New albums we listened to this week
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Young and Sick | Death Vessel | Efdemin | Old 97's
Young & Sick | D
I was so stunned by Young & Sick (Harvest) that I went back and played “Continuum” and “House of Spirits,” just to make sure I wasn’t having some kind of aural hallucination. Nope, I still like those songs just fine. They’re not on this new album because they would mar the uniform shittiness of this corny, derivative, tinny-voiced and even tinnier-synth babble. This thing’s so fucking smooth it turns sex into an abstraction. Cuz the real thing is yucky, or requires an erection. Think he can actually get it up? Could Kenny G?
—Dotun Akintoye
Death Vessel | B+
Joel Thibodeau used to make spare, falsetto folk-pop. That’s still the core of Island Intervals (Sub Pop), but the songs here are arrayed in sheaths of shimmery sound: chimes, pump organs, layered vocals, junk-drawer percussion. It was — unmistakably — recorded in Rejkyavik, with associates of Múm and Sigur Rós, and resembles Jónsi’s prismatic Go only with the alien histrionics replaced by unassuming sweetness.
—K. Ross Hoffman
Efdemin | B-
On his third Dial Records full-length, Berlin-based minimal meister Phillip Sollmann sidelines his moody, after-hours deep house for a starker if still magnificently slinky full-on foray into micro-techno. Decay’s durably thumping grooves are supple and very nearly lulling, but there’s always a hint of unease: gorgeously rippling synths that never quite find resolution, eerily seductive swirls of melody, billowing atmospheres that toe the line between swaddling and smothering.
—K. Ross Hoffman
Old 97’s | A-
Old 97’s are one of the great rock bands of the last 20 years, and Most Messed Up (ATO) is the best on-record testament to that fact in well over 10. They’ve probably earned the album’s sorta-hokey, career-recapping opener, but it’s everything afterward that demonstrates why. It’s the Dallas quartet’s rowdiest set in ages, getting them back in touch with their country-punk roots, and frontman Rhett Miller in loose-livin’ “serial ladykiller” mode like we haven’t seen, maybe ever.
—K. Ross Hoffman
