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Welcome to A&A. There are 14 full reviews in this issue. Click on an artist to jump to the review, or simply scroll through the list. If you want information on any particular release, check out the Label info page. All reviews are written by Jon Worley unless otherwise noted. If you have any problems, criticisms or suggestions, drop me a line.
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A&A #279 reviews October 2006
 The ApplicatorsMy Weapon (Hairball 8) Raucous, all-female band--they are the Applicators, fer cryin' out loud--playing basic rock and roll. Loudly. And, for the most part, playing it exceptionally well. Very tight sound, really, a lot like early L7. The production is full, but not terribly sharp (I did say "early"), and that suits these songs just fine. Too much precision would strip the band of most of its personality. And that's not a problem here. Lots of shouting, lots of catchy anthemic choruses and lots and lots of buzzsaw guitar riffs. Just the sort of thing to get the blood flowing and keep it going all night long. I think I liked this album too much to write a lot about it. Either you get it or you don't. The Applicators are anything but subtle. One listen to the first song will tell you everything you need to know.
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Colour Revolt Colour Revolt EP (Esperanza Plantation/Tiny Evil) Take one dose of one-man emo eccentricity and then add large quantities of any number of hip sounds and you might get close to Colour Revolt. The press note on the front states "There's a lot going on in a Colour Revolt song!" Most often, that sorta statement is an overblown bit of puffery. Not so here. I like a band that can sound like OMD and Archers of Loaf--in the same song. The overall feel is pop, but these folks (or person, as I don't know anything about the actual makeup of the act) make that generic label woefully inadequate. The sounds, the moods, the themes shift radically from song to song. Which might be a hindrance on a longer release. But it probably won't be. 'Cause when yer good, yer good. And the Colour Revolt is pretty damned fine. This six-song introduction is most impressive. Contact:
ElephoneThe Camera Behind the Camera Behind the Camera (Three Ring) Four guys who play stark, yet supple, rock and roll. At first blush, these songs sound like they were ripped off a sound board from a live set. Then the first hints of studio work bleed through. Maybe it was just my ears, because the more I listen, the more I hear the fine work done assembling this album. Producing and mixing is an art, even when you're dealing with music that's one step from the garage. The trick is to make it sound good without stripping out all the energy. Sure worked here. Elephone isn't a balls-out, take-no-prisoners kind of outfit. But the songs are relatively minimalist, and that sort of stuff requires a patient hand. Hard to make the claim of being basic when you've got as much electronic content bubbling in the background. But Elephone is just that. And this album does a fine job of bringing the sound out into the open.
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 Guitar Gabriel & the Brothers in the
KitchenToot Blues (Music Maker) The Music Maker Relief Foundation is one of the more impressive blues preservation groups around. This re-issue of a 1991 cassette is Music Maker's first "official" release--though it has been selling CDs and tapes for years. Gabriel's sound is steeped in the finger-picking Piedmont style--that would be North Carolina Piedmont, if you didn't know--but he had been around long enough to pick up a few things from elsewhere. What didn't change was the acoustic setting and the meticulous fingerwork. I'm impressed by the sound. I have no idea what the source tapes were like, but this sounds real. Acoustic guitars can sound awful when miked up, but on this disc they sound like Gabriel is playing in my kitchen. I spent too long in Durham not to be a sucker for this kind of down-home blues. Those who like to hear a real rural sound done right will do no better than to pick up this disc. And check out the Music Maker web sit while yer at it. There's a lot more where this came from.
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 Hallelujah BoyNoise and Silence (Transaction) Hallelujah Boy has spent a lot of time recording and posting new demos, hoping to reach 100 songs by the end of the year. Somewhere in between, the boys actually polished up twelve of them and have this album to show for it. Perky indie-pop fare, the sort of thing that ought to interest fans of GBV and similar sorts. There's a bit more reliance on organ and general electronics here, and that helps to fill out the sound. I like it. Well-orchestrated without the orchestra. Sometimes it pays to let the seams show. The production sound is hardly perfect, but the wrinkles here and there provide an interesting view into the mind of the band. What you don't fix says a lot about you. What I hear is a band that wants to sound human. Not out-of-tune or overly messy or anything like that. Just not perfect. Except for the hooks. Some of them may, in fact, be beyond reproach. It's always good to stock plenty of honey.
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The HideawaysThe Whiskey Tango Sessions (Dren) A little Byrds, a little Jay Farrar, a little Jayhawks, a little bit of everything that folks call alt. country. Played with loose hand that lets the sound roam just far enough. I will admit, right up front, that I find this kinda stuff rather appealing. Comes from a late 80s Missouri college education, I suppose. But the Hideaways do this sound very well, and they add a few nice touches of their own. Such as authentic (as opposed to ironic) twang. And clanging guitars within a two-step. I don't know why people refuse to call this "real" country music, but it is to me. Whatever. Labels are stupid. Good music is the key (I've typed that line a few thousand times in my life), and the Hideaways are exceptional. Pull up a rocker and some Jim Beam and set a while.
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 Kind of Like
Spitting/LemuriaYour Living Room's All Over Me split LP (Art of the Underground) Two trios who hail from opposite sides of the continent. They decide to throw down a split. Thank goodness. Lemuria has seven songs, and the construction is pop. The sound turns from raucous to introspective to shiny and back to raucous without losing the central vibe of the band. I really like these folks. But I'm a sucker for energetic music with great hooks. Sounds like Spitting is much less refined. These guys make a lot of noise, and they hide a fair amount of it in the slightly muddy mix. That would usually be a complain coming from me, but here it simply gives the songs that extra bit of character. These boys are from Portland, and they remind me of Treepeople and Built to Spill and other PacNW outfits. Completely unsophisticated, and rather charming that way. Splits work best when the bands aren't a perfect match. These two acts complement each other quite well without getting in the way of the other. Just the way it should be.
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LudicraFex Urbis Lex Orbis (Alternative Tentacles) It's been more than a decade since Fear Factory first mixed a death metal growl with gothic wails. Ludicra is the latest band to follow, ripping through a pastiche of heavy sounds (black metal, stoner rock and melodic eurometal, just for starters) and throwing a similarly wide variety of vocals on top. This only works if the songs actually pull together. Ludicra does an outstanding job of managing this astoundingly aggressive chaos. Even when the sound is at its most extreme, the only word I can come up with is "beautiful." Maybe I just don't get enough of the loud stuff these days, but these guys are completely on top of their collective game. Loud, mean and utterly fearless, Ludicra cuts an impressive path. Few bands would dare play songs like these, and even fewer could. Loud music sounds better when it is played louder, of course, but these guys sound quite good at moderate volumes as well. The musical ideas are impressive, and the presentation is impeccable. Big, big smiles from me. Contact:
 Movie Star KissStarting Over (self-released) Formerly known as Supercrush (and formerly from St. Louis), the now-rechristened Movie Star Kiss hails from Los Angeles. And does its best to play melodic riffola. It's best is pretty durned good, too. Pleasantly fuzzy guitars combined with insistent 80s AOR-ish choruses (think more Cheap Trick than .38 Special) all played with just the right level of insouciance. This is the sort of sound that still persists in the midwest, even if the boys are now trying to make it on the coast. And since I spent a good chunk of my formative years in that vicinity, I'm more than sympathetic to the sound. More importantly, I'm always happy to hear good music. Solid rock and roll. Nothing more, but that's good enough for me. Don't know if there's a big market for the stuff (Didja know Cheap Trick released a new album back in June?), but hell, I'm impressed. Contact:
The New Sound of Numbers Liberty Seeds (Cloud Recordings) Hannah Jones decides to get really weird. As if her work with Circulatory System isn't unusual enough. Funny thing is, the stranger the sounds, the closer the songs seem to come to standard pop. See, Jones likes to take bits and pieces of strange sounds and build songs around them. But she does have a background in percussion, so each song is built around rhythm. And when you do that, you can never escape into deep space. And the way she likes to assemble her drone-like vocals tends to simulate a verse-chorus construction. So what I'm saying is that while this album gets more and more bizarre as I deconstruct it, when I sit back and let the sounds wash over me, I hear Brian Wilson. Er, no. I don't. But fuzzing out does help to bring the songs into focus. And the less I think about the songs, the more I like them. Kinda the opposite of my usual experience, but then, this isn't any kind of usual album. Just one I happen to like an awful lot.
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 Pilot Scott TracyWe Cut Loose! (Alternative Tentacles) A vaguely-hipster, sorta-garagey, peppy pop-rock outfit on AT? Hell, why not? Can't think of a reason right off the bat. Ahem. Anyway, these folks obviously like the Cars and Kraftwerk and Superchunk (early incarnations of each, of course), and that's about what they play. Upbeat, perky tunes that couldn't be sunk by a million torpedoes. Despite a reasonable amount of electronic accompaniment, the sound is dirty. These folks are no mechanical band. They're a bunch of folks working their asses off to make joyous music. And they succeed gloriously. Just a little shot of happiness headed your way at the end of the summer. The leaves may be thinking of clogging the gutters, but there's always time for one more sweet blast of joyous wonder.
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Scott SolterPlays Pattern is Movement: Canonic (Hometapes) Scott Solter produced Stowaway for Pattern Is Movement last year. For some reason, the band let him take the tapes of that album and create something altogether new. So every sound on this album comes from the Pattern Is Movement sessions, but it's quite safe to say that Canonic sounds nothing like Stowaway. This is really an intriguing project. Solter was intimately involved with the music, and yet he was also able to disassemble it and then create his own work from the bits and pieces. It is, of course, something of an electronic pastiche (kinda the only way to do this sort of thing, really), but the songs here are centered. They are songs. There may be some abstract thought, but there are no abstract songs. Solter punches up the sound even as he files down some of the specificity. He transforms most of the guitar he uses. Indeed, just about everything has some sort of new wash or whathaveyou added. Just another way to claim ownership. Of course, the band did give Solter permission, and Solter gives full creds to his source material. This is the perfect counterpoint, though, to people who say that sampling is always stealing from artists. I don't like it when people use recognizable bits of well-known songs to punch up their own lame-ass material. But building something up from the ruins? That's pretty cool. Contact:
 Spottiswoode &
McMahonS&M (New Warsaw) Jonathan Spottiswoode is something of a modern-day Leonard Cohen. He's got that baritone-bass voice and a wryly bleak way of looking at the universe. I've been digging his stuff for years. Here, his "band" has been pared down to longtime collaborator Riley McMahon--though there are plenty of friends who help out as well. These guys have worked together for a long time, and together they create some truly amazing settings for Spottiswoode's songs. Earlier recordings were rough in spots, though listening to them it's pretty easy to hear the progression that led to this set. Spottiswoode jettisoned just enough of his eccentricities to allow him to make a truly great album. Which isn't to say the other stuff is mediocre. It's fabulous. But this album is something else altogether. There is an emotional depth past mere melancholy, and the music is sparsely sumptuous (where did that vague bossa nova feel come from? I love it!). What was done quite well in the past has been stroked perfectly here. An album to play on a cold winter night when it seems the spring will never come. You'll warm up knowing that someone feels worse that you do, and you just might get a laugh or two while you're at it. One of the finest albums of any year. Contact:
Summer Hymns Backward Masks (Misra) The press notes contain references to everything from Galaxie 500 and J Mascis to Mercury Rev and Yo La Tengo. I guess there are lots of music reviewers out there who are geezers like me. The Galaxie 500 reference makes the most sense to me, though this album sounds a lot more like a loosey-goosey version of Luna. I never understood how folks could hear bands as disparate as, say, Superchunk or Lambchop and claim to hear something "southern." But now that I've relocated a couple hundred miles to the north (though still south of the Mason-Dixon line), I think there's something to all that. These guys are from Athens, and there a languid grace to these songs that might, indeed, have southern roots. Or maybe not. I mean, Dean Wareham is anything but southern. The ringing production sound helps to lend character to these songs, so that even when they spin a bit off their axis there's always something pretty to hear. For the most part, though, that lackadaisical feel is one of the great joys of this album. If you ask me, I'd say these guys are closer to the Comas than anyone else. Cheerier, to be sure, and a bit more dedicated to pop song construction, but that's my call. It really doesn't matter who you want to hear in these folks as long as the other band is one you really like. 'Cause these folks sure do make a nice album.
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Also recommended:
Justin Beckler Oh! My Troubled Mind (self-released)
Bite the Capsicum Bite the Capsicum CD3 (Shame File)
Can Joann Hurt People Hurt People (self-released)
Cities Variations (Yep Roc)
Dark Meat Universal Indians (Cloud Recordings)
Bronwen Exter Elevator Ride (Grantham Dispatch)
Alex Gomez Warm Sensations (self-released)
Grey Does Matter Your Job Will Kill You (Pop Rally)
The Heartstring Band Presents: Aurora Songs Vol. I EP
(self-released)
Jim Lampos Thunder Moon (Clocwyse Productions)
The Mars Volta Amputechture (Universal)
MONO & World's End Girlfriend Palmless Prayer/Mass Murder
Refrain (Temporary Residence)
Niobe White Hats (Tomlab)
One Ring Zero Wake Them Up (Barbes)
Edoardo Ricci/Thollem McDonas Sono Contento Di Stare Qua
(Edgetone)
Rent Romus' Lords of Outland Culture of Pain (Edgetone)
Rope, Inc. Is That All? EP (Fish the Cat)
Rust Kings Hotel West Virginia (Dren)
Sybarite Sybarite (Temporary Residence)
Various Artists Songs from the Movie Fortunes (Pravda) | |
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