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!

Artist: Regina Spektor

Album: What We Saw from the Cheap Seats

Regina Spektor plays piano reasonably well, and has a breathy but flexible singing voice fond of chirps, coos, swoops, creative weird mouth noises, and really awkward melisma (switching notes mid-syllable). My family and I adore her, and she’s had chart success, mainly with Fidelity from 2006’s wonderful Begin to Hope, but I can imagine why her songs could drive someone batty. Her strengths are childlike, even though her topics aren’t. She hops between specific observations — some mundane, some clever, some bizarre — and well-meaning offers of universal truths she worked out yesterday and hopes you’ll like. I think many of her juxtapositions hold up extraordinarily well, but people have told me she strikes them as too cutesy, or too obvious.

What We Saw from the Cheap Seats has evidence for all sides, perhaps. Consider the ultra-perky Ne Me Quitte Pas (Don’t Leave Me), piano mostly replaced by some bubbly sound patch like a vibraphone but much cuter, plus fake drums and a horn section. “Down on Lexington, they’re wearing new shoes stuck to aging feet/ and close their eyes and open, and not recognize the aging street/ and think about how things were right when they were young and veins were tight/ and if you are the Ghost of Christmas Past, then won’t you stay the night?” … to me, that’s a heckuvan empathetic verse for someone herself still young and pretty, and I also end up liking the next verse, even though it’s set in “the Bronxy-Bronx”.

Or consider All the Rowboats, the insistent, percussive, darkly atmospheric musical successor to Apres Moi, Edit, and Machine from prior albums. I’m an instinctive animist, so it could be written for me: “All the rowboats in oil paintings, they keep trying to row away/ and the captains’ worried faces stay contorted, staring at the waves… First there’s lights-out, then there’s lock-up, masterpieces serving maximum sentences/ It’s their own fault for being timeless; there’s a price to pay, and a consequence… But the most special are the most lonely. God, I pity the violins/ in glass coffins, they keep coughing. They’ve forgotten how to sing”. I still like museums; I’m a lot sorrier for the 90% of the New York Metropolitan’s collection that’s not on display at a given moment. It’s a great song topic either way.

It slots well with the more typical concern for a friend on piano ballad Firewood, where the urgings “Everyone knows you’re going to live, so you might as well start trying” (and later “Love what you have and you’ll have more love/ You’re not dying./ Everyone knows you’re going to love/ though there’s still no cure for crying”) fit around the acknowledgement “Someday you’ll wake up and feel a great pain/ and miss every toy you’ve ever owned”. Me, I just miss the stuffed animals. The eyes; they’re what get ya. Friends usually have eyes too, the bastards.

When Regina Spektor tells a friend — on the brief Phil Spector-ish pop-orchestrated the Party — “You taste like birthday, you look like New Year/ You’re like a big parade through town/ you leave a mess but you’re so fun”, well, that’s somewhat how I envision her. It means I don’t appreciate, from her, a well-crafted but generic pop-jazz lost-love song like How, and that I prefer Patron Saint‘s jaunty piano and kick-drum to its vague pains-of-true-love musings. In terms of content, half of What We Saw from the Cheap Seats feels slight to me, by Spektor’s standards. It’s also her most stripped-down set of arrangements since 2005’s Soviet Kitsch or before, though that’s not a quality judgment. But “by Spektor’s standards” is the kicker. I really like Regina Spektor albums. This was true before, and remains so.

– Brian Block

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