Photo of the Mountain Goats by Jillian Clark
First Thought Fridays is a (mostly) weekly column offering quick-hit takes on some of the albums released this week, serving up first impressions, favorite or least favorite songs, and whether or not they’re worth a second listen. Check back for more each Friday night or Saturday morning.
Three First Thought Fridays columns plus a full album review and three movie reviews, all in eight days? Yeah, I’m going to keep this intro—and the reviews!—short and sweet this week. Here’s what I listened to this week, in the order in which I listened to ‘em.
The Mountain Goats, Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan (Cadmean Dawn): Head Mountain Goat John Darnielle’s songs are often literate, witty, and wordy, but he goes all out on the band’s latest, a “full-on musical” inspired by a dream and telling the story of three survivors of a shipwreck stranded on a desert island. Darnielle clearly understood the assignment, crafting a cycle of songs with Broadway-sized scope and ambition, but it’s multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas who is the real MVP, adding symphonic flourishes that give the arrangements scale and adding details that grab your interest on those rare occasions where the main melodies don’t—take, for example, the saxophone and flute accents on “Through This Fire.” The album even has the stamp of approval from no less an authority on musicals than Lin-Manuel Miranda, who sings backup vocals on a few tracks. Tommy Stinson of the Replacements shows up as well. Will I Listen Again?: Definitely. The first listen was very impressive; I’d love to listen enough to really dive into the lyrics and story.
Portugal. The Man, Shish (KNIK/Thirty Tigers): Wow. If you, like me, are mostly familiar with Portugal. The Man from their feel-good, mildly funkified pop singles like “Feel It Still” and “Live in the Moment,” you are not even a little prepared for how wild a ride this album is. Opening song “Denali” offers up a little of that pop-friendly sound you’re used to, then bastes it in wailing heavy metal guitars, then “Pittman Ralliers” bursts in behind it as a full-on Black Flag-style hardcore song. Bandleader John Gourley has an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to instrumentation and genre, following up those aggro moments by tossing in sunny hippy ballads and The Kills-style haunting riffs and slow, sad, and spacy Cure-style melodies and fat distorted Flaming Lips guitar chords and free jazz trumpet freakouts and, and, and…you get the picture. There are only 10 songs on this album but it feels like 30 because of how many different ideas are packed into each one. And yet somehow, it all works. I struggle to think of a more musically adventurous LP I heard this year. Will I Listen Again?: Yes.
Malena Smith, 27 in Maine (self-released): St. Louis-based singer-songwriter Malena Smith has performed with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and the Adam Maness Trio, and is currently the Next Move Artist-in-Residence at the World Chess Hall of Fame here in our fair city. Her debut EP is a singer-songwriter showcase, using mostly just piano and acoustic guitar to craft a timeless sound perfect for supporting her warm, earnest vocals. Favorite tracks: the Adele-esque paean to sobriety “Betray Myself” and “18,” the one outlier here that yearns for the simplicity of youth as it ditches the simple instrumentation heard elsewhere on the EP for Dua Lipa-style retro-disco. Will I Listen Again?: Yes.
Whitney, Small Talk (self-released): On their fifth album as Whitney, Max Kakacek and Julien Ehrlich (both formerly of Smith Westerns) are in full ‘70s soft rock mode: unhurried tempos, breezy guitars, falsetto vocals, lush string backing, all performed impeccably. It reminds me of stuff like Bread or Chicago after the Peter Cetera takeover. Wait a minute…I don’t like Bread! Or Peter Cetera! So yeah, I didn’t really like this. I will say the composition skill and musicianship are undeniable, it’s just in service of a genre that does absolutely nothing for me as a listener. If you have more pleasant memories of listening to KEZK in the ‘80s than I do, though, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better modern equivalent than this. Will I Listen Again?: No, but don’t let that stop you.
Orchid Mantis, In Airports (self-released): In Airports is Thomas Howard’s fourth release this year as Orchid Mantis, after dropping two EPs last winter and another full length in April. (His lengthy Bandcamp page shows this is not an anomaly.) The album was inspired by a week Howard spent stuck in an airport, while the album’s sonics were inspired by the bands Low and Slowdive (I hear some of The Sea and Cake and Real Estate in there, too). It’s all slow, woozy tempos and beautiful ringing guitar notes and hushed vocals—prototypical dreampop stuff. The quality is solid throughout, but I’ll be honest, the songs started to blend together as the album wore on. (This could very well be a me problem; I did listen to a lot of new music today.) Good news, though: the album closer “Strange Heaven” was so good it shook me out of my doldrums. All said, it’s all sonically very pretty, and makes for excellent mood music. Will I Listen Again?: Yeah, I’d give it another shot.
Bonus! Hüsker Dü, 1985: The Miracle Year (The Numero Group): I’m going to break two informal column rules: this is my first time writing up a reissue, and my first time writing up something I haven’t heard all the way through yet. But this release is too amazing to not draw attention to while I have the forum.
Minneapolis punk heroes Hüsker Dü were on fire in late January, 1985. Six months earlier, they had unleashed the all-time great hardcore concept album Zen Arcade. Two weeks earlier, they had fired off its follow-up, the equally era-defining New Day Rising. And they already had the songs loaded in the chamber for the next album, Flip Your Wig, which would be recorded that Spring and released in September. And before Flip Your Wig came out, they’d already be playing songs from their major label debut Candy Apple Grey, which would drop in March of the following year. Five LPs’ worth of songs released in about 20 months. Sheer insanity.
In the midst of all this, Hüsker Dü arrived in Minneapolis for a pair of hometown album release shows for New Day Rising. The first show makes up the first disc of 1985: The Miracle Year, and oh my god, what a discovery this is. The band simply sounds phenomenal, with all three instrumentalists at the top of their game—Bob Mould with his buzzsaw guitar attack, Greg Norton with his impossibly nimble basslines, Grant Hart propelling it all at faster-than-album speed on the drums while somehow still signing half the songs. The New Day Rising material is particularly well-honed and lands with the explosive power of a nuclear bomb. NDR and Flip Your Wig found the band shifting into poppier territory and it’s stunning how well songs with more complex arrangements like “If I Told You” and “Books About UFOs” translate to the lightning-fast Hüsker Dü live show. (How fast? 9 of the show’s 23 songs don’t crack the two-minute mark.) On top of showcasing the NDR material, the band also performed five songs from the yet-to-be-recorded Flip Your Wig (Mould’s “Hate Paper Doll” and “Divide and Conquer” hit extra hard; Hart’s always beautiful love song “Green Eyes” provides a much-needed chance to take a breath), plus four fun covers: the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” (sung by Mould), the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” (sung by both Mould and Hart with guest support from Dave Pirner of Hüsker Dü’s little brother band, Soul Asylum; Mould didn’t quite learn all of his lyrics) and “Ticket to Ride” (sung by Hart), and, to close the show out, the Mould-sung Mary Tyler Moore Show theme “Love Is All Around.”
Also included in the set from the Numero Group is a second disc of another 20 live highlights from the rest of their 1985 tour. I haven’t listened to that one yet, but I listened to that first disc today in the optimal setting—in the car, driving on the highway, volume so loud that my ears were ringing afterwards—and, my god, it was amazing. My love for Bob Mould’s music is well-documented on the site, but even beyond my super-fandom, this release is something special. This is the moment when hardcore went pop, when the underground entered the mainstream. Be warned, it’s abrasive, but it’s also amazing. | Jason Green
