6/23 New Music Roundup
A few new albums from bands I’ve never really spent a whole lot of time with, plus a bunch of new songs from some of my all-time favorites!
Sludge, sludge, and more sludge. Citizen is never a band I’ve paid much attention to, though I heard their name all the time. 2013's Youth earned a listen or two from me, but never really connected. However, their single from last year, “Silo,” caught my ear in all its somber splendor on the excellent Run For Cover Records “Best of 2014” sampler.
Prior to the release of Everybody Is Going to Heaven, the band released the video for the stellar “Stain,” which will go down as the best Nirvana song Nirvana never wrote. The aesthetics of both the video and the music are captivating and intense. Although the rest of the album fails to reach these heights, and there’s a bit too much gloom and doom for these sunny days of late, this album is still an interesting, engrossing album for the right mood.
Listen: Full album (Spotify, non-Spotify), “Stain”
Looks like Conor Oberst still has some rage left in him after all. The gradual mellowing out of Bright Eyes over the course of their catalog was capped off with the somber, beautifully weird The People’s Key. Oberst’s solo album last year contained some of his most straightforward, folk/rockiest material yet.
Enter Desaparecidos, a band long thought to be a one-off project for Oberst since the band’s first album was released over a decade ago. Yet, the aggression and intensity hasn’t waned much, if at all. The album lingers in the awkward space between indie and punk inhabited by artists such as Cloud Nothings, Japandroids, and Wavves, though this album definitely falls more on the punk side of that binary. In fact, it’s more punk than most of the punk albums I’ve listened to this year.
Listen: Full album (Spotify, non-Spotify), “City on the Hill”
Lee Ellis is the lead singer of Lee Corey Oswald, a new-ish punk/indie/emo band that combines darkness and quirkiness to make some pretty solid, if somewhat immature, music. Ellis writes acoustic and full-band songs equally well, as evidenced by two standout tracks from last year’s Regards, “Sarah, Work Is a Four Letter Word” and “Progress.”
This solo album definitely falls more on the acoustic side of things, as would be expected, but Ellis gets a little experimental as well. There is a heavy presence of synth and drum loops featured here, which I’m honestly not a huge fan of. But when he sticks to guitars, Ellis usually comes through. All in all, this is a fine album, although I enjoy the acoustic tracks infinitely more than the synthy ones.
Listen: Full album (Spotify, non-Spotify), “Flipside (Grow Up)”
In kind of a surprise announcement, Lucero released a new song and details on a new album, All a Man Should Do, which will come out on September 18th. Lucero’s last album, 2012's Women & Work, pissed off and alienated many longtime fans with its squeaky-clean production and poppier sound. Since no one’s making any money anymore, you’d think we’d have stopped accusing bands of selling out long ago, but here we are.
Really though, fans wouldn’t have been mad if the songs on W&W were better, but they really just weren’t all that good. About half the songs on the album were actually pretty great, up to the high standard of Lucero’s previous work, but they got buried under too many weirdly-upbeat honky tonk jams. Luckily, with this gorgeous song and 2013's brilliant Texas & Tennessee EP, the band seems to be on the right track again.
A similar story can be told for Craig Finn’s new material, although his first solo album, 2012's Clear Heart Full Eyes, was met mostly with ambivalence rather than anger, and has largely been forgotten by the average Hold Steady fan. Faith In the Future will be released on September 11th, and while “Newmyer’s Roof” sounds more captivating than anything on CHFE, ambivalence is a pretty appropriate summation of my feelings toward the announcement of a new Craig Finn album.
However, there is reason to be hopeful. CHFE followed the release of Heaven Is Whenever, released in 2010 and largely considered to be The Hold Steady’s swing-and-a-miss record. Finn’s new album will follow last year’s Teeth Dreams, which was a nearly triumphant return to form for THS. Finn seems to have found his footing again after the creative slump he and THS fell into after the band’s “last great album,” Stay Positive, came out in 2008. Who knows? Faith In the Future might blow us all away.
So, this album is going to be weird. Based on this and the first song released from it, gone are the days of Dan Andriano writing quiet, sad acoustic songs or straightforward rock songs. I don’t even quite know how to categorize these songs. They definitely are nothing like anything Andriano has released yet in his career, as far removed from his first solo album as they are from Alkaline Trio, The Falcon, and his earlier work in Tuesday and Slapstick. I’m still sort of trying to wrap my head around these two songs, so I haven’t really formed an opinion of whether I like them or not. But you have to give him props for trying something new.
The Front Bottoms have somehow managed to find a way to keep evolving their simple, acoustic-based indie/emo sound. They first added more of an electric element on Talon of the Hawk and have been expanding their sonic palette a bit more on the few songs released since then. The direction taken on their split with GDP, released earlier this year, sounded almost like an epiphany to me. It seemed like the band had finally achieved the sound they had been searching for on their previous two records, and it was gorgeous and exhilarating to hear.
And yet, on the two songs released since then, “West Virginia” and “Cough It Up,” that sound has been completely abandoned. “West Virginia” had some of the heaviest guitars yet featured in a TFB song, and “Cough It Up” follows up with folky, almost country-like drums and bass. Always changing, these guys. The expected album to follow might sound like a totally different band.
