Blonde Redhead
(4AD)
Perhaps the most ambitious album of the year, 's jaw-dropping mix of wispish melodies and soft, shadowy, ambient sound is tough to pull off. Blonde Redhead pull it off and excel at it. This album is Blonde Redhead's achievement, either the best their career will offer or the first step in a legendary career.
Blonde Redhead began their career as a guitar and drum, Sonic Youth and sadcore indie rock band. They were never great, held in the shadow of the noise rock icons and often failing to write music that wasn't over-the-top depressing to the point of being silly. But no one ever doubted their potential. Blonde Redhead's songs were always innovatively written, full of dissonance and disregard for measure and scale, and verse-chorus-verse style. La Mia Vita Violenta and Fake Can Be Just as Good were albums from a band trying to find a voice and almost succeeding.
But the style of isn't the ambling guitars of La Mia Vita Violenta or even the fuller music of their later albums with Fugazi's Guy Picciotto. Blonde Redhead have moved on to a far more vibrant sound. A brilliantly layered album, 's music is far more kinetic than any of its contemporaries. Layers of piano, guitars and the occasional violin-toned synthesizer dance from note to note so quickly and with so few breaks in the music that it becomes nearly impossible to hold on to notes, even the most glimmering ones, before something else astonishing happens.
The result is a completely engrossing album, a staggering mixture of spiraling and spinning sounds that never clash, a psychedelic album that stays aggressive, dizzying atmospheres and mind boggling harmonies. Every complement ever paid to Radiohead is true for -the experimentalism, the inteligence, the ability to set aside the genre of rock 'n' roll to make great rock 'n' roll. But above all else, Blonde Redhead have such mastery of their sound that they never seem to go above even the most pop-oriented audience. Blond Redhead have done something unique - an album which is cerebral and approachable at the same time.
Kazu Makino had been the lead singer of most of Blonde Redhead's past work, with a Bjork-like squell, while Amedeo Pace sang up front on the occasional track. But Pace is the star singer on this album, adding tension to lurching songs like \Falling Man."" Makino now is as much an instrument as a vocalist. With a focus on the sound in the background, the vocals and their tragic-love lyrics blend into the music.
They used to be a midlevel indie-rock band who would get lost wallowing in their own misery, but now Blonde Redhead are a band with the power to dispel the notion that only simple music or circular melodies can be accessible, and that smart music has to be boring. is beautiful, ambitious, worthwhile stuff. It's easily the best album of the year.
-Joe Uchill
Sigur Ros
()
Sigur Ros' new EP is divided into three tracks-or, more precisely, sections-titled ""Ba Ba,"" ""Ti Ki"" and ""Di Do."" In any case, it's good to see Sigur Ros getting back into the habit of titling their songs again, after the ridiculous pretentiousness of their 2002 album ( ), which featured but eight untitled tracks. Then again, it's easier to say ""the second song on that untitled album"" than to sound foolish as you try to navigate singer Jo`nsi Birgisson's invented lyrical language of Hopelandish, wrestling with such phonetic-defying song titles as ""venf-G-Englar.""
What's the occasion, you might ask. For , Sigur Ros have made the logical progression from experimental Icelandic ""rock"" band to composing original music for live modern dance performances.
But not just any modern dance performance. Sigur Ros was asked by Merce Cunningham, the renowned 84-year old modern dance choreographer, to compose original music for his dance company's ""Split Sides"" performance. The result is 20 fairly interesting minutes of ambient whirring and clicking and clinking that work better than they should.
Because their music is closer to nebulous swirls of sound that wash over each other than to conventional songs with a verse or chorus, Sigur Ros seem uniquely suited to write a largely improvisational score for a dance performance. Radiohead might also be a good candidate for the job and, in fact, they composed music for the first half of the performance.
Sigur Ros start things off gently on ""Ba Ba,"" with the chimey plinking-reminiscent of Radiohead's -of two hand-cranked music box devices that provide the foundations for the songs on the EP. You can hear the band cranking the boxes, and even the ratchet noise that is made when they are played backwards is turned into an instrument. Add a xylophone and a wildly imaginative percussive instrument created by Birgisson's father, as the bands does,??and you have one helluva modern dance party. The instrument consists of pairs of pointe ballet shoes that are mic'd to provide percussion.
""Ba Ba"" flows into ""Ti Ki,"" which expands the sound with organ tones and some mechanical whirring and clicking over the twinkling of the music boxes. As ""Ti Ki"" builds into a symphony of bleeps and hypnotic organ chords, it morphs into the climatic-almost tribal sounding- ""Di Do.""
""Di Do,"" the EP's final and most interesting track, features loops of previously recorded monosyllabic utterances by Cunningham himself. Cunningham seems to be repeating the infantile song titles, but the band has chopped up the recordings and assembled them in a jagged, slightly disconcerting order. The mechanical -sounding samples grow more intense over the ominous build of a synthesizer; then everything slowly disintegrates into Sonic Youth-style distortion and purposefully uncomfortable white noise. It's a fascinating song, if not one that you want to listen to??very often.
And that pretty much describes the whole EP. It's an interesting, novel experiment, but at only 20 minutes, it's at best only a fleeting taste of what must have been an extraordinary evening of modern dance and unconventional soundscapes.
-Adam Malacek
Eric Clapto
(Reprise Records)
Eric Clapton's could have been a humble tribute album of one guitar master honoring another. Instead, it is an extension of the mistakes Clapton has made throughout his career.
The album features 14 songs written by Robert Johnson, the patriarch of the blues, and covered by Clapton, the prodigal son of the genre. Where Johnson mastered the blues, Clapton stumbled too far into rock, and now is trying to come back. Though has its merits by the strength of Clapton's interpretations of individual songs, the entire production is an apology to Johnson that comes a little late.
Songs like ""Hell Hound on My Trail"" and ""Me and The Devil Blues"" are fine substitutes for the atmosphere of the Mississippi Delta while ""Traveling Riverside Blues"" suggests the myths of the river. Clapton demonstrates he is faithful in spirit to Johnson, but not in form. In form, songs like ""If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day"" and ""Last Fair Deal Gone Down"" show that the pull of rock has mastered Clapton. His riffs seem a little too rough and his voice is too well adapted to playing arenas to embody Johnson.
Clapton is a little too at ease on this album, neither innovating nor experimenting. He is merely updating and adapting the music of days past to be available for another generation. Clapton already has tribute albums dedicated to him and he has chosen to make one.
While this album is confined to its genre, the artist is regressing with it. In recent years it seems that Eric Clapton has thrown up his hands to mainstream music and declared that only the old masters can make blues relevant. When he released Riding with the King in 2000 Clapton depended on the immortality of the quintessential bluesman, B.B. King. Now he is relying on the legend of Robert Johnson to sustain his next work.
There was a time between his self-titled 1970 release and of 1977 that could have cemented Clapton's place as the blues artist who would hold the genre over until its next revival. Unfortunately Clapton got caught up in fusing blues over and over with rock and then succumbing to the mediocrity of the '80s. Though and sustained him in his later years, it looks like Clapton is marching away from the crossroads.
The fault of Eric Clapton is not acting as the ambassador between the nostalgic lands of his heroes, King, Howlin' Wolf and Johnson, and the new territory of the blues under the reign of Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Jonny Lang. Instead, he seems concerned with occupying his own middle ground for himself.
This album is the blues cannibalizing itself. This doesn't mean it is suffering from its own trademarks, but instead that the suffering seems contrived when it should be genuine. This album is part of the problem that is making Robert Johnson more of a celebrity in this era than he was in his own. Ultimately is Clapton's way of comparing himself to the past master, but the comparison reveals itself to be mediocre at its best and exploitive at its worst.
-Ben Schultz
