Print Edition: September 19, 2012
Aimee Mann
Charmer
The latest record from New Wave-vet Aimee Mann opens strong, with an innocuously-buzzing synth and Mann’s rich, effortlessly-beautiful voice set to dutifully-chugging Tom Petty power chords. While it grabs your attention early, the album’s immaculate fullness seems to sweep each song into the next. On first listen, Charmer breezes by almost too easily. Looking back on my early notes, I seem to have been gearing up to write off Mann’s latest as “overproduced Starbucks-bait.” But then something changed. I listened to it for a second time. Then a third. I slowly realized I couldn’t bring myself to pass the same judgement I’d initially prescribed. What the album’s dense production and Mann’s casually-delivered vocals at first disguise is a collection of understated, but masterfully-crafted pop songs. Take the chorus hook of “Crazytown,” where a walloping stop-start guitar line is fused together by a series of “oo-oo-oo-oooo-oo”s. Or “Gamma Ray,” a gently rollicking number anchored by the bridge’s declaration of crushing inevitability: “One thing leads to the other / and none of it’s good.” While Charmer’s tension lies in the juxtaposition of Mann’s terse lyrics and impossibly agreeable music, its effectiveness would have been helped by pared-down, dynamic production.
The xx
Coexist
Peering inwards, hung up on happiness, The xx’s plain, evasive directness evolves in Coexist. He (Oliver Sim) fears falling for an image yet fantasizes love into “Fiction,” she (Romy Madley Croft) inverts the storied dream of “Angels,” both “Try,” or at least say they will. Doing lies beyond the reach of these liminal lovers, situations configured differently over time, but they are always either on the cusp or “Missing.” The age-old queries and directions are near-fossilized here, lyrics eroded past specificity, retaining only the tightly structured question-question, claim-criticism that drives Coexist’s opposite glorification and fixation on what can’t be changed. If there’s one thing that The xx shares with pop music—despite their reticence to celebrate freely or do away with regret—it’s the address of the universal: “Will you miss me.” Sim’s and Madley Croft’s voices never stretch near the point of breaking, either as a visage to hide their internal monologues or as a part of the stream of modern connection and expectation. Producer Jamie Smith, though, varies the approach beyond the curtailed repetends of The xx’s debut, adding soft electronic churns and skitters, weaving in silence as unforgettable possibility, eternal dread.
The Avett Brothers
The Carpenter
Lyrically, The Carpenter doesn’t stray from the impressionist poetic lyrics that Scott and Seth Avett have honed over the years, nor does it stray from their favoured topics: growing old, death and self-reflection. North Carolina’s grassroots underdogs Avett Brothers join forces with bearded, superstar producer Rick Rubin for their sixth studio album to build off the commercial success of 2009 predecessor I and Love and You, and the album failed to reach the heights the group had previously climbed. Besides the dreadful Soundgarden inspired “Paul Newman vs. the Demons,” The Avett Brothers stick to monotonously familiar territory. There’s nothing particularly progressive or novel about The Carpenter, it just feels less tender and less personal, despite its recognizable sound and principals. At its best moments, The Carpenter lands somewhere between the laid-back harmonies of Fleet Foxes, the wounded defiance of The Band and the bittersweet wistfulness of Willie Nelson, with sincere ballads like “February Seven,” “Father’s First Spring,” and “Winter in My Heart” placing the band in their comfort zone. The band’s moody Americana.
Animal Collective
Centipede Hz
Faster and more chaotic than their last output, 2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion¸ Animal Collective’s Centipede Hz still retains the moody psychedelic/electronic indie-rock sound that has characterized the band’s past. The tracks share a few distinct features: looping drum fills and percussion under a multitude of sounds, musical or not, such as electric organ, radio static, voice samples and dog barks. The album has a density that plays analog against electric, every track buzzing and popping over the amplified guitar, making the levels as crowded as the album art. The vocals, though always sung with much echo, range from the hectic, powerful and messy screaming of “Today’s Supernatural” to the more plaintive pop-like “New Town Burnout.” It takes some patience to see the songs as more than the garbled sums of the individual parts, but after this is done the confusion dissolves and the tracks become overworked experiments in the layering of instruments on simple rhythms. Overall, Centipede Hz is a novel experience for the ears, and although none of the songs offer instant gratification for virgins to Animal Collective, it might convert anyone to the band through its strange, incessant creativity.
