December 2016 reviews

Highly recommended: Johann Johannsson, Loscil

Well worth your while: John Legend, Daughter

As always, these reviews ran in the Waterloo Record.

Streaming is great for sample purposes, but please find a way to directly support your favourite artists financially.

Childish Gambino – Awaken, My Love! (Glassnote/Universal)

The world hasn’t felt this on the edge of chaos since the early 1970s. That might be why soul music in particular has been looking to leaders of that era for inspiration. Now comes Childish Gambino, a.k.a. the acclaimed actor and screenwriter Donald Glover (Community, Atlanta), ditching his hip-hop career for a full immersion into George Clinton’s early Funkadelic records: the psychedelic rock guitars, falsetto lead vocals, full-band backing vocals, sludgy beats.

On first impression, it works incredibly well—as an homage. Glover is a fantastic singer, even managing some powerful Prince-like squeals. His musical collaborator, Ludwig Göransson, plays most everything except drums, and it’s his arrangements that make the album work at all.

On deeper listen, however, an homage is all it appears to be. Glover’s singing is convincing enough that one assumes he’s conveying some kind of spiritual salvation from a world of woe. Actually, on the opening track, “Me and Your Mama,” when it sounds like he’s fighting a life-or-death battle in a fascist oligarchy, he’s actually howling: “You really got a hold on me, so this isn’t just puppy love.” For a rapper and a screenwriter, it’s strange that the lyrics are the weakest part of this project. But even the music, while interesting, doesn’t really hold up as more than a pastiche. It hits a real low on “California,” which is nothing short of cartoonish, akin to Ween covering Nilsson’s “Lime in the Coconut.”

The best thing about Awaken, My Love! is that it might send the curious scrambling back to discover Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain, an album that I had an overwhelming urge to listen to on the morning of Nov. 10. It holds up. A little too well. (Dec. 15)

Stream: “Have Some Love,” “Redbone,” “Boogieman”

Jóhann Jóhannsson – Arrival OST (Deutsche Grammophon)

Loscil – Monument Builders (Kranky)

If you were either spooked out and/or captivated by the beauty of Denis Villeneuve’s new film Arrival, a large part of that experience was the score by Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. (Jóhannsson’s score for Villeneuve’s previous film, Sicario, was nominated for an Academy Award last year; they’re currently collaborating once more for the remake of Blade Runner due next year.) All ominous bass tones and digitally manipulated human voices, it’s the ideal accompaniment to interstellar communication, of sonically illustrating the awe and fear and responsibility of inchoate dialogue with an alien species. In an inverse process, Jóhannsson wrote the theme before Villeneuve even started shooting; the music would be played on set to set the tone. It’s far from an afterthought; it’s as integral to the film as the script or the cinematography. Even better: here, it also functions entirely independently as a somewhat unsettling meditative soundtrack.

Why Vancouver composer Scott Morgan, a.k.a. Loscil, has not been tapped for any Oscar-bait assignments is anyone’s guess. (He has, however, scored the 2006 Genie winner for Best Documentary: Scared Sacred.) He’s been creating fascinating minimalist ambient music for more than a decade, and his 11^th album could well become a calling card. Inspired directly by Philip Glass’s stunning score for the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi, as well as the photographs of devastated landscapes by Edward Burtynsky, Monument Builders is sparse, expansive and evocative. French horns and percussion permeate the occasionally pulsing synths and layered atmospherics; melodies and movements are glacial yet hardly obscured.

In these past few months, if not the past year, we’ve all had plenty of reasons to shut off the noise of the world and mourn the losses that pile up seemingly every week. In addition to everything else 2016 has handed us, between these and Colin Stetson’s reimagining of Gorecki’s “Sorrow” symphony, it’s also given us an antidote. (Dec. 1)

Stream Arrival: “Heptapod B,” “Properties of Explosive Materials,” “One of Twelve”

Stream Loscil: “Drained Lake,” “Straw Dogs,” “Anthropocene”

John Legend – Darkness and Light (Sony)

The classiest man in all of R&B is still riding high from his wedding-dance smash “All of Me” from 2013, and he has every intention of staying on top of the pop game on his fifth solo album (not counting his Roots collaboration). He has a surefire way of doing it—namely, a song called “Surefire.” And another called “Love Me Now,” which, yes, might sound like a Coldplay song—but infinitely better because it’s in the hands of Legend. Guest spots from Miguel and Chance the Rapper are surprisingly uneventful; Legend does far better on his own on the rest of the record. However, when Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard shows up on the super sultry and soul-shriekin’ title track, it’s thrilling and chilling and holy moly, can we sign these two up for a full-length duets album? Hot damn. (Dec. 8)

Stream: “Love Me Now,” “Darkness and Light” feat. Brittany Howard, “What You Do To Me”

Bruno Mars – 24K Magic (Atlantic)

Surely only the most joyless can resist “Uptown Funk”—at least the first 100 times you heard it. Bruno Mars knows a good vibe when he hears it, which is why the title track of his new album tries (and fails) to head uptown once again. His frequent collaborator Mark Ronson isn’t around this time; it wouldn’t appear that a hitmaker of Mars’s calibre would need him, but this sounds like Mars is flailing around trying to land the right groove. His singing and vocal arrangements—and, when he does his best James Brown, like on “Perm,” his shrieks—are flawless, and he commands a tight band that no doubt slays in the stadiums. But the songs this time out don’t really catch fire, and, as happens too often with Mars, the lyrics are laughable: “You need to activate your sex”; “Let’s just kiss until we’re naked.” It all probably sounds way better on stage, when all we have to do is watch the man with the moves. (Dec. 8)

Stream: “Perm,” “Finesse,” “Too Good to Say Goodbye”

Sting – 57^th and 9^th (Universal)

Sting is not through with rock music—or is he? After his lute album, his Christmas album, his symphonic reworkings, his original Broadway musical, it’s been 13 years since he put out something resembling pop music. Somewhere in between there was a Police reunion tour, and a collaborative tour with Peter Gabriel. But here, when he sings rather lethargically over a mid-tempo rocker, “Here comes the sound of everything I’ve ever feared,” one can’t help but wonder why he bothered. He perks up on the surprising rocker “Petrol Head,” and the old activist does have a few things to get off his chest: “One Fine Day” is his somewhat schoolboyish letter to the editor re: climate change that would make Bono blush (“Dear leaders, please do something quick / Time is up, the planet’s sick”). It’s all impeccably executed, of course, but unless you’re the rare breed of Sting fan who prefers his ’90s output to the rest of his career, this might just send you scrambling back to that lute record. (Dec. 8)

Stream: “I Can’t Stop Thinking About You,” “Petrol Head,” “Inshallah”

Warpaint – Heads Up (Rough Trade/XL)

Daughter – Not to Disappear (Glassnote/Universal)

“You’re a new song, baby, you’re a new song to me.” So goes the lead single from the third album by L.A. quartet Warpaint, a band whose 2014 Rough Trade self-titled debut would have given few to predict that the band would write a four-on-the-floor post-punk disco pop song heard repeatedly on alt-rock radio stations. It’s a new song to them, it’s a new song to us.

Warpaint shares a similar mood to The Xx, though instead of a Jamie Xx, they have drummer Stella Mozgawa, who’s just as inventive when she’s working a drum machine as she is when she’s turning Jenny Lee Lindberg’s dub-reggae-influenced bass lines upside down behind the kit.

“New Song” finds Warpaint cannibalizing their own sound in a pop-friendly package; sadly, the result is insipid. The rest of Heads Up, however, finds them emerging further from the shoegazy haze of their earlier work, pushing their rhythm section to the front of the mix while the two guitarists-vocalists get more abstract and rely less on copping directly from the Cocteau Twins’ playbook (or, more accurately, the Golden Palominos). Heads Up is a huge step up, on every level—and though they probably do have pop songs in them somewhere, that’s not where their talent lies; maybe they shouldn’t even try. “New Song” is more of a distraction than a gateway drug.

British band Daughter share the sleepy female vocal aesthetic of Warpaint and The Xx, but crank up the volume on the guitar amps, which sound like a howling winter storm. Not to Disappear, Daughter’s second album, came out in January; it’s a beautiful slow burn, and it seems all too fitting to end 2016 with a chorus that goes, “I feel numb in this kingdom.” Vocalist/guitarist Elena Tonra sounds like she spent her childhood listening to The Cure’s Disintegration and Jeff Buckley’s Grace, while her Swiss guitarist and French drummer manage to steer clear of shoegaze cliché. They’re not always successful; Tonra’s lyrics can stumble, and their attempts at ratcheting up the tempo (“No Care”) don’t really work. But when all their elements snap together, like on the triumphant single “How,” the results are stunning. (Dec. 15)

Stream Warpaint: “Whiteout,” “So Good,” “Don’t Wanna”

Stream Daughter: “How,” “Numbers,” “Doing the Right Thing”

February 2014 reviews

Highly recommended this month: Adrian Raso with Fanfare Ciocarlia

Worth your while: Wet Secrets, Sam Roberts, Freedom Writers, New Mendicants

These reviews appeared in the Waterloo Record and Guelph Mercury earlier this month.

Beck – Morning Phase (Capitol)

Apparently Morning Phase involves not having yet left the bed. Beck’s first album in six years (and first good one in almost 10) finds him struggling to find his own pulse. The sluggish tempos aren’t the problem; his 2002 album Sea Change was a full-on bummer of a record, albeit beautiful, and containing some of his finest songs. Morning Phase, on the other hand, is Beck at his most marble-mouthed, surrounded by amazing studio musicians who are called upon to do—well, not much of anything. The not-terribly-originally titled "Blue Moon" conjures some pleasant Pet Sounds moments, but it stands out from the rest of this pack merely because it’s remotely interesting psychedelic folk. Sad-ass strings milk the melancholy for all its worth, but come off as the emotionally manipulative soundtrack to a 10-hanky tearjerker rather than a worthy successor to Nick Drake, which appears to be the mood Beck is after here. By the time he gets to a song called “Turn Away,” I’m ready to take his advice. Especially during the same week that new records by Neneh Cherry and St. Vincent show up. (Feb. 27)

Download: “Blue Moon,” “Say Goodbye,” “Turn Away”

Broken Bells – After the Disco (Columbia)

Broken Bells is James Mercer of the Shins and Danger Mouse of—well, of a lot of your favourite records of the last 10 years (Gnarls Barkley, Black Keys, Gorillaz). They’re talented men. Their attention to minute sonic detail is impeccable. They both know a thing or two about songwriting. But you knew that already.

What’s striking about the second Broken Bells album is how almost exactly half the album is inspired, engaging and brilliant—and then the other half sounds like they kind of gave up. When it succeeds, After the Disco marries delicate acoustic guitars with electronics, string sections, drum machines and—surprisingly—bass lines driving the instrumentation, whether it’s a disco song, a ballad, an obvious Bee Gees homage (“Holding On For Life”) or something in between. When it flops, it sounds like a lot of fancy toys and no one to play them. (Feb. 6)

Download: “After the Disco,” “Perfect World,” “Holding On For Life”

Egyptrixx – A/B Til Infinity (Night Slugs)

You can practically hear the dripping neon. Toronto producer David Psutka, aka Egyptrixx, creates industrial, ambient electronic music that reeks of ’80s futurism. It’s a few small steps from Vangelis’s Blade Runner score, ominous and eerie and existing in a suspended state: Psutka resists throwing a thumping bass drum beneath these tracks. Indeed, there’s very little bass at all, just a lot of sounds from an archaic ’80s Roland DX7 synthesizer, including the cheesy yet haunting digital choir patch. Psutka was collaborating with a visual artist in Berlin while making this record; the artist works with fluorescent lights, images of Martian landscapes and what looks like molten lava. The music here is equally amorphous, melodic yet ephemeral—and as lovely as it is downright creepy. (Feb. 20)

Download: “Disorbital,” “Water,” “Alta Civilization”

Neil Finn – Dizzy Heights (Lester)

The Crowded House bandleader keeps himself busy with plenty of projects—with his brother and Split Enz bandmate Tim in the Finn Brothers, with his wife in Pajama Club, and with a reformed Crowded House—so this is only the third solo release in his storied career. Here, he turns to modern psychedelic wizard Dave Fridmann, the sonic architect behind the Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, Tame Impala and MGMT, to immerse the Beatlesque songwriter in rich soundscapes.

On paper, it sounds like a perfect match. But Finn’s songwriting skills haven’t aged well—nothing he’s done since Crowded House’s heyday, including the band’s two reunion discs, holds up to those first four albums. Fridmann and Finn share production credit, so hopefully not all the good ideas here are Fridmann’s, but it might sound that way to any Flaming Lips fan. Especially when Finn tries on an ill-fitting falsetto, ala the Lips’ Wayne Coyne, on "Divebomber"; he fares much better in brothers Gibb territory on "Recluse." (The Bee Gees are clearly on a comeback in the zeitgeist. See also: the new Broken Bells album.)

If you dive in not expecting the quality of songcraft on which Finn made his name, it’s a decent collection of adult pop. But it feels like Fridmann could have made this record with anyone. (Feb. 20)

Download: “Recluse,” “Flying in the Face of Love,” “White Lies and Alibis”

Freedom Writers – Now (independent)

The list of great Canadian hip-hop records is too short; the list of great Canadian political hip-hop records is minuscule, if it exists at all. The Freedom Writers may not have much competition, but even if they did, this record would be sure to come out on top.

This is a collective of Toronto MCs—Tona, Adam Bomb, Frankie Payne, Theo 3 and Progress, with occasional guest Mathematik— and producer Big Sproxx, who set pointed critiques and manifestos to music: “I make red, black and green face-mask music / I make First Nation genocide retribution music / Nat Turner, slave revolt / Rakim, Paid in Full.” Aside from the potent language and expected swipes at more lightweight hip-hop (“I see you making hella hits but you should rebel a bit”), Freedom Writers dig deeper—unlike most political posturers, you get the impression these guys *actually read newspapers*: “Water levels rise / hire more cops / Lord of the Flies / Piggy’s on top / A wolf in disguise eats from the flock / The revolution is televised / See it on Fox.”

Not to suggest they’re po-faced sourpusses. Big Sproxx packs his tracks with big, brassy samples, some serious scratching skills, and the five MCs have a winning chemistry that’s all too rare these days, when hip-hop groups are an endangered species and guest MCs phone in their cameos. They’re also not exclusively political; there’s a much broader emotional spectrum here than that, but that’s when they pack their biggest punches. (Feb. 6)

Download: “Separation,” “Never Give Up,” “Arizona Bay”

Fresh Snow – I (Reel Cod)

This instrumental Toronto quartet wanted to make an album inspired by the ’70s German experimental group Neu!, by recording a long jam session shortly after the band formed. So many ideas came out of that one session that engineer Tim Condon and guitarist Brad Davis slowly assembled the various motifs and sounds in the studio and sculpted them into actual songs, inviting string and wind players to enhance the melodic elements while allowing squalls of feedback and droning keyboards to inject chaos into the creation. And so this debut album by a noisy, experimental improv act is surprisingly polished. If they can extract this much from one six-hour jam, their future looks promising indeed. (Feb. 20)

Download: "Helix Pass," "Your Thirst For Magic Has Been Quenched By Death!," "To a Sea"

The New Mendicants – s/t (Ashmont)

Joe Pernice, Norman Blake and Mike Belitsky have formed a new group. To most people, this is not only not news, the names don’t even register. All are members of underappreciated bands of the last two decades: Pernice with the alt-country act the Scud Mountain Boys and folk-pop Pernice Brothers, Blake with the Scottish power-pop veterans Teenage Fanclub. Only drummer Belitsky, as the drummer in the venerable and ubiquitous Ontario favourites the Sadies, might look familiar.

Both Pernice, a Boston native, and Blake moved to Ontario for love. They recently became neighbours in Toronto, around the corner from Belitsky. (Until recently, Blake had been living in Kitchener.) Within minutes of their first kitchen session, the story goes, Pernice and Blake were booking recording dates. No wonder: their voices blend beautifully together. Comparisons to the Byrds are inevitable, but not made lightly; Pernice and Blake hit that sweet spot between English folk and California pop that few bands since the Byrds have pulled off. The music is consistently lovely; the lyrics, however, are not nearly as sunny. “You look so young at the ledge on the edge of December” doesn’t lend itself to sing-alongs on a summer day with a warm breeze. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Blake is on a roll, even though Teenage Fanclub’s output has slowed to a trickle. His last album, released in 2011 under the name Jonny, was another collaborative effort, with Euros Childs of Welsh pop weirdos Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci. It wasn’t that far removed from this album. Maybe Pernice and Blake should invite Childs into this fold to flesh out the live harmonies, and make him a Mendicant next time around. There can never be too much of a good thing. (Feb. 13) 

Download: “Cruel Annette,” “Shouting Match,” “Out of the Lime”

No - El Prado (Arts and Crafts)

For everyone who’s ever hated the band Yes, here comes hot new L.A. band No!

But seriously, folks, for everyone who wishes The National would release two new albums in the space of 12 months, here comes hot new L.A. band No. With a baritone singer and a flair for dark drama set to stadium-size alt-rock anthems, No seem tailor-made for the modern zeitgeist. That’s not their fault. They do it very well—arguably better than The National themselves; they’re certainly less narcoleptic. They should soak it up while they can. But stop them if you’ve heard all their songs before. (Feb. 20)

Download: “Monday,” “Leave the Door Wide Open,” “What’s Your Name”

Adrian Raso and Fanfare Ciocarlia – Devil’s Tale (Asphalt Tango)

I’ll admit: it’s been a while since I’ve lived in Guelph. When I was there, I knew Adrian Raso only as the guitar teacher at Guelph Music, whose fiery fingers were mostly put to work on wailing heavy metal leads (which he still does, with his rock band the Big Idea). Not my bag. What I didn’t know was that his career had blossomed to the point where he’s collaborated with Prince percussionist Sheila E. and members of the Stray Cats and Extreme. More important, I had no idea he had an acoustic side of him that revered Django Reinhardt’s style of gypsy jazz.

It’s that pursuit that led to this collaboration with arguably the best Balkan brass band in the world, the 12-piece Fanfare Ciocarlia, who hail from a remote region of Romania. They specialize in a blistering, relentless tempos and virtuosic display. It’s hard to imagine them taking a back seat to anyone, never mind a Guelph guitar teacher. It’s just as hard to imagine Raso carving out a space for himself amidst Fanfare Ciocarlia, who have played together for decades.

And yet: both camps meet here as complementary equals. Neither is here to upstage the other. Even though Raso’s fingerwork can match the brass players 16^th note for 16^th note, more importance is placed here on the actual songs and group dynamic. We know these people are all incredible; they don’t feel they have to prove it in every phrase. On the track “Spiritissimo,” Raso even makes room for another guitar hero, Rodrigo Sanchez, of Rodrigo y Gabriela, with whom he shares a similar love of metal shredding and flamenco.

Now: can someone help Raso bring Fanfare Ciocarlia to the Guelph Jazz Festival this fall? If so, that town will never be the same. (Feb. 6)

Download: “Quatro Cicci,” “Devil’s Tale,” “Spiritissimo”

Sam Roberts – Lo-Fantasy (Universal)

Sam Roberts’s breakthrough 2002 single, “Brother Down,” owed as much of its success to its stripped down, percussive arrangement as it did to its singalong hook. Roberts and his band subsequently turned toward less imaginative guitar rock, but their last release, 2011’s Collider, displayed an Afrobeat influence and more emphasis on rhythm.

Here, Roberts gets all groovy on us. Opening track “Shapeshifters” sounds like INXS on a good day; the second track, “We’re All In This Together,” recalls the Stone Roses, of all people, the 1990 sensation that hyperbolic Brits will still try and convince you redefined rock and dance music forever. (They did not.) On hand to help is British producer Youth (Killing Joke, The Verve, Paul McCartney), who told Roberts to stop clinging to ideas hashed out on his home demos; everything was ripped up and put back together in the studio, and it’s no doubt a stronger record because of it. In the midst of that creative chaos, his band never relies on lazy rock arrangements. I don’t know what they’ve all been up to in the past three years, but they’ve become versatile studio sidemen, the likes of which Daft Punk could call to take on the road with them. They’re now much more than a dime-a-dozen Canadian bar band.

Of course, Roberts is not the only Montreal rock artist to be found on the dance floor lately, and there are moments here that wouldn’t be out of place on Arcade Fire’s Reflektor. If anything, Roberts has taken the rousing anthems of Funeral and set them to a Reflektor beat in ways that even Arcade Fire themselves don’t entirely pull off. Most importantly, he’s come up with 11 tracks that comprise the best album of his career, all but guaranteed to dominate pop radio in 2014 and be road-tested in time for summer festival season. (Feb. 13) 

Download: “Metal Skin,” “Human Heat,” “Too Far”

Warpaint – s/t (Rough Trade)

It’s February. Valentine’s Day. It’s cold and miserable outside. Maybe you’re lonely. What do you need? Something that sounds like Warpaint. But not necessarily Warpaint.

Warpaint are four ladies from L.A. who were formed—on Valentine’s Day, actually—10 years ago. They’ve toured with The XX, worked with Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante, and this, their second album and first for a large indie, was produced by Flood (U2, Nine Inch Nails) and mixed by Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, Beck). While it’s—obviously—well-produced, Warpaint still sound embryonic. Granted, it’s abstract, delicate music, and owes more than a few debts to early Cat Power.

Warpaint are not great players, with the exception of drummer Stella Mozgawa, who anchors most of the more airy moments here. They effectively conjure atmosphere and texture, and when they gel, it’s seductive and satisfying (and reminiscent of the early ’90s Golden Palominos albums featuring Lori Carson, if that means anything to you). Over the course of the entire record, however, they sound not just lethargic—nothing wrong with that—but lazy. There’s a lot to love here, but not nearly enough to make you want to get out of bed. (Feb. 6)

Download: “Love is To Die,” “Disco // very,” “Son”

The Wet Secrets – Free Candy (Rawlco)

The Wet Secrets are a band from Edmonton who wear marching-band outfits, boast a mean horn section, and were favourites on CBC Radio 3 way back in 2007 with snotty pop-punk anthems like “Get Your Own Apartment” and “Grow Your Own F--king Moustache.” Seven years later, bandleader Lyle Bell is sober, less snarky and taking the group as seriously as you can take a band called the Wet Secrets. The outfits are still there, but the horns take a back seat to spacey keyboards, female backing vocals and fuzzed out guitars. Atypical for the genre, the lyrics are hardly flippant or flaccid: “I’ve seen the fire in the eyes of the darkest souls who own the night,” starts one song. The peppy “Sunshine” has a chorus that goes, “I want to die in the sunshine in the city.” Bell is experienced enough not to tolerate any ramshackle sloppiness: every drum fill and organ chord is carefully placed, without sacrificing any rock’n’roll energy. The result is one of the finest garage rock records to come out of this country in recent years. (Feb. 13) 

Download: “Nightlife,” “Animals in Disguise,” “Death of the Party”