Dinosaur Jr.
4/5
Farm
Since reunions are ubiquitous these days, it’s worth clarifying: what exactly should we ask of a band returning from the grave? Farm, Dinosaur Jr’s second full-length since its original line-up re-formed in ’05, just might be the gold standard.
On one hand, the album couldn’t sound less surprising; on the other, it’s hard to imagine it coming off as any more solid and enjoyable. Farm proves that there’s no shame in picking up right where you left off, as long as you do it with conviction.
Dino frontman J Mascis’s many talents have rarely been captured so vividly as they are on Farm’s first two tracks, ‘Pieces’ and ‘I Want You To Know’. Both perfectly sum up the blissfully fuzzed-out style Mascis has been honing for more than two decades. The former song deftly balances razor-sharp melodic contours with freedom-rock catharsis worthy of Neil Young, while the latter takes a groovier route to grunge-pop heaven. Here and elsewhere, Mascis’s inimitable twang floats beautifully above the gritty murk.
The guitarist has never shied away from excess, and some of the selections here (the seven-minute-plus ballad ‘Said The People’, for example) suffer from solipsistic bloat. But a few compelling curveballs – including the surprisingly metallic ‘I Don’t Wanna Go There’ and two strong tunes by formerly estranged bassist Lou Barlow – balance out a killer set that other would-be comeback artists would do very well to study.
Hank Shteamer
Available for download from www.7digital.com, or to order from stores.
Wilco
3/5
Wilco
The sorta-eponymous seventh from the reigning Chicago rock champs is a warm, hypoallergenic bath of an album. Mellow-but-upbeat ballads and breezy mid-tempo rockers fill out a brief, wheel-spinning record that rehashes the past couple of releases with diminishing returns.
Among the pleasant soft rock, only four tracks stand out. Unfortunately, two of them – the cheeky cheer-up ‘Wilco (The Song)’ and the saloon-piano stomper ‘You Never Know’ – mimic ’70s classics ‘Werewolves Of London’ and ‘My Sweet Lord’. The other highlights evoke the pretty experimentalism of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Not coincidentally, Jeff Tweedy’s poetry shines brightest on these as well. ‘I’m in a bull-black Chevy Nova,’ the frontman mutters with paranoia as the band evokes Steely Dan as Berlin beatniks on ‘Bull Black Nova.’
But the beautiful ‘Deeper Down’ is the real gem. ‘By the end of the bout/He was punched out/His capsized muscles shouting/Deeper down,’ sighs Tweedy with the hard-boiled poeticism of Raymond Chandler reading over a chamber ensemble. Plucks and strums tick and interlock in complicated, golden clockwork.
Everything else struggles to capture the same level of detail. The conservative dad-pop framework confines Cline’s guitar in a pressure cooker. In each song, when the LA axman finally gets the chance to lay down lines, his notes trill with pent-up restlessness. The solos in ‘One Wing’ and ‘Sonny Feeling’ dart and hum like pesky mosquitoes. We were hoping for brilliance. After the similarly disappointing Sky Blue Sky, Wilco seem happy to stick with merely pleasant.
Brent DiCrecenzo
Available at www.7digital.com or to order in stores.
Blur
3/5
Midlife
Scanning the back of this double-disc collection spanning Blur’s career raises one very important question: what sort of ‘Beginner’s Guide To Blur’ doesn’t contain ‘There’s No Other Way’?
Sure, we have all the other obvious inclusions over the 25 tracks, with just about every single included: ‘Song 2’, ‘Beetlebum’, ‘Tender’, ‘Girls and Boys’, ‘Parklife’, ‘Coffee and TV’, ‘For Tomorrow’ et al – but not, interestingly, their first UK number one ‘Country House’, which suggests that the Blur-Oasis war of the ’90s left some scars.
There are also some choice album cuts like ‘Sing’ (given new life via a pivotal scene in Trainspotting), Parklife’s stately closer ‘This Is a Low’, and ‘Battery in Your Leg’ (which was the only track on 2003’s Thinktank to feature guitarist Graham Coxon, whose acrimonious departure sidelined the band for the past seven years). It even includes the hard-to-find non-album single ‘Popscene’, a frantic piece of guitar pop that marked the band’s transition from the bandwagon-jumping shoe-gazers of 1991’s Leisure into the arch-proto-Britpop of Modern Life Is Rubbish. However, ignoring the band’s first hit – especially one that more or less called time on the ‘baggy’ movement and is still a guaranteed floor filler at any retro indie night – just seems downright perverse.
The flimsy inner sleeve isn’t much chop either: album release dates and some context-setting world events might help rock trivia quizmasters, but does little to explain the music – and Blur are a band whose music genuinely warrants critical discussion. The songs are still great, mind. But no ‘There’s No Other Way’? Really, lads? Really?
Andrew P Street
Available for download from www.7digital.com.
Elvis Costello
3/5
Secret, Profane and Sugarcane
Elvis Costello possesses one of the world’s finest voices and few songwriters can hold a candle to him. His late period albums are at best superb (the almost-Attractions reunion album Brutal Youth; the electronic-tinged When I Was Cruel; last year’s astonishingly overlooked live-rock Momofuku), and at worst interesting (the torchy, orchestral North; the country-blues The Delivery Man).
Here, in a semi-return to the tones of Almost Blue, he explores bluegrass and folk on an album that sounds like it was knocked up on a long weekend. That’s both a plus and a minus: on the one hand it’s got a raw immediacy that’s typical of producer T-Bone Burnett, but on the other it’s hardly an album that’s likely to entice anyone not already interested in the vagaries of Costello’s playful muse.
Even within the one broad style, there’s plenty of variety. The waltz-time ballad ‘I Felt the Chill’ is a co-write with no less a country music personage than Loretta Lynn, which contrasts well with the rollicking ‘Hidden Shame’, while the dark ‘My All Time Doll’ echoes the mood of Costello’s wry ‘God’s Comic’. ‘I Dreamed of My Old Lover’ is an authentic-sounding folk strum, as is the superb ‘Red Cotton’ – and a near unrecognisable Emmylou Harris adds harmonies to the gentle zydeco of ‘The Crooked Line’. The album closes with a cover of Patti Page’s classic ‘Changing Partners’, but the oddest cover is his own: ‘Complicated Shadows’ is reinvented (in superior form) with mandolin and slide guitar, contrasting with the drab rock version released 13 years ago.
It’s an undeniably well-made album, but it’s more of an impressively well-constructed genre effort than an inspired, must-hear collection of great new Costello songs.
Andrew P Street
Available for download from www.7digital.com.
Fiery Furnaces
2/5
I’m Going Away
Growing up in Oak Park, NYC, brother and sister Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger must have ridden bikes past the Nathan G Moore house. It’s an early Frank Lloyd Wright work, and architecturally speaking, it’s a mess. The mustard-and-chocolate monstrosity mashes together Tudor frames, rococo flourishes, gargoyles, classical columns, Gothic apses and modern lines. The anything-goes show-off piece is fascinating to look at, but you’d never want to live in it.
And that’s pretty much been the case with the Friedbergers’ Fiery Furnaces records: scatterbrained jumbles of art-pop ideas and the dense, nonsensical ramble-singing of Eleanor. She hasn’t met a chorus she failed to stuff with an entire short story of travelling salesmen or amnesiac tourists. Brilliant in spots, but overwhelming as a whole, Furnaces’ LPs would be impenetrable if not for their silly enthusiasm.
The duo’s sixth studio album makes great effort to strip away bells and whistles. Gone are the synthesizers, kazoos, sound effects and 10-minute run times. Here, the arrangements stick to a standard cocktail-lounge lineup of bass, drums, guitar and piano, all bathed in warm, organic production.
Perhaps not surprisingly, straightforwardness does not suit the Friedbergers. When jazzy percussion, boogie-woogie ivory-twinkling and light 12-bar riffing congeal in noodling passages of ‘Charmaine Champagne’ and ‘Staring at the Steeple’, you’d be excused for thinking you’re listening to a Phish or Zappa record. A few simpler soul-tinged numbers like ‘Cut the Cake’ and the upbeat finger-snapper ‘Keep Me in the Dark’ fortunately breeze by like Pavement’s dweeby best.
The Fiery Furnaces crank out a lot of records. Hopefully on the next one they’ll stop merely peeling away layers, tinkering with the same old weird house, and just bulldoze the goofy framework to the ground. Somewhere in them is a Fallingwater.
Brent DiCrescenzo
Available for download from www.7digital.com.
The Dead Weather
3/5
Horehound
That Jack White sure likes to get around, doesn’t he? First there was the Raconteurs, as an excuse for the White Stripes leader to faff about with buddy Brendon Benson, now he’s hooked up with Alison Mosshart from The Kills to make a record that no-one not already a fan of their other work will pay the slightest bit of attention to. And that’s apt, since it’s an album that was clearly made because it could be rather than because there was a burning necessity for it.
It’s of interest primarily because White contributes none of his trademark guitar work. In fact, in The Dead Weather, he’s the drummer (and does a much better job than his bandmate Meg…), with axe work coming from Dean ‘Queens Of The Stone Age’ Fertita. It’s an interesting instrumental decision that thankfully enlivens listening to some of the more drab moments: there’s not a whole lot of quality control across the eleven tracks of Horehound. White’s ‘I Cut Like A Buffalo’ is a pointless slice of proto-dub; the six-minute-plus closer ‘Will There Be Enough Water?’ is either three minutes too long or 15 too short, and while the instrumental ‘3 Birds’ sounds like a show reel to get work on Dario Argento’s ’70s horror movie output, it adds little to the album.
Other tracks work rather better. ‘Treat Me Like Your Mother’ is a savage single that plays to the filthy blues-rock influences of its creators; ‘Rocking Horse’ adds a dash of Tex-Mex, and Mosshart’s ‘So Far From A Weapon’ is a piece of early Bad Seeds-style call-and-response worksong blues that shows off the sultry powers of Mosshart’s voice beautifully. It’s not a terrible album by any stretch, but neither does it demand to be heard. And that’s OK.
Andrew P Street
Available for download from www.7digital.com.
The Alchemist
3/5
Chemical Warfare
If any rap producer not named Dr Dre or J Dilla is capable of a truly great ‘solo’ album, it’s the Alchemist. Beatmaker-driven rap LPs are usually glorified compilations or fruitless journeys into instrumental indulgence. But the Beverly Hills-bred, Manhattan-based boardsman’s first full-length, 2004’s 1st Infantry, was an outstanding showcase for his sinister, sample-based soundscapes, featuring cameos from suspects both likely (longtime associates Mobb Deep, Nas) and less so (the Game, TI), as well as skits so funny you might actually skip to them.
Chemical Warfare utilises a similar formula. Eminem, for whom the Alchemist (real name Al Maman) currently serves as tour DJ, drops by for an invigorating verse on the brief title cut; Mobb Deep’s Prodigy delivers some typically disturbing rhymes on ‘Keep the Heels On’. Inspired pairings include the Motownesque ‘Smile’, which teams R&B balladeer Maxwell with rapid-fire rapper Twista, and ‘That’ll Work’, featuring Southern stalwarts Juvenile and Three 6 Mafia over a vicious Exorcist sample. Al’s huckster-manager character, Jerry Swindle, returns to dispense some typically awful advice (‘You need to do your own little Alchemist dance…the Alcy Shuffle’).
But while Chemical Warfare hits all the points that made 1st Infantry a success, it shows its seams a bit more. One culprit is The Alchemist himself, returning to the mic here after years of concentrating on beats. Though he’s not as lyrically inept as some other producer-rappers, he’s no Eminem. But then again Eminem is no Alchemist behind the boards.
Jesse Serwer
Available for download from www.7digital.com.
