New (to me!) Tunes!

Here's some stuff that came out in 2015 that, for numerous reasons, I'm hearing for the first time. This is what January has looked like for me. 

Foxing - Dealer

I think I saw this in the running for Get Alternative's Best of 2015. I only finally listened to it after revisiting a music blog I periodically check for new emo bands. Phew. This is a less bombastic Aereogramme tinged with enough indie tendencies that they could flirt with mainstream success but probably entrenched enough in emo to scare people away (though they are playing Shaky Knees this year). The indie flare is really just a trap. This is for professionals.

Wrekmeister Harmonies - Night of Your Ascension

Some thirty collaborators join JR Robinson to create Wrekmeister Harmonies' most daunting album to date. It's an album inspired by villainous acts committed by supposedly pious and god-fearing people and is a towering nightmare.

Marching Church - This World is Not Enough

Coincidentally, Marching Church is about to release a new album (on my birthday!). This is the dude from Iceage and Var doing his take on soul music. Purportedly inspired by Sam Cooke and James Brown, it's kind of a cool, weird mess of an album. My favourite song sounds like a Nick Cave song, and I'm not entirely unconvinced a couple tracks don't sound like blown-out Bright Eyes songs.

Drug Church - Hit Your Head

I actually pre-ordered this album last year (along with the rest of Drug Church's catalogue), but I still don't have it yet and kinda forgot about it. I started listening to it again while walking the dogs, so I'm including it here. Patrick Kindlon from Self Defense Family fronting a Quicksand-type alt band. If you wanna make someone mad, tell them Tool's first two albums and Quicksand sound identical. They'll be mad because it's true and they can't handle it. 

Gates - Bloom and Breathe

Doesn't that album title make your heart swell and your shoulders lighter and chest looser and lungs fuller and eyes sparklier? "Bloom" is such a beautiful sound and breathing is such a beautiful thing to be able to do. Gates is a band, historically, that appears and disappears from my radar with an odd irregularity. This new album, though? Again: phew. Soaring, skyscraping post-rock-doused emo that is as triumphant as it is crushing. Probably better suited for neophytes than Foxing but still demands emotional fortitude. 

Crippled Black Phoenix - New Dark Age

"Damn, they really sound like Pink Floyd right now," I thought to myself while listening to Crippled Black Phoenix cover Pink Floyd's "Echoes" before looking at the title of the song(s) and realizing, "Well duh." Cool 57-minute "EP" from perhaps the most underrated post-rock band ever. The two original tracks find the band pushing their brand of riff-heavy post-rock into gloomier places while the 40-minute "Echoes" cover demonstrates the band's psychedelic and textural range. This might be better than Mankind (A Crafty Ape). 

Christina Vantzou - No. 3

The first song on Vantzou's 2015 release is titled "Valley Drone." I'm tempted to just leave it at that. Put this on, pick a book, and let the building tonal registers and sawing strings creep into the spaces between the letters and fill your eyes with nothingness.

Slow Meadow - Slow Meadow

Lush, gorgeous ambient music that feels like a lighter Deaf Center with plenty of sorrowful strings and piano drips. Maybe like a vocal-less stripped down Sigur Ros. Look at the name of the band, imagine what a slow meadow might sound like, and you're exactly right. Breathtaking. 

Helena Hauff - Discreet Desires

Rhythmic, danceable electro-goth with no vocals from this German DJ. An unavoidable impetus to dancing if ever there was one. 

The Kid is Emphatically Not All Right

About two weeks ago, I was a little inebriated and a little lonely in the middle of the holiday season. I avoided any sort of disastrous texting mishaps, but I fell headfirst into a downhill diatribe against Beach Slang's debut LP The Things We Do to Find the People Who Feel like Us. The title, though not succinctly, encapsulates the lengths and risks taken by outsiders and margin-walkers to connect with others. It also adequately summarizes at least one phase of the life-long friendships I've made. If I had written the album, I would've titled it The Things We Do to Maintain the Relationships with the People Who Feel like Us. One of those things is texting your friends how you maybe gotta lay off the new Turnover because "emotions." 

As hastily as I wrote my "review" of Beach Slang's full length, I deleted it. I did so because I thought the "discourse level" wasn't "high" enough, but I don't necessarily write on this blog to bandy about two dollar words. That's what essays are for.

Really, I deleted that post because it was a raw nerve. What bugged me so much about the Beach Slang album was its veneer of triumph and contentment. This is a profoundly unhappy album, but it is also an album that refuses to recognize in any external way its own unhappiness. Instead, it trades in honest self-evaluation with determined masquerading. The product, however, is a not-so-deceptive peak into the very real despair of Paul Westerberg, a 40-something punk who's writing late-night anthems for teenagers. After two decades in the punk rock scene, he's finally figured out the formula for portraying all the glittering euphoria of lovelorn outsiders. I'm just not convinced he's actually thrilled about it.

The Things We Do is a redundant album. It sounds like the 2014 EPs but sleeker and less virile. It also just repeats itself in a nauseating cascade of simulacra. Westerberg knows how to rhyme to sounds: uh and aye. Things are fucked, you've done some drugs, you've fallen in love, it's never enough. But it's all right because this is life and we're alive and it's our time and that time is night. 

That's the entirety of the album right there. Before I listened to the album, I wondered why the hell the band was doing an interview with People magazine. Now I get it. This is punk rock at its most digestible. Beach Slang's 7"s from last year weren't the rawest or ugliest albums, but they still had an edge, enough of one to bolster the warmth of the band's message. They stripped all of that away for the LP, though, leaving this shiny reminder of what Westerberg went through decades ago but can't forget. 

In a way, though, The Things We Do is exactly what it should be. It is a patently false picture of happiness and contentedness, but it veils its sorrow so thinly that it begs you to see through the sheen fabric to the exposed nerve underneath. When considered in that light, it's kind of genius. It's a trojan horse of self-evaluation, one whose effrontery is only heightened by how much it actually reflects the listener's own morosity and shameless attempts to hide those feelings.

After the attack, though, the trojan horse is left empty - a hollowed out ruse with a singular function. Once you've figured out Beach Slang's dark secret on The Things We Do, the album has nothing left to offer. 

Also - come up with another fucking song pattern. Jeez. 

Rays on Opinion

Best New Music, B+, 8/10, 4 stars, "something special," "triumphant return"...

That's a collection of snapshots from reviews of Baroness' Purple, their first full-length since the meandering, tedious, and yawn-inducing double-album Green & Yellow some four years ago. After Baroness released Blue in 2009 and their fellow Georgians slash heroes slash main source of inspiration Mastodon released The Hunter in 2011, it became clear what direction Baroness would subsequently take.

By the way, Blue, All Music's pick for Baroness' best album, is not their best album. It's not even in the top five:

Red
First
Second
Demo
A Grey Sigh in a Flower Husk (split with Unpersons)

And, honestly, I'd be fine with putting Red below the First and Second releases. Blue is an astoundingly forgettable record. I'm not even sure what Green & Yellow was other than something to snicker about.

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Let me be honest: the sole reason I'm even writing this is because I am shocked at the positive response Purple garnered both leading up to and after its official release. At each single's release, I was left gobsmacked by what I was hearing from the once-great Savannah band and the attached pressers. I mean, I get marketing. I understand that money changed hands to have Noisey host the release of "Shock Me" and laud the laughably bad single, but there's probably no money behind Sludgelord's almost embarrassingly positive review.

Let me be honest again: I also understand that I am approaching this review in an obnoxiously biased and petty way. I disagree with the general consensus and am apparently quite desperate to broadcast that fact. The justification, though, is this album. This album chock full of gussied up butt rock. Mall rock with enough bells and whistles to sneak it into the party.

Side note: we saw Brann Dailor leaving Criminal Records having just purchased Purple on vinyl. Shouldn't everyone in Mastodon just get free Baroness albums as royalty checks?

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The album's opening track "Morningstar" is what one might politely call an homage to Mastodon. A less polite person would call it a shameless rip-off. See, when Baroness' First and Second albums sounded like Mastodon, they did so in this grimy way that seemed more like Savannah's answer to Mastodon rather than Savannah's indebtedness to Mastodon. I always found Savannah's punk/metal scene to be pretty gnarly, so when we first saw Baroness all those years ago at the Waterfront in Brunswick, their brand of crusty riffage made sense and avoided being derivative. When Baroness released Red, an album I love, they were following in the post-Leviathan proggy footsteps of Mastodon but doing so in a way that sounded unique and compelling and intensely engaging.

Now that Mastodon has released two pop records and Baroness has followed suit, the sonic connection between the two bands isn't just as obvious - it's deflating. Whereas Mastodon is writing their version of Yes songs, Baroness is just writing their versions of Mastodon's pop songs. Every song has an anthemic chorus with some prog noodling thrown in and just enough heaviness to convince everyone that it's still a metal record and not a *gulp* hard rock album.

"Shock Me," "Kerosene," "Chlorine & Wine," and "The Iron Bell" are all very much the same song with the same interchangeable cringe-worthy lyrics and hooks.

The album's last two songs, "Desperation Burns" and - oh my good god - "If I Have to Wake Up (Would You Stop the Rain?)," are Baroness' last-ditch efforts to really come up with something unique on Purple. "Desperation Burns," though, just dissolves into the same goofy nonsense as the four songs mentioned in the previous paragraph, while "If I Have to Wake Up" is the album's ballad (I guess). It's funny, because that song title would probably warm my heart if it was on the new TWIABP album or something, but on this album, it just makes my skin crawl.

Plus, this song kinda just sounds like fancy Nickelback. You can imagine John Baizley and Avril Lavigne's ex-husband switching places and it maybe not even affecting the listening experience. I mean, you'd know you were listening to the guy from Nickelback and apparently enjoying it, but at least you'd be honest about it.

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Maybe that's all I want out of the people writing these glowing reviews of Purple: just admit that you like Nickelback. Admit that if Nickelback was a little less mainstream, you'd be all in. Admit it!

Or just admit that you don't want to write a negative review of an album written by a cool band that was in a near-death bus accident. Because if every review is going to mention that the nearly fatal accident is the impetus for the band's emotional and musical acme, then maybe it's also okay admitting it's the impetus for an objectively bad album getting praised so widely. Maybe, too, it's okay if that experience led to an inescapable patch of emotions that has trapped the band in this grungy butt-rock warbling nonsense.

The art we produce when we're sad or haunted or scared isn't always good. Sometimes those emotions are delimiting, locking you into this narrow form of expression that feels increasingly necessary. Tragedy can lead to good and bad art. In Baroness' case? I'm just glad it's over.