album reviews

February 22, 2012

Various Artists

Tally Ho!: Flying Nun’s Greatest Bits Flying Nun

In the Eighties and early Nineties, bands on Flying Nun Records made tiny, sheep-clogged New Zealand seem like indie-rock's last wild frontier -- an aboriginal paradise where post-Velvet Underground guitar rhapsody was pursued for its own transporting sake, untouched by irony or careerism. This anniversary retrospective samples thirty years of the label's top kiwi-pop: zoned-out strum mania from the Bats and Clean, ornery skronk from the Dead C and Gordons, bedroom clatterings from ... | More »

Air

Le Voyage Dans La Lune Virgin

Between Daft Punk's astronaut gear and Air's analog synth-driven Moon Safari, French electronic musicians have historically shown great nostalgia towards the old space age. Continuing the trend is this soundtrack to a marvelously restored color version of George Melies' pioneering 1902 film about space travel (recently re-canonized in Martin Scorcese’s Hugo). At 31 minutes, this set is double the film's length, so alongside score instrumentals like the twitchy trip-h... | More »

February 21, 2012

Sleigh Bells

Reign of Terror Mom & Pop

Can an industrial-strength guitar-noise duo blow up into the most pelican-fly rock band around? Of course it can, if it's Sleigh Bells. Guitarist Derek Miller and vocalist Alexis Krauss are the kind of music geeks who had their formative-crush experiences soundtracked to My Bloody Valentine and Slayer records. Sleigh Bells scored with their 2010 debut, Treats, but Reign of Terror is even noisier, funnier and smuttier. They bring a proudly aggressive sass to all the heavily treated guitar... | More »

Sinead O'Connor

How About I Be Me (and You Be You)? One Little Indian

"I bleed the blood of Jesus over you," declares Sinéad O'Connor on "Take Off Your Shoes," a gospel-rock indictment targeting the recent Catholic Church child-abuse scandals. From a singer who tore up the pope's photo on Saturday Night Live and who tends to get filed under "bat-shit crazy," the viscera isn't surprising. What may be is the empathy, wit and beauty on this focused LP. The naughty reggae-folk "4th and Vine" channels the Dixie Cups' "Going to the Chapel,"... | More »

The Chieftains

Voice of Ages Hear/Concord

The Chieftains have collaborated with everyone from Ziggy Marley to Madonna, but this 50th-anniversary album is the Celtic traditionalists' first-ever foray into indie rock. The Decemberists' Colin Meloy spins a springy version of Bob Dylan's "When the Ship Comes In," Bon Iver's Justin Vernon croons a ghostly murder ballad, and alt-country bands like Punch Brothers reel 'n' jig it up nicely. Indie rock's cult of schlubby singing doesn't always merge wit... | More »

The Move

Live at the Fillmore 1969 Right Recordings

This is exciting rock archaeology: two CDs of the best British band most Yanks never heard in the Sixties, caught at a heavy-psychedelia peak on its only U.S. tour. The Move were almost too cool for America, a U.K.-hit-single machine of mod-squad assault, acid-pop eccentricity and, in singer Carl Wayne, white-soul force. These October '69 shows combine guitarist-composer Roy Wood's ingenious takes on madness – "I Can Hear the Grass Grow," "Cherry Blossom Clinic (Revisited)" &n... | More »

February 17, 2012

Prinzhorn Dance School

Clay Class DFA

"We're happy in pieces/Happy in bits," sing Suzi Horn and Tobin Prinz of the Portsmouth, England duo Prinzhorn Dance School. They might be talking about their emotions; they're definitely describing their music. Prinzhorn's second album is all about pieces and bits – fragments of rhythm and melody, a bassline chunk here, a snare drum shard there – arranged and rearranged like a jigsaw puzzle. When the pieces slot together, the result is ingeniously minimalist art-po... | More »

February 15, 2012

Elle Varner

Conversational Lush Self Released

R&B newcomer Elle Varner breezed through last summer with the minor hit "Only Wanna Give It To You," a sprightly ode to cute boys and new shoes. She retains its bright pink spirit on this free mixtape, with producers J.U.S.T.I.C.E League and Pop & Oak twisting grandiose instrumentation and crispy drum tracks into a fresh spin on classic hip-hop soul. Varner is blessed with a raw, powerful voice that blends Alicia Keys' wails and Faith Evans' coo... | More »

February 14, 2012

Jessie Baylin

Little Spark Blonde Rat

"I'm sipping on your hidden stash of whiskey/A little drunker than you know," Jessie Baylin confesses with apt blurred enunciation in "Hurry Hurry." Actually, nothing moves fast in the music or the relationships on her third album. Baylin examines faltering affairs and resigns herself to a lot of waiting in a spacey kind of Dixie soul, like Portishead with a girlish Dusty Springfield at the mic. The effect, in "Joy Is Suspicious" and the title song, is both seductive and distant, as if s... | More »

Gotye

Making Mirrors Samples 'N' Seconds/Fairfax/Universal Republic

Gotye is a Belgian-born Australian with a Portuguese-looking stage name that he pronounces like a Frenchman ("Gauthier"). That's just the beginning of the cosmopolitanism on his bracing U.S. debut. Gotye crams in a little bit of everything: Turkish drums, West African thumb pianos, a bass line constructed from samples of an instrument called the Winton Musical Fence. (It's an actual fence in the Australian outback.) He pours these sounds into songs that run from buzzy garage funk to... | More »