Wilco
Myth, it has been said, is the buried part of every story. On April 23rd, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot finally emerges into the light of day, having spent the last year interred in its own cluttered mythology: a hermetic studio gestation, with the inscrutable guidance of Chicago ex-pat/kindly wizard, Jim O’Rourke; internecine squabbles; conflict and resolution with American media behemoth AOL Time Warner; the release portentously slated for September 11th, but mysteriously delayed; the indecipherable short-wave radio prophecies; and, eventually, the hero’s welcome, with the first stirrings of spring. It’s all there: the miracle birth; the unlikely hero; the, um, benevolent mentor; the primordial menace; good over evil. Joseph Campbell would be pissing himself if he weren’t dead.
The miraculous birth narrative of Wilco’s fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, is already old hat: banished from straightedge AOL Time Warner imprint Reprise on the cosmically short-sighted judgment of label executives who deemed the album a “career-ender,” Wilco streamed Yankee Hotel from its left-wing website to millions before signing with weirdo progressive AOL Time Warner imprint Nonesuch. Long is the way and hard that leads up from AOL Time Warner into the light, I guess.
But the unique circumstances of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot‘s long deliverance make for more than just pointless disc jockey chatter before spinning “Heavy Metal Drummer.” The long delay and streaming audio conspired to ensure that everyone in the world has already heard Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in part, if not in its entirety. Vast digital pre-circulation, corporate controversy, and buzz like a beard of bees have rendered all reviews afterthoughts at best.
But myth is always an afterthought, and these days, the motif I like chewing on best is, without question, that of the Unlikely Hero. Who would have predicted an album of this magnitude from Wilco? As much I love the band, the fact remains that they were together for five years before they produced anything that could stand with Uncle Tupelo’s March 16-20, 1992 or Anodyne. AM is rather forgettable, while the expansive Being There, though frequently inspired, travels on paths blazed by Tom Petty on Damn the Torpedoes, if not The Flying Burrito Brothers.
1999′s dolorous Summerteeth was exponentially more sophisticated than anything that came before it, though its heroin innuendoes, shades of domestic abuse and nocturnal homicidal impulses sat somewhat ill at ease alongside the album’s lush and infectious pop arrangements. Of course, Summerteeth was a strange and majestic, albeit dark, deviation from the alt-country genre Jeff Tweedy co-invented. But since Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, it has retroactively become more of a harbinger of things to come. Upon being pressed by the Chicago Sun-Times about abandoning alt-country, Tweedy dismissively bequeathed the old Wilco sound to Ryan Adams. And you can never go home again.
So does Yankee Hotel Foxtrot justify the controversy, delay and buzz? Everyone, I think, already knows that the answer is yes; all I can offer is “me too” and reiterate. And after half a year living with a bootleg copy, the music remains revelatory. Complex and dangerously catchy, lyrically sophisticated and provocative, noisy and somehow serene, Wilco’s aging new album is simply a masterpiece; it is equally magnificent in headphones, cars and parties. And as anyone who’s seen the mixed-bag crowd at Wilco shows knows, it will find a home in the collections of hippies, frat boys, acid-eating prep schoolers, and the record store apparatchiks of the indiocracy. No one is too good for this album; it is better than all of us.
But for all the talk of terminally hip influences– Jim O’Rourke, krautrock, and The Conet Project– Yankee Hotel Foxtrot still conjures a classic rock radio station on Fourth of July weekend. And this extends beyond the alternating Byrds/Stones/Beatles comparisons that pepper every Wilco review ever written; Yankee Hotel Foxtrot evokes Steely Dan, the Eagles, Wings, Derek & The Dominos and Traffic. The slightly disconnected, piano-led “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” is delicately laced with noise, whistles and percussive clutter, like some great grandson of “A Day in the Life.” The muted, “Kamera” strums along darkly with acoustic and electric guitars; the twittering electronics in the background don’t quite mitigate the tune’s comparability to the clever and precise (though now largely neglected) jazz-inflected blues-rock of Dire Straits’ stunning debut.
The cone-filtered and anthemic country psychedelia of “War on War” could have been jammed straight out of a hot “Bertha” at a 1973 Grateful Dead show. The violin and coked-up country lounge of “Jesus, etc.” recalls some mythical seventies in true love and cigarettes. The sharp, stuttering guitar solo that rips open “I’m the Man Who Loves You” could have come directly out of Neil Young’s hollow body electric circa Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. For all its aural depth and layering, Yankee Hotel tends to come off as earnest as yesteryear’s FM radio. Wilco gets the benefit of O’Rourke’s gift for cutting straight to the guts of every style, without the burden of his trademark contempt for the subject matter at hand.
And Tweedy seems to be coming into his own as a lyricist. I still wince when I hear him sing, “I know you don’t talk much but you’re such a good talker,” on Being There. The brooding introspection of Summerteeth made for a handful of elegant lyrics, most notably the skeletal beauty of “She’s a Jar,” where “she begs me not to miss her” returns as the stinging “she begs me not to hit her,” transforming a wistful love song into something gently bruising. But on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Tweedy becomes what I think he always was: an optimist and a romantic.
His declaration of wanting to salute “the ashes of American flags,” is less cynicism than, perhaps, the devoted liberal’s nostalgia for an honest patriotism (check out the array of properly lefty links at wilcoworld.com if you don’t believe me). “All my lies are always wishes,” he sings, “I know I would die if I could come back new.” In “Jesus, etc.,” there’s a cascading simplicity when he sings, “Tall buildings shake, voices escape, singing sad, sad songs to two chords/ Strung down your cheeks, bitter melodies turning your orbit around.” Sad, celestial and lovely. The final declaration on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is one of abiding dedication: “I’ve got reservations ’bout so many things but not about you.” There isn’t a truer word to be had.
On Summerteeth, Tweedy yowled about “speakers speaking in code” and I thought of that refrain from “I Can’t Stand It” when I first heard the words “yankee-hotel-foxtrot” uttered by the disembodied English woman on the sublimely creepy box-set of shortwave radio transmissions, The Conet Project, which is sampled sporadically throughout this record. And in a deeper, more deliberate world, perhaps we could trace that thread to unravel the secret wonder of Wilco’s new album. But I don’t think there’s any secret; and I don’t think there’s any code. 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. And why tell you? You all already knew this.
Review By Brent S. Sirota
Artist: Wilco
Album: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot [2002]
Genre: Experimental / Rock / Acoustic
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/wilco
-Track List-
1. “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” (Tweedy) – 6:57
2. “Kamera” – 3:29
3. “Radio Cure” – 5:08
4. “War on War” – 3:47
5. “Jesus, Etc.” – 3:50
6. “Ashes of American Flags” – 4:43
7. “Heavy Metal Drummer” (Tweedy) – 3:08
8. “I’m the Man Who Loves You” – 3:55
9. “Pot Kettle Black” – 4:00
10. “Poor Places” – 5:15
11. “Reservations” (Tweedy) – 7:22
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Set Your Goals
Named after CIV’s debut record, this San Francisco outfit formed in 2004 and now release their second album. They are on an extensive tour of North America until mid-November, followed by a short break and then European dates.
Two styles are very evident across ‘This Will Be The Death Of Us’, which begins with the thrash-metal title track of the same name. Reminiscent of The Offspring’s early work, it is breathless but doesn’t take your breath away and is listenable without being seducing. Along with ‘Like You To Me’ and ‘The Fallen.’ it is likely to create some energy in the mosh pit though.
The band’s other audio taste owes to the likes of Blink 182, punk-rock frat anthems such as the bouncy ‘Look Closer’ which will delight teens, but are hardly innovating. Again these tracks will get a live audience sweaty, and on ‘The few That Remain’ the band does at least convey an admirable swagger which is given a touch of glamour by the appearance of Paramore’s Hayley Williams.
It has to be noted that the record does get somewhat monotonous toward the last few numbers, while the acoustic instrumental that is ‘Arrival Notes’ has got to be one of the most ill-fitting minutes of music ever placed on an album. Still, it won’t stop the band finding their fanbase, but it’s also safe to predict they won’t become global superstars.
Review By Alex Lai
Artist: Set Your Goal
Album: This Will Be The Death Of Us [2009]
Genre: Rock / Punk / Hardcore
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/setyourgoals
-Track List-
1. this will be the death of us 3:09
2. with hoffman lenses we will see the truth 0:43
3. look closer 3:50
4. summer jam 3:05
5. like you to me 4:26
6. the fallen… 3:24
7. the few that remain 3:21
8. equals 3:23
9. gaia bleeds (make way for man) 2:52
10. flawed methods of persecution & punishment 4:09
11. arrival notes 1:08
12. our ethos: a legacy to pass on 4:34
Read MoreTry Album [Megaupload] | Set Your Goals – This Will Be The Death Of Us
Bandslam Soundtrack
Coming across like School of Rock hitting those awkward High School Musical years, Bandslam‘s soundtrack covers not just the battle of the bands that drives the film’s plot, but songs that inspire the film’s characters, as well. Though the movie stars teen pop singer/actress Aly Michalka of Aly & AJ and High School Musical‘s Vanessa Hudgens, its music leans more towards the rock side of the spectrum — classic rock, in fact: Bandslam kicks off with David Bowie‘s “Rebel Rebel,” and later touches on Nick Drake‘s yearning with “Road,” and the Velvet Underground‘s cool with “Femme Fatale” (marking the first and probably only time that Nico and Vanessa Hudgens will be in the same project). The soundtrack seems a little desperate to prove its rock-snob chops at times, but the inclusion of songs like these feels as instructive to young listeners as it does potentially reassuring to their parents. What’s more, some of the newer songs here are choices that don’t feel like product placement. Wilco‘s “What Light” fits right in with the more vintage tracks, while Shack‘s “24 Hours” is surprising as it is welcome. The album stumbles a bit when it tries to balance the time-tested songs with cuts from newer artists and the songs the fictional bands perform in the competition. None of these songs are bad, but they do make the album longer than it should be, and tracks like Seventeen Evergreen‘s “Lunar One” and the Daze‘s “Blizzard Woman Blues” are nice but not exactly necessary. The music from Bandslam‘s fictional band I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On ends up falling somewhere between School of Rock‘s heartwarming D.I.Y. vibe and High School Musical‘s glitz: Hudgens and Michalka run the gamut from “Amphetamine”‘s chugging punk-pop — which seems to be the go-to sound for teen movie bands since Josie and the Pussycats — to a cover of Jason Robert Brown‘s theatrical ballad “Someone to Fall Back On.” Bandslam tries to be and do a lot of things, and while it doesn’t always succeed, it works well enough that fans of the movie (and their parents) won’t be disappointed by the soundtrack.
Review By Heather Phares
Artist: Various
Album: Bandslam Soundtrack
Genre: Pop / Indie / Rock / Punk
-Track List-
Rebel Rebel – David Bowie
Amphetamine – I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On (Feat. Aly Michalka)
24 Hours – Shack
Where Are You Now – Honor Society
Lunar One – Seventeen Evergreen
Femme Fatale – The Velvet Underground & Nico
Twice Is Too Much – Exist
Road – Nick Drake
Someone To Fall Back On – I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On (Feat. Aly Michalka)
I Want You To Want Me – Aly Michalka
Pretend – Scott Porter And The Glory Dogs
Stuck In The Middle – The Burning Hotels
Blizzard Woman Blues – The Daze
Everything I Own – I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On (Feat. Vanessa Hudgens)
What Light – Wilco
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Rilo Kiley
It’s the prerogative and privilege of any pop act to change direction. It’s one of the things that makes pop music so exciting. But change always carries a degree of risk, and in the case of Rilo Kiley’s fourth album Under the Blacklight, it manifests a wonderful sense of irony: Under the Blacklight is Rilo Kiley’s riskiest album because it’s their album that takes the least risks.
Finding the band’s music polished to an almost blinding sheen, Blacklight is not a commercial album so much as Rilo Kiley’s conception (or misconception) of what a commercial album is. It’s their “Project Mersh”, an alternate-universe sell-out move. But beneath that surface– and Under the Blacklight is at first listen almost overwhelmingly surface– Rilo Kiley must know they’re full of shit. Either they’re utterly serious about their flirtation with the mainstream or they’re taking the piss with a wink. In both cases, the songs suffer a smothering slow death by context.
At the same time, the fun– or maybe “fun”– disc stresses how humorless and full of shit Rilo Kiley’s former indie brethren remain, scared stiff of the prospect of unabashed pop in the true please-the-masses sense. But it’s still an audacious, fascinating exploration of banality, almost to a patronizing point. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the big, straight down the middle-sounding first single is called “The Moneymaker”.
From note one, the album’s musical allusions and the references come fast and furious, and are often strikingly specific. The mock swagger of “Moneymaker”, for instance, sounds like Heart doing Foreigner’s “Juke Box Hero”, and the rest of the disc revels in similar oddball but specific collisions. The title track sounds like Aimee Mann writing a song for Mandy Moore. “Dejalo” is Rilo Kiley’s take on Miami Sound Machine. “Dreamworld” is Mirage-era Fleetwood Mac. “Smoke Detector” is Blondie by way of the Beatles. “15″ does blue-eyed soul like Dusty Springfield. And so on.
The saving grace for something so shallow is, as usual, Jenny Lewis, a strikingly direct singer and an even better lyricist. Especially following the verbose More Adventurous, she’s almost ruthlessly efficient with her words here, making the most of a few choice lines. “Smoke Detector” demonstrates nearly as many derivations and variations in meaning of the word “smoke” as there are of the word “fuck,” including “to fuck.” “I took a man back to my room,” she coos. “I was smoking him in bed/ Yeah, I was smoking in bed.”
In “Close Call” Lewis wryly observes “funny thing about money for sex/ You might get rich but you’ll die by it,” while the title track features the withering pun of an aphorism “even dead men lie in their coffins.” “15″ tracks the seduction of a wounded and vulnerable young woman, ripe like a peach and “down for almost anything.”Many of Lewis’s other character-study lyrics plum the sexual, too, not like a cop-out coy pop princess (even though someone like, say, Hilary Duff could do a fine job with the obvious cell phone metaphor of “Breakin’ Up”) but in a grown up sort of way. Or at least a distorted, corrupted, grown-up-in-L.A. sort of way.
Ah, L.A., where there’s a thrift shop on every corner, the breakfast spots bustle well into the night, the lines at clubland bathroom stalls snake to early 1980s lengths, acts get signed at karaoke bars, and the plastic surgeons know just the thing to do with all those rough edges. Forget that Rilo Kiley’s songs namedrop Brighton, New York, and Laredo: Under the Blacklight adds up to the familiar headline “California Band Makes California Album.” Were all the AOR indulgences at least tied together into a concept they might have been more easily forgiven. And were any of those lyrics a little more pointed and less generalized, like they were in the anomalously galvanizing anti-Bush protest “It’s a Hit”, they’d add up to more than just a 40-minute short story collection on tape (with incidental music).
For the relative few who really, really care, debates may rage over whether Under the Blacklight marks some sort of progress, though what’s just as likely is that Rilo Kiley’s earlier output was artificially regressive in a bid for some sort of cred. But leave that stuff to the conspiracy theorists. To be fair, most everyone would be well served giving in and enjoying Rilo Kiley’s pop for pop’s sake, smart, dumb and especially smug in equal measure. Song by song it goes down awfully easy, but be warned. The band sure cleans up well, but there’s a fair amount of guilty washing and hand-scrubbing to be done afterwards.
Review By Joshua Klein
Artist: Rilo Kelly
Album: Discography
Genre: Indie / Rock / Alternative
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/rilokiley
-Album List-
TRY ALBUM: RILO KILEY – THE EXECUTION OF ALL THINGS
TRY ALBUM: RILO KILEY – MORE ADVENTUROUS
TRY ALBUM: RILO KILEY – UNDER THE BLACKLIGHT
ALSO:
TRY ALBUM: JENNY LEWIS – RABBIT FUR COAT
TRY ALBUM: JENNY LEWIS – ACID TONGUE
TRY ALBUM: THE ELECTED – SUN, SUN, SUN
Arsonists Get All The Girls
Arsonists Get All the Girls started in 2005 as a joke and wanted to be the heavier version of Horse the Band. Horse the Band almost invented the genre Nintendocore with a hilarious keyboard and synthesizer sound in their metalcore. Besides a lot of humor they can also write catchy tunes and that’s exactly what Arsonists Get All the Girls lacks in most of the songs on ‘Portals’.
Yes, these fire-raisers can handle their instruments and come up with hot guitar riffs and funny keyboard parts. Still the breakdowns, moshparts or keyboard tunes are just cut and paste work. When this album continues you getting bored by the simple keyboard lines and also the melodic guitar riffs, especially in the 7 minute song “Portals” that’s just way too long. If you want to imitate Between the Buried and Me you should also have their song writing qualities.
No, Arsonists Get All the Girls from America is just one of the bands that jumps on the buzz Horse the Band created and although this album is already their third I can’t hear they have a sound of their own. The un-funny synthesizer sounds in for example “I Lost My Loss of Ruin” and “To Playact in Static” get on my nerves, just like the standard breakdowns do.
Review By Maurice
Artist: Arsonists Get All The Girls
Album: Portals [2009]
Genre: Hardcore / Death Metal / Experimental
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/agatg
-Track List-
01.Interdimensionary 01:24
02.The 42nd Ego 03:30
03.My Cup’s Half Empty 03:01
04.Skiff for the Suits 03:39
05.In the Empyreans 04:03
06.Saturnine 03:22
07.Violence in Fluid: Triceratops 04:01
08.Portals 07:26
09.I Lost My Loss of Ruin 02:58
10.To Playact in Static 04:50
11.Tea Time Tibbons 14:44
Read MoreTry Album [Mediafire] | Arsonists Get All The Girls – Portals
The Fray
Now that Coldplay has made the world safe again for moody piano-centric rock bands, no one has benefited quite as much as the Fray.
The Denver quartet hit the big time in a hurry with its 2005 debut, “How to Save a Life,” landing the first single, “Over My Head (Cable Car),” in the top 10 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart and on a movie soundtrack. The second single, the title track, reached No. 3 and ended up on four different TV shows, including “Scrubs” and “Grey’s Anatomy.”
That’s a lot to live up to on the band’s self-titled follow-up, released Tuesday on Epic.
The group doesn’t stray far from the template, turning in another batch of hooky mid-tempo songs that are pretty without necessarily sounding distinctive.
Many of the songs have a sweeping, cinematic quality, building from low-key openings to layers of piano, guitars and vocals stacked to the sky. It’s particularly effective on tunes like the lead track, “Syndicate,” “You Found Me” and “Where the Story Ends.” Each starts with a heart-tugging minor-key piano figure and subdued vocals from singer Isaac Slade, then soars off into Meaningful Big Rock Song territory.
The effect is poignant and dramatic in small doses, but the band turns it into a formula that loses much of its power by the end of this 43-minute album. All the same, individual songs stand on their own well enough that the Fray shouldn’t have too difficult a time duplicating the success of its multi-platinum debut.
Review By CD Review
Artist: The Fray
Album: Discography
Genre: Rock / Pop / Alternative
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/thefray
-Album List-
This Providence
“Sure As Hell” opens the album with darker more somber tones coming from an electric guitar and for a moment it looks as if the band has another trick up their sleeve. With the album either out already or close to being out songs like “That Girl’s A Trick” have already foreshadowed for most people what this record really has in store. The band was able to progress nicely from each of the previous albums but after the last self titled release it seemed if they were headed for a wannabe The Academy Is…, which I guess begs the question, who are you now?
There is no doubt that This Providence is able to craft a hook and a catchy tune without thinking twice about it, like second nature, but unlike each album before ‘Who Are You Now?’ feels really empty. It was a bit hard to put a finger on it at first but the glaring flaw with this record is how over dramatic and girl obsessed the songs have become. Starting with “Sure As Hell” and using images of God and hell to compare how much you want a girl seems to undermined the seriousness of the mood created.
“Keeping On Without You” Never really peaks into a climax but is able to do more with less. The chorus uses a clever melody relying more on sounds that actual words which is attractive and one of the first songs to pay attention to on the record. You’ll probably notice “My Beautiful Rescue” appears on this record like it did the last; and even though the new updated style fits with the record’s hipster feel it doesn’t do the original acoustic based song justice. Going back to the top of the review, the song which will probably be loved and hated the most by people will be “That Girl’s A Trick” whose melody and hooks only get stronger with each listen. Despite poking fun of it at the start, the song’s not terrible, only humorous with some of it’s lines.
Another guilty pleasure song, “Sand In Your Shoes”, has been floating around as a demo for a long time but hasn’t really been touched or changed since. The song’s nostalgic feeling line “When you’re only 18…falling in love is easy ” should pull at a few heart strings but beyond that the band just really shines when they bust out the acoustic guitars and sway back a forth a tad.
I wish it weren’t true but overall this is just a disappointing album which may seem attractive at first but will quickly fade and be little more than a distant memory when the end of the year comes and everyone is making their ‘best of the year’ lists. In the end it feels like the band is selling themselves short of their full potential, on the bight side though, it’s nothing they can’t come back from.
Review By The Album Project
Artist: This Providence
Album: Who Are You Now [2009]
Genre: Indie / Pop / Rock
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/thisprovidence
-Track List-
1. Sure As Hell 1:50
2. Letdown 3:39
3. Waste Myself 2:52
4. This Is The Real Thing 3:19
5. Keeping On Without You 3:44
6. Squeaking Wheels and White Light 2:57
7. My Beautiful Rescue (Renovated) 3:23
8. That Girl’s A Trick 3:30
9. Selfish 3:23
10. Chasing The Wind 4:10
11. Playing The Villain 3:26
12. Sand In Your Shoes 3:38
13. Somebody To Talk To 3:53
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