The REVIEWS
77:78
Jellies
(HEAVELY)
One step forward, two steps back. So goes the retro-futuristic bachelor pad music on Jellies, the debut album by former members of The Bees (aka A Band of Bees), Aaron Fletcher and Tim Parkin, the duo now known as 77:78.
Several tracks on Jellies take the familiar sound reminiscent of ’60s psychedelic pop into the future by stepping up the tempo and spicing up the arrangements. Keyboard centric folk melodies and harmonized boy-band voices dipped in reverb are merged with groovy horns and catchy choruses. Standout tracks “Love Said (Let’s Go)” and “Chilli” even add a little guitar to the hipster fun.
But the rich harmonies and sharp production isn’t sustained throughout the album’s 11 tracks. Several tracks not only step backwards from the mod rock but step back in time to mimic the slow tempo sunshiny pop of early ’60s boy bands, but lack the freshness of their heritage.
While Jellies shows a few fleeting instances of distinction, mostly the band tend to echo their influences rather than use them to develop their music into something new. The amiable melodies tend to wallow within the comfort zone of gentle, retro-futuristic pop while never being quite catchy enough to be memorable, but are sunny and warm nonetheless.(www.facebook.com/7778music/)
By Matt the Raven
Lily Allen
No Shame
(WARNER BROS.)
In ways similar to Kate Nash, fellow Londoner Lily Allen woos us with her spry indie pop and cheeky brashness, often teetering on the edge between rock and pop, and just as often appealing to both audiences. Unfortunately her fourth album, No Shame, has fallen off the edge, landing squarely on the pop side, and losing her dual-sided appeal as a result.
Gone are the adventurous and playful arrangements and catchy pop hooks; replaced instead with slower tempos, sparse arrangements, and clicky, electronic beats. Except for an occasional stripped down Reggae/Calypso vibe, the music is lacking in melody, relying on Allen’s sweet, accented voice to provide it. But even the usually gripping vocals are dampened by the use of Auto-Tune.
The songs are pleasant enough but are straightforward and lack bite, often coming off as cloy while trying to be clever. Cases in point are “Apples” and album closer “Cake.” Instead of glib lyrics about topical subject matter, the former’s chorus is a repetitive refrain of “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” while the latter repeats the age-old adage “have your cake and eat it.” Proving Allen has no shame lowering the bar to produce sub-standard pop lyrics.
No Shame is not a complete waste of time though. “Trigger Bang” (featuring Giggs) and “Waste” (featuring Lady Chann) are both bouncy tunes with bits and pieces of various rock genres merged with a sassy attitude and recapitulated into fresh sounding pop. Giving us what is expected from a new Lily Allen release.
But over the course of the whole record, the lethargic tempos, lack of style, and the uninspired songwriting become a bit tiring. So the album as a whole is a disappointment for someone with so much talent and potential.(www.lilyallenmusic.com)
By Matt the Raven
Arctic Monkeys
Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino
(DOMINO)
So here we are. Five years after the slicked back hair and leather clad riffs of AM, Arctic Monkeys are back with a new record, the oddly-titled Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino. The project that started out as a solo project for frontman Alex Turner now incorporates the entire band—something equally as perplexing as it is ill-fitting.
It’s worth stating that, before we get any further into this, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is a good album. It trades out the pure indie rock edge of the band’s entire discography to date for a fuzzy, alternative absurdism that can initially wrong-foot it’s audience. On tracks like “Four Out of Five” and “Science Fiction,” atmospheres are created that drown out distinctive moments of any instrument-based melody until they become a blur, a thick haze through which Turner’s vocals and lyricism alone are allowed to shine.
This characteristic, an unwavering devotion to foreground the band’s central personality and creative force is as much a positive for the record as it is a negative. In the same way that Tame Impala’s records have become more and more about Kevin Parker—to the extent where very few other people are even involved in the recording process anymore—so it goes that new creations from Arctic Monkeys feel more and more like a collection of songs that are Turner’s, and Turner’s only.
Those looking for the kind of anthems that we’ve become accustomed to on Arctic Monkeys records are pretty out of luck here as songs similar to previous hits “Do I Wanna Know?,” “Mardy Bum,” and “Brianstorm” are traded out for a set of compositions that sound a lot more like a set of Bowie B-sides and album tracks from across his mid-’70s era, straying from the straight up British rock and roll he came from and heading straight into more Americanized blues and, dare I say, even R&B.
It’s true to say that, as a result of this album, Arctic Monkeys now have as many good-to-great albums as they do mediocre ones, and that this is down to this record’s consistency and overall sense of setting. Equally though, the creative force of the band is becoming increasingly about one man’s sense of identity, something that drives against their sense of community that has been inherent in their work up until this point. (www.arcticmonkeys.com)
By Michael Watkins
Eric Bachmann
No Recover
(MERGE)
Eric Bachmann’s role as leader of underground alt-rock kings Archers of Loaf and barroom balladeers Crooked Fingers is, it seems, firmly in the past. More recently as a regular collaborator with Neko Case and as a solo artist he’s committed to a notably more expansive sound and more accessible tone. Here on his fourth solo outing Bachmann offers a suite of songs that benefit from the rough-hewn power of his vocal, tender arpeggiated guitar lines and gentle lifts of electronica. It’s certainly low-key but on songs like the ’70s radio-friendly “Daylight” and the title track we get snapshots of hard, sad situations as vivid as a Polaroid. “Wild Azalea” wouldn’t be out of place as a standout ballad on a recent Bruce Springsteen record while “Boom and Shake” offers a brief, brutal vision of an ecological apocalypse that’s hard to shake off. Soft, ragged, and bruised, Bachmann will always deal in the losing situations of life but seems to have conjured some rays of light here that make those moments seem more livable.(www.ericbachmann.com)
By Michael James Hall
Beach House
7
(SUB POP)
Baltimore’s Beach House are universally beloved in the way that their mention will often elicit the kind of warm smile that you see on the face of someone deeply touched by a gesture. In that vein, their albums are artful parcels delicately wrapped with tender love and care. When you untie the bows, a lavender potion of harmonious synth and guitar wafts forth, pumped outward by the atomizer of electronic rhythm.
The six albums preceding this one provide many a go-to when you’re quite content to feel dreamy. Over a circuitous 12-year float, songstress and caster of keys Victoria Legrand and her spirit animal in mood, guitarist Alex Scally, have gradually made a kushy corner for themselves apart from the rest. They’ve now reached the sort of rarified status of a group whose comparisons branch out in both directions, covering their own influences and those they’ve influenced in kind.
7 marks the number in a sequence of Beach House albums as well as a point of departure from past conventions and most importantly, concerns. It’s common to speculate about causal ties to an evolution in sound and substance but in the case of 7 the factors are pronounced, practically spelled out by the band in a transparent love letter to the listener. In it they share that unlike past records, 7 was conceived without respect to how it would translate live. It was also spun together at leisure in a home studio with deference to creative impulse and unencumbered by time constraint.
Each song on this magnificent album is thus a different chocolate in the box. Legrand’s aquatic vocal tone is the balance, its cool resonance blending into the music as if it were itself an instrument. Opener “Dark Spring” sweeps you up in its space-prog momentum before giving way to the continuous lava-like bass purr of “Pay No Mind,” the first of a couple of nods to The Cure that tickle you pink. In a few spots, Scally channels Porl “Pearl” Thompson’s tone. Then you pause to wonder if anything has ever brought back that warm wash-over from John Hughes cinema more than “Woo.” Images bloom of Sam and Jake kissing over the table at the end of Sixteen Candles to “If You Were Here” by Thompson Twins during this one and don’t be surprised if it’s eventually considered one of this generation’s shining songs.
There are other welcome allusions. Voices of My Bloody Valentine echo as always while “Dive” saunters forward with the gait of contemporaries Widowspeak before picking up into an amplified Lush-like shoegaze tempo. Finally, “Last Ride” is a long triumphant play, ultimately surfacing over the classic Jesus and Mary Chain meets The Ronettes “Be My Baby” drumline, the 77th and final Beach House song on their 7th and most ambitious album.
You’d have to really be picking nits to mine Beach House productions for things that could have been done better; you may take or leave their style of sedated love pop, but you can’t deny that it has always been done beautifully and to vivid effect. It wouldn’t, however be unfair to say that the production heights reached on the Dave Sitek-enhanced Teen Dream has since settled in a lower stratosphere. Thanks to co-production from Pete “Sonic Boom” Kember of Spacemen 3, whose neo-psychedelic touch passes like rain showers, Beach House is reaching for the moon once more on the beloved Baltimore duo’s most stimulating aural experience to date.(www.beachhousebaltimore.com)
By Charles Steinberg
Bernice
Puff LP: In the air without a shape
(ARTS & CRAFTS)
Awakening from a seven-year dream is a frightening prospect. But for Toronto, Canada dream-pop outfit Bernice, emerging years after their debut album, What Was That, in 2011, that dream serves an inspirational purpose. The new record, entitled Puff LP: In the air without a shape, sounds as elusive as its title suggests, with plenty of the downtempo R&B-meets-electropop for which the group is well known. Frontwoman Robin Dann reflects patiently on childhood memories and her own personal history, while the band slaloms along with sparkling synths and a rhythm section that sounds much more sentient than on Bernice’s other material.
But in spite of the subject matter—which ranges from small boys dressed in suits, to rose gardens, to lunar observations—the album never gets too nostalgic. Even on more sentimental tracks, the music is at once alive, albeit slightly inaccessible. From the indeterminate clicks and beeps on opening track, “Glue,” to the drop on the soaring track “Passenger Plane,” this record sounds patient, matured: like a Tune-Yards/ Florist blend that’s been aged for half a decade.
“He’s the Moon” is so textured it almost feels like it could peel off of the album’s tracklist and walk around in the Canadian sunshine. “St. Lucia” sounds
