New Review: Iron & Wine, Kiss Each Other Clean

Release Date: January 25
Label: Warner Bros.

It wasn't all that long ago that Iron & Wine's Sam Beam was just another acoustic-and-folk-minded singer-songwriter, churning out simple, emotional guitar songs. However, something changed upon the release of 2007's The Shepherd's Dog and Iron & Wine has blossomed into a massive, musically adventurous band. Kiss Each Other Clean is the latest example of Beam's acceptance of bolder sounds and styles, ensuring that anyone who still calls his band a "folk" act will need go hunting for some new genres. The album has a definite musical obsession with the 1970s, heard on the smooth, FM-radio-ready "Monkeys Uptown" and "Half Moon," along with the Steely-Dan-style harmonies riddled throughout. There's also some saxophone skronking ("Big Burned Hand"), some indie-approved balladry ("Tree By The River") and even some light gospel in the form of the opener "Walking Far From Home," with it's stately rhythm and chorus of backing vocals. Perhaps the strongest track is the last, "Your Fake Name Is Good Enough For Me," which takes the Steely Dan comparisons to fantastic heights before dissolving into an honest-to-god guitar freakout. If Kiss Each Other Clean has a weak point, is undoubtedly the lyrics, which feel too overwrought, earnest or bizarre to carry any true emotional depth ("we will become an ice cream cone?" Come again?). However, the music is strong enough to distract you. Along with Destroyer's Kaputt, Kiss Each Other Clean has made this a very good week for soft-rock revivalism. Also, gotta love that album cover.

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Album Review: Destroyer, Kaputt

Release Date: January 25
Label: Merge

Destroyer's Dan Bejar is a musician who does things his own way. Perhaps best known as one-third of the indie rock supergroup the New Pornographers, Bejar's witty wordplay, unconventionally elegant arrangements and nasal voice keep him quite separate from most of his contemporaries. It's no surprise then to hear him mine a vein of musical influence that has been tragically ignored by other hip, forward-thinking bands: the lush romance of Steely Dan and Avalon-era Roxy Music. Unfortunately dubbed "soft rock" by the judgmental music press, this sound suits Bejar's purposes beautifully, as he wraps languid sax solos, mournful clarinets and sighing keyboards around lyrics nostalgic for an earlier era. The stunning opener "Chinatown" displays Kaputt's style right off the bat, blending carefully mixed acoustic guitars and keyboards with atmospheric touches and crisp drumming. Over it all, Bejar croons the mysteriously maudlin refrain "I can't walk away... in Chinatown." There are other 80s musical touchstones here as well. New Order is name-checked in the lyrics of "Blue Eyes," before again being felt in the intro to "Savage Night At The Opera," with its distinctly Peter-Hook-y bass part. Throughout, Bejar creates a mood of glamor and class, tempered by his clever, occasionally sad lyrics. The sprawling nine minutes of "Suicide Demo For Kara Walker" are built on a masterful control of tension and release, while other highlights like "Downtown" and "Song For America" prove that Bejar's talents work just as well when compacted into three-minute pop. Finally closing with the eleven-minute-long "Bay Of Pigs (Detail)," Kaputt manages to be remarkably consistent while featuring a very diverse group of songs. We've known Bejar had skills for many years now, but this his first truly excellent album, from start to finish, not to mention 2011's first great release.

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Album Review: Gang Of Four, Content

Release Date: January 25
Label: Yep Roc Records

It's a sad fact that Gang Of Four, one of the greatest post-punk bands of the late 70s, only recorded two-and-a-half good albums. The same band that recorded 1979's blistering Entertainment! also gave the world such undercooked and forgotten albums as Hard (1983) and Mall (1991). You probably haven't heard these albums and you probably never should. Entertainment! remains the band's definitive statement, made all the more powerful by the fact that the band never even came close to duplicating it. With its snarling guitar work, courtesy of alt-guitar hero Andy Gill, relentlessly tight rhythm section and barked, politically charged vocals, Entertainment! is a landmark album. Ranting about consumerism, class warfare and gender relations against an aggressive musical backdrop, Gang Of Four's fingerprints are still found throughout modern music. So here we are in 2011, with Content, Gang Of Four's first album in sixteen years. Gill's guitars are loud. Frontman Jon King yelps a lot. There are songs with titles like "You'll Never Pay For The Farm." Content feels carefully calculated to be a return to the Entertainment! aesthetic. Yet, it never moves beyond simple imitation. Opening with the hacking guitar storm of "She Said 'You Made A Thing Of Me'," Content's biggest weakness becomes apparent very quickly. Without the band's former rhythm section of bassist Dave Allen and drummer Hugo Burnham, the song sounds flat and thin. What follows is more of the same, save for the grating vocoder exercise "It Was Never Gonna Turn Out Too Good." Is this better than Gang Of Four's insipid mid-career offerings? Yes. But it sounds uncomfortably close to a band doing a good Gang Of Four impression than the great band themselves. Unlike their contemporaries Wire, who showed how post-punk bands can age well with this month's Red Barked Tree, Gang Of Four have proven that perhaps they are truly best left to memory.

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Album Review: Deerhoof, Deerhoof Vs. Evil

Release Date: January 25
Label: Polyvinyl

I find it very hard to review bands like Deerhoof. For the better part of the past two decades, this San Francisco-based band has recorded album after album of off-the-wall, experimental art-rock, rarely changing the basic formula for their music. Deerhoof live off the tension created by their spiky, rhythmically complex instrumentation and singer/bassist Satomi Matsuzaki's almost childlike voice. It's a jarring effect and one that I've never been wild about, but it's an undeniable element of the band's sound. Deerhoof Vs. Evil features more of the same, although some of the band's rougher edges are smoothed out by some surprisingly lilting melodic touches (listen to "The Merry Barracks"). Matsuzaki's voice is as polarizing as ever, especially when her lyrics boil down to chirpy, repeated chants, such as on tracks like "Hey I Can." However, a few songs, most notably "Behold A Marvel In The Darkness," construct a fun, more traditional indie rock vibe that suits her voice quite well. Deerhoof Vs. Evil isn't going to be the album that sells me completely on the merits of Deerhoof. However, that doesn't prevent it from being a strong, consistent record from a band that seems quite determined not to compromise when it comes to their musical style.

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Album Review: Smith Westerns, Dye It Blonde

Release Date: January 18
Label: Fat Possum Records

Smith Westerns are a four-piece band from Chicago, who traffic in a slightly more indie-friendly version of glam-rock's fabulous riffitude. However, if you read the reviews of Dye It Blonde, the group's second album, one point is hammered over and over again: holy sweet jesus christ, these kids are young! Their debut album was recorded while the band members were in high school. Which was last year. That's some sobering stuff for a guy like myself, at the ripe ol' age of twenty-two. However, the average age of Smith Westerns has ended up haunting them in a distinctly gimmicky way. We're not talking about music recorded by children, but we're getting uncomfortably close. Everything they've released thus far has been greeted with condescending disclaimers about the band being "good for their age." Dye It Blonde's critical reception has been no different, as various major publications have been heaping praise upon it. Yet, once you recover from the shock of realizing you're listening to young whippersnappers, the album loses a fair bit of charm. Beneath these (presumably) cherubic, young, smiling faces lurks a set of catchy-but-uninspired riffs borrowed from T. Rex albums. The sparkling keyboards in the background give off a distinctly calculated quality as they try to evoke weary decadence. The lyrics expound upon the usual themes of youth, love, romance, tragedy and various combinations thereof. Sure, hearing teenagers play music this professional is nifty, but that doesn't automatically make it great. At the end of the day, Dye It Blonde plays strictly by the rules, aping a set of heroes whose heyday was long before Smith Westerns' band members (or myself) were born. Their inability to add anything substantial to an old formula keeps them from being anything truly noteworthy.

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Album Review: Tapes 'N Tapes, Outside

Release Date: January 11
Label: Ibid Records

For about a month during the summer of 2005, "blog bands" were the latest craze. The word-of-mouth buzz and snowballing popularity that the internet fostered allowed a handful of bands to raise themselves out of the morass of indie rock wannabes and get some national attention. The most famous of these bands was Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, who ended up selling hundreds of thousands of copies of their debut album out of their apartment. However, finishing second in the blog band race was Tapes 'N Tapes, a nervy little quartet out of Minneapolis, who scored major critical points with 2005's The Loon. Fast-forward to 2011 and we find Tapes 'N Tapes trying to put the pieces back together. Outside is their third album, following the disappointing and much-mocked Walk It Off. Most of the music press seems to have moved on, but Outside contains a surprising amount of charm for a band most have already written off. The band's signature thin guitar work and urgency has evolved a bit, allowing more keyboard texture and eclectic instrumentation. The band's most compelling element, though, remains frontman Josh Grier's voice, capable of lifting even the most generic of indie rock tracks into another level with its emotional immediacy and rough edges. The album's opener, "Badaboom," benefits the most from Grier's histrionics, as he switches gears halfway through, turning a fragile whisper into a defiant, raspy roar. Songs like "SWM," "Desert Plane" and the aptly named "Freak Out" further consolidate the band's strengths. Outside is far from perfect and Tapes 'N Tapes still have plenty of work ahead of them if they want to reestablish themselves as an above average band. However, it's an admirable step forward for a band that time is rapidly forgetting.

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Album Review: Wire, Red Barked Tree

Release Date: January 11
Label: Pink Flag

Long after the Sex Pistols, the Ramones and the Clash have ascended into history or descended self-parody, Wire are still here. The seminal English art-punk band have withstood the test of time, continuing to release intriguing records while their more celebrated peers have faded away. Red Barked Tree is the latest addition to their stunning body of work. The fact that it comes over thirty years after their most celebrated releases is just gravy. The original 1970s trilogy of Wire albums, Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154, tracked the band's evolution from minimalist, abstract visions of three-chord fury towards a more keyboard-heavy, textured post-punk sound. Red Barked Tree continues this legacy, showcasing the band's more jagged tendencies with songs like "Two Minutes," while still giving plenty of time to the group's more restrained side. The opening track, "Please Take," is insidiously catchy, especially for a song that opens with the line "please take your knife out of my back." The album reaches a fantastic balance between these styles, offering a concise encapsulation of everything Wire have been and continue to be.

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Album Review: Cake, Showroom Of Compassion

Release Date: January 11
Label: Upbeat Records

In a move that should surprise no one, Cake have recorded yet another Cake album. The Sacramento-based group have an immediately identifiable sound and Showroom Of Compassion is steeped in it. Never mind the fact that they haven't released a new album since 2004. Cake are back and, hey, they still sound like Cake. Like all five before it, this new Cake album comes complete with a catchy lead single ("Sick Of You"), featuring John McCrea's distinctive speak-singing and a snappy trumpet section. There even a few yelped backing vocals for those of you who still love "Short Skirt/Long Jacket." Unfortunately, after "Sick Of You," there's a substantial drop-off in the album's song quality. Cake have never been much of an "album band" and Showroom Of Compassion is no exception. You get more nibbling guitar lines, more horns, even more snarky McCrea, but those pieces never gel as well as they do on the lead single. Indeed, Cake have returned after a long absence, virtually the same as ever: one solid, quirky single nestled amid more forgettable tracks.

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Album Review: The Decemberists, The King Is Dead

Release Date: January 18
Label: Capitol Records

Colin Meloy and his merry band of indie-rock troubadours have spent the past five years thinking big. After the breakthrough success of 2005's still-excellent Picaresque, Meloy seemed to think that what people wanted were epic songs, full of heavily described characters and convoluted narratives worthy of Russian literature. The following albums, The Crane Wife and The Hazards Of Love, ended up missing the mark somewhat, as Meloy's sharp songwriting skills got consumed by ambition. So, The King Is Dead is a shift away from all that pomp, as the band mines heavily from R.E.M. and the more twangy end of Neil Young's career to create simpler, country-inflected tunes. This shift would be admirable if not for the fact that Meloy swings the pendulum ridiculously far, robbing his songs of what made them interesting in the first place. The King Is Dead is a lifeless, trite and altogether boring trawl through the lazier elements of American music, sewing together an endless stream of lyrics about seasons and "ancient riverbeds" with dull, major chords. There are no five-part operas about fawns, for which I am thankful. But there's also aren't any interesting songs. That's a rough trade-off.

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Delphic: Acolyte

Year: 2010
Label: Polydor
Producer: Delphic and Ewan Pearson
Running Time: 51.7 mins

Every review of Acolyte, the debut album from the British group Delphic, mentions three phrases: “dance-rock,” “Manchester” and “New Order.” This handful of buzzwords neatly encapsulates the critical party line for this album. You’ve got a genre/sound, a lineage and a big name dropped for comparison. Acolyte has only been released in the UK so far, so we only have the ever-excitable British press as the album’s acid test. However, despite the virtually universal acclaim it’s been getting, I can’t imagine that Acolyte will make much of a splash over here in America when it finally arrives.

That isn’t to say Delphic’s music is bad. After riding the massive wave of UK-music-press hype for the past year and finishing third in the BBC Sound Of 2010 poll, the three-piece band have released a solid, cohesive debut that serves as more than just a vehicle for popular singles. Their influences are fairly obvious (most reviewers pick out New Order, Underworld and Orbital as major touchstones), but, as MusicOMH’s Ben Urdang says, “they recycle well, managing to do it with gravitas.” The New Order comparisons are so obvious they can’t be ignored (“’Submission’ boasts a solo so indebted to Peter Hook's style it all but turns up in a pair of leather trousers and starts complaining about Tony Wilson's mismanagement of the Hacienda,” writes The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis), but the quality and consistency of the songcraft keeps Acolyte from sounding like a tired copy of older bands. I think we can safely put Delphic in the same category as bands like Passion Pit, who are rehashing the sounds of the 1980s but updating them for contemporary listeners.

However, history has proven that dance-rock is a tough genre to work with. NME’s John Doran points out that “the road to hell is lined with the burnt-out husks of groups who tried to fuse rock and dance.” While Delphic probably don’t deserve such a bleak fate, they lack that magical spark that appeals to both rock and dance fans. The band leans heavily towards the dance side of the equation, only veering towards rock-ish territories in their silvery guitar lines and emotionally weighted lyrics. The tracks that do the most work on the album, like “Doubt” and “Halcyon”, work much better as wordy dance jams than “serious” rock songs that just happen to be fun to groove along to.

Those generous English critics have given Acolyte an almost universal 80% approval rate across the board. While I agree with the general assessment of this album as “immediate and assured” (Drowned In Sound’s Aaron Lavery), the substance and truly compelling songs aren’t quite there. With this debut album, Delphic have shown a lot of potential, but they’re best work is probably still ahead of them. When Acolyte finally does make the long journey across the Atlantic, where the music critics are much less forgiving, I doubt it’ll be anything more than a cult hit among the groups of Anglophilic people who watch Skins religiously.

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Vampire Weekend: Contra

Year: 2010
Label: XL Recordings
Producer: Rostam Batmanglij
Running Time: 36.6 mins

It’s impossible to talk about Vampire Weekend’s sophomore album, Contra, without addressing the haters. For every starry-eyed fan who loved the peppy guitar-pop on the band’s self-titled debut album, there seems to be an equally vociferous music fan, blogger or cynic ready to shout them down. While this kind of argumentative discourse is nothing new, Vampire Weekend’s music has hit a nerve within the music listening community, becoming one of the most polarizing new bands in recent memory. All this has resulted in a very volatile environment for Contra to be released into.

The critics have responded by taking an extremely defensive stance about the band’s music. Despite the thousands of naysayers who popped out of the woodwork after VW’s debut was released, very few music critics ever seemed to join their ranks. That album was an unchecked critical success, currently clocking in as the fourth-most acclaimed album of 2008. However, rather than taking an “I-told-you-so” attitude, the band’s champions are already trying to head the detractors off at the pass. Pitchfork’s Mike Powell projects that those with “ferocious objections” to the first VW album will continue to “hate [Contra] with a vigor,” while John Murphy at MusicOMH compares the band to fellow NY hypemongers the Strokes, who famously failed to live up to their promise after one acclaimed album.

However, the reviews for Contra are overwhelmingly positive. Most publications (including the behemoths of Rolling Stone, SPIN and NME) have given it a fairly safe 80%, while Pitchfork has lauded it with a bold 8.6/10 and a coveted Best New Music nod. Paste falls in line with an 8.7. The general critical sense is best summed up by Paste’s Jason Killingsworth when he says that Contra proves that Vampire Weekend was “no fluke.” Since most of these critics loved the band from the word “go,” Contra seems to be only reinforcing their existing beliefs.

This is a bit odd, since, by the critics’ own admission, Contra is a wildly different record than its predecessor. While it seems that VW’s first album will go down in history as a fusion of “Paul Simon’s Graceland with the touchstones of preppy ennui” (Rolling Stone’s Will Dana), Contra finds the band jettisoning much of their established sound (clean, thin guitar leads and spare production) in favor of a more lush sound, built upon keyboards and a few hip-hop influences. Most critics have also noted that the lyrical themes have changed. As Powell points out, “these lines don’t scan as being about privilege or money, but about people struggling with their social status.” I agree strongly with this assessment. Contra’s biggest edge over Vampire Weekend is that it (mostly) drops the class-warfare-baiting and lets more universal emotions fuel the songs.

I add that parenthetical because Ezra Koenig’s lyrics are still threatening to collapse under their own multisyllabic weight. John Murphy breaks from the critical party line by (correctly) observing that “it’s impossible to deny there’s a bit of smugness to Vampire Weekend that irks somewhat.” Murphy points to the opening song, “Horchata”, as a prime example of this sense that “Vampire Weekend are cleverer than you,” with its nonsensical opening couplet of “In December, drinking horchata/I’d look psychotic in a balaclava.” While SPIN’s John Dolan seems far too willing to accept Koenig’s shenanigans (“A ruling-class dude would look silly enjoying his leisure-hour drink dressed like a Chechen terrorist”), I feel that Murphy has pin-pointed Vampire Weekend’s biggest weakness. They can only hide behind big, flashy words for so long.

Full disclosure time: I am one of those rabid detractors who flew off the rails when Vampire Weekend took the world by storm a few years ago. I still find most of that album grating and shallow, while the Graceland comparisons feel superficial at best to me. That said, I honestly feel that Contra is a major improvement. At least four songs here (“Taxi Cab”, “Run”, “Diplomat’s Son” and “I Think Ur A Conta”) are songs I can say I honestly like, while there are a few more I find pleasant in smaller doses. Again, the turning point for me, as a listener, has been hearing Koenig inject rawer emotions into his lyrics, best heard on the hushed “I Think Ur A Conta”, which ends with the singer professing some very complicated love. It’s a song haunted by betrayal and lies, promises kept and broken, which finally ends with Koenig’s whispered dedication that “I just wanted you.” As cliché as it might be, I find these emotional risks much more compelling than the flippant ridiculousness of “who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma.”

Contra also reveals keyboardist/producer Rostam Batmanglij as the group’s leading musical force. After showing promise with his surprising Discovery project last year, Batmanglij has applied the same gently driving electronics to his main band, with quality results. The bouncy “White Sky” provides a nice bridge between the older VW style, while the M.I.A.-sampling “Diplomat’s Son” just drops you into the deep end of this new, guitar-phobic world. Even stranger is the slow, reserved “Taxi Cab”, which, as Killingsworth says, “adopts an emotional vulnerability and depth.” While such a generalized phrase like that would usually just be critical filler, it actually describes the song’s impact quite well.

The album’s weakest moments are the ones that flash back to the debut album’s lightweight, breezy guitar-led fluff. “Cousins” is all energy, but no substance, while “California English”, despite Pitchfork’s best attempts to read meaning into its lyrics, is the same kind of hyper-ironic bullshit that rubbed me the wrong way on VW’s debut. “Giving Up The Gun” is a more interesting case, with its radio-ready drive and keyboards, but at almost five minutes long, feels unwieldy and in need of some serious editing. Topping all this off, we’ve got the forgettable “Holiday”, which, at barely more than two minutes, could probably have been left off the album without anyone shedding any tears.

Ultimately, Contra is a step-forward for the band, all while awkwardly keeping the other foot planted in their past. It’s a “transitional album” if I’ve ever heard one and I agree with the astute Murphy at MusicOMH when he says that “album number three could well be the classic that they’ve always threatened to make.” They’ve partially excised the demons of their debut and are rapidly finding a unique and compelling voice all their own. Vampire Weekend have risked more with Contra than I think anyone truly expected and are in line to be rewarded handsomely for it.

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