RANDOM STABBINGS & ARTLESS CRITIQUE, AUGUST 2010

Growing, Pumps (Vice Records)
In the same way that it’s hard as a reviewer to report correctly on the actual artistry involved in creating such bizarre sounds as this, it’s difficult to tell what this Brooklyn technologist is genuinely hoping to accomplish.  In layman’s terms, it immediately demands a reality check of the stereo to see if some bagel crumbs got in there somehow; the layering consists of pure glitch on one parallel track, breakbeats on another, and subsonic house on another, ie it’s got a beat and you can dance to it, but are you supposed to?  “Hormone” makes use of old-time vocoder – again for nebulous purposes – while the coolest thing on here, “Massive Dropout,” wants to be a Martian’s idea of drum n bass rinse, making use of claustrophobic in-your-face production riding one track and android disco on another, ultimately giving the impression of what your ears hear while you try to shake yourself out of a bad hit of Ketamine.  Never a dull moment here, despite the lack of humanoid vocals, if that helps you any.
Grade: B [street date: 4/6/10]

Flatfoot 56, Black Thorn (Old Shoe Records)
Funny, I’m from Boston, but this Chicago style of Celt-punk resonates better with me than Dropkick Murphys’ stuff.  Though the production can be a little cheesy and the punk a little light compared to Dropkicks, FF56 have a well-rounded sound that doesn’t always play to back of the scuzzy bar, simpatico more with Ramones on the harder bits.  That doesn’t go for things like the Street Dogs-worshipping “Smoke Blower,” but these guys know that hardness isn’t exclusively the realm of meathead moshers; in fact there’s an 80s-ness in many places here remindful of Clash, Television, that sort.  The boozy shantytown singalongs reek of mawkish authenticity too (“Shiny Eyes”).
Grade: A- [street date: 3/30/10]

Jerry Castle, Don’t Even Ask (My World Records)
Due to natural selection, country music is trending away from the over-processed sounds and predictable emoticons of Big & Rich and leaning toward the “real country” sounds of Gary Allan.  While I admire the fact that Castle (here backed by a respectable squad of Nashville studio guys) has gone similarly au natural, I would have really liked to hear more along the lines of “Charades,” the opener to this, his second album.  The tune is a countrified slant on Devendra Banhart and Zeppelin, which obviously has no relation whatsoever to Brooks & Dunn’s forced twanging and beer-gut BS, but also isn’t a direct challenge to Allan, whose inspiration takes over the entire balance of this record (although Castle gets even more little-cabin-in-the-woods-ish when he trots out his toddler daughter for a duet of “You Are My Sunshine” – kindly gag me with a spoon).  Like Allan, the hooks are simple and don’t need racks of processors to get their points across… or do they?  It’s one thing to join a rebellion, another to lead the pack the way Allan does, and quite another to play at being a Luddite for its own sake.  Castle’s stuff has its charm, but honestly this stuff went in one ear and out the other; perhaps a little NASCAR pride might help in future.
Grade: B- [street date: 7/27/10]

Elizabeth Ayoub, Oceanos Y Lunas (Four Quarters Ent)
Born of Lebanese parents who fled with her and her 6 siblings to Venezuela, Ayoub comes from a strange multilingual planet, where one minute Barbra Streisand would be belting on the radio and the next the family would be reciting the Koran.  There’s professional acting on her resume to go with this debut album, produced by Grammy winner Javier Limon, who has coaxed many gentle slopes and breezes out of the world-type sounds and vibes captured here.  Not to say this is actually a world album, more like an unplugged, ethnically diverse whatzis that might as well have come from Gloria Estefan after a Wah bender, in other words yoga-workout chill. Although her voice is quite like Estefan’s, Ayoub is more charming (certainly more unique-sounding) when warbling lyrics in Semitic tongues (“Habibi”) than Spanish, but that’s just nitpicking on my part – brainy soccer moms could get a lot out of this one.
Grade: A- [street date: 5/18/10]

Darklight Corporation, Darklight Corporation (Ramrod Records)
Once you get past the default-mode drunk-pirate bellowing of singer Fabio Santos you’ll notice much similarity to Ministry on the part of this New Zealand foursome.  They convey an anger-management style that’ll work as well for fans of KMFDM, especially in opening track “One Man Revolution,” with its hollered tag syllable of “rise” upping the anarchic ante (I wouldn’t have advised using antiquated Deep Purple-style organ for the fadeout, but don’t let me stop you kids from believing oldschool is your only hope).  “Nailbomb” follows with a crazy-PO’ed mid-tempo grind riff, again in the fashion of Ministry, and then it’s on to 80s death/speed metal for “Born To Govern,” which only loses an edge when Santos resorts to government-issue screams instead of digging deeper to get at his inner hate.  This all may sound a bit juvenile, but have no doubt that these guys are on the right track – a little more rage (and a few extra dollars in the studio) and they’ll be freezing blood in the same way that Jourgensen’s crew did in the closing scene from Hurt Locker, which, dammit, is what all you metal weenies should be aspiring to, if you can one day just get your head out of stuff that sucks.
Grade: B+ [street date: 2/24/10]

Melissa Auf der Maur, Out of Our Minds (Phi Group Inc.)
Fans of Hole and Smashing Pumpkins will know bassist Auf der Maur (that’s her real name, not some dingbat shibboleth), who joined Courtney Love’s circus after the overdose death of Kristin Pfaff.  Her bucket-list accomplishments have thus far included forming a Black Sabbath cover band, sleeping with Dave Grohl, and generally being a go-to bassplayer associated with a diverse set of acts ranging from Smashing Pumpkins to Ryan Adams.  OOOM is her 2nd album, and if the music were more compelling I’d get off my ass and check the self-titled debut for comparisons, but for our purposes here it really should suffice to note that it’s a bassplayer’s album.  No, not in the sense that Auf der Maur is Stanley Clarke’s Mini Me; I’m saying the lackluster skaggy post-punk riffing that goes on was obviously written on a bass, aimlessly rolling and meandering for some parts, settling into minimalist dumb-bunny grooves for others.  It’s got a pulse, sure, but the sell-by date is expired – people don’t even get Lydia Lunch anymore (not that Hole had an iron grip on such punk concepts either). Glenn Danzig makes a bizarre duet partner in the stream-of-semiconsciousness gab-fest “Father’s Grave.”
Grade: B [street date: 4/6/10]

Paul Manousos, C’Mon C’Mon (Shock & Fall Recordings)
It takes more than one half-attentive listen to the title track to see that Manousos is influenced by anyone other than Van Morrison, so I’m proud to report that I bit the bullet – I cannot fricking stand Van Morrison – and noted the Elvis Costello in “Outside of Town” and the 70s approach to his cover of “Wichita Lineman” (one particularly angsty passage sounds like vintage Moody Blues).  More and more voices pop out of the record as it presses on – this San Fran-based world-traveler groks the advantages of sounding muddy-crazy, so there’s a hillbilly edge in here reminiscent of Deer Tick in the more acoustic numbers and Kings of Leon elsewhere, but wait, he gets kind of Roy Orbison-vs-Robert Plant-ish on “Getting Out,” and then it’s Mick on twangy stompy closer “Long Long Way Back Home.”  The upshot, then, of all this is that Manousos’s voice is more a pastiche of familiarity than a wholly unique sound, but there’s certainly room in the music world for a Kings of Leon gone madly pop-melodic, which is the general gist.
Grade: A- [street date: 4/6/10]

Toadies, Feeler (Kirtland Records)
2nd album in 2 years from the Fort Worth post-grunge band who invented the radio hit “Possum Kingdom” with its “do you wanna die” chorus (now an integral cog of Guitar Hero II).  The band was broken up for several years when bassist Lisa Umbarger went off to raise dogs and get all Dali Lama, not that one could blame her after they suffered the humiliation of Interscope Records telling them that a lot of the material from the original 2001-era Feeler sessions sucked.  That’s probably more than you need to know to enjoy this LP, but it’s helpful background being that there’s very little about this album that would persuade one to think of it as something that wouldn’t have worked back in 2001 as a typical edgily hip Interscope product.  There’s a lot of commercial post-punkiness here, plenty that’s ear-grabby but not annoying (a Tool-inspired break on “Suck Magic,” Soundgarden-like roaring on “Joey Let’s Go”).  It’s a different world, though, post-9/11, and because of that one could almost see this as – I dunno, quaint.  Good hard bar-rock (with a quirky enough edge, yadda yadda) is over, but don’t let that stop you from picking this up.
Grade: B+ [street date: 8/17/10]

Remaindermen, Remaindermen (Nowhere Records)
Remaindermen’s rather nice collection of college-radio grooves – some of which border on prog, if you want to get pedantic – would have resonated with me a lot more if they’d left “White Lodge” off this EP, only because I believe that a ban on both xylophone and cello is way overdue in “alternative” rock.  That said, this Chicago fivesome (who used to be called Trio In Stereo) could be hugely appealing to wine-gulping cube-droids who look to Canada for their rebellion – though touted as a psychedelic band, Remaindermen’s softly tweeing French Kicks-style vocals evoke Win Butler in a romantic mood, and there are quasi-U2 grooves that Broken Social Scene wouldn’t throw out of bed.  Regardless, there’s really no filler here (which is, yes, an essential characteristic of EPs), and if pressed I’d obviously sum this up as French Kicks after a Minus The Bear bender.
Grade: B [street date: 4/6/10]

The Russians, Crashing the Party (Moontower Recordings)
One (and the most common) way to categorize the output of Boston-area jack-of-all-tradesman Scott Janovitz is Beatles meets Flaming Lips.  I’m not sure Janovitz is real big into Flaming Lips, though; he and his band (actually a series of 15 different guest spots from locals who’ve played with the likes of The Figgs and Juliana Hatfield) make quasi-pop in a broad but always agreeable palette of pastels, so although their budget is probably markedly smaller, this belongs in the gray area of psychedelic-ambient AOR-bubblegum inhabited by Here We Go Magic and Winston Giles (am I still the only human on earth who knows about Winston Giles?).  The bolded bullet on Janovitz’ resume is a stint in Graham Parker’s band, but, just so you know, there’s no shuffley bar-rock here, just pop vibe that can get a little Gang of Four on the hard edge but mainly cloisters in a no-nonsense Brit-pop dream world adorned with ambient-techno.  Opener “The Record’s Over” channels George Harrison, and then you’re in territory pioneered by Norman Greenbaum (“Not So Loud,” which would have been a more apropos title for the album, come to think of it), and then it’s Oasis on Rohypnol for “Talking to Yourself.”  The appeal and potential is obvious, but this angle just hasn’t clicked with John Q. Public thus far (perhaps because it speaks so succinctly to genuine artistic freedom, that old menace).
Grade: B [street date: 7/13/10]

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Outraged ranting, indie label release news and spaghetti sauce recipes are always welcome.  Email esaeger@cyberontix.com

THE EMOTRON OFFER “DRINK A BEER FOR ME” MP3

The aforementioned album is entitled “Vampire Lunch Lady Tits,” and is due to drop August 10th , 2010 on Los Angeles-based electro label Slanty Shanty Records.

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PENNY HILL OFFERS “SALEM” MP3

After years of crafting her songs in secret she quickly caught the attention of some of Norman, Oklahoma’s best musicians when she began to play out in 2007. Having her pick of local talent gives Penny enormous versatility on the stage and in the studio. 

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MEET THE MUSICIANS: SLANT

I am ashamed to admit that before sitting with Munir to do this interview, I actually had no idea why Slant was even called Slant. For an ace journalist, that’s pretty unacceptable. Promising to keep my embarrassing secret, Slant guitarist Munir explained it to me. “If you look up the definition, it’s to view something in a different way, in a different direction, in a different interpretation. So music is interpreted in millions of different ways. It’s basically our interpretation of music…kind of like our slant on things.”

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KELDINE HULL PRESENTS: BEYOND THE VELVET ROPE

Talented musicians come a dime a dozen. They’re the soundtrack to every dive bar and street corner, cruise ship and four star hotel across the continental US.

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SLANTY SHANTY RECORDS PRESENTS COKE RATS / MP3

Pissed off, weird and obsessed with serial killers and fantasy movies since childhood, bored Chicagoan Timothy Tsurutani has found a suitable outlet for his girlish falsetto, cannibalistic savagery and his obsession with noise breakouts in COKE RATS.

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LIARS “SCISSOR” FREE DOWNLOAD

Scissor, the first track from Liars’ eagerly awaited fifth studio album, Sisterworld, will be available online at the band’s site, www.thesisterworld.com from today.

Says Angus Andrew of the track: “The song is built from some strange vocal interactions I was having with myself. It’s a description of someone realizing their own inadequacies.”

Album tracklisting
Scissor
No Barrier Fun
Here Comes All The People
Drip
Scarecrows On A Killer Slant
I Still Can See An Outside World
Proud Evolution
Drop Dead
The Overachievers
Goodnight Everything
Too Much, Too Much

RANDOM STABBINGS & ARTLESS CRITIQUE, DECEMBER 2009

The Swimmers, People Are Soft (Mad Dragon Records)
There was a metallish, hard-rock release on Mad Dragon Records a few years ago that had the most slovenly album art I’d ever seen and really bad music to match – I forget who they were, but they left a taste in my mouth that didn’t compel me to race to the stereo when their succeeding releases showed up.
But Mad Dragon is a co-op from Drexel University; expectations should be low.  And thus met, here, by a definitively vanilla flavor of Strokes vs Interpol vs Gang of Four.  All is not utterly hopeless, though: the production is decent enough (except for, gack, a purposefully cheesebag, poorly rendered LCD Soundsystem-ish segue in “What Is the World Coming To” that’s really unnecessary – we get it, you guys have listened to crummy college rock in your lifetimes), and in fact “Drug Party” is the sort of noise-rock no-wave nobody should hate if they have a rock n roll bone in their body.  Some 88-patterned metrosexual nu-mod Kinks-mania (“Nervous Wreck”) sews up the clumsy but sociologically correct scattershottedness of it all.
Grade: B- [street date 11/3/09]

Brim Liski, Brim Liski (EP) (Latenight Weeknight Records)
Side project from Colorado’s Shoreline Dream, who are slowly developing a rep as a player within the Sigur Ros sphere of similitude.  What this spells is carte blanche for the trio to drown electronics and bright shoegaze guitars in slowness and some degree of gloom, though, in this instance, not to the point of setting the listener to fits of impatient violence against defenseless plastic disks.  There’s a navel-gazing Colin Newman angle to much of this, meaning that it could have worked during the more reflective slices of Buffalo Bill’s home life in Silence of the Lambs, but the band is aware of this whole new millennium thingamajig being out there, thus we get “All the Things,” Daft Punk redrawn for Martians.  Since this is an EP, an uncomfortable amount of remixes shows up, knocking the legs out from under spotlight track “Fight” and its drawling pair of shimmer-guitar arpeggios.  But that’s a common lesson learned in DIY – Latenight Weeknight is their, and Shoreline Dream’s, own label — and if you’re looking, meanwhile, for next-generation super-mope, you’ll want this.
Grade: B+ [street date 11/10/09]

Frankie Knuckles, Motivation Too (Nervous Records)
Widely regarded as the Godfather of House for being one of the pivot men at Chicago’s Warehouse at the dawn of the genre, Knuckles, now 55, here uncorks his second uninterrupted flow of “deep house” (ie disco by any other name) punctuated with pump-up you-can-do-it speeches from divas and would-be preachers.  Scary idea to anyone who cringes at the thought of 70s soul still having a place in the world, but these are probably the most capable hands available for this kind of thing.  None of it’s his own work, but that’s the only real-world complaint I can come up with, for the music itself does carry a big, danceable, motivational stick.  The warmup is “Faith,” a low-key pair of chords over which Dr. Gary Gray gently proselytizes from a Tony Robbins soapbox, this prior to Big Brooklyn Red dishing the irresistibly floor-filling “He Moves” with its monster Temptations-on-steroids chorus.  Michelle Weeks’ “A Purpose” puts the kibosh on any fun longtime-disco-haters are having, but a nicely modern rub of Jon Cutler’s “One” is worth the slog.
Grade: B [street date 10/20/09]

Janus, Red Right Return (Realid Records/Warner)
You’ve heard things like this before – emo-tinged AOR as radio-humping nu-metal – but doubtless with not quite this much backing up the noise.  There are hooks, yes, from the 70s AM radio-fashioned chorus of “Six Letters Sent” to the soaring angst-therapy in “The Nerve,” but here’s something where the PR promises actually back up all the exclamation points:  it’s truly an album-album, perhaps with some sort of concept in mind but not as inaccessibly self-indulgent as Tool’s Aenima, if you can dig that.  These Chicagoans do ebb and flow, but never take their eye off the reason regular plebs buy albums in the first place.  There’s also a good feel for what works in a particular song – the cello in “Maybe It’s You” helps things rather than making a pompous, too-obvious guest-shot out of itself.
Grade: A- [street date 9/22/09]

Matthew Ryan, Dear Lover (IPO Recordings)
In the past, Pennsylvanian Matthew Ryan, who used to do everything unplugged, could have been mistaken for Tom Waits after drinking Lindsay Lohan under the table, and the story would have ended there; he’s nearly 40 now, and if he were content being a sub-headliner at folkie fests there would have been no reason to switch gears.  But this is a very notable release, similar to a dizzy, nearly retired pitcher going out and throwing a no-hitter relative to these experiments in sound, a lot of them electronic, all of them demanding attention and not simply hoping someone looks up from their magazine at Barnes & Noble.  This funny-looking Gollum-faced dude has fortified his unplugged guitar with some Nintendo ambience, not too glitchy at all, more like late 90s nonsense like Air, Third Eye Foundation and Flowchart, that sort.  Esoteric, off-putting crap like that usually comes with a dazed sounding chick singer or whatnot, so Ryan’s stock automatically goes up a few points just for having his ruined throat do the singing.  The tunes are more hypnotic than catchy, this owing to an antiphonal style that pauses for effect after every line, but it’s easy stuff in which to lose oneself, in turn owing to his years of experience thinking folk-rock.  A huge surprise that may deservedly wind up on some year-end best-ofs in high places.
Grade: A [street date 10/27/09]

James Moody, Moody 4A (IPO Recordings)
Jazz sax-player Moody is a name recognizable to your regular Joe Wine-Taster, and perhaps for you as it does for me, for whatever reason, his name has always conjured a younger guy, not one of those old super-legends who’s either in the grave or has one foot in it.  But holy crow, man, he’s 84, and has accumulated a bit of legend of his own, having been a part of Dizzy Gillespie’s unit (he’s with the Dizzy All Stars nowadays) and put out a set of records, as legends tend to do, on Prestige.  In this quartet-setting collection of jazz standards, we’re asked to pay some attention to pianist Kenny Barron, considered one of the best pianists in the world, but it’s Moody’s genial, talkative sax that seems perpetually spotlighted.  No real burning to speak of; this is low-key high-class dinnertime stuff, such as Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight” and Sammy Fain’s “Secret Love,” the latter segmented with “blues march” military snare.  Barron’s comparatively uptempo “Voyage” also gets a run-through.
Grade: A [street date 8/25/09]

Pelican, What We All Come to Need (Southern Lord Records)
Never pictured myself concurring with Pitchfork.com (and let’s just be clear that there’s nothing wrong with breathless, overblown rock journalism per se, so you shouldn’t hate Pitchfork just because they use big words – you can certainly hate them for attributing superpowers to regular-Joe slacker bands, but go ahead and try writing 1200-word CD reviews yourself and see how whacky you end up looking.  It’s the quantity, not the quality, with those guys, so blame the zine’s insane slave-driving editor), but they nailed it an album or two ago when it comes to Pelican:  their drummer is a huge failure.  Such a sad thing, because for this album the guitarists have come up with some riffs that’d compete with just about any band for sheer mid-tempo-doom brutality.  Their trip is a singer-less one, though, and in order to make people forget that their competition, the drummer-led Don Caballero, is around also making singer-less albums, you need someone a smidge more interesting than a cut-rate Tommy Lee keeping boring, workaday time on a loose hi-hat.  These guys are just never gonna get it, and that’s such a shame – if they could find a singer like the guy from Crowbar it’d be a whole new ballgame.
Grade: B- [street date 10/26/09]

Bad Lieutenant, Never Cry Another Tear (Triple Echo Records)
If you’d ever thought there was something about New Order frontman Bernard Sumner that bespoke James Taylor or a cuckolded Michael Stipe, there was evidence to be found here and there, but this project does have a knack for spotlighting the pure pop element of which he’s capable.  Matter of fact, until the familiar highwire bass line shows up 3 minutes into second track “Twist of Fate,” it may as well be a Regis & Kelly-approved REM album.  That’s not a bad thing at all if you ever made out to the island-vacation patter of “Love Less” from New Order’s Technique – and what citified 80s survivor didn’t – a tune that now has a not-horribly-distant grand-nephew in “Summer Days,” a tune done up with a lot of intimate, historically correct 80s touches and an extended-length beach-time guitar solo.  Speaking of REM, again, distorted cowboy-alt guitar suits the band adequately enough in “This is Home,” and it’s about there where you’re hoping for something goosebump-raising along the lines of “All the Way.”  “Poisonous Intent” comes close, but the intent here is toe-tapper piffle for retired crook-leggers, so it’s ixnay on any really excitable stuff.
Grade: A [street date 10/13/09]

Mem, Archaea (self-released)
Success is elusive for any band doing things on their own label, and that’s probably the only reason you haven’t heard of this Brooklyn band.  Configured similarly to a less hiphop-acknowledging Pendulum, they obviously want a piece of the Killers’ pie, if from the side more flush with techno, and they’ve also got their fingers in things Muse, Radiohead and Coldplay – their little Minus The Bear-sized fist is shaking at an awful big world.  Such is the tale of this LP’s tape: some great piano shimmer, some prog runs, haunting 4-chord filibusters, and you know, what the hell, why not some Chris Brown vocodered plastic-soul.  The question ultimately becomes one of whether or not one of the aforementioned big fish would allow any of these songs on an album, and the answer – despite the chump-change price Archaea can be had at from Amazon – is absofrickinlutely.  “The Trenches” has a stunningly mature synth fractal, the type of sound you’d only ever hear on a Jolie/Cruise/Clooney soundtrack, and you could easily picture Coldplay and The Killers getting into a bidding war over “I Just Can’t” for B-side use.  And this is a debut LP?  Big things to come if they can keep this ship afloat through the inevitable major-label horrors ahead. 
Grade: A- [street date 3/17/09]

Kristeenyoung, Music for Strippers, Hookers, and the Odd On-Looker (self-released)
St. Louis-raised gothie-pinup Kristeen Young bangs her piano into smithereens for the sixth time, scrawling a nuance-less Dresden Dolls across her long-held girl-keys/boy-drums setup.  There are two voices to her, one being a shakily perturbed Ani DiFranco/Tori Amos for dummies, the other her everyday singing voice, the basics of which you’ve heard before from any townie girl able to pull off Pat Benatar karaoke.  The problem is verisimilitude of the songwriting; the first 2 songs are so identical as to seem like one big huff-puff nyeah-nyeah-bouncing tantrum that’s already gone on for one too many verses resurfacing in an unwanted reprise – the two-tone nyeah-nyeah thing is a Where’s Waldo throughout the whole album.  Thus put off, it’s hard for jerks like me to concentrate  on the more thoughtful/useful/tolerable bits; it’s very likely that the track order screwed her up, which happens, and doesn’t detract from the clown-shoes bombast of “Everybody Wants Me To Cry,” an epic slant on paranoia.  And whatever, TV-psycho-movie background cacophony always has a place in punk gestalt.
Grade: B [street date 10/13/09]

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Outraged ranting, indie label release news and spaghetti sauce recipes are always welcome.  Email esaeger@cyberontix.com

Language Arts, Where Were You In The Wild

Where Were You In The Wild, the debut LP from Vancouver’s Language Arts is a record made for the music geeks. No, not because it presents a certain bookish aesthetic. But because this eleven-track masterpiece contains some of the most original and inventive music available for blogging purposes. Sadly, it’s only those who are constantly on the hunt for fresh sounds which will appreciate this (Truly) genre-defying bliss.

Yes, the world of new music is a wild one. It’s very often occupied by buzz bands whose shelf life lasts as long enough for bloggers to soak it up and just as quickly comment on it, before a new rose is picked from the wild. While Language Arts might have found themselves victim to this fate, the slant that these two Vancouverites take on acoustic twee-pop is just too blatantly charming to ignore. It hardly matters if “Twee” is a cool or legit term anymore; Where Were You In The Wild breaks conventional indie-pop rules as it hops gracefully from track to track with the poise of a wild rabbit and the curiousity of a newborn baby.

Lead singer Kristen Cudmore takes some serious cues from Kimya Dawson (Of Juno fame) when it comes to her vocal stylings. But her range is exemplified in whimsical fashion on “Lighthouse,” in which she howls over classical sounding acoustic guitars. Cudmore’s lyrics are never heady, but certainly beg a few listens. After all, often it takes a genius to write so much by saying so little.

“If I could write songs all night like Randy Newman, I would.”

The acoustic bent on these tracks is omnipresent, but each track evolves in such a manner that the acoustics become more sweeping than simply acting as a crutch. The plaintive acoustic guitar switches gears so often on “Coughdrop” that it borders on the hypnotic. The thing is, only a fool wouldn’t agree to get hypnotized here. Cudmore’s brash yet delightful observations on the world around here (And the steadfast manner in which she delivers these observations) employ a serious hip-hop mentality, while the three ubiquitous instruments, namely classical guitars, banjos and violins give Where Were You In the Wild highlight the band’s folk roots.

Daring and original, Where Were You In The Wild is a record so timely that it may very well eclipse its peers and outlast the very blogs that gave Language Arts credence.

By Joshua Kloke

Rating:

Slant, Slant

If Tool and Jimi Hendrix had some kind of post mortem love child, it would be Slant. And if Tool, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, and Nirvana could create a celestial collaboration, it would be Slant’s latest album, self titled “Slant”.

“Slant” takes you on an epic journey of intricately skilled drum solos, nostalgic guitar riffs, and soul wrenching vocals. With effortless transitions, each song simply glides into the next until you’ve reached the last track and are left thirsty for more. “Slant” is more than an album. It’s a carefully crafted musical expression of life, death, and everything in between.

Slant- comprised of lead singer Fahim, Ilya on bass, Munir on guitar, and Andrew on the drums- has all the makings of a talent durable enough to stand the test of time. Until you’ve done your ears the favor of buying their album, here’s a break down of my personal top five picks.

Track 2: Lying and Bleeding
A suspenseful introduction and smooth finish play out against the backdrop of fascinating guitar riffs, addictive melody, and unpredictable tempo changes.

Track 3: All I’m Good For
The pure emotion and intensity in Fahim’s voice is piercingly clear, reaching out and literally grabbing your soul, all the while giving you the impression that his boundless vocals could take you anywhere.

Track 9: Through It All
The chorus, both catchy and melodic, will stay in your head- but I doubt you’ll mind. A bold statement, I know, but it will make a fan out of anyone fortunate enough to listen.

Track 10: Boiling Pot
A masterful instrumental and blend of classic rock wrapped in a haunting melody and tied with an intriguing effects bow.

Track 16: Beautiful Angel
Written in memory of lead singer Fahim’s cousin, this song speaks out to anyone who has ever lost someone with a truthful clarity. The pain and anger at losing someone you love is painfully expressed through honest lyrics and a pure melody.

For your one stop shop on everything Slant, go to:
www.myspace.com/slantmusic
www.slantmusic.net

Review By: Keldine Hull

Rating:

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