Are you headed to a record store today to buy Reflektor? Some
other good records came out this month too. (And last month, too, of course.)
The following reviews ran in the Waterloo Record.
Highly recommended: Willis Earl Beal, Darkside. I had to stop
myself, when writing about such a sexy record, not to say: “Come to the
Darkside!”
Recommended: Basia Bulat, Dirtbombs, Haim, Tim Hecker, Jordan
Klassen, Lindi Ortega, Shad
Willis Earl Beal – Nobody Knows (XL)
This man debuted in 2012 with an album of extremely primitive
home recordings, in which his stunning voice detailed a life of despair and
hardship as sung into a hand-held device. On stage, he could silence large
rooms with just his a cappella voice, or accompanied by a reel-to-reel tape
machine. Beal may look and sing like a modern-day Sam Cooke, but he doesn’t fit
any particular mould, from soul music or anywhere else. On his first proper
recording, Beal—who never wanted his demos released in the first place—takes
advantage of his new resources and colours in his sketches, albeit sparingly:
rarely does he employ a full band, and a mournful string quartet evokes loneliness
rather than sounding lush. Beal is a guy who wrote his first songs while riding
his bicycle through deserted city streets at night; his music still suits those
solitary, nocturne environs. No matter how you dress him up, he’s still the
wallflower who fixes you with a steely glare and a commanding voice, drawing
you into his slightly unstable mind. Don’t look away. (Oct. 3)
Download: “Wavering Lines,” “Coming Through” (featuring Cat
Power), “Too Dry to Cry”
Blue Rodeo – In Our Nature
(Warner)
In the last two years,
Blue Rodeo officially welcomed long-time shadow member and guitar wizard Colin
Cripps into their lineup, and released a revelatory box set covering their
first five albums, each of them a classic in their own right. Their last studio
album garnered their best reviews and sales in over a decade. And on top of that, Jim Cuddy put
out his finest solo album to date, Skyscraper Soul. So why is this album so
flat and uninspired and perhaps the dullest of their entire career? We had
reason to expect so much more.
(Oct. 31)
Download: “Wondering,” “When
the Truth Comes Out,” “Paradise”
Basia Bulat - Tall Tall
Shadow (Secret City)
The third album is key:
after the surprise of the debut, after the expected letdown of the follow-up,
it’s then that you really have to step up or step off. Toronto
singer/songwriter (and one-woman autoharp revival society) Basia Bulat rings in
Arcade Fire’s Tim Kingsbury (with accompanying engineer Mark Lawson) and sets
her mind to writing the best songs of her career, and letting her voice shine
against sparse backdrops—“It Can’t Be You” gives instant goosebumps, as does
any other track where she strips the arrangements down to two or three
instruments. “Never Let Me Go” finds her reaching for big, Celine Dion-style
high notes; thankfully the Brian Eno-ish soundscape behind her is devoid of
bluster. The bigger songs don’t disappoint, however, as befitting an album
produced by a member of Arcade Fire; the title track is a slow build of a
gospel number with a rousing payoff. (Oct. 10)
Download: “Tall Tall
Shadow,” “It Can’t Be You,” “Someone”
Darkside – Psychic
(Matador)
You know a band can
successfully create a mood when the 11-minute opening track of their debut
album whizzes by in no time. Darkside is a duo started by Nicolas Jaar, a
French electronic musician, and his touring guitarist Dave Harrington. They’ve
both spent time making minimal techno and jazz and experimental rock, and
together they create something not unlike a 21st-century Pink Floyd:
pre-, um, Dark Side of the Moon (they deny they’re named after the album), or a
collaboration between Caribou and Thom Yorke. The sound is sparse and yet huge,
and for an album based on house music, it seems almost frightened of
repetition; every track is constantly evolving, and the smallest guitar lick or
live percussion passage can alter the entire song. When it comes to seriously
sexy records of 2013, there is really no contest. The Darkside beckons. (Oct.
24)
Download: “Golden Arrow,” “Paper
Trails,” “Freak Go Home”
The Dirtbombs – Ooey Gooey
Chewie Ka-blooey! (In the Red)
This album has some of the
stupidest songs ever written. Did the album title give it away? In this case,
though, that’s a good thing. Detroit’s finest garage rock band tackle ’60s
bubblegum with complete reverence, lots of fuzzy guitars and a helluva lot more
funk than these songs deserve (there are two drummers here). This is the band,
after all, whose last album (Party Store) brilliantly applied a garage rock
aesthetic to covers of Detroit techno classics.
These aren’t covers—there
are no Archies or Banana Splits classics, although one song blatantly rips off
the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.” And so bandleader Mick Collins, a man in his
40s, is writing new songs about yummy food and girls on carousels and playing
in the sunshine—and succeeding brilliantly, just as the original bubblegum
songs had been calculated by older men to appeal to a teen market. Rich with
vocal harmonies and slightly psychedelic effects, the Dirtbombs take this silly
idea very seriously, as craftsmen of any genre should.
Most importantly, however,
it’s the sound of a hot, sticky summer that never ends. (Oct. 10)
Download: “Sugar on Top,” “Hot
Sour Salty Sweet,” “Jump and Shout”
Haim – Days Are Gone
(Sony)
I’ve been reading about
Haim in Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone months before this, their debut album,
arrived. The advance buzz from the mainstream media elite—not a term I use
lightly, but come on, Vanity Fair?—is completely understandable. This album
sounds like a million bucks: three sisters with impeccable harmonies singing
sunny California pop seeped in Fleetwood Mac and Sheryl Crow, with a bit of the
’80s (Hall & Oates, Bananarama) thrown in for good measure. One track, “The
Wire,” even opens with drums cribbed directly from the Eagles’ "Heartache
Tonight."
Their big-tent appeal is
aimed at Millenials and their grandparents and everyone in between, therefore
Haim’s sole weakness is occasional bouts of blandness. But between the solid
songwriting and the occasional sonic surprise—like the ersatz dubstep of “My
Song 5,” which sounds a bit like Tom Waits producing Beyoncé—Haim actually live
up to the hype. Move over, Adele. Call off the Grammys right now and give most
of them to Haim. (Oct. 10)
Download: “Falling,” “If I
Could Change Your Mind,” “My Song 5”
Tim Hecker – Virgins (Paper Bag)
Tim Hecker does not make ambient music, although at times his
heavily processed and reprocessed approach to abstract soundscaping can be
soothing enough—if you’re not paying attention. For Hecker is the rare ambient
artist that demands to be played at maximum volume—not simply to appreciate the
enveloping, subtle layers in his music, but because, despite the lack of beats
or easily identifiable musical motifs, Hecker’s music is aggressive and
unsettling. To patronize it as aural wallpaper is to entirely miss the
point—especially when the cover of Virgins is an image meant to emulate one of
the infamous torture photos from Abu Ghraib. The music inside is often just as disturbing.
Hecker, who self-identifies as a “middle-brow brutalist,”
started his career creating with sonic manipulations that seemed adrift in a
digital world. On his last album, Ravedeath 1972, he employed a pipe organ to
achieve a much more ominous sound than anything possible with computers alone,
and ended up with the most popular album of his (albeit obscure) career;
messing audibly with the real world paid artistic and commercial dividends.
Here, he uses pianos and clarinets and flutes and god knows what
else—it’s often hard to tell—to create music as terrifying as The Exorcist, and
as awe-inspiring as Sigur Ros at their best (they invited him to open for them
at Madison Square Gardens, which must have been both an incredible and
incredibly strange venue). It’s haunting, intriguing yet almost completely
opaque; as Jackson Pollock was to Georgia O’Keeffe, Hecker is to his fans like
Godspeed You Black Emperor and The National: similar in intent, radically
different in construction. And—unlike many of his peers at this end of
abstraction—nothing about this could ever be accused of being lazy, for Hecker
is a maximalist, constantly mutating and transforming his sounds and
composition to keep the listener on their toes.
Because Hecker refuses to give you any easy answers, engaging
with his music is a two-way exchange. He only gives you half the story, if
that; in doing so, he’s more than stimulated your imagination to fill in the
rest. (Oct. 17)
Download: “Live Room,” “Black Refraction,” “Virginal II”
Elton John – The Diving
Board (Universal)
Paul McCartney – New
(Universal)
Every few years, it seems,
Elton John claims he’s had an artistic rebirth and is getting back to his roots
and setting aside the Disney schlock he’s been peddling for decades now. The
Diving Board, the 31st album of his career, follows up his two-piano
collaboration with his formative idol, Leon Russell; producer T-Bone Burnett
returns to make this equally bare bones record, made with mostly just a rhythm
section.
John finished most of it
in a matter of days—and then kept coming back to it and adding more. He should
have left it alone. The woodshedding didn’t improve the album; the 15-track
albums seems interminable—the fault solely of the perfunctory songs, because
his piano playing and singing are top notch.
He opens the album by
singing, “I hung out with the old folks / with the hope that I’d get wise”—this
from a 66-year-old man who has said this is his “most adult album” ever. It’s
nice to hear him trying, but it’s unlikely to be more than a curiosity for most
fans.
Much like Elton John, Paul
McCartney has spent decades lowering our expectations—offstage, anyway. And for
a 71-year-old to title his new album, um, New doesn’t get anyone’s hopes up. Here,
however, he sounds inspired in ways he hasn’t for years, sounding exactly the
way you’d always hoped this Beatle would. It’s the kind of album precious few
of his peers are still making, one with modern production that successfully
references every point of his career. (Oct. 24)
Download Elton John: “Oceans
Away,” “Oscar Wilde Gets Out,” “The Ballad of Blind Tom”
Download Paul McCartney: “Save
Us,” “Early Days,” “New”
Jordan Klassen –
Repentance (Nevado)
Ah, 2003. It was the year
of Arcade Fire’s first EP and Sufjan Stevens’s Michigan album and the Dears’ No
Cities Left and the Hidden Cameras’ The Smell of Our Own. Vancouver songwriter
Jordan Klassen was 18 at the time, right at the age when we fall most deeply in
love with the music that shapes the rest of our lives. And so it is that his
first proper full-length draws heavily from those records, filled with
plaintive guitar, banjo and gentle singing as well as rousing choruses, choirs
of friends and decorative strings. And yes, a glockenspiel or two. While
pleasant and soothing and perfectly suited to soundtrack a trailer for a quirky
indie film, Repentance also shows a strong new songwriter with an uncanny
ear for melody. Don’t be surprised if this becomes a word-of-mouth favourite in
the coming months; it has all the hallmarks of a quiet classic—at the very
least, Klassen is the most promising new songwriter from Canada’s West Coast in
far too long. (Oct. 31)
Download: “Ranchero,” “Piano
Brother,” “Go To Me”
Moonface – Julia With Blue
Jeans On (Paper Bag)
“There’s a
pseudo-intellectual inside of me / oh, but luckily, there’s something else,”
sings Moonface, a.k.a. Spencer Krug, formerly of Sunset Rubdown and Wolf
Parade. Thank god.
What is that something
else, exactly? “A frog with its tongue stuck to the inside of my chest / a crow
that keeps banging up against the glass / a well-intentioned demon somewhere
within / maybe that last one’s not so bad / maybe that last one’s the main
attraction.”
Yep. Krug is a confounding
figure, an acquired taste who seemed to be diving off the deep end once he
retired the Sunset Rubdown band and reinvented himself as Moonface, which until
now has mostly focused on experimental instrumental music. This, however, is a
solo piano and vocal collection of confessional cabaret music. Even as a
fair-weather fan of Krug’s, I was worried this raw approach would not suit him.
I was dead wrong.
His singing is stronger
than ever, his youthful yelp having mellowed into an odd but compelling croon.
His piano playing is alternately delicate and strangely ham-handed; one has to
assume the latter is for effect, distracting at times yet adding to the
emotional heft of the performance: he’s demanding your attention. This is not piano-bar
music.
Although it’s hard to tell
with someone as poetic as Krug, this also sounds like a remarkably personal
album about his recent move to Helsinki, and it’s to his credit as a performer
that he can turn prose like this into a plausible melody: “If I am an animal I
am one of the few that is self-destructive / I have chewed through my beautiful
muscle / I have chewed through my beautiful narrative to get out of Canada /
and into your door.” (Oct.
31)
Download: “November 2011,”
“Everyone is Noah Everyone is the Ark,” “Julia With the Blue Jeans On”
Lindi Ortega – Tin Star
(Last Gang)
There are lots of good
country singers; precious few great ones. Toronto-to-Tennessee transplant Lindi
Ortega is, simply, one of the best. She’s a hollering heartbreaker who sounds
schooled in gospel and loves vintage Johnny Cash, and now has some Nashville
cats to colour in her noir-ish balladry and occasional shitkicker. If you’re
already hip to Ortega, there’s not much new on her third album: just 11 more
reasons to be floored by her voice, one that would make Dolly Parton proud.
(Oct. 10)
Download: “Gypsy Child,” “Tin
Star,” “All These Cats”
Shad – Flying Colours
(Black Box)
If anyone tries to knock
Shad, they usually complain that he’s too nice. After all, who doesn’t love
Shad? Born to Kenyan/Rwandan parents, raised in London, Ont., educated in
Kitchener-Waterloo, and now calling Vancouver home, he’s dropped three albums
full of intricate but clear wordplay, rocked stages with his winning charisma,
and acted as a rap ambassador as a clean-cut, conscious alternative to
audiences who didn’t think they liked hip-hop.
That last tag obviously
irks him a bit, and it’s one he addresses directly on lead single “Stylin’,”
while he also makes fun of people who exoticize his background. But “Stylin’ ”
is the kind of song sure to silence any critics, as he spits dense, brilliant
and often hilarious lyrics, playing with his flow, while the backing track
alternates between a fuzzy bass and John Bonham beat that recalls the Beastie
Boys, while the chorus switches to a low-riding Dr. Dre beat with Saukrates on
the hook.
He’s even better on the
joyous African-tinged “Fam Jam,” a tribute to the immigrant experience in
Canada, while throwing in injustice against Aboriginals and refugees, Big Oil,
and how it feels “when you’re Third World born but First World formed /
sometimes you feel pride / sometimes you feel torn.”
Shad’s free-association
and triple-entendres are where he’s at his best, but on “He Say She Say” he takes
a turn into straight-up love-gone-wrong storytelling, a tale of a Peter Pan
manchild who loses his love, with a chorus that simply repeats, “I wanted to do
a verse about how they worked it out, but…”
Conversely, he goes all
epic on “Progress,” a song ostensibly about—what exactly?—Don McLean’s “American
Pie,” the death of Biggie and Tupac, Hurricane Katrina, the history of slavery,
and how “America don’t need Jesus / the future is here.” That one’s going to
take some time to process.
Shad’s Achilles heel has
always been his backing tracks. The production here has stepped up
considerably, though it does seem to be stuck in middle gear—following the
Drakeification of hip-hop in 2013, most tracks here are mid-tempo and
reflective. The difference, of course, between Shad and Drake—and Shad fans
usually posit him as the anti-Drake, something he admits on “Long Jawn”—is that
Shad has a helluva lot more to talk about. (Oct. 24)
Download: “Fam Jam (Fe Sum
Immigrins),” “Stylin’ ” (feat. Saukrates), “He Say She Say”
Justin Timberlake – The
20/20 Experience (Sony)
It’s not 20/20 vision if
you’re blind in one eye.
Earlier this year: I
couldn’t believe how good the new Justin Timberlake was. This month, I can’t
believe how hideous the new Justin Timberlake is.
Ostensibly the second half
of an album with the same name he released back in March, this companion piece
has none of the swagger, soul or the magic that made the earlier installment
one of the most joyous pop pleasures of 2013. Never mind that he borrows a
slogan from anti-rape campaigns (“Take Back the Night”) and sets it to a
seduction number, one that recalls late-period Lionel Richie, of all things.
Ignore the lame Jay Z rap on “Murder,” in which he attacks Yoko Ono, of all
people (“the pussy that broke up the Beatles”—really, that misogynist myth
still exists?).
Granted, both albums are
guilty of unintentionally hilarious, unsexy lyrics (“I got you saying Jesus so
much it’s like we’re laying in the manger”), but the music here is half-baked,
tracks that obviously didn’t meet a quality control that was intact last time.
Worse, he ventures into guitar territory on “Drink You Away” and “Only When I
Walk Away,” a sonic suit that’s particularly ill-fitting on an otherwise
well-dressed man.
If he hadn’t set his own
bar so high, none of this would matter. But everything about this looks like a
cheap cash grab from an artist who’s worked hard to finally earn our respect.
(Oct. 10)
