forkcast tracks

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

"Jail La La"

Dum Dum Girls
"Jail La La"

[Sub Pop]

7

You could talk about the virtues of obscured melodic accessibility in almost any of the bands that have emerged from the lo-fi scene, but good luck finding the immediate pop charms that Dum Dum Girls possess. Sure, they're noisy as shit(gaze), but their early singles have showcased songwriter and sole permanent member Dee Dee's penchant for 1950s pop earworms and spiky post-punk alike.

"Jail La La", the first single from the Dum Dum Girls' Sub Pop debut, I Will Be, continues the Girls' trajectory towards the "pop" side of the noise-pop spectrum. It's a transition perhaps brought on by the co-producing hand of longtime songwriting and production Svengali Richard Gottehrer (the Angels' 1963 classic "My Boyfriend's Back", Blondie's 1976 self-titled debut). Feedback fanatics will still find plenty to love in the metallic drumbeat and rumbling guitar line that anchor the song, but it's the separation of Dee Dee's quickly delivered and melodically enunciated vocals from the rest of the mix that give "Jail La La" an expansive, three-dimensional sound.

Those new dimensions also reveal Dee Dee's lyrical skill, as she details the protagonist's mental transition throughout the song. She doesn't know how she landed in the pokey, she can't remember many phone numbers off of the top of her head, and she's surrounded by grotesques in her holding cell (the woman "covered in shit/ And high as a kite"). But the time the chorus hits, the observations and rationalization drop out, and she's left with a time-honored girl-group ache for someone to "Tell her baby/ Or else he won't know I need saving." It's a compelling take on someone's thought process when trapped in such a non-negotiable situation-- from complex details to broad pleas-- and it showcases Dee Dee's ability to fuse the more threatening and noisy aspects of new wave and post-punk with the teenage heartache of girl-group pop.

MP3:> Dum Dum Girls: "Jail La La"

[from the "Jail La La" single, out 02/16/10; I Will Be, out 03/30/10 on Sub Pop]

— Larry Fitzmaurice, January 20, 2010
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"Let Go"

jj
"Let Go"

[Sincerely Yours]

4

"Summery," we said? Ha! The cold Swedish winter is right outside! As if to make good on Sincerely Yours' past promise of "no fantasy, no stupid escape," jj's latest leaves behind Balearic beaches for a desert of the real. The Swedish duo's still quasi-anonymous (What? Free health care and no TMZ?!) female singer mentions the change of season in her earnestly intoned lyrics to "Let Go", the first mp3 from the forthcoming follow-up to my favorite album of 2009, but she wouldn't have to. Suspiciously Nebraska-esque harmonica gets her point across immediately. Fragile guitars, icy keys, and Knife-like blots of percussion all second.

jj n° 2 stood on a lofty precipice between naïveté and cyncism, sensitivity and machismo, Saint Etienne and Flo Rida. "Let Go" breaks on through to the other side. A little bit more New Age now: As my colleague Eric Harvey alerted me, the melody to the synth-glistening chorus bears a more than incidental resemblance to Sting's "Fields of Gold", which maybe shouldn't be surprising-- have you ever tried listening to "Fields of Gold" in jj's usual state of mind when it's perpetually dark and freezing outside? "All I have is my soul," the new song begins; a drug reference, a Boss reference, and a reference to label bosses the Tough Alliance later, we're told to free ourselves, let the jealous sun burn our skin anyway. Huh. I was ready for other people to be puzzled by jj. I just wasn't ready for it to happen to me.

MP3:> jj: "Let Go"

[from n° 3; out 03/09/10 on Secretly Canadian]

— Marc Hogan, January 20, 2010
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"Ad Infinitum"

Andrew Cedermark
"Ad Infinitum"

[Underwater Peoples]

7

The steam off your coffee, the faux-fur on your Elmer Fudd hat, that streak of green light across a red-dark sky; Andrew Cedermark wrote a song for all the little details of winter. "It's good to be alive when night is here by five," he sings here in duet on the brief "Ad Infinitum", and through a haze of wooly, forever-unspooling guitars, the former Titus Andronicus sideman captures the languid pace of the coolest evenings, the warmth buried beneath all the coats and sweaters. "Ad Infinitum" begins tentatively, stumbling a bit as Cedermark allows the guitars to draw in around him. Halfway through, the frost on his fingers eventually gives way to a triumphant Santa'n'Johnny fireplace-ready fretwork tumble. The whole thing's got the easy Vaseline-on-lens feel of an oversaturated home movie; not the warped VHS-era warble favored by most of the 1980s babies who grew into Underwater Peoples, but the flickery filmstrip kind, replete with dust from your grandparents' attic. Hell, there are even bells. A delicate midwinter's delight.

MP3:> Andrew Cedermark: "Ad Infinitum"

[from Underwater Peoples Winter Review; out now on Underwater Peoples]

— Paul Thompson, January 20, 2010
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Tuesday, January 19, 2010

"Crushin' Feelin's"

Freddie Gibbs
"Crushin' Feelin's"

[self-released]

7

Gary, Ind.'s Freddie Gibbs has the anti-social fire of a backwater regional rapper, and that's maybe his most important strength. But his other virtues (timing, technical prowess, the sense that he could keep rapping for hours at a time without losing his train of thought) are the values that East Coast rap nerds value most, and these days Gibbs is working the same blog channels as the neglected East Coast rap nerd favorites. So it makes sense to hear Gibbs jumping on a beat from a B-lister summit like Statik Selektah's "Take It to the Top" (original lineup: Cassidy, Saigon, Termanology)-- he's got a signed-and-dropped major label history that two of those guys would sympathize with. And besides that, it's a gorgeous beat, a twinkling, jazzy guitars-and-horns thing that bleeds into the background without ever dissipating into mere atmosphere.

Gibbs uses the track the same way his predecessors did: As an opportunity to put on a rapping clinic. And Gibbs is a great rapper, his heavy snarl refracting into darting couplets, jumping in and out of tricky patterns and snapping off complicated one-liners with such blank detachment that it takes a few listens to pick a simple boast apart: "Fuck the booth, I'm where the drugs was/ Hit the streets with nothing but truth and slaughter your buzz, cuz." When Gibbs goes for three and a half straight chorus-free minutes like this, his relative lack of charisma becomes something of an issue, and his lines start fading from memory before you can move to the next. But then again, mixtape freestyles don't come much tougher or more rock-solid than this.

MP3:> Freddie Gibbs: "Crushin' Feelin's"

[self-relased]

— Tom Breihan, January 19, 2010
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"Enemy With an Invitation"

Nothing People
"Enemy With an Invitation"

[Permanent]

6

With two LPs and scattered singles of sparse, semi-creepy basement-bred pop, Orland, Calif.'s Nothing People tap into a new, more anxious vein on their latest single. Something's different here, but it's hard to pick out what: Maybe it's the way the vocals come barking through layers of delay, or maybe it's the squeals of feedback layered beneath the laid-back, almost glammy groove at the heart of the track, but all these elements congeal into something that feels insistent and surging despite its relatively languid tempo. Even as the vocals get more frantic and the guitars start to spill over from one-note insinuations to daggers of distortion, it still feels like the real storm has yet to come. You hear a shouted "Look what I've done," and you believe it's probably something serious-- it hits the right, ominous notes, but "Enemy With an Invitation" gets its tension from holding back.

Stream:> Nothing People: "Enemy With an Invitation"

[from "You're Invited" 7"; out now on Permanent]

— Jason Crock, January 19, 2010
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"Albatross"

The Besnard Lakes
"Albatross"

[Jagjaguwar]

7

During the opening verse of "Albatross", the first track released from the Besnard Lakes' third album, The Besnard Lakes Are the Roaring Night, vocalist Olga Goreas repeatedly sings, "you showed me so much." It's a fitting introduction to the song's stark display of exertion. Making music on an epic scale is hard work, and here the Montreal-based collective makes no attempt to hide the effort behind it. The song wears its bombast proudly, propelled by a beleaguered drumbeat and a reeling wall of shoegazing guitar fuzz. Even the gorgeous West Coast harmonies impart a sense of weariness, weaving a poignant seam through the track's center. It's the kind of song where each striking element is used either to build the track up or tear it down, an exercise in alternating creation and destruction, and it turns out to be the sort of thing that the Besnard Lakes do best.

MP3:> The Besnard Lakes: "Albatross"

[from The Besnard Lakes Are the Roaring Night; out 03/08/10 on Jagjaguwar]

— Susannah Young, January 19, 2010
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Monday, January 18, 2010

"Ayisha Abyss"

Serena Maneesh
"Ayisha Abyss"

[4AD]

4

So you think Primal Scream's Vanishing Point has a sound worth resurrecting? Norwegian shoegazers Serena Maneesh apparently agree. "Ayisha Abyss", the first track released from the not-quite-badly-titled-enough-to-be-funny S-M 2: Abyss in B Minor, is a cataclysm of slithering bass, whirring guitars, and echo chamber vocals. It's a fairly myopic take on Primal Scream's druggy, disjointed B-movie phase, mistaking narcoleptic haze for detached cool. Hard to tell if the oddly fugue-like sensation that starts to set in is boredom or mere indifference, though it scarcely matters. While "Abyss" might fare better in the context of the album, as a kind of a palette cleanser between sections, offering it up as the first taste of the new record is as indulgent as it is woefully misguided. Say what you will about Kasabian and their lobotomized Gillespie-isms, but even they are rarely this dull.

MP3:> Serena Maneesh: "Ayisha Abyss"

[from S-M 2: Abyss in B Minor; out 03/22/10 (UK) and 03/23/10 (U.S.) on 4AD]

— Jonathan Garrett, January 18, 2010
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"Icarus"

White Hinterland
"Icarus"

[Dead Oceans]

7

Casey Dienel's solo debut and her first record as the leader of the band White Hinterland placed an emphasis on her jazzy, occasionally Vince Guaraldi-esque piano playing, but this track from the forthcoming album Kairos entirely omits the instrument in favor of a deep bass groove and understated drones. She's not entirely out of her comfort zone. One of the highlights of White Hinterland's Phylactery Factory was the bass-heavy number "Lindberghs & Metal Birds", and the group's stopgap French-language EP Luniculaire was carried by its low-end, particularly on their inspired cover of Serge Gainsbourg's "Requiem Pour Un Con". Even still, this is by leaps and bounds the most stark and atmospheric composition Dienel has released to date, owing more to Beach House's moody languor and Bat For Lashes' dark romanticism than the fragile, perky sounds of her earlier material. The new tone suits her well, especially in how the open space and deeper tones keep her high voice from having to compete with the treble of her piano. There are some gorgeous moments in "Icarus"-- the wordless vocal refrain is just begging to be sampled-- but the piece doesn't always gel completely, and seems especially wobbly as it reaches a competent yet shrug-inducing conclusion. This is a good song, but it's hard to shake the feeling that it hasn't yet reached its fullest potential. Maybe a better remix or a superior live recording lurks around the corner.

MP3:> White Hinterland: "Icarus"

[from Kairos; out 03/09/10 on Dead Oceans]

— Matthew Perpetua, January 18, 2010
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"Facelove"

PS I Love You
"Facelove"

[Hype Lighter]

8
 

Honest-to-goodness, hard-line indie rock is alive and well in the great white North. "Facelove"-- a ferociously catchy single from Kingston, Ontario, duo PS I Love You-- was the hiding on the B-side of a shared 7" with "All Yr Songs", last fall's Best New Music-approved track from Toronto's Diamond Rings. Sorry we didn't catch the flipside sooner. "Facelove" is a towering tribute to art of the build, helmed by juicy, punched-up guitar work that demands to be felt (if not just plain gawked at). Part of me thinks that PS I Love You could have gotten away with dubbing their half "All Yr Bands", as they shred like Ratatat on a ZZ Top kick through a Wolf Parade stomper, or Broken Social Scene crashing a high school battle-of-the-bands, just to revel in beating living hell out of any pimpled Zep cover band who dared show their face. Except here, they do all that with only two guys, a stiff backbeat, and a ton of a great licks. Impressive stuff.

MP3:> PS I Love You: "Facelove"

[from the "All Yr Songs"/"Facelove" split 7"; (sold) out now on Hype Lighter]

— Zach Kelly, January 18, 2010
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Friday, January 15, 2010

"Lovesick"

Lindstrøm & Christabelle
"Lovesick"

[Smalltown Supersound]

8

Lindstrøm's resuscitation of Tangerine Dream-meets-Giorgio Moroder space disco style has always been about indulgence, his willingness to coyly embrace the "guilty pleasures" of an older generation's dancefloor and film soundtrack clichés. His latest record, Real Life Is No Cool, is a collaboration with vocalist Christabelle, who improvised most of her lines as they recorded. Instead of indulging in all of 1980s prog-symphonies' biggest excesses, the album finds Hans-Peter using the same textures and melodies while reining in the extravagance, making an LP of pop records shaped from the building blocks while leaving the extended edit disco 12"s and Brain Records longplayers behind.

"Lovesick" finds Christabelle sing-speaking under her breath, her whisper-y free association ambiguously confident, as if her love is generating giddiness and uncertainty simultaneously. The track's trick is to play with your perceptions of her mindstate-- how does she really feel, and how is she trying to present herself, and where do these feelings intersect? The way the song jams bass and horn riffs from an anthemic pop memory at right angles against a steady, chugging Lindstrøm groove creates an impact like running in slow motion. Another example of co-existing contradictions, a kind of confusion: savoring this love malady for the long haul while it quickly passes in one queasy-yet-diffident whirlwind.

[from Real Life Is No Cool; out 01/19/09 on Smalltown Supersound]

— David Drake, January 15, 2010
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