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THE RECORD EXCHANGE REVIEW: TATI ON AMYL AND THE SNIFFERS’ ‘CARTOON DARKNESS’

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November 11, 2024 - The Record Exchange Blog - by - No Comments

Artist: Amyl and the Sniffers
Album: Cartoon Darkness
Reviewer: Tatiana Silva

Amyl and the Sniffers’ junior album is nothing groundbreaking in the sound of Aussie pub rock, but the attitude of frontwoman Amy Taylor easily carries this album into my top 10 for 2024. Like the short-lived, euphoria-inducing inhalant the band is named after, Cartoon Darkness is 33 minutes of bullshit-ridding incantation backed by the same inebriating instrumentation that got me hooked with their 2021 album Comfort to Me. 

One of my favorite mantras from the album’s “U Should Not Be Doing That” highlights the growth in musicianship from this Melbourne-based pub-rock punk quartet:

I’m working own my worth, I’m working on my work, I’m working on who I am

I’m working on what is wrong, what is right, and where I am

Amy gives us her most complex melodies to date, we hear saxophone for the first time in “U Should Not Be Doing That” and the band proves they’re more than just rowdy pub rockers with debut ballads “Big Dreams” and “Bailing on Me.” Lyrically I am obsessed with Taylor’s bluntness in disregarding the opps (misogynists, racists, fascists and, well, anyone just generally f*cking up the vibe). I do have to throw a bit of shade on the “they didn’t want to see us succeed” trope that comes up throughout the album, as the band was touring internationally and opening for acts like Foo Fighters within the first year of their self-titled debut in 2019, which also went on to win the 2019 ARIA Best Rock Album of the Year. I am grateful to have downtempo moments in Cartoon Darkness to flesh out my admiration for Taylor while she sings about heartbreak and wanting to escape a place that feels inescapable. It’s a unique feeling to feel like you’re growing with a band, as Comfort to Me did not find me well but served as a driving force to get me to where I am today. The switch-up in styles has me genuinely eager to hear what new sounds and ideas the band will conjure in following projects, and how I will also have grown and changed by the next time we meet. 

Amyl and the Sniffers continue to be the band that I would recommend when you need to lock in to just surviving the next day (because sometimes it be like that). With all of their albums ringing in below 40 minutes, they know how to drive a beat forward with clear, crisp dictation that can be dicey to find within the genre. Taylor’s lyrics read like spells and will easily have you sold on sticking things out to spite it all. 

In the chance you don’t need any of Taylor’s spellwork lyricism, I’d highlight “Tiny Bikini” and “Doing In Me Head” as instant on-repeat tracks, the kind that feel eerily familiar but also so tingly new you can’t stop until you’re absolutely sick of them. “Chewing Gum” is mid-tempo for the album and pulled at my heartstrings, as I’m a big cheesehead for any gum/love reference ever since I heard Air’s “Playground Love.” The penultimate track, “Going Somewhere,” has a dark, flirty playfulness that leads us into the final track “Me and the Girls,” which holds my favorite mantra: 

Me and the girls are stealing our napkins, me and the girls don’t want to be taxed

Me and the girls want free abortions, you and the boys can’t even get waxed

Me and the girls, we don’t want protection, me and the girls don’t want to be boxed

Me and the girls are gonna go party, you and the boys can shut the fuck up

So I am once again pouring my wee little heart out and asking you to indulge in less than an hour of primal, somatic and strutty chords. And if you’re an overachiever, watch the official music video for “U Should Not Be Doing That” – all I have to say is Steven Ogg.

Until next time! 

XOXO Tati

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THE RECORD EXCHANGE REVIEW: REM ON SQUAREPUSHER’S ‘ULTRAVISITOR 20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION’

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November 4, 2024 - The Record Exchange Blog - by - No Comments

Artist: Squarepusher
Album: Ultravisitor 20th Anniversary Edition
Reviewer: Rem Jensen

Toxic, Bush’s second term, Facebook; 2004 brought a selection of events and moments that shaped and sneak-peeked the post-Y2K world as it was developing. There was a general sense of culture, with the boom of the Von Dutch multi-layered fashion archetype and the timeless classic of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie being released, countered by rising disdain for the jingoistic stubbornness of the US’s strong-handed involvement in the Iraq War, which imploded after our two attacks on Fallujah. The year brought many tug-of-war battles between citizens and their surroundings, muddying up the rocky but palatable ground that media, global politics and life was hurriedly shaping into.

However, gone from the notions of cultural relevance was the fringe, and while the indie rock of the Strokes, Interpol and Arcade Fire was taking shape and forming the new norm that still runs into today’s music landscape, the ever-creeping impact of electronic music was becoming less easy to ignore. Daft Punk, Gorillaz, Radiohead; pop was being digitized, but what was going on with the music that had already been digital?

When I think of electronic, I think of three names, predictably: Aphex Twin, Autechre and Squarepusher. These three Warped artists nailed down and progressed electronic music to a realized form, which in the evolution from Kraftwerk and Silver Apples continued a legacy of driving, inventive rhythms and textures brought on by the mangling of circuits and capacitors: Aphex with his ambient techno sound that encapsulated almost all of the ‘90s; Autechre with their cold, glitchy, cerebral generative programming; and Squarepusher, thee Tom Jenkinson, who stood out by inserting more of a human touch into his take on electronic music, much to be attributed to his imperfect, unpolished-sounding experimentational playing of his bass guitar.

This is a long way of establishing that Squarepusher’s work felt more alive and less robotic than his surrounding cast, and his 2004 record Ultravisitor threw caution to the wind and took a few swings at electro that were broad, bold, daring and super weird, but sounded less like it was cooked and stewed in the drab, concrete, dank rooms that home-recorded electronic had been establishing.

The album gets a lot of credit for me in the Squarepusher catalog as an interesting symbiosis of live and studio recordings; Tom Jenkinson’s work had always had a feel of realism to it, with those plucky bass lines, vocal samples and some tongue-in-cheek quirks that didn’t take themselves too seriously, but had plenty of room to do so. On Ultravisitor, there are our familiar conventional Warp quirks of corybantic drum and bass cuts, but splashed within and around that ‘90s sound are many strange tone shifts, with some downtempo jazzy tracks back to back with cacophonous musique concrète experimentations, not to mention the breakbeat cuts.

Our three-track run of “Telluric Piece,” “District Line II” and “Circlewave” hits all these benchmarks, and is a shining example of what the record set out to do; we go from screeching, vengeful improvisations, to coked-out, murky ragga jungle, to almost post-rocky, entrancing nu-jazz beats, all within one side of an LP. 

“An Arched Pathway” I might describe as the soundtrack to a cybernetic vampire tripping down an escalator, regaining their footing, only to eventually have a repeated battle with a banana peel they keep slipping on. Jenkinson’s bass here really steals the show; fed through strange, computerized effects, struck and thwapped with the vigor of a psychopathic deviant obsessed with the banjo.

Here on Jenkinson’s seventh record, the bass work is some of his most straightforward and focused yet, like the closer “Every Day I Love,” whose ambient meditative loops might remind one of Loren Mazzacane Connors or “Andrei” with its almost classical music or modal jazz way of progressions done with so much emotional intention. These tracks stand in evident opposition against songs like the sadistic mangled beat discombobulation of “50 Cycles,” or one of my favorite cuts on the record, “Steinbolt,” which has these insanely ear-splitting resonances that collude and conspire with the malicious coupling of harrowing synth pads and some undeniably diabolical breaks.

Predictably, the drum-and-bass feel to this record is what lulls me in, but the obtuse Pollock splattering of genres keeps me listening. It’s not enough to just have the breakbeat acid worship of “Menelec” – it must be bookended by very strange, ominous synthesizer drones and sinister noise walls, mutilating the drum cuts into fragmented, twisted remnants of the track’s rhythms heard just earlier.

A fan favorite – also, a continuation of one of the tracks off of his 1999 release Budakhan Mindphone – titled “Iambic 9 Poetry” couldn’t be more different from the previously mentioned track; despite it not having the live audience cheers and room mic mixing of some of the other cuts on Ultravisitor – “I Fulcrum” and “C-Town Smash,” for example – this feels like the most alive track on the record. Between its Four Tet-like sampled drum swings, the Boards of Canada brooding synth plucks and the gigantic big band sound the last quarter of the track explodes into, it’s just really neat to have a straightforward and irrefutably upbeat track on such an ominously culminated and explosively varied album.

My heavy-handed introduction to this review may have been fueled by my fantasization with music evolving in a time of evolution, and electronic music specifically was hitting an advantageous stride in the mid-‘00s: Autechre had their own explosion of experimentation with the flashcore shrapnel of Untilted, Venetian Snares struck a chord with his modern-classical drum and bass amalgamate record Rossz Csillag Alatt Született; and the glitch music of ‘90s forefathers Oval and Pan Sonic was finally being expanded upon and formulated by now-cemented genre staples such as Fennesz, Ryoji Ikeda, Jan Jelinek and Vladislav Delay. 

Then here lies our record in question. Sitting at an important time of the aughts, electronic music was reaching its general maturity while stick-to-itively kicking at air trying to obliterate anything in its sight, and Earthly living was hitting a genesis moment of technological advancements, and soon to be all too familiar seeds being sown in our tendencies to want, and have and feel, and as a result become stronger in an increasingly overstimulating, disjointed, frenetic and accelerated world. 

With its bastardizations of goofy jazzy bass solos, maniacal and unrelenting drum breaks and wildly experimental electroacoustic noise tangents, you can catch all of these songs and MORE – notably on the bonus LP, which includes the Venus and Tundra EP cuts – on the 3LP 20th anniversary edition of Ultravisitor, where you can stage yourself in a time not too different from ours now, and settle into an intricate and distracting break from your everyday crusade of momentum versus time.

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THE RECORD EXCHANGE REVIEW: THOMAS ON MDOU MOCTAR’S NEW ALBUM ‘FUNERAL FOR JUSTICE’ AND TREEFORT HALL SHOW

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October 28, 2024 - The Record Exchange Blog - by - No Comments

Artist: Mdou Moctar
Album: Funeral for Justice
Concert: Treefort Music Hall, October 19, 2024
Reviewer: Thomas Metzger

ALBUM REVIEW:

Mdou Moctar’s newest album Funeral for Justice is a pyrotechnic, explosive modern-day blend of Saharan blues and Jimi Hendrix, with tracks about brutal government regimes and family tradition. 

Mahamadou Souleymane, better known as Mdou Moctar, is a Tuareg songwriter/musician from Niger. He made his first guitar himself, using spare pieces of wood and bicycle cables. However, the small village of Agadez he grew up in did not allow secular music, so he had to practice in secret. His practice sure paid off, as you can argue he is one of the most talented, interesting guitar players out there right now, with constant comparisons to Jimi Hendrix.

Lightning fast solos, chugging 6/4 grooves and lyrics about his home village were prominent on his last full length album Afrique Victime. Funeral for Justice takes those points and turns the amplifier up to 11. “Funeral” has Moctar singing about oppressive government coups and the longing of freedom for his people while shredding these absolutely face-melting solos, especially on the track “Imouhar,” meaning “brother(s).”  The track opens with a subdued Saharan Blues riff, and group vocals come in singing:

 “Imouhar, you know this indeed we have a written history/Written in books and the whole world knows it.” 

Then, the track opens up as an explosion of electric guitar hitting you square in the face. After pleading to his people to not abandon their traditions, Moctar erupts into another mind-bending solo, now using his guitar to assert his frustration and persuade his people. Moctar does not hold back. You know exactly what he is feeling.

The songs on Funeral for Justice are inherently political, mostly inspired by the Nigerian government being taken over by a violent, right-wing military coup back in 2023 while touring for Afrique. It was because of this coup that Moctar and his band couldn’t return to their home country, and were afraid for the lives of their loved ones. The final track “Modern Slaves” shows Moctar yearning for peace and safety for his home, singing, “Oh world, why be so selective about human beings?/ My people are crying while you laugh.” 

Moctar’s feelings about oppressive regimes on this album are relatable to anyone who has gone through it: the longing for peace and stability, and the uncertainty of what will come next. While Funeral for Justice is a cry for help and for freedom from the abuse of fascist powers, Moctar will also release Tears of Injustice in 2025, which features an entire rerecording of the album on acoustic instruments, in what Matador Records describes as “the sound of grief” and “the meditative mirror-image to the blistering original.”

CONCERT REVIEW:

While Moctar’s studio albums do a good job demonstrating his talent on guitar, where he truly shines, in my opinion, is in the live setting. 

Fast-forward to October 19, 2024, Treefort Music Hall: Can and Neu playing over the house PA, providing just a small snippet of the classic sounds of the past that Moctar and Co. have adopted into their playing. While there were many events happening around the Treasure Valley that night, those who chose to see Moctar were delivered an amazing performance. 

The lights go out, and a tape-loop recording consisting of chicken roosts and background wind and conversation plays over the house speakers. Moctar and his band stroll out on stage, dressed in Nigerian garments and huge white scarves. Very nonchalant, not saying much to the crowd. Just a simple smile and wave. Mdou Moctar is a man of few words, but needless to say, his playing does the talking for him. 

And then, the tape loop ends and the band launches into the opening track of Funeral for Justice, and in an instant, we are 0 to 100 mph. Moctar’s fiery guitar chops light up the crowd, myself included. 

While the similarities of Moctar and Hendrix are apparent, Moctar has formed his own style and path of guitar playing, borrowing the stylings of Saharan blues legend Ali Farka Touré and mashing them together with raunchy blues riffs played at the speed of light. Listening or watching him solo with no pick is enough to make even the most seasoned of guitar vets go “Holy s***!” 

While Moctar may be across the world playing shows night after night, he certainly hasn’t forgotten about his people. The passion and intensity he puts in every single riff, jam and song is felt across the entire room. 

And just like Hendrix had Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding laying the foundation for Hendrix to go crazy, Moctar’s backing band – rhythm guitarist Ahmoudou Madassane, drummer Souleymane Ibrahim and bassist/producer Mikey Coltun – were putting in work, laying the steady 6/4 grooves for Moctar to release his anguish and frustration through his guitar. Drummer Ibrahim pounds those drums and provides an awesome mix of rock, blues, disco and Afrobeat rhythms throughout his playing. Guitarist Madassane provided the tight rhythm guitar, and bassist Coltun spawned thunderous bass that you could feel in your entire body.

It surely can’t be easy laying the foundation for a player like Moctar to do his thing, but his band members make it look so easy. With someone like Moctar taking the lead, the band needs to be rock solid and grounded, and they very much were. Songs can spin off into extended, krautrock-meets-Saharan-blues-style jams, where Moctar takes the lead and plays like his life depends on it. And in a way, it does. 

About halfway through, we launch into another explosive jam. Surprisingly, about midway through the 6/4 shred-fest, the beat switches to a 4/4 disco/funk groove that couldn’t be resisted by the crowd. It was a nice foray into a style that we maybe don’t often associate with Moctar, but could be reminiscent of late-era W.I.T.C.H. (We Intend To Cause Havoc) albums. 

After about an hour and 15 minutes of face-melting solos, the band exits the stage, the crowd screaming and clamoring for more. Moctar returns to the stage, solo. The crowd loses it. He slowly picks up and tunes his guitar, and in this moment of anticipation and “what will happen next,” I have never heard Treefort Music Hall so quiet. No barware clinking, no background conversations; you could hear a pin drop. Everyone was waiting in awe at what he would do next.

After the rest of the band returns, they launch into a final, atomic-level explosion of a jam, Moctar taking to the front of stage. He knows what the crowd wants, and he is feeding off it. Running both hands up and down the neck of his Olympic White Fender Strat (similar to Hendrix), Moctar shreds his most intense performance of the entire night. He wants the crowd to remember this show, and boy will it be hard to ever forget.

While Funeral for Justice is great on a nice turntable and speakers, truly nothing compares to seeing Moctar live. The jams get more intense, and the energy in the room is irresistible. The face-melting solos blasting the noggins of everyone inside Treefort Music Hall that night will linger on in the minds of everyone who was there, and I truly feel bad for anyone who wasn’t there to experience it. Moctar is a once-in-a-lifetime talent, one that I will drop everything to go see if they come to town, and so should you.

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THE RECORD EXCHANGE REVIEW: JOHN O ON MIRANDA LAMBERT’S ‘POSTCARDS FROM TEXAS’

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October 21, 2024 - The Record Exchange Blog - by - No Comments

Artist: Miranda Lambert
Album: Postcards from Texas
Reviewer: John O’Neil

Innovation is a concept often misunderstood. In country music, too much change is seen as a betrayal of the whole concept of “three chords and the truth.” But nothing comes out of nowhere; everything is built on a foundation of things that came before. How much groundbreaking takes place is secondary to the fundamental basis of music: does it speak to me, to my heart and soul, and am I inspired to sing along?

Postcards from Texas finds Miranda Lambert in control of her considerable gifts as a singer, player, writer and mogul. There is nothing that she turns her attention to that she doesn’t excel at. The songs are steeped in Texas place names, which works here because of the fun the singer is obviously having speaking her truth. It’s serious fun too, because often the best response to the challenges that a person faces is to find humor in your circumstances, and to laugh at misfortune.

This album is a masterclass in collaboration. No less than 18 songwriters are credited on this record, with Lambert co-writing 10 of them. It all sounds consistent with the overall vision, even though the songs are diverse in content and melody. They hearken back to the classic country sound of artists like George Strait, the folky storytelling of Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, the plain spoken “tell it like it is” songs of Loretta Lynn, combined with guitar driven country-rock of the Byrds, Gram Parsons, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. She is a great singer, delivering time and time again with confidence and power. Despite the number of collaborators, the overall sound is hers. The hooks are huge, and memorable. The guitar playing is great, not overbearing or flashy, just perfect for the song. Nothing is out of place, and there is not a bad song on the record. And there are clever moments of wordplay that could devolve into gimmickry in less-capable hands (“Armadillo,” “Looking Back on Luckenbach,” “Alimony”) that instead hearken back to the great story songs of classic country. And there are great stories contained here.

Now in her forties, Miranda Lambert seems as driven as ever. Given the number of enterprises she has taken on outside of music, both charitable and commercial, it makes her music even more remarkable, because she delivers on every promise. Her mantra, which has been constant since before she signed her first record deal, is, “If it’s a maybe, it’s a no.” (reference, pg 57 “Her Country” by Marissa R. Moss) – anything that isn’t true to her Texas country roots. It’s no small thing to remain true to yourself, going against the grain while simultaneously honoring the things that make your sound what it is. She is real, and anything that is not real to her is not something she will do. I have no reason to believe that will ever change. And I will always listen to her records, as long as she wants to make them.

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THE RECORD EXCHANGE REVIEW: CHAD ON MORPHINE’S ‘CURE FOR PAIN’

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October 14, 2024 - The Record Exchange Blog - by - No Comments

Artist: Morphine
Album: Cure for Pain
Reviewer: Chad Dryden

It’s hard to imagine here in 2024 that vinyl ever went through a “dead era,” but if you hear a collector use that term, it’s likely they’re talking about the ’90s. And I can tell you with certainty (because I was there) that’s exactly what the decade was like for vinyl while the compact disc was peaking.

In the here and now, that means countless beloved albums from the ’90s are either woefully scarce (and painfully expensive) due to limited demand for the format (and thus minuscule original press runs) or unavailable on vinyl – most artists and labels simply never bothered to make it.

Fortunately, in recent years the ’90s have been getting their just due, as the racks at stores like ours are filled with vinyl reissues from an array of artists large and small who made their mark in the last decade of the millennium. Morphine is one of them.

Cure for Pain, originally released in September 1993, was virtually impossible to find on vinyl upon its release – only one pressing surfaced, in 1994, and that was in Brazil. The first U.S. pressing finally arrived in 2011, and now Rhino Records has cut a fresh remaster from the original tapes in conjunction with its annual Rocktober reissue series.

The album was and remains one of my favorite albums from the ’90s, and is universally accepted, more or less, as Morphine’s crowning achievement. The Boston trio – principal songwriter Mark Sandman on vocals and homemade two-string slide bass guitar; Dana Colley on baritone and tenor sax, which he often played simultaneously on stage; and Jerome Deupree then Billy Conway on drums – were scene vets who came together with a decidedly unique concept for jazz-influenced underground rock. In lesser hands, it would be a one-trick gimmick like so many from the era, but the sheer talent of the musicians and Sandman’s fully-formed vision for their aesthetic resulted in a series of incredible albums leading up to his death on stage by heart attack in 1999.

Sandman – whose wry, hipster-cool wit was always on display in interviews and on stage – alternately referred to the Morphine sound as “low rock” or, in a winking nod to the times, “implied grunge.” And certainly there’s a low-end aggression to some of their songs, but ultimately the groove triumphs. Sandman makes the most of his two strings, crafting slinky, sultry and sometimes feedback-soaked bass lines that provide more color than most rock bassists can conjure from a traditional four-string. It’s a foundation for his bohemian lounge-lizard tales, the sort of hazy cigarette-smoke late-night noir that traveled a through line from mid-century jazz to Tom Waits to Jim Jarmusch films. Morphine provided a soundtrack for the fedora-clad hepcats of the ’90s, and it’s no surprise their songs found their way into movies of the time like Get Shorty.

Morphine’s music may have been the product of a certain era and a certain place, but unlike many artists and albums from the ’90s American underground, the moody, infectious Cure for Pain does not come on like a time capsule here in 2024. Seek it out if you haven’t already, or use this fantastic Rocktober reissue as an excuse to revisit a certified classic, then come back for more on Black Friday when Morphine’s B-Sides and Otherwise compilation gets its first-ever vinyl release.

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