Midlake: The Courage of Others

Jeff Laughlin, February 5, 2010 in Music Reviews. 2 Comments Tags: , .

Mr. Laughlin, you requested an opening Tirade?  Yes, Kent.  Entrusting the music reviewers of America with a jewel like The Courage of Others was a mistake before it happened.  Yes, it was a follow up that took years.  Yes, it followed an absolute (though polarizing) classic.  No, it isn’t the same Midlake sound that we got accustomed to.  No, none of this shit matters.  If you wanted a review of the last Midlake album, I’m sure you can find it somewhere else, like the first ten paragraphs of all the major review sites’ takes on this new jam.  This is a review of The Courage of Others, and I refuse to fall into the trap of this being anything else.  End of opening tirade, a terrifying vision of things to come, here’s my review.

Midlake’s The Courage of Others is the pinnacle of why my roommate and I started 10Listens.  This was a band with a lauded past taking a chance on a new sound.  They aren’t expanding since The Trials of Van Occupanther.  Instead, Midlake is contracting; tightening like a coiled snake.  Like a white wine and raspberry reduction (the moody darkness of the guitars, the swirls of flutes) with added honey (the vocal deliveries and their rising affectation), The Courage of Others adds to the palate by subtracting unneeded synth and overused harmony.

Don’t believe me? Listen to “Rulers Ruling All Things” and note how together everything sounds.  The guitar and vocal interplay, the brilliant lyrics, the masked building– all of this would have been over-the-top synth and pan flutes and solos midway through that detracted from the flow.  Instead, we get a few measures of detached and elongated notes– the hills of a world they created overlooking the towns they invented.  “Rulers…” is their best song to date.  It is the song that got me past my preconceived notions.

My first two listens, I was just excited to get a new Midlake. They could have added a puppy getting stabbed on vocals and I would have looked right past it.  Never noticed.  Then, in later listens, I was enticed by my bitter, sophomoric tendencies to dismiss the album as boring schlock; a band unable to match their previous, amazing effort.  Then, I noticed the “missing” parts and how unnecessary it all is.  As the band croons “I only want to be left to my own ways,” they speak directly to to the listener.  They didn’t re-record the Fleetwood Mac songs, they didn’t try to get louder or flashier.  They perfected their craft.  Midlake wrapped their scales around their music and squeezed not the life from it, but drained the best juices of its innards.

“Children of the Grounds” draws from sympathetic wells while swirling with building electric guitar.  “So I’ve come to wait/for the end of it all/’til I’m gone from here./I’m gone./I’m gone./I’m gone.”  The lyrics create solemn detachment that bands have tried to author for decades.  “Core of Nature” opens to a circular and insular riffs that conjoin so well to the vocals, a review might say the lyricist sounds bored.  There is nothing less boring than a singer that knows how to sing with, rather than overpower, his/her bands’ brilliance.  Nothing.  I’ll never get bored with good songs.  Perhaps, if I were to take this album at a cursory glance, I could get bored.   Taking it in this many times (much more than ten, I’ll confess) and being this involved, I’d rather review this ten times than listen to anymore albums until then.

The fault of Midlake’s effort lies in their aggressive willingness to continually under-manage their songs.  I recognize that.  “The Horn” cries out for more than the albeit complex opening.  Or maybe it’s less it needs as well– less monotone, less cymbal, less rambling flute overpowering the song.  Could it be that the one song that mirrors their past could benefit from being like the rest of the album?  Yes and no.  In the place of stagnant instruments comes the need for more movement.  The same need haunts the title track.  Where brooding British-style melodies hang repetitiously over us, the guitars should be leading us along the beautiful lyrics more forcefully.  Then again, I like both of these songs and the should-be boring album closer.

Why do I like such repetitive music so widely panned by more popular sites?  For the same reason I write here.  For the same reasons I have never realized my potential at anything.  Perhaps, if I thought my job were to be a cultural attache rather than muse on music, I could tell you that this album isn’t as good as Van Occupanther. I won’t, because it is not my job.  I don’t get paid to write these.  I don’t get these albums for free unless people are nice enough to give them to me.  I haven’t got the profligate’s education on jazz or the ideal ear to disseminate what is supposed to be popular and why.  I know next to nothing about the bands Midlake loves to imitate.  Perhaps, like the main character in “Fortune,” I’ve missed my true calling: “All he was wanting was a bumbling man./ I wouldn’t go.”  I could wax philosophic about the old days of 2005 or 1975 or 1961.  I could go into why this album disappoints or why it will not be a classic.  But, I won’t go.  I won’t fall for the trap of wanting more from a band that so readily provided a beautiful album.  I’ll leave that to the experts, their hands recoiled in fear of never creating anything so fantastic.  Meanwhile, Midlake’s scales slither in circles and I alongside them– because The Courage of Others is good whether I’ve heard it in some other, better woods or not.

First Listen: Massive Attack’s Heligoland

B. Michael Payne, February 4, 2010 in Initial Response and Music Reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

In a way, I’m an ideal reviewer for this album. I’ve never heard Massive Attack. Ever. I’m familiar with the idea of Massive Attack. They have something to do with “the 90s” and “trip-hop.” Back in Santa Fe, whenever a certain friend and I saw a flyer that said the band was trip-hop, we’d split open into stitches of laughter. So in another way, maybe I’m not a very good reviewer for Heligoland, Massive Attack’s fifth album. Without ever hearing the band, I have a caricatured notion of them, a sham-antipathy to their music.

As I listened to Heligoland I took notes on each song, but in retrospect it remains difficult for me to begin to characterize each song. “Repetitive in a bad way.” “Terrible lyrics.” “Syncopated synth bass line lifted directly from 1997.” “Sounds like a chillwave Balkan thing.” “Uninspired.” “Sounds like something from the Matrix soundtrack.” “Did he just rhyme ‘gasoline’ with ‘gasoline?’” “Reminiscent of every late-90s British band.” There were only a handful of songs that sounded like they should have been released in the last five years, and if they were physical objects, you wouldn’t need a very large hand to hold them. The unfortunately-titled “Paradise Circus” is the first (perhaps only) genuinely sexy song on an album that often aspires to “sexy” but settles for “just friends.” It has a guest vocal from Hope Sandoval, who I understand is another 90s trip-hop-ish holdover. It succeeds, though, on its own terms—a relative lack of studio meddling and a light production hand. The rest of the album pushes in ten different directions at once, creating a sort of static apoplexy. By striving for a modern sound, it wears itself out and stays stuck in the past.

Heligoland’s sheer busyness is what makes it such a disappointing album. It’s quite clear that the band looks for something that it just fails to find. Rather than the heterogenous, sophisticated album Massive Attack seemingly tried to create, they end up making a messy, old-sounding affair. Using the same synth patches and clunky bass lines they must have trotted out ten years ago, Massive Attack end up crafting an album that I can only imagine is self-derivative, canon-cannibalistic. The songs lack compelling melodies, the lyrics aren’t much better than what the average high-schooler writes in study hall, and the music is comprised of a bulky mass of undirected attitude. I don’t ever need to hear arpeggiated Spanish guitar over synth sounds and drum machines—especially with flat female vocal accompaniment. I know of a few high-end chain restaurants who would beg to differ, though.

I still don’t have any strong opinion on the band, but I suspect I don’t need any more listens to reach a fairly definitive conclusion on this album (see above). Listening to it has confirmed my every suspicion about the cottonheadedness of trip-hop as a genre, and failed to justify all the great things I’ve heard about Massive Attack. As I listened to Heligoland, I couldn’t resist comparing it to Portishead’s Third. Portishead, another band invariably pegged as trip-hop and pinned to the 90s, superseded genre and age in order to create one of the best albums of 2008, an album that sounded like absolutely nothing else around. Massive Attack’s Heligoland sounds like all the cheesiest music around—ten years ago.

First Listen: Harlem’s Hippies

Joe O., February 4, 2010 in Initial Response and Music Reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Hippies is the second album by Austin-based rock trio Harlem, and the band’s first release on Matador Records.  I haven’t heard Harlem’s debut, 2009’s Free Drugs ;-) , but I think I can safely assume that Hippies sounds a lot like it.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy my first spin through Hippies. It’s perfectly good garage- loose but not too sloppy, catchy but not terribly generic, confident but not insufferably cocky.  I just didn’t hear anything unique about Harlem’s style.

I’m sure I’ll listen to many of the songs on Hippies again.  The album’s just much too long (16 tracks) and samey for me to want to listen to the whole thing 10 times before its April 6th release.  But I probably wouldn’t skip any of these tracks if they came on while my iPod was shuffling.

Los Campesinos!: Romance Is Boring

Paul, February 4, 2010 in Music Reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , .

So this is how the affair ends, is it? Such a shame. Los Campesinos!, a Welsh septet known for their chaotic-yet-controlled ruminations on failed romance (and their frenetic recording; their two previous albums were released within eight months of each other) are the musical equivalent to The One That Got Away. Fans of previous effort We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed may have expected a bit of the same with the new album, albeit with perhaps the precision of an evolving act. They would be sorely disappointed.

I suppose it’s evident in the title! Romance Is Boring. Doesn’t exactly carry the same raised-eyebrow weight of Doomed, does it? Instead it comes off as a reduction of all the ills that plague Los Campesinos! as they enter this new stage of their career: a disaffection with any aspect of life beyond the most cynical self-hatred, an exultation of giving up on any semblance of happiness or excitement and, most of all, a total lack of interest in seducing listeners with the awesome power of seven musicians who can really tear shit up when they want to. It’s a sad, unpalatable boiling-down of Los Campesinos’ brief history. Being in love with life, or music, is shit. So why bother?

Doomed and 2008’s Hold On Now, Youngster… presented a fresh take on a formula as old as Cap’n Jazz; a rambling wreck of guitars, strings and keys clattering in a brilliant unison under the vocals of Gareth’s almost spoken-word soliloquies. It was a cacophony of indie instrumentation but oddly beautiful. If anything, the band knew the beauty of moderation, be it with a full-band chorus of vocals to emphasize the wrenching pain of a certain verse or string-breaking guitar strumming sliding effortlessly into virtuoso fingering when a song verged too close to angst-driven overkill.

Of course Gareth wasn’t the first UK native to pine for a simpler connection between the sexes, but there was something uniquely clever and honest about his lyrics. Here was the lion with kitten’s paws, in love with the idea of romance yet finding nothing in the twenty-first century wasteland of youth culture. He was the smart kid with the kind heart threatening to hurt himself… You realized his emotions were real yet in the end you also knew things would work out for him. Or so you thought.

Instead now we have “Straight In At 101″, a classically Campesinos tune with lyrics as trite as “feels like the build-up takes forever but you never touch my cock”. Perhaps the smart kid with the kind heart hit rock bottom? Not a good look for the boy you thought you knew. Female co-vocalist Aleks (Or is it Gareth’s sister, new-hire Kim? It’s impossible to tell but one of them keeps edging horribly into Riot-Grrl territory) offers this gem on “We’ve Got Your Back”: “I’m sweating off the cheat notes on my thighs; they’re for your benefit not mine”. I don’t know, am I suddenly the grumpy old man on the indie rock block or is this all just puerile nonsense? To boot, we have another bloody reference to “Doe Eyes” (Youngster fans will understand). Could it be a subtle hint to the absolute mediocrity of the effort? Maybe I’m the paranoid old man instead. It’s a real shame because as first single “The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future” showed, the band is perfectly capable of keeping the killer music while maturing the lyrical content.

At least these three songs have sustainability. I found myself humming them in the shower and eager to play them back during my commutes and workouts. Understand though that most of Boring is the calamity of Los Campesinos without the flashes of beauty. Noodling guitar lines (heavily distorted) and shouts (not nearly as in unison as with previous recordings) seem thrown in as last resorts. There are no ascensions to glory in these tracks; the first thirty seconds of the song are about as good as it gets. A couple of tunes devolve into teetering monologues over silence, chugging so slowly into anti-climactic ends that you almost want to tell poor Gareth to just shut it.

And so it goes that as this assignment ends, I relegate Boring to a spare 50 MB of my iTunes. Several of the songs will be welcome reminders in future shuffle sessions. None will stay with me like some of Los Campesinos’ previous efforts. It was a nice run… I fell head over heels for them and cooled a bit only to love them more. Upon which we reached a crossroads and there it all became clearer: the self-pity, the blemishes, the repetitive content of our interactions. I made the decision that maybe it’d be better if we just went our separate ways.

First Listen: Broken Bells

Joe O., February 3, 2010 in Initial Response and Music Reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Broken Bells is the self-titled debut of a collaborative project by The Shins’ frontman James Mercer and Gnarls Barkley’s multi-instrumentalist/producer Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton.  Initially, the project appears to offer the best of both worlds in refreshingly new contexts, without feeling forced; Mercer’s bewitching folk-rock melodies seem right at home among Burton’s futuristic soul soundscapes.

Though the second half of Broken Bells didn’t immediately grab me as strongly as the first half, this is definitely a record I’d like to spend some time with.  Burton’s productions usually reward repeated listens, and I didn’t get much of a chance to absorb Mercer’s lyrics, which tend to be mysterious and multi-faceted.  Expect a full review sometime around Broken Bells’ March 9th release date.

The Magnetic Fields: Realism

Joe O., February 2, 2010 in Music Reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields doesn’t write songs quite as much as he writes “Songs.”  Kind of like how Quentin Tarantino makes “Movies” and The Simpsons is a “Sitcom,” Stephin Merritt compositions rarely have just one level; practically every artistic choice he makes works as a wry comment on songs you’ve heard a thousand times before.

So anyone familiar with Merritt’s work will already know not to take the title of the new Magnetic Fields album literally.  It’s called Realism not because it lacks the irony, the extended metaphors and other self-aware artistic conceits that the band typically relishes.  If anything, the title of the almost-all-acoustic album may just be a swipe at pretentious folk musicians who think their style is any more “authentic” than the rest.  In fact, with its abundance of autoharps, toy pianos, campfire sing-alongs and studied medieval minstrelsy, Realism is one of the most frivolous and artificial Magnetic Fields records to date.

That’s not necessarily a criticism.  Realism certainly contains a fair share of moving “Songs” that reveal profound and heartbreaking truths about human nature, and in typical Merritt fashion, they do so in ways that remind us to take a step back and think about how fucking silly it all really is anyway.  (At one point, a jilted lover/new parent sings, “Seduced and abandoned, and baby makes two/ I think I might drink a few,” before stoically adding, “…and maybe the baby will too.”)

The album opens with “You Must Be Out Of Your Mind,” arguably its best and most accessible track.  It’s so good that at first, a casual Magnetic Fields fan might think the band’s ripping off one of their past hits.  But “You Must Be Out Of Your Mind” clearly has its own great melodies and its own righteously catty attitude (”I want you crawling back to me/ down on your knees, yeah/ like an appendectomy/ sans anaesthesia”).  In 15 years, when the masses have finally (I hope) embraced Merritt as one of the most brilliant songwriters of his generation, “You Must Be Out Of Your Mind” will surely be one of the songs sung by American Idol contestants on “Stephin Merritt Night.”  (Of course, Idol won’t stay on the air for the next 15 years; it’ll be cancelled after this season and resurrected as soon as nostalgia for the 2000s becomes marketable.)

The songs that follow don’t always pop as potently as the opener, but they all have their charms.  On “Interlude,” “Always Already Gone,” and “Painted Flower,” Merritt enlists the band’s most sincere singer, Shirley Simms, to add warmth and pathos to lyrics of haiku-like brevity (”I’m just a painted flower, a frozen bloom/ left alone in some forgotten room/ a fly in amber, I pose in my tomb”).  When the lyrics get too nasty or depressing, like on “I Don’t Know What To Say,” “Seduced And Abandoned” and “From A Sinking Boat,” Merritt tempers them with his own deadpan bass-baritone.

Some of the most delightful moments of Realism come when Merritt playfully lampoons the tight-assed Caucasians that make up much of his audience.  I always get a kick out of Claudia Gonson’s performance in “The Dolls’ Tea Party,” where she sings as a WASPy woman suffering from arrested development- or perhaps a precocious little girl who will soon grow into such a woman: “At the dolls’ tea par-tee, we twit-ter along/ we prat-tle and tat-tle on who’s done whom wrong.”  It’s not exactly a song I’d ever crave to hear on its own, (and it almost sounds like it might have been an outtake from Merritt’s ingenious score for the off-Broadway musical version of Coraline), but I smile every time it plays.

I feel the same way about the songs where whole gang sings together, as they do in “We Are Having A Hootenanny,” “Everything Is One Big Christmas Tree,” and “The Dada Polka.”  These tracks are the most “Song”-like on the album- note the way that “Hootenanny” tries to sound like the lamest, least rambunctious hoe-down in history, and how the singers deliberately over-enunciate their zzzzzzzees.  As a result, their replay values aren’t quite as high as the other tracks on Realism- but they make listening to the entire album a hell of a lot more “Fun.”

First Listen Exclusive: Decoration Ghost’s Haze of Wine and Age

Jeff Laughlin, February 1, 2010 in Initial Response and Music Reviews. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

The first release from Greensboro, NC’s Decoration Ghost is the melding of rock-and-roll minds.  Coming from several other longtime rock bands from the late nineties and through the last decade, this group unabashedly embraces an aesthetic.  I have no problem with this.  In fact, I’m already a fan.  Having stumbled my way through the learned-haze of college watching the bands previous to this conglomeration, I was ready to have my expectations met. I was not ready, however, for them to be exceeded.

The Haze of Wine and Age is simple, but by no means orthodox or scientific.  Though nothing is too complex or exceptionally lithe on first listen, these songs are emotionally triggered and inspired.  Each song invites the listener despite being ragged and rocking, and I am looking forward to involving myself more and more with the record, to be sure.  Expect a full review by next week.

Available for purchase HERE.

Stream some of the album HERE.

First Listen: Retribution Gospel Choir’s 2

Jeff Laughlin, January 28, 2010 in Initial Response and Music Reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Editor’s note: First Listen is a new feature on the site, allowing you a little more insight on how we regard our criticism.  Hopefully, it will enlighten. Or just make it look like we have a lot going on. All artwork and commentary is subject to change as the albums premiere or the labels/bands tweak the albums.  Feel free to bash the idea via the comments or on twitter (@10listens).

All I know about this band is that Mark Kozelek liked them enough to produce their first record and that Alan Sparhawk (of Low) is good at things.  2 is their Sub Pop debut, thus giving them more production and creating a lusher, fuller sound.  The result is a fascinating blend of Sparhawk’s telling lyrics and RGC kicking ass.

“Hide It Away,” I will go ahead and say, is already one of my favorite songs of the past few months and the album as a whole promises to be a fulfilling series of listens. 2 is a short blast of 10 songs, most of them hard-rockers filled in nicely with loud/noisy filler from a three-piece front.  I actually can’t wait to start devouring the album as a whole rather than trying to form a first opinion.  I suppose that’s a pretty high honor for a band I knew little about, other than some names.  2 came out a couple of days ago, so the full review should follow shortly.

First Listen: Dr. Dog’s Shame, Shame

Jeff Laughlin, January 27, 2010 in Initial Response and Music Reviews. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

Editor’s note: First Listen is a new feature on the site, allowing you a little more insight on how we regard our criticism.  Hopefully, it will enlighten. Or just make it look like we have a lot going on. All artwork and commentary is subject to change as the albums premiere or the labels/bands tweak the albums.  Feel free to bash the idea via the comments or on twitter (@10listens).

Shame, Shame is the sixth album for Philadelphia’s Dr. Dog.  Their lo-fi sound mixed with jammy psychedelia has been, in my opinion, either highly entertaining (the album We all Belong is one of the best albums of the past decade) or fantastically boring (Fate followed We All Belong and was a major disappointment). This is their Anti-Records debut.

I’ve been less than excited to hear the album, to be perfectly honest, since I thought Fate was such a letdown.  It’s been sitting on a pile of CDs, unmolested, for around a month and I finally got around to it after being bored to death with other possible reviews. It’s a sad way to discover what has impressed me so greatly.  Shame, Shame, on the initial listen, is a return to form– a polished version of the lo-fi sound that captivated me three years ago.

Honestly, I’m itching to listen more and have the album’s lyrics and 60s-esque backup vocals wash over me more and more.  The tail end of the album needs especially close attention as the songs lengthen and strengthen.  Dr. Dog has, thus far, not disappointed, and that is a major relief.  Problematically, the album’s release date is targeted for April, so it may be awhile before any of us get to enjoy this together.

Short Cuts: Charlotte Gainsbourg’s IRM

Joe O., January 25, 2010 in Music Reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Given her award-winning and hyper-passionate performance in last year’s Antichrist, I expected a little more feeling from Charlotte Gainsbourg on her latest record, IRM.  Then on second thought, I figured it makes perfect sense for an actress who just starred in a Lars Von Trier film to retreat into a womb-like world of whispered emotions and detached eroticism.

Of course, an album with such subdued vocals and modest pop melodies needs a good producer to keep the audience stimulated, and IRM is fortunate enough to feature some inspired work by the inimitable Beck.  Most of the time, he surrounds Ms. Gainsbourg with gentle acoustic guitars, simple piano chords and throbbing bass drums, creating the sensation of a lover absentmindedly caressing your skin as pent-up lust pulsates through her veins.  Sometimes he has fun inserting his uber-European muse into extremely American genres, like in the White Stripes-lite blues rocker “Trick Pony,” or the horse-walkin’ country of “Dandelion.”  On a few tracks he also seems to get a kick out of suffusing the atmosphere with haunted bordello orchestras, as if to remind us that the lovely lady singing was the very same child conceived by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin during the magical Melody Nelson sessions.

Most of IRM is pleasantly sensual, tailor-made for heavy petting on a quiet Sunday afternoon.  A couple of songs (the nasal “Greenwich Mean Time” and the lyrically clunky title track) are almost annoying enough to belong in iPod commercials, but they’re kind of redeemed by their playfully mechanical productions.  And though the record often drifts awfully close to aloofness, it does contain one must-own instant classic that justifies its existence: the bouncy, brassy “Heaven Can Wait,” where Beck drops in for a duet and helps lay down a tune worthy of The Kinks’ late-’60s golden age.  For those 2 minutes and 41 seconds, purgatory has rarely felt so alluring.