DIIV: Oshin (2012)

(Captured Tracks)

When this Beach Fossils offshoot changed their name to DIIV (instead of Dive), the most apt response was from critic Chris Weingarten: "Who gives a SHIIT?" Indeed, this is the lowest, most limited-appeal depth of a certain breed of indie pop -- a curious hybrid of surf music and dream-pop that's become the specific parlance of Captured Tracks but has also infected more visible acts like the Drums and Surfer Blood. All this is more or less derived from both Flying Nun groups like the Bats and the long-forgotten throwback beach boys the Barracudas, whose records are practically a blueprint. This particular group's long-festering debut Oshin, though, deserves credit for its modesty. It neither claims to nor achieves any significant level of pop transcendence; it's easy to criticize it for washing over us ineffectively, but I'm not sure it completely intends to do anything else. It's a lazy record for lazy times.

That said, the hook is a severe one; the walls of jangly guitar on "(Druun)" and "Past Lives" stir something deep in us nostalgic types, and makes it hard to accept that this a record almost wholly free of complete songs. What we get is more fragmentary. When an actual voice finally asserts itself on the third cut, "Human," it's a bit of an off-putting shock. Said vocals are in the Kevin Shields camp, ebbing and flowing casually over and under the music and never putting across anything distinct lyrically or melodically. Throughout the record, they appear as an instrument at various intervals and can come across as alternately ghostly and vaguely emotive, but even at the rare points (like "How Long Have You Known?") that they're provided with an actual hook, it's endlessly repeated as though it wasn't considered worthwhile to complete the idea. That vagueness of spirit is nice in theory, but you know, even My Bloody Valentine had compositions. For better or worse, this feels like jamming and noodling that happens to be quite pretty but has little final value beyond ambiance.

Again, though, DIIV show an admirable restraint that both helps and hurts. It will take no leap of faith whatsoever to picture any of the tunes here as the evocative and winning score to the '80s throwback teen film of your dreams; they have just the right level of earnest wistfulness to back up less abstractly expressed emotions. On their own, it's like listening to, well, a film score... but one thing that separates this from the zillion other records like it is that only once does it cop to any kind of giddy retro-throwback trip, on the awful Miami Vice pastiche "Doused." In small doses, this stuff is great to zone or even to write to, but its squandered potential is depressing -- there's plenty of talent and a great sound here, and you wish they'd take it somewhere instead of grinding down into the ground with their ringing guitars until sundown.

The Antlers: Undersea EP (2012)

(Anti-)

RECOMMENDED

The Antlers' breakthrough Hospice was a bleak, drab affair; the follow-up Burst Apart an immersive tower of beautiful sound -- and this is somewhere in between, skewing toward the latter. There was a lot of press about it being some sort of highly ambitious project and/or exercise in defiant difficulty, but none of that comes across. It's mood music, something to change the color of a room for the moment, and it's splendid in that regard.

Just don't come looking for songs -- there's not a hook to be found across these four cuts, just a pervasive plodding along that's audibly the outgrowth of one-eye-open jamming. The music itself is competent enough but not beautiful; it's made such by (who else?) singer Peter Silberman's lilting, hypnotic vocals, always the lifeblood of the group. He holds your hand through lengthy dirges like "Endless Ladder" and provides a framework through which to appreciate this music's heavy, transformative but subtle charm. It's also not a bad introduction to the band; if you dig the vaguely despairing tiredness of it all, go pick up Hospice. If you like the singing and the music's ability to sustain a complex mood (for almost half an hour!) and wouldn't mind the injection of a little energy, try Burst Apart. Meanwhile, this is more than worthwhile to file in with your discreet-music collection.

[SEE ALSO:]
Hospice (2009)
Burst Apart (2011)
(together) EP (2011)

Frank Ocean: Channel Orange (2012)

(Def Jam)

RECOMMENDED

Gonna lose a few friends with this statement: this album isn't that good. I spent most of the year attempting to change that opinion; didn't work. It has sparks of brilliance that cannot be fucking denied, for sure, and there's no way around it: in those moments, it's like you're listening to Stevie Wonder in the late '60s, except with a modernist (for good and for ill) slant. And like Stevie Wonder in the '60s, Frank Ocean is a great, great talent -- the sole cultural benefit of the Odd Future phenomenon -- who's not yet come to full fruition. At least, not LP-length fruition. Not meaning to second guess the opinions of other folks who know far more about music than I do, I feel like we're treating My Cherie Amour like it's Innervisions here. There's nothing wrong per se with recognizing the latent pop genius within Channel Orange, but it seems to me that there's some overcompensation here for the fact that major labels no longer take the time to develop artists. And in and outside of the big business circuit, there's a kind of responsibility -- a sort of NYSE gambling -- to assure the future of those who are promising grand returns down the line but couldn't otherwise merit the necessary support to get there.

Here's what's wrong with this: when Ocean releases his follow-up to Channel Orange it will be leagues better than this; and the follow-up to the follow-up could well be a masterpiece. There's little doubt that he has it in him. But what will rockcrits say? Chances are they will respond with a wild mixture of thoughts nothing like the uniformity that greeted this record, giving the subsequent ones a few years of unfair devaluing and thus rendering the same growth they're pulling for stymied before the fact. This is yet another reason why the music business these days is lose-lose, but as I.A.L. Diamond said, why should I depress you? Let's celebrate what works about Frank Ocean's debut.

Listening to the album in sequence, the jolt to end all jolts is "Thinkin Bout You," somewhat conveniently issued as the first single, which opens as an almost reverent bit of '90s slow-jamming before Ocean unleashes the kind of loverboy falsetto that lengthy after-dark, uh, conversations are built upon -- it's an "Adore" voice, if you read me. The song's assured and gorgeous enough to immediately and unhesitantly put attempted soulfuck maestros like the Weeknd in their place, as nothing he's issued has the warmth and weight of this in writing or performance terms. Of the album's four other peaks, three are singles (or are soon to be): you already know "Pyramids" if you've been within earshot of any music blog or news source this year -- it's an idea-filled throwback mess, and could easily be ponderous, but Ocean's winning performance and enthusiasm keep it on the rails and poke subtly, tantalizingly at a cathartic peak that never comes... which is all the better, actually.

"Sweet Life" marks the coalescence of Ocean's pure grandness as a singer with producer Pharrell Williams' finely tuned way around a classicist, smoothly funky R&B ballad -- its moodily passive mid-'70s sound renders the lyric about wasted lives an almost Pet Sounds-esque example of irony, the blissed-out music hiding the paranoia. It's this track that most easily conjures up Stevie Wonder comparisons, as Ocean's method-acting for the luminary is uncanny, and he doesn't merely imitate, he fleshes out and twists the sound being referenced. Even that isn't a pure lift or imitation, for Ocean is well aware of the very 2010s tinge of fear and dread he's adding to a fluffy, familiar base; it's as perpetual and unnerving as the undertones of horrific propaganda injected into traditional girl-group pop by Cults' debut album last year.

And then there's "Lost," one of the half-dozen or so best songs (to my knowledge) of the year -- both a heartbreaking ballad about a relationship broken by drug use and a hauntingly intense midnight anthem that surges, bursts with momentum. It begins with a simple enough synthesized trill, backgrounded by traditional electro-pop that gradually builds, the arcade of adulthood, and comes to suggest both entrapment and escape on the immediately striking, cold-chill chorus with its ingeniously evocative but threadbare lyric: "Miami, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Spain / Lost." As if that weren't enough, Ocean spreads out to tightly controlled, lilting vocal interaction on the bridge that (let's add to the list of giants, shall we?) suggests both Marvin Gaye and Van Morrison -- the song sings him, as Greil Marcus would put it, and not just in a single moment but across layers of overdubs, bettered again by the supercharged, emotionally drained singing on the coda. At bottom of all this, we're looking at something so straightforward but immediate as a song whose music simply conjures up its intended emotions magnificently, a piece of storytelling told almost entirely by melody, voice, beat, production. I doubt Channel Orange is a masterpiece, but not that this song is. It's heading to radio in December and I expect we'll be hearing a lot of it.

Another cut that soars in far less explicit fashion is the Earl Sweatshirt cameo "Super Rich Kids," a five-minute marathon of great wordplay and greater, less organized than usual vocal playfulness that's taken on an incongruous darkness by the end, a suggestion of what Ocean was going for artistically for the entire record but couldn't seem to completely clutch. "Super Rich Kids" sounds like a throwaway that accidentally became good, but therein lies the problem -- the record is stuffed with irrelevant pieces that aren't so lucky, surreal cinematic skits and half-formed ideas like "Fertilizer" and "White" (an excruciatingly self-serious John Mayer guitar showpiece) that are unable to rise above their own frivolity. It makes the big songs stand out, easy to latch on to, but the record as a whole is made so disorganized and diluted it's hard to separate its greatness from its doldrums.

Some will argue that this very shapelessness of form is what makes the record great. I sympathize with this argument; the White Album's my favorite Beatles record! It's just that the wading through material may be worth it when your reward is a "Lost" or a "Pyramids," but when it's merely a half-decent cut like "Pink Matter" (with an excellent Andre 3000 spot, it should be mentioned) you feel that, yes, it's Playlist time. And if you're like me, when you separate the songs you want to hear every time here, you get about seven or eight -- which is why this is a good album, because any album with that may good songs is good, but any album that subverts all that with tiresome directionless pieces of "business" can't be truly great.

That said, it's disingenuous to pretend that Ocean's own skill isn't the very culprit of my disappointment -- when you hear "Lost" or "Sweet Life," it's hard not to want an album full of those, and it's almost a certainty that he could give us one. He chooses not to. Fine. But he also does this within songs, and if anything that's more irritating. I'm irked every time by "Crack Rock" and its matching of a delightfully clever lyric and brooding, contaied melody (along the lines of "Ballad of Dorothy Parker") with nearly the stupidest, least interesting two-syllable chorus imaginable ("Crack rock crack rock / crack rock crack rock" = instant skip). And why waste a perfectly serviceable keyboard creation like "Forrest Gump" and its sympathetically presented framing of a childhood crush on an allusion to a cultural artifact of far less imagination that even the lesser moments of Channel Orange, one that doesn't deserve the reverence he gives it here? The sublime and the stupid, all together, and don't forget that Wonder had that horrendous "Superwoman" track on Music of My Mind.

It's inevitable now that Channel Orange will top a large number of year-end polls, and I don't think that's a bad thing -- it's an imaginative and identifiably new record, yet one with a sense of history, maybe one of the first pop or soul records that truly knows how to deal with the baggage and deep past of its form. The individual songs have been presented with the analysis and investigation that's ordinarily reserved for long-acknowledged classics. And again, there's nothing about that that isn't good for new music in general and R&B in particular. But yes, Ocean will make far, far more consistent and stirring albums in the future, albums that will rush through you with abandon and leave you as breathless as the best songs on this one leave you now. For now, enjoy this, and don't let your eyes off this kid.

Advance Base: A Shut-In's Prayer (2012)

(Orindal)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Read my review at Metro Times.

Your opinion of this is likely tied exclusively to how you felt about CFTPA, but if they're in your wheelhouse, it's hard to imagine a lovelier slice of unbridled melancholy for your holiday season (there's even a Christmas song!) than this low-key, truly beautiful half hour. What I love most about it is that as dire and dark and sometimes emotionally raw as the songs are (especially "My Sister's Birthday," which just... oof), they are also consistently so playful and witty in ways both large and small.

Additionally, when I reviewed this earlier this year I communicated directly with Owen Ashworth and he was by some margin the nicest person I dealt with in the course of freelancing. Not that all this should influence your opinion of the music or anything, but for heaven's sake buy this thing; it's great and he truly deserves your support.

Suckers: Candy Salad (2012)

(Frenchkiss)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Read my CRANK review at Metro Times.

It's not garnered a lot of momentum, but this is a fine pop record somewhat in the vein of MGMT's Congratulations with touches of the Shins and (why not?) the Beatles, and generally very strong songwriting and full-bodied singing. I don't know if it's anything truly great and artistically significant, but I get more pure joy out of it ("Turn on the Sunshine" and "Bricks to the Bones" give me a profound singing-in-the-car urge) than I have from most new music I've heard this year. Hideous album cover, though; I've taken to hiding the LP behind a bunch of others.

One-sentence reviews #2

Mount Eerie
Clear Moon (2012)
(P.W. Elverum & Sun)

The unmistakable and harrowing(ly pur-tee) sound of hitting a rock-bottom depression with droning, uh, "soundscapes"; this is the sharp cheddar to Bon Iver's velveeta.

***

Japandroids
Celebration Rock (2012)
(Polyvinyl)

!!!!! AVOID !!!!! - I'm not going to condescend to your tastes if you can put up with this grating crap but as with Fang Island, if you tout this record even nostalgically but still sneer at Saves the Day and Fall Out Boy and the like, you are one of the world's Problems.

***

Ty Segall
Slaughterhouse (2012)
(In the Red)

More interesting than it initially seems, this (in some circles) big tentpole is just Nuggets-infected throatiness with a strong, shambolic hard rock edge -- the main obstacle for me -- and if such pureness of theory strikes your fancy, I'd advise giving this a spin.

Miles Davis: Walkin' (1954)

(Prestige)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

Though it's not commonly recognized as a breakthrough or landmark, this key collection from Miles Davis and his monstrous mid-'50s rhythm section (Percy Heath and Kenny Clarke, plus Horace Silver on piano) marks a turning point in his rapid maturation during his first decade of performing and recording. Walkin' is anything but the casual stride suggested by its title -- it's an intense, assured, and dramatic set of sides stabbing forth, commanding attention. As with the majority of Davis' Quintet recordings of this period, many will argue this cut-up assortment isn't the best way to hear these sessions, and maybe they're right, but these five cuts present such a flawless argument for Davis as a nearly peerless progenitor of bop that I can't see questioning the resultant package.

The thirteen-minute "Walkin'" itself is one of Davis' earliest true classics, even as it refines and rambles atop a standard blues structure, and it goes a long way toward persuading the novice about his own command over a gifted band. Alto sax player Dave Schildkraut, something of an unknown apart from these and a few other sessions, holds his own, as does a particularly playful Silver whose interpolations are quite delightful, but everyone marches in step according to Davis' own whims, as his dictatorship over the arrangement is such that his trumpet blares come across like announcements from on high. Yet everything is subservient to the curiosity and joy in the entire band's performance; the periodic explosion of that opening fanfare, followed by the sliding triumph of J.J. Johnson trombone fury that launched a thousand spy movie themes. This shares space with swing, introspection, soft and subtle grooving; the recording is everything, a mountain of possibilities.

Johnson reappears on "Blue 'n' Boogie," the yang to the yin of "Walkin'," and enjoys a splendidly complex interplay with Davis, who allows himself to be overtaken a bit by his peers because it's best for the driving, jumping number itself. On the three shorter performances orbiting these two, Davis in turn explores a democratic possibility, sustaining mood and exhibiting a freedom to explore and experiment with wildly divergent solos and tangents -- "Solar" is a conventional piece but its starkness points a subtle way forward, while the pure style evident in Davis' own work on "Love Me or Leave Me" (not on the original release, added in 1957) renders it the forgotten showpiece here. But I return most frequently to the calmly tricky and gloriously romantic "You Don't Know What Love Is," an instance of the sort of classicist yearning that proves as much as Coltrane's Ballads that a true innovator's command of traditional themes and techniques can be as seductive and stirring as his most cutting-edge material.

Within my limited knowledge of jazz, I find myself still attached to some of the recordings I first fell for, and Miles Davis' Prestige albums are paramount among these, which may or may not reflect a bias since it just so happened they were available to me at a crucial point. But I truly believe Walkin' itself is, not counting the undeniable but technically revisionist Birth of the cool, Davis' first great record, a work of art immediate enough to convince a universal swath of people while softly suggesting the sort of subversions and eccentricities that would quickly transform him. There's such an innate magic to these five sides, I have a hard time imagining a better introduction to Davis as a player and bandleader. But is there such a thing as a "bad" introduction to Miles Davis?

[SEE ALSO:]
Birth of the Cool (1950)
Relaxin' (1958)

[This is the last catalog review for a month or so while we participate in highly intensive catchup on the music of 2012, already in progress, with the first examples likely to show up Sunday evening, maybe earlier. Old records will make a return to the blog along with a new, more leisurely but more consistent posting schedule in December.]