Author Archives: Bill Purdy
White Rabbits – It’s Frightening (Music Review)
White Rabbits
It’s Frightening
TBD
Rating 2.5 out of 5
From the first few seconds of the opening track (“Percussion Gun”) of White Rabbits’ It’s Frightening, you know exactly what you’re in for: a good old fashioned rock and roll record. One that happens to sound a lot like Spoon record.
That’s no coincidence. Spoon’s Britt Daniel twisted the knobs and gave It’s Frightening the same distinctively effortless swagger and precise sheen that characterizes his own band’s sound.
It’s Frightening is, essentially, a “formula” record. It follows a blueprint developed in the 1970s, when artists like Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, and Bob Seger ruled the airwaves and the charts with a gritty working-class sound that incorporated a singer (or two), a drummer, a guitarist (or two) a bass player, and a piano (maybe) on exuberant, catchy sing-along tunes. Somewhere along the way the formula was further refined while, at the same time, artists that followed it were marginalized to independent labels. Bands like Spoon, The Hold Steady, and The Black Lips have traded sales for critical praise — and the devotion of a small but fervid fan base, built slowly and deliberately by a nurturing independent record label.
Unfortunately, the “formula” doesn’t seem to be the proper aesthetic choice for White Rabbits, a band whose 2007 full-length debut, Fort Nightly, was much more stylistically scattershot – and much more interesting. While the songs on It’s Frightening are good (particularly the three songs that open the album), they don’t stick around for long once the record’s stopped playing.
Imagine the material performed live, however, and it’s the kind of stuff you’d expect to hear performed at a local dive bar late on a Friday night, the air fragrant with draft beer and cigarettes, ceiling fans ineffectively cooling the gathered masses. Good, old-fashioned rock and roll.
If White Rabbits can capture that sound — instead of Spoon’s — their next album should be one hell of a record.
Links:
White Rabbits: http://whiterabbitsmusic.com/
Music Essay on Fort Nightly: http://www.zaptownmag.com/2008/12/white-rabbits-fort-nightly
Alligators – Piggy and Cups (Music Review)
Alligators
Piggy and Cups
Applehouse
Rating: 3 out of 5
It takes some balls to step up to the plate and take a big swing. Everyone’s watching you, and you’re more likely to fail than you are to hit it over the fence. Yet, there’s a steady line of folks willing to have a go at it. And even if you nail it, the glory’s fleeting. You’re nearly forgotten by the time you round third and head home. You can even see the next guy warming up in the batters box.
A labored baseball metaphor for indie rock… Yeah, I went there. If it was winter, you’d be dealing with hockey metaphors. Believe me, this is better.
Alligators is the latest Seattle band to take their turn at the plate, offering up their debut, Piggy and Cups. They swing hard, they even manage to make good contact, but do they hit it out of the park?
It took a while for me to figure out where Alligators were going with this one. The first two tracks evoke enjoyable (if not overwhelming) early-aughts indie pop rock, in the vein of Nada Surf or, maybe, The Sleepy Jackson. They are pleasant, slickly produced, well written songs destined to be enjoyed while being played, but not to linger too long on the palate.
The third track, “Original Fear,” amps up the prog a bit, intersplicing pleasant-but-punchless vocal harmonies with a screaming chorus that would sound right at home on a Mars Volta record.
About four and a half minutes into the fourth track, “If You Want To,” Alligators shifts its focus a bit. At that point, the song reaches a multi-instrumental crescendo (think The Beatles’ “A Day In The Life,” from which it draws an obvious inspiration) and has pretty much faded out. All of a sudden, from somewhere in the back of the studio, the band launches into a soulful 30-second a cappella chant: “That’ll be the best!” – with handclaps. (Personal bias revealed: I love handclaps. I believe handclaps, along with “woo!”s and “doot doot”s, are the single highest-value elemental contributors to any pop song I wind up liking.)
By the time “Conqueror” rolls around, the stage is set. “Conqueror” is the album’s best cut, and every song up to this point has been rather masterfully sequenced to prepare the listener for its impact – which, like Midlake’s “Roscoe,” stands out from the rest of the record with a sort of timelessness: shades of Neil Young, perhaps; some hints of Fleetwood Mac around the periphery.
“Conqueror” is a pretty great song on a pretty good debut record. Alligators may not have hit it out of the park with Piggy and Cups. But like a rookie up for a late-season tryout with the big league team, they had the hit that drives in the game winning run in an otherwise meaningless game. It may not mean much now, but it definitely qualifies Alligators as a band to keep an eye on.
Portland Cello Project – The Thao & Justin Power Sessions (Music Review)
Portland Cello Project
The Thao & Justin Power Sessions
Kill Rock Stars
Rating: 3 out of 5
The album kicks off with a spare and mournful adaptation of modern classical composer John Tavener’s “The Lamb,” a piece that would be well suited scoring a bleak art film about a lonely man driving across a vast, lifeless desert. It’s an unconventional way for a bunch of hipster cellists to introduce the listener to a collection of pop songs, but at the same time it drives home the point: the Portland Cello Project are classical musicians. Serious classical musicians.
But, wait! They’re playful pop musicians, too! As soon as they’ve lured you into a palpable sense of melancholy with “The Lamb,” they snap you out of it with the best pure pop song of the collection: Thao Nguyen’s “Beat (Health, Life, and Fire).” This one hits like an ice cold beer on a hot summer day; a refreshingly upbeat song that has Thao slinging her syllables with the kind of gusto we became accustomed to on last year’s excellent We Brave Bee Stings and All. The PCP (plus a percussionist or two) proves itself perfectly comfortable alongside Thao’s distinctively yelpy intonations.
Local Portland troubadour Justin Power rounds out the opening triptych with the somber “Cut the Rope,” a slightly menacing, nautically inspired piece that demonstrates explicitly how quirky the PCP want you to think they are. It’s a beautiful song, delivered with an enormous amount of heart, but it feels out of place here — especially after the refreshing uplift of the Thao song.
And it’s at this point, after the first three songs, that we begin to realize the album’s biggest problem: The Thao and Justin Power Sessions feels, in total, like a randomly-sequenced mix of material from three distinct four-song EPs:
- On the first of these EPs, a bunch of cool cats with cellos flash their chops with “novel” adaptations of modern classical (“The Lamb”), tango (Carlos Gardel’s “Por Una Cabeza”), indie (Norfolk and Western’s “Turkish Wine,” the only instrumental cut that fits comfortably alongside the vocal tracks), and heavy metal (Pantera’s “Mouth for War,” which is every bit as toothless and dreadful as it sounds on paper). Two and a half stars.
- On another EP, earnest newcomer Justin Power delivers his own heartfelt brand of emo-folk alongside a competent string ensemble. The album closer, “Travel,” is, arguably, the best of this bunch — a lovely road song stylistically reminiscent of orchestrated Iron & Wine. Three stars.
- And on the third EP, rising Kill Rock Stars artist Thao showcases her distinctive voice with the support of some soulful and adept classical musicians (some of whom sound like they’re playing guitars and banjos and drums instead of cellos, but I suppose that’s the point). Four stars.
Had Kill Rock Stars marketed this as separate EPs, I would have recommended the Thao EP to just about anyone who likes distinctive female singer-songwriters. I would have recommended the Justin Power EP, with some reservations, for those who have an eye for developing indie talent. And I might have suggested the PCP EP as a gift for your teenage niece who plays cello. And, since the album is available digitally from several on-line retailers on a song-by-song basis, perhaps these are real options.
Otherwise, for those who have a fetish for hard media or who (like me) have to own the whole album: Three stars.
Wye Oak – The Knot (Music Review)
Wye Oak
The Knot
Merge
Rating: 4 out of 5
Wye Oak’s 2007 debut, If Children, sounded very much like a self-released debut album from a promising young band without a record deal. It opened with “Please Concrete,” a bit of a jaw dropper that combined the loud-soft-loud post rock of Mogwai with the brooding folkiness of slowcore pioneers Low, then trailed off into a pleasant but ultimately underwhelming collection of songs.
Their follow-up, The Knot, delivers on If Children’s promise in spades. It is still, recognizably, a Wye Oak record. The distinctive musical elements – Jenn Wasner’s plaintive voice floating amid an occasional cacophany of guitar and drums – are all there.
This time around, though, the band has matured significantly. Wasner’s voice has evolved from early Cat Power to early Christine McVie (not a bad thing), and Andy Stack’s voice is only heard in harmony (an excellent decision — he’s a much more effective multi-instrumentalist than he is a singer). They’ve also added subtle string arrangements, slide guitar, and some banjo to the mix as well, eliciting the sort of gothic melancholy that you might hear on, say, a 16 Horsepower album.
The opening track, “Milk and Honey,” sets a deeply restrained tone, as Wasner and Stack harmonize alongside a plodding drumbeat while guitars soar in the background but never quite come to roost. When they finally do touch down, about a minute into “The Prayer,” it feels oddly cathartic. “Tattoo,” the soaring musical centerpiece of The Knot, begins with a redemptive, uplifiting, gospel chorus before settling into the hopeful “I Want For Nothing.” The whole record is really nothing more than a reinforcement of this theme of restraint and catharsis. Some listeners might find it repetitive and samey-sounding, but these ears find it compelling at a very personal level that is difficult to articulate.
Despite its many redeemable qualities, The Knot may have a tough time finding the audience it deserves. It’s just not the sort of record you want to share with your friends. It is, however, the perfect soundtrack for a long, solo, nighttime drive across town, or an hour sitting under a tree (a large oak tree, perhaps?) by a lake on a humid summer day.
Pocket – “Sampo” (Music Review)
Pocket
“Sampo” (second in a series of download singles, with remixes and b-side)
Fraga
Rating: 2 out of 5
…wherein Asobi Seksu vocalist, Yuki Chikudate, gets the retro-electro-disco treatment, courtesy of Burnside Project frontman and remixer extraordinaire, Pocket. The ingredients are promising: Chikudate has one of the most distinctively lovely voices in shoegaze, and Pocket (producer Richard Jankovich) has developed a reputation as an innovative remixer of artists such as Beck, Radiohead, and Of Montreal. The execution here lacks punch, however. “Sampo” sounds less like the classic Italo-disco it’s paying homage to than the sleepy single-of-the-month that it is. While pleasant enough to listen to (thanks largely to Chikudate’s beautiful voice), it’s just not a strong tune. It sounds like something Jankovich wrote for a college music composition class and dusted off for this project.
The Mux Mool remix of “Sampo” can’t compensate for the original’s basic weaknesses. Layering the vocals over a thumping IDM backbeat, then adding a light New Order keyboard flourish, it flops around directionlessly for four and half minutes before slowly fading out. The Blue Eyes remix of “Sampo” introduces a deep, wormy bass and an angular guitar riff that gives the track a welcome sinister edge (and that could be sampled from a !!! record), but the echo-laden vocal track never really connects as well as it should. The Craig Wedren remix is the most experimental of the bunch. It (wisely) focuses almost entirely on Chikudate’s vocals, looping and layering them atop a cloudlike (and barely noticeable) synthesizer foundation. It’s the least catchy version of “Sampo” in this collection, but by stripping it down to its most basic components, it manages to distract the listener from the original song’s compositional flaws.
A better bet: the “b-side” to “Sampo,” “Swept,” featuring vocals by Lorraine Lellis of Mahogany. “Swept” settles quickly and confidently into an uptempo groove that sounds a bit like St. Etienne as remixed by New Order. It’s seeped in the same retro synth-pop nostalgia currently being mined by acts like Cut Copy and Junior Boys, and it manages to satisfy in the same guilty-pleasure sort of way. Noticeably, “Swept” is a much better pop song than “Sampo.” One can’t help but wonder how this project would’ve turned out had Chikudate recorded it instead.
