M83 – Junk

★★★★

Released April 8th, 2016 on Mute Records

My wife and I keep Sirius XMU, the “indie” satellite channel, on in the car pretty much all the time. One consequence of this is that, when the blogger guest DJs come on, things can get pretty random. One day, during what might have been Brooklyn Vegan’s set but was probably Gorilla Vs Bear’s, the subject of vaporwave was brought up. Sort of. Whomever it was referred to what they were playing as “weather-channel-core”, as in “the sort of music that you’d hear played over the weather channel as it flips through various local and regional forecasts.” This is pretty similar to the concept of vaporwave – where the dulcet sounds of late 80s/early 90s training video music (along with every other uncool musical movement of the era) are reconstructed into something bizarrely post-modern. Either way, it’s taking the sound of music that was never really meant to be listened to actively and ensuring that the listener has to do so.

The genre has had some limited success, mainly online. Macintosh Plus (or Vektroid, as she normally goes by) had a lot of people on /mu/ convinced with Floral Shoppe that vaporwave was their life. Saint Pepsi has bubbled around alt-indie radio and Oneohtrix Point Never celebrated his signing to venerable Warp Records with R Plus Seven, a heavily vaporwave-influenced album. Still, in a year where everything sounds like Drake (because everything on the charts has Drake on it, natch), it’s hard to imagine people grooving to adult contemporary saxophones, smooth jazz sounds, factory-preset synth voices, and those hollow, echo-laden drums that scream “cheap Eighties power ballad”. And yet, here is Junk.

Of course, if anyone was going to “go vaporwave”, it was going to be Anthony Gonzalez. His M83 project may have kicked off with a couple of hard-synth albums that appropriated the bombast of Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness for an uncertain new age, but his sound came into its own on Saturdays=Youth, the soundtrack to the dream John Hughes movie that only ever existed in your head. It was unabashedly influenced by the Eighties, to the point where the person inside you that desperately wants to be cool feels uncomfortable listening to it at times. Hurry Up We’re Dreaming followed this up with a sprawling double album of synth-rock heroics, dream pop bliss, and more of that Breakfast Club soundtrack vibe. Junk is not like that. Junk takes Gonzalez’s love of 1987 and dives in full-force. This is the smooth jazz-AOR-proto-diva-power-ballad-hybrid album that has been lurking inside of his head since forever. “Go!” has one of those searing guitar solos that used to anchor pop songs (like Eddie Van Halen’s wailing on “Beat It”); “Walkway Blues” has some texture-treated sax (or synth-sax, possibly); “Moon Crystal” is pure VHS nostalgia – an advertisement for a spa, or some other feature you’d watch on an internal hotel channel. “For The Kids” is the sappiest family movie ballad that was never released in a glut of bad straight-to-video movies, although “Atlantique Sud” comes close. “The Wizard” adds in the thin-tape of cheap commercial grade VHS sounds, like a training video that’s been watched too many times over thirty years. “Sunday Night 1987” closes out the album with exactly what the title promises, a smooth, nearly edgeless bit of calmed-down soulful balladry with those Casio-preset piano noises and reedy late-period Billy Joel saxophones.

Junk has all of the trappings of vaporwave except perhaps for its politics. The artists that originally started piecing together the disparate parts that make up the genre intended to offer a satire or critique of modern consumer culture and the disturbing habit of throwing away everything that is even the slightest bit old. It’s meant to reveal the cracks in the golden facade of capitalism by ironically remixing music that was only intended to be a backdrop to sales tools, or to cynically fill in places in art that was only ever intended to make someone along the chain some money. Does Junk fulfill this? Not particularly. It seems to function instead as an homage to Gonzalez’s youth, much as his previous two albums functioned. It uses nostalgia to make nostalgic art, rather than critique the past and future. It’s done in such a deft and seamless way, however, that I can’t really count that apolitical status as a fault. Instead, it’s a tribute to a time and a sound that most people would rather gloss over or ignore. You can see that reflected in the reaction to the album; most people don’t seem to know what to make of it, thinking that there must be some hidden ironic agenda going on that they’re not in on. The cheese is sincere, however, and celebratory.

AND THE REST…

Deakin

Sleep Cycles

★★★☆

04/08/2016 on My Animal Home Records

That Kickstarter Josh Dibb did initially to crowdfund this album? He donated most of that to charity. Kickstarter is problematic. Sleep Cycles is a good album though, one that approximates the bare essentials of his Animal Collective day job without getting into the high-flying lysergic excesses.

Peter Wolf

A Cure For Loneliness

★★

04/08/2016 on Concord Records

The former singer for the J. Geils Band tries to pretend that thirty years of history hasn’t happened and that he can still get away with lite-rock AOR music. It’s always fun when you can guess exactly where each song is going to go from the minute it starts. Did I say fun? I mean sleep-inducing.

Ben Watt

Fever Dream

★★☆

04/08/2016 on Universal Music

Like an actual fever dream, it goes in many strange directions and there’s very little to grasp onto once you wake up.

Future Of The Left

The Peace and Truce Of The Future Of The Left

★★★

04/08/2016 on Prescriptions Records

I just want an album that’s as rich, over-the-top, and powerful as Travels With Myself And Another. Admittedly, this comes pretty close.

Teleman

Brilliant Sanity

★★★

04/08/2016 on Moshi Moshi Records

One of those indie albums that sounds an awful lot like all the other indie albums. Except for “Dusseldorf” and “Glory Hallelujah”, though: both of those are stellar tracks.

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.

Japanese Breakfast – Psychopomp

★★★★☆

Released April 1st, 2016 on Yellow K Records

The dream of the Nineties is alive in more places than just Portland these days. With every second kid out there wearing a flannel overshirt and a fitted cap, and every second band trading in post-Dinosaur Jr. guitar crunch, one can be forgiven for thinking that they were reliving their memories of 1992. Unlike their fuzz-pedal worshipping contemporaries – Bully, Speedy Ortiz, Joanna Gruesome, the Crutchfield sisters – Japanese Breakfast takes their cues from a more esoteric place. Psychopomp is a little bit Isn’t Anything-era My Bloody Valentine, with the airy charm of vintage Asobi Seksu and a bit of the more out-there moments of Guided By Voices. “In Heaven” is a shoegaze paradise; “Everybody Wants To Love You” is a chug-along lo-fi anthem. “Jane Cum” and “Triple 7” are the highlights, soaring numbers that focus their attention on the impassioned vocals of Michelle Zauner.

Zauner is the real show here. The songs on Psychopomp are reworks of some lo-fi stuff she worked on when her old band, Little Big Leagues, was still active. She and collaborator Ned Eisenberg rebuilt them into something both strongly reminiscent of the shoegaze/dream-pop days of the late Eighties and early Nineties while retaining a vibrant mysteriousness that sets the music apart from the merely derivative. The fact that it breezes by in a scant 25 minutes only adds to it; unlike a lot of her contemporaries, Zauner knows when to call it a day. The quick runtime means that each of the songs on Pyschopomp stands out on its own as a strong contender, and lets the strengths of each song shine through, something that might have been lost in a much longer work. It’s wistful and heavy, pure indie pop at its finest.

And The Rest…

RJD2

Dame Fortune

★★☆

03/25/2016 on R.J.’s Electrical Connections Records

Self-produced hip hop albums can get quite self-indulgent, and Dame Fortune is no exception. The producer’s long-standing talent is there, but only in fits and doses.

The Thermals

We Disappear

★★★

03/25/2016 on Saddle Creek Records

The Portland supergroup’s strongest album in quite some time. It’s not The Body, The Blood, The Machine, but then again what is? Solid, fist-in-the-air power-pop that often edges into punk.

The Range

Potential

★★★☆

03/25/2016 on Domino Records

A deeply human record, all the more so for its electronic starting point. Brooklyn producer James Hinton used samples gleaned from YouTube for the vocals on this record, which is something I do that I didn’t realize was actually legitimate. Off to the DAW I go.

Open Mike Eagle

Hella Personal Film Festival

★★★☆

03/25/2016 on Mello Music Group Records

Like his fellow Milo on the (now-defunct) Hellfyre Club label, Open Mike Eagle twists words, scratches out lyrics, courts controversy, and lives in the interstitial zone of the black middle class in America. Like Milo, he lets his desire for alt-hip hop vibes and out-there production overshadow the songs at times.

Bob Mould

Patch The Sky

★★★☆

03/25/2016 on Merge Records

Another record from a man who seemingly just can’t stop recording them, former Husker Du and Sugar frontman Bob Mould may not be Robert Pollard but he’s close. Patch The Sky is one of the best albums he’s ever released, a stripped-down collection of power-guitar songs that bring to mind what his legendary punk band might have sounded like had they allowed it to age gracefully.

White Denim

Stiff

★★★☆

03/25/2016 on Downtown Records

Solid white-boy funk and soul, Stiff is a breezy, poppy album that sounds like it’s the 1970s that have come around again, and not the 1990s. It’s the sort of album that invites you to have a great ol’ time, and then helps you get there.

Plague Vendor

Bloodsweat

★★★★

03/25/2016 on Epitaph Records

An abrasive, jittery album that is secretly formed of big hooks and a lot of punk rock swagger. Like a serrated switchblade, it’ll stab right into your gut and then stay there.

Deerhunter – Fading Frontier

★☆

Okay, here’s the thing Bradford…

Oh Jesus, this is difficult. It’s difficult because Microcastle and Halcyon Digest are two pillars of indie rock. It’s difficult because the haze of Microcastle got me through any number of days at work. It’s difficult because even though you decided to strike out in a more straight-forward, garage-rock (and the Dead, let’s not forget)-influenced direction on Monomania I still thought it was one of the best records released in 2013. Now, though, this album…

Okay, let me start off by saying something blunt. I hate Real Estate. Hate them. I feel like they’re the Coldplay to Deerhunter’s Radiohead. By this, I mean that they take everything good about Deerhunter and water it down for casual listeners to embrace and feel good about. It’s a mess of cutesy arpeggios, clean production, and vocals that substitute reverb for fog and depth. It’s Rote Indie Rock, much as Coldplay became the insufferable face of Rote Alternative Rock.

There’s too many places on Fading Frontier that sound like Real Estate. Too many moments where the haze seems to have been surgically scrubbed clean in some over-stuffed pricey studio. You invited some guests to provide music on this album, which would normally be a nice change of pace. However, in inviting members of Stereolab and Broadcast, you’ve ensured that this album, besides “All The Same” and “Snakeskin”, is powered mainly by drum machines and synths. You have, in Moses Archuleta, one of the finest drummers of the indie rock era, and yet you choose to go the route of bands that, god love them, are not Deerhunter. Instead of songs full of weird noises that are powered by hooks that you’ve made your name on, they’re mushy, meandering tracks that meld together and prove to be utterly forgettable. Out of nine songs, the two I’ve mentioned above are the only ones worth mentioning ten minutes after the end of the album. The fifteen minutes between “Breaker” and “Leather And Wood” are easily the worst fifteen minutes in either the Deerhunter or Atlas Sound discographies.

Look, I get it. You had a car accident and it gave you a new perspective on things, or some such mythos-making. It really just sounds like you decided that you wanted to abandon why people fell in love with you in the first place in favour of maybe making it onto terrestrial radio, as though that’s something people still want to do in 2015. Of course, Monomania just barely missed hitting the Top 40 and it was much better than Fading Frontier – it was noisy, it was passionate, there was some real rock n roll sentiment framing the songs. Fading Frontier has none of that. You abandoned the leather jackets and pyschotropics for…sterile synths and slick mainstream acceptance? I’m sure it works for some people, Bradford, but it sure as hell doesn’t work for you.

Yo La Tengo – Stuff Like That There

★★★

Way way back in the 1980s – 1990, actually, but who’s keeping score? – indie shapeshifters Yo La Tengo released an album called Fakebook which was, as the name implies, a collection of covers and old Yo La Tengo songs that were reworked to fit alongside them. It was a high point in the band’s early catalog, and twenty-five years later they’ve returned to the concept for another go-around. Stuff Like That There reproduces the structure, putting covers alongside reworkings of old songs. Out of the nine featured covers, the only two that are likely to be named by the general populace is Hank William’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and The Cure’s “Friday I’m In Love”. This time around, however, the vibe is considerably laid back, featuring gentle, acoustic versions that are suited for playing on the porch, or around a campfire under a stretched-out spray of stars. Everything here is very quiet but suffused with deep meaning courtesy of Georgia Hubley’s warm, expressive voice; like Low, they’re able to get a lot out of relatively little on Stuff Like That There. The album also marks the return of guitarist Dave Schramm, who was a fixture in early Yo La Tengo and played on Fakebook. Schramm takes over the leads, leaving longtime guitarist Ira Kaplan to take on a strictly rhythm role, and the effect is pronounced. Typically, a Yo La Tengo album would feature odd, angular guitar work courtesy of Kaplan; Schramm is a much gentler, more Jerry Garcia-influenced guitarist, and the leads he glides on here are much more suited to the material.

If you ever wanted a mostly-covers Yo La Tengo album where everything sounds like a bunch of people sitting around a campfire approximating the Dead, then Stuff Like That There is going to be right where you want it to be. Otherwise it’s just another addition into the lengthy Yo La Tengo catalog, and not a particularly essential one at that.

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.

Palehound – Dry Food

★★☆

So at some point it became fashionable to dig through the ruins of the Nineties for inspiration. A certain part of the Nineties, mind you: no one is out there trying to get a revival of New Jack Swing going, and those horrible early Nineties outfits are the fodder of Bojack Horseman jokes rather than actual modern fashion choices. Nineties indie rock, however, is quite obviously the in thing in certain circles these days. How many bands hyped by the Interwebz lately have been dead ringers for 90s alt-rock underground acts? Yuck, Twerps, Jeff The Brotherhood, California X, Speedy Ortiz – the list keeps going, long after I’m tired of naming them off. Is this Twilight‘s fault? I noticed people wearing dour flannel outfits after the movies gained traction, and after you finish listening to Alice In Chains for the umpteenth time I guess there’s nothing to do but dig through digital crates.

Either way, Palehound is another entry into the canon of bands that really wish it was 1995 again. Even the name sounds like something the alt-rock scene would have vomited up, like Keanu Reeves’ band Dogstar (remember them? No you don’t). If Jeff The Brotherhood wants to be early Weezer (with the cock rock worship intact) and Yuck wants to be Dinosaur Jr., Palehound seems fixated on early Cat Power, mediated through the latter Pavement records. It’s okay. I realize that’s a meme but there’s really no better way to describe the album. It’s not offensive. It rises slightly above mediocre. It will find some fans, and people who are nostalgic for a time period that they were infants in will pick it up and talk about how authentic it is.

Here’s the thing: I didn’t listen to Pavement or Dinosaur, Jr. until 2002. My friends and I didn’t grow up listening to Built To Spill, and I didn’t realize that Chan Marshall was a person who made exquisite music until 2006. If you grew up outside the city core, you grew up on the radio and on mainstream alternative rock: your Nirvana, your Pearl Jam, your Soundgarden, your Alice In Chains. The Nineties that bands like Palehound are imagining were a decade reconstructed after the fact, subtracting crap like the Nixons and Creed in favour of Guided By Voices and Sebadoh. For most of us, it never happened, but Palehound wants to spin a world where it did, a world of winsome vocals, messy guitars, and skinny flannel indie-kid poetry. Good on them for trying, but it’s a pale imitation of work that was obscure the first time around.

Titus Andronicus – The Most Lamentable Tragedy

★★★★☆

New Jersey punk rockers Titus Andronicus first appeared fully formed, as a balls-out whisper-to-a-scream theatrical unit on The Airing Of Grievances. For me it was love from the first moments. They were a band that was more than willing to add off-kilter bits to their songs – quotes from Shakespeare, references to Camus, snatches of Springsteen, doo wop, and late-70s guitar-worship heroics. It was as though Conor Oberst had taken up fronting Fucked Up in order to bring it out onto a stage and perform, and their follow-up, The Monitor, doubled down on this. The Monitor was a full-blown epic, taking the American Civil War and comparing it to New Jersey circa 2010. It’s an album of widescreen guitar fireworks, teetering back and forth between shaky whiskey-soaked balladry and full-out punk firebreathing. It’s easily one of the five best albums of this middle-aged decade, which makes the sharply reduced scale of 2012’s Local Business all the stranger. Frontman Patrick Stickles seemed to dial back his ambition in favour of being more accessible, or maybe just in favour of being able to play the songs correctly live. Either way it was a misstep for a band whose strengths lie in being utterly ridiculous with regards to their songs and their whole albums. It is without (much) hyperbole to say that when the band announced that it would be recording a new album, it was tacitly suggested by nearly everyone that it would be their make-or-break moment. They needed something big and ambitious to cement their legend.

The Most Lamentable Tragedy delivers on this.

29 songs over an hour and a half. A five-act rock opera about Our Hero (a stand-in for Stickles) and his struggles with manic depression. Seventies bar stomping, modern punk fury, ballads, intermissions, Zeppelin-esque nine-minute riff mining, a Pogues cover, “Auld Lang Syne”…there is literally something for everyone in the sprawled-out fences that mark out the album’s territory. “Dimed Out” leads the charge as the standard-bearer of the punk heroics that marked the band out as one to watch in 2008, with “Look Alive” and “Lookalike” rushing headalong with it. The “No Future” saga ends with parts IV and V; IV kicks the door open on the album with the screamed slogan “I hate to be awake”, while V sets up the ending of the album before the slow, falling-apart ballad “Stable Boy”. Tracks like “Mr. E. Mann”, “Fired Up”, “Funny Feeling” and “Fatal Flaw” feel like stretched out takes on the cleaner, poppier sound of Local Business. “More Perfect Union” and “(S)HE SAID/(S)HE SAID” set out on a different direction entirely, mining slow changes and moods over the course of nearly ten minutes each. 2012’s “My Eating Disorder” could be considered a precursor to these sorts of songs, although both are more complicated and atmospheric than that song. What’s most surprising, however, is Stickles’ melodies. He’s always been more of a screamer than a singer, but “Lonely Boy”, “I Lost My Mind (+@)”, “Come On, Siobhan”, and the closer “Stable Boy” all speak to his strengths as a sort of corrosive pop vocalist, like Kurt Cobain with a better sense of theatrics and a musical vocabulary that extends beyond ripping off Black Flag and Killing Joke.

There’s a desperation to the band that plays well to its audience. After all, unless you’re settled into a career and are making good money, the future projected out from 2015 is starting to look a little desperate all on it’s own. The Sex Pistols screamed about “no future” but Patrick Stickles has taken up that line as a mantra, alternately raging against the brick wall of nothing that awaits and tiredly accepting it. It’s a back-and-forth that seems all too familiar to those trying to balance part-time work with rising costs and seeing no appreciable relief coming in the future. Stickles’ take on his state of being is grim: While “No Future Part IV: No Future Triumphant” begins the album screaming about how he hates to be awake, and “No Future Part V: Endless Dreaming” closes the saga by whispering that if hates to be awake, he should just end it all and sleep forever. Fittingly, the final track on the album, “A Moral”, is silent. The Most Lamentable Tragedy takes the bands nihilism to its logical conclusion and it’s hard to imagine where they could go from here. They’ve spent their past doing everything within the range of ragged-edged punk rock, and on this album they bring it all together into one big blowout. Afterwards, there’s something akin to a hangover: a lost feeling, confused ideas about what to do next, and the slightly more positive generalization to Stickles’ main theme: if you hate to do something, why are you still doing it? It’s a question you can apply to so many aspects of your life, even when Stickles is applying it personally to life itself.

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Hop Along – Painted Shut

★★★☆

So, the Nineties. They were quite the time, right? So it would seem, at any rate, from the state of popular culture right now. Twilight brought back flannel fashion for a while, making me wonder for several years if I’d stepped back in time to a Nirvana concert, or if maybe I’d just gotten blackout drunk and woken up in rural Washington. Now all I see around town are girls in crop tops and floral print pants, Blossom-style. Jurassic Park is killing at the box office, the U.S. election is shaping up to be Bush vs. Clinton, and I think I saw someone with frosted tips the other day. Hold me. I’m scared.

Musically we’re seeing signs of nostalgic flashbacks from people who should chronologically only barely remember any year starting with “19”. Yuck thought Dinosaur, Jr. was awesome; Speedy Ortiz is a big fan of crunchy American indie rock circa 1996; Joey Bada$$ really wishes that Illmatic and Enter The Wu Tang just came out yesterday. Further on, we have exhibit D: Hop Along, the Saddle Creek-signed project of Frances Quinlan, former freak folk enthusiast. At first blush it’s crunchy college rock for college kids who attended college just as Felicity was making college look far more glamorous than it really was. There are subtle signs of something deeper buried within, however: the circling vocal strikes of Quinlan, who seems at times the sum of Ben Gibbard, Conor Oberst, and Jeremy Enigk; the gnarled lead guitar lines that are as much inspired by early Modest Mouse as anything else; the smoky, country undertone to the slower tracks, especially the darker ballad “Horseshoe Crabs”. There’s more to Painted Shut than simple rote 90s worship, which is important to note as we move headalong into an era that promises nothing but.

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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.