Author: brian

Canada’s the Burning Hell are still described on their own website as “the alter-ego of ukelele player and all-purpose nerd Matthias Kom”, which made sense as of their 2011 masterpiece Flux Capacitor. As of 2013’s louder, more rock-centric People, it makes better sense to refer to Kom as a guitarist, but the essential idea holds true: as pleasant as the old-time swing of their sax and clarinet is (where still applicable), the Burning Hell‘s songs revolve around the words, and Kom’s dry, speaking-melodically tenor voice. He tells stories: some autobiographical, some fictional. But even if we can largely tell which are which, it would be unfair to impose such structure on him.

Grown-Ups, a slow-burning rocker that brings Neil Young’s Americana out towards Pearl Jam or Live without the teensiest hint of melodrama, serenely opens the album by recalling “You were a Nazi hunter/ I was a Cockney punter/ We used to meet on some rainy English street/ You’d be looking sharp, I’d be in a dirty old jumper/ Despite our different social stations/ Despite my lack of vocation/ I’d find you some piece of crucial information”. This is, of course, entirely of a piece with “We used to take photographs in graveyards/ back when we were little goth idiots/ We used to smoke hash before math class/ Everybody did it”. What it’s not of a piece with is “I got the invitation, it’s on the fridge/ beside the picture of you and your kids”. So the song becomes a polite ducking out, rejecting the invitation because “By the time you read this” … an exciting prologue that is never expanded on. By the time you read this, something will have happened: fill in your guesses here. Just don’t make it ordinary: don’t blemish the memory.

Amateur Rappers is virtually pop-punk, barreling forward eagerly, with one sinister clarinet-led detour into klezmer. Kom’s delivery remains calm, though, stand-up comedy edging at times towards white-guy rap flow (with clarinetist Ariel Sharrat adding sing-song melody for the chorus). It’s about knock-knock jokes, founding a really fun religious cult, finding happiness the wake of apocalypse, and how “parenting is the last refuge of the scoundrel”. Holidaymakers, jaunty and pre-rock and swingin’ with woodwinds and rhythm guitar, is a 1st-person-plural narrative in which our heroes have too much fun noticing the world’s little sensory details to get out of the way of an onrushing train, so then they must plead to St. Peter for a chance at reincarnation because they don’t want to be dead and have to miss everything. Wallflowers, acoustic early rock’n’roll (American Graffiti soundtrack plus clarinet and female “ahh-ahh-ahh” backing), is an intentionally awkward/ goofy flirting song, but still again sweetly caught up in details: “I like the way your pants are the same colours/ as the colours of the band around your hat … That sparkle in your eye shines/ like a shiny diamond in a diamond ring/ and like a crow, don’t you know/ I’m helpless around shiny things”.

Realists and Industrialists, although pleasant as band performances by Burning Hell, represent the downside of Matthias Kom’s slackness, their stories shrugging their way towards generic c’est-la-vie morals like “It is what it is”, “You are what you are and I am what I am”, and “It takes all kinds of people to make a world”. Barbarians is much more fun, a 7-minute narrative where the band speeds up and slows down, rocks fiery and backs into eerie xylophone, shows a sense of guitar drama that often reminds me the Doors’ the End (but at other times of something much more playful), and invents a myth about Vikings, magic trees, Loki, and how destiny likes to play mythical heroes for suckers.

People isn’t necessarily about *real* people, but then, it generally is. It’s just about us when we’re off-duty. And it bops along with just the right amount of energy that you can dance to it like a person of any age, whether you want to essay a Charleston, a Twist, a very gentle mosh, or me and my 7-year-old twisting my raincoat into a hundred unlikely shapes as our shared partner-dance prop. Which is an act of parenting, thus scoundrelhood. But I think Kom would get it anyway.

– Brian Block

To see the rest of our favorites, visit our Favorite Albums of 2013 page!

(Amazon does not carry the Burning Hell‘s People, but you can buy it at Burning Hell’s bandcamp site, and the band themselves keep 80% of the money you spend there, because bandcamp.com are lovely that way.)

Paul McCartney writes good-natured melody-driven pop songs, which often (as on New, or 2005’s Nigel Godrich-produced Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, or his electronics-driven albums as the Fireman) make an effort to keep up with contemporary production innovations. There’s a good chance you knew that, come to think. He co-led a ’60s band called the Beatles, who were usually celebrated as leading a musical revolution (reports differ as to whether they wanted to be counted in for the destructive bits) while selling then-record numbers of albums (or as Casey Kasem would put it “These guys are from Ireland and who gives a shit”). But they occasionally were attacked by otherwise intelligent people (in this case Lawrence Miles) on the grounds that “Nothing they did in their entire existence was genuinely new, certainly not the supposed ‘revolution’ of Sergeant Pepper, yet they displayed an astonishing ability to take other people’s music and make it so straightforward – you might even say banal – that everybody on Earth could understand it”. Which is a silly way of saying that they took avant-garde ideas generated by academics and other weirdos, and turned them for the first time into songs, excellent songs, thus making an extraordinary run of albums.

McCartney’s solo career, from 1970 on, has long suffered from a vague widespread disappointment that he has no desire, left on his own, to be ahead of the pack. But by refusing to ever be left completely behind, Paul McCartney reached the age of 70 able to make a very fine New album in which different songs sounded like different stops along the entire timeline of his life — 2013 included.

At the most modern end, Appreciate is club-dance electronica, McCartney’s vocals switching among trendy James Blake-style neo-R & B, a heavily processed chant feel, and an especially catch bit of rapid-fire singing. The gentle Looking at Her could easily have been an acoustic guitar ballad, but instead is synthetic, twinkly, and taken over at unpredictable intervals by aggressive industrial-ish beats in a rather dubstep-style structure. Hosanna is a pretty minor-key harmony piece over acoustic guitar, but the guitar’s natural echo is processed into a vividly unnatural creature of its own, haunting the song in company with bird-calling synthesizers. Road‘s wobbling synthesizers, distant drums, and ominousness put much of the song in the vicinity of late-’90s trip-hop, except when the piano’s forceful bass chords take over.

Then again, New , a jaunty music-hall song with piano, horns, handclaps, and lightly psychedelic production touches, could have fit unobtrusively onto Magical Mystery Tour in 1967. Queenie Eye, after a brief string quartet opening, is thumping piano-led rock’n’roll with a shouty chorus. Save Us‘s overdriven, compressed power chords feel like nothing before the 1980s, but the jubilant feeling and piano and horns and urgently tuneful group-sung chorus all harken back to rock music’s founding. Alligator‘s occasional heavy guitar hook is produced like a ’90s grunge band covering Ennio Morricone, and the treble synthesizer activity feels like the same era, but there’s barbershop quartet in the vocals and skiffle, Paul’s pre-Beatles genre, in the song’s core. The folk-rock Everybody Out There feels in some ways timeless, but there’s a guitar hook that’s pure ’80s R.E.M. and crowd-baiting, whoa-oh-oh’s, and echoed beats that would feel at home in ’80s arena metal. Then again, the folky Early Days and country-stomp sing-along Get Me Out of Here would have sounded fine when Paul was a little kid.

The lyrics are fine but don’t mostly affect my reaction to the record. My favorite song here, the acoustic-guitar-centered On My Way to Work (which does have a couple nicely fuzztoned hooks), is an affecting song about loneliness, and watching other people looking for some sort of direction in life, where the narrator is blatantly not Paul; more often we either don’t know anything about the narrator, or it’s clearly the perspective of an old rock star. The main things Paul McCartney has learned about life are that if you’re rich and millions of people love you, you can be happy, and if you have a gift for writing catchy but subtly unpredictable melodies, you should write lots of them. You’ll need to decide for yourself how useful you find those lessons, but on their own terms, they’re wise. And as any newscast will remind you, not everyone who *does* need those lessons learns them.

– Brian Block

To see the rest of our favorites, visit our Favorite Albums of 2013 page!