Following in the slow rock tradition of Austin brethren American Analog Set, Slow Widow wonder aloud, “what would happen if I played this shredding Black Sabbath riff more slowly than if I were asleep while playing this shredding Black Sabbath riff? One friend described them as being Torche songs reduced in speed 3 or 4 times. I say they’re like MBV, Torche, and Sonic Youth songs frozen like January molasses. It’s a good set of songs, however you turn it.
Obits is the latest in a long series of great projects from Rick Froberg of Drive Like Jehu and Hot Snakes. These are slow murder ballad surf blues with untraceable analog parts. It’s like Radio Birdman slowed through those angular Holtzman forcefields in David Lynch’s Dune. It’s like dread coming on inexorable, blood dry by the time it hits the tracks.
I just had to get that out there. That is all.
It is true. On a day within the last range of days I attended the performance of Dan Bejar and his enormous band here in Seattle, in a club, and I was not sitting in an assigned seat. This was one of the very few shows that I’ve seen since getting here that was actually in a club without seats, a show that had an actual crowd standing will-he-nil-he in a room in front of speakers (albeit one that concentrated shoulder to shoulder at lead-like densities waaaay out back on the way to the bathroom, completely confusing those of us up front who were swinging our arms around wildly in an expression of the modern angst of 21st century alienation in the hopes of making even superficial contact with another human being without the aid of ill-fitting prostheses like the email or the iPhone).
Dan Bejar is traveling with a large, talented, and dedicated retinue on this outing in support of his latest record, Kaputt. The saxophonist/floutist alone worked hard enough to earn the ticket price back for the whole band.
One has to wonder, however, under what sort of fear the band works with Dan Bejar to execute live and on a small club stage the very complicated smooth jazz-meets-new-wave vibe of the new LP, as there were few smiles from the rest of the gang.
Perhaps that was just it- they were really trying hard to hit all the marks and put on a fucking amazing show. Mission accomplished, and kudos if that’s all it was. The idea that kept a smile on my face, though, was that Bejar might actually be the eccentric his lyrics portray, that the band may really be working strenuously aviod the oblivion inside the annoyance of Dan Bejar, the artiste. Whatever it was, thanks for coming to town and playing flawlessly through Kaputt, and through a lot of Your Blues, to boot. The show was excellent.
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Openers The War on Drugs brought some much-needed East Coast rock and reverb to the stage, doing that Philly new-psych thing they and all the acts that have split off from them the past few years do so well. Good times all around.
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This week I had a Deerhunter moment. Tweaking from overstimulation on all fronts, unable to find pleasure in anything, turning away from myself and my tasks in ever tinier right angle spirals of repeated procrastination, it was suggested to me that I give Chicago’s Bottomless Pit an innocent listen. Jaded and beyond hope and seeing no harm in it, I plugged them into my headsockets and set the tunes to “blast.”
O, would that I could have felt anything.
And at the first golden guitar notes and motorik drumbeats of “winter wind”, the first track off their 2010 record Blood Under the Bridge, I felt the wintry ache of spring awaken in my bones, and in those in the human ossuary loved by God most of all—the hammer, the stirrup, and the anvil—first.
That is the Deerhunter moment, by the by- the sudden epiphany that something mind-blowingly good can appear from nowhere and change everything.
As a friend recently put it to me, music is a disease. We wake to life innocent, and we take things to mean what they mean. Like the addict deserving of compassion, all men are too ready to love, or perhaps not well enough prepared for the repercussions of discovering the grand, immediate secret that cannot be shared. When we give openly of ourselves, of our time and full attention, how much more often we find ourselves asking whether the losses we have sustained by not instead investing in the funds more hedged is the result of our misunderstanding at a hopeless, inceptive stage the valuable things in life, or whether our constancy has been undermined by others who reframe the straightforward task of living as enterprise. Like Bottomless Pit sing on “Is it a Ditch”, whatever it is, “…We won’t find what it is before we stop.”
O, the loss of innocence, the passing, as it were, of our first vain and fallible sorrow.
Of course, music is not a disease, and, further, it is a testament to our small human spirits, drunk and ignorant and swelled up disproportionately most of the time on the wrong things, that it takes five angels with five trumpets (and probably Ke$ha) in the terrible amphitheater of humanity to provoke the crowd into such anomie and torpor as befits opening up for Abaddon. In that tired club, where the bouncers have scales like iron breastplates, teeth like lions’ teeth, and tails in which is the power to harm people for five months, I affirm that the saved are the ticketholders who only came because they heard they might get to see Bottomless Pit sing songs that redeem. Let’s face it, no one could learn these songs except those who have been redeemed— particularly not those of whom they sing on “Winterwind” who are “waiting on a winterwind like they’re gonna get something”, but only those who are “waiting on a Winterwind for free.”
As the Old Possum warned us, in order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession. And as I have said before, you have to live with yourself if you are to live at all. Bottomless Pit remind us of that simply by making some of the best music that’s ever been heard in defiance of the apparent impossibility of anything in today’s world for the artistically inclined who would invest everything.
Music is not a disease, artist, but steel yourself if you are going to venture to that bad club and cling to the medicine of that organ-grinder’s monkey on your back- I read somewhere there are still two woes to come.
There’s plenty more Bottomless Pit live to be seen at the Union Rockyards Youtube channel, and plenty of recorded stuff to stream and buy at their website. The digital end of things (CD-only and download purchases) is being handled by NJ’s Comedy Minus One label.
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The indefatigable Ted Leo was at a small auditorium at the Henry Art Gallery on Friday, February 25 doing a solo show put on by UW’s Rainy Dawg Radio. Indefatigable may be a hyperbole, considering his recent comments, however clarified and defused, hinting at retirement and his postponement of about 2 weeks of dates at the beginning of his tour. The pictures tell the story. The lighting wasn’t so great, we were seated (a guaranteed mood-killer), the sound was sub-par, the audience was a bit too hushed, and Ted was fighting his way through the onset of a cold. All that said, it’s always a pleasure to see the hardest working man in rock managing not to sell out for one more year. He pushed through whatever he was fighting to deliver a solid performance. I don’t think this guy can put on a bad show.
I can (proudly?) say I contributed one moment of hilarity to the nearly nonexistent banter between Ted and the audience (I mentioned the audience was quiet, right?). Hoping to hear a favorite track off his debut solo record from ’99, a little ditty called “The Northeast Corridor”, I piped up during one of those airless pockets of absolute non-interaction the audience was showering the stage with to request… a nonexistent song called “The Northwest Passage.” In the abbreviated parlance of today, that was a superfan fail. It did manage to animate the audience a bit, though, and the gracious Mr. Leo was very nice about my request being for something on the opposite side of the country from where the subject of the song should have been and the fact that he hadn’t rehearsed that one.
Still a good show, though.
One question for the Ted Leo-lovin’ world at large- I guess I can understand why no one ever asks him to play the brilliant songs off the first record (that might be an obscure entry in the catalog, what with all the tape noise and effects noise tracks filling out the incredible songwriting), but why am I the only one who requests “The Great Communicator” at shows? Has everyone forgotten about that one?
I had the pleasure of seeing John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats play a solo show at the Meany Hall Auditorium at the University of Washington in Seattle this past Tuesday, and aside from the warm memories of his always entertaining and eloquent between-song banter and the soulful renditions of his wonderfully-written songs, all I have to show for it are these shitty cell phone photos. Again, I forget to bring my real camera to a show. Playing a somewhat emotionally heavier than usual set, he thanked the audience repeatedly for our silently rapt attention to his renditions of songs he played in dedication to a friend of his he had just lost to cancer. The Mountain Goats aren’t theater, they’re poetry—a real attempt by a human being to communicate with others.
His opener was a young woman with whom I am entirely unfamiliar, one Jesy Fortino, AKA Seattle’s Tiny Vipers. She does chilling, quiet, long-form meditations on nothingness all alone up on stage with her acoustic guitar and her looping pedal. She sounds like Nico from the velvet underground singing Bradford Cox-produced variations on Cat Power’s “Crossbones Syle”. Somehow she loops the resonant sound from the notes she plucks from her guitar while managing to not actually record the pluck itself. The result is layered beauty, and the effect is soporific. And man, what a voice.
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Some facts of secondary relevance: I’ve only ever seen or heard alt-country labeled bands at shows that are the provenance of guilty, guardedly fearful financial organizations (Son Volt upwards of 3 times during New York’s summer-long outdoor River-to-River festival, popularly known as “The-City-Makes-a-Nearly-Empty,-Painless-Gesture-to-the Sucker-Hopeful-Future-Bourgeois-Paying-the-City’s-Rents Concert Series”), as part of a neighborhood arts organization’s summer to-do (Wilco at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center), thanks to a gesture of largesse by the caliph of an inland city-state to his teeming, restive plebes (Wilco again, debuting “I am Trying to Break your Heart” at the Taste of Chicago”), and by dint of that careworn, if obfuscative, axiom, “A rising tide lifts all boats” (enjoying the acoustic perfection from where I sat with my back leaned against the back wall of the bandshell during yet another Wilco set. They were playing for paying ticket-holders at Brooklyn’s McCarren Park Pool that night— this was before the gated-community set, whose fortresses continue to go up in Williamsburg, decided their kids need a place to swim other than the ocean since their money and numbers have ensured Frank Serpico’s services are no longer really required there, prompting the city to decree that the pool would be restored to working order, no longer used as a concert venue). And, recently, on Monday night I got to see the fantastic Old 97s play at the Showbox at the Market in Seattle through the good graces of Easy Street Records. This is to say I’ve only ever seen this brainy, frank, hopeful, tender, egalitarian and plain-spoken genre of minstrelsy performed gratis.
But why is that? Indie rock, I love you and every other over-confident, stars-in-their-eyes, innovative, cock’o the walk flavor of the minute blog sensation youthful bravura tempts into swelling your ranks, but how easy is it to enjoy the shows your stable puts on with all that courtly intrigue and those transactions of cultural capital poisoning the air? The concert venue is a house of prayer, but you are dividing it into a house of specialized niche musical self-marketing content exchanged so hipsters can get laid! Galilee’s scene is so over! Why am I swilling my beer money away at your shows? Alt-country shows— this is where all the other folks in western shirts have been taking their R&R. I think I’ve found my people.
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Monday’s Old 97s show brought a smile to my face and reminded me of two reasons why I got hooked on seeing live music to begin with. The first is that hanging out in a room full of people who are just happy to be gathered to hear music- good or bad- is good juju. Alt-country, country-rock—however you choose to term this stuff, it is blessed with the best crowds. The second is that there’s something transcendental about being part of that artist-audience circuit when the performers are as happy to be there as the fans are.
Alt-country isn’t a form that requires a constant virtuosity. It honestly and openly relies on hokey tropes hearkening back to long-quelled booms and forgotten busts when there were such things as cowboys and overnight boom towns. The only thing this requires is that everyone be in on it. With a wink and a smile, the Old 97s most certainly are. This doesn’t rob the act or the genre of authenticity. If, as they say in the academy, I may make an intertextual reference, there are some Silver Jews lyrics that speak better to what I’m trying to get at than I can do myself,:
When you know how I feel I feel better/When you’re 15 you want to look poor./Do unto others, and run like a mother/I don’t want to look poor anymore. -Silver Jews, “Buckingham Rabbit”
No one wants to be the coal miner’s daughter, and most of us probably aren’t. It’s still good, in the knowledge we’re all, artist and audience alike, getting screwed somehow, to catch the momentary pit stop distraction of our collective candles burning brightest as we make our tumbleweed’s journey to the ignominy of the grave. It’s also real good to don a western shirt with pearlized buttons and stand in a loud room.
And did I say that alt-country doesn’t require virtuosity? Perhaps, but please don’t think I malign the headliners of Monday’s show. The harmony and the sorrow in Monday night’s rendition of “Valentine” brought a genuine tear to my eye, and the twanged-up Dick Dale fury of Ken Bethea’s lead guitar made me happy to be alive.
The other day I sat down before my computer, excited to write about the new Gatekeeper EP, Giza, released this past December 13 on UK’s Merok Records. What happened instead was that I spent the next few days reveling in Front 242’s back catalog. How could a thing like that happen?
Well, it’s because Gatekeeper is doing a lite take of an amalgam of artists that includes Front 242, Coil, and My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult. The difference is that with those other bands you could believe the artists had sacrificed something- or just gladly irreversibly given something- for the realization of an idea. To wit, at about 07:15 in this interview on Red Bull Music Academy, one of the members of Front 242 rebukes the interviewer’s insinuation that the band was in a privileged position to be making the music they were making with the equipment they were using in the early ’80s by saying, with not a little bit of apparent irritation, “An Emulator is about the price of a car and I decided not to have a car but have a machine. There are a lot of people who have cars here and would probably be able to buy an Emulator in the same sense.”
Like other musicians in their genre at the time, the expression of their art required something from them above and beyond the time put in. This was part of the fact that they pushed their art over boundaries, making it both artificially and intrinsically anathema to the mainstream. Wearing safely established symbolism doesn’t accomplish this same goal.
In the same few minutes of the RBMA interview mentioned above, he goes on to talk about the sense of freedom and opportunity they felt at that time as they were confronted with new synthesizer technology. (This exchange is featured in the first segment of the interview highlights video embedded below)
“…You have a new machine, a new concept, you can start from scratch. This is an opportunity for us. We felt maybe here we have a machine that is going to be able to express something of our culture because this machine is as naked as our musical culture… And so you think, ‘Here I have a chance to create a new aesthetic, to create new concepts, a new vision of music’.”
So, let’s look at Giza. The opening sound on the Giza EP is a sample of a motorcycle being started. Does the image of the burly dude on a hog still hold such strange and terrible Hunter S. currency that it’s going to send kids running from the dance floor to Mom’s skirts? Actually, that’s just what I’m getting at. On Giza you have several such samples vaguely evocative of “scariness” rooted somewhere in the familiar. However, without lyrics, an idea, a reason, a drive, a shaking fist or a primal investment on the part of the artists, this isn’t “Do you Fear for Your Child,” this is Adventures in Babysitting. There is nothing here to push the music on Giza out of the realm of the fear-ish, out of the category of the sinister-y. This is all just camp once the excitement of being reminded that you really want to listen to Front 242 wears off. There’s nothing electrically boundary-transgressing enough here to give you the surprising smack of satisfaction you’re looking for when, after your sojourn into the back-catalogs of the dread of the technological police society that Industrial music was a manifestation of, you remember to revisit Gatekeeper.
I like the stuff they seem to be into, but unless they push it their music, rehashed Twitch-era Ministry orchestra hits, Art of Noise et al-type vocal samples, and Front 242 background chanting/crowd noise and all, is just more Burning Man/Vegas revue weekend vacation dance music for deluded, self-assured careerists to use drugs to without making any significant changes in their lives. At least Enigma was doing this sort of thing at the tail end of when this music was actually being made.
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Motorcycles! Brrrrrmm!! Hell and stuff!
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Texture, prolonged tension, vocal samples, lyrics, message, and still unlike anything I’ve heard before or since.
What a year.
My apartment burned down, I got into a PhD program, I got engaged, I spent the summer sweltering in the Midwest, I got married, I drove across the entire country with my wife, and I just finished my first quarter as a doctoral candidate.
Did I listen to any music? Let’s perform a simple diagnostic test that will tell us the answer.
Diagnostic Question: Was I alive at any point during 2010?
Answer: The aforementioned details of what went on would indicate yes.
Result of diagnostic analysis: I listened to music in 2010. This is what I really got into.
Clean and long-form dance songs about how terrible and shallow people are in New York. For some reason this really spoke to me this year. There are also some meditations on commitment once and for all to yourself or another person, commitment to the wrong person, making the mindless sex with the funny people who have to drink and pretend they don’t want to make the sex before they make the sex, and sticking to your guns. End of shipping manifest.
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This record transformed the stifling inland old-growth Southern Indiana/Moon of Endor jungle where I spent the summer sweating myself into a damp raisin into a hazy place of dreams and pining. Wild Nothing is VA dude Jack Tatum, and what he achieved here made it safe for men to cry again, to cry little girlie tears of winsome loneliness into the 150% humidity of a million degree summer night. Reverb washes from these songs across miles of imaginary sepia toned highways, while jangly faeries hold your sniveler’s hand and you weakly bop to the no-balls-at-all vocals and the distant drums, too limp-wristed to masturbate. Seriously, this is a really good record.
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For some reason this came out in 2008. I didn’t know anything about this until my buddy DC and his crew at WWALT alerted me to the fact that I was already deeply in debt and I didn’t know it. I was in debt and I needed to pay my respects to Mr. Kurt Vile. I have done so, and I continue to do so with interest.
Though the tome of wisdom that is comprised of Vile’s work can be opened to any page for enlightenment, this is the album that does my soul the most good. Every song takes you back into the womb of the blues, where mother earth’s arterial amplifier hum swishes all around your foreverdreaming ears and Momma never kicks you out of the house.
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Tom Jenkinson, or Squarepusher, is the guy Radiohead looks up to as their Radiohead. See the trailing bits of the below interview he gave to BBC2’s The Culture Show for Thom Yorke’s kudos if you want proof. If you sit through the part of the piece intervening between the start and the finish of the interview, and I don’t see any reason why you wouldn’t want to, you will gain a valuable insight as to why Jenkinson’s work always stands out as such an individualized oeuvre. As he puts it, he tries to keep a “hermetic” approach to his work, to let what he is expressing develop with limited influence from or intertextuality with trends that sweep through music at any one time. I listened to nothing but this record for several weeks straight as it deeply and tortuously carved from the inside of my head the high chambers of Squarepusher’s new cathedrals of tone. Everything on this record, from art to composition to the engineering of the sound, is a high resolution postcard from a new world. He has pulled in the reins and diverted from his last few performance jazz influenced records to revisit some earlier themes of otherworldly R&B and sharp synthesizer crunch, culminating in a record that could just as easily have been named “Oh my god” if the demonstrative appropriateness of the record’s title had been deemed important than being cryptic and awesome.
Sure, fine, I’ll reduce this record to an oft-reproduced blurb singer/songwriter/guitarist Bradford Cox posted on his Facebook page around about the time of this record’s release. He said that the title is a reference to “a collection of fond memories and even invented ones…The way that we write and rewrite and edit our memories to be a digest version of what we want to remember and how that’s kind of sad.”
What is it really? It’s a painful and ecstatic faceplant on the very edge of spiritual awakening, if you take the subject matter of “Don’t Cry” or “Revival” at face value. I’m just one listener/fan/critic, but these sound like meditations on how a person at the end of their rope can turn toward faith instead of away from it when they’re at the very terminals of extremis.
The record’s a desire-gone-cold reflection on lost youth and gained cynicism, on life lived on the perimeter if you take “Desire Lines” (sung by guitarist and vocalist Lockett Pundt) at its word. “Memory Boy” is a tribute to the departed Jay Reatard if I ever heard one. The opening riff is pretty reminiscent of the former Deerhunter collaborator’s track “Before I was Caught” from his final album, Watch me Fall.
The limitless talent and the fearlessness with which Deerhunter put out their new music is incontrovertible, unassailable. It is the only true mark of an artist. At the end of the day or the end of a life, what does one have but one’s work? The simple fact is that we, all of us, know that we have nothing if we have not remained true to our talents and our ideal selves, to THE IDEAL SELF locked like a minotaur inside the maze of mysteries or miseries he or she must decipher alone. Deerhunter is a pack of monsters who live that human axiom to its rarely practiced extreme. I unabashedly love this band with their shimmering atmospherics, their endless experimentation, and their personal lyrics.
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A weird trip through handcrafted techno. This album which I thought completely programmed in a DAW is actually completely played live. It’s cold-weather music for weird headspaces.
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My wife, she of the impeccable musical taste who is always teaching me something new, she introduced me to Mr. Lloyd Cole during our courtship. Maybe first she slipped me “Like Lovers Do” during one of those stealthily competitive and eminently meaningful exchanges of single songs that takes the place of exchanging mix tapes in the digital era, and, when I was sufficiently whammied by that, by the depth and breadth of her musical knowledge and her acumen in discerning killer songwriting, she closed in for the kill with the masterful and timeless “Are You Ready to be Heartbroken?” That could be how it came about that I became a fan of Lloyd Cole.
Then, there we were with a 3,000 mile road trip ahead of us. Thank the songwriting gods with every pagan rite they demand that Lloyd Cole put together a top-notch country band to back up his melancholy musings and Westerbergian turns of phrase just in time for our departure. It starts eloquent and sad, lamenting the pratfalls of self-involved lovers on the skids in tracks like “Like a Broken Record” and “Writers Retreat!”, and it ends elegant and glad with overtures like “Oh Genevieve” and “Double Happiness”. On the way he manages to touch the fuck you kiss off base as well, with the resignedly exasperated- but not too hurt- “That’s Alright.”
Thanks, Lloyd. Glad to see you weren’t afraid to be heartbroken again.
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Black city is a wild meander through the secret ghettos of techno, where the locals will tell you there’s nothing to do, but from the windows waft strange vocal stylings and the streets throb with secrets.
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Have you ever been wrong, said something in foolish youthful bravura you wish you could take back? I have. I’m sorry, Shy Child, but I was wrong about your new record when I first heard it. I thought that your last record, Noise Won’t Stop was the pinnacle of what your work was going to amount to. All the staccato breaks, the overpowering, interweaving lead synth lines, the barely comprehensible shouting over all that musical intensity. It was so tight and immediate. How was I supposed to be prepared for this shift into measured genius, into subtle groove? I wasn’t up to the task.
I’ve spent the year listening to the new record, Liquid Love, however, and I’ve changed my ways.
Have you ever come to the realization once you took inventory of how many of a certain group’s CDs you had or how many plays of an artist’s songs you’d racked up on your MP3 player, that you were a superfan of a band, or that that one record you’d been overlooking was, unbeknownst to you, in actuality your favorite? That’s how the ballad of me and Shy Child would go.
Like LCD Soundsystem, Shy Child is a New York band that has learned how to put the space and pace back into dance music. That’s where I’ll stop that comparison, though, because Shy Child is doing something else entirely in all other respects. They’re a band that bites all the cheese of ’80s synthesizer decadence and cornball delivery, they steal riffs from Tango in the Night era Fleetwood Mac and vocal cadence from Hall and Oates, but they are still firmly entrenched in dance music. Between albums they’ve learned to sing and not shout, and the deliberate delivery of their carefully designed synthesizer sounds is a testament to a commitment to musicianship that goes beyond the berserker bombast of their last album. Arpeggios, sleazy slow disco-paced beats, throbbing basslines, and vocal harmony strung up over all the neon. An almost total lack of that dilettante’s crutch, irony. This is absolutely one of the best records of the year.
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In the world according to Ted Leo, we are all terminal cases- unless we stand up, once and for all, and hear the tracks he’s laying down.
The hardest working man in Rock ‘n Roll is also the only actually earnest, tireless, unimpeachably incorruptible, driven, and humanist artist to aspire to the concert stage since the baby boomers popularized those tenets as a disguise for their avarice and consumerism in the ’60s. He’s a real punk.
He and his Pharmacists put together a big, lush set for their Matador Records debut this year marked by a speed, vivacity, and urgent intensity that has only grown more remarkable over the course of an already long and wonderful career in music.
And this is the thing about Ted Leo. He’s not cashing in, he’s not slowing down, he’s not mellowing out. He believes in his art and he believes in his message, and he backed that up this year with some of the hardest-driving music he’s put out to date.
“Where Was my Brain?”, the song from which the album’s title was taken, has these quintessentially Ted Leo lines, lines that really, really spoke to me this year:
Well modern agriculture gave me my fill/until I saw the things it brutally killed/well modern architecture gave me a kick/until I lived among the brutalist bricks/where was my brain?/with me all the time/getting it wrong again.
Sporting influences from Squeeze to Thin Lizzy (and millions of local stops in between I am not even qualified to speak to), the man, the songwriter, the band continues to set the world on fire, bathing it in the light of warning flares and messianic abandon.
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How many times in a row have you felt compelled to play a remix album? I didn’t think I could love the material on last year’s Sexuality by Sebastien Tellier any more. It was verging on carnal. Then this remix collection dropped.
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This one has been growing on me, all new wave and echo. The opening track sucks you in with a combination of The Cure’s “Pictures of You” and Psychedelic Furs’ Pretty in Pink, and then the record just takes off.
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This Sweet Lights S/T is a great record for fans of Kurt Vile and the Beatles, a good slow-grow set that I can’t say I deliberately put on for straight-through listening, but that came on randomly often enough, always giving me pause to see who it was, that I came to love it front to back. There was a reason this never came off my iPod all year.
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Pure Chicago aggression, pure aggro intensity, pure obsessive method. This is one of the most inventive, intense, aggressive, and sonically interesting recordings I’ve heard in a very long time. No guitars, only basses. There isn’t anyone else out there doing what Bear Claw is doing. Small wonder Steve Albini listed them as one of his favorite bands.
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Normally I revile music that trades in a false sense of nostalgia, but there is something really happening here. Digital aliasing brought on by downsampling, fuzzy filtering, the trappings of overbearing tape compression, slow compressors that mean each instrument is pushing the other one out of the way in the mix- all these things are here along with a dreamy 1.5 times slower speed to the swing tempo that really makes you feel like you are somewhere better, in the sun and on drugs.
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The follow-up to 2007’s Sire debut New Wave, Tom Gabel’s Against Me! are riding the Butch Vig big drum express deeper into pop territory. Good thing they are bringing all that ordnance. Sentimentality, power pop, strong lyrics (as always) and slick production find Against Me! still waving the punk flag. After the anthem of New Wave‘s “Thrash Unreal”, I didn’t think it was possible for him to make another sad song such a Springsteen-y stadium rocker. Yeah, he gets sadder on this one, and bigger.
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COERCE YOU 