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Archive for the 'Praise and Malaise' Category

Dum Dum Girls – I Will Be

Published
by
Michael Hansen
on March 18, 2010
in Praise and Malaise
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When famed rock critic Lester Bangs heard the Shaggs, he made a prediction that the cro-magnon men of the world would eventually grope and mangle rock music into an unrecognizable heap that only the girls could put back together. I don’t think that we’re there quite yet, but lately we have seen a de-masculinization of male vocal styles, and an increasing amount of girl groups with new solutions to old problems. It is the latter of these two universes that Dum Dum Girls belong to. In late 2008, ringleader Dee Dee began the project as both a cathartic vessel and shrine to her heroes The Stooges and the Vaselines. Producing treble-heavy hybrids of old school punk and bubblegum pop she describes as “blissed-out buzz saw,” the tunes found footing amongst the new wave of buzz bands playing lo-fi rock with smeared melodies shifting on top. However, to lump the girls in with this movement entirely would hardly do them justice. While the dirty production value is certainly at least part of their aesthetic make up, the upcoming debut full-length I Will Be proves that its far from the only thing going for them.

There’s a million words we turn over when trying to describe it; ‘the gift’, ’soul’, ’steez’, whatever abstract quality a certain artist has that can make a familiar song exciting again, the Dum Dum Girls have got it. The hacked guitar play, simple drum beats, and candid tone stir up something refreshingly un-cryptic in a scene that feeds on vagueness. Their direct delivery on tracks like ‘Jail La La’, harking sentiments like, “This woman’s clearly out of her mind/she’s covered in shit/and high as a kite,” contributes to the thrill of watching Dee Dee and Co. try on different hats. Throughout the 11 tracks producer Richard Gottehrer (The Voidoids, Blondie, The Go-Go’s) helps them summon everyone from The Ronettes to Black Tambourine. What came out was an efficient album of three minute songs running on primitive garage riffs, starry-eyed harmonies, leather skin, and teenage empathy. It’s not the next big thing, it’s not revivalism, it’s just an excellent depiction of someone singing songs in front of the mirror. Highly Recommended.

I Will Be is available on Sub Pop March 30th.

MP3:::
Dum Dum Girls – I Will Be
Dum Dum Girls – Jail La La

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Worn Records and White Fences

Published
by
Daniel Krow
on March 15, 2010
in Praise and Malaise
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whitefence Worn Records and White Fences

White Fence, the one man project of Tim Presley (of Darker My Love fame), plays trebly psychedelic pop that sounds just as influenced by 60s bubblegum one-offs (I’m looking at you Lemon Pipers and your “Green Tambourine”) as by “serious” artists like Love and the Byrds. On his debut album for Woodsist, White Fence, Presley sounds more like a wide-eyed teenager thinking of endless metaphors for his crush’s eyes than a horny garage rocker (with a few exceptions, like “Baxter Corner” and its paranoid chorus of “Lose your number, lose your name!” and the swaggering “Destroy Everything”). Songs like “I’ll Follow You,” “Sara Snow,” and “The Gallery” (which is provided below for your consideration) sound like they’ve just been unearthed from the dusty archives of some Sunset Strip studio, remnants of a period when every band, even the “square” ones with matching suits, had to have a least one vaguely psychedelic song.

White Fence loses a little steam in its second half, but the eleven track stretch from “Mr. Adams” to “Ring Around the Square” is so effortlessly charming and inviting that it should supply you with enough goodwill to make it through the sorta half-baked experimental stuff to get the totally sweet Lennon-esque closer “Be Right Too.” Listening to White Fence, you can almost fool yourself until thinking you’re really listening to some long lost 60s band; whether that seems cool or just another example of how lame indie rock has become in 2010 is up to you, but the fact remains that White Fence is full of some pretty amazing psych pop jams.

White Fence is available on vinyl here and will be available on CD from Woodsist April 17.

For fans of:  Syd Barrett, Love, Ariel Pink

MP3 :::
White Fence – The Gallery

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Rangers – Suburban Tours

Published
by
Michael Hansen
on March 13, 2010
in Praise and Malaise
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rst

Upon relocating from Dallas to San Francisco, Rangers masthead Joe Knight conjured his glazed weariness into the 11 tracks of murky psychedelia that would become his debut LP Suburban Tours. On the odd album opener “Deerfield Village”, he positions himself as some sort of repetitive, humorless version of Ariel Pink, with abrasive blasts of lazy vocal snarls. Aside from “Brook Meadows”, Joe keeps tight lipped, opting to concentrate on the rough-edged collage approach to neo-ambient music that Rangers explore. Saturated melancholy, super compressed down tempo drums, and wheezing vhs synth lines make up the bulk album, which is a roundabout way of admitting that this really just sounds like a new Ducktails cassette. Only on a couple tracks like “Glen Carin” does he nail the looking out the window on a rainy day phenomena well enough for us to ignore his overlapping sonic neighbors.  Suburban Tours is a well executed mission statement, but where is the benchmark for this perpetual 80’s fetish? Are we now obligated to write up anything that sounds like it could be the soundtrack to a job training tape/pizza party/insert nostalgia? Even if this was just intended to play as a hazy personal pet project, I can’t help but feel like it was popped right out of the hypnagogic cookie cutter.

Suburban Tours is out now on Olde English Spelling Bee.

For Fans Of: Ducktails, Arch M, Universal Studios Florida

MP3 :::
Rangers – Deerfield Village
Rangers – Glen Carin

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Caribou – Swim

Published
by
Kenny Bloggins
on March 11, 2010
in Praise and Malaise
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caribou-swim Caribou - Swim

Dan Snaith, a.k.a. Caribou a.k.a. Manitoba a.k.a. “The Professah,” seems to follow a chronologically retroactive pattern. His earliest work reflected IDM and glitch standards prolific in the ’90s. Then his breakthrough full-length, Up in Flames, evoked silky ’80s dream pop and shoegaze. 2005’s The Milk of Human Kindness took cues from the heyday of krautrock. This eventually propelled Snaith squarely in the baroque pop part of the space-time continuum circa 1966 in the form of Andorra, an album that all but references The Left Banke by name. So what of Swim? Will Caribou continue his time traveling trajectory, make good on the album title, and release his surf rock / doo wop / Skiffle album? Not quite. Caribou hinted with the somewhat disappointing “Odessa” a possible move toward more dance-oriented material. For the most part, this is true. However, the result is much more interesting than “Odessa” suggested.

Snaith makes it clear this time around that he’s going balls to the wall, trying on a variety of new hats. “Jamelia” juggles dub beats, Colin Bluntstone-channeled vocals, orchestral arrangements, and non-linear songwriting in one of Caribou’s most driving efforts. “Bowls” is an exploration of the more minimal and ambient works under the Manitoba moniker, replete with David Fridmann ethereal harp accents, Aphex Twin-informed minimal techno, and glitch flourishes.  ”Hannibal” acts as a compromise betwixt the splattered rhythms, bubbling low end, and horn explosions of Scratch Perry and the fluid, galactic vibe of Boards of Canada circa Twoism. “Kaili” shows Caribou experimenting with acid house samples over pop vocals and Love-inspired psychedelic orchestration. The idea has more value than the actual product, but the bold jump should be applauded nonetheless. Despite some pitfalls, Swim showcases some real moments of brilliance and clarity, best demonstrated on the psilocybin-saturated “Sun” – an angelic, blissed out motorik club banger augmented with hauntological synths and the self-evident mantra of “sun.”

Though not as strong as his mid-decade releases, Swim is a surprising follow-up that, while not groundbreaking, is thoroughly enjoyable and a great juxtaposition of electronic and psych genres spanning every decade Snaith has covered in his impressive repertoire. Moreover, Swim set a new paradigm for Caribou by breaking his old pattern, which may be one of the album’s biggest triumphs.

Swim drops courtesy of Merge on April 20 (hurhur, 420 lol), which should be available for pre-order soon. And lest ye forget, Caribou swings through Louisville with Toro y Moi on June 8th at the Zanzabar.

MP3 :::
Caribou – Sun

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Serena Maneesh – Abyss In B-Minor

Published
by
Kenny Bloggins
on February 23, 2010
in Praise and Malaise
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s-m-sm2-aa Serena Maneesh - Abyss In B-Minor

You can place Serena Maneesh into a number of columns, but neogaze is not one of them. Their 2005 eponymous record hinted at a band on the verge of realizing their sound, and Abyss in B-Minor is the result of such ephiphanies. Abyss in no way resembles a rehashing of my favorite movement in rock music. Sure, the essential elements are there – hall reverb, dynamic loudness, a blend of ambience and pop sensibility, blurred album art, and all the general ad infinitum shoegaze/dream pop reference points. However, there’s an intrinsic punk-informed aura about the group. They eschew the trends that defined the tongue-in-cheek shoegaze term. There’s no detachment, no navel staring, no aloofness – Serena Maneesh is a rough around the edges, delightfully gutteral collective. They will beat your ass. If you don’t believe that, exhibit A: they recorded this album in a cave outside Oslo. However, outside the album’s epic bookends, Abyss in B-Minor is a body of pop songs, and each one is deceivingly brutal under the shimmering surface. If you could strip away the nasty gale of noise and fuzz that I imagine the apocalypse would sound like, you could possibly play this record around your folks. But since that’s not the case, I don’t recommend it.

Unlike that Raveonettes album that (actually) was entirely in B Minor, Serena Maneesh is all over the place. You’ve already been treated to the bubblegum pop of “I Just Want to See Your Face,” but the following track “Reprobate!” really showcases what makes this band great, demonstrating their sweet and sour technique. The vocals are crystalline, delicate, almost gossamer, yet backed with a wailing squall of noise that’s more apropos to a Wolf Eyes jam session than a traditional dream pop love song. “Melody For Jaana” recalls early Slowdive without replicating it – the band’s visceral harshness still runs afoot even in slower, more ambient numbers. “Honeyjinx” is one of the more interesting moments on Abyss, a song that wavers between dissonance, Swans-style dungeon doom rock, a soaring vocal pseudo-chorus, and a pastiche of electronic snippets as the composition implodes on itself. Intriguing and enjoyable. “Blow Yr Brains In the Morning Rain” captures an uncharacteristic (for these guys) sloppy garage aesthetic and juxtaposes it against a celestial sheen and panning, layered rhythms. “D.O.W.S.W.T.T.D.” shows the band at its most synth-driven, while “Magdalena” ends the album with flutes and surprisingly sunny vibes for a sect of Scandinavian individuals. See? All over the place.

As a whole, Abyss in B-Minor is much more song-focused than their self-titled release, though also a little less cohesive. However, the craftiness in which Serena Maneesh can swing in and out of moods and tones like a sine wave is both jarring and exciting, separating Abyss from previous efforts (not to mention other newgaze groups) and marking a more mature and complex album. Expect to see Serena Maneesh placed among the best of the year.

Abyss in B-Minor is out on 4AD on March 23.

Fagen-Becker Quality Rating
steelydan2 Serena Maneesh - Abyss In B-Minor

MP3 :::
Serena Maneesh – Reprobate

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The Art Museums – Rough Frame

Published
by
Michael Hansen
on February 16, 2010
in Praise and Malaise
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l_e8a7baea2d9141df933494e257cea04d The Art Museums - Rough Frame

Like we expected earlier this year, The Art Museums are all geared up to be one of the first band’s to steal some hype from the hypnagogic, beach fetish-centered state of music with their dressed-down anglophile pop jams. Sitting pretty on the keen eyed Brooklyn label Woodsist, the Bay Are duo will unveil their debut ‘mini-LP’ Rough Frame to the public today. In just under half an hour, Josh Alper and Glenn Donaldson (of Skygreen Leopards) filter 9 tracks of urgently mundane tales of cads, mods, and lovers through a crunchy Tascam 388 tape machine. Along the way, they tap into thirty-odd years of pop music, amalgamating the gentle angst of Television Personalities, the pastel-colored mannerisms of the New Wave, and the bare-boned song writing prowess of the early K Records scene. As such, the results are mixed. The paper thin drum machine is only there to carry the rhythm section, which in turn is immediately buried by duo’s harmonies, shifting all the grunt work onto the shoulders of the song’s vocal melody.

Occasionally, that strategy works out just fine, like on the lead-off singles “Sculpture Gardens” and “Paris Cafes” which burrow their catchy verses so deep inside your head that you completely overlook the fact that you’re tapping along to what sounds like Peter Gabriel fronting the Magnetic Fields. Problem is, after those immediate fixes, the other 15 minutes of this album sound comparatively uninspired. That aside, they still get points for not hiding behind an ocean of reverb, proving that whatever moments of glory they achieve are won by craftsmanship and not some cheap post-production solution. Rough Frame’s end result sounds like it was untouched from it’s original form as a demo, and it reaps the pros and cons you would expect. It’s eager, fresh, and un-calculated, but it also feels like it was peeled a little before it was ripe enough to do so.

Rough Frame is available here.

MP3 :::
Art Museums – Sculpture Gardens
Art Museums – Paris Cafes

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LSD, Not Steroids, For This Mark McGuire

Published
by
Daniel Krow
on February 13, 2010
in Praise and Malaise
. Comments

mark_mcguire LSD, Not Steroids, For This Mark McGuire

Mark McGuire’s new album, Guitar Meditations Vol. II, is two minutes shy of a hundred and twenty minutes of stunningly beautiful electric guitar music. Maybe it if was his first release in a year or two, Guitar Meditations… might seem like an event, but with at least five or six solo records released in the past three years, it just seems like more of a good thing.

With at least two songs clocking in at around thirty minutes, you might think Guitar Meditations… would get boring, but it never does. “Beneath The Bells” shimmers and bubbles like early Tangerine Dream, while  ”Wandering Memory” finds McGuire picking folksy melodic lines over a bed of synths for the first thirteen minutes, then switching to 80s prog-pop palm mute riffs for a bit, before ending with the kind of beautiful, easygoing jangly riffs people only seem love when some dude is mumble-singing over them. “Postcard,” which I’m attaching for download, wonderfully confuses the “overproduced” guitar sound of 80’s soft-rock power ballads with the trebly guitar lines of Yo La Tengo or  The Clean.

Mark McGuire and Emeralds have put out some of the best ambient and drone records of the past ten years, records that belong beside classics like Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works II, Fenessz’s Endless Summer, and The Stars of the Lids’ The Tired Sounds of the Stars of the Lids. Those searching for the proof behind that statement should look no further than Guitar Meditations II.

Guitar Meditations II can be purchased from Volcanic Tongue and Mimaroglu.

MP3 :::
Mark McGuire – Postcard

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The Seven Fields of Aphelion – Periphery

Published
by
Daniel Krow
on February 5, 2010
in Praise and Malaise
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periphery The Seven Fields of Aphelion - Periphery

There’s a couple things you’d expect from a solo album of a member of the Black Moth Super Rainbow: vocoder, funky drum beats , and woozy analog synths. On BMSR’s The Seven Fields of Aphelion’s new album Periphery, you only get the last one. Closer in sound to Emeralds or Stellar OM Source, Periphery is full of gorgeous ambient synth music that would probably have sounded as natural in 1985 as it does in 2010. On tracks like “Sunburst Chemicals,” “Lake Feet,” and “Mountain Mary,” The Seven Fields of Aphelion plays real live piano, giving an added poignancy and emotional tug to the music.

There has always been a warped new-age bent to BMSR (they did live in a commune together) and The Seven Fields of Aphelion brings that to the forefront, creating music that’s serene and reflective, but with totally new signifiers for what’s “peaceful” and “calming.” While listening to Periphery, you could just as easily contemplate the beauty of a dead shopping mall or an 80s cop show as you could a river stream or sunny meadow.

You can buy Periphery from Graveface Records starting Feb. 16th.

MP3 :::
The Seven Fields of Aphelion – Sunburst Chemicals

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Duncan Cameron’s Excellent Adventure

Published
by
Daniel Krow
on January 29, 2010
in Praise and Malaise
. Comments

philexperiment Duncan Camerons Excellent Adventure

Duncan Cameron is an alias of Lieven Martens, the Dutch dude behind Dolphins Into The Future. His A Horseback Ride to the Sanctum of Montu, a reissue of Martens’ out of print tape, Tansprocesz, has just been released and it’s supposedly an audio diary of Duncan Cameron’s trip to the Temple of Montu in Egypt. For those unfamiliar with the name Duncan Cameron, he’s a man who claims he and his half brother jumped off the USS Eldridge, the ship supposedly involved in the notorious “Philadelphia Experiment,” in 1943, and time traveled twenty years into the future to Montauk, Long Island, where the government was doing top secret work on psychic warfare.

duncancameron Duncan Camerons Excellent Adventure

Basically, A Horseback Ride… is supposed to be the sound of a government trained time traveler/psychic warrior journeying on horseback to an ancient Egyptian temple to read hieroglyphics (!). If you keep this in mind when you listen to the tape, its seemingly strange mixture of bird noises, bubbling brook samples, gamelans, howling dogs, and old school Radiophonic Workshop synths actually makes sense. Compared to Dolphins Into The Future’s masterpiece ….On Seafaring Isolation, A Horseback Ride… is a difficult listen, but the concept behind it is such a perfect storm of underground culture obsessions (time travel, psychics, government conspiracies, Egyptology) that it’s hard not to be won over, not to mention the fact that Martens drops perfect little synth mini-suites at the end of each side of the tape.

A Horseback Ride to the Sanctum of Montu can be purchased here.

MP3 :::
Duncan Cameron – Glyphs [edit]

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Harlem – Hippies

Published
by
Michael Hansen
on January 24, 2010
in Praise and Malaise
. Comments

harlem-hippies-aa Harlem - Hippies

Harlem are the newest hot button garage rock export from Austin,TX who have caught a lot of media buzz as of late for their fiery, angular revivalism. Their new up-coming full length Hippies is a collection of primitive drum spasms and jerky, elastic strumming that mangles classic rock into a child’s play thing. Scratchy sing along vocals tear across forty minutes of wire-y guitar play, with occasional slight adornments of bells and pedal steel guitar.

It’s really not bad, but then again that’s their main problem, it’s not particularly memorable, it actually feels like a step back, or at least an ill-advised consolidation of their last album Free Drugs. There are highlights, like the swagger of “Gay Human Bones” or the perfect vocal melody on “Be Your Baby”, but at 16 songs that all sound pretty similar, I had to check to see if the disc had started over already or not. It’s really just a bunch of honest, three-minute freakouts running on bravado alone, aiming to be the soundtrack to your next house party. They’ve got the spirit, and sometimes they nail the scuzzy post-grunge slacker anthem right on the head, but they could stand to stray from their comfort zone a bit more, or risk slipping through the cracks. I bet they put on a fun live act, though, and maybe that’s all these guys are trying for.

Hippies is available April 6th on Matador.

For Fans Of: Meth Teeth, Black Lips, Jay Reatard

MP3 :::
Harlem – Be Your Baby
Harlem – Gay Human Bones

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