Review: Ala Muerte – Santa Elena

Originally published in Delusions of Adequacy Dec. 11, 2008

My Bloody Valentine knew how to bury and obscure the heart of a poppy melody or a dazzling hook in a mountain of carefully manufactured noise and guitar squalor. Bands like Rodan or The Sonora Pine figured out the value of letting an emotive frontwoman belt out a refrain over a textured underbelly of guitars. Bianca Bibiloni, the Queens, N.Y. native lurking behind the Ala Muerte moniker, is a student of both methods, as evidenced by the measured and melancholy-laced shoegazing of Santa Elena, Ala Muerte’s full-length debut on Public Guilt. But, still, despite the attention to craft, there is something about the record that does not work as well as its predecessors and forebears, something that doesn’t quite click into place. In short, Santa Elena is a sometimes-beautiful, if occasionally imperfect, record.

The songs on Santa Elena are precious, almost to a fault. Guitars shimmer and sparkle and fade, field recordings flesh out the atmosphere and ambiance, and Bibiloni’s voice, a vehicle that seems to constantly push the diaphragm to its limits, is ever-present. Sometimes, the combination works, as on the lush album-opener “All Is Gone,” the tender “Red Flags” and “Choose Your Own Ending” or the mysterious “Loki,” which combines lo-fi recording techniques, a subdued, vaguely Latin guitar ballad and supporting vocals that whip through the background of the song like a feverish microburst.

Elsewhere, the presentation seems overcooked, even hammy. In this category, there’s “Grim,” which takes the focus off dissonant and ghostly guitars with multiple, wailing vocal tracks that have you yearning for the subtlety of a whisper, murmur or a simple coo. Or there’s “Demeter,” another beautiful guitar-driven gem that loses its direction with layered vocals that, again, push the diaphragm a little too much.

There’s plenty else to love about Santa Elena. A set of instrumentals or near-instrumentals on the 10-song, 45-minute disc are frighteningly good. The first is the moving “1892,” a too-beautiful, too-short chamber piece where Bibiloni pairs viola with an understated guitar line. (It’s two and a half minutes that really steal the spotlight from the rest of the disc. We need more like this.) Then there’s “She,” where all the elements of the song – a spare guitar line, tiny ribbons of oohs and aahs, what sounds like a synthesizer – dwell below a phantom fog of white noise, like fish swimming, trapped, below the icy surface of a winter lake. (The verdict, though, is still out on “Fireweed,” the record-closing offering that descends – or ascends, depending on your interpretation – from a ballad of noisy guitars into a full-throated rumble, complete with thrashing drums.)

The true accomplishment of the record, though, might be that it’s a solo effort. Critique as you might Bibiloni’s songs or her sentiments, it’s difficult to imagine how one person assembled Santa Elena. The record offers an impressive breadth and range of performance for one person, the kind of range one would expect more from a collection of musicians than a solo artist. There are tender knots of guitar, not to dissimilar from Rodan, one minute (“All Is Gone,” “Demeter”), spacey atmospherics the next (“Grim”). The record is diverse enough to demand repeated listenings and cohesive enough to stand up to them. It’s not a perfect document and the gems are scattered among some lesser works but it remains an engaging disc and, most definitely, a promising one.

Review: Melvins – Nude With Boots

Here’s another year and there’s another record from The Melvins.

This one, an 11-track outing titled Nude With Boots, sows some familiar territory — namely the grungy thrash of 2006’s excellent A Senile Animal -- but even when these guys are rehashing or revisiting parts of their work, the result can sound refreshingly new.

The disc begins with a pair of tracks that are conventional album-openers as much as they are passionate tributes to the Kiss mantle: “The Kicking Machine” and “Billy Fish.” On the former, guitarist and frontman King Buzzo unleashes angular guitar chops that could have triggered crowd roars on Alive!, ones that snake between the tight trap-beats of dueling drummers Coady Willis and Dale Crover. On the latter, Buzzo barks “Wake up! Come on!” over a distorted but fluid refrain that wouldn’t have been out of place on Tool’s Aenema.

Elsewhere, The Melvins refine some of the sludge-and-storm of their Houdini heyday, offering the pseudo-epic “Dog Island” or the 1-2-3-4 stomp of “The Stupid Creep,” which could have been a B-side from A Senile Animal.

What makes the record, all 40-odd minutes of it, more than your average bit of punk-metal or, dare I say, modern grunge, though, are the bizarre touches and the attempts to stray from the tried and true. “Dies Iraea,” with its reverb-laced guitars, drum rolls and background whistles, could narrate some long-lost spaghetti western. And Buzzo even flirts with the blues on “Suicide In Progress,” whose early kicking gives way to a careful walk of guitar, bass and drums.

There are missteps, to be sure.  The short “Flush” is little more than Prick-style ambient noise or transitional asides and the five-minute meltdown “It Tastes Better Than The Truth” is tacked onto the record’s end like an afterthought. (What the hell is he screaming over all that claptrap – “It looked just so?”)

But even the occasional error, if you’re want to call it that, is erased with gems like the perfectly titled “The Smiling Cobra,” whose anthemic guitars and pounding drums are bred to incite a riot. Or the radio-ready title track. Or the moody plodding of “The Savage Hippy,” where Buzzo’s guitar becomes unchained in a haze of white noise and feedback.

The record’s a suitable introduction to new listeners – a compact summation of why the groups is so heralded in the first place – and a welcome addition to fans left transfixed after A Senile Animal, the group’s debut as a quartet. What better way to end the final third of the year?

Now, let’s see if we can sneak a preview of what 2009 will bring.

Review: Pee-Pee – Castile Jackine Is Vooded At Broonus Mousin: Volume 1

Originally published in Delusions of Adequacy Dec. 5, 2008

Alright, let’s get it right out of the way, then. Yes, the band’s name is Pee-Pee and, no, the moniker does not seem to have any reflection on the music contained herein. (To a third, perhaps-unspoken question: I don’t know if we’re supposed to search between the lines for deeper truths about urine or one’s genitalia, depending on your read on the slang.)

Castile Jackine … Vol. 1, this Denver ensemble’s debut, begins strongly enough. The opening track, the pseudo-ballad “Jaroline,” boasts catchy acoustics and the ideal balance between orchestral strings, horn blasts and poppy verses. The beautiful and infectious “Love Needs A Quivering, Restless, Aching Fire to Lay Its Head On,” with its digitally manipulated acoustic bounce, sounds effortlessly hip, the kind of track you hear on an iPod commercial and wonder, “And who is that?” And the bittersweet “I Hope My New House Feels Welcoming For You” bleeds its sincerity, with songwriter/bandleader Doo Crowder whispering over carefully plucked acoustic verses.

Elsewhere, though, the record runs itself off the rails. The 10-minute-long “Freakout Jam” is more waiting and awkward starts and stops than it is the illuminating psych-rock exercise these guys might believe. “Pee-Pee Song” is, as you pretty much might expect, needlessly goofy; over blues scales and a kind of chugging percussive drive, the group spews lines like “This is what Pee-Pee is about” or, perhaps more illustrative, “Singing a song for Pee-Pee/ Singing a song for life/ Singing a song for Pee-Pee/ Singing the ‘Pee-Pee Song’ ‘til you die.” On the funky “I Love U 2 Much,” the group cranks up the Stax factor with a soulful female lead and some choppy guitars, but the track is bizarrely out of place. (It might light up a crowd live but I don’t think it quite works here.)

And this says nothing of tracks like “Madness Song (Remix),” less a remix than an excuse to cut up a straight-forward folk-rock song with an inexplicable series of different sounds and contexts. Here, kitchen sink be damned, you get well-recorded acoustics, lo-fi cassette murmurings, an acid-dripped verse, robot-voiced trance, swirling horns and pensive sitar, all independent of each other. (That’s half the song but you get the idea.) This doesn’t sound like a band condemning genre limitations or, to borrow an overused phrase, being experimental. This might be weird for weird’s sake. This is the sound of wandering.

Sometimes, the meandering approach works. Tracks like “Love Needs A Quivering, Restless, Aching Fire to Lay Its Head On” – I’m feeling a single – don’t work because they stick to the script. They work because they’re ambitious and well-initiated, catchy enough to cling to your memory but quirky enough to separate them from the rest of the pack. But tracks like “Madness Song (Remix)” just don’t fly.

Sadly, the record ends not with a brighter moment but with a somewhat duller one, the sky-is-the-limit mix-up of “O, Little Boy.” The track, like the record, flashes promise early on: the lazy sway of funky guitars, poppy progressions, vocals that suggest something grandiose is lurking around a corner. But, halfway through, the song shifts into a 60’s-inspired blues-rock romp complete with shouts of “I need you/ I need you more,” soulful backing vocals, the whole package but more a formula than an invention. About five minutes in, someone does the unthinkable. They co-opt the nah-nah-na-na-nah-nah melody of The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” and they don’t stop, instead repeating the familiar refrain over a bluesy descent. (Others also are quoted.) It’s an interesting choice but a flawed one. Maybe some critics are too protective of the Lennon and McCartney songbook, but there’s reason to suggest you need to have an excuse before cribbing from the holy canon. Pee-Pee, it seems, does not.