Weekly Whiskey Episode 11 (For Realz)

Well, it finally worked. Hope it was worth all the trouble! I have just had one of the worst 24 hour periods of my life, as if the universe wants to make surviving til my vacation as difficult and painful as possible. Such is life.

Liars- Sisterworld

Despite the great reviews it got, I've always been a bit underwhelmed by Liars's self titled album. It's not a bad album by any means, but compared toDrum's Not Dead, which had a conceptual and musical unity, flow, and pacing, it seems scattershot and unfocused. That it came out only a year afterDrum's belies its quick production, and though some of it was by far the most accessible music the band had ever made, there was also stuff like 'Leather Prowler' and 'The Dumb In Rain': dark, cacophonous counterpoints which would send those drawn in by 'Houseclouds' running in the other direction.

Sisterworld is something else entirely. It has a conceptual unity like Drum's Not Dead but lacks that masterpiece's flow and bi-polar divide between the textural, dreamier tracks and the percussion heavy, experimental stuff. Instead, Sisterworld has its own strange internal logic and sound. Opener 'Scissor' sounds like Liars compatriots TV On The Radio at first, with only vocals to drawn the listener in. Subtle orchestral instruments fade in, increasing in volume until the band kicks in at 1:41 and hey, it's a Liars song after all! The remainder of the album plays out with similar strange juxtapositions and literally sounds like nothing else I've heard before. The subtle or overt orchestral elements mix with the band's sound surprisingly well, and as a whole Sisterworld is the sort of thing that, on paper, shouldn't work.

It's a testament to how far the band have come as songwriters and arrangers of sound elements that the album actually does work. Something like the punishing drum and guitar caterwaul of 'Scarecrows On A Killer Slant' shouldn't be as weirdly catchy as it is, especially when the band is screaming "stand them in the street with a gun/and then kill them all!" Yet it sticks in your head as memorable and hooks you from first listen. Likewise, album closer 'Too Much, Too Much' somehow is able to make Disney-esque clarinet and bassoon (at least, that's what I think they are) flourishes back up the dreamy keyboards and guitar atmospheres in a sensical, enjoyable way.

If Drum's Not Dead was their drum heavy album, Sisterworld usually doesn't use them, or does in simpler ways. 'The Overachievers' reminds me of the beat to Can's 'Oh Yeah' sped up and thrown into a blender with late 80s Sonic Youth at their noisiest and most strident. 'Drip', by contrast, only resorts to a subtle percussive bit that sounds like someone tapping on the rim of a snare as a texture rather than a propulsive rhythm; meanwhile, the loops of sound and menacing vocals lend a supernatural horror vibe, with singer Angus Andrew wondering "when will I awake/from this dormant sleep/to eat" like some kind of Cthulu-esque monster, older than time itself.

Like a lot of the really fantastic and interesting indie rock coming out for the past few years, it's hard to categorize or describe what Liars accomplished onSisterworld. Like the challenging but rewarding R&B tinged experimental pop of Bitte Orca by the Dirty Projectors, you end up giving paradoxical, contradictory descriptions and praise. This album is not accessible, but if you have a predilection toward more challenging material, you'll be like me and think that 'Scarecrows On A Killer Slant' is a great single. The somehow-it-works use of orchestral elements on the album puts it in a different place from even the rest of the Liars's discography even if, for the most part, it definitely sounds like the work of the same band who made Drum's Not Dead andLiars. Taking the title literally, Sisterworld really does feel like it belongs to its own time and space removed from our own world even if it has enough similar elements to our world to make sense.

See? It's all paradoxical: Sisterworld is experimental and challenging, but weirdly catchy and memorable; the way it uses orchestral elements to mix with the band's pounding drum rhythms and heavily processed guitars and keyboards shouldn't work, but it does; it sounds quite unlike anything else out there, even from Liars, though it still retains their personality and isn't a huge departure from the previous two albums in some ways. Man, I give up. I'm just going in circles now. Here's the "too long, didn't read" version: Sisterworld is possibly the best album Liars have ever done, and one of best albums of 2010 so far.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

The Rapture- Echoes

I want to begin this review by admitting that when this album first came out, I thought it was absolutely amazing. Dance-punk wasn't a terribly familiar kind of music to most of my generation. At least it wasn't to me; bands like Gang Of Four, Liquid Liquid, and ESG still aren't very popular, that is to say, they aren't some of the more obvious ones that older music fans will point you to when you're starting out. So Echoes came as a revelation, and I'll never forget listening to it in the winter of '03, 'Open Up Your Heart' starting just as snow began to fall when a friend and I were on the way home from going out to eat. It was magic, and the rest of the album was a frenetic throwdown that combined the kinds of music he and I were heavily into: arty punk/post-punk, experimental and otherwise electronic music, and funky dance music.

But with that history in mind, Echoes is an album that I've recently revisited and it doesn't hold up. Perhaps it was the blush of youth, where every new album I heard was exciting and interesting. Perhaps my tastes have changed a bit. Maybe I'm a little bit more keen on spotting something that I think will endure instead of being a momentary, 'capturing a time period well' thing. Or perhaps this album isn't as good as I thought, not a 'classic' though still pretty good.

You know, I'm going to go with that last 'perhaps.'

The Rapture were at the forefront of the dance-punk explosion that took place roughly around 2003, which was sort of concurrent with the freak-folk explosion and slightly after the new garage rock revival thing had begun to die down. As alluded to above, their music combines the energy and raw power of punk, the production techniques and techno beats/bleeps of electronic music, and the booty shaking power of funk. Single 'House Of Jealous Lovers' seemed to speak to everyone, giving us music we didn't really know we wanted. There's no denying the greatness of this song--it'll easily go down as one of the defining tracks for this decade, at least as far as the 'underground' is concerned--but barring a few other gems, the thing I've come to realize is that Echoes is a fun album anchored by a fantastic song and a few great ideas spread out thinly over 11 tracks. Nowadays, Echoes sounds very homogenic, and I usually lose interest by 'Killing.'

This kind of situation, in which one retrospectively realizes an album isn't nearly as good as one thought, happens. It happens a few times to each of us, I think. A band will release a single or two and then eventually have those on their first album and the music press and all the scenesters go crazy for it, praising it to high heaven. I mean seriously, Pitchfork gave this album their 'best of' status for 2003. 2003 wasn't an incredible year for music but still, there were better albums than this. But I digress. In the end, you come to know that whatever was praised so highly, what captured your heart so strongly, doesn't hold up. Echoes is an OK album; it's a fun listen and really good to drive or dance to, but it's not going to go down in history. Other than 'Open Up Your Heart' and 'Infatuation', the album is little more than 9 variations on the sound 'House Of Jealous Lovers' established. It's an excellent song, sure, but I don't need that many things like it. Maybe this is a good thing if, again, you want a peppy, energetic album to groove to, but it doesn't make for a timeless music.

The Rapture face the same problem that many bands do who release a single or album that defines a sub-genre of music: where to go from there?? Too often the new sub-genre attracts a hundred new bands who all sound nearly identical, the 'sound' becoming a homogenized and dogmatic one in the process. Dance-punk is a great starting point, but you've got go somewhere from there. Unfortunately, The Rapture chose to wait 3 years before releasing their next album, by which point no one really cared about them anymore. Moreover, they had trimmed away some of the interesting experimental/punk aspects of their music, effectively making them a white boy indie rock dance band. The only band of the 2003 dance-punk era who seemed to have escaped is Liars, who were always far more 'out there' than the other bands and quickly proved it with their second and third albums. I suppose LCD Soundsystem escaped too by virtue of the fact that they were always much closer to the dance side of the dance-punk equation. Also, with songs as good as those on Sound Of Silver, it wouldn't matter what 'style' you were. Hey...now that was a classic album, one that'll stand the test of time (probably). Just as most of the hardcore punk bands are a historical curiosity because they didn't go anywhere from super fast, super aggresive punk rock, dance-punk bands will probably go down as a historical curiosity because most of them didn't go anywhere from their starting points, either. As a 'scene' they're important and good, but as individual bands they're forgettable. I'm sure The Rapture's follow-up to Echoes, Pieces of the People We Love, is decent, but I really don't care.

It may seem as if I'm being a bit hard on Echoes, but I like to think of this as more 'correcting the curve.' For what it is and what it's trying to be, it makes for good, fun, danceable music with a handful of fantastic ideas and sounds. Unfortunately, these fantastic ideas and sounds are stretched to fill 11 songs, and anytime I can tell someone they only really need to hear one song ('House Of Jealous Lovers') off a record, I'm a bit reluctant to get too crazy about it. Anyway, Echoes is good but it's not 5 stars, 10 out of 10 good. In the end I just feel...ambivalent about it.

Islands- Arm's Way

It's tough to grow up. But it's even tougher to grow up when all you're known for is being a kid. Just ask any of the many child stars over the years who have tried to parlay their pre-teen successes into adulthood. What, then, to expect from a band like Islands, and leader Nicholas Thorburn, who has made a living out of crafting childish and catchy indie pop?? What to make of Arm's Way, an album that seems to perversely force itself into maturity and forget the band's appeal in the first place??

Well, that's not entirely fair. Thorburn's aesthetic, going back to the Unicorns album from half a decade ago, was to combine a whimsical, childish indie pop aesthetic with dark subject matter (many of his songs deal with death) and an experimental, genre bending playfulness that touches on prog rock, hip hop, and tropical flavors. And it's also true that the Unicorns album and the Islands' first album, Return To The Sea, had long songs. But, this album isn't as good as either of those, and gives one the impression that Thorburn took the worst tendencies of those albums to hear this time out, while simultaneously trying to forcefully mature the band's sound. Which is to say, he made the arrangements more complicated and focused more on nuance and overall sound than crafting 'hooks.' The result is an interesting, frustrating, and ultimately unfulfilling album that gives you just enough succor to want to come back but never enough to fill you up.

"Fill you up" is a bad way of putting it, because the one thing you're going to hear from most people about this album is how bloated it is. At 68 minutes it is inexcusably long, and for a band that formerly seemed to have no shortage of ideas (Return To The Sea is incredibly varied and consistently good at the same time), it's kind of sad that the album only has enough good material to support half that runtime. 'In The Rushes' is, frankly, a mess, a song that plods along for five minutes in search of a direction before suddenly quoting The Who's 'A Quick One While He's Away.' Unfortunately, this kind of "too clever for its own good" thing might have worked on a shorter, more quixotic Unicorns track, where you expect that kind of self conscious "oh, we're so quirky!!" vibe and can forgive it, but here it just seems like the band reaching to mirror their own attempts at length and bombast to that masterpiece and coming up very short. I will admit that I love the out-of-nowhere samba/Latin ending to 'J'aime Vous Voir Quitter', but this song is only three minutes long. Moreover, album closer 'Vertigo (If It's A Crime)' is 11 minutes long and mostly instrumental, and it's probably the most successful new idea on the album--it goes through many phases and ideas, but none of them are arbitrary or worthless fluff. So, my point is this: either give us these sharp changes in shorter songs, or go the Fiery Furnaces route and make the longer songs winding funhouses of sound, texture, and feel.

I've been listening to the new Wolf Parade album, At Mount Zoomer, at the same time I've been digesting Arm's Way and my overwhelming impression is that Thorburn desperately needs a creative foil. While the main Wolf Parade guys (Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug) can function very well outside of the band, they often have collaborators in those projects, too. Unfortunately, Thorburn seems adrift on his own course after the Unicorns broke up and Jamie Thompson left Islands. While he's capable of producing some brilliant and beautiful moments--of which 'To a Bond', 'The Arm', and most-likely-choice-for-single 'Creeper' are a testament--those moments are surrounded by lots of extraneous music that should have been left on the cutting room floor. This may sound hypocritical after I praised Sunset Rubdown's Random Spirit Lover for doing a similar thing, but the music between those brilliant, memorable moments on that album is very enjoyable if you listen to the album as a whole. With Arm's Way I just want to skip to the good parts and scrap the rest.

My hope is that Arm's Way is a difficult, growing pains album, not unlike the second Liars release. Now that Thorburn has moved his aesthetic past the quirky, quixotic, and compact indie pop/prog rock/cute-songs-with-dark-content phase of his career, let's assume he can either learn a new way of bringing his epic ideas to a more successful fruition, or perhaps re-learn some of what made his previous releases so great in the first place while better expanding their palette and delivery.

In Case You Missed It: Three Films Set To Drum's Not Dead

There’s a growing trend over the last decade or so for bands to include a DVD with the first pressing of their albums, perhaps as a token of esteem to loyal paying fans as well as a shot in the dark to encourage sales. Whether they are documentaries about the making of the album (see Phish’s Specimens of Beauty, which was packed in with Undermind), live footage (see the DVD packed in with Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky), or a mix of the two (see Mogwai’s Mr. Beast DVD), they rarely serve as more than something you’ll watch once or twice and forget about.

At the same time, listening to music while watching visualizers is awesome. Though I only have experience with iTunes, I can tell you that while I (sadly) hardly ever just listen to an album while doing nothing else anymore, iTunes’s visualizer makes for a convenient excuse to watch some psychedelic visuals while focusing on the music at the same time. I am a multi-tasker by nature, so even though staring at a mesmerizing, swirling screen while saliva overcomes the dam of my lips isn’t productive, it is still is something more than staring at my ceiling or keeping my eyes closed for 30~60 minutes at a time.

Packed in with the initial batch of Drum’s Not Dead by the Liars was a DVD containing three different films set to the album: two by band members and one by an honest-to-god filmmaker. This is kind of like a mash-up of the two above ideas because, between the three films, we get lots of pretty artsy visuals, studio footage, live footage, and…uh…a bunch of footage of a snail.

Let’s begin, shall we?? First up is ‘Drum’s Not Bread’, which is the most interesting and entertaining of the three. I won’t go song by song, but let me hit some highlights.

Here we see some semi-typical live footage, albeit clearly not live footage of the song that plays over it.

This is one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever seen: masks pitched somewhere between Mardi Gras and creepy-birdlike-plague-doctor-style-mask, facial hair, haunting eyes, and the screen divided into sectors to complicate matters for the better.

I don’t remember what song this amateurishly animated part goes to, but suffice it to say that everything acts out or illustrates the lyrics and I like cats.

I figured I’d end on a high note—pun definitely intended. In case you’re too sheltered to tell, this is footage of one of the Liars dudes rinsing out his bong, all after brushing his teeth and shaving his moustache. Classy!!

The second and worst film is called ‘Helix Aspersa.’ I suppose if you listened to the album and thought to yourself, “gee, I wish this was set to footage of a snail crawling around, eating stuff, and having lame editing magic done to it” then this would be your favorite thing ever. Also, you need to seek professional help.

Just in case you think I’m lying, here is a snail.

And here is a snail with crazy mirror imaging!!

The third film is a mix of depressingly amateurish film student imagery, live footage, and semi-interesting experiments. The fact it was done by some European guy who is (maybe??) an honest-to-god art film dude is a bit sad.

See?? This is what I mean. You’d be better off with iTunes’s visualizer.

Then there’s this, though it’s only dark and hard to see because I took a screen cap at the wrong moment. Anyway, it’s the clean shaven, impossibly young looking member of Liars screaming into a microphone, which is maybe less interesting than the pictures I could have shown you of odd looking front man guy throwing himself all around the stage in weird outfits.

Last but not least, the honestly-kind-of-cool three shot of the Liars guys while the last song plays. From left to right: clean shaven, impossibly young looking guy who looks around and occasionally seems to respond to questions silently; odd looking front man guy who doesn’t move or say anything for the entirety of this shot; guy-who-looks-like-Viggo-Mortensen who is a bit more affable and emotive.

What conclusion should one take from this project?? Well, it turns out to be just like everything else I mentioned earlier. I’ve only watched these twice since I bought the album almost two years ago. It’s slightly more interesting than the typical DVD pack in but it’s still not as cool as a visualizer.