You could read the press release for My Latest Novel’s new album, Deaths And Entrances, and you’d likely have a pretty good idea what it’s about.  Breathtaking melodies?  Check.  Gorgeous harmonies?  Check.  Sweeping arrangements?  Check.  As good as their debut album Wolves was, Deaths And Entrances radiates confidence and suggests that My Latest Novel is a band who have hit their stride.

The band holed up for nearly two years in an old pub in their hometown of Greenock to create Deaths And Entrances.  In addition to borrowing the album title from a Dylan Thomas poem, My Latest Novel drew upon many other literary gems for inspiration, including Alasdair Gray’s ‘Lanark’, Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ and Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’.  Such literary influences, along with the fact that many of the songs were written at the same time, result in an album that is cohesive and flows as one body of work rather than eleven individual tracks. Continue Reading

Redlinespotting is the debut album from Örnsberg (named after a Stockholm metro stop), aka Swedish musician Johan Ragnarsson.  With self-professed influences such as Pet Shop Boys, Oasis, Beach Boys and Glasvegas, this debut certainly has some intrigue hanging about.  As much as I wanted to like this album, it being Swedish pop and all, sadly it falls short of expectations.

The wordless ‘Intro’ sets the mood for the album, shoe-gazy rhythms backed by the sound of a train on its track.  What follows are ten songs about the city, about love, about work, about.. well, about life.  It’s no doubt difficult to be a one-man band without over-utilizing the synthesizer, and unfortunately this overuse is prevalent on Redlinespotting, resulting in track after track melting into one another and sounding very samey.  Tempos don’t change much and although Johan has a nice enough voice, his range is limited. Continue Reading

I grew up on country music.  Outside of The Beatles, my dad loathed rock n’ roll, so my siblings and I were reared with the likes of Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson and yes, Waylon Jennings.  While our forced musical choices were unappreciated at the time, I can say that all these years later I am greatly indebted to my dad for opening that certain avenue to me.  Waylon Forever, often touted as Waylon’s final recordings, was a project that began in 1995 when Waylon proposed a collaboration with his son Shooter Jennings.  It wasn’t until several years after his dad’s death that Shooter Jennings finished the recordings with his backing band The .357‘s.  With a combined total of eight tracks, including one cover and just one new tune, Waylon Forever begs the question – was it really worth the wait? Continue Reading

Few artists can weave tragedy and heartbreak into gorgeous lyrics and melodies the way Elvis Perkins can.  After losing his father to complications from the AIDS virus years ago and his mother in the September 11 disaster, it’s safe to say that he has shouldered more tragedy than most of us.  Perkins’ solo album Ash Wednesday dealt mainly with these issues, and his first album with his backing band, the self-titled Elvis Perkins In Dearland, maintains a natural progression in both sound and overall feel.  In contrast to the stripped-back nature of Perkins’ debut, In Dearland showcases vast instrumentation and an almost cheerful aura.
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After an agonizing near-three-year wait, Portland’s The Thermals are releasing Now We Can See, the follow-up to their superb The Body, The Blood, The Machine.  Following an amicable split from their longtime label Sub Pop, there was some early talk of Hutch Harris and Kathy Foster self-releasing the album, though in the end they signed with Kill Rock Stars.  Now We Can See was produced by John Congleton (Explosions In The Sky, Polyphonic Spree), and while the sound is crisper than past albums, it doesn’t take away from The Thermals’ signature raw sound, a sound that, for this album, Hutch dubbed “post-power-pop”.
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Canada does a lot of things right, and one of them is music, specifically supergroups.  Comprised of three of the hardest working men in the music business, Swan Lake is releasing their sophomore album Enemy Mine.  Collectively involved with at least seven different bands/projects, you have to wonder where Spencer Krug, Dan Bejar and Carey Mercer find time for it all.  Most impressive, though, is their ability to nearly consistently release quality records, no matter the project.  Swan Lake collaborate indeed, and fairly: each member fronts three of the album’s nine tracks. Continue Reading

The past few years have seen me develop an ever-intensifying love affair with Scottish bands: Frightened Rabbit, The Twilight Sad, My Latest Novel, Camera Obscura, etc.  And when 1990s made their debut with 2007’s Cookies, I fell pretty hard for them too.  As I live in the U.S., some research was required to discover that guitarist Jackie McKeown & former bassist Jamie McMorrow were members of The Yummy Fur for the better part of the 1990’s (the decade, ha).  From what I gather, The Yummy Fur had quite the cult following, but never really broke into the consciousness of the masses.  Conversely, 1990s came onto the scene with a bang, garnering heaps of critical praise of their debut.
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In my experience, the majority of those individuals who’ve heard The Decemberists fall into one of two camps: love their beautiful music or hate their pretentious music.  The Hazards Of Love isn’t likely to change anyone’s opinion of the band.  Concept albums can be tricky, and are often met with derision by both critics and fans, but The Decemberists pulled one off beautifully with 2006‘s The Crane Wife, so why not try again?  The album was born out of Colin Meloy’s interest in the 1960’s British Folk Revival and subsequent discovery of an Anne Briggs EP entitled The Hazards Of Love.  Initially intending to write a single song, the project exploded into not just a concept album, but a full-blown rock opera. Continue Reading

How does a pop band such as Brooklyn’s Bishop Allen tackle the daunting challenge of topping an album as good as 2007’s The Broken String?  Well, you know the old saying… “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.  With their new, quite animal-centric, release Grrr…, Bishop Allen are back with catchy tunes, hooks galore, and a more polished sound than their past releases.

Opener ‘Dimmer’, with its staccato guitar, bouncy rhythms and Justin Rice’s bordering-on-tenuous vocals is signature Bishop Allen sound.  Much of the rest of the album is, instrumentally, more stripped back than The Broken String, and percussion takes the forefront – expect lots and lots of xylophones.  Songs like ‘The Ancient Commonsense of Things’ will be running through your head when you awake in the morning; ‘True Or False’, the obligatory Darby Nowatka-fronted track, features a lovely horn section on the chorus.  Unfortunately Grrr…, although clever enough, doesn’t quite live up to the lyrical standards of Bishop Allen’s previous albums.  However, I do enjoy the ironic nature of ‘Rooftop Brawl’ in which a rather graphic suicide (attempt?) is set to upbeat and bouncy guitar riffs. Continue Reading

It’s difficult (well, alright, it’s downright impossible) to review Matt & Kim without using words like über-cute, spastic and gleeful.  So I’ll just get that out of the way right off the bat.  The Brooklyn duo has finally released their sophomore album, Grand, their first recorded output since their eponymous 2006 debut.  The past 2+ years have seen Matt Johnson and Kim Schifino touring extensively and winning indie kids over one sweaty, jubilant live show at a time.

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Howe Gelb has been in my periphery for a while, but I’ve never bothered myself enough to seek out his music. Then I was given for review proVISIONS, his first Giant Sand album in four years. Now, I’ve experienced my share of “grower” albums over the years, but there are grower albums and then there are albums that slap you upside the head when you least expect it. My first impression of proVISIONS was indifferent at best and completely uninterested at worst. I gave it two or three subsequent listens, but with no more of a positive outcome, I shelved it, planning to give it one more listen closer to release date, bang out a review, and be done with it. The album, however, had other plans as it wormed its way into my subconscious so masterfully that my planned final spin of the album blew me away just a little bit. Continue Reading

Finding information about The Capstan Shafts on the internet is, well, downright challenging. We know this: The Capstan Shafts is the moniker under which Dean Wells records and releases his music. He hails from Lyndonville, Vermont and has performed live just a handful of times. Insanely prolific, Wells has released somewhere around 24 EPs and full-lengths since 2004, sometimes on his own Ladder The Xmas Monkey label, other times on various tiny indie labels. His tunes are notoriously short in length – often clocking in at under a minute, rarely over two, and his lo-fi approach has earned him countless comparisons to Robert Pollard, John Darnielle and Jeff Mangum. Continue Reading

There’s no shortage of nautical imagery in the realm of music, particularly in the indie-folk set. Enter Port O’Brien, with their sophomore effort All We Could Do Was Sing, a ‘not-quite’ concept album loosely based on the sea. The main difference between Port O’Brien and other sea-shanty belting artists, however, is that this Oakland band has a sublimely intimate connection to their subject matter; founding members (and romantic partners) Van Pierszalowski and Cambria Goodwin spend every summer on Kodiak Island in Alaska – Pierszalowski fishing on his father’s boat and Goodwin baking at the Larsen Bay Cannery. Continue Reading

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

That quote itself could have been the perfect review for The Ascent Of Everest’s debut How Lonely Sits The City. Now, I admit to being a bit of a lazy person, but even I’m not that lazy… So here goes: Post-rock has never really been my “thing”. Perhaps it’s my short attention span doing battle with the often marathon-length tracks, or maybe it’s my partiality to things like, say, lyrics. Upon receiving HLSTC, I was admittedly daunted by the album’s scant five tracks, ranging in length from seven to fourteen minutes. Still I approached it with the same open mind I try to approach any new music, and I came away considerably moved by the album’s mixture of subtle beauty and crashing intensity. Continue Reading

Young German band MIT are shaping up to be a quite a hot commodity in 2008. In the weeks leading up to the release of their debut album Coda, interviews and reviews of the trio have been steadily creeping into all corners of the indie music blog-o-sphere. So let’s go ahead and get the inevitable out of the way: MIT are a German electronica band. As such, they have been – and will continue to be – likened to Kraftwerk and Neu!. Such comparisons are indeed understandable, but perhaps also a bit lazy, as MIT have crafted a sound that is more punk than Kraftwerk and less Krautrock than Neu!. In fact, the band itself rather aptly describes their sound as electro-punk.

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