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words: Jamie Milton
Welcome readers, to 2010. Music publications get off their bottoms this Monday. We’re starting the year new-music-wise by bringing you a band set to release their third studio album next month: We Are Wolves.
Their sound, have you yet to come across it, is instant and choking. The opening chords of ‘Holding Hands‘ attack you without warning, with a Fucked Up-esque venom, grappling the rims of your throat, squeezing tighter. Confidence comes in heavy surges through Alexander Ortiz, his voice tickled with a thin backdrop of reverb. It’s a relentless, short-lived number, rewarding from the off.
‘Holding Hands‘ is taken from ‘Invisible Violence‘, which reaches the US on February 2nd via. Dare To Care.
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ALBUM REVIEW: Metric – Fantasies
words: Jamie Milton
“If somebody’s got soul / You’ve gotta make the move”
Metric have soul. They have an effortlessly achieved demeanour of cool that has always been something to be reckoned with. In ‘Live It Out’, tracks were refreshing, all due to a rare gothic groove that scared the living shit out of you. Think about the first time ‘Patriarch On A Vespa’ blew you away with its overhwelming powerful opening chord. They had intention, direction, a consistent aim and achievement. I think you can probably tell where I’m going with this…
Whether some big-wig record heads have their ears parked on the studio walls or whether it was a genuine belief that commercial success was the right way to go, ‘Fantasies’ is an altogether manifested attempt to build on reasonable popularity and mould it into something huge. It’s not, strictly speaking, ’selling out’. No. It’s a bandwagon jump on musical trends but it’s not neccesarily a die-hard attempt to lure in the dollar. But in this plunge for the riches, something’s fallen out of their pockets. The dirtiness of Emily Haine’s lyrics – gone. The tightness and formidability of the rhythm section, the overall sound – only visible on one single track, ‘Gold G
uns Girls’. That very song, assisted in some small part by occasional glimmering moments of hope, save the album from falling from the money pit straight down through the trap door to oblivion.
‘Stadium Love’’s title on its own is definitely a statement, reassuring all of where exactly Metric aren’t aiming for. But they leave without any indication of where exactly they are heading. Metric has always been Haines’ outputs for the jaunty pop, the side-step from her mirkier creations as a solo artist. Here, there’s no sense of joy or relief on her part – as a project, Metric doesn’t sound refreshing to any of the members anymore.
It feels like more than just a stumble, more on the level of a fifty-foot-dive from a luxury apartment onto rusty concrete. Truthfully, never has an album so much deserved to be laid out on an interrogation table, repeatedly asked “what the fuck just happened?” The first three tracks, commencing with the awkward but catchy ‘Help, I’m Alive’, declare something at least, and warrant mild applause. ‘Gold Guns Girls’, believe it or not, is near-on perfect. But there onwards comes a dip so severe, the musical equivalent of Paradise to Hades, that you feel physically offended. ‘Stadium Love’ is the perfect example of how not to apply synthesizers and stop-start rhythms, the culmination of a dreadful period of indecision and what must be sheer laziness.
3.9
mp3: Metric – Gold Guns Girls (zshare)
ALBUM: The Acorn – Glory Hope Mountain
words: Hazel Sheffield
originally written for gigwise
Sufjan Stevens once tried to write fifty albums, one for every American state. If he’d taken the melodic warmth of his songwriting further afield, to the colourful coasts of Central America, the result may have been something like this. A blend of familiar North American folk and something a little more foreign and tribal, Glory Hope Mountain manages to expound a musical narrative that is extraordinarily descriptive. It was written as frontman and vocalist Rolf Klausener’s tribute to his mother, Gloria Eperanza Montoya (the title of the album is a rough translation of her name), who fled an abusive childhood in Honduras, journeying to Canada to forge a new life.
But Glory Hope Mountain is more than a biographical exercise. A careful ear can hear the chronicled threads of a life caught between cultures and journeying far from home, yet beyond Klausener’s descriptive intentions this LP introduces a vital and diverse musical mind. Each track is an accomplished and carefully realised whole, brought to life through diverse ethnic instrumentation that gives The Acorn’s music a rare vividness and colour, setting it apart from the work of contemporaries in the vein of experimental folk.
Klausener’s music manages to be subtlyupbeat without ever straying into the 
territory of the twee. Clever, poetic lyrics anchor the songs on theright side of comfortingly melodic. Opener‘Hold Your Breath’ is sparsely orchestrated, telling of a birth, before slippingwith a delicious thud into a pulsating, forward facing rhythm duringverses. Punctuated mid-track by abeautifully upwards-leading instrumental bridge that feeds into a clattering guitar led outro, it is the perfect introduction to an album that is by shadesepic and unrelentingly energetic, such as in ‘Low Gravity’, and at other timesunhurried and soulfully down-tempo, as in ‘Flood Pt. 2’.
The foreign influences of the album, inherent and indelible underneath every track, become especially evident in the vocal accompaniment and steady calypso chug of ‘Flood’, a song that sounds so organic it could have climbed, tinkering and rattling, from the branches of trees. ‘Oh Napoleon’ is mesmerisingly woeful, with its rocking, descending guitar riff and lyrics you can disappear into: ‘Talk about your peace of mind/The one I found so hard to find.’
There are weaker moments. ‘Sister Margaret’ is overdubbed by spoken sampling that is barely audible, and never breaks into song, so that it kind of drifts instrumentally, acting as album filler of less memorable quality. Meanwhile ‘Antenna’ starts with radio white noise that leads into uncharacteristically bland songwriting. But with the fragile, wavering double female vocal of ‘Lullaby (Mountain)’, Glory Hope Mountain ends, leaving the listener lost in the mountains and rivers of aural landscapes, handcrafted with painstaking and seamless detail. Though by no means a perfect effort, this critically lauded LP from Krausener and co. nonetheless introduces a profound and expansive folk-writing talent, combining traditional, contemporary and foreign influences that are married with new vibrancy by this Canadian collective.
7
PLAY: The Acorn – Crooked Legs [purchase at insound]
MFM @ HYPEM
