Album Review: Sondre Lerche — “Heartbeat Radio”

Norwegian pop phenom Sondre Lerche is often compared to Burt Bacharach for his melodic, jazz-inflected compositions and silk-smooth vocals. Unfortunately, Lerche shares another trait with Bacharach: He kind of sucks as a lyricist. Throughout Heartbeat Radio, Lerche drops cringe-worthy lines and trots out D.O.A. clichés (“Is it hot in here, or is it just me?” rears its head) that distract from his indisputable talent as a composer and arranger. Following his flirtation with straight-up rock on Phantom Punch, Heartbeat is Lerche’s big, romantic, orchestral-pop record. Sugary melodies stack up on countermelodies (and counter-countermelodies — check out the dizzying string coda on “Good Luck” and the diet disco-funk of “I Cannot Let You Go”), but in many cases the flourishes fall just short of moving or memorable. While more technically accomplished, Heartbeat’s pleasantly vanilla vibe feels like a step backward from Punch, on which the songs were pumped up with energy and badly needed tension.

Album Review: The Antlers — “Hospice”

Hospice is the best record this year that I have absolutely no desire to revisit anytime soon. Brooklyn’s Antlers have crafted an impressively assured album with beauty oozing from every moody track, recalling the crystalline ambience of Sigur Rós one second (“Kettering”) and a sleepier Arcade Fire the next (“Two”). But the concept behind this concept album — a man witnessing his loved one painfully die of bone cancer — is really fucking depressing. Frontman Peter Silberman scripts a crushingly bleak mortality play, packed with upsetting details like “shining children’s heads” and “hundreds of thousands of hospital beds.” It’s heavy stuff, but occasionally the music buoys the subject matter like a fleeting happy memory. Besides, Silberman warns us up front how the story ends, singing, “I didn’t believe them/ When they told me that there was no saving you.”

Album Review: Julian Plenti — “Julian Plenti is … Skyscraper”

Spoiler alert: Julian Plenti is really the alter ego of Paul Banks, well-dressed frontman for one of rock’s most polarizing bands, Interpol (opinions range from “Best band ever!” to “Hey, is this a Joy Division b-side?”). Banks’s nom de plume proves to be totally pointless: Instead of crafting a new style that requires listeners to distance themselves from his main gig, Skyscraper mostly just sounds like Interpol with a less talented rhythm section. Make fun of Interpol’s Carlos D all you like (and you should — dude wears a fashion gun holster), but his bass lines are more memorable than all of Skyscraper. A few flashes of inspiration — the understated piano on “No Chance Survival,” Sgt. Pepper’s horns on “Unwind,” and the haunting, acoustic “On the Esplanade” — are noteworthy, but the rest of the album showcases Banks’s worst traits: monotony and bad puns (see: “Fly as You Might”). At least he didn’t grow a soul patch (RIP Chris Gaines).

Album Review: Japandroids — “Post-Nothing”

Canadian duo Japandroids* are concerned with only two things: guitars and girls (and not necessarily in that order). Their much-hyped full-length debut, Post-Nothing, is a brief, blistering set of low-fi garage that transcends its carport origins by replacing cock-rock swagger with puppy-dog charm. Brian King (guitar) and David Prowse (drums, no relation to Darth Vader) play their respective instruments like they’re in a much bigger band, with Prowse’s syncopated beats punching holes in King’s solid brick walls of noise. Drunk on amplifier fuzz, the guys sprint through relationship stages like oversexed teenagers, covering infatuation (“Wet Hair”), commitment (album highlight “Sovereignty”), and the inevitable post-split depression (epic closer “I Quit Girls”) in a little more than 30 minutes. Despite the unhappy ending, King and Prowse know better than to waste their time slamming the fairer sex. Rock-cliché misogyny just doesn’t suit them — Japandroids are programmed to love.

*We already have a Japanther. What’s next? Japancake? Japancreas?
Japanderson Cooper?

Album Review: YACHT — “See Mystery Lights”

For fans of the Blow — the Khaela Maricich/Jona Bechtolt electro-pop collab that produced the sublime, sensitive Paper Television — Bechtolt’s current project, YACHT, can feel like a consolation prize. For kids who just want to shake their asses, though, See Mystery Lights is the real winner, packed with irrepressible beats that will soundtrack countless dark, sweat-soaked dance floors. Bechtolt and vocalist Claire L. Evans (who always sounds too cool at best, and bored at worst) mash up post-punk riffs (“It’s Boring/You Can Live Anywhere You Want”), Afropop (“Ring the Bell”), and pure bubblegum (“Psychic City”), among other genres, into a catchy — if not always coherent — whole. While Bechtolt’s production skills are unquestionable, lyrics range from clever (“I’m in love with a ripper”) to confused (“Be careful with the downloading / Read the comments”). No matter how fun YACHT can be, they mostly make me miss the Blow — if only because Maricich gave your brain something to do while your ass was moving.

Album Review: Spoon — “Got Nuffin” EP

Spoon is officially a “comfort food” band. Whether you spin early effort A Series of Sneaks or commercial breakthrough Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, you pretty much know what you’re going to get: Singer Britt Daniel’s raspy, lovelorn musings, Jim Eno’s methodical, musical drumming, and whoever’s playing bass at the time staying out of the way. Sure, there have been small variations in the ingredients, but why screw with a winning recipe?

It’s been two years since Ga⁵ pushed Spoon into the mainstream, so it’s no surprise that raving Spoon-atics (myself included) salivated Pavlovian-style over news of the surprise EP, Got Nuffin. While calling the four tracks an EP is stretching it (“Tweakers” and its remix are essentially unfinished, fuzzed-out drum loops), the title track is an instant classic, a stripped-down minor-key stomper that’s surprisingly life-affirming (“I’ve got nothin’ to lose but darkness and shadows,” Daniel croaks). Meanwhile, “Stroke Their Brains” is a bouncy, reverb-crazy mad-science experiment, with Daniel as the creature on the operating table. Consider our brains stroked, and our appetites whetted for the next satisfying entrée.

Album Review: Discovery — “LP”

Discovery — an electronic R&B side project consisting of Vampire Weekend keyboardist (and spell-check nightmare) Rostam Batmanglij and Ra Ra Riot’s Wes Miles — has a few strikes against its imaginatively titled, Auto-Tune-heavy debut right off the bat: 1. Most side projects tend to suck; 2. They don’t do themselves any favors by taking their name from a Daft Punk record; 3. Jay-Z has recently declared Auto-Tune dead, and you don’t argue with Jay-Z; and 4. Discovery poorly covers the Jackson 5’s best-ever song, “I Want You Back” (too soon, guys). To be fair, the duo began working on LP four years ago, back when the King of Pop was still (sort of) alive and T-Pain didn’t even own a top hat. Intended as a summer soundtrack, LP barely works on that level — no amount of chopping, screwing, or cameos by über-talented Angel Deradoorian (of Dirty Projectors fame) can salvage the record’s slight songwriting or influence-groping (“Swing Tree” is essentially a rip-off of Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love”). LP is worth trotting out at your next hipster barbecue, but play it early — and save the Daft Punk, Jay-Z, and J5 for when you really want to start the party.

Album Review: Wilco — “Wilco (The Album)”

It’s ironic that as the U.S. collectively shits the bed, Wilco — the band that built a career on articulating modern American angst — hasn’t sounded this upbeat in a decade. Coupled with the feather-light Sky Blue Sky, Wilcologists may call this the group’s “rose period.” You could also call it what it is: frontman Jeff Tweedy is pretty much through making grand statements in favor of jamming out with his band. Unfortunately, said jams — and (The Album) as a whole — just can’t compete with their best work.

Things get off to a promising start with the deliciously meta “Wilco (The Song),” and the epic “One Wing” and murder-fantasy “Bull Black Nova” are obvious highlights. But not even a Feist cameo can save the pleasant-but-limp “You and I,” and the rest of the album kills time between catchy dad-rock (scolding lyrics like “Come on, children, you’re acting like children” are, like, the definition of dad-rock) and songs that are good-enough yet ultimately forgettable. The band that once successfully tried breaking our hearts with cross-genre experiments has seemingly settled for a smoother road, but at least Tweedy — who famously struggled with panic attacks and pill addiction — sounds happy. The guys in Wilco are no longer killing themselves to reinvent the wheel; they’re simply content to enjoy the rest of the ride.

(Read my 2007 review of Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky after the jump.)

Album Review: Regina Spektor — “far”

Since being “discovered” by the Strokes in the early 2000s, Regina
Spektor’s been polishing her act for the mainstream. The end result is far, a surprisingly dull record featuring almost none of the playfully whacked, creative gusto that was, up until now, her trademark. The rough edges Spektor once proudly flaunted have been sanded down by no less than four (!) producers, and while there’s an occasional bright spot (the moody “Genius Next Door,” the bouyant “The Calculation”), much of the record resorts to the kind of preachy pop treacle she used to be the antithesis of. (She does mimic a dolphin during “Folding Chair,” but it just doesn’t feel the same. Sigh.)

Music bloggers roasted Spektor when her Begin to Hope track “Fidelity” made an appearance on scrubs-opera Grey’s Anatomy, but at the time I wrote it off as a happy convergence of art and commerce. But far sounds too much like rom-com fishing. Note to ReSpekt: if you don’t want people to think you’re writing songs for Grey’s, don’t start one with “No one laughs at God in a hospital.”

Album Review: God Help the Girl — “God Help the Girl”

Stuart Murdoch, Belle & Sebastian’s master storyteller, conceived the musical God Help the Girl sometime around 2004. Five years later, Murdoch’s still working out the details (like, um, a screenplay), but that didn’t stop him from finishing the soundtrack. Murdoch auditioned vocalists from both sides of the Atlantic in search of the perfect voices for his lovelorn, misfit (yet ironically always gorgeous) characters and hit the twee jackpot with Catherine Ireton (who plays Eve, the titular girl in need of divine intervention). Ireton’s strong yet feather-light voice admirably carries the record, a collection of well-crafted songs that recall B&S’s simpler, string-filled early days while paying homage to ’60s girl groups and old-school musicals.

There are a few kinks, though: Brittany Stallings’s showy rendition of “Funny Little Frog” is more American Idol than American Bandstand, and Murdoch teeters on the line between clever and corny until he inevitably stumbles on a few lyrical clunkers (see “Pretty Eve in the Tub”). Eve wishes that “life could be musical comedy,” but it seems Murdoch has been living one all along. We should be grateful to be let in on his latest head-movie — even if its runtime is only 45 minutes.