The second full-length from Hundred Waters is not an evolution so much as a refinement. If 2012’s Hundred Waters saw the electro-folk band sketching out the borders of their sound, The Moon Rang Like a Bell finds them zeroing in on what they do best and going deeper.

Hundred Waters: The Moon Rang Like A Bell

The Moon Rang Like A Bell

The second full-length from Hundred Waters is not an evolution so much as a refinement. If 2012’s self-titled effort saw the band sketching out the borders of their sound, The Moon Rang Like a Bell finds them zeroing in on what they do best and going deeper. The production is improved in every way, but given how hushed and quiet they can be, the effect is still pretty subtle. Acoustic instruments have been jettisoned; the pillowy synths and layered vocals of singer Nicole Miglis nestle easily in the mix, sometimes leaving questions as to when one end and another begins. Indeed, the key to Hundred Waters’ rich and tactile atmosphere is that their machines never sound quite like machines, but everything sounds close; on “Murmurs”, distant piano is buried under reverb and digital crackle, sketching out chords with a vaguely gospel feel, as a strange voice sings a tune while so near to the microphone you can hear a tongue clicking against teeth. It’s an album that always feels like it’s whispering in your ear.
The band’s approach is difficult to place in a specific time. That’s not because their aesthetic is especially innovative or new, or because it seems like it’s from the future; rather, they bring to mind a moment when updating dusty old song structures with the tools of the present seemed like the next logical step in music. “Digital folk” was the term used in a review of their self-titled debut, and that captures it as well as anything: music that is both earthy and disembodied, with humans and electronics joining at some blissful halfway point. Hundred Waters thrive in the place where post-rock meets freak folk, and sing-song melodies are twisted into strange shapes by circuitry.
The connection to Björk is hard to overstate. Part of The Moon’s appeal is that it hearkens back to the style of Vespertine, the last album when Björk’s restlessly experimental music still had a foot in accessibility, before she took such a conceptual turn. There’s a similar sense of music-as-place here, and a desire to fuse ancient and modern in search of a new mode of expression. And in that respect, oddly enough, Hundred Waters remind me of another group from Iceland—Múm, in particular their 2000 album Yesterday Was Dramatic—Today is OK, an album sometimes described at the time as “folktronica.” These aren’t influences I’m talking about, necessarily, but ways of hearing what Hundred Waters are doing. It’s not a coincidence that these signposts are from music made around the turn of the millennium, when rapidly changing technology meant the future sound of pop was up in the air.
But if much of Björk’s power comes from her unpredictability, the feeling that a breathy sight could turn into a scream and a song might explode, Hundred Waters are always set to simmer. That mostly works in their favor on The Moon Rang Like a Bell, as the album’s strength comes from its gradually accruing moments. So the spell of the minute-long a cappella opener “Show Me Love” is broken by clear piano chords and miniature percussive explosions on “Murmurs” and then the following “Cavity” raises the intensity before the bright and twinkly “Out Alee” brings it back to earth. Sequenced beautifully, the record is full of these gentle arcs, and the sound is so consistent it can feel like a 49-minute piece broken into 12 movements. The impact of any one song is heightened by its proximity to what came before and what follows.
In an interview, Miglis highlighted the importance of her lyrics to The Moon Rang Like a Bell, but for me the album functions more like an instrumental album, where meaning comes from the sonics. On the page, her words are allusive and fragmented, hinting at moments of doubt and turmoil, but on record, the words come over as pure sound. There’s a moment about halfway through “Innocent” where Miglis breaks away from language and sings a “dah-dah-dah-do-dum” phrase, but with her voice coated in processed fuzz, she sounds like an amphibious creature prone to reverie. This line communicates as well as any phrase on the album. “Is it only in my head?”, she asks a moment later, and it wouldn’t be a bad subtitle for an album so steeped in imagination.


Multi-instrumentalists Ramin Rahni and Ariyan Basu formulate intricate art rock with unusual time signatures and impossible-to-predict textures.

Confidence Freaks Me Out

If mathematics or advanced musical theory are not your strong suit, then Confidence Freaks Me Out might make an intimidating first impression. The second album from Tar Of, the Brooklyn-based duo of multi-instrumentalists Ramin Rahni and Ariyan Basu, is defined by unusual time signatures and impossible-to-predict textures that only occasionally tumble in the direction of pop songcraft. Like an uber-nerd going long on their latest obsession, Confidence Freaks Me Out takes some time to warm to, warding off those unwilling to sift through the discordance.
But Tar Of aren’t here to bore you. As they narrate in an Instagram post describing the creation of the album cover, the duo collaborated with a mathematician and a felt artist to visualize the 11/8 time signature of lead single “Amused by Their Comment” as a cone of equal proportions, sliced to reflect the song’s 2-1-3-2-1-3 rhythmic patterning. The cone then reappears as the party hats that Rahni and Basu wear in press photos and in the icing on a Confidence Freaks Me Out-shaped cake. Instead of treating nerdiness like a members-only club, Tar Of want to invite you to celebrate.
Confidence Freaks Me Out charts a dizzying path through thickets of Reichian repetition, spacious, circular dance tracks like Kate NV’s, and the orchestral chamber pop of Cate Le Bon, with dashes of Animal Collective-esque vocal harmonics familiar from the duo’s earlier records. “Amused by Their Comment” eloquently captures the shambolic spirit, assembling layers of toy piano, sawtooth synth, guitar, trumpet, saxophone, clarinet, and zurna, a double reed woodwind instrument often used in Assyrian folk music. Each instrument seemingly follows its own rhythmic dictates, latticing into a danceable pattern as improbable as Thom Yorke’s in “Lotus Flower.” On “Berry,” muted glockenspiel, an autoharp played with chopsticks, and the sound of a cracked La Croix can create a dreamy instrumental palette for whimsical lyrics about “my toot Feri,” melding the Farsi word for mulberry (toot) with the name of Basu’s grandmother, Feri. The interwoven instrumental and lyrical nods to Iran, detailed in behind-the-scenes Instagram posts, are a loving testament to the duo’s shared cultural roots.
Though Tar Of’s kinesthetic quest for repetition often seems to struggle against itself, the fission generated is rewarding. Their competing sensibilities are best articulated on “Uh Oh,” as woodwind instruments swirl atop an off-kilter prepared piano beat before resolving into staccato bursts of clarinet, viola, and synth—a fleeting reminder of rhythmic stability grounding the chaos. On “Garbage In,” they force themselves to write a straightforward chorus at 120 bpm and conjure simple beauty, even as the lyrics—“In the season’s midst, fiction breathes a bit hot (too hot)”—gesture at natural disaster.
With 14 of 24 songs coming in under a minute, the record is driven by interstitial tracks that frequently blend into one another. In these fleeting moments the duo’s esoteric tendencies occasionally fall flat, like the halting stutter-step drums on “What’s Up My Dude” awkwardly propping up lyrics that sound like leftover studio banter (“Where’s my dude?/There’s my dude”). But the short runtimes mean that such experiments hardly get the chance to drag things down. Confidence Freaks Me Out’s outsized density can feel both nourishing and unusual: A choice that clicks for one person may baffle another, and the bite-sized indulgences can pack in just as many ideas as the more fleshed-out compositions. When you feel like you’ve already heard every conversation in the room, Tar Of’s labyrinthian visions are a welcome reprieve.


The Long Beach rapper threads the fables of the past with the reality of the present for another expertly written, starkly candid record.

Dark Times

Vince Staples is not the rapper you come to for lyrical acrobatics. His bars are stark, jumping between straightforward recountings of gang-related violence and bits of dry humor fit for a Mitch Hedberg set. Both also extend into his presence as one of the rap internet’s favorite talking heads; he can turn an explanation of why he doesn’t share his home address with his closest friends into a hilarious exchange—until you stop to think about what exactly makes him so guarded. This candor helps his stories, jokes, and his recent Coen Brothers-indebted Netflix series, The Vince Staples Show, stick to the ribs.
Looking back, Dark Times feels like a logical progression from his last few projects. During the press run for 2022’s Ramona Park Broke My Heart, Staples admitted he was ready to move on from making “an anthology of my neighborhood and my past,” a promise he frequently bends to suit his needs. Dark Times has plenty of trauma, but the difference is it more directly intersects with his present life as a celebrity trying to stay out of the way. “Children’s Song” hangs a lantern on this idea early by starting as a rallying cry for a friend who’s locked up before offering a cold reality check: “Niggas be like ‘Aye bro, ‘member back when?/Let it go, loc/I’m way too rich to be your friend/I’m way too lit to let you dim me,” he says in his trademark deadpan. That couplet is even more cutting when this hook follows just two bars later: “Don’t play with my Crippin’, go play with your kids, bitch.” He’s having his cake and eating it in the most Vince Staples way imaginable.
Staples’ monotone voice used to dilute his more intense songs, but now he just sounds tired of having to read everything and everyone for an angle. After mapping out hip-hop toxicity over EDM and techno beats (made specifically for sync licensing) on Big Fish Theory and memorializing the California of his youth on his 2021 self-titled album and Ramona Park, who wouldn’t be? His insouciance still leads to great stories and affirmations of Black resilience, but what once registered as body blows now lands like a firm but loving grasp on the shoulder from an older relative.
“Justin” slowly builds romantic tension up to its bombshell ending—the woman Staples is courting suddenly introduces him to her actual boyfriend as her little cousin—and then discards it with a shrug, like Staples is mad at himself for getting caught up. Other highlights like “Étouffée” and “‘Radio’” recast old encounters and family history as edifying parables for a stolen youth. On the former, Staples’ connections to Louisiana inspire him to chart a path from toting guns in Polo pajamas to a place where it’s a privilege to be told your music fell off. Later, “‘Radio’” draws bridges between chance encounters with music, from having his life changed after hearing Blu & Exile’s Below the Heavens to appreciating Brandy and Roberta Flack more after a bad breakup. Using his still-blistering concision, these lessons flesh out aspects of Staples’ notoriously private life and give credence to motivational pieces like “Little Homies” and the opening verse for “Freeman.” It’s easier to take Staples’ advice (“You don’t gotta crash out for the set, lil homie/Keep your head on the swivel when you step”) and longing (“I’ll never find a equal mind, I’ll settle for the fattest ass”) seriously when he’s laid out the steps he took to get there.
The production is where Dark Times can sometimes go from stoic to sleepy. On the surface, italso seems like the next logical step in Staples’ journey. A grip of producers both established (Michael Uzowuru, Jay Versace, Cardo) and more obscure (LeKen Taylor, Saint Mino) come together to offer a sound mixing the maudlin Cali worship of Ramona Park and the chirpy minimalism of the self-titled with a stately, polished tone. Staples often sounds best when the beat is busier than he is; or else he risks being dragged down by the BPM. That risk actually pays off on lead single “Shame On The Devil,” whose gauzy thump and smooth chorus from North Carolina singer Baby Rose is countered with some of Staples’ wonkiest vocals and the long hard looks at love and fame warbling through them.
Otherwise, these are workmanlike mid-tempo cuts, occasionally to a fault. The Cali sway that never truly leaves Staples’ music is most apparent in the rattling synths and drum claps of “Étouffeé” and the disco-leaning rhythm of “Little Homies,” both viscous and smooth like olive oil flowing down the walls of a glass bottle. “Government Cheese” and “Freeman” lack the spark of the rest, generic offerings that are carried by Staples as opposed to both shouldering each other’s weight. There’s nothing on Dark Times that’s surprising and challenging for Staples but little that detracts from what already works.
There are several moments on Staples’ Netflix show that, while definitely exaggerated, display the banal insanity of his life as a niche rapper: A bank he’s visiting to get a business loan is robbed by a group who turn out to be homies from around the way; family members press him for money while eating ribs at a cookout; his celebrity is constantly cast as either a non-starter or enough to get him shot at or jumped by theme park mascots. That same attitude, slightly toned down, flows through Dark Times. There’s nothing grand or portentous about this album—every win, mistake, lost loved one, and lesson is presented as a fact of life. Perhaps he’ll never truly get past reconciling the scars of his upbringing with staring down a million dollars for the first time in disbelief. “Life hard, but I go harder,” he sings softly on “Little Homies,” as much a reminder to himself as it is to the youth tracing his steps.


Using electric mandolin, electrified violin, pedal steel, and snare, the Baltimore group’s music tilts bluegrass and Western swing toward raga and drone; it’s both avant-garde and compellingly listenable.

Salmon Graveyard

The 19th-century folk song “Arkansas Traveler” is as much a part of the Southern landscape as kudzu, red mud, and humidity. Its melody, which has been borrowed by everyone from Charles Ives to Raffi, is simple and playful; you can picture someone playing it on a banjo in a Les Blank movie as easily as you can imagine hearing it spilling from an ice-cream truck’s speakers. Where some songs of its era command a gravitas that makes them feel brittle as parchment, “Arkansas Traveler” can be pulled like taffy in a Gatlinburg candy store window. Some might call it kitsch. But judging by the way they play it on their debut album, Salmon Graveyard see “Arkansas Traveler” the same way John Coltrane saw syrupy tunes by Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer or Rodgers and Hammerstein: as a high-art gem that just needs a little polish.
Salmon Graveyard is the project of guitarist and electric mandolinist Corey Thuro, a regular in the Baltimore and D.C. improvised music scenes who has collaborated with Matmos’ M.C. Schmidt, among others. The music he and his band play is, in a sense, a countrified form of raga, long improvisations over phrases that repeat relentlessly. Drones have figured in American folk music for centuries—you can probably follow the hum of an open-string fiddle back to the Highlands bagpipe—and artists like Henry Flynt and Pelt have long used bluegrass instruments to make stridently, uncomfortably avant-garde music that’s still recognizably within the lineage of Bill Monroe or the Carters. While Salmon Graveyard are willing to take their explorations to challenging places, the plucky swirl of John Hoegberg’s pedal steel and the nonstop march of Jonah Guiliano’s snare give their music a glossy cosmopolitan feel that has more in common with Western swing. Think of it as Bob Wills gone free jazz.
That approach makes Salmon Graveyard unique in their musical realm: They are fun and easy to listen to. You can dance to them. Thuro’s distorted mandolin and Alani Sugar’s electrified violin wrap and tangle in “Arkansas Traveler,” squeezing the song so hard Hoegberg starts picking his bass like he’s playing hardcore, drawing out harmonics, playfully trying to push the song back open. It’s sprightly in a somewhat neurotic way, like it’s been up for two days, all black coffee and trucker speed. “Peak Bottom,” meanwhile, kicks off the 26-minute two-part composition that forms the center of the album with a long, slow whistle from Hoegberg’s pedal steel, the sound of a bomb dropping in a mid-century cartoon.
“Peak Bottom” and its companion track, “Salmon Graveyard,” are built around a single brief repeating phrase played by Thuro and Sugar. It’s an asymmetrical curlicue reminiscent of Ornette Coleman’s “Ramblin’” that in a very short period of time manages to push and yank and finally resolve; it is also, in its gulping and hee-hawing and two-stepping, very funny. Thuro and Sugar play it like they’re chasing chickens around a barnyard, full of cheek and light sarcasm. While both musicians tug apart and take solos of their own—Thuro’s in particular edging toward the cosmic picking of Chris Forsyth—the piece is a showcase for Hoegberg, on both bass and pedal steel. On the former, he slurs and slides, sometimes sounding like he thinks he’s playing a fiddle and sometimes like he thinks he’s Fugazi’s Joe Lally. He plays his pedal steel with sparkle and twinkle, but he also lets it melt into a gooey mess of reverb and sustain. When the band regroups after a long period of deconstruction, he calls everyone back to the dance floor with a pinging harmonic and a train-whistle slide. He is probably the only pedal-steel player in history whose playing can credibly be called “angular.”
You can dip in and out of “Peak Bottom”/“Salmon Graveyard” and feel like you’re encountering several different bands. The good cheer and ticklish approach to Western swing recalls ’90s semi-ironists BR5-49 or Austin stalwarts Asleep at the Wheel. Catch them once they’ve started to slow down and they play with the heartbroken cornpone lope of Hank Williams. At a dead standstill, with Hoegberg plucking his bass and Sugar droning on her violin, you can picture Brian Eno carefully placing a spittoon in the corner of his German studio. You might hear Tortoise in the pulse of Giuliano’s rimshots. At one point late in the piece, Thuro pulls away from the theme and makes his mandolin shriek like Joey Santiago’s guitar in Pixies’ “Vamos.”
Remarkably, this never stops feeling like country music, even at its freest. Maybe it’s the way the perpetual one-two strike of Giuliano’s snare makes it sound like they’re vamping for time in an oversold beerhall, or the way the album’s democratic mix keeps the mandolin from taking over and pushing us into guitar-wonk territory, but Salmon Graveyard never feels as though its rusticity is something to be overcome. They may borrow an organizing principle from free improv, but Salmon Graveyard don’t have to look too far past country music’s borders to find new vistas; they’re already hypnotized by its past.


The Bay Area trio takes several beats to slow down and expand on a nice EP that mines indie rock and slowcore for its finest components.

Crossing Over EP

When the pandemic hit, Sour Widows had just taken a big leap into the unknown. In February 2020, the Bay Area trio released their self-titled debut EP, a six-song set with alt-pop hooks and slowcore-infused grandeur. What particularly set them apart was the interplay between the two singer/guitarists, Maia Sinaiko and Susanna Thomson, who have a talent for subtle builds to a big climax. Bolstered by empathetic drumming by their longtime friend Max Edelman, it’s tantalizing to imagine what they could’ve done if they’d played SXSW last year as originally scheduled.
Their new Crossing Over EP, recorded remotely, could quite literally have never existed without the tragic disjuncture of a world on pause. But it’s also a bit of a mulligan, an extra chance to define themselves before a planned full-length debut. With Crossing Over, Sour Widows seize this unusual opportunity, leaning into their more introspective, atmospheric side across four songs that glide by in what feels like both less and more than their 22 minutes. They’re beguiling and impressive, showcasing a band with lightness as well as heft.
Again and again on Crossing Over, Sour Widows create a sense of false comfort out of rudimentary furnishings, only to pull the emotional rug out from underneath. The sprawling title track is inspired, Thomson has said, by the reality of a long-distance relationship, and there’s a gentle familiarity both to the song’s Bedhead-ed opening riffs and the first verse’s apparently autobiographical description of battling the elements on an earlier, do-it-yourself tour. Before long, though, the guitars have become brambled, the storm imagery tangled up with the remote romance. Thomson and Sinaiko are harmonizing about, first, “Something in me crossing over in me,” and then “this life/splitting in me over and over in me,” and then there’s a ragged, windswept guitar solo. When “Crossing Over” finally ends, with an extended outro, it’s in a state of exhilarating ambivalence.
Other songs on the EP use a similarly basic toolkit to achieve a similar giddy transcendence. Opening song “Look the Other Way” also relies on slow-burn guitars, splashing cymbals, and vine-like harmonies, passing through more lyrical inversions (“When you look the other way” becomes “I won’t look the other way”) en route to another piercing guitar solo. But the effect is almost as wonderfully disorienting, and there’s a charming loftiness to a line like, “Someday I’ll be as dead as a star.” The closing “Walk All Day” is Sour Widows at their most cozy and cosmic, with fingers squeaking over acoustic guitar frets as Sinaiko and Thomson murmur about cell division, angels, and how “love is blind/leading the blind.” Sour Widows find the infinite in the intimate.
The narrative stakes in these songs are higher than they may seem, too. “Bathroom Stall,” which Sinaiko has said is “about a relationship I had with someone who struggled with addiction, who very tragically passed away three years ago while we were together,” again travels from serenity to catharsis. But there’s a jarring physicality to its climactic scene. “Do you remember it like I do?/Your lips turned blue/I had my fingers in your mouth/And I couldn’t get them out,” the band sings. With the Crossing Over EP, Sour Widows have a chance to reintroduce themselves, and they’ve come back wielding raw vulnerability like a superpower.

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On his third album, Berlin producer Sebastian Genz switches up his dreamy house sound with forays into drum ‘n’ bass and boom-bap hip-hop but can’t shake his nostalgia addiction.

Yesterday’s Tomorrows

There are musical styles that stretch wide and loose, like a sagging tarpaulin, and there are those that fit as tight as a surgeon’s glove. The former aesthetics—minimal techno, say, or dream pop—allow for all kinds of variations. In the latter (dub techno, straight-edge hardcore), the tropes become so specific that to alter them even slightly would be to fundamentally undo the identity of the style in question.
For nearly a decade now, as one of the core artists on Hamburg’s Smallville label, Moomin—the Berlin producer Sebastian Genz—has had a hand in crafting one of the most snugly proportioned aesthetics in house music. You can count the key elements of the Smallville sound on one hand: There’s typically a repeated chord progression on something like a Rhodes piano; the drums, either sourced from a classic Roland drum machine or sampled from disco or jazz, have been filtered so as to make the handclaps and hi-hats sound sharp yet battered, like your go-to kitchen knife. Added texture might come from a loop of faraway vocals, squashed like the sound of an AM radio transmission, or easy-listening strings, or maybe a snippet of seagulls. Where vinyl has been sampled, which is often, the clicks and pops are pushed prominently to the center of the mix. The overall effect is dreamy to the max: wistful, sparkling, jewel-toned. Suffused with both nostalgia and childlike innocence (Moomin takes his name from a Scandinavian comic strip), Smallville house verges on twee.
Genz signed with Brighton, UK label Wolf Music for his third album, Yesterday’s Tomorrows, but the particulars of his style haven’t changed much. His drums still have the bite of a fresh Granny Smith; his keys still glow like an aquarium. Even when his drums are keyed to the 120-BPM skip of the dancefloor, the melodies feel more evocative of kittens yawning or willows weeping. It’s an excellent sound for outdoor day parties of the sort that are popular in Berlin, where lazily ecstatic crowds sway in slow motion to a pitter-pat groove that never breaks its step.
There is one major difference this time out: No longer making just house music, he’s now stretching his template to encompass boom-bap hip-hop and even drum ‘n’ bass. Only four of the album’s eight tracks are the kind of four-to-the-floor deep house for which he’s known, and all of those are textbook Moomin. None is exactly surprising, but they all deliver a gratifying twist on his sound. “In Our Lifetime” gets its elliptical groove from jazz brushes. “Maybe Tomorrow” twists muted Rhodes and guitar counterpoints into an upbeat groove with a beatific mood. And both “Daysdays” and “Shibuya Feelings” achieve that alchemical reaction in which two chords and just the right drum sample combine to form a blissfully propulsive loop.
The stylistic detours on the album are less surprising than they may seem. Both drum ‘n’ bass cuts, “Into the Woods” and “Move On,” use the same tremolo-kissed electric pianos as his house tunes; so do the boom-bap tracks, “Fruits” and “949494.” Genz has always been a nostalgist at heart—his house tracks, like those of his peers, have typically looked to the early 1990s for inspiration—and his breakbeat cuts, both fast and slow, are rooted in the same era. His jungle tunes evoke LTJ Bukem and other producers who wedded jazz licks with plunging sub-bass, while his downtempo tracks could easily pass for something off the pioneering trip-hop label Mo Wax’s Headz comp. Genz even acknowledges his debt to the past with “949494,” a 94-BPM foray into abstract beats that could have come from 1994, the genre’s heyday.
All of these tracks are both skillful pastiches and fine productions in their own right—but, dwelling on the past as it does, the album doesn’t feel terribly urgent. It’s a cozy listen, no doubt. But instead of looking back to ’90s electronic music’s futurist impulse and taking those inspirations somewhere new, Yesterday’s Tomorrows seems mostly content to wrap itself up in the past and linger there, hitting the snooze button while history marches on.


Andrew Broder's follow-up to Ether Teeth trades some of his obscurantism for electro-pop song structures.

10th Avenue Freakout

As Fog, Andrew Broder's music sits at the crossroads of electro-pop, turntablism, found-sound collage, and indie-folk, and seems locked in a tug-of-war between clarity and deconstruction. Adding to this sonic tension is Broder's gentle and genial voice: It projects a tenderness absent from most collage-based music, which is typically either instrumental or features anesthetized vocals as a simplistic trope for modernity and alienation.
Those contradictions played a major role in the success of Fog's sprawling but almost brutally minimal Ether Teeth. It's a shame then that 10th Avenue Freakout pulls away from this blankness, thereby muting the effects of its incandescent peaks. Here Broder is breaking with obscurantism and moving toward catchy Postal Service-like song structures, but although the spacious, detailed production is still topnotch, the record suffers because Broder doesn't fully embrace his pop impulses.
"Hummer"-- the title track to Fog's 2004 EP-- recurs and is a template for this album. Over plodding drums and a clipped choral sample, Broder intones a melodically tedious verse that gives way to pristine, perfectly phrased falsetto harmonies. The off-kilter drums, patchy organs, and faltering vocal melody of "Can You Believe It?" evoke an electro-pop Neutral Milk Hotel-- especially the chirpy brass near its finale-- and the svelte, suburbanly sexy whirr of "We're Winning" dips into some cheeky cultural criticism: "Jesus Christ is my American Idol/ He's the brand new funky president." And "The Rabbit" returns to Ether Teeth's sharply drawn contrasts, surging and collapsing with counterintuitive élan.
If the whole album were this charming, it'd be an unqualified success, but too many songs proceed from point A to B with little variation or depth. Those tracks seem to equivocate between the collagist Fog and the pop Fog, reconciling their tensions instead of exploiting them. And so despite being peppered with luminosity, 10th Avenue Freakout is too often dragged down by aural wallpaper-- stretches of anonymity with few distinctive moments.


As with its predecessor, 2005's Pixel Revolt, nearly half of the tracks on this new John Vanderslice album make mention of, or allude to, the World Trade Center attacks, while the rest of the songs are awash in the debris and carnage from the tragedy and its aftermath.

Emerald City

After a two-year wait, John Vanderslice follows 2005's Pixel Revolt, an album waist-deep in post-9/11 dread and despair, with 2007's Emerald City, an album waist-deep in post-9/11 dread and despair. If the previous sentence makes the new album sound like it's a carbon copy of its predecessor, then you see what I'm getting at. Vanderslice reportedly wrote most of the album while trying to resolve some visa issues concerning his French girlfriend entering the U.S. The album's concluding track, "Central Booking", is the one song that directly addresses this issue, though its concluding thesis-- "looks like September won once again"-- hangs over the entire album.
As with Pixel Revolt, nearly half of the tracks make mention of, or allude to, the World Trade Center attacks, while the rest of the songs are awash in the debris and carnage from the tragedy and its aftermath. Even the album's title is a pointed reference, the "Emerald City" being a derogatory nickname for the "Green Zone" in downtown Baghdad. However, while Vanderslice's observations and commentary sounded fresh and fierce two years ago, the same essential message run through similarly sounding songs this time around rings hollow.
Musically, Vanderslice is on top of his game, deftly walking the line between tasteful and ostentatious, but even his skill in this regard can't soften the heavy-handed rhetoric. The queasy acoustic guitars on "Kookaburra" lend the song (which details the apocalyptic power of "lightning shot from the sky", a recurring theme) an unsettling air, while the lilting piano figure of "The Parade" sets a happy scene for what turns out to be another ironically bittersweet paean to the collapse of the towers (never mind an awful case of synthesizer flatulence in the bridge). Throughout the album, Vanderslice chooses to use amplified acoustic guitars, similar to what you'd hear on Spoon albums. They lend the more aggressive tracks (like "Time to Go" and "White Dove") a percussive propulsion, but these gains are undercut by the lyrics' lack of oomph.
In the past, Vanderslice could infuse both his fictional and non-fictional songs with a convincing emotional heft. This time around, he's as eloquent as he's ever been, refining and strengthening his short-story songwriting style. However, the constant referral to "lighting from the sky" and towers and drones flying by becomes as cloying and ineffective as the multiple references to 9/11 utilized by political hopefuls and pundits. Only on the album's concluding track does Vanderslice snap out of his insightful ennui and involve the listeners in what he's saying. The brief verses of "Central Booking" concerning the plight of his girlfriend and him being separated by distance and bureaucratic red tape ring truer than the purporetedly heady rush of imagery concerning a woman's dead daughter ("White Dove") or a Cindy Sheehan-esque war protester ("Tablespoon of Codeine"). The worst offender is "Time to Go", the portentous story of a wagon-train trying desperately to cross the country ("Burn the wagon wheels for heat").
Even on a short-and-sweet track like "Numbered Lithograph"-- a song that sounds an awful lot like something his last album's co-conspirator, the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle, would put to tape-- there's something missing. The idiosyncratic references that would ground the lyric sound forced, and the more immediate details ("Your cellphone shuddered and blinked/ It was your boyfriend again") don't resonate. Maybe the album falls short because of what Vanderslice claims at the end of "The Minaret": "I can see both sides, and it paralyzed me."