The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart
Belong

Whoa. I had previously dismissed the cheekily-named Pains Of Being Pure At Heart as an overly twee example of indie rock, but with their second album, Belong, they have not only dodged the "sophomore slump" but produced one of the year's finest records.

Produced by Flood and mixed by Alan Moulder, the dream team responsible for some of the 90's best albums (Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie, U2's Achtung Baby, Depeche Mode's Violator, and Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral, just to name a few), it should come as no surprise that Belong has their fingerprints all over it. Not only is it produced by relics from the heyday of the so-called "Alternative Nation," but the record sounds of a time and place that puts it squarely during the era when Lollapalooza was a touring concern. It's got everything from that era: big fat guitars; angular bass work; breathy vocals; noisy feedback.

Opening with the stellar title track, The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart know how to get right to your swoon centers, and they stay there throughout the entirety of the album. The first time I heard Belong, I said, "This sounds just like The Jesus & Mary Chain!" Only it's better than anything those mopesters every dreamed of recording, because Pains understands chiaroscuro far better than the Chain. For those of you without big vocabularies, chiaroscuro is a strong contrast between light and dark - it's an art term, and fully appropriate for a band whose ambitions so strongly straddle the line between art-rock and noise-pop. The band knows when to float along on a cloud, or roar through the speakers with a blast of shrieking noise, and they balance both tendencies with an equal helping of both that fully balances their sound.

I could go into individual tracks here, but I won't bother - the entire album is that good. Clocking in at 39:20, it doesn't overstay its welcome - a relief, because this kind of music could get a little same-y after a while. No, at 39:20, this album is perfect in size, shape, and composition, and could well be the best album of the year thus far.

Soundgarden
Live On I-5

The last year has seen something of a Soundgarden renaissance. The band reformed, headlined Lollapalooza, released Telephantasm (a greatest hits retrospective), and announced they'd be entering the studio to make new music - all of which are enough to make an old Soundgarden fan feel warm and fuzzy. The icing on the cake, then, would of course be a new live album... wouldn't it?

Last week, I talked about how live albums are hit-or-miss affairs. Live On I-5, recorded in the mid-90s during a West Coast tour, is both hit and miss. Some of the songs are excellent, including a slow, drugged-out cover of the Beatles' "Helter Skelter" and a ferocious rip through the underrated "Ty Cobb." (The material performed from Down On The Upside, one of Soundgarden's most misunderstood releases, is especially excellent.) Also of note is an extra long take on Badmotorfinger's "Slaves & Bulldozers," which was always a highlight of the band's sets.

Unfortunately, this live document is just that: a live document. The crowd is insufferably loud, and far too much of their applause and hollering makes it on to the disc, resulting in something that sounds like a low-quality bootleg. I can understand featuring the sound of the crowd in between songs, and especially if the band is bouncing their work off of the group in front of them, but too much of the quieter moments on this record find the band drowned out by their own followers -- a shame for fans and collectors alike. Until the new album comes out, this will have to tide us over, but I'll take the studio albums over this collection any day.

Mastodon
Live At The Aragon

Live albums are usually hit-or-miss affairs; Mastodon's first foray into the world of the concert document is mostly miss. The band's decision to play their latest album, Crack The Skye, in its entirety is a bad idea right off the bat - we just heard this album, and it sounded far, far better in the studio, where the astral sound effects and untreated vocals could stand on their own. Furthermore, the band rarely strays from the sound of the record, which makes for a boring listen in its own right. Want to compound the problem? The vocals sound terrible - not because they were recorded poorly but because the two vocalists suck live when they're not growling or masked by distortion. The decision to steer clear of any material from their two strongest albums (Leviathan and Blood Mountain), save a track from each, also adds to this record's detriment. The only high point is a cover of the Melvins "The Bit," and that comes at the end of the disc. Save your money and buy the originals.

Does It Offend You, Yeah?
Don't Say We Didn't Warn You

Pitchfork.com, that arbiter of music taste - that last bastion of all things good in the musical multiverse - didn't like Does It Offend You, Yeah?'s first album. They called it "barely adequate dance-rock... doggedly ugly, riff-driven electro" and described DIOYY as "a hard band to warm to." Fuck them. I thought it was great. True, sometimes the band's tendency to dip into noisy "electro" irritates, but they alternated their squelchier tendencies with mid-tempo melodic rockers. I saw them open for Nine Inch Nails on their Lights In The Sky tour, and had it been any other band up there I would have been bored and checking my watch. Instead, I had a great time.

God knows how they're going to take the new album, Don't Say We Didn't Warn You. It starts off with the band's usual irreverence - a clip of them in the studio, farting around on an acoustic guitar - but soon accelerates into the band's signature sound, which is like a busted computer farting out blood on the mixing desk. This band likes their keyboards broken and covered in puke, and the Zulu chanting on the background of starter track "We Are The Dead" only adds to the air of fucked up musicians partying.

But whereas before, the band was content to shift between music and noise, now, they blend the two. Before "We Are The Dead" is over, the acoustic guitar returns, and it demonstrates a young band growing more confident in their abilities. Two follow-up tracks - "John Hurt" and "Pull Out My Insides" - are absolutely stellar variations on this theme, and the opening trio is worth the price of admission alone. "John Hurt" is a symphony of sound on a blown speaker system - did that "Woo! Yeah!" sample of James Brown, which so many artists have used that it has its own Wikipedia page - while "Insides" is more confessional, more pleading, more like the emotionally charged music that closed out their first album.

Of course, nothing great can last forever, and the album does lag as it continues. "Wrong Time Wrong Planet" is a slinky bass-driven vamp that goes seemingly nowhere and descends into meaningless Fairlight fondling in its second half. "Wrestler" features a sample of someone shouting "Fuck you, you're wrong! Fuck you, we're right!" that's more tiresome than interesting, and "Wondering" has a sample rap by UK grime artist Trip that doesn't interest me in following up on any Trip records, if you know what I'm saying.

DIOYY like to end things on a high note, if their first album is any indication, and the closer here, "Broken Arms," is a beautiful, slowly building ballad which consolidates the band's strengths and brings back the acoustic guitar. It's nothing wonderful, but it's certainly a lot of fun, and contains enough earworms to keep you coming back for more. Pitchfork may pooh-pooh all they like - I'll take Does It Offend You, Yeah? over half of their Best New Musics any day.

Radiohead, THE KING OF LIMBS

Not everyone can bat a thousand. Even Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player who ever lived (contestable), had to suffer through a couple of rimshots in his day. For Radiohead, The King Of Limbs is that rimshot.

Released with little fanfare a few weeks ago on the band's Web site (it'll be out physically in late March, if you're still into that kind of thing), The King Of Limbs is only 37 minutes long, which is the start of my problems with it. Not that I don't like short albums, but after the long wait since In Rainbows (that was three apartments ago, for Chrissakes), I expected a little bit... more.

But it wouldn't be such a bad thing if Radiohead blew my head off for 37 minutes straight. Not so here. For 37 minutes, Radiohead dodges, ducks, dives, and, uh, dodges the bloody point. Neither fish nor fowl, The King Of Limbs operates in in-between mode: not quite a guitar album, and not quite an electronica album, Radiohead sound like they don't know what they want to do.

It opens with "Bloom," which is pretty enough, even if it sounds like vocalist Thom Yorke is drowning in his own words half of the time. "Morning Mr Magpie" builds off of an interesting rhythm section, all clicks and clacks, but it goes nowhere. It isn't until the album's third track, "Little By Little," with its Middle Eastern guitar flourishes and relative momentum, that Limbs reveals a song I wouldn't mind hearing live.

From there, it's on to dubstep (the less said about "Feral" the better) and the album's single, "Lotus Flower," which is the most forgettable, vanilla song Radiohead has produced since Pablo Honey. The second half of the album provides us with some of the 'head's quieter moments, but they pale in comparison to previous work.

So, there you have it. A middling record from a bunch of geniuses. They didn't exactly phone it in but the album's a rimshot, to be sure. Just so long as Yorke & Co. don't decide to pull a Jordan and become baseball (er, cricket) players, we'll all tune in next time.