There’s something about minimalistic art that gets me every time: The way Piet Mondrian turns four vibrant squares of color into a complex and thoroughly satisfying artistic expression, the way Samuel Beckett transforms the bare essence of a play into transcendence or how Philip Glass makes spacey music oddly effecting.
The xx, the latest schoolboy-turned-rockstar graduates of England’s famous Elliot School for performing arts, employs minimalistic beauty in its debut album, xx. The four 20-year-old kids exhibit startling maturity and elegance in their work, all while using only a few masterful brush strokes. Lead vocalists Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim sing with sultry descants. The pair’s intoxicating and smooth vocals harmonize like two lovers in bed — there is something dark and deeply “sexxual” hidden between their quiet table manners. On the track “Basic Space,” Croft and Sim’s vocals parallel changes in simple instrumentation to create a slowly evolving pop song. Like Romeo and Juliet forced to sit next to each other at a dark dinner table amongst their families, the sexual tension on xx is palpable.
The xx has a clear affinity for American R&B. The album opens with “Intro” and “VCR,” which provide listeners with the rare glimpse at guitar and keyboard solos — the rest of the album emphasizes romantic lyricism, mutually abstract and poppy spaciousness and the basic beauty of the human voice. The xx presents its music graciously, allowing room for the songs to breathe and take on lives of their own.
Some especially heartbroken lovers out there in Valentine Land pine over the scenic summer days spent with their inamorato — the restless nights, the breathless moments, all the high times they could have spent together after a now-broken relationship.
Neon Indian, on the other hand, seems to have only one regret for the summer — quite a different kind of longing for “high times.” In “Should Have Taken Acid With You,” the absolutely quirky and instantly unforgettable breakup song, singer Alan Palomo combines drug-induced melancholy with euphoric nostalgia to create low-fi gold. The two-minute song wears its New Order and The Magnetic Fields influences on its sleeves, integrates cartoonish instrumentals to the palette, yet still finds ways to stay poppy and fresh. What separates Neon Indian from its influences is the intricacy of its minute propensities. With complex layers of synthesizers and warped computer instruments, Neon Indian buries hook after hook into intricate harmonies.
Palomo, the one-man show behind the Austin, Texas project, is now based in Brooklyn, performing numerous shows there. Neon Indian’s first LP, Psychic Chasms, drops Oct. 13, and is set to include Palomo’s trademark relaxed vocals and bizarre keyboards.
Neon Indian’s other songs maintain the same utterly chill sense of pop, as with blogosphere favorite “Deadbeat Summer.” Palomo celebrates staying in and drugging out, riding a hallucinogenic wave toward a Ferris Bueller-esque chorus, which makes doing nothing seem like a groovy and epochal triumph.
In “Terminally Chill,” one of the best introductions to Neon Indian’s laidback sentimentalism, Palomo experiments with electronica and simplistic drums, making the tune a headphone-ready trip.
Neon Indian songs jive like MGMT jams, but without all the rush to live fast and die young with cocaine and model wives. Palomo has tried harder than any artist in recent memory to turn “not trying” into an art form.
The Pains of Being Pure At Heart – “Come Saturday”
The Pains of Being Pure At Heart is not content with happiness. No, this band is a straight-up, completely legal hit of pure ecstasy, rocking exhuberantly with their influences on their sleeves, combining ’80s notions of electropop with ’60s lyrical storytelling.
The New York based-band succeeds on its mix of jovial amatuerism and pop chops. Its songs are well-crafted shoegaze gems in the same vein as My Bloody Valentine, but also contain sloppy, low-fi instrumentals like any great start-up garage band. The Pains of Being Pure At Heart plays simple, hook-filled songs that could easily fit in the yet-to-be-filmed “High School Musical 4.” Appropriately, the band stole its name from an unpublished children’s story of the same name.
The group’s self-titled debut album boasts sugary pop hits that the listener can simply rock out to. “Come Saturday” is a teen ode to hanging out with your sweetheart on the weekend: “Who cares if there’s a party somewhere? / We’re gonna stay in.” Lead singer Kip Berman’s excited, baritone vocals harmonize wonderfully with keyboardist Peggy Wang’s airy, fragile voice, as if they are simulaneously singing to one another and discovering true love.
Yet, the group is not just twee pop and dreamy lyrics — The Pains match substance with its style. The noisy instruments demand to be heard, yet blend perfectly together. On “Young Adult Friction,” the band is firing on all cylinders, merging innumerable production tracks together to create a multi-layed, giddy tune.
The Pains of Being Pure At Heart is a promising, gleeful band — hopefully, it will mature while keeping the heart of a kid.
Michael Angelakos is a lover. He’s the kind of lover who sees romance in terms of techno beats and freakin’ on the dance floo’. He’s the kind of lover who digs on Kanye’s “Love Lockdown” and Randy Newman’s “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” simultaneously. He’s the kind of lover who professes his desire of a woman by shrieking out brilliantly feminine falsettos. But he is, nevertheless, a lover.
Angelakos, the lead vocalist of electro-pop up-and-comers Passion Pit, presented his then-girlfriend his musical project, Chunk of Change, as a belated Valentine’s Day gift. Chunk of Change, the four-song EP/ode-to-love, eventually leaked into the Emerson College community, developing Passion Pit a viral buzz and following around the Boston area.
Passion Pit slowly developed into a full band, reissuing its EP and touring with artists such as Death Cab For Cutie and Girl Talk. Its sound is boundlessly energetic, tightly focused and hook-filled.
On tracks such as “Cuddle Fuddle” (all in all, the poorest choice of song title on the EP), Passion Pit experiments with odd synth choices and ooey gooey lyrics such as “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair / Things are better when you’re with me.” Many of the keyboard instrumentals sound as if they are being tortured, with overly distorted xylophones and computerized pianos seemingly begging for mercy. Luckily, the band never strays too far from pop goodness, singalong choruses and hooky, Walt Disney-esque lyrics.
“Sleepyhead,” Passion Pit’s love note to dance floors and narcoleptics everywhere, shows the band at their best — and weirdest. The song contains samples of Irish harp playing by Mary O’Hara matched with the perfectionist keyboards of Angelakos and pianist Ian Hultquist. Angelakos’ extremely high-pitched falsettos fit in perfectly alongside MGMT-ish electronics and disco-influenced bass licks.
Passion Pit’s debut album, Manners, is due out May 18, promising to deliver more love to the world. The part of the world that grooves on eccentric techno, that is.
Air France is not a band. Not really. Air France is a bird singing happily to its friend while constructing its nest in a palm tree. Air France is a couple on their honeymoon, sipping adult beverages out of coconuts and watching the sunset.
Air France is sex on a beach.
By combining influences from the Balearic Islands with the warmth and beauty of the shoe-glaze genre, Air France creates breathtaking, sublime music, transporting listeners to an exotic and incredible new world. Like DJ Shadow or RJD2, the group merges older recorded material, such as animal noises and personal conversations, with catalog instrumentation and some of their own digital electrobeats. Truly, the Swedish duo, who chose to ironically share a moniker with the Paris-based airline, knows how to spin.
Air France’s latest EP, No Way Down, borders on aleatoric — meaning “random” — music, by carefully piecing together conversations, oohs and ahhs, tropical birds, children laughing, ocean waves and instruments like horns, strings and synths. Most of the tracks lack vocals completely, sounding something like the background music you would find at a travel boutique night club.
The track “June Evenings” opens with a far-off woman’s voice bemoaning the changing of seasons: “Spring has arrived early here, a time for lovers / And it is as if the season mocks my sadness.” These melodramatic words launch the song into trumpets, indecipherable vocals and even a verse of whistles.
On a standout track, “Collapsing at Your Doorstep,” Air France combines marimbas, exotic drums and a hypnotic vocal pattern to create the most danceable and accessible tune on the EP. The song gives off a worldbeat vibe, as if the entire universe of Air France takes place under a canopy dance party on some distant beach.
Luckily for the listener, Air France will fly you there, free of charge.
Bishop Allen – “The Ancient Commonsense of Things”
Some suave, preppy, sweater vest-wearing students – recently graduated from an Ivy League university – decide to form an indie-rock band based in New York City with a name conceived by a little-known film director. You probably think you know how this band’s story ends (or Week-ends, in this case).
But the true band in question, Bishop Allen, is not Vampire Weekend, even if it might share an extraordinarily eerie number of similarities. The Brooklyn, New York act started when the two key members, singer Justin Rice and guitarist Christian Rudder, met on WHRB, Harvard’s college radio station nearly a decade ago.
Since 2003, Bishop Allen has released three full albums and a staggering 12 EPs, of which they wrote and recorded during an ambitious 12-month period in 2006. Its most recent full-length album, Grrr… is due out March 10.
While Bishop Allen certainly has a fair share of typical indie qualities (the band members appeared as characters in “Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist” last year and contributed tunes to said “playlist”), they also have a distinguished songwriting style that separates them from the rest of their scenester peers. By implementing a wide assortment of colorful instruments and many layers of melody, Bishop Allen songwriting feels both scatterbrained and focused at the same time.
On “The Ancient Commonsense of Things,” Rice sings with staccato over pizzicato strings, exotic marimbas and hook-filled guitars. With a simple chorus and sing-along “oohs” and “aahs,” Bishop Allen finds an appropriate balance of pop and weird. In the song “Dimmer,” Rice combines nonsensical lyrics that set a playful tone with Rudder’s bouncy bass and violins.
On the whole, Bishop Allen packs just as much bite as Vampire Weekend and has a unique pop quality that will likely develop a congregation of its own.
Rapper Young Churf, best known for his brief spot in Ratatat’s “Seventeen Years,” is in the song saying: “ I don’t write my stuff anymore — I just kick it from my head.” For avant-garde hip-hop artist Why?, a band that sings about masturbating in museums, gypsies with knives and men fornicating at sporting events, listeners may wonder if the group had to kick all that from its head.
However, lyricist Yoni Wolf’s stream-of-consciousness verses and obscure, personal and often polarizing references are as poignant and delicate as reading a diary. His lyrics are beautifully dressed over poppy instrumentals in Alopecia, Why?’s acclaimed 2008 album.
Why?, originally the stage name for Wolf’s solo work, has evolved into a full band, complete with keyboards, bass and electronics. The group combines elements of indie-rock, hip-hop and even folk with an overtly expressionistic and ceaselessly candid tone. The result sounds like the inner thought processes of an adult male in perpetual puberty — confused about the emotional and bodily changes he is facing.
One instance of this is on “Good Friday,” where Wolf explores notions of death, race and sexual fantasy in a way that is mysteriously dark and unquestionably unique. The song opens with a simple bass line and high hat drums, coupled with Wolf’s drawling vocals.
Throughout many of the songs, Wolf’s tone of voice borders somewhere between bored and pleading, as if unsure if he is passionate, narrative or emphatic with his lyrical storytelling. In tracks such as “Fatalist Palmistry,” Wolf accomplishes a more diverse vocal range through multiple vocal tracks, both melodic and monotonous, layered together.
Yet Why? is never too morbid. It might be overly descriptive and sexually experimental, yet it keeps listeners around with well-placed hooks and attention-grabbing lines.
While Wolf may kick things out of his head that are controversial, confusing and all together strange, Why? retains its edge by keeping their ideas linear, exciting and always in-your-face.
The Rural Alberta Advantage – “Don’t Haunt This Place”
Nils Edenloff, lead vocalist of The Rural Alberta Advantage, doesn’t really “sing.” No, not really. Instead, Edenloff whispers, sighs, screams, whines, talks, laughs, begs, pines and confides in the listener, welcoming them into his hometown and showing them around to everything and everyone he loves.
Indeed, as the band’s name might suggest, Edenloff grew up in a log cabin in rural Southern Alberta, Canada, a hometown that strongly influenced his songwriting. Now based in Toronto, the band still sticks close to its roots in its complex lyrics, nostolgic vocals and a Canadian-heavy tour to promote Hometowns, the band’s debut album.
Hometowns is, in many respects, a work of true “indie” proportions, with low-fi recording, strained vocals and many experimental tendencies. Yet, what makes the album stand out is the breadth of the lyrics, the emotive vocals of Edenloff and the group’s unique manipulation of the folk formula.
“Rush Apart” and “Luciana” sound like the best parts of Neutral Milk Hotel and The Microphones. Edenloff shouts over noise-folk guitars and bass-heavy drums, which often climax into cymbal crashes and a bold horns section.
“Don’t Haunt This Place,” the quiet standout of the album, starts with warm organ synth and an almost-monotonous Edenloff. The track evolves into an ode to the homesick, the heartbroken and the hopeful romantics, with lush violins, tambourines and the beautiful vocal contributions of bandmate Amy Cole. Edenloff crafts songs that are both joyous and thoughtful, with lyrics that can live and breathe within anyone who has ever missed home.
From Hometowns it is apparent that for The Rural Alberta Advantage, no matter how you change as a songwriter, no matter how far away you move in the world and no matter how old you get, the idea of home is always just a verse or a chorus away.
On the international stage, the state of Japanese entertainment is rather unfortunate. Breaking into the Western limelight is difficult, especially when Americans expect Japanese film and music to possess a certain amount of restraint and conservatism. For example, Japanese films are assumed to be about one of two things: respectful samurai protecting their ways of old or overgrown lizard-robots terrorizing some fleeing pre-pubescent sounding men.
Similarly, Japanese music today consists of either classic Japanese arrangements or assembly line pop aimed at imitating boy bands of 10 years ago. Due to this standard, it is rare that a Japanese artist breaks any musical barriers in their own country, let alone breaking into the American indie music scene.
Yet Shugo Tokumaru has done just that. With an eclectic blend of more than 50 instruments, arranged with a perfectionist’s eye, Tokumaru creates complex compositions that rival American folk artists like Sufjan Stevens and The Magnetic Fields while still retaining elements of his Japanese homeland.
Tokumaru, who has released several albums in Japan, had his latest album, Exit, released internationally. The singer-songwriter combines instruments like guitars, drums, accordions, xylophones and violins, as well as vocals in both Japanese and English. His sound feels euphoric, psychedelic and folksy, contributing a tone that is both uniquely Japanese and universally accessible.
From the start of “Parachute,” the opener and a standout track on Exit, the listener is assaulted with whimsical bells and carefully placed bass guitars. This three-minute song is packed with so many sounds and notes, it is almost overwhelming. Perhaps this is overcompensation to gain attention from the American indie scene, or perhaps it is just Tokumaru showing off all his talent. Yet the all the instruments are tied together with a joyous mood and Japanese lyrics that are so exotic and unique that it is hard to find fault with much of his work.
Other later tracks on Exit, like “Hidamari” and “La La Radio,” serve as interludes that connect the album as a whole, implementing melodies and phrases from songs earlier in the album. Overall, Exit is a beautifully constructed Japanese album for a world audience. The album is as epic as Godzilla, as composed as a samurai, and just as innovative as any other American indie album out today.
Indie-rock singers that try too hard to be unique usually end up sounding like distorted camels. Often, these “creative” indie-rock lyricists don’t have much to talk about, and these scenester instrumentalists reprocess their percussion until the drums sound like miscellaneous car parts. And typically, these indie-rock bands just aren’t very good.
But Nana Grizol isn’t one of these indie-rock bands: It’s a clarinet-toting, harmonica-wielding, punk-pop-garage-rock-folk-fun-times band with 12 members, even more instruments and endless energy.
On their debut album, Love It, Love It, the band explores many diametric tones, sounds and themes. The album opens with “Circles ‘Round The Moon,” an up-tempo, chorus-heavy, lightning bolt of a song that clocks in at under a minute and a half. The song is whimsical and carefree, combining joyous keyboards and bold horns with lyrics that decry living in the city because “you can’t see the stars.”
Yet hidden behind all the youthful innocence, lead singer Theo Hilton’s songwriting also contains grace and depth atypical of most punk bands. Like Okkervil River and Neutral Milk Hotel -— two members of Nana Grizol were actually in Neutral Milk Hotel — the group’s loud and folksy brand of music lends itself to a mix of both the uplifting and the somber.
In later songs like “Everything You Ever Hoped or Work For” and “Voices Echo Down the Halls (for Jarod),” Hilton half-sings, half-screams lyrics about friendship, loss and heartache in ways that make the listener want to cry and laugh at once. The bands’ firm grasp on tone and loose method of playing sounds like a party with a mission.
Truly, the Athens-based group defies any one genre. By combining random elements of rock, anti-folk and punk, as well as bringing many diverse instruments to the party, Nana Grizol sounds vibrant, exciting and urgent in ways that no camel impersonators ever can.
Editors at The Emory Wheel, Emory University's student newspaper, sound off on their favorite albums and artists of the moment. You can find more info here.
