Mogwai
The Hawk Is Howling
Matador
originally published September 10, 2008
It would be nice to discuss this sixth album by Mogwai without looking in the rearview mirror. But the Scottish band is still rocking out in an 11-year-old shadow, that of debut Young Team, still a room-shaking, genre-defining ball of tense power and beauty.
The sixth proper full-length (discounting the group’s recent film scoring), The Hawk Is Howling is an attempt to step backward into a more straightforwardly epic past. Gone, thankfully, are the vocals of the past few albums, leaving Mogwai to focus on cinematic build and release. The grade is both pass and fail. First, single “Batcat” wants to be badass and display the band’s love for metal. Metal it is, but of a cheesy Torche variety. True, Mogwai’s always had a metal tinge, but the tinge was always what kept things enjoyable. The very next track, “Danphe and the Brain,” however, is a miniaturized version of good Mogwai. The atmospheric guitar swirl as backdrop, some tasty pulsing beats and unobtrusive keyboard, all of it building to a nice small-screen climax. As on the past few records, the reliance on synths and other sparkly stuff brings things down a notch.
Mogwai simply isn’t a band with songwriting chops, and peeling away the layers of grandiose power and distortion just reveals a lackluster hit-and-miss affair. This is not a Young Team-or-nothing rant, but the first four albums induced shivers, while here the howls sound more like yawns.
Mogwai plays Variety Playhouse in Atlanta on Monday, Sept. 15.
The Fiery Furnaces
Remember
Thrill Jockey
originally published September 10, 2008
If you’ve never heard sibling-band Fiery Furnaces prior to pressing play on this release, there’s really no way to prepare you for their entrance. But, alas, such is their charm.
This collection of 51 live tracks from 2005 through the 2007 “Widow City” tour clocks in at two hours plus. The album begins with an oppressive wall of distorted bass which dissolves into applause augmented by a digital delay finally resolved by the mostly staccato carnival-like organ that propels the strange compositions throughout the album.
I once heard Fiery Furnaces described as “challengingly experimental,” and I concur, mentioning this only to disclaim that my appreciation of Remember perhaps warrants an asterisk. However, should the inquisitive investigate, they will likely feel their attention rewarded by the syncopated rhythms, delirious melodies, and stark charisma of Eleanor Friedberger’s vocals captured here.
The press kit accompanying this release went to great lengths in stating the effort the band put into reshaping these songs across the documented tours, and while listening doesn’t seem to prove or disprove this, my previous experience with their work, admittedly, has often warranted a sense of wonder as to how they remember what they did seconds ago, let alone recreate it on stage.
Nevertheless, this package remains compelling and tight throughout, and somewhat awe-inducingly so for all its superficial erraticism. They may get esoteric at times, but a healthy sense of humor and an overall conviviality provide repeated entry points throughout and, occasionally, rapture.
The Walkmen
You & Me
Gigantic
originally published September 10, 2008
Hamilton Leithauser opens his band’s excellent new album with the lyrics “It’s back to the battle today, but I wouldn’t have it any other way,” and the first track “Dónde Está la Playa” goes on to both praise the virtues of late-night dancing while acknowledging the morning-after drawbacks.
This wary fence-straddling is present not only in the lyrics on You & Me, The Walkmen’s fifth studio album, but also in the ringing guitars and shimmery, insistent cymbals of the elegiac rock songs. It’s a sound that’s both nostalgic for the early 2000s, when the band made its first big splash, yet aware that what has passed is past - and most likely unreclaimable. You & Me sounds like a band on the verge of growing up, unsure of friends with real jobs and tucked-in shirts yet out of place in that early-20s lifestyle. “You keep replaying through the days that have brought you to this place,” Leithauser sings later in the album, “What happened to you?” And the eerie whistling on “On the Water” lends the track an otherworldly, Ennio Morricone sense of otherness, while the keyboards throughout the album provide a dense backdrop for Leithauser’s pained croon.
More than anything else, You & Me provides the morning after for the boozy late-night chronicling of 2004’s Bows + Arrows, struggling against stasis while admitting that comforting sounds, surroundings and styles have a certain appeal. At 14 tracks, the album overstays its welcome, and its songs start to run together, but that’s a forgivable offense when the quality’s this high.
Windmill
Puddle City Racing Lights
Friendly Fire Recordings
originally published September 10, 2008
Distinct vocal tendencies can be polarizing. Bob Dylan (among many others) has carved out a comfortable career in music despite possessing pipes that were not polished by years of choir practice and voice coaching. And aside from the forgivable name change, the former Robert Allen Zimmerman can’t be accused of being contrived or kitschy. With that said, there are several voices in rock to which those accusations would fittingly stick…
Matthew Thomas Dillon, a British troubadour performing under the moniker Windmill, may have changed his name like Mr. Dylan - but his vocal style is more akin to Alvin (of The Chipmunks), in that the cutesy delivery becomes a grating novelty before Puddle City Racing Lights arrives at the midpoint. And like the aforementioned vermin crooner, the voice begs the question: Is he for real? It’s difficult to believe Dillon sings like this in the shower.
Piano-driven, well-produced emotional mini-epics are ripe for the picking as Windmill delivers 14 blatant break-up jams that beg another question: Do you think the relationship(s) would have lasted longer had the man possessed a more post-pubescent voice?
Not a lot of room for love-lost rock delivered with sugar-twee vocals in your life? Then seek out “Racing,” for an especially rainy and depressing lonely day and “Tokyo Moon,” for the same day - on acid.
Doug Hoekstra
Blooming Roses
Folkwit
originally published September 10, 2008
Insert lap steel and country fiddle here. One of the pitfalls of being a solo act lies in assembling a cast of musicians who don’t carry an equaled concentration of vision or emotional commitment. On Blooming Roses, author/songwriter Doug Hoekstra gathers 16 or so Nashville veterans for such a collection of unmemorable performances. Digestible, likable, and somehow mistaken for a modern day Oscar Wilde, Hoekstra’s sleepy alterna-folk ends up sounding more like a yawn than a literary escape from the mundane.
A songwriter laureate, Hoekstra has dazzled press machines at home and abroad, eliciting heavy comparisons to the Velvet Underground; all the while, Hoekstra’s mild-mannered folkscapes are lyrically trivial - contrasting rather than highlighting VU’s unabashed rawness and depictions of NYC drug culture. Although he delivers plenty of insight, Hoekstra’s counterfeit Lou Reed sounds studious, falling short of raising any existential hairs. Imaginative lyrics like “She’s bright as origami/ she blinds me like a gun” hardly hold their own weight without a poetic framework, even with the aid of clever instrumentation. Evidently, it seems the press has carelessly sold Hoekstra’s latest as high pop art like a bottle of pinot noir to an audience who may not know the difference.
The album’s drowsier moments, such as the wounded “Subway Train,” are among its strongest; still, even behind misplaced gospel vocals, the pain is hard to feel. And while Hoekstra plays equally with his devils and angels, one gets the sense that he’s reluctant to venture outside and get dirty. For now, Hoekstra’s quaint album will sound safer in well-lit city cafes.
The Dandy Warhols
…Earth to the Dandy Warhols…
World’s Fair Label Group
originally published September 10, 2008
Although much less dark than their last album, the latest outing by the Dandy Warhols is just as much of a mind trip. The kaleidoscopic space travels on this collection are simply fueled by much happier drugs. Coming back into the orbit of their anti-gravity rock swirl are salient hooks and a clear desire to party. The sheer variety demonstrated here is head-spinning, with the record’s centrifuge throwing off a quixotic spectrum of colors that rambles far and wide to encompass cloudy-headed shoegaze drifts (“Wasp in the Lotus”), planetarium soundtracks (“Musee d’Nougat”), rollicking country (“The Legend of the Last of the Outlaw Truckers AKA The Ballad of Sheriff Shorty”), Love and Rockets grooves (“Talk Radio”), and even disco-era Rolling Stones (“Welcome to the Third World”).
The best in the rainbow grab bag include the chunky, foreboding glam of “Mission Control” and the woozy revelry of “Mis Amigos.” “The World Come On” may be lean on words, but the anthem’s open-armed, globe-spanning bounce makes it the album’s choice cut.
Despite floating all over the stylistic ether, the Dandys somehow manage to land on their feet and pull it all off with élan. The memorable record may be a carnival of miscellany, but it’s a carnival nonetheless. It’s a romp of confected psychedelia that’s fun, deliciously odd, yet still accessible.
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