Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra - Kollaps Tradixionales... 89/100

I enjoy film scores, but I don’t listen to them in my spare time. As companion pieces to film narratives they can be utterly bewitching and lovely, but independent of visuals, I often find them to be pleasant background music at best, and dragging at worst. It is in this same vein of opinion that I also find instrumental rock music to be unappealing, and often, cheesy and overbearing as well.

And so, it was with a happy heart (and engrossed mind) that I first listened to Kollaps Tradixionales in its entirety. The newest incarnation of Silver Mt. Zion has created a cinematic masterstroke with this, their sixth studio LP, one that is variously tense and hauntingly ethereal, peppered with feverish squalls of swirling strings and distorted guitar.

The album is bookended by two fifteen-minutes epics; opener “There is Light” and grand finale “‘Piphany Rambler,” both go through stages of gently building tension and rolling mid-tempo laments before bursting into a melodic storm of strings and Efrim Menuck’s baritone wail. The band’s creativity and adeptness at turning musical complexity into emotional effectiveness is exemplified throughout the album, especially five minutes and twenty seconds into “There is Light” when, over his band’s cacophonous 3/4 waltz, Menuck desperately wails in staccato syncopation “there ain’t no truth but the no truth and there ain’t no thing but the nothing.”

While the album has only one track under six minutes, these songs never rest on a repeated phrase for long before twisting the tempo, melody or arrangement to create a new, dynamic movement in their ever-changing songs. Kollaps Tradixionales is an album on which the band’s proficiency, creativity, and sheer exuberance are overwhelmingly present, and whose quality should go mostly unmatched this year.

Lightspeed Champion - Life is Sweet! Nice to Meet You... 74/100

Sometimes a catchy pop song is just a catchy pop song, and nothing more. It’s not going to change the world, but you’re going to enjoy listening to it a couple of times before it gets set aside to be obscured by better albums with a longer shelf-life.

Enter Lightspeed Champion, the king of said catchy pop songs. Devonté Hynes’ second solo album since leaving his former band the Test Icicles is a varied smorgasbord of ear candy centred around his theatrical melodies and exuberant, boyish voice.

Appropriately titled Life is Sweet! Nice to Meet You, the album begins on maybe the darkest note Hynes is capable of. Shimmering synths and mid-tempo bass plucks take the listener to the two minute mark of opener “Dead Head Blues,” whereat the listener begins a dramatic and bouncy journey through the pop soundscape of the 2000s: first single “Marlene” has the faint disco tinge and aching strings that mark the work of Montreal’s Islands; “Faculty of Fears” features dainty string plucks reminiscent of Andrew Bird; “Madame Van Damme” is punctuated by a hollered chorus straight out of the repertoire of 00s British groups like the Cribs or the Libertines; even the reverb-y strum of “Sweetheart” bears momentary resemblance to the shaky charm of Lifted-era Bright Eyes.

This shouldn’t suggest that Life is Sweet! Nice to Meet You is plagiarized; these are compliments. Devonté Hynes employs classic pop moves that have been proven effective by the multifaceted pop of the new millennium, and uses them well.

Life is Sweet! Nice to Meet You isn’t a masterpiece by any stretch of the mind, but it’s a tasty, varied mix of “snack” songs for the peckish listener. If you’re hungry for something more lastingly satisfying, you’d do better to look elsewhere.

The Game - The R.E.D. Mixtape... 68/100

The Game is the thinking man’s thug, a reflective, ponderous character who considers all sides of an issue so carefully that he often makes a bold, bridge-burning move only to renege less than a month later and wholly embrace another point of view. Does that make him “fake”? Only if being contemplative enough to continually grow makes one so.

It is thusly that the Game’s first two albums, The Documentary and Doctor’s Advocate, were thoroughly absorbing affairs that made up for solid-if-not-stunning tracks with consistently thoughtful lyrics that often painted vivid and emotional mental pictures. So excuse me if, even after the disappointment of 2008’s LAX, the R.E.D Mixtape gets me just a little excited for this year’s forthcoming The R.E.D. Album.

The rap mixtape is typically regarded as practice for the event that is the full-length album, and the R.E.D. contains enough quality that it should set more than a few tongues wagging for the studio album’s spring release. The one-two punch of openers “Cigar Music 2” and “Bang Along” are pure, gangster-rap gold: the former features the MC spitting a nostalgic verse over a syncopated piano riff, while the latter is an anthemic street tale complete with the tinkle of a toy piano and a sampled soul refrain.

“Better on the Other Side,” Game’s tribute to Michael Jackson, is as touching as syrupy R&B sung by the likes of Chris Brown, Usher, Mario Winans and Boyz 2 Men can be, but there’s something to be said about Game’s verse on the song. His lyrical tribute to MJ, in which he recalls imitating the Jackson 5 with his brothers, speaks volumes about the powerful and inspirational influence that Michael Jackson had on an emerging generation of young African-Americans that the white media and public couldn’t possibly understand.

Unfortunately, the R.E.D. Mixtape suffers from a sagging, derisive latter half, but that’s understandable: mixtapes like these serve as a dumping ground for tracks that the artist feels just aren’t good enough to keep around as future singles or album tracks. Yet even through the cheesy, guest-hampered second half, Game holds his own lyrically, relieving any fear that his eccentric narratives might be losing their effectiveness.

So, as far as serving the purpose of getting listeners excited about a forthcoming full-length studio album, the R.E.D. Mixtape is successful. But a proper album, it ain’t.

Peter Gabriel - Scratch My Back... 20/100

Conceptually intriguing and soundly curated, the S.S. Scratch My Back was supposed to be a thing of beauty, but sadly, the ship went under this Tuesday, February 16 almost as soon as it left port.

None of the lives of the 12 original songs aboard the vessel were spared as they were caught in a storm of poor and cliched arrangements that left the songs slow, melodramatic, and worst of all, tediously drawn out.

Reports state that it was as if Peter Gabriel, the shipwright, had paid little to no attention to what made the original songs so likable in the first place. He stripped the songs of their hooks and their intended lyrical meanings, turning them into insipid, leaden versions of themselves.

Of the ship’s passengers, David Bowie’s “Heroes,” which was to turn 33 this year, was the first to go under. Sapped of all it’s original triumph and energy, the song stood no chance of survival as it was bogged down by a lengthy intro that burst into a sappy whirl of synthesized strings.

More devastating, however, was the loss of so many young aboard the ship. Bon Iver’s 3 year-old “Flume” was forced under by Gabriel’s refusal to keep the song’s folky rhythmic sway, while the Arcade Fire’s “My Body is a Cage,” also 3, had it’s original organ tension replaced by lazy, conventional strings. It was a horrific six minutes before the song finally drowned, under a noisy chorus that elicited none of the awed reaction the original provoked.

Gabriel’s shoddy workmanship showed especially when he seemingly missed the entire feeling surrounding some of the passenger songs. The irony of the Magnetic Fields’ cynical and amusing story about “The Book of Love” went overlooked by the ignorant Gabriel, who sung the lyric “the book of love is long and boring” in a weepy, dramatically romantic whisper.

Investigation following the tragedy showed that rather than picking the songs that suited his vessel best and imbuing them with some sort of meaning and musical complexity, he configured a trendy, calculated set of songs that would make his vessel look stylish and in touch with modern shipbuilding.

Instead, his laziness and overwhelming sense of self-importance in the execution of the task were made obvious by the S.S. Scratch My Back’s complete inability to float when immersed in water.

Robert Pollard - We all got out of the army... 79/100

Former Guided By Voices frontman Robert Pollard’s a very busy person, and so are you if you’ve been keeping up with his body of work. Between his solo venture and his bands the Boston Spaceships and Circus Devils, the man released nearly a dozen records in 2008 and 2009.

The best part? Pollard’s hit the vein of form he was in in the mid-to-late-90s, when he released classics like Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes and Mag Earwhig! in his prolific cult band Guided By Voices. The songs on his first of many projected 2010 long-players, We all got out of the army are as energetic, as lo-fi and, most importantly, as engaging as his best work.

Songs like “Silk Rotor,” “Post-Hydrate Update,” “Cameo of a Smile” and “His Knighthood Photograph” are all buzzy, sing-spoken hits akin to “Watch Me Jumpstart” or “Tractor Rape Chain,” albeit just shy of those songs’ anthemic quality and ramshackle charm. And while excellent, Pollard-signature slow-burners like “Red Pyramid” and “Wild Girl” never come close to hitting the triumphant heights of “The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory” (though, you know, very few songs at all do).

At times, it can be disappointing that Pollard’s so prolific: his albums, which come so fast, they rarely afford the critics’ attention and have become less of an event with each passing release.

But those paying attention are getting a treat. Pollard is destined to go down as one of the most important songwriters of the “indie” generation, even if only half his recorded output gets its proper due.

If you haven't been paying attention, it's never too late to start. And you could do much worse than starting a record as consistently rewarding as We all got out of the army.