Softer Than Yesterday – Burning in the Ashes of the Revolution

I was liking this song for the first 15 seconds or so, but then the loud guitars come in and then the limitations to the production are made all too clear. Then I’m wishing some other song was on.

The guitars are hollow and flat – and so are the vocals. It’s just not there with this song. The production has a lot to answer for. I’ve heard demos with a better sound.

Perhaps when this band hook up with a better producer and more cash they will be able to lay down a few track that will do this band justice. At the moment, though, it’s just not happening. Maybe if this song was remixed or rerecorded with a better producer, things might have been better for this song.

So if there was a nice emo song somewhere, it’s not getting noticed. The mix is just all over the place.

Northvia – Mya

More atmospherics come in the form of Northvia, and this one ain’t bad either. There’s some great sounding chiming guitars here. This is a bit like Spaceman 3 or Spiritualized at their most accessible. The song gently makes it way and slowly builds up.

Perhaps the drum sound isn’t quite right. They have a raw sound, yet everything else is glossier.

It’s very cinematic. The music conjures up images of flying, and you see them looking down onto the ground that is rushing by underneath. You could easily see this music being in a movie. Perhaps the band needs to do more than just build the song up then suddenly down, and then back again. It’s a structure that has been used countless times, and this band could probably set themselves apart from other bands of this genre.

Other moments in the song remind of Mike Oldfield at his more playful moments. It’s nice travelling music.

There are some cool moments in this song. This band’s attitude is spot on, and I see myself liking the direction that this band is heading.

Saosin – Translating the Name EP

I must confess that I am a regular visitor (addict) of mp3.com. I mean the site hosts over a million (literally, 1,000,000) bands. You can listen to and even download these bands’ songs, completely for free, and LEGALLY! How can you resist the place? Ok, now that the shameless plug is over, the relevance appears. Saosin was recently featured on mp3.com’s homepage, and I passed them up because I thought they were some Asian band. Boy, was I wrong. I apologize to Saosin for an instant judgement based solely upon the band’s name.
I later found out that Saosin is a group of five guys from California showing off their hardcore roots and their “new-age’ melody skills. They contrast chugging riffs and melodic picking, while juxtaposing melodic yet powerful singing against all out screaming. If I had been typing this about three or four years ago, the concept would’ve been groundbreaking. In this day and age, everyone’s doing the emo dance, and a band needs to breathe their own style into the genre to get recognized.
So what is Saosin’s marker? It seems to be the emphasis on melody. The vocals that carry the melody are done in a style that’s becoming increasingly popular: high, but not punkishly high, and with a slightly nasal intonation that quickly reminded me of “The Phoenix Rising.” They make much more use of these sung vocals than their screamer, featuring melody over thrash in each and every track. In fact, even their chugging, loud, meant-to-be-ferocious parts come off as a bit more melodic than the average band. Trust me, this is still sharp, angular, and hardcore, but there’s just a lot more tune here.
And to counteract that positivity, there must be a negative thought. This gets old fast. They use the exact same formula of pounding drums, blazing guitars, melody, and occasional screaming on four of the five songs on this EP. That equals overkill and boredom by the last song. Thankfully, the highly intense “Lost Symphonies” sees the vocals soaring and the two guitarists mashing a riff and a melody together to make a whole new sound. Otherwise, it’s just a black line on a white page….it always stays the same.
We the jury, find that Saosin is not guilty of being just another lame screamo band. It’s inherently obvious that they have talent. It’s just that they need to develop it. This debut EP is the first step in the right direction. Let’s hope they keep moving and don’t just stand on this stepping stone the rest of their career. Otherwise, they will get lost in the shuffle and be grouped as “another lame wannabe.”

The Beatings – The Heart, the Product, the Machine and the Asshole

Get this CD and put it in your car stereo, drive around alone, sing along really loud. Put it on while you get ready for the big date. Getting home way too blasted in the early morning? No problem, try The Beatings while you stare at the spinning ceiling. If you just got dumped, pour another whiskey, and crank the last song, “These Days Will Be the Old Days Someday.”
The Beatings are the real deal, making the kind of uninhibited songwriting and performing that bands struggle for, but few ever actually achieve. If they can’t hit the notes, they shout them out anyway. The playing is unselfish and deceptively basic, traditional, but not to the extent of being uncreative. They have big swaying anthems (“Sick Day”), quirky, sharp pop (“This Year”), and even dark, disturbing laments (“Organ Donor Regrets”) that would make Billy Childish proud. There’s some winking and shrugging when they scream about how “the transvestite bar got the best of them (me),” but then again, maybe there’s not.
Here’s a brief description of the music itself . . . Throughout the six songs here, the ingredients rarely (though they do on occasion) stray from the standard garage band set up. There’s dirty guitars, a thick, quarter note-happy bass, and a hard hit drum kit that let’s you know what part of your body to nod, tap, or shake. The voice that most often comes through is a bassy, though surprisingly expressive instrument, something that calls to a more vocally talented Calvin Johnson. This is the easy defining characteristic for The Beatings. They’re also fond of the “three chords and the truth” approach, but are no means limited to it. “Transvestite Bar,” a seven-minute trek through the geography of a very strange evening, sports a banjo and organ, giving something of a rootsy melancholy to its minor meanderings, while “Sick Day,” lead by the voice of the female bass player, offers up a welcome break about half way through the somewhat gloomy EP.
About the only negative thing that could be said about the record is that the opener, “American Standard,” is a more sullen, slowed-down theft of Pavement’s famous “Summer Babe,” and the closer, maybe the favorite off the whole disk, “These Will Be the Old Days Someday,” appears to be heavily influenced by the sad and sweet tunefulness of Modest Mouse’s earlier work. Even this though is easily overlooked because of the personal stamp The Beatings put on the songs, and after a few listens, the comparisons fall off the back of the truck. This is one of the best finds in a long time. Check them out.

Craig Bennett – Faster Forward

At a glance, Craig Bennett’s Faster Forward seems to do with mid-70s Brit rock what Josh Rouse’s new release 1972 does for the Steely Dan era (Rouse does a better-than-passable Michael McDonald impression, by the way, though I’m not sure how proud he should be of that). That is, Bennett, who for much of this album sings like a David Bowie sound-alike, seems to be a tourist dipping into Bowie-style rock circa Ziggy Stardust. This reading, though, fails to do Faster Forward justice. It may be stylistically backward-looking, but the wink and nod are convincing enough to let you know that this isn’t just in exercise in nostalgia. In other words, this ain’t a Lenny Kravitz record.
Bennett plays a variety of instruments on the album himself, though he also employs a rotation of bassists, drummers, and other musicians, and works in street sounds and background talking, with everything thrown into the mix together for an ecstatic kitchen-sink effect. It works wonderfully.
Bennett is a supremely gifted songwriter. The tunes are pop perfection, and there are virtually no static moments throughout the full 13-song album. Everything is up tempo, and ther energy the music gives off is contagious. I caught myself literally tapping my foot at one point. Bennett’s lyrics are skewed and oddly angled views of the world. “My Muse Has Become a Nuisance” opens the album by casting the songwriter’s muse as a real person, a disaffected thrift store clerk with whom Bennett has cell-phone conversations. She’s a demanding one, too, reminding him that she “inspires all your sad songs about how life is so long.” The album takes off from there, tripping and careening through whirlwind of unique observation, a lot like the Flaming Lips but with more irony, less sentimentality.
If these are sad songs about how life is so long, they certainly aren’t aimed at depressing you. More likely, Bennett is having fun with the notion of the world-weary, fretting modern (and usually British) pop songster. It’s worth pointing out that Bennett is from Georgia, so there is a lot of affectation here (he can’t really sound that much like David Bowie, can he?), and I’m not saying that it isn’t distracting sometimes, but the album succeeds anyway, due chiefly to the fact that songs just plain sound good. The melodies are tuneful, the arrangements work, the lyrics are confoundingly compelling, and what else do you need?

Various Artists – Stop Me if You Think You’ve Heard This One Before…

Compiling a definitive yet concise collection to celebrate the 25th year of Rough Trade Records was never going to be easy. After all, where do you start with a label that has been the past/present home to such diverse acts as The Smiths, The Fall, Aztec Camera, Mazzy Star, The Strokes and erm… Scritti Politti (to name just a handful), during the course of its first quarter century? Moreover, how do you represent such a dense back catalogue when you had to sell the bulk of it off years ago? (Historical Note: Rough Trade collapsed financially in the early/mid 1990s, forcing label boss Geoff Travis to cash in his rights to pretty much every record the label had released up until that point). The answer to this conundrum is therefore to dig not so deep into the coffers newly swollen by The Strokes’ recent landslide sales and get the label’s current/future artists to cover songs by Rough Trade bands of yesteryear. A brilliant idea from a recording rights/cash-flow perspective and a pretty intriguing prospect for fans of the label’s scattershot approach over the years.
The net results are, as you’d expect with these things, dependant on a) the quality of the artists involved, b) their ability to pick the right old songs to resurrect, and c) how they choose to do them. Many contributors seem to score sufficiently on all three counts. Ex-Cocteau Twin Elizabeth Fraser (currently working on a solo album for Rough Trade’s Warners-funded sister label Blanco Y Negro, as rumour would have it) scores particularly highly with a serene spin through Robert Wyatt’s “At Last I Am Free,” as do neo-prog noiseniks Oneida, who turn in a brilliantly bloodshot cover of James Blood Ulmer’s “Jazz is the Teacher, Funk is the Preacher.” And if you like the idea of Felt doing a cover of Galaxie 500’s “Tell Me” or a Will Oldham-like death-country deconstruction of The Strokes’ “Is This It,” then The Tyde and Royal City respectively oblige. Some fail to ignite the birthday cake candles of course. Alisdair Roberts’ weedy trad-folk interpretation of Ivor Cutler’s “I Had a Little Boat” is as hopelessly tedious as anything from his recent album for the label, and those who worried about what kind of influence 80s pop producer Trevor Horn was going to have on his recent clients Belle & Sebastian will certainly listen in horror to the band’s sloppy synth-pop reworking of Young Marble Giants’ “Final Day” (though thankfully the band’s bountiful new album for Rough Trade – Dear Catastrophe Waitress - has been spared any such plastic-pop distortions).
Somewhat conspicuous by their absence are current label rooster rulers The Strokes (surely a Smiths or Fall cover could have fitted in easily with their sonic stencil?) and much-adored slow-motion masters Low (the entire Galaxie 500 or Mazzy Star oeuvre seems ripe for their picking), but perhaps such appearances would have been too close to the (plagiarist) bone. Yet what this compilation lacks in “big’ names and quality control is more or less made up for by the album’s best track by a nautical mile – British Sea Power’s turbulent and towering take on Galaxie 500’s celestial space-rock classic “Tugboat” – which is worth the low cost entry price of this 16-track selection alone (£5 or approximately $8, depending on which side of the Atlantic you live).
Like the label’s lengthy history, this is a confusing but compelling and cliché-free exercise in celebrating some of music’s most perverse and powerful characters. Here’s to the next 25 earth years, Mr. Travis and co, future financial crises and major label take-overs permitting of course.

Paula Frazer – A Place Where I Know (4-Track Songs 1992-2002)

Despite over a decade of hard work on the periphery of the alt-country scene she has helped to define – firstly with Tarnation and more recently as a solo artist – Paula Frazer is still a hugely under-sung talent. It’s only recently that recognition has come her away, often indirectly, through her live and studio collaborations with Tindersticks, Mark Eitzel, James William Hindle, The Czars, and Cornershop. Blessed with a voice that holds an earthy yet otherworldly presence that Neko Case can still only dream about (and that’s saying something) and a sturdy grasp on the whole Morricone-meets-Patsy Cline schtick, Paula Frazer is well overdue for a respectful retrospective release, and this is where A Place Where I Know comes in, kind of.
Instead of taking the safer (though contractually tricky) route of compiling past recordings from three Tarnation albums or from her first solo release Indoor Universe, Frazer has instead rooted around in her own recording archives to bring together many of her favourite old songs (plus a few previously unreleased cuts) in reassuringly lo-fi demo form. It’s a brave move commercially and artistically but one that reaps plentiful dividends. Besides, most of her Tarnation material is still in print via 4AD and her solo debut is still pretty fresh on the shelves, so why not excavate the blueprints and secret sketches of her past glories to cast a fresh perspective on her role as a dusty visionary?
By focusing upon her rich haunted tones (often double-tracked and self-harmonising) and on her desolate electric/acoustic guitar-playing we get somewhat closer to the essence of Frazer’s unpretentious mission to replicate/update authentic shades of lost Americana. From the porchlight strum of the gorgeous “Idly” (originally released on Tarnation’s Mirador), through the lilting but dread-laden “Long Ago” (previously unreleased) to the twangy gallop of “An Awful Shade of Blue” (another Mirador track), Frazer’s command of her dynamic vocal range and her songwriting craftsmanship rarely comes unstuck. And in some cases the fuzz, hiss, wow, and flutter of these very roughly laid-down recordings brings us closer to the sonic template Frazer keeps in her head; it’s like listening to ancient country 78s spinning on a gramophone with a worn-down needle or picking-up a lost 1950s radio transmission beamed in though some time/space wormhole whilst driving across the Mexican-American border.
Admittedly, this demo-based compendium isn’t a perfect representation of Frazer’s talents; the more fulsome film noire aesthetic of her finest Tarnation recordings perhaps shows some of these songs in a better light. Furthermore, it’s frustrating that three beautiful bonus “live-in-hallway” tracks are only playable/viewable via the CD-Rom video element of this collection, though some audiophiles will no doubt find a sneaky means of transferring them to a more universal listening medium. Qualms aside, this compilation is an essential purchase for Frazer fanatics and for discerning admirers of rural Americana alike.

Avenged Sevenfold – Waking the Fallen

Sometimes I forget bands like Avenged Sevenfold exist. I like to fool myself into thinking that I live in a world where everyone appreciates the genius of Arthur Lee, and where everyone sits down at their kitchen table with their children and listen to After the Gold Rush or Blonde on Blonde and smile and eat saltwater taffy. I sometimes, in my pop culture vacuum, forget that some kids were actually reared on post-Nirvana MTV, believing all that innocuous bullshit, soaking in the overly glorified images of teenage alienation and taking it way too seriously. Such is Avenged Sevenfold, or as I refuse to call them, A7X.

All right, let’s get the complimentary aspects out of the way so I can get to making fun of these eyeliner-wearing yahoos. They’re talented, they obviously know how to play their instruments, and for that I applaud them. Starting a band despite an utter lack of vision takes a lot of motivation these days. Yep, these boys can play. Drummer the Rev. pounds with such fury one’s to believe he has Lars Ulrich and Vinnie Paul nipping furiously at his heels. Vocalist M. Shadows (God, I wish I was making these names up) allows his scream’s crushing power to collapse in full force on the listener, and guitarists Synyster Gates and (snicker) Zacky Vengence effectively dole out speed metal precision and Van Halen-esque masturbatory riffage with surprising competency. Oh, and bassist Johnny Christ is the bassist.

“Unholy Confessions,” second track on Waking the Fallen, optimizes Avenged Sevenfold’s lyrical capacities with such so-sincere-it’s-laughable lines like “Constrict your hands around me / squeeze till I cannot breathe / this air tastes dead inside me / contribute to our plague.” This kind of sanitized Goth metal seems most suited for 13-year-old diary-obsessed girls who are afraid of direct sunlight. “I’m alone in here / No more feelings / Killed my fears / Don’t ask / you’ll never know / you’re left behind and I’ll be exposed,” Shadows vomits in “Desecrate Through Reverance,” as if his very MTV-hopeful future hangs in the balance. (Speaking of which – reverance? Didn’t these boys have a dictionary handy while they were mining the Bible and Danzig’s back catalogue for “kick ass” song titles?)

The saddest part of all is that my Utopian vision of happy families listening to happy folk-rock and eating taffy will probably never come to pass. As long as today’s youth are still counting down the days to the next Warped Tour, pissing themselves in anticipation for M. Shadows to gob a big one in their face, and their parents are still hopelessly obsessed with Dire Straits and Phil Collins, there will never be the sonic unity I so dreamed for.

Spark of Life – Promises Made, Promises Kept

Spark of Life has succeeded in making a good, although far from groundbreaking album that’s a hybrid of all things punk. There’ are traces of emo, hardcore, and pop-punk. The addition of melody to this mix makes the album infinitely more enjoyable. The hooks are memorable and the vocals are strong, all of which makes Spark of Life a force to be reckoned with.
If it were not for its sometimes formulaic and derivative sound, this band might be considered unstoppable. “Welcome Home Relax and Slow Down” is a healthy dose of Strike Anywhere’s brand of melodic hardcore, with a Vision-esque sing/talk bridge. But this song is not a completely by the book flattery-affair. The most surprising element is the soft piano interlude and backup during the anthem and outro. When trying its hand at straight-ahead anger Spark of Life is equally successful. “Has Anyone Seen the Manual” is one of the more powerful songs, sounding a bit like Quicksand except more punk. “Hooks Every Foot” borrows a formula popular with those nu-emo bands like Finch that are all poised to break huge, from the brutal back-ups screams to the melodic vocals. The song has a solid lead-in hook and anthemic chorus.
The overtly melodic and the more hardcore songs seem to divide the album 40/60, but the group is apt at performing both sounds, often within the same song. The effort is actually quite cohesive because even in the more pop-oriented material there is underlying aggression that ties in with the harder material. Unfortunately within this harder material there is one dud. “Despite what you think” tarnishes the accomplishment of the album as a whole by showcasing lackluster songwriting and inane lyrics. The repetition of “An Angel Sent Just for Me” comes off like a horrific Limp Bizkit B-Side to “Break Stuff.”
The most rewarding and unique aspect of Spark of Life’s sound is the absence of sheen and gloss that seems to cover all the other records in this genre. There’s actual grit (intentional) in the production. This makes the group’s energy, enthusiasm, and anger so much more believable. It gives Spark of Life a much more immediate and real feeling, which is more than one can say for any other run of the mill mass-produced mall-emo angst.

Horse the Band – R. Borlax

Spazzcore, hardcore, brutal, often punishing, screaming, guitars always loud, sometimes metal sometimes punk, and a keyboard/synthesizer. Yeah so the keyboard/synth doesn’t really match up in the equation, but that’s the shtick, and the gimmick that sets Horse the Band (nice name, huh?) apart from most other bands of their ilk. The keyboards alternate between playing horror movie-style background music (think Psycho’s shower scene) and Nintendo music. So to a degree the group isn’t far off in calling themselves the first Nintendo-core band. If it weren’t for, you know, the tortured screaming and really loud guitars, I could sometimes picture myself playing a fucking brilliant game of Excitebike.
But the main difference between Excitebike and Horse the Band is versatility. In Excitebike you could: race against other bikers on courses around the world, do air flips and other tricks, run over people, and design your own course increasing the game’s possibilities to almost limitless proportions. Horse the Band alternates between being really fucking loud to pretty loud, and really fucking angry to pretty angry. After listening to the disc repeated times, the effort seems really unfocused. There of course is nothing wrong with angry music, but these guys just seem so drowned in it, they are unable to produce something that resonates.
Take for instance a song like “Bunnies.” It begins with a great hook and keyboard lead-in. The title of the song and the keyboard background support makes one think the song is almost a Reggie and the Full Effect-style parody. But a glance at the lyrics offers otherwise: “SMASH/SPLAT those fucking bunnies / Send them information in a sensationalist manner / They corrupt / Heads snapping and misspelling eyes” – ummm..yeah. The rest of the song continues making some extremely mixed and vague metaphors between bunnies, our leaders, and their war machine. And the rest of the lyrics aren’t much different.
A focused and fixed release of rage might be much more therapeutic for the group and consequently much more cathartic for the listener. The idea of keyboard lead-ins and back-ups is a potentially interesting and exciting addition to hardcore. However, until Horse the Band’s brand of power violence is in tip-top shape, no keyboard gimmick will save them.

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