Spring Roundup, 2015

For those albums I’ve been too busy to get to in the first third of 2015, an accounting, or at the very least a terse quip.

Ghostpoet – Shedding Skin ★★★☆

A rather different and not altogether unsatisfying followup to 2013’s Some Say I So I Say Light

Jeff The Brotherhood – Wasted On The Dream ★☆

Weezer without the charm, early heavy metal without the bite, it just makes me miss Be Your Own Pet all that much more.

Lightning Bolt – Fantasy Empires ★★★★

Noise for people who need structure.

Twin Shadow – Eclipse ★

He was always a weenie. Now he’s a weenie with major label money.

Hey Rosetta! – Second Sight ★★☆

Much like a big bubble of pop, shiny on the surface but vanishes into air if you look at it the wrong way.

Natalie Prass – Natalie Prass ★★★

It’s pleasant enough but I don’t get the high praise and hoopla behind it. Maybe like Andrew Bird if Andrew Bird was an inoffensive little major label folkie.

Napalm Death – Apex Predator – Easy Meat ★★★☆

Evolved grindcore, which is to say it’s what I expect out of a Napalm Death album.

A Place To Bury Strangers – Transfixiation ★★

The former Loudest Band In New York just doesn’t seem as loud or as vital anymore.

Screaming Females – Rose Mountain ★★★

A progression but not a peak, the sound of a band trying to find its way forward.

The Pop Group – Citizen Zombie ★★

As I said weeks earlier, not every halfway-famous band from the 1980s needs to keep putting out records. Sometimes you should just let your legacy stand on its own.

Built To Spill – Untethered Moon ★★★☆

That dictum doesn’t apply to bands from the 90s, though, as many indie darlings of that time – Dinosaur Jr., Superchunk, Pinback, et al. – seem to have figured out the knack of being consistently great.

Dutch Uncles – O Shudder ★★☆

Nice enough pop rock, but the singer’s voice makes me want to gargle razor blades.

Echo Lake – Era ★★★☆

Moving, euphoric, and pretty much exactly like their first album.

Lady Lamb – After ★★★☆

Quirky indie rock with enough gain on the guitars to give it some heft. Surprisingly good.

Matthew E. White – Fresh Blood ★★★☆

Like Tobias Jesso, Jr, Matthew E White is a reborn Seventies piano man looking to channel heartbreak into soaring pop. Unlike Tobias Jesso, Jr, Mr. White can do more than just plunk rote chords on his chosen instrument.

Cannibal Ox – Blade Of The Ronin ★★

Fourteen years later, and this is what we get. I guess I know how Guns ‘n’ Roses fans feel.

Tyler, The Creator – Cherry Bomb

★★☆

In the run-up to his new album, Odd Future leader Tyler, The Creator promised everyone a new Tyler, one who was more mature and willing to go forward. This was by and large greeted with muted enthusiasm, since the OF schtick has worn a bit thin in the years since the world picked up on Bastard. Bastard was fresh and exciting; Goblin dropped off after a couple of listens: the best that could be said for Wolf was that it was hit-and-miss. With Cherry Bomb Tyler had the opportunity to step forward and take his game to the next level.

Sometimes he does that, but a lot of the time he doesn’t.

“DEATHCAMP”, the opening track to both Cherry Bomb and Tyler’s chaotic Coachella set, is a great kick-off. The N.E.R.D. vibe that he nicks here is no accident; in the middle of his second verse he raps “In Search Of… did more for me than Illmatic“. It’s a line that marks a clear divide between him and the old guard of hip hop, and it reminds me of an uncomfortable conversation I had not long ago where I discovered that there was, in fact, such a thing as dad rap. Then “BUFFALO” comes on and it’s about as perfect a Tyler track as you can get. After that, though…

As it turns out, Tyler’s take on maturity is that it involves R&B tracks with some off-kilter melodies. “FIND YOUR WINGS” is where he tries this and fails; “FUCKING YOUNG/PERFECT” is where he manages to pull it off. The noise that makes “DEATHCAMP” so much fun is taken to its extreme on “CHERRY BOMB”, which sounds like nothing so much as an early Wavves track, from back when he thought that heavy clipping made tracks sound cooler. As an artistic statement I think that “CHERRY BOMB” succeeds, but taken into context with the rest of the album it highlights the biggest problem: everything here feels completely unfinished. God knows no one was rushing Tyler to complete the album; either he felt he needed to compete with Earl Sweatshirt or he actually thought that a badly mixed, unmastered album made for good hip hop.

The other problem, of course, are the lyrics. We were promised maturity, and what did we get? Liberal use of the word “faggot” despite the slow-crawl backlash he’s received against it, and cringe-fests like “Blow My Load”, which finds him writing lyrics like he’s still 16. In a way, he is. He’s still that kid from the promo shot of Pitchfork’s “/b/ Generation” article, flashing his dick to the photographer with his friends around him. Earl has started the path to being a grown-ass man – a bitter one, to be sure – but Tyler is still running around like it’s 2010 and Odd Future is still the Next Big Thing. I mean, sure, he managed to get both Kanye and Lil’ Wayne on “SMUCKERS”, but who still takes the guy seriously at this point? Far from being OF’s breakout star, he’s seen his star eclipsed by both Earl and Frank Ocean, and he’s not doing anything to try to change that.

Everyone knows that when you hit the drinking age in America, it’s time to leave /b/ for better forums. Everyone except Tyler, anyway.

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Death Grips – The Powers That B

★★★★

Death Grips are less a musical act and more of an experimental piece of performance art with a noise-hip-hop component. Having built a rapid and rabid following since their debut mixtape Exmilitary, the group has followed a narrative that seems more punk rock than anything else. Signed to Epic, they wallowed in major label cash so much they named their debut The Money Store, and proceeded to shop around a wilfully noisy, alienating album whose sole concession to mainstream hooks was the paranoid “I’ve Seen Footage”. They quit touring abruptly to work on the follow up, No Love Deep Web, which they released to the internet without asking their label for permission first (also, the cover art was the title written on one of the group member’s penis). After Epic dropped them they released a third album, Government Plates, and managed to wind up on another major label, this time Capitol’s Harvest Records. After announcing a double album, they self-released the first disc, Niggas On The Moon, and then announced that they would break up after the full release of the second half, Jenny Death. This spawned the invigorating-and-then-annoying “Jenny Death When?” meme, spurred on by the band itself when it was revealed that the tracks on an instrumental self-release, Fashion Week, spelled out “JENNY DEATH WHEN”.

It’s Jenny Death Now, finally, and the meme can finally die. The Powers That B is a fitting “end” to the group’s legacy, a double-disc set of the best stuff they’ve ever committed to digital space. Niggas On The Moon, which has been out since June of 2014, is easily their most experimental work, played entirely on the Roland V-Drum and featuring Bjork vocals as “found sound”. Stefan “MC Ride” Burnett sounds more lost and paranoid than ever when the layers of heavy noise that characterized their previous work are stripped away. It may be, as some have opined, “shouting hobocore”, but his drugged-out rantings and fractured, angry, politically-charged viewpoint seem even more on point with the eerie instrumentals present on the first disc. The second, the long-awaited Jenny Death, brings the group back full circle to the punk rock sampling days of Exmilitary. Here the guitars are live, churning against the industrial-noise soundscapes and jutting off sparks. “I Break Mirrors With My Face In The United States” sums up the bands aesthetic in the best way possible; “Inanimate Sensation” and “On GP” bring out a newish direction in their sound, making them seem simultaneously more relatable to more normal metal sounds while showing off their stark divide even more. “Death Grips 2.0” ends the album with savage beats that trip over themselves, like drum n bass tracks that have been rammed together and looped. The title is fitting, since the day Jenny Death leaked the group hinted that they might make some more music after all. If they continue on with the progression that they have shown here then I’m all for it – Jenny Death shows a band still willing to play games with the major label world and confound expectations.

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The Knife – “Shaking The Habitual”

Named after a Foucault quote and steeped in Cultural Marxism, Shaking The Habitual is the thinking grad student’s electronic act. It’s been seven years since their previous album, 2006’s highly regarded Silent Shout, and the ensuing years have seen any number of remixes, production works, and a side-collaboration on the rather creepy Fever Ray. This new LP finds them embracing noise and dark ambient work with full force, in sharp contrast to their previous work. Where Silent Shout crafted bold new sounds out of the bones of cheesy Europop and trance, Shaking The Habitual seems hellbent on carving songs out of pure sonic building blocks. It’s a wild new vision and for the most part it works. There are moments where the scrawled drones outstay their welcome – as on the nearly twenty-minute middle track “Old Dreams Waiting To Be Realized” – but for the most part the artistic statement holds together with real force. With its deeply, radically progressive politics and it’s artsy noise-skronk, it brings to mind specifically the dark experimentations of the early 1980s, which makes sense; similar times call for similar statements, after all.

Verdict:

BEST NEW MUSIC

Youth Lagoon – “Wondrous Bughouse”

Trevor Powers’ second album is immediately much denser than his 2011 debut, more willing to dive into that gravity well in an effort to slingshot around and achieve warp speed a la Star Trek IV. His work with Youth Lagoon is built around layers of psychedelic noise built into swooping loops and juxtapositions of drone with melody. The best tracks here, such as “Dropla” and “Mute”, marry the dizzying psych work with strong central thematic melodies – “Dropla” in particular will find it’s way into the center of your brain. At its worst, however, like “Attic Doctor” or “Sleep Paralysis”, it becomes nothing more than a circus celebration of self-indulgent loops, like Animal Collective on auto pilot. At its root, the best that can be said of it is that it takes its whimsy very seriously, and that this can come off as a virtue most of the time. It is definitely an album that can be said to have grown, if somewhat painfully, from The Year Of Hibernation, and the songs are all more or less strong enough to whet the appetite while Powers does some more growing and maturing and comes out with a third album that will likely captivate everyone. Think of Wondrous Bughouse as his adolescent phase: gangly, awkward, a little of full of itself, but brimming with promise and youthful charm.

FINAL MARK: B+

Grouper – “The Man Who Died In His Boat”

Like the Cocteau Twins before her, Liz Harris deals in an abstractly intimate type of songcraft that transcends lyrical clarity; much of the time, she comes across as an artist intent on sketching out melodies and creating the ghosts of folky pop songs. This vocal ambiguity pairs with the mournful atmosphere and the organic noise instrumentation to evoke emotions that you can’t even really name. Is it existential sadness? The acceptance of inevitability? Something as mundane as merely missing another human being? I strongly suspect that the effect will be different for each listener, making this an album that you can take home and make your own, an album whose intimacy is intensely personal and achingly beautiful. It was written at the same time as 2008’s Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill and it makes a more than worthy companion album to that modern classic. They both outline a contemporary redefinition of the possibilities inherent within ambient songcraft, and allow the listener to pour themselves into the emotional mould that Harris presents and holds tantalizingly just out of reach. The Man Who Died In His Boat is ostensibly a “folk” album, but it far outstrips the limitations that the genre often imposes on artists. By welding elements of experimental noise and studio effect play with downtempo acoustic chording, Harris crafts something more along the lines of a discourse of elemental dread, loss, and recovery.