The Sea and Cake
Car Alarm (Thrill 205)
*5.0*

Goes well with Nyquil, Vicodin, and “Good night John Boy.”
Yawn.
That’s it, that’s the review. Sea and Cake’s 8th album, Car Alarm, is a long, drawn-out yawnfest that opens with a tiny little baby yawn which gets increasingly wider as the disc moves along.
This is the challenge for ambient electronic musicians. The dreamlike euphoria typically exhibited by this genre propels the listener’s electrical brain activity into alpha mode (the brainwaves of meditation), sometimes surging into theta (the brainwaves of drowsiness), and, if the composer is not careful, might even put the listener into the lower frequencies of Delta (sleep) without ever stimulating beta, which are the all important brainwaves of action and excitement.
The best ambient bands know how to do this. Air, Can, Eno, Fripp, The Album Leaf, Dead Can Dance and, of course, The Beta Band are all proficient at coaxing their listeners in and out of various brainwaves. And they do this, not with power chords, screaming vocals or anything else that destroys the ambiance of ambient music, but by tapping into the listener’s base emotions.
As recordings go, Car Alarm does not do this. The thing is all theta and no beta, which is not to complain that it’s slow and serene, but that it does not conjure any usable emotions beyond, Is it nap time yet?
Too bad really. The Sea and Cake is normally most awesome. Previous albums have succeeded in stimulating many beta waves, but on Car Alarm, you really just find yourself searching for the snooze button.
Originally published in SD CityBeat 12.01.08

Loyalty to Loyalty
Cold War Kids
(Downtown Records)
5.0
Goes well with medication
I thought the Cold War Kids’ first album, Robbers & Cowards, was full of snazz. Snazz is the parts of the record that gets inside you, agitates you, churns your organs upside down and inside out. Snazz is the parts that take you to the peaks of the highest musical mountains and drops you to the bottom of the lowest valleys. Then, when you finally play out an album like that, after you suck it dry of all its snazzitry, you have no choice but to pine for the next.
Well, after much pining, I finally acquired, Loyalty to Loyalty, the Kid’s second album. And I’ve been playing it over and over, waiting for some snazz to kick in, but it never does. Too bad because it really had the potential to be an outstanding piece of work. Besides snazz, Loyalty2 has everything that made Robbers & Cowards great: It’s got the same industrial jazz and blues vibe, the same quirky, unpredictable tom and snare slaps, the same moments of lyrical despair echoed by reverbified guitars, and the same plodding, exhausted bass line that sounds like a fat man lumbering down the basement steps to a waiting noose.
On paper, Loyalty2 is a winner. But in the guts, where music is really heard, it ain’t happening. It’s got no vavoom, no shama-lama, no snazz, dig?

originally published in San Diego CityBeat

Pink Spiders
Sweat it Out
(Mean Buzz Records)
*5.0*
Goes well with: Bubblicious
If this album proves anything, it’s that we can finally put to rest the adage that pink is the new black. There is certainly nothing black about the new Pink Spiders CD. Sweat it Out is pink in the old sense of pink, in that it is light and sweet, like the air inside a bubblegum bubble blown by a teenage girl. And like most strictly pop records, this one sounds good at first and gets increasingly less evocative with every listen.
Of course, Sweat it Out tries to be pink, as in black, as in “pink is the new black,” with references to boozing and drug addiction, but even the drug song (”Gimme Chemicals”) sounds more like he’s licking his fix, not snorting or spiking it. The obligatory tequila reference is suspicious because there isn’t any tequila in an appletini. And these guys are strictly appletini.
Oh sure, the tones are just right, the harmonies are flawless, the tunes are catchy and the separation is to die for. As far as mixing and producing goes, it’s damn near perfect. But I’m of the opinion that if the music is slick, the production should be gruff–unless you don’t mind sounding like the air inside a teenager’s bubblegum bubble.
Originally published in CityBeat Magazine: 09/30/2008

All Make Believe
Gregory Page
Sounden Records
8.6 stars
*Goes well with gramophones and gin martinis
Every time I listen to a Gregory Page recording, it reinforces my belief that Page doesn’t just write songs, he writes albums.
Most artists (and there’s nothing wrong with this) write their tunes à la carte, drop them into an album, and give the album a name after the fact.
But judging from what I hear on his records, Page comes up with an album concept first, then writes songs that perpetuate the album’s theme.
I could be wrong about this, but it’s certainly how his albums read, especially on Make Believe, Greg Page’s 7000th solo album, on which appear music-loving bumble bees, hand-shaking ghosts, silver dollar moons, telephone psychics, automobiles that dream, and bedrooms that rain – all of which, by themselves, are simple metaphors, but combined become important components of the Make Believe theme. Take the title cut for example:

“There’s a knock at the door
My grandparents are here
On a holiday from heaven
We hug and we cheer
And play cards and drink whiskey
Then they disappear.”
The two signature aspects of this album are his lyrical imagery and the bittersweet that oozes from the speakers, thanks, in part, to liberal dashes of the most melancholic instrument in the world, the cello, as well as the violin, which puts the sweet into “bittersweet.”
Also enhancing the emotive aspect of All Make Believe is the hint of 40’s style vocals – a cross between Mel Torme, Nick Drake, and James Blunt – with all of Torme’s style, most of Drake’s woebegone tone, and none of Blunt’s overblown cornball-adry

Kings of Leon
Aha Shake Heartbreak
(RCA)
*8.1*
Goes well with Strokes, Hives, and terrorism.
What we have here is a bit of rock and roll terrorism. Everyone knows that rock music is Satan’s domain. Yet, in recent years there has been a surge of Christian bands who have infiltrated the genre and are trying to dismantle it from the inside.
At first it was blatant, as with bands like Stryper and Petra, whose every song lyrically praised the Lord so that you always knew who the Christian rock bands were. Then they got a little harder to identify, and consequently more popular, as with POD and Switchfoot and countless other not so blatantly Christian bands. But now things have gone too far. Except for the fact that the Kings of Leon named their band after their evangelist father, there are no other identifiable Christian characteristics to this record whatsoever.
The sons of bitches have gone undercover!
Still, there’s no denying, this record is fantastic. You should get it for sure. Just don’t buy it. Otherwise the terrorists win. Steal it off the internet instead. It’s the Satanist thing to do.

Originally published in San Diego CityBEAT Magazine circa 10/05

Ice-T
7th Deadly Sin
*4.0*

According to my calculations – give or take – Ice-T says “nigger” 885 times on The 7th Deadly Sin.
Ho hum.
Man, Ice-T used to be an innovater. He nearly created gangster rap. He opened a lot of eyes to a lot of things; like when a black man says “nigger,” there’s a good reason. When Richard Pryor released That Nigger’s Crazy, everyone said, “Huh? Can he say that?” And the answer was, damn right he can say it – he owns it now. Richard Pryor helped reclaim the N-word from rednecks for comedy; Ice did it for music.
But that was then – today it doesn’t mean anything anymore. “Nigger” is sung so often in rap, it has become a conjunction, or a pause, or an easy way to add an extra syllable to match words and music; it has become the word between the words that matter. And now you have white skate rats, corporate rock Yo-Yos, and housewives all saying it. Hell, even grandmas are yelling from their bedrooms, “Fix me a sandwich nigga; I’m hungry!”
What happened was, the man got a hold of the lingo, and now rap is dead. If you care to see the body, it rests in peace in the jewel case of The 7th Deadly Sin. Ice has stopped evolving and when that happens – you’re dead. He’s spouting the same boring noise, and has become a caricature of himself.
There is hardly anybody in contemporary rap who compares to what Boogie Down Productions and Disposable Heroes of the Hiphoprisy were doing. Don’t even talk about Gil fucking Scot Heron – who wrote the soundtrack to the revolution and was the pre-cursor to what rap was supposed to be: an intelligent, emotional documentation of the black crisis. Today’s rappers aren’t even on the same planet with this guy and they all owe him royalties.
Yep, rap is dead, but there’s good news – now that the man has rap in its icy grip, blacks will have to invent a whole new genre for whitey to steal. Like a Phoenix from the flames, expect something new and exciting to emerge from the African underground. I can’t wait.

“Young rappers, one more suggestion before I get out of your way You can’t talk respect on every other song, every other day . . . Four-letter words won’t make you a poet. It’ll only magnify how shallow you are and everybody know it.”

*Gil Scot Heron – Message to the Messengers

Originally published in the Seattle Stranger 10/99