Jun. 11, 2008 - Issue #660: Hot Summer Guide 2008
New Sounds
ColdplayViva La Vida or Death and All His Friends
EMI
SARAH HOLTHAM / sarah.h@vueweekly.com
Dramatic, dramatic, dramatic is what comes to mind after listening to Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends. The newest release from brit rockers Coldplay touches on everything from death to religion, resulting in an album that has given an overhyped group a sense of reinvention and a less-wimpy-sounding Chris Martin. Darker lyrics and a heavier sound has allowed the band to produce stand-out tracks on this album like the dominantly instrumental track “Life In Technicolor,” the upbeat title track “Viva La Vida” and the haunting “Cemeteries of London.” My conclusion, though: Parachutes is still the best Coldplay album.
Steve Earle
Live From Austin, TX
New West
EDEN MUNRO / eden@vueweekly.com
Yes, it’s another release from the series of Austin City Limits archival albums, and, yes, it’s another live album from Steve Earle, but damn, this is pretty much the best performance of his to be caught on an official release. When Earle last came through Edmonton, he brought a DJ along for the ride, and while it’s always nice to see an artist stretching out and taking chances, it was awkward at best. This performance features Earle and his band, the Dukes, and it features the best version of the group, with former Blackheart Eric Ambel ripping apart the guitar lines and kicking the songs up several levels while Earle himself growls and spits the lyrics like an old punk. This is absolutely a welcome release, and a nice addition to Earle’s catalogue.
Tim Fite
Fair Ain’t Fair
Anti-
MARY CHRISTA O’KEEFE / marychrista@vueweekly.com
This is one of the most flat-out thrilling records I’ve heard in a long time. Brooklynite Tim Fite raided the entire American songbook—everything from Joplinesque rags, barefoot folk and spirituals to soul, dub and rock, plus embellishments like melodious spoken word and sampling—and brought them together in an album that’s as close to a contemporary snapshot as any music can get these days. It has that dewy immediacy of originality, plus a restless and shameless kleptomania for pan-global, pan-circumstantial sound—snippets of video game whirrs hang with Broadway musical belter lines; rich velvety cello swivels around sneaky, evolving beats that clatter into glorious breakout moments of pure pop. The lyrics are a fusion of the kind of plainspoken poetry that trips off Will Oldham’s faux-hick tongue married to shout-out urban culture, pop culture wit, and an abstracted admiration for protest music, fueled by a real appetite for change, fetchingly carried by Fite’s bourbon-gargle morning vocals. Honestly? It’s kind of like Randy Newman, the Flaming Lips and De La Soul were all reanimated in the future, and had a band. The only drawback to Fair Ain’t Fair is that its magnificence is arresting—this isn’t music to do other things to. Just listen.
Manraygun
Misfortune Telling
Independent
MARY CHRISTA O’KEEFE / marychrista@vueweekly.com
The pair of puns on the cover of this debut full-length from the local veteran music-makers behind Manraygun is by no means a sign of forthcoming hilarity. Rather, they alert listeners to the presence of doubled meanings lurking in the folds of the album’s sadsack tales, a sharp ambiguity that seems to be a universally bemusing gift of age, expressing itself in the sigh of a slide guitar, flourish of percussion or doleful bass line. If there’s one thing Misfortune Telling wears on its sleeve, it’s history: these are songs grounded in vintage rock, early Springsteen to the Clash, idealistic working class rock and its cathartic stories of loss, losers and endurance. Ah, but there’s another sleeve: Manraygun’s sonic tapestry is considerably fattened up by the players’ allegiance to Southwestern roots, served up a little Gothic-style. If you could imagine the breadth, genre promiscuity and easy charm of a hoser Alejandro Escovado with the Handsome Family playing a little back up—that may come close. But there’s a density to Misfortune Telling, a lushness in the recording and in the solemnity of the songwriting, that marks it as more unapologetically expansive and ambitious.
David Myles
On the Line
Little Tiny Records
SCOTT HARRIS / scott@vueweekly.com
You can really feel for David Myles when he sings, “”There’s too much on the line / There’s too much at stake” on the opener “I Don’t Want to Know.” There were high expectations of the New Brunswick-born, Halifax-based songwriter following 2006’s much-lauded Things Have Changed, an album which earned Myles a host of awards, including two Music Nova Scotia nods and top honours in the Chris Austin Songwriting Contest. But in response Myles has created a great album, an effective blending of jazz, gospel, blues and rock into his east-coast folk sound. Myles demonstrates why his songwriting has been getting such acclaim, penning everything from the jaunty gospel of “New Friend” to the loss-filled “World Don’t Work,” on which Myles’ mournful trumpet joins Old Man Luedecke’s banjo, to the terrific renewal of the escape-from-life love song “Cape Breton,” which returns to the On the Line theme and is destined to find its way to numerous summer road-trip mixes.
My Robot Unicorn
Alphabet Soup
Independent
MARY CHRISTA O’KEEFE / marychrista@vueweekly.com
Oh, that Marshall Watson, always with the adorableness! The winsome animating spirit behind My Robot Unicorn has taken time out of his busy schedule of mounting musicals and such to give us another one of his sprightly song-stuffed discs. Alphabet Soup, as you may suspect, has a trope: there are 26 tracks, one for each letter in the tradition of “A is for ... “, plus an amazing bonus queer anthem on the closing track. The record owes much of its charm to the lowest of lo-fi production on champagne ambition, so Fleetwood Mac-scaled intentions are delivered on the twee-est of pop instruments: shitty synths, dinky piano, xylophone, tambourine and maybe some handclaps and pre-vocal snorts and murmurs. Then there’s Watson, his skeletal, urgent voice whisper-chanting impressionistic dispatches from the frontlines of the sexuality wars over bedroom dance music informed by hip-hop, disco, Morrissey and utopian orchestral pop—and fabulosity ensues, or at least the kind of frisky subversive mischief peddled by the like of the Magnetic Fields.
Sam Roberts
Love At The End Of The World
Universal
LEWIS KELLY / lewis@vueweekly.com
Sam Roberts unfortunately returns to form with his latest studio album, Love At the End of the World. After 2006’s wonderfully imaginative Chemical City, Roberts has learned to march in step with the Canadian radio-rock establishment. Love At the End of the World is bland and boring for the most part. There’s the odd song that manages to break free of the shackles of commercial conscription (“Lions of the Kalahari”), but for every one of these you get two nondescript tracks of generic rock. While there’s certainly worse stuff out there, it’s still sad to see Roberts conform after flirting with creativity on his previous record.
Story of the Year
The Black Swan
Epitaph
JAMIE REINHART / reinhart@vueweekly.com
Story of the Year is back with an album that sounds the same as the band’s others, though that’s a good thing. I don’t know any other band that makes it feel like you are listening to four different groups at once, blending punk, hardcore, metal and rock together while remaining catchy and melodic with superb vocals, gut-ripping screams and gang vocal chants. “Choose Your Fate” sets the tone for The Black Swan, with George Bush quotes like “slowly but surely achieving our objective” followed by a screaming “Liar!” when the song kicks in. That theme of unhappiness with the state of the world is what brings the lyrics to the surface of the album forcing you to look past the music to hear what they are saying. Even though the CD sounds the same as the rest of the band’s catalogue, SOTY continues to progress and try new things like on “Message To The World” with an African-sounding chant and the pounding of djembes or the piano playing on “Terrified.” This isn’t the record of the year—or even SOTY’s best album—but it is the most flawless CD that the band has created, lyrically and musically. V
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