Holding more polished production than previous releases, Wilco (The album) features some obvious overdubbing of vocals as well as elaborate layering of instruments. One track straying from alt-country in jangly chaos, the blustery hypnotism of “Bull Black Nova” gushes out some darker melodies with an unexpected bridge leading into a jumbled catharsis of shakers, synth, and the most aggressive vocals Tweedy has delivered to date. “Deeper Down” soaks us in a droning Andrew Bird-esque whistle while the background gets coated with the sound of the crashing waves and arbitrary knocking.

Tweedy maintains incredible songwriting especially on the gorgeous “You and I,” featuring a duet between Tweedy and accomplished musician Leslie Feist. The pair’s vocals lie directly on top of one another, creating the illusion of a conversation between partners in a distraught couple. Tracks like the lonely, apocalyptic lament of “Country Disappeared” and the clipped feather eulogy of “One Wing” brim with metaphors and allusions allowing for a wide array of listener interpretation. After 15 years and seven studio albums, tracks like “Solitaire” and “You Never Know” undeniably express the maturity and ability of Wilco.

Has Wilco released better work? Probably. Is this album slightly too slick in its production to follow suit with the back catalog of one our favorite bands? Probably. Is this album an enjoyable listen, regardless? Yes. So, as the title track reminds, no matter how rough the road, kick back, let go, and let Wilco–because this band will “love you baby.” -Landin E. King, Contributing Editor

Wilco (the album) was released on Nonesuch Records on  June 30, 2009.

The record brings the dark side: it’s atmospherically eerie and somewhat sinister without going overindulgent or gimmicky due to Fertita’s brilliant guitar play of feedback and tone, matched by Mosshart’s empowering vocal howls. Even stepping out of the limelight, Jack White’s presence pervades the inspired proceedings.

From the opening track of the album, “60 Feet Tall”, the band relentlessly floors listeners with a sound that reverberates throughout the nether regions. Mosshart’s demanding presence snarls on tracks like “Treat Me Like Your Mother.”  But which one of her male fans wouldn’t want to take a vicious scolding from the goddess with a crooner’s growl?

Fertita’s assault of feedback and distortion consistently comes across as controlled chaos, single-handedly taking tracks to hair rising heights before calming back down, if only for a small amount of time. Hypnotic and head-splitting, Ferita simultaneously departs from and fulfills White’s blues vision. Lawrence matches the guitar with a heavy, hazy bass that acts as a grounding rod for the rest of the members wicked flights.

As for White on drums, he can definitely hold his own when working with such talent, especially on an instrument that stands as a backbone to the musical composition. He even shares vocal parts on the mid-album freakout “Rocking Horse,” the charged up “I Cut like a Buffalo,” and the slow paced closing track “Will There Be Enough Water.”

Beginning to end, White’s latest is heavy from the head to the hands to the hooves. The Dead Weather seamlessly blends and bends rock genres into one solid, wildcrafted groove. Horehound will likely weather the competition for the rest of the year to claim its place as one of the best rock releases of 2009. –Jim Belote

Horehound was released today on Jack White’s Third Man Records.

After peaking with his work in Black Star with Talib Kweli, along with his first solo album, Black on Both Sides, Mos Def’s next two albums seemed to show the rapper slipping, even sounding resigned at times on 2006’s True Magic. Finally, with The Ecstatic, we see Mos Def recapturing the wild excitement of his earlier work, sounding elated to be on a track.

Rather than a typical hip-hop album, it’s truly progressive. Most of the songs disregard choruses, instead choosing to barrel through verse after verse, a technique that has also been used by other artists, particularly on 2004’s Madvillainy, the collaboration album between rapper MF DOOM and producer Madlib (who, incidentally, contributed beats for several songs on The Ecstatic). In fact, Madlib’s contributions help give The Ecstatic its very Eastern or more worldly feel. This would be due to all of those beats coming from his Beat Konducta in India. And, in many ways, The Ecstatic surveys hip-hop culture, hitting on many of the main themes found throughout the genre, such as gunplay, politics, women, and dissing other MCs.

The album begins with Muslim chanting, referencing Mos Def’s own Islamic faith, and a sound bite from Malcolm X on “Supermagic.” Though The Ecstatic has many general political observations, the only explicitly political statement speaks out about the Iraq War: “And looking at me curious: a young Iraqi kid/Carrying laundry, what’s wrong G, hungry?/No, gimme my oil, get f*@k out of my country.” This comes from Slick Rick, who is featured on “Auditorium,” one of the stand-out tracks on the album.

On “Life in Marvelous Times,” the record’s first single, Mos Def flips back and forth between memories of his youth and the present day. Each of these “bright moments” describes the stark realities of urban life, pointing out the gap between the rich and poor (”They green grass is green, our green grass is brown”); ultimately, the message and song’s overall tone is triumphant, shown by the song’s title, as well as the final verse:

And we are alive in amazing times

Delicate hearts, diabolical minds

Revelations, hatred, love, and war

And more and more and more and more

And more of less than ever before

It’s just too much ‘more’ for your mind to absorb

It’s scary like hell but there’s no doubt

We can’t be alive in no time but NOW

“History,” produced by the late J Dilla, features Talib Kweli and Mos Def, collectively known as Black Star, reuniting on record for the first time in years. For fans of the group and underground hip-hop in general, it is a long-awaited moment that turns out to be worth the wait. One can only hope the two continue to step into the booth together in the future.

Even with its oddball moments, such as “No Hay Nada Mas,” a song completely rapped in Spanish, The Ecstatic is one of the best hip-hop albums of the year and an early contender for best album of the year. But, more than that, it is a return to form for one of hip-hop’s best, a return to form that fully showcases Mos Def’s talent and certainly keeps fans anxious for more that will inevitably come, hopefully sooner rather than later.  –Cassie Traun

The Ecstatic was released on June 9, 2009 on Downtown Records. Visit http://www.myspace.com/mosdef

by Luke Pimentel, Editor

June 29, 2009

The Mars Volta is one of contemporary rock’s few real paradoxes, a band that seems to fundamentally thrive on chaos.

I don’t mean crazy-lifestyle, snorting-coke-while-getting-blown-on-the-toilet chaos; I mean “chaos” in the sense that the very notion seems to permeate their entire musical aesthetic.  Vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s famously baffling lyrics are often derived from his own turbulent past (not that you can really tell), while guitarist and producer Omar Rodriguez-Lopez is known to record band members’ parts completely separate from each other, using only metronomes to keep time.  Instrumental arrangements and song structures mutate wildly from record to record, and catchy hooks are regularly forced into bed with elaborately-constructed noise.  Track names are seemingly chosen for their Brobdingnagian levels of obscurity (almost as obscure as the word “Brobdingnagian”); “Vermicide”, “Concertina”, and “Cicatriz ESP” are some of the catchier ones.  Even business moves are tough to read, with the band often saying one thing and doing another.  As recently as late last year they jumped ship from Universal, talking up the possibility of independent or self-distribution…. only to sign with yet another major, Warner Brothers, instead.

Two truths emerge from all this.  One is that being a supporter of the band is often head-scratching work.  The other is that when the band gets ready to drop a new release, expect the unexpected.

Octahedron is their latest, and in the “unexpected” department, it certainly delivers… but not for the reasons you’d expect. (Stay with me.)   It features a leaner ensemble, the band having shaved two members from its ranks during recording (rhythm guitarist Paul Hinojos and saxophonist Adrian Terrazas-Gonzalez), and several other members having magically disappeared into the mix.  Isaiah “Ikey” Owens now provides sonic texture instead of the fills and manic solos that punctuated prior records, Thomas Pridgen’s robotically precise drum work is merely capable instead of showoffy, and even Rodriguez-Lopez himself has stepped back, relegating his solos to isolated moments, and preferring acoustic guitar to electric in forming the foundation of many of the songs.

The result is that Octahedron is by far the band’s tidiest record – melodic, song-driven, almost completely devoid of jams… and at fifty minutes, pretty damn short.  Some have even called it an attempt to go “pop”.  That, of course, is an overstatement; it’s still got plenty of Rodriguez-Lopez’s trademark warped time signatures, a surreal Jeff Jordan album cover, and Bixler-Zavala’s Burroughs-on-peyote lyrics, which are only slightly more comprehensible than before.  If this is indeed a pop record, it’s a pretty strange one.  However, it’s certainly a marked departure from their prior effort, the tuneless and savagely overproduced Bedlam in Goliath.

In a recent interview with Reuters, Rodriguez-Lopez claimed he was listening to Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen while writing Octahedron.  It’s a testament to his skewed instincts that the final product sounds almost nothing like those two influences.  Rather, it sounds like he spun King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King a few dozen times and completely absorbed that album’s rhyme and meter.  Both records share a love of see-sawing tempos and bouts of hard-rock thunder followed by moody, introspective ambience.  The clever breakdown in the middle of international lead single “Cotopaxi” is a dead ringer for similar acrobatics in Crimson’s “21^st Century Schizoid Man” (minus the saxophone), while the soupy arrangements on “With Twilight as My Guide” are eerily reminiscent of “Epitaph”, not to mention the Volta’s own “Televators”, off of debut effort De-Loused in the Comatorium.

Album opener (and stateside lead single) “Since We’ve Been Wrong” is the band’s most overt stab at commercial acceptance since “The Widow”, and features some of Bixler-Zavala’s subtlest vocal work… well, ever.  It’s also one of his more coherent songs lyrically, seeming to be about the deterioration of a long relationship.  “Desperate Graves” is another track seemingly ready-made for alternative radio with its fatty main hook, and “Teflon” is perhaps the album’s highlight, working a great cyclical guitar wail that evokes the lumbering menace of A Perfect Circle.  Juan Alderete – perhaps rock’s most unsung bassist – comes to the forefront here with an absolutely deadly bottom line that owns the track.  Only one song falls prey to Bedlam’s horde-of-locusts production style, and that is “Cotopaxi”… but even then, the track trades flat-out aggression for lyricism, with a terrific uphill riff and loud-to-quiet dynamics that are far more entertaining than almost anything on Bedlam.

Clearly, based on those descriptions, no one will ever accuse the new “stripped down” Volta of being minimalists, nor that they’re anywhere close to returning to the halcyon days of De-Loused, much less At the Drive-In.

What is positive, though – and what rings true about critics’ pop assertions -  is that the album shows purpose and restraint; the band appears to be playing for other people here rather than just for themselves.  That transformation could pay off; Octahedron is the first Mars Volta album in many a moon with the potential to attract new ears rather than alienate them.  It’s an encouraging turn for an immensely talented band that has spent far too long under its own shell.

“Octahedron” is available in stores now.  For more information on The Mars Volta, please visit www.themarsvolta.com or www.thecomatorium.com.

By Andrew William Smith, Editor

June 6, 2009

Some music fans like to do drugs, and then, some music does us so well that the sound itself produces feelings better  than drugs. The simple sonic code of certain records conjures in listeners the temporary and indescribable elation allegedly available to the users of mind-altering substances. Opening your ears and body to feel the beat and bask in the heat of Passion Pit’s debut album Manners just might be the cure to your summertime blues.

To begin, Manners wants to “Make Light” by stating its groovy and seductive formula with infectious force. By track two, we cannot help but to go “higher and higher and higher” thanks to the “miracle is of ecstatic fright.” While some listeners might get lost in the sheer sexy of the Pit’s musical hex, these pure musical pills pack a poetic heft, revealing wicked hot embers of wisdom listen after listen, as we join Michael Angelakos on the majestic “Moth’s Wings” in “Burning incandescently/Like a bastard on the burning sea.”

While the lyrics of identity crisis that form the funky crucible of “The Reeling” could have been scrawled by hand in a spiral notebook for creative writing class, their hypnotic endurance is anchored in an irresistible beat, so much that when this notebook gets discovered by the more mature band members years later, I imagine these reflections will still mean something, just as these tunes will still intoxicate.

Lots of bands have integrated indy rock with some fleeting falsetto, some keyboard candy, paying some disco dues with shameless booty-shaking ooze. Back in 2005, I was in awe of the debut records by The Killers and Scissor Sisters precisely because of the effeminate ferocity and visionary velocity with which they were transforming the jaded, macho world of rock with a glittering new wave glow. But the Scissor Sisters haven’t been around the block in a bit, and The Killers have yet to fully recapture the impetuous yet innocent glow of their first disc despite noble, listenable detours into other lands.  With fiery themes touching many tracks and conveying the lover’s light that is the legend of the band’s formation, let’s hope Passion Pit can stand the heat of its blogged buzz to keep its candles burning brightly. This sleepyhead sure likes waking up and dancing to first coffee with a track like “Sleepyhead.”

Given the breadth and depth of this year’s Bonnaroo lineup, it’s hard to say that I am more excited to see one band over another considering how much aural goodness there is to go around. Despite some of the mixed reviews I’ve seen of the Pit’s live presentation, I anticipate that the group’s 11:15 performance at This Tent will be highlight of the festival’s opening night. Hoping to find a spot close to the stage, this is one pit I’d like to express some dancefloor passion in.

Passion Pit’s Manners was released in May. The band is on tour now. See http://www.myspace.com/passionpitjams