By Jesse Cataldo
The Decemberists – The Crane Wife – Capitol Records
It seemed impossible for the Decemberists to get any nerdier, but they’ve signed to a major label and lo and behold, the stakes have been raised. The band (named after the secret society who unsuccessfully revolted against the Russian government in 1825, obviously) has previously produced five albums of suprisingly literate, painfully fey music under the command of lead singer Colin Meloy, who’s made the transition from the neighborhood kid who only came outside for solar eclipses to a talented post-grad creative writing student with a Victorian fetish. While Picaresque found the band stagnating, The Crane Wife shoots off in new directions and aims for far-off horizons. The lyrics remain similarly effete, while the band layers on prog keyboards and studio effects before linking the songs together in a rough concept-album scheme. While not as tight or cozy as The Tain, it certainly signals growth, with a complexity that’s far more rewarding than their other works. As usual, your level of appreciation will coincide with your tolerance for Meloy’s lyrics, which are simultaneously earnest and gimmicky, in period costume.
The Hold Steady – Boys and Girls in America – Vagrant Records
In the press for Boys and Girls in America, their third album, The Hold Steady play up their self-proclaimed status as a bar band. This raises an interesting question – what exactly is a bar band? Must it be an unshaven group of college dropouts in Sublime t-shirts needling your growing headache with power chords and Dave Matthews covers, or can it be a state of mind? The label is just a cute angle to push albums, so it hardly matters, but either way, The Hold Steady sound a lot like a bar would if it could be a band. Boys and Girls in America, which tells the stories of exactly who you’d guess it would, does a good job of keeping up this atmosphere, although perhaps not as well as on The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me, their last album. The stories in the songs are ragged and personal, like Bruce Springsteen without the social conscience, and while the lyrics aren’t poetic or beautiful they get the point across. The music is somehow even boozier, befitting the atmosphere, but it’s also messy and repetitive and not very rewarding, even with the warm hum of the Wurlitzer that runs under the heavy guitars. A bar band till the end, The Hold Steady has produced an album that will undoubtedly take a few beers to appreciate.
Tim Hecker – Harmony in Ultraviolet – Kranky Records
Without lyrics to hold on to, sound and noise based music does best with an auditory theme to fasten it’s hooks to, something to provide structure and focus. Such a theme will usually fall on the side of either machines or nature and Tim Hecker, choosing to spare ear and lighten hearts, goes with the latter. Indebted to classical works such as Debussy’s “La Mer,” Harmony in Ultraviolet invokes the ocean in all its impenetrable grandeur. It wouldn’t be a stretch to label this a descendant of that type of classical composition – although lacking a unified structure, the album nonetheless communicates a unified feeling from beginning to end. Hecker varies between vibrantly shimmering, cresting waves of noise (“Whitecaps of White Noise” and “Spring-Heeled Jack Flies Tonight” and softly sparkling underwater majesty (Chimeras, Harmony in Blue). Overall, Harmony is arresting and hopelessly beautiful, ascending to a level that few electronic albums can ever hope to reach.
