Review: The Marches – 4 A.M. Is The New Midnight

The Marches get about 65 seconds into the opening of its Satellite/Star Records outing before someone name-drops the title of the record. The detail is a minor but, unfortunately, an illustrative one. 4 A.M. Is The New Midnight always seems in a rush to nail down the bottom line and deliver; while this keeps the record’s 15 tracks compact and colorful, it does less to allow the band to explore the terrain it’s sculpting here – a mixture of Motown, funk, pop and dancefloor designs.

The record is occasionally accented with what, for lack of a better phrase, could be called electro-pop. The title song, which opens the record, features both a snaking keyboard line and vocals from what sounds like a Mac. “Rudolph Valentino” uses similar synths to flirt with hip-hop. And “Bobby Brown,” all synths and distorted voices, caves under the pressure of its own electronic conceits. But the better songs on the disc wander from this formula, whether it’s using piano to establish some drama (“Sometimes Sex Isn’t About The Money”), injecting horns to jazz up the proceedings (the incredibly catchy “Cold Hands Warm Heart”) or letting a lead saxophone’s blaring just take the show away (“Ghost of A Chance”).

The record has some genuinely engaging moments. The sensual female lead that simmers her way through “Need Me Back” – “Have you ever needed someone ‘cause no-one needs you back?” she coos  — is one of the record’s standout performances. The incredible “Don’t Love With Your Eyes” channels swing bands like the Cherry Poppin Daddies. The foot-stomping “Bad Touch,” with its hopping bass line and sax-driven choruses, gets the blood flowing and the funky sway of “So Ill” also is worth noting. (This is all especially impressive given the fact that only two songs on the disc crack the three-minute barrier.)

There are, sadly, a couple of bumps in the road, from an oddly placed faux-rock exercise (“Wish You Were Here”) to a pair of synth noodlings that merely slow the pace of the record (“Skinema,” “The Trouble with Heart Murmurs”). For some reason, The Marches also has chosen to include 90 seconds of goofing around in the studio, right in the middle of the record (“End of The Album Pt. 2”).

All in all, it’s good record, especially so for someone seeking bite-size fare for the dancefloor. You just wish they had given some of the material on the disc more room to spread its wings and grow.

Review: Pit Er Pat – High Time

Every time I listen to Pit Er Pat, I am reminded of the early silent films of Man Ray, the way the camera fixates on an object or a motion and, by fixing its gaze, somehow both illuminates and changes it. Like Ui before them, these guys know that, if you give voice to the twins of rhythm and repetition, magical things can happen.

The evidence of that kind of extra-linear musical thinking is in high supply on High Time, a thoroughly modern invention — the trio’s sixth record and its first outing since 2007’s Covers EP. On the album-opening “ANNO IV:XX,” percussive elements and a faint, trebly guitar lead the way as much as a repeating and transfixing count-off that never seems to transcend beyond the number 2. On the moody “Creation Stepper,” we’re not treated to verses and choruses as much as expanding bridges built around xylophone and a well-buried bass. On the closing “The Good Morning Song,” we’re bombarded with walls of orchestrated and found sounds but the driver is a pulsing piece of keyboard melodrama that envelopes you even as it offers the song a simple pace, a stable foundation on which to build.

That’s not to say the record is some brainy academic exercise. “Copper Pennies,” with its punctuating bass, and “The Cairo Shuffle,” whose main beeps and blurts sound like an organ filtered through a fuzz pedal, speak directly to the hips. “Trod A Long” features a percussive thrust of a reggae flair. Even less percussion-focused songs, like “Evacuation Days,” seem like a flirtatious invitation to the dance-floor. (Fay Davis-Jeffers’ sultry delivery doesn’t put any dents into the suggestive nature of it all.)

It’s hard to pick stand-out tracks because the record is full of them – from the memorable repetitions of “ANNO IV:XX” to the subtle jazz slither of “Omen” to the wonderful, Tortoise inspired slinking of “Creation Stepper.” Even the record’s sole aside, a two-minute offering titled “My Darkers” can feel magical, a piece that transforms a church organ murmur into something both menacing and comforting. It’s an interesting bit of alchemy and, like much that surrounds it, it works.

Review: Blackout Beach – Skin of Evil

Originally published in Delusions of Adequacy March 11, 2009

The record opens with a repetitive thumping, like some primitive dance beat mouthed onto the waiting surface of a microphone, before we hear the guitar, shimmering and beautiful, a fragile and repeating series of notes cascading off the walls in an echo chamber. Voices drone and murmur low in the background. “I think there was men before me who were too scrambled by Donna’s awesome, awesome power,” a man laments, his voice confident and bordering on the theatrical. “But did any of them ever fly? And by fly I mean dipping out … into the indentations and the golden crescents of the sky?” The song progresses — the man’s voice joined by a second, even more theatrical, of his own design — before the guitar shifts and the song suddenly expands. “Decelerate! Decelerate!” he moans. “The aeroplane is diving out of gold.”

Skin of Evil, out on Soft Abuse Jan. 20, is a breathtaking, mesmerizing record, a lyrical song cycle about love and loss, affection and anger and alienation. In 30 short minutes, Blackout Beach – the “nom de guerre” of Vancouver’s Carey Mercer, on loan from Frog Eyes – creates a musical universe with a densely constructed language all its own, meshing a theatrical, often-campy vocal delivery with gothic-rock atmospherics and lots of them. The record, to be sure, will only unveil its treasures to the right set of ears but that almost seems beyond the point for someone willing to listen. In short, this is a gem.

Mercer, who appears herein almost universally alone, builds Skin of Evil around a woman named Donna and, though he invokes that name regularly throughout the record’s 10 songs, her presence is more urgent for what she sometimes represents.  This is a theme record. She is often gone, but she is never gone.

In “Nineteen, One God, One Dull Star” — which features a somewhat traditional piano progression, synths, and backing vocals from Carolyn Mark and Megan Boddy — Donna is an object of longing, something Mercer remembers as keeping him above the tide. In “The Whistle,” whose biting nature is offset (or supplemented) by the grungy rumble of an electric guitar, she is a woman who has distanced herself from Mercer’s affections. Her current love becomes an object of scorn. “William, her boyfriend, feeling her up, so tacky, so she groans,” Mercer sings. “So I laugh. An old friend, but fucking William I want to crack his neck and perform one million castrations with his bones. No, I won’t. No, I won’t. No, I won’t.”

In “Three Men Drown in the River,” Donna sleeps on a riverbank as men, presumably lovers, drown, a poisonous symbol. In the closing “Astoria, Menthol Lite, Hilltop, Wave of Evil 1982,” she leaves behind a cracked cassette tape and Mercer just can’t summon the strength to burn it.

The clear passion in Mercer’s lyrics is matched by the aesthetics of the sound he builds around them – textured guitars, occasional percussion, the interjection of a piano. His voice, always high in the mix, falls somewhere between Bowie and Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, and it is an incredible vehicle for material that pulses with the stuff of life. But the sound also is worth lauding – the Dead Man guitar scruff of “Three Men Drown In The River,” the trippy reverb of “The Roman,” the vocal swooning and swaying guitars of the abbreviated “Woe to the Minds of Soft Men.” Occasionally, these sounds fall together into something conventional – the acoustic verses of “Sophia, Donna, I was Down the River Waiting,” for example – but, more often than not, they are heartbeats and spare soundings that accompany Mercer’s voice.

“Astoria, Menthol Lite, Hilltop, Wave of Evil 1982,” which closes the record, begins with a rumination about feeling like an ocean town stuck in winter and ends, like many songs, lamenting the absence of Donna. The closing might be the most typically beautiful segment of the record – skittering electric guitars and acoustic guitars dance above a piano reprise in the last two minutes or so – but it’s Mercer’s words that will burn into your memory. “She wanted to sail away to some other cape, some other town, some other series of towns that suck the little highway into the ground,” he sings, his voice building. “But that was not alright with the dawn. That was not alright with the dawn.” He ends the record wailing. And Donna is still gone.