Congratulations by MGMT

We live in a precarious time for album-makers. When I say album makers, I don’t mean all music artists. I don’t mean Lady Gaga or Jay-Z, because even though they are capable of making well-balanced, artistic albums, their records are usually nothing more than a well-sequenced collection of prospective singles and enjoyable filler. MGMT are real album-makers, the kind who know that hits like their synth-poppy “Kids” don’t mean the same thing when you place them along side freak-folk ballads like “Pieces of What” (both off their debut, Oracular Spectacular). On said debut, the band made a clear artistic statement that they wanted to be considered album makers like retro-heroes Pink Floyd or neo-retro-heroes The Flaming Lips. But I doubt most people who heard “Kids” have ever heard “Pieces of What”, because albums are in low demand these days.

On their sophomore attempt, Congratulations, MGMT make a retroactive attempt at sonic unity which they hope will revive interest in the medium of the album as artwork. For that reason they haven’t released any singles, and after hearing the record, none of the 9 tracks seem plausible as singles. They are all amalgams of psychedelic confusion, Andrew VanWyngarden’s notoriously cryptic lyrics, and an attempt at pop breeziness that comes out like a muddled and confused trip. Although anthems remain absent from the setlist, the album does not entice. The opener is a surf-rock odyssey meditation on the difference between drugs and love and the epic “Flash Delirium” trades newfound fame for existential panic. The interplay of these two themes, the difference between the real and the fake, the synthetic and the organic provide the thematic backbone against which these Wesleyan grads throw a mixture of 60’s retro-fitted ideas. What’s amazing is that it often sticks, and they come across as truly genuine fanboys of an era gone by, evoking a nostalgia for the idealistic records of the Beatles and Beach Boys while maintain the indie, hyper-modern sound that made them stars among the youth. This album has a soothing, natural pace that often overrides the shortcoming of tunes like the instrumental “Lady Dada’s Nightmare” which would be unbearable in different context, but in the weird stream-of-consciousness of Congratulations gets by on a cutely humorous title and peaceful dreaminess. You won’t whistle the tunes here and you certainly won’t decipher most of the lyrics, but this record is a sonic blanket in which you can lose yourself for awhile. MGMT retreat into that sonic oblivion in order to reach new listeners, a move that is surely doomed to fail, but for that reason is tinged with the dramatic scope which makes this strange journey worth taking. 4/5

New LCD Soundsystem Tracks Bode Well For New Album

I've been a lil busy for reviews, so I'm giving you a present while I finish up my review of MGMT's new record, Congratulations

LCD Soundsystem's New Album This is Happening is set to release about a month from now, so promotional tracks are coming out. the first single, which is available for purchase, is called "Drunk Girls" and its a fantastic riff of LCD's funky grooves, and social satire. Now you can hear the newwave anthem opener of the new album, "Dance Yrself Clean" and the fantastical freak-jam ballad "Change" which thankfully has nothing to do with Obama (on the surface at least, these are clever little devils). I loved their 2007 album Sound of Silver as one of the very best of the last decade, I'm almost worried by how optimistic these tracks make me for the new album. My brain says it can't be better than the last one, but may ears are saying... well you can check it out here

I'd Rather Watch You

From "Adding Machine: A Musical" which is a current fascination of mine. The original recording is smokier (read: superior), but this girl seems nice too. Plus, I'm a huge advocate for homemade t-shirts.

Contra by Vampire Weekend

The first song on Vampire Weekend’s new record is called “Horchata” where the title beverage serves as a gentle reminder that, no, Ezra Koenig and company haven’t been sweating too much over the economic crises. Instead they’ve been celebrating the newfound fame and success that they rightfully won with their brilliant self-titled debut, an exuberant resurrection of Afro-beat production and snarky lyrics that reminded critics of Graceland and me of Talking Head ’77. So if they’ve been celebrating and making money doing what they love, why is the cinnamon-rice-milk-themed opening cut of Contra so sad? The answer is simple: because Contra is a decidedly and artificially more mature record than its predecessor.

All across the board this is a more focused and production-savvy effort than the debut. We get the beefed up guitars, pounding drums and confident singing of a real rock band. The songs are much longer with hummable choruses and bridge anthems, ska rhythms and M.I.A. samples. On “California English” they even integrate their indie rollick with Auto-tune. That’s right auto-tune! The symbol of misguided pop artists everywhere! This amalgam of new sounds makes the record an often-interesting listen, and with the 80’s inspired “Giving Up the Gun” they could be reaching out for some radio play. This is definitely the kind of larger record which will see them expanding their fan base greatly, and if the first record was too idiosyncratic for you, this one might have some easier points of entry into the band’s aesthetic: “White Sky”, my favorite on the record, has the Paul Simon guitar work and inspired vocal hooks which first drove people to the band while maintaining a steady rhythm and good melodic sense. But I didn’t like the first record because I’ve long been craving the days when Peter Gabriel fans would be vindicated for their belief in the emotive powers of African flutes. I liked it because the lyrics were really clever and the songs were a lot of fun.

While a few songs maintain the fun (“Cousins” in the moment most reminiscent of the first album) most drag in gloomy maturity and the lyric sheet of this record just kind of sucks. “Holiday” and “Taxi Cab” still commit to the band’s detailed descriptions without adding up to anything, the stories just sit there. The songs don’t say much and feel weighty once the spectacle of their production wears away (around the 3rd or 4th listen in my experience), which brings me back to that M.I.A. sample, the one in “Diplomat’s Son”. Why use it? It doesn’t benefit the song in anyway, it doesn’t reflect the themes in the song (something about privilege, sex, regret, and boredom), and it doesn’t go with the sound. Koenig probably decided that M.I.A. is cool and therefore using M.I.A. samples is cool under any circumstances. This kind of lazy attempt at credibility is wrought throughout the record. “Walcott” was a cool song so the band reinterprets it here as “Run”, but again it just doesn’t work, because they miss the point. “Walcott” a great song about cutting free of constraints because the narrator is just as trapped as the person he thinks he’s freeing. In the end neither Ezra nor Walcott could escape Cape Cod, and the song’s frantic melody reflected that tension. “Run” is just a simple construction of phrases that sound clever for awhile. There’s no real insight or conflict in lines like “we mostly work to live until we live to work”.

The record ends with “I Think UR A Contra” which turns an obscure political reference into a poignant moment of regret. “I just wanted you” Koenig laments and really hits home. Funnily enough, it’s the simplest lyric on the record. It goes to show that a beautiful song will always be more powerful than innovative production or oblique lyrics, something they often forget on Contra. They make a lot of pretty noise on this record, but only in these rare moments do they really say something. Older? Certainly. Wiser? If they are, they don’t show it on this go-around. 2.5/5

Blackjazz by Shining

Metal is a genre I’m both compelled to and repulsed by, because while it houses a lot of the most overbearing, ridiculous vacuousness the music industry has to offer, it is also a natural breeding ground for music that is transcendently grand in scale while maintaining dense layers of complex sound, rhythm and melody. Blackjazz the latest offering from Norwegian band Shining is the latter type of metal album, a dark concoction of twisted lyricism with virtuosic touches and complex passages that will continue to reward for dozens of listens. Really there’s no better description for it than the album title itself.

This is not an easy record at all; there are passages that I’m still working through with great tribulation. The songs here aren’t often tight, though they tend to keep structure in the earlier part of the record; “The Madness and the Damage Done” (sure Neil Young’s headbanging along) and “Fisheye” feature hummable choruses and verses whose lyrics you could parse through if you really wanted to. These guys aren’t Mastodon; there isn’t any poetry to be contemplated on this record, but they do give you a saxophone which is often just as good. It’s a great way to ease you into the album, though I promise the tracks compromise none of their mire for accessibility.

And then there are the jams. We’re talking big, monstrous jams that only a Nordic metal band can get away with and not be called pretentious or indulgent (“Blackjazz Deathtrance”), a ridiculous King Crimson cover that improves on the original, and reprises! Reprises! How they make it all hold up for almost an hour is a testament to brilliant musicianship. This isn’t Metallica, its neither tuneful enough nor boring enough, it’s more like a demon possessed Coltrane’s great A Love Supreme and made it writhe with a cathartic fury that modern listeners can find fresh and relevant. If Blackjazz doesn’t scare you away, it’ll enthrall you for a good long while. 4/5

Realism by The Magnetic Fields

The Magnetic Fields’ Stephen Merritt is a joker so before the lyrics even begin he gets his three biggest laughs out of the way: the album’s title in association with a band notorious for insincerity and cynicism, the album’s title in association with a female silhouette on the cover as direct juxtaposition to the male silhouette on the band’s previous album Distortion, and the album’s title in association with its sonic theme of American folk music and acoustic accompaniment (as if either have anything to do with realism). As per usual he is obviously crafting an obtuse album where every word matters, where the song about the ex-lovers has nothing to do with love and the song about paint has everything to do with it. In its 35 minutes, Realism, creates the least realistic and perhaps coldest record Merritt has ever made. It’s the sound of someone getting so invested in the lie they’re telling that they start to believe it themselves.

Take “Better Things” one of the standouts here, which regales a myriad of mythological creatures before floating into the CSN chorus ”I have heard the singing of real birds/ Not those absurd birds that simply everyone has heard”. It shows what fools we are in love and in music. Those 69 Songs aren’t about love at all, realism isn’t real. We Are Having a Hootenanny” is a great match.com send up, and the typically ridiculous “Seduced and Abandoned” is required listening for those who think Twilight: New Moon is the epitome of romanticism. All these songs have a brilliant slant, which Merritt delivers in his apathetic bass, playing with perspective, the ideas of truth, often brilliantly but unnecessarily when the tunes don’t hold up. “Walk a Lonely Road” and “From A Sinking Boat” both regale heartbreak in some of the laziest and least interesting tunes Merritt has written. Really the novelties here are the standouts and none are as powerful as about 45 of the 69 Love Songs. This is an album that makes you think more than it makes you feel, and most of that thinking comes from the cover art. To be fair, I’ll thinking about those male-female silhouettes for a long time. Distortion and Realism are male and female respectively; he certainly makes you work for it. It is usually better than this. 3/5

Snakes for the Divine by High On Fire

If you love metal, you could easily ponder the heaviness, incredible hooks, the brilliant speed and drugging sludge of this latest effort for a long time. If you hate metal, you might reflect that at least this is more succinct and cohesive than most of the stuff you’ve heard and, of course, less cartoonish than the faux-metal they peddle out to schoolchildren. If, like me, you have a few metal albums you return to (Remission,Reign in Blood,Master of Puppets when I’m feeling sassy ) but feel ambivalent about the step-child genre of pop music, you might ask: so what? These guys, for all their rock, won’t be able to tell you. Their job is to play, not to signify, and they do their job well. 2.5/5

Volume 2 by She & Him

She (Zooey Deschanel, 500 Days of Summer) is the indie chanteuse who is transforming a fledgling acting career into a serious acting career/fledgling music career with the help of Him (singer-songwriter M.Ward) who is undeniably the more talented one (see Post-War and Hold Time), but is less integral to Volume Two and for all his pathetic sensibility the less interesting of the two. Yes, Him’s production notes, guitar work, and occasional harmonies help define the sound of this recording, making it more interesting than your average folkie offering, but these are Zooey’s songs (two covers, both well-chosen) in Zooey’s voice (over-Appalachian, under-diverse, she can’t muster up a scream?), which means we must grapple with who She is.

Her film performances are so still and quiet - and so much intrinsically linked to her big-eyed charm - that it’s hard to pin whether they are understated or simply lazy. The record is much the same way: a harmonious blend of 60’s and 70’s-lite sounds which takes you away on a breezy vacation without ever really reminding you of why you left in the first place. Deschanel’s songs bounce melodically, and offer lines that are compact and appropriate for her aesthetic (“I’ve gotten over it, over and over again”) playing gentle puns against romantic insight. Her songs rarely come across sincere however: “Home” is a goofy come-on that turns a harp and dream-like vocal distortion into the crudely-drawn fantasy that I’m sure many people have of the singer. It seems like She knows what people want from her and is simply playing into that hand (don't even get me started on the closing number). She conceals her flaws, wanting to be liked, but ultimately people are likeable for their flaws. PJ Harvey is aggressive, Liz Phair is slutty, Brian Wilson is controlling: that’s kinda what’s great about them, and on their records they reckon with those traits. While things like “Thieves”, “In the Sun” and “Brand New Shoes” sport great hooks, they all play for sympathy.

What makes me question the lyrics is the same thing that makes me question the sound of the record itself. This isn’t a full-on cultural renaissance of 60’s harmonics like The La’s tried to be; it’s a charming if dangerous, attempt to exploit nostalgic romanticism for cash, fame, and all that jazz. Zooey’s album is a charming diversion from the real world of human relationships, a diverting fling that’ll tap your toes and flutter your heart, but she’s not the kind of girl you want to settle down with. 3/5

Just In Case Anybody Has Forgotten the Prioreties in Here

Reminds me of so many real talks in my own emotional life:

Quarantine the Past by Pavement

A best-of for a band that broke into the Billboard Top 200 once and the Billboard Top 150 never, but is nonetheless one of the most essential American bands of them all. Poets who thought they were rockstars, they were meaner than Green Day, funnier that Nirvana, and cooler than Radiohead. They made irony sincere and sincerity ironic all in a ghostly jam of nostalgic riffs and familial haze. Sure you should probably just buy the five albums they made in their short life (If you don’t own the first two, stop reading this and buy them now.), but this contains EP tracks and such goodies and you can play it start to finish and love every song. That’s 23 songs you can cherish forever for the price of Ke$ha’s new record. 5/5

Wu-Massacre by Ghostface Killah, Method Man, and Raekwon

The reason the first Wu-Tang record will always be the best is that it’s the only one which (for obvious reasons) doesn’t require any back-catalog knowledge for the listener to get all the jokes and references, so while these three Killer Bees are almost incapable of being mediocre, let alone bad, on record, this thirty-minute sampler is obviously supplemental to a body of work that incorporates some of the best records in rap. Fishscale, Liquid Swords, Only Built For Cuban Linx Pt. 2, and of course the timeless debut are all more accomplished, about twice as long, and half as expensive. If you dig those grooves though, adding this to your collection can’t hurt. 3/5

New Amerykah Part 2 (Return of the Ankh) by Erykah Badu

New Amerykah Part II (Return of the Ankh) by Erykah Badu
The Ankh, also known as key of life, the key of the Nile or crux ansata, was the Egyptian hieroglyphic character that read "eternal life". Egyptian gods are often portrayed carrying it by its loop, or bearing one in each hand, arms crossed over their chest. (Thanks Wiki!)
Erykah Badu has drawn some attention recently over the music video to this album’s first single, “Window Seat”, in which she strolls through the streets of Dallas, slowly removing her clothing until she is shot and falls to the concrete dead, evoking the specter of JFK’s gruesome assassination. In her blending of Neo-Soul beats, and hazy 70’s funk production, her P-Funk croon Badu attempts to use her music as a way of exercising spiritual demons from the past and putting them in relevant context for listeners today. An admirable task, and an admittedly difficult one which she only occasionally pulls off with the grace and dexterity of contemporaries like D’Angelo, Maxwell, and baby-daddy Andre 3000.

This follow up to Pt 1, which I haven’t heard and I think I would enjoy, is rumination about love and relationships accented by her sharp, smoky voice. And while I usually agree with her about love (It’s hard!), I disagree with her about funk. George Clinton believed that if you moved your ass, you freed your mind, where as Badu seems to want to sedate both. The tinkerings of this album are often beautiful, but often sedate, caught in hazy loops which don’t enhance the lyrical concept of this work and, frankly, make the songs kinda boring. “Window Seat” is good rainy day listening and instrumental “Incense” reminds me of my beloved blaxploitation soundtracks but the songs don’t really move. She goes for transcendence but ends up lost in her own earthiness not understanding that that’s the only place transcendence ever goes. It’s tragic, but unintentionally so.

This is an enjoyable retro-fitted record that subverts some of my favorite music, but the funk Badu subverts is jagged and rough, twisting the listener in unexpected directions taunting you with complex rhythms that made you want to dance but are bafflingly asymmetrical. You see, the big joke is that there is no Ankh; there are just asses, brains, and heartbeats. Joke’s on her. 2.5/5

First Quarter Report

The year’s a quarter over and I’m elated so far. These are my favorite records and songs so far.

Albums!
1. Have On On Me by Joanna Newsom
2. Transference by Spoon
3. Odd Blood by Yeasayer
4. The Monitor by Titus Andronicus

Songs!
1. “Drunk Girls” by LCD Soundsystem
2. “Go Long” by Joanna Newsom
3. “Rhinestone Eyes” by Gorillaz
4. “Flash Delirium” by MGMT

First Post

I was doing these on Facebook Every Sunday. I wanna do them here now.