Luckily for everybody, 1986 have come back with “Everybody Is Whatever I Think They Are”, which is not only a good album title (and presumably some sort of deliberate mangling of Arctic Monkeys, “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not” [which, as long as I’m getting parenthetical here, is a lousy title, also a lousy band name, also a lousy album, also a … well, let’s close all these brackets and parentheses and get back to the matter at hand; where was I?]), but is also an album that delivers the swagger and the songs that the first 1986 album did, but more so. The Dino Jr-ishness—“Black Spring” could be straight from “You’re Living All Over Me”—is still intact (this is good), but the songwriting is a little more tightly controlled and complex (this is better), and the playing is more confident, and more swaggering (this is best). This album, while not saturated in it, makes more comfortable use of the band’s psychedelic impulses (for example, the intense and deranged “Aunts Marching”, which descends gradually into more of a drunken stagger than a march), and they pack a lot of mean guitar, big drumming, juddering basslines, mood and tempo changes into songs that hover more or less in the three-and-a-half to four-and-a-half minute range.

Let’s come back to those paired titles, because it sums up what I like about 1986: where “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not”, as a title and an album, is a semi-interesting idea (and music) riding on a pose, “Everybody Is Whatever I Think They Are” is a genuine posture, with an implied and casual fuck you, and you don’t get the impression the band shrug themselves out of it when they’re behind closed doors: this is music with brains and with guts and integrity, and it’s got that third one because it’s using the first one and doesn’t even think about the second. But anyway, I gotta go, because Jesus Is on the Phone.

As in 2001 Lift to Experience investigated the intersection between Texas and Jerusalem, so here in 2010 Titus Andronicus maps the routes running through the American Civil War and contemporary New Jersey. And they discover that tramps like them, baby they were born to die. This is E-Street Band New Jersey, but with Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis leading the sides, Walt Whitman nursing the injured and William Lloyd Garrison leading the calls for emancipation.

Proceedings begin in the foreign territory of Massachusetts, out on the highways and out by the powerline with the radio on, and tear ass with no small amount of loathing of self and other for the Garden State Parkway, for Mahwah, for bars and parties and drugstores and pisspots and “The Battle of Hampton Roads”. Just where the borders lie between the new New England of Titus Andronicus and the torn-apart land of 1861-1865 remains blurred and shifting across the hour, and the music strikes tones from the opening gusto of the Boss to the Irish-punk-folk lilt of the Pogues, constantly laced through with snapping military snares, “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “John Brown’s Body” (same tune, different anthems). Glory, glory, hallelujah, you’ll always be a loser and the enemy is everywhere… this is an album as blistering and intense as it is intelligent and weird and wonderful.

White Hills blast big psychedelic blues-rock that expands and expands and expands and expands, surfing the ever-rippling and rising wake of the silver machine, cresting up over Monster Magnet and rolling up into a tsunami, seven songs, sixty minutes, sprawling guitar riffs and treading bass, drumbeats collecting fill after fill upon fill and fill, one wave of song ebbing only long enough for the next to crash down upon it. Plus, on “Let the Right One In”, church bells. Listen loud.

DISCLAIMER: The fourth song on this album, “Owen Noone & Marauder”, uses text from the French translation of my novel, Owen Noone and the Marauder, as its lyrics. Although I had nothing to do with the song, and nor do I know the band personally, I’m nonetheless flattered into a compromised position as a critic. With that in mind, read forth:

This album begins with a woman singing in a kind of Arabic way (not in Arabic, please understand), and develops into an increasingly louder, rockinger swell until it breaks down for spoken lyrics (en français… I don’t speak French, so I have idea what the guy is saying, but he sounds increasingly agitated or excited), then builds to a blister of an ending.

Deskaya is a band intent on blending a variety of influences—dub, reggae, ska, Arabic—into a prog-rock format, and they blend their influences well. Without reaching the dizzying heights and complexities of Mike Patton, they earn the right to be compared to that Faith No More style of music (not so much many of the other Patton projects). Deskaya’s songwriting in much more straightforward than that comparison would suggest, and perhaps in both the comparison and the exception lies the one thing about this album that itches a little bit: after a while, the structures sound a little (only a little, I would emphasize) formulaic: songs tend to rise to a swell, then recede or drop, to build back up to a second swell. The thing is, their songwriting is good—the songs aren’t at all boring, and they have good riffs, the musicians play extremely well, and the instrumentation—guitars, percussion, keyboards, sometimes wind instruments—blend and create a full and complementary sound that rocks and swaggers. They engage your listening interest over songs that last as long as seven minutes. So it’s not like they are beating a formula to death or anything even close to that. But this band’s technical ability means they can afford to be more adventurous with their songwriting; but Deskaya are a fairly young band, so maybe that’s more of a hope for the future direction of the band than an actual criticism of the present record, which uses its brains pretty well while also rocking them out.

This charitable aspect presents you with the perfect opportunity to discover Schooner if you’re not aware of them already: it’s only five bucks, and it’s a charitable donation, so if you end up not liking the album, it’s a tax write-off anyway.

But if you don’t like Schooner, then there’s something wrong with you, friend. Their album, “Hold on too Tight” was one of the best things I heard in all 2007, and it still gets regular rotation at my house. This release, a 16-minute E.P., has a slightly less-polished sound to “Hold on too Tight”, without losing any of the quality. Schooner’s strength is blending country and pop influences into beautifully constructed songs. So on the opening track here, “Feel Better”, and you get a surf-inflected country stomp, you get a little mariachi inflection on “Fortuition”. The songs always seem to be hovering over a meeting of Rick Nelson, Brian Wilson and John Lennon. But again: these are influences used by a band that exudes an authentic originality, not the direct pinpoints of some derivative songwriting and playing. This is a band with brains: they are lyrically smart without being smartass, and when it comes to instrumentation the songs don’t rest on a couple guitars and drums and bass; piano comes and goes, “Duck Kee Nights” is an instrumental tack piano (I think) piece with the sounds of the crickets and the highway as a rhythm section, some ukulele helps you “Lose Yourself”, and across these songs there are various percussion and other instruments lending subtle and effective underpinning to the fabric. There’s also much to be said for the vocal arrangements: harmonies and backing vocals are consistently beautiful and/or dynamic (witness the woo-oo-oos on the opener, or the ba-ba-ahs that course through the final track, “In All Probability”).

When I reviewed “Hold on too Tight” a few years ago, I said you should be prepared to make Schooner your new favorite band. I don’t want to repeat myself, so this time I’ll just say go to cytunes.org and buy this album. It’s worth way more than the five bucks it’ll cost you, and the money’s going to a good cause. Once you’ve done that, then go and buy “Hold on too Tight” so you can support this outstanding band, too.

This is a short little record of five songs and sixteen minutes, and allow me to list the titles: “Lindsey Brohan”, “Unforgettable Super Lady”, “Soda Popinski”, “Radio”, “Twice”. You could buy this limited editon 12” record for the song titles alone. Sometimes it’s a little hip-hoppish, sometimes it’s a little soulish, or funkish, or latinish. It’s always a whole bunch of fun (no –ish).

People who don’t smile listening to this music need to check for a heartbeat; the beats and melodies jab at the corners of your mouth and push them upwards. “Soda Popinksi” is a little gem of genius that begins and ends with a little kid telling a rhyme about George Washington and works that little kid’s voice into a goofy mmmmmmmm while the rest of the song doodley-doos and soda popinskis.

The best thing about this short little record is that it manages to be joyful and fun and interesting and utterly devoid of cynicism without being obnoxiously saccharine or twee. You can dance to it, you can sit and head-bob to it, you can take your kids to the library to hear it performed.

You’d better go and buy “Javelin”, because one day you’re going to find yourself having gotten up on the wrong side of the bed, and you’re going to put this album on, and you’re going to feel better. And if that isn’t enough for you, well, it should be.

They’re releasing another 12” on Thrill Jockey next year, and a full length album on Luaka Bop sometime thereafter, and I suggest you keep your ears open for them. Hooray!

Good news, everybody!

They’ve done it again. This album is less of a sea and more of an ocean, from the big and deep and slow and menacing blues stomp that gives into altogether more swaggery one at the opening, to the dripping guitar chords that roll into one another across most of the other tracks, and including the little islands of acoustic-guitar that pop up a couple times. There are nine tracks in just over half an hour of music here, but the album has such a coherence and intensity of sound that listening to it seems epic—in a good way. An engine of tight, steady drumming punctuates the whole album. Pontiak have found a way to energize psychedelic/stoner rock without—as I said in the last review of their music—ever seeming to do anything spectacular. Which is a kind of spectacularness itself.

What follows is much more pleasant to the ear: an entire album of lilting percussion, precise, yet sauntering guitar, and hoo-ing, ha-ing, yelping, wailing and alternately soothing vocals, grooving bass, and keyboards doing various things as well. Sometimes these things happen all together, sometimes they happen in smaller combos. It’s all pretty wonderful. OOIOO pretend they’re a rock band, pretend they’re a pop outfit, pretend they’re avant-garde artiness. And yet, they’re never really quite any of these things, but never really quite not any of these things. It’s not easy to wrap pop and rock and soul and and and and and and into one accessible sound, and still to make it intriguing, and still to make it fun. But OOIOO seem to have found a magic formula. Except it isn’t formulaic; far from it. This album is a little journey through all points musical: funk, soul, high life, all the pops and rocks I’ve already mentioned, and more and more and more. And yet the journey isn’t just slapdash globetrotting or island hopping; this is OOIOO’s sixth album, and these women take their listener by the hand, whether to lead, to dance or to celebrate, and in listening, you always feel the strength and comfort of that guiding hand as one idea leads to the next, as one song gives way to another, from the aforementioned “SOL” to the “Honki Ponki” that finishes the album.

What he has created from this ostensibly simple starting point is a work of no small wonder. These four songs are essentially pop songs, stretched to the aching point, slowed down so that the listener can enjoy almost every single aspect individually, while also enjoying every single aspect simultaneously. This album is a hymn to sound, and a hymn to the possibilities of sounds, and a hymn to the beauty of sound, and a hymn to the joy of music. The second song on this album, “Let There Be Love”, takes two one-second samples of the Bee Gee’s song of that title and works them into a sonic response to the appeal that the title makes, and in so doing becomes one of the most breathtaking and beautiful pieces of music I’ve listened to in a very long time. It’s ten minutes, and worth the price of the album on its own. And yet, “Let There Be Love” is surrounded by music equally thrilling, equally beautiful, equally wonderful. A thesaurus of synonyms for beautiful and wonderful will only begin to tell you what you are missing if you don’t find forty-five minutes of your life to devote to this masterpiece.