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Derby: Posters Fade

June 13, 2008 / Mike Farley

There is just not enough good indie pop out there, but if you look hard enough, you can find bands making it. Case in point: the trio from Portland, Oregon known as Derby, who are back with their sophomore effort, Posters Fade, the follow-up to the band’s critically acclaimed debut, This Is the New You. The hype is something you can take or leave, because ultimately the music-buying public is going to decide if they like it or not. With Posters Fade, Derby has delivered an album full of melodic, lushly (but not overly) produced songs that are just easy to listen to. Imagine a cross between Nada Surf and Collective Soul, maybe a bit more to the Nada Surf side, and that’s Derby. There is also a subtle Beatles influence, especially on the stunning best track, “If Ever There’s a Reason.” For the most part, Derby’s music will not grab you, shake you, and spin you around, but it will make a good soundtrack for watching someone get grabbed and shaken and spun around. (LABEL: Green Submarine)

Derby MySpace page

Alternative, CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Indie Labels, Pop, Rock

The Beautiful Girls – Ziggurats

June 13, 2008 / Captain Capm

It’s hard to get excited about B-grade dub. Dub is one of those genres that bands who are playing it either really nail it down from the start or just kind of meander with the ideas and have no strong execution of them when all is said and done. The Beautiful Girls are one such band. Ziggurats is filled with a bunch of uninspiring dub-inspired numbers that sound almost comatose at times. For proof, look no further than the first two tracks here, “Royalty” and “Sir, Your Fashion Has the Cold Heart of a Killer (ugh). The former veers between overbaked rawk and listless dub while the latter is about as generic white boy dub as you can get. Both songs sound like they’re about to collapse from either ennui or exhaustion, which is funny considering there’s zero energy floating around here. However, when the band drops the dub nonsense and goes a power pop route, like on “Thought About You” complete with tasty handclaps, things get a little more interesting. Unfortunately, that only happens once out of 13 tracks total here. The rest of the album is spent doing retreads of the “Royalty” groove, or passing gas with uninteresting acoustic ditties (“Dela”). Stick to the pop, boys. (Controlled Substance Sound Labs 2007)

The Beautiful Girls MySpace page.

Artists, CD QuickTakes, Pop

The Futureheads: This Is Not the World

June 6, 2008 / Jeff Giles

Two albums and one left-field Kate Bush cover into their career, the Futureheads found themselves without a label after 2006’s News and Tributes tanked hard enough for the band’s UK and American labels to pull their respective plugs. In another era, this might have sounded the death knell for such a young band, but this is the wild and crazy digital ‘00s, where global distribution is available to anyone with enough money (and a dangerous surplus of optimism) to start a label. The Futureheads, as it turns out, have both – which is a good thing for anyone with a jones for driving eighth notes, crashing drumbeats, and stridently gulpy New Wave vocals, because This Is Not the World delivers all of them in spades. The quirky personality the band displayed on earlier recordings is kept mostly in check here, in favor of a more traditional verse-chorus-verse pop aesthetic, but the change suits the band – and they get in and out too quickly to overstay their welcome, bashing out the album’s 12 tracks in just under 40 minutes. Longtime fans lamenting the lack of experimentation would do well to switch off their brains, turn this up, and jump around for awhile – and if you’re looking for your first perfect summer record of 2008, look no further. (Nul 2008)

Futureheads MySpace page

Alternative, CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Rock

Unicycle Loves You: Unicycle Loves You

June 6, 2008 / James B. Eldred

These Chicago-based indie rockers site classic ’60s pop and psychedelia as big influences, but one listen to Unicycle Loves You’s self-titled debut will probably remind most listeners of Canadian power pop powerhouses the New Pornographers with their harmonizing male/female vocals, chiming jangle pop riffs and upbeat keyboards. They even got the quirk factor down with songs like “Great Bargains for Seniors” and “Woman Bait for Manfish,” the latter of which gets bonus points for featuring a marimba intro. Don’t mistake them for clones of that supergroup from the Great White North though, because their ’60s influences do eventually make their way to forefront with it all coming together on the wonderfully psychedelic closing track “Dangerous Decade.” They also stand out from their Canadian contemporaries thanks to their lyrical cynicism and dark wit, both of which are delivered perfectly via the ever-so-slightly sneering vocals of lead singer Jim Carroll (no relation to The Basketball Diaries guy). Now all they need to do is work on that truly awful band name. (LABEL: Highweel Records 2008)

Unicycle Loves You MySpace page

Alternative, CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Pop, Rock

KaiserCartel: March Forth

June 6, 2008 / Jeff Giles

Fans of sensitive male/female duos such as the Weepies and Eastmountainsouth have a new friend in KaiserCartel, the Brooklyn-based indie-folk outfit made up of Courtney Kaiser and Benjamin Cartel. (Get it?) Their first full-length release, March Forth, offers up a dozen sweetly mournful, acoustic-based duets; though Kaiser’s vocals take up the lion’s share of the spotlight (and rightly so), Cartel is always there to provide a coolly shaded yin to her angelic yang. (It’s nowhere near as pornographic as it sounds.) While leaving a bit of room for the sort of adorably innocent silliness that you’d expect from a band that starts its concerts surrounded by stuffed animals – “Season Song” is, well, a song about the seasons, complete with the line ”It’s time to cheer / The seasons of the year” — most of the album is pleasantly pensive, if a bit on the bland side. Though too many of the songs run together in a tasteful blur, KaiserCartel occasionally busts out with a number like the beautiful “Good Ones,” whose gently plangent melody is worth the price of purchase alone. More like that one, please. (bluhammock 2008)

KaiserCartel MySpace page

CD QuickTakes, Pop