Proficiency at editing is just as prominent on the list of this quartet's skills as is their songwriting ability. Rather than presenting results along the way since recording commenced in 2002, Akron/Family have waited and produced a work that lends the project the air of appearing fully formed from out of nowhere.
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The same musicians whoworked on the debut return, but with a completely new captain at thehelm, as Prekop creates a truly original work with shifting stylesmid-song, laid-back rhythms, and super smooth accents that surprise asmuch as or more than they entertain. These songs are not completelydifferent from what he has done before, but merely the logical nextstep and expansion of what he does best. The album's fourth track"Dedications" starts out like a lost Motown groove hit of the 1970suntil his voice and bright playful guitar come in. Next it's asingalong on the choruses, where universal feelings touch a chord thatall can appreciate, double-tracked vocals matched with the rightharmonies. Then, almost imperceptibly, at the end of the song, a blendof synthesizers appear from out of nowhere to close out the track in anigh-drone that instead tickles the cerebral cortex. One song, unlikeall the others but that still fits, as every track fills the formula bynot being like the last. Instruments come in and out, tempos change,and the whole sonic color wheel might be askew from before but it'salright: Prekop never treats the song like a mistress, using thetechnique and casting it aside. Every tone, every word, every note,every beat is a faithful lover, just with different back stories. "ASplendid Hollow" builds to a gorgeous climax from a quiet beginning; "C+ F" is pure pop with handclaps and thudding bass; and "Density" isalmost hip-hop, but done with pure lounge grooves instead of big beatdrums and processed bass notes, with the always welcome addition of RobMazurek. Some of the songs don't hit right the first time through, butthat's mainly because the intricacies of the arrangements are notimmediately apparent. This is becoming Prekop's strongest suit, and thelack of a question mark on the album's title is a sly wink, as well.It's a statement, as in "Sam Prekop is your new professor," and classis in session.samples:
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DFAThis week brings three new slabs of heavy DJ vinyl from DFA Records,with this one by Black Leotard Front sounding the most adventurous tomy ears. "Casual Friday" is a massive 15-minute groove that starts outas ingratiatingly slick metropolitan disco and ends up asingratiatingly slick deconstructed electro-funk from planet weird.Justlike last year's "Yeah" by LCD Soundsystem, "Casual Friday" puts all ofthe obnoxious stuff right up front, as if to scare off potentialsquares: world-weary whispered French narration with a mind-numbinglyrepetitive, despondent chorus of "Bonjour, bonjour, bonjour, bonjour,comment allez-vous." The track slowly shifts into more interestingterritories as a glassy synth peal announces the arrival of thejuiced-up funk combination of bass and guitar. The frankly laughablelyrics about putting on a dress and taking off an overcoat aremeaningless, merely an excuse to keep things focused on the glitterysurface of things, so that it comes as a shock when the vocals aresuddenly stretched into monstrous, echoing shrieks and a snarlingGerman voice pops into the mix. The track shifts through a series ofdistinctly Moroder-esque transformations, recalling a halcyon time whenrhythmic Krautrock synthesizer workouts were not in a vastly differentworld from mainstream NYC disco-sleaze. Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russomshould be familiar to DFA enthusiasts who sought out their fine "ElMonte" single, and together with artists Christian Holstad and DanielSchmidt comprise Black Leotard Front, a performance art dance troupe.Those who expected another synth-only, Tangerine Dream-esque affair maybe disappointed by the more dancefloor-friendly aspirations of "CasualFriday," but careful attention to track provide weird thrills aplenty,especially when the cheeky vocals are stripped away on the single'sinstrumental flip side, which in my humble opinion is vastly superiorto the vocal version.
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This time around, and true to thetrack's title, MacLean clears a more cybernetic causeway, creating a Trans-Europe Express-on-methamphetamineenergy that pushes the track into dizzyingly hyperactive and syntheticterritory that might have been better left unexplored. Along thisfuturistic highway, MacLean takes a few short off-ramps into stutteringbeat deconstructions, intriguing vocal samples and Commodore 64anachronisms, but ultimately the trip left me with nothing more than asore ass and a coin tray empty of toll money. "Less Than Human" on theflip side is even more self-consciously retro, a vaguely Teutonic(again) house exploration heavy on the analog side of things, thatfeels like it was tossed off very quickly and cheaply. This is notnecessarily always a bad thing, but in the case of this single, alittle more attention to detail might have been in order. Juan MacLeanhas a full-length LP due out this summer, and I can only hope that this10" is not an indication of a complete style change, as I honestlypreferred the early stuff. samples:
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By the End of Tonight's style is mostreminiscent of mid-90's post-rock maestros like A Minor Forest and DonCaballero. The songs are generally instrumental indie-rock suites withvarious parts making up the whole. The marriage of these parts withinthe suites is where the band sometimes missteps. Individually, theseparts sound great. But when coupled together or sequentially followingone another, they sometimes clash and lose a little of their logic and,thus, their impact. The mashing together of these parts is akin totoddler jamming unmatched jigsaw puzzle pieces together, creating aforced harmony and an unnatural synthesis. The band's music writinglacks a certain discipline just as the toddler lacks a certain jigsawpuzzle faculty, but the absence of this discipline lends something elseto the music which is largely lost on similar bands: youth. By the Endof Tonight have a youthful brilliance and vibrancy which is entirelyrefreshing and fun. When you get beyond the kitsch of drummer JeffWilson using a child's drum kit, the band's youth is better consideredan advantage than a detriment. Though the songs can result in anentropic collection of sound, there is a lot to appreciate within them."4's, 5's, and the Piano That Never Made It Home" is a custom-built,hardcore-band opener. It begins contemplatively with dueling guitarparts, a measured bass line, and drums which set the pace humbly for awhile and then break out in an eruption of primordial pounding. Theother instruments follow obediently. Halfway through the song, thetempo switches glaringly and this is when you first get the sense thatthe band's glue does not always hold the songs together perfectly."Stop, Drop, and Roll Does Not Work in Hell" begins calmly enough butis heralded soon by some distant emotive vocals (shouted at instead ofinto the microphone) and then explodes into some more metallicsignatures, all the while remaining quite playful. The most memorablesong is "Setting Sail in April" because the song's syntax is the mostjarring and pleasing at the same time. The disparate parts here are notwelded seamlessly and yet they are so catchy and compelling that itdoes not matter. There are moments of pure pop-punk beauty here. Oneminute into the song, you could be listening to The Descendents. Twentyseconds later, there are guitars so triumphant it could make even themost hardened indie-rocker shout out in unrestrained optimism. The songthen descends (or, perhaps, ascends) into a mathematic jam sessionuntil, with about a minute left, there is an unamplified guitarbreak-down worthy of the most sentimental Blink 182 riff (dispel yourprejudices about Blink 182; their sometimes careful tunesmithing canproduce some honest pop punk gems and their membership in the emo clubis hardly ever recognized justly). It is a fitting benediction for thesix-minute suite. The final two songs follow along in a similar styleand do no less to both confound and contain the listener'sexpectations. By the End of Tonight are endlessly playful, surprisinglyenergetic, and certain to stimulate either ire or interest with thislatest offering. samples:
- 4's, 5's, and the Piano That Never Made It Home
- Stop, Drop, and Roll Does Not Work in Hell
- Setting Sail in April
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The performance on A Frames' latest couldbe called sloppy, except it follows an annoyingly predictable patternof basic and pounding rhythms and excessively dissonant melodies thatgo nowhere and barely change over the course of a song. Sullivan'svocals are bellowed out over this rather noisy cascade of sound likesome campy narration of a bad Frankensteinmovie and the result makes me want to flip straight through many ofthese already short and narrow songs. "Black Forest I" and "Experiment"aren't too bad in and of themselves; the first begins like a factorygetting ready to churn out the most evil and nasty of monsters and thesecond is an all-engines-firing burn that wheezes by in a haze ofstatic and bumping low-end frequencies, but Black Forest rarelyescalates into anything exciting beyond those tunes. Half way throughthe album (when the dull gray color of the entire album begins to showthrough most strongly) I'm ready to turn it off and by the end I'mtwiddling my thumbs waiting for something to happen that I didn't seecoming from two songs away. Over time certain songs become moretolerable, like "Galena" and "Death Train" or even "U-Boat," but in theend the whole package just sounds like an underperformed, cold, anddistant take on the basic formula of guitars, drums, and voices. samples:
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Absence isperfect background music for urban blight: the dirty drum breaks andjazz loops hung on walls of blinding white noise and screechingindustrial droning are as hard and unpalatable as the Garden State'swater supply, and simply seethe with anger and indignation. Risingbarely discernible above the din comes Dälek's lyrics, denouncing thelandscape around him, without stopping at the Turnpike for social andpolitical damnation. With a new, savage directness reminiscent ofBoogie Down Productions and Public Enemy, he tackles all comers in acultural "war of survival." Poetically, Dälek is still in a class ofhis own, dealing the complex and varied material with aplomb and brutalhonesty. Justified white anger scalds on "Permanent Underclass": "What,now we equals cause we have a King's holiday?/ Coming storms here tostay/ They turned the noon sky heron gray/ Africans into slaves/ Say wefree/ but if we speak like Malcolm X they assassinate"; and "Culturefor Dollars" paused to muse but still demands tough answers: "Whotrades his culture for dollars?/ The fool or the scholar? Griot? Poet?Or White collared?" The newfound lyrical directness is a welcomechange, and perfectly suited to such in-your-face music. Dälek stillrequires considerable fortitude from their listeners. "Distorted Prose"alternates lyrics with noise in a chaotic call and answer that aftersix minutes leaves the aurally weak begging for mercy. War of survival,indeed. However, out of all the madness seep bizarre harmonies—thesymphonic hook in "Ever Somber" is hypnotic and absurdly catchy, arevelation that surprises and rewards an unsuspecting ear. Absence is Dälek at their best: consistently harsh, grim and bleak but disquietingly irresistible.samples:
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Proficiency at editing is just as prominent on the list of this quartet's skills as is their songwriting ability. Rather than presenting results along the way since recording commenced in 2002, Akron/Family have waited and produced a work that lends the project the air of appearing fully formed from out of nowhere.
Although rooted in traditional songwriting, the album has many nuances that elevate it above the recent deluge of "new folk/americana." "I'll Be On The Water" appears at first to be a simple, lovely ditty sung by one man with an acoustic guitar to his significant other. As the song progresses it reveals layers of field recordings and subtle instrumental accompaniment which place it in a landscape that enhances the sentiment of the lyric. The first verse of "Suchness" sounds like a dusty recording of someone singing on his front porch. Alien percussion, vocal harmonies, swirling electronics and, ultimately, a full electric band, pop up from underneath the floorboards at the 3 minute song's halfway point to take it into a realm that is at once surprising and natural. Akron/Family have a knack throughout the set for smoothly transforming songs from one mood to a wholly other without disrupting the flow. "Lumen" begins as a sparse dialogue between vocals and a melody led by bells and violin. It suddenly switches to build toward a climax of epic proportions by employing military drums and persistent guitar picking, achieving a sense of propulsion. This same sense of forward motion runs through "Running, Returning," during which the repeated, wordless chant which accents the song's persistent rhythm seals the deal that this bunch is an appropriate backing band for Michael Gira on his current Angels of Light tour. The group's mastery of a wide range of instruments lends this set a full sound. These muti-instrumentalists use guitars, banjos, piano, organ, melodica, various percussion and electronics to give a true sense of the outcome being more important than the means. By leaving themselves open to use any instrument or compositional idea that fits the moment, they effortlessly combine threads of traditional and modern music into a new whole. Some of the melodies, particularly on "Suchness" and "Afford," sound as if they are ancient song forms that have been stumbled upon by Akron/Family. "Afford," for example is introduced as a gorgeous and forlorn song. At the mid point, it descends into 30 seconds of eerie ambience where it seamlessly fuses traditional song structure with modern minimalism. This midsection also allows for reflection upon the song's only lyric, the repeated line "The power I afford you is the one I wish I had over you." By enhancing their songs with so many different subtleties, Akron/Family has set a course on a path that could convincingly fork in several different directions.
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Planet Mu
Upon further inspection it isrevealed that these are in fact Hungarian titles, as this album wasinspired by a trip to Hungary, during which Funk had some sort ofepiphany involving imagining himself as a pigeon. As absurd as thatsounds, it has fueled the most cohesive effort by Funk to date, onwhich Eastern European melodies dominate and his trademark blastbeatsare used to accent orchestral composition. "Hiszekeny" is a beautifulminiature, which features bells and harp rhythmically dancing aroundmelodic string patterns. "Felbomlasztott Mentokocsi" features nopercussion at all, and instead features weeping cellos and violinswhose sweeping tones play against each other to echo the tension inlife through rhythmic and melodic tension. Funk's take on RezsoSeress's Hungarian suicide song "Ongyilkos Vasarnap" ("Gloomy Sunday")manifests this sense of sadness and loss in a more direct way, bycombining stuttering beats with Billie Holiday's vocals from the 1941recording of the notorious song. Jazzy drumming and downright pastoralwind instrumentation figure prominently in the first half of "Hajnal,"before strings combine with hectic breakbeats. As chaotic as therhythmic programming often becomes, these tracks are always grounded bythe melodic elements. This is most effective on "Szamar Madar," duringwhich a gorgeous melodic theme recurs throughout the track's six minuteduration. Much of Funk's music is centered around beats in odd timesignatures played at break neck speed, keeping listeners on their toes.These pieces, although rhythmically challenging at times, aspire toachieve a higher sense of compositional cohesiveness. Funk iscommunicating in a language that will appeal to more than just thosewho are breakcore enthusiasts. Although he has not abandoned the use ofintricate rhythms, he allows these tracks more breathing room. Mostpieces have long beatless passages during which all manner of acousticinstruments create a tension that makes the rhythmic bombasts moreeffective when they appear. This is not to suggest that he has simplydistilled his usual fare to reach a wider audience. Instead, he hasfinally shown that he is capable of, or interested in, combining hisskills as one of today's most advanced beat programmers withunprecedented foreign elements. In the process he has broken out of theholding pattern his prolific career was beginning to settle into andproduced an accomplished work of incredible depth.
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Matador
Without the benefit or detraction (it depends on yourperspective) of meticulous post-recording tinkering and mixing, thesongs sound a little less polished than a proper studio album but stillrather robust, proving that the beast Mogwai is unable to be laid lowby something as trivial as a live, synchronized recording session.Matador bills this release as "a virtual Mogwaigreatest-hits-without-actually-being-one." Once past the obviousvacuousness of that statement, at least two things become clear: one isthat greatest hits compilations are almost always culled from theoriginal studio versions of the songs (I don't think that Matador'smodified vision of this album as a "virtual" greatest hits collectionwas based on the fact that these songs were alternate versions); two isthat while these songs are a representative array of Mogwai's career(from such early releases as the third seven-inch to as recent as thelatest album), they are not indicative of the best material Mogwai hasreleased. There are too many older omissions and perhaps too equal aconcentration of recent songs. In fact, the selection of songs here israther inscrutable without being unpleasant or disappointing. The albumbegins with a kind tribute to the fallen John Peel (he introduces theband to the listening audience) who championed the band from theirbeginnings. Peel's intro leads into "Hunted by a Freak" from Happy Songs for Happy People,indicating that this collection is not in the typical chronology fromearliest to most recent recordings (nor is it from most recent toearliest). Though the drums are a little more tinny here, "Hunted"sounds very similar to the original version including the ghostlyeffects-processed vocals. "Cody" is the first song which has a trulydifferent feel from its original counterpart. This version is milky,lustrous, and shockingly warm, providing a nice balance to the morechilly and precise version from Come On Die Young. The originalversion separates the drum track in one stereo channel and everythingelse in the other, while this version mixes everything together withoutthe post-production aesthetics. The warmth lies in this amalgam. Theambient "Superheroes of BMX" from the 4 Satin EP is a strangechoice for inclusion because of its drifting and soporific nature (Ialways thought the song was largely aided by the prenominatepost-recording tinkering) but it works surprisingly well and seeminglydid not put the studio engineer to sleep. Young Team's eminent"Like Herod" has an expanded eighteen-minute treatment here, but Iwould just as soon throw it away and listen to the original versionwhich is sufficiently brutal (in the good way) and mesmerizing. As itis on the Ten Rapid collection, the gem here is "New Paths toHelicon Pt I": this song breathes its own life and, as it inflates andeventually explodes, my attention is rapt. Background and foregroundcompress into one dimension and my head feels a little smaller but justbig enough to contain the cosmic reality of listening to nine musesdancing and frolicking down a cypress-covered mountainside in Greece.
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Alien Transistor
Most notable in this assembly are his breathyvocals, delicate and ethereal, at times reminiscent of the late JeffBuckley's quieter moments in performance. With heartfelt lyrics basedon cornerstones such as time, hope, friendship and love, Chen touchesupon moments and senses that we can all easily identify with."Bellyfull" [sic] lifts the lid off the disc for beautifully melodicand poetic lyrics such as "An age of silence, dribble on chin / Thefate of the universe, a bellyfull end" to permeate throughout theseemingly complex arrangement of acoustic guitar and drawn outprogressions from what sounds to be a harmonium. This particularinstrument appears again amidst the heavier strumming of "Stay Awake"to carry a simple yet pleasant counter-melody that weaves against thevocal line and occasionally leads the tune's progression. The rockin'"Epilogue" gives the disc a swift kick in the arse with driving, snappyJungle-inspired beats and fuzzy low end from guests Craig Mod and MattRào on drums and bass respectively, while the Boy bangs out the dirtytones and ringing power chords on the electric guitar while inquiringwith "I hope they're satisfied." Having expanded this project with afull band, as seen a couple of weeks back on The Eye, Chen'sBoy In Static, though a complex concept on paper, appears to have beeneasily adapted for live performance. Perhaps the Notwist or one oftheir member's other projects would consider taking Chen and company onthe road so that those of us outside of the Boston area can experienceBoy In Static first-hand.
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