Magnatune; 2005
Rating: 4.6

There are several good songs on this record, but you’d never know it because Lisa’s best asset - her voice - is usually drowned in effects that would’ve been put to better use disguising her template preset synth ‘instruments.’ Tigers represents no progression from Fruitless, technically or creatively. The album’s mediocrity is especially irksome because Lisa is clearly a decent songwriter and good singer, but her ’shimmering textural pop’ needs studio production like Ashley Simpson’s voice.

With better production and a little more energy, Lisa could be an excellent female Maximilian Hecker. A shining light of hope is found in ‘Lowell’, specifically when the instrumentation sounds less like a raw Fruityloops piano roll and more like Stereolab. Lisa plans to release another album later this year. I hope she can solve her production problems and embrace creative daring.

Self-Released; 2004
Rating: 7.0

The bad/great thing about music today is that any schmuck with a sound card and a few software synths can record an album. Eureka Sön is more a compilation of the band’s best work to date than an album, but as a scattered collection of cheaply produced indie rock tracks you could hardly ask for better - or more varied. Album opener ‘Antes’ is the atonal Spanish Pet Sounds track The Beach Boys never recorded. ‘Centro’ builds to a synth-buried Kenna chorus. ‘Reversible’ belongs on a poor man’s Kid A. ‘Ti’ is ripped from Now Here Is Nowhere. And don’t forget the aptly titled ‘Holey Foley’ and the glitch-techno cacophony of ‘Ruido’. Album pepper their… album… with a dozen styles, many of which they pull off as well as genre veterans. They do occasionally fail, however: ‘Crei’ and ‘Yoo’ are bland 90s alt-rock ripoffs without the crisp production.

Don’t dismiss Album’s music along with their moniker. If they apply their talent to just a few of the diverse styles on Eureka Sön for their next LP (due this fall), they might write one of the best albums of 2005. You can download Album’s entire catalog from their website.

iD.EOLOGY; 2004
Rating: 6.5

In this cut & paste, remix & revive musical culture, nothing is dead, not even disco. With Circle EP, Cuebism has sown the head of the Bee Gees onto the body of a minimalist Xiu Xiu and not bothered to hide the stitches. The album’s opening electronic noise asserts digital surgery like the opening of Radiohead’s ‘2 + 2 = 5′ bares the recording process with failing cord connections. Every song is built with thinly sliced synth phrases and conspicuously cut-off samples laid atop a groovy beat. With so many uncovered incisions, it’s a good thing Cuebism knows what he’s doing; despite lacking guitars, vocals, and shiny vests, Circle EP is one of the catchier disco albums I’ve heard. The man clearly has a knack for the perfect fishhook that reels you in every time until you surrender to its funky hip-hurling rapture.

As the ludicrous cover art suggests, the album isn’t about artistry or musical progress, even though both are present. It’s about sliding into the John Travolta finger point pose in nothing but wool socks on your linoleum floor. It’s about filtering the fun-loving from the freeloaders at your evening party; the hips don’t lie. It’s about replacing your dining room chandelier with a disco ball. Why not bounce-strut your way to work next time? It’ll help if you wake up to Cuebism.

Sierra; 2000
Rating: 8.6

Video game composers get no respect. Koji Kondo and Nobuo Uematsu have been wowing gamers for decades, but it wasn’t until Pitchfork favorite Amon Tobin composed for Chaos Theory: Splinter Cell 3 that anybody noticed a video game soundtrack. They (and everybody else) missed a masterpiece when they overlooked Paul Ruskay’s ambient soundtrack for 2000’s Homeworld.

Contrary to scientific fact, there is sound in outer space, and this is what it sounds like. Distant pulsars hum, black holes moan, sailing ships shimmer, and the fabric of spacetime sighs under the invisible strain of dark energy. And every so often, the cadence of war can be heard.

Homeworld is a battle strategy game set in the vast emptiness of deep space, which Paul Ruskay’s eerie, otherworldly soundtrack fits perfectly. It opens with a choral version of Samuel Barber’s classic ‘Adagio for Strings’ - a thousand Kharakid souls calling desperately to their distant Homeworld. Most of the tracks are quiet ambient pieces that sound remarkably like Radiohead’s ‘Treefingers’, ranging from tranquil (’Garden View’) to ominous (’Diamond Shoals & Galactic Core’) to downright creepy (’Ship Graveyard’). But Ruskay really shows off his talent on the ‘battle’ tracks: ‘Imperial Battle Music’, ‘Swarmer Battle Music’, and ‘Turanic Raiders Battle Music’. Tribal drums and an insectoid whine join the uneasy mechanical ambiance with a texture that suggests the biomechanical future sure to come. In fact, like much ambient music the soundtrack is even more a triumph of careful sound design than musical composition. Ask yourself, “What does outer space sound like?” before hearing Homeworld and you’ll get a sense of what an impossible feat this soundtrack achieves.

Video game music has come a long way from its bleep-bloop beginnings. Music fans and critics who ignore this blossoming field miss a few of each year’s best releases. This is one of them.

Dim Mak Records; 2003
Rating: 4.1

A political statement album for social change (mostly) without lyrics? Sure, why not. ‘Sharpshooter’ tellingly opens the album with wandering guitar harmonics interrupted by channel surfing samples & static. The song quickly reaches near-metal heaviness just before we hear news reports on the fallen WTC towers. Oh, so it’s gonna be that kind of record. A few minutes later, we hear Noam Chomsky’s speech on the United States’ serial genocide, and the third track begins with Mark Hunter (Christian Slater in Pump Up the Volume) asking, “Do you ever get the feeling that everything in America is completely fucked up?” Yes, it’s definitely that kind of record.

As a soundtrack for those angry with America, Impossible Leap in 34 Simple Steps caters to a vast audience. But what of the music? FMtM get their message across with speech samples of such diverse voices as Malcolm X, George W. Bush, and Kirk Douglas’ Col. Dax from Paths of Glory, tying them together with heavy Tortoise-style post-rock. Shifting musical tones communicate how they feel about each sampled quote, a simple trick that occasionally works. The volatile mix of instruments and samples is politically undermining as intended when it works (’Comrades and Friends’), and boring and contrived when it doesn’t (’The Quiet Before’). From Monument to Masses have talent, passion, and vision, but all must be refined. They have a lot of work to do before they record anything that inspires people.

Radical Duke Entertainment; 2004
Rating: 7.4

Genre is so passé. Antwerp twerps Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung (DAAU) join big boys Radiohead, TV on the Radio and others in taxing music taxonomists with kitchen sink audio alchemy. DAAU grew up under the auspices of Belgian brethren dEUS and Moondog Jr. (Zita Swoon), but musical comparisons to their early stage superiors are futile. Album opener ‘My Goodness! Poetry’ is a Klezmer incarnation of Apocalyptica covering The Fiery Furnaces covering Camille Saint-Saëns. My goodness! It’s free verse until ‘Raw Like Milk’, which finally resembles common song structure with melody and repetition and all that. But as you settle into its accelerated Mogwai build, you become intoxicated by their tipsy gypsy Mozart mash. Amidst so many musical deviations, the ‘2 + 2 = 5′ cover adds up to an unimaginative conceit to tune in Radiohead fans, a broad band dial that connects for me.

For all this deliberate musical dissociation, DAAU frequently get off to familiar phrases from film scores. But it’s probably too late to discover new lines in the mathematically limited world of music, anyway, and DAAU’s puree-set blender reduces their disparate influences to whispered hints of cinnamon and turmeric. Despite spicy metaphors, the album’s texture underperforms its writing. The songs’ energy and complexity require more than the sparse chamber instrumentation supplies. The album’s strongest track - ‘Even More Lost Souls’ (following ‘Lost Souls’ and ‘More Lost Souls’ from previous albums) - triumphs because of the soulful expression enabled by its simplicity and melancholy pace. The mournful drone remains tensely pre-orgasmic to the end.

Excepting the dub-percussion reggae track, ‘A Funny Little Feeling’, DAAU’s latest rocks through contemporary classical music but sounds like neither style. Blame the instrument selection: violin, accordion, cello, and clarinet. They’ve settled a bit since 2001’s Life Transmission, which made use of more styles than tracks. Still, after nine years and six albums, DAAU refuse to forge a signature style - but everything they serve is guaranteed fresh.

Wea/East/West; 2003
Rating: 8.5

The problem with Radiohead is that they’re too damn good. In 6 short years they exalted (The Bends), redefined (OK Computer), and laid waste to (Kid A) modern rock. Radiohead were grandstanding: “Here, I made a new genre for you to play with! This is its perfection. But let’s see what you can do with it, just for fun.” Like Citizen Kane, Kid A has so far defied non-Radiohead imitation. Artists as diverse as Beck and Kashmir have tackled OK Computer. But The Bends claims the most imitators, the most enthusiastic of which is Muse. After a promising start with Showbiz and an atmospheric improvement in Origin of Symmetry, Muse hit the crescendo they always seek with Absolution.

The album was originally an uplifting orchestral record with a Queen track count, but when the U.S. and U.K. invaded Iraq, Muse ’scaled it down‘ to what is still the most pompous and epic album ever recorded. It’s a soundtrack for the Big Bang or a supernova or, as ‘Apocalypse Please’ suggests, the end of the world.

Absolution is a political/religious record too massive for anything so petty as a few wars and religions. Early tracks melodramatically predict a coming apocalypse and call for worldwide penance. ‘Time Is Running Out’, and we reach ‘Blackout’ just before the album peaks with ‘Butterflies and Hurricanes’, a devastating anthem for eponymous butterfly effect heroism.

On Absolution, Muse rock harder, tighter, louder, more dynamically, and better than ever before. They’ve finally matured beyond Bends-awed tone cloning and written a unified record that is all their own. Sure to please fans of Rachmaninov, Freddie Mercury/Thom Yorke falsetto crooning, and Michael Bay movies (oops: fans of Michael Bay explosions), Absolution is the apex of Pomp Rock.

Muse may never surprise us, but at least they can’t continue on their present course; they can’t record anything bigger than Absolution. Vocalist/songwriter/guitarist/pianist/whole frickin’ band Matthew Bellamy has mentioned disco influences for Muse’s next. No comment.

The only thing I like better than hearing great music is sharing great music with others. (Okay, not really, but it sounded good.) This blog exists to bring attention to some great music that may or may not have received adequate attention elsewhere and to warn you about less-than-stellar music. I’ll try to review every album sent my way and fill the gaps by plundering my own vast collection. Nobody is safe from a Music Lover Rant: not obscure, unclassifiable Belgian bands, not revered oldies, not Britney Spears. Okay, maybe Britney Spears.

So sit back, enjoy my review, check out great music, avoid bad music, and send me free music!