Wild Nothing: Gemini (2010)

(Captured Tracks)

RECOMMENDED

Dream pop of the ‘90s lives on in this elegant one-man synthpop nod to Belle & Sebastian, Lush, and the Las. Virginian Jack Tatum crafts chamber pop songs under a sensory-overload electrical storm. Modesty is his power and his failing both; the songs are subtle enough to benefit from his polished, big-idea digital arrangements, but at times they seem to beg for more breathing room, and more willfully expressive vocals.

Attempting to fully grasp Gemini, Tatum’s full-length debut under the self-deprecating rubric Wild Nothing, feels too much like predicting the future: the group’s entity and formation are still a work in progress. Only after the completion of Gemini did WN become an actual complete band for the sake of live shows that have reportedly proven more engaging than the record begins to let on. Tatum is still in the process of discovering his voice as well. Affecting a Stuart Murdoch (“Live in Dreams”) slash Kevin Shields (“O Lilac”) nonchalance at first, the second half of the album sees him periodically stretching to a convincing, melodic Billy Corgan screech on the shimmering “Bored Games” and even a bit of cooing Morrissey on the Ronettes (by way of the Jesus and Mary Chain) clone “My Angel Lonely.”

Whether this is Tatum’s permanent project or not, he’s one to watch, and even if few songs on the album stand apart, its textured, chilly, intimate mood will make it a favorite for many. It perfectly captures the gothic mood of sub-Nirvana alternative in the days of 120 Minutes, a trip well worth taking again.

Sleigh Bells: Treats (2010)

(Mom + Pop)

!!!!! AVOID !!!!!

Like fellow glorified cheerleaders Fang Island, Sleigh Bells craft ultrawattage, high-spirited, intolerably annoying pop for folks who actually enjoyed pep rallies in high school. Parading lyrics like "You can do your best today!!" the duo come off like guidance counselor rock -- sunny, bright, repetitive music that would inadvertently drive a borderline case to suicide.

Oh, and this stuff is loud. Loud, like, tastelessly, needlessly, irresponsibly loud. Treats might qualify as the worst mastering job of the year, compressed to shit and maxed out until everything pushes to a migraine ceiling. There's no reason to believe this isn't how Sleigh Bells wanted it. It's like staring into a fresh flourescent bulb for half an hour, or eating three bales of cotton candy before riding Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. No matter how young you think you are, this isn't good for you.

Signature track "Rill Rill" is gaining a reputation for its uncredited copping of a sample from Funkadelic's "Can You Get to That." It's amazing that it takes something that trivial to get people outraged at these clowns. I'd comment more specifically but that would require listening to this shit again. Stay away. Drink five energy drinks if you need to wake up this badly, for god's sake.

Emeralds: Does It Look Like I'm Here? (2010)

(Editions Mego)

!! CAUTION !!

Here's a trio from Cleveland kindly providing us with ambient, theatrical synth-sludge that takes lengthy, loose form for an hour. The noise is too intrusive and gurgling to be agreeable, too harsh to be pretty, too shapeless to be enjoyable, not shapeless enough to be interesting. My girlfriend said "I feel like I'm listening to shitty music in space." I don't know that it's altogether shitty. The guys in Emeralds sound like they're having fun. We're the ones who suffer.

As when we spoke of Flying Lotus in this space, in many ways this is a mark of my perhaps embarrassing foot-dragging in regard to electronica. I thought I loved avant garde but these stabs of malfunctioning-computer effects, the watery distortions of jazz and dance that come screaming through -- this isn't the sort of weird I relate to. So chalk this to me being unqualified to review this if you like.

In this case, however, I feel as though I know at least a little bit about ambient, as well as the analogue psychedelia and shoegaze to which Does It Look Like I'm Here seems to aspire, and this doesn't connect. I always thought the first goal of ambient was not to present itself, not to stand out. Trippiness comes across, but the music is too repetitive and long-winded to make the right impression. I could use more material like "It Doesn't Arrive," three and a half minutes of feathery easy listening that gradually builds and sustains a mood much more satisfyingly than the droning, endless, maddening title track. The warmer textures and variance on "Access Granted" help make it a keeper, but the remainder is all the more cast off by its charm.

Emeralds' music may be conceived in the spirit of Music for Airports but it unequivocally demands attention at all times; it's busy, uninviting, and abrasive. The group's sheer quantity of releases seems to suggest this is all quite easy for them. I'm sure there is something to be said for all of it, but I'd require training to hear the difference. It certainly feels like niche product to me.

Spoon: Transference (2010)

(Merge)

RECOMMENDED

Well, here's a surprise: an album by Spoon of the kind of stuff Spoon is good at -- classic-sounding, melodic, razor-sharp boyish rock music. Transference is the band's seventh album; it's as consistent and enjoyable as any of the others. As ever, the band comes off as professional and exceptionally competent, everything coming in the perfect size and dosage -- the vocals break just enough, the atmospheric numbers rollick just enough and the rollicking numbers vice versa, the hooks all pass easily through; the record feels remarkably like listening to modern rock radio in the days when it had some level of decency. "Written in Reverse" is the ideal example, a blissfully controlled vocal and just the right muscle to its easygoing swagger.

Merge Records' cofounder Mac McCaughan once said of hearing Spoon's Girls Can Tell in a bar that the record came off with such a classicist charm that he briefly mistaked it for the Rolling Stones. Spoon does indeed come across with the relaxed confidence of the Stones in the '70s; you can hear it in this album's "Out Go the Lights," the sort of laid-back, addictive late night mood piece that was unveiled so effectively by the Stones at their tightest, or "Goodnight Laura," a classic circa-1973 mood-piece ballad. Spoon periodically displays the reverence for punk that one often assumes is the hallmark for bands in their position, but as on "Got Nuffin," it's always without pushing too hard, always with a certain respectable distance that keeps any strain from seeping through. (On a mostly unrelated note, is it me or does "I Saw the Light" sound like it should have been on the soundtrack to Disney's Jungle Book?)

The consensus on Transference seems to be it's a weaker album than Spoon's prior efforts on Merge; the slight discordance of growth here and there aside (love the studio twiddling on "Who Makes Your Money"), I don't really see the big difference. This band always seems to offer what's expected; the grooves are pleasing, but they're airtight and almost too dispassionate. It's actually possible to hear "Nobody Gets Me But You," here positioned as the danceable climax, and mistake it for a slow burn stoner romp. Though not boring, Spoon's records feel like background music to me; they sound excellent while they're on and it's easy to get caught up in them, but it's difficult to remember much about them after they're over. I don't mean this critically though; I love background music.

Titus Andronicus: The Monitor (2010)

(XL)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Patrick Stickles -- literature major, Harvard student, dyed-in-the-wool rock & roller -- is a whirlwind. Within his capacity as the frontman of New Jersey's epic punk rockers Titus Andronicus, he is a channel for unapologetic emotion: triumph, mourning, disappointment, rebellion. We're so many years away from the Clash and the Rolling Stones, but somehow these basic principles have never been abandoned by the young people who are meant to be reached by pop music; an anthem of displacement or lust or thrilling, depressing drunkenness fires them all up the same way. It takes a special kind of human being, though, to take the plunge so eloquently, so directly, and so unpretentiously.

The Monitor, named for Civil War lore -- the USS Monitor was the Union's vessel involved in the first battle between two ironclad warships -- is everything a rock band can hope for as a sophomore effort: expanding beyond freshfaced promise, it offers intelligent lyricism, conceptual ambition that isn't betrayed by dinky ideas, deeply felt performances, visceral kick, asides and secrets aplenty, and the ability to generate fist-pumping awe. Oh, it's also very possibly the best rock album of 2010. It comes on like some lost marching band pounding its way into the fog. Those unfamiliar can contemplate a Southern rock version of Neutral Milk Hotel, or a more ethereal and bookish Replacements, or a wilder R.E.M., or a historically obsessed Old 97's, but that only begins to scrape at the endlessly affecting, powerful music herein. Some will feel the way they did upon discovering Funeral and remembering that maybe naïve teenage feelings belonged in rock & roll after all.

Only there's very little naïve or teenage about this: Splicing in speech (Abraham Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison, Jefferson Davis, etc.) and metaphor of the Civil War, it's an inordinately adult record, a document of internal struggle with self, love, self-love, self-hatred, family, anger, drugs, rejection, whatever. (Maybe even murder, on "Richard II," which fits both the bitter spit of hatred and a Scooby Doo reference.) They occasionally shred and thrash with abandon, but on much of the record TA plays with surprising conservatism, almost suggesting a mildly off-kilter revision of The Band. But Stickles pushes them over the edge into beyond-the-pale territory with his vocal fray, half-crazed and half-astonisngly beautiful lyrics, and the entirely believable threat that he could simply fall apart at any moment.

Stickles tosses in lyrical references to Billy Bragg, Bruce Springsteen, and the Velvet Underground, but his suspicion of all things, his determination to push himself in the wrong direction, is somewhere closer to the Hank Williams school. On the opening track, he snarls "I want to realize too late that I should never have left New Jersey." There are certainly times that Stickles' words are suffocatingly personal, and it seems physically painful for him to sing them ("So all I want for Christmas is no feelings, no feelings now and never again... I have surrendered what made me human and all that I thought was true / So now there's a robot that lives in my brain and he tells me what to do" simultaneously belies and fits perfectly with the emo march behind it), but there is also effortless, frank beauty to be found. The stunningly moving (and hilariously labeled) drinking song "Theme from 'Cheers'" will remind many of Rhett Miller at his peak, clashing hedonism with resigned, knowing self-awareness ("Let's get fucked up and let's pretend we're all okay") as it pictures a wasted weekend of drinking passing into an infinite number of them and finally closing on the eventual discussion of grandchildren at a bar, and the ride out of the world on a stretcher. The clear-eyed vision is tempered by wails of protest: "Those dreams are lying in the still of the grave, what the fuck were they for anyway?"

Titus don't really document contented moments, nor are they concerned with overblown dramatics. All of the flourishes feel justified, partially because something like "God knows how many times I've said this before, but I really don't feel like doing this anymore" actually reads and sounds like a man who's had it, for real. No clue how much the ring of truth translates to reality, but the record wouldn't be the same without it: "Down in North Carolina, I could have been a productive member of society / But these New Jersey cigarettes and all they require have made a fucking junkie out of me." The delivery of a line like "If you talk and nobody's listening, then it's almost like being alone" renders its slight angular, arhythmic nature shattering.

The aim of much of the rage and uncertainty is deliberately vague, but at least some of it -- "The enemy is everywhere, but no one seems to be worried or care" on the dual rallying cries "Titus Andronicus Forever" and "...And Ever" -- seems inevitably political. "Four Score and Seven" raises the stakes: "After 10,000 years, it's still us against them / And my heroes have always died at the end... It's still us against them / And they're winning." But the most impassioned, fiery cries are saved for the chaotic, cathartic but intensely focused finale, "The Ballad of Hampton Roads."

Epic punk is undoubtedly not a new idea, but this certainly seems to carry the stripped-bare attack of a punk anthem to the limit of its literary possibilities. Sure, "Sister Ray" (17:27) is three minutes longer than this (14:02), but the steady building and release of its tension, and certainly the not-at-all-coolheaded vocal, offers a more multifaceted screaming into the void. The song amounts to a haunted cry, a protest against everything, a rejection of dread and an embracing of uncertainty, and most of all, an unadorned primal-scream emptying of frustration. "Is there a girl at this college who hasn't been raped? / Is there a boy in this town that's not exploding with hate? / Is there a human alive ain't look themselves in the face without winking / Or said what they mean without drinking / Who will believe in something without thinking 'what if somebody doesn't approve' / Is there a soul on this earth that isn't too frightened to move?" After turning the gun on himself ("Half the time I open my mouth to speak it's to repeat something that I've heard on TV"), Stickles makes suicidal promises ("When I drink I'm going to drink to excess / And when i smoke I will smoke gaping holes in my chest"), and no, dad, he's not making this up, before pleading pathetically, comically, humanly "I'd be nothing without you, darling, please don't ever leave." It also has bagpipes.

It would be a mistake to overlook the album's more textured songs. The calm, (even) sadder, gospel-tinged "To Old Friends and New" is an anthemic dysfunctional-family lament. Piano aggression, cathartic strings, and a slapped-together Beggars Banquet or Sister Lovers sound mark "Four Score and Seven," beautifully wounded. The gleefully insane "A Pot in Which to Piss" builds to defiant wiry punk but opens up on a brooding dirge that suggests intimacy, hope, and crippling fear. My favorite line is "You ain't never been no virgin, kid, you were fucked from the start" but there's another, quite telling bit in what sounds like a psychodrama about a band's attempts to make it: "You can't make it on merit, not on merit and merit alone / Dan McGee tried to tell me, 'There ain't no more Rolling Stones' / They're all going to be laughing at you." That an album like this could be issued to no more fanfare than it's received suggests the only reason there's no more Rolling Stones is we're too lazy to find them. The Monitor is real shit. It's dangerous, it's addictive, it's harrowing, it includes a recital of a Walt Whitman poem, it's playful, it's rock & roll -- if you've any kind of a taste for the weird and true, waste no more time getting to know it.

No Age: Everything in Between (2010)

(Sub Pop)

!! CAUTION !!

That yellow warning print is probably not deserved, but I find this record frustrating enough that it seemed appropriate.

There's apathy and there's apathy. There's Pavement and there's this. There's awkwardly wailing above a beautiful din and there's painfully whining over an anonymous wall. There may be a glitch in the punk rock fan who can't see the good in this, the same issue I have with virtually all metal, but it's not impossible for it to come off as terrible. Perhaps some of us have become overly accustomed to a modern understanding of punk that verges on pure pop.

It's tempting to think of Wire when confronted with Everything in Between, which amounts to art-skate music the way Pink Flag amounted to an art-rock renovation of punk itself. That's one of many elements of No Age's new album that are great. To boot, who isn't all for bouncing beats and trashy guitars and minimal evolution past the core? We all love low-fidelity noisemaking and the hard hit of a beyond-basic band setup. But there is also something to be said for the universal impact of precision and clarity, and -- if the record's not meant to encompass either -- barring that, beauty to our beloved muddiness.

The songs on this record squeal and fade for a nonstop half hour without much of a direct hit. The set of influences and aesthetic purposes seems all mismatched and flipped around; these songs that would sound so convincing with a more varied sonic approach, and this compelling, terse sound that is too massive to properly fit these songs. There is no reason to doubt that the adolescent anthems here are as secretly eloquent as has been reported. The way in is just damned hard to find.

Delorean: Subiza (2010)

(Matador)

RECOMMENDED

Delorean is a fascinating DIY case study writ large -- a band tasked with creating not only their own audience but their own entire scene. Based in Barcelona and unhappy with the near-nonexistent dance music community, they inaugurated, developed, promoted, and ingrained in the localized music universe an intriguing style of electronic composition. Determined to share it, they worked and worked and worked until something stuck.

Today they are a widely acclaimed Spanish treasure, signed to True Panther Sounds (now a subsidiary of Matador) in the U.S., thus bringing their third album Subiza to a world’s worth of curious folk with expansive tastes. Only problem: the record opens slowly with three draggy numbers, revenge-of-the-drone Jock Jam "Stay Close" to torture chamber pop "Real Love" to featherweight easy listening "Endless Sunset," all overly reliant on pedestrian skittering and currently-in-vogue vocal noodles.

With track four, "Grow," Delorean begins to feel like a functioning band, and the back two thirds of the album bring consistent pulsing pleasure for dance floor reflection. "Grow" initially comes off as another bit of sample burlesque but the precise, pleasing beat kicks in, a lite-jazz riff blasts through, and the gently passionate, faintly accented vocals of Ekhi Lopetegi wash over with imperfect faux-digital drive. Insistent but politely so, the track aptly defines intelligent dance music in five minutes.

The remaider of Subiza happily lives up to that promise. "Simple Graces" suggests mid-‘60s R&B without aping it, and Lopetegi translates the musical tension of the four prior tracks into purebred joy. The samples, at times conjuring the Avalanches, at last fall into line seamlessly. The populist bent of "Infinite Desert" and "Come Wander," both celebrations of early Hi-NRG, makes them must-hears for any Pet Shop Boys fans lingering around the indieverse.

Never deliberately a dance unit until their circumstances demanded such a reaction, Delorean’s pop roots come through, beat notwithstanding, as the record draws to a close: despite the club soundscape, "Warmer Places" is Beach Boys purity at heart, shimmering harmonies and all, proving it’s not only the BBs’ weirder shit that merits modern attention and influence. Feverish optimism and an infectious beat render any context for "It’s All Ours" irrelevant. It is just delightful, lounge-tinged pop with the slightest, warmest hint of the weird. This is where the band’s heart seems, admirably, to truly lie. My sole wish for album the fourth: less Caribou, more LCD Soundsystem.