Motörhead - The Wörld Is Yours: A-

"Outlaw"

The people who claim to have figured out the “Motörhead formula” by saying that they simply release the same song over and over are naïve and ignorant. There is a very definite formula for why and how Motörhead manages to come up with albums every couple of years that sound starkly similar, but it’s not because they fucking thought “Hey mates! Let’s just rewrite the same song for each album we release!” No, you fools! It’s not that simple! The truth is Motörhead albums have all sounded extremely similar since the early nineties, because each new album up to and including this point has been a random collection of songs that were recorded in a massive studio session in 1991.

Exhausted and frustrated with the process of going to a studio between tours to record a new album, of which sometimes there were two released in two consecutive years, frontman Lemmy Kilmister came up with the ingenious plan to, for a full month, record as many songs as possible and to release ten to eleven of them every two to three years. In December of 1991, Lemmy, guitarist Phil “Zoomer” Campbell and Drummer Mickey Dee walked into Music Grinder Studios in Los Angeles and emerged on January 1^st 1992 with 3,129 new songs. With the exception of the independently recorded Inferno, each new Motörhead album sounds similar to the last, because all of them have been produced by the same producer with the same equipment at around the same time so that Lemmy’s mind could be eased in between tours.

So essentially, what we have with The Wörld Is Yours and every other Motörhead album that has been released since 1991, is the very definition of a grab bag. As you can infer, the quality of a Motörhead album has not depended on the band’s lyrics, instrumentation or mood for decades. Now that you know the ultimate Motörhead secret, you can see that what makes a Motörhead album good at this point is the track sequencing; does this collection of songs sound good in this particular order?

For 2008’s Motörizer, this was, for the most part, not the case, for 2002’s Hammered, this was most assuredly not the case and, for 1996’s Snake Bite Love, this was hell-to-the-no not the case. But, for 2011’s The Wörld Is Yours, this is the case. Now, I could go into detail about why I think The Wörld Is Yours is good and why I believe that it’s the best Motörhead album since 2004’s Inferno. I could say that I like the stabs of guitar chords in “Outlaw”, that I like some of the lyrics in “Get Back in Line” like “Good things come to those who wait/But these days most things suck” or “If you think Jesus saves/Get back in line”, but come on. This is a motherfucking Motörhead album we’re talking about, here. Do you know when the last Motörhead album is going to come out? 2324! I’m doing you a favor by not giving you more details! I’ll leave that to the historian in 2350 that has to create the archive of the entire musical career of Motörhead in a fifty two-volume book series. Just know that The Wörld Is Yours is excellent, listen to it if you wish, and hold tight for another couple years when, like the Disney Vault, ten more songs will be released from the “Music Grinder” sessions.

You must guard The Secret of Motörhead with your life. It seems easy now, but things are going to get really heated in a couple decades, when people begin to wonder how Lemmy can release ten, twenty, then hundreds of posthumous albums. Motörhead albums are, essentially, compilations, now, and that’s a dangerous prospect with a scope of which I don’t think even Lemmy, understands. Many have called him the cockroach of rock and roll; a man who, no matter what, will still be coming out with new material. I’m here to tell you that, in three hundred years, Lemmy’s going to wish that he had the brief longevity of a cockroach. In the case of The Wörld Is Yours, the Motörhead formula has served the group and humanity well, but its repercussions are farther-reaching than you or I will ever see come to fruition in our lifetimes. I pray that civilization will find a way to outmaneuver the Pandora’s box that Motörhead opened that fateful December in 1991. And, now that you know, you have just as much responsibility as I do to surreptitiously warn others of the catastrophe that is to befall us all.

Motörhead - The Wörld Is Yours: A-

The Go! Team- Rolling Blackouts: A-

"Buy Nothing Day"

It should be no surprise to those familiar with the sound of UK indie electronicists, The Go! Team, that their third album, Rolling Blackouts, does little to diverge from the sound they established with their debut, 2004’s Thunder, Lightning Strike. The group still sounds like the best high school pep band you could ever hope for, with the zeal of the group’s many singers ceaseless across the album’s forty minutes. It’s almost redundant to say that they sound like blacksploitation-era funk and giddy pop punk, because of how consistent that sound’s been with them over the years, but I want do so to make sure that it’s taken note of that that sound can be applied to every song on Rolling Blackouts. But consistency does not an excellent album make. What makes Rolling Blackouts exceedingly enjoyable is that The Go! Team manage to dig into the elements that have made them distinct and enrich them to create an album that seems like a subtle but logical next step in their musical career.

With Rolling Blackouts, The Go! Team makes the right decision to give their sound depth and variance. All of Rolling Blackouts is energetic and vibrant, but each of its tracks conveys a different mood. Songs like “T.O.R.N.A.D.O.” and “Back Like 8 Track” are very much indebted to their seven-year-old style, but tracks like “The Running Range” and “Secretary Song” add a slightly slower dynamic while still maintaining that glassy-eyed aesthetic. “Apollo Throwdown” is also a traditional Go! Team gem, but its beat is buoyed by harps and a swooning orchestra, tempering the song and giving it a more mature sensibility. The ready-for-the-marching-band instrumental, “Bust-Out Brigade”, builds with the ardor of RJD2’s “Let There Be Horns” and the chorus of “Ready To Go Steady” recalls the emotional succinctness of Shonen Knife’s Japanese pop.

The two best songs of Rolling Blackouts are the Bethany Cosentino (of Best Coast fame) collaboration, “Buy Nothing Day”, and the mostly instrumental “Yosemite Theme”. While the former aligns itself with that Go! Team sound, the latter is the most radical distillation of the group’s newfound richness. Beginning with a saintly horn line and lightly picked guitar, the track weaves in instruments new to the Go! Team pallet like banjo and harmonica into something that actually sounds like the soundtrack to a kickass Yosemite Park documentary. With the mixture of these elements and the blasting percussion characteristic of every track on Rolling Blackouts, I am reminded of Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown, a film that, for me, turned the wilderness into something not just pretty, but cool and fun.

“Buy Nothing Day” should not be underestimated, though, because it features Rolling Blackouts’s best melodies. Cosentino’s voice, which has already proven itself formidable on her own debut, fits in well with The Go! Team’s vastly detailed production flourishes. It’s Rolling Blackout’s most spare track, with only orchestration added to the standard guitar/drums/bass combination of most rock bands, and is all the better for it.

The success of “Buy Nothing Day” is representative of the success of all of Rolling Blackouts. Some may see the group’s choice to tone down their bombast as a watering down of what makes them good, but I see it as a conscious realization by the group that they cannot keep releasing the same album year after year. Nevertheless, it’s hard to see people who enjoyed Thunder, Lightning Strike abhorring Rolling Blackouts, as its changes are not drastic or immediately apparent. What Rolling Blackouts proves is that a group that simply digs deeper into what they’re good at can be just as rewarding as a radical change or a stubborn repetition.

The Go! Team- Rolling Blackouts: A-

Telekinesis - 12 Desperate Straight Lines: B+

"You Turn Clear In The Sun"

The focal point of Telekinesis’s second album is not auteur Michael Benjamin Lerner’s voice, lyrics, guitar-playing or even songwriting. What makes 12 Desperate Lines a supremely listenable album despite the fact that it is, essentially, an album of indie pop retreads in the vein of Fountains of Wayne is the bass. Within the album’s first thirty seconds, its presence is made obvious when a propulsive if not virtuosic bassline forces Lerner’s voice and guitar strums to the backseat in the album opener, “You Turn Clear in the Sun”. Throughout, the bass of 12 Desperate Lines keeps things interesting and flowing at a brisk pace. Its authority over the mix can range from the supportive (“I Got You”) to the decorative (“Fever Chill”) to the ubiquitous (album highlights “I Cannot Love You” and “Please Ask For Help”). It’s an essential aspect of 12 Desperate Straight Lines that, from time to time, lifts the craft of entire songs above the mire of monotony.

The only other notable aspect of 12 Desperate Lines is Lerner’s lyrical turn in “You Turn Clear in the Sun”, which takes a “turn the other cheek” attitude to a breakup song. With simple and concise diction, Lerner makes his ruminations sound both cute and revelatory. “I could sit and wonder/’Bout where I went wrong/Or I can go out on Friday/And try to have fun”, he muses over light percussion and that rich bass. It ‘s a naively simple mindset to express in a song, but one that I cannot say I’ve heard on any record in recent memory. Lerner spends the song killing that estranged ex with kindness (hoping her next lover treats her right, writing down the fond memories they had together), until the listener is unquestionably on his side when he inquires to that former lover, “Now was it you or was it me?”.

Other than that, 12 Desperate Lines’s bass presence is the best thing it’s got going for it. In that regard, it’s surprisingly unique, but I wouldn’t blame you if you avoided it all but “You Turn Clear In The Sun”.

Telekinesis - 12 Desperate Straight Lines: B+

Earth - Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light Pt. 1: B+ / Minks - By the Hedge: B-

"Father Midnight"                                                                       "Indian Ocean"

Sometimes, originality can be really pesky. Sometimes, you’d just rather listen to an album and not have to worry about whether the artist playing it is going to influence generations of musicians or even whether you’re going to remember it a month from now. Sometimes, there’s just music that you want to indulge in for a singular mood and Hell to all else if you just want to hear background music for forty or so minutes. The music by New York duo, Minks, can be safely considered indie pop and the music by Washington quartet, Earth, can be safely considered drone. Both groups have released these types of “mood” records; pieces of music that are not meant to be enjoyed for individual songs, but for the stringently monolithic moods they represent.

Earth have been playing music since 1990. Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light Pt. 1 is somewhere around their eleventh album. It is composed of five tracks, the shortest of which is over seven minutes and the longest of which is over twenty. For over an hour, the group, with a new cellist added to their basic guitar/bass/drums ensemble, finds one melody and repeats it with military-like precision and ungodly stamina. To give you some perspective on how much Earth is adverse to change on Angels of Darkness, the addition of a cellist has been regaled by some critics as being a radical change for the group, but it is barely heard on the album, playing long, desolate notes just off in the distance as Dylan Carlson’s guitars take center stage. Angels of Darkness evolves in texture from minute to minute much like a glacier melts, but there’s something fascinating about listening to it occur. The album is mixed beautifully, accentuating Karl Blau’s bass, which gives each song a valued richness, especially on the closing title track. The group sounds like they’re soundtracking a nonexistent Western and can be rightly compared to Mastodon’s work for the film, Jonah Hex. Angels of Darkness may run about twenty minutes too long, but it’s an excellent album to just brood over, in a masochistic sort of way.

The debut album from Minks, By the Hedge, actually has some semblance of distinction between its songs. “Kusmi”, the record’s opening track, has a nice hook and sets a good tone for the rest of the album. “Indian Ocean” is a delicate instrumental composed of layers and layers of jangling guitars. By the Hedge, overall, however, plays with the fluid anonymity of countless other groups dabbling in shoegaze, indie pop and the like. Singer, Shaun Kilfoyle’s, voice reaches comical levels of inscrutability, repeating nonsense in “Funeral Song” and mumbling into his sleeve for just about everything else. To give you a sense of how very average By the Hedge is, my notes on the album pretty much end here, and the rest say things like “Decent”, “Again, decent”, “Shoegaze-y”, “Quite shoegaze-y”, “Again a decent song”, and, in a startling change of form, “Again, blah”. By the Hedge is very similar in sound to Wild Nothing’s painfully boring Gemini, but sounds much more like a group that cares somewhat about what they’re writing. It’s consistent, and, if you’re into that sort of thing, who would I be to deter you from it?

Earth - Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light Pt. 1: B+ / Minks - By the Hedge: B-

Thomas Giles - Pulse: C+

"Medic"

Thomas Giles, for those who do not know, is the frontman of Between the Buried and Me. Whether you enjoy Giles’s mainstay or not, there is no denying that the band he’s in is one of the more formative metal bands recording music today. They’re schizophrenic, progressive and consistently fascinating. A song like “Prequel to the Sequel”, from the group’s Colors, is a song to be studied for its sharp turns from tunefulness to din to bravado to insanity, even if, in my opinion, it’s not that great of a song. I don’t particularly like Between the Buried and Me, but I cannot deny that they are a group that is never satisfied with not pushing the envelope with every new album they release.

Thomas Giles’s first official solo album (he released an album under the name Giles in 2005) pushes something, and that thing is my patience. As much as Pulse is a surprise coming from a guy who makes most of his money playing in one of America’s most popular metalcore bands, the album comes off exactly like Thomas Giles trying to make a statement about how much of a surprise it is. On Pulse, we hear Giles experiment with electronic, acoustic, metal, and (I kid you not) dubstep. However, the execution of all these songs comes off as exceedingly half-assed and pretentious, as if Giles only made the effort to sound different and then rushed through the rest of the songwriting process.

The worst of Pulse comes right at its beginning, with “Sleep Shake”. Here, among flowing guitar chords and a monotonous drum beat, Giles opens up his album with this line: “It started like a normal day/I jumped and explored the yard/My senses seem tense/Like a bond between two friends/They’ve never really been my friends/Just a common sense of self/But today I feel so strange/Like I’m someone else”. If you didn’t notice, Giles is trying to put himself in the mind of an emotionless robot, but the awkward wording and meaningless similes sound embarrassingly clunky. That, and most of the lyrics of Pulse, circumvent cleverness and go straight for the ostentatious. In “Scared”, when he sings “I’m here for you/I’m here for all of you”, it doesn’t sound like Giles is being benevolent, but, instead, expecting you to be really fucking impressed with how goddamn benevolent he is. But, really, these hollow signifiers are just cover-ups for the fact that Giles can’t write lyrics for shit. At the chorus of “Sleep Shake”, one would assume that he would have to pull out a trump lyrical card to consolidate what I’m sure he thought was genius in those previous verses, but the best he can come up with is “I’ve become different now”. Is it too obvious to say that he isn’t fooling anyone in this regard?

It doesn’t help that Pulse also sounds surprisingly cheap. I say that Giles takes cracks at many genres on the album, but its songs that feature more than just a piano or an acoustic guitar sound downright amateurish. The aforementioned “Sleep Shake” and many of the electronic songs on Pulse have some regard for texture, but their choruses routinely devolve into shooting-for-the-rafters chord-strummers with electronic blips floating around, sounding like a Muse caricature or Dream Theater at their most shamelessly poppy. “Catch & Release” tries to split the difference between the thrash of Between the Buried and Me and Giles’s electronic aspirations and ends up sounding like an irresponsible Shining, and not even Shining is particularly good at that kind of sound. “Hamilton Anxiety Scale” actually sounds promising with its hand percussion and off-kilter bass lines reminiscent of The Mars Volta, but it too cannot help but, like most of Pulse, resign its fate to a stale crash cymbal-laden chordgasm. Few albums exemplify the feeling of displaying free-floating ideas and little else from an artist than Pulse.

However, there is one legitimately good song on Pulse, and, it’s the one that, by far, resembles Between the Buried and Me. “Medic”, placed arbitrarily in the middle of the album between two ambient electronic tracks, is a sleeper cell that reveals itself wonderfully with a quick drum intro and takes off from there into a magnificent landscape of fractured riffing and growling vocals. It’s unexpectedly rousing in the best ways, and, at less than three minutes, ransacks every other song on the album. For all the ambition acrobatics Giles attempts on Pulse, “Medic” makes it abundantly clear where the man’s skills lie. And, ultimately and ironically, I don’t think I’ve heard a song as out of place on an album as “Medic” is on the otherwise inert Pulse.

A part of me does have some respect for Giles for diverging so much from the sound of his main group, especially one that’s ensconced in a genre as rigid as metal is in comparison to other musical genres, but, here, his imagination is stretched far too thin. Pulse is probably the most radically eclectic album I’ve ever heard, but it’s nearly impossible to reward it when it is so consistently awful. Those who haven’t a passing interest in Between the Buried and Me should avoid all of Pulse but “Medic”, and BtBaM fans should just wait for the band’s new album in April and breathe a sigh of relief that Pulse isn’t a sign of Giles permanently striking out on his own (yet…). The moral of Pulse is to get “Medic”, and we should be thankful that the album yielded an ending as happy as that.

Thomas Giles - Pulse: C+

Over the Rhine - The Long Surrender: A

"The Laugh of Recognition"

Well, this looks familiar. An artist that tends to play in the genre somewhere between folk and jazz releases an album in the new decade. They’ve been around for upwards of a decade, and their newest album seems to be just another notch in their belt in their long but consistent career. The artist is a traveling group of musicians, but the frontperson of the group is a woman. Her voice is front and center, but, on their newest, the deep voices of men can be heard throughout, backing her up. The album comes and goes with little recognition from both critics and the public. Entertainment Weekly gives it an A- and, in doing so, gets the attention of one music critic. He listens to the artist’s newest album and falls in love with it, calling it his favorite album of the year and featuring it as a little-known addition near the top of his year-end top ten list.

At the risk of creating a pattern for the albums I review positively, The Long Surrender really is the best album I’ve heard yet this year. After more than twenty years of soldiering through radically changing sonic landscapes, Over the Rhine have released a nearly perfect album, one that, like Laura Veirs’s July Flame, forces you to keep quiet so that you can take in all of its subdued brilliance. The chemistry between the members of the group is apparent with every calculated pause and wink. The songs of The Long Surrender manage to sound both professional and loose, asking nothing more than your ear to take you to the group’s emotional epicenter, where it’s surprising how little you have to do to find some kind of resonance.

The clear center The Long Surrender is lead vocalist Karin Bergquist, who has been the core of Over the Rhine along with her husband, Linford Detweiler, since the group formed in 1990. She wears many hats on The Long Surrender, all of which are equally captivating. Whether it is sexy or lonely, Bergquist’s rasp holds a tone that embodies the mature and the assured. Her voice makes Over the Rhine sound like a folk-influenced lounge band, slinking throughout The Long Surrender’s arrangements with alacrity, whether she intents to play bold or meek. She pronounces her “s”’s like “sh”’s, giving her voice the slight vulnerability that keeps you from writing it off as saccharine or overproduced. She cannot help but come off as genial.

But Bergquist is more than just a pretty voice. The Long Surrender is a lyrical achievement for her, simply because she knows what phrases fit the mis en scene of the arrangements she’s given. A prime example of this is in “The Sharpest Blade”, where she silently slays her verses by ending each by musing, “I still dreamed of a love to outlive us / And I still prayed that this life will redeem us”, indicating the hope Bergquist’s character has for the relationship she fights to maintain. However, the descending melody that accompanies that phrase makes it clear to the listener that that goal will be a far from easy fight. This conflict between the love of the concept of love and the crushing sorrow of prolonged loneliness is thematic throughout The Long Surrender, as the album’s title would suggest. Bergquist sings the title of “There’s a Bluebird in My Window” with the same wonder for life that has befit generations of singers before her, but she repeats to her lover, “Why do you always make me drink alone”, making the insistence on the title seem more like a distraction from the problems of the protagonist rather than a coincidental delight.

The Long Surrender peaks when this pattern is broken, though. For six and a half minutes, Bergquist goes off on a rant as clever as anything I have ever heard on “Infamous Love Song”. She describes the relationship between herself and her partner with a candor that is, at times, hilarious, but consistently vivid. Her voice bears so much theatricality, I imagine her rolling on pianos in a dive bar in Cincinnati as she climbs Jacob’s ladder and high fives Cupid in her lyrics. And, as she keeps her head above the fray of realism in the verses, she always makes sure to dive down to where us mortals bear flaws to plead to her lover, “Baby, our love song must survive.”

There is a reason, though, that The Long Surrender is an A and not an A+, and that problem too lies with Bergquist’s delivery at times in the album. Although, for The Long Surrender’s majority, Bergquist is fun and insightful, her eyes are occasionally bigger than her stomach in terms of what she believes she can get away with singing. It’s slightly wince-inducing in the couple of times Bergquist references the “beebop apocalypse” in “Infamous Love Song”, and, in “Rave On”, she tries to make the phrase “Rock on” sound poignant, for which she barely succeeds. But, in “Only God Can Save Us Now”, she goes way off the edge when she tries to make the phrase “Fuzzy wuzzy wuzzy wuzzy wuzzy was a bear” sound like a slice of genius when sung in a rootsy country tune. It doesn’t. It’s the consequence of giving Bergquist so much face time on an album as long as The Long Surrender: she’s bound to come across a few clumsy phrases. In “Only God”, that line can make you go “What?” and take you out of the song for a couple seconds, but, for the most part, when Bergquist slips up, it’s easily forgiven in the context of an album as sonically rich as The Long Surrender.

Over the Rhine have never received the popularity that a group that has been around for as long as they have and has been so prolific deserves. However, they are the kind of band that, when introduced to others, conjure rave recognition (You’d be surprised how many 5 star reviews Over the Rhine have received by various publications over their twenty-year career). By definition, they’re a cult group, but that’s so strange to think about in reference to a group that made The Long Surrender, quite an accessible record whose themes any listener could relate to. So I’m doing my part to make the fantastic group, Over the Rhine, that much less esoteric; The Long Surrender cannot be underestimated as a masterpiece of soul-bearing Americana, and is destined to be one of the first hidden classics of this decade.

Over the Rhine - The Long Surrender: A

Yuck - Yuck: A-

"Suicide Policeman"

If you’ve heard anything about Yuck and their self-titled debut album, it’s that these guys sound a lot like ‘90’s indie rock. With this and Male Bonding’s excellent 2010 debut Nothing Hurts, I’m starting to detect a trend of our friends on the other side of the pond trying their hand at the lo-fi that’s so prevalent in modern American indie rock. And, based on that and this, they’re giving us a run for our money for Clinton-era bluster. Yuck is a group in a long line of bands that wears what are now modern childhood influences on their sleeves. They’ve been welcomed relatively well here, but many have been turned off by the group, dismissing them as “Yuck La Tengo”, which insinuates that their sound is unoriginal and heavily referential.

The heavily referential bit I cannot deny. Listening to Yuck, you can’t help but think of at least two immediate influences on the group that are made quite obvious. Countless bands have been named, from Sonic Youth to Smashing Pumpkins. For me, Yuck alternates in style between Dinosaur Jr. and Static Prevails-era Jimmy Eat World. There is an argument to be made that the album’s best songs are largely enjoyed for their nostalgia factor. “Suicide Policeman” is an excellent acoustic ballad with a heartwarming concept and execution, but it smacks of Elliot Smith before the rest of the band takes it into the territory of Marcy Playground’s “Sex and Candy”. “Rubber”, the album’s closing track, devolves into a guitar fuzz jam, of which I love every minute, but I would be lying to you if I didn’t immediately find a direct correlation between it and ten other groups I couldn’t quite name. I’m sure that every song on Yuck can be linked to some group of the 90’s, but, and maybe this is because I don’t know enough about that decade’s music, Yuck sounds more like the sound of an era rather than just the work of one specific band of the past.

Regardless, there’s something to be said for good songwriting. Yuck may be heavily indebted to the groups that more than built the house they’re working in, but their debut album is nothing if not genuine, and, for what it’s worth, stands up pretty well next to the material of those aforementioned bands. Yuck is a display of excellent songwriting, tempered production and supple bass (which I’m convinced is a make or break aspect to any lo-fi album). It definitely has an alluring immediacy, but you will be surprised how long its songs stick with you long after you think the nostalgia’s worn off.

Yuck - Yuck: A-

PJ Harvey - Let England Shake: A

"The Words That Maketh Murder"

Let England Shake is an album designed to grow on you. Well that’s not quite right. Let England Shake is an album designed to, like that tired old onion metaphor, peel off layer after layer of nuance to you the more times you listen to it. The album’s lyrics in the liner notes are of a Cliff Notes-level abbreviation, entire lines stripped out, leaving just the essential phrases of each song. The sound of Let England Shake completely betrays its lyrical content, and every instrument, from the various frequent collaborator John Parish plays to Harvey’s own voice, have some deeper meaning hidden in them that can be found in multiple listens. It’s as if PJ Harvey purposely leaves out essential information within her presentation of Let England Shake to make it an experience that can only be fully appreciated when observed on several levels.

The first strange thing that is made apparent while listening to Let England Shake is the intrusion of discordant melodies within the seemingly beautiful pallet Harvey lays out for the listener. Someone might mistakenly hum out of place on the title track’s xylophone melody, as it is played in a 7/4 time signature (like Pink Floyd’s “Money”). Others will think they left YouTube open when the trumpet march comes in out of nowhere on “The Glorious Land” or when Harvey duets with a sample of a throat singer in the acoustic “England”. It’s the first layer of the proverbial onion, hinting at a din that lies just underneath the shakers and light guitars.

A simple second look into Let England Shake reveals that the album’s lyrical content is tenaciously gruesome. “The Glorious Land”’s last thirty seconds consist of a call-and-response chant whose call is Harvey imploring, “What is the glorious fruit of our land?” and whose response is a little hard to hear. It turns out that response is “The fruit is deformed children”, creating an image that could make even the most imagination-deprived shudder for a second. At first, Harvey’s quoting of “Summertime Blues”’s “What if I take my problem to the United Nations” sounds playful, but, with closer inspection, is representative of a caustic realism for the effectiveness of worldwide peacekeeping instead of the naïve innocence invoked in the original song. And this layer is by no means revealed all at once. Much has been written about the “Soldiers fall like lumps of meat” line in “The Words That Maketh Murder”, but I never actually heard that line until I listened to the album a sixth or seventh time. Let England Shake is literally opening up new nuggets of depth to me as I write this review, and no doubt it will continue to for quite some time.

Even the themes of Let England Shake are not as they seem. Anyone who has read the track list or just read the title has an excellent idea of what the album’s subject is. However, although the titular country is name-checked countless times, Harvey’s lyrics seem more concerned with tackling the topic of armed conflict, and not necessarily that of England. Harvey has cited the violence in Gallipoli, Iraq and Afghanistan as reference points, but Let England Shake’s lyrics mostly describe vast, universal landscapes of carnage, either expressing her beliefs on war as a third party or by putting herself in the boots of a soldier as on the aforementioned “The Words That Maketh Murder”. The end of “In the Dark Places” builds a wave of emotion around the repetition of the phrase “Our young man / Hit with guns / In the dust / And in the dark places”, and, as it crests, you can’t help but feel something intense, whether it be patriotism, disgust or outrage, and, at that and many points in Let England Shake, geographical context becomes meaningless.

Harvey’s characterization of England is similarly deceptive. The beginning lines of “Last Living Rose” are easy to make out. “Goddamn Europeans / Take me back to beautiful England”, she sings sweetly. One would not be faulted if they interpreted that as her mission statement and stopped paying attention there, but, alas, Harvey has much more to say. “And the great and filthiness of ages and battered books / And fog rolling down behind the mountains / On the graveyards and Dixie captains / Let me walk through the stinking alleys”, she sings and goes on throughout the song in a light rant that’s the lyrical high point of the album. You see, as much as Harvey iterates that she is nothing without England, she inveighs it constantly on Let England Shake, calling its glorious fruit deformed children and so forth.

Ultimately, Harvey depicts England in much the same way Arcade Fire depicted the suburbs in their album of the same name; impartial and unrelenting, but with an often conflicting romanticism that we all have to some extent for our hometown for the simple fact that it was where we came from, no matter how much we hated that place. Harvey may live and die through England, as she says on Let England Shake, but her tales of ambivalence and violence towards the land for which she is so faithful are more transcendent than you, I or PJ Harvey could ever fathom.

PJ Harvey - Let England Shake: A

The Twilight Singers - Dynamite Steps: A

"Get Lucky"

For as much as I hate the gripes from people about how modern music is missing something that made the classics of yore so fantastic, I will admit that there is something that modern music lacks that was relatively abundant in the past. The slow burn is a term used by many a critic, myself included, describing innumerable albums, but, in my opinion, the art of the traditional slow burn has all but been abandoned for decades. The slow burn I refer to is incredibly difficult to describe, but everyone has heard it, because it’s a very classic sound. It’s slow, piano-laden, orchestrated, cinematic and, most importantly, old. Artists like Elton John and Peter Gabriel trotted its sound in its heyday. Menomena are pretty good at it, The Walkmen are always on the verge of it, Goo Goo Dolls fail miserably at it and Oasis hit the nail right on the head with it on their 2008 song, “Falling Down”, but its graces are just not a heavy priority with groups that have no reverence for the purveyors of 70’s cheese. Well, I’m pleased to announce that, for those who like to walk around town when it’s foggy out and pretend they’re in London, for those who want to get a tan fedora and matching overcoat at some point in their lives, for those who thought Phil Collin’s soundtrack to Disney’s Tarzan was pretty fucking amazing, for those who know exactly what the fuck I’m talking about (Of which I don’t think there are many), The Twilight Singers have something that will Blow. You. Away.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much more to say about Dynamite Steps, because any reason I could give about why I enjoy it will end with me grasping for abstract metaphors and concepts for a sound I cannot, for the life of me, describe. So let’s start with the mechanical. Greg Dulli has been playing music since the late 80’s when he was a part of The Afghan Wings. In 1997, he started The Twilight Singers, and he has been releasing albums by them as well as many solo projects ever since. Dynamite Steps is The Twilight Singer’s fifth album.

Greg Dulli’s voice is rough and craggy, whether he sings high or low. He slurs his words and elongates his syllables, giving his lyrics the air of being sung from the mouth of an honest drunkard. When he raises his voice above the fray in the chorus of “Waves”, it’s clear who was a great influence to The Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser. Although the band hails from New Orleans, there’s something about Greg’s voice that sounds vaguely British. He often speaks of the Devil and refers to the seedy streets of Vaguesville, USA, and its various miscreants. Love is warm and Dulli can’t help but feel thankful for ever having experienced it. He’s a luckless romantic hardened by the streets that built him, and isn’t afraid to tell his story to anyone at the barstool that asks him about it. He’s benevolent, now, but, at one point, he was the most dangerous motherfucker you’d ever meet.

My only criticism of Dynamite Steps is that “Gunshots” tries too hard to go for the slow burn jugular, implementing the hackneyed bap boop boop bap boop boop bap drum beat that worked for The Yeah Yeah Yeahs on “Maps”, but is now an aughts cliché. It’s still a damn good song, but a bit of a cheap move for Dulli, when the man clearly knows how to make a song affecting in other ways.

The only time Dynamite Steps doesn’t sound like (refer to above clusterfuck) is “Waves”, exempting the song’s chorus. Its loping bass line, wily keyboard textures and skittering drums are the stuff of dirty old man fantasy. Grinderman wish they’d written something this devious. The rest? Well, it’s… that. If it sounds like Dynamite Steps is some musical enigma, it’s not. Its themes are so universal, words can’t describe it; that feeling in your stomach you get when you know you’re going to cherish an album for the rest of your life. Like slow burns? Don’t know what they are? Neither do I! Get Dynamite Steps anyway.

The Twilight Singers - Dynamite Steps: A

Cut Copy - Zonoscope: B

"Where I'm Going"

I was getting pretty frustrated listening to Zonoscope for about the third time, trying to figure out what indistinguishable 80’s band Cut Copy were taking most of their musical cues from. It was clear that Depeche Mode was an enormous influence on the group and that the maladroit white-boy disco of Hot Chip were an easy reference point, but, with each time I listened to a song like “Take Me Over” and “Blink And You’ll Miss A Revolution”, I knew there was one specific band from the eighties these guys could not help but ape in the most conspicuous ways.

Now, it should be enough of an insult to Zonoscope that I ended up spending the time listening to it playing “guess who” with the influences, but what should be an outright slap in the face is that the group I ultimately deduced Cut Copy were carbon copies of was not actually a band from the 80’s at all. It was Yeasayer. If you listen to a song like “Take Me Over” and then hear a song like “O.N.E.” from Yeasayer’s excellent Odd Blood from last year, it literally sounds like the same band is performing both songs. The only clear difference between Zonoscope and Odd Blood-era Yeasayer is that Yeasayer did a much better job of making the nostalgia of the 80’s something quite vibrant. Zonoscope just sounds like the rehash of a rehash, Dan Whitford’s noncommittal deadpan not even trying to compete with Yeasayer’s Chris Keating’s glorious yelp.

Zonoscope, is a decent synth pop homage, but, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the short time I’ve run this blog, it’s that there’s quite a bit of decent synth pop homage out there. The first half is slightly promising with the chorus of “Need You Now” being pretty good and “Take Me Over” sounding like a modest party-starter (probably because its synth line is almost exactly that of “You Can Call Me Al”) but, even then, the album sags to instantly forgettable new-wave exercises in its second half. Then the whole painfully mediocre mission statement is summarized in the closer, “Sun God”, which manages, with ease, to take all the things that make Zonoscope banal and pointless; aimless synth throbs and half-assed lyrics (“You got to live / You got to die / So what’s the purpose of you and I”) and space it out over 15 minutes, which gives it absolutely no playback value, but, on the bright side, is a shorter length than the rest of Zonoscope, so it could be a pretty good substitute for the same listening experience. If you want a good Cut Copy album, get Odd Blood and let this one fade into what I would call (but never again) THE BOREVOID.

Cut Copy - Zonoscope: B