Category: Music reviews

The second of the albums I nabbed from Just Not Normal is Les Draps et la Plinthe, by Achnn. It’s a jangling odyssey set in a milieu of mildly cacophonous clatterings and digitally-artifacted clicks. This album achieved a depth of texture with an excellent application of sound layering, incorporating a seemingly endless host of both natural and artificial sounds (users of AT&T’s Edge network will find themselves reaching for their phone on more than one occasion, only to realize it’s the track and not RF interference). That being said, the cacophony rarely gives up any depth of emotion, which gives the overall album a very clinical and cold feeling; with the exception being “Rateau”, which manages to invoke a depth of texture and emotion.

Better in small doses, though superbly executed.
[Rating:3.5/5]

It’s been some time that I’ve been meaning to pick up some new noise and write a noise review or two, so I decided that my first stop should be the Just Not Normal netlabel. The offerings there are voluminous, so I scrolled through until I found a few albums that sounded interesting. Here’re my thoughts on this one:

I’m not as active in the noise/experimental scenes as I used to be – either online or in real life. Fortunately for me, noise hasn’t changed much in the last few years. Musings on Human Metamorphoses is a quick jaunt down the path of minimal audio manipulation. There are touches of classic electroacoustic dabbed throughout this offering of largely clashing snippets of audio. The brevity of this album is both a saving grace and a shortcoming. On the one hand, with ten tracks averaging around two minutes apiece, it never settles down long enough for the repetition of a single track to wear thin. On the other hand, the short track life and nonexistent track cohesion literally obliterate any chance of an evolution of sound or aural narrative.

Overall it is a well-executed album in its style. My current tastes trend toward something with a little more depth and grandeur, so take this review with that grain of salt.

[Rating:3/5]

It’s really difficult to articulate my feelings on this album. I was still in diapers when DEVO was at their prime, and they had long since stopped being an influential force in music (or even good, for that matter) by the time I discovered them as a teenager. So, to say that I’ve been waiting a long time for this album would be disingenuous. I never, in my wildest fantasies, anticipated that this album would happen, and now that it’s here, I find myself with mixed feelings about it.

First, it is very much DEVO in their purest pop form. The sound is unmistakable early 80s era DEVO. And this may be where I’m slightly disappointed, since that era was never as appealing to me as earlier DEVO efforts. Inevitably this album will be compared to Freedom of Choice, which is absolutely a fair assessment, but it does have some small elements of Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are DEVO!. It’s those little touches of aggro, the abrasive use of ring mod and Bob Mothersbaugh’s brutal guitar work (whenever it’s audible) that elevate this album above the din of similar work. As a collection of songs, it’s uneven: the first four tracks are rock solid, followed by a handful of decent tracks and ending with two tracks that really should have ended up on the cutting room floor. But, I won’t begrudge them one or two bad tracks on their first studio album in 20 years.

Ultimately I hope that this is the first in a series of new albums from the Forefathers of De-Evolution – us spuds sure could use some guidance in these times. If nothing else, I hope it serves as a reminder to the guys in the Faint, that this is how synthpop is done.

And yes this score is favorably weighted because it’s fuckin’ DEVO.

[Rating:4/5]

When listening to this album I can’t help but think that this is what it would sound like if Neil Young wrote songs that I like: stylistically, this is not the type of album I would typically find myself spinning on a regular basis. Jason Molina’s vocals, while nasally and occasionally questionably in key, are genuine and lend heart to an album rife with overt homage to folk and country. The genius of this album is apparent in the choice of traditional instrumentation that transcends the typical indie rock foundation of the songs it contains, and yet fails to fall into the soporific trappings of the neo-folk movement. It would have been a solid five star album, but for the jarringly incongruous inclusion of guest vocalists on a few of the tracks.

[Rating:4/5]

Every so often, I will stumble across an album that somehow gets stuck in my head and nothing I do will reverse the process. Renegades is one of those albums. I’ve a longstanding love/hate relationship with RATM. While I’ve been known to poke fun at the obvious hypocrisy of their message, Evil Empire is a rare example of a virtually perfect album. Unsurpassed is their ability to make funk so primal and brutal, and they didn’t fail to deliver with this collection of cover songs. The subject matter tackled here is diverse, interesting, and, at times, questionable. Where this album works best is when the band elevated a classic hip hop track to the level of blast-beat rock funk. Of course, this sets the stage for disappointment when they failed to funk up the rock tracks that they covered. The weakest track on the album was the one for which I had the highest excitement: DEVO’s “Beautiful World”. And we have to wonder why they chose “In My Eyes” as the Minor Threat track to cover (I would have killed to hear them funk up a cover of “Filler”… *drool* ). But, all-in-all, the album stands well as their denouement, and certainly has found it’s niche in my library.

[Rating:4/5]