Every now and then the title of an album is a perfect embodiment of the music found within. Los Campesinos! are dead right calling their album Hold on Now, Youngster…, because from the first track on, the album is a thrilling madcap whirlwind of sound, words, and voices that by the end leaves you feeling like you’ve been engulfed in an indie pop-driven hurricane. The members of the Welsh seven-piece are hyper-literate, hilarious, and know their way around a hook as they pile through the 11 songs on the album like they are on a breakaway heading for the goal. Words tumble out in jumbles, the lead voices (Gareth with his high-pitched whine, Aleksandra with her sweet kid tones) trade off lines and sass each other, and the instruments (guitars, bells, keys, violins) whip up a joyful mess, while the drums try mightily to pin it all down. Bands with less grasp on dynamics and timing and a less sympathetic producer than Broken Social Scene’s producer Dave Newfeld might have ended up with a real mess of a record on their hands. Instead, Los Campesinos! have a ringing success here: a combination of punk rock energy, indie pop wit and emotion, indie rock experimentation, and the raw feel of classic garage bands throughout the ages.

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Tone Loc will play two Detroit bars that were scammed by someone pretending to be Loc’s manager. [NME.com]

R.I.P., Sean LeVert. [WKYC.com]

Mos Def will portray Chuck Berry in the Chess Records film Cadillac Records, joining a cast that includes Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters, Beyonce as Etta James and Cedric the Entertainer as Willie Dixon. [Billboard.com]

Liz Phair signs to Dave Matthews’ ATO imprint, interviews John Cusack, Gerard Cosloy and members of Urge Overkill for the 15th anniversary edition (yikes!) of Exile in Guyville [Pitchforkmedia.com]

The sequel to the love-it-or-loathe it Juno soundtrack hits iTunes on April 8. [Idolator]

Chris Cornell is a fan of David Cook’s cover of his cover of “Billie Jean.” [Entertainment Weekly]

Attack of the One-Man Bands is exactly that, 58 different one-man bands spread over two discs of raw, crude and fascinatingly brilliant blasts of sonic madness, most of it so ragged and urgent that it makes vintage punk sound like Air Supply. So unhinged that it’s probably a serious health risk, this set delivers cut after cut of glorious bedlam with all the subtlety of an amplified jackhammer set loose in a glass house, and anyone sane should probably hate it, but like a child’s tantrum, it’s impossible to ignore, and like the child that throws that tantrum, it’s impossible not to love. Each of these one-man bands is currently active, and while most are decidedly lo-fi, even the ones who wandered into real studios seem to treat them like giant boom boxes, creating a clatter and din that shoves the needle into the red from note one. While a good deal of what is here is vicious punk rockabilly like Phillip Roebuck’s crude, spare and dangerously kinetic “Jackass Blues” or Pete Yorko & the One Man Music Band’s “Like Me” assault, some of it, like Royer’s One-Man Band’s version of the fiddle classic “Train on the Island” or 1Man Banjo’s deconstruction of “Mole in the Ground” (simply called “Mole” here), is seriously bent and skewed bluegrass mountain music. Train Wreck Washington’s banjo piece called “Walked All Night” sounds like an old wax cylinder field recording, and feels like it was recorded a hundred years ago. Uncle Butcher’s “No Judge No Trial” is as raw and frightening as a running chain saw thrown on a feather bed — chickens flying everywhere, as they say. Then there’s The Amazing Elephant Man’s primal “Can’t Go Outside,” which is literally a child’s frustrated rant given rhythm and electricity. Scary, unsettling, fascinating, delightful, vital, urgent and insistent, these 58 tracks are somehow — for all their abrasiveness — oddly comforting. Just like that one vigilant dog barking away relentlessly down the street late at night, it means someone is watching after all, and they ain’t gonna keep quiet about it, even if the rest of the world is trying its best to sleep.

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Anybody who has followed Jack White’s online screeds and offstage brawls knows that the White Stripes mastermind can tend to get a little, well, defensive when he’s challenged (and sometimes even when he’s not), but this trait hasn’t always surfaced on record – at least not in the way he and his merry band of Raconteurs do on their second album, Consolers of the Lonely. At the very least, this bubbling blend of bizarro blues, rustic progressive rock, fractured pop and bludgeoning guitars is a finger in the eye to anyone that dared call the band a mere power-pop trifle, proof that the Raconteurs are a rock & roll band, but it’s not just the sound of the record that’s defiant. There’s the very nature of the album’s release, how it was announced to the world a week before its release when it then appeared in all format in all retail outfits simultaneously, there’s the obstinately olde-fashioned look of the artwork, how the group is decked out like minstrels at a turn-of-the century carnival, or at least out of Dylan’s Masked And Anonymous. Most of all, there’s the overriding sense that the Raconteurs are turning into an outlet for every passing fancy that Jack has but will not allow himself to indulge within the confines of the tightly-controlled White Stripes, whether it’s melodramatic Western operas like “The Switch and the Spur” (whose concluding bridge states “any poor souls who trespass against us…will be suffer the bite or be stung dead on sight” functions as a virtual manifesto for the band) or the slick studio trickery that makes this the biggest White-related production yet. And it’s hard to shake the feeling that this is the show of Jack White III (as he now insists on billing himself, playing right into his ongoing Third Man fetish), as that despite the even split in songwriting and producing credits between Jack and Brendan Benson, and even how they trade off lead vocals, that only White could have pushed the Raconteurs to get as stubbornly, stiffly weird as they do here. Of course, that impression is not tempered by how Brendan mimics Jack’s manic blues babble, particularly on the spitfire “Salute Your Solution” – White does follow Benson’s gentle, rounded phrasing on the elongated melodies, but that’s a subtle distinction overpowered by the force of Jack’s concepts. And this is indeed concept in plural, how cult hero Terry Reid is used as a touchstone for the band’s progressive blues-rock via a blazing cover of “Rich Kid Blues,” or how there’s an evocation of the old weird America in all the albums rambling centerpieces or how half of the record fights against pop brevity, while all of it is a deathblow against the idea that the Raconteurs are power-pop sissies. Sometimes, the group hits against that notion with a bluesy bluster, especially on the opening pair of tunes which tread a bit too closely toward Jack conventions, sometimes their attempts to stretch out are either ill-defined (”Attention,” “You Don’t Understand Me”) or collapse under their own weight (”Many Shades of Black”), but the moments that do work – and there are many – are the best music the Raconteurs have yet made. The album truly kicks into gear with the tipsy country-stomp of “Old Enough” and after that, there’s a series of remarkable moments: that absurd Morricone dust-up “The Switch and the Spur;” “Hold Up” which rages like ’70s Stones at their sleaziest; the rampaging “Five on the Five”; that splendid Reid cover that finds its heir on the steadily building “These Stones Will Shout;” and finally the closing backwoods ballad on “Carolina Drama.” These songs illustrate all the ways that Jack White’s stubborn stylization pays off – they’re quite deliberate in their conflation of the traditional and modern, yet they never sound over-thought, they kick and crackle as pure kinetic music. Broken Boy Soldiers lacked tunes like these, tunes with considerable weight, and these songs turn Consolers of the Lonely into a lop-sided, bottom-loaded album that’s better and richer than their debut.

Lots of late-2000s indie bands boast archaic and/or exotic influences, but few use them with the energy and creativity that the Dodos do on Visiter, their first officially released album. Country blues fingerpicking meets West African Ewe drumming meets metal meets folky indie pop sounds like an all-too-wacky description from a band’s MySpace page, but the Dodos turn these far-flung elements into delightfully natural-sounding music. What holds it all together is Meric Long and Logan Kroeber’s strong pop sensibilities — that’s “pop” in the sense of memorable melodies and ear-catching hooks, because the Dodos’ songs are too full of ideas to stick to a verse-chorus-verse format for very long.

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Last year while everybody was busy going wild over the Pipettes and their warmed-over take on the girl group sound of the ’60s, another band in England was effortlessly knocking their weak efforts into a cocked hat. Lucky Soul are influenced by a similar musical era but instead of slavish imitations, they pump their Northern Soul meets G-Group sound with a thrilling blast of energy and, thanks to Ali Howard’s sweet and soulful vocals, a warm emotion that’s missing from the Pipettes’ clinical approach. Lucky Soul also easily trump Duffy’s studied, over-blown and over-sung songs, give Candie Payne a run for her money and provide an indie pop alternative for anyone who’s tired of Amy Winehouse’s antics but still has an affinity for her backwards-looking, soulful style. (And though this might scare off older folks and mystify everyone else, if you close your eyes you can almost hear a Bite-era Altered Images influence, especially in Howard’s voice but also in the lushness of the arrangements.) The group’s 2007 debut album The Great Unwanted was pretty much slept on but it’s possibly the most joyful, pure-est pop album of the year.

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How well can you judge a CD by its cover? We put that question to the test by having each classical editor choose an album based solely on its cover, record his/her initial impressions and expectations, and then review the recording. Each editor’s “before” expectations are listed below; follow the links under the entries to see the “after” reviews. And now, on with the judgment!
 
 

Anthony Coleman: Lapidation
Blair Sanderson

At first blush, this CD appears to feature some kind of sparse avant-garde or ambient music, judged solely by the simple abstract art on the cover. There’s a subdued, minimalist feeling to the washed-out colors and roughly repetitive shapes, and the spiral — do you go clockwise or widdershins? — connotes an introspective approach in the music, perhaps of a meditative bent. Does a Japanese rock garden spring to mind? A Zen koan, anyone? Without knowing the work of this composer or how lapidation (i.e., the stoning of a person to death) figures into the musical style, method, or structure, one might guess that the music has some connection to pitched percussion or tuned stoneware, and hopefully not smashed crockery.

Read the review here

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Heather Phares: “At this stage in the competition,” as Simon Cowell likes to say, American Idol is all about picking off the contestants that, for one reason or another, can’t capitalize on the potential that took them to the finals. Chikezie was a prime example of this — one week, he was a genre-mashing dynamo, the next, a quiet storm balladeer, and neither persona quite clicked with the judges — so it’s not terribly surprising that he left on Wednesday night. His departure is a little disappointing, though; even if he never quite found his niche, he had a nice voice and was more appealing, in a quiet way, than some of the more loudly “charismatic” singers on the show.

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