CHVRCHES – Every Open Eye

★★★☆

Scotland’s CHVRCHES blew up the scene in 2013 with a debut album, The Bones Of What You Believe, that was the best synth pop album since Violator. It’s hard to follow up that kind of a meteoric album; you would need a synth pop masterpiece, or, more likely, a pop masterpeice. Every Open Eye is not that album, but then again what could be?

It is a really well-crafted album, though. The three opening tracks – “Never Ending Circles”, “Leave A Trace”, and the sublime “Keep You On My Side” – are CHVRCHES firing on all pistons, songs that take the groundwork laid on the debut and building more complex, darker structures from them. Then it falls off, with only “Clearest Blue” and “Playing Dead” really standing apart from the more mundane pieces that surround them. Even those mundane pieces, however, are great examples of good pop music, and Lauren Mayberry presents herself as the perfect pop frontwoman, taking charge in the choruses but letting the synth and drum work speak for itself when appropriate.

Every Open Eye suffers from having such a barn-burner as The Bones Of What You Believe as its predecessor. If this were CHVRCHES’ debut, it would seem freer, more expansive; it would be a solid rocket and a reason to expect greater things. Since we’ve already seen those greater things, this album becomes a placeholder of sorts; we know they’re capable of greater things, so now we have this sophomore album to tide us over until they (presumably) blow all of our minds with their instant classic third album.

Baio – The Names

★★★★

Solo albums are usually pretty suspect. For every Ozzy Osbourne there’s a whole host of guys like Slash, Paul Banks, Scott Weiland, and Mick Jagger – people who have no business separating themselves from their bands. They’re typically the result of too much ego to be contained even by a world-shaking band, and a need to stake their own claim discrete from where they became famous. This effect is even worse when it’s the bassist from a famous band. The reason behind this is that the bassist, in your typical rock ‘n’ roll format, is the most boring person there is. No one cares about the bassist.

Chris Baio is the bassist for upper-crust Ivy League dorm band Vampire Weekend. After three albums of riffing on Paul Simon like he was the Second Coming of Jesus, the band seems to have come to a period of individual exploration. That is to say, singer Ezra Koenig is doing some stuff in collaboration with others, and now bassist Chris Baio is staking out a solo album, The Names. Just the idea of the bassist from Vampire Weekend making a solo album is typically enough to make me cringe.

He pulls it off really, really well, however. These are not the sort of rote Vampire-lite songs that you might expect to tinkle oh-so-preciously from your speakers. These are songs anchored to hard, throbbing bass, more influenced by epic house anthems than they are by Upper West Side Soweto. Lead single “Sister of Pearl” is actually the outlier here; most of these tracks resemble the opener, “Brainwash yyrr Face”, with light, graceful vocals playing around the maypole of that monolithic rumble at the bottom. “I Was Born In A Marathon” is the best track here; it runs through a tidal bridge that shows a masterful hand with fusing house tropes into a more general pop form.

Chris Baio bucks a trend here; he may not be Ozzy Osbourne but gets the job done in a rare fashion, and it’s one solo album that’s actually worth listening to.

Low – Ones And Sixes

★★★

My eldest daughter had trouble falling asleep when she was a baby and I would have to walk her back and forth in the front hall of our house until she finally nodded off. To aid in this I would put on quiet music to help sooth her; her favourite piece to fall asleep to was Things We Lost In The Fire, Low’s 2001 masterpiece. It was soothing, contemplative, and sounded great even when you hushed the volume to barely audible levels.

Ones and Sixes, by contrast, would probably keep her awake (at least until “Landslide”). The slowcore veterans have picked up a certain level of production value over the years that tends to cancel out the quiet, brush-on-drum nature of their sound. This album is no different; many of the drum arrangements feels as though they were programmed, rather than teased out, and the exuberance with which they play actually has some dynamic and volume to it, a quirk that has become increasingly apparent ever since C’mon. “Landslide”, as I alluded to, comes the closest to the twilight lullabyes of their older work, but it’s the odd one out this time, rather than the standard. In a way it feels as though Low is now a different band than they were when they started out 21 years ago. Obviously this is true of most bands, but with Low you can really feel it. This isn’t music to drift off into dreamland to anymore, but rather music to wake up on a sunny spring morning to.

Craig Finn – Faith In The Future

★★★★

Craig Finn has spent most of his time fronting Brooklyn-by-way-of-Minneapolis rockers The Hold Steady engaged in tackling the big themes of growth and life. Albums like Separation Sunday and Stay Positive are about the big changes in people’s lives, about the big picture of failure that his characters live through, about friends who grow up together, grow apart, and find themselves again. They’re about how resurrections really feel, and about how words alone could never save us. Faith In The Future, his second solo album, dials back these ambitions to take a look at the minutiae of the lives of new(ish) characters. There’s no Holly, no Gideon, no Charlemagne on this record. Instead, we have a narrator telling a woman that he’s still in search of their son, but he took a detour into a messianic desert cult for a while. There’s a murder being plotted in a scuzzy club. There’s Sarah, an ex-girlfriend calling to try to make amends about how things ended while avoiding angering her unstable new boyfriend. There’s Finn himself, scared and wanting to be drunk on a roof in Brooklyn on September 11th, 2001, trying to figure out what the future’s supposed to mean.

To be sure, there are ample observances that hearken back to lines that have come out of Finn’s mouth before. Everyone’s still searching for their saviour, and while there’s no pipes made out of Pringles cans “Sandra From Scranton” comes off like the second draft of the girl from “Lord, I’m Discouraged” or “Joke About Jamaica”. These are songs that are very easily identifiable as Finn’s own, in the same way that guys jetting off from death-trap New Jersey towns to seek their desperate fortunes in the wilds of America are forever stamped by Bruce Springsteen. If you’re in a dying industrial belt town, working in a restaurant, going out to shows, slowly slipping into bad addictions to love and hard drugs, you’re a Craig Finn character, and Faith In The Future is a textbook study in them. Musically, he keeps things spare, mostly acoustic guitars, drums, and basic, muted keyboards; to go back to the Springsteen reference, these are the characters of Darkness On The Edge Of Town played out in the poppier half of The River.

While it lacks the epic arena punch of his band’s work, it’s a heartfelt enough album to satisfy longtime fans of that band. As a matter of fact, I would have almost preferred to hear “Maggie, I’ve Been Searching For Our Son” as a full-on Hold Steady song. Still, it’s a solid collection of songs that speak to the fact that Finn’s not just a great frontman, but a great storyteller as well.

Helen – The Original Faces

★★★★

Another autumn arrives (almost) and so comes another album from Liz Harris. Instead of another Grouper album, however, Ms. Harris has put together a dream-pop outfit called Helen that approximates the sounds of the early Nineties, when wobbly tape noises, ultra-lo-fi recording, and thick fogs of reverb were par for the course. A lot of that is, of course, stuff that Liz Harris uses seemingly every day, but the difference here is obvious. Grouper is a project that approximates folk, except drowned in dread and isolated tape artifacts. Helen is a pop group at its core, albeit one that sounds as though it was recorded live in an intimate club in the late 1980s and then left out in the rain for the past 25 years. A track like “Felt This Way” sounds like what would happen if your house caught fire and your copies of Darklands and Heaven Or Las Vegas melted into each other but were still listenable. These are, despite all of their accouterments, skeletal songs; the bass pokes through the holes in the sonics in a way that will make any aficionado of raw garage-recorded rock ‘n’ roll sit up and clap. The gain used on the guitar amps is something rather unusual for Harris, but the way that the distortion is scattered to the winds and made to suffuse the whole song – as on “Pass Me By” – is quite warm and familiar. Where the album really comes together is on “Dying All The Time”, where Harris and Co. up the racket to a near-punk fury by way of a drum line that carries all of the diffused distortion and thumping bass to an entirely different world.

If you miss noisy dream pop from the days when you were still buying it on cassette, do yourself a favour and track down a cassette copy of The Original Faces.

Blank Realm – Illegals In Heaven

★★☆

Blank Realm are an Australian band that define the term “middle-tier”. They are a bellwether of what people are talking about when they’re talking about mainstream indie – arpeggiated near-ballads indebted to the Stone Roses broken up with the occasional more uptempo number. They’ve never been anything particularly special, and Illegals In Heaven doubles down on this middle-of-the-road oblivion. The album kicks off in an exciting enough manner with “No Views”, a garaged-up number that kicks along in a more galvanizing fashion than they’ve ever really managed before. Unfortunately, it falls apart quickly after with songs that lounge and snooze rather than rally; “Costume Drama” and “Palace of Love” make an attempt at getting the party started again but it’s largely an abortive effort. Illegals In Heaven tries to trade in on mid-tempo balladry to fill out its scant ideas, and tellingly said ballads are nowhere near the league of the uptempo pieces.

“Too Late Now”, the final track, exemplifies the real problems with this album: it’s slavish Stone Roses worship with a ham-fisted attempt at being edgier with the vocal, and it only half-works. It passes the time well enough, but nothing sticks around after the fact, like a dream that gets scattered and lost upon waking.

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.

Ducktails – St. Catherine

★★☆

Ducktails’ Matt Mondanile’s musical day job is with indie middlers Real Estate, and that sums up part of my problem with it. There are very few Real Estate songs I can actually stand, and it’s been my longstanding opinion that the band is the Coldplay to Deerhunter’s Radiohead. This extends to side-projects; for my money, Atlas Sound and Lotus Plaza are much better diversions than Ducktails has ever been. If I’m being honest, however, there was a possibility that Ducktails might have won me over, had I been able to ignore the four albums they’d released previous to St. Catherine. There’s a certain loveliness to the arrangements, after all, a hazy sort of stoned beauty in the songs. The problem, however – the same problem I have with Mac DeMarco, incidentally – is that there’s nothing to really grasp onto on any of the songs. There are some clean Real Estate chords, some whipped-up old vintage synth noise, a lazily sung bit processed through one filter or another, and a bass guitar mixed high and burbling in the background. Despite all of these parts there’s nothing to really string them together; there are very few hooks on St. Catherine, and after several spins of the album I’m hard-pressed to come up with a single memorable moment.

St. Catherine is an album to try if you’re in the mood for something to be aimless and stoned to, but even then it’s going to wear thin about halfway through.