Hot Chip - One Life Stand (2010)

I’m very pleased with this new album by Hot Chip. Their last two didn’t click with me, even though there is nothing especially bothersome about this band. I especially like the vocals on this album. They have a nice sort of airy croon that’s very emotive and has a soothing tone and meshes well with the electronics that color the album. It isn’t a dance pop record in the sense that it’s a club-ready hip-swinger sort of album, but its dance elements are more subtle giving it a lush sound, helped greatly by the vocal style. “Thieves in the Night” which opens the album is pretty much a perfect pop song. It has a nice beat to it and a pleasant melody. The synths gain momentum as the song goes until it’s a full-fledged electronica background and by the time it ends, is just sublime. I think it’s the best song of this style since “All My Friends.” While it isn’t the only good song on this album, the opener is easily the best. Another highlight is the title track, which places a catchy beat behind the soulful vocals. “Brothers” shows they can pull of a slow song as well as they do upbeat ones. The vocalists alternate verses. Finally, “Take it In” seems to want to end the album with a bang, driven by a gritty bass line over a club beat and a melody loosely reminiscient of a James Bond score. Even the weaker tracks aren’t all that bad. “Slush,” for example, is a bit on the drowsy side, although the middle section in which the vocalists duet is nice and the second half of the song showcases some interesting textures. Of course there are the requisite ringing synth notes, pounding beats, and glowing ambiance that make this dance pop, but Hot Chip use these tools to perfection on this album. That’s what makes for good pop music, having the fundamentals down and adding some personality and emotion to the mix. I think I’ll have to go relisten to The Warning and Made in the Dark.

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jj - jj n° 3 (2010)

I really enjoyed this band's debut album last year and am somewhat surprised to have a follow-up so soon. In style this is a very similar album to jj n° 2. For anyone unfamiliar, their a Swedish dream pop band, but that doesn't really do them justice since beyond beautiful atmosphere is an adventurous streak that brings unusual instrumentation into their music. While there are a lot of really good song ideas here that don’t always feel fully fleshed out. The music is beautiful, very rhythmic, and there’s an orchestral section that covers everything with a heavy portion of strings. The only downside is this feels very subdued at times and I find myself wishing they would just amp it up a little bit, which I think would give this a truly majestic feel. I give them credit for their creativity, best shown on “Let Go,” but the album lacks something that would make it truly great, and instead we have a good album by a creative band, who are probably going to top this album sometime in the future.

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Bomb the Music Industry - Adults!!!... Smart!!! Shithammered!!! And Excited By Nothing!!!!!!! (2010)

Bomb the Music Industry sound like a blend of hardcore punk, skate punk, and ska, with an overall attitude that is energetic and positive. They are a very fun band because they don’t sound angry, as one might expect of punk rockers, the vocals sound fairly good natured even when all the band members are screaming them at the top of their lungs. Another cool thing about them is that they record and distribute their music themselves, offering their discography for free on their website http://bombthemusicindustry.tumblr.com/, which is why I didn’t post a link. Unusual elements often find their way into the music, such as keyboards and synths, and they frequently use acoustic guitars giving some songs a folk-punk feel. In short, this is a band any fan of punk rock should hear just because they really breathe life into their music with their sense of free spiritedness (is that a word?). They’re a better, more creative, more intelligent, more fun version of NOFX, if that helps anyone. This is an EP with seven songs and is consistent with the quality of their previous work, especially their last album Scrambles (2009), despite being a bit slower. “All Ages Shows” is more or less a power ballad. The first half of “Struggler” and “Slumlord” are also more on the mellow side, and even the full-band sections feel a bit less energetic. Still, this shouldn’t disappoint fans.

Foxes in Fiction - Swung from the Branches (2010)

This is a rather lengthy album of ambient music. It relies heavily on synth notes that can be heard to rise and fall in volume, with occasional percussion and vocal effects. The synths give the album a nice glow with an effect that’s somewhat hypnotic in a relaxing sort of way. I especially like the use of the ice cream truck song in “Cream Screen,” which buries that song underneath recorded highway sounds and a thick layer of airy noise. If you like ambient music, this is as good as anything. This album is offered for free at a link I found on his myspace page (http://www.myspace.com/foxesinfiction). Go here to get the album: http://foxesinfiction.blogspot.com/2010/02/swung-from-branches.html

Titus Andronicus - The Monitor (2010)

Their music is quite original—it blends indie rock with punk and elements of prog-rock and it’s impressive. I couldn’t really think of an appropriate enough adjective because anything I notice about the music could be also said about any number of albums I’ve heard but wont quite capture the essence of this album. Not to say this is out of this world, it does drags on a bit at times and it does sometimes feel like they tried a bit too much, but overall this is really good. But for every overindulgent composition there’s at least a few moments where everything clicks and just feels grand, like the second half of “A Pot in Which to Piss.”

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Autechre - Oversteps (2010)

I really wanted to review something I’d enjoy. A lot of the new music I’ve heard has been unremarkable, and so Autechre feels like an antidote from the mediocrity I’ve been injesting of late. This duo really doesn’t need much of an intro. They’re like the Radiohead of electronic music. Everything they do is praised for its creativity, emotional resonance, and they’ve been consistently good for over a decade. Oversteps sounds somewhat like a soundtrack to the mundane everyday lives most city folk (like me) lead. And that’s really a high compliment because they use their machines to create something that feels very real. It borders on industrial and has elements of other electronic styles here and there, but it maintains an element of gloom that conjures incredibly vivid images without using vocals or samples. It is remarkable what some artists can do, using the same or similar tools as everyone else, but creating something completely unique and interesting. Oversteps is not at all catchy or tuneful, in fact it’s hard to pick out any distinct melodies, but the atmosphere it creates is really very powerful, and makes this album worth anyone’s time.

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Ted Leo & The Pharmacists - The Brutalist Bricks (2010)

I can really tell Ted Leo’s trying to sing his heart out, and while it’s somewhat endearing it isn’t exactly pleasant to the ears, unless the song’s melody is really great, like on “Me and Mia” or “Counting Down the Hours” from Shake the Sheets (2004). Because of this, your tolerance for his voice will go a long way to determining whether you like his music. If you liked his past work, I don’t see any reason you won’t enjoy this. It’s certainly a bit more inspired and cohesive than his last album, Living With the Living (2007). Most of the music on this album is straight out of the typical punk rock playbook with quick downpicking on the guitars alternated with power chords in the chorus (see “The Mighty Sparrow”) and a drummer trying to kill something on his snare drum (see most of these songs). I cant really fault a band for sticking with what’s tried-and-true. Ted Leo does this, but his music is not boring. The pacing and energy does get a bit exhausting since there aren’t the strong melodies to grab you, but that doesn’t make it boring. All of the songs sound pretty distinct, even on the first listen, which is an accomplishment. Many of them are, as described above, fast-paced rockers in which Ted howls his vocals over garage-rock-ish music. Then there are some more gritty songs, generally a bit more distorted and messy, like “Mourning in America” (good song) and “The Stick” (not so good). This style is very hit or miss because it sounds like Ted is trying to be something he isn’t. They don’t stand up well alongside his typical vocal style, which is somewhat high-pitched, sometimes (unintentionally, I think) bordering on squeaky. Then there are a couple quieter slower tunes, which provide a nice respite from his energy, such as “One Polaroid a Day” and “Tuberculoids Arrive in Hop”. I find a lot to dislike about his music but somehow I enjoy this a lot more than my opinions may make it seem. It isn’t remarkable but it’s pretty fun, which is more than enough to be worth my time. My favorite song is “Bottled in Cork” which makes good use of an acoustic guitar to provide some rhythm.

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Lightspeed Champion - Life is Sweet! Nice to Meet You (2010)

Lightspeed Champion spends too much time trying to borrow from his predecessors and influences when he is probably capable of writing perfectly good pop songs in his own style. Falling Off the Lavender Bridge (2008) was a fine, though not remarkable album and I expected him to follow it with a similar album because… why not, right? He must have gotten very bored over the last two years, because this new album is something else entirely. The songs that I most enjoy from this album are the ones that are unabashedly poppy, the ones that latch onto something really fun (like the funky melody of “Marlene”) and don’t try to be anything more or less than the sum of their parts. These songs are in the minority. On most of this album he appears to be going for a more abstract type of songwriting. A lot of songs go for the fuzzy lo-fi-ish indie pop of bands like Guided by Voices or Pavement—groups that made it okay for pop music to not be all that poppy in the traditional sense. That’s all fine and good, but it comes across as derivative when Lightspeed Champion does it, and it’s made even worse by the fact that the less ingenuous songs here are the better ones. If he’d not been trying so hard, he might have written a better album. Some examples… “I Don’t Want to Wake Up Alone” sounds like a crappy high-school power trio covering GBV (or The Ramones with your discman headphones on the fritz, take your pick), and it just as compelling as it sounds. “Smooth Day (At the Library)” sounds like a sleepy soul song until it devolves inexplicably into aimless guitar noodling. “Dead Head Blues” is a cutesy duet sung over very underproduced ukulele strumming, but I don’t usually judge first tracks too harshly as I typically expect them to be intros of some sort to wean us slowly onto the meat and potatoes of the album. “There’s Nothing Underwater” is eerie synths and echoes with barely audible vocals (was it recorded underwater?) It comes across as pretentious rather than artistic. I mean, good for you LC, you’re “unconventional.” That means nothing unless you have the music to back it up. You can be a pioneer, an experimenter if you will, but to be successful, it has to translate into good music and it doesn’t on this album. Then there are the intermissions. They add nothing to the album basically because they sound pretty much exactly like the aimless offbeat jams that surround them. Interludes on albums are meant to somehow break up the continuity of an album by interjecting something different from the bulk of the record. These intermissions really aren’t intermissions, and I’m not a big fan of intermissions anyway. If an album is good enough, it doesn’t need to have an aimless divider (cough cough Band of Horses) of whatever ambient noise or instrumental motif the artists feel compelled to include but couldn’t write into an actual song. If he turned in an entire album of poppy songs like “Marlene,” “Romart,” and “Madame Van Damme” this would be among the best albums of the year so far. Instead it tries to be something fresh and intrepid and falls flat on its face.

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Eluvium - Similes (2010)

Eluvium make really pretty ambient music that sounds a bit classical at times. He does wonderful things with a piano and his vocals aren’t too bad, though they aren’t the main attraction. He creates a very nice atmosphere with his ambient sounds. My only complaint is that sometimes it gets a bit predictable: often songs are in the form of a shimmering note that grows progressively louder until the piano and maybe vocals come in. This motif is so common amongst instrumental post-rock and ambient music that it lacks any real impact. This type of music is not supposed to be predictable in the slightest, and that keeps Eluvium from being a really great ambient artist. His music is pleasant enough to make for great albums though, since it isn’t easy to put this much beauty on a compact disc.

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The Album Leaf - A Chorus of Storytellers (2010)

This is another very pretty album from Mr. LaValle. This is his fifth, and is maybe a small step down from Into the Blue Again (2006). It’s mostly instrumentals that rely on ambiance and makes great use of piano and synthesizers to create its atmosphere. I generally like when he sings, as he did on a couple of great songs from Into the Blue Again, but the vocals on “Falling From the Sun” and “We Are” feel too much like the centerpiece of the songs, and I would prefer them to compliment the soundscapes rather than distracting from them. “There is a Wind” and “Almost There” are tracks with vocals that work well, however, maybe because it feels as though the vocals fit the melodies a bit better. His vocals are really devoid of emotion but have a nice sort of echo to them that works well with the keyboards and ringing synthesizers. While much of this album is truly beautiful, he’s really going to need to make some changes to his sound. Five albums in, it’s beginning to approach stagnation. Hopefully next time the music will have something to make it unique and fresh, like he sounded the first time I heard him. Picking out highlights seems foolish since the album really doesn’t differ all that much from track to track, but I’ll be foolish and go with “Falling From the Sun” and “Tied Knots” simply because of their stunning melodies. Chances are, you’ll be using this as background music while focusing on something else, like studying or housework, and it’s likely to sort of float by unless you make a distinct effort to pay attention, but if you do, you’ll hear some very pleasant music.

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Liars - Sisterworld (2010)

Liars are all about atmosphere and mood, but they play songs that are structured in the standard rock format, so they are a bit odd to say the least. The buzz around their back catalog, especially Drum’s Not Dead (2006) outshadowed my actual impression of the music, which was of appreciation without being overly enthused. The vocals are very understated, and the synthesizers, guitar, and percussion produce sounds that are hard to latch onto. These aren’t rock songs, but they don’t feel like the non-rock music I’m used to. It doesn’t really feel like a progression, like post-rock. It doesn’t have the free-flowing nature of the better jazz or electronic albums I’ve heard. And it doesn’t have anything that immediately jumps out at the listener, so (unless you’ve been swept in by the hype) you’re facing the moodiness of these songs, most of which convey images of confusion. I think the impression most people will get is that this is a challenging album, and that will undoubtedly appeal to many people who will find the overall mood of this album brilliant. But, listeners should be prepared for something unwaveringly moody, and if they can get past that, they’ll find a very interesting album that doesn’t sound like much else out there.

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Four Tet - There is Love in You (2010)

Four Tet’s electronica music sounds like most decent electronica music I’ve heard. If you have the ear for it, maybe you’ll hear what sets him apart from others making this type of music. For the rest of us, this is pleasant, midtempo electronic music that’s catchy but not all that memorable as far as electronica goes. The album has received mostly glowing reviews, suggesting that this album is simpler and more stripped-down than some of his past work. I think this is a good album, but it probably wont elicit strong reactions from most listeners. It’s often quite pretty, which is really all I need for this type of music.

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