[review 2006: the honourable mentions]

Finding new music is occasionally a chore. It’s certainly not as easy as it used to be, when I was a teenager and all I did was suck down MP3s from random FTP sites and read the now-defunct Addicted To Noise and Wall of Sound. So whenever I find someone in a place I didn’t expect, it’s cause for celebration. I picked up the latest Essex Green album on a whim and loved it, found Handsomeboy Technique from a single MP3 posted on a message board I frequent, and essentially discovered electronica years ago thanks to a video game.

One of my volunteer gigs was holding a launch party, and we had a couple of bands lined up, as you do for these sorts of things. Some of the names I recognized because we’d seen them before at other launches or in the magazine I volunteer for, but Laura Barrett’s was one I’d never heard before that day, when I showed up to do merch. When I met her I thought she was just someone who showed up really early; someone else who was just a fan of the magazine had already found us about an hour before we were slated to start. I didn’t realize she was slated to perform until she gave us some expert help with the PA system.

Barrett was the headliner for an evening show, and after seeing what she was going to play I was a bit worried: it was a kalimba, basically a very small piano you play with your thumbs. Barrett was going to follow a punk band and a high-energy dance troupe, and she was going to have to compete with one of Toronto’s many jazz festivals just outside the art gallery where we’d set up shop. How on earth was this small woman and her quiet kalimba supposed to keep anyone’s attention after all that? As the sun went down and the outside noise level went up, I started to worry a bit.

I shouldn’t have been concerned, because two songs into her set she had her entire audience sitting crosslegged on the floor in rapt attention. With her combination of charming stage banter, slightly loopy lyrics and breathtaking artistry, she’d managed to cast a spell on the audience that even the flamenco band just outside the doors couldn’t break. She’d brought ten CDs to sell that day, and sold them all in a flash. Luckily for me, she kept number eleven tucked away just in case, its ornate packaging slightly defective but otherwise in fine condition.

I honestly have no idea whether Barrett intends to make her solo career a going concern, as she’s already got a pretty full load; she’s a touring member of the Hidden Cameras and she also plays with Henri Fabergé and the Adorables. If Earth Sciences is all we get, it’ll be a shame—five gorgeous songs just isn’t enough. Barrett weaves intricate songs like musical labyrinths in which you can lose yourself; despite only picking up the kalimba less than two years ago, she sounds like a pro, spinning complex note patterns as if they were nothing. She’s similarly adept at singing, her dulcet tones a lush counterpoint to the music. But Barrett’s music isn’t just beautiful, it’s also just a bit absurd; she covers Weird Al and sings about robot ponies, two obvious nerd pride badges. Is it any wonder that she’s opened for Final Fantasy in the past?

Give Laura Barrett half a chance and she’ll put you in a trance. Earth Sciences is an intimate and alluring listen, flawed only by its brevity. Apparently there’s a second EP in the works. One can only hope.

(more…)

[review 2006: the honourable mentions]

When I first heard this album, performed live at a small back room in Toronto this past January, I could already tell where Neko Case was headed—further from the honky-tonk of her early albums, down the road she blazed when she unleashed Blacklisted in 2002. But if Blacklisted’s best tracks recalled the deep, dark night, then Fox Confessor Brings the Flood is the cold morning after. The difference in atmosphere is subtle but tangible nonetheless, but thankfully Fox Confessor is just as good an album as its predecessor, even if the emotional thrust is different this time around.

I don’t know where exactly I got this idea from, but several tracks on Fox Confessor evoke images of bare trees and icy rushing rivers with snow-covered banks. There’s a frigid air throughout the album; the sound is crisper, the passion muted, the lyrics less direct. Whereas Blacklisted had genuine moments of drama (”Pretty Girls” and the title track) and longing (”Tightly” and “I Wish I Was the Moon”), Fox Confessor is less of an emotional rollercoaster ride. When Case does approach those previous heights, as on “Hold On, Hold On,” there’s still an element of distance not present on previous albums.

But to appreciate Fox Confessor is to understand that Case no longer seems to be working with quite the same template. The late-night confessional lyrics of songs like “Tightly” are gone; in their place are beautifully told stories with Case as narrator, not protagonist. As I’ve never been one to focus very much on lyrics except the most obvious, I’m not the person to do the deconstruction; I’ll leave that to people like the fine folks at cokemachineglow. In any case, the same thinking carries over to the production and arrangements, carefully crafted to create more subtle and complex effects than any of Case’s prior albums, but also less forceful and direct.

The unfortunate part is that the added complexity and distance makes Fox Confessor Brings the Flood a less immediate listen, and so even though certain songs grab you and never quite let go (”Star Witness,” “That Teenage Feeling” and “Maybe Sparrow” are some of my favourites), it’s harder for me to figure out how it all comes together as an album. So right now this is not an album I love, but more one whose charms I can appreciate. I can imagine myself turning the corner one day—but not just yet.

[review 2006: the honourable mentions]

Since the dissolution of Cibo Matto in 2001, Miho Hatori has been on a bit of a journey. Between a bossa nova excursion as one half of Smokey & Miho and a guest spot on the Gorillaz’s first album, Hatori has kept making music, though with a much lower profile. Notably, while her Cibo Matto partner Yuka Honda put out two solo albums, Hatori remained silent on the recording front until recently. Released over a year ago in Japan, Ecdysis has only made it across the Atlantic recently—a strange twist, considering Hatori has lived in New York for over a decade and has largely collaborated with American musicians. (To be pedantic: yes, technically this means Ecdysis shouldn’t be on this list, as it’s a 2005 release. For the two of you that care, I hope you’ll forgive me.)

From the opening track it’s clear this isn’t your usual indie album; more than anything else I heard this year, Ecdysis sounds genuinely exotic. It’s an organic, intimate affair, slightly reminiscent of some of the quieter moments on early Bjork albums. In fact, if you put “Human Behavior” and “Headphones,” you might start to get an idea of what Ecdysis is all about. The first three tracks set a relaxed pace and a chill vibe that carries through the whole album, even when the beats pick up slightly on standout tracks like “Barracuda” and “Sweet Samsara Part II.” For the most part Ecdysis is content to lull you with its low-key nocturnal lullabies.

If there’s a downside, it’s that none of the songs are absolute stunners, though each one is pretty good. But really, to concentrate on single songs is to lose the forest for the trees; the impact of any single track is nothing compared to the lush, inviting soundscape you enter whenever you put on this album. For forty minutes you can be somewhere completely different from your usual existence; Ecdysis is an album that rewards the wanderlust of your imagination.

[review 2006: the odds and ends]

The good news: Comfort of Strangers is no Daybreaker. The bad news: Comfort of Strangers is no Central Reservation, either.

For her fourth studio album, Beth Orton made some sweeping changes. She’s completely eliminated any trace of electronica from her music, apparently refashioning herself as a straightforward folk artist. Instead, she’s turned to Jim O’Rourke to produce the whole affair, and a small group of musicians to serve as a more traditional backing band. Orton also seems to take a lighter approach this time around; on previous albums even the quiet folk ballads had a dramatic, melancholic quality that is almost completely absent from Comfort of Strangers. This isn’t necessarily an unwelcome change, though. Unlike many other artists that turn up after a years-long absence looking as though they swallowed a truckload of anti-depressants, Orton actually makes Comfort of Strangers work without becoming precious or saccharine. Kudos to Orton for realizing the world doesn’t need another Sarah McLachlan.

The greatest victory Orton pulls off here is turning Comfort of Strangers into the antithesis of Daybreaker, an album at times overwrought and overproduced. Nothing on Comfort of Strangers feels particularly belaboured, and in fact the general atmosphere of the album is carefree and relaxed. And the more I listen to the album, the more Orton’s new direction makes sense. Though I will always have a soft spot for Trailer Park, the fact is there are plenty of people who do the electronic-folk fusion far better these days—even drastic remixes of Orton’s own songs bear this out. So as an antidote to the ills Ryan Adams and company inflicted upon Beth Orton’s career, Comfort of Strangers succeeds.

Where Comfort of Strangers fails, however, is in attempting to reach the previous highs of Orton’s career. The album is a fresh start for Orton, but she has yet to prove that she can make her new formula work on the same emotional and musical level as Central Reservation. The album sounds like the perfect soundtrack to a convertible road trip through midwestern America, in that it sounds effortlessly beautiful and reminds one of the open country. Hell, she has a song called “Heartland Truckstop.” But Comfort of Strangers rarely engages on a more immediate level; the album works best as background music and stubbornly refuses to climb above. Songs like “Countenance,” “Comfort of Strangers” and “Shopping Trolley” are all very agreeable but not all that interesting. This is not yet an album you can love passionately.

But Beth Orton albums have always been slow growers. The merits of Central Reservation weren’t obvious until the tenth or twentieth time I heard “Pass In Time”; there’s no reason why Comfort of Strangers couldn’t reveal its particular charms over time as well.

[review 2006: the odds and ends]

Jenny Lewis lost me the first time I saw the video for “Rise Up With Fists!!”

If you’ve never seen the video, take a look. If you have, let me explain. For whatever reason, I can’t track down the third version of this video, but they’re all essentially the same except for the opening line—it’s Sarah Silverman saying either “With a twist of lemon,” “Lemonade!” or “Semen!” (guess which version I couldn’t find). In any case, it’s followed up with an asinine laugh track and all the band members pretending to laugh hysterically. The whole video is essentially a play on Hee Haw (fun fact: Hee Haw was on the air until 1992!). You can tell by the costumes, the set and the random spurts of canned laughter. Oh, and about halfway through the piece, all of the band give the camera the good ol’ knowing wink, but it’s an especially knowing wink that says, “yeah, we know even this knowing wink is cliche, and we’re letting you know that we know!” Yes, we’re being Ironic! Hur-fucking-ray. But why wink to the camera at all? It all seems completely out of place.

No one was ever going to mistake Jenny Lewis for a genuine country singer, as if that really means a whole lot these days. After all, mainstream country has only recently abandoned the abhorrence that was New Country (and arguably vestiges still remain), and one of the leading lights of the alt-country scene is none other than Neko Case, whose career bears many similarities to Lewis’s. They both began in bands playing music in a different genre (Case with Vancouver punk band Maow, Lewis with Rilo Kiley), they both started singing solo while with said band, and they both had trouble initially gaining acceptance as a legitimate country artist. Case went on to perform on the stage of the Grand Ol’ Opry, though in typical Neko Case fashion she got kicked out for stripping down to her bra (Case claims it was heatstroke, a far less exciting version than the apocryphal tale). But kicked out or no, Case doesn’t have to worry very much about not being taken seriously as a country artist or a singer-songwriter. So legitimacy shouldn’t be a problem; if a punk drummer can make it, so can Jenny Lewis.

And she’s off to a decent start; the one-two opening punch of “The Big Guns” and “Rise Up With Fists!!” is promising, even if the video for “Rise Up With Fists!!” isn’t. And while the remainder of the album begins to settle into a slight malaise, it’s mainly because the songs aren’t quite up to snuff and the sound isn’t varied enough to compensate. The gospel stylings of the Watson Twins are fantastic, but over the course of a whole album the impact dulls a bit. Same with the spitshine polish on all the tracks—very pretty, but very consistently pretty, consistent to a fault. It’s an easy album to listen to, but not enough of it sticks. Lewis has better luck with the slower songs like “Melt Your Heart” and “Rabbit Fur Coat,” but the upbeat tracks aren’t all that memorable.

In the end, the problem is not that Jenny Lewis is having a hard time getting others to accept her as a country singer; she does a good enough job of that, though no one is going to accord her the same credentials as a Loretta Lynn or a Dolly Parton. The problem is she seems reluctant to embrace the label herself. You can hear it best in “Handle With Care,” which is not only the closest the album comes to sounding like Rilo Kiley, but is also the track where Lewis is joined by her other indie-rock friends like Ben Gibbard and Conor Oberst. And there’s something slightly odd about pairing up with the Watson Twins for your first solo album; for a woman whose voice is near-universally praised, was it absolutely necessary to have two more angelic voices behind her? Not that it was a bad choice—clearly it wasn’t—but it’s like the golden-era New York Yankees paying off the other team to lose the World Series.

Granted, these are all small signs, and I may be reading too much into it. But then there’s the video for “Rise Up With Fists!!” At first it seemed just a bit offensive to me, though I easily take offense at imagined wrongdoings. It seemed like she was laughing at the very country tradition she set out to join, like she was somehow above it all. Now I’m not so sure about that interpretation; after all, she seems fairly invested in her material throughout the album, and the song itself is bereft of the knowing winks the video provides. In fact, the video is an odd choice for what is actually quite a beautiful song. It’s almost as if Lewis was trying to tell you not to take any of it seriously—the laugh track, the knowing winks, Sarah Silverman—almost as if Lewis didn’t quite trust her material to stand on its own merits.