Gayngs

Relayted (Jagjaguwar, 05.2010)

For: Prince, CFCF, pretty much the whole Dirty Dancing soundtrack

Byline: Midwestern supergroup (feat. Bon Iver, P.O.S, Solid Gold, Megafaun, Prince?) create a sprawling record filled to the brim with easy-listening, bedroom soft rock, with jaw dropping results.

**Note: The above picture is not the official Relayted artwork. Rather, a rad, commissioned portrait of the band.**

My good friend Justin Couch (more on him later) once said that the saxophone ruined music in the 80's. While I am inclined to agree with him, I can't say enough about the saxophone's welcome contributions to Midwestern supergroup Gayngs' debut album Relayted. While the very appearance of a saxomophone may bring on cringe inducing memories of man perms, open collared button up shirts, and pretty much anything Michael Bolton related, the brassy timbre of the baritone sax on Relayted push the already saccharine smooth jam studio session into, "this couldn't get any more chees....OMG, that is a saxophone"...And so it begins. Gayngs' music, while an already head-scratching enough tribute to the FM dominated soft rock of the late eighties/early nineties, is even more perplexing given the impressive 23-member roster that makes up the band. Some of the most notable members include Justin Vernon aka Bon Iver, Minneapolis rappers P.O.S and Dessa, freak folk outfit Megafaun, electro-glam outfit (and masterminds behind the project) Solid Gold, as well as various members from Leisure Bird, The Rosebuds, and Digitata. These members share a common loci, and apparently (who knew?) an affinity for the music played during steamy, red filtered, made-for-tv love scenes.

The question you are probably asking is: Does it work? I am here to give a resounding yes in their favor. Yes it is totally self-aware, at times tongue-in-cheek (just check out P.O.S spoken word outro confession on the album closer "The Last Prom on Earth"), but on the whole, the album rises above the weight of its influences and pens some incredibly gorgeous tracks. The album is significantly more than the sum of its members, there is hardly a scrabbling for top-billing, everyone's voice is heard either as the revolving door band leader or somewhere in the liner notes. Megafaun's drawl and slide guitar bow gracefully to autotuned vocals, vaguely safe 808 hip-hop beats and smooth jazz guitar solos, all while the buzzing keyboard driven undercurrent unearths sounds we haven't heard since Eric Carmen's "Hungry Eyes". There are some delicious anachronous moments that rear their head in the course of the hour +, year long studio experiment. The discordant, tribal-drummed, gorgeous mess of "False Bottom" is all squawking horns and dive-bombing synths. A pretty welcome reprieve from a polite but almost too nice of an album, an album that you wouldn't mind buying a used car from but would never let your sister date. "Faded High" is a watermark moment on the album, a relatively upbeat number replete with multi-tracked falsetto vocals by Dessa. "Spanish Platnium" begins in typical Gayngs fashion, hollow sounding drums with a liquid solo guitar breezily panning from headphone to headphone, some saxophone in there (why not?), but oscillating beneath the surface is a swirling guitar drone gluing the whole thing together. The 21st century is not lost on Gayngs.

If Bon Iver fronting a soft rock band had you at "Bon," Vernon's vocal contributions do not disappoint. To those already familiar to his experiment in making autotune software cry on "Woods" off of 2009's Blood Bank, his exclusively auto-tuned vocal contributions on "Spanish Platnium" and elsewhere are no surprise. But I think all of us took a step back when he trades Bone Thugs n' Harmony (midwestern legends shamefully not called into the studio)-style call and response machine gun fast raps with P.O.S on the excellent, excellent, excellent album closer "The Last Prom on Earth" ... Best musical moment of 2010. In fact lets call this one of the best albums of 2010, saxophones and all.

Ryan H.

Sightings

City of Straw (Jagjaguwar, 04.2010)

For: AFCGT, These Are Powers, The Dead C

Byline: The noisiest, busiest, dirtiest no-wave noise punk this year in a year full of great noisy, busy, dirty no-wave noise punk albums.

Holy wow. Give me a second to compose my thoughts while I pick my guts off the floor. City of Straw is a massively disjointed, disemboweling masterpiece of snarling, minimalist electronic beats and precision timed noise terrorism. Distributed through Jagjaguwar after a long stint on Load and Oneida's Brah records (who own probably the coolest brand image imaginable), it is hard to imagine City of Straw fitting into the discography of the record label behind Bon Iver, Julie Doiron, and Okkervil River. Even as I write this, however, Jagjaguwar is in the process of distributing new albums and back catalogues of improvised noise giants The Dead C, Richard Youngs, not to mention their long-standing relationship with Oneida and the release of 2008's best slice of fuzz-pop Women. I suppose label acquisitions play little into the 8 + year existence of no-input art-squalor of Brooklyn's Sighthings. Sighthings sound like a bizarro-Nirvana, processing and capturing the massively dirty swells of fuzzed out power chords and playing them back through a million blinking sequencers in the catacomb-like sewers beneath New York City. Guitars are played like bowed violins of sweeping noise swells, resonating with a low end hum that give these waves of noise and a grimy, yet often inexplicably graceful, arc of distortion laden screeds. Beats split time and are triggered by live drumming spit glitched-out, drunken, binary manifestations of nightmares a la Burial meets Atari Teenage Riot (esp. on "Weehawken" and "Saccharine Traps". yikes.) "Sky Above Mud Below" is an anthem in the truest sense of the world with impossibly-fast triplets stereo pans along to Mark Morgan's tortured howl. Sighthings often sound like a band that is ostensibly immune to easy comparisons or relationship to anything considered pop music. But with a classic rock band three piece (guitars-vocals, bass, drums) and discernible verse-chorus song structures in a majority of the album it is clear that Sightings work with the same toolset that their labelmates own, but they constructed a mechanical, fire-breathing pterodactyl about the size of a young whale out of theirs.

P.S Did I mention this was produced by Andrew W.K? As if this couldn't get any more rad.

Ryan H.

Tar and Pine

Sightings Myspace

Sunset Rubdown

Dragonslayer (06.09, Jagjaguwar)

Byline: Krug & CO. slay it again.

For: Spencer Krug

What if we lived in a culture devoid of referentiality. What would our music sound like? What would we talk about? How could music critics survive? I did an interesting thing on my 1,000,000th listen of Dragonslayer, I made a quick and dirty list of musical touchstones and direct influences I could find in Mr. Krug's newest output. This is what I got: Bryan Ferry, King Crimson, Jamie Stewart (Xiu Xiu), and Carey Mercer (band mate of Krug's in Frog Eyes), The Fall, Terry Riley. That's about it. It is pretty safe to say that the voluminous output of Spencer Krug, split between Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown, Frog Eyes, and Swan Lake, exists on its own squarely within the 21st century. This is a pretty startling fact especially in the day of just about every young band ripping off the Kinks and burying everything in under an avalanche of static and tape hiss. This isn't to say that Sunset Rubdown exists in a vacuum, in context Sunset Rubdown sounds similar to the output of every other band coming out of Montreal in the middle part of this century. But wait, wasn't Spencer Krug in at least half of those bands? Good point Ryan. But isn't the 21st century all about recycling old ideas into a new context. Uh, yeah, well, moving on...

The truth is, I am an unabashed admirer of Spencer Krug in every form, right now he can do no wrong. Dragonslayer is Sunset Rubdown's, which initially started out as one of the many side projects stemming from Wolf Parade, most immediately accessible and easily listenable albums he put out. Shut up I am Dreaming and Random Spirit Lover are massive, behamoths of musical ideas and aspirations. I can only take each in moderation however, by the end of each listen my head hurts and my ears have lost years in their practical use to me. Dragonslayer isn't Sunset Rubdown light, per say, it is as if the SD collective have taken the insane amount of musical ideas and themes that inhabit each song and liberally spread it over a whole albums worth. There are moments that grab you by the throat and never let you go, from the palm muted riffing in "Idiot Heart" to the drum 'n bass intro to "Nightingale/December Song" (which attributes its original idea to post-minimalist Terry Riley). My favorite track is of course "Paper Lace", easily the most arresting song on February's Swan Lake's Enemy Mine. It is a curious idea to cover your own song on an album of only 8 songs, but the alternate arrangement is an almost Caribbean by the way of Paul Simon jam, I'm so glad he didn't choose an acoustic version. It wouldn't be a SD album without self-referentiality and reoccurring themes from past albums and projects. For example "You Go On" is almost the coda to Random Spirit Lovers "Trumpet! Trumpet! Toot! Toot!", and Idiot Heart contains the lines "if If I was the horse/I would throw off the reins". I'm not sure if any of this makes sense if you aren't a rabid Spencer Krug fan like me. But if you are you will understand while I am calling this one of the best releases this year.

Ryan H.

"Idiot Heart"