Fans of the snide and sarcastic take heed! Future of the Left ’s The Plot Against Common Sense and The Intelligence ’s Everybody’s Got it Easy But Me both come out this week just in time for you to deride everyone else’s dumb summer activities! The latter is a fun little romp through the garage but I’m not really digging T he Plot Against Common Sense all that much — I’m always happy for a band to be putting much-needed cynicism into the world but much of Future of the Left’s newest just sounds like ham-fisted alt-rock. Still if one felt like trying to do some good in the world you could hand out copies of The Plot to X-Fest patrons and potentially save a budding Linkin Park fan from growing up to be a complete moron.
Here’s something though: Olympia WA’s Broken Water have released two records this month! The Kickstarter-funded Seaside and Sedmikrásky arrived in my mailbox last week and the trio’s Hardly Art debut Tempest hits stores this week. Good luck finding a review of either that doesn’t mention Sonic Youth in some manner but I’m more than cool with a band sounding like Sonic Youth when it’s pulled off this well. Kanako Pooknyw and Abigail Ingram’s songs have a slightly more dream-pop approach than what SY generally dabbled in (thankfully without crossing into Blonde Redhead — i.e. banal — territory) and while Jon Hanna may sound like a cross between Thurston Moore and J Mascis with killer jams like “Paranoid” and “Drown” Tempest gets my recommendation regardless of comparison points.
If you crave new sounds however you might do well to check out the distinctive future-pop of Laurel Halo ’s Quarantine . I’ve seen people reference everything from Björk to James Ferraro in describing this one and while those comparisons are relatively founded Quarantine still sounds uniquely otherworldly. I could live without the grating vocal histrionics on tracks like “Years” but it is nice to hear a person singing over such spaced-out sounds without 20 layers of reverb for a change.
Which brings us to This is PiL the first new studio album from Public Image Ltd. in 20 years. The general response I’ve seen thus far for This is PiL is one of surprise — surprise that it exists yeah but also surprise that it’s not a complete pile of trash. It’s still not a particularly good album mind you (“Lollipop Opera” and the title track are pretty embarrassing with John Lydon hilariously wailing inanities like “You are entering a PiL zone!”) but as far as potentially disastrous reunion albums go Lydon and co. do sound revitalized and like they have something to say even if it just seems like numerous dub-inflected declarations of “I am from London” and/or “This is PiL.” It’s better than PiL’s records from the ’90s but that’s not saying much.
