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The boring album art accomanying Moby’s Wait For Me is perfectly suited for the album itself; the disc drones on and on with no innovation and nothing interesting or notable – a disappointment from someone who has shown flashes of such in the past, particularly with Play – the album accomplishes the moody and melodic feel Moby said he was going for in interviews, but, predictably, that translates to a cure for insomnia for listeners.
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30 years into their career, Sonic Youth aren’t necessarily innovators anymore, but what they are making is leagues beyond what you would expect from most groups who’ve been around so long: despite the typically confounding lyrics (“Elastic dreams of vicious actions/Plastic stomachs wrapped in steel”?) the songs on The Eternal are tightly and engagingly structured in their use of both noise and melody, never meandering, and most of the time just flat out rocking the shit. (See “Sacred Trickster”, “Antenna”, signature epic “Massage the History”, and the Lou Reed homaging “Poison Arrow”)
Tags: kim gordon, sonic youth, the eternal, thurston moore
This latest posthumous J Dilla release is a collection of beats mixed by Pete Rock and overseen by Dilla’s mother, their caring influence assuring that this is far more than what you’d expect, with beats fit to rival the man’s best material wonderfully sequenced and framed as a radio show hosted by Rock; the beats themselves are inventive and eclectically imagined and the guest appearances – while often unnecessary – are certainly well-intentioned.
Tags: black thought, blu, doom, frank n dank, havoc, j dilla, jay dee, jay stay paid, m.o.p., pete rock, phat kat, raekwon, slum village, stones throw
Primary Colours graduates The Horrors from the group of kitschy garage goths that they debuted as into something more refined though just as (forgivably) derivative – they’ve clearly done their homework and their more evolved sound is a mishmash of the last thirty years of classic British post-punk, from the moody Ian Curtis vocals to the shoegaze inspired guitars and ambient excursions – and the album’s closing track and biggest highlight, the epically rocking and almost dance-able “A Sea Within a Sea”, is hopefully a sign that the band plans to take their sound into uncharted territory instead of drawing on the past.
Tags: primary colours, the horros
On Veckatimest, Grizzly Bear hone the multi-instrumental soundscapes of Yellow House into a series of far more individualized and fully-realized songs, wonderfully absorbing musical worlds (see the impossibly gleeful sunshine pop of “Two Weeks”, the acoustic grandeur of “Southern Point”, or the moody ballad “Ready, Able”) – watch out for the album’s forgettable middle stretch though, where their subtly expert songcraft wears a bit thin until they manage to pull it all back together again.
Tags: daniel rossen, department of eagles, ed droste, grizzly bear, veckatimest
The extent of familiarity a lot of people have of the Meat Puppets is that they were an influence on Kurt Cobain and played with Nirvana during their MTV Unplugged performance, which is unfortunate because the Meat Puppets are an incredibly sonicly diverse band, demonstrated particularly well on Sewn Together, which features a near-perfect melding of modern rock with elements of bluegrass and subdued but powerful vocal harmonies (see “Blanket of Weeds” and “Sapphire”)…Curt Kirkwood said of the record, “If I can get away with it, I’ll make a record as cheap as I can and put as little work as I can into it,” and it’s glaring in the more traditional, straightforward rock songs and moments (see “Rotten Shame” and “S.K.A.”) that don’t have the same level of imagination or personality as the aforementioned tracks and are the biggest weaknesses on the album.
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