Best New Rock Albums of 2008, part 2
##11-20
Palmer, singer of Dresden Dolls, is still very recognizable here, and at times this could be a DD CD, yet somehow the difference is strong, with this collaboration with Ben Folds (who produces) more rocking and modern in tone and also much denser instrumentally, with a lot in the mix (including East Bay Ray of Dead Kennedys on guitar). There’s still a fair amount of irony in the lyrics, but with the music friendlier and less arch, I suspect many rock fans will prefer this to Dresden Dolls.
While the band’s style has changed since 1993’s great Postcards from the Arctic, Mitch Friedland’s plaintive vocals, wistful lyrics, and appealing acoustic guitar all ensure that this is a triumphant return. The thick layers of effects-heavy guitar overdubs that made their earlier albums so shoegazy in tone are largely replaced here by keyboards, string arrangements, even a trumpet solo (though, never fear, there are still such early ‘90s-ish sounds as heard on “Anew”). The result, at times resembling the mellower end of the British psychedelic spectrum, is more acoustic in timbre and more pastoral and ruminative in attitude. And, yes, Big Takeover publisher Jack Rabid drums throughout and takes a vocal, and, yes, I interact with Friedland a lot at Sound Fix, but this album is where it is on my list purely on merit.
This is really saying something, I know, but this might be Mark Kozelek’s greatest album. Its low-key country rock didn’t reach out and grab me immediately, but – drawn in as always by his warm voice – I eventually fell in love with every single jangling track.
Wilderness continues to not repeat itself. This Baltimore band’s third album was written for the Whitney Biennial. Moving at a very deliberate pace, (K)no(w)here merges art rock, drone, stoner beats, and post-punk textures in a style that’s practically avant-garde. Despite being divided into eight tracks, there are not breaks; it’s one long composition (41 minutes) built around timbres. When the surface of the music offers such compelling sounds, the simplest figures – say, the alternation of two sparse chords – can be a hook. Nobody else has reimagined the basics of rock so drastically or so well in a long time.
This two-CD package presents the same material run together on disc 1 and banded on disc 2. The album title could be taken, in Orwellian “some are more equal than others” fashion, to indicate Brian Eno’s primacy in this endeavor. Robert Fripp’s guitar comes to the fore on a minority of the tracks, and this disc is more murkily ambient than the pair’s groundbreaking 1970s LPs. I mean “murkily” in a purely descriptive, non-pejorative sense; on many tracks, one can imagine one is floating in amniotic fluid with the sounds filtering through an intervening body. Some tracks are purely beautiful (“Timean Sparkles”); others have a sinister undercurrent to their spaceyness. There are only a few rhythmically defined pieces among the 13 titles; “Tripoli 2020” and “The Idea of Decline” have insistently syncopated beats, and the closing “Cross Crisis in Lust Storm” (with Trey Gunn added) is joltingly industrial. The only reviews I’ve seen of Beyond Even were negative; I think if it had been released under just Eno’s name, without expectations of guitar heroics, it would’ve been more happily received.
Ribot goes rock with his new power trio, so fans who’ve wanted more screaming guitar from him get their wish. After a brilliantly revamped punked-up cover of “Break on Through,” Ribot jets through – put “warped” in front of each following genre description – harmolodic funk, R&B, soundscape-accompanying-spoken-word (“When We Were Young and We Were Freaks,” spectacularly beautiful in its mix of calm undulations and skronk guitar), semi-electro counterpoint devolving into freakout then mutating into rock, a quietly beautiful instrumental ballad, another quiet ballad with a slight reggae tinge, Latinized disco-rock, a funny Beck parody, and so on. So there’s a degree of musical whiplash involved, but all tied together by his sparkling guitar work.
It was a six-year wait between Notwist albums, practically a generation in pop music terms, so it’s not surprising that there have been some changes. Nothing that alters the trio’s core values, though: insistent yet gentle beats, like mellow Neu updated for indie-rock; friendly, unpretentious vocals; an immediately identifiable mix of electronic production and song structures, sometimes with jangly guitars, sometimes without. The changes are largely in their array of sounds, much wider on some tracks thanks to collaboration with The Andromeda Mega Express Orchestra and a few other guests. Often beautiful, always addictive, The Devil, You + Me was worth the wait.
Oneida has added more variety to its sound in recent years but here pares back to basics. That said, it’s still a bit of a change from previous albums as this is the closest they’ve yet gotten to pure Krautrock. Most of the record is instrumental, and what singing there is comes on the most basic level both musically and lyrically. (The motorik feel is deceptive, though, as it comes not from the drums, which actually vary the rhythm quite intriguingly, but from the other instruments.) It’s as though they stepped back, evaluated themselves, and decided, “This is what we do best, this is what we enjoy most in our music, and now we’ll do it better than ever.” The result is pure exhilaration.
This was my favorite obscure discovery of the year (at least, it wasn’t until 2008 that it made its way across the Atlantic): a septet from Stockholm, Sweden that I can’t help comparing to Explosions in the Sky – although only on this CD, as the music on their MySpace page can be much proggier and synth-based or much more built around vocals. There are occasionally vocals on Scars & Souvenirs, but buried in the mix, they seem less verbal and more another instrumental texture along with the electronically textured trumpet, throbbing bass, shimmering synthesizer, and billowing waves of guitars. When their momentum builds and the drummer smashes out his juggernaut beats, it’s spectacularly majestic.
With just Mark Eitzel and Vudi surviving from the original lineup, and with the latter mellower than in the past, this might as well be an Eitzel solo album, but that’s a fine thing as well. The mood is largely contemplative (though Eitzel still gets off some zinger lyrics), with lots of fingerpicking acoustic guitar in the foreground and lush overdubbing. For a peppy change of pace there’s “All The Lost Souls Welcome You to San Francisco,” kicked off by electric piano chords and propelled by snare hits. Most haunting, despite its surface snarkiness, is “The Windows on the World,” chronicling a recent yet lost era of New York, and with some foggily snarling electric guitar squalls building until they take over and end it. These are atypical, though, and quiet character studies dominate, yet are so compelling that the album never bogs down.
