Category: Alternative (Page 15 of 155)

Filter: The Trouble with Angels

September 22, 2010 /


RIYL: Nine Inch Nails, Stone Temple Pilots, Alice Cooper’s Brutal Planet and Dragontown

Filter is Richard Patrick. It’s his toy and he is going to steer it, hire the rest of the band and collaborate with who he thinks will make the best record. Mind you, it is going to sound like a Filter record. There will be those trademark Patrick screams contrasted against his solid singing voice; there will be crunchy industrial guitar riffs, chugging bass lines, at least one ballad and Patrick will be wrestling lyrically with subjects like addiction and the ills of organized religion. For The Trouble with Angels, Patrick works with Bob Marlette (Iommi, Alice Cooper, Atreyu among others) to re-sharpen the fangs of Filter. Marlette produces and engineers the record while co-writing nine of the ten songs.

Consistently, this is a heavier effort throughout the 41 minutes then the last several records and is much more akin to the debut Filter release, Short Bus then anything released since. Interestingly enough, Patrick brings back original Filter co-conspirator Brian Liesagang (who left the band in 1997) to add “Sound Design and Programming” to the project. The first three tracks (“The Inevitable Relapse,” “Drug Boy,” and “Absentee Father”) roll over you like a locomotive. Patrick’s intentions are loud and clear. The fourth track, “No Love,” slows the train down but features a thumping chorus and Patrick singing at the edge of his range.

There are two songs where things slow down and the record produces “Take a Picture”-like moments with the ballads “No Re-entry” and the gorgeous album closer “Fades Like a Photograph (Dead Angel).” The latter features some of Patrick’s most poetic and moving lyrics to date. Other than those two songs, Marlette is inspiring Patrick to be heavy. Marlette got great work out of Alice Cooper on Dragontown and Brutal Planet, moving Alice into industrial metal territory for two records. Here he gets a good record out of Patrick’, who has been busy the last couple of years re-energizing the brand name. Filter has released two albums, a greatest hits package and a remix album of 2008’s Anthems for the Damned in the last four years. Sobriety has treated Richard Patrick well and his fans have reaped the rewards of his re-energized work ethic. (Rocket Science Ventures, 2010)

Filter MySpace page

Alternative, CD Reviews, Industrial, Rock

Me, Myself, and iPod 9/22/10: Wake me up when September ends

September 22, 2010 /

esd ipod

Sorry, disappeared for a while there. I took a week off after Lollapalooza – my first week off in two years, I might add – and I still haven’t caught up on email. I know, wah wah wah, you have too much music to listen to. Hey, I’m just sayin’, there are only so many hours in the day. My kids miss their daddy when I hole up in the music cave, and I miss them, too.

Mackintosh Braun – Could It Be
Man, if only the rest of the record could keep up with this song. In theory, I should love Mackintosh Braun. They make ELO-inspired synth pop, which is as close to my wheelhouse as things get. In reality, I merely like Mackintosh Braun. I think it was the processed vocals that did me in. They have ’em on every track. The record overall is good, and I’m betting they can do better next time around, but if you’re going to take one song of theirs with you, this one, for now, is it.

Chatelaine – Broken Bones (Depreciation Guild remix)
Ah, Toni Halliday. She could sing the phone book, and I’d swoon. Her new band, Chatelaine, is a much mellower beast than Curve, but their album Take a Line for a Walk is a keeper. This remix of the leadoff track is a neat mix of both her past and her present. But mostly her present.

Doppelganger – Breaks My Head
I’m a sucker for those slow-building songs with only a handful of chords. This is one of those songs.

Alternative, Artists, CD Reviews, Downloads, Electronica, Me Myself and iPod, Pop, Rock, Steal This Song

Herra Terra: Quiet Geist

September 16, 2010 /


RIYL: Kenna, Muse, The Killers

The press release for Quiet Geist, the new album from Northeastern electronic pop quartet Herra Terra, dared to name-check two big D’s that will get us to instinctively request a review copy like a Pavlovian dog: Depeche, and Duran. Silly us. We’ve seen this before, it’s almost never accurate, and as it turns out, it wasn’t accurate here, either. But in their defense, that’s probably because they knew that comparing it to Kenna’s New Sacred Cow would just leave people scratching their heads.

The funny thing is, we’ve heard quite a few artists lately who have taken inspiration from Kenna’s first album, the joke being that no one bought the record, but everyone seems to have heard it. And we’d bet dollars to donuts that Herra Terra could play the album start to finish at their next Halloween show, if leadoff track “Ejection Seats” is any indication. The songs are better arranged than they are written, which is not to say the songs are poor; it’s just that the music doesn’t stand above the nifty shifts in tempo or the slow builds, both of which anchor “You Were the Accelerator.” There is also the matter of singer John Paul Tonelli’s voice; It’s too muscular for the kind of music the band plays. That might sound like quibbling, but show us the last synth-driven band with a butch singer. Still, there is potential here. When the songwriting catches up with the band’s sense of atmospherics, they could be dangerous. (The Mylene Sheath 2010)

Herra Terra MySpace page
Click to buy Quiet Geist from Amazon

Alternative, Artists, CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Dance, Pop, Rock

Chromeo: Business Casual

September 14, 2010 /


RIYL: Cameo, Zapp, Hall & Oates

If you’ve ever flipped the collar on an Izod shirt, owned a pair of Bugle Boy jeans, or purchased Hall & Oates’ Rock ‘n’ Soul, Part One on cassette or vinyl, Chromeo is your custom-built funky time machine – a synthy, vocoder-soaked trip to a parallel reality where musical history stopped in 1984. It was a pretty nifty trick the first couple of times around – and their last release, 2007’s Fancy Footwork, earned them a Daryl Hall endorsement and the ironic love of an audience too young to remember Lionel Richie’s Can’t Slow Down – but most tributes to dead genres wear thin pretty quickly (see: Darkness, The). So it would be a mistake to expect similar results from their next album, right?

Chromeo_01

Maybe not. Business Casual doesn’t really add anything new to the Chromeo formula, but it doesn’t really need to – whether or not you believe P-Thugg and Dave 1 are serious, they’re really good at recreating that early ’80s vibe, to the point where you might find yourself wondering if you requested “The Right Type” on your local Top 40 station 25 years ago. Everything, from the buzzy synths to the soulful-but-not-too-soulful vocals, sounds like it’s being beamed in from a giant boom box on the planet Atari – and more importantly, the songs are as clever as they are catchy. It’s ultimately a fairly empty exercise, and if you’re old enough to remember when this sort of stuff was originally being made, it probably seems more than a little ridiculous to be witnessing a revival of something that was regarded as inherently disposable even when it was popular. What’s sillier, though: the idea of a band intentionally mimicking yacht soul, or the fact that Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop” spent five weeks at Number One?

In the long run, it’ll be interesting to see where Chromeo takes this; even the artists they’re imitating moved on eventually, never to return. But hey, if they can deliver three albums that do this much with such a paper-thin gimmick, there might not be anything they can’t do. Break out the velour and pass the cocaine. (Atlantic 2010)

Chromeo MySpace page

Alternative, CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Funk, Hipster, Pop, R&B, Songs

Brandon Flowers: Flamingo

September 14, 2010 /


RIYL: The Killers, Vigilantes of Love, U2

Brandon-Flowers-Flamingo-Official-Album-Cover[1] Flamingo, or chameleon? Listeners who mainly remember Brandon Flowers from early Killers hit singles like “Mr. Brightside” and “Somebody Told Me” may be in for a bit of a shock with his solo debut, which finds him toning down the gulpy vocal shtick that made him famous – and finally making the widescreen roots rock record he was aiming for with Sam’s Town.

Flowers has always struggled to get a grip on his outsize ambitions, and there are moments on Flamingo that don’t resonate as strongly as they’re supposed to. For the first time in his career, though, he doesn’t sound like he’s trying too hard; these songs come across more like personal statements than would-be epics. They’re still woefully derivative of Flowers’ influences – seeing Daniel Lanois’ name in the credits is going to trigger waves of eye-rolling from U2 fans who still think of Flowers as a Bono wannabe – but the difference here is that instead of trying to stand on the shoulders of giants to craft Grand Statements, he’s just using his musical DNA to write songs. It may read like a pretty fine distinction, but when it’s pouring out of the speakers, it’s huge – the difference between being handed a message and beaten over the head with it.

Of course, he’s still earnest to a fault. Flamingo might present a slightly subtler Brandon Flowers, but this is still music that leaves you feeling like you’re speeding across a lonely highway, or pensively looking out over a sepia desert mountaintop. It never hits as hard as it wants to, but so few mainstream rock records even bother asking you to really feel anything anymore – there’s something hopelessly noble about an album aimed so squarely at the heart. (Island 2010)

Brandon Flowers MySpace page

Alternative, CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Rock

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