Fucked Up: Brilliant punks or flawed rockers?

Fucked Up: more than the greatest punks?

If an album is one of the best hardcore punk albums you've ever heard, does that also make it a great album? On the one hand, the record is clearly at the top of its game. But on the other hand, sticking to well-established guidelines is self-limiting.

I can't quite figure out how to answer that question, but it's the essential dilemma I'm facing in writing about Toronto band Fucked Up's new hardcore epic David Comes To Life, which was released on Matador last week.

This much is true: David Comes to Life is about as good and enjoyable a hardcore punk record as I've heard in a while. The three-guitar group has done a lot of growing up (despite a name that ensures they're only going to be taken so seriously). The 18-song, nearly 80-minute long epic is full of terrific riffs and and rhythms. Arrangements on the record are masterfully done. From the haunting piano and guitar build of the first track, "Let Her Rest," you can tell you're listening to something entirely different, something more than a bunch of amped up guitar anthems.

New Beck-produced album coming from Stephen Malkmus

Malkmus and The Jicks

Though it's music critic heresy to say it, I'm going to:  I really don't think Pavement's first record, Slanted and Enchanted, is all that good. In fact, I think Pavement got better with every album, though Terror Twilight might be an exception (it's not quite as strong as Brighten the Corners).

Why is that relevant? Stephen Malkmus, who co-founded the band with a guy named Spiral Stairs, reputedly took more and more control of the band until it was practically his solo project. It was a good move. Malkmus had a lot more talent than the other guys. For further evidence, one only need listen to the four albums he's released under his own name (and alternately with a band called The Jicks).

The Antlers outdo the hipster crowd with Burst Apart

The Antlers: not hipsters or lumberjacks

Readers1 may have figured out by now that I'm not a big fan of hipsters or hip. Every time I listen to something by a Brooklyn band these days, I brace myself for the usual cascade of disappointment, bewilderment and rage. So much of the Williamsburg scene seems like empty posturing and hapless harmonizing.

So I was surprised to find that I really enjoy Brooklyn-based The Antlers' new record, Burst Apart. I've only listened a few times through but haven't been able to pull myself away.

The trio -- singer guitarist Peter Silberman, drummer Michael Lerner and keyboardist, etc, Darby Cicci -- has put together a really terrific album of atmospheric songs composed of everything from reverberating guitar chords to shimmering electro-key effects, longing trumpet calls and dance beat drums, churning through a lot of different sounds but never straying far from a key aesthetic that seems all their own. 

Danger Mouse's 'Rome' is a fair tribute to that old Spaghetti Western sound, if you're into that kind of thing...

White, Jones, Danger Mouse and Luppi explore the sounds
of the Spaghetti Western in Rome.

Danger Mouse is arguably the most important producer of the last 10 years. After landing on the map with his Jay Z/Beatles mashup "The Grey Album," Danger Mouse has been the sound behind some pretty big records: The Gorillaz' Demon Days, Gnarles Barkley's St Elsewhere, Damon Albarn's The Good the Bad and the Queen, Beck's Modern Guilt and the Black Keys' breakthrough Attack & Release, not to mention his other projects like his collaboration with Sparklehorse and The Shins' James Mercer, Broken Bells.

What Danger Mouse has excelled at is giving these bands and other projects an amazing sound. Danger Mouse records have an unmistakable cinematic atmosphere -- they sound like big productions that fizzle and pop over the airwaves from some swinging hip time of the '60s of our imagination. In an era of constant nostalgia and digital recordings, it's a sound that lends these records a classic and timeless feel, a sort of audial legitimacy.

Fucked Up grows up?

Just a quick post to share this: Fucked Up, the hardcore punk band, has a new video promoting their upcoming Matador record David Comes To Life. It's 10 minutes long and pretty entertaining. It's clearly trying to make the case to listeners that outgrew punk a long time ago, that the band has done something quite a bit more interesting. I think the video works. I actually find myself eager to hear what the new record sounds like, and I'm not a fan of the band.

Check it out:

RANT: Why Fleet Foxes drive me nuts

Stephen Bishop's guitar is about to get what's coming to it courtesy of Bluto.

It's nothing personal, but I hate Fleet Foxes. To me the Northwest band of bearded bards represents an arm of indie music (no way we can call it rock) that drives me a little nuts.

I've got nothing against beards or acoustic guitars, hippies or harmonizing. But put them all together and it gets a little tedious. From indie darlings like FF to run-away head-scratcher success stories like Mumford & Sons and their Grammy nomination (I mean, WTF?), there's something just plain old fashioned antediluvian about the whole thing. These finger-picking acoustic poseurs are not much more than a museum-piece schtick recycling of the sounds of Alan Lomax.

Beastie Boys: 25 years of the provocative and the pointless

25 years later, The Beastie Boys are still at it.

I like the Beastie Boys. But I have a hard time wrestling with the following question: Why?

A lot of what I like about the band has to do with their place as a constant companion in my junior high and high school years. No one my age disliked the band's 1986 Def Jam debut License to Ill and its anthemic single "(You Gotta) Fight for your Right (to Party)." The Beasties did more to accelerate the rise of hip hop in the suburbs in the late '80s than nearly any other force (Run DMC's Aerosmith collaboration of "Walk This Way" is a close second, though). As a kid, I thought that song -- as stupid as it was -- sounded awesome.