Album reviews
Featured review
F
I DON’T EVEN know why I bothered to take this album out of the shrink wrap. —Michael Olender
A+
RHODE ISLAND DRUM and bass duo Lightning Bolt are one of the most intense rock bands around. The band differentiates itself within the genre with an interesting instrumental approach. Bassist Brian Gibson distorts his bass guitar so it sounds like a car with a bad muffler revving, mixed with a lion’s roar, while drummer Brian Chippendale somehow has the ability to drum at speeds a cartoon character on crack couldn’t keep up with. Together the pair create a propulsive, chaotic, swaggering, hypnotic, effects-drenched masterpiece. While some tracks on Earthly Delights may seem strictly heavy metal at first, this notion quickly erodes. This is an avant-garde album—a rock album for art snobs. Each track, though maintaining a metal façade, draws heavily from kraut rock, noise, post-rock, punk, and even minimalism. Each song is indelible, but it’s the final track, “Transmissionary,” that makes the record. It’s a dense, swirling showpiece that uses a Middle-Eastern style riff to a deeply mesmerizing effect. All Lightning Bolt does is play fast, hard, and passionately, but they’ve made Earthly Delights a strange, thoroughly enjoyable, deafening assemblage of an album.
—Danyal Khoral
A
MANNERS, THE LATEST from Massachusetts band Passion Pit, is a an unbelievably upbeat, quirky, and fun album—especially considering it only took the band two months to write and record. Described by the band on their website as their “first proper full-length” album, Manners is a follow-up to the band’s Chunk of Change EP which lead vocalist Michael Angelakos originally created for his girlfriend as a Valentine’s Day present in 2007. The group’s sound has dramatically evolved from the first four tracks they recorded for Angelakos’s now-ex flame.
Passion Pit’s sound is vaguely reminiscent of MGMT, but they differentiate themselves by giving their music a softer feel. Light-hearted tracks like “Sleepyhead” and “The Reeling” have an energy to them that fans can appreciate. Lyrics like “I believe in gentle harmony/ How I loathe all this obscenity” and “I’m dreaming somebody/ Would simply come and kidnap me” are clever and heartfelt. Overall, the album has an interesting sound that mixes electronic and pop and relatable, poetic writing. Manners is an excellent album. —Julie Bortolotti
A-
IT SEEMS THAT practically everything is going the musicaltheatre route these days, whether in television, film, or even music. Musical-theatre hybrid band Stagehands are one group taking notice of this phenomenon. Their record, The Silent City, is an album that tells a complete story.
Band members Geoff Stevens, Mackenzie Zufelt, Justine Moritz, Nemanja Protic, David Yenovkian, and Marko Pandza double as actors on this project to perform a play using only their music. Each member takes on a diff erent character and sings the story of young songwriter Stan who sets out for Laconia, the land of entertainment, to seek his fame and fortune. Upon arrival, however, he realizes that his fantasy city is actually ruled by a repressive mayor who, among other things, demands that the famous wear masks, concealing their identity.
For theatre-style music, the band actually puts out a decent record. Th e songs are not showy and the band manages to infuse emotion into their tunes with only the occasional Broadway pitfall of shallow, inane lyrics. To be fair, the songs get better as the album progresses and culminates in “Island Fever,” where the band experiments and combines both slow and fast tempos in one song. Overall, this is a surprisingly good album considering its heavy reliance on musical-theatre conventions. —Maja Stefanvoska
