These are Colton’s first impressions of Speak in Code. Read Dan’s here.

Alright Eve 6 fans, get your worn albums out and let’s have a talk.  Oh, look at you, you’ve got the old Eleventeen record?  That’s good, that’s good.  You’ll be the most disappointed of all.

These guys have rounded the bases before, and that 2004 show under the arch was a walk-off home run for the ages.  But don’t come into Speak in Code expecting another dinger.  Or even a ground rule double.  In fact, we should probably get off baseball metaphors altogether before I find a way to use “interleague play.”

I’m talking around the fact that this album sounds different because I’m nervous about how you’ll react.  And as I do, I’m making it sound worse than it is.  So let’s rip off the band-aid:

Eve 6′s sound hasn’t evolved, it’s gotten older.

There is less anger, less violence, less bitterness.  It’s All in Your Head in its sweeter moments was still defiant.  Here, the lyrical passivity of “Situation Infatuation” and “Moon,” though mild, is emphasized in context by the incomplete vigor of “Lion’s Den” and the friendly chords and gentle choruses across the album.  And by whatever general-store toolbag is talking to us in “Trust Me.”  Seriously, it’s like the “Sunset Strip Bitch” himself wrote a song for their album.

That throwback angle keeps working: “B.F.G.F.” might as well be the flipside of the “Think Twice” coin, except (again) this time they play the A-hole they used to cuss out. “Tongue Tied” and “Small Town Trap” introduced us to a kid who’s gonna get a job someday and start singing “Downtown.”  Now for homework, compare and contrast the dream dates of “Everything” and “Superhero Girl.”

Let’s think about the timeline here.  After a seven-year break, Jon Siebels only rejoined the trio in March of 2011, yet is credited as co-writer on most of the tracks.  How fast did these get written?  There were two- and three-year gaps respectively between earlier releases.  It’s not like they haven’t toured recently, either: they’re on the road right now.  (By the by, Matt Bair—who filled in for FOUR YEARS until Siebels signed back on—has no credits on the album and no shout-outs on the Thanks page of the liner.)

I should’ve put all that truth on the rocks instead of giving you my feelings straight.  Look, there’s good here, it’s just not where my mind states.  I love “B.F.G.F.” (or, as it streams on Billboard, “BFDG”), which is a half-step in a different direction and would be an excellent song for any band; it just happens to be Eve 6 adding their stylistic touches.  They made a good choice releasing “Lost & Found” to fans before the lead-off single “Victoria,” because while both rock, the former is one of my favorites here.  My number one overall goes to the Sugi Tap adaptation “Pick Up the Pieces,” which I remember hearing live in 2008.

Truth is, Speak in Code does seem destined to grow on me.  The alt-sick beats and spry wordplay that won me over are still here, with a bass that carries tunes better than most, even though most bassists don’t sing.  I flinched pretty hard when I heard a subtext of “life’s not so bad” in the lyrics and felt the melodies undercut by easy spirits, because that’s a change.  But Eve 6 will stay in heavy rotation for the next few weeks, and I’ll probably be fully on board by mid-May when we get into interleague play.  Count it!

Dutch post-rock crew All Shall Be Well has announced the winner of the Storytellers contest I told you about.  I hope some of you submitted!  This is an exciting project, and I encourage all of you to follow along at the band’s website, where they will be posting updates over time to “make the songwriting process very transparent” as they work towards their next album.  Fans of music with heart (as opposed to mass-produced pop) and fans of artistic pursuits of all kinds should take advantage of this chance to get insight into the process of writing a soundtrack song based on a short story.  Since the band will be detailing their own progress, the next update you’ll see on this page will probably be a review when the new album is released late this year.

See the announcement at All Shall Be Well dot NL and follow the band via your favorite social network.  Don’t forget to name your price for their first release, ROODBLAUW, on bandcamp, or stream and download 30-second compositions at soundcloud!

And, just to be clear: “the 90′s” aren’t a genre.

I point this out because it seems to be the only label anyone could find for homegrown favorites The Dirty Dishes.  A quartet with bona fides from Berklee College of Music, the band first came to my attention when I saw them open for Autolux in August 2010.  Lead singer and guitarist Jenny Tuite had me clinging to her siren voice while waves of rock, metal, and fuzz buffeted me from all sides; and there were shipwrecks to show.  Later, at their merch booth, I got to chat with Socrates Cruz, a Harvard grad and local musician and music promoter who at that time was running an underground concert venue out of his Allston home, where The Dirty Dishes were repeat performers.  Apparently they had a serious following, only about a year and a half since playing their first show.

So here’s what I came home with that night:

The Dirty Dishes - In The Clouds EP (2009)

The ’09 debut EP that they refer to as In the Clouds features arpeggiated riffs, fierce drumming, and a healthy mix of cleanliness and dirtiness.  Plus, the breakdowns are wicked fun.  (I’ve applied for a student permit for saying things like “wicked pissah” and order “cawwwfee” at Dunkin Donuts, but the ID hasn’t come yet.)  But through it all, Tuite’s plush, vespertine melodies pass undisturbed, as if taking no notice of their chaotic surroundings.

Have you ever been on an airplane with a veteran pilot who flies you smoothly through a thundercloud?  You can see the dark and lightning but can’t feel the turbulence.  That’s what it’s like to crawl inside her vocals.  Of course, as the band plays on, you’re welcome at any time to grab a parachute and jump, taking your chances in the thin air.  Sometimes you’ll get the clouds, sometimes you’ll get the storm.

If you want to know how that feels, you’ve got two options: take a listen at their bandcamp, or read the reviews.  Let’s see what those say.  Apparently these guys are RIYL… Smashing Pumpkins, Pavement, Deftones, My Bloody Valentine, Stone Temple Pilots, Dinosaur Jr., Nirvana, or Fugazi.  Catch the common thread?  That’s right, The Dirty Dishes sound exactly like the whole 90′s!  (This is my sarcastic face.)

We resume the story.  The band was pretty pleased working with prolific mixing engineer Keith Freund (founder of Fix Your Mix), and would again, but was less pleased about recording pell mell in various basements and sometimes in the back of a van.  For their next effort, they wanted the full studio experience, and a $1,700 Kickstarter campaign helped make that dream come true.  Touring, including trips outside Massachusetts whenever possible, never really took a backseat, and The Dirty Dishes’ following continued to expand.  The only signs of growing pains were a change in drummer (the great Mike Thomas replacing the great Kevin Lynch) and a hold put on Tuite’s solo project, Cloud Cover.

The next time I saw them play was August 2011, though I wish I hadn’t waited so long.  (By the way, it’s easy to get fooled into thinking these guys are just “a shoegaze band” when you see them live, because that’s exactly what Tuite does.  But the rest of the band does not hesitate to rock, and their music is so much deeper than that.)  After the show I had no trouble finding guitarist and synth player Alex Molini outside the venue, where I congratulated him for a solid show (there was a hi-five involved) and asked when we’d see new material in disc form.  He said all the tracks had been laid down but that they had no idea how long it would take to finish producing.

The answer came in the winter.  I preordered ASAP, giving happily when asked to name my own price.  Finally, earlier this month, a bundle of joy appeared on my doorstep.

The Dirty Dishes - The Most Tarnished Birds EP (2012)

The Most Tarnished Birds (bandcamp) doubles The Dirty Dishes’ published catalog from five songs to ten.  Track 1, “Hush”, fits perfectly with what came before.  There’s wind, there’s hail.  There’s an occluded front.  All of nature seems poised to unleash itself upon you; and it does. Later, in “Break”, you have almost no chance of finding the elusive 5/8 beat and must hold on tight—because whether you know it or not, you’re only in the eye.

The band also advances their art and explores new musical territory.  “Gaze” lets Tuite freak us out just a little bit as her glossy voice begins to creak and succumb to the eerie guitar, playing on all the trust we’ve built up as that voice guided us through storms past.  Its chorus, along with several other songs on the EP, features melody of a more traditional rock style than most of In the Clouds.  “Bloom” and “Blur” actually come across as potentially accessible to a much-expanded market.  These encroach on the kind of dream pop made profitable by The Silversun Pickups and others, perhaps including recently the very digital M83.  By the numbers, the songs on The Most Tarnished Birds average around 3:28, some thirty seconds shorter than the debut EP and perfectly scaled for radio.

Of course, we’re still kept on our toes.  Just as the earlier “In the Clouds” (the song) tripped up stoners with an abrupt cutoff, perhaps heralded by the mid-song lyric “But then you’ll bolt awake,” here the unprepared get shaken by the surprise psychedelic freakout bridge in “Bloom”.  There are a lot of clever elements to catch on repeated listens, from Jay Marcovitz’s bass ranging from sweet to static, to little bits of taped sounds, to the cheeky self-reference near the top of the album when the siren sings, “We’re in the clouds now.”

Tomorrow I’ll be at another Dirty Dishes show as the open for Cloud Nothings.  Already this month, the Boston group has played three sets at SXSW (their third appearance at that festival, if I’m not mistaken)—including one as part of Cruz’s “Boston in Austin” showcase—and seven other shows across six other states.  Not bad for a local act!  But, especially with the networking opportunities SXSW represents, there’s a palpable hope in this town that The Dirty Dishes aren’t going to be local for long.  They’re ready for success on a grander scale, and we might not be able to contain them for much longer.  One way or another, they’re bursting out of Boston.

Public service announcement courtesy of EarnThis.net!

The short version: a talented new indie band from the Netherlands is now accepting short story submissions so that they can pick one and write a soundtrack for it.  Read their official announcement here and see details below.

~

All Shall Be Well (And All Shall Be Well And All Manner Of Things Shall Be Well)… is a long name for a band.  Those words were said to have been spoken by God to a 14th-century mystic named Julian of Norwich.  “Mystic” is a good word for describing the sounds on the band’s 2011 debut album, ROODBLAUW, available for name-your-price download at their bandcamp.  Go ahead and stream it there, and also check out their one music video, which right around 3:15 starts doing one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in a music video.  If you’re down with high-quality album packaging, you can also check out their limited-edition 40-page booklet and cd, which can find its way to America for around $20 all told.

Even for a fan of the instrumental post-rock genre like myself, comparisons to Explosions in the Sky seem unavoidable here.  The style is very much the same; “sedate” is not the right word, since songs tend to peak at gale force, but there is nothing jarring or angular.  Dynamics transition smoothly over long periods of time and vamps ensconce you like warm blankets.  The biggest selling point of All Shall Be Well to me is that they are essentially unknown, which means music fans get that exciting opportunity not only to discover something new but even to touch it and become a part of it.

You didn’t write Friday Night Lights.  (H.G. Bissinger, if you’re reading, please comment.)  Explosions in the Sky probably won’t ever write a soundtrack to your story.  But All Shall Be Well will.  And how many submissions do you think they’ll get?  If their video has 4,500 views on YouTube, and each fan has watched it X times, and only Y% of fans will try submitting anything, and you can write better than half those guys anyway…

So, find or write a narrative short story of 1,000 words or less, in English or Dutch (just in case), and send it in to storytellers@allshallbewell.nl by Thursday, March 15.  If you get famous off this, make sure to let us know!  And maybe see if you can get an extra free t-shirt for me?

Good luck!

Topping the UK charts is as easy as a² + b² = c².

The Music Information Retrieval (MIR) team at the University of Bristol recently announced to the world that they had devised a mathematical formula that indicates what qualities of a song are important, and to what degrees, in determining whether that song will eventually make it into the top 5 spots of the UK Top 40.  Their research is on display in a very pop form at scoreahit.com.  And in the interest of fairness, you might want to take a glance at how they present themselves before you hear my opinions.

To me, as a lover of music and an acquaintance of the industry, the idea of an equation for success smacks of mythology.  While I recognize that claims of pop music becoming both formulaic and hit-driven are patently true, it’s just as true that not every cookie-cutter record becomes a worldwide bestseller.  I choose to believe that what separates hits from misses, if it is predictable at all, has little to do with song structure.  (It’s probably nothing noble either; I’m thinking along the lines of publicity funding.)

Press coverage, at least what the team links to, has uniformly been reminiscent of Bristol’s official release.  Maybe that’s a comment on journalism.  But, if you’ll follow me through the jump, I’d like to show you the problems I find with this particular study, its results, and its presentation.  In the process, I hope to completely maim your dreams about any holy grail of a Hit Equation.

Philosophy

“What are the features of a perfect hit song?  Is there any equation describing a hit?  Are there any features which are changing importance through the ages?”

Armed with 23 “features” by which to describe a song, the MIR team sought to answer these questions.  Their approach was to see which of these features—danceability, loudness, harmonic simplicity, etc.—were prominent in UK Top 40 songs since 1960, then to find trends.  Specifically, trends that distinguish between the top 5 spots and the bottom 10 spots.  No distinctions were made based on genre or song style except as captured by these features: that is, the presence of a ballad at #1 was taken as a sign that a top 5 song ought to be slow.  If #2–5 were dance and rock tracks, then the team’s math would suggest that a top-5 song should actually be fast, but the conflict between #1 and the others would be interpreted as a signal that speed doesn’t matter as much as other features might.

Averaging out qualities across the top 5 like this (although, it’s important to note that they are not literally taking an average! see below for more on their fancy math) is perhaps okay for a first attempt.  In a thorough analysis, I’d like to imagine that the public has some desire to keep, let’s say, one ballad in the top 10 or so at all times, so that ballads compete against each other for dominance but not against the rest of the charts.  If anything, they would have a separate equation for themselves.  You could say the same thing about a country song, or a few club tracks: not all records are competing for the same spot in our hearts!

Features

If you had to name just 23 things that separate a classic from total garbage…

Scratch that.  What if you only had to name 11?  The Bristol bunch irritates me by misrepresenting their set of features.  Let me list for you ten of the qualities they kept in mind:

• Loudness Variation
• Non-Harmonicity
• Tempo > 190bpm
• Tempo 170–189bpm
• Tempo 150–169bpm
• Tempo 130–149bpm
• Tempo 110–129bpm
• Tempo 90–109bpm
• Tempo 70–89bpm
• Tempo < 70bpm

Did you catch what happened there?  It was subtle.  Scientists are subtle like a fox.  (If you don’t know, by the way, bpm is “beats per minute”—how many times you tap your toe.)  So, how many features did I just list: three or ten?  They play a similar trick with time signature and with the length of a song to get up to “23.”

Subdividing features, while not an entirely rotten practice, is something the MIR team did to cover up a more serious shortcoming of their model.  The Hit Equation scores a song linearly in each feature.  If algebra class was a long time ago, let me explain what that means: according to the Hit Equation, if being loud is good, then being louder is better.  Without limit.  Holding all else equal, a song that breaks your eardrums is king.  Even if it doesn’t score well elsewhere!  A linear model is one that sees some features as more important than others, but one that cannot admit a “sweet spot” in any feature.  It’s pure min/maxing.

By breaking up, say, tempo into eight features, the team was able to force a sweet spot.  If “Tempo 130–149bpm” scored best, then that’s where a song wanted to be.  There are eight other features that were not subdivided, which means no sweet spot.

One other comment here.  The website is very good about showing in detail how a song’s “high-level features” such as Non-Harmonicity were defined mathematically.  (It’s complicated but it works!)  Two of them, however, Energy and Danceability, were extracted from a song information database run by The Echo Nest, who does not publicize their definitions.  These features are not derived in a straightforward way, and whether they are trustworthy or not, it’s frustrating to be denied access to their real meaning.

Science

How music works?

I told you these guys weren’t just taking an average.  What are they doing?

The MIR team explains their technical method: machine learning based on an application of Tikhonov regularization known as a Time-Shifting Ridge Regression (TSRR).  Whoa, big words!  Don’t worry, yours truly happens to be a scientist, and this part actually turns out to be kosher.

TSRRs are good things.  Using all of the UK Top 40 since 1960 as the input to “train” their equation is a good thing.  It means that a computer gets to look at all those songs, knowing which ones actually made it to the top 5, and figure out what qualities must have been important.  The smart, hard-working computer spits out an equation that can then be used to predict how successful a new song might be, based on how it fits into the picture of all these other hits through the years.  With no scientific caveats, the Bristol bunch was good up to the point of generating their Hit Equation (v.s. and v.i. all of my non-scientific comments).

Note [Edited Feb 23, 2012 by the author]

Previously, at this point in the article, I alleged a heavy criticism at the MIR team based on my own faulty assumptions about their method.  For this I apologize to all those involved in the project.  To be clear, I had stated that the Hit Equation trained their TSRR with all of their song data from the past 50 years, then applies the resulting equation to the same set of songs.  This is false.  Each prediction made by the Hit Equation is on the basis of the preceding data, i.e., what songs charted earlier in time than the one being scored.  Only after a prediction is made in this way, and added to the team’s running Results, is the actual success of that song taken into account, modifying the formula as appropriate so that it can be applied to future songs.

The Perfect Song

One cool thing the Hit Equation manages to do is evolve through time.  Because of the power of the TSRR method, the Bristol bunch is able to produce an equation that depends on what year and month you’re looking at, which accommodates the changing taste of the public.

(They made a YouTube video that shows the importance of each feature as it changes over the years.  I’d like to point out, as you watch, that Energy has always been a detractor.  The Hit Equation predicts that the public has been staunchly opposed to energetic music at all times.)

But let’s jump to today.  As of the beginning of 2012, what makes a great song?  According to the Hit Equation, the ideal top-5 hit is…

• loud, danceable, and over 190bpm, but crucially must be low in energy;
• non-harmonic (lots of “noise” outside of the dominant chord structure) but in a major key;
• lasts between 6 minutes 15 seconds and 8 minutes 44 seconds;
• and has a tertiary time signature, i.e., you tap your toes three or six times for every time you bob your head.

Huh, come to think of it, that describes just about all of my favorite songs of the last year!  Thanks, scoreahit.com!

Taking the Hit Equation for a Test Drive

The team has designed a free app that allows you to name almost any recorded song, or even upload one of your own, and see how it scores using their formula.  Let’s see what it says about the best-selling songs in the UK of all time:

Some might say that the bestselling singles of all time are likely to be exceptions to the rule.  I’d counter that an exceptional song that follows the rules is likely to sell more copies than an exceptional song that breaks them all, since this is a popularity contest.  The MIR team mentions, on this point, that the Hit Equation by design predicts that novelty is a bad thing and that songs breaking the mold will flop, which is certainly true the vast majority of the time.

But that’s not all: they have at least two more excuses for why some of the bestselling singles of all time would score so low.  First, they can’t be held responsible for charity releases, such as the first two in my table there.  Their sales are surely somewhat less contingent on their musical qualities.  Second, the app grades all songs, regardless of release date, on the basis of the end-of-2011 version of the Hit Equation.  This is despite the fact that they prided themselves on an equation that evolves through time, and despite the fact that they grade the songs you input by accessing information about them from a database which also contains the songs’ release dates.  Oh.

Meanwhile, if you’re wondering what score out of 12 is needed to qualify as a “probable hit,” I’m right there with you, buddy.  All I have to go on is this article which uses the Hit Equation to prove that Bruno Mars should’ve won all those Grammys; the author refers to a score of 7-out-of-12 as “squarely in the ‘Hit’ camp.”  Ignoring for a moment the logical leap that Grammys are awarded based on the particular musical features used by this formula, let’s just try applying it somewhere that it ought to be quite successful.  Here are the scores for the three bestselling singles in the UK of the 2000′s:

For the sake of comparison, here’s a MIDI that I wrote in high school.  It scored a 7.

What a Hit!

Other Bits

I’ve probably gone on long enough already, but inquire within if you’d like to hear more of the fascinating things the Bristol bunch did wrong:

• Presentation.  The songs they label as Expected Hits, Unexpected Hits, and Hidden Gems are all hand-picked samples that construe themselves as typical representatives of those classes of songs.
• “Interesting” results.  Conclusions they choose to highlight include that the rise in popularity of danceable songs coincided with the end of the Disco era and that “music of all qualities is getting louder.”  (Surprise!)
• Choice of features.  Unable to translate these qualities into math, the MIR team chose to assume that the popularity of a song has utterly no dependence on the quality of a singer’s voice, the instrumentation, the song structure (e.g., presence of a chorus), or the lyrics.  Among other things.
• Confirmation bias.  A study predicated on the feeling that “all today’s songs sound the same” provides data indicating, actually, a remarkable amount of novelty and variance, and fails to state this among its conclusions.
• Binning.  This is a statistics issue, but the way they subdivided features like tempo and the way they chose to compare #1–5 on the charts against #30–40 were poorly motivated and likely became sources of error.
• Honesty.  Many of my complaints might be responded to when a formal scientific paper is produced, but it is frankly improper conduct that the team has made an entire website and strongly publicized their project before writing such a paper and making it available.  [Edited Feb 23, 2012 to add: My point in this bullet may be overly harsh; my feeling on the matter is colored by a particular recent uproar in my own field of study.]

Forever to Seek the Grail

Where I choose to place my trust

In May of 1988, a ridiculous novelty single called “Doctorin’ the Tardis” ran to #1 on the UK charts by copy-pasting liberally from already-popular songs.  Months later, the artists (who recorded under many names but are best known as the KLF) published the book pictured above, from which I made the word-cloud at the top of this post.  It’s long out of print, but you can easily google for the full text.

The Manual explained “How to have a number one the easy way,” and went into elaborate detail about how to steal material, get your sound engineer to actually write your song for you, and focus on publicizing the heck out of your song long before you’ve even recorded it.  It’s a very tongue-in-cheek book and a very British book, but I have more faith in the effectiveness of its methods than I do in the Hit Equation.

If you want to find the formula for success in the music industry, ask a successful producer.  They know.  And they do not have any formulas plastered on their wall.  If you want to conduct a pop psychology study, don’t brag about your math and make a website with a “/science” subpage.  The public is very gullible, and will believe anything you say because science has a good reputation.

And if you want to put my MIDI on a CD and sell it in stores, knock yourself out.  It’s apparently a hit waiting to happen.

When I saw Dan’s predictions, I felt compelled to follow up with a batch of my own.  But I knew I had to one-up him somehow, so I went for the old snazzy-synonym-in-the-title trick.  Works every time.  I’m gonna classify these as “Temerarious (But Not Lunatic).”

I predict that, in 2012…

1. Five different dance albums will reach the number-one spot on Billboard, and one of them will hold it for two (or three) weeks.
2. The video game industry — and reviewers — will take Naughty Dog’s challenge seriously and begin building a new age of story-based gameplay.
3. If there’s a slow news day and no elderly royals are on their deathbeds, Kate Middleton will divorce her husband.
4. In the mode of Rocky Balboa and Live Free or Die Hard, we’ll receive word of another manly reload in the making with a title that distracts from the age of the franchise.  I’d probably guess Lethal Weapons if it weren’t for this, which may or may not end up with a number in its name.
5. Equestrian events at the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London will be delayed to the point of infuriation by rainfall and fog.
6. There will be a movement on Twitter and Facebook suggesting that Americans should be allowed to cast their votes for president via Twitter and Facebook.  Many will sign the online petitions, but none of those who do will get out of bed on election day.
7. Six months in, Ashton Kutcher will reveal that his starring role in Two and a Half Men is all part of an elaborate prank for the premiere of a new season of Punk’d.
8. A few progressive American high schools will make available loaner copies of e-books in place of the hard copies for English students with Kindles and Nooks.
9. Taylor Swift will not attempt a nationwide summer tour as she focuses on her acting, which will earn her no accolades whatsoever.
10. Within Q2 of FY2012, Apple will finally top last October’s stock prices and continue rising as Tim Cook finds the secret notes Steve Jobs left hidden around his office: “Northern European indie music,” “All-black exterior,” etc.
11. The minimum latitude at which a person may admit to following NASCAR will jump up to 43 degrees north.
12. Lady Gaga will, by sheer concentrated mystique, form a supergroup including Stevie Nicks, Don Henley, Meat Loaf, and Afrika Bambaataa, but still will not produce a single track as compelling as what Ke$ha recorded into her laptop mic while alone in her bedroom with the lights off.
13. Simon Cowell will leave The X-Factor before its second season to rejoin American Idol, simply because he can no longer abide Steven Tyler as his replacement.
14. “Greece Voted Out of EU” will appear in millions of Google Reader feeds right below The Daily Bunny.  One of those things will be forwarded by thousands.
15. I’ll be one of about 500 people who notice when Spock’s Beard goes into studio with their new lineup; one of about 5,000 who buys tickets to a brief Gatsbys American Dream tour, hopefully with a stop on the eastern seaboard; and one of about 500,000 who hear about it when Eve 6 releases their fourth album.

Look, Jews et al., any occasion you can come up with is fine — Scientologists have Freedom Day to look forward to on the 30th — just find a reason and make sure you’ve got The Whole Shebang ready to tap on New Year’s Eve.  This is the 2011 release from Audiostrobelight, a bunch of energetic speakerbusters from Virginia Beach, and it is going to stay up all night with you.  Remember fun?  Remember loud, dance, party, and rock-out?  Those guys remember you too, and they want you to buy Audiostrobelight’s album.

If you’re too busy to read this article, just check out the band’s own promo.  (Also, quit your job, you’re wasting your life!)  You’ll hear immediately what you can expect from The Whole Shebang: driving pop-punk that’s stuffed to the liner with hype, and not the empty kind.  Every song has that classic tug-of-war between fast, danceable rock and half-time breakdowns when you get to jump up and down and pump your fist and taste the sweat flying off the girls and guys all around you.  Did you see in the promo when they dropped the balloons on the audience, or the confetti and streamers?  If you aren’t into that, we can’t be friends.

“Okay,” you say, “Mr. O.,” because you and I aren’t on a first-name basis, “but the fast electronic dance-rockcore pop-punkadelia scene came and went, and hasn’t been heard from since 2005!  So why make such a big hubbub about one on-the-rise revivalist band?”  Two reasons off the top of my head.  First, I wasn’t done with that scene yet when it died.  Second, Audiostrobelight fits into the leading edge of that movement, not the middle, and looks set to evolve it into something more expansive.

Just check out their line-up:

• Bass, guitar, guitar/keys, drums.  (Ho-hum.)
• Dual vocalists.  (Okay, standard fare for the genre.)
• Electric violin/mandolin.  (Now we’re talking!)

And, since you mention Yellowcard, that’s an apt comparison.  Some of these songs would’ve fit perfectly on Ocean Avenue, and Audiostrobelight also gives us plenty of Fall Out Boy’s Infinity on High, Cartel’s Chroma, and the rowdiest bits of Simple Plan’s No Pads, No Helmets… Just Balls.  But we also get rhythms that sample the escapist banner-waving of Less Than Jake’s ska-born Anthem and the alt-metal demolition drive of The Receiving End of Sirens’ Between the Heart and the Synapse.  Variety is packaged in to keep your body parts moving four or five different ways every song, which adds significantly to The Whole Shebang‘s replay value.  Plus, Yellowcard didn’t have a mandolin.

Combine this ability with the kind of live show that the band themselves describe as “ridiculously debaucherous,” and you can see how, on the strength of their State of the Art EP from 2009, these guys have developed a ravenous fan base who gives them a run for their money in passion.  Along with Warped Tour credentials, Audiostrobelight has opened for Cobra Starship, Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, Anberlin, and the aforementioned Fall Out Boy, to name a few.  While they’re not national headliners yet, take them seriously when they sing, in A Fifth of Feelgood, “This town won’t be the death of me!”  (“This town” being VA Beach, which fits nicely when you remember how Less Than Jake was always repping Gainesville, FL.)

Hey, is that the first lyric I’ve dropped?  Let’s open up these seven tracks.  Because it’s always worth mentioning when a band starts their album with a song called You’re Not Funny, You Stupid Clown.  It’s well positioned: when Audiostrobelight makes it big, you’ll be able to listen back to this one and hear “Give me the chance / Give me the time,” “We ain’t on top but we ain’t bottom,” and “We’re gonna reach for the stars / We’re gonna look past mountains.”  I’d love to see that premonition come true.

A Fifth of Feelgood lays all their cards on the table.  Keys are featured, the violin is used as an effective instrument and never a gimmick, and we get smacked in the face repeatedly by the JE-JUN, JE-JE-JE-JUN, JE-JUN in the bass and drums.  They’re singing the same adolescent dreams that we were crooning along with half a decade ago.  Whether they’re giving a friend a long hard send-off in Anchors Aweigh or begging for another chance with an “old flame” in Argyle, the constant in Audiostrobelight’s pushes and pleas is emotion.  All the bands they learned from used to be called “emo,” didn’t they?

While Drop the Act is the most anthemic shout-along, those last two songs I mentioned might be my favorites.  Argyle gives the band the chance to show that they’re perfectly capable of bringing things down and singing sweetly; they’re just happier when it’s all about “Going pound for pound / I bring the noise like your nightmare sounds.”  And the album closes on a fade-out at the end of Anchors Aweigh with three layered vocal lines carrying three strands of feelings.  Two-man harmonies assure “You’re better off without me” while the lead undercuts the sentiment with “I never want to trace this back / And let the record show I’m happy once again” and the gang vocals chant “Anchors aweigh, my friend!”

Where the f*** are they???

Audiostrobelight caught my attention by throwing back to beloved bands gone by, but what really hooked me was the depth of The Whole Shebang.  Every turn on my iTunes shows new traces of a band I didn’t know they had in them.  Excellent arrangements reward a careful listener, who will find every instrument playing a carefully crafted role to make you answer the call: “Let’s go / Let me see you put ‘em up right now / Tonight we’re gonna have some fun!”

Do yourself a favor this holiday season and pick up a copy for yourself.  The Whole Shebang also makes a great gift for anyone on your list who doesn’t suck.

In 2009, shortly before being absorbed into the same media conglomerate that runs Kim Kardashian’s website, PureVolume gave a big bump to a couple of kids from Tacoma, Washington playing under the moniker He Is We.  Twenty-four hours and tens of thousands of plays later, Rachel Taylor and Trevor Kelly were on someone’s radar.  Because no matter how many indie/emo kids “graduate” and start putting PureVolume in a corner, the leaders of the music industry always save it a dance.  In December of 2010, He Is We’s debut album My Forever was released on Universal Motown.

They go with a modern casual-meets-dirty-hippie look.

For me, it’s tough knowing whether to appraise My Forever as an album or as a collection of songs.  Not that every record needs a unifying concept; but artists are made great in my eyes by their ability to produce a cohesive whole in which it sounds like all the parts grew in the same garden.  He Is We displays a precocious knack for arrangements that bring out the best in every song, with the drawback that the differences between songs are all the more pronounced.

Let’s start with commonalities, to give you a basis.  Lyricist and vocalist Rachel brings a Sara Bareillesque strength and a rock sensibility, like a modern-day Michelle Branch.  (I’m being told that Michelle Branch is still making music.  We’ll see how that pans out for her.)  Tie that in with all the romanticism of a Colbie Caillat or a Taylor Swift and you’ve got… you know, for all the chicks out there on the mic, Rachel might be fitting into her own little slot!  That’s certainly true of her quick poetry: it flows like water, better than anyone else on the pop market.  Rachel’s voice is what defines the sound of He Is We.

The music is based around straightforward, classic song structures featuring whatever instrumentation works on a song-by-song basis.  You’ll hear some songs with a deeper bass than you’d expect, including “And Run”, where the bass is featured and foundational.  Guitars and pianos vie for playing time across the album while multi-tracked vocal harmonies float in the background more often than not.  The use of orchestral strings is effectively tied to the drama of each piece.  Occasional timpanis and concert bass drums give you the impression that there’s actually an orchestra involved, not just a bunch of session violinists.

As much as the diversity of sounds enhances each track, it’s where I start to wonder about the cohesion of My Forever as a whole.  “Love Life”, a slow-and-fast break-up ditty, brings in a brass section for the final minute.  There is exactly one duet, “All About Us”, in which Underoath’s former drummer and “clean vocalist”, Aaron Gillespie, passes verses back and forth with Rachel.  Poor Aaron was replaced when, in August 2011, a new version of the song was released featuring Owl City singing the boy parts.

From the charming lovey-doveyness of “Forever & Ever”, “Everything You Do”, and “Happily Ever After” to the frustrated adolescent stirrings of “Blame It on the Rain” and “Fall”, the overall quality of the writing and production maintains a ready-for-radio standard.  Normally I’d expect track 2 or maybe 3 to be the anchor, ready to hit shelves as the lead single.  Here it’s not so clear.  If anything, I’d expect the sing-along “Happily Ever After”, a manifesto of hopeful love if ever there was one, to be the fan favorite, but it’s all the way back at track 5.  And the bonus acoustic track – which I admit was an eyebrow raiser for me on a debut album – is a reprise of track 4, “And Run”.  It’s hard to grasp the logic behind the sequencing, though I guess it’s a moot point if each song is terrific individually and most iPods are tuned to Shuffle anyway.

So let me get to the one song that is just from a completely different place from the rest.  Right in the middle of the album, before the tunes about being single and after the tunes about being adorable, is a song about a double murder.  “Kiss It Better” tells a story of a vengeance kill after a man’s wife is shot, from the perspective of the surviving subject who is sharing a prison cell with his overwhelming memories.  No reason for the initial action is given.  If we can handle the lyrics, the music itself alternates between sparse acoustics and haunting full-orchestra crescendos.  My impression of the album as a whole would change radically if this emotive elegy were the final track and the final thought we were left with, so different from all that came before.  As it is, the mood it creates so tangibly is difficult to shake when we return to tra la las and oh, oh, ohs.

We can’t know for sure who’s responsible, but I’d like to credit the atmosphere and musical realism of “Kiss It Better” in part to producer Casey Bates, whose work with Pacific Northwest bands like Portugal. The Man and Gatsby’s American Dream I have loved for a long time now.  Casey worked on “Blame It on the Rain” and “Fall” as well.  Aaron Sprinkle, another of Washington’s best producers (see his work with Eisley, Anberlin, Acceptance, etc.), did his magic with “All About Us” and “Prove You Wrong”.

I’m still not sure where Rachel and Trevor were coming from as they pieced together My Forever.  Their artistic focus is something we might get to see develop over time.  But their ability and quality is already ahead of their age.  To find out for yourself, go ahead and stream their whole album for free off MySpace.  Or take a look at their PureVolume, where they’re streaming 40 tracks and giving away eight and where, at the time of this writing, they’re getting ready to ring the bell for their 5,000,000th play.

To the founder of our feast: a piano ditty written at age 16.

Forget everything you know about Vanessa Carlton.  Realistically, forget the one thing you ever knew about Vanessa Carlton – the “da-da-da da-da-da dum” song from those five-year-old Zales commercials.  The voice you heard in “A Thousand Miles” belonged to Carlton, as did the melody; but the orchestra, the overproduction, and the publicity that made us love the song all the way to three Grammy nominations were largely handiwork of hitmaker Ron Fair.  Now forget everything you know about Ron Fair.

What would it sound like if Vanessa Carlton made her own album?

Answering that question required a transformation. Carlton spent two years as a recluse, she says, absorbing and moving internally but not creating much of anything.  Then came the instrumental pieces “that probably no one will ever hear.”  Only when a personal reflection chanced to grow into a fully lyrical song did the veil draw back and the possibilities of a return to the album format as an artistic outlet become possible.

She determined to fund this “arts & crafts” project herself to avoid any label’s influence until it was done.  Under the guidance of voices from the 70′s, she sought to record the entire thing to tape to enable a true classic vinyl experience.  All of the songs were written and arranged by Carlton herself explicitly for this album and never drawn from a well of old material.  This was to be the album she had always wanted to make.

The names and places who contributed to the recording are a cabinet full of gems.  The producer is Steve Osborne, who brought to life Doves’ “Catch the Sun”.  Musicians Patrick Hallahan (My Morning Jacket) and Ari Ingber (The Upwelling) appear as players while the legendary Stevie Nicks – Carlton’s friend, mentor, and occasional collaborator – sequenced the tracklist.  Most of the work was done at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios, while the world-famous Capital Children’s Choir worked at Abbey Road to lend their talents to four tracks.

I guess by now you might be wondering what the album actually sounds like.

Art by Jo Ratcliffe.

Rabbits on the Run kicks off with an unassuming piano line and soon echoed, multitracked vocals are layered on top of it.  Track one is the single , “Carousel”, which features hopeful lyrics, plenty of uplift in the chords, the soft heartbeat of a bass drum, and just a little bit of Osborne’s mellotron that is absolutely flute-like.  At the bridge, “Carousel” opens into a grand canon led by the children’s choir with many of the instruments taking up their parts.  It comes off as charming that this song is centered around a hook that is nothing more than an ascending C-Major scale.

Later songs like “Hear the Bells” build an unabashedly creepy atmosphere.  A rich darkness surfaces and resurfaces throughout the ten tracks, always receding again to a more driving melodic sensibility that faces forward with its chin up.  Gone are the childish attachments and dependencies that haunted older material like “Pretty Baby” and “Rinse”, replaced wholesale by stories of acceptance: of wrongs, of destiny, and of the unknowable.

While an ambient spirit claims the early and late tracks, the same lyrical approach is taken to more rocking and romping tunes in the middle, especially the infectious “Dear California” and follow-up “Tall Tales for Spring”.  “Get Good” stands out to me as a campfire song that begs for a country-style cover.  I’d pay good money to hear what Tim McGraw and his missus could do with that sheet music.

Through the album’s progression, Osborne’s mastery of expansive and engrossing soundscapes shines.  His own instrumental contributions match Hallahan’s in their cleanness and frequent subtlety.  Carlton herself has an effortless, almost conversational voice that is however not the most pure.  (She once said she used to smoke and drink whiskey just to make her sound more “leathery.”)  Some listeners may wish they could hear the vocal qualities of a Carole King or a Norah Jones on some verses, myself included.  But her speech, like her songwriting and fingerwork, is not lacking for beauty; and this is, after all, her record.

Stevie Nicks must have had an easy time choosing the closing track, “In the End”.  Musically, it is a slowed-down sample from “Tall Tales for Spring” that glows with an eerie electricity.  What few words there are come out muted, buried ominously beneath the sounds.  The dearth of lyrics is unsettling in itself, as if the songwriter abandons us to groaning emptiness as the album “disintegrates back into nothing.”

The creative process behind the album fed on inspiration from Richard Adams’s Watership Down, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and the Tolkienian mysticism of the village of Box, Wiltshire, where Real World Studios is located.  Carlton has had an occasionally uncomfortable time promoting the immensely personal album; making the late-night talk show rounds was visibly less enjoyable for her than conducting one-on-one interviews with people who actually remember who she is, and you can see a back-and-forth between these modes in her brief appearance on Fox’s “Good Day LA”

The experience of making Rabbits on the Run was a gift for Vanessa Carlton.  But the album itself was intended for anyone who likes to be wrapped in a blanket of beautiful music; for anyone who misses the classic approach to analog recording; and, of course, for the fans who have stayed with Carlton through her fall from the spotlight and even through her quietest years.  She has a special name for these last ones:

Dear Phantom Friends,

The album, the collaboration, the arts and crafts project that is Rabbits on the Run, is a vault of melodies, philosophies, and questions that will forever preserve the past three and a half years of my life. A chunk of time that has reshaped who I am and has humbled me. The process of making the record was restorative and prickly and shook me out of a ten year slumber. It was also magical. I made this record with a group of artists that I never thought I’d get to work with. On the eve of this release, as I type in to black buttons, and stare at a glowing screen in my hotel room, I feel grateful that I’m able to create music and send it out into the world like some sort of ship on the sea. It is how I connect. It is how I stay alive. I realize now that this record isn’t mine anymore, it belongs to the hearts and brains of those that connect with it. And I humbly hand it over. I hope that it brings you to life in the way that it brought me to life.

Love

Vanessa

And he completely won me over last night. From the broad perspective I’d gained by hearing “Come on Get Higher” on the radio a few times, I was sure he was a pretty boy with a guitar in the vein of, let’s say, Rob Thomas in his solo years. One night in a room with Matt and a sold-out House of Blues full of his best friends has convinced me that he is about as far from that as possible: he’s actually the second coming of Rob Thomas in his Matchbox Twenty years.

Look how sweet he is.

Here’s why I use that comparison. I’ve always felt that the reason Matchbox Twenty enjoyed the enormous success they deserved (with their debut album achieving certified Diamond sales) is because the lead singer and his lyrics were totally swoon-worthy for the chicks, but the band rocked hard and had the respect of men; and with their cross-generational appeal, nobody had any reservations about listening to this band. I believe that Matt Nathanson fits that mold. The female fans aren’t hard to capture when you have such a cute beard and you like to spend your days crooning about love to the tune of your own nylon strings. The boys will sign on for the hard-hitting songs that, to my delight, apparently pervade his body of work, and for his hilarious crowd interaction. Getting the old and the young to come together at table… well, that falls out of a classic pop sensibility in the songwriting.

Matt’s understanding of his diverse musical roots was built into his show. He and his lead guitarist managed a spot-on cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer”. When playing expandable bridges, he gave nods to past and present influences alike by sampling Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, Cee-Lo Green, Demi Lovato, and others, always bringing the crowd along with him. When the whole band was in acoustic mode for a two-song mini-set, Matt decided to scrap whatever was supposed to be the back half in favor of attempting an impromptu rendition of Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” just because he had heard the crowd singing along with it in the set break after the opener. None of his band had rehearsed this song – it’s not in their repertoire – but they played the entire thing, including all lyrics (with full crowd support!), and the lead guitarist was clever enough to put down his instrument, pick up something electric, and completely nail the major solo. It was incredible.

Part of what made that possible, and what makes Matt’s music so much better than I expected, is that he has a band. I have a sort of superstition that I’ve built up overt ime where I avoid artists who play under their own name, because that’s what you do when you “make your own music” and use session players and touring musicians instead of a band who has input into the material. Matt had a bassist, drummer, keyboardist, and guitarist, each of whom played interesting parts. They were not collectively relegated to simple background material designed to put the focus on lyrical melodies and not take too long to write. When the band went into acoustic mode, the bassist went to string bass (which was totally sick on Whitesnake) and the percussionist walked out to the front of the stage and whipped out an everloving djembe.

The inter-song banter was lengthy, made worthwhile by the fact that it was always entertaining and by the full two hours that Matt spent on stage, accounting for only a two-minute turnaround before the encore. He discussed the suggestive nature of a crab singing “Darling it’s better down where it’s wetter”, talked about what it’s like to wake up on Sunday morning next the person you love and realize you’re lying on their devil tail, and dedicated a song to Kim Kardashian’s ass. And I was serious about his hips. The man has a dance-happy lower half, and his legs were wigglin’ and booty was shakin’ through all of his own songs. He even used hip thrusts to help the audience time difficult clapping patterns.

It’s hard for me to remember exactly what I heard, because I was unfamiliar with all of his material before I heard it live last night. (Wikipedia tells me he has seven albums!) But I know that every time I tried to imagine Rob Thomas singing the words, I was pleased. Matt’s voice is a little higher, and in truth his words are less bitter – if he has a “Push”, I’d love to hear it – but his sound is just as edgy and he has the band to back it up. I think he suffers from the fact that there is no “alt” scene anymore, so he gets listed as a pop rock artist and doesn’t get played on as wide a range of stations. But he should.

See, even his former self and bandmates are ashamed to look upon him now.

The bottom line is that this guy is one Santana collaboration away from making me a life-long fan. A song co-written with Mick Jagger à la “Disease” wouldn’t hurt either. He just needs to deny the bright light that will someday call him toward the cozy-as-a-cloud profitability of Adult Contemporary music, try not to ditch his band, and avoid becoming a hollow shell of his former self. Because, you know, I know this one guy who did that.