Album review: Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Mosquito

Published by Jeff Becker, May 22, 2013

Score: 7/10

Review:

The female alter-ego of the Flaming Lips strikes again.   Brewing up the same concoction of odd, eerie, temperamental pop (sound familiar, Wayne Coyne?) that we normally see from the Lips, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs blast away from all angles on their new release.   In an era right now where oft-ignored bands (i.e., Daft Punk) are suddenly become the coolest thing on the planet literally weeks before their release, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs – led by the enigmatic Karen Orzolek are peaking after a 13-year odyssey among the indie ranks.  Mosquito is the electromagnetic climactic work the Yeahs x 3 have defined themselves as for over a decade now.   From the sexiness of ‘Under the Earth’ to the NIN-style ‘Buried Alive’ the Yeahs are all over the place – just like they like it.   Where the album misses out is with the dramatic momentum downshifts from track to track.  While the Yeah Yeah Yeahs  are at their peak right now of holding our attention they never quite grasp the opportunity to put the nail in the coffin of what could be a great release.   But that’s ok.   That’s what the tour is for.

–TWTHS

Album review: Saturday Looks Good To Me - One Kiss Ends It All

Score: 7.5/10

Review:

Forget the multiple lineup changes (One Kiss Ends it All features lead vocals by no less than five separate present and former band members).  The seemingly revolving door that makes up the core of Saturday Looks Good To Me is keeping up just fine with their eclectic twee-pop styles on disc.   Every track sounds like something you’d hear while walking into a 1960′s candy store – straight from the jukebox on Happy Days or lifted from outtakes to nearly every twee album on your indie shelf.   Despite their allegiance towards 50′s and 60′s pop One Kiss Ends it All is still varied enough to easily bust through those paper-thin barriers we try and wrap around it.   Pop delights such as ‘Invisible Friend’ (ala, Camera Obscura) and ‘Polar Bear’ (which sounds like a Zooey Deschanel original from She & Him) are wonderful, where as ‘Sunglasses’ is direct from the Belle and Sebastian archives somewhere, I swear.  With no two tracks sounding the same the entire album still fits like a glove with a quirky but alarmingly catchy odd assortment of timeless pop gems.

–TWTHS

 Want more to read?   See below from the Saturday Looks Good To Me publicity peeps:

In their decade-plus existence, Saturday Looks Good To Me has never taken a typical path: endless line-up changes, shifts in sound from lo-fi 60′s pop to experimental noise rock, a twisting discography heavy on one-off singles and bizarre package tours with afrobeat and freakfolk bands.

In 2012, bandleader and songwriter Fred Thomas returned with a fresh new line-up, including new vocalists Carol Catherine and Amber Fellows, but also with old friends from previous SLGTM incarnations like bassist Scott DeRoche and drummer Ryan Howard showing up for the fun. The band’s fifth proper album, One Kiss Ends It All, came together following the group’s first tour after getting back in action, however the four years since their last full-length weren’t spent cultivating this new batch of songs. Instead, a spontaneous and breezy vibe flows through the album’s 12 selections, drawing on the reference points of 60′s pop and early indie rock, all filtered through the band’s skewed pop lens.

Thomas’ songs are always bittersweet, but short, uptempo rockers like “Invisible Friend” and “Break In” recall the open-hearted running melodicism of New Zealand kiwi-pop while more groove-oriented numbers like “Polar Bear” or “Sunglasses” meld electronic elements with the same sharp-edged attitude of the first Strokes album. Even former SLGTM lead vocalist Betty Barnes (who now lives in Sweden) sings lead on two tracks: the doo-wop piano lament of “Negative Space” and the spare indie rock road trip “The Ever-present New Times Condition”.

Saturday Looks Good To Me’s albums from the early 2000′s (All Your Summer Songs, Every Night) predicted the reverb-saturated production and girl-group revisitations that indie rock would embrace several years down the road. One Kiss Ends It Allexpands on those early lo-fi marvels and feels more like a revelation than a continuance. With more sophisticated arrangements and melodies more direct and engaging than anything the band has ever done, the album feels like re-telling the details of a dream minutes after waking. Something new colliding with something that shouldn’t make sense in a beautifully strange collage. And always more details hidden in the corners.

Full Album Stream @ Paste: 

http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/av/2013/05/album-stream-saturday-looks-good-to-me—one-kiss.html

Album review: Still Corners – Strange Pleasures

Score: 8/ 10

May we bask in the joy for a bit?  In October of 2011 as Still Corners were touring tiny US clubs in support of their debut album on SubPop we wrote in our review of that show that, “Still Corners has plans to be more than this, and they probably will be”, and that their “growth will be quick and rampant”.    It’s nice to be right once in awhile.   The new sonic brilliance and imagery of their new album Strange Pleasures leaves their decent debut album Creatures of an Hour in the proverbial dust.   Creatures of an Hour was a mere footnote to a career that will probably be grudgingly under-appreciated unless SubPop can help create some magic buzz.   Tracks like ‘The Trip’ and ‘Midnight Drive’ are the buoyant, ethereal pop gems that Still Corners showed promise of in 2011.   The catchy bass line on ‘Midnight Drive’ is the album’s highlight – a pulsating dark, cryptic, eerie jam of a groove that glides effortlessly from Tessa Murray’s breathy vocals.  It’s one of the musical highlights of 2013 to these ears and a complete fulfillment of the promise from their predecessor.

–TWTHS

Photos and review of Still Corners – October 2011 in Minneapolis

Album review: She & Him – Volume 3

Score: 7/ 10

She & Him’s Volume 3 fulfills its inevitable predictability much like the Motown albums of the 60′s did.  Seriously, did anyone back in the late 60′s expect the next album from the Supremes or Marvin Gaye to really sound that much different than their prior?   No chance.  Instead of variety She & Him give us bouncy, infectious charm, primarily via Zooey Deschanel’s girl-next-door delivery and her hot-librarian appearance on the front cover.  This album, even weeks before its release was the most sure thing being released in 2013.  No one expected this to be Ward and Deschanel’s Atoms For Peace anyway, right?    Given the scope and stature of M. Ward’s catalog and stellar reputation, one would prematurely think She & Him is merely another edition of the M. Ward solo catalog with Deschanel on lead vocals, along with perhaps a single, courtesy composition contribution from her.   But in fact it’s the opposite.  This is a Deschanel solo album and produced by Ward.   Of the 14 tracks, twelve of them are credited to Deschanel with two covers mixed in.  She sings all the tracks and she dominates this very fine release.

Running a full 14 tracks it’s long, nearly too long.   Eight or nine tracks would have been ideal and more than sufficient.   With a sound that relies on a single type of appeal, it begins to lose it’s lo-fi charming edge after a half dozen tracks, regardless of how catchy the material becomes later on in the album.   Given that, the album still zips by like a breeze.  A flip through the liner notes while listening to the music and you get pushed back into that 60′s-70′s period where the first few plays of the album sounded pristine before the pops and cracks from the vinyl made their inevitable appearance weeks later.  Volume’s 1, 2 and now 3 of the She & Him catalog are becoming a time capsule of sorts for modern day indie.  Without a clunker in the bunch and piled on top of Ward’s cred and Deschanel’s universal appeal, it’s a catalog that is slowly creeping up on many must-have lists.  That fact alone has certainly pushed it past the expectations we had after the announcement of Volume 1.

–TWTHS