Alvvays, and taking a holiday from dark music

No. 1416: Alvvays - Blue Rev

Anyone who has kept up with this blog/newsletter and its previous incarnation, or just knows me personally and what I like, wouldn’t be surprised to hear me say that I gravitate toward dark art. Especially music: metal, goth, post-punk, industrial, even dark and noisy hip-hop for that matter. But that’s not exclusive; as much as I like The Cure and Thou and whatnot, I need some brighter and lighter music to balance it out. I’ve been thinking about this lately since in Richmond we’ve been kinda cooped up indoors on account of being covered in a thick layer of ice for more than a week. My wife and I didn’t leave the house for nearly a week, and by the weekend we were going stir crazy and had to leave if for no other reason than to get a sandwich. But the lack of Vitamin D probably wasn’t helping. And I also learned something about myself: I always thought I liked it cold, but being 20 degrees every day gets old quick. Especially when the roads are borderline undriveable and the sidewalk is like an ice rink. 

Alvvays is exactly the band I need when the gloom needs to go away for a while. Not that they don’t occasionally have a little gloom in their music as well, but it’s a subtle shade rather than being overwhelmed by the darkness itself. They won me over with their self-titled debut on the strength of songs like “Archie, Marry Me,” and their sophomore album Antisocialites features one of the best songs I think I’ve ever heard, “Not My Baby.” What a goddamn song. But then again, there’s a bunch on their third album Blue Rev that come pretty damn close. 

Big on hooks and full of jangly guitars, Alvvays have a sound that nods to mid- to late-’80s college rock, and there’s even a couple songs here named after new wave and punk heroes: “Belinda” (as in Carlisle) and “Tom Verlaine.” When they really drive up the energy on a song like “Pressed,” they can deliver something that echoes The Smiths at their best, but by and large this is an album full of infectious guitar-pop nuggets like “Pharmacist” and “After the Earthquake.” They’re just so damn good at it, and as clever and intricate as the songwriting can be, they make it seem effortless.

They’re one of the indie success stories (of sorts) during a time when bands just aren’t getting as much attention as solo artists who you can have a parasocial relationship with. Though this past week we saw Geese, a new-ish band!, as the musical guest on SNL, which I guess people were mad about? Which is dumb, there’s a lot of things to be mad about right now and a band getting more popular is absolutely not one of them. (I’ll have more to say about Geese in a while, doing my best to accelerate the process.) But despite having a sound that’s so rooted in what was even kind of a niche scene four decades ago, Alvvays have played big festival stages and sell out tours, and that’s always an encouraging thing to see when big corporations are trying to sell us on AI pop stars. Fuck that. Rating: 9.2

Listen: “After the Earthquake”

No. 1417: KEN Mode - NULL

I love me some KEN Mode. I probably don’t have enough of their albums, seeing as how I only have two, though one of them is their best. (That would be 2013’s Entrench, a noise rock masterpiece if you ask me.) But NULL, released one year ahead of a companion album titled VOID, is damned good, and was one of my favorite records of 2022.

Now KEN Mode basically has everything you’d want in a noise rock band: They’re heavy as fuck, and alternately bleak and hilarious. NULL, and VOID for that matter, lean a little more toward the bleak, which they don’t lose any points for, even if they’re missing songs titled “Secret Vasectomy” and whatnot. But that darkness does make the two albums stand out a bit, particularly held against a more sardonic release like 2015’s Success. But like every KEN Mode album, NULL positively kicks ass, which is what I’m really looking for here. And the band gets bonus points for the fact that they’ve had a full-time sax player for their last few albums. Noise rock plus sax is where it’s at.

It’s here where I’d like to point out that the Matthewson brothers are super nice, as well, and have given Treble more than a few shout-outs for showing their music some love. We also made a video interview with them at SXSW back in the day that was pretty entertaining. So this is me saying: KEN Mode are chill folks who make great music and deserve all your support.  Rating: 9.0

Listen: “A Love Letter”

No. 1418: Denzel Curry - Melt My Eyez See Your Future

I recently wrote a beginner’s guide to Aesop Rock for Treble that included some brief musing on the idea of longevity in rap music, spurred in part from an interview I read with him from a decade ago in which he seemed preoccupied with the idea. Shabazz Palaces’ Ishmael Butler once told me that he had a moment in his life where he thought rap was a young man’s game, but in spite of that, he ended up pursuing something weirder and enduring in its own curious way. In both cases, they weren’t sure if longevity was possible, at least not for them. But here we are, years later, and they’re still delivering great music pretty consistently.

Denzel Curry’s a younger rapper but he’s already had an interesting, fruitful and unpredictable career. I wouldn’t have guessed based on early singles like “Zeltron 6 Billion,” which slaps, that he’d end up doing everything he has, but he’s managed to not release the same album more than once. On TA13OO he worked with JPEGMAFIA and made a Native Tongues-style throwback and a few other stylistic turns on what was a more conventional trap record, refined those ideas in a tribute of sorts to his native Miami in ZUU, and more recently, drew heavily on Memphis-style horrorcore on King of the Mischievous South Vol. 2.

Melt My Eyez See Your Future is my favorite Denzel record, arguably his “best,” though that’s a subjective measure. It covers the most ground, features his most introspective lyrics, incorporates a lot more jazz rap sounds, including appearances from Robert Glasper and Thundercat, and in general has more space and breathing room than his previous two records. The extra-short “Smell of Death” by Thundercat is my favorite track (I wish it were three times as long!) but there’s no shortage of highlights. It’s not a perfect record, and slowthai’s appearance on “Zatoichi” leaves something to be desired, but the ambition and creativity is enough to make it easily Denzel’s best in my opinion. Its Three 6 Mafia-inspired follow-up was a big shift away from that, and his next project is a group effort, so it’s safe to say this will also be the only one of its kind, at least for a while. Watching Denzel Curry’s career has been fun and fascinating, and while he hasn’t had the career that Ish or Aes have had as of yet, he’s well on his way. Rating: 9.2

Listen: “Smell of Death”

No. 1419: Beth Orton - Weather Alive

I’m not sure if it’s quite right to call Beth Orton underrated. She’s made some highly acclaimed records, sold a decent amount of copies of her debut Trailer Park and, especially, its follow-up Central Reservation. She’s worked with a lot of great artists (Chemical Brothers! Dr. John! Terry Callier!) and generally never released a bad record. 

Still, some of her really special material, like 2012’s Sugaring Season or this one, Weather Alive, still feel like hidden gems. At the time Weather Alive was released, it’d been six years since her last album, the more electronics driven Kidsticks, and she’d made yet another big shift toward gracefully melancholy dirges that remind me more of late Talk Talk than, say, pop singles. There’s also some more jazz-tinged material, like “Fractals,” which features Alabaster dePlume playing saxophone and Tom Skinner playing drums, which I might have guessed if I didn’t already know that going into it—there’s a groove to it reminiscent of The Smile’s funkier material, and it’s an infectious break from the atmospheric vibe of it all.

Still, I find myself drawn more to those darker and hazier moments. Perhaps I need bands like Alvvays to break up the darkness, but I still can’t help but immerse myself in the slow burn of “Arms Around a Memory” or the breathtaking title track. Three decades into her career, it feels like her boldest and most exploratory work, and as I get older, it’s often the records that require a little more time spent, a little more investment, that I end up treasuring the most. This is very much one of them. Rating: 9.1

Listen: “Weather Alive”

1420: Celebration - Celebration

Speaking of underrated, this is a band that’s as underrated as it gets. A Baltimore band that began life as a duo called Birdland, Celebration seemed peripherally connected to the New York art rock thing happening at the time, mostly because of their connection to TV on the Radio. I’ll help jog your memory if you’re still scratching your head—their singer, Katrina Ford, is the other vocalist on “Staring at the Sun.” In fact I saw Birdland open for TV on the Radio at The Casbah way back when, and they were a cool band, even if they were just a glimmer of what Celebration would become. 

And boy, what a killer band they were. To the best of my knowledge, Celebration haven’t broken up, though Katrina’s doing solo music and started another new project with keyboardist Sean Antanaitis, but having live drummer David Bergander in the mix makes a big difference. His rhythmic element gives their psychedelic synth and organ drones even more heaviness and dimension on The Modern Tribe, which was released on 4AD at a time when it was putting out some of its weirdest material (see also: Scott Walker). But just one listen to a track like “Pressure” and its hypnotic off-kilter groove shows what a wild and wonderful band they were. And maybe still are? 

I actually hadn’t thought about this record in a while until I found it in a used bin at Wax Moon in Richmond, and it was an automatic buy. Maybe they didn’t quite catch on like some of the buzzier bands in the mid-’00s, but they made some damned good and weird music all the same. Rating: 8.9

Listen: “Pressure”