Snap Judgements- Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, Matt & Kim’s Grand, Cut Off Your Hands’ You & I
If good looks was a minute/ You know that you could've been an hour- Smokey Robinson, 'The Way You Do The Things You Do'
You'd probably want to get rockist on their asses.
Spinner streams the latest album by Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavilion. Now, I’m about to admit something. I was wrong about this album. I heard a song or two off it, and I just thought, “Meh, just more hipster twaddle from the new Grateful Dead.” All the constant praise I heard from the Hype Machine lobby that this redefined modern rock and all this nonsense. I didn’t want to hear it. And I didn’t want to like it. But this is a great album. My standard for such is, after you listen to the album, do you want to listen to it again? The answer, for this record, is a definite “yes!” There is a lot going here. Animal Collective refuses to play by the rules of rock music. They know their pop history, but there will be no guitars. No foundation rhythms. No, they ask you to stick around. Hear what develops. Beautiful keyboard lines drift away to pounding drums which loop to ambient chants. Radiohead always talks about how they wish to be ‘outside’ rock music. This album is as outside rock as you can get. I’ll be very much interested in how they replicate this live. This album is a definite buy.
This leap crushed 8 80-pound hipster dudes.
Find the new Matt & Kim album streaming on Spinner as well. ‘Good Ol’ Fashion Nightmare’ works. ‘Cinders’ gets going with some Heavy synths. Ugh. The rest of this album makes you want Pitchfork to start tomorrow so you can add to your hipster teeth collection. What do you get when you sound like every other band from Brooklyn? Rubbish.
Don't call us Franz Ferdinand.
Finally, find the Aussie younsters Cut Off Your Hands’ debut American LP streaming at Spinner. Starts off with a clunker. Why don’t bands put a better song as their first track? As my fellow rocker Kev always says, “You start out loud, and just get louder on tracks two and three.” Advice more people should heed. ‘Expectations’ works. They’re a little too cute by about six-sevenths. And I’m somebody who dorks out on sincerity. ‘Turn Cold’ is hot. Great lil’ single. Hmmm. I think ‘Heartbreak’ is gonna suck. It does. It’s surprisingly bad, at least. I’m just making time here, people. Reading about Blago in the Sun-Times, if you want complete disclosure. How unprofessional, I know. ‘Let’s Get Out of Here’ cranks it back up. There ya go, boyos. ‘Still Fond’ shows they’ve heard a Jam track or two. Whatever you do, do not listen to this after Grand. You will want to listen to complete silence for about six hours. And there’s the headache. It might be the Old Style. I think ‘Nostalgia’ will suck. It does. Early prediction- ‘Someone Like Daniel’ will suck, too. Uh oh. Not off to a good start. ‘People these days just can’t get it right/ We need something today to makes things right.” Wait! Are these guys Christian rock? Hey, at least this too sucks suprisingly.
On the bright side Cut Off Your Hands, you’ll always be huge down under. 
Snap Judgements- Antony and the Johnsons’ The Crying Light & M Ward’s Hold Time (UPDATED)
Fragile- This End Up
Antony and the Johnsons’ second-album The Crying Light drops the 20th, but you can stream the album at Spinner. Antony Hegarty and his spectral vocal-stylings have been busy, guesting on everything but the last Lil’ Wayne album. I bought the last Antony & the Johnsons album a few years ago when it topped a number of best-of lists. I wanted to hear what all the fuss was about. I really dug it. In fact, I drove a number of friends crazy with the amount of times it spun. The new album arrives in a much different world. Listening to this record, I couldn’t stop thinking about Proposition 8 in California, and the struggle for gay rights. I don’t know if this album contains a ‘Bitter Fruit’, but Antony is his struggles’ Billie Holliday. His voice sounds like the wounded dreams of every gay person. Seriously. I don’t believe there is a more wrenching vocal in pop music today than Hegarty. Especially as The Crying Light moves onto its second side with I think the three best tracks on the album- ‘Another World’, ‘Daylight and the Sun’, and ‘Aeon’. You can hear the hopes of millions of gays here in the States. Antony sings of tolerance, acceptance, and filial love- all goals of the gay rights movement. This is the first great album of 2009. Buy it.
Yeah, this smells like last night.
- Never Had Nobody Like You by M Ward
M Ward returns with Hold Time on February 17th. You can stream it at NPR. I saw M Ward at Pitchfork last year and he put on the kind of set he could easily pull off on his front porch. I told my friend that day, “He’s the Dickey Betts of indie rock.” I still like that comparison. Just like Mr. Betts, Mr. Ward’s music doesn’t come with his clothes or his tour bus. No, his music is how he lives every day. Listening to M Ward’s albums, you definitely think you know M Ward. That’s not easy for any artist. Hold Time starts off slowly, with none of the burn we heard in Ward’s last album, Post-War. Where that album had him posing effectively as an indie Hank Williams, showing the indie kids the joys of ’40s songcraft and shuffles, Hold Time makes a much more assertive nod to the pop world. Sometimes that works well, as in ‘Fisher of Men’, the best song on the album. This song has the cockiness and worldliness of a young Johnny Cash. Great stuff. But at worst the album has covers of Buddy Holly’s ‘Rave On’. Buddy’s strident response to Sun Records becomes a loungey, slow meander by Ward. I couldn’t stop thinking to myself, what an awful cover! Overall, nowhere near as good as Post-War, but still good. Burn this album, and it’s worth a buy if you’re a fan.
- The mp3 posted above reminds me of exactly what makes M Ward so great. The song sounds like something you’ve heard before, not because it’s stale, but because of his sense of melody. I love the lo-fi sound of his guitar and that piano cutting in and out of the song. And yes, that’s Zooey Deschanel of She And Him fame on back-up vocals.
O'Hare Arpt., IL
