+44

When Your Heart Stops Beating

Interscope

originally published December 20, 2006

This new project founded by Blink-182’s Travis Barker and Mark Hoppus is markedly different from the silly babypunk of their previous band. With the debut of +44, they’ve made an album of dramatic, adolescent love songs. That’s not meant to sound dismissive, though, because nearly every other song on this album is solid. Essentially, there’s a perfect EP buried somewhere in here.

The lead track “Lycanthrope” features melodic and driving guitars that open up fully in the chorus, and earnest, if somewhat restrained, vocals. The track sounds very much like a more masculine Promise Ring. “When Your Heart Stops Beating” has a ringing guitar lead similar to Buzzcocks' “Airwaves Dream." The chorus, though, is reminiscent of the dudes’ previous band and winds up weakening the track. But, y'know, old habits die hard. “155” is a wonderfully catchy, downbeat, keyboard-driven track with lyrics eerily similar to Bruce Springsteen’s “The River.”

When Your Heart Stops Beating seems to exploit every imaginable musical trend in the hopes of making a hit. On one hand, Barker and Hoppus have made a career out of being dumbasses, which make me think this album is really just a studio creation by a particularly observant producer (except that it’s self-produced). On the other hand, having fistfuls of cash made from being a dumbass means you can enter the studio confidently with the financial freedom to make whatever album you want. In the weak, modern emo tracks “Lillian” and “Weatherman,” there are some definite attempts to connect with an audience a good 10 to 15 years younger than Blink-182’s original fans, but the album also features a decent amount of thoughtful, well-executed and memorable rock and roll. Even dummies grow up.

Isis

In the Absence of Truth

Ipecac

originally published December 20, 2006

Mike Patton, the proprietor of perhaps one of the most reputable, solid metal record labels around, opens his mouth wide on this release, but for some reason I can only hear the voice of Nick Hexum. Yes, visions of the platinum-domed duckshit from 311 skank about in my brain throughout my listens to In the Absence of Truth, often with sidekick S.A. "Doug" Martinez mugging behind him. This, for starters, is a problem.

I'll be honest and say that I have not seriously listened to Aaron Turner's Isis in a few years, all the while admiring his Hydrahead Records for consistently putting out impressive (and generally well-packaged) heavy tunes. Their last record from which I could even pantomime a riff was 2001's Celestial, which was at the tail end of their period of most folks considering 'em to be less Isis and more NeurIsis. But most common knowledge regards Isis as having stepped out of Neurosis' shadow into its own spiritually attuned, methodically tribal sludge machine. However, as extreme metal, like most brands of underground music, ekes out a larger nook in the gigantic cube of lukewarm polyurethane that is the mainstream, Isis has somehow found itself aping the great creative failures of prog-metal, Tool.

While drummers and that guy from Low may disagree, it has always been my opinion that Tool is a generally ill-advised group that favors melodrama and ostentatious Guitar Center beat-offs a bit more than is stomachable. Perhaps it's a byproduct of the fact that challenging, interesting metal bands are continually falling all over their Voivod records to open for Maynard Keenan & Co. that Tool's never-ending "atmospheric" parts have become a staple of Isis' output. And while older songs like "Deconstructing Towers" were satisfyingly aggressive in their imploding insistence, Isis has regrettably embraced the more languid, flanged-out aspects of its dynamics. This places the bandmembers pretty hard on the opposite side of the prog line in the sand from their (far more creatively fruitful) breakout counterparts in Mastodon.

So, in a nutshell: Isis now basically sounds like Tool with the singer from 311. And I should stress that while this does not appeal to me, it might appeal to you, and that's fine. Because I have a snowboard I am trying to sell. Drop me a line.

Isis is playing at the 40 Watt Club on Thursday, March 8.

Sickoakes

Seawards

Type

originally published December 20, 2006

Is it wrong for me to review a record that came out eight months ago? If it is, I don't want to be right. Even I can't hear every album around its release date. I only stumbled across Swedish sextet Sickoakes a few weeks ago, and it's the first band for which I've ever scribbled such a belated review, despite the grumblings of my editor. The debut Seawards may have been around since April, but for me it's a new release, so there.

Type Records has quickly grown into one of the premier abstract music labels in the world. Even at import prices, if I see one of its records, I buy it, no questions asked. And so I was rewarded beyond my dreams with Sickoakes. The band generally follows the post-rock template, a formula that has grown tired and wrung out like a cheap rag in recent years. But from the elastic guitar notes that open "Driftwood," I was immediately captured. The word tired was nowhere near my mind for an hour. I'll go so far as to say the last post-rock band that hit me this hard was Do Make Say Think, and that was when the genre was richly fertile. Sickoakes features two horn players, so the music comes off with a bit of that group's flavor, but this album might surpass even the great Winter Hymn, Country Hymn, Secret Hymn. "Taking the Stairs Instead of the Elevator" gradually builds delayed chiming guitars for 10 minutes. But it's the combined monster of two-part "Wedding Rings and Bullets in the Same Golden Shrine" that gives the album its instant classic status. Totaling 27 minutes, it takes its time but delivers catharsis over and over and then gauzes and fades away forever.

Post-rock is awesome again, and I'll be obsessed with Seawards for a long time, and pissed it took me eight months to hear it.

Christopher Henderson

The Legend of the Oglethorpe County Ghost Truck and Other Tall Tales

Independent Release

originally published December 20, 2006

Christopher Henderson is an anomaly in the Athens music scene. He doesn’t play music for any specific audience but a specific audience will probably find him. His music - deeply American country, rock and old-time - isn’t wholly original but nevertheless is discernible by his playing and his voice. Henderson makes very few missteps on this album but the ones he does make are very obvious, at least to me. For example, the verse melody in the opening track “The Ladies Of Tonight” is, practically note-for-note, taken from Fleetwood Mac’s 1975 track “Say You Love Me.” Overall, though, Henderson has made a very pleasant album that is well played, well sequenced and a clear statement of his love of this music. The cover art, which features a wrecked and kudzu-covered police car in front of what appears to be an old feed or implement supply store speaks volumes about Old South meeting New South.

The bluesy “Sun’s Gonna Rise” is a classic take on the Christian rapture theme accompanied by a solid piano groove and gentle guitar lead. It sounds similar to John Fogerty’s “Old Man Down The Road” but only slightly so. The a cappella “Julianne Johnson” uses Leadbelly’s arrangement for the traditional song, and sounds great here, with its vocals all breathy, appropriately man-sized and heavy.

“Please Turn Around” shows a more contemporary, pop sound without any of the Nashvegas baggage that many other artists would have piled on top of it. The dirge-like “Better Day” has a gorgeous piano melody that drips with an emotive melancholy. In fact, the whole album is as sincere as it possibly could be. This is what separates Henderson from many other artists that plow this same, familiar territory. His treatment of the common language of this music is creative, deeply personal and heartfelt. Who could reasonably ask for more?

Gordon Lamb

Christopher Henderson is playing on Friday, Dec. 22 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at Little Kings as part of the weekly "Committee of Vigilance."

Chavez

Better Days Will Haunt You

Matador

originally published December 20, 2006

Neglected in its day, Chavez only existed for a few years, roughly '94 through early '97 or so. The band managed to put out a decent amount of great music, though. Better Days Will Haunt You gathers together both albums, 1995's Gone Glimmering and 1996's Ride the Fader, plus the Pentagram Ring EP and a few stray compilation tracks. As great as Chavez was, though, it still seems like an unlikely band to receive the deluxe reissue treatment.

Back when the group existed, it was hard to find people who'd admit to liking Chavez. I was a big fan, but only one other friend agreed with me; everybody else I knew outright hated the band. Those people were, and likely remain, fools, by any measure of the word. On the surface, Chavez's complexly structured, hard-edged rock and roll sounded like something that could theoretically have been heard on 99X; this was a hard-sell in the heyday of the local indie-pop movement. Even if people couldn't appreciate the band's precision and mathematical leanings, they should've recognized and respected that Chavez was still interested in melody, and considerably more so than semi-similar contemporaries like Slint or Shellac. This obscured focus on melody, as revealed by Clay Tarver's craftily intertwined guitar lines and Matt Sweeney's sedate yet impressive vocals, proves that Chavez wrote actual songs, and not just showcases for chops and skill, like, say, Don Caballero.

Anyway, Chavez was one of the finest indie-rock bands of its time, and Better Days Will Haunt You offers the proof. Beyond the 30 or so songs, the set also includes a DVD with two hilarious music videos and a home video from the band's 1995 European tour opening for Guided By Voices. The latter is fairly unnecessary, but should be of interest to fans of GBV and director Garry Marshall, who provides amusing Catskills-esque commentary on the alternate audio track.