actually the longest track, 15-minute epic closer "Plain of Jars". It starts as one of the quieter, gentler numbers that ebbs and flows beautifully, finally building tension towards the end and then quietly releasing. A predictable move, maybe, but it makes for a really satisfying ending to a continually satisfying record. A real highlight of the year for me.

Rating: 8.5/10

Double Dagger - Masks EP

This is my introduction to Double Dagger and, to date, all that I've heard from them. It shows a lot of promise, and I like it a lot. What they do is nothing new and nothing too unique, but they do it well. Scrappy punk that floats somewhere between post- and pop- with some similarities to a lot of '90s indie guitar bands with ragged, emotive vocals. There's a healthy dose of wit, especially in "Sleeping with the TV On" (which makes me think of Black Flag's "TV Party" even though they're not really similar), probably my favorite track on this EP. Overall a very likable little sampling of what Double Dagger has to offer that I'd recommend to just about anybody.

Rating: 8/10

The Fall - Your Future Our Clutter

The Fall have such an enormous catalog at this point that it's usually kind of hard for me to care when they - or whoever Mark E. Smith has put together as his band right now - release a new album. For whatever reason, though... well, OK, because of all the positive reviews, I decided to give this one a shot when I probably haven't bothered with a recent Fall album since The Unutterable which was released ten years ago (and is pretty good, if I recall). I'm glad I did, though, as I think I like this as much as just about anything I've heard from The Fall from the past twenty years (mostly the '90s, obviously, since I haven't bothered with much from this decade). It's a powerful, relentless, heavily-grooving record that is irresistibly fun. M.E.S.'s formula still works like a charm after all these years.

Right out of the gate, you know this thing is going to be good. "O.F.Y.C. Showcase" stomps by furiously with the band (du jour) and M.E.S. in top form, and from there Your Future Our Clutter plows on steadily until finally cooling down a little at the end. The album's centerpiece and pseudo-title-track is possibly the standout, "Y.F.O.C. / Slippy Floor", a seething, sprawling mini-suite powerhouse. The guitars are really strong throughout this album, providing memorable hooks and a searing edge to the songs. Smith sounds old, for sure, but he sounds livelier and sharper than he has on a lot of other recent stuff I've heard of his (collaborations with other artists, mostly). Even though there's something a little bit artificial, or "Fall, Inc.", about the notion of M.E.S. just cranking out fall albums with whatever group of kids he's happened to assemble at the time, I can't help but enjoy hearing him do his thing at such a high level. Another year, another decade, another new Fall album, and it's great.

Rating: 8/10

When are you gonna get around to reviewing that Titus Andronicus? I noticed it's near the bottom of your best-of list.

And have you heard that new Violens album?

It's gonna be quite a while before I get around to the Titus Andronicus album. I may come around on it between now and then. A lot of things are in the queue before that, and I think Emeralds and Sleigh Bells are next.

I've never heard any Violens. What are they like?

cool.



There's some songs over at RCRDLBL and I can find the link for their new album in a bit.

http://rcrdlbl.com/artists/Violens/music

I just listened to a handful of tracks there, and they were pretty good. I'd be interested in hearing more.

just posted it in the twentyten thread.

Emeralds - Does It Look Like I'm Here?

Emeralds' thoroughly retro sound strikes me as pretty trendy (given that a lot of "new" electronic music lately is taken with appropriating worn, kitschy aesthetics), but I can't really say that they sound like anybody else right now. The closest thing I can think of is Adam Forkner's current White Rainbow project, but that sounds far more guitar-heavy. What they sound most like are early '70s electronic artists like Tangerine Dream that were developing their sounds more or less pre-disco, before "ambient" was really a musical term and before metronomic dance beats became such a staple of electronic music. This is pleasant, pretty stuff, mostly; fairly spacey and psychedelic bleeps and bloops with some actual, discernible guitar playing here and there.

Like their previous two albums, this one mostly sort of blends together. There are a couple of standouts, though, the more dynamic, intense, and heavier tracks, like 12-minute epic "Genetic", and the title track. I don't think that this is any great developmental leap from what they've done previously, but I suppose that it is their best release so far. It's just a little bit more interesting, a little fuller and richer, perhaps. It's still not exactly exciting although I suppose that's just the nature of the kind of music they're creating. It's nice as background music, a good soundtrack for working (at a computer or anything else involving sitting at a desk, I'd imagine). I don't think it's the sort of thing that anyone needs to go out of their way to hear, but there are certainly worse ways to spend an hour than chilling out (more or less) with this album.

Rating: 7.5/10

Sleigh Bells - Treats

I really hated this band when I first heard them. I've come around a little to the point where I can tolerate them, maybe even "appreciate" what they're doing to an extent. There's worse stuff out there for sure. (Witch house?) Their music is loud, simple, and dumb, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that. Sometimes it works really well. A lot of the time it doesn't.

"Infinity Guitars" is probably their best "big, loud" number. It actually manages to make me feel sort of psyched, sort of pumped up... about... I don't know what. Maybe it's the cover art - I'm sure it's also a label that's been applied by many critics - but a lot of this has a big sporting event feel, the stuff played over bad speakers in stadiums to get fans hyped up. I guess that's at least part of what they're going for. The weird exceptions to this are slower numbers "Run the Heart" and "Rachel" that clog up the middle of the album before it reaches its other high point, "Rill Rill". "Rill Rill" is also a lighter, slower (well, none of the songs are actually fast) track, but somehow it manages to work. It actually sounds kind of like some late-'90s loop-based alt-pop single, like something by Len (ugh) or somebody. Maybe I just like it because it offers a refreshing break from the obnoxious BOOM BOOM BOOM of the rest of this album. After that it's right into the irritating "Crown on the Ground", the somewhat more tolerable but much shorter "Straight A's", the grating "A/B Machines", and finally the closing title track - another non-highlight - coming not a moment too soon. It's a short enough album not to really piss me off, and I guess they're doing enough of their own thing for it to have its place. I could do without it, though.

Rating: 6/10

The album definitely needs more "Rill Rill"...that song is a beast. I don't like the rest of it, though if I heard it outside or in a shop or something where talking isn't necessary, I probably wouldn't mind it.

Also, Rill Rill IS a loop/sample but of Funkadelic.

Woods - At Echo Lake

I was recently talking to someone about music fads, and she brought up the previous lo-fi trend, expressing her weariness of it and how "all the bands sounded the same". Now, maybe we listened to a different batch of bands that fell under this broad umbrella, but still I couldn't disagree more. If anything, it seems to me like it was one of the more disjointed "movements" to come by in recent years. All that really united most of the bands was, basically, low fidelity recording quality. You had straight-up garage rock revival, Royal Trux-esque junk-rock, inhalant-damaged beach punk, something that sounded like Joy Division demos, homespun girl group pop, and just some downright abrasive, earsplitting, dissonant indie guitar rock. Oh, and then you had the hippie-ish, outdoors-y bands like Ganglians and Woods. Where Ganglians had a little bit of a Beach Boys vocal harmony slant going on, Woods utilize a singular, somewhat extreme falsetto, making for a pretty unique sound. At times when they pile on the guitar squall, Woods reminds me a little of early Mercury Rev, but only a little.

So anyway, I like Woods. I don't think they sound like anybody else, really, and yet there's something fairly familiar and comfortable about their music. They draw on a lot of the same hip influences that a lot of their peers do so there are some underlying similarities in that sense. On this album, they've made some very slight refinements on their formula, and that has its pros and cons. On the plus side, even when they get jammy, it's only for maybe a minute or two, nothing like the nine-minute snoozer "September with Pete" from Songs of Shame. (Here they even get a little Krautrock-y on "From the Horn", but it's only two minutes long.) There are also some much more memorable and solid songs this time around like "Blood Dries Darker", "Suffering Season", "Time Fading Lines", "Mornin' Time", and "Get Back". On the downside, they've essentially lost their edge. There's nothing particularly interesting or exciting here. Songs of Shame seemed rife with potential, and that can be a virtue unto itself sometimes with new music. Now it seems like maybe they've stopped developing a little bit prematurely. It could just be that this is a transitional phase, and hopefully if they're stopped experimenting, they'll make up for it by refining their songcraft even more in the future.

Rating: 7.5/10

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Before Today

This has been one of the more wonderfully weird albums I've heard in the past few years. On the one had, Ariel Pink seems to almost jokingly dabble in discarded genres like soft rock, drawing surface comparisons to something like Ween. And while Ween isn't always a joke, per se, I've always felt like there's a cynical, jokey undercurrent in practically everything they've done, that they're never taking music seriously. That music itself is a big joke. I don't feel that way about Ariel Pink, but maybe that's just because he hasn't made his 12 Golden Country Greats yet (as far as I know - this is the first thing of his I've heard). Right now, his music feels current, vital, and fun, and possibly even sincere in its love of "cheesy" aesthetics.

There are a lot of great, catchy tracks on this album. "Bright Lit Blue Skies", "Fright Night", "Beverly Kills", "Butt-House Blondies" and "Revolution's a Lie" are pretty hard to argue with on their own. I'll have to admit that I wasn't immediately drawn to lead single "Round and Round", but it is a pretty good representation of the album as a whole, in all its bizarre goofiness and irresistibly tuneful glory. Opener "Hot Body Rub" may make it seem like you're being set up for a bunch of sloppy, cartoonish screwing around, but as soon as the appropriately named "Bright Lit Blue Skies" kicks in with its pseudo-surf guitar, driving rhythm, and solid pop hook, it's apparent that's not the case. The album has a few ups and downs like that, occasionally veering into territory that is just plain weird ("Menopause Man"), and on a track like "Can't Hear My Eyes", really working to earn those Ween comparisons. Overall, it's a really fun ride, though, and easily one of my favorites of the year. Where a lot of recent artists (chillwave, for example) have taken worn, forgotten, and even formerly embarrassing sounds and crafted them into kitschy, nostalgic, cut-and-paste scrapbooks, Ariel Pink has really created something here with some life and vitality of its own.

Rating: 8.5/10

Thanks for the heads up on this. My listening habits have tended away from overdriven psych lately, but I'm really impressed by the dynamics of this, particularly in the latter half of the record.

Surprised you hadn't heard that, with Chasny's involvement and all. But yeah, it's the dynamics and variation that make it.

i'm surprised too. my psych mind is a sieve...

Oneohtrix Point Never - Returnal

Oneohtrix Point Never (now there's a name I would dread ever saying out loud) makes electronic music that fits somewhere between what I would consider to be trendy/predictable/boring and something I actually find interesting and unique. He kind of traffics in the same sort of sound palette that I feel like I hear all over the place right now: samples that recall damaged VHS audio, clipped (chopped) & slowed down vocals, vintage/primitive-sounding synths and effects, and a general sort of druggy chillness. However, he also makes the most interesting ambient music I've heard in a while, beating out Emeralds by a nose. And it doesn't hurt that he's not afraid to throw some abrasive noise into the mix, as he does on the first track here.

Aside from that opening track, the only one that really stands out is the title track, which also happens to be the only proper "song". The vocals seem to actually be "sung" by Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never), but are heavily processed and sound like a far more subdued Dan Deacon or Battles. (You'll have to look up the lyrics to have any idea what he's singing about, but I wouldn't recommend it.) So after opening with a noise track and following it up with two spacey ambient numbers and an actual song, the album moves into what I think of as more typical OPN territory, i.e. all the elements I mentioned in the above paragraph. To his credit, I think he's probably one of the frontrunners in this particular aesthetic. I like this album, even if I get a little bored with the second half of it, and I think that OPN probably has a little more going on and a few more interesting ideas than a lot of the other recent electronic music that I've heard. Still, it doesn't really have me excited about the future of the medium or this particular subgenre, whatever it is.

Rating: 7.5/10

where'd your Beach House review go?

Bottom of page 1.

Duurrrr... I must've clicked on pg. 1 thinking I was clicking pg. 5

That was one of the worst ones I've written, I think. Bad even by the low standards I've set.

Gonna try to plow through a few of these today. All of which are sorta out of my wheelhouse.