reviews

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?

Krisis’s Recommended Releases of 2010:
Corinne Bailey Rae – The Sea

The Sea is a record that’s hard not to read into. Singer-songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae was working on the unenviable task of following up her ocean- and genre-crossing self-titled smash debut when her saxophonist husband died from an accidental overdose in 2008.

Corrine Bailey Rae - The Sea. Released 1/26/2010.

The resulting record is visceral and arresting, a snapshot of a shattered heart, still heavy, dragging its owner beneath waves.

The Sea offers an emotional landscape that extends far beyond immediate grief. It rages and bargains, sometimes calm, sometimes churning. Opener “Are You Here” tries to recall the image of a distant lover, every verse ending with a wounded, plaintive call of “Are you here? Are you here, cause my heart recalls, and feels the same.” Her cooed vocals sometimes sound like they won’t resolve into words at all, neither there nor on “I’d Do It All Again,” a slowly-built ballad that wells up into a single extended organ-filled crescendo.

The record has a fantastic quiet-to-loud ratio. Bailey Rae was a punk-rocker in UK before her cooing pop breakout, and that heavier urge is brought to bear on this record. Throbbing synth bass raves up the end of “Love’s On It’s Way,” the refrains of “Diving For Hearts” thrum with energy, and “The Blackest Lily” is her heaviest song yet – not on guitar squall, but with an energetic rhythm-section stomp and unleashed vocal power previously unheard.

The jazz-tinged R&B of Bailey Rae’s debut is still present, but shattered to pieces. “Feels Like the First Time” hints at the effervescent hits like “Trouble Sleeping,” but adds a throbbing, aerobic bass and a high tinkly of piano that echos the hook, but sounds like a shredded version of the Psycho riff.

The simplest, most-cheerful singles here are “Paris Nights / New York Mornings” and “Closer.” “Paris / New York” is light French pop in the model of her debut, but “Closer” a seductive classic that’s more pointed than “Put Your Records On” or “Like a Star.” The crystalline, optimistic chanteuse of the debut album has matured into a woman with more curves.

“Diving for Hearts” is the sound of the waves crashing above her head as she wills herself to drown below her throb of sorrow. “I longed for you like the lovesick moon pulls the tide,” she sighs, “so I peeled off my skin, I just slipped right, and I become alive.” She wallows in the cool numbness of drowning her emotion, wondering “Was it emotion or should I keep on diving down? Under this ocean I long to keep on diving until my heart is found.”

The Sea struggles against a sorrowful undertow that Corinne Bailey Rae might disappear into, never to reemerge. Yet, even in the darkest moments her joy shines through – joy in the memory of her lost lover, and a newly found joy in life. This might not be the follow-up she meant to make, but it’s a powerful testament to the strength of her songwriting and her limber, expressive vocals.

Krisis’s Recommended Releases of 2010:
Rufus Wainwright – All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu

If there’s any accusation most frequently leveled at Rufus Wainwright, it is about his excess. His arrangements have escalated ever since his 1998 self-titled debut, swelling past baroque chamber pop on his double-album Want until the sound seemed to become the point on Release the Stars, swallowing up a weak group of songs.

That the intervening release was a note-for-note recreation of Judy Garland’s classic “Judy Live at Carnegie Hall” does nothing to defuse the accusation.

All Days Are Nights is a bracing reversal of course – an entire album of Wainwright completely solo at the piano, unleashing intricate, complex, classically influenced piano and carefully controlled vocals. No production tricks, string ensembles, or choirs of 128 Rufuses in angelic harmony.

Just on the level of engineering the record is a beautiful thing. Wainwright’s piano is giving the loving attention of a recording of Debussy preludes, and his baritone is crisp and close, dressed with just a layer of reverb. Gone is the prickly, pinot grigio edge on his younger vocals, in favor of a deeper, richer resonance.

But this record isn’t just about sound – it’s a formidable group of songs. It’s about the twinkling cascade of arpeggios on “Who Are You New York,” chasing a fleeting ghost from Grand Central Station to Madison Square Garden. It’s about the loose Joplin rag and tossed off insults of “Give Me What I Want and Give It To Me Now,” seemingly containing more simultaneous notes than Wainwright has fingers. “What Would I Ever Do With A Rose” seems an impossible challenge to sing, as the melodic content of the calm vocal floats far above the rippling arrangement beneath it.

The middle of the album sets music to three Shakespeare sonnets – 43, 20, and 10. The songs are more impressionist than melodically immediate, the first two a palette of cool piano, the third fluttering and alive, each with painterly swaths of melody evoking a mood more than they are reciting a poem.

“The Dream” is the sole pop song of the album, even in its nude state evoking the majestic sprawl of Want One. Both the piano and melody cleave to a more modern aesthetic of discernible chord progressions and repeated refrains before exploding into spectacular aerobics. A love song of planetary scale, it narrates “The dream has gone away, the Earth could not play,” before accusing “the Earth just spins in place, throwing things away … I am left behind, corrupted crushed and blind.” Eventually it explodes into rising and falling riffs running like shivers up and down the keys of the piano, like the crescendo of “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk” spread out across half a song.

You might miss the production aesthetic at points. “True Loves” is as lovely as the Danube Waltz with its bright, clanging seventh chords, but Poses and Want producer Marcus De Vries would have turned it into an epic. Simple “Zebulon” implies an acoustic guitar to sketch the sinew between suspended, unbroken piano chords. “My mother’s in the hospital, my sister’s at the opera,” Rufus confesses, “I’m in love, but let’s not talk about it. There’s so much to tell you.”

All Days Are Nights feels like a previously unknown album of classical piano music that happens to be accompanied by vocals – I half-wish Wainwright has released an accompanying CD of just the piano arrangements. So many classically trained pop music artists disappear behind their hooks and production, obscuring their daunting talents in favor of accessibility. Since Rufus was never too accessible to begin with, it’s a thrill to hear him stripped bare – more a composer than a songwriter.

Hearing how complex Rufus Wainwright is without a single collaborator seems to at once justify and dismiss his past excess – is there any artist more deserving of it, but for who it’s more unnecessary? Even stripped bare there’s something excessive about his talents, an overwhelming beauty that’s so much more refined now over a decade after we first glimpsed it.