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Tag: Reviews

  • #25 album of 2013 – We Need the Rain by the Bye Bye Blackbirds

    #25 album of 2013 – We Need the Rain by the Bye Bye Blackbirds

    Artist: Bye Bye Blackbirds

    Album: We Need the Rain

    If I’d run a personal poll of my music-geek friends to name the best album of 2013, I think the winner would have been We Need the Rain, an old-fashionedly tuneful guitar-pop album by the Bye Bye Blackbirds. This comes with a caveat: a large share of my voters would have Bye Bye Blackbirds - We Need the Rainbeen personal friends of Blackbirds singer/songwriter Bradley Skaught (with whom I’m a friendly online acquaintance). But it also represents something real: Skaught has made at least four albums prior to this, and it’s We Need the Rain in specific that I’ve seen capture listener enthusiasm in such a major way. Its songwriting fits a clear musical tradition — emphatic male tenor/alto vocal melodies, guitar riffs, vocal harmonies, simply propulsive drumming, interesting chord changes, everything built for sing-along catchiness — that used to be highly commercial (Buddy Holly, Rubber Soul) and then kept existing long after it wasn’t anymore (the Rubinoos, the dB’s, Marshall Crenshaw, Adam Schmitt, Richard X Heyman). Its performance, unlike with Skaught’s previous band lineups, is a louder, chunkier rock take on these sounds, with some new country-rock leanings as well, as if Neil Young or the Old 97s had ever tried to pass as British Invasion bands.

    Because there’s so many records like this, what makes one stand out can boil down to collections of little details. All in Light cuts the guitars and vocals in and out to leave plenty of emphasis on a syncopated tambourine-and-drumbeat built for sports arenas. Like a Thief spreads out to accommodate several different very good guitar solos, gang-harmonized call-and-response chorus vocals, classic-rock organ, and various key changes, but is pushed along by 5 minutes of gloriously persistent quarter-note drum stomping. Don’t Come Back Now‘s legato vocal melodies trace the quarter note beats with unusual precision, and the guitars flip from mildly sinister to rousing when the lyrics flip from bad romance (“Fathoms deep but still we walk the plank again”) to a determination to move on and be alone. Butterfly Drinks puts a blues-rock swagger to its pop harmonies, pumping up its realistic seduction lines “Meet me where the light looks better on me, I’ll meet you where the light looks better on you./ Just a few drinks for the nerves, and just a few drinks for the road”.

    Brand New Sitting Still — co-written with Paula Carino (a wise-ass tunesmith whose 2002 album Aquacade is We Need the Rain‘s major competition for “most widely loved album made in my friendship circle”) — is pretty and restrained, with Christmas-y percussion, but shows Bye Bye Blackbirdsoff with quietly impressive guitar soloing and an extreme number of chord changes. Waiting for the Drums genuinely sounds like a re-mastered early Beatles track — not counting the quick rock-god drum solo — right as they were moving on from “She loves you and you know that can’t be bad”, to lyrics more like Skaught’s “Two sad eyes soaking up a desert/ Look around, nothing’s getting better./ Listen to the verse, waiting for the drums/ Aching in your heart, playing like your numb./ But now that you find you’re in love/ will you surprise me?” Arena-rocker Broad Daylight rings out forcefully, but with heavy syncopation and plenty of space.

    Then there’s 6-minute album closer Spin Your Stars, co-written with lazy, abusive comic-strip cat Garfield (whose full name turns out to be Lindsay Paige Garfield). It leaves us with a mastery of classic-rock slow-burn drama — I’m thinking of current band Black Mountain, but you can imagine a heavier, de-countrified Hotel California or one of Neil Young’s unfolding desert rockers — building to the plea “Call and change me/ call and save me/ call and change me/ leave this world behind”. Which would be an intense relief to Jon and Odie.

    We Need the Rain exists partly to bring vibrant melodies and vocal harmonies to exactly the kinds of guitar-rock where it’s expected, and then again, partly to other kinds of rock where it isn’t. It’s by a California guy I spent a very pleasant afternoon with once, fifteen years ago, a guy who liked me before I had any social skills, and that probably made me pay closer attention than otherwise. What I heard when I did so was all up to the band.

    – Brian Block

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

  • #26 album of 2013 – I Fear a New World by Cold Crows Dead

    Artist: Cold Crows Dead

    Album: I Fear a New World

    Cold Crows Dead, as evidenced on their debut I Fear a New World, play mostly-pretty music of a polyglot form that’s become modestly popular in indie rock circles. Most of the songs — we’ll get to the exceptions — combine the sort of creatively-processed Cold Crows Dead - Fearflutes/ violins/ piano/ etc orchestration that dates back to Pet Sounds; with synthesizers that convey an eerie analog feel more akin to early BBC Radiophonics experiments than to the Human League or New Order; with the mildly skewed rock energy and high, whiny, slightly-croakish male vocals popularized by bands like Pavement.

    As a combination it compares, in case this helps, to Flaming Lips’s Soft Bulletin-through-At War with the Mystics phase; to Grandaddy/ Jason Lytle, especially Under the Western Freeway; to Sparklehorse’s periodic higher-energy songs; and to Cloud Cult from the Meaning of 8 to the present. In my opinion I Fear a New World is superior to any Flaming Lips (or Grandaddy or Sparklehorse) album. Not for any deep reason, just that I think Flaming Lips are a really interesting, rightly acclaimed band that’s prone to a few terrible and/or bland ideas per album, while Cold Crows Dead fully justify each of their album’s eleven songs with specific cool ideas and good tunes. Also, without suggesting that Murray MacLeod is a natural singer in any way, he sounds exactly like Wayne Coyne would if Wayne Coyne hit all his notes, and that would be a nifty new thing unto the world.

    At its most graceful, I Fear a New World sounds like a sung negotiation with a choir of sad robots while a strolling waiter provides violin accompaniment (Ghost That Burned Your House Down); or empathetically miserable piano balladry that turns semi-anthemic (Scarred and Thoughtless); or a warped lush take on waltz-time ’50s slow-dancing (Screaming at Shadows); or like UFOs eventually rousing one of the more echoey tracks on the Cure’s beautiful-depression opus Disintegration (Gone) (I first called it the Cure’s “magnum opus”, but it ain’t carrying no firearm, just a small knife sharp enough to gash a co-operating wrist).

    Deadheads and Killer Party trade a small amount of grace to get back a large enough injection of rock music that we can guess Cold Crows Dead don’t mind listening to Pixies albums, even if on shuffle with Brian Wilson’s Smile. Men in Bleak is an experiment: slow and massively echoey, big goth bass riff swaggering in the background as slam poet Stephen John Kalinich orates, alternating with MacLeod’s most ragged, insistent, angry singing. Hold It Together is another experiment, a shuffling dance tune in 7/4 time where the sing-song urgings are mild intrusions over long-held vocal notes that dissolve meaning into pure sound. My Shovel is either an experiment or a gag, with its periodic unraveling into Limp Bizkit style roaring about “My shovel! My shovel!”; it makes me giggle happily.

    I didn’t mean to do the song-by-song description thing, but it ended up fitting my point: Cold Crows Dead haven’t invented anything new, yet, in the indie rock world. Sad, lush, pretty, sorta rock, sorta weird: that’s been done before. But in eleven songs, I Fear a New World presents eleven different reasons for doing it again. I’d hate to be so jaded that this wouldn’t delight me.

    – Brian Block

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

  • #27 album of 2013 – Felicite Thosz by Magma

    Artist: Magma

    Album: Felicite Thosz

    I present to you the following inside look, in internal-dialogue form, at my annual album ranking process:

    “Wow, 2013 has been an incredible year for progressive rock. So many albums full of brilliant, dynamic, adventurous-yet-melodic playing — so many albums where I don’t have a clue what the singers are on about, and I don’t need to because they aren’t even what sticks in my head”.

    “Yeah, but if you cram those reviews in towards the end everyone will get bored reading them”.

    “So, uh… you want me to start writing them early? Rank one at #27 or something?”

    “Yes.”

    “But which?”

    “Magma‘s Felicite Thosz.”

    “Why them? How can the grandeur of Bruno Ruder’s piano playing, or the symphonic dynamics and subtle production of Christian Vander’s drumming, deserve that? What can I possibly say against an album of lovely classical/ choral vocals — and occasional lovely Magma - Felicite Thoszwacked-out gibbering — in a *made-up space language*?”

    “You could say it’s only 32 minutes long.”

    “THOSE BASTARDS!”

    “Also, Magma killed Kenny.”

    “Well, they’re French. You can’t expect them to have the exact same child-rearing values we have in the U.S.”

    Felicite Thosz is structured as a single 28-minute piece of music (plus a 4-minute coda). I like the fact that the main song is divided into ten cd tracks, because it helps me mentally store what’s happening: Ekma leading off as if Queen had been deranged Muppets singing opera; Teha an especial showcase for Stella Vander’s gorgeous voice; Waahrz giving Ruder a variety of genres in which to quickly demonstrate his piano excellence; Tsai! choral like the holy church of racing-through-the-village-overturning-things; Ohst letting vocalist Herve Aknin take the lead in a four-way sung conversation like a rollicking would-be Broadway number. I wish all really long songs included such thoughtful artificial separations. But it *is* a long song, marvelously structured to be played through as is. Even the unconnected les Hommes Sont Venus makes sense as the album’s conclusion, a gentle fugue-structured letting go.

    For those of you with prior awareness of Magma‘s work — their first album was released in 1970, and bandleader/ drummer/ singer Christian Vander was 64 when Felicite Thosz was released — I will say that they’ve changed. Felicite Thosz is more composed, more classical, less jazzy, prettier, and happier than anything I’ve heard from them before. Obviously, a lot of people like their weird music to be dark and chaotic and loopy; Magma have produced a lot to fulfill that desire in the past, and praise to them for it. In 2013 they tried this instead. Personally, I think progress towards joy is a heckuva way to race into old age.

    – Brian Block

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