Rating: 4.0
Greg Dulli of The Twilight Singers and formerly the Afghan Whigs is highly public, bordering on boastful, about his alcohol-soaked, drug heavy past. If his history is intended to tell us something about his music, or vice versa, his music about his tumultuous past, The Twilight Singers’ EP A Stitch In Time has succeeded. A Stitch In Time is an aging rocker’s bar stool ramble; bittersweet story tinged with wisdom, wistfulness and folly.
Rating: 8.0
Low-key isn’t a term often used to describe rock and roll. But every once and a while there comes a band that can bark without the bombast, emote without Emo, and grip without grandeur. One such band is The Annuals, a six-piece jazzy rock band from North Carolina. With an unassuming, diamond-cut devotion to their craft, this odd little band is a fresh breath of air among the stink of artists simply waiting in the fame line.
Rating: 5.0
Robbers on High Street sound exactly like Spoon; it is impossible for me to listen to the album without thinking this non-stop. When listening to Spoon, of course, it would be non-sensical to be distracted by how much they sound like Spoon. But because Robbers on High Street aren’t supposed to sound exactly like another band, it becomes an issue. With other derivative bands, like Interpol, I am casually and infrequently interrupted with the notion that they sound a lot like Joy Division. When I listen to Muse, I wax nostalgically on a blonde-haired lazy-eyed Thom Yorke for about 30 seconds before overdosing on Muse’s spacey melodrama. Most other times, when I hear a band being derivative, it’s vague and comforting: “This sounds like the Beatles” or “That harmony sounds like the Beach Boys”. It’s a not unpleasant, fleeting sensation.
You know how “Yellow Submarine” kind of makes you want to sing along and is simultaneously the most annoying song ever? Yeah. “In the Countryside” is like that, so it’s not necessarily the best way to kick off a disc that’s only ten tracks long—and the second track, an unbefitting empty nod to hard rock, isn’t the best way to follow it up. Leaving the Nest, the first “full length” from Benjy Ferree on Domino Records, is charming at times and grindingly stupid at others. It was originally released as a six-track EP and later re-released after the label requested four more songs. I experienced the sensation of being in a cartoon one moment, driving on a winding country road the next, and gallivanting with Robin Hood and his merry men the moment after that…or maybe I have Robin Hood on the brain due to the cover art. Either way, Robin Hood fits in somewhere.
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I tried. Really, I did. I wanted to like this EP from Los Angeles-based, “the bird and the bee” (lower case, just like e.e. cummings would have wanted it) but to use the vocalist’s own words, I kept feeling like they were, “…working up to something but (they gave) me almost nothing.”
Darwin was right and the Teddybears are proof positive. Born over 15 years ago as neo-jazz rockers who favored punk, the Teddybears mutated, grew, shrank and transformed to become the Euro-electronica band we have today. Along the way they picked up enormous bear heads, a better-than-cult following and the attention of several significant international artists who jumped at the chance to contribute to the Bears’ mission.
Similar to The Decemberists’ work on The Crane Wife, the Kansas quintet White Whale dives into the past for their debut album WWI. It is a world of navigators and admirals, lovers and cynics, and a hell of a lot of ocean. Although a commendable effort from a band that shows remarkable promise, WWI is on the whole a deflated bag of microwaved history and detached feeling under a pretty sky of musicianship. The band is capable enough, but White Whale trips into the whimsy pit of using concept art and fable as an avenue for forging a memorable sound. The result is a sweet outing of daring that doesn’t grip, but seldom fails to glow.