6.11.12
The reason for the recent lack of posts is because I've been in transit between my old home/job in Baltimore and my new one in Atlanta. In that time I've acquired new discs from Best Coast (The Only Place), the Walkmen (Heaven), Liars (WIXIW), and Japandroids (Celebration Rock).

I'll slowly start writing normal entries again, but these last few weeks have been crazy, and I think this is probably only the second or third time since starting this blog that I've taken a break for this long, so it might take me a bit to get my sea legs back.

6.12.12
Finally! Frank Ocean tells us the title and release date for his new album (Channel Orange, July 17), announces a US tour kicking off next month, and shares a new track from the album, "Pyramids". This might be the first record I'm genuinely excited about in 2012.

6.13.12
Listened to Japandroids' Celebration Rock once, and I didn't hear anything that was distinguishable in any way from their debut, Post-Nothing. I will listen to it again at some point, but it might be awhile.

6.14.12
After listening to the streaming preview of Liars' WIXIW, my initial impression was that it seemed heavily influenced by Radiohead's King of Limbs, and after spending some time with it after it was officially released, that impression still holds true. It's not just the reliance on gurgling, murmuring electronica, but the whole atmosphere of the disc is the same——quiet and subdued in the same way as a forest at dusk. Both albums are tone poems that evoke the same sense of solitude so complete that it teeters on the edge of madness. The title of the opening track for WIXIW puts it into words perfectly: "The Exact Colour of Doubt" (and you have to wonder if the British spelling of "colour" isn't a coded acknowledgment of the debt WIXIW owes to King of Limbs).

There's also a good bit of mimicry of Radiohead's complex drumwork (skittering backbeats that make me thing of lunatic spiders) but for a band that named one of its albums Drum's Not Dead (which prominently featured the thundering primal rhythms that have become a signature element of the band's sound), it's not surprising that the percussion is a major element in the tapestry of the music.

There's a little bit more of an edge to WIXIW, compared to Limbs, but while there are a few tracks that stand out, overall this disc seems more appropriate to me as a Liars side project than a proper entry in their catalogue. Of course, the one constant with Liars is that they are always reinventing themselves in fairly radical ways, and there is something about the vibe of the record that makes it undeniably a Liars work.

It could grow on me a bit more——most of their releases do——but overall I'm a bit disappointed. Despite their incredible career and their authorship of at least one song on every record that becomes one of my favorite tracks released that year, they have yet to issue a coherent masterwork, and I was really hoping that this might be the one.

6.15.12
Another great new track for download, "Who", the first single from David Byrne's collaboration with St. Vincent, Love This Giant:

This project sounds so awesome on paper that it's either going to be one of the best things released this year or it's going to be awful along the lines of the Metallica/Lou Reed collaboration Songs for Lulu. I'm betting on the former based on this track; can't wait for the full album release.

6.18.12
I encountered Hot Chip and YACHT around the same time (I picked up Hot Chip's Made in the Dark and YACHT's I Believe in You. Your Magic Is Real. in 2009, when both albums had been out for a while), and because of their focus on dance music with a bit of whimsy, they've always occupied a similar place in my mind.

But Hot Chip has always been more polished and consistent, and when comparing their just-released In Our Heads with YACHT's most recent release, 2011's Shangri-La, it's clear that Hot Chip have taken more steps forward over the course of three albums than YACHT has in the same period. I still like YACHT (Shangri-La really grew on me after not making much of an impression at all during my first couple of listens), but in terms of consistency, there have always been more songs to love on Hot Chip's records, and Hot Chip also seem to have stronger thematic elements tying their tracks together.

Still not sure if I'm going to like In Our Heads as much as Made in the Dark or One Life Stand, but those were two very strong releases, and In Our Heads can definitely stand shoulder to shoulder with them——even if it's not their best, it's a relative ranking where the differences in quality are pretty minor.

6.19.12
I've been a Walkmen fan for a long time now, but their earlier work could be very hit and miss——I tended to love the songs or never want to hear them again. There has still been some of that on the last few albums, but they've been increasingly moving towards a calmer, more consistent sound that plays up the things I love about their music.

The just-released Heaven continues this trend, and it may be their most relaxed and accessible album to date. Lead singer Hamilton Leithauser's vocals even sound different——not nearly as strained and angst-ridden as usual. Organist Peter Bauer recently published a piece in Salon about his kids and music that describes the kind of night that this album would be perfect for, and it's yet more evidence of how the maturity in their personal lives is echoed in their approach to making music and in their songs.

Although I miss barnburners like "The Rat" and "Thinking of a Dream I Had", I'm happy to see that there are ways for bands to age gracefully while remaining true to their essence. A younger me might be disappointed in this move towards a more laid back vibe in their music, but I'm aging right along with them, and it suits the me I am now just fine.

6.20.12
As a sidenote to yesterday's post about the Walkmen, I find it interesting (and very telling) that as Wilco has undergone a similar change in their sound——generally less experimental and easier to digest——they have been met with low album scores and derisive labels like "dad rock" from Pitchfork, but the Walkmen, who have achieved far less commerical success and remain a relatively cultish band, have seen their ratings skyrocket: You & Me and Lisbon, the two albums that started this trend, received Best New Music designations, and all three records have gotten scores above 8 (out of 10), which Wilco hasn't seen since their seminal Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

Granted, I don't enjoy Wilco's work as much as I used to, but I never loved a Walkmen album as much as I love the string of releases from Wilco from Summerteeth to A Ghost Is Born, so maybe the Pitchfork ratings are a result of a perception that Wilco is in decline, whereas the Walkmen, who were never at that level in the first place, seem to be getting stronger as time goes on. Still, the fact remains that both bands have matured musically in similar ways, and one has been punished and the other rewarded by the tastemakers.

6.21.12
It's making me a little crazy that Frank Ocean's Channel Orange comes out in less than a month and I still can't preorder it on Amazon.

6.22.12
Fiona Apple's new album (the title of which I will reproduce just this once), The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do, has some great, great songs on it. But I'm having a hard time getting really into it——it features just her vocals, a piano, and percussion, and lacks the full orchestral swells that were a big part of what I liked about her sound, especially on When the Pawn (which is a truncated version of another extremely long album title) and the unreleased version of Extraordinary Machine.

I can't help but feel like this is a demo/acoustic version bonus disc that should have been included alongside the main album's deluxe edition, not the official version of the record. As much as I like a lot of the stuff on The Idler Wheel, I can't help but wonder what it could have been if she had allowed Jon Brion back into the studio with her to help shape it into a fully realized work.

6.25.12
Listened to Beck's Odelay recently for the first time in years, and it's aged much better than I thought it would. "Hotwax", "Lord Only Knows", and "The New Pollution" are three songs that had all but vanished from my memory but make for a really strong opening to the record behind "Devil's Haircut", and "Jack-Ass" and "Ramshackle" quickly retook their places as two of my favorite Beck songs.

One song that didn't wear so well: "Where It's At", one of his best known songs and, if I remember correctly, the biggest hit off this album. It's almost gratingly irritating, and I can't tell if that's because it was so overplayed during its heyday that there's no recovering it now or if it was appropriate for that cultural moment and not built to be a classic that could weather changing tastes.

I'm irritated by the end of "Ramshackle", which has a two minute long break of silence about four and a half minutes in, and then finishes off with 45 seconds of annoying, repetitive vocal samples and glitchy keyboards. Just for fun, I looked it up on iTunes to see if they kept this nonsense for the digital release, and I wasn't surprised (although I was irritated) to see that they hadn't.

Instead, the digital version of "Ramshackle" concludes after the song proper, completely eliminates the silence, and shoves the annoying noise into a separate track called "Computer Rock" (and I further note that they took a brief period of silence——no more than five or six seconds——at the beginning of "Where It's At" and separated that into a ten second track of nothing called "Intro to Where It's At").

6.26.12
An album that didn't age so well: the Amps' Pacer. This was Kim Deal's first release after the Breeders' Last Splash, which remains one of my favorite 90s records, and I remember being excited about hearing her music again and pretty happy with the album as a whole. Listening to it again, though, it doesn't have a whole lot to recommend it. There are some decent songs on the first half of the album, but it really tails off after that and the last half is pretty mediocre.

Kim Deal wouldn't release any new music after this album for another seven years, and even though she's kept the Breeders somewhat alive, with three albums and an EP since 2002, she never really managed to recapture the power and weirdness of their first two records when the Breeders were seen by most fans as little more than a Pixies spinoff.

Of course the Breeders were far more than that, and even though I'm a fan of Frank Black's early solo releases, the Breeders' first two records (which were made in the same time period as Black's first two solo records) put the Frank Black solo efforts to shame and made you consider, just for a moment, the absurd possibility that maybe Black Francis wasn't the only genius in the Pixies.

6.27.12
I really like St. Vincent's Strange Mercy (and I'm really psyched about her upcoming collaboration with David Byrne), so much so that I bought its predecessor, Actor. But I've listened to it a few times now, and while I don't dislike it, there's also nothing on it that grabs me the way that most of the songs on Strange Mercy do. I'm not sure why this is——stylistically, it's clearly the same artist, and she's using a lot of the same techniques and themes, but the songs just don't work the same way.

I'm not going to give up on it yet, but it didn't take more than a couple of listens for me to fall in love with Strange Mercy as a whole, and there were songs that I fell for immediately.

6.28.12
Los Campesinos tonight——my first show in the Atlanta area. I still haven't written about the first time I saw them last year at the Black Cat in DC, but if this show is half as good as that one, it will be well worth staying out late on a work night.

6.29.12
I'm probably posting this too late to do anyone any good, but here are my selections from Amazon's monthly list of 100 MP3 albums for $5. The only must-have is the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, and although purists may object to it being both the 40th anniversary remaster AND in stereo, if you don't own it, this $5 digital version is as good an entry point as later. If you get really obsessed, you can go back and get the original master. In mono. On vinyl.

There are a decent number of good-to-great records this month, though: the Decemberists' Picaresque, the National's High Violet, Spiritualized's latest, Sweet Heart Sweet Light, and Eleanor Friedberger's (of Fiery Furnaces fame) debut solo album, Last Summer.

As for me, I'm likely picking up Elliott Smith's Either/Or. I'm a fan, but my entry point for him was Figure 8, which came out a few years after this fan favorite, and I never went backed and picked up any of his earlier stuff.