The Smashing Pumpkins – If All Goes Wrong [DVD]
Coming Home Media (11/11/08)
Unrated
271 minutes

’90s acts have never been able to handle their own popularity. From the extreme example of Kurt Cobain’s suicide to the whimpering out of Soundgarden, Clinton-era bands that rode the alternative bubble until it burst could never seem to get comfortable with the idea that they appealed to a mass audience; and that some of the people in that audience might be the same people that used to beat them up in high school. This happened because the underground (or college) scene in the ’80s that spawned some of the ’90s most popular bands was an “us vs. them” reaction to the bloated Reagan-era commercialism and lowest-common-denominator pandering that defined the popular hair-metal scene at the time.

Odd, then, that Smashing Pumpkins would fall in that same category.

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Eagles of Death Metal – Heart On
Downtown Records (10/28/08)
Rock

Eagles of Death Metal are Jesse “Boots Electric” Hughes and, moonlighting from Queens of the Stone Age, Josh “Baby Duck” Homme. And Eagles of Death Metal are rock, bottled. Take a little ’70s strut-groove cock rock, mix it with some ’80s style hedonism, and you’ve got EoDM in your glass. EoDM are so gloriously sleazy, in fact, that they qualify as not just music but a connoisseur’s wine list of trash. Each song on Heart On, actually, is akin to a specific blend of debauchery:

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Cold War Kids – Loyalty to Loyalty
Downtown Records (9/23/08)
Indie rock / Blues-rock

“We were yelling our heads off / Now I’m surrounded by snow”.
—”Avalanche in B”, on Cold War Kids’ new album Loyalty to Loyalty

I guess so. I don’t think an album has been this influenced by the booger sugar since Young Jeezy’s last. I remember, the first time I heard Cold War Kids’ excellent “Hang Me Out to Dry”, thinking that they sounded like at any second they might lose the rhythm and devolve into some ponderous, off-key Radiohead-worship. That they continue to hold onto that steadily bouncing groove throughout the track and match it with a loose Bono-ish warble is part of what made them the apple of every blogger’s eye for about 5 minutes.

The hype clearly got to the Cold War Kids’ heads while recording Loyalty to Loyalty, and it got there through their nostrils. Thing is, while at a lot of times this record indulges in melodramatic id-unleashing atonal cocaine-casualty caterwaul, it doesn’t completely drop the plot. At its best moments, the album has a sinister vibe that loses you in the dark headspace of the hour past closing time, when the buzz just starts to turn and the streets are almost, but not quite, empty.

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Jenny Lewis – Acid Tongue
Warner Bros. (9/23/08)
Indie rock

With 2006’s Rabbit Fur Coat, Rilo Kiley frontwoman Jenny Lewis wowed critics and shocked fans by releasing an album of sparse, beautiful and haunting songs in the style of classic country and soul. That record showed her stepping out of the shadow of Rilo Kiley collaborator/ex-boyfriend Blake Sennett and crafting a piece of art that took some of the best melodic and lyrical elements of Rilo Kiley’s best songs and stripped away any layers of hipster irony and guard to make one of the most touching albums of our generation.

On her new solo record, Acid Tounge, Lewis steps confidently into her solo role. This record genre-hops more than Rabbit Fur Coat (and almost as much as Rilo Kiley’s excellent Under The Blacklight, from last year), but it keeps itself rooted in the country and soul of the ’60s and ’70s. Jenny Lewis has the kind of character in her voice for which any Idol contestant couldn’t begin to hope; no one recording these days strikes such a fine balance between delicate and powerful.

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What’s good, Whitey? I see Love, War, and the Ghost of Whitey Ford just dropped on Sept. 23. Swingin’ for the fences on this one, huh? What I always dug about your stuff is you ain’t afraid to get serious, talk about some real shit that has some real emotion behind it.

This one though? Bro, it’s one thing to talk about homeless dudes and chicks gettin’ abortions; you’re gettin’ biblical on this record. I’m gonna lay it out for you, Everlast. What people liked about your solo work was that it was stripped down, gritty, raw and acoustic. I’ll give you some credit for tryin’ to spread your wings a little, but this album is overproduced and it just doesn’t work for your style of songwriting. Everything is slick and studio polished, but you lost the soul that your best stuff was about. I’m gonna be straight with you, son—this one is gonna sink like a stone (and what’s up with you and the word “stone” anyway? “Stone In My Hand”, “Throw a Stone”, “Letters Home from the Garden of Stone” all on one record?).

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OPM – Golden State of Mind
Suburban Noize (9/2/08)
Reggae (Dub / Ska) / Alternative / Rap

It seems strange to say that a group of tattooed white boys could play reggae and be genuine, but sincerity is the name of OPM’s game. On Golden State of Mind, these guys make absolutely no pose for what they are. They spin yarns about partying and smoking weed over island grooves informed by punk and hip-hop, under a blanket of skin art and skater chic gear—they’re like understudies to Kottonmouth Kings.

The idiom in which a group like OPM could thrive probably died out in 2000 or so, but the band seems genuinely unconcerned with fitting into the current skurban-emo zeitgeist. They’re unapologetic mooks, but the catch is, they have a grasp on melody and mood to which the average stoner-frat douchebags can’t even aspire. Very few artists (American or Jamaican) who take their cues from reggae have swung as hard for the fences as OPM do on Golden State of Mind.

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Unwritten Law – Live and Lawless [CD/DVD]
Suburban Noize (9/30/08)
Rock / Alternative / Pop-punk

Unwritten Law have staked their claim for most of their careers through touring. They were known in the early ’90s as tour dogs, they’re Warped vets, and after their single “Seein’ Red” hit in 2002, they gained a large tweenie-bopper audience when they opened for Pink. While a lot of bands fall into the Frampton Comes Alive trap and make a live record that is sprawling and ponderous, UL keeps the pace and energy sprightly on Live and Lawless. Live records have been making a renaissance in the last few years, due to the fact that digital technology can solve all the problems for which live records (and especially live punk records) used to be known. This is certainly one for the die-hards, but a neophyte to Unwritten Law can see what all the fuss is about.

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Of the summer’s two comedy juggernauts, Pineapple Express was clearly going to be the one with the bitchin’ soundtrack. Judd Apatow’s films aren’t necessarily known for their soundtrack awesomeness in the way that, say, a Tarantino film would be, but he and his people have good taste and usually throw in some surprises (I’ll always remember the giddy feeling I first got at hearing “Solid” by The Dandy Warhols as the theme song for Undeclared).

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Zebrahead – Phoenix
Icon Records (8/5/08)
Punk / Rapcore / Metalcore

Zebrahead are one of those bands that have always existed on the fringes of the music biz and never transcended into true artists. If they have any die-hard corps of fans, they either exist overseas or are more committed in theory than in practice. Is this because they aren’t talented? Because they aren’t original? Because their band members aren’t pinup material? No, on all counts. They’re just one of those bands that suffers from their success.

They’ve consistently kept their albums reviewed in magazines, they’ve gone out with Warped Tour and played all over Europe and Japan, amongst other places. Zebrahead are a typical fledgling rock band, as opposed to a typical independent rock band. If they didn’t have the minor amount of label success and marketing-mix business strategies of every typical also-ran band, they might have actually built a little more street cred and become at least minimally as popular as their spiritual brethren Sum 41, Good Charlotte or CKY. As it is, they just straddle a crappy fence on which to be stuck: lacking the panache needed to make them radio-stratosphere successful, but too much of a product for the indie kids.

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ism – Urgency
STM Records (8/5/08)
Rock / Alternative / Electronic

I knew it would happen eventually. Around 2001, when the garage-rock renaissance came roaring in as a reaction to the hyper-technologized sounds of nu-metal, rock fans were in a tizzy over the idea that rock was getting back to basics; ditching all the techno and hip-hop affectations and bashing out a few chords in a garage, like it used to be. In the last few years, we’ve seen that it was really just the impotent meathead aggression that needed to recede. Bands like The Killers and The Bravery have brought back the melodic qualities of great songwriting that got lost when everyone decided to let their computers do the thinking; but they augmented it with an intelligent and carefully meted-out use of technology.

Now, ism has come along and brought the whole thing full circle. Urgency has all the hallmarks of indie-rock simplicity but it is fully integrated with electronica, and it avoids being gimmicky or feeling welded on. Looking at the apocalyptic black-helicopter album cover (which, incidentally, is my early vote for favorite album cover of the year) and seeing the punctuated band name, I was ready to hear a slice of Reznor-derivative tech-rock. What I didn’t expect was to hear some genuine melody, which Urgency has by the pantload.

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