The Von Bondies Pawn Shoppe Heart (Sire)
"I'm a broken man/This here's my broken band/From a broken land/We call Detroit City": It sounds like a Jack Black parody of rock & roll poetry, but it's as deep as the lyrics get for Von Bondies frontman Jason Stollsteimer. But Pawn Shoppe Heart is powered by righteous riffs, and like a Luddite love child of Alice Cooper's "Eighteen" and Skid Row's "18 and Life," the Von Bondies' second proper album offers all the kicks of a souped-up kit car roaring down the open road. Don Blum drums like the wheels are falling off. Stollsteimer's and Marcie Bolen's guitars sizzle like spit on a griddle. And just as Kim Deal's vocal turns used to upstage Black Francis, bassist Carrie Smith sings "Not That Social" with all the seductive soul that Stollsteimer's caterwauling can't quite manage. Plus, the awesome "Crawl Through the Darkness" just might be strong enough to fight off their neighbors' "Seven Nation Army." (PETER RELIC)
Sondre Lerche Two Way Monologue (Astralwerks)
Norway's Sondre Lerche possesses a boyish yet accomplished voice that's every bit as expressive as his tunes. He's only twenty-one and looks even younger, but this thinking person's pop star writes ornate, Sunday-morning melodies that suggest a composer twice his age, and his soft, urbane tenor rises to the challenge. Recalling an early David Bowie minus all the affectations, Lerche croons in clear, Anglo-accented English, shifting between reedy low notes and a swooning falsetto of casual, sensual grace.
His second album, Two Way Monologue, showcases those sweet melodies even more effectively than his debut, 2002's Faces Down. Recorded in his hometown of Bergen, Norway, its uncluttered arrangements assimilate decades of chamber pop, folk and even jazz. Strings, horns, woodwinds, various keyboards and guitars swirl around, evoking studio craftsmen from the Beach Boys to Steely Dan to Prefab Sprout. Lamenting as a pedal steel guitar cries through "Stupid Memory," the singer proves he's already become a master of lighthearted melancholy, singing as if smiling through his heart's mishaps. Lerche's well-scripted self-consciousness seems effortless, because he and his backup musicians don't rock: They swing.
His weakness is his words. Lerche clearly puts effort into his poetry, but the results are often vague, and at worst they suggest a nonsensical translation of what might have been eloquent in the singer's native tongue. Even Lerche's emotive singing can't save the lyrical train wreck that is "Track You Down": "When tears are pretzels pouring down/ Each time the sweetness is returning/At times when you appreciate that you survived." Somebody needs to find this budding Burt Bacharach his own Hal David, or at least a better English teacher. (BARRY WALTERS)
TV on the Radio Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes (Touch and Go)
Brooklyn's TV on the Radio are indebted to everything from late-Eighties indie rock to classic soul music -- on last year's stunning Young Liars EP they did a doo-wop cover of a Pixies song. The band's debut full-length, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, is an immaculate album about disappointment in all its forms: romantic, civic, psychological. TVOTR know how to treat painful topics with an elegant touch. "I will be your screech and crash," frontman Tunde Adebimpe tells a paramour on "Ambulance," "if you will be my crutch and cast." "The Wrong Way" is a protest song about the state of black America drenched simultaneously in muted rockabilly and jazz skronk. "Dreams" serves up artful, vindictive, spare poetry over dirgelike feedback. It all hangs together, somehow, swaying unerringly from one idea to the next. TV on the Radio's Desperate Youth is a rebuke to their retro peers: Not all the good ideas have been taken already. (JON CARAMANICA)
The Bad Plus Give (Columbia)
By jazz-purist standards, the Bad Plus are piano-trio gangstas, playing heretical covers of Abba, Blondie and Nirvana with titanic perversity. But pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson and drummer Dave King are quite serious about their sedition. They never merely jam on those songs; they build new, tightly scripted rapture from pieces of the original tunes and rhythms. On Give, their third album, the Bad Plus triumphantly bag truly extreme game: the roiling guitar noir of the Pixies' "Velouria" and Black Sabbath's death-fuzz march "Iron Man." In the former, Iverson's piano tiptoes into earshot as cymbals and bells rise up around him like steam. Then, as he hits a peak of rolling-note grandeur in the chorus, the trio kicks into hard-stepping funk that is more like 1969 Sly Stone than like the Pixies or Bill Evans. "Iron Man" is slow and heavy, of course. But King rolls across his kit with volcanic ecstasy, and at the end, the Bad Plus veer from minor-key holocaust to major-key sunshine: Ozzy as the Prince of Light. Iverson, King and Anderson are also outstanding composers, and they connect inside these originals with the same aggressive joy and melodic verve. Anderson's "Dirty Blonde" is a particularly enchanting example of their symphonic pow and empathic tension: the sweeping melancholy of the piano; the nimble rubbery jump of the bass; King's fierce, sobbing swing. By any standard, jazz or otherwise, it is moving, mighty music -- bad in all the right ways. (DAVID FRICKE)
Zero 7 When It Falls (Quango/Palm)
Short on originality but long on lusciousness, the British duo of Henry Binns and Sam Hardaker, otherwise known as Zero 7, are Air without irony. When It Falls is absolutely busting with floaty Fender Rhodes keyboard riffs, plucked acoustic guitars, billowing cornets and sexy vocalists. It's all purpose-built for a lights-low, aftershow party for two. "Somersault" burbles with Velveeta bass and simmers with a feline soul vocal by Sia Furler, and "Passing By" has a seven-layer rhythm underneath the vintage-keyboard vamping and Barbarella sound effects. The deliciously slow "In Time" features an effortlessly gorgeous vocal by Sophie Barker, and its beats and pieces tumble along with a rustic, quasi-western feel, as if Zero 7 have bizarrely reinvented Harvest-era Neil Young as a zipperless, untortured electronic producer. It's very sexy, though not exactly romantic. When It Falls is akin to a fabulous one-night stand: It feels great, it's very easy, and it requires absolutely no love or commitment at all. (PAT BLASHILL)
Mary Lou Lord Baby Blue (Rubric)
Just as the Kodachrome nature studies in the CD booklet suggest, urban street singer, former subway busker Mary Lou Lord fits most comfortably surrounded in serene, bucolic wonder. Her voice is high and unmighty, naturally attuned to simple folk-pop melodies and lo-powered arrangements. Here, surrounded by a modest supporting cast of acoustic guitars, violin and unobtrusive backing vocals, she sets loose on the Nick Saloman catalog with fruitful pit stops into Badfinger (the title track) and Pink Floyd (a modest reading of "Fearless" from 1971's Meddle). Saloman, best-known as psychedelic revivalist the Bevis Frond, never imports his own fuzz-heavy Jimi-wahs, but rather chaperones with a light natural touch, ably collaborating with Lord on two standouts "43" and "Turn Me Round" and adding just the right amount of rhythmic oomph to Lord's sole original "Long Way From Tupelo." No need for Lord to walk those country lanes alone. She's found the perfect partner. (ROB O'CONNOR)
Graham Parker Your Country (Bloodshot)
Country music is often the last refuge of the aging rocker, but there's nothing remotely dilettantish about this angry not-so-young man's foray into the genre. Even in his earliest days, Parker had a certain tear-in-your-beer aura about him, a vibe that's underscored here by layers of lap steel and barrelhouse piano. The latter instrument pushes the life-on-the-road paean "Anything for a Laugh" towards blue-highway territory, while the former brings extra sass to the kiss-off twanger "Cruel Lips" (on which Parker duets with Lucinda Williams). His classic speedballer "Crawling From the Wreckage" [which hit the charts in 1979 for Dave Edmunds] is recast as a rockabilly chugger. But there are a couple of missteps tucked in among the two-steps -- a limpid version of the Grateful Dead's "Sugaree," a too-clever "Nation of Shopkeepers" -- but Parker is not trying to seem like a dyed-in-the-wool Dixie-ite and that's what makes Your Country's flag worth flying. (DAVID SPRAGUE)
Deerhoof Milk Man (Kill Rock Stars)
It makes sense that Deerhoof's seventh full-length record Milk Man opens with singer Satomi Matsuzaki urging listeners to "come closer." The saccharine chorus of the title track reflects all that Deerhoof have done to add a softer element to their frenetic, delirious expressions. A loosely rendered concept album, Milk Man is the story of an unseemly Sandman/Pied Piper-like character who lures unassuming innocents into his lair -- a fitting narrative base to Deerhoof's chaotic and creepy clatter. Much like Milk Man the character, Milk Man the record subtly draws listeners in with stark blurts of innuendo and expectation. Matsuzaki's childlike vocals arranged over guitarists Rob Fisk and John Dieterich and drummer/keyboardist Greg Saunier's loopy, prog-rock melodies, create a sublime sound -- an aural train wreck of noise and shimmer -- and a gloriously contradictory record with a sweeter feel than Deerhoof's previous offerings. (JULIE GERSTEIN)
Gingersol Eastern (Rubric)
The alt-country three-piece Gingersol play "happy-choly" (their words) -- peppy songs with sunny melodies and clean guitar lines that usually turn quite sad. On Eastern, the L.A.-born, New York-based band's lightweight harmonies and fluffy jangles navigate a world of failures and rejects, breakups and "all-time lows." But the rough edges dirtying the band's previous three efforts -- the swagger that attracted Replacements devotees -- are now smooth, shiny and soft. Main songwriter and singer Steve Tagliere and album producer Seth Rothchild -- who also mans the guitar and keyboard -- instead texture the tunes with drum programming, synths and the occasional lap steel to craft gentle songs full of hooks but no umph. Lyrical tricks like "I'd like to take back what I didn't say" ("You and Your Cloud") and "That's what I get for marching to the beat of my own drum machine" ("Blink") lack emotional edge and can't compensate for the lost backbeat. (BENJAMIN FRIEDLAND)
Slaid Cleaves Wishbones (Philo)
You can't spit in Austin, Texas without hitting a singer-songwriter, but New England transplant Slaid Cleaves distinguishes himself with melodies that roam to unexpected places, yet never lose their hook. On his sixth album, Wishbones, Cleaves' songs benefit from his partnership with former Lucinda Williams cohort Gurf Morlix. Acting as producer and guitarist, Morlix forges Cleaves' folk into rocking, roots music ("Drinkin' Days" has a tease of the riff from Williams' "Passionate Kisses"). Whether relaying the story song of "Quick as Dreams" (inspired by the book Seabiscuit), painting longing pictures of the life of a modern troubadour on "Road Too Long" ("Diner fries, diesel smoke/You won't be young for long) or turning a harsh light on himself in "Sinner's Prayer" ("I want to be a better man/A broken promise in my hand), Cleaves' voice is honest and strong. (MEREDITH OCHS)
CocoRosie La Maison de Mon Reve (Touch and Go)
The story goes that after years of estrangement, the Casady sisters (Sierra and Bianca) reunited in Paris and concocted La Maison de Mon Reve (The House of My Dream). And what a dream it is. CocoRosie mess with meter and measure to create creepy and bewitching songscapes. Blending trip-hop, jazz and blues loosely led by guitar, piano, flute and weird, ambient sounds (chains, roosters, toys), the duo use their siren voices for sociopolitical rabble-rousing. In "Jesus Loves Me," they brazenly channel what sounds like an old black man: "Jesus loves me/But not my wife/Not my nigger friends/Or their nigger lives" (is that the sound of church-collection coins at the end of the song?) And they pull off their own strain of Billie Holiday's "Ain't Nobody's Business" with "By Your Side": "I'd wear your black eyes/Bake you apple pies . . . All I want is to die a housewife." No matter how much living has separated these siblings, it's clear they both still draw outside the lines to fantastic effect. (ROBIN AIGNER)
(March 8, 2004)
