An Acute Case: 18 November 2022
Canted indie pop, candid indie pop, grown-up juvenilia, and eloquent despair
Alvvays: Blue Rev
How much you get from this canted offer depends on your tolerance for songs that prefer limning indie pop norms to getting stuck into them. The progressions are familiar enough, with baroque keyboard bridges, Eno electro-fritz, and backwards guitar solos forever popping up at tangents, while Molly Rankin creates her relational dramas from just a handful of narrative breadcrumbs: here, she’s bumping into your sister at the pharmacy and being told you’ve got “that new love glow”; there, overhearing “Murder, She Wrote” as you’re rolled down the corridor on a stretcher. While on “Pomeranian Spinster” the gifts come quicker than I can jot them down: “I don’t want your advice on the run in my tights”; “There was a time when someone could’ve said you can’t recreate all the things that are read”; plus something about Presbyterian ministers and their tiny concepts. Her delivery is so muted and her lyrics so oblique that putting it together can be hard work, especially without a biographical leg up—the surest sign of the real Molly is “Bored in Bristol”s “If there’s a role I’ll play it”, which is only more misdirection. But while their privacy doesn’t always move me, I respect it, and find their relentless energy and dexterous interplay more than enough compensation. B PLUS
Arctic Monkeys: The Car
In British culture, the evolution from pseudo lad to pseudo gent isn't uncommon—which should take nothing away from how assiduously they’ve moved into lounge rock, but may prompt listeners to consider the similarities between their evolution and, say, Martin Keown’s transition from jeering simian to professorial pundit. Maybe he's also unduly influenced by late-era Bowie. ** (“I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am” “Body Paint” “Big Ideas”)
The Beths: Expert In A Dying Field
The tunes are so agreeable, and Elizabeth Stokes’s voice so gorgeously candid, that the first few times round you’d be forgiven for thinking this is all untroubled melody. Surely nothing this charming can have bumps or sharp edges. Only the more you listen, the more you notice Tristan Deck’s really-quite-hearty drumming and Jonathan Pearce’s really-quite-heavy riffs. Turns out they’re, like, a rock band. After that, the songs start to sink in. Not just the title track or “Silence Is Golden”—both song of the year contenders that deliver premium drama, emotion, and metaphorical inventiveness in each of their four acts, including bring-the-house-down finales—but the prime McCartney pop dreams “I Want To Listen” and “When You Know You Know”. Then you’ll pick up on their dynamic developments—the dainty bridges, the periods of calculated quiet, the backing oohs and aahs. And then you might start noticing what that gorgeously candid voice is singing, which it turns out is pretty special—from emollient “I can't allow this furrowed brow” to fragile “I'm not getting taller anymore / So when I fall it's the same distance as before” to statement of terms “If you won't commit to the expedition / I could go alone on a solo mission.” A MINUS
Callista Clark: Real To Me: The Way I Feel
That this 19-year-old from Zebulon (real place!) goes out of her way to get the punctuation right in “It's 'Cause I Am” tells you something about her serious turn of mind. Her Taylor-tight writing tells you something about her talent. But it's her country-Rihanna vocals on "Give It Back Broken" that make you sit up. As emerging talents are wont to do, she dips in the middle. As emerging talents are also wont to do, she re-emerges at the end. As for her inability to decide on an album title—let’s blame that on the emerging talent thing, too. ** (“It's 'Cause I Am” “Give It Back Broken” “Sad”)
Dry Cleaning: Stumpwork
After the Conservative hell of Truss, Dorries, and Patel, a well-spoken British lady expressing her feelings with calculated sincerity is a comfort that shouldn’t be underestimated. Even better that Florence Shaw does so in artful monochrome, throwing the complex world-mess she observes one oddity at a time into stark contrast. Unfortunately, her band have gone for a gentler jangle and suppler basslines in 2022—one which doesn’t always manage to keep up with her conversational chatter. Looser tunings, kazoos, whistles, and horns put on a good show, as do playful developments like the way “Kwenchy Kups” starts with a Sonic Youth riff that morphs into a Go-Betweens jingle. But whereas Shaw’s I don't knows, okay wells, uh-huhs, hmms, huhs, and ra-ra-ras underscore her accounts of peaceful fish meat, leaping gazelles, curtains that look like butts, and lost tortoises, the tunes have a tendency to meander. At the end, unforgivably so. It’s one thing for her to catch you staring at the wall; another for her band to be at it, too. B
Emperor X: The Lakes of Zones B and C
In which Chad Matheny makes a musical and political success out of a commentary on bourgeois malaise and fingers-in-ears indifference to a judgement day that's today, tomorrow, and yesterday by treating both with tender rage and bitter empathy. The size and scale of his themes occasion not only regal horn charts and backing choirs but gossamer-light piano and, in one case, complete silence. It’s with such supremely weirdo ambition that he integrates songs about compromised communism filtered through Blink-182 pop-punk and a phone call with a hummingbird recently escaped from a stray projectile on the same record. Elsewhere: two plane crashes, death inside frozen ice cores, élan vital, and a backwards unexploded inverted star. Like all disenfranchised left-leaners, he does the respectable thing and flagellates himself before others, with the opening verse tracing his decision to fight for freedom with songs rather than action to the “cheapest PA I could find” and the sweatshop where it was probably made. Yet for all the existential threat on display, it's a beguilingly comforting record, which I can only attribute to my sheer relief at hearing someone express their fear so eloquently. A
The Front Bottoms: Theresa
It’s rare for a band to wear their re-recorded juvenilia so well. Then again, that shouldn’t be a surprise, as juvenilia is Brian Sella’s metier. Maybe his outlook is less grown-up than on 2020’s “In Sickness and In Flames”, though I doubt the band’s critics will acknowledge progress from “Everyone has their own invisible weight to pull” to “Everyone blooms in their own time”. On “The Winds”, Sella counts at least ten questions he'll never know the answers to (forgetting that he’s already chucked out a notebook full of others on “Hello World”); on “The Bongo Song”, he digs his own grave and prepares to die because, yup, he's been dumped; and on “More Than It Hurts You”, he cuts off his fingers so no one can ID his body when it’s washed up on the New Jersey shore (not sure why he does that other than because he can’t decide whether or not to dye his hair yellow). All are well-written, sardonic, and affecting. But what elevates them is the tension between Sella’s closely-attended arrested development and the maturity of an acoustic-first approach that allows each song to grow—with thought-through dynamics, tonal shifts, whistles, claps, bongos, pianos, and strings supporting vocals perfectly poised between stony stoicism and complete emotional unguardedness. A MINUS
Dylan Hicks: Airport Sparrows
If it takes an hour of politely experimental jazz-pop to produce “I Ain’t Forgotten You”, I say it’s worth it. The rest of the time I’d still rather hear the songs than read the lyrics, but it’s a close call. * (“The Weather On Your Side” “I Ain't Forgotten You” “Happiness” Reduce Me To Ashes”)
Ray Wylie Hubbard: Co-Starring Too
Of course, Lzzy Hale, James McMurtry, Wynonna Judd, and Hayes Carll have their own vocal signatures—and Willie Nelson still sings better than Jesus—but it’s thanks to Hubbard’s rough-as-arseholes, shit-talking grumble that this totally frivolous collection of collabs keeps its pecker up for forty minutes. With his range restricted to whatever falls between a growl and a grunt, he sidles, swaggers, and stomps through high-grade bar-band boogie replete with leather jacket licks and lightning rod solos. And if his tough side puts you off, his soft side might win you over. When the lyrics don’t concern listening to rock and roll or playing rock and roll or literally just naming other rock and roll figures, he does pro-woman with such grizzly resolve you figure he must take it as seriously as he does looking mean. B
Ka: Languish Arts
Still monastic. Still deploying evocative instrumentals that prove his listening skills match his talking skills. Still letting the beat drop out to underscore his point. Still repeating hooks like he’s just stumbled across them. Still constructing epigrams made for classrooms across America (“For Pete's sake / Can't wait till our kid’s kids have kids to be great”). Still very, very still. *** (“Full Cobra” “Ascension” “If Not True”)