Even on their debut, These New Puritans had an impressive sound that seemed too complex to be performed by four people. The indie sound armed with vast, eclectic instrumentation made 2008’s Beat Pyramid a particularly promising debut, but it was hardly expected that they would make such a leap forward. Their sophomore effort, Hidden, recalls the progression Silverchair made from a more guitar based rock band to a more low key, experimental one, except instead of over the course of three albums, it happened with one. The guitar fueled moments of Pyramid are gone here, with brass, woodwinds, and piano taking the forefront. Despite this radical change, These New Puritans still sound like themselves, their trademark dark melodies still in tact. Hidden shows These New Puritans as somehow both far more epic and far less pretentious than even the last few Muse records.

Vat iz ze hidden image?

Lead songwriter and vocalist Jack Barnett and co. juxtapose organic and electronic sounds so well all across Hidden that you hardly even notice the first time you hear it. The atmosphere is looming and seductive, but is never overwhelming, much like The XX’s self titled debut last year. Unlike it, however, Hidden seems to have the undercurrent of a noir film score, which is divided into songs that are re-cut and formatted into a more rock-friendly structure. Songs like We Want War, which makes seven minutes fly by way too quickly, displays this all too well, with cleverly placed breaks and random sound effects, and makes the song itself feel as if it’s barely keeping afloat in the massive score.

One of the great things about Hidden is that with the wide array of instruments used, there are so many moments where you can’t quite put your finger on what instrument you’re hearing. “Is that.. a bassoon? A harpischord? ….a triangle?” George Barnett’s percussion in particular is remarkable, on Attack Music he’s keeping a beat while clattering on whatever the hell he wants, as warped synths, a choir, and a sharpening blade (one of the random sound effects mentioned earlier, a lot of them repeat themselves throughout the album) lead the bizarrely followable carnival-like melody. His clever drumming also backs  the choir as they take the lead in Orion’s multiple sinister hooks.

Sometimes the business in the music almost resembles a sound collage; Both Fire-Power and Drum Courts – Where Corals Lie’s peaks boast somehow melodic cacophonies with everything hitting its stride at once, before each element falls away one by one, and all that’s left is a fading single sound before the next kicks in. The brief instrumentals, Canticle, and opener Time Xone, are pure score and serve as a breather (or in Time Xone’s case, the proverbial calm before the storm) in the midst of These New Puritan’s unique brand of intensity.

Careful, the two on the left are totally checking out your junk

Hidden is a deep, atmospheric album that has quite a lot to reveal over repeated listens. It’s also quick and with a good enough flow to encourage repeated listening, making the already fascinatingly sharp instrumentation even more inviting for analysis. These New Puritans have taken chamber pop to the next level, much like Neutral Milk Hotel and the Arcade Fire did before them. All in all, it’s an incredibly impressive and original effort that deserves all the praise it gets.

Yes, even the “first masterpiece of the 2010s” that have been spreading like wildfire this month.

Chris Barnes’ outfit Six Feet Under has been rather prolific throughout its career, with eight full length albums, one EP, and now three cover albums, all in fifteen years. As is the case with most death metal bands, of course, minimal progression has really been made, and their later work sounds marginally different from their earlier stuff (partly thanks to a change of guitarists). Still, Six Feet Under has had a few ideas unique to the genre, the first and most obvious being the heavy groove they incorporate into their brutal death metal approach, and large abandonment of high speeds. Another was their choice of covers; while most other death metal bands would cover Venom, Possessed, or some other progenitor of the general extreme metal genre, they would cover groups like Thin Lizzy or the Monkees. After a while, they put out 2000’s Graveyard Classics, which was a well conceived all-covers project, and sounded good. Ten years later, they’ve slapped together ten more covers with Graveyard Classics 3, and by now it’s become clear that this particular idea has well worn out its welcome.

Oh, now that shit's spooky. ...kinda

Despite the clear intention of these covers, they’re played very faithfully, and nothing really new is tried with the exception of Chris Barnes growling the vocals instead of singing them, which of course for this band is nothing new at all. The most interesting song here is their take on the Ramones’ Psychotherapy, for the obvious reason that the Ramones are the only band on Graveyard Classics 3 who are really out of Six Feet Under’s element. It’s impressive that they’re able to take such a fun, sarcastic song and make it sound so menacing; lines like “Gonna kill someone” and “I’m gonna burglarize your home” are taken so out of context that it deserves mention. After all, the best covers are usually those that take a completely different perspective with a song, rather than attempting to simply replicate it.

Still, as mentioned before, the covers are largely too faithful to be very compelling. Even songs the listener may not be familiar with still sound like Six Feet Under, but not; A Dangerous Meeting (Mercyful Fate) and Metal on Metal (Anvil) are clearly Eighties metal, where the Metallica (Frayed Ends of Sanity) and Slayer (At Dawn They Sleep) songs are just that. Of course, this is not intended to be an artistic statement, just the band cutting loose and having fun playing favorite songs, but it just doesn’t feel like it had to be released as an official full length. Especially when they did this much better the first time around.

While Graveyard Classics 3 is mostly mediocre, some covers are just plain bad. Van Halen’s On Fire sounds incredibly tired and boring, but the worst by far is Prong’s Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck. This was the one I was personally most interested in hearing, and it was the most disappointing. The band’s version has absolutely no edge, and it’s hard to believe that Chris Barnes and co. couldn’t think of more creative things to do with this song. Despite being heavier than the original, it sounds strangely watered down, and listening to Chris Barnes imitating the background screams from the original with his own high pitched howls is a hard thing to not laugh at.

They look nothing like any other death metal group. Look, he's got DREDS!!

Not to call Six Feet Under a lackluster band, because as far as their genre is concerned they’re perfectly adequate, but the gimmick of giving older songs a death metal flair has gotten old, particularly as the theme of an entire album. It certainly was a good idea when they first did it back in 2000, but by now (and especially after the somewhat bland second volume, which was a reinterpretation of AC/DC’s Back in Black album) it’s lost its charm, and coming from a band who is unquestionably talented but also undeniably past their prime, it’s nothing that merits more than one or two listens.

Hadouken!(don’t you DARE forget that exclamation point, dammit) was a prominent part of the so-called New Rave movement, an absolute delight of a name for which we have ever insightful NME to thank. Their 2008 debut, Music for an Accelerated Culture, propelled by the unabashedly energetic single That Boy That Girl, was a frenetic, absurd amalgum of dance-punk, trance, house, and I’m sure a number of others I’m forgetting; it was a loud, in your face, and ultimately fun listen, much like Mindless Self Indulgence’s earlier releases. Also like MSI, however, Hadouken! seems to receive critiques for what are essentially the wrong things. Surely, these critics don’t think that Hadouken!’s fans are swooning at the philosophical musings behind vocalist James Smith’s lines, like “How he dresses I care zero, as long as he don’t spill my drink,” or “I should have put this flame out years ago, but you burnt my house down.” There’s nothing groundbreaking or poignant here, and there was never meant to be; it’s little more than mindless fun, and to judge it on any grounds other than that seems to miss the point. Where Mindless is clearly more tongue-in-cheek than Hadouken!, the latter has a bit more variety to offer musically.

Da world be smashin' shit up, yo

Having said that, For the Masses is a loud, bouncy good time. Hadouken! has traded in a bit of the boisterous energy from their debut for more groove, but the aggression still comes across loud and clear. Though none of the ten in this set are particularly short, the added melody helps the songs breeze by much more quickly than they feel they should. First track Rebirth shows right away that synth player Alice Spooner has gotten somewhat sharper with her lines and layering, and her chemistry with guitarist Daniel “Pilau” Rice has grown noticeably as well.

There’s also a stark difference between their previous singles (That Boy That Girl, Liquid Lives) and those on For the Masses, Turn the Lights out and M.A.D., which was released on an EP back in September. The newer ones are a lot less reliant on aggression, and feel more confident in their melodies, but are still as fun as the older ones. The house sound that dominates a lot of the tracks, most prominently Evil and Mic Check, is well conceived in that despite the obviously heavy electronic presence, the bass, guitar, and drums still give it a genuinely organic feel. Hadouken! also hits a similarly industrial sound on Play the Night, a bruising number with a great KMFDM-esque riff.

For the Masses is clearly cut from the same cloth as Accelerated, but there’s a more eclectic feel here. House Is Falling exhibits more facets than the entirety of their last album (which true, doesn’t exactly make it a prism of a song), and for all of Ugly’s ridiculous sentiments of “fucking your face up”, it plays with its groove very well. Yes, James Smith yells “FUCK YOUR FACE UP,” and somehow, the threat in his English accent fails to intimidate.

Oh alright son, you can go with your friends. Now what time will the rave be over...

There’s a bit more on For the Masses than the typical “more of the same” syndrome; the synths and guitars go better together, there’s a bit more restraint to their attack, and James Smith is still armed with some poetry that will make you WEEP. Hadouken! is admittedly polarized however, and if a manic and fast paced blend of aggressive electronic dance styles sounds good to you, you will probably love this. If you were a fan of the band before, you’ll probably love this. Anything else, however, and chances are it will irritate you; though I imagine that is the whole point.

Releasing 2008’s flat out spectacular Devotion, endorsement (including an opening touring slot) from one of last year’s heavy hitters Grizzly Bear, and getting signed to Sub Pop made quite the year and a half for Beach House. And with as good as Devotion was, nobody would have minded vocalist Victoria Legrand and instrumentalist Alex Scally being unable to quite match it, much less top it. The duo, however, have indeed managed to live up to the somewhat large hype by not only meeting expectations, but toppling them with their third, unexpectedly mature album, Teen Dream. Recorded in a converted church, you can almost hear the setting; the lush keyboards, the echoing vocals, the music seems to exude the space in which they played. In the same way that Animal Collective did around this time last year, Beach House has established the first high mark of the year to beat.

Zebraorgy? Shit, I dunno

One amazing thing about Teen Dream is the fact that its melodies are even more consistently spot on than Devotion’s. Every song is swimming in them, and they’re all so seducing that even when the opening track Zebra gives off a slight resemblance to Weezer’s No Other One, you can’t help liking it all the more. This, along with Silver Soul (and its gorgeous chorus of “It’s happening again..”), gives Teen Dream an absolutely stunning beginning.

Walk in the Park shows off just how much Scally has grown as an instrumentalist. His layering is masterful; the warm guitar contrasts with the almost icy sounding organ, but they never drown out the drum machine, even when the keyboards erupt in the chorus. Legrand’s hauntingly beautiful vocals waver over everything, hypnotizing to such a degree that she could rival Hope Sandoval. Even when the melodies are at their simplest, such as on Used to Be, the piano’s following of Legrand’s voice is just layered over time and again until the song resembles a psychedelic haze almost so thick as to mask the original tune. At the end, the layers sound about to fall about, playing barely in time together, as Legrand repeats “Any day now” (she uses repetition with startling effectiveness all throughout Teen Dream) and it abruptly ends.

As good as the album’s beginning is, the end proves able to best it. The swooningly smooth and gentle Better Times gives off that classic dream pop vibe, where something is repetitive but it’s just too pretty for you to care, before leading into 10 Mile Stereo, which like Used to Be, also has a deceptively basic beginning but is scarcely recognizable once it finishes. The more spare but equally arresting Real Love picks up here, driven by a piano and Legrand’s powerful emoting and Take Care closes us out with a strangely poppy, psychedelic drone, complete with harmonizations, a piano echoing as it climbs and falls, and sweeping cymbals.

This reminds me of George Michael Bluth.. "I feel like we should kiss again... to freak them out"

Teen Dream is, well, amazing. Not only is it unrelentingly gorgeous from beginning to end, but it’s exciting to see how quickly this duo is progressing. It leaves very little room for improvement on their sound, but I, for one, am too blown away to even think about what they put out next.

With the exclusion of Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, Mark Oliver Everett’s work under the Eels moniker for the last decade has largely been little more than mildly inspired tongue-in-cheek baroque pop. Many have pointed out that this could well be a result of how the toweringly personal Electro-Shock Blues put off so many listeners with its intensely emotional material, and it makes sense. Still, while scaling back that aspect has certainly made the Eels more accessible, it’s doubtfully a coincidence that three of Everett’s last four albums were dominated with just passably catchy music when it was clear that he was capable of much, much more. On his eighth full length as the Eels, End Times, he chronicles a messy divorce and general anxiety over aging with a great deal of understandable angst, and it’s most likely because of this that he sounds more genuine than he has in years.

"Is this really how you see yourself?" "No, I needed more wrinkles but I ran out of ink.."

Having been put out just shy of a year after his last release, Hombre Lobo, the idea that End Times was written in a fashion similar to Beck’s Sea Change (driven by heartache and created rather quickly) isn’t out of the question. While this isn’t quite as profound as Beck’s melancholic masterpiece, it has the same sense of urgency in most places and the same overall gloom. Despite this, Everett still maintains his sad sarcasm, just without the irony. This is by far his best method of delivery, simply because it feels so honest; it’s a large part of what made Electro-Shock Therapy so damn good. The story he narrates in the single A Line in the Dirt is a perfect example: his distant lover locks herself in the bathroom, so he resorts to pissing outside, and singing about it in that heartbreaking voice of his. Making this kind of sardonic humor into a painfully beautiful song is truly his forte.

The heavier songs (at least heavy by Eels standards) have a great sense of vigor as well; cuts like Paradise Blues and Unhinged bring to mind aggressive songs from earlier albums that came across as watered down, not for lack of songwriting but conviction. Here they flourish because he’s got fire in his voice, and it doesn’t feel like he’s simply repeating himself. On others, such as the nakedly honest Nowadays and I Need a Mother, he makes impressive use of his knack for hooks and while his frail, weathered voice isn’t exactly anything new, he displays none of the contrivances that have marred a lot of his songwriting since 2000’s Daisies of the Galaxy.

Boo hoo, even my dog is a reject

While it’s not quite as good as Electro-Shock Blues, it’s wonderful to hear Everett this passionate again, even if it is yet again over loss. This is especially true for someone who’s followed him since his surprise hit Novocaine for the Soul back in 1996; his formula had been stale for a long while, and especially after the bland Hombre quashed the hopes that Blinking Lights restored, it’s good to know that the Eels are still able to be as sharp as they’ve ever been.

Spoon seems to more and more be approaching a Yo La Tengo-like status as a reliably good indie band churning out high quality releases every two or three years. Granted, the latter has a good ten years on the former, but both have a consistency remarkable not only in quality but in the fact that the quality requires minimal sound tweaking to attain. Last year head Spoon Britt Daniel produced the White Rabbits’ excellent sophomore record, It’s Frightening, which in spite of their own style, had a distinct Spoon flavor to it. This, paired with the release of the Got Nuffin EP, fed a great deal of the anticipation for the new album(as if their fans actually needed the goading). Now that Transference, their seventh album, is finally out, it lives up to all expectations with unsurprising ease. While not as meticulously produced as its two preceding releases, Transference still has all the charm and cleverness one would expect from the band.

I am so alienated and unique...

The first thing you might notice about Transference is its somewhat raw sound. In comparison to its predecessor, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (as has been mentioned before), this album feels a lot more whimsical than its more tight and polished predecessor. While songs like Is Love Forever? have endlessly luring hooks (namely in the opposing guitars and bass), an even more fascinating aspect is the great meshing of pop and lo-fi. Love is followed by the compelling pair of The Mystery Zone and Who Makes Your Money, which each manage to sound musically minimal, yet rich. The bluesy piano led stomp of Written in Reverse returns Transference to the more raw, almost demo-sounding character that Love presented, though with much rougher edges, and not to mention a rather clever lyrical structure. Midway track I Saw the Light is another more garage-sounding tune, but something that is a testament to Spoon’s songwriting is how the album never sounds like two separate halves forced together; despite the obvious difference in overall sound among the tracks (more subdued vs. more rough), there is a very strong sense of cohesion.

After the addictive garage sound of Trouble Comes Running is an almost startlingly lullaby-esque song in Goodnight Laura. Extremely gentle and unironic both musically and lyrically, it’s a very simple and sweet ballad which, again, to compliment Transference’s cohesion, nestles in quite nicely between Trouble and Out Go the Lights‘ throbbing tale of heartbreak. Lead single off last year’s EP of the same name, Got Nuffin(continuing the trend of phonetic singles like Don’t You Evah) picks up really well here with its lively sound and hopeful lyrics, and leads perfectly into the closing Nobody Gets Me but You.

Hehehehe this time ask for Harry Sach ppffffffttttt

It’s not impressive that Spoon has released another fantastic album so much as that they have managed to keep their sound relatively uniform while so easily avoiding redundancy. Though released nearly a full seven months beforehand, Got Nuffin served as a great single partly for how highly representative of Transference it is; instantly catchy melody, clever instrumentation, and an undeceptively positive, upbeat sound.

Welsh band Lostprophets have returned from their hibernation recently with The Betrayed, their first album since 2006’s Liberation Transmission.  After bursting onto the hard rock scene with their 2000 debut thefakesoundofprogress, the band changed its sound a bit, becoming much more polished and radio-friendly with 2004’s Start Something (which featured the radio hit Last Train Home), an album that achieved some success on the US charts. 2006’s Liberation Transmission followed, and mellowed out the band’s sound even more, replacing the raw aggression and innovation that was a part of the band’s debut with dance-y punk pop and super-polished hard rock tunes. The album was somewhat of a letdown to longtime fans like myself, with the derivative radio jam Rooftops the hit song from the album. Coincidentally, I still hear that song at supermarkets, so I guess it paid off for them.

Well, they returned this month with The Betrayed, the result of some tumultuous record-label hullabaloo in the past few years. After scrapping some songs because they were ‘too slick and shiny’, they tried to enlist the help of super producer Bob Rock, but that fell through as well. They then took matters into their own hands writing and recording an album while bassist Stuart Richardson took over production duties. The songs they wrote during this time resulted in the track list of The Betrayed.

As a long-time fan of Lostprophets who became interested in the band upon seeing the video for their song Shinobi vs. Dragon Ninja way back in 2000 or so, The Betrayed is pretty good, despite its title and silly cover art. I didn’t really care for Liberation Transmission, as it was much poppier than I was used to. I much prefer the raw sound of thefakesoundofprogress and the harder-edged pop-rock sound of Start Something than the danceable songs with handclaps that plagued Liberation Transmission. This time around, the band seems to have tried to capture all three elements of their sound onto one album, and the results are mixed.

one of them didn't get the 'Wear a white shirt to the shoot' text....

Some of the songs on the album try really hard to be “raw”, such as Dstryr and Dstryr, with an abrasive riff and lead singer Ian Watkins doing some yelling amid the vocals. He yells, says ‘motherfucker’ a bunch of times, and it’s easy to see the fist pumps that inevitably go down when this song is played live. It’s not bad, but it’s a bit of an obvious attempt to recapture their harder-edged sound. First single It’s Not the End of the World but I Can See it From Here is pretty catchy, in the way most Lostprophets radio singles are. The video features the band playing the song on a rooftop somewhere in LA, and it’s an aggressive yet catchy tune with some nice rhythms and guitar riffs, and a sing-along chorus. Where We Belong is another single from The Betrayed, and it is not unlike Rooftops and Last Train Home (from Start Something). It’s what people have come to expect from the band in terms of radio singles, and with good reason. It’s slightly predictable but still not a bad tune, despite its obviously epic-sounding drum fills and staccato guitar.

Next Stop Atro City is another attempt to be ‘raw’, and it suffers the same fate as Dstryr and Dstryr, with loud noisy verses and another sing-along chorus designed for mush-pit approval. It’s not bad, and features a nice propulsive assault toward the end of the song. The issues I have with The Betrayed can be seen with the very next track, For He’s a Jolly Good Felon. After the abrasive noise bomb of the previous song, this one comes next, with its dance/punk guitar riff and radio-ready sing-along verses, creating a huge difference between its sound and the previous track’s aggression. With this album, Lostprophets are trying to please all of their fans, whether they prefer the band’s old sound, the radio-rock sound, or the dance/punk sound. All those styles of Lostprophets are on display on The Betrayed, and for that reason it doesn’t really flow well as an album. In addition, the ‘raw’ songs don’t really come off as that ‘raw’ because of the shimmery production that the songs have; they aren’t as organic and authentically raw as they were back in 2000.

Don’t get me wrong, the band still does do all these styles efficiently, but The Betrayed comes across as a bunch of songs they had written a while ago thrown onto one album of varying styles, without much cohesion. That’s not to say this is a bad record, in fact I’d say it’s much better than Liberation Transmission. It just doesn’t flow very well, but that makes sense, considering the rocky path this record went through in order to be finished, with producers switching constantly, label support dwindling and the band ultimately doing everything itself.

If you’ve ever like any of Lostprophets’ radio singles, then you’ll probably enjoy The Betrayed. If you haven’t liked them since 2000, you probably won’t care much for The Betrayed. I think it’s a solid record, though, and a marked improvement over their previous album.

Theoretically, Guy Ritchie had quite a bit at stake with the latest rendition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ceaselessly popular (or rather ceaselessly profitable and easy to remake) Sherlock Holmes. After all, his last two films, Revolver and RocknRolla, did not attract very much in the way of attention or revenue (is it something to do with titling his films with words that begin with “R?”). And yet, somehow, even with three consecutive “flops” (don’t forget, Swept Away came before Revolver and RocknRolla), Guy’s career never seemed to want for a resuscitation. Even a powerhouse producer like Joel Silver wasn’t hindered by the obvious gamble involved in the financing of RocknRolla. But still, why, with all of the evidence proving Guy as anything but a director of box office successes, would he be selected as the one to remake a star-studded, action-infused, studio-helmed film?

From left: Guy Ritchie, some tart that's supposed to replace Madonna, Robert Downey Jr., Rachel McAdams, and Mark Strong

The answer is twofold: The first, and most overt, being he is British. And Sherlock Holmes is a quintessentially British story, never mind that Robert Downey Jr. plays the lead. The second is that his directorial techniques are mutable. While he may be known for his fast cutting, gangster sympathies, and music taste that creates a soundtrack far superior to any other in recent years, it is unquestionable that Warner Brothers saw in him the trait of malleability, someone willing to make concessions if asked, perhaps both because of his personality and his desire to claw his way back into the mainstream of film consciousness.

Robert Downey Jr. playing Guy Ritchie's charmingly eccentric version of Sherlock Holmes

Apart from the why of how Guy Ritchie landed such a coveted film, the other important query is: Does the film live up to the expectations it has been leavened with? I say, yes. And it is definitely better than the standard fare one finds in the cinema. Audiences seemed to agree as Holmes stayed at the top for two weeks before being bumped by Avatar (ugh, a shallow triumph by James Cameron. Sorry, but I really don’t give three fucks about the advancement of special effects. For fuck’s sake, Dali made better films with the rudimentary tools at his disposal).

The follow up to that aforementioned query, however, is: Does the film measure up against Ritchie’s prior films? The answer to that is, sadly, no. Try as Ritchie might to inoculate the movie with traces of himself (e.g. the prominent display of The Punch Bowl, a pub he owns in the posh Mayfair section of London, and Lord Blackwood’s creepy utterance of The Book of Revelations, which I maintain is a a discrete show of affection for Madonna’s “The Beast Within”), Sherlock Holmes loses Ritchie’s typical panache to the talent heavy cast, the slick editing, and a script that he did not write. Even though the cleverness of the dialogue is there to remind you that the sceenplay is in the vain of Ritchie’s trademark wry humor, I think people assume that it could have been written any Brit, since the perception is that they’re all born with the wit of Shakespeare and the magnetism of the royal family.

The real life rogues themselves at an after party for the film's premiere

Ritchie’s chance to return to the more ruffian ways illustrated in Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch does not seem to be on the horizon either. His next two projects are an adaptation of his own graphic novel The Gamekeeper and a sequel to Sherlock Holmes.

Self-described as “future fusion metal,” Danish band Mnemic have indeed had an impressive blend of heavy genres to boast in their near twelve years of activity. The group has done a great job of juggling death metal breaks and metalcore structures against their industrial backdrop, and after how cleverly they weaved a somewhat progressive element into 2007’s Passenger, Mnemic didn’t seem too far from putting out an album that was going to floor everyone. After three years, their fourth album Sons of the System is finally here… but unfortunately, it just doesn’t stand up to their older material. The same basic elements are in place more or less, but it seems that the attempt to implement a bit more melody has not only sacrificed some of the aggression in their attack, but suffers a good amount itself, because melodicism requires an at least passable knack for writing hooks, which Mnemic really doesn’t have.

Awww, they're all holding hands! That is so cute

“Let’s just say it has become more theatrical, more electronic, and just more catchy,” the band said of their latest release. “We have put all our focus on writing good songs and not being afraid of experimenting.” While this may have been their intent, it doesn’t take many listens to the album to dispute this. For one, the band sounds more streamlined than ever; their choruses now feel as if striving for power rather than actually displaying it, particularly in the opening title track’s attempt at an anthemic chorus which falls extremely short (the cheesy outro of “Will we rise? Will we fall?” doesn’t help, either). The Erasing is another example of this; the swirling synths come out of nowhere for the chorus, and it completely mismatches with the rest of the song. It also brings the lackluster production to mind, namely in how the synths and keyboards often sound buried in the mix, and not for sake of deliberate layering either; they simply get too hard to hear in places, and frankly don’t reward the effort made in searching for them.

There are many points in Sons that do work very well, though, and they’re mostly in the album’s second half. Fate and Hero(In) have the older trademarks of more complicated time signatures and better matched choruses. Elongated Sporadic Bursts resembles a slightly electronic, more accessible Meshuggah (in style as well as title), with a great groove that keeps strong throughout. Orbiting, while not the best closer per se, still manages to end things on a good note. The song takes a number of metal clichés, like timed cymbal grabs and fading out with an extended chorus, and makes them sound a bit fresh. Still, while these songs do stand out positively, it’s really only when compared to the rather generic majority; nothing here is as good as anything they’ve done on their previous discs.

Even while waiting for an available elevator.. they're still BAD ASS

Sons of the System certainly isn’t without its moments, but as a follow up to their interesting body of work, it’s a huge disappointment. Too many of the songs sound watered down and uninspired, and even the best tracks can’t compare to older songs; for instance, there is nothing here with the fury of Deathbox or the complexities of The Eye on Your Back. Nothing is really that bad either, but as far as being especially memorable, Sons doesn’t have a whole lot to offer. Try Passenger, or The Audio Injected Soul, for a better representation of their sound.

One of the many bands of the indie movement to be plagued with ridiculous amounts of hype (before the release of their debut, no less), Vampire Weekend was able to meet the impossibly high expectations better than many of their contemporaries with their 2008 self titled record. While it was fairly derivative in spots, it was very well written, and had a unique worldbeat fusion that gave its indie pop sound a very interesting flavor. Two years later, they have released their long-awaited sophomore effort, and not only does it live up to its predecessor, the band has taken a bold step forward and run with the worldbeat aspect that made their debut so special, while maintaining not only their basic sound, but keeping their pop sensibility as well.

"Boy, I hope that this picture will be used for an album cover in another twenty seven years"

Lead single Cousins serves as a great sample of Contra; it’s got a standard rock format but loaded with so many different ideas it can’t help but charm. The frenzied guitars are outstanding, but what really steals the proverbial show is the rhythm section. The drums and bass simply DO NOT QUIT on this song. Its instrumentation could well be the least broad out of any track on the album, but it still sounds every bit as exotic, and the energy is downright captivating.

On a number of tracks, they sound a lot like Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel jamming with an indie band, particularly on the trio of White Sky, Holiday, and California English (HAH! I used an oxford comma, Vampire Weekend! SUCK ON THAT). Ezra Koenig’s higher sounding vocals are more controlled than flailing, the unwaveringly upbeat tempos rest upon laid back sounding yet somewhat complicated beats, there’s a slightly tropical sound which comes across as strangely authentic (with English’s random autotune, no less), and overall the afro-meets-synth sound is very well implemented. Clever percussion and keyboards are implemented throughout as well, which is immediately noticeable on opener Horchata as well as the gentle, piano driven Taxi Cab.

Even at Contra’s most aggressive, the songs sound smooth and controlled. Run’s alternating gallop and offbeat, stuttering drums seem to take the lead over the synths and guitars, and the complex relationships therein are fascinating. There’s also the fast, surprisingly danceable Giving Up the Gun (which will no doubt spawn some awesome dance remixes), which retains all the creativity, and even the very core sound, of Contra’s other nine tracks, but with a pleasantly unexpected kick that shows off a bit more of the diversity they’ve grown into.

Pitchfork: "Vampire Weekend may be more punk rock than you think." Oh yes, I sees it!

Vampire Weekend’s debut had some great ideas, but they weren’t given the imagination that they’ve received here. Contra is a very lively affair, as well as brisk; the ten songs breeze by in just over half an hour. It’s not only a flat-out triumph musically, but lyrically compelling as well, a big theme challenging that perhaps problems that seem more trivial when compared to the world’s more pressing issues are still just those – problems. All in all, a fantastic record from a band proving to be growing into themselves far faster and more gracefully than expected.