Vikings & Beekeepers

What I love the most about doing these quarterly reviews is that they’re as far from definitive as you can possibly get. I think back to my first quarterly review and there are albums that are on my 6 to 10 list (or not even on the list at all) that are now more preferred than my top five. These things are very “of the moment.” It’s a living, breathing organism, music. What tickles us one day turns around to bite us on another day. More commonly, what confounds and disappoints on our first listen, may very well morph into something rewarding and worth of re-visitation.

These are the recently released albums that I’ve been enjoying lately. You’ll notice that many of them are fairly popular albums. Perhaps in a few months time I’ll discover a little self-released album brimming with glorious moments. Or maybe I wrote another album off too early. Either way, these are the precious few that spoke to me with immediacy and at least hinted at the promise to stick around for the long-haul.

1. Harvey Milk “Life…The Best Game In Town”

In Life’s hilarious Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trashesque liner notes Harvey Milk bassist Stephen Tanner refers to the album’s 10 tracks as either a hit, a masterpiece or a turd (and in the case of “Skull Socks & Rope Shoes,” a “gerbil turd”). It’s difficult to tell when Tanner is or isn’t being sarcastic, but it’s easy to tell that on the whole, Life ain’t no turd. It’s been a stunner of a year for metal fans, and this huge, slow and burly monster may be the most welcome surprise of 2008. Whether spitting perverted Velvet Underground lyrics over a relentlessly heavy and repetitive single note riff or stapling some smelly chest hair onto an old Fear track, Harvey Milk keep their metal heavy, sweaty and strange. Listen to this hit/masterpiece/turd and you are guaranteed to jump out of your seat at least once.

 “Motown”

2. Blitzen Trapper Furr

For as much as I enjoyed last year’s Wild Mountain Nation, the truth is that it was one amazing (title) track surrounded by some good songs and a handful of really terrible ones. When the band dropped the cacophonous schtick, everything clicked. Truth is – and I’m sure this sounds backwards – Blitzen Trapper’s freak flag was also their Achilles’ Heel. All the band really needed to do for Furr  was to rein in the wonkiness and just sing the friggin’ tune. Amazingly, that’s exactly what they did. Instead of being a band that briefly shows a hint of promise and subsequently disappears as so many trumped up bands have done before them, Blitzen Trapper have actually delivered on their potential, releasing an album that makes all the necessary adjustments and reveals them to be one of indie rock’s elite alt-country space rockers.

3. TV On The Radio Dear Science

Yeah, I was the guy that didn’t dig Return To Cookie Mountain. Something about it just didn’t…register. It’s like on that thin line between “intriguingly layered” and “overwhelmingly, suffocatingly layered.” This new one still straddles that line and there are some weak moments (please guys, never try rapping again), but both the dense moments and the relatively stripped down moments give an endlessly fascinating glimpse of the 21st century version of the world that spawned Sign ‘O’ The Times.

4. The Hold Steady Stay Positive

Stay Positive didn’t receive the same kind of glowing praise that earlier Hold Steady albums did simply for the fact that it’s the first album to not make significant improvements on the album that came before. However, when your predecessor is Boys And Girls In America, one of the most potent and winning rock records of the decade, there’s not much else you can do except continue to chug along and at least prove comparable. Stay Positive contains a few areas that would be considered branching out (harpsichord, new wave keyboards), but for the most part, the band plays to its skill set while lead singer Craig Finn works the crowd like a seasoned stand up, dishing out callbacks to earlier work like their going out of style (they’re not). The Steady keep things smart and a bit safe, but they’re still able to create their best opening one-two punch with classic-status anthems “Constructive Summer” and “Sequestered In Memphis.” Maybe it’s a sign that the band has hit its creative peak, but the truth is, if standing pat sounds this good why would anyone ever want to move forward?

5. Jay Reatard Singles 06-07

Okay, so it’s not a real album, but just like Singles Going Steady and Inches before it, Singles provides a potentially more satisfying snapshot of an artist at his peak than any proper album could. Reatard’s brand of “plug-in-and-let-it-rip” punk/indie is possibly the most infectious of its kind, stomping all over a slew of his overrated lo-fi contemporaries. I get the feeling that this one’s going to stand the test of time.

6-10 (in no particular order) The Walkmen You & Me, Young Jeezy The Recession, Ratatat LP3, Oxford Collapse Bits, Brian Wilson That Lucky Old Son

This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 3:20 pm and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.