There's plenty to like about the Mystery Jets' latest album Radlands, a kind of shiny, clever, brit poppy thing, with echoes of Pulp and the Kinks. Still for music geeks, really, it's all about the first song, "Greatest Hits," in which a very well put together album collection is divided asunder...whatever else happens, for instance, the singer is keeping Double Nickels on the Dime and rightly so.
Have a listen, and see how you have...
My wonderful, way-too-grown-up son is going to prom tonight and I am all teary about seeing him in a tux like he's getting married, which he will some day, I suppose, lucky girl...
Anyway
Saturday, May 26, 2012
Friday, May 25, 2012
Red Kross Re-Krossed
Red Kross, the SoCal punk band that pretty much invented teen-powered, melodic post-hardcore, will release its first album in 15 years this summer. Researching the Blues, which features the Neurotica-era line-up of Jeff and Steven McDonald, Robert Hecker and Roy McDonald, follows a series of reunion shows at Coachella, All Tomorrow's Parties and with the Hoodoo Gurus in Australia.
It's on Merge this summer. Here's the title track...pretty great, IMHO.
"Researching the Blues"
It's on Merge this summer. Here's the title track...pretty great, IMHO.
"Researching the Blues"
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Malcolm Middleton's trying not to be angry
Interesting swerve in direction from the former Arab Strap mainstay....
Human Don’t Be Angry
Human Don’t Be Angry
Chemikal Underground
In Arab Strap and in the five solo albums since, Malcolm Middleton has always sounded like a man squinting into unexpected daylight, grasping for a cigarette and piecing together the unfortunate (but never, it sounds like, entirely unexpected) events of the night before. He is disconsolate in the way that romantics often are, but without much real rancor. To listen to Malcolm Middleton is to recognize and be forgiven for all the ways that human beings fall short with each other.
Human Don’t Be Angry, then, is an odd departure, mostly downplaying Middleton’s frayed-edge tenor, his dead reckoning of human weakness (including his own) and the surprising warmth and humane-ness that has, in the past, lifted the weight of negativity. Instead, we get a primarily instrumental, loop-based collection of tracks, built out of bright, clear electronic elements – keyboards, drum machines, synths – and layered in intricate, repetitive patterns. The more lyrical elements of Kraut (bands like Cluster and Tangerine Dream) seem to be prime influences, though certain passages sound like subdued Mogwai and others (especially the ones with xylophone) like Tortoise.
More
The "theme" at Soundcloud.
Human Don’t Be Angry
Human Don’t Be Angry
Chemikal Underground
In Arab Strap and in the five solo albums since, Malcolm Middleton has always sounded like a man squinting into unexpected daylight, grasping for a cigarette and piecing together the unfortunate (but never, it sounds like, entirely unexpected) events of the night before. He is disconsolate in the way that romantics often are, but without much real rancor. To listen to Malcolm Middleton is to recognize and be forgiven for all the ways that human beings fall short with each other.
Human Don’t Be Angry, then, is an odd departure, mostly downplaying Middleton’s frayed-edge tenor, his dead reckoning of human weakness (including his own) and the surprising warmth and humane-ness that has, in the past, lifted the weight of negativity. Instead, we get a primarily instrumental, loop-based collection of tracks, built out of bright, clear electronic elements – keyboards, drum machines, synths – and layered in intricate, repetitive patterns. The more lyrical elements of Kraut (bands like Cluster and Tangerine Dream) seem to be prime influences, though certain passages sound like subdued Mogwai and others (especially the ones with xylophone) like Tortoise.
More
The "theme" at Soundcloud.
Stanley Clarke interview
My Stanley Clarke interview runs today at PopMatters.
Bringing the Bass Up Front: An Interview with Stanley Clarke
By Jennifer Kelly 24 May 2012
It’s 1975. Stanley Clarke, the bass player for Return to Forever, has just released his second solo album Journey To Love. The single “Silly Putty” has begun climbing up the pop charts. He and his band are playing a sold-out concert in Indiana. The reception is wildly enthusiastic. But later, as Clarke heads backstage, he runs into a promoter, shaking his head, profoundly unsettled by the idea of a bass player writing songs, leading a band and headlining at a large rock arena. “He just couldn’t believe it,” says Clarke. “To have the bass player standing out in front of the band and the guitar player in back and the keyboard player over there and the horn players over on the side ... to have me, the bass player, talking to the audience and playing and laughing and all crazy, it was weird to this guy. No singer, and the place was packed. Something was wrong.”
Clarke laughs at the memory, half a lifetime past the days when a bass player as band leader was a radical idea. “At that point, I just recognized this was not fashionable, but I kept doing it and it started something,” he says. “Going on stage as a bass player is a total natural thing now. But then, for the bass player to play shows and release an album, it was a no no.”
More
Bringing the Bass Up Front: An Interview with Stanley Clarke
By Jennifer Kelly 24 May 2012
It’s 1975. Stanley Clarke, the bass player for Return to Forever, has just released his second solo album Journey To Love. The single “Silly Putty” has begun climbing up the pop charts. He and his band are playing a sold-out concert in Indiana. The reception is wildly enthusiastic. But later, as Clarke heads backstage, he runs into a promoter, shaking his head, profoundly unsettled by the idea of a bass player writing songs, leading a band and headlining at a large rock arena. “He just couldn’t believe it,” says Clarke. “To have the bass player standing out in front of the band and the guitar player in back and the keyboard player over there and the horn players over on the side ... to have me, the bass player, talking to the audience and playing and laughing and all crazy, it was weird to this guy. No singer, and the place was packed. Something was wrong.”
Clarke laughs at the memory, half a lifetime past the days when a bass player as band leader was a radical idea. “At that point, I just recognized this was not fashionable, but I kept doing it and it started something,” he says. “Going on stage as a bass player is a total natural thing now. But then, for the bass player to play shows and release an album, it was a no no.”
More
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
A darker, warier Hallelujah the Hills
One of my favorite why-aren't-they-bigger bands has made a new album, and it's considerably less buoyant the celebratory than the others...but still very much worth hearing. Check out my review of Hallelujah the Hills' No One Knows What Happens Next at Blurt today.
More
While you're over at Blurt, why not read Ron Hart's piece on Flying Nun at 30.
I said: No One Knows is more downbeat than previous Hallelujah the Hills outings, warier, more contained and considerably less exuberant. There are still massed horn sections and all-hands, group-shouted choruses, but less of them. There's a lot more smoulder between the explosions. "Get Me in a Room," the album's first single, sounds like Telephono-era Spoon, taut, world-weary, minimalist and the opposite of the giddy, literate excesses you expect from Hallelujah the Hills. "Nightingale Lightning" is more true to form, bulging with trumpet solos and weird string-and-opera-singer-samples and unstoppable in its upslanting chorus. Yet there's no mistaking the disgruntled, discouraged tone of an album that includes songs titled "Care to Collapse," "Dead People's Music" and "Hello, My Destroyer."
More
While you're over at Blurt, why not read Ron Hart's piece on Flying Nun at 30.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Bad man, good songwriter: Cory Branan
Mutt, which is Cory Branan's third album and out today on Bloodshot Records, is not just the best country rock album I've heard this year, but maybe, in some ways, the best rock album. Branan reminds a lot of Richard Buckner on his slow songs, like "The Corner," he's got that same heart-breaking flutter in his voice that just rises above the grit. But the places where he really knocks me out are the faster, more rocking songs where he's as fast and rough and beautifully sloppy as Paul Westerberg...check out "Bad Man," which is the lead-off single from this really excellent album.
Nice boots, eh?
Nice boots, eh?
Monday, May 21, 2012
Sigur Ros
I quite enjoyed the new Sigur Ros, called Valteri and out next month on XL...and didn't think my review for Blurt would see daylight until the print issue came out this summer. But look, here it is on the site, a bit early.
I said, "Sigur Rós has, in the past, caught flack for valuing static beauty over development, building icy, gorgeous landscapes that remain nearly motionless over the course of a song. Here, however, momentum lurks in even the prettiest tableaux."
More here.
I said, "Sigur Rós has, in the past, caught flack for valuing static beauty over development, building icy, gorgeous landscapes that remain nearly motionless over the course of a song. Here, however, momentum lurks in even the prettiest tableaux."
More here.
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