Fall 2008 turned into Spring 2009 turned into Fall 2009. Fall 2009 turned into Spring 2010, and Spring 2010 turned into today. At long last, Menomena, Portland's most creative bari sax-wielding rock trio, has found a suitable day to release their third LP, Mines, on Barsuk records, and what a day it is! For—and you might want to sit down for this—July 27th has also been chosen by the endearingly bizarre pop quartet Miniature Tigers to release their second full-length, on Modern Art Records: F O R T R E S S.
It is 76 degrees here in Columbus, partly cloudy, only moderately humid, and I'm going to sit on my porch with a glass of vodka lemonade and spin these shiny new records until their grooves bleed. Metaphorically, of course.
Also, if you buy had bought Mineson Amazon today on the day of its release, you can save could have saved cash money!! Be warned, though: you will only receive the digital tracks, with none of the packaging. Normally, this would be an irrelevant detail, but this is Menomenawe're talking about. They tend to be a bit more, um, lavish with the thought they pour into their packaging—I am the Fun Blame Monster came with a flip-book animation, and Friend and Foe's packaging was interactive, with a different permutation corresponding to each track. Mines will be no different. (Except, of course, that it will be completely different.)
Reviews of each will be forthcoming. Meanwhile, head to your favorite electronic retailer or local record store and get you some!
Sleigh Bells' Treats gets a fuck yeah out of 10. In exactly thirty-two minutes, Songwriter / Guitarist / Producer Derek Miller and his icy femme fatale Alexis Kraus will convince you that everything electronic indie pop has been doing lately is wrong, all wrong. We don't need more Diplo, Treats argues, we need more Bomb Squad. We don't need more Animal Collective, or Grizzly Bear—we need a more accessible version of Fuck Buttons. A more crunk Crystal Castles. We need to banish our hyper-intellectual overthinking egos and just obey the Ying Yang Twins' command: Sh-Shake, Shake.
The now-famous story of Miller and Kraus' meeting is as spontaneous and unlikely as the music they've created together. Miller, waiter at a Brazilian restaurant in Brooklyn, mentioned to a mother-daughter pair in his section that he was looking to partner with a female vocalist. The mother, as mothers will do, immediately volunteered her daughter. Not long after, Miller and Kraus worked up some demos and distributed them on the internet, catching the attention of M.I.A. (via Spike Jonze), and were soon recording Treats for her N.E.E.T. label.
The resulting album is like nothing you've ever heard. Miller, previously a member of aggressive screamo rock Poison the Well, pulls the crackliest static from the distant orbits of hardcore metal and rhythmically pulses them in a blender, while Kraus either sings dispassionately along or, when the spirit moves, shouts urgently and chaotically. "Tell 'Em" is a great opener, with a kinetically fast bass beat, manufactured siren wails, raucously group-spirited hand claps, and a surprisingly cheerful guitar riff, which ascends from the downbeat after a few pickup notes and is joined the second time around by another guitar playing a third above. True, the lyrics are a bit thin (timidly suggesting by the end that "you could do your best today" ...you know, or not), but that obviously isn't the point. The beat is awesome, the production is awesome, and the head-bang potential is maxed out.
The next winner (and they're all winners) is "Kids," an urgent psychedelic homage to the chaos between youth and adulthood. (Indeed, the video on their myspace juxtaposes young children at the beach with 80's Girls Gone Wild: Miami-esque footage.) Here we have guitars mimicking sirens, tambourines on the off-beat, unintelligable lyrics, and, of course, the frightening sound of kids laughing and screaming. It is also the first to feature Kraus' voice as a percussive instrument, a technique used throughout the rest of the record. After "Riot Rhythm," another eyeball-exploding track with perhaps slightly less thought put into its execution, "Infinity Guitars" appears as the album's first real standout. It begins by presenting all of its composite parts separately, building the anticipation of the simultaneous freak-out slowly and purposefully. Kraus' drunk-high-school-girl-in-the-WalMart-parking-lot-yelling is moderately distorted over a laid-back beat, until around the two-minute mark when Miller gives us all the metal and velocity his pentagon-sized machines can muster. It's quite the show.
"Rill Rill" stands out later on the album for being more summery and nostalgic, but never loses the bizarrely well-placed beats that define the Sleigh Bells brand. The lyrics are appropriately hilarious ("Wonder what your boyfriend thinks about your braces? / What about them? / I'm all about them"), and the a cappella moment in the middle of the song reveals Klaus' impassive voice to be equally deadpan and alluring. The great, golden, shimmering church bells ringing in the background and super-duper-reverbed wood block make the song more epic than a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, jubilant and victorious.
Sleigh Bells' only weakness is, currently, a strength: their attitude of utter immediacy, crafting songs that feel good, following their own logic, regardless of external songwriting expectations. This attitude led them to pioneer a whole new category within indie noise pop, but hopefully it won't make their next efforts eye-rollingly familiar. (A song like "Straight A's," built upon the single lyric "Ain't no sleep, we want straight A's" works when it's unexpected, but any attempt to pull off something similar will just sound like the same old band attempting to pull off something similar.)
Whatever happens next for them, Treats is an unexpected delight for 2010, which promised to be a great year for music already: in addition to reboots of familiar sounds like Vampire Weekend, Panda Bear, The Arcade Fire, The Tallest Man On Earth, and so many others, this novel duo from Brooklyn is just the big, long-haired, sweaty head-bang of a surprise we needed.
Throughout the early 2000s, Kristian Matsson, frontman for the obscure Swedish rock group Montezumas, experimented in his spare time with recording music significantly different from the six-piece, Link Wray & The Raymen-inspired pop-boogie his main project pursued. Instead, Matsson took a deep breath, picked up an acoustic guitar, and slowed his lyrics down enough to accommodate Roscoe Holcomb-style melodies, finally developing a collection of original folk tunes good enough to be released on the last day of 2006, by the Scandinavian label Gravitation. This first offering, eponymous with his newly minted nom de plume, presaged the coming change in Matsson's career, but also quietly heralded the change in what folk music will from now on expect from its most talented practitioners.
In short, Matsson had become The Tallest Man On Earth. Here was a fleet-fingered guitarist who was also a singer—not just someone who hit the notes, but someone who responded to them, allowed himself to be hit back. And not only was he a guitarist, and a singer, he was a consummately evocative writer, churning out language that marches along quite effortlessly on its own. Fifteen months later, Gravitation published his first LP, Shallow Grave, and almost immediately The Tallest Man was off touring the U.S. with John Vanderslice. The rest is, albeit quietly, history.
Mid-April's The Wild Hunt, released this side of the Norwegian Sea by Dead Oceans, shimmers and floats and dances and dreams even more ferociously than its two predecessors, which is an accomplishment already, just on its face. But the devil is in the details—and there are a lot of details.
Matsson plays the guitar stupendously. His 5000-piece-puzzle fingerpicking style is featured on five of the album's ten tracks, but calling the other four 'strummed' does a disservice to the precisely rhythmic bass and occasional counterpoints he slides in with his nimble left hand. (For you smart asses dissatisfied with my arithmetic, the tenth song is played on a piano.) On "You're Going Back," Matsson seems to master his own sound as he goes, sliding up the mids just before he starts singing, cutting the bass to rhythmic precision, and holding the treble back at will. Meanwhile, "Troubles Will Be Gone" is built upon a fingerpicked line both frenetically complex and melodically beautiful, and the lyrics of "The Drying of the Lawns" float down a river of sunny, summery countermelodies shining from Matsson's busy fingers.
This is not, however, a guitar record. Matsson's virtuosity is a critical element in terms of foundation, but the real magic—or, wildness—is in his songwriting and vocalization. His themes are complex, even inscrutable, but are executed with such real emotion that it is impossible not to be affected by the spirit, if not always the intellect, of his songs. Album opener "The Wild Hunt" sets the stage, with Matsson casting the age-old Scandinavian folk tale around himself, declaring his purpose to live in the midst of nature even as the gods set deadly chase all around him. "Let's watch phenomenons that rise out of the darkness now," he urges, caring more for the experience than for safety; he even expects himself to be stolen by the immortal hunters: "and I plan to be forgotten when I'm gone." Compare this to the first song on Shallow Grave, where, instead, Matsson yearned for the day he would "get to slumber / Just like a mole deep in the ground / And [he] won't be found." He's come a long way.
Having established his priorities, Matsson gets into relationship stuff with "The Burden of Tomorrow," in which he reveals his fear of becoming the title of the track. He reassures himself with claims of vast, Norse-legend-sized brags ("once I held a glacier to an open flame"), a literary device he employs throughout the album in a sardonic, self-amused way (In "Thousand Ways," he claims, "I got sixteen hundred tigers now, tied to silver strings." And who says he doesn't?).
One of the most talked-about tracks is "King of Spain," which, incidentally, makes Matsson's fourth reference to Spanish culture (you have to keep reminding yourself, 'this guy's from Sweden.') In it, Matsson reimagines another theme from Shallow Grave, specifically from "The Gardener," the song which gives reason to his superlative moniker: "I know the runner's going to tell you / There ain't no cowboy in my hair / So now he's buried by the daisies / So I could stay the tallest man in your eyes, babe." Basically, homeboy murders anyone who might possibly betray his imperfections to his lover. In "King of Spain," however, The Tallest Man has matured enough to be open about at least some of his faults, in keeping with his I-plan-to-be-forgotten-when-I'm-gone aesthetic: "I am not from Barcelona / I'm not even from Madrid." He still wants to be the Tallest Man On Earth, but recognizes that he can't manipulate his lover into thinking that he is, instead having to request, "Well if you could reinvent my name / ... / I wanna be the King of Spain."
The real success of the song, however, is in his joyfully distraught singing of wonderfully imaginative lyrics, just a boy lost in a daydream, taking it further and further until belting out rapturously, "I'll wear my boots of Spanish leather / Oh, while I'm tightening my crown." But whatever it is, or is not, it is also a celebration of a man's feeling of invincibility when his lover chooses him to be The King of Spain, or The Tallest Man On Earth, or whatever spectacular metaphor you please.
The other songs on the album triumph just as resoundingly, in their own respective moods and themes. "Love Is All" finds the speaker drowning his lover, singing "I bet this mighty river's both my savior and my sin," only to repeat, distractedly, "Oh, my savior and my sin." Matsson's crackling brown paper voice returns to the refrain, "Here come the tears / But like always, I let them go / Just let them go," in ways so subtle and moving it is almost painful to listen to. Similarly, the way Matsson breaks his voice over, "Oh a thousand / It's just a thousand" on "Thousand Ways" makes you almost believe that he has, in fact, "lived a thousand years, a thousand turns of tides."
The final track, "Kids On The Run," is perhaps the most heartbreaking, which is appropriate given that its most memorable moment is at the end when Matsson turns his crunching, gravelly, nasally voice to maximum affectedness and pleads, "Oh, let's break some hearts...." Significantly, it is also the only song he plays on the piano, which echoes weird and lonely after nine tracks of warm, fast guitar playing.
The creativity and depth that Kristian Matsson displays on The Wild Hunt—indeed, has displayed in his whole short career—promises much, much more growth, rebirth, and excitement. The earnest voice, the virtuosic guitar, the deep songwriting, the impeccable sense of timing, the sheer presence—Matsson has it all, and is using it to define the next evolution of folk music. Even if his lyrics are sometimes frustratingly impenetrable, perhaps they are, after all, just "riddles," carved "on the lonesome vine," left for us to find "the lonesome place" where The Tallest Man On Earth was—if the legendary event happened at all—born.
Fall 2008 turned into Spring 2009 turned into Fall 2009. Fall 2009 turned into Spring 2010, and Spring 2010 turned into today. At long last, Menomena, Portland's most creative bari sax-wielding rock trio, has found a suitable day to release their third LP, Mines, on Barsuk records, and what a day it is! For—and you might want to sit down for this—July 27th has also been chosen by the endearingly bizarre pop quartet Miniature Tigers to release their second full-length, on Modern Art Records: F O R T R E S S.
Also, if you 
