|
 Smashing
Expectations
By
John Brodeur
Silversun
Pickups
Swoon
(Dangerbird)
‘They’re
a Gish cover band.” That was an easy but appropriate
way to write off the Silversun Pickups when their “Lazy Eye”
became a sleeper hit in 2007. The live experience did nothing
to amend that description; here was a band that practiced
in all the things that made Smashing Pumpkins a superband
in the early ’90s—harsh soft-loud dynamics, fuzz-face guitar,
and adenoidal, borderline feminine vocals (courtesy of bandleader
Brian Aubert). Whether or not you liked it, you’d heard it
all before.
Time and success can change a lot of things, and with their
second full-length, Swoon, Silversun Pickups have not
only delivered a record that grows on their promise but finds
the band making a cosmic creative leap. They’ve become their
own band with this new set: It’s ambitious; it’s got swagger;
it’s a grower. And it actually feels like an album,
not just a collection of singles. So there’s nothing as easy
as “Lazy Eye,” but that’s a good thing—who needs a simple
pop hook when you have a symphony at your disposal? The first
half of Swoon, from the atmospheric expanse of “There’s
No Secrets This Year” through the sinister, ballooning Radiohead
groove of “It’s Nice to Know You Work Alone” and the overdriven
charge of first single “Panic Switch,” is the best 26 minutes
of rock music you’re likely to hear this year.
After such a brilliant start the second half could easily
have been anticlimax, but following a brief bit of navel-gaze
(“Draining”) the album roars back to life with “Sort Of,”
the kind of frantic, dynamic anthem Billy Corgan would give
his drummer to write at this point in his career. In an album
filled with peaks and valleys, this one song makes the climb
about 10 times, each time a bit higher and more slowly. When
the orchestra returns for “Catch & Release,” it merely
feels like sugar coating—who needs a symphony when you’ve
got such a talented band at your disposal? With Swoon,
Silversun Pickups are well on their way to being one of the
defining acts of the decade.
 Black
Dice
Repo
(Paw Tracks)
The realm in which experimental trio Black Dice operate is
a place they call the “hive mind.” Like a wasp’s nest, it
can be an uncomfortable place for the casual listener to stumble
into, but to call the swarming clouds of sound the band concocts
on Repo unwelcoming would be unfair. For upwards of
a decade the band has made it their M.O. to sift through the
cultural detritus to which every human being is now exposed
on a second-to- second basis, and hew totemic assemblages
of their findings in a manner that renders the mess all the
more human for its mere intentionality. The hive can be a
tough club to gain admittance to, but it’s certainly worth
the effort. Upon first listen, Repo will sound raw
and haphazard, woozy and cartoonish: That’s the point, but
not the whole point. Samples of all manner of media will orbit
your head. Drum breaks will speed up, gallop out of phase
with engine fuzz and repeat. Fragments of an instructional
cooking show will modulate pitch and decay. A guitar will
establish a motif then abandon it. There’s almost something
defensive about it, as if each sound is dive-bombing one’s
head so as to protect the queen. The language brothers Eric
and Bjorn Copeland speak with their bandmate Aaron Warren
is as insular as the private tongue twins develop as toddlers,
but the logic is sharp and decipherable. Enduring the initial
onslaught is the price of admission here, and the repeat listener
will be rewarded with admittance to increasingly complex chambers
of the fort—like “Glazin,” which sounds like “Teenage Wasteland”
for the Ritalin generation, and the bombastic “Ultra Vomit
Graze,” which might even be considered funky. There’s probably
something adolescent and even nihilistic about it all, but
Black Dice are less concerned about erecting some idealistic
clone from all the wreckage, than they are in proving the
heap can be surmounted.
—Josh
Potter
 Monks
Black
Monk Time (Light in the Attic)
It’s autumn, 1965; Southeast Asia and America’s inner cities
are in full-on burn mode. Over in Germany, five recently discharged
American GIs have formed a rock & roll band, and they
find a following playing the same grimy Hamburg clubs that
the Moptops did a few years before. But this wasn’t one of
those sub-Beatle wannabe acts running rampant at the time—these
were Beatle-slayers.
The
Monks played like they wanted to take someone’s head off,
full speed ahead and all systems go, laced with fuzz, wah,
feedback and an incessant clanging rhythm fortified by an
electrified banjo that sounds like a small black hole imploding
each time the plectrum hits the strings. The organist, from
the sounds of it, was raised on Bach and circus music. Together
they made what is in my estimation one of the greatest rock
& roll records of all time, Black Monk Time (reissued
this year on the Light in the Attic label). Rhythm and mayhem
is king here, but this isn’t just a bunch of guys flailing
around aimlessly. The intent was not only to drink and get
laid (though that was plenty important), it also was to stir
shit up: subtle and not so subtle protests about the liars
in charge and the kids dying in streets both foreign and domestic
(and plenty of sexual innuendo) made these guys the spiritual
forerunners to the MC5 and a slew of other bands now deemed
proto-punk. Here you’ll find the germs of the Autobahn-inspired
motorik beat of krautrock, except a heck of a lot faster and
groovier. “Higgle-Dy-Piggle-Dy” and “I Hate You” have probably
the most unhinged yet controlled guitar sounds put down on
wax pre-Hendrix. Said guitarist, Gary Burger, also is the
singer/yelper/ringleader; his asides and exhortations alone
are worth the price of admission. Whenever you’re thinking
rock and roll is dead, don’t be sad—it won’t be once you slap
this baby on.
—Mike
Hotter
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