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It's so sad that some emo music has gotten the bad rep that it has, asthe style's beginnings had a lot of promise in bands like Sunny DayReal Estate and Mineral. It was energetic, loud guitar music with"emotive" vocal performance and songs that dealt with humanrelationships mostly. Emo has had its off-spring, from the emo-pop ofJimmy Eat World to the emo-sap (or, for me, emo-suck) of DashboardConfessional, and their sound is now more recognized and prevalent thanthe original. They are also the source of the bad reaction to emo.Every once in a while, though, a band or two come along that are loyalto the original sound without sounding trite, and the Impossibles weresuch a band. Showing off all the components of the original sound, butlacking a bit of focus, they released two full-lengths and 2 EPs beforecalling it quits. Now, two members of that band return as Slow Reader,a great name for a band if I've ever heard one. The sound isdrastically different from their former band, as now they record lushpop laments with electronic flourishes. The core feeling is there,though, and the vocal performance is still emotive while maintaining aninteresting detachment and laziness. "I Like You Most" may sound like ahorrible Chris Carraba song title, but it instead takes more from BenFolds and the Beach Boys with overmixed drums and clear harmony vocals."Stupid Bet" features the best lyrics on the whole release, with softlydelivered vocals and remorse over self-created loss and suffering."Anesthetic for the Amputee" is probably the most raw song on thealbum, with just acoustic guitar and a multitude of voices filling thethe speaker. It's a good start, with its weaknesses intact, but itshows promise. For a traditionally punk or ska label to be releasing itis really a good sign of where both artist and label are heading.
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The upright bass gives a resounding and metronomic thump thump thump onthe new Molasses album. This low-octave punctuation generates a gloomyyet suspended feeling: you might grow anxious in the gray fog thatsurrounds these songs, but you simply cannot escape it or shed thegloom. It lumbers methodically after you while your feet are rooted inplace and you have nowhere to go. But the more you are compelled tolisten in place, the more you notice the glistening sounds of the musicwhich come breaking through the gloom. Scott Chernoff's voice isfamiliar and inviting; it has this habit of laying a heavy croon oraccent on the end of verses and lines, while laying off almostdisinterestedly at the beginning of them. It's not unlike rocking upand down on the waves in a unstable rowing boat which could capsizewith the next swell. Again, the feeling is one of inescapableisolation, but this time some Dramamine might help.
Surrounding Chernoff is the requisite (and, at this point, almostcliched) Montreal cooperative of musicians whose memberships in otherbands would be too laborious to enumerate (a sampling of theConstellation and Alien8 labels will give you a representativecross-section). Let it just be known that there is a lush assortment ofpiano, guitars, strings, horns, and organs. "Death March (Erskine'stheme)" lets loose at one point with what rightfully could be called anaural assault of horns, percussion, guitars and banjos. For about twominutes, it sounds as if thirteen New Orleans brass bands weresimultaneously competing on separate street corners of Bourbon Street.My biggest disappointment with Molasses is how similar all the songsare. I enjoy the sound of the first few songs, like "Valley Song" and"Insomnia," and the music along with the lyrics along with thepackaging (we will talk about this shortly) create this lovely gothicenvironment (not gothic in the way you are thinking. I am merelytalking about 18th century spooky houses in rural New England, lit bymoonlight and with wind rustling dead leaves on trees). But soon therepetition of chords, tempos, and vocals give the sensation of beingstuck in a time loop. Listen to one of the song samples and you have afairly good idea how the entire album sounds. The instrumental songscome almost as a relief, for they are the most distinct andexperimental pieces in the two disc set and they remind us we stillgoing forward in time rather than repeating it. Despite the homogenoussound, it is not too much of a chore to listen through two discs sinceMolasses executes a pleasant sound. The packaging of 'A Slow Messe' isbeautifully done without being cumbersome and unwieldy. The dualbooklets feature lyrics as well as Chernoff's photographs, distressedto make them look ancient or unearthed. By the end of listening to thealbum and perusing the inserts, I understood how aptly named the bandis. Chernoff's vocals stretch out with the viscosity of drops ofmolasses, keeping level and understated during the formation of thedrop and rising at the point at which the droplet of molasses gets tooheavy for itself and finally falls away into the dark space below.
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Whilst the leading cut promoting the very disappointing Plastic Fangisn't much to get excited over unless you're big into the V/Vm Shakin'Green Door massive, the bulldozing Techno Animal remix of "Over andOver" shows just how a slice of mediocrity can be elevated togreatness. I only picked this single up for that remix, which is ashardass siren spurting as the best of their audio assaults and mightjust be the best thing Spencer has done, or had done to him, sincePussy Galore! Barry Adamson's remix of the same track is alsoeffective, if comparatively slinky and sleazy. It doesn't set theemergency flashlights off at quite the same frequency but it gets thefeet moving frantically with its fucked over drum'n'bass distortionmoves, as does the Tremelo Beer Gut mix of "She Said." Who is TremeloBeergut anyway? Only the sugary sheen of the Sub Species "MoneyRock'N'Roll" remix fails to get my blood pumpin'. This is a bland lotof ol' toss that sounds like some kind of misguided bid for Ibitha.Otherwise, this is a creditable salvage operation that pulls surprisingfiery modern machine shapes from an album that seemed like an exercisein terminally bland self parody. If you've ever enjoyed anything fromTechno Animal, Barry Adamson or Jon Spencer then this single shouldn'tbe ignored. So far I just can't be bothered to watch the four videos ofthe Explosion in action tagged on the end, but I guess they probablyoffer value for rock'n'roll money if you have a computer that can dealwith that much shakin' excitement, Steven.
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I used to be a big Meat Puppets fan and when I finally got the chanceto see them play live and interview them it was a blast. Curt Kirkwoodwas as hilarious, hallucinatory and obtuse an interviewee as his lyricsmight have suggested he could be and they effortlessly blew thecomparatively lame Soul Asylum right out the door. Nirvana should needeven less introduction. So here are Kirkwood and former Nirvana bassistin a new trio with a drummer from some band called Sublime who I'venever heard of and probably never will bother to. As you might expect,Eyes Adrift are much more like Meat Puppets than Nirvana, after all,Kirkwood was that band's main songwriter. He still splashes togetherdashes of punk rock, country and weird psychedelic acidfire guitarsolos in a way that shouldn't disappoint any old Meat Puppets fans. Infact, the new band seems to have revitalised him and set him lookingfor slightly new angles to throw his illusive songlight on. The albumstarts unobtrusively and builds inexorably. What would be the firstside seems to coast by nicely, but it seems they saved the best songsfor the second half. "Solid" is classic Kirkwood, a huge psyched outlament by a protagonist whose blood has frozen in his veins, perhaps aperverse metaphorical reflection on Meat Puppets and his bassistbrother's drug problems? "Telescope" should have lovers of cute melodictwists and hard chuggin' metal riffage alike grinning from ear to ear,as Kirkwood shows anyone who'll listen how he'll aim his potato gun atthe sun. By the time they run themselves a "Slow Race," where theobject is to lose, there are no fish left in the streams, they've alltaken to the air. Despite some subtle textures imparted by computerediting and recording, there aren't really any huge leaps from MeatPuppets music, but some small progression has been made out of thecreative cul de sac that band seemed to end up in latterly. My biggestsurprise was finding a copy of this CD for the price of half a pint ofbooze in a bargain bin, but the last track is also quite a curveball."Pasted" is an epic meandering voyage that stretches out well overfifteen minutes and glues a vaguely folk rock lyric about old St Paul,which might be sung by Novoselic, onto some of Kirkwood's most ecstaticsundrenched guitar noise ever. You can hear the entire album at the Eyes Adrift site where they also have two new songs up for grabs. The obvious is dead.
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Belgian Arne Van Petegem is also making an attempt to graduate from theclass of instrumental group of European laptop nerds with his latestEP, a prelude to his forthcoming second full-length album. In the threeyears since his last LP, Arne has been recruited by a number ofmusicians and labels to do remixes, singles and compilation tracks.It's probably through this that he reached two conclusions: #1) it'snot so bad to start including organic sounds like guitar back into themix and #2) my voice isn't so bad that I can't start singing the songsI write! Arne even harmonizes with himself on the title track of thisEP, a blissfull introduction to the more evolved Styrofoam sound. Thepretty melodies and robotic percussion have not been forfeited and thevocals and guitars just add a much nicer dimension on this, a moreradio-frendly version of a track of the forthcoming album. "Fade OutYour Eyes" is a live recording of what sounds pretty much likeStyrofoam remixing himself: letting his vocals and instruments twitterand waiver in a beat-less tapestry of digitally echoing samples whichcould easily go on forever. The disc is rounded out by two charmingtechnologically-enhanced cover tunes: "Hard to Find," originally byCodeine and "Snow Crush Killing Song," originally by Mountain Goats.The full-length I'm What's There to Show That Something's Missingis due out this week, but those lucky enough to catch the Notwist ontour right now can catch both a set by Styrofoam and his place in theNotwist, filling in for Martin Gretschmann, who's off doing stuff withConsole right now. While I still might have reservations when it comesto laptop performers, Styrofoam deserves credit for having a rock clubaudience attentive and interested, something most laptoppers can stillonly fanticize about.
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What's immediately striking about the third album by Michael Gira's Angels of Light is the visual presentation. The six photos—an empty chair, a cluttered desk, a room full of plants, a bookcase loaded with CDs and books, a rosary draped over a thermostat, and, perhaps most tellingly, an empty bedseem to paint a picture of a sufficient but lonely life.
Coupled with the title, one can't help but construe that Gira is sending out a clarion call to former partner Jarboe. Does he want her back or has he found peace on his own? Further lyrical clues are open to interpretation as Gira's songs often blur the lines between autobiography and fantasy. The opener, "Palisades," inquisitively details a suicide in which "reasons won't come, and no one will regret that you're gone." Gira whoops and hollers most on the climactic "All Souls' Rising," and "Nations," 2001 tour favorites. Conversely, he softly sings "with the rhythm of your breathing, with the rhythm of my thinking," over the tumbling, tender electric guitar notes and strums of "Kosinski." "The Rose of Los Angeles," another paean to Gira's mother, has drastically changed into a stomping romp with a decidedly Irish flavor. The crack of percussion and bluesy guitar disrupt the bleak reminiscences of "What You Were." "Sunset Park" repeats the single enigmatic line "she'll bring some, she brings some, she brings one, she'll bring one" ad nauseam in a swirling wall of sound march. Gira concludes the album with the half droned, half near-whispered, semi-optimistic prayer, "God save us, from what will come." Musically and thematically Everything feels more haphazard than the previous albums, and with none of the tracks exceeding seven minutes, it lacks the epics that made How I Loved You so stellar. Comparisons to the past aside, it's still a fine album. An impressive orchestra of cohorts was once again assembled to add varying degrees of layers to his voice and acoustic guitar, including everything from standard rock band instrumentation to mandolin, accordion, harmonium, flute, trombone, harmonica, banjo, fiddle and even a children's choir. A new version of the band sans drums—Gira (vocals, amplified acoustic guitar), Devendra Banhart (electric guitar), Christoph Hahn (lap steel and electric guitars) and Patrick Fondiller (bass guitar, mandolin, mandola)—is currently on tour in North America through late April with Banhart opening with a solo set.
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Seemingly out of nowhere comes this 21-year-old oddball whose fourtrack demo tape piqued the interest of Michael Gira and thus thisrelease on Young God and membership in The Angels of Light. Banhart'sbiography reads like a transient David Lynch. He has lived everywherefrom Texas to Caracas to Paris to a NYC squat, attended art school inSan Francisco and played gay weddings and Ethiopian restaurants.Somehow it all makes sense. Selected for this disc are 22 of the 75 orso songs recorded over the past three to four years. Gira wiselydecided not to polish the diamond in the rough, i.e. he has simplyreleased the original demos rather than quarantine Banhart in a studiofor new versions. This is bare Banhart: double tracked voice andacoustic guitar with whistles and hand claps, plus tape hiss andwhatever else happened to be going on in the background for extracharacter. Most of the time the finger picking is plaintive and thevocals are hushed (recalling Nick Drake some), at others it's much morefrantic with wild strumming (recalling Syd Barret some) and thefalsetto morphing into the call of some yet to be discovered rainforest bird. The lyrics are suitably simple and/or surreal withdeceivingly naive plays on words and word associations that reveal asharp mind. Prime examples are in "Roots (If The Sky Were a Stone)":"when the roots of the tree / are as cold as can be / when the wind andthe sea / are the moth and the bee / when the rays of the sun / lickyour skin with its tongue / and the grass with its green / and theshine with its sheen / and the trains with their tracks / and thespines with their backs / and your sway with its slow / and the windwith its blow" and in "Michigan State": "well my snail has my favoriteslow / the shell helps the snail still the skin lays low / and if mysnail has my favorite slow / then my cold has my favorite snow / but ifmy snail is cold and comes to a halt / then my sea has my favorite salt/ the salt keeps the sea from feeling sweet / and my toes have myfavorite feet / and if I sweat salt and the Earth sweats heat". Inaddition, there's "Lend Me Your Teeth" with it's strange single linemantra: "I'm lost in the dark / lend me your teeth / come on!"Everything is fair game as subject matter for Banhart's songs (10 areless than two minutes long and many come to a sudden, unexpected end)including lovers, teachers, friends and family. I never get theimpression that he's being weird for weird's sake—it's eccentric butgenuine, child-like but brilliant, raw but real. These songs areextraordinarily touching, melodic and infectious.
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Coil is easily playing some of their most haunting, spectral, hypnotic, and sublime material ever, combining the new with the old and doing so without the outcome sounding muddled or too disparate.Threshold House
The cohesiveness of the album is achieved in a couple of ways: "Last Rites of Spring" gets overhauled completely and extended into a 10 minute noise-fest. "Amethyst Deceivers" and "Ostia" are altered in small ways that result in a new sound but retain the spirit of the original. "Are You Shivering?" is the perfect misnomer; its glowing tones and soft, simple drum part are the perfect warm blanket. The firey, yet cleansing attack of "A Warning From the Sun," on the other hand, with its scratching and violent pandemonium easily reduced my brain to rubble and at the same time soothed it by way of whimsical melody. The extra treats, however, are three of the previously unreleased songs. "The Universe Is A Haunted House" begins with quiet echoing synths, water leaking from ceilings, and absolutely threatening promises of mischief from Jhon Balance. It later turns into a rhythm propelled freak-out session of LSD-like proportions. "Bang Bang (Sonny Bono)" is, strangely enough, a cover of a Cher tune. It is composed of piano, Balance's singing, and patches of serpentine glitchery that slither in and out of the air. It's also the closest Coil has ever come to performing a ballad. The album ends on a very high and exhilirating note with "An Unearthly Red." Here an explosive Balance screams and shouts over dissonant and jarring rhythms while fits of ecstatic decomposition bounce and detonate everywhere without remorse. Melody battles against a wall of distortion and tension builds and builds to a boiling point that just might make you sweat; this is one hell of a way to end a record. At this point I've almost completely forgotten that this is a live recording because the quality of the sound and the songs are so absolutely fantastic. Go buy this album, turn out the lights, turn on this record, and prepare to have your ears and mind blown away. 
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Canadian born London dweller Dan Snaith has reintroduced Manitoba with his second full-length release. Up In Flamesis a fantastic surprise, as it is a complete turn around from themeandering simplicity of the relatively trendy instrumental electronicmusic on earlier releases. With vocals, guitars, bombastic organic andsamples drums, feverishly catchy melodies, and a complete overload ofcollected sounds, instruments and an excess of quirky samples, thiscould easibly be one of the most maximalistic recordings by one personin a long while. With the keen skill of roping everything into ablissful melodic soup, this album is easily poised to be thebreakthrough hit of the spring. From the opener "I've Lived on a DirtRoad All My Life," there is no irony, no pulled punches, as the musicjust barrels in with nearly no introduction. A gorgeous interlude endsthe piece with a moment to let things settle in and stays rather lowkey for the instrumental follower. "Skunks" opens and closes with thesounds of frogs (what identifiable sounds do skunks make after all?)but is propelled along with bass and guitar playing, layers of drums,screechy sax, The energy blasts back in with the one-two punch of thetwo vocal tracks "Hendrix with KO," and the single "Jacknuggeted,"which could easily be two of my fave songs on the disc. Snaith isn'tafraid to stack killer drum samples upon drum samples, hand claps, fillthe rest in with gorgeous harp sweeps and always make it a point to endon a good note. With songs like "Bijoux," this one man army hasachieved what numerous multi-member ensembles have only ever dreamt of.If anything, on the vocal tracks, Snaith probably could try and get alittle more confident with his voice so it's not as buried in the mix.Other than that very, very minor observation, this album is flawless.Manitoba is set to tour North America with Four Tet and Prefuse 73.Promises have been made to turn Manitoba into a fully realized liveband with two drummers, guitars and a whole mess of other people. Let'shope this happens.
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- Chris Lopreste
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2002 was a good year for James Murphy. Not only did his label, co-ownedwith Pat Mahoney, release some of the year's best records (Black Dice'sBeaches and Canyons and The Rapture's "House of Jealous Lovers"), buthis own self-proclaimed "electro-disco" one-man group, LCD Soundsystem,put out the underground dance hit of the summer. His second release asLCD Soundsystem simultaneously caps off a spectacular 2002 for Murphywhile hinting at an even better 2003. "Give It Up" begins where the"Losing My Edge" 12" left off, but with some minor adjustments. Goneare the Casio beats and the hipster-scene criticism, and much of theelectro influence. Instead, we're given a fuller, more band orientatedsound (although it's Murphy who plays all the instruments), featuring apropulsive, funked-up bass line and an all-around fiercer rhythmsection. The result is an instantly danceable track, engaging from thevery first notes of the opening drum roll. One would expect more of thesame on the flip side of the 7", but "Tired" delivers a pounding, dirtyrocker that is quite befuddling at first. But after a few listens, it'sclear that Murphy (along with Mahoney on this track) can just as easilywrite songs that sound more appropriate in a dank bar than at a chicdance club. Yet, even though Murphy has proved he can do more than justwrite a good dance tune (although it's still what he does best), Iwould hate to see LCD Soundsystem release a full-length anytime soon.After two singles as good as "Losing My Edge" and "Give It Up," I'd bebegging to hear an LP, but I have a nagging feeling that these tunesare best served up in small doses.
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- Steve Smith
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While I love sociological criticism woven into art, if it is so deliberate that it is an album's strongest point, I'm bound to be disappointed after the first listen. That being said, Lovebomb is an extremely well-founded concept album about love and the expression of culturally specific social processes, an overarching thesis that I won't attempt to evaluate. Thaemlitz covers many angles and perspectives in his exploration of this ubiquitous emotion, using generally interesting, but sometimes run of the mill, electro-acoustic music.
The listener is first welcomed with some glitched-up, timestretched-out pop music; the meandering piano line and horribly distorted vocals reference music's obsession with "love." The track is convincing without coming off as overly clever. The second song, constructed from an African National Congress radio speech calling for "reactionary violence" against colonial oppressors, uses cut-up and lightly flanged spoken word in a result that slightly resembles the tonalities of traditional African singing. It's interesting at first but not something I'd like to listen to repetitively. "SDII" begins with Sammy Davis' computer-processed call for restraint following the assassination of Martin Luther King; then the dialogue fades into an immense, and slightly unsettling, drone. "Lovebomb" is incomprehensibly lush, progressing though gentle washes of synthesized and edited sound, orchestral samples, and chaotic walls of noise, without the music ever being truly interesting. The subsequent track contains some simple, plaintive piano melodies and a recording of Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti, all subjected to digital manipulation so that they're entangled in a gentle web of sound, as it explores relationships between futurism, fascism, and racism. This piece probably contains the most music-driven emotional impact. "Signal Jamming Propaganda" combines the word "love," excerpted from various pop songs, for an amusingly schizophrenic, but quite expected, montage. The last few tracks continue to be thought-provoking in their perspective and material, but not so much in their music, and the final "bonus dance track" is catchy in a non sequitur and superficial sort of way. Lovebomb, as a whole, is good but inconsistent, and its sociological criticism is almost too overt for me, so in the end it is just a slightly above average electronic album. 
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