The Kills-Midnight Boom

This album sounds like a weekend when your significant other leaves town. “U.R.A. Fever” has a duet, sounds kinda upbeat, kinda down, and by the time “Cheap and Cheerful” stutters into place with a guitar and VV’s cough, clearing the nicotine out of her lungs, it’s all about the heavy drinking and dancing.

From here, “Tape Song” gently glides us down to “Getting Down” and “Last Day of Magic”, sounding like the promise you make to yourself to “stop having fun” but you know you can’t keep, dancing and drinking and partying. “Hook and Line” has the same rollicking feel of a sedated Yeah Yeah Yeahs song, even though the Kills have been at this sound since before the three Y. “Black Balloon” has some melancholy, maybe starting to miss your significant other, but by the time “M.E.X.I.C.O.C.U.” comes on, you’ve met up with your friends and they’ve all brought X, coke, and cheap beer.

“Sour Cherry” has a heavy backbeat and those infectious handclaps that are there to let you know that this album is about dancing and singing along with band. “Alphabet Pony” has the sound of a thrown together, slow, cheap and drunken night out, with thrown together nonsense lyrics and a few good laughs. Add a synth drumbeat and a raunchy guitar/bass line, and you have a mix for a good single. “What New York Used To Be” has the sound of a broken amplifier and “Wooo Wooo” chorus, that comes off as creepy and disturbing, and the final track, “Good Night Bad Morning” is a slow, almost ballad to the night before looking back from the day after.

All in all, the album is a grungy-poppy ode to good times and good memories. From stuttering guitar intros and the cough that won’t leave, the album veers drunkenly between a nasty blooze album and a bubblegum-pop idealization of reckless fun, dirty drinks and the taste of cigarettes in your mouth. Definitely better than previous releases, the band has really owned up to their sound and grown into a beautiful personification of having a night out dancing and drinking with friends. Much better than the triple Y; Karen O even took her stage presence and style from VV, though the YYY’s fans keep forgetting that. Or maybe they’re just too young to remember…

Stand Out Tracks: “Cheap and Cheerful”, “Getting Down”, “Last Day of Magic”, “Hook and Line”, “Sour Cherry”, “Alphabet Pony”, “What New York Used To Be”

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds-Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!

The dirty, swirling, grinding organ that accompanies the majority of this album’s tracks places this albums somewhere between the mid-70’s and early 80’s. The random use of Farfisa and Wurlitzer organs and keyboards make the band sound like some staggering 60’s psychedelic, art-rock band (read as the Doors). Much of the lyrics for the album include the swaggering, sex-driven lyrics of a cock-rock band, but some lyrics work as softer, arty ballads, more in line with the Bad Seeds circa 1994 (think Let Love In).

Where have all the swaggering, coke-addled, sex-fueled rockstars gone? Hopefully this album says nowhere. What’s missing from the music scene now is that older generation of which Nick Cave is quickly becoming, the generation that lets us know that there is nothing wrong with a little cock in our rock, a little drugs in our music. It puts the bump in our grind and makes us quiver in anticipation, luridly awaiting the sex and drugs in our rock and roll like a bunch of gibbering masturbating fanatics. And this is exactly where any good “fan-atic” should be when listening to music: greedily awaiting the next set of lyrics and ready to gobble down the chorus like some sweet sweet candy.

We need people unafraid to make albums that seem almost too ridiculous to conceive, like a concept album based around Lazarus: without depravation, there can be no redemption, and with no redemption there is no point in a concept album. This theme of redemption carries over from the classical music that spawned the rock opera. In opera, the theme of indemnification upon a main character is evident in the “classic” rock operas: Tommy, The Wall, and now, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!.

These albums usually turn out pretty much just okay, but this album has only one way to be described and that is (in my humble opinion) fucking awesome. It’s good, it flows, and best of all, none of the tracks fall into the “skippable” list. I actually want to sit through all of the tracks on the album and love listening to every song. This is a rare thing; to date the only albums that have this effect on me are: Rated R, Songs For The Deaf, Ariadne Thread, Gulag Orkestar, and now Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!

Give it a listen and see what I mean.

Also, other than the obvious New Testament reference, see if you can spot references to Oedipus, Odysseus, and Leopold Bloom.

Stand Out Tracks: “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!”, “Today’s Lesson”, “Moonland”, “We Call Upon The Author”, “Lie Down Here (& Be My Girl)”, “More News From Nowhere”

The Killers-Sawdust

As stated previously with the Dresden Dolls’ album No, Virginia, the sign of a band on the way to hiatus is when they release a greatest hits compilation or a “here’s all of our songs that we cut from our album” album. Either that or they are an older band looking to make more money. Since the latter rules out the Killers, the assumption that I am making is that they have backed themselves into a sound that they cannot write new material in. Either that or they write music that they cannot recognize as better with this new material; most of the tracks from the Sam’s Town sessions are better than any of the songs that the band actually included on the album. This means that they cut songs that were better from the album. Why? Did they actually have the songs then? Or is this some attempt at tricking their audience?

Even the Abbey Road mix of the title song for Sam’s Town sounds better than the mix that was included on the album.

If you like the Killers’ sound, then you will like this, as it is more of their same retro-80’s rock, with some surprising country sounds, like on “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town”, and the reworked styling of 80’s music on “Where The White Boys Dance”. The song “Romeo and Juliet” has a lyrical flow that is suspiciously close to a Lou Reed song, and Lou Reed actually makes an appearance on the first track, “Tranquilize”. His part is barely audible and, after listening, seems like it was only done as a marketing trick to grab hardcore Lou Reed fans like myself into buying same-old same-old regurgitated “alternative” bands’ mediocre mixes. I am hard on this album, but not without reason: I bought all three albums and liked the first one, was disappointed by their second (I expected them to change their sound, even if only a little. They had such promise…), and remain unimpressed with the third.

If a band is going to make a living as “artists” then the band should be willing to push their sound into as many new sonic terrains as possible, whether or not the fans understand or not. I understand that this is uncommon for bands on majors, but the way that most music business is, it seems to follow that indie labels would take a cue from majors, thus a “trickle down” effect on music industry. A label is a label, regardless of its financial backing ability or patronage ability, and it is up to the artists who have signed the contract to push the borders of their musical ability and push the limits of their talent.

I may be a hypocrite; I would sign on and milk a cash cow as long as I could, but the difference between myself and a band like the Killers, is that if they did something that their label did not like on the second one (imagine if the second Killers album sounded like an Animal Collective album) then the label might drop them. They could then, more than likely, parley their previous success into signing with an indie and keeping a good portion of their fan base, given the fact that, indie or major, a label still wants to sell and expose the people that they have contracts and agreements with.

That said, the Killers have turned into one of the most predictable, pussy bands within recent memory.

Stand Out Tracks: “Tranquilize (Featuring Lou Reed)”, “Where The White Boys Dance”, “Glamorous Indie Rock and Roll”, “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town”, “Romeo and Juliet”

Xiu Xiu-Women As Lovers

It is no surprise that the band Xiu Xiu used the title of one of Elfriede Jelinek’s darker novels as the title of their own album: at times the album drifts between darkly sexual themes and lyrics, while at others the music itself seems like a guide in surreal wanderings through a bleak unconsciousness. Specifically in “In Lust You Can Hear The Axe Fall” the lyrics seem to wander and become obsessed upon certain patterns of thought (“Cut love me into your breast/ Crush a pastry into your breast”), focused on discordant themes in the music and violently erotic vocal phrasings.

With the help of the instrumentation, the band creates a sense of dream-like ambience, as if in a Bunuel film. This atmosphere is created through the use of misplaced horns, swirling patterns in the melodic, very light rhythmic percussion, stereo manipulations, and effects that force themselves over the vocals, causing a subconscious “understanding” rather than actual listening. Even when the vocals are heard, the Burroughsian content and phrasing makes the listener “zone out” and experience the entirety of a song.

Certain structures are inherent to music and specifically popular music; structures such as “verse-chorus-verse” or the Nashville chord chart of “I-IV-V”. Xiu Xiu seems to exist outside of these structures, which gives this album the feel of David Bowie’s Low, in which the listener is left not knowing when one track is over and when the next has begun. This album works to break down a preconceived notion of structure that is taken for granted as being in existence in “rock music”. Rather than explaining or qualifying this album with other music, it would be more effective to use art or literature to qualify the feel of the album: Dali, Bunuel, Burroughs, Jelinek, and Barth associate with this album more readily than other bands or musicians.

Stand Out Tracks: “I Do What I Want, When I Want”, “In Lust You Can Hear The Axe Fall”, “Under Pressure (Featuring Michael Gira)”, “You Are Pregnant You, You Are Dead”, “White Nerd”

Mixtape Monday No. 1

1. “There She Goes”/ Babyshambles
2. “Premonition”/ Cococoma
3. “What More Can I Say”/ Jay-Z + The Beatles
4. “Walk Like An Egyptian”/ The Puppini Sisters
5. “That’s My DJ”/ Girl Talk
6. “Alphabet Pony”/ The Kills
7. “ When You’re Evil”/ Voltaire
8. “22 Ghosts III”/ Nine Inch Nails
9. “Dio”/ Tenacious D
10. “Remember Mavis?”/ Sarandon
11. “Ask About Me”/ Girl Talk
12. “Greyhound Bus”/ The Moldy Peaches
13. “Miracle”/ Cocorosie
14. “Nature Springs”/ The Good, The Bad, and The Queen
15. “The Wizard”/ Bat For Lashes
16. “Campaign of Hate”/ The Libertines
17. “Tire Swing”/ Kimya Dawson
18. “Cold Hands”/ The Black Lips
19. “The Life Highrise”/ The Foxglove Hunt
20. “Five On The Five”/ The Raconteurs
21. “21 Ghosts III”/ Nine Inch Nails
22. “I Heard Her Call My Name”/ The Velvet Underground
23. “ She Uses Love Like A Cuss Word”/ Micah Dalton
24. “Night School”/ Frank Zappa
25. “Gayle Lynn”/ Xiu Xiu