The Big Pink currently enjoy an astounding wave of Intarwebz hype, but I certainly won’t let that affect my opinion of the their debut A Brief History of Love. However, the record itself just happens to suck, all things considered. No, the hype didn’t ruin the listening experience. It just epically blows, hype or not.
Yes, The Big Pink is a true and accurate nod to shoegazing, and yes, I love shoegaze and second-wave shoegaze. However, it’s bad shoegazing, dude. It’s The Jesus and Mary Chain AFTER Darklands. Ya know, when they made rad videos for “Sidewalking” and shit, with, like, their name on a big marquee behind them while the Reid brothers are fuckin’ rawwwkin’ (one of the few unintentional hilarious decisions of the Creation camp). Gross…
There are some worthwhile moments on this album, such as “Velvet,” wherein the band combines their natural pop-centric attitude with truly thick distortion swells and harmonies, coming off more like The Catherine Wheel or The Boo Radleys than, ya know, an even shittier version of Pop Will Eat Itself or somethin’. Maybe The Big Pink could rename themselves Pop Will Shit Itself. That would be poignant. But even if the whole album was packed with songs like “Velvet,” no amount of quality songwriting on A Brief History of Love can make up for “Dominoes.” That song gave me gastric pains. As Jeffrey said while we were listening to the record in the office, “it’s like Jesus Jones goes on a date with Kevin Shields, and JJ tells everyone they slept together, and Kevin is totally embarrassed.” Gotta do better next time, 4AD.
So yeah, this record is doo doo. I’m totally bummed. Gonna listen to the new No Age EP instead for a pick-me-up. Laters.
For fans of: Jesus Jones, Shitty-period Jesus and Mary Chain, The Jesus (circa Big Lebowski)
Effects pedals tweaker Adam Forkner, a.k.a. White Rainbow, has a lot going on for a relatively new artist. Besides touring Europe and supporting Deerhunter, dude also fist bumps Pauly Shore (see the Possibly Relevant links below). But what’s probably most relevant is that his new body of work for Kranky, New Clouds, is a funky, technicolor, rainbows-and-gumdrops psychedelic score for modern dance. Four songs, 60ish minutes long, and genre ambiguous, New Clouds is a beautiful and driving aural jaunt that, at the sake of sounding like a cheesedick, you just sorta get lost in. This is good vibes head music for folks who’s got, what Bad Brains called, that P.M.A. This album got my day started this morning.
I’ve tossed around the label “ambient music for people who don’t like ambient music” more than once, but it’s undeniably a good label for White Rainbow. There are no lyrics or verse/chorus actions (as you would expect from music often reviewed on this blog), but there’s lots of melody, lots of lush instrumentation, lots of texture, intricate rhythm, vague vocal chants, and a tension-and-release dynamic that makes New Clouds almost pop-oriented at times. If you haven’t peeped ol’ Rainbow yet, think of him as a shoegazey version of Growing that spent more time in the woods meditating, collecting cool threads, and partaking in the good peyote. And like Growing, who spent time frightening the Hot Chip fans on a supporting string of dates, White Rainbow also opens for a group infinitely inferior to him (Yacht… bleh) on a southeastern Asia vision quest. But hey, I can jive with whatever spreads his krautrock forest gospel.
New Clouds is a beautiful record, and surprisingly upbeat. Use it to get your day started. Or use it as the centerpiece in bong-rippin’ activities. New Clouds goes both ways. And it just dropped this week on Kranky. Go see about it.
Louisville’s Phantom Family Halo adds another page to archtype-laden book of rock folklore. Right before their long-awaited grand statement to the world drops, the sprawling 2 LP Monoliths & These Flowers Never Die, and they begin their nationwide vision quest with Russian Circles, the band’s auxiliary drummer, Tony Bailey, suddenly passed away. As an esteemed and prolific member in the local music community, the news sent shock waves through the city. However, the band did not utter a word about it publicly. Phantfamlo never discusses peripheral information in any capacity, even when directly relating to the people in the band, and they’ve always kept things close to the chest. Undoubtedly this adds to their mystique. Monliths, despite its foreboding mood, is congruent to this attitude. The grainy, dry psychedelia found within evokes both an intimacy and mystery not often found in this genre. If you knew nothing else about them, you’d probaby be baffled as to who they are, where they came from, and what they want from you. They probably like it that way. Phantom Family Halo doesn’t float above the horizon line like the flower power groups do – they’re standing behind you.
Monoliths & These Flowers Never Die is a bold, majestic record that’s viscerally formidable and fresh – a crafty stew of swampy acid rock, haunting soundscapes, immense space, a slight gothic flavor, and eternal heaviness. Five songs in is a track called “Dec 2012,” and I’ll be damned if I can find a better brain-burning soundtrack for the apocalypse.
Opener “Blackouts and Runaways” truly makes use of playwright Bertolt Brecht’s assertion of “The past inside the present,” citing that “the rapidity of change and the increase of knowledge in the modern world have forced us to see history in a new light: not as a finalized past but as a process in which the new continuously transfigures the old.” Without sounding pretentious and wanker (I promise you I’m not going in this direction), Phantom Family Halo has synthesized this idea to great effect. “Blackouts and Runaways” meshes conventional garage rock/harsh vintage psych and hauntological retro-futuristic electronic flourishes to create art without a time stamp, a warped perception of what rock music used to be (as we understand it), and a proclamation that fears the future. In other words, it’s fucking heavy, and it sets the tone for the rest of the album – an body of work that’s chronologically ambiguous yet sonically pointed.
The motorik 10-minute opus “Monoliths” scares the shit out of me. It’s the sound of someone looking into your window after dark, donning a masquerade facepiece and wielding a nine inch blade, making your balls retract ten-fold. No one has written more paranoid krautrock saturated in impending doom. “Third World War” is nothing but pure mindfuck. A twinkling, bucolic melody carries you through over a minute of serenity before pure menacing proto-metal and a blanket of vehement, Link Wray-style reverberated vocals dicks you in the dick. And yet, songs like “Alive and Well” peak out from around the corner – a playful, aurally credulous three-minute ballad that mixes a bit of Boards of Canada atmospheric synths with orchestral samples that, aside from the melodic vocals, wouldn’t sound out of place on Aphex Twin’s Richard D James album.
There’s a surprise at every corner. And while the instrumentation can be somewhat sparse and rigid, each movement through the album’s massive 18 songs reveals strata of mysterious sounds, cavernous imagery, and lush evil. Monoliths & These Flowers Never Die an invigorating and exciting listening, while at the same time, provokes your eyes to constantly dark around for predators all the while. It’s weird and it’s awesome. It’s the heat-induced forest fire ruining the hippies’ fun during the summer of love. Most importantly, Monoliths & These Flowers Never Die does not easily fit in any genre or subgenre, acting more as an anthropomorphic, mercurial, growing beast that is certainly one of the most profound statements out of Louisville in years and, and in my opinion, one that holds up well against any given heavy hitter in the experimental rock field. Get lifted.
Phantom Family Halo’s Monoliths & These Flowers Never Die is available now on beautiful vinyl or in digital download format courtesy of Karate Body Records.
For fans of: Six Organs of Admittance, Fever Ray, Spiritualized, Boris
As some footnotes to the review above, why don’t you go on and have a real taste yourself. Here is some video of “These Flowers Never Die” from their show at Lisa’s Oak Street Lounge last July that I went to and had a sweet time. Of course, sadly, this footage is some of Tony’s last. But, tour’s still on. I’ll post those dates closer to their leave after the holidays.
Bedroom recordings/one man bands can obviously suffer from a lack of third party editing, indulgence, and impulse. But sometimes these caveats can also prohibit the growth of an entirely original, immersive, and painstakingly personal product. Seems like the ideal position for music junkie/nerd hero Atlas Sound, whose love for hushed, ghostly melodies have turned him into one of rock’s most beloved wet blankets. Bradford Cox doesn’t exactly share this sentiment anymore, though, and with his second album for Kranky, we find the project head trying to outrun his introverted nature on Logos.
The result is an album that is autobiographical not by it’s lyrics, but by the source of it’s sounds, it’s homages, collaborations, and cerebral passageways. It’s not self-mythetization so much as process of association. As children, we learn who we are by pretending to be others, and similarly Atlas Sound has begun to find it’s own unique shape through it’s loving mimics and costume changes. On “Quick Canal”, the soundtrack to a light-headed departure from our atmosphere, Cox recruits Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier for vocal duties. His sparse production of bio-luminescent synths and an unrelenting kraut shuffle allows his teenage hero to gracefully develop her siren call over Cox’s idiosyncratic groundwork. Another symbiotic marriage is formed on “Walkabout”, the albums sunniest cut. With the help of recent tour mate Panda Bear, the two successfully transform the Dover’s “What Am I Going to Do”, into a big beat ode to childhood of hiccuping organs and blissed out vocal camaraderie. But while this will be considered the album’s leading single, it would be a shame to let Cox’s commanding presence on the solo tracks go unnoticed.
Atlas Sound’s approach has always been admittedly loose and comprised largely of first takes. “There are songs on here I don’t even remember recording,” he said in a recent interview with Stereogum, but never before has this technique been so adaptive and fitting as it is now. Take the title-track “Logos” for example, which ends the album on a note of confidence (and is my current vote for song of the year). The churning synths explode over a swing beat and descending bass line, all filtered through a garage rock lens. Cox’s vocals, picked up from some passing transmission, hang on to the beat like he’s experiencing slight lag time through his head phones. His verses curl and drag, adding and cutting syllables at the drop of a dime, all fueled by a bravado that makes it impossible to have it any other way.
As a man with such an efficient connection between his ideas and his process, we loose the courtesy of presentation, but in it’s place we gain the opportunity to witness occasional moments of phenomena that only flows when you’ve desensitized yourself to the red recording light. Consequently, Logos has trouble holding on to a cohesive statement. Rather, each track seems to have been selected for how well it captured an individual mood. Birthed across the world in various studios, back stage at Deerhunter shows, hotel rooms, or forever lost locations, it plays more like a collection or anthology than an album. Cox seems to be utilizing a supposedly “baselined” music industry to take some risks on Logos, and I think everyone would benefit to try the same. If there’s one album you pay for this year, this should be it.
Logos in available October 22nd through Kranky Records, and is currently being supported by a tour with Broadcast.
Broadcast, in some ways, seem to have followed rather stridently along a solid trajectory. The group started as a quartet firmly planted in haunting ’60s vocal pop and garage ballads, augmented by lightly arranged vintage atomic age samples and Trish Keenan’s silky and distant vocals. The latter was, of course, the only thing that ever remained consistent, as Broadcast became more divergent through the years, ending with 2005’s glitchy, noisy, electronics-heavy and cosmically surreal Tender Buttons.
Perhaps it as simply a new direction or the influence of Julian House from The Focus Group on this latest effort, but Witch Cults of the Radio Age acts as the bridge between the organic retro-futuristic pop of Work and Non-Work and the more chaotic latter repertoire, with extra ornate instrumentation courtesy of House. This is a spooky, gorgeous record, and probably the most accessible effort from the “library music” camp (i.e. the Ghost Box/Mute/Warp family that both samples and draws inspiration from the classic BBC Radiophonic Workshop – see Barry 7’s Connectors and the Ghost Box site for additional reference).
With the exception of Keenan’s contributions that channel Margo Guryan and The United States of America, it’s hard to distinguish where Broadcast ends and The Focus Group begins, other than the weirdo samples that House is wont to incorporate into his instrumentals (including a slew of Conet Project snippets, which is major thumbs up). The collaboration is seamless and refreshing, and has added to an extremely strong addition to the nearly flawless curriculum vitae for both Broadcast and The Focus Group. I’m not sure if I feel this way because I’ve been listening to the same Broadcast catalog for four years and this disc is new, but Witch Cults of the Radio Age might just be my favorite Broadcast release thus far. Hence, I’m getting very excited for the full length due out on Warp some time next year.
No need to give Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age our normal rating or any of that jive. This is absolutely essential listening that earns its one billion smiling Donald Fagens. It’s total insanity.
You can purchase the digital release right now at Bleep, and/or grip the physical release on October 26. Get on it!
I’m making it my personal mission, my top task on the action items list, to spread the gospel of Detroit quartet Oblisk. This is an amazing new band that, no exaggeration, might be the best American shoegaze group (and it’s gritty shoegaze) these ears have ever heard. I will do everything in my power to make sure these guys sell billions of records, and it’s a goddman travesty that this is not the case.
Anyway, there’s no need for any sort of overlong, overhyperbolic review for Oblisk’s Weather Patterns, despite the fact I’m wont to do such. The brass tacks of the matter is that Oblisk has crafted an absolutely beautiful record that both travels at high speeds above the troposphere and slithers within cracks in the earth. It’s odd in many ways that Oblisk hails from a decaying industrial metropolis. Sure, the minor keys, grimey fuzz, distant tones, and distorted vocals suggest a bit of an ominous environment. But Weather Patterns is packed with mystique and excitement – a record that wonders and wanders.
Oblisk’s loyalties are outlined with a line in the sand – this is new psychedelia. That is to say, this is not a group rehashing flower power like the Paisley Underground did. Oblisk is a group that synthesizes what’s good in psychedelia and adds an opaque gloss. Weather Patterns evokes pure Spiritualized-informed space rock, kraut a la Amon Duul, a touch of post-punk, darkly veiled and midtempo pop-oriented shoegaze in the vein of Medicine and Slowdive, and eastern mysticism (best exemplified on instrumental “Blue Iceberg”).
The epic “Tiger Fighter,” and I’m calling this right now, is the “Leave Them All Behind” of this decade. It’s fucking gorgeous and I don’t want to ruin it by yapping on about it. The song is available below along with one other sample (and it took me forever to narrow down my selection for sharing to two because the album is sick).
I enjoyed the new Tickley Feather record the first time I sat down to listen to it on Wednesday. Then yesterday I had a nasty 24-hour flu bug (or a 24-hour H1N1 – I’m uninsured, so I didn’t have it professionally diagnosed) and got rowdy on the Nyquil and Dayquil at the same time. I was thoroughly fucked. It was at that point that the new Tickley Feather jam hive sounded real good. I tried to type out my review for the album in this state, but all that came out was thoughts like “fickley teather’s bringing the happy face grind out ya doppler radar outta control” and “annie sachs lol, reminds me of, like, ’sacks’ as in ‘i want to carry around sacks so if someone ask for a hand i can be like – no dice, got these sacks’ jack handey to the max”(true story). Better wait until I’m 100% to write this, which I’m doing right now.
So… the fuck was I talking about? Oh yes, we were discussing adorable lil’ Annie Sachs, a.k.a. Tickley Feather a.k.a. Animal Collective’s BFF 4 Life. The Feather recently described her forthcoming Hors D’oeuvres as an attempt to embrace her “Southern Gothic meets Existential Hillbilly vibe,” promising a more bucolic, joyful, accessible effort. Bucolic? Yes, and you can hear the optimism embedded within from her recent move back to her homestead of rural Virginia. But accessible? Fear not, Tickley Feather is still weird as all hell and delightfully psychotic and looking glass-esque. Different this time around, as previously alluded, is the very concise, focused songwriting. The album’s production still sounds like it was recorded underwater (as it should), but the melodies and compositions are so good. Perhaps Hors D’oeuvres will go quadruple platinum. I fucking hope so.
Tickley’s signature drum machine, melted keys, and allegiance to four-track recording still remain in the forefront as she experiments with many genres, intrepreted slight askew of course. “Sure Relaxing” combines aquatic vocals and wah-pedal to evoke a sexy, LSD-lens Cocteau Twins. “Club Rhythm 96 and Cell Phone” brings you nasty dance funk electroclash as recorded by and for the Morlocks. “Buzzy” takes a page out of Ariel Pink’s instrumental jam book, using minimal loops and altering their fidelity to change the mood and timbre of the song throughout a la William Basinki (and a gorgeous one it is). “Don’t Call, Marilyn” amalgamates a ’60s doo wop sensibility with a sort of paranoia-inducing carnival beat and remains a big highlight.
However, where Tickley really hits her stride is on “Trashy Boys” and “Roses of Romance.” Tickley has a serious sense of soaring melody that was only hinted at on earlier work like “Natural.” Despite the wash of hazy effects and otherwordly disposition, there’s a quiet intimacy a la Movietone through the songs’ resplendent warmth that’s quite refreshing in the freak folk realm (though called Tickley “freak folk” is a bit of a disservice to her rather ingenious music). Truly gorgeous stuff.
Hors D’oeuveres holds up as I listen to it now with a sober mind, and was totally fuckin’ awesome on cough meds. Without sounding cliched, it is truly a syrupy trip into strange candy-coated lands, like entering the “Dark World” in Zelda Link to the Past. Highly recommended for all ocassions, and I reckon that it will end up on the best-of list for the year.
Hors D’oeuvres will burrow a hole in your dome when it drops October 20 coutesy of Paw Tracks. The image at the top is not the cover of the new album, by the way. High-res artwork has yet to be released for it.
