The soft bigotry of low expectations

The press kit for the B-52s' first album in 16 years depressingly mentions LCD Soundsystem, the Rapture, and the Killers as sonic touchstones. It's kind of gauche that Astralwerks feels the need to compare a long-awaited record by veteran hitmakers to a bunch of young turks who, shiny and exciting though they are, have not yet proven that they're capable of anything as pop-redefining as the Dadaist wedding staple "Rock Lobster." Sure, "Mr. Brightside" is a great song, but it probably won't be rocking bar mitzvahs 30 years from now.

You can find additional thoughts about the B-52s' boring yet peppy Funplex on the same bat channel.

Ice princess

I wonder if Kelley Polar likes figure skating. The sport speaks to the kind of challenges he seems interested in—the technically agile, flamboyant, self-consciously eccentric kind. To extend the metaphor, it's possible to view his second album, I Need You to Hold on While the Sky Is Falling, as a most respectable, but ultimately unstuck, sort of musical quadruple salchow. In figure skating's weighted scoring system, it's conventional to give someone who attempts a really difficult, interesting new trick some extra credit. Let's give it some points for trying anyway, shall we?

The rest of my review of Kelley Polar's delightfully weird second record is just a triple loop away.

Beware the company you reside in

About halfway through "My Favorite Year," the gentle anthem at the emotional heart of Canadian singer-songwriter Dan Bejar's predictably strong ninth album as Destroyer, he abruptly shifts gears, briefly abandoning the song's gradual climb toward tremulous guitar-pedaled bliss for a moment of punk. "Beware the company you reside in," he barks eight times over a muffled yet discordant riff before the drums kick in and he steers back toward the stratosphere. In an interview given to New York Magazine, Bejar characterized this moment as "a pretty obvious part of the song to hate." It also happens to encapsulate all of the essential excellence of the Destroyer project, typifying Bejar's historical willingness to irritate or offend his audience to a productive end. In context, the gambit initially seems bratty and provocative, the lyric's obtuseness amplified by the abruptness of the shift as well by the fact that it's over so quickly. Repeat listens reveal that it's the cornerstone of the song—the complicating facet that makes something otherwise perfect into something unique.

Th rest of my review of Trouble in Dreams is over here.

I went to SXSW

It was pretty fucking awesome.

I wrote about it for Slant! Post one deals with Friday, and post two deals with Saturday.

Sunday and Monday summed up in one sentence each, respectively: Hangovers are worse in motels. Austin is not a walkable city, but its airport has excellent BBQ.

(Not) Selling the Drama

Mark Lanegan and Greg Dulli, the caterwauling former frontmen of Screaming Trees and the Afghan Whigs, respectively, have both earned a good measure of maturity. Now that they're at least 10 years past their prime, you can hear hard living and the burden of experience in their voices: Lanegan's has taken on some of Tom Waits's nicotine snarl, and Dulli's soulful quiver stumbles off-key a bit more than it did when he was supposed to be the next big thing. Their long-anticipated collaboration might have been an intriguing document about the second acts of America's alt-rock elder statesmen; judging from the album's fairly unrelentingly doomy compositions, they probably have some (not altogether surprising) things to say on the topic. Unfortunately, though, Saturnalia raises the question: At what point does one cease sounding mature and start sounding old?

The rest of my review of the Gutter Twins' Saturnalia is just a hop, skip, and a jump away.