TMT :: Album Review Samples

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 has always been high stakes music. Everything or nothing. Now more than ever.

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.

The Mountain Goats - All Eternal's Deck

This is not a twist in the vein of Mount Eerie's Black Wooden Ceiling Opening. It is not exactly the unexpected black metal record that the All Eternal's Deck art, title, and super legitimate, super hyped production credits might suggest. Those hopes and assumptions were dissipated after a listen to the album's first single, album opener, and slow burner "Damn These Vampires". It sounded like a good Mountain Goats song but not much like something anyone would call metal.

If the inscrutable hype/power of death and thrash metal is anywhere to be found here, it's not too obvious. All Eternal's Deck will not destroy your speakers (but as always, your mileage may vary regarding damage done to your heart. Oh, ho ho.). It's not an affront to the music of dad rock dads. Really, the album doesn't even make much of a mess. The most brutal moments don't borrow from Morbid Angel-producer Erik Rutan, but certainly hold their own against anything else John Darnielle has done post-boombox. The fury of "Estate Sale Sign" can run with Heretic Pride explosion "Sax Rohmner #1", while the slightly quieter "Prowl Great Cain" scalds a lot like "No Children".

The occasional twists in approach that pepper Mountain Goats albums are easier to spot but harder to conceive of. "High Hawk Season" brings in some barbershop harmonies, "For Charles Bronson" is a song Darnielle could have written and recorded at any point in his career, while "Never Quite Free" could have never come before now. The imbalance is strange, but ultimately it works both because Darnielle is Darnielle: someone with inexhaustible talents as a songwriter, and an ear for things that work for him and never against.

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.

Buck 65 - 20 Odd Years

Buck 65 has been hard to deal with for a while.

And 20 Odd Years more or less solidifies the unfortunate trend that Buck 65 is just...a whole lot better when someone else is handling production duties. 2009's Bike for Three! collaboration with Belgian producer Greetings from Tuskan found the whiskey-rasping MC sounding more competent than he ever did on 2007's "Situation".

Something about rapping over his own work brings out the worst in Buck. He constantly defeats his concepts with completely cringe-inducing lines. Had opener "Superstars Don't Love" been handled by someone else, maybe we wouldn't have to uncomfortably shift in our chairs as "rural China" gets rhymed with "girl's vagina". Sigh.

The rule--for better or for worse--holds here with 20 Odd Years, an album that collects four limited edition EPs released months apart last year celebrating Buck 65's twenty (!) years recording. For better, because Buck sees 20 years time as a cause for celebration and has invited a lot of friends along. This is where things get good. Really good, actually. Nick Thorburn's work on "Gee Wiz" goes beyond his floaty vocal on the song's hook. On "Stop", Hannah Georgas delivers a pop chorus that completely dominates the rest of the song on its own merits.

Yeah, there are missteps so bad they are unforgivable. It's so hard to deal with solo-Buck on "Zombie Delight" when it's surrounded by great collaborative efforts. It's unfortunate to have to pick apart these outings when whisperings of a second Bike for Three! album are heard on the horizon.

TMT :: Live Review Sample

This was the last of three Yoni Wolf solo shows three shows taking place in Philadelphia's First Unitarian Church this weekend, all three with opening support from Frances Quinlan of Hop Along. The space is small, not more than ten rows of pews, each seating three comfortably. The bands set up maybe four feet away from the first row. The extraordinarily intimate setting matched the purpose of the event perfectly And favorably eliminated both a crowd and the need for anyone to stand.

More with aesthetics: It was odd, seeing Yoni at his most put together. His hair showing no signs of the unruly curls that have pervaded WHY? promotional images since the cLOUDDEAD days; instead it is slicked respectably with product. His fairly characteristic mustache sits natural on has face, looking absolutely unnovel. It's the look of a man who might have things together: the same one who posted a picture to facebook of himself signing on first house a week ago..

But his words betrayed him, in the way they've made WHY?'s career doing. Dense, intricate internal rhymes characteristic of earlier WHY? material were matched by some powerful (and powerfully sad, chill-inducing) refrains. On the only item being sold at the merch table--a limited edition screen print--was written the phrase "I know with no uncertainty that I'm uncertain and I don't know." The line was the foundation for a chorus of a song in the middle of the set. Brutally effective, I felt myself wanting to sing along without knowing the words to sing. This question of "ok, but where next?" ran throughout the set, informing nearly all eight of the new songs.

With only two players, arrangements were unexpectedly sparse. Yoni mostly perched at a church piano that had fallen slightly out of tune, Josiah alternating between guitar and bass while operating a bass drum simultaneously. The songs were played with lots of thumping low end, drums keeping time layered with funk-inspired bass lines. Maybe rap-like, maybe not.

As mentioned above, the set (below, with some annotations, including fragments of lyrics so proper titles can be attached once these things have proper titles) was almost entirely comprised of new WHY? material composed between 2007 and now, to be recorded for the next WHY? record in May and June 2011. Stressed online, and again a song or two into the set, a strict rule against any recording was in place. And understandably so, but it's a bit of a bummer that no one will be able to hear these songs again for a few months. Or maybe more than a few, depending.

The hype is hard to handle, especially with the final product farther away than any of us would like. Doing this sort of trial tour so early is the makings for a tough, frustrating wait. In context, it's the highest compliment I can give the band as they and Snake return to the studio with completely new material for the first time in years.

Good luck, godspeed, etc etc. We're waiting to be blown away.