For The Birds

Rook
Shearwater
Matador, 2008
8.9/10

Boy, has this guy got a voice. Jonathan Meiburg, of Okervill River fame, has a vocal range that would have rivalled Jeff Buckley - wrap it around some delicate, descriptive lyrics and some of the nicest alt-country instrumentation you'll hear anywhere, and you've got yourself one hell of a record. Rook has a cleaner sound than the band's last LP Palo Santo (the first release, in particular), and a shorter playing time, making it a less intimidating listen. Where Okervill River can tend to be a bit theatrical (particularly on recent releases), Shearwater's sound is more elegant and restrained - though, when necessary, the band still aren't afraid to go at it hammer and tong, such as on Century Eyes, where you can literally hear Meiburg taking a step back from the mic, tilting his head back and yelling into the sky. One of the great things about Rook is the contrast between the rockier and softer numbers, an example of which comes with the very next track - the beautiful I Was A Cloud - where the soft strings and shimmering piano keys paint the perfect watercolour backdrop for Meiburg's softer side. The album's finest cut, however, comes in the form of piano-driven rocker The Snow Leopard, a song built around a proud piano and bass combination right out of the seventies. A brilliant album, and one sure to feature in end-of-year top ten lists.

Artwork: B+
Nice idea. If that's a real dude under all those birds I'll bump it up to an A.

Strange Birds

Visiter
Dodos
French Kiss, 2008
3.5 stars

I don’t know whether it’s the boho, art school vibe, or the loose Deerhoof-ish folk instrumentation, but this album has a real San Francisco feel to it. It’s a set of songs you can relax into, like a crusty old couch in a city bar – at first something seems a bit not right, but once you’re in you’re not going anywhere. Banjo strums and drumsticks slapped on chair legs push the songs along and into one another - it all sounds kind of slapped together and hurried, but the pace of songs such as Fools gives it an uplifting energy that Animal Collective would be proud to call their own. Elsewhere there are moments of acoustic funk (Park Song) and ramshackle blues (Winter), making for a real lively affair. It’s easy to forget that it’s just two guys, as they pump out more instrumentation than a three-way battle of the one-man-bands. Quite an effort.

Artwork: B+
I'm a massive fan of kids' artwork - I eat most meals off Picture Plates made when I was a kid myself - so, for me, these guys get runs straight off the bat. The story goes that they performed for a class of LA school kids and afterwards the kids gave them a bunch of drawings they had done, which Meric Long and Logan Kroeber decided to use as their album artwork. The strange spelling of the album's title 'Visiter' came from one of these drawings. Nice touch.

Published in mX Thursday July 24, 2008

Skin and Bones

Skeleton
Abe Vigoda
PPM, 2008
4 stars

Skeleton is so tight and taut it sounds as though it could burst apart at any second. This LA four-piece call their sound 'tropical punk', which is about right, though they have a big math influence too. They've played a bunch of gigs at notorious LA hot spot The Smell, a venue brought to fame by fellow Californians No Age, a band whose sound is echoed in Skeleton's chunks of droney, bright noise. With guitars worn so high they might as well be necklaces (ala Battles), these guys tear through a series of punchy, ecstatically happy tracks littered with coconut percussion, grumbly bass and loose vocals. Songs change three or four times before they run their course, often ending as something quite different to what they began. Considering they have twice the manpower of No Age, it's no surprise that they sound like twice the band, though their sound is much more highly-strung, and they spend less time building up dense layers of sound as they do skipping between complex multi-guitar patterns. Highlights include Cranes (I swear there's a Smiths influence in there somewhere) and opener Dead City/Waste Wilderness, a track that yells 'here we are, now listen'. It's a hard invitation to turn down.

Trivia: These guys are named after the actor of the same name, who featured in the Godfather films and random '70s sitcoms. In the '80s he was referred to as 'the late Abe Vigoda' by a magazine, leading many people to believe that he was, in fact, dead. The publicity didn't hurt his career though - the 87-year-old is still acting today, recently making a cameo in The family Guy. Go old fella!

Artwork: TBA

Wild Pantomime

Limbo, Panto
Wild Beasts
Domino, 2008
4 stars

How, and why, a group of twenty-one year old lads put together an album like this is astounding. When I was twenty-one I was still listening to Wu Tang, but with Limbo, Panto these guys have produced something far more sinister than any of the 36 Chambers - modern British math-tinged dinner-theatre rock. No, that’s not a mis-type. Hayden Thorpe’s falsetto is a weapon – at times he sounds like a wounded drag queen, but accompanied by some great keys and chiming indie guitars it’s a truly unique sound, and surprisingly palatable. Disregarding the vocals for a second (if you can), the instrumentation sounds like a more baroque, theatrical version of the Editors. The band produce some really engaging moments, such as bright opener Vigil For A Fuddy Duddy and the dark playfulness of Woebegone Wanderers - all in all, Limbo, Panto is easily one of the most welcome strangers to emerge in 2008.

Artwork: B
Bands are using old-world serif fonts on their album designs all over the place these days, but this is one band whose sound the look actually fits. The cover photo just looks like (surprise, surprise) a bunch of 21-year-olds goofing around with kitchen utensils and a slow shutter-speed, but the photos and text layouts on the inside of the booklet are nice and elegant, portraying a dark, twisted feel that perfectly compliments their skewed baroque sound.

Published in mX, Thursday July 17, 2008

Island Creatures

Dream Island Laughing Language
Lucky Dragons
Mistletone, 2008
4 stars

Like a friendly cousin to Black Dice, or the difficult offspring resulting from a one-night-stand between Boards of Canada and Panda Bear, Lucky Dragons main man Luke Fischbeck, here with Sarah Rara, have produced an intoxicating blend of digital samples, non-descript vocal chants, handclaps and muted recorder lines. Dream Island's 21 tracks have no real structure, building up and buzzing around the ears like mosquitoes on a hot night, before changing direction or disappearing completely. Despite its digital leanings, Dream Island is a very organic sounding album, almost trance-inducing at times - Wander Birds is a dark electronic track built from light synths, reminiscent of Clark’s Body Riddle, and Wooden Cave Loop is a great acoustic tropical island cave jam. Were you to bury a microphone deep in an anthill, amplify the resulting recording a thousand times and play it through a stack of giant conch shells, and this is probably what you’d hear. Yes, it’s a good thing.

Artwork: TBA
Given, I haven't yet held a proper copy of this album in my hands, but from what I've seen it looks pretty interesting - perhaps as strange as the music itself. I'll have to track one down.

Published in mX, Thursday July 10, 2008

Playing On The Road

I fell in love with Sigur Rós around the time of their third album (). I was totally caught up in the swell of mystery surrounding it - an unnamed album, full of unnamed songs, by a band from some strange country who play their guitars with cello bows. A few months later I found myself in Prato, Italy, sitting in an open air amphitheater watching my first Sigur Rós concert - to this day, that concert remains the most memorable, most affecting musical experience I've ever had. On the same trip I bought my copy of the band's breakthrough album Ágætis Byrjun, and listened to it through laptop speakers in my hotel room. To say I was 'into' this band would have been putting it lightly. When Takk... arrived in 2005 I was overseas again, this time going through a whole different set of emotions. Scotland hadn't turned out to be all that I had hoped, and the melancholy tones of Takk... echoed exactly what I was feeling. It clicked.

Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust
Sigur Rós
XL, 2008
3.5 stars

And so, three years on, we come to Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (in English, With a Buzz in Our Ears We Play Endlessly). The band told us to expect something "more understandable to the public" than past offerings, but nobody would have expected opening track Gobbledigook, a track best described as Sigur Rós impersonating Animal Collective (and well). Gobbledigook sets the bar high for the rest of the album, and the following track Inní mér syngur vitleysingur carries its pace through another poppy, percussion-driven number reminiscent of Takk...'s more uplifting moments. From then on, Með suð plays like a career retrospective, picking up on sounds and styles from the band's last three albums (Góðan daginn is an Ágætis Byrjun-ish slow-cooker, Straumnes is a ()-ish atmospheric instrumental and Með suð í eyrum sounds like a Takk... outtake) and adding the odd acoustic number, such as the lovely Illgresi. Overall it's a solid, if somewhat uneven album, let down by a couple of moments of self-indulgence - namely, the pointless first four-and-a-half minutes of Festival, and the over-the-top orchestration on the otherwise lack-lustre Ára bátur. The most interesting moments come in the album's first ten minutes, but from then on, unfortunately, it's a slow fade in momentum. Then again, I'm no longer travelling - who knows, were I living elsewhere, and in other circumstances, this album too may have hit a nerve.

Artwork: B
Nudie run! Fun.

Published in mX, Thursday July 3, 2008