Spoilt, but ill

Given the name of this blog, a Built To Spill related post has been a long time coming, but here it is, and it arrives due to improbable circumstances. Doug Martsch & co. have self-released a 7-track mini-album under the moniker "The Electronic Anthology Project", which transforms one track from each of their LPs into an unlikely slice of synthpop. The track names are all anagrams of their original source (so The Weather becomes At The Where, Get A Life is now Age I Felt etc.). It's clearly a bit of low-key fun, with the moody reworking of I Would Hurt A Fly into What If Your Dull being the album's unqualified success. There's some minor revelations here too; who would've thought that Going Against Your Mind could ever be made to sound like A-ha's Take On Me?

Should there be a Volume 2 to this project, here are some of my suggestions:

Time Trap -> Prime Tat
Kicked It In The Sun -> I Hide Sunken Ticket
Stab -> Bats
In Your Mind -> Your Dim Inn
Carry The Zero -> Razor Cry Thee
Lie For A Lie -> Life Or A Lie
Liar -> Rail
Planting Seeds -> Dealings Spent

I'm desperate for suggestions for Velvet Waltz!

Raise Your Hands!

Sufjan's back with a new EP! With the 50 States project seemingly well and truly canned, all has been a bit too quiet on the Sufjan Stevens front for too long, so the All Delighted People EP is like a bolt out of the blue. Thankfully, the wait for new material has been worth it, as what is supposedly an EP is in fact an 8-track, 50-minute epic. He never has been one to do things by halves has he?

Stylistically, All Delighted People is a mix of the old and new, and no better is that represented than on the immense title track. The inclusion of the same track twice on the same release is always a questionable move, not least when it's 10 minutes long, but the two arrangements here are so different, they could almost be different songs. The first, with its vocal acrobatics and its labyrinthine twists and turns, could almost be the Dirty Projectors, whilst the warmer musical arrangement of the second version is much more in-keeping with the Sufjan who recorded Illinois. Elsewhere, there's the usual lavish arrangements and angelic female vocals on the likes of Enchanting Ghost and From The Mouth of Gabriel, whilst the real curveball comes in the seventeen-minute Djohariah. Its opening 10 minutes of guitar-noodling would seem like a major over-indulgence were it not for the fact that it's just one element of an exhilirating build-up, that breaks away suddenly into a surprisingly spare track.

All riveting stuff, and all for the very wallet-friendly price of $5. All Delighted People is currently available to stream on Sufjan's bandcamp page. Welcome back Sufjan!

UPDATE: There's a new Sufjan LP on the way too! The Age Of Adz comes out on October 12th on Asthmatic Kitty Records.

Review: Les Savy Fav - Root For Ruin

Sometimes, a little break can do you the world of good. Les Savy Fav took six years between releasing 2001's Go Forth and its follow-up Let's Stay Friends. On the back of accessible yet riveting singles such as Patty Lee and What Would Wolves Do, that album that provided the cross-over into mainstream recognition, bolstering their reputation as being a formidable and highly volatile live act.

A further three years down the line (and a full month earlier than initially planned due to a premature leak) and LSF are back with Root For Ruin, a very much back-to-basics album, which strips back some of the sheen from Let's Stay Friends, and focuses on the guitar interplay of Seth Jabour and Andrew Reuland to deliver a more immediately gratifying set.

Root For Ruin hits the ground running with Appetites, and rarely pauses to catch its breath (the clues are there in the song titles - High And Unhinged, Excess Energies, Let's Get Out Of Here). All the hallmarks of a great LSF track are there in that opener; the barbed, interlocking guitars, Tim Harrington's rasping vocals and sick wordplay ("The stakes are so low that we eat off the floor/that's what we got long tongues for"). The likes of Lips'N'Stuff, Dirty Knails and Excess Energies follow very much in the same mould. Throughout Root For Ruin, guitarists Jabour and Reuland assert themselves as one of the finest and on-the-dial pairings around, finding the middle ground between the intricacy of Television's Verlaine and Lloyd and the intensity of Fugazi's MacKaye and Picciotto.

There's still plenty of poppier moments on the record. The jangle of Sleepless In Silverlake and the big chorus of Let's Get Out Of Here form the album's catchiest duo of songs whilst the choppy, slackened guitars of Dear Crutches could almost be Modest Mouse.

When the band strays off the well-beaten path, however, the results are even better. Poltergeist is a dark, claustrophobic affair, which has both a stoned and gothic quality to it. Closing track Clear Spirits, meanwhile, is much more exotic, with its big eastern riffs and Egyptian imagery. Both tracks, with their haunting, reverberating vocals, show that Les Savy Fav can do atmosphere just as well as punching you in the gut.

Root For Ruin is, in summary, Les Savy Fav through and through, and that's mostly for better rather than for worse. It's a very strong and highly enjoyable set of songs which stick close to what LSF do so well, but its successful forays elsewhere hint at what a great album it might have been, and what hopefully might be next time around.

76/100

Listen to if you like: F*cked Up, Future Of The Left

New Music: Grinderman, Women

Welcome back Nick Cave, Warren Ellis and chums. Grinderman are back, and they are as delightfully dirty as ever:

Grinderman - Heathen Child (released 30th August)

Calgary band Women also return this month with their second record, and if this cut is anything to go by, it might be something a bit special. Discordance at its prettiest. This is probably not the official video, but it should be:

Women: Locust Valley (from Public Strain, out late-August on Jagjaguwar)

The Club Is (Re)Open(ed)

The news that Guided By Voices have reformed, however briefly, to carry out a mini U.S. tour was well received by me, and I have my fingers and toes crossed that the reunion will spill over onto our shores (along with copious amounts of booze, no doubt). It's a small miracle that they have any time to tour at all, given Robert Pollard's exhausting run of releases (in the time I've taken to put this together, he's actually put out another album). It's not just any old GBV line-up too, but the golden era early-to-mid nineties GBV that spawned Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes et al. Happy days.

I recently read Perfect From Now On by John Sellers (having been lured and ultimately misled by it's Built To Spill-related title). It's a light and fairly entertaining read which leads to the author, a self-confessed GBV fanboy, going on a quest to follow round his idols on their 2004 farewell tour. The overriding impression you get about Robert Pollard and his merry troupe is that they were just normal good-time guys, who got on stage and acted like rock stars - high-kicks, mike twirls, the lot - but the moment they stepped off stage, they became normal guys again, usually heading back to Pollard's place to knock back several cans and watch sport on TV.

That golden era of GBV was endearing for its sloppiness, both in the quality of recording and its delivery, and those albums are seemingly the key texts in the spate of lo-fi and so-called "shit-core" bands which have popped up within the last few years. What so many of these bands seem to neglect, however, is GBV's playful experimentation, not to mention their way with a great tune; it's true that you can't polish a turd, but it's equally true that by layering it in fuzz and pushing everything into the red, you can't un-polish one either. But then again, as Pollard sings on Echoes Myron, "some of us are quite pleased/with the same old song". I'm sure everyone who hears that song on one of their live dates will concur.

Review: Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

Music critics can be fickle mistresses. Follow up a good debut album with a great sophomore effort and you can be heaped with praise, however undeserved, for the rest of your career. Do it the other way around, however, and you're cast off as one-hit wonders, also-rans, who can never hope to hit such peaks again. Herein lies the current predicament for the Arcade Fire. Of course, it doesn't help matters when you introduce your third album to the world with an uncharacteristically low-key effort (the sombre title track), all of which meant that the hype and level of expectation were not all they might have been.

Yet against these odds, the Arcade Fire have seriously delivered the goods with The Suburbs. At 16 tracks and 65 minutes, The Suburbs threatens to be a sprawl (it even has a multi-part song entitled Sprawl), but the even pacing and consistent theming of the tracks actually makes it the band's most focussed record to date.

Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels), the opening track from Funeral, depicted kids digging tunnels through the snow to escape their parents. The kids in The Suburbs are no different - "grab your mother's keys, we're leaving" Win Butler tells us on the opening track - and the BIG themes that bore so heavy on the shoulders of Neon Bible are of no concern to the inhabitants here ("when the first bombs fell/we were already bored"). The return to more personable matters is a most welcome one, and whilst the concept of disillusioned kids living out their repetitive, sterile lives in modern suburbia is hardly an original one, it is at least carried out whole-heartedly and coherently, with multi-part songs, and the repetition of key themes and lyrics.

What takes a bit of getting used to is the lack of bombast - on the first few listens at least, this really needs to be regarded as a very separate entity to its predecessors in order to be judged objectively. More driven songs like Month of May and Empty Room are the rare exceptions to an album which predominantly plays out in mid-tempo. But despite the more stately nature of the material, the songs are richly detailed, and when the band takes a song to a rousing conclusion, as on Suburban War and We Used To Wait, the indulgence feels well earned.

A few forays into new-wave might have been disastrous, but actually produce the album's glittering highlight on the Regine-led Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains), a Blondie-like gem that will surely go down a storm live. A few more obvious highlights wouldn't have done the album any harm, but The Suburbs succeeds in being greater than the sum of its parts, the archetypal grower. Most crucially, in executing this change in direction so well, they've proven that they are in it for the long haul, that they can and will remain one of the great bands in recent times.

The Suburbs closes with a reprise of the title track, in which Win Butler tells us "If I could have it back/all the time that we wasted/I'd only waste it again". For all their frustrations at their insular existence, the kids in The Suburbs lack both the ambition and imagination to do things any differently. For the Arcade Fire, thankfully, that's not the case.

86/100

Festival Overview: Field Day 2010

These New Puritans on the Adventures In The Beetroot Field stage

With a multitude of acts over five stages and just £33, Field Day promised to offer great value for a one-day festival. Truth is though, you can have too much of a good thing - with so many different stages and acts packed into so little time, performances were too short and clashes were all too common-place (take note, future festival organisers!). So whilst I was hoping to tell you about No Age, Atlas Sound and Esben & The Witch, this little lot will have to do:

Memory Tapes: Playing as just a guitar-drums duo plus a laptop, Dayve Hawk took a more live approach to his Seek Magic material, which gave him ample opportunity to showcase his way with a Cure-esque guitar lick. Unfortunately the toning down of the electronic side of his music meant that some of the craft of his songs were lost, making for a somewhat hit-and-miss set, though it did improve as time went on.

These New Puritans: The most visually interesting set of the day, featuring two oboes, a set of chains for secondary percussion, and a singer in chainmail, These New Puritans focused on their dazzling second album Hidden, but an all-too-short set meant there was sadly no Attack Music or Fire-Power. Arguably though, the highlights of the set came from their energetic performances of earlier material, suggesting a band still getting to grips with their new-found ambitions.

The Fall: The latest incarnation of Mark E Smith's post-punk institution made their way out onto the stage one by one, culminating in the appearance of the great cantankerous one himself. The years have not been kind to Smith - he looks old enough to be the father of any one of the other members - but he still knows how to rant incoherently over whatever racket the band throw at him. And whilst you wouldn't be able to pick out any of the other members in an identity parade, musically, they're a tight, muscular outfit. No wonder the reviews for Your Future, Our Clutter have been so positive.

Hypnotic Brass Ensemble: Playing in the background as we took time out for nosh, the 9-piece Chicago output certainly gave a rousing show, with instruments big enough to take your eye out even from distance.

Caribou: Dan Snaith brought along three other guys who played in a close-knit circle in the centre of the main stage, and provided unquestionably the highlight of the day. Sticking purely to material from his new album Swim, Snaith & co. concocted a dazzling display of trance-inducing music, culminating in a mesmeric performance of album highlight Sun. Outstanding, and a lesson to Dayve Hawk of Memory Tapes on how to bring bedroom music to a live setting.

Silver Apples: There was a very warm reception to Simeon Cox III and his home-made synthesiser, the remaining living half of seminal electronic group Silver Apples. And whilst his quirky synth loops and lyrics about oscillators seemed rather quaint, they also seemed strangely contemporary.

Finally, a special mention to the brass band that seemed to play non-stop for the entire day, playing everything from Ricky Martin to Journey.

Not just smoke and mirrors, Caribou blew everyone away. One fan expresses
their pleasure with a wellington boot containing foliage and an umbrella. Naturally.