Suspended Animation
FANTOMAS
Ipecac
Fantomas handily provided you with your horoscope for the entire month of April; now that that month has passed, let's look back and see how accurate it was. Did you watch a lot of cartoons? Did your hear more brief, super tight metal riffs than usual? Were you exposed to perplexing bits of monologue that might as well have been hollered at you in an alien language through a megaphone? Did you slap a baby? And most tellingly, did you have an awful lot of dark, schizophrenic high-volume freak-out fun?
The experimental extreme-music supergroup's fourth studio album is, conceptually at least, a psychotic aural journey through the fourth month of the year, with each track representing one of its 30 days. But really, who cares? What's important here is that, after a couple of arty albums designed to engage the listener's more refined senses – one a collection of re-imagined soundtrack music and the other a subdued, cinematic one-track creepfest – Fantomas has decided this time around, fuck it, it just wants to blow your hair back, make you laugh and trip you out.
And the band succeeds admirably. Suspended Animation vaguely recalls the warped-carnival early days of frontman Mike Patton's previous project, Mr. Bungle, minus the extended song lengths and intelligible narrative lyrics – and plus Fantomas' trademark hyper-brief attention span and deeply unsettling edge. (www.ipecac.com)
-SCOTT HARRELL
Magic Time
VAN MORRISON
Polydor
You have to figure that after 40 years of making music, the law of diminishing returns should have kicked in for Van Morrison long ago. True, he may not be making an instant classic with every release, but he still puts out some damn fine albums. Like Magic Time. Morrison dips into his usual big bag of influences: jazz, blues, Celtic, folk. The acoustic-driven "Celtic New Year," featuring the Chieftains' Paddy Maloney on tin whistle, is an effortless classic, easily one of the better tracks Morrison's done in over a decade. Magic Time shows little trace of the half-hearted singing of Morrison's last few efforts. His voice appears to be getting better with age.
-SCOTT DEITCHE
Directions to My House
WILL BERNARD TRIO
Dreck to Disc
In the stale world of jazz guitar – where Pat Metheny is a god, Charlie Hunter passes for progressive and Bill Frisell is about all there is that's consistently exciting – an album like Will Bernard's Directions to My House comes as nothing less than a revelation. The Oakland-based axe man kicks the CD off with "Not Necessarily Stoned": Set to a New Orleans march beat, it finds him overlaying slurry electric and bluesy National steel. (The song veritably begs for Tom Waits on vocals.) From here, Bernard and company veer liberally into skittering post-bop, free-rhythm meanderings, luscious atmospherics, lyrical melodicism, skronky freakouts and more. His tones range from slurry to warbly to spiky, and his fractured phrasing never fails to surprise. (www.willbernard.com)
-ERIC SNIDER
Face the Truth
STEPHEN MALKMUS
Matador
Stephen Malkmus may forever labor under the weight of comparison to his work as Pavement's frontman, but what a shame to dismiss out of hand the solo albums he has put together. Face the Truth resembles his debut in its emphasis on warm, funny, laid-back indie pop, although you wouldn't realize it while listening to the opener "Pencil Rot," a loud, energetic track laden with synthesizers and effects. "Freeze the Saints," though, instantly evokes sunsets on the beach.
-COOPER LANE BAKER
The Woods
SLEATER-KINNEY
Sub Pop
Right out of the speakers, The Woods is a bracing experience. "The Fox" features blistering guitar riffs that come as a shock from a band known so much for the clean angularity of previous work. This song is the opening salvo in Sleater-Kinney's attempt to redefine themselves. "Let's Call it Love," an 11-plus-minute jam, is the only boring spot here; everything else is fresh, courageous, and entirely commendable. And like the band sings on "Entertain": "If you're here 'cause you want to be entertained/ please go away."
-COOPER LANE BAKER
Undoing Ruin
DARKEST HOUR
Victory
D.C. unit Darkest Hour updates the regimented ferocity and epic classical-music moods of Metallica and Iron Maiden with a technical ability that's stunning, and a familiarity that only occasionally proves tiresome. No one's gonna mistake John Henry's Generation Screamo vocals for the thrash singers of yore – hell, even Slayer's Tom Araya hit the pitch sometimes – and the band sporadically incorporates dissonant riffs and chaotic rhythms more in step with current progressive hardcore than the late-'80s undergrounders that fused punk's speed to metal's intricacy. But there's no mistaking where Darkest Hour's roots lie, and while Undoing Ruin occasionally runs together as a result, there's no mistaking the group's prowess, either.
1/2
-SCOTT HARRELL
Swordfishtrombones
TOM WAITS
Island
After carving out a niche as a post-beat troubadour in the '70s, Waits switched to Island and really upped the stakes with Swordfishtrombones. Instead of folk- or jazz-based arrangements, he went avant-garde, using brake drums and banjos and hurdy-gurdys and pump organs and such. His melodies became more oblique; his voice coarsened; his lyrics turned grotesque, vivid, cinematic. ("Well Frank settled down in the Valley/ and hung his wild years on a nail that he drove through his wife's forehead.") This and 1985's Rain Dogs are extremely influential – and certifiably great – records.
-ERIC SNIDER
This article appears in Jun 29 – Jul 5, 2005.