Yeasayer - Odd Blood... 60/100

It took a long time to come to a verdict on Odd Blood, Yeasayer’s follow-up to their not-awesome 2007 LP All Hour Cymbals. Its quality is just too damn dependent on the listener’s mood and critical lenience, making it hard to make any sort of unbiased, bona fide judgement of the album.

So, how happy are you right now? Those of you feeling downright ecstatic, this album will blow your mind. First single “Ambling Alp” is a rollicking, sun-speckled fountain of melody and positivity that advocates (I kid you not!) sticking up for yourself, while the rest of the album is similarly sprinkled with high-pitched call and response vocals, “ooh-oohs,” and shimmering synths over uptempo, hand-clap-aided tracks. It’s charmingly quirky and melodically engrossing - the hallmarks of any good pop album.

Besides, it’s the kind of pop music that offers a little more, right? The kind of post-Merriweather Post Pavilion, post-Dear Science pop that marries past incarnations of the bubblegum genre with the experimental, genre-hopping nature of music in the digital age.

But take a second listen, now that your momentary euphoria has worn off. Aren’t those lyrics annoying? When they’re even coherent, they’re nothing but reductive cliches and over-dramatic statements about universal themes like love, sexuality and life that are so vague, they’re rendered meaningless.

Listen again to those “engrossing melodies”. Suddenly, the soaring, 80s-style choruses of tracks like “Madder Red” and “I Remember” feel cheap and gimmicky, if not downright irksome. The quirks that seemed so charming through rose coloured lenses are gone, and all that’s left are grandiose musical statements that have all the sentiment of a dollar store Birthday Card.

What’s more maddening is that you just realized that Yeasayer is really ripping off a bunch of your favourite bands. Rather than progressing as artists, the band is just absorbing more and more of the musical zeitgeist and churning out better imitations of the bands making real strides forward. Sure, there are hints of Animal Collective here, but where are the challenging time-signatures and dreamy atmospherics that charge that band’s music with real emotional tension and depth? And where All Hour Cymbals mimicked the sound of AC’s middle period, isn’t Odd Blood just aping the band’s post-2007 output?

The only treats here regardless of mood are found in the metallic churn of album opener “The Children” and the atmospheric-but-concise finale “Grizelda,” which, despite lyrics as dim-witted as the rest of the album’s, strikes a chord somewhere that incites disappointment that Yeasayer couldn’t inject some real quality between these excellent bookends.

But hey, cheer up... There, doesn’t Odd Blood sound good again?

Hot Chip - One Life Stand... 67/100

Hot Chip has alway had a kitschy, novel feel to them that always got in the way of my ever taking their music very seriously. The band, along with fellow glitch-poppers Cut Copy, have always seemed less concerned with music than with style, which they manifested by adorning the album covers with campy, 80s-style “futuristic” and making art-y videos that screamed “i’m quirky!” Even the music itself seemed more focused with establishing an aura than with constructing songs.

On One Life Stand, the band seems to have cut ties somewhat with their ironic, idiosyncratic past, to varying degrees of success.

On the bright side, the band’s newfound focus on summoning emotion from music is refreshing, and showcases a side of the band heretofore unseen. “Hand Me Down Your Love” is a bouncy little ditty, decorated by stabs of piano and washes of violin and static that give the song added depth. “Alley Cats” is a similarly likable song, with band members Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard layering their forlorn melodies into haunting rounds and harmonies.

These successes, unfortunately, are few and far between. The down side to the band’s maturing is that the majority of One Life Stand is dull, repetitive and dragged out. Despite being only ten songs long, the average track here is a lengthy five minutes’ duration, plenty long enough to, say, lose the listener’s attention on the flavourless title track, or to rankle on ballad “Slush” with it’s annoyingly repeated “humminna humminna” verse phrases.

By losing their quirky idiosyncrasies, the band has also sacrificed what made them even the slightest bit cutting edge. Here, the band teeters precariously on the brink of easy-listening, having imbued their music with emotion that feels disingenuous at best and at worst, downright cheesy.


One Life Stand is the sound of an irony-less, straightforward Hot Chip, but it may just have come at the price of what made them interesting (if not irksome) in the first place.

Hollerado - Record in a Bag... 72/100

Boisterous, male-created, straight-forward power pop is a dangerous genre in which to practice. There are pitfalls aplenty, and just one wrong step can make even the most energetic, well-intentioned album no more than a steamy, 45-minute pile of headache inducing, hit-the-roof-with-a-broomstick tedium.

Luckily, the scrappy Canadian foursome have a lot of important things going for them. The band have been blessed with charm, melodic and guitar chops, and luck in equal measure. In the spirit of being thankful, let’s count the band’s blessings:

1. They haven’t written one perfect cross-over hit for a cellphone or beer ad or something, only to surround it with weepy, lunkheaded ballads and cheap, less catchy imitations of the original (I’m looking at you, The Caesars, Razorlight and The Fratellis). Record in a Bag maintains consistent quality all the way until the end of the record.
2. The band won a battle of the bands-esque contest held by a radio station in Ottawa, Canada that scored them a quarter of a million dollars!
3. They got a distribution deal from Canadian label Arts&Crafts without sounding like one part Broken Social Scene, two parts water.
4. They managed to infuse their straightforward, guitar-driven pop-rock with elements of other genres (Irish traditional/gospel on album standout “What's Everybody Running For? Part III,” for example) without sounding forced or reductive.

Assuming the band keeps in touch with their humble, D.I.Y. roots (the record really does come in a Ziploc bag, complete with confetti and a temporary tattoo) and steers clear of the kind of sterilizing studio sheen that kills many a sophomore effort, the band may just be onto something.

On Record in a Bag, they’re just a better-than-average power-pop band that, if they had a nickel for every time they sang a “doot doo,” would be rich. That, or if they won a quarter-million dollars every time they entered a radio contest, right?

Gil Scott-Heron - I'm New Here... 87/100

That title is a lie; soul singer/spoken word poet Scott-Heron’s been around since the early 70s. And in the forty years since then, Gil Scott-Heron hasn’t lost an iota of his ability to convey, using only the spoken word, exactly what the man himself is feeling in powerfully emotional and vivid mental images.

If anything, time is on Scott-Heron’s side. It’s made the singer/poet’s voice more gravelly and more evocative than ever, his baritone growl now reflecting the world-weariness expressed by his poetry.

It’s no surprise, then, that I’m New Here, which was begun in 2007 when XL Recordings label owner Richard Russell sought out Scott-Heron to make his first studio LP in 14 years, is a strikingly genuine, emotional record. His solemn reminiscences on family, fearlessness and facing the past are accompanied perfectly here by Russell’s sparse, rhythm-centric production. His gentle, meticulous touch ensures the spotlight always rests wholly on Scott-Heron: a solitary, plucked guitar is all that accompanies him on the title track, while “New York is Killing Me” has nearly no instrumental backdrop besides a snare, a cymbal, and a pair of human hands.

“On Coming From A Broken Home (Part 1),” which samples the surprisingly sombre beginning to Kanye West’s “Flashing Lights,” sets the mood perfectly for I’m New Here, with Scott-Heron acknowledging the lasting effect that his grandmother had on his existence. On subsequent spoken interludes, (woven skillfully by Russell throughout the album,) he takes the time to thank his family for their substantial supporting role in his life and comes to terms with his own limitations. On “Being Blessed,”, he even playfully acknowledges his mortality: “If you gotta pay for things you’ve done wrong, I’ve got a big bill coming at the end of the day,” he claims through an audible smile.

But it’s the stark contrast between Russell’s minimalist compositions and Scott-Heron’s lyrics that make I’m New Here such a thoroughly engaging album. While lyrically, Scott-Heron is boldly trying to assert himself as a man who’s both acknowledged his past transgressions and admitted that he’s relied on the strength of others along the way, he’s sonically isolated, stranded in a sparse and desolate record, facing his own inescapable end. It’s an existential dilemma suggested solely by the compelling tension of words against the accompanying music, an effect not often carried out on record in such a successful and absorbing way.

But I’m New Here is more than just a tense, minimalist ode to existentialism. It’s an album of overwhelming musical and lyrical quality and a statement of continued relevance from an artist that, had the revolution been televised, might have gotten the wide acclaim he so justifiably deserves.

Massive Attack - Heligoland... 69/100

Whether due to the lukewarm reception of 2003’s 100th Window or not, it’s been seven years since Bristol, UK trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack released a studio full-length. And while Heligoland has nothing on the duo’s cinematic 1998 high-point Mezzanine, it’s an often-fascinating collection of songs that sees the band complete their transformation from epic, distortion-loving experimentalists to trip-pop progenitors.

The album’s lengthy guest-list works relatively well here, or at least much better than it did on 100th Window. TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe, Elbow’s Guy Garvey, Damon Albarn, former Mazzy Star Hope Sandoval, and electronic frequent-feature Martina Topley-Bird all guest on separate tracks, and only Garvey falls completely flat. It’s not entirely his fault; “Flat of the Blade” is a dull, lifeless track, devoid of either the intense instrumentation of past Massive Attack albums or the absorbing, labyrinthine chord structure of the successful songs that surround it.

The Damon Albarn-featuring “Saturday Come Slow,” for example, is pulled from the edge of listener apathy by a suddenly-desperate chorus in which Albarn yearns “Do you love me?” The swirling nylon guitar pluck of “Psyche” is similarly captivating, but it’s on spacious first single “Paradise Circus” (f. Hope Sandoval) that the duo’s marriage of guest to track is most successful. Sandoval’s sensuous drawl is the perfect companion to the tense piano trickle and handclaps that fade lazily in and out of the song, and the strings that bring the song to a close provide a hint of the cinematic grandeur that characterized Massive Attack’s earlier work without seeming overbearing.

And while it’s too bad that a fair few of these songs are a hint too long, (only two of the ten tracks are much shorter than five minutes long) it’s what most Massive Attack fans have come to expect. This time around, at least there’s no eight minute “Anti-star” to slog through.