Don't forget that you can stream the entirety of all these albums once by following the Lala link under their title!
Tegan and Sara: Sainthood
Lala | Myspace
I think I've been forever scarred by Belle and Sebastian. I instinctively associate Someone and Someone Else with Boring. Boring is by far my most commonly leveled accusation against music I don't like, but Belle and Sebastian must eat Boring at least once a day to achieve the spectacular levels of Boring they evoke.
Fortunately, Tegan and Sara arrived to salvage my conception of Someone and Someone Else. They have exciting haircuts and make exciting music. They also have a really stupid picture on the cover of this album, but that's okay: the record itself is a shining example of what makes them so good, which is basically... they write really, really catchy songs and are really, really adorable singing them. That is by far the best description I can muster of this, or any Tegan and Sara record.
It's hard not to criticize the main single, "Hell," for having already been written by other contemporary artists--for this single, the twins are "Everyone and Everyone Else." But it's equally hard not to like it, because most people doing it haven't been Tegan and Sara. This may sound unfair to every other artist who's written an uptempo pop song with an epic change in dynamics during the chorus, but it's also unfair to them that they aren't Tegan and Sara, and I didn't do that. You get the picture, right?
The rest of the songs are very much like what you'd expect based on prior output. There is a bit more experimentation on a couple tracks like "Arrow" and "Night Watch," both of which have a lot of electronic effects on them, but they are nothing too drastically different. The mid-album "Northshore" is even a straight ahead, barely two minute almost-punk number which mimics The Con's strategy with "Hop a Plane," and just like on The Con, it's a very welcome jumpstart for the latter half the album.
I need to emphasize again: Tegan and Sara are the only major label recording artists in existence who could get away with an album cover this stupid and avoid having my whole writeup focus on lampooning it.
Third Eye Blind: Ursa Major
Lala | Myspace
I barely like this enough to put it here, but I do. The thing is, you've probably already heard most of its best points on the radio. I think that Stephan Jenkins has a tendency to overwrite his songs. Choruses replicate too freely, and there is just a bit too much musical indulgence, like the pointless snoozer of an outtro appended to "One In Ten," an otherwise very enjoyable song. Bottom line, there are more 4:30+ tracks than anyone should be comfortable with on an alt rock album, which unfortunately is standard for 3EB.
Despite the fact that it's just plain too long, Ursa Major has enough solid material to warrant listening. The first two tracks have a lot of energy, and aren't even pushing it in length. After that things are a lot more up and down; mostly I think 3EB is at their best when they're up tempo and high energy, though the aforementioned "One In Ten" is a slow (short!) and quiet piece I found really enjoyable. Its followup, by contrast, is four minutes of dull, and that kind of vacillating is what you get the whole way through. I doubt I'm going to be returning to it much longer, but hey, you should give it a try with that link up there. It's free!
Jemina Pearl: Break it Up
Lala | Myspace
Let me tell you a story about a girl named Jemina. Once, when she was a kid, she was the vocalist and lyricist for this really awesome punk/garage band Be Your Own Pet, and I loved her for the way she snarled wittily juvenile lines at me about bicycles and Bad Brains and zombies and how she was an independent motherfucker who was going to rape me. I'm not kidding.
Then for some reason Be Your Own Pet made a really shitty album and broke up. Then Jemina started a new band as a solo artist and it was The Best Thing Ever. They played a show in Philadelphia on their first tour, and I talked to her about astrology after the show and she was very pleasant and, sadly, did not threaten to rape me.
Break it Up is a perfect successor to Jemina's earlier work. The humor is much more subdued, but rightly so. She's still got that distinctive snarl, but she's doing a lot more singing. And rightly so. The songs are still rock, but they've lost some punk and gained some pop... rightly so.
If Break It Up does anything wrong, it's that a few tracks are still clinging to The Old Ways and it's for the worse. "Looking For Trouble," for example. It's too much like what made the second BYOP album such a dud: it's going for a rebellious old school rock and roll feel, but feels insincere and manufactured. I think Jemina is just too good at infectious pop rock gems to still be bothering with that kind of wanky stuff.
Raveonettes: In and Out of Control
Lala | Myspace
I love this! I'm a latecomer to the Raveonettes, but I'm really enjoying this album. It's very sugary, produced through and through like a straight up pop album, but it feels alive and sincere. The vocals are your typical sweet and subdued affair, and that works perfectly for what this band is all about.
The one thing that I really don't like about this album is track four, "Boys Who Rape (Should All Be Destroyed)," which sticks out like a sore thumb on a record that's otherwise lyrically dedicated to by-the-books love and loneliness material. I'm pretty well in agreement that rape sucks, but that doesn't mean I want to hear about it on a skippy little pop album. And there's nothing overtly poetic about the lyrics--just about every line sung can be summed up by the title of the song--so their lack of novel information remains unjustified.
I'm not saying you can't effectively write a pop song about how sad rape is, but this is like if you were having a cheery conversation with your best friend about video games and then right in the middle of it you suddenly declared, "all rapists should be castrated and hanged immediately." It's just weird; there's nothing else in the content of any of the songs that evokes such a heavy or disturbing topic.
(Is it odd that this is the second album in this entry that's lead me to mention rape?)
Drummer: Feel Good Together
Lala
Drummer is an amalgamation of the drummers from five bands I either don't know or don't like, so I'm a bit surprised how much I like this record. What sounds like it would develop into something overly experimental is actually a very infectious collection of well-written and accessible songs, their eccentricities only serving to add nuance.
You can tell that the musicians on this album are all drummers, and it works. Everything sounds much more calculated here than what you usually hear, including the drums themselves, which somehow manage to throw in a lot of oddball rhythms without distracting from the melody or diminishing their catchiness. The point at which this becomes especially clear is midway through the opening song, when the drums cut out altogether and a keyboard line (reminds me of "Baba O'Reilly" in a good way) suddenly takes their place as rhythm maintenance.
Parts of the album evoke Pavement and the Pixies for me, but it's very much in possession of its sound (and perhaps I'm not the best person to say so anyway, since neither of those bands have more than one album that's ever driven me to listen repeatedly.)
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