Every once in a while, there's a record that is so good and makes me so happy, I find it virtually impossible to write a review of it. There's all this pressure to somehow convey in the space of a hundred or so words how goddamn good a record is. To convince YOU that this record will move you as much as it did me. So I hem and haw and write all my other reviews around it until I have no choice but to face my fear and go for it. So here it is. The new record by Florida's Poison The Well. Up until now, I've been a fan, and definitely enjoyed their records. But 'Tear From The Red' is such a colossal leap from their last record. Ostensibly a 'metalcore' record, it manages to encompass so much more: rock, emo, hardcore, death metal, even pop. The heavy parts, even when the vocals are howled, are somehow as catchy and heart wrenching as any Get Up Kids weeper, if not more so. And then when PtW -do- go for it, and break it down and get all mellow and sweet and emotional it's just devastating. And the playing on this record is so phenomenal. The riffs are so thick and huge they just smack you upside the head, but you just kind of bob along, oblivious, banging your head and spitting out teeth and letting this wave of furious emotion watch over you. The songs shift from crunching near-death metal, to wild free-metal, to stuttering stop-start rhythms, to spacy almost Voi Vod-ish melodies, and dreamy shoegazey bliss out parts. Halfway through the record they break out with just vocals and acoustic guitar, but the melody is so odd, and the voice is so impassioned and the chord progression is so unexpected that it ends up being just as intense as any of the heavy stuff, and not cheesy at all. And track three! What can I say? If you could wear out a track from playing a cd too much, I would definitely need a new one by now. Track three has the absolutely most punishing part of almost any song I have ever heard, where the kick drums, guitars, and bass all stutter then stop, over and over. Huge and unbelievably heavy. I was listening to it in my housemate's truck, and when that part came on I had to turn up the stereo so loud that I could SEE the beat making little waves in the rear view mirror. We have been getting a little worn out on this whole metalcore explosion, but Poison The Well have stepped up to the plate with not only one of the best metalcore records ever, not just one of the best emo records ever, but one of the best records I have heard in a long time. Period.
The last Poison The Well record was easily the best metalcore record, if not one of the best plain ol' METAL records, of last year. And this new one seems poised to repeat the feat! This is PtW's major label debut, taking the plunge, that years ago meant risking losing your core audience to cries of 'Sell out!' but now just means that we may be seeing Poison The Well on MTV and who can argue with that. It's getting tougher and tougher to describe metalcore, my thesaurus is worn away to the size of a matchbook. Yes, this is pummelling, crushing, brutal, punishing, the guitars are downtuned, thunderous riffs, and howled shrieks and furious double kick drumming and relentless rhythms and all that. So yeah, it's HEAVY. But Poison The Well write amazing songs. Every riff, every lyric, every melody, no matter how unlikely, is a part that you will find yourself humming to yourself days later. Incorporating the often problematic, clean vocals and melodic emo breakdowns more deftly than most into their overall sound, PtW drag you kicking and screaming on a rollar coaster of extreme dynamics, lush production and gorgeous catchy pop swathed in metallic brutality. The melodic parts, of which there seem to be a lot more this time around, owing more to their progress as songwriters methinks than their major label leap, are as soaring and captivating, as catchy and heart wrenching as anything the Get Up Kids or Reggie And The Full Effect could come up with on their best days. And so much less cloying, nestled the way they are, all snug and warm between a row of amps on 11 and a swirling, writhing moshpit. This definitely hits the metal spot, but pushes all our emo buttons and satisfies our pop sweet tooth at the same time. At first I didn't like this nearly as much as their last full length, but the more I listen, the more I am completely baffled and knocked out by how much more advanced this record is than its predecessor, so complex and varied, full of hooks, labyrinthine arrangements, beautiful melodies, sheer face-melting metal, gorgeous soulful vocals, lush, layered instrumentation, throat shredding demonic screeches and bizarre but subtle production. This definitely raises the bar impossibly high. It's about time!
Over the last several years it seems the instrumental rock(ish) records can easily be filed in distinct sections. There are the proggy spazzed out offerings, angular math rock that's still being played to death, epic quiet loud quiet GYBE! worship, Chicago post-rock, folktronica, etc. etc. Something so nice about hearing a new outing from a band we always feel has slipped under the radar and whose take on instrumental rock feels really refreshing right now. Polar Goldie Cats have put out some great records on Up as well as Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace. They play songs that are subtle and brimming with just the right amount of suspense and tension. Like later era-Unwound there is a darkness with melody which go so nice hand in hand. In fact it got us thinking a lot of some of our favorite bands sans vocals like Quixotic, Blonde Redhead, Helium and Sonic Youth. While there was for sure a moment in time when this sound was all around, lately we haven't been hearing much like this and we have to say this has totally hit the spot.
LA's Polar Goldie Cats continue their instrumental post-rock explorations on this new Up platter. Their Nels Cline-produced debut had faded into the mists of history, but lo and behold here they are with another album. A nice surprise actually.
Los Angeles instrumental band's first full-length. Endorsed by Thurston Moore, what does this tell you? Hmmm. Reminds us of a cuddlier, more linear Thinking Fellers.
Sometimes the world does indeed seem like a surprisingly small place. Years back, we were email penpals with a guy in England, who drummed for a killer mathy post rock band called Polaris. We exchanged records, and dug the shit out of the Polaris stuff we heard. Eventually we sort of lost touch, but would often wonder what happened to our friend, and wonder what had happened to the band, who as far as we were concerned should have been way more popular than they were.�
Well, years later, we get a random email from a label looking to get their records into the shop, and lo and behold, right there on the list is a record from a band called Polaris. It couldn't be. Could it? But indeed it was, recorded in 2004, this most recent release (their last?) from UK math rockers Polaris is like a modern take on nineties math rock. A little dreamier and more melodic and a little less raw then we remember, but still so good. Channeling the sound of Polvo, Pitchblende, Archers Of Loaf, Rodan and the like. Spidery minor key melodies, angular riffage, complex mathy drumming, lots of start stop arrangements, super dynamic, with long brooding stretches of loping melancholy groove, giving way to brief squalls of soft crunch, moody Tortoise like meandering, occasional bits of metallic buzz, gorgeous swells of dramatic Slint-isms, weary drawled vocals, all woven into long flowing post rock soundscapes. We sometimes forget how great stuff like this sounds. Hardly any bands make music like this anymore, and even the modern math rock and post rock bands who do have a totally different vibe than back in the day. The cool thing is, while Polaris definitely sound like they were transported here from 1995, they manage to update the sound, making it their own, somehow prettier and dronier, the vibe woozy and dreamy as well as propulsive and tightly (un)wound. So good. Several songs in, we were smitten, totally transported, captivated. It seems impossible but it doesn't sound dated at all, even though it's so reminiscent of the nineties, a testament to the bands skills and chops. Absolutely recommended, especially to folks who miss the math and the post in their rock.
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Pole's first album was released on the Berlin electronica label Kiff SM to immediate critical acclaim. Extending Oval's ability to control chaos, Pole manipulated the granular synthesis that made listening to Chain Reaction records more than just another techno single, within the contexts of dub schizophrenia. Just as Lee 'Scratch' Perry reprocessed tape hiss through EQ and excessive reverb, Pole reprocessed the Chain Reaction sound into dynamic skittering dirty blips and huge dubbed out thundercracks of drum kicks.
Pole's first album has just been released in America in conjunction with his second album, an even more skeletal and more Jamaican sounding variant of the first, through Matador, whose editorial selection in licensing electronica has so far been exemplary!
Between 1998 and 2000, Stefan Betke released three albums as Pole, producing some of the most influential electronica of that era. Emerging from Berlin where he worked as an engineer under Robert Henke (aka Monolake), Betke proposed a fragmented post-techno aesthetic that broke from the Chain Reaction sound which had been so prominent in Berlin at that time. Essentially, he reassessed one of the major influences upon Chain Reaction, that being Lee Perry, furthering the ghost in the machine echo and tape hiss accumulation, but through a novel digital synthesis upon a handful of malfunctioning electronic modules. Here, dynamic skittering blips, pinpricks of digital errata, and a perpetual cloud of simulated vinyl static fluttered amongst sporadic yet dubbed out thundercracks of drum kicks and a constant thrumb of digi-dub basslines. When Pole's first album came out (simply designated 1), no one was doing anything close to this; even Vladislav Delay's abstracted electro-dub had yet to be formed. By his second album (just called 2), the night-time digidub structures of Pole sharpened in focus, and the fragments of post-acid bleep and his static-cling grains of sound snapped in place against the dub. Melodies flickered in the distant space well behind the throbbing bass and crackling small noises, often times sounding eerily prescient of what Kode 9 and Burial would transmogrify into dubstep nearly a decade later. His third album (yup, it's 3) had become self-aware of the impact that Pole was having upon the global electronic scene, with the downbeat rhythmic stabs and delay-impacted sounds having been more aerosolized but no less convoluted. These three records are clearly the best work that Betke has produced, and they are now back in print as a triple cd set. Oh yeah, 4 bonus tracks. We like that.
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Pole's first album was released on the Berlin electronica label Kiff SM to immediate critical acclaim. Extending Oval's ability to control chaos, Pole manipulated the granular synthesis that made listening to Chain Reaction records more than just another techno single, within the contexts of dub schizophrenia. Just as Lee 'Scratch' Perry reprocessed tape hiss through EQ and excessive reverb, Pole reprocessed the Chain Reaction sound into dynamic skittering dirty blips and huge dubbed out thundercracks of drum kicks.
Pole's first album has just been released in America in conjunction with his second album, an even more skeletal and more Jamaican sounding variant of the first, through Matador, whose editorial selection in licensing electronica has so far been exemplary!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Stefan Betke's newest album of austere, German "pop & click" dub. Still quite beautiful but, like Oval, this release doesn't break any new ground the first two had already broken. If those weren't enough for you, pick this one up. (The biggest change is probably the cover art... This time it's all yellow and has a number 3 on it.)
In keeping true to Pole's self-referential titles, "R" is the re-issue of his first single "Raum" along with a handful of reworkings of the tracks off of that single and some remixes by Pole's associates, Burnt Friedman and Kit Clayton. While the original "Raum" tracks featured his signature style of skeletal digi-dub, constructed out of faux-PiL basslines, tinker-toy
Two tracks, one - "Zwei" - off the album and one - "Eins" - exclusive to this 12".
If memory serves us correctly, the previous Pole album (which was the eponymous 2003 release) was a complete dud, as it ventured into clunky jazz tropes that didn't meld with Pole's murky dubbed electronica. Steingarten arrives four years later; and while it's a vast improvement upon that aforementioned album, it can't be said that this is a 'return to form' necessarily. No, the days of druggy Chain Reactive soundscapes are gone for Pole. Stefan Betke (the German artist behind the Pole moniker) still sees the merit in bringing an organic ethos to digital produced electronica, and frosts his downtempo breakbeats with acoustic basslines, playful vibraphones, and fizzing psychedelic guitar noise, all of which have been sampled and framed tightly into place. If this sounds like a digitized version of early Tortoise or a more tight-laced Fridge recording, that's because it does.
First we've heard from this French instrumental math / post / noise rock combo, and holy shit, these guys push all our musical buttons, channeling the spirit of Polvo and Pitchblende, all droned out atonal guitars and wild mathy rhythms, mesmerizingly hypnotic metallic grooves and soaring layered sonic sprawls, the perfect post / math rock hybrid, fusing loping super melodic mesmer with gnarled dense near metal crush, but somehow managing the near impossible, making all of this weird mathiness insanely catchy, the sort of rare band that can conjure up swirling intricate landscapes of chugging and churning and soaring and droning, all manner of shimmer and crunch, pummel and pound, into something that you may find yourself humming hours later. Fans of outfits like Psychic Paramount, Dazzling Killmen, Laddio Bolocko, Phleg Camp, Don Caballero, Bastro, Breadwinner, Drive Like Jehu, Rodan and the like will flip. A new favorite band for sure!
It's been ages since we'd heard from these French math/noise/post rockers, but thankfully very little has changed in their sound world, still trafficking in a style of music woefully underrepresented these days as far as we're concerned. We'd still cite the same list of bands we did in our review of their first cd-r: Dazzling Killmen, Don Caballero, Bastro, Breadwinner, Rodan, Drive Like Jehu, Laddio Bolocko, you get the drift. Each song here is dizzying in its scope, sometimes locking into tense tightly wound grooves, other times obliterating structure entirely, the guitars churning and chugging, jagged and sharp, flitting easily from chiming melody to skull caving bombast, before unexpectedly unfurling weird bent notes, or strange detuned melodies, the drums don't hold everything together so much as make it even more frenzied, a constant cascade of wild, loose limbed fills, sometimes even slipping into total blastbeats, the guitars following along, the instruments doing some wild dance, lurching and stumbling, leaping and swaggering between styles and sounds, but somehow, the whole goddamn thing holds together like some musical math problem made flesh. It's short too, just 4 songs, but they cram as much into these 4 songs as most other math rock bands manage in their whole life span. Super limited too, and we get them direct from the band in Europe, so when we run out, it might take us a while to get more.
The Finnish avant-classical duo of pianist Eva Polgar and visual artist Sandor Valy are back with a brilliant postmodern musical reimagining of one of the oldest surviving pieces of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh. This is the duo's third collaboration together and unlike the first two, The Bruegel Variations and The Mondrian Variations, where the scores were defined by visual elements found in the paintings of Breugel and Mondrian respectively, Gilgamesh was conceptualized in a completely different way. The Epic of Gilgamesh was an epic poem from Mesopotamia dating back to the 18th century BC, and chronicles the mythic life and adventures of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk and his companion Enkidu, a wild man created by the gods to distract Gilgamesh from oppressing his people. Together they fight monstrous mountain guardians, giant bulls, battle jealous Ishtar, and in the end after Enkidu's violent death, the story chronicles Gilgamesh's desperate search for Immortality and the meaning of life beyond death. The epic was originally discovered carved on twelve stone tablets, and here lovingly reproduced as 12 QRC codes (when scanned, each brings up part of the poem), the duo of Polgar and Valy have created a 12 part musical piece that doesn't seek to illustrate the text as much as to compartmentalize the story into the moods of its integrated characters and the ancient civilization they inhabited. Valy began creating key melody lines for each part which Polgar would elaborate on then give back to him and slowly, through an exchange of female and male composed tropes echoing the back and forth male and female interchanges of Gilgamesh and Ishtar, the piece came to fruition. Gilgamesh finds in itself a companion to their earlier work, in the duo's penchant for minimalist composition and complex rhythmic structures, this time adding instrumentation of clarinets and violins, zithers, kettle drums and chaotic horns to the fray, channeling not only Philip Glass, but John Zorn at times as well. Epic indeed!
Using visual artworks as a means of musical composition often sounds better in theory than in practice. Take the recent book and cd of Baudouin de Jaer's solo violin interpretations of the musical motifs in Adolf Wolfli's cosmological drawings where the audible results were less dazzling than the images would suggest. But not so in this latest experiment from conceptual composers Eve Polgar and Sandor Valy who turn the nonrepresentational paintings of Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian into beautifully vibrant minimalist scores. Mondrian, who started out as a representational painter, became increasingly interested in a process of reduction from nature into essential forms that soon evolved away from any overt natural reference. Most famous for his painting of bold black lines on white grounds and geometric forms in primary colors, and their perhaps musically influenced titles (Broadway Boogie Woogie!), it's not hard to see a correlation of sound and vision in his work.
There is an interesting booklet that comes in the slipcase with this, detailing the process of how the pieces were composed to which paintings, where we also learned that this is not the first time the composers have worked in this manner. They previously worked out scores based on paintings by Breugel and there are cool pictures of how they designed scores based on how the orientation of the heads of peasants in Breugel's paintings followed a kind of musical order. Would like to see how that turned out musically, but getting back to the Mondrian Variations, the music starts out with repetitive solo piano figures that have a simple but idiosyncratic repetitive quality with sudden pauses that seem to follow a precise structure. With each composition, we're introduced to something new sonically through computer programs and samplers: an organ, pitched string modulations, then some minimal percussive rhythms until the pieces grow more epic in scope with choral like sounds, vocal counting of the odd tempos and blocks of interweaving rhythms. Of course, the musical corollary of this is Steve Reich and Philip Glass, but the music feels somehow different as if Polgar and Valy were reaching the same place through a completely different approach. Regardless of the process, the music is engaging and a delight to listen to. An extraordinary release on Circle's Ektro label that comes highly recommended! Please note: these cds have cardboard slipcases that arrived in somewhat less than pristine condition due to shipping, so persnickety collector types be warned. And, like most Ektro titles, these aren't limited but might take a longer time to restock, once we're out, since they come all the way from Finland.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Been searching for more projects from the members of the wonderful Pastels? Well, if you've already gotten a hold of the International Airport cd starring Ms. Aggi, this could very well be the twangy, sweet lil' addition to your collection that you've been seeking.
Hard-rockin' and sometimes jazzy progressive rock from Argentina, recorded in Buenos Aires in 1977. A four piece, guitar/bass/drums and the requisite assortment of keyboard instruments, including mellotron. Includes bonus tracks not on original LP. Lots of emotion and instrumental flash: psych-style guitar heroics, piano jammin', latin percussion, etc.
You might already be familiar with the PVCs from their own albums or their recordings with fellow Bloodshot-er Kelly Hogan. They are, by the way, an alt-country supergroup whose membership includes the Waco Bros' Jon Langford and Steve Goulding, Tom Ray of
Hey, here's a new pop album from Uncle Bob!
He may have laid his Fading Captain label series to rest, but Robert Pollard ain't shutting down any time soon! He can't be stopped, and Merge Records is helping to ensure that with not one but two new albums at once! The label has suggested the age-old Beatles vs Stones debate as a fitting differentiation point between the two faces of Pollard's current double whammy -- that is, a poppy one and a harder edged rock one. Coast To Coast Carpet Of Love is the former, and the one we favor of the two (psst, the other is Standard Gargoyle Decisions). Lots of jangly guitars, lots of peppy energy. Pollard's releases are seldom so clearly sorted and defined. We can usually count on some element of bee-in-his-bonnet randomness, but not so this time. And you know what? As much as we've always loved and appreciated his devil may care approach, it's really a pleasure to hear a relatively even keeled sixteen songs in a row. That's the case with this here album.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Man, it's about time this guy put something new out! Ha-Ha. We couldn't resist, but as anyone who has been paying any attention knows, Pollard has been putting out records almost every other day it feels like after he pulled the plug on the late great Guided By Voices. The post GBV records aren't all great, but they aren't all bad either. Most fall somewhere right in between, crammed with so many songs there's always bound to be a few classic Pollard winners, most often set amidst a whole bunch of less rememberable moments. More and more his songs have a very '70s era vibe (reminding us of The Who) and some of us thought this even ventures into Dire Straits or Peter Gabriel territory. Which makes sense when you think about it, because on classic rock radio of the future there better be lots of Robert Pollard in rotation. Bigtime Pollard fans/completists will want this, but not totally essential for everyone / anyone else.
Ack, the word "CAMELTOE" surfaces without warning in the song "It's Only Natural" But wait! Please don't let that dissuade you from checking out this new Robert Pollard solo release. Yup, GBV / Pollard completists you probably already knew... he's gone and done it again! Cranked out another full length to add to his already bulging body of work. Geez, you'll soon be needing a dedicated shelving unit (if you don't already!). With such profuse musical output, you can imagine there might be some hits and some misses in the bunch, and there certainly have been. That said though, we're happy to report that this falls in the former category. Perhaps his most cohesive collection of songs in recent memory, this album alone is pretty darn jam-packed unto itself with a total of fourteen songs. It's an even balance between his more rambunctious obtuse tunes and what are perhaps his most wistfully reflective jangly numbers. His Fiction Man partner in crime was Todd Tobias who handled the lion's share of the instrument playin' as well as recordin' and producin'. For those keeping track, this is #30 in the Fading Captain Series.
In his first post GBV solo record Mr. Pollard shows no signs of letting up..at all! 26 new songs that run the range of the legacy of song writing that Pollard has displayed over the years. What's really nice is the timelessness that continues to be displayed in his songs. If you heard this playing you could think that maybe some of this was really early GBV songs that you never heard before. The cd starts on fire with 3 of the best Pollard penned songs we've heard in a while. If you've been feeling overwhelmed the onslaught of his releases this is one to jump back in with for sure. You get the raw lo-fi side of him as well as the more made for stadium fist in the air rockers as well. While we think that maybe folks like Ryan Adams don't need to be releasing as many records as they are, Robert Pollard can keep churning out the releases as long as he'd like and chances are we're gonna like what he comes out with.
It's hard to say what exactly a new Robert Pollard record means at this point. We'd imagine it means something dramatically different to different people. To fans, i.e. fanatics, who at this point most likely have thousands of Pollard penned songs in their collection, it simply means more songs. Which is not a bad thing at all. And if you're one of those people who makes arguments like "Do I really need everything by that band?" or "Do I really need another record by so-and-so?", well odds are, you're probably not a GBV fan, and heck, you're probably not an aQ list subscriber either. So for most folks, having 3 or 4 Guided By Voices records is probably enough Pollard to last them a lifetime. Which is perfectly fine on the one hand, but on the other, with a body of THOUSANDS of songs, limiting yourself to just a handful, you'll miss out on some amazing tracks. Spoken like a serious music nerd. But then this IS the aQ new arrivals list, and presumably, you too ARE a crazy music obsessive, and have more records than you can listen to, and tend to buy everything by the bands you love, and in that case, then we can happily tell you, that this is in fact another collection of killer songs from one of our favorite modern songwriters, and while it may be a 'solo' record, it sounds a lot like the most recent GBV records, which again is not a bad thing at all. The 'band' here is a duo, but they kick up a pretty good din, with a decent high fidelity production, and some crazy catchy songs, as well as the usual weird little experimental passages. And like all Pollard/GBV records, the sound is all over the place, jangly British invasion style jangle one second, murky super distorted dirgery the next, bombastic and anthemic one second, crunchy and fuzzy and power poppy the next. Full disclosure: we've loved pretty much every Guided By Voices record, and heck, most of Pollard's solo efforts as well, so even though our knee jerk response to a new record might be an exasperated sigh, once we throw it on, we find ourselves wanting to listen to little else.
Singer for Guided By Voices unleashes a full length that's as good or maybe better than recent work he's done.
Hmmm, has Robert Pollard been compared to the Energizer bunny yet? Goodness! When does this man ever rest? Perhaps he's aiming for a spot in the Guinness Book for most cds released? Yet another solo offering of his distinct, lo-fi (relative to later, not earlier, efforts), unadorned psych pop that jumps from cloudy, tripped-out guitar fuzz with vocal fits, to threadbare folkiness with piano and acoustic six-string in the blink of an eye (particularly on the four sectioned "The Spanish Hammer"). As is typically the case with any of his release, there's one or two songs that shine brighter than the rest. Motel of Fools is no exception, it's graced with the wistful "Captain Black". However there'll also be the one or two less... er, pleasing moments present also. On this cd, it's the beginning of the third song "Red Ink Superman" in which the vocal recordings are slowed down to a crawling sludge. Once he's done with that though the rest of the song - and album - for that matter - bounce back to fine Pollardness.
A week without a new Robert Pollard and/or Guided By Voices release is like a week without sunshine... errr, well, almost. Fortunately it seems we've got nothing to worry about 'cause the well sure isn't showing any signs of drying up. This week we not only received GBV's Suitcase 2 (a gigantinormous 4cd boxset to be reviewed soon), but also this new solo Pollard release. It's a six song collection of music he did for Steven Soderbergh's murder mystery 'Bubble'. Ah, one great musicmaker and one great moviemaker. What's not to love about that? Absolutely nuttin'! Pollard released both the boxset and this ep on his Fading Captain Series label (volumes #37 and 36 respectively).
You'll have to excuse us if we seem to have found ourselves at a loss for things to say about Mr. Pollard and his innumerable projects and releases. We've totally lost count. C'mon, cut us some slack! His songs may be utterly human and personal, but the man behind it is an almost inhuman music-making dynamo. While there are plenty of GBV and Pollard supporters around aQ, we're pooped. There's barely enough time to digest the last release before a new one lands in our lap, and there's always a few numbers that get their hooks into us. That said, this is pretty darn classic Pollard in indie rock mode... meaning there's very few of his weirdo wacko noisy detours. Normal Happiness = sixteen engaging, endearing poppy nuggets, the kind he does so well! Whew, looks like we weren't at such a writer's block after all!
Maybe not the place to start for GBV/Pollard neophytes, but will surely more than please his legions of devoted fans.
Another week, another Robert Pollard release! Had enough yet? If so, we (and probably he too) would understand. Many of his solo outings can be a bit haphazard, but allow is to reassure you that this album is actually remarkably solidly packed with Pollard pop gems and quite light on the overt weirdness. Maybe he should have titled it "Robert Pollard Gets Down To Business"? Diehard fans should certainly give this one a spin!
If you happen to somehow be new to this musical gent, this probably isn't the place to start. Figuring out the best introduction can be a daunting task. At last count we had about 59 Pollard and Guided By Voices entries in our database, and that's not even including his alter egos and side projects. There's so many that a few times we ran out of words with which to review them! Nonetheless we can advise you to head first and immediately to Guided By Voices' Bee Thousand.
As if he wasn't busy enough, Mr. Robert Pollard now adds "record label exec" to his curriculum vitae. Silverfish Trivia is the first release on his new label Prom Is Coming. Seven songs = twenty two minutes... most of the tunes are captivatingly short'n'sweet under-three-minute nuggets in true Pollard fashion, but one "Cats Love A Parade" stretches out longer and psych-ier than the rest reaching almost the eight minute mark... which is also in true Pollard fashion.
Hey, here's a new rock album from Uncle Bob!
He may have laid his Fading Captain label series to rest, but Robert Pollard ain't shutting down any time soon! He can't be stopped, and Merge Records is helping to ensure that with not one but two new albums at once! The label has suggested the age-old Beatles vs Stones debate as a fitting differentiation point between the two faces of Pollard's current double whammy -- that is, a poppy one and a harder edged rock one. Standard Gargoyle Decisions is the latter. It's grittier and more distorted with more electric guitar dissonance. We personally favor the brighter, sweeter sunbeam that is the former (Coast To Coast Carpet Of Love), but perhaps you'll see things differently.
Pollard's releases are seldom so clearly sorted and defined. We can usually count on some element of bee-in-his-bonnet randomness, but not so this time. And you know what? As much as we've always loved and appreciated his devil may care approach, it's really a pleasure to hear a relatively even keeled seventeen songs in a row. That's the case with this here album.
Mister Pollard keeps on keepin' on... and on and on! Is there a word beyond "prolific"? His musical output is ceaseless! It's a neverending string of lo-lo-fi pop meanderings and dishevelled bizarre noisy shambles that's been peppered with some absolute winners as well as some stinkers. We've got two new ones in this month, Superman Was A Rocker (under his own name) and We've Moved (under the moniker Psycho And The Birds). Right now, we're leaning in favor of the latter because this one is a bit too wacky with its radio clips and other random tidbits of mischief interspersed with the songs. Might be your cup of tea though! If you're gonna get your feet wet with this or any other Pollard release, you've gotta be prepared to accept the wheat with the chaff, the dreamily tuneful with the discordantly tuneless. Of course if you're already a Robert Pollard fan, you probably already own this! Heck, we often wonder why he doesn't just set up an Uncle Bob's cd of the month subscription club.
Second solo album from Guided By Voices singer and songwriter.
We'll go out on a limb here, and say that of the hundreds, maybe thousands of songs Guided By Voices recorded over the course of sixteen full lengths, and about a million eps and singles, most if not all, were pretty damn great. Sure there were some throwaways, but for a body of songs that epic, the ratio of good to bad was impossibly high. And most folks credited songwriter / GBV head honcho Robert Pollard, and rightfully so, but then a funny thing happened after the dissolution of GBV, Pollard started releasing solo records, and records with other ad hoc outfits, and that ratio turned around, WAY around, and suddenly, a new Pollard record didn't elicit the same sort of excitement that a new GBV record did. Even here, we didn't bother with a bunch of the Pollard releases, partially cuz it's just impossible to keep up, but also because it seemed like the magic was gone, where GBV records were inspired, Pollard records seemed more like a job, just what he did. To be fair, there were a bunch of records that we loved, and even the ones we didn't had at least a handful of killer jams. But We All Got Out Of The Army sees Pollard and friends returning to form big time. Opener "Silk Rotor" sounds like classic late era GBV, a little glammy, super hooky, with a lurching angular verse, and a soaring totally memorable chorus, one for the GBV / Pollard pantheon for sure. And the hits just keep coming, from slow burning brooding lopes, jangly pop dirges, to weird almost new wave sounding angular jams, to totally classic British Invasion worship via four-track and beer, to warbly acoustic lo-fi bedroom indie folk, to the record's other GBV style classic, the title track, with its stop/start verse and super heavy hooky chorus. Killer stuff for sure, and an essential addition to your already shelf busting GBV / Pollard collection!
Robert Pollard may have closed the book on his band Guided By Voices, but he sure as heck ain't stopping the music makin'! For that we're very happy, but having said that, we're much less happy about this new ep. Simply put, these four songs seem uninspired and hurriedly dashed off. Sure one of Pollard's particular talents has always been nailing the hooks and the hearts with alarming brevity, but such is not the case with Zoom. There's only a couple of fleeting glimpses of that dear Pollard pop magic, and taking the eight minute long running time into consideration that's a rather poor ratio. Disappointing.
This record contains sweet, sad rock songs from 3 Guided By Voices alumni fronted by the seemingly inexhaustible Mr. Robert Pollard. Any fan of these gentlemen will be impressed and pleased with this record. It is very much in the same vein as previous
Many pop fans were severely saddened when those Scottish dreamboats The Delgados sailed off into the sunset in 2005 after ten years and five albums. Well, we can all dry our tears... at least a little bit because Ms Emma Pollock (who was one of the charmingest voices from that band) has emerged with an album that respectfully carries on in her former band's wonderfully sumptuous and poignant pop tradition. On the surface Watch The Fireworks reflects the sound of lemon meringue, dew drops, crushes, and snugglin', but there's more to it than simple sweetness. After you get swept up immediately in the opening number's carousel waltz tempo and Pollock's voice, you'll find songs with a bit more burly energy than that of the Delgados. The backdrop of electric guitar crunch, sturdy bassy organ lines, solidly struck piano keys and insistent drums make for a pleasing counterpart to her sweet singing. It propels each song up-up-up into the super pop stratosphere, burning off any grey clouds and leaving nothing but warm golden sunlight. It's easy to see why it was such a good idea for her to open for the new Pornographers on their latest tour for their album Challengers. if you get a chance to see her, don't miss it! Otherwise, buy this now!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Pollock and Krasner were a couple, they lived in a house on Long Island and made paintings we hang in museums. This is a recording of them talking with William Wright (1950) and Marc Miller (1982), respectively. And you know it's got a nice cover.
After two previous outings of cello laced electronica (including the marvellous heroin house album The Science of Breath), Polmo Polpo covers "Kiss Me Again and Again" by Arthur Russell's avant-disco-funk thing Dinosaur L back from 1981. This 22 minute track opens quite akwardly with a basic disco groove and some jittery-junk-jive guitar riff that begins like an out-of-tune Marc Ribot chicken scratch. But slowly, the guitars mellow their contortionist twisting and open into a rather attractive disco jangle. File next to LCD Soundsystem in late '70s / early '80s disco-punk worship.
The previous outing for Polmo Polpo (aka the Toronto based musician Sandro Perri) was a collection of very hard to find 12" singles, encapsulating a sound that merged hazy organic melodies from slide guitar and cello with the minimalist techno archetypal of Chain Reaction. It was, quite simply, a gorgeous sound. Here on "Like Hearts Swelling," the rich orchestration remains while the pronounced techno rhythms settle quietly into the background or are completely avoided on most tracks. That said, the undergirdings of techno are still Perri's basis for sound organization. Compact blocks of sound denoted by synthetic bass lines and tightly looped samples repeat themselves in hypnotic phrases, following the same patterns established by Gas on the majestic "Konigsforst" album and its more playful cousin "Pop." The strength of "Like Hearts Swelling" is found in the counterpoints between these subdued structures and the expressive melodies of cello, slide guitar, glockenspeil, accordion, and ambient passages culled from these instruments. The jubilant melodies from the album's second track "Requiem For A Fox" slide up and down the guitar frets, returning to a simple descending melodic fragment that is remarkably similar to the chorus from Blondie's "Dreaming." While this is probably an unintentional appropriation, the timbres and moods of this album reflect many of the sounds proferred by likeminded canucks Godspeed! You Black Emperor and their side projects. In other words, it's beautiful.
When working in such a restrictive environment as Chain Reactive microhouse, the success and failure of a piece of music usually comes down to the basics of writing good music in generating a punchy rhythm out of Reactor and filtering ghostly remnants of melody out of synthetic / metallic atmospheres. Microhouse pioneers like Vladislav Delay have faltered when trying to get too clever in their textural programming while forgetting that the core to heroin house is dance music. But like Plastikman and Gas before him, Toronto producer Sandro Perri (aka Polmo Polpo) understands where minimalist techno has succeeded with an unrelentingly throbbing, Kompakt-monophunk rhythms and slowly filtered aerated reverberations. The murky hiss and thick white noise common to the early Chain Reaction records are present in Polmo Polpo's exceptional debut "The Science Of Breath," but have been sculpted out of heavily digitized lap steel, cello, and slide guitar. Very nicely done!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
