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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My Morning Jacket – The Waterfall

★★★★

It’s been a full decade since My Morning Jacket hit their undisputed peak. 2005’s Z was a masterpiece of soaring, momentous rock that fit together the Dead, the Who, and the Flying Burrito Brothers. When they released the scattered, utterly forgettable Evil Urges as a followup in 2008, the band was written off, and despite a decent comeback attempt in 2011 with the solid Circuital they have obviously gone down the same path of descent as Band of Horses or Plants and Animals.

All of this makes The Waterfall something of an unexpected treat. Rather than continue down their road, they stop and make a case for being one of the great…slightly less appreciated bands? There’s no point in pretending that they’re obscure – they were an episode-long obsession for Stan Smith on American Dad after all – but their stature has certainly depreciated. “Believe (Nobody Knows)” is a great classic rock track though, and “Spring (Among The Living)” features some searing guitar work that holds its own with the great works of the past. “Big Decisions” is a crunching anthem shot through with pedal steel guitar, and serves as a perfect reminder of the power that country inflection in music can have when it’s done right. “Only Memories Remain” is a textbook closer, something to ride the sunset out on at a festival, but it has a hook that will stick in your head and leave you singing it at 2 AM when you actually should be sleeping. If it sounds like I have first hand experience in this then you would be right.

The Waterfall is at it’s heart a stellar summer album, something to listen to in a field, or on the deck, or while on a hike. It screams early evening relaxation and mid-afternoon sunshowers in equal measure, and the juxtaposition is epic.

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Best Coast – California Nights

★★★

California Nights is the perfect example of why picking your lead single carefully is important. Leading off with the title track, it would seem that Ms. Bethany Cosentino had decided to go in a much darker, much more downtempo direction on her third LP. This would have been actually kind of welcome: While her debut, Crazy For You, was the perfect pop album for hitting the sunny beach in style, The Only One was like it, but without the charm and winsome longing that she’d brought to the first one. “California Nights” is a big leap forward for her as a songwriter, a slow psych-rock number that could double as a soundtrack for, well, light-blinded California nights.

It’s the only song like it on the record, however. The rest of the album is a return to the tempos and structures that she brought to the table on Crazy For You, but with a bit less sun and shrug. In and of itself this is a good thing – there’s none of the mid-tempo L.A. slog that marred The Only One and quite a few places where the speed spikes and Cosentino stretches into pop-punk territory. “Heaven Sent”, and “Fine Without You” both mine this vein, but the rest of the tracks aren’t terribly far behind.

Can we just pretend that The Only One didn’t happen and that California Nights is her follow-up to Crazy For You? Her second album can just be considered a strange aberration, much as Bad Religion’s Into The Unknown is seen as an ill-advised dip into something best forgotten.

Django Django – Born Under Saturn

★★☆

Three years ago the Scottish indie rockers burst onto the scene with an album chock full of surf-inflected pop nuggets, a debut that was more treats than tricks and got a couple of songs in permanent rotation on any number of rock lover playlists. Born Under Saturn, at first, offers an enticing platter of more-of-the-same. It’s pretty delicious, for a couple of minutes; after the first song, you start to realize that this buffet has been sitting under hot lights for too long and is the exact same set of material that was offered up the first time, only without the novelty, the hooks, and the appeal.

Like so many bands today, Django Django mines inspiration from the vast reaches of the psychedelic era. Right from the get-go on “Giant” you’ll hear melodies that stem directly from the Paisley Sixties, married to the dense, chunky grooves that were delightful the first time around. Now, though, they just feel suffocating, as though the lockstep of their rhythm section is drowning the actual hooks. There’s certainly nothing as lasting as “Hail Bop” or even “Default” on this record, although there’s also nothing outright awful either. That’s probably the biggest problem with the album: there’s just nothing to write home about, good or bad. It simply is, and you need to do something more than fake treading water to make a career out of your band. It’s 2015, and there are enough musical options out there that you don’t need to stick with a band that is just going to offer up a dried-out version of yesterday’s buffet items.

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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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Mikal Cronin – MCIII

★★★

Sometime Ty Segall associate and power pop pusher Mikal Cronin proved himself an expert at writing big hooks in songs that felt familiar without being derivative on MCII. That album has a permanent place on my phone, largely because even if it wasn’t there the songs would be popping up into my head on a constant basis. MCIII doesn’t have that same quality. While the album is still full of songs that are very recognizably Mikal Cronin songs, they don’t have the same sense of ease in conveying giant hummable melodies. The proceedings of MCIII seem darker, more depressed, and infinitely less sure of themselves. Right from the beginning of “Turn Around”, the sound comes off as muddier; Cronin sings at the same basic volume as he does on MCII, but here he struggles to be heard over the large, enveloping middle that has arisen out of the production.The rest of the first side follows suit, with a hesitant Cronin struggling for space with the rest of the instruments, while those instruments muddle along in an unexciting fashion. The second half, with its numbered conceit, improves marginally; here he adds piano and strings into the mix, which has the effect of livening up the tracks. The same problem with burying the hooks occurs, however, and in the end it’s just as unsatisfying as the first side. Even a surefire winner like “iv) Ready” falters from the odd reticence that mars the album. MCIII is, compared to the majority of pop albums released, a decent enough album, but in direct comparison to is predecessor it falters significantly.

Alabama Shakes – Sound & Color

★★★☆

Boys & Girls was a blast from the past, a reaffirmation of soul music and a vehicle for the impressive pipes of singer Brittney Howard. It found the neat balance between being a critical darling and achieving a wide-ranging mass appeal, and in doing so it set the band up for that most awkward of situations: the Eagerly Anticipated Follow-Up Album.

Typically, such an album sees the band looking to expand on it’s sonic pallette;”Look at us!” it screams, “we aren’t just about (blistering blues rock, Stax Records soul, Janis Joplin without the crippling addictions)! Check out what we can also do!” Then the band will normally fire in all directions at once, trying a little bit of everything to prove that they have staying power. Sound & Color is that album. Sure, they still have all of the above-mentioned elements – they’ll never escape their roots – but they add shade, gradient, and at one point something that seems to approximate punk rock. There are some downright funky moments – the solid groove underpinning “Don’t Wanna Fight” for one – and some oddly psychedelic moments as well, as on the ever-evolving “Future People”. The drawback to this, of course, is that there’s very little coherency beyond Howard’s artillery-fusillade of a voice. Each song goes off in a different direction and it’s very easy to get distracted mid-way through.

That said, despite the fact that it took me three attempts to get through the album from beginning to end, it’s well worth the effort. The band is tight enough that you could easily be fooled into thinking that they were on album number ten, and Howard’s voice is, as always, a juggernaut of emotional resonance. A fine sophomore effort, if a typical one.

Young Fathers – White Men Are Black Men Too

★★★★

Scotland’s Young Fathers have defied classification since day one. Their sound remains staunchly between all things, preferring to take day trips through soul, R&B, funk, hip hop, and TV On The Radio-inspired indie rock. None of these are particularly accurate, since at any one given time Young Fathers have taken a fuzzed-out view of these discrete genres and stamped them with their own particular ideals.

White Men Are Black Men Too rolls through all of these points and more in just under forty minutes. When things start to get a bit too conventional, the group will throw in some sort of oddball gesture – a key change, a time-shift, some squalling noise over top of what otherwise might be a lost classic from Return To Cookie Mountain. It gives the album a sense of familiarity, but that familiarity is then ripped away on a constant basis and replaced with something almost familiar, but also distressing, moving, and utterly modern.

Of course, at first glance no one cares about the music, because they’re all wondering what the hell the title of the album is going on about. The line comes from what is arguably the best track on the album, “Old Rock ‘n’ Roll”, which in itself is partial reframe of an argument between the group’s management and frontman Alloysious Massaquoi. Massaquoi, who came to Edinburgh via Liberia, takes the position that he’s “tired of playing the good black…tired of having to hold back”, and that he’s “tired of blaming the white man / his indiscretion don’t betray him / a black man can play him / some white men are black men too.” He wonders in the full argument with his management why questions of race always have to be discussed “behind closed doors and never confronted head on”. In a way it melds well with the state of affairs in 2015, given Kendrick Lamar’s release of To Pimp A Butterfly, which touches on many of the same issues. The group holds no fear, but forges ahead into the future of both music and politics with their eyes wide open.

Waxahatchee – Ivy Tripp

★★★☆

I’ve been waffling on what to say about this album. I finally got a full review hacked out yesterday, but I’m ditching it. It’s stilted, awkward, and reads like a “music review”, the kind you find in people’s zines or on some kid’s blog. So here we go, we’re just going to wing it today instead.

The things I like about Ivy Tripp are hard to articulate. They’re more sense impressions than anything else. When I listen to it I feel like I’m standing in a copse of trees, staring out into the line of trunks, smelling the acrid scent of burning wood, and wondering what the hell to do next. The leaves under my feet are dry, and give a satisfying crunch when I walk on them. The air is cold and smells like autumn dying, like winter trashing around in the womb, getting ready to be born. The fire nearby is crackling, throwing off heat in an all-too-small radius. Inside this circle of trees and the smaller circle of fire-warmth I’m safe. Outside, the world blurs by in increasingly unrecognizable ways. Outside there are no careers, just an endless parade of jobs and contracts. There are no houses, because they’ve been neatly priced out of our reach. There is no direction to go in, because all directions are equally shiftless. Outside is a desert stretching in all directions, and the footsteps that lead away fade out after a time into nothing.

Inside, though, there is light, and warmth, for now. There is sadness, more of a heaviness than a bleakness, and there is uncertainty, but there is also beauty, and sweet wistful longing.

Actually, there might be a bit too much sadness. I fell for Katie Crutchfield on Cerulean Salt, mainly because of a shared adoration of crunchy, lo-fi 90s indie rock – your Pavement, your GBV, your Built To Spill. Ivy Tripp shows off a love of another peculiarly 90s kind of rock – the slowcore sounds of Low, Codeine, and Slowdive. This is admirable as well, but it makes the album drag out just a bit too long.