“You’ve got some charm, I must admit.”
So croons Jack Tatum on “Summer Holiday”, a standout track on his latest album as Wild Nothing, Gemini. More than just a kitschy 80s sentiment, it’s a pretty good encapsulation of what this record has to offer. Tatum is a skilled enough craftsman, but his charm is in his almost religious adherence to the pop gods of the 80s, and those who have followed in their wake. If you swiped Tatum’s iPod, I can basically guarantee you’d see it dominated by The Smiths, and his favorite recent band would probably be The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, with perhaps a couple songs by The Shins. Oh yeah, and Loveless is probably on there. Come to think of it, if you want to know what kind of music Jack Tatum listens to, just listen to Gemini. It’s a nice little stylistic burrito; incorporating an array of influences that are pretty easy to trace, and resulting in a charming, if not particularly creative, forty minutes and change.
I don’t want to come down on the guy too hard, mind you. This is a really good record. Tatum is undoubtedly an extremely skilled songwriter, and Gemini is a mystifying record, with sunny hooks swirling and drenched in a hazy shoegaze blur. I’d venture to say he beats The Pains of Being Pure at Heart at their own game, in a lot of ways – the most prominent of which being that the songs are way, way better.
But if anyone tells you this is anything (significantly) more than pastiche, they’re misleading you. Like, I honestly thought I was listening to a Smiths’ record sometimes (not least during the last forty-five seconds or so of “Bored Games”). Tatum does a good job evoking Johnny Marr, but in the end, that’s really all he’s doing. Gemini beautifully reincarnates past masters, but ultimately doesn’t really bring all that much of its own to the table. To really make an impression, Tatum will have to step out of the shadow of his influences and show us his chops as an artist, not just an imitator. Because just like in the world of painting, people who can’t make it on their own forge the work of the masters. It may be a charming forgery, but it’s a forgery.
7.3 / 10.0
Some bands, you just root for. The Black Keys always sort of got stuck in the shadow of the White Stripes, simply by virtue of the fact that there were two of them and their music had a similar kind of dusty blues charm. The big difference is that the Keys are song and hook-focused, while the Stripes take Jack White’s technical chops to the bank. This difference has played out in pretty stark ways over the two bands’ careers, and I have to say I’ve been more generally interested in the artistic evolution of the Black Keys than I have by that of the White Stripes. Why? Because the Black Keys haven’t forced anything. They stayed in their comfort zone until the Danger Mouse-helmed Attack and Release. Now, on Brothers, they offer up the synthesis of their Danger Mouse influence and their unpolished, bluesy roots.
LCD Soundsystem has long been on my “Most Overrated Acts, Like, Ever” list. For all the critical acclaim James Murphy and Pat Mahoney have amassed over the past few years, I think their albums are seriously patchy, and I certainly can’t pinpoint what so many other critics say is so brilliant in their music. Sure, I like “All My Friends” as much as the next guy who doesn’t work at Pitchfork, but I think we’re being a little liberal in conferring the label of “genius” or even “cultural icon” upon the nucleus over at the DFA.
More people than I would have anticipated have asked me to elucidate my position on The National’s new album, High Violet, despite my open admission that I have a difficult time writing about them in an objective way. I decided to do it here for a couple of reasons. First, self-indulgence. Second, because High Violet is the sort of album that people need to write and read about. It’s the kind of album that deserves to be considered and reconsidered. It warrants any and all of the attention it gets, in print, conversation, or just in your headphones.
Josh Ritter is fighting a losing battle. The heavy, dated narratives of Ritter’s work should weigh his songs down. They should be trite. They should be lame. They should inspire many a hipster groan and eye roll. And this record is full of them: “The Curse”, “Folk Bloodbath”, and “Another New World” being the most prominent examples. But they won’t, save for in the most heartless of listeners. On the contrary, Josh Ritter’s new album, So Runs the World Away, explodes with pathos and skill, from the yawning orchestral feedback of “Curtains” to the joyous shuffle of “Long Shadows”.
You can always tell when pop music is Scandinavian: it’s a little dreamier, a little drearier, a little droopier, and more than a little more electronic-influenced. It’s also generally a lot warmer and less affected than American indie (and way, way, way less affected than British indie). Sweden’s The Radio Dept. aren’t bandwagon riders, though; they’re actually veterans of the Swedish pop scene. So they aren’t the latest hot export – they’ve been around the block a couple times – actually they’ve been circling the block off and on since 1995. But they use that distinctively “Scandinavian” (God, that’s probably kind of offensive, but whatever) production style as a central element of their latest record, Clinging to a Scheme. They cover a lot of stylistic ground, but everything is held together by the production.
I’ve been told that I can’t write objectively about The National. That’s probably true.
You really have to feel for the people over at Island Def Jam Music in one sense. It stands to reason that they probably thought they had a really good thing going when they found The Killers. Nobody expected much from the Sin City outfit when they first surfaced, and then critics were all over their debut like high school kids after prom. And then, in the blink of an eye, The Killers alienated basically everyone except their die-hard fans and the most stubborn of critics, and now they suck balls.
