Radiateur – Brasil

This is probably by far my most favorite song I have reviewed so far. I have really started to enjoy scouring the myspace for foreign bands, because sometimes you will stumble upon little gems like this.

Radiateur are from France, & play amazing warm & catchy instrumental rock in the vein of old Euphone, Pele, The Letter E, & the sound Tristeza had on their Insound ep.

This song is amazing. It has an extremely catchy, airy bassline that gets stuck inside of your head in about three seconds. The drums are excellently played, very minimal, a lot of hi hat tapping, sounding just like the drums on The Nudes. The piano is used to a nice effect, not overpowering or playing too much, just enough to add some nice variety to the song. Towards the end of the song, the bass becomes punchy, the drums accentuate by some restrained cymbal bashing (when is bashing ever restrained?) The piano carries the same melody as before, just played a little higher, & then the bass takes on a very June Of 44 sound. Sadly, the song just ends abruptly after that. I wish the song was at least another three or four minutes longer.

Jake Stigers – No Vacancy

Jake Stigers knows his way around a hook and his second album No Vacany makes that abundantly clear. But, the production and overall feel of this record represent an MOR mentality that ultimately limits the album from a creative standpoint.

And how can they call seven songs an album. Keep in my, this is not a seven song Led Zeppelin album where the songs stretched into the ten minute range. No, these seven tracks clock in at a brisk twenty two minutes. I just don’t get it.

The stuttering guitar riff that opens “Ride With You” is augmented by Stigers’ smooth rock voice, but the chorus of “I wanna ride with you/I wanna roll with you” sounds like it could have been written by Uncle Kracker. And that doesn’t bode well for the rest of the “album”. “End of the World” has a bent note guitar hook in the opening to die for. This track makes clear Stigers’ gift of melody, and even has stronger lyrics. There is no way that you can listen to this song, and not picture it being used in “Grey’s Anatomy” or another show of that ilk. A key track. “She’s a Woman” slows the pace, with a nice, sweet acoustic guitar strum. The lyrics, though, bring the song down from it’s gorgeous melody.

“Tomorrow Never Comes” is a nice piece of rock and roll, with a classic sense of building the song slowly through the verses, to that huge chorus. But, again the lyrics are lacking. His cover of John Hiatt’s “Ridin’ With the King” is a decent, bluesy reading. It showcases not only Stigers’ impassioned vocals, but some nice swinging guitar. “House of Our Own” sounds like it belongs on Adult Contemporary radio. It’s a pretty song, with a decent hook and the lyrics are an improvement. The one minute acapella “Slow Time” isn’t really much. Sounding like crappy doo wop group, this should have been taken off the record.

There is little doubt that Mr. Stigers is a talented songwriter. His melodies shine throughout this album. But, he just doesn’t have the lyrical prowess to make these songs real stunners. Maybe if he would work as hard on the lyrics as he does on the melody, he can deliver an album of true grace, and hooks. Until then, No Vacancy can tide you over as an okay album that just doesn’t deliver consistently.

Instrumental Quarter – Traffic Jam

Sickroom Records has made a name for itself by bringing many European math and post-rock acts to the attention of fans Stateside, and they continue the tradition with Traffic Jam, their second offering from Italian quartet Instrumental Quarter. While the band’s brand of jazzy, laid-back instrumental post-rock is hardly innovative, Traffic Jam proves to be an enjoyable addition to the canon of a genre that has been stagnating as of late. Band leader Paride Lanciani’s strong guitar melodies and Davide Areondo’s excellent violin and Rhodes work go a long way into injecting a little sincerity into a musical form that’s quickly becoming a by-the-numbers cash-in. Still, even if their motives are pure, Traffic Jam has its share of glaringly referential moments, and one can’t help but wonder if maybe everything under the post-rock umbrella is beginning to sour.

Traffic Jam starts strongly for the most part, the band’s fluid composition style sweeping up the listener and carrying them away before there’s much chance to struggle. The band’s promotional material makes big on the music as a vehicle out of the hustle-and-bustle of the daily grind, a highlighting of the bond we have with nature through music. While this idea of an organic connection does come through in the subtle drumming, pizzicato violin and resonant acoustic guitar chords found throughout Traffic Jam, one can’t help but feel that this connection to nature is at times just a weak façade. “Waking to the 5th” sounds like the background music to those silly videos of swooping aerial shots over picturesque landscapes. Personally, I’d rather not be reminded of desperate attempts to squeeze a few more drops of blood from the tourist turnips when I listen to my post-rock. The band is truly talented, but the relatively short track times remove the usual epic post-rock feel from the proceedings, at times making the band sound more like session players scoring a television show than musicians making a resounding musical statement. Tracks like “The New Year” seems to fade out and end before they’ve even had a chance to get their pistons pumping full-speed.

In fact, when the band finally does stretch itself out, the results are impressive. The seven and half minute “The B&W Movie Set” finds the band channeling the fragmented splicings of Stars Like Fleas to wonderful effect, eventually erupting into a brooding Damnation-style dirge with finger-picked guitar and jazzy cymbal play. Immediately following it, Instrumental Quarter make their only real misstep on the album, the boring rocker “Water Guns,” which segues into a few more tracks that seem moments away from running out of steam before the album picks up again and closes sturdily with the upbeat “Jackpot” and the Celtic-flavored “I’m So Excited.”

Traffic Jam is the work of a talented group of musicians and an interesting and worthy addition to the increasingly homogenized post-rock catalog. Now if they’ll only start behaving like post-rockers; three and a half minutes is the perfect song length for pop music, it’s true, but we post-fans want (and pretty much expect) to invest more time in songs than that! After all, we can always just stand at one of those “New Age Moods” set-ups by the greeting cards in Wal-Mart when we want our nature-rock in brief snippets. Not that we ever would, though.

Nueva Vulcano – Split

The band composed most famously of Shiner’s frontman has been kicking around for a few years now. The Life and Times have a worldly philosophy, releasing music everywhere and touring overseas since their inception. This split contains three tracks from both The Life and Times and Nueva Vulcano, a Spanish band (you probably guessed this already) from Barcelona. I’m actually partial towards the band I was unfamiliar with, even though I’ll never be able to comprehend Spanish.

A remixed song off The Life and Times’ full-length is the first thing to come off this split. “My Parade” is actually “Muscle Cars,” but the name change signifies a Freeman Moxy remix. No, I cannot tell you what the hell that means. I compared it with the original a few times and the remix is pretty much a waste of your life. The most noticeable changes are some added twinkles and volume distortion. In essence, whoever was behind the wheel on this operation screwed the song over. Someone please tell me why there needs to be a “remix” of a Life and Times song in the first place?

Anyways, the next song is more like what I wanted to hear. It’s a subdued instrumental running about three minutes in length. I have a strong feeling that “The Silent Take” could be perfectly placed in a movie soundtrack as introspective fodder. The atmosphere is spread out and the mood settling. Typical of The Life and Times material, it’s also very bittersweet in retrospective.

Nueva Vulcano brings some much needed focus back into my attention span. Out of the gates, they sound like early Appleseed Cast, but more disjointed. The riffs are bright and vocal melodies uplifting, but in terms of recording quality it’s lacking. “Palo Rosa” has one of those bombastic build-ups or what I like to call “cool parts” when I’m not writing a review. If Nueva Vulcano writes more songs like the previous one, that are complete rather than unfinished thoughts, I’m all for it.

This split is out now on a Spanish record label, and if you’re looking for it you can purchase it online. I know for a fact that The Life and Times’ official store has all versions in stock. In any case, it’s worth checking out, at least for a couple songs.

Saturnin – Pied De Nez

Another incredible find on myspace. I should write Fox a thank you letter for not turning myspace into a pay site yet, which will probably happen soon in the future since myspace funds are used to pay for Rupert Murdoch’s extravagant apartment in New York. I think it costs something like a hundred thousand a month? I am pretty sure that is what it was, if not something even more costly than that.

So anyway, let’s get to Saturnin. Sounding like Air mixed with early Pink Floyd, this will get the indie rock ladies all in a swoon, especially if they read Rilke and Goethe to Talkie Walkie.

The song is really subdued and understated, with a strong emphasis on the singer’s vocals, which are really gorgeous in that French pop kind of way. There isn’t very much variation with the drums within the song, but I could care less. The bass is just used to anchor the song, nothing really fancy or any flourishes to be found. The keyboard, on the other hand, creates a very moody melody to counterpoint the silky vocals, and the few guitar washes just add some color, but could be done without. The main draw are the vocals. I know I have brought them up a lot, but it is the same with Air. The music is always really strong and beautiful, but it is used as a foil to highlight the vocals. This is another song I wish would last longer.

The Jet Age – Breathless

I wanted to like this album. I don’t even know why but I just did. Perhaps my optimism was brought on by the excitement of knowing I had a trip planned to the coast for the weekend right in time for one of the biggest storms they’ve had in years. Hey, who doesn’t love big waves? But despite my continual optimism as I listened my way through the album, I just couldn’t get into it.

The recording was sub par and I had to really crank the volume to hear the details within each song. Although there really wasn’t a lot of detail so I suppose there isn’t much to be lost with a softer volume. “Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Lose” opens the album and starts right off with a trippin’ guitar solo ala Mr. Lenny Kravitz which rears its head again throughout the track. Former front man of The Hurricane Lamps leads the vocals hear and they feel a bit flat and could use a boost of enthusiasm, despite the rolling drum beat and over-the-top electric guitar.

“Ride On” bounces onto the scene with a lighter heart and I am pleased to hear the guitar solos traded in for upbeat backing guitar that had a really nice harmony tone. The previous song just lost my attention and I was thoroughly bored around minute three but this second track showed promise in their ability to be catchy.

“Denny and Michelle” started out with a low-key guitar tone slightly reminiscent of bands in the Stone Temple Pilots era but it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly who. The track has quality about it that makes its exact age hard to determine. However, it bleeds into the following track “Slope” which sounds so similar that at first I didn’t realize it was a different song but rather there was just a strange pause in the middle.

The explosive drums and continual use of heavier-than-necessary guitars has more of a tiring effect on me rather than an energizing one. It also helps to blend all of the songs together and make it so that each one lacks in its own personality. The vocals also don’t offer any versatility. Once the album has come to a close, I’m hard pressed to pick out any one particular song.

“Out of Sight” while sounding pretty close to every other song on the album, has added some harmonies to some of the vocals and has made it sound more catchy and fun. I think the beat feels a tiny bit too fast and he says the line “Out of sight” too many times..

The Jet Age is a bouncy, somewhat timeless group that draws influences from many generations spanning from Stone Temple Pilots and Lenny Kravitz to Jet and The Killers. However, there upbeat nature takes a toll and it’s hard to hold that type of high energy for an entire album. By the time the end draws near, I would always grow weary and feel I’ve heard all I needed to hear. And yet, as soon as the music stopped, not a single line stuck in my head and tried to coax me into putting my headphones back on.

Fair To Midland – The Drawn And Quartered EP

This quintet from Texas take their name from the old saying “fair to middling”, meaning moderately good. A term that also comes in handy in summing up the music on The Drawn And Quartered EP. That is if you like heavy-handed, schizoid-rock trying to pass itself off as prog-rock.

There’s not much variation between the four songs featured here (two studio, two live) or much in the way of breaking out from the overdone thrashing beats, off-tempo buzzsaw guitars and semi-industrial rhythms that bands like Tool and System Of A Down make a living from. But Fair To Midland attempt to soothe their savage beast with breaks of leaner guitars that allow some artful keyboard lines to blow through. Any light they bring however, is quickly extinguished as the jagged rock kicks in again as quickly as it left.

“Orphan Anthem ‘86″ and “Kyla Cries Cologne” are the two studio tracks and both are richly produced power-rock tunes containing copious amounts of chugging and churning guitars and throbbing bass lines. The fluttering keys and undulating electronics of the intros grab the ears while the rest, coupled with the lively drumming, give the whole head a shake, letting go briefly for concise open passages void of any cool solos. “A Seafarer’s Knot” and “Abigail” are the two live tracks taken from a 2004 show at the Granada Theater in Dallas, TX. Amid the crowd noise, these tracks feature more of the same dense rock, although a bit rougher around the edges.

On the plus side, singer Darroh Sudderth’s slick and refined voice give Fair To Midland a vocal advantage over what other bands in this genre offer and lends some prog-rock cred to the mélange. His voice flows effortlessly over the serrated rhythms, hitting both highs and lows while smoothing out the overall sound.

As a Holiday bonus, the EP comes with a twelve minute video featuring the band playing their last live gig before resigning to the studio to record their first label-released LP which will be available in 2007.

Thom Yorke – Spitting Feathers EP

Shakespeare wrote that brevity is the soul of wit. Perhaps Thom Yorke should have taken heed of those words in 2006. Yorke’s first solo disc, The Eraser, was released in July; while there was much fanfare, the disc fell flat on with some of listeners (most of whom seemed to unfairly expect the musical ‘rapture’ to come from the nine-song collection). References were, however, made to The Eraser being the equivalent of ‘Kid B’ due to its skeletal electronic structure and poignant, pointed lyrics.

The ‘Kid B’ comparisons didn’t seem relevant, however, because Kid A caused a minor furor for being slightly revolutionary in that it was a radical departure from Radiohead’s OK Computer (though it did seem to be a logical, though somewhat radical progression). After following Kid A through Amnesiac to Hail to the Thief (and adding in Jonny Greenwood’s ethereal Bodysong soundtrack along the way), it doesn’t seem unexpected at all for Yorke to be releasing collections of so-called ‘boops and bleeps.’ The intent of Kid A was to skew the musical landscape for so-called rock bands; the reasoning behind The Eraser was merely to shore up the template for that sort of thing – a far less grandiose undertaking, to say the least.

The Eraser had fine moments, but even at a mere nine songs and 41 minutes, it felt overblown somehow. Taken in brief doses, The Eraser had a few capsules of fine tuneage; as a whole, it suffered from too much sprawl to weigh in as much more than fine background music.

Yorke turns this problem around with the five-song, twenty minute Spitting Feathers EP (Japanese release only, unfortunately), which is far more worthy of the ‘Kid B’ mantle in a much more flattering way. “Drunkk Machine” compiles multiple electronic ebbs and swells and layers them over a staggered pair of simultaneous rhythms that drop in and out of the track. Yorke’s sobering vocals float down in another patchwork audio synch; when his voice echoes out, “I’ve got a bad feeling,” it feels like a declaration wrought from heaven itself, even if it is being shared by a feeble, meek angel. The track’s breakdown sticks out like the soundtrack to a metalhead’s LSD freakout, with Yorke’s caterwaul howling morphs into something resembling Robert Plant through the surrounding electronic mayhem. Perhaps there’s an anti-Bush sentiment in there as well, lyrically … “The Drunkk Machine / Spitting nonsense … Talking in tongues … Splitting hairs / Don’t listen … The Drunkk Machine spits / Who made it in charge?”

“A Rat’s Nest” is best described as a whirling dervish, as synth noodles audibly encircle Yorke’s pained croakings, whipping around his voice as if trying to lift his words to a different plane of musical existence. “Jetstream” is admittedly a curiosity more than anything, with Yorke spitting frantic, high-pitched wails about “a fucking rubber man” bouncing atop an artsy white-boy’s idea of breakbeats.

The gem, however, flies in the face of the issue that The Eraser suffered from most, as York stretches that album’s “Harrowdown Hill” into an intense seven-minute epic that makes the song far more powerful than the original inclination. The sparse synth swells and more sparse beat allow Yorke’s sharp, minimalist guitars and invasive vocals to cut through listeners. The mood of the track fits the subject matter (the suspicious death of Dr. David Kelly, a former employee of the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence who appeared to have been ‘erased’ through a disguised suicide for scapegoat clauses), and Yorke’s pained warbling of passages such as, “Don’t ask me, ask the ministry” and “Did I fall, or was I pushed, and where’s the blood?” After the blast of intensity, the light, distorted vocal techno-dub fare of “Iluvya” ends the album on a distorted, more resolved note.

Although one of the tracks here is merely an extended edit of a previous song, the whole of Spitting Feathers represents the sort of material the music world seems to expect from Yorke on an everyday basis in this day and age. This collection of disjointed, syncopated electronic madness is five songs of creative, understated art-pop genius evident to those who are looking to find it. This stuff will most likely go over the heads and around the bend from a large amount of the general public, but it’s obvious these days that Yorke’s making his music for the people looking specifically for it. In that respect, Spitting Feathers is a smash hit, indeed.

Jeniferever – You Only Move Twice

Ok, so I am taking my advice now, and this is going to start following a thematic flow so you could make a mixtape with all the songs and not have them be too different.

Jeniferever play a sweet brand of dreamy indie pop, falling somewhere between The Album Leaf and Owen. If that doesn’t get you overly excited about this band, then you probably have no heart.

“You Only Move Twice” starts out with a simple melody, sounding a little bit like The MP, then a reverb drenched guitar comes in, really low and quiet, adding a perfect atmosphere for the drums to move the song along. When the singer starts up, you could mistake him for Mike Kinsella, which is great for this song. If the vocals weren’t so delicate, they could really mar the song. About a minute in, a guitar comes in heavy for just a few seconds, then segues back into the gentle melody. Towards the end of the song, the vocals come in stronger, with the guitar strokes being a little bit heavy handed, & the drums played a little more forcefully, but it all fits in quite nicely, adding the right power. Then some American Football trumpet and strings come in, and the song ends beautifully.

Rifu – Bombs for Food, Mines for Freedom

Hardcore is a cruel mistress. Fickle fans are quick to dismiss bands for being unoriginal; yet music straying from established preferences gets tossed aside just as easily. Most listeners will lump Norway’s RIFU into one of these categories, and really, it doesn’t matter which one.

RIFU get pushed back and forth between hardcore and punk influences. They bang away with more rage than a band like Avail, but lack the intensity of a Pg. 99 or the focus of a Converge. On the album Bombs for Food, Mines for Freedom, RIFU doesn’t thrill, nor do they do anything unforgivable. This new disc is a blistering album to be sure, but you’ve probably heard it before.

Under 38 minutes long, the album is compact – only the first 2 minutes are wasted on an intro track. Overall the mix is good but the rhythm guitar sounds muddy, most likely because they play a lot of low-end chords fast. One of the larger sonic drawbacks is the singing. The vocals can be grating, even for hardcore punk. Luckily there are various singing styles, from hardcore screams to punk rock shouts. Lyrical content is vaguely political, so the words won’t date the album too much – just in case you revisit Bombs for Food, Mines for Freedom in 2020, which you won’t.

All tracks are loud, fast and sweating with discontent, but the best among them include “Sold Out World” and “Come All and Blow Your Brains Out”. If you like hardcore punk, you can give them a fair shake by visiting their website.

Next Page »