WORDS BRIAN CARROLL
It's June, and the spring music drought is officially over. If you like the Black Keys, or Swans, you've probably already bought those bands' new records and are enjoying them correctly. Instead of telling you what you already know, this month Made reviews three solo releases that are in danger of falling through the cracks in light of all the new music by which we find ourselves surrounded:
PHOTO COURTESY OF ARBUTUS RECORDS
SEAN NICHOLAS SAVAGE – BERMUDA WATERFALL
Pointing to exciting new signs of life in the recently deceased Chillwave genre, the tenth album from heartful Canadian John Waters clone Sean Nicholas Savage is a cool breeze for a hot summer's day. Eschewing notions of punk as fashion, or even leaving the bedroom, Bermuda Waterfall finds Savage perfecting a homespun mood of sincerity and nostalgic lightness to craft a musical oasis, an admirable and marketable skill worth honing in trying times. Savage sometimes confuses time with place, as if to be transported by nostalgia automatically moves your soul around the globe, but Bermuda Waterfall remains clever, musically sound, loose, and leggy.
Your ears will truly stand at attention upon playback; Savage opens the album bizarrely by channeling Exotica legend Yma Sumac from left-field for one minute before fading out abruptly on the first track, “Boogie Nights.” From there, things get much more accessible, but Savage still embraces an unlikely parade of discarded influences throughout the lounge-y affair. With a particular bent to late Seventies R&B and early Eighties lite-FM, like a four-track Daft Punk on a shoestring budget, nods to Roberta Flack, Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan, Christopher Cross, Lionel Richie, Shuggie Otis, Elton John, Michael Jackson, and even Wham! all pop up in the mix, each subtly pointed toward the Caribbean in their own way.
On Bossa Nova single “Naturally,” Savage delivers some of the closed, percussive synthesizer needed to bring electronic music producers away from the dead-end of sawtooth-based EDM doldrums. Though his sincerity and enthusiasm is occasionally too apparent, with glorious and sweeping falsetto harmonies unselfconsciously drenched over almost every chorus, Savage's wonderfully warm acoustic guitars and Rhodes Electric Pianos stand out as the album's disarming, sunny highlights.
Sean Nicholas Savage has created a relaxing vacation record for people who can't afford to go on a relaxing vacation. The poolside schtick wears a tad thin when it's dialed in too-directly, unveiled, but as I wipe the sweat from my brow in a sweltering apartment, my hat goes off to him for selflessly attempting to reverse global warming (and time itself). You might not play it into the ground, but will enjoy dusting this record off once in a while for years to come when you can't quite put your finger on what it is you want to listen to. On Arbutus Records.
PHOTO COURTESY OF NETTWERK RECORDS
PETER MURPHY - LION
As if aware of precious time running out, Bauhaus and Love & Rockets singer Peter Murphy has abandoned patience and ambitions for pensiveness. With Lion, the studio-centric crooner delivers a testosterone-laden blast of Hard Synth-Rock, as if he's been tracking wounded antelope David Bowie across the Serengeti and is finally ready to pounce for the kill.
Upon his coronation, Murphy never holds back, allowing the listener to feel every crisp beat and guttural vocal roar in the mix as they run for the hills with him to viking Valhalla. The best tracks, like “Low Tar Stars,” “The Ghost of Shokan Lake,” and “Loctaine” still benefit from the Goth flavor Murphy does better than anyone, but as the production frequently strays too far from classic new-wave design, updating samples and synths with their supposed modern day equivalents, things only seem to progress as far as 1994, not 2014. While it's awesome to hear Murphy try to melt faces, he does so strictly on his own, admittedly dated terms.
Over-produced, a term I loathe, is a begrudgingly apt description of this bulging mass of effected guitars, synth, orchestration, and digital drums. Imagine Filter, Rob Zombie, Primal Scream, and Rammstein all played simultaneously and you have a sense of the insane power Murphy is attempting here. The album somehow manages to transcend this excess through the sheer tunefulness of Murphy's actual songwriting, especially when he steps out of attack mode and into rock royalty mode on the flip-side.
Despite the album's impressive ambition and killer energy, you have my permission to feel fully drained by track five, a feeling which the album smartly capitalizes on by letting the reeling dizziness in the wake of its various walls of sound become integral to the drugless psychedelia it creates between outbursts. While listening, I had a hard time flicking this pesky notion that buried underneath the hubris, Murphy was writing like Sea Change-era Beck on some of Lion's enormous and expansive ballads, for whatever that's worth.
Peter Murphy's heavy-handed production gambles will likely pay off with overdue commercial airplay and new respect, especially from the Trans-Siberian Orchestra crowd, but anyone who prefers folk, twee, and cute, organic sentimentality should give this release a wide berth. Recommended for Hard Rock veterans.
PHOTO COURTESY OF WARNER BROS.
DAMON ALBARN – EVERYDAY ROBOTS
Damon Albarn's experience of making a Gorillaz album entirely on iOS devices (The Fall) must have had an effect on his worldview. Forty-five seconds into his fourth --not first, as his label would have you believe-- solo album, he takes a lyrical swipe at smart phones, and you fear you're in for another preachy, hypocritical release about the evils of modern technology. Statements about today's society being programmed and not having enough time to think independently are indeed easy, low-hanging fruits. Especially so when the artists who make them are dependent on the same devices from which they distance themselves to create and spread their music.
It's lucky, then, that the album quickly turns about-face to embrace technology and finds Albarn filling almost every track with odd chirrups and squeaks, giving an experience not-too-dissimilar from riding on a slow amusement park ride featuring animatronic songbirds desperately in need of a little WD-40. These strange background noises and how they interact with lilting acoustic guitar patterns are the album's architectural strong point. Albarn can crank out effective, lightly heartbroken ballads like nobody else, so he does this almost exclusively here.
The title track, “Everyday Robots,” is a curious, serviceable, beautiful earworm, but not a hit. “Mr. Tembo” is a self-derivative single that flatly combines the gospel and African vibes of late-era Blur to unsurprising, lackluster results. Maybe you've heard snippets of this album, found it predictable, and are wondering where the truly unique songs are hiding. At the tracklist's midpoint, starting with “Parakeet,” the same eerie dread and downright weirdness Blur delivered on their classic William Orbit-helmed 13 slowly begin to creep toward the spotlight. By the album's close, everything starts sounding a lot more comfortable, genuine, exploratory, and, well, interesting. Half creative and half skippably dull, Albarn's new one is recommended on a track-by-track basis, if you have the time to sort it out.