Tag: la times

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


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


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

New Releases


Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi Present ROME
Rome stays fully on-message from beginning to end, accurately mimicking the style, sound and recording techniques of the film scores from classic Westerns. Many of the tracks are instrumentals, but Jack White adds his Bluegrass-inspired vocals to a handful of songs. He first pops up on “The Rose With the Broken Neck,” somewhat taking on the persona of the prototypical “depressed badass” cowboy to stay with the theme. Read the full review on Hop Hop DX


Hank Williams III – Hillbilly Joker
First things first: If my bootleg Hank III collection (what, you don’t have one?) is to be believed, a large percentage—80%, to be exact—of the tracks on Hillbilly Joker have been floating around the interwebs in a quasi-legal status since 2003 under the album title This Ain’t Country. (Some tracks also appear on III Shades of Hank; use this information however you’d like.) That said, even with a new moniker, the old This Ain’t Country is a pretty apt title—as Williams fans who dig his hard rock side project, Assjack, know, there’s more to the man than his souped-up, hellbound take on his grandfather’s genre. Hillbilly Joker splits the difference between Hank III proper and Assjack, and as a result, will either offer something for both sets of fans or disappoint them, depending on your level of cynicism. Read the full review on Pop Matters


Ben Harper – Give Till It’s Gone
The 10th studio album from L.A.-based rocker Ben Harper suggests a cathartic confessional. Pointedly a solo effort (previous Harper albums have largely co-billed backing bands the Innocent Criminals and Relentless7), it’s also his last with longtime record label Virgin and comes after a very public split with his wife, actress Laura Dern. (Yes… that Laura Dern… we know.) Read the full review on the LA Times

New Releases


Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues
Helplessness Blues is comparatively deeper, more intricate, and more complex, a triumphant follow-up to a blockbuster debut. Working again with producer Phil Ek, they’ve crafted a cavernous record that allows more room for them to breathe and stretch. The album’s longer, episodic cuts contain disquieting shifts in tone. “The Plains/Bitter Dancer”, for example, begins as a spindly, psychedelic folk tune reminiscent of some of the Zombies’ more introspective moments, and then, after a brief pause, bursts suddenly into the type of gangland chorus Fleet Foxes have practically trademarked by now. Read the full review on Pitchfork


Beastie Boys – Hot Sauce Committee Part Two
What makes “Hot Sauce” so vital is that the Beasties sound hungrier than most musicians currently posting their first Internet demos. This is vintage Beasties, all exuberant pass-the-mike battle rhymes and gritty break-beats so funky, it’s near impossible not to head-bob through the entire record — or slam dance, as the hard-core thump on “Lee Majors Come Again” so inspires. These aesthetics prove not so much dated as timeless: The Beasties don’t sound as if they’re repeating themselves as much as creating fresh grooves with a sensibility that’s proved enduring. Read the full review on LA Times


Bill Callahan – Apocalypse
One of his most remarkable tricks– and one he returns to all over Apocalypse– is the ability to sound both controlled and casual at the same time. The songs here are filled with silly, borderline bad ideas that an artist with less confidence might’ve scrubbed after taking a long walk and a good rest. “Baby’s Breath” speeds up and slows down in a way that sounds unrehearsed, devolving into distorted guitar toward the end. The sloppy backing track on “America!” quotes what sounds like Civil War songs and 50s jungle-rock. (It also casts Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson as part of an imagined U.S. military force and ends on an acidic joke about American imperialism: “Well everyone’s allowed a past they don’t care to mention.”) A few songs feature, prominently, the flute. Read the full review on P4k

New Releases


Lucinda Williams – Blessed
“Blessed,” one of the best albums she’s ever released, comes as a relief. Produced by Don Was (who produced Raitt’s “Nick of Time”), the dozen songs on the album tackle complicated emotions with a deft touch to create profoundly moving moments. Whether it’s the sense of loss in “Copenhagen,’ about the instance in which she learns about the death of a friend, or “To Be Loved,” a tender ballad that every mother should sing to her children before bedtime (“You weren’t born to be mistreated/You weren’t born to be misguided/You were born to be loved”), Williams’ writing on “Blessed” is seamless. Read the full review on LA Times


Mike Watt – Hyphenated Man
Musically, Hyphenated Man consists of short songs in a guitar-bass-drums configuration, similar to the Minutemen. In fact, Watt said he was inspired by the making of the Minutemen documentary We Jam Econo.

“I had to listen to Minutemen a lot while it was going on,” Watt said. “We drove around Pedro and I answered questions and showed them around and we listened to music.”

That process gave Watt an opportunity to revisit Minutemen music for the first time in 20 years. “I didn’t listen to it for a long time after D. Boon got killed. It made me sad,” Watt said. “But listening to it was, like, ‘Wow, this is kind of interesting, no filler.'”

For Hyphenated Man, Watt said he wrote the songs on guitar and then built bass lines around them. “Sometimes I’d do that with D. Boon, I’d write a little on guitar, and he would take it and make it real,” Watt said. “It’s just a different thing than coming from the bass straight off.” Read the full Interview on Recoil


Devotchka – 100 Lovers
Devotchka’s triumph on their new album is the increasing synthesis of their many influences. You don’t get to yell “Wheee! Mariachi!” on this first track (and really, do you want to do that anyhow?), but that doesn’t mean the band’s drifting into more radio-typical sounds. All the previous influences still present themselves throughout the album, but more seamlessly than before. Even a more exotic track (to US ears) like “The Common Good” sounds less like one tradition juxtaposed with another and more like, well, Devotchka. Read the full review on Pop Matters

New Releases


Low Anthem – Smart Flesh
It’s too bad the Foo Fighters already called an album “Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace,” because that title perfectly describes the new effort by the Low Anthem. To record the follow-up to 2008’s buzz-building “Oh My God, Charlie Darwin,” this Rhode Island-based folk-rock outfit set up shop in a former pasta-sauce factory outside Providence; the group’s goal was to capture an explicitly handcrafted vibe not much in vogue in these days of Pro Tools and Auto-Tune. Read the Full Review on LA Times


Adele – 21
Somewhere in 21, there is an honest, direct, sonically mature record fighting to get out with personality intact. You never would have guessed that a quirky bossa nova cover of the Cure’s “Lovesong” would work, but it does. Read the full review on the Guardian


G-Love – Fixin’ to Die
The enigmatically smooth and uber-cool Garrett “G. Love” Dutton has always ninja’d a few small red herrings of country and classic Americana into his famed and now nearly flawless meld of hip hop and blues, but there was always the sense that he was unwilling (unable?) to outwardly throw it into his mix. Turns out, it took the nudging of Seth and Scott Avett (better known at the Avett Brothers) to get him to really turn it out, and when they got into the studio with him to produce “Fixin’ to Die” after sharing the stage together at last year’s Summer Camp Music Festival in Illinois, they ended up helming one of the most important albums of G’s career. Read Full Review on Sacramento Press

New Releases

The Decemberists – The King Is Dead
Recorded in a converted barn on Oregon’s Pendarvis Farm, The King Is Dead eschews the high, mystical wailing of British folk for its North American counterpart. Rustic and roomy, the record nods to Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, early Wilco, the Band, Neil Young, and especially R.E.M. In places, it almost feels like a disrobing: “Let the yoke fall from our shoulders,” frontman Colin Meloy bellows on opener “Don’t Carry It All”, his voice loose and easy, freer than he’s sounded in an awfully long time. Read the Full Review on Pitchfork

Cage The Elephant – Thank You Happy Birthday
Having gained notoriety a couple of years back for intense live shows and memorable singles like 2008’s slouchy, sexy “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked,” Shultz and his pals, including brother Brad on guitar and secret weapon Daniel Tichenor on bass, stand at a crucial juncture. Can Cage the Elephant survive the scrutiny of jaded aficionados who call its drum kit-toppling yet sweet-toothed approach to guitar bashery nothing but a rehash of flannel rock? This set of ripping rave-ups and effortlessly tasty singalongs answers YES, in all caps. Read the full review on LA Times

Madlib Medicine Show 11
Funkadelic, psychedelic, jazz infused break-beats mixing influences and sounds of electronic, soul and a whole lot of Hip Hop – Madlib’s eleventh installment to the Medicine Show series, entitled Low Budget High Fi Music, is a welcomed addition to this multi-instrumentalist’s repertoire of work. With the longest track of the album being 4 minutes and 37 seconds long, the rest of the songs fall in the realm below the 2 minute mark. Each track is laced by Madlib’s incredible ability to capture a motivating groove accentuated by melodies whose instrumentation drives its listeners forward. Combined by great pacing, seamless jumps between tracks (and at other times intentional abrupt stops to melodic flowing sounds), the hilarious skits, commercial-styled breaks, interesting samples and ear-perking interludes excuses the fact that some may be turned off at the length of the entire album (42-tracks long). Read the full review at allhiphop.com