Reviews by Mady Thuylein
 FOXYGEN
- ...And Star Power (Jagjaguwar)
Since the first time I heard the dewy-eyed lyric, “I
caught you sipping milkshakes in the parlor of the hotel”,
I’ve been somewhat smitten with the psychedelic princes
behind Foxygen’s screwball absurdum: moody-broody
Jonathan Rado and Kevin Barnes incarnate, Sam France. The
tunes on this year’s album, …And Star Power,
don’t have quite the same groove as “Shuggie”
or 2012’s “Make It Known”, which is what
I imagine would be a schizoid redux of The Nightmare Before
Christmas sing-alongs. In fact …And Star Power is
a whole different animal or rather, a whole different behemoth
(yes, it is 24 tracks in total). The album meanders with
no ebb-and-flow, sauntering through the piano-sodden alleyways
of “Flowers” into the manic reverberations of
the four-part Star Power series. Amidst the ethereal roars,
“How Can You Really” is the one outlier of this
collection, staying true to the more refined, mid-fi drowsiness
of preceding albums. In spite of the noticeable shift in
sound, Foxygen doesn’t abandon their liking for the
psychotropic, seeing that almost all the songs have a way
of erratically changing modulation. A personal favorite
is “Everybody Needs Love”, an all-encompassing
piece that employs the inertia of lobbing guitar lines and
a sweet, pleading dirge that is completely and quintessentially
Foxygen. …And Star Power is an album that requires
a second gander, a hefty task given its length, but after
a few listens, the kaleidoscopic chaos that doesn’t
register immediately begins to manifest into something sublime,
something totally unique to the self-proclaimed 21st Century
Ambassadors of Peace & Magic.
 AVI
BUFFALO – At Best Cuckold (Sub Pop Records)
The cover of At Best Cuckhold pans the mise-en-scènce
of what seems to be a house party. And if you look closely,
you see a dazed and confused, Solo cup-adjacent Avigdor
Zahner-Isenberg staring blankly ahead against the floral
tapestry of a carpet. Avi is the coming-of-age novel of
music, a testosterone-driven Sufjan Stevens, and four years
after his debut of folky, high tide tunes, the Californian
is still the 19-year-old boy who’s burning one in
your basement. At Best Cuckhold is straight out of the neurosis
of a teenager’s psyche; all ten tracks are chock full
of tongue-in-cheek sexual innuendos and non sequitur seductions.
Zahner-Isenberg summons his characteristic falsetto in “Memories
of You” and dirty talks us in the only way that the
band can, with nonsensical couplets (See: “You got
magnum desire/ I’m a cheeseball on fire”). The
record relies on a certain algorithm that makes itself known
in “She Is Seventeen” and “Oxygen Tank”:
piano ditties climax into an accelerando of one of Avi’s
epic guitar solos. “Overwhelmed With Pride”
discerns itself with some soulful harmonies and “Two
Cherished Things” echoes, as if Zahner-Isenberg is
singing straight into the gaping chasms of youth. Sure,
Avi Buffalo is playing it relatively safe with his enfant
terrible mystique but we need to remind ourselves that at
23, this is only the chrysalis for him. Avi’s got
a bildungsroman to write and it won’t be long before
we turn the pages and say, “They grow up so fast”.
 TEAM
SPIRIT – Killing Time (Vice Records)
In recent years, the garage rock pantheon has been ransacked
by the unruly, straight-out-of-senior-prom ruffians of the
genre (think The Smith Westerns, The Orwells, and Twin Peaks).
This month, Team Spirit releases their first LP, Killing Time,
as if to storm this bastion of devil-may-care Holden Caulfields
and claim their rightful pulpits on the rock n’ roll
throne. The members of the band harbor a few more years in
comparison to their counterparts and are slightly more mature;
after all, front man, Ayad Al Adhamy had a synth-centric stint
as the keyboardist of Passion Pit. But to that, they say,
so what? Punch-drunk power pop meets a salvo of fleshy guitar
riffs as the band harks back to the denim jacket dishabille
of youth. Al Adhamy belts plenty of ooohs and aaahs, and perhaps
this lyric offers a précis of the album’s central
motif: “I still suffer from a teenage heart.”
Killing Time is a stylistic debut more than anything else.
The songs seldom stray from a joie-de-vivre, nostalgia-imbued
aesthetic but for the sake of this thematic collection, it
totally works. “New Year’s Resolutions”
and “King Bruce”, in particular, exemplify Team
Spirit’s gambit as the David Wooderson’s of today’s
garage/glam rock: they’re still veering in vans, still
diving into the messy refuse of adolescence, and they may
be older, but they’re certainly not wiser. At least
not yet.
Additional note: Team Spirit has some awesome music videos
to accommodate their songs.
Check out the video for “Teenage Heart”
to see some gory vignettes of Ayad Al Adhamy etherized on
an operating table to remove his, well, teenage heart.
DARK AGES – Self-titled (darkagesnyc.bandcamp.com)
In their self-titled album, Dark Ages plays with the binary
of chaos and order to bring us a slice of nebulous ambient
metal. The first track, “Golem”, catapults into
the more Dionysian part of the record: there are no vocals,
only the merciless clanging of drums and distortion-heavy
arpeggios. Dark Ages has a manic-depressive, meandering
style that dispels all inertia in “Pawns”, a
series of jarring guitar twangs followed by a throttle of
percussion that serves as an interlude to the otherwise
Apollonian appeal of the LP. The music suddenly hushes to
a pianissimo at “Sweat” and plucks the bass
before once again, spiraling into the crux of every song
on Dark Ages: guitar-fueled goodness. In the longest track
of the album, “The Gates of Arotaakh”, the strings
have lost all decorum and are practically shrieking, only
quieting in the latter three minutes to set a precursor
to the final, ghoulish aria that is “Post Mortem”.
Dark Ages fits almost too comfortably into a paradigm but
at the same time, the capriciousness of their songs and
the band’s abandon of linearity offers something that
is fundamentally macabre yet accessible to those of us who
aren’t metal aficionados.
JerseyBeat.com
is an independently published music fanzine
covering punk, alternative, ska, techno and garage
music, focusing on New Jersey and the Tri-State
area. For the past 25 years, the Jersey Beat music
fanzine has been the authority on the latest upcoming
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