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Editors: In This Light and On This Evening

January 14, 2010 /


RIYL: Joy Division, Peter Murphy, Shriekback

Editors have stood out from their UK peers by doing the most unlikely thing: staying the same. In an age ruled by extreme makeovers, Editors followed their 2006 breakthrough The Back Room with an album almost exactly like it (2007’s An End Has a Start), and were rewarded with their first #1 album in the UK and their highest-ranking single.

Then a funny thing happened: they grew positively bored with what they were doing.

Editors_KevinWestenberg4

Cut to present day and In This Light and On This Evening, Editors’ third album, where the band chucks the guitars for a wall of synthesizers and in the process makes an album that is absolutely unlike anything they have done before and yet right in line with everything they have done before. The songs carry the same epic feel of their best work – lead single “Papillon,” for one, has a mile-wide chorus – but the new tools they use to build those songs have opened the playbook considerably. The melodic high keyboard line in “Bricks and Mortar” serves as a secondary vocal, while the delicate “The Boxer” touches upon ideas that would have been completely foreign to the band last time around. “Eat Raw Meat = Blood Drool,” meanwhile, could be this generation’s “Being Boiled,” a relentless piece of minimalist electro that stacks on some real drums for dramatic effect.

As remakes go, In This Light and On This Evening is the type that will impress both the casual Editors listener and the diehard. Even better, the band has put themselves in a position to take their next album in any direction, and it would appear to be a logical progression from here. Quoth the prophet Sheryl Crow, a change will indeed do you good. (Fader 2010)

Editors MySpace page
Click to buy In This Light and On This Evening from Amazon

Alternative, Artists, CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Dance, Electronica, Gothic, Melodramatic, Pop, Rock, Widescreen

Lucero: 1372 Overton Park

January 13, 2010 /


RIYL: Ryan Bingham, Bruce Springsteen, Soul Asylum

1372 Overton Park is the sixth album from these Memphis blues rockers, but it marks their major label debut. There’s a rootsy blues rock sound at the core, but with a punk influence and soulful horn arrangements from Memphis session player Jim Spake. The band claims no one genre as their own, preferring to mix and match. Guitarist/vocalist Ben Nichols is the star of the show, delivering gritty vocals blending blues with punk and country vibes throughout the album. You rarely hear a punk influence blended with a horn section though, making for a relatively unique vibe.

The tunes are mostly bluesy rockers, accented with those soulful Memphis horns to create a sound that seems like it would go well with adult beverages. “The Devil and Maggie Chascarillo” builds slowly with piano and arpeggiated chords, and some tasty lead guitar that could open up nicely live. “What Are You Willing to Lose” shines with an up-tempo rocker where Nichols truly sounds like a man who is indeed ready to lay it all on the line, as he sings in the song. “Sixes and Sevens” is a high-energy party tune about gambling and carousing, with the horns and lead guitar intertwining nicely, while “Hey Darlin’ Do You Gamble?” brings things down a notch with a heartfelt romantic plea from Nichols to the girl of his affections to gamble on running with him. Overall, the album hits the mark as an homage to the musical heritage of Memphis. (Universal Republic 2009)

Lucero MySpace page

Artists, Blues, CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Country, Punk, Rock

Sound Tribe Sector 9: Ad Explorata

January 13, 2010 /


RIYL: Disco Biscuits, Pretty Lights, EOTO

Ad Explorata is Sound Tribe Sector 9’s follow-up to 2008’s Peaceblaster, an album that delivered more of the live immediacy the band is known for. But the jamtronica stalwarts are also known for constantly pushing the boundaries with their sonic explorations, so it’s not shocking to hear the band shifting direction again. STS9’s continued experimentation with electronic technology has driven a few old-school fans away, for it was the band’s instrumental skills that set them apart as a pioneer in blending rock with electronica. But the band’s continually growing fan base knows that STS9 uses modern technology as just one more tool in their musical arsenal, without becoming slaves to it.

“Phoneme” opens the album with almost eight minutes of atmospheric vibe, serving as sort of an appetizer that sets a spacey tone before the giving way to “Heavy,” where trippy synths and hard-rocking percussion conjure some of the classic STS9 sound. “Looking Back on Earth” brings a cosmic vibe indeed, but with drummer Zach Velmer powering the tune’s deep groove with a heavy attack. The psychedelic synth work is definitely the star of this album, with bassist David Murphy and guitarist Hunter Brown often joining keyboardist David Phipps in the synth and sampling mayhem, as they increasingly have been onstage. But while Brown’s tasty fretwork is perhaps at too much of a shortage here, most of the songs are well-served and probably inspired by the synth-heavy formula. Longtime fan favorite “EHM” receives overdue studio treatment and the tune is a keeper. Inspired by author John Perkins’ best-selling “Confessions of an Economic Hitman,” the epic song about the folly of predatory capitalism opens with a spooky vibe that builds slowly but surely into a monster groove that epitomizes just how dynamic the band can be with multiple synths. Percussionist Jeffree Lerner adds some heady cowbell work (even though it too is from a synth) as the song explodes into an up-tempo jam.

“Atlas” is another major highlight, featuring Velmer at his dynamic best over a majestic sonic tapestry that feels like it could be the soundtrack for a Rebel Alliance assault against the Empire. “Re:Stereo” takes listeners on more of a down-tempo journey, while “Central” brings things back up into another spacey groove before “Lion” drops an intense rocker similar in vibe to “Atlas.” The new album isn’t going to win back that smaller demographic of old-school fans that drifted away when the band started using more synths and samples in the middle part of the past decade. But it’s another strong collection of sonic explorations demonstrating that STS9 is a band that will never be content to hit auto-pilot. (1320 Records 2009)

Sound Tribe Sector 9 MySpace page

CD Reviews, Electronica, Instrumental, Jam Band, Psychedelic, Rock

Eels: End Times

January 13, 2010 /


RIYL: Grant Lee Buffalo, Parthenon Huxley, Jonathan Rundman

Here’s a record that lives up to its title. Eels frontman Mark “E” Everett has never exactly sounded peppy, but on the band’s eighth album, End Times, he sounds like a hollowed-out husk, strumming his guitar while he patiently waits for the sweet relief of the apocalypse. And despite Everett’s well-earned rep as a fairly dour dude, he came by this set’s crappy mood the hard way – yes, friends, End Times is the latest addition to the time-honored rock & roll tradition of the divorce album. Where some divorce albums sound angry or sarcastic, E copes with his pain pretty much the way you’d guess – namely, by opening his miserable veins all over these 14 songs. The story starts, appropriately enough, with “The Beginning,” a wistful look back at what almost was; 11 tracks later, E’s curled into the fetal position, telling us “I Need a Mother.” Alternating between haunting ballads and howling psychobilly stomps, all topped off by Everett’s not-quite-tuneful vocals, Times is relatively harrowing stuff; the closest the album comes to a single is the vaguely jaunty “Mansions of Los Feliz.”

EELS New Photo

Musically, End Times might be the Eels’ sparest collection; according to the band’s press release, it was largely self-recorded, on an old four-track in Everett’s basement, and it shows. Though some arrangements tend toward the fleshed-out (“A Line in the Dirt” even includes a little brass), the overall effect is that of a solo confessional. This is wholly appropriate, given the material, but it also means that, even in the context of the Eels’ other albums, End Times is the kind of thing you really have to be in the mood to hear. Hear it one way, and it’s just morose noodling; hear it another way, and it’ll slay you. Not quite as good as Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, in other words – but depending on your taste for heartbreak, it still might end up being your favorite Eels album. (Vagrant 2010)

Eels MySpace page

Alternative, CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Pop

21st Century Breakdown: Jim Washington’s Best Albums of the 2000s

January 9, 2010 /

As I compiled my list of the best music of the decade (a much, much longer list than you see here) one inescapable conclusion reared its shaggy head: the last 10 years pretty much belonged to Jack White.

How many other artists produced five stellar albums in the aughts, not to mention a couple of killer side projects and (that old rock critic standby) incendiary live shows?

No one, that’s who.

So, the best album of the decade really came down to which White Stripes album did you like more, White Blood Cells or Elephant.

Thankfully there’s no wrong answer. I first became enamored of “Fell in Love With a Girl,” totally fell for “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground,” became quite close to “We Are Going to Be Friends” and spent a lot of time in “Hotel Yorba” and “Little Room.”

On the other hand, Elephant had “Seven Nation Army.”

“Seven Nation Army,” motherfuckers. How could a song released in 2003 sound like it invented the bass line? Not just that bass line, but the whole concept of bass lines.

So as we recap our favorites of the decade, rock lives on into the new century in various forms, from low down and dirty to high and arty to pulsating and poppy, while what was once the cutting-edge hip-hop has devolved into auto-tuned disco synth. No doubt something new will emerge in the next decade to take our minds off it.

1. The White Stripes: White Blood Cells (or Elephant)
2. Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
3. Outkast: Stankonia (or Speakerboxx/The Love Below)
4. Green Day: American Idiot
5. The New Pornographers: Electric Version (or maybe Mass Romantic)
6. The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
7. LCD SoundsystemL Sounds of Silver
8. TV on the Radio: Return to Cookie Mountain
9. Jay-Z: The Blueprint
10. The Strokes: Is This It?

Just a few of the runner-ups:

Queens of the Stone Age: Songs for the Deaf, Rated R
Belle & Sebastian: Dear Catastrophe Waitress
Drive By Truckers: Southern Rock Opera, Dirty South
Sufjan Stevens: Come On Feel the Illinoise
Arcade Fire: Funeral
Franz Ferdinand: Franz Ferdinand
Decemberists: Picaresque, Crane Wife
Radiohead: In Rainbows
Ben Folds: Rockin’ the Suburbs
Missy Elliott: Miss E…So Addictive
The Roots: Phrenology

Alternative, Americana, Artists, Funk, Lists, Pop, Power Pop, Progressive, Punk, R&B, Rock

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