Of Monsters And Men covering MGMT

I have my suspicions about these neo-trad revivalists (partially from having to hear them every day at work) but this clip actually nearly won me over.

Palma Violets – “Best of Friends”

This song. This song right here. Every time I hear it I feel the urge to write down the name, because I know I’ll forget it if I don’t, and yet I never do. Now it’s here, so that everyone can share in the fist-in-the-air, summer’s-here exultation that this track’s chorus and reverberating leads promise. Open-air garage rock for the nights that never end.

Cayucas – “Bigfoot”

Poor Cayucas. They just want to play the soundtrack to an endless summer, paying homage to Vampire Weekend and Beck along the way. These days, however, are a catalytic era for popular music; under the surface, an intense period of creativity and exploration is occurring. Bands like Cayucas that come along and just want to take stock of what’s already been accomplished are typically derided for being “derivative” and lacking in artistic merit. Albums like Bigfoot, though, aren’t about creating some new artistic paradigm, however; they’re just here for the barbeque and the brews. It’s an album written to be played in the summer, outdoors, and in this goal it succeeds admirably. The first two tracks, “Cayucos” and “High School Lover”, hit like a one-two punch to radio while we were all still languishing under snow, and they brought with them the promise of brighter, warmer days. Now that those days have arrived, Bigfoot provides a perfect accompaniment to them; it works for outdoor parties, BBQs by the lake, cottage get-togethers, or whatever other cliched Summer Activities you’re into. It doesn’t aim much further beyond that, and it doesn’t have to. You can’t discuss Hemingway and Proust with it, but who cares? You can chug a beer to it, it’s at least vaguely intelligent, and sometimes that’s all that really matters. Now go outside, or something.

Final Mark: B+

And, if you’re going to go outside, don’t forget to bring a book. If you need a book, you can find links to such sundries on http://www.trevorjameszaple.com . There’s even an excerpt you can download to try it before you buy it. Shareware stylez. Word.

Lord Huron – “Ghost On The Shore”

I started off rather disliking this new ambient folk band, but it’s tracks like this that make me start to rethink this stance.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra – “II”

In the wake of Tame Impala’s success with Lonerism, expect there to be many more bands that trade in nostalgia for acid-tinged rock edging their way into the light. Foremost of these is Unknown Mortal Orchestra; their love of funky drumming and tough, reverb-soaked guitar licks practically guarantees their ascendency to the ranks of indie buzz bands. The problem, however, is that this is largely all they do. Every track on the album follows the same sort of formula – drums like an old school hip hop sample cut through with guitar-noodle riffery – and deviates from this path only slightly. Some are louder than others – as on “The Opposite of Afternoon” – but they all cover the same sonic terrain. The high points of this style are, frankly, rather incredible: check out the single, “Swim and Sleep (Like A Shark)” for a good clue as to what a brilliant pop single sounds like in 2013. If the album stuck more to crafting moments like that, instead of losing itself in meandering, self-important guitar passages, it would be acclaimed. There is definite potential there, as long as guitarist/leader Ruban Nielson can get over himself long enough to realize it.

Final Mark: C+

And don’t forget to check out my book at http://www.trevorjameszaple.com, excerpt available for free and without much effort! Shareware 4 Lyfe.

Veronica Falls – “Waiting For Something To Happen”

On their second album, the English pop band continues to be rather difficult to pin down. They have wistful, twee melodies like genre legends Camera Obscura, but their sound is much more robust than anything that outfit ever released. They have elements of shoegaze and Eighties alt-rock, but they’re hardly the engine-rush, Hughesian soundtracking band that The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart perfected. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, like it always does: they aren’t prep-school-wistful, they aren’t a twee version of the Smashing Pumpkins, but they do okay. The C-86/Jesus And Mary Chain vibe some of the tracks hold helps to propel it along, but it gets mired down about a third of the way through and everything sort of sounds similar once you get to the end. Their 2011 self-titled debut held a lot of promise but Waiting For Something To Happen doesn’t really deliver, unless “promise” is supposed to lead to “more of the same”. The album’s title accurately describes the act of listening to it; you keep waiting for something to move you to the next level but nothing ever does. Decent enough, but rapidly approaching the vanishing point of “why bother?”

Final Mark: B-

My Bloody Valentine – “m b v”

When I first read that My Bloody Valentine was finally releasing a follow-up to 1991’s Loveless, a legendary album that stands as the icon of the shoegazer movement, my first question was, naturally, “why?”. I mean, seriously. If it’s been 22 years, what’s the point? Obviously the pressure of following up an album as iconic as Loveless is negated by the fact that more than two decades have passed. Surely the band members have better things to do with their lives than to gather together and try to relive past glories. Other iconic Nineties groups have tried to do so in the last few years; most have failed miserably. Did anyone really care about Soundgarden’s latest efforts? Does anyone besides the terrestrial radio heshers even listen to new Alice In Chains music? You don’t see Pavement releasing new material, and it’s not as though Slint has decided to try to out-do Spiderland. So, it was with trepidation that I listened to MBV. I even took quite a while to listen to it after I acquired it. It sat on my hard drive, gathering dread like spider webs. Even after glowing review after glowing review rolled in, I put off listening to it.

I shouldn’t have been afraid. It’s not Loveless, but it’s very, very, very good. It recreates the sonic stew the band bankrupted their label chasing all those years ago, and even manages to clean up the proceedings a little. The album is still mired in the lower frequencies, with subtle changes rumbling under the ghostly vocals and vacuum cleaner melodies, but there are nods to real, complicated percussion in places. It was rumoured in the late 1990s that Kevin Shields had recorded an MBV album that added jungle and drum n bass music to the mix, and the ghost of that long-shelved project still haunts tracks like “In Another Way. The pairing seems as though it should always have been; somewhere, someone has mixed a set of dnb paired with Isn’t Anything. It falls short of similar praise with its predecessor by slightly overstaying its welcome on a consistent basis. Several of the tracks run longer than they really need to, although a bit of longevity can be excused after such a long absence. Taken as a whole, m b v is a more than worthy followup to Loveless, and a prime contender for 2013 as well.

Final Mark: A

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – “Push The Sky Away”

The band’s last album, 2008’s Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, was a raucous affair, full of the sort of visceral garage-punk blasts that had always cropped up here and there in the their catalog, albeit on a much more consistent scale. Push The Sky Away takes the opposing path; where their last album scorched the earth, their newest meditates gloomily in the devastation. It’s the sort of contemplative tone that they took most notably on 2001’s hushed No More Shall We Part, but filtered through the sort of sonic crunch that Nick Cave explored in his Grinderman act. The result is an album that is both spiritual and heavy, uplifting and oppressive; it’s the sort of light-and-dark dichotomy that is quintessentially Nick Cave. The lack of hooks may be disconcerting to some, but it’s not as though the album is amelodic; tracks like “We No Who U R” and the title track will still get stuck in your head long after the album finishes. This sort of skill in songwriting is impressive, especially when one considers how long the band has been at it; to still be this good, this many years after inception, is a feat of which few songwriters in the modern era can boast.

Final Mark: A-