Playing Catch-Up, Part 3

Artist: Gossip

Album: Music For Men

Year: 2009

Grade: 3.5 pretzels

Before reviewing Music For Men, I need to impress upon people the sheer, explosive energy of Gossip’s live performances. If you ever get a chance to see them live, do not hesitate to go. Do whatever you can to get tickets. Maul people, if you have to. Whether you’re a big fan of their music or not, Gossip are just way too fun to miss live. Beth Ditto’s world-quaking voice has no comparison and the rock-solid grooves the band locks into make not dancing an impossibility. This is music that compels you to move, in whatever way you feel appropriate, doing whatever it can to keep you from standing still. I bring all this up for one very important reason: Music For Men doesn’t even capture a tenth of this energy.

Not that the songs aren’t there. “Love Long Distance”, with that insidious little piano riff, is a top-notch, single-worthy track. The stomping “Pop Goes The World” is a fantastic dance-oriented jam. Topping everything off is “Heavy Cross”, a ferocious, growling beast that features guitar leaping from tension-building scratches to a completely unhinged chorus riff. While they may not have the fire of “Standing In The Way Of Control”, the song that put Gossip on the map, at least 80% of these songs are worthy additions to the Gossip songbook. They’ve just had all their fangs removed by the production.

The man I’m choosing to blame is producer-to-the-stars Rick Rubin (his clients have included the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Beastie Boys and Slayer, to name only a few). Thanks to Rubin’s influence, Music For Men is Gossip’s first major-label release. However, his production is terrifyingly slick, polished and smooth. Gossip are a band that celebrate and flaunt what others would call flaws, so a certain level of gritty audio mixing is appropriate. On this new album, all those thrilling rough edges are sand-blasted away to make the band more radio-friendly. The results are songs like “Dimestore Diamond” and “Men In Love”, which sound thin and slightly empty. Guitarist Brace Paine isn’t given the chance to dominate these songs the way he does live, removing one of the most exciting and necessary elements in Gossip’s music.

The upside to all this is that Hannah Blilie’s drums are suddenly pushed to the forefront, in all their chugging, unstoppable glory. The rhythm in these songs is just insane. The tense, angular “Vertical Rhythm” shows the subtle end of the band’s spectrum. Rubin’s production is actually very appropriate for these slow-burning numbers. Sadly, “Heavy Cross” is alone when it comes to sheer rocking power. Gossip are at their strongest when Ditto and co. are at their most brazen. This is a band who challenges our perceptions of human sexuality on paper (gay and lesbian themes dominate the lyrics) and who challenges our perceptions of beauty onstage (Ditto is quite a large woman, Paine has a penchant for dressing in bondage gear and Blilie rocks a very androgynous look. Just check out that cover). They need to tear the roof down if the song demands it and Rubin’s toothless production takes too much of the danger and fun out of an exciting band.

Playing Catch-Up, Part 2

Artist: Volcano Choir

Album: Unmap

Year: 2009

Grade: 3 pretzels

Volcano Choir’s Unmap is another critically lauded album that has evaded me for some time now. Volcano Choir is less of a full band and more of a collaboration between the band Collections Of Colonies Of Bees (don’t worry, I’ve never heard of them either) and Justin Vernon, better known as Bon Iver, who’s For Emma, Forever Ago has highlighted Best Of The Year charts for the past two years (due to two separate releases). All these musicians are Wisconsin natives and together they’ve created an album that fits nicely into the charmingly folky reputation people associate with the Cheese State.

Or does it? While Vernon’s warm, hushed vocals set a tone of fire-side strumming and acoustic pleasantness, when you actually dig in and listen to Unmap, you realize how unusual this album really ended up being. “Island, IS” seems like a lilting little acoustic ditty until you notice the subtle keyboards squeaking in the background. “Mbira In The Morass” is much more obvious in its strangeness, as a variety of non-traditional percussive elements clank and chime away, while Vernon’s voice takes on a much more angular tone. The minute-long “Cool Knowledge” gets ripped apart halfway through by some thudding drums. “Still” actually has Auto-Tuned vocals! You wish I was kidding about that.

Unmap is secretly a very experimental record. The risks the musicians are taking are quite subtle (most of the time, Auto-Tune notwithstanding), but at least one detailed listen reveals the odd sonic complexity oozing right beneath the surface. Mercifully, few of these elements feel intentionally “challenging,” in that cerebral, confrontational kind of way. They mostly just sound like off-the-wall ideas that someone thought sounded really good within the context of the song.

Which brings us to the album’s greatest flaw. While Unmap has all these great, unusual touches, they’re grafted onto a set of songs that go virtually nowhere. Either they end up too short to stretch out completely or they just wander on for six minutes until you’re completely sick of them, no matter how many soup cans they’re using for drums. While unintelligible lyrics aren’t a bad thing in the abstract, here, they just underscore the frustrating lack of musical solid ground for the listener to stand on. Unmap is a strange sonic soup of an album, with unexpected musical elements occasionally floating through a broth of folky traditionalism. There are tasty moments, but you end up a bit frustrated once you’ve eaten all the substance and you’re left a bowlful of boring music to slurp down.

Playing Catch-Up, Part 1

Artist: Neon Indian

Album: Psychic Chasms

Year: 2009

Grade: 2.5 pretzels

As much as I try to keep up with the latest exciting or buzzed-about releases, things do occasionally slip through the cracks or escape my notice. One of these is Neon Indian’s Psychic Chasms, which has been floating around for about a month now. The usual suspects (Pitchfork and the blog community) have lavished this album with praise, so it’s about time I weighed in with my own opinions.

First of all, before you can talk about the album itself, you have to talk about “Deadbeat Summer”, the album’s lead single and all-around calling card. In and of itself, “Deadbeat Summer” is a wonderfully blissed-out little nugget of indie-pop, bouncing and gurgling along without a care in the world. If I heard this song in, say, the middle of July, I’m sure I’d be listening to it about eighty times per day. Now that we’re in the middle of November and I’m greeted by the biting New England wind every time I walk out the door, it’s a bit of a different experience, but the song’s cheerfulness still shines through.

The problem with Psychic Chasms is that it fails to sound like anything more than a brightly-colored vehicle for this one great song. The synthy dance-jam “Terminally Chill” comes the closest to greatness in its own right, but the rest of the album just sounds way too thin and undercooked. There are only about four complete songs here, with the rest of the album dedicated to sonic soundscapes and sketches that might have grown into something more interesting, if given the time. Yet, here they are on Psychic Chasms, sent out into the world long before they’re ready to face the light of day.

Neon Indian’s primary composer, Alan Palomo, clearly has a yearning for the expansively electronic music of the mid-80s. Shades of New Order are all over the album, along with some New Romantic sparkle and even some bubblegum pop air-headedness. Despite the variety of negative connatotaions we associate with those genres, Neon Indian have boiled them down into something that is both pleasantly nostalgic and quite modern. The idea and the sound they’re working with seems like a lot of fun. If only there were a few more actual songs amid all the burbling keyboards and springy drum machine loops. “Deadbeat Summer” is only the first step. Psychic Chasms just doesn’t follow through on that single song’s promise.

Keepin' Up The Good Work

Artist: Atlas Sound

Album: Logos

Year: 2009

Grade: 3.5 pretzels

I was late to jump on the Deerhunter bandwagon. While various chunks of the music community immediately attached themselves to the Atlanta-based band’s dreamy, meandering sound, it took me a couple of years (and a very impressive live show) to see the quality songwriting hiding beneath all the shoegaze-lite guitar strumming. Over the past six months, I’ve cracked one of the many musical mysteries I’ve been trying to solve, meaning this is the perfect time for me to hear Logos, the second solo album from Deerhunter’s frontman, Bradford Cox.

Again recorded under the moniker Atlas Sound, Logos is a considerably more coherent and unified work than last year’s Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel. Even more organic and babbling than Deerhunter, Cox’s solo songs strip away most of the shimmering guitars in favor of warm acoustic guitar strumming, supplemented by layered keyboards and minimal, efficient drumming. This fairly skeletal sound reveals the songs’ odd twists and turns, featuring all kinds of pleasantly atonal details floating through the mix.

Of course, the downside to this style (and all of Deerhunter’s work, for that matter), is that the songs can get so wispy that they threaten to float right out the window. Roughly half of Logos compensates for this with winning melodies or other compelling elements, but “Kid Klimax” or “Criminals” will pass by unnoticed if you’re not careful. The songs aren’t exactly boring, but they don’t draw attention to themselves. The album’s highest points, including the endlessly hummable “Sheila” and the squelchy “Walkabout” (featuring Animal Collective’s Noah Lennox), are the songs that force the listener to interact with them in some way.

Logos is very good by the usual solo album standards. It has its own distinctive qualities that separate it from Cox’s work in Deerhunter, while still retaining enough similarities that fans should embrace it pretty much wholeheartedly. It also features a handful of truly memorable songs, which rank among some of the most enjoyable indie pop in years. The other songs do let the album down somewhat, but I’m not going to kick the proverbial gift horse in the mouth, here. “Walkabout” alone justifies this album’s existence and it’s nice to see Cox maintain his insanely rapid rate of new music releases.

Some Songs Are Better Than Others

Artist: Morrissey

Album: Swords

Year: 2009

Grade: 3 pretzels

2009 was an important year for Morrissey. First of all, everyone's favorite curmudgeon turned fifty back in May (presumably, he had an “unhappy birthday”). However, second and more importantly, he released Years Of Refusal in February, a strong, assured album that capped a tremendous comeback decade for Moz. Combined with You Are The Quarry (2004) and Ringleader Of The Tormentors (2006), Morrissey’s work these past ten years has reassured the world that the Mozfather isn’t fading into obscurity as he ages. Not unlike Nick Cave, who is still rocking hard at fifty-one, Morrissey is entering his fourth decade in the music industry on a very strong note.

However, as the last dregs of the 2000s float around, Morrissey is releasing one final album, Swords, compiling the assorted b-sides that accompanied his past three albums. This makes sense on a number of levels. For one, those three albums will always be grouped together by music historians, hopefully as Morrissey’s “renaissance period.” Having all their outtakes grouped together is convenient for fans and underlines the albums’ trilogy-like status. Morrissey has also established a precedent for releasing compilation albums, giving his fans more and more of the moody babble and anti-social moaning they love so much (I say that with affection, Moz). Finally, if nothing else, it gives the world more of Morrissey’s amazing song-titles.

I mean, really, how does this man come up with this stuff? “If You Don’t Like Me, Don’t Look At Me”? “Friday Mourning”? Perhaps best of all, Swords offers up “Don’t Make Fun Of Daddy’s Voice”. While the actual track is a lackluster guitar cruncher marred by some misplaced keyboards, just reading that song title makes me grin (an experience foreign to Morrissey himself). As is occasionally the case with Moz, the idea is better than the actual execution and most of the songs here are better quips than they are songs. However, there’s nothing truly abysmal, with the possible exception of the shapeless “Sweetie-Pie”. These are b-sides and they sound the part. They would have dragged any album down a bit, but they’re still interesting to those deeply interested in Moz’s craft and bottomless depth for musical moping.

Swords doesn’t have too much value for casual Morrissey fans (although a fiery cover of Bowie’s “Drive-In Saturday” is nothing short of awesome). Those interested in buying into the cult of Mozzer are encouraged to pick up his aforementioned three proper albums of the decade, along with his very solid work from the early 90s. Once you’ve thoroughly absorbed those basics, you should be ready to dive into Swords, which features a less polished, but still rewarding side to the man’s songwriting.