Magic Kids - Memphis (2010) [True Panther] // Grade: B -

Memphis natives Magic Kids have released their appropriately names debut LP Memphis. This is a band that’s manifesto is to spread happiness to the world, tread on the side of love not evil, and that bad music is the stuff which makes you sad. Their name is inspired by the early 90s movie poster of “Magic Kid” (with clouds, Christmas tree, kid in karate split, clown, red convertible and featuring tag line “dreams are just wishes…coming true”) but is a flick the band has never seen. They don’t want to ruin the illusion of the so terrible it’s awesome poster and who can blame them. The movie is probably crap. The members of Magic Kids seem to be genuinely happy people, which is a refreshing change from the blank emotions of some hipster bands floating around. They even have slumber parties after every show. No wonder Magic Kids creates music that is so spunky and upbeat. It’s so sugary sweet it almost gives you a toothache.

Memphis is an album full of modern day pop oldies with a twee edge. They do a superb job of mixing the sunny disposition of early 60s pop but instead of basing songs around simplistic repeating melodies they take it to grand places. A mixture of instruments are used (horns, strings, oboes, synths, drums, guitars) to create these epic crescendoing instrumentals that are cause for celebration as the joyful lyrics like “you were always on my mind and you stayed in my pocket all the time”, “there’s no candy sweeter than my baby”, and “it’s so good to be with you” are chirpily belted out (with exuberant back up vocals to boot). The previously released single “Hey Boy” apparently took seven months to record and definitely is a phenomenal track, but then the LP took only two months.

Regardless of the short time frame, Magic Kids have created grandiose pop tracks that you just can’t sit still during (especially track “Superball”). I hate to say they’ve reinvented old fashioned pop for a modern era (because I’m sure they’re not the only band out there making great pop music) but with tracks “Good To Be”, “Cry With Me Baby”, and “Candy” you can hear the doo wop influences intertwined in their extravagant, superbly produced instrumentals. The layers are just as complex as some ethereal shoegaze stuff that the ear has a lot to listen to and doesn’t just get soaked in sugar. They break up the pure sunshine tracks with “Skateland” (featuring more rock heavy guitars), and reflective yearning slower tracks “Hideout” and “Summer”.

Memphis is a perfect album to bring anyone out of the summer’s over funk and perk spirits up for the changing season. Magic Kids are touring throughout the fall and I’m sure they put on an awesome show, so check them out if you get the chance!

Bastard Priest - Under the Hammer of Destruction (2010) [Pulverised] // Grade: A

About fucking time. I like my death metal like I like my meatballs. Ground flesh, blood and with a kick. I want to feel blood running down my cheek when I bite into my death metal. Göteborg can kiss my meatball-laden ass. Stockholms län’s modern death revival is mincing up some fucking brutal death metal akin to Possessed and Death’s early work. If you fiend for the best, do not miss Bastard Priest’s new album Under the Hammer of Destruction. These dudes have come a long way from the gritty and compressed sound of their 2008 demo, Merciless Insane Death. Expect old school breaks, decrepit vocals and lighting-beckoning riffs.

I swear to God, “Blasphemy from Hell” and “Visions of Doom” alone will sell you on this album. Super simple and yet highly-effective deliverance of death metal. Seriously, it’s not that hard to put a good album together. The formula is simple. Blast beats, reverb in the vocals, riffs and deep breaks. Then all you need are some easily-repeated lyrics. Take “Evil Pain” for example. I don’t think Matt Mendoza even mutters anything besides “Evil Pain” for the entire three minutes. That doesn’t mean Under the Hammer of Destruction is predictable though. Akin to their influences like, Repulsion and Autopsy, Bastard Priest knows how to mix it up just enough to keep the listener engaged. With eleven tracks and 35 minutes to do so, Bastard Priest keeps you in tune.

In what I think is the best song on the album, “Power of Death” screams an homage to Chuck Schuldiner’s greatest work. Just listen to it and tell me you’re not fighting the urge to drum on your desk. Many hits follow, including “Chuck”, “Merciless Insane Death” and “En Hälsning från Helvetet”, a Bombanfall cover. How epic is that track? Damn. Under the Hammer of Destruction might be one of the better death metal albums of 2011. For a while, the Germans have been ruling the world and now, maybe it’s time for a Stockholms län revival. If I could open a death metal meatball bar at some point in my life, I’d get Bastard Priest to play the opening party!

Nite Jewel - Am I Real EP (2010) [Gloriette] // Grade: A-

Listening to Nite Jewel feels like being caught up in a pillow fight. The bedroom lights are dimmed as fluffy smacks catch you off-guard, tangling your hair over your eyes and obscuring your view. The scene unfolds slowly, the air above calm in waiting for your next move.

From full-length Good Evening, Nite Jewel emerged in paleness, offering tranquil dance melodies shifting under a bedroom disco ball. The act’s recently released Am I Real? EP finds Nite Jewel gripped to the same ideals, but projecting their sounds with a newfound boldness. The former grit and buzz of their production has vanished, replaced by smooth, slow-burning synth funk. Ramona Gonzales’s warbles and quiet wails remain built on repetition and ambiance, though this time we hear a greater attention to tunefulness and a smattering of straightforward vocal melody lines.

Nite Jewel work well (perhaps, better) in the space of an EP. Six songs forces them to put their most focused selections forward, and we’re left with one solid track after another. The ordering of the tracks seem tirelessly considered, beginning with the atmospheric “Another Horizon” in which Gonzales’s voice simultaneously provides both the upfront and backing vocal sounds. Her voice comes forth like a wounded bird; delicate, tentative, calling out with immediacy. “We Want Our Things” takes a step away from the disco beat lines, picking up the sounds of synthpop before transitioning into a glittery, grinding interlude. Over moments of clear vocal melody, a more structured Nite Jewel begins to come into view, setting the stage on which spectacular closer and title track “Am I Real?” plays out as a fully developed composition of smooth jazz tones supporting a powerhouse display of vocals from Gonzales that leave the impression of capable lyricism and sublime mood-setting.

Am I Real? is a testament to the idea of hearing a band in their early days, and that unshakable feeling of excitement in your gut, knowing that yeah right now they’re rough around the edges, but there’s something really special here and down the line they are going to shine. Congratulations Nite Jewel, you’ve made the leap from interesting, to shining.

Soft Metals - The Cold World Melts EP (2010) [Captured Tracks] // Grade: B+

Soft Metals have garnered quite a bit of hype and love from the internet recently, even here, on this very blog. Now with their first official release, the debut EP The Cold War Melts sees the duo try to live up to that blog pressure with five tracks that run through a dark club land of Italo disco and cold wave to brooding late night dance floors and housey synth fueled nostalgia for a night out at club that never really existed.

The Cold War Melts starts with the brilliant “Love or Music”, a track full of grooving drum machine claps and slow achingly retro synths stances, when the vocal hits it’s drenched in all that echo and reverb you’d expect from an Italo disco track from ’83 but it’s got a surprising dynamism that stops it from being too spacey and brings the pop element in with a vengeance, properly nice. To go from there would take something impressive and track two manages it with the EPs title track which bursts into life with dark and throbbing synths that beat out a rhythm that the Predator would stalk you to, it’s a great dance floor tune all acid squelches, posing in the dark, lasers painting lines though smoke and after work execs chatting on phones the size of bricks.

By the third track the late night, trip out on the dance floor vibe is firmly established and you can settle into the pop hooks and epic female vocals drifting serenely over everything. Then we hit up what I find most annoying on albums (and especially EPs), the instrumental track. And sure it’s nice enough and would maybe be fine on a release with more songs but I just can’t help feel instrumentals are included as filler, especially when the rest of the songs have such a pop sensibility about them. The final track “Another Goodbye” brings things back with a glacial New Order via Patrick Cowley feel, slow and seductive with vocals like a valium dosed 1983 Madonna.

This is the sort of release that can be enjoyed via headphones on a rain soaked day as much as on the dance floor of a smoke filled club. The EP’s heavy Italo sound will I’m sure draw obvious comparisons to Johnny Jewel’s recent work. But what sets this apart from Glass Candy, Chromatics and Desire is that Jewel has never worked with a vocalist as confidant as Patricia Furpurse nor released 5 tracks quite as dancefloor ready as these.

Fans familiar with Soft Metals will have no doubt heard these five tracks via their soundcloud and Myspace page for quite some time now but they’re a band that’s very much deserving a wider audience and an official vinyl release. So while I enjoyed this EP quite a bit, I’m at the point where I’m dying to hear newer material my ears haven’t yet fully devoured. But for the rest of you who will undoubtedly first be introduced to Soft Metals via this EP you’ll find a dark, imposing and even epic release that once over will have you where I’m already at… eagerly awaiting what’s next.

Metallica – The Black Album (1991)

Vs.

Queens of the Stone Age – Songs For the Deaf (2002)

The Game is simple… if only one could exist which would it be? What’s more important… personal relevance, cultural significance, or simply being the better album all other things aside? Choice is yours…

Oofa! So let me preface this by saying that I’m a pretty big Eli Roth fan. I think he’s one of the sharpest minds making Horror today. And while he hasn’t really directed anything since the  merely “OK” Hostel 2, the man knows what it takes to make not only great but campy horror… so I went into The Last Exorcism, which he produced (his first as a producer), hoping it would be an extension of the witty, blood-soaked and tongue-in-cheek style he not only helped resurrect, but take to the next level.

Roth has been tweeting endlessly about the film and crowd reactions to its numerous festival screenings, reputed gorehound sites were singing its praises, and it had a clever viral campaign a week or so prior to its national debut. So you know, I had a pretty good feeling that this film would deliver a few solid thrills, some chuckles, and gore, gore and more gore. Oofa! Was I ever wrong.

I’ll give the film its due in how it cleverly revamped the tired exorcism model into something that could have been a great premise. Cotton Marcus has been groomed to be a reverend since he was a child, eventually taking over for his father preaching sermons and performing exorcisms. Problem is that Cotton is a great showman, and all of this is just a fun little act. For him, being a reverend is not about faith, but simply telling people what they want to hear to get past their problems. When Cotton reads about an autistic child who dies at the hands of another reverend during an exorcism, he has a crisis of conscious and decides that it’s time to expose exorcisms for the ruse that they really are. He teams up with a film crew who sets out to document every aspect of the preparation and staging of what will hopefully be the last exorcism ever.

Cotton and the crew head down to Louisiana to the Sweetzer farm after receiving a letter from Louis Sweetzer to come help his daughter, Nell, who is supposedly possessed and slaughtering livestock in her sleep. Cotton obviously doesn’t believe in demons and for him, the whole production of an “exorcism” is a sort of shock therapy for people move past some psychological baggage that they’re carrying. So Cotton does his whole exorcism shtick and proclaims young Nell cured. But funny thing is that later that night, Nell shows up in Cotton’s hotel room acting creepy as all fuck. From then on, the film shifts to Cotton trying to figure out what the underlying cause of her “demonic” behavior is, as the audience is left guessing if Nell is actually crazy or possessed all the way until the end.

Before I tear into the film, I would like to single out both Patrick Fabian (Cotton) and Ashley Bell (Nell) for their acting… actually the acting in The Last Exorcism is, overall, pretty damn good. It’s the directing and the plot that leave a lot to be desired. The whole film is shot from the perspective of the film crew’s cameraman, except none of it whatsoever looks like it was shot from one camera by a guy documenting something. It’s over-directed and so strategically shot and paced that you can’t help but wonder why the film couldn’t just have been about a film crew documenting the exorcism  rather than the supposed “real” film. This fault is very hard to get past, like speaking with someone with a bad toupee. Try as you might to get past it, you just keep wondering “how do they not know how bad this looks?” instead of actually concentrating on the conversation… or movie in this case.

The guessing game of what’s at the root of Nell’s “possession” is also pretty tedious and predictable — a melodramatic see-saw back and forth centered around family trauma that just makes you want to scream, “Ok, we get it! Show us more blood and creepy contortion shit!”, most of which had already been used for the trailers. After dragging on and on, at the very end you’re gifted with a bungled yet clever twist (right before sputtering into either a poor homage or comically bad rip of The Blair Witch Project) that just leaves you contemplating “why couldn’t this more just have been more of this?”. Those 5 minutes at the end are some of the films most interesting and it’s only suspenseful moment. It’s a shame they weren’t fleshed out more.

Maybe I expected too much from something Eli Roth would put his name and money behind, and that’s probably my fault because horror is horror and even the greats produce their fair share of crap. The Last Exorcism is about on par with the Horror movies that get dumped at 1am on Showtime 2, and that’s probably when and where you should catch it… preferably from the middlepoint on, after stumbling home half-soused.

RxRy - VAEIOUWLS (2010) [Self-Released] // Grade: B+

These 12 songs, all named as vowel variations (“AIUIA” or “EUIEE”), mark the bedroom arranger RxRy’s most focused and inclusive effort yet. Whereas the curative eight-song debut took just six days from start to finish, the 40-minute VAEIOUWLS took closer to two months to complete and upon first listen, you’re given a layered invitation into lurking the space just below the water’s surface and only faintly hearing the noises above you.

It was originally thought that the player behind the RxRy tag was Panda Bear’s Noah Lennox and that the debut, self-titled batch of 8 songs were “unreleased joints” from the Animal Collective member’s Tomboy sessions. Fending off the case of mistaken identity, rumors were discredited after RxRy posted an image on their MySpace page, saying simply that he/she/it was “not Noah.” The sonic similarities are largely a stretch as the music on both VAEIOUWLS and RxRy remain planted in the realm of murmuring electronic ambience and many steps away from the Wilson-soaked, hazy harmonic luminosity of Lennox.

VAEIOUWLS is a pervasively discrete collection of digitized pulsations swabbed over barely-there washes, buzzing ambiance and soothing landscape (and genre) nods. It’s easy to tick off immediate similarities to the likes of Aphex Twin, Eluvium, Loscil or Nathan Fake while placing the songs under the overused mark of IDM alongside lesser parts of Dub, Dark Ambient and House flourishes.

RxRy’s debut was made while its creator was ill. Starting in December of last year, the  sonic space spawned as an in-the-moment restorative measure— “Rx” is the prescription and “Ry” represents rays extending outward— and soon became a cure for routine. The musician describes daily life: “Wake up, drive to school, float aimlessly, drive home, get lost in sounds, repeat” like a perfect subtitle for the creation. Getting lost in VAEIOUWLS’ runtime is of effortless appeal.

What you’ll notice is just how much RxRy’s sophomore release skims the fat from other contemporary background maestros; this is a record that’s deep, though concise, and glowingly ear-to-ear agile. Starting with waving synths and building percussive clunks, VAEIOUWLS’ opener, “AIUIA” is over before you have a real chance to fall anywhere near it’s bottom. “UUAII” is spiced with orchestral weight and a low-toned bass hum, though it plays more like a refrain of sorts, checking to see if it’s listener is still there.

Starting to pick up pace, VAEIOUWLS’ legs are well and stretched by the time “EIIOA” hits and we move through jumping bass prods that bolster an almost electro lead before the album’s opus “AAIEI” blows in with multi-layered sophistication.

The person behind RxRy represents a growing number of boutique artists that exist solely on bandwidth buzz and viral value. RxRy says on their blog, “I want people to have free music, unrestrained and broadly available to every person who can download it,” They support the ubiquitous goal by continuing to offer music like VEAIOUWLS, at no cost. Though they “would love” to release physical formats, all RxRy releases— 2 LPs and EPs as well as a few singles— have all been free, direct Mediafire links. VEAIOUWLS is well worth a listen- so snag a copy down below.

Download RxRy’s VAEIOUWLS for FREE! (Click Here)

Hipster Youth - Teenage Elders (2010) [Self-Released] // Grade: B-

Love or loathe Crystal Castles, their use of chiptune samples sort of repositioned the genre, illustrating how 8-bit beats could sound as one element of a larger, hi-fidelity composition. But as good as those samples sound within their work, severing them from the context in which they’re generally created loses much of the specialness of the sound. 19-year-old Aidan Wall (who also releases music as Porn on Vinyl) produces gritty, off-kilter 8-bit bedroom dance under the name Hipster Youth on album Teenage Elders.

With track titles bearing names like “Pop Song For Those With Short Attention Spans”, “I Lost My Corpse Paint” and “Super Fun Hipster Suicide Party”, Wall  brings a observational humor to his tracks. They feel lighthearted, approachable but also carry with them a measure of loner self-doubt. Aidan Wall is that kid with the messy hair in the back of class inking out a graphic novel when he should be taking notes. Teenage Elders embodies that notion of creative escape from the mundaneness of reality, and for anyone who’s ever built a world within their own head and decided to live there awhile, Wall is easily identifiable as a kindred spirit.

As a whole, the album possesses little continuity. Some tracks are barely over a minute (“Interlude [Yes, I did drink too much. I must get out of here]“, “Things I Should Say”) while “I Lost My Corpse Paint” clocks in at nearly nine. Stylistically, Wall leaps between sounds which does nothing to help the album’s flow, but establishes an environment of wild unpredictability that is energizing. “Pop Song For Those With Short Attention Spans” pairs far-off, light typewriter-sounding beats with woozy vocals then jars you out of dreaming and into “Little Lost Bear” which sounds like an synth organ-led final boss showdown. “Myself Or Something” emulates gritty reverb with digital static while both “Super Fun Hipster Suicide Party” and “Things I Should Say” kick up the pace offering speaker-blown 8-bit dance parties to the mix.

The sound quality overall is amateur at best. The collection of tracks don’t transition well, with volume level discrepancies that are often jarring jumps. But neither polish nor high production values are the point. Teenage Elders is exciting. You are never sure what will fly into your ears next, but you can count on it being highly creative, and, fun.

You can download Teenage Elders for FREE at Hipster Youth’s Bandcamp or by using the player below.

ARP - The Soft Wave (2010) [Smalltown Supersound] // Grade: B

The Soft Wave is music that hovers in the twilight, a transition of a thing, one stage to the next. Arp mastermind Alexis Georgopolous once described his ambient electro as “summer ending and autumn beginning”, but this second release recalls even more: black night to dawn, inland to coast, teenagerdom to whatever comes next. Not simply a series of opposites, but the literal stasis between Points A and B.

It’s a wistful thing, that stasis. And The Soft Wave is a wistful album, if for no other reason than the chords strike that chord, you know, the difficult-to-pinpoint emotional clusterfuck of nostalgia and hope-filled ambition all at once. We’ve learned it from the movies; we’ve know it from TV. When incidental music goes like this—a minor suddenly finding a major, warm and analogue moments like white-tipped waves—we’re trained to suspect the end of something.

And in that sense, this album is equal to Arp’s 2007 debut. Maybe even better, if emotional brilliance outpaces technical—and the experience of non-stop work outpaces that. Georgopolous has, after all, accomplished loads in the interim: scored the modern-dance Replica and Doug Aitken’s film Migration, remixed Lindstrom, released some stuff with other band The Alps. He also moved from San Francisco to New York, which makes one wonder: is this man’s life anything but transition? Whatever tendency he gets out of his system, however, whenever, isn’t he constantly shuffling from this thing to the next?

Well, yeah. Hence the album’s affection for minimalism, an affection stronger than even In Light‘s most stripped moments. Clean white rooms, a paring down; this one song about this one melody and nothing else. “Alfa” and its psych guitar. The shock of milky vocals on “From A Balcony Overlooking The Sea”. The “High Life” implication of steel drum, how it suggests all these vacationy elements without actually using them. If the preset-reminiscent beats feel exhausted by the end—the one bit that’s a nagging constant—it’s only because your focus is meant to be elsewhere. I just spent so much time as a kid playing with the built-in Casio accompaniment, it’s tough to hear much else. Ignore me. The intention is pure. And so are the jams, these creamy and organic things evocative enough to conjure a weepy eyed mess. The Soft Wave is Arp at its most bone-bare: the reality of nostalgia and our so-wistful stasis, soundtracked.

Bonded By Blood - Exiled to Earth (2010) [Earache] // Grade: C+

There’s a time in every band’s music career where they have to choose between two paths: a new direction and progression or just the same ol same ol. Sure, your debut might have slaughtered thousands of fans but there’s only so many ADD kids out there who appreciate balls to the wall thrash with little direction and guidance. Take Bonded by Blood’s career. When Feed the Beast came out, people thought “ok, I get it, these guys like old-school Exodus and Maiden”. But when their new album, Exiled to Earth was announced, everyone was kinda hoping for something new from the band. Instead, we get force-fed the same yawning experience. If I wanted to hear Exodus, I’d listen to Exodus. Nah mean?

Not to say that Exiled to Earth isn’t a prime example of California “old school thrash” because it is. Jose “Aladdin” Barrales’ vocals very much fit the bill of an 80′s thrash band. The riffs are there, along with the crowd chants and lead takeoffs fill the 42-minute assault. At a certain point though, it comes across as a hokey-gimmick. I just picture the band practicing in their parent’s garage on a cul-de-sac somewhere in the ‘burbs. That’s the best imagery I can supply because the literal translation of cul-de-sac is “bottom of bag” and that’s just what Exiled to Earth is; an album about robots killing people in the future. What? Really?

Critique aside, I’m sure there’s a long-haired and mustached, sleeveless shirt wearing uncle somewhere who will jam out to this in his 1980′s GMC van with a unicorn airbrushed on the side. Ok, a wizard, not a unicorn. But still. I had high hopes for Bonded By Blood doing something, well new and all we get is the same regurgitated and predictable trash. Oops, I mean thrash. There are some nice moments in the album though. “Prison Planet” and “ Sector 87” are two outstanding performance pieces. The title track “Exiled To Earth” isn’t too bad either and the drumming in “Prototype: Death Machine” is note-worthy. I know that sounds like a good amount of decent tracks but I’m merely pointing out the best on the album.

Sure, this was a harsh review but sometimes an album just hits you where you least expect it to. These expectations really do lead to your like or dislike of a band. While Feed the Beast was a pleasant experience, sometimes too much of a ‘meh’ thing gets toxic. Exiled to Earth isn’t a bad album, just not what I wanted to hear. With all of the futuristic overtones in the album, you’d think the band would do something, I dunno, new?