Felt Drawings - Body
(stream/free download)
It's best to get this out of the way first: Body is an incredibly good album. Body is also an unrelentingly sad album. It details a great loss without hope anywhere on the horizon. Without a laptop in sight, sole-Felt Drawings member Dom Tiberio creates dark, industrial drones highlighted, but never brightened, with dancible synth-pop melodies. Instrumentally, the album is stuff you could dance to but never would. Over which Tiberio's frank lyricism informs the music, answering the question of why this music sounds this way. And why it has to.
It's not an unfamiliar dichotomy (see: the Smiths, the Cure, etc.), but is here taken further and is all the more intriguing for it. Body is pop music daring not to be, and uncaring where it lands. Music that is not literally hard to listen to, but music that can sober any mood. The refrain of "How is it Supposed to Be?" desperately demands "just tell me how to love / show me how it's done", before qualifying the question with the only two options left: "is it kiss and hug or is it punch and blood?" Felt Drawings is high stakes music. Everything or nothing.
There is a lot to love here on Body, but it is going to hurt. And if you are going in, understand you will have to play by some uncomfortable rules. If you put nothing in, nothing is going to come out.
As with life, as with love.
Yuck - s/t
Yuck's self-titled debut is the answer to the question of what it would have sounded like if the band that practiced twice a week in your neighbor's garage back in 1995 had been any good. It's pretty cleat these sounds of the 1990s are something artists find themselves longing for. A decade with tastes and innovations more scattered than united in any one way.
In 2009 Japandroids' Post-Nothing delightfully helped to fill a void that had existed since Pavement disbanded. Last year, Surfer Blood's outstanding debut Astrocoast captured a lot of the things Weezer did on the Blue Album. But it's this Yuck album, in 2011, that manages to decode whatever it was that made rock music in the 90s so loved. It's music that isn't only informed by, but speaks to a period of time ten years passed. This time, the music is not as a reaction to whatever it was happening in the late 1980s, but whatever is happening in the late 2000s (and what that is, I'm not sure anyone knows yet).
Beyond all that, Yuck has made an album of good songs. The album opens with back to back hard rockers and from there covers just about all the ground you'd expect. Things slow down on ""Shook Down", become beautiful on "Suicide Policeman", and eventually distort beyond recognition on Rubber, the album's slowburning conclusion.
Dirty Beaches - Badlands
As Dirty Beaches, sole member Alex Zhang Hungtai, channels the spirit of the 1950s pop utterly. He works inside the ghostly, vague memory of a decade that has gone more or less unacknowledged in the current collective pop music conscious. We nod to Elvis, sure, but contemporary pop music history starts with the Beatles. Many of these sounds are taken directly as Hungtai borrows from a variety of samples and standard melodies. The whole thing sounds like it was bootlegged onto tape by a motorcycle passenger, tuning their radio into some nonexistent copy album. And going seventy miles per hour.
Badlands is frustrating and difficult to understand contextually, but not particularly difficult to listen to and to like. It sounds nothing like anything else happening in music today, but borrows so heavily from its inspirations it creates a bit of a conundrum. Is listening to Hungtai lay down ghostly vocals over a 2 bar sample of Françoise Hardy's "Voilá" worth listening to? And if it is, is it worth attention, praise?
Probably. Because what sounds unimpressive on paper ultimately kind of works. Badlands sounds unlike anything else happening in music today, a phenomenon given weight by the fact that the 1950s have been so widely passed over for so long. With a carefully managed, but effortless—and when you play these songs side by side with the source material, the sensation of low effort is uncomfortably apparent—aesthetic, Badlands is an album worth of attention. If only to have an opinion on it, which is to have an opinion on what music created like this means.
As for praise, lack thereof, or condemnation, you'll have to call this one for yourself.
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