I first heard about Minsk in an article on PopMatters more than a year ago. Adrien Begrand, their main metal writer, did a column on the increasing indie cred of metal bands like Mastodon, Between the Buried and Me, Isis, Pelican, and others. He devoted a fair amount of ink in this column to Minsk, a little-known Illinois band who had just released their first full-length album, Out of a Center Which Is Neither Dead Nor Alive. Intrigued, I spent a bit of time looking for the album (unsuccessfully), but was soon after distracted by Pelican and Mastodon.

While I still haven’t gotten Minsk’s first record, I have gotten their newly-released second album, The Ritual Fires of Abandonment. After seven or eight listens, I really can’t say enough good things about this record.

From what I’ve seen, Minsk seems to get a lot of comparisons to Isis, but while I like Isis’s stuff (2004′s Panopticon in particular), I find Minsk to be a lot more interesting. Like Isis, Minsk sits pretty squarely in the post-metal camp. However, the latter tends more toward the experimental, with less time devoted to massive wash-of-sound passages.

The Ritual Fires of Abandonment is a sprawling, adventurous album. Three of the six tracks clock in at over thirteen minutes long, with the longest running to over fifteen minutes. Normally, I would look at such a track listing and expect a turgid, pretentious affair. However, with impressively intricate song structures, precise drumming, and three of the band members sharing vocal duties, Minsk never falls into the tired cliches of prog-rock or goth/doom metal. Track #4, “The Orphans of Piety,” provides an excellent example of the band’s range and power. It’s an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink kind of song, with quiet instrumental passages suddenly swinging into huge guitars and screaming vocals. Normally a recipe for disaster, Minks pulls it off and then some.

In short, run, don’t walk to get this record. While it’s only July, The Ritual Fires of Abandonment is already on my short-list for favorite albums of 2007. In the meantime, I’m once again on the hunt for their first album.

Most of the reviews I’ve seen of the new Spoon record have been of the “Their best album yet!” variety. My feelings regarding this album are more of a mixed bag.

Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is a good album, to be sure. The songs are tight, they are well-produced, and they are enjoyable to listen to. At this point, though, those are all characteristics one has come to expect from Spoon. Superlatives like “best album yet” require something above and beyond the band’s usual work. This album doesn’t meet that criterion.

There are a couple of tracks on the album that stand out, particularly #8, “My Little Japanese Cigarette Case.” However, most of the songs blend together into a somewhat seamless mix of glossy production and well-timed hand claps. Following as it does 2005′s diverse yet stellar Gimme Fiction, the relative monotony of the new record comes as something of a disappointment. This comparison may be unfair, since no band can keep topping itself indefinitely, but there it is.

On a somewhat petty note, the title of this record sucks. It’s hard to type, and it’s annoying to say, making one feel stupid talking about it in the same way as having to order “Biggie fries” and “a Biggie Coke” at the Wendy’s drive-through. I find it irritating when a band attempts to be clever in this manner.

So no, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is not Spoon’s best work. However, it is still a good album, and I would definitely recommend it.

The Polyphonic Spree has launched the latest salvo in its ongoing battle against musical subtlety and nuance.

After several listens, I’m still trying to discern in The Fragile Army any sign of progress or development from the band’s previous outings. So far, all that I have come up with is that the band has given up the gimmick of all dressing in white robes. Instead, they have substituted the gimmick of dressing in black, vaguely militaristic outfits. With 20+ people in the band, I can only guess that this tactic may help to identify strangers and vagrants who might have wandered on stage and started playing along.

However, with everyone playing all at once, as loudly as possible, all the time, it’s hard to imagine that a few strays would really make much difference.

Upon hearing the Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible earlier this year, I imagined it to be unlikely I’d find another album anytime soon that felt so much like being repeatedly clubbed over the head with an entire orchestra. The Polyphonic Spree have proven me wrong, in spades.

There’s only so much of this sort of thing a person can take, and this band more than filled that quota two records ago. By the third track, everything here sounds the same. Songs should really have more to differentiate them than “This is the one where the band whistles along,” or “This is the one with dubbed-in sound of marching.”

The best thing I can say about this record is that at least all the songs aren’t about the sun this time around. On the other hand, they aren’t really about much else, either. The lyrics on The Fragile Army consist largely of platitudes about being happy and trying harder, repeated over and over. In other words, pretty much the same as all the rest of the band’s work.

Short of a hankering for Godspell-style empty euphoria or a fit of masochism, I can’t really think of a reason to keep this album around. In the meantime, I’ll be listening to a lot of the Archie Bronson Outfit and the new Bad Brains to cleanse my palate.

The Bees are a British band who, for reasons that don’t interest me enough to be worth investigating, are known in the States as “Band of Bees.” Their new album Octopus just came out.

This record is all over the map. There are songs that sound like the Band. There are songs that sound like REO Speedwagon (yes, REO Speedwagon). There’s a song that sounds like Woodstock-era Santana, and another which finds the band channeling Sam & Dave. If there is anything tying the tracks together as a whole, it would be the Bees’ unfortunate jam-band tendencies. They never reach full-on Phish/Moe territory, but there was enough hippification going on here to piss me off relatively quickly.

Perhaps the band’s strategy was to throw as much as possible at the wall and see what stuck. Unfortunately, if that is their strategy on Octopus, it hasn’t worked out so well. Some of the songs are catchy at first, but I challenge the listener to remember anything about any track on this album five minutes after it ends. The Bees fail to come up with a single memorable song here, and they waste the listener’s time with pointless stylistic detours.

This record might be fine for putting on in the background at a party, especially if a bunch of hippies have shown up to your party and you want to distract them in the other room so they won’t spoil your party with their reek of patchouli and constant talk of the global conspiracy to suppress free-trade hemp. That is really the only good thing I can think of to say about Octopus. Otherwise, avoid, avoid, avoid.

I’ve been listening to this album quite a bit over the last couple of weeks.

A Chicago band, the Ponys are frequently lumped into the post-punk revival genre. This classification, while more or less true, is unfortunate. More well known post-punk revival bands such as Interpol and the Editors take their inspiration from Joy Division and, frankly, aren’t that good. While Joy Division did fine work, there wasn’t a lot much territory left to explore in their particular corner of the musical map by the time of their demise. As a result, contemporary bands that follow in their wake are left to retread the same ground.

The Ponys, on the other hand, steer more in the Television/Richard Hell & the Voivods direction and end up having a lot more to work with.

Having heard some early tracks from Turn the Lights Out on KEXP, I’d been listening to the 2005 album Celebration Castle and liked it straight out of the gate. The new one is quite good as well, and if pressed, I would have to say it is the better of the two. Turn the Lights Out is a tighter, more consistent album, and I like the vocals better (the style, not the content—a bit more on that below). The band also sounds more mature on the newer outing. Where Celebration Castle features a number of tracks that might as well be on a Television record, Turn the Lights Out finds the band heading in their own distinct direction.

The only complaint about this album might be the lyrics. I haven’t had a chance to listen closely enough to say for sure, but my initial impression is that they tend to repeat a lot, which is usually a good indicator that there is not much deep going on.

That being said, I would recommend giving Turn the Lights Out a listen.

The first time I listened to this album, I hated it. The second time, I found myself thinking that maybe it was actually pretty good. The third time, I was oscillating back toward (but not quite reaching) my original opinion.

Battles is yet another collection of people from other bands, the drummer from Helmet and a guitarist from Don Caballero among them. This album is mostly instrumental—the few vocals present are processed to the point of inscrutability. It’s rife with crazy timing changes, dueling guitars, weird effects, and slow, quiet passages alternating with blasts of everyone-playing-at-once.

In other words, math rock.

I remain of two minds about Mirrored. On the one hand, there’s some good stuff here. The tracks “Atlas,” “Tonto,” and “Leyendecker” (numbers 2, 4, and 5, if you’re counting) are particularly good. Challenging in parts, it’s true, but I found myself getting into these songs once they got going.

On the other hand, such high points are buried among piles of musical wankery that would put both The Mars Volta and Jethro Tull to shame. Songs go on and on. And on. Hooks are repeated over and over ad nauseum, and then the band throws in some sleigh bells or a drum loop or a sudden rhythm change. Lather, rinse, repeat. As the second half of the album progresses, it becomes clear that Battles, while technically quite good, have a fairly limited bag of tricks.

In the end, I can’t say that this is a good album, but it does have its moments. The first half is definitely interesting, but Mirrored wears out its welcome pretty quickly after that.

Yeah, I’ve got *no* idea what these guys are singing about. The music is pretty decent, though.

Dungen is a Swedish band, which is why I can’t tell you what any of the lyrics are about. Their 2004 album Ta Det Lugnt got a lot of good press, but I was rather underwhelmed. These guys are obviously good musicians. However, the album had a rather annoying 60′s pop sound to it, compete with the occasional psychedelic freak-out. At the time, I chalked it up to people being overly impressed by the cryptic (because they’re in Swedish, see?) lyrics, and moved on.

Flash forward to 2007, and the Dungen has a new record out. After reading more good reviews, I decided to give Tio Bitar a try and was pleasantly surprised.

Don’t get me wrong—the 60′s vibe is still there, along with the psychedelic freak-outs. The difference is that this time around, the band has found a less annoying take on basically the same material. While I can’t put my finger on it exactly, it may have something to do with less of the pop, more of the rock. The end result is an album that’s worth at least a listen or two, as opposed to one that sends me diving for the stop button.

Dungen seems to be a band permanently trapped in a decade that ended almost forty years ago. My guess is they’ll continue to mine the period for their sound, and like any decade, the Sixties had its ups and downs, music-wise. This time around, Dungen came up lucky.

I was never that big a fan of the mid-Nineties Americana sub-genre. Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt, Wilco—while praise was heaped upon them by critics and fans alike, they mostly sounded like Seventies-style country rock to me, repackaged with some alternative stylings for a new audience.

Thus, you can imagine my surprise when I found that I actually liked Wilco’s 2002 record Yankee Hotel Foxtrot quite a bit. Living in Ann Arbor at the time, I heard the entire album on Detroit’s WDET (which played a lot more music then that it does now, apparently). I was immediately impressed by the album’s variety and experimentalism, and repeated plays revealed a depth that continued to reward the returning listener.

Unfortunately, 2004′s A Ghost Is Born had a rerun feel to it, and Kicking Television, the live album released a year later, found the band continuing to tread water. Nonetheless, I was interested to hear the recently released Sky Blue Sky.

To sum up the new album in a word, BORING.

Giving the record an inexplicable “A” rating, Entertainment Weekly’s Chris Nashawaty came up with the perfect description: “This may be the best Eagles album the Eagles never made.” Maybe that’s good news for Nashawaty’s readers, but warmed-over variations of “Desperado” are about the last thing the music world needs.

Sky Blue Sky isn’t a bad album, and it does have its moments (track 2, “You Are My Face,” is pretty good). Sadly, those moments are few and far between, bobbing about and mostly lost amidst a sea of mediocre mellowness. On track after track, we are treated to delicate, muted guitar, brushed cymbals, and Tweedy muttering on about… well… honestly, who cares? Listen too closely and you’ll be asleep inside of ten minutes.

Maybe this album would be fine for playing in the background on a sunny Saturday afternoon. If that statement sounds like faint praise, that’s exactly what it is intended to be. With its throw-away lyrics and somnambulant instrumentation, Sky Blue Sky is 50 minutes’ worth of tepidity. If it happens to be playing as the result of someone else’s efforts, fine—let it play. If, on the other hand, you actually have to go to the effort of putting in a disc or selecting an album and pressing play, this one isn’t worth the effort.

I’ve had this album for a couple weeks now, but held off on writing about it so as to make sure my opinion was more or less fully formed.

NIN is one of those bands whom I find it difficult to approach objectively. Pretty Hate Machine came out just before my freshman year of college—in other words, a time of no small emotional turmoil. As a result, that album struck a chord that it might not have had I encountered it at a different time in my life.

Reznor’s subsequent work was… varied. The Downward Spiral, while quite good, took his particular brand of insular misery about as far as it could go. The Fragile, an overindulgent double album was yet more of the same and signaled an artist stuck in a very deep rut. 2005′s With Teeth, with its shorter, *slightly* more accessible structure, seemed like an attempt to change direction. Unfortunately, that direction turned out to be something along the lines of Pretty Hate Machine, The Sequel, and ended up being just plain boring.

As has been pointed out in many reviews already, it comes as something of a shock to find Mr. Reznor putting out a new full-length album a scant two years later. Also surprising is the fact that it’s actually pretty damn good.

I would say this is probably Reznor’s best work since Pretty Hate Machine. Musically, he’s managed to update his sound in a way that was missing from With Teeth. That record sounded like it should have come out in 1995. This one, while still retaining a distinctive NIN sound with its layers of effects and electronics, has its feet planted squarely in the current musical and social climate.

Lyrically, Year Zero represents a huge change from previous Nine Inch Nails albums. Finally, we have an album that is not devoted to Reznor’s terrible luck in love and his resulting feelings of despair and helplessness. A political concept album of sorts, this record doesn’t hold any earth-shattering revelations, but it’s refreshing to hear Nine Inch Nails songs that look outward rather than inward.

It is hard to say whether Year Zero will win over many new fans, and I wouldn’t want to place any bets on whether it represents a new trend for Reznor. However, I’ve found it to hold up quite well to repeated listens and would definitely recommend checking it out.

Why is she so popular? Someone please explain it to me. If I have to hear that stupid “Rehab” song one more time, I’m going to scream.

I’m just sayins, all.