The Bohicas – The Making Of

★☆

The making of what? The album? The title references the making of itself? What in the name of all that is holy does that even mean?

It doesn’t matter. Let’s talk about what does matter: the utter mediocrity on display on this English indie band’s debut album.

The album starts off promisingly enough. “I Do It For Your Love” kicks out a riff that recalls early Cars in all their stiff glory. Then Dominic McGuiness starts singing and it all falls down. He is easily the most uninspired frontman I’ve heard in weeks. The music on display is at least muscular, if rather generic. It’s equal parts Strokes and Strokes wannabes – that is to say, it’s largely indistinguishable from everything else on alternative radio. Is it the Kaiser Chiefs? Two Door Cinema Club? The Vaccines? No, it’s the Bohicas! If McGuiness had anything approaching a personality he might have been able to sell these songs, given that there’s nothing terrible about them. Unfortunately, McGuiness has the personality of the singer of the local bar band, making The Making Of into a muddle of half-realized anthems, stock riffs, and generic alterna-vocals with lyrics that could be easily interchanged between songs without making anything confusing.

I guess it fits well on the radio to break up Mumford & Sons and Coldplay, but I’ll be damned if I know why anyone would seek out and listen to the album more than once.

Sleaford Mods – Key Markets

★★★☆

What is punk? What has punk ever been? There’s a lot of confusion on this particular topic these days, I find. There are people out there who honestly believe that punk requires distorted power chords played fast in a very short period of time. Hardcore fans think that only hardcore is punk. Pop punk fans think you need a Warped Tour berth in order to make it in punk. Kids have grown up immersed in skateboard commercials and Tony Hawk video games and so associate the sounds pioneered by Adolescents and Bad Religion as being quintessentially punk. Alternately, kids grew up crying about being “friendzoned” and bored in the suburbs and so think of The Wonder Years and The Hotelier (to get some recent examples in here) as being purely punk. The effect is the same: it requires loud distorted guitars and standard verse-chorus-verse structures, like it’s fucking Blue Oyster Cult or something.

People get weirded out when I tell them that Wu-Tang was punk. The whole thing about punk is an ethos. That’s it. It has nothing to do with the music, and that should be patently obvious to anyone who has listened to Devo, the Slits, the Ramones, and Oingo Boingo back to back. The Clash weren’t punk because they sounded a certain way, and neither were the Ramones. . Punk means doing it your own way, without any regard for what the “industry standards” are, and it often means doing it on your own, without much outside help, because the industry is centered around what already sells, not on taking risks. The Ramones banged out three chords in a garage and got together with a lot of like-minded bands to create their own movement, outside of the Eagles and disco and whatever else was popular in 1977. The hardcore bands from the 1980s got together in basements and abandoned spaces and played to people who were just like them – the fringes of society and other hardcore bands. They did so completely outside of the frame of reference of acceptable label-based music and did their own thing. The Wu-Tang Clan share a similar story. Hip-hop was getting big before 1993, but it had a certain sound that needed to happen in order to get record deals and promotion. The Wu didn’t want that sound, so they did their own thing: RZA produced dusty, chopped-up, menacing tracks over which the others spat complicated, gritty stories that felt like more literary versions of the accepted gangsta music coming out of the West Coast. They made their own sounds, crafted their own image, and forced the industry to come to terms with them. In doing so they molded the shape and sound of their genre for years to come, much as the Ramones and the Clash did in the late 1970s. In other words, the Wu? Punk as fuck. The bands who adopt an image and a sound to get record deals and Warped Tour slots? About as punk as Donny Osmond.

So, Sleaford Mods. The Nottingham-based duo are not at first glance very punk, for the reasons outlined above. They most assuredly are, however. In 2015 they make what can be tagged as hip-hop, but hip-hop in 2015 sounds unlike this. 2015 hip-hop requires 808 bass, trap rolls, aggression, menacing string stabs, and a minimalist sing-song sort of flow that comes straight outta Soulja Boy. Sleaford Mods utilize drums and bass, often cut live, crafted in a vision of hip hop seen through the eyes of English rockers. That’s pretty much it in terms of instrumentation – no samples, no semi-automatic gunfire-type hi-hat fills, no deeply booming bass. Over this stark arrangement, Jason Williamson spits off-kilter rants about capitalism, unemployment, shitty living conditions, live shows, the failures of the record industry, and how, after seeing the Von Blondies, he wouldn’t fuck around with Jack White. All of this is rendered in an East Midlands accent, like Mark E. Smith had grown up listening to rap in the Nineties. It does not sound like anything that should be on anyone’s radar, and yet, much like Death Grips, it is.

Death Grips, the leading light of the not-at-all-a-movement punk-rap movement, are noise terrorists, playing not only with their sound but also with their label and with audience expectations. Sleaford Mods keep it more working class than that delivering the goods without making it flashy or more complicated than it needs to be. Key Market is even more straightforward than their previous album, 2014’s Divide and Exit, and this proves to be both a blessing and a curse. While the no-frills arrangements allow Williamson’s personality to really come to the forefront like never before, it makes the album sound musically like an updated version of The Fall. That said, of course, there’s nothing particularly wrong with taking your cues from both hip hop and The Fall, leaving Key Markets as an exciting, bewildering album that shows off the band’s talents at blazing a new punk trail.

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The Vaccines – English Graffiti

★★☆

Sometimes it’s easy to underestimate the effect that The Strokes had on modern rock. After all the band itself put out one classic debut and a series of follow-ups that can be charitably described as decent. We’re now fourteen years out from the moment that Julian Casablancas kicked over a mic stand in the “Last Nite” video, and their presence has been enmeshed into the public consciousness for so long that it seems as though it had always been there. The mixture of strummy 70s heartland guitar rock (that “Last Nite” intro is pure “American Girl”) and Television-appropriating melodies sounded odd next to Seether and System Of A Down at the time, but now every band on alternative radio has the Strokes DNA.

The Vaccines are no exception. Their 2011 debut, What Did You Expect From The Vaccines? earned them hype as the Next Saviours of Rock ‘n’ Roll because they could pull off the swagger and the wit of the Strokes in a fun way. Like so many bands before them – Franz Ferdinand, The Killers, and the Strokes themselves – their second album was an attempt at more of the same and the intensity of the hype dropped away. Now, with English Graffiti, they attempt reinvention. Forget relationship songs, we’ll write songs about stuff. Dave Fridmann will produce. We’ll tell everyone it’s because he did The Woods, but we’ll tell him to pull out the tricks he played on The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots. Actually you know what, we’ll get Cole M. Grief-Niell to produce too, to get that so-hot Ariel Pink AM pop sound at the same time. Everyone loves that sound, right? We’ll get on the radio right now.

And so English Graffiti was born. “Handsome” is a quick-and-slick opener, just the kind of thing to get thing pumping. “Dream Lover” follows and reaches for the arena seats, the festival slots, and anywhere else that you can throw your fist in the air and become disconnected from the band on stage. “Want You So Bad” and especially “(All Afternoon) In Love”, however, crawl along far too slowly to elicit any interest, and “20/20” and “Radio Bikini” overdo perky and radio-ready to a large degree. The album bounces back and forth between crawling on the floor and jumping on the bed, strung together by the gloss that both Fridmann and Grief-Neill polish onto everything. The final effect is that it sounds like candy-coated post-Strokes alterna-rock, aiming for everyone and hitting a few people along the way. The biggest problem with the album, though, is the way that the instruments are allowed to run into the red on a constant basis. There’s a buzz behind every instrument that comes from pure clipping. Volume-boosting for a bigger sound worked magically on The Soft Bulletin, it works significantly less magically on English Graffiti.

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Speedy Ortiz – Foil Deer

★★★☆

The Massachusetts indie rock band got a lot of listeners on the strength of their debut, 2013’s Major Arcana. Foil Deer doesn’t change the formula much, but in this case it’s definitely one of those “avoiding fixing if not broken” deals. As it was before, the band comes off on the surface like they’re another group dealing in crunchy 90s guitar nostalgia and recycled slacker ideology. Beneath that initial impression, however, Sadie Dupis’ lyrics reveal a depth of unease, sadness, and humor that a lot of the aforementioned 90s bands would have killed to possess. The first verse of the best track on here, “The Graduates”, bears this out: “We were the French club dropouts / But we never got excused from class / The secretary must have been high / To turn a blind eye on us sneaking out back / And we were pregnant on the balcony / And you caught me with a cigarette / I never put the thing on my lips / Just crushed it and spit on where I laid it to rest”. Don’t let the high school references fool you, though – “The Graduates” is a song about crushing on your friends in general, and was written specifically about Dupis’ now-boyfriend Dylan Baldi, he of Cloud Nothings fame.

The problem with basing interesting song writing around 90s alt-rock/grunge nostalgia, of course, is that it becomes hard to separate the tracks after a while, since they’re constructed out of the same distorted power chords and thundering drums we’ve been listening to since 1992. Given some time to pick it apart, however, Foil Deer reveals itself to be one of the better alt-rock retreads to come out recently. This sounds like a backhanded compliment, and it is.

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Panda Bear – Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper

★★★☆

The last major outing for Noah Lennox – Animal Collective’s Centipede Hz – was a rather disappointing album. The stakes, therefore, were pretty high for this new Panda Bear album. Would Mr. Lennox find his footing again, or would it turn out to be another case of diminishing returns from a once-hot artist who managed to change the rules for a brief, shining period in the Oughts? Spoiler alert: it’s the former.

Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper returns to the same sort of sounds that made Person Pitch such a delight. Unlike his last Panda Bear album, 2011’s Tomboy, it eschews a stripped-down focus on guitars and drums and returns to the sampler and the synthesizer. It’s electronic pop with a severely experimental bent, like Caribou took a lot of acid and played Pet Sounds with abandon. That last bit is maybe a bit more of a red herring this time around; while Lennox’s vocals on Person Pitch were strongly influenced by the Beach Boys, his work over the last eight years has made those sounds his own, and so now they sound less like the Beach Boys, and more like Panda Bear in its own right. The songs don’t cloak themselves in studio weirdness like on Centipede Hz, where all of Animal Collective’s tricks served to distract rather than enthrall. Instead, they get right to the point and stay there, allowing the weirdness to enhance your quality of life. There’s a bouyancy on these songs that cannot be denied, a quality that’s easy to spot on the singles “Mr. Noah” and “Latin Boys” but is also present on the slower, sadder tracks “Tropic of Cancer” and “Lonely Wanderer”. They’re cloudy songs with hope, and while they break up the joyousness a bit, the overall effect of the album leaves you feeling cleaner and happier than you were when you went into it.

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