Stevie Nicks - In Your Dreams: B-

"Ghosts Are Gone"

Here’s some revisionist history for you: Has anyone noticed that Stevie Nicks has a really annoying singing voice? I find it to be the stuff of washed up rock stars’ wet dreams, when 70’s heroes like Meatloaf thought they had a fighting chance in the 90’s by softening their style to the kind of soppy mush that you could only properly consume with a spoon. Stevie Nicks’s devilish warble has made me uncontrollable wince for every single song she’s released since her time with Fleetwood Mac. It reminds me of the lite-rock radio station I was forced to listen to while my mom drove me to school from Pre-K all the way up to sophomore year of High School.

So basically my enjoyment of Stevie Nicks’s newest album, In Your Dreams, is a constant struggle between that voice I find so maddening and the surprisingly catchy melodies Nicks consistently writes. But then, like the best of storylines (Halo, The Twilight Saga) a third party comes in and knocks me right on my ass, that being Nicks’s penchant for positively dreadful lyrics. “White Sargossa Sea” tells a miserable tale of a couple whose sole interesting quality is that “The only thing they did together / Was to make love,” there’s a good ol’ vampire pander for the cheap seats in “Moonlight (A Vampire’s Dream)” and Nicks fails hilariously to make Mardi Gras sound like a wedding ceremony in “New Orleans”. The lyrics seem to get progressively worse as In Your Dreams continues. The album hits a new high (see: low) in “May Be the One” with the line, “You may be the one / But you’ll never be The One,” which I can only see making sense if it were sung to either Neo or Jet Li. But then last track “Cheaper Than Free” makes all the competition its bitch, as it is a wellspring of laughably awful phrasing. If you were considering getting In Your Dreams, let these last choice lines from “Cheaper Than Free” be a warning to you of what lies in store:

“What’s cheaper than free? / You and me”

“What’s faster than a fast car? / A heart”

“What’s better than high fashion? / High passion”

Stevie Nicks - In Your Dreams: B-

tUnE-yArDs - w h o k i l l: B+

"Gangsta"

The best song on California singer/songwriter Merrill Garbus’s second album under the name tUnE-yArDs comes three songs in. “Gangsta” begins with thumping toms and expressive bass as Garbus juxtaposes growls, screams and falsettos in her characteristically unhinged voice. However, as it progresses, the track begins to disintegrate. Garbus’s warning of, “Never move to my hood / ‘Cause danger is crawling out the wood,” gets chopped and rearranged as horns atonally blurt out the sirens signaling the track’s collapse. It’s a fascinating situation to listen to, because it sounds like Garbus’s own insanity is causing the track to implode. It plays out like she is bouncing off the walls of a house that’s crumbling around her, so dedicated to her own insanity that she causes the negative feedback through which the song is destroyed.

The only song on w h o k i l l that gets close to matching that glorious cacophony is last track, “Killa”. In that track, Garbus exerts her dominance by abusing the listener with riveting threats like “I’m a new kinda woman, a don’t take shit from you kinda woman.” “Read or not, I’m a new kinda killa,” she hollers and you’d almost feel your life was in danger if you were to doubt her. Eventually, her madness proves too cumbersome for one voice and Garbus splits herself into two characters, each ranting into a speaker like it’s the time-out corner. “I’m so hip!” hilariously yells one Garbus. The track is so deranged that I literally cannot think of a way that it could be performed live short of Garbus, night after night, cutting herself in half and having each side scream at opposite sides of the venue.

There are a lot of smaller moments on w h o k i l l that utilize the freakiness featured so prominently on “Gangsta” and “Killa”. “My Country” is a pretty chaotic opener, Garbus again juxtaposing double tracked screams with fragile falsettos before a honking saxophone steals the show in the track’s second half. Both it and lead single “Bizness” employ abstract vocal manipulations that are reminiscent of Jònsi’s “Go Do”. Throughout the album, Garbus proves to be an enthralling vocal acrobat, often coupling her demented performances with lyrics just as gasp inducing. The centerpiece of “Riotriot” is when the song stops so that Garbus can holler, “There is a freedom in violence that I will never understand!” a line ripe for analysis because it walks that enviable line between brilliant social commentary and pure nonsense. And it’s hard not to have a strong reaction to the last line in “Es-So”. “I ran over my own body with my own car,” she softly sings over rambling guitar. And yes, you should feel bad for laughing at that line.

But I guess my main criticism of w h o k i l l is that there are six tracks between “Gangsta” and “Killa”. Many critics have been citing the album’s entirety as a jaw-dropping spectacle as if to say Garbus is constantly hurling herself at your speaker system. In fact, aside from those two tracks, Garbus exercises significant restraint on w h o k i l l. When inspected, many of the album’s qualities that one might consider strange actually stem from slight tweaks of African rhythms. And when that aspect is further inspected, Garbus’s use of these African influences proves to be no more bizarre than their use by Vampire Weekend. I think when critics speak of w h o k i l l being divisive for its off-kilter nature, they are referring more to Garbus than the album, itself, which is an important distinction. While Garbus is clearly the bananas in the w h o k i l l fruit salad, the album’s arrangements do not always support her over her numerous creative hurtles.

Which isn’t to say that there is a bad moment on w h o k i l l as a result of this. It just means that the album becomes a lot more conventional in the time between “Gangsta” and “Killa”. Garbus crafts some positively immaculate vocal harmonies on “Doorstep”, singing sha-la-la’s in the background while she pleads over a relationship in the process of breaking. You may be surprised to find that a majority of the tracks on the album begin with slow builds instead of a swift kick in the face. In fact, the longest song on w h o k i l l, “Woolywollygong”, is a dark acoustic number. In the track, Garbus sings a lullaby to a sleeping a figure, as if the song itself is being used to ward off boogiemen. Despite its creepy guitar riff and spare percussion, “Woolywollygong” is oddly beautiful, Garbus’s voice reliably accommodating to the track’s uneasy nature.

The unfortunate thing is that the slower songs in between those two misfit anthems that I have mentioned in all this review’s paragraphs now feel slow to start in comparison, even bordering on lulls at times. Each track on w h o k i l l has its own personality, but the fact that they don’t go all out and don’t throw caution to the wind keeps the album from becoming the oddball Mecca it very well could have been. So, while, I do not dislike a moment of w h o k i l l, these moments of relative quiet make the album good and centered as opposed to radical and great.

While it would be more courteous to praise Garbus for keeping w h o k i l l grounded with more straightforward topics and arrangements, I honestly wish she hadn’t. Not every album needs to be an all-encompassing utopia of balanced extremes; sometimes it’s appropriate for an album to just never let up and it’s a little frustrating that Garbus was significantly contained on this release. For all my talk of softness and self-control, though, w h o k i l l is still one of the more unique and off-putting albums you will hear this year. I just wish it had gone the full Monty in terms of wall-to-wall craziness. Then it would have been a real treat to hear peoples’ reactions to it.

tUnE-yArDs - w h o k i l l: B+

Brad Paisley - This Is Country Music: C+

"Toothbrush"

I really wanted to like This Is Country Music, I really did. With modern country music sounding like a parody of itself with goofy artists singing hyper-patriotic songs in embellished southern drawls, it’s strange to say there was a time when the genre could be used for cogent social commentary and the listening spectrum was not always a choice between the strictly conservative and The Dixie Chicks. So I was excited to hear Brad Paisley’s newest album after hearing the praise the man received for 2009’s American Saturday Night. The reviews coming in for This Is Country Music were following suit, so I expected there to be some legitimately intelligent music for me to chow down on.

Little did I know how wrong I would prove to be. Any hope I had that This Is Country Music was going to be anything but shameless pandering was destroyed with the album’s first few lines. “Well you’re not supposed to say ‘cancer’ in a song / And telling people that Jesus is the answer can rub ‘em wrong,” he sings on the title track. “It ain’t hip to sing about tractors, trucks, little towns or mama... But this is country music, and we do.” Now, I will be the first to admit that I am a political liberal, but as a music fan, those lines are insulting. I don’t know what fascist music industry Brad Paisley’s been toiling under the past decade, but I’ve heard tons of songs about mama, little towns, trucks and, oh yes, even Jesus sung by rap, rock and pop artists alike. Paisley saying that country music solely deals with these subjects is not only silly but patently false. And this is the first single for This Is Country Music. The song sets a tone for the rest of the album that it never gets close to shaking.

But what I like about This Is Country Music is probably more interesting to talk about first. As pompous as he sounds on many of the album’s songs, Paisley can have a really clever voice when he doesn’t have the right wing breathing down his neck. For example, “Camouflage” is a cute tune about the titular pattern being the new fashion craze. It’s a good song despite the fact that, as if beamed down by the Gods of Redneck Ridicule, Larry the Cable Guy yells “Git ‘er Done” not once but twice on the track for seemingly no reason. Elsewhere, “One of Those Lives” has a decently executed moral about appreciating what one has and “Toothbrush” wittily describes the stages of love through the objects Paisley brings to his girlfriend’s house.

Also, there is no getting around the fact that Paisley is a masterful guitar player. All over This Is Country Music, the man will go off on great solos that transcend the rudimentary arrangements in which they are placed. “Eastwood”, which features whistle work from none other than Clint himself, is an excellent example of this. It is essentially an instrumental through which Paisley can realize his dreams of being an axe-slinger in a Spaghetti Western, but it’s still quite enjoyable and probably the best track on the album. It seems that, with This Is Country Music, the best voice Paisley possesses is with his six string.

Alas, Paisley’s lyrical faux pas cripple This Is Country Music from being worth the listen. There are some respites, but Paisley generally has the subtlety of a banjo over the head on this album, and it gets tiring fast. Paisley’s celebration of summer feels like sand thrown in the face on “Working on a Tan”, that hackneyed phrase is relentlessly repeated like it’s unique in the Blake Shelton duet, “Don’t Drink the Water” and we know that Paisley and Carrie Underwood really love fucking each other in the ode to gratuitous PDA, “Remind Me”. But for all the blatant attempts to be mawkish and curt, This Is Country Music gets quite lazy, defecting to boring ballads and a chorus like “Wish I could be the lake that you’re swimming in,” by its end. There’s a theme established in the first song that completely disappears in the album’s second half only to reappear on the very last track. This all makes the album sound thoroughly half-assed, pushing aside storytelling for rote sentimentality and common denominators. In the context of most of the mainstream country we have had to put up with, This Is Country Music will sound above average, but it is a genuine disappointment to find that Brad Paisley is an artist just barely better than the worst.

Brad Paisley - This Is Country Music: C+

Friendly Fires - Pala: B

"Live Those Days Tonight"

A turkey on the cover would have been more appropriate.

Friendly Fires - Pala: B

Coma Cinema - Blue Suicide: B+

"Caroline, Please Kill Me"

Well, it’s been two days since summer unofficial started, so how’s it been going so far? Feeling excited? Hopeful? Well fuck that! Because the reviews are in and Coma Cinema’s third album is going to depress the living shit out of you! Good weather? Fuck it! Good friends? Fuck it! Summer love? Fuck it, man! Don’t you know that the only permanent thing about true love is the pain you feel when it goes? I hope you weren’t planning on leaving your weeping bunker for the next three months, because your sorrows are ripe for the wallowing and Coma Cinema’s got the Kleenex!

But in all seriousness folks, Blue Suicide, the third album by one-man-band Coma Cinema, has the potential to really get to you. It’s one of those records that is so consistently morbid, you’d have to laugh it off to keep yourself from shrinking into a fetal position. The album was made in a nomadic way; main man Matt Cothran scrounged around towns in South Carolina for abandoned musical equipment so he could intermittently record his two-minute shame spirals, so you can imagine how downtrodden the guy was feeling throughout the album’s making. Not only is this ragtag setup conveyed in Cothran’s lyrics, but in Blue Suicide’s production, which seems to shirk wide ambitions for tape fuzz and Elliot Smith-like acoustics.

However, you may be surprised to find that, despite its back-story, Blue Suicide is remarkably cohesive. True, the double-time drums of first track “Business As Usual” sound like pure shit, but it’s not like there are inconsistent moments of high fidelity juxtaposed with moments of low, something I had assumed upon entering the album. Most likely as a result of the restrictions on the album’s making, the lengths of Blue Suicide’s tracks are quite short (only about half exceed the two minute mark). However, it doesn’t feel like Cothran’s just recording single ideas onto analogue tape, which is what the album’s making would imply. Instead, each track of Blue Suicide is complete and has a distinct identity, a great testament to Cothran’s ability to write full songs despite his limitations.

And then there’s Cothran’s crushing pessimism. The album that first comes to mind when listening to Blue Suicide is Titus Andronicus’s The Monitor. However, instead of having some ballast like a group chant of “You’ll always be a loser,” Cothran refuses to stop obsessing over death, ultimately concluding that living makes him feel like a whore. So the safety net of Blue Suicide isn’t so much missing as it is made out of barbed wire.

Cothran’s diatribes against himself are worded cleverly, so rarely do they come off as self-pity although that is essentially what they are. “I am willing to eat what the vultures will not,” he informs on “Greater Vultures”, and his acoustic guitar sounds so frail and his voice so defeated it’s borderline transcendent early into the album. When I listen to Blue Suicide I end up chuckling at how colorful Cothran’s cynicism can get, but the album’s worth listening to if only to hear a well-executed expression of an emotional extreme.

So if Cothran was hoping to make a really miserable record, then slap a blue ribbon on Blue Suicide, because it’s a winner. However, I would still recommend allowing the album to ruin the flow of at least one of your days while you’re trying on bathing suits and setting up the slip-n-slide. Blue Suicide is very well made, regardless of its circumstances. It gives hints of a Coma Cinema that can be truly transformative through that oft-abused sentiment of grief. But, wait a minute. Is that a violin I hear in the title track just before the album ends? Well then, perhaps things are looking up.

Coma Cinema - Blue Suicide: B+

Couldawouldashoulda: May 2011

Hello all and welcome to the May 2011 installment of Couldawouldashoulda, where I rattle off the five albums that just barely didn’t make the cut for my top 50 albums of 2011. You may have noticed that I neglected to make a Couldawouldashoulda for April, and this was because I had finals and put off blogging during that time. So, making up for that, here are the April Couldawouldashoulda’s described briefly using clever burger metaphors.

Earth – Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light Pt. 1

Shit that burger took FOREVER to eat. Could have used more seasoning, though. Or any condiments. Or a bun for that matter. Now that I mention I, they just basically gave me a big plate of boneless ribs. Still good though.

Nicolas Jaar – Space Is Only Noise

Listen, this is good, but I’ve been to a lot of burger joints recently that have made a similar burger much better.

The Low Anthem – Smart Flesh

Are you sure I ate this burger? It looks nice on the menu, but I don’t remember eating it. I feel full though. And a little sleepy.

Toro Y Moi – Underneath the Pine

Alright, this burger is slightly more thought out than the last one they gave me, but a dry burger’s a dry burger, dude. I’ll pass.

Within Temptation – The Unforgiving

I’m liking it, but did they have to put so much cheese on it? Why does this burger have so much cheese on it?

And that’s that. Here are the Couldawouldashoulda’s for May 2011:

Big K.R.I.T. – Return of 4Eva

Original Review Here

While still great, Return of 4Eva was hardly the masterpiece I was expecting after last year’s debut, K.R.I.T. Wuz Here. The album certainly shows K.R.I.T.’s craft maturing, but I don’t think that necessarily warrants him completely disavowing the wildly successful cheap thrills of his past like K.R.I.T. Wuz Here’s summer smash, “County Shit”. I wanted to hail Return of 4Eva as K.R.I.T.’s magnum opus as much as the next guy (and apparently every publication that has reviewed it), but I simply cannot bring myself to do it. It’s just an above average rap album.

Tim Hecker – Ravedeath, 1972

Original Review Here

In which Paul attempts to parse meaning from distant piano melodies and simmering atmospherics. Tim Hecker’s seventh album is great fun if you like to watch your own house burn down; it’s fraught with haunting ambient textures and bits of cacophony are sprinkled in like walnut pieces in grandma’s famous pumpkin bread. As a listening experience, though, Ravedeath 1972 does an excellent job of conveying terror brewing just over the horizon if not the apocalyptic undertones other critics have cited. Sometimes, the album finds itself on the wrong side of my tumultuous relationship with ambient music, but it’s worth your time nonetheless.

Thursday –No Devolución

Alright well this was going to have to come out eventually. You will not find a review of Thursday’s seventh album, No Devolución, on Check Your Mode because I forgot to take notes on it and a couple other albums. I rated them but, like a moron, I completely forgot to do anything with them. So as a primer, here are the albums I have overlooked:

The Skull Defekts – Peer Amid

Magic Pie – The Suffering Joy

Panda Bear – Tomboy (probably the most notable of the three)

Sorry about that. Anyway, No Devolución shows the New Jersey sextet (?) taking a centrist approach to their post-hardcore sound. While that’s admirable, I find myself counting far too many missed opportunities on the album as a result of this compulsion for balance. When the group goes positively apeshit in the three choruses of “Past and Furious Ruins” with distorted screams and jagged riffs, it almost feels like a fever dream, because it leaves as quickly as it arrived, the group pretending it didn’t just sonically kick you in the face as they go into the soft tumble of the verses. There aren’t nearly enough moments like that on No Devolución. While it’s a great album regardless, I would suggest the group bring out the chains and whips next time around...

Sic Alps – Napa Asylum

Original Review Here

For what should have been an unremarkable lo-fi record, Napa Asylum has had legs since its late January release. The San Francisco group’s third album is just a collection of two-minute guitar pop exercises. The chorus of “Eat Happy” literally goes, “Eat eat eat eat eat eat eat eat eat eat eat eat eat happy,” for example and yet it is captivating in ways that will make you feel ashamed of yourself. The album’s so simple you’d almost wish it would just go away, but it has adamantly refused, and I must say it makes a rather convincing case for itself. Alright Napa Asylum, we’re cool. Just don’t drink all my Pib, OK?

Colin Stetson – New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges

Original Review Here

Pretty elaborate title for an album that’s basically a guy wrestling with a saxophone for an hour. Pretty prophetic Laurie Anderson poetry for an album that’s namesake doesn’t speak a word. Is New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges overblown? You’d think so, but it actually earns every one of its elitist signifiers because Colin Stetson can play a bass saxophone like he’s giving birth to a heaving, enchanting demon. At least with his instrument, Colin Stetson has conceived a masterpiece that warrants all the artsy bullshit that comes with it, the placental nourishment if you will for that festering brilliance kept in Stetson’s utero for what feels like centuries. These graphic birth metaphors doing anything for ya? No matter. Get this album, because, if you don’t, you may need an epidural for the pain you’ll endure for not forgiving yourself.

Couldawouldashoulda: May 2011

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+