Who needs vocals? Lots of people, actually. How many times have you shown someone that band with the amazing guitarist, ridiculous drum beats or funkiest bassist you’ve ever heard, only to be on the receiving end of the twisted face of disgust as the music is thrown back at you because they didn’t like the singer?
When it comes to screaming, lo-fi vocals or just plain unintelligible singing, the situation only gets worse with arguments flung around by those who like to hear the lyrics not necessarily loud, but clear:
“Screaming is for those with no talent who can’t sing.”
“They only use lo-fi to hide their inadequacies.”
“I’d probably like it if I could tell what they were saying.”
Librarians – Present Passed
Postfact Records (3/9/10)
Indie rock / Pop / Psychedelic
Like some benevolent pop overlord, Animal Collective dominated 2009 with a synth-drenched fist of genius, so it’s unsurprising that their sound has begun to seep into the diets and DNA of those who you might consider downwind of them in the musical food chain.
Merriweather Post Pavilion is Librarians’ biggest problem with their latest release, Present Passed. The considerable influence and sway that hangs over every moment clouds whatever the band are trying to create here and you’re just left thinking you’re listening to a collection of Animal Collective demos and cuts with the occasional brief foray into a mundane indie-rock vein.
The vocal and synth sounds feel like a running sprint to catch up to the flatbed psychedelic pop bandwagon of 2009 as it speeds by and, just when you think the band may have stumbled upon pastures new, they revert to their Merriweather aping in an attempt to forge a build-up, chorus or climax.
Close Your Eyes – We Will Overcome
Victory Records (2/16/10)
Pop-punk / Hardcore
The debut album by Close Your Eyes has been tagged under the sound-alike banners of Rise Against, New Found Glory and A Day to Remember, and you can hear why from the offset.
Although touted as the big hardcore release of 2010 so far, stay away if you’re expecting something gritty, edgy and, well… hard. This is “hardcore” in the current trend of beat-down, stuffed, riff-infused, heavied-up pop-punk; polished to perfection and sprinkled with chart-friendly melodies and anthemic sing-a-longs.
KiNDERGARTEN – Small
Self-released (2/10: available on iTunes)
Rock / Funk / Punk
So, apparently, KiNDERGARTEN are the “new” sound of New York, made up of equal parts Talking Heads, Television, Elvis Costello, David Bowie and Lou Reed, with a touch of Prince.
Besides Bowie and Prince, I’m not so sure. The idea that this is the “new” sound of New York when there are bands such as Yeasayer and Vampire Weekend around is just nonsense.
If I were to write this band an ingredient list it would go as follows: Tay Zonday and his “Chocolate Rain”, Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds, the standard distorted chug of a guitar swaggering through a pop song, the vocal yaps and yelps of Ziggy Stardust and the glammed-up, fabulously operatic tendencies of Queen.
So this week I finally upgraded to an iPod Touch. It’s really a nifty piece of technology, though I find the lack of continuous video playback to be a bit stifling. That said, it’s not as frustrating as having to decide what music was going to be taken off of my 4GB iPod Mini whenever I purchased something new.
I should be raving about how awesome it is to be living in the year 2007. But instead I’m lamenting one of the other purchases I made on Wednesday—Joanna Newsom’s Have One on Me.
I don’t know why I picked it up.
The Laughing Man – A Palace for Alice
Kotori Studios (2009)
Rock / Blues / Funk / Folk
I say, “fusion,” and your mind probably says, “No.”
That image of the middle-aged men in the awfully loud shirts, trying to cram as much in the way of cheesy latin pastiches and bad bebop into their sweating attempts to make a guitar weep in case it might make them look young or sexy. They do it because they can’t afford a sports car or the maintenance on a gold-digging early twenty-something. Imagine a similar looking man listening to that 27-disk super set of such music, spinning away at his air guitar because the sports car and money-related lady is out of reach and who can’t play anything past “Kum Ba Yah” on a six string. Fusion has a bad rep.
Fortunately, the world has The Laughing Man and their thirteen-track debut full of prefix- and suffix-bending fusion, but without the desperation or pretenses. Or the shirts.
Today I had my mind blown.
I was hanging out with my friend as he went to pick up his kids from school. Now since his kids are in preschool and elementary school, there’s really nothing on the radio for them to listen to. It sucks and I empathize with his plight.
I mean, this is my former roommate—my best friend, with whom I initially bonded over our admiration for The Lox. He’s from New York. He lives and breathes hip-hop, but he’s a parent, so he’s got to pay attention to what his kids are absorbing.
Anyway, I’ll toss together a random mix, burn it and throw it his way from time to time. (Incidentally, he shares his birthday with my coworker.) Sometimes I’ll make a mix of songs that I know he’s been dying to hear and other times I’ll make it a theme. Since it was has birthday, for instance, I created a Cake mix.
Emo now resides in the same social stigma bracket as an STI in a group of friends, and misspelt tattoos, all of which are awkward, cause painfully annoying yelps and squeals and make people scatter like a cloud of leprosy.
But isn’t emo the whiney great-grandson of punk?
Good old punk. Locked away in some kind of pop-culture purgatory and disallowed from resting in piece(s), instead grave-robbed and forcibly danced around like a meaty man-sized puppet. It’s dragged up as both an amusing, cringing anecdote of times gone by and a much vaunted milestone for that horrible, all encompassing term: “popular music”.
We all know punk died in 1979. Sid Vicious did a Bruce-Willis-in-Armageddon-style finale, taking out the big, bad, DIY musical asteroid with some Hollywood-sized, nuclear super-bomb: an overdose of heroin and a session of Spungen bludgeoning to avert the oncoming punk apocalypse. Ben Affleck returned to earth to marry Liv Tyler and we all got a happy ending.
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