CMJ » Christine Werthman

Laura Stevenson’s Winding ‘Wheel’

Christine Werthman — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 17:30:58 +0000

Photo by Dave Garwacke

Country, folk and the blues have always held out open arms to sad songwriters. The lamenting dip and drag of a fiddle, the feathery stroke of notes on an acoustic guitar or the cry of an electric all provide a vehicle to turn your depression into something more compelling than blubbering. Maybe that’s why it’s sometimes hard to separate these genres—and why they’re often lumped into catchall categories, like Americana or, better yet, the dreaded “roots music.” Laura Stevenson exists somewhere among those labels.

“Renée,” the opening cut off of her equally delicate and ferocious new album, Wheel, starts with Stevenson singing in a fragile whimper next to an acoustic guitar. But then the stretched sob of the violin joins, then some rolling drums keeping waltz time, and suddenly it feels like you’re listening to a rock version of the “Ashokan Farewell.” “The hardest part is getting older,” she bellows like some weathered woman looking back on her life.

But Stevenson doesn’t fit the rest of that classic country trope. She’s from Long Island, a land not exactly renowned for its abundance of country singers, and she’s an easy-going 20-something, one who, when I met her at a bar of a Manhattan hotel lobby, was anxious about meeting up with her dad later in the city and fielding his questions about the progress of her master’s thesis. After our meeting, she would head into Brooklyn for band practice.

All of her band members live within a four-block radius of each other in Clinton Hill with rehearsals happening at the apartment of her accordion player, Alex Billig. Stevenson, Billig, bassist Mike Campbell, drummer Dave Garwacke and guitarist Peter Naddeo used to go by Laura Stevenson And The Cans, but they changed to simply Laura Stevenson on this latest album. The name change resulted from the advice of some well-meaning industry friends who Stevenson says advised, “‘You gotta drop “The Cans.” It sounds stupid.’” Another problem was the association of a female-fronted band with the word “cans.” “I didn’t want people’s jokes about my boobs on the internet to win over the fact that this is what my band is called,” she observes.

The name thing, as it now stands, makes Stevenson uncomfortable, but it’s not unfair to give her so much credit in the band, as Stevenson writes all of the songs. Some of the writing happens at her apartment in Brooklyn, but she sublets it in the winter so that she and Campbell, her boyfriend and bassist, can house sit her childhood home on Long Island. She gets a lot of work done in those months of near isolation, but it also leads to run-ins with people she “went to high school with…who stayed.” Those high school years played a big part in Stevenson’s migration to music, as that’s around the time she met members of the Arrogant Sons of Bitches.

Frontman Jeff Rosenstock grew up a town over from Stevenson, and she remembers first seeing him when she was in middle school. “He was older than me, and he was punker than me, so I just thought he was awesome,” she says. They became friends by hanging out at the same shows, and later, after she “kinda got kicked out of school but not really” and was home full time, he invited her to come on tour to play her giant Yamaha keyboard with his new band, Bomb The Music Industry. “I got a hernia from [lifting] that keyboard,” she says. “My boyfriend yells at me when I lift my amp, but you gotta get strong, gotta build up.”

Stevenson and Campbell have been together for six years, and they met while working at a rock summer sleep-away camp in Queens for 12-to-17-year-old “creative kids” who were all just “trying to make out with each other.” They bonded over the stress of the experience, and eventually started playing music together, along with Stevenson’s friend Billig. They had a series of drummers who kept quitting but then found a match in Campbell’s college friend Garwacke. Billig added his friend Naddeo on guitar, and the lineup was settled.

Laura Stevenson And The Cans released their first album, A Record, on Asian Man in 2010, but for their follow-up, 2011′s Sit Resist, they joined up with New Jersey independent label Don Giovanni. The band was friends with label co-founder Joe Steinhardt, who went to Boston University with Billig and Naddeo, but they weren’t sure they fit on the roster, home to bands like Screaming Females. “That was the world we came from,” says Stevenson. “But that’s not what we sound like at all.”

Stevenson’s music aligns with the straightforward, slice-of-life writing of labelmate Waxahatchee and the countrified, sweet-but-smart melodies of Caitlin Rose, but the expansiveness she brings to her songs is all her own. “L-DOPA” is about Stevenson’s grandfather’s mother, and “Eleonora” covers her relationship with her older sister—”but her name’s Katie” and she lives in D.C.

This autobiographical take resulted in one of the best song’s on the album. A lot of the writing for Wheel took place in the summer of 2011. Stevenson was living in Crown Heights, and after experiencing a couple of “gentle robberies” when she was walking by herself on the street, she was inspired to stay inside a lot. It was this indoor funk that led her to write one of the album’s best songs, “Runner.” The track is a jubilant ripper that doesn’t betray its mood until you hit the chorus of “This summer hurts.” “I get a little depressed in the summertime,” she says, adding with a laugh that she also sometimes thinks about her own death right before she falls asleep.

In this way, Stevenson is a total embodiment of her music: Her easy laughter tempers any melodramatic side. “I still like music that’s optimistic sounding despite the content,” she says. It’s a lot like a good country song, hiding the bad news in a smile.

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Junip – Junip

Christine Werthman — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 15:41:18 +0000

Making intimate music is easier for a solo performer than for a band for a reason that is purely common sense: If you only have one person playing, the songs can be as tiny and personal as they want to be. But José González’s minuscule songs are more potent than most. With an acoustic guitar and a whispering voice as his only tools, González designs quietly beautiful music. His songs are poetic and yearning, and all are painted on a postcard-sized canvas. An easy example of this is his well-known cover of the Knife’s “Heartbeats”: González stripped the beat-heavy, gothic club track down to its core components and reminded listeners that, beneath the synthesizers of the original, the song had a strong melody and a set of lovelorn lyrics that gave “Heartbeats,” well, a pulse.

But the Swedish singer-songwriter with Argentinian roots is not just interested in distillation. Junip is his band with drummer Elias Araya and keyboardist Tobias Winterkorn, and though it’s been in existence since the late 1990s, the band only released its debut album, Fields, in 2010. González’s intention with Junip has always been to get bigger sounds than he does as a soloist, which, again common sense will tell you, is easier to do with a larger ensemble. The three-piece did make things a little louder on Fields, but it felt almost choked by the thread of quiet intimacy that González wrapped around his guitar-picking fingers on his own releases. The downside to this consistency in tone was that Junip’s music lacked any elements of surprise. Yes, the drums added drive, and the synthesizers gave an electrified contrast to the acoustic guitar, but the songs all maintained the same even keel; nothing ever burst.

That’s changed on Junip, the trio’s sophomore release, where González’s bigger-sound ambitions are finally realized. Opener “Line Of Fire” rises up like a slow-moving tidal wave, the metallic prickling of the guitar, the lulling notes of the synthesizers and the muted-though-present percussion ebbing and flowing until everything builds to a climactic crash by the string-swarmed end. That swirling, tumbling sensation in the music runs through the album from start to finish. Even when the songs slow, there’s still a tide pushing you along.

González fronts Junip, but Araya and Winterkorn have too much of a presence on this album to be labeled as supporting cast. Araya likes his gentle shakers, his tambourine rings and his hand-hit drums, but he also drops rhythmic wallops on the sinister “Villain” and clock-like ticking on “Suddenly.” Winterkorn’s work on the keyboard often appears as a low hum that fills in the songs’ blanks like a bass line, but he dusts “Walking Lightly” with glimmering, upper-register notes played in double and triple time, and his spacey buzzes on “Suddenly” send a far-reaching ripple through the song, like drops of water in a still pond.

As the man giving voice to the band, González remains the shy centerpiece. He never stretches his singing too far beyond his safe zone—he lets the instruments shoulder the burden of growth—but his voice is less dainty than it was on albums like Veneer. The more forceful delivery is necessary to help lift him above the louder instruments, but it’s also a result of the content he’s carrying. He’s in a lecturing mood on album highlight “Your Life Your Call,” advising “dry up your tears” and “pull yourself together.” But those demands all relate to a tough-love message: “No point in looking back/Over your shoulder/Leave your worries behind/For a while/You’ll forget everything/As you get older.”

González is most comfortable keeping his emotional distance, as he does with nonchalant, go-with-the-flow lines like “If it’s all right with you, then it’s all right with me” on “So Clear” and in a song title like “Your Life Your Call.” But he does open up on Junip with songs like “Suddenly” (“Keep our love growing, growing, growing/Each time I’m next to you”) and “Head First” (“I keep asking myself how it came tumbling down”). It’s got to be a challenge for a guy who sounds so reserved when singing and favors poetic vagueness to give first-person acknowledgment to the fate of a relationship. There aren’t a ton of plain-speaking moments on this LP, but their sporadic appearances mark his personal growth victories on the album.

That’s part of what makes González so intriguing: that the songs of a guy who is often willing to provide little more than a supporting pat on the back still come off as emotionally rich. Some of that is a credit to González’s restraint—his aversion to heart-tugging phrases makes his smaller moments of openness that much more powerful—but it also has to do with the shrinking and swelling instruments that say what the lyrics do not. After hearing Fields, it seemed silly to call Junip González’s band because it felt too timid to be a group collaboration. But now, it makes sense. This is a more assertive team of three musicians listening and responding to each other. The sounds are bigger on Junip, but it’s the audible give and take among the performers this time that makes the album intimate.

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Stream Deerhunter’s Monomania

Christine Werthman — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:21:30 +0000

Deerhunter‘s Monomania isn’t due out on 4AD until May 7, but a full stream of the album is available now via NPR. The first sample of the band’s fifth album was the title track, a hissing, scuzzy song from the Atlanta group, performed live on Fallon. Watch a bloody-gauze-sporting Bradford Cox and the band play that version here, and stream the full album below.

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Listen To Disclosure’s Latest Single, “You And Me”

Christine Werthman — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 20:31:10 +0000

U.K. electronic duo Disclosure announced earlier this week that its debut album, Settle, will be coming out June 3 through PMR. Now Guy and Howard Lawrence have made album track “You And Me” available for streaming. This single will come out as a standalone on April 28 and features vocals from Eliza Doolittle. Doolittle begins with “Home is where the heart is/And I gave it to you in a paper bag,” going on to describe refusing a relationship’s pending defeat while the beats skitter around her. Listen to the song below.

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Watch Miguel’s Video For “How Many Drinks?” Featuring Kendrick Lamar

Christine Werthman — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 18:00:22 +0000

Last week brought us a Kendrick Lamar-featuring remix of Miguel‘s “How Many Drinks?,” a track off of the R&B crooner’s Kaleidoscope Dream (RCA). Today, we’ve got a video starring Miguel, his pompadour, Lamar and a shirt-and-shorts combo that might reveal a sailboat if you stare at it long enough. Most of the Clark Jackson-directed performance video focuses on Miguel, but Lamar pops in for his remix verse and does some impassioned lip-syncing of Miguel’s lines at the end. Watch it below.

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Stream The First Single From Daughn Gibson’s New Album

Christine Werthman — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 16:31:54 +0000

CMJ 2012 alumnus Daughn Gibson has announced that he’ll make his Sub Pop debut this summer with a new LP, titled Me Moan. The album comes out July 9 and was produced by Gibson and Benjamin Balcom and recorded in Chicago. Me Moan is Gibson’s follow-up to his 2012 debut solo LP, All Hell. Judging by “The Sound Of Law,” the first single from Me Moan, Gibson is putting a little more rhythmic drive behind his baritone-and-guitar-led sounds on this new album. Find the song stream, tracklist and Gibson’s tour dates below.

Tracklist For Me Moan:
01. The Sound Of Law
02. Phantom Rider
03. Mad Ocean
04. The Pisgee Nest
05. You Don’t Fade
06. Franco
07. Won’t You Climb
08. The Right Signs
09. Kissin On The Blacktop
10. All My Days Off
11. Into the Sea

Tour Dates For Daughn Gibson:
05/24 – Barcelona, ES – Primavera Sound
05/26 – Brussels, BE – AB Box #
05/27 – Amsterdam, NL – Paradiso #
05/28 – London, UK – Birthdays
05/29 – Paris, FR – Point Ephemere
05/30 – Copenhagen, DK – Pumpehuset
06/01 – Porto, PT – Primavera Sound
07/16 – Louisville, KY – Zanzabar
07/18 – Detroit, MI – Magic Stick
07/19 – Chicago, IL – Pitchfork Music Festival
07/21 – Madison, WI – High Noon
07/22 – Minneapolis, MN – Triple Rock ^
07/23 – Fargo, ND – Aquarium
07/25 – Vancouver, BC – Biltmore *
07/26 – Seattle, WA – Capitol Hill Block Party *
07/27 – Olympia,WA – Capital Theater (Backstage) *
07/28 – Portland,OR – Doug Fir
07/30 – San Francisco,CA – Rickshaw Stop **
08/02 – Los Angeles,CA – Echo **
08/03 – San Diego,CA – Casbah **
08/04 – Phoenix,AZ – Rhythm Room **
08/06 – Marfa,TX – El Cosmico (FREE SHOW)
08/08 – Austin,TX – Red 7 ***
08/09 – Houston,TX – Fitzgeralds ***
08/11 – Nashville, TN – Stone Fox ^^
08/12 – Atlanta,GA – Earl ^^
08/13 – Charlotte, NC – Milestone ^^
08/15 – Washington,DC – Black Cat (backstage) ^^
08/16 – Philadelphia,PA – Johnny Brenda’s ^^
08/17 – Brooklyn,NY – Glasslands ^^
^ with Merchandise
* with Cairo Pythian
** with William Tyler
*** with the Young
^^ with Hiss Golden Messenger
# with Kurt Vile

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Download Christopher Owens’s Acoustic Lysandre

Christine Werthman — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:13:01 +0000

Christopher Owens has released an eight-song, acoustic version of his recent solo album, Lysandre. Lysandre Acoustic Album features only Owens and an acoustic guitar, and that pairing actually lends itself better to these songs, which document a tour Owens went on with his former band, Girls. This rendition is more intimate, stripped-down and folk-y, less detached ’70s soft rock than the original.

Though the tracklist includes only eight of the 11 originals, the two instrumental pieces—”Lysandre’s Theme” and “Closing Theme”—were just tacked onto other songs. The only one that is actually absent is the cheesy lounge number “Riviera Rock,” and I happily bid it farewell. But the ones that remain, including this bittersweet, sunny but sad version of “Part Of Me (Lysandre’s Epilogue),” sound even better with the acoustic treatment:

Listen to the full album here, or download it for free on Owens’s website. And check out the dates of Owens’s new solo acoustic tour, which starts in June and will include songs “spanning his entire career,” according to a statement.

Tour Dates For Christopher Owens:
06/07 – Salt Lake City, UT – The State Room
06/08 – Denver, CO – Bluebird Theatre
06/11 – Minneapolis, MN – Icehouse
06/12 – Chicago, IL – Hideout
06/15 – New York, NY – The Slipper Room
06/16 – New York, NY – The Slipper Room
06/19 – Atlanta, GA – The Earl
06/20 – Nashville, TN – High Watt
06/21 – Oxford, MS – Lamar Lounge
06/23 – Austin, TX – Cactus Cafe

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Listen: Oberhofer’s “Together Never”

Christine Werthman — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:22:50 +0000

Photo by Rachel Eply

Oberhofer has already released two songs from his upcoming EP—“Earplugs” and “You And Me (In The Future)”—and now he’s put out a third. Compared to the other tracks, “Together Never” leans more toward the rock end of Oberhofer’s pop-rock spectrum, and the watery electric guitar is reminiscent of something you’d find on a Youth Lagoon song. But it’s less psychedelic than anything from Trevor Powers and more straightforward with its thoughts as Brad Oberhofer sings, “If I had a choice, I would be gone/If I had a choice, I’d be with you.” Stream it below.

NOTALGIA is out April 23 on Glassnote.

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Watch The Trailer For The New National Documentary

Christine Werthman — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 15:49:38 +0000

New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival starts this Wednesday, April 17, and now there’s a trailer for the film will open the proceedings: Mistaken For Strangers, a documentary on the National. The film was directed by Tom Berninger, the brother of frontman Matt Berninger, and follows Tom on his year spent as a roadie for the Brooklyn band. As you can tell from the trailer, the Berninger brothers mix about as well as oil and water, with Matt being the serious and driven one and Tom coming off as the bumbling screw-up with a big heart. It has all the makings of a Chris Farley movie, so hopefully there’s a David Spade character in there to smooth things out in the end.

Watch the trailer below, and check out the official movie poster above (via Pitchfork).

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Telekinesis – Dormarion

Christine Werthman — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 14:45:32 +0000

Michael Benjamin Lerner can’t stay quiet. If you have listened to any of his releases as Telekinesis, you know that Lerner gravitates toward explosive power-pop, and any attempts he makes to temper the driving sounds are about as effective as placing a lid on a geyser. Take the song “Coast Of Carolina,” a track off of his 2009 debut, Telekinesis!: It starts off with a lazily strummed acoustic guitar and a hazy voice that sounds like it was recorded on a tape deck, but then clarity strikes, and drums and an electric guitar team up to punch you in the ears. Part of this may have to do with Lerner’s background as a drummer—the need to make booming sounds is part of his musical DNA. It may also have to do with the fact that anyone who helms a one-man band, and covers most of the parts in the studio himself, has got to be fueled by an abundance of energy that translates into his music.

In 2012, Lerner journeyed to Jim Eno’s studio on Dormarion Lane in Austin, Texas, to record the 12 songs that would make up his third album. The 26-year-old, Seattle-based musician and the Spoon drummer brought their percussive brains together, and two weeks later, Dormarion was finished. The album’s credits show that Lerner wrote all but one song by himself (“Wires” was co-written with Matthew Caws, lead singer of Nada Surf) and that although Eno contributed a little percussion here, a little extra synthesizer there, Lerner was also the go-to on all of the instruments. I’d really love to see Lerner play everything by himself live—maybe by implementing lots of guitar and bass loops, drumming via pulley system, playing the keyboard with his feet—but unfortunately, he does have a real touring band.

Dormarion starts with Lerner’s gotcha dynamics: A quiet acoustic guitar and Lerner’s distant voice open “Power Lines,” but then an electric joins in to mimic the riff and blasts the song off into joyous power-stance rock. This is Lerner’s happy place, bashing his drum kit and chugging out hearty guitar parts reminiscent of Big Star. Big and bright melodic songs dominate the album, though Lerner does try to show he’s not a one-trick pony with “Ever True,” whose sharp, dark synthesizers overpower the track as they beg you to dance. Please? No? OK, that’s cool. Then it’s back to the rock show with you and some trudging guitars on the following song, “Island #4.”

But there are moments where the variations pay off. “Symphony” is the album’s most intimate song, featuring only Lerner’s lightly shivering tenor and an acoustic guitar. This is Lerner’s love song moment, the one quiet time where he resists blowing a tender moment to smithereens. “You are my love and/You are above/Any women that I’ve ever met,” he sings, adding, “I do believe that/We are machines and we/Search till our parts intersect.” It’s a perfect bit of nerd sincerity that convinces you that Lerner isn’t putting you on with his sudden vulnerability.

Lerner doesn’t just operate on a loud-and-soft spectrum though. “Ghost And Creatures” is the album’s best song, and though it doesn’t contain Lerner’s drum smashes—just some drum machine from Eno—it propels itself with syncopated piano and rumbling synthesizers. There’s a haunting quality to it, and Lerner has called it “the most unlike-me song I’d ever written.” But that’s the key to progressing Telekinesis: Lerner released two solid albums of guitar-and-drum-led rock, but he grows on Dormarion because he is finally willing to knock over the boundaries he built for himself.

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Watch: Eleanor Friedberger’s “Stare At The Sun” Video

Christine Werthman — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:56:42 +0000

It’s going to be short-sleeve weather in New York City for about eight more hours before it’s back in the 50s, so watch the spring-y new video from Eleanor Friedberger now before it makes you depressed. The video for “Stare At The Sun” rotates among shots of Friedberger and her full band, of a young girl signing the lyrics and of the Fiery Furnaces member frolicking in the tall grass with some sheep dogs. Watch it below (via Pitchfork).

Friedberger’s sophomore solo album, Personal Record, is out June 4 on Merge. Find the tracklist below.

Tracklist For Personal Record:
01. I Don’t Want To Bother You
02. When I Knew
03. I’ll Never Be Happy Again
04. Stare At The Sun
05. Echo Or Encore
06. My Own World
07. Tomorrow Tomorrow
08. You’ll Never Know Me
09. I Am The Past
10. She’s A Mirror
11. Other Boys
12. Singing Time

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Rilo Kiley – RKives

Christine Werthman — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 14:55:11 +0000

Jenny Lewis and Blake Sennett met in L.A. in the 1990s and started recording music together in 1998. They shared a history of being child actors—Lewis face-palmed and then kissed Fred Savage in The Wizard, while Sennett played that little punk Joey The Rat on Boy Meets World—and sometimes I think I see traces of this experience in their music: There was a lot of darkness in the songs, a lot of timid sadness, but like any good kid movie or TV show, there was always at least a fleck of childlike optimism shining through the curtains.

I found Rilo Kiley through the band’s sophomore album, The Execution Of All Things. By the time I got to them in 2002, Lewis and Sennett had already broken up, added bassist Pierre De Reeder and traded drummer Dave Rock for Jason Boesel. They’d also jumped from Barsuk, which had put out the band’s Take Offs And Landings, to Saddle Creek, the Omaha, NE, label that had also just released Bright Eyes’ Lifted Or The Story Is In The Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground a couple of months prior. While both of these albums are rooted in indie rock, they take diverging paths—Conor Oberst favoring strings, electronica for Rilo Kiley. But the moroseness of the lyrics and the switching from delicate singing to frustrated outbursts are what really tie the two together in a shared bond of raging fragility. Listening to these albums back to back is a lot like meeting two siblings who don’t look that much alike though you can still tell that they’re related.

That’s the Rilo Kiley that always did it for me—the emo and angst-y one (Of course it was. I was 18 when I first started listening to them and hungry for melodrama.). Execution owns most of those songs, my favorites, but they pop up on Take Offs, More Adventurous and 2007′s Under The Blacklight, the band’s last LP and debut on Warner Bros. RKives, the band’s collection of demos, b-sides, hard-to-find and never-before-released songs, contains some darkness but mostly light. The album opens with an acoustic-guitar-based, Lewis-led ode to the band’s L.A. hometown, now titled “Let Me Back In” though also introduced in live shows as “I Love L.A.” Lewis makes L.A. sound like a nice-guy boyfriend she keeps leaving and then crawling back to when things get rough. “No matter how cruel I’ve been/L.A., you always let me back in,” Lewis sings in that swooning, girlish voice of hers. I’m accustomed to tribute songs like this crapping on other cities before boasting the greatness of one, but Rilo Kiley’s is no “I Love L.A.” And without this punchiness, it’s too saccarine and would have fit better at the end of the tracklist as a sing-along encore.

“It’ll Get You There,” the album’s second song, is better starting material. The hazy electric guitar opening sounds like the sun rising, and Lewis’s voice grows taunting and coy as she rattles off all of the things that will “get you there,” including trips, compliments, “little white pills” and heartbreaks. The guitars rip, and Lewis soars through the chorus, reminding that she can do the quiet thing, but she can also caw. She’s equally capable of riding the middle range, as she does on the bright and driving “All The Drugs,” singing, “Stupid I was and stupid I’ll be.”

Lewis and her voice have always been the focal points of the band, but she alone would not have been enough to make Rilo Kiley succeed. For that, you need some instrumental sounds that parallel Lewis’s talent, and RKives provides examples of those successes. There’s a lush slide guitar on “Bury Bury Bury Another,” just-enough hi-hat hits on “The Frug” and a saloon piano on “About The Moon” that sounds like an outtake from Rabbit Fur Coat, Lewis’s solo album with the Watson Twins. The album also provides examples of those failures. There’s a clubby remix of “Dejalo” on RKives that features rapper Too $hort. If you’re thinking, “Wait a minute. Rapping and Rilo Kiley sounds like a terrible idea,” well, you’re right. I didn’t like this song in its original form on Under The Blacklight, and trading in the guitars for synth bleeps that sound like they were leftovers from No Doubt’s “Hella Good” shockingly does not improve things.

But what is consistent throughout is Lewis and Sennett’s way with words. When Lewis sneers, “Happy birthday/You’re halfway to 60″ on “A Town Called Luckey,” a song with a recurring line about a “middle-age crisis kind of thing,” it’ll feel like a gut punch to anyone who’s not exactly gleefully cartwheeling toward their 30th. The age thing also comes up on “Draggin’ Around,” where Lewis sings, “Here’s to the younger ones/When they replace me/Here’s to the bitterness that keeps the sweet so sweet,” without a trace of bitterness in her toast. Rilo Kiley always had the ability to acknowledge the bad without letting it suck you down. That got lost on the weirdly glossy, distant and jaded Blacklight, but RKives restores the balance. It’s a reminder that above all the grim images in the music and the mysterious drama that put the group on hiatus, this was—and maybe will be again one day—a hopeful band.

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Watch: Junip’s “Your Life, Your Call”

Christine Werthman — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 19:32:43 +0000

In case you missed it, Junip released a video yesterday for the song “Your Life, Your Call,” a track off of the band’s upcoming self-titled album. This clip is the sequel to the “Line Of Fire” video, which featured an older couple going through the motions of a marriage on the rocks, as indicated by some long faces and a little shtupping with the pool boy. In part II, director Mikel Cee Karlsson further complicates the story (The old guy knows? Did he kill her? Is that their kid??) before concluding it. Watch it below, and download the song off of CMJ’s April Mixtape.

Junip is out April 23 via Mute.

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Watch James Blake’s Video For “Voyeur”

Christine Werthman — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 19:13:55 +0000

James Blake’s latest video really gets into the groove—the record groove that is (Ayooo!). The clip for his song “Voyeur” opens with a shot of a spinning record, marked with the logo for Blake’s 1-800 Dinosaur label, before the camera zooms in and leads us through a darkened geometric world within that looks like the seedy underbelly of a city constructed by the Doozers from Fraggle Rock. Watch it below.

Blake’s new album, Overgrown, is out April 8 via Republic.

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Stream The Knife’s New Album

Christine Werthman — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 15:46:09 +0000

The Knife‘s new album, Shaking The Habitual, doesn’t arrive until April 9 via Mute, but today you can stream it on the band’s website. The album follows up the band’s 2006 breakthrough LP, Silent Shout, and has already spawned two videos, one for “A Tooth For An Eye” and the other for “Full Of Fire,” posted below. Stream all 98 minutes of the Knife’s new album here, and download “A Tooth For An Eye” off of CMJ’s April 2013 Mixtape here.

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