I am completely against the idea that you have to be a good singer to front a band. My problem with this singer is that he's not singing like this because it's just how his voice is. He sings like this because he wants to. My impression is that he was listening to Radiohead's Kid A and said to himself, "why doesn't he sing like that all the time?? I should do that!" I would suggest that he tone it down some, except that it defines the band. And it defines the band because the music isn't strong enough to fall back on.

The album starts out promising enough with a calliope and organ song featuring a 1920's old-timey carnival barker. It's unfortunate, because this is the most interesting song on the album. "Let The Cool Goddess Rust" is a good choice for the second song because it has a strong melody, which allows the listener to ease into the vocal delivery. It's also in familiar lo-fi electric guitar indie territorry. The next song, "Over and Over Again", is probably the best song musically because the singer tones everything down and goes into full Thom Yorke mode. But at heart, it's just another new wave song; albeit a good one. Then for some reason comes a bell/music box style chord progression, repeated for one minute. Why is that there? It's a poor segue between songs; I can only guess they considered the arrangement clever. The majority of the album is good, but without that unique voice, they're just another 80s new wave influenced indie band.

I may have been harsh on these guys, but the truth is I like listening to their music when the singer isn't in full "nerdy Rick Moranis singing mode". But they neither make me want to clap my hands nor say "yeah." Good band, gimmicky singer; I say "burn".

Freak: Clap your hands!

Band: But I feel so lonely!

Freak: Clap your hands!

Band: But it won't do nothing!

Until they ask him if he's up to something, which he probably is. The whole effect is beautiful, lo-fi, textured, and affecting. The rest of the album, not so much.

Things do start to get a little tedious almost the minute modern instrumentation creeps into the mix (i.e., the first second of track 2.) This band isn't big on the ol' songwriting, is the problem - they often let entire songs go by on one simple riff, without even changing things up for a chorus. They're very good at texturing those riffs, adding in guitars and layers of tinny percussion and pretty vocal harmonies, but none of them are particularly prodigious as instrumentalists, either, and there's a limit to how much dynamic tension you can create by changing the way you play the same chord. On the other hand, the sounds they get out of their instruments, particularly the rubbery, endlessly looping bass and the assortment of fun keyboards, are pretty nifty. The appropriately-named "Over and Over Again" is very pleasant listening, partly because the vocalist has reigned in his crackbrained yelp and has decided to croon a little bit. But still, the song ends thirty seconds before the track does, and the band just keeps chugging away at the same loop, as if to remind us that change does not fit into their musical ideology. They are proud of their sameness.

Let's return to the problem of the vocals for a moment. They're drunken, Isaac Brocky, like all the cool rock bands from 2005, each word laden with emotion and inflected to wring the most damage and defeat from every syllable. Problem is after the first track the lyrics don't do much to convince me I should care -- I don't know what he's on about, really, and the band's very cuteness, the chug of their same-y choo-choo indie rock, undercuts whatever gravitas he might've had. Check out the heartland america Springsteen rock of "The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teeth", for example, with its three-chord shuffle -- it sounds like a brain-damaged Modest Mouse, with all the danger drained out, and as the singer's voice cracks on nearly every word I have to stop and ask myself: is this parody?

There are a lot of ideas at work here, and a lot of it's really very nice to listen to, but the shifts in tone, the way that we can't tell whether the singer is actually deranged or just doing a clever ironic put-on distances it for me. "Is This Love," where he sings his woah-woah-woahs as if he's about to fall off his chair (sounding more like his persona from the first track than at any point since), and there's an entirely unexpected time-signature change-up at the end, brings me in again -- the stupefyingly tedious guitar porridge of "In This Home On Ice" kicks me out. This album would've worked so well without half the songs-- if they'd paid attention to the feeling they created at the top and preserved it throughout instead of throwing whatever they had on to the tracklist. Without a lot of musical interest, originality, or innovation to trade on, that feeling is about all they have going for them. So go ahead and burn this one, make the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! album you want to make, and discard the rest. (For your reference- my CYHSY! album is tracks 1, 3, 7, 8, and 11, with an option on the tiny loops of 4 and 9 for padding.)

And give me points for not mentioning the ridiculous media frenzy that sparked up around these guys, whose only super-remarkable feature at this point is their genius for self-promotion.

The Clientele plays pop songs in the vein of the teen pop songs of the 60s, calling to mind the crooning groups of smart, handsome, young, wholesome boys that made up popular rock and roll bands back then. They tend towards the more mellow side of that era, sounding not like the Beatles, but more like the later Monkees, Smile-era Brian Wilson, The Animals, and just grazing upon The Velvet Underground. Really, they sound like very early-era Spinal Tap (during the "The Flower People" era). They've got all the sounds right: the singer's accent is dead-on, they have flat, subdued drums, and the very necessary Vibroluxe reverb vibrato guitar. But the sound that The Clientele gets is very authentic, and by that I don't mean that like Mexican restaurants mean it when they tell you the cooking is "authentic". That is, I'm not saying they sound like a band from 60s, I'm saying they sound like an actual, legitimate band. They're not trying to sound retro, that's just the music they like, and it comes out in what they write. They use the style well, and if you listen closely enough, you can make out modern influences in the guitar and bass lines as well.

That being said, what they do write is professional, well-recorded, and very convincingly played. The only problem is that I have a hard time remembering more than a couple of the songs. This album mostly has well written songs devoid of any hooks. The songs I do remember I'm not likely to be humming later on. "E.M.P.T.Y" and "Spirit" both have memorable lines and good flow. "Losing Harringey" is a spoken word song with an interesting anecdote, albeit a bit cheesy. But I have to ask myself: when is the next time I will listen to this album? The answer is, "not soon", and so I'll have to recommend you burn this CD.

...OK, I'm not going to waste my short review on this sucker, but I am finding it difficult to get through it without nodding off. You could stick a tap in these guys and put the resulting ooze on your pancakes. (Skim the production sheen off the top and feed it to Love is All, won't you?) They have a song called " E.M.P.T.Y.", for god's sake, and it's so string-sweetened and lead-arpeggiated and shaker-stained that there's not an inch of free space in the mix where you can hide from the saccharine sadness. (Seriously. There's a keyboard back in the back, cutting off all escape). And then the George Harrison guitar solo kicks in. It is enough to make you consider self-disembowelment as a proper critical response. Also, somebody should tell the guitarist that he's allowed to turn down the knobs on his amp marked "reverb" and "tremolo".

All of which isn't to say that the stuff isn't nice. It is, unbearably so. The bass parts are smooth and happy, the drummer is uncomplicated but competent, the melodies and harmonies are all very pleasant, and the lyrics vanish into the ether without leaving much of an impression either way. It's just missing that certain je ne sais quoi that makes for memorable and interesting music. As it is, this stuff would be great for quiet moments in romantic movies - the kind where people look damply off into the distance out of rainy windowpanes, or where they sit and stare at the ocean. There're twelve "our songs" here for romcom couples I don't care about. If you gave these guys some drugs, they'd sound like Spiritualized - and god, what a massive improvement that would be. In the meantime we have to deal with songs like "Impossible", which features vocals so voluptuously cutesy that I'm almost certain they kidnapped Ken Stringfellow and used some horror-film machine to suck all the lingering grunge out of him before propping him up in front of the mic. And please don't get me started on "Losing Haringey", an instrumental track made from unbearably sweet Beatles leftovers mated with musings about the singer's youth delivered in fine short-story style. As far as I'm concerned you can't get away with this kind of thing unless you're Scottish.

Of course it isn't as bad as all that -- I am in some respects a musical diabetic, and the same way I couldn't listen to Brian Wilson without reaching for the insulin, the sheer honey-dripped goodness of this music is not something I can easily stand. Nonetheless, this is about my opinion: this stuff is repetitive, hollow, and gives me hives. Skip it.

This music carries with it the energy associated with so many of the musical movements of the past: 70s punk, 80s new wave, and 90s riot grrl. Apparently Love Is All has a desire to be counter-culture as well, with songs named both "Turn The Radio Off" and "Turn The TV Off". It's very refreshing to hear a band having this much fun, too. The fact that the CD is a few decibles louder than the rest of my music helps, too. But plenty of bands have this kind of passion. What sets Love Is All apart is their ability to play their instruments and their ability to write hooks. They remind me of The Concretes, with the deep reverb, female singer, horn section, and so-obvious-why-didn't-I-think-of-it hooks. The only problem with the CD is that Love is All tries to go full speed the whole way. Some of the songs in the middle of the album ("Busy Doing Nothing") sound like they're just shooting blanks. And on such a short CD, it's even more disappointing.

But even the mediocre songs are still good: "Aging" vibrates with B-52s-style absolute abandon. My tastes are such that this CD may slip to the bottom of the pile, but I appreciate what Love Is All is doing too much to suggest anything besides buying this CD.

So, unfortunate recording choices and overuse of vocal effects aside (she really doesn't need to be distorted, ever - her natural yelping makes up for it) what kind of music are we dealing with here? We've got riot-girl ska, disco punk, europop, and when we're lucky (like on the opening track), a delicious melange of all three. Lyrical content is uniformly charming - "I know we like the same kind of cheese!" she intones with great gravity on the rubbery disco number "Used Goods". It's all about the tedium of everyday life, with the defining anthem being "Busy Doing Nothing", a sort of Franz Ferdinand with horns number about sitting at home wasting time. She wants you to turn the radio and the TV off, she couldn't even bother to come up with the titles to all these songs. But she also falls in love, as on the weird, sweet "Felt Tip", which hangs on a wonderful, deep-throated bass groove and is so soaked in delay that everything swirls gently together, and it works, tripping between euro-pop balladry and mad disco fury. And all about a dude who likes to write on walls.

The more I listen to this album the more cause I have to lament the way it was recorded. I want to hear more of it -- there are only a few duds, like the intentionally repetitive "Make Out Fall Our Make Up", which is almost completely swallowed up by the sucking pool of distortion in the middle of the mix. And even that one might've been saved and even made majestic in a big-drum eighties sort of way if the parts had been separated properly. You could say that the manic listlessness that defines the lyrical content of the album spilled out and lazied up the execution, but every musician on here is twice as tight and skilled as any member of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!... there's a disconnect which can only be explained by cash flow problems. So I say to every major label: sign these kids up and give them a recording budget! Where's the Elektra for these folks? (Oh, right. They went under.)

In the meantime, buy this album to hear a sketch of what might've been. Or just turn it way, way up, which is the only way to properly hear everything that's going on.

Apparently the editor of this album is one Clinton Sparks, who is referred to on the album as "Mr. Get Familiar"...

Most of hip-hop is devoted to talking about hip-hop itself, and Clipseis very good at pointing out just how awesome they are.

...'get familiar' seems to be the major theme of the mixtape, as not only is there a sample of some kid saying "get familiar" throughout the album, but most (probably all; again my ignorance betrays me) of the songs are heavily sampled from current hits (the ones I recognized were Beyonce, The Game, and Kanye West). The idea is that all the songs are going to be 'familiar' to the listener, as the beats are stolen wholesale and reworked in their own fashion. It's kind of fitting that they decide to engage in this kind of pop cannibalism...

At least you can get it cheap.

...celebrating their novelty while at the same time preying on pop culture, because the characters Clipse portrays themselves as are crack dealers, people that prey upon the dregs of society yet pride themselves at their ability to inspire addiction. They say, "I sell nose candy; Willy Wonka", and, in a hip-hop fashion, they have interesting enough personalities to make the comparison apt.

At a few interludes on the album, they stop everything to explain parts of the album, like what is meant by "the black card" (apparently the black American Express card could purchase a small nation if you felt so inclined) or why some exclusive song is on the album. These are charming...

The interludes make the album feel like an E! Hollywood Exclusive, or anything on E!, really. Flashy editing of nuggets of preview-reel-ready best-of moments interspersed by interviews aboutthe project itself, and just like E!, the program's logo appears in every single transition (here, the logo is "Clinton Sparks").

...and even unintentionally hilarious at times: when they inform you the Black Card can purchase a jet, a jet noise flys by, and then to end his rant, he declares "Zing!" — a word I didn't realize anyone cool was allowed to say.

It's an interesting exercise, especially in today's fads of remixing and "mashups" and "remashmixups", because the soul of rap was always in the way that the beats were used and what you say over them. In that respect, this album is a huge success. The 'get familiar' strategy throws you off at first because you're consciously thinking about the hook from the original beat. But crack and unlimited credit cards aside, one thing Clipse does have is talent, and they're able to make each song their own.

AND NOW, the exciting conclusion!

This stuff isn't my thing, but I didn't mind listening to it at all. It was catchy, and Clipse are talented enough to still remain interesting. Buy.

Let's talk about structure for a minute. The first half of the tape is about how awesome the Re-Up Gang (which is how this album should properly be credited - the Clipse only make up a third of the group) is and how they are very good at crushing their enemies. The second half deals with the ins and outs of coke dealing, and also, maybe, a little emotional shit: particularly after Pharrell, the beatsmith and definite odd man out of the group, raps on "Maybe", calling himself the black John Lennon. And for the two songs that're left at least Mal and Pusha seem comfortable with leaning back a little bit and letting some vulnerability cloud their lyrics. This means that for me at least the second half is a lot more pleasurable to listen to, since there's less squirm-inducing misogyny to contend with - but the exceptional beats redeem a lot of these tracks, like "What's Up", which feels like an instant classic even though they're not rapping about a hell of a lot. I should mention that the MCs I haven't mentioned yet, Liva and Sandman, aren't bad, either -- they have deep, buttery flows, in the Biggie Smalls vein, and they each explore a different aspect of that style. Liva is unexpectedly dexterous, Sandman is laid-back and velvety. But in terms of content they're journeyman MCs, solid but not nearly as interesting as the Clipse.

This is good enough to merit a buy (although, of course, you can't -- this is a mixtape, the samples resolutely uncleared.) It's worth downloading just to hear "Maybe", which apart from its amazing beat has a hook that, if you're at all sociologically minded, will make your brain hurt -- "You and me - baked ice cream and BBC..."

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Yeah. I just fucking reviewed this. Now I get to review what amounts to another Ladytron.

OK, to be fair they are a bit different from Ladytron. Ladytron is far more produced and far more gothy, with more of an industrial sound than Broadcast, who is more reserved and techno sounding. But both have the same intended feel to them: ambient electronic music that retains a traditional song structure. They also have very similar lead vocalists in both style and timbre. But what separates Broadcast from Ladytron (and what makes them better) is that they sound less like a band singing over music they made in GarageBand and more like an actual group of musicians. The arrangment of music is far more organic, more analog. Some songs are even absent the electronic parts entirely. Overall, Broadcast is more musical than Ladytron and catchier. I just wish I didn't have to listen to them each in a row.

The album certainly doesn't start off with very much hope. As much as I love the title "I Found the F", the singer's voice carries with it a certain amount of dullness. As opposed to the singer of Ladytron, who carries a unique indie vibe, the singer of Broadcast inspires relaxation and comatose behavior, perhaps inspiring one to dance like the sad goth kids one might see on a mediocre sketch comedy show. The next song lets me down again, being one of the more disappointing songs inspired by Alice in Wonderland I have heard. But by the time the third track, "America's Boy" comes on, I have a much better idea of what Broadcast is all about. They're basically Bis in slow motion, electronica pop slowed down a bit; opting for atmosphere over structure, distorted and haunting background pads instead of slick and sweet instrumentation, reverb over compression. "Tears in the Typing" is a departure from the rest of the album, being a simple stripped down, reverb-drenched acoustic singer/songwriter number that reminds me of Mirah.

There are still some sore spots on the album for me. "Corporeal" is another Ladytron sound-alike, and "You and Me in Time", even at 1:24 is kind of boring. But it's very difficult to find any other negative areas on this album, because Broadcast's melodies are really very catchy. The atmosphere and her voice say "sleep", but the hooks on the album say "listen". Burn.

The first track of this album is the last time we hear live drums- the rest of the time it's all held together by a casio beat barely elevated from its primordial click-track ancestry. Somebody had a couple of good keyboards (and a couple bad ones) and decided to make them interesting by running them through a variety of bargain-basement distortion effects. Throw in some equally fuzz-slathered guitar and bass and put a vaguely Nico-sounding chanteuse with an unidentifiable accent over the whole thing, and you've apparently got the recipe for indie success. I'm kind of baffled by this album: it sounds like it was recorded in someone's bedroom, and not in the good way, there's not a whole lot of interest going on lyrically or melodically, and the only thing that differentiates it sonically is that they gave the knobs on all their effects pedals an extra quarter-turn so it sounds really bumpy and 8-bit. There is a nice baseline hidden in there at one point - Track 6, I believe, "Corporeal", and of course it has the kind of one-finger fucked-synth solo snaking all over it that would make an engineer wonder where the bad circuit is.

The rest of it verges from acceptable to deeply irritating. "Arc of a Journey" is particularly fun - how you make this track is you turn on the auto-chording and arpeggiating function on an electric church organ, hold down a key for five minutes and then near the end turn your distortion up. Also feel free to solo very slowly with your other hand. And there is "Subject to the Ladder", which by cunning use of two alternating chords contrives to let you know that something is subject to the ladder. She implies that it may be her mind.

If this is a one-person project I guess it's cool in a look what I did in my basement sort of a way. If there was an actual band involved that's sad. You don't really need to listen to it either way. Skip.

This style means that I should probably run through this album a song at a time. "My Home Is The Sea" is lyrically what you'd expect: heavily bluegrass-influenced (he uses the word "reckon" at some point) and highly poetic, describing the thoughts and life of a man at sea in a roundabout way heavy on imagery. The song is quite dynamic, going from vocals and a clean electric guitar to full band when the drums kick in about a minute in to guitar solo back down to a quiet, organ-led bridge, and then it starts over again. It's excellence in songwriting, as the drums come in at the right moment, the way the electric guitar is recorded is at once clear and refreshing, even the quiet parts are catchy, and the outro solo is a calm denoument that sails you back into port. I focus on the first song because it captures the best of both sides of Bonnie and Matt. It's an average length but doesn't leave the listener wanting more despite its length, the full band parts are that kind of nostalgic 70s folk rock, and the two vocalists work wonderfully in tandem. "Beast For Thee" and "What Are You" are more quiet, classic country/western guitar fingerpicking ditties (the most fitting term) which lend credence to the "boring" hypothesis. It's saved somewhat by the lyrics on "What Are You", which describe a romantic interlude and remind one of a modern revisioning of Victorian-era sexual relations.

The album takes it down another notch on "Goat and Ram", which has a soft section of about 2 and half minutes which is quite inaudible unless you are listening to it at full volume. Then, the song launches into full band, distorted guitar that wakes you up and scares the shit out of you (especially if you've turned up your player up to hear the other part). Then it goes back to sleep. It reminds me of cartoon characters sneaking into the bad guy's room at night, and the audience gets spooked when the bad guy stirs, maybe screaming in his sleep and tossing and turning violently, and then finally returning to rest. "Lift Us Up" is the same as the ones before, with a stripped down arrangement of two electric guitars and two singers. The song's not completely boring, however, as the hook in the chorus is quite excellent. "Rudy Foolish" is just the same, but without the hook.

Don't get me wrong: Bonnie and Matt's basic arrangement, two electrics and two singers, isn't bad on its own, even with their quiet style. It's just that when songs in this style don't have a definite hook to them, they tend to all blend into each other in a haze of soft, gentle voices and arpeggios. That makes the loud sections on "Goat and Ram" so much more powerful - but by the time they show up, I've completely lost interest. The hook on "Lift Us Up" makes it rise far above the songs around it. The excellent flow on the opener make it the clear winner. Similarly, "Bed Is For Sleeping", the next song after "Rudy Foolish" works because the main theme is so catchy. The next song, "Only Someone Running", works because the simple change to acoustic guitar totally changes the atmosphere. Above that, the chorus is excellent, although the backup vocalist kind of slaughters his question-and-answer harmony at the climax of the song, ending up sounding like a bad impression of a gospel singer. "Death In the Sea" and "Blood Embrace" are both dull songs, but "Death In the Sea" is much better because it only lasts two and a half minutes. "Blood Embrace" gives us the exact same thing for over seven minutes, kind of like "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" but not as good. It also ends with a strange dialog cut from an 80s movie or something. The album ends strong, though, with "I Gave You", whose structure laid out like a classic country song while retaining their basic style.

This album is a lot like Iron and Wine's 2004 Our Endless Numbered Days — well-performed and soothing, but there are only a few songs that manage to be very moving. The rest is mood music, and I don't give that very high regard artistically. Burn.

It's always struck me as a weird accident of fate that Will Oldham is an indie rock star and not, say, one of the endless roll of folkies and adult-contemporary reformed rockists who quietly sell out middle-sized venues the nation over without any of us kids (us who count, you see) ever having heard of them. His stuff is so restrained, so classic-minded, so grown up - man's music, not boy's music - that you have to wonder where, in the man-depleted landscape of indieness, he is supposed to fit.

This album, although ostensibly by Oldham (as Bonnie 'Prince' Billy) and Matt Sweeney, belongs to Oldham, with Sweeney adding musical polish in the guitar lines and ethereal floating harmonies to the schtick Bonnie Billy perfected on "I See A Darkness". Everything is quiet, here, drums and bass sparingly scattered behind circling or spiraling guitars which buzz and seethe gently as Oldham sings his songs of death and relationships and relationships and death.

Sweeney does get the chance to take the lead here and there, as on "What Are You", but that song is just as pretty and ethereal as everything else on the album, if not a little more so. Sweeney's idiom is slightly more countrified than Oldham's archaisms and doom-tinged meditations, and thus slightly more straightforward.. with Oldham, you have to be prepared in the middle of a dirge for a silly rhyme involving his tummy or a weirdly inappropriate use of the word 'friend' or the odd 'thee' heaving into view. (And yet, still, somehow, it always feels mature and assured... it's a dad's measured silliness.) It's worth going with him -- he always has a lot to say, as on the epic "Blood Embrace", wherein he contemplates how he would deal with a partner's infidelity, wishing he would walk away but knowing that he would stay and fight, before yielding to a lengthy sample of dialogue from a movie where the protagonist seems incapable of doing either. It's a moment that shouldn't work, but it does, because the backing instrumentals, soothing and evocative, are cinematic in and of themselves.

In an album this quiet one does eventually wish for a little more to sink one's teeth into, and a few more songs from Sweeney would've been welcome if only for their overt songiness. This is largely countered, though, by the fact that many of the album's strongest songs are near the end - like the fuzzy, bent "Death In The Sea", which oddly turns out to be about wanting to live, and "I Gave You", a song about a dead love which is nearly swallowed up in its own distortion but which is carried through by Oldham's vocals, which are (always) at once plaintive and strong.

Buy this one - it's as good as "I See A Darkness" in places, and better. And the cover art ain't bad either.

It's interesting that I mentioned The Band in my last review, because apparently The Hold Steady was inspired heavily by Scorcese's documentary about The Band, The Last Waltz. Apparently, the lead singer said something like, "Bands don't sound like this anymore. Let's do this from now on," and they've certainly achieved success in that regard. The Hold Steady is the kind of straight-forward rock'n'roll that no one plays anymore. It's not prog rock, but it's not punk; it's not as masturbatory as Van Halen or as juvenile as AC/DC; they aren't afraid to use organs or power chords or harmonized guitar solos; it's not cheesy or pretentious, and it sounds equally good at an arena or a local festival or a small club. These guys also play guitar riffs that would make AC/DC jealous, and they routinely segue into "Layla" or Billy Joel-esque piano parts. But, despite me comparing them to 10-20 year-old music, they are undeniably modern. It's just that no one sounds like them these days.

I have to admit, I was on the fence on this one for a long time. I really appreciate what The Hold Steady does, but I wasn't entirely sure if this was something good or something great. They cover a long range of styles, to be sure, from Rancid-style guitar playing to 50s 6/8 ballads to blues riffs so bluesy they are almost country. But it's still very hard to decide if there was any depth to it. What eventually won me over was the lyrics. The album is a loose concept album about a girl named Halleluiah (Holly for short) and the narrator — who, I'm not sure, may play different characters in each song. It's kind of intentionally vague. The album tells the story of how Holly tries to reconcile her similarly vague religious teachings with her adolescent existence, has some strange experiences, gets reborn again in a bizarre program, and comes out more or less with an awareness of herself. But the story, if you can call it that, is absorbed into the mind by osmosis. It's told in circles, in a non-linear fashion, from different viewpoints. In fact, it seems as if the story actually changes as the album goes on, which makes it very difficult to compile into a continuous narrative.

One of the best songs is "Cattle and the Creeping Things", which is about someone reading the Bible with a strangely naive common sense blue-collar view:

"she likes the part where one brother kills the other. she has to wonder if the the world ever will recover. because cain and abel seem to still be causing trouble."

The actual words the lyrics are made up of are just as good as anything John Darnielle writes. The Hold Steady and The Mountain Goats are actually often mentioned in the same breath, and it's because both write good lyrics that are very often sung in a spoken manner. The difference between The Hold Steady and The Mountain Goats, though, is that The Hold Steady has rhythm. The Mountain Goats desparately try to shove every word they can into each verse, no matter how awkward it is. The Hold Steady sing/speaks each line with an incredibly natural flow. The passion they sing with differs, too. The Mountain Goats sing with a warbly, sensitive, emo passion, while The Hold Steady has two basic speeds: sad drunk and angry drunk. It helps that the lead singer has the unique voice to pull this off. When he sings, "I'm a very busy man, man," you believe it.

This is an album that has to be heard. It's something you won't see come out these days, and The Hold Steady have a penchant for turning an excellent phrase. Go out and buy this album. I guarantee if you can get past the singer's voice, which may be a turnoff to some, you will have fun listening to it at least once. You may even grow to like it.

Craig Finn shouts his lyrics, which are stories that happen to pull rhymes out of the air haphazardly as they go. He's got a knack for song titles ("Charlemagne In Sweatpants") and character and color, and he sells every line he delivers. The songs all tell the same story, but they're mixed up chronologically and you can never be sure who's narrating what or who each character is meant to be at any given moment or who's been born again or whether the whole thing might just be about Stevie Nix. If it's your thing you could probably spend days unraveling it, figuring out who had drugs in their socks and who took who up to Penetration Park. The tone don't vary much, sure, and you can really only tell one song from another by the hooks, but it's all catchy enough, and there are some moments which stick out -- like "Don't Let Me Explode", musically a fifties make-out number stapled to a Weezer-esque rocker, lyrically a tale of two people who despite themselves never went everywhere or saw anything. This is followed by "Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night", which feels to me like the masterpiece of the whole damn thing, a song that starts with meeting W.B. Yeats at a party and proceeds to kick your ass up and down, breaking out the horn section before stopping dead in its tracks so you'll notice how awesome the bridge is. A piano comes out of nowhere and plays a series of chords that make me think of a post-Rent musical or the New Pornographers, and then the rest of the band falls on it and for an all-too-brief moment they don't sound like anybody else. Not that it's a bad thing when they take on the styles of their elders, necessarily. "Your Little Hoodrat Friend" is at least 85% Springsteen, dumbed down appropriately and tinged with country rock, and it's a delight. Weaker tracks like "Multitude of Casualties" coast a little, chugging along on the back of the lyrics, but generally somehow arrive at a moment of catharsis anyway.

The complaint will be that it all sounds the same and that the lead singer never switches up his delivery, which given the sheer weight of words this album deals in can wear on the nerves. But screw that. If you're not up for this much triumphal ass-kickery at once take it in chunks. And the real exciting part is that according to nearly all the critics they topped this one with their 2006 album. Stay tuned for our take on that and in the meantime pick this sucker up (by buying it, if possible.)

This album is really heavy, and they don't hold back on the opening track. "The Fox" starts off with what is probably the loudest noise on the album; the guitars and drums playing as loud as they possibly can. Immediately, you know that this is Serious Rock, the kind that even the most jaded rocker is going to admit 'rocks'. On this album, Sleater-Kinney combines very simple, blues-inspired guitar riffs with heavy choruses and crooning vocals, which on the surface makes them remarkably similar to Led Zeppelin. When they sing "land ho!", they do it with soul and a vibrato that Devendra Banhart is probably very jealous of. It's also clear that their drummer is one of the reasons for their success as she basically excudes pure energy. The next two songs are based off of jaunty, elfish rhythms that quickly turn into dark, distortion filled straight-forward choruses, and in the case of "What's Mine Is Yours" eventually becomes a brief backwards guitar jam noise solo, that when used sparingly, is an effective tool in advancing the song. It works well here, but is overused a lot later on in the album, especially on "Let's Call It Love", which is 8 minutes of it. It's still somewhat forgivable if you decide to call that the "end of the record" and chalk it up to a noise outro or something, which allows you to get up and shut off the record at any time. The problem, and the largest stain on this record, is "Night Light", the song that follows "Let's Call It Love" and ends the album. The song is completely uncharacteristic from the rest of the album, and what's worse is that it sounds like an indie rock copy of Evanescence.

Most of the songs on the album are in the same vein as the first three, but it doesn't get boring or detract from the album, and no critical complaint can be made about it. That's like faulting Rancid for sounding like a punk band. There are a few points that stand out from the rest of the album, thought. The verse on "Jumpers" leans more towards the "alternative" side of indie rock than you might expect. "Steep Air" could be mistaken for the Sleater-Kinney take on Modest Mouse. "Modern Girl" is a soft song with the guitar distortion turned off that is more melodic than the rest, with a pianica(?) in it. They make up for the guitars by distorting the entire mix. Incidentally, this album was produced by Dave Fridmann, who has worked with The Flaming Lips before. His goal seems to give the album a very live feel to it, which actually succeeds spectacularly. The entire mix is saturated, and the reverb on the vocals isn't the tone-sucking reverb you might hear from say, Broadcast; instead it gives the music a live feel. (The reverb also hangs on a little longer at the end of vocal passages, bringing to mind psychedelic 70s artists.) Add to that the fact that Sleater-Kinney is a band with a phenomenal amount of energy that actually comes through on the CD, as opposed to other excellent live artists, e.g. The Arcade Fire.

If you value rock and roll in the depths of your soul, as I know you do, you will accept the gift Sleater-Kinney has given you and buy The Woods. It's also interesting in its own right as an artifact, as this is apparently the final studio album ever released by this band.

Let's just go with instinct, then. This stuff is bitchin' in a way that went out of style a long time ago. The guitar lines are massive and yet still retain a measure of the intricacy and interplay that made Sleater-Kinney famous. Opener "The Fox" feels like the start of something huge and scary, with huge walls of chugging guitar buoying up Corin Tucker's unmistakable ululating vocals, but that overt menace is replaced as the album goes on with a feeling of timelessness. You can't be sure when this stuff was made, and on songs like "Jumpers" you feel the guitar sound sloping off into the kind of timeless growl that made Sonic Youth's best material transcend itself. Or, possibly, I'm just a sucker for baritone guitar and twining melodic lines, and songs about how soulless California is. See, maybe I do like it that much. Or not. Or...

I suppose the problem is that every note, every squall of noise, even the gimmicky "Modern Girl" (a sugary pop song about being a consumer repeated three times, each time with the distortion on every part turned up just a tad and the lyrics a little more menacing) feels inevitable, Classic, both as a genre and as a descriptor. The way Tucker shouts her 'woah-oh-ohs' on "Entertain" hearken back to a thousand other woah-oh-oh's, male and female, british and american, but all indubitably rockin'. And even as "Let's Call It Love" threatens to destroy you with its endless noise-solo breakdowns you still feel as if you're standing in a stadium, you at one end, the band at the other, both of you caught up in a ritual as old as the Rolling Stones (and that's old, brother)... and it's really kind of wonderful to hear that arena-rock, here-are-my-balls mentality filtered through a resolutely indie all-girl three-piece punk band. It works as if it were always meant to work this way, as if the sparkling production and trim guitar lines they'd always favored were self-imposed chains that they've finally allowed themselves to break. It's rockism at its best. And they do have the chops to pull it off -- the guitars are precise in their sloppiness, alternately huge and amorphous and sharp and cutting, and their drummer (Portand institution and current member of Quasi Janet Weiss) is thunderous.

So. Yeah, they got me. This is probably a classic and well worth a buy. I just hope Stephen's review is slightly more useful.

A band like this in California would produce something pagan and hippy (like My Barbarian). A band like this in New York would produce satanic metal, and a band like this in the Midwest might produce something nerd-core. But in the fertile indie ground of Portland, they produce something gilded and unique. (However, before Isaac claims yet another victory for the Pacific Northwest, I should point out that lead guitarist Chris Funk — as seen on The Colbert Report — is from the other Northwest - Northwest Indiana, specifically my hometown of Valparaiso.) The album starts off with the epic "The Infanta", telling a story about princes and dukes and whatever, I'm still not sure what he's saying. But it's exciting, melodic, and the East Indies influenced style makes you feel like you're watching an old 70s film like Lawrence of Arabia or The King and I or something similarly exotic. I also want to note that while his voice is not perfect by any means, it's still an excellent voice that is made better simply by the singer's confidence. It's put up front in the mix and is clear and understandable, something you don't see too often in modern music.

The rest of the album is a journey and interesting to listen to. Sometimes it's the album's lyrics, sometimes it's the music alone that is engaging. It helps that The Decemberists are excellent storytellers, like "The Sporting Life", a song odd in that it doesn't talk about the exotic, but rather football, in telling the story of a young high school player who injures himself on the field. A very innocuous-seeming scene, but it's told in a simple yet engaging fashion. But taken too far, it can backfire: the lowest point on the album comes in "Espionage", a very long story about a spy and his lover. The song starts off well enough, but it drags on with a plodding verse. After you think the song might end, it inexplicably spirals into a failed attempt at some kind of string crescendo which ends in more of the verse. It's disappointing, because the song would have really worked with some editing.

Other than the length of some songs, I can't find any fault with this album other than the basic style, which might be off-putting to some people. But if the idea of hearing about people shipwrecked inside of a whale or about royal court intrigue doesn't bother you, then you should definitely buy Picaresque.

The word Picaresque is used to refer to a certain kind of swashbuckling narrative of grand guignol and global adventure popular in the mid-eighteenth century. And, oddly enough, when you crack this sucker open you get exactly what it says on the tin, minus the eighteenth century part. (Although there're songs on here that would've gone down a storm in the dockside taverns of Liverpool, back in the day.) You also get the best album we've had so far, rife with tales of bloody revenge, international espionage, double suicide, and love affairs that last beyond the grave. And it's all constructed with the rhythm and the narrative of the whole shebang in mind, which is particularly welcome in these trying times, now that the idea of the record album as a cohesive unit seems to be on its way out. Again.

We open with a galloping drumbeat that tells you that we mean business - that this cute, literary little band has grander intentions this time and is going to wipe the floor with you. And the opener, "The Intafada", is a stunner, a five minute description of a royal procession bearing a holy babe plucked from the water in a basket. That's it - no context provided, just intense martial climax after climax. The Decemberist's sound, beyond being flecked through with horns and bowed bass and accordion, is notable for its sense of rhythmic and dynamic tension -- this song starts out loud, gets louder, straps on some hilariously over the top spaghetti western arpeggios, gets even louder and then slows to a halt for a brief, yearning glance at the prince's virgin bride. And then it gets louder still. And then it's straight into the double suicide, with the perversely catchy "We Both Go Down Together", which is part shanty, part irish lilt, part piano rock and contains melodic hooks that burrow into your head. This story of a love that could never be sets the tone for the rest of the album, ushering in the tone of romantic doom that will see us through to the end, where in the ethereally beautiful "Angels" we are treated to a more metaphorical drowning.

It's hard to pick out highlights because the album's dripping with them. Check out "The Sporting Life", a tale of failure on the football field that is redolent of Belle & Sebastian's high-school-forever aesthetic and sounds just enough like something off of "If You're Feeling Sinister" that we know it's a homage, without ever feeling like anything but a Decemberists song. (You don't get banjo in B&S.) This whole album actually reminds me of that band's underrated comeback album "Dear Catastrophe Waitress"... there's the same willingness to experiment, the same far-reaching narratives, and the same half-serious sophistication, but "Picaresque" is far more cohesive and thus far more successful. It balances its higher and more ludicrous flights of fancy with songs of bracing immediacy. The epic cold war romance "Espionage" is full of crazed stylistic tailbacks and about-faces, starting and stopping and building and falling until it lands eventually in a Glass-ian minimalist cul-de-sac which explodes into the one moment on the album where the vocals aren't pushed to the fore, drowned instead in a storm of noise. Then, after the stripped-down ghost song "Lost At Sea" to clear our palates, we have "16 by 32", a triumphant stomp-along protest song about the war in Iraq, which could stand alone as a radio single if it weren't so caustic. This balance of the high-flown with the direct serves the album very well indeed, and nowhere better than with "Bus Mall" and "The Mariners' Song", the last big songs on the album, which are placed right next to each other because isolated they would be overwhelming, the first from sheer poignancy and the second from pure swashbucking ridiculousness. The first is a story of teenage runaways who turn to prostitution (and is probably more affecting to me because it's set in Portland and I recognize the places he mentions and the sort of kids he's describing.) The second is about a revenge-crazed sailor who is swallowed by a whale, only to find himself sharing the thing's cavernous belly with the very man who brought about his mother's untimely demise. Either might be over the top if they weren't juxtaposed so closely. As it is, it just feels like Colin Meloy flexing his compositional muscles, particularly because after the whale we get the stark intimacy of "Angels", proving that the bastard can write love songs that don't involve civil war captains or selkies.

The last thing I want to mention about the album is that it has a song that functions as a kind of mission statement. "Engine Driver", which references both the Who and "Wichita Lineman", is about a man trying to escape his overpowering love for a girl by diving into story after story and character and character. He is "a writer, a writer of fictions", a line and a conceit which so disgusted me when I first heard this album last year that I shelved it and didn't give it a second look until I had to review it here. You might have the same reaction... it's almost as easy to hate Colin for his cleverness as it is to be swept along by his stories. I'm in a different place now than I was then, and I think this is easily among the top five albums of '05, and that you should buy it. But it ain't for everyone, not even always for me. But just for the chance that you can allow yourself to be caught and dazzled by it you should give it a shot.

All arguments about whether singles collections should even be reviewed aside, after hearing this, my only experience with Mr. Braxe, perhaps he is best served to the general public as a Best Of collection. Those of us who are not versed in techno can experience the highlights of his career without being turned off by what is — as having a singles collection affirms — a bunch of mediocre filler along the way.

If you aren't familiar with Mr. Braxe, like myself, he seems to have a very distinct style. His recordings push the high end of the EQ, and his synth pads give you a very distinct feeling: the feeling of being awake at 5am in the countryside. His sparse arrangments and chords are exceedingly natural, like an incarnation of techno wandering the moors. On "Intro", there is a repeated "woo-ooh" that bears a striking resemblance to a Bob White's call, normally heard at 6am in Indiana while waiting for the school bus. This is music to play a 10 year old driving video game to until 4 in the morning. It's music to make coffee to, if you were so inclined.

Overall, if this were not a singles compilation, I would advise the techno enthusiast to hastily purchase this CD, and the layman to burn it. But seeing as how this is a singles collection, the enthusiast probably already has all of these songs already, which would lead me to suggest to you to burn the CD.

God deliver me from these neo-discophytes and their broken-record stylings. The loops that drive these tracks are usually less than two seconds long -- the tedium bores into the brain as the phased vocals swirl in and out. This is less music than counter-insurgency black ops -- I bet there's an entire section for it in the new prisoner interrogation guidelines. The only thing that saves it from being outright torture is the occasional funky bassline that worms its way in to taunt you with its musicality.

Where were the hippoisie when my favorite band decided that disco-electronica was in again and did it with actual songwriting? You didn't care. You didn't dig the emotion. You didn't dig the beats, which were easily on a par with this numbingly same-y crap. If you couldn't dance to it without a measly thought in your brains it wasn't cool enough for you. You let them die, and now you shovel up crap like this, which is hip because it's European.

Yeah. If overuse of phasing and tremolo were a crime, these people would be shot at dawn, with the overuse of canned handclaps cited by the prosecution as an aggravating factor. May you rot, Alan Braxe! How do you make a hip-hop song so limp and unrappable that the MC sinks into it like a man being swallowed by a vat of thick porridge when you refuse to use any loop longer than five seconds? It must be a christmas miracle. (That's Track 11 for those of you foolish enough to still be listening at that point in the album). Skip! Skip! Skip!

As good as the lyrics might be, they're also the biggest problem. One of the complaints I've heard levied against Pavement (don't worry, I'm getting to The Mountain Goats) is that they "sound like a bunch of indie dorks making it up as they go along." This applies equally well to The Mountain Goats as well: Darnielle sounds like he's just singing whatever crap comes off the top of his head. Oh, he's most definitely not; the lyrics, taken separately, are quite good. The problem is that the man has an annoying, and to my ears, wrong approach to meter. Most of the time he sounds like he's trying to cram as many syllables into a phrase as possible just so he doesn't have to violate the sanctity of his lyrics. What I imagine to be Darnielle's creative process is this: first, he figures out a tune on the guitar, improvising lyrics and coming up with some kind of hook. He then takes that hook and writes a poem around it that has no relation to the song whatsoever. The result sounds like someone trying to cram a square peg into a round hole. In the end, the music is great, the lyrics are great, and ne'er the twain shall meet.

But this is a criticism that can be levied against The Mountain Goats in general; it doesn't address this specific album. This album has a much higher production quality than I was expecting; it's slick, like you would expect from say, a Broadway album. I say this because "Dance Music" sounds like it comes direct from the Rent soundtrack. Overall, the arrangements are well thought out, especially for music which is at its heart simple singer/songwriter acoustic ballads. If there is a problem in the music, it's cello-driven pieces that are reminiscent of old Beatles song but sound incongruous with Darnielle's voice and the album as a whole.

I'm not familiar with The Mountain Goats' other work, but this is an expertly made, detailed, and closely crafted album at the very least. So that leads me to a conflict: if it were up to most fans of indie rock, they would tell you to buy it. If it were up to me (and it is), I would tell you to just skip this album. But I suppose that you need to hear the Mountain Goats at least once before deciding your position on them, so ultimately, I would suggest an averaged burn.

So this guy turns out to be a classically poppy songwriter with a great voice and consistently interesting lyrics. Also he has a song here called "Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod", which beats out Cursed Realms (Of The Winterdemons) and Sometimes A Pony Gets Depressed as the best song title of 2005 so far. There are shades of They Might Be Giants in here, although I'm not sure wherefrom they come, since this stuff isn't as musically complex and is far, far more emotionally committed. I think it's just the general air of nerdiness, a certain kind of cool-but-dorky-dad quality in the vocals. And that's what you really have to latch onto with this guy - his voice, his passion, his delivery. The music itself is resolutely pleasant but unremarkable, and the production is intentionally haphazard. It has, occasionally, dat ole chimera Pop Sensibility padding around its bones, but I could do with a little more movement, a little more complexity, a little more ache to go with the tape hum. And then there's the problem of repetition - there's not much structurally, musically or even melodically that separates "Up The Wolves" from "This Year" or "Broom People".

Darnielle's at his best when he's at his least cartoonish, as on the affecting album closer "Pale Green Things" and the death-meditation "Song For Dennis Brown". The appeal of this music is in the emotion packed into each song, and the more stridently dorky Darnielle gets the harder it gets to access that feeling, and one's attention drifts to the music, which is only good insofar as it supports the vocals, and then things get boring. There are some exceptions - the dumb sunny pop of "Dance Music" buoys up two little vignettes about destructive relationships in a wonderful, sour-sweet mix. This is another case where the best songs on the album achieve a unique beauty that makes me see why people could fall in love with this artist and follow him to the grave, but where the merely solid tunes leave me uninspired. I'd rather listen to the Decemberists -- Darnielle has a better voice, and I believe the stories he's telling me are true, where Colin is obviously telling a bunch of fibs. But I'd rather have insincerity delivered in layers of musical complexity than sincerity served on a half-warmed pop platter. If you will. If you tend the other way (and there are many good folk who do), this stuff's for you.

So. As a whole, the endeavor feels slight, and that's the recipe for a burn, in my book -- you should check it out, if only to hear the way Darnielle acts the vocals on "Dilaudid".

In a weird way, I get the feeling that the kind of person who is into this might also be into Morissey too. The music has a kind of unique indie 80s feel, covered by a depressing shroud of gray that reminds me of the feeling you get when you watched crappy 80s bands with horrible stage presence on cheesy 80s videos with cheesy background effects, like everyone is kind of surrounded red thanks to "edge-detect" technology. I say Morissey, though, because both Morissey and Ladytron have, from a certain perspective, a particular quality of lameness. But there's a certain kind of charm that has the potential to cause a completely inexplicable snowballing of appreciation, as if somehow the performer has found a way to trasmit that 'indie' feeling: the feeling that you are the only one on the planet who might like this person because your musical tastes are just that eclectic, but at the same time you feel that there might be others like you, so you wear your Smiths shirt as a beacon. I'm not saying that such a feeling is childish or even undesirable, I'm just saying that both Morissey and Ladytron are able to hypnotize certain listeners into feeling it.

That said, Ladytron was an absolute trial to sludge through. Every single track sounds vaguely the same, with a few exceptions like "Fighting In Built Up Areas", and the last couple songs, "White Light Generation" and "All The Way". But these aren't nearly impactful enough to make up for 12 songs worth of Ladytron. Even the album title, "The Witching Hour" is a let down. It's more like the "Watching Late Night Infomercials Hour", though I suppose both of those are around midnight. So unless you are a fan of mellow techno that is mellow due soley to its mediocrity rather than its aural quality, I would suggest the music fan skip Ladytron.

You know how I mentioned in passing that my favorite band (while it lived - bis, for those of you not in the know) died because nobody wanted to listen to their darkly atmospheric disco electronica? They were apparently ahead of their time. Ladytron is death disco of the highest order (though not as good by virtue of not being Scottish) and as a result I can't help but like it, all the while cursing the fickleness of taste-makers everywhere. What makes it better than the Alan Braxe is that a) these are songs, rather than looping exercises, and b) that the phaser has been ditched for guitar-borne distortion. In other words, it's a band, not a concept.

That being said, this stuff still ain't all that great, and its presence this far up the list is kind of perplexing. There are some really awful songs pushed up right near the front of the album, like "International Dateline", which mates the rhythm from 'lust for life' to a melody line that's nearly identical to the first track of the album and then opens with the flat-affect girl singer intoning "Woke up in the evening / to the sound of the screaming / through the walls it was bleeding / all over me." Awww. That album opener, though, is a corker, insistent and driving, if just as gothy, with raw-edged guitars mated with choked-off back-mixed electronic squirts to create a grimy wall of sound. The vocalist is at her best when she's at her most sugary, drenched in reverb and twisting her vowels like a teen idol, rubbing up against a backing track that takes no prisoners and chugs forward dumbly, a juggernaut with sharp corners. This band can't do spare, they can't do dynamic variation, they can't do start/stop. When they try they fail badly. But when they start punching and don't let up til the song exhausts itself, they succeed. I dig the swooping guitar effects and driving beats on mid-album tracks like "Sugar" and "Fighting In Built Up Areas", the latter of which is sung in russian, which improves matters tremendously. The album really picks up around that time, with lyrics like "If I give you sugar, will you give me / something elusive and temporary", which beats the hell out of bleeding walls. Break out the minor chords and let's have a doom dance party -- we can wear pancake makeup and cherry lipstick and glow-bracelets.

But when they slow down the beats, take out the guitars and try to bring the floaty melodic vocals, things get depressing. "Soft Power", which sounds like an outtake from a Castlevania soundtrack, is a great example. Without the driving beat or the hard-panned guitars all the wind goes out of their sails.

In short, when Ladytron plays to its strengths and goes over the top it works. You can bop your head to it, you can score your revenge fantasies to it, you can run in the woods and rip out the throats of small animals. Thank god they have a decent drummer, even though they've recorded him in such a way that he sounds as tinny as a machine -- it's the fills that keeps music like this thing going, enabling swoops and crescendos to go as they should. (Or maybe it is a machine, and it's good programming. Either way.) There's a stretch of songs, from "Sugar" to "Weekend", that I enjoy greatly, and "High Rise", the opening track, has made its way onto a couple mix tapes of mine. But the rest of it fails to reach my hindbrain and the rational part of me can see it for what it is -- trashy electronica with plastic fangs on. A burn, here, and that's generous.

The album starts off with a simple guitar riff, quickly brings the rest of the band, and it becomes very clear: Franz Ferdinand is a fun band. Normally, on this first track, you'd get the now-ubiquitous disco style beat, but Franz Ferdinand turns it into a just-as-dancable shuffle beat. There's some sweet instrumental guitar interplay here, the chorus is catchy as anything, and the musi