Album reviews (in short): Pissed Jeans, Sally Shapiro, BLK JKS and Mount Eerie
September 22nd, 2009
Mount Eerie Wind’s Poem [P.W. Elverum & Sun]
Not many musicians could get away with recording a black metal album. But then again, there aren’t many musicians like Phil Elverum. After dropping his Microphones moniker for Mount Eerie, he’s become even more obscure with his vision. Most recently he’s obsessed over themes of nature and Wind’s Poem follows up 2005’s “No Flashlight” with an exploration of the sub-genre’s dramatic reputation. What’s obvious from the inception is that Elverum isn’t donning any corpse paint and torching cathedrals. Where the black metal influence lies is in his balance of darkened folk with severely loud guitars and deep, morose melodies. The most obvious examples of his experiment come in the torrential blitz of “Mouth of Sky” or “The Hidden Stone,” which uses asphyxiating levels of distortion alongside woodwind instrumentation to offset the punishing drum crashes. But he refuses to make Wind’s Poem a work of pure homage, using warm synths and ample percussion on “Between Two Mysteries” and some doped up organ for an admitted Twin Peaks influence on “Through the Trees” to counter any such metallic aggression. More than a “black metal album,” Wind’s Poem is Elverum continuing to expand his sketches and arguably the best thing he’s put one of his names to since The Glow Pt. 2. Rating: A-
BLK JKS After Robots [Secretly Canadian]
After being hailed as the “African TV On The Radio” by Diplo, the debut album by South Africa’s BLK JKS (no vowels) arrives with some pretty heavy expectations. After Robots follows up March’s tasty Mystery EP, and while there is some validity to the TV On The Radio comparisons, the Johannesburg-based four-piece are much more exotic, like the “prawns” in District 9. Described as “afro futurism” by the band, their sound has a distinct Africanism to it, yet doesn’t fall into the sort of trappings that would brand it “world music.” No, instead (and unfortunately) there’s a much heavier concentration on prog-minded jams, squelching guitar solos and composite polyrhythms. It comes as no surprise then that it was recorded at Electric Lady Land studios (Hendrix is all over this), by Brandon Curtis from Secret Machines, a band who are more than familiar with extended songs beyond necessity. To say this album is rife with tangents is an understatement as vast as their home continent. “Cursor” and “Kwa Nqingetje” slip deep into the jazzy, psychedelic dub that removes the Mars Volta so far from At the Drive-In (that’s not a compliment). “Banna Ba Modimo,” on the other hand, centres in on the type of rock wankery Santana has made a career out of. Sadly, it isn’t until the final track, “Tselane,” that BLK JKS demonstrate they can break out of this mania and hone in on something that sounds fresh. Rating: C
Pissed Jeans King of Jeans [Sub Pop]
One look at the hairy arm gracing the cover of Pissed Jean’s third album ought to corroborate their reputation for being jokers. Okay, so this group of dudes named their band Pissed Jeans of all things and managed to write a song about scrapbooking, but if you set aside the absurdity you get – just like with 2007’s Hope For Men – you get one of the year’s more visceral rock records. Built from the same scuzzy DNA as bands like Flipper and The Jesus Lizard, these volatile Pennsylvanians match their acerbic expressions with sludgy riffing that scrapes and cuts its way into your bloodied ear canal. “Half Idiot” is a demented confession throttled by a mid-tempo rhythm and convulsive breakdowns in the pseudo chorus, while the subsequent “Dream Smotherer” is hate rock at its finest. “Request for Masseuse” features frontdude Matt Korvette hamming it up to his fullest, waxing instructions over some muddy distorted guitar lines while he receives his treatment. “Spent” is the biggest test, stretching their tenet over seven minutes into a seemingly improvised piece of work both on the band’s instrumentation and Korvette’s stream of consciousness prose. Had they kept it all to frantic fits of punk exercising, Pissed Jeans could have given King of Jeans a hope of becoming something for wider consumption. Instead, however, their patience and fondness for teasing keeps the record thriving at a pace that best suits their tongue-in-cheeky rock, which sees them continuing down a path of complete and utter brilliance. Rating: A
Sally Shapiro My Guilty Pleasure [Paper Bag]
When Sweden’s Sally Shapiro burst onto the blogosphere in 2006 with Disco Romance, she brought with her a retro freshness that was as much to do with her throwback to ’80s subgenres like Italo disco and Euro dance pop. The fact that she was an enigma – her true identity is still a mystery – certainly helped, but the combination of such coy, sweet vocals with svengali Johan Agebjörn’s percolating production made the entity Sally Shapiro a sensation for the indie set. Three years later, My Guilty Pleasure arrives with some concern: can something so timely and so niche survive in this age of blink-and-it’s-over hype? In this case, yes. Pleasure has enough of the sweetness that made Romance such a delight as well as the necessary progression to keep it fresh. Agebjörn delves deeper into an ambient space, which really opens up the already expansive galaxy. He opens with an waves crashing in, stabbing synths and stuttering vocal loops on the introductory “Swimming Through The Blue Lagoon,” peppers “Let It Show” with pulsating bass lines, and disembodies undulating synths on a cover of Nicolas Makelberge’s “Dying in Africa.” But the disco tinges on the sparkling “My Fantasy” and the campy “Moonlight Dance” help Pleasure become just that. We’ll see where the two can go from here, but for the time being their light still shines brightly. Rating: B
- Cam Lindsay
Tags: blk jks, mount eerie, pissed jeans, sally shapiro
Posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 4:14 pm by Cam and is filed under Reviews.
