On Monday night, I trekked down to a dilapidated duplex near Greek row, with one of my friends who promised me that I was about to hear the next biggest band to hit Seattle. I was a little skeptical. We walked in, and there were four people lounged around a messy living room, eating Doritos and strumming or beating on their various instruments.

The band is composed of four members: Adam Mina (electric violin), Kendra Cherry (bass), Rob Michael (guitar), and Darcey Taggart (drums). They’ve been together for four months. Their name is Caribou Ate My Gold. When I asked them about the name, they all laughed, like they were enjoying an inside joke. “It’s hard to explain,” Darcey said.

Their music, too, is somewhat of a puzzle. Adam named Yellowcard, William Shatner, and The Arcade Fire as their biggest influences. Even after hearing them play, it’s hard for me to describe how they managed to incorporate the bands that influenced them into one sound.

Caribou ate my Gold may not, in fact, be the next big things to hit Seattle. The rehearsal that I was privleged enough to watch allowed me one of the first peeks at a band that is, in a word, strange. A loud but melancholy electric violin is the most obvious element of all their songs. While Adam draws out the melody, Rob speaks the lyrics of their songs (which range in subject matter from banana bread, to Australian citizens, to love affairs with 9-foot-tall women), and Kendra sings soothing refrains in the background. While no one would dream of faulting Caribou for being unoriginal, its possible that the band may have strayed a little too far from the beaten path to savor any real hope of generating a large fan base.

But regardless of what the public reaction to the band will be, once Caribou plays a real gig (as of yet, its performances have been limited to friends dropping in on its rehearsals), the four members have succeeded in fulfilling one of their dreams. Darcey said that starting a band was something they have always wanted to do, and they decided just to go for it. The four members of Caribou Ate My Gold are ambitious and driven. They had a dream. They made it work. The band’s motto: “Find a place, make it happen.” The motto is somewhat enigmatic, like many other things associated with the band. But the basic gist seems to be this: if you want something, go for it. And they did.

After writing numerous posts about all the disappointing albums released lately, and criticizing one band after another, I started thinking about things a little differently after talking with Caribou. Whether or not all my favorite bands release killer albums this year, maybe it’s enough that they’re out there–recording, playing, and living their dreams.

The Used, a four-person band from the nowhere town of Orem, Utah (a town with few other claims to fame–it lists as some of its noteworthy attractions Applebee’s and Circuit City), released their third album, entitled Lies for the Liars, on May 22, 2007. The album is a lot like their two earlier releases: fast, urgent guitar lines; enough screaming to make the album reek of emotional overload without grating too much on the ears; lyrics that reinforce emotional charge of the vocals.

It’s perhaps not the greatest album to ever hit shelves, but it could very well be the greatest album so far released by The Used. When I saw it live a few years ago (after the release of their first, self-titled album), The Used, although it was the headliner of the tour, played a 25 minute set. After the six or so songs that the band played, vocalist Bert McCracken could barely manage to squeeze out a farewell to the crowd out of his exhausted vocal chords. Their second album, In Love and Death, attempted to remedy this problem, by adding to the band’s repetoire a number of songs that were without the signature screaming that so limited the band’s ability to deliver a long set.

Lies for the Liars is a good compromise between the first, almost-entirely-screamed album, and the second, tamer release. Musically, the album follows well after the first two. The guitar and bass lines are consistent with earlier recordings. The drums not overwhelming, but still add energy to the tracks.

My favorite part of the album, though, are the lyrics.

For example, consider “The Bird and the Worm”, about a school boy trying to establish his place in the world, but being constantly attacked by the judgment of his peers:
“He wears his heart safety-pinned to his backpack/His backpack is all that he knows/Shot down by strangers whose glances can cripple/The heart and devour the soul/All alone he turns to stone/While holding his breath half to death/Terrified of what’s inside/To save his life/He crawls like a Worm from a Bird.” The backpack detail provides a humbling picture of the persona in the song, not only establishing him as youthful and suggesting at his innocence, but also implying his relative isolation from the rest of the world since his backpack is “all that he knows.”

Here’s another good one: “This feeling never leaves you alone/You pull the trigger on your own/You’re hiding in your safe place/Hiding with your eyes shut tightly/All the way to the hospital.” This one is quote typical of the band: a song about the hopelessness of life. The image of guns and pulled triggers is another common thread that runs through songs by The Used. While staying true to one of its favorite motifs, the band also introduces an element of psychology into the lyrics of this song (entitled “Hospital”).

All in all, Lies for the Liars is true to the reputation the band has built for itself. But the lyrics of this album add an extra depth that was lacking in much of their earlier stuff.

My Chemical Romance released their third album, The Black Parade, on October 31, 2006. This album is clearly an attempt to break away from the image they cultivated for themselves through their first two releases, I Brought you my Bullets, you Brought me Your Love (July 2002) and Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge (September 2004). Granted, it’s conceivable that a band was a little less than pleased to be commonly referred to as the epitome of the much-derided genre of “screamo” music. So maybe it really was time for a change. But was it wise to ditch the “screaming” and whole-heartedly embrace the “emo”?

The band was formed after front man Gerard Way and one of his friends (Matt Pelissier, a former drummer in the band) wrote “Skylines and Turnstiles” in response to the September 11 attacks. The band, still in the process of formalizing their roster of permanent members, released I Brought you my Bullets in 2002, on Eyeball Records. It followed the release of this album signing with Enterprise Records, and then going on tour with Avenged Sevenfold (click here for Avenged Sevenfold’s official site; click here for its myspace page). Having collected a fan base while on tour, My Chemical Romance released Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, to much acclaim. It went platinum in less than a year, due in large part to “Helena”, “The Ghost of You”, and “I’m Not Okay (I Promise”.

The Black Parade was poised to ride the wave of commercial acclaim that followed Three Cheers. But the band released an album that didn’t need to rely on former success to cultivate airplay. The Black Parade is, in a word, mainstream. I don’t want to sound like a music snob, turning up my nose at anything that isn’t alternative. I admit, I enjoy listening to the occasional Fallout Boy or Panic! at the Disco album, regardless of how mainstream those bands might be. So it’s not that I was particularly opposed the sound of The Black Parade, per se, but rather its sound as compared to the sound of earlier releases.

On the bright side, this is one of the first albums I’ve written about in this blog whose lyrics didn’t disappoint me. There’s some very impressive vocab choices (some examples–”penitence”, “squeamish”, “contrition”). And pretty much every song has at least one really well-crafted lyrical moment (some more examples–”You play ring around the ambulance” from “House of Wolves”; “If you could coddle the infection/They could amputate at once/You should have been/I should have been a better son!” from “Mama”).

But the music, on the other hand, is far from ideal. There’s a jumpy, grating drum line that drags through the whole album, making one song blend into the next. The guitar is undefined and chaotic; every song sounds mashes together, like there’s too much music and every guitar line is piled on top of another guitar line, fighting to be the dominant line. And here’s the kicker: the drawn-out, overly-heartfelt, ’80s rock vocals and the ubiquitous power chords make the album sound, most likely contrary to the band’s intentions, as though it was recorded as a tribute to Bon Jovi circa 1986 (around the time when they released Slippery When Wet, the album containing “You Give Love a Bad Name”, and “Wanted Dead or Alive”.

To sum up, The Black Parade is listenable. Not horrible, not wonderful. My main complaints are this: that the band abandoned its trademark screams for a sound more akin to ’80s hair-band rock, and that the music sounds more like a group of boys got together and made as much noise as possible on various instruments than a genuine composition. But if you’re willing to overlook the shortcomings, and listen to a mediocre recording with a couple redeeming lines, The Black Parade wouldn’t be the worst choice.

This week I want to talk about Modest Mouse’s latest release, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. But before I do, I feel that I have to come clean about something. I’m not one of those die-hard Modest Mouse fans that followed them long before they had any mainstream success. I hopped on the bandwagon after the release of Good News For People Who Like Bad News. Even now, I own most of it’s earlier releases, but I would only really call myself a fan of Modest Mouse circa 2004 and later.

That said, in many ways I wasn’t disappointed by We Were Dead, which was released on March 30 this year. At least, I wasn’t disappointed in it the first time I listened to it. Even the second time through, I appreciated the arrangement and some of the lyrics. But then I listened to it a third time.

The album opens with “March into the Sea”. After an odd and half-hearted accordion intro, the grunge guitar, coupled with front man Isaac Brock chuckling throatily to the beat of the song, draws in the listener. The sound itself lives up to the band’s precedent. What I realized the more I listened, though, was that the lyrics fell short. Unable to follow the plot of the song by just listening to it, I Googled the lyrics. (Click here to view the lyrics of every song on We Were Dead.) “March into the Sea” opens like this: “If food needed pleasing/You’d suck all the seasoning off/Lick it off!” The lyrics that follow are even more muddled and nonsensical. A sampling:

“I’ll be beating my heart’s record for speeding
I’ll be beating the record for heart skipping

Oh, the doggone tails, well they fell off
But we just turned back, marched into the sea
..Well, we just turned around, marched into the sea

Take all that you need
Let my saxophone free
Till it’s gone, till it’s gone

Well, this coffee you bleed
Like the leaves of a tree
Ahaha! Ahaha!

Let’s shake hands if you want
But you– both hands are gone!
Oh, haha! Haha!”

Admittedly, most of the songs are not quite as disjointed as the first one. Not lyrically, anyway. Most of the album is much like everything else Modest Mouse has released–a jaded and cynical collection of melancholy musings. The only novelty that We Were Dead adds to the repertoire is an abundance of ship imagery. I don’t mean to imply that this is entirely bad. I like their earlier work, and would have been disappointed if I couldn’t see any of the band I knew coming through in the most recent release. But as my roommate (whom I look to as my musical guru) said, “they’re capitalizing on the image they’ve made for themselves. . . they have this niche that they’ve carved out, and their new album should do something new, not just re-do what they’ve already done.”

“It’s still good, it’s just not interesting or novel.”

That pretty much sums up the accomplishments of We Were Dead. The band certainly succeeded at perpetuating the sound that made them famous, but fell short of achieving anything noteworthy with their new album.

I assumed that the album title was mostly just a nod to the album’s nautical theme. But the more I listened to it, I began to wonder if it was a little more prophetic. If the album itself were a ship, it certainly did sink in a slew of mediocre reviews (click here for the Rolling Stone Review, and here customer reviews from Amazon.com). Could it have been more of an admission that whatever well of creativity that was tapped during the production of Good News ran dry when the band set out to record We Were Dead?

Until the release of their new CD, Neon Bible, I was never a huge Arcade Fire fan. When my iTunes was set to ‘Shuffle’, and one of its songs came on, I didn’t skip over it, but I never used to make the conscious decision to listen to it. The only reason I even obtained a copy of Neon Bible is that my roommate has always been a much bigger fan than I am, and she bugged me for weeks to give Neon Bible a try.

I was hooked by the time the second track was over. My iPod has been constantly looping Neon Bible for the past week, and I’m still finding new things to love. According to the band’s Myspace site, Neon Bible boasts the use of a pipe organ, a Hurdy Gurdy, a military choir, and a Hungarian orchestra.

The eclectic nature of the composition of the tracks reflects the eclectic nature of the composition of the band itself. Arcade Fire is comprised of seven members who came together over a period of time from various backgrounds, and somehow managed to congeal themselves into a band with one comprehensive sound. (Click here for a link to a very artfully written biography of the band by Alex Neal–definitely more entertaining than any bio I would try to recreate.)

I spent some time reading reviews written by other people for this post. The general consensus seems to that Neon Bible doesn’t quite live up to the high standards set by Funeral (their first album) or even The Arcade Fire EP. (Click here for the Rolling Stone review–it does a good job of summing up the majority of the complaints lodged against Neon Bible.) I’ll even admit that the critics raise a few good points. After reading over and over again that the reverb was excessive, I’ve started to notice that some of the lyrics and melodies would be a lot cleaner without it. But even though I have to (grudgingly) admit that Neon Bible is not the perfect album, I can’t say that that admission really affects my love for it.

My roommate (the die-hard Arcade Fire fan I mentioned before) said this about the new album: “It’s kind of gloomy and overdone, I guess, but who cares, if it’s the kind of CD that makes people want to listen to it over and over again?” As far as Neon Bible is concerned, I’m in complete agreement with her. There are a lot of albums that may be catchy or fun to listen to, but their flaws outweigh their benefits. No so for Neon Bible. There are definitely problems with the album, but the end result is a beautiful, gothic album that I can’t force myself to stop listening to.

My first post in this blog was a long rant about all the bad albums that came out last year. While I stand by the claim that 2006 was a bad year for music, there were a few exceptions. I was planning on writing about Forgive Durden tonight, but I was walking home from work a few minutes ago with my iPod on suffle, and a song from the most recent Decemberists’ CD came on. It reminded me how much I love their new CD, and I decided to save Forgive Durden for another time, and talk about The Crane Wife.

The Decemberists (click here to view their website) are no longer the relatively-obscure band that they were when they released their first three CDs. (They’ve become so mainstream that some of their songs are even played in Starbucks.) Their first three CDS (Castaways and Cutouts, Her Majesty the Decemberists, and Picaresque) were released on the small, independent label Kill Rock Stars, but The Crane Wife was released on Capitol Records, making it their first major-label album. But for those who still don’t know who the Decemberists are, I can’t think of a more fitting description than Stephen Colbert’s, who called the band an example of “hyper-literate prog rock.”

The two things I appreciate most about the Decemberists are their amazing vocabulay (notable on The Crane Wife is the inclusion of the word ‘dirigible’) and the subject matter of their songs. In this second category, The Crane Wife may not have quite lived up to the other albums, but the songs did contain some interesting plot lines. The Crane Wife, more than their other albums, has certain overriding themes that reappear. The title comes from multiple tracks based around the old Japanese folktale about a man who falls in love with a crane who has changed into a woman. The theme of war is also more prevelent on this CD than on previous ones.

Although there are certain aspects of this album that are not quite perfect (some of the plot lines of the songs are a bit stale- like “O Valencia!”, which basically retells West Side Story) it nevertheless is an amazing addition to the esteemed repitoire of the Decemberists. It compliments their other offerings well. There is even a song included on The Crane Wife (“The Perfect Crime”) that finishes the story started in “Bagman’s Gambit”. In a year of disappointing music, I am happy to report that I can still count on the Decemberists to release an amazing and very satisfying album.

When I first heard Billy Talent’s latest offering, Billy Talent II, I was not impressed. The first CD the band released under the name Billy Talent is still one of my all-time favorite albums, but I found Billy Talent II to be a disappointing follow-up. The songs were undeniably catchy, but the lyrics alternated between being cliche and not making any sense. One of the most obvious differences between the two albums was the significantly greater number of songs about girls and love on Billy Talent II. Billy Talent I is full of tracks written about uncommon subjects (how lies can overtake a life, the laments of an aging prostitute, the willingness to sacrifice everything for an immortal reputation). Billy Talent II, on the other hand, includes too many love songs. The songs that aren’t about love try too hard to be clever, either coming off as too obvious or too senseless.

But even though I was disappointed in its new album, I still went to the Billy Talent show at El Corazon on 4/3 (click here to see upcoming Billy Talent shows, and here to see upcoming shows at El Corazon). And even though the show was packed with songs from the new album, Billy Talent’s stage presence made up for any shortcomings in the music itself.

Billy Talent is a Canadian band, which, according to the lead singer of Cancer Bats, one of the openers, is “fucking huge in Canada.” He proceeded to remind us how lucky we were that we were seeing it at such a small and intimate venue. Tickets for this show were only $12, but the price of tickets for Billy Talent’s shows in Canada cost over $40. After seeing the show, I would have gladly payed $40 or more.

The band had inexhaustible energy, which was most apparent in lead singer Benjamin Kowalewicz. Ben wasn’t stationary for a second of the show, even though the band played a long set and an encore. Plus, in between songs, Ben achieved the perfect balance of joking with the audience and telling personal anecdotes and just introducing the next song. Most impressively, he stopped a song right in the middle when he saw a girl fall down in the mosh pit, and refused to resume singing until he had ensured that she was okay.

So even though I was originally unimpressed with the latest offering from Billy Talent, I find myself listening to Billy Talent II more now that I have seen it performed live. The personality of the band, and of Ben Kowalewicz especially, endeared my to Billy Talent even more than I already had been.

In the last year of so, I’ve noticed a disappointing trend: that nearly every new album released by a band that I had previously adored, failed to meet even half of the expectations that I’d set for it.  Of course, there were a few exceptions to this rule, but for the most part, bands seemed to be floundering where once they had flourished.  I want to devote this blog to my own personal reviews of new albums of old favorites and new talents.

Since this is my first post, I’m going to start with a brief reminer of some of the disappointments that inspired this blog.

I eagerly awaited the release of A.F.I.’s decemberunderground.  Even though Sing the Sorrow had definitely tended more towards pop than their earlier albums, I grew to really appreciate it, after my initial shock.  I expected decemberunderground to be even more mainstream, however I was shocked at the degree of the transformation.  The redeeming factor of Sing the Sorrow was that its lyrics remained original, despite the pop beat.  decemberunderground, on the other hand, combined a pop beat with trite lyrics (ex. “the heavens bowed before him/simply a look can break your heart.”)

I was even more excited about Brand New’s release of The Devil and God are Raging Inside of Me.  Their first album, Your Favorite Weapon, though the music was a little repetitive and some of the songs were filled with too much rhyme and cuteness, promised potential.  Their second album, Deja Entendu, more than fulfilled that promise.  Musically, they had matured drastically, and they moved past the overriding theme of their first album (girl trouble) to explore less common story lines (a young boy caught between his love for a girl and his fear of her sexual experience, a man contemplating taking advantage of a drunk girl he met at a bar, performers disillusioned with their craft.)  Brand New certainly changed their sound for their most recent release- unfortunately, they wrote every song to sound like a funeral dirge and wrote a whole collection of songs that were pretty much all about being disappointed in yourself, and acknowledging that everyone else was disappointed in you as well.

Other disappointements from 2006, as well as some raves and more recent reviews will follow in later posts.