Author Archives: Andrew Gable
The Twilight Sad- No One Can Ever Know (Fat Cat)
The Twilight Sad
No One Can Ever Know
Fat Cat
Links:
The Twilight Sad on Facebook
The Twilight Sad on Myspace
Fat Cat Records home
Melancholy and sweet, borrowing much from the mid-80s British alternative/proto gothic music scene, The Twilight Sad released No One Can Ever Know earlier this year.
Occasionally energetic and aggressive, most of No One Can Ever Know features a wall-of-sound presence recalling their Scottish compatriots Idlewild, yet at other times the it is more like a mopey, shoe gazer version of lo-fi Bauhaus or Joy Division. The most obvious difference, aside from the 30-year time frame, between these bands is the absence of infectious hooks with The Twilight Sad. They’re one clear, repetitive and catchy line per song away from bringing the glory days of black nail polish and exploded hair-sprayed jet-black big hair.
Their third LP, the gloomy No One Can Ever Know is a breath of fresh air in these stale days of reverb non-surf indie rock that currently floods and washes out the music scene. Generally adhering to the modern lo-fi sound with the occasional clipping of vocals or instruments, the album stays consistent without overdoing the sound or lyrical feel.
The third track, “Sick,” is a standout song. As a perfect example of the influence from the 80s alternateen music scene, “Sick” uses muted, rapid-fire electronic drums and lightly distorted guitars to carry singer James Graham’s heavy Scottish accent. Toward the close of the song, strong, building synthesizers add a strong crescendo to off set Graham’s dying words “Until the party ends, until the part when we retire.”
“Don’t Look At Me” is the strongest song on the record. Heavy bass lines lay over an accordion (sounding much like a synthesizer in its relentlessness) and odd-timed drums carry the song through four minutes of near-constant aural massage. Lacking an obvious chorus to repeat, opting instead to repeat a changing set of lyrics over a more defined musical chorus, “Don’t Look at Me” never allows the listener to get to an easy ending point. This matches the lyrical content as well. Leaving out the beginning of the story by starting with “And I still watch you/ It’s not the right thing to do,” Graham moves to repeat “I hated watching you grow old” near the middle, and circles back to asserting “and I still watch you,” the song never fully starts or resolves—forcing the listener to hit the repeat button.
Nedry – In a Dim Light (Monotreme Records)
Nedry
In a Dim Light
Monotreme Records
Links:
Two years after Nedry released (and later re-released) Condors, they are back with a powerful and passionate LP In a Dim Light, a new 10-track album to keep your ears nice and cozy.
When one thinks of the trip hop genre, the names Portishead, Morcheeba and Massive Attack usually come to mind. Too slow to dance to, too fast to just sit still, trip hop blends warm, room-filling bass with smooth electronic hip hop beats, usually smoothed over with a post-lounge singer. Like sexy piano bar music for the 2000s.
Fitting nicely into this group, enter Nedry with In a Dim Light. Forming in London in 2008, releasing an EP and an LP, the trio return. True to trip-hop form, the music is slow (for dance music), grooving, sexy and low-key without losing the listener’s attention. Overall, In a Dim Light is the perfect soundtrack to a lowly lit martini bar or a steamy make-out session. Trip-hop should be mandatory make-out music.
The production is high enough quality that members Chris Amblin and Matt Parker could very well have had their music stripped out of a motion picture—like a lovemaking scene in Tron. Vocalist Ayu Okakita’s hymns are not simply overlaid as in low-quality electronic music, but weave in and out like fog through an open door at a country cabin. Okakita’s breathy Japanese vocal accent comes across like Björk (without the childish squeaking) mixed with Beth Gibbons of Portishead (without the forced sultriness)
“Violacea” (scientific name for a number of violets and morning glories—you’re welcome) is a standout in the mix. Okahita’s repeated taunt “let the dark come” ebbs and flows on semi regular cycle over the sound of rainfall with a down tempo beat. Heavy on bass, as trip hop should be, and featuring a repeated de-crescendo of synth keys is both intriguing and mesmerizing. This would be the music for “Second Base” in the make-out session.
“TMA” is unique in the mix if for nothing else than its sheer intensity: more electronic dance rock than trip hop. It wouldn’t be such a standout out track if it wasn’t on In a Dim Light, but it would still be great. The low-tuned bass drum beneath simple repetitive lyrics “what I want is what I know/what I know is what I don’t,” with layered and distorted guitars come off like a Garbage song from their glory days without Butch Vig’s overproduction. Okakita’s frustrated and winding vocals build and drop in presence, clipping the production levels at their peak, recalling the intensity of Leslie Rankine from her days in Pigface. “TMA” would be the make-out artists going for home.
Dirty Ghosts- Metal Moon (Last Gang Records)
Dirty Ghosts
Metal Moon
Last Gang Entertainment
Links:
- Dirty Ghosts Official Site
- Dirty Ghosts on Myspace
- Dirty Ghosts on Facebook
- Last Gang Records Official Site
Dirty Ghosts drift their way from San Francisco with Metal Moon, a ten-track LP dropped from Last Gang Entertainment. Experience in the music world (Parchman Farm and Teen Crud Combo) has trained primary member Allyson Baker’s Dirty Ghosts to emerge after a five-year period of planning and plotting.
Metal Moon is a fun and infectious pop-rock-disco-electro hybrid album produced by Aesop Rock. With plenty of hooks, plenty of upbeat dance-rock beats and riffs and plenty of repeated vocals; this is an interesting, yet slightly disconnected album. Most songs have a great presence all their own, but most never seem to burst; instead the songs mostly feature continuous crescendos that never quite get to ecstasy.
The opening track, “Ropes That Way,” is a perfect example. The nice and tight 4/4 beat (à la Song #2 from Blur) with alt-blues bass line bouncing about starts the song out energetically, and the break downs leave nice breathy spaces for throwing down some funky dancing. The lyrics “And on a better day/Gonna finally say/That I’ll never gonna leave you with / The ropes that way” are repeated over again, building up to a catchy bridge, but in the end, the climax never gets there.
Borrowing the bass from late ’70s pop funk and the drums from disco, “No Video” uses alarm samples and dirty single-note blues guitar to deliver the most structured cut. “No Video” has one of the l The fuzzy vocals and echoes blend very well with fuzzy strings so well as to evoke a hot and sweaty roller disco.
The production on Metal Moon is clear and bright, sounding very much like an updated version of 90s darlings Luscious Jackson, mixing in a touch of the White Stripes. Putting “Ropes That Way” on the front of the LP shows good production and planning.
The songs individually sound pretty similar but not to the point of a fully coherent album. The tempos are similar, as are the very warm and stand-out bouncing post-hip hop bass grooves, and Baker’s vocals are clean with plenty of multi-tracked vocals and occasional overuse use of echo effects.
Allyson’s smoky and passionate voice sounds well-suited for dance-pop and takes to digital manipulation so well; I’d be surprised if she isn’t hounded by DJs and electronic music producers asking to sample her voice for music samples.
RIYL: Luscious Jackson, pop-funk, any female-fronted Grand Royale Records release from the 1990s.
Sharon Van Etten – Tramp (Jagjaguwar)
MP3: “Serpents”
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (0.0KB)
Sharon Van Etten
Tramp
Jagjaguwar
Links:
All songwriting and performing is personal. Everything a musician releases has a little piece of their heart and soul in it. Even if it’s only because he or she had to rehearse and rewrite the song a million times before your wanting ears hear it, each song has been constructed from tiny yet important fragments of the artist’s heart and soul.
Such is the case with Tramp, the new album released by Sharon Van Etten. With the assistance of a host of helpers, Matt Barrick of The Walkmen, Thomas Bartlett of Doveman, Jack Condon of Beirut and Jenn Wasner of Wye Oak, Tramp has the worn-in presence of a raggedy scrapbook — as heartfelt as any old blues music. The album is somewhat standard adult-contemporary work meets bluesy alternative rock, yet it reveals enough emotion to rival a high school drama troupe.
Like the air in an old man’s bar, most of the production is hazy, sticky and drab. Some songs clip the production; the rumbling distortion successfully emphasizes the desperation in Van Etten’s voice. The sonic power of the album ebbs and flows, whereas the writing stays strong. Biting criticisms and lamentations dance with swirling siren’s calls to balance out the work.
While her sensibility is apparent in every cut, not all the tracks seem to belong on the same album. The intensity of Ms. Van Etten’s lamenting on more aggressive tracks like “Serpents” and, to a lesser degree, “All I Can” contrasts with more subdued songs like “Joke or a Lie” or “I’m Wrong.”
The production and her vocals mostly unite Tramp; most of the tracks are more low-key, dirge-like tracks that I imagine could be played during a dinner party or get-together. In this way the more upbeat songs (tempo and presence-wise) stand out as successful singles that are vaguely related to the other tracks. There is of course no requirement that every song on an album share the exact same production and feeling,
Sharon’s vocal skills remind me a bit of ’90s-era Margo Timmins of Cowboy Junkies; her confident and bluesy tone summons the image of a performer who spent ten too many nights at a bar smoking and drinking and hearing endless pick-up lines from would-be suitors without a single chance in hell.
Sharon Van Etten recently performed “Serpents” on the Late Night with Jimmy Fallon show to promote Tramp. The piece swells to full power in less than a minute and stays strong with its rambling vocals and mock-cadence drumming. Basic two to three-chord structure is repeated over and again in a dream-rock ambient jam causing the listener’s attention to stay on the lyrics: “You enjoy sucking on dreams/ so I will fall asleep/ with someone other than you/I had a thought, you would take me/ seriously and listen up.”
“Serpents” was the best choice for a single. It’s a great song, the best on the record by far when considering the poetry and cutting lyrics. The problem with this is that “Serpents” does not represent the rest of Tramp for the same reasons. After some research, the live video performances show that a number of other songs get a kick in the ass when done on stage. The caffeinated versions are better than those from the studio, which are an incentive to see Ms. Van Etten live. But one would have to do their homework to know this ahead of time.
“All I Can” is more indicative of the rest of the songs on Tramp. “All I Can” relies more on Van Etten’s vocal prowess and backup harmonies, where “Serpents” relies on building guitars and drums. The track swells, albeit at a slower pace, to a grand finale with horns, harmonies, drums and guitars. Van Etten’s voice slides between notes in her words without twang or yodeling (thank god), deliver her wanting to show/ I want my scars to help, and heal/ how much you wanted/ so much you found”
“Ask” is another powerful track to check out. Van Etten’s voice shows its depth and range from solo smoky lows to bright, soaring harmonies. The struggle to ask for help from a dark place is laid out in beautiful melancholy for the near three-minute struggle. Acknowledging we all get down and stuck sometimes, Van Etten admits though it’s easy to feel tough and self-sufficient, it’s sometimes simply not enough.
A set of songs from a show in Philadelphia in early February has been turned into videos that can be found on YouTube. Check them out. Do it.
The Minor Leagues – North College Hill (Datawaslost Records)
The Minor Leagues
North College Hill
Datawaslost Records
Link: http://minorleaguesmusic.com/
First, a caveat I’m from the decaying musical black hole of Cincinnati, the same city that The Minor Leagues hail from. Granted, I haven’t been to a show in a bit due to work, school, internship, etc. Too many bands from the Queen City are just terrible and waaay too many are college kids playing ’90s alternateen music covers to drunken college kids. Don’t get me wrong, there are fantastic and often overlooked gems that exist now and that have sadly faded away (including every totally awesome gnarly cool band I’ve ever played in). But we aren’t known as a mecca for great original music. This is part of why The Minor Leagues struck me like a sucker punch at an art gallery. There is little precedence for Cincinnati to have produced such a unique and fantastic sound, much less on an album.
North College Hill, named after a small city to the north of Cincinnati, is one of the few gems. 24 hours worth of perfect pop harmonies packed into 36-odd minutes sit nicely on top of mid-tempo indie pop guitars, drums, trumpets and bass. No overproduced sounds, no distorted guitars to cover a lack of training, no fast-paced drums to hide awkward silences, no vocal effects to make the singers sound like pre-teen robots. In short, it contains none of the apparent requirements of making a modern pop pièce de résistance. That’s French for “if there was a just god in the world, this album should be making the band a lot of money.”
The album features 10 tracks of roughly even length. Some are better than others, but there isn’t a bad song to be heard. Overall, the vocal harmonies stand out as the strongest aspect. It is crystal-clear that a lot of time went into the vocal melodies and harmonies; the mix of notes, textures and timing is near perfect. The music is well crafted; but the music seems to serve the role of a vehicle to carry the lyrics and vocals. Most of the album could be as strong if the music was completely removed. Some of the recurring themes include the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, and melancholic observations of a crumbling neighborhood. Not the most positive topics but the bittersweet topics mesh well with the choral work present in most tracks.
There is a hypothetical point in the future that members of any band acknowledge when “every note and progression will have already been played.” To some extent this is a rationalization to allow a guitar pattern or drum fill or vocal melodies to sound a bit like (or even blatantly rip-off) other songs that have come before. There is some truth to this notion as well, and ultimately serves to free the band up to make music that sounds great to them.
So it doesn’t detract from the quality of the album to say that there are many portions of the tracks on North College Hill that make me think of other bands and songs I’ve heard before. The male vocals on “Please Don’t Take me Love Away” sound like they could have been found on a b-side of a single from the True album from Spandau Ballet, and likewise for “Weekends are the Worst.” The vocal texture and range neatly match the tone of the New Romantic flavor of the New Wave school from 30 years ago. The vocals from “Weekends” even borrows some of the twang of ’80s-era Elvis Costello. For those readers under 20, “New Wave” was what we old people called “alternative” electronic music.
“Home” is a swelling of a song, with repetitive lyrics and a crescendo of music churning around about for three minutes. Starting with simply vocals repeating, “you can’t go home, there is no home, you have no home” over and again, the band comes in slowly with acoustic guitars and drums and even xylophones for accents.
The least shiny song would be “1985 Forever.” The pieces of the song individually are fine, with minor-key arpeggios and bouncy bass lines streaming over-confident drums. The end product seems to be forced, like the band had a number of good pieces that were stitched together a bit haphazardly.
On the other side, “Secret Codes” is instant gold. Just press play and voila. The only problem with the song is that it is so short. The near-four minutes of the track cold go on for many times longer and still be as shiny and pretty as it is. The chorus “we live in secret codes” is perfectly balanced in parts, with three or more singers matching so well that it wouldn’t surprise me to know the band all had classical training. Towards the end of the song the band breaks into partial rounds to drag out the lyrics; also present are a number of backup vocals repeating the same words in accent form.
Easily the album of the year so far. Though it’s only February, the other submissions to ZapTown better bring their game faces to compete with North College Hill.
