The Homegrown Snob

After a decade of reclusive hibernation, the Thin White Duke returned Monday with a new single, video and the announcement of a new album.

The song — a moody, understated ballad — “Where Are We Now?” reflects on Berlin and a relationship. The video is more affecting than it first appears, an off-putting mash of scenes from the autoshop below Bowie’s late-’70s Berlin apartment with period footage of the dilapidated city and Bowie’s (and a woman’s) face projected onto some kind of two-headed figurine.

What is exactly is going on? Who is that woman? And just where are we now? Expect no clear answers but enjoy.

Watch the video by clicking this link.

The album, The Next Day, (featuring that BRILLIANT cover above) is due out March 12 in the U.S. It will be his first album since 2003′s Reality, which has held up well. It’s produced by Tony Visconti — who did board work and production on Bowie’s albums between ’77 and ’80 (The Berlin Trilogy era, arguably his most influential period).

My top 10 of 2012:

1. Fiona Apple – The Idler Wheel is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve you More Than Ropes Will Ever Do

Without question, the most neurotic, audacious, honest, revealing, sharpest and smartest album of 2012.  Without question. With little more than Apple’s guttural voice and sparse piano and Charley Drayton’s restrained percussion and some wildly inventive lyrics, she takes the listener inside her mind while she dissects (and pokes fun at) her romantic and personal shortcomings.

2. Jack White – Blunderbuss

3. The XX – Coexist

4. Sinead O’Connor – How About I Be Me (And You Be You)?

5. The Punch Brothers – Who’s Feeling Young?

6. Spiritualized – Sweet Heart, Sweet Light

7. Rufus Wainwright – Out of the Game

8. Aimee Mann – Charmer

9. Bat for Lashes – The Haunted Man

10. Garbage – Not Your Kind of People

My favorite songs not on those albums:

“Under the Westway” – Blur

“Simple Song” – The Shins

“Yet Again” – Grizzly Bear

“Everything Wrong” – Martha Wainwright

“Myth” – Beach House

“Bad Religion” – Frank Ocean

“Elephant” – Tame Impala

Beach House – “Myth”

One of the most beautiful songs I’ve heard this year. Good luck resisting when that chorus kicks in.

Punch Brothers – “Who’s Feeling Young Now?”

You folks can take your Mumford and Sons. I’ll take my folk-pop without the pomp and pseudo-religious babble and with better musicianship, please. The Punch Brothers: Chris Thile’s second-best band.

Clinic – “Miss You”

New Clinic = sleigh bells, Casio keyboard beats, compressed vocals and druggy eerieness. Full-screen this vid to really go psychedelic with it.

7/10

Natasha Khan, a.k.a. Bat For Lashes, stands out among the heaps of artists indebted to1980s Kate Bush and 1990s Bjork, mostly because she’s able to meld those influences with her own voice.

Her first two albums, 2006′s Fur and Gold and 2009′s enthralling Two Suns, blended her own earthy, fairytale visions with light beats, washes of synthesizer and immediate hooks. The word on her third, The Haunted Man, is that it’s leaner and more direct.

That’s true in part. It is indeed leaner, with far fewer instruments and sparser arrangements throughout. But more direct?  The melodies here mostly take their time and stretch farther afield than her more concise, earlier peaks.

The obvious exception is “Laura.” Built on a simple piano line and Khan’s affecting vocal, it feels much bigger than it is. Writing about it is pointless because you just need to hear it once to understand. It’s the best thing she’s ever done.

Beyond that, the album feels a little unfocused. The songs are pleasant, beautiful but in a delicate and understated way. Because of the similar approach, the tunes tend to run together, especially on the record’s second half.  Still it’s a beautiful, haunting sort of record that will appeal strongly to a select audience.

Next to “Laura,”  ”Oh Yeah” is the most memorable. Unsurprising, given it’s built on a very 1980s reverbed synth riff and a backing choir — her bread and butter.

7.5/10

Though she hasn’t enjoyed mainstream success since 1985, when her ‘Til Tuesday hit “Voices Carry” was a MTV staple, over the last 15 years Aimee Mann has emerged as an indie-stalwart, a small icon for female artists and one of our finest songwriters.

Even if she’s seemed a little detached since moving from the deeply felt sketches on her first four solo albums (plus the “Magnolia” soundtrack), her observations of the painful sides  human nature remained sharp even when her melodies wandered.

Charmer is the most out-and-out pop album Mann’s done, which means its also her most straightforward and predictable. That might read as a slight, but the pleasures of these 11 songs are in their familiarity and the sound of Mann playing to her strengths — both as a lyricist and a keen melodicist.

The characters in these songs are some of her truest and deepest: the self-loathing born winners of the title track, the masochists with crushes in “Labrador” and “Crazytown” and the scathing humor of “Living A Lie,” a top-notch duet with The Shins’ James Mercer.

The songs themselves are just as vibrant — from the power-pop of “Charmer” to “Gamma Ray”‘s measured swagger, through to the minor-key shuffle of  ”Red Flag Diver” — and clock in as her most succinct set. The sound is built on comfy sounding pop-rock that ruled the airwaves between 1972 and 1982, reminiscent of The Cars, Supertramp, ELO and a host of others.

If these songs feel less lived-in than her pre-Lost in Space work, they’re no less vivid for it. They’re tough to find fault with at all. For an artist sometimes pegged as perennially downcast, at least on record, the level of craft and artistic distance on display makes for her most accessible record — even if it’s not her best.

“Charmer”

“Labrador” feat. Jon Hamm and Jon Wurster

4/10

You’ve got to hand it to The Killers for sticking to their guns.

Despite more than a half-decade of being lambasted for neo-Springsteenisms and frontman Brandon Flowers’ preposterous lyrics, the band hasn’t let up on it’s cheese-rock one ounce. In fact, they’ve consistently upped the cheese factor on each successive album, starting with Sam’s Town in 2006, increasing it on 2009′s Day and Age and now Battle Born.

Even when the band’s quality control was most questionable (mixed metaphors, thundering bombast, fairly ridiculous tales about Cinderella attempting to outrun the Devil while searching for her nightgown in the desert), the singles were remarkably consistent. For every “Dustland Fairytale” and “Uncle Jonny,” we got an  impeccably crafted cut like “Read My Mind” and “The World We Live In.”

So Battle Born arrives, to these ears, as The Killers’ first failure.  It’s a record that’s all surface, where every emotion is on Flowers’ sleeve and every riff and chorus aims for stadium backrows.  The first single, “Runaway,” is endemic of all of the problems, showcasing the worst of The Killers’ tendencies toward overwrought and outsized arena anthems.  It’s less Springsteen, more Bon Jovi; less “Joshua Tree,” more Journey.

Yes, this is that kind of plastic-rock record. It’s disarmingly bad. Moreso because this is a band that’s proven they’re so much better than “Here With Me” and “The Way It Was,” both schmaltzy horrors of cliche power-balladry.

Congratulations to The Killers for making, if not the year’s worst album at least its most disappointing.

8/10

Some will mistake the quietness of The XX’s second album for boredom, aimlessness or just a lack of ideas.

That would be missing the point of Coexist, an exercise in tenderness, heartbreak and subtly colored late-night tunes.

The band’s 2009 debut, X, showed a band in their late teens arriving fully formed with a remarkably light touch: They knew just what they wanted to say and exactly how to say it with understated vocals, plain-spoken but heartfelt lyrics and minimal instrumentation. The bittersweet, conversational duets between singers Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim lent an immediacy to the bare-bones songs.

A year later, X won the U.K.’s Mercury Prize for album of the year and has only become more revered since. Saying it’s one of the best debuts of the last 10 years isn’t going very far out on a limb.

So, Coexist comes with the baggage of expectation. But instead of building on the insistent, minor-key hooks they laid down on their debut, the three members spread their sound out and stretch it even leaner than before.

For music lovers yearning for a headphones-record, it’s pure ear candy, all skittering beats, minimal bass, subdued keyboards and (no surprise) reverb, reverb, reverb. There are also new sounds: wailing backing vocals, queasy keyboard loops and the surprisingly effective steel drum sample on “Reunion.” The songs themselves are even sparser than before: shorter melodic lines, nearly whispered vocals, mostly built atop only one or two instruments playing at a time.

A few listens reveals this as a darker album than their debut. That album was built around the tentative first experiences of love and the emotional dance we play. Coexist is obviously the post-breakup, or at least the now-we’re-in-this-what-do-we-do?, record.

“Tides” is about drifting apart. Ditto that on “Missing,” with some self-doubt thrown in. ”Separate or combine/ I ask you one last time/ Did I hold you too tight?/ Did I not let enough light in?” is a key lyric in “Chained,” one of the best songs here.

But there’s still a sweetness. It surfaces on the “as in love with you as I am” refrain of “Angels” and holds through the entirety of “Our Song.” That balance, and Sims’ and Crofts’ vulnerability, keep it from sounding chilly or distant.

The XX plays with minimalism but their emotions are big and warm and Coexist feels like a big, soft pillow. Some listeners will be let down by that but the payoff is just as great as their debut, even if it takes a little more effort to sink into.

6/10

You need to know up front that A Thing Called Divine Fits is not a Spoon record.

Though Spoon’s Britt Daniel is one-third of electro-indie project Divine Fits — and his fingerprints are left solidly on about a little more than half of this debut album’s tracks — his band’s level of craftsmanship and viscerally odd indie/New Wave rock is rarely found here.

Some are hailing Divine Fits as a seamless blend of Daniel’s punchy songwriting and Wolf Parade’s Dan Boekner’s electro-pop leanings. (New Bomb Turks’ Sam Brown is in there, too, but I can’t pinpoint his influences.)

Not me. I say Boeckner’s vocals are weak and he isn’t the greatest lyricist. I say his only strong song here is “My Love Is Real,” which is darkly catchy and insistent. I say his presence dilutes Daniel’s songs, two of which — “Flaggin’ A Ride” and the wonderful “Would That Not Be Nice”  – are classic Spoony stuff.

Most of this record sounds tossed-off, like they had a good time in the studio, had some interesting ideas and made some captivating noise without songs to match them to. There are compelling moments, but they’re fleeting. Besides the strong hooks mentioned above and a groove here or there there’s little to return to.

And so A Thing Called Divine Fits is fine while it’s playing but quickly forgotten, something that can’t be said about about any of Daniel’s other records.

Jack White – “Freedom at 21″

Ah yes, another sweet track from Jack White’s stellar Blunderbuss. This one — “Freedom at 21″ — exemplifies what makes White such a treasure. The riff and song structure are pure classic rock, but the drum track pushes it just off-center. His vocals are a yelping, wailing wonder. The lyrics are a modern twist on the old blues formula of the woman who “does what she damn-well please.” And then the production flourishes — that crazy, warped-sounding guitar at the bridge, his repeated vocal refrain, and the one-off “hey, hey, hey” — are the kind of touches other artists would build whole songs from and run into the ground. Really, modern rock doesn’t get much better than this.

Oh, and apparently Hype Williams still directs music videos. Who knew?

Plus -Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme in cameo at 2:40 for the win.

The Killers – “Runaways”

Hey, remember when everyone loved The Killers? Yeah, that was 2004. Since then, they’ve spiralled desperately downward into faux-Springsteen territory, only coming up briefly for air and decent tunes. Here’s “Runaway,” the worst kind of Killers song. It sounds like Boston dog-screwing that Simple Minds song from “The Breakfast Club” while they stare at a poster of “Born to Run.”

Spoon – “The Way We Get By”

I cannot cannot CANNOT believe this song’s been rocking my face off for 10 years. But, yep, as of this month (next Monday, Aug. 20, to be exact) this and the other 12 amazing songs on Kill the Moonlight have been in heavy rotation on my stereo and in my brain. This video’s a real missed-opportunity. I’ve always envisioned a bunch of druggy hipster kids taking to the street in choreographed dancing at this song’s climax. But that’s not very indie of me, now is it?

For some reason, I woke up this morning with my head stuck in the arse of spring 1997.

If you’ll recall, that’s when the Music Industry and its phalanx attempted to shove this “new” genre of synthesizer-based music called “Electronica” down our collective throats. For about six weeks, MTV and MTV2 aired electronic music after midnight. Compilations were issued by the dozens.

“This is the next grunge! This is what’s going to sell! Middle-American teenagers with no access to club drugs, let alone dance clubs, are really going to dig these wacky Europeans and their rainbow-colored hair!”

Obviously, that didn’t happen. The industry quickly abandoned Electronica in favor of teen-pop (by May 1997) when U2′s Pop charted to lackluster success. For the most part, the music was uninspiring — 6- to 8-minutes of bleeping and blooping and static in a formless, ambient, tuneless mess. There was little hook-loving teens could grab onto. But there was some memorable stuff in all those instrumental/extended tracks.

A few years later, Fat Boy Slim and Moby — and teen pop itself — rode synthesizers and programmed beats to the top of the charts.

So, here, I revisit the best of the 1997 electronic-music push:

Daft Punk – “Da Funk”

One of the deepest grooves of the time set to one of the coolest videos. This one got huge play on MTV.

The Chemical Brothers – “Setting Sun”

Next to Daft Punk, The Chemical Brothers were the best act to emerge in America during Electronica. This track, featuring Oasis’ Noel Gallagher on vocals, has always been a favorite of mine.

U2 – “Mofo”

This nasty track — like the best electronic music – actually rocked. But if U2 can’t make something mainstream, it ain’t gonna happen.

Gus Gus – “Believe”

This is where most Americans drew the line, right? How much more alienating could electronic pop get? Add this freaky visual and 15-year-olds tuned out permanently. But it holds up remarkably well. And, yeah, that video’s still so creepy and strange.

The Prodigy – “Breathe”

Laughably cartoon-ish now, these blokes were on Madonna’s label and hyped and hyped and hyped and disappeared. This — their last real hit — is still their most menacing and best.

Bentley Rhythm Ace – “Bentley’s Gonna Sort You Out”

Still one of the funniest and most intriguing music videos I’ve seen, this is also a terrific little song — like pop, funk and ’60s kitsch tossed in a blender without the lid on.