hiatus

i’m having some major computer issues at the moment, so i think it’s best if i don’t update this page for awhile so that i can focus on getting things sorted out.

things will pick up again in november. expect reviews for the past lives EP, chris cornell’s scream, q-tip’s long-awaited the renaissance and others that i’ve been working on but haven’t had a chance to post yet.

i would like to use november/december mainly as catch-up months for releases i’ve missed or haven’t had an opportunity to get to.

also in anticipation for the long-awaited guns n roses album, i intend on doing a live-blog of me listening to their discography for the first time. we’ll see how that goes.

take care, and i’ll be back soon.

[UPDATE] october 30th: so apparently the chris cornell LP isn’t coming out until february. i guess i won’t be reviewing that until the new year.

also, in other news, expect things to be back to normal by sunday night/monday morning. thanks.

Filed under: News , guns n roses, hiatus, november releases, past lives, q-tip

Deerhunter – Microcastle

following the release of their critically praised debut, cryptograms, deerhunter issued the aptly titled EP, flourescent grey. where cryptograms was the equivalent of an aural miasma: hazy, ambient, cyclical and often puzzling, flourescent grey was as its title suggested: tight, poppy, and yet still tied to the gloom of its predecessor. microcastle continues along that same path, offering a more revealing glimpse of the band in a moment where they’ve seemingly let their guard down. singer bradford cox has taken a bit of a leap of faith here, as his vocals are no longer disguised by numerous effects and loops. he’s being far more open with his work, which suggests that he’s in a much more comfortable place this time around, but also a much more vulnerable one. with its brilliant and shimmering songs, microcastle is far less reliant on shoegazey tropes, having shifted to more dreamy aesthetics of baroque-pop (ala the beach boys or grizzly bear), which further suggests openness as well as vulnerability. what these changes all add up to is a stunning and logical shift for deerhunter, one that elevates and exposes their songs to the level they deserve. a risky move, but one that has paid off in full.

Filed under: Album Review , 2008, bradford cox, cryptograms, deerhunter, flourescent grey, microcastle

somewhere steve albini is laughing

every now-and-then this blog gets visitors redirected to it from search engines and luckily, through the magic of wordpress, i can see what terms they used to get here. i was a bit surprised to see that people are not always looking for music when they arrive:

i attributed most of my traffic to people looking for .rar blogs and links to full albums, but now i can say that this blog has more than one (misleading) draw to it. so, i’d like to welcome those of you who might’ve stumbled upon this site inadvertently in your search for big black cocks. perhaps there’s potential for a slogan here: “there was no sound: come for the big black cocks, stay for the awful sentence structure.”

i suppose i was a bit naive to think that tagging one post with the word “cock-rock” (that tag has since been removed), and another with “big black” wouldn’t get me into a bit of trouble. lesson learned! i’ll take responsibility for that one, but i have no clue how “fuck babes” redirects here.

in other news, i think sunday nights/mondays are going to be the days when i do the bulk of my review-posting. that way i can get the jump on other review sites and blogs that schedule their reviews around release dates. i’m also going to try to limit myself to two reviews per week (although i’ve rarely exceeded or met that quota before) to help give myself a bit of a deadline/goal to meet, and it’ll also force me to pick two specific albums to listen to, which sounds far more efficient than my current method of listening to everything-under-the-sun to figure out what i’ll then review.

Filed under: News , announcements, confusion

Of Montreal – Skeletal Lamping

as an ambitious, theatrical record, skeletal lamping has of montreal reaching for more challenging heights, bringing their music to campier extremes. their music is a hybrid of so many different styles and influences that it’s at times very difficult to hang on for the ride; however, there is little doubt in my mind that this band is sonically ahead of its time. even the personal exorcisms that take place on this album are both exciting and exhausting. of montreal are so unabashedly campy and fun that you can’t help but enjoy yourself while listening to this record, which helps to ground all of the commotion when it threatens to lose its centre. the problem with campiness (or glam, in this instance) though, is that it’s very difficult to find a convincing balance between self-indulgence and modesty, and unfortunately, skeletal lamping finds of montreal in a place where this balance is not fully realized —not to say that the record is without its merits, as songs like “touched something’s hollow” and “an eludarian instance” are clever combinations of wit and depth— but the album’s sheer pace alone makes it difficult to discern at times whether or not kevin barnes is being ironic or sincere as he sings. the problem with that kind of uncertainty is that the songs are too silly to be taken seriously, and reading them as being purely ironic makes him seem as though he’s being exploitave of the highly sexual situations within the narrative.

Filed under: Album Review , 2008, kevin barnes, of montreal, skeletal lamping

The Dears – Missiles

more than a few critics have latched on to the animosity among the dears during the recording of their latest album, missiles, which led to murray lightburn dissolving the band save for himself and his wife and keyboardist, natalia yanchak. although i will maintain that conflicts within bands often result in excellent albums, i think it is essential to make clear that this album still sounds very much like a dears record, despite the lack of dears involved. through the band’s history, members have come and gone, making lightburn the most consistent aspect of the band, but also a person who is fairly used to change at this point. these songs are much more experimental than prior dears releases, mainly because there’s a freedom that comes with cleaning house that allows for songwriters to take more creative chances with their work. missiles is a deeply intimate record, one that could be argued to be the closest to lightburn’s own vision for the band yet. this level of intimacy that the dears achieve (it almost sounds like they recorded it in their bedroom) is suggested by lightburn and yanchak’s voices being much higher in the mix as well as their choices in instrumentation. not only are they been stripped-down in terms of band members, but the baroque leanings the dears have dabbled with on prior albums are absent here as well. these songs are not the racuous anthems you might have heard on gang of losers— nevertheless, the dears have successfully translated the intense, dynamic quality of their songs to a more stripped-down level.

Filed under: Album Review , 2008, missiles, murray lightburn, natalia yanchak, the dears

Oasis – Dig Out Your Soul

oasis are a difficult band to review. as much as i can criticize their work or point out the flaws in a certain album of theirs, people will continue to buy their albums, see them at concerts, line their pockets and basically reaffirm what the band has been doing since their debut: whatever-the-fuck they want.

i’ve had to come to terms with the idea that at this point in their career, oasis aren’t going anywhere. so long as oasis keep churning out the dinosaur rock, they won’t be getting any complaints. so here we are at record number seven, dig out your soul, and while i highly suspect that this album will find its way to the top of the charts, it will do so without making any waves whatsoever. perhaps the more vacuous an album is, the more buoyant it’ll fare on the high seas of the billboard charts. dig out your soul is as good as any other oasis album (as oasis albums go), but oasis albums are highly inconsistent, monotonous affairs that lack any real depth or insight despite the constant comparisons the press makes between them and the beatles, and now, the verve.

perhaps oasis are best compared to their native director guy ritchie. at first, works like definitely maybe or lock, stock and two smoking barrels seem really interesting and original simply for their novelty. then that novelty becomes a crutch and the sole basis for said artist’s existence. while their aesthetics are unabashedly superficial, they continue to rely on them, trying to pass off what they do as somehow meaningful or significant, all in an effort to reproduce their initial success. if only they could marry their form and content in a way that they didn’t feel as though they had to make a grand statement, the end result would turn out to be a much more honest and rewarding effort.

while i admire their “plug in and play” attitude and their insistence on doing things their own way, oasis seem unable to actually translate that attitude to their music; what their aesthetic lacks in pretence, is made up for by their druggy, overblown, self-important lyrics. it’s my guess that oasis will probably be remembered best for the animosity between the bros. gallagher, and i’m always surprised to hear none of that tension makes it to the actual record whatsoever… they could use that tension to their creative advantage, playing off of one another as the point and counterpoint, good cop and bad cop. perhaps that technique is overdone, but it seems like such a logical move for two people within the same band who probably hate each other (see: the beatles). while i realize the redundancy of comparing oasis to the beatles, i think there’s definitely a lesson here that the gallaghers haven’t yet learned from their heroes.

in their defence, i can see that they’re trying to incorporate different voices into their songs, as noel and liam let their band in on the songwriting fun, but noel has and always will be the best songwriter in oasis, which makes the juxtaposition of his tunes vs. the others less a creative statement and more of the reason as to why this record blows so hard. sure, you could blame this on the sequencing, as the first four tracks are all noel’s, but cut out all the other songwriters here, and you cut out all of the fluff; in other words, this record would’ve made a really strong EP, or even solid beginnings for a noel gallagher solo project.

even on the noel-penned songs, there are loads of problems. sure, they rock the hardest, and are the most well-written in terms of catchiness and excitement, but they are nevertheless exploitive of  oasis’ back catalogue and psychedelic music in general. suddenly psychedelic-sounding music becomes shorthand for spirituality and enlightenment, yet what do we actually learn from any of this after having listened to it?

for some reason, this album is being erroneously touted in the press as a “return to form” and paradoxically, a much more “mature” direction. this kind of lazy criticism sounds like press-release-journalism at its worst. how can a record be a return to something as well as a departure? actually, how can this record be considered a return to form when oasis have never really departed from what form they had been doing in the first place? dig out your soul really doesn’t make good on that promise, and instead, banks on the listener’s nostalgic feelings toward oasis to pass off a lack of ideas as something completely intentional.

Filed under: Album Review , 2008, dig out your soul, liam gallagher, noel gallagher, oasis