Radiohead's new album, The King of Limbs

My impression on first listen to the new Radiohead album: it's like a watered-down version of a lot of their past work. They've gone on autopilot.

The King of Limbs sounds most like their previous album, In Rainbows, which I wasn't a big fan of either. But at least In Rainbows had 2 standouts: "All I Need" and "Nude." I'm not hearing any standouts on The King of Limbs.

The album is fine, not bad. But Radiohead used to be in the forefront of interesting, challenging new music. They're now just one more band.

Here's "Lotus Flower" from The King of Limbs:

Two songs from Arcade Fire's upcoming album, The Suburbs

On NPR's "All Songs Considered." If you click the link labeled "Hear The Interview And Songs," they play one song ("The Suburbs") right at the beginning of the interview (1:10), and there's one more song ("Month of May") at 16:40. The album is supposed to be released in the US on August 3.

Both of the songs are pretty mediocre for a band that's had so many great songs in the past — and these are presumably highlights of the new album. The music is OK, not bad, but they've lost that magic that made their debut album, Funeral, so compelling.

It's also painful listening to the interviewer (Bob Boilen), after they play "Month of May," struggling to formulate a question about how the band's music has changed. Boilen seems to be an Arcade Fire fan, and I bet he realizes that the new album is probably going to be a disappointment. But when you're on NPR interviewing one of the most acclaimed indie bands, you're not going to criticize their music. So you have to come up with a question like this:

When I think of the scope of your music and falling in love with it in 2004, and then hearing this, I feel like you're sort of gravitating more to, uh, rock 'n' roll fare, and the early stuff was more like, "What kind of sound is this?" I mean, obviously, we've only heard two songs from the record, so it's a little hard to tell.

This is a somewhat understandable reaction to "Month of May," which is self-consciously heavier than Arcade Fire usually is — though it's akin to the scorcher from Funeral, "Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)." The question makes less sense applied to the title song, "The Suburbs," which sounds like a watered-down version of songs from their previous two albums. It's not in a particularly different genre than "Rebellion (Lies)": mid-tempo, intense but restrained, piano-driven rock with soaring melodies over a steadily thumping rhythm section. The difference is more intangible: "The Suburbs" just isn't the breath of fresh air that "Rebellion (Lies)" (the #29 song of last decade) was.

What Boilen might have been thinking, but couldn't say, is that Arcade Fire started out seeming like they would be one of the great bands of their generation, but it seems more and more like their greatness was mostly confined to one album. Of course, I'll have to listen to The Suburbs in full once it comes out to see if I'm right about this . . .

Regina Spektor's new album, Far

You can listen to the whole thing here.

My opinion on first listen: a big step down from her last two albums. I'm not hearing any songs on the level of "Fidelity," "Better," "Samson," "The Flowers," or "Us." It's not bad, but you can hear her trying too self-consciously to recapture the magic that used to seem to flow effortlessly out of her, like this:

"This LP is basically not very good."

This review of Chris Cornell's new album, Scream, is actually more useful than the average review by a professional music critic. (Via ChordStrike.)

In that spirit, I wrote a review of St. Vincent's yet-to-be-released album Actor (which I was anticipating last Music Friday). Here it is, in full, originally appearing as a status update on Facebook:

John Althouse Cohen thinks the new St. Vincent album is pretty good but not as good as Marry Me. Better-produced, though.

You might read reviews of the album in Pitchfork or Rolling Stone, where the critics are trying to (1) satisfy people's word-count expectations and (2) show off their (a) facility with metaphor, (b) aptitude for lyrical analysis, and (c) knowledge of musical influences (probably mentioning Kate Bush and Joni Mitchell), but my Facebook status update tells you everything you need to know.

If you're a fan of St. Vincent based on Marry Me, it's worth getting Actor, but expect a bit of "sophomore slump." If you don't have either of her albums, get Marry Me first, and only get Actor if you really like Marry Me. Any ink spilled, or bandwidth hogged, dissecting this album in any further detail will be superfluous.

St. Vincent and Regina Spektor, part 2

I haven't been this excited about two upcoming albums in at least a couple years.

There's St. Vincent's second album, to be released May 5, and Regina Spektor's fifth album, sometime in June.

[UPDATE: You can hear the St. Vincent album streaming online, free at NPR's site, for two weeks starting on April 21.]

I blogged about both of them in my inaugural Music Friday post.

Here's "Actor out of Work," a song St. Vincent has pre-released from her upcoming album, Actor (via her website):



I'm glad to hear her trademark sound intact: lovely compositions reminiscent of Paul McCartney or Brian Wilson, incongruously overlaid with grinding dissonance.

The best albums of 2008

No, I don't know what they are.

But I have some links to people who claim to know. And they say things like this:

If you would smile if someone called you 'twee', get this album immediately and get ready to dance around your living room in your bunny ears and vintage aprons because this is your freakin' theme song times a dozen, kiddo.

That's from Summer Anne's top 15 on her blog, Boingy Boingy. Her list is especially good because she has a YouTube clip for one song from each of the top 10 albums. (You might remember Summer from when I blogged her manifestos.)

That list and all the others are making me realize how little I know about the music of 2008, even though I feel like I'm really up-to-date on music. I'll never get through even half of these albums, but I'll try to get through a bunch, eventually.

Here's eMusic's top 88 albums of 2008 -- or, the top 88 albums that are available on eMusic (which doesn't carry major labels). I buy most of my music from eMusic, so this is the list I'll be using the most. They say the list was put together by the website's staff but informed by users' feedback. A nice feature is that they give a short phrase summing up each album (e.g. "Art rock that swoops and soars") in addition to the full-length blurbs. [UPDATE: They've now posted the readers' choices as a separate list.]

Letters Home from Camp has a few people's top 10 lists, with some embedded YouTube clips. This list is by my friend "Alex B."

Pitchfork has a reader poll of the top 25 albums (among other lists). #19 is Of Montreal's new album, which I trashed here.

And here's Metacritic's list of the top 30, which has the (dis?)advantage of being derived by simply averaging out actual reviews of the albums and letting the chips fall where they may, instead of having someone consciously put the whole thing in order. This list also differs from the others in that they tell you each album's score, so you can see whether an album was tied with the next one down or came out ahead by a significant margin.

And if you want to know my opinion (which, again, is of very little worth), the only 2008 album I can whole-heartedly endorse so far is Goldfrapp's Seventh Tree (previously blogged). I was shocked (not "shocked, shocked") to see that it wasn't on any of the lists I've linked to in this post. It wasn't eligible for the eMusic list because they don't sell it, so that's fine ... but what's everyone else's excuse for passing over this radiant gem of an album? It's hard to choose one highlight from an album where every song feels like a hit single, but here's "Caravan Girl":



As usual, you can't particularly hear the bass part in this YouTube clip, so you should definitely buy the album to hear the real music.

There are others I've enjoyed and would probably put on a "best of 2008" list if I made the necessary effort, but haven't sufficiently immersed myself in yet: My Brightest Diamond's A Thousand Shark's Teeth, Ratatat's LP3, Cut Copy's In Ghost Colors, Uh Huh Her's Common Reaction (previously), and the pianist Enrico Pieranunzi's album of Scarlattis sonatas mixed with improvisations.

UPDATE: Others I left out: Avishai Cohen Trio's Gently Disturbed, Jenny Lewis's Acid Tongue, MGMT's Oracular Spectacular.

Any thoughts? Please, comment away!

UPDATE: Here are people's lists on Metafilter, just a few months late.