I realize that I haven’t been around having the sort of self-effacing and embarrassing adventures that people who read The Bugg Blog love, but I have been listening to quite a few new albums, and I thought that instead of giving them all gigantic reviews, I’d place them in easy-to-find multi-review entries here on the main page. So welcome to the new review format, which will be used and not used as I see fit.

Archers of Loaf – Vee Vee This reissue of the Archers of Loaf’s second full-length album is every bit as great as last year’s Icky Mettle package. The album comes with an extra disc full of demos, rarities and compilation tracks that paint a picture of the Archers morphing into what they became on later albums.

It’s not that Vee Vee is fractured or actively bad; it’s that the band feels bored with the guitar stop of their prior work. The focus is now on learning to write stronger songs. Listeners can see head Loaf-er Eric Bachman growing as a songwriter from track to track, and while it’s exhilarating at times, sometimes the gaps and lead guitarist Eric Johnson’s penchant for counter melodies that peeks through doesn’t have the same effect on me that it did on Icky Mettle.

With that huge caveat out of the way, I love Vee Vee. I think the nostalgia factor sort of adds a weight to this album that wouldn’t be there if I didn’t live with it back in the ‘90s.  If you are a longtime Archers fan, Vee Vee is a great record, full of stompers and the beginnings of great songwriting. But for the uninitiated, I’d recommend checking out Icky Mettle instead.

Ferocious Fucking Teeth – self-titled This is not nine A.M. music. This might not even be nine P.M. music, but it is (as the band name states) ferocious. Ferocious Fucking Teeth are a band that is very much influenced by the brutal thud of Shellac and the screamo stuff that Planes Mistaken for Stars did, and they do it will. Sure, sometimes it feels like they are musically limited within the genre that they inhabit, but the songs that the band puts together are pretty damn powerful.

There are some hints of post-hardcore a la Quicksand and Fugazi placed within FFT’s songs, but the general this album feels like forty minutes of exceptionally hard body shots from Mike Tyson. I mean that in the best possible way. Ferocious Fucking Teeth will punch you in the liver until your bile comes up and then they will plug into that and play a rock show.

Ferocious Fucking Teeth’s album comes out on February 28^th via Safety Meeting Records. I highly endorse pre-ordering it now as they are doing some beautiful limited-edition vinyl.

Ceremony – Zoo The lead singer of Ceremony really reminds me of John Lydon/Johnny Rotten. He sings in a nasally tone and has that cheap mic/distorted vocal thing that Keith Morris had on the OFF! EPs.  It’s invigorating at times, and annoying during other moments, but Zoo is still a decent album and Ceremony a good band.

Ceremony play punk-influenced music – sure a lot of it sounds like the Spirit of ’77 first wave of punk rock, but there are also nods to sixties-garage and even some soul music by the way of British Invasion acts featured in the songs. Most of Zoo’s tracks are short, powerful and to the point.

Ceremony isn’t breaking any new ground with their music. There are no jaw-dropping guitar solos or amazingly stream of conscious lyrics; instead, Zoo is a collection of twelve solid songs that revel in the history of rock and roll. Maybe that’s the problem. On a certain level I like this album because it feels so lived-in and familiar, but on another I feel like these guys are The Black Crows for the leather jacket wearing masses. I’m torn.

Lambchop – Mr. M  Throughout their long career, Nashville’s Lambchop have always felt like some bizarre country-inflected amalgam of The Magnetic Fields and Steely Dan to me. There’s intelligence to their lyrics and their music that a lot of other bands don’t have, but they balance it out with enough lyrical subversion so that it never feels hoity-toity like The Mountain Goats.  Now Lambchop are back with their eleventh album, Mr. M and they continue to impress me.

Mr. M is a slow, plodding and gorgeous records full of low and croaking vocals from bandleader Kurt Wagner, and I love it. It feels home made, but the songs are polished and recorded gorgeously. This isn’t a lo-fi album; this is a fully-realized studio creation. Every song feels like it was scrutinized to the last note and the result is a really perfect Lambchop album. I especially dig the instrumental “Gar” and “Gone Tomorrow”. Everything on Mr. M is well done.  The album does drag. Rocking out isn’t something that Lambchop are particularly interested in doing on this record. But it’s still a gorgeous listen.

I’ve been a bit slack about updating the blog lately, and I’ll explain all of that in another entry, but until then I thought I’d write a few quick reviews of some stuff that is newly released/just came to my attention.

Van Halen – A Different Kind of Truth Fourteen years after the abysmal Van Halen III and eight years after a trio of new Van Hagar songs appeared on their Best of Both Worlds greatest hits set, Van Halen are back with David Lee Roth for A Different Kind of Truth.  So far, the album has gotten a few good reviews and it’s easy to see why: there’s tons of hotshot guitar playing, arena-ready beats, harmony-filled choruses and Roth’s weird throat screams. This album tickles those sensitive nostalgic places that it’s supposed to and for a moment you feel like you are drinking shitty foamy beer at a keg party in 1985 when David Lee Roth shows up on a flying dildo/surfboard. It’s amazing and the beer is cold. You’re twenty-two and the good times will never end.  That’s what A Different Kind of Truth feels like after two listens.  You’re happy that this has happened after years of wondering through the vast wilds of Cabo Wabo with only the screams of Hagar the Horrible to guide you.

A few listens later it hits you; you aren’t out of the woods. You’re still in the forest. You keep passing the same trees and the songs are often cobbled-together versions of throwaways from Halen’s formative years.  Everything starts to feel sinister. Those palm trees that were in Hagar’s Cabo have retreated to something called Chickenfoot and what’s left has turned into those twisted and creepy trees from a Tim Burton movie. This isn’t Halen: it’s a carefully crafted idea of what Halen is supposed to sound like. Is it good? I don’t know. It’s probably a lot to ask for Eddie, Dave and Alex to get together and create the same fun party music that they did in the early eighties, but it’s even creepier to hear them do an impression of themselves on this album.  There are some wonderful moments when you think holy shit, they’ve still got it, but everything feels like a retread of itself. Listen to it for the nostalgia, but don’t listen to closely.

Anti-Flag – The General Strike When we last left Anti-Flag, they were churning out huge punk rock choruses raging against the 2008 bailouts on The People or The Gun, now they are back with similar anthems on The General Strike. I want to write about huge musical leaps forward and an evolution of their sound, but this is by-the-numbers punk rock, and you know, that is completely okay with me.

The General Strike finds the band still waving the flag for leftist ideals and causes, and it feels like there is some thought put behind the lyrics on the album – it’s not just bumper sticker slogans. The music is powerful and energetic. I imagine that if I had the desire to get up and move I’d probably be all about this album. Put it does make for good quasi-pogoing in my office chair. Plus, the album is barely thirty minutes long and nothing drags. This is fun punk rock.

The General Strike is slated for release on March 20^th on SideOneDummy Records, so be sure to check it out.

Dreamers of the Ghetto – Enemy/Lover The first time I wrote about Dreamers of the Ghetto was when I caught their opening set at the Saturday night show on the Hopscotch Festival’s main stage. There I was impressed by the lead singer’s resemblance to Sting and the band’s music which aped a lot of the overlooked stuff from the eighties like Tears for Fears and New Order. In short, I was impressed.

I finally snagged a copy of the band’s debut, Enemy/Lover (it was released last June) and I am in love with this album. I don’t know why either, the music isn’t as “live” feeling as the stuff I normally like. It feels a bit processed and I detect some drum loops, but damn if the band’s inherent gift for writing a compelling melody hasn’t won me over. I really like it, and upon first listen I remembered some of the songs I heard from the concert back in September – the melodies are that strong.

Enemy/Lover is a hell of a record. It’s kind of neat that a band is this strong on their debut. As a listener, it reminds me of those big, widescreen bands from the eighties. This stuff is built for tons of people to nod their heads and pump their fists to. There are big choruses and the band, in their own ultra-earnest fashion, never feels contrived or cheesy. This is a great record. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

Nurses – Dracula I saw (and raved about!) Nurses and their opening spot for The Mountain Goats two weeks ago, and the album is more of the same from these guys.  I don’t mean that in any sort of ho-hum way, either, because the album is a more refined version of their excellent live show. In some ways, it’s awesome to hear the spare arrangements that the guys display in concert fleshed out, but on other songs, I rather like the minimalist approach that they took live.

That complaint isn’t enough to ruin Dracula for me, though. I think that this is a really solid collection of tunes by a band that is still finding their niche. I get a real Vampire Weekend vibe from the group on the album that I didn’t get live. I think that it has something to do with the spacey guitar lines, the high pitched vocals and the rumbling drums, but there’s none of the preppy kids ripping off Paul Simon’s Graceland baggage that Vampire Weekend carries.

Dracula is a strong collection of songs from my favorite new proponents of white indie funk, Nurses.

Drowner – Drowner This is a new band out of Houston, Texas and they are really riding that spacey, My Bloody Valentine- shoegazer thing. I remember the first time I heard a band that sounded like this: it was during the pre-Lollapalooza 1992 hype, I decided to own a CD by every band that played and Lush was one of those bands.  Lush didn’t exactly sound like Drowner, but the feeling of how do they get such a righteously LOUD guitar sound on such a pretty song is definitely there.  This is a beautifully creepy record that I highly recommend.

The thing that I like about Drowner is that while they aren’t writing huge pop choruses, they aren’t lazy with the melodies. This is a strong album and a group that I’m officially dying to hear more from. Let’s hope they venture out from their Texas home to the Asheville NC/Athens GA areas (hint, hint).

Drowner will be released on March 13^th on Saint Marie Records, but you can stream or download their single “Never Go Away” here.

Hospitality – Hospitality These guys play some of the most fun pop music I’ve heard in a while. I love the bouncy and airy quality of what they do. It feels like Hospitality is trying to be a slightly less-literate and more American Belle and Sebastian. That’s not a bad thing, either.

Sure it’s cutesy indie pop, but I love this. I love the attention to song craft that the band has. Sure, the music has a wistful and effervescent quality, but these aren’t throwaway songs. This is damn fun music. Not every band needs to be the Beatles, sometimes The Archies are perfect, and Hospitality gets that.

I remember a period after Rick Rubin began working with Johnny Cash and before his death; the baritone-voiced country singer became “cool” again. People forgot Cash’s really bad period in the eighties and embraced him as a deep voiced, black-wearing grandpa of badassery and Cash the institution was created for people my age.  The love of Johnny Cash and all of his stark, almost McCarthy-like mannerisms is valid, but I remember screaming from the veritable rooftops that maybe our generation had a Johnny Cash that was working and still creating vital music, and that person’s name was Mark Lanegan.

Most people know Lanegan via his prior band, The Screaming Trees (the band’s “Nearly Lost You” felt like it was everywhere during the summer of ’92) or his work with the Queens of the Stone Age, but most don’t know his excellent solo work. His debut album, The Winding Sheet, and its follow-up, Whiskey for the Holy Ghost, are both stark country albums that really ride that Man in Black vibe perfectly.  So when I heard that Lanegan was releasing a new album entitled Blues Funeral, I knew I had to hear it.

I’ve been out of touch with Lanegan’s solo work for a long while; he’s released four albums prior to this one that I know nothing about, but I know that I’ll hear that stark, Pentecostal tone of his voice and it’ll be like welcoming someone home.

Blues Funeral is not the dark country album that I wanted to hear. Instead, this album is electric. By electric I don’t mean “not acoustic” so much as I mean that there’s all sorts of bleeps and statics and noises that make this not sound like something that comes from the Lanegan that I knew and loved. Instead, it reeks of two roommates, one playing Lanegan and the other playing some sub-Wax Trax-level nineties electronic music in the same apartment. It doesn’t feel right and I don’t like it.

That’s not saying that Blues Funeral doesn’t have some bright spots – two tracks near the end of the album, “Leviathan” and “Deep Black Vanishing Train” are awesome nods to the Lanegan that I knew. The rest of the album is full of synths, drum machines and things getting in the way of the singer’s awesome voice.

I hope that Blues Funeral is a misstep for Mark Lanegan; the guy’s voice and persona are two of the more under-appreciated things in rock. It really sucks that his more country and blues-influenced material hasn’t cast him as an elder statesman of acoustic evil, but this album makes him look about as threatening as Glen Danzig carrying kitty litter.

If you’ve been online today and paid attention to just about any site that pays attention to popular music you’ve probably seen the string of bad reviews that have sprung up about Lana Del Rey’s album Born to Die.  My initial thoughts about the hype was simply asking why are all of these sites giving so much attention to an album that they pretty unilaterally agree is bad?  That was followed, of course, by the prerequisite who the hell is Lana Del Rey, and then I wondered why there is so much anger in these reviews.

For my readers who exist in the same sort of bubble that I find myself inhabiting, it’s okay. We can make it through the Deluge of Del Rey together.  She’s the latest in a terribly long line of female pop stars that fizzle instead of sizzle. She’s already flamed out publicly during her much-talked about Saturday Night Live appearance, and it seems like this album is probably going to certify her as a flash in the pan.  But this isn’t just someone saying that Del Rey is a throwaway pop tart, these are attacks that are just plain mean.

From Spin:

This is all stupendously hokey and stylized and yet immensely appealing; it’s a fully defined sound — a point of view, as Heidi Klum would have it — and worth surrendering to even if you’re the sort of person who’d enjoy watching a TV show where people who use the phrase “the gangster Nancy Sinatra” are shot out of cannons, directly into walls.

Stereogum:

[T]he songs come off like 15 different variations on a drunk chick at the bar trying to convince someone to come home with her.

Sure, most good reviews have a bit of venom, but these just reek of betrayal more than anything; like an angry group of indie nerd record reviewers were just told that Santa Claus (or Thom Yorke) wasn’t real.  They seem insulted that Del Rey is just a persona of a more vanilla singer-songwriter and they want to bring it up in every review. It’s just too much. I’m okay with hype, but the palatable sense of anger by the nerds who write music columns – nerds who very well could be me if editors would realize that I am a goddamn genius – is simply hilarious to me.

So in the name of deciphering why there was so much rage, I decided to listen to Del Rey’s Born to Die tonight. What follows are my impressions of the album. Free from the rage or namechecking of the artist’s real name.

Born to Die is not good. But, I don’t think that it’s supposed to be good. The songs, more than anything establish Lana Del Rey as a brand. She’s not the new Madonna – that’s Lady Gaga, she’s not Cyndi Lauper – that’s Katy Perry, and she’s not Janet Jackson – that’s Beyonce. Instead, Del Rey is positioning herself as some sort of Fiona Apple clone.  There’s that fucked up, tragic pretty girl thing happening and the torchy songs colliding with strings. Its dumb music that is barely tolerable, but the kids will eat it up.  There are three clearly discernibly different melodies on the entire album and Del Rey manages to deliver them all in the same monotone. This is obviously music that has been processed and focus grouped and produced all to hell, but did anyone expect it not to be?

I think that’s where all of the anger and frothing at the mouth to tear down the image of this pre-fabricated star that music blogs like Pitchfork and Stereogum created comes from: she isn’t real, and she was created by record executives. She was then marketed towards those sites and they bought into this idea of a new Dusty Springfield/Nancy Sinatra character that they were selling. Indie nerds are supposed to be a bit savvier than this, and yet they were had by Lana Del Rey’s people.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if you are stupid enough to be moved in any way by something made, manufactured and marketed by a huge company like Interscope Records (who released Born to Die), then you probably deserve this album.  To me, it’s nothing more (or less) than a Sandra Bullock film: meaningless fluff that will be out of my limited view in the next week.

And I’m okay with that.

I love The Hold Steady. They un-ironically play some of the best, seventies-feeling rock n’ roll out there. Their music is full of joy and bombast and their lyrics, spread out over the course of the band’s five studio albums, make people who follow their lyrics feel like they are immersed in one big, epic Bukowski-by-the-way-of-Eggers novel. I tear into each album hoping to play air guitar while hearing tales of a girl named Hallelujah (but you can call her Holly) and guys named Gideon and Charlemagne, girls who can tell which horse finishes first and all those killer parties, and for the most part I’m rewarded handsomely.

The Hold Steady’s fifth album, Heaven is Whenever, was a strange record. It contains some of my favorite individual Hold Steady songs, but it’s also their weakest album. In a weird way, it was a sign that things needed to be shaken up.

Taking a cue from that, The Hold Steady’s lead singer Craig Finn has released Clear Heart, Full Eyes, his first solo album. The album feels warm and familiar – Finn’s voice is unmistakable, but everything else feels different. The bombast is missing and there appears to be all new characters fucking up the same old things in these songs.  It’s a bit alarming at first for longtime Hold Steady fans, but upon multiple listens it’s the record that Hold Steady fans need.  Why is that? Allow me to explain.

For the last three or four records, The Hold Steady have felt like a band dying to mature. Finn is singing more instead of just ranting, there are vocal harmonies and the songs feel well-written instead of the big swaths of classic rock impressionism that the band specialized in at the beginning.  But in growing up The Hold Steady seem to be losing that intimate, hey bro let me tell you a story quality of their songs. On Clear Heart, Full Eyes Finn is back in his role as the guy at the corner of the bar, doling out anecdotes and parables for the losers. It’s a beautiful thing to hear.

Are there missteps on Clear Heart, Full Eyes? Yes. Sometimes the simple instrumentation doesn’t fit the tales that Finn weaves – “Terrified Eyes”, with it’s big vocal refrain at the end, begs for a Hold Steady-style rave-up. Instead, we are left with a garage-y country feeling shuffle. It could be so much more, but here in the intimate setting of a solo album it just sort of hangs there, buried as track six on the album.

Clear Heart, Full Eyes is a good album. It’s solid and nothing is offensive. Maybe as a fan and booster of The Hold Steady I’m not giving its fair shake because I need to guitars and energy, but Finn’s voice is so singular and identifiable that it’s hard to hear it in a more intimate setting like this one. I’m still listening to it, though.  Craig Finn has written a damn fine collection of songs, but in a weird way I think that it’d be better if I didn’t know who he was before hearing it.