[Here begins my meager attempt to catch up on the myriad local releases stacked on my desk:]
Sea Wolf, “White Water, White Bloom”(Dangerbird) – Alex Brown Church’s sophomore album is the like the second date with that person you were positively giddy over after the first outing. Then, after all the preening and anticipation, ABC (as he is credited in the liner notes) gets really heavy, so deep into his own metaphors you don’t know whether to run screaming or sit mesmerized. “White Water, White Bloom,” written over a few lovestruck changes of season in Montreal and recorded in Omaha with Mike Mogis (Bright Eyes, Monsters of Folk, M. Ward), is, well … pastoral. In fact, it makes “On Golden Pond” look like an asphalt parking lot. Its fastidiously orchestrated folk-pop provides a gorgeous landscape for ABC’s poetry of reckoning and renewal – a verbal thicket of natural imagery displaying a near-obsession for all things H2O. Let’s see, the album’s lyrics reference water, riversides, waterfalls, mist, fog, dew, seas, bays, snow, ice, currents and flows, harbors, frost and the St. Lawrence. And I might have missed a rivulet or stream, but they’re probably somewhere on Sea Wolf’s “Get to the River Before It Runs Too Low” EP or “Leaves in the River” full-length. So is “White Water, White Bloom” worth getting all moist over? Yes. It could even be the start of a long-term relationship. Recommended.
HEALTH, “Get Color”(Lovepump United) – The sophomore album by the L.A. quartet known more for the remix of its debut album (“HEALTH//DISCO”) than debut itself (“HEALTH”) makes all kinds interesting noises. But with its smudgy synths, abrasive guitars and gnarly percussion, it possesses an almost math-rock obstinacy. Save for “Die Slow” and “In Violet,” there is little in the way of color here, except maybe charcoal, and scant less payoff. As a sonic experiment, “Get Color” deserves some sort of scholarly treatise, or at least a noise-rock merit badge. But as an album I can hang with for more than 10 minutes, I’ll wait for the disco remixes.
||| Video: After the jump, watch the video for “Die Slow”:
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