Rantings, reviews and lists from a person who structures half his life around obsessing over music.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Built To Spill & Meat Puppets @ The Fillmore, San Francisco, CA, 02/25/08

At first glance, the godfathers of 80's underground cow-punk and the godfathers of 90's indie guitar rock don't have much in common, besides their title. The relatively unknown opener from Seattle, Helvetia, worked to bridge the gap between the two bands with a sound that fused the best of both styles: Anthemic songwriting, J. Mascis-esque vocals, Sonic Youth style noise solos, and a penchant for jamming out. But even their fairly impressive attempt (which encouraged me to check out their myspace, something that I encourage any Dinosaur Jr fan to do as well) couldn't make the two bands' performances feel any closer to one another.

Meat Puppets took the stage and exhibited an energy and excitement that you wouldn't expect from a bunch of gray haired middle aged men going on their 28'th year as a band together. The Bassist in particular, Cris Kirkwood, overflowed with enough glee and playfulness to fill a giddy schoolgirl at her first high school dance. However, their age revealed itself in the extremely dull moments that they decided to play any of their recent work. Thankfully, the extended jam sessions that tied each song together made up for such mistakes, and fan-favorites like "Up On The Sun" and "Plateau" were instilled with enough improvisation and twists to feel completely new.

Sadly, Built To Spill was in direct contrast with Meat Puppets' enthusiasm (which surprised me, since the first time I witnessed them, on the You In Reverse tour, they were spectacular). Their stage presence was just what you would expect from one of the spokes-bands of the slacker generation. Whether staring solemnly at their shoes or pensively fixated on their guitars, they barely changed their facial expressions and stage positions for the entire show. Other bands may have been able to put up a show without much movement, but Built To Spill's best songs vary between ecstatic joy and soaring chaos, so by all rights, their physical manifestation should be appropriate. Instead, I got the impression that they were going through the motions, completely unmoved by their own stellar compositions. But the even bigger issue was the poor sound-mixing, which effectively eliminated the best parts of each song (dense layers of supplementary riffs, slide guitars, and Doug's wonderfully whiny voice) in favor of the rhythm guitar's overloud chunky monster riffage. Still, unmoved by their most recent work, it was nice to see that they hadn't abandoned their classic albums, crafting a set that took all the best tracks from their trio of greatness (There's Nothing Wrong With Love, Perfect From Now On and Keep It Like A Secret).


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Friday, February 15, 2008

Atlas Sound - Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel (2008)

4.5 ★/9.0 - 9.9

Anyone who finds themselves indifferent to this album and only liking the obligatory single "River Cards" (Or, more justifiably, the excellent "Bite Marks", which sounds like Aphex Twins doing Weezer's "Only In Dreams"), may want to reconsider their approach. Bradford Cox's solo experiment should not be taken in anywhere near the same vein as his other band, Deerhunter. Ultimately, that band is about pop-rock. Atlas Sound may be under the guise of a dreamier version of the same thing, but these songs are above and beyond such restricting structures. Instead, Cox crafts a full-blooded ambient album, layering his walls of sound to create a 50 minute transportation to another world that is weightless, transcendent, and above all, gorgeous.

Like most ambient music, enjoyment develops out of repeated listens. Only then do otherwise bland songs reveal the subtle elements that make them interesting and engaging. "On Guard" would be a bore if not for the way hand claps, disembodied voices and a keyboard scale enhance it so effectively. The laser beam phasers of "Scraping Past" begin to fufill as a guitar solo would. The Blade Runner-esque synth pads of "Winter Vacation" add a heavenly quality to an otherwise simple drum machine. The slowly mounting white noise on "Recent Bedroom" make a fascinating tension between beauty and abrasiveness. But the best parts are instrumental tracks like "Ready Set Glow", "After Class" and the title track, which become otherworldly in their simplicity, matching the dreamy aura of similar minded experimentalists (Brian Eno, Panda Bear). It's individual highlights are so good that they almost overshadow the fact that Let The Blind Lead... achieves a certain coherence that very few singer-songwriters seem capable of. It begins with a ghost story, and the rest of the album follows suit, settling into a spectral groove of relentless supernaturalism and beauty. This kind of intimacy and ethereal pulse gets attempted all the time, but not enough of those attempts really get down the single-minded perfection that My Bloody Valentine's masterpiece, Loveless, so stunningly exhibited 17 years ago. This is perhaps the closest anyone will ever get. Read more...

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Los Campesinos! - Hold On Now, Youngster (2008)

4.0 ★/8.0 - 8.9

With Hold On Now, Youngster, I will never judge a book by it's cover again. Los Campesinos! is a band that's made themselves known through Myspace. They're a band that, when described, sounds completely void of anything new or original. They're a band who, being on the same label as Stars and Broken Social Scene, have a lot to live up to, and at the offset, very little suggests that they can. And yet somehow, they succeed where so many other generic, quirky , "up-and-coming" indie rock bands fail. Or maybe their followers are just too busy dancing their asses off to see otherwise.

Hold On Now, Youngster mostly stays in one mode: spastic, wired and zany. One can imagine the band composed of a bunch of melodramatic 9 year olds, stuffed with a day's worth of sugar and let loose. Occasionally, a J Mascis-esque guitar lead will surface, but otherwise, sounds buzz and bounce off the walls in a speed-induced rush, supporting the anything-goes, shout-as-much-as-you-can-NOW vocals (What do you expect from a band with a song titled "You!Me!Dancing!"). But wedged between lightning charged keyboards and glockenspiels, is a startlingly sincere and poetic core. As a matter of fact, you can approach the album as a touching and emotional masterpiece just as much as you can approach it as a fun joyride. "My Year In Lists" is a 2 minute lesson in advanced poetry that every Dashboard Confessional in the world would benefit from. It's companion piece, "Knee Deep In ATP" gets a little sappy, but makes up for it with brilliant structure that switches from high-octane spazz-pop to tenderly epic and back again. And speaking of tender epics, the closer, "The Year Punk Rock Broke My Heart" pulls a move that's typical of an Arts & Crafts band and builds beautifully driving, hair-standing tension for 3 minutes, that, every single time it's played, hits just as hard as the first time you heard it.

I've developed an extremely close relationship to Hold On Now Youngster, and I'm sure I won't be the last person to do so.. Its nearly limitless youthful exuberance and affecting nostalgia means it's an album made to be loved and cherished. In The Aeroplane Over The Sea comes to mind, and not just because we've reached a 10 year anniversary for the cult classic (nor is it because the whole album is also done in a single key). It's just the intimacy I feel listening to it. Now, I'm not suggesting that it has even half the depth of that masterpiece (well, maybe at least half), but it is capable of affecting someone in the same way. Now, I'm not suggesting that it has even half the depth of that masterpiece, but it's certainly capable of affecting someone in the same way. When I first obsessed over In The Aeroplane in my teenage years, it was a snapshot of my childhood. Now, a few years later, Hold On Now Youngster takes me back to high school - the haze of discovering Pavement and Sonic Youth, dancing alone in my room, racing shopping carts and blowing fireworks to escape the seemingly all-enveloping confusion of puberty, angst and drama. Read more...

Friday, February 1, 2008

Have A Nice Life - Deathconsciousness (2008)

4.5 ★/9.0 - 9.9

The 2000's are coming to a close and for a long time, it appeared this decade's crowning lo-fi achievement would be The Glow Pt. 2. But for every Pavement, there's bound to be a Guided By Voices, and it looks like The Microphones are finally gonna have to share their throne with Have A Nice Life because their debut, Deathconsciousness is a sprawling double album that emerges as a transcendent, emotional masterpiece. And this much is clear even before listening to the damn thing. It's plastic case is twice as big as a normal cd jewel case and will stick out like a sore thumb in your collection. It was composed over the course of nearly six years and is supplemented with a 75 page booklet that's filled with history lessons and theories that strengthen it's enormous themes of death and religion. But it's epic scope isn't just on the surface; every repeat listen further reveals it's ambitions to be bigger than anything released this decade. This is all the more striking considering the fact that it's an mail-order-only release, from a completely unknown duo that is essentially a personal bedroom recording project, based in Connecticut of all places. But we get the sense that Tim and Dan aren't trying to become successful musicians, or even musicians at all. They're simply obscure philosophers and this is the soundtrack to their byzantine ideas.

Despite such complex conceptual motives, the musical ideas on Deathconsciousness are strikingly bare. Unlike Phil Elvrum who tended to show off his dynamic range, Have A Nice Life let their somber progressions sit, gaining resonance and power with droning repetition while they layer it with swirling patterns of emotive vocals. Every moment of vulnerability is expanded like taffy to it's breaking point, drenched in a subterranean, lo-fi mist and driven by industrial drum machines that make it sound like it's been recorded in a boiler room. The result is a mix of Post Punk, Shoegaze and Post Rock, but what Deathconsciousness accomplishes is beyond genre. "A Quick One Before The Eternal Worm..." is stunningly spacious and formless whereas the furious punk of "Waiting For Black Metal Records..." and "The Future" are condensed blasts of rage. The heartbreaking depths of "Who Would Leave Their Son...", "The Big Gloom" and "I Don't Love" are bottomless while the mind-shattering "Earthmover" rises past heaven in true GY!BE fashion. And interludes like "There Is No Food" and "Deep Deep" exhibit barricades of impenetrable sound and texture.

Affectionately advertised by it's creators as "the most depressing album ever made" and running past 85 minutes, a full listen to Deathconsciousness can be exhausting. But anyone who meets it halfway will likely have a religious experience. With the exception of the tired "Telephony", Deathconsciousness is nearly perfect. It plays not like an album, but like a powerful film. Unfortunately, getting a hold of this little-known gem can be a pain, but I can't stress enough that Deathconsciousness should not be missed by anyone. Read more...
"How many times must a man look up
before he can see the sky?"