Evangelicals – The Evening Descends (Dead Oceans Records)
“A stranger reaching out for your hand / An outlaw after hours leanin in / So if you see me actin out, understand / To be left out in the snow without a coat / Can do bad things to a man.” This character, whether it be the “Skeleton Man” described above or the authorial suicide (“Paperback Suicide”) or societal suicide (“Stoned Again”) evidenced elsewhere is the recurring an/pro-tagonist of the Evangelicals’ second LP, The Evening Descends. It is this theme – and the elaborate craft in the production and songwriting – that propel Descends from the good to the, to borrow from “Stoned Again,” “So unbelievable.”
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What is sometimes surprising about Butane Variation’s live sets are how weird and visceral they can become. Sure, some of their recordings are rocking (as a verb) but they don’t prepare you for the noise the four musicians make upon the stage, most recently at Boulder Coffee Company in Rochester, NY. The end of a dozen dates (the band left South Carolina the morning of the 18th to make it to the Boulder show) BV played many new numbers that one can assume will be a part of a new LP planned for a September release.
“Lately I’ve been thinking about all the days gone by / …All the other kids pushed me around / I’d say nothing, I’d just stand there / And I’d dream my song / It’s a song of pain / It’s called ‘Howling at the Moon.’” “Howling at the Moon” is (cleverly?) the very song these lyrics are lifted from, urging the listener to think of the musical world of Ariel Pink as a self-referencing (and with that a small) world in which the creator laughs last. Or at least laughs. Much of this lightheartedness can be attributed to that wonderful invention, the electric guitar. If there are acoustic guitars on Pink’s Scared Famous collection I did not discern them. This avoidance of the acoustic sound allows Pink’s songs a causticness and viscerality that might well become burdensome pathos with our folk friends’ favorite instrument.
Twenty seconds into The Horns of Happiness’ two-song EP What Spills Like Thread we know approximately where we’re headed. This is Velvet Underground (“Sister Ray”), Yo La Tengo (“Spec Bebop”) territory, the extended song that is basically a riff, a verse, for however many minutes they let the tape roll, and if you don’t like it you can lump it. Side A, “Rehearsed Verses” asks “Will you share a year with me?”, tossing out the challenge from the get-go. The female vocal (Shelley Harrison) sings about “How hard it is to find . . . How hard to find / Is it yours or is it mine?”
“And I’ll plead with a thousand voices / I AM SANE / My soul felt so safe up there / No self-centered natives destroying our earth.” Take To the Skies, Enter Shikari’s debut LP, is not about understatement. It is sometimes, however inscrutably, startlingly beautiful. This is doubly surprising given the band’s intense, foreboding sound, something the internet says is “post-hardcore” and even “trance.”
There are some bright spots on Trances Arc’s third release, Xoxox. The keyboard breakdown of “You’re In – You’re Out,” the outro from the same instrument in “Birds Collide.” Elsewhere, “Parliament” perks the interest for at least thirty seconds (the “Oh ooh whoa oh” part) while two songs – “Cold Drivers” and closer “Look Up” – are interesting in their entirety, if only because they are those that don’t sound like the others. The songwriting on Xoxox is not merely straight to destination – my beloved Insomniac (Green Day) is much along these lines, and perfectly so – but seems unaware of another way to write a song. Even the breakdowns (often the most loose parts of rock songs) sound rehearsed to death, or obvious. Instead of what I have found to be a common reaction to Panda Bear’s Person Pitch – a feeling of “I should have done this”, as though one should have invested in Apple or discovered plutonium – Xoxox prompts the reaction, “So what? I could have done this.”