sad, bouncy songs. insanity. battleaxes. zsa zsa gabor. when liquor is what’s for breakfast, lunch and dinner. shirley simms singing like she’s just had twenty quaaludes and was dragged to the studio by her hair (at gunpoint). a lot of distortion.
yes, reader love, the magnetic fields have a new album. and it’s good. and it’s the first thing to surface from stephin merritt’s main (and best) project in four years.
disclaimer: i still wish stephin would kidnap susan amway, persuade her growing cranberries isn’t the best she can do and make her sing his beautiful songs again, but all in all and nevertheless, distortion deserved a small celebratory photoshoot.
i have a soft spot for electronic classical music, or contemporary classical music, or whatever you want to call it. the stars of the lid are probably the best band working in this minimalistic, chilly genre right now, and it had been six years since the tired sounds of stars of the lid… but their breathless, airy compositions with exactly the right drones at the right time still sound blissful and pregnant with meaning, and that’s all this blogger asked for. more organic than their previous work though – more lamonte young than delia derbyshire. which isn’t at all a bad thing either.
studio are a swedish duo. their music is an unlikely combination of krautrock, balearic trance circa 1988 and pet shop boys-ish synthpop. that might sound a bit repelling and too scene for its own good (like, the kind of music scene people wearing couture that looks like thriftstore gear listen to in lounge bars or wherever hipsters go to die), but yearbook one is actually really good. i challenge you to listen to ‘radio edit’ or ‘no comply’ without feeling the desire for a royal serving of ecstasy.
some people say music shouldn’t be political. m.i.a., everybody’s favourite tamil tiger, would probably bang their heads against a wall. hiphop infused with the modern lovers, new order, the clash and with aboriginal children on the mic is fine with me, and even if you would want to block the political messages (which i happen to agree with) out, there’d be a hell of a listenable dance record left. and it’s good to know an AK-47 is $20 in most of africa these days, not to mention the fact that she’s out for your money, and she’ll shoot you for it (i’d shoot you if you were a capitalist, stock exchange-crawling parasite and take your money, too, hypothetically speaking).
every once in a while some major label pundit crawls out from under his rock and screams the album format is dead. if they just listened to no shouts, no calls, they’d know this is definitely not the case. electrelane’s specialty is the kind of stereolabby kraut-pop one gets obsessed with before he knows it even happened. this is probably the most cohesive album of the year: 11 concise, pretty songs that break your heart and spin your world around.
i got into deerhoof with friend opportunity, way back when in 2005 (haha). if that album was a noiserock assault on the senses, friend opportunity is its crazy cousin who lives in a nepali ashram and claims she’s in contact with the cosmic entities after she’s sniffed a gallon’s worth of diesel fumes. on this little objet d’art, deerhoof switch from noisy guitars to menacing tropicalia to japanese synthpop every two minutes or so. ready your ritalin and off we stride!
yeah well, if you haven’t heard this album chances are you’ve been in a particularly nasty coma for the better part of 2007. to sum it up shortly, james murphy expands on his eponymous debut’s chunky dance-rock, coming off like this generation’s eno or kraftwerk in the process, and well, it’s a really good album. that port-a-cath does look nasty, dear, you should go download ’someone great’ and rest for a little while, maybe.
dan snaith, aka caribou, has spent most of his career synthesizing sixties psychedelia, latter-day folktronica and 70s drugscapes. on andorra, his fourth album, he somehow permutates sixties sunshine pop, creating a little universe of songs about girls with grannies’ names, sometimes steve reich-ian, sometimes droning, sometimes jarring, at times very ornate and chocked up with strings – andorra is like a bonbon box full of yummy chocolate, there simply isn’t room for even one more heavenly sighed word, drone, or found sound, and it’s just so… satisfying to listen to.
kevin barnes, of montreal’s only real member, had hit a bad patch when recording this little gem. his wife had ran off, leaving him snowed in in norway, in the grip of a bad chemical depression, which in turn spawned hissing fauna. i’ve rarely heard a more accurate expression of serious depression – yes, it sounds glammy, but isn’t glamour the saddest things at times? and yes, it’s bouncy, but if you were on ten tabs of lithium a day, you’d be hopping around like a kangaroo too, trust me. hissing fauna is both catchy and sad, hopeful and desperate. the irony of it all is that this record seems to have been of montreal’s big commercial break – but then kevin and nina are back together and both way happier than they were.
disclaimer: i really loathe animal collective and wouldn’t call it music (all i have to say about animal collective is: fuck off, americans, get a job). i consequently didn’t think panda bear’s solo stuff would be any good, but it is. person pitch sounds like a protools collage of the tribal chants of a long-lost country, the best in acoustic developments this century, and delicious warbly organ drones. it’s a thing of beauty, and i’m addicted to it… but animal collective are still wankers.
the fiery furnaces have always been a tricky band, to say the least. they seem to be stuck in a cyclical movement between awesomeness (blueberry boat!) and complete suckiness (their opus about, and sung by, their late grandmother olga saranthos. it has to be heard to be believed). widow city finds them back in greatness-mode: it’s a 70s-inspired classic rock story about being carried off to decorate bordellos, dancing naked for the sultan of medina sidonia, the hieroglyph for french canal boat, feeling really lonely, inventing ‘the emergency cigarette behind glass’, cairo, demonic husbands with mistresses, the duplexes of the dead, a murderous grand jury, and doormats with nautical prints. oh yeah, the music is quite brilliant too – menacing, sexy math rock grooves, contradictory as that might seem. this is an album that makes me feel like somebody, something not many albums could possibly pull off. 
