Freelance Whales

Freelance Whales

Weathervanes

2010

With their beautiful and rousing debut Weathervanes, the Freelance Whales snatch a victorious Spring from the icy clutches of Winter, with fascinating oscillations of meter and melody delivered on big fluffy womb-like clouds of melancholy optimism. Through sweetly delivered vocals fluttering over choice instrumentation I can already see the lime floating in the gin soaked summer nights. And it’s a good thing, because with a band name like the Freelance Whales, the music had better be exceptional.

The album is incredibly appealing, with its pleasant dream-like feel enhanced by the billowy grit of a melodica and microkorg drone under tasteful banjo parts and layered with floatingly hummable melodies. The vocals have an earnest delicacy whose playfulness is only enhanced when the lyrical pace increases, showcased in the near perfection of the second song, “Hannah”. Its gratifying arrangement of driving rhythm and fast paced vocal delivery hits all the right spots, dropping to half time and a syncopated beat, allowing the chorus to release the longing and emotion pent up from the verse. Add the fun layer of extraneous jangly bells and swirls and you’ve got comfort food for summer.

But it’s when the fifth song starts that you realize that you’ve already been hooked; they had marked you in the store before you even knew you were listening and tapping and humming. That song is “Starring”, and that title word moves far past merely memorable into the earworm territory of Wrath of Kahn, only voluntary and pleasurable. The first wash of the microkorg grabs you on a primal level, communicating directly with your autonomic nervous system, commanding it to release endorphins. As soon as the trippy break beat starts, you realize that this album just broke through, just went from good to great. And plus, any album that references kilojoules gets extra points in my book.

The second half of the album settles into a continuation of variations on the theme, including the evocative “Broken Horse” and the fantastic closer “The Great Estates”. Amidst the breathy whispers of repeating vowels and melodic hooks reminiscent of the Police, if Sting had never left the hammock, you’ll find an album that flows easily and fluidly as a trapeze artist, wrapped in a wooly blanket of dreamy glockenspiels, taking a warm bath in electrofuzz melodica. This is the stuff that outdoor evenings in the summer are made for. And considering they have at least nine (9!) shows in Austin this week around South by Southwest, we’ll have plenty of opportunities to catch multiple sets, and I for one hope that their live show can live up to this album.

Brian S. Meurer

Peter Gabriel: Scratch My Back

Peter Gabriel

Scratch My Back

2010

If I could buy the world a Coke, I’d take the money that I would use to buy the world a Coke and distribute as many copies possible of the new Peter Gabriel album, Scratch My Back, far and wide throughout the land. It is a spellbinding reimagining of eclectic songs spanning the past three decades and is achingly beautiful, emotionally raw and intense. It’s an album that works on many levels, ranging from the deceptively complex and elegant orchestral production to the both powerful and delicate qualities of Mr. Gabriel’s 60 year old voice.

Since 2010 is reliving the mid-eighties right now, it makes sense that the video king of 1987 would be the next in a long line of mass-homage, from Johnny Cash to Springsteen and Paul Simon. His innovative forty plus year career is studded with hits, controversy, landmarks and millions of sales. It is, however, precisely his diminished position in current popular consciousness that allows the leap directly to kinetic energy for the composer of Here Comes The Flood and Mercy Street.

Scratch My Back is a sterling choice of songs and feels like each has an intensely personal connection with Mr. Gabriel. It’s an album without guitars or drums, filtering songs that rely on these into strings and horns. There is a tension that runs through the disc that conjures the artist’s frustrating attempt to express the inexpressible. The songs are evocative, moving and dynamic, completely deconstructed from their original form and suspended in the bouquet of an orchestral chianti. The vocal delivery is emotive and passionate, both gritty and fragile, belting and subdued. The entire album hinges on the thematic and relevant, the meaningful and the unutterable. This is expressive music as high art. And it’s only half the story.

The interesting, nay, genius aspect of this idea will come later this year, when the artists tagged here pick up the gauntlet and choose their own Peter Gabriel song to cover. My mind spins considering who will do what song? Pick a slower piano driven one like Washing Of The Water and bring the guitars and drums? Will anyone be bold enough to touch the Passion album?

Even though the entire album feels like the jubilant slow motion finale of a triumphant marathon, it is sure to have its share of detractors. Some will find it dreary, the orchestral arrangements overwrought, melodramatic, unoriginal; essentially unable to breach short attention spans. There are some people who are unable to find beauty in sadness, or who believe that joy and minor keys are mutually exclusive. Lamentations about the absence of guitars, drums and originally penned source material miss the point. This is not an album of the three minute pop song, compressed and auto-tuned to false perfection, as illustrated by recent Grammy performers. This is an album about stripping away flesh and bone to distill the essence of a song’s spirit, absorbing, inhabiting and internalizing that essence to express something meaningful to the artist. It’s about the moment, and it’s Peter Gabriel’s moment, and it’s about time.

Brian S. Meurer

Yeasayer: Odd Blood

Yeasayer

Odd Blood

2010

Allow me to go on record officially and dub 2010 the new 1985, and Yeasayer has thrown their chips all in. In a stylistically varied album, they cover a lot of bases and carry a lot of baggage that they must overcome. It is this audacious ambition that somehow fuses the confidence of Prince in Purple Rain, the excitement of the Pointer Sisters in Beverly Hills Cop, and the whimsy of the theme to Fletch.

The sonic landscape of Odd Blood is rife with the synth swirls, keyboard stabs and the percussive gated reverb of a bygone era. It shares a feel with Brooklynite neighbors Vampire Weekend and MGMT, but shows itself to be at the more commercially accessible end of the block. If John Hughes, God rest his soul, were alive today and continuing his cathartic cinematic teen drama in the vein of The Breakfast Club and Pretty In Pink, Yeasayer could fully expect a tap on the shoulder to contribute, if not dominate, the soundtrack.

After the otherworldly opener “The Children”, with its experimentally off-putting digital chainsaw vocal effects, the album settles into an eclectic spectrum with synthpop at its center, betraying just the slightest hint of industrial (please don’t tell Trent Reznor). It’s an album that infuses the essence of mid-eighties gems like Billy Idol’s 1984 archetype “Eyes Without A Face”, the one two punch of Duran Duran in 1984-85 with “Hungry Like The Wolf” and “View To A Kill”, and in a hypothetically fantastic scenario, if Depeche Mode had composed the music for Miami Vice Season Two.

But the album is deceptive like a Trojan Horse. It has a lot to get past, and the listener’s ability to do so may depend on the context and time period in which you grew up. The first listen didn’t click with me; the second gave me pause. Somewhere by mid-album, around the song “Love Me Girl”, almost imperceptively, your shoulders will start to move, maybe one is the snare, the other the kick drum, and you start to think about a time when Tears For Fears, Pet Shop Boys and Simple Minds ruled the airwaves.

“Ambling Lip” is the first single off the album, and it’s a marching pulse of effects-laden island sway. A lot of the album is full of effects that sound as though they were dehydrated into powder, placed in the bottom of a boiling cauldron and set over a witch’s fire to meld and bubble to the surface in strange, unidentifiable forms. “I Remember” includes a cascading waterfall of notes that in previous years may have signaled that you just saved the princess with the clever use of your raccoon suit in SMB3. In other places it’s the synthetic growl of a moog or the squeal of a motion-detector ghost that people hang around Halloween.

Odd Blood is a collection of varied, but mostly upbeat, melodic synthpop songs. It’s this lighthearted sense of post-ironic playfulness that pulls the album through the weighted baggage of its material. It just happens to draw heavily from the year MCMLXXXV, and you can bet what this year’s trendy tattoo will be.

Brian S. Meurer

Spoon

for The Weekly Feed

Spoon
Transference
2010

In the search for insight into the nature of reality and truth, there is a traditional zen koan, a paradoxical question posed from Master to Student, that I have pondered for some time now: “What Is The Sound of Spoon Recording?”

When I imagine Spoon in the studio, I picture Andy Warhol’s working and creative area, The Factory; a spacious warehouse that encompassed a renaissance idea of art, whose maxim, in more ways than two, was anything goes. Any idea could be pursued, as the Factory was stocked with supplies to support any whim: painting, sculpting, music, performance, recording, film, etc. I then imagine the Factory populated with the late, great Jim Henson’s Muppets: Gonzo on bass, Animal obviously on drums, Beaker meticulously adjusting every guitar knob and pedal, Dr. Teeth himself on vocals, produced by a veritable mixologist behind the control board, the Swedish Chef. And thusly Spoon’s Transference arrives into the world.

Transference plots the increasing creativity and complexity of Spoon through their unique view of rhythm-as-Rube-Goldberg contraption, whereby the boot kicks over the bucket that drops a ball on the lever that launches the distorted fuzz bass melody that pushes the floor tom to the third beat, which holds the disjointed guitar keeping time on the offbeat. Like these glorious machines, you are mesmerized concentrating on these workings and their effects. Instead of making this album inaccessible, it becomes filled with grooves, at times thick, nasty, trance-inducing grooves. Snake charmer grooves. If there were a subdued hipster rave at a cool coffee shop, this album would be the house music.

Transference really begins to hit its stride by the third song, The Mystery Zone, imbued with a hypnotic mathematical bass drone that time warps you out of any present context, only realized when you snap out of it as the song finishes, you yawning and rubbing your eyes. This is mainly due to Spoon’s affinity for designating an instrument, melody or rhythm as the constant, that one aspect of a song that is going to be the static premise around which everything else revolves, like a game of Frozen Catchers when you were a kid, always determining who would be “it”.

This theme continues through Who Makes Your Money and into the very essence of a Spoonian single, Written In Reverse. This is a solid set of eleven songs that defy the trap of self-indulgence that plague bands who attempt to shun an outside producer, and it’s encouraging to see Spoon succeed in this regard. In addition to it being their first self-produced album, Transference is Spoon’s seventh album, and has a remarkable depth of creativity for that level of longevity. There is also a variety to the album that keeps it fresh, including that adventure in lo-fi exuberance Trouble Comes Running, as well as the 300 level course in dynamic build of I Saw The Light.

Transference is the sound of a band having fun, with its Rube Goldberg machine of bass, drums, piano and guitars falling into odd places that kick the rhythm in the back of its head, projecting both it, and Spoon, forward.



Brian S. Meurer