a short review of a lo-fi indie guy's singles

The single, "Homesick," is the latest in a string of low-key charmers

Lo-fi bedroom indie rock project Parent Teacher released the bruised single "Homesick" last month. Its melancholy opening—fresh strings chiming through the song's chords on an acoustic—is followed by tinny drums and a bass that's a little louder and grittier than you'd expect. With the school bell having rung, out comes the resigned but pure and melodically simple vocal: "I lied instead of being direct, my feels protected the disconnect."

The sound mix is a tad off, and I resisted at first. But after listening again and trying the two other songs released this year, the music grew on me.

Parent Teacher reminds me of Grandaddy, Ben Gibbard, and 22º Halo. This artist has a knack for melody and songwriting. Sound engineering and all that stuff can be fixed, but without the melody and songwriting, you have nothing.

"Homesick" is posted below, but I recommend trying "Capital Artist" and "Fire Door," too. They aren't all sad-guy songs. And—confession time—I like the raw, stripped-down clips of these songs ("Fire Door," especially) posted on his Instagram more than the released versions.

a music review: “Unessential Oils” by Warren Spicer, the guy from Plants and Animals

Montreal rolled in the 2000s, producing bands like Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade, and Warren Spicer's band Plants and Animals.

 

"Unessential Oils," Spicer's first solo effort, represents a vibe more than a vision. Spicer said, "The process was the therapy of working through. The result is more a document than construction. It's what happened, not what I made happen."

It absolutely sounds like an album of therapeutic chilling. You put it on and soak.

See Spicer shaving in the tub? The album includes the downbeat song, "Suds." He sings, "And every day I'm trying to get back to that / I'm like a monk in deep meditation / Oh, I’m safe inside—oh, inside my suds, left alone with a cold beer in a hot bathtub / Send me back to sleep, and when I get on my feet, I'll be a new man."

Spicer and his collaborators coax tracks. The quiet performances emphasize delicate, shimmering percussion.

The vocal textures the sedated music with hints of strain. Spicer sings about release and holds on to his intensity.

My favorite song is the opener, "Distrust the Magician." This sounds brutally chill.

Chords ripple under slippery drums and cymbals that sound like sun through crystal windchimes. "I'm above you now," Spicer sings, sounding painfully removed. And I love how the drums syncopate in the outro. So good.

Album single "Chameleon" features a Latin jazz rhythm and numbed chords that lift the refrain's vocal melody: "Oh babe, I love you a lot / Oh babe, I need you now / And we could have a lot of fun just putting trouble on the run / I know we've got a lot to do, and you and me are trouble at the best of times / But living is a lot of fun—hiding like chameleon."

And you can relate to the words in "Solutions to My Gloom," where Spicer meditates on the sense of doom felt even in everyday, low-pressure situations. "In fact, I like it here in the waiting room / A sensе of impending doom / scroll and creep through the punctured skin / Solutions to my gloom." This, sung to the song's breathy, layered arrangement.

 

"Don't Go to Bed When You're Mad" wakes from sedation and expands time. The instrumentation gently pulls at Spicer's wavering, detached vocal. The music is a helium-filled balloon, and his voice is the little string you hold on to. A guitar picks out meandering trails of freed melodic thoughts.

 

"Unessential Oils" is an exhale—or an attempt at one. Take a deep breath.

 

Secret City Records released "Unessential Oils" on May 31, 2024.

 

Note: I reviewed an album by Plants and Animals guitar player Nicolas Basque and his bandBibi Club and the 2020 Plants and Animals album, "The Jungle."

 

a review of a band that likes The Strokes

The Projectors set out to reintroduce aught rock

The Strokes balanced great melodies and tight, energetic performances with the cleverly aloof and slightly unpredictable vocal of frontman Julian Casablancas. The band’s raw, swaggering debut, Is This It, followed the example of The Stooges and Velvet Underground.

The Projectors may be more reminiscent of Herman’s Hermits than The Stooges, but the band does have some pretty good songs on this newly released self-titled album. The singer, Dylan Rysstad, acknowledged the influence of The Strokes when he described writing these songs: “With the first couple songs, ’When the Lights Came Up’ and ‘Golden Age’, I really embraced certain influences and didn’t try to obscure or hide the fact that it was starting to sound like someone else. The songs I’ve been writing for this project are what I want to be playing and listening to, and somewhat ironically, I feel like it’s the most me, if that makes sense.”

It does make sense—influences are not hard to understand. The “someone else” is The Strokes, and though Rysstad seems to be defending himself here, everyone knows musicians connect with other music just like the rest of us.

More importantly, The Projectors are not straight ripping off The Strokes the way, say, Ed Sheeran ripped off Marvin Gaye. The Projectors are just not able to rip off The Strokes.

The band lacks qualities that made The Strokes debut so good—the energy, the rawness, the swagger. But the music has other well-done elements common to songs by The Strokes—songs like “You Can Only Wait,” “Golden Age,” and “Lost in Spaces” feature a choppy, jangly rhythm guitar, a lead guitar playing simple melody throughlines, and a solid, pulsing bass. This is a warm and sunny sound led by an easygoing, agreeable vocalist.

The Projectors are based in Victoria, British Columbia. The songs on this album were originally released in April 2022, but they have been remastered and now re-released as the band works toward bigger things.

something about a 2019 album, “What Life” by Club Night

First thing every morning—but especially Monday morning—I hear the bus flatulate to a stop 30 feet outside my bedroom, and I know the world is back at it. And through my window I watch garbage trucks collect piled trash behind the restaurants and bars and dump glass bottles, sucked empty, into breakage. The workers use bins, bags, and boxes to gavage-feed the truck until it pulls away, stuffed stupid, the engine howling hollow wind.

Listening to the brilliant album What Life makes me feel alive—like I want to catch every bus and all the garbage is a celebration. Club Night released What Life in April 2019, but I heard it only recently. The music often sounds high-spirited but contains multitudes. The songs convey spontaneity, as if Club Night is experimenting with changes and rhythms, but the band’s idiosyncrasies are masterful and the musical sum captures a contagious, noisy energy of hooks and melody.

What Life opens with “Path”—the drummer counts off 16 beats as the bass guitar insists on the note, then the drum rolls through fills while the guitar strings pull off and hammer on, wheedling notes, and the vocal—charged and high—cries out to all and sundry. The lack of inhibition speaks volumes. The music sweeps through emotions—joy, restlessness, righteousness, desperation. Even the quieter moments carry energy.

Club Night takes all the noise of daily life and filters it into music. What Life feels a little like the perspective grief can give you.

“Cough” opens with a brief mellow passage, then the restless drumming and guitar figure in. The song segues into a faster heartbeat. The vocal swallows water, as if drowning under reverb and the mix, but its expressiveness and pitched cry allow it to pierce the bonds of the surface.

The bass guitar starts “Cherry” with a head-nodding pulse. Then guitar harmonics ping a melody. Tumbling drum fills hold the momentum, and the volume grows, the rhythm quickens, the angles sharpen until the song drops into a nice and easy playout.

Club Night’s blend of fragility and ferocious animation reaches near-perfection on “Trance.” Take just the moment of one lyric: “I let out a howl so unspeakable.” Josh Bertram’s vocal starts as a hoarse, tortured scream, then slides into his melodical caterwaul. The song has incarnations, taking on different rhythms and paces. The vocal pierces, the guitar phases, the drums roll to a bass alive with inspiration. At 3:00, the song hits a triumphant coda.

And within an album full of highlights, the best among them is the last song, “Thousands.” I probably will play this song from time to time the rest of my life. I love it for the crescendo at 3:30—the snare drum starts cracking, the feedback sings, synthesized skies whistle as they fall—and then it all resolves with the lyrics, “What if we wanted more? Not waking up to the taste of bad news again. I dare not ever ask though I bawl at the splintered sunlight alone… What if we wanted more? Are you happy with the life that you chose?”

Club Night’s frontman, Josh Bertram, was previously in Our Brother the Native. What Life, and Club Night’s previous EP, Hell Ya, are far less experimental than Our Brother the Native and sound more like early Animal Collective and maybe Mae Shi. What Life captures something—a time, a storm of influences and events, maybe. But what if we wanted more?

 

 

something about Beach House's "Superstar"

 

Beach House is releasing an album, Once Twice Melody, in "chapters." The four songs comprising the first chapter were released in November. One song was "Superstar."

"Superstar" offers sentimentality. Sentimental songs always have a chance with me. I like sentimentality. I like to remember good times from when I was younger because otherwise I just worry about everything that is happening now or might happen in the future. I like to think about the good times in past relationships.

    When you were mine
    We fell across the sky

 

Then the song (and I with it) turns maudlin for a moment.

    Something good
    Never meant to last

 

something about last year's album from Plants and Animals, "The Jungle"

 

Here is an album that did not get enough attention last year—The Jungle, by Plants and Animals. It was released in October 2020 and is Plants and Animals’ fifth studio album and first in four years. The Montreal indie-rock band broke through with its 2008 album, Parc Avenue, which featured the glorious kiss off, “Bye, Bye, Bye.” But coverage of subsequent albums dwindled. High-profile music site Pitchfork had reviewed every Plants and Animals album since 2008, but not this one. I do not know why: the band self-produces wonderful, beautiful-sounding records, and The Jungle is no exception.

 

The title track features a restless bass and head-nodding beat. Plants and Animals has always captured this kind of nervous cool. The last 90 seconds jams out. The song sounds casual, but that belies its precision. The good ones can make it sound easy. Then comes “Love That Boy” with its acoustic layers, electric guitar shimmering out alien, submerged little notes, and trippy, translucent lyrics: “Is the moon following us? Is it moving at exactly the same speed? All experience connected, holding on its fingertips.” The floaty sounds complement the tight drumming and loudly churning bass.

 

What follows are the album’s best parts. “House on Fire” is fucking great. The hi-hat riding atop a throbbing, plucky bass; the synthesizer that comes in at 51 seconds like the air horn on a semi-trailer truck; the programmed synthesizer that darts through scales; and then the verse—delivered with ebullient focus and clarity: “Your house is burning—your home is on fire!”

 

Plants and Animals capitalize on that intensity with “Sacrifice.” This song includes sudden rhythm changes. Insistent tom drums and gained-up guitar hack away through several chippy bars in the verse, then chords splish as the singer implores, “Hold on to yourself / Don't you want to die?” Then the song abruptly downshifts into a dependency-shedding chorus: “I gave you the best years of my life, volunteered on your behalf / sacrifice—it doesn't matter—for dopamine and lots of laughs.”

 

A cassette tape that sounds like it was left in the car all summer plays a recording of an acoustic guitar picking out a chord. Jangly, slightly warped. That is “Get My Mind.” At 21 seconds, the hi-hat opens up, the drummer raps on the snare, and the music tumbles into a song. A guitar slices off a thick, fuzzy riff of single, heavy notes, and the arrangement builds into a spiritual experience.

 

And it is here that The Jungle pulls back. “Le Queens” steams. A woman sings, “Sous les lumières dans le Queens / Tu t'embrasse avec moi / Ton visage blanche sous les fars / Pour la premiere fois”; then a switch to English: “Baby, don't you laugh ‘cause hearts get broke like that.” On “In Your Eyes,” a heavy phaser with subtle wah-wah effect produces underwater tones. And then the finale: “Bold” walks in quietly. But at the chorus, it cries out for your attention: “Waiting for you to be more bold / The drama rising, running out of time / Okay, what's next?” I first heard The Jungle two months ago. I have listened to it over and over, and I know what is next. I will return to The Jungle as time runs out.

 

 

 

 

The lyrics to "Polar Opposites"

Polar opposites don't push away.
It's the same on the weekends as the rest of the days.
And I know I should go, but I'll probably stay.
And that's all you can do about some things.

I'm trying, I'm trying to drink away
the part of the day that I cannot sleep away.
I'm trying, I'm trying to drink away
the part of the day that I cannot sleep away.

Two one-eyed dogs, they're looking at stereos.
Hi-fi gods try so hard to make their cars low to the ground.
These vibrations oil it's teeth.
Primer gray is the color when you're done dying.

I'm trying, I'm trying to drink away
the part of the day that I cannot sleep away.
I'm trying, I'm trying to drink away
the part of the day that I cannot sleep away.