Hit me like you did the first time
I spoke to Wayne Coyne about The Flaming Lips’ latest slew of box sets and compilations.
A new Hope
With their excellent releases under their belts, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever can be safely inducted into the “can do no wrong” category.
Money City maintenance
Over at the Spotify for Artists blog, I spoke to Jay Ferguson from Sloan about the fine art of staying alive.
Five alive
Johnson has said that his goal for V. was to make a summer album—but in his case, he started writing it last year during a summer where the sun was being obscured by black clouds both figurative (the Trump administration) and literal (the fiery ash that was raining down on his home city of Portland due to the inferno consuming the nearby Columbia River Gorge). Instead, he came up with a record that’s all about savoring those fleeting moments of happiness when you can find them.
Cake bosses
The Sea and Cake have been so consistent and so singular for so long that the words “taken for granted” now turn up in their reviews as much as “Chicago” or “post-rock.” Their albums do seem to blur together, with each record subjecting the band’s signature components—John McEntire’s gliding rhythms, Archer Prewitt’s jazz-inflected guitar lines, and analog synth tones warmer than a wool sweater—to slight shifts in texture, personnel or backing instruments. But the overall quality of their discography makes a strong argument against the idea that artists must amass a canon of releases that build upon each other in linear fashion. Like a prescription refill, a new Sea and Cake album offers a fresh dose of the same soothing medicine. But there’s a new urgency to their 11th full-length, Any Day, which comes after a six-year absence.
The Kids are alright
The sound of Lost Friends is as celebratory as its lyrical tone is serious. The trio often comes off like a band twice its size, coloring in the standard guitar/bass/drums arrangements with a rich palette of piano, strings, pedal steel, and electronic textures … But while Lost Friends’ slow-building ascents and soaring choruses function as necessary release valves for the unrest bubbling up from Joy’s lyrics, over the course of 12 tracks, a certain identikit quality takes hold.
Reimer remembered
Delicate and playful at times, dark and foreboding at others, this collection forms a collaged portrait of an artist who was always seeking new pathways to access the most elemental emotions, from joy to dread.
Big-league chew
Jay Watson isn’t shy about self-deprecation. His recent string of albums as GUM have functioned as billboards for his own diffidence: Glamorous Damage, Flash in the Pan, and now, The Underdog. Perhaps such humility is a natural byproduct when you’re a silent partner in both Australia’s most famous psychedelic rock band and its most rambunctious, while trying to carve out space as a solo artist beyond their long shadows. By Watson’s own admission, GUM’s past records effectively served as storing houses for whatever ideas are bouncing around his head when he’s not playing with his other bands. But the encouraging evolution of the project suggests that Watson may not be able to keep up the false-modesty act for much longer.
A Tuff-love intervention
Nothing announces an artist’s maturation quite like a waft of wind chimes. That sound eases you into The Other’s opening title track, whose dulcet organ tones provide a suitably melancholy backdrop for Thomas’ confessional lyrics about bottoming out and finding the will to carry on. It’s the sort of atmospheric vignette that would be highly effective as a two-minute scene-setter… but it goes on for three times as long as that, subtly layering additional textures yet never quite building up to the big emotional payoff suggested by its epic proportions. Beyond introducing the album’s overarching themes of pain and perseverance, the song also proves emblematic of a record that’s always reaching for the stars, yet sometimes strains too hard to get there.
Snake some action
Hot Snakes always sounded like Froberg and Reis eagerly getting a head-start on their cranky-old-man years; this is a band, after all, whose most potent, clear-eyed mission statement was called “I Hate the Kids.” On this album, it sounds like they’re already bracing for the end of their lives, if not the world.
Testy Patterns
Claustrophobic and expansive in equal measure, Makeness’ mélange of trembling melodies and strobe-lit intensity suggests a sheltered soul being exposed to inner-city life for the first time and absorbing the shocks to his system.
Hinds catch-up
If Hinds’ 2016 debut, Leave Me Alone, presented more discrete genre exercises, I Don’t Run melts down its ’60s girl-group, ’90s twee, and post-DeMarco indie-pop influences down into a lustrous swirl befitting its superior songcraft.
Surrender to the Voidz
In both look and sound, the Voidz are the Turkish Star Wars version of the Strokes: a proudly low-rent, audacious, bizarro-world transfiguration that’s equally admirable and repellent. And for those Strokes fans who thought the Voidz’s messy 2014 debut, Tyranny (credited to Julian Casablancas+The Voidz), was a one-off blurt that the singer just had to get out of his system, Virtue doubles down on his commitment to obfuscation.
Bless this Mess
With the Messthetics, Lally and Canty defer to Anthony Pirog, a dexterous guitarist and a mainstay in the Washington D.C. avant-jazz scene, who’s given free rein to unleash his six-string splatter atop Lally and Canty’s propulsion. But lest that combination suggest a post-hardcore version of Surfing With the Alien, the album is more an instrumental power-trio record that values economy and emotional resonance over technical wizardry and structural complexity.
Golden slumbers
Nap Eyes’ “White Disciple” is a song-of-the-year candidate for me; the rest of their new album further confirms its title’s false advertising.
Page 1 of 38
