Author Archive for Justin M.

Ted Leo and The Pharmacists: Brutalist Bricks

Justin M., March 9, 2010 in Music Reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , .

After a forgettable first album to review on 10Listens, I was anxiously looking for something to cleanse my musical pallet.  Something consistent and enjoyable enough to make me forget the back-and-forth that dominated my last reviewing experience.  Ted Leo and The Pharmacist’s latest effort, their sixth full length album as a group, was exactly what the doctor ordered.

Some might say that Ted Leo’s sticking with the same general technique throughout his career represents an inability to evolve as a musical artist. He can very easily be written off as “always sounding the same” and “unmemorable.” These antagonistic people have nothing but my unmitigated scorn. In truth, this new album, Brutalist Bricks, is an accomplishment because of the fact that it’s Ted Leo playing a game he knows how to play very well. Brutalist Bricks is self-contained, and it certainly  doesn’t overreach to try to be something that it actually isn’t.  Unoriginal? Maybe. But it’s entertaining and fun. Even if  the vast majority of the album does sound like other Ted Leo efforts, why would this be a bad thing?

If pressed to respond using only two words, I would go with “playful” and “energetic” to describe the album. I really can’t think of two better terms. I cannot help but feel that the now-pushing-forty Ted Leo had an immense amount of fun putting this together. From the very first track, entitled “The Mighty Sparrow,” Ted Leo’s guitar is leaping out of the speakers with an immeasurable energy and pace, backed by steady drumming replete with more than enough cymbal play to maintain the overall mantra of the track. This song sets the tempo for the whole album, which rarely deviates from the fast-paced scheme.  If anything, most of the album seems to be an exploration by the group to see how fast they can go before they’re forced to stop to take a breath, a stylistic decision that makes the more mellow, thoughtful guitar play by Leo shine through in moments where the tempo is lessened and the vocals are given pause.

Brutalist Bricks really hits its stride in tracks three through seven. The first of these, “Ativan Eyes,” might be my favorite on the whole album.  The song is quite chorus-driven, accentuated by echoing from backing vocals that highlight perhaps the best guitar sound on the record. I use the term “playful” above, and this song is the epitome of it on this album from a guitar perspective, as Ted Leo ventures from the bold  sound that made “Me and Mia” so awesome, to an almost whisper-like string picking with no vocals to end the track, all while Leo asserts that he “wants your eyes here” because he is “so sick of cynics” and “wants something to trust in.”  I easily exceeded the requisite ten listens on this particular track, and I can see myself coming back to it in the future.

Another instance of the “playful” quality of this album can be seen at the 2:40 mark of the second track, “Mourning In America.” Here Leo employs what I can best describe as “the airhorn sound effect from that Drake song.” It’s out of place in a Ted Leo song,  assuredly, but so out of place that it works perfectly to achieve a unique sound and level of humor not often seen.  Well done indeed.  The song “Tuberculoids Arrive In Hop” is the only song that can be seen as a radical departure from the others.  Driven by hauntingly simple acoustic guitar, only a few notes dominate the majority of the song. Ted Leo shows no lack of ingenuity here as he pairs moments where he sings like Phil Collins with the occasional helium-high falsetto.  At least, for a brief song before we explode back into the typical sound of the album with “Gimme the Wire.”

This album is a far cry from “best album ever,” but it is fun and extremely enjoyable as a result. With Brutal Bricks you have forty-one, awesome, energetic minutes that will be over before you even know it.

Past Lives: Tapestry Of Webs

Justin M., February 24, 2010 in Music Reviews. 3 Comments Tags: , .

Past Lives was formed  from the fragments of The Blood Brothers and a few other bands in 2007. Tapestry Of Webs marks their second major output and their first full-length follow up their debut EP from 2008, Strange Symmetry.  If nothing else, this album serves as a testament to the validity of the 10Listens mission statement, because it was only after many, many listens that I was able to form a coherent, stable opinion of Past Lives’ offering. Unfortunately for the album the more time I spent, the more my opinion started to veer towards the negative as little imperfections became glaring inadequacies.

I’ll start by talking what this album does right. If you like songs that run in a deeper pitch, driven by bass and percussion rather than blaring electric guitar, this album can offer you some fitting tracks to suit your needs.  What makes the emphasis on bass and low chords so effective is the immediate contrast it creates with the higher-pitched vocals of lead singer Jordan Blilie. In particular, the opening track, “Paralyzer” is a great start to the album.  It is dominated by a few simple, omnipresent bass chords supplemented with drumsticks clicking together and slight support from the lead guitar. Add Blilie’s falsetto-esque pitch into the mix and it creates a perfectly moody air that mirrors the tune’s subject matter, which plays on the themes of arousal and impotence.  Furthermore, the true strength of this simplistic bass line is the way in which it magnifies the two hearty tempo changes in the song, the first around the 2:00 minute mark and the latter at 3:05; the contrast is entertaining, and as the song drifts to the latter of these two shifts in tempo, accompanied by the sonorous echoes of backing vocals and cymbals, one cannot help but think, “Yes! This is an album headed in the right direction!”

And you’d be wrong, quite wrong. No sooner has the first song ended than you are greeted with the cockpunch that is this album’s second track, “Falling Spikes”. Oh, how I loathe this song. The subtle, evocative qualities of the first song, and the stellar buildup it engenders is replaced by brash, nearly incoherent screaming. Literally, the song starts off with Blilie forcibly yelling the title of the song into your earhole. It so harshly clashes with the song before as to be completely aggravating and off-putting. This 2:40 minute track could never be over soon enough in my opinion, though I’m sure there are some people who enjoy Past Lives’ aggressive style.

The relationship between these first two tracks is a perfect microcosmic representation of the faults of this album as a whole: it is horribly put together. This trope of slow/quiet, bass-driven songs being followed by faster/louder counterparts happens again and again. Halfway through we encounter “Deep In The Valley,” a stripped-down, instrument-driven, melancholic ballad that is almost girlish in its delicacy (to say nothing of the fact it sounds like there’s actual female backing vocals). This song dabbles in sublime synthesizer-based effects and reverberations that perpetuate the quality of  a dream. Of course, what follows it is the song “K Hole,” a track that introduces itself with a sound effect that literally sounds like the loud honking of a decrepit horn from an early 1900s automobile.

To be fair to this album, “K Hole” does mark the beginning of a  string of four tracks that are all consistent in their general sound. They are full of  guitar energy and aggressive cymbal play the highlight of which is “Hospital White,” perhaps the only fast-paced song I enjoyed on every listen, probably because it was the last of this group of four and I was actually finally used to this tempo after all of the aforementioned flip-flopping. And then, of course, the album veers back to rip off three straight tracks of just the opposite types. We’re back into the realm of instrumental playfulness and subtle vocals. The concluding track “There Is A Light So Bright It Blinds” forms a nice counterpart to the initial song on the album, as they are both cut from the same cloth. So if nothing else, I can safely say that this album did bookend itself nicely, though I have to ask: whither consistency for everything else in between?