Ought – Sun Coming Down

★★★★

Montreal’s Ought may be the poppiest band on Constellation Records, but this is a relative status; given the band’s predilection for building off of the discographies of Gang Of Four and The Fall, “pop” is probably not the first term to come to mind on a first listening of Sun Coming Down. Anyone familiar with last year’s More Than Any Other Day will find Sun Coming Down to work on the exact same pleasure centres: angular, nearly atonal guitar work, song forms that follow the tracks of a tidal ebb and flow rather than traditional verse-chorus structures, and Tim Beeler’s half-mad, half-Mark E Smith vocal delivery. It’s equal parts bliss and despair; as Beeler growls on “Beautiful Blue Sky”, “I’m no longer afraid to dance tonight / ‘Cause that is all that I have left”, marking out desperation and joy in equal measures.

Ought is about as classic post-punk as you can get these days. There are a million bands who want to be Joy Division but not many now that look at some of the other canonical bands: Gang of Four, Pere Ubu, Swell Maps, Mission of Burma, et al. Ought takes a more holistic approach to post-punk appropriation, chewing and rechewing their influences until they come out sounding like their own band, and a good one at that. If this year’s utterly awful Gang of Four record left you in tears, do yourself a favour and pick up Sun Coming Down, because it won’t steer you wrong.

Keith Richards – Crosseyed Heart

★

Keith Richards – rock ‘n’ roll guitarist, legend, living heroin syringe – has not released many solo efforts in his career. Part of this is probably due to the fact that the endless tour of his day band keeps him occupied. Part of it is probably how unutterably bad Mick Jagger’s solo albums are, and not wanting to ever release something that might be on that level. There are, in fact, only three: Talk Is Cheap, recorded just before the band got their act back together at the end of the Eighties; Main Offender, recorded just before the Voodoo Lounge sessions and the rebirth of the band’s artistic credibility; and now Crosseyed Heart, released ten years after the Stones’ best album since Tattoo You and with vague rumours of a new Stones album in the works.

Crosseyed Heart has a lot of problems. First of all, it’s too long at nearly an hour and fifteen tracks. Secondly, it relies too heavily on Richards’ voice, an instrument that has it’s own warm, whisky-scratched charm but doesn’t hold a candle to Jagger. Thirdly, while the album is mostly mid-tempo Ageing Boomer Rock, there are some regrettable deviations into styles the Stones already tried and ditched (such as the overlong and lazily presented reggae diversion of “Love Overdue”, or the pseudo-Tom Waits delivery of “Suspicious”). There’s very little guitar flash here, save for the tough acoustic Robert Johnson riffing of the brief title track and a few almost-riffs here and there. Instead, we’re offered the same sort of AOR that every other former star of the Sixties and Seventies seems to think passes for Upstanding Professional Rock Music; that is to say, it’s boring as all hell.

Worst of all is that I can discern a point to the album. Most artists use solo albums as an outlet for music that doesn’t fit with their band or that could be deemed more experimental than their band’s fanbase could handle. Failing that, it’s a good way for an artist to abandon a sinking ship and stake claim on a name of their own. In the former example, none of this is stuff that the Stones’ older fanbase wouldn’t be able to handle; the real deal here is that the material on Crosseyed Heart is by and large too syrupy and flavourless to ever pass muster on a Rolling Stones album (save for “Goodnight Irene”, which could maybe be an outtake from the Beggars Banquet sessions). In the latter example, there’s no furthering Richards’ reputation here. He’s already about as famous as he’s going to get. The Rolling Stones are under no threat of disbanding (according to the rest of them it’s Charlie Watts’ decision anyway) and there’s absolutely no need for him to separate himself from the band, especially on this uninspired group of songs. So what gives? Why do Boomers feel the need to put out albums that don’t say anything or mean anything? Aside from contractual obligation I can’t think of a single reason as to why Crosseyed Heart needs to exist, at all.

The Libertines – Anthems For Doomed Youth

★★

Despite the fact that it’s axiomatic by now – nowhere more so than in the hidebound narratives of rock ‘n’ roll – there are always more bands who think that you can, in fact, go home again.

You can’t.

The Libertines were, once upon a time, the hottest thing to exist in post-Strokes Britain, a furious mixture of CBGB punk and Rolling Stones swagger. They were a band whose songs you could put on repeat and never tire of them.

Then drugs and mayhem forced them to take a decade off in the wilderness of C-list glamour and Kate Moss.

Now they aren’t.

End of story.

Craig Finn – Faith In The Future

★★★★

Craig Finn has spent most of his time fronting Brooklyn-by-way-of-Minneapolis rockers The Hold Steady engaged in tackling the big themes of growth and life. Albums like Separation Sunday and Stay Positive are about the big changes in people’s lives, about the big picture of failure that his characters live through, about friends who grow up together, grow apart, and find themselves again. They’re about how resurrections really feel, and about how words alone could never save us. Faith In The Future, his second solo album, dials back these ambitions to take a look at the minutiae of the lives of new(ish) characters. There’s no Holly, no Gideon, no Charlemagne on this record. Instead, we have a narrator telling a woman that he’s still in search of their son, but he took a detour into a messianic desert cult for a while. There’s a murder being plotted in a scuzzy club. There’s Sarah, an ex-girlfriend calling to try to make amends about how things ended while avoiding angering her unstable new boyfriend. There’s Finn himself, scared and wanting to be drunk on a roof in Brooklyn on September 11th, 2001, trying to figure out what the future’s supposed to mean.

To be sure, there are ample observances that hearken back to lines that have come out of Finn’s mouth before. Everyone’s still searching for their saviour, and while there’s no pipes made out of Pringles cans “Sandra From Scranton” comes off like the second draft of the girl from “Lord, I’m Discouraged” or “Joke About Jamaica”. These are songs that are very easily identifiable as Finn’s own, in the same way that guys jetting off from death-trap New Jersey towns to seek their desperate fortunes in the wilds of America are forever stamped by Bruce Springsteen. If you’re in a dying industrial belt town, working in a restaurant, going out to shows, slowly slipping into bad addictions to love and hard drugs, you’re a Craig Finn character, and Faith In The Future is a textbook study in them. Musically, he keeps things spare, mostly acoustic guitars, drums, and basic, muted keyboards; to go back to the Springsteen reference, these are the characters of Darkness On The Edge Of Town played out in the poppier half of The River.

While it lacks the epic arena punch of his band’s work, it’s a heartfelt enough album to satisfy longtime fans of that band. As a matter of fact, I would have almost preferred to hear “Maggie, I’ve Been Searching For Our Son” as a full-on Hold Steady song. Still, it’s a solid collection of songs that speak to the fact that Finn’s not just a great frontman, but a great storyteller as well.

Slayer – Repentless

★★★

Repentless is a Slayer album. People who know the band know what I’m talking about. It’s a lot like when Bad Religion put out New Maps Of Hell. You knew exactly what you’d be getting going into it and you weren’t disappointed. With Repentless that means that particular Slayer death metal sound: machine gun drums, rapid-fire riffs, and Tom Araya’s hateful bark punctuating everything. The difference is that there’s no Jeff Hanneman, who died in 2013 of cirhossis of the liver. There’s also no Dave Lombardo, who was fired three months before Hanneman’s death, reputedly as the result of a disagreement with the band’s pay structure. Hannemen was one of the band’s principle songwriters, and Lombardo gave the band their signature drum sound. If there is any justice in this world, Repentless will be Slayer’s last album, and that’s okay.

Araya and guitarist Kerry King (and, I guess, the bassist) make a good stab at a classic Slayer album, and for the most part they hit the right notes. Gary Holt plays well on the drums but can’t match Lombardo’s infernally inspired pummeling. King tries to substitute more modern squeal-noise for Hanneman’s nimble-fingered solos, but it was the breaking free of those solos that made classic Slayer songs such headbanging masterpieces. This is Slayer, limping and bleeding but still possessed of a hideous vitality, a rotting half-life still capable of terrorizing but not for much longer.

Empress Of – Me

★★★

Me is a hard album to pin down. It’s a mix between straightforward dance music and dream pop, with the dream pop part being the unsettling sounds that seem to roil and lurk beneath the surface of the sharp-edged synth chunking and twittering arpeggios. At first blush it feels like FKA Twigs without taking chances, or The Knife without the sense of glamour-noir. It’s aiming for art, but is it artsy enough to get that far? From the beginning it goes like this: I want to say no, that this is a case of Lorely Rodriguez putting together a subtle pastiche of a decade of popular undercurrents in pop, but then the next song will have me reversing the position and proclaiming that this is sensational, an electric mixture of art and pop that pushes the sounds of the dancefloor forward even while it anchors you to shaking in a particular groove. Then the next song will have me back at my original position. It goes like this, back and forth, never resolving even at the end. Is this a good album, or does it merely put up a convincing facade of being good? Is this a potemkin record?

I’m left without answers, and in the end I have to conclude that it is, in the final reckoning, a good album. Not a great album, or even a particularly original album, but a good album. If Ms. Rodriguez kept the continuous party beat behind every song as she does on “Water Water” and “How Do You Do It”, it would transcend being merely good into something ethereal. It’s the sub-Twigs modern R&B feel of tracks like “Everything Is You” and “To Get By” that really bring the album down from being a slice of dancefloor perfection. It’s the art-disco throb that makes Empress Of great, and as such Me would be much better suited as an EP with the mid-tempo stuff deleted.

FIDLAR – TOO

★☆

“40 oz On Repeat” sounds like Weezer. “Punks” sounds like the Black Keys. “West Coast” sounds like the Gaslight Anthem. “Why Generation” sounds like bad radio indie – like if Kula Shaker was covering the original songs of a Strokes cover band. “Sober” is what Nada Surf would sound like if they were a goofy Epitaph pop punk band from the late Nineties. “Leave Me Alone” sounds like an outtake from Colleen Green.

It just gets depressing after that. Nothing sounds like FIDLAR. Fuck this dude, none of this is a risk. It’s the sound of a band that got some recognition for being good and immediately began scrambling towards the wads of cash that were being offered their way.

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. I’m going to go drink some cheap beer, because I like it, and because FIDLAR obviously prefers Heineken these days.

Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats – The Night Creeper

★★★

Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats are as The Sword were – a Sabbath-worshipping doom metal band with a serious case of the groove. Where The Sword have moved on to allowing other Seventies hard rock icons into their sound, Uncle Acid have chosen to stay the course. If you caught Mind Control two years ago, The Night Creeper will seem instantly familiar, and this can be good or bad depending on your thoughts on recycled Sabbath riffs and rotted psychedelic atmosphere. Even if you’re getting tired of bands reappropriating classic rock, however, there’s a lot to like about The Night Creeper. This is serious head-nodder music; the band can mine a groove like very few other bands, and they can manipulate the flow like masters. When “Inside” starts bouncing after the hazy dream-inducement of the title track, you’ll start jumping up and down without even realizing it. It’s “Slow Death”, though, that brings the creepy horror film vibe to it’s peak, with it’s atmosphere of dread fueled by a musical space that is not often found in Uncle Acid songs.

What it comes down to is this: if you haven’t soured on hard rock riffs after all of these years, then The Night Creeper is right up your alley. Otherwise, take a pass.

NOW FEATURED ON SEROWORD.COM

Helen – The Original Faces

★★★★

Another autumn arrives (almost) and so comes another album from Liz Harris. Instead of another Grouper album, however, Ms. Harris has put together a dream-pop outfit called Helen that approximates the sounds of the early Nineties, when wobbly tape noises, ultra-lo-fi recording, and thick fogs of reverb were par for the course. A lot of that is, of course, stuff that Liz Harris uses seemingly every day, but the difference here is obvious. Grouper is a project that approximates folk, except drowned in dread and isolated tape artifacts. Helen is a pop group at its core, albeit one that sounds as though it was recorded live in an intimate club in the late 1980s and then left out in the rain for the past 25 years. A track like “Felt This Way” sounds like what would happen if your house caught fire and your copies of Darklands and Heaven Or Las Vegas melted into each other but were still listenable. These are, despite all of their accouterments, skeletal songs; the bass pokes through the holes in the sonics in a way that will make any aficionado of raw garage-recorded rock ‘n’ roll sit up and clap. The gain used on the guitar amps is something rather unusual for Harris, but the way that the distortion is scattered to the winds and made to suffuse the whole song – as on “Pass Me By” – is quite warm and familiar. Where the album really comes together is on “Dying All The Time”, where Harris and Co. up the racket to a near-punk fury by way of a drum line that carries all of the diffused distortion and thumping bass to an entirely different world.

If you miss noisy dream pop from the days when you were still buying it on cassette, do yourself a favour and track down a cassette copy of The Original Faces.

The Wonder Years – No Closer To Heaven

★★★★

Emo became a pejorative at some point in the past ten years. I first encountered the word describing a grouping of bands who were described as “the sensitive young man’s answer to riot grrl”, which included such acts as The Promise Ring, early Jimmy Eat World, Texas Is The Reason, Sunny Day Real Estate, and Jawbreaker. It was punk rock with style and grace, with hectoring vocals about girls. Heartbreak, struggle, trying to get over loss, but ultimately about the opposite sex.

At some point this became twisted and emo became redefined. Someone who’s “emo” now dresses in black, has a hairdo that only hair spray and a staunch defiance of gravity could create, cakes on the makeup, and likely bears the scars of cutting themselves. They listen to Pierce The Veil and Black Veil Brides. It’s a fashion statement rather than a particular subgenre of punk, and even though punk rock itself is a fashion statement more than a genre, it’s become a widely derided form. Bands that once rocked the emo label now go by the much safer “post-hardcore” and pretend that other term never existed.

The Wonder Years are a band that is firmly of the older version of the word “emo”. They’re a band whose music has often relied on the tropes pioneered by those bands from the late Nineties; 2011’s Suburbia I’ve Given You All And Now I’m Nothing was a spearhead in the so-called “emo revival”, coming off as a somewhat poppier Sunny Day Real Estate. Their lyrics were, of course, about growing up, and girls, but they structured it in such a way that it felt searing and sincere rather than pop-cheesy like the spawn on My Chemical Romance. Between that and 2013’s The Greatest Generation they’ve made a name for themselves as an accessible entry point for neo-emo, or post-hardcore, or whatever people are calling it nowadays.

No Closer To Heaven changes up the recipe a little. Their previous three albums – The Upsides, Suburbia, and The Greatest Generation – were a trilogy that examined Dan Campbell’s coming-of-age, with all of the inherent fear and loneliness that came along with it. There was a poppiness to them that allowed for singalong choruses and that dreaded word “accessibility”. No Closer To Heaven, however, is not poppy; it’s a collection of heart-wrenching pieces with bare nods to accessibility, full of midnight confessions, long bridges, circular patterns, and everything that made an album like Diary great. Amidst this are two homages to great artists who died young: Patsy Cline, who predicted her own death in a 1963 plane crash, and Ernest Hemingway, the great author who, ragged from shock treatments, shot himself in his Iowa home in 1961. “Song For Patsy Cline” is particularly haunting: “My airbag light’s been on for weeks / And I keep having dreams / Where I go through the windshield but I don’t fix it / Patsy Cline came and sang to me / She told everybody / How she knew she would die soon before she did”. It’s a fitting setup for the theme of loss that runs through the album. “Cigarettes & Saints” is the most explicit of the examples of this theme, being more or less a eulogy for Campbell’s departed friend Mike Pellone, who died of a drug overdose before No Closer To Heaven was completed. “Twice a week I pass by the church that held your funeral” he sings, “And the pastor’s words come pouring down like rain / How he called you a sinner and said now you walk with Jesus / So the drugs that took your life aren’t gonna cause you any pain / I don’t think he even knew your name / And I refuse to kneel and pray / I won’t remember you that way”. “Thanks For The Ride” talks about another friend that died in a car crash; instead of dwelling on her death, he pretends that they simply lost touch after college, and that she’s living in California, married with a new baby. These themes get tied up together on the final track, “No Closer To Heaven”: dead birds, Patsy Cline, car crashes, Ernest Hemingway, and wandering in circles.

No Closer To Heaven is a summation of everything that the neo-emo/post-hardcore “movement” stands for. It builds upon the bones of much older bands and builds something raw and real out of them, adding on to the canon of those bands rather than engaging in rote recreation of their music. In moving away from the pop-punk end of the emo spectrum they prove their artistic bona fides and set themselves apart.