Neumo’s
Seattle, WA
February 28, 2007
Montreal pop quintet Malajube takes risks. Their hugely operatic sophomore album Trompe L’Oeil veers into melodrama with drunken abandonment: like a friend made in a Parisian hostel, they’re loads of fun, mysterious and a little reckless—but in a way that only our less-jaded, foreign counterparts can be, they’re also somehow innocent and refreshingly free of self-consciousness.
Rating: 7.0
In 2005, Hrishikesh Hirway relocated from Los Angeles to Mumbai, India, where he shaped much of what would become the fourth full-length from The One AM Radio. The thought-provoking lyrics and seamless blend of acoustic and electronic instrumentation make for an exceedingly pleasant listen. Though not rife with intensely memorable moments, This Too Will Pass is an album that will seep into your brain, unbeknownst to you, and make itself at home. It’s too pretty not to.
Rating: 7.75
Hand-picked by Thurston Moore for his Ecstatic Peace label, Pagoda plays traumatic, sludgy art rock: the musical incarnation of an adolescence spent immersed in the sounds of the nineties. One can see why Moore may have taken a personal liking to Pagoda: as he and Kim Gordon, both children of college professors, formed Sonic Youth as an performance art project of sorts, Pagoda boasts a similar pedigree of intellectual vigor, New York grittiness and multi-disciplinary artistic vision.
Tractor Tavern
Seattle, WA
February 15th 2007
“The band requested that there weren’t chairs I guess?” I overheard a man in a flannel shirt say. “That’s shitty, I’m tired.” The woman with him, I presume was his date, had her arms crossed and was looking around the room for a chair. The only seats available were the few copper and red velvet stools surrounding the bar. And they were certainly taken by that point.
Rating: 1.0
The Broken West, a bright-eyed well tanned quintuplet hailing from the musical paradise of Los Angeles, have recently released their full length debut on Merge records, I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On, an album that I currently have the dubious pleasure of holding in my hands right now. It really is quite bad. I am finding right now that mere words, the only tools currently at my disposal, may very well be insufficient to describe the unfortunate noises entering my ears. So instead I encourage you to picture a modern day Sisyphus sitting on a chaise lounge in his living room sipping a brimming martini and sucking on an olive smartly plucked from the bottom of his glass. And instead of the rock that we may rightly have expected him to be pushing on his uphill treadmill, he is forced to walk, hands trembling, towards the stereo where he will push play, auto-repeat. And as I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On falls from the speakers and thrusts itself upon unwilling ears in a manner that could pierce the hymen of the most virtuous of virgins, he covers his face with his hands and settles into eternity.
Yes, that does seem to sum it up quite nicely – but don’t take my word for it, give it a listen yourself.
Showbox
Seattle, WA
February 14, 2007
Mark Linkous aka Sparklehorse has taken five years of hermetic exile from music since 2001’s incredible It’s a Wonderful Life. In that half-decade, he rarely updated his website and only released one or two tracks on compilation albums. The recently released Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain is pretty good, but contains the god awful single, “Don’t Take my Sunshine Away.” The new album also sees Linkous in a bit of a dry spell. That is to say he seems to be suffering from writer’s block because four of the twelve tracks are outtakes, either previously released songs or re-recorded ones, from his last album. Incidentally, those songs are also the best ones on his new record.
Rating: 2.0
David Terry is Aqueduct or Aqueduct is David Terry, an Oklahoma transplant who now resides in Seattle and has generated a following by opening up for bands such as Modest Mouse and the Flaming Lips. His last album, I Sold Gold was released in 2005 on Barsuk Records and helped to establish Terry in the independent music community with it’s subtle electronic arrangements and retro drum machine led rhythms. That record has possibly the worst cover that I have ever laid eyes on, which in itself signaled an obvious attempt to display, before even hearing a single note, that this was going to be derivative throwback rock. Musically, there were some intriguing things going on, but the listener has to get past the almost unbearable Ben Folds-like vocals and elementary lyrics.