Tag: pop matters

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


Eleanor Friedberger – Last Summer
Unlike Matthew’s solo forays, which amplify his compositional idiosyncrasies (see his current Solos series featuring one instrument per album), Eleanor has chosen an immediately pleasant pop/rock mode and found many colors within it. For instance, “Inn of the Seventh Ray” has numerous numerical antecedents in past Friedberger songs “Seven Silver Curses”, “Seventh Loop Highway”, and “Cabaret of the Seven Devils”, but the song stands out within this already impressive run by virtue of its comparative unfussiness. A couple of piano and guitar chords repeat, and are embellished, and longing echoes in the singer’s voice. Three quarters of the way through the song, nearly all of that is scaled way back, and she sings over some background “ooohs” that are surprisingly haunted and affecting. Read the Full Review on Pop Matters


Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter – Marble Son
Throughout this gorgeous collection of music Sykes’ voice crisscrosses the paper-thin rift between deep pain and true bliss, enabling songs to drift into the ether in between. Slower moments build with a creepy, meandering flow before bursts of swirling psychedelic rock attack that would make Comets on Fire proud. This is heavy. Read the full review on Glide Magazine


MellowHype – BlackenedWhite
…even as it nods toward accessibility, BLACKENEDWHITE works as yet another fascinating, bizarre, expectation-defying piece of work from a group of young artists who don’t make anything else. And unlike the others, this one features zero rape threats. For neophytes, Tyler’s Bastard is still the place to start; he’s the group’s figurehead and most talented member, and you really have to confront how fucked up these kids are if you have any interest in engaging them. But BLACKENEDWHITE pushes them closer to humanity without sacrificing the weirdness that’s so central to their appeal. They’re not out of surprises yet, and they probably won’t be for a long time. Read the full Review on Pitchfork

New Releases


Handsome Furs – Sound Kapital
Opener “When I Get Back” has Boeckner returning to his native land a changed man, for better or for worse, as Perry’s left hand punches out deep grooves and her right hits an almost bubbly synth melody. “Memories of the Future” sees Boeckner disparaging the nostalgia that, arguably, drives this entire project and its wanderlust—“I throw my hands to the sky / I let my memories go.” The track proves that he and Perry can turn a forward-looking outlook into just as much of a jam as a backward-looking one. “Serve the People” could be an indictment of Russian oligarchs and American corporatists alike, and it will get fists in the air in both countries. Early single “What About Us” turns the record’s most club-ready and retro banger into a New Order-esque heart-on-sleeve coda, with Boeckner singing, “Let’s stay in this evil little world / Break my heart” over and over again to somehow comforting, ethereal results. Read the full review on Pop Matters


Fucked Up – David Comes To Life
More than any single Fucked Up record, David Comes to Life is thick with walls of noisy melody. It’s hard to get a handle on just how many guitar tracks are on a given song, and Shane Stoneback deserves a medal for mixing the sheer bulk of the sound into something so clear. But for all the shoegazey textures and blistering sonic assault, David Comes to Life is also direct and immediate. Hooks are piled on top of hooks, bursting through torrents of spacey noise (“I Was There”) and peppy rhythms (“The Recursive Girl”) alike. At points, the primal appeal of the blunt and effective riffing even brings to mind the bar-band rock of the Hold Steady. Read the full Review


Brian Eno & Rick Holland – Drums Between The Bells
A track on Drums Between The Bells like “cloud 4”, with Eno’s multilayered voice modulating between intonation and generous song to deliver gently optimistic, contemplative lyrics over legato organ lines and softly arpeggiated synths, finds itself speaking to Another Day on Earth and the semi-titular track “Just Another Day.” This cluster itself speaks to the instrumental (I dare not say ‘voiceless’) meditations “The Big Ship,” “Sombre Reptiles,” and “Another Green World” that nestle at the center of 1975’s Another Green World. It’s a testament to his maturity and prescience that Eno can maintain a conversation with his past achievements, giving an impression of a sustained meditation on an eclectic bundle of decades-long vibrating strings, and that he remains as happy creating “three-dimensional instantiations” of poetry as he is setting poetry to music, and finding time between to promulgate as many permutations as can be mustered or set in motion. Read the full review

New Releases


Cults – Cults
As the singles testify, the secret to Cults’ success is the way the group takes reference points that have been cited to death by now and breathes new life into them, putting a twisted twist on what only appears to be lovey-dovey girl-group pop through their edgy, inventive compositions and the effed-up romances Follin sings about. Even though Follin and Oblivion seem especially reverent of their influences, they’re also riffing off ‘em in clever and ingenious ways. Like on “You Know What I Mean”, where Follin conveys the cool doo-whoppy sway of the Supremes’ yearning-and-burning vocals as sparkling synths and sound effects play behind her, only to bring her simmering mood to a boil when she shout-sings the chorus. And you might swear you hear the Supremes’ pop symphonies peeking through here and there on “Most Wanted”, with just the right hints of swelling strings and gently tinkling ivories. All in all, Oblivion’s deft orchestration really takes center stage on “Most Wanted”, as a thumping bass line and old-timey blues guitar get across an authentic blast-from-the past feel as they accompany Follin’s honeyed vocals. Read the full review on Pop Matters


Kate Bush – Directors Cut
Her new album, which admittedly took only half as long to make as its predecessor, isn’t actually a new album, despite Bush’s insistence to the contrary: it consists entirely of new versions of songs from 1989’s The Sensual World and 1993’s The Red Shoes. In fairness, you can see why she’s chosen to point them up. They tend to be overlooked in her oeuvre, more because they separate her twin masterpieces Hounds of Love and Aerial than because of their content, although The Red Shoes is perhaps more muddled than you might expect, given her legendary perfectionism. Nevertheless, the decision seems to have bamboozled even her diehard fans, whose trepidation was not much mollified by the single Deeper Understanding. Again, you can see why she wants to point it up: its lyric about abandoning social interaction in order to hunch over a computer seems very prescient in the age of Facebook and Twitter. Read the full Review on The Guardian


Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – The Boatman’s Call (Reissue)
More than any other album in this batch of reissues, The Boatman’s Call is greatly enriched by a remaster that amplifies the magnitude of Cave’s loneliness, from the burning-ember ambience of “Lime Tree Arbour” to Ellis’ trembling violin lines on the absolutely devastating “Far From Me”. But even though The Boatman’s Call is Cave’s most confessional, open-hearted album, its sense of sorrow and catharsis transcends a strictly personal interpretation. It speak volumes about the album’s universality that its songs have soundtracked everything from Michael Hutchence’s funeral to Shrek 2. Read the full review on Pitchfork

New Releases


Battles – Gloss Drop
In a sense, Battles is the double-aughts version of a progressive rock band, featuring virtuoso musicianship pretty much unheard of in indie rock circles. All that was missing were lyrics about gnomes and fairies and the ilk. Battles was a band that was looking backward as much as they were looking forward, and it all began to make a heck of a lot more sense to me under that reflective prism.

That brings us to the sophomore album and yes, I had to wonder where Battles would go from Mirrored. That record captured a particular style of post rock-cum-prog, and my fear was that there would be a temptation to repeat the formula and do the same thing twice. Happily, with Gloss Drop, this is not really the case, although the driving musicianship and some of the trademark whimsy of Mirrored shines through. Gloss Drop is not merely a sequel to Mirrored, it’s an album in its own right, one that incorporates world music on a somewhat prominent basis, and one that sees the band move more in a pop-oriented direction. Read the Full Review on Pop Matters


Arctic Monkeys – Suck It and See
[Suck It and See] takes as its starting point Humbug’s least representative track, Cornerstone, a sighing, richly melodic lament at odds with the lurching, Josh Homme-produced darkness evident elsewhere. The result is the first Arctic Monkeys album that tries to ensnare the listener with its tunes, rather than guitar riffs or Turner’s lyrics. Oddly, what its mid-tempo stew of thick basslines, feedback-laden guitar lines, churning chord progressions and thumping drums occasionally recalls – presumably unwittingly – is the ooh-look-at-the-cosh-boys Morrissey of the mid-90s, though anyone who feels their spirits understandably sinking at the mention of that particular juncture of Morrissey’s career should note that the contents of Suck It and See are noticeably tighter, lighter on their feet and infinitely more fun than anything on Southpaw Grammar. Read the full review on The Guardian UK


Tyler, The Creator – Goblin
There is no need to introduce this man at all. You should know his name, his crew, his height, his favourite food and, especially, the name of his enormously awaited sophomore album. He expects you to, because the first entry in his Goblin journal is detailed with a furiously direct account of the hurricane of Odd Future references that has consumed Twitter and every second webpage on the internet in the past few months. It’s as if Tyler is narrating his own career in a third-person perspective. At the forefront of an eerily hellish beat, he calls out his critics, attacks the nay-sayers and compiles all his angry tweets (they’re more like ticks really – he just says what he wants, when he wants) against ‘White America’ into the 6:49 he has assigned himself: “N****s getting offended/They don’t wanna fuck ‘cos I do not fuck with religion/Well see that’s my decision you fuckers don’t have to listen/Here, put this middle finger in your ear.” Read the track by track review on Hip Hop Isn’t Dead it’s just Sleeping.

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