And so The Singles Jukebox turns to thoughts of Silverchair.

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[5.60]

Jonathan Bradley: It’s difficult to overstate how esteemed Silverchair is in Australia. It isn’t just sales, though each of their albums has topped the charts and gone platinum many times over. Local critical consensus lodged the group in the Aussie pantheon early on, greeting each new release as further proof of the band’s extraordinary artistry. “Neon Ballroom is a sustained, adult work,” wrote Craig Mathieson in the Australian imprint of Rolling Stone, of a collection of mopey Led Zeppelin retreads. “What will they be able to do in five years time?” Mathieson would include Neon Ballroom in his 100 Best Australian Albums book. By its March 2002 edition, RS was ready to declare debut single “Tomorrow” the sixteenth greatest song of all time, and that same month, critics marveled at the symphonic mess of a maturation that was the partly Van Dyke Parks-arranged Diorama. All this for a group understood, in the rest of the world, to be a post-grunge punchline that doesn’t even have the Gwen Stefani connections of Gavin Rossdale. Yet somewhere along the route to National Treasure status, Silverchair frontman Daniel Johns learned how to tone down his affection for classic rock dramatics and purple poetry. “Straight Lines,” a 2007 number one, was a streamlined and sophisticated pop single from a frontman who had shown little prior aptitude for either melody or restraint. Credit a decade-plus of pop industry experience and an escape from adolescence, but it was pleasing to hear a national icon achieve actual modest proficiency. “Aerial Love” is in the same vein: a 35-year-old with his mind attuned to airy R&B. He’s not the only one to have abandoned his teenage tastes; I too was there at Newcastle Entertainment Centre when the group launched its 1999 tour. It’s less Justin Timberlake and more Darren Hayes, but “Aerial Love” is small and carefully pretty. These subdued achievements are better for Australian pop than any of our compensatory impulses.
[7]

Micha Cavaseno: The last time I checked out Silverchair, they’d somehow trascended making really awful songs in the post-grunge realm (“Open Fire” and “Suicidal Dream” might be some of the worst lyrics in ever.) to mining U2/Coldplay territory to some success. That was almost a decade ago, not to mention a decade after Silverchair was a ‘hot commodity’ in the US, and now I have Daniel Johns doing… soul. A curious decision, but somehow he mines a weird sort of modern Phil Collins territory, despite having a much better falsetto than most aging rockers attempting R&B (I mean, his falsetto’s honestly better than Timberlake, but his accent makes it seem like he seems to be Elmer Fudding up a lot). All in all, a suggestion that Johns isn’t too far gone to keep his career going yet another decade if he fleshes out his efforts.
[6]

Anthony Easton: This is so well-crafted that I believe every lie he’s feeding me. Soft R&B jams need all that finger-snapping production, and the hint at falsetto works like sugar on the delightful bullshit. 
[7]

Alfred Soto: Does he mean “Fucked on a Plane”? Anyway, lovely chorus bolted to underwritten verses. I direct you to Luke James, who did this gesture with more finesse last fall.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: It is 2015. In the midst of an R&B boomtime, how are people willing to settle for this sub-Nick Jonas mewling?
[2]

Cédric Le Merrer: If you really want to find precedent for this in Daniel Johns’ work, you can turn to Young Modern for the vocal freedom and the sound of electric piano… but it’s like there’s at least an album’s worth of experimentation missing to link point A to point B. Aerial Love’s every detail is too perfectly finished to be called experimental. Lorde collaborator Joel Little may have something to do with that. Anyway, it’s a contained little dispatch from people who have listened to Rhye or Goapele. Every sonic detail from the phased vocals to the barely audible saw buzz effect on the break, spells headphone listening session and not sex jam. Anyway, it’s not really a song about fucking: it’s about being horny and waiting for someone, not anyone, and there’s a sense of a fragile equilibrium to this situation that is graceful.
[9]

Edward Okulicz: From a dude who sang in a band because someone had to, who played grunge because that’s what teenagers listened to at that point, Johns has shown a surprising level of competency outside AWW MAN, THE CHAIR!! THEY ROCK!!!. “Straight Lines” is a decent track, his chorus vocals on The Presets’ “This Boy’s in Love” is more than fine, and he co-wrote Natalie Imbruglia’s superb “Want.” He is not without talent. This low-key debut has the sound right, and his falsetto isn’t even awful, and “Aerial Love” is about half-way to being a slick and good track. The problem is that once you work out you can do more with your voice than growl impotently over guitars, you get the idea that you might self-harmonise awkwardly, or, worse, forget to write a chorus. Or write one that’s terrible. This isn’t good, but it’s a hundred times better than Chet Faker. If ever I heard an auspicious failure, this is it.
[4]

Brad Shoup: Falsetto’s like a black tux for these guys: it’s a classic look, no matter what shape your career’s in. Johns’s dry-vocal experiment in seduction posits self-love as the most aerial love of all. The good taste stops suddenly on the bridge, where he smears himself all over the stereo field. There, he sounds like Pentatonix warming up a Kid A tribute.
[5]

Mo Kim: For a song about aerial love this is surprisingly content to hum quietly along. My favorite part of flying is when you’re up in the air, anyhow: Johns’ voice glides across this dotted black sky of an instrumental with dignity and grace.
[7]

Patrick St. Michel: Ignoring Daniel Johns’ backstory, “Aerial Love” seems limp. His breath-on-neck minimalist approach to R&B assumes space automatically equals sexy, but it’s just kind of boring. Dude’s voice isn’t strong enough to overcome that either.
[4]

The title’s not self-reflexive.

[Video][Website]
[6.20]

Edward Okulicz: This derives its grunt not from Barnett’s semi-conscious rant, but from a delicious lineage of Australian female-fronted dirty indie pop. I hear echoes of long-forgotten loves like the first two Deadstar records, Moler, a bit of Waikiki. The rant itself boasts some terrific lines, though you can’t actually do origami with Australian banknotes as they’re made from a super-technical plastic polymer thing that can survive a washing machine. I’d rave more but I wish the chorus didn’t end and put most of its emphasis on the song’s worst line.
[8]

Micha Cavaseno: It’s not the bars — those aren’t for me but they’re fine, and I love the origami line. It’s the cloying Neanderthal sub-PJ Harvey B-side stomp-along being used as backing.
[2]

Alfred Soto: Loquacious because she loves how words sound as much how they sound against rusted-through guitars, Barnett has come up with a terrific single. Singing the verses in the same key is Barnett’s way of annoying the shit out of her audience with her eternal diatribe. So is a backing that sounds like it was recorded in another room, as if annoyed to the core. The riff’s good, equal parts Kinks and L7. And it boasts a solid Valentine’s Day line: “I want to exploit you, honey” is as good as “I might like you better if we slept together”
[7]

Anthony Easton: I can only be disappointed if I am surprised. This grungy mess of anger and self-loathing proves that the rant is an overestimated form. 
[1]

Ian Mathers: The “Loser” that 2015 deserves, I guess.
[6]

Brad Shoup: It’s like a Crass song written by a fast-fashion retailer.
[4]

Mo Kim: Here are three long monologues, each more pointed yet confused in their introspection; not even the speaker is safe from her own withering deconstruction. Barnett finds a perverse strength in her reading, however, delivering “Pedestrian At Best” like an honor roll student trashing her room just to keep her parents on edge. On the verses, she walks a tightrope between rehearsed poise and anger spilling over, while on the chorus she carves apathy into punchlines that cut as much as they invite singing along. And then there’s that gut-churning tag team of guitar and drum barreling forward, falling apart at the seams but holding together just through sheer tenacity. This has been a trying winter, and I appreciate it when noisy songs like this can cut through the cold.
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: Like a mashup of Kate Tempest (imagine splicing in “I’m swaying to a power ballad”) and “A Cleaner Light” with great lines and great hooks and lacerating self-awareness.
[8]

Patrick St. Michel: Any song capable of capturing how small things can snowball into existential dilemmas and turn one into a mess is a winner for me.
[8]

Cédric Le Merrer: This captures the feeling when your troubles return and you know that you must change but don’t how, and how it’s all a grind anyway. Because you’re having so many feelings you can’t express or understand them all. Any interference in this private pity party an trigger the bullshit detector. It makes you insufferable. It can be a form of neurosis; it may just be growing up and figuring stuff out.
[9]

“Peter Brown called and said, We can make it” — oh wait.

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[5.33]

Mark Sinker: Imagine opening your eyes in a familiar place and discovering that something huge and terrible had happened while you slept. This is how the swell and fall of the Ozymandian empire seems to me: a plague — or some colossal physical cataclysm of terrible effect — that had passed entirely into history by the time I woke: “Two vast and trunkish bros of rock/…/Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose smirk/And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command/…/Nothing beside remains blah blah…” The effect’s been perverse, I suppose: cocooned and belated (long story), I can’t summon the loathing people felt in the moment for what the brothers stood for; and when I encounter something like this now I respond, mesmerized, to the small, almost mannerist delicacy of the permutational refashioning of a palette of classicist elements. It’s as if a tyrant had laid horrific waste to a continent to hardshoulder himself the space to work up opaquely poetic miniatures from patched threads and clichés, unmocked by the oafs and eggheads he knew no other way to face down or shake off.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Every part of this, every string huddle and bass lick and piano contrail and Gallagher wail, every “yes I’ll find youuuuu” and every other piece of high-flying instrumental birdpoop should be cheap and obvious and yet is so, so uplifting. I can’t help it. It’s like seeing white and gold.
[7]

Micha Cavaseno: Look, Noel Gallagher is the smartest living human ever. No, not Slavoj Zizek, no, not Stephen Hawking, and especially not Thom Yorke. I will square up for Noel Gallagher. His solo work remains some of the best in a culture (rock) that is so dead that the soda it drank eons ago has crystallized into plastic but he plugs away at it. And not for nothing, this little slab of disco-edged U2 pomp (which seems like a jab too. I mean, come on, wouldn’t that title be THE BEST fake U2 song name ever?) grooves more slickly and has more layers than it really needed to satisfy Oasis fans, and better than any Coldplay song. I can understand the fear, especially given how “Wonderwall” borders “Santeria” on campfire bullshit anthems, and if you lived in the UK you’ve been taught that he is the enemy (rather than actually terrible people like Damon Albarn or the people in Massive Attack), but just take a deep breath. Relax. Understand one law of mankind: Noel Gallagher is wrong about a lot of things, but Noel Gallagher is right about you.
[7]

David Moore: Hold on, this isn’t just the premise of a Kroll Show sketch?
[5]

David Sheffieck: And at last, Noel Gallagher’s transformation into a bottom tier alt-rock band of the late-90s is finally complete. Waiting patiently on a cloud somewhere, Vertical Horizon has earned its wings – at least they would’ve known to cut a minute from this.
[1]

Alfred Soto: Unschooled in this British music scion’s exertions since the apogee of New Labour, I exercised, breakfasted, and listened. The talent for horrible lyrics remains: “strike up the band” rhyming with “sinking sands” I expected, but not “fly on the wall.” Nor the steady beat and disco strings. He collaborated with the Chemical Brothers — house piano is not beneath him. In short, not useless.
[4]

Ian Mathers: It almost has to be better than the band name/song title combination, right? And it is, the bassline along is nice enough to ensure that. The chorus honestly isn’t bad (I’ve never minded Noel as a vocalist), but it doesn’t actually quite break through to being good either. The whole thing honestly does feel kind of… regressive? Atavistic?
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: In which Doves solidify their position as this generation’s Beatles, or generation of Noel Gallagher’s anyway. “High Flying Birds”, you see – they’re even supporting him at a hometown show, such is his debt. Noel’s ventures into post-sunset not-quite-dance music have been profitable, so this is happily familiar. There are modifications: “AKA… What A Life!” had pounding pianos; this has strings. While that sailed him home with acquiesce, this is cinematically vast.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Look, I don’t give a toss about Blur either, but the fact is Noel Gallagher is recording disco-prog in 2015, so this war was lost a long time ago.
[6]

And we’re still dancing…

[Video][Website]
[6.17]

Micha Cavaseno: As ever elusive, Burial re-emerges on a “secret” white label via one of the top 5 UK dance labels of the past decade, Keysound (where he’d once remixed label-head Blackdown’s “Crackle Blues” long before the Burial Boom occurred). Its a new age for Burial, as his scratchy takes on the Ghost-era El-B drums are now properly engineered and lack their former “pop” but demonstrate the almost Madlibbian ADD-riddled switch-ups now frequent in Burial releases. “Temple Sleeper” sounds not like the olden days of even proto-dubstep, but rather a moody tech-Speed Garage sound, before switching up into a rude 4Hero esque ‘ardkore slapper that belies the ghostly and evanescent qualities of so much of his work, then slips again into a fluorescent skipper, sounding more like broken beat with Terry Riley slabbed upon it. One wonders if Burial will ever return to album lengths, or is rather content with turning each tiny sliver of physical release into transmitted glimpses at the way he has learned to stretch his style far beyond his dark garage days.
[8]

Will Adams: “We’re about to go to another dimension,” chirps the sample as we enter the sixth minute, as if the preceding worn-down beats hadn’t already sedated us.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Schlockier and faster than recent Burial and hence a surprise, with breakbeat and ’90s techno flourishes, complete with doomy sampled male voice. How’s that for chasing moneylenders out of the temple?
[7]

Ian Mathers: Starts of sounding kind of like the trance records we used to listen to in high school played back through a shitty old boombox with some extra samples layered in. That’s not really a complaint, but if you’re thinking it indicates that this isn’t as impressive as some Burial tracks, you would be right.
[6]

Brad Shoup: How cool would it be to check out on Burial for a really long time and when you check back in it’s some really rococo nonsense, like Pure Moods II-core with tacky rain SFX covering everything, maybe Mortal Kombat samples and dank-ass Big Beat vocal fuckery? Well, we’re 80% there!!!
[7]

Josh Langhoff: Good to have a hobby.
[4]

No word on whether this was originally called “Outline$”…

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[6.33]

Edward Okulicz: You don’t even need Kylie Minogue to make a really good Kylie Minogue single these days.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: In theory I love the idea of the EDM revival as launching pad or second chance for solo vocalists (though it doesn’t work so readily in practice), but handing over your tracks to someone of Dragonette’s caliber makes them so much better. Surprising no one, I like Martina Sorbara better shy than cocky, and “Outlines” nails the crush-at-first sight feeling where you aspire to come-ons but first have to come out of your head. Everything’s a double meaning. “I wonder what you do”: the most clichéd of big-city smalltalk, but also something more monkey-brain, wondering what this body, this palpable proddable thing that could prod back, could do. “Outlines”: all you can see of a boy in the dark, but also unfinished business, like he’s a blank space (and you’ll write your name). Mike Mago’s track builds and luxuriates but avoids obvious moves; it’s easy to classify all pop-EDM as one strain (that might be corporate, might be destroying the world), but there are subtypes. I’m not so big on big-festival-tent emoting, but what I’ll always fall for are tracks with a sense of inevitable forward motion, a hand of fate pressed on you just so.
[9]

Alfred Soto: Extolling the glory — fuck the heartbreak — of the fleeting glimpse, with Martina Sorbara’s high, vodka-clear tone showing that she’ll dance by her damn self if said glimpse doesn’t harden into a worthy dude. Mike Mago’s gurgling sonics provide more than glimpses.
[7]

David Sheffieck: Shuffles when it should shimmer, bubbles when it should burst. It’s like Dragonette got a memo that Mago missed, and the result is a song whose early moments suggest something that could explode but settles for a fizzle.
[4]

Micha Cavaseno: House’s form of benign dystopian oppression of sterility reigns supreme again.
[2]

Will Adams: I love when dance music tiptoes, and on “Outlines” it’s necessitated by the timid lyrics. It makes the chorus — when that xylophone bass rolls in — that much more dramatic; it’s the moment when the narrator and all the shy kids on the dancefloor are forced to make a move.
[7]

Scott Mildenhall: Martina Soblabla more like. (Sorry.) The last thing Dragonette should sound is nondescript, and yet here their frontwoman turns in a vocal so featureless that its blankness couldn’t even be taken as plaintive; it’s just blank. It’s easy to compare it to “Hello”, so let’s: there was a song colourful and buoyant, combining a cryptic coyness of emotion with eminent joy. “Outlines”, meanwhile, is about exciting as a flannel, and half as intriguing.
[5]

Sophia Clara: Without Dragonette’s voice, which is delightfully affected, this song would be kind of a generically boring electro-pop track. With her voice, the lines about taking up space make so much more sense. She’s on the verge between giddy and bored — “another dance in the dark/another love under cover.” Another, another. It’s a robot song, repeating over and over, but her voice is elastic and occasionally tremulous and very human (I’m right at your boooOOOOrder/why can’t I come ooooooOOOOOVER). Still, the culminating moment that ought to follow the ecstatic build of this song never really comes, the claustrophobia of the beat never gapes open. There’s no bass drop, not even symbolically. It’s not satisfying to listen to, but I’ve still had it on repeat.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Once the bassline comes in, Martina Sorbara’s essentially racing against her own remix. We’re too smart for bosh or something, so Mago’s running his rise onto chill garage shores. But again, with a melody this nimble and developed, further expansion would probably seem grotesque. But let’s keep our options open for next time, yeah?
[8]

It’s Dance Music Thursday and Will can’t stop shouting about it…

[Video][Website]
[5.33]

Will Adams: FAIS DES RONDS AVEC TON BASSIN! DES RONDS AVEC TON BASSIN! DES RONDS AVEC TON BASSIN! DES RONDS AVEC TON BASSIN! FAIS DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS! DES RONDS!
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: I guess Fergie really DID book a Paris ticket! Or at least one to Igloo Australia.
[4]

Alfred Soto: It’s not her fault the cadence mimics “All About the Bass” but I’m entitled to my biases.
[3]

Cédric Le Merrer: The opening synths are sharp, cutting stabs whose edge progressively disappear under an avalanche of plushy house piano. Somehow it builds into a dizzying hula hoop dance, and there’s surf guitar involved for some reason. I can listen to it with eyes closed and imagine a great Winamp-style visualisation. I don’t really know why it works so well, but this could certainly do as the soundtrack to a variety of bizarrely themed parties.
[8]

Brad Shoup: I’m going to treat this like a swat at novelty gold, rather than Yelle’s attempt at some Peaches-style neurodevelopmental tragedy. But to really make this work, the MIDI house has to hold a lot more — and more weird — dioramas. Moving your pelvis while eating an apple in Rome is just a dumb Beats sentence.
[4]

Micha Cavaseno: You’d think that with their career approaching a decade, this group would’ve learned some new tricks. I just can’t get how electro-rap, a genre that was never that edgy or creative, sustains itself on more bad ideas with time. House pianos? You use house pianos now?! Yelle, the entirety of EDM is laughing at you from above in their lofty airships of decadancing, shouting “LIGHTWEIGHT” at you guys while spilling Red Bull-and-whatever mixtures on your heads. Get it together, or get out of here already!
[2]

David Moore: The dollar’s precipitous deflation has only been exacerbated by Kesha’s abandonment of the currency altogether, so here’s Y€ll€ to cash in before the Fed takes inflationary action. The result is a pop pied-à-terre; empty use of the signifier doesn’t result in any meaningful contribution to the U.S. pop economy, but at the same time I don’t begrudge the French for having a little fun abroad.
[6]

Luisa Lopez: Mercifully free of Dr. Luke’s handprints until that extended vocal distortion, which feels like a descent into hell and, I imagine, sounds similar. Everything else around it is so funny, kicking its colorful trash around the room until the movement becomes an arabesque, that it’s almost forgivable.
[6]

Patrick St. Michel: It is far funnier spelled out, perhaps a bit too literally, here, the whole song an instruction manual of seduction that basically boils down to one direction repeated ad nauseum. As catchy as this gets, it also burns itself out by the end, which is impressive given a pretty scant three minute playtime. But for about 60 percent of this, it is delirious fun in any language. 
[6]

And I want to be EMA, so there’s a nice bit of synergy…

[Video][Website]
[5.64]

Alfred Soto: God, what a perfect band name. “Mew” is what they sing like — mew mew mew the stars are out tonight, admire my perfect arpeggios and my autographed photo of Ben Gibbard. Key lyric: “I wanna be with a girl like she.”
[0]

Luisa Lopez: If stadiums were dreamscapes, and rock music a phone call, and satellites our friends. It never quite hits you in the heart, but oh it gets close. 
[6]

Mo Kim: Top five moments, in order of appearance: 1) The surprising serenity of those opening strings. Such a small thing to fixate on, but I genuinely want to make those strings my morning alarm — my quality of life would probably significantly increase. 2) That first iteration of the chorus when, after about a minute of solid buildup, everything drops out but massive guitar chords layered over skittering hi-hat rhythms. In some ways those are opposites, but in others they’re one and the same. 3) Jonas Bjerre’s delivery of the line “my own electricity” as something that aches, wants, strips to reveal something vulnerable but vital. Chiiiillllls. 4) The layering of the different voices and melodic motifs from 3:30 forward makes me rewind every time because there’s so much there I want to catch again. 5) Imagine hearing the final minute of this in a stadium, people shouting back “My life is my own” over drum rhythms that have finally broken free, sounds that envelop the listener but still feel warm and soft and uplifting. I’m still not entirely sure what to make of “Satellites,” but it makes me feel the same way I feel after eating a particularly satisfying breakfast, and I’m not much of a breakfast person.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: Mew will forever be in my good graces for their Stina Nordenstam collaboration, but here they’ve launched into tenor/e-guitar orbit way too soon for the runlength. It’s pretty; so, in the start, are failed rocket launches.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: Jonas Bjerre’s voice is so much the dominant force in Mew’s music that you can barely notice that the music underneath has changed tack mid-song until he stops singing. A big stadium indie anthem is liable to start strutting without you noticing, and some people find this thrilling and some find it nauseating. Usually I fall into the former camp but on this occasion there’s a little bit of a feeling that maybe I’m wrong.
[6]

Ian Mathers: I loved Frengers, then they went a bit prog in a way that was uncompelling. I’m still waiting for hooks as shimmering as “She Came Home for Christmas” or “Snow Brigade,” but even at their most abstract Mew are usually good for at least a few straightforwardly lovely singles. “Satellites” is in that tradition, although your tolerance may vary based on how you feel about Jonas Bjerre’s enthusiastic yelp of a voice. Personally, I’ve missed it.
[7]

Micha Cavaseno: My beef with post-rock emerged with Explosions In The Sky appearing on Letterman or one of the same unfunny dudes. I’d heard Godspeed! You Black Emperor on Last.FM after ODing on Slint and thought it was OK, and the Internet explained to me that this was the next step in the best that guitar world could provide. Much to my horror, I bore witness to a bunch of gaudy white dudes with the biggest idiot baby-faces of glee over-enthusiastically mugging while playing what was musically basic as hell, and overwrought with sincerity and glistening crescendo self-importance. Mew operate a similar vibe, though much more overtly married to the arena bombast of rawk in the way Muse indulge in neo-prog via Radiohead and Jeff Buckley. They are doing the dumbest of bold gestures, but they perform them to such hysterical preciousness and “STAND BACK, WE’RE DOING BOLD MUSICAL GESTURES” that I almost want to call up my idiot uncle, snap him out of his Rush Fan coma and sic him on this sack of musical placenta.
[1]

Brad Shoup: Lyrics so syntactically off, vocals so falsetto, music so high-flown and proggy, I thought I was listening to a 2010s Coheed record.
[5]

Iain Mew: “I like you real silver line” is a clear successor to “care-line”: not clear what it means but still sweet and perfect for the filagreed music. Mew have already proved themselves expert at huge yet tranquil, and the space synths and satellite transmission patterns help “Satellites” feel like an emotional epiphany that’s the more touching for being willed through a layer of fog and static for broadcast.
[8]

Will Adams: A radio edit will cut this to the appropriate length, but the whole journey is necessary to enjoy “Satellites”: a triple-meter intro that twists and turns across keys until it lands on its uplifting tempo and an arrangement that is larger than life.
[7]

David Sheffieck: In this fallen world, we ended up with the Coldplay we deserve (i.e. Coldplay), but in some alternate dimension guided by justice, the earth got Mew instead. While they’re melodramatic and kinda ridiculous – this is, after all, a song about wishing to be a satellite – Mew are also masters of a kind of radical honesty, the kind that it takes to make a six-minute song about wanting to be a satellite and turn it into a epic with massive hooks. It’s the rare gimmick that’s yet to wear out its welcome, possibly because the band never saw it that way in the first place.
[8]

Fair to say we have some irreconcilable issues with Gibbard…

[Video][Website]
[4.62]

Micha Cavaseno: How have these hacks done it? How is their drummer always playing things that sound nice but are devoid of funk? How has nobody called out Ben Gibbard on his gimmicky ultrafast vibrato, nasal mewlings and train scrawlings by a dude who has a bachelors in English and a lot of opinions but no content? How does their guitarist come up with riffs I’m sure I came up with learning the guitar and make them sound like they’re some of the most difficultly acquired song-parts in ever? This band is still locked in HBO Series Finale Outro sonics, and I’m sick of it.
[4]

Juana Giaimo: Death Cab For Cutie have found a formula and no matter how hard they try to avoid it, they always fall into it again. “Black Sun” isn’t an exception, but it has its bright moments, like when Ben Gibbard changes the serious melody of the chorus for a much warmer, vulnerable one. Instants like these are what makes Death Cab For Cutie worth following, even when they always make me feel that they could be better. 
[6]

Alfred Soto: I can’t get past Ben Gibbard’s voice: that of an emphatic NPR announcer, rapping a knuckle on a podium. I can’t endure the well-behaved feedback and lethargic electric piano either. In short, the band’s tip-toeing through this incoherent number feels like the sort of crime I need to report to The Hague.
[3]

Scott Mildenhall: Ben Gibbard really does have an unavoidably awkward voice. It’s so rounded that it’s almost Weird Al, only lacking the same cartoonishness, instead leaning here towards a seriousness he nonetheless cannot pull off. Even if he could better sell the occasionally poetic contradictions of lyrics, though, they’d fall flat in an arrangement largely even flatter.
[4]

Thomas Inskeep: I first came into contact with Ben Gibbard via Postal Service, whose album I will forever and ever love in spite of its eventual ubiquity in American Apparel stores. Accordingly, I’m inclined to like Gibbard-vox’d stuff — except for the fact that his main gig is so goddamn boring. This has a good bit more texture than I’ve heard from DCFC, however; once the fuzzed-out guitar “solo” kicks in, it makes me think of Moby circa “That’s When I Reach For My Revolver” crossed with early-ambient Moby. Which is a positive.
[6]

Luisa Lopez: Given that this album is supposed to be, at least in some sense, a farewell to departing guitarist Chris Walla (and ideally an acknowledgment of the complexities of goodbyes), I expected something a little less noisy, a little more “Passenger Seat”. Goodbyes can be complicated, and often are, but infusing them with crushing guitars and verses whose images sound lovely but hold no weight when measured against the sentiments they’re meant to hold up doesn’t somehow make a departure something it was not or a song something that could have been good. 
[4]

Ian Mathers: Oh god, is this going to be a divorce album?
[3]

Jonathan Bradley: Chris Walla is a talented producer, one who nurtures into being warm and intimate sounds that accord with dramas of domesticity and close studies of knotty relationships — think not just of his work with Death Cab, but also, say, with Tegan and Sara. “Black Sun” is Walla’s old band’s first work since he moved on though, and as if to make up for his impending absence, the group, along with producer Rich Costey, have scrimshawed their new single with sawtooth blurts and iridescent synth formations. Walla plays on the song, so neither his departure nor the band’s sonic one is decisive: after all, the group’s shift from melody-driven song structures to textural ones did not begin here either. Yet it is a shake-up significant enough to make this band sound more interesting than it has in a long while, even if it’s another step down the road to a technical fussiness that, as much as these guys try, cannot be made interesting in and of itself. Death Cab was never punkish and it was suited to the studio even in its lo-fi youth, but Ben Gibbard’s thoughts were most transfixing when clouded with collegiate messiness, and perhaps also when my ears were situated amidst the same. With no new stories to tell, the band is looking instead for new ways to do the telling. That is fine, to a point.
[6]

Anthony Easton: Did a song so committed to being a portent of doom just intone the line “there is a dumpster in the driveway/with all the plans that became undone”? That has to be taking the piss, they can’t be serious with that shit.
[3]

Edward Okulicz: “A desert veiled in pavement… a city of seven hills.” This is not so much a song, more a guy dictating a map to a com-fit artist in the hope someone might recognise it.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: I’d figured mid-2000s indie would forever be a gap in my musical knowledge, but somewhere along the line the minor-key moroseness, the synth squalls, the Kubla Khansense lyrics giving way to unadorned feeling, even the canned drum pattern all got buried in there. Comfort-food rock.
[7]

Brad Shoup: A creeping, melodic opal. I dig late-period Death Cab, with all this divorce imagery and glances at the sunset. Gibbard’s voice is turning husky; he was never one to hold a note, but now they’re slipping from his hands.
[7]

Patrick St. Michel: The first album I ever SoulSeeked was Death Cab For Cutie’s Transatlanticism: 30 percent because I liked The Postal Service, 70 percent for being a morose high schooler, to the point that Ben Gibbard’s mumbling about the glove compartment passed as poetry. I could picture “Black Sun” once meaning a lot to me, its muddy trudge passing for gloopy doom, but coming from a 38-year-old, it’s just boring and overdramatic.
[3]

Amnesty Week picks come through again, knottily…

[Video][Website]
[7.12]

Patrick St. Michel: Tricot have always had the “math rock” tag attached to them, and it isn’t totally off. The trio (once quartet, but the drummer split) do all the start-stop guitar playing that is shorthand for the style, but to reduce them to being good at plotting out their sound and playing “angular riffs” misses a huge chunk of what makes them exciting. It’s all in lead singer Ikkyu Nakajima’s voice on “E,” as she goes from near whisper to yell with plenty of stops in between, blanketed by her bandmate’s background “oooohs.” Most math-rock is content to pride itself on timing, but Tricot aren’t afraid to get wild and turn “E” into something unpredictable, channeling one of their big influences Number Girl. But it isn’t just imitation — it’s them finding their own voice, and carving out a space for themselves. 
[8]

Iain Mew: Last time out I concentrated on Tricot’s formation of order from chaos. Since then, “Break” took them a bit far into order, and “E” has them lean in the other direction to suitably ecstatic effect. I love the confidence of the long set of musical stabs that start it, and from there it’s a headlong dash into some more headlong dashes, a song that keeps in the technical wizardry but is more intent to get to many different types of energy the fastest ways it can.
[8]

W.B. Swygart: The initial appeal is sort of musical chairs-y — guessing where the start and stop bits are, looking for the little fluctuations in the silences and reacting accordingly. Then the wailing begins, and that’s even better, as lead Tricot starts scrawling and daubing all over the neatly arranged modules, like a cross between Space Invaders and Tetris – a thing I’m assuming has already happened several times, only this is in ROCK FORM. Not sure what it all adds up to yet, but it’s plenty of fun.
[7]

Micha Cavaseno: The world’s sweetest and most forlorn band for fans of This Town Needs Guns come through once more, with complex noodling and teenish wind-up. So few math-rock bands have that sense of wistfulness. Fuck, now I’m wondering what an all-female Dillinger would sound like. That’d be so sick.
[7]

Sonia Yang: Lesser bands would choke at the task of integrating start-and-stop rhythms into a continuous flow, but Tricot delivers richly textured aural delight. There’s a wilder, looser quality to this compared to their previous work — looks like experimenting with five(!) different drummers really expanded their horizons. I love the different shades of Nakajima Ikkyu’s voice; she flips flawlessly between ethereal whisper, passionate cry and wry drawl. You’d think putting a proper hook over the dueling-in-harmony bass and guitar lines and raining drums would be overwhelming, but these girls are master jigsaw puzzlers.
[9]

Brad Shoup: Prog thresh on a plastic kit: everything’s hollowed out except for the vocalist. I’m sure they’ll find a decent full-time drummer eventually, but that knuckled-up riffing and those close harmonies can almost cover the gap.
[6]

Ian Mathers: This is the first band in a long time to kind of remind me a bit of Life Without Buildings (more instrumentally than vocally), although with maybe a bit more aggression. It’s not quite gelling for me yet, but LWB were also unintuitive at first, so I might just need a little longer to get on their level.
[6]

Will Adams: The trick is to avoid figuring out what’s behind the curtain. My musician’s brain wants to count the beats and determine the mixed meter. My music-lover’s brain wants to stage dive.
[6]

“Could be worse with a ukulele” really says it all, doesn’t it?…

[Video][Website]
[4.12]

Anthony Easton: Three minutes of cosmic babble and neo-hippie wordlessness. I spent the last three weeks on the West Coast, and this kind of acoustic rampant-ego-pretending-to-be-humble sound was all over the place. I do not look forward to hearing this after escaping from those enclaves. Could be worse with a ukulele.
[2]

Alfred Soto: Not aware of too many things, she knows what she knows, you know what I mean?
[3]

Juana Giaimo: Lacking a warm and honest love song, Echosmith thought they could replace it with lots of metaphors and an uncatchy “oh la la la” — but a formula isn’t always enough.
[4]

Micha Cavaseno: Everything this band does screams “self-obsessed dork.” But now it’s “self-obsessed dorks doing #AMERICANA.” It’s peculiar though how easily they can pretend to be a dozen different bands without ever having any likable qualities. There’s some identifiable ones though. Being TOTAL NERDS!!!! *throws crumpled paper at this band*
[1]

Mo Kim: Every cohort of high school kids needs their Paramore, I guess.
[6]

Josh Winters: A rightful successor to Taylor’s lovestruck backyard-porch strummers.
[8]

Brad Shoup: This may feel overstuffed with imagery, but if all you’ve got is a telescope and a field, I imagine you’ll start personifying all kinds of bodies. “Bright” keeps feinting toward a big hook, but everyone curls back into that solemn thock. So it’s a moodpiece, assured and reserved, and completely not embarrassing. 
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: I’ll still defend “Cool Kids,” and the vocalist does well with her Musgraves qualities, but this is like a theme song for a movie adaptation of Stargirl. Styled after “Drops of Jupiter.”
[3]