Black Pyramid: Warswine (Boston Phoenix, 7/29/10)

With a rattling echo that conjures a battle cry skittering off the walls of a great Viking hall, Andy Beresky’s repeated wounded howl of “War! Swine!” at the 4:20 mark of this eight-minute epic is a sound to behold. Off a Serpent Records split 12-inch with Kentucky metal duo Old Ones, “Warswine” works as a sampler of everything that Beresky’s Northampton doom crew BLACK PYRAMID do right — punishing fretwork and low-end stuttering riff yawns, sure, but also multiple dynamic shifts, fist-pumping vocal-anthem blasts, and chasm-bridging lead breaks that flicker and lick your ear like fire flares bursting out of a gurgling lava trench. Let BLACK PYRAMID singe your cochleae this Wednesday at Allston’s Great Scott on yet another crucial Born of Fire gig that’ll see them share the stage with Valkyrie, Earthride, Elder, and Phantom Glue. Meanwhile, you can grab the “Warswine” MP3 below.

DOWNLOAD: Black Pyramid “Warswine” [mp3]

Katy Perry: Teenage Dream (8/24/10, Boston Phoenix)

Contrary to common perception, there are only two genres of popular music: music written and performed by teenagers, and music written and performed by people trying to remember what being a teenager was like. Count Katheryn Hudson, d/b/a Katy Perry, in the latter category. Although she spent her actual teenage years trying to make it as a Christian pop star, her 20s are being put to use reimagining her teens as a time of being a sassy and mouthy pop brat.

Her first stab at temporal re-creation had her spending three years with an army of producers on a major label’s dime throwing songs at the wall and seeing what would stick. The resulting debut album spawned two #1′s — ear borers helmed by producers Max Martin and Dr. Luke. Her sophomore outing shows greater focus: Teenage Dream is front-loaded with synthetic whump-pop that fuses Perry’s singular vocal nag to irresistible songsmithery. Martin and the good Doctor are mad geniuses at a certain style of dog-whistle pop making: what might sound like a grating shriek to some is dance-floor gold to the music-buying public. Which means that prior to this album’s release, most of the country is already involuntarily humming along to audio crack like “California Gurls” or the title track on the gym’s stairmaster.

In some ways, however, the initial cavalcade of hits and would-be hits is a Trojan horse: you may be sucked in by office-Christmas-party-anthems-to-be like “Last Friday Night,” but 20 minutes later, you find yourself slogging through somber relationship bombshells like the zesty-yet-uncomfortable dumped-ex anthem “Circling the Drain” and the existentially weird “Who Am I Living For?” In the latter, Perry intones, “I march alone to a different beat” — and even though the song’s lack of pep signals the deflated-balloon portion of the album, the sullen ‘tude finds her talking, at last, like an actual teenager.

Endless Boogie: Full Head House (Boston Phoenix, 8/5/10)

Most bands go through a period of refinement, where the loose-jamming phase gives way to taut compaction. But what if a band’s loose jamming is also tight and dynamic — does that mean that said band can stay in the shed forever?

They can if they’re Endless Boogie, a Brooklyn riff unit who make inchoate screaming and non-stop soloing come across as refreshing and appealing. On paper, the record seems like a chore: eight tracks ranging from five to 23 minutes, full of never-ending Blueshammer workouts.

But don’t be fooled — not only do these guys know how to play, they know how to leave room for one another. Meaning that you have drone-ons and sharp-focus lead work blazing at all times without anyone’s getting elbowed out of the spotlight. Guitarists Jesper Eklow and Paul Major make indulgent and seemingly formless dad rock that understands when to apply the pressure and when to sit back and cook, whether in the nearly 10-minute slow burn of “Top Dollar Speaks His Mind” or the, uh, nearly 10-minute slow burn of album opener “Empty Eye.” If these dudes can keep cranking out this kind of high-grade schlock, here’s hoping they never make it out of the garage.

Early Man: Death Potion (Boston Phoenix, 7/20/10)

Metal is a tough game: for all the talk about ferocity and velocity, success is often predicated on timing alone. And being ahead of the curve — well, that’s a plus only if you want to be seen as an unheralded trailblazer. Such is life for Early Man, who, back when floppy downtuned strings and big pants were still hanging in there, led the way for countless other metal acts to go back to pre-1985 NWOBHM/thrash.

Now that thrash is back, they’re trying to capitalize with this long-player, a sprawling work that rests on Mike Conte’s twisty riffs and cool vocal stylings. It isn’t as fast, frenzied, or atom-bomb explosive as many acts that have formed since the band’s ’05 debut, Closing In, but sometimes, as Gurney Halleck says in Dune, the slow blade penetrates the shield. Not that this record is lazily paced, but Conte & Co. aren’t using speed as a diversion or a crutch. Instead, it’s all about power and solid hitting, like a grunting tennis match played by pros who are in it for the long haul.

From the chugging Hetfieldian gusto of “Someone Else’s Nightmare” to the piercing screams and juggernaut charge of “Six Mothers of the War God,” Death Potion is packed with enough blistering metal moments to distinguish it from those who have followed Early Man in the thrash-is-back sweepstakes.

M.I.A.: /\/\ /\ Y /\ (Boston Phoenix, 7/8/10)

M.I.A. is predictably unpredictable — whether it’s the Diplo-assisted baile funk of her debut, 2005′s Arular, or the demented low-budget world beat of ’07′s Kala, her sonic plan has always been to hit it and quit it. She flirted with pop fame/infamy with the left-field success of Kala‘s “Paper Planes.” But anyone digging into Maya (or /\/\ /\ Y /\, as it’s being promoted) expecting club-banging pop hits will be . . . not disappointed, but definitely confused. Yes, there are buoyant moments of transcendence, like the effervescent “XXXO” and the reggae-tinged “Tell Me Why,” with its yearning lilt. But twixt those two tent poles, there’s a whole lot of weirdness, and pop fans will likely be left scratching their heads through confusing tweakfests like “Teqkilla” and the metal-tinged “Meds and Feds.” Of course, if you come to M.I.A.’s third album expecting light sing-songy jams, then you get what you deserve. She’s always known her way around a pop hook — but she also lives to confront, whether in her public image or in the grooves of her records. In Maya‘s case, that means slick dance productions rubbing shoulders with brittle lo-fi distorto jams. “You want me to be somebody who I’m really not” goes the chorus of “XXXO” — and on much of the rest of the album, Ms. Arulpragasam is intent on testing that identity crisis. Meaning that you have songs built on smooth psychedelia (like the closing “Space”), but you also have jams built on the rhythmic pulse of a hand drill (“Steppin’ Up”) or the mean drum sound of the dude from Sepultura (the Lightning Bolt–ish “Born Free”). It’s pulverizing, it’s hip-swaying, it’s disorienting, and it’s atmospheric — in short, it’s primo culture jamming from a restless musical force of nature.

Thieves Like Us | Again And Again (Boston Phoenix, 5/26/10)

When today’s musical magpies look back to the ’80s to steal the sonic shiny items that catch their ears’ fancy, they gravitate toward the Day-Glo sheen of that era’s false promise and anthemic vacuousness. Thieves Like Us, however, are not that breed of pilferer.

Although they steal from the past (shamelessly! gratuitously!), their music is about creating an alternate ’80s that captures the bottomed-out loneliness born of excess and restless indulgence. Their debut, last year’s Play Music, still fooled you into waltzing onto the dance floor, with 808-pounders like “Drugs in My Body.”

Again and Again is a beast of a different color, the sound of a classic New Order or Pet Shop Boys track — if someone had first sunk his incisors in and drained the blood from it. Death dirges like “Forget Me Not,” “Mercy,” and “Silence” manage to be funereal and joyless without appropriating goth tropes. Instead, the way these young Europeans utilize cascading synth figures — which loop and descend like a dying message in the farthest reaches of outer space — suggests a final sad request for one last dance before the inevitable apocalypse. Boredom and forlorn ennui have never sounded so charmingly chipper.

Crystal Castles: Crystal Castles (Boston Phoenix, 5/19/10)

The battlefield of ’00s electro-tantrum spazz-ravers is littered with the corpses of those who burned too brightly at the outset and, in the process, burned out any interest in a sustained career of noisemaking. After all, once you’ve shocked and awed the glowstick crowd with synth-stabs and video-game glitches that fry synapses and short-circuit the minds of casual fans, where is there to go?

For their second, homonymous album, the stuttery Canuck duo Crystal Castles have replaced most of the non-stop screeching high jinks that made them (in)famous with a predeliction for yearning synth-pop. The friction between the occasional bouts of the old electronic pummeling (like the scud attack of “Doe Deer”) and the glistening new-romanticism of “Violent Dreams” and “Year of Silence” is refreshing.

But the real excitement comes when they mix both in the same song, achieving the warehouse/dance-floor satori that elevates should-be-singles like “Baptism” and the gauzy “Not in Love” (the latter a cover by obscure Canadian ’80s-new-wavers Platinum Blonde). Having put aside the gimmicky Atari-melting antics of yore, the Castles have created a dense-yet-airy thicket of pure pop transcendence.

Broken Social Scene: Forgiveness Rock Record (Boston Phoenix, 5/4/10)

Recent “loudness wars” notwithstanding, dynamics in music have very little to do with actual volume. That dB meter can flicker any way it wants — human beings still tune in to shifts in style and mood more than audio overload. And on those terms, I think the new BSS album may already have a lock on most dynamic record of the year.

BSS themselves are famously dynamic, with membership fluctuating between a maximum of 15 and the new minimum team of six (not counting “guests”). And they haven’t put out a record in five years — at least not a “proper” release, if you don’t count solo projects and offshoot ensembles.

This might explain the epic yearning that is toploaded on Forgiveness, from the horn-tastic deluge of opening sprawler “World Sick” to the cinematic schizophrenia of the aptly titled “Chase Scene.” But it’s also clear that head BSSers Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning are not satisfied just trying to bring every tune to an otherworldly climax: they take the record down odd detours like the inner-sanctum ballad “Ungrateful Little Father” and the æthereal wash of album closer “Me and My Hand.”

MGMT: Congratulations (Boston Phoenix, 4/8/10)

Listening to the new MGMT album requires similar preparations to those for a prolonged psychedelic experience: you may want to leave some time in your daybook for unexpected detours, and it’d be wise to erase previous experiences from your mind for fear that heightened expectations may not be met and mass bummerage will ensue. Once you’ve got your supply of water, and the “Do Not Disturb” sign is hung on your doorknob, and the mood lighting is just right, you can listen properly and ask: what the fuck is up?

What did I say about erasing expectations? Anyone putting the needle anywhere on this disc had better forget about waiting around for “Electric Feel 2: Electric Boogaloo.” Instead of repeating their recipe of wan, vaguely Prince-y dance-tasm moods, wunderkinder Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser create a lighthearted collage of jaunty surf jangles, snappy and irreverent paeans to Brians Eno and Wilson, and trailing plangent piano chords. There are harpsichords and flutes and recorders and reverse Mellotrons that disappear down unseen corridors, and notes and sounds that just hang in the air — if this album had a sustain pedal, there’d be a cinder block on it. Closer “Congratulations” sounds as if someone in the dorm next door were blasting “The Weight” so loud, you could hear the bass through the wall. It all ends with the polite spittle of golf claps; the ephemeral evaporation of the whole experience compels me to repeat it, again and again. Do I even need to tell you? It just gets stranger each time.

White Wizzard: Over The Top (Boston Phoenix, 3/30/10)

White Wizzard circa 2010 may be a complete fraud to some — if not for their ersatz appropriation of all things NWOBHM (new wave of British heavy metal, if you’re not by the computer), then for the fact that the entire band save bassist Jon Leon jumped ship after the recording of last year’s breakout High Speed GTO EP. Leon rounded up a new band of scabs for the recording of this album, which adheres so closely to the strict confines of early-’80s pre-thrash classic metal that it almost counts as a formalist exercise. But fuck it.

These metal Menudo-ers whump you with front-to-back catchy licks, gallivanting bass throbs, and piercing vocal shrieks. Just as it takes a charlatan’s sleight of hand to put a thousand ’80s metal unknowns in a blender, spew the result on your audience, and pretend that it’s blood, perhaps it takes a crew of formalist pros to spit out such classic-on-first-listen gems as “White Wizzard” and “Out of Control.” Essentially a statement of purpose against the twin bogeymen of late-’80s thrash and mopy ’90s grunge, Over the Top is both a generous heaping of fretboard-tapping castrato rock and a vendetta against those who seek to remove the sheer fun from metal.