On Ladyhawk's second album, their spirited rock songs are decent but fairly ordinary. They bring plenty of angst and passion to the material but don't do enough to develop these impulses. Too frequently their arrangements play it safe, as if they're trying to refine the same song over and over rather than challenging themselves to break new ground.
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This week’s release from the prolific duo is actually the reissue of a 2006 CDR-only release of live material that truly demonstrates how proficient the band is in a live setting, with a four song set that could easily be mistaken for a tightly constructed studio album, and two additional live pieces that differ somewhat in feel, but are still of the same high quality.
When the tracks that make up the first half of this EP were first released about a year ago on a split 12” with Eluvium, it represented a somewhat drastic change from what Jesu had been doing up to that point. All the way through Conqueror, there had been a definite concession to shoegaze pop, but still enshrouded with the monolith riffs that established Godflesh as a force to be reckoned with prior. But here was a mostly electronic, very calm and almost pure pop record that, in hindsight, heralded more recent works (the split with Envy, parts of Pale Sketches). And now these tracks are available on CD with two alternate versions that represent a very different take on the original material.
Nobody has ever been able to explain to me just how we went from the awesome diversity and promiscuous intermingling of '90s alternative music to the present day's drab dichotomy of wussy hipster twee and cathartic yet indigestible metal. Specifically, I lament the loss of that seemingly dying animal known as noise rock, its Amphetamine Reptile and Touch & Go fueled heyday woefully behind us. Yet thankfully there are more than a few pilgrims to the jizz-soaked shrine to The Jesus Lizard, the obsidian monolith of The Melvins, and the crumbling temple of Girls Against Boys.
That inimitable style of drawing that graces this EP's cover lets us know exactly what we are in for: rough and ready songs about death. Just like the cover, the songs here are from the same mold as previous outpourings of gloom from the trio. There is no massive shift in style or approach: ten songs; 20 minutes; in and out like a SWAT team on a midnight raid.
Devising a method to capture a moment of exaltatio with sound is no small feat. Aranos attempts to do just that with a minimal and powerful arrangement of six Tibetan singing bowls and wood flute. Whether this recording brought me closer to release from duality is up for debate, but it certainly did not pull me further away.
It has been six years since this Chicago trio, best known for constructing mainly instrumentals based around two bass guitars and a set of drums, released their last record, 2002’s Millions of Brazilians. In that time it seems that their sound has been slowly fermenting and evolving in sparkling and unexpected ways, not least with the addition of vocals, and with the further addition of strings, guitar, and keyboards. What results is a strange musical dislocation, a selection of 12 scintillating, yet simultaneously bittersweet, indie-tinged rock songs that bubble along with a nervous, tangential energy that often goes off in totally unforeseen directions.
Christoph Heemann's and Timo Van Luijk's latest offering on Robot Records is a frustrating combination of expected, quiet beauty and unexpected experimentation.
Tim Simenon presents his first full-length album of new material since 1995's Clear. Future Chaos is not quite a return to form, but an evolution of the familiar BTB sound, an album of leftfield electronic vocal pop curiously unstuck in time, informed by decades of big beat, trip-hop and acid house, but carving out its own idiosyncratic niche.
It comes as no surprise that this Kentucky based trio has produced a slab of blown speaker noise rock that parents and small animals will be disgusted with. However, something can be unsurprising and yet still be completely satisfying, and I don’t think anyone who enjoys music is petitioning for a “Hair Police covers A Flock of Seagulls” album. Although, that would probably be pretty awesome.
