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: 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: 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.

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: 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.

Album Review: M. Ward — “Hold Time”

M. Ward, aka the “Him” of indie duo She & Him (not to be confused with HIM — the god-awful goth band from Finland), had a long, steadily growing career before hooking up with Zooey Deschanel (so jealous!) and blowing up on the national stage.

Fortunately, Hold Time capitalizes on all the new attention by simply being yet another great M. Ward record. Ward’s folk-tinged tunes — covering well-worn topics such as love (“Rave On,”), spirituality (“Epistemology”), and death (“Blake’s View”) — don’t reinvent the wheel, but he skillfully avoids clichés with some (not too) clever wordplay, and his unhurried, rough vocals satisfy like a good back scratch. On “Stars of Leo,” Ward croons, “I get so low I need a little pick-me-up / I get so high I need a bring-me-down,” and Hold Time almost always finds itself on the right side of the line between too hot and too cool — a skill Ward has been honing since before “he” became “Him.”

Album Review: Andrew Bird — “Noble Beast”

Andrew Bird’s Noble Beast begins with lush orchestral strings right out of a Disney cartoon, complete with a zippity-doo-dah whistling solo. But then Bird starts singing about homeless sociopaths in a voice so smooth he may as well be singing about a fox and a hound who are BFFs. “Oh, no,” he croons, before more whistling.

The conflict between Bird’s occasionally dark lyrics and his sweet, gorgeous arrangements is just about the only tension in a record that doesn’t rock so much as roll along pleasantly. On first listen, Beast sounds like average coffee-shop fare, but the extended white-noise, Latin-percussion outro of “Masterswarm” and the 7/8 section of the restless “Anonanimal” (in which Bird nails a particularly difficult vocal line seemingly effortlessly) dispel that notion.

Aside from Bird’s classical training, his vocabulary skills also come in handy with songs like “Tenuousness” and “Nomenclature.” (Dude even makes a hook out of the word “souverian.”) Noble Beasts won’t upset the latté-sipping crowd, but there’s a lot to drink in for the wide-awake, initiated listener.