AWmusic

In the last month there have been reviews of Veckatimest that explain the origin of the album’s four syllable title, a short biography of Brooklyn band and their recent history (Radiohead tours, talk show performances and philharmonic backing etc) as if these prologues are trying to cover up the fact that (for some) Grizzly Bear are a fairly new fully-formed band. Or maybe these contextual introductions take up the appropriate amount of space in an article for the relief of reviewer who hasn’t got anything more to say about the album other than “Two Weeks” is a deceptively jovial pop song. But hey, even this opening paragraph is 112 words long.
Veckatimest deserves a little more attention than an editorially challenged pithy catchphrase, especially when at the end of the year it’s probably going to be sitting on a golden throne next to Merriweather Post Pavilion, waiting to be crowned.
Naturally, for those who played Yellow House to death or cursed themselves with the bad-karma-serves-you-right-for-being-impatient, shitty album leak, this release manages to live up to its almost unrealistic expectations. Rather than continuing with an explicit Yellow House template (layered experimental folk and West Coast baby-boomer Americana) that could have perfectly exploited the post Fleet Foxes marketplace, Veckatimest works as a sonic divergence. Choppy time signatures, pounding drum fills and chunky riffs divide the songs into definite segments, and there is a pronounced use of the space that surrounds the sound of an instrument rather than crowding the mix with an abundance of proverbial bells and whistles. Not that these techniques haven’t been employed before, but the melodic flow of Yellow House, which evoked a kind of aural arcadia, seems to have been replaced by the artifice of a recording pretending to be a live band, which is more in keeping with how the four-piece play together away from the studio, while also containing the Chris Taylor flourishes now expected from a Grizzly Bear recording.
Differences and familiarities aside there’s much on Veckatimest that distinguishes the record as a testimony to the working Grizzly Bear model of 2009. The wielding of the vocal chords makes the voice the album’s most conspicuous instrument. There are the signature four-part harmonies, the choral arrangements of The Brooklyn Youth Choir and the augmented intonations of Edward Droste and Daniel Rossen. The unearthly intro to “Dory” and the polyphonic climaxes of “Fine For Now” are (the most obvious) examples of a band exhibiting an accomplished a cappella technique that accompanies the more regular sounds of the electric and the acoustic rather than deputizing for them, and the traditional instrumentation sometimes sounds far from traditional. For every upfront guitar strum on “Southern Point” (a kind of distant relative to Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill”) or insistent pop plunk on “Two Weeks” – there are the more esoteric noises of a vibrating spooky organ on “Ready, Able” or the stomping bass of “I Live With You.” Veckatimest sounds all the more enriched for these and other musical jigsaw pieces, with funny shapes that shouldn’t fit but do, which maybe make this album less immersive than their last, but all the more lasting in a way that only reveals itself to you once it has been lived with for a considerable amount of time.
Lyrically the songs address the typical existential anxieties that come with the failures of our intimacies and the white noise awareness of mortality, but some may argue, like Woody Allen, that death and love are the only two things that matter in this short life of ours. We may be “all faltering” and there might not be “anything left” but kudos to Grizzly Bear for including the words, “routine malaise” in a commercial pop song, without sounding like pretentious prigs.
The details and intricacies of Veckatimest show Grizzly Bear to justify more than a lazy Brian Wilson (or even Van Dyke Parks) comparison, but in a world full of sound bites that belie surface level opinions, such juxtapositions come in handy. Grizzly Bear deserve a little more than that, and on Veckatimest they create music with depth, to be lived with, that gets better as it ages with you, which can only really become part of the cosmic soundtrack, the great big compilation multi-tracked opus that plays in the background of a life.

Grizzly Bear – Fine For Now
Grizzly Bear – Cheerleader

Here We Go Magic – Tunnel Vision

Here We Go Magic is the new outfit fronted by Luke Temple and this track has been popping up on websites everywhere as a precursor to the debut album, much like the seven-inch single used to do years ago (released February 24th on Western Vinyl). As this song indicates and the album augments, this isn’t an electro-folk digression but an expansive and inclusive exploration into the idioms of folk, electro-trickery and muted recording techniques.
Here We Go Magic – Tunnelvision

Sleeping States – Rivers

Markland Starkie AKA Sleeping States is the kind of artist you want to hold to your bosom and keep as your own and unfairly/secretly hope no one else is going to find, even though he’s be around for a while now (There the Open Spaces will be the grand old age of two this year). But in these months of relative hibernation Starkie’s lethargic lullabies are the kind of songs that perfectly complement a slower way of life.
Sleeping States – Rivers

Real Estate – Suburban Beverage

This new band made up of members of Predator Vision and Ducktails are currently being touted as the kind of outfit you want to hear on a beach holiday when the air feels as if it’s on fire and people start wearing ridiculous looking summer clothes. But the listless jangle of Suburban Beverage with its weary vocals and guitars peals form a befitting calm winter soundtrack to play in the movie of your life – when you aren’t doing very much at all.

Real Estate – Suburban Beverage

Everything was as it should have been a few days ago. 2009 was just an empty cultural vessel waiting to be filled and the ghosts of last year’s music players, end of year lists and conversational exchanges were still hanging around, waiting to be replaced. It could have been another predictably desolate January, but then Animal Collective had to go ahead and ruin it by releasing their “best recorded album.” Just as the usual seasonal torpor descended upon us, the band effectively pressed a ctrl/alt/del button on our wintertime psyches by delivering one of the best albums of 2009, and long before anyone else had a chance. Now the bleak winter visions don’t look so bad and the cold doesn’t get to your bones as much as it should when your finger presses repeat on your listening device, again and again and again…
Merriweather Post Pavilion is a ridiculously euphoric album, full of Animal Collective’s signature sonic techniques. The tribal rhythms, the choral chants and the bubbling background noises are all still bumping into one another in joyous ways, but the crunching dissonance, elongated passages and bleating yelps of old have evaporated to present a new streamlined, almost pop version of the band. As Strawberry Jam revealed in places and last year’s live shows explicitly confirmed, they’ve now ditched the freak-folk and embraced electronic psychedelia, and on Merriweather Post Pavilion they’ve reaped the benefits by melding the primal pulse-quickening excitement of dance music to the warmth of emotional connection and the exhilaration of just being alive.
The low-end bass may manipulate rising heartbeats and the constant peaking of the repeated song climaxes may mimic house music’s obvious ecstatic amphetamine based mores, but the content of the songs themselves manage to belie the traditions of the dance music form by infusing a very real sense of excitement into the listening experience by addressing the joy of sensation, physical satisfaction and even out of body experiences. Avey Tare sings about watching dancers, walking around town and wanting to “leave my body, just for a while,” whereas Panda Bear advocates domestic security, doing what his body wants to and asks confusingly if he is “really all the things that are outside of me?”
For many of the contrary appreciators of Animal Collective who still hold Sung Tongs up as the pivotal ground zero of the band’s career, Merriweather Post Pavilion will seem like a disappointing commercial realignment of a cherished experimental band. But despite the absence of the familiar baying cacophonies that used to typify the Animal Collective sound and the subsequent electronic re-shaping of their musical identity, Merriweather Post Pavilion is still a remarkably unique album and one that could have only come from this band. Not a single song feels out of place or lacks the exhilarating incantation of the shared vocals and the songs are sequenced perfectly together with detailed textures that increase the infectious joy of listening to tracks like, “My Girls”, “Brother Sport” and “Summertime Clothes” continuously in a loop, and if that is your bent you won’t want Merriweather Post Pavilion to ever stop playing between your ears.

Animal Collective – My Girls
Animal Collective – Brothersport
Animal Collective – Summertime Clothes

**Links removed by request, Web Sheriff pwnage**

Apart from the fact it has an obvious motorik rhythm and the song’s thrust is the perfect aural accompaniment to watching cars eat up the white lines in the middle of the road, this Deerhunter track manages to represent the essential dichotomy of travelling in a motor vehicle. The contrast between the moving world outside and still world within a car is significant, like a song called “Nothing Ever Happened” that has a lot happening within it.
Deerhunter – Nothing Ever Happened

Best Song From A Band Named After An Animal
Animal Collective – Seal Eyeing

Putting Animal Collective in this category may be a little too literal, but once again Animal Collective release an arresting stopgap EP between albums and the Water Curses EP will maybe seem like the ideal bridge between Strawberry Jam and Merriweather Post Pavilion when we have the benefit of hindsight, but beneath the aquatic bubbling sounds that introduce “Seal Eyeing” there exists a fragile reverberating piano odyssey made for moments of graceful meditation.
Animal Collective – Seal Eyeing

Best Song Influenced By Pet Sounds
Department of Eagles – No One Does It Like You

The ghost of “God Only Knows” echoes through this track but Department of Eagles deliver pleasing layer after layer of ornate sounds, which only reveal themselves fully after repeated listens. Like many of the tracks on In Ear Park, the rich production values seem to offer an opportunity to get lost in a world of detailed instrumentation, which is surely the intention behind the same techniques used by Brian Wilson, all those years ago.
Department Of Eagles – No One Does It Like You

Best Song To Contemplate The Fragility Of Existence With
Chad Van Gaalen – Rabid Bits of Time

Chad Van Gaalen sings about death on Soft Airplane, sometimes with cheeky abandon in chirpy sounding songs that are designed to get under the skin, but nowhere is the flimsy thread of mortality personified so appropriately than on “Rabid Bits of Time.” When Gaalen sings in his quivering voice, “No one knows where we go, when we’re dead or when we’re dreaming,” it’s like listening to someone telling you something you already know, but never really understood until it is disclosed as simply as it is here.
Chad Van Gaalen – Rabid Bits of Time

Best Song That Ends With A Whimper
Women – Black Rice

“Black Rice” clangs along like a lost art rock classic from a late 60s, which for once doesn’t sound like it is an amateur appropriation, reshaped and regurgitated into a diluted version of the original music that influenced its creation. Glockenspiels tinkle with the guitars to lead to a climax that never comes as the momentum abruptly ends with a limp strum, and after all the musical pay-offs that have become so commonplace it’s refreshing to hear a song that causes you to listen to its journey because it doesn’t conclude with a bang or a fade.
Women – Black Rice

Given the pseudo krautrock guitar work he displayed in his former band, The Secret Machines, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to anticipate Benjamin Curtis channeling the sonic mojo of Michael Rother in his new three-piece, School of Seven Bells, but as the first bars of the opening track “Iamundernodisguise” introduces Alpinisms with the combined chant of two vocalists who unfortunately sing in the same ethereal tone as the saccharine pop outfit The Corrs, hopeful expectations are soon annihilated in the first few seconds. Thankfully, when Curtis’ guitars blast into the song a tasteful equilibrium is restored and the traumatic memories of sickly vocal-styles are eradicated and the band make sense, but it’s a regrettable frame of reference to commence with.
Vocal prejudices aside, Alpinisms corresponds to the proverbial treated guitar textures and airy female voices regularly found in the shoegazer catalog and Curtis seems to be also emulating the guitar woos of Kevin Shields (”Face to Face on High Places” sounds uncannily like a remixed Loveless track). But it’s not all spaced-out guitar effects and siren-like singing, “White Elephant Coat” is bass driven old-school goth (as in graveyards and bats) and “Connjur” throbs with a post-rock momentum that’s meant to be heard on the inside of sleek cars as they float through West German landscapes of concrete and steel.
The galvanizing aspect of Alpinisms and its disparate influences comes from the electro arrangements that elevate the otherwise diluted facsimiles of experimental guitar from the musical history books. Synth textures echo along with the guitars and electronic tempos adorn all of the tracks here to make this debut more than just a means of looking backward to look forward. Even the vocals delivered by twin sisters, Alejandra and Claudia Deheza surpass the too appeasing by far timbres employed by the thousands of fluffy soon-to-be-forgotten pop bands, when the choral layers develop into musical mantras or are fed through a vocoder. School of Seven Bells may take their name from a well-known institution where pickpockets learn their nefarious trade, but as much as the separate ingredients of the Alpinisms recipe regurgitate the familiar, there’s little here that comes across as downright stealing.

School of Seven Bells – Face to Face on High Places
School of Seven Bells – Connjur

The critical consensus on J. Spacemen aka Jason Pierce aka Spiritualized, is that he reached his creative peak around 1997, with the symphonic-space-rock-blues-opus in pharmaceutical blister packaging, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. It’s been an eleven long years since then, five years since Spiritualized’s last album and nearly six months since Songs in A&E first appeared, heralding a return to form and a well-publicised brush with death.
Pierce’s contracting of periorbital cellulitis with bilateral pneumonia in 2005 has been regularly documented and has coloured most of the assessments of Songs in A&E (meaning Accident and Emergency) despite most of the material being written before Pierce’s three-week stay in intensive care. But for an album dedicated to the hospital that saved his life, includes the sound of a respirator on “Death Take Your Fiddle” and is furnished with eerily prophetic predictions of his illness, such considerations are obvious, but how much has changed to warrant this return to form?
The sole permanence of Jason Pierce in Spiritualized, as the band endured countless line-up changes, has preserved his place as a galvanising musical force but it has also kept his insular technique in focus for a little too long. This one portal and its shtick, of detailing pharmaceutical dependence and an associated desire for spiritual rapture, (that has been repeated for eighteen years) has become tedious in its monotony, despite the transcending quality of listening to someone singing from the squalor of self-medication (imagined or otherwise) as they look to the heavens to contemplate their mortality. Now, after a near death experience and a very real medical dependence, it’s a little too easy to expect that Songs in A&E has a newfound “he means it, man” gravitas, when the initial references to morphine, codeine, and Jesus start to service the here-we-go-again reflex.
Still, there are a few minimal changes to the Spiritualized model. “I Gotta Fire” and “Yeah Yeah” are a little more straight-ahead than expected, and a little too straightforward in their rock-by-numbers delivery, to be coming from someone who used to arrange ambitious psychedelic compositions. A sparser musical method may be warranted when the road to excess clearly doesn’t always lead to the palace of wisdom, but this back-to-basics approach presents a limp rock ‘n’ roll routine instead of a successful paring back of any extraneous sonic indulgencies.
What is significant is the voice, the sleepy slur of old has mutated into a fragile croak and the cracked words and the vocal strains add a lived-in authenticity to the down-tempo musings on vulnerability. This transformed voice charts a larger transformation, from a nebulous one-dimensional preoccupation with God, drugs and love to the consequences of a prolonged exposure to God, drugs and love. Pierce may rarely look beyond himself, but his age-old concerns seem plaintive on Songs in A&E because they sound plaintive, as opposed to being a supplementary consideration of the story of the man behind the artist. Spiritualized may not, after all, be matching the former grandiosity of their past glories or even ruminating on matters beyond the usual pleas for narcotic salvation, but Songs in A&E delivers a soulful voice, back from the dead, with a refined and seemingly haunted sensitivity.

Spiritualized – Death Take Your Fiddle
Spiritualized – Sitting On Fire

Sometimes the cold metallic sheen of the loop-based, electronic and beat-laden can be a little too sophisticated in its modernity to transcend its exclusivity to the dance faction, which is a shame, because often the loop-based, electronic and beat laden can be fairly warm and inclusive, without sounding like a field recording of a toolbox being fed into a washing machine. High Places use an emptied-cutlery-draw-falling-onto-steel-drums kind of percussion, alongside what sometimes sounds like old arcade machines parping in the background, but the organic and human elements of this debut eclipse any consideration of this Brooklyn duo working in a musical ghetto branded with the simplistic “Intelligent Dance Music” acronym.
Clunky bone rattling rhythms stumble forward like the natural sound of objects being hit and Mary Pearson’s wispy vocals, which barely surpass the ethereal or the monotone, combine to present the homemade quality of an album given the “made at home” epithet. Beneath the musical veneer the lyrical content also unveils a literal organic concept, dealing with the wonder of participating in nature and the impact of an inner imagined, or outer natural world. The songs, whether they address the joy of climbing trees or just the beauty of them dressed in lights, convey a sense of childlike awe, which also seems to suit the timid vocal delivery. Similarly, the tinkling electronics, concocted by multi-instrumentalist Rob Barber, patter away like the distant memory of a noisy music lesson at a nursery, as the convoluted clank of (what sounds like) wood and metal jostles among the artificial and the processed.
At times, the tangled tintinnabulations of the individual tracks saturate the album in a crowded and indistinguishable rhythms and the furnishing of an abrasive pulse with a fragile voice is an especially well-oiled mechanism in dance music, but there are enough captivating moments to distract the listener from an over familiar modus operandi. The galvanising momentum of “Namer”, the pleasing eastern twang of “The Storm” and the exquisite atmospherics of “From Stardust to Sentience” all proffer a repeated pressing of the repeat button, as does the chanting cadence of “Gold Coin” in its gleeful revolutions.
Although not strictly their first official release of note (there’s the 03/07 – 09/07 collection of singles and stray tracks) this self-titled “proper” album manages to meld the subject of unselfconscious wonderment to the object of the mechanics of the machine-based, with results that are far from cold, inhuman or exclusive.

High Places – The Storm
High Places – From Stardust To Sentience

The second album from Department of Eagles has been a long time coming, mainly thanks to the attention grabbing virtuosity Daniel Rossen has displayed in Grizzly Bear, the scattering of interesting demos and unrelated Department of Eagles material that has been floating around the net for aeons, and at the very least, the recent ascent of Mr Rossen’s profile with his other band as they play on Conan, Letterman and tour with Radiohead. Appetites have wetted, heads have turned and collective internal monologues have murmured, “Wait, this Grizzly Bear guy has another band…”
Inevitable comparisons to Grizzly Bear abound, especially when both groups seem to roam in a similar baroque and elegiac musical landscapes with corresponding accoutrements of guitar, piano and strings, but its probably best to forget about the baggage that comes with resemblances and listen to In Ear Park on its own terms, as was intended, as an album from a group that predated one member’s more successful other one and a platform for personal catharsis, wholly embellished and supplemented by a succession of ambitious musical arrangements.
Sonically, the music here closely resembles the kind of experiments done by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks on Smile. “No One Does It Like You” even clomps along like a distant cousin to “God Only Knows” with the kind of layers of percussion and harmony that alerted The Beatles to the West Coast in 1966. This rich instrumental depth additionally evokes memories of late 60s film soundtracks, performed by a Hollywood house band and touched by the hand of Burt Bacharach or Harry Nilsson, but for an entrenched use of ornate retro production techniques in a form of music that is rarely cutting edge, the end result is complimentary as opposed to being reductive.
It’s the substance of the songs that elevate In Ear Park from being a shallow appropriation of rock’s golden age and particularly the emotional depth of the material as it deals with the fleeting nature of existence and the prevalence of loss. The macro of an expansive sound coupled with the micro of the intimate creates an achingly beautiful disclosure, often connected to therapeutic images of the natural world. Parks, rivers and fields are places of abiding memory and the anxiety of existence is divulged in arresting moments of pained eloquence. Phrases like, “My God in heaven, what were we thinking?” or “Oh boy when you’re gone, you are gone” are sung with a haunting poignancy as the fertile sounds (that blossom with each recurring listen) frame the emotional in a lasting and affecting musical panorama.
Rossen has admitted that the material produced for this release was unsuitable for his other unit and perhaps this level of confidentiality is unique to his first band? But it’s doubtful that the lucidity presented on In Ear Park will remain on one single record. This album may capture the personal, when most of the songs are essentially based on the pathos of the passing of time, but these intimations are graceful and inclusive rather than mawkish and self-indulgent, when recalled through the nostalgic visual imagery contained therein. If all albums are caught moments of time, both for a band and in terms of content, In Ear Park is a particularly lush and vivid one.

Department Of Eagles – No One Does It Like You

Department Of Eagles – In Ear Park

Numerous associations spring to mind when coming across a band named after “the fairer sex”. Primary ones being that this could be a group of agitprop feminists, satirical jocks or even lovers of the Charles Bukowski novel of the same name. In fact, Women are an all male four-piece from Alberta who have just released a hissing and vibrating 29-minute lo-fi tour de force called, erm… Women.
Recorded in the same basement that produced this year’s wonderful Soft Airplane album, with the help of Chad VanGaalen and an arsenal of wonky old tape machines, and centred around the nucleus of the 60s art-rock clang of “Black Rice” or the spiky guitar squabbles of “Shaking Hands”, Women (for a debut) contains an uncommon mastery of the kind of dissonant tangents that usually make you want to press skip on your music player (but don’t) and the type of melodies, that make you feel like you’ve heard them before (when you haven’t.) In its most transparent and over zealous classification Women by Women is the sort of album that could be placed between that legendary white record with the banana on it and that famous green one showing awkward looking non-surfers feeding animals at a zoo, that is if you like put your music collection in an anal chronology of pop versus the avant-garde.
Voices crack with patented punk ennui, drums beat like the hearts of hyperactive children and guitars chime away like unholy church bells, but nothing on this record seems out of place or wilfully perverse. Even the de rigueur ever-present lo-fi tape-hiss, so often used as a misplaced form of authenticity, is happily overwhelmed by the sound of songs being played, rather than just being recorded. “Group Transport Hall” with its vocal harmonies and sweet glockenspiel or “Cameras” in its pleasing metallic chug are perfectly delivered in a mere minute, with little room to contemplate the hiss and thud of wonky recording techniques. The ends justify the means when the ends comprise the sound of a band that is willing to experiment, include three instrumentals on a debut and finish an album with a great big squall of noisy nonsense.
Pretty melodies may turn into ugly noises and an ugly racket may become something beautiful, but that’s ok, it’s all part of the same compelling potential. There is a lineage of the immediate and the not so immediate co-existing quite happily on most of what has been called classic, at one time or another, and maybe Women will one day belong to that lineage? Right now, your internet search engine may not be able to find the name of this band without dredging up a deluge of inappropriate material, but after hearing this record you’ll probably want this moniker to permeate beyond the lexicon of Pitchfork related blog/websites and maybe even end up on top of the first page of a Google search, as unlikely as that may be.

Women – Black Rice
Women – Group Transport Hall