Pet Shop Boys: Elysium (2012)

(astralwerks)

!! CAUTION !!

Yeouch, that hurts. This is one of my favorite bands ever -- it depresses me to say a bad word about anything they've done. So we'll get it over with quickly. This is a bit of an embarrassment and a huge misstep for Tennant and Lowe after the exquisite Yes; slow-paced, dirgey, undistinguished in composition and performance, poorly and unenthusiastically sung, and far too enamored of its own cute cleverness -- mocking other artists' feckless reachings for the past but guilty of the same exact thing itself. "Ego Music" is a bit like a poor man's "Yesterday, When I Was Mad," which was already a slight dilution of "How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously?" which had evolved from "Hit Music"; one suspects it made the album because the duo still regrets leaving the similarly themed but vastly superior "Shameless" off Very.

It otherwise doesn't sink that low; not quite, but close -- the incomprehensible Handel nod "Hold On" would be a b-side at best in non-lean PSB years. The large problem is not so much that Elysium is over the top and bad as that it's just barely even there and surprisingly dull. PSB once revolutionized the idea of adult contemporary pop on their all-time peak, Behavior; now they attempt to enliven a watered-down dreamy krautrock and end up with subterranean atmospherics that make Fleet Foxes sound positively lively.

The record begins and closes competently; "Leaving" sounds about exactly how you'd expect Pet Shop Boys to sound in 2012, which is sort-of a compliment, and closer "Requiem in Denim and Leopardskin" livens things up with its ambitiously moody lounge-beat, sounding sort of like something you'd hear in The Limited, which is also sort-of a compliment. The entire remainder of the first half snoozes ineffectively save the slightly danceable "A Face Like That," which makes up the difference with a good injection of pop-stupid. The more upbeat second half is harder to ignore in its overreach, though you can detect some of the latent charm in "Give It a Go," and the dumbness of "Memory of the Future" at least sounds like a less lazy put-on. But what on earth is the story with Tennant's weird monosyllabic pronunciation throughout the LP, especially on "Everything Means Something"? This over-enunciation was Michael Stipe's great experiment roundabout 1998, and we all know how that turned out.

I dunno. I'm inarticulate about this. Few things get me more wound up than the announcement of new Pet Shop Boys, especially because it tends to be a blindsiding surprise I discover some months after the fact, given that the group has few fans Stateside. Every time I write them off (as I did after Fundamental, and to a lesser extent Nightlife), they come back swinging. I hope this is no exception. And please don't let a stupid review like this turn you away from them. I just didn't like this particular goround of theirs; I'll cheer up soon enough.

[SEE ALSO:]
Yes (2009)

Passion Pit: Gossamer (2012)

(Columbia)

The best this self-consciously intricate, tightly composed pop record gets is on its enormously timely opening cut, "Take a Walk," which shows actual grit in its anthemic treatment of popularly familiar class-oriented money troubles and growing up in a shadow of self-hatred -- a truly alive flaunting of demons. It's a stark, sad celebration of something troubled. But these graduates are more interested in the piling on of bravura sound-and-sludge stunts, most blatant on the extremely annoying "I'll Be Alright" but manifesting all through the wafer-thin, top-of-lungs power pop of the remainder. It's not disagreeable, really, but it's a lot of work to get through it -- and it's all the same after a while, coming off more as a social experiment than a loose and fun record.

Michael Angelakos probably wants people to be happy, to enjoy themselves, but the Brian Wilson soul-cracking needed to provide such smooth, straight-line soullessness of the body of the record is audible in every calculated second. Pick any one of the songs past track one to take with you and you get the whole idea, everything Passion Pit has to offer you right now. I choose "Carried Away," I like its hook and respond to its emotional heft, but even it isn't a spot on "Take a Walk," the wisdom and high fever of which shows much potential -- so of course it's the one they licensed out to a taco commercial.

The Mountain Goats: Transcendental Youth (2012)

(Merge)

RECOMMENDED

It's not altogether surprising that some are finding this new Mountain Goats album to be John Darnielle's most connected, startling work in years while others are blasé and underwhelmed. What are the lessons of Darnielle's career, after all, if not that even a cult artist can reach his disciples for a myriad variety of reasons. At its best, for me Transcendental Youth is a flamboyantly emotive record, an ironic but felt celebration of the desperation it carefully documents by long-suffering outcasts and lost causes. Bugger the notion that his work relies wholly on his alternately literate, revealing, and wide-eyed lyrics -- if you didn't already get the message from All Eternals Deck that this has become a real and full-fledged band, you will now.

What does make the difference between a good and great Mountain Goats album is the strength of the vocals, which invariably say a good deal about Darnielle's engagement with the subject matter (spoiler: he's consistently very attached and compassionate toward the people and actions he sings about). Still, if you're not on board with a song about offscreen Scarface characters ("The Diaz Brothers"), distantly poetic though it may be, nothing's likely to wake you up to fully appreciate it, not even that high-octane piano playing.

It's all still music, first and foremost, to me, and musically I don't find this sunnier treatment of unsavory-as-ever matters to be more engaging than the variably brooding and impassioned Eternals, which I still believe was one of the best collections of songs Darnielle has put together, and without the safety net of a unified theme. If there's a theme here, granted, it's a vague one, but it takes very little searching to find the common chords between a tune inspired by the death of Amy Winehouse ("do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive") against insistently anthemic drums and guitar, and one about Frankie Lymon's pounding drive into permanent oblivion. The Winehouse song is destined to join the pantheon of shouted-with-gusto concert staples; the Lymon one boasts Darnielle's most durable hook possibly ever. And in no sense does lyric writing get much better in anyone's canon than "the loneliest people in the whole wide world are the ones you're never going to see again," though I doubt one can convey the impact of that line in writing.

The table was set for this LP's adventures in pop writing and unexpectedly intricate arrangements way back on 2009's The Life of the World to Come, which at the time was hailed as something new and elaborate musically and conceptually. Everything Darnielle has issued since then, including the two Goats albums and his collaboration with Franklin Bruno as the Extra Lens, has come across as a sort of loosening of that record's tight conceptual reins, in service of ever more agreeably sung and expressed missives from the same diverse characters and forbidden-thought pits as ever. It's for this reason that I feel my ideal Mountain Goats are those of 2011, a loosening but also a furious but never hard focus upon eclecticism. Darnielle's a new father now, and we now have new horns, new brightness, a new elasticity to match.

So a good number of the songs here whoosh by -- undeniably pleasurable and with a not infrequent effect of rendering one agape at the three-piece's virtuosity -- despite better melodies than ever, more affected, nightmarishly detailed production that occasionally puts the spotlight on Darnielle's metal fascination ("Until I Am Whole") as well as a long-untapped love of melodrama, but it's a short walk from spare, haunted chiming there to the self-consciously drab "Night Light." The songs in this problematic midsection will undoubtedly mean the world to some; I've little doubt that "Counterfeit Florida Plates" is the best song about schizophrenia and stealing sunscreen from CVS that's ever been written, or that the "perfect howl of emptiness" on "In Memory of Satan" will strike someone as being just for them. It's all quite intensely hunkered-down and hard-hitting, but not really up my alley. Nothing here, frankly, gets to me like "Age of Kings" or "High Hawk Season" or "Estate Sale Sign." What I'm getting at is: the playfulness in Darnielle's voice seems to be driven to a sense of obligation here rather than the exploratory or heart-wrenched rumblings on his best work. But I'm probably just deaf to things I want to hear but can't.

Don't take complaints about this undeniably slick, verbose mood music to be a referendum on the horns, Darnielle's big new discovery here courtesy arranger Matthew White, which liven up what could be a bleak affair. They enter first on the staggering "Cry for Judas" ("I am just a broken machine and I do things that I don't really mean"), tempering its hopelessness; and peak on the closing title track, one of the most ingratiating pop pieces this man's ever performed. It's big band splendor and could almost be a Lovin' Spoonful song -- a musical break from the often harrowing mental-health breakdowns chronicled elsewhere here. But mental health breakdowns are a big reason we're all here. There's none better than on the best cut on Youth, the one on which all of Darnielle's conflicted impulses hang together flawlessly -- "Lakeside View Apartments Suite" finds us in another screened-in, bleak drug hovel; the cloudy, volatile, intense atmosphere is notable for its keenly observed sense of place and the nearly unbearable heartbreak lurking behind it. If those troubling internal casualties and impulses are something that connect to you, you probably need to hear this album in full. If you're sort of tormented by it in a manner that you weren't even by "No Children," go ahead and listen, but keep the lights on and your loved ones near, for heaven's sake.

[SEE ALSO:]
The Life of the World to Come (2009)
All Eternals Deck (2011)
All Survivors Pack (2011)

Nas: Life Is Good (2012)

(Def Jam)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Purely musically, there's no doubt this is Nas' best album in well over a decade. With varied, capable production handled in bulk by No I.D. and Salaam Remi (on separate tracks), it employs a robust R&B sound that seems deliberately backward, yet fresh in its playful applications. It's in his lyrical themes, however, that Life Is Good comes across as the most consistent (and least self-conscious) LP the great rapper has put together since It Was Written in 1996. That's not to say that Nas has reined in his more unsavory mannerisms; there's sexism, bitterness, and bare anger that's all unbecoming years after the fadeout of Illmatic's goodwill. What's striking is the messiness; Nas keeps comparing this to Marvin Gaye's Here, My Dear, and he's right in many respects. The rants and raves that occupy Life Is Good -- an ironic title, of course -- are meant to piss you off, to make you shake your head and try to psychoanalyze the dude. But there's just enough of an abstraction here to make this a successful examination of a broken human both living in and trying to escape the past.

Like Gaye, Nas has recently (at the beginning of this decade) gone through a divorce, his from high-profile recording artist Kelis, hence the "I hate you so much right now" jab. But Gaye's divorce album was uncomfortable and difficult by design, and its devastating emotional effect will never come easily to a lesser artist, and putting yourself in the shadow of an artist like Gaye, even if you were once potentially one of your generation's greatest MCs, doesn't make for a great starting position. Thus, it's handy that this isn't strictly a lovelorn song cycle. It's more of a snapshot of an inner world at a specific moment in time. What's clearest of all is how much Nas cares about this music; there are some artists, like Alex Chilton, whose boredom produces immaculate beauty. Nas has never been such a figure; his material lives or dies by his engagement with it, and while he's never released an embarrassing album, his work has been reliably hit and miss for, now, most of his career.

There are shades of that apathetic version of Nas here. An obnoxious singalong like "Summer on Smash" just doesn't really belong on the same slab of wax as most of this material. And the clumsy half-heartedness of the family-man shit "Daughters" creepily recalls his most faux-inspirational material from the early 2000s, all diluted and radio-safe. Commercial aspirations are, of course, the pleasure and undoing of Life Is Good at its extremes, but unlike Here, My Dear, it achieves populism without sacrificing the anguish at its core. The intelligence and craft within the grandiose "A Queens Story," high drama with a hint of Gene Kelly sentimentality, is hard to fault artistically or commercially. The furious rhyming over these perfect melodramatic hooks with all their towering, revolving strings and piano are as rousing as the resignation of already-legendary closing breakup manifesto "Bye Baby" is wounding. Meanwhile, he's fun again; listen to the tricky Rufus Thomas analogue-thorny beat on "Loco-Motive" -- there's liveliness here.

Such a rediscovery of energy may not warrant the overjoyed reception that this has been afforded, but how many other rappers have even tried to cope with middle age so head-on and nakedly? The memories of Biggie and arena-rock mannerisms of "No Introduction" might paint Nas as a figure from another era, but you can't say he sounds out of touch. Indeed, the new adaptability he shows is impressive -- Heavy D's weird, over-the-top Kanye-styled club production on "The Don" is approached with delicious nonchalance on Nas' part, as though he walks in, looks around approvingly, says a few words, drops the mic and leaves.

In the past, many of us have come away disappointed at such moments. After all, Nas is at his best when exploiting the percussive potential in his tonguetwisting verbal assaults; at the peak of each of his major albums, and during the bulk of Illmatic there are these moments wherein he goes off in rapid-fire mode and you simply must throw your head back and get thoroughly swayed back and forth, as though there were something cosmic or religious about it. It's been a while since that happened, so when it does, on "You Wouldn't Understand" -- an astoundingly smooth late-'80s R&B groove that fades much too quickly -- and "World's an Addiction," it justifies the leaner, subtler moments. The latter cut is particularly interesting as it initially seems to stop the record in its tracks with its plodding urban-sprawl soul and Anthony Hamilton's initial stark, wheezy shouting. But get to the verse that begins with the attention-grabbing character study "Doctor busy operating on a lady who's sedated / He can barely concentrate cause he’s newly separated" and witness the most passion Nas has spewed out since Illmatic on his brief but well-told tale of a man coming apart.

Of course, it's a short trip from that story's punchline about premeditated murder to a conclusion that we're hearing the musical meltdown of a certifiable asshole, and many of Nas' public behaviors, those having to do with Kelis and otherwise, may bear this out. But at least the album's honest and blatant in its raw self-examination, malicious as it may sometimes be (check album cover for guest appearance by Kelis' wedding dress). That again harks back to the moral conflicts of Here, My Dear, as befitting the classicist soul influences throughout this album. The high-energy disco moves on "Reach Out" are more Midnight Love or "Got to Give It Up" than anything, though, and handily illustrate a damaged soul's willingness to change. Such unhesitant dance music -- pop, even -- is a stretch for Nas. That's undoubtedly the point.

That vitality is the needed context for the revelations Nas offers when he's back in a world he understands. "Accident Murderers" makes so much more sense in said context than it did as a single earlier in the year because it's a reasonable, well-paced outlier; even its Rick Ross guest spot is engaging. The compressed lite-jazz sound of "Stay" and surprisingly killer Amy Winehouse sample on "Cherry Wine" are suggestive of heavy, deep dreams of something transformative. In this respect, Life Is Good fails -- but it's a remarkable, artistically exuberant failure of rare dimension. Nas will never be as tight as he once was, none of us will be, but there's a new appeal to his looseness and untidiness here. It works just like that strange Motown / cued-up old-school fusion on "Back When": it's a reflection, a pause to ponder in the wake of a change and in the grip of an uncertain future. Don't they call that the blues?

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti: Mature Themes (2012)

(4AD)

!!!!! AVOID !!!!!

Ariel Pink was just another bedroom-pop cult figure knocking out lo-fi projects consistent in their sleepy-eyed disaffection until 2010's dazzling Before Today, a tour of alternative rock history that tapped into the joy of discovery, of vinyl plundering and expressionistic elaboration on the results, peaking with the shimmering melodic opus "Round and Round."

Such pleasures are only fleetingly recalled on the disappointing Mature Themes, in the skeletal but catchy Byrds-alike "Only in My Dreams" and the almost convincingly soulful "Baby." Otherwise, this is a frustrating regression into Pink's deadpan whining of yore; at worst ("Driftwood," "Schnitzel Boogie"), he resembles Arthur Lee on an end-of-the-road drug bender. Gone is the spark and restlessness, replaced by the Haunted Graffiti's new fixation on softcore-porn Muzak. There was a time, of course, when not giving a fuck was renowned as some sort of punk virtue, but if you're looking to surround yourself with apathy for an hour, better Stephin Merritt's actual popcraft than the fanatical flatness of this joyless New Wave; it comes across as a joke, and we're not in on it.

[Submitted to MT but unpublished.]

[SEE ALSO:]
Worn Copy (2005)
Before Today (2010)

Cat Power: Sun (2012)

(Matador)

RECOMMENDED

There's always been a strain of the catholic and the populist running through Chan Marshall's work, something that periodically made it easy for outsiders to brand her as the sort of quintessential singer-songwriter for the latte circuit during the decade we recently wrapped. Those with faith in her remain as dogged as Leonard Cohen and John Darnielle's acolytes because theirs was the privileged knowledge that the music on Marshall's albums as Cat Power was, however bold and interesting, incidental to her treatment of it. If her work is sparse and cold or if it's strange Tahitian rollerdisco, the spotlight remains on the drama inherent to her own writing and singing, much as Cohen can record nightclub music or Darnielle can work with metalheads and no one worries for a tenth of a second about the appeal of either being subverted.

Nevertheless, there's a disconcerting eagerness at the center of the first Cat Power album in a whopping six years, since the brilliant The Greatest. No question about it, Marshall makes a few eyebrow-raising decisions here and occasionally gives evidence that she felt little interest in decisions at all, resulting in an awkward kitchen-sink atmosphere and what sounds like, well, radio -- filtered through the sensibilities of a post-radio world. Sun might or might not be a deeply personal record for Marshall but its musical ambitions and quirks are front and center, and it's a Frankenstein creation that feels very much of its time. To a degree, this translates to a kind of breezy nostalgia: try divorcing yourself from listening for FM static when you hear the opening riff of "Peace and Love," a virtual replica of the meaty sonics in mid-1990s "modern rock"; try ignoring the corporate rock-ready artificial blues that persist through "Silent Machine"; and try ignoring how "3, 6, 9" lays its foundation upon the architecture of Hits, Hits from any era. Its stark rock-soul formula, complete with an Annie Lennox vibrancy in the singing, is note-perfect.

It's also one of many songs here that no one seems to have known how to conclude. Sun isn't all that long, but it is long-winded, and Marshall buries herself enough that one can speculate freely on motives. Did a lack of confidence create this? Or just guardedness? There's still challenging, torn-apart emotional fire here, but we must search it out. "Always on My Own" might well have been a Moon Pix chestnut if not for the sense that we're hearing it from a considerable distance, like something blared from the megaphone at a closed service station. Marshall wraps around its heavy drama, but it doesn't go much of anywhere -- you're really there to hear what she's doing, and there are roadblocks. Conversely, "Real Life" contains her most energetic, revealing, and broken vocals on the album, yet its production comes across as some freakish sort of riot grrl revision of Mr. Mister. In sum total, Sun means to be a forward-looking and modern record with a revealing new direction, but as much as it succeeds as a collection of fine and fine enough songs, stacked together it's more like a bare grasp at things to find something that works. That creates a sense of general sleepiness, and it's hard for strong material like "Human Being" -- spooky guitar, building drums, sultry lead and a trickily elevating, shifting backdrop -- to shine in the pile.

Marshall doesn't know where to hang her hat, and Sun is best when it cops to this problem. The first three songs are grab-bag pop that summarize everything to follow without becoming too overloaded. The piano that rolls crazily in from the left channel on opener "Cherokee" gives an edge to an oceanic intensity shaped and recast by Marshall, whose vocal is all cold focus and assurance -- she's back, as an instrument and accompaniment to herself. It's new and great, and it's weird, but not as weird as the title cut, a bizarre but endearing match of video-game jock jam with plodding funeral march -- it's here that the hard rock texture of Marshall's vocals, explored to good effect on past records, comes in handiest, and it's here that her exoticism is best applied to a quick and painlessly intriguing coda. The revolution? Well, something akin to joy on "Ruin," a pulse-pounder offset by Marshall's sly "bitchin' and "complainin'," delivered with pomp and tossed-off brilliance like she's just giving you directions.

Then she hits upon what could make a good record a great one: she strips away all the stylized business, and leaves us with sadness that towers on "Manhattan," which is one of the best songs she's ever written. Its unadorned loneliness, a pure sense of loss, is beautifully expressed ("All the friends that we used to know ain't coming back") and complemented by an arrangement that wheezes with a worn-down prettiness while keeping the clipped, quickened pace of the rest of Sun -- thus accidentally pointing up the major problems with the other songs. Marshall's directness here makes all the difference; as on past records, there's the feeling that we're sharing secrets here, an understanding of sorts, as though it's just her and the listener.

One more cut like that could have made the big difference and made this another major album in an illustrious career. What we get instead is the ten-minute "Nothin' But Time," a glamorously gloomy Iggy Pop joke the world didn't particularly need. It's an inexplicable lapse into a kind of self-parody that brings to mind nothing so much as the way the Rolling Stones used to close out their albums with singalong atrocities about "the hard-working people" and getting "what you need." Those were fine songs, in fact, but they were born of a different time whose separation from us is severely underlined by the unconvincing nature of this seemingly endless dirge, which Marshall is equipped neither to present nor to rescue.

But what of it? Is there any point in fanboy carping about a great singer-songwriter who continues to deserve our support? No, I doubt it; it's been so long since The Greatest that I feel fortunate that Cat Power is back and still bringing us new music, especially music as strong as "Manhattan" and "Ruin." If I confess that I could recommend this unreservedly without "Nothin' But Time," I hope it doesn't seem that I'm being a spoilsport. But in their two extremes, "Manhattan" and oh, sweet "Nothin'" illustrate the same basic problem with Sun: its musical venturing outward is oddly affected and insincere, something that wouldn't matter if there were evidence that Marshall was using it as a springboard rather than a filter. But the strange fixation with conventional rock histrionics that "Nothin'" toys with seems like proof that we caught Cat Power in a strange mood. Really, you know, maybe that's a privilege for us we should embrace.

Dirty Projectors: Swing Lo Magellan (2012)

(Domino)

Read my Metro Times review.