Todd Goldstein, back in his Harlem Shakes days / photo by David Greenwald
I think I’ve gushed enough about ARMS in the last couple years, so as Summer Skills‘ long-awaited November debut edges closer, here’s the band’s latest, “Glass Harmonica.” Can it save 2k11? It can try. Catch the band at CMJ starting Oct. 19.
The worst thing an artist can do is have nothing to say. EMA, like a magpie, has plucked at convenient bits of rock history (Debbie Harry’s style, Kurt Cobain’s guitar playing) and stitched them together into the facsimile of something fresh. Watching her was like watching the Gus Van Sant version of Psycho. Were she performing in a warmer genre — twee-pop, maybe, or folk — she would’ve been easier to like, but as it was, her sour punk rehash was icy and airless. The band was painfully competent, avoiding the technical virtuosity that might’ve made them intellectually compelling and the amateurishness that could’ve turned them human. To her credit, Erica M. Anderson is a fine student of the rock playbook, prancing and prowling about the stage with leonine confidence. But it has to be said: if she wasn’t a pretty, stylish young woman with a choppy haircut, she would have a deserved thin sliver of her current popularity. Do you know how I know this? Show me an unpretty indie singer and I’ll show you a band you’ve never heard of.
By contrast, Wild Beasts offered dazzling musicianship and charisma hairy and powerful enough to climb the Empire State Building. Despite Radiohead’s ubiquitous American popularity, growing up in their shadow has had a more profound effect on the musicians of their native Britain; there’s an intensity and ambition in Wild Beasts’ music that’s simply absent from most of their domestic counterparts. The group opened with “Lion’s Share” and immediately established their hold over the room: unlike this year’s terrific Smother, the band’s live performance is anything but gentle. The rhythm section boomed with sub-bass eruptions and Bonham-esque drumming, hammering the crowd into the ground even as dueling singers Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming’s melodies and guitar lines pirouetted skyward. Either Thorpe or Fleming could offer the band a sterling full-time lead singer; watching them balance each other’s raw charisma was to witness an act of staggering generosity.
None of their material was less than gripping, but Smother‘s songs, removed from their bedroom atmospherics, were the hardest to deny. If their set had a flaw, it was location: Wild Beasts could’ve played to Coachella’s polo fields on Thursday night and still struck each listener in the heart. Or whatever part of them was most susceptible to thunderous bass.
Harlem Shakes devotees/potential 2k12 saviors Out Go the Lights have released the second single from their upcoming EP, Sun, and it’s another slice of indie rock heaven: Spoon-evoking chromatic chord shifts, ragged vocals, a half-cup of harmonies, a sprinkling of fidelity and no wub-wubby bass whatsoever. Take note, Skrillex!
Let’s face it: keeping up with new music is hard work. There are too many blogs, too many bands, too many tweets/Facebook updates/RSS feeds/track premieres/album streams/Vimeo clips/Mediafire links. It’s exhausting.
The Mercury Music Digital Record Club is a new subscription service designed to make finding music easy again. Maybe even fun.
Here’s how it works: Every Tuesday, I send the week’s best new album direct to your Spotify inbox, along with a surprise vintage LP that influenced the week’s sounds–so you can soak up the classics while you stay fresh. All you have to do is open Spotify, press play and enjoy. 8 albums a month, only the good stuff. Easy, right?
Members will also receive a custom-made Personal Mixtape designed specifically for you based on your Spotify/Last.fm profile or a list of your favorite music — curated by a human being who wants to help you find your next favorite band, not a computer algorithm that thinks it knows who you are. In the months to come, Mercury members will also receive special playlists and exclusive MP3s you won’t find anywhere else.
I founded Rawkblog back in 2005 with the goal of helping people find great music every single day. If you’re reading this, hopefully you’ve found some! Unfortunately, it is nowhere near a full-time job: on a good month, the site pays for the hosting bills and a nice dinner. Rawkblog’s not going anywhere, don’t worry. Mercury Music is just the next step forward, a way for you to support what I do and get something fantastic in return.
Mercury’s going to launch in the next few weeks: bookmark the site, like us on Facebook and sign up for the mailing list below and I’ll let you know when it’s ready. Get excited! This is going to be great.
Hannah Peel’s debut album is a record of elegance and humor, a combination only improved by its rarity. “The Almond Tree” opens The Broken Wave with a somber piano line and a feather-light vocal, a porcelain veneer broken by the oom-pah rhythm section that swoops in like the town busybody. An electric guitar adds unexpected grit to the mix, and by song’s end, we’ve arrived at something of a mission statement. It works better as that than a composition in its own right, but there’s no lack of strong material here. The horns-and-strings-aided “You Call This Your Home” turns its title into a resolutely harmonized refrain; “Song for the Sea” lets her thin, lovely voice reach its greatest heights; wounded piano ballad “Unwound” evokes Fiona Apple’s early work.
But Peel most reminds me of Sally Seltmann’s work as New Buffalo — there are similarities in their matter-of-fact melodies, particularly “Today Is Not So Far Away’s” maze-like chorus, but it’s the soft colors of the shifting arrangements that make them true contemporaries. Peel never uses a roar when a whisper will do, a trait that may make The Broken Wave too subtle for some. That said, the album is a mere 35 minutes: if you sat through that three-LP Joanna Newsom set, the least you can do is give this one four or five spins.
The notion of objectivity is always a convenient ruse in pop criticism, but I have to admit I’m probably not emotionally equipped to tell you what I saw last night with any degree of reality. I might as well have been watching the Beatles. Yes, dear reader, I am a Ryan Adams Fan, and last night he played maybe the best concert I’ve seen in my life. It helped that the performance came at Largo, the only club in Los Angeles — maybe the world — where there are no cell phones, no cameras, no conversations, no clinking drinks, where artists truly let their hair down and take their shoes off and play the kind of shows you wish they’d play every night. Read the rest of this entry »
Hannah Peel’s debut album is a record of elegance and humor, a combination only improved by its rarity. “The Almond Tree” opens The Broken Wave with a somber piano line and a feather-light vocal, a porcelain veneer broken by the oom-pah rhythm section that swoops in like the town busybody. An electric guitar adds unexpected grit to the mix, and by song’s end, we’ve arrived at something of a mission statement. It works better as that than a composition in its own right, but there’s no lack of strong material here. The horns-and-strings-aided “You Call This Your Home” turns its title into a resolutely harmonized refrain; “Song for the Sea” lets her thin, lovely voice reach its greatest heights; wounded piano ballad “Unwound” evokes Fiona Apple’s early work.
