What are you currently listening to?



Been listening to:
  • Sufjan Stevens - Carrie and Lowell. Boss album
  • Gave Young Fathers a listen recently, too. Liking what I've heard so far.
  • Jimmy Eat World - Clarity. Boss album.
  • Listened to In Keeping with Silent Earth III by Coheed and Cambria for the first time in ages recently. Great stuff.
  • Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz. A lot of fun.
Still need to listen to:
  • Mew's new album
  • Young Father's new album
  • Dustin Kensrue's new album
 
Hellerad said:
@johnnydawg68 @RadioFriendlyUnitShifter @coollino

I haven't listened to it yet, but it will be tough to top Father John Misty
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Hmm, I much prefer Mew. A lot of that is down to my personal taste more than anything though, I'm sure FJM very well put together, just not really my kind of thing these days . Off the top of my head, my 'guitar based' faves include Sufjan Stevens, Waxahatchee, Speedy Ortiz. And the 2nd half of the new Built to Spill.

My top two are: Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - A Year With 13 Moons & Holly Herndon - Platform which are more electronic/drone/ambient.
 
coollino said:
Hmm, I much prefer Mew. A lot of that is down to my personal taste more than anything though, I'm sure FJM very well put together, just not really my kind of thing these days . Off the top of my head, my 'guitar based' faves include Sufjan Stevens, Waxahatchee, Speedy Ortiz. And the 2nd half of the new Built to Spill.

My top two are: Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - A Year With 13 Moons & Holly Herndon - Platform which are more electronic/drone/ambient.
Click to expand...

Need to check that out. Perfect From Now On is one of my favourite albums.
 
coollino said:
Hmm, I much prefer Mew. A lot of that is down to my personal taste more than anything though, I'm sure FJM very well put together, just not really my kind of thing these days . Off the top of my head, my 'guitar based' faves include Sufjan Stevens, Waxahatchee, Speedy Ortiz. And the 2nd half of the new Built to Spill.

My top two are: Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - A Year With 13 Moons & Holly Herndon - Platform which are more electronic/drone/ambient.
Click to expand...


I am now of the opinion that this Mew album is the best album I've heard this year. I can not stop listening to it.

I haven't been this into an album in yonks. Gets right into your head and seems to get better with every listen, even after what must be 40 spins now.

I love Mew. I just hope I don't have to wait another 6 years for their next one....

@johnnydawg68
 

RadioFriendlyUnitShifter said:
I am now of the opinion that this Mew album is the best album I've heard this year. I can not stop listening to it.

I haven't been this into an album in yonks. Gets right into your head and seems to get better with every listen, even after what must be 40 spins now.

I love Mew. I just hope I don't have to wait another 6 years for their next one....

@johnnydawg68
Click to expand...

Here's a great write up on Stereogum. This guy gets it and he's able to express clearly what makes this record, and the band, so great.

By Michael Nelson / 2:00 pm
Tom’s not doing AOTW this week, so I’m pinch-hitting for him. And I’m happy to be doing so, because I’m writing about one of my favorite records of 2015. But before I get to that, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention another worthy album that’s out today — Blur’s The Magic Whip.
There are a lot of similarities between that album and the one I’m actually reviewing, Mew’s +-. Both records arrive after lengthy hiatuses: Blur’s last, Think Tank, came out in 2003, although they’ve dropped a handful of singles in the intervening years; Mew, meanwhile, haven’t released anything at all since the 2009 LP No More Stories Are Told Today, I’m Sorry They Washed Away // No More Stories, The World Is Grey, I’m Tired, Let’s Wash Away. Both records feature the return of a founding member who was absent last time around: For Blur, it’s guitarist Graham Coxon; for Mew, it’s bassist Johan Wohlert. (Notably, both bands are quartets who recorded their previous albums as trios rather than replace the missing component.) Both records were made by European acts (Blur are from England; Mew are from Denmark) with traditional rock-band configurations (vocals/guitars/bass/drums) who come from a classic-rock lineage and who could appeal to “rockist” tastes, but who don’t pander to those tastes or subscribe to any orthodoxies. These are singular bands who have spent their long careers developing singular sounds. Both +- and The Magic Whip are strange and uncompromising records — not difficult records, but weird ones. I’ve spent less time with The Magic Whip, and I’m still trying to decide if I love it or merely like it a lot. But I’ve been listening to +- for a few months, and I’ve been enamored with the thing since the very first spin.

Mew’s sound was firmly established in 1997, with the release of the band’s debut album, A Triumph For Man. It’s a sound that draws primarily from post-rock (Sigur Rós, Stereolab) and prog (Yes, Rush), but displays traits of psychedelia, indie rock, emo, shoegaze, and pop, too. The most recognizable element is Jonas Bjerre’s high-gliding tenor, which hasn’t really changed at all over the past two decades, and which therefore provides a sonic through-line for the band’s entire career. That voice is so distinct and consistent that it seamlessly connects a song like “She Came Home For Christmas” (the first and only single released off A Triumph For Man) with a song like “Witness” (the third and most recent single released off +-), so that both songs sound like not only the work of the same artist, but like they could appear on the same album, maybe in succession.

That’s an illusion, though. With each new album, Mew have moved further away from traditional sounds and structures; they’ve become more adventurous, more experimental. But they’ve also increasingly embraced bigger, prettier, stickier melodies. It’s a strange dichotomy that reached something of an apotheosis on 2009’s No More Stories, which contrasted prog-metal with bubblegum pop, krautrock with bedroom folk, never feeling like it belonged to any of those genres — or any other genre, either. It’s truly otherworldly stuff.

In some ways, +- might feel like a step back toward this world. It’s Mew’s lushest, least discordant collection. In a world where Walk The Moon‘s Rick Springfield/Eddie Money throwback “Shut Up And Dance” is a top-10 hit, it’s not insane to imagine a song or two off +- making some waves in the mainstream. I don’t think it’ll happen, but I don’t think it’s out of the question. Either way, though, it would be a mistake to conflate Mew’s synth-y, sweet confections with those of, say, Passion Pit, just as it would be a mistake to write off the glossy, glorious +- as a move toward the center. This might be Mew’s most accessible album, but it also might be their most complex. The rhythms (courtesy of Wohlert and drummer Silas Utke Graae Jørgensen) attack at odd, unlikely angles, but surge like four-on-the-floor pop. Bo Madsen’s guitars are squiggly and sharp at one moment, wall-of-sound huge the next. Every single audible element here feels carefully chosen and deliberately placed. From a distance, it all sounds anthemic — monolithic, even — but get up close and you can plainly make out the endless layers and meticulous construction. I’ll put it another way: No More Stories was my favorite album of 2009, and I was more than ready for a follow-up by 2012; by that point, I was anxiously waiting and on the lookout. I spent 2013 in the same state. And 2014, too. But when I finally heard +-, the long delay seemed totally self-explanatory — Mew had obviously spent every single waking moment of the last six years painstakingly perfecting these songs.

In that sense, +- has more in common with D’Angelo’s long-gestating Black Messiah than it does Blur’s quickly assembled Magic Whip. Like Black Messiah, +- is a cathedral built of countless instrumental blocks, individual performances that are deftly delivered, resulting in a monument that revels in the sheer glory of sound. But where Black Messiah at least feels improvisatory, +- has the grid-like precision of Pinback. That can give the album an airless quality that might leave some listeners cold. (An even better comparison than Black Messiah might be Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, which was eight years in the making, and which has many of the same clean lines and gleaming surfaces as +-.) But it’s not a cold record. It’s inviting, resonant, rich. Bjerre’s dreamlike lyrics dwell in nostalgia, loss, and hope, and his dextrous delivery gives them a visceral impact. If anything, it’s an album that asks the listener to feel — maybe even forces the listener to feel.

+- was produced by Michael Beinhorn, who also produced Mew’s excellent 2005 album, And The Glass Handed Kites, but is probably best known for his work on some of the slickest records to emerge from the mid-’90s alternative scene: Soundgarden’s Superunknown, Hole’s Celebrity Skin, Marilyn Manson’s Mechanical Animals. And like those albums, +- envelops you, dealing in a broad spectrum of styles in which you are slowly submerged. Opener and lead single “Satellites” has the Broadway-prog grandeur of Muse or My Chemical Romance. The pillowy, textured “Making Friends” reminds me of both David Sylvian and Peter Gabriel. “Clinging To A Bad Dream” recalls the Nu Balearic subgenre largely spearheaded by Dan Lissvik in the early aughts on records by anonymous Euro acts like Studio and A Mountain Of One. These are disparate sounds, but here, Mew claim ownership of them all.

The album has two notable guest performances, both of which pay major dividends. The first comes from the New Zealand singer Kimbra, who lends vocals to “The Night Believer,” trading lines with Bjerre, giving his angelic presence a corporeal foil. The second is delivered by Bloc Party guitarist Russell Lissack, who both played on and co-wrote the best (or second best) song on +-, “My Complications.” Lissack’s fleet, rhythmic style is pretty unmistakable, and its hard angles provide a powerful counterpoint to Mew’s vast, sumptuous bombast. When the song goes airborne in its final two minutes, with Wohlert’s lite-disco bass echoing Lissack’s racing guitars, the uplift feels especially well earned. The other option for best (or second best) song is +-‘s closing track, “Cross The River On Your Own,” a devastating ballad that starts at near-silence and steadily swells over the course of seven and a half minutes, traversing a topograhic ocean or two in the voyage to its constellation-high climax. It’s an astonishing piece of music, and a fitting capper for this astonishing album.

It’s difficult, frankly, to contextualize Mew, because they seem to have neither peers nor imitators. They’re not part of a scene and they’re not representatives of a movement. They can seem aloof or high-minded; their album covers and titles are uninviting, if not outright ugly (to the point that they now seem deliberately trollish). But the music made by Mew is almost miraculously beautiful. It demands awe, but it deserves awe, too. It might be another six years before Mew return — and it might actually be even longer still. That’s ok. +- is big enough to bridge that span, however long it may be. It’s an exhilarating journey, and it offers a world of amazing things to see and hear along the way.
 
Listening to another long awaited release from Django Django (streaming on iTunes radio). Loving it too so far. Not on the same level as Mew, but some really strong stuff.

03bddd11.jpg
 
coollino said:
Hmm, I much prefer Mew. A lot of that is down to my personal taste more than anything though, I'm sure FJM very well put together, just not really my kind of thing these days . Off the top of my head, my 'guitar based' faves include Sufjan Stevens, Waxahatchee, Speedy Ortiz. And the 2nd half of the new Built to Spill.

My top two are: Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - A Year With 13 Moons & Holly Herndon - Platform which are more electronic/drone/ambient.
Click to expand...

Same. I tried the FJM album and it just didn't stick. Like you said, might be down to my personal taste atm. The Sufjan Stevens record is immense, but then my dad just died and the whole thing is about death and loss and it really resonates with me. Death With Dignity is one of my favorite songs of 2015 so far.

Listened to the new Built To Spill once through and really enjoyed it. Planning on going back to it, but with Mew and Django Django putting out new stuff it's going to be tough to get an album into my rotation anytime soon.
 
johnnydawg68 said:
Here's a great write up on Stereogum. This guy gets it and he's able to express clearly what makes this record, and the band, so great.

By Michael Nelson / 2:00 pm
Tom’s not doing AOTW this week, so I’m pinch-hitting for him. And I’m happy to be doing so, because I’m writing about one of my favorite records of 2015. But before I get to that, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention another worthy album that’s out today — Blur’s The Magic Whip.
There are a lot of similarities between that album and the one I’m actually reviewing, Mew’s +-. Both records arrive after lengthy hiatuses: Blur’s last, Think Tank, came out in 2003, although they’ve dropped a handful of singles in the intervening years; Mew, meanwhile, haven’t released anything at all since the 2009 LP No More Stories Are Told Today, I’m Sorry They Washed Away // No More Stories, The World Is Grey, I’m Tired, Let’s Wash Away. Both records feature the return of a founding member who was absent last time around: For Blur, it’s guitarist Graham Coxon; for Mew, it’s bassist Johan Wohlert. (Notably, both bands are quartets who recorded their previous albums as trios rather than replace the missing component.) Both records were made by European acts (Blur are from England; Mew are from Denmark) with traditional rock-band configurations (vocals/guitars/bass/drums) who come from a classic-rock lineage and who could appeal to “rockist” tastes, but who don’t pander to those tastes or subscribe to any orthodoxies. These are singular bands who have spent their long careers developing singular sounds. Both +- and The Magic Whip are strange and uncompromising records — not difficult records, but weird ones. I’ve spent less time with The Magic Whip, and I’m still trying to decide if I love it or merely like it a lot. But I’ve been listening to +- for a few months, and I’ve been enamored with the thing since the very first spin.

Mew’s sound was firmly established in 1997, with the release of the band’s debut album, A Triumph For Man. It’s a sound that draws primarily from post-rock (Sigur Rós, Stereolab) and prog (Yes, Rush), but displays traits of psychedelia, indie rock, emo, shoegaze, and pop, too. The most recognizable element is Jonas Bjerre’s high-gliding tenor, which hasn’t really changed at all over the past two decades, and which therefore provides a sonic through-line for the band’s entire career. That voice is so distinct and consistent that it seamlessly connects a song like “She Came Home For Christmas” (the first and only single released off A Triumph For Man) with a song like “Witness” (the third and most recent single released off +-), so that both songs sound like not only the work of the same artist, but like they could appear on the same album, maybe in succession.

That’s an illusion, though. With each new album, Mew have moved further away from traditional sounds and structures; they’ve become more adventurous, more experimental. But they’ve also increasingly embraced bigger, prettier, stickier melodies. It’s a strange dichotomy that reached something of an apotheosis on 2009’s No More Stories, which contrasted prog-metal with bubblegum pop, krautrock with bedroom folk, never feeling like it belonged to any of those genres — or any other genre, either. It’s truly otherworldly stuff.

In some ways, +- might feel like a step back toward this world. It’s Mew’s lushest, least discordant collection. In a world where Walk The Moon‘s Rick Springfield/Eddie Money throwback “Shut Up And Dance” is a top-10 hit, it’s not insane to imagine a song or two off +- making some waves in the mainstream. I don’t think it’ll happen, but I don’t think it’s out of the question. Either way, though, it would be a mistake to conflate Mew’s synth-y, sweet confections with those of, say, Passion Pit, just as it would be a mistake to write off the glossy, glorious +- as a move toward the center. This might be Mew’s most accessible album, but it also might be their most complex. The rhythms (courtesy of Wohlert and drummer Silas Utke Graae Jørgensen) attack at odd, unlikely angles, but surge like four-on-the-floor pop. Bo Madsen’s guitars are squiggly and sharp at one moment, wall-of-sound huge the next. Every single audible element here feels carefully chosen and deliberately placed. From a distance, it all sounds anthemic — monolithic, even — but get up close and you can plainly make out the endless layers and meticulous construction. I’ll put it another way: No More Stories was my favorite album of 2009, and I was more than ready for a follow-up by 2012; by that point, I was anxiously waiting and on the lookout. I spent 2013 in the same state. And 2014, too. But when I finally heard +-, the long delay seemed totally self-explanatory — Mew had obviously spent every single waking moment of the last six years painstakingly perfecting these songs.

In that sense, +- has more in common with D’Angelo’s long-gestating Black Messiah than it does Blur’s quickly assembled Magic Whip. Like Black Messiah, +- is a cathedral built of countless instrumental blocks, individual performances that are deftly delivered, resulting in a monument that revels in the sheer glory of sound. But where Black Messiah at least feels improvisatory, +- has the grid-like precision of Pinback. That can give the album an airless quality that might leave some listeners cold. (An even better comparison than Black Messiah might be Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, which was eight years in the making, and which has many of the same clean lines and gleaming surfaces as +-.) But it’s not a cold record. It’s inviting, resonant, rich. Bjerre’s dreamlike lyrics dwell in nostalgia, loss, and hope, and his dextrous delivery gives them a visceral impact. If anything, it’s an album that asks the listener to feel — maybe even forces the listener to feel.

+- was produced by Michael Beinhorn, who also produced Mew’s excellent 2005 album, And The Glass Handed Kites, but is probably best known for his work on some of the slickest records to emerge from the mid-’90s alternative scene: Soundgarden’s Superunknown, Hole’s Celebrity Skin, Marilyn Manson’s Mechanical Animals. And like those albums, +- envelops you, dealing in a broad spectrum of styles in which you are slowly submerged. Opener and lead single “Satellites” has the Broadway-prog grandeur of Muse or My Chemical Romance. The pillowy, textured “Making Friends” reminds me of both David Sylvian and Peter Gabriel. “Clinging To A Bad Dream” recalls the Nu Balearic subgenre largely spearheaded by Dan Lissvik in the early aughts on records by anonymous Euro acts like Studio and A Mountain Of One. These are disparate sounds, but here, Mew claim ownership of them all.

The album has two notable guest performances, both of which pay major dividends. The first comes from the New Zealand singer Kimbra, who lends vocals to “The Night Believer,” trading lines with Bjerre, giving his angelic presence a corporeal foil. The second is delivered by Bloc Party guitarist Russell Lissack, who both played on and co-wrote the best (or second best) song on +-, “My Complications.” Lissack’s fleet, rhythmic style is pretty unmistakable, and its hard angles provide a powerful counterpoint to Mew’s vast, sumptuous bombast. When the song goes airborne in its final two minutes, with Wohlert’s lite-disco bass echoing Lissack’s racing guitars, the uplift feels especially well earned. The other option for best (or second best) song is +-‘s closing track, “Cross The River On Your Own,” a devastating ballad that starts at near-silence and steadily swells over the course of seven and a half minutes, traversing a topograhic ocean or two in the voyage to its constellation-high climax. It’s an astonishing piece of music, and a fitting capper for this astonishing album.

It’s difficult, frankly, to contextualize Mew, because they seem to have neither peers nor imitators. They’re not part of a scene and they’re not representatives of a movement. They can seem aloof or high-minded; their album covers and titles are uninviting, if not outright ugly (to the point that they now seem deliberately trollish). But the music made by Mew is almost miraculously beautiful. It demands awe, but it deserves awe, too. It might be another six years before Mew return — and it might actually be even longer still. That’s ok. +- is big enough to bridge that span, however long it may be. It’s an exhilarating journey, and it offers a world of amazing things to see and hear along the way.
Click to expand...



Fantastic review. Especially after reading what must be the worst review I've read in the past 3 years from the Guardian; where the album was seemingly dropped on someone's desk, who'd never heard of the band, and said 'reviewer' got about 1/2 way through before saying "that's enough to spunk out a quick paragraph. No one even knows who these are anyway, right?".

The bit in bold really sums up the band beautifully there. They are not part of any scene at all, which is just a wondrous thing in itself. No ad campaigns, no listening with your eyes. They just leave you to stick an unassuming album on and then a few hours later, you're listening to an incredible album. And you have no idea at what point it became incredible, only that it did!

The best thing I can say about it is that I was absolutely dying to hear The Magic Whip. I'm a huge Blur fan and their hiatus has been twice as long. Yet, in spite of already buying it, I haven't listened to it once. It's all Mew, baby.
 

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