Equation #34: Satellite Party

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If there's one thing that many music lovers can agree on, and I'm sure there's at least one, it's that the sex has been drained from modern rock music. Not the misogynistic, porn-like sex that's prevalent in pop music, the "girl, I wanna rock you world" type, and not the idyllic, storybook romance sex, the "baby, our bodies sing to each other and the universe becomes one with us" tripe. No, what's missing is the "sexual" (not the "sexy"; there's plenty of "sexy" since Justin Timberlake was kind enough to bring it back), the carnal, passionate, unashamed human sex between two people who aren't just "hooking up". While "Sexy" requires gender roll-playing, physical perfection and, quite often, alcohol, "sexual" is funky, earthy, and has a mole on it's ass. Does "sexual" care? No! "Sexual" is all about the inner beauty, it's all about the deep desire for your lover and that good, good lovin' that happens. That's what's missing from rock; songs about planet-aligning connections and the ancient art of sensuality.

Well, Perry Farrell, his wife, and his A-list of talented friends are bringing the "sexual" back, as it were. Farrell's latest project called Satellite Party (occasionally "Perry Farrell's Satellite Party) culls together a "who's who" of modern prog, funk and pop including, but not limited to, Nuno Bettencourt, Flea, John Frusciante, Fergie, Joy Division/New Order bassist Peter Hook, Thievery Corporation, Hybrid, Peter DiStefano, film composer Harry Gregson-Williams and Jim Morrison. Yes, that Jim Morrison. Farrell's included a "lost song" by the long-deceased Doors frontman called "Woman in the Window".

The debut album "Ultra Payloaded" is filled with upbeat, funk-rock tunes that resonate a sexual energy and project an atmosphere of, well, a celestial party. Dancing, loving, indulgence and uninhibited grooving are the themes. Virtually every song is either a call to boogie or a call to nookie. The first singe "Wish Upon a Dogstar" is a solid opener; a new wave rocker with a soaring chorus and an endlessly danceable beat starts the album the way a party album should be. The energy stays at shin-dig level through the funky, Chili Pepper infused "Hard Life Easy", the love-fest anthem "Kinky" and onto the deep disco groove of "The Solutionists". A key theme of "Ultra Payloaded" seems to be that everyone deserves to cut loose once in a while; life is hard, you put up with a lot of shit and now it's time to let your hair down, grab a Mai Tai and get buck naked.

Even more mellow tracks like the orchestral "Awesome" and the hot and sweaty "Mr. Sunshine" keep the flow alive, the album as a whole could serve as a stand-alone party mix, for the right crowd. All along the way choice nuggets of ass-shaking, hip-gripping music. The closer, the "lost song" featuring a drowsy lyric by Jim Morrison, puts punctuation on the hippy lovefest experience with the line "Just try and stop us, we're going to love." For bonus reading and confusion, see the "Bio" for the band from their website.

Equation #33: Editors

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Editors

The definition of "emo" has been the subject of countless inquires, arguments and late night, coffee/Ritalin fueled discussions. Hell, even local news is getting in on the dialog (Jenny Tatone, you know what I'm sayin'.) Is it strictly defined by mopey teenagers with eyeliner, nautical star tattoos, lip piercings and shaggy bangs? I'm sure Hot Topic would like to think so. Is it as vague and open-ended as simply "emotion", whether it be in music, poems, or art? Doubtful. That definition is about as valid as calling a band "indie" these days. (Guess what Hipsters, when Death Cab for Cutie signed to Atlantic they stopped being indie, that doesn't mean they suck now.) So what is "emo"? I chose to apply the old euphemism usually tagged to difficult art pieces; "I can't define art, but I know what I like". In other words, you know it when you see it.

When Editors released their debut "The Back Room" last year they were met with the task of ducking the shackles tying them to Joy Division, Interpol and She Wants Revenge; granted their place on that train is fitting and not entirely uncomfortable, but Editors had more in mind than just carrying the much desired Ian Curtis torch, they wanted to actually affect people with their music. The skipped the cold, cocky smarm of their contemporaries and aligned themselves with more "emotional" bands (like "emo", see how I tied that in?) like Elbow, British Sea Power, Doves and even The Verve. Their debut stood out, it grabbed people's attention and tingled some neck hairs here and there and it was no accident that, while they blended in nicely with much of the dancey post-punk in the mix today, people actually remembered that the band was Editors and the song was Munich.

Their second outing sees Editors following much the same path they chose in 2006 but with affecting improvements. While their arsenal of choice hasn't changed they've managed to pack more content and at least as much feeling into the music alone. That's saying nothing for Tom Smith's lyrics which have stepped away from "The Back Room"'s often repetitive lyrical framework and moved into a much more thought-out, inventive arena. Not to say that there aren't choruses or hooks here, there certainly are, but there's at least more actual words in these new songs. The themes of the songs follow suit from before; love, hope, trust and friendship with the usual grandiose reprises and soaring confessions of fear, loneliness and longing to keep it grounded. The album's opener "Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors" is reminiscent of Coldplay but without the obligatory sappiness and engineered emotion. It's a good choice for a first track, it pulls you in emotionally but gets the heart-swelling over with early on so you're not gagging by the end of the album. The majority of the remaining tracks are more driving and up-beat, save the gorgeously worded "The Weight of the World" and "Push Your Head Towards the Air", and put to bed any worries that Editors have gone all adult contemporary on their fans. Tracks like "The Racing Rats", "Escape the Nest" and title track "An End Has a Start" are more forceful and intense and overall the album seems to have more of a sense of urgency than the last, as though "The Back Room" was a plea that didn't take and "An End Has a Start" is a more serious and desperate request.

For those who feel a band should reinvent themselves each time they release a record then you'll probably scoff at how similar these two albums are at times, but "The Back Room" worked for the same reasons this works and there's nothing wrong with the continuation of a theme as long as it's where you're most effective and "An End Has a Start" is a very effective album.

Equation #32: Battles

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Battles

The robots are coming! And they've learned how to make you shake your booty!

The debut full-length by the much EP'd NY band Battles is on a mission like a rich Nigerian potentate to infect you with it's intractable, mesmerizing virus. Resistance is futile and you WILL be assimilated, "Mirrored" beeps, chimes, buzzes and grinds like a clockwork juggernaut from the first spastic, cd-skip drum idle to the last click and blip. When people typically think of "dance" music, they probably think of something with a strong back-beat, lots of repetition and a steady hook. Battles, however, would like you to rethink what it means to dance, toss out your notions of sweaty models grinding their crotches together and imagine a more fevered, hectic scenario; a distant future tribe of people lunging and stomping in unison, shaking and flailing their limbs as if to summon some ancient and elder god to silence a volcano or end a drought. This isn't just music to get lost in, it's music to lose YOURSELF in. The maniac rhythms and throbbing synths urge you to freak out and start twitching. The syncopated tones and cheerfully insane whistles beckon you into a state of frothing abandon before lulling you into a passive, trance-like state where you're left to drift in the vast ocean of slow, drugged up freak outs.

People also call this type of music "math rock", which I can appreciate, as music at it's root form is essentially mathematics, but if this music is "math rock" then it applies to "math" as it was understood around the time of the Spanish Inquisition; a satanic, pagan system that was foul and heathenish in the eyes of Almighty God. This is no more "math" than a sausage is a Fruit Roll-up. However I bet it "Mirrored", run through a computation machine, hooked to an oscilloscope and fed through a vacuum tube would produce some interesting spreadsheets.

Overall this album is a refreshing glimpse into a rarely palatable genre of music, especially coming from a band from New York. Normally when I hear "avant garde" I gag a little on the mental pictures of over-serious performance artists shoveling breakfast cereal into their underpants dressed like a Greek god on a pogo stick, but this is the good kind of avant garde, the kind that actually has merit and relevance in reality. And for that, Battles, I thank you.

Equation #31: Fields.

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Fields.



This is a Tek Screw. It's a self-drilling screw for sheet metal that's used a lot in the industry I work in. Last week I removed a wall in my office that used a lot of these and while I was removing and applying these screws I was listening to "Everything Last Winter" by Fields. (I think the period is on purpose) If you've ever used a self-drilling screw before you're familiar with the satisfying feeling of that thread finally taking hold as the screw breaks the surface of the sheet metal. For the first few seconds your pressing hard on the drill and nothing seems to happen, then it finally pops and it all makes sense. This is an experience I liken to Fields.' debut album.

The first time through it didn't strike me as anything really special, it was very standard indie with a twist of shoegaze and a light dusting of prog. It played through and, like a 45 day jail sentence, didn't stick. Until the second time through, about two and a half minutes into the track "Skulls and Flesh and More" when the vocals drop out and the synths and guitars start singing this beautiful melody that washes over and over and it just hit me. The threads finally gripped and the album dug it's way in and I haven't been able to put it down since.

After sitting down and giving it the proper attention and focus I realize there's a hell of a lot of nuance I was missing trying to pass this album off as background music. The opening track "Song for the Fields" starts out with a rhythmic acoustic strum pattern and an off-beat clean guitar chirp, giving the listener the impression that this album is going to be a Clash\Blur\Ride revival album through and through, that is until the vocals lift-off about a minute in with a harmony that almost lifts your feet of the ground. Once airborne the song kicks in the jets and is off with a growl. Screaming along with purpose and passion and focus it levels off with the repeated vocal "you're not the only one" and glides for a moment in a sonic hold pattern only to break off into a dive again, ending in a knee-gripping splash down after a full 5:47 flight. In case you didn't catch that analogy, it was airplanes.

The album takes a softer turn in "Charming the Flames", a quiet, haunting guitar pattern leads into chiming arpeggios then into a full-open pop/rock jam. Following it up with the dreamy, relaxing "You Don't Need This Song (To Fix Your Broken Heart) takes it down another step with sunny harmonies and a skipping drum part and honest, self effacing lyrics; "Sing this song like any other one/cause they're all the same". The synth woodwind solo is a nice, appropriate touch. Up next is the beautiful folk number "Schoolbooks", tender harmonies and a waltzing 12-string guitar bring to mind Great Northern or Calexico and, like most of the other songs on this album, it doesn't hesitate to break into a fuzzy wall of guitar and organ to add just a bit of a diversion to keep it interesting.

"The Death", by far the heaviest track on the album sounds like Bloc Party if Block Party had a female vocalist and used a Hammond B3. Present again is Nick Peill and Thorunn Antor's flawlessly melded harmonies and that persistent wave of distorted shoegaze guitar. That doesn't change for "You Brought This On Yourself", a humming, chugging track reminiscent of a less progressive Zwan (remember Zwan?). My favorite track on the album, the one that finally made me stand up and take notice, is "Skulls and Flesh and More", it starts out upbeat, sparse and poppy and is pretty typical of the rest of the album until the instrumental mid-section which is just this soaring, beautiful drenching of sound which drops out for Antor's delicate Icelandic lilt to take the forefront and finish out the song as it started but more energized and refreshed, like that sigh you get after hugging someone you haven't seen in a while.

The band then follows it up with a darker, more serious track "Feathers". Again featuring Antor on lead vocals, it's similar in many ways to a lot of the other tracks but is just different enough to keep the album moving forward.

I've noticed that I tend to like an album more when the band saves an excellent track for the tail end of the album, something to reward you for following the path to the end, you know? Well Fields. left a gem in "If You Fail We All Fail" right before the end of the record, it's got a brilliant guitar lick on top of a stampede of rumbling sound that repeats throughout the song and really takes on the lead part in this track, wrapping it all up with a white gust of feedback and fading into the gentle, cheeky acoustic footnote "Parasite". Despite being a track designed to say goodnight, "Parasite" doesn't seem like a toss-out afterthought but a well-intentioned final statement to an album that has taken the listener on an exciting, refreshing ride.

Equation #30: Travis

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Travis

Were Travis ever cool? I can't tell. I used to listen to "The Man Who" and think that it was cool; it had nice melodies, it had those infectious early Coldplay guitar chimes, it was basically left over 80's pop without the weird clothes and big hair. But I'm listening to Travis' new album "The Boy with No Name" and it's almost exactly the same as "The Man Who", which was released in 1999. Their last album "12 Memories" was a bit heavier, a bit more produced and pretty much overtly political. I didn't really like it much. That album was easy, I formed an opinion on it and stuck to it and a few years later I'm still satisfied with that opinion. However "TBWNN" is causing me some confusion; can a band effectively release the same album with different chords and words eight years later and still hope to stay relevant?

Well, apparantly so, in this case. Travis has doubled back to cover the same "puss-rock" path they blazed in 1997, (you know, the one that Coldplay and Keane followed them down, snapping twigs and trampling foliage?) using much of the same relaxed, mellow production, easy melodies and pacifying arrangements that made them semi-famous as poster boys for adult contemporary soft-rock. They've recreated themselves as an earlier version of themselves, but the question remains: is that so bad? I mean where could Travis really go? They can't jump from the inevitable and lazy Radiohead comparisons to the more popular and equally lazy U2 comparison like Coldplay did, they can't beef up and try to be tough because the led singer's name is Fran, and they can't get any MORE mellow or they'd risk turning into Smooth Jazz and their only fans would be female office workers in their early 40s. Not to say that that's not the primary bulk of their fan base, but there's still a nugget of folk like me who still enjoy a bit of mellow Top 40 every now and again. So what are we left with? It's been 10 years since Travis' debut and if you were to measure their creative growth in steps toward the refrigerator then they bumped into the dog's water dish and fell backwards into the recycling bin. I DARE you to decipher that metaphor. However this album is filled with truly enjoyable songs, I'm super cereal! It's got more puss than a cat show and offers about as much to the modern music collective as a Right Said Fred Greatest Hits compilation it's still kinda catchy and kinda pretty and kinda...... nice. Just, really, gosh-darned nice.

So, I'm 400 or so words into this review and I still haven't really formed an opinion about this album, and I know that's hard for you readers because without my vastly enlightened opinion on records you're just flopping around like fish on a porch swing, so I'll scrunch my face up real hard, bear down and grunt out a position on whether this album is good or bad.

Hurrgggggggg!

Equation #29: Pela

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Pela

Thursdays at my office are pretty boring. Everyone sort of stands around wishing it was Friday, waiting for that sweet release like a weary Death Row inmate. I'd usually be sniffing dry erase markers and playing solitaire on my palm pilot in the men's room by now but today is different, different because of Pela.

Their debut album "Anytown Graffiti" is just the anthemic, grandeous rock I need to make the first Thursday of May seem like the third Monday of October, if you know what I mean... Yeah, neither do I. Despite only running 40 minutes the album packs in quite a bit of of feeling, obviously taking a cue from elder rocksmiths like U2 and Coldplay they layer each track with bombast and bravado, long reverbs, swimming delay and thundering drums. You know, arena rock. Only don't expect them to be playing Live Aid or selling out Red Rocks anytime soon, their sound is still very much in the larval, or even pupil stages; nervous, a bit timid but filled with optimism and enthusiasm. While the arena rock label is a pretty easy tag to attach there's really a bit more going on here than just huge choruses and walls of shimmering guitar. Adding a bit of that New-New-Wave-Post-Dance-Punk-Core stuff the kids love so much brings up comparisons to Bloc Party and The Killers but with less emphasis on booty shaking, which is not to say that there aren't some toe-tappers here, but it's not a Franz Ferdinand cover band, as if you'd ever need such a thing. In short, it's a collection of poppy, happy sounding rock music with some great melodies. It's feel-good stuff, well crafted and enjoyable.

Equation #28: Handsome Furs

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Handsome Furs

If you're not paying close attention you'd assume that Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner are the same person. If they were two guys in totally different bands that weren't from Canada then you'd never suspect that they might be sharing the same throat. But put them both together in Wolf Parade and they sound exactly the same. The same warbly, yelping cries, the same manic, half-drunk shivers come from each of their mouths and it blends very well together. Now, until recently I truly thought that there was only one singer in Wolf Parade, until I started collecting family tree projects; Sunset Rubdown (Krug), Swan Lake (Krug), Atlas Strategic (Boeckner)and now Handsome Furs (Boeckner). I thought they all contained the same singe person from Wolf Parade. I thought wrong. Dead wrong.

Ok, that's a bit dramatic but seriously, these Canadians and their band orgies. It's no wonder that Wolf Parade moved from Victoria to Montreal, they were probably hoping to garner a spot in Broken Social Scene. OOOOO SNAP!

But anyway, this review isn't about Wolf Parade anymore than this review is about delicious cupcakes. This review is about Handsome Furs, which is not Wolf Parade, it's close, it's got a lot of the same crunchy grooves, but Handsome Furs is only two people who are getting married and play instruments while Wolf Parade is 4-5 guys who are (as far as I know) not married to each other. Right, so have I made it clear yet that Wolf Parade and Handsome Furs are not the same band but are similar on many levels due to it being a side project of one of the key members? I have? Good. Stop asking me about Wolf Parade, I'm trying to do a review here.


What makes Handsome Furs so different from Wolf Parade (ha! You can't stop me! I don't care who you are!) is in the earnest emotion in the delivery. Boeckner has always sounded emotional (or "emo") when singing but the music hasn't always matched that level of sincerity. Forming a band with his fiancee must have been the right move to bring the noise down to a more personal level. The songs often sound as though they were created and performed simply for the enjoyment of the creators, though that's not to say that it's not enjoyable, accessible rock that jumps and grinds and wheezes like a sweaty desert wind. Simple guitar, simple drum loops, simple melodies end up creating a complex sound that masks the lack of a full backing band. Plus I'm sure multi-tracking helped a bit. Tracks like "Handsome Furs Hate This City", "Can't Get Started" and "Dead + Rural" have the obvious helping hand of a robotic rhythm section, though it doesn't detract from the rustic, arid feel of the music. Though tracks like "What We Had" and "The Radio's Hot Sun" feel more analog there's still an element of modern clicks and whistles giving the whole album a anachronistic feel. Kind of like Blade Runner or the uniforms in the original Star Trek.