Pop/ Indie album reviews
In this issue
+/-, Jumping the Tracks
Jumping the Tracks represents the first batch of fresh +/- material in a half-dozen years, continuing the maturation process that fully flowered with 2008’s relatively desolate Xs on Your Eyes. “Young Once” opens Jumping with the melancholy guitar ministrations of James Baluyut and Patrick Ramos, channeling Peter Buck’s jangling riffage and Ira Kaplan’s desperate squall, while being propelled by Chris Deaner’s tribal drumming. +/- don’t present nearly as grim a facade as they did on Xs on Your Eyes, although things aren’t all sweetness and light, either. And yet, like the band’s best and most definitive works to date, there are discernible shafts of light in the darkness, and a brooding joy in their patented whisper-to-blister dynamics. +/- are never going to produce the feel-good hit of any season, but Jumping the Tracks is a most welcome return to the glorious gloom the group has cultivated from the very start. —Brian Baker
The Men, Tomorrow’s Hits
The mellowing of the Men continues. In just two short years, the band responsible for the mostly balls-out and hardcharging Open Your Heart has down-shifted into Tomorrow’s Hits, an eight-song album that flounders too much in mid-tempo purgatory. It was ultimately unimportant what vocalist Mark Perro was sing-shouting on crowd-movers from earlier efforts; here, on slower, more singsong offerings, Perro’s low-mixed vocals are murky, damning their meanings to the same fate. I get the sense that there’s some cool ’70s nostalgia going on in “Dark Waltz” with a drum-playing brother who sold weed and the family van, but I’ll be damned if I can ferret out the details. And there’s some nice relationship drama in the hornand piano-laden “Another Night.” At least I think there is. The upside to the band’s introspective turn: You can hear strains of other artists that went from ripping to gripping, such as Ted Leo and the Replacements. We’ll decide to read that as promising. For now. —Brian G. Howard
Morrissey, Your Arsenal Definitive Master
As his po-faced interview on The Colbert Report in 2012 confirmed, Steven Patrick Morrissey’s persona has reached an absurd crescendo. His newly reissued 1992 album is one of the best encapsulations of everything both great and frustrating about Morrissey. (The reissue also perversely contains a DVD of a Bay Area gig from 1991, before Your Arsenal was made, although the album’s “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful” is performed.) With former Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson producing, the LP is a frequently roaring glam/ rockabilly hybrid that often sounds nothing like the Smiths. Musically, there’s nary a bad track on Your Arsenal. The turbo-charged Peter Gunn/Batman riff of opener “You’re Gonna Need Someone on Your Side” sets things alight. “You’re the One for Me, Fatty” sighs sweetly; “I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday” yearns longingly. Your Arsenal’s lurid fascination with violent urges (contrasted with moments of tenderness) gives the album sick power and continued relevance.—Michael Pelusi
Unwound, Rat Conspiracy
Much has been made of the late, great Unwound and their tendencies toward avant-angular rhythms and ferocious slabs of noise. That’s fine. Lord knows, they never got enough of hearing those Sonic Youth-meets-Fugazi comparisons. But the one thing that we have learned more about through Numero Group’s recent explorations into the Olympia quartet’s catalog is that there was more to the melody of Unwound than just a few simple, catchy, primitive riffs. The Rat Conspiracy box set acts similarly. Taking its name from the working title for 1993 album Fake Train on Kill Rock Stars, the box compiles that LP, its immediate follow-up (New Plastic Ideas of 1994), B-sides, live stuff and odd-but-apt covers by the Minutemen. There’s pounding drums and fractured layers of screech to be found on “All Souls Day” and such, but singer Justin Trosper’s haunted holler, the chilledout sheen of “Hexenzene” and the tuneful rush of “Entirely Different Matters” reveal Unwound to be more than noise-mongers. —A.D. Amorosi