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.
Wussy | tUnE-yArDs | Ringo Deathstarr | Lykke Li
Wussy | A
Attica! (Shake It) strikes you as merely great before it assumes its full stature and you realize Wussy is adding a few new sonic touches to that country-drone noise thing they do so singularly and so well. As lyricists, Walker and Chuck Cleaver claim for their emotional turf the very smallness of our lives, our heartache at the passage of time.
—Dotun Akintoye
tUnE-yArDs | B+
Merrill Garbus is a one-woman carnival, and Nikki Nack (4AD) is her wildest, thrillingest ride yet. Seemingly nothing is off limits in her Technicolor D.I.Y.-pop playground: She interpolates Busta Rhymes, Bill Haley, Jonathan Swift; calls out life by name; conflates counting rhymes with civics lessons, bloody satire with bubblegum funk, diatribes with dance parties. The sheer volume of musical information here — tribal chanting! fiddle tunes! field hollers! clattery junkyard drum circles! slinky show-choir R&B! lasers! — makes the album feel like a continuously erupting fountain of confetti, as delirious as it is disorienting.
—K. Ross Hoffman
Ringo Deathstarr | C+
With God’s Dream EP, Ringo Deathstarr is trying new ideas (as in “Shut Your Eyes,” striking similar to Shriekback’s “This Big Hush”) but sifting through record crates was never the problem for an Austin trio that likes to wear its influences on its sleeve. “Chainsaw Morning” hints at the grand scope of their ambition and separates them from lesser navel-gazing Kevin Shields devotees. But mostly this is merely good shoegaze.
—Robert Skvarla
Lykke Li | A-
Sweden’s favorite dreamy, doomed romantic has spent much of her career fusing the intimate with the anthemic; little wonder, then, that her sparsest record also boasts her biggest choruses. I Never Learn (LL/Atlantic) pares back the singer’s wall of sound, swapping handclaps for strummed acoustics to yield something lush and majestically chilly. She’s well-schooled in the classic pop art of misdirection: proclaiming “I’m never gonna love again” — in full-on, no-fooling power-ballad mode — like it’s the most joyous, triumphant sentiment imaginable.
—K. Ross Hoffman
