Year Future – S/T EP

Year Future’s self-titled EP was released in early 2004. So why now, in mid-September, am I reviewing it? Well, it was under my bed and I thought I had lost it. So when I found it I thought I might as well keep to my obligation, even though the band already has a new EP out since this one.

Year Future features VSS and Angel Hair frontman Sonny Kay, but this doesn’t sound much like either of those bands. Year Future plays the post-punk card with just a hint of dance-punk sensabilities. Unfortunately, YF is far less screamy than the above mentioned bands, which is pretty disappointing.

For the most part, the self-titled EP is pretty boring and trite. It’s full of semi-groovable basslines and painfully immature guitar work. Throughout the EP, the music just trots along, boring and unstimulating. Sometimes the guitars take on this surf tone that is similar to Dead Kennedys or maybe even older Cramps.

“All of Your Eggs” starts things off with a bouncy bassline and Rockey Crane’s uninteresting guitars noodling over the top. “Win/Win” has guitars that fade in and out over a straightforward bassline. The most rocking track is probably “Each Other’s Futures” with its pleasant dynamics.

It’s hard to judge a band off of just four songs because it’s just hard to be accurate with such a small amount of material. Press is out on the new EP, and I’ve read good things, so maybe the band worked out the kinks and got things going. Maybe there’s a future this year after all.

Tacoma Radar – No One Waved Goodbye

Tacoma Radar is a project that began in 1998 with Kenny Anderson (not the NBA basketball player) and Richard Ferguson (not the US soldier), two Scottish boys (that’s right, they’re not from Tacoma). They’ve been playing and writing songs with a myriad of supporting personnel over the years, and for their debut, No One Waved Goodbye, they enlisted vocalist Jennifer Cosgrove.

The songs on NOWG all feature low and forlorn arrangements with an emphasis on creating a very sparse feel and lots of ambience. It’s your standard modern dream-pop album, essentially. The band takes the tried-and-true path forged by Low, Bedhead, Galaxie 500, and many, many others but inject a few little twists of its own. Nothing too out of the ordinary here, just some atmospheric strings, synth, and even some slide guitar for the occasional Americana flourish. Nearly every tune follows a basic, pop verse-chorus-verse structure, with a few exceptions.

The first track, “So Much Water,” is one of those exceptions. Near the end of the song, the band leaves the basic structure of the song and builds into what the listener would assume would be a climactic peak of cello and electric guitar fuzz. But just when you think, “Okay, now things are really going to take off and go somewhere!” nothing happens. There’s a cymbal crash and then everything dissipates into nothingness, and not in a fulfilling kind of way. As mentioned previously, this is one of the tracks which actually deviates from the formula a little.

The vocalist, Jennifer Cosgrove, delivers the lyrics with the speak-singing style made so popular by the Lillith Fair crowd. Unfortunately, her delivery is also really detached and apathetic. This is a hindrance to the songs, because as highlighted above, they’re pretty standard and a killer vocal delivery with some oomph and feeling would push things over the top. But alas, that was not meant to be. If there is a next time for Tacoma Radar, a little more experimentation and a more forceful, passionate vocal delivery would really make things interesting.

Tacoma Radar has a lot of good things going on, but the band didn’t take enough chances with this record and hasn’t found its unique voice yet. It’s not that this is a bad band. On the contrary, these folks seem to have their act together pretty well. It takes a lot of dedication and hard work to record and release an album. There simply isn’t enough substance behind the songs and sounds to last beyond the first listen.

Tub Ring – Zoo Hypothesis

In the liner notes to their fifth full-length offering, the members of Chicago’s Tub Ring scrawl a few words about how, several thousand years ago, our ancestors from outer space “seeded” Earth with life. The sentiment is arguably a direct descendant of William S. Burroughs, the great American writer who was never at a loss for compelling and occasionally surreal narratives about the origins of culture and Western language systems. In Tub Ring’s hands, the theme — visited from time to time throughout the aptly titled Zoo Hypothesis — gets a slightly different treatment, instead reflecting colors of isolation, abandonment, and rage at authoritarian structures. You might not be able to ask for a more punk-rock reading of such a decidedly sci-fi germ of an idea. But while Tub Ring may thrash about with all the unhinged fury and pent-up aggression of a punk-rock band, these musicians distance themselves significantly from the trappings of the genre by avoiding three-chords-and-a-cloud-of-dust clichés and instead displaying a proficiency for dense, shape-shifting passages and genre-twisting sonic collage.

Zoo Hypothesis is, in short, the record Mike Patton probably should have made between Faith No More’s Angel Dust and Mr. Bungle’s Disco Volante. Tub Ring is clearly more entrenched in the hardcore and punk traditions than those bands ever were, but vocalist Kevin Gibson seems to make no bones about modeling his delivery after their theatrical and able-throated frontman. On a good handful of the record’s 16 tracks, it can be downright scary to hear the similarities, from the way Gibson slips that operatic tremolo into his vocal scales to how he adopts Patton’s wild-eyed carnival barker roar and lays them right over Tub Ring’s angular verses and refrains. It doesn’t feel like it’s an homage, really, as much as it’s a form of impersonation and mimicry (conscious or unconscious is left for you to decide), but it seems to work.

The remaining four-fifths of the quintet, however, are far from just a backing band for Gibson’s clearly practiced delivery. Collectively, they serve up a feast of genres and colorful passages, often jumping from one to the next several times over the course of fairly short songs. So, the listener gets the Skeleton Key/Danny Elfman introductions of “Tiny, Little,” the choppy metal guitars and funky bass of “Death of a Robot,” the synth flourishes that inaugurate “The Promise Keeper,” and the mosh-pit-initiating punk of “Sharpening the Sticks.” And they get them all, in rapid and interwoven fixes, over the span of less than 10 minutes. There are moments when the quirky diversity feels more plotted than intuitive — the cheesy harem sway that sets the pace for “I Could Never Fall in Love with You,” the “California Girls” sunshine-optimism of “Raindrops” — but it doesn’t flat so much as it just slows the record’s impressively aggressive pace.

One clever technique that makes up for that and keeps the record moving, though, is the placement of tight (and sometimes nonexistent) slivers of dead space between songs. More times than not, Tub Ring thrashes from one track right into the next, leaving the listener to wonder where one narrative cools down and the next gets its blood boiling. The conceit works, forcing you to take in all the passages as one massive flurry of sound. It’s particularly effective between the record’s most aggressive and pounding fare. Case in point: the way the hardcore roar of “Dog Doesn’t Bite” bleeds right into the punk march of “Alexander in Charge.” One second, we’re listening to Gibson repeatedly bark the title of “Dog Doesn’t Bite” over quick, successive hits of guitar, bass, and drums, and the next, we’re thrown into an entirely different barn burner. A similar trick bridges the acidic, full-throat screams of “The Viking Song” with the Ramones blitzkrieg-bop bridges of “We are the Righteous.” (Though the latter includes an absolutely furious chorus, what I keep returning to is a sinister buried keyboard line that feels like it was pulled right out of the B-52’s “Rock Lobster.”)

There are moments on Zoo Hypothesis that could grab the ear of someone not hungry for inventive or bombastic punk (the bizarre carnival collage “The Night Watch,” the somehow deceptively soothing “Vehicle”), but Tub Ring works best here when the amps and the mixing board are cranked up to meltdown levels. It’s here where, conceits and collages and concepts aside, you figure the band has got to be loud and angry enough to be heard on whatever planet to which those alien ancestors were in such a rush to return.

Traindodge – The Truth 2xCD

“Abandon City,” the first of the 20 songs on Traindodge’s The Truth, begins with about a minute of slight, atmospheric synth that recalls the “Twin Peaks” soundtrack. It then launches into a hard-rocking post-hardcore riff straight out of the Jawbox playbook. At about the three-minute mark, the vocals kick in, mostly of the “sassy,” sing/shout variety. Then comes a quieter passage, twinkly guitars accenting the synth effects that form the foundation of the music. Then it’s another big riff. Finally, there’s a sample of a car screeching down a highway. This is all within the first seven minutes, and it’s pretty exhilarating. The formula doesn’t change for the next hour and a half or so.

Traindodge shows some serious balls by releasing this as a two-disc set, especially considering how many parts most of the songs contain. A little more stringent quality control on these tracks could have pushed this record to even greater heights – the best moments are pretty exhilarating – but at least you get your money’s worth. It’ll take quite a few listens to absorb all of the music here.

The guitars on this record are very crunchy, which compliments the heaviness of the harder riffs. The guitars also contrast very nicely with the quieter synth-based parts, which tend to be squeaky clean. The dynamics, and some of the chord progressions, owe a great deal to bands like Shiner and Juno, but Traindodge has a strong grasp on the style.

The only serious drawbacks here are the affected vocals (the first lyrics on the record, “I can’t sing but hear me out,” more or less cover it), and the band’s tendency to cut the really cool parts too short and drag out some of the less memorable sections for a little too long. This is a very good two-disc set that would have been even better as a single album.

Lords – The House That Lords Built EP

The first thing that struck me about these Kentucky-based Lords was how well the CD artwork reflects the band’s metallic wall of sound. Inside the front cover, the listener is given a glimpse of the “house” – it’s a castle, really – referred to in the title. The towers of this cartoonish building bear a clever resemblance to guitar amps, sound equipment, and drum kits. Leaning more than the Tower of Pisa, these skewed monstrosities look anything but stable. It’s a visual metaphor for the sensation you’ll be bombarded with if you dare to spin The House That Lords Built.

This EP contains 10 tracks, but for metaphor’s sake The House That Lords Built is a 10-room complex, although two of these are corridors (interludes) and the last is a portal that leads back out of the castle. Inside you’ll encounter a musical haunted house: medieval Iron Maidens, blood-sucking Ozzy bats, an axe-wielding Greg Ginn. Lords conjure a trio of ebony-titled influences – Black Cross, Black Flag, Black Sabbath – which they blend at full power, concocting a potent mix of hardcore and metal. Lest you think you’ll have time to explore every cobwebbed nook and cranny, let me tell you from experience: once you enter, you’ll find yourself out the door before you know it. That’s because the longest song here clocks in at just under two minutes, while the shortest track is a mere 12 seconds, a staircase-mounting relief that leads from chaos to more chaos.

If there are any flaws in the construction of this House, it’s in the last track, the “portal” I mentioned before. It’s titled “Mount,” completing the biblical reference of the previous three tracks, “Sermon,” “On,” and “The.” In 19 minutes, the entire album is played backwards on the left channel, preceded and followed by several minutes of dead air. If Lords had limited it to a minute or two, it would have made for an artistic effect equivalent to a whirlwind blasting you out of the House and purging you of the dissonance you heard within. Instead, the length of the track makes for a tedious listen that will have you ending your stay before the 19 minutes are up.

Nevertheless, the seven-song, 10-minute EP contained within this disc more than makes up for that one skip-friendly defect. Crafty metal riffs and bone-crushing drums are the foundation of The House That Lords Built, and a reliable foundation it is. Enter at your own risk.

M83 – Dead Cities, Red Seas, & Lost Ghosts

It rarely snows where I live. Every year I wait until sometime in January to see if we are going to get that one or two days of snow when everyone freaks out and they close schools and make a big deal of the whole thing. When it actually happens, it is a stunning sight to behold. The sky is a bleak white color as the snowflakes drift gently to the earth. If I could just hold onto those moments and put them in a glass bubble, it might not even come close to the breathtaking beauty of M83’s Dead Cities, Red Seas, & Lost Ghosts.

The French duo crafts dense walls of white noise and melody using only old synthesizers and minimal but well-employed guitar. Its music is mostly instrumental with vocals only on one or two tracks. After reading several glowing reviews of this record, I decided to find out what all of the fuss was about. I conjured images of a band that sounded like Air based solely on the fact that this was a French electronic duo. I couldn’t have been further from the mark.

M83 recalls the best moments of Boards of Canada without all of the stupid hip-hop beats. It resurrects Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine’s blurry wall of distortion using mainly keyboards. M83’s melodies take time to develop and unfurl into stately crescendos of sonic bliss not unlike those of Slowdive and Sigur Ros. The ambient qualities owe a debt to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. M83 takes all of these elements and blends them into a perfect example of how electronic music influenced shoegaze and now shoegaze is influencing electronica.

“Birds” starts the record off sounding similar to “Fitter, Happier” from Radiohead’s OK Computer. A computerized voice tells us that “birds are singing, flowers are blooming, and I am flying” over a keyboard that sounds like it is literally melting down into the beginning of the song “Unrecorded.” This song then begins with a repeating melody that collapses into bursts of lovely distorted fireworks. “Run into Flowers” is the single from the record and the only song here with “actual vocals.” This is not only the single best song I have heard this year, but it’s a wake-up call to every My Bloody Valentine wannabe band out there that time is up because the bar has just been raised. There are several running melody lines in this song that compete with each other throughout the haze, bubbling underneath. I find something new every time I listen to it. “In Church” starts out with a droning synth that sounds like something that you would hear in church. Heavenly “ahhhhhs” can be heard in the background that come in about one minute into the song. Droning, distorted guitars come in drowning out the washes of keyboard to end the piece.

“America” picks up the pace and delivers another amazing addition to the record. It has cut-and-paste sound clips over the beginning and drops out for some ambience before cutting in again with even more conversation samples. “On a White Lake, Near a Green Mountain” sounds like Boards of Canada and Slowdive got together and created the soundtrack for a post apocalyptic world where there isn’t anything but sand and space as far as the eye can see. This ends quickly as it segues into a song called “Noise” that is anything but noise. It is simple keyboard notes played over a droning guitar that seems like someone is pulling the strings off one by one while holding it right next to an overdriven amp. “Be Wild” and “Cyborg” are futuristic slices of repetition. “0078h” has more vocals, but this time they are cut up and injected into the song like random bits of information passing by on a flickering computer monitor.

“Gone” is another long, drawn-out affair with lovely synth strings and gurgling guitars. It seems as though at the end of this song M83 is using a pitch shifter to stretch the sustained guitar lines out into the nether regions of the inside of a black hole. This is a place where time and space no longer exist and you can get lost. “Beauties Can Die” has a twinkling keyboard part that seems to fizzle out after a few minutes ending the record. Ten minutes later, the end of the song comes in sort of the way that Radiohead’s Kid A did at the end of its last song except that here the wait is longer and the payoff more rewarding by a few minutes.

It took a couple of listens before Dead Cities, Red Seas, & Lost Ghosts struck me as completely brilliant. It is always hard to tell if something is really good for yourself if the hype surrounding it is big. I always know I really like a record if every time I go to pull out something to listen to, I find myself reaching for the same thing. I must’ve listened to this a couple of hundred times in the past month. I’ve said several times when reviewing other records this year that such and such a record will be in my top-10 at the end of the year. This record will not only be in my top-10 but probably number one. This is a really special record by some incredible human beings.

Omar Rodriguez-Lopez – A Manual Dexterity: Soundtrack, Vol. 1

Why aren’t film soundtracks more structured? The films they represent often follow rigid guidelines, rarely straying from genre qualifiers or predictable plots. And while it’s true that indie films have much more leniency than major motion pictures, rarely are they the complete messes their soundtracks might have you believe. Omar Rodriguez-Lopez’s A Manual Dexterity: Soundtrack, Vol. 1 is such a mishmash of sounds and structures, such an incoherent babble of a record, that it not only leaves the listener wondering what the hell the movie could be like, it leaves the listener with little desire to even see the movie.

Of course, Rodriguez-Lopez made his underground hay with now-defunct post-punk quintet At the Drive-In. He earned it, too: ATDI’s records were best known for singer Cedric Bixler’s high-octane wail, but it was Rodriguez-Lopez’s pulsing, flailing leads that set the band apart. Since the 2001 breakup, Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala (Bixler) put together The Mars Volta, releasing last year’s De-Loused in the Comatorium to endless praise from ATDI fans (and few others). That record’s prog arrangements and lengthy track times made it nearly unbearable, and while Rodriguez-Lopez managed to throw in some interesting guitar parts, it was clear that he was moving away from ATDI’s punk-flash and into decidedly more ambient territory.

During its very best moments, A Manual Dexterity comes across as a more aggressive Brian Eno, making up for what it lacks in melodic genius with waves of sound. The other tracks – shall we say, most tracks – are too grotesquely experimental and self-consciously art-damaged to make them even listenable.

Truly, all of the elements are in place. Rodriguez-Lopez is a talented, underappreciated guitarist who wishes not only to show his aggressive riffs but also to slap some beauty on a plastic canvas and see what sticks. Unfortunately, Rodriguez-Lopez comes off as the most indie-centric Guitar World jammer ever: You can almost see him, hunched in a corner of the store for hours, playing with effects pedals that more creative guitarists discard, flanked by lazy, unmotivated employees alternately trying to sell him something and push him out of the store as quickly as possible.

Some of this stuff is comically bad. “Of Blood and Blisters” torments listeners with two minutes of “pretty” piano interrupted by tremor-inducing white-noise stabs before launching into the record’s first real groove. The groove is fantastic, except that it comes eight songs in, and in the middle of an otherwise unlistenable track. “Around Knuckles White Tile” actually features shredding, and on “Deus Ex Machina” he connects with his Latin heritage, throwing a laughably out-of-place Latin traditional in the middle of this mess.

The songs all start off very quietly, as if taking a minute to convince you of Rodriguez-Lopez’s artistic credibility. After all, man, these are like, really deep songs, even though they don’t contain any words. Whatever film this accompanies, I really want no piece of it. Rodriguez-Lopez is an undeniably talented six-string slinger, but until he learns to restrain his artistic tendencies, he’s Jeff Fucking Beck without a good rhythm section.

Cheval de Frise – S/T

Here’s Cheval de Frise, looking to all the world like one prime god-damned stinker, dropping magic sticks once again into the heady brew of a unique jazzy, math-rock shitpit. That’s a good thing, ya dig – the Frise is some fan-fucking-tastic tomfoolery, when it wants to be. And the band most certainly wants to be, right now, and right fucking now.

It can get a bit too mathematic at times. The opening track alternates between some invigorating sonic nonsense and more expectable, boring, angular post-punk bullhockey. The Oxen/Champsian moments overwhelm the Beefheart/Luttenbacher-esque parts in a tragic display of forgivable mishappenstance. It is some amazement post-hastedly, howsoever, when one realizes the complimacated rhythmic orchestrations are necessary for understanding the absolute intransigent nature of man and our sorry-ass excuses for “music”. But what jitters there be on this record! Spastic twitchings of a nature quite unlike all those other spastic twitchings I so readily disapproved of while at university.

The French are good at looking down upon things, and Cheval de Frise has a lot to look down upon from these two men’s impregnable mountain fortress of highly choreographed (and oh so vitalistic) noise emissions. If you’d like your Lightning Bolt with more structure and less noise and more Don Cab, the guys in Cheval de Frise could be your friends. If you’d like your Don Cab with less vocals and more Gallic arrogance, the artists of Cheval de Frise could be your golf partners. If you’d like your golf with less walking and business and more sputtering, splattering jazz-rock, the folks in could be your future missus. It’s a hard thing to deny, this arbitrary awesomeness.

In the future, all music will sound like Cheval de Frise, if only because in the future the future will move so fast that all sounds everywhere are heard simultaneously. If you scream really loud in space, your head might explode, but if you scream “Cheval de Frise!” really loud in space, your head will be comforted by the downy soft alien pillows of the miscellaneous extraterrestrial space creatures that will come to protect you and proffer up safe intergalactic harbor. Not that Cheval de Frise is cosmic – this band is very, very, very France.

The Trouble with Sweeney – Fishtown Briefcase

Thanks to the likes of Wilco, Ryan Adams, and a handful of others, twang – twang as a metaphysical concept, that is – has been reestablished in our collective psyche. Suddenly, Beamers are blasting “I Walk the Line,” Wilco’s work is burgeoning on the iconic, and our President says “clearing brush” is one of his favorite pastimes. If I were at all upwardly mobile, I put my money in whiskey futures.

The term alt-country has become something like the Caucasian version of the amorphous misnomer “soul.” Fishtown Briefcase, the new album by Philly’s The Trouble with Sweeney, has, like the band’s other work, been wrongly categorized as alt-country. The album’s got both soul and twang to burn, though maybe not in the way you’d expect. Fishtown doesn’t directly address genre – not in the way an early Wilco record would, anyway. Instead, using a sort of Replacements-meets-Wilco on Vicodin sound, Fishtown Briefcase keeps the unexpected close at hand. How unexpected, you ask? Two words: Wings cover.

Sweeney’s easy-breasy cover of Wings’ “Listen to What the Man Said” is the best evidence of frontman Joey Sweeney’s knack for mélange. His voice, normally reeking – reeking in a good way – of Tweedy, Adams, late Westerberg, et. al., takes a melodic leap here that contains the angelic tones of soul and the hungover yearning of alt-country.

“I hope your Sleep is Dreamless” and “(A Girl Called) Your Song” are slow-tempo ode-to-a-girl songs that, while more consistently redolent of indie rock, are still brave and surprisingly concise. Sweeney can render a character – in the case of “(A Girl Called)” an untouchable, not-so-distant hottie – in only a few words. “Working for the DKNY,” Sweeney writes on “(A Girl Called),” “till she opens a shop of her own.” Mister Sweeney, I have a confession: I think that you wrote a song about that girl I stare at on the bus. How embarrassing.

Sadly, The Trouble With Sweeney, brandishing the best of alt-country and indie rock, is likely to be placed in one of those dreaded “best bands you’ve never heard of” bins of hip obscurity. It’s a cryin’ shame, however, to throw these guys in with alt-country castoffs, the sensitive and oblique indie-rockers, or toss them in the back of the records hops with the gag-worthy detritus of “folk-rock.” Truth is, only undersexed critics care about these distinctions. Sweeney, himself an award-winning music critic who’s appeared in publications like Philadelphia Weekly, certainly knows that songs trump movements any day. He’s got the songs to prove it.

Funeral Diner – The Wicked EP

Okay so this is not the new Funeral Diner record. This is an EP that came out on another record label in 2002 and then went out of print. Alone Records has done all of us Funeral Diner fans a huge favor by re-releasing it this year. I can’t even begin to tell you how ecstatic I was when I opened my review package and pulled this record out. I immediately threw it in my CD player and began to rock the fuck out!!! So…ummm…let me regain my bearings for a second here and tell you some important things about this record (actually review it) instead of just telling you to go out and buy this right now, which is what I want to do instead.

The Wicked EP might not be the best place for anyone getting into this band to start. The first song, “…And the Beast Shall Be Made Legion,” is actually pretty terrible. I would opt to skip this track if I had only known what it would be like. It is supposed to be a Godspeed You! Black Emperor type of instrumental song. What we have in reality is something more akin to Enya with jangly guitars. The keyboard tone is soooooo cheesy that it sounds like it came from a mid-80s Casio. What were you guys thinking?

“End on 6” immediately redeems the record, which is awesome from here on out. The only problem with the other three songs is that there is a major difference in the sound quality between songs, especially this one and “The Wicked.” “End on 6” begins with a grating blast of noise and throat-shredding vocals that will be familiar to any fans of Funeral Diner, Yaphet Kotto, Portraits of Past, etc. It is quite fast and extremely well written. It ends with some gang vocals screaming as the music drops out. “The Wicked” picks up where this left off but with better sound quality. This song builds up about a minute or so before the guitars take off, blasting out your eye sockets in the process. There is a break about mid-song where the music falls away and there is a nice strained scream before it comes in again. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is what this genre of music is supposed to be like. A perfect example if I ever saw one. “It Burns” ends the record on a high note as well.

Funeral Diner is one of the few bands out there that is really doing this style of music well. It seems that every time I turn around there is one more metallic hardcore band putting out one generic record after another. If you want amazing music from people who put real heart and soul into their hardcore, Funeral Diner is it. While this may not be the band’s best record and not one to start out with, it is a perfect addition to anyone’s record collection that is already a fan.

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