Axes

Lots of people spend their time on trying to find the next "alternative music sensation." Sadly enough, most of those sensations (like, for example, The Strokes) then sound just like all those other bands before them - so it's new faces, but the same old stuff. It's actually kind of amazing (and sad) to hear how little experimentation people - musicians and listeners - are willing to tolerate.

Enters Electrelane, a band that not only on a superficial level - the band members are all women - is quite different from the rest of the crowd. I don't know whether they will be the next sensation, in a sense I don't think so (they're too unusual).

This is their third album, and it's a mix of their first two. If you've read anything about it, you probably saw it's being compared with Stereolab. If a band is like Stereolab if they use organs and have a woman singing then, sure, this is like Stereolab. But it seems to me the "stereo" you want to use for these kinds of comparisons is the one in stereotype.

The album mostly features instrumentals, recorded to sound a tad rough (Steve Albini did the recording), and the sheer variety of tracks is quite interesting. One of my favorites, "Eight Steps" sounds like an Eastern European folk band going nuts. Others feature lots of unusual instrumentations, incl. weird piano riffs and such. It's definitely a very interesting experience, and if you don't like it right away it'll definitely grow on you.

Electrelane's Axes finally arrived. It's been out for a week, I can't figure out what the hold up was but I am so happy with it. It is noticably not as catchy as The Power Out, which, probably I will be the only person that misses that. I like catchy. Especially the way that one was catchy. With hooks so smart, if I were a fish I wouldn't mind losing my life to hooks like that. I would snap on. I would take the bait. They could reel me in.

Axes is starker, and more Stockhausen, which is always popular with modern minds, not always mine. It's what John Cale's Paris 1919 should have sounded like, and was so disapointing and boring because it didn't. And it's a lot like that final, two-album leap that Talk Talk made when they transcended everything, when they abandoned pop for good and went free. I hope Electrelane stick around though.

This is more experimental, locked into grooves and extended noise-rock, with less accessibility than on "The Power Out." While nothing leaps out on the new CD as did the choir-based Valleys or the rambuctious Take the Bit Between Your Teeth, as a whole, "Axes" feels more cohesive, more of a whole package designed to convey a serious committment to constructing blocks of sound that move and shift. Heady music, rather intellectual, yet not as austere as those too enamored of art-rock and free-jazz influences would have it. The assured, sometimes perky, often cautionary vocals prevent this from being all theory and no practice. The contrasts between the sunnier style of the words and the serious tone of the lyrics makes for an intriguing contrast, and keeps the right balance between artistic intent and popular reception. The group reminds me of a similarly eclectic ensemble a decade ago, NYC's Run On, who married the avant-garde and no-wave traditions with indie-rock directions and concise song lengths. Still a rather young band in age, Electrelane should be able to continue the path they have blazed over the past half-dozen years, and I look forward to their opening up of more connections between krautrock, NYC-inspired guitar-based orchestration, English eccentricity, and Continental ambiance.

Why this did not earn a perfect score was due to the album's mid-point nadir, Business or Otherwise, which is too loose, too wonky, and too indulgent in its lazier assembly of what in the other songs has benefited from a tighter composition, unified methods, and propulsive direction. This track halfway may have been placed to break the mood of what may have otherwise been too similar sounding an album, but while the intent is understandable, the variety of this track fails to grab the listener in the same way as the more energetic and better arranged pieces do. Steve Albini's dry and precise recording techniques work well for the band, although as on many of his indie-band productions, the results may be a bit off-putting for those wanting a lusher soundscape.

If you like this, a B-sides/live/demo collection appeared in mid-2006 that continues in this vein, hearkening back to the turn of the century and the early free-flowing nature of the band's instrumentals, moving into a more mainstream (if only by comparison) approach, and then heading off, as does this CD, into areas on both CDs like versions of The Partisan which show the band's ability to combine a message with a pulse. This is a welcome band, with intelligent music that neither falls into the pomposity of prog nor the whimsy of pop. Somehow, it manages to be firm yet not forbidding, a series of structures that tower once assembled as if to march and clatter past those watchers less able to create these massive models of moving sound. Still, we can stand and listen to them as they rumble past us.