Franz Ferdinand – Tonight (Domino)
It’s been four years since their last studio release, and Franz Ferdinand have returned in fine form—the Scottish quartet’s latest effort, Tonight, is brimming with disco-inflected rhythms and infectious melodies.
While the tracklist presents a marked change from their earlier albums, it’s reassuring to hear the Glaswegian boys doing what they do best at the core of Tonight. The roaring riffs, pounding percussion, and booming vocals of Alex Kapranos combine to produce a medley of danceable grooves. It’s not quite a new sound; rather, an expansion of their old one.
The bass-heavy opener and lead single, “Ulysses,” packs a powerful punch with Kapranos alternating between a rasp and a roar. The sing-along chorus repeats a hook so catchy it’s impossible to get out of your head.
The rest of the album lives up to expectations, with “No You Girls” composed in traditional Franz style with an addictive chorus and accompanying handclaps, and the cheeky “Turn It On,” where Kapranos croons: “You know I’ll get you on your own.” New forays into electronic territory such as “Twilight Omens” deliver irresistible synth flourishes, while the eight-minute “Lucid Dreams” features a hazy, extended riff.
A number of unexpected discoveries bring the album to a close. The ethereal “Dream Again” provides a surprisingly mellow finish to a highly energetic album. The closing track, “Katherine Kiss Me” is an acoustic ballad that tells the same story as the jaunty “No You Girls” from a softer, more vulnerable perspective.
The result is a collection of fun, danceable rockers capped off with a lilting finish, as Kapranos ironically bemoans: “You leave me dancing alone.” But if this album is playing, there’s little chance of that being anyone’s fate.
—Niamh Fitzgerald
VVVV
LATE OF THE PIER – FANTASY BLACK CHANNEL (EMI)
If the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse chose to descend upon a sweaty London nightclub, it’s a reasonable assumption that “Hot Tent Blues,” the crashing minute-long intro to Late of the Pier’s full-length debut, might provide the soundtrack. But those 76 bombastic seconds of guitar and synth flourishes announce a different type of Judgment Day. After releasing four singles that set the UK underground on fire, Late of the Pier’s Fantasy Black Channel has arrived, armed with a fistful of frenetic party-starters.
It was always assumed that British nu-rave would be a short-lived fad, but Late of the Pier’s urgent, futuristic sounds are an indication that the annoying moniker isn’t ready to die just yet. In fact, the album seems to be the work of a manic bunch of garage rockers who somehow got their hands on expensive synthesizers, old drum machines, and a boatload of MDMA.
Mixing influences the way they might mix pills on a night out, “White Snake” has all the off-kilter madness of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” with body-shaking grooves taking the place of head-banging riffs. While singer Samuel Dust’s lazy vocals take a backseat to the infectious synth line of “Space & the Woods,” he turns around and cranks it up to screeching hair metal territory on “Focker.”
For all their quirks, Late of the Pier are infinitely satisfying when they turn down the drug-induced mania in favour of a straightforward hook, hence the uber-cute music box instrumentation of “Random Firl” and the soaring glam-punk chorus of “Heartbeat.”
Fantasy Black Channel is the best 60-minute party you’ll find on record so far this year, and by the time you work your way down to “Bathroom Gurgle,” the debut single that set the hype machine in motion, you’ll be exhausted, dehydrated, and disoriented by the best kind of sensory overload.
—Rob Duffy
ANIMAL COLLECTIVE – Merriweather Post Pavilion (Domino)
Since the 1970s, 14-year-olds around the world have engaged in a similar ritual when it comes to the appreciation of complex works of art: sparking a few doobies and convincing themselves that they understand Dark Side of the Moon. In teenage logic, a month’s worth of mescaline would only begin to help me figure out what’s going on with Merriweather Post Pavilion, the latest LP from American art stars Animal Collective. It’s hard not to feel let down by the big, muddled mess that this record poured into my headphones.
The principal problem amounts to surplus. More than any of their other releases, Merriweather is desperately in need of an editor—there are choice melodies here, but damned if you can hear them under all that plinking, plunking, and pounding.
The album’s few effective songs benefit from their relative attempts to rein in their creators. Standouts include “Into the Flowers” and “Summertime Clothes,” which boasts the album’s most linear melody, relying on the endearing repetition of “I want to walk around with you.”
The rest is designed to be thought provoking, but comes off as an insipid jumble—like the irritating electronic xylophone refrain of “Daily Routine,” or the drum-circle drone vocals that drown out all discernable rhythm on “Lion in a Coma.”
Sadly, the Collective seems to have abandoned the tempo and time signature switches that made tracks on Sung Tongs, Feels, and Strawberry Jam such curious delights. The sonic experimentation that’s marked their best work has taken a turn for the worse, leading to grating synthesizers, murky feedback, and intolerable percussion (how did they find so many things that sound so shrill in one studio?). There’s something empty about complexity for complexity’s sake, and Merriweather has turned Animal Collective into a band with a cold drum machine where their heart used to be.
—Wyndham Bettencourt-McCarthy
Vv
ANDREW BIRD – NOBLE BIRD (Fat Possum)
Andrew Bird is a man of many layers. A self-proclaimed instrumentalist, Bird whistles his way into melancholia with “Oh No,” the first track on his latest record Noble Beast. He experiments throughout the album with his above-average whistling skills, and drawing on elements of jazz, folk, Latin and country, lulls his eclectic influences into a surprisingly coherent and intricate album.
“Oh No” provides a reassuring hand-clap to counter its whistled melody, while Bird exercises his linguistic powers with an unsettling vocal turn. “Masterswarm” laces a Latin beat with mournful vocals, layering a mournful violin loop interspersed with a whistled tune you’d expect to hear on the wind of an abandoned country road.
For Bird, words themselves seem to carry very little meaning, as nonsensical lyrics are crooned, relished, and repeated throughout the album. “Tenuous” picks up on a country vibe, with Bird singing confidentially, “Tenuous at best was all he had to say / When pressed about the rest of it, the world that is / From proto-Sanskrit Minoans to Porto-centric Lisboans / Greek Cypriots and harbor-sorts who hang around in quotes a lot.”
Bird seems to employ words not for their dictionary meaning, but for their linguistic power. On Noble Beast, words become tools of noise and elements of sound assuming meaning on their own terms.
Overall, Bird creates an album both exotic and intimate, something you wouldn’t be surprised to hear crooned between lovers on a South American seashore. He diverts from his traditional folk, pop, and chamber-pop influences, and in fleeting moments, captures a certain a transcendent uniqueness.
—Emily Kellogg
VVVv
TWO TONGUES – TWO TONGUES (Vagrant)
The self-titled debut of Two Tongues is a collaborative effort between Max Bemis and Coby Linder (of Say Anything fame) and Chris Conley and David Soloway of legendary New Jersey punk band Saves the Day. While one might expect a breakthrough from these pop-punk heavyweights, the album plays like a mildly interesting collection of b-sides off Say Anything’s last release.
Bemis’ gasoline vocals are as emotive as ever, though his newfound celebrity has diffused his manic tendencies, making his lyrical and vocal delivery far less convincing. Any follower of Saves the Day’s recent work will know that adding Conley’s voice yields similar results to that of a female backup vocalist. Gone are the days of Conley’s ballsy teenage vocals on early records like Can’t Slow Down and Through Being Cool. Instead, listeners are forced to endure his nasally falsetto interspersed with Bemis’ yelps about unrequited love.
Stylistically, Two Tongues shuffles around between standard, dual-vocal pop-punk (“Wowee Zowee” and “Come On”) and awful, 70s-style guitar-rock (“Don’t You Want to Come Home” and “Back Against the Wall”). While the glory days of messenger bags and shaggy bangs are long gone, the assumed credibility of this release disappears when it’s played in full. Bemis can’t seem to stray from his faux-minimalist, boy-with-guitar persona, and Conley is simply too weak in vocal chords or testosterone to contribute anything of substance.
Fans of Saves the Day and Say Anything will be sorely disappointed by this half-assed project. Apparently money does buy happiness, and I wish these guys would have gotten dumped (or, at their age, divorced), which might have provided adequate subject material to make this album memorable.
—David Pike
V
