Friday, July 16, 2010

Holy Sons - Criminal's Return


“Criminal’s Return,” the latest offering from Holy Sons, is like thickly printed Braille for the ears. There is a tactile connotation to it that suggests roughly used and stained surfaces, and yet there is a certain placidity to it, too - something scarred and whole about the songs. The music is lush and dense at times, and sedately sparse and haunting at others. All without losing a sense of continuity. Even in the low points, there is always a wash of sound just at the edges of our ears’ reach.

Emil Amos uses ambient tones, solid guitar work and soberingly philosophic lyrics to drive the album from start to finish. The sound of waves gently tumbling onto a beach leads into the first song, “From Now On”, and Amos’ melancholic voice soon follows, singing like someone on the low side of a night of drinking when the hours of debauched gaiety are more than half over and every minute is another step closer to a morning that would be better put off. “Every night is a wasted chance to change and every dawn, from now on.”

The meat of “Criminal’s Return” is fuller than any of Amos’ previous releases as Holy Sons, save “Drifter’s Sympathy”, and is heavily influenced by his work as the drummer for Grails. There are large spaces filled only with instrumentation and samples where Amos lets the music breath. We are submerged in sound and drawn up lightly by his voice. Neither overwhelms the other and the two compliment each other symbiotically, each caressing and supporting the other. Meanwhile, the samples, prudently and purposefully chosen, enhance the sense of haunting sadness and slight heartache that runs throughout the album.

Timothy Horner, the ex-violinist from the Grails who has since disappeared form the music scene, aids Amos on a few tracks recorded in 2005 and stashed away to wait for a fitting project. “Criminal’s Return” appears to be it. It is hauntingly dystopian and conceptual, and marks an advance in the ever-growing body of work produced by one of the most prolific artists of today. Amos has succeeded in crafting an album that sounds at once layered and sparse, and yet retains a measure of continuity. It is the kind of album that takes a couple of listens to get into but quickly becomes a favorite for rainy days or long walks.

Black Prairie - Feast of the Hunters' Moon


There’s a dirt back-road somewhere in Black Prairie. Dust in the air and grit on the light breeze that tousles the tall, sun-bleached grass and whispers through the leaves of the occasional gnarled oak or sycamore. They seem to be passing through it on their way from one place to the next and momentarily passing the melancholic landscape. It’s not that they sound like they should be touring with some country band but that at their best their music belongs to those parts of the country where farmhouses with peeling white paint stand and open spaces are left naturally unkempt. When they’re hitting it, they’d be perfect for a Saturday night in summer sixty years ago, playing on some rural stage while people who drove in from the surrounding farms danced and drank moonshine.

On “Feast of the Hunters’ Moon”, Black Prairie produces a handful of the enchanting moments that transport you to that long-passed yesterday - especially when Annalisa Tornfelt rests her violin and sings. Tornfelt’s voice is something shot through with smoky sad whispers, and deserves to be heard a lot more frequently on the album. As it is, she sings on only four songs and that’s a downright shame because without her cool cooing, the band meanders into tired jamgrass material or overdone Americana, becoming mediocre and routine. Nothing you couldn’t find by simply looking up Dobro samples on Google.

The five-piece band, consisting of Chrisk Funk, Nate Query and Jenny Conlee of the Decemberists and Jon Neufeld and AnnalisaTornfelt of other lesser-known bands, are all prodigious Portland-based musicians and could burn down a barn any day of the week given the opportunity. They just didn’t bring enough matches to the studio before recording “Feast of the Hunters’ Moon”.

Wolf Parade - Expo 86


Suppose there was a machine that could project out an image of what was happening in a person’s brain. Could take the waves, electrical pulses and vibrations, and assemble them into some sort of moving picture. Let’s call it a neuropictometer. Now, pretend someone took that contraption and aimed it at Spencer Krug’s and Dan Boeckner’s heads. Eccentrically beautiful and wildly bizarre illustrations would plaster the walls like someone made a smoothie without putting the lid on the blender. You’d have portraits filled with cacophonies of abstruse colors splashed erratically across crooked canvases, scenes populated by people in the midst of their own personal maraudings, wilds overgrown with caterwauling imaginations. And that’s only the minds of Wolf Parade’s two lead vocalists. You could create a sci-fi movie series longer than all six Star Wars episodes and better than both runs of the miniseries V if you beamed brainwaves out of the craniums of all four band members.

On Expo 86, Wolf Parade’s upcoming release, everyone contributes their own personal mania. Everyone gets their moment to exercise their fevers. Sure Krug’s and Boeckner’s awkwardly bleating vocals are iconic of the band, but so too is the play of Arlen Thompson and Dante DeCaro. Starting from the very first song, “Cloud Shadow On the Mountain,” Thompson’s driving drumming forms a steady force, and he spends a great deal of time hammering the shit out of the skins and beating the brass off his cymbals, creating emphasis and rhythm. Meanwhile, DeCaro rakes and ravages solos on the guitar. Boeckner also plays guitar but it’s DeCaro who handles the big moments. His lick to open “What Did My Lover Say (It Always Had to Go This Way)” blows the fucking doors open for the rest of the song and pounds over top of Krug’s ringing and vibrating keyboard play. It’s one of the most ecstatic moments on the entire album. DeCaro simply kills it and everyone else takes his lead. Krug gets his moment on “In the Direction of the Moon,” and beguiles the black and whites, stretching and contorting their sounds. Everyone leads at one point or another and the album is largely successful because of that united approach.

Everything on Expo 86 was recorded live to tape except the vocals and you can tell by the thickness of the sound. It’s almost overwhelmingly massive, a wave rising and crashing back down with the power and energy of the biggest Pacific coast barrel. It sounds like you’re hearing it live, which you can do in Portland on July 27th. The band poured more of their raw muscle and force into the recording resulting in an album heavy with potency and life. They’ve managed to spill their goddamned brains out into the music. Though we may be years away from creating the most basic neuropictometer, we don’t need one to see the reels rolling in the brains of Wolf Parade. We’ve got Expo 86.

2 songs from Wolf Parade's EXPO 86 by subpop

Horse Feathers - Thistled Spring


Coldplay and Horse Feathers sound nothing alike. But, if Chris Martin and the rest of the boys grew up in the American west, in a more rural land. If they wrote songs dug up from that pastoral earth so marked by the changing seasons. If they subtracted the electric guitars and replaced them with acoustic guitar and banjo. If instead of a drummer, there was a string section. If rather than playing grandiosely cliché music, they focused on drawing from waveringly delicate emotions. If, if if. It’s a lot of ifs to be sure, but if they were all true, you’d have Horse Feathers. You’d have something warmly touching and coolly evocative. Music that speaks not just to emotions but to the weather and environment those feelings are rooted in.

Weather and environment are alive in Justin Ringles work and tongue. When your voice is weatherworn, ethereally light and buoyed up with trembling emotion, it’s a good idea to accompany it with strings set tenderly aquiver. They compliment each other, just like rain and sadness or sun and joy. Ringle must know this. Thistled Spring is so defined and colored by it. So formed and gilded, so captivated and made full by the pairing of his voice and the band’s play. They are a vine and its trellis, fruitful because of each other. Ringle so masterfully joins the two, it’s impossible that he doesn’t know this.

The album is celestial, full of sounds that return you to its title, that remind you the music is about Spring, the season of rebirth, of wet and cool, of gradual warming and fragility and hope. Violinist Nathan Crockett and cellist Catherine Odell do an amazing job of making their instruments hum. They play long, steadily flowing sections that draw emotionality out and lift Ringle’s soft, almost fragile voice, making it waifishly robust. On the start of Cascades, a ghostly soft ringing created by drawing a bow along the edge of a cymbal and sounding like a singing saw but deeper and fuller, sets a mournful and tenderly haunting tone. It’s one of several highlights on Thistled Spring, an album fat with songs that marry Ringle’s lonely, worn and lovelorn vocals and the bands excellently ardent playing. There’s no ifs about it.

Yet, if horses hand horns, they’d be unicorns. And if horses had feathers, their wings would sound like Thistled Spring when the wind ruffled them.

Menomena - Mines


I was up in PDX a few weeks ago visiting my mahollers when I got my first taste of a sea-salt-pistachio-cardamom brownie. It’s not such a far-flung or disparate concoction as it may seem. Certainly not so contradictory as McDonald’s new healthy “Go Active” meal (are you fucking kidding me) or gay African American republicans (deal with it Dennis Sanders). The brownie is delicious. It’s toothsome. It’s ambrosial. It’s just fantastic. That’s not really what this is about. This isn’t a review of a brownie that I had a few bites of and want more of now. It’s about Menomena’s new album, Mines, and how they continue to fuse different elements of music into a cohesive and energetically enjoyable unit. Yes, yes, it’s true that the band is made up of multi-instrumentalists but that’s not what makes their sound diverse yet unified. It’s the way they employ those ingredients that joins all those various influences into winsome and full indie pop.

On the new album, Brent Knopf, Justin Harris and Danny Seim play everything from blues-rock guitar licks and hip hop drum kicks to classic pop piano flurries and honking saxophone. There’s a certain joyousness to the music, even in the down-tempo moments. There’s a sense of playful lightheartedness. They clearly opened a window and shoved seriousness out. Not that they don’t take their music seriously but that they do it without ego. It’s light. It’s fun. A lot of the gaiety must result from their recording method. If you haven’t heard or read by now, the band uses a digital looping recorder called Deeler that Knopf programmed himself. They pass a single mic attached to Deeler around and each member takes a turn recording a riff and looping it. It’s a very democratically constructivist approach that results in their effulgent sound. It might be similar to the way that salty, nutty, spicy, sweet confection was made. The cooks were just fucking around in the kitchen and decided to make a brownie, each adding their own randomly chosen ingredient. That’s pure speculation though.

All the elements of this broad range of sound and fun are on display on the second track of the album, the Harris-led “TAOS”. At the start, a guitar whales backed by kicking drums then dies off so the space can be filled by gathering piano. The piano gives way to ringing cymbals and thudding drums, that get some support from a bleating sax, only to be replaced by winding piano, before blazing back with the guitar and horns at the finish of the track. Meanwhile, Harris’s voice lifts, falls and rolls through self-effacing lyrics supported by soft full vocal backing near the end. It’s really too much to describe here. I suggest you just give it a listen. “Five Little Rooms” is similarly diverse, though driven more by sax and break beat style drumming and supported by a rippling electronic sound that could be a theramin but is more likely Knopf playing the keys.

Knopf, Harris and Seim create fun and diverse indie pop, omnivorously drawing from other genres and styles to create their own perfectly thick, happy and quirk-captained music. You can’t just cram a sheet of sea-salt-pistachio-cardamom brownies into your ears… well… I suppose you can but it’s gonna be a messy affair and you won’t get much out of it. Just listen to Menomena’s Mines instead. Leave the spiced chocolate ear for a special occasion.

Federale - Devil in a Boot


It’s mid-day. The sun scorches the air and the drone of cicadas forms a ceaseless vibrating undertone. A Jack-in-the-box plays a crooked tune from behind a window with a white curtain indolently lifting and falling in the slow breeze. The sun catches dust adrift in the air, lending it a sepia patina. Flies buzz. A train pulls out of the station. Four gunshots ring out. “Devil in a Boot”, a soundtrack to a non-existent western, begins. It’s the kind of music that you hear while watching Clint Eastwood chew a cheroot and wear a cast-iron stove door under a wool poncho. The kind of music you read a Louis L’Amour book to.

Federale is here to make westerns cool again. To bring back the soiled and sweaty bandito and the solitary and scarred gunfighter, the poker saloons filled with gay glass breaking and bar fights, the rumbling thunderstorms that roll out over the prairies. And on this their second release, they are damned successful. The music itself tells the tale. It doesn’t need any words. The themes of the classic westerns are all there in the tonalities and timbres, just as they were in Ennio Morricone’s compositions. The notes that imply solitude and pain, shootouts and feuds, long dusty rides and revenge.

Collin Hegna, the bassist from Brian Jonestown Massacre, leads this rather sizeable band on their quest to pick up right where Morricone and his contemporaries left off in the late 1960s. The band even makes use of some of the same sounds that enlivened those sweaty western scenes. The sounds of the life: gunshots, cracking whips, train whistles, non-lingual voices, trumpets, environmental ambient noises. They play standard instruments as well, of course, using them to further invoke visions of the old west. At one point, Dasa Kalstrom, percussionist for the band, beats out the rhythm of a train gaining momentum that would have you looking both ways before crossing the tracks were you to be standing near some when you heard it. “Devil in a Boot” is filled with these onomatopoeic moments, these canvases of sound that are the images they are set to describe. It needs no movie. Only ears to see.

Blitzen Trapper - Destroyer of the Void


If someone put on the new Blitzen Trapper album, Destroyer of the Void, it’s damn fucking likely that you’d mistakenly think John Lennon and George Harrison have come back to life to reune with Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney, and the famed foursome decided to invite Tom Petty to join them as their new lead singer. Shit’s just that similar. As it turns out, no scientific research is in order. The world has not gone sideways. No one has risen from the grave to strum and sing. There was never some covert meeting and recording session, either. Blitzen Trapper has simply made an album that largely sounds like a smash up of the two entities.

Judging from the music and title of the new album, the aim seems to be to dismantle the divide between the Beatles and Tom Petty. To stitch the six-year gap together and retroactively create a bridge between the band and the man. In doing so, Blitzen Trapper has discarded much of the alt hippie-country style that made them such an entertaining and enjoyable band to listen to, replacing it with harmonies and instrumental accompaniment that sounds downright derivative. The result is that there are few remarkable songs. Almost nothing stands out other than the scattershot nature of the album.

They do have a couple of gems in there, though. “The Man Who Would Speak True” is a Dylanesque track that harkens back to Blitzen Trapper’s brilliant EP, Black River Killer. It has that cool country sound and story-telling, that fairly simple and bare arrangement and smart lyrical content that garnered Eric Earley praise as a songwriter. But just as the band sinks into that iconic style, the doo-wop harmonies return and it’s back to the same uninspiring tunes as before.

The Tom Petty and the Beatles sound is not entirely terrible and is at times enjoyable in a comfortably familiar sort of way. Some songs sound more Petty-ish while others verge on Wings covers (I’m looking at you duet with Alela Diane, “The Tree”). They can be agreeably light and fanciful but it’s nothing that hasn’t been done before… a lot. It is something that could’ve been engineered by taking the acappella recordings of Tom Petty and fitting them to the instrumentals of various Beatles tracks. Call it Let It Be Full Moon Fever, or Destroyer of the Void.

Scout Niblett - The Calcination of Scout Niblett


Scout Niblett’s guitar is alive. I swear it. I can’t tell you if it’s a Fender or a Gibson. It doesn’t matter. All I am sure of is that it is a living, writhing thing filled with the throbs and rumbles, the growls and whispers, the pains and burdens of life, its breath winding its way, coiling and uncoiling from around her voice. In her hands, it flashes glimmers of dunish light where her voice is vacant and simmers or wails underneath it when she sings. It’s a melancholic animal she manipulates to enrapturing effect, stringing it along to compliment her beautifully aching discordant warble.

Her voice has a way of turning on eccentricities and bending to expose the raw and scarred feelings within her words, buoying them up with bare emotion. And where the guitar she so deftly beguiles is not enough or requires purer force, she crushes a set of roughed up drums with tender aggression, beating a pulse out of them that is blinding.

Really, the entire album “The Calcination fo Scout Niblett” is a living thing, an inebriating animal that wraps you in its disturbed yet welcoming emotionality. Niblett has a way of drawing life out of the things she touches and says. Her words seem to hang in the air, lingering longer than the vibrations that made them audible. The chords she strikes seem to remain with you even after their pulse has died off. She’s one of those rare artists that have somehow tapped into an essence, a central truth, and whose work resonates so purely that it is frightening at times to hear because you feel laid as bare as her. You feel as exposed.

It would be ridiculous for me to try and tell you about the individual songs. To try to express what they mean and how they sound. As all living things do, they evolve. They are continually emergent, reborn with each play. It is sufficient to say just this: Scout Niblett is alive.