THEGIORNALISTI -- FUORICAMPO -- 7.5/10
Italian indie music is in something of a renaissance these days. With the growth of the Internet as a means to spread awareness of quality music, plus, I suspect, a certain need for dissociation from Italy's currently dysfunctional political situation, the 2010's has seen the proliferation of numerous excellent Italian bands. In recent years, Calcutta and I Cani have reached nearly unprecedented levels of mainstream (heh) success. Hand in hand with these new artists, ascending just as the likes of Verdena and Baustelle settle into elder-statespeople status, is Thegiornalisti. Thegiornalisti occupy a very well established niche comfortably in-between Calcutta and I Cani, combining the raw honesty of Calcutta with the electronic texture of I Cani. This comfortable middle-ground isn't the result of synthesis, however, but a mere coincidence, as upon listening to Fuoricampo, one overwhelming source of inspiration becomes evident -- '80's synthpop. And so, like an Italian, male-fronted Chvrches, Thegiornalisti provide a wealth of hooks and throwback aesthetics, with just enough sincerity to separate themselves from the mainstream, if only briefly, as Thegiornalisti have merged into contemporary pop after the tongue in cheek Completamente Sold Out much as Chvrches' latest offering sounds like the dark and poppy album that Taylor Swift should have wanted Reputation to be. More apt than the Chvrches comparison, however, is reference to the obvious '80's synthpop influence on this album, which is even recognized in words in the chorus of the album's heavy-hitter, "Fine dell'estate" (on which more later): "la colpa è tutta tua, e di qualche film anni ottanta". And these songs really do sound like they belong on the soundtrack of John Hughes high school flicks, unapologetically so. But that unapologetic homage to Thegiornalisti's influences is what makes this album, oddly, so unique. It doesn't pretend to be new or inventive, but digs so far back into what in contemporary music is supposed to be passé: the '80's pop and saccharine mopeyness (see "Proteggi questo tuo ragazzo") with a frankness that is simply disarming. This album has a lot of style to it, but what about the substance? Sounding like the '80's isn't enough to build an album around. What this album is built around is a pair of massively hooky songs with some nice hors d'oeuvres in between. Following the simple tone-setter opener, "Per Lei", the first of the two giants that bear this album on their shoulders is "Promiscuità", an irresistibly sweet homage to interpersonal intimacy with a pounding base line and melancholy synthesizers over a wide-eyed set of verses that draws you in. The images presented in this song of words whispered and spoken during late night smoke breaks echo the timeless aesthetic of the song masterfully. After this are the earnest but sdolcinata "Proteggi questo tuo ragazzi", which delivers on the same set of emotions as "Promiscuità" without quite the same energy level. The following two songs, largely interchangeable, are a nice, pensive interlude before we build up the the second highlight of this album. This interlude, the drifting "Mare Balotelli" and "L'importanza del cielo (Miyazaki)", lead into the similarly sweet and longing imagery of "Aspetto che", which leads into the confident punch of synthesizer at the start of "Fine dell'estate", a song that ultimately ends up towering over the rest of the album. Where most of the rest of these songs rested on atmosphere and nice verses, "Fine dell'estate" breaks the mold with a powerful chorus and driving riff. If there's anything to remember this album for, it's this song, which leads to the unfortunate downside of this album's construction in that it is ultimately just a vehicle for one stellar track. Maybe "Promiscuità" and "Proteggi questo tuo ragazzo" would stand on their own better if not for "Fine dell'estate", and maybe I'd actually have some recollection of the songs that come after it. It just feels like the song that should close the album, and having the comparably light fare of three more songs follow after is like taking aperitivo after secondo piatto. Sadly, I'm no longer interested in what comes afterward. Fuoricampo's greatest strength may ultimately be it's greatest weakness. Nonetheless, when I want to listen to Thegiornalisti, I still find myself drawn to the imbalanced highlights of this album than to the better constructed Completament Sold Out. Highlights include "Promiscuità", "Aspetto che", "Fine dell'estate"
RIDE -- GOING BLANK AGAIN -- 8.5/10
Ride continue to be the band I underrate to myself the most. How seriously can I take the band that recorded Carnival of Light and Tarantula? Whose guitarist went on the play bass in post-Be Here Now Oasis? Who had to give up the shoegaze limelight that they created to the likes of Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine? This was how I felt when I saw them live last year and was seriously impressed with their set (even the new stuff), and this is how I feel now when I confront the unbelievable truths that I know deep down. First of all, Ride truly were great in their day. You'll never find me not in the mood for their best moments, be it "Taste", "Like a Daydream", or "Vapour Trail". Secondly, and perhaps harder to believe, Going Blank Again, the album with the weird clown on the cover is the best Ride album, not the album with "Vapour Trail" on it and the near perfect album art. Relistening to this album always reminds me how actually impressive it is. 8:17 opener "Leave Them All Behind": captivating for the entire length (as is reissue bonus track "Grasshopper", which clocks in at 10:56). "Twisterella": possibly an all time great song, even with the closing chorus "look at Twisterella, hasn't got a fella". "Cool Your Boots", "Time of Her Time", "OX4": all great. Yes, there's some filler here after "Twisterella", but when Ride gets into their groove, the earnest and smooth intonations of Mark Gardener and the shimmering riffs of Gardener and Andy Bell hit the spot. Not to mention the unsung hero of Ride, drummer Loz Colbert, who may not be unleashed as on some of Ride's pre-Nowhere tracks (see the end of "Like a Daydream" for his most impressive work), but when you actually pay attention is providing consistently excellent and remarkably complex rhythm behind the scenes for a band that sounds effortlessly perfect. And while Ride tend to stick to a formula of clean, layered riffs and equally clean and ingenuous sounding vocals, more on this album than on their debut, they continue to do well when they mix things up, both on the lauded opening track and on thematic variations like "Time Machine". At the end of the day, however, it's the jangly pop with just a hint of their noisy shoegaze origins that makes this album so listenable, and while it doesn't break the mold like their early EP's and Nowhere did, it finds them in perhaps their best form, producing intriguing hook after hook. Sometimes you just forget that an album doesn't need to pull too many tricks to do its job. Highlights include "Leave Them All Behind", "Twisterella", "Cool Your Boots"
TEENAGE FANCLUB -- GRAND PRIX -- 8/10
Speaking of albums dominated by one song, how about Grand Prix, one of many fine post-Bandwagonesque efforts for the endearingly optimistic Scottish singer-songwriters. To get the obvious out of the way, yes, "Sparky's Dream" is one of the best songs ever written. It may be unassuming, but just listen to it. There's just something about the way it lifts off going into the chorus that is truly impressive. In many ways, much as I described for Fuoricampo, the rest of this album feels like it lacks consistency in comparison. Not to see there aren't many great moments on this album. The opening lines of "About You" continue to be exhilarating, and nearly every song is a quality piece of craftsmanship, from the sneaky-good chorus of "Mellow Doubt" to the sweet, turn-that-frown-upside-down message of "Don't Look Back" and "Verisimilitude" to the sparkly riff of "Discolite". This album forms a formidable duo with its successor, Songs From Northern Britain, of albums where every track has its charm. So why does this album still finish as runner-up to Bandwagonesque in the popular imagination? To my view, it's that maybe it's too consistent. Even with "Sparky's Dream" racing out like a shooting star to separate itself from the pack of songs on Grand Prix, to some extent this album is one uplifting, jangly pop song after another. I admire Teenage Fanclub's sunny outlook, and even moreso their consistency, considering this is the work of three main songwriters, but to some extent, warts and all, shifting from the somewhat mundane "December" and "Sidewinder" to the likes of "Alcoholiday", "Star Sign", and "The Concept" helped those songs cement themselves in my memory, perhaps as did "Everything Flows" in comparison to two unnecessary "Heavy Metals". So while I might pop into to the overall inferior A Catholic Education to hear the opening track or the stellar duo of "Critical Mass" and "Too Involved", Grand Prix provides a host of solid tracks that makes it hard for anything aside from "Sparky's Dream" to stand out. The same issue unfairly plagues, at least in my mind, the likes of Built to Spills Keep It Like A Secret, where "Carry the Zero" and sometimes "Temporarily Blind" get all of my attention. Nonetheless, it's impossible to downplay just how consistently solid this album is, and how refreshingly positive is its outlook. Highlights include "Sparky's Dream", "Verisimilitude", "Going Places".
BLUR -- THE GREAT ESCAPE -- 6.5/10
Capping off my listening trip through some albums with one monster track that completely overshadows everything else on the album, here's the album with "The Universal" on it -- Blur's follow-up to the generation defining Parklife, The Great Escape. Looking back, you may forget that this is the album that won the so-called Battle of Britpop over Oasis' (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, and perhaps assume that it was Blur's more famous third album that found itself in the ring with Oasis' heavy-hitter (which may have lost the Battle of Britpop but did start the Loudness War). I suspect if everyone could do it over, this particular battlefield was perhaps a bit misplaced. Maybe we could have had Modern Life is Rubbish or Parklife instead? Maybe even Dog Man Star or Different Class if we were lucky? But so be it, The Great Escape won, perhaps a harbinger of the death of Britpop two years later with Oasis' pompous but unsubstantial "let them eat cake" statement, Be Here Now. While Blur show they still have some ideas left in them, and would go on to follow the reinventions upon which Suede and Pulp were already embarking with one of their own in their self-titled follow-up LP, they only manage to string enough of this ideas together to make one great song and a bunch of okay songs that you can point to and say "well, this moment is good". Like, there are those background vocals in "Country House". Those are interesting. And "Best Days" is depressing, much like some other excellent Britpop music. And so is "He Thought of Cars", which has that cool intro part. Unfortunately, there's never enough to build anything truly impressive. While Modern Life is Rubbish threw hook after hook in your face until you admitted that it was brilliant, and Parklife picked up where that left off with a hooky first half and then surprised you with a dark and moody second half before closing with "This is a Low" (which needs no further description from me), The Great Escape feels like a bit of Blur by numbers. There are some classically Blur cheeky moments, but ultimately it feels like they're just trying to make another Parklife. Even "The Universal" starts out feeling like a second "To The End". Nonetheless, however, it takes the cinematic lushness and swirling chorus of that song turns it into an undeniably towering monument to Blur's tongue-in-cheek suburbanity. Capping off (although it sits dead in the middle of this 15 track album) three LP's worth of examining the meaningless mundanity of middle-class life, "The Universal" serves as the climactic statement of all of those songs about how work is dull but you do it anyway, and the struggle to find satisfaction and fulfillment from life, declaring "It really, really, really could happen. When the days they seem to fall through you, well just let them go." By The Great Escape, Blur really had "made it to the end" of the themes that had carried them through their three breakthrough albums, taking over a movement started by the enigmatic and melodramatic Suede and bringing it to the masses. Much as Suede had reached an end and hit the restart button with the neon brightness of Coming Up, Blur would have to move on from the simple yet profound guitar pop that they had exhausted to the varied influences that would drive Blur, 13, and Think Tank. Highlights include "Country House", "The Universal", "He Thought of Cars".
Saturday, September 1, 2018
Saturday, March 17, 2018
More Reviews - F, part 3 (I love the 2000's)
THE TWILIGHT SAD -- FORGET THE NIGHT AHEAD -- 8/10
Going alphabetically means I do a double-dose of the Sad, but also means I have to go in backwards order. Fortunately for me, Forget the Night Ahead is as good a starting point as any when approaching The Twilight Sad in a holistic manner. The 2000's had their fair share of bands who made their debut with instant classics - The Arcade Fire, The Strokes, Interpol, The Libertines, among other, perhaps slightly more under the radar acts like JJ72 or Hope of the States whose debut albums still get all the press. It's no surprise that Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters should be The Sad's best known album. In sharp contrast to the more minimalist or stripped down sound of most of the bands mentioned above, Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters takes a page out of MBV's playbook with heavy walls of sound, and the stoic yet sensitive and at times intensely impassioned musings of James Graham and his thick Scottish accent make it a distinctive and uniquely memorable sounds. Forget the Night Ahead, rather than just being the follow-up to Fourteen Autumns, serves as the point of departure for the sound that has defined the band ever since, maintaining moments of shoegazey loudness but for the most part moving more toward a more sparse presentation that is more comparable to their post-punk contemporaries, Interpol in particular, than their debut was. In this, one might regret that the walls of sound that set their debut apart have been more and more left to the wayside, but, on the other hand, it freed The Twilight Sad to approach their songs in a more conventional manner, allowing them to showcase the flashy choruses that they were always meant to write. Where their debut draw a certain vague beauty from the mystery of repeated phrases like "your red sky at night won't follow me", "these walls are filled with blame", or "your green eyes turn to blue", Forget the Night Ahead makes more use of a more typical verse-chorus structure, and, when done most effectively, presents some seriously impressive bangers. Chief among these is second track "I Became a Prostitute", which hops adeptly from chorus to chorus - "we're all fine in the back of your mind..." to "you are the bearer of a womb without love" - with an aggressive heft accented with the same jagged but now clearer guitar din as always. Forget the Night Ahead starts off strong, with four stellar tracks, but, not entirely unlike Fourteen Autumns, slows down in the middle. The likes of "That Birthday Present" and "At the Burnside" do their best to pick things up on the back half, but overall the album feels like it becomes a bit samey over time. Not to say that The Twilight Sad aren't great a what they do best - heavy and earnest elegiacs with deceptively catchy hooks - but over time, the impact is dulled, such that the simple but direct introduction to "Interrupted" becomes one of the highlights of the album. Taken alone, each of these songs still packs a punch, and while the sound of this album moves toward the broader trends in 2000's indie and post-punk, one can now see that this was a crucial step in forging the sound that would emerge, like a dark and cynical butterfly, from its cocoon with Nobody Wants to Be Here and Nobody Wants to Leave. This is not to say that Forget the Night Ahead doesn't have value on its own, as it's packed with a seething energy, but it's not quite as tight as The Twilight Sad's first and most recent releases. Highlights include "I Became a Prostitute", "Seven Years of Letters", "That Birthday Present", "At the Burnside".
THE TWILIGHT SAD -- FOURTEEN AUTUMNS & FIFTEEN WINTERS -- 9/10
I could have sworn I'd reviewed this album before, but apparently not. After the listening to Forget the Night Ahead, hitting play for this album and hearing the tinny piano and slide guitar gently growing at the start of "Cold Days from the Birdhouse" is like going home after a year abroad. It's familiar, and yet there's a newness to it that comes in spending time away. It's been awhile since I listened to this album, not because I don't really, really enjoy it, but just from having been listening to other stuff lately (mostly emo, please don't judge). Right away, there's a quality to it that a lot of the other major classic albums of the 2000s were missing. Because where it shares bits and pieces of what made some of those other albums, listed in the previous review, great, this is one of those few albums that puts it all together. It's got that rusticity that made Funeral so different at the time, the darkness and cynicism of Turn On the Bright Lights, the youthful restlessness of the likes of Is This It, and the open frankness of another Scottish band of the 2000s that means so much to me (Idlewild, who combined these elements before they even existed in their separate forms on the 2000 masterpiece 100 Broken Windows). For all the novelty of how this album sounds, it's got the goods to back it up. The first two tracks on this album may be the best on any album, ever, traversing between warmth and passion with a natural ease that's immediately relatable. But it's not all about "Cold Days From the Birdhouse" and "That Summer, At Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy", it's about the poetic moments that effervesce out of thin air throughout this album, separated by scenic, layered soundscapes. Because of the hefty titles of these songs, which on any other album would appear pompous and overwrought (see Funeral), it's hard to remember exactly where these moments appear, but when moments like "and why do they come when you're always raining", "and do your fear not grow when you see that you're all mine, with a knife in your chest", or "head up dear, the rabbit may die", the words themselves, on reflection, don't seem to mean anything, but there's a certain significance in the way they're expressed, like an abstract painting, the communicates a profound emotion. Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters may be inconsistent at times, but this is a remarkable album in the way in which is communicates its messages, through climaxes of energy and obfuscated language, that is special in unique. Highlights include "Cold Days From the Birdhouse," "That Summer, At Home I Became the Invisible Boy", "Walking for Two Hours", "And She Will Darken the Memory".
THURSDAY -- FULL COLLAPSE -- 7.5/10
Ooooooooooh boy. This is an album that likes to live on the edge if there ever was one. Much like Finelines, reviewed in my last set now nearly a year ago, Full Collapse is very much emblematic of it's time, it's polished production and over the top angst in this case not a product of its time, but, in fact, the archetype of it's time. You see, Full Collapse is the album that defined screamo as a sub-genre, which is sure to give it a black mark through the lens of time, chaining its legacy to the likes of AFI and The Used, and not undeservedly, perhaps. In marked contrast to some of the more lavish emo albums of the '90's, Mineral's The Power of Failing, for instance, Full Collapse is flawlessly sleek and and almost laboratory levels of clean, such that in moments of over-the-top emotion, one hesitates to blame it on youthful exuberance or the foibles of inexperience. Such is the case of the odd introduction "A0001", which seems like it should introduce a sci-fi concept album rather than the raw confessional that follows. This is followed immediately, however, by the serpentine riff of the vivid and monumental "Understanding in a Car Crash", which sets the tone for this album of highly polished emo anthems, accentuated by a healthy dose of screams. In comparison to the likes of more recent emo bands like The Hotelier or The World is a Beautiful Place..., Full Collapse isn't quite as excessive as one might assume for the band that put screamo on the map, but it is at least a little bit over the top. It does add a significant potency to the likes of "Autobiography of a Nation" and, especially, "Cross Out the Eyes", but by the time we get to "I am the Killer" and the otherwise very good "Winding Up", it starts to feel unnecessary. Perhaps fittingly, this is an album of extremes. First of all, there will be plenty that will despise this album for fitting too well into the much maligned yet nonetheless popular scene that it would ultimately be crucial in spawning, and many will find the constant flow of unhinged emotion, "the sound of your shotgun pulse sounding over and over in your silent halls", to be just too much. At its core, however, Full Collapse is a gripping album, full to the brim with energy, and if you can throw restraint to the wind, you may just be able to get swept up in it. Highlights include "Understanding in a Car Crash", "Concealer", "Cross Out the Eyes", "Standing on the Edge of Summer".
ARCADE FIRE -- FUNERAL -- 8.5/10
There was a time I disdainfully refused to give the Arcade Fire a serious listen. At a time when all my friends who listened to indie music would not shut up about them, the more so with the Butler brothers spending their summers in a town near mine (and filming the video for what I now think to be their best song, "Rebellion (Lies)", in that same town, where my grandparents live), a time when they won the obligatory indie band Grammy for an album that is probably only their third best, all while bands like, say, The Twilight Sad, were completely ignored, a time when they were emblematic of that lumberjack hipster aesthetic that everyone hates but to which I am now ambivalent, I couldn't bear to listen to them as a matter of principle. Well, times have changed. I could smugly pan Reflektor as pompous, overambitious (as I listened through Dog Man Star for the billionth time) and yet not especially good, and be right about it, and now that Everything Now has happened... I guess I can make my peace with The Arcade Fire. People are all about The National now, I think (their best work now a decade behind them), so I can drop my righteous indignation and give them an honest listen, after all this time. Now, as you can see, there are lots of random, external factors that go into our tastes. Just as I said hearing the shimmering opening notes to "Cold Days From the Birdhouse" brings me back to when I first heard The Twilight Sad, maybe I'd feel the same about the remarkably similar opening piano to "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)", written three years earlier, to give credit where it's due. Funeral, likewise, must have felt like a precious gem at the time when it came out. With the cold and cynical attitude of Interpol, The Strokes, and The Arctic Monkeys so prevalent at the time, having a band come out using every kind of percussion instrument available and unafraid to show some vulnerability must have been a breath of fresh air. This is an album that, compared to those other albums, has quite a bit of variety to it, from the earnest intensity of "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" and "Neighborhood #2 (Laika)" to the hushed confessionals "Un Annee Sans Lumiere" and "Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles)". Overall, Funeral uses its rustic production to great effect, containing a certain tenseness like a coiled spring that is never quite released, and the combination of Butler's and Chassagne's voices are amplify that impression elegantly. Taking the aesthetic of Neutral Milk Hotel and slowing it down into stately ballads and angsty anthems, this album sounds timeless even now, over a decade later, by virtue of it sounding like a Pre-Raphaelite relic even at the moment that it was released. While this album at times slows down in the middle and straddles the cliché at moments, it contains more than a few truly special moments, and remains deserving of the praise that has been lavished upon it. Highlights include "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)", "Neighborhood #2 (Laika)", "Haiti", "Rebellion (Lies)"
Going alphabetically means I do a double-dose of the Sad, but also means I have to go in backwards order. Fortunately for me, Forget the Night Ahead is as good a starting point as any when approaching The Twilight Sad in a holistic manner. The 2000's had their fair share of bands who made their debut with instant classics - The Arcade Fire, The Strokes, Interpol, The Libertines, among other, perhaps slightly more under the radar acts like JJ72 or Hope of the States whose debut albums still get all the press. It's no surprise that Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters should be The Sad's best known album. In sharp contrast to the more minimalist or stripped down sound of most of the bands mentioned above, Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters takes a page out of MBV's playbook with heavy walls of sound, and the stoic yet sensitive and at times intensely impassioned musings of James Graham and his thick Scottish accent make it a distinctive and uniquely memorable sounds. Forget the Night Ahead, rather than just being the follow-up to Fourteen Autumns, serves as the point of departure for the sound that has defined the band ever since, maintaining moments of shoegazey loudness but for the most part moving more toward a more sparse presentation that is more comparable to their post-punk contemporaries, Interpol in particular, than their debut was. In this, one might regret that the walls of sound that set their debut apart have been more and more left to the wayside, but, on the other hand, it freed The Twilight Sad to approach their songs in a more conventional manner, allowing them to showcase the flashy choruses that they were always meant to write. Where their debut draw a certain vague beauty from the mystery of repeated phrases like "your red sky at night won't follow me", "these walls are filled with blame", or "your green eyes turn to blue", Forget the Night Ahead makes more use of a more typical verse-chorus structure, and, when done most effectively, presents some seriously impressive bangers. Chief among these is second track "I Became a Prostitute", which hops adeptly from chorus to chorus - "we're all fine in the back of your mind..." to "you are the bearer of a womb without love" - with an aggressive heft accented with the same jagged but now clearer guitar din as always. Forget the Night Ahead starts off strong, with four stellar tracks, but, not entirely unlike Fourteen Autumns, slows down in the middle. The likes of "That Birthday Present" and "At the Burnside" do their best to pick things up on the back half, but overall the album feels like it becomes a bit samey over time. Not to say that The Twilight Sad aren't great a what they do best - heavy and earnest elegiacs with deceptively catchy hooks - but over time, the impact is dulled, such that the simple but direct introduction to "Interrupted" becomes one of the highlights of the album. Taken alone, each of these songs still packs a punch, and while the sound of this album moves toward the broader trends in 2000's indie and post-punk, one can now see that this was a crucial step in forging the sound that would emerge, like a dark and cynical butterfly, from its cocoon with Nobody Wants to Be Here and Nobody Wants to Leave. This is not to say that Forget the Night Ahead doesn't have value on its own, as it's packed with a seething energy, but it's not quite as tight as The Twilight Sad's first and most recent releases. Highlights include "I Became a Prostitute", "Seven Years of Letters", "That Birthday Present", "At the Burnside".
THE TWILIGHT SAD -- FOURTEEN AUTUMNS & FIFTEEN WINTERS -- 9/10
I could have sworn I'd reviewed this album before, but apparently not. After the listening to Forget the Night Ahead, hitting play for this album and hearing the tinny piano and slide guitar gently growing at the start of "Cold Days from the Birdhouse" is like going home after a year abroad. It's familiar, and yet there's a newness to it that comes in spending time away. It's been awhile since I listened to this album, not because I don't really, really enjoy it, but just from having been listening to other stuff lately (mostly emo, please don't judge). Right away, there's a quality to it that a lot of the other major classic albums of the 2000s were missing. Because where it shares bits and pieces of what made some of those other albums, listed in the previous review, great, this is one of those few albums that puts it all together. It's got that rusticity that made Funeral so different at the time, the darkness and cynicism of Turn On the Bright Lights, the youthful restlessness of the likes of Is This It, and the open frankness of another Scottish band of the 2000s that means so much to me (Idlewild, who combined these elements before they even existed in their separate forms on the 2000 masterpiece 100 Broken Windows). For all the novelty of how this album sounds, it's got the goods to back it up. The first two tracks on this album may be the best on any album, ever, traversing between warmth and passion with a natural ease that's immediately relatable. But it's not all about "Cold Days From the Birdhouse" and "That Summer, At Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy", it's about the poetic moments that effervesce out of thin air throughout this album, separated by scenic, layered soundscapes. Because of the hefty titles of these songs, which on any other album would appear pompous and overwrought (see Funeral), it's hard to remember exactly where these moments appear, but when moments like "and why do they come when you're always raining", "and do your fear not grow when you see that you're all mine, with a knife in your chest", or "head up dear, the rabbit may die", the words themselves, on reflection, don't seem to mean anything, but there's a certain significance in the way they're expressed, like an abstract painting, the communicates a profound emotion. Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters may be inconsistent at times, but this is a remarkable album in the way in which is communicates its messages, through climaxes of energy and obfuscated language, that is special in unique. Highlights include "Cold Days From the Birdhouse," "That Summer, At Home I Became the Invisible Boy", "Walking for Two Hours", "And She Will Darken the Memory".
THURSDAY -- FULL COLLAPSE -- 7.5/10
Ooooooooooh boy. This is an album that likes to live on the edge if there ever was one. Much like Finelines, reviewed in my last set now nearly a year ago, Full Collapse is very much emblematic of it's time, it's polished production and over the top angst in this case not a product of its time, but, in fact, the archetype of it's time. You see, Full Collapse is the album that defined screamo as a sub-genre, which is sure to give it a black mark through the lens of time, chaining its legacy to the likes of AFI and The Used, and not undeservedly, perhaps. In marked contrast to some of the more lavish emo albums of the '90's, Mineral's The Power of Failing, for instance, Full Collapse is flawlessly sleek and and almost laboratory levels of clean, such that in moments of over-the-top emotion, one hesitates to blame it on youthful exuberance or the foibles of inexperience. Such is the case of the odd introduction "A0001", which seems like it should introduce a sci-fi concept album rather than the raw confessional that follows. This is followed immediately, however, by the serpentine riff of the vivid and monumental "Understanding in a Car Crash", which sets the tone for this album of highly polished emo anthems, accentuated by a healthy dose of screams. In comparison to the likes of more recent emo bands like The Hotelier or The World is a Beautiful Place..., Full Collapse isn't quite as excessive as one might assume for the band that put screamo on the map, but it is at least a little bit over the top. It does add a significant potency to the likes of "Autobiography of a Nation" and, especially, "Cross Out the Eyes", but by the time we get to "I am the Killer" and the otherwise very good "Winding Up", it starts to feel unnecessary. Perhaps fittingly, this is an album of extremes. First of all, there will be plenty that will despise this album for fitting too well into the much maligned yet nonetheless popular scene that it would ultimately be crucial in spawning, and many will find the constant flow of unhinged emotion, "the sound of your shotgun pulse sounding over and over in your silent halls", to be just too much. At its core, however, Full Collapse is a gripping album, full to the brim with energy, and if you can throw restraint to the wind, you may just be able to get swept up in it. Highlights include "Understanding in a Car Crash", "Concealer", "Cross Out the Eyes", "Standing on the Edge of Summer".
ARCADE FIRE -- FUNERAL -- 8.5/10
There was a time I disdainfully refused to give the Arcade Fire a serious listen. At a time when all my friends who listened to indie music would not shut up about them, the more so with the Butler brothers spending their summers in a town near mine (and filming the video for what I now think to be their best song, "Rebellion (Lies)", in that same town, where my grandparents live), a time when they won the obligatory indie band Grammy for an album that is probably only their third best, all while bands like, say, The Twilight Sad, were completely ignored, a time when they were emblematic of that lumberjack hipster aesthetic that everyone hates but to which I am now ambivalent, I couldn't bear to listen to them as a matter of principle. Well, times have changed. I could smugly pan Reflektor as pompous, overambitious (as I listened through Dog Man Star for the billionth time) and yet not especially good, and be right about it, and now that Everything Now has happened... I guess I can make my peace with The Arcade Fire. People are all about The National now, I think (their best work now a decade behind them), so I can drop my righteous indignation and give them an honest listen, after all this time. Now, as you can see, there are lots of random, external factors that go into our tastes. Just as I said hearing the shimmering opening notes to "Cold Days From the Birdhouse" brings me back to when I first heard The Twilight Sad, maybe I'd feel the same about the remarkably similar opening piano to "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)", written three years earlier, to give credit where it's due. Funeral, likewise, must have felt like a precious gem at the time when it came out. With the cold and cynical attitude of Interpol, The Strokes, and The Arctic Monkeys so prevalent at the time, having a band come out using every kind of percussion instrument available and unafraid to show some vulnerability must have been a breath of fresh air. This is an album that, compared to those other albums, has quite a bit of variety to it, from the earnest intensity of "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" and "Neighborhood #2 (Laika)" to the hushed confessionals "Un Annee Sans Lumiere" and "Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles)". Overall, Funeral uses its rustic production to great effect, containing a certain tenseness like a coiled spring that is never quite released, and the combination of Butler's and Chassagne's voices are amplify that impression elegantly. Taking the aesthetic of Neutral Milk Hotel and slowing it down into stately ballads and angsty anthems, this album sounds timeless even now, over a decade later, by virtue of it sounding like a Pre-Raphaelite relic even at the moment that it was released. While this album at times slows down in the middle and straddles the cliché at moments, it contains more than a few truly special moments, and remains deserving of the praise that has been lavished upon it. Highlights include "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)", "Neighborhood #2 (Laika)", "Haiti", "Rebellion (Lies)"
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