IMPERIAL TEEN
The Hair the TV the Baby & the Band
(Merge)
In the half-decade since the last Imperial Teen album, the band’s
four comrades have been running a hair salon, scoring television,
raising a baby, and fronting another band (Will Schwartz’s electro-pop
project Hey Willpower). Hence the name of their new album, The Hair
the TV the Baby & the Band.
Despite—or perhaps because of—the extended break, the
album is an exhilarating blast of pop perfection. These music veterans
are as effervescent and excited as ever. Like their color-coordinated
stage wear, Imperial Teen’s music has always been a triumph of
sophisticated simplicity, and that’s here in spades. From bratty,
buoyant songs such as “Everything” and “One Two,” to the sultry strains
of “Shim Sham,” and the retro-cool of “Fallen Idol,” you can still get
a contact high from the band’s obvious chemistry and the joy they take
in making beautiful music together.
It’s refreshing to know that 11 years after releasing their
debut—and in spite of the hair, the television scores, a growing
family, and another band that could have split them
apart—Imperial Teen haven’t skipped a beat. BARBARA
MITCHELL
THE NEW
PORNOGRAPHERS
Challengers
(Matador)
1/2
The New Pornographers: Two talented yet disparate composers, four
vocalists, at least half a dozen band members, and a comprehensive
breadth of pop smarts that makes the combined faculty and student body
of Berklee College of Music look like a cage of chart-reading monkeys.
With so many balls in play, you’d expect the them to get hopelessly
entangled, like some oversized Muppet spider, dancing furiously to an
ever-accelerating accompaniment. Yet,miraculously, the Pornos twist and
whirl, from start to finish, with nary a misstep on
Challengers.
In terms of instrumentation, the Canadian supergroup’s fourth
full-length is their most ambitious to date. The melancholy closer,
“The Spirit of Giving” (one of three songs by Destroyer’s Dan Bejar;
the remainder spring from the mind of A. C. Newman), features harp,
French horn, and accordion. On “Adventures in Solitude,” the conjoined
vocals of Newman and Kathryn Calder croon “we thought we lost you” over
and over, banjo and mandolin notes hovering around them like chipper
summer insects.
Continuing the progression of 2005’s Twin Cinema, the 12
new tracks further expand the group’s stylistic repertoire. There are
still glimpses of their bristling power pop of yore, particularly on
the art school twist “All the Things That Go to Make Heaven and Earth.”
Yet the program also encompasses a six-and-a-half-minute epic that
features some of Newman’s niftiest lyrics (“You are not the first to
wake up/to learn your lines before you have the part”), a ditty driven
primarily by tremolo guitar (“Failsafe”), and the desolate “Go Places,”
tenderly sung by Neko Case. Forget what those initial numbers look
like; it all adds up magnificently. KURT B. REIGHLEY
JUNIOR SENIOR
Hey Hey My My Yo Yo
(Rykodisc)
1/2
Wasn’t the whole idea behind Junior Senior just instant
gratification? Jesper Mortensen (Junior) and Jeppe Laursen’s (Senior)
shameless concoctions—big, ripe hooks; immediately ingratiating
party chants; and beats intended to move everything from house parties
to stadiums—weren’t exactly a gradual-appreciation sort of
proposition. So it’s curious that the Danish duo’s second album has
taken two full years to come out in the U.S. Maybe 2003’s D-D-Don’t
Don’t Stop the Beat so perfectly concentrated the dozens of prior
pop thrills it recalled, either directly (“C’mon” is a direct steal
from “Mony Mony”) or merely in drive-by manner (the falsetto “oooh”s of
“Rhythm Bandits” is straight from the Beatles’ version of “Twist and
Shout”), that most Americans probably figured they’d heard everything
they needed to. Or maybe it just didn’t sell enough records to make a
label want to scramble for the follow-up.
But Hey Hey My My Yo Yo ought to be a big hit with people
who adored D-D-Don’t: It’s occasionally cloying (the milky
vocal harmonies in the background of “I Like Music” and “No No Nos”
evoke wayward Care Bears) and doesn’t peak as high as the debut, but
it’s more consistent overall. They still proudly steal from all over
the place, not least themselves: “Take My Time” is reminiscent of the
D-D-Don’t hit “Move Your Feet” with more electro-R&B
glide, while “We R the Handclaps” suggests a lot of quality time spent
with the KC and the Sunshine Band catalog. When Mortensen and Laursen
chant on “Hip Hopallula,” “There’s too much good stuff out there to
ignore,” they could be talking about themselves. MICHAELANGELO
MATOS
CARIBOU
Andorra
(Merge)
1/2
Hey, everybody, did you hear? It’s the 40th anniversary of the
Summer of Love! Besides boomer-age magazine publishers and the
nostalgia industry (right, same thing), who fucking cares? Actually,
from the sound of his fourth album—the first two recorded as
Manitoba—Dan Snaith, now known as Caribou, does. Boy, does he
ever: From the gloriously wussy folk-rock vocal harmonies to the flutes
hidden behind feedback to the glowing-gold haze hanging over every song
(this album sounds the way overexposed film stock looks),
Andorra evokes bygone psychedelia as aptly as any recent
album.
Snaith’s music isn’t merely a throwback, though. Caribou expands to
a full band live, but his albums are done alone with a laptop. You’d
hardly guess it listening to “Sandy,” with its concentric-circular
guitar picking and drums that sound like the Byrds’ Michael Clarke
leaning on the toms. You might also figure any chorus that goes,
“Sometimes in her eyes I see forever/I can’t believe what we’ve found/I
know in time we’ll be together/And now our love will make this sound,”
would have to come from a lighter-headed, lysergic past. Instead,
Snaith’s dazed, undermixed vocals give them a modern wink.
Musical detail is everything with psychedelia, and Snaith piles on
the little touches: the pinging synths bouncing around “After Hours”
and the electric keyboards and cello underpinning “She’s the One” (sung
by Jeremy Greenspan). But Snaith flattens it all into a beguiling 2-D
matte finish, so that what hits you first is the sound in full. The
whole dazzles; the parts sort themselves out later. MICHAELANGELO
MATOS
ARCHITECTURE IN HELSINKI
Places Like This
(Polyvinyl)
1/2
Places Like This is the work of a leaner and meaner
Architecture in Helsinki. The band have sloughed off former members
Isobel Knowles and Tara Shackell to become a sextet, and they’ve
separated geographically, with main singer/songwriter Cameron Bird
migrating to Brooklyn while the rest of the band remain in their native
Melbourne. They’ve ditched the geeky instrumentation charts that
appeared on their old album sleeves for bright illustrations by Will
Sweeney, although they’ve lost little of the actual
instrumentation—there’s still plenty of conga, trombone,
synthesizer, and the like.
Unfortunately, they have lost some of the trembling enthusiasm that
made In Case We Die such an unexpected triumph. Bird’s
winningly timid and breathy vocals have become more of a strained,
blustery growl. And where that album’s instrumental bombast was
complemented by a kind of scrappy rush and held together by sweet,
sentimental melodies, this new album’s bursts of fanfare and funk are
disjointed, those endearing melodies largely replaced by gaudy,
unsatisfying hooks.
There are exceptions that find Bird and crew (especially sometimes
vocalist Kellie Sutherland) still sounding as wide-eyed and gleeful as
ever. Lead single “Heart It Races,” with its layers of stoned
background vocals and steel drums, is playful and catchy. “Like It or
Not” is a charmer full of cute keyboard bounces, shaky acoustic guitar,
cheery trombone, and absurd vocals. And Sutherland’s singing on
“Nothing’s Wrong” hits the same sweet spot as In Case We Die‘s
“Wishbone.” These tracks all recall Architecture’s best work, but
they’re stranded amid relative duds such as “Feather in a Baseball
Cap,” “Debbie,” and “Same Old Innocence.” Places Like This is
a merely good record with some great songs. As the sequel to the
brilliant In Case We Die, it’s a disappointment. ERIC
GRANDY
Finn Crisp Ahk-mak
Wasa Ritz
