This follow-up is just as nasty but much more involved: where the debut was sharp, terse and loud as fuck, Field Recordings is sprawling, massive, and loud as fuck.
On Sea Change, Beck sounds intentionally world-weary, but it's the songs themselves that sound labored. Is it no longer enough for Beck to write profound, genre-bending tunes that stand on their own? Does he really need the crutch of suffocating overproduction and bold strokes of orchestration to shock us into caring again?
Bailey's ability to let the song go where the improvisation takes it-- while resisting the temptation to veer completely off course-- is the mark of a true artist, and Ballads is a fine entryway to the appreciation of Bailey's art.
Each listen is deeply satisfying. Haunt Me is not a shift in paradigm, but it does explore this particular sound with taste and invention, and I wouldn't hesitate to place it on the top tier of current abstract electronic music.
But despite its standout moments, the repetition of the album's central lyric and the relative lack of innovation in contrast to Ágætis byrjun can't deliver on such claims, and ( ) simply winds up a decent follow-up from a band who has already proven themselves capable of much, much more.
Once you push the politics of it aside, Under Construction's a good record with some incredibly sick production work.
Blacklisted's accompaniment is roundly excellent and evocative, but Case's voice is what really sells the record.
Most of Mclusky Do Dallas holds this pace, but infectiously poppy songwriting always girds the extreme elements. This works to keep the mood varied, as the band stretches out barbed-wire guitar lines like the one on "Collagen Rock", or follows the easy stride and sudden fits of a song like "Alan is a Cowboy Killer".
There's no reason Breakdown couldn't put Hot Hot Heat on the national stage-- the band's accessible enough on top of their inventiveness to be a feminine facial structure or two away from superstardom.
Given the fact that it does, eventually, manage to overcome the horrific-sounding concept of British hip-hop, it seems pretty reasonable to give it a recommendation. Bloody good show, I say.
With One Beat, Sleater-Kinney have turned in an album that absolutely, positively OBLITERATES the gender card, an album so colossal that all prefixes to the label 'rock band' must be immediately discarded.
Journalistic integrity aside, it gives me great pleasure to be able to like a new Sonic Youth album without having to force it, and to finally give their back catalog a nice, long rest. You can bet your hat there's gonna be Jeremies who say Murray Street isn't far-out enough, and Ericas who would prefer the band kept things under four minutes, but a whole lot of in-between folk are going to be pleased as punch with the results.
A decade into their career, the Notwist have created a masterpiece by pulling the same trick they pulled on Shrink: mixing things that might not seem to fit together into a beautiful, seamless whole.
This record is an adventure in starkness, beyond Girls Can Tell even while evoking some of that album's finest moments.
The pleasure to be had from Thought for Food has nothing to do with musical referencing. This modest and unusual album stands on its own as a quiet triumph-- one unlike anything I've ever heard before.
Dense, beautiful, intricate, haunting, explosive, and dangerous, this is everything rock music aspires to be: intense, incredible songs arranged perfectly and performed with skill and passion. Source Tags and Codes will take you in, rip you to shreds, piece you together, lick your wounds clean, and send you back into the world with a concurrent sense of loss and hope. And you will never, ever be the same.
Beneath the great story of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, there are all the tropes and symbols and coincidences of a little mythology; but under that is a fantastic rock record.
Turn On the Bright Lights has been one of the most strikingly passionate records I've heard this year. That other people I've spoken with have the opportunity to experience it, and that they feel similarly about it, can only be a good thing.