JAGA JAZZIST – One Armed Bandit (2010)

Although not quite as unhinged as Estradasphere or some of the more berserk offerings from John Zorn, Jaga Jazzist have been, if nothing else, dependable sentinels of modern jazz. As an ensemble, they’ve fused their laid back (but nonetheless intense) compositions with everything from breakcore glitches to spacey guitar soundscapes to dance floor electronics. But unlike Estradsphere or John Zorn, these stylistic pairings are a means to an end; Jaga Jazzist aren’t interested in bending or subverting genres. They are, at the end of the day, a jazz ensemble: they still favor rhythm over melody, openness over structure, etc. If you’re used to listening to things like The Mars Volta, you might decry something as contemporary as Jaga Jazzist as “too disciplined” but it’s really the other way around. At their worst, The Mars Volta have one rule (“no rules”), which they’re only too quick follow into realms of mindless musical tedium. Jaga Jazzist, by contrast, don’t seem to be concerned with rules. They’re just here to play, thanks.

Such is the vibe one gets from One Armed Bandit, the band’s first album since 2005’s What We Must. They begin things with decidedly little fanfare (The Thing Introduces…, a thirty second garbled trumpet transmission), before launching into the album’s title track. While you might expect the album’s longer songs to outshine the shorter ones (if for no other reason than there’s more room and time for the band to roam around), the songs are pretty consistently intriguing in their depth, regardless of length. That being said, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that the nine minute Toccata is the best offering here; it’s a great take on the virtuoso model, one that’s surprisingly hypnotic in its minimalism. while we’re on the subject, minimalism isn’t a defining trait of One Armed Bandit; much of what’s here sounds like a free-form Tortoise working with a larger palette. Jaga Jazzist seem to favor that approach (the rhythmic perpetual motion machine) – they’re just working on a much bigger scale with it.

It’s worth stating again that if you’re looking for unabashed instrumental genre-defying weirdness, you should look elsewhere. Jaga Jazzist, even at their most unpredictable, don’t really fly off the handle, so to speak. And that’s what I like most about the band. For someone like me, someone who’s got such an unbelievably, otherworldly affinity for strange music, bands like Jaga Jazzist are kind of like the best of both worlds. They’re adventurous enough to satiate your appetite for the bizarre, and they’re grounded enough to keep you aware of the all the details (of which there are just the right amount). Hmmm. Apparently you can have your cake and eat it, too.

THE SOFT PACK – The Soft Pack (2010)

Few bands stabbed adrenaline into the heart of the punk ethos with more homicidal gusto than The Plot To Blow Up The Eiffel Tower. Shakespeare (well, technically Juliet, but whatever) once asked “what’s in a name?” Sometimes, the answer is self-explanatory. It’s kind of remarkable that the band lasted for five years before disbanding, given their propensity for thoroughly abusive live performances. After they disbanded, the members went their separate ways. Some of them wound up in Crocodiles. Bassist Willy Graves, sadly, passed away in September of 2008. And drummer Brian Hill found his way here, to The Soft Pack. And despite the band’s indisputably calmer demeanor, the shift for Hill is surprisingly comprehensible: instead of heralding a manic punk onslaught, he’s simply trying to some get some garage walls to collapse.

Formerly known as the Muslims (the band changed their name because “ignorant and racist” comments being made about them), The Soft Pack’s debut album sounds like a band determined to channel a delicate balance between garage rock, punk and surf rock all at the same time. Given the headstrong nature of these genres, that’s easier said than done, and the band pull it off about as well as could be expected. There’s no question that The Soft Pack’s main priority is to make the audience overload on primitive rock bliss (C’mon, More or Less), but they’re also not afraid to push the tonality of their instruments into uncomfortable realms at times (the stabbing, pre-Moon and Antarctica Modest Mouse guitar twitches in Answer To Yourself, the Crystal Antlers-rivaling organ blizzard in Move Along). Bear in mind that none of this is excessive – indeed, I wish The Soft Pack pushed their songs towards their breaking points more often. That would make The Soft Pack a truly warped record, a living document of a band trying to destroy their songs. The last time I heard a rock band do that over the course of an entire album was …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead in 2002, with Source Tags and Codes. And that was ight years ago.

While talking with a friend of mine about New Jersey punk outfit Titus Andronicus, my friend said that while he enjoyed what the band did, he confessed that sometimes, he wished they’d just “get to the point.” While I can’t say I’ve ever experienced that listening to Titus Andronicus, I see where he’s coming from. There’s something to be said about perfecting the art of instant musical gratification. And while The Soft Pack aren’t quite masters of this trade yet, they sound as though they want to be, and that goes along way. Each song on The Soft Pack sounds as like a band coming to grips with a live or die situation. Once they come to believe that it is life or death, then they’ll be masters. As it stands, however, The Soft Pack aren’t quite there yet – but they’re forging ahead on the path of enlightenment at an alarming rate.

THE ALBUM LEAF – A Chorus of Storytellers (2010)

Though they like working with Birgir Jón from Sigur Rós (A Chorus of Storytellers was mixed at Sundlaugin, the former-swimming-pool-turned-studio maintained by Birgir; past efforts of The Album Leaf have been recorded there, as well), The Album Leaf don’t have that much in common with Sigur Rós. I say this even though the first time I actually heard The Album Leaf was on a Sigur Rós radio last.fm station. But I digress. Jimmy LaValle (principal songwriter for The Album Leaf) isn’t as focused on texture and timbre as his Icelandic post-rock friends are. He’s more concerned with taking the big ideas of post-rock and turning them into something tangible, without sacrificing the emotional impact in the process. And when he lands this pirouette (as he did on 2004’s excellent Into The Blue Again), he’s among the best post-rock has to offer.

Whether he’s taking the fury of This Will Destroy You down a few decibels on Within Dreams or combining Efrim Menuck minimalism with Amiina’s grandeur on Until The Last, LaVelle doesn’t misstep on the album’s instrumentals. The few problems on this album lay in the songs with vocals. While it’s not the case on all of the songs, the vocals are, more often than not, an unfortunate distraction. The repetition of the phrase “find a way to fall” on Falling From The Sun, for example, gets tiresome awfully quick. And on There Is A Wind, the vocals only help to illustrate the stasis that the song itself get stuck in halfway through. Still, these are minor offenses. If they bother you at all, it’s nothing the “next track” button on your iPod can’t fix.

Post-rock is all about evocative musical imagery than perhaps anything else. And there’s a number of different ways you can be evocative in your music: you can turn it into a texture-timbre playground (Tortoise), you can forego all subtlety and swing for the emotional fences (Mono). You can play with dynamic range a whole lot (Mogwai). You can make punk rock for a dying world (A Silver Mt. Zion). Or you can self-sabotage your own work and hope that it doesn’t come off as arty posturing (Fly Pan Am – and it doesn’t). Despite the occasional vocal faltering, The Album Leaf are delightfully evocative here. And by this measure, A Chorus of Storytellers is a success.

MIDLAKE – The Courage of Others (2010)

Yesterday, I wrote about Citay; specifically, how I thought the band seemed to be more concerned with our perception of their songs than with the actual songs themselves. This is a tricky thing to pin down – after all, not all artists create albums that live or die with their sincerity. But when you’re tapping the veins of musical courses that have been run repeatedly into the ground over the past several decades, sounding genuine really is important. The harder you strain for this legitimacy, the more we notice it. Regardless, it’s hard to put to into words, save to say that when you hear it, you’ll know. Me? I think Citay were trying too hard. They played like puppets, and I saw their strings. On the other hand, Midlake, with The Courage of Others, get it just right.

For the uninitiated, Midlake have a very full-bodied approach to folk music. They embrace ensemble instrumentation, and they’re not afraid to use a distorted electric guitar here or there to get their point across. Perhaps the band that did this best in ages past was Jethro Tull; now it goes without saying, of course, that Midlake aren’t a clone of the aforementioned band – they merely share in their affinity for chamber-folk romanticism. It’s hard to listen to The Courage of Others and not hear that passion in every song. Comparatively, this is a more intimate album than The Trials of Van Occupanther was. It’s quieter, and the production is more open (everything has more breathing room here). Not to mention the songs themselves are more mellow and low-key. For example, Core of Nature (the album’s best song) is about the most intense this album ever gets, and even its deliberate melodies (and its occasional noisy guitar accents) ebb into mild points of serenity. This is definitely the most peaceful album I’ve heard all year. As a bonus, “peaceful” here does not also mean “boring.” There’s a lot going on here – you just have to, you know, listen.

Midlake never quite got the attention they deserved for The Trials of Van Occupanther, and I suspect the same will hold true for The Courage of Others. This is an album that will probably fly under most people’s radars. See, the people nowadays in the position to hear an album like this would probably regard it (an album of unapologetically earnest folk songs) with a displaced sense of irony or bitterness. The attitude seems to be that if you’re embracing lush melodies and harmonies, and you’re not making a pop album (a la Grizzly Bear), then you’re a generational anomaly. Current trends aside, though, The Courage of Others is likely to make an impression on you if you give it chance. Just don’t complain about its prettiness. That is, after all, the point.

CITAY – Dream Get Together (2010)

You probably wouldn’t know if from reading my blog entries, but I actually do have a rather deep fondness for jam-based music. Now, I know, I know, I’ve slammed The Mars Volta for meandering and being directionless in the past, but really, I don’t mind excessive rocking out once in a while, but with one caveat – you’ve gotta devote yourself to it completely. No band does (or did, I should say) this more shamelessly than Liquid Tension Experiment. Their music has no frills, offers no surprises, and completely sounds like what you’d expect most of the members of Dream Theater (when they were younger, anyways) jamming away furiously to sound like. It’s sheer wild-ass technical masturbation at its finest; to paraphrase a review of theirs I once read, it’s a book that’s amazing solely because it has so many more pages than the other. They bypass all manner of artiness and taste and go right for the brain’s aural pleasure centers; prog-pornography, yes, but it doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not.

The Mars Volta couldn’t claim the same; with their latter sins, they want to impress you. Liquid Tension Experiment, by contrast, just want to make A Noise Unto The World. That’s all. And that’s why I love them. And Estradasphere. And Comets On Fire. And Secret Chiefs 3. And Citay? Well, I’m not so sure. This being the first of the band I’ve heard, they seem more concerned with melding all the with the associations of the Rock’n Roll of Yesterday together than anything else. I’m having a tough time recalling the last album I heard wherein the desire to sound classic was this transparent. I mean, Citay’s myspace page lists bands like My Bloody Valentine. Melvins and Rufus Wainwright as “Influences” – either they’re being ironic (gross.) or they didn’t want The Grateful Dead to be up there all by its lonesome. While Dream Get Together isn’t terrible, I’m not sure what it accomplishes; it’s not likely to thrill Deadheads, and non-Deadheads will be little more than amused by it.

Citay don’t mean anybody any harm, and Dream Get Together is not likely to give you an aneurysm or make you swear at children like some albums might. But it leaves you feeling sort of cheated. I’m all for bands tapping into the past, but I’m not into bands painting a picture of it. In the end, it only leaves me feeling like I never got to where these bands wanted to take me.

ORPHANED LAND – The Never Ending Way of the ORWarriOR (2010)

Wow, and I thought Ihsahn’s latest solo album was great (well, it is, but…). Who would’ve thought I’d find an even better album the very next day? To be fair, though, I kind of saw this coming; I had both Ihsahn’s After and this, the long-time coming new album from Orphaned Land sitting on my desk, and I just so happened to tackle the Ihsahn album first. But I had a feeling the newest Orphaned Land would top it, and it does. I remember back to 2004, when Mabool was released – it was the band’s third album, and it could not have defined “breakthrough” more if it had tried.

To begin with, no one had really heard of the band (prior to Mabool, they had released two albums on Holy Records that went largely unnoticed), and they seemed to generate a mystique that made them all the more fascinating (they’re from Israel! they treat spirituality seriously! they mix prog and death metal and Middle Eastern folk and yet sound nothing like Melechesh or Nile!). We obsessed over these things, and the album was quickly granted entrance into the pantheon of prog-metal classics. Now we have this, The Never Ending Way of the ORWarriOR; silly title aside, this is a monumentally progressive album. It’s an 80 minute suite of epic after epic, where Arabian elements work right alongside elements that are more…well, Western. It’s divided into three chapters a la Pain of Salvation, and none other than Porcupine Tree sonic architect Steven Wilson produced it. It’s simply astounding. I’ve listened to the album three times now, and I can’t really pin down the specifics. It’s the kind of album that’s so huge and inviting and executed so perfectly, that it’s really easy to get lost in. It ends, and you wind up enchanted. And then you want to listen to it again.

As I hinted at earlier, the only thing that’s really wrong with The Never Ending Way of the ORWarriOR is the title itself; sure it’s tied into the concept of the album, but not necessarily so; that is to say, the album doesn’t sink or swim based on the title. But the music – you can sense the dedication that went into everything. It took the band six years to compose and arrange Mabool, and I’m guessing it took a similar amount of time for them to do this one, too. But even if it didn’t, it doesn’t change the fact that this is some of the best progressive metal you’re likely to hear all year. Sorry, Ihsahn – you still rock, buddy.

IHSAHN – After (2010)

Ihsahn was destined to have a solo career – anyone who heard Emperor’s final album, Prometheus: The Discipline of Fire and Demise, knows this. That album was entirely composed by (and produced by) Ihsahn, and from it, you got a clear picture as to what direction any future music he might compose would be moving towards. And though it took him five years (during which time he worked with his wife Ihriel in both Peccatum and Star of Ash), we were finally treated to a proper Ihsahn solo album (The Adversary) in 2006. Angl followed in 2008, and now, in 2010, we have After. It’s worth noting that each of these albums has gotten decidedly more progressive in both structure and scope, with After being the most progressive of the bunch. Listening to it is sort of like listening to a weird blend of an uber-thrashy Emperor crossed with Porcupine Tree and Ephel Duath’s The Painter’s Palette (not any of that new crap).

After tends to keep these elements from mixing too much, which is probably for the best (keeping that ratio going for 53 minutes might start to sound gimmicky at some point) .Austere highlights the Steven Wilson side of things beautifully; you’ve got your vocal multitracking, a slower, more intricate midsection of the song, plus some great fretless bass work, to boot. A Grave Inversed takes care of the thrash area of things, making sure to pile on guitar solo after guitar solo, while Ihsahn lets loose his trademark tortured wail for all denizens of the Earth and beyond to hear (the saxophone even gets tossed in the fray near the end, and flails around frantically, trying to stay afloat in the song’s outgoing tide of metal). Album closer On The Shores taps into a vein of some of that long absent Ephel Duath madness: it’s ten minutes of diabolical noise that recedes into a (relative) state of serenity for awhile, before picking up again (albeit less intense this second time around).

Listening to After kind of makes me miss progressive metal. Don’t get me wrong, I know the genre still exists, but to me, it feels like it’s been marginalized to a bunch of insincere side-projects on Inside Out (half of them with Mike Portnoy). After is significant because it’s both progressive and totally not afraid to rip your face off. That’s not something I seem to hear much of anymore. And while I certainly hope that Emperor at some point reconvene and release some more material somewhere down the line (it’s not that unlikely), I’ll be satisfied if Ihsahn can keep creating albums like these.

FOUR TET – There Is Love In You (2010)

I guess I should start by saying that the Four Tet album I’m most familiar with is the remix collection he put out in 2006. And seeing as how it’s been five years since his last album proper (2005’s Everything Ecstatic, a wonderfully abstract collection of glitched-out jazzhoptronica – yeah, you read right; I stand by that) I’m not really sure how well I can contextualize There Is Love In You for the uninclined. But I can try. So with that in mind, here we go:

The first thing I notice about There Is Love In You is how startlingly…electronic it is; true, Four Tet albums were never not electronic in some way, but this album seems to have more in common with house/dance music than with jazz or hip-hop. It’s hard to listen to a song like Sing, for example, and come to any other conclusion. But not every song on the album sounds like it was made with Matthew Herbert in mind (please, don’t make the mistake of thinking that because I used the words “house” and “dance”, this is somehow a club-ready record as a result – because it’s not); a lot of the songs on here follow the post-rock wax/wane blueprint to great effect, and these are the songs on the album that stand out the most to me.

Most of these songs are shorter in length (between two and three minutes), which is odd, because if post-rock has established anything, it’s that “brevity=failure.” Still, Four Tet makes these songs come alive despite going against the genre’s principal aesthetics. The most memorable ones for me are Reversing (a shimmering of cascade of ambient loveliness, calling to mind the solo work of Sigur Rós’ Jónsi Birgisson) and Pablo’s Heart (which is a more straightforward composition: think Dntel crossed with +/-). The album’s longer songs are easy to get lost in, which is both a blessing and a curse; nowhere is this more applicable than with Love Cry, the album’s longest song (over 9 minutes). Listening to it is like taking a vacation and then forgetting where you went afterwards.

While it’s true that There Is Love In You definitely contrasts with Four Tet’s earlier albums (in more ways than one), there’s still a connection between them that cannot be denied. The flow of the songs is every bit as steady as the material on, say, Rounds, and the electronic manipulation that takes place here is (like on past albums) used not as an effect, but as an instrument, as a compositional tool. As long as Four Tet stay true to these structural/philosophical points, I don’t foresee a bad album in their future. That includes There Is In Love You. Even though that’s the now in the present. Word.

THE MAGNETIC FIELDS – Realism (2010)

Stephen Merritt doesn’t have anything left to prove to the music community. The Magnetic Fields’ 1999 triple-album 69 Love Songs was an achievement that most artists can only dream of; it wasn’t noteworthy because it actually did contain 69 love songs, but because all the songs were fascinating. As grand as the idea behind the work was, the end result was astounding because of the amount of life Merritt breathed into them. Since 69 Love Songs, the band have gradually been releasing albums that are part of a trilogy, a trilogy defined by absence (of synthesizers, in this case), rather than presence. 2004’s i was the first of these, a first-person pronoun-centric collection of what were surprisingly elegant acoustic arrangements. 2008’s Distortion stood in marked contrast to i; the songs here were absolutely lovely, their Brian Wilson by way of Kevin Shields atmosphere something wonderful to lose yourself in. Now in 2010 we have the final part of the trilogy, Realism. Unfortunately, this album feels like a regression in many ways, taking the most off-putting elements of i and marrying them with what feels like a sarcastic childrens album from Hell.

This on its own doesn’t necessarily make for a bad album (at least not on paper). I’m sure Ween could turn such a thing into a masterpiece, or at the very least, something on par with La Cucaracha. But Stephen Merritt’s wit and humor are not served well at all by these puzzlingly snide songs. True, there are a few times on Realism where Merritt hits the rights notes, most notably on the opening track, You Must Be Out of Your Mind; it’s the only flawless song on the album, sounding like it could’ve been an acoustic b-side of California Girls from Distortion. The melodies and tone are similar, but the instrumentation is totally different, with You Must Be Out of Your Mind favoring chamber pop lyricism over fuzzed-out bliss. A few other songs work in spite of odd stylistic choices (Better Things would be worth listening to if those nauseating bird sounds would’ve been left out). But mostly, Realism leaves you with a sour feeling, the kind of sour feeling that comes only when a brilliant artist creates something that has thoroughly forsaken their abilities – and nothing having been gained from their creative sacrifice.

Realism is the quickest follow-up album The Magnetic Fields have released in ages; the four or five year wait period between albums that has become customary was cut down to just to just two here. Merritt said that he thinks of Distortion and Realism as a pair, and I believe him – there’s certainly a bond between the albums that exists solely because of the differences between them (it’s not just a “they have similar cover art!” thing). But bond or no bond, there’s no denying that Realism is disturbingly inferior. Well, now that this trilogy is out of the way, perhaps a return to synths is in order. Get Lost pt. II anyone?

BASIA BULAT – Heart of My Own (2010)

Back in 2007, Basia Bulat released her first album, Oh, My Darling; it was an uneven record, with a few great songs on it (Snakes and Ladders, In The Night, the latter of which was mysteriously absent on the US version of the album – a shame, given it was easily the best song on the record), and a lot of other songs that simply weren’t all that memorable. I think the biggest thing I took away from Oh, My Darling was that favoring one instrument usually relegated to the sidelines in this type of music (read: the autoharp) does not, on its own, a good album make – you’ve got to use that instrument in songs that stand out, in order for the focus to mean anything. And that was Oh, My Darling’s greatest flaw: it seemed more concerned with fitting in than standing out.

The same can be said for Heart of My Own, although this album does increase the great-song-to-mediocre-song ratio a bit. Still, it’s hardly an improvement in the grand scheme of things; perhaps the best way I can describe the album is as a refinement of generalities. It starts well enough with Go On, a cloudy-sky folk portrait with a lush instrumentation that doesn’t stay in one place for very long. Unfortunately, Go On is the album’s high point. The other two noteworthy songs here don’t reach the same echelon. Gold Rush, operates on the same basic wavelength as Go On, although the mood here is brighter. And the album closer, If It Rains introduces gospel into Bulat’s mix, with moderate success; it can’t rival, say, Nick Cave’s O Children, but it does send the album off on a positive note. There. All done. You may have noticed I declined to describe the other songs on the album. That’s because there’s not a whole to say about them. They’re all songs we’ve heard before – they’re songs that are troubling in their familiarity, and aren’t really worth deconstructing.

Again, like its predecessor, Heart of My Own isn’t terrible, but it doesn’t have much of an identity; Laura Veirs’ latest album runs circles around it. This isn’t to say that Basia Bulat is incapable of releasing an album that’ll break out of the quagmire of low-tier singer/songwriter folks – quite the contrary, actually. She’s got a wonderfully expressive voice, and a definite ear for melody (albeit a scattershot one). But these songs don’t do much to showcase her talent; they restrain her more than they emphasize her. Perhaps her next album will push the envelope a bit more. For my part, I’ll definitely be willing to take a risk to see if it does.