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.
Tigers Jaw | Fucked Up | Bis | Ela Stiles
Tigers Jaw | B+
Before three-fifths of Tigers Jaw left the band last year, they finished Charmer (Run For Cover), a record that takes the Scrantonians’ keyboard purrs, rhythm-savvy guitar work and sense of dirt-kicking, lovesick frustration to a logical conclusion. Brianna Collins and Ben Walsh don’t touch on anything too fresh here; if they keep writing midtempo slow burners like “Teen Rocket,” at least I won’t run out of tracks for mix CDs for any and all future crushes.
—Marc Snitzer
Fucked Up | A
Fucked Up abandons the meta-narrative of David Comes to Life and looks inward with Glass Boys (Matador). Damian Abraham’s near-inhuman snarl — accompanied by the band’s increasingly arty take on hardcore — is at its most confrontational when he’s directing it at himself. Am I an echo or a whimper? Glass or stone? Would my 15-year-old self be disgusted by me now? If this record feels like the on-ramp to a midlife crisis, it’s one that’s just as triumphant as it is horrified.
—Marc Snitzer
Bis | A-
If data Panik, etcetera (Do Yourself In), the surprise fourth album from Scotland’s most adorable revolutionaries, had appeared a decade ago, following the electro-pop left turn/dead end of 2001’s Return to Central, its jittery angularity, neo-new wave bounce and gummy punk-funk grooves might have been, for once, right in step with a zeitgeist that they had unwittingly prefigured. Instead, the ’90s cult heroes’ signature candy-coated agit-pop feels as gloriously iconoclastic as ever, and this unexpected return delivers a hook-stuffed, sugary shock to the system.
—K. Ross Hoffman
Ela Stiles | B+
Whether or not you consider the spellbinding 17 minutes of this Sydney singer’s self-titled, purely a cappella debut (Bedroom Suck) to be an album, there’s no question it’s something special: soothing and haunting, ancient and alien. These seven songs — varying in length from 20 seconds to 10 minutes-plus — present Stiles as a Celtic Julianna Barwick, weaving together tendrils of ambient drone, devotional music and creaky old British Isles folk.
—K. Ross Hoffman
