Cass McCombs - Wit's End: B+

"County Line"

At thirty-three, I don’t think Cass McCombs should be sounding this old. The California singer/songwriter has been writing drowsy waltzes for almost a decade, now, but, on his newest album, you’d think Wit’s End was an implication of debilitation rather than insanity. A song like “County Line”, features a devious descending organ line. You would hope McCombs would take advantage of it to elevate his silent lament to a cathartic altitude, but McCombs lets the line be, the notes fading without context. While “County Line” is a good song regardless, its repeated anticlimaxes are indicative of Wit’s End’s defeatist ambition and how cumbersome it can be at times.

The arrangements of Wit’s End border on medieval. Mandolin and harpsichord abound and songs tend to unfold like parables. “A Knock Upon the Door”, the last song on the album, plays out with the humble theatrics of a Canterbury tale, making sure to add a funny knocking sound at the title’s repetition. It should be no surprise that the album’s dark undertones are accompanied with ominous lyrics, and McCombs delivers spectacularly at times. Most effective is “Buried Alive”, which somehow manages to romanticize embalming; McCombs singing “polyethylene reserve” like it’s a choice on the wine list. “A calf is easy to brand,” he warbles on “Memory Stain”, sounding strangely sadistic in his nasally monotone. I don’t know how I feel about McCombs’s sonic approach on Wit’s End, but his persona is one that he plays admittedly well.

The problem with Wit’s End, though, is that its songs can be construed as boring as opposed to just understated. I see it somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. On one hand, the dry repetition of songs like “The Lonely Doll” can get so tedious you may miss some of McCombs’s best lines. In “Memory Stain”, a shaker interrupts the song intermittently throughout its seven minutes as if to acknowledge that it needs to regain your attention. But on the other hand, there are some long songs on Wit’s End that breeze by with great aplomb. Although it’s over nine minutes long, “A Knock Upon the Door” simply sounds like McCombs telling a ten-minute story. All the tracks on Wit’s End are good for at least one modest hook. At the very least, the album’s mood remains consistent.

So Wit’s End isn’t for everyone, maybe not even for most. It’s a depressing album, and, unfortunately, it doesn’t always deliver on that communal uplift that has immortalized the best albums made in its style. At times, it feels like McCombs is building his songs on flimsy foundations, which is unfortunate because Wit’s End hints at work that can achieve what he only partly accomplishes. I would suggest Wit’s End for people who are already fans of Cass McCombs, but for those not already versed with his work, you could just give this a cursory listen and move on.

Cass McCombs - Wit's End: B+

Boris - Attention Please: B / Boris: Heavy Rocks: B

"Les Paul Custom '86" "Missing Pieces"

Boris albums have always been growers for me. I got into the Japanese metal band after doing a presentation about them in school. I got their 2006 album, Pink, thought it was pretty good and bought their 2008 album, Smile, when it came out. I thought Smile was excellent, but, after months and months of listening to it, I realized that it was more than just an excellent album, but a perfect blend of the band’s trademark drones, heavy riffing and pop leanings. It was upon that point that I appreciated Smile much more and boosted it from an A- in my mind to an A+; it would go on to claim the second place spot on my list of greatest albums of 2008. For some reason, the eclectic stylings of Boris have always taken longer to absorb than most.

At this point in my listening experience with Attention Please and Heavy Rocks, the two full-length albums that Boris have released simultaneously as a follow-up to Smile, I have been disappointed, but for different reasons. On one end, you have Attention Please, the group’s foray into lite-metal with explicit propensities for pop and even dance. It is the first Boris album to feature guitarist Wata singing exclusively and her coo greatly softens the brashness that Boris fans have come to expect. And then on the other end there’s Heavy Rocks, a veritable Boris greatest hits album, featuring all the same elements that made Smile great to an almost uncomfortable degree.

Let me first say that I do not dislike Attention Please because it goes in a significantly mainstream direction. Boris fans should have seen this coming, as songs like the “Statement” B-Side “Floor Shaker” and “8” from the group’s 2009 Japanese Heavy Rock Hits series, were tracks that showed the group developing into a more streamlined metal act. Those two tracks I mentioned happen to be fantastic. While neither have surmounted Smile’s drone odyssey, “You Were Holding an Umbrella”, as my favorite Boris song, both are some of the greatest metal songs of the 2000’s, the former sporting an infectious guitar lick and the latter featuring arguably the most cathartic guitar solo in an entire decade. People have been accusing Attention Please of being akin to J-Pop, which is absurd. If anything, it’s the next logical step for the group to take since releasing Smile.

I don’t like Attention Please because it’s boring. As a guitarist, Wata doesn’t get nearly enough credit for the amazing fretwork she has been laying down for fifteen years now, but as a singer, she’s quite anonymous. I imagine Boris called the album Attention Please because it was a pretty radical shift; the fact that it is so comparatively mellow should be enough to make people notice. Unfortunately, though, the novelty of this sedate sound fades as Attention Please goes on. Wata sings in a whisper, so it is logical that the album’s arrangements accommodate her tone. Its tracks are a lot more tempered and, by its second half, it opts for ambient drones that blend into a pointless blob. And then the album ends. While there are some moments of riffage and interesting musical concepts (the sexy pulsing bassline in the title track for one), Attention Please ultimately feels more like Boris diluted than a distinct creative shift. The album comes off as more lazy than adventurous.

My dislike of Heavy Rocks mostly stems from its existence. While listening to the album, it is clear that its purpose was to be a counterpoint to Attention Please, an album that’s Smile-like blend of the group’s disparate styles would satiate fans scratching their heads at Attention Please. It is the second Boris album called Heavy Rocks after all, as if to double down in trying to redeem the group’s metal cred by releasing an album that almost wants to redefine heavy music through this brazen repetition.

While this is an admirable sentiment that I would not normally object to, Heavy Rocks sounds far too much like a Smile rewrite. You’ve got your twelve-minute drone in “Aileron”, your punkish guitar romp in “GALAXIANS” and even your gut-wrenching ballad in “Missing Pieces”. While these tracks are great fun, the similarities to Heavy Rocks’s predecessor become quite stark and the album begins to feel more obligatory than anything else. “Jackson Head” is dumb fun for its repetition of its nonsensical title, “Riot Sugar” erupts into the crisp metal that has yielded some of Boris’s best songs and the breakneck chugs of “Czechoslovakia” sound like prime Anthrax, an approach to songwriting I have never quite heard from the group before. In the abstract, these are still good songs, but it is difficult to ignore the originality elephant in the room while listening to Heavy Rocks. As a result, it too feels like a diluted Boris album.

I’m not worried, though. Boris is such a consistently fabulous group that I could chalk these two up to transitional records and I’d probably be right. Smile was the seamless consolidation of a group’s work with a lot of creative ground to cover. While Attention Please and Heavy Rocks falter significantly, they observe the group going into directions that I wouldn’t find objectionable if they were performed well. It’s unfortunate that it took Boris four years to make Attention Please and Heavy Rocks, the longest time between Boris albums in the group’s career, but my faith in them remains strong. Very few metal bands have been willing to evolve and experiment quite like Boris has, so I think we can forgive them if they release some slipups along the way.

Boris - Attention Please: B / Boris: Heavy Rocks: B

Death Cab for Cutie - Codes and Keys: B+

"St. Peter's Cathedral"

Before I really got into music and before Ben Gibbard became my arch nemesis by marrying Zooey Deschanel, Death Cab for Cutie defined indie rock for me. Right around the time Plans came out, the inoffensive jangle of hit singles “Soul Meets Body” and “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” were so omnipotent, I assumed that was what all independent music got off on. A song like “Crooked Teeth”, a bona fide classic in my mind, was vaguely quirky but nevertheless incredibly safe, the musical equivalent of a soft pat on the back. The group’s music never spoke out of turn and addressed love and faith in terms so grand they wouldn’t so much as ruffle the perfectly coifed hair of a JC Penny model. When I later found out that the group’s name was based on a song that Digital Dream Door named one of the strangest of all time, it made perfect sense. Death Cab for Cutie were a group with just enough snark to keep their creativity levels barely above cruise control.

And then “I Will Possess Your Heart” came out. At over eight minutes, the track was the last thing I was expecting to hear from the homely guys who wrote “The Sound of Settling”. It told a story through the perspective a persistent stalker, but Gibbard worded his lines so as to make the narrator sound almost amiable. “How I wish you could see the potential,” the protagonist quietly laments after nearly five minutes of an ominous bassline and light piano. “The potential for you and me.” It was a brilliant expression of a complicated character narrative and the song’s video was just as fascinating, a camera wordlessly following a girl across the world; haunting and yet so ambiguous. The song convinced me Death Cab were capable of making music that could confound as well as comfort. At the very least it signaled a maturation in style.

That newfound darkness, to a certain extent, is injected into all the songs of Death Cab for Cutie’s eighth album, Code and Keys. While no track reaches the creative heights of “I Will Possess”, the album is more consistent in the group’s attempts to stray away from major chords and verses-chorus-verse structures. The chorus of “House Is A Fire” pivots on a strange key, sounding unsure but intriguing amidst electronic percussion I hesitate to relate to Ben Gibbard’s 2003 one-off, The Postal Service. Songs like “Some Boys”, “Doors Unlocked and Open” and first single “You Are A Tourist” are conventional pop songs built around foreboding piano lines and heavy bass. This sonic gloom, along with the album’s improved production, is a welcomed addition to the Death Cab aesthetic that gives the group a much-needed depth.

However, there are other songs on the album that have a Plans-like obsequiousness. “Underneath the Sycamore”, “Monday Morning” and the title track are laden with timid acoustics and Jason McGrerr’s painfully metronomic drumming (which is a shame because he has proven himself to be quite good on songs like “Meet Me on the Equinox” and “I Will Possess”). These are great songs, but I prefer Death Cab when they go for something greater than the sum of their parts, like on penultimate track, “St. Peter’s Cathedral.” Beginning with Gibbard singing over light organ, the song builds with a faint choir and synthetic percussion until the group strikes a minor chord and the track swells wonderfully in a flurry of Boy Scout chants and Gibbard’s insistence that there is no afterlife.

For all this talk of a discovered negativity, Codes and Keys will probably be known as one of the few Death Cab albums to end on a happy note. “Stay Young Go Dancing” is just about as joyous of a waltz as you can surmise from its title. It’s a great song like the rest of Codes and Keys, but it also shares their marginal confliction. You see, at this point, Death Cab for Cutie have a lot of styles to contend with. I haven’t even mentioned albums of that innocuous back pat pop like Transatlanticism and Something About Airplanes that longtime Death Cab fans were hoping the group would return to after Narrow Stairs. There isn’t really anything like that on Codes and Keys, and, personally, I’m happy about that. It’s no revelation, but the album is an indication that the group continues to move onto something different, a quality of which I am pleasantly surprised to find.

Death Cab for Cutie - Codes and Keys: B+

My Morning Jacket - Circuital: B+

"Holdin' On to Black Metal"

I’ve never been very much into My Morning Jacket, mostly because I find that they are a band founded upon contradiction. The first song I heard from the group was “Off the Record” off their 2005 album, Z. It was a breezy indie rock number that went into an electronic-indebted jam session in its second half. The song clocked in at five and a half minutes and that felt just right for a song so poppy and modest. Come to find out, though, that the group is supposed to be a southern rock outfit with Flying V guitars and raucous live shows, and I couldn’t believe it. This was mostly due to MMJ singer Jim James’s voice. It was so soft, so nasally; it couldn’t possible fit over any music that was remotely aggressive.

So now, we find ourselves at My Morning Jacket’s sixth album and I’m still having trouble with that contradiction in their style. The Louisville group seems to have a lot of ideas on Circuital, and the product’s a bit of a sprawl. “Victory Dance” sounds like a Deep Purple raised in Memphis and “Wonderful (The Way I Feel)” sounds like acoustic Neil Young. More than any other song I’ve heard in a long time, “Outta My System” sounds like The Who circa The Who Sell Out. With double-tracked vocals, James speaks of the need to get debauchery done early in life so that it doesn’t manifest itself in a “midlife crisis”. “They told me not to smoke drugs, but I wouldn’t listen / Never thought I’d get caught and wind up in prison / Chalk it up to youth but young age I ain’t dissin’ / I just had to get it outta my system,” James sings at the track’s beginning and I’m immediately reminded of a Roger Daltry-like character lecturing youngin’s only slightly younger than he. I half expect James to say he can see his drug problem going on for miles and miles.

It’s difficult to say whether Circuital lives up to the southern rock thrill that I have often heard is these guys’ trademark. Instead, we have some really good indie rock songs, nothing more nothing less. “You Wanna Freak Out” is light guitar pop in the vein of “Off the Record” that is a highlight late in the album. “First Light” is a classic rocker shaken up by a blaring low-end synth. The winner of best track on the album is a three-way tie between the title track, “The Day Is Coming” and “Holdin’ On to Black Metal”. The title track erupts from an acoustic jaunt into reliable rips of power chords and guitar solos. “The Day Is Coming” features an off-kilter drum pattern with a bass boom that refreshes the verses. And “Black Metal” features a children’s choir and a horn section, two of the least likely components to ever be featured on a black metal song. Nevertheless, it rocks like a raunchy spy film theme sung with dainty falsettos.

Despite the many places that My Morning Jacket explore on Circuital, the group never stretches themselves too thin. It’s a very consistent release and fans of the group’s last two albums will find nothing to object to here. I don’t know if Circuital or My Morning Jacket in general deserve all this critical praise, but I dislike nothing on the group’s newest and enjoy quite a bit of it. One could make the argument that MMJ is having some significant trouble finding a cohesive sound, but I’d be more likely to chalk that up to experimentation rather than indecisiveness. While not exemplary, Circuital will satisfy one’s taste for indie rock that wishes it were a couple decades older.

My Morning Jacket - Circuital: B+

Thurston Moore - Demolished Thoughts: B+

"Benediction"

While listening to Demolished Thoughts, I cannot help but think, “He would.” A guy like Thurston Moore, an integral part of one of the pioneering indie rock groups of the late 80’s, would write an album that sounds like a collection of acoustic pseudo-grunge songs. Listening to Demolished Thoughts, I am reminded of an excellently produced mid-90’s “MTV Unplugged” performance. I know such a description carries along with it many negative connotations, but it’s true. Demolished Thoughts is a beautiful album that always makes it clear from what era its maker comes from.

Moore’s voice on Demolished Thoughts sounds like J. Mascis at times, others like Marcy Playground’s Jon Wozniak. His notes trail off like Michael Stipe at a low register. He’s adequate and distinct, but quaint and unassuming. The album’s arrangements, however, more than make up for that. Demolished Thoughts is almost exclusively acoustic with a drummer, bassist, harpist and violinist providing the only accompaniment. Its songs are solemn but breathtakingly. First track “Benediction” is languid with swelling violin that comes in at just the right time. When his acoustic moves heavenward to accommodate Moore’s higher register as he sings, “You better hold your lover down,” it’s glorious. The whole album is filled with moments like these; songs so beautifully arranged that, by the end, Moore’s voice only gets a few lines in before the listener is transported back into this agreeable wonderland.

Demolished Thoughts ain’t all butterflies and The Sound of Music, though. Moore strums his acoustic aggressively on “Circulation”, a track that disseminates into booming darkness during its chorus. “Mina Loy” is also dark and an excellent exhibit of Moore’s versatile guitar playing. His work here may not burst into raucous solos, but there isn’t a moment when what and how he plays his six-string doesn’t contribute to the tone of the music.

I almost wish there were more moments like “Mina Loy” on Demolished Thoughts. As I mentioned before, by the end of the album, Moore defects most of his songs to instrumentals and this sometimes makes the tracks blend unintentionally. Still, it’s an impressive album that I don’t think anyone expected from this noise rock luminary, let alone expected to sound this good. What ultimately may be most important about Demolished Thoughts, is that it shows that, at 53, Thurston Moore still has something to prove. How cool is that?

Thurston Moore - Demolished Thoughts: B+

Lady Gaga - Born This Way: C+

"Judas"

About a year ago, Joanna Newsom talked to The Guardian about her dislike of Lady Gaga. “I'm mystified by the laziness of people looking at how she presents herself, and somehow assuming that implies there's a high level of intelligence in the songwriting,” she said, later clarifying that Gaga was basically “Arty Spice” and that her music and the way people treat it made her long for the days of Cyndi Lauper. I was surprised by those words from a singer/songwriter that has seldom been so outspoken, but I remember being more surprised by what Ryan Dombal had to say about it after reporting on the story in a Pitchfork article:

“Strong words. You could argue that Gaga's success in making people like M.I.A. and Joanna Newsom hopped up enough to consider the idea of art and talk out of turn in interviews basically fulfills her purpose. She's a provocateur, and it seems to be working.”

Proving Newsom’s point to an extent. Others may have dismissed Joanna Newsom’s criticisms for being jealous of Lady Gaga’s success and I would actually agree with that assessment. If you were writing twelve minute long multi-part suites in the form of intricately sequenced triple albums, how would you feel if it turned out all you had to do to be wildly commercially and critically successful was to strap on a meat dress and sing about disco sticks over tinny techno?

Lady Gaga’s at an envious point in her career where she could do whatever she liked and people would call it an artistic revelation. Now, I’m not saying reception to Gaga’s newest album, Born This Way, is like that, but I have a hunch that if she were to release an album of Auto-tuned belches, her fan base would find some way to dance to it and many a music critic would find reason to hail it as the next logical step in her crusade as America’s “provocateur”. Gaga’s at a place right now where it’s just convenient to join her bandwagon and dissent is stifled or debased to that cursed accusation of “jealousy”. Put simply, Lady Gaga is too big to fail.

Before I get into this review, I have one question to ask those reading this, whether they be Gaga fans or not: Do you honestly believe that people will remember Born This Way ten years from now? NOT Lady Gaga, Born This Way. Lady Gaga’s third album released on Interscope. Do you think that people will remember the music on this record in a decade: a tenth of a century? If your answer is in the affirmative or the negative, I urge you to read on. You can probably tell what my answer to that question is.

Let me begin by saying I don’t care about the themes of Born This Way. I don’t care about the obtuse sexual references, the gay pandering or the frequent references to a Black Jesus. You know why? Because Madonna did it almost thirty years ago. I know that it’s taboo to say Lady Gaga owes her entire career to Madonna, cliché even, but it’s absolutely true and needs to be acknowledged. There’s a reason why religious groups were barely frothing at the mouth when Gaga appeared in a latex nun outfit in her video for “Alejandro”, and that was because they thought they had pretty much stated their case about it. Thirty. Years. Ago. Listening to Lady Gaga and watching her videos, I can’t help but think that the Tipper Gores of the world have won, when we find what is controversial to be a slight upgrade from what was divisive decades ago. And Madonna didn’t need to write a whole album to be controversial. She just needed to make one video and that was it. She moved on.

And if you think that I’m somehow glorifying Madonna out of all this, I ask you to name Madonna’s third album. See, even I can’t name that shit.

The lyrics of Born This Way are an easy target for criticism, but I would rather not discuss them in this review. It should be a no brainer that lines like “Put your hands on me / John F. Kennedy” are nonsensical and, when taken seriously, sound even more ridiculous. Ed Comantale’s review of Born This Way for Tiny Mix Tapes does just that and is hilarious as a result, so I definitely recommend reading that if you want to get a full hazing of Gaga’s lyrical talent (although I’m still not completely sure if he’s joking in the piece, which makes it that much more entertaining). However, one could argue that the lyrical content of Born This Way should be taken with a grain of salt. After all, Lady Gaga never pretends that her lyrics mean anything substantive.

Oh wait except she does. All over Born This Way, there are STATEMENT songs that try to either empower or inflame, but they all come off as inert. Equating one’s freedom to one’s hair in “Hair”, while characteristically Gaga in its relation of the superficial to the profound, is a pretty lame way of instilling pride in one’s listeners. And in the unfortunate country experiment “Yoü and I”, Gaga sings in a faux twang, “There’s only three men that imma serve my whole life / It’s my daddy and Nebraska and Jesus Christ.” While that line would make for an entertaining Christmas card, the mission statement is meaningless and yet sung with all the heartfelt relevance of a letter from Saint Paul to the Corinthians. I wouldn’t care so much about this if Gaga made a point of acknowledging how stupid her lyrics were. But throughout Born This Way, she positively refuses, forcing me to apologize for this unequivocal rubbish for her.

It also doesn’t help that the production of Born This Way is surprisingly cheap. I will concede that songs like “Bad Romance” and “Alejandro” were dumb fun because their hooks were so catchy, but it seems like Gaga made a conscious decision to put the production quality of Born This Way on the backburner so she could concentrate on her lyrics… but then forgot to write those as well. However fabulously Gaga fashions herself on Born This Way, the album’s beats are no better than that of Ke$ha, sloppy seconds from a Dr. Luke coke and hookers party. Famous Def Leppard producer Mutt Lange guests on “Yoü and I” but channels more Songs From the Sparkle Lounge than Pyromania. “Americano” and “Scheiße” try to distract from their lazy stereotypes of ethnic music by having Gaga speak in different languages, of which I don’t think anyone was asking more of after “Bad Romance”. Also, did I mention there are seventeen tracks on this thing? To say that Born This Way could have used some editing is a vast understatement.

However, there is a reason why I didn’t just slap an “F” on Born This Way and move on. There are some moments on the album that are fun for what they are. The first couple singles like the title track are tolerable and “Government Hooker” is enjoyable for its superfluous self-censorship and the funny voice of the guy who sings “Back up and turn around” in the song’s pre-chorus. Even though it’s a part-by-part rewrite of “Bad Romance”, “Judas” is a barnburner for the sheer lack of fucks it’s willing to give. The verses pummel your eardrums relentlessly while a skuzzy synth dirties up the mix into an amalgamation of what the Lady Gaga aesthetic utopia could be. Much later in the album, “The Queen” has the faint keyboard chord changes to make it a contender for a decent Olivia Newton John song. However, that track is the fifteenth on Born This Way. There are eleven other songs in between that and “Judas”. The interim is a long fucking slog.

It seems now that the music has become only a small fraction of the multimedia monster that is Lady Gaga. I asked whether you believe Born This Way will be remembered in ten years as opposed to Lady Gaga the artist, because I find it impossible to extricate the album from the person who made it, and that’s a huge problem. Even with the most unapologetically personal album of this decade to date, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye West could tell stories that you wouldn’t need to be knee deep in his bullshit to relate to. This is not the case with Lady Gaga. If you think she is great for her advocacy of gay rights and her adventurous fashion sense, that’s fantastic and I will support your support of her, but to say that her music reflects these ambitions is disingenuous. Gaga has made a career out of rewriting the same five songs into full albums so she can concentrate on her image as an activist and a populist, and Born This Way is no different. However, I got news for you folks. That’s not a revolution, that’s the music industry at its ugliest.

Lady Gaga - Born This Way: C+

Ponytail - Do Whatever You Want All the Time!: B+

"AwayWay"

Trying to sound as least pretentious as possible, allow me to explain to you how it feels to be a singer in a rock group jam session. The jam session is a method through which the musicians of a group can warm up and experiment with ideas; steady rhythms and interminable repetition create an environment excellent for creative flow or just playful showing off. While this is an optimal setting for fleshing out musical schematics, it does not leave much room for a singer, whose job at the basic level is to sing over a group’s arrangements. So, in a jam session, the singer tends to be left out of the proceedings and, as a result, through desperation to be part of the process, a vocalist may sing melodies based upon nonsensical words that only vaguely adhere to the key in which the group is playing. Essentially, it’s vocal improvisation, and I haven’t heard a single case when it didn’t sound awkward or detract from the jam session’s purpose.

The lead vocal work of Molly Siegel on Baltimore quintet, Ponytail’s, newest album, Do Whatever You Want All the Time!, very much reminds me of that kind of predicament. A groove will be set by a standard set of guitars, bass and drums, but any momentum or dynamic established would be immediately decimated by Siegel, who will squawk a miscellany of syllables with little care for tempo or tune. Do Whatever You Want sounds like what would happen if someone gave the sound engineer’s 3-year-old daughter the mic during a jam session but then proceeded to lose her for a forty-minute recording. Rarely does this vocal approach sound appropriate within the album’s context and it always causes the album’s songs to drop in quality to some extent. More than anything else, Do Whatever You Want sounds painfully imbalanced.

This is a great shame, because the musicianship on display in Do Whatever You Want is fantastic. Lead guitarist Dustin Wong spins elaborate threads of six-stringed melodics while drummer Michael P, bassist Jeremy Hyman and other guitarist Ken Seeno keep up, excellently. Whether it be through the math rock of album opener, “Easy Peasy” or the fluttery bass of “Honey Touches”, the guys of Ponytail are proficient enough in their instruments that they could convey that sense of wide-eyed cheerfulness if Do Whatever You Want featured no Siegel at all. The album’s song titles also seem to be thought up by that little girl let loose in the studio, but make no mistake: these are professionals at work, bobbing and weaving like the best jam bands that ever were.

There is one moment on Do Whatever You Want in which Siegel proves to be an asset to the group, resulting in the album’s high point. “AwayWay” begins with business as usual for Ponytail until the group slows down halfway through the track. With a slow buildup, Wong and Seeno deliver shimmering guitar lines when Siegel, out of nowhere, sings and repeats a wordless but concise vocal melody, upon which the track then slays. That moment shows that Siegel isn’t incompetent, just misguided. I can only hope that Ponytail can let their guard down enough to allow themselves to utilize such a conventional songwriting technique as logical vocals in the future.

Your enjoyment of Do Whatever You Want All the Time! largely depends on your tolerance for Siegel’s singing. I am a huge fan of melodic death metal, so ignoring obnoxious vocals has become somewhat of a regular practice for me. I can enjoy the fantastic musicianship enough to give the album a solid B+, but, if you are easily annoyed, avoid this thing like the plague. There are moments in songs like “Flabbermouse” and “Tush” when Siegel isn’t featured, only to come barreling into the mix with her insufferable gibberish, so the inconsistency will probably frustrate you more than anything else. Do Whatever You Want is going to seriously piss some people off by its inherently polarizing nature, so looking into it is definitely a risk. I’m still debating with myself about whether going through with that endeavor is all that worth it.

Ponytail - Do Whatever You Want All the Time!: B+

An Horse - Walls: B+

"Trains and Tracks"

If Walls isn’t the transcendent bastion of coming-of-age adolescence that An Horse intended it to be, it is certainly an indication of the Australian girl/guy duo’s potential to write at least a few songs akin to their ambitions. The songs of Walls are spritely when they need to be and somber when appropriate. Singer Kate Cooper has a precocious voice that bounces along to Damon Cox’s instrumentation with a strangely Brooklyn accent. It comes out when she pronounces those “r”’s in “Dress Sharply”, and gives Cooper a distinct personality on the album, whether that flair was intended or not.

Walls is abound with signifiers of young adult friction like obligatory “Twin Peaks” references and songs about airports. The arrangements are often rudimentary, but when Cox accompanies Cooper’s erudite lyrics with instrumentation just as incisive, the results are exemplary, as on the thumping album highlight, “Trains and Tracks”. Walls is peppered with some great one-liners, and, even when Cooper talks about that airport, she sounds clever and self-aware. “We could count all the planes at the airport,” she sighs in the gentle “Windows in the City”. “But that would mean that you and I were in the same spot.” Unfortunately, Walls features too much inconsequential filler, but, its highlights show that An Horse may yet have their best days ahead of them.

An Horse - Walls: B+

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit - Here We Rest: A-

"Alabama Pines"

Based on how gorgeous Here We Rest is, it’s a wonder why Jason Isbell hasn’t become an enormously popular country star with the likes of Lady Antebellum, Taylor Swift or even The Zac Brown Band. Here We Rest is troubled and incredibly personal, but this isn’t a Jamey Johnson or Hayes Carll deal where you get some guy twisting country into progressive directions; the former Drive-By Truckers member’s newest album is so elegantly polished, you might want to consider recommending it to your grandmother to make it her album purchase of the year. These are unquestionably pop songs, and they’re performed so wonderfully, it will give you renewed faith in the structure of a song, something that seems to have been eluding me these past few weeks.

Instrumentally, Here We Rest does not surprise. You’ll hear acoustic and slide guitar as well as standup bass and banjo. Isbell has a smoky drawl that seems to sound both weathered and youthful. He employs it to make the arrangements of Here We Rest pleasing and often exemplary. “Never Could Believe” pops with tactile percussion to give the track a rich ensemble flavor. The post-chorus of last and best track, “Tour of Duty”, features a heavenly chord progression that shouldn’t fit within the country setting, but is absolutely heart-wrenching, an excellent coda to the track’s bittersweet subject matter of a soldier returning to civilian life.

But the core of Here We Rest is Isbell, himself. With his personable voice, he can revisit memories and play characters so convincingly, your guess is as good as mine as to which songs belong to which category. The album’s many vocal harmonies are precious, but rarely does Isbell come off as optimistic. From Here We Rest’s onset, he longs to go back to his Alabama hometown through the pines that line the roads. In the first track, he sounds separated from the past that shaped him, and we learn what caused such isolation as Here We Rest progresses. Isbell speaks at length about lost love and drug use, but he covers these topics in ways that incorporate a story. Instead of waxing poetic about a lost love, Isbell decides to pay her a visit. Now, instead of grasping at metaphors, you can feel Isbell’s nostalgia in real time as he catches up with his old flame in the beautiful “Stopping By”. “Darling, I’m not one to judge,” he sings in the bridge of “Codeine” to his lover addicted to the titular drug. “But if I was I’d say you don’t look so good.” It’s a clumsy line, but its imperfection makes the track all the more compelling. His dejection is palpable in the song’s final chorus, when he reinforces for the last time that it is one of his friends that’s feeding his lover’s addiction.

The travails of adulthood pervade every note of Here We Rest, and Isbell conveys them with personal stories of Everyman flair. In an especially poignant expression of weakness, Isbell fears for the future in one of the album’s most touching lines. “All my playground fears have faded,” he sings with trepidation on “We’ve Met”. “Replaced with grown-up nightmares / That have come true.” These are tender accounts from a road to maturity fraught with mistakes, but they’re worded so beautifully, they are instantly forgiven. Chord progression notwithstanding, “Tour of Duty” best accomplishes this, ending Here We Rest with a future as unsure as that of any other character on the album. “I’ve done my tour of duty / Now I’ll try to do what a civilian does,” Isbell sings over tightly strummed guitars and light percussion that convey an air of confidence. It’s a line so simple, it’s silly, but it excellently exemplifies the debilitating culture shock that can demoralize someone that’s been away from their home far too long. It’s a familiar but depressing situation that can ruin the commercial potential of Here We Rest. That is until that chord progression kicks in.

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit - Here We Rest: A-

Faust - Something Dirty: B

"Lost the Signal"

The only thing more surprising than the fact that Faust has, more or less, been around since the early 70’s is the fact that their newest album, Something Dirty, has the impatience and frustrating inconsistency of a group that formed yesterday. It’s hard to say exactly what number album Something Dirty is in Faust’s catalogue, because there is a whole ordeal about the group splitting into two bands with the same name, both releasing albums that fans debate whether which if any are released by the Faust of kraut-rock yore. And if this creative fissure had any effect on the music that this version of Faust has created, it’s pretty obvious. Something Dirty is a hodgepodge of disparate guitar squawks, jaunting atmospherics and foreign voices so ripe with youthful vigor it often collapses under the weight of its own lunacy.

The reason why I see Something Dirty’s chaos as more or less endearing is because, when I listen to the album, I cannot help but have glimmers of hope that Faust will tout out something cohesive when really cool ideas keep popping up. Regardless of how misguided the songs of Something Dirty are, their components are great in their own right, and, when thrown into a complete package as opposed to an aimless void, the results are astonishing. “Lost the Signal” ebbs and flows beautifully as a ballad sung by a whispery female voice. The chugging guitars and determined percussion of “Dampfauslass II” could be turned into great post-punk. But “Damfauslass II” simply peters out in two and a half minutes, its concept dashed away to make room for the next musical hiccup. Unfortunately, such is the story of the tracks that precede it.

So make a mixtape of melodic sound bytes interspersed with intriguing but ultimately pointless tape fuzz and recorded machinery and you have Something Dirty, an album that would be pretty good if it could stand to pause and focus before thrusting itself into seven-minute ambient odysseys and minute-long affronts to tonality. Something Dirty isn’t an album to be enjoyed, but to be referenced. Through it, we see both how Faust has evolved in the past forty years and what they might think of next. Do groups this old make transitional records? If not, then kudos to Faust for setting the standard.

Faust - Something Dirty: B