 
REVIEWS BY AUDREY ZEE WHITESIDES
 WAXAHATCHEE
- Cerulean Salt ((Don Giovanni, 2013)
In a positive review of Torres’s great self-titled
debut earlier this year, Pitchfork writer Jayson Greene
said that Mackenzie Scott (aka Torres) often “plays
a coiled, hurt figure willing herself to find the courage
to transform into a 50 Ft Queenie, and not quite succeeding,”
and that her songs “would explode, if only they had
a little help.” I don’t have the space here
to go fully into the complex dynamics of a male music critic
describing a female singer-songwriter as a vulnerable, emotional,
and damaged figure; let me just say there’s a long
history of men fetishizing female hysteria in writing, and,
while I don’t think Greene’s quite doing that,
he is representing what he sees as raw “female need”
as being something that makes Scott tantalizingly incomplete.
(Also, those songs do explode.)
What does this have to do with Waxahatchee’s sophomore
album, Cerulean Salt? Like Torres, it’s an
album of blunt feeling, the kind that can be read as pure
confessionalism and vulnerability, and I want to make it
clear how important it is to recognize how much more is
going on here.
Perhaps most obviously, Cerulean Salt is much
cleaner-sounding than Waxahatchee’s 2012 super lo-fi
debut, American Weekend, and this time it’s
not just Katie Crutchfield’s voice and guitar. It’s
cleaner than her records with P.S. Eliot, and if the songs
have a bit less energy than that band’s, they are
also more arranged. Not that this is a bad move: That thin
lead guitar that creeps into “Dixie Cups and Jars”
between verses couldn’t have happened on Sadie
or American Weekend; Crutchfield feels like she’s
using instrumentation and texture more deliberately here
than on any of her other records to date. Check the restrained
melancholy in the palm-muting and imperfect vocal doublings
on “Blue Pt. II” leading into “Brother
Bryan,” which never uses a single guitar but still
feels like an anthem through the sheer repetition of its
simple bass and drum lines. The fuzzed-out “Misery
Over Dispute;” the sudden yet organic pace change
and chorus harmonies of “Peace and Quiet” (and
that single “ooh-ooh-ooooh” before the verse
starts!); these are clearly composed moments, ones that
give Cerulean Salt a diversity of sound to go with
the increased fidelity.
Sometimes, this cleanness and arrangement makes Cerulean
Salt feel like an album with good deal of pleasure
and craft smarts, but low stakes. And perhaps that would
be true, were it not for Crutchfield’s lyrics. To
complement and subtly harmonize with the controlled lack
of musical sloppiness, the words eschew high emotional drama
yet manage all that aforementioned “blunt feeling.”
Crutchfield has a way of transforming everyday objects into
totems of emotion: I love the line, “We’ll smoke
‘til our pockets are empty” on “Brother
Bryan,” turning the amount of cigarettes one has into
a physical marker of how we lose time. Or this wonderful
sequence from “Dixie Cups and Jars:” “Make-up
sits on your face like tar / The champagne flutes [or flute’s]
poorly engineered / Employ Dixie cups and jars.” While
authors back to Xenophon have made cosmetics disgusting
in one way or another, the stickiness and heaviness of tar
is a simile I haven’t heard; the replacing of champagne
flutes with paper cups and glass jars is just a nice little
moment of bathos. This is definitely a headphones album,
not so much because of any nifty production tricks or denseness
of music-- you just don’t want to miss these words.
The words also bring us back to confessionalism. A lot
of the time, Crutchfield does deal in emotions: “The
atmosphere is fucking tired and brings us nothing”
in “Blue Pt. II,” “We are only 30% dead”
in “Brother Bryan,” “I had a dream last
night / We had hit separate bottoms” in “Misery
Over Dispute,” etc. And a lot of the narratives on
the record-- about love and wanting-- seem autobiographical
to some degree. But Crutchfield’s confessionalism
is less total violent purging and vulnerability and more
like the Confessional poetry of Anne Sexton (Crutchfield
has mentioned in interview that she once had a band where
all her songs were about Sexton poems,) where the excavating
of emotions is only half the work. Listening to Cerulean
Salt multiple times, the motto that arises is “In
this dejection lives a connection”, from closer “You're
Damaged” - like Sexton, the point of words in Crutchfield
is to arrange and re-cast emotions into something more wide-ranging
than just personal expression.
These are sad songs, songs of loneliness and displacement.
But when I’m done listening, I feel satisfied or relieved
in some quiet way. Taken in sum, the emotions of the album
are bittersweet rather than harrowing, the act of someone
looking back and relating the pain of life without collapsing
in it. Which is why Waxahatchee’s Cerulean Salt is
ultimately such a pleasureable album-- it realizes that
confessing is just as much a part of living as drinking
champagne out of Dixie cups, that the emotional and the
chances of the everyday are not separate but rather ways
of understanding each other. It’s a nice expansion
of Crutchfield’s palate both musically and as a writer,
and let’s hope the next album sees her even more unafraid
to stretch out.
 HILLY
EYE - Reasons to Live
(Don Giovanni)
I’m pretty sure, in retrospect, Amy Klein was the best
part of Titus Andronicus. Before she left in 2011, Klein played
guitar and violin for the band, and occasionally provided
vocals to allow listeners a break from Patrick Stickles’s
deluges of ego. I saw the band twice in 2011; once in spring
and once in winter, opening for Fucked Up. At the spring show,
Klein’s cover of “Oh Bondage Up Yours!,”
shortly after X-Ray Spex singer Poly Styrene’s death,
was the most exciting moment of a great concert. She was gone
by the time I saw them again; I wasn’t as into them
but was pretty sure it was just because they were opening
for Fucked Up, one of my favorite bands. But then Local Business,
Titus’s next album, turned out to be a disappointment
(see Jim Testa’s review on this site) after the excellent
Monitor; and Klein’s new band Hilly Eye has just released
the near-flawless Reasons to Live.
Hilly Eye’s a two-piece, Klein on guitar and lead vocals
and Catherine Tung on drums and backing vox. It’s always
exciting when a two-member band manages to take up all the
possible space of a song in ways larger groups don’t.
There’s something intimate and economical about a good
two-piece, where both people only have each other to rely
on for sound dialogue. (Japandroids’s first album, e.g.,
which sounded pretty much like two guys had been yelling at
each other over their instruments in a garage, with only enough
time to think of so many notes and words.) Hilly Eye’s
songs manifest this intimacy and economy in the album's extreme
focus-- in fact, they’re hyper-focused on each drum
hit, each vocal harmony, and each slight volume swell. Tung’s
drumming in particular is an incredible example of restrained
intensity-- check out “Almanac”, where she plays
the same simple pattern for over half the song then suddenly
starts playing twice as fast, pushing Klein’s guitar
forward from dream poppy to beautiful noise break.
Reasons to Live is a master class in dynamics (not
to talk about her old band too much, but this is part of my
theory that Klein was Titus Andronicus’s secret genius--
the dynamics on The Monitor were awesome). Opener “Way
Back When” is a slow-burn throughout, teasing at noise
eruptions but harnessing the feedback into measured arpeggios.
As the song ends, the guitar gets quieter while the snare
drum suddenly becomes more prominent, leading into “Jersey
City”. “Jersey City” was originally on Hilly
Eye’s debut EP, "Fireworks" (“Double
Dutch” was also on that EP, but it’s changed more,
being over a minute shorter and much tighter), but it’s
so much more satisfying here as a long coda to “Way
Back When”-- after almost seven minutes of holding back
and making languishing dream pop, Klein’s voice suddenly
turns into something like Allison Wolfe of Bratmobile and
she half-sings, half-yells, “You think you’re
sooooooo cool / You got an appetite for destruction.”
(Not to reduce Hilly Eye to a riot grrrl revival act, of course.)
“Way Back When” and “Jersey City”
function as one long, nine-minute opener, and the sudden vocal
shift is only the first of several viscerally exciting dynamic
moments on the album. The last minute and fifteen seconds
or so of “American Rail” are pure ecstasy; the
drum build which abruptly turns into an almost a capella bridge
of “Amnesia” does loud-quiet-loud as well as anything
else since the Pixies; the sequence of “Animal”
as noise-punk anthem fading into the dissonant harmonies of
“Louisville” and fading further into the quiet
chimes of “January”... I don’t have enough
space in this brief review to list every time things explode
or become a hush, or tauten into something in the middle,
but let me just say each time I’ve listened to this
album, I’m impressed with some unnoticed transition,
some moment of change. On a similar note, the album’s
sequenced brilliantly, flowing between weightless dreaminess
and heavier, riffier tracks in exactly the right balance.
On their Facebook page, Hilly Eye call their music psychedelic
noise pop, which seems about right. The album generally exists
in a space of beautiful noise, melodies heightened by rather
than blunted in distortion. Words exist in a similar lovely
disorientation-- the vocals are often sung so high that it’s
hard to make out what’s being said, and even when I
can hear what Klein’s singing, I’m not 100% sure
how to translate it into common English. (For a professional
bit of confusion, see Pitchfork’s review of “Amnesia”,
in which the writer scans the chorus as “Oh glory /
my country, it lies” and praises Klein for it. Unfortunately,
the actual words are, to my ears, “my country, it lies
above”, which is much more interesting if less direct.)
But while I’m not always sure what’s going on,
I can’t help feeling compelled to sing along wordlessly
to the high parts, and the more understandable lower vocals
all feel anthemic. “I put my money in a wishing well
/ I watched the sun turn the water golden”; “If
I’m alive, then you’re alive / If I’m in
love, then you’re in love / We go around, we go around”;
the afore-mentioned chorus of “Amnesia”-- they’re
all perfect balances between hermeticism and a kind of accessibility.
My favorite track, “Animal”, is the most relatable
for me-- double refrains of “You walk like a girl, but
you’re a liar / And you talk like a girl, but you’re
a liar / All the boys who get beaten up / All the girls who
get beaten down” (later genders are reversed) and the
Blake-referencing “Liar, liar, burning bright / in the
forest of the night / Keep your promise to the girls / Tear
apart the fucking world... Keep your promise to the men /
Turn them into trees again”. It’s a weird and
surreal as hell space, but somehow I just feel I’m in
it with Klein, particularly around the impenetrability of
gender that’s going on here. I’m sure other listeners
will have their own moments of just getting it, probably in
different places.
As 2013 goes on, I don’t think too many albums will
be upsetting Hilly Eye’s debut as one of the best of
the year. If you care about guitar music, noisy pop, poppy
noise, or music that bends and warps rock into its own kinds
of anthems rather than following the usual chord progressions
and textures, check this out. After spending some time with
this excellent Reasons to Live, I think I’ve
got one more of those.
 Cat
Power-- Sun (Matador 2012)
It doesn’t seem like it should be a divisive moment
when an artist returns with new material after six years,
having recovered from well-publicized unhappiness; or when
an artist announces DIY sufficiency by playing and producing
virtually her entire new album herself. Cat Power’s
Sun contains these narratives of revitalization
and independence, and I at least was excited. Yet when an
artist builds a reputation on songs of spare desperation
and depression, strength isn’t always what fans want.
When The Guardian streamed Sun before its official
release, I recall reading quite a few comments to the effect
of, “She’s happy now; fuck.” Sorry, Chan
Marshall: your mental health isn’t worth as much to
some of your base as your old skeletal electric guitar lines.
But Sun isn’t a simple happy record: sure,
the cover has a blue sky and a rainbow, but they sit with
a picture of Marshall at 20 (she’s now 40). If there’s
hope here, it’s mixed with the knowledge of what’s
been left behind. Rainbows fade quickly, like youth, and
the sun that brings them out? It’s not just a signifier
of new energy. “It’s hot, it’s hot, and
close to us,” Marshall sings on the title track. “Here
it comes, here it comes, it’s still warm / Here it
comes, here it comes, we’re all so tired of waiting,”
and those last four words are repeated a few times later.
Ever been in a Southern summer, like in Marshall’s
native Georgia? They get pretty exhausting. So Sun isn’t
just Cat Power’s “happy album”, nor is
it just her “electro album” or “hip-hop
album” like other reviewers have suggested. All of
these things touch on aspects of Sun, but ultimately
this is Cat Power’s extrovert album-- and thus pop
album.
First, though, a word on the electronics. Yes, Sun is full
of synths, drum machines, and even a couple Autotuned vocal
parts. Let’s not forget that Moon Pix opened with
a Beastie Boys drum sample (and Sun is mixed by Phillip
Zdar, who did Hot Sauce Committee Part Two); but here electronic
instruments are centered for most of the album. It’s
bold, if sometimes confusing-- e.g., Cat Power doesn’t
need software to be on pitch, and unlike in Kanye West and
Bon Iver’s pioneering uses of Autotune, there doesn’t
seem be any meta-aesthetic commentary on artistic vulnerability
and distance. I hesitate to call this an electro album for
this reason-- the change seems like it was done rather because
Marshall thought it might sound cool than for any dedication
to exploring the potentials of electronic music. Key cuts
like “Ruin”, “Manhattan”, and “Nothin
But Time” use a lot of acoustic instrumentation, and
only on “Silent Machine” are electronic textures
allowed to erupt and contend with Marshall’s vocals.
Otherwise, the electro parts exist only to make the canvas
Marshall sings on big as possible.
Hence, pop. The aim of the new sounds is the opposite of
Cat Power’s old minimalist guitar/piano sketches,
which created a sense of introspection and intimacy. Of
course, intimacy is always a bit illusory on record-- we
each feel like the song is written just for us, and it’s
not. Sun’s great achievement is trading the
subtle artifice of this intimacy for the literal artifice
of synths and vocal effects without becoming any less inclusive.
As mentioned earlier, the best songs here take a kind of
weariness and offer if not happiness, then at least rest.
“Bury me, marry me to the sky,” the chorus to
“Cherokee” begins, and it gives an idea of what
Sun is about. Burial and marriage both are transcendent
acts here-- both unite the singer with the sky, both give
respite. “Manhattan” and “Nothin But Time”,
among the best songs of Cat Power’s career, both recall
LCD Soundsystem in a way. The former reminds me of tracks
like “Home” or “Someone Great”,
a self-aware, dislocated looking-in that can only occur
by looking out at one’s environment. And the latter,
like “All My Friends” or “All I Want”,
channels exhaustion into affirmation by repetition. “Nothin
But Time” proves its point--”You ain’t
got nothin but time / and it ain’t got nothin on you”--
across its 11 minutes, becoming one of the most vital songs
I’ve in a while. Iggy Pop’s backing vocals should
earn him some kind of cameo of the year award.
Which isn’t to say the whole album is so successful.
The middle third drags a bit-- after “3,6,9“
suggests Autotune and radio-pop are going to be important
parts of the album, there is a run of low-key tunes that
are nice individually but kind of blur together sequenced
as they are. Sticking a more dynamic song like “Silent
Machine” or “Peace & Love” in the
middle might have helped, or making “Always on My
Own” even quieter to provide contrast. As it is, the
moments between “Ruin” and “Manhattan”
don’t really make an impression on first listen. “Peace
& Love” is a good closer, a vocally-layered chant,
but its sloganeering-- “99%, y’all!”--
seems a bit affected after the resonance of “Nothin
But Time”. Yet, if Sun isn’t a classic like
Moon Pix or You Are Free, “Peace & Love”
shows why it’s still a pretty great flawed album.
Cat Power is still earnest, still has things at stake. The
stage has gotten a bit bigger, and the roof is off-- in
the light, we see her face more if we can’t hear the
thoughts as clearly-- but most importantly, we find the
sun has warmed and burned each and every one of us after
the dancing is over.
 The
Capitalist Kids -- Lessons on Love, Sharing, and Hygiene
(Toxic Pop)
There are plenty of political punk bands; but how many
can write a sweet love tune too? It’s hard to picture,
say, Propagandhi writing a song about singing They Might
Be Giants songs on a second date, or Against Me! allowing
themselves the corniness of “missing the electricity
/ that happens when we touch hands”. And yet, as their
band name and album title respectively show, Austin’s
Capitalist Kids are the rare band that can show us why both
politics and love matter.
Both themes are given about an equal weight, and the implication
is that without one or the other, we’d be sunk. The
Capitalist Kids advocate togetherness in both realms-- they
aren’t afraid of being called Socialists because Socialists
stand together, and “Eagle Thunder” takes its
name from the fact that singer/lyricist/bassist Jeff (credited
with no last name in the liner notes) and his future wife
apparently call themselves Team Eagle Thunder. The album’s
greatest fear is that “We Are Each Ultimately Alone
in the Universe”-- it’s no accident that that
song is the most jittery here, switching between stop-start
guitar riffs and fast palm-muted sections, lyrics spit out
with maximum anxiety. But even “We Are Each Ultimately
Alone...” ends with a “please”, with the
possibility that things aren’t so ultimate, and most
of the other songs combat this idea.
Of the love songs, “That’s When I Knew”
is both my favorite musically and the one most likely to
make me smile. It mixes sixteenth-note palm-muted guitars,
some tasteful “woah-oh-ohs”, and the afore-mentioned
TMBG reference. It’s the story of a new relationship,
the little details that let us know we’re falling
in love. The political songs are all pretty great, attacking
capitalism both in general and in specific failings. “Parachute
of Gold” ties in nicely to the Occupy movement, “Socialism
Ain’t a Dirty Word” defends progressive politics
in an election year in which government’s involvement
in issues like business and health care is a crucial debate.
“Ayn” is a real stand-out, smartly criticizing
her brand of free-market capitalism as just another way
to make sure the “supermen” get everything the
rest of us can’t.
The general sound of the album is heavily indebted to the
classic Lookout! Records bands that were playing when these
guys were teenagers-- spiced up by a mid-song key change
here, hand-claps there, the short acoustic closer “Ericacoustic”.
None of the songs repeat each other, but it’s a very
familiar sound. It’s accessible to anyone whose knowledge
of pop punk doesn’t go beyond Green Day or Bad Religion
(Jeff’s voice is sort of between Billie Joe’s
and Greg Graffin’s, actually), but those of us who’ve
heard a Crimpshrine record or two will appreciate how the
sound gets updated and tweaked in places. The Capitalist
Kids have taken all the catchiness of classic records and
really played up the vocal melodies. But by playing around
with rhythms that sometimes chug into each other and sometimes
emphasize staccato hits, and almost eschewing choruses altogether,
they’ve made a record that pays homage without aping.
It makes Ben Weasel-slam “Weasel” a lot more
personal, as you can tell he really was a big musical hero
to the band. Fittingly, the song about getting older, living
in a world when Lookout! is punk history, “Three-Oh”
has a more mellow sound, and the extended instrumental outro
sounds like the Capitalist Kids breathing and letting themselves
bring out sense of melody they’ve sprinkled through
the rest of the album.
Unfortunately, I do have one unavoidable critique of the
album. I realize a lot of punk fans aren’t going to
agree or care with this complaint, but it’s part of
a big problem in the scene. As I’ve said before, the
love songs here are generally sweet, have an intimate and
self-deprecating sense of humor, and generally come off
as honest and heartfelt. But there are some lyrical moments
that make it difficult for me to wholly appreciate them:
“...and pretty soon now you’re gonna wonder
how / you ever lived before you met me”; “...so
stop resisting, just give in to happiness / this might be
as good as it gets”; “I need a tube or two of
super glue / so I can glue her to me today”; “...and
maybe one day when we’re older / we’ll put some
babies in her”. All of these lyrics depict a relationship
model popularized by Weezer (great article here: http://www.theawl.com/2010/04/sex-offender-week-rivers-cuomo-messes-you-up-forever
--though I’m not saying anything on Lessons on
Love... is remotely as terrible as a standard Rivers
Cuomo lyric, just that there’s some common DNA) in
which women don’t have a lot of independence. Sure,
the guy in this model professes dependence and need too,
but there’s always the sense that he’s the provider,
protector, and possessor. The idea is that, because a guy
loves a girl, she owes him love back. I don’t want
to accuse anyone in this band of real-life misogyny-- the
problematic lyrics aren’t aggressively male-centric
so much as not fully thought-out-- I’m just saying
that, as someone who isn’t male, songs that perpetuate
ideas of women giving themselves up to men and being glued
into relationships are getting pretty old. Punk is full
of gendered power dynamics, and the Capitalist Kids may
not be making these any worse, but these occasional lyrical
acts aren’t making things better either.
That said: this is a great album, and I don’t think
the above paragraph should stop anyone from picking it up.
Some love songs, like “That’s When I Knew”,
are respectful and relatable the whole way through, and
those that aren’t generally only get dodgy in one
or two lines. I still listen to Pinkerton; I just have to
listen to P. S. Eliot and the Max Levine Ensemble too. Buy
Lessons on Love... for the politics, for the music,
for its intimacy-- just be careful about which relationship
lessons you choose to take away.
 Toys
That Kill? - Fambly 42 (Recess Records)
After around two decades in F.Y.P., Underground Railroad
to Candyland, and Toys That Kill (plus a solo career and
day job as head of Recess Records), Todd Congelliere probably
could’ve gone the tried and tired way of “rockers/punks
grow up, make album of surprising musical maturity and introspection”
and no one would’ve minded. The last TTK album, 2006's
fantastic Shanked!, ended with “31 Year Old
Daydream”, a song about frustration and failure in
love and punk, and hope for a final cleansing? “Let
‘em hear the rain / that’s falling on me”.
It was a great song closing a great album, but it seemed
to herald a settling-down for the band. So it’s even
more unexpected and impressive that Fambly 42,
TTK’s newest album, is perhaps their most unsettled
album yet.
Fambly 42 is in some respects an album about aging,
as many of Congelliere’s works have been since F.Y.P.’s
grade-school concept album and obnoxious masterpiece,
Dance My Dunce. But there’s not very much in
the way of meditation or exploration of personal change?
aging is a messy, fragmented process here. In fact, age
is only one part of Fambly 42‘s disjunction.
The album is full of paranoia and suspicion? its beginning
line is “Dust mites, parasites, all could’ve
been there that night” and ends by repeating “If
I come back down they’re gonna get me” two dozen
times. When love goes bad in “I Don’t Wanna
Be Around”, Congelliere doesn’t get sad, he
gets claustrophobic; when he takes a second to realize getting
older hasn’t improved him in “Stye”, he
still sees other people making worse mistakes; in “Ape
Me”, he’s not bored, but his “time is
worth shit zero”. It’s not nihilism, and certainly
not run-of-the-mill punk anti-authoritarianism? there are
lots of “if”s and choices in the songs? rather
a look at a life lived with powerlessness and everyday absurdity.
The universe according to Fambly 42 is arbitrary and off
(on the vinyl, side A has a picture of a raccoon biting
a canine leg, then side B replaces this with an child biting
the same leg), but worth participating in. “I’ve
Been Stabbed!” offers a summary of the album: the
attack isn’t by any conscious enemy but by “a
lightning bolt” and the narrator isn’t sure
why any of us are fighting back. The metatextual second
verse concludes “Tried to laugh, tried to sing, tried
to get along / but I dunno this song. I don’t know
it!” Of course, Congelliere is singing anyway.
Musically? though the band still has a broader range than
many pop punk acts, leaning towards suspended chords and
syncopated guitar parts? the album uses a restricted sonic
palette, at least compared to Shanked!. Some of this due
to the band self-producing Fambly 42, resulting
in a purposefully lower quality that presses the instruments
together and obscures the mix. Drum beats and strumming
patterns are re-used, and melodies from songs often resemble
each other (listen to “V-Chip (Installers)”
and “I’ve Been Stabbed!” back-to-back).
But this works to the album’s advantage, creating
a sense of inter-song dialogue and motifs that force both
claustrophobia and unity. The album feels familiar and pressing
the first time through. Variations, like the harmonic-minor
stomps of “Abort Me Mother Earth” and “I’m
Foaming!” or the folk-punk banjo that briefly opens
up “Clap For Alaska”, keep the album from fermenting.
Ultimately, Fambly 42 is an album where everything
is related and nothing is understandable - hence the title’s
misspelling of “family”. The almost-title-track,
“Fambly”, (one of three written and sung by
Sean Cole, Congelliere’s partner since F.Y.P.) contains
the line “Family, it sleeps with it’s (sic)
clothes on”. Toys That Kill know it’s what’s
familiar that gets most distant without ever going away,
and has the most potential for mutation. Here’s hoping
they keep getting weirder without losing us.
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music, focusing on New Jersey and the Tri-State
area. For the past 25 years, the Jersey Beat music
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