The Art of the Mixtape

Insta-Review: I Am Home, The New Complainers (2012)

Insta-Reviews are generally shorter reactions to new album releases that still deserve to be heard

If you were to pass Jon Palmer, The New Complainers frontman, on the street in the city he might just strike you as an ordinary guy, the city folk who fill the rank and file of student youth that are looking for work. Thing is, Jon Palmer is the strident lead singer of a great Boston rock band, and they’ve just released their debut today, I Am Home. Created and produced over a year in a Mission Hill apartment, I Am Home isn’t just the work of some college band using Garageband light production, but a labor of love that rocks with the reckless abandon that only some established rock bands can boast.

Propulsive, and armed with instrumentation that’s inebriated with bar-rock form ( that’s sharp and boozy guitars, syncopated drumming, and keyboard work that amplifies the rhythm), Palmer’s live vocal takes sound like a young Hamilton Leithauser (of The Walkmen) and the harmonies are at times Beatleesque (that’s unified oohs and aahs in the background) but what’s most clear is that the band is really enjoying their time behind the mic.

“Brollo” indeed serves as a good introduction to the album as a whole, with production that could easily have been taken from a live performance, where the guitars burn and hum from small amps and the vocals and drums come clean through, but it’s really “Layaway” and “Whatchya Feel” that struck me as The New Complainers at their best, and if you do believe in the singles era, these would be the two to take from the album (but really, buy the whole album you cheapskate).

“Layaway”

Whatchya Feel

The New Complainers are clearly a band that enjoys the night, especially the weekend where alcohol and bars are co-conspirators to fun evenings.

RIYL: The Walkmen, Garage Rock, Bar Rock, bands that rock

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Review: Lonesome Dreams, Lord Huron (2012)

Lord Huron is a band that is heavy on locations, and the emotions that go along with them. Their first effort, Into The Sun, was an EP that evoked the tropical setting of some far away island, a modern day Robinson Crusoe content to explore the splendor of the wild. It was in the truest sense an independent effort; Ben Schneider (Lord Huron’s namesake) composed, arranged, and played the songs all by himself, layering vocals and atmospheric production into a manifest of the optimism that once sprung forth from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. This boundless worldly music brought forth another EP, Mighty, again pitting transcendental themes of retrospective youth and love like waves washing up on a shore of an uncharted isle with some of Schneider’s strongest music to date, “Mighty” “Son of A Gun”, “The Stranger” and “When Will I See You Again” once again pitting a lonesome figure against an optimistic world.

It was around this time that I heard of Lord Huron, through music blogs like Rollo Grady and Everybody Taste, and fell in love with their ability to transform the myriad emotions of the world around them into a boundless epic of persevering hope. When I saw them in concert, I was even more impressed and besotted by overwhelming emotion (and beer) I sought out the band members and thanked them for their music, to which they replied a LP would be forthcoming in the next year.

What makes a debut LP succeed these days is a band’s ability to coalesce the sound that stood out in their EPs and build upon it. Both Into The Sun and Mighty showed exceptional promise and vision of a new artist but were perhaps limited by it’s one man tour-de-force. Both live and on Lonesome Dreams, Lord Huron comes equipped with a full band, and as a result, a fleshed out version of his music.

While Into The Sun and Mighty reflected journeys both external and internal, Lonesome Dreams album cover is a lush background with one stark solitary figure riding into the night
a man still trying to find his way in a vast landscape of the unknown. And so begins “Ends Of The Earth” as a call to empty echoed earth, a call propelled forward. If the Beach Boys had been more taken by the America of the 1800s than say 1950’s youth, that might give you a picture of how tightly the harmonies are constructed, as the wide open expanse of instrumentation builds behind them. "Out there’s a world that calls for a girl headin’ out to the unknown" croons Schneider in a prologue to the energetic bandit narrator of “Time to Run” who’s committed an unknown crime simply because “I wanted everybody else in the world to know that / I wanted everyone to know you’re the girl for me."

Schneider had a specific vision in mind when he set about writing the themes to this album ”When I first started working on the record, I was trying to make an anthology of old western tales. I thought it’d be interesting to look at it from that lens, so I came up with this fictional author who wrote all those stories. And that’s George Ranger Johnson.“ If his album covers and music videos are any indication, Schneider is an extremely visual artist, so the creation of a whole separate persona to take credit for his influences is only a natural extension of his work. (The music video for "Time To Run” evokes a Technicolor Western, complete with title credits and obscure language subtitles)

At their worst, Schneider and company sound like Bon Iver decided to record For Emma, Forever Ago in the Serengeti which is not a bad thing at all. The arrangements shimmer and sparkle with a tropical tinge, a horizon not burdened by buildings but sunsets. This natural longing, this environmental escapism is central to Lord Huron’s heart. Their music is not the sounds of the urban jungle, frenetic and artificially fueled, but rather reflective of the natural sunlight, a warm enveloping sound that fills your heart with unbridled hope.

Schneider is lucky to be blessed with such an emotive voice, both hopeful and world-weary, which befits many of the songs on Lord Huron’s debut like “The Ghost On The Shore” and “Brother (Last Ride)” and the expansive, sometimes droning instrumentation of this collection of songs lends a worldly flavor to the western narrative flavored lyrics. While it is an intriguing strength of the band as a whole, it also led to my disappointment with the results of “The Man Who Lives Forever” where the melody line gets lost in the Eastern flavor, where live it is dominated by intricate guitar lines and overlapping melodies.

Still, Lonesome Dreams is an overwhelmingly strong debut that showcases Lord Huron’s singular vision, astounding vocal harmonies and epic melodies that are as transportive as they are expansive.

Top Picks:

I Will Be Back One Day

The Ghost On The Shore

Time To Run

Ends Of The Earth

Album Rating:

Lord Huron’s debut album, Lonesome Dreams, comes out tomorrow (10/9) and if you’ve somehow missed the album stream on NPR, you should probably go ahead and listen to it now

Grab it on IAMSOUND

Review: Life’s A Gas, The Tins, (2012)

I first heard of The Tins when I came across “Backbone”, a joyful concoction of Weezer’s stadium rock of the 1990’s and popcraft of the 1980’s. I was immediately hooked and un-sated by their only release, The Tins EP , and I wanted more. All the while, The Tins maintained a personal relationship with their fan-base, announcing a Kickstarter campaign to finance their debut album wherein they offered prizes from a modest thank you on their Facebook page, to playing a private show for the donor, to even offering their tour van as compensation (that specific offer was never taken). Sweet touring van aside, The Tins more than delivered on their first LP, officially out today featuring cuts that exemplified their backbone of 1980’s pop meets 1990’s stadium rock, as well as a few songs that show them heading in a new direction.

“Hit and Miss” begins the album with a snyth-driven hook and an emphatic back beat that builds the song to an energetic crescendo, and it’s all around a strong anthem. The Tins follow the song with a startling change of pace in “We Fought The Moon”, a cut with a startlingly melodic slow hook that finds the band in fine territory in between Modest Mouse (particularly the vocals and syncopation) and Weezer in the fuzzy rock arrangement. “Taking Liberties” could be a lost single from The Monkees with it’s 60’s garage rock organ lines and close-knit harmonies, and it features a nice little Bo Diddley bridge. Meanwhile, “Spies” propels forward with a hook that would have made The Cars proud. It’s a strong introduction for the album, but perhaps even more surprising is how the second half is even better.

“Vicki” had been released earlier as the album’s first single and it deserves mention as one of the album’s stand out tracks. It seduces you with that warm and fuzzy 80’s pop vibe, while the lyrics tell a story of “a virgin with the urges” . The accompanying music video is fittingly dark, dead bodies stack up as zombies begin to pick off the band. While it could be interpreted as commentary on teenagers whose main desire is nothing but having fun and trying to have sex, it’s clear that The Tins are having fun, though few could make this dark humor sound so good. When “Midnight Crowd” first came onto my speakers, my roommates wondered how they hadn’t heard this Shins song before, and although it’s a bizarre change in arrangement, a more organic and acoustic affair, The Tins trademark anthemic hook is still there in the chorus and far from being derivative, The Tin’s make what could be just a shameless rip-off into a good what-if jump off point for where the band could go with their sound, it doesn’t hurt that they manage to sound more like The Shins of Oh, Inverted World than The Shins have in years.

The Tins begin another dark tongue in cheek tale with “Shozo Hirono” which wraps a ne’er do well tale about a murder with more enthusiasm than a Cormac McCarthy novel as the narrator spirals into confusion. The instruments swell with climactic psychedelic vigor before a descent into white noise, and the end of the narrator’s story (and life?).

“Colors” brings back the Modest Mouse off beat drumming syncopation, and one of the album’s more dynamic hooks and it’s a nice transition between “Shozo Hirono” and the next track “Please Be Kind” which sounds like The Cars and The Clash had a baby, and that’s a good thing, the track flutters and whirs with a funky bass line, propulsive drumming and fantastic guitar interplay. If “Midnight Crowd” and “Please Be Kind” are indicative of where the band could go moving forward, I’m even more excited for their sophomore effort than I was of their debut.

“Halo” is a story of a love gone wrong, and it has a fascinating build in terms of instrumentation and hooks a plenty, and it helps close out the album along with “Whiteout” on a strong note, with “Whiteout” being their strongest take on the Modest Mouse sound.

While in many cases, sounding like another band is damning praise, The Tins don’t sound like they’re trying to cash in or out of ideas, they just want to pay homage to their influences. Also, as a debut LP, with only a single EP to their name, they’re amazingly polished and cohesive, this is a band that can write anthemic pop rockers and intricate syncopated indie rock with an equally strong footing. If anything, this is a band to keep an eye on, and it’s a great debut.

RIYL: The Shins, The Cars, Modest Mouse, Weezer

Grab Life’s A Gas on Bandcamp

Eric Earley of Blitzen Trapper Covers The Band’s classic “Up On Cripple Creek”

Granted, I’ve never heard of the good old Deschutes River Brewery, but I like the concept of having artists cover river related songs by a river, it’s a perfect fit for all of the indie live music video companies that are around nowadays, and plus who doesn’t want to see Eric Earley of Blitzen Trapper cover a classic by The Band?