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Places Like This | Architecture In Helsinki
Polyvinyl Records | 5th June

Review by Tom Fairman

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Polyvinyl Records
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Sounds like … a slightly-sexualised High-5

A Mess+Noise reviewer once described listening to Sarah Blasko’s music like “sucking on candy while thinking about diabetes.” In that case, listening to Architecture in Helsinki, the iconic Melbourne-based Indie group, is like sucking on candy while thinking about sugar.

This ultra-sweet aesthetic has been a common theme for the band. 2000’s ‘Finger’s Crossed’ sampled a garbling baby on the track ‘The Owl’s Go’, and 2004’s ‘In Case We Die’ featured ‘Maybe You Can Owe Me’, a primary-school love ballad for a pair of innocent, naïve schoolmates whose sleep-depriving attraction to one another was mixed equally with fear.

On Places Like This, they seem to be aiming for more maturity. Let’s call it the ‘early-high-school’ phase of their career. It’s that time of your life where you’re no longer afraid to dance, yet you have no real idea where those moves may lead you. A good example is ‘Hold Music’ - while at times reminiscent of a saucy R’n’B anthem, it ends up sounding something like a slightly-sexualised High-5. The sweet naivety of the ‘techture in ‘sinki pervades despite their desire to grow up, and with a record as enjoyable as this, you can’t really hold their saccharin sound against them.

Sadly, the album as a whole doesn’t have the stamina to make an indelible impression on your music collection. That said, opener ‘Red Turned White’ may, in some respects, be the most redeeming and impressive song on the album. The song evolves from a disjointed drum beat and seemingly out of key vocals before slowly, like an image coming into focus, twisting into a realised track you can damn well shake your booty to. From chaos to disco in 2:46 - How can one complain?

7 out of 10

Lies For The Liars | The Used
Reprise | 22nd May

Review by Tom Fairman

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Reprise Records
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Sounds like … masturbation

In my heady days as a young punk-rocker in the obligatory shitty band, my bandmates and I would often indulge a joke together – the “nu-emo-breakdown”. You know how it goes – the songs pacing along, all concentrated teenage angst, and then bam, it’s bridge time kids. The drumbeat is chopped in half, the guitars burst their bounds, a violin or some string arrangement comes out of fucking nowhere, and before you know it, you’re screaming your heart out at the crescendo of the music and accordingly your emotional investment. Game, Set, Match.

The Used’s new album makes clever use of this cunning emotional technique on tracks 1 through to 11 (for those playing along at home, ‘Earthquake’ employs it at precisely 0:36). It’s ashamedly easy to get caught up, similar to lingering a little too long on a Today/Tonight report. And the usual gothic themes are there – death, weakness (‘The Bird & The Worm’), death, religious indifference (‘The Ripper’), death, and of course, don’t forget the triumphant, acoustic-love-ballad sometime around track 9 (‘Find A Way’).

This music is designed to elicit emotional catharsis. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the manner of The Used is that it’s self-indulgent, repetitive and superficially addictive– a bit like masturbation. Sure, you’re blown away by the sheer pleasure of the mastering. You think you’re convinced of its sincerity after wave upon wave of intense sound, accentuated by Bert’s lead vocal screaming. But, there is no subtlety in the work, no hint of intelligence that even My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade demonstrated, and there is no further reward on repeated listens. The depth and sincerity hinted at by the lyrical content and album art, upon closer inspection, is just like mascara - the shadows merely being painted on.

3 out of 10

SideA/SideB

Cassadaga | Bright Eyes
Saddle Creek | April 10th

Reviews by Tom Fairman & Jigantor

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Saddle Creek Records
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In this regular feature, two of our writers review the same album, providing two perspectives on the same record. After all, when it comes to music, beauty really is in the ear of the beholder.

Review by Tom Fairman

Sounds like … the love child of Neil Young and Bob Dylan with a dash of M Ward.

Conor Oberst, the mind behind Bright Eyes, is not the new Bob Dylan. Oberst has been plagued by this comparison ever since his brand of semi-political folk-rock was brought to a wider audience with 2002’s Lifted. He is, however, an extremely prolific and dedicated songwriter. And Cassadaga is another chapter in his saga following 2004’s double heavyweight I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn.

Of the divergent musical paths forged in the wake of his previous albums, Oberst seems to have pursued the Western-essence found on I’m Wide Awake. Opening ominously, Cassadaga crystallises the ills of modern society in a single sentence – “Corporate or colonial/the movement is unstoppable/like the body of the centrefold/it spreads." Four Winds follows, complete with a violin riff bizarrely reminiscent of Santa Clause is Coming to Town, which works surprisingly well.

The highlight of the album comes midway through, on Middleman - a potential rock song that has been oppressed and distilled into a suspiciously gentle acoustic piece, which works exceptionally well for Oberst. The song simmers, threatening to burst its mere musical constraints, listeners eagerly anticipating a slash of distorted guitar – or something loud - to break the tension. But this never comes, and by the conclusion, it’s not a track of wasted potential - rather, a cause to marvel at Oberst’s fine grasp of restraint and ability to weave boundless energy within every guitar chord and soft string pluck.

Oberst doesn’t always nail it - Make a Plan To Love Me takes the tempo of 2004’s single Lua, but holds none of its strength, beauty or potency. This sentiment pervades the album. Yet the mastery of Oberst’s work is that which initially appears to be mostly repetitious country ballads, with dedication, reveals a taciturn glow that refuses to be extinguised and compels you to return.

7 out of 10

We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank | Modest Mouse
Epic | March 17th

Review by Tom Fairman

Website | Epic Records
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Sounds like … Franz Ferdinand with personality disorders.

Modest Mouse, fronted by the enigmatic Issac Brock, have returned with their first long player since 2004’s mainstream success, Good News For People Who Love Bad News, and have thus entered into an era of their career where they’ll find every Tom, Seth and Mischa scouring the tracks of We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank for the next foot-stomping Float On follow up.

We Were Dead opens strongly with March Into The Sea, a frenetic portrait of complex commercialised modern life that echoes the bands work on 1998’s The Moon & Antarctica –“We all stumbled round tangled up in the cords from our phones, V.C.R. and our worldly woes.” The track, which sets the tone for the rest of the album, builds to a crescendo that gives way to first single Dashboard, which seems to answer Float On’s “we’ll float on, good news is on the way” with “we scheme and we scheme but we always blow it.” James Mercer of The Shins provides back up vocals on the infectious We Have Everything, and the 8-minute Spitting Venom remains strong despite varying between sea-shanty, blistering rock and indie groove.

No artist deserves all of their post-‘hit’-art to be endlessly compared and graded against their ‘breakthrough’ work, yet this is unfortunately inevitable. We Were Dead, while perhaps being slightly overlong, not as intriguing as The Moon & Antarctica, or as easily accessible as Good News, should be seen for what it is, and that is a strong, intelligent album in the arc of Modest Mouse’s career. Here they have proven their ability to write irresistibly enjoyable dance-rock songs that bear a razors edge that quietly rips at modern life, only revealed when the lyric booklet is pried open – suitably mimicking the commercialized culture they so often criticize.

7 out of 10

Jarvis | Jarvis Cocker
Rough Trade | March 4th

Review by Tom Fairman

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Rough Trade Records
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Sounds like … a quiet evening, a good book, and a glass of red wine with the former front man of Pulp.

Before I delve into this review, there’s something you should know.

I had a little aurgasm the first time I heard Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time, the hip-rockin’, head-bobbin’ first single off Jarvis. So with my rock-sytocin levels going through the roof, the following review may be a little skewed.

With Pulp on hiatus, Jarvis Cocker found himself free to indulge in some unfettered song writing, the result being the ear-pleasing aforementioned first single, originally written for Lil’ Blue Eyes herself, Nancy Sinatra.

Jarvis rattles along with the infectious sardonic wit that was so representative of Pulp’s work, with Fat Children a pitch-perfect example. Yet, there are numerous departures from that Pulp-sound, with other tracks on the album employing softly played pianos and brushed drums, creating a solo record that is more synonymous with “intimate” than “personal.”

However, the real beauty of Jarvis is the urgency to the dryness, with Cocker pleading with fainéant youth on From Auschwitz to Ipswich, “can’t you please do something with your life?” The (unfortunately secret) track, Cunts are Still Running the World, is the most hilarious, brutally honest and perhaps only disco-protest-song of our generation. From beginning to end, it safely eludes falling into the Bob Geldof & co. preaching pit, Jarvis seeing that the problems of the world can’t be solved by a $2 white plastic wristband.

So as the album slowly stops spinning, and you’re left panting, staring lovingly at everyone’s favourite bespectacled hipster, I can only hope that it was as good for you as it was for me.

9 out of 10