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There is no better enduring image for Ted Leo than when I saw him at the Pitchfork Music Festival a few years ago. In a set where he had introduced new material that would soon be released as parts of Living With the Living, he ended it with one of the liveliest cuts from 2003's Hearts of Oak, "The Ballad of the Sin Eater". Tossing his body around stage and spitting out the song's derisive "You didn't think they could hate you now, did you?" chorus in the song's percussive coda Leo intentionally smacked himself in the head with his microphone, cutting his forehead open and bleeding all down his face before grabbing his guitar and ripping a tension-wire solo to end his set.
But Hearts of Oak is way more than "Sin Eater"'s acerbic wit. It's also the classic rock stomp of "Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone?", the grinning whistles of "Tell Balgeary, Balgury is Dead", the satisfying falsetto of "Dead Voices". Leo and his Pharmacists brought punk rock energy to Thin Lizzy guitars, married to Leo's delightfully intelligent takes on politics and personal relationships. Classic rock for a new generation.
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We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed was the second of the two records that Los Campesinos! released in 2008, an opening combo so deadly it might as well have been Ali's. There was something inimitably surprising and fun, but serious and impassioned as well, about those two records. They burst with with child-like zeal, tempered by a maturity present even behind their most unhinged musical moments.
We Are Beautiful is slightly darker than its predecessor, a crunchier, more aggressive sound at its core, like the guitar tones that open the album on "Ways to Make It Through the Wall" or the chugging, half-cocked attack of the verses on the title track. Previously undetected tastes for feedback crop up, particularly on "Heart Swells/Pacific Daylight Time" and instrumental respite "Between an Erupting Earth and an Exploding Sky". At their core, of course, Los Campesinos! were the same anti-romance romantics of their debut, but by adding new elements to their sound they proved they would be able to be more than nerdy kids who couldn't dance.
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Godspeed You! Black Emperor is a pretty dramatic band name, and Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven is a pretty dramatic album title. It fits. They're a dramatic band. Post-rock itself hinges on an overabundance of drama and Godspeed were the band that both perfected the art and kind of ruined it for everyone else. After they figured out to stay on the less pretentious side of the line from the gruff reading of their debut's opener "Dead Flag Blues", the game was over. After Skinny Fists there was nowhere else to go.
Strangely, it was precisely because the band dialed their pretensions down a bit that the music was able to meet them. Opener "Storm" begins the record triumphantly, with cresting strings and horns and militant snare rolls, but when the clouds eventually break and the field recording of Barco A.M./P.M.'s anti-bum policy creep in, they become affecting, not obnoxious. Similar is "Sleep"'s beginning, with Murray Ostril's Coney Island memories that are so honest that the lend a de facto honesty to the entire haunting movement. It was unexpected moments like those that justified the band's penchant for dramatics.
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On Advisory Committee, Mirah's second album had Phil Elvrum, the man behind the Microphones, come in again to man the boards and produce the piece, like he had on her debut. It's easy to think of this as a strange move in 2002. After all, Elvrum's own albums were notable sonically for their low fidelity, with Elvrum talking about recording with the microphone underneath a bucket. But Elvrum knew what he was doing with the San Francisco singer/songwriter, giving remarkable clarity to all of the individual and unique guitar tones and drum sounds the varied album asked for, and wisely lending Mirah's child-like voice a maturity and wisdom this time around that wasn't heard on her debut.
Elvrum pulls out all the stops for the faux cowboy opener "Cold, Cold Water". Western guitars give way to strings give way to huge organs give way to plucked mandolins give way back to gritty blues riffs - all in the 75 seconds. But it's deeper cuts, like the clever way the guitars burst over the horizon on "The Sun", or the home-demo pop song quality of "Recommendation", that showcased the seeming unlimited potential in the pairing between the two. Subsequent albums would prove Mirah to be an innately gifted songwriter, but Advisory Committee still stands as her most towering achievement.
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Even at the beginning of their career Death Cab For Cutie sounded at least mature, if not old. At the time that Death Cab's second album We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes came out, lead man Ben Gibbard was still fresh-faced at twenty-four. But his songs has a reasonability in their romance that seemed beyond that age, with a self-critical sense of honesty that would have been more than many 24-year olds would have dared.
Where The Photo Album was polished and clean, We Have the Facts was raw and abrasive in a bracing manner, the slight lack of clarity making observations like "I could taste your lipstick on the filter" that much more realistic. It's also the darkest Death Cab album this side of Narrow Stairs, even the relatively energetic "Company Calls" is followed by its crushing epilogue. When Gibbard claims on closing track "Scientist Studies" that "This is my last defense," it's less a last stand than a final admittance far beyond 24.
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Common has always been known for his freestyles and with good reason. Seeing the dude ramble poetically for around seven straight minutes at Lollapalooza in 2006 was as impressive a musical display as I've ever seen, right up there with John Stanier's polyrhythmic drumming for Battles at Pitchfork Music Festival. But it's even more impressive to see a mind that understands language on such an advance level take to the paper, using the time it takes to write to plot out its verbal gymnastics.
Take for example the albums original single "The Corner", packed so densely and effortless with internal rhymes that it seems almost accidental. Musically the album is so smooth, with J Dilla and Kanye West at the height of their respective powers, and they seem to regard the album as a restrictive project, appropriating their strengths into unfuckwithable neo-soul like a painter attempting to make a masterpiece with only two colors of paint. Common plays his own games, mixing relationship and religious philosophy on "Faithful" and the courtroom drama of "Testify", but he's at his most incisive dealing with the problems he's seen first hand like on "The Food" and "The Corner", bringing intelligent hood stories with impressive wordplay that's just as impressive as Common's freestyle skills.
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A couple of albums after Personal Journals Sage Francis would turn his wrath on his critics, telling them disdainfully that "This is hip-hop for the people/Stop calling it emo." He was attacking both the idea that his take on hip-hop was somehow less than "true" hip-hop and the idea of lazy criticism at the same time, but it failed to take into account that, especially on Personal Journals, nobody was speaking in the hip-hop vernacular with his level of brutal, open honesty.
Sage has always been a heart-on-his sleeve rapper, his subsequent albums have been perhaps slightly less personal, but no less honest. What sets Journals apart musically is the way that Anticon's producers complimented Sage's harsh, gritty voice and rapid-fire delivery in a way that none of his albums since have been able to match. Dig the glistening pianos of "Message Sent"'s meditation on the written word or the creepy guitar arpeggios of the mismatched love on "Specialist". The album's highlight is the sister self-mutilation tale "Inherited Scars". It was the song that would ensure the emo comparisons, but it's transcends that genre in its brutal evaluations ("Is it my place to put a smile on your face?" Sage roughly asks), becoming something that justifies Sage's later request.
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Living alone is difficult. Striking out for the first time on your own, or even if it's just the first time in awhile, can seem unsafe and scary; there's no safety not or, if there is one, it's dreadfully obscured. Peter Silberman's concept album Hospice showed starkly how much isolation could negatively impact a life, through the theatrical fatalism that cropped up in drama so personal and haunting that it was hard to feel separated from it.
Even at its loudest moments - the caterwauling chorus of "Sylvia", the extended, crashing coda of "Kettering" - Hospice still has a gentle, hushed feel, one that suggest the privatization of these cathartic moments, like hiding in a closet to punch a wall or burying your head in pillows to scream. In fact, it's this lack of confrontation that drives the characters of Hospice like the turn-the-other-way abortion tale "Bear". A product of Silberman's year and a half reclusive behavior in New York, Hospice used something intensely singular to give emotion to a feeling wholly universal.
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While Hearts of Oak was raw and vibrant, inclusive of the punk energy and spirit Leo must have found camaraderie with at San Francisco punk label Lookout! Records, which once served as Green Day's home before they attempted to become some strange amalgamation of the Clash and U2. On the other hand, Leo's precursor to Hearts of Oak shared similarities of sound, but The Tyranny of Distance was a suffocating affair that managed to seem crushing even when it was attempting levity.
No other Leo album have had a song so intentionally heavy as the monstrous eight-minute "Stove By a Whale", where Leo sings from wherever Julian Casablancas was on the first two Strokes albums over gritty, reappropriated blues riffs, or as tense as penultimate track "St. John the Divine"'s echoing guitar stabs and slithering bass. Even the first half of pop songs ("Dial Up", "Parallel or Together?", "Timorous Me", "Under the Hedge") feel inexplicably bleak, setting up for the album's resigned second half. While darker, it captured a more personally focused Leo; with his considerable songwriting skills were turned to more universal issues, people were drawn to his deft tackling of human emotion.
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We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed was, in a way, a reactionary album by Los Campesinos! Why would a band with such a great first record rush to put out a second one that already showed them embracing new sounds? Because their debut Hold On Now, Youngster... was such a brilliant and effective mission statement that without answering the question of where the band was going to go from there quickly, they might not have gotten off the ground at all.
More unabashedly joyous than We Are Beautiful, at least musically, Hold On Now, Youngster... made liberal use of raucous group shouts, the play between boy and girl vocals, and packing as much high-octane burst into the album's twelve songs that seven people could possibly load. Yesterday I mentioned that Menomena's Friend And Foe was addition by subtraction, well Hold On Now, Youngster... was addition by addition, piling layer over glorious layer until every one of the listener's pleasure centers was activated like a kid visiting Disney Land for the first time. They had to follow this up quick, otherwise they'd have been lost at Space Mountain forever.
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