Norfolk & Western’s fourth album, The Unsung Colony, shares borders with not a few contemporary forms – pop, rock, folk, film – but tries to finagle as much rustic, antiquarian swagger within its borders as it can muster. Surely much of the instrumentation is right on: The swooping violins, the military drums, the western chatter of piano. But then a xylophone, an exhausted lyric, and the illusion is over.
Read full work »
Guitar stomper ‘Family’ is everything to love about Clinic’s debut lp, Internal Wrangler, but opens their fourth album, Visitations, like the band wanted to announce, ‘The boys are back in town.’ The majority of Visitations plays out this way, occasional organ or slide guitar happening by.
Read full work »
What the Melvins, largely a metal band to people who don’t normally listen to metal, have always had that set them apart from metal bands was a certain nuanced funk or pop, something both light and dark at once. See, for example, the lead guitar of ‘History of Drunks,’ from the bands new Senile Animal, which chugs along with heavy vigor but whose lead guitar has something bluegrass or country or surf about it. The Melvins don’t turn a sound away, they steal it and stomp on its face.
Read full work »
Patty Griffin has spent five albums flirting between Sunday morning service and Sunday night regret. Some songs (“I’m Getting Ready,” “No Bad News”) are vivid, animated; some sip shots of pop with the country/folk; but Children Running Through, in its earnest melancholy, conjures far too easily the image of a hillside crowd in the rain, at night, flicking spent lighters at a dark stage to a plaintive vocal.
Read full work »
His fourth release post-Guided by Voices, Robert Pollard’s Normal Happiness sounds like a prolific man stuck. It rocks n rolls well enough, even bounces sometimes. Were it an EP or outtake collection it might be notable, for surely it’s no dud, nor, at thirty-four minutes, is it especially long-winded. But the sixteen songs here, however impressive individually, do little to compliment each other on the whole.
Read full work »
Constant tempo, melodic, and loud/soft shifts are only part of what Deerhoof is after on their playful eighth release, Friend Opportunity, though those alone may have sufficed. Psychedelic acid rock turns into French pop and then they dance, all in a toe-tapping, head-nodding flurry.
Read full work »
If I could have written a letter it would have been to the person who provided the greater amount of body odor on the J train into Manhattan that afternoon. I had given a dollar to two subway musicians on the platform who were playing Woody Allen caper music with a clarinet and bass guitar and, sitting on the train, was staring at the city as we crossed the East River. Two teenage girls across the aisle talked and giggled as one of them reached her arm all the way inside the tube of chips they’d been eating from to get at the last bits. I formed a judgement of the attractive woman sitting next to me, mooning over Lady Chatterley’s Lover. She laughs, I thought, not because it tickles her funny but because she wants us all to know she’s sophisticated enough to understand and, moreover, laugh at what goes on in the naughty novel.
Read full work »
It’s only four songs, and all that separates opener, ‘People,’ from closer, ‘People (Live),’ is that the latter is true to its name, but Animal Collective’s EP arrives as a well received (however brief) letter from friends abroad.
Read full work »