|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Cat Power — Sun
Best track: Nothing but Time Worst track: Human Being Matthew Dear —
Beams
Best track: Her Fantasy Worst track: Overtime Rating *** Grizzly Bear —
Shields
Best track: Sun in Your Eyes Worst track: The Hunt Rating *** Bob Mould — Silver
Age
Best track: The Descent Worst track: Fugue State Rating ** Top 10 Singles One More Night Maroon 5 (NM) Legend: (CU): Climbing Up (FD): Falling Down (NM): Non-mover (NE): New Entry
|
||
|
|
||
Seventeen years after
Chan Marshall’s debut as Cat Power, and six years after her
most recent album of original material, comes Sun, her ninth
album. Recorded over five years in three different locations,
including at a studio in her former Malibu home, Sun is a
modern record, featuring electronics, drum machines, and grand
synthesiser noise that projects with a confident abrasion. The album
opens with Cherokee, a song that can be interpreted and applied
to many of Chan’s more trying experiences during her life, as she
sings: "I never knew love like this/ wind, moon, the earth and
sky/ I never knew pain like this/ where everything dies." Silent
Machine recalls solid mid-1970s rock and Manhattan is a luminous
anthem to a wanderer’s life. Chan performed and produced the album
herself and it certainly feels like she’s in control. Nothing but
Time is the finest track here, and captures all of her musical
elements in the best light. There’s a lightness and honesty in these
compositions despite their often busy arrangements. Even the rawest
track, Always on My Own, features a positive note, "I want
to live my way of living". Marshall’s mellow, bluesy voice is
as enticing as ever, and in places, she delivers her immensely
rhythmic lyrics in a casually spitfire way, like on the drums-driven
lead single Ruin. The collection proves that she’s still
capable of impressing through the casual ease with which she seems to
smoothly spin wildly imaginative and memorable songs from thin air.
Songwriter, guitarist,
keyboardist, DJ, producer and all-round electronic auteur New York
City-based Matthew Dear has been making incredible inventive dance
music for more than a decade. Recorded in his home studio in New York,
Beams aims to represent a far brighter creation than 2010’s
melancholic Black City. On his fifth album, Dear
undertakes the most striking and significant transformation of all:
mixing high art with deeply personal revelations, finding a way to
express a more unified self after years of playing commercial music. Talking
Heads-like grooves run through Up & Out, the song perhaps
being something of a tribute to Dear’s idol, David Byrne.
Also delightfully strange, Get the Rhyme Right centers
around a famished radio dial on the hunt for a clear frequency,
growing loopier with heightened starvation. Lyrically, Dear has
opened up slightly with more personal subject matter, especially on
lead single Her Fantasy, which is one of the few tracks to
retain that dance music beat. As the album advances, the relentless
dance floor pulse drops slightly and the record’s emotive heart is
revealed. The outright gorgeous and uplifting track, Do the Right
Thing is, perhaps, the purest and most honest piece of music Dear
has released. While the record has some club-ready tracks, Earthforms
thrives on its dark, Joy Division-style bass lines that make the
record memorable.
After making its name
with the meticulous, harmonious indie-pop on 2009’s Veckatimest,
the quartet seems to loosen up with its third outing Shields.
Creative instrumental contributions are plentiful, from Chris Bear’s
delicate and carefully executed drum rolls to Daniel Rossen’s
chiming guitars and fondness for harmony. The arrangements are rich
throughout, and Droste’s partnership with co-bandleader Daniel
Rossen hits a high with Adelma. Sun in Your Eyes stretches out
past the seven-minute mark, yet never feels tired, fatigued. Gun-Shy
is a burst of rustic splendor, with a pointed Stephen Stills guitars
and its mystical chorus taken straight out of the seventies
counterculture. The band’s lyrics are more mysterious and oblique
than ever, and the scraps that listeners get, such as "Cloistered
from yourself/ You never even try," from What’s Wrong,
are different idea of relationships that work like extreme bird’s-eye
view. Half Gate is a heart-wrenching track, built around gentle
marching band nourishes, baritone strings, and of course, the quartet’s
enthralling harmonies. The album’s highlight remains Sun in Your
Eyes, a balanced masterpiece in which every note seems carefully
planned to play a role in its volatile transformation from sparse
piano ballad to triumphant anthem. The arrangements and production of A
Simple Answer are full of strange depths and unexpected touches
that build to a furious and distorted climax.
Silver Age,
Mould’s ninth solo album and the first since 2009’s Life and
Times, continues this journey of the past, embracing the
sweltering tunefulness that has distinguished his work since Hüsker
Dü’s Everything Falls Apart, singing about pain, rage, youth
and success. Silver Age isn’t only a shift in sound from the
more eclectic work of Mould’s last few records, but a shift in mood
as well. The trio brings incontrovertible energy to the 10 tracks,
whether engaging in steamrolling punk (Keep Believing),
mid-tempo rock (Angels Rearrange), 1990s-alt-rock grunge (Steam
of Hercules) or power-pop (Star Machine). On Briefest
Moment, one of the disc’s most breathless and infectious tracks,
Mould pulls back from the cryptic angst and dives straight for the
heartstrings. The soaring single The Descent is even better,
making the best use of a classic pop/punk chord progression in eons.
From the dreamy, Man on the Moon to the stylish Steam of
Hercules to the ominous urgency of Angels Rearrange, Mould
just sounds so perfectly at home when howling to the limit. First
Time Joy salutes the momentum of new found love with a pensive
melody and a tempered vocal that builds in passion as it moves. If
there’s one constant in Bob Mould’s career, it’s affecting
lyricism, and this is also worth noting on Silver Age. "Never
too old to contain my rage," he scorns on the title track,
reinforcing that age is nothing but a number.