Eleanor Friedberger – New View

★★

Released January 22nd, 2016 on Frenchkiss Records

Eleanor Friedberger is best known as being half of indie also-rans The Fiery Furnaces, who once did an entire album with their grandmother. She is also the muse behind “Eleanor Put Your Boots On” by Franz Ferdinand, and “Anything You Want” by Spoon. She’s never been one of the more enticing songwriters on my radar, which is why 2013’s Personal Record was such a surprise. That album showed that Friedberger had a finely tuned sense of pop urgency, a bouncy sense of melody tied into tight arrangements that were undercut with a sort of jittery nervousness, like the songs had all been up too late drinking large amounts of coffee. Some of the tracks bordered on the anthemic, and despite my lack of enthusiasm for The Fiery Furnaces Personal Record ended up on my year-end list for 2013.

Most of what made Personal Record so great is missing on New View. The airtight arrangements have been replaced with drawn-out jams that border on early Neil Young a lot of the time (including the spacey, one-note guitar leads). It’s a rambing, homespun album that keeps Ms. Friedberger’s interesting sense of phrasing and lyrical bent and ditches everything else. In an interview with The Guardian, she said “I hope that this album just sounds like an adult woman who’s okay, as boring as that sounds!” Eleanor, the concept does sound boring, and the execution does it no favours. Surely there must be something that’s bothering you. Art is about communication, in its essence; if you don’t have anything to say, why bother saying anything? Furthermore, if you don’t have anything to say, why draw it out as much as you do on New View? Another pop record in the vein of Personal Record might have made the lack of theme in the songs more palatable; as it stands, it makes New View completely forgettable.

Tindersticks – The Waiting Room

★★★

Released January 22nd, 2016 on City Slang Records

Tightly wound, evocative, spring-loaded songs with lush instrumentation and funky little grooves: it’s a Tindersticks album, and a particularly good one. Not as good as one of their big epics from the 1990s like Tindersticks, or Curtains, but a worthy addition to a pretty solid discography. Then again, that’s also the biggest problem with The Waiting Room. It’s a good Tindersticks album, and that’s it. There’s no dynamic reach here, no sense of urgency or intensity. It’s an album by a band that’s already proven that they can do this sort of in-the-pocket white funk by the barrel-load, so one might be tempted to ask what the hell the point is in 2016. Sure, it makes a great background album; it’s both interesting and inoffensive, so it makes for a perfect cocktail record, but there’s nothing much of worth beyond that. If you want perfection of form there are earlier Tindersticks albums; if you’re looking to reach out of the comfort zone and find something new, The Waiting Room is not that album.

Fat White Family – Songs For Our Mothers

★☆

Released January 22nd, 2016 on Fat Possum Records

Fat White Family are a London band that likes to do two things: first, get in your face and slay sacred cows in the name of being offensive (in order to get at the truth of things, of course); and second, hoover up every known drug in existence. They’re sort of semi-legendary for both, even this early into their career.

Now neither of those things bothers me, per se. I enjoy irreverence, and there aren’t many cows I consider sacred when it comes to music. A similar band in this vein that I absolutely adore would be Future Of The Left. The big difference between Fat White Family and Future Of The Left, however, is that FOTL isn’t the most utterly boring collection of tripe I’ve come across in months.

Songs For Our Mothers starts off promisingly enough. “Whitest Boy On The Beach” is a fun, ramshackle kind of song that straddles the line of post-punk while urinating on it. Unfortunately, everything that comes after moves along at a crawl, coming off as a collection of dirges by ruffians who are trying to shock you but end up just putting you to sleep instead. I honestly fell asleep a couple of times listening to the album. Not a good sign for a band that wants to get by on being provocative.

Ditch the opiates and try some crack next time, lads. It’ll bring out your personality more.

Chairlift – Moth

★★☆

Released January 22nd, 2016 on Columbia Records

Singles:

“Ch-Ching“

“Romeo“

Something, Chairlift’s second album, was a pretty solid record and a lot of fun. On the strength of singles like “Sidewalk Safari”, “I Belong In Your Arms”, and the purely Eighties-biting “Amanaemonesia”, it got by on charisma and peppy synth work. That was four years ago. Since then, the world has become somehow even more inundated with bold, peppy synth pop. CHVRCHES happened, and then happened again. Chillwave pillars like Washed Out and Neon Indian became akin to cliches. So when Moth was released today, it came out into a sea of similar albums by similar bands.

To it’s credit, the front half is loaded with good songs, from the agitated funk of “Polymorphing” to the twin-barrel singles “Romeo” and “Ch-Ching”. Then “Crying In Public” happens and you’re left feeling uncomfortable and vaguely embarrassed, which I suppose brings out the idea behind the song but also makes you wonder why this lazily histrionic ballad wasn’t left in the 1987-marked bin it was discovered in. The back half is yawning mediocrity except for “Show U Off”, which rediscovers the fun of the first four songs. Then it ends on “No Such Thing As Illusion” and I’m trying and failing to come up with a reason to feel any sort of way about it; ambient balladry only works if there’s something to hang onto, and the walls of that song are smooth and blank.

Moth is one of those very common albums in popular music: you’ll find yourself singing along to the singles on the radio even while the album itself gathers dust.

Ty Segall – Emotional Mugger

★★★★☆

Released January 22nd, 2016 on Drag City Records

It’s 2016, and after eight years and fifty bajillion albums, Ty Garrett Segall is the undisputed master of modern psychedelic garage rock. On his own he has classics like Melted to his name; Slaughterhouse, recorded with his touring band as the Ty Segall Band, is one of the most vicious rock ‘n’ roll albums you will ever hear; his work with Fuzz is some of the best stoner rock ever recorded. Disciple/touring bandmate Mikal Cronin has gone on to stake a claim of his own, and his work with King Tuff brought Black Moon Spell to the next level. He’s the guru of the noisy underground, and with good reason.

His last two proper LPs, however, seem to have been a transitional thing for him; they seemed searching, as though Segall was no longer sure of who he was or where he was going. 2013’s Sleeper was uncharacteristically subdued, favouring acoustic guitars and hushed songs over the thick fuzz and twisted weirdness of Melted or Twins. Released a year later, Manipulator returned the volume but left out the bizarre out-there experimentation that characterized his early work. It was also very straightforward, for Ty Segall: it was a wall-to-wall collection of stately classic rock tropes lifted out of Zeppelin, Sabbath, and Bad Company, without much of the high-flying psychedelia. It’s good stuff, but in the face of everything that came before both Sleeper and Manipulator feel staid, like what would happen if a normie tried to approximate Ty Segall.

Emotional Mugger brings him back around full circle to Melted again, returning the weird conceptual nature, the odd noises, and the sense of trippy dread while keeping the traditional structuring he explored on his previous two records. The opening riff of “Squealer” shows that his old love of slathering his stuff in thick layers of goopy fuzz has returned; “Diversion”, “Mandy Cream”, and “Candy Sam” all continue in this vein. “Emotional Mugger/Leopard Priestess” and “Baby Big Man (I Want A Mommy)” hearken back to the experimental vibe that he brought to albums like Hair and Reverse Shark Attack while keeping their feet planted in the earth. “Squealer Two” is funky, adding wah into the fuzz-guitar mix to create something that sounds like David Bowie’s “Fame” as done by a severely drugged out Black Sabbath- which is to say that it rocks. The only real missteps on the album are “Breakfast Eggs” and “W.U.O.T.W.S.”: “W.U.O.T.W.S.” probably doesn’t need to be explained, as it’s the sort of weirdo run-down-the-radio-dial that sounds cool once and then gets skipped every time after; “Breakfast Eggs” has a nice rolling groove of a riff but the whole “Candy, I want your candy” line falls flat. I get that it’s playing with a rock ‘n’ roll trope but it doesn’t succeed in subverting it so much as it revels too much in its overall cheesiness.

There is also an overall theme running through Emotional Mugger, about how modern existence and the overabundance of technology robs us of our emotional response to stimuli and overburdens us with information and experience, but to Segall’s credit it doesn’t interfere with the proceedings at all. In the end, it’s a summation of everything that sets Ty Segall apart as an artist and a performer, and it sounds really great when you crank it up loud.

David Bowie – Blackstar

Blackstar

★★★★☆

Released January 8th, 2016 on ISO/RCA/Columbia Records

Singles:

“Blackstar“

“Lazarus“

In 2013 David Bowie emerged from ten years of quiet to release The Next Day, an album that recalled his work with the Berlin Trilogy of Low, Heroes, and Lodger without ever actually being as wildly experimental or as unsettling as those three albums. Despite this, it was easily the best album Bowie had released in a long time (personally since Earthlings, for most people since 1980’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)) and gave birth to discussions of a new creative renaissance for him. This idea tends to ignore the fact that, aside from the relatively regrettable period of 1983-1987, Bowie has been in a constant state of reinvention. After his pop period, he became a hard rock dynamo (Tin Machine), a purveyor of sax-soaked New Jack Swing and rave rhythms (Black Tie White Noise), an industrial-etched grunge freak (Outside), and a jungle and drum n bass ingenue (Earthling) before settling into a somewhat more sedate period of more traditional pop/AOR songs.

Still, despite this restless nature, there’s nothing in the Bowie catalog quite like Blackstar.

To say it’s “experimental” is to miss the point. To call it “jazz fusion” is to massively generalize what’s going on here. There’s saxophone all throughout the album, in a way that there hasn’t been since 1993, but it’s not jazz-sax in the sense that one normally considers it. Longtime collaborator Carlos Alomar once likened Bowie’s sax playing to the brushstrokes of an impressionist painter, and this is especially true of the sax usage on Blackstar. Between Bowie and his new lieutenant Donny McCaslin, the saxophone is used in unsettling ways throughout the record, as a tonal voice rather than as the typical flurry of notes or jazzy finger-snapper. In fact, “unsettling” is the best way to describe the album, and in that it’s the first Bowie album to truly evoke unease and contemplation since Scary Monsters. So there. It’s his best since Scary Monsters. People have been using that line to describe Bowie albums since Black Tie White Noise but if we’re really going to examine the man’s discography (and I already have) then it’s more in line with being his best since Heroes. More to the point, it’s not quite like anything else, so comparing it to previous albums is almost a useless exercise. “Blackstar” is nearly ten minutes of atonal noise, thoroughly modern percussion, unsettling lyricism, odd voices, and a clean vocal section that feels like it’s the straight man to the experimentation going on around it. “‘Tis A Pity She Was A Whore” is a stellar Bowie song in the tradition of stellar Bowie songs – a more menacing take on something like “Beauty And The Beast”, let’s say – and “Dollar Days” is akin to that, only in the form of a ballad like “Word On A Wing”. “Lazarus” is structured so that every line is punctuated by bursts of sax and distorted guitar, lending it weight and unease; the reworked version of “Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime)” makes what was previously an interestingly curious single into a something altogether more gritty, as though the group decided to take the jazzy feel of the original out of the club and into the dark and rainswept streets. “Girl Loves Me” kicks along like the teeth-bared Bowie of the late 1970s and returns to his love of strange languages (Nadsat, from A Clockwork Orange, and Polari, a slang among gay men in Britain in the 1950s) as well as his previous techniques of Burroughs-esque cut and paste. “I Can’t Give Everything Away” is the most straightforward cut on the album, a Bowie crooner like he’d fallen into on Heathen or Reality, although it is far beyond anything that was featured on either (except maybe “Bring Me The Disco King”)

Blackstar does something more than merely prove that Bowie still has it. It presents a worthy addition to the legend that has been created around him. It’s as good as Station To Station, Low, Heroes, or really anything else he’s recorded, and as able to stand on its own.