Blog: PopMatters

Primal Scream: More Light

May 13, 3:06am PopMatters

If the band wanted to shoot out the lights on XTRMNTR , More Light just turns them back on again. One of the most memorable record reviews that I've ever read, something that has stuck with me all of these years, came in 1997. Ben Rayner, then of the Ottawa Sun and currently of the Toronto Star, reviewed the then-new album by Scottish band Primal Scream, Vanishing Point, and he said something to the effect that the album was so cool, that even tearing open the cellophane wrapping off the CD case went so far...

• » SoundCloud
• Primal Scream - It's Alright, It's OK
• Primal Scream - Official

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File Name:

SoundCloud

Artist:	Primal Scream
Title:	It's Alright, It's OK
File Name:	SoundCloud
Genre:	Alternative
Year:	2013

Artist:	Primal Scream
Title:	Official
File Name:	SoundCloud
Genre:	Alternative

Pure X: Crawling Up the Stairs

May 13, 3:05am PopMatters

This Austin trio's debut was a pitch-perfect evocation of early 4AD LPs of yore. With a bigger budget and more professional sheen, the group explores more textures but fails to create many songs to compliment their atmospheric prowess. If you're a young musician or band that is just starting your career, there is no greater gift -- or curse -- than having your very first effort get bestowed with the following words: "it's a promising debut." Promising because you might be good but you're not there yet. You need to figure some things out first, cut back on your [...]

• PURE X - Thousand Year Old Child

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Artist:	PURE X
Title:	Thousand Year Old Child
File Name:	SoundCloud

Juno Reactor: The Golden Sun of the Great East

May 13, 3:04am PopMatters

This is simply a great album wall to wall, one that updates a classic sound for those of us who were raised on "Head Like a Hole". If there's one word that describes the eighth and latest album from Juno Reactor, it is this: epic. Even the cover art portends something Biblical: a man in some kind of futuristic headgear and wearing traditional robes is carrying a baby wearing a gas mask and a lamb, as though these two carried items are headed towards an altar to some fire and brimstone God to be sacrificed. And the songs themselves [...]

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Mike Pride's From Bacteria to Boys: Birthing Days / Mike Pride: Drummer's Corpse

May 13, 3:03am PopMatters

Jazz drummer Mike Pride has two new albums. Stylistically speaking, they're completely different. On a broader artistic level, their dilemmas have a bit more in common. With the exception of Mike Pride's name being printed on the front covers, there is little to no overlap between the simultaneously released Birthing Days and Drummer's Corpse. You can't get away with saying he isn't prolific and you certainly can't claim that he's just repeating himself. Birthing Days is the second album for Pride's jazz quartet From Bacteria to Boys while Drummer's Corpse appears to be the first album made by an [...]

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TimLee3: Devil’s Rope

May 13, 3:02am PopMatters

Tim and Susan Bauer Lee are songwriters who can celebrate the good times while giving a nod to the hard times, because they make the good times all the better. The thing about TimLee3 that is both reassuring and disconcerting is their sound is so familiar and comfortable that by the time you've heard this album for the third time it seems like it's been a part of your collection for 20 years. But then, when you try to describe just what it is you're hearing, it shifts on you, suddenly, like the transmission of one of the souped-up [...]

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2cellos: In2ition

May 13, 3:01am PopMatters

They could have done something interesting with this idea, something exaggerated and unlovely. Recording novelty versions of pop songs is one thing, but saying that you're "extending the possibilities of the cello" by doing so is just cheeky. Luka Sulic and Stjepan Hauser extend the possibilities of the cello across 13 tracks, most of which will be familiar to anyone who has been listening to mainstream radio over the past few decades or so. Behold "Highway to Hell", "Candle in the Wind", "Clocks", "Voodoo People", etcetera. Track 11...

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Solar Bears: Supermigration

May 13, 3:01am PopMatters

Solar bears turn in an interesting album of ambient pop that wears the group's influences proudly on its sleeve. Sometimes for good, sometimes for bad. Solar Bears' latest covers a wide pastiche of instrumental styles, with opener "Stasis" coming across like the best echoes of Delerium, Enigma, Robert Miles, and even a faint touch of Enya thrown in a blender. It's all discordant, echo-ambience until "Cosmic Runner" gets going. Their penchant for basic hip hop beats behind the music continues here - and it serves as an evocative, fun start to the disc. From a mix of reverb-drenched guitar [...]

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Lychgate - "Sceptre to Control the World" (stream)

May 10, 12:00pm PopMatters

Cambridge, England's Lychgate craft black metal that's heavier on artistry and atmosphere than it is on violence and vitriol. But that doesn't mean "Sceptre to Control the World", from their forthcoming self-titled LP, won't crack a few skulls, either. Lychgate is of the black metal camp less concerned with bludgeoning you with speed and noise (not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you) than covering you with riffs and atmosphere and squeezing you to death gradually. "Sceptre to Control the World" rolls in like a thick fog, carried by coiling melodic guitar lines that wrap around both the [...]

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Counterbalance No. 128: Animal Collective's 'Merriweather Post Pavilion'

May 10, 10:00am PopMatters

Venture my way into the dark where we can sweat. One takes the 128th most acclaimed album by the hand. Animal Collective's indie rock sensation is the focus of this week's Counterbalance. Klinger: Well, Mendelsohn, last week you asked me if the canon was still open, what with the inclusion of slightly more recent records like Radiohead's In Rainbows on the Acclaimed Music aggregate of the greatest albums of all time. Now this week we have Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion, an actual, honest to God album that was released not just during this century, but right at the [...]

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Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century

May 10, 3:15am PopMatters

This insightful and entertaining look at the history of music piracy offers invaluable background to the hot-button issue of creativity and the law. Reprinted from Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century (footnotes omitted) by Alex Sayf Cummings with permission from Oxford University Press USA. © 2013 Oxford University Press. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or printed without permission in writing from the publisher. || 1 || (Music, Machines, and Monopoly Music lends itself to reproduction. A musician composes a song by fumbling for the right chords,...

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Rod Stewart: Time

May 10, 3:06am PopMatters

Rod the Mod attempts to get back to where it once began. Time waits for no one, but Tom Waits for you. The big news here is that Time is not only Rod Stewart's return to recording rock music but also marks his first collection of self-penned songs in decades. Such an enterprise -- at least on paper -- stands to re-institute some long-lost rock credibility for Stewart and to fulfill the hopes of long-suffering fans who have pined for a return to the style of Rod's '70s glory days. Those fans have had little reason for...

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Karl Hyde: Edgeland

May 10, 3:05am PopMatters

One half of Underworld goes solo and avoids the two main pitfalls of doing so, redundancy and pointless novelty. It's natural to be little suspicious of solo albums, especially the first solo album by someone who's productively worked in a group setting for years (and maybe extra especially when that group is still a going concern?). Popular music has a rich, sometimes hilarious history of musicians who are famous and/or beloved ditching their usual collaborators, at least temporarily, for all sorts of reasons. But often those reasons range from pointless to megalomaniacal, and not...

• GrillMarketing - Karl Hyde "The Boy with the Jigsaw Puzzle Fingers" (Radio edit)
• Sampler - Karl Hyde - Edgeland

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Artist:	GrillMarketing
Title:	Karl Hyde "The Boy with the Jigsaw Puzzle Fingers" (Radio edit)
File Name:	SoundCloud
Genre:	Alternative

Artist:	Sampler
Title:	Karl Hyde - Edgeland
File Name:	SoundCloud
Genre:	Alternative
Year:	2013

The Appleseed Cast: Illumination Ritual

May 10, 3:04am PopMatters

Illumination Ritual is like a watch that you want to take apart and view all the individual springs to see what makes it tick, particularly when it comes to the rhythm. As a critic, I face a couple of dilemmas in reviewing the new album from Lawrence, Kansas-based band the Appleseed Cast. The first is a matter of pigeonholing. The group has been called everything from alternative rock to emo to post rock as the group has challenged the boundaries of genre with each successive release, so it's hard to really define the sound of the band to [...]

• The Appleseed Cast - Illumination Ritual Album Sampler

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Artist:	The Appleseed Cast
Title:	Illumination Ritual Album Sampler
File Name:	SoundCloud
Genre:	Post-rock
Year:	2013

HIM: Tears on Tape

May 10, 3:03am PopMatters

The old dog hasn't learned any new tricks but he's doing what he knows with a reinvigorated fire in his belly. Over the course of time HIM have found their place in the world as one of those acts who keep releasing music for themselves and their fans while the rest of the world has largely forgotten about them. Back in the early '00s the world was still their oyster: they were absolutely massive in their native Finland, managed to have a respectable amount of popularity all around Europe and even managed to touch upon the...

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will.i.am: #willpower

May 10, 3:02am PopMatters

#willpower sets the dance floor ablaze with excellent production, flawed by a lack of cohesion. Will.i.am (William Adams) has played a gargantuan role in pop music. As one quarter of genre-bending band The Black Eyed Peas, the producer, rapper, and singer has achieved phenomenal success. The key is that his success has been constrained to his band or collaborations with others. As a solo artist, success has eluded him; Songs About Girls (2007) delivered a minor pop hit with "I Got It From My Mama", but failed to capitalize commercially....

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Sexmob: Cinema, Circus & Spaghetti (Sexmob Plays Fellini: The Music of Nino Rota)

May 10, 3:01am PopMatters

Bernstein gets Sexmob back out of the freezer for a cinematic tribute sure to thaw any detractor of campy jazz. More than 30 years ago, Hal Willner, the great master of the all-star jazz tribute project, released Amarcord Nino Rota, an album of Nino Rota covers that featured Bill Frisell, Steve Lacy, Muhal Richard Abrams, Wynton Marsalis, and Carla Bley, just to name a few. And while Nino Rota's soundtrack work for the films of Federico Fellini is still floating around, a copy of Amarcord Nino Rota will criminally cost you 50 bones at the...

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Úlfur: White Mountain

May 10, 3:00am PopMatters

Úlfur paint pretty auditory pictures that lack the necessary focus for sustained engagement. I will always have a soft spot in my heart for all things Icelandic. Landscapes, people, food, movies, and especially music; if it hails from the land of shaggy little horses and rotten shark you can count me in. I spent my junior year of college at the University of Iceland and fell hopelessly in love with the place. So the following review for Úlfur's new record White Mountain will be inevitably colored by my...

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Snapper: Snapper EP

May 9, 2:30pm PopMatters

Snapper's sound -- less jangly than the Clean, more fierce than the 3Ds -- is both of a piece with the Flying Nun aesthetic and utterly singular. Like so many New Zealand bands, Snapper has ties to a lot of acts. There's not really sibling rivalry in the kiwi-pop of the late '70s, '80s, and ''90s, but these bands all seem related. Snapper was fronted by Peter Gutteridge, previous of the Clean, the Chills, and the Great Unwashed. Drummer Dominic Stones went on to play in the excellent 3Ds. Their work as Snapper, along with Christine Voice and Alan [...]

• Snapper - S/T (1988)

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Artist:	Snapper
Title:	S/T (1988)
File Name:	SoundCloud
Genre:	Alternative
Year:	2013

Hüsker Dü's Grant Hart to Release New Album (stream)

May 9, 1:35pm PopMatters

Hüsker Dü's Grant Hart has a new solo project releasing this summer via Domino Records. The Argument has seriously literary -- as well as musical -- ambitions, based as it is on the legendary "Paradise Lost" poem by John Milton. The album sees the light of day on 22 July, but two preview songs have just been released to spark interest in the endeavour.

• Domino Record Co - Is The Sky The Limit?

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Artist:	Domino Record Co
Title:	Is The Sky The Limit?
File Name:	SoundCloud
Genre:	Rock 'n' Roll
Year:	2013

In the Valley Below: Hymnal EP

May 9, 1:30pm PopMatters

Stylish synths, cool atmosphere and great vocal interplay make the LA duo's debut EP a brilliant first step. Nothing hymnal in Hymnal, but what we get is much better. The LA duo In the Valley Below's three-track debut EP lies somewhere between atmospheric soundscapes and outwardly bouncing melodies, coming off like Husky Rescue inspired by urban metropolises after dark rather than nature. The mix of stylish synth tones and sparingly but effectively used live instruments is a great one, but the key element here is the equal lead vocal duty share the two...

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