News

Cleaning Up Their Act

Somewhere in indie-land, invisible tastemakers are putting a premium on sophistication and atmosphere. The French duo Air are old pros at both, but their new album—appropriately titled Pocket Symphony—is rather designer-tepid. It makes you wish they'd hurry up and have their midlife crises, so they can be freed up to try something weird again, like 10,000 Hz Legend, or write another deeply accessible pop song like "Playground Love."

Sophistication and atmosphere both work best as a means rather than an end—as Symphony's shortcomings prove. However, several less established acts have recently stepped up, and are putting a new premium on artful, classy pop songs—music that's careful not to short-change melody and form.

Elvis Perkins (son of Anthony) is a new name on our docket, and his debut, Ash Wednesday, bounces along with all the freshness of a first album, but little of the typical awkwardness or indecision. Perkins' folk-pop songs are deftly fleshed out with brass, violin, and theremin, but he allows the guitar and drum parts to be unexpectedly loose and shambling—there’s even a ramshackle sing-a-long chorus on the most upbeat, addictive tune, "May Day." Likewise, Perkins' appealingly laid-back vocals help to leaven his often cryptic lyrics, so that they remain intriguing rather than frustrating.

On his third album, Dressed Up for the Letdown, Richard Swift's slippery songs come with a good deal of polish. But little production touches left over from his lo-fi past hang around the edges of every tune, keeping them honest with a bit of DIY percussion here, a pinch of uncategorizable noise there.

Comparative veterans Andrew Bird and Laura Veirs have found their own ways of preserving freshness while approaching—or, in Bird’s case, having already embarked on—the second decade of a musical career. Bird's Armchair Apocrypha and Veirs' Saltbreakers show great care in varying the sonic palette from track to track, and both records also demonstrate highly focused songwriting—whether it be Bird's air-travel, protection charm "Fiery Crash," or Veirs' habitual illustration of inner states using precise natural and nautical imagery.

Sophistication takes a decided backseat to atmosphere on the Besnard Lakes' second album—their first for the Jagjaguwar label—entitled The Besnard Lakes Are the Darkhorse. They take spacey walls of guitar feedback reminiscent of the early '90s shoegazer bands and mix it with classic, Beach Boys-style harmonies. That's not their only trick, but it is their best one—and it's good enough to sustain the songs through occasional lapses in judgment, like jacking the "this is an anthem, kids"-meter up to 11 a few too many times.

Labelmates Odawas move in subtler, more interesting directions on their own sophomore album, Raven and the White Night, dropping wounded vocals, droning organs, vintage synths, fingerpicked acoustic guitar, and the occasional heavily-compressed electric lead into one big echo chamber of darkly hallucinated Americana.

Oddly enough, cheeky sister act CocoRosie end up pursuing similar moods on The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn (due on April 10th). In a change of heart, they make an effort to invest their deliberately trashy, libidinal electro-folk with some genuine psychic weight this time around. The resulting arrangements are even denser, more elaborate, and a good deal more emotionally spiked, than on past albums. The duo achieves an almost claustrophobic sense of nostalgia by piling on layers of ghostly keyboards, tweaked backing vocals, and disjointed sound effects, until all but the dippiest of the Casady girls' reveries are contorted into haunting, doleful shapes.

But more bewitching still is Blood Is Clean (due April 16th), the solo debut of Jackie-O Motherfucker's Honey Owens, under the name Valet. At their best, Ms. Owens' hypnotically layered guitar streams and echoing, chant-like vocals generate an aura of intense calm out of which she conjures deeply ambivalent emotions. On the title track, Owens' sings "My blood is clean, but the devil is in me" with such coiled, private intensity that the lyrics—though obscure and afflicted—resonate profoundly.

The best atmospheric jams reinforce a fundamental advantage music has over more strictly narrative arts: You don't have to know what a song is "about" to feel its power, all you have to do is let it wash over you.

- Nate Cunningham
03.23.07