Gerald Krampl – Timediver

I’ve always admired composers who record instrumental music by themselves (actually, I am one of them). The fact that it was written and performed entirely by one person gives it a very personal and intimate quality. It’s directly from their mind to your ears with no medium to alter or ruin it. Timediver, the new disc by renowned keyboardist Gerald Krampl, is a nine song cycle in the tradition of Mike Oldfield. It is beautiful, absorbing and very eclectic…but there is also a major flaw that holds it back.

Krampl achieved fame during the 70s and 80s when he formed the prog rock bands Kyrie Eleison and Indigo. In 1999 he started Agnus Dei with his wife, Hilde, and in 2006 he scored the documentary 31Projects (which sought to educate about the Holocaust). This new LP (his first official solo work) has been described as a “…soundtrack for imaginary films in mind,” and it is similar to the work of Italian composer Federico Fasce. It’s a relatively short experience, which is both good and bad.

Timediver’s opener, “Steamborn,” begins with percussion, a simple piano melody and synthesizers. It could easily fit as one of the slower, more subtle futuristic parts of an Ayreon album. It’s very inspirational and prophetic, as if it’s a soundtrack to a monumental journey to decide the fate of mankind. At the half way point is a brief interlude of striking flutes and what sounds like a telephone ringing. The second half matches the first. “East-West” has an African drum pattern and a more industrial timbre, as if to represent the mundane routine of a factory job. There is clearly an influence of Brian Eno as well, and some of the noises could have fit in Genesis’ masterpiece The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. “Samarcand” is flute based with a looping harpsichord pattern behind it. It changes key as the flute continues its solo. Eventually some other synthesized riffs expand things a bit, but it never strays from where it began. Again, Ayreon is immediately thought of.

“Dark Veil” commences with a similar mood to “Steamborn,” with a sad piano melody and operatic synths and electronics. Near the end, Krampl brings in jarring, sudden dissonance by breaking up the flow and striking notes suddenly. Eventually it leads back into where it began. “Lakeview” is a lot more up tempo with its 80s pop drumbeat and happy chord progression. It would fit as the closing credits of a Final Fantasy game or an Anime show. In other words, there is something intangibly Japanese about it. “Spirit Dancer,” on the other hand, is intangibly Chinese with its rhythm and plucked strings. In these cases, it’s almost impossible to explain how they fit the Asian classification, but if you hear it, you’ll understand.

“Timediver” has very nice counter playing between the piano and various synthesized instrumentals. The percussion provides just enough drama and doesn’t syncopate too much or too little. The bridge in the middle is very poignant and stunning. It’s a very optimistic track, and surely one of the best on the disc. “Quiet Days” contrasts with a mysterious piano melody and electronic accompaniment while maracas dance. It reminds one of a film noir or spy video game. The closer, “Reflections,” features arpeggiated acoustic guitar, swirling flutes and very active percussion. It’s a pleasant ending.

As for the problem with Timediver, it is extremely repetitious. The first thirty seconds of each track is essentially the entire track. Krampl adds a new instrument and a few notes every so often, but 99% of the tracks stay the same throughout. This is very disappointing because what’s there is very nice and affective, but it should only stay for a little while before changing into something else. For example, most people recognize the opening of Oldfield’s debut Tubular Bells as the theme to the film The Exorcist, but that portion doesn’t last long, and the fifty minute piece continuously evolves and changes drastically. By contrast, the tracks here never change except for the middle sections I’ve noted. It makes it too much of an endurance test.

This album is a mixed bag. It suffers from its own ideas in that they are great for a bit but swiftly become tiresome. Krampl has crafted a very inspirational record full of short but sweet melodies, but they happen to last far too long with barely any variation. If all nine tracks were condensed into one, it would be a very diverse and impressive song. As it is, listening to the first thirty seconds of each piece is essentially hearing the whole album a lot quicker.

Bearsuit – OH:IO

Bearsuit’s songs are high-energy, spastic smash-ups where all the stop signs have been removed.  Male and female vocals easily morph from airy sweetness to raucous shouts to multi-tiered choir harmonies, while instruments run the gamut from guitars to keyboards to horns to flutes to zippy, zapping arcade game noises. 

This sextet from Norwich, England (Cerian Hamer, Lisa Horton, Matt Hutchings, Jan Robertson, Iain Ross, and Richard Squires) are jazzed about something, raring to go, making distorted guitar discord clash colorfully with angelic choir mayhem, yet never devolving into a mess of cacophony (which is a pretty amazing feat!).  The band members are having loads of fun, and, depending upon the listener, it can be an exasperating, exhausting, and/or exhilarating earful.

 Like kids on a trampoline, Bearsuit is boisterous, hyper, and carefree, exuberantly jumping from song to song and different music styles in short order, hopscotching between noise and melody, where the fast pace of the songs threaten to crush the delicacy of the melodies and airy singing.  The band incorporates the shouty bits of Huggy Bear, the twee bits of Belle & Sebastian, the electro-bounce of Bis, and the lo-fi guitars of Comet Gain, with horns and flute thrown in for good measure.  The guy at times sounds like Damon Albarn of Blur and the girl sounds like Amelia Fletcher of Heavenly on the more placid segments, and like Manda Rin of Bis and Niki and Jo of Huggy Bear on the remainder. 

Schoolyard shouting chants open “Jupiter Force (Recruitment Video)” to a mélange of fast drum beat, smooth to fluttery horns, laser-zip noises, static, and distorted guitar, as the guy and gal trade off shouty vocal lines.  Delightful, but brief boy ‘n’ girl melodies pepper “More Soul than Wigan Casino” amid a mad-dash beat, cowbell, horns, and tremors of flute. 

Bearsuit goes orchestral with strings and cymbal crash at the start of the audaciously-titled “Steven F***ing Spielberg”, which then flaunts a rapid drum beat, distorted guitars, woodwind notes, and male and female vocal harmonizing.  “Dinosaur Heart” rips a noise-pop page from Huggy Bear’s diary by alternating aggressive, shouty vocals and sweet, delightful melodies from the girl, with the guy ending up unhinged and yelling his head off.

On “Foxy Boxer” the guy comes on like a despondent Damon Albarn, moping that “I don’t know what’s right. / I don’t know what’s wrong.” while synth notes, snappy hand-claps, a wasp-like guitar line, and faster-paced drums kick in amid added female shouts and “Ooh, oohs”.  “The Love Will Never Find You” is like a Belle & Sebastian track on fast-forward with male and female breathed out sing-talking bolstered by horn lines. 

The members of Bearsuit must have either just gotten out of high school or they remember that time vividly, because “Hark! The Feral Children” features a speedy marching band beat with peppy, cheering vocals that spazz out into go-for-broke fight club shouts which call to mind a demented, Boredoms-like level of lunacy that could only be found at a high school pep rally.

There’s nothing quiet about “Shh Get Out” with its fuzzy arcade game noises, stop-start rhythms, various screamo shouts and yelps, and quasi-spooky “Ooohs” that are overtaken by Boredoms-like female shriek-shouts by the end of the song.  The album then does a 180, with the next track “Mission io must not Fail” adding a tranquil vibe of flute warble, distorted guitar, spacey blips, calmer guy vocals, a chorus with handclaps, and a lovely parting bit of angelic choir vocals that fade away…

The Santiago Steps – Okay Okay Okay

Talk about misleading or false impressions. The first song off Okay Okay Okay, the third outing from California’s The Santiago Steps, starts the proceedings just the way you’d hope an album-opener would. The song— titled, simply, “Boardwalk”—begins with an emotive, if understated, progression on acoustic guitar, an almost hesitant repetition, alongside casual bass and some equally casual vocal cooing. In some two minutes, a too-short two minutes, it gradually expands to include a borderline-haunting piano motif and violin that moans and swoons over the verses. (In that loosely woven sort of way, it almost feels like a forgotten instrumental from Songs: Ohia.)  The record’s eleventh track, which helps book-end the 36-minute disc, is a song of a similar color, an introspective offering defined by repeating guitar figures, spare notes on piano, and wordless vocals.

So Okay Okay Okay both begins and ends with shades of low-fi folk-pop, something off-handed and engaging. The problem, for lack of a better word, is often what falls between.

About half of the nine tracks that take place after “Boardwalk” but before the closing “Song for the Sea” are perfectly, perfectly fine: they’re well-played, well-constructed pop-rock songs, some made better by the added texture of a trumpet or the thrust of an emotional, instrumental bridge. But they can suffer from a lack of daring, a lack of desire to break the mold. We’re treated to bouncy power-pop (“Love Is Small,” “Way Away”), full-throttled, guitar-crunched rock (“Breaking Ranks”), acoustic balladeering (“What We Left In The Trunk”), even a little unexpected foray into funk (“Gone Away”). But the songs – or, more appropriately, the songwriters and the performers behind them – largely tend to play it safe, opting to rarely stray from pre-established formula. As a result, there’s little momentum, like a car floating in neutral as it wanders toward its eventual destination.

When The Santiago Steps do wander off the beaten path and break free of genre cliches, the result is much more inviting.  “Giving Way,” with its thudding percussion and digitally delayed shards of electric guitar, gets the blood flowing, even in eerily quiet moments when all you’ll hear is multi-tracked vocal harmonies, anxious bass and the distant whistle of a synthesizer. The timid “Red Mountain,” where reverb-heavy guitars and dreamy bass lead the way, flirts with something beautiful but runs a ridiculously abbreviated 49 seconds. The violin and breathy vocals steal the spotlight on the rootsy “Flatlands.” These moments should be celebrated and the listener likely will wish they were more in abundance. Why fall back on formula when you can do this instead? The answer is hard to find on Okay Okay Okay, a spotty record that’s only sometimes full of heart.

Some of the trouble with Okay Okay Okay is on display with a song like “Strange Obligation.” The record’s third song, it starts with a degree of promise — a jangly bit of electric guitar, complimentary male and female vocals – and comes to include bass, drums and violin, all in place, all well-played. There’s even something catchy and memorable about the song, maybe in the way that violin snakes between the vocals. But it never quite catches, instead merely shuffling through the verses and choruses. (Any semblance of subtle beauty is stamped out by the rock n’ roll testosterone of “Breaking Ranks,” which immediately follows it.) It’s not that the song is broken. You just wish it was given the same emotional punch of that album-opener.

A.C. Newman – Get Guilty

Although being the benevolent de facto dictator and primary songwriter of The New Pornographers, Carl Newman has been sage enough to share singing duties with Dan Bejar, Neko Case and – more latterly – Kathryn Calder, over the band’s increasingly successful four studio records to date.  So when it comes to his solo side-project – which began with 2004’s The Slow Wonder – much of the appeal depends on whether you have the lust for a New Pornos album without all the extra-special personnel divvying-up lead microphone duties.  This second ‘A.C. Newman’-monikered set tacitly acknowledges and tests such a question of affection; which is both its strength and occasional weakness.

Stylistically-speaking, Get Guilty veers little from the blueprints originally sketched-out by Newman’s early-career in Zumpano and drawn to near-perfection with The New Pornographers.  This means more kinetic keyboards, strummed layers of six-strings, stomping percussion and multi-tracked vocals, all wrapping-up power-pop-meets-glam-rock packages. 

Newman wastes little time from the opening “There Are Maybe Ten Or Twelve…” in sprinting from the starting-blocks with a melodic avalanche that initially threatens to overcome proceedings with a tad too much gusto and not enough subtly or variety.  It feels as if the relatively more sedate tempos that restrained the last New Pornos LP – 2007’s Challengers – left Newman with too much pent-up and ready-to-blow zest.  Thus, his imploding energy splatter does leave a few songs – like “The Collected Works” and “All Of My Days And All Of My Days Off” – dampened in over-similarity. But given more time, richer details reveal themselves song-by-song, even if the sustained speediness and arrangements alter little.

Hence, there’s much pleasure to be derived from the electro-acoustic scuffling “Like A Hitman, Like A Dancer,” the soaring crescendo-building through “The Heartbreak Rides,” the blissful sing-along “Prophets” and the harmony-enveloped “Elemental,” which might have warranted inclusion on 2005’s Twin Cinema – arguably the best New Pornos release so far.  Ultimately however, as with the aforementioned Challengers, some of the most effective moments are the slower ones, such as the swooning “Young Atlantis” and the strings-tensioned “Thunderbolts,” with Newman’s female backing foils providing the Case/Calder-like counterpoint chemistry that might otherwise leave us tired-out by his best-in-moderation pipes. 

Get Guilty is unlikely to bust Carl Newman out beyond his inherited fan-base but neither is it likely to disappoint those listening out for more-of-the-same, albeit with obvious but not crippling disadvantages.  Next time, extra divergence and greater comfort-zone violation could make for a more adventurous affair, rather than just a respectable pre-practiced one.  In the interim though, Get Guilty is still worthy of judicial spinning.
 

(Territorial Release Note: Get Guilty is available on Matador in the US, Last Gang Records in Canada, and via Broken Horse Records for the UK & Europe)

Dead Heart Bloom – In Chains

New York City-based Dead Heart Bloom’s latest release, In Chains, is the last installment of their EP trilogy which began with Fall In back in September 2008 and was followed by Oh Mercy in November. If we learned anything about Dead Heart Bloom from these first two EPs, it’s to expect the unexpected. And so it’s no surprise, given the voluminous talents of the core duo of Boris Skalsky and Paul Wood, that In Chains is an exceptional piece of musical work, even though they have jumped genres once again.

Gone are the frothy synths and reverberating bass lines of Fall In. The angular chord changes, turbulent distortion and razor-sharp guitar leads of have vanished and all have been replaced by a more pensive, trippy and desolate Americana sound as Dead Heart Bloom continue their stylistic experimentations. These expressive explorations have also allowed the band to show off their vocal variability and prowess as well, as the vocals on each EP are transmuted to fit with it’s style. Whether it’s a Bowie-esque smooth baritone, a Peter Murphy-like distortion or, in this case, druggy, reverbed and melancholic.

Opener “Flash In A Bottle” sets the tone early as the somber acoustic frames play out in a slightly Southern-Gothic style that’s bolstered by a woeful but catchy melody as the eerie resonances make the sparse song sound full. The claims of Beck-like eccentricities are substantiated on “Halfway Gone” and “Farther Than You” as the bouncy, broken-hearted pop is emphasized by a trippy organ solo on the former, while the latter is a sprawling freak-folk ditty that features a crafty slide guitar backdrop and ghostly but rich vocal harmonies. The slow and somber lullaby “Impossible New City Dream” ends the affair in a wave of saddened strings.

It’s phenomenal, and a testament to the band’s talented musicianship and songwriting, how Dead Heart Bloom is able to hop genres so easily while maintaining originality and artistic integrity. Each EP in this series is well crafted and exquisitely recorded and mixed. But the true marvel lies in the way they are all tied together, even though musically divergent, with a common theme, complete with splendid cover art and designs. In fact if you lay out all three EPs in sequential order, the front mosaic makes a composite picture of a chained, deteriorating wall, while the back spells out the band’s name.

It’s apparent that no matter what Dead Heart Bloom do next, it will be done well, in sharp style, and with a clever charm that will make it an engaging listen worth many repeated plays. Much like the three EPs in this series.

Robert Henke – Atom/Document

Atom/Document is the companion album by Robert Henke (Monolake) for performance artist Christopher Bauder’s Atom. The piece was designed around a matrix of 64 illuminated, LED patterned balloons that are triggered by Henke’s music. According to Henke’s website, the album is merely “a document of one possible scenario.” Further explanations may still be needed for the listener to appreciate how the music fits within these constructs. Henke provides the following statement: “The music for the performance has been created according to a few basic principles: there are floating elements, that are not percussive and have no direct connection with the LEDs in the balloons. There are percussive elements, where in each piece each percussive element has to trigger an LED. And there are no percussive elements allowed that do not trigger LEDs.”

Henke decided to release the album to draw more attention to the art. In order to do so he needed to restructure or even redesign a few elements of the music so that it would work without a necessary exposure to the performance aspect of the project.  The artwork for the album itself has plenty of pictures that document the balloon matrix at various stages so that the listener has at least some kind of visual stimulation relevant to the project. If you want a better idea of what we’re talking about you can check out an excerpt video of a performance here.

Those familiar with Henke’s work will no doubt recognize his usual trademarks on Atom/Document. Most of the album is filled with ambient electronic music that has hints of melody accompanied by minimal beats. Some of it sounds very similar to an album by Morgan Packard called Airships Filled the Sky released in 2007 on Anticipate. Although not a performance piece, that album was also coincidentally packaged with a DVD of SuperDraw sketches by artist Joshue Ott that were sync’d up to a few of the album tracks. While listening to Atom/Document I couldn’t help but wonder why there wasn’t an accompanying DVD with at least one captured performance from the piece.  As it is, the music will most certainly be of interest to fans of Henke or his alias as Monolake. For everyone else, I believe the work remains inexorably tied to the performance piece. Don’t let that prevent you from checking out Henke’s work if you’re a first timer. His catalog is considerable and I’m not sure if there is really a specific place better than any other to get acquainted.

Boo and Boo Too – No Tempo

Kansas 5 piece Boo and Boo Too orchestrate a squall of biting, beautiful rock music on their new album, No Tempo. The sound is a desperate cacophony, weaving three spiraling guitars through a solid rhythm section and urgent vocal. Boo and Boo Too sound good, whether they’re building up or tearing down.

No Tempo is a dense album, dreamy but driving. Straddling noise rock, post-rock, and post-punk, the music takes after Sonic Youth, The Walkmen, and Interpol. The vocal has less presence and clarity than Hamilton Leithauser’s of The Walkmen, and comes off less icy than Interpol’s Paul Banks. Vocals and guitars ache together–the strings in frustration, the vocals in desperation. Their emotive, abrasive combinations rise like the cries of a wounded coyote, invading the city on the howling wind.

The rag-tag sets of 6 strings unravel strands of melody and manipulate space, complimenting Boo and Boo Too’s efficient rhythm section. Drums and bass thump out the songs’ core, and the cymbals pierce the din of guitars. No Tempo opens with “I Know Nothing’s All Right”. The heavy stepping rhythm section sleep walks under reaching guitars while the vocal builds from a desperate, boozy lament to a tortured shout. The song’s wailing catharsis promises no release, despite the opening lyric, “When I die, I don’t want you wondering why I never cried out for you at night / I’ll try and set all of this right”.

The slow burn of “Obviously” showcases a hazy wreck of guitars making beautiful noise. The vocal throughout No Tempo is seeped in echo and reverb, forever pleading and pushing. Two minutes in, “Obviously” breaks into a run with a slap happy snare and more spiraling guitars, everything barely holding together.

Ghostly guitars gain strength as title track “No Tempo” begins. Finally, the bands opens up, and the music thumps and wails to a triumph, crowned by the lyric, “And now my spirit is free of face”. The track is 5 minutes, composed mostly of the rise and fall of the intro and outro. This creates a powerful and dramatic effect when played live, but this effect can be lost on a listening audience. Still, it was great while it lasted.

“White Light, Dark Sheets” introduces a choppy rhythm and scaled guitar lead fit for The Strokes. The interplay of instruments rings out a little crisper than most other tracks, with equally good results. Three minutes in, the song gains intensity, largely due to the rising emotion of the vocal.

No Tempo’s tenth and final track, “Alleys in Whitechapel”, spans 9 minutes, showcasing many of Boo and Boo Too’s strengths: a solid rhythm section, space stirring guitars, and vocals turning in fits of emotion. All 10 songs are chock-full of color and mood. The album is solidly produced, no feature overpowers and the music doesn’t stiffen up from too much polish. Boo and Boo Too sounds hot. Fans of The Walkmen, as well as  Interpol and Sonic Youth will especially enjoy.

Bruce Springsteen – Working on a Dream

Somewhere along the way, Bruce Springsteen realized that it was time to get back to his pop sensibilities. Those same feelings that allowed him to write many of the greatest songs of our time and frankly, of all time. And after his strong resurgence with 2002’s The Rising, the immense legend has since turned in gem after gem. He’s turning 60 years young this coming September and with fifteen studio albums under his belt, we are greeted with sweet sixteen, Working on a Dream.

His voice is something to marvel at as he sounds strong, resourceful and downright perfect. The gorgeous, “Kingdom of Days” is a genuine manifestation of what Springsteen has to offer. Here lies what a love song should be as he tells a story of lost lovers that share every waking moment together. Intertwined with strings, dramatic percussion and completed with a soaring guitar bridge, Springsteen sings, “I love you, I love you…Sing away, sing away, my darling, we’ll sing away” with a fervent gusto that is unmatched.

Following in the shimmering gleam that was Magic, Springsteen waited little time to write these songs. It’s his quickest turnaround in over twenty years between albums but what he has crafted certainly feels like a dream. Whereas The Rising was his hope for a prosperous America, after six more terrible years of politics, Working on a Dream is the jubilant fruition of hopes and well, dreams.

One of the main keys to this album’s luster are all of the smart song styles that are chosen. There are moving and lavishly orchestrated beauties like the proper closer, “The Last Carnival,” there is a straight-up blues stomp with “Good Eye,” and that’s followed by a sweet country shuffle in “Tomorrow Never Knows.” And everything starts off with the epic, opera-like, “Outlaw Pete.” In an entirely dramatic role, Springsteen sings about a jaded and misunderstood criminal searching for help. There’s striking instrumentation, vivid vocal tricks and even gongs as he sings, “Can you hear me?” Honestly, it’s sheer genius.

My dad was always a Springsteen die-hard. Although he was a bit too young to hear The Beatles or any of their contemporaries during their prime, he was fifteen years old when the masterpiece, Born to Run, came out. And what always consumed him and drew him close to Springsteen’s music was his ability to tell stories of sincere Americana with remarkable skill. The pleasant candor of “Queen of the Supermarket” is something very few can achieve. At the heart of what makes the United States the best country in the world are stories like this, of true and tried, real, Americans who shape our image and soul. And nobody does it better than The Boss.

But I’m not sure many will truly understand how lucky we are to have this musician still making music for us. “Surprise, Surprise” is nothing more than a birthday greeting but with Springsteen’s magic, it quickly turns into a classic. In former albums, his songs were cluttered with clunky words and the melodies took a backseat to some forced ideas. However, on Working on a Dream, the two are married in a brilliant manner; it doesn’t matter what the topic is because it will be terrifically evoked. This isn’t just one of the best songwriters still making music; this is one of the best songwriters of all time.

The fantastic song he wrote for The Wrestler is included on here and it makes for a caring gift to an album that is truly special. This isn’t a tired old pro knocking one more out but rather, a superb song-craftsmen and musician in control; Working on a Dream is one of Bruce Springsteen’s best albums, period. And whether he is channeling the Holy Spirit through his reckonings, re-telling fables and tales about everything under the shining sun, or just writing honest poetry from the heart, he is at the top of his game. It’s well deserved too, because in this day and age, we still desperately need him.

Ra Ra Riot on the Road

1/30 – Colgate University (Hamilton, NY) 1/31 – Smith Opera House (Geneva, NY) 2/11 – Barfly (Birmingham) 2/12 – King Tuts (Glasgow) 2/14 – Academy 2 (Newcastle) 2/15- Night and Day (Manchester) 2/16 – Bodega (Nottingham) 2/17 – King’s College (London) 2/18 – La Fleche D’or (Paris) 2/21 – Richard’s on Richards (Vancouver, BC) !@
2/22 – Lucky (Victoria, BC) ! 2/24 – Doug Fir Lounge (Portland, OR) !@ 2/25 – Neumos (Seattle, WA) !@ 2/27 – The Independent (San Francisco, CA) (Noise Pop) !@ 2/28 – El Rey Theatre (Los Angeles, CA) !@ 3/1 – The Loft (San Diego, CA) !@
3/2 – Detroit Bar (Costa Mesa, CA) !@
3/7 – Harvest of Hope Festival (St. Augustine, FL)
3/8 – Langerado Music Festival (Miami, FL) 3/10 – The Parish @ HOB (New Orleans, LA) # 3/11 – Walter’s on Washington (Houston, TX) # 3/12 – Cine El Rey (McAllen, TX) # 3/13 – The White Rabbit (San Antonio, TX) # 3/14 – Granada Theatre (Dallas, TX) # 3/16 – The Slowdown (Omaha, NE) #
3/17 – The Billiken Club (St. Louis, MO) * 3/18 – The Conservatory (Oklahoma City, OK) $ 3/24 – The Cinemat (Bloomington, IN) $
3/25 – Musica (Akron, OH) $! 3/26 – The Blind Pig (Ann Arbor, MI) $
4/7 – Tower Theatre (Upper Darby, PA) %
4/8 – DAR Constitution Hall (Washington, DC) %
4/9 – John Belk Arena (Davidson, NC) %
4/10 – Louisville Palace Theatre (Louisville, KY) %
4/11 – Orpheum Theatre (Memphis, TN) %
4/12 – Brady Theater (Tulsa, OK) %
4/15 – Roy Wilkins Auditorium (St. Paul, MN) %
4/17 – Aragon Ballroom (Chicago, IL) %
4/18 – Michigan State University, Breslin Events Center (East Lansing, MI) %
4/19 – Carroll College, Van Male Fieldhouse (Waukesha, WI) %
4/24 – Gonzaga University, McCarthey Athletic Center (Spokane, WA) %
4/25 – Morrison Center (Boise, ID) %
4/27 – Sacramento Convention Center, Memorial Hall (Sacramento, CA) %
5/1- Austin Music Hall (Austin, TX) &
5/4 – Ryman Auditorium (Nashville, TN) &
5/5 – BJCC Concert Hall (Birmingham, AL) &
5/6 – Fox Theatre (Atlanta, GA) & ! w/ Cut Off Your Hands @ w/ Telekinesis # w/ Tokyo Police Club
* w/ Maps & Atlases $ w/ Passion Pit
% w/ Death Cab for Cutie, Cold War Kids
& w/ Death Cab for Cutie, Matt Costa

The Silence Kit – A Strange Labor

A few years ago I had the pleasure of reviewing an album by the Russian band Silence Kit. It was a phantasmagoria of sound wrought by a few like-minded experimental post-rock musicians. It’s odd that there exists two bands with the same unusual name, but here we have another Silence Kit, this time from the Philly/New Jersey area. The US Silence Kit tends towards aspirational indie rock and falls somewhere between Bikini Atoll and Interpol.

The cuts on A Strange Labor tend toward the near-grand. That is, they’re restrained versions fan-singalong anthems about love, loss, and other staples of the genre. There’s a hint of sadness and regret that tinges these minor-key tracks, in a way that the British bands have always been so good at. It’s guitar/bass/drums/programming/keyboards/vocals the way God intends for it to be.

On a cut like “And If I Ever See You Again,” it’s Interpol’s guitars, rolling toms, and — unexpectedly — no crescendo, no surging guitars at the end, no screaming. It’s the kind of restraint that younger bands can’t seem to harness. Likewise on “Reassurement.” And then on “You Can’t Be Serious,” it’s almost Arab Strap in its spare, dark, and even tone. “Linguist” breaks out the real rock moves, punctuating its sturm-und-drang with some really high bass notes. The bridge of the song features spacey keyboards and crisp guitar, a la Starsailor.

The album has a few ballad-type slow numbers with acoustic guitar as well: “Dry Summer,” “Missing the Point,” and “But This Remains” round out the collection by turning things down and getting sensitive, if a little melodramatic. It’s an occupational hazard and almost a truism that singers will over-emote when given the spotlight on the stripped-down, bare-your-soul numbers, unfortunately. It’s not overdone to the point of being distracting, though, so that’s a good thing. And besides, this album isn’t trying to be uplifting, so you have to cut it a little slack.

Next Page »