Listen To This!

It seems strangely out of place yet is entirely welcome, like your best friend from home coming to visit you at Uni. An autumn EP release as a follow up to 2008’s eponymous LP, The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart haven’t quite served up the full album we were maybe hoping for, but boy, have they come close. Production has tightened up, while retaining the distant, slacker-pop vibe, and there’s even hints on Twins towards some power-ballad territory.

It’s not until the final track, a St Etienne remix, that the true sadness and tragedy of the title track is revealed, as we realise that we were fooled all along. Amongst the lo-fi, glorypop, the lyrics tell of the drunken teenage fumble “in the back of your mother’s car”. Granted, the title track is more than reminiscent of previous single, This Love Is F______ Right, especially with its ambiguous lyrics, but who cares when The Pains are keeping this up!

While I take some time to absorb the fresh offerings from Cedric and Omar, here’s what Amazon also has to say on the matter…

“Octahedron is the stunning new album from The Mars Volta. An album heady with the emotion and high-drama that has always been the band’s trademark, their newfound simplicity and focus has delivered some of the most immediate and powerful songs in their discography. The album opens with the tender ache of “Since We’ve Been Wrong”, Cedric’s keening vocal establishing a mood that’s deeply blue, powerfully melancholic, a suckerpunch that hits every bit as hard as Octahedron’s unashamed rockers (the gleaming futuristic funk of “Teflon”, the tense chase-music of “Cotopaxi”). Pulling back from the full-tilt experimentation of previous releases, the album invests its energies in Omar’s gift for songcraft, for swooning guitar runs of high tension and emotive power (”Luciforms”‘ epic riffage), and for the nagging hooks and melodies that wreath the churning rhythms of “Desperate Graves”.”

There always was a glorious sense of exhausted tenacity in the sound of Grandaddy. Ever since I first heard ‘Summer Here Kids’ from the album Under The Western Freeway, Grandaddy has always given my music listening a very special splash of melancholy. That’s not to say Lytle’s music is consistently downbeat or depressing – far from it – but that there is the ever present sense that there really should be something more, and that after all the effort put in it simply sucks that the full appreciation deserved never seemed to appear.

On Yours Truly, The Commuter, Lytle has presented a fine set of songs that work as a great follow on to Grandaddy’s swansong, Just Like the Fambly Cat. Littered amongst the traditional, dreamy computerpop, are a stack of hooks and lyrics that show continued defiance; It’s The Weekend manages to champion the joy of the end of a working week without degrading into a hedonistic ‘living for the weekend’ mentality – instead we get the sense he’s overjoyed but once he gets through the front door he’s crashing on the couch with a beer and switching on the football with no intention of moving for the next 48 hours.

This latest offering is a joy for anyone who was following Grandaddy and was justifyably disappointed at the news when they called it a day. It’s good to know Lytle will continue to create work which lets us little people know we’re not alone.

Out of the ashes (well, not really ashes) of the Bristol music scene, which gave us that remarkable brand of trip-hop through groups such as Portishead, Tricky and Massive Attack, comes this offering from Malakai. Lead single, Faded World, is filled with woozy, swirly piano parts and distant deck-scratching. There’s also a remarkable feeling the music is haunted by the echoes of the Beatles – not in any derivative way, but somehow through the vocals and phase there is a very real twist of Lennon. This record is well worth a look if you like any of the Bristol scene, or indeed if you like intelligently unusual music at all.

With band members from Fountains of Wayne, Cheap Trick and Hanson, it would be foolish to expect Tinted Windows to turn out to be some kind of experimental mathcore band. And although that would certainly have been interesting, what we have here, thankfully, is pure power-pop of the highest order: catchy, disposable, and totally engaging.

The hooks are solid, the vocals have bite, and the production sparkles. Kind Of A Girl and Messing With My Head stand strong as a pair of fine album openers. The summer is upon us. Let this be the soundtrack.

Despite mixed reviews, It’s Blitz isn’t that much of a departure from the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s previous work. OK, so Heads Will Roll’s disco-happy synth beats may have thrown fans a little, and the album overall has inherited a new, less guitar-centred sound. But that’s just fine. What we have been handed here is a fantastic, beat-driven piece of pop. It’s dancefloor filling stuff, and if it makes the indie hipsters turn their noses up and shuffle off to listen to a bit more Of Montreal, well, it’s their loss and our gain.

Yes, it’s been called retro, sounding like the C86 bands of old. Agreed, there’s no hiding the influences of My Bloody Valentine, Belle and Sebastian, and I’d even go as far as to include Teenage Fanclub and Camera Obscura into the mix. But since when was this a bad thing to bring fresh new tunes into the foray, considering the 70s punk/glam inspired offerings by the Walkmen and the Strokes during the early 2000s?

The recording is distant, the vocals less present in the mix than a lot of recent overproduced pop-rock, but The Pains of Being Pure at Heart have created a delicious slice of ‘tweemo’.

Opener ‘Contender’ immediately displays the My Bloody Valentine influences, while ‘This Love Is F______ Right’ and ‘Stay Alive’ offer intriguingly suspicious lyrics and spot-on songsmithery respectively.

“I’m the desperate, and You’re the savior,” yells Spencer Chamberlain during what seems to have become the obligatory false start before Underoath’s latest offering bursts into a ravaging assault. I’ll admit the first 20 seconds had me fooled – I immediately worried for the disturbingly lo-fi production, only to breathe easy as soon as the familiar sound of the Florida boys threw itself to the forefront.

Actually, album opener Breathing In A New Mentality comes in at not much over two minutes, before we’re thrown straight into absurdly titled Anyone Can Dig A Hole But It Takes A Real Man To Call It Home. We begin to realise we’re in for a quick, but thrilling, ride.
And this is the beauty of ‘Lost In The Sound Of Separation,’ – this time it feels like everything Underoath were trying out previously on ‘Define The Great Line‘ has been tightened up and improved. For where ‘Define…’ was a sprawling, spluttering epic ‘Lost…’ is a slick, sharp, well-oiled machine that delivers the goods song after song. There’s some very real freshness to it at the same time; ‘Emergency Broadcast :: The End Is Near’ opens with a dirty, fuzzed-up bass which add texture not really heard before in an Underoath tune, and then treats us to a grimy, palm-muted guitar chug.
‘The Only Survivor Was Miraculously Unharmed’ belts out a traditional attack which nods back to the heavier style first shown on ‘Define..,’ with a glorious mantra ‘Repeat, repeat, repent and repeat, the cycle never really ends,’ Chamberlain’s inner pain laid bare for all to see in his guttural screams.

‘Lost In The Sound Of Separation’ refuses to be ignored. The navel-gazing of ‘Define The Great Line’ has been distilled down to conscise, brutal energy. And it works.