Elliptical Soul

December 8, 2011

There are dozens of reasons why Jón Þór Birgisson, better known as Jónsi, is a memorable character. His frontmanning legendary post-rock band Sigur Rós aside, he is Icelandic, blind in one eye, wears a distinctive fauxhawk/cowlick hairstyle, and tends to dress like a character from Final Fantasy, to name a few. In 2010, with his band on a baby-related hiatus that seems now about to end with the release of live album/concert dvd Inni, Jónsi set out to deliver his debut solo album Go, which was like a dancier, even-more-upbeat-even-though-you-thought-it-was-impossible take on Sigur Rós’s 2008 mouthful of an album, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust. A miscellaneous track or two aside, We Bought a Zoo is his first release since then, and the soundtrack/score for the Cameron Crowe film is about what you’d expect from a pairing of the two.

Listen to Go or any of Sigur Rós’s albums and you’ll notice that a common trend is for songs to be bookended by beautiful, tinkling pieces of ambient sounds. Jónsi and his boyfriend Alex expanded upon that idea with their ambient recond Riceboy Sleeps, and if you’re a fan of any of the above, you will enjoy the instrumental passages We Bought a Zoo has to offer. (Though not always instrumental in the technical sense, Jónsi has always used his voice more as another instrument than anything, especially given his propensity to sing the most elegant take on scat you’ve ever heard.) Pieces such as Snærisendar delight in their beauty, and fill your head with images of suns rising on pensive, snowladen landscapes. They may not bring anything to the table that you couldn’t get from the projects mentioned earlier, but damned if they aren’t pretty.

The less positive news is in the field of the more conventional songs. The soundtrack uses three tracks from Go, which are all fantastic, as well as Hoppípolla, which only the least cynical of types can claim not to have at least become somewhat tired of yet. Only two originals are brought to the table by Jónsi: Ævin Endar and Gathering Stories. Unfortunately, rather than recapturing any of the manic happiness or laid-back beauty of Go, they come off as overwrought, overbearing, and turgrid. That’s not to say that they’re not pretty in their own right - but it distinctly feels as if Jónsi’s got his solo music fully flushed out of his system for now, and that a return to his bandmates will bring a welcome refreshment to his creative juices.

7/10

8:04pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZR0OYwC-Diyf

(Notes: 20)

Filed under: jónsi sigur rós we bought a zoo review 2011 7/10

December 7, 2011

insertradioheadlyrics:

Patient Product Information

Spiritualized®

Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space B P
——————————————————————————
Please read this leaflet carefully before you start to take your medicine. If you have any questions or are not sure about anything, ask your doctor or pharmacist.

Keep this leaflet in a safe place, you may want to read it again.

Produced, arranged, and mixed by J. Spaceman.
——————————————————————————
What constitutes Spiritualized tablets?

01 Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space 02 Come together 03 I think I’m in love 04 All of my thoughts 05 Stay with me 06 Electricity 07 Home of the brave 08 The individual 09 Broken heart 10 No God only religion 11 Cool waves 12 Cop shoot cop…
——————————————————————————
What are the active ingredients of Spiritualized?

The tablets contain the following active ingredients in white tablets marked DEDLP 034.

Spaceman - Vocals, Fender Telecaster, Fender Jaguar, Vox Starstreamer, Gibson Firebird, Piano, Hammer Dulcimer, Autoharp.
Kate Radley - Vox Continental, Farfisa Compact, Roland D20, Piano, Vocals.
Sean Cook - Fender Jazzbass, Harmonica.
Damon Reece - Gretsch Round Badge, Percussion, Bells, Timpani.

What is Spiritualized used for?

Spiritualized is used to treat the heart and soul.

What is the recommended dose?

Play once, twice daily or as recommended by your doctor or pharmacist.

When should you be extra careful while taking Spiritualized?

If you are taking any other medicines, including those not prescribed by your doctor. This is extremely important, as using more than one medicine at the same time can strengthen or weaken the effect of the medicines involved.

If you drink alcohol regularly or use recreational drugs.

Important: Spiritualized may effect your ability to drive or operate machinery, if affected you should not drive or operate machinery. This may be made worse if you take alcoholic drinks.

What should I do if I forget to take my tablet?

If you forget to take your tablet, take your next dose as soon as you remember. Then go on as before.

What are the possible side effects of Spiritualized?

As with other medicines, some unwanted effects can occur. These may include: delirium, a sense of intoxication, visual and auditory hallucinations, euphoria, fever, cold sweats, slurred speech, numbness of the extremities, lack of co-ordination, stupor, memory loss, bloodshot eyes, mental detachment, paranoid psychosis, temporary paralysis, jerky eye movement, imbalance, sense of well being, purposeless movement, lethargy, dizziness, visual disturbances, palpitations, disorientation, confusion, personality change, arrhythmia and changes in the level desire.

In cases where Spiritualized is used over a long period of time dependence may occur. If you are concerned about these or any other effects, talk to your doctor.

What should I do if my symptoms persist?

Try the alternative medicines ‘Lazer guided melodies’ and ‘Pure phase’ available without prescription across the counter.

(Source: buckturgidson)

5:47pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZR0OYwCxzBZU

(Notes: 4)

Filed under: spiritualized ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space vinyl liner notes

November 17, 2011

I know she’s kinda fug, she’s just my party drug / And I ain’t all that fly my damn self

I’m an of Montreal fan. I’ve seen them live three times (more than any other band), and they top my Last.fm playcount chart. Frontman Kevin Barnes is in the habit of releasing a companion EP for some of his recent albums, and thecontrollersphere belongs to last year’s False Priest, a professional, if not entirely inspiring, release. But listeners hoping for another Icons, Abstract Thee (one of the greatest EPs of all time) will be sorely disappointed, as I was. thecontrollersphere sounds like what it is, and what most EPs are - a small collection of rejects that weren’t good enough to make the album.

Black Lion Massacre is an atonal noise romp, and while it’s always fun to see bands let their hair down and experiment outside of the pressure of an LP, the opener is just… bad. Flunkt Sass vs the Root Plume is turgid and awkward, and only the last three tracks begin to approach listenability. Holiday Call, L’age D’or, and Slave Translator are all adequate in their own right, but they still disappoint. They bring the sexuality of post-Hissing Fauna of Montreal, but without any of the pop sensibilities that made songs like Wicked Wisdom or Sex Karma so endearing. The vocal melodies are amongst Barnes’s worst, and the arrangements are entirely uninspired. Holiday Call does little to earn its eight minute length.

With a new album titled “Paralytic Stalks” due in 2012 from the ever-prolific group, thecontrollersphere is worrying - it could be a sign of decline, or it could simply be the band getting rid of a few less impressive tracks they had resting finished and dusty on the studio shelf. Fingers crossed for the latter.

4/10

6:09am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZR0OYwC2Caiu

Filed under: of montreal thecontrollersphere 2011 review 4/10

November 17, 2011

Stuck living the same song, swear I must have done something wrong / Cause I’ve been feeling like this so long

BEST OF 2011

We all have our “project bands.” Those obscure new groups who we stumble upon by complete chance before Pitchfork decides to post about them and ruin everything. Often these are local bands, our proselytizing fueled by an injection of hometown pride. Pure X, hailing from my own city of Austin… were the project band of a guy I know from Kansas. Embarrassing. I paid his praise no mind until I caught wind of their origin city, which I was shocked to learn of given that I hadn’t heard a peep about them or seen them on any of the concert bills around town. Once I finally gave them a listen, I greatly regretted not giving them a chance earlier.

Pure X (shortened from Pure Ecstasy for legal reasons) are, to swiftly throw them in a box like any good critic does, a dream pop band. But rather than pursuing the trendy, upbeat Pains of Being Pure at Heart/Joy Formidable approach, Pure X set out to be minimalist, laid-back, and atmospheric.

The most apt comparison would be to Darklands-era Jesus and Mary Chain or Painful-era Yo La Tengo: blissfully dreamy and fuzzy around the edges without ever quite becoming a wall of sound. The entire album is hard to make out distinctly through the weed-soaked haze that envelopes it, but the lack of vivid edges is exactly where the album’s appeal lies.

All these atmospheric qualities would be nothing without a foundation of well-crafted songwriting, however, and in this area is where Pleasure continues to parallel the giants mentioned above. The delightful track Easy is one of the catchiest songs you’ll hear all year, with a classic wordless “oo-oo-oo” recalling vocal hooks from decades past.

The closest album to Pleasure that’s been making the 2011 rounds is the equally purely ecstatic Puro Instinct’s Headbangers in Ecstasy - but where the latter aims for a Cocteau Twins-like brand of heavenly transcendence and only manages to be vaguely irritating, Pure X pulls through on the basis of charisma and an impressive consistency (bordering on - but not quite reaching - dreaded same-iness). If you’re not convinced by the gorgeous opener Heavy Air (which possesses a descending bassline and falsetto reminiscent of Sigur Rós’s legendary Ágætis Byrjun), you’d be safe turning off the album there, but for those of you who were uninformed of or uninterested in Pure X’s existence before now, don’t make the same mistake I did and hesitate to listen to Pleasure.

9/10

5:41am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZR0OYwC2B5VJ

(Notes: 44)

Filed under: pure x pleasure 2011 best of 2011 review 9/10

November 17, 2011

Love, this is a dark world and I’ve lost focus / Please tell me you need me

It’s rare to find an album that seamlessly and perfectly fuses two ordinarily opposing aesthetics together, but on his 2010 debut album Cerulean, Baths (the electronic project of Will Wiesenfeld), does exactly that. Cerulean somehow manages to make glitchy, stuttering beats as soothing as a Brian Eno drone album.

You could describe Baths’s sound as somewhere between chillwave and glitch-dance, with a dash of Passion Pit thrown in, specifically the sound of Wiesenfeld’s weedy falsetto. But where Passion Pit frontman Michael Angelakos brashly screams his lyrics, putting off listeners with a low tolerance for singers of the grating persuasion, Wiesenfeld alternately buries his voice in the mix (♥), harmonizes with himself over several layers (Apologetic Shoulder Blades), and gives his voice a sexy R&B edge (Lovely Bloodflow).

How exactly Baths manages to take such off-kilter beats and hyperactive samples and make them almost lullaby-like is bewildering, but he undeniably pulls it off with flying colors (or with a flying color, his choice being cerulean). The album art’s washed out and overexposed whites and blues match perfectly the over-saturated yet lush samples and synths used throughout.

Only a few less-than-memorable tracks in the middle of the album prevent it from being a perfect listen (you won’t remember Rafting Starlit Everglades even after hearing it a dozen times, though neither will you feel compelled to skip it). At just over 43 minutes, Cerulean is the perfect length from Apologetic Shoulder Blade’s heavenly a capella intro to Plea’s climactic… pleas. Ultimately, the record is relaxing and smooth enough for background music but engaging and beautiful enough to focus your entire attention on without fear of boredom, and that achievement does not cease to impress.

9/10

4:52am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZR0OYwC28e9b

(Notes: 17)

Filed under: baths cerulean will wiesenfeld review 2010 9/10

November 16, 2011

There’s an empty space inside my heart where the weeds take root / So now I set you free

Artistically, I can’t say I envy the spot Radiohead have been in since releasing Kid A at the start of the new millennium. The “off-the-wall-by-mainstream-standards masterpiece” may have confused some listeners, but it didn’t take long for fans and critics alike to hail it as their second masterpiece after 1997’s OK Computer (or their third, depending on who you asked). Since then, a ceaselessly growing fanbase endowed with an astonishing sense of self-entitlement has heaped more and more pressure on the band’s later efforts, which have either been met with rather mixed reception (Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief) or, in the case of In Rainbows, praised as a comfortable masterwork by a group of artists supremely confident in their skin at last, after a decade or two of insecurity and self-doubt.

The King of Limbs couldn’t have been a greater departure from In Rainbows. The latter was open-aired, clear, crafted with a keen eye for pop sensibilities, and overall positively summery by Radiohead’s “gloom-monger” standards. The former is, in a word, robotic. You could recycle Kid A/mnesiac-era adjectives and call it “claustrophobic” or “alien” but that would invite misleading comparisons - as a whole, the band hasn’t done anything like The King of Limbs before. Here, samples and disorienting, looped percussion dominate the album, with the exception of a stripped-down two track reprieve on the second side.

It’s impossible to tell what Radiohead were thinking when they recorded this album, as they announced it unexpectedly, released it less than a week later, and didn’t do a drop of press on it for months. Maybe they were desperate to retain their title of perennial innovators, or maybe they just wanted to throw together whatever music struck their fancy and get it out there. The “newspaper” album theme lends credence to the latter theory, but the band has seemed to take a perverse delight in being opaque and illegible lately, so one guess is as good as another.

Speaking of “opaque” and “illegible,” Bloom is as perplexing an opener as I have ever heard. The classic role of the first song of an album is to hook the listener, and often it will end up being one of the best songs on the album, or at least one of the easiest to listen to. Bloom is actually the least accessible song on the album, and the turgid, stuttering studio recording pales in comparison to the energy-packed, driven version performed live. It does admirably succeed at foreshadowing the confusing and somewhat messy nature of the album, however.

Morning Mr Magpie and Little by Little make up the meat of the first side, and are two solid tracks that wouldn’t have felt out of place on Hail to the Thief - the spindly guitar during the chorus of Little by Little cements its spot as one of the album’s best, and the breakdown halfway through Magpie with only Thom Yorke’s eerie, wordless voice and a groovy ascending bass riff is instantly a classic Radiohead moment. But the first half ends by returning to Bloom’s bizarre obtuseness with Feral, a throwaway, repetitive instrumental that feels like a lightweight dance version of Amnesiac’s Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors.

Side two of the record is decidedly more interesting, opening with lead single Lotus Flower which features classic “simplistically groovy” drumming from Phil Selway, recalling Morning Bell (the glorious Kid A version, not the rather unfortunate alternate take on Amnesiac). Give Up the Ghost is unchanged from early solo rendition performed by Yorke, with gorgeous guitars and vocals stacked and looped over one another.

Codex is the album’s great failure - an absolutely soporific and cringeworthy dirge that sounds like a reject from the b-sides of In Rainbows. The five minute track destroys what little pacing the album ever gathered, but the album is emphatically saved by Separator, which as the closer stands tall over the rest of the songs. Somehow Radiohead manage to use a single measure of drums looped over and over for the duration of the entire song without changing once, but rather than becoming boring or repetitive, the instrumentation takes on a brilliant drone which hypnotizes the listener and invites them to nod their head and lose themself in the (literally) dreamy lyrics (incidentally, the lyrics on King of Limbs are rather unremarkable and par for the course for Radiohead - cryptic yet memorable, unusual yet unworthy of discussion). The entrance of the trebly lead guitars on the second half of Separator is the best moment on the record, bar none, and leaves you feeling far more satisfied that you would have admitted to being if you were asked during Feral or Codex.

The King of Limbs is not a “successful record” in the same sense that OK Computer, Kid A, or In Rainbows are. But spiritually it harkens back to the cluttered mish-mash of Amnesiac, which is confusing at first but endearing in time, and like the often under-appreciated 2001 album, The King of Limbs is more than the sum of its parts and a rewarding listen if you can abstain from hypercriticism. Radiohead have earned that much.

8/10

5:11am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZR0OYwB-XnuE

(Notes: 5)

Filed under: radiohead the king of limbs review 2011 thom yorke 8/10

November 15, 2011

I want you to love me, you send me a coffin of roses / I guess that’s the way that things go these days

BEST OF 2011

This contender for album of the year first graced the ears of Internet listeners in late 2010. There’s something magical about the first leaks of the next year hitting the web in November and December, a sensation that’s only been made possible with the Internet’s proliferation. It almost feels like you’re cheating, snatching an illicit glimpse into the future (illicit in more than just the sense that you’re downloading it illegally, of course). This same early excitement can also lead to devoted listeners seizing upon one of these prematurely born albums and hyping it beyond its due merit - a fate that Destroyer’s ninth album was in danger of. But as the year passed on, now only slightly more than a month from its conclusion (those 2012 albums should start leaking any day now), Kaputt has held its own against any album released during the calendar year proper.

The irony of a silky-smooth-jazz-pop LP being released by a band named “Destroyer” can’t have been lost on anyone, but Kaputt is a significant departure from Dan Bejar’s equally-non-destructive previous releases. 2008’s Trouble in Dreams was, sonically, a relatively standard indie affair, bordering on folk-rock Decemberists territory. The only immediately apparent similarity between it and Kaputt is Bejar’s lazy, yet affected, drawling voice. Kaputt’s sleek, sophisticated white cover art reflects the album’s content admirably well - there isn’t a touch of disorder or roughness to be found in the record’s 50 minute run-time.

Every track is drenched in reverbed atmosphere - the similarities in production to chillwave can’t be ignored, but Kaputt generally ignores synths in favor of heavily-chorused guitars and saxophones. At times the album veers dangerously close to parody, with more than one song sounding like a perfect fit for a softcore porn flick - but against all odds, the album pulls it all off with sincerity and not a touch of the irony so everpresent in modern indie culture. That goes only for the music, naturally; the lyrics contain a healthy serving of tongue-in-cheek cynicism among them. Bejar isn’t beyond dropping a few hip names either, mentioning a first love for New Order, nodding to The Beatles, and naming a song for artist Kara Walker.

The boldest steps on Kaputt are the aforementioned eight and a half minute-long “Suicide Demo for Kara Walker,” and the eleven minute closer “Bay of Pigs”. Each has a blissful ambient introduction before introducing a dancier beat along with the song proper, and the payoff is always worth the wait. Kaputt will be too saccharine for some, but there’s nothing broken about it, and if you can accept the over-the-top smoothness and sensuality, you’ll find few albums this year that are better.