Album Review: Other Lives - For Their Love

A whole host of instruments familiar and unfamiliar can be found throughout Other Lives‘ four albums. Picking apart these complexities is one of the best parts about being a fan: realizing how sparse the drums are, discovering ghostly background vocals, and connecting Jesse Tabish’s lyrics to the band’s arrangements, to name a few highlights. This is still true, nine years after their breakout album Tamer Animals, which landed them not only a cultish following but a coveted spot opening for Radiohead. 2015’s Rituals was a left hook from the band, who wasted zero time making their “electronic record” while continuing to strategically bury compelling sounds underneath a pysch-folk haze.

Five years later, we have a new Other Lives record. Recorded on their own terms in an A-frame house (as depicted on the album cover) in Oregon’s Cooper Mountain Region, For Their Love is definitely the same band as before, but almost disappointingly so. Gone are much of the fun mysteries behind the arrangements of your average Other Lives tune. Each of the 10 tightly-wound tracks lays its hand out for all to see. “We wanted 10 songs that held up by themselves,” explained Tabish about the process.

Indeed, For Their Love showcases a much more collaborative and balanced Other Lives, and the mix makes the songs more immediate. Though this might disappoint fans who were eager to dig deep into this record, it isn’t always bad. Those spectre-like vocals that were buried so deep on Tamer Animals cuts are now the focal point, accentuating the most poignant words. “Ah you really fucked me up this time,” sings Tabish with his wife Kim, now a fixture in the band, on standout “Cops”. As ever, it’s not what Tabish sings, but how he sings it.

There’s an impressionism to lines like “It’s a lost day man, for the newborn seeker” on “Lost Day”, but the drama remains evident. Furthermore, there’s drama everywhere on For Their Love. “Hey Hey I” explodes with one of the band’s most consistent drum grooves layered atop a Tame Impala-inspired piano syncopation: “Hey man, something don’t seem right / they only come at night!” sings an ecstatic chorus at the song’s peak. Conversely, “We Wait” is incredibly somber, as Tabish recounts the horror of his best friend’s murder at 17 years old. “It’s been haunting me for the last decade,” Tabish admits. “It’s part of my larger narrative of dealing with troubling stuff in my life.”

With this haunting tale in mind, you wonder what other “trouble” is being addressed throughout For Their Love. Few songwriters have been able to stray away from addressing “these troubling times,” but Tabish often gets by through penning more vague poetry. It works to the band’s favor, but they struggle to make the full album experience stick, which is most apparent on For Their Love.

This is more a collection of songs than an album. Each individual song is a painting, but the landscape barely shrinks even on the album’s softer moments. “Dead Language” is a welcome reprieve from the bombast of the singles, but still can’t help filling out the EQ spectrum by its end. Closer “Sideways” is perhaps the best song here, but this is largely due to the fact that it stays slow and peaceful throughout.

Take any one moment of For Their Love and you’ll find an engaging piece of pop rock, but, where previous albums blended freak folk with Joey Waronker’s bizarre production, For Their Love falls too neatly into that now dreaded “indie” category. This is unfair for a band with this much vision.

Other Lives could be deemed a more down-to-earth version of Fleet Foxes, but that’s not fair either. That being said, it’s hard to stand out when each song on your new record has the same woodsy atmosphere. Sure, having a distinct identifier of your sound is a good thing, but mixing it up over the course of 10 songs is essential. The fact that the band engineered and produced For Their Love on their own is consistently made clear. As much as one should praise the singular voice in a piece of art, Other Lives could’ve used an outside ear or two.

Still, there are no bad songs here. Some fans might even be thrilled with the more consistent approach. For Their Love often feels like the more meticulously produced sibling to Tamer Animals, both to its credit and discredit. There’s not a lot of staying power on this record, but at least it’s well done. “We really set out to make a band record,” said Tabish of the process. Other Lives have accomplished just that.

Album Review: Ian Chang - Belonging

At what point does a musician decide to take that leap into a solo career? It’s a question most famously faced by jazzers and session musicians, and is as old as popular music itself. Electronic artists have one of the richer histories of sharing collaborators before that solo album finally drops. Ian Chang’s career is a modern example of the collaborating shapeshifter – collaborative in the sense that his list of credits is immense (aside from his role in Son Lux, he has worked with the likes of Moses Sumney and Matthew Dear, to name a couple) and shapeshifting in the sense that his style can be applied to a host of pop and electronic styles.

Six instrumentals and three vocal features make up Belonging, but only the former works consistently in Chang’s favor. At his core, Chang is an electronic percussionist, melding dizzying beats with a neoclassical bent. Dig into the world of academic, computer-based composition and you’ll find many similar sounds. His debut, Belonging attempts to provide a bridge between experimental and pop music sensibilities, but suffers greatly by trying to have it both ways.

“Drunken Fist” is the best song here. A boiler room hiss provokes a host of creeping percussion and erhu samples that could make their way into a horror film, but the overall creativity of the song trumps the frightening atmosphere. “Bird’s Tongue” is another gem, using Hanna Benn’s voice as an instrument instead of a focal point – a trick that the other collaborations on the record could have used to a great end.

The problem with the best songs on Belonging is their brevity. “Swarm” is hardly a track at all, clocking in at under one minute despite featuring one of the album’s best performances, as a treated bongo tickles the eardrums with a Zach Hill-inspired performance. But why is it so short? Stack some of the rest of the album’s beat drops or flashes on top and you’d have something really special.

Instead the song disappears to usher in “Audacious”, which features Blonde Redhead’s KAZU and suffers from poor sequencing. KAZU’s hook is one of the only memorable melodies on the record, but it almost immediately gives way to a beat break that chops the track’s elements into a skittering mess. A vocalized version of the hook then carries the song to its unceremonious end. Many of the other tracks here suffer the same fate. All the puzzle pieces are there for great songs, but the final arrangement is obtuse and incomplete. To wit, the album is barely thirty minutes long despite being packed to the brim with samples and techniques.

“Comfort Me” is even worse, adding a horrid lyric to the pile of problems: “Big lights and small minds / Yeah, you know what I mean / It’s complicated,” sings Kiah Victoria. Why would we know what the lyrics mean if it’s also complicated? The answer probably lies in the record’s title; Chang and company are trying to belong, but feel stuck between their styles, never quite giving in to one cohesive sound.

There is a beauty in attempting to belong to a community of artists, and Chang’s catalogue is evidence that his skills are in high demand. But, the question of whether or not he should go solo still stands. Chang’s production style fits well within an established genre of Brainfeeder-adjacent jazztronica, but is not as rewarding. Belonging is a neat and meticulous record that begs to be lengthened in the solo compositions, but frustrates and falters in its collaborations.

Album Review: Iggy Pop - Free

“To explain all this needs further explaining,” says the godfather of punk on his eighteenth studio album Free, and we’re all craning our necks to know what’s on his mind. Is he talking about the internet age? How does he feel about politics in 2019? Is there a solution to the ills of modern American society? Does it matter? The rest of the lyrics on ‘Glow In The Dark’ don’t deign to blame anyone in particular for the problems we face, and it looks good on him: “Everyone must play their part in this world/ servants will serve and kings will rule/ pretend we don't know but I bet that you do.” If he’s holding any of the solutions to our problems, he must not feel like sharing.

Iggy Pop’s last album, 2016’s Post Pop Depression, didn’t push his career forward as much as solidify it. The subsequent Live at Royal Albert Hall was proof enough that he gave all his classic energy to the performances. After this long tour (with a handful of much younger rock stars), it’s no surprise that Iggy needed a break from the grind: “I felt like I wanted to put on shades, turn my back, and walk away. I wanted to be free,” he explained at the album’s announcement. As a result, Free just kind of happened to him. It’s short and blunt, but not lazy or arduous; and that’s really the most we can ask for.

See, in 2016, Post Pop faced up against a lot of late career gems that proved to the world that you could make a classic at any point in your career. Iggy’s album wasn’t one of those records, and as such the stage was set for a kind of rebuttal. Free is in some ways a response to David Bowie’s Blackstar - however the two records don’t bear many sonic similarities. Blackstar’s bleak saxophones are traded out for a bolder, sharper set of trumpets on Free; and where Bowie obsessed and dissected his impending death, Iggy Pop is now lounging luxuriously in an Eno-inspired pool of peaceful noise. Despite all this, it’s hard not to compare the two.

The album opening title track, although the shortest, tells you all the great things about the record. Easygoing ambience flows like the seaside depicted on the cover, letting you know that this isn’t going to be the whack in the head that made classic Iggy so good. ‘Loves Missing’ shows up after, crawling along at the pace of a Low song and never conforming to pop music’s usual forms. What does change over its length is the intensity of Iggy’s voice, mutating from a low mumble in the beginning to a pained wail by the end.

This formlessness looks real good on Iggy. He’s more interested in reading poetry than writing hooks, and longtime fans will have no problem admiring the words like a kid listening to a parent read them JRR Tolkien. “Love and sex are gonna occur to you/ and neither one will solve the darkness,” he mutters on closer ‘The Dawn’. Notable here is his use of the word “solve.” He’s past the point of fighting off his demons tooth and nail, but is also quite aware of the good life can offer in spite of “the darkness.” Iggy’s found freedom in acceptance, and we’ve much to learn from him.

Incidentally, the vast majority of the words on Free weren’t written by Iggy Pop. From a reading of Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Goodnight’ to a handful of songs co-written by jazz auteur Leron Thomas, this could almost be considered someone else’s album. The collaborations with Noveller are particularly prescient, with Free bearing many similarities to Sarah Lipstate’s wonderful 2017 album A Pink Sunset for No One. “This is an album in which other artists speak for me, but I lend my voice,” Iggy explained ahead of release. It shouldn’t matter much to us whether or not he wrote the songs - if it’s poetry that he approves of, we ought to approve of it as well. Still, more original lyrics would have been welcome.

Things turn sour on second single ‘James Bond’, where a flatline bass dirge (especially dull compared to the incredible bass playing on ‘Sonali’) guides Iggy’s voice. The track isn’t all that bad, but serves as a bit of a slap in the face to the rest of the record’s sobriety. Iggy takes a dig on promiscuity-as-virtue on the following ‘Dirty Sanchez’, a song as nastily composed as the sex move itself. But, it doesn’t suffer the blandness of ‘James Bond’, instead showcasing a squealing Iggy Pop that we’ve heard little of since he collaborated with At the Drive-In in 1999. The song would work better if it wasn’t a constant onslaught of monstrous vocals on a record of soothing treatises on age and industry.

Though it’s not surprising that Iggy included a couple of left hooks, it hurts a little bit that the album doesn’t have more of the sing-speak poetry and post-rock dreaminess. He does it so well, but only about 22 minutes are dedicated to this sound. ‘James Bond’, in contrast, is a distraction from a compelling new direction.

Whatever the case, it’s good to listen to an album where you can feel Iggy taking it easy on himself. At this point, there’s no tour announcement, but it’s really your own damn fault if you haven’t caught him live yet - the man’s a workhorse. Still, I’d like to see him out there screaming onstage a few more times. If that means we get less content, albeit good content without a tour, then fine. At the very least, let’s revel in the fact that Iggy put out maybe his first album that goes well with red wine; and that it’s still punk as fuck.

Album Review: Purple Mountains - Purple Mountains

In 2009, David Berman, just a few years into his first shows with The Silver Jews, announced his retirement from music. It wasn’t too surprising. After all, it can’t be easy singing indie’s most introspective and anxious lyrics to a crowd of strangers night after night. However, it’s easy to forget that Berman didn’t inform indie rock like his buddy Stephen Malkmus did. Rather, The Jews are more aptly described as coming from a tradition instead of creating one. If it wasn’t clear that he was raised on country at the time, it certainly is now.

In 2018 Berman produced the glorious second album from Yonatan Gat, the criminally overlooked Universalists. Gat’s playing doesn’t mirror Berman’s style in any discernible way, but they made the collaboration work with bizarre combinations of recording and editing. A far cry from Berman’s traditional work, the record ebbs and flows with a fluid pace, never once letting you sink into a familiar songform.

In 2019, Purple Mountains was announced and released. Instead of feeling like he had to double down on Gat’s avant garde recordings, Berman made the most conventional record of his career. Following in a strictly country tradition, these songs continue to breathe fresh air into a genre that’s been revitalized around every corner in the last few years. Hell, a guy from Saskatchewan made the most authentic sounding country album of 2018.

But remember, Berman and the Jews made country cool in a time that was dominated by Garth Brooks, and Purple Mountains is a fabulous reminder of just how deeply we felt his every word in the 90s and 00s. The first three tracks are so strong, you wonder how long he’s been cooking them up. 'All My Happiness Is Gone' is the catchiest sad song this side of The Eels, and 'Darkness and Cold' has a haunting quality that’s only matched by a Nick Cave or Elliott Smith.

'Margaritas at The Mall' and 'Storyline Fever' showcase the cleverness we’ve been missing from Berman these last ten years. But if we were to discuss Purple Mountains strictly in its lyrical prowess, we’d be able to write a novel. It’s not that any lyric is particularly potent or individual, it’s just that he clearly writes his poetry from a deep understanding of what makes rock music work. “When you’re seller and commodity/You gotta sell yourself immodestly”' he rambles on 'Storyline Fever,' perhaps offering on a silver platter the exact reasons why he’s returned to the recording studio.

Whether he feels every emotion he’s describing or is putting on a mask, the songs remain enjoyable and lighthearted. 'Snow Is Falling In Manhattan' however is particularly honest. The observance of nature is a natural response to life’s difficulties, and Berman takes his time chewing the scenery. When a soft horn section enters in the choruses, you could dream away an afternoon as if Berman’s contemporaries Lambchop were arranging the tunes. It’s incredibly well done.

Although the songwriting is quality enough to make a lot of modern singers jealous, Purple Mountains is lacking in adventurism. You have to ask 'would I like it more if 2019 David Berman took more risks?' But, it’s more satisfying to have a comeback record that stands its ground instead of one that reaches beyond its limits.

The other nagging questions is that, despite the upbeat production, is David Berman still this upset with the world around him? Though he meditates so strongly on anxiety, heartache, and worthlessness, it’s hard to believe that things have been going so poorly for him. He’s been a married man for decades and has made quite the career for himself outside of music, so it’s more comforting (although potentially false) to assume that he sings about sadness because that’s what he’s good at. You’d hope his past is haunting him more than anything else these days.

In 2003, Berman attempted to kill himself with a combination of xanax and crack cocaine, demanding to get the New York hotel room where Al Gore had stayed before losing the 2000 presidential election - “I want to die where the presidency died!” he demanded at the time. You’d think a guy with such strong convictions about the state of society would lean all over the topic on a record in 2019, but Berman sticks to what he knows best. It’s another feather in the cap of Purple Mountains - that he knows his strengths and keeps to ‘em. Even though it’s been ten years since Silver Jews ended, Berman still sings with the flare and gusto of a classic, a term that’s much easier to pin on him after hearing this album.

Album Review: Yeasayer - Erotic Reruns

Yeasayer have made a sufficient pop album in the same way that Pizza Hut makes a sufficient meal. Each ingredient is identifiable as long as you don’t focus on it - there’s melodies, structure, and hooks. But the closer you squint at each piece of the recipe, the more saccharine and processed you realize those parts are.

There’s a lack of substance from the get go on the bands fifth album Erotic Reruns. ‘People I Loved’ is a one-size-fits-all intro, injecting pop tropes with a centimeter-wide needle. Just 18 seconds pass before a singalong chorus interrupts the funk: “why was I so hard on the people I loved?” A fair question for creatives and left-brainers alike, but it’s also a question that requires context to have meaning. Motivation and depth are further squashed by a “nah nah nah” bridge that cuts the track into bite-size pieces. Less than three minutes go by before a hard stop, which is a relief as much as it is a hindrance to the songs staying power. How do you ask is co-frontman Anand Wilder hard on the people he loved? Don’t look here for any answers.

The instrumentals turn more inspiring in the back half with the fat bass groove of ‘Ohm Death,’ the electropop sheen of ‘Fluttering in the Floodlights’, and the album’s best song, ‘Let Me Listen In On You’, which consistently takes interesting turns in the face of Erotic Rerun’s rigid verse-chorus forms. As the title suggests, the album is largely about reigniting a romance. ‘Listen’ is by far the most honest: “We don’t make love like we used to/ we don’t read by candlelight.” A stacked bridge follows orgasmically, and you remember a time where this band were so exciting you could barely contain yourself.

Yeasayer, for all their early career hype, never had that one perfect record. Debut All Hour Cymbals was immensely promising with its group vocals (‘2080’) and chaotic shifts of psychedelic brilliance (‘No Need to Worry’). The following Odd Blood proved that the band could pen some damn fine pop tunes as well, still hinting at a potential that was ready to burst. The records since then get more disappointing at a staggering pace. Even though there are several ingredients that work well together, Yeasayer are afraid to take chances in ways that once worked so well for them. Looking at the track times for this record is proof enough that they’ve opted to settle. Nothing passes the 4-minute mark, and there’s only 9 tracks. You’d think the band were ashamed of themselves.

Not to say there’s anything wrong with writing a concise album. The problem is that Yeasayer are in the middle of an identity crisis. They want to share a psychedelic experience but seldom write anything someone older than fourteen would find strange. They also want to compose hooks, but proved themselves long ago as being more adept at a spiritual singsong approach. As a result, these songs don’t live nicely in any genre, and suffer under the weight of attempting cross-pollination no matter how much they ape Prince on single ‘Ecstatic Baby’. This track is an absolute goof - too short to prove that Keating had something important to say but too out of step with the rest of the albums narrative to blend in.

“You want as many people to like your music as possible without having to compromise,” explained  Keating in a 2010 interview with Rolling Stone, just as the band were crossing into pop territory. They were doing it quite well, stacking multiple arpeggiators and glimmering song structures on top of one another. When there’s this much fun in the instrumentation, any simple phrase can be something of beauty (like on Odd Blood standout ‘O.N.E.’). Erotic Reruns is not a compromise in the way that Keating was weary of, but it forces you to have to weigh it against not living up to your potential.

At best Erotic Reruns is tolerable - at least in the sense that ‘Ecstatic Baby’ could squeeze itself into a top 40 playlist without notice. At worst it’s an insulting cash grab abomination and a confirmation of mediocrity. Indie rock has long since become a commodified descriptor that now lands in the same grey area as college rock, alternative, or even new wave, and Yeasayer’s is one of the genres saddest tales. Still, don’t let Erotic Reruns convince you that this band never had anything going for it. Crank ‘Ambling Alp’ at the next house party you attend and you’ll remember why you’d like to give this new record a shot, but you’ve been warned.