Album Reviews | SPIN.com

The Mark Lanegan Band, 'Blues Funeral' (4AD)

Ken Bachor — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:43:58 +0000

Is it really possible that Mark Lanegan hasn't already put out an album called Blues Funeral? I mean, shit, that title would work for any of 'em. Which isn't to say that the ex-Screaming Trees frontman's albums all sound the same -- far from it -- but they pretty much all feel the same: bad. Like, wake-up-in-a-cheap-motel-room-head-aching-pour-me-another-drink bad. In his songs, all hope is always lost, yet we press on anyway, or at least he does.

Much of this vibe comes from Lanegan's voice -- a smoke-scarred, death-haunted baritone that croaks, rasps, and howls with charismatic relish. The man could turn a Sesame Street sing-along into a deathbed confessional. "With piranha teeth / I've been dreaming of you," he moans here with typical cheeriness on opener "The Gravedigger's Song," a throbbing, reverb-heavy swirl that recalls his work with Queens of the Stone Age and feels like the sort of love song someone might write just before pushing their lover in front of a train.

On it goes: "Oh, baby, don't it feel so bad," he groans on "Bleeding Muddy Water," an atmospheric, post-apocalyptic crawl. The attraction to pain and life's seamy underbelly is almost erotic, with Lanegan describing the titular swamp in terms that feel weirdly sexual: "Muddy water be my grave / You are the master, I've been the slave… You know I feel you in my iron lung." The supple "Phantasmagoria Blues," with its lament of "a bruised and beaten love" alongside images of razor blades and electric chairs, feels cut from the same cloth.

Lanegan is a recovering heroin addict and, presumably, a lifelong depressive, but he's no slacker. Blues Funeral is the seventh album under his name, and that doesn't include two he made with Belle & Sebastian's Isobel Campbell, one with Greg Dulli (as the Gutter Twins), two with the U.K. electronic duo Soulsavers, and his off-and-on collaborations with QOTSA. This is also the second album credited to his "band," which this time around includes drummer Jack Irons (ex-Pearl Jam and Red Hot Chili Peppers) and guitarist Alain Johannes (ex-Eleven and QOTSA sideman), along with intermittent contributions from Dulli and Lanegan's numberous other QOTSA compatriots, Josh Homme, guitarist Alain Johannes, Dave Catching, and Chris Goss, among others. Echoes of that band's snarling guitar stomp can be heard on the raucous "Riot in My House," which also boasts what might be the stoner-rock lyric of the year: "When burnouts by the score / Strung out in metal cages / See Technicolor pour / From every laceration / I realize that I'm slowly coming down with you." The clattering, psychedelic rocker "Quiver Syndrome" features sweet, insistent hooks and warm backing ooohs (think "Sympathy for the Devil") that somehow only make it sound more sinister.

Elsewhere, the musical influences are a little more surprising; several tunes pulse with electronic beats and prominent synths. "Ode to Sad Disco" is roughly what its title promises: a woozy meditation on the emptiness of club culture ("See all the lonely children lose their minds") set to a sleek groove that wouldn't sound out of place on a Depeche Mode song, while "Harborview Hospital" lays Lanegan's troubled growls about devils, fiends, and hellhounds over chiming guitar lines, sparkling synths, and a shuffling dance beat. The effect is oddly invigorating, injecting an uncharacteristic lightness into the proceedings.

Such sonic textures filter into nearly half of the songs on Blues Funeral -- perhaps the creative residue of those Soulsavers collaborations -- but ultimately it doesn't greatly alter the emotional tenor. Interestingly, it's the album's most ominous-sounding tune that provides a note of hope. The song, a stone-cold Leonard Cohen-style bummer called "Deep Black Vanishing Train," feels like Lanegan's attempt to explain the lifelong wrestling match with his demons. "Lost on a violent sea / Day on endless day," he sings over a distorted acoustic guitar and distant organ tones. "I have finally freed myself / But it's been hard to break away." The idea that the light at the end of the tunnel could be something other than an onrushing train may be the closest he ever gets to redemption.

Of Montreal, 'Paralytic Stalks' (Polyvinyl)

Ken Bachor — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:42:59 +0000

Of all the psychedelic psychos who have professed membership in the Athens, Georgia-based indie-pop collective Elephant 6, none have written songs as maddeningly diffuse as Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes. His band's '90s recordings weren't artfully disjointed (like Olivia Tremor Control), or expressively messianic (like Neutral Milk Hotel), or playfully tweaked classic-rock (like Apples in Stereo). They were just the melodic doodles of a dude unwilling or unable to follow any but the most roundabout route from one note to the next, a series of incorrectly completed connect-the-dots puzzles that were borderline catchy enough to be mistaken for pop music.

Eventually, and unexpectedly, Barnes' hooks started falling into place. By 2005 he'd written a tune suitable for soundtracking an Outback Steakhouse commercial (minus the brand-inappropriate lyrics "Let's pretend we don't exist / Let's pretend we're in Antarctica"). Two years later, he premiered his alter androgyne "Georgie Fruit" on Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, and what seemed at first like amateurish drama-club nonsense was in fact a baby step toward deciding he he'd rather front the fabulous glam-dance band that emerged on 2010's False Priest. Whether driven to impress arty R&B guests Janelle Monáe and Solange Knowles, steadied by the hand of L.A. chamber-pop producer Jon Brion, or just lucky enough to have been prescribed the right meds, Barnes commanded a brand of indie-funk as convincing as his lyrical descriptions of unstable young women, and his evolution from twee to fey sounded like a genuine artistic achievement.

Well, hope you enjoyed that while it lasted. Barnes has talked up the self-produced Paralytic Stalks as an intense personal statement influenced by 20th-century classical music; that could mean a lot of things, but none of them is "Party!" What drives this album is the tension between discrete pop elements -- keyboard tunelets, steady drum patterns, guitar arpeggios, freefalling xylophone -- and a surrounding wash of electronics and strings (arranged by violinist Kishi Bashi). Even on the relatively straightforward "Dour Percentage," in which a flurry of falsettos and flutes and kettle drums resolves into brassy soft rock, terms like "verse" and "chorus" and "bridge" are less descriptions than wild guesses. The result is a nightmarish mess, but it's no relapse into disarray. Barnes must have patiently sweated out countless studio hours to simulate his chaotic psyche so intricately.

Which brings us to a question: why? Which, in turn, brings us to a lyric sheet wherein Barnes decries "the violent autism of our suborned, oblique, cracked-out species," calls for us "to suffer more, face our puerility, ban converts that vitiate, devise new stratagems to disavow our quotidian characters," and obsesses over the phrase "so much bitterness." For such a verbal guy, he sure does have a clotted way of expressing himself. And though you can't always judge a song by its title -- after all, the Outback jingle was called "Wraith Pinned to the Mist (And Other Games)" -- when five of an album's nine titles tag some hapless noun with a fancy-ass descriptor ("Gelid Ascent," "Malefic Dowery" [sic]), and the final two songs burden their nouns with two modifiers apiece ("Authentic Pyrrhic Remission"), we've clearly encountered a serious adjective-abuse problem.

Most damningly, for a record depicting a midlife spiritual crisis, Paralytic Stalks offers up some pretty damn collegiate insights: "It's fucking sad that we need a tragedy to occur to gain a fresh perspective on our lives," for instance. Often, you can't tell whether Barnes is addressing his god, his wife, or some poor unfortunate who happened to sit next to him on the bus. But let's pretend that "Can't you hear me crying out for guidance?" is directed at Jon Brion, and the whole of "Ye, Renew the Plaintiff" is at Kanye West. You know, just for fun. Because, after all, what could be more perverse than having fun while listening to an album that's so perverse?

Van Halen, 'A Different Kind of Truth' (Interscope)

Ken Bachor — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:39:06 +0000

I was 13 in 1984. More to the point, I was 13 during 1984. It's hard to overstate the impact of Van Halen being the biggest band on the planet at that critical moment of an impressionable suburban adolescent's cognitive and social development. They were my Beatles: four distinct outsize personalities with skill sets to match, adding up to more than the sum of their considerable parts, a lab-tested calibration of chops, hooks, showmanship, and humor. Their logo was made to be scrawled on the front of an algebra notebook. They became the embodiment of what the term "rock band" even meant, and each band I've encountered since has been refracted through that image and attendant mythology, measured against that formula. Fifteen seconds into any song and you knew it was them; my mom knew it was them. When this platonic ideal fantastically imploded a year later, the tragedy of the subsequent lineup (no need to name names) wasn't that their records were limp (they were) or whether they sold (they did), but that the band was ordinary, and, worse, seemed relieved by that fact, unburdened from the need to be a spectacle, too disengaged to properly navigate the fabled thin line between stupid and clever.

All of which is to say that for 28 (*sigh* doesn't even begin to cover it) years, I've been thinking entirely too much about this moment. Four years after an unlikely and, at least as far as the public is concerned, melodrama-free tour with David Lee Roth, there is now an actual new album, A Different Kind of Truth, that is technically the 12th Van Halen album, but really it's their seventh. Red flags abound, though: For something that would have been the biggest event in pop at nearly any other point in the past two decades, there's a weird hush surrounding this release. Could be that the fairly execrable leadoff track and first single, "Tattoo," lowered expectations. Or maybe Van Halen are now a high-end novelty act, multi-platinum fringe-dwellers who don't just want to appeal to your easy sense of nostalgia, but don't really have a peer group they're striving to outshine. They'll be playing arenas all year... but with Kool and the Gang opening. The six Van Halen albums between 1977 and 1984 comprise one of rock's most unassailable hot streaks ̬ how do they make something that doesn't feel like a wan postscript to that? Better yet: why?

A Different Kind of Truth doesn't duck either question. It's not perfect — it's too long by a third, David Lee Roth often sounds like a 2 A.M. drunk doing David Lee Roth at karaoke, and a Kinks cover wouldn't have killed them. But the album clearly aspires to both be part of the canon, and, if need be, serve as an entry point. Advance buzz noted that the tracklist was plundering the band's much-bootlegged 1976 Gene Simmons-produced "Van Halen Zero" demo, as if that spoke to some lack of ambition, but this is actually the mission statement: To redeem the band, and brand, after decades of neglect and bad hoodoo, pitting themselves against their younger, hungrier selves seems far more inspired than lazy. Besides, Van Halen were still dipping back into that well as late as 1984's "House of Pain," while Diver Down didn't suffer any from having just four original non-instrumentals on it.

So skip "Tattoo" — maybe just delete the track from your iTunes as a time-saver — and newly appointed opening track "She's the Woman," one of four songs here originally from "Van Halen Zero," sets the pace: lean and snarling and running circles around the amateurish versions recorded 36 years ago (or 16 years before bassist and genetic-lottery-winner Wolfgang Van Halen's birth). Ditto "Bullethead" and the album-closing duo "Big River" and "Beats Workin'," previously known as "Big Trouble" and "Put Out the Lights," respectively. No synths, no hits, no dubstep experiments. There's your how.

Even the songs that aren't directly reworked versions of Paleolithic demos are designed to sound familiar. "Stay Frosty" is damn near undignified in its wink to their debut album's beloved "Ice Cream Man"; roll your eyes at the idea of men in their mid-50s rehashing their best ideas for fun and/or profit, and many will, or marvel at the fact that it's 2012 and you're listening to a new Van Halen song that sounds like "Ice Cream Man." Bands have been ripping them off for years; they've earned their turn. If ever there was an album that demanded we think a little less, this is it. A week after the mass vivisection of Lana Del Rey, that should be the ultimate compliment and ultimate gift.

Best to let go of Diamond Dave — that smirking, leather-chapped, high-kicking slab of testosterone — and accept Roth as hammy, mildly embarrassing Uncle David. He doesn't attempt any of those trademark dog-whistle shrieks (save for a great one on "As Is" ), nor does he embrace the Heart Attack and Vine-era Tom Waits boze-de-boze-de-bopper we imagined he'd age into; what's left is a middle ground of amiable, Borscht-Belted come-ons over some ferociously performed music that people used to call heavy metal. If you were banking on more than that out of this record, I don't know what to tell you. The euphoric "Blood and Fire" (Dave's purring aside, "Told ya I was coming back!" is this album's "You're gonna get some leg tonight fo' sho'!").The frantic, haute-for-teacher "As Is" and the mid-tempo shoulda-been-the-single "You and Your Blues" can hang with any heavy-breathing romp they made in their heyday. And if there was still such a thing as AOR radio, these songs would be all over it, spiking convertible rentals all summer long. But there isn't. So what now?

Anyone looking for chances to wince will find them — "Outta Space" answers the musical question, "What if, instead of Sammy Hagar or Gary Cherone, Fred Schneider?" — but they're too innocuous to inflict any damage. If you're gonna gripe about crooned bumper-sticker lyrics like, "When you turn your stereo on / Does it return the favor?," it's a real short trip to realizing that a car named after a Central American country is a silly metaphor for fucking, and that trip sounds like no fun at all.

Meanwhile, despite Eddie Van Halen's various recent physical maladies — he's probably one-eighth bionic by now — he's still every bit the freak of nature that launched a million clumsily finger-tapped "Eruption" renditions. The double-time "China Town" is most likely to strike fear in the hearts of the nation's tablature-writers. And while the absent Michael Anthony is the elephant (not) in the room, this must be said: When it comes to navigating the space between his father's and uncle's signature flailings, Wolfie's combination of nature and nurture comes in pretty handy. Anthony's trademark background vocals, to say nothing of his just-happy-to-be-here demeanor, are sorely missed, but the kid knows what he's doing. And Eddie and Alex know what they're doing placing him there: The band's publishing is credited to two entities, The Three Twins, LLC and Diamond Dave Enterprises, drawing skewed battle lines, lest anyone consider getting crazy from the heat all over again. (And come to think of it, the few seemingly botched vocal takes left on the record may be how the brothers Van Halen exact their revenge these days.)

But the prospect of soap-opera antics seems unlikely. Toward the end of Van Halen's surreal warm-up show at a tiny Greenwich Village jazz club last month, a beaming Roth turned to the two brothers who've spent the better part of the past three decades as his archenemies and said, "This has to be one of the best gigs ever, right?" Had the microphone been anywhere near his mouth, this would have just sounded like the latest in a long, glorious career of Barnumesque stage blather. But the mic was at his side, and both Alex and Eddie nodded emphatically, more shocked than anyone. Having already proven they can still mint money playing the hits without killing one another, the opportunity to be relevant rather than merely present has to be its own reward. And to do so when their days of dutifully molding teenage consciences by the millions are a distant memory, and when bands half their age show no inclination or ability to pick up the mantle, has to be the closest that faded multimillionaire demigods can get to the feeling they had when they were playing to land a record deal. There's your why.

Leonard Cohen, 'Old Ideas' (Columbia)

Ken Bachor — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:13:13 +0000

My grandma's friend Willy told me the funniest and most honest thing I've ever heard an old person say. This was maybe two years ago, when I was visiting the retirement home where they both live. I asked Willy how he was doing. "The medicine they're giving me for my cancer's giving me boobs," he said matter-of-factly, "but they got some pretty nurses here who think I'm" — and he bit down hard on this next word — "cute." "So," he shrugged, "I'll get along till it's time to go."

Yep, it sucks to be old. When he was a spry 53-year-old, Leonard Cohen sang, "I ache in the places where I used to play." He's 77 now, so I can only imagine how he feels. But like Willy hinted, the cute crap can hurt worse than the body breaking down. Get past retirement age, and we'd rather pretend you're sexless (Betty White excepted). So there's some discomfort when, on the slyly priapic "Anyhow," from his wonderfully unsentimental, beautifully tuneful Old Ideas, Cohen lends his grizzled roué's growl to the line "I'm naked and I'm filthy and there's sweat upon my brow." Dirty old man. Shame on me.

Is there a situation where a dude Cohen's age with an impure mind isn't deemed inappropriate? (God forbid gramps gets a boner.) Fueling that question is the shittiest, noncorporeal thing about winding down the clock — and it's an impulse that Old Ideas, Cohen's first album of all-new material in eight years, is determined to deny. Simply put, the man knows we put oldies in a box before we put them in the ground.

Nowhere is this more true than in popular — or in Cohen's case, semipopular — music. Graybeards generally get two songs to sing: The Old'n'Plucky Rag or the 'Bout-to-Die Dirge. In the former, the graybeard's harmless amiability casts a sweetly reassuring spell. That's the idea, anyway, of a record like 69-year-old Paul McCartney's new standards collection, Kisses on the Bottom, which with its sugary string arrangements and air of assumed nostalgia has all the charm of a codger intent on sticking a Werther's Original in your ear.

Then there's the last-testament tip, wherein wizened types impart solemn wisdom about what they learned, who they loved, and what they never knew they had, in always-stark musical settings (see 75-year-old Glen Campbell's The Ghost in the Canvas, from late last year; or 70-year-old Neil Diamond's most recent servings of aged American cheese.) In each of these instances, there's no ambiguity and the emotional spectrum is dim. No deep red sensuality and/or black humor and/or dark blue longing. You only get one mood, old-timer. Make do.

Or don't. In his inimitably conspiratorial manner, Cohen uses Old Ideas to subvert what we expect from an alter kocker like him. Namely, easy answers or pat wisdom. The first track, "Going Home," is a sardonic gag about the very idea of the aged-master artist. On it, Cohen sing-speaks with more strength and subtlety than he did on 2004's Dear Heather (playing 168 shows between 2008 and 2010 must've helped), playing the role of inspiration itself. "He will speak these words of wisdom / Like a sage, a man of vision," he intones, his own rinky-dink keyboard a cheeky ripple in a warm pool of cooing female voices, "Though he knows he's really nothing / But the brief elaboration of a tube." He's not talking TVs.

Even the songs that seem to explicitly address the big D are full of feints. The suavely lascivious blues-lurch "The Darkness" measures pain as a fight between love and death that neither wins. Later, the hymnlike "Come Healing" finds Cohen, backed by the Webb sisters' chastely angelic vocals, asking us: "See the darkness yielding / That tore light apart." But those backup singers — their voices are so eerily pretty that they sound like a taunt, or maybe a mirage. On the smoky, seven-minute "Amen" — which could be a bemused response to his own "Hallelujah" — Cohen pleads for understanding, only to admit that he's had vengeance on the mind. And while he's soft-shoeing away from any final sentence, a shrugging synth-bass and smirking trumpet take turns shading the lyrics with solace or shame. Then there's "Show Me the Place," which wafts by on a breeze of Sunday-morning organ swells. That one's mostly just lovely — and lingers nowhere near as long as the casually loping "Banjo," in which a busted 'jo stands in for the reaper. Aging is nothing if not absurd.

In an interview shortly before the album's release, Cohen said he'd start smoking again if he makes it to 80. I say light up now, Leonard, because Old Ideas proves that you know as well as anyone that Death doesn't care for the fuzzy-wuzzies. And he loves a good laugh.

Imperial Teen, 'Feel the Sound' (Merge)

Ken Bachor — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:35:04 +0000

"With a foot on the ground / I can turn it around / Warming up to the sound / And I'm not coming down," croons Imperial Teen masse over a percolating keyboard riff on their splendid new album, sounding like a veteran quartet with nothing to prove, but still hellbent on proving it anyway. Keeping the alternative-rock fires burning well into adulthood is an enduring conundrum, especially for bands cheeky enough to adopt an adolescent name. But Sonic Youth and Teenage Fanclub still pull it off, and so does this Bay Area crew on Feel the Sound, their first release since 2007. Emphatically so.

One trick is to take your time. This is just the fizzy Bay Area indie-pop ensemble's fifth studio album in a career old enough to drive in most states, and the subject matter is as grown-up as you'd expect. It's tempting to interpret the anxiousness invoked here as the manifestation of a midlife crisis, especially in light of the Teen's last album, The Hair the TV the Baby and the Band, whose title called out each member's extracurricular pursuits: bassist Jone Stebbins' hair salon, keyboardist/guitarist Roddy Bottum's film and TV soundtrack work, drummer Lynn Perko Truell's offspring, and keyboardist/guitarist Will Schwartz's side band, Hey Willpower. That album's most telling song was "Room With a View," set in the rehearsal space of a band struggling to cope with unsympathetic neighbors while vowing to "do our best to pretend we'll be 20 for life."

Feel the Sound does no such pretending, but Imperial Teen still sound as fresh and vital as ever. The band always has radiated an adorable eagerness, which infused even their cattiest barbs with sly wit packaged in chewy pop goodness. But a lot more of those barbs are inward-directed nowadays ("The music's stopped and I can't sing / But I can get through anything," goes the closing verse of "Last to Know"), couched in manic arrangements that exude a sense of the band members feeling dazed and overwhelmed. Song titles include "Over His Head," "Don't Know How You Do It," and "Overtaken," all rendered in their respective choruses with the greatest of deadpan ease with lovely male-female harmony-vocal chants.

Then again, this is a band that's always made the most of ambiguity and contrast. First emerging with 1996's Seasick, Imperial Teen were a genuine curiosity surfing in Kurt Cobain's wake (indeed, the band's Faith No More/Sister Double Happiness pedigree has always been one of the least-relevant things about them). They were one of that era's few indie-rock bands with an overtly gay sensibility, about which they were so disarmingly matter-of-fact that it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. "I never swallow, I chew," declared that album's "Butch," which worked the classic quiet-verse-to-loud-chorus dynamic. Still, they were more inclined toward the Velvet Underground's drone than Nirvana's sturm und drang. Seasick opened with a song called "Imperial Teen" that built to a cryptic, tongue-in-cheek chorus that was murmured rather than hollered: "Imperial Teen, 2-3-4-1 / Does it hurt when you scream?"

Sixteen years later, Feel the Sound opens with "Runaway," featuring a more conventional count-off and new-wave keyboard atmospherics that glide along breathlessly. The sound is so exuberant that it's easy to miss the lyrics begging for escape from everyone and everything: "I could be you and you'd be me / Go in, go out, go in, go out — yeah!" Self-produced for the first time (this is their first record not helmed by Steven McDonald of Redd Kross), the arrangements are a bit less jingle-jangle and more keyboard-focused, the better to evoke the luscious tones of '80s Euro-pop (play Love & Rockets' "So Alive" back to back with this album's "Hanging About" sometime). For all the angst, the music itself is delectable and loose, with room for high-tension strings on "Don't Know How You Do It." A perfectly understated piano hook is the ideal decoration for disturbing, end-times rumination "The Hibernates."

The passage of time looms large throughout Feel the Sound, as do imminent partings. By the penultimate song, "It's You," Imperial Teen almost sound as if they're bidding farewell: "Too many songs we sang are left unsung / Another dream unwritten, the record's done." Maybe so, but this record is killer. And they don't sound ready to give up just yet.

Lana Del Rey, 'Born to Die' (Interscope)

Ken Bachor — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:01:49 +0000

Read the review, then check out Deconstructing Lana Del Rey: untangling the year's most divisive new artist.

"Bob Dylan" is not his real name. The "Ramones" were not related. "Sun Ra" was from Alabama, not Saturn. The Strokes' dads are not plumbers. "Rick Ross"… look, we don't have time for this. Yes, Internet, and God bless you for devoting most of the past half-year exclusively to pointing this out, Lana Del Rey is a pose, a persona, a version 2.0, at least, the contrivance of a messy, wayward, unformed, aspiring pop star rummaging through closets and clutching at borrowed pearls. Desperate to be what she thinks you want her to be. Calculated, malleable, untrustworthy, fumbling indelicately for "her" voice or a voice that's "real." As the Bard wrote: "I can change / I can change / I can change / I can change / If it makes you fall in love."

Eat it, Lizzy Grant. We got you. We cracked the code. Consider youself chastised. Feel free now, Internet, to go back to what you were doing before, i.e. subjecting to withering skepticism and operatic disdain the alleged authenticity of every scrap of music ever created by every human being seeking a modicum of public approval, ever, with the possible exception of Fugazi.

Calm down.

And here it is, Born to Die, the album, the "product," the anticlimax, borne of the lips that launched a thousand thinkpieces. Whether you know Ms. Del Rey primarily through that one YouTube video (the still-unassailable "Video Games") or those two Hulu clips (her still-mortifying Saturday Night Live performances), you've no doubt internalized her Peggy-Lee-joins-Portishead steez by now, fused to a theoretically hip-hop-savvy retro-futurism that is expertly established within 30 seconds of the title-track opener. The liquid-nitrogen 808s and Heartbreak dead-heartbeat, the soporific strings, the teenage-dream romantic fatalism, the sexy-grandmotherly ingénue moaning, "Feet don't fail me now," like a Valley-girl Desdemona.

Another major sonic precedent here is "Milk," the last song on the first Garbage record, the poisoned apple of 1995's eye, wherein (look, okay, the vastly superior) Shirley Manson wailed, "I'm waiiiiting / I'm waiiiiting for you" over nuclear-pathos grunge-glam symphonics. (Toss in that goofy, melodramatic torch song they did for the Leo DiCaprio/Claire Danes Romeo + Juliet remake, too.) Just jack up the goofiness, the melodrama, the glamour, the pathos. This is all stupendously hokey and stylized and yet immensely appealing; it's a fully defined sound — a point of view, as Heidi Klum would have it — and worth surrendering to even if you're the sort of person who'd enjoy watching a TV show where people who use the phrase "the gangster Nancy Sinatra" are shot out of cannons, directly into walls.

OBJECTIVELY RIDICULOUS LYRICS ON THIS ALBUM
"Everything I want I have / Money, notoriety, and rivieras."
"It was like James Dean / For sure / You're so fresh to death / And sick ca-cancer."
"Let's take Jesus off the dashboard / Got enough on his mind."
"Light of my life / Fire of my loins / Gimme them gold coins / Gimme them coins."

Yes, let's get "Off to the Races" out of the way. Holy moly, is "Off to the Races" just wall-to-wall GTFO. Miley Cyrus noir. Let's hear it for the boy: "He doesn't mind I have a Las Vegas past / He doesn't mind I have an L.A.-crass way about me / He loves me / With every beat of his cocaine heart." You had me up until "cocaine." The vast majority of this record is given over to rhapsodizing over some hunky, dangerous fella, and none of the alterations — sonic, biographical, cosmetic — allegedly made to the real-life Lana/Lizzy could distort the truth as thoroughly as her unrelenting Ooh He's a Bad, Bad, Sexy Man routine. It's instructive to picture what this guy would actually look like IRL, some clown with a real emotional haircut, Crocs hanging off his feet, Urban Outfitters leather jacket hung over his IKEA futon, remnants of that Taco Bell burrito with the Fritos in it congregating at the corners of his mouth as he binges on Skyrim, blasts "Pumped Up Kicks" on infinite repeat, and gargles dozens of shots of, like, Goldschläger.

Still, she loves him, yeah yeah yeah. The approximate vocal style here is Crushed-Out Schizo Coquette, especially when she goes the full Marilyn Monroe/Victoria Jackson for "I'm your little Scarlet / Starlet / Singing in the garden / Kiss me on my open mouth." Verily, what made her newborn-foal-on-ice-falling-into-a-volcano SNL debacle so terrible was how it exacerbated the key aspect of her voice: Every consecutive syllable sounds like a different person, rendering even a relatively simple line like "Oh please, stay here / We don't need no money / We can make it all work" into a mind-boggling improv-comedy flash mob. If we're already dealing with an empty/mutable personality, it's best to pretend "Lana Del Rey" is a girl group: Replace Sporty and Ginger, and call the new quintet Posh Spice, Baby Spice, Scary Spice, Drunk Spice, and Nas Spice.

(First thing to do after that is kick out Nas Spice. The nominally rapped "National Anthem" is patently ludicrous: "Money is the anthem / God you're so handsome," delivered in an Off-Broadway lisp that someone somewhere mistakenly regarded as erotic. She sounds like Napoleon Dynamite's brother.)

OBJECTIVELY RIDICULOUS LYRICS ON THIS ALBUM PT. II
"Money is the reason we exist / Everybody knows it / It's a fact, kiss kiss."
"Let's get out of this town / Baby, we're on FIYAH."
"Pabst Blue Ribbon on ice."
"Kiss me in the D-A-R-K dark tonight / Kiss me in the P-A-R-K park tonight."
"My old man is a tough man, but / He got a soul as sweet as blood-red jam / And he shows me he knows me / Every inch of my tar-black soul."
[A bunch of mumbled shit in French]

Is that all there is? Camp tragedy? Unintentional comedy? Yeah, so? Even the terrible parts of Born to Die are just so lovable, which bodes well for the actually great parts. Let no man speak against "Video Games" itself, the pocket-orchestral glamour and true-romance dizziness tuned just right: "He holds me in his big arms / Drunk, and I am seein' stars / This is all I think of." (The video, too, worthy of the Hollywood-as-Beautifier/Annihilator canon right alongside Mulholland Drive, or The Big Sleep, or the videos for "Welcome to the Jungle" and Poison's "Fallen Angel.")

Even the filler here bemuses and/or dazzles. There are at least two things wrong with the song title "Dark Paradise," but the mesmerizing stereo-panned, Greek Choral backing chants of "Radio" will remind you how much money, effort, and studio time have been poured into all this. And "Carmen" gently ascends/descends to Drake/Weeknd empty-hedonism poignancy: "Relying on the kindness of strangers / Tying cherry knots, smiling, doing party favors / Put your red dress on / Put your lipstick on / Sing your song, song / Now the camera's on / And you're alive again." Lyrically, Born to Die is as rigid and self-referential as any Hold Steady record, the lipstick/bikini/party dress/mascara/high heels tableaux repeated until it passes from lasciviousness to slight nausea to deadened malaise.

And climactically, "This Is What Makes Us Girls," whose title alone is just trolling you so hard. Wherein a pack of small-town Lolitas booze it up, trigger catcalls, skip school, break into pools, steal police cars, maybe hit the pole, etc. etc. This is all breathy, breathtaking bullshit, a shameless jumble of Rebel without a Cause, Fast Times at Ridegemont High, Twin Peaks, Showgirls, Smashing Pumpkins' "1979" video, Gossip Girl, and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. But if you forget to approach this with a cynical, detached remove — if it catches you Internet-distracted and momentarily vulnerable — the last verse will, for a split-second, whack you across the nose with an old Vanity Fair: "They were the only friends I ever had / We got into trouble and when stuff got bad / I got sent away / I was waving on the train platform / Crying 'cause I know I'm never coming back."

This, too, is objectively ridiculous (even if it's apparently true), but she sounds so serious and genuinely despondent. This all has been so absurd: Who cares what percentage of that, or this record, or her is true? What do you care? Whether Born to Die sells 100,000 copies or 10,000 or 1,500, it has served a valuable purpose as the Internet's insta-backlash, hype-vortex tipping point, the darkest night yet of our Tumblr-ing soul. A cautionary tale. We should be ashamed; what we did to Black Kids looks rational and nurturing by comparison. This record is not godawful. Nor is it great. But it's better than we deserve. We broke her; we bought her.

Craig Finn, 'Clear Heart Full Eyes' (Vagrant)

Ken Bachor — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:53:53 +0000

You can only cheerfully bark the refrain "Gonna walk around / Gonna walk around / Gonna walk around and drink" so long before your feet get tired, your poor liver gives out, and the rest of the kids at the party wander off and get jobs and stop being, well, kids. Which is the point at which Craig Finn's career truly started.

Over five exhilarating albums as the thirtysomething toga-party-preacher frontman for Brooklyn-via-Minneapolis classic-rock poets laureate the Hold Steady (plus three earlier, even seedier & surlier efforts with Minneapolis' Lifter Puller), Finn has riffed and raged and enraptured, an erudite torrent of carnality and Catholicism combining the cheap, intoxicating thrill of a keg stand with the fervor of the Sermon on the Mount. The Saturday night/Sunday morning dichotomy made (mild-mannered, bespectacled) flesh. And now, the earnest but tepid Clear Heart Full Eyes, which as a solo album makes an excellent argument for sticking with your apostles.

The still-active Hold Steady have slowly, elegantly mellowed, it's true. The thrilling roar of their brain-of-Springsteen, brawn-of-Meatloaf barstool rock has been tamped down gradually by soft balladry and an exquisite weariness they'd hinted at from the very beginning. ("Killer parties almost killed me," went the thesis of their 2004 debut.) But they still have guitarist and semi-secret weapon Tad Kubler and his occasional bursts of Zeppelin-via-Replacements bombast to prevent total atrophy. Left to Finn's own devices, Full Eyes flirts with flat-lining entirely. "I only died on the inside," he announces in his inimitable half-sung, half-declaimed yap on "No Future," his Austin, Texas pickup band ambling through one of the peppier, punkier numbers on an album dominated by folk, alt-country, blues, and soft-rock fuzziness that serves only to blunt his typically sharp lyricism -- conviction, but little catharsis.

The half-shuffling, half-trudging "Apollo Bay" sets the tone, slow and solemn, as if the Hold Steady's unapologetic anthemia had been replaced by atmospheric Gothic folk, with an arty, Marc Ribot-esque distortion-as-abstract-expressionism guitar solo ripping through it, but not quite jolting it to life. "When No One's Watching" keeps the raging guitar and begins to liven up, with rumbling upright bass goading Finn along as he lambastes some dimestore lothario, "A weak man living off of weaker women." Our host still remains absurdly quotable, dashing off wizened one-liners that carry you through even the record's dullest moments. The hazy, punchless blues-rock of "Jackson" is briefly brightened by the occasional bon mot: "Stephanie was long on looks and short on mental health."

You can pleasantly while away Full Eyes just luxuriating in Finn's long-codified tics. Count the name-drops (Freddie Mercury and Johnny Rotten on "No Future," Joan Didion and Graham Greene on "Honolulu Blues"). Take a shot every time he mentions Jesus (and prepare to get just obliterated). Spot a few recurring lyrical motifs ("the back half of the theater"). The best moments here explicitly evoke old Hold Steady tourmates Drive-By Truckers, the gold standard for novelistic Americana: "New Friend Jesus" is a pristinely goofy, Mike Cooley sorta tune, acoustic-driven and spry and boasting all of Finn's best lines: "It's hard to suck with Jesus in your band" takes the crown, only to have it immediately snatched away by "People say we suck at sports, but they don't understand / It's hard to catch with holes right through your hands."

"Terrified Eyes" generates a similar peaceful easy feeling, but the only other genuine highlight here is "Rented Room," a harrowing, funereal, lovelorn dirge, basically an archetypal lonely-guy breakup song imbued with genuine beauty and pathos. Sing/declaim/yap along: "Playin' records in a rented room / Hotter than Hell into Bark at the Moon / Certain things they get really hard to do / When you're living in a rented room." Those lines nicely encapsulate Finn's immense appeal: the wry specificity of the album titles and the even wryer non-specificity of "certain things."

That's the song here most likely to get scratched into your soul, but we stumble to a close with "Balcony" and "Not Much Left of Us," two half-hearted attempts to evoke that same transcendent glumness that just come off as merely glum. At its best and/or weirdest, Clear Heart Full Eyes reaches for a Tom Waits sort of sublime seediness, (mercifully) drained of all the psycho-carnival-barker shit. But as an attempt at the autumnal grandeur of Waits' Mule Variations, it has far too few variations. Sing about boxed-in barhounds too long and you risk becoming one yourself.

Cloud Nothings, 'Attack on Memory' (Carpark)

Ken Bachor — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:21:36 +0000

In evolutionary terms, the march of indie rock into the 21st century has been largely monkey-to-man; it's rare that a young act with pop promise takes a hard left at ape and winds up on all fours, a lion instead. Our bands have been getting smarter and more sensitive, not cannier and crueler.

So what's up with Cleveland's Cloud Nothings? Like so many contenders before them, their melodic sweetness burns dimly beneath mounds of sour fuzz. One of those bands we're always apologizing for ("Dude, it's an aesthetic!"), who are always apologizing for us ("Dude, it's all we had"). The bands who start out as No Age (abstract, feral) and grow up to be the Pains of Being Pure at Heart (linear, twee). Seldom does a prominent buzz band flash its grimy hooks, shine them up across a series of boutique releases and an LP debut, then bury them in our shoulders to drag us into hell. Wavves' King of the Beach was surprising because it turned out that inveterate stoners could write pop songs. Cloud Nothings' latest is surprising because we already knew that, and this little shit decided to stone us instead.

Attack on Memory opens with a brutal one-two sucker punch. Last year's self-titled full-length, helmed almost entirely by frontman Dylan Baldi, closed with a bouncy ball of a punk-pop jammer, "All the Time," cruddy guitars meddling in major-chord bliss, Baldi's voice high and spry as he sang, "I say forget forever / I'm doing fine right now." In 2012, a whole wrecking crew now behind him, Baldi offers "No Future/No Past," an opening statement even bleaker than its name. Pensive keys and melancholic guitar build slowly over a methodical drumbeat. A distinctly In Utero anguish boils over into a crashing finish. The words "give up" seep from Baldi's throat like a death rattle. And this is followed by nine minutes of "Wasted Days," an upbeat and epic thrash through bummertown that recalls the nearly proggy punk-metal of early Trail of Dead. Here, what once was a one-man basement project becomes a full band to be reckoned with — twining guitar solos, visceral bass rips, snares, and cymbals — a live thing wrestling with itself on the floor of Steve Albini's studio. It's enough hi-fi brimstone to block out the sun.

So when the smoke clears and Baldi resurfaces on "Fall In" with a little Green Day snot on his tongue, the effect is relief. It's both a breath of fresh air and confirmation that the 20-year-old still can do catchy, even if the tone and message have changed. Make no mistake, not once are we allowed to forget that at the base of all that pummel and scree lie the ashes of some failed relationship, and his angst plays like a perfect storm of grungy self-loathing and hopeless emo yearn. On "Cut You," he sways between those two poles schizophrenically, growling like Kurt Cobain ("Can he be as mean as me? / Can he cut you in your sleep?") before pining like a Get Up Kid ("Is he gonna work out? I need to know"). Like so few of his peers, Baldi uses his voice as an actual instrument, an emotional weapon that wreaks raspy havoc, even in the midst of Attack on Memory's brightest song, "Stay Useless."

Big feelings. Big guitars. Very big effect. Turns out Baldi's aspirations for Cloud Nothings are familiar after all, but his pop dream is still rooted in the '90s. He's naked at the front of the classroom, but he's unashamed. His heart's on the floor, but who cares. Banged-up Fenders and trashed Peaveys circle his head like demons. The synthesizer is someone else's nightmare.

First Aid Kit, 'The Lion's Roar' (Wichita)

Ken Bachor — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:45:53 +0000

The Pierces. The Watson Twins. Tegan and Sara. In an international indie scene curiously awash in close-harmonizing sister-folk acts, you can understand why Sweden's First Aid Kit chose a name -- even a name as blandly utilitarian as this one -- that sets them apart from the ever-widening post-Carter family. Really, though, Klara and Johanna Söderberg could've called themselves the Only Children and there'd still be no denying the centrality of those blood-relation harmonies: Singer-guitarist Klara gets off exactly two verses on The Lion's Roar before she's joined by singer-keyboardist Johanna, whose voice sticks steadfastly to her sibling's for the remainder of this often-gorgeous sophomore album.

And why shouldn't it? Like John Bonham's beat or Eddie Van Halen's guitar, the Söderbergs' singing is a sound worth building a band around -- luscious but haunting, tender but stern, with as much of that flock-of-birds collective-consciousness thing as any of their peers, current or historical. Those tightly braided vocals have served as First Aid Kit's calling card since 2008, when they uploaded a bare-bones YouTube cover of Fleet Foxes' "Tiger Mountain Peasant Song" that's been viewed nearly three million times; the duo's 2010 debut, The Big Black and the Blue, opened with a minute-long a cappella stretch.

But true to its title, The Lion's Roar feels even more defined by pure voice: Near the end of "In the Hearts of Men," for instance, the Söderbergs do away with lyrics, luxuriating in the genetic purity of their wordless la-la-las. And they use "Emmylou" to salute some fellow top-shelf harmonizers, promising, "I'll be your Emmylou, and I'll be your June / And you'll be my Gram and my Johnny, too." (So much for resisting the Carters.) Atop an easygoing cosmic-country shuffle, these prematurely old souls go on to equate romantic devotion with musical cooperation: "No, I'm not asking much of you / Just sing, little darling, sing with me."

Interestingly, First Aid Kit traveled halfway around the world -- from Stockholm to Omaha -- to make a record that emphasizes their homegrown charm. Mike Mogis of Bright Eyes produced The Lion's Roar at his ARC Studios, where he staffed the sessions with a number of players from Nebraska's tight-knit Saddle Creek scene, including Ben Brodin and Nate Walcott. (The Söderbergs' dad, Benkt, came over with them and played bass, which blows for the guy from the Faint.) Mr. Omaha himself, Conor Oberst, even shows up on the album's closer, "King of the World," a cheerful, foot-stomping ditty about one day waking up "all alone with a big family and emptiness deep in my bones." To that the Bright Eyes frontman can't help appending the kind of vaguely apocalyptic aphorism for which he's so adored: "If you fall for your reflection," Oberst warns, "you will drown in a dream." Duuude.

In spite of all the work he throws his pals, Mogis never allows the arrangements to pull focus from the Söderbergs' vocals. (Compare his restraint to that of Coldplay bassist Guy Berryman, who co-produced the Pierces' expansive You & I, due out in March.) The closest Mogis gets to ball-hogging here is "Dance to Another Tune," which with its tolling piano and seasick strings comes on like Lana Del Rey's "Video Games." As soon as they open their mouths, though, Klara and Johanna retake center stage, ruminating on how "there's nothing new under the sun" and "all that will happen has already begun." Probably, yeah. But First Aid Kit reaffirm those familiar truths beautifully.

Chairlift, 'Something' (Columbia)

Ken Bachor — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:53:19 +0000

Caroline Polachek is getting better at Scrabble. On her synth-pop crew's skeletal 2008 debut, Does You Inspire You, the singer-keyboardist was so proud of the song's hazy, unusually worded chorus — "The most evident utensil / Is none other than a pencil" — that the band risked a video budget, winning a VMA nomination for their datamoshing 4D clip. Now, the first song on Chairlift's new album raises the syllabic stakes to downright goofy heights: "Is it amnesia / Amanaemonesia / Mistaken for magic," goes "Amanaemonesia," which may or may not be a real condition. There's a quirky video for that one, too.

Accordingly, Polachek's takes on alienated Brooklyn disaffection are more playful than most. In "Met Before," she gets déjà vu from too many ninth-floor loft parties, and or "Sidewalk Safari," she hunts hipsters even more explicitly than Foster the People did on "Pumped Up Kicks" — by actually running them over. This all befits these quirky borough transplants who broke through with "Bruises," an iPod commercial honeypot that celebrated grass stains and frozen strawberries, among other metaphors. They didn't especially stand out from the scads of '80s-minded, synth-soaked indie bands at the tail end of the 2000s, but they laid the path for Something, their true major-label debut.

With Chairlift now whittled down from a trio to a duo, Polachek's Cocteau Twins-cum-Feist vocals turn stranger, hookier new corners, while instrumentalist Patrick Wimberley (who sneaked massive weirdness into beats for Das Racist on last year's Relax) artfully fills out these misshapen pop tunes. Only the opening squelch of "Sidewalk Safari" matches the never-knew-what-hit-you shock of Das Racist's crank-shifting "Michael Jackson," but Wimberly bends and contorts Polachek's torch songs in ways that equally textural peers like Class Actress and Au Revoir Simone have yet to master.

Credit producers Alan Moulder (My Bloody Valentine, Smashing Pumpkins) and occasional Hot Chip/CSS tinkerer Dan Carey. "Ghost Tonight" sounds like Tears for Fears' '80s radio epic "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," redesigned to fit onto Björk's Homogenic. "Wrong Opinion" draws on a friendlier version of the Knife's aluminum-walled histrionics. And "Guilty as Charged" (sadly, not a cover of the Walk Hard chestnut) utilizes a loop so lo-res it could make you check your MP3's bit rate, with horn stabs beamed in from some beat program's default setting. Nonetheless, it emerges as a engaging, top-notch ballad with a bit of frost on its breath.

That these studio rats have mastered kitsch-en sink sonics is perhaps unsurprising; what's unexpected is their ability to deliver such full-bodied arena-pop cheese while remaining so cool and detached. The best song here, "I Belong in Your Arms," skyrockets off a pumping Hall and Oates beat, while the glimmering new-wave sweep of "Met Before" is as straight as straitlaced pop gets. Moreover, these 11 roomy tunes fall all over the sonic spectrum, which is a credit to Chairlift's curatorial skills. Fake-sounding percussion glistens off real-sounding walls; keyboards sound more pillaged than patched; clangs sound like they're emanating from actual metal objects. The overall affect is a travelogue falling between chillwave's lo-fi explorations and the sophisticated melancholy of Lykke Li's Wounded Rhymes: tightly economic pop tunes that draw on aural largesse as much as claustrophobic bricolage.

The weak points don't even feel like they're on the same record — "Take It Out on Me," with its rainfall of MIDI scales, could be Small Black mistakenly dropped into the playlist. But at her best, Polachek's ice-curling vocals keep the troubling fog at bay in favor of something merely partly cloudy. And in her shrouded way, she welcomes the distinction, as well as the small-stakes stardom that could soon set her apart from the crowd: "Amongst the buzzing of billions / Clear like yesterday, when you look at me and smile."