twgeek

The first time I heard a Vampire Weekend song two years ago, I was less than impressed and never gave them a chance, particularly after reading some unfavorable comments regarding how they ripped off some great Afro-pop and were just a bunch of rich kids from Columbia. Unfair? Sure, but that first song I heard simply didn’t appeal to me and that was really enough to make up my mind.

Now we have “Contra”. I have purposefully not read anything about this album because I wanted to have an unbiased take on it. I did see that it has reached a level of “universal acclaim” on metacritic.com, but so did Vampire’s eponymous first album, so that isn’t saying much. Taking an impulsive risk with my $9.99, I purchased “Contra” from iTunes. I can truthfully say that it is not money misspent. It is an album packed with great melodies, infectious Afro-pop rhythms, and loads of fun. Let me get one thing out of the way before I get to the good stuff. The lyrics, while at times witty and very funny, are perhaps too full of self-indulgent references to the hipster Manhattan lifestyle.

What makes “Contra” a good album is the musicianship. Starting with “Horchata”, a song about pining for summer days in mid-December, Vampire Weekend reels the listener in with a heady mix of drums, Caribbean/African-influenced percussion, driving bass, marimbas, and tight rhythm guitar. “White Sky” and “Holiday” continue to develop the sound while keeping up the quick pace. At this point I couldn’t care less about the lyrical content; I just want to hear them play.

The pace finally slows down with “Taxi Cab” midway through the album. This is a very well-placed song as it is the perfect mid-set breather. This respite is short-lived, however, as the very next song, “Run” picks up the pace again. This is the first of three songs that highlight “Contra”, along with “Cousins” and “Giving Up the Gun”. The rhythms are at their most complex, the keyboards offer a dissonance not heard elsewhere on the ablum, and there is a sing-along quality to the songs that would make them an absolute blast to experience live.

“Contra” then tails off a bit with the last two tracks, “Diplomat’s Son” and “I Think Ur a Contra”. The former is a strange hybrid between Afro-pop and Reggae and is just a little too muddy for my liking. “I Think Ur a Contra” is just a mess of a song. Slow, full of atmospheric keyboards and lacking the precise, angular rhythms displayed in the rest of the album, it is a disappointing end to an otherwise brilliantly fun album.

The self-titled debut from the supergroup Them Crooked Vultures sounds quite familiar, but refreshingly new. For the uninitiated, TCV is Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters) on drums, Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age, Kyuss, Eagles of Death Metal) on guitar and lead vocals, and John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin) on bass and keys. This is the dream super group for kids who grew up listening to Zeppelin and then, as teenagers, migrated to the hard alt rock of the early 90s.

“No One Loves Me & Neither Do I” starts off the album sounding like Queens of the Stone Age with better bass and drums, but it quickly evolves into a blending of the best stylizations of the members’ previous groups. That description may prompt some worries about self-indulgent excess, but the experiment really does work. Unlike many other super groups from the past decade (Audioslave and Velvet Revolver immediately come to mind), TCV seem to have taken the approach of writing the music together in the same space. The signature sounds are there from each individual, but the songs never sound like a mash-up; it is obvious that there was a great deal of give and take during the writing process. Because of how well the music works, it is easy to be in total awe of the brilliant musicianship displayed throughout the album. 

There is not a dud on “Them Crooked Vultures”, but there are three highlights, (interestingly enough the fifth, sixth, and seventh songs) starting with “Elephants”. This track clocks in at almost seven minutes, but does not meander aimlessly. It begins as a raucous blues instrumental that settles into a slack blues rhythm during the verses, only to find its way back to a straight 4/4 tempo during the choruses. The lyrics are intensely personal, depicting a dysfunctional relationship between two people with huge personalities that explode when they are together. It is a grinder of a song, the best representation of Homme’s stoner rock on the album.

“Scumbag Blues” sounds like the spawn of Cream, perfectly evoking Jack Bruce’s falsetto and thumping bass, Ginger Baker’s jazz-influenced drumming, and Eric Clapton’s wailing guitars. “Scumbag Blues” is no mere imitation, though; instead, it is a well-placed tribute to the original rock super group. It is the work of three musicians at their finest, and if it doesn’t make you want to get up and dance, you must be dead.

My favorite song on the album is “Bandoliers”, a classic rock breakup song featuring a long instrumental break near the end. With lyrics again focusing on a fiery and intense relationship, the song is built around a distinctly Eastern European folk-influenced sound. Jones’ keys and Homme’s guitar play off each other while Grohl pounds out a staccato rhythm. “Bandoliers” is unrelenting lyrically and musically and best represents the overall theme of “Them Crooked Vultures”: brilliant musicians playing incredibly well-written music at volume 11.

Okay, so this is not the newest album I could review; I have bought much more music in the months since April, but I started taking notes as soon as I subscribed to the iTunes Pass for Sounds Of The Universe
and nothing was going to prevent me from following through with it. Besides, I had to start somewhere, right? There are a few more older albums that I will write about soon; maybe you will discover some new-ish music to listen to and everything will be right with the world. On with the review…

Released April 21, 2009

Listening to the open drones, clicks, and blips of “In Chains”, the first track on Depeche Mode’s latest effort, Sounds of the Universe, I can’t help but wonder if the year is 1985. Analog synthesizers dominate the album so much that it almost seems to be the entire point of the exercise, and for that, perhaps Depeche Mode should take a lot of criticism.

On “In Chains” it genuinely works, though. As the guitars of Martin Gore and moody vocals of David Gahan kick in we are taken further away from the 80s synth-pop of Depeche Mode to the alt-dance-rock of 1993’s Songs of Faith and Devotion. This is full-on electronic gospel music preaching to the converted. Gore’s lyrics speak of the overwhelming paralysis felt upon seeing the object of his obsession, while synths and guitars create a foundation upon which Gahan’s tense delivery builds until the song finally releases us in a single fading distorted note.

Unfortunately this is the high point of Sounds of the Universe. Throughout the album the song-writing is inconsistent and at times inferior to past DM efforts. There are some very solid songs on the album (we’ll get to those in a moment), but about half the tracks sound like first cuts or just song fragments frozen in the middle of the creative process. These are typical DM songs layered with the synths, beats, and harmonies that DM became famous for in the 1980s, but without definition or resolution. It is quite odd to hear this coming from a band that so completely relies on the tools of the studio to create their music. Whether it is due to the absence of Alan Wilder, who left the band in 1995 after tiring of touring, or just an unwillingness to do the hard work and finish the songs, DM fail to deliver fully on the promise that these ideas suggest.

Foremost amongst the failures is “Hole to Feed”. The title suggests the now-stereotypical DM S&M/bondage themes, but lyrically the song must mean something only to Gore because it is completely nonsensical:

We are here
We can love
We share something
I’m sure that you mean the world to me
When you get
What you need
There’s no way of knowing
What you’ll have
Is another hole to feed

 

In the past, DM‚Äôs lyrical transgressions could be forgiven because at least the music was inventive and catchy, but the analog synths sound so dated and the structure is so aimless that ‚ÄúHole to Feed‚Äù fails on every level. 

‚ÄúFragile Tension‚Äù and ‚ÄúJezebel‚Äù are album filler. Dreadful lyrics that could have been written by a 14 year old heartbroken boy are made even worse by the dominant analog synthesizers—you know the kind that were so popular on early ‚Äò80s top 40 radio? They are everywhere on these two songs and the result is distracting and irritating—the whining synths are poison to any chance DM had at making these songs worth repeated plays. ‚ÄúJezebel‚Äù is the one song on the album in which Gore sings lead vocals. While some fans may enjoy his falsetto tenor voice, clearly these lyrics should not be sung by anyone without laughing:

They call you Jezebel 
Whenever we walk in 
you’re going straight to hell
For wanted acts of sin - they say, 
and that I’ll have to pay 
But I need you just this way
They call you Jezebel
For what you like to wear
You’re morally unwell
They say you never care for me
But what they fail to see is that your games are the key

Open their eyes to the beauty

Open their hearts to the fun
‚Ä®Open their minds to the idea that you don’t own someone

 

Seriously?

Thankfully the remaining tracks do not suffer from these missteps. “Wrong”, the lead single for the album, sounds like a grade-A track from Songs of Faith & Devotion. Armed with a military march beat and an anxious melody guided by heavy synths and guitars, Gahan recounts a life of mistakes that was preordained. Sung from the past tense, however, we are led to believe that he finds redemption. On a side note, the video is a must-see.

“Peace” picks up where “In Chains” left off, providing the album with another hymn. The music builds grandly through the verses to each chorus and repeats with each verse, hinting at a change to an up-tempo dance beat that just never arrives. The tension created while Gahan sings “peace will come to me, just wait and see, peace will come to me, it’s an inevitability” is almost unbearable, but the juxtaposition of sound and lyric makes this a killer song.

Sounds of the Universe varies wildly from solidly structured, meaningful songs to cringe-inducing throwaways from DM’s infancy as a band. Listeners looking for a return to classic DM form will be disappointed to hear only three quintessential Depeche Mode songs (“Wrong”, “Perfect”, and “Corrupt”). While buying the entire album can not be recommended (and certainly only the biggest fans should purchase the iTunes Pass for the album), there are some really solid songs that form the best post-Wilder work DM has done.

Rating: On a scale ranging from poor to exceptional, Sounds of the Universe is average.