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Sun Come Undone by Thrushes (myspace here). Last Summer it was (2007), I was sent this beautiful, harrowing, haunting record by the band, from Baltimore, Maryland. I've had it, and a laudatory review swirling around in the back of my brain since then and I actually thought I had written of it already, but apparently not.

Thruses mix Phil Spectre-ish pop sensibilities with ghostly guitar progressions and huge sounding drums, long quiet spaces, and splashing choruses that sound like you've just hit the water after jumping off a cliff.

The band has a very sophisticated way of building up a delicate tension like a crystal house and then bursting it to powder with explosive crescendos. Every time the record begins to seem a bit like territory already covered it seems to read my mind and change tack.

They self identify as shoegaze, which I suppose is appropriate. The label tends to suggest navel gazing music (of course it does) but I don't want you to walk away from this paragraph without being told that this is really a fun record to listen to. You'll find yourself chanting "Let's go out tonight!" along with the band on "Ghost Train" because you just won't be able to help yourself.

Sun Come Undone quite reminds of me of Sonic Youth but in their more tuneful moments (which is to say, in apposition to SY's more noisey/atonal moments). The only real criticism I have of it is that at times singer Anna Conner sounds like she was still finding her voice a bit, I'd reckon by now it must be something to behold, and throughout the record I think she more than makes up for it with well-chosen, short, sweet, lyrical hooks that seemed designed to make your heart sigh.

Do check them out, they have a couple of gigs coming up over the next two months, including an appearance at The Annex in New York City on April 12th. Find out more about their gigs and buy Sun Come Undone over on their Myspace page.

Wherein I am one of three people on the planet who actually isn't very excited about the new release from our friends up north:

On first blush, I didn't much like any of Arcade Fire's new album Neon Bible. Even for them it seemed a bit overblown and strained. I put it down and didn't come back to it for a few weeks. Upon my return I realized that buried underneath the overbearing and uninspired first half of this album is at least solid single's worth of new material.

Opener "Black Mirror" when A/B'd with "Neighborhood #1" from Funeral comes off flat and sour. "Keep the Car Running" makes me think of Robert Smith hugging Midnight Oil - it makes me afraid. The title-track is repetitive (but mercifully short) and "Intervention" aims high but trips all over some clumsy lyrics and a rather hollow performance by Win Butler.

"Black Wave / Bad Vibrations" is my dividing line for the album. The first half, Regine's half, is poorly mixed, bass heavy, and ill-conceived - which is unfortunate because honestly I prefer her voice over Butler's. By this point I'm ready to quit listening to the album yet again.

Fortunately, the very first stanza of the "Bad Vibrations" half is easily the most evocative on the album up to this point, and the music is the sound of a storm's rolling thunder - a perfect set up for "Ocean of Noise", easily the best song on Neon Bible.

"Ocean" does what all of my favorite Arcade Fire songs do, which is to take a familar old motif and update it to accompany modern paranoia. To my ears it sounds like a "Killing Moon"/"Red Right Hand" rip off, but it is a very very good one with a coda to match anything they have ever written. The sequencing here is key to how this half of the album plays out, because when "The Well and the Lighthouse" starts, it kicks you in the stomach and runs away.

"(Antichrist Television Blues)" is a point of annoyance and a signal for more rough water ahead. Butler specifically mentions 9/11, and makes what I feel is the most Dylan-esque thing Arcade Fire has done - neither of which I might add are positive for me. At all. Regine's vocal bridge is weird as hell and almost saves the song for me. But hey, I didn't really like "7 Kettles" so much, so I can excuse a lull.

Things pick up a little on "Windowsill" which is (ironically) a musical cousin to "7 Kettles", but more desperate and affecting: "The tide is high and rising still", fortells the apocalypse. We probably ought to "Keep the Car Running" so we can escape easier. However, Butler deserves a kick in the shin for the line: "I don't want to live in America no more." You don't live in America. You don't. We all know that. If you are paranoid about living Next to America, then by all means write about that. It works better for us because it sounds more honest.

"No Cars Go" is an old song - circa 2002 - and no amount of synthesizer can cover that up, because it is by far the most interesting thing on Black Mirror. Too bad Win phones in his vocal performance again, replete with lackluster "Hey!"s and an cringe-worthy modulation on the third chorus. It's still better than most of the rest of the album. Closer "My Body is a Cage" is pretty rousing stuff, as Arcade Fire throw the gospel at us. While not spectacular, it makes an appropriate denouement.

Ultimately, Neon Bible is missing much of the enthusiasm and tightly packed arrangements of Funeral, and thus falls short of the hair-raising impact of that album. I do appreciate the attempt by the band to not make Funeral: Part 2, but they've taken a pretty sharp turn towards entirely remapping the past without their own peculiar twists - and seem to be struggling to find their unique voice again.

Fully Operational X Japan - Self-titled EP CD
2005 | self-released

FOX Japan is a band mostly from West Virginia with some members scattered about the states, getting together to record and do short tours. It's a rocking indie pop band that seems to have been kicking in some incarnation or other for the last ten years, but what appears on this EP from 2005, presumably their first release, is some really well-developed music with a melancholy, biting humor.

I dig the music quite a bit, and I'd say it bears quite a bit of resemblance to Pavement. Also, I'm guessing that like Pavement, live cuts of these tunes would probably come off with more appropriate vitriol given the subject matter. The lyrics are fascinating. "Emasculate Me," which finds the narrator questioning his role protesting anything in modern life struggling to find an appropriate position to take:

My great grandad was a farmer
So my granddad could be a teacher
My granddad was a teacher
So my dad could be a lawyer
My dad became a laywer
So that I could be an artist
Oh, capital
America got rich upon the backs of slaves and natives
Now it's staying that way
Because of bombs and cheap labor
I'll happily partake and complain about it later

Not a popular stance to take in the world of indie rock! But we've definitely got a live one here. Each tune, like Emasculate Me, comes off with a rather chill vibe, very clean recording sound (especially for what sounds like home recording), but has a latent sarcasm and cynicism that is most pleasing to me. I really want to see these guys rock out and get into it. The lyrics are all pretty intimate, dealing with loan sharks and over indulging in modern convenience and living needlessly complex lives, and taking on the corporate mono-culture and evangelical Christians ("Jesus Would Be Ashamed of You People" is not to be missed, friends).

Not coincidentally, FOX Japan is coming to the Garden State where I doth reside. The dudes will be playing a place called Cafe Arabica in Morristown, NJ, where I almost never venture, and I've not heard of the venue. It's a hookah bar, and I love hookah bars. The place seems to be booking a lot of Singer/Songwriter acts. FOX Japan is playing at Cafe Arabica on Dec 28th 2006, at 9pm.

You can download two of their tunes, order their EP, connect to their MySpace page, and get general info about the band and their tour on their website. Here's Emasculate Me. Additionally, they've made a new track, "What Follows", presumably from their upcoming EP, available on their website. Quite different from the more traditional indie rockin on their first EP, it's somewhere between Belle & Sebastian and Frank Zappa, and I like it a lot, especially when Charlie Wilmoth starts screaming "ARE YOU GONNA BEHAVE!" over and over again over a wall of ripping distortion. These guys are a blast.

Eliane Elias - Around the City
2006 | RCA Victor Records

It keeps happening that I look at a CD's cover art, read the tracks, develop some kind of "oh, it's gonna be like ____" impression, and then I listen to it and it turns out I was really off-base. I'm glad that this keeps happening. I have a keen interest in all things Brazilian, and just like some people have a fetish for all things Japanese, even super-deformed characters on keychains, I'm a big fan of Brazilian culture, especially the other-worldly music.

That is certainly driving my interest in Eliane Elias's record Around the City. It's thirteen tracks mixing her originals with Jazz arrangements of covers that are quite brilliantly put together. The opening track "Running" is so far my favorite, and it's an original. I really didn't think a cover of Bob Marley's "Jammin'" would be any good at all, but the musical performance is quite over the top, it's not to be missed.

On the other hand, I truly hope that I never hear "Oye Como Va" again, and of the various covers on this record, I'm very surprised to see this included, especially since 1) that tune has been worked to death by everybody and their mother, and 2) this is the one cover who's arrangement doesn't really add much to or do much with the original.

I'm a little surprised at how many covers are on this record (6); my guess is that this record is aimed at Jazz heads, who find it very common to pickup records that highlight performance and arrangement of standards and popular tunes, where the praise is to be found in the interpretation.

All in all, this disc is a really fun, sexy, chill listen, it makes you want to sip wine and dance slowly in some place dark, especially if you're listening to it at work while programming database code. Yus. The general impression I get from this record is of an artist who is focused on the music itself, and I think that doing bizarre covers of popular tunes is about as close as she's willing to go to selling herself as a piece of pop media, there's really no compromising the music on the other tunes for cliche pop hooks, and there's quite a bit of Brazilian Portuguese for lyrics.

Dead Leaf Echo
Faint Violet Whiff
2006 | Year Of The Gallon Records

From the opening track of this six song EP, Dead Leaf Echo charges forward with the droning-rock sound made enormously popular by Interpol a couple of years back (along with some healthy dosings of Morissey and U2), but like a lot of Interpol's material, it seems to lack the hooks I think you need to get away with that.

Because the music isn't exactly in your face (the exception being the heavily reverbed drum kit), the vocals are bright and on top of the mix, and because the vocals become that which my interest hinges upon, I guess I'm feeling a little more demanding than I usually would. The singing isn't off-pitch, but I want to hear less breathy Morrisey crooning, my ear keeps looking for something to cut like a knife through the dreamy texture of these songs and the laden production.

"Poison Lips" really goes head-first into the Morrisey memorializing. Really some pretty stuff, but it's just not for me. On the other hand, "Walking Away" seems to do a much better job of channeling the various evident influences into a working formula, the first track on the disk where this two-piece writing team (plus friends) bears its teeth. Suddenly you hear a lot more U2. I'm wondering if perhaps these songs wouldn't benefit from production that was less slick? The really pretty, dreamy and delayed guitars sound far away, even when there's a musical interlude.

"Shell of Love" is honestly very pretty. "Ooooooh, what in the world have you become?" It's so sad and beautiful. It's on this track that sheer sincerity makes it through the monstrously difficult task of recording what is honestly an active and living expression (a performance) of an emotion, and making it easily replicable. Recording music is heinously difficult because you're trying to freeze that which is essentially motion. "Shell of Love" is one of those amazing moments immortalized, the perfect take, the perfect sound, the perfect mix, and you couldn't ever do it the same way again if you tried.

"Denial" continues in this vein, but it's running time of nearly 8 minutes is a bit more than I can stand in the particular format. Back are the blurred swirling droning sounds and a vocal line that has the right amount of passion but lacks the hook it needs to cut through. Some really interesting things take place wherein ambient / environment noises are mixed in and panned hard stereo right to left (like sirens on the street).

The last track is a remix of "Shell of Love" by Invisible Kid (I think this is his link), an interesting take on what is easily this record's single, but I have to say I don't think the beats and added ambient workings add much to the tune, I really prefer the cleared space of the original where the singer is able to reach through all the heavy production and chorus effect and into your heart.

There's really a lot of potential in this group and its song writing, and I would imagine catching the singer alone with his guitar somewhere would be one of the most intimate and enjoyable performances you could ask for. Faint Violet Whiff takes a bit of a beating with effects processing when it needs to have a real warm-blooded energy if these songs are going to make it inside you like "Shell of Love" does. I'm not saying it needs to rock. But you want the listener to feel the heat of those tears.

Dead Leaf Echo: Thanks very much for sending this in, I appreciate it. I'm sure this record was a lot of hard work, and I hope that my criticism here is constructive.

Billy Gray
billy@tankcrash.com

Nouvelle Vague
Bande a Part
Luaka Bop

Timing can sometimes be everything. Amidst the sudden euphoria for everything 80's several years ago, a new appreciation for the lounge scene among mature cosmopolitans simultaneously sprung up. The French act Nouvelle Vague brilliantly combined the two styles and came across with a fresh and sultry take on a catalog of 80's songs that were being rediscovered by a new generation. Critics were hesitant to allow Nouvelle Vague the opportunity to extend beyond a mere novelty act, but the audiences disagreed. Now in 2006, after touring the world, the band has released Bande a Part under Luaka Bop, David Byrne's world music label. The record is a strong musical offering that continues to challenge conventional musical tastes and further explores the possibilities of the cover band.

For Example- ever wondered what the memorable Bauhaus track "Bela Lugosi's Dead" would sound like played by a smoking Brazilian lounge act? Or what Billy Idol's "Dancing With Myself" would come across reincarnated as a zydeco/bossanova shuffle? These fantastic musical meanderings, and many more, are explored with an international perspective by this funky French collective. Back on their self-titled debut, leader Marc Colin put together a group of musicians to, as he says, "arrang the greatest, but rarely covered early '80s post-punk numbers in an original and personal way". The group continues the experiment on their new album with sounds that are a musical nod to the styles of the Caribbean between 1940 and 1970.

Nouvelle Vague successfully transplants these selected post-punk gems out of the wet and overcast milieu of Britain and the claustrophobic pretentiousness of the early 80's downtown New York scene where they were created. The band then brings the songs into the hot and sweaty atmosphere of the Caribbean and the move does wonders for the songs. Hearing New Order's "Blue Monday" sung in a sexy French accent in the middle of a hot Spanish-speaking club by Melanie Pain to the beat of maracas, shakers and funky mallets is a bit, well, cool. The breathing room that is injected into these tracks allows for them to be enjoyed in environments that they originally would have seemed out of place in. Can you imagine before making out to the Cramps track "Human Fly"? You can now. A new lease on life has been given to these classic, yet aged tracks.

Any 80's enthusiast will undoubtedly find loads to like on this record. And someone that can't stand the datedness of 80's songs will find these new versions fresh and funky. It just goes to show that a well written song, like the Buzzcocks' "Ever Fallen in Love" or Echo and Bunneyman's "Killing Moon", possess a timelessness that can translate into any musical language. Anyone that can't get down, or least nod their head, to the Nouvelle Vague's take on "Dance with Me" by Lords of the New Church, or any of the other tracks on Bande a Part, has a serious rhythm deficiency.

Akron/Family - Meek Warrior
2006| Young God Records

What happens when four country kids relocate to Brooklyn, NY in the hope of making the next great American record? What you get instead is three rather interesting releases by a band called Akron/Family on ex-Swan Michael Gira's label Young God Records. Their latest release, Meek Warrior, is pure art school-gospel that is as confounding as it is exhilarating. Just when you thought the Brooklyn scene hit its creative peak with Return to Cookie Mountain earlier this year, Akron/Family has added another chapter to the ever evolving musical scene that is Brooklyn, NY.

A serious reconsideration of the musical possibilities that lay ahead in the 21st century is a damned near unavoidable after the initial hearing of "Blessing Force", the opening track to Meek Warrior. It is staggering to the mind to hear four dudes unabashedly banging out their deepest darkest musical desires. How does it come across? Well, I think it's safe to say that Meek Warrior is THAT album that on a dark and stormy night your stoner friend or weirdo roommate will corner you and insist "Dude! You gotta hear this!" All the while hurriedly pulling up the album on iTunes and then stopping suddenly, he gives you a serious look and says, "wait...smoke this first, trust me!"

The transition from the closing jazz freak out of "Blessing Force" to the delicate hay-danglin-from-the-mouth hymn "Gone Beyond" finds the band reveling in its wide array of musical abilities and tastes. Freak-folk, noise-rock, alt-country, whatever...the musical borders in this band were stripped away along time ago. What comes out is a beautiful noise that holds more sway over the mind with each ensuing listen. The unpredictability of the musical directions within the record is what will probably garner most of the attention from critics. However, beneath the chaotic juxtaposition of musical elements lays a subtle, yet masterful song-writing ability. This contrast perfectly informs the listener of what it must be like for a group of artists to transition out of a rural setting and into some Brooklyn loft, channeling the maelstrom of artistic urbanity that is proliferating out of the borough across the bridge.

LJ Battaglia

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Ed: one of the tracks, "Gone Beyond" is available as a free MP3.

Channels - Waiting For The Next End Of The World
August 2006 | Dischord Records

Released at the end of August, the first full-length record from Channels is the stomping, triumphant, beautiful and blasting follow through to the Open EP that the band released on DeSoto Records (ah, desoto, how i miss the dismemberment plan. *sniff*).

Channels, J. Robbins's new post- Burning Airlines and Jawbox project, seems like the natural progression of his compositional and performance abilities, but the project has a sense of shimmering beauty and lurking pop that you didn't often see in the former bands. His wife Janet Morgan plays bass and handles a good portion of the vocals, her Kim Deal-esque delivery takes tracks like Lucky Lamb and Chivaree into a place that Robbins could never do on his own. Darren Zentek's drumming couldn't be a better match for Robbin's and Morgan's truly strange and adept riffing, dynamic changes, swells, drives, and dives.

This record is intense. So much complex but catchy music for a trio to be cranking out while delivering some really touching lyrics, ranging from the anthem catchy "I love my friends and all my friends are in love" of Chivaree to "This fucking century puts Bombs in my dreams," of the very same song. The lyrics of The New Mandarins (featured recently in a Jersey Beat podcast), which kicks off the record, are a smart and personal indictment of the direction of our culture since the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks. The whole record is pre-occupied with the invasion of popular fear into the personal life.

Chivaree originally appeared on Open, and is available for download on the DeSoto site right here. Put that on your ipod and play it for all your friends.

Channels is the inheritor of the DC post punk sound, forging ahead, expanding the sound, adding a hyperactive twang, aaah-aaah vocals, blistering guitar solos and a feminine beauty that just isn't so very present in the music from that scene. It's weird to hear something that almost could almost be called prog-something except for the fact that it doesn't come off as nerdy and mathematically obsessed, more about hitting just that right sound to invoke just that right emotion. Channels delivers their pop with a vicious density and beauty where most post-hardcore-punk groups can only muster up the formula that Green Day patented back in '94.

The recording and production quality of this record is fantastic, and was mostly recorded and mixed by J. Robbins himself (although early recordings of "Lucky Lamb" were done with good ol' Don Zientara).

Definitely worth your $10. Order your copy from Dischord online if it's not in your local store.

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An unrelated aside: a little-known but awesome record store here in New Jersey is in Somerset - Curmudgeon Records. They often pack that place for shows, too. Worth checking out if your in the more central or western Jersey and you need a decent place to hunt down your crushes. Definitely a place where you could find this record if you want to buy local. Tunes in Hoboken comes to mind as far as stores in North Jers.

One sunny Sunday suave Sceneless editor Billy Gray hands me a promo copy of the new solo disc by Roger O'Donnell, The Truth in Me.

I scan the press sheet. "An album made entirely on the Minimoog Voyager synthesizer". Oh dear, this sounds like it's going to be a laborious investigation into myriad sounds rather than an album with songs. Worse yet, the Voyager is monophonic. I'm not sure my brain can handle an album without chords.

"Former member of the Cure and Thompson Twins". Aren't there about 30 former members of the Cure? Who really gives a crap about the Thompson Twins?

Fast forward a couple of days. I'm at work, I have yet to listen to the album, but I am doing a little research:

A little prodding reveals O'Donnell helped record Disintegration, Bloodflowers and a couple others, but only helped write any material on one album. He was unceremoniously ejected from the band by Robert Smith in 2004 when Smith decided (again) that his philosophy wasn't jiving with people not named Simon [Gallup].

My phone rings. It's Shannon. It seems our dog Simon (really) thought it would be a good idea to taste the Roger O'Donnell promo disc. Apparently, he didn't like it too much. A pile of disc shards and paper were left in the middle of my living room, all topped off with a rhinoceros sized bowel movement. Absorb that for a moment: My dog hated O'Donnell's disc so much he destroyed it and took a shit on it.

Not being one to resign myself to any notion of fate, I decided to check out O'Donnell's MySpace page. Clearly my dog does not prefer 9 minute long explorations of the same basic musical theme on one instrument. Nor does he like the Moog. I'll keep that Wendy Carlos record on the high shelf from now on, I guess.

Tris McCall & The New Jack Trippers
I'm Assuming You're All In Bands
$5 | 2006 | Jersey Beat Music