Johnny Marr – The Messenger (Sire Records, 2013)
Over his tenure with The Smiths, and in the two and a half decades since that band split, Johnny Marr has built a reputation as the greatest guitarist of a generation. His playing has added texture and heft to recordings by The Pretenders, Modest Mouse, The The, The Cribs, The Healers, and numerous other groups. Yet surprisingly enough, this is his first proper solo album.
Accordingly, it sounds like an artist expanding his horizons, revitalized, refreshed, remembering all that he can do. Some is experimental, some is introspective, some is just plain rock and roll. And it’s all drenched in layered waves of guitar – rumbling under verses, growing in intensity at the choruses, using the spaces between words to break free and unleash attacks of chiming, strumming, searing catharsis.
Each track has its own personality, its own vibe: ‘The Crack Up’ combines underwater bubbling with ethereal harmonics and a lead line that seems squeezed out of thin air, ‘Upstarts’ is a blast of swaggering britpop riffs, ‘I Want The Heartbeat’ races and thrills, the tones of ‘Lockdown’ dance around the melody and thrash like a vintage glam anthem. There are a lot of great songs here, but that’s almost beside the point because it’s not about the songs, really – it’s about the sounds. And the sounds are many, and varied, and breathtaking in their sweep and power. Johnny Marr has finally stepped into the spotlight, and this disc is a picture of a man in his natural element, doing what he does better than anyone.
The Messenger is now available on CD, vinyl, or as a digital download.
Bastille – Bad Blood (Virgin Records UK, 2013)
Though they’re still largely unknown outside of the UK, I wouldn’t be surprised if Bastille went on to become the world’s next new favorite band – their album manages to be a million things at once, without sounding forced or contrived. It’s emotive singer-songwriter music with liberal electronic underpinnings. It sounds perfectly of-the-moment, yet unplaceable and timeless. The songs are so well-crafted as to be immediate earworms, the production and arrangements overflow with elements that head straight for the gut and the hips.
The first song, ‘Pompeii’, has just been released as a single, entering the UK pop charts at #2 this week. It’s a masterpiece of momentum: it begins with a baritone choir, hidden just out of sight. The spotlight falls on a young man, singing all alone at center stage. Percussion floats in from the orchestra pit, quickly joined by some robot handclaps. (Robot handclaps are always good.) And then we get to the chorus, the curtain rises, and all these elements come together in a rush of drums, strobes, keyboards, and soaring voices.
The entire record works on a similar level: a cinemascope take on modernist electropop, melodies that climb to the skies and glide slowly back down. The tunes push forth with an impeccable sense of dynamics: build, maintain, release, repeat. The verses rumble like rivers, the choruses hit like tidal waves. And the voice at the center keeps perspective and never loses the connection to the audience: conveying intimacy on an epic scale.
Each track manages to pull out some amazing trick, some moment of conjuring doves out of hi-hats: the subliminal doubled human/robot vocal of ‘Bad Blood’, the chattering drums and buzzing tones entering under the straight balladry of ‘Overjoyed’, the kitchen sink crescendoes of ‘Laura Palmer’, the choral expanse of ‘Get Home’. Bastille have fashioned their own subgenre of baroque stadium synthrock, scaling up computer-driven pop song blueprints, creating a sound that spans concert halls and cathedrals.
Bad Blood is now available as an import CD; US release details have yet to be determined.
They Might Be Giants – Nanobots (Idlewild/Megaforce Records, 2013)
Here are some numbers: This album has 25 tracks, only three of them 3:00 or longer. The longest track is a mere 3:21. The shortest is an even mere-er 0:06. (Track 12 is called ‘9 Secret Steps’, and it times in at 1:56.) This is the 16th studio album to be released by They Might Be Giants in their 31 years as a band. In that time, they have also released 7 different live albums, and 9 compilations that include otherwise-unavailable material.
Here are some details: It sounds exactly like They Might Be Giants, as it should. It’s the first release of their new distribution deal with Megaforce Records. Many of the pop song subgenres that are unique to this band are well-represented here – the historical biography (Tesla), the bits-of-foreign-language singalong (Stone Cold Coup d’Etat), the rocking but somewhat unnerving first-person love song (Call You Mom), the sparsely-arranged paranoid ballad (Black Ops), the circular-lyric-brainteaser (9 Secret Steps), the dysfunctional romantic lament (Too Tall Girl), the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them stylistic pastiche fragments (nearly half the album).
Though it can sometimes forgotten beneath the compulsive quirkiness and referential wordplay, Johns Flansburgh and Linell remain two of the sharpest songwriters working today. They can turn out infectious tunes in their sleep: songs flash past in spontaneous dreamlike fashion, lyrics leaping through Little Nemo-esque stream of surrealism with their own internal logic.
This is what They Might Be Giants do best: follow their muse on whatever bizarre tangent it may lead, and return with slightly-skewed, picture-perfect melodies. They go on rocking in their own distinct, brilliant way, taking footnotes from history books and treatises on insanity, and using them as the bases of your new favorite pop songs.
Nanobots is now available on CD or for download; the vinyl edition will be released on March 19th.