The National – “Trouble Will Find Me”

The band’s sixth studio album finds them settling into a definite groove, a comfort zone that seems immediately more expressive and tangible than the experimental/creative phases of a thousand other bands. To say that the band perfected their sound on their previous album, 2010’s High Violet, is probably not hyperbole – every track on that album (and Boxer, truth be told) was a winner, and while the same may not be the case on Trouble Will Find Me, it’s close enough to warrant a recount. The National have always been about a love of challenging rhythms married to Matt Berninger’s melancholy baritone, and nothing about that has changed here. Standouts like “I Should Live In Salt”, “Fireproof”, “Sea Of Love”, and “This Is The Last Time” showcase the odd timings the drummer prefers, as well as Berninger’s insidious songwriting type – songs that take two or three listens to really settle in but that are studded with little hooks and phrases that necessitate further spins. On the whole, Trouble Will Find Me is rather top-loaded, with the really stellar moments on the last half of the album coming a bit further apart; side B settles into a gentler, more piano-driven set that is comforting but tends to run together in the end.

There may be little here to differentiate the album from anything they’ve released since Alligator but unlike most bands this is not a serious problem. Fans of the band will not find anything to dislike and will probably be ecstatic about the continuation of their sound. Newcomers to the National will find an album that, while not as immediately accessible as High Violet, provides plenty of outcroppings for casual listeners to grab on to. Of course, that there would be anyone left out there that hasn’t listened to the band yet would be something of a surprise; after all, despite their lack of airtime on terrestrial radio, they routinely sell out shows, take over Sirius XMU for a week to celebrate this release, and get away with charging lower-level stadium band prices for their tickets. It’s a testament to the internet age that, in a world where they’re not getting played on modern format radio, they’re one of the biggest rock bands going – a lot of you are listening. A lot more will be listening after this album, I’m sure.

FINAL MARK: A

The Men – “New Moon”

Punk rock maturity can be a very iffy thing. For every artist like Bob Mould (whose transition from Husker Du to Sugar to solo work sounds like it was always meant to be) there are a thousand like NOFX, who keep playing like they’re 17 well into their 40s. It can be ugly, with a group of portly grey-hairs trying vainly to keep up with the galloping rhythms they gave themselves whiplash to twenty years before. Thankfully Brooklyn’s The Men avoid that pitfall, although a lot of that may have to do with the relatively young age at which the band has decided to add comfortable elements of classic rock into their sound. There are harmonicas on “Bird Song”, for Chrissakes, and a piano-driven riff that is strongly reminiscent of “Cripple Creek Ferry”. The ghosts of Neil Young’s Crazy Horse days are all over some of these tracks, such as the opener “Open Door” and “I Saw Her Face”, although the mid-album one-two punch of “The Brass” and “Electric” provide the counterbalance of driving punk rock, in the same yearning vein as last year’s Open Your Heart. What it comes off like is a punk rock version of Blue Rodeo, full of loud guitars, impassioned playing, and weepy, boozy feels. It injects a lot of character into the band’s sound, and they sound like they’re coming into their own, four albums in.

FINAL MARK: B+

Chelsea Light Moving – “Chelsea Light Moving”

It can be tempting to read a lot into this album, since it’s Thurston Moore’s first major move since Sonic Youth dissolved into a tepidly scandalous divorce. Following a mid-life crisis that broke up both his marriage and his band, this new album represents the direction he wants to push his career in. Chelsea Light Moving answers that the direction he’s moving in is circular. It’s certainly spotlights his long-standing tendency towards heavy guitar work built on high gain and feedback. The tone is angry, although as per usual it’s a very diffuse anger whose target is unclear. It’s reminiscent more of the tone on Washing Machine or the heavier parts of Daydream Nation than it is of Rather Ripped or A Thousand Leaves, however; it’s guitar work that snarls through the gutter, levitating on its own squeals. It makes Chelsea Light Moving into a Sonic Youth record made in a world where Lee Ranaldo and Kim Gordon no longer exist, a dark world where Moore is free to follow whatever Sabbath/Flag blackness he wishes. Personally, that makes it a winner: Moore was always my favourite part of Sonic Youth, and Kim Gordon’s meandering, flat-voiced passages always left me a little cold. The problem, though, is that Moore very rarely leaves his comfort zone here; he rehashes his best Dirty moments but doesn’t use this new chapter of his life to say anything new. It leaves Chelsea Light Moving feeling like it ended up being less than it could have been; instead of progressing, it simply feels like Moore ends up wallowing in his own sullen quicksand, thrashing about in the same patterns until he becomes stuck. It sounds great, but it ultimately goes nowhere.

FINAL MARK: B-

Vampire Weekend – “Modern Vampires Of The City”

I was ready to trash this album after first listen. Lead single “Diane Young” has been a burr in my side ever since its release; it takes the chaotic, reel-through-the-streets feel of Contra single “Cousins” and makes it annoying. Subsequent singles “Step” and “Ya Hey” were good, but did not take the sting out of that annoying, high-to-low knob twisting that irritated me so greatly about “Diane Young” (especially since “Ya Hey” repeats the effect, albeit in a much more subtle fashion). I had scathing things to say about my first run-through of the full album – “apologism for Eighties AOR”, “grand, empty gestures a la the worst of U2”, “the more execrable parts of Paul Simon’s back catalog” – that sort of thing. A funny thing happened, then, when I looked over my notes: I discovered, after my usual calculations were finished, that the album merited a B. I did not feel a B when I listened to it, but upon further reflection it strikes me that what disappoints me about Modern Vampires Of The City is the same thing that disappoints me about Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. Both albums are frothy, empty-handed, overtly ornamental middles bookended by some shockingly good tracks. The first three tracks of Modern Vampires Of The City are, honestly, top-notch Vampire Weekend songs. The opening track, “Obvious Bicycle”, kicks the album into the air with style, while “Unbelievers” and “Step” keep the proceedings feeling like both a progression and an inventory of where the band has been. Then “Diane Young” comes in and the whole thing comes crashing down to earth. Everything for the rest of the album up until “Ya Hey” reminds me painfully of a band of rich kids who, trying to make grand-sounding ideas with profound statements about modern existence come to life, end up with a middling collection of post-Pop U2 songs. The mid-tempo becomes excruciating. “Everlasting Arms” is particularly bad; it’s the sort of John Tesh-worthy track that anyone aspiring to “indie cred” would have been ashamed to have been caught listening to ten years ago. Today, in this post-“Beth/Rest” world, it passes as an artistic statement. Then “Ya Hey” comes along and saves the album, as does the strident following track “Hudson”, which marries a militant drum beat to an apocalyptic vision of a destroyed future Manhattan. “Ya Hey” shows the sort of growth and maturity that the rest of the album strives for but never quite achieves; where the rest of the album seems to treat its spirituality as a simple backdrop, “Ya Hey” has an adult conversation with the concepts of God in the thriving urban 21st Century. If only the vast middle had seen fit to have this same sort of conversation.

When Contra came out, it was de rigueur to refer to it as Vampire Weekend’s More Songs About Buildings And Food. It made sense; their self-titled debut was such an exciting burst of new and globally-embracing ideas that comparisons to Talking Heads ’77 were inevitable, and when the follow-up progressed towards maturity while keeping one foot in the past, the comparisons continued. I guess that really makes Modern Vampires Of The City the modern equivalent of Fear Of Music, which is okay, since I don’t like Fear Of Music all that much, either. Still, though, if the trend keeps up that means that the next album will be their Remain In Light, which is something fun to look forward to anyway. As it stands, though, I find it overblown and underdone; as I said earlier, though, I find the same of Sgt Pepper’s, so take that however you will.

FINAL MARK: B

(And again, don’t forget to visit http://www.trevorjameszaple.com and download a free excerpt of my first book, Disappearance. Maybe even buy it, if you like it.)

Guided By Voices – “Flunky Minnows”

Speaking of modern-day Robert Pollards: Robert Pollard. Does this guy ever stop? Does he ever run out of classic ideas? How many GBV albums will 2013 bring us? This is the lead single from the fourth post-reunion album, the first three having been released just last year. The quality keeps getting better, at any rate; this track in particular seems to find the ‘classic lineup’ really getting back into its groove like it’s 1994 all over again.

Ty Segall – “Music For A Film 1”

My sweet Lord, those drums, and that wiry guitar work. It’s like someone achieving their own personal Revolver in a dirty hole-in-the-wall. This guy has already proven himself to be a modern-day Robert Pollard, churning out a staggeringly prolific catalog of mostly very good songs. “Music For A Film 1” takes him in a much more expansive sonic direction, although the title sounds like the placeholder filename of some experimental studio fuckery. Maybe he needs to do that more often.

Parquet Courts – “Light Up Gold”

Parquet Courts are a Brooklyn band, but don’t hold that against them – they barrel forward with a singleness of purpose that cuts through the pseudo-intellectual fluff that a lot of borough bands seem to wallow in. Right from the kickoff, this album does not tiptoe around why it came; “Master My Craft” is as straight-forward as a gunshot and as catchy as a coronavirus. Leadoff single “Borrowed Time” flows naturally from the ending, creating the greatest one-two punch of the year, easily. The fifteen tracks contained here have a shockingly high percentage of gold embedded in them – the album only really lags once or twice briefly, most notably on the sort-of-slow “Yr No Stoner”. Andrew Savage and company really do master their craft here: the songs are tight, ridiculously catchy, and (with the exception of the five-minute ode to the munchies “Stoned and Starving”) less than three-and-a-half minutes in length. As a debut album this is an auspicious start; I’ve had this one on my heavy rotation list since I first caught “Borrowed Time” on satellite radio earlier this year. This is minimalism that manages to say more in half an hour than some artists manage in their entire career. Thank all the gods that Whats Your Rupture? decided to rerelease it (it was originally released in 2012 on the tiny Dull Tools label), because it’s going to be a presence on my year-end list for sure.

FINAL MARK: A

Thee Oh Sees – “Toe Cutter – Thumb Buster”

Thee Oh Sees roll on in their ultra-prolific career of garage bliss, marrying a queen bee-sized riff to a quivering, multi-dimensional vocal take. The video is pretty violent, although not really gory – fair warning.

Best Coast – “Fear Of My Identity”

I know, I know, Best Coast fell off on their mopey second album. This is a 180 from that, however; Beth Cosentino sounds like she remembered which direction the beach was in and decided to mope and tan at the same time. Great fun, at any rate.

Deerhunter – “Monomania”

So, as it turns out, I’ve been worrying about this album for absolutely nothing. I’ll admit: the title track/first single did not inspire confidence in me. While the track has since grown on me, I had visions of a more streamlined, mainstream-oriented Deerhunter, built for play on terrestrial radio. While this is about a quarter true, it’s not as big a deal as I’d fretted about; it’s more streamlined, sure, but it’s still very recognizably a Deerhunter album. However, where previous pinnacles of 2000s underground rock like Microcastle reveled in hazy drifts of experimental noise and the filtered, dreamy vocals of frontman Bradford Cox, Monomania places the sonics front and center. This is really the only immediately off-putting feature of the entire record; once “The Missing” kicks in you realize that nothing has really changed about the band’s fundamental sound. There is still the insistence on looping, hypnotic riffs and sighing vocal melodies; it’s just the presentation that’s shifted to the forefront. The signature gallop of “Sleepwalking” could be slotted directly onto Weird Era (or, really, Microcastle’s “Nothing Ever Happened”) and I swear that I heard “T.H.M.”‘s primeval ghost floating around the middle of Halcyon Days. Bradford Cox brings about the most direct change – the effect of cutting the summery haze from his vocals is jarring but oddly satisfying. For the first time, the band approaches what could almost pass for a traditional rock and roll type of sound. “Pensacola” is a great example of this kind of change: the way the guitars play off of the drums is classic Deerhunter, but with a subtle difference that actually summons Neil Young out of his hoary past and makes him dance with Cox like they were upstate New York hippies on some private stretch of drug-addled land. It’s like Deerhunter covering the Grateful Dead covering Deerhunter (check out the beginning of “Dream Captain” and tell me differently), or, in the case of the punishing “Leather Jacket II”, the best moments of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club with the storm and explosion of Slaughterhouse-era Ty Segall. Deerhunter sells their souls to rock and roll? It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for ’em.