If some were worried that 2008 wasn't going to have the same share of great albums we've seen in recent years, a slew of this week's releases should alleviate most (if not all) of those concerns.
Last week I poached
Foals great debut on Sub Pop and
yesterday I wrote about
Tapes n' Tapes' sophomore release, which is fortunate, since I probably wouldn't even be able to get to either this week with all the rest of the riches that dropped. To wit, we have the latest from
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds,
Man Man,
The Breeders,
Clinic,
The Long Blondes,
Jason Anderson,
Cloud Cult,
Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin,
Richard Swift,
Neva Dinova,
Peter Moren,
The Duke Spirit,
Robots in Disguise, full-length debuts from
Wye Oak,
New Bloods,
The Old Haunts, and new EPs from
Spoon and the much hyped
Fleet Foxes. In fact, there's so much good music, I'm breaking up this post into two parts, one today and a continuation tomorrow.
Playlist:
New Releases 04.08.08
Album:
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!
If the garage rock of Nick Cave's
Grinderman project last year served as a cathartic exercise, then
Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! is a refinement of that midlife Christ-kick. Cave hands the guitar back to Mick Harvey and mans the organ, hammering out an album that infuses some of
Grinderman's noise and bravado into songs that often recall the power of '97's
The Boatman's Call. At age 50, Cave is now releasing some of his most vital work, and he seems to be having more fun while doing it, taking himself a little less seriously. In the stomping title track and opener
"Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!" Cave re-imagines Lazarus (calling him 'Larry') crossing America before ending up "back in the streets of New York, in a soup queue, a dope fiend, a slave." Meanwhile, with
"We Call Upon the Author," Cave eschews Bukowski ("a jerk!") preferring the works of John Berryman ("the best!") but still calling upon the author to explain his suicide. Prolix, of which I often suffer, provides another humorous take. "I say prolix! Prolix! Something a pair of scissors can fix." And then there's the line "our myxomatoid kids spraddle the streets." Colin Meloy's thesaurus just got green with envy. It's not all fun and diction, though, as Cave still has time for one of his patented murder ballads in achingly beautiful
"Jesus on the Moon." The album ends with eight minutes of Cave saying 'c'est la vie' to the unstoppable force of time with
"More News From Nowhere." "Don't it make you feel so sad, don't the blood rush to your feet, to think that everything you do today, tomorrow is obsolete? Technology and women and little children too. Don't it make you feel blue?" As long as it's backed by the Bad Seeds, it don't feel so bad at all.
Full Album Stream from AOL
Album:
Man Man - Rabbit Habits
When Philadelphia's Man Man released
Six Demon Bag back in 2006, it was if someone had blended all my Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa albums as into one delectable shake. But both live and lyrically, the songs took on more than just a rehash of music's marginalized past.
Rabbit Habits, whose title comes from the practice of rabbits eating their young, doesn't stray too much from their Waits/Zappa/Beefheart junkyard ethos, but this time around, there's an underlying darkness amidst all the vaudevillian tomfoolery. Frontman Honus ruthlessly hunts down the title character in
"The Ballad of Butter Beans," and then calls out a vacuous lover in
"Poor Jackie." "I don't see what everybody sees in your sexy body. All I see is a shallow grave, trapped inside a pretty face."
"Whalebones" brings it's own dark heartache, with the line "but she holds him like an infant, though it breaks her in half to know he'll wake like a man -- sold on cold indifference." All this lies underneath tremendously fun (re: great live) songs, full of crazy instrumentation. Pitchfork TV launched yesterday, and the first
video time-waster you should check out is
the behind the scenes look at Man Man recording this album, recording falling junk, dogs in the bathtub, and of course fireworks (
"Mysteries of the Universe Unraveled.") All in all it's a great rock album, even though there's nary a guitar in the mix.
Full Album Stream from AOL
Album:
Wye Oak - If Children
This album is already destined for my
Best of the Year (That's Really Rrom a Previous Year) list, as it was originally self-released last summer by the duo from Baltimore.
If Children is a great debut, one that relies quite a bit on the shoegaze of the nineties, along with the dreamy folk pop of
Yo La Tengo, but without sounding entirely derivative. Jenn Wasner's vocals are a bit like a laid back Kim Deal, dry and double-tracked, but lyrically a bit more like Jenny Lewis, smarter than you give what you're hearing credit for. The duo easily move from the controlled feedback of first single
"Warning" into the gentle acoustic pop of
"Regret," a nice demonstration that the band isn't reliant on the shoegaze angle. Meanwhile,
"I Don't Feel Young" is a joyous number, where Phil Spector's wall of sound meets
Crosby Stills and Nash, by way of lots of distortion, of course. It's an album that I've had on repeat all week now, and only through the incredible depth of today's haul will it (temporarily) slip out of rotation.
Stream the album from Merge RecordsDownload:
"Warning" [mp3]
More on the radar this week:
The Breeders - Mountain Battles /
Free album stream from AOL (more tomorrow)
Jason Anderson - The Hopeful and the Unafraid /
Free album stream from AOL (more tomorrow)
Foals - Antidotes /
Free album stream from AOL (
Reviewed last week)
Clinic - Do It! /
Free album stream from AOL (more tomorrow)
The Long Blondes - Couples /
Free album stream from AOLTapes 'n Tapes - Walk it Off /
Free album stream from AOLFleet Foxes - Sun Giant EPOld Haunts - Poisonous Times /
"Volatile" [mp3]
Cloud Cult - Feel Good GhostsSomeone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - Pershing /
Free album stream from AOL /
"Glue Girls," "Think I Wanna Die" [mp3]
New Bloods - The Secret Life /
"Oh, Deadly Nightshade" [mp3]
Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours /
Free album stream from AOLRichard Swift - Richard Swift As OnasisJim Noir - Jim Noir (Free AOL Stream - Not in Rhapsody)Neva Dinova - You May Already Be Dreaming /
Free album stream from AOL /
"Knee High Boogie Blues" [mp3]
Peter Moren - The Last Tycoon /
Free album stream from AOLThe Duke Spirit - NeptuneRobots in Disguise - We're In The Music BizIke Reilly - Poison The Hit ParadeBoredoms - Super Roots 1Spoon - Don't You EvahThe Wombats - The Wombats EPHayes Carll - Trouble In MindFinest Dearest - Finest DearestMarie Digby - UnfoldEric Avery - Help Wanted /
Free album stream from AOLMeat Meat Manifesto - AutoimmuneThe Green Owl Comp: A Benefit For The Energy Action CoalitionReissuesDark Meat - Universal Indians [Expanded]The Microphones - The Glow Pt. 2 (w/ Bonus Disc) tags: music, album review, foals, man man, nick cave, wye oak, indie rock, new releases, rhapsody
Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger's team up with Sebadoh's Jason Loewenstein is the most straightforward release the band has had since EP. While I'm sure the cult following are missing the crazy concepts and prog-rock noodling solos from Matthew, the Furnaces have always been better when they work off a simpler blueprint, like they do here. Songs like the title track, "Charmaine Champagne" and "Even in the Rain," beg to be hummed immediately/hours/days/weeks later ("Charmaine" so much, the song even reprises itself with "Cups & Punches" - "she could sing you the squarest thing on the jukebox"). 
Wye Oak's debut was a pop album at heart but deliciously heavy on the My Bloody Valentine, but you wouldn't know it from their second release. Nearly all MBV references have been scrubbed, and in their place is an Alt country foundation. There's still some sweet feedback and the first two songs are have some of the bands' best moments on record. The album, unfortunately, kind of falls flat after that, and I'm left wishing for some of the sweet 90's sound they pulled out for their debut. 
