Archive | March, 2011

Day 11: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – Belong

11 Mar

Belong

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart are streaming their upcoming album for free on their site. Belong, the band’s sophomore effort, officially comes out on the 29th of this month, but for some reason, they’re letting us hear it a little early.  I’m certainly not complaining.

Well, The Pains are back, and doing what they do best.  On Belong, they stay true to the sound that made their self-titled debut so great. Themes of love, lust, and heartbreak abound throughout the album, as The Pains stick with what they know best.  Distorted guitars? Check.  Dreamy vocals? For sure.  Abundance of synthesizers?  Oh yeah, that’s there.

The band does make a few attempts at slower songs on this album, specifically on Anne With an E and Even in Dreams. They work.  Well.  You can still tell that it’s the same band that has made great up-tempo tracks like Contender and This Love is Fucking Right!, as the dreamy guitars and melodramatic lyrics are still there in full force.  The speed of the songs is just turned down a little, leading to a ballad…or as close to a ballad as a fringe-shoegaze band can get.

Ultimately, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart have put together another solid album.  At the moment, I like it better than their debut, but that could be because I’m excited to hear some new material from them.  Regardless, even after the excitement wears off, I’m sure that I will still hold this album in high regard.  It seems that with Belong, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart have cemented themselves as a force to be reckoned with in today’s music scene.

Stream Belong in its entirety, legally, here.

Day 10: Freelance Whales – Weathervanes

10 Mar

Hannah

What is it about the banjo? That hillbilly instrument makes everything sound better, Freelance Whales included.  Not that they need it, though.  Weathervanes sounds a bit like Illinois-era Sufjan Stevens mixed with the Postal Service, which is definitely a good thing.

With Weathervanes, Freelance Whales were able to pull something special off.  They successfully mixed the sensitive instrumentals and vocals of folk music with the forceful, rhythmic bleeps and bloops of electronic music, and managed to make a sound all their own.

Freelance Whales really shine on their upbeat, fast-tempo songs.  Tracks like Hannah, Generator ^ First Floor, and Starring are definitely standouts on the album.  These songs are where that mix of electronic and folk sounds really get to show off.  Banjo and synths blend beautifully, with some electric guitar riffs thrown in there for good measure.

That’s not to say that Freelance Whales can’t handle a slower song either.  While listening to the album, I was thinking “this sounds a bit like Sufjan” early on, but the song Broken House is where I knew that Sufjy must have influenced them quite a bit.  I couldn’t stop thinking of Casimir Pulaski Day while listening to that song.  I think it’s the delivery of the vocals—a higher pitch, sung very calmly, but very passionately.

Ultimately, Freelance Whales only fall flat a few times, on tracks like Ghosting and The Great Estates. These songs are pretty boring and repetitive, and tend to go on for a bit too long.  These are easily overlooked, though, when the rest of the album is considered.

Day 9: Dananananaykroyd – Hey Everyone

9 Mar

Black Wax

What the hell did I just listen to?  Seriously.  I’m confused.  There were breakdowns, handclaps, screams, group chants, and so many other things that shouldn’t go together.  On top of all that, the band’s name is Dananananaykroyd.  This all lead to a fairly confusing album listening.  For the sake of giving things unnecessary labels, I’m going to call this post-indie-hardcore-punk-pop.  I couldn’t possibly narrow it down any further than that.

Los Campesinos! used to link to Dananananaykroyd’s site from their blog, and that’s how I originally found the band.  I googled their ridiculous name, and listened to Black Wax, a single of theirs.  I understood why LC! liked these guys.  At first listen, they have a similarly happy sound. That initial listening of Black Wax showed promise, but it didn’t do a very good job of preparing me for the attack on the ears that is Dananananaykroyd’s Hey Everyone.

Honestly, I can’t tell you if I like the album just yet. While listening to the album, I was thinking “what the crap is going on?” or “why does this indie-pop song have a breakdown?” pretty much the entire time.  There was just so much going on musically, that I’m going to have to give it a few more listens before making a call.  All I can say right now is that Hey Everyone is, at the very least, a unique album.  Dananananaykroyd merge so many different aspects of the many variations of rock music together, that I’m struggling to form an opinion on it at the moment.  One thing’s for sure, I’m either going to end up loving it or hating it.

Day 8: David Bowie – The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

8 Mar

Suffragete City

I keep up with today’s indie music.  I try to, at least.  I’ll be the first to admit though, that my knowledge on music that was made before the nineties is insufficient.  That’s why I’ll be letting my dad pick an album for me to listen to once a week.  He’s the type of guy who says “I have that on vinyl.” to pretty much every old song that we hear on the radio, so I believe he’s more than qualified for this.

For this first week, mi padre picked Ziggy Stardust by Bowie.  The only song by Bowie that I really knew before this was Suffragette City, due to the countless hours that I used to spend playing Rock Band.  That had to change.

I understand why the album has remained so popular over the years–it’s really fun to listen to!  It’s pretty much your standard rock music, with a few unexpected instruments thrown in now and then (sax, harpsichord) and a singer with a great, distinct, unique voice.

The thing that sticks out the most about this album is definitely Bowie’s voice.  I listen to so many bands with awful singers, that it’s nice to hear someone with pipes every now and then.  You don’t need a good voice to make good music, but it can’t hurt.

Apparently, there’s some kind of story attached with this album.  I think it’s about aliens teaching humans about peace and love and then getting killed or something…obviously, I wasn’t able to pick up on the plot of this album too well.  If it really is there, it’s nothing like…let’s say Hospice by the Antlers, where you get slapped in the face numerous times with the story line.  You don’t really need to understand a story or theme to enjoy this album, fortunately.  It’s just all-around solid rock music, which is better without a plot.

Wham bam thank you mam.

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Day 7: Black Lips – Good Bad Not Evil

7 Mar

Bad Kids

White people playing blues-rock is something that I tend to stay away from.  The White Stripes conquered the genre, and to me, everyone else sounds like a phoned-in rip-off of Jack and Meg.  It seems like I’m the only person in the world with this mind-set because I can’t find anyone else who dislikes the Black Keys, Black Lips, or any other color-noun blues-rock band.   Oh well.

Good Not Evil by Black Lips is just more of the same white noise to me.  And honestly, lots of this stuff is just stupid.  For example, on the track Navajo, Cole Alexander turns a story of falling in love with an Indian girl into a chance to name as many Indian tribes as he can.  Fortunately for me, only one of the songs on Good Not Evil surpasses the three-minute mark (and that doesn’t really count because it’s that oh-so-original trick where a band puts a secret song at the end of the last song), which leaves the album at a considerably short 36 minutes.  That’s a thing that people like about Black Lips, I guess.  They start it up fast, get to the point, then break it down quickly.  I can get behind a band that does this, but only if the resulting music is good.

There is one redeeming thing about this album, though.  While I’ll probably avoid most things by the Black Lips for the remainder of their existence, there’s a good chance that I’ll come back to the song Bad Kids.  It’s like nothing else on the album, with a faster tempo than most songs, and what I’m pretty sure is a glockenspiel being played in the background.  Those 2-minutes and 7-seconds were the only ones that I enjoyed while listening to this album.

Day 6: American Football – American Football

6 Mar

Never Meant

I’m a huge fan of Cap’n Jazz, a former band of American Football singer Mike Kinsella.  Cap’n Jazz were pioneers of post-hardcore, and turned it into the emotional, screamy, angry genre that we know today.  Because of the inclusion of Kinsella in American Football, I expected more of the same.  I was geared up to hear some pure, uncut, teen angst, delivered in the form of screams, sloppy melodies, and low quality recordings.  Naturally, I was surprised (and a little disappointed) to hear some tight instrumentation and comparatively calmer vocals.  I have to assess this album on its own, and completely forget the masterpiece that is Cap’n Jazz’s Analphabetapolothology while doing so.

Honestly, I was bored throughout the duration of American Football.  This album would have failed to hold my interest even if I had never heard of Cap’n Jazz before.  The songs all seem to go on forever, with fairly uninteresting guitars in the background.  The intricate drum beats do help many of the songs out a bit, but never enough for me to really enjoy what I am listening to.  Maybe I need to listen to the lyrics a little more closely.  I’ve gathered that the album is mainly about all of your friends leaving for college, so the lyrics should apply to me.  Lyrics alone aren’t enough to hold an album up, though.  You can have the strongest words in the world lined up, but with boring, repetitive instrumentation behind them, they’re just going to fall flat.

Lot’s of people claim that they didn’t like American Football on their first listen either, but it became one of their favorite albums ever.  Who knows, that could happen to me.  I plan on giving it another chance, but I don’t think I could ever see this as a favorite album.

“That’s life, a so-so show.”

-American Football – Stay Home

Day 5: Braids – Native Speaker

5 Mar

Lemonade

Braids is one of those bands that I just stumbled upon.  I was looking for a show to go to last Saturday, and this band was opening for Baths.  The show ended up selling out, leaving me without a ticket, so I just got around to listening to their album.   It’s funny to me how I always seem to find great music by chance.  I had never heard of this band, knew nothing about them, and had never read a review before I listened to Native Speaker. Honestly, this is how I prefer to go about listening to new music.  If I don’t have any preconceived notions, I’m open to a lot more.  It’s much more likely that I’ll be judging the music based only on how I feel about it, as opposed to the Critical Reception section on the album’s Wikipedia page.

Anyway.  The album.

So this album kind of put me in a trance.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s great when an album can do that to me, but it does make it a little hard to describe musically.  My god Carles would describe this as bleepy-bloop core, and that’s about as close as I can get.  Braids create a dreamy sound, with a liberal use of echo on vocals, and a copious amount of synthesizers.  Because I just zoned out during the album, I can’t pinpoint a song that sticks out as especially brilliant among the rest, which says something about the album as a whole: it’s all good.  With only seven songs—granted, only two are under four minutes in length—Braids create a calm, relaxing sound, that I definitely wish I had gotten to see live. Oh well, if they keep making music like this, I’m sure they’ll be back.

Day 4: Andrew Jackson Jihad – People Who Can Eat People are the Luckiest People in the World

4 Mar

Rejoice

Damn.  Sean Bonnette is quite the lyricist.  In this album alone, he manages to touch on murder, cannibalism, arson, and what I’m sure are a few other morbid topics that I haven’t picked up on–all in under 26 minutes.  I’ve heard good things about AJJ for years now, but for some reason, I never got around to listening to them before this.  I’m kicking myself for that now.  Fortunately, Bonette has a couple of Chicago shows coming up that I’ll be able to make.

AJJ have a very unique sound.  They’re described as folk-punk, which I guess is pretty accurate.  Aspects from both of those genres are evident on People… The instruments–an upright bass and an acoustic guitar–represent the folk side, while the destructive, angry lyrics show the duo’s punk side.  They pay their dues to folk lyrics, though, especially on the awesome Survival Song. After throwing in a couple of lines from the Dust Bowl classic Do Re Mi–with tongue in cheek–Bonette shouts “And we totally ripped off a man named Woody Guthrie/And I bought a restaurant for his son named Alice/And I fed false information to the audience/And that’s how I learned how to survive.”

This album helped me figure out what I like most in music: misleadingly happy instrumentals and musical arrangements, with unconventional, melodramatic lyrics (i.e. Los Campesinos!, a few Titus Andronicus songs).  These traits are hard to come by, so when I find a group that exhibits them, I’m going to latch on.  Which means there will be a whole lot of Andrew Jackson Jihad in my future.

Day 3: Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin – Broom

3 Mar

Pangea

I base a lot of the music that I try out on my last.fm recommendations.  Sometimes, they come through.  Other times, it fails spectacularly.  One can’t expect a music-based algorithm on the internet–a free one no less–to be perfect.  Anyway, when I saw the ridiculous name “Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin” listed on my recommendation page, I knew that I would have to give them a try.

It’s unfortunate that I’ve stumbled upon this band before Spring has had the time to go into full force.  SSLYBY’s mellow, indie-rock will probably fall more pleasantly on my ears when there’s no longer snow on the ground, when puffy down coats are no longer necessary, and when plaid shorts take over for jeans.

This is something that I can definitely see myself listening to in a few months.  There’s no question that Broom is a good album, with quite a few songs that I liked on this initial listen.  The jangly guitars and simple drum beats work well together, and Philip Dickey’s bored, slightly muffled voice leads to a very relaxed, low-key sound.

The problem is, I’m not in a relaxed, low-key mindset at the moment.  Chances are, I won’t be in that mindset until my last final exam is over.  On Friday, June 10.  At 1:40 pm.  In 103 days.  When that time comes around, I’m sure that I’ll be able to appreciate this album.  For now, though,angry, loud, and fast music is what I need.  Fortunately, I’ll be listening to Andrew Jackson Jihad tomorrow.

Day 2: Baths – Cerulean

2 Mar

Aminals

Before listening to Cerulean, I had literally never heard anything by Baths before.  So when the album opened with some harmonious, angelic singing at the beginning of Apologetic Shoulderblades, I thought to myself “Oh no, is this a Grizzly Bear rip off?  Am I really going to have to start up this blog with two albums that I don’t like?” That’s why I was so pleased when a sample of someone saying “What the fuck?” interrupted the heavenly harmony.  Sure enough, those obnoxious vocals were chopped and altered from that point forward, with a great beat behind them.  It’s as if Will Wiesenfeld—the man behind Baths—is letting me know that he’s nothing at all like Grizzly Bear.

The rest of the album is pretty solid as well.  Wiesenfeld has definitely created a unique sound, one that I’m not entirely sure how to describe accurately. . . Maybe a mix of Local Natives and Passion Pit? That’s about as close as I can get. It’s electronic, and most of the up-tempo tracks have great beats behind them.  One thing’s for sure, you’ll have fun listening to this album.

My main problem with Cerulean is the large amount of filler.  It’s not Sleigh Bells filler, where the band was obviously struggling to put together enough songs for an album—there are 14 songs in total.  The album is long, too, clocking in at over 50 minutes.  It’s not that I don’t have the attention span for long albums, it’s just that I don’t see the need for some songs, like Rafting Starlight Everglades and Rain Smell, two objectively boring songs.

Overall though, I do like this album.  Wiesenfeld has talent, and a unique sound that I would love to hear more of.

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