Thrice
Thrice began as a band with little grandeur or focused style, a band in an Identity Crisis. Quick, distorted guitar riffs and the screams of Dustin Kensrue filled small clubs around the United States, and fans filled small bars to hear the hardcore staples “Deadbolt“ and “A Subtle Dagger.”
However, with the release of their fourth album, Vheissu , the band saw a heavy change in style. This would cause a near-riot of Thrice fans, who felt as though they were losing the Southern California act they loved so dearly. With the heavy inclusion of more electronically-produced beats, keyboard parts, and sing-along style anthems, the band had found a new sound that was more in line with Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief, and much less in line with hardcore bands such as Glassjaw and Chiodos.
The band would soon embark on an even larger and more epic collection of tunes known as The Alchemy Index. The four discs the band put out between 2007-2008 would find the group musically describing the four elements and would stretch the band’s melodic hardcore to its limits.
With new release Beggars, the band has done a much better job of combining the pop punk of The Artist in the Ambulance with the lyrically-improved songwriting of The Alchemy Index, not to mention the musical tricks the band has picked up along the way.
Songs like lead single “All the World is Mad” and “Talk Through Glass” are the heaviest you will find musically on the album. Bassist Eddie Breckenridge and drummer Riley Breckenridge carry the tracks, while Kensrue and guitarist Teppei Teranishi deliver wonderfully executed pieces of the puzzle. This style doesn’t push anything the band has done in the past, but it certainly doesn’t do anything to degrade the mountain the band has built, either.
Thrice finds the true sweet spot here with slower tracks like “Circles” and “Wood and Wire”. Both feature a style that stays consistent for most of the song before eventually building to a crescendo that could have allowed for the songs to be extended, but instead only leads to the next track. On “Circles”, Kensrue speaks of setting “sail with no fixed star in sight” and “driving by Braille in candlelight”; however, the band sounds as tight and focused here as anywhere else on Beggars.
“Circles” goes into the strongest and catchiest track on the disc, “Doublespeak”, which stands alone here with no other track being its musical equal. The keyboard heavy track is by no means light. The very dark sounds of the song match the words, with Kensrue begging, “Honey if you think you’ve seen a crime, won’t you look the other way?”
Though it doesn’t feel like the band has made the type of leap that’s occurred on previous albums, where exactly is there to go after a fire, water, earth, and wind double-album release? When you have an answer, be sure to mail ‘em. In light of that, Thrice has found a great middle ground that serves them well, and one that’s kept them relevant without losing the ability to create what they desire.
Review By Bruce Matlock
Artist: Thrice
Album: Beggars[2009]
Genre: Experimental / Rock
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/thrice
-Track List-
1. All The World Is Mad
2. The Weight
3. Circles
4. Doublespeak
5. In Exile
6. At The Last
7. Wood & Wire
8. Talking Through Glass
9. The Great Exchange
10. Beggars
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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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
Secondsmile
Two years after first making waves in the UK alternative scene, Dorset’s very own Secondsmile now return to make an even bigger splash with the follow-up to 2006’s ‘Walk Into The Light And Reach For The Sky’, aptly titled ‘Years’. Despite being the time elapsed between the two releases, the title could also allude to the musical progression, real or perceived, that the band has made in that time as well as the effort put into this album.
‘Years’ certainly sounds huge, a feat accomplished partly with the help of veteran producer Andrew Schneider (Cave In, Two Gallants) and the mastering skills of equally renowned Greg Calbi (Ramones, Sonic Youth, Mogwai…) during the band’s stay in New York. But credit also has to go to the band members themselves, raking the cash together for the trip and making the most out of their stay. The opening track ‘Smokestacks’ for example, is a wide-screen but low-key crawler of a song, building up beautifully from the kick drum beats in the intro to a tornado of spotlessly clean guitars and poignant vocals courtesy of an in-form Ross Smithwick. By contrast, ‘Stars Away’, with its dodgy beat and harp-like guitars is very reminiscent of BSM-labelmates This Town Needs Guns, whose Dan Adams in fact provided trumpets for the song.
Having moved on from the slightly messy post-rock of their debut album, Secondsmile have audibly put a lot of thought into how to streamline their songs while keeping that intricate, edgy feel. Judging from the fascinatingly dense but frail, thickly layered but permeable sound of the record, they have succeeded. The only detrimental point that could be made about ‘Years’ is that it atmospheric but not necessarily melodic, and at 50 minutes can be a bit testing. However, repeated and attentive listening will bring out the best in this album, a release that everyone involved with can and should be proud of.
Review By Noizemakesenemies.co.uk
Artist: Secondsmile
Album: Years [2008]
Genre: Indie, Rock, Experimental
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/secondsmile
-Track List-
1. Smokestacks
2. Long Road Home
3. Tell Me A Story
4. Years
5. Goodnight, Sleep Tight
6. Stars Away
7. Everything And All That’s In Between
8. Aspen Fears
9. Halfman
10. The Burning Heart And The Dragon Tattoo
11. Soundtrack To Your Life
12. To The Sea
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Hermit Thrushes
Slight Fountain occupies a dubious middle ground. It’s a pop album that leans heavily on the kind of queasy, off-kilter melodies and unpredictable chord progressions championed by David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors, but it arranges those elements into a collection of songs infinitely more accessible than anything off The Getty Address or Rise Above. While I have a lot of respect for Longstreth and the madman stuff he does with melody, the group doesn’t — at the risk of unironically echoing Stephen Colbert — speak to my gut. In a way, the (comparatively) straightforward nature of singer/songwriter Yianni Kourmadas’s compositions exacerbates my feeling of disconnection with his take on DP’s aesthetic. He, in essence, appropriates a style of music I already find emotionally alienating and further strips away much of its headiness and complexity. He does what Longstreth does, only not quite as well.
This is not to say that there aren’t interesting things happening from song to song. Take “Snowflake Heart” as an example. It opens with the halting thump of the bass drum, pounding in time with an awkward progression of acoustic guitar chords and a staccato vocal harmony in falsetto. Then, all the backing elements drop away at the verse, leaving Kourmadas to sing over a bare-bones guitar accompaniment. Following the chorus, the guitar is joined by the bass and drum, with the addition of a ringing trumpet. It’s as pure an example of Hermit Thrush’s ambitious song dynamics as I could hope to find.
Unfortunately, the pleasures gained from such excursions feel largely academic. This is due, in no small part, to Kourmadas’s total non-presence as a singer. He offers a breathy, muttered vocal performance reminiscent of Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum, if Elverum didn’t really give a shit about what he was singing. The lyrics themselves don’t do much to help the situation. On the page, they read like especially cryptic haiku. Yet for all of their mysteriousness, the songs conjure little in the way of evocative or memorable imagery.
For as many risks as Hermit Thrushes take, I can’t help but walk away from Slight Fountain thinking that I’ve heard it before. Maybe the band would be better off exploring more conventional melodies. The most vital-sounding and memorable track on the album for me is “Ceci,” a song that relies less on peculiar sounds or jarring melodic shifts and more on instrumental interplay and subtle changes in tempo. It sounds almost like a late-90s Built to Spill composition condensed to its most essential elements. This song, at least, sounds like a song and not merely an intellectual exercise. And if “Ceci” is less ambitious than the rest of Slight Fountain, consider this: the song is no more derivative than anything else Hermit Thrushes have to offer this time around.
Review By TinyMixTapes
Artist: Hermit Thrushes
Album: Silent Fountain [2009]
Genre: Thrash / Folk / Experimental
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/hermitthrushes
-Track List-
1. An Oil Fruit
2. Snowflake Heart
3. Ceci
4. Push
5. Golden Wounds
6. Broken Adze
7. Song From Boat
8. Black Cat
9. Older Trees
10. Headless
11. Found House
12. Gooseneck
13. Perla
14. A Good Dream
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