(Polyvinyl/Shock)

Equal parts experimentalism, pop music and bizarre song titles

Initially, I was prepared to write off Paralytic Stalks as a staggering, less coherent cousin to Of Montreal’s last two efforts – False Priest and Skeletal Lamping. I found myself grasping for the hook-filled experimental pop songs of the past and coming up with handfuls of psychedelic complexity. With their 11th album Kevin Barnes and his Athens (Georgia, USA) outfit have sacrificed some of the immediacy of the appeal, couching their sharp-if-demented lyrics in more complex compositions. A cohesive album rather than just a collection of disparate songs, Paralytic Stalks’ tracks do blend into one another, Barnes’s experimental passages holding it all together. There are times during the overlaps when it does feel like listening to two very different pieces of music simultaneously, and – as isolated events – these moments are a bit disconcerting, messy even. However, viewed in a context of the album as a single entity, somehow they manage to work. It’s not all experimental noodling though, far from it; the record’s shorter tracks, Malefic Dowery and Spiteful Intervention in particular stand superbly on their own as testaments to the group’s pop savvy. Meanwhile, the longer of the nine tracks are trips through lush, heavily layered instrumentalism – orchestral, psychedelic, even soulful – interspersed with bright clearings Of Montreal’s very own brand of catchy lyricism. If you’re looking for a record to love but only have an hour to spare, this probably isn’t the best choice; once you take the time to accept the eccentricity for what it is though, it’s hard to turn off.

****

NILS HAY

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(Sony Music)

Brooklyn duo enter sophomore territory

Chairlift manage to make kitschy-weird sound ultra-cool on their second album, Something. Chairlift struggled to rise above a wash of electronic pop when they arrived on the scene in the mid ‘00s, but Something should drag the band out of the under-underground and place them before a more focussed, indie-pop audience. There’s an urgency and sense of antagonism in the blips of Wrong Opinion and Sidewalk Safari that is swept away when Caroline Polachek’s voice first sounds. Swinging between wildly apathetic and swamped with emotion, Polachek is at once uber-chic and girl-next-door. The album is full of this dichotomy, both melodically and thematically – it’s not immediately appealing on all accounts, but has ‘something’ about it that makes you want to go back for more. While tracks like I Belong In Your Arms and Amanaemonesia reel you in with gripping hooks and melodies, tracks like Take It Out On Me come across as total cheese until you listen to them a number of times. The layers of melody are shimmering and laden with fantasy, but while Polachek’s voice is haunting, and there is a near-aggressive energy to it, Something seems to shy away from any real darkness. It exists in a purgatory between exceedingly modern and blatantly nostalgic, and as a result, it ends up being an extremely slow burner.

***½

KRISSI WEISS

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(The Noise Company/Shock)

10 years since Sha Sha, Kweller comes Full Circle

For his fifth studio album and debut release on his new label, The Noise Company, Ben Kweller has stepped back from the heavy country influence of 2009’s Changing Horses and created something sonically more akin to his early albums (I can’t help but wonder if the song Full Circle refers both to this, as well as his return from New York to Texas). That said, Go Fly A Kite differentiates itself from the previous body of work as both a more eclectic and – as worn-out as the word is becoming – ‘mature’ album; the undeniably youthful sentiments of Wasted & Ready and Commerce, TX having grown into tracks like Gossip and The Rainbow. Even so, Kweller clearly had no hesitation about reaching for his electric guitar and turning up the fuzz, or firing a few glissandos down the piano; the sense of levity – which, for me, has always been as integral a part of his work as his musical and lyrical talent – remains well and truly intact. Straddling the border of alt-country and indie rock, there is something almost retrospective about Go Fly A Kite; yes, it is the work of a more experienced songwriter, but there is an unshakable feeling that if you somehow distilled Kweller’s first four albums into 10 songs, this would be the approximate result. As a fan of the previous work, that’s hardly a complaint, but as someone who also believes in the man’s talent, I don’t feel unreasonable by expecting something more.

***½

NILS HAY

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(Domino/EMI)

Smooth, seductive – and not much else

E Volo Love is likely to be the first you’ve ever heard of Fránçois & The Atlas Mountains, but as the album’s immaculate grasp of emotional tone – in this case, a kind of indolent wistfulness tinged with melancholy – would indicate, the eponymous Fránçois Marry is an old hand, and this is in fact his sixth album (he has also spent some time touring with Camera Obscura). This, however, is the first of his albums that has secured the imprimatur of a global record label, and thus the first that has made a splash in Marry’s native France. It’s not hard to see why Marry’s group is a nifty acquisition for Domino – Marry sings in both English and French, which lends his band an effortless cool in both countries (and helps him get around France’s notorious radio language quotas), and his group has the same kind of slinky sensuality that characterises Domino favourites Wild Beasts. Musically, however, there’s more than a hint of early Phoenix going on in E Volo Love, as though Thomas Mars and co. had followed their muse down the path of those gentle AM pop songs littered throughout United’s second half. All of which makes E Volo Love a perfectly palatable proposition – imagine the soundtrack to beautiful young heiresses and toffee-nosed boys experimenting with sex, cocaine and heartbreak in the Riviera and you’re pretty close. It’s just that Marry doesn’t spike his super-smooth confection with anything like bitterness or anger, which means that, as impressive as it is, it’s all variations on one well-elaborated theme.

***½

CHAD PARKHILL

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(Lucky Number/Co-Op)

A slow burner

The debut record from Caged Animals is one of those records that you’re initially unsure of, but manages to steadily wear away at your scepticism, making you uncertain, yet completely smitten. Caged Animals is actually the moniker of New Jersey-born artist Vincent Cacchione, who also performs in Brooklyn group Soft Black. On Eat Their Own, Cacchione fuses together elements of ‘80s synth pop and R&B, with lyrics plagiarised from the diary of Ben Gibbard. The result is a record filled with fascinating tunes, even if Cacchione’s high-pitched vocals and propensity for melodrama, such as on record opener Teenagers in Heat and Teflon Heart, can be initially disconcerting. It gets much better though, with Cacchione showing a knack for picking out catchy melodies on songs like This Summer I’ll Make It Up To You and The NJ Turnpike, which sounds like a mash-up of Beach House and the doo-wop intro from The Five Satins’ In The Still Of The Night. Piles Of $$$, a pile of bleh song, shows that Cacchione’s got the whole irony thing down pat,  taking aim at pop through flagrant overuse of vocoder, tepid Milli-Vanilli styled percussion, and the repeated refrain: “I got piles of money!” But it’s the final moments that show Cacchione’s brilliance, with true standouts like The Feelingz, with its ‘90s R&B vibe, and All The Beautiful Things In The World, constructed on a assertive hip hop beat and gorgeous keys. Once you traverse the initial veneer of weird, you’ll find Eat Their Own to be a competent release that varies between the comfortably familiar and the outrageously strange.

****

DARRAGH MURRAY

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(Fuse/Decon)

Kanye’s last shred of thug cred comes over to the bling side

For all the stern expressions and title on the album cover (it’s a fact that colons are the strictest of all punctuation), Pusha T’s first major release album should come with a “Mission Accomplished!” banner. Clipse, his hip hop duo with brother Malice, took more than a decade before hits like Grindin’ got any traction, even with encouragement from Pharrell Williams. Taking an indefinite hiatus in 2009, Pusha T roamed the studios as a hired gun – appearing most notably on Kanye West’s Runaway – before releasing the first Fear Of God mixtape in 2011, with Fear Of God II months later on the G.O.O.D. Music label (home of Kanye, Common, T.I. and other hip hop kajillionaires). That’s a lot of history, but it suggests that Pusha T stands at the crossroads between his long faithful street rap and the glitzy world that Kanye is grooming him for. Judging from Let Us Pray, he’s unsure which way to go. Very little attention seems to go to track listing, jumping from one mood to another and from doomsday sirens to clean mixes, but most damning is ending with I Still Wanna and Alone In Vegas. Two of the weakest rhymes – the titles forming the hook with mindnumbing repetition – hint at Pusha T’s yearning for the things that fame has denied him. But it’s hard to be sympathetic when Pusha requests a girl to “sell that pussy to me” on What Dreams Are Made Of. Pusha T refuses to be a one-dimensional rapper, but by attempting to have feet in both camps, he hasn’t really conquered either of them.

***

MITCH ALEXANDER

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