ALTER.NATION #32
Foxygen, The Black Keys, Josh Ritter, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, The Cranberries, Lamb, Kevin Morby, Guided by Voices, Altin Gün, Otoboke Beaver, Rodrigo y Gabriela
weekly favtraX
28-04-2019
28-04-2019
Foxygen - Face the Facts from Seeing Other People
...“Face the Facts” explores what it’s like to become an irrelevant musician, offering a tongue-in-cheek list of regrets and impossibilities. While some of the tune reads as genuine, it walks the line between sincere and ridiculous, with absurd banter like “I’m never going to see your face again/ I’m never going to dance like James Brown/ I’m never going to be black/ and I’m never going to get you back” making it hard to take too seriously.
Regardless, the song fits well with what we’ve heard from Seeing Other People thus far, continuing to move the group in the self-proclaimed “Sad-Boy Plastic-Soul Adult-Contemporary Cartoon-Noir” direction they’ve been promoting...
The Black Keys - Eagle Birds
The Black Keys have just announced their ninth studio album. “Let’s Rock” will be their first in five years, following 2014’s Turn Blue... they share the album’s second offering. “Eagle Birds.” They wrote, tracked live, and produced “Let’s Rock” at Dan Auerbach’s studio Easy Eye Sound in Nashville. Leisa Hans and Ashley Wilcoxson contributed backing vocals. “The record is like a homage to electric guitar,” the band’s Patrick Carney says. “We took a simple approach and trimmed all the fat like we used to.”
Josh Ritter - Old Black Magic from Fever Breaks
...Less prone to stylistic detours than previous outings, Fever Breaks is a straight-up band album, with Ritter and company administering some serious muscle on cuts like "Old Black Magic" and "Losing Battles," the latter of which gives off a distinct Crazy Horse vibe.
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Booieman Sam from Fishing for Fishies
After taking a break from releasing new albums for over a year, the always entertaining, often brilliant King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard returned in 2019 with Fishing for Fishies, a blues-inspired recording... "Boogieman Sam" is the most normal-sounding track on the record with its choogling groove and singsong vocals; it also features harp glissandos, strange vocal effects, and a long and wobbly guitar break. Here, and throughout, they sound like a jam band that was shot into space and came back to earth with alien DNA...
The Cranberries - Wake Me When It's Over
...Like the rest of the songs on In The End, the new track still features O’Riordan’s sly, impassioned vocals. “This was a song Dolores had been working on for a little while,” Cranberries lead guitarist Noel Hogan explains. “It’s a fun song to play and it’s bright and quite uplifting. It’s very much a classic Dolores song with a soft verse and a massive chorus.”... In part, it explained their decision to release In The End with permission from O’Riordan’s family.
Lamb - Armageddon Waits from The Secret of Letting Go
British duo Lamb wrote and recorded their seventh studio full-length after completing a European tour which commemorated the 21st anniversary of their beloved 1996 debut. Since that album's release, Lou Rhodes and Andy Barlow have continually refined their genre-splicing sound without losing their touch for relating deep human emotions. The duo's songs have often featured complex arrangements that draw from jazz and drum'n'bass, but they've always served as a pedestal for Rhodes' grand, poetic sentiments... "Armageddon Waits" injects swells of Bond-worthy cinematic strings, and while it's one of the album's most outwardly expressive, hair-raising moments, it never seems like overkill.
Kevin Morby - No Halo from Oh My God
On the four albums leading up to Oh My God, singer/songwriter Kevin Morby channeled some of rock & roll's greatest heroes, calling on various phases of Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, and others with rootsy tunes that breathed with restless longing. The mystique of the songs was supported by fully fleshed-out arrangements and sharp, guitar-centered production... Morby worked again with producer Sam Cohen (who assisted with the songwriter's 2016 album Singing Saw) and instead of the dense instrumentation of earlier work, Cohen suggested some songs be stripped down to just a few spare elements...
Guided by Voices - Dead Liquor Store / The Pipers, The Vipers, The Snakes! from Warp and Woof
Just when we were all getting used to the notion of Guided by Voices making only one album a year and recording songs that were in the neighborhood of three minutes long, Robert Pollard has to go and remind us he's still the guy who made Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes. Something of a throwback to GbV's early lo-fi era, 2019's Warp and Woof -- which arrived a bit less than three months after the super-sized Zeppelin Over China -- is a manic burst of bite-sized tuneage, whipping through 24 songs in less than 37 minutes... And even more important, this lineup of Guided by Voices continues to demonstrate it may be the best in the group's nearly 35-year history, and guitarists Doug Gillard and Bobby Bare, Jr., bassist Mark Shue, and drummer Kevin March hit a near-perfect sweet spot between raw, scrappy basement jamming and the power of a tight, emphatic rock band in full flight. Warp and Woof is a series of short sprints compared to the marathon of Zeppelin Over China, but it covers a lot of ground at a brisk pace and it's a whole lot of fun. Who would have guessed that GbV would be in the midst of a new golden era 15 years after they first broke up?
Altin Gün were formed by former members of Jacco Gardner's band to pay tribute to the Turkish psychedelia of the early '70s that they discovered and fell in love with while on tour in Turkey. Bassist Jasper Verhulst fell under the spell of artists like Baris Manço, Selda Bağcan, and Erkin Koray, who blended traditional Turkish folk sounds with the wild sounds of their day, so Verhulst decided he wanted to do something similar in the 2010s, using modern production techniques and synthesizers along with psych guitars and Turkish instruments... Powered by the rhythm section's elastic bounce, the guitar's fuzzy wandering, the bubbling keyboards, and the bewitching sound of the electric saz (as played with fiery precision by Erdinç Ecevit), the album has a rich sound that rivals anything by modern psych masters like Dungen and King Gizzard, while remaining true to their brief of making the classic Turkish sound come alive for the modern era.Ecevit's alternately mournful and joyous vocals are a clear tie to the past, as is Merve Daşdemir's hauntingly beautiful singing. .. and songs as spookily pretty as "Leyla" or "Anlatmam Derdimi" make for perfect soundtrack music for introspective summer evenings when the shadows are just beginning to creep in.
Otoboke Beaver - datsu . hikage no onna from Itekoma Hits
おとぼけビ〜バ〜 - 脱・日陰の女
When the English label Damnably Records released the 2016 compilation Okoshiyasu!! Otoboke Beaver, it made it easier for those outside of Japan to hear exactly why the Kyoto band had such a fervent fan base... Otoboke Beaver add more detail and sophistication to their music on Itekoma Hits' new songs... Itekoma Hits doesn't leave listeners a moment to catch their breath -- or grow bored. Arriving a decade after Otoboke Beaver formed, it suggests they're becoming bolder and more surprising with time.
Rodrigo y Gabriela - Echoes (Pink Floyd cover) from Mettavolution
Mettavolution, the title of acoustic guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela's fifth studio album, is drawn from two distinct words. "Metta" is Sanskrit for loving kindness, compassion for self and others, and one of Buddhism's engines of "bodhichitta," the awakened heart's desire to benefit all beings through meditation and action. The word "revolution," with its Latin root, offers several meanings, including "a fundamental change in the way of thinking about something." What does Mettavolution have to do with rock & roll, particularly the metal- and flamenco-influenced inspiration of R&G's music? Doesn't beautiful music benefit all who encounter it? Mettavolution is the first studio album by the duo in five years... While the album's most previewed track is a sense-altering 19-minute cover of Pink Floyd’s "Echoes," it's in the five front-end cuts where R&G reveal their latest musical evolution... The staccato lyric fills set up a contrast for the labyrinthine "Echoes," that commences briefly with an insistent, clarion single-note pulse. This version doesn't drift. It asserts its languid bluesy persona before articulating the melody in verses that preface the innovative themes that emerge later. It's a breathtaking conclusion that serves to underscore the abundant originality and soul R&G bring to everything they play...
Foxygen, The Black Keys, Josh Ritter, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, The Cranberries, Lamb, Kevin Morby, Guided by Voices, Altin Gün, Otoboke Beaver, Rodrigo y Gabriela
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