But I Was There: The Wombats/The Squares @ Cinespace, 8/7/07

Guaranteed to leave your memory less than "Crystal" clear (GET IT?!??!)

The Squares, "Bottle Me Up" (album version) - Long-time readers - a category which, in relation to this site, refers to anyone who's been reading longer than since, like, February - may remember a long, rambly (moreso than usual, even) post I wrote about my friend Shaun's band the Squares - or, rather, about basically everything EXCEPT the Squares. It's not that they were a bad band, but when it came to their music, them crazy kids were so clearly (a) working in a musical idiom (poppy emo) that tends to leave yr boy kinda flat and (b) in desperate, pleading need of tightening up their sound that I was left with no choice but to do the critical fan dance. That, however, was several squillion months ago; in the interim, they cut their drummer loose, replaced him with some new dude they found on Craigslist, somehow got themselves booked as the opening act for the Wombats' gig at Cinespace on Tuesday night, and then proceeded to blow my fucking mind with just how good they've gotten since their last appearance in this space. I mean, I still wouldn't put them in the same echelon as Escort or Explorer's Club or the Procession when we're setting up the list of up-and-coming American indie-rock royalty, but man oh man did they ever get good. I mean, hell, I've only been waiting for nine months to see the Wombats, but thanks to the Squares (and the gallons of promotional vodka I poured down my throat) I barely have anything to say about them.

Well, okay, that's not true. The Wombats were, of course, fun as fuck, although anything less from a band who put out an album as riotously enjoyable as Girls, Boys, & Marsupials (an album which I'm still loving almost as much all these months after getting it - outside of the Long Blondes' Someone To Drive You Home, I'm hard-pressed to think of a nu-Britpop album with a comparable shelf-life) would be unacceptable. I missed a few songs looking for a bathroom in which to relieve myself of some of the aforementioned free vodka so I may have missed them playing "Lost in the Post", but other than that they kept their set lean, mean, and with a definite ebb and flow to it - hell, they kicked things off with "Girls, Boys, & Marsupials" (aka the acapella album-closer) seemingly as a piss-take, although it did do a fine job of building anticipation for the rocking-er moments yet to come. And boy did they ever come; when the 'bats launched into "Moving To New York", you could practically hear the audience's collective interest come to a knife-sharp point, no mean feat considering that we're talking about a TUESDAY AT CINESPACE here - it takes one hell of a band to get a room full of label reps to stop trading war stories from lining up to buy an iPhone, but damned if the Wombats didn't pull it off.

Unfortunately, it has to be said that in doing so, they didn't really offer up anything which couldn't be gleaned just as easily from the album. That's not a dis, of course - believe me, there's plenty of bands who I can only wish were good enough to be as good as their recorded stuff, especially when the stuff in question is as indisputably top-shelf as Girls, Boys & Marsupials - but it did put them at something of a competitive disadvantage when trying to seize the crown from the Squares, who turned in an eye-opening set for anyone who'd ever come in contact with their music previously. I really actually feel kinda bad foaming at the mouth about the salutary effects of the Squares replacing their drummer given how much of said drummer's beer I've drunk over the years at Shaun's house parties, but facts are fuckin' facts: the simple act of shoring up one pillar of their rhythm section seems to have galvanized both of the other Squares into getting their shit into lockstep formation, and the end result is just a quantum leap in the right direction. For one thing, given their predilection for glossy, prefab indie-pop, the ability to keep rigidly to a beat is of paramount importance; this is, after all, a band that worships at the feet of the Cars, and I think we can all agree that "Shake It Up" would be exponentially less satisfying if David Robinson had gone slippin' and slidin' all over the place. More crucially, though, having a reliable rhythm section frees Shaun's vocals from being forced to give their songs their shape. Shaun's not a bad singer, but he does have one of those idiosyncratic thin indie yelping timbres to his voice which works about eleven thousand times better complementing the rest of the track as opposed to leading it by the nose into Proper Songville. And now that Shaun isn't compelled to try to fill in inconsistently-laid-out patterns thanks to their new drummer and his ability to actually create rigid rhythms (as opposed to alluding to their existence - again, sry Nate), he can focus on performing the songs more effectively, and boy is he ever able to do so.

Look, I'm not trying to argue that the Squares are glory-bound for stardom now; they've still got a ways to go, especially when it comes to pruning the their songs' lyrical content for the benefit of how well it scans (this is going to sound seriously ironic coming from my sesquipedalian ass, but I'm a firm believer in the idea that all bands with any designs on going big should try to write songs based around hooks of no more than either two words or four syllables). But listen to "Bottle Me Up" and tell me you can't hear the pop chops already present, even in this old mix with their old drummer (not the best way to present evidence for the band's advancement, I admit, but they haven't rerecorded this song with their new drummer and it really is the best showcase for their faculties as a pop band), and imagine how much more effectively they'd be able to be deployed with a more capable rhythm section. I mean, I'm not saying they're going to be the next U2 or Radiohead or OMC or what have you - I'm just trying to say that, with a little work, they could turn out to be an indie-pop outfit capable of scratching the same itches as Los Campesinos! or the Moths, and that's not a bad place for a young band to be. (Click here to buy the Squares' Call Me When Your Boyfriend's Dead direct from the band, or click here to buy digital copies of Wombats song from their digital store. Also, anyone who wants to buy me the Official Wombats Cuddly Wombat may feel free to do so.)

The Long Weekend, "Record" - Speaking of bands about whom I hate to talk shit, here's the Long Weekend, a band which seems downright poised to be this year's edition of the template filled out so ably last year by the Rifles. Looking back at their debut single "Medway Is The Difference (Between My Town And Yours)", I'm frankly a little embarassed that it took me so long to reach that conclusion; it took me about four seconds' worth of "Record" to lead me to the conclusion that these guys' one trick involves robbing Mod titans blind without feeling the need to cite their sources. This certainly isn't to say that I give a fuck, of course; for one, the Kinks have always left me kinda cold (that's right, I said it - motherfuck a Village Green Presevation Society), and for another, the Long Weekend are really really really effective thieves, or at least certainly good enough at thievin' to lift me up and over any lingering angst over credibility from my days as a middle-school dumbass. I mean, "Record" isn't anything even remotely novel; even restricted simply to the context of the band's output, its most original feature is probably that tambourine which shows up for the chorus to lend it a little Stax-y flavor, and what with Mark Ronson's existence this year it's a little hard to laud that as a stroke of heroic boldness. The thing is,the song they've come up with is so invigorating and effective that I just don't have it in me to give a fuck; the overall arrangement of "Record" is so expertly managed that I don't even have it in me to knock the band for tacking superfluous real estate onto such an obvious candidate for a three-minute gem of a pop single. I have no idea how well this approach will (or even can) play out over the course of an album, but I do know that I'll be checking in with the Long Weekend every chance I get to get a better idea. Oh, and I also know that that Rifles album deserved way better treatment than it got from the open market. If nothing else, it's at least better than the friggin' Maccabees album. (Click here to buy the "Record" 7" from Norman Records)

The Rushes, "Ripping It Down" - Look, as someone who's an avowed-enough sucker for a big, space-filling piano to find himself constitutionally incapable of switching stations whenever Train's "Drops of Jupiter" comes on (hands-down the most shameful admission in the history of this blog, and that covers some ground), my admiration for the Rushes' "Ripping It Down" was more or less a given - make it through the first thirty seconds and you'll hear what I'm talking about. What I'd like to draw your attention towards, however, is everything else about this song - or, better yet, everything else which inevitably won't be a factor in whether or not they start pulling in that Coldplay cream. I mean, sure, I guess you can focus on the almost-abrasive friendliness of the track's structuring or its mom-beckoning falsetto opening - yeah, okay, it's kinda breathtakingly cloying and tacky, and given my explosive allergy to wussy bullshit like the Turin Brakes or Richard Hawley I can't really fault anyone for turning elsewhere. But good lord, do I ever pity those of you who check out early on this one; you'll be missing out on some truly glorious multi-part harmonies and a tempo-shift which you can practically see the drummer poised at the ready to launch into and a piano being played by someone who really knows who to wring it dry of drama. I mean, these are downright inexhaustible virtues, folks; I've overlooked worse crimes against music for far lesser rewards (as previously mentioned - seriously, sheesh), and as long as the Rushes keep offering them up with such smirk-free ease, I'll be making a point to keep right on keepin' on. "Ripping It Down" is just a spectacular song, easily the best one I'm posting in this batch, and its b-side ("Will You Won't You") is shockingly close to being almost as good, so hopefully I'll be able to do so for years to come. (Click here to buy the "Ripping It Down" 7" from Piccadilly. Also, simply because the potential for lolz grossly outweighs the guilt which comes from being a jerk, I do have to point out this post on their MySpace blog which may well typify Spectacular Review-Oriented Indie Butthurtedness for the next decade and beyond - seriously, gang, anytime you start off a post by declaring that you'd never give a second thought to reviews, you've more or less pushed the horse out of the barn and blown the door into smithereens already. Doesn't reduce their gifts as songsmiths one iota, though.)

Sparrow House, "The Reflection" (Daytrotter session) - Part of me kinda thinks that the next Voxtrot album should be a split affair, with half the tracks going to Ramesh & the Gang and the other half being given over wholly to keyboardist Jared Van Fleet's Sparrow House project; I kinda get the feeling that the contrast between Voxtrot's insistent dynamism and Sparrow House's trademark lo-fi whispery gentility would go a long way towards rectifying the complaints of the nation of folks who are wholeheartedly entitled to their desperately wrong opinions about Voxtrot (i.e. everyone except me and Cindy Hotpoint). Of course, I also kinda think that Van Fleet has it in him to come up with even more compelling songs on his own than with his bandmates; if I had any doubt left after the gorgeously unassuming "When I Am Gone" (available for downloading on Sparrow House's site), it all certainly got resolved by the time he came knocking to do a Daytrotter session and dropped this woozy, gauzy, breezy, other-adjectives-which-end-in-zy little gem on us all. I mean, this is gorgeous stuff in the same vein of those Lou Reed songs where he capitulates to prettiness, and that simply isn't ground which gets covered by bands these days; one can only shudder to think of how effectively Van Fleet might be able to use actual production facilities to create sonic space rather than simply relying on the acoustics of the room in which he happened to stumble upon a piano. (Click here to buy the first Sparrow House EP direct from Van Fleet. Oh, and don't be a retarded person - just buy Voxtrot and learn to like it.)

But But I I Was Was There There: Vampire Weekend @ the Troubadour, 7/16/07; The Field @ the MOR Bar, 7/19/07

Ohmigod, shoes

Vampire Weekend, "Walcott" - I'd long since come to terms with the fact that Vampire Weekend were a pretty safe pick for the role of Indie-Rock Kids Who Come Clear Out Of Nowhere To Get Featured On Like Episodes Of The Office And Stuff for 2006, but until I made my way up to the Troubadour on Monday and saw a line nearly stretching from the ticket window to the (terrible and overpriced) Indian restaurant on the corner, I had no idea just how safe a bet it was. Unfortunately, as with any shit-hot indie band on the rise, the overwhelming preponderence of their fanbase at the moment consists of douchebags of the highest order, the kind of people who only take the shrinkwrapping off the box sets they buy to get their friends to stop pointing and laughing at them; I can safely guarantee you that if St. Kelefa hadn't written Vampire Weekend up, half the audience would have been disrupting their roommates' living-room conversations by plopping themselves down in the corner and breaking out the old guitar. And really, someone's gotta point it out: Vampire Weekend really couldn't be a more ideally-suited band for this particular breed of 'bag, not only musically (in a very real way, their sound might as well be lab-grown to appeal to everyone who grew up listening to Graceland but still wants to wave their indie-rock dick around), but sartorially; Jen spent the entire night flipping out over the entire non-rhythm section's decision to wear overpoweringly preppy uniforms right down to the matching topsiders (apparently a VERY SERIOUS OFFENSE or something), while I couldn't help but notice that I'd managed to get excited about a band whose drummer wears Phish t-shirts in public seemingly without even the most cursory trace of irony.

Luckily, none of this discounts them from being really, really good. When D. Wreck passed along a copy of their LP a few months ago, I will freely admit to being less-than-overwhelmed (or, at most, "whelmed"); what I heard was a bunch of songs which sounded like they needed about a quarter of their running time excised and a substantial amount of work put into tightening up their sound, and I just didn't see the point in anointing them Kings of NY Indie Up'N'Comers while the Harlem Shakes are still stomping around. Well, Monday night did a damn good job not just of illuminating just how much tighter their sound's gotten even over the last few months, but of how exceptional a gift these kids have when it comes to actually playing their songs, a rarer gift than you might think these days. I mean, at least in a live context they're so good at turning their songs into discrete total packages that their attempts at hooks almost grate, and as someone who lurves a good hook that's not something I say very often. And it's hardly a matter of being impressed by the technique at the heart of their deceptively convoluted song structures; "Walcott" is almost free from the polyrhythms and World Musicisms that go so far to define their sound, but oh my god did they ever pull it off live; this demo version really doesn't do justice to the sound those keys make when they're crashing so insistently right in front of you. I strongly suggest that you check out their show live if you get a chance - and make sure to get there early, too. (Click here to visit the band's homepage and buy the "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" single directly from them)

Annie, "Heartbeat" (The Field remix) - I have to admit to being more than a little disappointed by the Field's set at the MOR Bar in Santa Monica last night; I don't exactly know what I might have been expecting from a set of his, but "forty five minutes of nothing but his music" was pretty much the furthest thing from it. That's not to say that I had a bad time, of course - I defy the techno-loving World of Sense to have a bad time in any environment where "Sun & Ice" is playing, especially when the entire audience totally falls for the "record skip" towards the middle - but I tend to think of DJ sets as a chance for me to get some forced exposure to stuff I wouldn't have listened to otherwise, not recaps of stuff on which I've already come to a conclusion. Still, if nothing else last night ably demonstrated that the Field's aesthetic technique of suddenly yanking his songs out of abstraction has some serious dancefloor legs; whenever he'd introduce elements of concrete familiarity - the infamous Kate Bush sample, that cheesy guitar at the end of "A Paw In My Face", and most of all Annie's chorus as heard in the song accompanying this post - the crowd came alive, or at least as alive as a crowd of Westside Beautiful People can feasibly get. (Click here to buy From Here We Go Sublime from Insound)

Pete & the Pirates, "Come On Feet" - I have to admit that the most lasting impression surrounding Pete & the Pirates' Wait Stop Begin EP is probably going to end up being the note reading "AWESOME!!!!" which the mailing clerk at Insound decided to scribble onto the margin of my order slip; there are few dragons I chase with more determination than experiences with record-store customer service which actually manage to ratify my taste, and it's enormously reassuring to see that it won't necessarily be going the way of the dinosaur as the music-selling business moves out of the brick-and-mortars and into cyberspace (helloooooooo 2000!). Fortunately, whoever the mysterious "JW" might have been, he/she was devastatingly right, since if Pete & the Pirates are to be summed up in a word, "Awesome" suits just about as well as any; their EP isn't wholly consistent since they're such a young band, but their peak moments - the most immediately accessible of which is easily "Come On Feet" - are so flat-out invigorating that it's easy to forgive. I mean, we could sit here all day throwing out comparisons - Maximo Park, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the Wombats, etc etc etc - but any comparison would really just pale in comparison to these guys' readily-available gifts for pacing and inflection; just because they bump sonic elbows with a bunch of bands, after all, doesn't mean that they can't be awesome. Or, as the case may be, AWESOME!!!! (Click here to buy the Wait Stop Begin EP from Insound)

The Paper Cranes, "I'll Love You Until My Veins Explode" - Realize, gentle reader, that by describing the Paper Cranes as a hybrid of the Arcade Fire and the Cure, I'm characterizing them as a cross between my favorite band to make fun of and quite possibly my least favorite band in history (respectively). Of course, those descriptors flower into obviousness elsewhere on their debut EP Veins; lead single "I'll Love You Until My Veins Explode" seems almost completely free of both the vocal histrionics and the meticulous time signatures in comparison to the rest of the songs, instead choosing to ride a piano refrain which takes it dangerously, deliciously close to Dexy's Midnight Runners or even kinda Spoon-ish territory. Luckily for the band, one trait "I'll Love You Until My Veins Explode" does share with the rest of their output is an almost psychotic gift for getting stuck in one's head; they really could stand to tighten their rhythm section up (wow, twice in one blog entry! do I get a prize?) if only because the idioms in which they tend to operate increase in effectiveness in direct proportion to their rhythmic single-mindedness, but seriously, "I'll Love You Until My Veins Explode" is the standout track due to its structuring - in terms of songwriting, other songs on the Veins EP (particularly "Milkrun" and "Out On The Horse Tracks") match it, assuming they don't surpass it outright. You'd be smart to check it out before their album drops next month and people find themselves incapable of shutting up about them. (Click here to buy the Veins EP from Insound)

But I Was There: The Long Blondes @ the Echo, 6/15/07; Hot Chip @ the Henry Fonda, 6/13/07

Sorry, Ms. Jackson, but I am for real

The Long Blondes, "Five Ways To End It" - Ever since the Arcade Fire broke (relatively) huge a couple of years ago, there's been a lot of talk about "record-collection rock", a blanket description for a wildly disparate group of subgenres which all operate under the perfectly reasonable assumption that their audience isn't missing a single reference. Like most blanket descriptions, it's more or less useless; not only does it extend far beyond rock at this point (We Got It 4 Cheap, anyone?), but more often than not it doesn't even have anything to do with either the audience's or the artists' respective musical histories. Is, for instance, Neon Bible a more enjoyable record when you're able to parse it down to its influences? Can you enjoy Beach House without ever having heard a Nico record? Is there any substance to From Here We Go To Sublime beyond the deciphering of its samples? The answer to all of these questions, of course, is a big, unironic HELL YES; I could more or less give copies of each of those records to my mom and she'd more than likely be able to discern the appeal of each of them without a whole lot of effort (not that she'd necessarily like them, of course - my mom may be cool, but I can't really see her digging into the Kompakt aesthetic too willingly). Ironically, the Long Blondes rarely get classified alongside records like these despite being the referential peer of any of them; more often than not, they just get tarred with the same Nu Britpop brush that's been applied to everyone from the Guillemots to the Futureheads simply because they share the same aesthetic. Needless to say, I see things differently - I see the Long Blondes as the most explicitly (and certainly the most effectively) allusive band working today with the possible exception of LCD Soundsystem. And last month, I got proof. Twice.

As you can probably infer from the title of this post, one of those forms of proof was their show at the Echo, a show which, but for an encounter with a buncha Frenchies a few weeks earlier, would have run away with the title of best show I've seen this year and never come back. To say that the Long Blondes understand their fanbase is an understatement of historic proportions; I've seen millionaire televangelists preach to their flock with a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the implicit understanding that the Blondes - and especially Kate Jackson - demonstrated that Friday night. I hasten to add that they didn't necessarily have the whole crowd eating out of their hand; Los Angeles being the way that it is, whenever some buzzworthy British band shows up to do a show, at least a quarter of the crowd is going to consist of (1) industry fuckers approaching the event as an excuse to do some tax-deductible drinking and (2) scenester turds who'll all hopefully break their backs in the shower and starve to death from the resulting neglect some day, and this show was no exception. The difference, however, was obvious in everyone else - in the way they sang along with every line to their favorite songs, or the way they broke out in rapturous applause whenever Jackson set herself apart through a moment of divinely inspired howling, or, most tellingly, the way they recognized even the most obscure b-sides within a few bars. I mean, before that night I wasn't sure anyone else in Los Angeles had ever even heard "Fulwood Babylon", but I'll be damned if the crowd didn't outright erupt as soon as Jackson started hissing about people thinking she was being perverse on purpose. Well done, Los Angeles. Back of the net.

BUT, and this is important, the river does run both ways - it's very clear that the Long Blondes are just as cognizant of their audience as their audience is of them. Most bands touring in support of their recently-released album tend to play as much of that album as they can possibly manage to fit into their allotted time onstage; this way they get to reinforce the superiority of everyone in the audience who's already heard it while offering up an enticing taste for all the newbies who've just heard a song or two on the radio. They'll also tease their big songs, arranging them into sets which play to a different energy than the albums from which they're culled to make the experience seem distinct from the one offered up by the record; this is why Franz Ferdinand used to (and may still - I dunno) close their shows with "Darts of Pleasure". The Blondes, on the other hand, were having none of that shit; blessed with an awareness of how their songs work on their audiences, they put together a set stuffed full of b-sides (although it would be unethical to point out that some of these b-sides, including "Five Ways To End It", made it onto the bonus disc of the American release of Someone To Drive You Home) arranged to elicit the same effect that they would at at home or in the car - opening their set with "Lust In The Movies", using "You Could Have Both" as the anchor of the latter half of the collected songs, etc. It helps, of course, that they all turned out to be just as good at playing those songs as their records had promised - seriously, Jackson's voice could fill an empty room and still keep oozing through the cracks in the siding - but it was clear from note one that the sine qua non for their capacity to play as well as they did in the first place was their recognition of their songs' withering effectiveness on an audience who'd acquainted themselves with the process of losing their shit to them.

Well, actually, that's not quite the whole truth, which brings me to the second form of proof of their incomparability afforded to me last month. A few days before they showed up to raze the Echo to the ground, I was lucky enough to interview Jackson for a feature in the Rockit (which just went up a few days ago - dig in), which more or less confirmed every preujudice I'd already entered into with regards to the Long Blondes. For one, it turns out Jackson really is the single most intoxicatingly alluring woman on the face of the earth, just not in the way I'd been expecting - over the phone, every shred of the carefully-cultivated, immaculately-manicured edge she projects in her music morphs into the most confoundingly charming concoction of articulate forthrightness and good-humored self-effacingness imaginable. I mean, I might as well have interviewed Pam from The Office, only Pam wouldn't hang up the phone and begin dropping note-perfect intonations about the tenability of happy endings. More to the point, however, Jackson might have been the canniest subject I've ever interviewed, a statement which doesn't cover much time but does include both Al P from MSTRKRFT and James motherfucking Murphy, two dudes who most emphatically know how to do the D.A.N.C.E. with inquisitive music critics. I don't think I asked her a single question for which she didn't seem to have an elegantly-couched response, a result I'll acknowledge owes a substantial debt to the fact that I'm hardly the first stuttering dork to ask her about what it's like being from Sheffield as long as I'm able to get the point across that holy crap does this lady ever understand the conditions of her band's commercial existence. There were moments when I legitimately wondered whether I was simply playing Jeff Gannon (er, minus all the dude-fucking) to her Dubya.

The more I think about it, though, that might just be the whole point of the Long Blondes as an artistic endeavor. As bizarre as this is going to sound coming from someone who's spent the last eight months screaming at everyone in earshot about the virtues of a band that name-checks Scott Walker as a totem of self-enforced loneliness, I'm starting to think that the touchstones which make up so much of the Blondes' body of work aren't really the primary sites of identification for their audience - rather, it matters less that they invoke Arlene Dahl effectively than the fact that they invoke her in the first place. After all, the only thing over which the crowd at the Echo was bonding was the presence of the Long Blondes; the band's insanely nuanced references might have gotten their foot in the door, but it was their immaculate conception of their own specific brand of art that got that crowd going berzerk. Take, for instance, their inclusion of "Five Ways To End It" in their set: given both its relative obscurity and the degree to which Erol Alkan's production played a role in the effectiveness of the original, they'd have been completely forgiven if they'd just chosen to play something else instead. But no; during my interview Jackson kept insisting on "Five Ways" as one of her favorite songs to perform due to both how much she enjoyed performing it and her simple, fan-ish appreciation for the way the synths swirled all over the track, and by the time she got done performing it for the crowd at the echo, you'd have been hard-pressed to find anyone who'd have disagreed with her. Ever since then, I've been thinking that maybe that's the secret of effective record-collector rock, then: it's not so much about knowing who else is on your audience's shelves so much as knowing for damn certain that you're in the mix and in no danger of being replaced. (Click here to buy the American edition of Someone To Drive You Home, which includes a bonus disc featuring four of the Alkan-produced b-sides, from Amazon)

Hot Chip, "Ready For A Fall" (Live at Bonnaroo, 6/15/07) - Believe me, I'm as surprised as you to see the B-word mentioned on this site; you've got my word that if there were any other proof of this song's existence (especially a better recording of it), I'd gladly be using it instead. But oh well - having heard some of the songs performed live, I feel pretty safe in reporting that Hot Chip's forthcoming album damn well ought to be the best album of whatever year in which it ends up being released. I mean, their live show is incredibly good and they certainly do know how to switch up their songs for a live audience (at the risk of spoiling their show for anyone who hasn't caught it yet, don't be surprised if you walk out with a renewed appreciation for New Order's "Temptation") and holy HELL can the little guy sing, but c'mon; the news of the day was the fact half of their set consisted of new stuff, and all of it sounded atrociously great. All of it, however, bowed down to "Ready For A Fall", a song I would have no problem calling Hot Chip's best song ever if I weren't a little gunshy after dropping that same tag on "My Piano" just a few weeks before (not that I'm necessarily wrong, mind you - "My Piano" is fucking TREMENDOUS). As with all the best Hot Chip Songs Ever, it comes down to the Chip's apparent ability to seemingly flip a switch and have their song absolutely roar to life; I'm a big fan of their Stone Grooves, Maaaaan like "Boy From School" and "From Drummer To Driver", but I'm an exponentially bigger fan of their more thrilling moments, like the bit on "Over and Over" where the drums kick in on the chorus or when That Bassline first pokes its head out on "Playboy", so it's probably not too surprising that "Ready For A Fall", which contains arguably the most emphatically devastating moment of OH SHIT HERE COMES THE WHOLE SONG-ness in their entire catalogue. Again, the recording is not the greatest here; you'll have to endure a fair amount of hooting hippies for a while and the band comes across as kinda muffled, but stick with it; you'll wind up with a pretty damn good idea of what I'm talking about. I mean, we're talking about a song good enough to force me to acknowledge the existence of Bonna-fucking-roo here; this is clearly unimaginably crucial territory for you to explore. I seriously cannot wait to give someone money for this album. (Click here to visit Hot Chip's homepage, or click here to buy The Warning from Amazon.com if you're the last dumbass on earth who doesn't own it already.)

Della Humphrey, "Dream Land" - In what I can only conceive of as a direct response to my bragging about my ability to decipher the musical metatext of Soul Jazz' Studio One reggae compilations, a while back the label put out Studio One Women, quite possibly the most misleading title in the history of the series. It's a million miles away from bad, naturally, but most of it turned out to be traditional reggae, which of course is perfectly
fine but just not my personal cup of tea; I vastly prefer the kind of reggae which makes an effort to employ the kind of commercial strategies which could have earned its exemplars playtime on American radio, so I'd been hoping for Studio One Women to have featured a couple of dusty old gems in the vein of Susan Cadogan or Dawn Penn and, unsurprisingly, never really made it very far into the record. Luckily for me, I'm both lazy and an idiot, and as a consequence of my half-assed attitude towards streamlining the contents of my iPod found "Dream Land" popping up randomly one night, only to be repeated roughly eighty squillion times since. It still barely sounds like American music, of course - I guess you can kinda hear echoes of songbirds like, I 'unno, Dusty Springfield in the clarity of Mrs. Humphrey's voice, but the song itself is such a stuttering, loping little jaunt that it's hard to imagine it catching Berry Gordy's ear. This is mostly due to the song's distinctive dynamic - after all, for a song that barely cracks the two-and-a-half minute mark, it sure takes its sweet time in getting to the chorus - but just as much due to the stripped-down sound; aside from Humphrey's vocals, the only instrument really on display here is arguably that twangy guitar. But it's more than enough; when traditional reggae's firing on all cylinders, it doesn't need to be showy; it can rely on the logic of its trademark arrangements to carry the day, and lord knows that's precisely what happens here. Seriously, just give this a shot. (Click here to buy Studio One Women from Amazon.com)

Album Review: Maximo Park, "Our Earthly Pleasures"

are nowhere to be found on this record

Maximo Park, "Girls Who Play Guitars"
Mark Ronson, "Apply Some Pressure" (feat. Paul Smith of Maximo Park)

edit: I swear to god I knew the name of Maximo's first album was A Certain Trigger

second edit: I SWEAR TO GOD I KNEW Version WAS MARK RONSON'S SOPHOMORE ALBUM HENCE THE CLUMSY ITALICIZING EMPHASIZING THE IRONY. O SHIT, I GOT WARRANTS.

In an interesting paralell to the situation ten years ago, we may have plenty of wiggle room to go in this decade, but it's a fair bet that modern Britpop has already seen its moment come and go. There may well be incredibly enjoyable albums and singles still a ways down the pipeline at this point in the genre's current incarnation, but it's highly unlikely (if not flat-out impossible) for them to be delivered at the blinding pace at which they showed up during that magical year bookended by the Futureheads and the Rakes' respective debut albums; as staggeringly inconsequential as all those albums turned out to be, the panicky, nervous through-line connecting them all was simply too intoxicating to resist at the time. (Of course, one could easily raise the counter-argument that this same homogeneity of effect did more to undo the genre's viability than anything else; eventually, consumers will settle on the one album that best approximates the idealized form of the genre that they've been cultivating in their heads and send everything else back to the record store in epic fashion, which is why the imaginary people who come over to my apartment and nose through my stuff always register so much surprise to discover Capture/Release as the lone representative of this period in modern musical history in my record collection. But I digress.)

In a lot of ways, Maximo Park's debut album Apply Some Pressure epitomized all the virtues of the age, and in some of them it even demonstrated the potential for the aesthetic's future growth. Other bands might have had better ears for a hook or a gimmick, but no band on earth (or at least in England) was able to manifest pure urgency quite like the Parkers were; more than any of its contemporaries, A Certain Trigger sounded like a record made with the express intent to get itself released before someone else beat them to the punch. Unfortunately, it's this precise phenomenon which keeps Our Earthly Pleasures, their sophomore album, from demonstrating itself half as compelling as its older brother - artistic urgency is, after all, awfully hard to sustain when you've already proven yourself supernaturally adept at managing it.

That's not to say that Our Earthly Pleasures even remotely resembles a bad record; it's simply impossible to compare it to A Certain Trigger and not be stricken by the leaps Paul Smith & co. have made in the last year when it comes to being an Actual Rock And/Or Roll Band. Songs like "Girls Who Play Guitars" demonstrate a leap forward of Maoist proportions in terms of efficiency and articulation when broken down to their component parts like "lyrics" or "guitar lines"; I'd honestly call "Girls" one of the three best songs they've ever written, and it probably won't even get a single release until November, assuming it ever gets one in the first place. Still, the problem isn't even how... galling? is that the word I'm looking for here? it is to see a band which hooked me on their wild abandon suddenly start preaching the virtues of restraint - I'm not happy about it or anything, but anyone who's ever lived two or more years in a row understands how all youthful exuberance, no matter how genuine or earned-in-earnest it might be, tends to wither and die over time. No, the real problem at the root of Our Earthly Pleasures is that the game has simply changed; now it finds itself tilting at the second-finest guitar-pop record of the decade compositionally and lyrically, and like the rest of its brothers in second-generationhood, it's simply not a fair fight. Maximo's gift was always for performance rather than demonstration, and if Our Earthly Pleasures is any indication, now that they've found themselves in a position where they've got the attention of people looking to follow in their shoes they flat-out don't have much to say.

Of course, all of this is basically so many wasted words when comparing any song from Our Earthly Pleasures to Mark Ronson's Mitch Ryder'd-up revisitation of "Apply Some Pressure" for his sophomore LP Version. By any criterion available to man or beast, "Apply Some Pressure" is at best the fourth-best song on Version, but it's by far the most illustrative of its source now that Maximo's lead vocalist Paul Smith seems more in love with the serpentine power of double-tracking than in his own preturnatural yelp; despite widely surfacing nearly a month after Our Earthly Pleasures, Smith's performance on Ronson's version of "Pressure" remains the first glimpse of of his old enthusiasm for keeping up with his backing track, presumably because Our Earthly Pleasures devotes itself so single-mindedly to the task of making an album to which people will still be listening ten or twenty years down the line. The dueling ironies, of course, are that (1) just as before, that's exactly what all of the Park's contemporaries are trying to do, and (2) attempting to do this precise thing may be the single most effective way to cancel out all of Maximo Park's strengths, or at least all of the strengths they demonstrated on their first album. I'm all for bands developing over time and everything but damn, folks, if this is what we've got to look forward to from the class of '04-'05, we are in for one bumpy-ass ride. (Click here to buy Our Earthly Pleasures from Amazon.com, or here to buy Version from Amazon.co.uk)

The Killers, "Bones" (Tiga remix) - With Scott Stapp seemingly finally banished from the cultural discourse, I'm honestly not certain if there's anyone working in music today who inspire quite as much unbridled venom on my part as the Killers; in the interest of saving space, let's just say that I see them as having the same relationship to rock as P. Diddy has to voting and leave it at that. Nevertheless, I find myself inexorably drawn to any remix of any of their tracks by anyone with even the slightest shred of dancefloor acumen; I've even heard that worthless "I've got soul/But I'm not a soldier" song turned into a legitimate house-music axe murderer, no mean feat considering we're talking about the single most resigned-sigh-inducing lyric in recent memory not mulling over a track's merits as a "panty anthem". And, true to form, Tiga's remix of "Bones" is a world-fucker; words really can't convey just how much more palatable Brandon Flowers' sixth-grade stabs at depth become when backed by a track which in no way attempts to secure anything even approaching legitimacy. Of course, I wouldn't even be able to make that claim if the backing track Tiga pulled out of god-only-knows-where weren't arguably the best thing he's come up with since his take on "Sunglasses At Night"; his work here defines the appeal of his icy musical perfection in exponentially more adroit fashion than anything on Sexor, and that's even before the chorus bathes you in the majesty of his interpolation of the big hook to the Killers' original. I still think the Killers need to hire Jacques Lu Cont to produce their entire next album pretty much more than anyone needs to be doing anything anywhere ever, but after hearing this remix, I'd settle for Tiga guiding them through the musical birthing process; if he can wring something this close to Speak & Spell-era Depeche Mode out of the Killers when they're taking aim at boring-ass rock bluster, the possibilities to what he could construct for them with direct access are all but limitless. In the meantime, please enjoy this histrionic triumph, although you'll readily recognize that you hardly need my permission. (Tiga's remix of "Bones" is currently unavailable commercially, but in the meantime, visit his MySpace to hear more music)

Sarabeth Tucek, "Something For You" (Contino remix) - The original version of Sarabeth Tucek's "Something For You" is a pretty, if predictable, alt-country pining-away girl-n-gee-tar affair, but flip the record over and boy are you ever in for a treat. Contino's remix may take a few listens to fully sink in, but I speak from experience when I say that it'll absolutely bury itself in your consciousness; whether it's the gentle clatter of about six layers of instruments or the note-perfect evocation of wistfulness inherent in Tucek's voice cutting through them all like a scythe through a wheatfield, you have my word that there's a hook in here for you somewhere. Anyone in love with the empty-veined tone of records like Beach House or The Greatest will be unequivocally over the moon off this song, I can guarantee you that much; everyone else can go kill themselves for all I care. (Click here to order the "Something For You" single from Sonic Cathedral records)

As I Come Back (Again)

So I've decided to start doing a few more album reviews than before, which is to say I've decided to start doing some album reviews. There will, of course, still be plenty of pure MP3 content (by which I mean "MP3s and me bitching about the shameful dearth of third-person female manipulation of my junk), but album reviews are easy and I need to get back on the right track. SO:

Try and guess what pun you'll be seeing lead off every single review of this album

Shitdisco, "Disco Blood" (single mix) - It's just a sad fact of life: sometimes, even our most carefully cultivated methodologies fail us. My introduction to Scotland's Shitdisco, for instance, came to pass thanks to one of my iron-clad rules of singles-buying, namely that any single of even the most marginal interest put out by a band which doesn't appear to have an album in their future is to be immediately purchased. You will of course forgive me if I didn't expect to see an album proudly flying a flag reading "Shitdisco" in my lifetime; when I placed my order for the "Disco Blood" single back towards the tail end of 2005, I figured no band with a name like that pushing a sound like theirs promised to sound (second rule of singles-purchasing: if at all possible, let your purchasing instincts be guided as thoroughly by the hilariously untrustworthy descriptions furnished by the shops trying to take your money - hey, that initial listening experience isn't going to preserve itself) had a hope in hell of seeing so much as a second single, let alone a full album. Unsurprisingly, "Disco Blood" revealed itself to be a mix-CD stalwart almost on contact - I have friends with things like "lives" and "relationships" and "clean driving records" who, to this day, couldn't begin tell you who Bobby Orlando might have ever been, but know for a fact that he's coming 'round for tea. It wasn't even that "Disco Blood" was even necessarily all that great; it just sounded like a bunch of kids trying their damnedest to make something, and their enthusiasm for the task (to say nothing of the startling efficiency with which they accomplished it, given their means at the time) was just too infectious to deny.

At the time of this writing, Shitdisco's debut full-length Kingdom of Fear is two weeks away from its release date, and with it comes a really high likelihood of Shitdisco never crossing my mind again. Kingdom of Fear is, of course, by no means a bad album; with the exception of the less-than-engaging "I Know Kung-Fu" (ironically the b-side to the "Disco Blood" single), pretty much every song has something to reccomend it to the modern Anglophile, be it relentlessly frantic drums, searingly timely backing vocals, or that singular glee which only ever seems to show up on records made by young British kids acutely aware that although they may or may not be making art, they're definitely making a product. Kingdom of Fear could quite reasonably be summed up as the precise midpoint between the Klaxons' Myths of the Near Future and the Rapture's Pieces of the People We Love, and given my freely-admitted affection for both those records, I don't have it in me to tell like-minded spirits to give this one a pass outright. The record does a more than capable job on that front itself.

The problem with Kingdom of Fear, I guess, is that for an album released by a band called "Shitdisco", there's precious little of either actually on the record. It's arguable that Kingdom of Fear represents the apex of indie-rock production this year, given the raw material out of which it shapes itself; songs like "Another" echo the Shitdisco I used to know only insofar as that it moves at breakneck speed and Joel Stone and Joe Reeves' signature yelps probably couldn't even be wrangled into submission by Phil Spector. Everything else about the track is sweetened and smoothed to the point where it might as well be serve in a cone - I mean, even my little sister could probably differentiate between the layers of sounds on this track and point out lots of cool little moments where they come into collision. These songs actually sound like disco songs now - three-and-a-half-minute disco songs for the Paul Epworth set, sure, but disco songs nonetheless.

And therein lies the problem: everyone already knows what those songs sound like, so there's little incentive to try to introduce them around to people. Kingdom of Fear is full of finished products utterly immune to frivolous deconstruction, which is a perfectly admirable accomplishment for a band except for the fact that sitting around and frivolously deconstructing music is a substantial part of the point of getting way too into music in the first place. I stopped being interested in movies right around the time when those insufferably tedious Lord of the Rings movies became the lingua franca for discussions of the virtues of the art of filmmaking among my friends, mostly because I'm exponentially more interested in how people interact with those virtues than the volume of their presence. Compared to the Shitdisco with which I grew acquainted a year and a half ago, Kingdom of Fear is kinda like that - its artistic successes have absolutely no bearing on anything outside the confines of its running time, up to and including the actual band themselves. They may have made a real, no-foolin' record, but they've done so at the cost of their enthusiasm for (a) making music and (b) finding a way to turn that music into songs, and while the tradeoff might seem fair on the surface, in the long run it's just nothing to get excited over - or rather, nothing which promises to foster excitement for any period of time past the end of its tracklisting.

Look, I'll be honest: I'll probably end up keeping Kingdom of Fear on my iPod for a good minute or two if only to see how well it fares popping up randomly when I throw on shuffle mode (and I'm guessing it'll fare a lot better like that than as a contiguous experience). There are going to be a lot of people who like this album a lot more than me, and I can't fault them for doing so, although my guess is that across the board they'll be both younger and less interested in having good taste (or being gleefully supercilious about having bad taste). It is not - repeat - not a bad album, and the band has enough of a gift with a hook and an innate grasp for how a song should flow that it's wholly conceivable that they've got a for-realsies good album in there somewhere (although with a bandname like theirs, the window of opportunity before the real world sets in may be pretty small). But it's not a compelling album, no matter how closely or for how long you've been tracking the signifiers it draws upon, and anyone who could imagine themselves listening to it in fifteen years with the same doe-eyed admiration it'll most assuredly draw from some quarters upon their first listen is without question kidding themselves in a sincerely hilarious fashion. Hell, in fifteen years, do you even think the members of the band are going to be talking about how Dad had some minor chart success with a band called Shitdisco? Fun though it may be to listen to, there's simply no other way to describe Kingdom of Fear as anything other than an abomination; if they'd stayed the course of releasing singles whenever the spirit really and truly moved them, they might have cultivated an earnestly enthusiastic fanbase, all while refining their sound into something with little (if anything) to do with conceptions of being au courant. Now the most they can hope for is to stay just far enough below the radar to avoid being mentioned on VH1 Scotland's I Love The 2000s. (Click here to pre-order Kingdom of Fear from Amazon.co.uk)

Strange Idols, "She's Gonna Let You Down Again" (single mix) - Of course, if you want to hear how to put together a song so immaculately that you probably won't be able to help but tell your grandkids about it, look no further than Strange Idols, this year's early frontrunner for my springtime Britpop fixations. To say that "She's Gonna Let You Down" again is impeccably formed would actually be a pretty gross distortion of the truth; the reality of this magnificent little pop gem is that it's in dire need of another verse or two (ironic considering the way it clocks in awfully close to the mythical three-minute mark) or just some sort of gentle rreintroduction to the sonically hostile world known as Everything Else I've Heard Since This Song Suddenly Showed Up In My Life. They're already working with Gareth Parton, quite possibly the ideal producer in light of his work with the Pipettes (war crimes committed against "Dirty Mind" excepted, of course) so they've clearly got a future ahead of them; as anyone who's come into contact with the songs from their demo which made the rounds last year can attest, they already have an undeniable knack for songcraft even before they started steeping themselves in the dark arts of auteurist production. And if that is, in fact, what's happening, you couldn't ask for a better first step on this kind of journey than "She's Gonna Let You Down Again", a remarkable concoction of in-your-face brassiness and painstakingly arranged layers playing off each other to come up with something with the patina of an instant classic, something I can't even imagine haters being able to deny. Non-haters, of course, are in for a serious treat. I urge you to give it a shot and see on which side of the fence you end up falling. (Click here to order the "She's Gonna Let You Down Again" single, which is backed by the also-quite-kickass "Berlin" from Rough Trade)