on the pulse - 2020 - week 10 - underneath heartbreak testimony

So, amazing how many things can change worldwide in just a week, eh? Well, I still listened to a lot of music and had a pretty busy week here, so let’s hold on, and get On The Pulse!

Real Estate - The Main Thing - I’m not going to dance around this: remember a month or so back when I covered Bombay Bicycle Club and said a lot of critics gave lukewarm passes to milquetoast and increasingly anonymous indie rock? Yeah, if you want the poster child of that, we have Real Estate, a thoroughly inoffensive and pleasant set of jangling guitars and winsome vocals that didn’t have the grooves for a solid vibe or sharp enough writing to break free of their vague existential ennui - and the whitebread critics adored them until 2017 when it seemed like everyone woke up to realize, ‘wait, what has Real Estate really done besides steadily clean up their production and scrub away even more personality’. So if you can’t tell, I’m not a fan - Days and Atlas were fine enough as background music, but I would never seek them out, so now we’ve got an album post-critical hype… and it’s a Real Estate album, so you get a lot of clean jangling guitar lines, hazy and occasionally oily synth touches, decent grooves, and some of the most uninvolving vocals and songwriting in indie rock. That’s probably my most consistent issue with Real Estate: Martin Courtney’s vocals and presence is layered in a way to be utterly uninvolving, with lyrics so stripped of unique and explicit detail that any of the ennui at time’s passage and uncertain future feels utterly leaden. Maybe it’s overexposure to more literate indie rock bands or the most recent brand of emo that tries to embue their wistful contemplation with a sense of urgency, but for as lightly pleasant as Real Estate is, even with the integration of more synthetic drum machines and a bit of strings and a smattering of yacht rock there’s nothing that pulls me back to this. Now I say all this with the qualification that this band has always been in the nap fodder side of indie rock, and thus I can’t get mad at an act that’ll certainly soundtrack middle aged, presumably progressive white people slumped on their couch midway through a bottle of wine… but while I’m fairly certain a part of me will wind up there, I ain’t there yet. 5/10

Body Count - Carnivore - Okay, let’s keep this real: the question is less whether this album is any good and more ‘was Body Count ever any good?’ For those not aware, this was a thrash metal/hip-hop side project by Ice-T where he doesn’t really rap that much, instead delivering hyperbolic and ultraviolent stories with the belief that as a parody they would both speak truth to power but also inspire black kids to stay away from them. The problem with this sort of parody is that hip-hop rapidly hit this level of excess anyway and Ice-T was really hamfisted with his messaging - this sort of project and genre fusion required tact he didn’t have, so previous Body Count albums have not only aged really badly, but also could default to glorification as much as ‘sending a message’. Couple that with just better rap metal that’s been released throughout the decades and Carnivore feels like it’s struggling to catch up. Now it’s not a terrible project - it doesn’t as shoddily produced as previous Body Count albums, and Ice-T has always been a powerful frontman, and if you can break free of the cognitive dissonance of long-running Law & Order SVU star Ice-T rapping about police violence, lyrically this album feels a bit more grounded… until we default back to the same hypermasculine violent posturing. And this feels all the more jarring opposite the two tribute songs, one a middling cover of ‘Ace Of Spades’ and the other a tribute to the late Nipsey Hussle featuring Amy Lee of Evanescence, and it’s as tonally weird as you’d expect. The frustrating thing is that even if you’re accepting this on its most basic level in concept, it’s not even good metal - the grooves are sloppily defined in the bass, the riffing gets tedious, there’s barely an attempt at atmosphere, more than a few songs are lacking momentum, and for as developed as the drumlines can be, they often don’t synchronize all that well with the rhythm guitar, which leads to messy solos. Overall, this has always been a novelty side project of which I’m not sure you could ever take that seriously - and in 2020, not much worth discussing. 4/10

Spectral Lore & Mare Cognitum - Wanderers: Astrology of the Nine - Okay, this is a lot. Two one man black metal projects, one from Greece and one from the U.S., they put out a collab album called Sol in 2013 that was showed a ton of potential even if it seemed to defer a bit more to Spectral Lore’s more wild and dissonant experimentation than Mare Cognitum’s sharper focus on melody and song structure. But it was a collaboration that showed promise, so when we got a full ten songs that nearly run two hours exploring the entire solar system… well, there was a part of me that thought back to that Sufjan Stevens Planetarium project a few years back, but this isn’t quite that, with both men taking alternating individual songs before closing in for a few collaborative joints. And this would be fine enough… if I didn’t feel that Mare Cognitum didn’t consistently deliver more striking and potent melodies especially in the guitar leads all the way through, whereas while Spectral Lore has interesting moments of experimentation like the warmer progressive guitars on ‘Earth’, heavy bass driving the progression on ‘Uranus’, and what has to be his choice to add more icy electronics to part two of ‘Pluto’, his moments of indulgence leads to cuts that run long on a project that already feels bloated, even for its cosmic scope. Again, the biggest problem with this is the length, and while I’d argue there’s enough variance in the shredding, atmosphere, howling and guttural vocals, and insanely pummelling drumwork that it stays engaging longer than I expected, certain passages do wear out their welcome. Thankfully, if you’re going to have an album run this long, exploring the tempestuous parallels between the Greco-Roman pantheon and their planetary counterparts - often with vividly graphic detail - is probably the way to do it, so when you can make out the lyrics they are pretty interesting in terms of poetic flair, especially the searing beauty of ‘Venus’ and the tempestuous giant of ‘Jupiter’. But as a whole… while I can respect a behemoth of this size, I only really love it in patches; definitely a potent and ambitious project that’s worth hearing, but in comparison with other black metal I’ve heard this year, I know I’ll only go back to this in isolated moments. strong 7/10

Gotthard - #13 - For me at least, Gotthard is the perfect act to cover in a show like this: a Swiss hard rock act that’s been cranking out subtle stylistic variations of a vintage sound for decades now, and they don’t really give me a ton to say unless they go above and beyond, which they did reasonably consistently in the 2000s and with 2014’s criminally overlooked BANG!. I wasn’t wild about their 2017 album Silver, but coming back with #13… the struggle becomes how to sell this to anyone where the advice isn’t just to go check out Open or Homerun or Lipservice or Domino Effect, because once again, we’ve got a midtier Gotthard album that seems to be struggling to differentiate itself. Yes, Nic Maeder is delivering better vocals… shame the drum and bass mixing is really inconsistent, especially around the cymbals, and that’s not counting the moments that try to get rougher and more lo-fi like Dial Hard. But that’s never been a great sound for Gotthard - a very 90s update to a very 80s formula - especially when they lock into a bluesier vibe with more developed bass and better solos and overall stronger songs - certainly better than that Indian-inspired experiment on ‘Missteria’ or that attempt at a breakdown on ‘Rescue Me’ to close out the album, that’s for damn sure. But none of this is all that unfamiliar, and it’s not a good sign when the most distinctive moment on the album is a middling cover of ABBA’s ‘S.O.S.’ - all the more distracting because Gotthard already has an original song with that name from 2012! And given that the writing for this band has never been more than basic hard rock platitudes - outside of a baffling marriage ballad called ‘Marry You’ that becomes pure cheese - I’m stuck with the songs that have the strongest hooks, and there’s just not many of them: ‘Man On A Mission’, ‘Better Than Love’, ‘Every Time I Die’. The rest just feels like Gotthard meat-and-potatoes, and this many albums in, that just doesn’t give me much to work with. Strong 6/10

Code Orange - Underneath - So remember a few weeks back when I covered Loathe and said that I don’t have the deepest level of familiarity with metalcore? Well, going back into Code Orange reminded me of just how close the genre could fall into outright howling nightmare fuel, leaping into the conversation in a big way with Forever in early 2017. Granted, some of that was inevitable when you get Kurt Ballou of Converge to produce it, but what made Forever so viscerally potent even as someone who doesn’t really love the genre and knew some of the ‘demolition of corporate mainstream rock’ was kind of out the window given their signing to Roadrunner, they were just uncompromising and visceral enough to make you think it’s possible. Yeah, some of it was just hyper-aggro posturing, but when it was just catchy enough to stick, it showed promise, especially with a commitment to some real creeping dread in the jagged atmosphere… so obviously the next thing to do is replace Kurt Ballou with Nick Raskulinecz, who was responsible for some of the most flatly produced and underwhelming mainstream rock and metal of the past decade. And I hate to be the one to say it, but losing some of that suffocating atmosphere and thicker low end does hurt Code Orange here - the guitars are flatter, the oily industrial and power electronics textures hit more bluntly and can honestly sound a little dated if you remember the late 90s, and the jagged blasts of squealing noise and clanking percussion amidst the breakdowns are slowly becoming more of a crutch of uniqueness for a band getting subsumed into more radio-friendly metalcore… kind of a shame because that sort of metalcore has never been my thing. And I get that Code Orange has never been subtle, per se, but it reminds me of the shift to beefier, blunter tactics that characterized Nine Inch Nails shifting from The Downward Spiral to The Fragile, and it just doesn’t cut as deeply for me, even if this approach does given their melodies a little more space to breathe, which is a good touch. And yet I’ll be blunt, the songwriting doesn’t really save them much? I do appreciate the band not really trying to make an anti-social media album but rather one that shows how social media has revealed what’s been lurking beneath us all along, which builds on themes from Forever and makes some potent points around online shaming and stalking, but there are definitely moments where a reactionary angle seems to slide in with lines like ‘the tabula rasa has been harmed’, and the hyper-aggressive posturing starts to become a little harder to take seriously, especially with its continuous broadsides at the industry. As it is… again, this is not my genre so take everything with a grain of salt here, but this feels like a compromise for a band that’s trying to do everything but compromise, and it leads to a good, but jarring listen. strong 6/10

Caitlyn Smith - Supernova - Man, this was a project I needed this week, a very welcome follow-up to Caitlyn Smith’s starmaking pop country debut Starfire that was among the best albums of 2018 - although there were some concerns driven by expanding the production team and seemingly sliding towards the more atmospheric, reverb-driven indie Americana sound that’s been adjacent to dream country but kind of got played out five or six years ago. And thus an easy comparison for me maybe becomes Florence + The Machine but with a twangier, more soulful bent - and a lot of credit has to go to Smith for refining her delivery and technique - Starfire had moments where her delivery could feel a little unpolished, and even as the instrumentals develop more soul and smolder here, she meets them well in the middle and remains one of the most striking voices in country right now. That said, while I think this project is great in its own right - and the closing track ‘Lonely Together’ is goddamn devastating - I’d struggle to say this album is as good as Starfire, and it comes down to two factors. The first is the production - the switch to Christian Langdon isn’t bad, per se, but you can tell certain instrumentals aren’t quite as refined or lush or diverse and there are moments where the mix feels a little blown out in comparison to the cuts produced by Paul Moak. The larger problem, though, I’d attribute to the writing, namely that the songs fall into two categories: love songs that fall hard and break apart harder, and the smoldering, ‘I can’t get over you, I want to move on’ songs that tend to be a little more interesting… but if you’re looking for the more diverse storytelling and emotional complexity that characterized Starfire’s deep cuts and most potent moments that wound up among my favourite songs of 2018, you’re not really getting that as consistently. Still, I’d argue this is a pretty great project, and it absolutely works for current times, let me say that. Light 8/10, check it out.

Niall Horan - Heartbreak Weather - So I want to say right now that Flicker was the sort of project that caught me off-guard in 2017 - I had zero expectations that it’d be good at all, let alone a great solo pop debut that put Niall head-and-shoulders above not just One Direction, but the majority of mainstream pop. Yes, the influences and especially Fleetwood Mac worship were obvious, but married to really strong songs underneath and the project has held up. And thus for a more expanded sound going into his sophomore album, I had expectations this time around, especially with ‘Nice To Meet Ya’ being the underappreciated powerhouse that it is… and Heartbreak Weather is just as great as Flicker if not better. For one, it’s more a varied and explicitly modern project - the rock-solid compositions could still get a little sleepy on the back half of Flicker, and the balance across this album is far more consistent in spacing out the ballads with the upbeat or more anthemic moments, especially with those coursing bass grooves that balance out some of the heavier percussion. And while you can tell there were glances at Ed Sheeran and Shawn Mendes’ templates in production and cadence courtesy of the Teddy Geiger and Tobias Jesso Jr. cowrites - maybe even a little of The 1975 as well circa 2016 - Niall will get a little rougher and louder than all of them… which can have some mixed results with blown out mixing, but that’s a minor gripe, especially when his hooks place him in a different ballpark. But what elevates Niall further is something that’s very different in modern pop, especially from male artists: emotional honesty that still feels grounded in mature confidence. That swagger can feel old-fashioned, but when you consider how many of the songs circle around the uncertain, questioning moments beginning a relationship, either starting fresh or more commonly from an ex where there’s still messy feelings, there’s modern framing and context. And while you’d think for fourteen songs this would start to get repetitive, Niall is surprisingly solid at keeping the emotionally throughline consistent but varied, from the nervous butterflies that comes with something new and exciting to the sweeping moments of pure ego - although it really locks in when we get the conflicted frustration trying to move on and by the end of the album, the big swing to try and recover the old relationship… that even he knows won’t work and inevitably pushes him back on the road again. So it winds up being a tempestuous album… but a great pop album all the same. No sophomore slump here, strong 8/10.

Jay Electronica - A Written Testimony - I feel it’s very important for me say this right out of the gate: even if I had bought into the hype, there was no way in hell that a Jay Electronica album could have ever matched expectations. It’s like with Tool and Fear Inoculum… except Tool actually had significant bodies of work, whereas Jay Electronica had scattered singles and a few EPs, all of which showed tremendous promise that has allowed fans to keep the hope alive for over a decade. And now that we’ve finally gotten a full-length album, seemingly muscled into shape by Jay-Z corralling a wayward artist who’d rather be anywhere else… does this really match any of the hype, or even rise to the standards of the best cuts Jay Electronica has actually released? I’ll be blunt: this is mediocre, coasting on ego and hype and presumptions of genius that get very thin very fast, and any attempt to be self-aware about it is revealing of the worst possible arrogance from both Jays here. Yes, Jay Electronica, part of releasing art means you get criticized for it, and it leaves me instantly suspicious when the album switches to increasingly hollow bragging or Nation of Islam inside jargon, often not in English - which feels very much intended to keep up the aura and mystique which the content doesn’t really support, especially when it comes with a healthy dose of antisemitism and pro-Michael Jackson conspiracy theories! It’s not surprising that Jay-Z fares better - although I’m not sure he could have picked a worse time to double down on the uber-capitalist side of his persona - but then we actually have to get to the music and execution… and there are so many baffling missteps here it’s hard to know where to start. Why is the vocal mixing of two rap icons so shoddy from song to song, and why did they include a single released in 2010 with a timbre and structure that barely fits - and on the topic of not fitting at all, why is Travis Scott here at all doing a James Blake impression, especially when you’re going to get Blake himself later on? And what’s frustrating is that going more lo-fi doesn’t so much sound experimental or weird - especially if you’ve heard a lot of underground hip-hop, where this barely scratches the surface - it doesn’t match with the content. When Jay-Z had No I.D. for 4:44, the rougher sample-driven backdrop made sense for a more introspective and personal project; here, the production doesn’t match the opulence of the flexing nor the mystique it’s trying to cultivate, and with so many crowd cheers peppered in with beats left running with plenty of space for verses, it feels really self-congratulatory and it doesn’t feel earned! And when you factor in how they import a hook from 2010 to have a good one, and how a lot of the percussion and samples are really shoddily mixed, and how the project has no sense of momentum or any songs that come close to ‘Exhibit A’ or ‘C’… you know, I think back about Dr. Dre’s Compton album from 2015, and how many people were unsatisfied with it or just outright dismissed and forgot about it because it could never match the expectations for Detox, but I still love that album because it expanded its focus and had such a lush, vibrant world that stacked great verses and performances where even if you could obviously tell who was writing for Dre, it was at least trying so much harder. This isn’t even close… even if I do think the hazy moment of melancholy at the very end was well-executed. Light 5/10