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Krisis’s Recommended Releases of 2010:
Vampire Weekend – Contra

Contra is masterpiece of camouflage, with Vampire Weekend burying their true identity beneath layers of musical influences and hiding cutting, carefully composed poetry beneath Afro-Jùjú rhythms. Even the band’s name is a disguise, evoking goth rock or careless popped-collar excess, but not the delicately-crafted, smart pop lying beneath the surface of their carefree songs.

Who’s to say this isn’t the work of wasted Ivy-Leaguers on an extended lost weekend? Silly “Horchata” and sunny “Holiday” seem to fit that mold. The latter is a nearly-Ska retread on Weezer’s “Islands in the Sun,” but listen closely to the story implied by the lyrics – a sketch of a naive co-ed who would cheerfully wear a neon Che Guevara shirt while vacationing on a central American beach.

And the gleeful, hyper-literate “Horchata?”After the ten-cent-word rhymes of its opening verses it dispenses this observation: “Here comes a feeling you thought you’d forgotten,:chairs to sit and sidewalks to walk on. Oh, you had it, but oh no you lost it. You understood, so shouldn’t have fought it.”

That is Contra, in a microcosm. Yes, Vampire Weekend is at a party with their peers, wearing their pink, popped-collar polo shirts… but they’re the most introspective guys in the room, and they feel sorry for every privileged person in the place.

That might also include themselves, as on “Taxi Cab,” whose delicate regret and self-pity wring more pathos from the word “grocery” than Death Cab For Cutie can muster on an entire album.

Vampire Weekend is like Weezer or Death Cab for Cutie, if both eschewed their rhythm guitars, convenient couplets, and conventional song structures. So, really nothing like either of them. Rather than lose themselves in the hopeless emo rock their constant pity for self and others would suggest, Vampire Weekend plays up the utter camp of their musical influences to brighten the corners of a dour world.

Each song offers crowd-pleasing poly-rhythms and thesaurus-wielding rhymes with an intricacy that suggests a college thesis rather than a sound collage, all-but-obscuring lyrics depicting the blithe beauty of thoughtlessness, frailty, and failure. “Cousins” is the surest party-starter on the disk, with its bass line hopskotching over tinkles of rimshot percussion. Between seeming inanities the lyrics casually accuse, “If an interest in culture, you should be lining the walls. When your birthright is interest, you could just accrue it all.“

That wit, with its irony-dripping, Ivy League pedigree, pervades the album – both in lyrics and arrangements. Sometimes the utter Paul Simon-ness of it becomes too obvious, but even at its peak on “White Sky” the band is stretching beyond his Graceland, adding non-stop trickles of guitar picking that are impossibly precise and their opposite – an imprecise, swooping falsetto vocal hook.

Only once is the poly-rhythmic pretense abandoned for straight-forward pop, with the direct and dirty guitars and percussion on irresistible “Giving Up the Gun.” It sound checks Depeche Mode while describing a washed-up hipster, once surely gaudy but now rusty and gauche. “You said you wouldn’t flinch,” it muses, “But in the years that passed since I saw you last you haven’t moved an inch.”

Even as the band adopts an almost-trite electro-pop reggae take on UB40 on “Diplomat’s Son” they dispense the most heartbreaking narrative of the album, how a mutual desire of two friends lead to icy dissolution. The cleverly genderless narrator obsesses and waits, finally melting into bed with his or her obsession, only to watch early the next morning as “in the dark when the wind comes racing off the river there’s a car, all black, with diplomatic plates.”

Closer “I Think Ur a Contra” is equally plaintive, but with music to fit the mood – a reflection on growing apart where both sides of a romance represent their own revolution, a civil war that will never resolve back into a single bed. “Never pick sides, never choose between two,” was always their strident mantra, but finally our narrator is ready to admit, “but I just wanted you.”

You’d never expect that to be the end of an album that started with the silly “Horchata,” but that’s the point. Contra is an album of endless entendres – dance-party and pity-party, emotional confession and emotionless evaluation. Is any of it the real feelings of the band, or just another disguise? You’ll never know, which is the point of Vampire Weekend’s careful camouflage. All that’s obvious is that Contra is an outstanding record.

Krisis’s Recommended Releases of 2010:
The Black Keys – Brothers

Brothers is an album of elemental music, heavy and hot, guitars ablaze and drums a seismic shake.

Two-man band The Black Keys have crossed the gulf of bluesy familiarity heard on their past records, transforming into something more fascinating and immediate. Their guitar and drums setup serves as inspiration rather than restriction as the band reinvents possibilities with every song, employing a series of incendiary melodies and riffs that sound as though they could send your speakers up in smoke.

Credit where due, part of the intense, elemental sound is surely from producer Danger Mouse, who leaves aside electronic trickery to carefully craft and texture every noise on this album. With a transfixing array of guitar tones and a solid slab of percussion beneath them, songs never sound empty even when they leave plenty of space to breathe – some air around the apocalypse of dust and smoke.

The antidote to that heat comes in the form of Dan Auerbach’s mercurial vocals, sweeping from sweet, raspy falsetto on “The Only One” to bluesy howl on “Ten Cent Pistol” to a horny guttural blast on “Next Girl.” Auerbach is so much more than a singing guitarist – from his squeaking through the top of his range on the pulsing “Everlasting Light” to his performance on heart-rending closer “These Days,” his weary, expressive vocals approach being even more impressive than his guitar playing.

For fans of the hookier, firey moments on the album, there is only a slight slump, as it descends into more standard squalling blues on “The Go Getter” and sparse “I’m Not the One.” The scarcity of these more standard moments only emphasizes the versatile power of Brothers as a whole. Directly following them is the soulful classic “Unknown Brother” and a crackling cover of Gamble & Huff’s “Never Give You Up.”

Despite the obvious heft of The Black Keys, Brothers still manages to surprise by its sheer heft as an entire piece of work. Fifteen two-man blues tunes from any other band would be too much for one LP, but in the hands of this band each song’s title is an endlessly repeatable refrain – a brand that seers itself deep into your brain until reading the track list evokes instant bite-size samples drifting to your ears from the inside out.

Krisis’s Recommended Releases of 2010:
The Bird & The Bee – Interpreting the Masters Volume 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates

I won’t lie – I immediately discount the quality of cover records.

As a musician I certainly understand the allure. Whether it’s the sheer joy of performing a favorite tunes or having a new interpretation on an old favorite, there’s something special about inhabiting someone else’s song.

But a whole album? Arrangements, studio time, pressing CDs, promotion – all for someone else’s songs that have had that same attention foisted on them before? It takes a pretty special artist-and-cover combination to make it seem anything but indulgent.

Enter The Bird and the Bee, a duo producing delicate, lounge-tinged electro-pop, and their 2010 record indulged not on covering a bevy of favorite artists, but just one: Hall and Oates.

Daryl Hall and John Oates amassed a towering number of hits in the 70s and 80s that will strike you as instantly familiar even if you don’t recall them by name. Somehow, the pair of Philadelphia sons fell out of favor with the past two decades of rockers. Bird and Bee make amends for the oversight by re-recording nine of Hall & Oates’ biggest hits with an obsessive eye to detail on On Interpreting the Masters Volume 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates.

The markers of Hall & Oates are present on every song – articulate and playful lyrics, groovy bottom-shaking bass lines and shimmering multi-part harmony. Really, as you hear these versions it’s hard to imagine what’s missing from the originals, no matter how well you have them committed to memory.

That’s all well and good – reconstructive surgery, an exercise in mixing board plastics. They do it every week on American Idol and Glee, and it’s usually both as sweet and as substantial as cotton candy.

Are these takes any different?

Yes. Yes yes yes, a thousand times affirmative. Interpreting the Masters is cotton candy sweet but with a rock hard center that can last through endless replays. It is a record of lasting quality, and definitely not an indulgence.

The band pays deliberate, loving tribute to Hall and Oates with electronic arrangements that are elastic but not overboard. They stretch around the originals to cocoon familiar songs with subtle enhancements. “Sara Smile” is the same slow-dance, seductive ballad;“Maneater” barely differs from the original, still thrillingly sparse.

At points the fidelity is so close that it sounds like the originals were remastered, gleaming with modern production, only in the process a seductive female vocalist was discovered on the master tapes. But unlike a remaster, this isn’t just a nostalgia act for dedicate fans. Knowledge of the originals is in no way a prerequisite to enjoying these songs, each reimagined as a modern day pop masterpiece in its own right.

Vocalist Inara George brings so much depth to her delivery – much more than the detached croon she adopts on the band’s familiar originals. She plays the coquette only on “I Can’t Go For That,” a genius read on the aloof lyrics. The original groove is dressed up with trickles of organ and descending synthesizer riffs, all of which are torn verbatim from the original but given more weight here.

Lead-off “Heard It On the Radio” received the most substantial reinterpretation, made aggressively modern and adorned with tiny blasts of electric guitar. George lets in a hint of weariness on the verses “Kiss On My List” before urgently confessing, “your kiss is what I miss when I turn out the lights.” “Rich Girl” has wheezing electronics that sound like cathode television sets blinking out over and over again. The song’s kiss-off sounded playful from Hall & Oates, but George delivers it with girl-on-girl violence – a subtle take on verses (with lyrics like “you’ll never be strong”) married to her pointed read on the chorus (admonishing, “it won’t get you too far”).

Interpreting the Masters Volume 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates is the best kind of cover album – it expands the palette of an inventive band, and finds ways to breathe new life into originals that never died out to begin with.

It’s hard to imagine the band mining any other pop catalog with similar results (adding a number to the title suggests a Volume 2?), but what non-Philadelphian would have guessed that they’d find such sure success with Hall and Oates?