Album review: First Aid Kit stings, heals and soars on ‘The Lion’s Roar’

First Aid Kit
“The Lion’s Roar”
Wichita

To single out one song for praise on the new First Aid Kit album “The Lion’s Roar” would be akin to extolling the beauty of a single stone in a mosaic.

With the help of producer Mike Mogis the Swedish sisters have given their sound and songwriting an overall brilliant polish.

For most artists convening in the Midwest to record their sophomore album the ac tmight be seen as a retreat into the hinterland. For Johanna and Klara Söderberg it was more of a pilgrimage. They got to record with Conor Oberst, the man who produced some of their favorite records and their self-described hero. Though he only appears on the closing song, his firewater spirit inhabits much of the album.

Separately and together the sisters also have a quality Conor always bemoaned he lacked: a fantastic voice. They bend notes into harmonies as if their vocal cords come equipped with whammy bars, and on songs like “To a Poet” their vocal melodies pitch and roll across the sky like biplanes trailing smoke. The voices intertwine and then break off into solitary loops only to find each other again at the apex or nadir.  

Just as the Stones lined their veins with blues records out of Chicago to pump out some of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll the world had heard, First Aid Kit has done Americana better than almost anyone currently dwelling this side of the Atlantic. Does it take outsiders to see the better picture through the details? Perhaps.

And perhaps someday someone will write a paean to Johanna and Klara much like their own plea to Gram and June on “Emmylou.”

Posted by | February 20, 2012 | Album Reviews | Comment 

Album review: Smashing Pumpkins still sparkle on ‘Gish’ and ‘Siamese Dream’

Smashing Pumpkins
“Gish” and “Siamese Dream” Deluxe Reissues
Virgin

Smashing Pumpkins‘ debut record “Gish” was released in May of 1991, just over 20 years ago. Their second record, “Siamese Dream,” came a touch over two years later in July of 1993.

By the time “Siamese Dream” dropped, the Pumpkins had been thrown (or more arguably, jumped) headlong into the alternative rock maelstrom that put loud, ragged, deviant thrashing at the forefront of the commercial music industry. The monstrosity of that world would leave them battered and artistically and commercially dulled, but what remains of those early years still resonates.

Remastered editions of “Gish” and “Siamese Dream” were released separately in November 2011, and are each accompanied by a full disc of non-album material. Much of this extra material has seen prominent release before. Though many have been remixed for this release, a large number of these cuts were B-sides or appeared on the compilation “Pisces Iscariot,” released in 1994. Also present in each reissue is a DVD of a live performance from the period and extended notes from Billy Corgan on the original album material. (Notes on the non-album tracks would have been nice as well, and likely more valuable to the listener.)

While not much in these collections is fully new, the bundling of this material from the band’s early period — which is both wide and deep in scope — gives a comprehensive representation of their work and identity that until now has been harder to glimpse.

Perhaps the most iconic Smashing Pumpkins album is their third, “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness,” which captures the sprawling, cinematic vision of singer, guitarist and creative principal Billy Corgan better than anything else they produced. The music on that record is well-polished and presented with every care to control what the listener hears and, in the case of the accompanying videos and artwork, sees. By design, very little reality exists on the fantastical “Mellon Collie.” The story of the band’s artistic maturation is obscured.

That story is wrapped up in their first two albums, which portray a naive group of talented individuals that managed to create some of the most ambitious and impactful music of their generation in spite of infighting and immense pressure (both external and self-imposed). They haven’t been lionized to the extent that many of their peers have (cf. Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Pearl Jam). But the band’s best contributions, primarily present in these collections, argue for elevated status in spite of the disfigured image the band would eventually acquire.

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Posted by | February 15, 2012 | Album Reviews | Comment 

Album review: Craig Finn mines the riches of regret on ‘Clear Heart Full Eyes’

Craig Finn
“Clear Heart Full Eyes”
Vagrant

Craig Finn left Brooklyn to record “Clear Heart Full Eyes” in Austin during a four-month break for the Hold Steady. While he arrived in Texas with songs in hand, the actual recording process — including meeting up with producer Mike McCarthy and introductions to musicians Josh Block, Jesse Ebaugh, Ricky Ray Jackson and Billy White — took only three weeks.

This is a short time for most artists, but especially ones who are working with purposefully different material and unknown (to them) musicians. It should also be noted that the musical atmosphere of Austin is a world away from Finn’s Minneapolis roots and current home in New York. However, as the album is named, Finn went in with honest intentions and his own experience, and came out with a straightforward, earnestly-performed album full of rich details to be discovered on every successive listen.

The first track is the spectacular “Apollo Bay.” It’s pensive, conflicted, dripping with spacey lyrics and Catholic guilt, hovering just above all-out weirdness with a throbbing beat that turns it dead sexy just before a keening slide guitar hints at Austin’s alt-country trademark. That slide guitar is a subtle clue ringing out from a psychedelic landscape, a tell that Finn is out of his element but backed by musicians he can trust. Although he recorded on a break from the Hold Steady, he is not at all alone.

Although much of “Clear Heart Full Eyes” has a definite country influence, there are a few tracks that are textbook rock ‘n’ roll. Another one of my favorite tracks is “No Future,” the bleak subject of being dead on the inside punched up by a very Springsteen-esque melody and cheeky declaration that Finn will take advice from no one but Freddie Mercury and Johnny Rotten.

Finn’s flat, narrative voice is too distinctive to leave the Hold Steady completely behind, as is his writing style. He’s still not really a singer, but the more mellifluous vocals he began using on 2006′s “Boys and Girls In America” are trimmed back again for something like occasional spoken word. His songwriting is affected by a similar paring down, something more contemplative and appropriate for a solo project and less so for a rock band. Finn still swims in complicated phrasing and big words, though, wielding his literary references in thoughtful riffs about speed, people he used to know, and Jesus.

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Posted by | February 10, 2012 | Album Reviews | Comment 

Album review: Ani DiFranco marches forward with ‘¿Which Side Are You On?’

Ani DiFranco
“¿Which Side Are You On?”
Righteous Babe

After four years without releasing a studio album, Ani DiFranco has returned with a matured songwriting craft, audacious lyrics and a challenge for pragmatic political and social change.

Since 1990, DiFranco has independently released over 20 albums and manages to sell out venues across the globe. Her style of music cannot be clearly defined; its borders are blurred somewhere within folk, indie, rock, soul — and specks of everything else. The greatest constant is her unwavering lyrical ability. She neither sugarcoats nor minimizes truths, yet she has a softer, poetic side depicting songs of love, leisure, acceptance and universal equality.

Her latest album, “¿Which Side Are You On?,” is comprised of 12 songs, all written by DiFranco. Her acoustic guitar playing is somewhat less aggressive than it has been previously. The first track, “Life Boat,” primes the audience with a slow, mellow sound. In passing, portions of the album could be described as musically monotonous or repetitive, but a closer look reveals the calmer, relaxed guitar work creates a nice backdrop for well-written, poignant lyrics. Do not be misled: true to Ani DiFranco’s form, other tracks, such as “Promiscuity”, “Splinter,” and “Mariachi” provide striking instrumentation and upbeat melodies. Healthy portions of an electric guitar add edge and mildly abrasive vigor when needed. Also, her life’s added perspectives as a mother and a maturing woman shine through on tracks such as “Albacore,” conveying her individual reality and what she believes the world could evolve to become.

The highlight of this album is the title track, “¿Which Side Are You On?” Originally written by Florence Reece in 1931, this song has been revisited by scores of artists over its 80 year lifetime, and it has resonated among activists for decades. Folk artist Pete Seeger, along with his banjo, performed a well-known version of “Which Side Are You On?” in the ’60s. DiFranco has supplied this tune with new life, reenergizing it with updated lyrics, yet her version holds the song’s soul and history intact by featuring Seeger on the banjo and background vocals.

The percussion ensemble only increases the classic song’s vitality, motivating the message even further. The snare drum in particular correlates with battlefield marches and patriotic references, fitting for this track. DiFranco has transformed this song into a fresh call to action. Her vocals were given a slight echo effect, which provides listeners with a sense they are presently witnessing her leading a crowd, microphone in hand, aimed to motivate the masses for justifiable action and positive change. She addresses the government, average workers, banks, consumers, men, women and voters of all types to reclaim the meaning of citizenship and what it’s worth.

Altogether, “¿Which Side Are You On?” pushes boundaries, accentuates affirmation and entertains musically — a pleasant return by Ani DiFranco.

Ani DiFranco: ¿Which Side Are You On? by ThatEricAlper

Posted by | February 6, 2012 | Album Reviews | Comment 

Album review: Ingrid Michaelson sweeps through heartbreak on ‘Human Again’

Ingrid Michaelson
“Human Again”
Mom+Pop

With her lilting voice and nerdy, girl-next-door looks, Ingrid Michaelson has charmed an audience and built a career around her good-girl appeal.

But that’s not to say there’s no substance behind her style. Michaelson’s career is both an indie success story and a commentary on the current nature of the music business. In an environment where it is easier than ever to make music, where everyone has a website and a YouTube channel, it can be, rather ironically, harder and harder for musicians to get their songs heard. Commercial radio is simply not as much of a factor in introducing new artists, and musicians must pursue other avenues to reach an audience.
 
Michaelson first got attention for song placement in television shows such as “Grey’s Anatomy,” and later by licensing her songs for TV commercials. Once upon a time, an artist that sold a song for commercial use was considered a sellout. (Remember when Neil Young declared that he wasn’t singing for Pepsi or Coke?) Today it’s the opposite. An artist can have a song on TV before a single on the radio. For Michaelson, “selling out” was the stepping stone to the audience she has now. When Old Navy picked up “The Way I Am” (from her 2006 record “Girls and Boys”) it helped pave the way for her career.
 
With her clever, literate lyrics and sometimes quirky, well-crafted pop songs, perhaps Michaelson’s success was inevitable. I never watched “Grey’s Anatomy” or saw those commercials. I came to appreciate her the old-fashioned way: by falling in love with her voice (and, to be honest, her looks). It may have been her persona that first got my attention, but I stayed for her songs.
 
On her new record, “Human Again,” Michaelson delivers more of the deeply textured arrangements and soaring vocals that are her trademark. And while she has always sung about both love and loss, this time around the emphasis centers more squarely upon the loss. “Human Again” is clearly Michaelson’s take on the classic break-up album.

As if there were any question, the record opens with “Fire” as she sings, “Open heart surgery/That is what you do to me.” She then moves right into “This Is War,” another heartbreaker featuring the lines “It’s a wonder at all that I survived the war/Between your heart and mine.” Thankfully, the third track delivers a bit of a respite with the upbeat tune, “Do It Now,” a catchy number and an admonition to seize the day.
 
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Posted by | February 3, 2012 | Album Reviews | Comment 

Album review: Nada Surf’s return to adolescence on ‘The Stars Are Indifferent to Astronomy’

Nada Surf
“The Stars Are Indifferent to Astronomy”
Barsuk

Ever the ones to ignore music industry convention, Nada Surf is obviously moving in a different direction with “The Stars Are Indifferent to Astronomy.” The album, released by Barsuk/City Slang on January 24, is a snappier, more buoyant effort than the softer, ardent sound that has defined much of the better-known indie corners (Death Cab for Cutie, the Shins, Bon Iver) for the past several years. It’s certainly more upbeat than 2003′s earnest “Let Go” or 2005′s mercurial ”The Weight Is a Gift,” and in a way, this makes the album more reminiscent of the band’s angsty-yet-unpretentious 1996 breakout hit, “Popular.”

The tempo of “The Stars Are Indifferent to Astronomy” rarely relents, though, which lends the feeling of forced amiability. I’m not asking for the perpetual nubbly sweater-wearing whisper of a Death Cab For Cutie record, but a little disaffection wouldn’t kill anyone. Although I kept waiting for a little crunch, itch, or well-deserved lyrical gripe, “The Stars Are Indifferent to Astronomy” is actually pretty innocuous, the crisp guitars and gentle harmonizing in songs like “Waiting For Something,” “Jules and Jim” and “Looking Through” sounding less like a cohesive release and more like a quietly-marketed Goo Goo Dolls/Gin Blossoms/Third Eye Blind project.

The general lyrical theme suggests a nostalgia for carefree, promise-rich youth. Sometimes this is more subtle, as with the repeating phrase “recursive tulips” in “The Moon Is Calling,” and sometimes so obvious it’s silly, as in “Teenage Dreams” or the line “I can’t believe the future’s happening to me” in “The Future.”

Combined with guitarist and lead vocalist Matthew Caws’ forever-young falsetto, it all suggests the juvenile hopefulness of youth but none of the anxiety. I don’t mean to imply that all good music is borne out of misery, but one of Nada Surf’s songwriting gifts has been an acerbic wit delivered with unapologetic directness. I don’t know if the intention was to return to a simpler way to write songs, but the band is cleverer than this, and has been gutsier in the past.

This is not to say there are no bright points. There are a few instrumental saving graces on this album: the mournful trumpet in the otherwise ordinary breakup song “Let the Fight Do the Fighting,” for instance, or the shimmery strings in “When I Was Young.” The constructed distortion of “Clear Eye Clouded Mind” leads off the album, and the other full song standout, “No Snow On the Mountain,” brings a tinge of the disaffection I so badly wanted. Unfortunately, this Hail Mary of a song comes too late and after too much passionless, textureless soft rock.

The name Nada Surf refers to an existential state of nothingness, or perhaps a Buddhist state of non-attachment. It’s about living in a sea of quiet static, I guess, and although fitting to play in the background somewhere, unfortunately, quiet static is how the album sounds. After a nearly 20-year-long career, “The Stars Are Indifferent To Astronomy” is less about stars and more about indifference.

Posted by | January 27, 2012 | Album Reviews | Comment 

Album review: ‘A Thurber Carnival’

Original cover art for A Thurber Carnival

Anybody here remember James Thurber? You should. The noted writer and cartoonist was part of that mid 20th century cabal of dry, literate humorists that included Robert Benchley, the incomparable S.J. Perelman and, of course, the various official and unofficial members of the Algonquin Round Table. Thurber brought his wit to the stage in 1960 in the form of a revue with musical interludes titled “A Thurber Carnival”. It opened on February 26, 1960 at the ANTA Playhouse on Broadway and ran for 223 performances, with a break from June 25 to September 5. The show closed on November 26, 1960; not a bad run for such a modest show.

The folks at Masterworks Broadway are now making the original cast recording of “A Thurber Carnival” available for the first time, and it is, to say the least, a welcome release. There is, to begin with, the joy of hearing the voices of familiar actors such as Peggy Cass, Paul Ford, John McGiver, Alice Ghostley at work. Like many of us boomers, I first encountered them on TV, so it’s good to be reminded that they all started out on the stage.

Mostly, though, it’s fun to be reminded of how good humor can be when it doesn’t beat you over the head. “Casuals of the Keys”, for example, derives laughs from the inability of an old beachcomber who dismisses his experiences with the like of a mermaid and a billiard player turned obsessive “goldfish grabber” while constantly quizzing his visitor for news of such wonders as televised Congressional subcommittees. “The Little Girl and the Wolf” (one of Thurber’s “Fables for Our Times”) turns the tables on Red Riding Hood (“Moral: it is not so easy to fool little girls now as it used to be.”). And, of course, the “The Unicorn in the Garden” (probably one of Thurber’s best-known stories) reminds us that the unicorn is, in fact, a mythological beast.

The album also includes some of Thurber’s more serious essays, including the touching “Memorial to a Dog” and “The Last Flower”, an anti-war story which is, sadly, as relevant now as it was fifty years ago. Jazzy interludes by Don Elliott are a nice counterpoint to the sketches.

“A Thurber Carnival” is available through all major digital service providers and as disc-on-demand, with the original cover art and liner notes, via ArkivMusic.com and Amazon.com

Posted by | January 26, 2012 | Album Reviews, Culture, Music | Comment 

Album review: Guided by Voices ramble, stumble and rock through ‘Let’s Go Eat the Factory’

Guided by Voices
“Let’s Go Eat the Factory”
Matador

There’s a fair amount of context to the new Guided by Voices record, “Let’s Go Eat the Factory,” so let’s recap.

Frontman Robert Pollard pulled the plug on Guided by Voices in 2004, ending a 21-year run that included dozens of releases and a staggering number of bandmates come and gone. In 2010 he reunited the band’s “classic lineup” for a one-off gig in Las Vegas. This was the same group of musicians that made up GBV from 1992 to 1996 when the band produced it’s best and most influential records: “Propeller,” “Bee Thousand,” “Alien Lanes” and “Under the Bushes Under the Stars.”

That single show led to a basketful of gigs throughout 2011, including a lengthy tour and spots at the top end of major festival bills. While a reunion of the classic lineup had once seemed incredibly unlikely, another recording from that troupe had always seemed an even longer shot. Alas, that is what we have here.

“Let’s Go Eat the Factory” is not a classic GBV record, though it is certainly a fine collection of music. Hallmarks of the band’s early standout releases are present, to be sure. The first eight tracks (“Laundry and Lasers” through “Who Invented the Sun”) could have been lifted from the middle of any of those records. They carry the same subversive, addictive hooks and fast-paced, shape-shifting melodies.

“Doughnut for a Snowman” and “Spiderfighter” form the nexus of this first third of the record. The former begins seemingly mid-song with the last few words of a verse and a bleating recorder solo, and then proceeds to wash a whimsical childhood portrait across a cozy acoustic arrangement. The brilliantly bipolar “Spiderfighter” gracefully transitions from a grating burner that’s all kerosene and fireworks to a heart-stopping piano ballad, the record’s finest moment.

“Let’s Go Eat the Factory” has moments like these throughout, but it still finds Pollard veering into the ditch on occasion. Oddball cuts like “The Big Hat and Toy Show,” “Go Rolling Home” and “My Eurpoa” are cul-de-sacs, unavoidable and undesirable detours. Similar pieces on the aforementioned GBV records worked because beneath the discordant sludge they held something at least intriguing enough to encourage another listen, which often led to another, and then another. And at worst, they rarely killed the momentum as they do here.

The most noteworthy tracks on “Let’s Go Eat the Factory” are those penned by Pollard’s songwriting foil, Tobin Sprout, the guitarist whose departure from the group in 1996 signaled the end of the classic era. Mostly saccharine and soothing, Sprout’s compositions are the egg and breadcrumbs in the meatloaf, keeping it all together. In addition to “Spiderfighter,” he also offers up the stellar “Who Invented the Sun” and “Waves,” a mildly disorienting spiral of sunburned guitars that is easily the album’s best cut.

Guided by Voices records are very much bric-a-brac. On “Let’s Go Eat the Factory” these trinkets are sometimes brilliant, occasionally forgettable, but most often enjoyable. The record can’t stand next to “Alien Lanes” or “Bee Thousand,” but it’s a nice addition to the band’s discography nonetheless.

Guided By Voices – Doughnut For A Snowman by FIRE RECORDS

Posted by | January 9, 2012 | Album Reviews | Comment 

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