Wild Nothing: Nocturne (2012)

(Captured Tracks)

This is screensaver music, albeit deceptive. Choose a random cut -- my way in was the opener "Shadow," which I liked enough to decide this deserved a full review, which I now regret -- and prepare to be wowed by two things: first, how much you still get hit squarely in the jaw by the sound of late 1980s jangly dream pop, even when you're hearing a third- or fourth-hand imitation of same. Secondly, is this the same Jack Tatum, the same Wild Nothing who put together the ridiculous but sort of delightful Belle & Sebastian / Smashing Pumpkins imitation Gemini? The two records have strikingly little in common, which is neat except that Tatum's choice now is to walk over even more well-trodden ground.

Again, the romantically druggy sound of all this is striking. Tatum knows his way around the Smiths / Cure corner of the galaxy and has a way with chilly intoned vocals and overdriven synth atmospherics -- it all falls on the ear quite agreeably, if ineffectively. When he bursts out of the template, it's enough of a derailment that you wonder why it doesn't happen more often. "Midnight Song" boasts a British Invasion melody buried under innumerable layers, an actual hook appears amid the sludgy pop of "The Chain Won't Break," "Shadow" is catchy and breezy enough to be a lost La's cut, and even at its laziest and most plodding you can still imagine kids playing pinball on Friday night with the album playing.

This might all add up to magic for you. It quickly cops to trends rather than revealing much that's personal or unusual, and the dull sameness keeps much of it from standing out. When it does command attention, it still seems oddly restrained -- that splendid Tame Impala vocal on "The Blue Dress" is wasted on a song that sounds like something from the bottom tier of the Chocolate War soundtrack, and "Paradise" embodies some romance and vindictive sarcasm in its lyric ("crush me with the lies / and tell me once or twice that love is paradise") but never pushes the buttons of its surreal imagery like reference point Vince Clarke. And though the record isn't all that long, it seems to go on for ages -- good for backgrounding, bad for concentrating. Still, give it a listen; I'd opt for Twin Shadow for 2012 makeout music, but something tells me this will suit some in much the same way.

[SEE ALSO:]
Gemini (2010)

Titus Andronicus: Local Business (2012)

(XL)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

This is not The Monitor, the high-concept 2010 record by Titus Andronicus that launched them into a world of ten-best lists, but nor is it thoroughly lacking in the earlier album's earnest grandness. We're no longer being thrust into a Civil War battlefield; the setting here is Patrick Stickles' heart and mind and all their own jarring impulses. One immediately notices a deliberate reining in of the production style on the aptly titled, aptly illustrated Local Business; the sound is punkish, thinner and more pressing if no less vital. There is, in a word I'd prefer not to use, less here that is "epic."

Nevertheless, this is a big album by design when you think about; modeling itself on Springsteen, the Rolling Stones and the Replacements, it's a true rock & roll album. More specific to its touch of the working-class anthemic is its status as a true American album, a true New Jersey album -- a gritty catharsis of drinking songs and camraderie by a group of decent guys who aren't afraid to occasionally expose their dark side, one defined by self-doubt and self-abuse rather than contempt for others. Like The Monitor, it's a quintessentially masculine recording, but not a "macho" one.

The three opening cuts are frayed, unslick fight songs that bleed into one another. The meaty punk of "Ecce Homo" is simple but towering, with Stickles' unprocessed and small voice struggling to be heard over the unadorned sludge. The band holds tight a bit until unleashing a skilled guitar attack atop the minimal punk rock on "Still Life with Hot Deuce on Silver Platter." The riffs are chunky and big, the melody is strong, and the tempo change on the bridge is utter screaming triumph, with "I'm not gonna cry!" the first of many built-in singalongs. It calls to mind Westerberg as well as Rhett Miller when both were more interested in rousing and commanding big groups of people, at least until its lovely Nicky Hopkins-like piano fade.

The hooks keep coming, aligned with Stickles' lilt and whine and scream, until the New York Dolls diversion of "Food Fight!" -- mostly an instrumental with exactly the chanted refrain you'd expect -- which along with the repetitive Ramones-lite "Titus Andronicus vs. the Absurd Universe" would've probably seemed more at home on a more self-consciously sprawling album; they're here just distractions. In between them lies the oddly triumphant extended rant "My Eating Disorder," which is about just that and contains the album's major musical risky strokes, a pounding and scary torment that Stickles makes harrowing with just the right balance of personal detail and universal dread. As a rallying cry, "Spit it out!" is no "The enemy is everywhere!" but it reveals significantly more.

"My Eating Disorder" sets the stage for the record's breathtaking second half. The final four cuts are as populist and immediate as this band is ever likely to get, tempering the slow release of something like "The Battle of Hampton Roads" with a restrained use of gigantic hooks and Stones riffs and -- until the finale, at least -- somewhat economical pacing. "From Jersey I come!" is the announcement on the glorious "In a Big City," an almost chanted mission statement, but "In a Small Body" turns these instantly appealing illusions of rock & roll spontaneity into a Pavement-like parlor game of cranked-up burger joint music that secretly means to wound. The absurdity of Stickles' lyric is barely noticeable against the brilliant throwback arrangement, which builds to an incongruously pretty choral decoration of "don't ever get in the waaaay," a classic Titus Andronicus sentiment of sorts. In the same vein, "(I Am the) Electric Man" is literally about being electrocuted but is a pure pop singalong with a "Honky Tonk Women" backdrop.

You're meant to stomp and clap and get a rise out of all this; it's punk gospel, if you will. The grand finale, "Tried to Quit Smoking," will surprise no one; it's the big ballad move that The Monitor hinted at in places, harnessing the rawness of the room for something stark and meditative, throwing off devastating but simple confessions -- "It's not that I wanted to hurt you, I just didn't care if I did" -- then suddenly, at the end, it's the fucking blues! Which is only too appropriate on an album that in nearly every sense is an unpretentious rallying cry that could've been issued thirty-five years ago next to Saints and Only Ones LPs and, except for the unbearably pretentious song titles, few people would've noticed. What Titus Andronicus have managed here is a record that's both destined for fist-pounding communal release in a certain setting but is also intimate, personal, and prepared to forge an immediate connection with the individual listener. It may not have the scope and breadth of The Monitor, sure, but it has something equally special.

[SEE ALSO:]
The Monitor (2010)

Jessie Ware: Devotion (2012)

(Cherrytree)

RECOMMENDED

That lounging, lazy EBTG beat! The hazy memories of beloved Texas, Seal, and George Michael singles we grew up with and pretended for a while that we didn't adore! The dredging up of the meaty synths, sleazy soundscapes and lush arrangements that launched your whole conception of New Romantic and the post-Prince R&B revival! Well, what we're saying is that this record is a nostalgia trip, the latest of many for all the things you never expected you'd miss about Adult Contemporary radio circa 1986 to 1996. Is this an intelligent, emotive deconstruction of the genre's still-resonant elements along the lines of Pet Shop Boys' Behavior or Destroyer's Kaputt? God no, but it's the kind of well-engineered, nicely (if unremarkably) sung schmaltz that can brighten up your evening almost invariably.

Devotion has a broader appeal, of course, than the chillwave and indie artists who've been mining this territory for the last few years, which is one reason it's been so unironically embraced. It deserves this treatment -- quite apart from any specific tie to a time or a movement, it's a highly serviceable and unpretentious pop and R&B record with a welcome Sade sultriness. It could've probably been an EP, for its best material is frontloaded: the agreeably subtle "Devotion" calls back to the most immersive trip-hop, and the retro hippery of "Running" adds a little grit to its Eurythmics throwback, which culminates in a beautiful vocally stretched breakdown that boasts Ware's best singing. And "Still Love Me" offers the aural intrigue of early '90s top 40 at its trickiest and most soulful; hardly a mere valentine, it's all quite convincing.

The trouble starts when you discover how much of the back half is built on persuasive production and moods (offered mostly by Dave Okumu) but offers few actual complete songs; the last two cuts are forgettable mush, and predecessor "110%" isn't much better despite its whispered deadpan. Some of the tracks are wondrous creations in theory. "Sweet Talk" is just a few paces away from "Love on Top" with its interpolation of upbeat mid-'80s R&B, but it never lives up to its wondrous sound or to its sources. "No to Love" comes on like Madonna circa Bedtime Stories, kinky low-NRG that will set you to swooning if this sort of thing's in your neighborhood, but there are more hooks in thirty seconds of "Secret" and "Take a Bow" than in this full 3.5-minute flush. The delicately screwy verses on "Swan Song" are an improvement, but it too cops out with an uninspired chorus. None of this does much to combat the old adage that imitation pop is nice enough but no substitute for the real thing.

The central conflict of Devotion is illustrated in two songs that might as well have been both sides of a 7". Ware is already a legend in some places for the demented "Wildest Moments," a pounding melodrama of the highest order that features her towering voice atop a titanic, Olympics-sized anthem. It's sticky but glorious, the kind of song that musically references Savage Garden's "Truly, Madly, Deeply" and somehow makes that sound like a good idea. But skip on over to "Night Light," an attempt at a similar kind of overdriven pop bliss, and you discover how easily the same concepts can fly off in the wrong direction. It's the same kind of classic melodic twistiness, the same faux-inspirational lyrics, the same utter Shadow Morton bombast, but it just plods, sinks, dies. This is a fun album, but it proves that sheer nostalgia has more limits than a lot of songwriters and producers are willing to admit.

Bob Dylan: Tempest (2012)

(Columbia)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

A corpse dragged through the mud, a ship and a planet hurtling toward bleak demise, a singer shot in the back, and a love more destructive than warm -- Bob Dylan's never been, it seems, in a darker state of mind than on his most striking left turn since Time Out of Mind returned him to the highest tier of American songwriting. Conversely, however, if he's on a rant it's one that finds renewed energy in the casual background C&W and fragmented folk of Modern Times and Together Through Life, because this is far more devotedly serious than either but also more defiant and devilish in its macabre humor. You detect unmistakable evidence in the 71 year-old's voice on even a gentle, dramatic sprawl like "Scarlet Town" that he is having, well, fun. A kind of fun, anyway, that which springs from a snapping into focus of creative energy; the last Dylan record that felt this vital was Love and Theft, and before that I couldn't even tell you.

Love and Theft saw release on September 11, 2001 and this album was issued eleven years later to the day; it could be an accident, but probably not. For all the well-oiled Dylan band's archaic textures, picking up impressively stripped snatches of traditional folk forms and cobbling them around their leader's vague musical and lyrical ideas, this is music that somehow captures, with surprising potency, the muted inner and outward chaos of its time. And does so as proficiently as any younger mainstream rocker or indie popper has this year or last. Its mythical romances and slightly abstract murder ballads don't just lie there in insular pleasure and wander off into the night; like some radio ghost he can prattle onward here for ten or fifteen minutes and hold you under a spell, beholden by a distance of wisdom and assurance but also incredulity. The album and the songs don't even seem to begin or end; they just come into existence and vanish.

To say this is a more focused variant on the messy Together Through Life is reductive but not actually inaccurate; that clean "classic rock" sound gets newly filtered here through better and more comfortably varied tunes. And Dylan's learning to own the fraying of his voice, at home in the studio if not on stage, and he manages to even put a Louis Armstrong spin of sorts on the weird ragtime country opener "Duquesne Whistle," and no amount of aged weariness and vocal cracking can bring down the persuasive (undoubtedly interpolated) melody of the title cut. That, by the way, is one of the big fifteen-minute showpieces here, something about the Titanic and what it revealed about how different people react to a disaster -- but try as I might, I can't seem to fixate on the lyric well enough to concentrate on its implications because the music itself, and the singing, are so hypnotic, casting a dusty, hazy magic with their moving roominess and sufficiently illustrative of their setting to render the words as a mere elevation.

Dylan enters Leonard Cohen territory with the love triangle sea chanty "Tin Angel," a bass-heavy menace with a hint of East Asian traditional music, or at least a westernized interpretation of same -- Dylan will never be Cohen or vice versa, and "Sing Another Song Boys" this isn't, with Dylan struggling to find a heartthrob bone in his body, but there is a yearning to this slow burn that's gradually acquired and cumulatively striking. The same goes for "Long and Wasted Years," which is like something from Empire Burlesque with vastly less intrusive production, and finds Dylan in his most sincere mode, a treat when it's surrounded by the robust, throaty sharpness of "Narrow Way" and the Van Morrison-like raveup "Pay in Blood," one of Dylan's most bruising songs in years. The manner in which these new songs contrast and play against one another is one of the two major elements to its success, the other being the sense of total immersion in its mystery, its haunted rambling.

A reliable band like Dylan's can generate beauty in the mundane, even in workhorse mode -- Dylan goes intimate and old-world on the soft doo wop of "Soon After Midnight" and Sexton, Hidalgo, Garnier et al. fall behind him as smoothly as can be imagined. They can make something vital out of a swaggering Muddy Waters lift, or make the distorted, deliberately backward Lennon tribute that closes the record feel as stuck in time as it should. All the while, Dylan never wavers from his own sense of purpose, renewed once again. Grab hold of the storytelling and the introspection if you want, but when he pitches in with a snarling "Even death has washed its hands of you," well, that's my Dylan.

[SEE ALSO:]
Together Through Life (2009)

Tame Impala: Lonerism (2012)

(Modular)

RECOMMENDED

Second verse, same as the first pretty much, although this time the emphasis is on Psychedelic Soundz rather than Songz, and architect Kevin Parker is all the more a one-man outfit than before, producing and writing and noodling and generally providing the sort of red-light makeout music that wallpapers the room well and probably does the job even better with good drugs.

Without knowing too much about Parker's process but having had some vague context delivered back in 2010, I get the impression that this is a low-rent operation that's become vastly more well-budgeted in time for a sophomore effort, and yeah, they still sound just as much like the Beatles as Oasis ever did, except no precision and not as many complete tunes -- nothing here's anything like "Lucidity" or "Why Don't You Make Up Your Mind?" -- but just a distinctive noise, and that can be okay. Parker does a good job of sounding really affected and gone all the time, and it's a good prompting to chill out, but all the real creativity was maybe expended on the song titles? They sound like HAL 9000 on a fun LSD rant: "Be Above It, Mind Mischief. Why Won't They Talk to Me? Nothing That Has Happened So Far Has Been Anything We Could Control. Feels Like We Only Go Backwards." So it's fun, and I bet they're something to see live, but I can't concentrate on it -- it's featherweight and floaty and goodbye.

[SEE ALSO:]
Innerspeaker (2010)

One-sentence reviews #3

The Avett Brothers
The Carpenter (2012)
(Republic)

It might be their fault and it might be mine, but this falls over like shapeless mush, a pretty bald (if understandable) nod to the adult contemporary crowds they've attracted.

***

Purity Ring
Shrines (2012)
(4AD)

Bubbly electro-goth synthery has less to set it apart than Crystal Castles or even Grimes, but it's probably a more agreeable party album than either could give us; the concentration on songwriting seems futile since the songs aren't very memorable.

***

Old Crow Medicine Show
Carry Me Back (2012)
(Decca)

!! CAUTION !! - Not only is band discoverer Doc Watson gone but so is its singer, lead guitarist, and shining light Willie Watson and the band's rootsiness just doesn't seem as purely interesting, nor the songs so impassioned, as they once did, but again, is it me?

***

Swans
The Seer (2012)
(Young God)

!!!!! AVOID !!!!! - Given the kind of stuff I listen to, I feel like this should make me swoon, but it comes from a corner of yelpy metallic repetitive post-punk so proggy I find it almost unbearable -- it'd be too much for me at a quarter the length.

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)