Gerald Collier – How Can There Be Another Day?

From his days as the creative powerhouse behind Best Kissers in the World to the digital-only release solo record Unreleased Country Album, Gerald Collier’s taken a few spins around the tilt-a-whirl that is the music business since the early 90’s. Having been performing as a ‘solo’ artist for almost a dozen years now, the prolific Collier has an expected pile of scraps and loose ends lying around the old tape vaults. Of course, when those toss-off tracks are coming from an artist this skilled, it’s not necessarily a stab in the dark to think there’d be interest in a collection of the best material.

And so it goes with How Can There Be Another Day?, a solid rag-and-bone collection of demos, b-sides and cover songs that, surprisingly enough, draws completely from the pinpointed ’97-’98 era between C/Z Records’ I Had to Laugh Like Hell and Warner Brothers’ self-titled album. The covers themselves are fine choices, though a few of the executions are a bit on the safe side.

Collier’s vocal inflections on the Rolling Stones’ “Jigsaw Puzzle” evoke Mick Jagger without getting too karaoke, though the arrangement and tempo is far too spot-on Stones to keep the six-minute track from feeling bogged down. His take on Richard Thompson’s “Night Comes In” swaps the accordion for a second guitar; the added flair gives the track a spark, though again, the performance feels more ‘tribute band’ than ‘emotionally attached homage.’ Admittedly, Collier and company give The Strangeloves’ “Sorrow” a gritty honky-tonk bar swagger while turning Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s “Rocket Man” into a southern fried, beer-swilling, Saturday night corner bar centerpiece, so all is easily forgiven on the cover tune front.

Leonard Cohen and Steve Earle tracks round out the covers end of the album, but stewing amongst that knowledge is fruitless, as the luster of this album comes through on the original material. Even within a catalog as quality as Collier’s, it’s criminal to think that the intense acoustic stagger of album opening “One Clear Shot” was ever relegated to ‘b-side album’ status. The quiet, down-home take on “Don’t Discard Me” draws the sort of goosebumps reserved for stuff like Jim Croce’s “Operator” (all of the chills with no cheesy aftertaste), while the tone of “Hell Has Frozen Over (On Who I Used To Be)” plays to the downtrodden poet, an elegy of regret and restraint that would’ve made for a fine liquored-up Tom Waits nugget in the early 70’s. The focal point here, though, sits upon two delicately plucked acoustic guitars as Collier’s shaky voice longs for revenge during “For Taking My Baby Away,” a song so stark and haunting that even crickets would be inclined to stop chirping and listen if exposed to it.

The only logical way to take inventory of How Can There Be Another Day? is to consider the disc as a pair of EPs – one comprised of six cover songs, and the other made up of Collier’s original material (ounding out that material are fine live full-band versions of formerly tamed tunes “Don’t Go With Him” and “I’m Not Coming Back”). The covers work well enough as placeholders, as they’re not bad enough to intentionally pass over, but not good enough to stand up to the absolutely blowout original material. For a b-sides collection, this is a marvelous disc to show that great things can happen when singer-songwriter guys undermine current culture and lean more to the folk/rock side of things, keeping the country twinges to a minimum. As with most releases in Collier’s cache of music, How Can There Be Another Day? is recommended – and then some.

Darkest Hour – Demon(s)

This is Darkest Hour’s first stamp on metal since their crushing 2005 album Undoing Ruin. The first single from their upcoming July 10th release Deliver Us shows no signs of slowing down for these gentleman. Darkest Hour have always walked a fine line between their potential to rule the world and their ability to hold on to their credibility as an underground force to be reckoned with, and they prove their potential for the former with this new single.

Immediately the melodic sensibility kicks in with a glorious guitar line evoking what can only be described as bell tones layered over a driving rhythm that doesn’t slow down. John Henry’s vocals have gone through so much, it’s amazing that he can keep going and getting even better with each album. Here, its no exception. He even sings in the chorus line, without sacrificing any ferocity. Thia is a moving piece, only slowing down in the breakdown that leads to the chorus. As far as technicality goes, Darkest Hour have always shown they can shred without being overbearing in their delivery. Here the solo combines their thrash like speed with enough simplicity to show their commitment to the integrity of the song and not just the impressive solo.

Personally, I can’t wait to here the full length album and this song, while solid, left me wanting more. They have yet to reach their full potential and thats saying a lot after such solid releases.

The Hold Steady – Norman – Opolis, Oklahoma – 2007-06-12

“She got screwed up by religion
She got screwed by soccer players
She got stoned for the first time in the camps down by the Mississippi River
Lord to be seventeen forever

She got confused about the truth
She came to in a confession
She got high for the last time on the camps on the banks of the rivers
Lord to be 33 forever”

–Craig Finn, The Hold Steady “Stevie Nix”

“Heavenly God! Cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy. He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him…A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!”

–James Joyce “The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”

She got screwed up by her vision
It was scary when she saw him
She didn’t tell a single person about the paths along the Mississippi River
Lord to be seventeen forever

–Craig Finn, The Hold Steady “Stevie Nix”

Beauty rejected and beauty accepted. I don’t know Craig Finn, but something tells me he saw a vision once that led him down that always diminishing and replenishing road of being an artist.

If poetry is a vessel, then some age old Irish themes (drinking, religion, repenting) have certainly come back strong with The Hold Steady. If these stories were always in the air, waiting for someone to find the right words and grab them and mold them in their own way, Craig Finn has found his own New York poetry with a bar band that gives the poetry some wheels and rock and roll resonance.

The girl in “Stevie Nix” didn’t accept her vision, and dammit she suffered, a choice contrary to the human condition. We all find ourselves a little screwed up sometimes, and it’s probably because we want something lost or left in a river. Craig Finn’s tragedies usually end in young people getting stuck in the bars.

Many characters in Finn’s bawdy fictions look for the instant high, the simple place to score, looking for that moment, trying to get it back. In relation to Joyce’s life story, the Catholic church is the opposing force in pretty much all activities that today’s youth view as fun – drugs, sex and rock n roll. And one’s experience with a serious Catholic upbringing leads to an amplified party existence in later years if the person leaves the clergy track.

Because Finn writes the way he does, about the people he does, The Hold Steady’s music (“Almost Killed Me” “Separation Sunday” and “Boys and Girls and America”) have felt like the first truly rock and roll albums to come out in some time: big guitars, earnest deliver, punk vocal chords, vivid stories, drugs, kids.

The Hold Steady comes at you from an escaped confession booth like a prayer purified by marijuana smoke, like a sermon possessed by Benzedrine and read by a whore, like a vision on a beach somewhere of a pale, serene woman or a woman on the Mississippi he chose not to follow the river. Like great authors who have grown up in the Catholic church, Craig Finn has chosen to create life out of life instead of fearing the clutches of the unworldly.

But the spell of Catholic rhetoric never leaves his verses where beat poetry, druggers and shady characters mingle with the language and people of the bible, the language that few Catholic authors can escape. The Hold Steady gloriously soils it with the wreckage of their own rock n roll lives –“you in the corner with a good looking drifter/two cups of coffee/ten packs of sugar/I heard Gedeon saw you in Denver/ he said you‘re contagious“.

When critics thank Thin Lizzy, Bruce Springsteen and The Replacements for The Hold Steady they should also be thanking the Virgin Mary.

It’s the language that makes the stories worth listening to and it invigorates the stories these authors tell with a lust for life evident in the all-night rocking of Brooklyn’s Hold Steady, the string band stampede sound of The Pogues or the magic in the words of Yeats’ “The Wind Among the Reeds.”

All of this hyperbole no doubt covers up how comfortable a setting The Hold Steady draws live.

Craig Finn sounds louder than Bruce Springsteen, and as a result he sounds taller than he appears live in his polyester blue and white Adidas sports shirt. He looks Gnomic and happy as hell onstage – somewhere between the journalist Joe Klein and Elvis Costello.

His poetry matched the bawdy guitar chords of Tab Kubler and classic piano solos. “Charlemagne” opens with an organ that sounds like a casio mocking the pompous pipe organs of century old chapels. They do baptize their audiences with songs perfect for beer.

Sunday June 12 at Opolis in Norman, Oklahoma the crowd was mostly young kids, kids just freshly influenced by music that stands at odds with messages the strips of churches in this town. But The Hold Steady also skirt the proselytizing of Web site and bloggers today. Their sound is not a soft one.

When Sufjan Stevens and Animal Collective fans flock to a Hold Steady album, they will most likely be disappointed by that abrasive voice and that E Street guitar sound. There’s no subtlety or irony, just beer worship rock.

To the outside observer a Hold Steady show is hedonism. To observers of American culture, The Hold Steady fits a mold of great American performers. They sweat, they uniformly medicate themselves with bottled Budweisers (they all drank them), they work hard and play for hours, they’re loud, their poetry comes from experience, the guitar riffs reach classic rock proportions, their music hits the road, lyrics shun time.

Like Joyce intended to do with his Dublin stories and dreamscapes, The Hold Steady did with Separation Sunday. Their songs drew map of their beloved, home, Brooklyn, where “everyone is a critic or a DJ,” Finn told the Norman audience.

While doing this in Hold Steady’s concept albums characters appear, disappear and reappear like a friend holed up for a while in his cheap apartment saying he’s “figuring shit out.” In aesthetic art so many vibrant persons get lost: those poor souls who beat up school kids, get strung out, and those tough bastards who accidentally expose poetry in the way they talk shit and the way they live their lives. When art forgets about these people, then it’s not doing its job. And that’s why half of the crowd knew every word to the songs.

Whether the crowd knew it or if they just wanted to rock (and rock and bump and bop they did) it’s hard to say. But the band who commanded their attention had done a lot of living and the road is now their reward. There is a reason they were invited to play with Bruce Springsteen at a recent tribute concert.

Finn yells his lyrics like the last guy at the bar trying to get someone to listen to his favorite passage from On The Road. After keyboardist Franz Nicolay took a shot of Jameson Irish whiskey Finn got going.

“There are nights when I think Sal Paradise was right/’Boys and Girls in America have such a sad time together.”

Finn sang to the ghosts of the Beat generation on “Stuck Between Stations” with gusto that never waned through the “Separation Sunday” material and the excellent “Southtown Girls.”

One group of fans had been following The Hold Steady for four states and the band already had conversation ready to crack open with them. If the groupies (all ball capped males) were any indication, The Hold Steady give the same kind of all-out performance every night.

A ten-year-old child made his way to the front of the crowd (always compact in a space that should never hold more than 72 people) thanks to some generosity on the crowd’s part. By the end of the set Finn couldn’t help but to declare little Curtis, as well as the rest of the crowd, part of The Hold Steady, reminding one of Morrissey’s penchant for letting fans onstage and telling all security guards to screw off.

A band so influenced by giants (the James Joyce thing may be a stretch, but a cosmic reality to this writer) has impressively managed to keep a punk vibe on their loud fictions and live the experience is communal– kids coming on stage, playing guitar, dancing with Finn. Many know the words by now. This point in The Hold Steady’s career, hype can do no more and the rest is in their hands.

And if the desolation angels of Brooklyn keep visiting Finn in his hangovers, then we should just be waiting in line to buy him another beer.

Jill Cunniff – City Beach

City Beach is the solo debut of Luscious Jackson’s leading lady, Jill Cunniff. As the first of the crew to go out on her own, she has made a decent attempt here but she needs to learn to stick to her strengths. With a distinct voice that lends itself well to breezy, summertime grooves, it is these points within the album that have the most promise. But unfortunately, this only makes up about half the collection and even the better tracks fall a little flat.

Opening the material with “Lazy Girls” is a step in the right direction for Cunniff. It caters to her strengths with her luscious voice floating alongside samples and a smooth, laid-back groove. The lyrics are simple and there are certainly no complicated twists to figure out here. It’s all about “eating orange popsicles”, having fun and just chillin’. “Happy Warriors” follows in the same groove with a Brazilian jazz influence featuring snappy samples backed by horns and high-pitched harmonies. This is certainly one of the more standout tracks of the album. “NYC Boy” is another song that lends itself well to Cunniff’s vocals and falls in line with the same style as the first couple tracks. There is even a hint of her old label mate’s influence with the Beastie-style flute swirling around in the background.

The album continues on in a pleasant manner, layered with mixed-up samples and various funky grooves that constantly have you thinking “where have I heard this before?” The style has a definite dated feel as though it should’ve arrived on the store shelves about a decade ago. “Eye Candy” picks up the tempo and starts in on the move towards the more pop side of the album that doesn’t blend well with Cunniff’s vocals. The piano is a nice addition here but the effort towards more of a pop style pushes it closer to cheesy than anything else. And then “Apartment 3” follows with an adult soft pop sound that could easily find heavy rotation on one of those ‘work friendly’ radio stations.

There are tracks like “Love Is A Luxury”, “Exclusive” and “Future Call” that just about take the whole album down altogether. With her normally smooth, breathy voice trying to keep up with the yelling style of “Future Call” and lyrics like “I hear you’re out with chicks/ your tellin’ me your working late / so when you say your all mine / I must admit I hesitate / this town is full of women out there huntin’ down a man / but I told you right from the beginning that I’m a one-man band” in “Exclusive”, it just becomes painful to listen to. But if those songs don’t do you in, the ending of “Exclusive” where she repeats “Why can’t we be exclusive?” will certainly do it. This isn’t a deep examination into relationships here, it just sounds pathetic.

The last two tracks on the album “Calling Me” and “Disconnection” return to the slow, sensual style of the earlier portion of the album. The latter features Emmylou Harris within the vocal harmonies but it doesn’t add anything to the track at all. And honestly, I have to wonder how many people would even make it to those last couple tracks. They come a little too late and cannot undo the mess of the previous tracks.

While some serious Luscious Jackson fans might find this album interesting, others might get halfway through the album and call it quits, or perhaps fall asleep during “Apartment 3”. Either way, while Jill Cunniff has a beautiful set of pipes without the complimentary musical environment even her rich, sensual vocals can’t help turn the bland lyrics into something that anyone would want to listen to on their next drive to the beach or anywhere else.

Pissed Jeans – Hope For Men

Pennsylvania’s Pissed Jeans comes on like a ton of bricks. Hope For Men plays out its catharsis in known ways, however, which is a shame because that limits the band. We’ve heard this sound from a host of previous bands. The album has its moments, to be sure – but overall, it comes off as old wine in new jars.

The primal yelling exhibits a David Yow influence on a number of the cuts (“Secret Admirer,” “I’ve Still Got You,” “Caught Licking Leather”). Jesus Lizard countered Yow’s howling with solid rock rhythms and some inventive, unexpected guitar riffs. Pissed Jeans has the solid rhythm section but dispenses with the invention in terms of the guitar. It’s been replaced with lots of power chords and even more feedback. Greg Ginn would be proud!

“I’ve Still Got You” does have a verse-bound guitar riff that holds you. “A Bad Wind” gets metallic and pummeling. More often, the guitar tends towards out-of-control squalls of feedback. Is Pissed Jeans the bastard child of Jesus Lizard attack and Godheadsilo heaviness? It could be, except that the one truly amazing track has little to do with either influence. “The Jogger” has nothing but calmly delivered, spoken-word nouns for lyrics and nothing but a low-rumble bass for backing (oh – and feedbacking guitars towards the end). It’s incredibly menacing. It’s like listening to a serial killer’s last rant before he takes his own life. It’s apparently an indictment of yuppie life and it succeeds masterfully: “Whole Foods / Matching outfit / Ford Explorer / The jogger.”

I listened to Pissed Jeans with high expectations, but this was based mostly on Sean McGuinness being the band’s drummer. When he played with Navies and Like Language, he showed that he was one of the absolutely most solid and clever drummers in post-punk music. His playing was a phenomenal mix of pounding and detail. With Pissed Jeans, though, his playing matches the tone of the music: primal and cathartic, but without much of what marks him as a giant in the field. Some moments on “My Bed” and a few others only hint at what he’s capable of.

Production-wise, the recordings do capture the band’s energy. It has long been a shortcoming of music like this that the recordings fail to do justice to the power of the live set. In that regard, Hope For Men does better than most. The live show is something to behold and remains the better way to experience the power of Pissed Jeans.

Buffalo Tom – Three Easy Pieces

When Buffalo Tom slipped-off into hibernation sometime after 1998’s feloniously-spurned Smitten, it appeared like the end was pretty much nigh for the Bostonian power-trio. For many fans, 2000’s Asides and 2002’s Besides compilations felt like admirable, albeit bittersweet, acts of closure. And when singer/guitarist Bill Janovitz talked rather dismissively about a recording reunion in interviews for his even more overlooked solo releases, it seemed like there was never going to be a right time or reason for Buffalo Tom to exist beyond the occasional US live show and the CD/vinyl racks of ruefully-maturing followers of seminal college-rock. So why does summer 2007 unexpectedly find Janovitz, singer/bassist Chris Colbourn and drummer Tom Maginnis back with a brand new album that cuts it with some of their best work?

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact reasons why, but it may have something to do with the more positive climate that Buffalo Tom’s unpretentious yet impossibly passionate breed of rugged folk-rock now finds itself. With the reunified original line-up of Dinosaur Jr., a reconfigured/relaunched Lemonheads, ongoing deluxe reissue campaigns for Pavement, Sebadoh et al. and a resurgent interest in Kristin Hersh, Buffalo Tom’s broad guitar-slinging peer group is finally enjoying its due historical recognition. Couple such retrospective warmth with The Hold Steady’s success in picking-up the baton from Buffalo Tom’s Hüsker Dü-meets-early-Springsteen marathon running, and it looks/sounds like 2007 is pretty much the best time in a nearly decade for a freshly-baked Buffalo Tom LP. Such zeitgeist-matching speculation aside, there’s more than likely been plenty of ‘internal’ impulses to push these three old friends back into the studio too; whether it be to take a break from fatherhood-necessitating day-jobs, to complete some ‘unfinished business’ or to just recapture the thrill of making music together again. Whatever the reasons behind it all, it ultimately matters little when the end-product is so assuredly well-built.

Neither too mature (i.e. boring), nor too desperately age-defying (i.e. embarrassing), Three Easy Pieces potently reenergizes older Tom trademarks as well as imprinting a few new ones. Put in lazier chronologically-contextual terms, this 13-song collection is sonically and thematically pitched somewhere the loose raw power of 1995’s Sleepy Eyed and the eclectic craftsmanship of Smitten. This means that there are indeed many direct connections to the rich Buffalo back catalogue, but not in a laurel-resting or obviously-retreading kind of way.

Traditionalists craving more sprightly and gutsy anthems – driven by layered meshes of acoustic and eclectic guitars and Janovitz’s earthy tones – will certainly not be disappointed by the “Tangerine”-flavoured chug of “September Shirt”, the scorching “Summer”-sized “Bottom of the Rain” and the vivacious “Velvet Roof”-echoing of “Good Girl”. Those who preferred the intangible tenderness of “Larry” will certainly feel their heart-strings strained by the evocative “You’ll Never Catch Him”. Whilst anyone previously enrapt by the threesome’s occasional Neil Young-nodding epics – such as the sublime “Sunday Night” from Sleepy Eyed – will be kept in thrall by the pedal-steel laced “Thrown” and the steadily-unfurling “Hearts of Palm”.

With all the family-silver proudly redisplayed, much of the extra enchantment comes from one unlikely primary source – Chris Colbourn. Always a bit of a love/hate figure for Buffalo-lovers; Colbourn is either seen as the band’s sweet pop heart or its twee underbelly. But as 2002’s revealing rarities compilation proved, his better songs have often been unfairly disqualified from the group’s tightly-sequenced long-players. But here, Colbourn seems to have finally been given the room to let himself shine; and thankfully he hasn’t squandered such an opportunity. His leading vocal/lyrical role on the terrific Teenage Fanclub-style power-pop of the title-track and the swooning “CC And Callas” is well-measured and assured. There are also some great almost duet-shaped tracks with Janovitz, that allow him space to excel as an equal, as best evidenced by the dual-hollered “Bad Phone Call”. However, it’s with the utterly glorious piano-ballad “Pendleton” that Colbourn delivers the crowns jewels of Three Easy Pieces, a composition sturdy enough to double as possibly his best ever contribution to the Buffalo Tom canon.

Inevitably, not everything quite hits the mark; ill-fitting backing vocals from Mission of Burma’s Clint Conley take some of the sparkle out of the otherwise respectable “Renovating” and there’s a few clunky lyrical couplets here and there (especially on the slightly-laboured “Gravity”). But then even 1992’s classic Let Me Come Over had the tiresome twosome of “I’m Not There” and “Stymied”; so we should know not to expect total Buffalo Tom perfection, and neither should we demand it, in case the trio’s ragged magic were to be put in jeopardy.

Overall though, the defining charm of Three Easy Pieces comes via a collective feeling – perhaps superficially interpreted by this scribe – that Janovitz, Maginnis and Colbourn are finally coming to terms with their legacy of commercial underachievement, realising that it has perversely managed to sustain their fraternity, consistency, integrity and honesty. It’s a redemptive journey that’s traced from “Bottom of the Rain” (“Where are all those golden years?”), inside “Good Girl” (“Maybe I can be someone this time?”) and right through to the climatic tranquillity of “Thrown” (“I have always known/You land where you’ve been thrown/Make that house your home”). Real or imagined, it’s a warm-hearted philosophy that beats at the core of a very special and ghoul-free return from the indie-rock grave.

Earthless – Rhythms From a Cosmic Sky

Throw together equal parts incredible drumwork (Mario Rubalcaba aka Ruby Mars of Rocket From the Crypt, Hot Snakes, etc.), blistering guitar riffs (Isaiah Mitchell of Nebula) and gut rumbling bass (Mike Eginton of Electric Nazarene) and what you get is the tasty Rhythms From a Cosmic Sky from San Diego rockers Earthless.

All consummate musicians in their own right, these riff spewing madmen came together under the idea of ‘Let’s specifically start a Japanese-psychedelic-heavy-Kraut-rock-band.’ Man-o-man, did they know what the world needed to hear! Rhythms From a Cosmic Sky is an unbelievable blending of these different styles, that doesn’t fail to come into it’s own. This is psych heavy riff-rock (with a little jam thrown in for good measure) at its best!

With three tracks clocking in at a total of 47 minutes and 42 seconds (but seeming longer, as it is a slice of eternity) there is plenty of music here to keep you satisfied.

“Godspeed” opens the album up with a rockin’ and rollin’ beat and a hearty helping of riffage that’ll give even the most riff hungry gourmand enough to chew on. Broken down into suites over the twenty minute plus epic, “Godspeed” changes enough to stay interesting throughout; yet never fails to keep returning to base, reminding the listener that this is indeed one song. Stellar, man, stellar.
“Sonic Prayer” continues in the vein of theme and variation, and between the two tracks it’s easy to see just what Earthless is putting down. So get with it and pick it up!

The final track is a cover of The Groundhogs’ 1971, “Cherry Red”. This is a killer cover from a great British band that garnered the respect and admiration of John Lee Hooker way back in the early days of the blues explosion of the early 60s. Earthless does it justice and you get the feeling that their version is how it should have been done from the start!

All in all, Rhythms From a Cosmic Sky is a great album, and I can’t wait to hear more from Earthless. These guys serve up some killer tunes, and it’s plain to see that it won’t be long before people far and wide know their name.

Hallelujah the Hills – Collective Psychosis Begone

“You could chalk it up, but you haven’t got a blackboard. You could shrug it off but your shoulders broke. You could laugh it off, but it isn’t a joke.” The middle passage of “Sleeper Agent (Just Waking Up)” doesn’t dissemble. But the rest of Collective Psychosis Begone, like the similarly titled So Gone issued last year by labelmates Evangelicals, revels in roguish trickery and unruly jollity. Loony song titles (“To My Scientist Colleagues I Bid You Farewell”), peculiar subjects (“Teenage Synesthete”), and background sonic mischief reveal an unbridled, imaginative approach to songwriting that rewards the passerby as much as the aficionado.

But something is lost, as it were, when the band hoists the black flag. Particularly for a band that clearly avows some professional ambition, there’s an incongruity here that, regrettably, subverts content where it most requires fortification. As an opener, “Sleeper Agent”—one of the best songs on the record—serves admirably. Ryan Walsh enters the instrumental mélange just as it really gets going, sounding like a bemused Isaac Brock talking shit about a pretty sunset; he muses for a while, inventing a delightfully clever dictionary metaphor along the way, but dashes it all when he drops “Let’s all plug into the telepathic disco.” This kind of Cedric Bixler nonsense would be fine in most circumstances, but there’s not enough going on here instrumentally to back it up. Not until about four-and-a-half minutes in do the cello and electric guitar reenter the picture, rounding things out nicely enough, but leaving quite a bit of unoccupied territory nonetheless. For a song that veers toward the seven-minute mark, it has entirely too little substance to keep things interesting. 90’s Modest Mouse—from whom it seems Hallelujah have taken some cues—were masters at this craft; the aforementioned “Talking Shit,” for instance, never asks “Where has the time gone?”—it simply seizes it.

For the most part, Collective Psychosis Begone’s songs pass by with just as little indelibility, blending agreeable Malkmusian lo-fi jams and folky arrangements that please but fail to imprint. Every so often, one of Marsh’s vignettes snags the ear into a second listen—I find “To All My Scientist Colleagues,” with its acoustic/trumpet merger and faux lament, especially amusing—but, like most bands who spend way too much time coming up with song titles, most are all too easily forgotten. Except, that is, for “House Is All Lit Up,” by far the album’s standout and an outstanding track by any measure. Here, at last, we find what Collective Psychosis Begone’s formula promises but seldom delivers: a quietly appealing series of verses that surround and supplement a cycloning, barn-storming, earth-turning breakdown to match Okkervil River’s “For Real.” It is telling that, occupying the third slot in an album full of frustratingly toothless melodies and endlessly eccentric lyrics, “House Is All Lit Up” truly merits its six-minute girth. Its structure should, indeed, be Hallelujah the Hills’ exclusive recipe. If, for their part, Hallelujah the Hills can forego some of the oddball experimentation next time out, drawing on some melodies that really stick to the ribs, they could piece together a fine twenty-first century reply to the great indie rock of the 90’s. After all, they’ve already got the inventiveness for the task.

Frank Black – Frank Black 93-03

If Frank Black’s 14 or so years as a solo artist are to be recognised as anything more than a time-filling exercise before and after an eventual Pixies reunion, then his stoic stubbornness and wilful reluctance to self-edit would arguably be the most defining characteristics. This has predictably had both a positive and negative impact upon his staggeringly vast solo discography. On the one hand, Black’s refusal to conform to expectations practically set in titanium by his Pixies legacy is peculiarly brave and admirable. He’s lurched through nervy indie-pop, swampy-blues, slouched country-rock and lots in-between, with the kind of impervious zeal that could embarrass younger less-principled guitar-wielding alt. rockers. His unwillingness to follow the more commercial avenues mapped-out by bigger labels has turned him into an independent hard-worker, not a pampered shirker. But such terms of engagement have also been part of Black’s undoing; putting his credibility at the continual mercy of damning faint praise or just plain indifference. Churning out 12 or so long-players (sometimes as unwieldy double-sets or as simultaneous releases) with increasingly narrow gaps dividing them and without a regularly strong backing-ensemble, has led Black into dissipating the tautness and economy of his Pixies canon. In the process, he has been encumbered with a dense mass of material that has obscured its own pearly moments. Such conflicting outcomes are clearly at play with the launch of this, long-overdue, ‘portable’ Frank Black anthology.

On the self-destructive side, Frank Black 93-03 is flawed just from a passing interrogation of the date restrictive title and its correlating tracklisting. By compartmentalising disc one (of two) to cover songs only as far 2003’s Show Me Your Tears, excludes worthwhile extracts from Black’s imaginative rapprochement with his Pixies material on 2004’s FrankBlackFrancis, 2005’s impressively intimate Honeycomb, 2006’s expansive/eclectic Fast Man Raider Man and 2007’s live/studio Christmass compendium. As well as robbing us of a complete overview of Black’s studio work on the first CD, the appended second disc compiles a seemingly random splatter of live recordings from late-2006, with different fan-fleecing set-lists for the respective European, Japanese and the US editions of the package. To confuse the timelines even further, on the studio disc comes the ‘hidden’ postscript of “Threshold Apprehension”, from Black’s forthcoming Bluefinger album (to be attributed to his Pixies pseudonym ‘Black Francis’).

However, from a more constructive and less pedantic perspective, although this compilation has its conceptual failings, it does actually contain some of the best Frank Black stuff we’ve ignored since Trompe Le Monde. Disc one’s chorological sequence gives us a good congregation of cuts from the first two-thirds of Black’s non-Pixies canon. Tracks from Frank Black (1993), Teenager of the Year (1994) and The Cult of Ray (1996) find Black still very much working under the same stylistic parameters set by the Pixies’ twilight years, with even Joey Santiago guesting here and there on guitar. The representatives of these records remind us that Black retained a good ear for razor-sharp melodies in the early-‘90s, even though he subconsciously missed the tension tug of Kim Deal. Thus, there are a slew of forgotten gems to pick from; like the howling hard-rocking “Los Angeles”, the twisted “Ten Percenter”, the strangely pretty “Speedy Marie”, the unpretentious anthemic pop of “Headache” and the plaintive jangle of “I Don’t Want To Hurt You Anymore (Ever Single Time)”.

By track thirteen, we hit Black’s conversion to rawer production, looser-playing, ‘60s/’70s retro shapes and a greater reliance on his erstwhile backing band The Catholics. The slackening of Black’s tight consistency certainly meant that the hooks became less forthcoming and the guitar solos became far more twiddling. In spite of these lapses, there has been some genuinely great things from Black, as rescued and rehabilitated here from some otherwise overlooked or slipshod LPs. The early-Tom Petty-style singalong of “I Gotta Move” is surprisingly gripping, the soaring “Robert Onion” is barroom-rock par excellence, “Velvety” makes a respectable nod to the wild prairie punk of The Gun Club and the hulky “Hermaphroditos” is a fine wink to The Stones circa the underrated Goats Head Soup. It has to be said that there are a few more noticeable clunkers amongst this second half of the disc – like the sludgy calamity of “California Bound” and the lumbering “Manitoba” – but they’re offset by the aforementioned extraneous material. The stuttering art-punk of “Threshold Apprehension” is a convincing flashback to Surfer Rosa, which bodes well for the soon-to-follow Bluefinger. Moreover, the bonus live tracks – at least on your writer’s European edition – are astonishingly enjoyable. Playing well-drilled shows with the reunited Pixies has certainly refocused Black’s on-stage energy and sense of occasion. Highlights include a blistering Biblical “Bullet” (originally on 2001’s Dog In The Sand), a muscular bluesy nailing of “Nadine” (from Show Me Your Tears), a snarling sleazy reconstruction of Roxy Music’s “Remake/Remodel” and a wonderfully philosophical “Horrible Day” (another found on Show Me Your Tears).

So despite himself, Frank Black has finally delivered a collection that earns him respect for his wrongly-neglected repertoire outside of the Pixies. Whilst Frank Black 93-03 is no Death To The Pixies-like retrospective revelation, it’s undoubtedly almost up-there with Guided By Voices’ equally-necessary Human Amusements At Hourly Rates ‘best of’, which is worthy praise indeed after all these years of erratic but commendable slogging.

Rumskib – S/T

Rumskib, the Danish duo of Keith Canisius (guitarist, vocalist, composer, producer) and Tine Louise Kortermand (singer), have all of the tools to be a success in the dreamy, ethereal shoegaze genre, or as some call it, “nu-gaze”. They have a captivating female singer who croons over reverb drenched, dreamy guitar soundscapes, their well crafted songs shimmer with heavenly melodies and they have a guest artist, Jonas Munk (Manual), who adds programmed beats and airy synth washes to give the songs a multi-layered and textured edge.

There is a problem though that may hinder any widespread acclaim for this young band. The problem lies in the fact that the music on this debut disc is a musical dead ringer for the sublime sound of the Cocteau Twins, leaving the listener to ponder whether to like Rumskib for paying homage to a great band by emulating them or to dislike Rumskib for being second-rate imitators. This reviewer’s feelings on the subject lie somewhere in between.

Rumskib achieve their nu-gaze sound with an assortment of distorted guitars, keyboards, tape loops, echo boxes, reverb and various electronic percussives. With both Canisius and Kortermand providing vocals, the result is something comparable to a mix of the Cocteau Twins, Delays and Curve. But their derivative compositions are mostly a bit heavier than the lush, gossamer melodies of the Cocteau Twins and a bit lighter than the alternative, guitar-driven noise-rock of Curve.

The songs on this self-titled disc use intervals of delicate and fuzzy guitars and waves of spacey synths along with earthly beats and tones for an atmospheric rock sound that is sometimes thick and complex and sometimes soft and airy, more similar to the Cocteau’s line of EPs than their full-length albums.

While the similarities to the Cocteau Twins abound, some choose to overlook them or have come to terms with the parallels or perhaps just prefer music in this genre over others (as does this reviewer), as Rumskib count Ulrich Schnauss, Serena Maneesh and Jatun among their fans. I suggest you pick up a copy of Rumskib and decide for yourself.

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