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7 Music Reviews

Bochum Welt, Elan (Fuzzy Box)

Bochum Welt's new album Elan has song titles like "Joystick Coupler" and "Vectors in Full Colors, but don't expect cartoonish video-game sounds. Instead think of the glow of a TV in the middle of the night. That is, the album as a whole offers a warm glow of sound, an ambient blanket that's short but comforting. Yet it isn't that sort of amorphous, fog-of-static kind of ambient; there's melodies, and at times the word "pop" might enter your brain, even though when it's all over you mostly remember that glow, that feeling. There's an Italian pop star named Garbo somewhere in the mix even; likely she's one of those voices that emerges occasionally to coo sweet nothings. When you read about Bochum Welt's two members - Gianluigi Di Costanzo and Brian Salter - they sound like computer scientists who've stumbled into the arena of soundtrack-composing, or perhaps the other way around. Elan was composed completely on computer. Something about the sound has me imagining giant old computers, the kind that took up whole rooms, though I'm sure they're using the newest and latest. Perhaps it's the way some of the music conjures up a retro-future vibe. Or, as a technology-slow kind of person, maybe there's a level of mystery to the whole process of composing music on a computer that gets me thinking about other mysterious computers of the past. Whatever techniques and tools they're actually using, though, are working for them; they're using a machine to create a glow that's alive, that's pulling you in and slowing your world down. - dave heaton

Dogme95, Arcadian Hymns (Mission Label)

Naming your musical project Dogme95 sets up expectations, to say the least. Has Nick Wright found a way to translate the Danish film collective's "rules" about filmmaking into music-making, or is he just banking on name recognition, on the inference of coolness and innovation that come with the name? Dogme95, the musical group, does have a sparse, lo-fi sound, so perhaps Wright sees himself as seeking the same sort of "purity" in his music that those directors sought in film. Yet it still seems like a ridiculous name, if only because it sets up expectations of innovation that he can't help but fail to reach. All of that said, Dogme95's album Arcadian Hymns is nonetheless an enjoyable playful and thoughtful work. Wright gives the appearance of fooling around: he tinkers with keyboards, thumb pianos, and lots of percussion; his vocals are an odd mix of chanting, crooning, and meandering; his songs occasionally seem formless at first listen. Yet in the process he sometimes emulates a spiritual sort of singing that makes the "hymns" reference in the title pertinent. The album opens with his call "Summon My Baptist Ways", and later the songs sometimes have the vague feeling of being hymns and sometimes resemble a rough and rambling sort of free meditation, like letting spirits lose from your body. The bulk of the album consists of more straightforward pop songs, small and catchy. Yet even those are puzzling in a good way, as the album veers from tiny love songs to accounts of UFOs on the ocean floor to childlike sing-songy tunes to meditations on the Civil War. Arcadian Hymns might not live up to the Dogme95 name in terms of clarity of vision, but the album's messiness ultimately reveals itself to be depth. The album's all over the place; Dogme95 trip through centuries in a primitive time machine powered by tambourines, and along the way they stumble across a host of unique associations, ideas, and sounds. - dave heaton

Drexon Field, Stratsophere Control (AttackNine Records)

Drexon Field's Stratosphere Control is like the electronic-music equivalent of a cereal bowl filled with marshmallow moons and pink vampires and purple clouds. The track titles reference Dracula, dinosaurs, solar systems, and "pickin' up girls at the Miami Planetarium", and ask the musical question, "Why Is there Food in the Science Room?" The music's bright, playful, and eccentric; it sounds like an '80s TV theme (think pastel colors, big hair boppin' around the plastic dance floor) doctored up by a mad scientist from the future. At the same time, don't let my litany of goofy similes make you think it's cartoonish music that'll only be liked by people who wish they could spend everyday taking drugs to Road Runner cartoons, or who wear bunny outfits around town for kicks. Drexon Field's music is fun, but also seriously intoxicating. It doesn't sound nostalgic or fluffy, it sounds exciting and fresh. Creativity is infectious sometimes, and this duo of Devin Underwood and Jared Sheehan, Bostonians who call themselves Drexon Field, sound like they're on a seriously creative jaunt, like they've been playing around in the studio and stumbling onto gold. Some of this music gets your head spinning, some of it hovers relatively close to the dance-floor, some of it is surprisingly melancholy, much of it is melodic in a fetching way, and all of it conjures up a unique, friendly, absorbing mood. And at the end of the last track, a piano comes in that sounds like it's from the turn of the last century, making you wonder if we haven't been time-tripping or stepping inside someone's brain, if this whole thing isn't just the warped dream of a riverboat musician, asleep at his piano in the year 1900. - dave heaton

Friends of Dean Martinez, Lost Horizon and Live at Club 2 (Aero Recordings)

The new Friends of Dean Martinez album Lost Horizon opens with sheer atmosphere, like the sound of a horizon stretching before your ears. It's quiet. You turn up the volume right as a guitar rings loudly through the desert: a lone electric guitar playing in a graceful yet unkempt way, beautiful for its roughness and for the notes it's hitting. Drums slowly join the party, and the music gently takes off: a steel guitarist and a drummer laying down a glimmering bed for the guitarist to beautifully cry over. "Landfall" is the name of the song, and it's the perfect way to ease into a Friends of Dean Martinez album, with a Southwestern mood created before your ears, as the guitar weeps in a way that holds you at attention, and the intensity of it all gently builds. The song captures the essence of the album as a whole - its expansive beauty and its intensity, how the musicians set a mood yet also burn melodies into your skin. Throughout Lost Horizon, guitarist Mike Semple plays like a far-gone former surf-rocker, like a demented stepson of Morriconne, like the ghost of Hendrix's country cousin, like a flamenco guitarist who battled the devil, Crossroads-style, and lost, now forced to wander alone across the dessert, his guitar glistening with anger and pain. It's an impressively compressed and focused album, yet its sounds are free and inspiring. A less restrained but equally inspired Friends of Dean Martinez can be heard on the recently released live album Live at Club 2 (actually a double-live album due to the bonus disc Live at Magnet - Berlin, which is just as good, with more of a stoned in the wilderness vibe, less fury). Live at Club 2 starts slow and ghostly as well, but soon enough the trio has turned their sound into a neverending dust storm of epic proportions. Their instruments cry out with passion, usually more like a big wicked stormcloud than one clear voice. It's a doom and gloom sort of album, but beautiful. They work their way through songs from their many past releases, including two from their 1995 Sub Pop debut The Shadow of Your Smile. There's a ragged lonely-at-midnight take on Gershwin's "Summertime", and an even lonelier and more touching rendition of "Tennessee Waltz". Between Lost Horizon and Live at Club 2, Friends of Dean Martinez make an amazing case for the power of the guitar, the way its wails and cries can conjure up centuries of history and oceans of tears. And as a trio they show how an entire landscape, geographical and emotional, can be built by just three musicians. They do so in a way that sounds effortless, and which sweeps away your immediate world and places you somewhere else entirely. - dave heaton

Marah, If You Didn't Laugh, You'd Cry and A Christmas Kind of Town (Yep Roc)

Seven years ago, Marah's debut album Let's Cut the Crap and Hook Up Later on Tonight introduced them to the world as a ramshackle ball of roots-rock energy from Philadelphia, rough and messy and heartfelt. The music was more diverse than it at first sounded, too, a hint of things to come. Since then, the group has continually shaken up their sound, evoking "Britpop" comparisons while attracting Springsteen to their side at the same time. Eluding one cohesive sound has sometimes given their music and indistinct air; other times they'll trip into a style that feels honest and leaves an impression. On their fifth album If You Didn't Laugh, You'd Cry, they mix up a stew of rock, pop, blues, country, and Bob Dylan which is completely pleasant but again not all that distinct, an album that begs for the descriptor "decent" more than it does for any sort of impassioned hyperbole. The album opens with the rollicking "The Closer", a beer-soaked sort of song that screams "we're just messing around", a little too loudly to be convincing. Next track "The Hustle" is more fun, the sort of melodic and countryfied rocker that'd fit quite comfortably on a Southern Rock radio station. From there Marah rolls through some amiable but not surprising songs: earnest ballads ("City of Dreams", "So What If We're Outta Tune"), blues-rockers geared toward the sloppy-drunk set ("Fatboy"), lovelorn hungover songs with a nice laidback, melodic feeling ("Sooner or Later", "Poor People"), and a stab at troubadour storytelling ("The Dishwasher's Dream"). It all has its pleasures, but none of them are overwhelming, and nothing feels as passionate and raw as their debut did so many years ago. More overtly fun is their holiday album A Christmas Kind of Town, though it's a lark that ultimately has fewer ups than downs, mostly due to the setting they force the songs into, which lends songs that should be loose and fun a rather stiff feeling. Marah and their guests (the band the Shalitas, and others) turn the album into a Christmas variety show with the air of the 1950s, or earlier, with skits linking the songs and purposely corny announcers. Even worse, most of the songs are performed like they're imagining how they might have performed the songs if they were a straight-laced '50s pop act instead of modern-day rockers. Some of the Marah-penned songs still manage to be a lot of fun, especially those near the album's end ("Christmas With the Snow" and "Handsome Santa"), and you can't go wrong with kickin' out "Auld Lang Syne", but the majority of the traditional Christmas songs sound surprisingly tame and soul-less, turning what first seems like a raucous party full of good cheer into the equivalent of a school play that you've been forced to sit through. - dave heaton

Sigur Ros, Takk... (Geffen)

Icelanders Sigur Ros made their mark over here across the water with their second album Agaetis Byrjun, a beautiful and mysterious album which struck some of us like a brilliant lightning flash. The group came off like they were composing the score to the movie of your weirdest and prettiest dreams, yet also had the urgency of a rock band. Their songs often built in anxious intensity and then exploded into kisses. Singer Jon Thor Birgisson used his odd, angelic voice like an instrument; he sang words foreign (to English-speakers) and made-up which communicated no message but so much emotion, and in his hands had the capacity to make you hear feelings and ideas even as you weren't receiving any literal ones. In that way, they shook up the artist-listener relationship in a good way. Ever since, they've been following their own delightfully unconventional path - they left the songs on ( ) untitled to emulate a blank page that listeners could fill in themselves, and playfully improvised a Merce Cunningham dance score (captured on the Ba ba/Ti Ki/Di Do EP. Their fourth album Takk... (meaning "Thanks") is their gentlest in tone, yet also has in spades the melodic sense that made so many of their songs (especially on Agaetis and the first half of ( )) so singable even when you didn't know what you were singing. And it truly captures the playful experimental spirit that had them previously involved in extra-album activities like tinkering with music boxes, collaborating on movie scores, playing in an all-guitar improv orchestra, and converting a swimming pool into a recording studio. The texture of Takk... is gentle, but has a diversity to it that keeps things fresh, with gorgeous strings all over the place, lots of circling piano-like instruments, and even a surprising burst of horns at the end of one track. It's a beautiful album, yet also not wholly optimistic in tone; it doesn't get mired in a dark cloud like the last half of ( ), yet it still has stretches that are thick with concern and anxiety, even as it at the same time often feels like the epitome of hope. It's not hip to utter positive thoughts about the music industry, but it's amazing to me that a band as unique and peculiarly themselves as Sigur Ros could generate enough attention for large corporate music retail chains to have a huge display of their album on the day of its release. People respond passionately to their music; their performance a few weeks ago here in Philadelphia was by no means flawless (the singer's voice was hoarse, for example), but still was greeted with the loud, sincerely enthusiastic cheers of people who are seriously touched and overwhelmed by the power of music. Their music made an average night feel like a truly magical one. Takk... holds that same power. - dave heaton

The Spectacular Fantastic, Goes Underground (Ionik Records)

On albums like Vortex of Vacancy, Cincinnati's The Spectacular Fantastic have already demonstrated their ability to make kick-ass home-made pop-rock albums, with big hooks that dig into your brain. On their latest, The Spectacular Fantastic Goes Underground, one-man band Mike Detmer and his pals have turned their instruments up a notch and made an album that's loud and proud, ready for the car stereo. With wild rock energy and super-catchy melodies, they come off like if the Apples in Stereo decided to pattern themselves after Crazy Horse. The album kicks off like an unleashed wild beast, gigantic and moving fast. Underneath are the same fine Beatlesesque melodies and Beach Boys harmonies, but the exterior is tougher, ready to rock you out your chair. By the third, fourth, and fifth songs, they're stripping things down to highlight the lovelorn ache inside; at one point "You've Got It" is almost just drums and Detmer's voice, singing lyrics like "You're the girl inside my dreams" to a classic tune. But these songs still have the tendency to hide an open hand until halfway through the song, and then slap you upside the head with rock n' roll power. As the album continues towards its end, they do end up toning things down, turning on the blue lights to give everything a melancholy mood. Side 2 (if this were an LP) is lonelier and sadder, yet played with the same raw feeling. There's heart, not just muscle, in ...Goes Underground, and much of the time there's a whole lot of both. - dave heaton


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