Events

Schedule

Reviews

Music

Videos

Interviews

Contact

Pictures

Blog

Home

Reviews

Shy Child
Koko
Dozo

Mochipet
Neon
Neon

M83
Cut
Copy

Kelley Polar
Does It
Offend You, Yeah?

Moby
These
New Puritans

HEALTH
The
Kills

Beach House

Goldfrapp
Kelpe
The
Raveonettes
Ssion
Hot
Chip
The
Teenagers
Kate
Nash

The Bang Gang DJs
We are
Wolves

Oh Astro

Vandelles
V/A -
Control OST
V/A
- Kitsuné Boombox

White Williams
Boys
Noize
The
Oscillation
Supermayer
Adam
Kesher

San Serac

Baron Zen (Remixed)

Freezepop
Bella
The
Tough Alliance

Numéro#
Shir
Khan

Michael Fakesch
White
Rabbits

Jamie T

Animal Collective

Junior Senior
Project
Jenny, Project Jan
Gravy
Train!!!!

New Young Pony Club

Justice
Walter
Meego

Robyn
Spoon
Theo and the
Skyscrapers
Clause
Four

Chromeo
Adam
Freeland
V/A -
Kitsuné

Boom Bip

Simian Mobile Disco

Digitalism
Motor
V/A - Get
Physical
Matthew
Dear
Black Strobe
Von Südenfed
Bonde do
Role

Dan
Deacon
Kathy
Diamond
Mickey
Avalon
Teddybears
Patrick
Wolf

Air
Albert Hammond,
Jr.

Ono /
Various Artists
Armand Van
Helden
Arctic
Monkeys
Bogdan Irkuk
(a.k.a. Bulgari)
The
Horrors
Presets
(Remixed)
A Sunny Day in
Glasgow
Plan B
LCD
Soundsystem
V/A - Ed
Banger
V/A - The
Upsetter Selection
I Am Robot and
Proud
IAMX
A Place to Bury
Strangers
Klaxons
A Touch of
Class
Young
Love
The Good,
the Bad, and the Queen
Audionom
Kudu
Softlightes
Shout Out Out
Out Out
V/A - DC
Recordings
Josef K
Linus
Loves
Sally
Shapiro
8-bit
Operators
The Phoenix
Foundation
Black Devil
Disco Club
In
Flagranti - Album
In
Flagranti - Maxi-Single
Depeche
Mode

Freeform
Five

Clipse
Marie
Antoinette
Goldfrapp
(Remixed)
Junior
Boys
Lindstrom
& Prins Thomas
DFA
Remixes Chapter 2
Moby
Whitey
Four Tet

Clinic
Los Amigos
Invisibles
The Killers

Fatboy
Slim
Basement
Jaxx
The Rapture

Tiga
Darkel
Lily
Allen
The
Kooks
Ratatat
Soulwax
The
Science of Sleep Brazilian
Girls
Ellen Allien
& Apparat
Be Your Own
Pet
Nouvelle
Vague
MSTRKRFT
CSS
DFA Remixes

The
French Kicks

Review Archives
David
Waxman
Cream
Freeform Five
Puffy
Amiyumi
Phoenix
Foundation
Hot
Chip
The
Charlatans
The
Rakes
Elefant
Gnarls
Barkley

The
Flaming Lips
Theo & The
Skyscrapers
Yeah Yeah
Yeahs
Matisyahu
St.Etienne
Clap Your Hands Say
Yeah

Black Wire
(Live)
She
Wants Revenge
Sia
Belle &
Sabastian
Black Wire
Audio Bullys
Mylo
The
Strokes
Artic
Monkeys
Concert Review:
Goldfrapp
We Are
Scientists
Babyshambles
Diplo
Tom Vek
Jamie
Lidell
The
Rakes
Antony & The
Johnsons
Madonna
The Fiery
Furnaces
Who Made
Who
Living
Things
The
Prodigy
Depeche
Mode
Super Furry
Animals
Metric
Gang Of
Four
The
Beta Band
Les Rythmes
Digitales
The Go!
Team
New
Order
The
Fall
Franz
Ferdinand
Elbow
Vitalic
Ian Brown
A.R.E.
Weapons
Calla
Sigur
Ros
Diamond
Nights
Princess
Superstar
The Dandy
Warhols
Royksopp
Stellastarr
Black Rebel
Motorcycle Club
Goldfrapp
Echo and The
Bunnymen

Listen to excerpts:

"The Volume"

"Angel of Mercy"

"Summer"

Click here to download it!

Shy Child :
Noise Won't Stop

released on Kill Rock Stars

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

The members of Shy Child know how important it
is to be in the right place at the right time. And like most
successful bands, they also know that sometimes you've got to
put yourself in the right place yourself. After a supporting
slot on Hot Chip's 2006 North American tour didn't net them
the attention they wanted, the Brooklyn duo (Pete Cafarella
and Nate Smith) took matters into their owns hands and packed
their bags for England. The band hit the pavement hard, and
then one year later, they basked in the glow of a gamble that
had paid off. They'd played Glastonbury, the O2 Wireless
Festival, and Wembley Stadium (opening up for Muse), secured a
rapturous NME quote for their one-sheets: "Shy Child are to
Kraftwerk what the White Stripes are to Led Zeppelin!", and
Jools Holland declared their sophomore album, Noise Won't
Stop, one of the best of 2007. Stella McCartney even
asked them to soundtrack one of her runway shows.

That's a lot of hubbub to generate in eight
months, and notwithstanding the British music press's penchant
for hyperbole, most of it is deserved. Noise Won't
Stop is built for the road; its 12 keyboard-driven songs
are more hammered out than played, charged with a synthetic
abandon that brings the first Faint albums to mind. But
occasionally brilliant lyrics combine with the adrenaline
rushes to create an album with far more depth to it than you
might expect, and it makes the album's mistakes more
pardonable.

Good thing too, because about half the
tracks on Noise Won't Stop have something wrong with
them. Moments of ridiculous, cheesy emoting ("Pressure to
Come," "Murder Capital"), timbral monochrome ("Kick Drum"),
and lazy choruses ("Generation Y") totally rob the record of
any chance at momentum, and up until its relatively strong
finish, Noise Won't Stop basically goes good song/bad
song, with very little in the way of grey area.

But Shy
Child is one of those bands that can do more than one thing
well, and that counts for a lot. Album opener "Drop the Phone"
is a pure stomper, with cowbells and keyboard bleats leading
the charge, while "Summer" is more sensitive, its synths
providing offhand comments on the album's most deftly worded
song. There are clever songs about cultural overload ("The
Volume"), rickety, nervous showstoppers ("Noise Won't Stop")
and set-closers ("Cause and Effect"), and even moments where
Shy Child sounds like a band deserving of international
recognition. On "Angel of Mercy," Smith and Cafarella take
hold of electrofunk keyboards and analog synths, stamp down
hard on the hi-hats, and sing a delightfully odd song about
how, thanks to technological advances, this generation might
actually never die. It's bizarrely poignant, and hopefully,
now that the band's come to the right place, there's more of
that to come.

back to the
top

Listen to excerpts on the band's Music page:

Click here to download it!

Koko Dozo :
Illegal Space Aliens

released on subTEKst Records

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

As anybody who lives in a city knows, melting
pots are always a mess. There's plenty of bad that comes with
cultures and backgrounds being crammed together in a tiny
space: people get pissed off at one another, tensions
sometimes arise, and that romanticized harmony never quite
rounds into form. But when it's time to party, it's pretty
easy to get close enough to ignore the problems.

The New York trio Koko Dozo strives for that
party-time closeness, and their debut album Illegal Space
Aliens definitely gets close enough. Every New York sound
imaginable is crammed into Illegal Space Aliens' nine
songs, from the city's camera clicks and metallic clanks to
the clubs' salsa, house, r&b, techno, funk, and hip-hop.
That might seem like a dangerously long list, but the band's
got the musical experience to highlight how closely related
they are. The shuffling, clattering percussion on album opener
"Second Time" might sound very different from the disco whoomp
of "Boomchi," but the evocative keyboard chords in the former
and the swirling (fake) strings in the latter show the songs
come from the same family. Even elements that see the band
wandering further out, like the blown out techno-inspired
drums on "Kokodozonomics" or the restless piano improvisations
on "Fulano de Tal," feel more and more at home once you get to
know them.

And if you need any additional incentive to
keep coming back to Illegal Space Aliens, look no
further than the vocals. Lead singer Amy Douglas doesn't
always have the perfect lyrics to sing (probably the most iffy
aspect of this record), but she's got a voice that can do
anything. She's got four octaves at her disposal, and she uses
them to sass ("Face on the Dancefloor"), emote ("Down") and
just plain belt; her emotional coloring's right in step with
the music backing her, even when the music's a little
silly.

Koko Dozo's music is a little involved by
clubland standards, and as such it's understandable that they
only play the occasional gig. But New Yorkers looking for
music that embraces their city's cultural diversity ought to
check them out. The best way to survive in a melting pot is to
get close.

back to the
top

Listen to excerpts here:

"Girls and Boys and Toys"

"The Graduate"

"Rambunktion"

Click here to download it!

Mochipet :
Microphonepet

released on Daly City

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

Hip hop culture has grown too big for its own
rhetoric. That may seem like a strange thing to say, but think
about it. It's the foundation of dozens, maybe even hundreds,
of local cultural scenes all over the world, and plenty of its
practitioners like to say they're part of a global, singular
thing. But at a variety of levels, the music's often pretty
myopic. DJs and producers tend to zero in on very select
musical styles, MCs mire themselves in mixtape feuds and
solipsistic boasting, and these intense preoccupations make
international collaborations rare. And when they do happen,
the results tend to be pretty messy.

This is all rather frustrating, because pretty
much since hip hop was born, musical omnivores and club goers
alike have been feeding on the related rhetoric of DJ culture,
which promises that concerns like genre and cultural
background are irrelevant to truly open ears. It's an
intensely problematic (and probably naive) theory, but the
right DJ can spin those would-be loose ends into sparks,
generate momentum out of plurality, and create a divine,
fleeting feeling that maybe it all does fit together.

Even though he flies below most radar
screens, the Oakland-based DJ/producer known as Mochipet is in
that elite company. His career output's nothing if not
eclectic: he's made everything from breakcore and tech house
to disco and hip hop, but on both the decks and self-released
mixes, he brings them all together without sacrificing any
fluidity. His newest album, Microphonepet, aspires to fit that
same musical eclecticism under the umbrella of indie hip hop.
Mochipet gives listeners a little of everything, from
true-school-inspired neo-soul and boom bap to techno-flavored
stutterers, and from track to track, the quality's
consistently high. The denser, more techno-oriented tracks are
his most inspired; "Get Your Whistle Wet"'s buzzing bass revs
up into overdrive over synth alarms, the digital twitches and
damaged breaks of "Rambunktion," and the sandpaper brushes and
bloops of "Take You Down" all work surprisingly well as both
club tracks and hip hop instrumentals. But Mochipet's also
digested enough music to make credible, more straightforward
beats: the breezy, whistling "Lazy Days," the bare,
utilitarian "The Graduate," and the summery "Ride On" all
honor the foundations they're built on.

There doesn't
seem to have been much thought put into the musical
sequencing, but Microphonepet's guest vocalists
would've made the effort irrelevant anyway. A staggering 28
rappers are crammed into these tracks (some appear more than
once), and when the pairings work, they really work:
Jahcoozi's Sasha Perera stays stride for stride with "Girls
and Boys and Toys" (all 132BPM of it), Dubphonics adds a dash
of smug arrogance to "The Graduate," 215: The Freshest Kids
have fun with "Vnecks," and the Hustle Heads and Kutti MC hold
their own in their respective tracks. But more than half the
MCs featured on Microphonepet seem uncomfortable
rapping over the beats Mochipet provides. There are a lot of
instances where some big fish are taken out of the water
they're used to (Hieroglyphics legends Opio and Casual both
struggle against big, whoomping UK garage basslines), but
other times, the MCs just drop the ball all by themselves.
RQM's clumsy ramble of verses on "PJs" is just brutal, and
Eriksolo of Oakland's Meanest Man Contest hardly secures
himself future guest spots with his spot on "Sharp Drest."

Most of Microphonepet falls between
the two extremes cited above, but its overall bloat makes the
solid tracks seem less appealing than they are. Mochipet's
found lots to like in all of them, and when they're released
as a current in one of his well-mixed streams, they sound
great. But Microphonepet is an appropriately flawed
portrait of genre that's entrenched in an awkward growth
spurt.

back to the
top

Listen to excerpts here:

"I Told Her On Alderaan"

"I Lust U"

"Michael Douglas"

Click here to download it!

Neon Neon :
Stainless Style

released on Lex

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

Boom Bip and Gruff Rhys have known each other
for a long time. Each has been in the music industry for over
ten years, and in that time they've played a lot of the same
festivals, gone on tour together a few times, and despite
working in different circles (electronic and indie rock,
respectively), their musical outputs have a lot in common;
both make bright, whimsical songs that fit pop trends and
subvert them at the same time.

Combined experience and shared philosophy
make the prospect of a Bip/Rhys collaboration promising, and
in practice, it delivers. Under the moniker Neon Neon, they've
created a debut album, Stainless Style, that's as
shiny and absurd as it is expertly produced. Based loosely on
the story of John Delorean, its songs revel in the misguided
ambition and excess of the 80's (and 00's), and the music
matches it, with an impressive range of genres and guests
along for a ride through the glitz and materialism of
everybody's favorite decade.

But contrary to what the above paragraphs
might suggest, there's very little about Stainless
Style that could be called crazy. Instead, a more
appropriate term might be fluid. There are straightforward
moments of radio-rock ("Steel Your Girl"), synth pop
("Raquel"), and even spacey electro pop ("Michael Douglas"),
but Bip and Rhys sneak surprises in at every opportunity.
Things like the drum machine solo on "I Lust U" and the
flattened reggae rhythms on "Sweat Shop" somehow make these
varied tracks fit together, and if you dig even further,
little touches like the muted metal percussion on the bottom
"Belfast" keep the compressed synths - the song (and album)'s
one dominant element - fresh from listen to listen. More
generally, the entire album is covered in a bright, enticingly
sterile studio glaze that both fits the retro-futurist theme
and accomodates the range of instruments. Stainless Style
moves in a lot of different directions, but it's guided
by steady hands.

In contrast to the icy, clean feel of
the music, the lyrics and guests are much more loopy. Yo
Majesty tramples over "Sweat Shop"'s compact beat, Naeem Juwan
knocks out Clipse-esque verses on "Trick For Treat," and Rhys
wanders into bizarre territory about once a song ( "Lawn mower
/ cost cutter / leaf blower / I've got a lust for power" goes
one especially strange verse on "Michael Douglas"). But in the
end, that proves to be Stainless Style's secret
ingredient. It makes John Delorean's world fun enough to
visit, but too weird to worship. And in today's era of
outrageous 80's idolatry, that's a message Bip and Rhys
probably wanted to get across the most.

back to the
top

Listen to excerpts here:

"Kim
& Jessie"

"Skin of the Night"

"Highway of Endless Dreams"

Click here to order it!

M83 : Saturdays = Youth

released on Mute

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

M83 has always been about size. Where plenty of
bands and artists obsess over capturing minutiae and small
details, M83's founding member, Anthony Gonzalez, works like
an I-Max director. It doesn't matter what's being shot; it
matters that what's being shot is going to be really fucking
big, and Gonzalez always uses that to his advantage. His two
previous albums, Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost
Ghosts (which he made with longtime partner Nicholas
Fromageau) and Before the Dawn Heals Us, swelled with
awe and emotional enormity, and on the right pair of speakers
or in the right mood, its simplicity and scope are enough to
strike listeners dumb, each feeling nearly transcendent.

Gonzalez's newest album, Saturdays =
Youth, is a kind of album-length celebration of teenage
years as he remembers them, and its first quarter feels
transcendent too. Instead of trying to channel emotions and
energies he no longer has, Gonzalez exalts teenage emotion and
its excesses and builds their memory up into something
indescribably big. Both "You, Appearing" and "Kim &
Jessie" are like the sonic equivalent of morphine, their
chords and synths potently open-ended. Each instills a reverie
that's tough to leave, and it's almost easier to listen to
them over and over again than move on to the next tracks.

Not that "Skin of the Night" and "Graveyard
Girl" are weak tracks. In fact, their excesses reveal the
scope of Gonzalez's perspective. Their lyrics might as well
have been stolen out of a 13 year old goth's poetry stash
("The cemetary is my home, I want to be a part of it,
invisible even to the night," e.g.), but their surroundings -
triumphant New Wave guitars on "Graveyard Girl" and desolate,
echoing pianos and keyboards on "Skin of the Night" - puts
that angst on the same level as the dew-eyed recollections
found on "Kim & Jessie"; there's no place in Gonzalez's
romanticism for selective memory. Saturdays = Youth
revels in the full spectrum of teenage feelings, no matter how
childish or unbecoming some might appear in retrospect.

These first four tracks are probably worth
the price of admission by themselves, but unfortunately, their
heights aren't reached again . The rest of Saturdays =
Youth somehow evokes both too much and not enough. The
interminable "Couleurs," for example, has an almost clubby
feel thanks to the 303 beats, but their forward clatter gets
lost in the enormous, static expanse of synths surrounding
them, and its length (well over eight minutes) weakens the
spell cast by the first four songs. Plenty of what follows
them is solid: "Highway of Endless Dreams" would sit nicely on
either of the last two AIR records, "Up!"'s breathy vocals are
gorgeous, and the electric hums and echoes of "Too Late" are
both epic and sad. But the back end of Saturdays =
Youth is lacking in something, and it's hard to say just
what that is. It may be that, for something as overwhelming
and confusing as one's teenage years can be, an artist needs
to have digested his subject totally to depict it in a way
that's consistently engaging. Far too often, Gonzalez seems
willing to embrace those bygone moments without getting a good
look at them, and it's that generosity of spirit that keeps
Saturdays = Youth, an otherwise decent album, from
being great.

back to the
top

Listen to excerpts here:

"Feel the Love"

"So Haunted"

"Hearts on Fire"

Click here to order it!

Cut Copy :
In Ghost Colours

released on Modular

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

It seems pretty safe to assume that Dan
Whitford is an excellent DJ. The driving force in Australian
band Cut Copy, Whitford's been in charge of two releases whose
strength lay in their inspired sonic combinations: his band's
debut, Bright Like Neon Love, was a woozy, beguiling
mixture of New Wave brightness, indie slack, and dancefloor
thump, and their Fabriclive installment, a solid (if
slightly safe) blend of dance and indie rock.

Bright Like Neon Love, which was
released back in 2004, deserves some credit for anticipating
(and maybe even spearheading) today's pluralistic dance
revival, but there's a reason it's rarely cited as a
touchstone by the indie rock press. Whitford's knack for
finding timbral and textural combinations (as well as ace
studio help - Phillippe Zdar mixed Cut Copy's debut) far
exceeds his songwriting skills, and In Ghost Colours,
his band's latest album, is both a triumph and a
disappointment for that very reason.

Aided again by a well-renowned knob twiddler
(DFA's Tim Goldsworthy), Whitford's fitted his sophomore album
with more of everything: more pop highlights, more electronic
textures, more interludes. But there's never a moment when
In Ghost Colours feels even the tiniest bit cramped
or cluttered. After laying the scene with some soft vocal and
airy synth samples, album opener "Feel the Love" slowly
metamorphoses from big acoustic guitar strummer to blissful
nu-disco to intro for the next track, "Out There On the Ice".
The song's liquid properties extend across everything on
In Ghost Colours. Whitford's got no problem putting
chopped vocal samples where a chorus should be ("Hearts On
Fire"), for example, or abandoning a song's lyrics before they
start to make sense ("Strangers in the Wind"), and the songs
don't end: they simply begin turning into new ones. On the
centerpiece "So Haunted," the droning, sax-esque guitar and
keyboard eighth notes don't prepare you for the soft chorus
attached, and halfway through, after a quasi-solo on the
guitar, glorious electrofunk keys and chimes come in out of
nowhere. Compared with the rest of the album's easy pace, it's
an almost jarring turn, but it's also about as unpleasant as a
pill of E kicking in. The balance that Goldsworthy and
Whitford strike between radio-ready rock and blog-approved
house is peerless, and it creates an environment in which
every aural surprise makes perfect sense.

Based on sonics alone, In Ghost
Colours verges on classic status, but giving it your
undivided attention is dangerous. As previously mentioned,
Whitford's lyrics leave much to be desired, and every verse on
this album pollutes its songs in some way or other. At their
most benign, the verses just make very little sense ("Feel the
Love"), but in worse cases, they make Whitford sound like an
asshole and totally ruin the music's soft, euphoric mood.
The insensitivity that spikes songs
like "Out There On the Ice" ('If that's what it takes, then
don't let it tear us apart / even if it breaks your heart'
goes the refrain) is enough to make the surrounding sweet
nothings start to reek, and the last thing this album needs
(or any pop album, these days) is a track-by-track evaluation
of its sincerity.

In the end, though, the above
paragraph amounts to a small gripe. Only a few tracks out of
15 are anchored by their lyrics, and nobody seems to care
about lyrical content anymore anyway. It's just tough to think
about how close this album comes to being one of the finest to
come out in years. Oh well. Fans will have to settle for
In Ghost Colours being the year's first great summer
record.

back to the
top

Listen to excerpts here:

"Zeno of Elea"

"Entropy Reigns (In the Celestial
City)"

"We Live in an Expanding Universe"

Click here to order it!

Kelley
Polar : I Need You To Hold On While The
Sky Is Falling
released on Environ

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

Kelley Polar is not your average electronic
pop musician. After winning a prize at the William Primrose
International Viola Competition at the age of 18, he went on
to study at both the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and
Juilliard, and he's currently a violist in a group called the
Apple Hill Chamber Players that plays most of its gigs in
troubled regions like the Middle East and Northern Ireland.

Given the heavy nature of his day job, it's
not surprising that Polar has a creative side project in which
he blows off steam; it makes perfect sense that it's couched
in a fun-loving genre like disco. But Polar's second album,
I Need You To Hold On While The Sky Is Falling, pulls
off an outstanding balancing act between complexity and simple
fun, seriousness and humor, carefree spirit and
philosophizing. Disco's liberating qualities apparently
encouraged Polar to try whatever he wanted, and the results
are thrillingly unique. The vocal melodies in I Need You
To Hold On... have all the melodic expressiveness of
musical theatre (but in a good way, I swear), and they imbue
Polar's songs, which range from a smiling vision of nuclear
apocalypse ("Chrysanthemum") and a song about a man falling to
his death ("Zeno of Elea") to meditations on the order of the
universe ("We Live In An Expanding Universe"), with a strange,
irresistible lightness. This contrast is crucial, because each
takes some getting used to. The songs are more monologues than
they are poetry, and as such they're rarely bound by
structure. But this frees Polar up. His lyrics are direct and
earnest, filled with more detail and meditation than a lyrical
structure will usually allow, and even at their flightiest,
there's never so much as a bumpy moment.

As you might
expect, the music surrounding these songs is involved, but its
appeal is immediate; it both demands your attention and
rewards it quickly, and the mix of strings and bright
programming is both right at home on Morgan Geist's Environ
label and far beyond it. On "We Live In An Expanding
Universe," the strings add a weighty, affecting dimension to
the immediate synths and multi-tracked vocals, and the mix of
vocal effects on display of "Sea of Sine Waves" mixes
wonderfully with the bright, squiggling keys. From start to
finish, the music conveys a world of complex, unlimited
connection just as well as the emotions evoked by that
possibility. It's not your average electronic pop album. It's
one of the best electronic pop albums of the year.

back to the
top

Album excerpts are available at the band's
Myspace page.

Click here to pre-order it!

Does It
Offend You, Yeah? : You Have No Idea What
You're Getting Yourself Into

released on Almost Gold

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

In its review of Does It Offend You, Yeah?'s
debut album, the NME managed to give the quartet a
lift ("near-classic," the final verdict read) and a PR
problem: the band's core songwriters, the magazine's writer
alleged, are laptop-wielders (the horror!). Both the drummer
and lead singer, the writer continued, were nothing more than
session men under contract for a year, signed on as a
marketing ploy to ensnare the innocent guitar-band-loving
youth. It's hard to believe that anyone with a set of eardrums
could be surprised by this, but apparently the rumor's caused
quite a stir over there (final verdict: the English take their
rock bands too seriously). The band's response to these
allegations doesn't quite refute the claims, but it's
surprising that they responded at all, as the music basically
speaks for itself. Their debut, You Have No Idea What
You're Getting Yourself Into, sounds like the work of two
different bands.

On one side, you've got the tracks that
brought the band all its notoriety: "Weird Science," "We Are
Rockstars," and "With a Heavy Heart (I Regret to Inform You)"
are explosions that make electro and heavy rock sound one and
the same. The key to these tracks is compression and brute
force: the drums and vocoded vocals are irrelevant to the
robot call-and-response of "Weird Science," while "We Are
Rockstars" destroys audiences with a single riff. "With a
Heavy Heart" brings some more traditional ingredients, like
post-punk guitar klang and saxophone, but it's still driven by
air raid sirens, filtered synth shrieks and burps. No matter
who does what in this band, those three tracks, along with
album opener "Battle Royale," are unquestionably strong, the
kind of thing that'll separate any band from any pack.

And this is certainly a good thing, because
the rest of You Have No Idea... slots them into a
much more crowded field. The rest of this album is
guitar-guided and radio-friendly, and its fit songs all
benefit from the hours put in by session men Morgan Quaintance
and Bob Bloomfield. Quaintance and Bloomfield bring a lot of
flexibility to the table, allowing the band to try out some
new things. Everything from the blurting haunted house rock of
"Attack of the 60 Ft Lesbian Octopus" to the New Wave
adventures of "Being Bad Feels Pretty Good" is way more
credible than it ought to be, and even the album's most
straight-ahead tracks, "Dawn of the Dead" and "Epic Last
Song," have some quirks to set them apart.

From their
singles to this hullaballoo surrounding the band's
songwriting, Does It Offend You, Yeah? is not what it appears
to be. But it would wrong to assume these mixed messages are
coming from a band without any talent. If anything, they might
be the most versatile band available at your record store in
either the rock or electro sections.

back to the
top

Album excerpts are available at the man's Myspace
page.

Click here to order it!

Moby :
Last Night

released on Mute

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

At this point in his career, Moby's playing
with house money. He's won a gajillion Grammys, DJed and
performed all over the world, and to top it all off he's a
millionaire many times over; from a creative standpoint, he's
entitled to do pretty much whatever he wants. But after his
last two records, 18 and Hotel, got smacked
around by critics, the man known to the IRS as Richard Hall
spent some time away from the spotlight. So much time, in
fact, that some began to speculate that Moby had called it
quits. The release of Go - The Very Best of Moby back
in 2006 didn't help matters, either.

But it turns out Moby spent that time getting
his groove back, and Last Night, his first release on
electronic music juggernaut Mute, is filled with the swagger
of an artist stepping onstage for an encore. Moby's billed
Last Night as "a very eclectic dance record," and for
the most part, it is. The majority of Moby's fans probably
don't know much about his beginnings as a house producer, but
this album's strongest tracks will have people scrambling to
acquaint themselves with his back catalog. Tracks like "Every
Day It's 1989," The Stars," and "Disco Lies" swell with
house-y pride, all big diva vocals, liberated piano momentum
and quick samples, and the funky guitars and keyboards on "Ooh
Yeah" and "I Love to Move in Here" create some of the best
moments Moby's ever committed to tape. But where Moby's
earlier house tracks were built for mixing, often running six
or seven minutes long, the tracks found here are shaped like
pop songs. Only three tracks of 15 run over the five minute
mark, and each puts the extra time to good use.

In addition to the house influence mentioned
above, Last Night is colored by several other
electronic music genres: trip hop colors tracks like "Alice"
and "Hyenas", and "257.zero" is techno through and through.
But this variety doesn't compromise Last Night's
cohesiveness. Moby's recent penchant for keyboard strings runs
through this album from start to finish, adding emotional
shade and weight in the most unexpected of places. As the
album progresses, a grand melancholy begins to set in, and the
mood that begins the album-closing title track is almost
desolate. With Kudu's Sylvia Gordon on vocals, "Last Night" is
heartbreaking, filled with synthy chills for the first half.
After a few moments of silence, the song is reprised by a jazz
combo, the perfect sound of nighttime solitude on the streets
of New York.

Last Night's the kind of album few
artists could pull off. In part, you have to be certain that
it doesn't matter if you succeed or not just to have a chance
of getting it right. Lucky for us, that seems to be something
Moby knows all too well.

back to the
top

Album excerpts are available at the band's
Myspace page.

Click here to order it!

These New
Puritans : Beat Pyramid

released on Domino

reviewed by
Bijai Mizell for GBH.tv

Brit rock band These New Puritans seems
poised to make a big splash on this side of the pond. After
considerable pre-release buzz in NYLON, Q,
and NME, Hedi Slimane, the ultimate arbiter of cool,
hand-picked them to compose the soundtrack to his August 2007
Dior Homme runway show. But Beat Pyramid, released in
North America on March 18, fails to live up to the hype. The
young band members (none are over 20) have that unique blend
of inexperience and arrogance that only seems to come with
youth. While their overall sound places them in the long line
of early 21st century post-punk revival bands, These New
Puritans lack a cohesive sound that makes listening to their
entire album enjoyable. True, there are plenty of catchy
melodies and infectious drum beats, and These New Puritans are
not above referencing unusual music genres, like dancehall
reggae. But the obscure, turgid lyrics are in constant
competition with the loud music, as if the band wasn’t sure
what to emphasize more. The result is often a pretentious,
cacophonous mess, tempered with bright spots like standout
tracks “Numerology”, “Elvis”, and “En Papier”.

The first and the last track on the album,
“…ce I will Say This Twice” and “I Will Say This Twi…” feature
a continuously looped voice saying (you guessed it) “I Will
Say This Twice”. “Numerology (aka Numbers)” is a great single
that exemplifies the strengths and weaknesses of the band. The
chorus is a great tribute to Joy Division and, more
specifically, its later incarnation New Order. But the lyrics,
such as “What’s your favorite number, what does it mean?
Number one is the individual, number two is duality…” are
distractingly inane. “Colours” shows off the bands’ fierce
pounding guitar riffs and electronic beats, one that keeps
heads bopping and toes tapping. “Swords of Truth”, which
features Gwen Stefani-like dancehall beats, is a bit dissonant
and overproduced. “Doppelganger”, one of two instrumental
tracks, evokes the atmospheric sounds of OK Computer
and is a welcome respite from the twitchy guitar riffs present
on the rest of the album. “C. 16th ±” is upbeat, fast, and
pretty enjoyable. In their subtle moments, “En Papier” and
“Infinity Ytinifini” can be quite melodic and intriguing.
“Elvis” is a straight, no gimmicks, great pop song. And it’s
here, when they strip away the pomp and frills, that we
finally see that These New Puritans is actually a good rock
band. From here, Beat Pyramid loses its steam. The
tracks that comprise the second half of the album are
uninspired, unitelligible, or downright unpleasant. Beat
Pyramid begins with promise, and ends with a muddled
mess.

While fans of Bloc Party and The Arctic
Monkeys might enjoy These New Puritans, Beat Pyramid
would benefit from serious editing. In this case, less is
definitely more.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

"Heaven"

"Crimewave"

"Glitter Pills"

Click here to order it!

HEALTH :
HEALTH
released on Lovepump United

reviewed by
Safiya Sawney for GBH.tv

In describing what emanates from HEALTH, a
five-member Los Angeles noise-rock group, "unusual" really
just doesn't do the job. After debuting on a split release
with electro-punk group Crystal Castles, Health played small
concerts, drawing eager listeners with its discrete sound and
making its presence known in the world of experimental music.
If you were to dump a male soprano group, an African drummer
and an organ player in the middle of a heavy metal concert and
then combine the resulting chaos with synthesizers, you could
possibly hear a sound similar to HEALTH's, a mosh-pit of
experimental melodies dominated by banging drums, screeching
guitars, erratic syth and brief, indistinct vocals. At first
the music seems blatantly confusing and cacophonous, but
further listening reveals a certain method to its perceived
madness. It's short, sometimes noisy, sometimes quiet, not
entirely ordered, yet still perfectly put together in a way
that encourages one to listen.

"Heaven," the first
track on their self-titled full-length debut, is a playful
introductory instrumental tune, dominated and introduced by
drums, and filled with punctuated pauses. "Girl Attorney" and
"Crime Wave" are noisier tracks that include soft chanting
vocals interspersed with the always-present drums and
squealing guitars. "Crime Wave" shows off the band's ability
to produce something more digestible by synching drums to
subtle melodies. "Courtship" contains syth squeals and screams
amongst drums and hymnal harmonizing. "Zoothorns" is
characterized by scratching sounds, loud drums and noise from
several syth sounds meshed together, forming music perfectly
suitable for the soundtrack to a terrifying Japanese horror
flick. It's wild, exotic and plain messy. "Tabloid Sores" is
fast-paced with sporadic squealing guitars and vocals amongst
drums, wild screams and sudden silent moments. The stand out
on this album is "Glitter Pills," a track, which unlike the
others, contain a base electro beat that one would actually be
able to rock out to while enjoying the band's musical stamp:
raw synth and indiscernible, monotone vocals. The noisy
element isn't very involved on "Glitter Pills." Not until the
very end, anyway, where after a brief pause heavy syth ensues
and then quietly fades away. "Perfect Skin" starts off quietly
and with projected vocals before the ubiquitous drums are
included. It's another non-messy playable sound on the album,
slow and stuttered with a satisfactory amount of noise. "Lost
Time" is a repetitive vocal chant set only to pounding drums
and cymbal strikes. It's a hollow song without much need for
any melodic intrusion.

While not everyone will accept
HEALTH's sound, there is a reason why they've garnered fans.
It's not music based on lyrics. It's music based on the fusion
of sounds and despite how experimental or "unusual" it may be,
it still is weirdly entertaining and appealing for those
curious enough to take a listen.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

"U.R.A. Fever" (video)

"Cheap
and Cheerful" (video)

Click here to pre-order it!

The Kills :
Midnight Boom

released on Domino

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

The Kills have to know that it's
make-or-break time. After their first two records basked in
the critical warmth emanating from the garage rock revival of
the early aughties, Jamie Hince and Allison Mossheart probably
realized after their last tour that popular tastes had
changed, and that they were going to have to fend for
themselves. Garage rock has basically become totally
irrelevant in the three years since their last album (No
Wow) came out, and without the status afforded them by
their place in that movement, all that's left is cold, hard
numbers: their debut Keep On Your Mean Side and
No Wow, to date, have sold a combined 70,000 copies.

That information may not add up to much (to
be fair, 70,000's a healthy number by indie standards), but it
probably helps to explain why their latest release,
Midnight Boom, took so long to make: the band's two
previous albums, produced right in step with musical fashion
and taste, each took less than two months to produce, but
Midnight Boom took almost a year and a half. The
band, aware of the stakes, wanted to make something different
(Hince was adamantly against making a "retro record"), and
after initially trying to work with a producer out in Los
Angeles, the duo fled to Benton Harbor, Michigan to work in
isolation. After close to 18 months, with Hince "sick with a
madness for this record," the band brought in Alex Epton
(a.k.a. XXXChange) for a fresh set of ears and additional
production help.

All this (admittedly circumstantial)
evidence suggests that Midnight Boom ought to be an
overheated, messy attempt to stay in the limelight. But in
fact it's the complete opposite. Thanks to just a few small
changes, their bluesy sleaze has been given a more percussive
pop, and for the first time the band's pop instincts are
featured outside the confines of the claustrophobic sexual
tension that marked their previous work. The result is
something looser, more opened up, and it suits the band well.
Tracks like "Tape Song" and "Sour Cherry" sound practically
buoyant thanks to their bottle and woodblock-created beats,
and the band's pop ambitions are revealed to be quite high on
tracks like "Getting Down" and "Black Balloon."

The
variety that those tracks provide also gives the band's more
familiar tracks more punch. The dark lurch of "U.R.A. Fever"
and the distorted chug and rattle of "Hook and Line" wouldn't
have the same impact in an album packed with similar songs,
but here, they're welcome dashes of attitude. No Wow
in particular suffered from its incessant moodiness and tape
hiss, but Midnight Boom's atmosphere is more relaxed.
Hince and Mossheart sound assured as opposed to older, even if
they're still not interested in showcasing their senses of
humor (the bizarre "Alphabet Pony"
notwithstanding).

The Kills may have a ways to go in
terms of pure songwriting before they're considered to be
among the indie elite, and as they grow more comfortable with
their status, that'll come. But Midnight Boom shows
that real talent lurked behind those crazy-eyed,
fight-fuck-or-kill poses they stalked around with for so many
years, too.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

"Gila"

"Holy Dances"

"All the Years"

Click here to buy it!

Beach House
: Devotion

released on Carpark

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

2007 was the year that America formally
recognized the newest stage of Western human development.
After digesting a research project by a member of the
Brookings Institution and a book by a professor at Princeton,
New York Times columnist David Brooks coined the term "the
Odyssey Years," referring to the decade-and-change that Baby
Boomers' children (and most likely every successive
generation's children) spend figuring out how they're going to
grow up. In so doing, Brooks endowed several wandering,
wondering generations with a stamp of legitimacy.

As it turns out, the music world was way
ahead of Brooks. Seven months earlier (Brooks's piece was
published in October), "All My Friends," the centerpiece of
LCD Soundsystem's Sound of Silver, was essentially a
paean to that same unsteady stretch, a look back by a man who
turns those years into the foundation for his success; Animal
Collective, Panda Bear and Yeasayer all released records
dealing with similar subjects later that year. Those four
records were easily among 2007's most stimulating, and it
seems they might represent the first steps in a nascent
movement concerned with the Odyssey Years, because not three
months into 2008, we've got another: Beach House's sophomore
release, Devotion. Like the aforementioned records,
Devotion is full of songs about committing to the
wanderlust and uncertainty of these years. Lead singer
Victoria Legrand's verses abound with images of travel and
transition, from harbors to astronauts, and her outlook is
endearingly conflicted, a swirl of negativity and hope that
varies from verse to verse: "Let's go on pretending / that the
light is neverending / so we'll still have all the summers /
let's be good to one another," she sings gently on "All the
Years."

That verse is punctuated by one of the
album's most intoxicating musical moments, as Alex Scally's
slide guitar drunkenly glides and bobs up over sleigh bells
and a pristine organ melody. Like most of this album's songs,
"All the Years" glides forward on a sublime collection of
organ drones and echoes, which radiate out of everything from
steel drums ("You Came to Me") and tambourines ("Some Things
Last a Long Time") to slide guitars ("Home Again") and
Legrand's voice. Almost every track has drum machine
accompaniment, but Beach House's songs are so colorful that
the ticks are easily ignored, even on "Holy Dances," a track
that changes rhythm three times. Instead, Scally's guitars and
organs create an endless, beautiful haze for Legrand's voice
to dip into and float across. Her voice is unglamorous, but
she uses it with confidence, and its cool and steady sound
(the band frequently multi-tracks it to create divine
harmonies) fits perfectly with Scally's contributions.

Both the music and lyrics on
Devotion approach the Odyssey Years in an almost
fanciful way, embracing them as a great obstacle to be
approached from any number of vantages. But the band
encapsulates their feelings on the subject with surprising
directness on the album's back end, and they do so with a
cover. The band seizes the lyrical directness of Daniel
Johnston's "Some Things Last a Long Time," pares away the
swirling ambience of the previous songs and turns the song
into a clean, lonely dirge, just echoing toms, tambourine, and
a guitar. It's the last great song on Devotion (its
final three songs lack the transcendent feel of what precedes
them), and its chorus encapsulates the central challenge of
the Odyssey Years: Some things last a long time.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

will be unavailable until
the album drops on Tuesday.

Click here to buy it!

Goldfrapp :
Seventh Tree

released on Mute Records

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

There are plenty of adjectives you hope
never to come across in an established band's press releases,
but "embarrassed" has to rank right near the top. The contexts
in which the word might be positive are few and far between,
and they're virtually nonexistent for a band like Goldfrapp, a
duo that's enjoyed steady critical praise, a decent amount of
commercial success, and has just released a record that's
markedly different from most of their earlier
work.

Unfortunately, it's
also the first word attributed to lead singer Alison Goldfrapp
in the one-sheet attached to Seventh Tree, the
English duo's aforementioned fourth album. The word describes
Alison's state as she tries to explain the origins of
Seventh Tree's title, but it stands at the the tip of
a large iceberg. From incomprehensible beginning to meek end,
Seventh Tree is the sound of a band in the middle of
a sharp turn, brimming with as much potential as ever but far
from finished with the fine-tuning and critical decisions
required to make the kind of transition they're attempting.
Without leaning too heavily on this press release, it seems
fair to say the band wanted this recording, and everything
that followed it, to be less draining than its predecessor
Supernature had been. At the same time, their brains
whirred with the possibility of making a record evocative of
the English countryside. As Alison goes on to say: "It's this
combination of the naive English folkiness with a bit of
horror and Californian sunshine thrown in."

After a few listens, it seems the band got
ahead of itself. Seventh Tree is vapidly pretty, the
kind of thing that can turn your brain off without activating
any pleasure centers. Tracks like "Clowns" and "Road to
Somewhere" are little more than processions of pleasant
figures and textures that drift indistinctly from beginning to
end. The variety at hand in both tracks is great; there is a
sublime metallic harp that combines with a warm synthetic
liftoff on "Road to Somewhere," and Alison's voice joins
canned strings on "Clowns" to form something as soft, chilled
and sunny as any English breeze. But both tracks suffer for
their loftier aspirations. "Clowns"'s lyrics make so little
sense that, despite being totally unintelligible, they manage
to ruin the song, and "Road to Somewhere" is stranded between
its epic swells and aimless songwriting. There's a certainty
and conviction that surfaces in stretches, as though the band
knows a beautiful stretch when it hears one, but these
haphazardly dot a maddeningly flaccid landscape, like snatches
of a resolution that pass through an afternoon spent doing
nothing.

Even if creating that vibe had been the band's
intention from the beginning, that's an incredibly tough
balance to carry off across an entire album, and Goldfrapp try
for it despite lacking any specific blueprints of their own.
Seventh Tree's most fully-formed songs, "Happiness,"
"A&E," and "Cologne Cerrone Houdini," all sound
distressingly cribbed, borrowing a little too liberally from
everyone from Air to the Beatles, and its these little nicks
that cost the album the cohesion that might've saved it. Its
songs do not sound better in sequence than they do apart, and
for something that ought, seemingly, to feel whole, it ends
rather suddenly, with album closer "Monster Love" not even
having the good taste to resolve itself, instead fading out,
seemingly in the middle.

There's more to like about this record than
I've let on, but there's far more to dislike too, and I'm
going to spare you the rest. Everybody is likely embarrassed
enough as it is.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

will be unavailable until
the album drops on Tuesday.

Click here to buy it!

Kelpe :
Ex-Aquarium

released on DC Recordings

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

Instrumental hip hop's gone a lot of places
in its day. From ghettos all across the world to the deepest
reaches of space, and from the dustiest corners of the past to
the dimmest projections of the future, it's gone everywhere
you'd expect it to go as a subgenre. Well, almost everywhere.

For some reason, no producer's ever bothered
to take his listeners out to sea. There are a couple possible
reasons for this (most of hip hop sampling's foundations are
too hard-boiled to evoke a life underwater, e.g.), but there's
also a lot of musical possibility inherent in aquatic
environments, and almost all of them are explored in
Ex-Aquarium, the second album by English producer
Kelpe. Though it dips its toes into a few other musical genres
along the way, Ex-Aquarium is at heart an
instrumental hip hop record, full of stable homemade breaks
and the easy ebb and flow of several tides.

And pretty
much immediately, it's that ebb and flow that's emphasized.
The steady guitar strum on album opener "Under" bobs about in
a current as its attack moves back and forth and multi-tracked
vocals don't quite stay on their tracks, and as the album
moves along, Kelpe gradually reveals a host of tricks that
each suggests a different kind of aquatic movement: the aged
wobble of synthesizers ("Whirlwound"), bubbling, wandering
keyboards ("Yippee Space Ghost"), and dubby echoes attached to
the drums ("Skylla") represent just a handful of the
production moves busted out. Each functions as a stylistic
anchor, the sonic element that colors and contextualizes the
parts surrounding it.

For the most part, those anchors
are small cogs, but they're still very important because most
of Ex-Aquarium's songs feature lots of moving parts. The drum
breaks tend to morph more than once within songs, and aside
from the intros and interludes, every melody introduced has
counterparts ("Silver Nutkin," in particular, shapeshifts so
many times it feels more like three songs instead of one), and
beats and notes take turns leading the songs forward. Where
they're going is tough to say; most tracks drift pleasantly,
like a deep sea exploration that follows whatever it catches a
glimpse of, be it a school of fish or a reef. Other times,
tracks seem merely to luxuriate in their surroundings: "Half
Broken Harp," a tremendous remake of a track that had appeared
earlier on DC's Death Before Distemper, plows through small
jets of string textures and keyboard pixellation on the
strength of a meaty break, and as the break fades away,
replaced by guitar strums, the less in momentum feels more
like a carefree pause than a significant petering
out.

And truthfully, it's hard not to get caught up in
similar feelings while listening to Ex-Aquarium from
beginning to end. There are moments you'll want to explore
more than once, moments you're likely to float past while
thinking about something else, and at the end you're left with
a strong sense of having taken a kind of journey. Like the
best work put forth by Four Tet or Amon Tobin, it's an
immersive experience.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

"Aly, Walk With Me"

"Blush"

"You Want the Candy"

Click here to buy it!

The
Raveonettes : Lust Lust Lust
released on Vice Records

reviewed by
Daniele Hauptman for GBH.tv

The Raveonettes are not a group you'd put on
to psych yourself up for going out, but their brooding,
angst-filled sound has not gone unappreciated. Sune Rose
Wagner and Sharin Foo make up the Danish band, whose main goal
seems to be making listeners want to get drunk and vent to
whoever will show them a little love. Some have called their
music “dancey,” though it could certainly clear the dance
floor at a club. Call it what you wish; it sounds like getting
drunk in a low-key bar—dark, noisy, and heavy on the
distortion.

It isn’t hard to figure out the theme of
The Raveonettes’ new album, Lust Lust Lust. All the
songs are about desire in some form or another, whether for a
person or an ambiguous object or idea. The opener, “Aly, Walk
With Me,” draws you in with a high-pitched blip that sounds
like a sound effect straight out of 2001: A Space
Odyssey, followed by a light bell and a two-step rock ‘n’
roll beat. Wagner and Foo harmonize their vocals, beckoning,
“Aly, walk with me in the summer / Aly, walk with me,”
half-asking and half-ordering, like moody sirens. Wagner
continues crooning to Aly, asking her to go for a walk with
him in Portland and New York City…and of course, right out of
his dreams, and into his arms. During all these longing
invitations, Foo takes the upper harmony, sweetly playing
wingman. The whole song sounds like a religious chant that
distorts halfway through, and wanders back and forth between
droning and static.

Though their music's gloomy, the
band’s playfulness is clear in their willingness to experiment
with self-imposed restrictions. They recorded their debut
release Whip It On with every song in B-flat minor,
and their first full-length CD, Chain Gang of Love
with all but two songs in B-flat major. In Lust Lust
Lust, the band continues to show an affinity for
particular keys and chords, as well as a love of structure and
simplicity. The recurring chord in “You Want the Candy” sounds
almost exactly like the one that drives the song that follows
it, “Blitzed.” As for resolution, the final song, “The Beat
Dies,” uses the same bell from “Aly, Walk With Me,” tying the
album together. Another standout, “Blush,” has an extremely
repetitive melody, perhaps due to its lyrical content. It
seems to confront a doomed relationship that has to end, but
still has lingering feelings of sexual tension, with the
enjambment in the resigned lyrics, “All I want from / You is
all I took,” set against the forward, “I can still make you
blush.” Just try not to feel sexually frustrated.

Most
of the tracks on Lust Lust Lust have repetitive,
somewhat hypnotizing melodies, along with grating feedback and
distorted guitars. The vocals give the album more of a 1950s
feel, with their minimalist melodies and smooth harmonies,
while the fuzzy guitars bring the sound down to a more modern,
basement-rock tone; this album sounds like it should be
playing in the background while some drunk teenagers grope
each other on a shadowy couch.

In a recent interview
with Pitchfork, Wagner discusses his unique yet somewhat
boring style. He explains, “I think that we have fans who know
that we're not... hugely entertaining in any way. We don't put
on a show, so to speak.” This album is Wagner putting himself
on display, untroubled by critics’ dissection. He wrote all
the lyrics, and performed all the instrumentals on the album,
which, in itself, is impressive. The album is nothing
groundbreaking; it sounds like something you’ve heard before,
but can’t remember, clouded in fog and mist. If you’d like to,
pick it up and jog your memory.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

are available at the
band's Myspace page.

Head over there to buy it!

Ssion : Fool's Gold
released on Sleazetone
Records
reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

Does it strike anyone else as odd that
sexuality's been stamped out of electro since electroclash
imploded? In the four-five years since that mini-scene's
demise, electro's become the new rock, the new house, the new
disco (in short, thee new hotness), but it's also muscled sex
out of our speakers in a way that's kind of unprecedented for
dance music. Even though electroclash's OD probably enabled
electro's mainstream rise - the genre's sound and attitudes
started to grow again without the vanity and image obsession
that was weighing 'clash down - electro's cultural position's
probably secure enough that even just a teensy smidge
of sexuality might even be welcome.

And lucky for us, it's arrived as more
than a smidge. In fact, it's arrived complete with eyeliner,
crossdressing, and backup dancers in the form of Fool's
Gold, the debut album from Kansas City freakazoids Ssion
(pronounced "shun"), a crudely inventive mishmash of disco,
electroclash, and rock that favorably updates the sound of
70's Detroit weirdos Was (Not Was). But musical strengths
notwithstanding, the band's secret weapon is the sexuality and
whimsy radiating out of frontperson Cody Critcheloe.
Critcheloe's lyrics are sexually frank, improbably guided by
both a street urchin's penchant for shock tactics (sample
couplet: I only walk like a fag because of my blisters /
and I only fuck girls cuz mom and dad never gave me a
sister) and a disarming maturity and sincerity: "Street
Jizz," for example, might be about cruising for sex in a park
at night, but Critcheloe's grown-up enough to let us in on the
little secret behind that "bougie" urge. (It feels more
dirty than it really is, he admits on the chorus) Thanks
to this balance, Critcheloe manages both to represent his own
sexuality honestly (for the most part) and use it like a crude
pike to jab reactions out of his audience. Just a few verses
in, plenty of Fool's Gold's songs seem right on par
with the schlock peddled by pranksters like Har Mar Superstar
and electroclash survivors like Avenue D, but Critcheloe
knows just how far he can push
things without reducing himself to a total joke: "The Woman"
might be the first song ever written to make fun of feminists
without coming off as totally inappropriate, and elsewhere,
"Bullshit" is triumphant and gross at the same time.

Getting back to the music, there are plenty of signs
that Fool's Gold was recorded on a shoestring (Ssion
released it themselves on CD-Rs about a year before Sleazetone
picked it up), but it's a quality the band uses to its
advantage. The canned strings and P-funk-ish keyboards get a
kind of deviant lift from the seedy atmosphere on "Fear Us,"
and the same can be said for the reggae touches on "Ah Ma" and
bomb-dropping sound effects on "Clown." There are one or two
clunkers that make Fool's Gold's modest production
value seem less charming, but by the time its squealing,
joyous closer "Heaven" draws to a close, the shortcomings seem
totally forgivable. After all, when you're having frank
conversation with someone, you don't get distracted by scuffs
on their shoes, and after Fool's Gold's 36 minutes,
you feel like you could have Cody and company over for dinner.
You're just going to have to hose the dining room down
afterwards, that's all.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

are available at the
band's Myspace page.

Head over there to buy it!

Hot
Chip : Made in the Dark
released on DFA/EMI

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

Though it's probably not the first word that
comes to mind, Hot Chip has always been about balance. Even
though Joe Goddard and Alexis Taylor, the band's songwriting
brains, have never been shy about indulging their offbeat
tendencies (especially when it comes to lyrics), their music's
always been well-balanced enough to support quirks that would
weigh plenty of lesser acts down. Whether that's involved
blending soul and electro or house and indie pop, Hot Chip has
always blended their sounds together cohesively.

But balance is a funny thing, and plenty of
bands have found the elements that go into it - restraint,
chemistry, whatever - are easily dashed by fame and
expectations, two things that have been piling up steadily
since Hot Chip started touring in support of their excellent
second album, The Warning. The band toured for an
ungodly amount of time, rounding the globe more than once
before finally getting down to business in a studio, and some
guessed that the extended haul might've done more harm than
good.

Instead, it turns out the band was just
soaking up the live experience. Their third album, Made in
the Dark, reveals a band adjusting its songwriting to
create something that will travel the globe better. The
opening track "Out at the Pictures" actually opens with taped
audience cheers, and a gradually tightening organ part whose
tension is immediately snapped by drum machines. The drum
machines, though, are joined by plenty of live percussion,
including a real drum kit, that bops through the verses and
charges through the chorus, with plenty of space in the
arrangement, both in terms of acoustics and space for solos,
should anyone on stage feel inclined. Both "Out at the
Pictures" and "Hold On," which sounds heavily influenced by
Talking Heads' "Crosseyed and Painless," hint at an interest
in momentum the band might've avoided earlier in their career;
it's not hard to imagine these tracks sounding great at a more
adrenalized pace, and elsewhere, the heat-ups and cooldowns on
"Don't Dance" and "Touch Too Much" speak to the same thing,
with each song transforming into a different animal at its
halfway point.

But this newfound emphasis doesn't cost them
any complexity, either. The tracks more reminiscent of their
Warning-era output, like "Shake a Fist" and "Ready
For the Floor," offset their big confident elements (bright,
crushing synths, angular guitar) with smaller, whimsical ones
(ribbiting percussion, squirting bubbles of synth) in a way
that's instantly recognizable and far more ambitious than
anything from their previous records. Paradoxically, those two
are growers, but on Made in the Dark's first two
ballads, all the growth Hot Chip's gone through in the last
few years pays immediate dividends. "We're Looking For a Lot
of Love" and "Made in the Dark" are gorgeous, pure soul songs
made out of space age sounds, with keyboards warming their
edges instead of horns, and some of the bravest back-up
singing Joe Goddard's ever done.

Made in the
Dark's not all perfect. It's front-loaded (so much for
the balance theory, right?), with the back three songs
sounding curiously unfinished. But that shouldn't stop you
from buying one of this young year's best new records. And
besides, the band'll probably have those kinks worked out by
the time they come to the venue nearest you.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

"Feeling Better"

"Fuck Nicole"

"Sunset Beach"

Click here to buy it!

The
Teenagers : Reality Check
released on Merok

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

Just who the hell do the Teenagers think
they are? Ever since their names started popping up on Myspace
and the occasional hipster rock playlist at the end of 2006,
the London-Parisian trio of Michael Szpiner, Dorian Dumont and
Quentin Delafon have been among the most blogged-about bands
during that time, somehow managing to stay Top 8 and
buzz-worthy on the strength of nothing more than three singles
and some strategically placed remixes. That kind of sustained
attention doesn't just swirl around anybody, and even the most
popular musicians out there - yes, Kanye, I'm looking at you -
don't really even have time to keep themselves in the fast
moving blog pipelines. So as an achievement (of sorts), it
certainly speaks to the band's 21st century media savvy, but
it also calls their designation as a band into question,
especially when you consider that the three of them had to
take some time off this summer to - get this - learn how to
play their instruments.

And when you get right down to it, that was
probably done as a courtesy rather than out of any necessity.
Delafon and co. are tricksters first and musicians second, a
trio whose smarmy charms are the secret to their success in a
way that musical talent's probably never going to be. Their
debut album, Reality Check, is a playful exploitation
of pop rock's conventions, with blithe anthems about anthems
("Feeling Better," "Make It Happen") and amusingly
chauvinistic love songs ("Homecoming," "Sunset Beach") nestled
between ruthlessly consistent synth swells and eighth notes
humming out of guitar and bass. Musically speaking, it bears a
passing resemblance to Young Love's Too Young to Fight
It, and though its self-awareness makes it far less
saccharine, it's not going to sound any less dated in eight
months. Instead, it's a warm pastiche, full of all the right
riffs but without any heart to pump blood through them.
Reality Check's moments of honesty and emotion are
dismissed with 'Whatever's rather than let loose with
histrionics, so the hooks grab, and then go, instantly
appealing and easily forgotten, each song gliding by
efficiently.

There may be quite a bit of self-absorption
and smugness stretched across the surface of Reality
Check, but there's something resonant sewn into the
lining too, a moral embedded in its stories, and it's that
emptiness and selfishness beget emptiness and selfishness. The
asshole narrators of "Sunset Beach" and "Homecoming" each get
what's coming to them, and the superficial qualities that are
good for an audience laugh on "Love No" and "End of the Road"
turn out to be millstones. If you boil it down enough, the
message is one everyone's supposed to learn in middle school,
but the Teenagers obscure it artfully each time, sometimes
hiding an entire's song's worth of sadness in a single cliche
('It's not you, it's me' on "End of the Road") or positioning
a narrator's true nature behind a quick question ('And if I'd
been popular at school, where would I be now?' in "Wheel of
Fortune")..

But even if subtlety rarely charts, hooks
always do, and if just one of Reality Check's does
(and several just might), the Teenagers will have set the
stage for their own misery. If Reality Check turns
out to be a wild success, they will become the rock stars they
set out to lampoon, their surprisingly cohesive debut taken
for an adolescent 21st century gas. And most improbable of
all, they will have become a band worth pulling for, in spite
of themselves. Not bad for a band that can't even play their
instruments.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

"Birds"

"Mariella"

"Nicest Thing"

Click here to buy it!

Kate
Nash : Made of
Bricks

released on Geffen

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

To hear my Anglophile boss tell it, Kate
Nash's Made of Bricks was one of the British music
biz's strangest success stories last year. After Lily Allen
added Nash to her Top Eight on Myspace, buzz ensued, she
signed a major label deal, and after some well-publicized
singles ("Foundations," very quietly, was one of 2007's best),
her album opened at #1 in the UK in August. In and of itself,
this isn't terribly unusual (August, after all, is a slow
month), but Made of Bricks wound up achieving
platinum status before the end of the year despite a lukewarm
critical reception, and with the record arriving in American
stores today, it seems only fair to dive into why.

To begin with, the critics weren't wrong. The
transposition of Nash's songs from Garageband and home
recording equipment to a big, bright studio manned by Paul
Epworth (a.k.a. Phones, producer for Bloc Party and the
Futureheads) is only occasionally successful. The musical
backing is rarely hard to listen to, and the highs outnumber
the lows, but there's a dissonance between music and lyrics on
some tracks so jarring it makes the songs almost infuriating
to listen to. "Dickhead," with its upright bass, string zings,
and back-up oohing, renders an awkward song completely
intolerable, and the syrupy violins on "Nicest Thing" turn a
former fan favorite into something unnecessarily polarizing.

That's normally not the mark of an album that
moves over a million units inside of three months, and in fact
you could probably say Bricks's success has come in
spite of Mr. Epworth. The album's secret lies in Nash's
personality; she's wry but timid, prone to certain weaknesses,
and in general she sounds ready to emerge from her cocoon as
soon as she stops smoking/dumps her idiot boyfriend/loses
those five pounds/whatever. The songs are severely precious,
but Nash has a knack for absorbing details and silly turns
that seem to fix everything in her songs. It's tempting to
compare her narrative voice to Bridget Jones's, especially
when you consider that the generation of girls obsessed with
that book in middle school is in its late teens/early 20's
now. That that character type's become even more culturally
visible since then ought to serve Nash well. Sometimes, you
just want to put on an album you can relate to.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

sadly, are unavailable.
But you've heard lots of it before.

Click here to buy it!

The Bang
Gang DJs : Light Sound
Dance

released on Modular

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

As you might have noticed, there's been a
lot of list-making going on lately. These last few weeks of
December are always reserved for everybody's Best Of's and
Worst Of's, and with 21st century media being the way it is,
you'd think this would mean that every notable music release
would get its due. "Everybody" means a lot more people than it
did five years ago (hell, it means more people now than it did
in '06), and most of them are just trying to do right by their
particular niche.

And Light Sound Dance fits into
several. Everybody likes to dance, first of all, but more
specifically than that, you'd be hard-pressed to find a comp
that touches on all of this year's indie dance trends with so
much skill and inclusiveness. Pretty much every country that
had an international dancefloor impact - Germany, Belgium,
America, France, Canada, Australia - is represented here, and
aside from some subtle local favoritism (almost every
long-running track on both CDs is by an Australian outfit),
everything feels unified in a way that most mixes never get
close to.

A big reason for this even keel is the
mixing. Even though the Black Disc bounds right out of the
gate with Thomas Bangalter's edit of DJ Mehdi's "Signatune,"
the Bang Gang DJs make it a point to slow quite a few songs
down and let the different timbres echo outward together. It's
a technique I'd bet grew out of a busy schedule of outdoor
festivals, the kind of environment where those electro house
basslines sound better at a simmer than a full-on roar, and on
most of Light Sound Dance, there's a mutating buzz
slithering through everything. It also affords the Bang Gang
crew the freedom to burn through songs at a brisk pace, and
they do. A good 75% of the tracks get less than 90 seconds on
their own before another track's elements start to creep in,
creating a highly fluid feel that would be positively liquid
if the songs didn't have so much kick; on the White Disc, this
openness is more pronounced precisely because that malevolent
insistence isn't as present from track to track. More textures
come and go, and they do so that much more leisurely.

But with any DJ mix, the burden is largely
borne by the tracklist, and Light Sound Dance's is
incredible. The sequencing is strong, with moods and musical
eras combined tightly, and surprisingly. The White Disc begins
with a cheeky Avalanches remix and runs through a string of
disparate styles before braiding them all together with
E*Vax's remix of "Wild Cat;" the Black Disc brings rock and
electro together with a savvy that only Australia seems to
have right now, with Duke Dumont, the Futureheads, In
Flagranti and Klaxons shining in one particularly memorable
stretch. Basically, the back of the packaging reads like six
or seven Best Of's thrown into one seriously smart blender,
and if you're wondering about my favorites of this year, just
go get this. It's all in there, somewhere.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

"Magique"

"Vamos a la Playa"

"Total Solide"

Click here to buy it!

We Are
Wolves : Total
Magique

released on Dare to Care

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

It's almost impossible to imagine, but We
are Wolves actually started out as an art project. God only
knows what kind of art project - if we're just going
by sound, I'd guess it had something to do with fist fighting
- but does that mean that, buried underneath their music's
psychotic energy and brute force, there lurks some commentary
on the modern human spirit and the forces that conspire
against it?

Maybe, maybe not. But whatever it is that
drives this trio from Montreal (well, aside from
testosterone), it's begun to mutate. On Total
Magique, a wider array of influences and emotions are in
play, but they're still unleashed on the listener with the
same blinding craziness that crackled through their debut
Non-stop je te plie en deux. Energy is the prism
through which We are Wolves channels everything, whether it's
more ambitious songwriting that incorporates psych ("Vietnam")
and rave-up ("Psychic Kids") qualities, expanded sound
palettes that sound like they've been nicked from Pedro
Winter's laptop ("Total Solide"), or even *gasp* softer
feelings ("So Nice So Cold," "Vamos A La Playa").

But
for all the expansion that Total Magique features, We
are Wolves are still all about giving vent to primal energy,
as the cracked out whirring organs, insistent drumming, and
unhinged yelping on tracks like "Fight and Kiss" and "Magique"
show. If only there was more contemporary art like this.

back to
the top

Album Excerpts:

are available at the
band's Mysapce page.

Click here to buy it!

Oh
Astro : Champions of
Wonder

released on Illegal Art

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

It's not every day that academic musicians
make pop records. Even though the means of production (and, in
electronic music at least, composition) are probably quite
similar, it's probably pretty hard for professional thinkers
to step into a world where radio DJs don't say "That makes
much more sense after you read this thesis," after the song's
over. Still, if you could apply a pop efficacy to all those
hifalutin concepts, you'd probably have a pretty awesome
record on your hands.

The husband-wife duo of Jane Dowe and Hank
Hofler known as Oh Astro was already established in the worlds
of experimental and academic electronic music when they
decided to make something for a wider audience, and their
debut album Champions of Wonder comes
thisclose to being that pretty awesome record. Made
using homemade software, a few dozen pop records and some home
audio recordings of their children, Champions of
Wonder is bright and fascinating, full of moments and
songs that evolve and mature every time you listen to them.
Unfortunately, it's also excessively reliant on certain
techniques that make it feel weaker than the sum of its
parts

It certainly begins well enough. Album opener
"Snow Queen" throws a monkeywrench into Ratatat's drum breaks;
"Hello Fuji Boy" lays Lionel Richie's "Hello" over a slippery
edit of Hot Chip; "Lucy Sees the Moon" has vocals that sound
both sped up and slowed down. This trio sets the bar high,
with each track establishing a kind of secret mood, its sudden
clunks, bursts, and flares holding you in their thrall until
the track ends. This template, which establishes moods instead
of rhythmic or melodic momentum or direction, is applied from
track to track, more often than not successfully. The steady
rhythms of "Candy Sun Smiles" and "Journey to the Center"
provide sure footing to survey their digital fireworks from;
the multi-tracked vocals on "Xanadu" are filled with beautiful
textures and microrhythms that amount to a kind of digital
sunshine; "Quiet Mouth," a close second behind "Hello Fuji
Boy" for best song on the album, is deft and intimate, with
crescendos and whispered words rising just behind a scrim of
digital noise.

But after a while, that
directionlessness takes its toll. Champions of Wonder
is difficult to listen to all the way through, mostly because
of how much energy each track asks of the listener. After
repeated listens, you start to get used to the splintered,
suggested melodies and the negative space and the glitches and
the spasms, and almost every track grows on you in it way. But
without discernible emotions or a set of rhythmic drives, any
album is going to feel a little long. There's probably an
essay floating around somewhere on that subject, but for now
let's just call it the one thing keeping Champions of
Wonder from being the first great crossover academic
electronic pop record.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

are available at the
band's Mysapce page.

Click here to buy it!

The
Vandelles : The
Vandelles

released on Safranin Sound

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

Duplicating sound is a tricky thing in
music. Without even getting into the technical difficulty
involved in getting your bass tone to sound exactly like Peter
Hook's or generating the same scuzz that comes out of
SebastiAn's laptop, producing a sound identical to one of your
idols has to impact the songwriting as well. How much
expressive power do particular sounds really have? Is their
power universal, or is their private value for the person
recreating them enough? Is there something lost in the
translation, even if the tone is perfect? These questions are
just the tip of a very large iceberg.

The New York-based quartet the Vandelles
doesn't seem to give much of a shit about these questions,
though. On their self-titled debut EP, the group manages to
recreate several iconic sounds perfectly: the electric haze of
Martin Rev's vocals in Suicide floats atop several songs, the
fiendish fuzz of Bryan Gregory's guitar in the Cramps roars
behind "Lovely Weather," the profound metallic curves of Robin
Guthrie's guitar for the Cocteau Twins arch out over "Die For
It Cowboy," and the whole EP is awash in the glorious noise of
Creation Records acts like My Bloody Valentine and the Jesus
& Mary Chain. This ear-splitting gallery is meant to serve
as the record's focus, with the remaining musical
characteristics - guitar riffs that range from dark to darker
and stomping 60's garage drums - serving as little more than
gateways from one cavern of noise to another. But the racket
created, loud and empty though it might be, isn't visceral or
engaging enough to justify being the focus. In some cases,
like on closing track "Dead Wave," it seems unnaturally reined
in, the kind of thing that's being exploited instead of
skillfully used.

Any sound (or sounds) as widely beloved as
the one(s) recreated by the Vandelles is going to cast a wide
net of associations, but the band's EP reveals that
sandwiching them together somehow cancels their individual
mystiques out. And for a release like this one, that's more
than enough to cause a shipwreck.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

Velvet Underground - "What Goes
On"

John Cooper Clarke - "Evidently Chickentown"
(Live)

Roxy Music - "2HB" .

Click here to buy it!

Various
Artists : Music From the
Motion Picture
Control

released on Rhino

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

The way I see it, there are two ways to look
at steadily growing cult of Ian Curtis. First there's the
standard wistful fanboy logic, that Curtis and the rest of Joy
Division were too artistically powerful for the masses to
understand during their existence. That's fine, but people
interested in things like, y'know, specifics and stuff, will
point out that there's a second (though admittedly related)
line of thinking that goes like this: after an entire
generation of American bands influenced by Joy Division rose
to prominence, an interest in Curtis as the face of this
inspiration began to germinate (the band's influence in the UK
had begun to manifest itself a good ten years earlier).

This arc primes Control's audience
for a mythic image of a man with larger-than-life emotional
troubles, and the film fulfills those expectations. Though the
film's shape was tightly controlled by people quite close to
him (his wife Deborah Curtis, whose memoir serves as the
foundation for the film's screenplay, and Anton Corbijn, an
artist who directed most of Joy Division's videos), Curtis is
unsympathetic but riveting, a man whose burdens have descended
on him from every conceivable angle. Some of these are more
easily articulated than others, but Control's
soundtrack suggests their range quite well. From the
all-encompassing anger in John Cooper Clarke's working class
punk poetry ("Evidently Chickentown") and the Buzzcocks'
percolating racket ("Boredom") to the mechanized desolation of
Kraftwerk ("Autobahn") and David Bowie ("Warszawa"),
Control's musical mise-en-scene is bleak but stark,
moving rather than numbing. Like many of Joy Division's best
songs, the soundtrack is filled with unsettling voids that
loom large over every mood.

These aforementioned extremes were both
integral to Joy Division's sound, and in its sequencing,
Control's soundtrack makes some compelling
suggestions not only about what music influenced them, but
about how they used it. When positioned side by side, you can
practically hear the popping dynamics of "Boredom" coursing
through the veins of "Dead Souls," but the contrast between
the Buzzcocks' breakneck speed and Joy Division's steady march
is downright spooky. And later on, hearing the desperate ache
Curtis et al. attach to Kraftwerk's machine landscape on
"Atmosphere" is heartbreaking.

In the end though, it's Curtis's bandmates
that add the most important finishing touches. The three
pieces of incidental music supplied by New Order are all wide
open, marked by distant, thin synth tides, faint metallic
bass, and melancholy melodies that feel, more than anything
else, mysterious and unfinished. It is beyond creepy that
these tracks, which were recorded about two years ago, are
likely to be the band's final work together, but they're
integral parts of a superb character study, both on screen and
in headphones.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

are unavailable.

Click here to buy it!

Various
Artists : Kitsuné
BoomBox

released on Kitsune

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

Thanks to Bravo, The Devil Wears
Prada and, uh, the E! channel, the soundtrack that plays
in America's head when trying to imagine fashion events pounds
on the temples like so: gay house music. Gay. House. Music.
Gay. House. Music. Mmf mmf mmf mmf gay house
music!

The gay part isn't likely to go away, but
it's frankly insulting to the fashion world to assume that
people so ahead of the curve are still listening to big stupid
diva records from 1996. Kitsuné, as they have a habit of
doing, has stepped up to correct the problem with Kitsuné
BoomBox, a kind of unofficial soundtrack to one of
London's hottest intersections of fashion and nightlife. Mixed
by BoomBox's long-time resident DJ Jerry Bouthier (a.k.a.
JBAG), BoomBox is very well-assembled, full of thick,
stylishly distorted bass that pulses beneath omnipresent,
synthy swoons and indie dance-rock whispers. It starts and
ends with energetic rock, the Guns 'n' Bombs remix of "Fancy
Footwork" and Shinichi Osawa's remix of "Pogo" as great
highlights, and in between some well-sequenced peaks lies
something more lush and emotive: Digitalism turn Daft Punk's
"Technologic" into a melancholy indie rocker, and Oliver
Koletzki contributes another one of his top-tier pieces of big
room house softness. The build-up that brings us to "Pogo" is
more surehanded than forceful, a move that lets more guitar-y
tracks like "Wanna Make Out," by the Glimmers and Princess
Superstar and "Fire" by the Young Punx work their magic.
What's really remarkable about BoomBox, in fact, is
how much room each track is given to stretch out. Almost every
track runs a full four minutes, which imbues the mix with a
steadiness that's normally pretty elusive in mixes like these.

It might be kind of unclear what kind of
relationship Kitsuné and BoomBox have to one another (Sure,
Kitsune's clothing has won them serious fashion cachet in
their own right, but who knows?), but even if it's nothing
more than two rising brands reaching out to help one another,
the sheer quality of Kitsuné BoomBox does the fashion
world a great service. Because honey, it's about so much more
than just the clothes.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

"Going Down"

"I
Want Candy"

"Fleetwood Crack"

Click here to buy it!

White
Williams : Smoke

released on Tigerbeat6

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

If you've come across White Williams's name
anywhere in the last few months, it's more than likely that
Girl Talk and Dan Deacon popped up too: The three of them went
on tour together not long ago, culminating in a crazed,
bizarro showcase as at Webster Hall during CMJ, and most of
the press clippings Williams has accumulated this year allude
to the fact that Greg Gillis (Girl Talk) and Williams were
friends long before Gillis got famous. At the time, all
Williams had in his discography was New Violence, an
EP whose forward motion was regularly overrun by swirling
weirdness, and the few write-ups that attempted to connect
Williams and his famous friends hailed the three of them as
party-starting eccentrics, musicians who valued engaging
quirkiness as much as fluid body movement.

Associations are a funny thing though, and
Williams's debut album Smoke both strengthens and
weakens the case that those three share any artistic
similarities aside from some serious music-nerd cachet. First
of all, the party angle is gone. Aside from the two or three
tracks that are suitable for dancing, Smoke's drums
are pretty much reduced to metronomes, simple ticks to keep
Williams's music in line, and this album moves leisurely, more
than happy to let itself get sidetracked.

And it's those distractions, like the
different swatches of texture and melody that drag underneath
Williams's cover of "I Want Candy," and the bubbling, churning
keys and guitars on "The Shadow," that make the case for a
connection stronger. "I Want Candy" and "The Shadow," among
others, deal with abstractions that manifest themselves in
many different ways, sometimes in the guise of a crushing,
synthetic hum (a common thread in Deacon's music), sometimes
in the form of trifles stacked perilously on top of one
another (the main draw of Girl Talk's recent material). Much
like Brian Eno's Another Green World,
Smoke's synths and guitars often feel like textures
and colors in an ever-evolving painting rather than cogs in
something moving in a particular direction; the mosquito-like
synths that buzz around the guitars on "Fleetwood Crack"
constantly change the track's depth, while the countermelodies
on the title track keep it staggering back and forth.

As consistently interesting as Smoke
is, though, it's the tracks that emphasize rhythm and movement
that show Williams at his most promising. The bright, upbeat
guitar riff on "Going Down" and insistent bass on "New
Violence" infuse their surroundings with an energy that takes
both to another level, while the low-key drive of "Route to
Palm" has the same kind of pop genius as so many Yo La Tengo
songs. These tracks are the total package, and if Williams
stays committed to making music for the body as well as the
brain, he could become an indie superstar. Let's hope those
well-publicized friendships of his continue to grow. A
fantastic debut.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

are available at beatport and
the iTunes Music Store.

Click here to buy it in MP3 form!

Boys Noize
: Oi Oi
Oi
released on Boys Noize/Last
Gang
reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

If you had to choose a dominant storyline
for music in 2007, you'd have to think that electrotouch's
penetrating the mainstream would take the cake. I mean, it
kind of wins by default, doesn't it? Justice "performing" on
Jimmy Kimmel Live and Kanye West sampling Daft Punk as part of
a broader phenomenon trumps Russell Simmons trying to ban the
n-word from rap records or Radiohead appealing to their fans'
consciences with In Rainbows. The genre's gotten
enough media attention throughout the year to claim some kind
of legitimacy for itself, but it would be naive to expect a
steady upward climb from here. There are plenty of questions
about how much acceptance this foreign institution can really
gain in America that are sure to start cropping up in the next
few months, and for my money they're probably going to start
as soon as someone gives Boys Noize's Oi Oi Oi a
terrible review.

To American eyes and ears, the electrotouch
scene breaks down like this: Gaspar Auge and Xavier de Rosnay
(a.k.a. Justice) are the idea men, the
design-students-as-musicians pair who are at their best
subverting dance music's sometime urge to be dangerous,
Digitalism and Simian Mobile Disco are the pop stars whose
releases try to bridge the gap between club and the proper
album, and Boys Noize (a.k.a. Alex Ridha) is the dance music
purist, the artist whose full-length debut (Oi Oi Oi)
hews most closely to his sound's beginnings and emphasizes
dancefloor utility over everything else.

Ridha holds this functionality so dear, in
fact, that Oi Oi Oi can't really be described as an
album (at least not in the rockist sense of the word). In my
opinion, it's not designed to be listened to from beginning to
end (and God help us all if I'm wrong about that), and I'm
fairly sure that most of its content couldn't be described as
songs either. Tracks like "The Battery" and "Arcade Robot," as
outstanding and disgusting as they are , feel more like
track-length DJ tools; "Arcade Robot" is just three Alan
Braxe-esque build-ups run through Ridha's distorted circuitry,
and "The Battery" is old-school electro that sounds like it's
been dipped in hydrochloric acid.

Even if it's not designed to be listened to
while sitting around the house, that doesn't change the fact
that Oi Oi Oi is one of the best electro releases to
come out all year. Ridha's more closely aligned with the
electro side of electrotouch, and all the genre's best
qualities are on display throughout this record. "Wu-Tang" and
"Deny Selected" update the electric guitar sampling techniques
that the Bomb Squad and Rick Rubin both immortalized, "Shine
Shine" makes seriously drugged references to electrofunk with
its robo-tambourine and talk-box chants, and "Vergiftet" is
high-powered and inhuman, all industry and alarm.

But what set Justice, Simian Mobile Disco and
Digitalism's releases apart this year was the noise
they made, and Oi Oi Oi is filled it. High-powered
electronic groans scream in before and after the downbeat
instead of on it, adding a dimension of abandon and added
energy that Ridha creates better than almost anyone. Ridha's
noize is serrated, EQed extremely high, and filled with a
malevolent variation of the electric tension found in old
synths. It's not something you're likely to hear on the radio
for a long time, but Oi Oi Oi's strengths embody what
made electrotouch such a story this year, and its reception
will be a great measuring stick for how big that story's going
to be down the road.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

are available on bleep and the
band's Myspace page.

Click here to buy it in MP3 form!

The Oscillation
: Out of
Phase

released on DC Recordings

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

It's been quite a while since bands used
spacey sounds aggressively. Though the drones, vibrations and
noises that imbued so much of psychedelia and Krautrock with
their mystiques haven't fallen out of style - if anything, a
wide range of different artists use them - these days they're
almost always used to inspire the same thing: a kind of heady,
peaceful remove.

It would be reasonable to assume, then, that
an album consisting of almost nothing but these spacey
signifiers would drift narcoleptically from beginning to end,
without any shocks or rumbles. But Out of Phase, the
debut album by Demian Castellanos's new project the
Oscillation, does almost the exact opposite. Castellanos is
certainly enamored of Krautrock's serene foreign synths, and
psychedelia's myriad wobbles and vibrations, but Out of
Phase is imposing, menacing and exhilarating just as
often as it is far out. A good deal of this has to do with
studio mixing. The album-opening "Visitation" is more of a
crescendo than an actual song, but everything is mixed up so
fiendishly high that by the time the track's ever-building
wall of noises suddenly vanishes, it makes quite a powerful
statement. Elsewhere, so many rays of energy flare off the
bass, keyboard and vocals in "Violations" that the track
sounds like it's reaching critical mass. Even the the more
sedate interludes ("Distant Transmission," "This is Nowhere")
have a sonic forcefulness to them that's hard to ignore.

But for all the studio mastery on display
here, it's Castellanos's pop instincts that make Out of
Phase so impressive. The high-voltage squiggles and
intergalactic echoes on "Gamelan Mindscape" owe a lot to the
rave-up created by its two guitars, while the overmiked dub
craziness of "Liquid Memoryman" pairs well with the grungy
drums. Every track, including the tremendous 10 minute closer
"Visitations (Exit)," is very efficient; the riffs are never
featured for longer than they should be, and Castellanos's
solos, even at their most abstract, make sense at a gut level.

Admittedly, Out of Phase is hard to digest
the first time through. But anyone who's intrigued by the
inherent possibilities in those cosmic sounds will be only too
happy to let it grow on them, because apparently, there is
adrenaline in space, and Castellanos has found it.

back to
the top

Album Excerpts:

"Saturndays"

"Us & Them"

"Please Sunshine"

Click here to buy it!

Supermayer
: Save the
World

released on Kompakt

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

Dance music producers understand that
getting their names out to larger numbers of people usually
requires clearing two hurdles. The full-length album is the
first, and the second is making music that can be played and
enjoyed outside of a club setting. Because most people working
in this field have spent most of their careers making singles
or doing remixes, coming up with a cohesive collection of
tunes separate from the ones you're already trying to hawk on
vinyl or in individual MP3 form is a unique and unfamiliar
challenge. Some artists are better equipped to tackle it
(think James Murphy, Lindstrom & Prins Thomas) than others
(think Paul Oakenfold), and more than a few don't even bother
trying, instead readying twelve potential singles and
arranging them into a sequence that's as engaging as possible
(Armand Van Helden).

If you were to judge the book by
its cover, Supermayer's Save the World seems like it
would fall into the latter category, a undeniable stream of
dancefloor magic whose superficial charms outweigh any lack of
substance: the much-hyped collaboration between two of the
German dance world's leading lights features a product
description that promises to "save your dancefloor by
magically moving asses." And it's unfortunate that Save
the World lacks such simple aspirations. Its
straightforward dance tracks are superb, filled with big,
simple pleasures and flawless execution. Superpitcher (a.k.a.
Aksel Schaufler) and Michael Mayer are experts at collecting
stimuli that provoke the same response, then arranging them so
their pleasures are cumulative. On "Saturndays," Mayer and
Schaufler work with space and echo, as organ rasps, low-key
synth whooshes, and differently filtered bass and kick drum
wash over one another to create a spacey bliss before small
melodies come into play; "Please Sunshine" is
intergenerational Euro disco made of elements new (a patient
Italo throb and futuristic synths) and old (a soulful [and
real!] sax, canned strings, and live drums and percussion);
"Two of Us," the album's unquestioned peak, is a galactic
epic.

But Mayer and Schaufler aim to balance out
Save the World's club anthems with album-format songs
and musicality, and their efforts, though not entirely
unsuccessful, are more of a mixed bag. The tracks founded on
nightlife sounds, for example, are saved by production savvy -
the edges on "Us and Them" are rounded off to add more oomph
to the bizarre robot vocals, while the bite of "Cocktails For
Two"'s constituent parts saves it from feeling like the cheesy
chillout track it verges on becoming. But the live
instrumentation that Kompakt crows about so much in its press
releases is an Achilles' heel. The live bass and guitar skanks
in "The Art of Letting Go" are more displayed than
purposefully used, and the trumpet and guitar parts in "The
Lonesome King" aren't enough to rescue the track from its
songwriting.

In the end though, if you step back and
remove all the context (dance music superproducers try their
hand at an album-length release), Save the World's
highs far outnumber its lows. And even if Supermayer didn't
totally succeed in bridging the gap between club and home
listening, they certainly got close enough to make us hope
that they keep trying.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

are available on both
iTunes and the band's Myspace
page.

Adam Kesher
: An Allegory of
Chastity

released on Disque Primeur

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

It's no secret that the French are a little
out of the loop when it comes to rock. They've never really
cared for the stuff, it seems, no matter what form it's come
packaged in, and the few Frogs to actually take an interest in
and get (relatively) big doing it, like Metal Urbain or Dr.
Mix and the Remix, seemed to be more interested in the noise
involved than the emotion behind it.

This fascination with rock's timbres has been
ongoing (as you might've noticed, it's worked its way into
their dance music recently), but for the most part French
artists couldn't be bothered with rock songwriting. Well,
until now. Adam Kesher's An Allegory of Chastity
might only have four original songs on it (the other four are
commissioned remixes), but its combinations of synth buzz,
club intensity and dance rock wallop make it one of the
strongest dance rock releases to come out this year. It starts
off with "P-Katherine," a melodramatic stomper filled with
dark images, synthetic church organs and furious guitar
scratches that change the track's texture several times, a
move the band executes even more successfully on the following
track; "Feel You In My Arm" alternates between a thick two
bass attack (one guitar, one keyboard), sampled guitar static,
and synth squiggles. Though there's an unmistakable dance rock
feel to both tracks, there's a club element in play here too.
The combinations and contrasts of sound are almost as
important as the notes themselves, which is why they form the
foundation of Chastity's two best remixes. Snack
& C'mish foreground "P-Katherine"'s organ chords and add
snorting bass and jaunty hi-hats for a rich update on 80's
electrofunk, while Yuksek chops up "Feel You In My Arm"'s lead
vocals, submerges them in a pool, and unleashes a lightning
storm of synth and static once they swim to the surface.

Adam Kesher are experts
when it comes to dressing French club music up in rock 'n'
roll clothes, but the band has straightforward rock to offer
too. On "Let the Earth Rejoice," verses are squealed in call
and response over fist-pumping bass, and "Irene" rides on
stiff cowbell and lead singer Julien's swaggering vocals. It's
only four songs, but it's also more than enough to get you
positively geeked.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

"Fairlight"

"Nihilistic Love"

"Love Tactics"

Click here to buy it!

San Serac
: Professional

released on Frog Man Jake

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

"Funky" is an adjective that gets thrown
around too liberally these days. Like most overused
music-related words, it barely means anything anymore, and at
this point it's basically synonymous with a particular musical
sound (in this case, a bassline with some wiggle to it).
Between that and the state of music's current soundscape, it's
easy to forget that beyond explicitly musical characteristics,
funk (and, by extension, all musics and sounds that should be
termed "funky") is supposed to be silly. George
Clinton drew that into every level of his music's blueprints
back in the 70's, and everybody who truly followed his lead,
from the samplers (Digital Underground, Dr. Dre with The
Chronic and Doggystyle) to the disciples (Morris
Day, Prince, and dozens of others), preserved that sensibility
as much as possible.

It doesn't take San Serac (a.k.a.
Nat Rabb) long to show he belongs in that latter category on
his second album, Professional. The pleasant build-up
of 808 drums, keyboard bass, and programmed synths on
album-opener "Tyrant" might reek of electro pop, but Rabb's
bizarre opening line - Isn't it strange, so many years on,
I would find you trafficking in theatre - sets the tone
for the remarkably consistent, and consistently weird,
funkiness that follows. With self-produced polyrhythmic
electrofunk behind him, Rabb delivers delightfully off-beat
songs with more showman's conviction than Gob Bluth, never
above asking the tough questions (Do you ever feel like
involuntary players in a serious game?) or being terribly
specific (You're safe with me...at least as safe as any
earthbound creature can hope to be...); a few disarming
moments of clarity ("Teenage Wildlife") even manage to sneak
their way in.

But even if Rabb's geeky persona isn't your
cup of tea, the music that backs it is harder to resist.
The nervous energy that pulses behind the Miami sound on
"Fairlight," the covert laser zaps snuck between the cowbells
and keyboard bass on "Nihilistic Love" and the Bryan Ferry
love on "Teenage Wildlife" are deliciously evocative of the
80's, but even if Professional's cut from the same
cloth as the last two Chromeo records, its design is more
free-spirited. Songs like "Tyrant" and "Love Tactics" have
bridges that rival their hooks, and where Chromeo sometimes
seems afraid to stray too far from their riffs, Rabb will
happily break out rhythmic distractions. The fact that the
second half of his record, which is comprised of dubs and
instrumental reworkings, stands on its own two feet is a
testament to Professional's musical charms. But make
no mistake about it - Rabb's bizarre, nearly theatrical
presence is the most crucial ingredient here, the one that
makes Professional one of the funkiest things to come
out in a long time.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

"Fucking Bored"

"At the Mall"

"Turned Around"

Click here to buy it!

Baron Zen
: At the Mall
(Remixes)
released on Stones Throw

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

Peanut Butter Wolf takes care of his. The
Stones Throw label boss has lent a hand to several friends
over the years, whether it was giving Madlib a place to live
(or at least perma-hotbox) in his recording studio, fulfilling
a promise to his deceased friend Charizma by releasing their
album Big Shots, or releasing his college buddy Baron
Zen's debut At the Mall about 14 years after he made
it.

Only the first of those three decisions bore
any business fruit (Blunted in the Bomb Shelter was
the first of many recordings Madlib made there), but with
At the Mall: Remixes, Wolf's managed to bring his
average back up to .500 by giving Zen's one and only record a
quirky makeover. It wasn't surprising that the original album,
a strange, grey brew of lo-fi Dr. Mix and the Remix-esque
covers and grungy 90's angst, didn't take off into 2006's
commercial orbit, but the cultured anti-glamour that made it
run is an excellent starting point for all of
Remixes's collaborators. In fact, more than a few of
them know its genealogy well enough to use it as a stand-in.
Ex-Lootpack DJ Romes's version of "Fucking Bored," for
example, imagines Zen's vocals as PiL-era John Lydon, and by
the time Peanut Butter Wolf backs Zen's snottiness with
electroclash on "Turned Around," Remixes has already
taken shape as a convincing DIY dance record; the echoing 808
and cheap buzzy bassline of J Rocc's "When I Hear Music," the
80's funk synths and vocoded softness of Dam Funk's "Burn
Rubber," and the keyboard faget G-funk of Arabian Prince's
"Money" all skew current party music trends and update Zen's
personality at the same time.

As with any remix album, there are a few
tracks that are more unique and "special" than coherent, but
the talent on hand overcomes the amateurs' mistakes. The
post-punk-flavored dub of Peanut Butter Wolf's "At the Mall"
and the smoky craziness of Madlib's "Shoes," with its Chinese
harp, bomb drop effects, and muffled brass, overcomes the
forced quirks of M80's "Night in Jail" and Blu Jemz's awful
version of "Walked in Line," a cover that shrinks Joy
Division's dread down from factory to strip mall size.

In the music business, something that looks
bad on paper is almost always even worse on the eardrums, and
putting out a remix album of your college roommate's
bedroom-recorded songs sounds like basically the worst idea
ever. But not only does At the Mall: Remixes maintain
the DIY spirit of its parent material, it drives along one of
the most delightfully odd exceptions to a rule I've heard all
year.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

"Pop Music is Not a Crime"

"Brainpower"

"He Says She Says"

Click here to buy it!

Freezepop :
Future Future Future Perfect
released on Rykodisc

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

Pretty much since they formed in 1999,
Boston trio Freezepop has been the consummate underdog. Their
New Wave synth pop was knowingly anachronistic, their lyrics
were disarmingly funny, sharp cuts against the twee currents
running beneath a lot of their material, and their irreverent
attitude carried them just as far as their musicianship.

They never became huge stars (underdogs
aren't supposed to), but thankfully they never gave up either,
and the group's third album, Future Future Future
Perfect, shows Freezepop improving on their sound and
sensibility without altering it too much. The improvement, at
least from an equipment standpoint, is evident almost
immediately - the opening crescendo of "Less Talk More Rokk"
is fuller and more sonically powerful than anything previously
recorded by the band, and this newly acquired access to muscle
is put to good use. Tracks like "He Says She Says" and "Ninja
of Love" get an added push from early-to-mid-90's electronica
touches, the epic echoes on "Frontload" recall late period
Ladytron, and combined with the group's more established
chilled, tight sound, the dramatic undercurrent lent by these
additions creates the illusion of more emotional breadth.

It's an illusion, of course, because the
other half of Freezepop's personality is defined almost
exclusively by sarcasm and cutting wit. This side of Freezepop
also has some new wrinkles on Future Perfect,
sometimes in more than one sense of the word. It's impossible
to ignore the specter of age that's begun to creep into
Freezepop's songwriting (this album's opening chorus - "the
music is loud, the kids are so young"), and there are a couple
tracks that seem forced ("Do You Like My Wang?"), but mostly
their sense of humor remains one of the group's chief assets.
Lines like "Some kid shouts 'less talk more rock!'...mostly
unironically'" tend to come out of nowhere, delivered with
nearly doped up disinterest by Liz Enthusiasm, and her casual
vocals work some mysterious magic.

On "Pop Music Is Not a Crime," a track that
starts out all business and gets progressively more joyous,
Freezepop outlines their raison d'etre:

If I wrote songs about more serious things

would you take me seriously?
It's just that I really
like to dance
do you feel the same way that i do?
Would
you dance to a song about dancing?
if so, I'd like to dance
with you.

And like most underdog causes, it's one we
all pull for.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

"No One Will Know"

"For the Last Time"

"Unless You're Golden"

Click here to buy it!

Bella : No One Will
Know
released on Mint Records

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

Canadians have a reputation for being polite
around these parts. As reputations/stereotypes go, that always
seemed both enviable and deserved to me, but for some reason
it always seems to be accompanied by a sneer or a smirk. It
could be that Americans are too ignorant to have better
stereotypes to lob at our north-lying neighbors, but that hint
of malice that always seems to lurk beneath that
characterization has to come from somewhere, right?

For the purposes of this review, I'm going to
assume that music plays a role in this situation. It certainly
figures prominently in No One Will Know, the Mint
Records debut of Vancouver trio Bella. The band's music
certainly has a lot going for it - lead singer Charla
McCutcheon's voice is cool and weary, and the band has a gift
for soft, effective melodies - but No One Will Know
is solid rather than memorable or impressive because their
songs' elements coexist rather than cooperate.

Almost every song on No One Will
Know begins with promise. McCutcheon and Tiffany Garrett Sotomayor craft
superbly melancholy New Wave soundscapes, the kind that remain
propulsive despite being low-key. These simple, lulling parts,
like the chimes and swells of "For the Last Time" or the
languid buzzes of "Settle Down," create open space that's
often filled with beautiful harmonies (all three bandmembers
are effective and capable singers, and their voices combine
well) and the songs on No One Will Know that are
dominated by these elements are among the strongest. The
problem often lies in the guitar work. Cameron Fraser's energy
certainly functions as the band's sparkplug on stage, but on
record that energy is more disruptive than anything else: his
fills on "We Said Goodbye" are too obtrusive, he's mixed too
high on "Go," and his solo on the title track is almost
generic. When McCutcheon and Sotomayor fence him in, as on the
American Analog Set-esque "Unless You're Golden," or the
explicitly sadder numbers, Fraser's work is much better, but
on plenty of songs, he makes poor use of the space his
bandmates give him.

There's definitely a lot to like
about Bella. McCutcheon's voice and Sotomayor's arranging are
a formidable tandem on their own, and aforementioned gripes
aside, Fraser's energy adds much-needed pep to the band's
step. But if they can get over their Canadian tendencies to
let one another's contributions be, they might really become
worthy of some serious international
attention.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

...are not available on
the group's Myspace page. In fact, very little is
available is available on there at all except for a blistering
condemnation of Rupert Murdoch's favorite teenage monitoring
device.

Click here to buy it!

The Tough Alliance : New
Waves
released on Summer Lovers
Unlimited
reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

It's not every
day that you hear the words "Kill this compromise" repeated
over and over again through a vocoder. Though it's a sentiment
that's been repeated in songs before (though not very often,
to be fair), that added electronic sheen, that synthetic
allure, certainly puts a new spin on it.

It's a spin that the Tough Alliance has
pretty much made its calling card on New Waves, an EP
the duo is finally getting released in North America. Over the
course of four tracks, the Swedish duo decries the pop life
that feeds on us from birth til death, but they package their
message in almost blindingly sweet bites of electronic pop.
Both "25 Years and Runnin" and EP-closing cover "Mine Was
Real" meld huge, airy New Wave synths to Caribbean (and I mean
that in the Sandals ad/cruise ship sense of the word)
percussion to fantastic effect, while "Silly Crimes" makes
superb use of those transparently synthetic orchestral
settings that the Magnetic Fields used to use so
well.

The vocal melodies on New Waves tend to
be a little cautious in comparison to the soaring music, and
if the Tough Alliance had as much confidence in their voices
as they do in their skill as programmers, most of this EP
would have radio potential. But as a group that seems to have
designs on undermining our culture, they'd probably prefer
sneaking in under the radar anyway.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

...are available on the
group's Myspace page.

Click here to buy it!

Numéro# : L'idéologie des stars

released on Saboteur Records

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

The final track of Kitsuné Maison 4
is actually three. It's an unusual move for a compilation
release, certainly, but like most unusual moves, it was
designed to hide something: sandwiched between Phones's "Stay
On the Outside" and the radio edit of Whitey's "Worryin,'" sat
a track that, far from being on the sharpest, shiniest lip of
cutting edge, was actually *gasp* a year
old!

It's funny that albums are still capable of
flying under the radar in this day and age, but apparently it
still happens. Numéro#'s catchy debut album, L'idéologie
des Stars, for example, came out at a time when their
sound - synth-led pop with dance-rock and house trappings -
was, and still is, en vogue, but oddly enough, "Hit Pop," the
elderly stowaway on Kitsuné Maison 4 was the
first wide exposure the band got. L'idéologie's not a
one-trick pony, though. Like most quality dance and synth pop,
Numéro#'s debut is propulsive and light, infused with teenage
sentiment but not dominated by it, and enjoyable even for its
missteps. Part of the album's charm lies in its size. The
riffs that dominate the strong opening trio of "Hit Pop,"
"Balance-toi," and "Lâche Ton Style" feel both epic and
private at the same time, and the disparity between the
chorus's falsettos and the Omnikrom-provided rap in the verses
of "Chewing Gum Fraise" is smoothed over by how modest, almost
abashed, all the song's elements are. Indeed, it's this
economy that puts a ballad like "C'est fini" across; more
forceful vocals or more pronounced mixing would betray the
fact that the track practically sounds like a Backstreet Boys
single, but Numéro# keeps it just small enough.

Not that keeping it small makes everything
better, though. "Journaliste" and "La vie d'artiste" are dully
negative, without any of the extravagance or wit necessary to
put negativity and sarcasm across in synth pop, and the truly
bizarre "La galerie d'art," which tries to bridge the gap
between Eurocrunk and Europop (and features Red Foxx
rapping?! WTF?!), truly suffers from its lack of
musical risks. But all in all, L'idéologie des Stars
is too good to remain ignored. Age ain't nothing but a number,
anyway.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

...are unavailable,
because Maximize doesn't drop until tomorrow, but...

Click here to buy it!

Shir Khan :
Maximize!!!
released on Exploited!
Records
reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

One of hip hop music's most oft-imitated
tricks is to stitch narrations together out of vocal samples.
These jumpy, rag-tag stories are generally used as intros or
interludes, and when they're made well, they're pretty much
guaranteed to stir up a combination of surprise, amusement,
and uncertainty in their audience. If you think about it, it's
about the perfect state to subliminally lull your audience
into for a DJ mix. Everybody from Prince Paul to Tiga's used
them to prime their listeners, but recorded DJ mixes that
actually manage to hold their audiences in those three states
are few and far between.

After initially hypnotizing
listeners with a collection of snippets culled from pop songs,
newscasts, and radio interviews, Shir Khan's
Maximize!!! seldom loosens its grip. Instead of
confining itself to a metronomic cycle of build-ups and
climaxes that take several tracks to unfold, Maximize!!!'s
energy level twists between high and higher; Khan's more
likely to throw a new genre at his listeners than take a
break, and the end result pretty much pops for two and a half
hours straight. Khan pits electro rock, tech house, techno and
breaks against each other under cover of electrotouch's
prickly synths and bristling bass on disc one, and though
there's plenty of force on display, it's often undercut with
surprises. The best-known tracks on Maximize!!! all
turned on their heads, like the Soulwax-cribbing rawk version
of Daft Punk's "Around the World," and the stomping battle
between I-Robots' electro hit "Frau" and Edu K's baile rock
"Sex-O-Matic."But it's when disc two starts that the surprises
really start to kick in. Instead of being more sedate (usually
S.O.P. when it comes to double disc sets), disc two is harder,
and better, with deranged baile funk (Sany Pitbull, Sinden
& Count of Monte Cristal) corrupting fussy house (Switch
and Herve's remixes) and jostling with grime before things
start to come unhinged.

Maximize!!! finally starts to behave
itself by closing with "Never Been on E," whose pensive melody
sounds some of the mix's only soft notes. But in the track's
final seconds, samples start chattering again, a sly reminder
of how fantastic surprise and uncertainty can sound, even over
the course of two hours.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

...are unavailable,
because Dos doesn't drop until next week, but...

Click here to buy it!

Michael Fakesch : Dos

released on K7! Records

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

Ever since Sun Ra began preaching/raving
about his interstellar affiliations back in the 50's,
musicians have been trying to repackage our earthly pleasures
in ways that will be fit for extraterrestrial consumption. To
many artists, that's meant fusing man and machine, a concept
that never seems to grow old, even after spawning multiple
genres dedicated to it. While plenty of this music was born
underground and is likely to remain there, there've been some
recent crossovers, some more unlikely than others - Daft Punk
(duh), Jamie Lidell, Unklejam, Kid606, and now, Michael
Fakesch.

As one half of now-defunct duo Funkstörung,
Fakesch has plenty of experience with transmutating black
music into machine music, and his debut continues down that
path. Dos is funk and r&b on the fritz, with
fidgety drums, synth and guitar samples slammed together like
tetris blocks, hip hop breaks spiking up through seared
ambient noise, booping synths that flit between being human
and robotic, and some of the most soulful singing you're
likely to hear on an electronic record this year. Generally
speaking, these stylistic combinations have been done before,
but what makes Dos so appealing is the cloud that
surrounds the relationship between the glitch and the funk.
Rather than trying to apply a formula, Fakesch keeps
everything open, and the result is a record that's seemingly
half songs, half microchip output.

To minimize the
chance of his listeners developing a preference for one or the
other, Fakesch slots the extremes that land safely on only one
side of this divide - like the Prince-shaped "Complicated" and
the malfunctioning "Crest" - together, shepherding his
audience toward that glorious grey area between the two: the
shuffling call and response on "Dot," the metallic clack and
thump on "Travel," the breathless edits on "Give It to Me."
Dos might not have cracked the code that links man
and machine in music, but it certainly shows there's a lot of
fun to be had if you're willing to lose yourself in the mix.

back to
the top

Album Excerpts:

"Kid On My Shoulders"

"While
We Go Dancing"

"March of the Camels"

Click here to buy it!

White Rabbits : Fort Nightly

released on Say Hey Records

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

Too many indie bands these days emphasize
just one thing. Either they're all rhythm or all melody or all
snark or all drama, with the other facets of their songs
remaining underdeveloped or concealed beneath the featured
attractions. The resulting music is slimmed down to the point
of being two-(or even one) dimensional, and it often sounds
unbalanced as opposed to focused, something whose returns
begin to diminish sharply after a half dozen listens. It also
doesn't bode well that many of the current indie world's
once-bright stars are starting to lose steam. The new Interpol
record sucks, the Rapture have become dance music remixers,
the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album is like, months
away...what gives?

The New York-based sextet White Rabbits, on
the other hand, are a band that emphasizes and offers not only
balance, but plenitude as well. Their debut album Fort
Nightly takes the taut, economical approach that's in
danger of falling out of vogue and presses it further, using
it as an excuse to fill their songs with more rhythms, more
harmonies, more instruments...more everything,
really. But the key remains moderation - it's the
size of the elements in a song like "I Used to
Complain, Now I Don't" that makes it so lovable, both for its
calypso rhythms and its Scottish art-rock guitars. Elsewhere,
this approach manifests itself more in the melodies; "March of
the Camels" sounds like a song the Specials might've recorded
if you'd chained them to a music hall piano. Even when they
rein themselves in musically, the band proves they've got more
normal (but no less effective) songs in them with the
album-opening one-two punch of "Kid On My Shoulders" and "The
Plot." And brimming from every track's vocal is a simple,
infectious enthusiasm that seems to come simply from
performing. It's amazing how far a little of that stuff goes,
and every White Rabbits song is filled with it.

Whenever a formula starts to sag beneath the
weight of so many bands using it, the temptation must loom
large for bands to forego it and try something a little too
unfamiliar. But Fort Nightly bucks indie's downward
trend so easily that it's hard to remember there was a problem
to begin with. A fantastic debut.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

"So
Lonely Was the Ballad"

"Operation"

"If You Got the Money"

Click here to buy it!

Jamie T : Panic Prevention

released on Caroline
Records/EMI
reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

Jamie T is the kind of guy you'd bring home
to meet your mom (er, mum). Sure, he drinks and does drugs and
sure, he's a musician and sure, he's one of those
freewheeling, who-cares types, but when you get right down to
it, Jamie T is all right. The London-born singer-songwriter
swerves back and forth between adolescent craziness and
conversational, sometimes confessional observations on his
debut album Panic Prevention, but it's ultimately T's
pop poise and mysterious charm that make it one of the best
indie pop releases of the year.

On Panic Prevention, it's the odd
side of those charms that comes out first with "Brand New Bass
Guitar," a blurt of quick guitar picking and squawking vocals
that seems designed to show off the kid's weird side. He's not
exactly the most technically polished singer, but Jamie revels
in that instead of hiding it, often delivering his vocals like
an actor more than a singer: "Calm Down Dearest" swerves
around the song's soused narration, and Jamie spends plenty of
Panic Prevention scrambling to the ends of his lines,
barely making it in time to move on to the next. Songs like
"Operation" and "So Lonely Was the Ballad" are like monologues
overflowing with details and ramshackle associations, and the
insistence with which Jamie offers them all up is endearing.

But if the doggedness of his vocal style is
more cute than anything, that same inventive scrappiness has a
much more impressive effect on Panic Prevention's
music. Tracks like "Salvadore" and bonus track "Northern Line"
show Jamie's capable of writing straightforward music, but
it's his tremendous instincts as a mixer and matcher of genres
that distinguishes this album: the snare rolls that slur over
the soul samples at the beginning of "Ike and Tina" soften the
transition into the murky keys and guitars that follow on the
verses, the effortless blend of hardcore, ska, house and
post-punk in the tremendous "Operation" and the savvy mixing
(on both sides of the studio glass) of drums on "Pacemaker"
all display superior feel and trust in his arrangements. The
balanace that Panic Prevention regularly strikes
between wiry teenage energy and narcotizing angst that shows
that he's got a lot on his mind, but don't worry about Jamie
T. He's gonna be just fine.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts:

"Unsolved Mysteries"

"Fireworks"

"Winter Wonder Land"

Click here to buy it!

Animal Collective :
Strawberry Jam
released on Domino

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

No two Animal Collective albums sound the
same. In the past five years, the Brooklyn-based band has
created everything from smothering drones to loopy, liberated
campfire songs to proudly inscrutable psychedelia, but the
vibe that permeates their discography, both as a whole and its
constituent parts, somehow remains the same. The group's
principal songwriters, Avey Tare and Panda Bear, probe their
world with a kind of primal wonder, creating music that's as
baffling as it is captivating, as bizarre as it is
beautiful.

Despite being their first album to bear sonic
similarities to their earlier ones (or maybe because of
it), Strawberry Jam still has those wide-eyed
qualities; perhaps its how those old touches are reused. The
remote, hypnotic guitars of Feels and Sung
Tongs hide under manic, compact shocks of drumming and
electronics from Spirit They've Gone Spirit They've
Vanished, creating a universe that's expansive and
mysterious as well as immediate and overwhelming. Murmuring,
multi-colored collections of notes are crowded together into
compact anti-grooves on tracks like "Chores," tiny samples
drive songs forward as drums crash in for the simple joy of
making more noise ("Fireworks," "Cuckoo Cuckoo"), child-like
vocals alternate between clusters of syllables and swooping
falsettos ("Unsolved Mysteries," "For Reverend Green").

In the thick of all this is Tare, basking in
modern life's hyper-awareness. Though he's had ample time to
develop his singing chops, Tare still sounds like he's
reacting rather than performing, which leads to more than a
couple disarming moments. "I can't walk in a vacuum," he belts
on "Fireworks," and part of me hopes that Animal Collective
never learns to.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

"Ur a Girl"

"Dance, Chance, Romance"

"Happy Rap"

Click here to buy it!

Junior Senior : Hey Hey My
My Yo Yo
released on Rykodisc

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

Back in 2003 when everybody was geeking out
to it, Junior Senior's "Move Your Feet" seemed more like a
perfectly realized pop experiment than an indication of a
future direction. Sure, it was an internationally successful
single, but its parent album D-D-Don't Stop the Beat
squiggled and wriggled between genres like some game of
musical Twister, and in the end the band seemed to always keep
a foothold (or maybe a toehold) on rock. Two-odd years later,
when its follow-up, Hey Hey My My Yo Yo dropped, our
perceptions turned out to have been terribly wrong. "Move Your
Feet"'s squeaky, Euro-digitized update of Motown turned out to
be a fantastic plot to build an album on, especially for a duo
so capable of churning out catchy tunes. Unfortunately, nobody
over here heard it. Lead single "Itch U Can't Scratch" made
the rounds on what was then a much-less-influential blog
circuit (remember the days?), ut that was about it.

Until now, that is. Rykodisc has stepped up
to the plate and given Hey Hey My My Yo Yo some
much-needed North American distribution, and it's a move we
can all be thankful for. Junior Senior's second album is an
adorable intergenerational dance party that's as endearing as
it is consistent. After a silly intro, the fun starts in
earnest with "Hip Hop A Lula," whose pitched up chorus sample
and sharply edited strings and horns (which are real, by the
way - peep the liner notes if you don't believe me) give the
track a feel that recalls the Avalanches' Since I Left
You. Junior Senior's penchant for packing all the best
stuff into the upper registers of their tracks is definitely
in play here, and it's Yo Yo's sonic calling card -
guest vocalists Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson (of B-52s fame)
and JD and Kathleen Hanna (of Le Tigre) all sound even more
helium-voiced than usual, and most of the album's synths and
keyboards are light, almost feathery, totally berefet of
midrange and low end.

It's an odd thought - super-trebly Motown? -
but the melodies and arrangements smack unmistakably of that
golden late 60's sound. "I Like Music (W.O.S.B.)" accents its
phrases with horn goodness, "Dance, Chance, Romance" features
Spooner Oldham, of all people (Wikipedia for those of you who don't get
what a big weird deal this is), on the piano, and bongos and
tambourines are the secret weapon behind the squeaky keyboards
on "Happy Rap." The rhythms are slightly off (but no less
catchy), a concession probably owed as much to changing music
taste as ProTools, but as long as your head's nodding, it's an
easily forgivable detail.

Ryko's release of Hey Hey My My Yo
Yo comes packaged with an EP the group wrote and recorded
in four measly days called Say Hello, Wave Goodbye.
It sounds more unfinished than anything else, and while that's
understandable, the seeds for another crop of hits are sitting
here - the wobbly keyboards and squealed chorus of "Together
For One Last Dance," the ticking guitars on "Headphone Song,"
the chorus of "U & Me." Just hope that when those tracks
get reworked for their third album, we get them on time. Go
Junior, Go Senior!

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

are available at the band's myspace page.

Click here to buy it!

Project Jenny, Project Jan :
XOXOXOXOXO
released on Might Records

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

Sad but true: it's hard to find genuine
whimsy in music these days. The old founts - indie pop, hip
hop, Weird Al - have all aged (and none very gracefully) in
the past decade, and even with music production costs at
previously inconceivable lows and the Internet's continued
growth as an incubator and disseminator for talent, for some
reason finding musicians that are silly and proud of it is
pretty difficult.

This cultural climate alone makes Project
Jenny, Project Jan a welcome presence. The Brooklyn duo has
been making bizarrely endearing music for a couple of years
now, and their first album, XOXOXOXOXO, distinguishes
itself, more than anything, on the strength of its
personality; the appeal of Sammy Rubin's beats lies more in
their quirky combinations than any low end theory, and
vocalist Jeremy Haines's charms are unquestionably eccentric
ones. Their music can be loosely classified as electronic pop,
but there are detours into dancehall, salsa and hip hop, and
there are clearly no rules in Rubin's book that prohibit, say,
a banjo line and a choir sample forming a song's backbone
("Zoobar"), or a heavy-footed latin piano from stomping around
with back-up singers and somber air-raid sirens ("Tourist").

Music like this can form a backdrop for
songs about pretty much anything, and Haines's oddball lyrics
gladly oblige, with topics ranging from the love between a man
and a transexual prostitute ("Baby's") to personal ads (the
nothing-but-acronyms "Personal") to screeched stories about a
man and Julio, his pet marsupial ("Marsupial"). It's silly but
somehow urbane at the same time, with most songs retaining
enough of an edge to avoid being dismissed as total novelties,
and Haines and Rubin display the kind of musical chemistry
that usually comes out of partnerships that are friendly first
and musical second. There are a few moments of immaturity
here, and a couple hooks don't quite grab, but
XOXOXOXOXO is such a charmer that it doesn't wind up
mattering too much. It's what on the inside that counts.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

"All the Sweet Stuff"

"Strip 4 Me"

"Frat Party"

Click here to buy it!

Gravy Train!!!! : All the
Sweet Stuff
released on Cochon Records

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

Gravy Train!!!! is an acquired taste the
same way Slurpees are. The Oakland-based group's stated, or
maybe shouted, raison, to have a big fat sexually-liberated
good time, has resulted in albums of everything from naughty
punk-rap to ostentatious new wave, but both have the auditory
effect of sucking down one of those Big Gulps that are bigger
than your head: garishly stained tongue and teeth, a digestive
system on the brink of sugar coma, and serious brain freeze.

Rather than pause to explain what the
auditory equivalent of sugar coma is, I'm just going to plow
on ahead and tell you that All The Sweet Stuff, the
Train!!!!'s newest album, can most definitely be described as
a new flavor for the band, even if it's just as syrupy as
anything else they've released. As you may or may not be able
to deduce from its cover, Sweet Stuff takes vague
cues from both small-town 60's and big city 80's - sloppy,
gregarious organs, slimmed down garage rock, 808 drums, the
odd synth, a Deee-lite cover. Though city and country rarely
mingle on individual tracks, the pairing works surprisingly
well as an album-length combination. Or even more likely, as
elements in a live set. If you close your eyes and imagine the
songs on Sweet Stuff being barrelled through by a
bunch of goofily costumed crazy people, you can just get into
the title track and ignore how rhythmically tight it isn't -
the guitar solos are slurred, the bass is submerged and behind
- or fantasize about chanting along to "D.A.N.N.Y." or
practice cutting it up to "Frat Party" in front of your
mirror. Even the patent silliness of the Sugar &
Gold-produced "Strip 4 Me" takes on an added allure if you can
imagine it soundtracking a few moments of grinding all up on
somebody. All The Sweet Stuff might not be the
healthiest thing to listen to in the privacy of your own home,
but if you get the chance to take it in on a night out with
friends, you needn't feel guilty at all.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

...are available on the iTunes music store.

Click here to buy it!

New Young Pony Club :
Fantastic Playroom

released on Modular

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

Sometimes a little patience goes a long way.
After 1000 copies of "Ice Cream", their debut single, sold out
in a whopping three days back in 2004, it would have been
totally understandable if London's New Young Pony Club had
done a smash and grab - signed with a major, farted out 26
minutes' worth of music to bracket "Ice Cream" on their debut,
and then immediately called their local investment analysts.
But the quintet had enough savvy to realize that going back to
the drawing board would be the smartest move, and the fruits
of that prudence - two more top-shelf singles, a licensing
deal for "Ice Cream" - are the main reason that Fantastic
Playroom, their debut, is so strong.

Like "Ice Cream", Playroom's
highlights, a blithe mix of the B-52s' infectious tension and
the arena-ready synths of labelmates Van She and Cut Copy, are
undeniable in their simplicity. Tracks like album opener "Get
Lucky", which rides a big, bright single-chord guitar riff
while small, rich synth harmonies zip in and out of the song's
simple backbeat, or "Grey", with its miniature rhythmic
adornments and sing-a-long chorus, are well-oiled,
well-constructed, and pop to their cores. At the forefront of
all of this stands Tahita Bulmer, who sings with a
determination to have her detachment heard over her bandmates'
playing. Bulmer's songs all seem to be about something, but
her delivery also offers plenty of assurance that you don't
need to worry about the subject matter too much; you'd be
better served enjoying the nod to ESG's "Moody" hiding in the
back of "Jerk Me", or the epic synths that burst in after the
bridge on "The Bomb" anyway. New Young Pony Club is
undisputably a band of its time, but the group's career also
shows that you've got to warm up for a while before you can
make an album that's so hot right now.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

"Genesis"

"Stress"

"DVNO"

Click
here to buy it!

Justice : †

released on Vice Records

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

In any art, the troublemakers have it good.
Make something that clicks with public taste, and you're
hailed as a people's champ, someone who's bravely flipping the
system on its head for all of us. But make something that the
public views as bad, and, well, it's supposed to be
bad. What makes you say it's bad, anyway? Your
expectations? D'y'ever take a minute to step back and
think about those expectations, buddy? Cuz let me
tell you something...

Right. You know where that leads. I bring all
of this up because the debut full-length from French
electronic duo Justice leans pretty heavily on the protections
afforded by the troublemaker tag. † is a willfully
punk record, equal parts filthy pleasure and defiance for its
own sake. The pleasures are mostly timbral, specifically from
the scarce, or at least unusually mixed, low end. Like Daft
Punk, a group to which they may be compared forever, Justice
takes disco slap bass and corrupts it - on "Let There Be
Light", the bass is dark and gummy; on "D.A.N.C.E.", it's
thick, and sharply truncated; on "One Minute Til Midnight",
it's gnarled, congealed, decaying...it sounds gross,
basically, but delightfully so. All of † 's
highlights, in fact, fit that description. "Genesis"'s
combination of monster movie horns, kettle drums, and
locust-like strings is epically scummy, "Stress" is campily
creepy, with pitched up canned strings and squawking air raid
sirens, and even a year after being released as a single,
"Waters of Nazareth" remains the gold standard for big, dark,
adrenaline-triggering French touch.

There's a lot to like here, no question about
it. But †'s prankster aspirations also produce some
tracks that are more fun in theory than practice. "New Jack",
for all its impressively precise editing, basically just
sounds like two people fighting over a radio dial; one guy
wants to listen to Alan Braxe, the other definitely doesn't.
"Valentine" sounds and functions like an interlude, except
it's almost three minutes long, and "One Minute to Midnight"
replaces the afterglow ambience normally reserved for dance
album closers with smug ennui.

Justice's notoriety is certainly deserved,
and † lives up to expectations about as ably as it
qualifies as an impressive debut. But until Xavier de Rosnay
and Gaspar Auge learn that the best troublemakers edit and
police their output as fiercely as the vanguards they're
thumbing their noses at, they're going to be viewed as
upstarts, not iconoclasts.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

"Romantic"

"Wanna Be a Star"

"Wanna Be a Star" (Walter on Salva on Meego
remix)

Click here to buy it!

Walter Meego : Romantic EP

released on Brilliante
Records
reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

If you run down the list of the most
successful electro-influenced groups kicking around today,
eventually you'll notice they all have one thing in common.
Beneath all the hyper-processed keys and synths, all the
super-compressed bass and electro feints, there's a pasty
indie-kid heart beating meekly underneath - Hot Chip (duh),
Junior Boys (duh), Justice and Simian Mobile Disco
(duh - "Never Be Alone"...?)...James Murphy even got
a little emotional on us on Sound of Silver. There's
a whole host of undercooked, overly complex explanations for
this, but let's keep things simple and posit that if you've
got a high indie-rock IQ, you've got a good shot to make it
big on the blog-house circuit, provided you've got the studio
chops

Walter Meego has both in spades. The two original
tracks on Romantic, their second EP, are anchored to
a pair of the most inward, wistful melodies you're likely to
hear on a dancefloor this year, but they're also carefully
packed with so many trebly, fidgety electro-touches that their
accompanying remixes all practice some form of addition by
subtraction; Flosstradamus, for example, dumps "Romantic"'s
beguiling layers of digital haze, watery giggles and
amphetamine-addled hip hop breaks to focus on a thin, static-y
synth line, while Salva swaps "Wanna Be a Star"'s mid-90's
French reference points for mid-00's ones. The original, a
chirping, bubbly patchwork of Air swank and Super
Discount space synths that opens and tightens like an
accordion, also gets transmogrified into a fidgety Aphex Twin
homage by Protman and Dangergirl and a quick and clipped
snippet of blog-house (the band's own Walter Sees Stars
remix).

It's fair to point out that the
melodies and lyrics on Romantic aren't really built
to sustain traditional songs; "Breaking Your Heart", an
acoustic version of "Romantic" featured on the CD release,
barely survives the minute and change that it runs for. But
they're just the right size for Romantic's dense,
pleasurable spasms, and if their upcoming full-length matches
its quality, then Hot Chip et al are going to have to make
room for one more up at the top.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

are unavailable, because Konichiwa's products
aren't licensed for sale in the U.S. But...

Click here to buy it!

Robyn : Robyn

released on Konichiwa
Records
reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

About two weeks ago, an article ran in the
New York Times suggesting that 1997 was the year when
pop music set itself up for the ungodly mess it finds itself
in at the moment; teen pop came back (in the form of
Backstreet Boys and 'Nsync), rap finally demonstrated, beyond
any reasonable doubts, that it was a bankable musical
commodity (thanks, Puff Daddy!), and country albums
collectively outsold their rock counterparts (even ten years
in, nobody can quite explain that one). Particularly tenacious
pop music listeners might also remember that 1997 was the year
that a Swedish pop star called Robyn made a respectable splash
in the U.S. with a song called "Show Me Love." Though that was
the first (and last) plenty of Americans ever heard of her, it
was Robyn's fourth single in a career that began back in
Sweden when she was just 16, and one that she's continued,
with no small amount of success, ever since.

I bring up the teeny
dance-pop thing for two reasons. First, "Show Me Love"'s
success may well have been the last bit of encouragement
American executives needed to loose "...Baby One More Time" on
the populace the following year, and second, it's a vein that
Robyn's continued to mine, albeit with increasing
sophistication and polish, ever since. Robyn, the
first record she's released on her own label (Konichiwa),
might feature production from the Knife, Klas Åhlund (of
Teddybears fame), and some guy who calls himself Kleerup, but
overall it's pitch-perfect pop from 2001 to 2004: small,
reined in dance grooves, crunchy electronic bass, compact
rhythms, brisk strings (both canned and fresh), superfluous
acoustic guitar strums, and light poppy r&b. On paper,
it's the kind of album that's begging to be dismissed, but the
craftsmanship's too good. "Anytime You Like" creeps through a
delicate array of bleeps and pulses, "Crash and Burn Girl"
bumps along to percussive canned strings and a slick, slight
bass, and lead single "With Every Heartbeat" saws at your
heartstrings with its synth current.

These elements are arranged around politely
sassy songs with a goofily "street" edge which are either
enhanced or totally torpedoed by Robyn's occasional ESL
hiccups. But 21st century teen pop's always prioritized
singing over the songs themselves, and Robyn can definitely
sing - in tune, on time ("Should Have Known"), with nuance and
confidence. There's some studio pixie dust sprinkled in there
for good measure, but that doesn't create confidence,
something she's clearly got in spades. Robyn isn't
going to make you long for the days when half the songs on the
radio were written by Max Martin, but its sweetness is only
heightened by its consistency. It's
like having a candy bar you haven't had in years - you're more
than aware of how bad it is for you, but that doesn't make it
any less delicious.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

"Don't Make Me a Target"

"Don't You Evah"

"Rhythm and Soul"

Click here to buy it!

Spoon : Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

released on Merge Records

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

Like most successful indie bands, Spoon is a
lot of things to a lot of people. The Austin band's been a
paragon of restrained refraction for almost 13 years now,
focusing beams of Britpop, early 90's art pop, soul and
classic rock into thin songs that can be about almost
anything. They've been hailed as flawless craftsmen, as
classic rock's 21st century vanguard, as Austin indie rock
royalty. And now, on their sixth album, Britt Daniel and Jim
Eno (the band's only two permanent members) can add another
bizarre descriptor to what's sure to wind up as an impressive
legacy: dub scientists.

Okay, that might be a little hyperbolic. But
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is distinguished more by the effect of
extensive knob-fiddling and studio finesse than its tightly
arranged notes, and what's more, that deftly applied studio
magic adds an extra contour to Spoon's ageless designs. At
first blush (or coming out of crappy speakers), Ga Ga Ga
Ga Ga's tracks have that plaintive, indie directness to
them: the snares thwack, the guitars are polite and cleanly
miked, Britt Daniel's voice has that alluringly gentle rawness
to it. But an extra ounce of attention reveals a bevy of
lasting studio touches that work in remarkable tandem with
Spoon's established musical formula. "The Ghost of You
Lingers", for example, robs a cheap, well-worn piano of its
echoes, then positions it at the top of a mix featuring deep,
airy vocals and sheets of static that blow in periodically.
It's both economical and melancholy, an effect that wouldn't
be so easily achieved without some ace mixing. Where the dub
influence is more overt, like the watery plinks and
evaporating hand claps on "Don't You Evah", these touches are
applied with the same subtlety and restraint as the honking
white soul accents that've been part of their music for years.

Of course, all this studio gravy
wouldn't be worth commenting on if the material it manipulates
wasn't good. But Spoon remains one of the most talented
songwriting bands in all of indiedom, and their assured touch
is still with them here. "My Little Japanese Cigarette Case"
is stately pop on par with Wilco or XO-era Elliott
Smith, "Underdog" moves with an understated swing, and every
track sounds painstakingly refined. It would have been
patently out of character for Spoon to change their sound to
accomodate another genre. As they've been doing their entire
careers, they've discovered and applied the facets of dub
fiddling which work for them, and their music, unsurprisingly,
remains crystalline.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

are available at the band's Myspace
page.

Head over there to buy it!

Theo and the Skyscrapers :
So Many Ways to Die
self-released

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

An eerie amount of evidence has started to
crop up that the undead have risen and are walking among us.
An ever-expanding chasm between the rich and the poor, the
rise of tans in a bottle, and now, Theo and the Skyscrapers.
The band - comprised of former Lunachicks frontwoman Theo
Kogan and two enormous dudes - has a new album, So Many
Ways to Die, that's filled with enough decadent zombie
grandeur to soundtrack the sequel to House of a Thousand
Corpses just as easily as an apocalyptic bacchanal.
Grunge, New Wave, and punk fester between the guitar, drums
and bass, Theo Kogan's necro-Amazonian warrior princess voice
coos and belts about everything from sex to suicide to the
death of New York City, and there are moments, like the dark
lurch of the title track, or the monolithic stone age guitar
squall on "Good Mourning," when So Many Ways to Die
will have you almost welcoming the flesh-eating end-times
with open arms.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

are available at bleep.com

Head over there to buy it!

Clause Four : Blue on Blue

Released on DC Recordings

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

Every now and again, a press release will
come across my desk veined with creativity-enhanced
gobbledygook. Stuff like:

"____________, the epic, thunderous,
often naked band died yesterday after falling off of a
mechanical bull at the Puss n Boots in Bogota,
Colombia."
or
"He randomly hears bleeps and glitches. His
sleep is plagued by fantasies of softly spoken women talking
in programming language over arrhythmic sound
shapes."
or
"_____________ were abandoned on the
doorstep of an alcoholic married couple composed of
ex-Megadeth roadies."
or
"After trying and
failing to carve out a career as a robot wrangler, _________
instead turned to becoming a robo-Pied Piper..."

Normally, passages like these are nothing
more than smoke screens designed to obscure the mediocrity of
the product, but in the case of Blue on Blue, the
debut release of Clause Four, they're almost necessary.
Blue on Blue is weird but compelling, six
well-designed odes to the merits of being easily distracted,
and even if its musical merits are not easily put into words,
every track contains plenty of strange beauty, if you're
willing to let your mind wander a little.

There's something very restless about Giles's
work. Though most of Blue on Blue could be described
as instrumental hip hop, Giles is too fidgety to stick to one
beat. Aside from the title track, Giles tends to use lots of
different rhythms, each of which acts as a kind of catalyst
for strange, mysterious washes of sound, plenty of it made up
of 8-bit computer tones. But the rhythms don't stick around -
most of the time, the drums start to act up, having become a
distraction. This impatience applies to other facets of Blue's
production too - the dubby echoes on "Version (#2)" are
sharply truncated, the attack in the guitar sample on
"Walking" periodically just disappears, and the song's
rhythmic elements tend to flinch off beat. But there's method
lurking here, too. Even though it takes some unpacking, the
three versions of "Version" are undoubtedly related; that
halting collection of notes that comprises the melody is
well-hidden, but the sublime turn that comes calling 65% of
the way through each will tip you off.

There are moments here that recall
instrumental hip hop tricksters like Ratatat and Boom Bip, but
while the impact of their records tends to stay about the
same, Giles's production chops have helped him create
something that makes both more and less sense every time you
listen to it. A delightfully puzzling debut.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

"My Girl (Is Calling Me a Liar)"

"Opening Up (Ce Soir On Danse)"

"Bonafied Lovin (Tough Guys)"

To buy
it, click here!

Chromeo : Fancy Footwork

Released on Vice

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

Even though the electro revival of the past
five-six years has been so successful, the amount of
electro-funk or electro-infused r&b that's come out in
that time has been disappointingly small. The names that come
up when talking about it - Prince, Rick James, Nile Rodgers,
Quincy Jones - are so big that it's not hard to see why very
few bands have stepped to the genre since its 80's heyday, but
since Chromeo released their debut She's in Control three
years ago, nobody's really attempted anything bigger than an
EP of the stuff. You could probably make the case that
She's in Control's high quality had a lot to do with
that too, but if you buy that, its follow-up is going to make
stepping into the electrofunk arena even more daunting.

Fancy Footwork is guided by some
serious smarts and incredibly sharp pop instincts. The dozens
of keyboard, synths, guitar and vocal parts that take turns
jigging through Footwork's drum machine programming
are all light on their feet, a perfect foil for the album's
delightfully silly lyrics, which deal with everything from a
bygone term of endearment ("Tenderoni") to getting in touch
with your emotions ("Opening Up") to, uh, having a crush on
your mom (kind of). Chromeo showed they've got arranging
talent on She's in Control, but that talent was
sometimes counterbalanced by screwing around. Fancy
Footwork is much more focused, and so even though Pee and
Dave aim for a wider range of songs here, they hit all of
their targets, even the sax-solo-tastic slow jam ("100%") that
closes the album out.

There are one or two songs here that
kind of fall flat ("Outta Sight" will get stuck in your head,
but not in a good way), and Pee and Dave have a bad habit of
setting the table for solos, then playing barely two bars
before jumping back into what they were doing originally, but
for the most part Fancy Footwork is a great goofy
step forward for two of electro's smartest guys. If they keep
this up, no one's going to mind that they're the only ones
trying to keep electrofunk alive.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

Revl9n - "Walking Machine" (SebastiAn
Mix)

My My - "Butterflies & Zebras"

KIM - "Wet n Wild" (Midnight Juggernauts
Mix)

Justus Koehncke - "Advance"

To buy
it, click here!

Adam Freeland : Mexico City

Released on Global
Underground
reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

Global Underground's been around for a
loooong time. The mix CD series started back in 1996, and in
the years since then their progressive house sets have put
several DJs as well as dozens of singles on the map all over
the world, as well as helped turn Global Underground
into one of the few reliable brands for partygoers everywhere.
But for this, the 32nd (!!) installment in the series, the
franchise released something a little different. Based loosely
on a DJ set done in Mexico City, breakbeat wizard Adam
Freeland's entry in the mix series covers everything from
raucous electrotouch to 80's futurism to Krautrock space
odysseys, but Freeland's awareness of Global
Underground's audience stops him from creating an
exhausting mind-fuck of surging craziness. Instead, the
balance of energy and pace here seems tailor-made for the
series's brand loyalists, offering party peoples an idea of
what the kids are listening to at a pace they can keep up
with.

Plenty of DJs who spin electrotouch these
days do it like they're intent on causing a collective nervous
breakdown, filling their sets with so much menace and
bone-vaporizing noise and distortion that it's hard to keep
from passing out. If you just glance at Mexico City's
tracklist, it looks like the first disc might've been designed
with similar bedlam in mind. Disc one could definitely be
called Ed Banger-centric, with storms of parched gasps and
evil sample drills courtesy of SebastiAn, schizophrenic gusts
courtesy of Mr. Oizo, stuttering and crushing beats courtesy
of Justice. But rather than cram them together like waifish
hipsters in a loft party, Freeland lets each track mostly run
its course before moving onto the next, and often puts one or
more low-key cuts between the crazier ones. People who are up
to their eyeballs in electrotouch might find this first disc a
little tame, but for people who have read more than they've
heard, it's a tastefully selected cross-section of what the
new genre's all about, and it's offered at a dosage that's not
likely to put you in the hospital. The second disc follows a
similar formula, but its music, despite being much more
varied, is better suited to it. The epic, unhurried quality of
tracks like Justus Koehncke's "Advance" or 120 Day's "Come
Out" or the inward loner funk of Andrew Weatherall's
"Feathers" make the second disc, which features three re-edits
by Freeland himself, much stronger.

Global Underground's stated
raison d'etre, to document the sounds of certain dancefloor
scenes all over the world, puts them in the unique position of
both salesmen and curators. Their longevity suggests that
they've been reasonably successful doing both, and if
Mexico City's more a musical showcase than an
exercise in DJ virtuosity, it's nice to think that, 11 years
deep, Global Underground can still be relied on to
give you a taste of what's hot.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

..are available all over the goddamned
Internetzzzz.

To buy it, click here!

Various Artists : Kitsuné
Maison Compilation 4
Released on Kitsune

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

I've read a lot of reviews recently suggesting
that Kitsuné Maison Compilation 4 isn't as big a deal
as its predecessors because it offers "more of the same," and
if that's not evidence of hip-seeking infecting music writing,
then I don't know what is. Once upon a time, finding a label
that just did its thing and did it well was cause for
celebration, not derision, and if electro-touch (or whatever
we'll all be calling it next week) is no longer so new it has
a distinct smell, well, that's hardly Kitsuné's fault. The
only thing the good people at this cute little French outfit
can be held accountable for is their sense of taste, and that
remains infuriatingly good. Maison 4's got variety,
with everything from guitar shocks and farting, squelching
synthesizers to Daft Punk and James Chance-sized boners in
abundance, and all the blog-monkeys out there ought to
remember that doing "more of the same" basically just
downgrades Maison 4 from "revelatory and
era-defining" to "disgustingly hip." Oh well, c'est la
vie.

Admittedly, it's not all perfect. Even though
this scene's mushroomed in size in the last 18 months (and
shows no signs of slowing down), there are some pretty blatant
rip-offs on display here. Whitey's "Stay On the Outside"
borrows pretty liberally from LCD Soundsystem's last record,
Punks Jump Up's "Dance to Our Disco" recalls (and by recalls,
I mean lazily co-opts) everybody from Gang of Four to James
Chance and the Contortions, and Midnight Juggernauts' remix of
Dragonette's "I Get Around" is a Daft Punk song. But
if electro-touch gets you off, these are small crimes,
especially in light of what they're surrounded by. Numero#'s
"Hit Pop" is triumphant club euphoria on an indie scale, Guns
n Bombs's "Crossover Appeal" is house with distorted keyboards
and a nasty guitar line that doubles as a bass undercurrent,
and Boys Noize's "Classic" mix of Feist's "My Moon My Man"
lives up to its title.

It's too early to tell whether this summer's
going to make or break electro-touch, but Maison 4
shows that Kitsuné's always going to have its back, and if
that's somehow not a good thing, well, I don't know what to
tell you.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

..are available on eMusic here.

To buy it, click here!

Boom Bip : Sacchrilege EP

Released on Lex Records

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

It was only a matter of time before some
smart-ass snuck in through the back door. The
80's/rave/disco-revival party music scene is so oversaturated
these days - with hype, hating, everything really - that any
savvy veteran producer has ample opportunity to both make fun
of and outpace most of what's already out there. Inevitable as
it might've been, the surprise here is that this much-overdue
dose of musical double-speak comes to us courtesy of Boom Bip,
an instrumental hip hop producer. On the Sacchrilege
EP, the Cincinnati native hijacks the synth palettes and drum
machines that have become damn-near ubiquitous recently to
create one of the most substantive "hip" records of the year,
and it couldn't have come at a better time.

Even if you don't buy into the argument that
subversive forces are at work here, the attempt itself would
have to be considered a failure if Sacchrilege didn't
sound great. But it does. EP opener "Snook Adis" is mysterious
and exciting, with keyboard tones that recall everyone from
Vangelis to Depeche Mode, and an Italo bass greasing the
wheels of hyperactive drum programming that gets fed up,
breaks down, and switches itself up every 45 seconds or so.
Its affective impact hides the complexity well, but on "Rat
Tail," the gallery of cyborg synth breakdowns crammed into the
beat's gaps is engaging enough on its own. Next comes "Coogi
Sweater," a snidely perfect mix of Adult. and Miss Kittin with
gleefully obtuse keyboard outbursts and blithely recited
couplets like "Custom kicks / get your fix / Coogi sweater /
sex is better" situated in a mix of grainy menace and sleek
tension. It's these successes that prep you to listen between
the notes on a track like "The Pinks," whose combination of
cowbell and airheaded harmonies says a lot about the empty
bliss that's in such vogue these days. But it's important to
note that "The Pinks" makes its comment with a straight face -
even the slightest hint of disdain would crush a track like
this, and Boom Bip keeps negativity out of it. He's having fun
with tropes here, not belittling them.

Sacchrilege closes out with
"One of Eleven," whose thick, cloudy keyboards, echoing synths
and house trappings are all nothing more than a smoke screen
for the skinny electro beat underneath. The track wanders in
its own fog for a while, and when the haze dissipates, all
that's left is a simple, throbbing electro pulse. Even though
the track is relatively subdued, it says a lot that when it's
all stripped away, what's beating underneath is still vital.
Boom Bip didn't show up just to cause trouble. He just expects
more from this three-headed revival, and on
Sacchrilege, he gives it to us.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

..are unavailable, because the album isn't
out in the United States yet.

To buy it, click here!

Simian Mobile Disco : Attack
Decay Sustain Release
Released on Wichita

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

Ever since word got out last year that Simian
Mobile Disco were working on a full-length album, everyone
here at GBH tried (and failed) to keep the expectations to a
minimum. There were plenty of singles and records that got us
excited, but at the end of 2006 it was clear that as a team,
Simian Mobile Disco had more arranging smarts, more melodic
gift, and more stylistic range than anyone else out there by a
wide margin. The idea that there'd be an album that could
connect the dots between "Hustler," "Tits and Acid," and (as
they were eventually released) "I Believe" and "It's the Beat"
was, at times, frankly a little too much for us.

Those kinds of expectations are unfair to any
album, and even if Attack Decay Sustain Release isn't
the instant classic we were hoping for, it's still extremely
good. The tracks that bracket Release's murderer's
row of aforementioned hits, like "Sleep Deprivation" and "I
Got This Down," are flawlessly arranged, with acid accents and
blips meshing their percussion and melodies together
perfectly. When SMD split the beats and notes up, as on
"Love," which features Barry Dobbin from Clor on vocals, they
punctuate its dance rock drums with slap bass, and the two
keyboard parts, when they intertwine, evoke the wrung-out
bliss that comes at the end of a great concert or DJ set.
Producers Jas Shaw and James Ford shift ably from deft breaks
to monolithic house beats, from twitching synths to epic
keyboard washes, and every part in all of Release's
tracks undergoes a metamorphosis at some point, giving
the whole album a subtle, liquid cohesion.

It's hard to imagine what tracks like
these fail to measure up to, but they're following an
impossibly tough act. When you first look at
Release's tracklisting, it seems counterintuitive to
put "It's the Beat," "Hustler," and "Tits and Acid" back to
back to back, but SMD rerecorded the latter two with the
intention of giving them a more "live" feel, and it works;
when the maelstrom of hi-hats, drums, and sirens on "Tits and
Acid" reaches its crazed peak, it somehow conjures up both
"It's the Beat"'s metallic echoes and "Hustler"'s deviant
vibrations, and for a moment you think Shaw and Ford have
uncovered some kind of key that ties all of today's dance
music together. Even though that illusion withers over the
course of the album's back half, which, aside from "Love,"
features the album's weakest material, it's a nagging high
that's tough to forget about.

Attack Decay Sustain
Release isn't a generation-defining release, but it's
still one of the best records we've heard this year, and even
if it'll take me another week or so to get over it, I'm sure
Simian Mobile Disco will gladly accept that as a consolation
prize.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

..are unavailable, because the album drops
next week.

To
buy it, click here!

Digitalism : Idealism

Released on Astralwerks

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

Even though Jens Moelle and Ismail Tuefekci
(who, by their powers combined, are also known as Digitalism)
can take a big chunk of credit for how big French touch and
filter house are right now, the two of them have always had a
soft spot in their hearts for guitars. It might be the big
honking synth lines that keep "Idealistic" and "Zdarlight"
entrenched in plenty of playlists, but you can't really
discuss the virtues of those singles without mentioning the
brisk scraping of pick against strings, and on
Idealism, their debut long-player, the German duo
blend dance rock and filter house more skillfully, and with
more consistency, than any other DJ or producer this year.

2007's already seen Black Strobe fall all
over themselves trying to make a rawk record, and Justice's
enduring fascination with distortion is about as subtle as a
gob of spit (though there's plenty more going on in their
music, to be fair), but aside from one or two tracks,
Idealism puts the specific sonic attributes that only
guitars have to excellent use in what are basically house
tracks (if we're going by drum programming). But they don't
ask too much of them, either. The guitars on Idealism
are fast and furious, but they're dampened and rarely mixed
very high, meant to keep the intensity up without leading the
charge, and for the most part, they don't have to;
Idealism runs over with dirty, catchy, and confident
synth programming. There's thick corrosive bass on tracks like
"Digitalism in Cairo" and "Homezone," there's keyboard work
that ranges from fiendish and twitchy ("Homezone," "Jupiter
Room") to terribly French ("Magnets," "The Pulse"), and the
drums, despite being pretty straightforward, are very
fashionably mixed (hi hats EQed to high heaven and run through
a pedal, blocky kick drums). There are
people who will frown at Idealism's drums and call
them unimaginative, but their rigidity is sometimes a saving
grace. "Anything New," for example, one of the few tracks here
that asks too much of its guitars, sees the clunkiness of its
bridges swept away much more efficiently by the simple
pounding of the drums, and the four-on-the-floor of "Pogo"'s
chorus gets back all the warmth and momentum that comes off
the verses.

There have been a ton of recent attempts
to fuse all the genres that jostle up against one another in
nightclubs these days, and most of them try (and fail) to
create something totally new. Idealism thankfully
doesn't aspire to that. Moelle and Tuefekci just want their
favorite timbres to move together to the same beat, and in
that respect, Idealism is quite a
success.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

"Unhuman"

"AC-775"

"Sikk"

To buy it, click here!

Motor : Unhuman

Released on Nova/Mute

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

It's fitting that Motor is a hard-working
band. Their debut album came out less than a year ago, and
since then, they've gone on an international tour, put
together nearly a dozen remixes, and cooked up a second album
that reflects their relentlessness. Unhuman is a
neverending jet stream of industrial, ebm (a.k.a.
electro-body-music), Chicago and Detroit house funnelled
through a dark (but mostly non-theatrical) take on Kraftwerk's
man-machine aesthetic, and if you can't keep up, well, that's
just your human frailty talking.

Aside from a few moments of call and
response, Motor doesn't screw around with human elements. Tiny
collections of two and three note melodies repeat over and
over again, acid flashes and Teutonic beats hurtle toward and
through you on some kind of light speed conveyor belt. Though
it bears a lot of the same characteristics as industrial
music, there's no faux-primal affect to get caught up in here,
which makes these tracks even more intimidating. Main
programmer Bryan Black (who used to work with Prince, of all
people) periodically hammers his melodies into flat rhythms,
and his bass lines into nothing, but there is something
inescapably musical about his madness. Despite the group's
stated goal to make music that is, well, not human at all, it
still manages to communicate a kind of vital, danceable
energy, even if that energy is pretty ominous and
dread-inducing; listen to the hyper-stiff 808 breaks on "AC
775," for example, and you'll start to notice the similarity
between the faces on Unhuman's cover and the twisted
grin that haunts Aphex Twin's first records.

Danceability and intensity aside,
Unhuman is not for everybody. It's a polarizing
record by design, and there are dozens of reasons to decide
that you'd hate it. But if you've ever had nights when you
want to dance til you forget how to do anything else (and that
includes feel emotion), then Unhuman definitely
belongs in your music collection.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

Chelonis R. Jones - "I Don't Know" (Herbert's
Presets Only Mix)

Lopazz - "Migracion" (Fujiya & Miyagi
Remix)

Booka Shade - "Unhealthy Pleasures"

Einzelkind - "As Long As You Want Me To"

To buy it, click here!

Various Artists : Five Years
of Get Physical
Released on Get Physical

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

In the space of just five years, the
Berlin-based dance label Get Physical conquered the market for
12"es and albums that are technically proficient but not
wanky, smart but not too brainy, and catchy but not shameless.
Their releases reference funk, disco, and many different
strains of house, but these references are backed by a desire
to keep those genres moving forward; they're eclectic as well
as inclusive, and that approach has netted them quite a lot of
success. It should come as no surprise, then, that the
material result of their five-year anniversary celebration,
Five Years of Get Physical, applies that same
blueprint. Five Years is a big, sloppy bash filled
with toasts, gags and recollections, with distinguished guests
mingling with the label's extended family, as well as an
encouraging look ahead for a label that doesn't seem at all
intent on slowing down.

On the first disc, the aforementioned guests
- Hot Chip, Fujiya & Miyagi, Herbert, and the Rapture, to
name a few - revisit and remix some of the label's biggest
hits, and the result is a delightful mess. As you might
expect, the biggest successes here come when the guests play
to their strengths. Herbert's mix of Chelonis R. Jones's "I
Don't Know" is a rich array of shining rhythms and synths that
colors the emotional nuances in Jones's vocals, Fujiya &
Miyagi's mix of Lopazz's "Migracion" is full of futurist
Krautrock warmth, faraway synths yielding to warm bass, female
falsettos blossoming into two-part harmonies, and Henrik
Schwartz's mix of Booka Shade's "Vertigo" adds some body heat
to the chilly intrigue of the original. The less objectively
successful moments, like the Rapture's slow-down of Williams's
"Piccadilly Circuits," or the gimmick-tastic versions of "Body
Language" and "Night Falls" turned in by Senor Coconut and
Larry Gold, come off because the emphasis here is on variety
rather than one-upmanship; it allows Fakesch to transform the
anthemic "Mandarine Girl" into a sandpapery shuffler instead
of forcing him to try and top it.

Congenial atmosphere aside, disc two kicks
the guests out and settles in for a collection of after-hours
tracks produced specifically for Five Years. Some of
their stable's got more experience with this (Booka Shade,
M.A.N.D.Y.) than others (Elektrochemie, DJ T.), but the disc's
sequenced nicely, and the gems easily buoy the rest. As has
been the case since the label started, Booka Shade are the
real stars here. Their "Unhealthy Pleasures" is delightfully
patient, its busy programming propelling and surrounding its
oblong synths, and their collaboration with M.A.N.D.Y. on a
remix of Laurie Anderson's "O Superman" draws long-lost
timbres out of Anderson's vocals.

Five Years isn't a transcendent,
essential purchase by any means, but that's not what its
producers set out to make. Its indulgences are there by
design, and it speaks volumes about Get Physical that so many
people, all over the world, are going to enjoy them anyway.
What a fabulous party favor.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

are available at eMusic and Bleep.

To buy it, click here!

Matthew Dear : Asa Breed

Released on Ghostly
International
reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

As one of the
leading figures of a genre that, at best, could be called an
acquired taste, Matthew Dear's got two things going for him
when it comes to trying to expand his fan base - critical
respect, and the element of surprise. Dear's deserved
reputation as one of microhouse's shining stars gets him
mentions in all kinds of publications, the occasional slot in
year-end Best Of lists by comprehensive music hubs like
Pitchfork and Popmatters, all without tons of people actually
knowing what his music sounds like.

This strange (and in some ways enviable)
cultural position is likely to the gild Asa Breed's
positive reviews with a certain mystique that it might not
quite deserve, but it certainly deserves all the praise it's
received already. Dear's third full-length envelops your ears
with everything from warm, rich guitars to finely wrought
beats, and even though it's sometimes short on immediate
emotional impact, the level of craftsmanship brought to bear
on it alone makes Asa Breed a great listen.

Surprisingly, the album's most consistently
engaging aspect is its singing. Dear's not much of a singer,
and that fact's not lost on him, but he's clearly put more
thought into the relationship that vocals have to a
song than most producers ever bother to, and his voice moves
around according to his relationship to what he's singing
about: on "Death to Feelers," Dear sings over the hazy toy
pianos and lazy echoes as though they were a distraction,
while on "Deserter," the album's first single, he embeds
himself in the song's current. This approach owes a lot to
Dear's detail-obsessed house beginnings, but David Byrne's an
obvious reference point too; on "Pom Pom," Dear appropriates
Byrne's nervous, semi-connected-statements lyrical style, and
"Elementary Lover," with its distracted guitar and pan-ethnic
pizzicati, owes a debt both to My Life in the Bush of
Ghosts and Byrne's solo work.

These points of reference influence Asa
Breed's music as well, but in a different way. Where
Byrne's music is often very forthright, a big unambiguous
declaration of disconnected humanity, Dear's songs often
feature one confident element in a sea of shyness; the
textures that scuttle by in "Vine to Vine," hiding in the
shade of Dear's big, deliberate guitar strums, the compelling
harmony in Dear's multi-tracked voice that's obscured by the
intricate, glitz beat on "Shy," these details grow on you with
each successive listen, and supplement the persona created by
his lyrics.

As with the music he got started
on, Asa Breed isn't big on emotional directness. The
most immediate vibe on Asa Breed is one of solitude,
and as such it's a tough record to throw on and listen to
casually. But if you're willing to sit down and sift through
it, you'll hear a thoroughly considered pop statement. If he
keeps this up, the mystique can't be far behind.

back to
the top

Album
Excerpts:

...are unavailable, because the album drops
worldwide on June 5.

To buy it (as an import), click here!

Black Strobe : Burn Your Own
Church
Released on Playlouder

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

Forging a strong bond between genres isn't
as easy as people would have you believe. Every single or
one-off track that's successfully combined rock and dance, for
example - ranging from early 90's work by Moby, Cornelius, and
the Prodigy right up to stuff by the likes of DFA, A Touch of
Class and others - obscures the fact that a successful
album-length union of the two has never really been created
(though Pretty Hate Machine is pretty close). And
without getting too much into specifics, it seems fair to
assume that this just boils down to an issue of limited
expertise. How many people can really master two genres? Is it
essential that an artist has an equally strong grip on both?
Apparently, it is, and people in search of examples should
look no further than Burn Your Own Church; Black
Strobe's full-length debut is distinguished as much by its
mastery of electro-house darkness as its relative inexperience
with hard rock's governing dynamics, and every deep dark scary
triumph is cancelled out by a handful of disastrous mistakes
that call the entire project into question.

To be fair, the disastrous mistakes don't
show up right away. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Burn
Your Own Church starts out with "Brenn Di Ega Kjerke," a
coursing, black tornado that whips itself up into a fury of
guitar roar and heavy metal kick drums, and its follow-up
("Shining Bright Star") pits an unholy swell of synthesizers
against a shuddering bassline with tremendous success. But the
rock touches in these two tracks are only accessories. It's
easy to miss this the first time, but all those metal
signifiers disguise the fact that Burn Your Own
Church opens with a pair of dark electro-house tracks,
the kind that Black Strobe still make better than anybody.
It's when the band ventures to make rock music adorned with
electro-house that things start to get messy. And sadly, even
though they get it right once - "Blood Shot Eyes" is
simultaneously burbling and bludgeoning - they show that
there's plenty to screw up. In some cases, it's technical:
"Not What You Need" works up a decent caveman stomp on its way
to a chorus that's drowned out by its own synthesizers. Other
times, it's a question of getting the vocal affect right (or
very, very wrong). "I'm a Man" needs to be sung by somebody
who has a sense of rhythm (and no French accent), and "Lady
13" features dreadful vocals delivering lyrics that are even
worse over a preposterously overwrought electric piano. Black
Strobe has been called theatrical and sometimes campy in the
past, but that sensibility was easy to overlook because of how
skillfully everything was put together. Here, however, the
group's inexperience - both Arnaud Rebotini's with this new
genre, and his bandmates' with one other - makes every
contrivance really sting.

Burn Your Own Church almost
succeeds in wiping out the memory of its horrendous middle
third with "Buzz Buzz Buzz" and "Last Club on Earth," but its
closer, "Crave For Speed," brings everything back with a
combination of gasped vocals, dramatic piano, and a wall of
guitar noise that sounds like some kind of demented union of
Air and Nine Inch Nails. Bands ought to be able to attempt a
contrast like that maybe once an album, but on a release
that's filled with them, it's enough to make you wonder if
anyone should be trying to do this kind of thing at
all.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

...are unavailable, because the album drops
on June 5.

To buy it, click here!

Von Südenfed : Tromatic
Reflexxions
Released on Domino

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

Back in 2001, Mouse on Mars released an
album called Radical Connector. Long-time fans called
it the group's first "pop" album, and even though they were
speaking relatively (giddy, twitchy texturefuck pop, is more
like it), history's shown it to have been pretty indisputably
ahead of its time. Though the album's visionary qualities were
dispensed in small doses, on one track everything came
together about four years too early: the writhing synths and
ghetto bounce of "Wipe That Sound" perfectly encapsulate, even
today, the souped-up electro sound that's been tearing up
dancefloors for almost two years now. In a stroke of
ridiculous luck, Mark E. Smith, the frontman of the relentless
post-punk band the Fall, approached them about appearing on a
remix of "Wipe That Sound," and for reasons that no one
can seem to figure out, this initial collaboration picked
up steam and eventually resulted in Tromatic
Reflexxions, an album's worth of collaborations which the
group released under the name Von Südenfed.

If Radical Connector came out about
five years too early, Tromatic Reflexxions is
undoubtedly underground pop for right now. Smith's malcontent
antics give Tomi and St. Werner a consistent, evocative voice
to channel themselves through, and the resultant tracks are
just as biting, focused, and unflaggingly hip as Smith's ever
been. What's most shocking, though, is how natural the
combination feels, even right out of the gate. Smith's
sneer-singing on album opener "Fledermaus Can't Get Enough"
falls right into step with the malevolent, heavily processed
bassline, even as it kicks the track past disembodied house
drums, groaning synths, and rusty hi-hats. Though there are
small signs that each side is trying something new, like
Smith's disturbingly gentle singing on "The Rhinohead," it
never feels quite like concessions are being made. This is
particularly impressive when it comes to Tomi and St. Werner,
whose seeming addiction to variety made their earlier records
both delightful and exhausting. Here, they rein themselves in,
and train their considerable production talents on the
smallest details of their songs' few elements. "Serious
Brainskin," for example, is a clinic in processing and
distortion, a dirty, edgy, pixellated, overmiked collection of
synths that blast in from nowhere, beats outrunning one
another to different finish lines, and sheets of white noise
that spray in with new ideas. All Smith contributes to the
track is a cryptic phrase ("We live in a strange and
mysterious town"), while Tomi and St. Werner reduce the beats,
chords, and noises to a glorious collection of static-y greys.
Elsewhere, the duo's mixing chops imbue "That Sound Wiped" (a
reworking of the track that kick-started this whole album)
with a kind of calm that rarely presides over the squiggles,
chirps, and whirs on display.

Very few tracks on Reflexxions seem
driven by one party or another, though the few tracks where
Smith takes center stage show he's still got it. On "Flooded,"
for example, Smith turns a story about flooding a nightclub
into a hilarious indictment of electronic music's enduring
facelessness, all over a smart two step beat and keyboard
jabs. It says quite a lot that Smith's baiting and wry tricks
still pack a punch, and more than anything, it's Smith's
steady defiance - of society, of age, of anything stupid
enough to try and hold him back - that puts the biggest stamp
on this project. He got two of electronic music's most
hyperactive talents to slow down just enough to let the world
appreciate them, and possibly, for the first time in their
careers, maybe keep up with them too. God only knows what kind
of effect Von Südenfed
will have on the here and now, but whatever that effect is, it
ought to bode well for the future.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

"Geremia"

"Caminhao de Gas"

"Bondallica" .

To buy it, click here!

Bonde do Role : With Lasers

Released on Domino

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

For all the talk about the Internet knocking
down borders and making the world's digital fun available to
everybody (well, everybody except the Chinese), people often
forget about good old-fashioned language barriers. It might
not affect chord changes or drum beats, but it makes it pretty
hard to get a complete feel for a pop song, and it's naturally
influenced what kinds of music make the rounds in our
collective ear drums. The combination of filth and silliness
that's made baile funk such an underground phenomenon, for
example, has always been pinned to the music, and most
Americans don't care about what comes out of its MCs' mouths.
In plenty of mixes, the vocals are actually treated as an
afterthought, mixed down and out of the way of the music
itself. In fairness to both the DJs
and the listeners, it's tough to make an argument that the
English-speaking world is missing out on some serious poetry;
Diplo, the genre's most high-profile champion, describes the
vocal side of baile funk as "little children screaming about
drugs," and the general consensus around Brazil is that baile
funk is basically pretty stupid (or if you're a fan of the
stuff, pretty stupid party music).

Bonde do Role's debut album, With
Lasers, is intoxicatingly stupid party music by design,
all bright, cartoon-y samples sewn with deliberate simplicity
to a mix of canned baile funk rhythms and 808s. People love to
talk about baile funk's "dirtiness" or "raw energy," but
With Lasers is more playful than anything else. It's
most evident in the lyrics, which are about everything from
daydreams of rubbing up against women on buses to gay James
Bond, but if you're not quite up on your Pajuba (that would be
the Portuguese dialect used mostly by Rio's gay community, and
Bonde do Role), it's impossible to know that. There are plenty
of musical indications, though. The booming drumline snippet
underneath "Geremia," for example, might be the song's
rhythmic backbone, but the track's really driven by the kazoos
and slide whistles between Marina Vello's verses. Because
baile funk's basically constructed the same way hip hop used
to be (that is, with sampling), half the fun lies in the weird
juxtapositions you can make, like the quirky interplay between
its flute sample, 808 drums, and vocoded adlibs on "Caminhao
de Gas." The genre crossovers that earned baile funk its
hipster street cred, like "electro + favela" or "metal +
favela" are here too, and thankfully they're mostly undercut
by the band's whimsy - the finger-tapping solos and demonic
intonations of "Dança Do Zumbi" or the sampled roar in
"Bondallica" are gags you can rock out to.

There's an amateurish quality to With
Lasers that doesn't always go down smoothly, especially
when they aspire to that "dirtiness" tag ("Marina do Bairro,"
for example, is pretty overwhelmed by the Grandmaster Flash
sample it's built around), but it's still a fine summer
record, especially when you consider that it probably aspires
to even less. It's just unfortunate that, without their
lyrics, people will likely dismiss With Lasers as a
disposable, stupid party album instead of a gleeful,
endearingly stupid party album. Enjoy what you can, and know
that there's more.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

...are unavailable, because Amazon has no
love for Dan Deacon.

To buy it, click here!

Dan Deacon : Spiderman of
the Rings
Released on Carpark

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

It's very easy to imagine a lot of people
hating Dan Deacon. Even though eventually most of us graduate
from high school (both technically and emotionally),
there are plenty of people out there who, even today, are very
resentful of people who flaunt their childish impulses instead
of grasping at pre-conceived standards of cool. The fact that
Deacon willfully projects an outsider's image, runs with an
artsy crowd, and basks in the glow of critical praise
(including plenty from that great indie polarizer, Pitchfork)
is enough to piss off most people, but Deacon goes so far as
to make his childish impulses the source of his coolness.

I wouldn't recommend Deacon's debut Spiderman of
the Rings to anyone fantasizing about giving him an
atomic wedgie right now, but those of you willing to tolerate
a little bit of preciousness in your indie electronic music
should read on, because while Rings is certainly an
odd record, its weirdness is meant to be inviting instead of
intimidating. Like Animal Collective, Deacon's music is filled
with identifiable elements accented by childish tics, which
add a child-like quality to the songs themselves. This is no
mean trick, considering the album is essentially comprised of
cheap, relentless synth programming, but Rings has
just enough childhood echoes in it, like the
early-60's-rock-band phrasing in "Okie Dokie," or Danny
Elfman's theme from Batman (though in
spazzed-the-fuck-out form here), to make you feel somehow at
home inside it. And that comfort is key, because just below
the surface of this album lurks an epic, nerdy exuberance
that's pretty hard to resist. It makes you want to squeal
along to the unintelligible verses of "The Crystal Cat," it
allows you to believe in and embrace the instinctive flow of a
track like "Big Milk," and it accentuates the inherent safety
at the core of the euphoric hum of "Wham City." Spiderman
of the Rings is driven by unimpeded instinct, and in an
era that's characterized by calculation and affect, that makes
it cool by default.

back to
the top

Album
Excerpts:

...are unavailable, because this hasn't been
released Stateside yet, but believe us, it's worth it.

To buy it, click here!

Kathy Diamond : Miss Diamond
to You
Released on Permanent
Vacation/Bubbletease
reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

Even though nobody would disagree with you
if you called Maurice Fulton an electronic music producer,
part of the Sheffield native's broad appeal is his seemingly
bottomless understanding of r&b. It informs his early
house singles, it's both the icing and the cake batter in his
disco tracks, and it even lurks beneath the surface of Mu, the
aggro-weirdo side project he has with his wife, Mutsumi Akamu.
This near-instinctive comfort not only allows Fulton to blend
cool keyboards and slap bass with the best of them, it also
gives him greater latitude to challenge those elements and
make them do things they've never done before, and on Miss
Diamond to You, the debut album of Sheffield-based
chanteuse Kathy Diamond, Fulton hands Miss Diamond a wildly
spacey collection of 21st r&b tracks disguised as disco
stretched to its breaking point. And despite a couple of
warts, it's ultimately Fulton's wizardry that makes Miss
Diamond to You one of 2007's best
releases.

The first thing
that jumps out at you about Miss Diamond to You is
how sedate it is. Most the album doesn't walk, it undulates,
exuding an ambience that's hard to pin down initially. All the
disco elements are here, overdriven slap bass, hand claps, the
excitable and upbeat piano chords that fused disco and house
together, but the unmistakable soulfulness they combine to
generate doesn't have that coiled up energy disco normally
has. For people who grew up thinking of disco as a dirty word
instead of a legitimate stop on the r&b continuum, who
then got into it after the fact, Miss Diamond to You
starts out as a mystery (though decidedly the good kind), and
there are only a few clues to its true identity: the sublime
shimmering guitars on album opener "Between the Lines" and
"Another Life," the epic funk/gospel organ solo on "Over," the
luxurious twin bass attack on "All Woman." But once you figure
out that the album's features owe as much to Mtume and Nile
Rodgers as they do to Pete Bellotte and Patrick Adams, the
album metamorphoses into something that's nothing short of
fantastic. In much the same way that James Murphy stresses
disco's entanglement with post-punk in his work, Fulton mixes
his r&b signifiers together in a way that's futuristic as
well as faithful. This way, a track like "Until the Sun Goes
Down" can be read as both a love letter to old rhythms and an
editorial on their continued relevance, and either way, Fulton
comes off as pretty eloquent.

Even though Fulton's the star here,
Diamond's no slouch herself. Despite being more an ingredient
than anything else, her voice is breathy and coolly soulful,
and recalls, depending on the track, at least a half dozen
late 70's soul singers. Even though her vocals are usually
multi-tracked and run through a mess of effects pedals and
filters by Fulton, she sounds blithe and empowered, totally
comfortable with coming and going from track to track, almost
like some kind of spirit, practically. And given the character
of the music she floats through and inhabits, it's worth
hoping that she continues to serve as a muse for Fulton and
his r&b history lessons.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

"Mr. Right "

"Friends and Lovers "

To buy this,
click here!

Mickey Avalon : Mickey
Avalon
Released on Myspace Records

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

It's hard to really write Mickey Avalon off
one way or another. You can sneer that he's just a whore who's
managed to successfully slither up one rung higher on the
ladder of prostitution, or that he's a calculating little eel
who's validating behaviour he better hope his daughter never
finds out about, or that he's a helpless little worm who's
been seized upon by ugly corporate superpowers who are only
using him as a lure for millions of teenagers and young
people. All chthonian imagery aside, there's bits of truth in
all of those accusations, but none of them really tells the
whole story. Mickey's got a star's personality, both in terms
of its scale and its insecurities, and the life he'd led prior
to hitting it big could fill many albums with captivating
material.

If he ever escapes the clutches he's in, he
might get around to doing that, but for now Mickey's still
being used, and his self-titled debut album reflects that
pretty thoroughly. Mickey Avalon is more than just a
blatant (and disappointingly clumsy) cash-in on hype: it just
might be one of the most exploitative records ever released.
Interscope Records attached its name to the project for a
slice of the sales pie, but didn't think to include one of its
product managers in the deal. To be fair, Interscope probably
just hedged its bet; Mickey Avalon's beats range from
decent ("Waiting to Die," the perversely catchy "Jane Fonda")
to lousy (the C-grade g-funk "Hustler Hall of Fame" the
sub-Frooty Loops garbage on "Roll the Dice"), and the only
adjective that could consistently be applied to them is
amateurish. There are, of course, 69 tracks (guffaw), but only
11 of them have music, and despite lasting under four minutes,
the wait between tracks 10 and 69, where "My Dick" festers,
almost isn't worth it.

But what makes all of this so
incredibly sad is Mickey's presence in the middle of it all.
He's got charisma for days, enough wit to be a worthy
punchline rapper, and there are moments on this album that
make you think he could write some really affecting songs too;
the dead-eyed, sneering chorus of "Friends and Lovers" is
almost spooky, and "Dipped in Vaseline" showcases a thoughtful
side that you secretly knew he had in him.

Mickey
takes creation pretty seriously; he's been a painter for
years, and he writes and reads a lot more than you'd expect
from a junkie, current or former, and if he ever puts his back
into it he has a chance to become one of America's most
prominent cultural anti-heroes. But for now, he's gotta stop
prostituting himself, no matter who's doing the wining and
dining.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

"Different Sound "

"Cobrastyle"

To buy this, click here!

Teddybears : Soft Machine

Released on Big
Beat/Atlantic
reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

It used to be that if you heard a pop song
in a commercial on TV, that ad served two purposes. The
record's executives probably thought they were getting a free
plug (and the record's writers knew they were getting some fat
royalty checks), but nine times out of ten, for viewers like
you and me, that particular ad became a 30 second public
service form letter whose contents read:

The song you are currently listening to is
the best track on the album ____________ by ______. It is
likely to be not only the best song on the album, but the only
song that could even be called decent. Consider purchasing
(insert product here) , but also consider yourself warned
about the album.

I'm not going to bore you with the hundreds
of examples that support my argument, but I will say that
times have begun to change, and flabbergasted old-timers in
search of evidence that this change is, in fact, occurring,
should look no further than Soft Machine, the debut
album by Sweden's Teddybears. Depending on your own personal
ratio of television watching to music consumption, you've
definitely heard quite a few of this trio's songs already, but
whether you know them as "Punkrocker" and "Different Sound" or
"that song in the Cadillac commercial" and "the music in the
background of that Nokia commercial with the multiplying
dudes" is irrelevant. Soft Machine is packed, end to
end, with songs that are slick and fashionable, big,
unimpeachably fun hooks, and enough welcome surprises to make
you expect big things out of them in the future.

8 of its 13 tracks feature guest vocals, but
surprisingly, this does nothing to impede the album's
cohesiveness. Whether they're backing reggae toasters like Mad
Cobra and Elephant Man, girly pop chanteuses like Neneh
Cherry, or Iggy Pop's grizzled intonations, the Teddys'
stadium-sized dance-rock sound is an excellent host. The
Teddys sometimes fall in love with their ideas a little too
much ("Ahead of My Time" and "Automatic Lover" are both built
out of pieces of their single "Different Sound"), but that's
certainly a pardonable offense, because taken as a whole,
Soft Machine is definitely better than advertised.

back to
the top

Album
Excerpts:

"Accident & Emergency"

"Bluebells"

To buy this, click here!

Patrick Wolf : The Magic
Position
Released on
Fontana/Universal
reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

For a borderline musical prodigy who's
classically trained, indie-inclined, and given to writing
songs about feel-good topics like lycanthropy, castration and
quaking emotional torment, Patrick Wolf has his head screwed
on surprisingly straight. He's been touring, recording, and
performing constantly since he was 16 years old, but Wolf
recently announced to fans that he's going to take the next
couple years off to recharge his batteries and live a little,
the first real break he's taken for himself since music became
his job as well as his hobby. On paper, it's an incredibly
sensible decision, but the maturity and warmth that permeate
The Magic Position, his third album, suggest that
he's ready for anything.

The Magic Position is
Wolf's first release on a major label (specifically that
destroyer of worlds, Universal), and its overall feel takes
some getting used to, but not in the conventional sense of
bigger budget = bigger studio = bigger sound: The Magic
Position feels claustrophic instead of full. Nothing
seems to echo in the same space, and everything sounds
unnaturally compressed. On one level, this strange mixing
serves practical purposes. Wolf's just as likely to use
woofer-wrecking bass as he is to deploy singing violins and
orchestral arrangements, and by shrinking/drying everything
out, he minimizes a sonic contrast that no studio magician's
ever succeeded in hiding. It also keeps the album's grander
moments, like the climactic bridge on "The Stars," from
getting anywhere near cheesy, and minimizes the shock of the
album's few unwelcome surprises (like the gabba-level BPMs on
album interlude "Secret Garden"). It barely even detracts from
the arrangements, and it doesn't at all affect the confident
melodies, of which there are many.

After a few listens though, this cramped
sound starts to take on another meaning. The music on tracks
like "Bluebells" and "(Let's Go) Get Lost" is thinned out to
the point of sounding like the memory of music, which, oddly
enough, enhances the record's private, personal feel. The
burbling keyboards on "(Let's Go) Get Lost," for example, both
perk the track up and add a hint of associative flair to a
line like "We could dance til our feet turn red / but the
beat's so boring and I'd rather be home in our bed;" they're a
sonic detail in one of Wolf's memories.

Impressively,
these memories manage to retain their emotional impact despite
the fact that Wolf's clearly digested and processed them
thoroughly. As on previous records, there's well-detailed
adversity and heartbreak in these tracks, but rather than
miring himself in it all, Wolf takes them as chances to push
forward. The Patrick Wolf of The Wind in the Wires or
Lycanthropy simply didn't have the confidence to
proclaim something like "So what happens when you lose
everything? You just carry on and with a grin," over a beat
that swings between big beat and electro (and on a real drum
kit, no less), and the album's lyrical content suggests that
his confidence is the result of a finished transformation as
opposed to an ongoing transition. There might not be much
evidence on The Magic Position that Patrick Wolf
needs a break from the strains of the musician's road, but it
also makes quite a convincing case that we can trust his
judgment. He's matured beautifully.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts
:

"Mer du Japon"

To buy this, click here!

Air : Pocket Symphony

Released on Astralwerks

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

Aside from the strange dread that permeated
their 2001 release 10,000 Hz Legend, all the music
that Air has made in the last ten years can be described with
the same handful of adjectives. Since their first singles came
out in 1997, JB Dunckel and Nicolas Godin have expanded their
instrumental palette, workied with a wide range of
collaborators, and formed the backbone of two film
soundtracks, but none of this success or progress has affected
the duo's focus on creating music that's blissed out, stylish,
and gently grooving.

It's a pretty roomy niche they've carved out
for themselves though, and on Pocket Symphony, their
latest release, Dunckel and Godin team with Nigel Godrich to
create an album that conflates their retro and futurist
elements more than ever before. Like most of Godrich's best
work, Pocket Symphony sounds like a traditional rock
record sealed in a futuristic display case, one that shades
every guitar strum with warm and sterile synths, adds every
echo digitally, and generally defies anyone who would attempt
to guess its music's age. Dunckel and Godin add to the
confusion by blending different instruments (Japanese
koto and shamisen) and guest performers (UK
pop elder statesmen Jarvis Cocker and Neil Hannon, plus
Afropop institution Tony Allen) in with their piano-led
meditations, and the resultant concoction would surely require
a lot of mental unpacking were it not for its central saving
grace: it sounds like an Air record. The tug of war between a
60's feel (established by Dunckel's piano and Tony Allen's
drums) and 21st century ambience (set by glitch-inspired
programmed drums and lilting synths) on lead single "Once Upon
a Time" makes the track's five minutes float past with the
same mystery that distinguishes the back half of Moon
Safari, the strained whispers and koto cascades
do a good job of hiding the fact that Jarvis Cocker's the one
singing on "One Hell of a Party," and the inward IDM-ish
cluster of chimes on album closer "Night Sight" makes you feel
like you've been floating in space for the past hour.
Pocket Symphony might not break the mold of previous
records, but if you need more Air in your life, it's nice to
know that another breath of it is readily
available.

back to the
top

Album Excerpts :

"In Transit"

"Bright Young Thing"

To buy this, click here!

Albert Hammond, Jr. : Yours
to Keep
Released on Scratchie/New
Line
reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

To say that Albert Hammond Jr approaches
this whole rock star thing from a different perspective would
be putting it mildly. It's fun to guess what combination of
personal details informs this (and there's a ton to choose
from: his dad had a pretty successful career as a songwriter,
he grew up in a tax bracket that George Bush has been
disproportionately kind to over the last eight years, etc),
but the steady maturity that Hammond the younger's displayed
throughout his career distinguishes him from scores of other
artists who have broken off from the bands that launched them.
Junior doesn't have grievances to air or a prog-opera that
he's been working on for the last ten years. He doesn't fancy
himself as the engine that made the Strokes go or the
misunderstood artist whose heretofore-bottled-up creativity
will finally be unleashed. Instead, his solo debut Yours
to Keep seems designed to convey an image most pop
artists only get around to trying on much later in their
careers, if they ever get to it at all: that of the humble
craftsman.

Yours to Keep is modest to the point
of emotional self-effacement. Its songs are slim, simple, and
efficient, its points of reference, which range from the Cars
to John Lennon, are transparent, and its lyrics, despite being
well-written and grounded in the familiar territory of
romantic travails, are emotionally weightless. This
poker-faced quality is intentional: Yours to Keep is
about melodies and technical skill on a small scale, not
overarching sentiment, and Junior doesn't want anything to
distract from that faultless arrangement of nursery comforts
on "Cartoon Music for Superheroes," or the effortless tension
in the guitars on "In Transit" or "101," or the processed
harmonies on "Hard to Live in the City." The album's most
expressive tracks are disguised as homages; "Call An
Ambulance"'s whimsical beginning and small-scale strums
obscure the pain hidden between the song's lines behind his
love of John Lennon, for example, and the only reason he lets
the line "Those foolish kids can't be ready, for the love that
comes their way" sound like an admission is because the words
aren't his - they're Buddy Holly's (on the album-closing cover
"Well...All Right").

It's a great listen, Junior's reticence
notwithstanding, and aside from "Bright Young Thing," a track
that inches right up to the precipice of real emotion, it's
enough to convince you that Hammond would do well to spend the
next ten years soberly refining his craft. But "Bright Young
Thing," with its sunkissed organ and synthetic xylophone
offsetting a fuzzed, vulnerable chorus, is enough to make you
wish that Hammond would allow himself some big sloppy
emotional excesses every once in a while. As Yours to
Keep proves, he's certainly got the talent for it.

back to
the top

Album
Excerpts:

"Toy Boat"

"Open Your Box" (Orange Factory remix)

To buy these, click here!

Ono : Yes, I'm a Witch /
Open Your Box
Released on
Astralwerks
reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

Like most pop-aligned female Artists, no one
really knows what to make of Yoko Ono. Depending on who you
ask, she's a trailblazer, she's a jack of all trades, she made
John Lennon's music start to suck; all of this and none of it
is true. Even though her messages haven't changed drastically
over the last 30 years, this multitude (and muddle) of
opinions has endured and we still don't seem to get
her.

She's a witch, all right, and an unabashed,
self-assured one at that, and her most recent releases, two
remix releases entitled Yes! I'm a Witch and Open
Your Box, show her to be just as confounding and
appealing today as she was back in the 60's. On Yes! I'm a
Witch, a gaggle of name indies ranging from fellow
fem-agitators like Peaches and Le Tigre to rock demigods like
the Flaming Lips and Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons) take
turns putting Ono's songs in new contexts, and even though one
or two tracks probably could've been left off, it's a highly
listenable effort that highlights not only Ono's uniqueness,
but the incredible variety of ways in (read: preconceptions
through) which she continues to be viewed.

Unlike with
most remix albums, Ono's collaborators have the opportunity to
tackle both her lyrics as well as her voice here, and
sometimes even do both. Porcupine Tree drops Ono's gently
quavering voice into a starlit country plain, the pedal steel
and piano amplifying "Death of Samantha"'s sadness and giving
the loneliness of its lyrics a nearly epic quality; Cat Power
sits with Ono at a piano and turns "Revelations" into a nobly
moving duet; Le Tigre gets so excited about sharing the stage
and her feminist message that they practically drown her out
on "Sisters O Sisters." Le Tigre isn't the only act on
Yes! that seems to revere Ono, but they're the only
ones who seem to have clear reasons for doing so, and the
consequences of this are surprisingly wide-ranging. DJ Spooky
and Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons) both latch onto
aspects of Ono's voice, recast them as personality traits, and
craft backgrounds for those traits; the eastern-flavored beat
on Spooky's "Rising" casts her as a kind of mystic fount of
wisdom, while Antony's spacious synth landscape recalls both
early Magnetic Fields and imagines Ono as a futuristic seer.
At times, though, her collaborators go about this the wrong
way. The Sleepy Jackson and the Polyphonic Spree both try to
outweird her (even though being weird for weirdness' sake was
never one of her intentions), and the Flaming Lips are so
excited that they get to cover "Cambridge 1969" that they
drown her out entirely with a big bright instrumental that's
so simultaneously recognizable and generic that it ought to be
called The Flaming Lips 2007.

Though they begin Yes! instead of
end it, there are a couple signs (Peaches's demented electro
version of "Kiss Kiss Kiss," for example) that Ono's
personality and message might be fairly well-suited for dance
music. That said, the signs aren't enough to prepare anybody
for Open Your Box, an album that places many of the
same songs featured on Yes! in the hands of dance
music producers. And, most surprising of all, Open Your
Box creates a perfect space for Ono to reconcile her
image as a hippie-dippy world peacenik with her more
polarizing quirks, and, in short, completely reinvent herself.
It begins with a version of "You're the One" remixed by Bimbo
Jones, in which every channel in the mix is set to Extremely
Fucking High: a throbbing, glistening bassline, disco guitar,
and a vocal hook that sounds like it's echoing through a vat
of molasses. The track's not a red herring, either. Open
Your Box is not filled with slight, icy minimal techno
that barely qualifies as dance music. It is instead stuffed
with big, proud house music tracks that are easy to get lost
in. And once you've gotten lost, Ono finds you. Except for a
few attempts to cast Ono as a dancefloor diva of the post-90's
Madonna variety, the tendency here is to bury her under more
than a few layers of euphoric echo and overdrive and turn her
into a kind of madwoman in the attic you can hear through the
cracks in the floorboards: Superchumbo's tribal house version
of "Kiss Kiss Kiss" only qualifies as tribal house because of
the deranged ululating going on underneath death-ray synths
and drums that are EQ'ed so high they could cut your eardrums
open, Murk uses the eastern inflections of "Everyman
Everywoman" as a spice rather than an overpowering main
ingredient, and Peter Rauhofer's version of "Hell in Paradise"
rips a page out of the book that Miss Kittin and the Hacker
started to write and draws campy little doodles all over it.

But it's on the album's title track (and
centerpiece) that the ingeniousness of this move really comes
through. Ultra Records regular Orange Factory assembles a
by-the-numbers superclub track filled with epic, cycling
synths, chugging percussion, and sleek bass, and basically
lets Ono go crazy over it, vamping, breathing heavily, gulping
for air, squawking and shrieking instead of singing. Her
crazed vocals turn the track into something that would both
sound perfect at Crobar and make Mu incredibly jealous. Bathed
in the abandon of dance music like this, her messages can
finally seep in free of preconceptions or prejudices. A witch
like her clearly belongs in the dark.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

"I Want Your Soul"

To buy this, click here!

Armand van Helden :
Ghettoblaster
Released on Ultra

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

"I like making sex records."
-
Armand Van Helden

It's always nice when you can sum up an
artist's approach to his craft in a single sentence, but it's
nicer still when the artist provides that sentence for you.
Even if there are a couple bits on his assorted albums,
singles and mixes that wouldn't play in my bedroom,
Armand Van Helden's spent nearly 20 years offering simple
pleasures to the dancing masses that fit that description, and
on Ghetto Blaster, that streak continues. Van
Helden's first album since 2005 pulls off a rare feat: the
record cashes in on the multi-pronged dance music revivals
with the savvy of someone who actually lived (and partied)
through the music on its first go round, but it's filled with
the simplicity and exhilaration you'd expect out of someone
who's only just fallen in love with the stuff too.

It bears mentioning that "the stuff" Van
Helden is celebrating on Ghetto Blaster is dance
music from the late 80's, specifically stuff from 1985 to
1989. There's a lot to fall in love with from those five
years, from hip house ("Touch Your Toes") and electro-laced
hip hop ("Playmate") to Chicago house ("A Track Called Jack")
and club ("To Be a Freak"), and though a lot of that stuff had
fallen by the wayside for good reasons, Van Helden threads it
all together remarkably well. Tracks like "I Want Your Soul,"
with its aggressive synth bassline and latter-day Nile Rodgers
keyboards, or "Still in Love," a whomping nod to La Bouche,
are joyously relentless, while others take it down a
half-notch to slip into something sexier. On his remake of
Kudu's "Playing House," Van Helden strips away Deantoni
Parks's rock drums and turns Sylvia Gordon's voice into a
jaw-dropping centerpiece, while "Playmate" is playfully dirty
thanks to Roxy Cottontail's rhymes. It's too bad the whole
thing isn't mixed into one continuous ride, but very few
people have that kind of stamina, anyway.

back to the
top

Album
Excerpts:

"Balaclava"

"The Bad Thing"

To buy this, click here!

The Arctic Monkeys :
Favourite Worst Nightmare

Released on Domino

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

The scrutiny that young successful bands
find themselves under these days is completely ridiculous. The
shit that gets heaped onto groups that the public tires of,
even when the media is responsible for that fatigue, would
crack most of us like eggs, and every time Pete Dougherty
staggers onto the pages of The Sun or Vice,
it's enough to make you consider moving to a cabin in Montana,
just to get away from a media juggernaut that will happily eat
a set of kids alive for a week's pay.

Because of the rollercoast ride of
public opinion they've been on in the last 18 months, it would
have been totally understandable if the Arctic Monkeys sounded
frazzled or disheveled on Favourite Worst Nightmare,
their follow-up to the simultaneously beloved and derided
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not.
Instead, it appears this British quartet has stared even its
nastiest detractors down, and it's made them that much
stronger.

The Monkeys literally beat back their
detractors over the first half of Favourite Worst
Nightmare with a combination of possessed intensity
("Brianstorm") and devastating kiss-offs ("Teddy Picker," "D
is for Dangerous"). Alex Turner sounds pissed but powerful in
these opening tracks, and that barely concealed force adds
extra bite to his efficient (if occasionally petulant) lyrics.
Hating on fame's trappings may've become de rigeur of late,
but coming from Turner, it's wry and well-crafted hating, and
even if the subject matter's not your cup of tea, it's backed
by music that really struts. After the Monkeys give the smoke
a chance to clear on "Only Ones Who Know," the band gets back
to business as usual: disarmingly observant and energetic
guitar pop. "Do Me a Favour" is a top tier pop song with a
slimmed down surf guitar that doesn't hinder the track's brisk
drumming, "The Bad Thing" is impressively taut, and the
Monkeys' new rhythm section shows us that a bit of nastiness
makes a great pop ingredient too on "This House is a
Circus."

People have, for some reason, declined to
discuss the Arctic Monkeys' influences, but Favourite
Worst Nightmare's polished mix of Modern Lovers wit,
Smiths sheen and even Pixies nerves is unique in both its
transparency and successfulness; the self-awareness that
permeates this record is a strength, not a stumbling block,
and if these guys are in fact the poster boys for a new
generation of bands whose careers are going to be incubated on
the Internet, then they've raised the bar for their followers
much higher with this release.

back to the
top

Bogdan Irkuk (a.k.a. Bulgari)
: The Distant EP

Released on Rollerboys

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

By now, the amount of great music coming out
of Sweden shouldn't be that big of a deal. The country's been
absolutely murdering the indie pop scene for the last few
years, and there was no reason to suspect that this musical
fertility was confined to a particular crop. In fact, between
releases like Sally Shapiro's puppy love masterpiece Disco
Romance and Audionom's motorik deconstruction
extravaganza Retrospektiv, there were several signs
that great electronic music from Sweden was imminent rather
than improbable.

That doesn't change the fact that its
actual arrival comes as a most pleasant surprise. All the more
pleasant and surprising, in fact, because the release in
question, Bogdan Irkuk's The Distant EP, is the first
release of a new Swedish label called Rollerboys, and its
three originals and two remixes glide in a way that's both
robotic and cinematic. Though the Rollerboys brain trust
decided to center the EP around "Curare,"a solid,
appropriately efficient two minute ride on the Autobahn, that
track's economic appeals are overshadowed by the opulence that
precedes and follows them; first track, "The Distant Message"
is a smooth synthesis of Alan Braxe swells and Italo bassline
oomph, with lush, galactic keyboards that are buoyed by a
bassline that's full and purposeful. It fits in perfectly with
the bazaar of Atlanta r&b touches of its follow-up "All
Nite Store," all rippling synthesizers, 808s, terse guitar
lines, and soft electric piano chords surrounding some
beautifully unintelligible Vocoded lyrics. And in a possible
sign of things to come, the EP-closing remix of "All Nite
Store" by Rollerboys labelhead Yourhighness (a.k.a Johannes)
brings a heavier rock beat to the table, and lets the
original's synths to mingle with something dirtier: nervy
post-punk guitar and grainier synths. It's a pretty sexy
combination, even after the initial surprise has worn off, and
one which is almost certainly a sign of more good things to
come.

back to the
top

The Horrors : Strange House

Released on Stolen
Transmission
reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

Ever since the Horrors started putting out
singles and getting NME all hot and bothered last
spring, the press has paid much more attention to the hate and
backlash directed at these rich little princes of darkness
than anything else. In spite of their reputation as a superb
live act, the reasonably high praise critics gave to both the
single and the video for "Sheena is a Parasite," the Horrors
were the band that everybody loved to hate in 2006.

Not that they've complained, mind you. Plenty
of bands would love to have nearly six months pass between the
release of their single and full-length debuts without the
slightest drop in notoriety, and aside from getting their
asses kicked on the street every once in a while, this
polarizing aesthetic of theirs has served them well. And it
is a full-blown, developed aesthetic, by the way.
Anyone who still thinks it's hilarious (and true) to call
these guys nothing more than a haircut band would do well to
pick up Strange House, a record with refreshingly
immediate strengths and shortcomings that are easily glossed
over by its pervading campiness.

At its best,
Strange House is long on atmosphere and affect and
short on almost everything else; their lead singer (the
perfectly wraith-like Faris Rotter) can ham it up with the
best of them, a superb combination of Jonny Rotten snot and
haunted house ghoulishness that works best when let totally
loose. The pleasant surprise here is that he can play more
than one character. His undead moan on "Jack the Ripper" is a
total scream, as is his glottal shriek on "Sheena is a
Parasite," and Rotter always fits right into step with his
bandmates, whose mix of psychobilly, straight-ahead punk rock,
and garage is distinguished mostly by someone who calls
himself Spider Webb. His Vox organ is the group's secret
weapon, and Webb's the guy whose chirping, whirring
contributions make Tomethy Furse's bass scuzzier, take some of
the pressure off Joshua Third's guitar, and most importantly,
add something seedy and occasionally macabre to the album's
proceeedings. His bandmates are all competent (Furse in
particular has mastered those psychobilly squall-solo), but
when they make space for him, Webb pushes their riffs and
fills to that next level. Songs like "Drawing Japan" get their
spark from him more than anything else, and no matter what
kind of sound they're going for, the more prominently he's
involved, the better.

In spite of the mix of genres on
display, this album takes very few musical risks, but with the
entire thing clocking in at 35 minutes, there's no point in
dwelling on the fact that none of them works. Strange
House has everything you could ask for out of a debut:
it's full of energy, style, and, in its own way, humor. And
though it's unlikely that that last quality will get noticed,
given the piranhic nature of the press these days, there's
plenty of reason to keep your eye on these guys. At the very
least, somebody's bound to beat one of them up again one of
these days.

back to the
top

Presets : Re-Sets

Released on Modular

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

Even though remix albums tend to function
better as curiosities or sideshows than as attractions unto
themselves, it's sometimes tough to avoid getting sucked in
with expectation. Even though (to my knowledge) no such record
exists, the idea that a remix album will have eight or nine or
ten prime dancefloor cuts on it simply because of the names
involved is irresistible to some people. So irresistible, in
fact, that they forget what they're buying, and wind up piling
an album's worth of disappointment onto material that's meant
to buttress EPs.

The Presets' Re-Sets is definitely
one of these releases. Re-Sets offers up four of the
Australian duo's best songs to a deadly lineup of DJs,
producers, and bands that includes Simian Mobile Disco,
Digitalism, Juan Maclean and Cut Copy, and if you can keep
your expectations in check, or even *gasp* keep an open mind
while you listen, you're likely to enjoy yourself.

But not right away; Re-Sets starts
off with fellow Aussies Van She trying way too hard to make
something dirty. Its uninspiring handclaps and submerged sex
noises won't get a rise out of you, but more than that, their
version of "Are You the One" is just poorly mixed, with the
song's once-walloping chorus dampened by a thin mat of
distortion that also pads the guitars and vocals. It's an odd
move for a band that also has a heavy-lifting rhythm section,
but it's thankfully one that's not repeated either. After an
effective but slightly monochromatic take on "Down Down Down"
by Digitalism, the rest of Re-Sets is filled out with
capable producers adorning the Presets' big, simple songs with
their favorite effects. Juan Maclean lays some hot thick
echoes and trance-y vibes down over "I Go Hard I Go Home,"
Aussie dance-rockers Midnight Juggernauts turn "Down Down
Down" into a synth-fueled epic, and Cut Copy turn "Girl and
the Sea" into a neon exercise in excess that's as big, soft
and beautiful as possible. Along the way, there's decent work
turned in by Simian Mobile Disco, askii.disco, and Bumblebeez
too, but there's no point in telling you about that. It would
only get your hopes up, and that's the last thing a record
like this needs.

back to the
top

A Sunny Day in Glasgow :
Scribble Mural Comic Journal

Released on Notenuf

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

Shoegaze isn't exactly a subgenre you'd
associate with radical excitement. Aside from Kevin Shields
nearly bankrupting Creation Records with the studio bill for
My Bloody Valentine's Loveless back in 1991, shoegaze
bands have always been more concerned with endless refinement
as opposed to ambitious, boat-rocking experiments. Like with
most guitar pop, that concern's important because the
difference between good and mediocre or even bad hinges on
very small things. A good shoegaze record can be the
soundtrack to a kind of blissful alternate universe, but just
a few miscalculations can turn all those gauzy textures and
whitest lights into something more like the uppermost limit of
twee, something that lifts you into the clouds even as it gets
weighted down with its own affects, and holds you maddeningly
still for as long as you can stand it, or until the album
ends.

A Sunny Day in Glasgow does no such thing.
The Philadelphia-based trio Ben Daniels and his twin sisters
Robin and Lauren Daniels have made rocking the boat their
first priority on their debut album, Scribble Mural Comic
Journal. Though it might be a shoegaze album in terms of
its textures and ethereal, otherworldly feel, Scribble
Mural Comic Journal dives deep below the surface of what
most shoegaze records float on, and thrashes around with an
intrepid abandon that's thrilling to listen to.

After an aerated intro ("Wake Up Pretty"),
Journal's excitement begins in earnest with "No. 6
Von Karman Street," a track with two distinct halves. It
begins like an airy piece of techno, with heavenly vocals and
currents of sound pulling things along both from above (with a
set of cycling, programmed synths) and below (with a walking
bass). But the second half, which starts with same figure of
the first, doesn't catch - the beat drives on before running
out of gas, and the vocals then swoop in and out
intermittently, bringing washes of ambient street noise with
them, and the track clacks to a close on the sound of walking
high heels. But before you can even settle into the idea of
listening to an electronics-based record, "A Mundane Phone
Call to Jack Parsons" comes stomping in, sounding like pre-
and post-Loveless MBV; an avalanche of kettle drums,
jangly guitars and close miked vocals that tussles with a
piano that sounds like it's being played in an elevator shaft.
The struggle between sounds is exciting rather than abrasive
because of the track's purposeful pace, and it's this steady
push forward that accomodates Ben Daniels's ambitious
songwriting. "Our Change Into Rain is No Change At All" is
both desolate and desperate, three distinct sections that
change the feeling of the song's recurring riffs, the
swoon-inducing "5:15 Train" is a constantly mutating haze of
rhythms and harmonies that engulfs the song's drums and
vocals, and a stomping drum beat keeps the warped and twisted
jangles and likembe of "C'Mon," the album's most difficult
track, in line.

Not everything on Journal is as
adventurous, though. "Ghost in the Graveyard" is built out of
Jesus & Mary Chain guitar scrap metal, but it never
manages to go much of anywhere. Except for the nearly
rambunctious album closer "The Best Summer Ever," when A Sunny
Day in Glasgow clings too explicitly to their influences, it
becomes a restraint; "Watery (Drowning is Just Another Word
For Being Buried Alive)" is disappointingly trad, and the
songs that seem designed to carry lyrics forward feature
vocals that are pretty much incomprehensible. Which, oddly
enough, isn't that big of a deal. One of the most beautiful
elements of A Sunny Day in Glasgow's sound is the twin voices
of Robin and Lauren Daniels. In tandem, they're sleepy,
soaring, full, and fuzzy all at once, the mean and the median
between Bilinda Butcher and Elizabeth Fraser: a perfect
combination mashed together, like the rest of Scribble
Mural Comic Journal, on instinct rather than formula.
Thank god someone finally decided to rock the boat.

back to
the top

Plan B : Who Needs Actions
When You Got Words
Released on Cordless

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

If you pop on over to his website, British
rapper Ben Drew (a.k.a. Plan B) will tell you straight up that
the stories he tells on tape are figments of his imagination,
things he imagines as a means of commenting on what's really
going on in the world. Some people think of what he does as
folk, some people think of it as hip hop, but, as he reminds
us, the point for him is to make something that makes you
think. It's pretty much unheard of for a rapper to admit to
something like that, but for B it's an incredibly savvy move.
First, it's sure to endear him to rap-wary parents everywhere,
and second, it makes his weaker songs into creative flops as
opposed to signs that he's being disingenuous, fronting like
he's experienced something that he hasn't, a much darker sin
in both rap and folk. It also establishes him as a
craftsman, a role that most rappers shy away from these days,
and one which his conscience and talents make him well-suited
for, even at this early stage of his career.

B's gift for storytelling is well-displayed
on his debut for 679 Recordings, Who Needs Actions When
You Got Words. Beneath energetic and poppy guitar strums,
B is by turns crude and humorous, disturbing and vulnerable,
blunt and (far less frequently) incisive, both a promising pop
anti-hero and menace to society. He's got one of the most
captivating mic presences in all of British rap, with a
menacing voice that's charged with adolescent intensity and
lyrics that he delivers with steady relentlessness. But his
imposing personality can do more than intimidate and bludgeon:
"I Don't Love You" shows B can be surprisingly funny even
under duress, and "Couldn't Get Along" is powerful in its
vulnerability and lack of adornment. And when this force is
channelled into a focused lyrical conceit, like the slo-mo
cinematic rewind of "Sick 2 Def," the results are pretty much
astounding.

B's urge to anchor every song he writes to
issues of urgent social importance is a noble aspiration, but
some of the issues he tackles are pretty thorny, and he hasn't
quite thought them through enough to let his gifts for
detailing shine through; "Tough Love" is way too blunt (and
could even be construed as cultural prejudice), "Mama (Loves a
Crackhead)" is pretty rote in spite of its title, and
"Everyday" is a cliche-filled disaster. Still, Plan B is sure
to become one of British pop music's most polarizing figures.
His mic skills are good enough to please any grime fan, and
his gift for finding the right chords on his guitar pretty
much guarantees him some time on the radio. But that seemingly
incongruous combination is sure to make him a square peg for
more traditional fans of both folk and rap, even though his
first crack at it was more successful than not. Add it all up,
and Plan B ought to be around, and making us think, for a long
time.

back to
the top

LCD Soundsystem : Sound of
Silver
Released on EMI/DFA

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

These days, recycling and imitation are
looked at as being both necessary and repugnant. People
constantly bitch about the detrimental effect this rehashing
has on creativity, but the next step after all this imitation
is internalization, that point at which an artist knows all
his favorite records by heart, and he's talked about what
makes them great in every concrete and abstract way, after
those albums have saved and ruined his life and become far
more and nothing more than just music to him. Past that point
of saturation, there's no more stretching and scrambling to
recreate that thing that was once most important to him;
whatever it is, it's become a part of his self-expression
instead.

It's hard to think of a better example of a
musician or producer who's achieved this state than James
Murphy. Over the past several years, Murphy's body of remixes
and singles has been practically faultless, a seemingly
neverending stream of divine distillations of 70's and 80's
punk, disco, and art pop, and the most exciting (read:
coolest) part about them all was the sense that these parts
had been slotted together via intuition rather than
calculation. Murphy's best songs, despite being transparently
composed of nothing but borrowed (and disparate) elements,
felt natural, and on Sound of Silver, Murphy's second
full-length release as LCD Soundsystem, that natural feel has
only increased. Intertwined with some of the most personal and
affecting lyrics he's ever written, Silver's music is
as stylish and propulsive as ever, but what makes it some of
the best of the year, and some of the best Murphy's ever made,
is how intimate it feels too.

Silver opens up with "Get
Innocuous!," a track whose elder statesman's wisdom is
disguised as a sarcastic diss. It begins with the same flat
washed-out drum machine beat that anchored "Losing My Edge,"
but before long the undertow of an Italo bassline and a lonely
electric piano chord pulls you into a reverie that's
irresistible and empty at the same time. As Murphy's
multi-tracked vocals enter, describing the seductions and
pressures of nightlife, the track's voltage steadily
increases, its drones thickening and its rhythms coagulating
before it inexplicably starts to peter out and literally
screeches to a halt on a pair of twisted violins. If you trace
the genealogies of the track's elements, the
signifiers/adjectives that crop up (Krautrock, Kraftwerk,
Velvet Underground) while trying to describe them make the
track sound much more epic and seductive than it really is:
the song's a warning, not a siren's call. But Murphy's
emotional attachment to these sounds is so divorced from the
contexts that gave birth to them that their effect on the
listener is much more subtle and moving than anyone could've
guessed possible. The piles of synth pulses that dominate the
fuzzy bass, submerged squiggles and orchestra of bells and
beeps on "Someone Great" could make for an epic electro-psych
experience at the right speed and volume (which I imagine it
is when Murphy and co. play it live), but on headphones, it's
the consummate loner jam, a break-up meditation that could
gently lay you down to sleep.

The above paragraphs aren't meant to
suggest that Murphy's lost his fastball. The man's been making
us dance for so long now that he can practically do it in his
sleep, and Silver's filled with plenty of those
blissful moments: A series of lean, warm arpeggios provides
the backbone for a great mix of percussion (handclaps, guitar
scratches, live drums, bells, and yes, cowbell) on the sweaty
workout "Us v. Them," the sticky, funky bass that bookends the
epic spacey expanses on "Sound of Silver" is frighteningly
addictive, and "Watch the Tapes" is as deliciously simple as
it is immaculately mixed. But the moments when Murphy reveals
himself are just better. On "All My Friends," the album's
unquestionable centerpiece, lite Steve Reich piano lines
quiver beneath stadium-filling guitar, bass and drums as
Murphy presents an utterly disarming second-person narrative
of his career's arc. There's an honesty, modesty and brevity
in the song that people as "cool" as he is are never expected
to have, let alone share with their audiences, but with
Sound of Silver, Murphy's made maturity into
something cool, and his patience and success has unequivocally
flipped the baby boomers' most popular axiom on its head:
never trust anyone under 30.

back to the
top

Listen:
Feadz
- Ed Banger Medley

Various Artists : Ed Rec,
Volume 2
Released on Vice

reviewed by
Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

Ed Banger goes deep. Everybody
knows Justice and Uffie and DJ Mehdi and SebastiAn and
whatever; those guys have kept this label up to its nose in
notoriety for close to two years now. But to really seal your
reputation in the big-time, you've got to have more than that,
and Ed Rec Volume 2 shows that Pedro Winter's label
is well-stocked from top to bottom. In fact, that might've
been the point; Volume 2's best cuts come off Ed
Banger's bench. Sixth man Mr. Flash's "Disco Dynamite" sounds
like the short edit of a b-side off the Chemical Brothers'
Surrender with squealing French synths on top,
So-Me's remix of the Klaxons' "Atlantis to Interzone" is a
dark and pummelling jam with jackhammer bass frosted over with
air raid sirens, and Vicarious Bliss's "Limousine" throws a
meaty Krautrock curveball at you as the compilation's closer.

About all that's missing from this comp
is, well, more. Techno compilations used to stretch to 70
minutes almost by default, but Volume 2 doesn't even
last 45. Justice and Vicarious
Bliss both offer tracks that are dancefloor length, but
SebastiAn's gloriously disgusting "Greel" should be longer
than three minutes, and it's too bad that Feadz's "Edwrecker"
has all the right ingredients for a six minute workout: it's
only three. Even DJ Mehdi, whose "Lucky Girl" sounds like ESG
on steroids, would benefit from a little more breathing room.
But none of this is a bad thing. Everything on Ed Rec
Volume 2 will sound great in a club. You'll just have
fewer minutes to savor everything, that's all.

back to the
top

Various Artists : The
Upsetter Selection - A Lee Perry Jukebox

Released on Trojan

reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

It's unfortunate that Jamaican music
continues to be covered by the umbrella term Reggae. Say
"Reggae," and it brings to mind a number of stereotypes and
generalizations that make it very difficult for an outsider to
know that there is much more to Reggae than reggae, let alone
what that other stuff is, or how it came to be. Trojan
Records, one of the most revered Reggae labels out there,
recently tried to remedy this by assembling a credible
collection of its more famous fans - filmmaker and Clash buddy
Don Letts, techno savant DJ Spooky, and Radiohead guitarist
Jonny Greenwood - to put together compilations of their
favorite Trojan material. The move was part birthday
celebration (the label celebrated the big 4-0 this year) and
part public service, and it's a testament to the quality in
their vaults that each of these releases was excellent, but
offering looks at this music's often-ignored variety and depth
through the eyes of outsiders had problems of its own: one
curator (Greenwood) sheepishly admitted to feeling that he
didn't know enough about the music he was picking.

There's no cause for that kind of alarm on
The Upsetter Selection - A Lee Perry Jukebox. Perry
is one of Jamaican music's most important figures, and on
Jukebox he plays every role imaginable - innovator,
musician, jester, producer. But more than simply being yet
another testament to how important Perry is, Jukebox
surveys the many strains and variations in Jamaican music's
DNA, all through the eyes of the mad scientist who created so
much of it himself.

Disc one opens with "Give Me Justice," the
first track Perry ever recorded, a ska track that highlights
how much influence American jazz and jump blues had on these
first strains of Jamaican pop. Many of the first tracks sound
like a kind of super-southern soul music, with thick, humid
basslines, guitars still on the upbeat, and more pronounced
and prominent horn parts. But as ska gave way in popularity to
rocksteady, and the tempo slowed, Perry took that as his cue
to experiment. Producers in Jamaica at this time were starting
to use their studios as instruments in and of themselves, and
it was in this climate that Perry's adventurousness (as well
as that of his releases) grew almost exponentially. His
bizarre on-record feuds with other producers (over everything
from who was the best in the studio to which American movie
actor was the biggest badass) sowed seeds that hip hop would
harvest decades later. He experimented with sonic texture
("Kimble the Nimble"), sampling ("Cow Thief Skank"), and
miking in ways that would influence both fellow dub
masterminds like King Tubby and early techno innovators in the
UK.

Perry wasn't locked up in his weird head
space all the time, though. In the space of just a few short
years, he'd honed his pop production skills and used them to
dispense messages that were both sacred and profane. By this
time, reggae's popularity outweighed rocksteady, and in
Perry's hands it seemed anything was possible for the genre.
He gave some of Bob Marley's biggest early hits ("Small Axe,"
"Duppy Conqueror") their earthy power. He made pop music that
was soulful ("I Do Love You") and sexy ("Hurt So Good"). His
chameleonic prowess behind the boards was so well-known that
artists from all over the world flocked to Jamaica to work
with him.

But the moments that will stand out more than
anything on this compilation came when Perry brought both his
pop dedication and his temptation to turn the studio into its
own instrument to bear on his own songs. "The Lama (a.k.a. The
Spiritual Whip)" is a radiating hothouse of vibrations,
"Bathroom Skank" is a studio masterpiece that's both deeply
suggestive and incredibly silly, and "Enter the Dragon" sounds
like being high and burnt at the same time.

On their own, these tracks are not
instructive. Any music fiend who's looked into Lee Perry on
the strength of his reputation could well have found them on
other compilations, but Perry's Jukebox tells the
story of where these complex mixes of style and
experimentation came from for him, and it's a story more
complicated than most would expect.

back to the
top

I am Robot and Proud: The
Catch & Spring Summer Autumn Winter

Released on Catmobile;
reissued on Darla
reviewed by
Max Willens for GBH.tv

You need certain kinds of albums to get
yourself through the winter. Sure, there are plenty of records
that sound more appropriate during the summer, or particular
sounds that correspond with spring, but when it gets cold and
dark out, certain types of albums become as necessary as
gloves and scarves, and trying to get by without them only
makes life more unpleasant. There are plenty of adjectives you
could trot out to describe this winter ware, but essentially,
this corner of your music collection ought to be characterized
by the unmistakable warmth emanating from its chilly
constituent parts. It's the seasonal need for music like this
that makes Darla Records' reissue of I Am Robot and Proud
(a.k.a. Shaw-han Liem)'s winsome debut The Catch a
well-timed boon.

Liem's gift for creating warm, inward
melodies is rivaled only by his ability to layer them
expertly. At its best, The Catch & Spring... is
intricate and intimate at the same time, filled with melodies
and textures that collude at a deliberate, purposeful pace.
Complex arrangements in electronic pop are nothing new, of
course, but Liem's soft touch imbues his work with the feel of
something private being revealed in confidence. "Eyes Closed
Hopefully" has a heart-wrenching melody that's sped up to hide
the weight that gets revealed later, while the complex swirl
of dance-y melodies and arpeggios of "Read & Re-read"
simplifies into a clearing of cautious bass and snipped vocal
samples.

The Catch & Spring... is
affecting even when Liem scales his musical ambitions back.
"The Satellite Kids"'s keyboards are daydream-inducing, while
"September Argument" undercuts its cold, metallic edges with
distracted, wandering melodies and chimes. This album's
trracks are as brisk and subtly heady as diary entries, the
kind of thing you can either reflect on or lose yourself in,
depending on your mood, or the windchill.

back to the
top

IAMX: The
Alternative
Import

reviewed by
Alex English for GBH.tv

I was very suprised by this release.
It has been a while since i've been
able to put a CD on and
keep it in my player for a while on repeat. Chris Corner,
former Sneaker Pimps front man, has certainly assembled
a
diverse and well written album. Teqhnique is not repeated
making each song a new experience. The song "The Alternative"
harkens back to traditional song writing found in glam/80's
while the stomp of"Nightlife" is undeniably modern.
"Nightlife" is my personal favorite from this collection, with
the bombast of a dance floor hit that makes me want to run to
the club and make the masses dance to it!"Lulled by Number" is
more of a sultry-trip-hop-meets-electronica offering that has
the perfect balance of human emotion and electronic
quirkiness. The treasure on this album is definitely "Song of
Imaginary Beings." The main guitar riff dances about the
beat's framework while Chris 's vocals draw you into its
perfection.  Often Chris's vocals are somewhere between
operatic exclamations and sleazy erotic huffs, a combination
that can't help but demonstrate his range.  The
other
stand out track on this album is "Spit It Out" - its
sugary pop glimmers throughout Chris' melodic vocal
performance.

Usually I am a hyper critical of an
album's sonic palette and i think that is THE reason why I
love this album so much - it is truly
dynamic.

back to the
top

Listen:

"Never
Going Down"
"To
Fix the Gash in Your Head"

A Place to Bury Strangers :
EPs
self-released
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

Success in
the record business isn't all about timing, but it's
pretty close. If A Place to Bury Strangers had formed just a
couple of years earlier, back when every music venue in
Williamsburg was crawling with journalists and
checkbook-wielding A&R people every night of the week,
they'd probably be sitting on a mountainous fanbase, idly
debating whether they wanted their upcoming world tour to last
four months or five, and getting into all kinds of trouble
while waiting for the follow-up to their critically beloved
debut to come out. Instead, this Brooklyn trio started coming
up only after the execs had packed up their Blackberries, and
even with a well-deserved reputation as one of the loudest,
most overpowering bands in the borough, A Place to Bury
Strangers only have a collection of self-produced EPs to offer
their public.

Not that this is a bad thing. Guitarist
Oliver Ackermann is a self-proclaimed studio addict, and their
three EPs, which will be available for sale when the band hits
the stage at SXSW in March, bear that out. Each EP reveals a
different facet of APTBS's haunting sound, a thrilling
combination of My Bloody Valentine, Joy Division, and the
Jesus and Mary Chain, and each is distinguished as much by
their songwriting as their creepy ambience. The first EP's six
strangely majestic songs are APTBS's heaviest, built around
the desolate echoes and distorted, metallic textures that
emanate from Ackermann's guitar and Tim Gregorio's bass. The
overpowering force of sound on songs like the first EP's "She
Dies" and "The Falling Sun" is channelled more into the
songwriting on their second EP, which is more mechanized,
almost mercilessly propulsive. The black clouds of feedback
and white noise that engulf "Never Going Down" are made more
menacing by Jay Space's driving drums, while "To Fix the Gash
In Your Head" hurtles forward with almost industrial momentum.

This second EP closes with the calmer "Ocean."
Designed perhaps to let listeners catch their breath, but it's
equally likely this inward track, with its warm, enclosing
bassline and less volatile mix, is intended as a sign of
things to come. The final EP showcases the band at its most
focused; instead of merely channelling the apocalyptic howl or
trying to overpower it, Ackermann and his bandmates simply
inhabit it. On "Half Awake," the drums are gently distorted
and highly EQed, the bass is clean and placid, and the guitar
rings and clangs through a very subtle fuzz. It's a highly
evocative instrumental, and even though it's clearly the
result of a sonic evolution, it's not their best song. Each EP
convincingly meets its ends through its different means, and
it's a shame so few people know who these guys
are.

back to
the top

Klaxons : Myths of the Near
Future
Released on
Universal/Polydor
reviewed by Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

You can't
tell by looking at them, but the Klaxons take themselves
pretty seriously. Strip them of their fab fluo threads, sweep
away the clutter left in your brain by all the blogging (both
pre- and post-"nu-rave" fiasco) and their gleefully ugly,
seizure-inducing website, and they're actually a bunch of
smart, unsmiling kids possessed by apocalyptic visions of
tomorrow. It's been a long time since a band with such a
weirdly serious (and seriously weird) outlook has been given
this kind of attention, but they are completely deserving of
it. Their first attempt to give the world at least fair
warning of what lies in store for us all, Myths of the
Near Future, is a gloriously disfigured post-punk record
bandaged up in literary riddles and surreal touches of Brian
Eno-influenced pop that's by turns terrifying and arousing,
and overall, it's nothing short of stunning.

It's not
often that lyrics have meaning these days, but the chorus of
"Atlantis to Interzone" has a line that perfectly sums up the
world the Klaxons (and, by extension, the rest of us) are in:
"You start at the end, and you end on your own." The Near
Future is blacklit and strangely habitable, filled with
mythical creatures (centaurs and the undead mingle with ships
and satellites) and specters, and is shot through with cosmic
destabilization; brutish clouds of distortion enshroud bridges
suddenly ("As Above, So Below"), synthesizers wither and die
instead of coming and going ("Isle of Her"), and mournful
pianos toll for the present as it hurtles past on rigid
grooves ("It's Not Over Yet"). Amidst this chaos, the Klaxons'
previously released singles still sound superb, both more
hopeful and more hopeless at the same time. "Golden Skans"'s
guileless harmonies sound heavenly and brave, "Atlantis to
Interzone"'s horrific craziness sounds like the end of the
world, and "Magick"'s churning bass
and alien echoes conjure up savage darkness.

There's
only 33 minutes of it to pore over, but Myths of the Near
Future demands multiple listens. It can be considered a
major achievement and a delightful curiosity, as well as the
most successfully ambitious debut to come out in a long time.
The Future can't get here fast enough.

back to the
top

A Touch of Class : Still
Sucks!
Released on
HBD
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

It's too bad
that IDM's put down its roots already. At this point, the
acronym describes a musical genre that's too wrapped up in its
own womb to make anyone want to dance (well, except maybe in
your room, by yourself, in the dark), but it's so firmly
established as a catch-phrase and a marker that the term it
originally represented - intelligent dance music - no longer
says what it means. For the most part, it's kind of a moot
point; dancing and thinking are mutually exclusive activities,
but where does that leave artists like A Touch of Class? The
New York production team understands dance music's genres and
sounds inside and out, and their latest CD, A Touch of
Class Still Sucks!, which compiles their most recently
released 12"s and remixes, goes well beyond simply being smart
- it's ingenious.

Still Sucks! opens up with a pair of
incredibly focused remixes. Though they're not averse to
throwing the kitchen sink into their tracks, Oliver Stumm and
Dominique Clausen's version of the Gossip's "Listen Up" is a
confident exercise in simplicity, with metallic percussion
simply keeping time on top, and all the energy emanating from
below. Down there, an abyss of keyboard buzz and a
stand-off-ish bassline are the nexus for roars of guitar and
Beth Ditto's wisened singing, and despite clocking in at well
over eight minutes, the track never drags. This death from
below is immediately contrasted with the electro house surge
of "Call Me," which pits Kathleen Hanna's breathless verses
and squealed chorus against 80's r&b keyboards and 808
punches. In terms of timbre, there are certain moments in
"Call Me" that might remind people of the DFA remix of
"Deceptacon" that everybody went apeshit over a couple years
ago, but where DFA created a glitzy din that Hanna seemed to
succeed in shouting over, A.T.O.C. eats her vocals alive, and
as the keyboards flash one last time over the drums, and a
distorted phone message wraps the track up, you forget she was
even there.

If Still Sucks! was comprised solely
of tarted up post-punk remixes, that would be fine. But the
high quality of their remixes notwithstanding, A.T.O.C. reveal
their talents more in their original productions, which smash
genres together with an aficionado's abandon. "Ultramodern," a
single for A.T.O.C. project the Ones, starts out with a
corrosive grime bassline welded to a two-step beat before
streamlining into electro-disco. The bass clots up again, this
time bracketed by late 80's r&b touches, and before long
all three parts crystallize into a polyrhythmic stunner that
sounds new and old at the same time. This intrepid,
un-self-conscious streak is magnified further by Still
Sucks!'s moments of genuine weirdness; on "Erlkoenig,"
dark trance-y synths flutter around a sample of Samuel
Barber's "Adagio for Strings" as a pair of vocalists get their
recitative on (in English translation) to Goethe's libretto.
The whole track is terribly over the top, but, like some
electro-rock version of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," it
actually works, too.

Dance music can be taken as seriously
(or not) as you like, and A Touch of Class Still Sucks!
shows that you can have it both ways. Its remixes are
novel and well-considered, the original tracks show a
knowledge of dance music that borders on scholarly, and almost
all of it belongs in any nocturnal playlist. And even if it
doesn't traffic in cracked beats and neurotic, obsessively
refined sonic textures the way IDM's supposed to, if it's not
intelligent dance music, I don't know what is.

back to the
top

Young Love : Too Young to
Fight It
Released on
Island
reviewed by Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

Hey kids,
remember "Since You Been Gone"? Of course you do! Remember how
it came out a couple summers ago, and by that Thanksgiving you
couldn't get away from it, and it became this Great Big
Manufactured pop song that you'd dance to with a big sneer on
your face? But then after that, remember how, around the 200th
time you heard it, you forgot to roll your eyes after every
verse and even squealed the chorus by accident? Remember how
after that, every time it came on at a club or in your car,
you screeched every word at the top of your lungs, and so did
everyone else around you? You call that song a guilty pleasure
now, but let's call a spade a spade, shall we? It's a great
song. And you love it. Just deal with it.

Too Young To Fight It, the debut
album of Austinite-turned-New-Yorker Young Love (a.k.a. Dan
Keyes) is fairly bursting with songs that you'll be tempted to
call guilty pleasures too. The first time you hear that rough
kicking bass on "Discotech," you'll be glancing over your
shoulder, making sure everyone else is tapping their toes and
swinging their hips as hard as you are. That track's
deservedly received a lot of press already, but Too Young
to Fight It has plenty of surprises beyond that opening
track. The sugar-rush dance rock groove of "Find a New Way"
takes a surprisingly strong hold, and "Underneath the Night
Sky"'s gigantic wall of synth and guitar will basically just
knock you on your ass. These are songs that, if you let them,
will make you dance like an idiot, belt their choruses, and
jump up and down like a twelve year old kid. And after you've
gotten up and dusted yourself off, you'll want to do it again.
It's okay to love em; just deal with it.

back to the
top

Damon Albarn et al : The
Good, the Bad, and the Queen
Released on
Parlophone/Virgin Records
reviewed by Gaspar Oliveira for
GBH.tv

Despite the heap of evidence that all-star bands
tend to make subpar records, I can't help but feel giddy every
time I hear about a record being put together by future
Hall-of-Famers. Unreasonable as it is, there's this idiot math
that whirs through my head when I hear two big names lumped
together that looks something like this:

Awesome (artist) + Awesome (artist) = SUPER
AWESOME (band)!

Needless to say, this fuzzy math has been the
cause of some serious disappointment for me, and Damon
Albarn's latest musical project needs to be counted among
them. This unnamed supergroup, fronted by Albarn and comprised
of no-names Tony Allen (Fela Kuti's best bandleader and one of
the fathers of Afrobeat), Paul Simonon (bassist for the Clash)
and Simon Tong (ex-Verve guitarist and frequent Albarn
collaborator) and supervised/produced by none other than
Danger Mouse, just released The Good, the Bad, and the
Queen, a limp, heartless record about England's past,
present, and impending doldrums, and - surprise! - it's kind
of a letdown.

The biggest problem here, surprisingly,
is Albarn's songwriting. The former Blur frontman has knocked
out some pretty wry tunes in years past, but most of these
songs are too small, too inward to accomodate his bandmates.
Filled with slight, unmoving images that are supposed to evoke
the ruin of English social life, the lyrics capture neither
the dystopic present nor the yearned-for past, and they're
sung by Albarn as though for nobody but himself. It's not
enough to get a rise out of Simonon or Allen (who's barely
here at all - he only appears on three tracks), and Tong
barely offers more than shading most of the time. Albarn wants
to suggest that the unrest of CCTV and imperial decay have
become permanent fixtures of the English landscape, and he's
using his band as a clause in his argument. His newest
bandmates' careers were defined by their reactions to Imperial
British ills, some occurring 40 years ago, and by shading the
corners of his songs with their dubby bass, vibrating guitars,
and ticking Afrobeats, he's trying to flavor his songs with a
character that spans generations. But the shining past work of
his bandmates came when they were given space to react to
specific crimes, and for the most part, The Good, the Bad,
and the Queen barely has space for them in the liner
notes.

back to the
top

Audionom : Retrospektiv

Released on
Kemado Records
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

The recent
upward spike of Krautrock's cultural currency is a strange
thing. Beneath all that yawning mysticism, Krautrock's birth
at the end of the 1960's was the sound of Germany's first
grown-up post-war generation engaging with an unimaginable
blankness, and trying to comprehend, close to 40 years later,
the circumstances that created the music made by bands like
Neu! and Popul Vuh is pretty much impossible. But because of
the influence it would have on post-punk, that passage of time
has changed how Krautrock's musical features are heard.
Instead of representing of an inconceivable present, Krautrock
has become a metaphor for the imminent and inevitable
mysteries of the future.

Very few bands seem to have noticed this
development (let alone interrogated it), but Sweden's Audionom
is a notable exception. The now-defunct collective's first
full-length release, Retrospektiv, which collects
recordings the band released in its various incarnations
between 1999 and 2002, is a fascinating look at how a band's
relationship to its influences can change, for better as well
as for worse. Initially shackled by their love of motorik,
Audionom strained so mightily against their self-imposed
musical confines that it changed how they used them.

In the beginning, Retrospektiv
is little else but Krautrock ornamented with post-punk
features. Album opener "Ljusets Krigare" casts it as pure
momentum, all thinly majestic drones and lockstep rhythms
rolling forward on a tide of loud, ringing guitars. That
definition is carried to its absolute limit on "Kristall," a
track that barrels forward on arpeggiated keyboards and
furious drumming toward something strangely optimistic. In
these strong opening tracks, Audionom seem to prize their
music's form over anything else, but the tracks that follow
find the band trying to take Krautrock apart; "Spindlar," for
example, experiments with trying to jumpstart the motorik
groove with violent guitar punches, and "Raka Katt"'s hostile
guitars delve into how much weight Krautrock's world of echoes
can handle. Further on, these endeavors pave the way for
reconstruction efforts like the punk raveups on "Horisont" and
the weirdly clinical "Boogierock," but it's ultimately on
"Kein Bock," the album's apex, that Audionom crack the code.
"Bock"'s big, tranquil synths and metronomic guitar strums
conjure up the future, while above and below, electronic
effects whir and grind as lead singer Johan Hinders's vocals
turn from strident barks to primal screams. It's the second to
last track on the album, but Retrospektiv proves that
the spectre of the future can awaken man to the present. You
just have to look at it hard enough.

back to the
top

Kudu : Death of the
Party
Released on
Nublu Recordings
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

There's
something very wrong with Kudu. Despite the ongoing efforts of
dozens of writers and publicists, this New York-based duo's
music just will not fit into a genre categorization.
In addition to exhausting all the traditional genres and even
most of the hyphenates, people have resorted to using made up
terms to fix the problem - tropical Goth?! Urban new wave?! -
but nothing sticks. Their debut for Nublu Records, Death
of the Party, has too many rhythms, too many emotions,
and too many facets to be considered only one thing, but even
if it only shines at certain angles, it's a unique record that
deserves close inspection.

Right from the start, Death throws
curveballs at you. On album opener "Hot Lava," lead singer
Sylvia Gordon's jazzy, impassioned vocals dominate the low
watt keyboards that swing beneath carnivale percussion, and
there's a passion and force in Gordon's voice that's
completely unheard of in electro pop. She can move up and down
scales like Ginger Rogers on a staircase, and she dances
between a light, nimble croon ("Neon Graveyard") and a
powerful belt ("Leave Me Alone") with surprising dexterity.
There are bits of phrasing and notes that she hits on
Death of the Party that recall everybody from
Siouxsie Sioux to En Vogue, sometimes even in the same song,
and the music behind her, particularly the drumming,
accomodates both sounds.

That drumming, provided by Deantoni Parks, is
more than up to this shapeshifting task, and given all the
stylistic variation, it would likely stand out more if it
weren't for the keyboard sludge festering between Parks and
Gordon. Despite the debts that Death owes to electro
and r&b and even punk rock, more than a couple of its
songs are hampered with a thick, dull keyboard sound that's
too distorted to be funky, too thick to create tension, and
too husky to keep up with Parks and Gordon's virtuosic
performances. The keyboards wouldn't necessarily be out of
place in any of the aforementioned genres, but they'd be
looked at as a negative. Not surprisingly, the songs that play
off that weight, like "Black Betty" and "Back For More," are
among the album's best, but it's when Kudu puts its
musicianship into more conventional molds, like on "Bar Star"
and "Love Me In Your Language," that the duo's talent is most
clearly visible.

This genre problem is probably going to
plague Kudu for a long time. But given that the genres that
people try and fail to slot them into are becoming
increasingly faceless these days, it's probably a good sign
that none of those tags sticks. They're too talented to be
called called electro or r&b or punk or new wave, and
don't even bother trying to come up with a label yourself.
Kudu's got their own thing, and their own name, and that's
enough.

back to the
top

Softlightes : Say No to
Being Cool -Say Yes to Being Happy
Released on
Modular Recordings
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

In Kris
Moyes's video for the Softlightes' debut single "Heart Made of
Sound," every word of the song's lyrics gets a bright,
beautiful moment on screen. Set in time with the song's brisk
vocals, "Heart Made of Sound"'s verses come and go as a series
of lightning-speed life cycles; each shot shows a word forming
from some strange collection of materials before the song's
lyric mandates a cut to the next one. Each of the shots is
uniquely vibrant, flush with interesting textures and vivid
colors, but as they whiz past at such a high speed and in such
high volume, their individually appealing characteristics are
melted down into one big statement: this video is gorgeous.

It's not often that a music video single
encapsulates a band's entire output, but anyone who's seen
Moyes's video (and if you're feeling left out, click here)
has unwittingly given himself a pretty good primer on the
band's music. The Softlightes debut album, Say No To Being
Cool - Say Yes To Being Happy, plucks indie music's
sweetest jangles, chirps, strums, and chords and daubs them
with a shining studio glaze before serving them all up at
once. There are playfully crunchy electric guitars and
brightly hypnotic acoustic ones. There are star-eyed, sweetly
whispered vocals and stories told through a vocoder. There are
sun-dappled keyboards and wistful pianos. But just like
Moyes's video, every one of Happy's sonic elements
gets sacrificed at the altar of songwriter Ron Fountenberry's
goal of making a brisk, bright pop record. Each song floats by
like a daydream, and after a while every guitar strum and
electronic burble is stripped of its emotional weight; only
the impression that everything is in its right place remains.
Thankfully, the parallel between video and album continues
right on down this enchanting line. This album is gorgeous,
all right. Just don't think about it.

back to the
top

Shout Out Out Out Out : Not
Saying / Just Saying
Released on
Nrmls Wlcm Records
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

Anyone who's
heard The Name of This Band is Talking Heads or seen
the Dirtbombs in concert knows full well that some bands just
can't be effectively captured in a studio setting. Whether
it's a lack of adrenaline coursing through the musicians'
veins or some mysterious technological shortcoming is
anybody's guess, but the fact remains that there are some
bands whose studio albums don't do them justice. Their
discographies might have their own separate charms, but most
of the time, when their fans put those records on at home,
they're doing so simply to jog their memories of incendiary
live performances.

Shout Out Out Out Out is clearly another one
of these bands. Armed with two drum kits, four bass players,
two vocoders and a hulking pile of samplers, synthesizers, and
percussion instruments, this juggernaut from Edmonton, Alberta
plays a heavy, smirking brand of dance music that's
alternately lumbering and freewheeling, and even if their
debut album Not Saying / Just Saying occasionally
sounds more restrained than you'd expect, it will also fill
you with an uncontrollable urge to find out when the band is
next playing live near you.

Any band with four freaking bass players in
it is going to put a lot of effort into sounding heavy.
Saying's songs are built around big, hulking grooves
that move well for their size, and on stage, SOOOO's
shapeshifting rhythm section probably packs enough wallop to
liquefy its audience's internal organs. On tape, though, that
impact is cushioned significantly. A song like set closer
"Chicken Soup For the Fuck You," which is built around a ra-ra
electrified bass riff, gets by in its recorded form thanks to
the percussive shitstorms that comprise the song's hooks, but
the subterranean harmonies of the two basses that probably
make the song so thrilling live are tough to pick up on here.
"Procrastinator's Fight Song" falls victim to the same
problem; it's a song that should threaten to blow out an
unprepared set of woofers, but instead the song's basslines
share equal space in the mix with an 808 drum machine and
synths that are there just to fill in what should be small
blanks.

But if Saying doesn't make it as a
substitute for the band's live performances, it does make you
pretty curious about, if not downright hungry for the real
thing. "Your Shitty Record Won't Mix Itself" buzzes with an
insistent electricity, and "Inspiration > Competition"
brims with the kinds of layered textures and hypnotic ambience
that favorably recall dance rock royalty like Out Hud. Shout
Out Out Out Out might never solve the "live band" puzzle, but
it seems like a sure thing that they are, as Mitch Hedburg
might say, way more intense in person.

back to the
top

Various Artists : Death
Before Distemper
Released on
DC Recordings
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

The neverending search for the Next Big Thing
seems to be moving faster than ever these days, and it's not
without consequences. If you want to make waves these days,
they better be high-pitched, bright, crazy, and simple ones.
Otherwise, there's a good chance that, no matter how
high-quality your wares are, you're running the risk of being
ignored. Innovations or combinations that can't be explained
in under 20 words get dismissed these days, and a lot of
otherwise deserving music gets short shrift as a result.

Take DC Recordings, for example. This
London-based electronic music label has been releasing
uniquely top-shelf 12" singles for over a decade now, but it
remains largely unknown because the contents of the label's
vinyl are, apparently, a little too involved for today's
pleasure-seekers. That might not seem like a good reason for
high quality work to go unnoticed, but after listening to
Death Before Distemper, DC's latest in-house
compilation, it's the only explanation that makes any sense at
all. Everything else about Distemper, from its funk
and disco rhythm sections and synthetic krautrock expanses to
its electro key/synth palettes and early hip hop breakdowns to
its sublimely varied collections of samples, certainly
deserves at least a little recognition. More than anything,
though, it's the way those elements are combined on
Distemper - expertly blended together with a
disregard for genre borders that hasn't been heard since Bill
Laswell was running amok in New York in the early to mid-80's
- that ought to be generating some hype. In those days, people
like Laswell thought it was perfectly reasonable to do things
like get Afrika Bambaataa and John Lydon to work together, or
make a Miles Davis remix album (a sample of which appears on
one of Distemper's tracks, appropriately enough), or
try to incorporate free jazz into pop music, and that intrepid
spirit sounds very much alive on this release. Sounds and
genres that have no business getting together are not only
combined here; they get on famously.

Instead of
submitting to the intensity and immediacy of its parent genres
though, this music unfolds more gradually, almost mysteriously
at times. The Orichalc Phase's "Respond in Silence"'s
shuddering vocals and hazy synthesizers radiate outward from
its post-punk rhythm section like a mirage; the synth burbles
and ticking guitars of the Emperor Machine's "RimRamRamRim"
erupt in a steadily expanding space landscape; the deep,
oceanic basslines of Padded Cell's "Are You Anywhere?" get
zapped and scraped by keyboards and skronking sax. At this
more deliberate pace, these once frenzied elements acquire an
almost psychedelic quality, coming and going in a way that's
unexpected without being jarring. To say that it's unusual
that overdriven synths and punchy hip hop breaks (Kelpe's
"Quick Broken Harp") can lull one into a trance would be
putting it mildly, but Distemper achieves that kind
of effect regularly.

Death Before Distemper doesn't pack
the same kind of dancefloor wallop of something like Kitsune
Maison or Ed Rec. But anyone who's developed a taste for
past-cribbing dance music over the past couple of years would
be stupid not to pick this up. The hype's gotta start
somewhere, right?.

back to the
top

Josef K : Entomology

Released on
Domino Recordings
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

Josef K hit
it and quit it, as it were. After recording two albums in the
space of six months and touring extensively in support of one,
leading man Paul Haig decided their work was done and
disbanded the Edinburgh group; they lasted barely two years.
In the 25-odd years that have passed since the band broke up,
the genre and sound (of post-punk) they helped to pioneer has
metamorphosed into something pretty far removed from what
attracted Haig to it in the first place, and it's that sharp
contrast which makes Entomology so captivating. A
kind of highlights package culled from both albums, their
singles, and a John Peel session, Entomology
summarizes a band that took their music and its suggestive
power very seriously, and the record's dread and desperation
are so palpable that it'll have you thinking maybe it wasn't
quite so cool to live in England in the late 70's after all.

To begin with, Josef K might have been one of
the best-named bands ever. Taken from the main character in
Franz Kafka's The Trial, Josef K is a man who slowly
loses his humanity after unidentified government agents
declare him guilty of an unspecified crime. It's not hard to
see how K's plight must've had a gruesome resonance for Haig
and his bandmates; there was a sense of doom hovering over the
UK in the late 70's, and though punk rock had railed against
that, the post-punk movement that was starting to take shape
at the end of the decade had a still darker feel to it. K's
first album, the initially unreleased Sorry For
Laughing, quivers with the same energy of punk, but
crude, abrasive electronic effects encroach further on the
manic nervousness of Paul Weddell's bass and Paul Haig and
Malcolm Ross's guitars. Their guitars don't merely scrape and
scratch. They shudder and screech and roar too; the tension on
display in songs like "Drone" and "Variation of Scene" is
almost inhuman, and every song from Sorry For
Laughing represented here is shot through with
electrocuted nerves and dread.

Electrocuted nerves and dread don't sell,
though, so after their label refused to release Sorry For
Laughing, K threw together The Only Fun in Town,
an album that's equally suggestive in a different way.
Essentially a funk record played way too fast as well as a pop
record played completely out of tune, Fun is a
hopeless, nihilistic charge through all of pop music's most
exuberant forms. There is a live, loose feel to
Fun's songs that, perversely, serves only to heighten
the music's deadening feeling. Even when their guitars
brighten, as in "Chance Meeting," they are somehow gnarled and
hollow too, with every bright moment inescapably chained to a
bleaker reality. And yet, even in this wasteland, it's
impossible to miss the impact K has had on legions of bands
ranging from Franz Ferdinand to the Rapture. 25 years later,
it's the music's only true silver lining.

As you might have guessed, Josef K
doesn't exactly make music you're likely to see in a car
commercial any time soon, but Entomology is one of
those rare albums that effectively communicates the weight and
pressure that bore down on the musicians who made it. It would
be quite a social cautionary tale if it didn't sound this
good.

back to the
top

Linus Loves : Stage Invader

Released on
Breastfed
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

Good friends
tend to have a lot of the same ideas. When you're in the loop
with someone like that, hearing them blurt out the same thing
that's just left your mouth is one of the most childishly
thrilling things that can happen. When you're not in the loop,
most of the time you just want the giggling and squealing to
stop so you can get a word in edgewise. It's hard to imagine
this kind of bond being too common in the music business, but
in the case of Linus Loves, a Scottish recording duo who are
good friends with Myles MacInnes (a.k.a. Mylo), it's not hard
to imagine the three of them finishing each others sentences;
the source of this speculation is Stage Invader,
their second album and first on British label Breast Fed
(whose stable Mylo has a stall in as well). Stage
Invader, like Mylo's top-tier debut album
Destroyrocknroll, trafficks exclusively in
bright-eyed, blissful dance music that doesn't suffer from its
simplicity, and even if one or two songs sound alarmingly
similar to those on Destroyrocknroll, and two or
three more alarmingly sample Fleetwood Mac, the overall effect
is certainly pleasant enough.

Invader opens with "The Love," which
fastens a few out of tune piano notes, a trumpet, and some
r&b vocal samples to a purposeful set of guitar fills and
bass snippets that move the song from beginning to end. Aside
from the different genres being mined (most of what follows
takes its cues from New Wave, electro, and French club music),
it's a good sign of what lies ahead. Invader's songs
aren't exactly paint-by-number, but each one is a very tidy
facsimile of great songs that are already floating around in
pop cultural memory; "Rock Chk" throws a bit more hip-shake
into Air's Talkie Walkie-era bubblegum space pop,
"The Terrace" sounds like a song you'd forgotten was on
Discovery, "One More Chance" sounds a little too
polite to be a Chemical Brothers song, but it's pretty close.
These attributions aren't meant to taken negatively. Linus
Loves have a superb ear for what makes songs go, and they've
rightly taken their cues from the best in the business.

More than anything though, Linus Loves wants to make
elation-inducing dance music, and so it makes sense that the
artist they imitate most successfully is their friend Mylo.
The centerpiece of this counterfeit spread is unquestionably
"VH1," a track that has the same sound and effect as Mylo's
heavenly "In My Arms," a four-and-a-half-minute-long diagram
of what it feels like to drop a pill of E - chirping
synthesizers dance close and then closer together with a warm,
fuzzed bassline, while underneath, guitar licks gradually
quicken like a heart rate. The song continues to swim and warm
up until the bassline drops out and a tide of keyboards bathes
you in the best feeling in the world for a full minute. It's
simple and undeniable, and even though there's an extra minute
of song that follows, it's all afterglow, and as the beat
ends, and the keyboards buzz one last time, there's a sore
temptation to push the back button on your stereo to do it
again. Not at all unlike the feeling of hearing a good friend
say exactly what you're thinking, actually.

back to the
top

Sally Shapiro : Disco
Romance
Released on
Diskokaine
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

Dance music
isn't supposed to be for loners. Ever since Belle &
Sebastian tossed off "Electronic Renaissance" as a kind of
experiment during their Tigermilk days, very few
artists have even tried to fuse melancholy sentiment with a
danceable sound, and almost all of them have failed. When
armed with guitars, the task gets a little easier - even if
the Smiths and New Order did set the bar pretty high all those
years ago - but aside from Ladytron or maybe Junior Boys,
there's not a lot of success to be found when taking the
electronics route.

Such crossovers are rarely
attempted, and it's quite a surprise that Disco
Romance, the debut album from Swedish duo Sally Shapiro
and Johan Agebjorn, even tries to fuse the sensibility and
vocals of an endearingly sadsack indie record (think of the
vocals from a K Records band like the Softies) with the
rhythm, synths, and glitz of Italo disco. But the bigger
surprise, which comes into focus almost immediately, is that
they completely pull it off. Agebjorn ingeniously taps into
Italo disco's most basic elements, from its simplistic pulse
and thud to its synthesizers, which were once used to evoke
everything from euphoric abandon to futuristic remoteness, and
recasts them in tragic roles, with abandon and remoteness now
being driven relentlessly by a desolate beat that wants to go
anywhere else. Even Italo's dramatic air stays intact here,
but on Romance those canned strings and rounded
echoes are used to buttress all the heartache, puppy love, and
resignation embedded in Shapiro's narratives.

Album opener ("I'll Be By Your Side") begins
on a dramatic note, but before the song's chorus - "Cuz you
know that when you feel so lonely in your heart, I'll be by
your side, tonight" - is even over, the most striking feature
of Shapiro's slightly treated voice is its innocent quality.
Instead of the big-voiced bombast that so often dominates a
line like that in dance music, Shapiro is meek almost, and
quiet as a mouse throughout the album, singing in the kind of
voice you can barely hear behind a closed door. Her melodies,
like Agebjorn's production, are simple and catchy, almost
completely without ornamentation or fireworks, but their
monochrome strengthens the symbiosis between music and lyrics
to the point that it's difficult to tell which element is
working in service of the other; her voice curtails the
cheesiness that plagues even the best Italo disco, and
Agebjorn's synths give your heart strings that extra tug as
Shapiro sings about the kiss she'd love to plant on someone's
lips, or the relationship she knows she has to give up.

Disco Romance is one of those rare
records that reveals all of its charms on the first listen and
forces you to keep returning to it. Shapiro and Agebjorn know
full well that sadness is part of pop's spectrum too, and
their first record dresses that melancholy in its best
Saturday night outfit and then happily doesn't even leave the
house. It's a new kind of escape and pleasure that's likely
remain unique in both dance and pop music for a long time.

back
to the top

Various Artists : 8-Bit
Operators - The Music of Kraftwerk...
Released on
Astralwerks
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

It's amazing
to think of what Kraftwerk has given me. For example, before
cracking open the jewel case for 8-Bit Operators - The
Music of Kraftwerk Performed on Vintage 8-Bit Video Game
Systems, I was totally unfamiliar with the term
"chiptune." As it turns out, the word refers to a subgenre of
electronic music devoted entirely to music made with the
lo-bit microchips found in old video game systems; chiptune
has hotbeds of activity in places ranging from New York to
Buenos Aires (Tokyo seems to be mysteriously absent), and to
listen to the crowd noise heard on the live track that closes
the album, more than a few very enthusiastic (or possibly just
very drunk) fans. On Operators, every one of the 15
featured artists is a vital contributor to this scene (yes, it
has its own scene), with more than a few of them being
responsible for inventing the technology that gave birth to
the genre in the first place. While these bits of knowledge
certainly raise Operators's Geek Quotient by a factor
of about ten, it also turns Operators into more than
an idiosyncratic covers record: it offers a fascinating look
at what makes this genre so appealing to its fan base.

After only a couple of listens, it becomes
clear that using these chips as the primary source of sound
has distinct advantages and disadvantages. 8-bit chips produce
bright, boxy tones that are most exciting when used in short
bursts or quick oscillations instead of drones or low-end
soundscapes. Their darker tones tend to be blunt without
having much force, and are often surrounded by a rough-edged,
pixillated distortion that has a nastier bite when the notes
are kept short. Given these facts, it's tough to imagine 8-bit
chips doing Kraftwerk's songs - the best of which stand out
for their austere mood and squeaky-clean production - any
justice at all, but Operators proves it can be done.
The majority of Operators' covers offer imaginative
solutions to 8-bit's sonic limitations, and one or two tracks
even manage to reimagine their parent material without
reducing them to novelties. The album's first three tracks
showcase Kraftwerk at everything from their most beat-driven
to their sloppiest, and the chips prove themselves more than
up to the task of capturing that and transposing it. Glomag's
version of "Pocket Calculator," for example, turns one of
Kraftwerk's silliest songs into a Mario Brothers time warp
complete with absurd, ambiguously accented vocals. Glomag
plays up on what was already there without reducing the song
in the process, and it suggests what the following track,
"Computer Love," confirms. Like it or not, these 8-bit tones
pack a nostalgic punch for this generation, and they give
"Computer Love"'s simultaneously happy and sad melody a kind
of second wind. It's a second wind with an expiration date,
sure, but that doesn't lessen its immediate impact.
Unfortunately, these three tracks are the album's high points,
and while there are some other noteworthy points -
Bubblyfish's effortlessly intricate "It's More Fun to Compute"
being the best example - the rest of Operators's
tracks are simply okay. Too much energy is expended
trying to clear the hurdles imposed by the technology, and the
impact of the songs themselves often gets lost in the process.

There are tons of people out there who seem to feel
kinship with certain kinds of technology, and love to see it
triumph over problems placed before it. For them,
Operators probably makes a case that the unofficial
musical timbre of their childhoods is still capable of
meaningful expression. As for me, I'll just thank Kraftwerk
for the unusual pop culture lesson. I love Kraftwerk, and I
loved video games growing up, but I usually had to play them
with the sound off. My parents always told me that the music
drove them crazy.

back to the
top

The Phoenix Foundation :
Horsepower
Released on
Caravan Records
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

The term
"Kiwi-rock" occupies a special place in the hearts of 90's
college radio geeks. For a good ten years, the island of New
Zealand seemed to brim over with literate, jangly guitar pop
bands that were just as punk as they were twee, equal parts
art and tart. Most of them involved various combinations of
members of bands like the Clean, the Bats, and Bailter Space
(to name three of the most well-known), which gave the
movement/subgenre a consistent, winsome identity that's more
clearly defined than that of most regional rock scenes.
Unfortunately, it also means that Kiwi rock could accurately
be described these days as being over the hill, with few signs
of a new crop maturing.

That is, until now. If the Phoenix Foundation
aren't "Kiwi-rock" in anything beyond the geographical sense
of the term, the grainy flecks of Kiwi's seeds can be clearly
seen beneath the elegant shine of their debut album
Horsepower. Horsepower is made up of almost
nothing but slow songs, but the album's languid pace never
grows tedious, as each song takes on that speed from a new
angle. There are moments of cool, soft expansiveness ("St.
Kevin"), homespun intimacy ("Wildlife"), and even understated
r&b styling ("Let Me Die a Woman") that suggest a band
that makes good use of all six of its voices, each concerned
with nothing more than creating something beautiful.

There are plenty of bands who spend their
careers endlessly pursuing the craft of balladry, but what
separates the Phoenix Foundation from the pack is its
grounding in a new strain of Kiwi sensibility, a new spin on
that strange mix of sweet and smart that charmed the entire
world just ten years ago. On "Going Fishing," as an organ
whirs and climbs atop a pair of guitars, it's impossible to
miss the echoes of their countrymates the Clean, and it's
welcome as something that's both new and old at the same time.
Enjoy the first fruits of this new crop from down under.

back
to the top

Black Devil Disco Club : 28
Later
Released on
Lo Recordings
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

Anonymity has
been an issue in dance music for some time now. Neophytes fret
over the genre's "anonymity" and "facelessness" constantly,
and the embarrassment of not knowing more about who made this
single or who remixed that crossover hit often reaches such
heights that you'd think the figures in question were
anonymous sex partners instead of music makers. For our money,
this anxiety comes mostly from writers and critics; it's hard
to write about something at length, and situate it in that
all-important context, when faced with a seemingly smaller
sonic palette, a less aggressive hype machine and, as a
result, a more limited back story.

This problem is sure to cross reviewers'
minds when they listen to Black Devil Disco Club's 28
Later. Produced by Bernard Fevre, the same shadowy figure
who produced the highly influential Disco Club EP
(which had been almost impossible to find on eBay for under a
hundred dollars before Rephlex reissued it a couple of years
ago), 28 Later doesn't sound like a 21st century
product at all. Its archly futuristic synthesizers are drier,
its drum machines are more primitive, and its contours are
less aggressively shaped and defined than most dance music
released in the last ten years. It's impossible to tell
whether these tracks have been sitting in Fevre's basement for
the past twenty years, or if it was just the tools which made
them that were gathering that same dust before he took them
out recently. As such, it's hard to give this record a back
story, but fans of Italo disco and French house really aren't
going to give a shit. After 28 Later blinks to life
with different bursts of synthesizer voltage, vocoded vocals
and a thick, steady bassline blasts it off into space, and for
the next thirty minutes Fevre treats his listeners to a ride
through a different universe as it was imagined in the 1970's,
full of shining halogens, foreign metallic clangs and echoes,
and heavily treated refrains that sound almost tribal. Several
of 28 Later's constituent parts have spawned entire
subgenres, but they're presented here as geographic features
in an alien world, strikingly different yet somehow of a
living whole. On "I Regret the Flower Power," a sickly pair of
synthesizers call and respond to each other before the
bassline beckons its listener below the treeline, into a weird
jungle of robotic birdcalls; elsewhere, "The Devil in Us"'s
vocals emerge from the depths of the same industrial wasteland
that birthed Joy Division and Depeche Mode, and each feels
part of the other.

It's impossible not to wonder, at
first listen, what year this record was made in, and though it
might be a while before someone gets to the bottom of the
where, when, and why of 28 Later, it doesn't really
matter what the answer is. Go cop it and invent one for
yourself.

back to the
top

In Flagranti : Wronger Than
Anyone Else
Released on
Codek Records
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

Despite its
recent predilection for putting on fetid airs, dance music has
always been (and continues to be) a rather stratified genre.
Its purest moments have always occured when it's inspired an
entire dancefloor to gaze or reach up for the heavens, for
reasons chemically-induced or otherwise, but recently there
has been an obsession with darkness, menace, and deviance in
dance music. Unsurprisingly, almost all of it is pretty
contrived, and in most artists' outputs there's an element of
grandeur that throws the whole thing off. When you get right
down to it, even the most waif-like body loses a lot of its
sex appeal if it's clad from head to foot in Diesel, and
leather's not quite as dangerous if it's hand-treated and
Italian.

Finding dance music with a legitimate strain
of perversity or deviance in it, then, ought to be considered
a real prize, and In Flagranti's debut album, Wronger Than
Anyone Else, is one of the year's real achievements
because of it. Alex Gloor and Sasha Crnobrnja have given birth
to a sound that is smutty, hostile, and disdainful all at
once, and amazingly enough it's all built exclusively out of
samples. Each of Wronger's 17
tracks is the result of Gloor and Crnobrnja e-mailing each
other snippets of sound taken off records purchased in bulk at
flea markets and thrift stores and then cobbling songs out of
them. It's a crude, utilitarian approach that's magnified by
the samples themselves, which include lots of amateurish (but
no less captivating) disco-speed music by groups like ESG and
more than a few artists from the P&P Records stable. It's
the sound of a legion of artists who could put down wicked
grooves but couldn't afford the studio time to record
or mix them properly, and the cumulative effect of hearing
dozens of them sewn together is utterly nasty and arresting.
Conga breakdowns, spiked guitars, manic basslines, 808s,
snippets of handclaps, bubbling arpeggios and turbo-charged
canned strings from scores of anonymous electro, disco and
punk songs are all treated with the same disrespect as they
come and go. They're not there to look good or sound nice.
They're there to make you dance, and that's it. Hard as it is
to imagine, Wronger Than Anyone Else makes you move
your ass as well as screw your face up.

back to the
top

In Flagranti : In the Silver
White Box
Released on
Gomma Records
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

Though
ostensibly part of the disco revival that ought to be in full
bloom by next summer (mark your calendars now!), there's
something very deviant about In Flagranti. Unlike their DJ
work, the transplanted Swiss pair's original material strips
disco's euphoric zip and swirl down to simple grooves and
building blocks before putting it back together with another
genre's instruction manual, and the results - in their own
twisted way - are quite exciting. Their debut for Gomma, the
vinyl-only maxi-single In the Silver White Box, shows
that disco looks just as good when reassembled by hip hop as
it does by electro. "What Are You Doing After the Orgy"'s
sunny canned strings and strolling bassline get hacked down
into samples that inject the song with a subtle malaise, which
In Flagranti ratchet up with manic turntable antics and a
Johnny Rotten vocal snippet; the title track's truncated disco
bass is bookended by house percussion which gets lazed by
snipped synth lines that flare up around the beat in a
tension-prolonging pattern; "Vegetable of the Month" mixes its
innuendo-laden strings down into the bottom of the 808-driven
darkness. Only "New and Non-Lubricated" fails to live up to
the standard set by its neighbors, undone by a bassline that's
too blocky, too thick to coast the way the rest of the song
seems to, but maybe that's the idea. Clearly, In Flagranti are
not above causing a little discomfort.

back to the
top

Depeche Mode : The Best Of,
Volume 1
Released on
Reprise Records
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

When a band
achieves a certain degree of commercial and artistic success,
the rules of discourse change. Instead of simply being a band
with a creative arc, said band becomes an institution whose
influence radiates through the ages. Their discography's highs
are cobbled together into endless "Best Of" permutations,
while their lows, however instructive or interesting, are
dismissed altogether.

When it comes to Depeche Mode, it's easy to
say that they've earned this kind of treatment. Through their
quarter century of existence, they've released close to 50
singles, the vast majority of which have charted. Along the
way, they gave birth to a sound that people still idolize,
expanded the definitions of international pop stardom, and
developed a following big enough that even their newest
records sell surprisingly well. They certainly deserve
Reprise's superb The Best Of, Volume One, which
collects 18 of the band's hits on one CD and also offers 23
music videos and a mini documentary on an enclosed DVD. What
makes The Best Of worth buying is not simply the
music, but the fact that it ingeniously represents the band as
the institution it's become through the CD and, through the
DVD, as a unit that grew, bit by bit, into the many adjectives
that they're now associated with. The Best Of's CD
mixes Depeche Mode's singles up; the CD opens with the stadium
slammer "Personal Jesus," their 23rd single, and from there,
it weaves everything from the synthy teen pop of "Just Can't
Get Enough," their 3rd single, together with the arch darkness
of "It's No Good" (their 32nd) and back again with little
regard to anything other than the pursuit of a tight playlist.
The CD's message, rather than being something bold and
slightly complicated like, "Depeche Mode so expanded pop's
boundaries that they created a unique subgenre whose
legitimacy they proved all by themselves," seems to be more
along the lines of "Depeche Mode is fucking awesome!"

Truth and merit of those two statements
aside, the DVD thankfully offers a slightly different picture.
The early music videos do a fantastic job of portraying just
how important their sound was at the time it came out.
Industrial, political, poppy and fun all at once - it was the
sound of a band reveling in its time instead of being freaked
out by it. The sight of Martin Gore banging on steel piping
and Dave Gahan dancing around without an iota of
self-consciousness in their early videos offers a striking
contrast to their later career, when that irreverence would
eventually become darker, more brooding, more theatrical, but
no less relevant. That slide down the scale of greys into the
slick darkness they would purvey for over a decade is hard to
pick out just listening to the CD, even after multiple
listens, but you can see it on the DVD with each passing
haircut, each successive outfit. Some of the videos haven't
aged terribly well, but in a way, that's part of the charm;
music doesn't lose value when you associate it with its
appropriate time period. These days, it probably even adds to
it.

As a final bonus, The Best Of's mini
documentary unwittingly showcases the silliness that ensues
when a band starts discussing itself and its canonical status.
Listening to Dave and Martin discuss their career trajectory
is enough to bring back echoes of Spinal Tap, and
there are only a handful of bands in the world that deserve to
be able to talk about themselves like that. Thankfully,
Depeche Mode fill that bill, and The Best Of offers a
uniquely thorough vision of what comes along with that status.

back
to the top

Freeform Five : Bisous
Bisous, Volume II
Released on
Perspex Records
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

The remix has
come a long way, baby. Since originally being grabbed onto
(commercially speaking) by record labels as a convenient way
to pad singles and greatest hits packages, a miniature galaxy
of remix stars has gradually begun to take shape, with some of
them raising themselves to the level of auteurs. This select
group emerged through a host of different processes, but the
remixers who have become their galaxy's brightest put just as
much of themselves into their remixes as the artists did into
their original compositions.

England's Freeform Five might not be
well-known in the United States as a remix superstar, though
he undoubtably is across the pond (the only person to really
ascend to that status here is James Murphy), but his work with
European and English artists shows just how valuable a
remixer's intuition can be. FF made Mylo's "Muscle Cars" into
the hit that it became, and in turn Mylo returned the favor by
turning FF's single "No More Conversations" into a smash with
his own remix. Each artist was able to read between the
other's lines, and through the remixes, each provided success
for the other. This grasp of what artists really dig about one
another is on display on Freeform Five's latest mix,
Bisous Bisous Volume II, which glides through some of the
biggest electro hits of '05 and '06 on its way to highlighting
the reasons for electro's incredible staying power. Despite
changing gears and genres several times, Bisous II is
never forceful or jarring. It's a well-arranged starter kit of
basslines that groan through grinding teeth, frenzied one note
keyboard transmissions, pitched up bits of inhuman singing,
drunken bells and sirens, and pulverized, squelching
synthesizers that are wracked by acid harmonies and chemical
energy. These elements are foregrounded from track to track by
their remixers, who range from misfits like Speaker Junk and
MSTRKRFT to pioneers like Etienne de Crecy, each of whom
brings a distinctive sensibility to their tracks, with
Freeform Five bringing them all together under one umbrella.
It's a top-flight testament to just how sensitive the stars of
the electro galaxy really are, and just how brightly everybody
can shine.

back to the
top

Clipse : Hell Hath No Fury

Released on
Zomba
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

Before it was
even released, Hell Hath No Fury acquired a
practically mythic aura. The typical reasons for hype - the
follow-up-to-a-successful-debut status, produced from start to
finish by their benefactors and champions the Neptunes - had
long since been tossed aside like wrapping paper, and what
writers and fans all over the country were so anxious about
instead was the album's gestation period. Lord
Willin', their debut, came out a staggering four years
ago, and in the years that followed Pusha T and Malice endured
major label drama that so rubbed them the wrong way that they
scraped together their own imprint, a modestly sized stable of
artists to push, and kept themselves on street radar with a
stream of mixtapes while endlessly refining their follow-up.
The result - a startlingly focused and thorough depiction of
the dead-eyed ennui and private torments that accompany
success in the drug and rap games - might not be the
masterpiece that people are prematurely branding it as, but
it's without a doubt the most polished pop product of the
year, and at times it shines so brightly it's blinding.

There's enough tension across Hell Hath
No Fury to suspend a tightrope. Each of Fury's
twelve drug-slinging tales is packed with brutal, unflinching
details that are at once ordinary and disarming, and listening
to Pusha T and Malice, it's impossible to tell if they think
there's a difference between the two. Malice delves into the
particulars of having "no accomplice but my conscience" with a
consideration that street rap hasn't seen since early-day Nas,
while T displays a knack for proper name wordplay that's
become peerless. On "Ride Around Shinin," the two of them
(along with surprisingly dextrous Re-Up member AB-Liva) show
themselves to be such exceptional salesmen that, once
rap-market-minded executives hear the joint, the Clipse might
not have to pay for their clothes, cars, or champagne ever
again. T throws fashion designers, vintners, cars and coke
lingo into verses like they were shopping bags in the back of
his Range Rover, and all together they acquire the same frosty
appeal; call it 21st century product placement. But
Fury's glitter and freshness are counterbalanced by
serious second thoughts about where the Clipse get their cash
from. The album's first proper track, "Momma I'm So Sorry" is
garrotted together by its chorus: "Momma I'm so sorry I'm so
obnoxious / I don't fear Tubbs and Crockett / Momma I'm so
sorry I'm so obnoxious / got two hot rocks in my pocket."
Fury's details of their impossibly alluring, morally
untenable lifestyle coalesce thanks to a conviction that's
hard to come by in any artist's second release, and it's
stronger here for Clipse than it's ever been.

It's gripping stuff, pretty much from start
to finish, with all of it set against some of the best beats
Chad Hugo and Pharrell Williams have ever done. "Wamp Wamp
(What It Do)" has wild clacking drums that could climb up
walls, "Ride Around Shining" and "Keys Open Doors" are colder
than Arctic wind, and "Chinese New Year" and "Mr. Me Too" are
the omega points of Pharrell's ghetto in outer space. The
symmetry between beats and rhymes is perfect, and even if
Hell Hath No Fury is just a gram or two shy of being a
classic, there are plenty of moments that will tempt you to
tip the scales for it..

back to the
top

Various Artists : Marie
Antoinette Motion Picture Soundtrack
Released on
Verve Forecast
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

More than
anything else, Sofia Coppola's movies are carried by her
highly noticeable personal touches. The girl makes no bones
about having good taste, and she devotes a lot of energy to
showing it off in her movies, especially when it comes to
their soundtracks. More than simply evoking appropriate moods
for their respective scenes, Coppola's soundtracks play like a
mix you might've received from an older sibling when you were
younger - six or seven tracks by members of the indie rockist
pantheon, two or three tracks by an artist "you need to know
about," and a few instrumental pieces from film-appropriate
sources cobbled together into a shell that surrounds an
emotional core. Soundtracks don't normally make movies go, but
in Coppola's oeuvre, they get pretty close, and they're always
good enough to stand on their own two feet.

Ignoring for a moment the quality of the film
it's attached to (the words "insipid" and "piece of shit" come
readily to mind), Coppola's two disc soundtrack for Marie
Antoinette thankfully doesn't stray from the above
formula at all. The pantheon artists, this time around,
include Gang of Four, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Aphex Twin,
Bow Wow Wow (who are still waiting for their membership cards
in the mail), Adam and the Ants, and the Cure, are mostly
confined to the first disc, where their barking, scratching
and sneering conjure up the feeling of being at a party where
you don't know anybody. The second disc, populated by the
artist "you need to know about," (in this case, the Swedish
dream-pop band the Radio Department) and some more sedate
"opuses" (hopefully so titled with tongue in cheek) by Dustin
O'Halloran, is all piano-driven morning-after tristesse, a
million shades of the same grey that grates against your
Saturday and Sunday mornings.

In a lot of ways, the
soundtrack plays a lot like a pair of mixtapes intended for
someone else, and as such its charms are limited. But the two
discs make for fine bookends to a night you know is going to
be a total disaster, the kind every big brother or sister
knows you're bound to have.

back to the
top

Goldfrapp : We Are Glitter

Released on
Mute Records
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

Since she and Will Gregory released their first
record back in 2001, Alison Goldfrapp has been indie music's
queen of the night. Her sonic palette's broader than the one
used by Ladytron's disenchanted coked up ingenues, her voice
is darker and more suggestive than Madonna's, and she's
comfortably above the whordes of electroclash pan flashes that
have come and gone since then. Her music's synthesized glam
rock, electro, house, trip hop and everything in between, and
as such her music appeals to plenty of different sets, critics
included.

It's hard to say why she isn't more famous,
and We Are Glitter, a remix album released on the
heels of her third album Supernature, only makes that
question more difficult to answer. Glitter rounds up
a murderer's row of remixers to rework some of
Supernature's tracks (the exception, "Strict
Machine," is off Black Cherry), and each plays like a
little essay that might be titled "Why I Like Goldfrapp." The
essayists in question write their responses in the idioms of
their respective genres, but Glitter is remarkably
cohesive because Goldfrapp's music shares roots with all of
her collaborators. Whether it's Carl Craig's galactic house
("Fly Me Away") or the Shortwave Set's dead-eyed glam ("He's
My Man"), each of Glitter's tracks represents a facet
of Goldfrapp's richly nocturnal identity. Shitkatapult's T.
Raumschmiere takes "Lovely 2 C U" and drags it down a dark
mineshaft, leaving it sooty and speckled with pulverized
gemstones; Ewan Pearson gussies "Ride a White Horse" up into a
euphoric trip to nowhere; Mum summon the cantankerous spirit
of Grandaddy to haunt "You Never Know." To put things mildly,
it's a compelling, idiosyncratic collection.

In some ways, though, it's sort of sad that
We Are Glitter exists. It's a record obviously meant
to keep Goldfrapp's name at the tips of DJs' tongues, but
plenty of her original material would do just as well slotted
into a playlist as any of these remixes. It can't be too much
longer before the first lady of nightlife gets her due, and if
it's really necessary, We Are Glitter is a highly
listenable step along that way.

back to the
top

Junior Boys : So This
is Goodbye
Released
on Domino Records
reviewed by Max Willens for
GBH.tv

Part of indie's aesthetic charm is its
chrysalid uncertainty. That tortured writhing we all know and
love is invariably backlit by a promise of transformation, and
these promises can be related to just about anything, be they
technical (the prospect of improved musicianship or greater
lyrical precision on subsequent releases), emotional
(persevering through a dark period of
drugs/lovesickness/ennui/some combination thereof), whatever.
It rarely matters whether an artist makes good on that promise
or not, because there is something endlessly seductive about
its presence, and as such it remains indie's common
denominator.

Junior Boys' second album So This is
Goodbye doesn't deviate from this formula at all, but
what makes it such a fantastic record is its simultaneous
fulfillment and proffering of promises. The promises it
fulfills are musical, all outlined on their ultimately
frustrating debut Last Exit: instead of the flat,
monochromatic neon flashes that evoked vaguely different
styles, Goodbye is flush with vibrant synths that
evoke electro, new wave, funk and disco with thrilling
specificity. Last Exit, for all the intricacy of its
parts, was a sparse record, with two or sometimes three
elaborate musical elements uneasily coexisting in every song.
But here, that same attention to detail is devoted instead to
fitting together several smaller elements to articulate
something patiently and confidently. The changes in
instrumentation are few - a few tracks on Goodbye
feature live drums and hints of wind instruments, but
this is a significantly more textured record than their debut,
with more coarseness and bite spread out across backdrops that
echo, ring, shine and pulse. Instead of the busy but
distracting drum programming that weighed down Last
Exit, courtesy of now-departed bandmember Johnny Dark,
Goodbye's rhythms are more colorful, more intuitively
joined to head songwriter Jeremy Greenspan's synths and
vocals. In plain terms, it's the sound of two people -
Greenspan and engineer Matt Didemus - driving home a single
point as opposed to three people striking limiting
compromises.

And throughout it all, despite the amazing
progress he's made as a vocalist, Greenspan opts to float
unobtrusively through Goodbye's haunting tracks,
singing about doomed love, nagging feelings, and stinging
memories. His music is so rich that his words don't even
matter, but with each successive listen, as one more verse
grafts itself onto your brain, you'll sense that even at a
lyrical level, there is something promising in the works for
this talented band.

back to the
top

Lindstrom & Prins Thomas
: Lindstrom & Prins Thomas

Various Artists : The DFA
Remixes - Chapter Two

Released on
Eskimo; Released on Astralwerks
reviewed by Max Willens
for GBH.tv

Some time last year, rumors surfaced that
Britney Spears had tabbed DFA's Tim Goldsworthy to produce
some material for a comeback album of hers. As expected, the
blogosphere erupted with keyboard-mashing howls of disgust and
anticipation in response, and after the demos surfaced, the
groans and giddiness only got louder, and with good reason.
Tucked away in the pressed creases of the trademark DFA sound,
there lurked one or two very Spears-friendly details that made
the collaboration seem like *gasp* a good idea.

Indie-rockist grumbling aside, Goldsworthy and his
production partner James Murphy have shown a peerless ability
over the years to construct coolly thoughtful spaces for pop
vocals through their remixes, and lately it's been hard,
especially when listening to The DFA Remixes: Chapter
Two, not to think of their ongoing remix work as an
audition. They can work wonders with any kind of artist's
material, and Chapter Two shows Murphy and
Goldsworthy tapping into the emotional core of vocals with new
levels of keenness.

Like any sensible
pair of pop producers, the DFA ignore their singers' lyrics
and engage immediately with their songs' vocal affects. Tiga's
uber-aloof vocals on "Far From Home," for example, get the
Neu! treatment here, as Murphy and Goldsworthy ignore the Lisa
Frankness of "Home"'s lyrics and put the track on a bullet
train bound for Berlin. Tiga's vocal monochrome makes this an
easy play on DFA's part, but their reworking of Hot Chip's
"Colours" shows they're capable of far more interesting,
nuanced interpretations as well. The original track, which
floated around in a Jimmy Tamborello-inspired ether, becomes
an experiment in space, alternating at first between
cavernous, organ-driven verses and airlock-tight synth blips
that adorn the chorus before the two wash together into
something propulsive, remote, and oddly engaging all at once -
much like The Mix-era Kraftwerk, and much like Alexis
Taylor's voice.

Even Chapter
Two's more paint-by-numbers fare is tastefully applied;
Trent Reznor's raw-throated histrionics get the trademark DFA
lozenge of lite acid-disco, making the resultant nine-minute
excursion far more successful than any eye-rolling hipster
could've expected. If Murphy and Goldsworthy can make Trent
Reznor an indie-dancefloor star, just think of the beautiful
music you'd make together, Mrs. Federline-Spears.

If DFA are the
generalissimi of the 21st century disco revival, then Norway's
Hans Peter Lindstrom is certainly a ranking officer in the
European campaign. In addition to much of his notoriety being
DFA-related (his remixes of tracks by the Juan Maclean and LCD
Soundsystem rank among his most well-known), Lindstrom has
pushed the genre's boundaries farther than anyone might've
expected to be possible. Where DFA have an unmistakable sound,
Lindstrom's tracks are unmistakably ambitious, the sound of
someone who holds disco's elements in no higher esteem than he
holds classic AM pop or house or lounge. It's natural, then,
that this ambition takes center stage on his full-length
collaboration with producer Prins Thomas, an album that
aspires to dispense the emotional breadth and reflection of an
indie pop record along with the groove and euphoria of a disco
release. Over the course of the disc's eighty minutes, a
surprising range of emotion and melody undulates outward with
deliberate grace that's almost too patient, almost too
careful. But it's the sound of a pair of artists placing their
craft above the cheap thrills of desperately stringing
together a collection of would-be singles, and in any subset
of dance music, that's commendable indeed.

Being considered a
singles genius is one of the sharpest double-edged swords in
the music business, and convincing the world at large that you
can do more bring dancefloor heat is a tough task. But as
disco claws its way back into our consciousness, these
releases offer proof that its most talented producers are
steeped in unexpectedly deep pop convictions, and luckily for
disco, that's certainly something worth
celebrating.

back to the
top

Moby : Go - The Very Best of
Moby
Released on
V2 Records
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

Observant music buyers out there will notice
that this is Richard Mills (a.k.a. Moby)'s second greatest
hits record. Back in 2000, the little guy released Songs:
1993-1998 to cash in on Play's absurd commercial
success, and business savvy aside, it was a good primer on
what had kept him in Elektra's good graces for the better part
of the 90's. Songs skimmed the cream off his early
records I Like to Score and Everything is
Wrong (among others) and arranged them well enough to
trick people into buying them like every good greatest hits
album should, and it also proved a serviceable snack for
people who were waiting for Play's follow-up, the
idea- and inspiration-free 18.

For some reason,
Go - The Very Best of Moby copies Songs's
blueprint faithfully. Aside from an obnoxious, clumsily
curated remix CD included as a bonus disc, Go
consists primarily of the biggest tracks off his last three
records: Play, 18, and Hotel. The
strategic thinking at work here seems to be that people who
weren't duped into buying 18 or Hotel, which
were very reasonably derided as Play, Parts II and
III, wouldn't recognize enough song titles that they'd
fork over $17.99 to catch one last glimpse of Moby before he
retired. Yes, Go has "Porcelain" and "Honey" and "In
This World" and "God Moving Over the Face of the Waters," but
everybody (for better or worse) knows those songs already, and
there's nothing else on here to recommend it, not even the
flat Debbie Harry collaboration "New York, New York."

Happy trails, Moby. You go on and enjoy your
retirement, but the only money you're getting out of me will
come from my newfound addiction to your teas. Keep your
greatest hits to yourself.

back to the
top

Whitey : The Light At the
End of the Tunnel is a Train
Released on
Dim Mak Records
reviewed by Tom Dunkley for GBH.tv

Whitey is,
essentially, Nathan Whitey - a British self-schooled musician
who writes the songs, plays the instruments, produces the
tracks and sings the words. His album The Light At The End
Of The Tunnle Is A Train falls into the electro-rock
genre - it's certainly dancey at times, and has a jagged
rock'n'roll edge. The programmed drums sound rather glam
rock-ish, there is an experimental feel to the album, and a
strong pop sensibility.

GBH actually booked Whitey at
Rothko well over a year ago. Commercially, the event was a bit
of a disaster; the audience of industry insiders and super
musically-aware hipsters that turned up were all on someone's
guest list, and if they weren't there was no way any of these
people would have even considered paying a cover charge. But
there was a feeling that Whitey was something special, and it
was only a matter of time before everyone else was to find
out.

Whitey's album has been knocking around as an
import ever since. Every now and then, you'll hear a DJ play
"Leave Them All Behind" or "Y.U.H.2.B.M.2," and a few DJ's or
import addicts may drop the name. Ultimately, it took the
forward-thinking Dim Mak Records to make the leap of faith and
put the album out in the US. We're glad, because now we're
tired of talking about Whitey after all this time, and we
figure it's time for someone else to do the
work.

back to the
top

Four Tet : Remixes

Released on
Domino Records
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

Kieran Hebden (a.k.a. Four Tet)'s music often
seems meant to evoke the sight of a stone skipping across
water, all washes of sound and slow, rippling melodies that
undulate beneath skittering, pattering, splashing drum breaks.
This cyclical touch and go is both a safe bet and a smart
move; Hebden's calm surfaces, usually woven from disparate,
gently treated samples and keyboard work, are often as
delicate as scrims, unfit for the heavy, abrasive contact of
genres like electro or glitch. His songs' fleeting, regular
intersections never cut too deep, and instead the repetitions
and variations of their meeting often produce a hypnotic
effect, something highly suggestive but never concrete.

This practice of
glancing these textures off one another this way has won him
admirers of many rhythmic stripes, ranging from
envelope-pushing jazz men like Steve Reid and Otis Jackson Jr
(Madlib) to indie-IDM knob turners big (Pole) and small
(Rothko), and it has resulted in many fruitful remixes. On
Remixes, Hebden offers listeners not only some of his
finest work with other people's material (Remixes), but an
equally compelling collection of remixes of his own work done
by peers (Remixed). Disc one (Remixes) displays Hebden
following his keen rhythmic ears, doing everything from
pelting MOR piano pop (Sia's "Breathe Me") with gravelly
percussion to wrapping tumbling hip hop verses (MF Doom's
vocals from Madvillain's "Great Day") in densely fibrous
screens of sound with engrossing success. Disc two (Remixed),
though necessarily much more varied, is no less exciting.
Nu-soul brothers Sa-Ra Creative Partners cobble the synths of
"A Joy" into a highly evolved piece of instrumental hip hop,
and Manitoba and Koushik each turn "Hilarious Movie of the
90's" into a pastoral daydream. Perfectly heady, and highly
melodic.

back to the
top

Clinic : Visitations

Released on
Domino Records
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

Back in 1999, Radiohead declared in a
year-in-review piece for SPIN Magazine that Clinic's
Internal Wrangler was their favorite record of the
year. The minute SPIN hit shelves, critics who'd been queuing
up to kiss and smell Thom Yorke's tiny little feet scurried
off to review (and subsequently gush about) Internal
Wrangler instead. In the ensuing mad dash that surely
jammed Domino Records' phone lines and e-mail inboxes for
weeks though, a lot of basic stuff got lost in the shuffle.
Most importantly, no one seemed to consider the fact that
Radiohead's love of Clinic may have had more to do with a
shared dystopian vision of England than anything else. When
looking at their press photos, people saw the surgical masks,
but missed the matching derbies, suits, and umbrellas.
Listeners fell in love with the crash-bang-boom of " C.Q." but
ignored the blustery, industrial train whistles. Thom, Ed,
Jonny, Phil and Colin, it was assumed, fell in love with
Clinic's eclectic musical originality, but nobody gave that
sound's point a second thought, and the oversight cost Clinic
dearly. Critics shook their heads and shunned follow-up
records Walking With Thee and Winchester
Cathedral as disappointments, but both were right in step
with Clinic's ongoing attempts to conjure up the ghosts and
festering social decay of their native Liverpool. And their
fourth album, Visitations, despite featuring some of
the most menacing, icy, and unflinching music Clinic has ever
released, will likely prompt critics to shovel more dirt on
the band.

The album opens
with "Family," a kind of demented interpretation of
"Streetfightin Man" in which strident drums hustle a sickly
garage blues guitar along while Ade Blackburn sings through
his trademarked clenched teeth about a weighed down working
class family. Clinic has been stripping 60's music for parts
for close to ten years now, but they reach new heights here,
deftly commandeering and subverting the pomp and bravado of
everybody from the Rolling Stones to the Kinks to Monty
Norman. The bombast and swagger that rules Brittania is
replaced in Visitations by a merciless, smoldering
disgust that's straitjacketed by a nearly ascetic sense of
restraint. Tracks like "Gideon," which glowers beneath
volcanic distorted guitar and kick drum, rumble and smoke
instead of blow their tops, and even the album's slower
tracks, like the James Bond-twisting "Visitations"
and the unhurried Northern Soul tinges of "Paradise" are as
focused as staring contests.

To be fair,
Visitations also features a reasonable amount of ammo
for Clinic's detractors. The hell-bound surf rocker "If You
Could Read Your Mind" bears a disturbing resemblance to
"Internal Wrangler," and the genre blending at work here uses
the same proportions as their previous work, but the end
result is still unnerving, unmovable, and cast in rotted iron.
Clinic might be one of the indie world's most deliberate
bands, but that's an adjective that cuts both
ways.

back to the
top

Los Amigos Invisibles :
Super Pop Venezuela
Released on
Gozadera Records
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

Imagine if dancing had been cool in 90's
America. Everybody would've been happier, no question about
it. But nobody would've been happier than, perhaps, Los Amigos
Invisbles. This relatively unknown Venezuelan group has been
based in Brooklyn for the better part of the last 15 years,
getting audiences to dance their asses off in embarrassing
obscurity. After an extended stay at David Byrne's Luaka Bop
label, they've since moved to latin imprint Gozadera Records,
through whom they just released their newest effort, Super
Pop Venezuela. Produced by the esteemed DJ Dmitri From
Paris, Superpop is a sunny, sexy covers record that
sounds just as good over cocktail-fueled discussions as it
does on a dancefloor. The source material ('60s Venezuelan pop
classics) is not likely to be familiar to those of you who
endure Winter in January as opposed to July, but it really
doesn't matter. Just be sure to play it on your roof while
it's still warm enough to throw parties up
there.

back to the
top

The Killers : Sam's Town

Released on
Island/Def Jam
reviewed by Max Willens and Tom Dunkley for
GBH.tv

After storming up the charts on the strength of
a debut album that brimmed with grandiose New Wave singles
(Hot Fuss), Brandon Flowers has decided that the
endearing thing to do would be to own up to his deep love of
Bruce Springsteen for The Killers' album number two. The
resultant Sam's Town is an album of glances back at
his hometown through the rearview mirror of his tour bus. And
the levels of grandeur are still set to 'Extremely Fucking
High'. "When You Were Young"'s chorus could blow the roof off
a football stadium, and "This River is Wild" bursts at the
seams with floodlit theatrics, pizzicato strings, and a
meditative piano outro that transports you back to the dusty
deserted saloon in Flowers' head.

Despite all the
posturing, Sam's Town belongs in the "disappointing
second album" file. There are a handful of good songs, but
we'll have to wait until the third album to hear them deliver
on the promise of their first.
By then, they'll have
hopefully figured out that we don't need another Bruce
Springsteen, but we are actually quite fond of the
Killers.

back to the
top

Fatboy Slim : The Greatest Hits: Why Try Harder

Released on
Astralwerks
reviewed by Tom Dunkley for GBH.tv

Fatboy Slim: the
name brings up a mixed bag of emotions for anyone into
electronic music in the '90s. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes
cheesy, sometimes both at once; FBS (a.k.a. Norman Cook) was
the poster boy for dance music. He was pop star, a genius, a
coke head, a UK media celebrity embroiled in very public
marital problems with his TV presenter wife; and to many, the
man was an institution.

Cook came into public
consciousness as the bassist in the popular indie pop-rock
band the Housemartins and after several successful projects,
collaborations and incarnations (Beats International,
Freakpower, Pizzaman, Fried Funk Food, Mighty Dub Kats) he
finally found himself dominating dance music as Fatboy Slim.

In the UK, the 90s was a great time to be going out.
Drugs, clubs, hot girls - the indie kids, the house-heads, the
blacks, the whites, the gays, the straights, the townies and
the hooligans all shared the dancefloor, brought together by
ecstacy - errrr - I mean the music.

Well, let's be
fair. The UK dance scene would never have flourished without a
little narcotic revolution. But it was a golden age, an age of
innocence when Fatboy Slim's machine-gun beats sounded like
the future. At least they did when you were high. No doubt,
Fatboy Slim is a huge talent, yet one whose time has surely
passed (at least until the next decade when people will start
playing his records again). But let's not let it go without
recalling some of the great moments. You remember "Praise
You," don't you? That was just fantastic, wasn't it? How about
"Rockefeller Skank"? That was good too. And "Gangster
Trippin"? That was surely one of the classic tunes of a bygone
age! And then there were the remixes - the one he did for
Cornershop's "Brimful of Asha" can still get dancefloors going
even now. And how about Groove Armada's classic "I See You
Baby"? Damn, I'm getting chills.

And then there is the
more recent stuff... Like, you know...
Ha ha. Don't worry, I won't spoil the moment. Unfortunately
though, the CD does, by including a few of the new clunkers -
but that's what the skip button is for.

Yes, Fatboy
Slim's The Greatest Hits: Why Try Harder is pretty
much everything you might expect. And in a way, the title says
it all. We hope that Mr. Cook does take a break. He's
been working so hard all these years, and if anyone deserves
one, it's him. Perhaps he could take up pottery or something.
We have the memories, the CD has the tracks - and that's all
we really need.

back to the
top

Basement Jaxx : Crazy Itch
Radio
Released on
XL Recordings
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

Buying a Basement Jaxx album is a lot like going
to BJ’s or Sam’s Club to buy groceries. You get three albums’
worth of hooks and ten genres’ worth of music for the price of
one CD, and from time to time you worry if some of it isn’t
just going to waste. Almost everybody loves the rush of their
singles, and very few people will dispute the uniqueness of
the Jaxx’s jam-packed eclecticism, but for plenty of people,
listening to one of their albums from start to finish is like
voluntarily entering a sugar coma. It didn't matter which
album, either - everything from Remedy right up
through to Kish Kash flirted with auditory overload.
But for the first time in their career, four albums deep,
Felix Buxton and Simon Radcliffe are trying new things with
their wild, maximal sound, and while the results are mixed,
it’s an encouragingly modest step forward for the clown
princes of England’s dance-floor royalty.

Rather than reveal
its gambles right away, Crazy Itch Radio plays it
safe, opening with lead single “Hush Boy,” an R&B
clusterfuck of tight horns and funky bass that somehow manages
to sound like early Janet Jackson, Chic, and Earth Wind and
Fire all at once. Basement Jaxx have flirted with R&B
grooves before, but “Hush Boy” finds them stuffing ideas that
would once have been spread out across six or seven songs into
a single track, and it works incredibly well. It’s a fine
example of what makes Crazy Itch Radio’s best tracks
so strong – rather than collecting little pieces of multiple
genres and combining them with occasionally incongruous dance
rhythms, Crazy’s highlights take one of two different
tacks: they either collect many acorns that have fallen from
the same tree and group them together, or they give disparate
elements that used to be little more than frenzied sound bytes
more room to stretch out. If “Hush Boy” stands as the standout
example of the former, the best example of the latter approach
is “Everybody,” which improbably fuses piano-driven house,
Middle Eastern dance, and what sounds like an Indian film
soundtrack sample together to form the most compositionally
ambitious song Basement Jaxx has ever done. It’s the kind of
song that demands and rewards repeated listens, and hopefully
the kind of thing they’ll strive to recreate on future
records. Unfortunately, many of Crazy’s other tracks
suggest that “Everybody”’s success might have had more to do
with chance than well-considered alchemy. Other similarly
ambitious tracks like “Take Me Back To Your House,” with its
swelling canned strings and plucked banjo, sound like
experiments that should’ve been left on their hard
drives.

The main problem
behind this scattershot mix-and-matching seems to be Buxton
and Radcliffe’s songwriting. They've never written even decent
lyrics, and their inability to write songs with different,
engaging ideas or attitudes makes it hard to adorn them with
appropriate sonic backdrops. It’s tantalizing to imagine what
kind of album the Jaxx could make if they teamed with just a
halfway competent songwriter (2004’s Kish Kash
offered proof that they can work wonders with other
artists), but it’s something that’ll have to wait until next
time.

A lot of people
will say that Basement Jaxx are like every other pop outfit, a
singles-driven duo that will bracket three radio-ready
highlights with unremarkable filler for as long as they can.
But they're clearly aware of the fact that they have legions
of fans, and that seems to have inspired them to try and
create something that has much more replay value. The Jaxx
have the talent to make records that are both fun and
complicated, and if Crazy Itch Radio is any
indication, their next record could be both, from start to
finish.

back to the
top

The Rapture : Pieces of the
People We Love
Released on
Universal/Motown
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

Any self-righteous indie kid's worst nightmare
is seeing their pet band get too big. All those fans that make
it a point to get in on the ground floor see success as a
death knell signaling the end of small shows, the fleeting
feeling of community that's shared amongst small cadres of
fans, and last but not least, their band's original
sensibilities and its accompanying sound. For the Rapture,
this indie success adage is only half-true: their third
full-length, Pieces of the People We Love, stakes a
pretty convincing musical claim that they are the premier
dance-punk band of the 21st century. Instead of the thumping
black-lit scrape of 2004's Echoes, Pieces brims with
a more texturally and rhythmically adventurous sound that
squirms out of easy genre categorizations.

In pop music,
lyrics have been an such an afterthought for so long that even
Stephen Merritt has begun hoping that someone will develop a
lyrics generator. Grooves have essentially replaced words, and
as a cultural development, that suits the Rapture just fine.
Ever since their brief apprenticeship in the Dojo of DFA,
they've grown increasingly comfortable within this
groove-based formula, and it shows here: album opener "Don Gon
Do It"'s clonking cowbells and g-funk keyboards cruise
purposefully under Luke Jenner's whinnying verses before a
multi-tracked chorus sweeps it all into the stars. It's tough
to say whether they've improved individually as musicians, but
Pieces shows the Rapture have gone through a major
growth spurt as arrangers, and it's allowed them to finally
try out some new tempos. Not long ago, Rapture songs could
move at three speeds, but Pieces shows that they've
not only refined those three, but they've added a couple new
ones as well.

The person who
likely deserves most of the credit for this is the damn-near
ubiquitous Dangermouse, who produces two of Pieces'
most unusual tracks, "Pieces of the People We Love" and
"Calling Me." The title track's overmiked drums, introspective
bass and neatly packaged blocks of guitar noise are a new look
to begin with, but when Luke Jenner's restrained falsetto
vocals get beamed in, it sounds like the work of an entirely
different band. It's not the kind of thing you could anchor an
album to, but as a change of pace it's delightfully
self-sufficient.

Bold moves aside
though, this album's centerpiece is "Whoo! Alright
Yeah...Uh-Huh," a sublime polyrhythmic track with
trance-inspired bridges, wild-eyed guitar scratches and a
shout-along kiss-off chorus that's close to being the best
song they've ever done. Most of Piece's lyrics are
clogged with mediocre pontifications on fame's hollow charms,
but "W.A.Y.U.H" is so gleefully contemptuous that when Jenner
smugly sneers "I used to think life's a bitter pill, but it's
a grand old time," it's enough to remind you of the Sex
Pistols, New Order, and Talking Heads all at once.

Whether they like
it or not, the Rapture are dance-punk's kings by default;
their chief competitors either dropped out of the race (Out
Hud) or went crazy in Berlin and decided to do something else
(the Liars) a long time ago. But so long as they continue to
stay true to their roots while pushing their undeniably fun
sound forward, the Rapture are certainly worthy of their
crown.

back to the
top

Tiga : Sexor
Released on
Last Gang
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

Ever since the dawning of club and rave culture,
or what 24 Hour Party People's Tony Wilson called
"the beatification of the beat," personality has become just
as important to a DJ's success as his record collection. Like
an MC or a rock band frontman, how a DJ says something is far
more important than what he's saying, often because there's
not much to say in the first place. Aside from dj/rupture's
one-ghetto-under-a-groove philosophy or Optimo's
pop-music-history-riffology, the general message of DJ's
everywhere seems to be pretty standard: get off your ass and
jam, we're going to party all night, get laid, gonna have a
good time, etc.

A big part of the
personality Tiga exudes is his unflappable jetset confidence.
The Montreal-based DJ-turned-musician has already built up an
international following on the strength of his raves and campy
house sets, and his debut album Sexor is the sound of
Tiga coolly putting his best musical foot forward. It's an
occasionally effete foot, to be sure, but it's also part of
such an enthusiastic and confident stride that you can't help
but follow.

Being able to work
with a supporting cast that includes Soulwax's Dewaele
brothers and the Scissor Sisters' Jake Shears on one's debut
album is enough to make anyone calm and collected, but Tiga
still takes plenty of risks. Sexor features covers of
Public Enemy ("Louder Than a Bomb"), Talking Heads ("Burning
Down the House"), and even Nine Inch Nails ("Down In It")
songs, and while it says a lot that Tiga tried covering those
songs in the first place, it says a good deal more that those
covers are among the album's highlights. Tiga has a house
aficionado's sense of pop economy, and like any good DJ he
knows exactly what to do with a pre-existing song's elements.
On Sexor's originals, he leaves that heavy lifting to
the Dewaeles, who help out on nearly two-thirds of the album,
including the singles "You Gonna Want Me" and the campy "(Far
From) Home." Where the Soulwax brothers supply arpeggiated
grooves and well-tailored production, Tiga concentrates on
applying the finishing touches, and not a hair on
Sexor's pretty little head head is out of place, as a
result, even on the sprawling collection of hidden tracks that
closes the album. Because with all the craziness in the world
today, it's not what you're saying, it's how you say
it.

back to the
top

Darkel : Darkel
Released on
Astralwerks
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

JB Dunckel is clearly pretty handy with a
keyboard. Over nine years and six albums, the hat-wearing half
of AIR has conjured up everything from lush smoking lounges to
dystopian space stations to cherry blossom-adorned cityscapes
with great success, and garnered quite a bit of international
acclaim along the way. But despite that success and the
obvious musical talent behind it, it's clear that Dunckel is
pretty unfamiliar with the bass. The Frenchman's self-titled
debut (under the pseudonym Darkel) is flush with the same
wistful melodicism and spacey drama that made AIR so popular,
but without the beguiling low-end that Nicholas Godin used to
provide, Darkel floats helplessly by in zero gravity.

Dunckel's first
priority here is creating an ambience reminiscent of both
Talkie Walkie and 10,000 Hz Legend. Every
song on Darkel is set in an otherworldly, highly
sanitized mix of swirling keys and streaks of futuristic echo
that's just as familiar as it is distant. As those AIR albums
will attest, it's fertile ground to root an album in,
especially when the songs themselves are sad or resigned and
can simply coast along on Dunckel's economical piano figures
instead of trying to go somewhere. Equally important to the
vibe borrowed from those aforementioned albums, Darkel's
vocals are little more than treated whispers that have very
limited range, so the moments when Dunckel can exhale his
lyrics instead of sing them, like "Pearl" and "How Brave You
Are," work best.

Those are Darkel's
strongest elements, and if they'd been sewn together into
something more modestly-sized like an EP, Dunckel probably
could have carried it off. But like many first-time solo
artists, Dunckel can't resist the temptation to try something
new on his debut. In this case, he wants to rock out, but
Darkel's forays into harder genres like punk rock and electro
are total failures because Dunckel clearly has very little
experience with bass and drums. Darkel's rhythm section is
wisely kept very low in the mix for most of the album, but
tracks like "TV Destroy" and "Beautiful Women" are tethered to
boring fills and dull throbbing that barely change for their
choruses. The interminable "Earth" is the worst offender, a
plodding six and a half minutes of grandiose choral
synthesizers and Dunckel periodically chanting "We belong to
the earth, doesn't belong to us."

If anything,
Darkel makes its listeners appreciate Nicholas
Godin's ability to subtly steer Dunckel's airy futurism in
compelling directions instead of admire said futurism on its
own terms. Here's hoping Dunckel's solo turn was an anomaly
instead of a sign of things to come for one of France's most
skilled mood-makers.

back to the
top

Lily Allen : Alright, Still

Released on
Parlophone/EMI (UK)
reviewed by Tom Dunkley for GBH.tv

Next to Gnarls Barkley, Lily Allen is probably
the most famous Internet success story - at least she is over
in the UK, where this cheeky London based tea-sipping nineteen
year old girl-next-door-type with pouty lips and extra-long
eyelashes has already scored a number one hit single.
Allen
has become one of the most blogged-about artists in the known
world over the last few months, something of an internet
obsession - her songs have received literally millions of
downloads from her well-thumbed myspace page.

You could
call Lily Allen the female Streets, the English Uffie or even
the pop version of M.I.A. - all of which would be misleading.
While she no doubt shares fans with all of the above, she
seems to have found a market all her own, creating an image
that is at once completely familiar (at least to us Brits),
totally accessible (young kids love her) and at the same time
brilliantly subversive. She sings of everyday things - like
riding around on her bike, finding out her boyfriend is
cheating on her, trying to shake off a persistent admirer down
the pub, her little brother's pot habit - all the while with a
knowing wink and a smile to anyone willing to pay attention to
her neatly packaged lyrics.

The question being asked by
many, though, is this: Is Lily Allen a real rags-to-riches
success story, or cynical marketing exercise? Maybe it is too
early to answer the question - but when it really comes down
to it, who cares? It is almost impossible to have more fun
listening to a pop album than with Allen's debut, Alright,
Still. The album, with lyrics written by Lily herself, is
full of humor and intelligence - delivered with Allen's
friendly, easy-to-listen-to voice. The production is better
than we have any right to expect, leaning heavily on ska
influences (think early Madness or Specials), veering off into
Chas & Dave style knees-up, pure pop, go-go, garage and
(at the low-point) even a Madchester-style, Happy Mondays
rip-off.

The entire album has been created to listen to
- there isn't a track on the album that we would tell you to
skip. In fact, we even feel guilty writing about this album.
We should just shut up and let you listen to it
yourself.

Stream Lily Allen at her myspace page

back to the
top

The Kooks : Inside In/Inside
Out
Released on
Astralwerks
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

The British music press has a history of getting
carried away when it comes to praising new bands. At even the
slightest prompt, say a 7" single that finds its way onto the
right desk, a band can go from the abyss of obscurity to being
hailed as the second coming of Jesus Christ in the space of
about a week. If it weren't for the fact that these
coronations seem to occur monthly, their inherent enthusiasm
would doubtless be more contagious. It doesn't help matters
that Brit-crits are never more susceptible to over-praise than
when they're reviewing material made by fellow countrymen,
whether the hype it creates is deserved (Moloko, Basement
Jaxx, the Futureheads) or not (Travis, Coldplay,
Babyshambles).

The most recent
object of this fleeting, nationalistic adulation, a Brighton
band called the Kooks, looks like an early favorite to take
home all sorts of Best New Band accolades because, as their
debut Inside In/Inside Out attests, they love British
pop rock just as much as their critics do. Aside from the
abbreviated album opener "Seaside," Inside In/Inside
Out is filled with politely loud British power pop that
makes very little effort to conceal its influences, which
appear to include virtually every internationally successful
British rock act of the past few decades. From the melodic
bashing of "You Don't Love Me" and "Eddie's Gun" (see: the
Futureheads) to the mild-mannered swaying of "She Moves in Her
Own Way," (see: isolation-era Kinks, Travis) the Kooks' first
priority is their hooks, which they seem comfortable
delivering in many differently shaped packages. This
pop-minded dedication keeps their just-passable lyrics from
weighing things down and makes even unexpected turns like the
reggae skanks on "Matchbox" and "Naive" come off without much
of a hitch. But if the Kooks' comfort with different styles
seems more precise and studied (albeit in a charming way) than
precocious, it's probably because it is: the quartet met at a
music conservatory a few years ago. Not that that's a bad
thing - pop music is a business, after all, and the Kooks are
as well-schooled as they come these days. All the songs are
tidy and well-oiled, with only a couple not falling within
that radio-friendly two and a half to three minute length. Or,
as NME puts it, they're "mini-anthems that never
outstay their welcome!"

Inside
In/Inside Out could easily wind up on the RIYL lists of
an impressively wide collection of already successful artists,
which is no mean trick for a debut album. But unless you
worship at the altars of Q or NME or
Radio 1, it's unlikely that you'll be able to see
just what that fuss across the pond is all about.

back to the
top

Ratatat : Classics

Released on
XL Recordings
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

Admit it: you thought those hip hop interludes
on Ratatat's debut album were just a conceit. At best (and
this was a stretch, you thought), those snippets of rappers
talking about their craft were a handy way for Evan Mast and
Mike Stroud to boast about the spontaneity of their creative
process, to stake the claim that Ratatat was the
natural result of thousands of hours of listening, recording
and performing being internalized, and then all coming off the
top in the form of songs. "I don't write my rhymes
anymore," proclaims one rapper at the beginning of "Seventeen
Years." "They're all just in my head now." But that was all it
was. The general opinion on Ratatat was that their
relationship to hip hop was tangential at best. Programmer
Evan Mast might've paid a lot of attention to how the snares
sounded on his well-constructed, shuffling breaks, but the
real centerpiece of his contribution was those woozy, oddly
emotional synths, right?

Well, not exactly.
Ratatat's sound is more deeply rooted in hip hop's production
aesthetic than anyone might've given them credit for, as their
second album Classics attests. Hip hop music, to
paraphrase Cocaine Blunts founder/XXL blogger Andrew
Nosnitsky, is essentially made by dorks. Everything from the
endlessly tweaked soul samples to the outrageously obscure
drum sounds represents the sound of loners doing their
damnedest to put forth just so the sounds that
clatter around in their frontal lobes, and at its best, the
result is a disembodied collection of feelings and impressions
that improbably come together to communicate something. Yet
even at its most successful, that cut-and-paste process has an
effect on the music. Even the warmest, liveliest beats have a
bit of distance to them, because some of the immediacy of its
parent music inevitably gets left on the cutting room floor.
But as any DJ Shadow fan will tell you, the best instrumental
hip hop tends to accentuate those feelings of remove and
nostalgia anyway.

Ratatat, it would
seem, are in on this secret. As with their debut,
Classics is a melancholy record constructed out of
exuberant elements. Arena rock guitars, funk basslines,
boisterous Britpop-styled pianos, and yes, hip hop styled
break beats are all drugged and tied together by deliberate,
muted synthesizers that put everything slightly out of reach
and out of focus. Those synths, in addition to being fantastic
sonic glue, are an unmistakable trademark, the sound of
associations being cobbled together in reminiscence. That
constant gives the album a cohesive feeling in spite of its
expanded palette of sounds, and they also function as a kind
of security blanket for Stroud and Mast, enabling them to
bring bolder juxtapositions to the table with knowledge that
the sound of distant memory is going to remain intact. On the
oddly titled "Tropicana," for example, the swaying piano,
cello, and guitar laze across a snappy, shapeshifting drumbeat
as simultaneously reverent and original as anything Madlib's
done - imagine that Otis Jackson (Madlib's dad) had been a
session man at Abbey Road Studios instead of a soul jazz
musician, and you'll begin to get the idea. Elsewhere, on
"Kennedy," those synthesizers lull a marching new wave
bassline and bright guitars to sleep before letting them wake
up again for a bright, neon-colored finale.

Classics
isn't exciting from start to finish; more than a couple songs
sound like leftovers from their debut that are made even less
appetizing when compared to the more adventurous fare that
surrounds them, but every track is so casually propulsive that
the lulls pass by just as easily as the highlights. And at 42
minutes, it doesn't suffer from too much lag either.

The moments in
which overtly "white" music has been successfully incorporated
into hip hop beatscapes are few and far between. Aside from
RJD2 sampling Elliott Smith on his hit "Ghostwriter," or
Afrika Bambaataa cribbing from Kraftwerk, musical genres like
indie rock and britpop and folk have been perceived as being
essentially incompatible with hip hop's form. But
Classics illustrates that, as a genre so explicitly
preoccupied with nostalgia and memory, hip hop can make room
for anything.

back to the
top

Soulwax : Nite Versions

Released on
Modular Recordings
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

For a long time, the common formula applied to
fusing rock n roll and dance music dictated taking dance
music's blueprint and appointing it with rock n roll fixtures.
Bands ranging New Order to the Rapture have taken new wave and
disco (and, in some cases, trance and techno) and interpreted
them with their own flourishes while preserving the general
dance aesthetic, and their reward has been (and continues to
be) great crossover appeal. Far fewer artists have tried to
take the converse route, however. Bringing rock's weight and
aggressive attitude to dance music, the theory said, would
clear dance floors instead of fill them.

Soulwax,
thankfully, has disproved that theory with Nite
Versions, a remix version of their album Any Minute
Now that takes the decidedly un-macho genres of trance,
electro, and techno and gives them a serious testosterone
injection. It opens with a cover of Daft Punk's "Teachers," a
track that's meant, like its parent, to act as an album
manifesto. Behind overmiked drums and three roaring guitar
notes, two heavily processed voices give shout-outs to artists
who provided them with inspiration, and the list is decidedly
not dance-oriented; "ZZ Top is in the house," drone Stephen
and David Dewaele on one of the track's choruses. This honor
roll-call gets interrupted by some grainy drum machine hi
hats, and then suddenly a wail announces the beginning of
"Miserable Girl," a grinding, nearly industrial track that
signals what lies ahead for the next fifty minutes: blunt,
grimy electro that is aggressively, deliberately simple while
remaining danceable. Almost every one of Nite
Versions' crude melodies is smeared with distortion,
crunch, and overdrive, and the pace rarely deviates from
four-on-the-floor. As you might expect from a duo that makes
most of its money from DJ'ing, the transitions from song to
song are seamlessly constructed, making Nite Versions
sound just as much like a DJ set as a meticulous,
well-conceived live setlist.

This combination
of relentless pace and abrasive textures might not get a party
started, but it will keep people going all out well into the
night, because that's what it's designed to do. By the time
Nite Versions closer "Another Excuse" comes on, it's
pretty clear that the cycling, trance-y keyboards, bongos and
tambourines, cowbell variations and energetic bass lines the
track provides sound just as good when they're caked with
filth.

back to the
top

Jean-Michel Bernard et al :
The Science of Sleep
Released on
Astralwerks/Source etc
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

Before we go any further, it bears mentioning
that I haven't seen The Science of Sleep. It doesn't
come out in theatres until later this month (September 22nd),
but I'm pretty sure that when it comes out, I'm not going to
see it. Even when it inevitably comes out on DVD, in all
likelihood around Christmas time, I have no intention of
renting it, either.

My reasons for
this pre-emptively announced boycott stem from two things: the
film's preview, and its soundtrack. The preview offers a
vision of a movie that panders as shamelessly and clumsily to
the indie market as anything that's likely to be released by a
major studio this year, the story of two "creative" types who
fall for each other, one of whom (Stephane) struggles with an
overactive imagination that frequently invades his reality.
That blurry coexistence of imagined and real, which
writer/director Michel Gondry depicted with such verve and
humor in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, also
figures prominently in the mise-en-scene and movement of
Sleep's narrative. But the film's soundtrack, composed largely
by French composer Jean-Michel Bernard, suggests that the
well-defined characteristics of Joel Barrish's personality,
his Oedipal issues, his suppressed sense of whimsy and his
private expressions of himself, are absent from
Sleep. That those specific characteristics are absent
is not the problem: the problem is that they have not been
replaced by anything. In Sunshine, Gondry dressed
Joel's quirks and details up and expressed them in highly
original ways, but it's hard to say that he infused them with
additional meaning. Gondry's fancy innovations gave flesh to a
skeleton that Kaufman provided him, and composer Jon Brion's
film score did the same. Eternal Sunshine's
soundtrack was hazy, sad, and quietly sweeping, the sound of a
loner struggling with expectation, pretension and yearning all
at once: it was music that reflected Joel's
personality

Bernard's
soundtrack, by contrast, has no discernible personality at all
beyond its wide stylistic range. As you might expect, many of
the film's tracks seem intended to invoke the sight of
Stephane's head opening up and all that wild and crazy stuff
coming out. Unfortunately, these tracks come across as
abortive trips down a bunch of different, alarmingly
generic-sounding rabbit holes. There are distant, piano-driven
reveries, dread-inducing french horns, shrieking strings,
plucked acoustic guitar meditations, and occasionally these
elements are mixed together and juxtaposed within individual
tracks. Yet together or separate, none is particularly
affecting. Between these stock segments of emotional
buttressing are segments of dialogue and gratingly twee and
precious songs (sample lyric: "Oh someday I know someone will
look into my eyes and say, 'Oh! You're my very special
kitten.'") that reveal nothing aside from Stephane's joie
de rever. It's impossible to imagine what he's dreaming
about, and while the music can't be indicted for that (Gondry
surely takes care of that part all by himself) the dialogue
snippets suggest that, whatever it is, it can't possibly be
that interesting.

On penultimate
track "Stephanie Blues," frigid piano keys plink and echo with
no real expressive rhyme or reason before a bright, beautiful
progression of chords flashes in from out of nowhere. Then,
after a scant two repetitions, it devolves into cold, obtuse
notes again before fading out. The other tracks explicitly
involving Stephanie ("Stephanie Quitte le Cafe," par exemple)
are characterized by a similarly distant quality that begs the
question: What kind of romance could ever exist between these
two people if there is such monochromatic treatment of one of
them? As previously mentioned, I don't plan on finding
out.

back to the
top

Brazilian Girls : Talk to La
Bomb
Released on
Verve Forecast
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

A little class and sophistication go a long way
these days. As two of the last elements in the pop music
universe that can't be bought, sampled, or manufactured, any
band that brings them to the table with whatever else they're
purveying is already way ahead of its vulgar competition. In
fact, if you bring anything else at all, you're pretty golden,
which is all to say that Talk to La Bomb, the second
album by Brooklyn quartet Brazilian Girls, is as well-executed
and charming as you'd expect it to be. There were, after all,
certain expectations to fulfill.

Talk to La
Bomb struts out of the gate with "Jique," one of several
multi-lingual numbers that lead singer Sabina Sciubba
completely takes over without even raising her voice. From her
first line, ("Tu sais pour toi j'ai une faiblesse") Sciubba's
delivery is impossible to ignore, a perfect mix of
frustration, yearning and invitation that handles German,
French, Spanish, Italian and English with equal aplomb.
Flawless pronounciation aside, Sciubba's talent for blending
aloofness and ardor is rare in pop music these days, a fact
that is not lost on her bandmates, who stay out of her way and
allow her mature and worldly delivery to take center stage.
The music behind her, a mix of alternately futuristic and
retro keyboards with nervy drumming, is as slinky as it is
sweeping, with each song held together by a sublime sense of
restraint. Instead of trying to force a particular issue from
song to song, the Girls' varied tastes, manifested in small,
fleeting melodic and rhythmic details, are allowed to mingle
freely in every song. Any group that's willing to flaunt
influences ranging from exotica to new wave to Serge
Gainsbourg to electro pop to post-punk must be sorely tempted
to get a little crazy from time to time, but these Girls
seldom do. Their moderation is so effective that even a track
like "Sexy Asshole," which runs well over six minutes in
length on caffeinated drum 'n' bass-esque breaks, droning
organs and finally a mist of synthesizers that the song
evaporates into, gets a free pass it might not have under
different circumstances.

Talk to La
Bomb isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but
it's also a record that no other band could come close to
pulling off, an urbane and compelling mixture of styles that
will agree with almost anyone who listens to it. If that's not
classy, I don't know what is.

back to the
top

Ellen Allien & Apparat :
Orchestra of Bubbles
Released on
Bpitch Control
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

Categorizing electronic music is a pain in the
ass. By now, the number of subgenres to choose from has
climbed into the hundreds, and the characteristics that
distinguish one from another are often so minute and
inconspicuous that to most listeners, it hardly even matters;
pretty much anything worth listening to is associated with
multiple genres on the All Music Guide, anyway.

Orchestra of
Bubbles, the first full-length collaboration between
German label heads Ellen Allien (Bpitch Control) and Apparat
(Shitkatapult) offers some engrossing evidence that good
electronic music is like porn: you can't define it, but you
know it when you hear it. Bubbles mixes the timbres,
textures, and rhythms of techno and IDM into intriguing
combinations of melancholy and energetic propulsion that
rarely suffer from their creators' desire to push their
respective genres forward; the album sounds like a spirited,
involved collaboration rather than a clash of egos. On "Jet,"
for example, a 4/4 beat and dramatic keyboards are wrapped in
synths as warm and alien as airplane blankets. It captures
perfectly the balance of nerves and eerie calm one experiences
at 30,000 feet, that combination of a coursing, modern sense
of momentum and airy motionlessness that shouldn't be able to
coexist, and each track is carried along by a similar
stylistic tension.

Bubbles's
striking balance comes from the fact that neither producer
moves away from their preferred sounds. Grainy clicks mix with
the dim glow of synthesizers, spliced vocals punctuate the
cinematic sweep of canned strings, pitches shift and keyboards
clang together, and aside from some very awkward-sounding
cello and violin parts in one or two songs, the congruousness
is astonishing. That the cello and violin are the odd sounds
out makes sense: despite some electronic treatment of their
tones, both instruments generate a weight that's difficult for
their electronic counterparts to support, especially on
"Retina," an otherwise delicate song that repeatedly tries and
fails to take off because of the attached strings.

More than
anything, though, intricate composition is what elevates
Bubbles' tracks to their high level. "Floating
Points" balances a spooky ambience against throbbing, even
frenzied drum programming while weaving several small melodic
themes together seamlessly. Elsewhere, "Do Not Break" is a
chameleonic track arranged with a nearly symphonic neatness.
Even the four lyric-driven tracks are bookended by lush
expanses of music that build gracefully on what rests beneath
Allien's and Apparat's words. There's not much going on
lyrically, but the emotionally remote moods they're meant to
evoke are well-achieved through the music.

In some ways, it's
surprising that the supposed gap between these genres isn't
bridged more often; they're very close together on the same
family tree. And while it's true that the emotional balance of
IDM and techno are often different, Orchestra of
Bubbles proves that there is common ground to be found.
It's heady music, and very little of it could be deemed
dancefloor-appropriate, but it's an engrossing, rewarding
listen from beginning to end.

back to the
top

Be Your Own Pet : Be Your
Own Pet
Released on
Ecstatic Peace/Universal
reviewed by Max Willens for
GBH.tv

The definition of a successful night out tends
to change as one gets older. Just a few years ago, the
standard by which all my other nights out were judged involved
being part of a house party mosh pit so crazy that the floor
wound up caving in beneath us. Having grown more refined and
graceful (read: out of shape) over the years, I no longer have
the stamina to enjoy such things, but listening to Be Your Own
Pet's debut album makes me wish I did. The precocious
Nashville quartet has already mastered the art of explosively
loud rock and roll, and aside from a few minor issues, Be
Your Own Pet undoubtedly deserves to be hailed as one of
the best records released this year.

If you sift
through the crater that Be Your Own Pet leaves on
your eardrums, you'll find traces of an extremely broad number
of artists, with the only common denominator being that they
are all loud. Many lazy critics quickly scrawled "YYY's" in
their notebooks the first time they heard singer Jemina
Pearl's assured squeal and Jamin Orral's thundering drums, but
the punk squall coming out of Jonas Stein's guitar bears more
resemblance to the racket made by Jon Dwyer (Pink and Brown,
Coachwhips) or Greg Ginn (Black Flag) than Nick Zinner's
sleazy overdrive. Additionally, Pearl's vocals are more
infectiously energetic than Karen O's; she can belt like Poly
Styrene or quiver like Gwen Stefani used to just as easily as
she can yelp and squeal. Every facet of her mic presence, from
its confidence to its playfulness to its sheer power, makes
her the consummate punk rock frontwoman. And that's great,
because sonically, BYOP is essentially punk rock for the 21st
century, a white-hot blast of energy that channels the music
the group loves instead of trying to reinvent a wheel or make
a snarky comment about it: "Bicycle, Bicycle, You Are My
Bicycle" hurtles through about five sections whose only common
thread is a chorus ("We're on two wheels, baby!") shouted over
the din of crashing cymbals and Stein's relentless guitar that
screeches to a halt after just two minutes, "Bog" gallops,
stomps, and charges through a story about a girl who gobbles
up a bunch of Xanax before drowning her boyfriend, and
"Wildcat!"'s needling guitar provides a wonderful backdrop to
one of the most weirdly romantic choruses you'll ever hear:
"I'm a wildcat, you're a worm, we are chasing each other and
taking turns, we aren't getting up, we aren't staying, we are
chasing each other all over the place."

About the only
thing wrong here is how much channelling Be Your Own
Pet offers. Even at just 33 minutes, it's overwhelming to
listen to from start to finish, and I almost refuse to believe
that the group could perform the entire album live without
dropping dead from exhaustion, particularly Orral, who seems
to beat his kit to within an inch of its life on every song.
Even if they can't, I'm sure they're still loads of fun. If
you go out to see them though, just make sure the floor's
solid.

back to the
top

Nouvelle Vague : Bande a
Part
Released on
Luaka Bop
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

One of the most enjoyable aspects of bossa nova
is its unobtrusive effectiveness. Rather than grabbing you by
the hand or kicking you in the ass, music by artists like
Jobim or Gilberto gently sweeps listeners off their feet and
leaves them in a reverie with the greatest of ease. On
Bande a Part, the second album by French duo Nouvelle
Vague, producers Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux imagine a
similarly inviting raft for their listeners to float away on
built from the most unlikely of sources: bossa nova-tinged
covers of 80's pop, new wave, and post-punk tracks. And while
the album as a whole is far from perfect, the overall
experience of Bande a Part is so pleasant that you're
bound to feel refreshed when you wash up on that distant
shore.

What makes most of
these covers so effective is a simple change in tempo. Every
cover is slower than its parent so a revolving door of
vocalists can draw out the wistfulness and sadness in the
lyrics, but a weary, detached delivery keeps them from getting
too heavy. At this unhurried pace, Libaux and Collin adorn
their tracks with beautiful combinations of percussion like
the rain sticks, xylophones, maracas and chirping birds that
illuminate Echo and the Bunnymen's "The Killing Moon." In
order for a cover to really stand on its own to feet, a
separate atmosphere has to be created, and Nouvelle Vague are
experts at doing that with percussive textures. Most tracks
feature a slickly harmonious blend of traditional (xylophone,
mbira, djembe) and electronic (drum machines, loops of found
sounds and nature recordings) elements that are highly
evocative without being too culturally specific. That cultural
ambiguity seems to be important to Collin and Libaux; this
isn't Factory Records Goes to Sao Paolo. Just as
importantly, it isn't Pure Post-Punk Moods, either.
Bande a Part beats the cheesiness tag by a mile
because with one or two exceptions, the arrangements cast its
songs in intriguing new lights.

For the most part,
Nouvelle Vague don't honor any aspects of the original songs
beyond the lyrics and the vocal melodies. When the duo tries
to keep the rhythmic emphasis of the originals intact,
however, their covers run aground. Billy Idol's "Dancing With
Myself" plods along under its kick drum and piano, Blondie's
"Heart of Glass" never reconciles its pointy rhythm section
with its overly sedate vocals, and the Cramps' "Human Fly" is
just a total catastrophe from start to finish.

Toward the end of
the mournful, accordion-laced crawl of album closer "Fade to
Grey," its twittering birds, street noise, and hypnotic steel
drums fades into the sound of an ocean crashing on the beach,
signaling the end of the ride. And while you've most likely
been somewhere on the Atlantic, listening to Bande a
Part is like going on a trip whose proper names you've
forgotten, but whose details remain.

back to the
top

MSTRKRFT : The Looks

Released on
Last Gang Records
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

A quick glance at the colorful and riotous album
art of MSTRKRFT's debut The Looks says a lot more
about the disc's electro-house contents than any set of liner
notes could. At a superficial level, that's a good thing,
because there are no liner notes. Spread out over two inserts
and a glossy cardboard sleeve, Seripop's designs chain the
textures of a collage and the bright, sleek hues of graphic
designs together in radiating, nearly kaleidoscopic geometric
patterns that recall both the blooming utopia and the fiendish
intensity of your last two acid trips, and if you're into that
sort of thing, they're practically worth the price of
admission, as MSTRKRFT themselves suggest on their website.

In plainer (read:
less pretentious) terms, The Looks is excellent
electro house that stands as a testament to what can be done
when the genre's sonic characteristics are expanded on the
right way. All the key ingredients are here - distorted, flat
keyboard tones, vocoders, and arresting, tinny drum
programming - but with nary a nanosecond of space between
changes in melody, tempo, or rhythm, and the claustrophobic
results ratchet up the intensity of what is often deceptively
intricate programming. On "She's Good For Business," an 808
claps over klaves and tambourines in addition to an EQ'd house
beat that drives simple vocal melody along steadily. The song
also features a soaring synth solo that makes for one of the
best bridges you'll ever hear on a dancefloor, and all of it
blends together seamlessly. Elsewhere, authoritative vocals in
the opening track "Work on You" mask a jungle of keyboards
that squawk and zip and fizz in a perfect storm that
completely changes as soon as you've started to figure it out.

All of this is
great on its own, but what sets MSTRKRFT's debut apart is the
adventurous incorporation of other electronic dance music
fixtures, most of them borrowed from French house. The first
single "Easy Love," for example, bounces along to a bassline
that recalls Homework-era Daft Punk, while the aptly
named "Paris" sounds like a Black Strobe track that shrank in
the dryer, with menacing, writhing basslines over arpeggiated
keyboards and air-raid sirens.

By the time album
closer "Neon Knights" comes on, a swelling, thudding bombing
raid of brightly colored one-note stabs, it's pretty
impossible not to think back to The Looks' album art.
If you buy MSTRKRFT's modest proposal that the art alone is
worth the price of admission, then The Looks is one
of the best deals money can buy.

back to the
top

CSS : Cansei de ser sexy

Released on
Sub Pop Records
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

If you've ever wondered what those well-dressed
South American tourists are giggling about together at parties
in Brooklyn or the Lower East Side, well, it's probably you.
They might not be chiming in while your guests rave about
their latest installation pieces, but they're certainly
listening, and while they're happy to be there (the open bar
was a good idea, after all), there's plenty of stuff worth
poking fun at.

That's certainly
what Brazilian sextet CSS seem to think. Taken as they seem to
be with pop culture's wild ride, the group's debut album
Cansei de Ser Sexy (that's Tired of Being
Sexy to us stupid Americans) is the result of a band
flashing a shit-eating grin while trying to keep their
collective tongue in cheek at the same time, and unfortunately
they've bitten off more than they can chew. Despite their
determination to keep things frivolous, CSS aren't skilled
enough to really cut loose, and the songs on Cansei
fall well short of the complex mix of ennui and infatuation
that they shoot for.

That said, they do
clear the language barrier hurdle admirably well. On their
single "Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above,"
Lovefoxxx (Luisa Matsushita) and Adriano Cintra sketch a
whirlwind romance with a mix of truisms and demands that's not
only charming but occasionally disarming; it's a really nice
piece of work in any language. On the sneering "Artbitch,"
'Foxxx yaps her sarcastic lines with an almost grungy
authenticity, making lines like "Wouldn't it be easier for
Beardsley? He could drop the paintings and photograph his
penis," and "What I do is called art-shit, and don't you dare
make fun of me," more funny than heavy-handed.

The best example
of this determined unseriousness, though, is "Music is My Hot
Hot Sex." Beginning with a bunch of nicely varied definitions
(from "Music is my boyfriend" to "music is my dead end" and
back again) before descending into closing verses in
Portuguese, it's a song that could easily collapse under even
the slightest weight. Instead, it's a summer trifle that winds
up meaning something in spite of itself. Not everything gets
carried off as gracefully, though. "Meeting Paris Hilton"
would've induced eye-rolls two years ago, and "Alala" is
unbecomingly self-conscious for a group like this. When CSS
are really trying ("Fuck Off is Not the Only Thing You Have to
Show" being a notable example), it all just sounds a bit dumb.
But when they're not trying to please anybody, Cintra and
Matsushita are an endearing songwriting team, making up for
their grammatical hiccups with an honesty that's hard to come
by in music this poppy.

Unfortunately,
that endearing quality translates better into lyrics than
music. CSS had no idea how to play their instruments back in
2003, and even Cansei's most efficient riffs and
glossiest intertwining guitars wear thin under a
snore-inducing rhythm section that's got good intentions if
not the chops to back them up. There's lots to be guardedly
optimistically about here; the three guitars usually pose well
together, with a combination of sheen, fuzz, and reverb that
verges on awesome plenty of times, and maybe on album number
two, they'll actually get there. For now, they may have to
concede that, funny jokes aside, what we have here is a simple
failure to communicate.

back to the
top

V/A : The DFA Remixes -
Chapter One
Released on
DFA / Astralwerks
reviewed by Max Willens for GBH.tv

Overheard at a record store somewhere last
year:

Guy
#1: (perusing CDs) Hey, a new DFA release!
Awesome!
Guy #2: (scratching at
mullet) Please, DFA is so played out.

Under normal
circumstances, it would be difficult to find a CD that
supports the views of both of the above record shoppers, but
The DFA Remixes: Chapter One managed to do just that.
Released in April of last year, Remixes was exactly
what it sounds like, a collection of nine reworkings authored
by James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy that highlighted their
exceptional consistency as remixers. But a lack of cohesion
and the challenge of sequencing (just how are you supposed to
sequence a bunch of remixes, anyway?) made $16.99 plus tax a
bit much to ask for what essentially amounted to nine b-sides,
so Astralwerks got the message and re-released
Remixes as a digital download this year.

As a business
move, it seems like a bad sign, a belated strike to an iron
that's definitely started to cool off, but music buyers online
shouldn't read too much of it. No matter where you start, it's
not hard to see what got the iron so hot in the first place.
These tracks are lush and economical at the same time, carried
along by simple, sexy mixes of live and programmed instruments
imported from different genres: keyboards that exhale new wave
air and organs that bounce with funk, basslines that strut and
buzz and flatten in equal measure, and synthesizers that jab,
zoom, and repeat in trance-inducing patterns. That prudent
spareness allows Murphy and Goldsworthy to change gears easily
without compromising their revered sound, enabling them to go
wherever they want from almost any starting point; because DFA
tracks are essentially well-arranged collections of riffs,
every sound in any given track gets equal billing, just as
much a part of the rhythm as the melody. There's a ton of
variety here, and although it's a strange listen from
beginning to end, every track will lodge itself in your head,
often whether you want it to or not.

The only things
that remain untouched from their original songs are the
vocals, but that doesn't mean the songs' original character
gets preserved. Blues Explosion's "Mars, Arizona," which
originally clocked in at a little over two minutes, gets
stretched to a staggering ten, transforming in the process
from crashing garage rock into a bass-driven rave up that
features John Spencer trying to channel Mick Jagger and Iggy
Pop at the same time. Le Tigre's "Deceptacon," one of the more
prominent cuts on the album, manages to turn Kathleen Hanna's
whiny squeal into something resembling soul by dressing it up
with funky organs and super-EQ'ed drums that wouldn't sound
out of place on a Cassius single. All of this stems from the
democratization of styles that DFA have made so popular in the
last few years, and despite the variety that permeates
Remixes, each track is unmistakably theirs.

To be fair, the
DFA transmogrifier doesn't always work. The formerly upbeat
Gorillaz single "Dare" gets turned into the sound of a
wretched hangover, all dull bass and throbbing percussion that
gets pierced by vocals so irritating you start looking around
for Aspirin by around the third minute (it goes on for another
nine, by the way), and that's before the horrible buzzing
syths that show up soon after.

Getting back to
our prospective customers, DFA are practically a brand-name at
this point, and Remixes deserves the DFA stamp of
approval, even more so as a digital purchase. With almost half
the tracks being over a year old, it might a tough sell to
people who have been following Murphy and Goldsworthy closely.
But if you happen to be playing catch-up, this will gain you a
lot of ground, and finally at a much more palatable
price.

back to the
top

The French Kicks : Two
Thousand
Released on
Star Time/Vagrant Records
reviewed by Max Willens for
GBH.tv

Not long after the Pixies reunited, guitarist
Joey Santiago's response to the question of "So what were you
doing before the band got back together?" had been this: he'd
been paying his bills by writing music for the doomed Fox
sitcom Undeclared. For an ex-rock star, it sounds
like a pretty good gig, though I imagine that he's pretty
pleased with how his first job is going this second time
around. And while it seems unlikely that the Pixies and the
French Kicks are going to run into one another in the near
future, I hope for the sake of Matt Stinchcomb, Josh Wise,
Nick Stumpf and Jamie Krents (collectively known as the French
Kicks) that Santiago is still in touch with the music
executives at Fox Television.

The French Kicks'
third album for Startime International, Two Thousand,
is so easy to listen to that half the time you forget to
listen to it. Clean, simple guitar and organ riffs and a
toothless rhythm section are the weak but steady pulse over
which drummer/lead vocalist Stumpf strains and sighs and
harmonizes for ten tracks, each of which is so bright, tuneful
and completely uninteresting that I can't think of any better
use for them than to stick them in the background of a network
television show. If you close your eyes during album opener
"So Far We Are," you can practically see the opening credits
roll over the start-stop riff, plaintive strumming and a
subtly mixed-in pizzicato figure. For execs still looking to
infuse their shows with a sound that fell out of fashion about
two years ago, tracks like "Also Ran" provide a Walkmen-esque
vibe with its muted bells and distant guitars at half the
price, and as a bonus, Stumpf's voice is considerably easier
to listen to than Hamilton Leithauser's.

Ultimately, the
main problem with all of these songs is that it's impossible
to discern if there's an emotional core to any of them. The
parts fit well together, no question, but they rarely cohere
into songs that are meant to say anything. If there's an
abundance of emotion on hand already, the Kicks would probably
be a decent musical supplement, but they don't create it on
their own, and after a while, even though the tracks don't
sound too much alike, they all begin to bleed together. Here's
hoping that they get attached to a good, upcoming JJ Abrams
project. That way, you won't have to have your stereo on along
with your television when you watch Felicity reruns
or Gray's Anatomy.

back to the
top