Record Review: This Week In Promotional Mailings

When you reach the apex of the blogosphere, record labels and PR firms from around the world want to be your friend. They’ll send you countless albums in the hopes that you will write positive reviews and help launch careers. Or, at the very least, you’ll be too embarrassed to have your name affiliated with a certain soul-crushingly pedestrian bands and you’ll get $3 in store credit from your local second-hand record store when you sell the promo just to get it out of your study or home office or wherever it is you choose to blog.

This is the situation I find myself in more often than not. But today, dear readers, I’m going to take the opportunity to write several short paragraphs about some of the albums that have made their way into my mailbox this month. Such an endeavor would be impossible for one man to tackle alone, so I have enlisted Nicci as my co-author, because the breadth of her pathetic pop music knowledge far outweighs my own. So, without further ado…

Cinematic Sunrise
A Coloring Storybook And Long Playing Record
Available on Equal Vision Records

From the opening strains of “Pulling A Piano From A Pond,” the listener is transported back in time to the year 2001, when the sounds of Dashboard Confessional, Something Corporate, and the Early November rang throughout the ears of high school sophomore girls. The singer has a tendency to accentuate the final syllable of every line he sings with an annoying animalistic hiccup. Nicci admits she would have loved it when she was an angst-ridden and heart-broken teenager. Our theory that Cinematic Sunrise are a Christian rock band posing as nu-Emo revivalists remain unsubstantiated. Oh yeah, and the packaging includes a full-length coloring book with a pack of three crayons. The booklet contains various nature-themed scenes, with the band’s faces hidden throughout. Highly unique? Highly retarded. [Listen to "Pulling A Piano From A Pond"]

Black Taj
Beyonder
Available on Amish Records

Like a restrained-Polvo, Black Taj open “Move Me” with a distorted angular guitar lick repeated, only without everything that made Polvo really cool. When the rest of the band enters the fray, the result is something of a genre-hopping, historically-confused cacophony of rock. Nicci hears classic rock (in the vein of Creedence Clearwater Revival) fighting to sneak into the band’s sound, while I heard AC/DC. Maybe a bad Foo Fighters song from one of their more recent albums? “Fresh Air Traverse” is Red Hot Chili Peppers playing — wait a second, there’s a song called “Cold Comfort”? Isn’t that the name of a Bush song? No, wait…that was “Cold Contagious”. Beyonder is about five-hundred-thousand times more enjoyable than the Cinematic Sunrise album, but I am not really that close to giving this band my stamp of approval. If each song continued along a linear progression from the opening fifteen or thirty seconds, each of these songs would be way more tolerable. Or, maybe they should just kick out the singer. The vibrato-tinged opening of “Damascus” shows potential, but they it gets really, really bad. Like, what The Ian Weinberger Trio used to sound like 99% of the time we tried to make up our own Frogstomp-inspired songs. [Listen to "Damascus"]

Capillary Action
So Embarrassing
Available on Pangea Recordings

I’m not going to lie, the artwork for this one has me excited. It’s got hand-drawn, Raymond Pettibon-style drawings of weird people on it. When the singer “sings” — which is how the album opens, unfortunately — he sounds like Harry Nilsson or Scott Walker. For the most part though, they sound like any of the bands they have toured with during the last two years (USAISAMONSTER, Daughters, An Albatross). Simply put, theirs is a sound filled with arty pretentiousness and delusions of noise rock greatness. Capillary action just might harbor some deep-rooted frustration at not having attended RISD (or just lived in Providence) at the same time bands like Les Savy Fav and Lightning Bolt (or Arab On Radar) were cutting their teeth. I’d recommend you listen to any of the other bands I named dropped (except for An Albatross) before you listen to Capillary Action. Nicci says, “It’s got guts though. It’s got guts.” She also is quick to point out, “that doesn’t mean I like it.” [Listen to "Pocket Protection Is Essential"]

Dropsonic
The Low Life
Available On Ascetic Records

Feedback is always a good way to open an album. Whoa, Faith No More alert! With Axel Rose strutting his shit out in front like some kind of queen. Nicci imagines the singer looks like Rocky from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”. I guess this album is redeeming in the same way that, say, a Buckcherry album is redeeming. They want you to think they party hard, and they achieve that fairly well. The only problem, of course, is that they aren’t very good. If these guys aren’t straight out of the grimy Hollywood hair metal scene, why…I guess I owe you all a Coke. [Listen to "God Lies"]

Styrofoam
A Thousand Words
Available On Nettwerk

Whoever the first songwriter was to listen to shit like the Pet Shop Boys and feel inspired to start their own “indie electronic” recording project…boy does that guy deserve a raping. It only took one minute and fifty-seven seconds until the first “Would you catch me if I’m falling” lyric spewed forth from the mouth of this Styrofoam loser. If there’s one thing I hate more than The Postal Service, it’s bands who model themselves after the Postal Service. Similarly, Nicci says that there’s nothing she hates more than singular artists who go by a band name. That’s about all you need to hear about A Thousand Words, an album that can be summarized in about 999 less words: suck. [Listen to "After Sunset"]

Ponytail
Ice Cream Spiritual
Available On We Are Free

I first wrote about Ponytail almost two years ago, and called them one of my favorite “emerging bands” (along with Volcano!, The Black Angels, STNNNG, Bikneva and Crystal Stilts…Oh well, I was only wrong about The Black Angels). Back then, they were “Weird stuff. Jolting and adrenaline fueled trash rock. The drums sound about as disgusting and broken as Brian from Lightning Bolt’s kit, and the guitar… I don’t know what the hell the guitar sounds like. Figure it all out for yourself.” Their new album is messy, noisy, and energetic. The vocals are annoying, “but tolerable,” according to Nicci, and the guitar is intolerable, according to Ilya. What do I think? I think this sounds like a band who would paint their faces in Indian war patterns before live shows and think they were awesome. And, wouldn’t you know it, there are finger paints all over the cover! This album gets two thumbs firmly in the middle. [Listen to "7 Souls"]

Alan Wilkis
Babies Dream Big
Self-released

It sounds how the front cover looks, complete with biplanes, a flying baby with a cape, and rainbows and green fields filling the background. It’s a bit too quirky and goofy for my liking, but I wouldn’t say it’s bad. Wilkis has a somewhat soulful voice, but it is at odds with the instrumentation, which vacillates between classic rock and electronica. In the same way that Cocorosie are guilty of combining literally every imaginable style in an attempt to appear worldly, these songs are saturated with noise that could have been left on the cutting room floor (that’s movie industry lingo for all the laypersons out there). I’d like to hear more stripped-down versions of these songs, without the unnecessary post-production bells and whistles (so to speak, there weren’t actually bells and whistles used to my knowledge), and with a little more attention paid to the actual songwriting [Listen to "Burnin'"]. Nicci says it’s really important to match the music to the vocals more, and she should know, for she is the epitome of vocal perfection…

…Which is why she lost on American Idol season 3.

ZING!