Pissed Jeans : Hope For Men
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Pissed Jeans are not from australia, and they did not rampage through the pub scene in the late 1980s, but you wouldn't know it to listen to them: These four Pennsylvania dudes play insane low-end party-killer spaz noise, the kind of punk sludge that recalls Aussie tough-guy legends like Feedtime or the Cosmic Psychos. This music is incredibly violent, yet unimpeachably cheery, like one of those shows where strangers are slamming into you but you don't mind because you'll hit them back twice as hard next time. Bradley Fry's guitar rumbles in the distortion, while Matt Korvette screams "People Person" (he isn't one), "Caught Licking Leather" (happens to all of us) and "A Bad Wind" (his sensitive ballad, which somehow makes him sound twice as deranged). So many bands try to nail this sound, and so few get close, but the Jeans are absolutely prime.
Taken from=rollingstone=
Labels: Review
The Cribs : Men's Needs, Women's Needs, Whatever
The Cribs specialize in songs about staying out too late, embarrassing your friends and losing your heart to girls who are even drunker than you are but deserve better than you anyway. It's a theme that never gets old, and their third album is a holler-along Brit-punk gem. Three brothers from the mining town of Wakefield, the Cribs didn't make an impression at first, but despite abysmal sound quality, their melodies unfolded over time – "We Can No Longer Cheat You" was one of 2005's great lost pop tunes. On Men's Needs, the Cribs give max boom and blast to snotty pub stomps like "Our Bovine Public," "My Life Flashed Before My Eyes" and "Girls Like Mystery." Franz Ferdinand's Alex Kapranos turns out to be a great producer, while Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo adds vocals to the spoken-word oddity "Be Safe." Finally, the Cribs deliver the tour de force they had in them, and it's about time.
Taken from =rollingstone=
Labels: Review
Queens of the Stone Age : Era Vulgaris
"I'm one of a kind," Josh Homme boasts on the new Queens of the Stone Age album. "I'm designer!" Well, that's one way to put it. There aren't any others like him, that's for sure, and he's never been an easy one to figure out. Here's a rock star who seems to shuffle his band's lineup as often as he shaves his back, yet who always sounds like himself, making fun of solemn art types but working harder than any of them. He manages to be the token metal dude for indie kids and the token punk for headbangers, without compromising for either camp. Homme makes music in all kinds of incarnations -- the Queens, Eagles of Death Metal, his endless Desert Sessions projects. But he always seems to inhabit his own musical world, a zone where lost kids chase the desert acid-trip vibe of classic Seventies midnight movies like Vanishing Point and Two-Lane Blacktop. Really, the scene in Vanishing Point where the naked hippie chick cruises across the desert sand on her Harley, blasting Mountain's "Mississippi Queen," could be the starting point for every song on this album.
Era Vulgaris is Homme's fifth Queens album, and like the others, it's intricately crafted, meticulously polished and ruthlessly efficient in its pursuit of depraved rock thrills, with robotic rhythm machines like "Turning on the Screw" and "I'm Designer." Last time, Homme got slept on with the excellent but underrated Lullabies to Paralyze -- people were thrown off initially by its down-in-the-dumps mood, which may be why the music took longer to kick in for some fans. But Era Vulgaris is a lot cockier than Lullabies, clobbering you instantly with guitars louder and uglier than a psychedelic biker party at Joshua Tree's Skull Rock. "Misfit Love" is the ultimate Queens anthem, all low-register guitar crunch, with a percussion track that sounds like tennis balls the size of Betelgeuse crashing into a Moog factory. Homme snarls, "I wanna see my past in flames," and he gets his wish.
Supposedly, his party buddies at the Era Vulgaris sessions included Trent Reznor, the Strokes' Julian Casablancas and regular guest Mark Lanegan. But none of them are really audible -- are you surprised? Instead, we get the many moods of Josh Homme, most of which concern the miracle of physical love and the procurement thereof. He's always said he wanted the Queens to be a band for the ladies, not the menfolk, and from the vocals to the bass lines this is his most crotch-tensive music. "Make It Wit Chu" is an old Desert Sessions song, revamped into a ridiculous lover-boy plaint, with Homme doing his sleaziest falsetto over a lounge-lizard cousin of Neil Young's "Southern Man." "Into the Hollow" is a surprisingly tender purple-haze ballad, with Homme's vibrato amid a gently quivering wah-wah and the usual assload of bass. "Run Pig Run" is staccato jackhammer blues metal, "3's and 7's" sounds like prime Nirvana and "Sick, Sick, Sick" is manic punk riffing, offering "a lick on the lips and a grip on your hips." All excellent news for Brody Dalle.
Homme is a man of many surprises. Here's something you wouldn't expect about Era Vulgaris: the influence of New Wave synth geek Gary Numan is all over this record. Even rave-ups like "Battery Acid," "Suture Up Your Future" and "3's and 7's" have vintage-synth hooks copped from The Pleasure Principle -- it may sound crazy, but if there's one thing you should have learned about Homme by now, he'll heist a badass riff from anywhere. In "I'm Designer," he sings about his "generation" and means it, his fey falsetto a parody of hippie cosmic aspirations. But even though the joke is a great one, you hear that falsetto, and you realize it's here for one main reason, just like every other sonic flourish on Era Vulgaris: Josh Homme loves how it sounds.
Taken from =rollingstone=
Labels: Review
