Heard Here

Patty Griffin
1000 Kisses

After a long and complicated trip through the politics and disappointment of the music industry, Patty Griffin has come through with yet another beautiful album. On Tuesday, Griffin’s latest, 1000 Kisses, hit stores.
Not unlike her music, Griffin’s career has been subtle but very powerful. She has gained a strong and loyal base of fans who adore her but don’t subscribe to the mania that some other folksy-fan bases do. In 1997 she debuted Living With Ghosts, a raw voice and guitar collection of 10 tunes, and 1999 saw the release of Flaming Red, which had a very produced, rocky sound. This record proved that Patty Griffin had no need or intention to be pigeon-holed into the folk scene. Between 1999 and now, Griffin has toured minimally (although she did give a stellar performance at Finney Chapel last fall) and has not released any recordings. 1000 Kisses is the third installment of Griffin’s discography, which yet again touches on previously uncharted territory with the same signature intelligence, emotion and power that she always captures.
1000 Kisses is a quiet album. Not only is the production minimal and tasteful, but the mood throughout the 10 tracks is generally melancholy and soulful. The highlights of the record range from “Rain,” the striking opening track to the vulnerable, deceptively simple “Be Careful,” to a beautiful cover of the Bruce Springsteen song “Stolen Car.”
It seems that often time the most talented artists are handicapped by the music industry. Griffin has had more than her share of trials in that area. With her previous record company Griffin had more than one experience of her recordings — including a fully produced and recorded album that was to be titled Silver Bell and released last year — being withheld from stores because of a lack of the record company’s support. This year, backed by a new, and hopefull, more helpful, record company, Patty Griffin is beginning a national tour to support her new release. There is a real honesty to this collection of songs, and 1000 Kisses is definitely worth the wait.

Patty Griffin will appear in Oberlin on May 11.

–Lucy Wainwright Roche

Plaid
P-Brane EP

The latest from UK techno duo Plaid, P-Brane is short and sweet. Its four songs are good but unsurprising. Present here are heavy, frenetic beats that ground ephemeral synth ambience — a handy contrast that makes P-Brane both dance-floor and bedroom friendly. Which is not to say that the EP isn’t interesting because it is: fragments of melody and beat coalesce beneath sweeping leads to form a rhythmic complexity that demands scrutiny.
Plaid has a knack for bending genre to create beautiful anti-pop tunes, but their focus on P-Brane seems to be the structure of the song itself. Beats establish the feel of the tunes and remain relatively unchanged throughout, though they may wax and wane in intensity to complement melodic builds. As for melody, however, Plaid remains elusive. Leads float in and out, preventing one from picking out a theme from the collage of sound. Abrupt melodic changes do not hinder the mellow flow of the songs but lend to the spacey complexity that characterizes P-Brane.
In the opener “Coat,” a thick, down-tempo beat is our guide as we hear a cool analog chord progression unexpectedly give way to a rhythmic lead comprised of finely diced voice fragments that are balanced by a slow organ-like synth out of which emerges another semi-slow organ-like synth part. You just can’t sing along to this stuff.
“Diddy Moosedid” offers a stream of ever-changing, hypnotic riffs that gives the song a dreamy feel despite its syncopations. In fact, Plaid’s ability to create a happy ambience while layering heavy beats with almost random-sounding and syncopated textures is what puts these tracks above the rest. There’s a complex harmony here between rhythm and melody, between pounding, schizophrenic beats and sweet-sounding, sparse synth parts.
The last two tracks on the EP sound more like collages — sonic journeys that actually work towards a conclusion. “Stills” is my personal favorite. Cool synth musings kick it off but are quickly abandoned. An ethereal arpeggiated chord progression then joins the beat as spacey noise builds to a mild climax. Though the feel of the song is not damaged, a quick cut to a repeated drum fill carries the song to silence as hints of happy chords preserve the ambience.
The last track has the fastest rhythm and a cool spy movie bass line to get heads moving. The tune builds itself up to a large and noisy climax but is also characterized by change — pick any two moments in the song, two minutes apart, and they’ll sound nothing alike. The result of all this movement is disorienting at times; it’s often hard to tell when one song ends and the other begins. But Plaid has created a great vibe with these tunes, at once danceable and mellow, that has me waiting for a full-length follow-up.

–Nathan Whinkler-Rhoads

Kylie Minogue
Fever

It’s one of the real tragedies of American cultural arrogance that only now are we blessed with the presence of Kylie Minogue on our airwaves. Like her British cohort Robbie Williams — who is still bizzarely absent from American cultural consciousness — the Australian Minogue is in the rest of the world a superstar. For more than a decade, her albums have gone platinum dozens of times over, and she has not only massed multiple greatest hits collections but also multiple greatest remix hits collections.
But Fever is a pretty good way for Kylie to forcefully enter the American market. The first single off the album, “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” is at the top of top 40 lists and the TRL countdown — but this isn’t a bad thing. The song transcends even the guilty pleasure realm and is in point of fact just a great pop song. Combining classic disco-derived vocals with modernized European-derivative beats, it is both eminently danceable and irresistibly catchy as a radio sing-along. Ditto with the mellower title track, which features one of the better dramatic builds to the chorus of any pop song in recent memory.
Kylie has been called “the Australian Madonna” by many in America without previous experience with her music. The analogy works to a point, but only to a point. Though she is featured riding a velvet bull in a banned British lingerie commercial, Minogue is in no way the sexual provocateur that Madonna once was. She is much more of a modern disco diva, and her music is less about challenging society’s gender and sexual structures than simply about dancing and having a good time. There’s no deep meaning in a song with a chorus of, “Give it to me / Give it to me / Give it to me like I want it.” And hardly any subtlety in her videos, where she usually wears something approximating a shroud. And that’s damn fine with me. Catchy, danceable, self-indulgent pop music has its place in this world when it’s done well, and Kylie does it just about as well as anyone.

–Jacob Kramer-Duffield