Parquet Courts – Human Perfomance

Parquet Courts – Human Performance

★★★★☆

Released April 8th, 2016 on Rough Trade Records

Parquet Courts are a lot of different things. A little bit Modern Lovers, a little bit Guided By Voices, the odd bit of Pavement, some old-world post-punk, the poppier moments of Swell Maps – it all rides a certain smoky nonsense, something borne out of the septic days of the Velvet Underground. I asked them recently on Reddit if they were kidnapped, locked in a room, and asked at gunpoint to choose between Pere Ubu and Swell Maps who their choice would be. Frontman Andrew Savage responded that first, this was an odd outlet for aggression, and second that he would have to be a patriot and choose Pere Ubu.

Parquet Courts are a post-punk band, but they’re an updated iteration of that exploration of what punk rock means. What does Wire and Swell Maps fronted by a deadpan, jittery Stephen Malkmus sound like? It sounds like Human Performance. The opening track, “Dust”, extends a Pink Flag era type riff while capturing a narrative out of the anonymous textures of everyday life. The title track lives on the edge of its own churning emotions, for sure, but it kicks off with one of the most succinct descriptions of love: “I know exactly where I was when I first saw you the way I see you now, with these eyes.” From there Andrew Savage tries to figure out exactly where it all went wrong, with regards to his relationship with both girl and city. Tracks like “Outside”, “Steady On My Mind”, song-of-the-year candidate “Berlin Got Blurry”, and “Keep It Even” tackle the former subject. More interesting are the songs that wrestle with Savage’s hot-and-cold relationship with NYC: “I Was Just Here” wonders fiercely where that Chinese restaurant got off to so quickly; “Captive Of The Sun”‘s Dylan-esque word vomit models the bustle and restlessness of the street; “One Man No City” examines the loneliness of the uncaring hordes; “Two Dead Cops” uses a real double-homicide of police officers in Bed-Stuy in 2014 to talk about the seemingly random and impersonal violence that crops up constantly in urban situations. The loneliness of a failing relationship is thus juxtaposed against the loneliness of the impersonal big city and a constant back-and-forth connection can be established between the two.

Parquet Courts have been on an upward trajectory of, if not maturity, increased awareness of their position as “artists” and of the art that they are creating. Light Up Gold was a mile-a-minute cross between pop punk, post-punk, and early Nineties indie rock a la Pavement and Guided By Voices. Sunbathing Animal followed suit, but on Content Nausea they got jittery, angular, and all of those other words we used to describe post-punk inspired indie rock with in the early Oughts. Monastic Living doubled down on that path, giving us a solid minute and a half of melody before spewing noise for the remainder of the EP. Human Performance brings it back around to the beginning, but with a heavy dose of that dreaded word I disavowed above: “maturity”. The noise terrorism is kept to a judicious minimum and the tempos have lost some velocity, and in this is the structure of a brilliant album.

AND THE REST…

Frightened Rabbit

Painting Of A Panic Attack

★★☆

04/08/2016 on Atlantic Records

“Get Out” is a great track and having National pedigree on production is promising, so why does this album fall so goddamn flat?

Deftones

Gore

★☆

04/08/2016 on Reprise Records

So you can’t go home again, as it turns out. Gore kind of sounds like the past glories of Deftones, if you take out things like edge and excitement.

PJ Harvey

The Hope Six Demolition Project

★★★☆

04/15/2016 on Vagrant Records

While not being as wall-to-wall brilliant as 2011’s Let England Shake, the veteran’s newest album manages to bring her politics local again, while getting off a few good shots. “The Wheel” happens to be a particular classic, and “The Ministry Of Defence” brings it all back around to Rid Of Me.

Mike & The Melvins

Three Men And A Baby

★★☆

04/01/2016 on Sub Pop Records

The gods of Sabbath riffery were supposed to do this album with underground Mike Kunka 16 years ago, and it shows. Like most Melvins collab albums, it’s only as essential as your sense of completion requires it to be.

Tacocat

Lost Time

★★★

04/01/2016 on Hardly Art Records

Breezy, fun pop-punk from the Seattle heirs of the riot grrrl movement. Doesn’t differ all that much from their debut, but then again it probably doesn’t need to.

Megadeth – Dystopia

★★

Released January 22nd, 2016 on Tradecraft Records

Singles:

“Fatal Illusion“

“The Threat Is Real“

“Dystopia“

The addition of Lamb of God drummer Chris Adler and Angra guitarist Kiko Loureiro to Megadeth’s lineup seems to have galvanized them. Dystopia is, musically, the first Megadeth album since 2004’s The System Has Failed to really embrace the aggressive thrash sound that made them famous in the first place. “Thrash” here is used a bit incorrectly, of course. Thrash metal implies that there is some awe-inspiring complexity that goes along with the speed, a blend of punk fury and metal heroics. The speed isn’t quite there and the riffs mostly chunk along rather than get knotty; all of this is perhaps forgivable for a band that is aging and that has repeatedly lost and then found its way again over the course of its career.

Less forgivable is frontman Dave Mustaine. His lead guitar skills are as slippery and quicksilver as they ever were, but the moment he opens his mouth everything gets dicier. His voice is aging awfully, for one thing. His signature howl has been reduced to an old man’s croak, and that croak is spewing things that would be embarrassing if they weren’t so damnably cliche. Mustaine has always been lyrically one to rail against authority in a tiresomely John Galt fashion, but on Dystopia this railing has been reduced to stuff you can find on any Tea Party web forum: Obama is a dictator, an emperor with no clothes, and he’s letting in Muslims who will destroy America from within. Why can’t we stand up to him? Why do we not face down the forces that oppose American interests? Wow Dave, Arabic singing before “The Threat Is Real”, gee, what are you trying to say, so subtle. And so on and so on into boredom. It lends every song a curiously turgid quality, which is undesirable given that the mainly bottom-end trawling guitar riffs already make them pretty stiff. It’s pretty bad when I would actually prefer the self-help sobfest of St. Anger to this, since it actually had some life (beyond that trashcan snare) and I could relate to it more.

Still, as far as Megadeth albums go, it’s less bad than Cryptic Writings and Risk, so at least Dystopia has that going for it.

Kurt Vile – b’lieve i’m goin down…

★★★☆

Anyone who’s been watching Kurt Vile explore the experience of a man and his guitar for a while now can be forgiven for thinking, upon a listening of “Pretty Pimpin'”, “Oh, he’s found a beat, good for him.” Vile’s stock-in-trade has been hazy dissipation for some time now, through his solo debut Smoke Ring For My Halo and into his excessively sprawling, hazy-to-the-point-of-incoherence sophomore follow up Wakin On A Pretty Daze. On b’lieve i’m goin down… Vile snaps back into focus, like coming out of a particularly deep stoned reverie.

This isn’t to say that he’s lost the meandering quality. A number of songs on here – the ones that stretch out towards the seven minute mark, mainly – are strongly reminiscent of his work on the last album, where you start losing the plot around the four minute mark and you never really recover it. “That’s Life Tho (almost hate to say)” and “Lost My Head There” are the worst offenders of this sort, but they’re balanced off by the melodic success of tracks like “I’m An Outlaw”, “Dust Bunnies”, and “Bad Omens”. The album works on that careful balance the entire way, teetering between focused, song-oriented work and the hazy, lengthy jams he’s particularly known for. The song-oriented tracks are a nice break from the jams, which don’t run quite as overlong as they did on Wakin On A Pretty Daze, but come close.

Ultimately Kurt Vile is at his best when he’s mining out a Crazy Horse-esque pattern with languid, stoned vocals, and that’s precisely what’s on offer here. It can get a bit exhausting at times but there’s always something to draw you back in, especially if you wear your hair long and keep a baggie of herbal medicine in your bedside table.

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.

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.

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Destroyer – Poison Season

★★★★☆

It’s been a long, long time since City Of Daughters, the first of Dan Bejar’s Destroyer albums to achieve wider distribution and recognition. Back then, in those heady days of 1998, he was the poet laureate of drinking in the park, a dissolute and languid lover scribbling guitar sketches of love for various women and hatred for the record industry. Since then he’s found a permanent place as the resident poet of the New Pornographers and slowly grown his image, developmentally and chronologically. He switched the mickey-in-a-paper-bag for fine bourbon, the ripped jeans for a crisp white linen suit, and the song-sketches for fully-realized instrumental smorgasbords. The density of his poetry developed alongside; by the time Destroyer’s Rubies came along in 2006, he was the poet laureate of the modern singer-songwriter.

Then came 2011 and Kaputt. At first the concept seemed absurd: it was an album deeply indebted to disco rhythms and the sounds of the early 1980s. It was, as both detractors and champions pointed out, the purest expression of yacht-rock that you could find. Despite its dubious influences, it worked amazingly well, garnering stellar reviews and numerous spots on year-end lists. The wider fame generated by the success of Kaputt also made Bejar more uncomfortable; having spent fifteen years taking potshots at the record industry,being caught up in it proved to be just as depressing as he’d imagined. This discomfort with the trappings of newfound fame explains both the four-year wait for Poison Season and the change in sound.

Poison Season is not a yacht-rock album. It is not a post-disco album. It is not a pop album, although Kaputt was never a strictly pop outing either. Instead, Poison Season is both a return and a progression. It’s a return to the sprawling singer-songwriter, the man in the open-chested white suit tickling the piano and singing literary songs of chasing lovers and lives. At the same time it’s much more than that. The sheer amount of instruments on any one given track can be overwhelming at times. It’s not just Bejar and a piano – it’s the piano, the strings, horns, dollops of full-throated saxophone, and a bit of guitar layered in for texture. On the two rockier tracks – “Dream Lover” and “Times Square” – it sounds uncommonly like the E Street Band before they left Asbury Park for the wider sounds of America. There’s a whiff of “Rosalita” and “Incident On 57th Street” here and there, although the Boss never went as fully chaotic as Bejar allows his band to go here. There are moments – like on the end of “Hell Is An Open Door” – where the songs descend into a maelstrom of instruments, furiously playing off of one another like a hurricane of sound. In the middle of it all, Bejar’s voice brings everything together, the anchor for the yacht in the middle of the fury.

If Kaputt was a (relatively) sunny album, a daytime album, Poison Season is the nighttime album. The yacht has docked and Bejar and Co. are playing on the beach to a crowd of well-heeled degenerates looking to party genteely until dawn. When dawn comes, it’s a surprise; “Oh shit, here comes the sun,” he gasps in surprise on the sax-drenched “Dream Lover”, and it’s a change from his previous embrace of the all-night escapade on “Here Comes The Nighttime”, from This Night. This is not an isolated self-reference, either; as usual, Bejar peppers his lyrics with backlinks to previous songs from Thief, This Night, and Your Blues. If you think you’ve heard a line before, you probably have, and it comes across as usual as a wink-and-nod to the people that have stuck with him across the wide gulf of years that separate drinking in the park from drinking at an open bar on a private beach.

If there’s a line that can sum up the feelings brought about by Poison Season, it’s “Bitter tears, bitter pills / it sucks when there’s nothing but gold in those hills”, from “Girl In A Sling”. That is to say, it may suck for Bejar to be cursed with a sense of style and flair that has proven popular, but for me listening it’s nothing less than triumphant. Destroyer will likely continue to be a popular unit, regardless of Bejar’s feelings on the matter, and for the rest of us that’s quite alright.

Chelsea Wolfe – Abyss

★★★★

Abyss is, at first blush, loud and crushingly heavy. This is, of course, not new territory for Chelsea Wolfe; the L.A. singer-songwriter has claimed black metal, doom, drone, and dark ambient music as her influence since the very beginning. Compared to her last album, 2013’s Pain Is Beauty, however, it’s practically a doom metal album in its own right. A good deal of this is the presence of guitarist Mike Sullivan, whose post-metal group Russian Circles sets the standard for crushingly heavy guitar work. The very first moments of “Carrion Flowers” make for the most oppressive sounds Chelsea Wolfe has ever engaged in, and the way her dusky voice cuts through the thickness is a moment of sheer frisson. The album cover sets the tone perfectly: the singer falling into deep water, sinking beyond breath, light, and life.

Unlike many of her influences, however, she manages to expertly balance oppressive heaviness with passages of lighter (though no less eerie) folk work; “Iron Moon” is the standard-bearer for this, shifting from the pound of sledgehammer guitars to fingerpicked strings and vocals with ease and a deftness of which a thousand grunge bands from two decades prior could only dream. “Maw” and “Crazy Love” focus more on the quieter parts, outlining a masterful interplay between acoustic instrumentation and the singer’s emotive voice. She even manages, on “Grey Days”, to incorporate programmed drums without having it sound out-of-place, or like bad Evanescence. It’s gothic-tinged rock done correctly, without angst or pandering to the over-makeup’d karaoke set.

Abyss takes Chelsea Wolfe’s music to a new, heavier level that plays up her influences while still keeping the proceedings firmly in her own camp. At times it feels as though the music is creeping out of your speakers to surround you, and smother you in darkness. Rather than go over-the-top in this, like many of her influences, she keeps her music agile, dynamic, and always interesting.

Moon Duo – Shadow Of The Sun

★★★

Moon Duo – a side project of guitarist Ripley Johnson, more known as a member of San Fransisco psych-rockers Wooden Shjips – have, on their fourth album, settled into a serious groove. They play psychedelic rock, marry it to a motorik beat, and stir a whole lot of post-punk/New Wave tone throughout. It’s an interesting mixture, even if it’s the same kind of music they were putting out in 2010; the old maxim of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” certainly applies to Moon Duo circa 2015. If you’re into lysergic guitar solos, pre-cheese New Wave, or if the concept of a Feelies that came of age in Haight-Ashbury era San Francisco appeals to you, Moon Duo are the band you’re looking for.

Will Butler – Policy

★★★

Multi-instrumentalist Will Butler’s day job is, of course, supporting his brother Win in Arcade Fire. As a solo artist, his output seems to skew towards a version of the sound his band has fallen into on the last couple of albums: part wide-scope, stomping rock ‘n’ roll, part nostalgia for the recession-plagued, synth-haunted days of the early 1980s. “Take My Side” and “What I Want” both show off his skill in crafting rootsy but slick guitar pop, while “Anna” and “Something’s Coming” bely a love of the dark, minor melodies of Gowan and Berlin. As someone who’s been obsessed with “Metro” of late, I find his efforts with the synthesizer to be much more satisfying; the more straight-forward rock and roll work comes off as a lesser version of the work his day band has perfected. “Finish What I Started” reveals a third side to Butler – that of a sad-eyed piano crooner – that trumps both the rock ‘n’ roll and the New Wave parts of Policy. On stage with Arcade Fire, Will Butler comes off as endlessly energetic, an inventive ‘fill-in-the-holes’ type, and a key supporter of main duo Win & Regine. “Finish What I Started” (and, to a lesser extent, “Sing To Me”) show a much different, more somber side to the man.

Policy shows off a deeper set of skills than Butler has displayed heretofore, but for all of that it still presents itself as a definite side-project – nothing world-shaking, just something to fill time and stake a name between monolithic Arcade Fire albums.

Noveller – Fantastic Planet

★★☆

Sarah Lipstate has, on Fantastic Planet, created an essential dichotomy: an album that is at once a deeply interesting work of beauty that is also utterly banal. As far as ambient music goes, the best stuff has always been able to function on its own, giving the listener room to conjure up their own ideas about what’s going on. Mediocre ambient feels as though it lacks context; they’re soundtrack pieces without a soundtrack,, backing tracks to over-ambitious poets or underground performance art pieces. Lipstate crafts something that sits squarely in the middle, saved from being purely mediocre by virtue of the deft touches she brings to her craft. The synthesizers are draped in glammy nostalgia, the bass is immediate, and the guitars sound like dozens of hours were spent on the processing of them alone – which, given her main focus on the instrument, they likely were. From a musician’s standpoint it’s an interesting album to pick apart for the “how did she get that sound” aspect, but that can only carry you so far. Divorced from gear-nerdiness, it becomes apparent about halfway through that there’s nothing to really hang your hat on in the pieces. Nothing sticks. I’ve listened to the album three times and there’s nothing that stands out to bring me back in, just a blur of well-arranged instruments. If you have some futurist art piece you’d like a musical accompaniment to, here’s your thing, but otherwise there are better ways you can occupy your time.