It’s pretty damn hard to dislike Spoon. Over the years, they have come to epitomize cool, they craft imminently infectious music, and have been remarkably consistent over the course of their career – certainly more so than other bands who rose to prominence around the same time as them (ahem, Death Cab). What’s more important, they haven’t traded mainstream appeal for artistic integrity, or at least I don’t think they did. Their music has always been genuine, their albums fresh and familiar at the same time.
It starts with sassy jazz chords pounded out on the ivories and Spoon’s by now signature rhythm guitar. The piano is the anchor that keeps the song steady, but the rest of the arrangement – at least in the first verse – is strikingly improvisatory, before falling more into a routine by the first chorus. The production is still Jim Eno, so there’s nothing particularly new to speak of there; unlike Chris Walla with Death Cab, he doesn’t seem compelled to reinvent the wheel on every. damn. album. Daniel’s vocal delivery is sharp and his melodic impulses more daring than anywhere on Spoon’s excellent last record, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.
Truthfully, this doesn’t rank up there with Spoon’s best work, which is to say that it isn’t positively ass-kickingly fantastic, but it’s still really damn good, and will absolutely warrant repeated listens. And most importantly, it bodes well for Spoon’s upcoming album Transference, which is set to drop on 19 January via Merge.
4.0 / 5.0
It might be hasty to say that The Strokes are, at least as far as iconography is concerned, the Bruce Springsteen or the Rolling Stones of this generation. That is, they are our generation’s image of rock and roll as a genre. Or at least they’re my image of rock and roll as a genre. From their appearance to their general demeanor to their style to their stubborn rejection of anything with keys, they exemplify all the rock star stereotypes I grew up thinking I’d never see first-hand. And it doesn’t really sound as though I’m alone in my thinking about this band; the words “Lower East Side” and “leather jacket” emerge persistently in conversations about The Strokes. They have become something less and something more than a band: they are, at the same time, caricatures and symbols. It’s sometimes tough to tell the difference.
You could make a pretty strong case for the statement that The Temper Trap might have been better off if they had remained decidedly off the map. Like, they could have released this album, Conditions, and it would have been embraced by their fans and maybe even by a few other people. Sure, they’d probably get all starry-eyed when they thought about the prospect of worldwide fame, but still; they would have been undeniably successful, albeit on a smaller scale.
Not much surprises me these days. We live in a time in which people are willing to give an hour of their day to watch the Kardashian sisters be useless. A time in which the man who killed John Lennon gets more conjugal visits in prison than I do in the real world. A time when nice guys never get the girl, and good girls always seem to go bad. In a world like that, what could conceivably be surprising? Well, I’ve been surprised by Rain Machine. If you had told me a month ago that this record would not just be bad – but boring – I would have told you to get out of town or get on some medication. But I’m sitting here, even as I write this, surprised. Rain Machine’s eponymous debut is not just bad, but it’s probably the most uncompromisingly boring record I’ve heard all year.
Alex Brown Church is not a household name, but I think that’s due to change. Over the past few years, he’s been pretty prolific, but has still somehow managed to go either completely unnoticed or completely underappreciated by most consumers and critical outlets alike. For some, he’s not gritty enough; his music, they say, is too even in temperament, too restrained. And while it’s true that Sea Wolf’s music is not emotionally aggressive, his debut was marked by the impression that just beneath the calm surface of the music, there was a deep reservoir of emotion and doubt simmering.
Nick Thorburn is on a mission. It’s not a new mission, and it’s not a secret mission. On the contrary, it’s a very public that has been occupying most of his time since he fronted the now-defunct Unicorns. The mission, which you may or may not have read about in interviews with Thorburn, is to write the perfect pop song. He’s been working steadily for more than a few years now, honing his songwriting and, perhaps more notably, his production instincts. Until now, Islands have produced two solid-but-not-fantastic albums in 2006’s Return to the Sea and the 2008 follow-up, Arm’s Way.
The 2000s have been kind of a weird decade for music. Lots of bands emerged, and the lists of influences are getting more and more pretentious and esoteric. Everyone’s jockeying for position in the race for the strangest, most unique sound. Bands both new and old have emerged placing more emphasis on sounding new than on sounding good. For all the great things about music today, and as heartened as I am for the potential that the next decade brings (especially compared to where we were heading into this decade), I can’t help but lament what seems to be a willful shift away from convention – change for change’s sake.
