Album: Piège / Meter Runs EP

Artist: Piège

Album: Meter Runs EP

Somewhere between a single and EP, these five tracks give us a look ahead to a forthcoming Piège full-length. This release is centred around the title track, which pairs Nick Storring¹ with the prolific Thomas Gill². "Meter Runs" is powered by Gill's soft-power vocal over a subtle elctronic throb which underpins the drifting feeling of being in a cab on a cold winter night, neither here nor there — in a liminal space free of whatever burdens await at the end of the ride.

The song is reprised in a "seized dub" incarnation, Gill's vocals blurring into syllabic component parts before dissipating into a haze of trumpet, as well as an re-recorded re-invention of the song by Gill. The b-sides include the fairly self-explanatory "Dance: Your Nights Are Always Young" and a fab cover of The Blue Nile's "The Downtown Lights", both carried by Storring's vox.

The vibe throughout is a pliant yielding of flesh melting into dreams melting into late-nite streaks of light seen through a car window — a dance soundtrack for long, dark December nights when you feel too lonely to stay home but too de-energized to go out.

This EP is currently available as a free download on Piège's bandcamp.

Track Picks: "Meter Runs", "The Downtown Lights"

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¹ Storring's work under his own name includes cello-centric electroacoustic scree.

² Gill records on his own as THOMAS, and can also be found on recent albums by OG Melody, Bernice and Loom, to name but a few.

Album: The Space Between Things / self-titled

Artist: The Space Between Things

Album: self-titled

It's been — yikes — over a year since I ran an album review, which hasn't been out of a lack of interest or material. Obviously I can't even keep close to staying up-to-date on the live write-ups, so there's just no time on top of that for more. And, anyways, album reviews are plentiful and easy to find, and there's just not as much of a opinion void to fill there.

A quick exception, then, for this release, passed along by friend-of-MFS Chris Hobson, who I first encountered on stage last year. This rigourously solo project has a different feel to it, but it's good stuff. Opener "Solitary Man" hints at Guided by Voices (without the free-association lyrical drift) and may be the jauntiest thing here. "Ginger Snap" brings Sebadoh to mind while "Don't Care That Much" has hints of Yo La Tengo — which is pretty good company to aspire to. Those names should provide a sense of the sonic terrain here — a low-slung, slightly spare sound with fuzzy bass and whispery guitar, recorded in appealing mid-fi — a classic bedroom four-track sound, intimate like a demo but with plenty of intriguing sonic details around the edges. It's not a masterpiece ("New Years Ever" gets a little yelpy for me, and the drum machine is a bit harshly tinny in some spots) and it's not one for every day and every mood, but recommended for those times when you feel a withdrawn solipsism descend upon you.

If I were going to paint a word picture of the emotions that this album suggests to me, it'd be something like this: imagine a winter morning. You have to get up early and go to work and it's still dark outside. Yesterday's coffee is still on the table, creamcongealed into an unpleasant browngrey smear. A silent house where even your own breath seems absent and you don't want to think about the past and you don't want to think about regret and you don't want to step out into the cold. The space between things takes up a good chunk of most anyone's life. We'd like to imagine there isn't so much of it, but at the quantum level, that's what most of everything is, right? Some days you go to lean on a table and just hope that it's going to be solid by the time your arm hits it.

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Chris Hobson has spent some time thinking about how to share his music in these times, and has decided, for the time being, to give this album away as a free download, which you can grab here. It's more than worth it.

Track Picks: "Solitary Man", "Ginger Snap", "Twins"

Album: Liechtenstein / Survival Strategies in a Modern World

Artist: Liechtenstein

Album: Survival Strategies in a Modern World

Oakland's Slumberland Records has been on a tear lately, and ups the ante with the release of this debut full-length from Swedish trio Liechtenstein. These three women from Gothenburg find the sweet spot between the fussiness of the Au Pairs and and the spareness of Young Marble Giants and, in adding plenty harmonies, actually come out sounding influenced by the girl group sound as much as any shambling band you care to dredge up. To contemporary ears, it might make more sense to situate them in the Black Tambourine/Vivian Girls continuum, but Liechtenstein's sound has more AM gold than that might imply. Nine songs in twenty-three minutes, this is packed to the gills with sweetness, reverb and hooks. The songs (all delivered in English) are smartly-written as well.

At an objective level, this isn't world-changing music, but so what? This has quickly become my most-listened to disc of the year. Highest recommendation.

Track Picks: 6 - "Roses in the Park" (listen to an MP3 at Slumberland's website!), 9 - "The End"

Album: Sonic Youth / The Eternal

Artist: Sonic Youth

Album: The Eternal

This far along the road, listening to a contemporary Sonic Youth album is a bit like watching a contemporary Simpsons episode — usually enjoyable, but often with the slight aftertaste of a rehash of something you remember from ten or fifteen years ago. Relative to their whole output, this may just be "just another Sonic Youth album", but it's not without its charms. You can look for the minute variations: get Kim to sing the chorus on Lee's song — it's like pairing up Lisa and Superintendent Chalmers! Lacking a killer single, this is saved by its depth throughout — good listening start to finish, and an especially good one-two punch leading off. After that, you can mostly sit back and enjoy the textures. Thurston seems to be bringing the least winning tunes to the table, leaving Lee's stuff to shine a bit brighter, and Kim, as usual, has a pretty good one and a not-so-good one in there.

I'm not sure what this says about the band and its music, but there's something interesting to the fact that more space in the album's liner notes are given to art and photography credits than to the music and who made it. Meanwhile, I dunno what high-art concept about "The Eternal" the John Fahey painting reproduced on the cover is meant to convey, but it unfailingly makes me think, "Mmmm..... cherry danish".

Album: Apostle of Hustle / Eats Darkness

Artist: Apostle of Hustle

Album: Eats Darkness

The third Apostle of Hustle full-length finds Andrew Whiteman and co. moving away from their signature sound — or perhaps digging a bit deeper into it. That is to say that the unique, Cuban-inspired "folkloric feel" that the band started from is a bit obscured by a more straight-ahead rock sound. But to call this a departure misses two points: first, that even if he has largely put down the tres, it has informed and been incorporated into his guitar technique; and also that this gets a bit closer to the sort of rockin' live sound that AoH have had all along.

The first two songs on the album are both crackers. The spiky energy of "Eazy Speaks" contrasts nicely with the warmly buoyant tones of the Lisa Lobsinger-aided "Soul Unwind". From there, the songs proceed quite sure-footedly, including two of Whiteman's most "pop" tunes yet in the bouncy "Xerxes" and closer "Blackberry". To the bad, though, the songs are interspersed between interstitial collages that play hip-hop mixtape skits up against Burroughsian cut-and-paste composition. Although they might fulfill a thematic purpose, helping to link the album's concerns (a fascination with cartoon-y hip-hop violence and Latin American revolutionary jargon and how all that relates to art and poetry), they are interesting to hear once, maybe, and after that are a bit of a distraction. They also pad out what is a short-ish thirty-six minute running time. Still, not much to complain about when there are a half-dozen top-notch songs here. A nice addition to the discography.

Track Picks: 2 - "Eazy Speaks", 3 - "Soul Unwind", 13 - "Blackberry"

Album: Jarvis Cocker / Further Complications

Artist: Jarvis Cocker

Album: Further Complications

Somewhat strangely, people were shocked — shocked! — that Jarvis Cocker released a rockin' album recorded by Steve Albini. I mean, he is a famous rock musician and all, not an Elizabethan balladeer, or just some witty bon vivant. Perhaps Albini's name set people off, like suddenly they were expecting this to come out sounding like a Jesus Lizard album or something. But Albini is, to his credit, pretty flexible, more interested in getting music made in a fuss-free and direct manner. So while we do have a set of rockers here, it's not extraordinarily far removed from what we might have expected.

The stripped-down musical approach does correspond with stripped-down lyrics. But that doesn't necessarily mean equal dumbed-down: "I never said I was deep / but I am profoundly shallow," as our man admits. Which means for every song that seems a little obvious (like "Caucasian Blues") there's usually something a bit more clever, such as "Leftovers", which finds our hero picking up girls at the paleontology museum ("If you want to study dinosaurs / I know a specimen whose interest is undoubted"). Everything here isn't a gem — "Homewrecker" sounds pretty generic, part of an unfocused mid-album sag. But generally the album's brio and élan carry it through.

It ends on a bit of a left turn with "You're In My Eyes", an extended disco meditation on memory and loss that sends the listener off with a slightly piquant jab to the chest, which, despite all the cleverness and irony it's often cloaked in, is something that Jarvis Cocker is one of the best at.

Track Picks: 4 - "Leftovers"

Album: The Thermals / Now We Can See

Artist: The Thermals

Album: Now We Can See

A cracker of an album. On their fourth full-lengther, the Portland duo get even a little more pop in outlook and in the clean production. But there's enough DIY in the bleat of Hutch Harris' vox and in the unswept corners of these songs to keep it from feeling oversanitized. Continuing from the band's earlier works, the jaunty music is a spoonful of sugar to go with an intense existential concern, and a fear of apocalypses both personal and otherwise. As an experiment, I made a word cloud of this album's lyrics:

Almost as expected, "sick" and "never" are the first things popping out at your eyes, "nothing" and "dissolve" almost as prominent — but "love" and "need" are just hanging just back, waiting for their moment. I think that captures things reasonably well.

Track Picks: 4 - "Now We Can See", 7 - "I Called Out Your Name"

Album: Peaches / I Feel Cream

Artist: Peaches

Album: I Feel Cream

A few slight tweaks to the Peaches persona, but this is generally a logical extension of Impeach My Bush. At first, following the state-of-the-Peaches "Serpentine", "Talk to Me" gives the impression that this album might be headed in more of a disco direction but after a couple tracks of that things revert a bit more to type. Which is too bad, as this is the album's best stuff. "Lose You" not only introduces a rare touch of vulnerability, but also has a soulful underpinning, bringing, say, The Gossip to mind. Most of the rest depends on finding the subtle differentiation from the rest of the catalog — and deciding to what degree it works. To the good, "Billionaire" is a good stomper with a rap cameo by Yo Majesty's Shunda K., while on the other side of the ledger, the title track sounds as if it were karaoke'd to a tired-sounding dance track from a decade ago. And so it goes down the line. There's really only a couple clunkers, so this is ultimately a worthy album. In the larger picture, whether you need this if you have another Peaches album depends on your affection for that sort of discographical hair-splitting.

Afterthought: Looking back on the above, it seems a bit churlish. The problem, of course, is that taken in the wrong context, this album's move-yr-bottom virtues are gonna be taken as, duh, merely repetitive. Properly applied in a "shut up and dance" situation, this is perfectly fine.

Track pick: Talk to Me

Album: Wooden Birds / Magnolia

Artist: The Wooden Birds

Album: Magnolia

A new project from Andrew Kenny (ex of the now-defunct, much missed, American Analog Set) is going to be heard by any fan of that band (and I am one) in the context of that body of music. While one can certainly discern the same songwriter's hand, we have a different musical palette here — sparer, leaner — with the songs centred on acoustic guit and vox. There are other sounds colouring in around those, including some bass, a bit of percussion, some female backing vox, but they're very much supporting elements. It's tempting to hear some of these tunes as what could have been potential AmAnSet demos, and, while a song like "Quit You Once" sounds, at its outset, like it could have taken its place in the discography, one is left feeling that the key difference here is that without the warm drone of AmAnSet's keybs, there isn't a higher gear for these tunes to kick into. Which can feel mildly frustrating and confining, but taken at their own face value and within their own sound-world, these songs feel just fine. The quiet percussive thwack of the guit playing can get a bit samey at times, but this is a low-key pleasure. Suitable for drowsy days.

Track pick: 1 - "False Alarm"

Album: Chain and the Gang / Down with Liberty... Up with Chains!

Artist: Chain and the Gang

Album: Down with Liberty... Up with Chains!

The latest vehicle for Ian Svenonius, known for his work in Nation of Ulysses, The Make-Up and Weird War. After being introduced via their live show, the album sounds a little dinky in comparison — clean and spare, almost like a demo. That robs the songs of the sweaty raunch they really need to get over, and without their live energy, they could be mistaken for aimless rehashed genre exercises. I don't think that's the case so much as I think this albums isn't the best of all possible arguments for these songs. The vox and some of the garage-primitive R&B bring to mind David Johansen, but when at his best, Svenonius manages to work in a sneaky critique of nothing less than contemporary American society. Not without its charms, though, as Svenonius has a slightly unwholesome magnetism and an ear for subtle sloganeering.

Track Pick: 5 - "What is a Dollar?"

Album: Metric / Fantasies

Artist: Metric

Album: Fantasies

Metric has always been a band where, from the outset, my idea of them never lived up to the reality of their albums. Each of them had good singles and were generally okay, but still...

So it was an utterly delightful surprise put this one in, and then just feel compelled to keep playing it over and over. Head-and-shoulders this is their best album yet, though I'm at a loss to say they're doing anything radically different. I stuck to this disc for days, trying to puzzle out what went so gloriously right, but am ultimately without much in the way of insight, besides hoary old standbys like "consistency". This album starts out with four gems and hardly lets up from there.

Or perhaps it's just the band is working right in their comfort zone, musically taut and lyrically inhabiting a self-aware terrain throughout. "Twilight Galaxy" reads like an Emily Haines poster come to life, a savvy rockstar older sister dispensing advice ("keep doing it wrong") directly to the teenagers, while "Blindness" has a sublime warmth that recalls Hines' excellent solo Knives Don't Have Your Back, but more like an extroverted flipside of the coin to that disc. That outward-lookingness is pushed to its maximal conclusion on closer "Stadium Love". It's a bit sad an album like this could well push Metric into those stadiums, and out of my orbit, but with something this good, they well deserve as much success as they can grasp.

Track Picks : 2 - "Sick Muse", 3 - "Satellite Mind", 9 - "Blindness"

Album: PJ Harvey & John Parish / A Woman A Man Walked By

Artist: PJ Harvey & John Parish

Album: A Woman A Man Walked By

"Where does the passion go?" PJ Harvey asks near the end of this album, which I'd also been wondering for much of its length. I can't say I entered with high expectations, given that it was the sequel to the okay-not-awesome Dance Hall at Louise Point (1996) and the follow-up to her rather dull White Chalk.

In one sense it's hard to kvetch that she doesn't hit it out of the park all the time, when at least you can get the impression that she had a restless creative spirit, and is always experimenting with new voices (Mark E. Smith here, Karen Carpenter there) and new ideas. An album of "Meet Ze Monsta" rewrites might sound fab, but it's impressive she generally doesn't stoop to doing the easy thing. Which means, basically, I can appreciate this album, but I don't particularly like it.

"Black Hearted Love" has a little bit of obsessive zest, but does verge into rehash territory. The title track, with its "I want his fucking ass" refrain, has a bit of edge¹ but quickly descends into "The Crow Knows Where All the Little Children Go", a mild, uninteresting coda. The sparer songs, like "The Soldier" and the concluding "Cracks in the Canvas" are perhaps the most rewarding.

Relistening reveals that this isn't a disaster, but I just can't find it fully engaging. Destined to be argued about in years to come as "perennially underrated".

Track Pick: 1 - Black Hearted Love

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¹ And provides some grist for those still working on their MA theses regarding "Power/Gender/Relationships in the works of Polly Jean Harvey".

Album: Japandroids / Post-Nothing

Artist: Japandroids

Album: Post-Nothing

"We used to dream/ but now we worry about dying," the band opines on what might be their signature track, continuing "I don't wanna worry about dyin'/ I just wanna worry about those sunshine girls". That situates them as being old enough to be worried about not being as young as they used to be, but still young enough to raise a ruckus about it. This Vancouver duo (guit/vox/drums) are garage rock maximalists, filling up their songs with a young man's rock'n'roll frenzy that owes as much to "Working For The Weekend" as to any punk antecedents. Full of pithy, quotable lyrics: "some hearts bleed/ my heart sweats" might encapsulate them best. Although there are a couple duff tracks, this is filled overall with a wonderful energy that makes it feel like they are reinventing rock'n'roll anew — post-nothing indeed.

On a somewhat sad note, sort of upsetting my normal way of doing things, I was a bit taken aback when after looking around some, I realized that this album was being released on vinyl and digital only: no CD to be found. It upsets all my little rituals of ownership, and seems like a sign of things to come. At least there was an option at Zunior to buy the album as lossless FLACs, but it's just not the same as having an disc to file away on the shelf — it just feels impermanent somehow.

Track picks: 2- "Young Hearts Spark Fire", 5 - "Heart Sweats"

Album: Junior Boys / Begone Dull Care

Artist: Junior Boys

Album: Begone Dull Care

Following on the very good So This Is Goodbye, we find Junior Boys in fine form and growing in confidence. Inspired by the work and methods of NFB animator Norman McLaren, these tracks are meticulously constructed, carefully orchestrated works. Working with longer tracks — most clocking in over six minutes — the album gets off to an excellent start with the slow-simmering "Parallel Lines", and for a couple tracks, the album sounds like a real world-beater. While it remains full of interesting countermelodies and details at the edge of the frame, it doesn't quite maintain its momentum throughout. But because of the textures and hooks, it's never less than good listening.

Yes, it uses the elements of 80's dance-pop, but it never comes off as retro-fetishism. Jeremy Greenspan and Matt Didemus simply use these sounds with surgical precision to craft some excellent tunes. This doesn't have a monster single like Goodbye's "In the Morning", but it's still eminently worth listening to the whole way through.

Track Pick: 1 - "Parallel Lines"

Album: Julie Doiron / I Can Wonder What You Did With Your Day

Artist: Julie Doiron

Album: I Can Wonder What You Did With Your Day

Coming back to this alb a spell past the excellent gig where I saw Julie performing these songs, it simply brings some measure of joy to relisten to these compelling, homespun songs. Employing a similar sound to her previous album (the Polaris-shortlisted Woke Myself Up), this one is given more to exploring happiness. The acoustic tracks at the album's start and end ("Life of Dreams" and "Glad to Be Alive") set the tone for the more rock-oriented songs they bookend.

As a songwriter, Julie is most noteworthy for her plainspokenness. Even when she builds "Tailor" around a series of metaphors ("If I were your paper, you could read me like a book/ If I was your pen, you could hold me in your hand") they're still the things close by, tangible in this world. But most songs don't even get that abstract, preferring an unambiguous immediacy: I am here, I feel like this.

Credit producer (and player) Rick White for the unaffected immediacy of the sound, which matches this mood quite precisely. With its vibe and sound, the whole thing is pretty wonderful, really, possibly culminating in the Eric's Trip-like rumble-and-clatter of "Consolation Prize". The album takes a pleasant left turn with the woozy synth-driven "Je le savais" and comes back for more with "When Brakes Get Wet" and "Borrowed Minivans".

It's considered, in some quarters, to be Higher Art to write about misery as opposed to happiness, so it is to be hoped that this album isn't considered to be a lesser follow-up just because it maintains a sunny disposition. For my money, this is fantastic stuff.

Track picks: 2 - "Spill Yer Lungs", 7 - "Consolation Prize", 9 - "When Brakes Get Wet"

Album: Mapfumo Reissues

Two recent reissues on the Water label give us easier access to two key early albums from Zimbabwe's masterful Thomas Mapfumo. A hero of his nation's liberation struggle, Mapfumo is also a musical innovator of the highest order as the inventor of Chimurenga ("struggle music"), which fuses the tools and energy of rock and roll with folk elements. Most strikingly, chimurenga transposes the cyclical rhythmic lines of the mbira (thumb piano) to the electric guitar. Mapfumo sung in the Shona language — itself a political act — and wrote songs relating to Zimbabwe's civil war and subsequent independence.¹

Artist: Thomas Mapfumo and the Acid Band

Album: Hokoyo (1978)

Musical dispatches from the civil war, Hokoyo still manages to sound jubilant. The title track (translating to "Watch Out!") sounds like a groovy party with its chanted chorus and saxophone-aided groove. From there, the sound settles into the chimurenga template, with the brightly-plucked guitars coming to the forefront. This is very good stuff, although not quite as accomplished as the music that would follow it. Highly danceable, and dangerous to boot — Mapfumo was thrown in jail once the authorities figured out what the songs were about.

Although the fidelity of this re-issue is mostly excellent, this disc has a couple relatively minor sonic flaws: "Mhandu Musango", for example, has some static-y interference at the start that almost sounds like surface noise on a vinyl disc. Whether these are flaws in the master tapes or a flaw in the remastering for this disc is unclear. Ultimately, it doesn't particularly mar the enjoyment of this album.

Track picks: 1 - "Hokoyo", 3 - "Hwa-Hwa"

Artist: Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited

Album: Gwindingwi Rine Shumba (1980)

A masterpiece from start to finish. Not only is this album full of the joyful optimism brought about by independence², the music is strongly inspired throughout. There is simply no language gap in the presence of these guitars. Most songs feature duelling leads, the rhythms playing off each other in constantly evolving patterns. These songs are hugely captivating: Mapfumo's arresting vocals ranging from moans to shrieks to yodels, the simmering rhythms, and always always always those guitars.

There are some songs here familiar to me from the compilation Shumba: Vital Hits of Zimbabwe (itself an excellent entry point into Mapfumo's work³) but there are also some superb album cuts here, including the sublime "Tinodanana", which reminds us that Mapfumo's woodshedding days came in classic R&B cover bands. This disc has none of the minor sonic flaws present on Hokoyo. Put simply: this is essential stuff, and ranks amongst the great rock'n'roll albums of all time.

Track picks: 1 - "Shumba", 3 - "Mhondoro", 4 - "Tinodanana"

It is great to see these reissues in the stores, and hopefully their presence means that Mapfumo is getting his rightful cut. The packaging does leave something to be desired: each disc comes with an essay that does a good job of situating this music, but there is scanty information otherwise: no full personnel listings⁴, and no translation of lyrics or even song titles, a useful aid present in other Mapfumo releases I've seen. These minor quibbles aside, these albums are highly recommended.

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¹ Making him, arguably, the author of the greatest rock'n'roll songs about agrarian reform, amongst other topics.

² Replete with several shout-outs to Robert Mugabe, a reminder of that moment before he slid from liberation hero to repressive dictator. Mapfumo held the post-independence government to account, and for his trouble, was exiled from Zimbabwe. He now lives in Oregon.

³ Also recommended is the Chimurenga Singles comp., composed of early Blacks Unlimited Sides recorded during the Civil War.

⁴ The liner notes do, at least, take care to give the names of the guitarists: Jonah Sithole and Leonard "Pickett" Chiyangwa, who should be far, far more famous than they are, ranked with any of the great guitar tandems you could name with two artists telepathically playing off each other: Verlane and Lloyd, Reed and Morrison, Richards and Jones, etc. etc.

Album: Yeah Yeah Yeahs / It's Blitz!

Artist: Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Title: It's Blitz!

I suppose one way to look at the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is as a malleable theoretical apparatus used as the delivery vehicle for Karen O.'s starpower. Another way would be to see most of their career moves as reactions to one outsized hit. And they are, of course, a rather good band that's a little bit creatively restless. With all this in mind, the shift in sound on album number three seems perfectly fitting. More synths, less guit is the basic template here, and it generally works very well. YYY work well with some manner of pulsating throb behind them, and these particular keyb-driven beats do the job just fine. The added advantage is that they also work well for the slowed-down songs — in fact, they are rather good in that regard.

The album starts quite strongly and ends well, but dips palpably in between. "Dull Life", a rare track here that sounds like a holdover from Show Your Bones launches this middle section¹. Not that it ever gets anywhere less than engaging, but there's a gap between the great and the pretty good stuff here.

Appended to the album are four acoustic versions, substituting strings for synths, that don't really add much to the proceedings. At a cynical level, these tracks feel like an indication that YYY are ready to entertain all offers for Starbucks compilations or appearances in episode-ending dramatic montages on network TV. They probably would have been better served if left severed from the album proper.

In the end though, this is good stuff, and does seem to indicate that YYY are trying to big up their sound and their audience without losing what makes them special. Good luck to 'em.

Track picks: 1 - "Zero", 4 - "Skeletons"

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¹ Although if there wasn't a track like this in the middle, I'd almost certainly be writing a sentence like, "After the first four tracks, the sound becomes a bit monochromatic, with no tensions to play against". There's no winning when you're dealing with a crank, really.

Album: Jon-Rae Fletcher / Oh, Maria

Artist: Jon-Rae Fletcher

Album: Oh, Maria

Speaking about his hands, this may well be Jon-Rae's first album where his reach doesn't exceed his grasp. But that might indicate that the former has receded more than the latter has expanded.

To put that another way: in the past, the definitive versions of his songs always seemed to come on stage, but here the recorded versions seem to be the equal of the live presentations I've seen — but this time round, the songs might not be as good. A casual song cycle of love and murder, Oh, Maria has the feel of an author shifting from autobiography to genre fiction.¹ Or, at least, we can hope that the doomed love story is more allegorical, an oblique way of reflecting on whatever darkness Jon-Rae has gone through.

Regardless, we do have some well-written tunes here, dealing with love and darkness.² Putting The River behind him³, it's a bit spare musically, but special notice must be made of Denver Rawson's trombone, which adds just enough to keep things from sounding too lean.

This disc is a welcome return for Fletcher, but I'm left with the impression that he isn't reaching as far as he could as a songwriter. Hopefully this'll be received warmly enough to encourage him to keep soldering on.

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¹ I'm aware here of the sort of tension in thinking that every "I" in a song up to this point has been an 'authentic' first-person report. But there remains a felt closeness in a song like "Fire", where it does feel like the product of an actual experience.

² Of the latter, "Downtown" takes its place in the noble subgenre of oblivion-seeking songs like Danny Whitten's "Come on Baby Let's Go Downtown" and Jimmie Dale Gilmore's "Tonight I Think I'm Gonna Go Downtown"

³This shift has caused me some slight consternation when it came to filing this disc. Hitherto, his discs had been alphabetized under "J", for "Jon-Rae and The River", but this one clearly should go under "F". Does one break up the set, or file them all together?

Album: Neko Case / Middle Cyclone

Artist: Neko Case

Album: Middle Cyclone

Until proven otherwise, a new release from Neko Case is a Major Event. For her last two albums, I started out sure she wouldn't be able to top her previous work, only to grow to realize just by how much she had. The real question is: how long can she keep getting better?

At a formal level, there are clear and obvious signs of growth. Though there are some songs that would fit comfortably on Blacklisted or Fox Confessor, it's clear that that Neko won't be limited or pigeonholed into replicating her previous sound. So this time, we get a bit less twang, and for the first time, it even seems like a bit of the New Pornographers are rubbing off on her, especially on the poppy harmonies of "I'm an Animal", a song about acknowledging our instincts and lusts, to the response: "you’re an animal too". In fact, in this album, Nature is seeping out all over the place, fecund and uncontainable. To the Byrds-y twang of "People Got a Lotta Nerve", Neko dresses down folks that would expect something other than instinct and animal nature from the Others.

There's a lot of of heady stuff in these lyrics, layers that seep out with further investigation. With her superb talent for collecting collaborators, her words are set in richly-jeweled fabrics. So, is this her best album? I'm not willing to commit to an answer yet, but it's damn good.

Track Picks: 3 - "People Got a Lotta Nerve", 9 - "Magpie to the Morning", 10 - "I'm an Animal"

Album: Condo Fucks / Fuckbook

Artist: Condo Fucks

Album: Fuckbook

Always up for a diversion, Yo La Tengo pseudonymously deliver their second covers album. A fitting counterpoint to 1990's Fakebook — which reaffirmed, in the midst of a noisier stretch of albums, that they could bring the quiet, this one does just the opposite, ripping out a lazy man's dozen tracks with one-take sloppy aplomb. This outta the garage approach might come as a mild surprise to those who follow the band only through their albums, but this is, of course, a side that YLT have always cultivated in their live shows (where their repertoire of covers is pretty monumental¹) and on their WFMU all-request telethon appearances.

Given their encyclopedic knowledge of rock'n'roll obscurities, the picks here don't veer towards the obvious, but they're all good, catchy rockers. YLT usually do right when they follow their muse down different paths, and it works here.²

Track picks: 7 - "The Kid with the Replaceable Head" (Richard Hell & The Voidoids Cover), 9 - "So Easy Baby" (Zantees cover)

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¹ It would be a fun project to come up with a live companion piece to this. Ripping concert takes of "I Can't Seem to Make You Mine" and "Jesse's Girl" come to mind, just as a beginning.

² Perhaps given that this is shouty rockers, it doesn't surprise too much that this album is a little light on tunes with Gerorgia on vox, which is understandable but still a bit sad.