Two Dudes, Two Computers

THE WANDERING LAKE-ASHAME 8.6

It’s been a while since I heard a record this _pretty_ in a while. I guess prettiness started popping up with folk music after Bon Iver. I dunno, I don’t listen to Bon Iver, but I suppose it sounds a lot like this.

The production, which is pretty great, since I found this, for free, on bandcamp, is very ethereal, and makes every song sound like a hushed secret or gentle whisper. I don’t know much about The Wandering Lake, but I think it is just one man, and his guitar. And his voice. Damn, his voice, dude. Like, whoa. It just carries and holds wonderfully. It’s kind of reminiscent of Win Butler, and maybe, maaaaaaybe, Jeff Mangum, but that just could be my inner fanboy coming out (again.) He holds these words tremendously, likes it’s nothing. The melodies he sings, like on “Water Patting” are like another instrument, perhaps one that could be found in those foreign, eastern songs I always hear on TV but never bother to search for. I should get on that.

The guitar is acoustic, and pretty. Sometimes finger picked (to perfection) and sometimes strummed. It remains unchanging-no real bridge or chorus. Just the guitar and voice. For kind of a while. But I’ll take that, and probably come more accustomed to it.

If you like Bon Iver or Fleet Foxes, or have a beard and like rainy days, you’ll love this.

Zach. 5-24-12

Silversun Pickups- Neck of the Woods    4.6

One fascinating aspect of fanatically following music as I do is watching how different bands develop through their careers. And by knowing so many, I have picked up on two major trajectories. Bands that fall flat on their debut album, but pick up their creativity to astonishing levels later in their careers (Radiohead, Wilco, The Flaming Lips, to name a few). And the bands that come running out of the gate with stunning debuts that bring out everything they have to offer (Bloc Party, Arctic Monkeys, The Futureheads, The Strokes). The problem with the latter category is that these bands often spend the rest of their careers experimenting with different sounds, looking hard for something new to try, only for every new offering to ultimately fail to match the excitement of their debut. Silversun Pickups are a band that certainly belongs to the latter category. The L.A based grunge revivalists came running out of the gates with Carnavas, an album that solidly blended grunge elements with sleek production. They were quirky and fresh, and had a brilliant trademark song in “Lazy Eye”. But the band didn’t really develop much on their sophomore effort, Swoon, mostly giving slight adjustments to their debut. So for their third album, the band went to big-time rock producer Jacknife Lee to help them develop. A band I mentioned earlier as part of the brilliant debut list, Bloc Party, did the exact same thing, turning mostly to Lee for their third, and most recent album, Intimacy. But that album, rather than developing Bloc Party, found them lost and confused, their experiments held unchecked, and the production burying Bloc Party’s music under a wave of electronic gloss. While Lee doesn’t cover this the way he did to Bloc Party, Silversun Pickups sound similarly lost on Neck of the Woods. The songs are almost completely lacking in focus or cohesion. Just when the band starts to build into something powerful, it’s dissolved into nothing. All of the band’s attempts at arena-rock swagger are confused and half-hearted. 

Opener “Skin Graph” would work well if it was half as long. Solid verses and a solid chorus are present, but any momentum the song has is broken by the constant breaks in momentum the band inserts everywhere. By the time the song finally hits it’s satisfying chorus, it’s been three minutes. Many of the other songs on here suffer from the same fate. Perhaps the band should observe Tom Petty guitarist Mike Campbell’s famous dictum: “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus”. Much of this toying with ambient keyboards, synthesizers, and instrumental passages sounds almost amateurish, the opposite of the professional sound the band wanted. The songs are generally ok, it’s just that there’s so much else going on in the music that is completely unnecessary that it nullifies any impact the band’s potent, loud attack may have when they finally get around to demonstrating it. The band wanted a standout single like “Lazy Eye” in “Bloody Mary (Nerve Endings), but even this lead single sounds frayed. An interesting electronic intro literally leads to nothing, as in silence, before singer Brian Aubert sings the first verse by himself with a guitar. Almost every song on here has a section like this, one that sounds promising but has no purpose. And the guitars, drums, and vocals are so electronically processed that they lack any impact or emotion when they finally reach human ears. Other than the solid industrial-grunge march of “Mean Spirits”, there isn’t a track on here that makes any sort of an impression. The eleven songs drag endlessly for fifty-eight minutes before the album finally comes to a close. 

I don’t know what exactly this band was trying to do when they wrote songs like “Lazy Eye”, but what they got was a fist-pumping rock classic. Now it seems Silversun Pickups are trying way too hard to recreate this sound. The band goes far beyond their capabilities on Neck of the Woods. Although they definitely are more than just the Smashing Pumpkins imitators that so many accuse of them being, Silversun Pickups don’t really demonstrate what they’re good at here. On this album, the band tries to make an arena-rock record, while endlessly toying with new sounds. This simply doesn’t work at all. But with the polished sound it has, this album is ripe for heavy rotation on mainstream rock radio. And it’s a sad thing to see a band that once seemed so fresh and exciting to move into the territory of tired, boring, and pompous mainstream rock. 

Jackson. 05/23/12

Best Coast- The Only Place   7.2

It took me awhile to warm to Best Coast. Their super-sunny approach to punk-pop, if you even consider them threatening enough to insert the word “punk” into their categorization, was a bit too sunny for me at first. But the thing with their music is that it is so damn catchy and upbeat that its incredibly hard to keep your nose turned up at it for too long. Actually seeing the California shores for the first time a few months ago made me come to even better terms with their music. It’s perfect music for an oppressively hot day in L.A, walking around aimlessly, basking in sun and innocence without a care in the world. Their debut, Crazy For You, perfectly embodied their aim and sound: fuzzy guitars and badly recorded drums were the perfect surroundings for singer Bethany Cosentino’s wistful, nostalgic, sun-stroked, and lonesome vocals. It was a lovely combination. But on The Only Place, Best Coast has suddenly decided to grow up musically. With new producer Jon Brion (Fiona Apple, Kanye West, among others), the lo-fi fuzz of the guitars and drums on the band’s debut disappear. With the newly clean sound, Cosentino’s vocals are front and center in the mix, something that often hurts the album. While Cosentino can certainly sing, her lyrics are far from her strong suit. Lyrics like “The world is lazy/but you and me, we’re just crazy” from her first album were fine buried beneath the lo-fi sound. But the lyrics are largely similar in their elementary rhymes here, and now they have nowhere to hide. While Cosentino writes some pleasant, catchy songs on The Only Place, her lyrics, and the somewhat cold, polished production of the album occasionally make it rather dull. 

The opening title track highlights this right from the get-go. An insanely catchy, bouncy song, Cosentino sings about how much she adores California. But verses like “When we get bored we like to sit around and stare/sit around and stare/At the mountains, at the birds, at the ocean, at the trees/We have fun, we have fun, we have fun when we please” make it hard to take the song seriously. Especially the last line of said verse, which cannot escape the lyrical connection that most wonderful of pop songs, “Friday”. “Why I Cry” is good, but lacks force behind it. Another major problem is that after the first two tracks, most of this album’s material is at mid-tempo. Although this isn’t entirely a bad thing, the lack of excitement in the production, vocals, or lyrics make a lot of the album’s tracks sound exactly like the one that came before it. Songs like “Each Year” and “How They Want Me To Be” are pleasant with the sunniness of the guitar-work and vocals, but fail to really excite or sound fresh in the way Best Coast used to sound. And, lyrical gems like the last verse of “How They Want Me To Be” (“And I don’t want me to be how they want me to be/You don’t want me to be how they want me to be/I don’t want me to be how they want me to be”) are cringe-inducing. But despite it’s faults, its hard to really hate on this album as a whole package. The songs are put together well, and Bobb Bruno’s sunny lead guitar work often give the songs a well-needed boost. The Only Place isn’t a standout, but it’s full of songs that will be stuck in your head for days after hearing them. 

Best Coast never aimed very high. Their songs started out as being hazy laments of innocent times and love in the California sun. Now they are simply less hazy, and a bit less innocent. But they’re still pretty lovable. And maybe, as a Jersey resident, I just don’t get the full bliss of the California attitude that so covers this album and Best Coast’s music. But hey, if you’re looking for an album to listen to while heading for whatever beach that may be closest to where you live, this certainly isn’t a bad option at all. Probably nothing would make the band happier than hearing their music being blasted out of a boombox or radio on some sandy shore somewhere. The summer is in.

Jackson. 05/20/12

Beach House- Bloom   8.4

When I reviewed Cult’s self-titled debut album last summer, I mentioned that they were different from the many man/woman, singer/guitar-player duos that were popular in indie rock (Sleigh Bells and the Kills, among others). One major group in this category that I forgot to mention was Beach House. Beach House also set themselves quite clearly apart from the rest of the pack. Their sound is almost a combination of all the various musical traits of these duos. While they have the sunny dreaminess of Cults, they have the dark lyrics of the Kills. That dreaminess is their main calling card, with Alex Scally’s guitar and synth work creating a dynamic, atmospheric swirl that surrounds Victoria LeGrand’s beautiful vocals. Their previous album, Teen Dream, set this combination to songs of innocence and youthful longing. But on Bloom, the band does just that. The production is more lush, the songs more fleshed out and strong, and LeGrand’s voice more beautiful and mature than ever before. 

The songs on Bloom work so well because of their depth. They are sunny, hopeful, and light without being cutesy. The guitars and keyboards borrow from past influences, but don’t make it entirely obvious. They create a sound entirely their own without veering too far away with what is familiar. The opening track, “Myth”, is the perfect distillation of this. A fluttering, spacey riff paves the way for LeGrand’s vocals. Her singing rises and falls with her lyrics, never staying in the same place for too long. It’s a steadily paced song, but it never grows boring. The dynamics of the songs are always changing. “Wild” is simply gorgeous. It is restrained, yet transcendental at the same time. Scally’s guitar work over LeGrand’s yearning vocals is impeccable, and is constantly driving the track. “Lazuli” immediately brings to mind Teen Dream highlight “Norway” with the impassioned rush of the song’s wordless chorus. “Other People” and “The Hours” are similarly blissful. While nothing on the album’s first half will blow you away, it’s nearly impossible to find any faults with it. LeGrand’s vocals and Scally’s musical accompaniment are simply brilliant on all levels.

Highlights from the second half include the beautifully restrained “Troublemaker”, and the sky-scraping heights of “New Year”. The latter evokes the fireworks and feelings associated with the celebration of the new year with Scally’s contemplative yet celebratory synth flourishes. The first half of “Wishes” is one of the very few dull stretches of the album. But at the halfway point, Scally takes over with a wonderful guitar solo that heavily evokes Robert Smith’s guitar work with the Cure. Closing track “Irene” settles into a hypnotic groove near it’s end, highlighted with LeGrand’s repeated affirmation “It’s a strange paradise” over heavily echoed guitar arpeggios from Scally. All in all, this album rarely refrains from the sound of the opening track. But the sound Beach House creates on Bloom is so blissful and perfect that it needn’t be messed with. It’s incredibly mellow music, but music that doesn’t get boring or repetitive with repeated listens.

While many thought Teen Dream may be Beach House’s tour de force, this album has put all the critics into their place. Bloom continues the band’s growth into a formidable unit. All of the occasional dull moments that used to be a part of Beach House’s sound are gone. The band has matured, and has created an album that is spoiled with layer upon layer of beautiful music. Beach House are a band that creates music that accomplishes the rare task of being blissful and challenging at the same time. While it is light and dreamy, it also has plenty of depth. And on Bloom ,there is more depth than the band has ever created before. 

Jackson. 05/17/12

PS: Today marks the one-year anniversary of the creation of Two Dudes! Thanks to our readers! Zach and I can’t wait to write more long, opinionated reviews of our favorite music for you in the future.

The Cribs- In the Belly of the Brazen Bull   8.2

The Cribs are lucky. The band are undoubtedly talented, but over the last few years, they have had many of the brightest talents in all of rock music to come and help them out. Rock legend Johnny Marr joined the band of brothers for a couple of years as a second guitarist. His contributions added another, more dynamic element to the band’s hard-rocking yet catchy attack. And even though Marr has moved on now, his impact is still felt on this, the band’s fifth album. What is truly unique about this LP is the production. Half of the album is produced by that most legendary punk-rock producer, Steve Albini. The other half is produced by another superb producer, Dave Fridmann. Albini’s ultra hands-off approach brings the band back to their scrappy roots. It’s just the three Jarman brothers in a room letting it loose, feedback and all. With the shiny production of their two most recent albums nowhere to be found, the band sounds fresh and rejuvenated. Fridmann, on the other hand, brings something entirely different to the table. Most famous as the Flaming Lips’ longtime producer, Fridmann brings a different element into the basic sound and attack of the band; the one that is so evidenced in the Albini recordings. The Cribs still sound like the Cribs, but elements of Fridmann’s past work (the Lips) manage to creep their way into the songs. Life-affirming keyboard melodies add depth to some tracks, yet are still subtle. The result is a combination of a back to the basics approach, and an experimental approach. And despite this split, The Cribs have never sounded stronger. 

This combination of experimentalism and a strong sound is evidenced right from the opening track, the excellent “Glitters Like Gold”. Ryan Jarman offers great hooks throughout, while the newly added keyboards give just the right touch to make the song a great opener. Single “Come On, Be a No-One” is classic Cribs. A brief, stout rocker that brings to mind Sonic Youth’s “100%” at times, it features guitar squalls that offer a discomforting accompaniment to the catchy vocal melody. “Jaded Youth” and “Anna” also sound like more mature, assured updates of the Cribs of old. They march confidently and loudly along without losing their tunefulness. “Confident Men” also demonstrates the band’s more mature sound by accomplishing a task that the band have failed to do effectively yet; write a slow song that doesn’t drag or sound sappy. After the mediocre “Uptight” comes one of the album’s highlights, “Chi-Town”. A head-banging ode to the Windy City, it shows Albini’s production work at it’s best. It comes about as close to capturing the “live” sound that so many bands desire as any song I’ve heard in recent times. The song is catchy, loud, and fun, a trio of characteristics the Cribs have always been good at capturing in their songs.

The second half of the album loses focus a little bit, going in increasingly divergent directions. But it is still rock solid. “Pure O” is a beautiful song in which Ryan Jarman does an unusual amount of actual singing, as opposed to his usual sing-yell-talk-scream combination. “Back To the Bolthole” is the most obvious example of Fridmann’s influence on the Cribs. If not for Jarman’s thick Wakefield accent, it could be mistaken for a track on the Flaming Lips’ Embryonic album. The lovely acoustic ballad “I Should Have Helped” is followed by something entirely new for the Cribs: a four-part medley that closes out the album. To add to the Cribs’ “let’s get the best of everything in rock!” attitude in making this album, they recorded this medley where the most famous of album-closing medleys was recorded, Abbey Road, from the album of the same name. For something so outside of the Cribs’ normal realm of creativity, the medley works surprisingly well as an album-ender, complete with the brilliantly titled closer “Arena Rock Encore With Full Cast”. The Cribs go for all kinds of sounds on this new album, but they never let their experimentation get away from them.

It has been fascinating to watch the massive wave of English garage-rock bands from the mid 2000’s, and how they have all developed differently. With this album, the Cribs have taken their baseline sound farther than they have ever taken it before. But the band doesn’t collapse under the weight of their own experimentation. Underneath it all is a fantastic group of songs, the best bunch the band has come out with yet. And with two of the best producers in recent rock history in Fridmann and Albini, you can’t go wrong here. The three Jarman brothers have demonstrated that they learned from playing with Johnny Marr. They sound more full, more creative, and more original than ever before on In the Belly of the Brazen Bull. 

Jackson. 05/14/12

Damon Albarn- Dr. Dee  6.5

Damon Albarn has made his career from writing about his homeland. He brought his first band, Blur, to colossal fame by writing witty, sarcastic tales of middle-class English life. These songs, with their wistful portrayals of the monotony of suburban England, connected with almost everyone in that country, and made them one of the most beloved bands in England’s long, storied, musical history. Part of what made their music so jarringly brilliant was that Albarn was intentionally flying the face of what was in vogue and popular at the time. While the world was worshiping the primal roar of American grunge, Albarn wrote music that announced its English roots in huge, bold letters. “Cool Britannia” took over in England, with a new wave of bands that all screamed their English heritage to the world, and denounced the American music that had so taken over their airwaves. So, it’s not entirely crazy that Damon Albarn should make an opera about a man who coined the term “Britannia” in the first place. While certainly far from the best album Albarn has made, Dr. Dee is the most experimental and diverse. 

John Dee is a rather unusual subject for an opera. A hugely controversial intellectual of the Elizabethan era, Dee was an eccentric, to say the least. He was a brilliant mathematician and an advanced scientist for his time. But, he had a firm belief in magic that won him many enemies in the stuffy courts of England throughout his long life. Queen Elizabeth I asked him to choose her coronation date based on a star chart, while during the reign of Queen Mary, he was arrested for charting her horoscopes. Towards the end of his life, he began to make earnest attempts to communicate with angels, and his dabbling in the occult developed in to a firm belief in it. Just like the man it portrays, this album contains some astonishing triumphs, some failures, and many things that are just plain confusing. This album contains some elements of being an opera, a Damon Albarn solo album, a musical, and a film soundtrack. And while it fails to do any one thing very well, Dr. Dee is often quite beautiful, if somewhat distant.

On the album, Albarn takes as many opportunities as possible to demonstrate his arranging talents with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra (normally under the direction of Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood). These orchestral arrangements are occasionally pretty in their melancholic tone, but Albarn’s lack of prior experience in doing this sort of work often shows its head. The arrangements are often somewhat flat and unmoving. It is when Albarn takes lead vocal duties, instead of various cast members, that the highlights of this album are found. With different voices, Albarn’s lyrics seem slightly out of place and confused. The plot of the opera is also hard to follow without the music’s accompanying visuals. But on the few tracks here that Albarn is in the spotlight, he shines. The album’s first single, and it’s best track by a mile, “The Marvelous Dream”, is Albarn at his finest. The muddled tale is suddenly clear with Albarn’s beautiful vocals and guitar accompaniment. His voice takes on a weathered, tired quality that captures the story he is trying to tell. Closing track “The Dancing King” is similarly superb. On “Apple Carts”, Albarn sounds like a weary, old minstrel from the age in which the opera is set. But the rest of the album does not fare nearly as well as these few highlights. With Albarn often trading vocals with actual characters in the opera, the storyline is often lost. Many of Albarn’s instrumental experiments on the album also fail to really go anywhere or add anything to the album. But, this isn’t really a “solo album”, it’s more an experiment for Albarn’s restless musical imagination.

This is just the most recent entry in Albarn’s incredibly diverse and rich back catalog. He fronted Blur, diversified (and had massive international success with) Gorillaz, turned introspective with the Good the Bad and the Queen, turned to funk with Rocket Juice & The Moon, and has now written an opera. All of these ventures have come with different degrees of success for him, but he will keep making music at a rate that puts most of his peers to shame. Although this album fails in many aspects, it is an interesting piece of music. It’s vague, dark, mysterious, and occasionally brilliant nature paint the portrait of a man who was the same way. It isn’t one of Albarn’s finest achievements, but it is an album that demonstrates just how diverse and talented he really is.

Jackson. 05/10/12

Off!- Off!   8.1

At the age of 21, on Black Flag’s seminal debut EP Nervous Breakdown, Keith Morris’ vocals were entirely made up of screaming tirades that all featured the same tone and outlook on life and society. He screamed about having nervous breakdowns, getting wasted and cruising around on a skateboard, and most of all, just being plain angry at everything. That was thirty-five years ago, Morris is now fifty-six. With the passing of all these years, the question remains, has his outlook on life, society, and culture changed? The answer is a resounding no. Even though he is older than my own and most of my friends’ parents, Morris is still screaming, and is still pissed: really, really pissed. Yet unbelievably, Morris is incredibly convincing in his vocals and lyrics. He doesn’t make a fool of himself in seeing the world from the perspective of a bored and angry teenager. And at many times, he’s downright scary. 

With 16 songs in 16 minutes, Off! doesn’t leave you a minute to breath. It comes at you, one song after another after another. Morris is angry, snarky, vicious, and unrelenting in his vocals. The songs often tend to blend into one, long, angry burst of unstoppable energy. But there are some stand-out tracks in the album. At forty-one seconds, “I Got News For You” is a searing, blistering take-down of (what appears to be) Greg Ginn, former guitarist and leader of Black Flag. Morris rails against Ginn for not appreciating all the other former members of Black Flag, and not recognizing their contributions. “Cracked” rails against potheads, the demise of hardcore, and Morris’ own personal anger, all in fifty-two seconds. “Harbor Freeway Blues” takes a fairly standard hard rock riff and turns it into a hardcore head-banger. By the time you start digesting the songs, the album is over. If there was ever a standard-bearer for a full-length hardcore punk album, this would be it.

The incredible thing about Off! is that it’s one of the best things Morris has ever done. Morris is full of energy, vitriol, and things that he wants to say to people, and he lets it all hang out here. Not only is Off! by far the best hardcore punk band America has produced in decades, they may be one of the best hardcore punk bands ever. Not only do they revive the spirit and the sound of the best of the genre, they make it modern while losing none of its intensity. This self-titled album, and Off’s first four EP’s rank among the best hardcore ever made. It’s angry, uncompromising, loud, and intense. And the lead singer is fifty-six freaking years old. If you ever think that punk is well and truly dead in the modern world, take sixteen minutes out of your day to listen to this. Then reconsider your opinion, because it doesn’t get much more punk than this.

Jackson. 05/08/11