KMFDM, Enemy (Metropolis Records)
This Hamburg, Germany-based industrial band has always been mandatory listening for safety-pin goths with aircraft-carrier-sized chips on their shoulders. I consider them Kiss for anarchists: crazy hair, piercingly loud fashions, and an unrelenting desire to smash the western world’s end-stage capitalist system. They’ve nailed the aesthetic with rage anthems before (“Free Your Hate” is still my favorite), but can they still compete in these sociopolitical times, which are obviously so [nervous hysterical laughter]? Well, things don’t get started until a few songs in: The rather childish title track sounds like something they thought would sound anthemic but doesn’t, and then comes “Oubliette,” which futzes around with Judas Priest-style riff-metal, which was never their strong suit. But then comes the echo-y, apocalyptic-sounding “L’Etat,” in which they remember that their biggest competitor is Rammstein; it’s one of the best things they’ve ever done. Resident hot chick Lucia Cifarelli steps in to sing the industrial-pop number “Vampyr,” sounding sweet during the verses and demon-rabid on the breaks of course, and — whoa, just hold it right there, they did get a new guitarist, and he can definitely shred. It’s OK! A-
Ben Rosenblum’s Nebula Project, The Longest Way Round (One Trick Dog Records)
Lot of fun, this one (if a bit scattershot with regard to focus), the latest release from award-winning (an ASCAP Young Jazz Composers award and two Downbeat awards, all in 2010) New York City-based pianist, accordionist and composer Rosenblum. Now, with regard to the parenthetical caveat above, there’s nothing inherently wrong with shifting genres and such in order to cover a crazy-wide spectrum of world music, and I’d chalk Rosenblum’s predilection for it to his eye-popping range of experience: He’s played with Rickie Lee Jones, yes, but also Canadian-Indian singer Kiran Ahluwalia and Brazilian hand percussionist/Late Show Band member Nêgah Santos; his influences are deep and varied, from Brazilian forró to Irish reels and jigs to Bulgarian folkloric songs and Dominican merengue. Yes, there’s accordion on here when it fits the mood, but no mood — or flavor of joyful expressionism, let’s say — is off limits, it seems. One minute you’re madly bouncing around in a hydraulically fitted 1964 Impala, the next you’re being treated to some of the most lively post-bop you’ve ever heard. So the verdict? Open minds will absolutely love this. A+
PLAYLIST
A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases
• Alrighty, my fellow cubicle-imprisoned office colleagues, January’s already almost out of the way, won’t be long before we’re all offline at the beach again, so let’s keep the agile AI synergy circling back and pivot to the new albums “hitting the streets” (prolly with nauseating wet flopping sounds) on Jan. 30, reach out if you want to ping my brains out or just network, my DMs are open! Now, folks, we’ve lost a lot of famous rock stars over the last few months, so let’s chat about it. The worst one for me was Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley, a boyhood hero of mine. I’d really been looking forward to the next time his band played at Tupelo Music Hall so I could mooch some passes and have a serious chat with him about maybe letting me try out to be his lead singer, or at least let me get up and sing some Zeppelin songs with him or something; he knew he was a godawful singer and I figured we would have gotten along since he was as much of a jackass as me and took very few things seriously. O Fortuna, guys, but the most recent one was of course Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, a loss that was the talk of social media for days. Funny story about Bob: Back in the mid-Aughts, I was writing a column for a corporate newspaper on the New Hampshire seacoast that’s nowadays mostly digitally distributed and no longer found in your 7-Elevens and such. Anyhow, I’d written a piece about how electronic music was going to take over sooner rather than later (again, this was a long time ago), and the next day, lo and behold, there was an email in my inbox from Weir, whose band Ratdog was in town. He must have been bored in town, because he mansplained around 900 words at me about how “guitar-based rock wasn’t going to go away,” which wasn’t what I’d said at all, so immediately I got defensive, thinking “who is this guy anyway,” because I knew and still know basically nothing about the Dead, and I assumed he was a second-banana guitarist hack they’d hired in the ’80s or ’90s, in other words I didn’t know that he had been an original founder of the Dead when they were still just a silly Mungo Jerry-style jug band. We had words, folks, angry words, like, I told him I thought the Dead were awful and I’d be embarrassed to be in a band like that, so he got mad and wrote back, “Oh definitely, I want YOUR life, sitting in your mom’s basement telling people to [censored] off.” From there it got really ugly — my editor at the time is the only one who saw the whole thing — and he somehow never invited me to Thanksgiving dinner, but all that aside, I feel bad for his fans, RIP Bob, which brings us to the new album from The Soft Pink Truth, titled Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever! It’s an experimental house music side-project from Drew Daniel, who’s half of the San Francisco duo Matmos, but there’s really nothing danceable at all about the first single “Time Inside the Violet”; it’s a bunch of violins and eerie weirdness, but you might love it, I don’t know.
• James Adrian Brown was the guitarist for the now-defunct U.K. alt-rock band Pulled Apart By Horses, and his debut solo LP is Forever Neon Lights. The single “Generator” is pretty neat, built over a noisy, catchy beat a la Wonky-era Orbital.
• French synthpop bro Sébastien Tellier releases his first album in six years, Kiss The Beast, led by the single “Thrill Of The Night (feat. Slayyyter & Nile Rodgers).” It sounds like early Madonna if that makes you happy.
• We’ll end the week with California-based emo-pop band Joyce Manor, and their new full-length I Used To Go To This Bar. The featured tune, “I Know Where Mark Chen Lives,” sounds exactly like Lit or Hoobastank or Dashboard Confessional etc.
Featured Photo: album covers for KMFDM, Enemy and Ben Rosenblum’s Nebula Project, The Longest Way Round
