There is no cure for exuberance. There is also no comparison. Houston, TX indie rock outfit Young Mammals know this on a molecular level, and debut LP Carrots bears out this notion, boiling over like some forgotten pot of water. "Confetti" whirs until dizzy and out of breath, sounding like Fang Island turned loose on the Where The Wild Things Are soundtrack. "8 4 8" proves a slightly milder ride until its final movement, a shouting and insistent bridge beginning with the starry-eyed lyric, "Let's talk all night ..." There is no relief from this, just hooks and energy when everyone else is asleep.
The next movement in Sufjan Stevens pysch-out-electro opus The Age of Adz hit the Internet today in unsettling, glitchy glory. "Too Much" is built on a central lyric, "there's too much riding on that/too much, too much," with washing synths and strings filling in the architecture around a foundation of halting electronic beats. After a Kid A-breakdown in the song's fifth minute, Stevens tests our will and the spacial limitations of his music in a final movement that pits fluttering strings and horns against laser synths. He rides this impulse toward the edge, a nearly uncomfortable man-versus-machine saturation, before letting the gears spin off and cough quietly out the door.
If The War On Drugs were a national policy initiative and not a Philadelphia rock band, it would be underfunded and completely ineffective, maybe even culminating with a 25-years-back Nancy Reagan screaming. "Just Say No" at terrifying volume. If The War On Drugs were a national policy initiative and not a Philadelphia rock band, it would feature an after-school program so comically ineffective it would later be proven to increase drug use among young people. If The War On Drugs were a policy initiative it would certainly invent as spokesman a trench coat-clad cartoon crime dog that even the most grounded 10-year old found at least a little troubling.
Luckily, The War On Drugs are a Philadelphia rock band with a brand new EP and a promotional single, "Comin' Through" that evokes cruise-control rock, gliding under its own power with meandering American guitars like a Petty-fronted Real Estate tune. It is road trip music, even if you're standing still, leaving the hysterical 80s and 90s in the dust of something new that feels pleasantly worn in.
The Fruit Tree Foundation is a collection of Scottish musicians who have come together to produce a record exploring issues of mental health, raising funds and awareness. Featuring heavy-hitters like Scott Hutchinson of Frightened Rabbit and James Graham of The Twilight Sad, as well as curatorsRod Jones and Emma Pollack, the collaboration is already bearing dark, intense and rich fruit. Even the simple edict of allowing Hutchinson and Jones loose on a record dealing with issues of mental health seems a match made in heavenly hell. After all, it was Hutchinson who looked us straight in the face in 2007 and sung, "You're not ill and I'm not dead/Doesn't that make us the perfect pair?" and then later in 2010 moaned, triumphantly, "I'm not miserable now!"
On "I Forgot To Fall," one of two teasers on the Foundation's website, Hutchinson's vocals are immediately recognisable, fragile and insistent. The arrangement is a spiralling affair of strings, splashing drums and building guitars. For this group darkness is not a foreign feeling, the depths known deep yet survivable, pain put on tape and left for others to hear.
The first sounds on The Killers' seminal 2004 debut Hot Fuss were the whack of descending helicopter blades. On Brandon Flowers' first solo record Flamingo, due out next Tuesday, we hear only the chirp of crickets as album opener "Welcome To Fabulous Las Vegas" emerges, a little folksy and a little bombastic. Flowers is no less obsessed with broken dreams and a fragile Americana, but this time the ethic is that of back porch storyteller, not a triumphant landing party.
The inescapable ethos of Flamingo, a record originally written and intended as the full band's fourth studio album, is that of a wistful, almost weathered nostalgia. When Flowers remarks blithely on the album's first track, "Didn't nobody tell you the house will always win?" it is with the perspective of a man who knows just how powerful institutions can be. On track two, "Only The Young," the catchy chorus is a portrait of an older man, claustrophobic, staring in the rear-view mirror at his youth. Maybe most crushing is "Hard Enough," a track so beaten-down, Flowers invokes Jenny Lewis' broken vocals for the duet on the chorus. Those expecting charging, battle-ready hymns will necessarily need to look elsewhere.
In the cloudy snow globe of Mr. Flowers' inspirations all is not remember-ten-years-back-when-you-were-young morosity. The comparatively ebullient "Magdalena" is an updated Springsteen anthem, rife with slide guitar, soaring backing vocals and a key change with enough buoyant power to pull the meditative side of the record out of the water. Even single, "Crossfire," with its illusions to a special type of purgatory is more relief than damnation. Most revealing is "Swallow It," evoking Talking Heads bizarre-pop and its message of temperance and maturity against a culture all too ready to eat at the buffet, stuff ourselves, obsessed with learning to run before we walk. While it isn't the most aspirational record, the expectation is that we're beyond that kind of pep talk. Flowers has us to himself, soft American songs in the fading darkness of early evening.
Follow us on Twitter for an mp3 of "Magdalena." Flamingo is out today in the UK and next week in the US.
The Brother Kite is one of the best bands you haven't heard of, unless you have exceptional taste or you're one of the my personal acquaintances on whom I've pushed their music. Perhaps their biggest fan is my former boss, a heavy-hitter VP at Virgin/Capitol who insists they are the best band he's heard this decade. The band's new record, Isolation, echoes the influences of their previous work (is it Brian Wilson playing Teenage Fanclub songs or the other way around?), only taking their sound to its most bombastic and directed eschelon, all soaring choruses, dark imagery and colorful, crystalline vocals in the dark.
Brand new UK band The Vaccines have barely a footprint in proof of their actual existence, only an infectious, patient-zero single and a publicist behind their emails who admittedly doesn't even represent them. You can't make this stuff up. So, the math on this is a little iffy, but we do know first demo, "If You Wanna," is a throw-back burner with good attitude and an instantly memorable chorus. For a band with a name and almost nothing else, a cocksure demo takes the place of depth, and you can be absolutely sure you'll be hear a great deal more from these shadows in the digital darkness.
Listen :: The Vaccines - "If You Wanna" [Link dead, killed by copyright 1.18.11]
There is no cure for exuberance. There is also no comparison. Houston, TX indie rock outfit Young Mammals know this on a molecular level, and debut LP Carrots bears out this notion, boiling over like some forgotten pot of water. "Confetti" whirs until dizzy and out of breath, sounding like Fang Island turned loose on the Where The Wild Things Are soundtrack. "8 4 8" proves a slightly milder ride until its final movement, a shouting and insistent bridge beginning with the starry-eyed lyric, "Let's talk all night ..." There is no relief from this, just hooks and energy when everyone else is asleep.
The Fruit Tree Foundation
