Throbbing Gristle
The Endless Not
(Mute)
The most perverse product yet of post-punk nostalgia, Throbbing Gristle's unlikely reunion album has been met by severe skepticism and outright silence. But far from being some bizarre attempt to cash in on the band's infamous reputation, The Endless Not is a genuinely rancorous scab of crippled electronics and scarred vocals. Shorn of historical context, it fails to recapture the importance of their original work, but in many ways this is their most accomplished, overtly musical release. In the confidently layered ambient soundscapes and uneasily grinding grooves, you can hear the result of bandmembers' subsequent tenures in Psychic TV and Coil. And in scabrous and self-scarring moods, it will—to quote one of the album's memorable refrains—"fit you like a shrunken glove."
—Jeff Jackson
Cindy Kallet & Grey Larsen
Cross the Water
(Sleepy Creek Music)
Among the admirable things about Cindy Kallet is the line she walks between hope and mawkish naiveté. On "Courage" she contemplates life's big questions, but instead of patchouli-soaked insight she offers, "So where is that highest wisest self/ with the really big picture of everything?" and concludes, "We're all walking wounded…." Some people dream of becoming one with the Godhead; on the title track Kallet notes she'd be happy to come back as a rock. The partnership between Kallet and Larsen is rich; wash revelatory realism in a catch basin of Kallet's dark, emotive vocals, add liberal doses of Grey Larsen's tin whistles, fiddles, flutes, squeeze boxes, backing vocals, and Celtic musical interludes, and what's not to like?
—Rob Weir
Babyshambles
Shotter's Nation
(Astralwerks)
The second Babyshambles album arrives on these shores amid tabloid tales of junkie blues, rehab nightmares and supermodel romances gone awry. But the music itself is far from sensationalistic. Shotter's Nation sounds thoroughly English and unconcerned with pandering to American tastes. It evokes Johnny Thunders producing an early '70s Kinks album, offering a charming mix of jazz-inflected pub rock, music hall melodies, gutter-glam attitude and punk guitars. The album is more woozy, less explosive, and less anthemic than the Libertines, but still stylish and catchy. No one tune sticks out—except maybe the acoustic lament "Lost Art of Murder"—but while this isn't music for the ages, these songs will far outlast the scandalous environment that birthed them.
—Jeff Jackson
Jimmy Eat World
Chase This Light
(Interscope)
Although Jimmy Eat World's frontman Jim Adkins bears a slight physical resemblance to Billy Corgan, his high, breathy/squeaky voice is more reminiscent, on this album, of Freddie Mercury or Bono. The record's chord progressions are almost identical from song to song (and "Dizzy" sounds pretty much like "Purple Rain"), but with so many layers of production it's hard to sort the mess out. There's a brief attempt at getting slightly political—"Electable (give it up)"—but mostly, these boys stick to their slick teeny-bopper formula, slather on the reverb and massage the angst of self-disenfranchised California middle-schoolers. Also, I'm still not sure that this whole album wasn't accidentally recorded at 120 percent of normal speed. It kind of makes me itchy.
—Tom Sturm
