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Monday, December 22, 2025

The Avenue | Music

Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

Album review: U2 – “No Line On The Horizon”

By ROBERT HILSON | Mar. 3, 2009

Noisy, surging guitars; octopus-arm polyrhythms; Bono hollering on like a hopped-up Pentecostal preacher; spectacularly transparent declarations of purpose whooped in flailing whoa-oh frenzy. These are the first sounds of "No Line On the Horizon," U2's new album, and they combine to say what, with this band, goes without saying: This is a statement.

Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

Album Review: Loney, Dear – “Dear John”

By ROBERT HILSON | Feb. 18, 2009

Emil Svanängen is moving on up, literally. Having recorded his first album on a laptop microphone and CD-Rs in his mother's cellar, the Swedish popsmith now makes a big enough name for himself to afford real studio equipment, a high-end computer, and presumably, his own home. In keeping with the little-guy theme, "Dear John" comes off like techno-fied Belle and Sebastian - Svanängen sings in breathless, hushed tones, as if trying to carry on a conversation in a library after running a marathon. Most of these songs flirt with electronic chamber pop, veering at alternate forks into "Phantom of the Opera"-esque theatrics ("Harm") and somber, Postal Service dance tunes ("Summers," which would fit snuggly on "Give Up"). If there's a turnoff, it's that a lot of these tracks are too prettily twee for their own good, like a good-looking guy who never makes the first move. And winds up living in his parents' basement.

Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

Album Review: The Bird and The Bee – “Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future”

By ROBERT HILSON | Feb. 18, 2009

Aside from an obvious flair for album titling (makes you want to shout, "'Ray Guns' are now, bitch!" doesn't it?), vocalist Inara George and soundboard extraordinaire Greg Kurstin also have a way with swinging '60s pop music set to fantastically modernized, yet still retro, production. Does this make sense? If not, think of "Ray Guns" as the aural equivalent to Disney's Tomorrowland - both create a future that will never exist by looking to tail-finned Cadillacs and moon landings as points of reference. This record awaits the mythical Year 2000, and in so doing, delivers groovy neo-psychedelia ("Ray Gun"), doo-wop era Motown complete with seductress spoken word bits ("Baby"), and breathy cocktail lounge balladeering ("Meteor"), all in a sleek electronic shell. "Diamond Dave," George's irresistible tribute to the great David Lee Roth, is not only the most catchy song here, but the only appropriate evidence by which to date this offering. It's Van Halen hero worship dressed in spacey beats and a plat-blond 'do, and as such, cooler than Judy Jetson in a discotheque.

Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

Album Review: Dalek – “Gutter Tactics”

By ROBERT HILSON | Feb. 18, 2009

If the election of President Barack Obama was a big can't-we-all-just-get-along inquiry to the good people of America, then "Gutter Tactics" is a scathing, unqualified "Hell no!" Or "not yet," anyway. Atop corrosive grooves tangled in haywire electronic beats, this Garden State duo spits tales of torture, war, civil rights abuses and the like, exposing every closeted sin, protesting all the wrongs that still need be righted. "Armed with Krylon" and "Who Medgar Evers Was" make up a suite of continuously devolving ambient rap that taps a well of run-for-your-life paranoia. The latter track works off a big, beefy drumbeat, spiraling feedback and lyrics about assassination. Indeed, this is dark stuff that takes nerve to slog through, and that's speaking nothing of the introductory monologue - a caustic, hell, fire and brimstone throwdown from the Rev. Wright himself. Or as Dalek likes to call it, "feel-good music."

Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

Album Review: A.C. Newman – “Get Guilty”

By ROBERT HILSON | Feb. 11, 2009

A.C. Newman is a silent killer. Left to his own devices, the New Pornographers' evil genius retreats from hook-a-second power pop to fiddle around with a less potent arsenal - off-kilter rhythms, tuneless guitar riffs, minor-key progressions. They're all here in one form or another, though working only as masking agents, attempting in vain to veil Newman's intoxicating melodies. Preferring slow burn to out-and-out explosion, "There Are Maybe Ten or Twelve" and "Prophets" qualify as growers by Newman standards, but in time each reveals itself as seductively charming as "Mass Romantic" or "Mutiny, I Promise You." "Changeling," on the other hand, is a throwback in this regard. Thriving on a big, obvious, harmony-laced chorus, it's further proof that Newman strikes two ways - in his own words, "Like A Hitman, Like A Dancer."

Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

Album Review: Bruce Springsteen – “Working on a Dream”

By ROBERT HILSON | Feb. 11, 2009

For whatever reason, "40 is the new 30" doesn't necessarily hold in the world of rock 'n roll. Seems the Glimmer Twins have so wrecked all notions of aging gracefully that success in AARP terms simply means not embarrassing oneself. Naturally, the Boss holds to a higher standard - bosses always do - and so "Working on a Dream" plays like another of Springsteen's "best album since…" candidates. Of course, it's not, because it's like the last handful of great songs about gritty underdogs and the power of love, E Street themes through and through. "Life Itself" and the Beach Boys nod "This Life" feels like Asbury Park, 1975, but the goosebumps stuff is in "Last Carnival," a campfire hymn about picking up early and moving on, no matter the circumstance. It's a potent reminder from an ageless guy who still knows best: we gotta get out while we're young.

Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

Indie band reunites with renewed energy, record deal

By JENNIFER ARELLANO | Feb. 11, 2009

The musical death and rebirth of a rock band rarely happens in the span of one night. But for Averkiou, such an unusual life cycle is the norm for the three-year-old Gainesville band. Convinced that they were playing their farewell show at Pop Mayhem in May last year after the brief departure of their guitarist, Averkiou played an appropriately rollicking final set.

Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

Album Review: Bon Iver – “Blood Bank”

By ROBERT HILSON | Feb. 11, 2009

"Blood Bank"? More like bloodletting - well, the last song anyway. The first three on this four-track hold-me-over from indie-folk songsmith Justin Vernon ebb and flow with all the woodsy beauty of an icy stream or a staggering moose. Mr. Bon Iver plays sparsely arranged acoustic pop that lives and dies on lyrical content and vocal delivery. In the case of the title track and "Beach Baby," an achingly fragile voice spins off melodic narrative flush with images that come alive in the depth of their detail. "Babys," likewise, continues the theme with cappella passages, chopsticks piano, and a warm refrain - "Summer comes to multiply." This is throw-another-log-on music for snow-ins, chamomile tea and photo albums, except for the unholy Dylan-Daft Punk union of "Woods," which takes a leak on your crackling fire and sends you running for a snow shovel and icepick.

Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

Album Review: Franz Ferdinand – “Tonight: Franz Ferdinand”

By ROBERT HILSON | Feb. 11, 2009

Trends always expose themselves on the third album. The Look only buys you so much time. Catchy singles only take you so far. By album three, you're either the White Stripes or you're Jet. Or, you're Franz Ferdinand, stuck in that untenable middle ground - milking the same-song formula for all it's worth, and in turn, fielding diminishing returns. So it goes, Tonight's "Ulysses" takes on "Do You Want To," which was take-two on "Take Me Out." That's a lot of "takes" for one sentence, not so many for three and a half years - the time between albums. And if this seems like a momentum killer, well, it is. So too are these songs - "Turn It On" and "Live Alone." They're all the same, really: slinky little danceable groove rockers that have three things in common. All catchy, all disposable, all written by a band destined to be the answer to a trivia question.

Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

Album Review: Thom Yorke – “The Eraser Remixes”

By ROBERT HILSON | Jan. 28, 2009

The beat-challenged white man's attempt to appeal to please cool urban people, the remix album already exists as something of a superfluous curiosity, but gains an added aura of "WTF?" whenever someone as supremely talented as Thom Yorke indulges in its futile pursuits. It is safe to say that each and every one of these nine edits resurfaces inferior to its predecessor, but The Bug's adaptation of "Harrowdown Hill" takes the butcher-job crown as it (for lack of a better term) erases the track's devastating electric guitar coda. Elsewhere, Various' "Analyse" rendition kills any sense of rhythm with stuttering drum machine percussion and layers of reverb. Yorke includes two versions of "Black Swan," which would seem laughably unjustified if not for the chorus's eloquent summation of the remix: "This is f----d up/ f----d up."

Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

Album Review: Glasvegas – “Glasvegas”

By ROBERT HILSON | Jan. 28, 2009

Glasvegas takes its name from hometown Glasgow and Sin City, which means that the Scottish quartet has an uncanny knack for haphazardly conjoining words and musical trends. To the surprise of no one, the NME crowd has anointed these Clash look-alikes London's latest and greatest craze du jour as This Month's Beatles manage a sound that pillages from almost every English musical movement of the last three decades. Shoegaze grandeur? Check. Ringing Edge-style guitars? Check. The Smiths' melodrama? Oh yeah, it's there -- most shamelessly in the form of "Lonesome Swan," a hackneyed rip of "I Know It's Over" with a guitar line set to the latter song's "Then why are you on your own tonight?" melody. Particularly grotesque is the Joe Strummer knock-off "Stabbed" that repeats ad nauseam, "I'm gonna get stabbed."

Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

Album Review: Late of the Pier – “Fantasy Black Channel”

By ROBERT HILSON | Jan. 28, 2009

Worlds collide in Castle Donington, England. Devo grows up a punk band; disco hones its chops at CBGB; black leather sprouts sequins. Late of the Pier wears the side effects. A four-piece from the British Isles, the young new wave act shows off all manner of mishmashed influences, piecing together a sound that filters the '80s' choice bits through a laptop, distorts them to hell and discards everything else. This cut-and-paste style makes room for swirling synths, Nintendo-bleep percussion, even Sabbath-lite riff rock ("Heartbeat"). But these secondary players all feed off the band's bread and butter: the almighty groove, which achieves a heightened state in the form of the menacing electro-blast called "Whitesnake." It's a song that unlocks imaginative, other-dimension scenarios - two-steppers take over Studio 54; Madge learns guitar; hipsters dance to power chords.

Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

Q&A with Streetlight Manifesto

By HENRY TAKSIER | Jan. 28, 2009

Streetlight Manifesto, New Jersey's beloved third-wave ska band, will play Wednesday at Common Grounds. The show, which also features A Wilhelm Scream, The Swellers and The Stitch Up, begins at 7 p.m. Tickets are for $14.

Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

Album review: Antony and the Johnsons – “The Crying Light”

By ROBERT HILSON | Jan. 21, 2009

If you've ever been to a wake, you know that death cleans up real nice - velvet casket, crisp new suit, lots of pretty flowers. It's this bizarre phenomenon, the union of darkness and beauty, that Antony takes to haunting extremes with "The Crying Light," a smiling cadaver of an album that opens with the line "Her eyes are underneath the ground" and only gets more frightening from there.

Florida Alligator
THE AVENUE  |  MUSIC

Album Review: Fall Out Boy– “Folie A Deux”

By ROBERT HILSON | Jan. 7, 2009

Here's a dirty little secret: The All-American Rejects have no backbone. But then neither do lobsters, and they're doing just fine. In "When the World Comes Down," the too-pretty Oklahoma natives pack all the punch of an aging Oscar de la Hoya, but when your clientele is teenage girls - text: omg! Gr8est band ever!!! - substance takes a back seat to confessions like, "There's a part of you that's still inside of me." If you can stomach the gratuitous fluff, the big melodies - "Another Heart Calls," "Believe" - go a long way toward quenching your sugar fix. It's when the guys use their sappy sound to vent ("Gives You Hell") that they run into trouble. Using strings, synths and pretty harmonies to convey pent-up anger? About as believable as Ben Stein the motivational speaker.

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