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Caribou – Odessa

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The Helium Tapes, a powerful rock and roll trio with extensive gigging experience in the St. Louis area, go tight-rope walking with safety net and corded harness on their second and latest release, Ghost Wave, which features heavy, multifaceted rock music coloring in and out of dirgy lines.  The group, who recently downsized to a trio after the recording of the album, buzz and churn out pop-rock spins with a dare-devil vocal mistress cooing woebegones over canyons of her personal history.

Thematically, Ghost Wave wears its organ on its tie-dyed sleeve. The band isn’t afraid to wrestle with death, as some of the songs concern the suicide of a friend and the death of a band member’s father. But instead of simply lamenting, Marshall is able to coax her and her bandmates’ troubles into verse, spreading them over the cosmos with ghostly billows of delay resonating in her wake. Guitarist Tim Lohmann flexes his effects pedals and forearm muscles to good use throughout the album, offering sitar sounds and warm patches of fuzz in the melodic moments not occupied by Marshall’s musings. These two elements play out best on album opener “Falling Behind,” as right-to-left stereo synths give way to a star-bound melody backed by a cubby hole of warm jammy psychedelia.

Although two albums into their recording career, the band still sounds somewhat young, feeling its way emotionally through the piecemeal songwriting process rather than laboring over it. This gives the album a lightness of mood, despite the band preferring to wrap itself in dark swirls. The Tapes seem to be having so much fun executing their sound they’ve created that a brooding style is hardly possible. For fans of the band, though, this is likely a draw for their live show, wherein the grooves and glitter come to life – Marshall can playfully work the stage, and the audience there to catch her if she falls.

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As anyone who has ever ventured into a bright-boxed American supermarket or completed a generic Google search can tell you, an overabundance of choices is often more overwhelming than it is liberating. In creative terms, limiting oneself to a few expressive ingredients and getting the most mileage out of each of them can often yield more exciting results than being set loose in a vast studio-sea of instruments. It’s for this reason that the third and newest LP from Russian Circles, an instrumental rock/metal trio from Chicago, IL, feels so refreshing in 2009. Throughout Geneva the Russian Circles achieve a wide-screen, cinematic feel without employing a veritable neighborhood of co-conspirators (a fashionable trend as of late). Instead, they take the three conventional instruments of their genre, electric guitar, bass, and drum kit, and then spread them out with a palpable sense of urgency to enveloping, starry expanses.

A particularly apparent example is the drum work. It’s thrilling to hear drummer Dave Turncrantz attack these songs with an aggressive melodic and compositional curiosity rarely seen in this type of music. His drums sound live, real, and relevant. Absent are the metronomic or sterile qualities that contemporary large-scale rock groups often rely on.  The resulting sensation of immediacy serves to guide the other players (guitarist Mike Sullivan and bassist Brian Cook) and most of the album to extremely rewarding places, despite the predictability of its structure.

I’m referring now to the peaks and valleys, the loud and soft dynamic that most instrumental rock bands use to create narrative in the absence of a vocalist. In Geneva’s case, a peak constitutes a powerful, metal-distorted guitar line, with the bass and drums providing rhythmic release from what usually starts as a patient, contemplative drone of feedback at the beginning of the song. Simple melodic lines are introduced on a single guitar or solitary violin (many tracks contain a violin or cello, the only other instruments which appear on the album).  Mounting crescendos ultimately craft an emotional, explosive finale. What makes this album special though, is how honest each step of the song-journey feels. Where instruments feel contrived or compete for attention in the efforts of most genre peers, on Geneva the musicians react to one another, playing as a group of friends rather than a cast of hired hands. Even the two string players feel carefully integrated into the trio’s conversation.

Russian Circles, while exhibiting a deep connection to members of their own genre, also seem to maintain a dialogue with rock music outside the strictly instrumental mentality. Many of Geneva’s tracks, such as the punchy, driving “Fathom” and the contemplative, space-worthy “Melee”, at times evoke the compositional and melodic sensibilities of Spoon’s Brit Daniel, or Radiohead’s Thom York, respectively. The spatial-sensitive production is another connection to recent indie and electronic music. Guitars and drones are layered thoughtfully, intelligently, and patiently. The mix is balanced and evocative, not content to sit still in the stereo field. Even when trite, metallic guitar tones are used, they seem to transcend their own reputations. Russian Circles want us to see these sounds for what they are, not for how other bands have used them in the past.

The best moments in Geneva are probably situated in its first half. A few of the longer songs in the second section such as “Philos,” which clocks in at over ten minutes, seem to merely reiterate the statements made in the first. Nevertheless, the format ultimately serves Geneva well, letting us fully immerse ourselves in it’s shifting landscape.

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This British group’s new album, The House That Dirt Built, their second full-length to date, is a dizzying array of funky, horn-driven hard-rock and reggae, splattered with multiple side-show sound effects and narrative-like conceptual bits.  These bits range from a scary movie intro sample to a tumbleweedy, western-tinged interlude, and they don’t let up once the album begins.  The experience is a lot like watching a well versed, enthusiastic cover band genre-hop at a county fair, complete with Elvis suit, Bob Marley wig, and multiple set changes.

The Heavy – Short Change Hero

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

The Heavy definitely know their influences and aren’t afraid to flaunt them, and to give them credit, they do it well.  Still, the first two real tracks (after the intro) are the only tracks where all these random elements come together to form something more than an extremely well-produced genre tribute.  These two tracks, “Oh No! Not You Again!” and “How You Like Me Now,” are straight up rock and roll songs by a band, not a gimmick, and don’t try to be anything more.  Unfortunately, the remainder of The House That Dirt Built feels uninspired (see the lyrics) and overproduced (see any of the show-bizy streaks that litter the thing).  This is a shame because the band, and even more so the producers of this record, are very capable of creating convincing sounds.  What’s lacking is convincing intentions.

Perhaps on future releases The Heavy will take off the costumes, lose the props, and find the band that they hint at underneath.

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