Reviews (cont’d)
MAKE EP 1 Self-released As neato as the band’s horizontally-challenging moniker is, naming your band “Make” and your debut “EP 1” makes you completely un-Googleable. Give it a shot. Frustrating, yes, but not as frustrating as listening to a clearly talented band — they’ve got chops, ideas, balls and solid production — wasting its time in a sub-Tool progmetal fantasy. It’s got all the hallmarks: The extended, winding song structures, the “here’s my metal voice”/”here’s my normal voice” thing, the slow and heavy bits, the melodic passages, etc., etc. I like so many things about this band (and from our e-mail exchange, they seem to be very pleasant and slightly goofy), but the package they’re wrapped in just holds nothing for me. I wish they’d more often go for the extremities of their sound, as they do somewhat on “White Light/Desert Throne,” which starts off repetitively beatific, blows out into doom with wraith-like, vomiting vocals, but then ends as somewhat bland, if pretty, stoner rock. —Jesse Steichen
Maple Stave LP1 Self-released Maple Stave has made a name in Durham, its hometown, by packing one hell of a wallop. The trio thrashes through a thicket of tight-wound baritone guitars and drumming that hits with the quickness and impact of chain-gun rounds. On its first full-length, this intensity remains one of the band’s best assets. The exemplary EP3 holdover “Heng Dai,” for
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example, bends time signatures with brute force as nervy guitar tones give way to chaotic bouts of distorted arrhythmia. But Maple Stave is also more spatially aware than before, allowing room for incremental crescendoes that lend even more force to incendiary moments. “If They Are Brave, They Will Fight” springs from lush picking and a steady bass line before mad-dog drumming splits the song open into a breathless cavalcade. Allowing its forces to build up before it attacks, LP1 manages seismic impact while remaining immensely satisfying from beginning to end. —Jordan Lawrence
Brian McGee The Taking or the Leaving Self-released Asheville’s Brian McGee, lead singer and guitarist of mid90s northeastern punk outfit Plow United, fills his second LP with the kind of everyman rock that made Springsteen a household name 30-plus years ago and drives bands like Gaslight Anthem today. There will always be a place for this no-frills Americana in the kinds of bars The Blues Brothers played after getting the band back together, especially given the touches of pedal steel and organ that show up this time around. And though his raw vocals are somewhat smoothedover, this isn’t unimaginative, limited or one-toned in any way — “Let’s Bleed” recalls Son Volt, while “First Kiss” could pass as a Strokes cover. You can call this alt-country or rockabilly, but tracks like “Driving Horses” expose the record for what it really is: essentially genreless, genuine rock & roll that doesn’t insist upon itself but generously sates listeners’ hungry hearts. —William Morris
Jenks Miller and Nicholas Szczepanik American Gothic Small Doses Though Jenks Miller’s recorded work has been remarkably diverse — ranging from cloudy, peaceful drones to harsh black metal to heavy blues meditation — patience has been its consistent virtue. American Gothic, a 35-minute collaborative exercise shared between Miller and D.C. sound artist Nicholas Szczepanik, is no exception. Here, the pair mostly trades in lush electronic drones that rise and recede like tides. The duo dives into dense, harsh timbres as eagerly as clear, meditative tones, never more adeptly than on “White Light,” which pits crashing waves of harsh electronics against shimmering, sunlit keyboard chords, matching panoramic beauty to raw power for a delirious effect. This trades the instrumental narrative Miller offered with his 2009 post-metal opus The Invisible Mountain (released under his Horseback marquee), for wide swaths of applied sound, which serve instead as a series of tangentially connected vignettes, each suggesting further possibilities in emotionally compelling instrumental composition. —Bryan Reed
The Moaners Nocturnal Holidays for Quince The Moaners have been playing outlaw country-tinged blues rock for six years and, now, three LPs. Nocturnal is a logical step in the duo’s evolution with a hint that — if it so chooses — it could go off the deep end into scary-good experimental folk. “Barbarian in China” is
three-and-a-half minutes of undeniable transcendence, evoking the bleak minimalism of Patti Smith’s deeply troubled Gone Again. It is — easily — the finest cut. More commonly, Southern rock truisms are given new life in songs like “Ramblin’” and “Blue Moon.” By and large, the Moaners’ lyrics are elegant in their tipsy simplicity, with guitarist and vocalist Melissa Swingle often evoking Johnny Cash-level sincerity. The musicianship is fantastic and uncluttered. So it’s okay if “Moonshiner” goes on too long, or if “Happiness Is the Road” collapses under its own lack of subtlety; the rest of the record is quite human, quite honest, and quite good. —Corbie Hill
Monsonia 33.3 Holidays for Quince This is one tense record. Alice in Chains achieved this kind of sustained anxiety in their better work, but even Staley and Cantrell let listeners up for air every once in a while. Not so with Monsonia. The record ends with the naked desperation of “Lived in Caves,” where a voice sunk in big guitars and bigger drums hints at a failed relationship that, 20 years out, remains unresolved. “Lumberjack Stunts” rides an unsteady truce between swaggering, stoner swing and a seething, repressed guitar that finally breaks loose in the third minute. Even then, there’s no resolution, it’s as if the song lost its temper, twitching eyelids and all. Much like hard rock did in the 90s, Monsonia brings metallic intensity to a format accessible to non-metalheads. The trio’s instrumental sound is huge, throaty, and dark, yet the vocal style brings a vulnerable, frantic quality that shapes the unbelievable tension endemic to 33.3. —Corbie Hill
The Old Ceremony Tender Age Alyosha Hyper-lush production. Keenly fashioned 60s pop hooks and arrangements. A confident, poetic (and well-named) crooner at the helm. The Old Ceremony’s latest longplayer is matured, well-versed pop-rock, if not a bit stated. Perhaps it’s a retro-leaning, but slightly younger brother of The National, trading in the 4AD stars’ jittery, haunted edge for an overall nostalgic swagger and bounce. That said, one of its most successful cuts comes in the wide-open, slo-mo strummer, “I Don’t Believe It,” a ballad concerning a lover in the midst of one of life’s darker moments. The hook contained in its verse is as timeless a thing as I’ve heard. Even if removed from its pluckier chorus, it backstrokes along magically. The kitchen sink percussion and reverb of songs like “Ruined My Plans” and “All At Once” call to mind Grizzly Bear’s production as much as Phil Spector’s. The casually ornate (but not fussy) and delicate (but not twee) Tender Age is another finely executed, accomplished longplayer from the reliable Django Haskins and his crack team. —Topher Manilla
Paleface One Big Party Ramseur The title of “You Will Get What You Want,” the song that opens the new one from Concordbased singer/songwriter/multiinstrumentalist/interesting character Paleface, can be considered prophetic if these are among the things you want: A strummy testimonial that deftly dodges being monotonic