Caw-Caw Music

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Having pushed instrumental guitar music through textural and tempo barriers for three albums before this one, 65daysofstatic have now reeled in the complexity and instead emphasised volume and dynamics. We Were Exploding Anyway seems to dispense with the subtlety and glitch-laden rock of yore, replacing it with the kind of cavern-defying hooks that The Prodigy, or even drum’n’bass goons Pendulum, could hinge their entire careers on.

Of course without the lessons learned through almost 10 years of touring, plus a massive coup in the form of an arena support slot with The Cure last year, We Were Exploding Anyway may well have hit jagged rocks with such an approach. 65daysofstatic transcend the competitive loud war by layering simple, effective and evocative ideas akin to an aural acropolis of cards.

The gargantuan centrepiece of the record begins with the Robert Smith-smeared Come to Me, which alights upon ambient hums before signature electronic bell percussion sets in. Within three minutes the track has begun pounding and The Cure’s vocalist is looped upon a churning, ebbing thrash parading as a dance anthem. The ebullient flow streams across eight minutes and yet it’s still difficult to shake upon its abrupt end. This is followed by Go Complex, an ominous Ministry of Sound death-rattle that bellows scintillating air raid grooves over itself. If club music imploded, this is probably what it would sound like. The only problem is that these two opposed beasts are so all-consuming that it may feel that this black hole core is all everything else leads up to.

More than anything the live setting seems made for every single one of these songs, rather than the other way around. From being a fringe concern – albeit one with an underground reputation worthy of rabid devotion – 65daysofstatic have grasped hitherto unimagined opportunities, capitalised on experiences and brought an eclectic yet huge arsenal with which to entice newcomers and open-minded veteran travellers with.

Bullet for My Valentine are the biggest British metal band since Iron Maiden. That’s a statement that (still) rankles the more pernickety metal fan, who continues to claim that, because BFMV focus on huge tunes (and have a penchant for syrupy ballads) rather than huge lyrics, and have meticulously straightened hair that’s more salon than sweatbox, they lack credibility. It’s just not true. They simply have more strings to their bow than the average metal band, hence their sure and steady rise to the top.

2008’s Scream Aim Fire, the band’s second long-player, went top five in both the UK and US upon release, and for its follow-up heavyweight producer Don Gilmore (Linkin Park, Avril Lavigne) has been brought in to create an album that will become ubiquitous. BFMV are aiming for world domination, and with Fever they may well achieve it.

The military drumming of Your Betrayal opens the album with infantry intensity and then some wonderfully crisp riffing gives way to Matt Tuck whispering about insanity and such. This approach is maintained throughout the rolling, pogo-friendly title-track and the fantastically frantic The Last Fight. The three make for a brilliant opening trio.

Despite the lyrics failing to improve upon previous efforts, elsewhere Fever represents a significant step forward, and practically guarantees that BFMV will fulfil the expectations preceding its release. An outstanding set of songs, this collection will raise the temperatures of metal fans across the globe.

Nigh on three years have breezed by since a certain 19-year-old shot up the charts with a whip-smart song about a relationship crumbling like make-up at the end of a long night. But our Gaga-dominated times feel like a world away from ‘Foundations’ and the time Kate and chum Lily Allen ruled the roost, with their thoroughly British kind of pop: no frills, just lyrics loaded with savage wit and a killer way with an interview to win over the kids. Meanwhile, it seems Ms Nash has been cocooned away with an ever-expanding record collection to devour, emerging now as a rather wiser and more assured butterfly. Previewed early via her website, the Slits-ish ‘I Just Love You More’ pointed towards a radical, grungey makeover. It was something of a riot grrrl red herring, though – a chance to show off her new-found affection for the underground that permeates more in spirit than sound elsewhere on her second album. Rather than a cynical ploy to win over the left-field vote, in the album’s context it comes over more like the natural progression of a still-very-young lady gradually uncovering her musical heritage. ‘My Best Friend Is You’ sees Nash ratchet up the calibre of her melodies, now relying far more heavily on the power of a good chorus and less on incising turns of phrase to draw our attention. Thus, lead single ‘Do Wah Doo’ is a vibrant nugget of passive-aggressive pop nous. “Everyone thinks she’s a bit of alright/But I think that she’s not so nice,” trills our protagonist, coyly holding back the jealous pay-off until the closing seconds: “Well… I think she’s a bitch!” That song’s debt to the girl-group sound is a recurring theme, most assuredly executed on the spectacular ‘Kiss That Grrrl’ – an earthier cousin to the The Pipettes’ ‘Pull Shapes’ – full of brass parps and twanging surf guitar. Indeed, where her debut sounded absolutely of its time, a reflection of the insular world of one very astute teenager, ‘My Best Friend Is You’ is just as much in thrall to the past. A paean to her punk forebears, ‘Mansion Song’’s feminist beat poetry is a concise, contemporary update of Huggy Bear’s pioneering riot grrrl stew. It’s plum stuff and Nash generally proves remarkably adept at co-opting her magpie’s nest of influences. Only in the final section do they overcome her own personality, with ‘Pickpocket’ a little too closely in debt to Regina Spektor and the admittedly pretty ‘You Were So Far Away’ filching the sparse, hushed tones of Cat Power. Largely, though, Nash sounds just like herself, and that’s exactly when she shines most brightly.

An electronic, atmospheric exercise in sonic texture mapping, Pantha Du Prince’s Black Noise is a numb wash, a narcotic, a glassy-eyed onslaught of meticulously manicured, well-produced loops, beeps, and blips. The future is here, and it feels like trying to sleep but instead tossing, turning, and staring at a cream-colored ceiling. White noise, that fizzy static you might hear from an old amplifier, is said to be an effective sleep aid. Your brain locks into its fixed spectral density and, by canceling out the chatter upstairs, you dream without a worry in the world. Black noise, fittingly, is silence: the absence of noise. This album’s noise is too cool and too busy to be black. It is decidedly white; it is persistently asexual, and it forgoes all emotional posture.

In that the record achieves a certain slouched grandeur, in that it makes the absence of conviction an accomplishment, it is a success. Unlike most minimal techno, Pantha du Prince is not content to let a single vamp carry a track from beginning to end. He modulates tempo often and, in doing so, innovates a genre that is appealing by virtue of its sparseness, of its hypnotic starkness, of its inherent resistance to ornamentation. If your mood is in need of stultifying, let Black Noise be your guest.

It is always difficult to assess stand-up comedy without the visual half of the presentation. Physical comedy, improvisational elements, and the spontaneity of live performance all get lost in the purely aural translations of a record. That idea, in and of itself, might become material for observational comedian Arj Barker, whose album LYAO arrives on March 2, 2010 through Warner Brothers.

In keeping with the title of the act, Barker performs a bit about the cock-ups that occur in text-only communication, riffing on the trials and tribulations of the cursed T9 function and suggesting fonts like ¬“Sarcastica” and “Fun Times Roman” to help convey tone more accurately.

However, that bit is a bright spot in what is otherwise a completely unfunny, poorly timed, badly performed, and unoriginal routine. The failings of this performance go far beyond the limitations presented by a recording of a live act. Many comedians’ performances and material have been strong enough to bridge that gap (the late George Carlin’s many recordings come to mind).
The real mark of bad comedy is when it actually offends. We have all reveled in the entertainment of an unclean, tasteless joke delivered by a great performer. This always comes from the comedian’s ability to remain likeable and create a context in which exaggeration and hyperbole are understood to not be expressions of actual opinion (even Dennis Leary’s No Cure for Cancer managed not to offend). But Barker’s bit on creating a sister organization to Doctors Without Borders consisting of sending untrained medics to Africa smacked of performing medical experiments on the victims of Third World society. I am not even sure that a solid delivery could have saved that material.

Spare yourself the wasted time and skip this recording. LYAO has g2g b/c no one is laughing.

Before he settled into life as the the folksy liberal conscience of indie America, a kind of Iraq invasion Dylan, Conor Oberst used Bright Eyes to make music that was angry, liquour-drenched, paranoid and – if anyone dare say it anymore – emo. Neva Dinova, meanwhile, are part of the Omaha?based Saddle Creek clique. In 2004, with Bright Eyes on the cusp of hugeness, they hunkered down together for some boozy sessions that became this collaborative split rarity of an EP. In retrospect, it sits in his discographyas the point where Oberst went, if not more sane, then more sonically sensible.

All this is significant now because the love-in between the pair has grown to such an extent that they’ve gone back, done four more tracks and given it a full-length release. Of the older stuff, Oberst and Dinova frontdude Jake Bellows split the reins, taking on the country and the bluesy end of things, respectively. But, as is often the case, both acts land up watered down. Dinova’s ‘Someone’s Love’ is pretty, but doesn’t match their usual eerie psych. Oberst’s ‘Spring Cleaning’ is the kind of cracked acoustic sketch he specialises in, but it never comes to life here.

Happier news is the fact that Oberst is scratching this itch in the first place. He’s hardly been a slouch since Bright Eyes went on hiatus, making two Mystic Valley Band albums and forming part of last year’s Monsters Of Folk supergroup, but none of those endeavours mined quite the same magical, melodramatic fairy tales he attains under that name. Bellows takes the lead on the whimsical ‘Someone’s Love’ and ‘Rollerskating’, which makes the other two the first genuine Bright Eyes material since 2007. ‘Happy Accident’ is the more energetic customer, all crashing chords and snarled longing. But the real diamond here is the magisterially twisted ‘I Know You’, in which Oberst trades barbed contradictions with a would-be lover over a spooky waltz: “Walking with you through the courtyard where everything’s marble and smooth/You said the idea of perfection was just fundamentally cruel”.

Soapbox preachers such as Frank Turner and Jon McClure might seem to be saturating the protest song market, but Chris T-T has something extra to offer. When he’s not championing the cause of social justice in familiar fashion, he’s exploring relationship dynamics with warmth and intelligence (see: ‘Love Is Not Rescue’, ‘Tall Woman’). Still, it’s when Chris goes back to his ranty roots that he’s most inspiring. ‘Elephant In The Room’ is a case in point, with its stirring rallying cry: “I remembered the previous centuries before the word freedom replaced just being free/A sleight of hand to steal our democracy/We can still win.” Fighting talk, just when we need it.

For those dissenters who accused LA’s Dum Dum Girls of riding on the coat-tails of similarly suffixed gal-pals Vivian Girls, it’s time to eat your words. It may have been a long time coming, but the debut album from this West Coast four-piece proves that despite sharing an obsession with fuzz, the Mary Chain and Shangri-Las melodies with their contemporaries, Dum Dum Girls are very much their own women. With ‘I Will Be’, they unfurl a sound far more intricate and subtle than their Brooklyn rivals. ‘Blank Girl’ (featuring Crocodiles’ Brandon Welch) and ‘Jail La La’ each usurp the Vivian Girls’ dream-pop girl-group harmonies by dint of Dee Dee Penny’s effortlessly cool, sugary croons. Make no mistake: as a self-confessed “choir nerd”, Dee Dee (real name Kristin Gundred) has the vocal chops to see off all competitors.

It was she who initiated the band as a bedroom project before roping in the likes of drummer Frankie Rose (ex of both Crystal Stilts and – yes – Vivian Girls). Both sticking to the garage rock template of outsider gang-dom and upsetting the genre’s canonical history as a tiresomely male-dominated field (the band’s name is a pointed play on a song from international man of mayhem Iggy Pop’s solo debut ‘The Idiot’), this rollicking debut album is a balance-redressing, cliché-bucking tonic.

‘It Only Takes One Night’ possesses both the frenzy and the cool of The Cramps’ signature sound, but in place of that band’s raw weirdness there’s the lulling breeze of Dee Dee’s vocal, evocative of a sedated Eartha Kitt. The record strays far beyond the basics of rockabilly and garage rock: ‘Yours Alone’ may feature Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Nick Zinner on reverberating, fuzzy guitar, but the tenderness of Dee Dee’s vocal transcends genre boundaries: “Met him at the school yard, five years old/Told him I would love him ’til I’m cold/We held hands, we took walks/My first kiss was at the docks… All my love is yours alone”. Rather than a mere stylistic nod to the girl group sound, Dum Dum Girls offer a subtle-toned exploration of the politics of the personal of which Ellie Greenwich would be proud, typified by latest single ‘Jail La La’, which is equally lustful and sentimental.

‘Bhang Bhang, I’m A Burnout’ recalls the dulcet tones of The Breeders circa ‘Divine Hammer’, while ‘Oh Mein Me’ takes its cue from Kim and Kelley Deal’s very own ‘German Studies’ textbook. Yet the song is not just an exhilarating journey into the foreign languages, but an analysis of the rollercoaster ride of love at first sight.

Admittedly, ‘I Will Be’ at times lacks the raw kinetic energy and fury that surged through early single ‘Catholicked’. The decision to exclude that song from the album is an unfathomable act to say the least. Still, there’s more than enough here to compensate for such minor misgivings: ultimately, ‘I Will Be’ is a convincing retort from an unfairly maligned band. Over to you, Vivian Girls.

With their last album ‘ABC 123’, a tribute to the 50th anniversary of the Helvetica typeface, it seemed as if To Rococo Rot were to follow their German forebears, the mighty Kraftwerk, celebrating the straight line in pursuit of joyous modernity. Sadly, with ‘Speculation’, their journey aboard the trans-Europe express to experimentalism seems to have been derailed. While the likes of ‘Away’ and ‘Ship’ trundle pleasantly along with an assortment of beeps and whirrs, it takes an appearance from Faust’s Jochen Irmler on the eerie chimes of ‘Friday’ to help ‘Speculation’ move from tuneful to testing. Too bad they couldn’t have made a similar Faustian pact for the rest of the record.

Who’d have ever thought someone from Yourcodenameis:milo would go on to make something vaguely decent? Justin Lockey – partnered now not only by Craig Philbin, but by one-time Cooper Temple Clauser Tom Bellamy – makes ‘Methods’ even more of an unlikely triumph. More broken Britpoppers than Broken Bells, the duo are the very embodiment of scrapheap-indie, yet ‘Methods’ fizzes with daisy-fresh exuberance and shiny production. The tunes probably have more sheen than Lockey or Bellamy would desire – polished in a lamey, little-bit-Coldplay way – but the bleepy, string-ripping FX prove that the duo are striving to be more than simply flyweight guitar cannon fodder.