It's always a drag when you hear a new album that does absolutely nothing for you by a band whose previous work you've liked. There are two of those right now, one a lot worse than the other. Aloha's 1999 debut EP The Great Communicators, The Interpreters, The Nonbelievers was great stuff, an amalgam of the Chicago school of post-rock -- long instrumental sections, unexpected time-signature shifts, heavy jazz influence, that sort of thing -- and some more traditional indie rock styles of the Death Cab For Cutie school. Plus a lot of vibes, and man, am I a sucker for vibes.
Well, I haven't actually been paying attention to the intervening records, so I don't know exactly when this changeover occurred, but the new Aloha album, Some Echoes (Polyvinyl), pretty much sucks. The jazzy post-rock elements of the EP are pretty much entirely gone -- as are the vibes -- and what's left is so lacking in distinction that even though I've listened to this album three or four times now, I couldn't tell you a thing about what any of the songs actually sound like. It's a dull, cookie-cutter, formulaic record with little to recommend it. All I know is that if I had been a bigger fan of these guys to begin with, I would have been furiously disappointed in this album. Like, on the level that I hated the Human League's Hysteria back in 1984.
The jury is still out on Damone's Out Here All Night (due out May 23 on Island/Def Jam), but I'm thinking it's going to end up at least a minor disappointment. I was one of the three or four people who actually heard and liked Damone's 2003 debut From the Attic, the release and promotion of which RCA fucked up in that way that only RCA can -- seriously, has there ever been a more incompetent major label than RCA? -- so that it missed its obvious target audience of Hot Topic-shopping teenage mall-punks. At a time when Avril's "Sk8r Boi" was all the rage and even Lindsey Lohan was being all garagey in that remake of Freaky Friday, From the Attic should have been a much bigger deal than it was: Noelle LeBlanc's bratty-girl vocals and Dave Pino's teen-angst tunes were a perfect match.
But the 30ish Pino -- who supposedly wrote all the songs on the album when he was in high school in the '80s, after he broke up with his girlfriend -- left Damone after the album and their RCA deal fell apart, and the rest of the band spent some time woodshedding after his departure. Ironically, what the new Damone turned into was something much closer to Dave Pino's OTHER former band, the tongue-in-cheek '80s-style rockers Waltham, than Damone ever were in their first incarnation. Out Here All Night sounds like Diane Warren-era Cheap Trick as fronted by Pat Benatar. This isn't as insulting as it might sound to some of you -- I kinda like Pat Benatar, and I think the main reason Cheap Trick's late '80s era is so disappointing is simply that it pales next to the brilliance of the first few albums -- but I do think it's a bit of a shame, especially since Waltham are so much better at resurrecting the glory of '80s mainstream pop/rock.
However, just to finish on a more positive note, Scott Walker's The Drift (4AD) is spellbindingly odd, but in a more accessible, less mannered way than his last album, 1995's semi-operatic Tilt. The songs have odd segues into absurdity (one female-sung verse of the 12-minute suite "Clara" is accompanied by the sound of a grunting man pummeling a punching bag), but with time, study and the help of Walker's elliptical liner notes, they do seem to be "about" something. "Jesse," for example, somehow conflates the 9/11 attacks with Elvis' stillborn twin brother. This album is also the first proof I've ever seen that Walker has a functioning sense of humor: "The Escape" climaxes with a dead-on impersonation of Donald Duck.
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