Frankie Rose is a real veteran. She’s spent a season each in New York-based bands Dum Dum Girls, Vivian Girls, and even Crystal Stilts.
As Frankie Rose, she shoulders all of the creative impetus, and left to herself, Frankie’s dreamy girl-pop chops are as sharp as ever – Interstellar is supremely smooth and listenable, about as immediate as a record can be without risking a vanilla label. Interstellar lives and dies by it; by this same token, it doesn’t take a ton of risks with its distinct 80s sentiment, and ultimately doesn’t plumb terribly arty depths. This is nitpicking, however. It’s blissfully short and a celestial delight to have on repeat.
“All that I want is a pair of wings to fly / into the blue of a wide open sky / show me your scars / I’ll show you mine / perched above the city on a pair of power lines.”
That’s one step from a Lenny Kravitz lyric. It takes gumption to offer a lyrical phrase about wanting to fly, and it takes heart make it feel more than vapid. On the whole, Interstellar has both in large supply. She’s outdone all previous efforts to date. It’s clear, listening to Interstellar, that Frankie’s calling wasn’t with anyone but herself.
Put Your Back N 2 It is a tale of emotional unease. Mike Hadreas is Perfume Genius, the one-man piano show guaranteed to put any sun-baked festival crowd to sleep.
The album is mature and substantial, if insistently somber, from start to finish. There are truly brilliant bits there, but they’re buried and unfortunately further in between than one would hope – the quick jaunt of “Hood” and the sober, cinematic “AWOL Marine” are transcendent, but they lug the plateaus along like so much baggage. Take “Dark Parts:” the self-sacrifice detailed is touching stuff, but the piano arrangement is hopelessly drab; its I-V-vi-IV plod is the same tired chord progression mocked en masse by YouTube jokesters Axis of Awesome. It’s a fine listen, but the lack of barbed pop hooks prevents Put Your Back N 2 It from fully taking off.
Perfume Genius’ “AWOL Marine,” from Put Your Back N 2 It.
If OFF! leaves you wanting more, and Thee Oh Sees jam too hard and too long for you, you must take ten minutes to hear FIDLAR. DIYDUI is a brief and impassioned ode to the west coast skate-punk credo. The lead track tells the entire story – “I don’t have a job and I don’t have a phone / I don’t have a life and I’m always stoned / wake bake skate.” They get in, get off, and get out.
Brevity is the soul of punk – DIYDUI is probably the most upbeat ten minutes you can spend listening to music today.
There are always those musical personas that ooze presence. James Mercer always dominated and directed the sound of The Shins, even on the distinct band effort of Wincing the Night Away. Let there be no mistake, however: The Shins are now a solo career parading as a band. Of this much, we can be sure – none of the previous members remain, after Mercer kicked them all out. Perhaps his turn recording with Danger Mouse as Broken Bells puffed the chest a mite?
The ease of the music has run away, in large part. Gone is the simplicity of “Kissing the Lipless” and “New Slang;” the muted arrangements of Oh, Inverted World are but vapors now. Instruments and filters are slathered on like obligatory coats of primer. Gone, too, are the insouciant melodic heights of “Phantom Limb;” when Mercer reaches for the stratospheric high notes on “Simple Song,” it really doesn’t turn the ear the same way.
The Shins’ “Simple Song,” from Port of Morrow.
Frankly, however, the real tragedy is that Mercer has ditched much of his lyrical filigree. Until “September” turns things around, the record’s poetry is a sore disappointment: “what have we done? / how’d we get so far from the sun? / lost, lost in an oscillating phase / where a tiny few catch all the rays / out beyond the western squall / in an Indian land / they work for nothing at all / they don’t know the mall or the layaway plan.”
Compared with the manic coping of Wincing‘s “Australia” or Chutes Too Narrow‘s “So Says I,” the above selection appears even more fantastically simplistic:
“an address to the golden door / I was strumming on a stone again / pulling teeth from the pimps of gore / when hatched a tragic opera in my mind / and it told of a new design / in which every soul is duty bound / to uphold all the statutes of boredom / therein lies the fatal flaw of the red age.”
Call it melodrama if you want, but that snippet is undeniably engaging on a lot of levels. Not to labor the point, but Port of Morrow, by contrast, takes a ham-fisted, direct approach: “I know that things can really get rough when you go it alone / don’t go thinking you have to be tough and play like a stone.” It’s heavy-handed and patronizing, and sounds offensively like 70s AOR, but without any of the fun of the shit-hot twin guitar solos. It’s almost like Mercer hired Tom Scholz to write his lyrics for him.
Port of Morrow isn’t a bad record, but it’s undoubtedly a decline. If you preferred the band’s first two records to the Starbucks-peddled third, Port of Morrow isn’t going to impress you much. From that perspective, it does little more than insist that it’s time to admit that Wincing the Night Away was a better record than first you took it for.
Youth Lagoon released a great record this year called The Year of Hibernation.
It captures the youthful fright that Win Butler stuffs into every Arcade Fire record: there’s a wide-eyed wonderment, a real ‘us-kids’ sentiment that’s hard not to identify with at any age.
Here’s “17,” one of my favorite tracks from that debut.
I attended a concert Youth Lagoon played last night at The Red Palace in Washington, D.C. As a bonus, here’s a short video I recorded of them playing “Daydream” as the show’s brief encore.
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Revisionism
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