Dr. Dog- We All Belong

    “Man, the 60’s were such a hip, groovy time; peace and love man, like, when shit gets too heavy, you gotta just go with the flow, man, like, just feel the music, brother”. If these are things you’ve ever thought or said, do yourself a favor and pick up Dr. Dog’s We All Belong, it will be a serious boost to your spiritual groove. Throw your parents’ record collection in a blender and made liberal use of the ‘frappé’ setting, and amongst the sound of shattering vinyl, you just might hear a track of two of this record.

    Be warned: We All Belong may cause extreme nostalgia for a time period you may or may not have lived through. Even on the first listen, songs on this record felt familiar, immediately producing the necessary number of jiggawatts to throw me back to my Beatles-filled childhood. But beneath the happy remembrances, there’s a certain soullessness in the music- these guys, passionate as they may be, are doing their best impressions of a handful of styles that were already strip-mined by more popular bands forty years prior, putting Dr. Dog in the regrettable category of ‘revisionists’. Vocals span from the ‘my throat is so dusty, since I just got off my motorcycle’ southern groan, to a decent John Lennon impression sans-English accent, and even some falsetto parts which recall Wayne Coyne. All the while, the rest of the band submits multi-layered Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young harmony to fill out each track.

    “My Old Ways” is nearly a Pet Sounds B-side, shimmering with that lost-and-found California beach vibe, and the verse riff on “Alaska” is a tumbleweed “Hey Joe”. McCartney bass turns rise and fall through “Keep a Friend”, followed by “The Girl”, which is another attempt to sublimate stale Beatlemania. “I don’t ever want to go back/ To the old days/ Leaving the dead underground”. Apparently the irony of their lines is utterly lost on them.

    The bottom line here is that, while the music Dr. Dog make is well-crafted, they are fighting an uphill battle. Not only are they very clearly taking their cues from older bands, without really adding any new food for thought, but their influences come from bands who have entered the ‘cannon’- bands who’s auras have outgrown their body of work. Dr. Dog wrote themselves into second-class band status from the get-go, and they don’t disappoint.



We All Belong

Good Luck- Into Lake Griffy

    Hey fellow members of the blogosphere. Today is my birthday, and I was strongly considering the laziness option and not writing a review, but persistence is the name of the game, so here’s some good ol’ indie rock to get you through the bleak winter months.

    Good Luck are an exuberant and gleeful indie three-piece, who excel in both witty optimistic lyricism and fancy guitar work. Think of them as Bloomington’s Algernon Cadwallader with a twangier, more competent singer. Bets are on Into Lake Griffy being this year’s Some King of Cadwallader, at least in terms of catchiness. Speaking of which:

Recipe for Good Luck vocals:

- 4 parts Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch circa There’s Nothing Wrong With Love

- 5 parts The Weakerthans’ John Samson

- 1 part high-register grit

[Shaken, not stirred , served in a paper cup]

    Lyrically, Good Luck make a list of their existential dilemmas and recite them with a wry smile. “How to Live Here” boasts the verse: “We all want to feel content/ but we need more than a place to shit and to lay a bed/If sometimes living doesn't terrify you, if love doesn't pulverize you, then where are you at? /Where's the power in that?/ Though it's been nothing but complicated /since the first time that two people dated /and your heart makes you deathly afraid /it's all you've got.” Their ability to take an apparently bleak scenario and turn it golden is their strength, and also makes Into Lake Griffy an ideal post-breakup record. “So we gathered up the broken stars, lit a spark, put them back up in the sky/If you can wish on their falling, imagine what you can do bringing them back to life.” Rad! Drums have the requisite busyness, but mixed low to make way for the melody.

    The sense of joy that pervades the whole record leans comparisons to Vampire Weekend, but avoids the over-clean, squeaky-sweet polish of their Mozart-esque debut. The ticklish speed might bring on some nostalgia for Tokyo Police Club’s first EP, but only in feel, not in content. There are bits of the new emo scene and pieces of the old lo-fi movement, but at the end of the day Good Luck don’t sound quite like anyone else, which is just the way it should be. Get on this record (preferably from NO Idea Records), you won’t regret it.


Into Lake Griffy

Crime in Stereo- Explosives and the Will to Use Them

    Long Island is a cesspool. Everyone knows that, whether they’ve actually been or not. It’s a cultural wasteland, devoid of redeeming qualities. In spite of this, a handful of decent bands have risen out of its ashes. Brand New, Arrogant Sons of Bitches, Latterman, The Fad, On the Might of Princes, and Small Arms Dealer all call the aforementioned strip of noxious land home, as do Crime in Stereo. Inevitably drawing from the frustration of living on the tumor adjacent to New York proper, Crime in Stereo play a catchy and technical breed of melodic hardcore which came to fruition on their first full-length, Explosives and the Will to Use Them.

    Explosives has the intricacy to entice those who find solace in the newest wave of emo (this guy), i.e. Algernon Cadwallader, Snowing etc, the brute force to call in the Minor Threat kids, and even some interestingly anthemic parts to boot. While some of the album gets caught in the rut of lightspeed boom-chick-boom boom-chick punk drums and indistinct guitar chugging, they truly put their mark where it counts. Longwinded silly titles aside, “Warning: Perfect Sideburns Do Not Make You Dangerous” is like being thrown against your will into a g-force machine until you black out, complete with the threat of “So you fuckers say you want a war?”. Lyrically, each song is more of a rant than a piece of music, but when matched with gruff untrained vocals, it comes across as nothing less than sincere. One overarching message is “We’re punk rock! Look at the scene decaying”, which really changes nothing as they’re more or less preaching to the choir, and the punk scene has been decaying since its inception. Their songs get a huge boost when their content strays more towards drinking alone and broken hearts. The over-hard macho gang vocals sometimes accidently recall Black Flag’s “T.V. Party”, but even this is excusable after the blunt force trauma that the guitars deliver.

    Most of the songs on Explosives barely hit the 2:30 mark, and when combined with the speed of each track, the record is full-speed sprint down Punk Rock Ave. that will merit several repeated listens. Album ender “Arson at 563” tops everything with the chorus of, “So close but still haloed to crash the calm/It’s only one night so what’s the harm”, a barbed hook guaranteed to stay lodged in your cochlea for days.


Explosives and the Will to Use Them

Aesop Rock- Float

    “So I heard y’all wanna float”, begins Aesop Rock’s second album, aptly titled *drumroll*, Float. We’ll, it’s not quite as strong a statement as being ‘ready to die’, or relating the shaolin slums of your birth, but it supplies a befitting color to the album that’s sets it apart from the hip-hop cannon. Combining minimalist beats with the abstract word salad flow of Busdriver, Aesop strikes a winning formula with skill and levity, carrying along a few interesting guests (Slug, Dose One & Vast Air) for the ride. This twenty track mammoth deserves all the acclaim it gets and then some.

    Float truly kicks in with “Big Bang”, which (like the rest of the album) Aesop unfolds like a modernist novel with the calm of a storyteller, ready at any moment to explode a into 10,000 word-per-minute lyrical cyclone. Yet unlike other hyper-literate artists (*ahem* Morrissey), he manages to remain unpretentious and hard-hitting. The lesson here is that his flow is jazz incarnate, wherein he continually overextends, oddly stresses, or pauses in unexpected places, only to save the momentum a few bars later. “Oxygen” sees Aesop casually debating himself about God, fishing, and lemonade, while “Basic Cable” bemoans modern society’s techno-dependency poetically, not pedagogically. “Plug it in, turn it on, be my mother when she's gone, great/wipe the spittle off my chinny-chin during the breaks/if I gotta go blind I'mma do it for the love of all television kind”. Solid.

    While the record remains easy-going, it doesn’t box itself into one style. “Skip Town” bounces along on a hazy reggae beat, the trifecta of “Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner with Blockhead” adds short instrumental breaks to the dense flows, and the dark, xylophone-laden jazz of “Spare a Match” is tastefully accompanied by a Digable Planets sample. He maneuvers each new style expertly, and his unconcerned delivery makes it sound easy.

    Aesop aside, Vast Air gives some solid lines amongst his posturing on “Attention Span”, namely, the uplifting hook "it’s the simple things in life that turn the peasants into leaders", one positive message of many on Float. Startlingly, Slug’s guest spot on “I’ll Be OK” is a let-down. He is audibly uncomfortable on the bouncy off-kilter jazz of Float, delivering two flat and uninspired verses which share nothing in common with his fantastic and self-loathing confessionals in Atmosphere. Fortunately, the only thing which truly upsets me about this record was not finding it sooner



Float

The Sea and Cake- Oui

      I recently took a friend of mine, Tony, who may know as the Motherfish Writer, to get a tattoo done. The shop was a nice enough place, but it happened to be located at the edge of one town which bordered several other towns, and without directions home, we manage to visit and then promptly leave four different towns in the matter of three wrong turns. The Sea and Cake’s Oui saunters through a similar predicament with style and grace, in the matter of measures slipping in and out of jazz, post-rock, prog, math-rock , all with a dreamy ambiance, and manages to find its way home without running out of gas. While the general vibe of the album doesn’t beg you to pay attention (it’s an ideal pre-sleep record), listen closely, and you shall be rewarded tenfold.

    The mostly instrumental Oui is, strictly speaking, one of the most peaceful records I own. Each instrument oozes high craft, and together they have been clinically proven to help listeners reach Super-Nirvana. Genre-blending and musicianship abound; it’s difficult to decide whether to file this next to their sister band Tortoise, Hatfield & the North, or Charlie Parker. Thankfully, Oui avoids the major pitfall of the genre- songs as long and dull as The Bible. By producing laid-back tracks within the range of the human attention span, Oui is both more digestible and more enjoyable. Even the longest song, “You Beautiful Bastard”, just misses the six minute mark, and not a beat of it is wasted idly ‘jamming’.

    While several of the tracks do contain vocals, The Sea and Cake mostly use this more as a form of instrumentation, letting lighter-than-air melodies mix with the jazz-inspired percussion and whirring synthesizer in the most economical way. This is a musician’s music. Expect none of the rawness or noise of your favorite punk band- this is the product of masterminds. Cutaway: Lex Luthor gleefully twiddles away at a MiniMoog. While this might not become your favorite record, its brilliance is beyond doubt, and despite calling Oui a great “pre-sleep” listen, I don’t consider that an insult. This record is a panacea to the busy mind, and instilling that sense of peace while retaining musical interest is a skill in its own right. Next time you’re feeling lazy on a weekend, spend the day in bed with The Sea and Cake, and hope your significant other understands.


Oui

J.R. Ewing- Ride Paranoia

      Scandinavia, what is your problem? Between Refused and these guys, I’m halfway convinced that instead of doing the sensible thing and breeding supersoldiers, the entire Nordic region is wasting their precious time building high-pitched scream singers who excel at being both incomprehensible and grating. And if you were wondering who ‘these guys’ are, the answer is J.R. Ewing. On their second album, Ride Paranoia, they deliver a punk-infused haymaker dose of Big Black, with a healthy but less chaotic vaccination of Pg. 99. If those names mean nothing to you, something loud, dark and heavy this way comes.

    The album opens with the muscular “Repetition is Failure”, which for the first 30 seconds recalls Drive Like Jehu, before the briefest flash of Steve Albini vocals and a quick tempo change. All hell breaks loose soon thereafter, and the not-so-foreign tongue-out screaming commences, with some fairly sophisticated guitar to keep it balanced. By track three, it’s easy to treat Ride Paranoia like a phonecall from your mother- drown in out, with the assumption that you’ll be hearing more of the same. The boys from Oslo put some challenging harmony on display, and then fence themselves into it for the next thirteen tracks. To make matters worse, the record suffers from some of the blandest mixing this side of the pond, and it’s difficult to derive which parts are really carrying the song. Everything gets lost in a loose, grey mass of unspectacular and ill-produced noise. Songs like “Pre Summertime Blues” hands you a packet of gardening seeds and a spade when you were expecting to be tasting the fruits of a bands labors, e.g. there are hints of greatness that feel rushed or unfinished, which sadly, is more egregious than just making songs that suck. J.R. Ewing, you seemed like a different kind of band when we first met. We might have to see other people.

    Vocals aside, Ride Paranoia plays out like any given record Sparta have slapped their name on: there aren’t enough good parts to excuse the album's length, and in the worst of cases, its existence. No doubt , “Naked Pavements”, “Laughing with Daggers” and “Midnight Episode” are all strong tracks with an assertive, aggressive sound that could easily find their way into the hearts of punk and post-hardcore fanboys alike. However, Ride Paranoia’s 34 minutes play out like their fourth-to-last track, “The Same Exact Thing”.



Ride Paranoia

Grooms- Rejoicer

        First post: why not start with something recent, and something local. Brooklyn-based trio Grooms released their first full-length, Rejoicer, on Death by Audio this past October (okay, kind of recent), and its ten tracks sing with fuzzy, noisy goodness, letting the ugly sounds haunt, with the occasional moment of clarifying accidental beauty shinning through the murk in a way highly reminiscent of Sonic Youth in their prime. Out of tune guitars? Check. Atmosphere, and drive? Check. Alright, let’s get down to this.

The album opens with the off-kilter “Dreamsucker”, sporting grungy high-register bass, and a guitar which could pass for a natural disaster. When they’re not drowning in a wave of feedback, the three Brooklynites keep up the tension with dissonant interplay which desperately tries to achieve some sort of resolution, only to be forced back into swirling chaos. “At the Pool” plays like a hangover, featuring what sounds like a lazy cello, and the violent headache drumming one might associate with waking up to bright lights. Singer Travis Johnson practically begs the words,“I wanna be/ I wanna be”, before being crushed under a couple tons of molten guitar noise. The entire first half of Rejoicer is a noise-rock fan’s wet dream. It’s not too heavy-handed, but there’s still substance, and they maintain an acid-washed air about them, while creating songs with force. However, the conviction starts to wear down towards the bottom half of Rejoicer. They don’t get “into it” so much as “out there”. Points for experimenting with their sound, but the last five tracks, while listenable, essentially miss the mark.

All told, it might seem that is record is retracing familiar territory, and to some degree it is, but Grooms aren’t just another band who are content to wallow in the wake of noise rock without adding a little more danger to it. Despite the spontaneous feel, there is always the assurance that these compositions are fully intentional, and birthed by musicians with intimate knowledge of their craft. Combining the aforementioned influence of Sonic Youth with intricate interplay and burnout vocals, Rejoicer is a record which showcases the potential of a young band.

Rejoicer