November 9, 2012
Album: About to Die EP - Dirty Projectors

Dirty Projectors released the follow up to their (debatably) breakout LP, Bitte Orca, in July.  Bitte Orca was their seventh album, and naturally, it’s more than meaningful for a band to turn around a name the way that Dirty Projectors did when it hadn’t faired well for years.  In spite of their success, Dirty Projectors have always been changing, and July’s release, Swing Lo Magellan was no different.  It took a concentration of the tricks they picked up on Bitte Orca and applied them to similarly syncopated but much simpler, sometimes Simon and Garfunkel-esque tracks.  About to Die, the band’s new EP, breaks out one of Swing Lo’s bounciest, catchiest tracks and makes it the kicking off point for a few previously unheard and related tracks.

Like the epigraph of a novel, About to Die’s title track, which also comes from the previously released album, doesn’t so much serve as a great track here - we’ve already heard it after all - but rather serves as a lens for us to view the following tracks through.  About to Die is as strong as ever, stuttering over itself while Amber and Haley’s voices flow in the background.  The following tracks then don’t stray far from Swing Lo’s incarnation of Dirty Projector’s sound.  About to Die puts us in a warm place, albeit one tinted by the track’s broader message, spoken to in part by the track’s name itself.  While You’re Here is the first track that we’re hearing that’s new here, and this, following About to Die begins to have a much stronger movement in context.

The new pieces on About to Die are strong. While You’re Here is a warm and simple piece that finds Dirty Projector’s women ooo-ing in the back and band leader Dave Longstreth contemplating over a plucky guitar.  It’s a description that could fit many a track on Swing Lo, but that’s hardly an issue.  We’d have loved to have Swing Lo be an extension of Bitte, but the band gave us something else.  Now, to get an extension of Swing Lo is equally pleasing.  While You’re Here is about a friend who passed away, and as usual, Longstreth deals with this in a way that both gives access to Longstreth’s emotions while providing meaning to the event itself.

Another trick we found on Swing Lo was Dirty Projector’s newfound ability to switch in and out of fully fleshed but altogether different styles at a moment’s notice.  It’s not so extreme here, but on mid-EP track Here Til It Says I’m Not we get a similar style of mimicry of big folk singer tracks as, part way through the song, Longstreth bursts into something large and booming that could stretch across a landscape.  The description may sound tacky, and though the sentiment may be, Longstreth’s application is exciting and powerful.  Closing track Simple Request doesn’t particularly serve as a means of taking us out but, like the rest of the EP, is yet another small variation on the sounds of Swing Lo.  This one works on those same beats and can easily fit on the same playlist as your Mamas and Papas’ songs. Like Swing Lo, this all emphasizes Longstreth as an emotional core of the band, rather than simply a band leader.

What then is the purpose of About to Die as an EP?  These are all great tracks - as good as any one on the LP proper.  It seems that these are songs that simply didn’t make their way onto the album for a lack of space or a poor flow, not a lacking quality or coherency.  Find a track to swap out, and one would hardly notice the difference.  About to Die doesn’t stand on its own, however.  It’s a brief series of tracks, and while they’re all great, Dirty Projectors don’t exactly make in-your-face hits.  The EP is great, and any Dirty Projectors fan - of which there are more than a few - will love it every bit as much as Swing Lo.  However, it’s no more than that - a simple of extension of Swing Lo.  Tracks like While You’re Here, which originated prior to Swing Lo’s inception, shed an interesting light on the change of sound that occurred in making the LP, and that’s something that fans will love to listen for.  For anyone else though: why start here?  The album is just as engaging, and it’s four times as long.

10:00am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHBNyWwMjBD
(Notes: 2)
  
Filed under: dirty projectors about to die about to die ep music 
November 7, 2012
Album: 2 - Mac DeMarco

The album art of Mac DeMarco’s 2 reeks of something a little bit Nascar, maybe a little high and dirty.  It’s grungy and unappealing, but of course, the type of music that would normally be aimed at such a demographic would look nothing of the sort.  Rather, DeMarco seems to exist among these things, and through 2, effortlessly details them to us.  We get the impression that the DeMarco on the cover may well just sit down and sing a song right there while smoking a cigarette, and the sound of this album isn’t far from that.

These are simple, charmed songs often circling around specific people.  We hear DeMarco sing about his family time and again.  The opening track, Cooking Up Something Good, begins with, “Mom’s in the kitchen… Daddy’s on the sofa… my brother’s in the ballet.”  The album even ends with the final track trailing off into a seemingly impromptu moment between DeMarco and his young daughter.  Family and friends are all around him.  His world is small but no less important for it, and DeMarco makes us feel that.

In many ways these songs speak to the type of updated folk and soul classics that She & Him produce, but where we chide the pairing for simply producing the type of music that they would want to listen to, DeMarco would seem to land beyond it.  It’s hard to say what fairness there is in that, but DeMarco’s presentation is distinctly more personal than Deschanel and Ward’s, which, though charming, doesn’t seem to present the real characters and southern spirit like DeMarco manages.  This is also helped by variations in the sound.  DeMarco’s casual, plucky guitars stretch toward the warm, rolling guitars of Wavves, albeit with significantly less acid in the mix.

DeMarco’s unassuming vocals carry us easily into his world.  He pleads and dreams, “Someday I’ll find it,” but acknowledge’s it’s only a fantasy, “Maybe she’s the best in dreams, she’s still the best I’ve seen.”  He works these simple notions well.  They’re relatable and honest, and he’s singing through acceptance and good nature rather than a pining loss.  Even when DeMarco turns to singing, “Sorry Mama.  There are times I get carried away,” or about his father making drugs in the basement, they’re all to build these little worlds around himself, largely free from judgement and more a portrait of the scene.

There’s little to excite on 2, but DeMarco’s simple and would-be unremarkable presentation of a small and real world is something to remark on.  2 contains a wholly consistent narrative of DeMarco and his world, and because of this, we can really take to these tracks.  It’s a calm, sometimes dirty, but broadly charmed visit to a place we don’t often hear from in a genuine form like this.  

10:00am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHBNyWoHRdP
(Notes: 2)
  
Filed under: mac demarco 2 music 
November 5, 2012
Album: Matricidal Sons of Bitches - Matthew Friedberger

Matthew Friedberger is best known as half of The Fiery Furnaces, a band composed of him and his sister Eleanor.  They alternatingly make approachable and fun indie rock with bluesy influences and confoundingly experimental rock that dips in and out of that same sound.  The Fiery Furnaces last released an album in 2009, and since then both siblings have released material on their own.  Where Eleanor gave us the charming Last Summer, Matthew has only gotten more and more odd.  His first solo album came in 2006.  It was a massive double album that approached two hours and was poorly received.  Last year he released a vinyl only series of eight albums, six of which contained only a single instrument per album.  Matricidal Sons of Bitches, if the title wasn’t any hint, isn’t any more approachable or down to earth than his last solo outings.

The music of Matricidal isn’t all that odd.  The confusion lies in figuring out what this album is meant to be.  Matricidal runs just over an hour, and at forty-five tracks, that means that these pieces are running under a minute and a half on average.  More specifically, they tend to run very short, nearer to thirty seconds, and occasionally are dotted with something closer to four minutes.  The album, in a broader sense, has four acts that are detailed by the excessively long track names like, “Expectant Fathers – In for a Surprise XII. It’s no Surprise to Me”.  In theory then these paint some narrative, but it’s nothing particularly evident or specific.  The music is effectively instrumental as well, and so we’re given nothing to follow but these casual movements of tonal narrative.

The music changes within and between these movements.  The changes over movements are easier to note: an increasingly ominous tone, something more experimental and mechanical.  Largely though, each track is an endearingly pleasant almost-classical song.  It could be the score to a French film, a short film, a classic black-and-white film.  It’s all distinctly the score to something, except that it’s not: it’s an album, and it’s sixty-two minutes long.  The question becomes then: what is Matricidal supposed to be, and how and when are we supposed to listen to it?  It appears to be released as an album because there’s no obvious route for this to become anything else.  An album is how music is released nowadays, and in some ways, music perhaps must conform to that or else teach us how it’s breaking that mold.  Matricidal does neither.  Labeling the LP as a soundtrack may be the only way to make sense of it.  That the film is nonexistent hardly matters.  It allows for this structure to have a sense of legitimacy and purpose.

The deeper problem is that one simply cannot imagine an instance in which listening to this makes sense.  Charming, classical sounding tracks might be lovely in the background when you’re baking, but these songs don’t continue to fulfill that in the way a continually listenable track or series of tracks might.  Songs cut out suddenly, dropping in the middle of a movement and switching us onto the next track.  It’s impressive how smart each song is, but it’s never fully elaborated upon.  We get what is clearly only one or two pieces of a song before it’s taken away from us.  It’s jarring, though you have a good forty chances to get used to it.  One might expect something like this, a sprawling, connected series of songs, to actually connect in some way, and while that happens loosely through tonality, the actual song connections only serve to remove us further from the odd experience that is Matricidal.

It’s unfortunate then that Matricidal became what it is.  Matthew clearly had no intention to focus on or embellish these, as we’re well aware of the quality he can bring when he does.  This instead leaves us with a jumble of loosely experimental, surprisingly listenable, but off-puttingly aimless tracks.  Matricidal’s fatal flaw is its inability to define its own reason for existence.  There’s a decent amount to like inside the album, but it refuses to actually be an album.  Instead, we’re seemingly listening to a score for a nonexistent film, and it’s hard to imagine why we’d want to sit through abrupt cuts and half-finished songs when we can instead put on a proper album, even one by Friedberger himself.

10:00am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHBNyWfavaV
Filed under: matthew friedberger the fiery furnaces music matricidal sons of bitches 
November 2, 2012
Album: Ocean Roar - Mount Eerie

Mount Eerie has set out to release three albums this year, which I guess makes him 2012’s Robyn.  His first effort, Clear Moon, was something of a surprise hit.  It’s a subdued album released among the fanfare of this forest/log cabin/rustic fad, but Eerie’s take was something much more specific and haunting.  I missed his second effort of the year when it debuted in September, but it’s been an obvious hit on my to-listen list.  Ocean Roar continues what Clear Moon started with equal strength and confidence.  These are albums with a well defined sound, but that live in a place of uncertainty and aimlessness.

Ocean Roar is very much cut from the same cloth as its predecessor.  It is neither a sequel nor something separate entirely.  Rather, Ocean Roar feels as though it may be a second act in a story that we’ve unwittingly become buried in.  Naturally, it’s now time for the rising action and climax, and Ocean Roar spends much of its time setting the scene something moody for Eerie’s vocalist (and only member) Phil Elverum.  Tracks like Engel Der Luft (Popol Vuh) and Instrumental are solely a continued grinding guitar reminding us that something ominous is looming.  It could reach the pseudo-drama of a prog act, but Eerie’s tones are natural and work to elevate a cleaner central thread.

Where this aggressive guitar shows its intent is on tracks like Waves or the opener, Pale Lights.  The latter runs just shy of ten minutes and greets us with the type of dark and forbidding but eminently rocking tones that we might expect from Arcade Fire.  Interrupting these tracks, however, is Elverum’s vocals.  He dips in at their cores, lowering the madness in favor of a calmer, woodsy grotto in which he can croon.  Many of these lyrics are closer to short poems.  Naturally, these makes for nontraditional tracks.  They aren’t focused around a lead vocal line, and their vocals aren’t even trying to lead us somewhere when they appear.

This can create the unfortunate effect of making the album feel oddly sparse of material, in spite of its near forty minute runtime.  These extended rock-outs are moody and excited, but they’re intentionally a step removed from attention grabbing.  This means that while they set the mood well, they don’t compel us as effectively as they could.  This would-be trilogy as a whole could almost be compared to an extended, more personal version of The Decemberists’s rock opera The Hazards of Love.  As a broader piece, these long rocking mood pieces work as stellar background material, but their ability to make a strong and meaningful track is questionable.  That isn’t what these pieces are going for, but without bringing this broader meaning to them, they don’t work as well as any piece of an album should.

It is, in spite of this, an equally strong album as Clear Moon, and it’ll be interesting to see if this truly is a trilogy of sorts when Eerie’s third LP of the year drops.  When Robyn did this in 2010, her third and final LP was short on new material: it was an expanded amalgamation of the first two’s hits, and it was worse off for it.  The charm of the quirks, kinks, and experimentation that an excess of releases allowed her made the first two strong, whereas the third, though good for all its collected hits, stumbled in its personality.  One can hope that the follow up to Ocean Roar won’t simply be the finest material of this past year, but a continuation of the journey that we’ve gone through on these first two.  There’s little doubt that that would make for a strong LP.

10:00am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHBNyWRyrsQ
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: mount eerie ocean roar music 
October 24, 2012
Album: Banks - Paul Banks

As Interpol’s lead singer, Paul Banks was known for casually cryptic lyrics, “We can cap the old times make playing only logical harm.  We can top the old lines clay-making that nothing else will change.”  Within them though were physical sentiments that managed to speak directly to us in spite of the would-be confusion.  This sentiment has created some veil over Banks himself, and his ever-changing moniker reflects that.  As Interpol died down, Banks released his first solo LP under the name Julian Plenti.  This summer, nearly three years later, Banks dropped the aptly titled Julian Plenti Lives… EP but this time credited to his own name.  The EP was an odd release, and it was meant as a lead up to Banks, the heavily eponymous re-debut of a solo LP.  Odder yet, it hardly speaks at all to the album.

It’s surprisingly easy to see what all of this switching around and personas means in the context of Banks (the LP, that is).  This may be the first time that we’re seeing something different out of him.  Interpol is known for its darkened rock revival sounds, and Banks’s first Julian Plenti release did little to differentiate itself.  It may have been a bit more loose, a bit more in the brightness of the streetlights that dotted Turn on the Bright Lights’s cityscapes, but altogether it was a release that was as much a part of Interpol as it was apart of Interpol.  That sound is almost altogether absent from Banks.

Even as someone hoping for more classic Interpol sound, it’s almost immediately obvious that this is a strength of the album.  When we hear the would-be Interpol of Julian Plenti or even Interpol’s fourth album, we’re hardly fooled.  We realize (yet again) that that spark may never be relit.  So to hear something so separate as what Banks delivers on Banks is refreshing, even if not satisfying.  What carries through is that signature thumping bass line of Interpol’s that keeps it alive and dark.  Around that however are new worlds, classic guitars, shimmering cymbals.  Banks vocals have, by choice or not, seemingly changed with age.  He’s trying more, and that removes that edge we love.  On the other hand, this new style has been present for a while now, and Banks has finally learned how to tap into it to best harmonize with his music.

Banks, for all its differences, is still easy enough to see as an evolution for anyone following along Banks’s career.  His interests are present.  There are guitar lines with a heavy focus, sudden breaks and rises, ways that he moves his voice.  The oddities of Julian Plenti Lives… seem to reveal themselves here as tamer interests of Banks.  It’s never so obvious, but Banks seems to be taking beats and themes from hip-hop or westerns and co-opting them into his own repertoire of sounds.  Where on the EP it was overbearing and tired, here they’re clever movements that fit neatly inside of each track.  There’s a certain sense of creation here, as though Banks had a purpose for each track.  Lisbon is absent of vocals and could easily be scoring something.  At times on Banks we have sampled vocals, though not quite as the flashy centerpiece that you’d find on a Kanye track.  Rather, on tracks like Another Chance, the sample (at least seemingly so) is transformed into the track’s lead vocals.

It works well, better than we should expect here.  The album doesn’t stay beyond its welcome, and each track is modestly different in a way that keeps us interested in a legitimate way.  On the other hand, no track can really stand on its own in a major way, nor can they be said to form something grander as a whole.  Banks seems to attempt to recreate the magic of his former lyrics, but it doesn’t quite come together.  Instead we get similes like, “You only hold me as the canyon holds the stream,” repeated several times over when it’s hardly a strong enough idea to be played through once.  This speaks to the broader success of the emotional content here: ideas are present, but there’s no insight to be found.

For an old fan, Banks is a surprisingly enjoyable listen for what is otherwise an unexciting release.  While other middle of the road albums tend to have their highs and lows, Banks instead presents a constant quality, which works in the album’s favor.  We’re never bored, just never enthralled either.  Moreover, it shows that Banks still has something to show us, and he hasn’t yet lost what it takes to make a smart song.  Whether it’ll come back again into something that can stand close to Bright Lights is hard to say.  It doesn’t exactly seem likely - Bright Lights was an album of a time, a place, and an atmosphere - but Banks, the LP, puts forth the notion that Banks, the artist, may still surprise us.

10:00am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHBNyVuHeMq
(Notes: 2)
  
Filed under: banks paul banks julian plenti interpol music