Need You Now

Australian indie band Cut Copy are easily one of my favorite groups that have come out within the last decade. Their songs sound like sonic bliss--at the same time futuristic and nostalgic, capturing the laissez-faire feeling of summers off from school when all you have to do is cruise around with friends and laugh at life. Hello Winter, they’re back!!!

Zonoscope opens with a blast of woozy ecstasy in the form of "Need You Now", the sort of track where you don't even realize how much tension the group has built up until they release it, and ends with "Sun God", a marathon 15-minute groove that slowly morphs into a tranced-out Giorgio Moroder thud. In between those two tracks, Cut Copy build a long-form piece of work that moves between genres and ideas and moods without ever sacrificing its dancefloor momentum.

Compared to the last two albums, Zonoscope has precious little guitar crunch, which makes it hard to even call Cut Copy a dance-rock band anymore. And that's for the best-- not just because that combination seems like a less thrilling prospect in 2011 than perhaps it once did, but also because Cut Copy have the architecture of dance music down perfectly and the confidence to execute the genre's moves with absolute precision. Even in the dead of winter, Zonoscope does its job beautifully. Imagine how it'll sound when you don't have to layer up to go outside.

Since they’re all great songs, why not start at the top of the album with “Need You Now”?



Get your own copy of Zonoscope here.

Still New

With a name like Smith Westerns and an album title called "Dye It Blonde", I thought this would be a band that I would dislike. Yet, lo and behold, I find a good pop sound and melodies that hit you the first time as if they were songs you already knew irresistable. I got sucked in by the midtempo ballads with singalong choruses, pounding piano, and swooping organ, and a loose, frayed-around-the-edges, feel. The production by Chris Coady plays up the strengths of the band like the boyish lead vocals, the super hooky choruses, and the great guitar work. Everything blends together perfectly without sounding glossy or overcooked, and the guitar tone is especially nice, totally overdriven but super compressed with plenty of punch. Of course a sound without songs is like a pretty homebaked cake that tastes like Dolly Madison, and the band deliver a batch of them here that make the total package quite tasty. The rockers like "Weekend," "Dance Away," and "Imagine, Pt.3" have a pleasing swagger, the midtempo tracks (like "Fallen in Love" and "End of the Night") bounce along happily, and the ballads have all kinds of ragged soul. Sounding both end-of-the-night epic and heartbreakingly sad, these songs provide some depth that the first record didn’t have.

For me, much of the album is reminiscent of Electric Light Orchestra without the strings. Dye It Blonde may be a step away from the lo-fi bedroom sound toward the mainstream, but it’s a small step, and they retain more than enough of the songcraft and attitude to keep things interesting. Anyone who liked the debut and was filled with apprehension about what would happen next will be pleasantly surprised, and might even end up liking this record more.

Take a listen to "Still New", a song so sweet that it makes me involuntarily sway and feel that inner happy.


Get your own copy of Dye It Blonde here.

Pow Pow

LCD Soundsystem. What more can I say? The creative genius of James Murphy takes us into the studio, with London Sessions, perhaps an album resulting from extensive touring in 2010, thus honing their live sound into a single studio session. The track listing reads like a greatest hits compilation and it would have been quite easy to produce just that, regurgitating the same versions of the songs we have come to love. But no, this album is even more playful, funky, and rambunctious than usual, with more cowbell!

When you put Murphy’s unusually elastic and inspired vocals, which range from insistent to hilarious, on top of the band’s sound, you’ve got the 2000s equivalent of Talking Heads when they expanded the group and became a huge force of oddball funk. It’s a more intense and synthesized version, and Murphy is no David Byrne (since he’s more likely to be in a dirty T-shirt than a big suit), but this wouldn’t work half as well if he were. His hopped-up hipster everyman with a bruised heart style is perfect for the band’s small-club intensity, and the album proves that the streamlined sound can translate into more than machine like bleeps and drum machine loops; it’s a vital addition to their already near-perfect catalog.

Take a listen to Pow Pow, a stand out track featuring Murphy's sense of humour with the lyrical stylingists and a penchant for getting funky!!


Get your own copy of LCD Soundsystem's London Sessionshttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif here.

A Flat Tent by WIRE

It should be of absolutely no surprise that the pick of the week for me is Wire's Red Barked Tree. As an ardent fan of this British group that has been around since the mid-Seventies, any time they put out an album, it's a cause for celebration. They have always been ahead of their time; their first three albums predicted the gradual turning of punk into synth pop, their second “electro-rock” phase predated dream-pop, and the third generation of their sound in the 2000's set the stage for the post-punk sound we are hearing being revitalized. It is also interesting to see that their peers, Gang of Four and Public Image Limited, have also come out of hiding with albums in 2011.

If a second Wire reunion was inevitable, its outcome has been refreshingly less predictable: Not only has the band avoided the easy nostalgia trend of playing its classic albums live in their entirety, Wire Mk III have proven to be more prolific and long-lasting than the band's two storied previous phases put together. Sure, founding guitarist Bruce Gilbert checked out of the current campaign back in 2004, but the band's momentum has continued apace. And there's no reason to suggest this won't continue: The new Red Barked Tree shows the band's vigor, melodic prowess, and capacity to surprise remain undiminished.

That album title is the first brow-raiser: Amid a discography filled with cryptic names (154, A Bell Is a Cup... Until It Is Struck, Object 47), Red Barked Tree presents a disarmingly simple image that's reflected in the album's surprisingly relaxed, pastoral turns (acoustic guitars on three songs) and a lyrical framework addressing the emotional and environmental costs of modernity run amok. Red Barked Tree is a shrewdly sequenced album, and it has to be, given that its impulsive stylistic shifts-- from mechanized thrash to psychedelic folk to nervy power-pop-- mirror the "age of fragmentation" that Colin Newman is railing against. But its 11 songs are more or less positioned along a logical arc, where a sense of ominous unease gives way to violent release before simmering into a peaceful comedown.

Take a listen to "A Flat Tent", one of the less obvious singles that people are writing about here. It exemplifies the current Wire sound!


Get your own copy of Red Barked Tree here.

Age Class by Weekend

While a lot of Bay Area bands tend to embrace the sunny, psychedelic side of their city's sound, San Francisco’s Weekend have seemingly chosen to embrace their hometown’s foggier side. Formed in 2009 by Shawn Durkan (bass/vocals), Kevin Johnson (guitar), and Abe Pedroza (drums), Weekend quickly made a name for themselves with their post-punk shoved through a shoegaze filter sound. The trio’s pounding bass'n'drum rhythms lay the groundwork for Johnson’s wall of reverb-drenched guitar noise, giving the songs a dark, subterranean feeling. The whole package is tied together by Durkan’s murky vocals, which feel both distant and warm, like hearing a My Bloody Valentine song on a fading radio station, or hanging out with at the Hacienda with Factory Records' bands. Sports is their debut album. Take a walk on the wild side, with the track "Age Class."

Listen here.

Get your own copy of Weekend Sports here.

Heaven's on Fire

The Radio Dept. were one of the more successful shoegaze-influenced indie rock bands to come out of Sweden in the early 2000s, making waves among indie aficionados on the strength of their critically acclaimed first release, Lesser Matters. Their latest, Clinging to a Scheme, continues the shoegazing and dream-pop tendencies of the group. They have been described as a combination of Saint Etienne and Jesus and Mary Chain. Their short song structure gets right to the point and sucks you in. Take a listen to Heaven's on Fire here.


Get your own copy of Radio Dept's Clinging to a Scheme here.

Nerve Salad

Producers/remixers James Ford and James Shaw formed Simian Mobile Disco in 2005, following their departure from the experimental electronic rock band Simian.

Delicacies, SMD’s third album, centers around tech-house instrumentals based around slow builds, minimal melodies, and wide-open, between-beat negative spaces as well as a second disc of the tracks mixed together. The tracks are all named after foods, but don't expect any sensual material. Delicacies is a hard-hitting nine-tracker of pounding club cuts, most of them over eight minutes long. Unlike the past two albums, they ditched vocals altogether here, creating an album that caters less to a pop dance music audience and more towards those who like to dance at non-mainstream clubs or for dance music aficionados and makers. Yet like great dance producers from Kraftwerk to Kompakt, they know how to balance innovative sounds with simple, feet-tugging beats. Lacking the retro flair of 2007's Attack Decay Sustain Release or the parade of guest features on 2009's Temporary Pleasure, Delicacies is still a delicious treat for dance fans.

Try my favorite track, “Nerve Salad” here.



Get your own copy of Simian Mobile Disco's Delicacies here.