This Week: Hit the highway with the Old 97's, skydive with Rocket from the Crypt, and discover Finnish rock gods for the 21st century.
Old 97's
Satellite Rides (Elektra)
There's a reason I usually don't write CD reviews—I suck at it. Somewhere between the emotional experience of listening to the album and the intellectual experience of analyzing it, something in my brain short circuits, like I've been forced to analyze the color green. It's even worse when it's a record that so totally wraps itself into my emotions, plays them like a cheap gong, and makes me like it. A lot.
The Old 97's Satellite Rides is equal parts shiny Brit-pop, Texas twang, hard-driving energy, and mind-boggling skill. Some adjectives to describe it might be unapologetic, confident, unironic, equal parts joyful and resigned. Rides is no longer just flat out rock-twang; here the sound and songs have gotten wonderfully rich and complicated, no longer just about boys and girls, but equally about loss, exhaustion, loneliness—and the moments when you forget all of that and just fall.
Instead of Rhett Miller, Murry Hammond, Ken Bethea, and Philip Peeples falling in your lap like a box full of energetic puppies as they have on previous projects like Too Far To Care and Wreck Your Life, Rides is the work of a band who now knows how to add that giddy electricity where it will work the best, not restrained so much as smart.
Like "Book of Poems," with Miller, vocals, and Bethea, guitar, kicking out all of the stops in the chorus, Replacements-esque in terms of fire but still intelligible. Or "Weightless," which starts off like a lazy pop ditty but gets a goose before the second verse. Or the Hammond-written "Up the Devil's Pay" that simply sends shivers up your spine when Miller takes up a haunting high-harmony. While "What I Wouldn't Do" comes off as a bit too fluffy, even it has a great, subtle touch that sparks it to life.
As a whole, Rides is the album where it all comes together, where Miller's strong pop sensibility and wit mesh with Hammond's background in bluegrass and old-time music, couple with Bethea's inventive chops and Peeples' rock-steady beats and drive—not like a souped-up camaro that's all flash, more like a fine piece of German engineering that can give you the ride of your life once you open it up on a beautiful piece of road.
—Adrienne Martini
Rocket From the Crypt
Group Sounds (Vagrant)
Rocket From the Crypt is one of those bands you've just gotta see to believe. The group's explosive live sets are a mind-boggling blend of hardcore punk intensity, James Brown showbiz professionalism and all-around raw power rock. It would be simply impossible for anyone to package their power on CD.
That said, RFTC has finally come pretty close with the release of Group Sounds. The band is still cranking out their trademark sound: a highly-evolved hybrid of trebly, buzzing rock 'n' roll energy punctuated by horns and full-throttle, rhythmic synchronicity that makes the glut of faux-gearhead bands in the indie marketplace look like wimps.
Group Sounds is an ambling shark of a record. The band is all muscle and every energy is focused toward the propagation of rock. If you've yet to experience RFTC, this CD is a good jumping-off point. But it's kind of like watching a video about skydiving—you've just got to experience it for yourself, man.
—John Sewell
Circle
Andexelt (tUMULt)
Admit it—you were sort of hoping that so-called "post-rock" would, in fact, rock a little, at least some of the time. It may be a bit late to salve your overall disappointment, but the domestic debut from Finnish group Circle does prove that cyclical rhythms, dubby textures, and even flutes can co-exist with Bonham-esque drum stomp and crunching guitars, but that's not the group's most impressive feat.
Andexelt is actually Circle's sixth studio album and was recorded in 1998 (the band has already released a follow-up entitled Prospekt in its home country). While members have come and gone, and some elements of its sound have changed from album to album, the band's basic approach has remained inviolate: long, hypnotic, repetition-heavy instrumentals built in layers over a basic pulse just a few lanes over from the driving motorik beat of Krautrock pioneer Neu!
The emphasis on rhythm is what really makes ends meet with Circle. The title track kicks off the album with Jussi Lehtisalo and Teemu Elo's big-balls guitar riffing and drummer Janne Peltom�ki's steady, arena-ready pummel, but quieter cuts such as "Zomilate" and "Kidul90s" actually build up more traction as the quintet winds tighter and tighter around each other in intricate syncopation. Even the more atmospheric tracks, such as the snaking, vaguely folkish "Humusaar" and the percussion-free drone "Friitalan Nahka" (which sounds like the Northern lights look) are based on an unmistakable throb. All in all, Andexelt offers a potent reminder that, even at its artiest, "rock" is a verb as well as a noun.
—Lee Gardner
April 5, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 14
© 2001 Metro Pulse
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