Has Khaela Maricich fallen in love? The zippiest, kickiest tune on Paper Television, “Parentheses” keyboard-bops with an ear-to-ear grin antithetical to the blue, lonesome musings and bleak, desperate character studies that Blow albums usually feature. Could it be that new collaborator Jona Bechtolt’s input is more than creative? “If something…
In a nutshell: A glob of autumnal piano dolor inches tentatively forward into a wasp’s nest of teed-off, antsy guitars, bells, and violins, emerging finally into sunlight and a fading, heavenly choir. If Stevens flipped his own script and chose to travel this mouth-agape, modern compositional route more often and…
Austin, Texas trio the Weird Weeds are likely to get their due in another decade or so, when some upstarts stumble upon their catalogue and — in the process of reinterpreting one of their frail, digest-it-and-forget-it songlets — infuse the source material with some much-needed presence and vigor. Yeah, okay:…
Chicago MC Lupe Fiasco achieves a remarkable duality on his first single, a soulful, summertime love letter to skateboarding (wherever you can, because you can, as long as you can) imparted with cool nonchalance over producer Soundtrakk’s brassy slopes and steady, measured drums. At the core of this song’s heavy-lidded,…
No band lives up to its hype when said hype has reached fever-pitch, blog-to-blog pinball proportions, but it should be noted that a number of Pitchfork-endorsed outfits do make the art-rock grade. Tapes ‘n Tapes, a Minneapolis foursome that self-released The Loon last year and recently signed with XL, is…
A vile slaughterhouse hostility emanates from Michigan’s Wolf Eyes. The clanks, hisses, scrapes, and flayed vocal disarray of their music is interspersed with pregnant, dreadful silences, and their track titles sound like scraps of icky, loathing poetry. Human Animal’s doomed thrills are horror-flick vicarious: Tuning in is like being trapped…
Chicago quartet the Cairo Gang represents pathos in its many forms — sometimes enraged, other times outwardly tranquil, mostly just sorta blah. Frontman/singer Emmett Kelly is content to let his sensitively expressed complaints and disappointments go almost overshadowed by effects-free, naked guitar-playing in the main, with bongos, flutes, and recorders…
All over her self-titled debut, Tam sings like she’s loaded or a few hours removed from that state, and the music is just as drunk — a colorless Ax UPR speeding up a ramp to the proper RPM at the outset, only to reappear later (tumbling and then ramping and…
“What now?/What now?/What now?/What now whaaaaaaaaaat?” wonders this Brooklyn boy’s choir, ethereal and cosmic, from a rosy, wavering Radiohead/Beach Boys howl of a sunset. The answer, apparently, is the state where Hunter S. Thompson spent most of his complicated life and eventually ended it — but Grizzly Bear may be…
“I’d rather fuck who I want/Than kill who I am told to” are the first words Peaches (a.k.a. Merrill Beth Nisker of Germany) hollers, like a petulant schoolgirl, on Impeach My Bush — a false sign that the schoolteacher-turned-electroclash-vixen has traded in porno for politics on her third album. Again…
Why these mystic-minded, lysergic journeymen (and journeywoman) felt inclined to pluck and cover a Beatles White Album obscurity is anyone’s guess. Their revision swaps out the central piano motif for countless equilibrium-challenged guitars and Isobel Sollenberger’s refracting, stoned vocals — with a bonus coda where the band delivers a low-key,…
The Vibration hews closer to midtempo, noncombative postriot grrl than anything else. Make no mistake, though: Ann Fitzgerald could score frontwoman work in any Olympia, Washington dorm basement, for she embodies that particular scene’s favored bratty, up-in-your-grill-like-it-or-not vocal quality where sarcastically genial shifts seamlessly to borderline enraged. On Amarilla she…
Either adult-contemp songstress Nelly Furtado just wanted to shed her squeaky-clean image or she decided donning revealing frocks and accentuating her sex appeal would equate to bigger bank. Timbaland tags along to guest-rhyme on and produce this urban format rhythm ‘n’ ho extreme makeover. In the video Furtado grinds all…
When I call this “trap music,” I’m not making a Young Jeezy reference. McKean’s reverberating American goth chordage and placidly telescoping vocals are the heavy shadows where the unseen horrors implied by his too-tranquil twilight scenario lurk, waiting to reveal themselves: “Come, lock the door/Nobody’s home/All the windows are closed/All…
Don’t let those could-be Finnish song titles fool you. Anathallo hails from Michigan, its name draws reference from a Japanese folktale, and its debut, Floating World, bears little resemblance to any of the zillion CD-Rs recorded in recent years by Avarus or Avarus-associated concerns. This five-years-running septet fuses the reeling,…
Walkmen frontman/lyricist Hamilton Leithauser does late-twentysomething/early-thirtysomething-in-midlife-crisis hand-wringing better than any other American working in indie rock today. That his band’s first two albums were titled Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone (in which he tried to convince himself his life didn’t suck) and Bows and Arrows (in which…
Sometimes sonics say more than words alone. This dynamite Canadian foursome rocks its significant-other separation anxiety like a toned-down Throwing Muses hurricane until all the band can muster is a lyric-free horde of evil-caterpillar keyboard patter punctuated by drum fills and random guitar scabs…
Like so many ragtag, fresh-faced (or willfully bearded) insurgents tarred with the freak-folk or New Weird America (the latter a genre tag so broad it’s almost useless) brushes, Philadelphia’s Espers draw melodic sustenance from a mind-boggling number of obscure and traditional organs and stringed things. A decided sense of purpose…
When Kamal “Radioinactive” de Iruretagoyena lets loose with a compressed, jammed rush of gobbledygook here — see “Refrigerator” or “Trouble” — it’s difficult to understand why this Los Angeles-based MC/producer hasn’t yet broken out of the backpacker scene that’s home to the Anti-Con contingent and its malcontent fellow travelers. Peep…
As Court & Spark guitarist/singer M.C. Taylor unhurriedly lays down meaty, old-school Joe Walsh-style riffs, it’s impossible not to picture him affecting a self-satisfied pout — an image that seems at odds with the poignant, clearing-at-the-end-of-the-path lyricism he imbues with such weary resignation: “I’m an old man in the gloaming/Sky,…
The feathery and the massive collide neatly here, as braided clumps of nimble, lively guitar are immersed in churning, rapidly rising growling-amp waters. Halfway through the track, blaring, iron-ore-pylon riffs jut in, obliterating everything that came before — perhaps a miniature allegory of humanity’s merciless drive for progress supplanting nature’s…
