Heard Here

The New Year
Newness Ends

From the ashes of seminal shoe-gazing superheroes Bedhead comes The New Year. Fronted by brothers Matt and Bubba Kadane, (both ex-Bedhead members) who both play guitar and sing, this Dallas supergroup finds the brothers with a new willingness to rock a little. 
Newness Ends, produced by uber-producer Steve Albini (Nirvana, Pixies, etc.), contains mostly quiet moments, but where Bedhead often felt like a lake — shifting along with slow, placid waves — The New Year give ways to swells of noise, loud drumming and, once in a while, a monsoon of crunchy, distorted guitars.
Whether the songs that the Kadane brothers write work well with this willingness to rock is another matter. The most confident songs on the album are the ones that find a middle ground between the plodding quiet of Bedhead and the noise of the typical Albini-produced album. The closest musical signpost to use as a reference point for these songs would have to be the early ’90s Portland, Oregon-based band Heatmiser, which featured a young Elliot Smith. Songs like “Half a Day,” “Great Expectations” and “One Plus One Minus One Equals One” move languidly, but have bite, backbone. They are very pretty, poppy and wistful tunes.
Perhaps the most poppy song the brothers Kadane have ever written, “Gasoline” claims, “Now I’m lying in the fetal position/I know I never should have been a musician/When I knew my ears would lose their omnision.” The song is almost a sing-along, and builds to a rocking climax, perhaps the best template toward the direction The New Year seems to be striving for. 
Unfortunately, the last three songs on the album — “The Block That Doesn’t Exist,” “Carne Levare” and “Newness Ends” — are too intent on being noisy from the outset, leaving nothing to build upon. These three songs leave the album in a completely different place than the one that the first two-thirds hinted at, leaving the listener somewhat jarred. 
Newness Ends is not an extremely consistent album, but nonetheless one with some great songs.

-Chris DeWeese

Rainer Maria 
A Better Version of Me

Apparently, these guys and gals are the next big thing. CMJ, for one, has said, “Jump on the bandwagon now, before this little band from Madison, Wis., becomes the next big thing.” Um, yeah.
It’s not that Rainer Maria is bad, exactly. They’re not, at least not in the classic sense of the word. Their music is eminently listenable, and can be pleasant or at least innocuous enough. It’s exactly the sort of thing you might hear on WOBC and think, “Well, this doesn’t suck so much,” or the sort of band that might be opening for a band that you actually like, and you’re kind of pleasantly surprised that they have a few good songs. The type of band that, as a colleague of mine said, “Sounds like what I listened to in ninth grade.”
And that’s the problem.
Rainer Maria is, ultimately, a completely predictable affair. They don’t venture anywhere that a hundred college-radio and teen-angst bands haven’t already gone. One could compliment them and say that A Better Version of Me maintains a consistent feel as an album. One could also be slightly less generous and say that every song sounds basically the same. I will do the latter.
The drums clash, the guitars rock, the bass rolls, the blasé-passionate vocals range randomly from melodic to off-key intoning the real feeling of the music blah blah blah. It’s about as unpredictable as a Rami and Max Martin-produced record. Rather than computer-analyzed hooks and bass beats, there is an intentional rough edge to the production, but it retains the somewhat hackneyed and worn slickness of commercial pop.
Talking about individual songs is kind of useless. One is a little faster, one is a little thrashier, one is a little more emo. Whatever. This album ends on the same note that it starts, and in between it doesn’t go anywhere particularly memorable.

-Jacob Kramer-Duffield


Gram Parsons
Another Side of This Life: the Lost Recordings, 1965-1966

Leonard Cohen. Richard Thompson. Nick Drake. If you omit Gram Parsons from this trio of romantic acoustic guitar-wielding crooners, the release of Another Side of This Life: the Lost Recordings, 1965-1966 demands that you immediately include him.
After dropping out of Harvard following his freshman year, Parsons began to apply himself solely to music. Another Side catches him at the best stage of his solo career — young, but singing songs that make him sound like an old man living a destructive life of whiskey and self-pity.
When listening to Another Side, as well as Parsons’ work in the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, the subsequent artists he influenced spread out like wings. Echoes of Alex Chilton, John Darnielle, David Berman and Will Oldham resonate loudly and obviously.
Like with the work of many solo artists, this record is so good because it is laced with intimacy. The hum of the four-track is omnipresent, Parsons talks casually before and after a few tracks and his pick clicks loudly against the guitar in nearly every song.
The good songs on Another Side aren’t just good — they’re unbelievable. The formula of simple chords, an acoustic guitar with no other accompaniment and a confident, if slightly twangy voice singing alternately beautiful, depressed and angry material has never been as effective as it is on a few of these tracks.
“Codine,” the first track, is one of the best and it’s difficult not to begin the song anew on the CD player after it ends. Parsons’ voice is clear and achingly melancholic as he offers the wise advice, “Stay away from the men/Pushin’ codeine around” over powerfully-strummed open chords.
“November Nights” is another jewel. After an indecipherable talking intro Parsons launches into an aching song about how to deal with a relationship when both members know each other too well and the best things that remain are memories.
When Parsons sticks to common themes like relationships and self-involvement, he succeeds inimitably. His more adventurous songs are the ones worth skipping. He sings in a languorous cabaret style in “Zah’s Blues,” which drags along laboriously, and “That’s the Bag I’m In” is typical white-boy blues about the trials of making breakfast and getting to work on time.
However, Another Side offers a beefy 18 tracks, and there are plenty of redemptive moments. Contemporary ears honed on indie rock will warm easily to the lo-fi quality of the record and the unfettered nature of the simple tracks. For an artist already as influential as Gram Parsons, the release of this long-unavailable and beautifully stripped-down material should have Son Volt and Mountain Goats fans on pins and needles.

-Nick Stillman

 

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