Author: brian

Artist: Carina Round

Album: Tigermending

Carina Round’s moody, sculpted, constantly-evolving alternative-rock songs could have been played in the glory days of MTV’s “120 Minutes”. So I’m intrigued by how hard it is to find a good comparison for her. To predict whether you’ll enjoy Tigermending, it might help if you like U2’s more evasive songs (Acrobat, Until the End of the World, Love and Peace or Else, a Man and a Woman). Or imagine Radiohead’s the Bends if the band had recorded each song in acrimonious compromise with their slightly older Amnesiac selves (no, without blowing up the space-time continuum; literal mindedness will not help here). Paula Cole’s tenser, more reserved songs — like Chiaroscuro and Hitler’s Brothers, not her hits — make a good comparison. Kristin Hersh’s solo albums show a similar sense of melody to Round’s. Also, if you know the genre term “shoegazer” and want to overlay it gently, as a thin laminate, on this whole paragraph, you might have a point.

The first half of Tigermending is built on songs that edge their way into powerful choruses. Much of the Last Time is just voice and raw, mildly syncopated drums, but bass piano notes and shards of guitar feedback and guest second vocalist build the song towards a full-fledged howl. Girl and the Ghost is voice and acoustic guitar early on; but the drums on the prechorus feel military, the later doubled vocals even moreso, and guitar again ends up experienced almost entirely as feedback. The rapid shifts between 6/4 and 4/4 time lend an insistent, tugging momentum. Set Fire feels immediately threatening in its array of echoed sounds (her singing included), and the danceable percussive momentum, when it starts, never hides the shifting distant sounds of warning. You and Me, on the other hand, is pure power ballad, a very good one — the surprise isn’t that her arrangement skills are perfect for 4-minute emotional buildups, but merely that she chose, for a song, to use them that way.

The rest of the album holds back from big choruses. You Will Be Loved, Marcel Marcel, Weird Dream, and the Secret of Drowning do so in order to interlock wider arrays of arrangement ideas. (Simplicity Hurts does so because it’s a weak ending to the record.) It’s not like her lyrical bent is for songs we’d link hands and sing together. The record starts: “Pick up the phone. I’m pregnant with your baby/ I wanted you to know the dreams that I’ve been having lately./ I woke up from an explosion, and the city speaks in sirens/ and the wreckage is my angel of devotion, a dying light inside him … Well it’s nothing that can’t be fixed with a hot bath and a fifth of mother’s ruin”. The Last Time is framed on the memory of being told “This is the last time I break your heart”, but it’s a chorus through the filter of time, while the right now is “full of giant snow balls five feet high/ The people had made families, played in the snow/ It made me feel calm so I stood for a while/ I listened, wishing I could burst into flames”.

The catchiest (to me) chorus on Tigermending asks “What’s that in your heart? The chorus of dust afraid to sing”. Unless the catchiest is the one led into by “When you find the truth, cut it out with a razor blade/ When you distribute, choose your voice like a hand grenade”. Carina Round‘s voice is fine: strong and tense and tuneful, with occasional hints of bluesiness. She saves her shrapnel for the guitars. And she would never plant an explosive in a place that wasn’t full of interesting things for unwary visitors to rummage through.

– Brian Block

To see the rest of our favorites, visit our Favorite Albums of 2012 page!

Artist: Surplus 1980

Album: Relapse in Response

Surplus 1980 — a new band, though founder/frontman Moe Staiano has been a fascinating percussionist in S.F. Bay bands for 15 years — have a well-chosen name. As long as you pick up on the right 1980 musical references: the skewed-punk and post-punk and spiky New Wave ones. Essential Logic, Pere Ubu, the Fall, the Slits, the Ex, Tin Huey, first-album Gang of Four: Relapse in Response is a louder and faster record than any of those, but draw from the same well of shouty discordant rock’n’roll clamor, the same joy in complaining. Chord progressions are less friendly than on a Chuck Berry record, but have the same elemental drive, and the drums — plus Staiano’s various re-purposed metals and tools — are clattered up front to make sure we don’t miss them.

Sometimes the guitars sound like sound effects from Bugs Bunny cartoons. Sometimes they sound like mis-transcribed Black Sabbath. Sometimes there’s horns, oboes, and clarinets helping out. Or toy piano. Assertively, of course; Surplus 1980 know, surely as any 4-year-old does, that even toys are a form of intrusion.

Staiano has a strong voice, but makes little pretense of being a singer. He can, when he chooses, go up and down a few notes on a scale, without smashing them beyond the point of repair. More often he’s a speaker, a character actor. M.E.S. Shoe Contract (named for the Fall’s Mark E. Smith) includes bouts of high-speed high-pitched urgency: “I could quit! I feel like having a clear view of focus of a storyline defeats the purpose of anything of lyrical significance! Wit is a form of smartness! Smart is sexy but I am not smart! So I will shut up, which is probably smart!” And a caveman-firm rejoinder: “So that makes me sexy, so that makes me sexy”. And the staccato, firm shouts correcting “But! this! absolutely! has! nothing! to do! with sex! at! all!”. Ironically, his male-female duet with Jesse Quattro later in the song, toying together with the phrase “It’s pure nonsense!”, *is* sexy… or maybe I’m just saying that and don’t really mean it. A little self-knowledge is a dangerous thing; I feel blessed to have none.

Trying to Succeed, Waiting with Little to No Result is frustrated angst-punk; Let’s Put Another One There is a critique of urban sprawl; the 8-plus minute Ed Saad, crammed with cool high-speed arrangement ideas, is probably about many things but the most obvious is the pleasure of saying “Ed Saad Ed Saad Ed Saad Ed Saad Ed Saad”. The Gooseneck, by Amy X Neuburg and the Cello ChiXtet, is a wonderful punk song to cover, sly and free-associative and funny as well as indignant. Staiano doesn’t even attempt its tricky melody or cello arrangement (although he does have a cello or two just sawing away), just focusing on the words as his band stampedes through: the best melody is handed to trombonists, who let you hear them slide from note to note.

So if it doesn’t help you to picture Surplus 1980 in relation to a bunch of old punks that only critics and geeks ever liked, perhaps you can picture them as an insane runaway marching band. Which is the best response *I* can imagine to those daily 6:30 a.m. practices, or to being loud strutting mascots to a bunch of annoying high school football players. A good sort of marching band, then, to have around.

– Brian Block

To see the rest of our favorites, visit our Favorite Albums of 2012 page!

Technical note:

You can hear various Surplus 1980 songs on their Soundcloud page, and buy Relapse in Response at Wayside Music .

If you’re game for buying things via our Amazon links (and it makes us happy when you do) – well, Amazon doesn’t have Surplus 1980. But if you’d enjoy them, maybe you’d also want the new Pere Ubu cd we’re linking in its place. Or the complete set of Oz books! I hope Amazon has that; click around, find out.

Artist: Thinking Plague

Album: Decline and Fall

Thinking Plague are an extremely skillful band of singer (Elaine di Falco), guitar (Mike Johnson), bass (Dave Willey), keyboard and drums (both Kimara Sajn), and sax/ flute/ clarinets (Mark Harris). Oddly for a rock band, they almost entirely avoid distortion, even for bass and guitar. It’s easier for me to give you adjectives about their album Decline and Fall than it is to assure you they’re compliments. “Composed”, in both the musical and emotional senses. “Difficult”. “Uncompromising”. If you started a stylistic line at, say, Maroon 5, and drew it in the direction of the Dirty Projectors (maybe halfway between Bitte Orca and Swing Lo Magellan), then kept going until you’d traveled twice your original distance, you’d be nearing Decline and Fall‘s vicinity, where no melodic or harmonic interval is ever normal and no rhythm is ever unchallenged by cross-currents.

Or you could navigate the Rock In Opposition island chain where Henry Cow (vocal albums only), the Science Group (ibid), the 5uu’s, Time of Orchids, and the Red Masque keep each other company. Thinking Plague feel more 20th-century-classical, and less heavy, than the latter three, but remain comparable. But if that’s meaningful to you, you’re probably aware of Thinking Plague already. In which case I’ll opine for you that Decline and Fall is their most stylistically consistent, melodically intricate album ever, and (for me) the first whose willfully knotty tunes fall consistently on the right side of the “hmm, interesting!” vs. “yikes – ugly!” border. My favorite Thinking Plague album remains 1989’s In This Life, which was more sprawling and varied and had shameless goth elements. But I’ll take Decline and Fall as the highlight of their mature style.

Malthusian Dances and Sleeper Cell Anthem are my favorites here, the closest approaches to “catchy”. The oft-pretty A Virtuous Man (length 11:53) shows off the players’ skills extra-well. I Cannot Fly deserves mention for Elaine di Falco’s spectacular interlocking vocals: she can’t exactly sing warmly with the melodies Mike Johnson composes for her, but she’s able to salvage the tone and grumpy charisma of a Liz Phair or a Lisa Germano, if either had spent years being rigorously trained at a school for vocal acrobats.

Liz Phair gets grumpy, when she does, about men (romantically interesting ones, record executive ones). Thinking Plague get grumpy about mankind. “See us dancing inexorably to the steps of a suicidal choreography, while the clock is ticking out the pace of collapse”, the record begins. At first you’d probably take it for wry, observational Seinfeld-style humor: “Bears and toads and fish floating dead, as blackbirds in their thousands rain down from the sky/ Fleas conspiring, forests expiring, as diseases multiply and rivers run dry” and such. But lyricist Johnson seems like a man making a moral point: he has di Falco sing “We must not place hope in fantasies. Dreaming of sprawling ‘dominion’, unspoken public opinion. Can’t we all strike it rich? Is it not the truth that God helps those who need it least?” No one, the band included, is evading blame: “We are, all of us, the bringers of hunger”, not to mention “Swirling on the currents of the deep blue sea/ thousand miles of plastic debris/ Nurdles and bottles and PCBs/ Compliments of you and me!”.

If you want redemption from Decline and Fall, you can choose. One song claims (after decrying “dogmas of hate”) “I choose to love my fellow man”. Another, far more vividly, looks forward to “Without us, the roar fades, the air starts to clear/ in green shade, life senses reprieve … Dams burst, roads crumble, shining towers tumble/ Balance is restored. And in time, the forests embrace the oceans”. The latter gets the final word. There is something inspiring, I think, in the purity of Mike Johnson’s anti-sociability, his complete disinterest in whether we enjoy his company or not. It wasn’t enough to salvage, for me, Thinking Plague‘s 2003 album a History of Madness; those melodies made my ears hurt, and I’m sure the composer didn’t mind. But these, I like. Maybe, by listening, I’m a sucker accepting his dare. But somehow, the damn thing’s kinda fun.

– Brian Block

To see the rest of our favorites, visit our Favorite Albums of 2012 page!