Feed the Animals picks up where Night Ripper leaves off, but is much more than a deflated, lackluster sequel. Gillis is all over the board with his influences, dipping his quill into a wide variety of rock (Thin Lizzie, Radiohead, The Band, Nirvana), trip hop (Aphex Twin), and even slow-burning crooners (Sinead O'Connor). Despite, or maybe thanks to, all of these new opportunities for sampling, there is no loss of danceability or catchiness. Girl Talk, nothing compares 2 u.
Our top album here at Sputnikmusic was Burial's Untrue. That album had a distinctively sparse, brittle tone to its atmosphere. Other than that though I found the album almost unlistenably boring. Imagine taking that one cool aspect of that album and fleshing it out in all regards. Then you'd have Son Lux's At War With Walls & Mazes, an album that blends a variety of genres and production techniques to create a glitchy, high personalized, trip hop masterpiece. At War With Walls & Mazes is a strong contender for album of the year. It is the best electronic release since Venetian Snares' Rossz Csillag Allat Szuletett. It is nearly flawless, and the scary thing about all of this praise is that it's only Son Lux's debut album.
Equal parts post-rock, dark ambient, and industrial, but mostly shoegaze, Have a Nice Life's debut album Deathconsciousness is a double-disc concept album of epic proportions but without pretention. Throughout the course of its 85-minute run time, the album treats the listener to a varied collection of songs; there are slow-burners, there are epics, there are anthems. This album is so packed with different ideas that they all blend beautifully into the reverby, distorted soundscape that defines this album's aesthetic. All of this is topped off by the fact that the concept is wonderfully executed and supported by a 70+ page booklet that charts the life and works of a near mythical religious figure from the 13th century named Antiochus. Though Deathconsciousness is an intense listen, and not for the weak-eared, it is ultimately a very likable and human album, never forgetting shoegaze's pop roots. There are moments on Deathconsciousness that are grating and dissonant, but there are far more that are beautiful and even catchy. At its core, it's an album that is very intimate with all of its ideas and soundscapes.
Sometimes I listen to hardcore bands and they just throw around a bunch of dissonant notes and make super sparse
but beefy breakdowns. Ghostlimb is heavy as **** at all times without sacrificing melody or succumbing to typical
hardcore fare. The album has 11 songs and is 15 minutes long. "Palimpsest" is a perfectly complete 55 second
hardcore nugget. These guys also don't take themselves completely seriously with deions of their music on myspace
being "Influences: none, traffic; Sounds Like: unreasonably mad" unlike other similar sounding artists. The result is a
hardcore album that understands that brevity and brutality can coexist with melody and sensibility.
In general, the first half of The Alchemy Index points to success. There are questionable aspects to both discs, but in general the cons are vastly outweighed by the pros. The Fire disc is a great exploration of the heavier moments on Vheissu. The album is explosive and intense, with Dustin ripping his vocal cords to pieces while the rest of the band unleashes their heaviest material yet. Songs like "The Flame Deluge" act as the most brutal work Thrice has ever created. Songs like "The Messenger" and "Backdrift" are surprisingly the weirdest, blending together electronic influences into heavy, harmonic minor chord progressions. The Water disc, excepting its opening track, is nearly flawless. Interestingly, it also continues a strand that was started on Vheissu's slower, more pensive tracks like "Atlantic." It's a collection of beautiful and wistful songs that all have lush and stunning arrangements. The Water disc feels exactly like it was recorded underwater. As a collection of songs, this album is amazing for nine out of the twelve tracks. As a concept album, it's halfway to becoming an amazing cycle. There are a few flaws and the second half of the collection to worry about, but so far Thrice has produced another stunner.
Justice's † is the best mainstream pop/dance album since Daft Punk's Discovery. Though at moments it rips off Discovery's catchiest moments, Justice find their own niche in the grimier and more aggressive moments found throughout the album. Though pop tracks like "D.A.N.C.E." and "Phantom pt. I & 2" are perfectly sweet, tracks like "Genesis," Let There Be Light" and "Waters of Nazareth" steal the show with their immaculate sampling, sandpaper synths, and relentlessly catchy and pulsing beats.
Sort of like a smoother version of Off Minor with some fossils from when they were a Midwest indie band. The flows, tempos, time signatures, and feels are all convoluted, making it the mathiest album I've heard in a while. What makes it even more amazing is they don't sacrifice their solid songwriting and the sound is fairly accessible against the dissonance and chaos the likes of a Dillinger Escape Plan. If anything the album feels a little homogeneous, though any individual track will shred your face into pulp. This is perfect for Tera Melos fans who were a little underwhelmed by the mere 19 minutes of Drugs to the Dear Youth, those awaiting Ire Works later this year, or really anybody who considers themselves fluent with post-hardcore or emo.
Venetian Snares, aka Aaron Funk, embarked on a Bartokian journey to Hungary to collect modern classical, jazz, pop, and other local music to create his own electronic reinvention of folk music. This album features these carefully chosen samples against Funk's progressive breakbeat and happy hardcore beats. The resulting sound is grandiose, epic, intelligent, and forward-thinking, all while remaining much more palatable than the typical schizophrenia and claustrophobia of the usual Venetian Snares sound. Rossz Csillag Allat Szuletett may be the most intelligent electronic album of all time.
3 tracks. 22 minutes. Below average quality recording. Sometimes it seems like that's all it takes to make a powerful emo album. Drowning With Our Anchors' Demo feels like a wonderful trip through both post-rock and melodic post-hardcore and emo. The songs are expansive and long featuring large instrumental breaks between the vocals. The most quiet and pensive portions of the album are both beautiful and eerie. There are faint voices in the background that set a ghostly mood that is complemented by the somber instrumental passages. When they hit hard, Drowning With Our Anchors crescendos are gorgeous and don't use the dissonance and distortion of other emo bands to get the point across. They seem content to push the point across melodically, using touching and simple guitar lines. Also, the vocals shredddddd. This album, while obviously not a full release, feels like a full gesture. Hopefully Drowning With Our Anchors will put out a more complete release in the future to capitalize on this initial promise.
The Pax Cecilia's second LP Blessed Are the Bonds is forged from the same fires that gave listeners Circle Takes the Square's As the Roots Undo and Dredg's El Cielo. It is epic, original, heavy, pensive, and savagely compelling music. It is transcendent. It taps into something above normal perception and does this with a strange lack of pretention. The sound is a mix of post-rock (Engine Down), alternative (Dredg), metal (Isis), and screamo (City of Caterpillar). The musicianship and songwriting are beautiful and the emotional weight of the album is relentless. And to top it all off, the album is free (www.paxcecilia.com contacts.html).
Hopesfall has written an album that exists as an extension of their 2004 album A Types. The taut songwriting and amazing vocals are back, and sometimes even better. The production is awesome and every song is packed with wonderful ideas. Hopesfall are essentially the best band to mix pop-punk and post-hardcore still actively working on that amalgam today. However, Magnetic North has too many unfortunate moments like the cheesy chorus on "Paisley" or the occasional nu-metal breakdowns to let it eat at the big kid's table with their previous two LPs A Types and The Satellite Years. Keep in mind though that that isn't stopping awesome songs like "I Can Do This on an Island" from picking up 40+ plays in just over a week.
Imagine the songwriting of a Midwest-Emo-influenced band like Don Cabellero or Denver in Dallas crossed with the
indie of My Morning Jacket. But that's just the surface. There's the crazed rhythms and tapping guitar of Tera Melos
and Hella, and riffs sweeter and smoother than ones heard from Minus the Bear. It seems like a freaky hybrid of styles,
but Maps and Atlases pull it off well, never becoming too relentlessly mathy or too ironically indie for their own good.
There are a few moments of incongruity and awkwardness, but overall this album is a wonderful example of genre-
bending.
Hot Cross stuns again, but this time the instrumentals are slightly stripped down and rugged while the vocals are the haymaker. Overall, the album has a much more youthful, straight-forward sound, which is likely the result of losing a guitarist, Josh. There's only one lame song ("Cardiac Silence") and a handful of godly ones ("Turncoat Revolution" and "Blame Truth" being among them). Even if it doesn't challenge as much as Fair Trades and Farewells, Risk Revival finds its niche and shreds away all the same.
Say what you will about the technicality of bands like Dillinger Escape Plan, Meshuggah, and Psyopus, but Tera Melos is there and they don't sacrifice any listenability for technicality. They have moved slightly away from their Braid/Denver in Dallas-type style and more towards oddball progressive stuff, but overall, this album feels more like a continuation of their last album than anything else, however they seem to be one guitarist fewer than last album. If anything that absence has made the rest of the band more inventive with its playing. This album is the first great release of 2007.
In the newfound popularity of Kayo Dot, it may be easy to miss Toby Driver's debut solo LP. This album contains some of Toby's compositions that he considered too weird and off the wall for Kayo Dot. Despite the inherent quirkiness implied by that premise, Driver delivers some fairly interesting and palatable pieces just left of his stuff on Dowsing Anemone With Copper Tongue. Read the full review to check out the cool techniques he used to compose and record each song.
