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Slipped Discs 2006[12 January 2007] by PopMatters Staff
Don’t be thrown of by the band name or album title. This isn’t a dire black-clad excursion into drone and sludge. On the contrary it’s about as far from that as you can get. Iowa City’s Death Ships have crafted a remarkably nuanced rock record that bleeds ever so slightly into alt-country. It’s a sound that, depending on how you hear it, has the band either straining at the confines of their heartland roots or pushing past them with a respectful nod and wave. At the album’s best, the songs on Seeds of Devastation begin as proper salutes to the country rock sounds of John Cougar Mellencamp, Buffalo Springfield or the Byrds, but that propriety never lasts too long. On “City Never Sleeps”, “Great American”, and “Knocks Over Time”, those sweetly-spun melodies spiral into acres of guitar distortion and rising waves of drums and searing vocals. Primary singer-songwriter Dan Maloney’s impressive control over his songs, wringing maximum emotional weight out of a riff or a phrase, is all the more impressive when considering this is Death Ships first release. The bar has been set high.
Rilo Kiley front woman Jenny Lewis’s burgeoning solo career has gotten attention, but vocalist and songwriter Blake Sennett is coming into his own with side project the Elected’s second album, Sun, Sun, Sun. Sennett’s songwriting comes from a place somewhere between adolescence and full-blown adulthood. He sings in his delicate, choirboy voice about lost love, nostalgia, and the ever-growing difference between where you come from and who you are. Sun, Sun, Sun sails along with bittersweet pop songs “Fireflies in a Steel Mill”, the country-influenced “The Bank and Trust”, and the swaggering blues of “Did Me Good”. When Sennett sings, “It made me feel sweet and sad / Warm, proud, and young”, he could be describing the feeling that Sun, Sun, Sun gives you: the feeling of missing, the bittersweet pang of memory. There’s no gimmick to the Elected, they’re just making music to help many of us navigate our twenties, and they do so with a gentle, knowing, optimism all their own.
Related articles:What made Light Poles and Pine Trees one of the best albums of 2006? Was it Smoke and Shawn Jay’s region-defying lyricism? Was it their elastic delivery? Their ear for wild beats? Their sense of humor? Yeah. But more than anything, Field Mob’s third album is just fun. It’s not disposible. It’s not a guilty pleasure. It’s not escapism. It’s an album full of sometimes-topical jams by a couple of dudes from Albany, Georgia who genuinely enjoy their time in the studio. While many stars in Atlanta dropped albums this year, Field Mob’s sleeper is the only one I’m still playing.
Records like the Figgs’ Follow Jean Through the Sea are habitually ignored by year-end lists, because music critics have an unhealthy obsession with ambitious grasps for profundity. Pop music needn’t be epic, obscure, and formless; it demands self-discipline, definition, and strict constitution, all of which Follow Jean Through the Sea—an impeccably written, smashingly performed power-pop record barely over half an hour—has in spades. Guitarist Mike Gent and bassist Pete Donnelly share songwriting and singing duties, as usual, but this time around their predilection for one-upmanship stings like a grudge-spurned sparring match. Gent’s stocky riff-driven songs, like the tongue-in-cheek “Regional Hits” and moody “City Loft Home”, are rousing complements to Donnelly’s fast-moving nuggets, like “Don’t Hurt Me Again” and “Let Me Hold You”. Don’t let records with longer runtimes and loftier concepts keep you from hearing this, probably the most satisfying LP of the Figgs’ 20-year career and certainly one of 2006’s most exhilarating 30 minutes.
Related articles:An incomparable singer/songwriter/arranger/multi-instrumentalist with vision, Lisa Germano released her best album this year. Did anyone notice? In the Maybe World is intimate and grand, raw and soft, dark and light. Within a dream-state milieu, it presents perspectives on death, the mystery and immediacy of it, on the split between the corporal and maybe-afterworlds, and on the puzzles of mortality, in terms blunt and fanciful. It sounds like no other album, presents its own absorbing universe. Whispered sadness, lust, mourning and questioning are orchestrated with the overblown grace of a golden-age Hollywood musical, but played out inside the quiet, unsteady mind of one person. This album has the precision of poetry and the demeanor of an extended lullaby—a swooning, lush, intoxicating one.
Related articles:The Green Arrows was a Zimbabwean pop group whose career spanned the 1970s from beginning to end. It received its first press notice in 1969 and broke up between 1979 and 1980 when the lead singer and two of his fellow band members fell out over an amount of money. This retrospective, assembled by a devotee, came out last February and doesn’t seem to have attracted very much attention, which is a shame because the music is outstanding—brisk guitarwork coupled with the languorously moist, between-the-toes squash of a band in love with its wah-wah pedal. If you think that Zim-pop was a wasteland until Thomas Mapfumo and Oliver Mtukudzi came along then this should change your mind. And the written record of the group’s history in the liner notes is extensive enough to stand as a reference work on its own. All in all, a beautiful piece of work. Related articles:
It’s not as if the Hacienda Brothers have re-defined country-soul with What’s Wrong With Right; it’s just that they’ve done a stunning job of merging the two sounds. Allowing only a touch of twang, vocalist Chris Gaffney delivers an Otis Redding-style performance over country music more suited to cacti and accordions. But it’s not just the group’s sound that’s so memorable, because the disc is full of lyrical gems from Penn and Oldham’s “Cry Like a Baby” to the surprisingly good “Cowboys to Girls” (which is every bit as cheesy and twice as effective as you’d imagine). The band manages to swing across styles and emotions without missing a beat, resulting in a brilliant pop album that fans of any of its genre should appreciate.
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