Category: Mini-Reviews

Artist: Debo Band

Album: Debo Band

Debo Band are eleven students and graduates of Boston’s Berklee College of Music — singer, guitar, bass, drums, accordion, two violins, four brass players — whose self-titled debut is my new favorite album of African-styled music, for what that’s worth. My prior favorites were Who is This America? by New York City’s Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra and, I guess, Remain in Light by Talking Heads — as well as, oddly, one album made by Africans (Tony Allen’s Secret Agent). My favorite album *from* Africa, Wildebeest’s Bushrock 1, is a rock album that doesn’t strike me as obviously African at all. Basically, when it comes to Afro-pop, I don’t know what the heck I’m talking about. As a music critic, that’s a weakness. I submit, however, that for a music *fan*, it’s a good thing: how do we learn, if we don’t start in ignorance?

Here, then, are some of my listening notes, trying to make sense of what I don’t understand. Akale Wube opens with fluttering cascade of violins. Settles into lean groove that’s equal parts klezmer and funk. Repetitive rhythm guitar, sax solos, fanfare. Ney Ney Weleba builds around fluid wailing Arabian-prayer-style vocals and a call-and-response between the brass-section and thumping drums, each avoiding 4/4 time. It builds quite the percussive momentum at the end. Yekefer Wegagene is slower, solemn, and reminds me of my old Israeli folk-dance classes.

I’ll list just two more, my favorites here. Habesha leads with a sinister bass groove, has fiery guitar solos, and is punctuated with drum-and-choral interruptions like Queen leaping out at you from behind a dark corner on Halloween (Freddie Mercury, refusing to Rest In Peace, included). By the end, it’s grandiose in a way that’s part Africana and part classical-based movie score. DC Flower is a cheerful, lovely pop song driven by fast clip-clop drumming and a swaying arrangement: someone who found the rest of the album 100% intimidating might still hum happily along to this one.

I’m gonna cheat now, and Google for informed perspectives. Reviewer Matt Cibula says “In just under an hour, we get a tour through funk, brass band music, R&B and rock, and at least three different kinds of jazz… all filtered through an Ethiopian sensibility”. David Peisner says “Ethiopian-American (leader) Danny Mekonnen is an ethnomusicologist by training… but he also has a mischievous, highly un-academic side… The lack of orthodoxy on display throughout Debo Band is consistently refreshing”. Joe Tangari adds “[E]ven if you’ve spent hours listening to Mulatu Astatke and Alemayehu Eshete, you’ll hear plenty of fresh ideas here, as the band spikes its arrangements with hints of Romany brass and even Celtic melody”. Sure, seems plausible. Seems like an album that I’d find a worthwhile challenge, too. Which – hey – is what *I* said. Alright, then.

– Brian Block

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

Artist: Winter Sounds

Album: Runner

There’s nothing too unusual about Winter Sounds’ Runner, so I’ll start with comparisons. They tend to be more rousing and uplifting in feel than the bands they resemble most; keep that in mind while mentally relating them to Big Country or For Against or Icicle Works, and you should be fine. Up to and including the ’80s-style big production, and adding the kinds of glistening keyboard sounds that guitar-bass-drums rock groups then would so often find their music supplemented with.

If you prefer more famous comparisons, they’ll be less accurate, but early U2 (especially Larry Mullen’s near-military drumming) would be relevant. So would the popper side of the Cure, Push and Just Like Heaven and In Between Days. Or the Smiths, if you stripped Morissey’s personality and lyrical acuity from How Soon is Now?  and There is a Light That Will Never Go Out, and as huge a loss as that would be, they’d still sound good. A more guitar-driven Coldplay are a solid reference point, especially if you can imagine them with a bit of Mew’s evasive subtlety and grace. Winter Sounds are more likely than those bands to drop down to something really quiet before roaring back; it’s a trick they’re pretty good at.

A theme that will recur in these reviews: it would be nice for you if I were better at following lyrics while listening. Then again, it would be nice if more bands were in the habit of providing lyric sheets (to MP3 buyers as well as to CD buyers). Winter Sounds make the sort of fervent songs meant to be sing along with. And while they’re not poets, the sentences I’ve picked out here and there imply that their fervent songs are also thoughtful and sincere and intelligent-enough. Runner might rank quite a bit higher on my list if they *made it easy for me to sing along*. But it wouldn’t surprise me if you handle that better than I do, anyway.

– Brian Block

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

Artist: Lost Lander

Album: DRRT

“Alternative orchestral synth rock Portland”, announces Lost Lander‘s Bandcamp tags: a fair place to start. Their songs – calm, pretty, elegant, and fond of long, glistening notes – remind me of “laptop-pop” bands like Postal Service and Owl City. But the ways the comparison fails are important too. Matt Sheehy’s voice is deeper and more strained, and Lost Lander are an actual band. Patrick Hughes’s drums thump and pitter-pat and crash and echo; Sheehy’s guitar is often acoustic or seems so, resonating with the hollow space in the wood; Sarah Fennell plays more piano than synthesizer. Unless the string sections that sometimes appear mid-song are synthesized; if so, they’re seriously well-arranged imitations.

DRRT‘s great strength, for me, is each song’s steady progression of arrangement ideas. Songs start with single textures, and pick up new layers one by one, discarding older textures before they get over-crowded. Two minutes into a song you might be listening to four different instrument lines, none of which were there at the beginning, yet there’s never a feeling of disorientation, of “what the heck?”. The main melodies – which to me suggest ones Radiohead’s Thom Yorke might use as he ages and loses his high notes – carry steadily through the switches. The album is always revealing something new, but patiently.

DRRT‘s weakness, for me — other than the vague lyrics (Through Your Bones does have some storytelling resonance) — is that, unfairly, I want it to be a different record. Hughes is a strong and propulsive drummer who keeps his feel and his patterns varied. I don’t want all those nice dynamic transitions when he breaks into a drum-free song, then departs; I want him to take some songs over. Wonderful World has a melody line that doesn’t fill out two long bars, so I want it to tighten up and barge ahead in 7/4 time (remembering that barges are not fast-moving boats). Lost Lander just fill the eighth beat with echoey guitar.

I enjoy how Your Name is a Fire starts with synth bass, clattering kettle drums, and urgent vocals trying out three ever-so-slightly conflicting ideas about where the beat is (which I’m certain is on purpose, but then they straighten things out). I enjoy how the cymbals and piano on Belly of the Beast/Valentina edge near chaos as the song falls apart (I’d enjoy it even more if the chaos was blended into the song). Pretty much I want Lost Lander to record the sequel to World Leader Pretend‘s final album Punches. But theirs is a calmer, more deliberative form of pop-rock; and sometimes, late at night, I decide that calm is a thing I’ve underrated.

– Brian Block

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