Album reviews

Jeremy Clemmons

Staff Writer

Belle and Sebastian, Write about Love

To have a career as long as Belle and Sebastian (formed in 1996,) you have to have gotten a few things right, and you also have to be somewhat prescient — their airy music has anticipated large shifts and turns in indie rock where few others have.  As a friend noted, the Scottish band have been almost workmanlike towards this ideal, creating a series of recent albums that have climbed decades in sounds and styles (60s, 70s, 80s, etc.)

Write About Love, by and large, is the latest example of this double-strategy, both predictably efficient and remarkably forward-looking.  Songs like “I Want the World to Stop” and “Come on Sister” are as groovy as the band’s ever been, as if they’ve set out to conquer 80s retro-pop once and for all.

The album’s best track, “I Didn’t See it Coming,” is a metamorphosis of their old dainty, unassuming pose into a brilliant combustion of synthesizers and overlaying melody, which makes them sound as close to acts like the New Pornographers as they’ve ever been.

There is the usual folksy stuff like “The Ghost of Rockschool” and “Read the Blessed Pages” — both, of course, with the tongue-in-cheek flirtations with Christianity — but these are few and far between on a modest but impressive album by a band that wears the adjectives comfortably.

Grade: B-

Sufjan Stevens, Age of Adz

Sufjan Stevens is the multi-talented musician behind such albums as Michigan and Illinois, which are — yes, you guessed it — kind of musical postcards from specific states.  The Age of Adz is somewhat unfortunately not a part of that project; it’s a very personal album of love and communication (or lack thereof,) rarely exiting Stevens’ heart, let alone a state border.

Where those previous albums were able to excuse their inconsistency and occasional missteps because of their audacity and clever conceit, The Age of Adz simply cannot.  Stevens’ tendency for random bursts of drum machine and electronic noise, while sometimes refreshing and fitting like on “Get Real and Get Right,” is often overbearing and distracting, if not pretentious.

Additionally, Stevens’ constant worrying about “talking too much” (“Too Much”) and inability to say anything effectively at all (“Futile Devices,” “Bad Communication”) are interesting thematic moments that are buried beneath both noise and lyrical incompetence — not as noticeable when he’s wistfully waxing poetic about local holidays and state mottos — in short, threading emotion in and out of historical significance and memory.

Grade: C-

Deerhunter, Halcyon Digest

Halcyon Digest is bonafide headphone music.  It’s a beautifully produced record by Ben Allen (who also produced the equally rewarding Merriweather Post Pavilion by Animal Collective) that warbles and strums like a cross between early shoegazer acts like My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jr and the dub-inflected ‘thickness’ of recent Portishead.

Despite being products of a digital age, Deerhunter are interested in the crackles and breakdowns of transmission; Brandon Cox concerns himself with aging (“only getting bored as I’m getting older”) usually right before moments where the music is on the brink of deterioration, as if he is speaking about some larger anxiety of technology and control.

Largely, however, the band is just perfecting a songwriting formula from their previous album, Microcastle.  Songs like “Don’t Cry” and “Memory Boy” are rather straightforward pop songs, which is a title Deerhunter wouldn’t reject.  Cox rarely drones, and he rarely shouts.  It’s all part of a half-ironic, half-dejected existence that seems to be the only foreseeable way to go.

Grade: A-