Archive for the ‘Music Reviews’ Category
Ólafur Arnalds is a young Icelandic musician whose work defines "architectural," as bulky strings are built around skeletal frameworks of piano, sometimes with sparse electronic loops for detail. He has a strong ear for proportion and balance, as if a single misplaced sound could trigger a collapse. At worst, his music can feel conservative and utilitarian, or overly cautious. There's a thin line between having an indelible personal stamp and charting by numbers. But at best, Arnalds' lucid forms and themes produce an agreeable opulence.
Before he was playing indie chamber music on tour with Sigur Rós, Arnalds played drums in hardcore bands with names like Fighting Shit. It is tempting to try and exhume some vestige of hardcore from his music, but that's a dead end. Arnalds' latest LP, with its almost hilariously generic post-rock title (the darkness, the ellipses, the vaguely ...
A veteran of the Chicago folk scene of the late 1960s and early 70s, John Prine ought to be more difficult to cover. He writes for his own voice, an instrument with a uniquely warm wryness and a limited range, which means his melodies are homey and modest, as if he's making them up on the spot. More crucially, his songs-- crammed with stray details and wonderfully skewed insights-- are strongly tied to his part huckster, part good ol' boy personality. Prine's a songwriter's songwriter, which means that the very traits that ought to make him hard to cover only make covering him an attractive notion. Many have pulled it off, too: George Strait, 10,000 Maniacs, Fairport Convention, and Johnny Cash.
Even so, an album of Prine covers is a dodgy proposition. It's bound to be erratic; tribute albums are by nature inconsistent, ...
The earliest circulating recording of Konono No. 1 is "Mungua-Mungua", a half-hour-long live jam that was taped in 1978. Aside from its rudimentary sound quality, it's formally identical to this album, the Congolese band's second studio disc: the amazing sound of electric likembes (metal thumb pianos) playing through fuzzed-up amps and jury-rigged mics, augmented by drums, the occasional whistle, and some call-and-response yelling. Reportedly, the band is used to playing for hours on end. They could go on like that forever, which is both Assume Crash Position's strength and its flaw.
It's been five years since Congotronics introduced Konono to a broader international audience. That record reached people who didn't know a thing about Congolese music, but loved the band's ping-buzz-crack timbre, admired their punkish "use whatever materials are at hand" attitude, and know a killer groove when they heard one. The group ...
José González cashes paystubs from Mute and is best known for covering Joy Division, the Knife, and Massive Attack, but his low-key charms as a singer-songwriter are never going to be considered "edgy." The building blocks of his music-- lightly plucked guitar, unhurried vocals, the occasional anti-establishment lyric-- makes it understandable for skeptics to paint him as merely a dorm-room fave. But even though it sounds strange to say, "there's more beyond the surface," to his unadorned music, at points Veneer and In Our Nature felt like what Krautrock or even minimal techno might sound like if they consisted solely of acoustic guitars. While it wasn't a sound that gave him a lot of room to maneuver, there always was underlying rhythmic force that could be hypnotic and haunting at the same time. And it's a quality that his reformed band ...
The late 1980s and early 90s were the Cure's heyday-- from an American perspective. It's not just that they were making great music; they'd been making great music for roughly a decade already. But these were the years during which they coalesced into this whole iconic thing, the Cure-- a sound, a look, and a sensibility that a few kids in every other high school could build whole identities around. Or at least whole wardrobes, decoration schemes, and notebook scribbles. One of my first big memories of listening to Disintegration involves wandering around the Colorado State Fair, from the agriculture show to the gang fights by the midway. This is a kind of reach I doubt Robert Smith ever imagined.
And yet there they were. You could say-- again, from an American perspective-- that it started with two things. There was Kiss Me ...
Pontiak's 2009 album Maker took a complex approach to underground rock music without sacrificing its propulsive energy. The album was asymmetrical and nuanced, but it was never encumbered by pretension or obviousness, and its gravelly sound gave it the feel of an old, lived-in rock record. Living, Pontiak's fifth album in two years, has some of that same rawness, but it lacks the intricacies that distinguish Pontiak's rock'n'roll from everyone else's.
Even though there are a dozen songs on Living, it basically relies on four types of song structure: riffy blues-rock; rumbling noise; gooey sludge; and swampy, often acoustic, dirges. Rarely do the styles converge in a single track or expand on familiar sounds, something that is particularly crippling when roughly half of the album is instrumental. To its credit, Living is cohesive, with the songs fluidly oozing into each other. But the ...
Despite its casual feel-- the unusually edifying title means "great vibe at a local bar"-- Casiokids' U.S. debut has been ages in the making. One of its most striking songs is "Fot I Hose", a dance track with infectious bass synths scudding over a sizzling rhythm section. It's the song that turned me on to Norway's Casiokids two years ago, when it appeared on a sampler CD for the 2008 Øya Festival in Oslo. When I saw them live, they augmented their genial free-for-all of dance, electro-pop, indie-rock, and Afro-pop styles with giant marionettes, shadow puppets, and videos. My impression was of an ambitious but humble band working hard to make their demanding music sound effortless, as to provide their audience with a frictionless good time.
While Casiokids hail from Bergen-- not exactly a cultural backwater, having already produced Datarock and Annie-- it took ...
Last summer, visitors to Chicago's photogenic Millennium Park were treated to the unlikely sight of Will Oldham performing to a crowd composed largely of kids and their picnicking parents. The occasion was a celebration of the Chicago-born Shel Silverstein, and therein lies the writer's broad appeal. Silverstein, of course, wrote some of the most beloved children's books of all time (Where the Sidewalk Ends, The Missing Piece, A Light in the Attic, The Giving Tree), but his cartoons and poems also appeared regularly in the pages of Playboy. Silverstein wrote plenty of songs, too, ranging from kiddie fare (the diaper-set staple "Boa Constrictor") to songs made famous by the likes of Loretta Lynn ("One's On the Way"), Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show ("The Cover of 'Rolling Stone'"), and Johnny Cash, who famously recorded both "25 Minutes to Go" and "A Boy Named ...
No band has ever mastered the ominous cymbal tap quite like Refused. On the Swedish hardcore band's final album and masterpiece, David Sandström's shivering tings signal a sort of warning. They usually come right as the band launches from tense, coiled quiet into all-out assault-- or, if they're already in assault mode, from one head-spinning riff to another. Those transitions come up a lot on 1998's The Shape of Punk to Come, and they keep you on your toes. Throughout the record, the band found some platonic ideal of tension-and-release, mutating constantly and pulling in all sorts of vaguely silly genre-leap ideas (chintzy techno beats! jazz breaks!) without altering the fundamental heaviness that they were so great at. It's the sound of a world-class hardcore band deciding that they're done with hardcore, that they want to push their music in all sorts ...
Describing Emeralds' music feels a little like capping that underwater oil spill must: how do you get your hands around this stuff? The Cleveland trio may favor methodical cadences in their music, but their releases come fast and furious. According to Discogs.com, they've put out around 40 releases in just four years, most of them CDRs and cassettes. There are variations of mood and intensity, and each major release has its own particular signature, owing in part to changes in gear and technique, and in part to being a band that improvises and records non-stop. Any given album feels like a snapshot of the band in time.
But Does It Look Like I'm Here? is the first Emeralds record you might be able to call "pretty." Listeners accustomed to the multi-vectored force of last year's What Happened, with its crush of competing swells, ...