Smogasbord

I've just got too many albums and not enough time to go through all of them to give them the full review and whatnot they deserve, sooooo how bout a bunch of shorter ones to catch up.

Artist: Local Natives

Album: Gorilla Manner

Rating: 9.5

Best Tracks: Airplanes, Wide Eyes, World News

Listen if you like: U2, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Band of Horses, New Pornographers (minus Neko Case)

Local Natives is a fan-freaking-tastic rock album. Ridiculously good drums mix with great vocals and solid guitar to form one of the best albums from the year. Guitar is weirdly reminiscent of The Edge on earlier U2 albums--check out Wild Eyes for more on that. World News is a fantastic track.

Artist: Caribou

Album: Swim

Rating: 8

Best Tracks: Kaili

Listen if you like: Weird prog rock techno. Think Prodigy meets The Ma

rs Volta meets Cursive meets Sasha/Xpnder.

This is a bizarre but awesome album that was dominating my ears for about a week and a half. If you dig prog rock, especially prog rock heavy on the keyboards and warping, hit this up. Very listenable if you're in the right mood for it but it lost a bit for me on the replayability--I listed for about 10 days and then I was done with it. I think I'll probably come back to it but for right now it is on the shelf.

Artist: The National

Album: High Violet

Rating: 9

Best Tracks: Afraid of Anyone

Listen if you like: The National. Just do it.

It is a superb album but... when your expectations are Boxer.... you are going to fall short of that. Boxer is one my all time favorite albums. Fake Empire is a top 5 song. High Violet is a great album, but I've been tempering my expectations for this album since Boxer invaded my brain and I still somehow felt letdown. That being said, if I didn't know Boxer and compare this album against it, I would love it--and I do love it but it's just... WHI I want Boxer Pt 2.

And the best for last...

Artist: Metric

Album: Fantasies

Rating: 10

Best Tracks: Sick Muse, Gimme Sympathy, Gold Guns Girls, Help I'm Alive really everything

Listen if you like: Muse playing Dance Rock

Everything about this album is fantastic. It has top notch tracks from front to back. It has multiple Dangerous Driving Songs. It is a perfect album, in my opinion. I can listen to it over and over and over and not get tired of it. Gimme Sympathy is a perfect pop song-- seriously, perfect--it has a ridiculous hook, it has a phenomenal refrain and... just listen to it.

BUY THIS ALBUM.

The New Pornographers -- Together

So it's been a while since my last post--but fear not as I've got a giant store of music that I've been a total slacker about posting on. There should be a solid number of reviews going up in the next week or two, so, hold on tight.

To start it off, The New Pornographers return with a set of tracks that just falls right in line with their last three or four albums. It feels like these are songs they wrote during Challengers, and just never got around to putting them out--which is a good thing if you liked Challengers (which I did)--and a kind of ho-hum thing if you didn't.

The album houses all the signature New Pron sounds--multi-track, man-woman/woman-woman/ man-man harmonies, tambourines, classical beats (Challengers had a Fugue. Together doesn't have anything THAT classical), some classical instruments and excellent, simple guitar and drums fills. Overall, the album is just solid, front to back, and there's really no songs on it that I find myself forwarding through--which is kind of a feat. There are definitely tracks that are better than others, but, I mean, fucking duh.

Neko Case remains at top form. She continues on her last four year track record and pumps out A+ music. Her vocals remain strong and her country-twang is tempered a bit by the other members of the group, which isn't really a good or bad thing, it just kind of... is? Her vocals are elevated by the harmonies in the songs she sings lead vocals on and she adds depth and tambour in those tracks where she provide the harmony.

Overall, the album is a Solid A- to me. The one "failing", if you can call it that, is that there's no iconic song for me on the album. There's no Bleeding Heart Show. There's no, My Rights vs. Yours. And I can live with that--the album is solid front to back, but if there were an iconic song, it would really elevate it to a high A album. There's not a lot of innovation here and there's nothing "new" to the New Pornographers, but I'd rather buy an album and have it be them showing everyone how good they are at doing the thing they come together to do than them going out to left field and doing something totally different.

Album: Together

Artist: The New Pornographers

Rating: 9.2

Best Tracks: Moves, Crash Years, Sweet Talk - Sweet Talk, If You Can't See My Mirrors, We End Up Together, Up In The Dark

Listen if you like: New Pornographers, harmony, Canadian Rock, Pop, Rock