The Intelligence

Atlantic says males are on their way out…which seems unlikely and anyway is kind of a bummer. The Intelligence – Lars Finberg from the A-Frames with whoever else wants to play – dedicates a whole album to them, which I reviewed last week for Dusted.


I said, The song “White Corvette” from The Intelligence’s sixth full-length begins as a low-end buzz, about 10 seconds in length. Longtime fans should enjoy it while it lasts, because it’s the only distortion on the track. The rest is airy, melodic and precise, The Intelligence’s characteristic jittery aggression set in Hemingway’s “clean, well-lighted place.” Not that there’s any give-up in intensity. The band’s scrambling post-punk guitars, its straight-up, dry-as-a-bone drums, its laconically abstract verses are all here, just viewed through an unusually clear lens.

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“Like Like Like Like Like Like Like”

Another great songwriter hiding out in his basement

My review of Jeremy Messersmith’s really excellent, criminally under-heard The Reluctant Graveyard ran yesterday at Blurt.
Jeremy Messersmith's self-released third album handily outperforms a whole Grey's Anatomy compilation's worth of Beatles-esque pretenders. From its earliest moments - say the moment that "Lazy Bones"'s jaunty, piano-pounding swells into multi-voiced pop hedonism - to its melancholy conclusion that "This is how it has to end, so love somebody while you can" The Reluctant Graveyard flawlessly balances joy and melancholy, intelligence and intuition. This is one of the best pop albums of the year, and next to no one has heard it

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"Violet!”

By the way, this has never happened before, but I am simultaneously out of records at Dusted, Blurt and Venus, so I don’t know, maybe I’ll just listen to Hot Rocks for the rest of the week. Cheers.

Prince Rama

So here’s a hint for all you aspiring bands seeking media coverage: leave your van unlocked.

Yes, that’s right, I first heard about Prince Rama when they had all their instruments stolen in Philadelphia. I immediately DL’d a bunch of their live tracks from the Free Music Archive, and liked what I heard, a cinematically vast take on eastern meditation music. And eventually, when they replaced their instruments and finished their full-length for Paw Tracks, I reviewed it for Venus.

I concluded, “Shadow Temple isn’t going to be for everyone, and the mainstream will probably never be ready for a dance/psych/drone aesthetic grounded in Hare Krishna chants. Still for its visceral force, its large-scale, mythical scope, and its sheer eccentricity, it’s hard to beat. Om mane padme hum, indeed.”

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“Lightning Fossil”

Hello it’s me the mistress, will you please pick up the phone?

Number 55 or so in my list of records that really should make my year-end list on the basis of quality, but which probably won’t on the basis of 10 is a tiny little number, Amelia Curran’s Hunter, Hunter has been out in Canada for a year or so, and even got a Juno. It’s so good…I wrote:

Hunter, Hunter sneaks up on you. The songs aren’t showy. There are no gimmicks. Curran plays no tricks with her voice, and sticks close to tradition with her arrangement. Yet listen after listen, these melodies gain traction and little bits of the lyrics stick in your head. You realize, quite gradually, that this album is a subtle triumph, maybe even a minor classic, and in any case, well worth waiting the year or so it took to make it to the States.

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I put “The Mistress” on my August mix, which I’ve been listening to a lot lately while doing the dishes, etc.and it’s pretty damned good. You can still get it here, if you want.


There’s also this live performance of “All Hands on a Grain of Sand”

You are my consequential girl....

Don't you hate it when bands do the same damned thing over and over and over? Doesn't it piss you off when they change? Yeah, it's a conundrum, isn't it, how much to change, how much to stay the same. Abe Vigoda has solved by pretty much completely reinventing itself, shifting from a Mae Shi-ish epileptic fit of a band two years ago into cold wave, synth romantics for the new one, called Crush. I quite liked Skeletons-period Abe Vigoda, which had a weird kind of tropical shimmer over its punk-ish anxiety (they got very sick of being asked about "tropical punk" but there is definitely a warmth there). I also really enjoyed Crush, possibly because it took me back to my wasted late (very late) adolescence daydreaming about Bryan Ferry and trying to decide whether I loathed Tears for Fears or secretly enjoyed it a little.

Anyway, here's the beginning of the review:

When Abe Vigoda broke out in 2008 with the shimmery punk Skeleton, it was closely associated with No Age and other spazzy, high energy, barely-teenaged punk bands like Mika Miko and HEALTH. Now, two years later, the band’s celebrating its fourth album, Crush, with a series of shows with Cold Cave. And curiously, the new pairing will probably work at least as well as the old ones. While Abe Vigoda hasn’t entirely left its trebly, guitar-spiking aggressions behind, it’s made a dramatic move toward a kind of dark new wave-y plasticine glamour that recalls not just Cold Cave, but forebears like the Cure, Depeche Mode and New Order.

The rest

Too late for dancing

I did a little interview for Venus with Caila Thompson-Hannant, who is the main singer for Shapes and Sizes, who started out as kind of a spazzy, epileptic dance outfit a la Deerhoof and have ended up more bass-heavy and trippy. There's a new album called Candle to Your Eyes, which sounds like some sort of Colonial-era self-defense maneuver, but actually is pretty good and not as abrasive as you'd expect.

Here's the interview.

And here is "Tell Your Mum"

And "I Need an Outlet"

I like Clinic…but I like it better when it’s really Clinic

Took a new band called Suuns to task for sounding a little too much like one of my favorite bands in this review, up last Friday at Blurt.

Suuns never really establishes its own consistent sound, until, near the end, the band settles on an aesthetic of jittery, robot-funky beats, murmured vocals, and repetitive keyboard riffs. It's entertaining, but unfortunately sounds awfully familiar. "PVC", in particular, is a dead ringer for "The Return of Evil Bill", while "Organ Blues" cuts almost as close to "Goodnight Georgie," Obviously, no one's got a patent on beat-driven, groove-stuttering, reverbed pop, and if Suuns wants to do this, god bless. Just be aware that there's an elephant in the room, and it's wearing a surgical mask.

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You can download the whole thing for free, if you want. You have to go here and enter your email address to get it.



Have any of you seen the French movie A Prophet?...we watched it over the weekend...really gripping story about an Arab boy who goes to prison and makes enough connections there to start his own hashish dealing business.