FFWD REW

New Plastic Ideas

For the Week of July 12 2012

Living amongst students from across the country this past week — i.e. my first time having to live in a dormitory — has done nothing to quell my condescension for popular tastes. Here I was thinking there’d at least be a token art school kid blasting ’80s pastiche pop à la the new Twin Shadow or something but nope! Just dubstep mouth-breathers and people lacking the mental capabilities to figure out that maybe covering “Hotel California” in the middle of a residence courtyard at 1:30 a.m. might be um inconsiderate. Alas!

Unsound is reunion album number four from Boston’s post-punk stalwarts Mission of Burma . Fire Records is claiming it to be Burma’s “most ambitious progressive and vibrant recording yet” which is sort of a half-truth — the band does take efforts to step out from the comfort zone that would have rendered Unsound unnecessary but as with any stepping out the results are mixed. “Second Television” is a wonderful Clint Conley pop song that builds into a frenzied tower of muscular rock but then we’ve also got “Fell?H20” which could have been a decent track if Roger Miller hadn’t decided to bookend it with watery porno guitars. Quick bit of advice for all aspiring guitarists: if you absolutely must use a wah pedal please don’t make it sound like Tom Morello scoring a porno flick. Unsound has its moments but I’ve never been embarrassed by something on a Burma record until this one.

Do they play the Dirty Projectors in Starbucks nowadays? Not to sound negative — Dirty Projectors is not a band I care enough about to get worked up over — but for a band so often perceived to be melodically radical Swing Lo Magellan sounds pretty tame. Listening to it I sometimes think “Hey that’s a cool panning effect.” Other times I think “Well I guess art school graduates making music to sell coffee is better than clueless douchebags making music to sell beer.” Regardless most of Swing Lo is downright pleasant breezing by in easily digestible two- to four-minute chunks with a more intricate sense of melodic layering than the average indie rock band so I’ll give it a pass (cloying “quirky” parts aside).

Lastly: remember Limblifter ? We Are Busy Bodies certainly does having freshly reissued the Vancouver alt-rock band’s 1996 self-titled debut. Drummer Kurt Dahle went on to join The New Pornographers a few years after Limblifter came out although the two bands aren’t really worth comparing — both make pop music but Limblifter’s sound is unabashedly ’90s: more distortion less jangle. This makes for a good excuse to waste an evening on a ’90s music video binge — go load up Limblifter’s “Tinfoil” on YouTube and follow the related videos from there. (I assure you Spacehog is a pretty funny band to hear in 2012.)

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