Heard Here

Boards of Canada
Geogaddi

Boards of Canada are among a number of artists at the forefront of the Intelligent Dance Music genre (IDM) that has been growing rapidly in the past few years. Geogaddi, their anticipated new release, showcases the group’s attention to sound quality, pitch control and harmonization in order to create exceptional electronic textures. Recording on England’s Warp label with other artists like Aphex Twin, Plaid and Autechre, they are part of the IDM movement that expands beyond techno and house beats to delve deeply into the compositional process. The pieces on Geogaddi stand out in the genre mostly because of their focus on melody and the bittersweet tonal patterns they create. Unlike Aphex Twin and Autechre, who tend to work in dark and jarring breaks in their beats and melodies, Boards create a texture that makes their work more accessible.
Alternating between short one-minute compositions and longer four- to five-minute pieces, the album’s 23 tracks show off Boards of Canada’s knowledge of electronic music processes and their deep understanding of pitch control and harmonization. The album opens with, “Ready Let’s Go.” From the start of the song, there is a signal generator creating a saw-tooth waveform, a thick classic synthesizer sound. Over this comes in a lighter synthesizer line of melody. The piece only lasts a minute and fades directly into “Music is Math,” a track with a heavy tonal basis that opens up with another synthesized harmony and light drum samples that build into a trip-hop beat. “Gyroscope” is more rhythmically focused, with a drum roll sample that is obviously tweaked and filtered. Under the drum are sweeps of chords and a vocal sample of baby-sounds.
While the songwriting is strong and interesting timbres are created, the album can be somewhat repetitive at times, especially during the longer pieces where an excellent loop is created but not much else happens. The synthesizer sounds seem trite after hearing the same filter sweep for the third or fourth time. But the album as a whole is very well conceptualized. Although there are moments of repetition, the shorter pieces break up the longer ones, counteracting that tendency.
Geogaddi is definitely an album to check out, especially if one is unfamiliar with IDM and electronic music as a whole. For someone who is well acquainted with the processes involved in the creation of electronic music, this album is full of interesting textures and highly synthesized sounds that create a surreal mood. Geogaddi is probably the best work by Boards of Canada and one of the better electronic music releases this year.

–Daniel Mintz

Clinic
Walking With Thee

If anyone ever thought British rock had to sound like Stairsailer or Spiritualized, they’ve never heard of Clinic. This Liverpool foursome’s second full-length album, Walking With Thee (Domino Records), sounds more like swinging London rock than the sincere over-orchestrated pop that’s been selling records across the pond the last few years. Clinic’s blend of ’70s New York-era punk guitar, ’60s keyboards and “oohing” and “aahing” female back-up vocals is what the soundtrack to the new Austin Powers flick might be if Mike Myers started doing heroin and amphetamines and hanging out with Twiggy and Andy Warhol. All of Walking With Thee seethes with the kind of art punk energy that informed album’s like Telvision’s Marquee Moon, and one is left feeling like they’ve just finished listening to a record every bit as rarefied, original and cult-inducing as Television’s.
In the haunting opener “Harmony,” singer Ade Blackburn proclaims, “I believe in harmony. I believe in Christmas Eve,” over trance-like riffs of keyboard, drum and harmonica. The experience, nearly equaled on the later track, “Come Into Our Room,” is like waking yourself up from some bizarre dream about your ex-girlfriend and Santa Claus to a hangover and an epiphany about the planet’s energy crisis. The reverb-drenched recordings seem to place the listener in the middle of a large hall with the band playing in a circle around them. “For the Wars” is so blissfully languid one expects a remix of it to appear on one of the countless “chillout” albums that keeping popping out of the UK.
But warm-summer-evening introspection isn’t the only mood that the Clinic master on this record. These Brits have just as much in common with Iggy Pop as they do with the Verve. Tracks like “The Equalizer” and “Pet Eunuch” are merciless in their energy and precision — the guitars sprint around the pounding keyboards. And throughout these sometimes grating, sometimes hazy tunes, Blackburn’s vocal melodies buzz and purr through clenched teeth like a mental patient on Valium asking you to “fill yourself with dreams.”
If Walking With Thee suffers from anything, it’s a lack of diversity. If you want to listen to “Harmony,” you might just as well listen to “Come into Our Room.” And “The Bridge” and “Sunlight Bathes Our Home” could conceivably be two different takes of the same song with the lyrics changed around. The formula of driving acoustic and synthesized drums, guitars and keyboards with some harmonica and clarinet thrown in for some melody is an instrumentation that, though original, is repeated too often throughout the album. This is not to say, though, that the group’s sound isn’t enjoyable, it’s that and more, but when you keep hearing that same clarinet melody with that same guitar tone, you wonder what Blackburn could be going on about so intently for 11 songs.
Overall, though, Clinic have made themselves a great record without the pretension that tends to pervade albums of this sort. When Blackburn relates that “People in the know, are just people in the know,” it’s clear he’s talking about his band much more than those friends of yours interning at that indie label back home.

–John MacDonald

Hank Williams III
Lovesick, Broke & Driftin’

Hank Williams III is the real deal. His first full-length country album (following several punk EPs), Risin’ Outlaw, showed that he had a voice just like his granddaddy, and that he could play other people’s songs pretty damn well (he only wrote two tracks on his debut). But Lovesick, Broke & Driftin’ sees Williams coming into his own as a musician, writing every song save a cover of Bruce Springstein’s “Atlantic City” (truly), and recognizing his particular musical strengths and weaknesses.
Where he is at his best, he plays a style of country that his grandfather perfected and popularized, but which is nearly vacant from today’s country music — a trend he is not too happy with. “Trashville,” a vitriol against the (supposed) country music capital (Nashville), opens with him singing, “Playing country music/ Ain’t like it used to be/ I’m so tired of this stuff/ They’re trying to get me to sing/ It ain’t no country music to me.” Perhaps it’s no surprise that a guy who hangs “Fuck Curb Records” (Curb is his label) signs across the back of his stage at shows referring to the industry hacks as “backstabbers,” but you’ve definitely got to admire his moxy, criticizing the biggest label in Nashville on one of its own records (other Curb artists: LeAnn Rimes, Tim McGraw, Jo Dee Messina, the Judds, and that embarrassment to the family name, Hank “Are You Ready for Some Football?” Williams, Jr.)
Nearly every song ends up as a highlight on the album; of the slower, more sorrowful songs, “5 Shots of Whiskey” and “Whiskey, Weed & Women,” are particularly outstanding, with the raucous “Nighttime Ramblin’ Man” providing a demonic-fiddle-based outbreak of Hank III’s punk roots.
Lovesick, Broke & Driftin’ is not only one of those albums that seems like it’s over too soon, it’s also one of those albums that you hear and immediately want to hear the next release. Not only the best country release of the last three years — yes, even better than the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, and anyways Dylan does just as good a job of “Man of Constant Sorrow” on Bob Dylan — this is one of the best albums of the last several years, period.

–Jacob Kramer-Duffield