Record Reviews
Marriage
originally published February 1, 2006
Marriage is a duo that begs for categorization. Its music causes the listener to want to quickly define parameters simply to make it more understandable. But that’s where things get messy: Marriage fits neatly into no sub-genre of rock music. There’s nothing about the local band’s self-titled debut album that compels a listener to file it away in any order other than alphabetical.
Beginning with some feedback that sounds like a studio test-tone, Marriage starts with “The Treasure of Pleasure.” Because the vocals are incomprehensible I can only judge the music, and it’s somewhat irritating. Alternating atonal guitar picking with bottom-heavy rhythms and pitching the vocals from screeching high to guttural low makes my ears turn off pretty automatically. This pattern continues throughout the second track “Run Buddy Run.” “Ten Cent Parade” starts off with a killer rolling guitar riff that is broken up but more of the atonal note playing and broken by senseless breaks in the song and ultimately killed off by an ending of nothing but bass-note plucking.
“You Will” is a solid track that features a Melvins-style chord progression and mid-tempo rocking. This track, however, is flawed by a full one-and-a-half minute intro with echo and empty space. After the intro, though, the song rocks for only one-and-a-half minutes more.
Drummer Brent Blalock and guitarist-vocalist Josh Wootton need no other players. There’s nothing on Marriage that would have been made any better by employing a larger ensemble of players. There’s solidity to the music that perhaps is present specifically because so few folks were involved in it’s creation. Musically, Marriage reminds me very much of No Means No and Lard. This record isn’t a “difficult” listen, but it is an irritating one; its songs never really do what they seem they should, and the whole thing seems full of half-steps, each track an exercise in multi-tracking rather than songwriting. Perhaps that’s the idea. But for musicians as skilled as Blalock and Wootton, I wish they’d have had other, better ideas.
Gordon LambRecord Reviews
MGMT
originally published February 1, 2006
On its first official release, guy-on-guy karaoke power duo MGMT (formerly “The Management,” but changed due to another group’s name claim) promenades a healthy dose of campy synths and cheesy guitar riffs. In Time to Pretend, they’ve diversified their electroclash style enough that even in just six songs, the duo doesn’t sound like a one-trick pony. Sure, they’re gimmicky, but that’s what makes synth-heavy harmonizing twosomes so charming and damn fun in the first place, right? Instead, they’re expertly maintaining the balance of being edgy man-whore badasses and singing their sweetly sentimental lyrics with such heartfelt enthusiasm. And they pull it off, with disco-glorious results.
The record opens with a glowing hymn to rock stardom and weeks on the road that waxes nostalgic about the simple life at home. “I miss the boredom and the freedom and the time spent alone,” the raucous duo sings in unison, bursting at the seams with joy. This track is utterly lovable, with euphoric electrohooks and a series of yeah yeah yeahs sung with such earnestness it’ll break your heart.
“I’m playing my guitar like I own it / Yeah, you know you want to check out my components,” they tease in “Boogie Down,” a jittery lust-on-the-dance-floor ditty that’s catchy and sexy enough to make Justin Timberlake and Peaches weep with envy, and with a beat and bass that sounds like they were lifted from a jungle-themed video game.
Whether they’re feeling dark and introspective (“Indie Rokkers”), hyper-sexual or bouncy and nonsensical (as in their seminal hit “Kids”), the boys of MGMT have cleared a niche for themselves in the rowdy indie dance-pop genre and on many an iPod jockey playlist.
Ann Tuppenhut MGMT is playing at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta on Saturday, Feb. 11.Record Reviews
The Capes
originally published February 1, 2006
Cleverness is neither right or wrong - it simply is. Some people, to the chagrin of others, seem to enjoy cleverness for the sake of cleverness. As much as some cats put the cleverness down, others seem to crave endless dollops of it, dollops the market readily provides.
If you’re a person who enjoys cleverness, The Capes might be for you. The Capes play at peak cleverness 100 percent of the time. An earnest lyric never survives when it can be replaced with a witty, cynical one. Each track on Hello packs three or four fizzy hooks, any of which could easily carry a song on its own.
“What You Want” and “Carly” are, on their surfaces, campy Brit-pop, and would sound as such on new rock radio, where they (the swaggering “What You Want,” at least) will no doubt spin once or twice, in the early morning. But their cheeky humor and all-over-the-place charm rise to and exceed the call of cleverness; their unfashionable self-awareness will spoil modernist nerds for lesser contenders. There’s some icky crypto-misogyny lying around, but in this giddily misanthropic context, it’s only troublesome if you let it be.
Like Super Furry Animals, like XTC, like Blur, like Nada Surf, like a host of equally worthy acts spun five times a week on college radio and forgotten, The Capes are damned clever. The better songs on Hello may not survive in a saturated marketplace, but they’re good enough to piss off anyone who can’t chuckle at someone else’s wisecracks.
Emerson DameronRecord Reviews
The Detroit Cobras
originally published February 1, 2006
Bringing a seldom-heard amount of fire and smarts to the cover-band genre, the four-piece Detroit Cobras know a thing or two about making unabashedly fun, and absolutely hormone-drenched, rock and roll. Baby, like the releases that preceded it, presents the two-girl-two-guy powerhouse plowing through a choice stable of R&B, soul and garage rock classics.
They turn Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham’s “Slipping Around” into a fist-pumper complete with copious “hey, hey, heys.” The Allen Toussaint-penned “Mean Man” gets a cool new swagger and singer Rachel Nagy wrings more than a little bit of double entendre out of the band’s own “Hot Dog (Watch Me Eat).” Equipped with Nagy’s smoky vocals and Mary Ramirez and Steve Nawara’s twin guitar buzz, the band is pure electricity throughout. It excels particularly on the Stax/ Volt chestnut “Weak Spot” and “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand,” a caffeine-fueled rewrite of “Baby Let Me Take You Home” which has also been done up by the Kinks, Animals and Rolling Stones.
As if that weren’t enough, Baby also contains the video for “Cha-Cha Twist” as well as the Cobras’ complete 2004 import EP Seven Easy Pieces, which features guitar work by Detroit garage kingpin Greg Cartwright and a spiffy run-through of the Olympics’ campy “My Baby Loves the Secret Agent” among several others.
Michael Andrews The Detroit Cobras are playing at the 40 Watt Club on Tuesday, Feb. 14.Record Reviews
Meredith Bragg & The Terminals
originally published February 1, 2006
The Departures is a five-song EP from already prolific DC-based indie rocker Meredith Bragg that follows his recent 2005 debut, Vol 1. Again, Bragg is joined by his revolving cast backing band The Terminals (the most recent version of which has included drummer John Roth and keyboard player Brian Minter) for a brief set of songs that show the group working as a more fine tuned unit than on its first release.
The Terminals’ instrumental filling-out is readily evident on songs like “Talk Me Down,” a steady, chiming track that incorporates some buzzing cello in the background, and “Let’s Start Over,” which gradually builds around Bragg’s calm, understated vocal delivery. His keen sense of melodic structure and arrangement are also important attributes that add to the EP’s worth.
Bragg doesn’t usually seem to get in a hurry about things and his songs often take their time to unfold, both lyrically and sonically. These qualities often lead to him being grouped under the “chamber pop” subheading. The EP also provides a nice preview of what to expect from Bragg and the Terminals’ future outings.
Michael AndrewsRecord Reviews
System Of A Down
originally published February 1, 2006
System of a Down did the polite thing and split its double album into two separate, fairly short releases, and as if to erase any doubt of the doubleness, Hypnotize goes from zero to 60 in half a riff, in contrast to Mezmerize’s deliberate opening sequence; the riff itself even echoes one from its predecessor. Regrettably, this does not make for the best song, but it comes back strong with “Kill Rock ‘n’ Roll” with lyrics like “So I felt like the biggest asshole / When I killed your rock ‘n roll (Mow down the sexy people)” and continues on a strong run through the title song and “Stealing Society.”
What this sequence, along with another great sequence at the end beginning with the weird, wonderful confection “Vicinity of Obscenity” (featuring the repeated lyric “banana terra cotta pie” - very Tourette’s - and a great, albeit stiff, circa-1983 funk-soul breakdown) reveal is that Hypnotize is less poppy than Mezmerize, but only because its hooks are less over-the-top. Instead, there’s an unexpected brightness, most apparent in the title song’s main riff, which stays stubbornly major where it should go all metal-minor, and all sorts of sunny lyrical images (probably meant ironically, but still), to say nothing of Serj Tankian’s irrepressible sense of humor. System of a Down can get caught flat-footed, but Hypnotize is too well-balanced for that to be a big problem, and the bandmembers are too much the kids who can’t resist a good joke to ever be boring. Stoner gypsy metal reaches its glorious apex with Mezmerize/ Hypnotize.
Michael BarthelRecord Reviews
Kites
originally published February 1, 2006
“Analog Merzbow,
Overheated Nintendo,
Pretty folk singing.”
Noise is so difficult to quantify. Anybody with one day’s familiarity with forcing machines to make ear-rupturing, knob-twiddling screeches can slap together half an hour of passable destruction. The above haiku is nearly enough to summarize Kites’ latest full-length Peace Trials, excepting the answer to the obvious question: is it noise or is it just noise?
Overall, one-man sledgehammer Chris Kites colors inside the lines of the former. His schtick is switching from hyperventilating homemade equipment (displayed lovingly and pretentiously in the liner notes) to a minimal electric folk, strumming and singing in a surprisingly effective voice. “Something About America” is the album’s highlight and its best ambassador. Manipulated synth loops form a drifting Eastern melody for a minute or so before fading out. Electric strumming drops in with Kites’ singing, much along the lines of quieter Chameleons or Billy Bragg’s “A New England.” Opener “Flag Torn Apart” is a more insane beast. Buzzes and pureed Tetris bleeps set the table for that now-familiar shrieking squall Merzbow made famous with his 80 trillion albums. Hardcore screaming random chaos ensues.
I’ll listen to it more than 20 times, and for a noise record, that’s fairly high praise. If you enjoy verbs like hyperventilating, knob-twiddling, and ear-rupturing, well, roll down your car windows in traffic and live it up with Peace Trials.
Michael WehuntRecord Reviews
Hubcap City (From Belgium)
originally published February 1, 2006
The city of Atlanta’s rotting interior is an ornate mess where disposable gentrification grows like kudzu over the remains of old Southern decay, making it a perfect incubator for Hubcap City (From Belgium)’s derailed trains of thought. Super Local 13 traipses across the landscape with the slow and uneven pace of a black-stained engine on the brink of shaking itself to pieces. Haunted, murky and totally miasmatic are the tones that carry each song, but a sense of absurdity is always simmering somewhere below the surface.
When the groaning picks of a detuned banjo, guitar, and the rattle of chains and trash can lids in “Staircase” bleed into the deranged anti-devil rant of “Hurrah, Hurrah,” the surreal takes hold.
Bill Taft’s songwriting embraces all of the disjointed and non-critical voices of automatic writing. Truncated tales of woe intersect with alcoves of adolescent memories in “Yippie Yeah Yeah” and “Blackout.” Digesting this sort of thinking-in-tongues approach requires a suspension of logical thought processes. Like splicing the phantasmagoric qualities of William Faulkner with the playful folk stomp of Woody Guthrie, Taft effectively evokes a sweltering sense of apocalyptic and art damaged naiveté. But whereas Guthrie’s machine simply killed fascists, Hubcap City rolls like a freight train over their defiled bodies. “Seven Zebra Heads 2 Plastic Skullz” coughs with malevolence as broken rhythms lurch and rotate in lop-sided cycles.
“Snarl Baby Snarl” draws Super Local 13 to a close with a hiss and a banjo, mapping out the new weird Atlanta in the spaces between the apparatuses of industry and the Appalachian avant-garde.
Chad RadfordRecord Reviews
Anti-Social Music
originally published February 1, 2006
The most maddeningly fake thing about the American upper-middle class is its children’s lust for authenticity. Why do you think rappers talk about getting rich? Because poverty blows. You’re already rich. Don’t cannibalize the ideas of the poor. Get out of the punk squats, now. You know all that crap Mom and Dad bought you over the years? Dig it out. And make the wildest music you can with it.
If you can have nice things, don’t act as if you can’t. Have those nice things, and abuse the hell out of them.
Anti-Social Music is a rotating crew of New York musicians. It includes members of The Hold Steady, Ida and other bands that, in my unfair assessment, play insidious comfort music for dullards who get drunk once a month and spend the rest of their time boring the staplers out of their cubicles. They decided the last way for them to shock the cognoscenti was to play “punk-classical,” a highbrow Bronx cheer with John Zorn’s ambition, Wolf Eyes’ goofy aggression and, apparently, U2’s budget. They do what the punks can’t afford to do. And, when it’s good, it smokes. It packs the thrills a record can only pack when it dares to antagonize the listener.
Dozens of instruments hold up Sings the Great American Songbook, from oboe to brass to mandolin. Sometimes, you’ll get a long interval of near silence, followed by a chilling clatter or a pulverizing racket. Voices spin through, sometimes woozy, sometimes operatic. Respect is paid to Zen, Po and Salt Lake City. Others have done variations on this gimmick, but never with this combo of skill and abandon.
Take heart, rich kids. Don’t jock anyone else’s style. You have your own noise to make, and it need not suck. Let this be your lodestar.
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