I have to confess that Andrew Bird’s recent work has left me underwhelmed to the point that this album actually came out over a month ago and I only bothered to actually listen to it for the first time a couple of days ago.

After what are, to me anyway, Bird’s two greatest albums, Weather Systems and The Mysterious Production of Eggs, he seemed to move in a more pop direction, embracing a slick, layered and lush sound.

Whether or not this analysis bears any relationship to reality I can never know of course, but it seemed to me at least like that richness of sound came at the expense of the sense of uncertain playfulness which made his earlier stuff so enchanting – and that’s also at the heart of why I like this album so much.

Sure, there are familiar lush pop songs, most notably in the nice, safe Eyeoneye which the record label decided to promote as a single. But there seems to be a lot more experimentation on this album than I have heard recently – a lightness to the touch, which I have missed.

A lot of the arrangements are a lot less busy than they have been for a while, and that allows things like the saw, his trademark whistling, and the meandering of his violin to gain a little more prominence, which from my point of view is a good thing. And between the use of the female vocal in Lusitania and the borderline jig which he plays on his violin at the climax of Danse Carribe, he seems to be open to more diverse building blocks at the moment, and this breaks up the album nicely, after the warm, soporific bath of Noble Beast.

The other impression given by the fact that the arrangements are a little looser and less crammed is that no-one is trying too hard here.  It gives the album a feeling of confidence, and that in turn makes it a nice album to listen to, as it feels less to demand attention and more to be content to wait for you to give it, sure that it will happen of its own accord.

Andrew Bird – Eyeoneye

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Andrew Bird – Lazy Projector

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 Sometimes you realise you’ve been writing about bands for years, and it slowly dawns on you that you might actually be the only one.  A quick search on The Hype Machine shows that’s not really true, but despite the fact that they’ve been around for a few years now, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything you might describe as buzz surrounding That Ghost.

Unless I am completely wrong about that, which is entirely possible, it seems a little odd, if you ask me.  They do lo-fi, they write pop songs, and these two things are perfectly in tune with the zeitgeist, so I would have expected there to be a little more widespread chatter about them.

Certainly Morning Now, the lead song from their new EP, Rosalind, is an absolutely corking tune, which very few bands I know could better.  It’s a slow, wistful, lovely song, which makes you sway, and whose lovely delivery makes your heart ache just a little bit.  And it may be downbeat, but the constant, gentle tash-tash-tash of cymbals keeps it from sounding maudlin or self-pitying.

Other songs on the EP tend to have a less rich sound, more rattle to both the percussion and the guitar, and just generally to sound a little more distant. On the subject of the percussion, actually, most of these tracks have something interesting going on in that area, whether it’s the industrial clank at the end of Snowrabbit, or the hiccups of wooden clacks in The Birth of My Son.

The slow pace and slightly distant vocal delivery seem to be the dominant features of this record, to the extent that when the pace picks up a little, such as on Too Far to Walk I think something a little more immediate would have been better.  Personally, whilst the thin, echoey vocal sounds good with the slower songs, bringing a certain sense of alienation with it, I don’t think it works so well with the faster stuff.

For those songs, the expression feels more forceful, more decisive somehow, but the vocal still maintains that slightly hesitant distance, which doesn’t really seem to fit.  Nevertheless, that minor nit-pick aside, this is another strong EP from a band I really am surprised are not more widely known.

That Ghost – Morning Now

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 Lungs, Dirt and Dreams is pretty well described by its title actually, and has a kind of thunderously epic quality which constantly kicks back against the kind of defeatism this kind of music tends to evoke.

You could easily compare a lot of this to Calexico, I suppose, albeit without the horns and the mariachi influences.  I suppose this is part of the reason the term ‘Americana’ was invented.  There’s a lot of the character of old American music in here, but it’s all pretty nonspecific, so I wouldn’t exactly call this country rock exactly, although there are vague elements of country in it from time to time.

The other reason for ill-defined terms like Americana, I suppose, is that this music is very evocative, not only of American landscape, but a fairly uniquely American style of storytelling, which manages to meld a grandiose canvas with paralysing internal detail, almost as if the vastness of the country induces its own kind of stifling inability to attack what is being done to you by the world, by quashing any kind of belief that you can ever succeed.

This album feels very like one of these stories, with cacophonous, slightly proggy songs crashing their way through guitar solos and the bashing of drums, and creating the impression that they go on forever.  These flaring bouts of fury are interspersed with the more quietly desperate moments, as if the protagonist of of the kind of stories I have mentioned is veering from raging against their fate to bitterly buckling to it.

By the time the one song on the album which is actually quite long, closer We Make Our Own Traditions, comes around, with its more comforting, contented atmosphere, you genuinely feel like you’ve been through the mill with this album, as if you have fought the fight yourself and are only now reaching the end of the story, and in doing so finding a place where you can accept your fate rather than railing against it with resentful futility.

As with the songs, the album itself feels like a bit of an epic, but it’s only forty minutes long.  You have to take your hat off to a band who can create that illusion of scale, and who can make you feel like the emotional journey of the songs is your own journey.  Because the music inhabits relatively familiar territory for me, I didn’t realise for a while quite how much I like this album, but it’s really good and I strongly recommend you give it a try.

Damon Moon & the Whispering Drifters – Lungs, Dirt & Dreams

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Damon Moon & the Whispering Drifters – Loose Ends

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 This is rather lovely. It’s a four-song EP which can be purchased on Bandcamp here, either as a cassette or as a name-your-price download, and I have been very much enjoying it over the last few weeks.

The music is that blend of acoustic instruments and low-key electronic beats which tends to be tagged as folktronica. It’s an annoying label, but I suppose it’s appropriate enough, and I’m not sure I can really think of a better one.

To be more precise, this music is a woozy concoction, with lovely, flighty vocals offset by fairly minimal, dreamy and wonderfully atmospheric instrumentation.

I suppose you could pick out elements of the Magnetic Fields here and there, particular when the beats are at their thinnest and most rattly.  The band will probably hate me for the comparison, but you can conjure roughly what to expect by taking the Postal Service’s template, thinning it right down and instead of pushing for the lush and the radio-friendly, aiming for something more plaintive and lost, perhaps a little closer to the more downbeat moments of Casiotone for the Painfully Alone.

The key difference between Brice Woodall and the bands I’ve just mentioned, however, is in the nature of the beat.  Where the other bands are insistent and purposeful, this stuff feels a little more like it’s sinking into the mist, and even the gorgeous guitar jangle on Even the Mice and Snakes can’t lift the song from the quicksand of the insistent pulse in the background.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that the whole EP feels rather like it is losing a battle with its own inner despondency, and drifting slowly into defeated apathy, this is really rather lovely. Maybe it’s the way the vocal feels like it alone is not giving up that does it, but in amongst all the excuses to drift into narcosis that this EP gives us, Some Odd Years feels like it has somehow managed to resist its own temptation.

Brice Woodall – Fables

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 Blimey this is odd.  Odd and gorgeous, but really still very odd indeed.

It’s gorgeous in two ways.  Firstly, the image on your right is a picture of the actual vinyl: a single-sided record, with a red design (contrary to the picture) screen-printed on one side of it.  They are only making a couple of hundred of these, so I recommend you get shifting and buy one here.

Secondly, the music might be just a little demented, but it’s still really good. I am always a little wary of kidding myself that I like weird shit as a form of self-congratulation – ‘ooh, I must have refined taste, look at all this left-field stuff I like!’ – but in this case I am pretty sure I just plain like this.

And that’s despite Jad Fair squealing and yelping his way through the record, whilst the musicians of Hifiklub and kptmichigan try and keep up.  Creating a sound to sit comfortably with this kind of demented burbling must have been a bit of a bloody challenge, but they’ve done a pretty bloody good job of it, I think.

Whilst embracing the fundamental uneasiness of the songs, they still manage to drag the record back to somewhere more comfortable just often enough to make sure that listening to this is a pleasure.  Birdhouse is still like a cross between a surreal nightmare and twisted fairy story mind you, and I know those comparisons are cliched, but the glutinous quality of some parts, married with the twisting discomfort of others means I think it’s probably the best way to describe it nonetheless.

Quite where the pleasure in the listening actually comes from I couldn’t tell you, however.  What I do know is that despite all I’ve just said, I still actively enjoy listening to this record, and in amongst all the unease there are redeeming washes of comfort.  Bugger me it’s odd though!

Jad Fair + Hifiklub + kptmichigan – Let’s Win

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Sometimes you get things immediately, and sometimes you don’t.  Usually the reasons are frame of mind or something like that, and what brings you round is listening to something with fresh ears a while later when you’re paying more attention or feeling differently, or sometimes once familiarity has allowed you to understand the music a little differently.

In this case the band will probably be pulling their hair out reading this review, because they emailed me ages ago about their stuff, and it ended up getting a bit lost in my inbox, and I can’t remember if I eventually just gave up on it or if I just emailed them apologising and saying I wasn’t into, but whatever it was it wasn’t my finest moment.

So far so mundane, but what’s slightly odd about this is that I was recently emailed by a producer of music videos wanting to advertise his services and what did he choose to showcase his work but a recent video he had made for Hiva Oa – the one at the top of the page in fact.  And for some reason, and believe me I have absolutely no idea what was different this time around – I thought ‘gosh, that’s quite good’.

This is the Edinburgh band’s first EP, and apparently precedes debut album to The Awkward Hello, Handshake, Kiss, which is pencilled in for release in May 2012 on local label Mini50.  Like much of Mini50′s output, the music is slow as hell and based far more around atmosphere than melody, so it does take a bit of listening to, but I do think it’s worth the time.

Much of the atmosphere here is dominated by the whispered singing, minimal acoustic guitar and relatively underemployed cello.  Badger, the first song on the EP and the one from the video which drew me in, has a denser, more layered and rumbling sound, with really nice skittery cymbals.  Thereafter the EP sticks to a more familiar, acoustic guitar-based format, sparingly embellished with strings and the barest of vocal harmonies – at least until the wonderfully sinister second half of 9 minute closing track Morning, that is.

It’s not insistent music, but it’s quite demanding in the sense that inattentive listens really are pointless.  But if you give it your full attention then it really is lovely, and I feel a little bemused that I somehow failed to notice this the first time the band got in touch with me.

 Edinburgh’s not really renowned for it’s synth-pop bands. In fact, Matthew will probably have a heart attack at the very thought of such a genre being discussed on the hallowed ground that is his blog. There are certain connotations with this sort of sound, and ever since The Killers appeared it’s kind of been untouched by any self-respecting musician, kind of like what Mumford and Sons have done to folk music.  However, to simply call The Machine Room a synth-pop band would be an injustice as there is far more to them than Micro-Korgs and haircuts.

‘Love From a Distance’ is a four song E.P and it has two songs I love (‘Your Head on the Floor Next Door’ and ‘Picking Holes’) and two songs I don’t really like at all (‘Camino de Soda’ and ‘Cost of Progress’).

Ever the optimist,  I’ll start off with the positives. ‘Your Head on the Floor Next Door’ is a song totally up my street; reverb-laden with patient build-up and just the right amount of clever hooks to keep me interested without it being too busy. It’s kind of like a synth version of shoegaze, which I think is a very good thing. ‘Picking Holes’ is the closing track and is on the more traditional guitar based side of shoegaze. It works well, and the vocals suit the sound as shoegaze meets garage rock somewhere in the middle.

‘Cost of Progress’ is the opener and it seems like a song which really doesn’t know what it wants to be. The singer sounds like that lad from Glasvegas in this one (eek!) and it is just so very ordinary. From it’s beat, to it’s riffs, to it’s vocals. The only thing I could liken it to would be a rejected Radio 4 song from 5 years ago. ‘Camino de Soda’ is much better but it still lacks the dreamy sheen that made me fall in love with the other tracks, coming across as predictable and boring. It just doesn’t surprise me and, to be honest, I think they band sound like they have a lot more imagination and talent than this song suggests.

What we have here is a very promising, if a little uneven, first effort. The Machine Room are doing things a lot of other Edinburgh bands aren’t, and this should be commended. I just think they are a band in their infancy who are still trying to figure out their sound and ‘Love From A Distance’ verifies this. That said, if they can write more songs like ‘Your Head On The Floor Next Door’ then we could have a seriously good band on our hands.

Buy ‘Love From A Distance’ from their Bandcamp.

Firstly, no I didn’t spell that wrong, it’s the actual name of the second album from Wakefield-via-Skerry musician Jamie Lockhart (Mi Mye). Lockhart’s last effort ‘Senc to the Shaking’ was just on the right side of twee for me to really enjoy, with surging pop melodies mixed with whimsical lyrics. What a difference an album can make as ‘twee’ is one word you could not use to describe ‘The Time and the Lonelyness’.

The album was written during Lockhart’s divorce from his wife and it is clear that the process was used as a sort of catharsis. It’s not an easy listen after you know the background, it’s almost voyeuristic, but some of my favourite albums could be put into the category of ‘difficult listens’. The sad thing about this record is you can actually see the relationship diminish during the period of the album. ‘Lament’ is still an extremely sad affair but there is a sort of hope that things could be resolved, with it erupting into a crescendo of ‘til our deaths‘. The next track ‘Fundamental’ puts all that hope to bed, as it is soon made clear that things are not going to be resolved, ‘I slept with the tele on for the company’. This would be sad enough in itself, but the rest of the album is Lockhart looking back at events in the relationship, things like first dates, and it is clear that Lockhart is using this album as a device for his grief.

What is really affecting about the album is how Lockhart writes in a kind of steam-of-consciousness narrative, which means he intertwines his token observational whimsy with heart-wrenchingly cutting statements. In ‘Romantic Destination’ he sings something about a trivial thing like food poisoning then follows up with ‘..and if they’re not that good, we’re supposed to stay by one another, just because we love one another’. This juxtaposition adds an odd sort of cohesion between the narrative from his previous album and this one, it also means that there is some sort of respite from all the misery.

His songs are really tied together by his delivery, he really means what he’s singing about. Of course he does, nobody in their right mind takes the death of a marriage lightly. The really sad thing about the album is that, although it starts off a little bit hopeful, by the time it finishes there really seems to be no hope left in him. It’s as though throughout making the album he thought he might find answers or a resolve, but as time has went on he resigns himself to the fact that what’s happened has happened and he just has to deal with it as best he can.

I really think everyone should listen to this album at least once as an extremely challenging listen but it really needs to be heard as rarely you find a song-writer happy to let you delve this far into their personal life. What Mi Mye has created here is something truly introspective which may not make you feel great, but boy it makes you feel something. Isn’t that what music is supposed to do?

The Time and the Lonleyness is out for name-your-price on his Bandcamp

I’ve found it hard to find the time to listen to new music as much as I used to. Work, then music work which isn’t my ‘proper’ work, then work experience to try and get a better ‘proper’ job. It’s all very exciting in the life of the Tadpole. However, for this week whilst Mr. and Mrs. Toad are sipping cocktails, taunting hipsters and doing their best to be anti-smoozers in SXSW, I’m looking after their cats. This also happens to coincide with me being off ‘proper’ work (read: folding overpriced t-shirts with Kelly Kapowski on them) so it really is the perfect opportunity to catch up on any releases I happen to have missed over the last couple of months.

My first port of call was the ever-brilliant label Underwater Peoples. Their eclectic roster includes some of my favourite indie releases of the last few years; Andrew Cedermark, Big Troubles, Real Estate, Ducktails, Julian Lynch. Pretty good, huh? So naturally I was kicking my own balls when I noticed they had re-released a couple of nihilist troubadour, and founding member of Titus Andronicus, Liam the Younger’s albums.

‘Revel Hidden Worlds’ was self-released back in 2010, and much like his Underwater Peoples and former Titus Andronicus alma matter Andrew Cedermark, Liam the Younger takes a more restrained approach to crafting his songs than Titus Andronicus’ in-your-face-with-melodrama approach. On his other two Underwater Peoples re-releases, After the Graveyard/Clear Skies Over Black River, Liam Betson is akin to Conor Oberst mixed with Woody Guthrie in his song-writing. Often the nihilist, and always self-deprecating Betson turns it up a notch with Revel Hidden Worlds, with the fuller band sound helping to intensify his song-writing.
The fact he mixes a tale about him being a constant disappointment (‘Lie’) with classic 50′s love song ‘Earth Angel’ is just a glimpse of the sort of dark humour and sadness Betson puts in his songs. ‘Ode’ harkens back to his previous two albums for the first half and then, as if he is sick of the song being a wee bit too nice, he makes everything that little bit louder. ‘Bob Dylan’ is the same, with that unrelentingly fuzzy garage sound not unlike his former band. I think why I prefer this to his other two re-releases is that it sounds like Betson clearly just got fed up with his songs playing it nice all the time. You’ve got to admire this sort of ‘fuck it, turn it up’ attitude and I really couldn’t fault this album. It’s earnestness, intensity and craft combined make it a record which really ticks all of my musical boxes. Thank goodness for time off, Underwater Peoples and cats, otherwise I may never have discovered this.

Lie by Liam the Younger

Bob Dylan by Liam the Younger

Buy all of Liam the Younger’s re-releases from Underwater Peoples

 I’ve been meaning to write about this for quite a long time, but I’ve been sort of unsure as to what exactly to write. In all honesty, I am not sure that the album itself really knows what it wants to be either, which doesn’t really help matters.

Released on PAWS’ Cath Records, this is a sprawling, messy collection of twenty-three songs, few of which are more than a minute or two long.  It feels less like it was an album released with a particular goal or concept in mind, and more like a bunch of songs which were recorded and made available in the hope that the very act of doing so might tell the writer what they are. Maybe even in the hope that if he was able to listen to what it was that he did, he might be able to figure out why he was doing it.

Even the first couple of tracks go from lo-fi indie, to bare-bones synth pop, to a frantic instrumental which borders on computer game music without being bleepy enough to be chiptunes, and then a dreamy acoustic number.  By the end of these songs barely six minutes have elapsed, and you’re still no closer to really understanding quite what it is that you’re listening to.

So it’s a mess, in many ways, and sort of an aimless mess at that, but I still find this album – if that’s what we should be calling it – a really compelling listen.

In some ways the uncertain meandering – Dying in the Garden could almost be a lost demo for Across the Universe, just as another example – makes this a lively, rather baffling listen which constantly has you looking up at the stereo thinking ‘what now?’

And in other ways, I actually quite like the uncertainty of identity.  It’s like Armstrong has been as generous as he can with his inner thought process, accepted that he isn’t sure where he’s going and very kindly invited us to come along on the journey to see if he can figure it out.

And there are enough ideas here that for all it sounds a bit unsure of its own identity, it’s not a record which seems like it has simply been lazily slapped out onto the internet for shits and giggles.  Twenty-three two-minute songs may give the impression of a lot of unfinished ideas, which I suppose you could take for laziness, but that’s not really how it feels to me.

Despite the fact that the songs could be described as sounding unfinished, depending on what you were expecting in the first place, each ninety second package seems to have integrity.  It contains its idea, expresses it in a way that gives it space, but no over-indulgence and then simply moves on.

So you can see how this review was a challenge to write, and why I shied away from it for a while.  I am still not entirely sure what it is I am listening to here, but the songs are varied, generally excellent, and that sense of trying to grasp the ever-elusive essence of the album just seems to make it all the more fascinating.  Odd.  But good. And available for free download over at Cath Records.

Sean Armstrong – Acid Bath

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Sean Armstrong – Dying in the Garden

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