NO GENRE

High Places “On Giving Up”

What happens when a couple of woodland nymphs stumble on a rave in the desert? Do they trade in their satchel of ‘shrooms for some E emblazoned with Snoopy’s face? Do they shed their beaded skirts for American Apparel spandex? Do they even know how to dance?

These are important questions to ask of High Places because the first single, “On Giving Up,” for their new album High Places vs. Mankind finds the band in startling new territory. Formerly, we had a pair of navel-gazers who sounded like regular contributors to Erowid. They made two albums full of sweetly earnest songs devoted to kindergarten classes and banana slugs and stardust.

But now the band (Robert Barber and Mary Pearson) has moved from Brooklyn to L.A., Barber has clearly bought some slicker toys, and Mary Pearson has dropped all the playfulness from her voice. “On Giving Up” is a straight club banger that glows with electric sex. Pearson’s deadpan delivery, though, simultaneously depletes and replenishes the song of its overt sexuality. The deep thwack of an 808 and mechanized shudders are going to soundtrack a lot of makeout sessions in the next few months. The lyrics, though, are surely going to give close listeners pause: “Though I have cried/So many times/So many times/It’s all because I feel everything that’s gone/It’s all gone/It’s all gone/It’s all gone.”

The song makes me all the more anxious (in both senses of the word) to hear the album. I’m curious to see whether the song marks a temporary or permanent departure for the band.

High Places vs. Mankind is out April 6 on Thrill Jockey.

The Mynabirds “Numbers Don’t Lie”

When She and Him release Vol. 2 on March 23, they will most likely be showered with accolades again. I don’t think there’s a critic, male or female, that could look into Zooey Deschanel’s face and tell her that music is too cute by half. And there’s no doubt that they deserve quite a bit of this love. But while The Mynabirds‘ debut is still 3 months out, I already feel bad for the band. The inevitable comparisons to She and Him are tiresome even before they begin.

It’s not hard, though, to see the legitimacy of such comparisons. The Mynabirds’ lead single “Numbers Don’t Lie” is a beautifully produced piece of golden AM pop. But the key difference here is in the voices. Zooey Deschanel’s voice is as precious as it is strong. But Laura Burhenn, a golden-haired chanteuse, has a voice that is husky and breathy in equal measure. It croaks and squeaks in all the right places. And the voices ultimately define the tenor of these projects. She and Him is cute in its relentless resurrection of Dusty Springfield and Bobbie Gentry. The knowing little winks at the irony of the project always bothered me (though I did really like the album). But the substance of Burhenn’s voice gives the whole song a kind of sincerity that She and Him frequently lacks. She actually sounds like an heir to Springfield or Gentry instead of a reverential tribute artist.

And whereas She and Him dealt primarily in elementary emotional distinctions (I love you or I wish you loved me or I miss you), The Mynabirds paint with a more nuanced brush: “If you want to be right/I will let you be right/You know that the numbers don’t lie/Two wrongs will not make it right.” Burhenn sounds contentious here; she wants the fight to end so she’s willing to compromise but she can’t help but pointing out one final time that she’s right. This woman is no supplicant to the whims of love.

The Mynabirds’ debut What We Lose in the Fire We Gain in the Flood is out on Saddle Creek on April 27th, which cannot possibly come soon enough.

Spencer Krug is certainly going to catch hell for his newest venture. Krug as Moonface, a solo project for the hardest working man in indie rock, has just released the Dreamland EP with a single 20 minute song called “Marimba and Shit-Drums.” But at this point in his career, I am down for anything that Spencer Krug is willing to throw my way.

Saying that “Marimba and Shit-Drums” is a single 20 minute song is a little disingenuous. There are really like 4 or 5 songs here that are scaffolded with the same conceptual framework: minimal instrumentation led by a marimba and, um, shit-drums (?), Krug singing the contents of his detailed lucid dream journal. As a guiding concept, it’s slightly suspect. Listening to other people’s dreams can be like watching a “surreal” student film directed by a burnout who spent most of his budget on the new Mars Volta and a bag of skunk weed. But Krug pulls it off because no one else in indie has access to their unconscious in the same way he does. I’m not sure that they lyrics would stand up to close critical scrutiny, but they’re interesting enough to engage any patient listener. Initially, I wanted to work my degrees on the song, but I quickly learned that working over the song is like whispering into a cobweb: it’s gone as soon as you talk to it.

Besides the sustained intricacy and interconnectedness of the lyrics, the most remarkable thing about the record is how listenable it is as a piece of music. Talking about the economy of a 20 minute song is patently ridiculous, but “Marimba and Shit-Drums” is thrifty. The marimba does a lot of work here: it carries both the melody and (most of) the percussion with its clear wooden tones. The titular “shit-drums” when they seem to arrive sound like electrified trashcans.A guitar riff pops up every now and then to flex some muscle on behalf of the song. Krug’s voice is always at its best when he’s locked into a line, repeating it, twisting the words around his mouth. Since we get a few refrains with different accompaniment, these moments stand out because they help ground the listener in something familiar.

I understand that “Marimba and Shit-Drums” will go down into the record as an eccentric side-project. It’s an unfortunate fate for someone as gifted as Spencer Krug because his wildest ideas become profitable expressions of his immense talent and willingness to take risks. Not everything that Krug touches turn to gold, but everything he touches is worth listening to enough times to commit it to memory.

Rating: 8/10

You can download the entire song for the price of whatever here. You can buy the 12” vinyl which comes with Krug’s dream journal here.

mp3: Lemonade “Lifted”

Four Tet “Angel Echoes


In 2007, Burial (aka William Bevan) imagined the likely soundscape after the collapse of known civilization. Since we will probably form roving tribes of warring hunter, Burial imagines a futuristic war drum tricked out with metallic edges. The drums, programmed to beat in the dark of the night, will rally the warriors for blood. The only vocal arrangements that can be utilized are fragments of lost culture. The surviving shards are digitally woven into the spaces between the dubbed-out beats. The last music on earth, created by those standing on the very edge of a dark precipice, will probably sound a lot like Burial’s Untrue.

But what if we make it? What if we stave off the cannibals and the disease and all forms of garishly mechanized death? What does our music sound like then? Four Tet’s “Angel Echoes” posits just such a miraculous survival. A bass drum and a hi-hat amble along in 4/4 while faint digital fairies flutter around the mix. Soon a voice rises out of the background, even more fragmented than anything Burial has worked with. But it doesn’t sound like the cadence of a futuristic funeral dirge. The voice and its accompanying bells shrug off Burial’s incessant grays in favor of color: red and orange and gold and yellow.

You can buy Four Tet’s latest album There is Love In You here.

mp3: Pill Wonder “Restless”

Underwater Peoples continues to infiltrate your playlists like laid back ninjas. This time we get a hazy brew of steel drums, thrift store organs, and a pushy bass drum courtesy of Pill Wonder. The electrified violin (?) threatens to overwhelm the mix, but you’re glad to be blinded by its brightness. The song parts ways with you before you get to know it. But it’s a great 2 minutes nonetheless. It’s nostalgic without being sticky, sentimental with being weepy.

“Restless” can be found on Underwater People’s latest compilation, which you can download here or purchase here.

mp3: Beach House “Norway”
(Courtesy of Sub Pop)

By the time you finish the harrowing and gut-wrenching “Real Love,” it is apparent that Teen Dream marks the ascendancy of a great band. Not only is the album the best of Beach House’s short but brilliant career, it is also an early candidate for album of the year.

Beach House, good as they are, can be difficult to write about. They don’t have a thrilling backstory. They aren’t working in any exotic genre. They don’t push boundaries or audiences or agendas. And on paper they sound precociously cute: a pair of good looking shut-ins make dreamy, heartbroken lullabies with a drum machine, a gauzy organ, and a mournful tambourine. But there’s nothing precious about this band: “You only give me what you don’t want no more.” There’s a bitter edge to a line like that; Stuart Murdoch couldn’t sing that line that convincingly. What they lack in talking points and instant hipster identification, they more than make up for in songcraft.

Among their many other virtues, Beach House’s songs have a kind of dizzying depthlessness. The endless echoes, the sheer walls of organ, the guitar figures that drift infinitely into space. The steady percussion doesn’t tether the band to the ground; it guides them as they float around an ether of their own making. Where the band once sounded windswept and ghosted, they sound clear-eyed and immediate on Teen Dream. Here, Victoria Legrand’s voice is less swaddled by the treated haze that garnered all those (lazy) comparisons to Hope Sandoval. More often than not, her voice has a pleasant understated quality about it; she’s not about to unleash any vocal runs any time soon. This flatness is actually a blessing: it allows her to remain focused on delivering the emotional timbre of the song without getting caught up in the mechanics of the delivery. But when her voice does rise, it doesn’t preen or strut; it soars, conveying the depth of the ache, the uncertainty of her feelings. And a lot of the credit for the band’s unique sound should go Alex Scally, the master of the band’s instrumentation. He clothes Legrand’s voice in arpeggios woozy with reverb.

In many ways, Teen Dream is a breakup album; Legrand is focused on describing the emotional process of separation and all its attending bitterness and relief. She tells a lover on the elegant “Walk in the Park” that “in a matter of time, it would slip from my mind/In and out of my life, you would slip from my mind.” The bright tremolo of the song’s chorus says everything: she’s looking forward to losing these memories. But Legrand is never concerned with drumming up past recriminations. She is a fair ex-lover. Even on the most confrontational moment on the album, “Real Love,” Legrand doesn’t have an axe to grind. In the final verse, she allows herself to say what’s on her mind: “Real love, it finds you somewhere with your back to it.” It’s stated as a point of fact rather than a pointed accusation.

On the stellar “Silver Soul,” Legrand calls love “a sickness, a manic quickness.” Love is both an affliction and a drug. And the album is very much concerned with presenting both of these sides. Legrand’s ambivalence with the enterprise of love is palpable: when she appears to be falling for someone, she mourns that “it is happening again” over and over and over. By the end of the album, she promises to take care of her lover but quickly adds a pair of qualifications: “I’d take care of you/If you ask me to/In a year or two.” The doubt expressed in those last two lines (the final two on the album) are devastating. But earlier, on “10 Mile Stereo,” she praises her relationship’s constancy: “It can’t be gone, we’re still right here/It took so long, can’t say we heart it all/Limbs parallel, we stood so long we fell/Tear a moment from the days that carry us on forever.”

Regardless of her insights into the inner workings of relationships, the thing that makes the album so great is the details. It’s the sharpness of her images: “limbs parallel, we stood so long.” Without that concrete image of two people literally standing next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, facing some kind of uncertain future, the listener is lost in a moment that is only clear to the singer. Most breakup albums are clouded with too many pronouns and too few antecedents. Great as Sea Change is, it feels almost too personal, too insular to the singer himself. But the best breakup records invite you into the fold. Dylan positions you directly between his wife and him on “Idiot Wind.” You can feel the insults whizzing by your ears. Likewise, Legrand keeps the listener as close to the action as possible. This is maybe why the album seems more cinematic than confessional.

Frequently we think of great albums as game changers. These are your mind blowers, your critic silencers. These albums steer the aesthetic of a generation of musicians. These albums show you what can be done in popular music, they show you that the world is a wider place than you once imagined. Albums like Person Pitch or Kid A or Stankonia or Drum’s Not Dead or The Cold Vein are quintessential game changers.

Teen Dream isn’t a game changer. However, is the first masterpiece of the decade. Masterpieces don’t reveal new terrain; they survey and map familiar territory in more detail than before. What sounds like pleasantly sedate dinner party music is actually an extended meditation on the lures and snares of love that is as soothing as it is unnerving. These 10 songs give voice to our gravest doubts and most beguiling contradictions in affairs of the heart.

Rating: 9/10

The Purple One was so inspired by my Vikings’ ruthless performance last week that he wrote and recorded a rousing fight song for the team in a single night. The lyrics are pretty absurd: “We r all amped up like a rock n roll band/Ready 2 celebrate every score/Ready 2 fight the elegant war.” I get the sense that Prince doesn’t really hasn’t watched a lot of football. Elegant war? The National Football League a stunning spectacle that celebrates everything that is good and bad about this country. The oxymoron “elegant war” doesn’t begin to cover the contradictions that the NFL carries in its soul.

But I think the song is just further proof that Prince is among the most inspired men on the planet. Literally everything that swings into the orbit of Prince gets translated into a song: sex fiends, various jewels, oddly colored rain, Batman, oral sex, Reagan’s Cold War politics, and, evidently, winning football teams. The only place on the planet that seems to be more grotesquely fecund than the Amazon rain forest is Prince’s Paisley Park Studios.

Dig out your horned helmet folks because Old Man Favre is going to run roughshod over this snooty little asshole this Sunday. Long reign the purple and gold.

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Tonight, as I rode home on the bus, I watched a guy play football on his Nintendo DS. Admittedly, it was kind of creepy, but I couldn’t stop watching because he was absolutely killing the computer opponent. Every time he had possession, he would score and convert the two extra points. And every time the computer had possession, he would force a fumble or pick off a pass. Turnovers literally on every computer possession. I did see a pretty nice safety, too. I watched the first two quarters of the game. At the half, this guy was up 80 – 0. I’m not kidding. That was the gaudy score that flashed on his screen before it cut to some animated cheerleaders. 80 – 0. I kept wondering how this guy could derive any pleasure playing a game that he had clearly mastered.

Spoon is the guy on the bus running up the score. They will never record a bad album. They will also never record a masterpiece. (Likewise, the guy on the bus will always have a good game; he’ll just never play a nail-bitter.) Much as I really do like the band, I will never get worked up for the release of a new album. I was excited to listen to the new album, Transference, on NPR. But the fact of the matter is that Spoon is merely a very good band.

They have become so adept at their brand of white boy soul that they appear almost joyless at times. While I thoroughly enjoy so many of their Spoon formula songs, I find myself attracted to the moments when they seem to challenge themselves. Think about the one or two formal experiments that they allow themselves per album: “Stay Don’t Go,” “Paper Tiger,” “Was It You?” “The Ghost of You Lingers.” These are previews of what Spoon could but will never be as a band. They will never record a full album of songs that push them as a band, even as Spoon itself. And, of course, the best moment on Transference is the experimental piece, “Who Makes Your Money.” Over a repeated organ chord and the metronomic snap of a snare, Britt Daniel’s voice sounds exhausted. But when the woozy chorus hits, with its titular question, he allows himself to improvise his soul man spasms. The details of the song are great: the bass rides low, throbbing darkly underneath that organ, a shaker fills out the song’s rangy dynamics. What’s so surprising about the song is how comfortable the band sounds in this space. They could push themselves like this more often, but I think they’d rather just opt for the play that will always end in a touchdown.

Last I checked, by the way, the score was 112 – 0 and Transference is good. Shame really.

Rating: 7/10

In the past 24 hours or so I’ve learned a very hard lesson about Yeasayer. They will probably always and forever be a disappointment to me. The root of this frustration is easy to finger but harder to justify. Basically, Yeasayer aren’t the band that I want them to be.

Now, I understand that that’s all kinds of unfair. You listen to bands as they are, not as they should be. But what about wanting bands to be all that they could be? That logic suggests that Yeasayer is making decisions that actively squander their limitless talent.

Exactly.

Yeasayer knows how to write patchouli-scented anthems (“Red Cave” and “2080″) for hippie communes. This is the band who wrote ‘Tightrope,” which was arguably the best song on Dark was the Night (which an unstoppable Voltron of indie rock greatness). I suspect, perhaps unfairly, that Yeasayer could write songs like these all day long but, for whatever reason, they’re choosing to write MOR indie pop. The fact of the matter is that Odd Blood contains almost nothing that made the band promising on All Hours Cymbals.

The album begins with the tuneless clunker “The Children.” Chris Keating’s unique voice is given the AutoTune treatment for no ostensible reason. And most of the rest of it doesn’t get much better than the opener. Both “Mondegreen” and “Rome” are unsalvageable messes of half-baked ideas that are frankly embarrassing. “Madder Rose” might be the worst offender: it’s getting continuous play on a new age/adult contemporary station in a Walgreen’s in Sedona, AZ. The endlessly ascending melodies of Yeasayer grow tiresome very quickly. Everything can’t be so reverential or glorious. “I Remember” swells and burst with the gas of its own earnestness.

So, what works? “Grizelda” bears the weight of a few listens, although its medieval referent is a morality tale about wifely submissiveness. Elsewhere, “O.N.E.” percolates with bubbling synthesizers and a dynamic backbeat. And Keating actually sounds more alive on this track: he’s ecstatically bitter, singing “You don’t move me anymore/And I’m glad that you don’t/’Cause I can’t take it anymore.” The only real highlight here is the lead single, “Ambling Alp.” This is the kind of song that made Yeasayer so initially promising. It’s a glorious pep talk (“Stick up for yourself, son!”) that takes Joe Louis’ career (especially his fights against Max Schmeling and Primo Carnera) as a point of literal inspiration.

This is a crushingly disappointing album, especially considering that Yeasayer participated in my absolute favorite episode of La Blogotheque’s Take Away Show. The band (and about a dozen friends) was at the height of their promise, singing “2080″ and “Tightrope.” Watch the amazing performance right now:

Rating: 4/10