The Fiddleback

Our good friend and dynamite art blogger, The Jealous Curator, is hosting a series of one-day art workshops held at the studios of amazing women artists. Attendees will make art and discuss creative issues while eating fancy sandwiches and sipping tea. 

Look for a Girl Crush party coming to a city near you. 

Reign of Terror, Sleigh Bells' second full-length album, begins with crowd noise and the kind of compressed electric guitar noodling reminiscent of a Def Leppard concert in the late 1980s. It is clear from this manic intro that this new record is going to be quite different from its predecessor, the frenetic and LOUD Treats (2010). That album somehow managed to be extremely abrasive and catchy at the same time without succumbing to the intentional lo-fi schtick of "shitgaze" indie rock. Compared to Treats, Reign of Terror is more polished around the edges. Fortunately, it still manages to be abrasive, but the focus of this abrasiveness has shifted from conventional electric guitar sounds and drum machines to the keyboards (or, more precisely, guitars manipulated to emulate the tones of keyboards). Also, whereas the first album focused on a strange variation of cheerleader rock—the kind where the cheerleader left the squad unexpectedly to join the color guard and date a pot dealer with a motorcycle jacket—Reign of Terror, far from its name, is almost somber. The album was purportedly composed by Sleigh Bells guitarist and primary songwriter Derek Miller after the recent deaths of two loved ones. As such, tracks like "End of the Line," "You Lost Me," and "Never Say Die" have no real analog from Treats. Similarly, singer Alexis Krauss's vocals possess more production sheen. For instance, if "Leader of the Pack" lacked Miller's signature tornado-siren lead guitar, it would not be unreasonable to imagine this being a big hit on Top 40 radio, given her breathy and calculated singing on the track. In other words, those expecting Treats II will be a little disappointed by Reign of Terror.

This is the wrong way to approach the album though. Sure, the record includes the requisite number of raging party jams of the type found on Treats, such as "True Shred Guitar," "The Comeback Kid," and "Demons," the song most representative of the earlier album. Reign in Terror, in many ways, reminds me of the transition the Yeah Yeah Yeah's made between their first album, Fever to Tell (2003), and its follow-up, Show Your Bones (2006). Many fans of the YYY's first record were initially disappointed by Show Your Bones for similar reasons. Fever to Tell and Treats both contain a manic, unrestrained sexual bravado about them that veers on being down-right dirty. Show Your Bones, on the other hand, featured more conventionally poppy songwriting structures, glossier production, and darker, more introspective lyrical material. That record, while not as good as the one before it, grew to be quite good after repeated listens, and is actually a much stronger record than its reputation suggests. Reign in Terror is also a grower. Reaching into the Def Leppard toolbox is always a dangerous move for a band of Sleigh Bells' ilk. But they are instinctive and witty enough to pull it off, especially on numbers like "Road to Hell" and "You Lost Me." One advantage the album has over Treats is that it is more developed as a song cycle. Treats is filled with wildly effective songs with no discernible thematic unity. Reign in Terror has emotional ebbs and flows, sonically replicating the structure of a classic novel (introduction, climax, denouement). Side One contains the anthemic numbers. Side Two begins with most anthemic of the bunch in "Demons," but quickly becomes positively maudlin when compared with the first side. Though I prefer the first album, Reign of Terror proves that Sleigh Bells were able to withstand their initial surge in popularity and deliver a follow-up LP that reveals (the dreaded!) "signs of maturity" without compromising their auditory integrity.

The deadline for the 2012 Black Lawrence Press Hudson Prize for an unpublished collection of poems or short stories is March 31. BLP does great work, so if you have a manuscript that's just sitting around collecting coffee stains, send it over. Details here.

Five Dollars / Five Days is our spring promotion. Send us a literature submission between April 5 & May 5 along with a $5 reading fee, and we’ll not only respond to your submission within five days, we’ll also tell you what we loved, hated, or felt ambivalent about. You get a quick turnaround with ink, we pocket a little cash to support the magazine.

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The Editors

Frankie Rose’s Interstellar opens with sustained synthesizers and the lyric: “Moving swiftly on the interstellar highway.”  The next line talks about moondust, and then the drums kick in and the album achieves some form of figurative liftoff, characterized by vaguely retro, jangle-space-garage pop.  Frankie Rose’s reference points are a bit all over the map on Interstellar—sixties girl group pop informs the melodies, eighties new wave pervades the beats and production, little flashes of  day-dreamy, indie-gaze sneak into the guitar work, and the arrangements find plenty of room for blissed-out space-pop—but that diversity of sounds and styles converge effectively to create an album that is just as rich in atmosphere as its melodies are immediately infectious. 

This combination of reverb-driven atmosphere, garagey melodicism, and retro pastiche shouldn’t come as a surprise considering Rose’s previous affiliations with like-minded bands Crystal Stilts, Dum Dum Girls, and The Vivian Girls.  But unlike much of the work from those bands with whom Rose was previously involved, Interstellar finds its greatest strengths in its willingness to eschew the garagier impulses of those bands, and even Rose’s previous album—credited to and titled Frankie Rose and the Outs—in favor of a cleaner, dreamier sound.  In other words, instead of coming off as a pop-inflected rock album by a garage band, Interstellar, thanks in no small part to the specificity of its vision, reads as a garage-inflected indie pop album from a solo artist.  Even when the songs feature meaty, full band arrangements, as on the wistful and gorgeous “Gospel/Grace,” or the Smiths-esque “Know Me,” Rose’s voice and its smooth, ethereal delivery, is the focus.  Some listeners and fans of Rose’s past work could potentially take issue with this shift in focus from a band dynamic to a more song and artist driven sensibility, but it is that very shift that allows Insterstellar to stand out from a crowded field of like-minded indie-pop.  That Frankie Rose can vacillate so impressively between the nineties-space-pop-anthematics of “Had We Had It,” the more straight-forward garage moves of “Nightswim,” and the elegant, reverb-drenched balladry of “Apples for the Sun,” is a testament to the versatility of Rose’s newfound freedom from  being in a band. 

If there is one knock against Interstellar, it is that the album feels a bit light.  There is no real sense of aboutness or thematic grounding running through these songs, outside of their general pop-driven wistfulness.  This isn’t exactly a problem, and it doesn’t by any means make Interstellar a bad or weak album.  If anything, the absence of a coherent sense of being about something allows Rose’s songs to be about their aesthetic impulses, and with songs as lush and well defined as those on Interstellar, aesthetics can be just as engaging as any theme or concept.  In fact, one of Interstellar’s most endearing traits is its ability to disarm listeners—that is to say, Interstellar’s aesthetic impulses makes it easy for us to get lost in its melodic contours and spring-time textures.  To these ends, the absence of any sort of thematic “aboutness” on the album works to its advantage.  With an album as well-crafted and lovely as Interstellar, it’s best to dissolve into the songs, not fixate over what they’re about. 
       

Five Dollars / Five Days is our spring promotion. Send us a literature submission between April 5 & May 5 along with a $5 reading fee, and we’ll not only respond to your submission within five days, we’ll also tell you what we loved, hated, or felt ambivalent about. You get a quick turnaround with ink, we pocket a little cash to support the magazine.

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The Editors

It's not often that two former Beatles put out albums within one week of each. Late January/Early February brought Beatle fans a small treat with the nearly-simultaneous releases of Ringo Starr's Ringo 2012 and Paul McCartney's vocal jazz standard exercise Kisses on the Bottom.

Starr's album, his seventeenth solo studio effort, is entirely reflective of the records he has been churning out since the pleasant 1992 CD Time Takes Time. Prior to that surprisingly solid outing, Ringo's discography was a straight-up mess. With the exception of Sentimental Journey (1970), an album of standard tunes, his best to date in Ringo (1973), the coked-out disco downer Ringo the 4th (1977), and the tolerable, Joe Walsh-produced Old Wave (1982, a record that was, tellingly, ONLY issued in West Germany and Canada), his records have ranged from just plain silly (Beaucoups of Blues, Goodnight Vienna) to just outright intolerable (you are Ringo's Rotogravure, Bad Boy, Stop and Smell the Roses). In 1987, Starr was slated to release an album produced by the legendary Memphis producer Chips Moman (who is today most known for heading Elvis Presley's return-to-form classic From Elvis in Memphis). The sessions were reportedly so bad that Starr stashed the tapes away. They have since circulated as some of the saddest bootleg recordings ever produced. After the debacle, Ringo cleaned up and devoted himself to becoming a professional ex-Beatle, putting on his hardly-ever-ending All Starr Band tour. Since then, Ringo Starr has released several solid, consistently listenable, highly Beatlesque (natch!) records that have been largely irrelevant.

Ringo 2012 is another of these albums. Surprisingly, it is an improvement upon his previous effort, Y Not (2010). That album, one of the most mediocre of his post-Time Takes Time batch of records, was one of his most introspective releases to date. But the record quickly loses steam. I say Ringo 2012 is a "surprising" improvement because it seems like Ringo Starr is completely out of ideas here...and Ringo Starr has never exactly been an "ideas guy." The album is incredibly brief, not even crossing the thirty-minute mark. Four of its nine tracks (his cover of Buddy Holly's "Think it Over," the folk standard "Rock Island Line," and re-recordings of "Wings" [originally featured on Ringo the 4th] and "Step Lightly" [from Ringo]) emanate from other sources. Two of its tracks retread ideas from the previous album in "Anthem," the proverbial boomer peace-and-love anthem which become a staple of the Richard Starkey songwriting corporation, and "In Liverpool," which harkens back to the material on Liverpool 8 (2008) as well. Despite all this regurgitation, the album moves by briskly and possesses no obvious clunkers—something which can't be said about most of his other albums. While few listeners under sixty will give this record much attention, it is a fun, breezy record that would probably appeal to even a few recent Tweeters who asked "WTF is Paul McCartney" after the telecast of the 2012 Grammy Awards.

Well, the release of Paul McCartney's awkward, 1940s porn-titled album Kisses on the Bottom—a line from the standard "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter" which opens the album—doesn't necessarily answer that question with any clarity. Kisses on the Bottom, McCartney's first proper studio album since 2007's fair-to-middling Memory Almost Full—is an odd project. It is the kind of album most successful pop icons McCartney's age (currently 69 years young) had recorded long ago. Hell, even Ringo Starr's first solo album—released all the way back in 1970—was an album consisting of big band pop standards (the underrated Sentimental Journey). After listening to his new record, though, it makes sense that he waited. Sure, he'd dabbled with pop jazz before. The Beatles' "When I'm Sixty Four," "Your Mother Should Know," and "Honey Pie" establish McCartney's interest in the genre. In 1971, he cut one of the strangest recordings in his oeuvre, Thrillington (under the moniker Percy "Thrills" Thrillington), an instrumental, big band version of his album Ram. It was not officially released until 1977 and he didn't publicly admit he was responsible for it until the 1990s. The reason why now is the perfect time for McCartney to release this kind of record is that his voice—from years of singing with his classic Little Richard shriek—has recently showed signs of distress and has grown ever-so-slightly froggy. As a result, McCartney's vocals have a smoky quality that he couldn't have mustered at any other point of his career.

Like Ringo 2012, Kisses on the Bottom is quite listenable but not all that noteworthy. McCartney's voice is the centerpiece of the album. In fact, he only plays instruments on a few tracks, a rarity for a man who has recorded albums where he played ALL the instruments many times before. Popular contemporary jazz artist Diana Krall provides most the arrangements and supplies a bulk of the piano playing. Guest spots by Eric Clapton and Stevie Wonder (who provides a nice harmonica solo on the closer, "Only Our Hearts") add to the proceedings without overwhelming them. The tracks with the more peppy arrangements, like the opener, "Only a Paper Moon" and, surprisingly, the usually cheesy "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive" show McCartney at his best as a vocalist in this milieu. On the slower numbers, which are in abundance, McCartney just doesn't sound emotionally committed as a vocalist. The grand exception to this rule is the aforementioned and well-placed closer, "Only Our Hearts." The record is a pleasant enough. But—and I'm talking to the Brian Wilsons, Van Morrisons, and Elvis Costellos of the world—do we really need another album of vocal jazz standards by aging pop stars?

Blood Memory
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Despite its smooth pop signifiers and icy precision, Visions, the new album from Claire Boucher’s one-woman-band Grimes, isn’t an easy proposition. Of course, the album isn’t particularly difficult. So what is Visions then, exactly? I’m not sure, and that is a big part of what makes the album so compelling.

On the surface, Visions is a pleasant enough album, blending elements of electronic pop and dance music with an ethereal sense of wonder that, despite the plethora of familiar pop tropes running through these songs, pushes the album into surreal territory. These songs don’t have a lot of hooks, and when a song does employ a strong hook, even briefly, it isn’t uncommon for the song’s structure to undercut that hook. “Genesis,” the album’s first “proper” track after a brief introductory vamp, is a fine example of the hook and dissolve strategy. The song opens with gentle, pulsing keyboards and a wistful, catchy synth melody. It’s an opening that promises a sort of pure brand of electro-pop that wouldn’t sound too out of place on pop radio. But then, in a move that turns out to be very characteristic of Visions as a whole, the song devolves into a series of loosely affiliated pop signifiers that never quite coalesce into a unified, capital-S “Song”: distant vocal chants, an arrangement that ebbs and flows, shifting, catchy melodies—here, each of these co-exist, but they work independently of each other. Grimes makes the same moves on “Eight,” with its juxtapositions of robot-voices, a chipmunked soul hook and chopped beats, and “Vowels = Space and Time,” which plays out like a series of bridges and verses, pasted together to sound both familiar and jarring. The later song has a chorus of sorts, but the unsettled motion between ideas returns to the idea that the song exists in pieces, not a whole. Occasionally, a track’s pieces will converge into something more closely resembling a song. When this happens, as it does on “Colour of Moonlight (Antiochus),” the end result is comforting—it’s nice to have a more familiar form to compliment the familiarity of the sounds—but also serves to highlight the effectiveness of the album’s deconstructive nature.

Visions, then, despite its heavy reliance on pop music tropes, isn’t much of a pop album. The familiarity of the album’s sounds makes it an easy listen, but that familiarity is constantly called into question through its challenges to form. In a sense, Grimes may have invented a new genre with Visions. It’s a genre that does for dance music what chillwave does for eighties-nostalgia and lo-fi. Only here, Grimes’ music is creating a sense of “pop-ness” through loosely associated signifiers from the genre, much like chillwave draws on lo-fi and analog textures to evoke a sense of memory and nostalgia. In a sense, then, Visions could be labeled clubwave, or dancegaze—an album that manages to be about electronic pop and dance music by juxtaposing the signifiers of those genres to evoke the genres themselves, while simultaneously exploiting and interrogating the aesthetic principles that make up those musics’ DNA. In other words, Visions probably isn’t a great dance album, but it will make you think about dancing.