On its 2007 debut, “All Hour Cymbals,” the Brooklyn trio Yeasayer created an alternate-universe “Smile,” the one Brian Wilson would have made had he grown up amid the sands of the Arabian Peninsula, not Southern California. The album had a wayfaring, nomadic feel, its Middle Eastern melodies and tribal percussion hinting at what indie rock might have sounded like in 5,000 B.C.

The group’s sophomore effort, “Odd Blood” (Secretly Canadian), is a more futuristic, less terrestrial affair. The shift is apparent from the opening track, “The Children,” 3 minutes of garbled, computerized vocals and cling-clang percussion. It’s a dispatch from ground control to major Tom Waits — a strange prelude to the digital dance party that follows.

With the weirdness of “The Children” out of its system, Yeasayer spends the next nine tracks piling on synth and vocal hooks. On the electro-reggae hybrid “Ambling Alp” and dance-pop confection “O.N.E.,” the band trades the epic scope of its early material for more mundane, human concerns. The former reads like a pep talk from a father to his son, while the latter chronicles the aftermath of an unhealthy relationship.

Although not every track is as accessible, “Odd Blood” is straight-up pop music done the Yeasayer way. The group goes from Mesopotamia to the moon, and the journey is as worthwhile as it is unexpected.

— Text by Kenneth Partridge, photo by Guy Aroch

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Ambling Alp mp3
O.N.E. mp3

February 8, 2010 at 8:00 am | Share | No Comments »

Austin, Texas, noise-rockers … And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead have never been known for subtlety, so it may take a minute to wrap your head around the sound of Borrowed Eyes and the Blood Red Road, the new band from former Trail of Dead member Danny Wood.

It’s more akin to the spooky, intense Americana of, say, the Gilded Palace of Sin or Castanets, on Borrowed Eyes’ first song, “Slaves.” The song is half of a 7-inch single split with fellow New Yorkers Midnight Masses. Borrowed Eyes plans to release a full-length album later this year.

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Slaves mp3

February 4, 2010 at 10:31 am | Share | No Comments »

Love gone wrong is a pretty regular song topic, but not this wrong: After a relationship gone sour, Pennsylvania singer and songwriter Timothy Showalter returned home one day to find only the charred ruins of what had been his house.

Showalter, who teaches at a Hebrew dayschool and, his publicity material says, even drives the school bus for extra cash, spent a bunch of nights in hotel rooms and on park benches with a borrowed guitar. Suddenly becoming homeless and possessionless gave him plenty to think about, resulting in the heartbreaking songs comprising last year’s aptly titled “Leave Ruin,” which he released as Strand of Oaks.

He hits the road this winter with White Pines for a 16-date tour that winds through the Midwest and ends up close(-ish) to home in Philadelphia. See dates here.

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End in Flames mp3
Two Kids mp3

February 3, 2010 at 8:23 am | Share | No Comments »

Finally, procrastination pays off!

Say that for whatever reason, you’ve been delaying the purchase of the Magnetic Fields 1999 opus “69 Love Songs.” For the past 10 years. Shame on you, obviously. Or maybe you’re the smart one, given that Merge Records today announced the April 20 release of all 69 songs, fully remastered, on vinyl.

What occupied three CDs will fill six 10-inch records, and the set includes an mp3 coupon and a 10-inch version of the original booklet featuring liner notes by “Lemony Snicket” author Daniel Handler.

It ain’t cheap, but you can pre-order the set here for a special pre-Valentine’s Day price. To further whet your appetite, Merge is giving away a free download of the band’s half-romantic, half-snarky song “Book of Love.”

(Also, just last week the Magnetic Fields released an excellent new album, “Realism,” on Nonesuch.)

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Book of Love mp3

February 2, 2010 at 2:14 pm | Share | No Comments »

It took a few attempts before Midlake hit on a compelling direction for the follow-up to the band’s acclaimed 2006 album, “The Trials of Van Occupanther.”

Four years later, the Denton, Texas, group returns with “The Courage of Others” (Bella Union). It was worth the wait. Actually, that’s something of an understatement.

The band’s third album is a stunning collection of 11 songs inspired by the sound of British electric-folk bands from the late ’60s and ’70s, but “The Courage of Others” is no throwback record: in fact, Midlake has rendered these songs in a way that’s timeless, and wholly riveting.

Leader Tim Smith sings in a melodious, understated voice over intricate musical arrangements — enough so that the musicians had to teach themselves to play in the prog-folk style of the album. A wash of acoustic and electric guitars, drums and wind instruments sweeps through opener “Acts of Man,” and there’s a taut tension in the overdriven electric guitar winding through “Core of Nature.”

Acoustic guitars intertwine on the lovely, subdued “Fortune,” and underpin the forceful blend of electric guitar and wind instruments that sweep through “Rulers, Ruling All Things.”

It’s a subtle, powerful and intently musical way to build on a record that could have been a career-defining release. Ultimately, all that craft and care resulted in a record that’s even stronger, demonstrating that true quality is worth the time it takes.

— Text by Eric R. Danton, photo by Bill Zelman

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February 2, 2010 at 8:30 am | Share | No Comments »

The first song on the sophomore album by the Wagner Logic is called “Waiting for Snow.” Given that the band is from Alaska, we’re guessing it’s never a very long wait.

Snow jokes aside, the Alaska thing is significant: the song is like a photo negative of that psychedelic California sound from the ’60s, with reverb-heavy, lo-fi vocals, swirling bursts of noise and big, stinging guitars. Instead of evoking hazy sunshine, though, the tune captures the chill and windy desolation of six months of winter in a Kasilof, a town known best for salmon fishing and dog sledding.

It’s from the self-titled second album by the two-man band (James Glaves and Jeremy Wagner founded the band in 2000 as a lo-fi basement recording project). “The Wagner Logic” follows the band’s 2008 debut, “Easiest to Grab.”

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Waiting for Snow mp3

February 1, 2010 at 12:00 pm | Share | No Comments »

Before Flavor Flav hawked cell phone plans for Sprint and got roasted on Comedy Central, before Chuck D debated Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele on CNN, before mainstream hip-hop was taken over by an endless stream of Auto-Tuned gangsta wannabes, there was Public Enemy.

“Yo! Bum Rush the Show” introduced Public Enemy to the hip-hop world in 1987. “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” upped the ante and irreversibly changed that world in 1988, but 1989 was the year P.E. broke through to the rest of the world when “Fight the Power” played over the opening credits of Spike Lee’s brilliant film “Do the Right Thing.”  By 1990 it seemed they could do no wrong.  In the face of such high expectations, it’s no small feat that their third album, “Fear of a Black Planet,” did not disappoint.

Like “It Takes a Nation,” “Fear” starts with a sonic collage of reactions to the group, black nationalist screeds and other incendiary samples to demonstrate that Public Enemy hadn’t lost its edge. “Brothers Gonna Work It Out” and “911 Is a Joke” display the lyrical prowess of Chuck D and Flavor Flav, respectively, and the latter a brilliant slab of funk with an irresistibly catchy, scathingly pointed chorus. The energy stays high on “Welcome to the Terrordome,” then dips on the unfortunately homophobic low point “Meet the G that Killed Me”.

Never ones to skirt controversy, they go from AIDS conspiracy theories to interracial romance on “Pollywannacracker,” police brutality on “Anti-Nigger Machine” and Hollywood’s history of racism on “Burn Hollywood Burn,” which features furious rhymes from Ice Cube and Big Daddy Kane. The first half is rounded out by fast paced populist rave-up “Power to the People.”

The second side starts strong with “Who Stole the Soul?” leading in to title track (and sonic masterpiece) “Fear of a Black Planet.” No track in any musical genre has so perfectly crystallized the insanity of white fears of contamination by other races. As Chuck D says: “All I want is peace and love on this planet (ain’t that how God planned it?).” The meditation on racism is quickly followed by a one on sexism, “Revolutionary Generation.” When was the last time you heard a hardcore hip-hop artist express an unapologetically feminist sentiment like “forget about me/set my sister free/R-E-S-P-E-C-T my sisters, not my enemy.”

Flavor Flav takes over on his second iconic jam of the album “Can’t Do Nuttin’ For Ya Man,” exhorting those who abase their dignity by living on hand-outs. Next comes the reggae soaked “Reggie Jax”, another sample heavy instrumental “Leave This Off Your Fu*kin Charts”, and two tight tracks about the power of music: “B-Side Wins Again” and “War at 33 1/3.”

“Final Count of the Collision Between Us and the Damned” is a brief respite before P.E. serves up a potent slab of the purest hard-core hip-hop on “Fight the Power.” Like “Satisfaction,” “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Fight the Power” was a bona fide anthem for a generation simultaneously expressing frustration and celebration (damn … they even got Listen, Dammit, rhyming now).

More than anything, “Fear of a Black Planet” leaves the listener dumbfounded by how quickly the lyrics flow, how sharply DJ Terminator X samples and scratches and how much noise the Bomb Squad manages to pack in to a single record.

After Dr. Dre and Snoop Dog slowed the tempo down in 1992, it would be nearly a decade before such intensity resurfaced in the hip-hop world with the breakthrough of OutKast’s masterful “B.O.B.,” featuring another dynamic duo of MCs in Big Boi and Andre 3000.

Aside from the 1991’s equally strong “Apocalypse 91 … the Enemy Strikes Black,” Public Enemy never quite recaptured the vitality and cultural relevance of their early work, though they never stopped trying and they never sold out. (Flavor Flav’s clowning around on VH1 doesn’t count, because he remained true to his jokester self.) The ubiquity of rap music is in many ways their legacy.

Along with KRS-One, Ice-T, N.W.A. and the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy bridged the gap between the pioneers that came before them and the superstars that came after them. They also bridged the gap between music and politics, and in so doing became part of the long tradition of American protest music, a tradition that has sadly and inexplicably fallen on hard times in recent years.  But with a new decade before us, it just might make a comeback.  Young Turks might want to give “Fear of a Black Planet” a listen for inspiration.

— Nicholas Coleman

February 1, 2010 at 8:30 am | Share | No Comments »

Funny coincidence: Slumberland Records has announced the forthcoming release of a Black Tambourine anthology, which wouldn’t mean much to Listen, Dammit, except that we’ve been listening the past few weeks to a lot of Black Tambourine.

The Washington D.C. band, a side project for members of Whorl and Velocity Girl, only lasted for two years between 1989-91, recording a relative handful of songs explicitly meant to be pop tunes (if noisy ones) in an era dominated by the rise of punk rock via grunge.

Lately, younger bands have been generous in citing the influence of Black Tambourine, including the Vivian Girls, Wavves and the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. Pains singer Kip Berman told Listen, Dammit, last year that Black Tambourine was among his favorite bands, in the company of similarly obscure acts like Rocketship and the Manhattan Love Suicides.

Slumberland’s anthology collects all the songs the band ever recorded, which, with any luck, will raise the band’s profile even further. The record is due March 30 and called simply “Black Tambourine.”

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For Ex-Lovers Only mp3

January 29, 2010 at 8:30 am | Share | No Comments »

It’s too bad that “The Fast and the Furious” was the name of a crummy movie about the harrowing drama of dirtbag street-car races, because it’s a perfect description for the music of Gangcharger.

The Denver band formed a year ago to play noisy, lacerating rock with ferocious intensity, drawing plenty of notice and earning spots on the bill at local music showcases. In December, Gangcharger released its debut EP, “Metal Sun,” four songs of experimental churning that sometimes call to mind no less than Sonic Youth. High praise indeed.

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Apparition mp3

January 28, 2010 at 11:29 am | Share | No Comments »

It seems like Scout Niblett is one of those low-profile indie singers who’s just always been around. So it’s a surprise to learn that her new album, “The Calcination of Scout Niblett” (Drag City) is only her fifth long-player.

Recorded with the influential indie-rock producer Steve Albini, the album is a typically minimal outing, with spare guitar lines, and occasionally a full band, breaking the mounting tension of heavy, claustrophobic silences.

Niblett (born Emma Louise; “Scout” is a tribute to the girl in “To Kill a Mockingbird”) sings with quiet intensity, like someone humming a familiar refrain to herself in a desolate subway station at 3 in the morning. You’re there, too, and you’re intrigued by the sound you hear, but you’re a little wary of getting too close: People do unpredictable things when they’re startled.

What’s startling here is how much power these insular, bare-bones songs have. Amid the crumbling electric guitar on “Cherry Cheek Bomb” or skeletonesque drum kit on “Lucy Lucifer,” there’s rarely a hook or a straightforward melody to help these tunes stick in your head. All the same, the music sticks with you, fascinating like an unsettled dream.

— Eric R. Danton

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The Calcination Of Scout Niblett mp3

January 27, 2010 at 11:34 am | Share | No Comments »