New Music Roundup - 7/24


Three pretty solid releases worth checking out this week.


The Gaslight Anthem - Handwritten


If you look at the entries on this site as primarily consumer reviews, then the one for this album will be pretty short and simple: if you've ever liked The Gaslight Anthem before today, you should listen to this album.  The Gaslight Anthem hasn't forgotten what about them their audience enjoys, and this album is a satisfying follow-up to their previous three.


Now, attempting to place this album within the context of the band's history is a little trickier for me.  I simply like what this band is selling, and I have noticed that with such bands (most notably The New Pornographers, but there are several others), it usually takes me a while to really judge a new release.  The fact that this album feels of a piece with the previous albums is both bad ("I guess this new thing isn't the most singularly great listening experience I've ever had") and good ("I like this band and what they do: why should they change?").  Further, I'm comparing these new songs to old Gaslight Anthem songs that I have listened to thousands of times, and there's always going to be a little incongruousness in that analysis.


So, what I'm essentially saying is that this album is just as likely to end up my favorite Gaslight Anthem as my least favorite.  The sound, at first blush, seems to be a little more akin to the driving uptempo rockers on The '59 Sound than the more midtempo experiments on American Slang, but I don't think that similarity represents a regression.  In the limited time I've had with the album, several of the hooks have already burrowed their way into my brain, so we're all good on the catchiness quotient.  I would have maybe liked a little bit more experimentation, but I'm not going to complain too loudly about not turning over a new page when the existing one is so satisfying.


Selections
45

Handwritten

Howl
The Gaslight Anthem – Howl


Here Comes My Man
The Gaslight Anthem – Here Comes My Man

New Music Roundup 7/17

Slim pickings this week.  Matter of fact, without Frank Ocean's new album, which was released on iTunes last week but everywhere else today, the new album release list would be a desolate wasteland (something something Ocean/desert wordplay).

Frank Ocean - Channel Orange

If you care about pop music (meaning the zeitgeist, not any particular genre), then you owe it to yourself to listen to this album.  Among a certain type of person, it's going to end up being incredibly over-hyped (if it isn't already): this album is certainly the current favorite for being the most common "Token Hip-Hop/R&B Album Added to Indie-Loving Critic's Best-Of Year-End List to Create a False Sense of Eclecticism."  Think of how every music critic lost their shit over Kanye's "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy": this album has a similar type of critic-baiting "depth" (although probably not the same type of radio crossover potential; more on that later).  

Additionally, there is the important news story of Ocean being the first big-time performer in the hip hop community to come out as a gay man (or bisexual; it wasn't entirely clear), which he did only two weeks ago.  Whether this announcement will actually help in album sales considering hip-hop's traditional... heteronormativity (to be charitable) is a very open question (although early sales reports have been promising), but there is no question that the announcement has at the very least raised the profile of an album by a singer who before this was known primarly as the dude who sang the hook on "No Church in the Wild."

Both of these facts mean this album will almost certainly be one of the more important ones of 2012 but does nothing to answer the question "Is it any good?", to which I answer, "Eh, I guess it's alright: feels like a B, maybe B+."  I've been listening to it since it came out on iTunes last week, and it definitely has its moments, but it seems to fall short of being the singular work of genius that a lot of music critics seem to have anointed it.  Personally, I think the album could have used more variety, particularly in the energy department: there are a few too many indulgent introspective songs with slow tempos, and they end up blurring together before long.  Also, hooks are conspicuously absent from a lot of the songs, the notable exception being the almost ten minutes long song "Pyramids," which is a legitimately great song.  Outside of it and the beautiful (if kinda by the numbers ballad-y) "Bad Religion," I'm not sure there's anything else on here that I can imagine hearing on the radio, although I guess no one really listens to the radio any more anyway.  For the record, I think my favorite song is the 39 second long track "Fertilizer," which reveals a playful bouncy vibe that could have been better incorporated in the non-throwaway tracks of the album.  

Selections

Fertilizer

Pyramids

Bad Religion

New Music Roundup 7/10

Don't call it a comeback (seriously, why would you?  I was only gone two weeks and frankly, I wasn't exactly at the pinnacle before that).

Work necessitated that this would be a short entry, but there are two really good new albums this week worth being on folks' radar.

Twin Shadow - Confess

I wasn't as excited about this album as I should have been because I got this guy mixed up with the mediocre Scottish band Twin Atlantic.  My bad: this is quite the album.  Remember how we were discussing summer albums, and I was attempting to distinguish between summer day albums and summer night albums?  If there was any question about what constitutes a summer night album, just listen to this thing.  Andy Greenwald and Chris Ryan of Grandland's Hollywood Prospectus Podcast called this album John Hughes rock, and I'm really jealous they came up with that before me, because it fits really well.  I will instead call it the midpoint between M83 and Tanlines, which of course is a far more obscure descriptor.  Anyway, this is really worth a listen.  

Selections

5 Seconds

Run My Heart

Be Mine Tonight