Author: Tanner

Tis The Season: Pure Pop’s Year Enders!

yearender-lists

Here we go again folks, back another year for our 4th (or 5th?) annual And Pure Pop Year Enders! And as with last year, you’re all invited to submit your lists! Because of last year’s overload of submissions and because you never start a sentence with “because”, we’d like to lay out a few ground rules to help keep things organized.

  • Your year ender should be relevant to Music, music culture and/or pop culture.
  • Your list should be not more than a top 5 (short and simple.)
  • Your review should contain at least 2 descriptive sentences / explanation for why you picked said year ender list item.
  • Each list item should contain both artist name and title, where applicable, if it’s a film list – film title, maybe director… use your best judgement.
  • Who you are. Name, Age, Location, Occupation, social security number and images you want to include… your cat, etc.

Submissions will be accepted until December 31st, and a full submission* will be chosen at random to win a Pure Pop Gift Certificate!

*Full means, fill out the complete form, don’t be a slacker, you slacker.

New Releases


Sigur Ros – Inni
Inni attaches real people to this totemic image: At the heart of it all, it’s four guys playing music and singing, with all their naked humanity on full aural display. And that, for me, is the one downside to this live album. Ironically, it’s also the best thing about it. Inni brings Sigur Rós and their music down from Olympus; it reminds us that they are mere mortals after all. Towards the end of the album, the band does provide a few “seeing God” moments of apotheosis, complete with the crescendo and climax that form the essential component of their best songs, restoring them to demigod status. “Festival”, the centerpiece of their most recent album, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, rears its fire-breathing head even more fully with Dýrason’s frenetic drumming in full force. Read the full review on Consequence of Sound


Childish Gambino – Camp
If you have only enjoyed “Heartbeat,” the LP’s first single, get the whole album. Because although it’s one of the album’s strongest tracks, there are better displays of Gambino’s talent on “Camp.”

The single’s catharsis is matched and exceeded in the album opener “Outside,” which uses stadium-sized posturing in production to showcase self-consciousness, regretful notions about death, heavy nostalgia. If this sounds like familiar – like Kanye, for instance – then you’re only partly right, because although he nods toward his contemporaries, Gambino does his own thing. Read the Full review on Death and Taxes Magazine


Tegan and Sara – Get Along
Sara Quin, one-half of the Canadian duo, said she hopes the intimate look into their lives will show the world there is a low-key side to their quirky personas.

“We’re just normal people and I didn’t want it to be too over-the-top funny, or too over-the-top rockstar-y. I just wanted it to be normal, middle-of-the-road,” Quin deadpanned in an interview with Wired.com. “We should’ve put that on the package: ‘Middle of the road. Not very funny. Not very intense.’” Read the full (sorta) review on Wired

New Releases


The Beach Boys – Smile Sessions
But part of the allure of SMiLE will always be the pieces, and the deluxe box has a lot of them. There’s almost a full disc of “Heroes and Villains” fragments and another entire CD with bits of “Good Vibrations”. Given the nature of this release, the extras are illuminating, arguably more essential than most outtakes included with bonus albums. Having source materials hints at roads not taken, and also offers insight into the difficulty of actually creating a record on this scale, given how much we’ve heard about all the bouncing and layering that SMiLE entailed (the complexity of which is partly to blame for the project’s being late and ultimately abandoned) and how many of the basic tracks were recorded live in the studio with a dozen or more musicians at once. There were only four and eight tracks to work with on the tape of the time, so one of them would need multiple instruments just to have voices and overdubs added later. Read The Full Review on Pitchfork


Atlas Sound – Parallax
There’s a couple ways to approach Parallax, the latest and greatest heart-pouring from Bradford Cox’s home-recording project Atlas Sound. The first is without the context of who Bradford Cox is, without knowing he is diagnosed with Marfan syndrome, without knowing he’s disseminated hundreds of songs on his blog, without knowing his role as frontman of the far more accessible psych-rock group Deerhunter, without a bead on his mercurial, tortured, and aching lyrics of past projects, and without a sense that Cox is becoming the premiere artist who combines his self and his music to create an unparalleled artistic symbiosis. Without that context, Atlas Sound can feel insular and difficult to penetrate. Read The Full Review on Consequence of Sound


Youth Lagoon – The Year of Hibernation
I guess what is so appealing, to me at least, about Trevor Powers and his Youth Lagoon project, is how believable it all is. This is just some fucking kid from Idaho (much like Arrange is just some fucking kid from Florida). And I don’t mean that in any derogatory way whatsoever, despite my callous and idiotic usage of the F-word. What I mean is that when you listen to the far-off then jittery electro treat “Posters,” and hear lines like, “When I was nine years old / I had a poster…/ I knew what I wanted to be / Never was the same,” it’s trite and childlike and not all that complex. Sure. What it is, in fact, is everything we wish we could say. But instead we spend too much time obsessing over what our words might be perceived to mean; Powers connects because he isn’t trying to. I’m speaking for him like a dickhead, but The Year of Hibernation would be just as successful if nobody ever heard it. At least for him. Read the full review on Absolute Punk

New Releases

Lou Reed & Metallica – Lulu

Lulu was first previewed with an especially repellent 30-second tract of “The View” that confirmed everyone’s worst suspicions of the project– namely, that Reed’s crotchety, atonal poem-rants would be wholly incompatible with Metallica’s fidgety riffage. The clip’s most prominent lyric (“Throw it away/ For worship someone who actively despises you!”) seemed to mock both artists’ most forgiving fans for even clicking on the link. By the time “The View” was released in its full, five-minute ghastliness— with Hetfield variously professing himself to be a table, a 10-story building and, possibly, the premier member of Philly hip-hop band the Roots— the Internet had all the evidence it needed to preemptively crown Lulu the Worst Album of All Time. – Read the full review on Pitchfork

The Decemberists – Long Live the King

A collection of outtakes from the King Is Dead sessions, Long Live The King finds inspiration in the Grateful Dead, whose gently rollicking “Row Jimmy” gets covered in spirited, surprisingly boozy fashion. Similarly, Long Live The King is a loose, almost ramshackle record; the songs, particularly the home-recorded demo “I 4 U & U 4 Me” are as catchy as ever, but they’re like snapshots of a band living in the moment, without regard for whether everything is falling exactly in the right place.  Read the the full review on AV Club

Florence + The Machine – Ceremonials

On her follow-up, “Ceremonials,” Welch has struck a fantastic and necessary balance. She’s found a way to honor her Bjorkian appetites for lavish orchestral spectacle while finding the depth and subtlety of her voice. She’s become a better actor, a keener listener and still manages to let it rip on occasion. But she also knows when to hush up, like at the close of “Spectrum,” when Tom Monger’s harp gorgeously flutters and dips around her. Read the full review on LA Times Blog

New Releases


Tom Waits – Bad As Me
Tom Waits may pay the mortgage as a musician, but he clearly has the heart of a junkman. With Waits, you get the sense that nothing ever truly gets thrown away—maybe pushed deeper back or buried beneath but never completely discarded or forgotten. On Bad As Me, Waits’ first collection of entirely new material since 2004’s clanging, scraping Real Gone, the once inebriated lounge act turned beatboxing junkman picks through the scrap metal and tire piles of his nearly 40-year career and shows that a shine can be salvaged from even the rustiest pieces. Read the full review on Consequence of Sound


Coldplay – Mylo Xyloto
After a short instrumental intro, Mylo kicks off with “Hurts Like Heaven,” a driving homage to LCD Soundsystem and a nice kick in the formula. (Coldplay’s members are expert formula-repeaters.) But from there, it’s a different recipe, with a series of songs that almost beg for a verse from Jigga. “Paradise” is the biggest, most obvious one, with its saccharine—but somehow acceptable—lyrics (“life goes on, it gets so heavy”) and loping breakbeat. If Martin hasn’t lined somebody up to throw down some rhymes on a remix, he’s missing out on some serious crossover potential. “Princess Of China” serves up a major player, though: Rihanna duets with Martin on a massive bit of pop-ready melancholia that should find a home on about six different radio formats. Read the full review at Chicago Sun Times


Bonnie Prince Billy – Wolfroy Goes To Town
Wolfroy Goes to Town is a hushed, hallowed, humble work; with a reverent air that borders on religious, and a congregation of backing singers —including the glorious warble of Chicago songsmith Angel Olsen— employed like choir to his preachin’. This suits a lyrical motif that is filled with references to the divine.

Early in 2011, the Bonnie “Prince” issued a seven-inch, “There Is No God” b/w “God Is Love,” which at the time seemed like a lark; especially given the giddy, drunk-country ramblin’ of the former jam, which found Oldham caroling “that which puts mouth on cock and vagina” with glee. Here, there’s the same lyrical predisposition —God that is, not genitalia— only delivered with far more gravity and grace.

Just as on Willy O’s first-ever album, the 1993 Palace Brothers LP There is No-One What Will Take Care of You, God is present, in some form, in every song; usually by name, often in spirit; a panoply of perceptions coloring an often-stark set of songs, God rendered various shades of loving, cruel, absent, omnipresent, bearded, feminine. Oldham explores notions of faith and religion, pitting belief in a deity against the way humans force their own narratives, their own agendas, onto some imagined man in the sky. “Good God guides us/Bad God leaves us,” he carols on opener “No Match,” and that mixture of sly humor and solemn profundity holds across the whole album.

As the songs roll out mournful and melancholy, Oldham still can shoehorn in the lyrically bizarre (like: “as boys, we fucked each other/as men, we lie and smile”; or: “fat men smiling, bearded men/with blue eyes shining, light within”), but they don’t play like jokes. The effect is sad, somehow; like back in that old Palace era, when a song called “You Have Cum In Your Hair and Your Dick Is Hanging Out” was so beautiful it could make you cry. Read the full review on AllMusic

New Releases


M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
M83 have never stood for half measures in any aspect, but Gonzalez is absolutely going for it here in a way that sheds new light on known tricks: The hair-triggered drum rolls of “New Map” recall Before the Dawn’s searing car-crash fantasy “Don’t Save Us From the Flames”, but Gonzalez’s nervy punctuation at the end of each line sells the idea that he’s along for the ride this time rather than being a passive observer. Dead Cities’ “In Church” was the sound of blissful acquiescence, but amidst the swaggering synth-metal of “Midnight City”, Gonzalez hollers, “The city is my church!” empowered and present, finding a voice for the evangelical zeal always implicit in his work. Read the full review on Pitchfork


Real Estate – Days
In contrast with the self-titled album’s stoned, friendly vibes, Days simply exudes confidence. They’ve clearly stepped up their production values in every respect; this time around, Etienne Duguay’s drums don’t sound so smothered or submerged, Matthew Mondanile’s guitar glides through each track with a sense of reverberating nostalgia clearly influenced by his solo work as Duktails, Alex Bleeker plays base with steadier and simpler purpose, and Martin Courtney’s vocals are layered and harmonized with more care and complexity than they ever were before. Then there are the tinier details that get the opportunity to shine through, like the subtle bells on opener “Easy,” the soft backing keyboards on “It’s Real” and “Out of Tune,” and the distant tambourine-woodblock combo on “Kinder Blumen.” The fact that Real Estate would even choose to include these embellishments in the first place suggests a willingness to grow, while their restrained use reflects a band that doesn’t feel the need to prove their growth; as the saying goes, they show us that they’ve expanded their sound instead of just telling us. Read the full review on 130BPM


Class Actress – Rapprocher
Like most acts that attempt to reclaim glamorous early-‘80s New Wave, Class Actress lives in a completely different era. Like Neon Indian’s first album, the somewhat lo-fi production values and vintage instrumentation never get in the way of the songs, but instead manage to stand alongside them hand-in-hand. This has to do mostly with the fact that the songs themselves on Rapprocher are just infectiously catchy. Whether its the insatiable choruses of “Love Me Like You Used To” or “Weekend,” Class Actress clearly has little interest in the washed-out vocals and melodic inaccessibility of other lo-fi acts. Read the full review on Paste

New Releases


Zola Jesus – Conatus
There has always been something almost subliminally idol-killing about the Zola Jesus project, and it really comes into focus here. Danilova’s childhood opera aspirations are subverted into something nearly opposite. Opera singing is narrative and flows smoothly from deep within. Danilova is more allusive and tortuous. Her voice keeps getting caught in her throat, where it’s stressed and twisted by transient emotional surges. Though the theatricality and the epic-pop trappings may evoke artists like Dead Can Dance, the vocals have the passion of blues singing. Danilova is equally iconoclastic when it comes to industrial influences like Throbbing Gristle, finding ways to make abrasion as musical as possible without sacrificing tension. Her touchstones have been digested into a personal style that is much more substance than reference. Read the full review on Pitchfork


Mastodon – The Hunter
The Hunter sees Mastodon taking a much more riff-heavy approach — shorter songs, more bombast — without compromising their epic feel. A purist raised on the literary universes encompassed on the band’s last three albums (Leviathan, 2004; Blood Mountain, 2006; and Crack the Skye, 2009) could pine for the 13-minute cosmic journey, but The Hunter is just as expansive as any of Mastodon’s earlier efforts, despite the lack of Hawkwind-style noodling. Having a pop radio producer at the helm seems not to have diminished the band’s determination to push boundaries, but rather to have made that desire more concise, more focused, and somehow more powerful. The shine given to The Hunter is definitely worthy of Warner Bros. (the parent of Reprise), and a measure of rock-radio friendliness hasn’t been a barrier to metal bands in the past. Read the full review on Tiny Mix Tapes


St. Vincent – Strange Mercy
Describing Annie Clark’s work as St. Vincent comes down to a toss-up between cinematic and clever. Both in the studio and in her videos, Clark is captivating, expansive, and yet undemanding. She slyly earns your attention with bombastic hooks, witty turns of phrase, or by mentoring a kid who just got a merit badge for “mind sandwich” (all done together in the video for “Jesus Saves, I Spend”), and then she reels you in further. She convinces you to take another step closer to the difficult subjects she intends to work out. Many were drawn in by the title track of her debut, Marry Me, for its cute power, the smoky vocals, the pretty girl singing directly to you with stark emotion. But what sticks in the end are her clever twists (“Let’s do what Mary and Joseph did… without the kid”) and the huge scope of such a simple song. Read the full review on Consequence of Sound

New Releases


Wilco – The Whole Love
“The Whole Love,” a 12-song effort that’s way more “Summerteeth” and “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” than more recent efforts: The band is having fun not only with sound but with structure, without sacrificing catchiness. Nearly every song contains some tangential surprise, odd hook, sonic back flip or midsong redefinition. The first single, “I Might,” sounds like ? and the Mysterians covering Radiohead and is the closest thing to a simple rock song on the record (rivaled by “Dawned on Me,” which suggests Electric Light Orchestra). “Sunloathe” is a surreal, psychedelic piano ballad carried forward by Kotche’s miscellaneous noise and layers of intricate countermelodies. “Standing O” sounds stolen from Elvis Costello’s “This Year’s Model.” Read the full review on LA Times


Nirvana – Nevermind (Deluxe Edition)
Twenty years later, here I sit swamped again in that riotous cataloguing of disaffection and narcissism, thanks to Nevermind’s big-event two-disc reissue. First comes the original album, at once unchanged and alien. The choruses strike me as ridiculously effective: pop sing-alongs hidden in the outsider sneer of punk. That radioactive pop core can’t be contained – not by dank effects, fragmented lyrics or even a mocking self-awareness about underground rock bands making major-label debuts. Butch Vig’s radio-glossed production has taken its share of lashes – and certainly the faint echo on Kurt Cobain’s voice during ‘Breed’ seems silly now – but he brings out the crossover potential of these songs even when they’re infected by groggy angst and vague sentiments. Like those loping verses and ravenous choruses, Vig’s pro sheen is a roadworthy vehicle for Cobain’s musing-venting-musing streaks. Read the full review on the Vine


Dum Dum Girls – Only In Dreams
Dum Dum Girls in particular had a way of reminding you that there was more to it than that. They had fun with irony; artifice; and winking, revisionist takes on musical history (Kristin Gundred’s Ramones-nodding stage name Dee Dee; Richard “My Boyfriend’s Back” Gottehrer’s co-producing credit on both full-lengths) that reminded you of the simple, triumphant facts: these women were all pretty excellent pop songwriters, and this thing they were part of was the most visible all-female front in indie rock since the riot grrrl movement in the early 1990s. Read the full review on Pitchfork

New Releases


Wolves In The Throne Room – Celestial Lineage
Casting themselves as warrior-monks chanting benedictions while honing their swords on blood-soaked whetstones, the Weavers wield “Permanent Changes In Consciousness” as a ghostly interlude—one that offers breathing space between “Thuja Magus Imperium” and “Subterranean Initiation,” two symphonic, multilayered epics that launch Lineage into cosmic orbit. But the disc stays tethered to terra firma; simultaneously earthen and unearthly, the closing track, “Prayer Of Transformation,” churns frantic dissonance, blackened ambience, and the choral aura of guest singer Jessika Kenney into a blur of ethereal sludge. Each shimmering chord is a crested wave; each blastbeat and bestial screech is administered with zealous conviction. Read the full review on AV Club


Blitzen Trapper – American Goldwing
Last year, some speculated that the sixth album by Portland’s Blitzen Trapper might see the band enter some kind of cosmic-progressive phase. The logic, such as it was, went that their Queen-inspired miniature rock opera “Destroyer of the Void” was indicative of the group’s future plans, where the last album’s other songs were not. However, borrowing from a host of ‘70s influences is just what Blitzen Trapper does. Had they chosen another song from the last album, critics might just as well have predicted the band would become full-time Laurel Canyon folkies, don leather for hard rock, or disband altogether allowing frontman Eric Earley to transform permanently into Bob Dylan. Thankfully, none of those things happened. On American Goldwing Blitzen Trapper remains true to itself—still inspired by its heroes, still fusing old sounds with new, and still compelling. Read the full review at Pop Matters


Tori Amos – Night of Hunters
Using a technique taken from classical music, Amos has created a cycle of repeating musical themes with her latest solo work, “Night of Hunters,” a beautiful kaleidoscope of remembering and letting go. Tori fans will be delighted to find that “Hunters” marks the return of Amos’ piano, which has taken a back seat to the electronically produced fanciness she’s favored in the recent past. Here her voice is a crystal bell with only the ivory guiding her. Tori’s preteen daughter Natashya Hawley, her voice a rich earthy tone that vacillates between Sia-esque beauty and childlike curiosity, joins her mother for duets on four tracks, most notably on the wonderful “Job’s Coffin,” their vocals playing off of each other like two calling birds. Read the Full Review

New Releases


Das Racist – Relax
“Relax” is Das Racist’s first commercial release, yet it shares the dense sprawl and uncomfortable laughs of the group’s previous Internet mixtapes. First single “Michael Jackson” proves an earworm equal to Das Racist’s breakthrough 2008 blog hit, “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” — as catchy as anything by Lil Wayne, but its postmodern absurdity actually seems intentional. “Booty in the Air” suggests an R&B strip-club anthem via someone too nerdy to have ever actually gotten a lap dance, while on “Shut Up, Man,” Kool A.D. bisects a buckshot spray of surrealist wordplay evoking Ghostface and MF Doom with an insightfully pointed query: “They say I act white but sound black/ But act black but sound white/ But what’s my sound bite supposed to sound like?” He’s clearly being hypothetical: It sounds a lot like Das Racist. Read the full review on LA Times Pop & Hiss Blog


Girls – Father, Son, Holy Ghost
The first listen to Father, Son, Holy Ghost brings with it an almost eerie sense of familiarity, like these are songs you’ve been hearing your whole life even when you can’t place them, and it’s sometimes startling just how specific the references can be. The opening “Honey Bunny” has a shuffling beat and riff that is close to Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome”; “Love Like a River” has a verse structure, chord changes, and tinkling piano arrangement almost identical to the Beatles’ “Oh! Darlin”, which was itself a direct rip of songs like “Blueberry Hill”. “Magic” has bouncy sunshine pop chords that bring to mind something from a Have a Nice Day comp, “Die” has almost the same melody as Deep Purple’s “Highway Star”. Read the full review on Pitchfork


Can’t – Dreams Come True
Turns out dreams come true indeed – CANT is like fresh air from left field, brilliant and creative, indicative of Taylor’s versatility as a songwriter. Not many vestiges of the indie folk Taylor and his bandmates in Grizzly Bear engineer with such mastery are present here, nor are many sonic ties to the myriad groups Taylor has produced. Dreams Come True is humid and brooding and dark, constructed gracefully of layers of shuddering drum machine and dizzying bass riffs and drones (you’ll need headphones for this one). Read the full review on Pretty Much Amazing