REALLY disappointing… normally if I’ve heard the two biggest singles from a label and nothing more, I expect the quality (and style!) on their other records to vary. It’s understandable. But DFA have built their reputation on a mere four 12″s and a handful of other tracks, so I assumed the stuff I’d heard was very nearly as good as what I hadn’t.

The non-famous LCD Soundsystem track is undistinctive; there’s no wit in the lyrics or edge to the music. The non-famous Rapture track is worse. Of the two bands I didn’t know, The Juan Maclean sound at least promising, and the weaker of their two songs seems to be a studio-mixed live track, so I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt; Black Dice must just like the sound of tape machines running, because there’s a radical lack of point to either of their contributions.

I’ve clearly let the Broken Social Scene thing get under my skin. I don’t know why. The last time a three-dozen-member band from Canada with pretentious packaging whose music bored me to tears became the toast of the indie world I might have grumbled a bit but I didn’t worry that I’d fundamentally lost touch with my own culture or anything.

And yet when Pitchfork reviewed this album by BSS vocalist Emily Haines I was simultaneously repulsed by the idea of this clique getting any more press than they already had, and intrigued by the idea that maybe there WAS a good record involved. Okay, the review could have been as misleading as everything I’d read about BSS, but I WANTED to believe. So I downloaded some samples from Metric’s website, and while they weren’t instantly compelling, they sounded like *songs* with *melodies* and everything, and I decided to buy it.

The sound’s very good; if every neo-new-wave band were recorded (or produced? I don’t know) this well I would be very happy. And Haines has a very nice voice for this kind of thing, sounding every once in a while like Kay Hanley fronting New Order… but she can barely write melodies: promising tunes trail off in mid-line and choruses make themselves stand out with repetition instead of memorability. The lyrics grate in places and not others, but all of them suffer from the appearance of having been written as prose (about US imperialism, the problems of fashion, etc.) and translated into song-words.

It’s almost more frustrating to like this somewhat than it would have been to just hate it. I don’t enjoy scoffing about things, as I am inexorably moved to do during the song that rips off “My Sharona”. Come on.

Before there were any rumors about a Pixies reunion, I’d thought Black’s double-album from last year was the most Pixies-ish thing he’d done in years. So when said rumors surfaced I wasn’t as skeptical as some of my friends. This album reenacts the worst excesses and pointlessnesses of the middle Catholics albums, though. If not for eMusic I would have already given up, though I guess I’m on board for the reunion tour. Just in case.

In “Horrible Day” Black sings “let me get my coat / and let me get my stash” in an echo of the changes Mark E. Smith made to the lyrics of “A Day In The Life” when The Fall covered it. Coincidence? I mean, I’m sure Frank Black has heard the Fall. I’m less sure he heard a Beatles cover they did 15 years ago on a half-assed NME-sponsored tribute album, but it’s possible. And yes, speculating about this is more interesting than talking about the album.

The eMusic blurb for this band blew me away with badness, so I quote it in full:

Here then, is the Swords Project, a category-defying band that, like it’s hometown mascot, samples its surroundings, processes them, and turns them into a beautiful exhale.

Note that, among other problems, it does not reveal where the band are from nor what the mascot is. But the record is very good. I’ve been sorely disappointed by a few records claiming to bring “song” style to the world of artsy post-rock, most notably the Broken Social Scene album… I swear the people who called that ‘catchy’ had never actually heard a song with a chorus. Anyway, this seems to fulfill that promise, even though nobody billed it that way to me. I would enjoy having a little more to hang on to…

Despite an album title so stupid I initially brushed off several references to them as “noise rock” and continued assuming they were hip-hop-aping cutie-popsters (like Sissy Bar or worse, Len — you remember “If You Steal My Sunshine”, right?), Hella had me for the first minute and a half of this record. On the first track, the crappy sound quality *blunts* the music’s abrasiveness, smearing the guitar squall into a kind of junkyard halo, with additional grating noises all just distinct enough to stay separate under the lo-fi convolution. But then Hella descend into jam-punk for two long songs, and the somewhat-entertaining last track isn’t enough for me not to go back to figuring that they’re dimwit posers.

Since TVOTR are apparently friends with fellow post-punk-revivers Liars, I’m suspicious about this record’s title. Though if you look at the track listing of a Liars record, you’ll see that there’s no way that favor’s getting repaid unless the song is called “watch out for the earthquake there’s tv on the radio ow my foot” and it’s possible that might not be good publicity.

Anyway, the slow-burn guitars and thumpy rhythms combined with very UN-indie vocals work out well. It doesn’t quite sound like anything I’m used to hearing, which means the good parts more than carry the dull parts. Kinda expecting the album to be better, though; there’s no good way to sequence two intense songs and three calmer ones on the same EP, while a full-length with the same proportions can be satisfying.

This has a little of the GSL spazz, but not enough that I’d make the connection on my own. It’s also kind of heavy like the stuff in my college radio station’s library that I could never get into because it seemed too much like metal (before just really liking metal was hip, natch). The thing is, though, that it also reminds me a lot of Interpol; not in an imitative way, just like different influences got them to the same place. Or maybe that all those Touch And Go bands I didn’t like (one of whom seems to have contained future members of Vaz) were absorbing and processing Interpol’s 80s influences in ways I didn’t understand. Because this is pretty good.

Like last year’s Emm Gryner album, this has pixellation in the cover art visible enough to be ugly, but not so obvious as to seem intentional. I know neither one’s operating at a level where scary-professional graphics folks are necessarily involved, but if my name was going to be on a record, I would look at it in a bright light at least once before sending it to press… just sayin’…

The Gibbard half of this provides interesting data for consideration next to the problem of Death Cab For Cutie getting mediocre just as Gibbard got a wider audience with the Postal Service. His songwriting really has changed, and from my point of view it’s not for the better; he might find his way to a new stable style, and he might not. But the simple acoustic settings of these songs make them so much more satisfying than most of The Photo Album and Transatlanticism that I feel somewhat vindicated and happy anyway. I hope that in a few years I won’t look back at this EP and think that it just dragged out the slow end of my fondness for Gibbard a little longer.

I don’t know Kenny’s band (The American Analog Set) and neither his three original songs nor his too-faint cover of DCFC’s “Line Of Best Fit” makes me want to, but there’s nothing obviously wrong, either.

From descriptions of the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, I had concluded that they sounded sort of like Low. Maybe the ‘family’ thing did it; maybe when I think of mislaid photographs I expect solemnity; maybe I was just confused by the reverent tones people talked about them in.

I still don’t know what the TFSP sound like, but having downloaded this repulsive solo album by Jason Trachtenburg, I no longer care. He has a terrible voice (neither trained, which I sometimes don’t like anyway, nor interesting or expressive) and loads every. single. line. of his lyrics with that awkward rhythm that says “aren’t I clever for singing about something unusual?” No, that rhythm isn’t a deal-breaker on its own for me; I’m an Atom And His Package fan, after all. But like a lot of other “funny” songwriters, Trachtenburg also kneecaps his own syntax to make rhymes fit and, once you get past the surface gimmickry of his “strange” subject matter, doesn’t have anything to say. That’s an important distinction — at first blush it’s more interesting to write a song about a radio antenna than about a love affair, but if, despite having the benefits of novelty at your disposal, you write a song about that antenna as lyrically tired and uninsightful as any fifth-generation ripoff of a Beatles song about a girl, then, well, it’s a swindle, not a hook. And seeing how front-loaded with gimmicks the Family Slideshow Players thing is, I think I sense a modus operandi.