HeiBräu

The elaborate and finely-tuned end of the music community, such as it is, tends to be populated by lifers. There are a handful of easily-recognizable names one could pull out; bands like Steely Dan, Boston, and ELO are made up of the kind of musicians who have those idiosyncratic tendencies that allow them to pore over their music. This kind of community is not populated with bands like The Apples In Stereo, because for the most part, you either have that tendency or you don’t. Yet, their newest would seem to defy that: the erstwhile lo-fi devotees had just released a greatest hits compilation cataloging a decade and a half’s worth of fuzz pop numbers, and then from under this Carl-Sagan-meets-M.C.-Escher cover, out comes Travellers in Space and Time. For its first five tracks, it’s the most aptly named album this year, perhaps as much so as A New World Record; it isn’t until “C.P.U.” that the band bears any real resemblance to its former self whatsoever.

When I first learned that John Dufilho, lead singer and guitarist for garage pop band The Deathray Davies, was playing drums for The Apples In Stereo, I felt a sense of strange comfort come over me. Prior to seeing his name credited for Travellers in Space and Time, he was something of a milk carton photo, not having released anything since 2005′s The Kick and the Snare (though the Davies have a new album coming this year, if their MySpace is to be believed). And to my surprise, I found he actually snatches the mic away for “Floating In Space,” which sounds right at home next to his own “Don’t Point at the Stoners:” “maybe it went right / look out and there’s no / atmosphere / no sign of life / it’s only us here.” Despite my enthusiasm for Dufilho’s presence on any project, it was really the early reports of the heavy ELO vibes that further morphed this latest Apples record from interest to enigma.

The Apples In Stereo’s “Hey Elevator,” from Travellers in Space and Time.

However — and even to a fault — Travellers in Space and Time is impeccably crafted. Melding the impossibly smooth feel of late 70s progressive pop with their upbeat, spongy roots results in more than just a few certifiable gems, but ultimately the album suffers from inconsistency. Though they were played out almost since the first time they graced a record (and certainly, even ten years ago, on Deathray’s oft-overlooked debut), Travellers has those annoying interludes; they’re like some power-pop equivalent of rap-record skits. They nearly always take the form of some horn-rimmed lab coat rattling off sci-fi techno babble, and frankly, at this point, they aren’t just meaningless drivel, they’re borderline irritating.

“Hey Elevator” and “Dance Floor” might be the most immediate tunes yet for 2010, and despite their collectively wistful disposition, they both inspire a pretty fine groove. “Dream About The Future” and “No Vacation” have upbeat sing-a-long moments aplenty, “Told You Once” crosses Lennon’s “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl” with the Bee Gees, and “It’s All Right” even reaches in the direction of prog-popsters Jellyfish. Where the record veers from its glossy outer-space sheen for “Dignified Dignitary,” it sticks out like a sore thumb, and beside that, it sports a dangerously similar vibe as The Rentals’ “Friends of P.” Similarly, the ska-lite horns of “No One In The World” threaten to overwhelm the already-saccharine song.

Largely, however, the record is filled with clever pop inventions (and re-inventions) that stick to your brain like gum to a picnic table. Travellers might be nothing more than an enjoyable pit stop on the way to less “frivolous” records, but I maintain that for some, it’ll be worth the time spent. Is it absolutely essential? Probably not. But is it fun to listen to? It depends — you familiar with Out of the Blue?

- Johnny B.

Bolstered by exotic and adventurous arrangements and a fresh theme, the band blasts out from the lead track “Meridian” into their lead single “Black Eyes.” As the piano punches its opening notes out, skipping beats as it reprises, Jonathan Meiburg’s unmistakable pipes fire out like a cannon over the water. This band isn’t even in the same state as Okkervil River anymore, let alone the same neighborhood.

The title track is ostensibly the culmination of seven tracks of slow burn – a kind of epic, late-breaking centerpiece meant to set off the rest of the album at a  fever pitch. What it really is, in fact, depends entirely on just how captured the audience has been up to that point, and as the album is mainly buttressed by acoustic guitar and string arrangements, it’s safely in grower territory. After spending a the better part of a half hour listening to softly cooing strings gently complimenting the slender reed of Jonathan Meiburg’s tenor, the accumulated tension is a little lacking. Meiburg’s lyrics, however, remain wholly enriched and safely above par: “Oh lights on the floor / let the audience rise / let them file through the halls still assured in their lives / until the sky shudders open / impossibly wide.”

Shearwater’s “Landscape At Speed,” from The Golden Archipelago.

Sadly, the lofty ambitions still leave thunderous gems like Palo Santo‘s “Hail, Mary” and Rook‘s “Century Eyes” unrivaled, as there’s nothing here that’s quite so electrifying. Neither, for all the unorthodox instrumentation, is there anything as atmospheric as the waterphone wail of “South Col,” or for that matter, a track so uniformly excellent and satisfying as “Leviathan, Bound,” or “The Snow Leopard.”

By contrast, “An Insular Life,” with its salsa-basted drums and hazy cloud of guitar strums, is among the stronger tracks, but the real knockout row is “Landscape At Speed,” “Hidden Lake,” and “Corridors.” They’re Archipelago‘s three indisputably engaging numbers, two of which highlight Thor Harris’ noticeably emboldened drumming, which affords the tracks in question a healthy dose of grit. Overall, however, after 2008′s wholly triumphant Rook, a complimentary album of rival quality might have been too much to ask or expect. All preceding records in mind, this latest release appears less like an unforgivable blight and more like a simple disappointment. Meiburg’s latent obsession with expansive theatrics is in no short supply on Archipelago, but in more places than one would hope, the melodies fail to muster what the poetry promises.

- Johnny B.

Scissor Sisters have this shit down. After their uneven, sequin-bedecked debut and 2006′s more consistent but less energetic Ta-Dah!, Night Work finds them nailing a polyester bulls-eye. The loss of original drummer (and resident straight guy) Paddy Boom to an ‘amicable parting’ doesn’t seem to have affected the chemistry all that much, unless you regard the band’s enthusiastic journey into ever-gayer waters to be some sort of a change. But if this is telling you anything about Scissor Sisters that you couldn’t have gathered from the cover art, I’m not sure how else we can help you. As it is, ‘Whole New Way’ is probably the best song about rear entry you’re likely to hear this year.

If anything, the band sounds more comfortable here than they ever did on Ta-Dah!, as much fun as that album was. Rather than trying to tread the sexually ambiguous waters of mainstream acceptance, they’ve gone full-bore for the other team, and the resultant dozen songs are dazzlingly fun. Every beat, every cadence seems precision-calibrated to inspire booty-shaking. There’s nothing here you haven’t heard before from any number of 70s-80s number ones, but the genius of Night Work is in the pastiche. These guys (and girl) know exactly what to steal and how to tweak it for the biggest punch. You’ve got legions of afro-crowned background singers bedazzling the final chorus on ‘Night Work,’ a hilariously funky groove underpinning ‘Any Which Way,’ and pitch-perfect 80s ballads in ‘Fire With Fire’ and ‘Skin Tight.’ Just hearing this stuff, you can feel a forest of big hair and shoulder pads lurking just outside your vision. It’s brilliant.

Scissor Sisters’ “Any Which Way,” from Night Work.

It’s hard to tell which road the band will take after this. They could journey further into the mechanical dance beats of ‘Something Like This,’ or the transcendent electronica of ‘Invisible Light’. They’ve got a handle on funk and swagger, humor and emotion. There’s a fiendish competence on display with ballads, a total grasp of melody on pretty much everything they touch. Most importantly, there’s a real desire evident in the band to avoid repetition. Despite the fact that pretty much everything on Night Work is recycled from somewhere else, it’s somehow cleaner, clearer, and stronger than before, sounding entirely like Scissor Sisters yet without a single false moment or cheap do-over. It takes skill to tap the same vein three albums in a row and never sound like you’re running out of ideas, but Scissor Sisters have done it here, with style. I call it their strongest album yet. Pass me my cheetah-print leotard.

- Drew F.

Over the past year, I’ve tried introducing my office-mate to some music. When I introduced him to Vampire Weekend, he immediately took to it. In fact, he and his girlfriend both became fans. Later on, when I gave him a link to a stream of Contra, he casually told me he liked it, but immediately rushed to get tickets to a show on Stub Hub. At that point, I knew this album was going to be big. Huge, even. As a sort of indirect review-in-a-nutshell, though: Let’s not forget that the debut did sell the better part of a million records.

Contra is, in many ways, the archetypal sidestep-the-slump move for any once-feted band. First, they didn’t wait too long. The longer you go, the greater the likelihood that the next record will bomb — or at very least, be disappointing to some degree — sophomore or not. There are a million examples from every form of art and entertainment to suggest this is true. Take your pick from Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Chinese Democracy, or even Duke Nukem Forever, which, rather than being released, was simply canned after twelve agonizing years of supposed development. On the other hand, there are albums like Portishead’s excellent Third (which was a decade in coming after Dummy), but instances like this are well and truly the exception, not the rule. Even Let It Be, an unforgettable Beatles classic, is easily the worst of their latter-day studio offerings, and also, not surprisingly, the one that spent the most time in production.

Secondly, it’s a meted and sharp expansion of their songwriting that plays to their strengths as multi-instrumentalists. They favor the keys more on this record on tracks like “Horchata” and “Run”, but bust out the guitars for the barn-burning “Cousins,” which highlights Rastam Batmanglij’s incredible chops on the frets. Contra is, with a few exceptions, no less fun an affair than their first record, and that is a rarity worth beholding.

Vampire Weekend’s “White Sky,” from Contra.

These things make it a savvy step for VW. To assert that the songwriting hasn’t taken a slight decline here, however, would be an oversight. Their first record wasn’t far from a modern masterpiece, despite the mixed press it got from skeptical indie followers who disliked the image they were projecting, and the “direction” it took their claw-scraped genre borders. If the potential for a flowering Afro-pop sub-genre caused them consternation, I personally think they need not worry; a duplication of Vampire Weekend would have to be the most obvious cop on the market. Afro-pop was practically empty prior to 2008, and Ezra Koenig and his boys capitalized on it so wholly that any immediate followers could never mop up the scraps for even a token amount of credit. Vampire Weekend are, by all accounts, a rare aberration.

Contra may have debuted at #1 in its opening week — which make no mistake, is an incredible feat; it’s only the twelfth time an independent record has done it since 1991 — but it’s clearly, if not egregiously, the inferior album. Vampire Weekend was so casual, so off-the-cuff, that you actually felt a little richer listening to it. It sounds silly, but the humanizing language and stories, Columbia University references and stomping ground revisits were an incredible coagulant for their aristocratic New York image. Not only that, but the rowdy approach made their respective families’ indubitable wealth, with all the polos and scarves it entails, less of a point of contention. They were simply four guys in a pop-rock band who made a record with a definitive time and place.

Contra, by contrast, doesn’t capture that seamless experience in the same way, despite its impressive sonic palette. Moreover, the emotional connectivity of the last stretch of three tracks can’t touch the heartfelt ascent of Koenig’s chorus on tracks like “Bryn.” In truth, though, this is nitpicking; “Giving Up The Gun” is the only real misstep to speak of here. It’s not an unforgivably grating tune, it’s just that it sounds tremendously misplaced. If Brandon Flowers were singing it with his trademark Springsteen-esque, strained-rocker rasp, it’d pass dangerously easily for a Killers single. Despite lacking their debut’s breezy insouciance (“Oxford Comma,” “Campus”), however, the remainder of the tracklist is well worth the investment. Contra isn’t to be missed.

- Johnny B.

I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth.

Titus Andronicus have a lot of reasons to be be put out. Derisive commentary aside, they’re from New Jersey – the weather alone could make one seasonally depressed, at very least, not to mention the no-left-turns and no-pumping-your-own-gas laws. The inspirational means are, at this point, practically a rite of passage for many great albums: just before it came time to write and record, bandleader Patrick Stickles went through a bad breakup, and The Monitor came pouring out like gore from a musket wound. In spite of Stickles’ evident talent for — notepad to microphone — dismembering his past failures and shortcomings, the record has a scrappy, comeback-kid streak etched from end to end. His run-ragged cry of “I’m at the end of my rope / and I feel like swinging!” in the middle of “No Future Part Three: Escape From No Future” feels like game 7, bottom of the 9th, full count – and though the odds are stacked long against, Titus Andronicus pretty well knock it out of the park for ten straight tracks.

Titus Andronicus’ “A More Perfect Union,” from The Monitor.

A record this startlingly emotive and historically steeped could only have come from the east coast. It’s draped in the history of the early states and the Civil War, referencing Lincoln and Minor Threat alike as the guitar solos soar and Stickles’ ragged pipes roil with palpable fervor. Yet for its left-field penchant and all the see-sawing between celebration and wallowing, The Monitor is light enough on its feet and packed with more than enough riffage to avoid sounding like a history lesson, or worse, simply a cobbled mess of emotions. In fact, just as the track list reaches critical mass with “Four Score And Seven,” respite finally hits home with the carousing “Theme From ‘Cheers’,” wherein bassist Ian Graetzer is allowed some face time of his own.

Titus Andronicus surely detest being called a lo-fi band. Though it might sound at first that the band operates at peak capacity at all times, there’s engaging new evidence of the myriad modes of attack that are a strict creative step forward from the similarly excellent The Airing of Grievances. The Monitor is not merely an aural evolution, however. It’s filled to bursting with a renewed impetus and maturity that outshine their debut in nearly every sense. In no uncertain terms: it sets the bar, in many ways, for a new decade of forthcoming angst. And what’s more, it’s amplified at every turn by the undercurrent of patriotic camaraderie, like some incendiary Ken Burns doc with a short fuse and a deafening report. This is modern punk rock at its explosive, cathartic best.

- Johnny B.

Harlem’s “Friendly Ghost,” from Hippies.

M.I.A.’s “XXXO,” from /\/\ /\ Y /\.

Field Music’s “Effortlessly,” from Measure.

LCD Soundsystem’s “Drunk Girls,” from This Is Happening.