Highly recommended
this month: Japandroids, The Xx
As always, these reviews originally ran in the Waterloo Record.
Streaming is great for sample purposes, but please find a way to
directly support your favourite artists financially.
Austra – Future Politics (Paper Bag)
Austra’s Katie Stelmanis must be an optimist to title both a
song and an album Future Politics in 2017. If she is, she keeps her sunniness
to herself in the actual music. Unlike the buoyant disco that illuminated the
second Austra album, 2013’s Olympia, Future Politics doesn’t sound like a fun
night out in the least—not that it has to be, of course, but it’s even more
dour than the goth electro of the 2011 debut. Stelmanis wrote this material
living in Montreal and Mexico, away from her Toronto home, and that isolation
informs the more sombre mood this time out. The twin sisters from Tasseomancy
are no longer in the band; their harmonies are missed; likewise, her talented
band sounds underutilized here. (Jan. 19)
Stream: “Future Politics,” “Utopia,” “I Love You More Than You
Love Yourself”
Japandroids – Near to the
Wild Heart of Life (Arts and Crafts)
“If they try to slow you down, tell
them all to go to hell.” So went the chorus to “The House That Heaven Built,”
one of many anthems on 2012’s Celebration
Rock that vaulted Japandroids from poorly kept secret of the Vancouver
underground into beloved rock’n’roll saviours. And yet they did slow down:
guitarist Brian King moved to Toronto; drummer Dave Prowse stayed in Vancouver;
they took two years writing and recording this, their third album and first in
4½ years.
Japandroids are a guitar-drums duo,
but there’s nothing simple about them. Wild
Heart is a huge leap forward in terms of songwriting, performance and
production. Whereas before they could be accused of simply extending a lineage
that runs from Bruce Springsteen to the Constantines, here they really come into
their own. These are much more than just drunken Saturday night odes to youth,
romance, rock’n’roll and the open road (not necessarily in that order) that
used to be Japandroids’ stock and trade. That still exists here: “North South
East West” is exactly the kind of fist-pumping catharsis one expects from this
band; expect this one to be a key part of the soundtrack of 2017. But they’re
both in their mid-thirties now, and so their signature intensity is being
applied to varying tempos and textures, including instrumentation that will be
difficult to duplicate onstage as a duo. Wild
Heart is very much an album as opposed to a live document.
Slowing down, in more ways than
one, has made Japandroids an even better band. Great rock bands are getting
fewer and fewer. This one is fighting the good fight. (Jan. 26)
I interviewed the band for this
Maclean’s article.
Stream: “North South East West,”
“Near to the Wild Heart of Life,” “In a Body Like a Grave”
Abigail Lapell – Hide Nor Hair (Coax)
Abigail Lapell is the latest signee to Rae Spoon’s Coax label,
which has emerged as a vital documenter of communities often marginalized in
the Canadian music scene, whether it’s trans advocate Spoon themselves, klezmer
firebrand Geoff Berner, or the cross-cultural electronic grooves of LAL. Where
Lapell fits in there isn’t exactly clear: there’s nothing revolutionary,
sonically or lyrically, on her second full-length album of haunting, gorgeous
modern folk music. Co-produced by Chris Stringer (Timber Timbre), he and Lapell
enhance her solo guitar skills with the most subtle yet effective textures. (Jan.
26)
Stream:
“Fur and Feathers,” “Night Bird and Morning Bird,” “Murder City”
Sleater-Kinney – Live in Paris (Sub Pop)
A friend mused recently: does
anyone make live albums anymore, and if so, why? YouTube clips abound; it’s
certainly no mystery what a band sounds like live, on any given tour, on any
given night. They don’t even function as documents of greatest hits anymore;
anyone can assemble one of those with a streaming playlist (or have an
algorithm do it for them). (I expand on this idea in this
Maclean’s article.)
The only real reason to release a
live album is if you’re at a stage in your career where you’ve reinvented
and/or improved on studio versions of these songs. By that token, there’s no
reason for this live album from Sleater-Kinney’s 2015 tour. The Oregon trio are
hands-down one of the most ferocious rock bands you’ll ever see, and their
comeback album No Cities to Love—after
an eight-year hiatus—showed that they sounded even better than ever. A third of
this live album are songs from that record, sounding note-perfect; another
third is from 2005’s The Woods—again,
sounding almost identical to the studio versions. Which is to say, they kick
serious ass: every slashing power chord of Carrie Brownstein’s, every cathartic
caterwaul of Corin Tucker’s, every monstrous drum fill from Janet Weiss (I
could listen to her play the opening to “Entertain” on loop all day). If for
some bizarre reason you ever thought Sleater-Kinney was a studio band, this
album lays that notion to waste.
The songs from earlier records are,
naturally, more alive and fiery than when Sleater-Kinney was a younger band,
than when they had yet to play those songs hundreds of times. The geekiest of
fans will delight in hearing them—in one of their earliest songs, “I Wanna Be
Your Joey Ramone”—change a reference to Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, to honour
his creative partner and now-ex-wife Kim Gordon. But this is not a greatest
hits record; it’s a set list, and a good one at that. In that sense, it’s a
fair introduction to the band for newbies—and a decisive rebuttal to anyone who
ever doubted the depths of this trio’s powers. (Jan. 26)
Stream: “A New Wave,” “Entertain,”
“Dig Me Out”
The Xx – I See You (XL)
It’s almost like The Xx never went away. In the 4½ years since
their second album was released, their sound has been ubiquitous in
commercials, in Drake songs (he sampled them on the title track to 2013’s Take Care), and in straight-up rip-offs
(the Chainsmokers’ “Don’t Let Me Down,” admittedly inspired by The Xx’s guitar
sound, was one of the biggest radio hits of 2016). The name of that 2012 second
Xx album? Coexist. How prophetic.
And now: I See You. On
it, the British trio accept the fact that they’re now playing for a much bigger
audience, as opposed to being shy 20-year-old goth kids making incredibly sparse
music that married the mood of dour new wave classics with pop songs and modern
electronics. The success of beatsmith Jamie Xx’s 2015 solo album informs many
of the textures heard here underneath (and, often, above) Romy Madley Croft’s
signature guitar sound and Oliver Sim’s R&B-inspired bass lines. Whereas
earlier Xx songs stuck out on radio playlists, the subtle EDM textures heard
here puts them even more squarely in the mainstream.
Yet the most beautiful thing about The Xx is that they haven’t in
the least changed what it is about them that set them apart from everyone else
in the first place. Though tempos are occasionally upbeat, there are no sunny
pop songs. Sim and Croft, childhood friends who are perhaps the only two gay
people (of different genders) to duet in the same band, will always sound like
outsiders, like childhood friends since kindergarten still singing for each
other in the shelter of their bedroom (though Sim, in particular, has improved
greatly as a vocalist; Croft didn’t have to). “I will be brave for you / do the
things I’m afraid to do,” sings Croft, in one of the album’s most affecting
moments. Another is when Sim, a recently reformed alcoholic, sing, “I go out,
but every beat is a violent noise.”
In almost every way, The Xx have proven how to maintain one’s
artistic integrity in the face of massive success. No wonder everyone wants to
rip them off. (Jan. 12)
I wrote about The Xx for
Maclean’s here.
Stream: “Dangerous,” “Brave For You,” “On Hold”