Casper & The Cookies
The Optimist's Club
Happy Happy Birthday To Me
originally published August 16, 2006
With their new album, Casper & the Cookies faced a dilemma. Given that they were clearly on the cusp of national visibility while still firmly rooted in the local scene (front-person Jason NeSmith has recorded many prominent Athens acts and performed as a member of Of Montreal), how could the band create something that would work in both contexts? The answer is surprising but effective: 72 percent of the new disc The Optimist's Club is a concept album about a road trip to New York, which appeals to those familiar with the band's past work for its ambition, but has enough of a hook and outsider perspective to draw in new listeners.
Said new listeners will find something that resembles Fountains of Wayne if it were an Elephant 6 band. The way this plays out is far less horrible than it sounds; it's strongly melodic but cleanly presented, with pretty and structural rather than noisy or trippy experimentation. The songs in the New York section of The Optimist's Club encourage goofy dancing, which matches the lyrical depiction of a romance's awkward beginnings. The section's leadoff song is "Kiss a Friend," evoking the expectation and loose camaraderie of a drive north with an opening fanfare and an orchestral part that vanishes seamlessly into the arrangement. You can almost feel the sun setting through your car window.
"DuChamp's Camera" ends with a field recording of Nation of Islam street preachers, capturing an outsider's fascination with the in-your-face eccentricities of New York - but also segueing thematically into "Sid from Central Park," the highlight of The Optimist's Club.
A long guitar solo ends "Hey Mr. Superstar," and we find ourselves in a much quieter, spacious mood for the rest of the album. This includes "The Optimist's Credo," an absolutely wonderful song that takes you by surprise. The drums are played freely and the vocals are repetitious and buried low. The overall effect is diffuse and snooze-inducing, but the lyrics, when you make them out, chant: "If she loves you / she'll come back." And then the music makes sense. You're supposed to feel like you're in a dream, murmuring an incantation like an invitation to hypnosis, optimism in the face of failure. It's remarkably effective.
Too bad, then, that the album's other quiet songs reveal few such treats, and that the sequencing throws us so jarringly from the get-in-and-get-out songs of the New York section to these, which can easily pass unnoticed beside a five-song run of fantastic pop-rock. NeSmith, Kay Stanton and drummer Davy Gibbs have only made 80 percent of a great album, but that's pretty good for splitting the difference.
Michael Barthel Casper & the Cookies are playing a CD release show at Little Kings on Friday, Aug. 18.Jolie Holland
Springtime Can Kill You
Anti-
originally published August 16, 2006
Springtime Can Kill You, Holland’s third release on Anti-, is a gorgeously velvet night stroll through the vagaries of love and its seasons. Holland emerged from the mid-'90s underground street folk scene, split between Austin and New Orleans, before she settled in San Francisco in 1996. There she became an indie legend by moving 150,000 copies of her first album Catalpa with no distribution ink. The scratched-record and sparse production values of prior releases are eschewed on the new record for the sake of more lush compositions and denser accompaniment, yet the sense of pure song is never absent.
Produced by labelmate Tom Waits flying under the name Lemon DuGeorge, Springtime Can Kill You echoes the piano from Closing Time or the Early Years volumes, sounding as if recorded in the same room with the same mics 30 years later. A wizened songsmith and lyricist, Holland’s real weapon is her voice, at turns a bent warble, a spooked girl in the graveyard, always an unfeigned longing beneath.
These songs display her singular virtuosic talent: her ability to bend emotions around chords that nearly contradict them, producing melody as a result. “Crush in the Ghetto” strikes whim and desire with the same blow as “the ants are crawling all over my pants as if they know where the honey is”. Built on an open-face barrelhouse piano, these songs are part lamentation, tribute, entreaty, surrender. Springtime Can Kill You is two people slow dancing under the ceiling fan, lights out, past midnight, fog rolling in.
Coy KingKaada
Music for Moviebikers
Ipecac
originally published August 16, 2006
Music for Moviebikers would be more appropriately titled something like March of the Goose, or maybe even A Waddle in the Clouds. This third offering from Norwegian sound artiste John Kaada is the invisible soundtrack to a day in the life of a downy white goose wandering aimlessly along the side streets of some tarnished European cityscape. The graying features of the world blur as each song follows the feathered protagonist with a soft-focus lens. Warm violins pluck and bow in “Smiger” and “Daily Living,” while a chorus of angelic voices coo over delicate piano lines.
In “From Here on It Got Rough” a gentle, percussive rattles slaps like webbed feet on cobblestones. “Birds of Prey” is a Morricone-esque arrangement swimming in ominous bass and plodding strings that summon both romance and something scary. Or scarier, perhaps.
Twenty-two musicians convened under Kaada’s direction for Music for Moviebikers, though their numbers are concealed in layers of drone. Putting these dreamlike qualities under the microscope, Kaada’s approach is not unlike late-19th/ early-20th century composer Eric Satie’s stylish notions of simplicity carried to extremes. The charm of the music lies in melodies that waft from melancholy to exotic to totally surreal, all with a fairytale sense of humor. And much like the elegant curves and cartoonish movements of the goose, there is nothing too slick or complex slowing down the pace, which makes Kaada’s imaginary score an elaborate work in its own right.
Chad RadfordDJ Spooky
In Fine Style: 50,000 Volts of Trojan Records
Trojan
originally published August 16, 2006
I've never quite liked DJ Spooky. Back when I was briefly into techno, he was too left field. However, when I soon fell in love with experimental music, I found him too pedestrian. His whole "illbient" sound never clicked for me. But as a compiler of classic reggae, I could see him coming up with a fantastic deejay set. He doesn't disappoint too much.
With access to the entire Trojan archives, it must be next to impossible to choose 34 cuts that follow the course of the venerable Jamaican label's long history while maintaining a flow for the reggae fan as well as the club floor. Some obvious choices are included here, such as "007 Shanty Town" by Desmond Dekker (unfortunately, not every reggae CD can feature "Israelites"), The Upsetters' "Popcorn," and "Ba Ba Boom" by the Jamaicans. I've always been less interested in late reggae a la Sly & Robbie, et al., and Spooky apparently agrees, reserving most of these two discs for the '60s and early '70s.
As solid as In Fine Style is, though, in the end it's just another of far too many best-ofs in the reggae section. After grooving through all 34 tracks, I was happy (good reggae always does that) but unimpressed. There just isn't anything that sticks out. No matter what your taste - dub, rocksteady, ska, dancehall - you can find better compilations easily.
Michael WehuntCSS
Cansei de ser Sexy
Sub Pop
originally published August 16, 2006
Oh, it's a roller-coaster ride with CSS. First you hear its great songs like "Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above" and get excited; then your hear the album and notice the other songs seem like repetitious, boring indie rock rather than funtastic electro-disco; then you hear the album was originally in Portuguese and figure that explains the repetitiousness; then you listen to the album more and notice that the boring, repetitious indie rock, while unfortunately sequenced, makes up a decided minority; and on the whole you've got quite a gem on your hands.
In sum, CSS makes music that sounds like the Scissor Sisters with a louder drummer and a zonked-out, shouty lady singing, and it's really really good. People have found all sorts of reasons to dislike the group, like the members are attractive and the only male member of the band is a co-writer on all the songs and they are a dancy Brazilian band on Sub Pop (i.e. they are bandwagonesque), but then they see the group live and they totally rock it and then it's okay, because indie rock people, present company included, are fucking morons sometimes.
Do not be one of those people. Get this album and notice how "Artbitch" is not a Yeah Yeah Yeahs rip-off, because it is cuttingly sneertastic rather than giddily over-the-top, and the songs are structured better than almost any electroclash band ever thought of, and just generally revel in the dumb-smart pop beauty of it all. Oh CSS, take me, I'm yours.
Michael BarthelMr. Lif
Mo' Mega
Definitive Jux
originally published August 16, 2006
The main thing suggested by this Mr. Lif album, released some months ago, is that music has become so atomized that if you are not a member of the target audience, you not only feel uninvited, but are in fact actively discouraged from enjoying the album. This is the only reason I can find for leading off an album with its five worst songs, including maybe the year's worst - the offensively bad "The Fries," a track actually about people dying after eating McDonald's, which is an accordion solo away from being a Weird Al song minus melody. These must be first in order to most please the Def Jux faithful, an assumption backed up by the track following "The Fries," which features verses from Aesop Rock, El-P, and absolutely no hook whatsoever.
After that, though, there's a song produced by Edan (all other songs but two are produced with tooth-gnashing inconsistency by El-P) called "Murs Iz My Manager" that's as sharp, funny and hooky as the best of De La Soul. And then there's a funny sex rap, and a sweet one! And a song for his son! It's all very human and rooted in banalities, and absolutely charming. We could talk the larger politics, but in terms of cultural politics, Mo' Mega is an album with a half each for entirely different groups, instead of one conceptual cinderblock for a particular consistency. And that's why an otherwise half-great album has been met with such resounding ambivalence.
Michael BarthelIf you are having problems with the site, or have questions or suggestions, please contact us here. Thanks!
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