Albert Hammond, Jr. announces new album

Maybe you were waiting for it, and maybe you weren't. Either way, Albert Hammond, Jr., who brought you "Yours To Keep", is done recording his new album. It's not been titled yet, but recording is done, and mixing and mastering is underway, which will be finished, according to the man himself, by January 8th. The album is slated for a release early in Spring of 2008. Of course, we'll keep you posted.

Record Review: Fink - "Distance and Time"

Rating: 6.0 / 10.0

"Hey There Delilah" has made me immediately suspicious of anyone who picks up an acoustic guitar and purports to wear his heart on his sleeve. I don't know why that particular song did it, but there it is. It's just that whenever I listen to that song, I feel like I know why it was written, and it sure as hell wasn't as a heartsick apostrophe to Delilah to try and somehow relate what she does to him. It was a trap, it was the ballad on the record that would make every girl who listened to it weak in the knees. It was Tom Higgenson's play at sex appeal. I don't hate it just because it worked so well (I'm probably a little jealous despite the fact that "Hey There Delilah" is a turd of a song, but there's no hate), I hate it because whenever I hear that damned song, I feel like that bastard Higgenson pulled a fast one. Now I can't fault him for having written a hit, genuine or not. But I can be bitter about the attitude he's spawned in me - the inherent and immediate mistrust of anyone in the business of writing slow, heartfelt, acoustic numbers. And I am. Very bitter.

So I cringed at the prospect of listening to Fink's (aka Fin Greenall) latest record. But any fears I had of disingenuousness were quickly dispelled. It's an very honest record, honest and uncreative. Of course, uncreative is not entirely a bad thing, there is a definite formula here from which Greenall does not deviate...ever. As a result, the record as a whole is quite a drag. The individual songs are nice enough, but the whole record does not amount to much more than background music. There is not enough nuance or subtlety in Greenall's music for the songs to sustain themselves, they are begging to be fleshed out by clever arrangements. So I suppose this record's honesty and commitment to truth is its tragic flaw. This record would have benefitted from another run through the production mill.

That said, there are no tracks that standout as bad, or even substantially weaker than the rest. It's a consistently good album. Just good - never more, never less. That is something of an achievement in itself. Greenall is a competent songwriter, not a great one. He needs to turn his eye to arrangement and production, expand his ear a little bit, and he might be able to do something very special.


-PTC

Noise Pop details emerge

As a follow-up to the previous report on Noise Pop:
http://neverlearned.blogspot.com/2007/11/items-of-day.html

Dates for The Mountain Goats, Magnetic Fields, and Gutter Twins have been firmed up. Darnielle et al will be at Bimbo's, The Independent, and Bottom of the Hill on February 29th, March 1st and 2nd, respectively. This, of course, straddles Ryan's birthday (3/1) quite nicely. The Gutter Twins also have a performance at Bimbo's confirmed. The Magnetic Fields will play two nights at the Herbst Theatre. Look for continuing Noise Pop 2008 coverage.

Second Opinion: Holler, Wild Rose! - Our Little Hymnal

Subtitle: Pretension in all the right places



Have we forgotten about folk? Two years ago, the clear choice for album of the year was "Illinois". There were standouts (in some case classics) from My Morning Jacket, Okkervil River, Andrew Bird, and Bright Eyes. Since then, the tide seems to have favoured pop and dance. Even Will Sheff and Sam Beam have turned to injecting rock and pop into their releases this year. The exuberance of 2005 has faded. The music community (the NME excepted, per usual) has stopped making up genres: what happened to "Baroque folk", "freak folk", and "psych folk"?

Holler, Wild Rose!, a group with far too much punctuation in their name for comfort, seem to have the answer. You want folk? They're give you folk, goddamnit. By the truckload. By the effing truckload. 12 tracks, 1.1 hours of it. When iTunes measures album length in hours, not minutes, I get worried. This is an album that calls for an intermission (I recommend lifting the needle during a slow moment in Godspeed!-length "Poor In Spirit"). I suppose this was planned for with the three "Selahs", but I'm a sucker for ambient Sigur Ros tracks.

After toying with Godspeed and Sigur Ros references, I really ought to consummate this genre pronouncement. Holler, Wild Rose! have more or less created "post-folk" and in every possible sense. This is the music Sufjan would make 50 years from now. The closest parallel for this album I can find is "The Rescue" by Explosions in the Sky. Witness the chiming electric guitars, colossal drums, glorious backing vocals, and occasional glockenspiel. This is very much the album Explosions should have done this year.

H,WR! put their own stamp on post-rock with John Moloskie's bluesy lead vocals a la Broken Social Scene or Cold War Kids, banjo, Wurly, and pedal steel guitar. Each song starts from an acoustic or banjo folk/blues base and, usually propelled by Ryan Smyth's drumming, builds into a layered guitar progsplosion. The most complex arrangement that they manage to pull off successfully is "Captive Train", which recalls a live version of an obscure Led Zeppelin song. Longer and more complex songs, with more than one dramatic peak, tend to strain the ear. The album also ends fairly weakly, with the third slow instrumental track drifting into the anemic "Promise Braid". Even the longer and wispier songs don't really reduce the album's cohesion, though. Our Little Hymnal should tide you over until Explosions in the Sky grow up or Sufjan releases California-The Golden State Rocks sometime this millenium.

8.1/10.0

-RJR

Record Review: Holler, Wild Rose! - "Our Little Hymnal"

Record Review: Holler, Wild Rose! - “Our Little Hymnal”

Rating: 8.7 / 10.0

When I tore open the envelope containing “Our Little Hymnal” by New Jersey six piece Holler, Wild Rose!, I literally had no idea what to expect. There was nothing besides the CD in that envelope that arrived in my mailbox - no photograph, no press kit, nothing. At first, this struck me as strange, slightly mysterious, and - if I let my cynical side get the best of me - a little sketchy. But then, while flipping through the CD booklet as I spun the record for the first time, I noticed something that made everything crystal clear. One sentence, written on the inside cover: “Our little hymnal is yours.”

That is probably a better summary of what this record stands for than anything I could come up with. It is not an album to be simply listened to (or even, I suppose, critiqued), but experienced. Every time I listened to this album, it sounded like the band had just discovered something magnificent, and was eager to share it, but still careful not to put too much of themselves in it that they distorted it or made it in any way impure. These meandering, vast works of shoegazing indie folk are not “theirs”, they are “ours” - they speak to us all, for us all.

The arrangements are sparse, strange, wonderful, expansive, with vocal melodies that soar, backing vocals and harmonies that infuse the dark atmosphere of this record with a gospel soul. Rather than write “slow songs”, “fast songs”, “soft songs” or “loud songs”, they write pieces of music that all have their own arc; the songs all evolve and change, amorphous and alive. Holler, Wild Rose! shirk common conventions of structure and let the music guide their songwriting rather than the other way around. And they are up to the challenge; they navigate their songs with supreme confidence and aplomb. The record wins no points for brevity, clocking in at just under 70 minutes. But I don’t think you’ll mind; I certainly didn’t.

“Our Little Hymnal” strives for the cohesion of Brian Wilson’s masterpiece “SMiLE”, painting with a sonic palette not unlike that of My Bloody Valentine with a dash of “Black Sheep Boy” era Okkervil River. The band grants their listener no breaks, which makes this record at times a tiring one to listen to. One can’t help but wish there were more bright spots to be enjoyed (like the standout track “Sun Vines”).

If anything, HWR! could stand to learn the value of brevity and structural simplicity - there is great value to be found in the juxtaposition of tight structural frameworks with liquid, formless streams of consciousness. But as it stands, this record is an achievement, and certainly worth a few listens.


-PTC

Record Review: Matt Pond PA - "Last Light"

Rating: 1.4 / 10.0

It kills me to write this. I honestly liked 2005's "Several Arrows Later". Sure, it was nothing groundbreaking, but I don't think enough people appreciated Pond's ability to craft a solid rock song. That record had some really great tunes on it. It's a record that I enjoy no matter what mood I'm in. It's a flexible listen, as many straight-ahead, dad-rock indie albums are. I never understood why Matt Pond got so much grief, especially when Wilco's boring-as-hell "Sky Blue Sky" got generally pretty solid reviews.

So okay; this review was supposed to be my polemic against the hypocrisy of critics, my scathing indictment of everyone who lets the fact that they loved "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" read genius into "Sky Blue Sky", of all those people who let their opinion of "Turn On the Bright Lights" colour their opinion of "Our Love To Admire". That's what this was supposed to be. But in order for it to be that, "Last Light" would have to be as good - or as unoffensive - as all of Matt Pond's other stuff. But looks like old Matt wanted to make my life a little more difficult.

The opening and title track was really good - exceptional even (enough to keep this record's score above 1). It got my hopes up. It sounded like Matt Pond had got a little grittier, a little less content with being the old vanilla milkshake of indie rock. But this song proves to be prophetic: "In the end, there will be only endlessness." A neat summary of what comes after this promising opener - a record that never seems to end (and never seems to get better either). Yes, from that first track, it is downhill. Pond throws in shiny production, guest appearances, and his characteristically distinctive-for-the-sake-of-being-distinctive-not-because-it-helps-the-songs arrangements, but at the end of the day, none of that stuff can save the songs from falling flat. Here, the simple, cloying quality of Pond's previous work is absent, and all we have is a shade under an hour's worth of evidence that he's run out of ideas. "Wild Girl", "Honestly", and "Foreign Bedrooms" are all especially low low points on a record that has no shortage of them.

To his credit, you can hardly blame him for having runneth dry his creating well. Since 2000, he's put out more albums and EPs than most bands put out in a career, and he's done it basically alone. He is Benjamin Gibbard without Chris Walla - a unidimensional songwriter who does not have the skilled producer behind him who makes it sound like he's growing.

There's not much I can say about "Last Light". I'm hugely disappointed by this record, and that's made worse by the fact that I know I shouldn't be. It was wrong to expect as much as I did from this record, and I - and sadly, Matt - am paying the price for it here. For now, I'll just put my headphones in, turn on "Emblems", return to days when Matt Pond had potential, and try and forget about this album.


-PTC

Record Review: Rogue Wave - "Asleep At Heaven's Gate"

Rating: 5.9 / 10.0

I was alarmed when I heard that Rogue Wave had signed to Brushfire Records. I didn’t like the idea of these modern lo-fi sophisticates being pre-packaged and made ready for the Jack Johnson-loving masses. It’s not that I mind Jack Johnson’s sound, but the link between it and that of these bay area indie mainstays seemed to me tenuous at best. Needless to say, I was pretty concerned when I first spun this record. I naively expected this record to sound like Jack Johnson: in my nightmares, Zach Rogue tried to huskily whisper four notes over five chords (a formula which I think only Jack Johnson can even approach pulling off). There would be no more reverb-soaked electric guitars, only beachy, O.C.-ready acoustic numbers. Such thoughts haunted me. I hated what I thought was coming.

Imagine my shock, then, when I pressed play and heard the exalted, furious pound of the remarkable “Harmonium”, much less the album that followed. This record is certainly not one for a beach trip. Quite the opposite, it is Rogue Wave’s darkest, most complex effort to date. At their best, the songs are heavy with struggle, weighted down by a troubled history, but trying desperately to stay positive, to see a light at the end of the tunnel. As the record progresses, however, Rogue Wave sounds more tired than tortured, resulting in a sloppy, lazy, unsatisfying last third capped off by the atrocious closer, “Cheaper Than Therapy”, with all the kitsch and cuteness of Regina Spektor’s most saccharine work. God save us.

In the end, I don’t think Rogue Wave was ready for a release like this. It is not evidence that they are incapable of producing a record with this kind of meaning. I think there is evidence that they might very well be just that. But what this album does prove is that they are far from their musical maturity. There are flashes of brilliance here (see “Harmonium”, “Lake Michigan”, and “Christians In Black”), a brilliance that their previous two records did not even hint at. But this is a patchy, inconsistent effort that would have benefitted from a few songs being relegated to the cutting room floor.


-PTC

2008 Coachella Preprepreview

A number of aspects of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival make it particularly interesting to follow. First off, its location. It's in the most populated state in the third most populated country in the world. It's a few hours from two massive cities and only a bit more from Northern California. Second, its eclecticism. It has among the most diverse lineups in festivaldom, with enough hip hop and electronic artists to spend the entire weekend there without seeing a guitar on stage. Finally, Coachella is a place for reunions. Pixies, Daft Punk, and Jesus & Mary Chain (to name but a few) have all reunited for performances at Coachella. With these in mind and the appearance of a Radiohead-esque cryptic "Coachella 2008 April 25-27 info coming" message on the official site, speculation mounts.

The big story thus far is My Bloody Valentine. The shoegazers have planned dates in Europe and have sketched out details of a new album. Rumours of talks with Coachella organisers surfaced and counter-rumours suggesting talks fell through followed shortly. I imagine that they will be there, fully reformed and mixing classics with new material. The show should be stellar.

Radiohead have laid out a few tour dates for next year in Europe as well in support of In Rainbows and one imagines that they will be at Coachella as well.

A while back, this poster showed up on the Coachella forums in various guises:


The feeling that MBV and Radiohead are to headline seems to have set in. In reality, very little of substance has been confirmed. The Breeders (http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/news/47454-the-breeders-return-with-imountain-battlesi) have listed a performance. Theories get sketchier from there. The poster above, into which someone poured a great deal of effort, is rooted somewhat in reality. Most of the artists on there should have a record to support from this year (The National) or early next year (The Postal Service) and didn't appear last year. Girl Talk is an exception, but he seems to be developing as an annual performer. Portishead have been confirmed to some degree. Again, anything is speculation until info shows up on the official site.
-RJR

On the Mars Volta

Last night, I engaged my roommate in a spirited debate about the merits of The Mars Volta. It was in this argument that I managed to properly articulate my feelings on them for the first time. I thought that I would articulate them here. I have listened to the Mars Volta. I listened to "De-Loused in the Comatorium" and "Frances the Mute", frantically in search of the innovative genius that I heard so many sources rave about.

I didn't hear genius. I heard a band that was terrified by the fact that they had nothing to say. A band that tried to mask its lack of a lyrical message in an impenetrable fog of PSAT words clumsily cobbled together in hopes that listeners will infer meaning and message from it. Don't believe me? I offer this selection from "Roulette Dares (The Haunt Of)" as evidence.

"Transient jet lag ecto mimed bison / this is the haunt of roulette dares / ruse of metacarpi / caveat emptor...to all that enter here / open wrists talk back again / in the wounded of its skin / they'll pinprick the witness / in ritual contrition / the AM trinity fell upon asphyxia-derailed / in the rattles of... / made its way through the tracks / of a snail slouching whisper / a half mass commute through umbilical blisters."

I don't think there's any need to go further. These lyrics are positively nonsensical; they bear no meaning whatsoever, neither at face value, nor after an English-Major style dissection. They are the work of a band that has nothing to say, but wants to maintain the appearance of profundity. This is far removed from the heartbreaking poignance of Jeff Tweedy's drug-addled chronicle of his search for stability as heard on "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot". On that album, the lyrics were as confused as Tweedy, and because he could not find meaning in the conventional, he groped desperately for a means of expression that would capture his struggle - and it was moving. Moreover, he had a body of work before YHF that proved that he could write straightforward pop lyrics (see "Being There"...both discs), for which YHF's lyrical complexity is all the more moving.

Well, plenty of bands write bad lyrics. Why indict the Mars Volta? I indict them because they take precisely the same approach to their music as to their lyrics. They have no substantive musical ideas, so they soak their songs in reverb, put disgusting effects on (the laughably untalented) Omar Rodriguez-Lopez's guitars, and willfully disorient their listeners in a maelstrom of hemiola and syncopation that lacks any musical direction or sense of purpose. I credit their very gifted rhythm section, but this is only two members of a now eight-piece outfit. Far from redemptive.

The Mars Volta seem to believe that making their music exhausting and difficult to listen to confers meaning upon it. The are cursed; they are (wrongly) assured of their genius, but also frightened by their own incapability to express it, so they revert to making their music so pointlessly complex that they can brand those who criticise them as philistines. My response to that strategy is this: self-conscious inaccessibility is really than self-indulgent garbage, and the deadly combination of their misguided arrogance, their incompetence as songwriters, along with the fact that they speak without having anything to say, has come through on their every release.


-PTC