Heard Here

Coldplay

Ani Difranco
So Much Shouting, So Much Laughing

Ani DiFranco’s new live album, So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter is a varied collection of songs that span the career of an artist who has been redefining herself onstage and in recordings for over a decade.
DiFranco is a singer/songwriter/performance-poet who refuses to be constricted to one genre. The songs on this latest effort range from rockin’ righteous tunes such as “Letter to a John” to sad, confessional laments like “Reveling.” She is able to bring up both serious political and personal issues with wit and grace. Her feisty lyrics are sometimes sexy, sometimes poignant and always intelligent in a delightfully unpretentious way.
Seven of the 24 tracks are live performances of songs that appear on the double CD Reckoning/Reckoning, released in 2001, but the compilation also includes new recordings of songs from albums as old as Not So Soft (DiFranco’s second album, released in 1991). Each of these songs is given a fresh, new feel thanks to the now defunct six piece band that traveled with Ani on her 2001 tour. Fans of her previous work will enjoy the musical version of her poem “My IQ” and an inclusion of a revisited “Not a Pretty Girl.” Enthusiasts and Ani-novices alike will most likely find themselves moved by “Self-Evident,” a song/poem inspired by the events of September 11, which DiFranco read as a work in progress for much of the tour beginning in September, 2001. The range of instruments, which includes an upright base, a keyboard and horn section, makes for some interesting improvisations, but unfortunately cuts down on the amount of haphazard story-telling that appears on previous live recordings.
DiFranco describes herself as a “tour hag” in one of the fewchatty interludes on the second disc of So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter, and she is one of the few artists who can safely call the road her home. Ani has been touring almost constantly for most of her career and she knows how to take the stage. She creates an intimate and casual atmosphere out of large venues packed to the limit. Though she rarely addresses them directly, the audiences are very present on her album. They consist of mostly female voices cheering and hooting at the songs’s racier lines. DiFranco acknowledges her ardent fans’s responses with her confident laughter, which is heard throughout the album, and you often get the feeling she is singing with a smile on her face.
–Julie Sabatier

Imperial Teen
On

You want Imperial Teen to be a European teen disco band because their music would be so easy to dance to. And they could be your new favorite band, if only the lyrics didn’t easily become such fluent slogans, propelling you into a Pepsi commercial nightmare á la Super Bowl Britney Spears. However, it gets deeper than that. Sure, there are the rock steady beats and far-out California keyboards that could make any roller-rink devotee melt, but the truly cool thing about this record is its willful buoyancy.
Where Imperial Teen’s last album, 1999’s What Is Not To Love, reveled too often in episodes of unsubstantiated gloom, On is both unabashedly jocular and deep. The tension between fun and depression that Imperial Teen’s sound stimulates is now embraced, with mostly magnificent results.
Every catchy Imperial Teen song includes three elements: an overly-simplistic but charming lead guitar, new-wave keyboards and boy/girl harmonies. There are any number of variations on this basic foundation, giving each memorable song its specific charisma, such as the pseudo-introspective lyrics of “Million $ Man” or the percussion-heaviness of “Captain.”
On’s best songs, of course, are those that break the pattern. “Baby” is loop heaven. Yells, keyboards, guitars, percussion, handclaps and choir-like harmonies are looped together with lyrics that match the straightforward structure: “I can’t take any calls/ I’m watching sun spots on the wall” and “Va va voom, vis- á-vis/ I call you, you call me.”
The bouncy piano of “Our Time” is a new-wave Beach Boys while “City Song” is an American take on Belle and Sebastian lightheartedness (“Go to the convent/ They’ll help you see clear/ Ave Maria/ Hey wait, aren’t you in Imperial Teen?”). Then there’s the minimalist drum-loop-driven “Mr. & Mrs” and the super-synthesized, ultra-bratty “Teacher’s Pet” — tracks that take the Imperial Teen system to new extremes of technological exploration.
The album tends toward songs with danceable rhythms, but there are a few philosophical moments. “The First,” the album’s closing track, is a meditation on regret, much darker than the rest of the album and much more successful than the equally languid “Undone”. It’s a piano ballad gone wrong: “Put your ear up to the radio/ What you hear is a miracle/ Go the other way/ There’s another way to feel undone.” It’s cute and all, but comparatively trite and frankly, just not good enough for the IT “system.”
On’s opening track, “Ivanka” summarizes well: it’s fast and headstrong with lyrics that don’t necessarily make sense but that you don’t necessarily want to think about anyway because you’re too busy humming along and cleaning your room in supersonic speed. It’s really great.
–Kari Wethington

Reindeer Section
Son of Evil Reindeer

You know those great ideas you have when you’ve had way too much to drink? However brilliant you may have felt stumbling home from the bar, when you wake up the next morning, you’ve either forgotten all those plans you made the night before or they just seem completely absurd. But if you’re Gary Lightbody, the lead-singer, guitarist, and songwriter of the Scottish indy three-piece Snow Patrol, those ideas turn into great bands.
The drunken brainchild of Lightbody, the Reindeer Section released their debut, last year’s Y’all Get Scared Now, Ya Hear, with a full fifteen members in tow - an unprecedented number for an indy band, or any band for that matter. Pulling together various members from Belle & Sebastian, Mogwai, Mull Historical Society, an Arab Strap, among many others, Lightbody created his own Scottish indy dream team. And now with an additional seven members (including Roody Womble from Idlewild and Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub), some pre-studio rehearsal time, and a full two weeks in the studio (as opposed to the measly ten days they had for the first record), the Reindeer Section has released Son of Evil Reindeer, a record that, like the debut, proves a intimate listening experience despite the bloated size of the band.
Somewhere between Belle & Sebastian’s impeccably written folk and Arab Strap’s brutally honest lo-fi rock, is the Reindeer Section. The brainchild of Lightbody, this impressive side project has become an outlet for songs too heartbreakingly fragile to make it onto the more up-beat Snow Patrol records. With the help of the well-suited back-up vocals of Eva’s Jenny Reeve, some piano, trumpet, flute, slide guitar, and other odds and ends, Lightbody muses wistfully about the women he wished he never met, those he can’t leave behind, and those knows he will never have.
Fortunately, Lightbody’s breathy Nick Drake-meets-Elliot Smith vocals perfectly suit his often ephemeral songs. His voice just floats above the band’s organic arrangements. “Grand Parade” and “Your Sweet Voice” are both accomplished folk ballads, while the sunny Mamas and Papas vibe of “Strike Me Down” makes even a break up sound like a good time and proves that the group has more sides to them then their nearly uniformly downtrodden debut.
Son of Evil Reindeer also finds time to highlight vocal talents other then Lightbody’s. Idlewild’s Woomble flexes his mojo on “Who Told You,” and Arab Strap’s Aidan Moffat turns up for another lude tale about falling in love, mid-life crises, and watching the tele on “Whodunnit? “ Still, it’s Lightbody whose presence is most felt, and though the record’s sincerity can get a bit overwrought, his songs are a real, if simple, pleasure thanks to his mates’ tasteful arrangements. At their best, the Reindeer Section have all the whimsy and hooks of a great Belle & Sebastian record but without all the smarmy attitude.
–John Macdonald