Tag: Eat Sleep Drink Music (Page 24 of 31)

Massive Attack: Heligoland

February 9, 2010 /


RIYL: The Specials’ “Ghost Town,” Radiohead’s In Rainbows, film noir soundtracks

If you read enough reviews of Heligoland (spoken as ‘Hell Ego Land’), Massive Attack’s new album and first in seven years, you’ll eventually be able to play Bingo with them. At some point, the phrases “dark,” “brooding,” “trip-hop,” “atmospheric,” and “guest vocals” will pop up in the majority of them, and as overused as those expressions are, they fit. Of course, the other reason many reviews will say these things – again – is because, well, what else is there to say about Massive Attack? They have carved such a unique niche for themselves that talking about their music is akin to dancing about architecture. Some bands just are. Massive Attack is one of them. It’s a sweet place to be if you can swing it, but it makes objective analysis of their music almost impossible.

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Up to this point, however, no one has ever needed to write “twelve years removed from their last good album” when discussing Massive, but that is exactly where the band finds itself; you have to go back to last century’s Mezzanine (‘last century’ is a trick writers use for dramatic effect) to find their last consistent piece of work, so the band needs this one to stick. And for the most part, it does, certainly when compared to the 2003’s hazy 100th Window; with a more focused approach on songwriting rather than groovemaking, Heligoland plays like Radiohead’s In Rainbows if they had gone the Santana route and recruited a slew of guest vocalists. (Bingo!) Longtime friend Horace Andy sings on the odd “Girl I Love You,” which begins in the vein of “Angel” but ends with a horn section jazz-out not unlike Radiohead’s “The National Anthem,” and the skittery “Babel” is like “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” done as a drum ‘n bass track. That’s a good thing, in case you were wondering.

Massive’s achilles, however, has always been their tendency to stay in a groove until it becomes a rut, and Heligoland is no exception. There is a lot to admire about the album, but it’s difficult to love; for as much time as they spend exploring dark themes both musically and lyrically, it’s lacking in emotional impact, and not even Damon Albarn can save the album’s final third from coasting to the finish line. Still, bringing the band back to a duo (100th Window was basically a solo project by Robert “3D” Del Naja) was a step in the right direction, but now that they’ve made two albums without Andrew “Mushroom” Vowles, it’s evident that present day Massive Attack is much like Think Tank-era Blur without Graham Coxon. The band still exists, but things will never be what they once were. It is now up to us to accept this and hope for the best going forward. (Virgin 2010)

Massive Attack MySpace page
Click to buy Heligoland from Amazon

Alternative, Artists, CD Reviews, Electronica

Gobotron: On Your Mark, Get Set…

February 4, 2010 /


RIYL: The Lemonheads, Pavement, Ben Kweller

On Your Mark, Get Set… receives bonus points off the bat for the band title, which riffs on our favorite video game of all time. It also receives a couple ‘Who’d a thunk it’ points because the album is the work of Manchester Orchestra guitarist Robert McDowell, a band who had us running for the hills two minutes into their performance at last year’s Lollapalooza. But still waters apparently run deep, as McDowell’s solo venture, which he performed and recorded by himself one summer and mixed the following summer, bears no resemblance to his day job, forsaking shrieking melodrama for yesteryear-flavored indie pop. “Nice Things” could pass for a lo-fi Sloan, and “Never Turn Around,” with its classic give-and-take vocals, is as perfect a power pop song as you’re likely to hear in this year or the next. Which means, of course, that there is no chance of these elements being incorporated into Manchester Orchestra’s sound, a decision that is as understandable (five words: girls don’t like power pop) as it is unfortunate. With any luck, thought, the Audities listees will buy enough copies of On Your Mark, Get Set… to encourage McDowell to give it another go. (Favorite Gentlemen 2010)

Gobotron MySpace page

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

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.

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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

OK Go: Of the Blue Colour of the Sky

January 7, 2010 /


RIYL: Prince, MGMT, Death Cab for Cutie

They are only releasing their third album, but OK Go has rather shrewdly defined themselves as a multimedia phenomenon rather than a rock band. It’s a genius move, really, because suddenly the standard benchmarks for judging a band’s success are thrown out the window. Did the last album go gold? Who cares? The video they made of themselves dancing on treadmills has racked up over 49 million plays on YouTube. They are, in short, the kind of band that record labels used to kill to have on their roster; their devoted fan base would guarantee that all of the band’s albums would sell reasonably well, and as an added bonus, they allowed their bean-counting overlords to tell people that they believe in the creative process above all else. (Pssst. They don’t.)

©Jeremy & Claire Weiss Photography/Day19.

You get the sense that the band is more than aware of their rather fortunate place in the pop universe, because they just used that freedom to create their most adventurous, and consistent, album to date. Of the Blue Colour of the Sky bears little resemblance to the over-caffeinated power pop that once served as the band’s calling card, trading the muscular grooves of their 2005 album Oh No for something, well, groovier. Prince’s influence is all over the place, from the Parade-ish “WTF?” (complete with a 5/4 time signature and rip-roaring solo) to the slammin’ “White Knuckles,” which is one of the best “1999” covers ever. (Likewise “End Love,” which is this album’s “I Would Die 4 U.”) Singer Damian Kulash gives the falsetto an extensive workout here, which is fitting with the lyrical content; he’s clearly had his heart broken – “Needing/Getting” is the Jilted Lover song of the year – so the falsetto gives good voice to his pain.

If they’re smart, OK Go will consider adding producer Dave Fridmann as an unofficial fifth member, because his influence here cannot be underestimated. The drum tracks sound like the stuff of Steve Lillywhite’s wet dreams circa 1983, and the guitars are crystal-clear. He clearly encouraged the band to think big, because these songs bob and weave in ways the band had never dared to try before; “Needing/Getting” and “Skyscraper” both feature lengthy outros, and the overall sound is positively massive compared to the stripped down Oh No. If there’s a catch, it’s the album’s final third; there is nothing particularly wrong with the songs, but emotional fatigue begins to creep in. And then, in the final moments of closing track “In the Glass,” they clean the slate with one hellacious tribute to “I Want You/She’s So Heavy,” a slow-building, climbing/falling chord sequence that will give Chris and Ben from Death Cab fits. If only Fridmann hadn’t recorded the drums so hot at the end; the music is so pretty, but when turned above a whisper, the drums sound like an avalanche. Pity, since Fridmann had done such a good job avoiding that pitfall up until then.

Of the Blue Colour of the Sky may not bring many new fans to the OK Go camp – outside of a few Prince devotees – but we’re guessing that doesn’t really concern the band much, and that is exactly how it should be; the second a band starts worrying about what other people think of them, they’re done. At this rate, it wouldn’t surprise us to see OK Go turn into the pop equivalent of Wilco. God knows, the world could use more of those. (Capitol 2010)

OK Go MySpace page
Click to buy Of the Blue Colour of the Sky from Amazon

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

21st Century Breakdown: David Medsker’s Songs of the 2000s

December 28, 2009 /

I used to have a thing about my musical tastes. I so desperately wanted them to be cool, or at the very least be something that only a handful of people were privy to. (I was tempted to say ‘hip’ instead of ‘privy,’ but you can’t spell ‘hipster’ without ‘hip,’ and God knows I’m not hip enough to be a hipster.) My friend Kathi, she has obscenely cool taste in music. I’m surprised she’s friends with me, since I surely bring her cool factor down by a good 20 points.

Then a couple of years ago, I realized – who the hell cares? A great song is a great song, and it doesn’t really matter how popular – or unpopular – it is. I can’t tell you how freeing that was, and I have a very well-known blogger to thank for it. When she admitted to me in private how much she enjoyed a band at Lollapalooza, only to dismiss them a few days later in her column, I realized that it was completely pointless to pander to hipster elitism. You’re being dishonest with yourself, and the hipsters are only going to turn on you in the end, anyway.

So I turned a blind eye to what was a pop song versus what was a “pop” song, as it were, and realizing that there was no distinction between the two made everything soooooo much easier. So here we are in 2009, and as part of our recap of the best music the decade had to offer, I have to try to apply this whole revisionist history viewpoint to the entire decade, which is no mean feat, to say the least. It therefore makes sense that assembling one big-ass list of songs will look like the work of someone with multiple personalities, so instead they are cut up into bite-sized lists for easier consumption, with YouTube links for the uninitiated.

Top 10 Modern Rock Songs of the 2000s
10. “Do You Want To,” Franz Ferdinand
“Take Me Out” was the bigger hit, but this song swings like Austin Powers in the jungle. Nice riff on “My Sharona” in the break, too.

9. “Galvanize,” Chemical Brothers
Push the button; shake that booty.

8. “The Bleeding Heart Show,” The New Pornographers
What the world needs now, is more hey la, hey la’s.

New_Pornographers_015

7. “Sometime Around Midnight,” Airborne Toxic Event
Suck it, Pitchfork. These guys are good. You’re just too far up your own asses to admit it.

6. “American Idiot,” Green Day
The only sad thing about this song is that Joey Ramone didn’t live long enough to hear it.

5. “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor,” Arctic Monkeys
I love the way these guys riff on Duran Duran lyrics, and then act as if they made it all up themselves. As the old adage says, talent borrows, but genius steals. And for the record, we don’t care for sand, either.

4. “Chelsea Dagger,” The Fratellis
Best drunken barroom chorus since “Tubthumping.”

3. “Laura,” Scissor Sisters
For all the progress that was made this decade in terms of hip hop and black culture becoming more accepted on pop radio, it appears that the gays still have a long road ahead of them. Pity.

2. “Never Miss a Beat,” Kaiser Chiefs
They opened their set at Lollapalooza with this. The only other band to grab me by the throat like that with their opening song is, well, My #1…

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1. “Knights of Cydonia,” Muse
September 11, 2006, Columbus, Ohio. Muse opens their set with this song, blows the roof off the place.

Top 10 Pop Songs of the 2000s
10. “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” Kylie Minogue
Proof that even the most alt of alt rockers love Kylie: The Flaming Lips covered this song.

9. “Drops of Jupiter,” Train
They did a great job recreating the Elton John sound. Too bad they didn’t have Bernie Taupin write the lyrics. Fried chicken? Ugh.

8. “Music,” Madonna
I watched this song take one of those sports bars that has basketball courts and bowling alleys, and turn every one of its patrons into dancing fools.

7. “Is It Any Wonder?,” Keane
Dogged by some for its similarity to U2, but when was the last time U2 wrote something this bouncy?

6. “Shut Up and Let Me Go,” The Ting Tings
I’ll shut up, Katie, but there’s no way I’m letting you go.

5. “Chasing Pavements,” Adele
It took two Grammy wins for this song to finally crack the Top 40. (*shakes head in disbelief*)

4. “Hey Ya,” Outkast
Andre 3000 finally picks up a guitar to write a song, and this, THIS, is the first thing that comes out. Mother, fucker.

3. “Crazy,” Gnarls Barkley
When my mom comes home from a trip to see my brother on the east coast and tells me about a song she heard by a band whose name is similar to some celebrity or other, I know that said celebrity knockoff band has struck a chord.

2. “99 Problems,” Jay-Z
“You crazy for this one, Rick!” Actually, Jay-Z, you have it the other way around. You crazy if you make this song with anyone other than Rick Rubin.

1. “Umbrella,” Rihanna
It was at least a year before I made the effort to find out what the hubub was about this damn “Umbrella” song. And then I heard it. Holy shit, this song pisses genius.

Big in the UK
7. “LDN,” Lily Allen
No guy wants to hear his ex tell the world what a lousy lover he is, but is there a man alive that doesn’t want a shot at Lily Allen?

6. “Nearer Than Heaven,” Delays
My favorite new musical expression of the decade: skyscraper, used to describe a song with soaring melodies. And this puppy’s the Empire State Building.

5. “Boyfriend,” Alphabeat
That this album didn’t even see the light of day in the States shows just how myopic our views of pop music have become.

4. “Digital Love,” Daft Punk
Keytar!

3. “Plug It In,” Basement Jaxx featuring J.C. Chasez
Come on, bang that head in the chorus. You know you want to.

2. “Never Be Lonely,” The Feeling
B-b-b-baby, this song is c-c-c-crazy catchy.

1. “Kids,” Robbie Williams & Kylie Minogue
Another song I thought had a shot at cracking the US charts. Funky verses, slammin’ choruses, what’s not to love? Robbie Williams, apparently. He never gained the traction here that other UK singers did. Strange.

Best Pop Songs You Never Heard
Of course, you probably have heard most of these songs, but I didn’t have another category to place them in, so they’re going here instead.

“Nice,” Duran Duran
Easily the band’s best song since “Ordinary World” and “Come Undone.” Anyone who likes Rio but has since given up on the band, go listen to this at once.

“I Believe She’s Lying,” Jon Brion
Los Angeles’ resident mad genius of pop finally gets his 1997 album Meaningless released in early 2001. Power pop fans proceed to lose their minds. And can you blame them? Listen to that drum track. It’s like the piano solo to “In My Life,” gone drum ‘n bass.

“Mine and Yours,” David Mead
If the video I linked to is any indicator, this was a big hit with the Japanese karaoke crowd. Go figure.

“She’s Got My Number,” Semisonic
Where an otherwise straightforward pop band goes off the deep end into delicious, melancholy strangeness. One of my bigger interview thrills was getting to tell Dan Wilson how much I loved this song.

“My Name Is Love,” Rob Dickinson
Catherine Wheel singer turns down the distortion, ramps up the harmonies. Again, the word ‘skyscraper’ comes to mind.

“Can We Still Be Friends?,” Mandy Moore
Dan Wilson reference #2: he sings backing vocals on this shockingly good Todd Rundgren cover. People have scoffed at the notion of Ryan Adams marrying someone like Mandy. Not me.

“io (This Time Around),” Helen Stellar
Let it not be said that nothing good came from “Elizabethtown,” as it introduced me to this beautifully spacey song.

“Buildings and Mountains,” Republic Tigers
Truly a band out of time, which is exactly why I love them. I wonder if the reason A-ha is breaking up is because they heard this song and thought, “Damn, they do us better than we do.”

“The End of the World,” Gin Blossoms
Most bands that take 11 years between albums come back as a pale imitation of their former selves, but the Gin Blossoms’ 2006 album Major Lodge Victory was a damn fine little record. This one appeals to my not-so-inner Beatlemaniac.

“Fragile,” Kerli
This Estonian princess is an odd little bird, but that’s what I like about her. This ballad closes her debut album with quite the quiet storm.

“Road to Recovery,” Midnight Juggernauts
Another band whose lack of success has me scratching my head. It’s the best dance album Peter Murphy never made, or the best rock album Daft Punk never made, one of the two. Or both.

My sincere apologies to the following bands, who also deserve mention:
Divine Comedy, Noisettes, Pet Shop Boys, Doves, Rialto, Beck, White Stripes, Rufus Wainwright, Kenna, Mylo, Pete Yorn, Apples in Stereo, Hard-Fi, The Thorns, Rock Kills Kid, The Hours, Derek Webb, Glen Hansard, Aimee Mann, Kirsty MacColl, Gorillaz, Air, Charlotte Sometimes, Mika, Def Leppard, Coldplay, Chicane, Elastica, XTC, and about 50 others.

Lists, Playlists, Songs

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