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: 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: Dirty Projectors — “Bitte Orca”

Bitte Orca is a strange creature. The Dirty Projectors’ newest is like some kind of awkward yet beautiful bird, seemingly incapable of flight due to its Frankensteinian anatomy (displaced rhythms, off-kilter guitar picking, stretched-out vocal harmonies, and then there’s frontman/zookeeper Dave Longstreth’s voice — so pinched and trembling it sounds like affectation). And yet, the album soars anyway, high on its own joyful weirdness. It helps that, unlike previous (even weirder) DP releases, Orca finds Longstreth turning his plethora of musical ideas into actual songs before hitting “record” — handclappy opener “Cannibal Resource” and pseudo-dance-rocker “Stillness Is the Move” even have sections that resemble choruses. Exquisite acoustic ballad “Two Doves” courts convention even harder but is a much-appreciated (and flat-out lovely) mid-album breather before Longstreth looses his menagerie again. Obtuse yet oddly inviting, Bitte Orca may be tough to catch up to — even after repeat listens — but it’s a fun chase anyway.

Album Review: St. Vincent — “Actor”

Pixie dream girl Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent) cornered the market on delicate, too-cute indie-pop with her debut, Marry Me. Actor, however, trades wide-eyed naïveté for jaded maturity, as Clark — who once penned a tune called “What Me Worry?” — now frets about being saved from what she wants and waking up the neighbors with shouting matches. Looks like the honeymoon is over.

Actor is a huge leap forward for Clark, who simultaneously focuses her songwriting while expanding her lush orchestral arrangements. Horns swoon and strings swoop prettily throughout, but just when things get too precious, Clark bitch-slaps her whammy bar over fuzzed-out, syncopated saxophone blurts that sound like Maceo Parker having a panic attack (check out the brilliant kiss-off stomp of “Actor Out of Work” and “Marrow”). Despite all the dark, gorgeous noise, Clark’s bewitching vocals and vivid lyrics still take top billing. In “The Party,” she paints an elegant, convincing portrait of after-hours love over unusually stripped-down piano and drums: “I sit transfixed by a hole in your T-shirt / I’ve said much too much, and they’re trying to sweep up.” It’s one of the album’s only understated moments, but Clark lends it as much drama as she does her lovingly bent Hollywood arrangements. Actor is undoubtedly one of the year’s best so far, and deserves a standing ovation.

Album Review: Bat For Lashes — “Two Suns”

I’m not sure why, but when confronted with a wholly unique, genre-busting, 21st-century sound, the default formula for describing it is to compare it to stuff we’ve already heard. So, yeah, Natasha Khan (aka Bat For Lashes) kinda sounds like PJ Harvey + Tori Amos x Björk² — but sophomore effort Two Suns is more than the sum of its influences.

Both intimate and sprawling, Suns effortlessly marries world rhythms, laptop-tronica, and good-ol’-fashioned piano balladry into an oddly compelling work held together by Khan’s magnetic, haunting vocals. Sure, Khan is prone to fits of hippie-dippiness (propulsive opener “Glass” references crystal towers, emerald cities, and a knight in crystal armor in less than 30 seconds), but she’s pop-culture savvy, too: The Karate Kid-inspired “Daniel” totally sweeps the leg of Peter Cetera’s sap-fest “Glory of Love.”

Album Review: Metric — “Fantasies”

Emily Haines should probably go in for a chest X-ray. According to Fantasies opener “Help I’m Alive,” she can hear her heart “beating like a hammer” — a possible symptom of cardio-related illness. We can safely rule out arrhythmia, however, because Metric pounds out a lock-step rhythmic groove that is impossible to deny — even when their sterile, radio-ready riffs don’t hit as hard as Haines’s plaintive lyrics. (Exception: the soaring, majestic chorus of “Sick Muse” is quite possibly the cure for clinical depression.)

While Haines kicks her bandmates’ asses on rockers like “Gold Guns Girls” and “Satellite Mind,” she’s more effective when she doesn’t have to work so hard to be heard. On “Collect Call,” the rhythm section cools off, giving lines like “keep me closer / I’m a lazy dancer / When you move, I move with you” room to resonate.