Tim Hecker - Ravedeath: 1972: B+

"In the Air: I, II and III"

Maybe I just don’t get it. All I’ve read about Ravedeath, 1972 indicates that it’s an album that is supposed to soundtrack a dystopian wasteland, fraught with despair and forgotten sounds. However, when I listen to Ravedeath, 1972, rarely do I hear anything particularly negative. I find the songs cool, I ruminate over the washes of ambience that Hecker crafts for this fifty-minute product, but barely do I perceive the arrangements to resemble cacophony. “No Drums,” true to its name, is docile and unassuming. The three “In the Fog” tracks are swashes of major chords played through undecipherable instruments. “Analog Paralysis 1978” ends with vague guitar finickry and slight pitter-patter and “Studio Suicide 1978” begins with what sounds like the New York Philharmonic warming up from an echo-y broom closet adjacent to the amphitheater. While these sounds are fascinating, rarely are they vicious. At worst, they are ominous, as in the “In the Air” series that concludes the album, but, even then, the last of them ends on a solitary piano that drifts off into the distance, signaling to me not disintegration but a hope for a better future. Like I’ve said before, Ravedeath 1972 and most ambient works are what you perceive them to be. The album’s great fodder for pondering your life, and, based on your own proclivities, Hecker’s songs can either affirm or disavow it. The album forebodes at times, but that does not mean it has to be depressing.

Tim Hecker - Ravedeath: 1972: B+

Elbow - Build A Rocket Boys!: B

"The Birds"

Please refer for reference

So slow, so boring, so average, so British. Not bad, but I guess if I sang a melody in an echo chamber over and over again, it wouldn’t sound so bad either, would it?

Elbow - Build A Rocket Boys!: B

The Low Anthem - Smart Flesh: B+

"Burn"

Smart Flesh, The Low Anthem’s fourth album, is very good, but, as it progresses, one gets the impression that it could be much better. The strengths of the band are apparent from the onset. Singer Ben Knox Miller has a quiet storm of a voice, fixing your gaze to his words whenever they are emitted from his lips. At times, his tone resembles that of James Taylor, at others Cat Stevens and Blitzen Trapper’s Eric Early. The frailty in his voice is flexible to the words he speaks. He sounds like Bob Dylan in “Boeing 737” and “Matter of Time” sounds like what would happen if Heath Ledger’s Joker wrote a tender love song. His soft voice brings attention to his lyrics, which can be entertaining through either depreciating quips (“First she shot me with whisky then chased me with gin”) or well-founded rhetorical portraits, as in the album highlight, “Burn.”

However, Miller’s vocal performance is just about all that’s interesting about Smart Flesh. With the exception of the presence of clarinets in songs like “Ghost Warrior Blues” and “Wire,” the album deals into the stereotypical folksy sound: acoustic guitars that just keep strumming, organs that play sweeping chords and banjo that’s only there to give the illusion of authenticity. I cannot name a time when the music is anything less than solid, but Miller’s humor and candor deserve a much better setting than one that just strives for average. The result isn’t necessarily an album that sounds bad, but the lack of musical ambition drags down songs that don’t have such a pronounced lyrical presence like “Hey, All You Hippies!”

So Smart Flesh is a success, but it’s too unnecessarily top-heavy. Mediocre instrumentation does not make for a bad album, but the anonymity of the arrangements can make one nod off in boredom and miss the greater skill that Miller observes. For however good his voice is, it’s very quiet and thus demanding of your full attention. The Low Anthem need to learn that it is possible for folk to be original and, though Smart Flesh is an admirable release, more like it will start to sound like wasted talent.

The Low Anthem - Smart Flesh: B+

Hayes Carll - KMAG YOYO (& Other American Stories): B+ / Charles Bradley - No Time For Dreaming: B+

"KMAG YOYO" (Live 21 Days Before The Largest Tax Hike EVER)  
"Why Is It So Hard"

Well, it was bound to happen eventually. Election season has begun, and President Obama has initiated his campaign for a second term in 2012. That means we can now start the conversation of what the man’s done for our country, whether we should trust him to lead for another four years, and whether he is worth our vote. For me, it’s the beginning of an unfortunate time, because I don’t think I will be comfortable casting a ballot for either of the sides from which I will be ultimately made to choose. We all know Obama sailed into the oval office on a wave of change, and the music immediately following his election reflected that virile surge of hope (Pearl Jam’s gloriously uncharacteristic optimist anthem, “The Fixer” comes readily to mind). But now, as it becomes an increasingly dreary task to parse out what has been made better in America under his first term, it is no surprise that music being released is beginning to echo the economic, social and political futility that exists now more than ever. It was in the start of the decade when this mentality started to take shape in music, and, in 2011, there is no escaping it. Although Hayes Carll is a country singer from Houston, Texas and Charles Bradley is a soul singer from Poughkeepsie, New York, the new albums from both typify this mounting negativity reflective of the state of the country.

Throughout KMAG YOYO (& Other American Stories), Hayes Carll comes off as the true postmodern country singer. His voice is sloppy and unhinged and his lyrics are flippant, making the pain and hardship described in most of his songs far more endearing than anything Lady Antebellum, Taylor Swift or even Jamey Johnson could write. In the title track, “KMAG YOYO,” Carll chronicles a hilariously fabricated series of events that unfold after he signs up for the army (Arms dealing, space travel. You’d have to hear it to believe it) and “Another Like You” pairs him with a lovable lass that’s just as deranged as he (--“Shouldn’t you be purging?” --“Well you’re probably still a virgin.” --“I can’t believe you’re not on The View.”). KMAG YOYO is an endlessly quotable album, apparent whether Carll is chiding love or politics. His finest moment, though, comes toward the album’s end, when he depicts a recessional holiday with devastating specificity on “Grateful For Christmas.” It’s a tear-jerking ode to imperfection, and, even if KMAG YOYO has some significant filler in between such highlights, it’s still nice to hear some country that’s clever and genuinely relatable for a change.

Charles Bradley toiled on the musical circuit for decades before Daptone Records picked him up a few years ago and finally gave him the platform for a debut album. Bradley, now 62, hefts all those years of disappointment onto that record, No Time For Dreaming. The first line on the album is indicative of its tone. “This world is going up in flames / And nobody wanna take the blame,” he rebukes amidst the retro instrumentation of the Daptones, No Time For Dreaming’s backup band. Often, Bradley’s fervent pleas sound on the verge of tears, a sentiment that is supported by the expressive instrumentation of trumpet player Dave Guy and saxophonist Leon Michaels. Together, they create the nostalgic soul not dissimilar to the work The Daptones have done with Sharon Jones, but, like her music, it’s hard to imagine the new-world perspective of No Time for Dreaming fitting in with the soul music of the 1960’s. The devastating sadness that often boils over in songs like “How Long” and “Heartaches and Pain” are wholly unique to Bradley, and the way he inhabits them makes for an overwhelming performance that rivals that of Otis Redding, a clear influence here. In “Why Is It So Hard,” Bradley tells the story of how he got to this point in his life, how he moved to Brooklyn from Florida and then to Poughkeepsie to escape his many stresses, bookending his verses by crying, “Why is it so hard to make it in America?” One would hope that the existence of No Time for Dreaming is an indication that things are looking up for Bradley. His voice and songwriting ability are somewhat of lost treasures, and it’s better late than never that we get to hear the genius this guy has been ceaselessly peddling for most of his life.

Hayes Carll - KMAG YOYO (& Other American Stories): B+ / Charles Bradley - No Time For Dreaming: B+

The Psychic Paramount - II: A-

"N5"

Restraint: Know it, understand it, love it, because restraint is the most important aspect to enjoying The Psychic Parliament’s first album in six years, II. Where other groups that deal in instrumental noise rock have a tendency to take advantage of the amorphous nature of their genre and flail their instruments tunelessly into expectedly bat-shit directions, The Psychic Parliament maintain a taut push-pull relationship between each of its three members that allows for countless melodies to ebb and flow through each of their tracks that often exceed the five-minute mark.

What will often happen on II is guitarist Drew St. Ivany and bassist Ben Armstrong will set the parameters of a song in terms of tone, tempo and tune, and then allow for drummer Tatsuya Nakatani to dictate the direction of the movements from there. The restraint in St. Ivany and Armstrong is obvious in the many times they resort to ambient distortion in order to accommodate the psychedelic nature of many of II’s songs, but Nakatani is equally disciplined. When he’s given the floor, he does not simply freak out and turn the proceedings into a boring “Let’s-count-the-cymbal-crashes” ordeal. Instead, he finesses his way through St. Ivany and Armstrong’s arrangements. On “N6,” he matches St. Ivany’s anxious strums with equally restless high-hat paradiddles that devolve into the hauntingly distant foundation to the following track, “Isolated.” Nakatani demonstrates his influence best when he rears “Intro / Sp” from chaos to sly propulsion by simply switching from cymbals to high hat.

II relies significantly on repetition, most notably in the two bass (?) notes played continuously on “DDB,” so The Psychic Parliament’s performance can often sound like improvisation. However, the poise the band observes on the album through these bouts of repetition turns them into the potential backbeats for songs with vocals, but ones that could never be constrained to any verse-chorus-verse structure. The overall effect of these songs is controlled chaos; lightning in a bottle. II soundtracks the most uproarious rager that ever took place so dangerously close to the edge of a cliff.

The Psychic Paramount - II: A-

Moonsorrow - Varjoina kuljemme kuolleiden maassa: A

"Huuto"

Varjoina kuljemme kuolleiden maassa isn’t your standard folk metal album. At over an hour and with just seven tracks, Moonsorrow’s ­­­­seventh release is made of incredibly long songs, and none of them are particularly concerned with forming discernable parts or even establishing concrete structures. No, instead, Moonsorrow have a riff per song, and they play the shit out of that riff, making up the majority of the length of Varjoina kuljemme kuolleiden maassa’s tracks, many of which exceed the ten-minute mark.

And, yet, somehow, it works beautifully. I don’t know if it’s the riffs or my admiration for the sheer chutzpah it takes to fill a sixteen minute song with little more than one guitar line and some instrumental accompaniment, but Varjoina kuljemme kuolleiden maassa is never grating, and that sixteen minute song, “Huuto” is the album’s fantastic centerpiece that breezes by like a song less than half its length. If you think this is a dubious justification for the quality of an album, then you obviously haven’t heard these riffs. Those guitar lines become grander and more encompassing with each iteration. They build and build until you have no other recourse but to hear them at full volume and sing the notes to yourself with a seemingly endless intensity.

There are more notable aspects to Varjoina kuljemme kuolleiden maassa. Henri "Trollhorn" Urponpoika Sorvali is a graduate of the Six Feet Under school of vomit/sing, but like the best melodic death metal albums, his psychobabble is far from center stage. The band has some semblance of arrangement at times, perhaps diverging into an instrumental passage before riding faithfully back into that pivotal guitar line. The album has a post-apocalyptic narrative to it akin to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (“As shadows we walk in the land of the dead” goes the album title’s translation), but the only evidence you will hear of it is in the interludes between songs, in which a man walks through tactile brush, conjuring images of The Road’s main character and his thankless journey to the shore. The songs, themselves, are far too epic to be thought of as soundtracks to vast wastelands; battles between gods or a treacherous march would be more appropriate.

The only negative aspect of Varjoina kuljemme kuolleiden maassa is that, in first track, “Tähdetön,” Moonsorrow utilize the mid-song folk dalliance that I’ve noted as hackneyed in other metal releases this year from MyGrain and Omnium Gatherum. Other than that, Varjoina kuljemme kuolleiden maassa is pure ear candy that could prove to be an even greater grower due to the mounting nature of the album’s arrangements. It’s no surprise that one of the first great metal albums of the year is a slow builder (This has been a slow building kinda year, ya know?), and the more time spent with it is more time spent having intelligent and affecting metal wash over your pleasure centers.

Moonsorrow - Varjoina kuljemme kuolleiden maassa: A

Amplifier - The Octopus: B-

"Minion's Song"

For The Octopus to be truly worth your time, its length would literally need to cut in half. At about two hours, the album is Manchester’s Amplifier serving up a plate of prog rock that’s really prog rock in length only. The first musical instrument heard on the album, at the end of the positively virile introduction, “The Runner,” is a piano, which is later revealed to be manned by a singer with a strangely ordinary voice playing what would appear to be a very ordinary song. Sel Balamir, that singer, resembles The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon for sounding particularly self-referential and particularly British, qualities that do not fit with the vast scope of The Octopus. That first actual song, “Minion’s Song,” sounds like a wry send-up of Industrial Age theatrics that Hannon did very well on his 2010 effort, Bang Goes the Knighthood. The difference between Amplifier and The Divine Comedy, though, is that Hannon can get his point across in less than four minutes; “Minion’s Song” needs almost six. This is a trend that becomes quite prevalent as The Octopus continues.

To Amplifier’s credit, The Octopus is not a customary concept album that’s bloated with senseless instrumentation or an intrusive narrative. However, if you’re going to have me listen to an album whose length spans the entirety of the Ramones ‘70’s output, there needs to be something for me to latch onto. There are some cool parts to momentarily treasure (I could name them, but nitpicking with an album this large would take up far too much space), but, for those who even finish the damn thing, Amplifier will come off sounding like a wannabe Porcupine Tree that thought they could one-up the prog factor in all the wrong ways. I’ve never felt trapped listening to an album, but, when you realize somewhere between “Trading Dark On the Stock Exchange” and “The Sick Rose” (which both might as well be recordings of appliances humming they’re so unmemorable) that you’ve still got another hour to go, it’s hard not to wonder how many better things you could be doing with those sixty minutes, an option of which may very well be doing nothing.

The Octopus doesn’t receive an F, because, on a track-by-track basis, it is a lot easier to digest, and, thus, a lot easier to appreciate. However, it’s rather daunting to be placed in front of those irrevocable two hours when planning to listen to it, and I’m here to tell you that, unfortunately, it’s as tough getting through them as it appears. Amplifier have the potential to be an excellent rock band, as evidenced by The Octopus, and the album certainly sounds better when you give it the chance, but it’s an unfortunate possibility that so many will choose not to hear it, because of its rather unnecessary length.

Amplifier - The Octopus: B-

Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring For My Halo: A-

"Society Is My Friend"

It’s coming to the close of the little music festival you and your friends had been organizing for a couple of months, and the final band that was supposed to play folk-influenced marimba (or at least that’s what it said they played on their website) still hasn’t shown up. The first three bands that played were good, and the crowd of a little less than a hundred people is pleasantly surprised how well these couple of college kids managed to get their shit together enough to put on a pretty good show. But, without that show-ender, all that you’ve worked for is going to end in a flat and awkward failure. There are about five minutes left of the last group before the folk marimba band’s supposed to play and you get a call from their manager saying that the band’s stuck in Pittsburg traffic and won’t be able to make it. You panic. It says on the program that the show goes until ten, and there’s no way you’re going to go up there and embarrass yourself in front of all those people. You confer with your colleagues to think of any last-minute plans, and Bill, ever the optimist, suggests something.

“That guy, Kurt. Hasn’t he written like a bunch of songs?”

“Yeah, I guess, but does he have enough to play a forty minute set?”

“Probably. I see him playing a guitar on the quad all the time and I don’t think I’ve ever heard him play the same song twice. I mean, do we have any other options?”

“I guess not… Is Kurt around?”

“Yeah. He goes to all these open mic-type things.”

Kurt arrives as if in a blissful daze. His wavy brown hair rests on his shoulders and his eyes are always half-closed, even when speaking to you. He seems nice enough and assures you that he has enough material to finish the set; he just needs an electric, an acoustic and maybe a drummer if you can spare one. You have all three, so you oblige and thrust him onstage a couple minutes after the last band has played. The audience is quiet as Kurt methodically sits at the stool center stage, grabs the acoustic laid out for him and starts fingerpicking the first notes of “Baby’s Arms.”

Smoke For My Halo is so personable, it sounds as if it were performed by a friend you never knew was a musical genius. His sluggish drawl conjures the image of an intense slacker, but he focuses that mentality into gorgeous songs that are relatable and often hilarious. There’s a song about Jesus, one about being on tour, one about selling out, and a shit ton about girls, apathy and some combination of the two. Smoke For My Halo is richly produced with extra percussion and clever guitar effects that contradict the laziness Vile emits so well in his performance. It’s an endearing effort that might convince you to turn up the bass a little and rest that extra hour before starting that really important paper you’ve been meaning to get to. I know a guy that reminds me of the Kurt Vile on Smoke Ring For My Halo, and you do, too. And you’re not alone if you count Vile’s success here as a win for that guy, as well.

Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring For My Halo: A-

The Joy Formidable - The Big Roar: A-

"Whirring"

Alas, in the time that I’ve had to listen to The Joy Formidable’s first proper album, The Big Roar, I haven’t found much to write about. I’ve been far too busy enjoying the album and taking in the great amounts of fun, joy, distress and catharsis this trio can conjure for a fifty-minute product that has the potential to mean the world to countless amounts of listeners.

In many ways, The Big Roar can be compared to Los Campesinos! Romance Is Boring, another album by a British group that seethes with erudite bravado; its UK release was almost an exact year before that of The Big Roar. However, The Joy Formidable are a lot more raw than Los Campesinos! in a lot of ways. Rather than clever wordplay, The Joy Formidable hinge their appeal on the performance of guitarist and lead singer, Ritzy Bryan. Whether strumming elastic chords or jading riffs with distortion, Ritzy’s guitar parts sound just on the verge of implosion, and The Joy Formidable’s bassist and drummer accommodate this attitude, excellently. Ritzy’s lyrics don’t riff on angst-y subjects in a stream-of-consciousness whimper like that of Los Campesinos! Instead they opt for poignant adages that are often just as affecting. “Love is the everchanging spectrum of a lie!” Ritzy hollers in a jarring falsetto on The Big Roar’s epic opener. “I don’t want to see you like this,” she pleads on a later track. These vague statements can seem to many like pompous posturing, but the massive heft of the band’s musicianship, coupled with Ritzy’s confident swoon, make these overarching declarations far from platitudes.

The Big Roar is the first indie rock album I’ve ever heard that prominently features double bass drum. Not surprisingly, many of The Big Roar’s tracks crumble under the weight of their own entropy, collapsing into bouts of chaotic fuzz and crash cymbal. To heighten this state of pandemonium, drummer Matt Thomas will begin wailing on his set to elevate the heaviness of the band’s tracks more than I’ve ever heard a group like them do. On the album’s centerpiece, the raucous “Whirring,” Thomas even weaves double bass triplets into the din that overtakes its second half. It’s unexpected at first, but becomes exceedingly appropriate as it is the highest musical addition the band could have incorporated at that point. When the song sputters close to the seven-minute mark, one wonders why other bands haven’t tried it before.

The Big Roar, by its end, feels like the culmination of multiple albums, because it’s packed with so many peaks that are overtaken by silence, there are a handful of cases when one thinks that there is no way that the group could continue after such a prompt aural beating (This effect even occurs midway through a song, as on the two-part “Llaw = Wall”). And yet The Joy Formidable carry on, hurling life-affirming climaxes at you like you were the last picked for a dodgeball game. The Big Roar is such a ridiculously promising debut for this London group, I’m surprised other critics haven’t received it as rapturously. It’s the perfect mission statement, because it establishes The Joy Formidable’s sound, but still leaves some aspects of it to be explored and improved upon, and I have the utmost confidence that they will continue to make great music as they get a more confident footing as a band. Welcome aboard, The Joy Formidable. Glad to have you with us.

The Joy Formidable - The Big Roar: A-

R.E.M. - Collapse Into Now: C+

"Alligator Aviator Autopilot Antimatter"

It’s one thing for a band to cop the performance style of R.E.M. and make something half-assed as a result. It’s something else, entirely, when the band whose style people are copping to make crappy albums are copping the copping of those bands to make something supremely shitty. R.E.M. are supposed to be this influential band that was a bastion of pre-indie rock (and they are), but on their newest album, Collapse Into Now, they sound downright amateurish, stripping the elements that made them unique of all pretense. Not a ballast can be found on Collapse Into Now to keep it from preening into a big dumb STATEMENT of an album.

So where to start? Music: Collapse Into Now suffers from the same ailment that struck The Hold Steady’s most recent album, Heaven Is Whenever, in that the lack of variety in the guitars makes it sound far too dense and monolithic. The guitar and bass work of Peter Buck and Mike Millis, respectively, is decent, but the production on their instruments is nauseating in its lack of dynamics.

Lyrics: Oh boy, here we go. Never have I ever heard such a decent album bogged down by such awful lyrics. Michael Stipe has written some fantastic songs in the past, but, on Collapse Into Now, he seems to take himself so seriously, he not only believes he can get away with reciting inane poetry like, “I cannot tell a lie / It’s not all cherry pie” and “This is not a parable / This is a terrible,” but believes that it is high-end art to be analyzed and admired. Over a pseudo-shanty built upon accordion and acoustic guitar, Stipe breathes solemnly, “The kids have a new take / A new take on faith,” with the utmost intention of having you hang on his every word, but that heavy-handedness is laughable to even consider taking seriously. “Mine Smell Like Honey” pairs inane lyrics with an even more inane song title, “Walk It Back” tries and fails miserably to form a chorus around a clumsy phrase and “Me, Marlon Brando, Marlon Brando and I” is just as bad as its title would suggest.

Collapse Into Now even has somewhat of an arc of shitty lyrics, climaxing on final track, “Blue,” by far the worst song on the album. In it, Stipe lets loose in a five-minute, distorted, stream-of-consciousness soliloquy, slinging the type of non sequitur vomit that could only come from someone who doesn’t think anyone would be smart enough to read into a single line or phrase. “Yellow circus left the stakes a broken ropes world’s useless mug / The ties that bind, ha ha / I can be a bad poet / Street poet / Shit poet / Kind poet too,” and he goes on like this for a few more stanzas before Peter Buck coos a soft refuge, but not for long, as we’re thrust back into the fray of Stipe’s pretentious psyche. That’s right, pretentious. “Blue” is so awful, it could make you lose faith in what R.E.M. has become over the past decade. It confronts you, directly, with the possibility that the band may believe significantly more than just their own hype.

It is in this regard that Collapse Into Now sounds like the work of an R.E.M. cover band, because it masterfully takes the notable aspects of the group and exaggerates them into agonizing caricatures. When Stipe sings in a lower register, he has a habit of trailing off his notes, making them sound, intentionally or not, much more poignant than any logic garnered from his lyrics could justify. He sounds like what my Michael Stipe impression would sound like if I wanted him to sound conceited and provincial. It’s surprising to hear such labored drivel from a group as respected as R.E.M. I’ve heard some heinous ‘90’s rehashing in my time, but it is a genuine disappointment to hear such a stalwart so spectacularly spin out as badly as the band does on Collapse Into Now.

R.E.M. - Collapse Into Now: C+