Modest Mouse – Strangers To Ourselves

★★★☆

It’s a common expression amongst long-time Modest Mouse fans that the band peaked with their debut, 1996’s This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About, and have been in a slow state of perpetual decline ever since. Personally, I would say that this is a bit misleading; they peaked on 1997’s Lonesome Crowded West and have been declining ever since.

When Good News For People Who Love Bad News came out, my friend and roommate opined that it was the worst Modest Mouse album yet, which still made it better than most of what had been released that year. I made the same joke in 2007 when We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank came out, and eight years later here I am making it again. It really is the worst Modest Mouse record – leaving aside their “debut”, 1994’s Sad Sappy Sucker – and while it’s no longer at the point where it’s better than most everything else, it still holds up quite well.

Ever since “Float On” improbably broke the band to a wider audience, their albums have alternated between radio-ready dance friendly numbers and slower, artsier pieces. “Lampshades On Fire” is the radio ready track here, waking up anyone who dozed off during the snoozy title track that opens the album. “Shit In Your Cut”, “Coyotes”, and the closer “Of Course We Know” are the more introspective cuts, following in the footsteps of classic songs like “Gravity Rides Everything” and “The Cold Part”. “Shit In Your Cut” is the worst of the three, being too long by an entire minute and relatively uninteresting besides. “The Ground Walks, With Time In A Box” and “God Is An Indian And You’re An Asshole” are both classic-sounding Modest Mouse songs; “Pups To Dust” and “The Tortoise and the Tourist” both attempt to hit that note as well but fall relatively flat. “Pistol” and “Sugar Boats” are more evidence of frontman Isaac Brock’s fascination with Tom Waits, a fascination that became exceedingly clear on the odder parts of Good News.

Lyrically, the theme that Isaac Brock focuses on here is environmental degradation and the impact that the human species has on it. “Lampshades On Fire” posits the human existence on Earth as a destructive locust party; “Ground Walks” features the line “The world’s an inventor / We’re the dirtiest thing it’s thought about / And we really don’t mind”; “Coyotes” shows mankind as a predator, saying “Mankind’s behavin’ like some serial killer”. By the time “Be Brave” comes around, he acknowledges that despite our efforts at killing it off, the planet is just too massive to care: “Well the Earth doesn’t care and we hardly even matter / We’re just a bit more piss to push out its full bladder / And as our bodies float down onto all their rocky little bits / Piled up under mountains of dirt and silt / And still, the world, it don’t give a shit”. The last track, “Of Course We Know”, takes the widescreen view of our time on this planet, asking “what in hell are we here for?” before realizing that “we just do not know”.

Strangers To Ourselves is actually quite a good album despite being the band’s worst. Isaac Brock may be slowing down the weird gnarled rock factory with age and sobriety, but he still manages to put indie rock artists half his age to shame. It may not be AOTY material, per se, but it’s a worthy addition to a legendary band’s canon.

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Dan Deacon – Glass Riffer

★★★

I don’t know if I’ve ever actually used this phrase before, but Glass Riffer is a hot mess.

It’s so cluttered. Every single bit of sonic real estate is developed. The arrangements are massive. Every moment seems intricately orchestrated for maximum payoff. Tracks like “Sheathed Wings” and “Learning To Relax” seem to blast out of the speakers like the blossoming of a nuclear fireball. This is an incessant, throbbing album that comes off like the epic start of every party ever.

And this is Dan Deacon supposedly stripping down and simplifying things.

While this sort of exuberant energy has its perks, 43 minutes of it can get tiring. Not helping matters is the second-last track, “Take It To The Max”, which rides an insistently annoying figure for far too long and ruins the end of the album. When he reins in these obnoxious tendencies the results are pure gold, like on the first single “Feel The Lightning”; Deacon, however, doesn’t always seem to be able to rein it in. Still, despite its “stripped down” nature, it’s every bit as full and satisfying as America or Spiderman of the Rings.

of Montreal – Aureate Gloom

★★★

“Bassem Sabry”, the opening track to of Montreal’s fifteenth album, is a red herring of the highest sort. It’s wah-laden guitars and disco rhythms make you think that, after the garage-inspired reset of Lousy With Sylvianbriar, the band was returning to the psych-funk sounds they established on Skeletal Lamping, False Priest, and Paralytic Stalks. At the same time, with its focus on an Egyptian political activist, the casual listener could be forgiven for thinking that the focus might not be on frontman Kevin Barnes for a change.

Neither is true. This is an album that dives into New York City in the septic days of the late 1970s and early 1980s: cigarette-stained glam-punk, drugged-out disco dens, street-sweat funk riffs, and damn the torpedoes rock and roll. It’s a record of volume, fuzz, and widescreen ambitions, and it centres around Barnes’ failed marriage to the Norwegian woman he first bled his heart out about on the band’s breakthrough album, 2007’s Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? Barnes has always had a habit of being overwrought when it comes to his lyrics (and his song titles), but on Aureate Gloom he takes that tendency to an unfortunate extreme. “Empyrean Abattoir” features lines like “Before your hysterical silence, you came rapping at my door / With your body as a sacrament, your mind a killing floor” and something about “stealing from his aureation of filth” after “masturbating your father’s pain”. What? “Virgilian Lots” compares the stability that Barnes and his wife once enjoyed to “the twin volcanoes of Cuauhnahuac”; on the next track, “Monolithic Egress”, he compares them to “the raping of the embryonic virgin spring”. The effect is rather like reading the intensely personal breakup diary of a kid (a 40-year-old kid at that) who desperately wants to be published in The Paris Review.

Aureate Gloom takes of Montreal in an interesting musical direction, one where Tom Petty and The Kinks jam with Chic and the past remains as always a grotesque animal. What it really bodes well for its the next album, the one after Barnes gets his divorce novel out of his system. The musical balancing act on display here is marred by his precocious-teenager divorce lyrics, and as a fiction writer capable of writing some pretty overwrought lines myself, it takes a lot to call someone out on that.

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Twerps – Range Anxiety

★☆

Just the other day I was saying, “you know what there isn’t enough of in modern music? Inoffensive, vaguely charming indie rock bands who play electric guitars like they’re folk rockers and play with twee boy-girl harmonies in a laid-back, cabin-in-the-woods sort of way”. Then I came down.

It’s not like Twerps are actively offensive; if they tried a little more, they might be, but the biggest problem is that they just don’t try hard enough to be anything. Three chords, some harmonies, and the blandest lyrics this side of Mumford and Sons. This is just the Feelies, watered down through the ages and rendered toothless, sort of like how Melvins got diluted into Theory of a Deadman at one point. It’s all very fresh-faced and earnest, like they had a residency in Stars Hollow and were playing the bandshell every night. Look for them to pick up banjos and make the transition to modern rock format FM radio soon.

Father John Misty – I Love You, Honeybear

★★★★☆

Fear Fun, a great little nugget of psychedelic pop, established the character of Father John Misty: a dissipated lady’s man, a snide drunk who may or may not have a heart of gold, who spends his time getting debauched in and around a vicious satirical caricature of Los Angeles. The man behind the character, former Fleet Foxes drummer/harmonizer Josh Tillman, thought him up while high on mushrooms and altitude – of course, the fact that his eponymous solo albums had gone absolutely nowhere probably played a role in Father John’s creation as well. There’s always been a hazy border between who Tillman is and who Father John Misty is; the border got even hazier last year when Tillman announced that his second FJM album, I Love You, Honeybear, was “a concept album about a guy named Josh Tillman who spends quite a bit of time banging his head against walls, cultivating weak ties with strangers and generally avoiding intimacy at all costs. This all serves to fuel a version of himself that his self-loathing narcissism can deal with. We see him engaging in all manner of regrettable behavior.”

Even a cursory scan of the lyrics for I Love You, Honeybear will reveal that, given the themes of finding lasting love despite running away from intimacy whenever possible, Tillman is playing himself on a lot of these songs. He recently married photographer Emma Tillman, and it’s telling that the very first line of the impassioned “Chateau Lobby #4 (In C For Two Virgins)” is in reference to her: “Emma eats bread and butter like a queen would eat ostrich and cobra wine”. “When You’re Smiling And Astride Me” carries on, briefly abandoning the wink and smirk of his narrative voice for a bare confession: “I can hardly believe I’ve found you and I’m terrified by that”. “Holy Shit” was written on his wedding day in an attempt to capture the craziness that was going on, and “I Went To The Store One Day” recounts the story of how they met, in the parking lot at the Laurel Canyon Store; he sketches out his vision of how they’ll grow old together, their life path entwined, and then brings it right back to the very moment they met. It’s wide-open sentimentality, a move that would seem schmaltzy if anyone else tried it; in Tillman’s hands, it’s powerful stuff, sure to make you go seek out the hands of the one you love so that you can refuse to ever let them go again.

Of course, it’s not all wide-eyed, long-lasting love on display here. The wasted lothario of Fear Fun shows up in spades, and when he does the results are always blackly hilarious. The face-palming one night stand of “The Night Josh Tillman Came To My Apt.” is easily the most caustic of these, featuring lines like “She says, like literally, music is the air she breathes / and the malaprops make me want to fucking scream / I wonder if she even knows what that word means / Well, it’s literally not that” and ends up with Tillman being more than obliging when she gets freaky in bed later and asks to be choked. “Strange Encounter” finds him panicking when another girl nearly dies in his house (presumably after hoovering up all of his drugs, like the girl in “The Night Josh Tillman Cam To My Apt.”) and ends with a bit of defensive petulance, “Yeah, I’m a decent person / little aimless”. “Nothing Good Ever Happens At The Goddamn Thirsty Crow” and “The Ideal Husband” bring out the belligerently drunk side of FJM; the former finds him savagely moving on a man trying to pick up his girlfriend, while the latter finds him crawling over every fault he can find in his own self-loathing before bursting in at seven in the morning blathering about subcumbing and wanting to knock the girl up. The height of this particular side of the album, of course, is lead single “Bored In The USA”, a stately, traditionally arranged piano ballad that spends four minutes skewering both the American Dream and the idea that two people could ever grow old together in the same passion that fuelled their youth. “Now, I’ve got a lifetime to consider all the ways / I’ve grown more disappointing to you as my beauty warps and fades / I suspect you feel the same” he says, and it’s hard not to think of it as a corollary to the sentiments he expresses in the title track, where the world is ending but he doesn’t care because he has love, and damn everything else. Once the initial intensity fades, what do you have left?

It’s that naked dichotomy – we can grow old together and we can never escape ourselves enough to grow old together – that gives I Love You, Honeybear its impetus. Even without the concept it succeeds as an admirably written collection of songs, but the concept brings it into the realm of being a modern classic. As a sophomore effort it’s leaps and bounds beyond the simpler, more rootsier Fear Fun, and despite the earliness of the calendar it’s a strong contender for album of the year.

Young Ejecta – The Planet

★★☆

Sometime around 2009 the synthesizer became arguably the most important instrument in independent music. Sure, synths have been big in hip hop and electronic music since time out of mind, but the rock and roll underground continued its guitar obsession long after most other genres had melded it back into an overall symphony of sounds. Then chillwave came along, bringing with it any number of artists who felt more comfortable with samplers and synths than they did with the traditional guitar/bass/drum setup. Washed Out, Neon Indian, CHVCHES, Chairlift, et al. brought the experimental ideas of synth-rock out of the 1980s and into the modern age, having washed off most of the cheese first.

Young Ejecta is actually the project of one of the members of Neon Indian – Leanne Macomber – and Joel Ford, who used to spend time in a duo with Daniel “Oneohtrix Point Never” Lopatin. So, suffice to say that it arrives with an impressive pedigree. Sadly, said pedigree doesn’t really translate out to impressive music. The Planet, a “mini-album” that stretches out to nearly half an hour, doesn’t present anything new, vital, or exciting. It’s quite honestly as close to generic Teens (what the fuck are we calling this decade, anyway?) synth rock as you can get. It’s all very *nice*, and that’s its major stumbling block. It’s pretty, the production is clean and gets you to nod your head in the appropriate places, it’s perfectly acceptable background music for doing whatever you do during the day, and that’s it. Nothing more. It’s boring. Neon Indian had some experimental quirks, but The Planet plays it safe. Chairlift and CHVCHES bust out maximalist melodic hooks, but there’s nothing of the sort on *The Planet*; in fact, there’s very little that’s memorable here at all, from a melodic standpoint. It’s the synth-rock equivalent of a Theory of a Deadman album: staid, by-the-numbers post-chillwave that doesn’t do much beyond try to catch the ear of people who’ve heard it all before and don’t want anything else.

pinkshinyultrablast – Everything Else Matters

★★★

There’s nothing new here, but when it comes to shoegaze in 2015 what do you really expect? All the usual signifiers are here: the reverb-soaked, wistful vocals, the guitar work that is made heavy through judicious use of delay pedals, the rocket-fuelled leaps in dynamics, the general sense that someone has taken amped-up C86 songs and applied a smudge tool to them. So, if you’re looking for originality, you’re looking in the wrong place. That said, as far as shoegazer bands go, pinkshinyultrablast is one of the better ones; Everything Else Matters is a lot of fun, derivativeness notwithstanding, and it’s sugar-rush vibe will surely catch more than a few people.

The Dodos – Individ

★★★★

The Dodos broke through in 2007 with Visiter, an enthralling album of new sounds that played with rhythm like they were just discovering it for the first time. Since then they’ve spent years chasing their own tail, exploring their penchant for tom-heavy polyrhythms, room-filling vocals, and poetic lyrics. Individ is the first album since that breakthrough that really stands out from the others, and although it doesn’t do anything extrememly different musically, it feels like there is more raw energy on these tracks. Evidence of this can be found especially on the back half of the album, where the last four songs launch out into blissfully distorted space that culminates on the guitar-storm of “Pattern/Shadow”. The idea on this one is resilience; “Precipitation” calls on a storm and survives in the face of it, setting a course for the rest of the album. This theme fits in well with their previous album, 2013’s Carrier, which found the band needing to move on in the face of the recent death of short-term guitarist Christopher Reimer. Here’s hoping that it’s evidence of a career resurgence for the band, as they deserve to become more well-known.

Viet Cong – Viet Cong

★★★★

Women were Calgary’s premier alt-noise band, and when guitarist Chris Reimer died mysteriously in 2012 it was a huge blow, breaking up the band at a time when they were a hot topic amongst the indie blog literati. Matt Flegel and drummer Mike Wallace are now part of Viet Cong, another project that fuses noisy art explosions with GBV and Joy Division-esque lo-fi pop sounds. Throughout much of the album they seem on the verge of falling apart, a shuddering makeshift weld-job of Jesus and Mary Chain guitar fuzz, thundering drums a la A Place To Bury Strangers, and the deathly vocals of Flegel. This last is where some of the influences become obvious; Flegel’s voice is strongly reminiscent of both Ian Curtis and Spencer Krug, and the gloomy surroundings only serve to strengthen those comparisons. Viet Cong is an album of what modern bands consider retro post-punk: gloomy, semi-gothy atmospheres with big drums and keyboards that wouldn’t sound quite out of place on a Sisters of Mercy track. Everything comes to head on the final track, “Death”, where the threatened breakdown finally occurs about seven minutes in, a collapse into bashed-out noise-chords after an intense, speaker-rattling build-up. It’s assuredly a strong debut, likely a contender for year-end lists, and absolutely a recommended listen.

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Sleater-Kinney – No Cities To Love

★★★★☆

My wife and I were married the year that The Woods was released. It was the final piece in a seven album run of pure excellence by Olympia, WA riot-grrrl act turned indie rock saviours Sleater-Kinney, and it was arguably their best work. It’s arguable only because the six albums that preceded it – including personal favourites Dig Me Out and All Hands On The Bad One – were largely masterpieces. So when the band went on hiatus in 2006 it was disappointing but perhaps not as disappointing as it could have been. Bands that have kept up the consistent level of quality that Sleater-Kinney managed are extremely rare in rock and roll history, and to expect the band to continue being awesome indefinitely was unfair. At the same time, it’s not like they broke up on bad terms. It was more in the way of an indefinite hiatus, and not the Soundgarden kind where the band actually hates each other but refuses to admit it. In fact, a recent NPR interview seems to indicate that getting them back together was as easy as hanging out watching unreleased Portlandia episodes with Fred Armisen and saying “gee, we should play more shows as Sleater-Kinney”.

There’s more to it than that, of course. The band has always been a seething base of operations for righteous feminism and anti-consumerism, a sort of less obnoxious Rage Against The Machine. The years since The Woods have been tumultuous; the near-total outreach of the internet in the Western world has brought even more odious ideas of racism and anti-feminism into full view. Movements like The Red Pill and GamerGate have gained popularity on the basis of ideals directly opposed to those that Sleater-Kinney – not to mention the entire feminist movement of the 20th Century – have stood for. For a band that spent so long codifing their rage into brilliant, complicated punk rock, it must have needled like nothing else. Eventually the slime creeping over the modern world becomes too much and something must be said. Hence No Cities To Love.

None of that would mean anything, of course, if the album itself was sub-par. Thankfully No Cities To Love is number eight in the band’s hot streak of great albums, a wonderfully knotty set of ten songs that abounds with righteous fury and great hooks. It’s heavy, scathing, and easily the equal of any rock album released by people less than half the age of the performers here. Corin Tucker’s strident voice has seemingly not aged a day, Janet Weiss’ drums still thunder like the gods, and Carrie Brownstein’s guitar still remains more complex and emotive than the next ten bands combined. It’s such a perfect Sleater-Kinney album that it melts away the ten years that preceded it as though they never occurred, and, again, such a feat in the history of rock and roll is extremely rare.