Heard Here

Movement, Gossip

You will all be glad to know that the Gossip has not, like the rest of the world, gone synth-pop. The Gossip’s new album, Movement, is what is to be expected from a new Gossip album. It is raw, bluesy and short with songs about how lead singer Beth Ditto is a lesbian. However, in the industry’s tradition of sophomore albums, this shows signs of maturity.

Ditto’s voice is in top condition, and her songwriting has started to stray just off the path of self-involved. Unlike the Gossip’s first album and early EPs there are no songs that focus on her weight or sexual preference. Instead, Movement is mostly filled with more traditional blues love and loss songs.

Nathan Howedshell’s guitar work has an abrasive blues-rock snarl and is completely repetitive. The highlights are the slightly more melodic riff of the first track “Nite” and the classic rock anthem power of “Light Light Sleep.” But the guitar is mostly monotonous and aside from speed and lyrics, many of the tracks are indistinguishable.

The highlights of Movement are, of course, Beth Ditto’s voice and the spots where her old school soul is showcased. In the song Nite you can hear the loneliness in her voice as she ranges from high screams to low growl, and the a cappella section in “Gone” is spiritual and a pleasure to listen to.

The one song that deals with the self-affirmation of an overweight lesbian is the pedantic “Yesterday’s News.” It’s a song about how much she’s grown and how much she’s learned about being comfortable with herself, presumably from her early Gossip experience. “Yesterdays news is today’s tragedy, but I won’t let it get to me, not like I used to,” she sings. The song also offers advice for hipsters everywhere: “You buy the right records, now you buy the right shoes/ yeah you look so good but that’s all you do.”

If you have one Gossip album, that’s enough. If you want a fairly straightforward blues-soul-garage album, Movement will do the trick. For a two piece band, they manage to fill the tracks and not sound sparse, and between Ditto’s voice and songwriting, Movement does have some interesting moments.

—Harry Gassel

Summer Sun, Yo La Tengo

Over the last decade, Yo La Tengo has taken their place as one of the most important independent guitar bands around. After the landmark 1997 album I Can Hear The Heart Beat As One, Yo La Tengo was on top of its game. Their biggest success came with the next album, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out in 2000. It was a hit with both critics and fans. It seemed then that these college radio favorites could do nothing wrong. After three years off, they’ve returned with Summer Sun. Having claimed their place at the top, Yo La Tengo is here to prove that they can do more musically than your average group.

Summer Sun starts with the spacy mellow “Beach Party Tonight,” a tune reminiscent of the opening to I Can Hear The Heart Beat As One. However, once it’s over, you’ve almost forgotten all about it. The second track “Little Eyes” is much more promising than the opener. Soothing, catchy, intricate and full of the usual Yo La Tengo charm, “Little Eyes” is a gorgeous track. Sadly, the band doesn’t capitalize on the song’s energy. It is followed up by the uninteresting “Nothing But You and Me,” which drags on far too long.

In fact, much of the album drags on far too long. It is an atmospheric album, but it never quite finds an anchor. Tracks like “Tiny Birds” waste far too much time trying to find themselves. During the disposable instrumental jam “Georgia vs. Yo La Tengo,” Yo La Tengo seem for the first time in their career to come across as slightly ridiculous.
The new sound works best on the zero gravity track “Don’t Have To Be So Sad.” This track floats perfectly along, with surreal pianos, double bass and saxophones colliding. The sound is successfully optimistic, a nice compliment to the song’s lyrics. Another winner is “Today is the Day” sung by Georgia Hubley. It’s the first track on the record to make use of space effectively. Its openness allows the bare emotion of the song to be lead along by the sparse guitars.

With more synthesized sounds than usual, the album is a departure in sound for Yo La Tengo. The majority of the tracks have a heavy jazz influence.

Though there has been a rather logical progression to the band’s last few records, this album fails to bring together as many influences as the previous works do. While this new sound is pleasant and well executed, it’s disappointingly bland. There’s a lack of edginess and desolation that had been present in tracks such as “Deeper into Movies.” Gone are the powerfully raw pop songs and coy ballads. Compared to previous works, this new album is lyrically deficient. While not a bad album, Summer Sun is just not as engaging as Yo La Tengo has been in the past.

—Oliver William Pattenden

Monday at the Hug & Pint, Arab Strap

It’s no coincidence that the cover of Arab Strap’s fourth record, Monday at the Hug & Pint, is distinctly reminiscent of the covers of Belle & Sebastian’s best-known albums. This duo’s new disc swims in the kinds of lush string-laden arrangements that the latter Glasgow band made famous on records like If You’re Feeling Sinister and The Boy With the Arab Strap (no connection). Where 2001’s The Red Thread confined itself to fairly minimalist territory with many tracks maintained simply by guitar, drum machine and voice, Monday at the Hug & Pint adds heaps of strings, percussion and even the occasional pedal-steel guitar to Aidan Moffat’s slurred brooding.

Arab Strap’s main attractions have always been Moffat’s sordid tails of love, sex and beer-swilling, not to mention that thick-as-a-bog Scottish accent. On the duo’s previous three discs there was usually more rant in the red-headed singer’s north country slang than actual melody. Many tunes sounded like Moffat stumbled home late after closing time only to find some of Malcolm Middleton’s haunting guitar textures on an eight track, pressed record and then proceeded to confess his latest romantic debacle. An Arab Strap song worked because you always felt like you were hearing things you weren’t supposed to and Middleton’s magnificently sparse instrumentation only added to the tension.

But an Arab Strap song doesn’t work when Moffat tries to sing. Though he desperately attempts to live up to the luscious strings and horns on “Act of War,” the buoyant arrangement fails to save his pipes from falling flat. And though Middleton’s dizzying finger picking on the opener, “The Shy Retirer,” starts the new record off with a surprising and welcome faster tempo, Moffat is simply unable to keep up. While Middleton’s arrangements are as confident as ever, their richness makes them the wrong fit for Moffat’s bitterly frank mumble. Only rarely, as on the gorgeous little tune “Meanwhile, At the Bar, a Drunkard Muses,” whose wistful guitar and warm synths pull you right in to Moffat’s soap opera, does the music give the poor bastard some room to breathe.

Arab Strap made their mark with restraint, not bombast. Middleton’s airy song-structures gave Moffat all the room in the world to move around his Glasgow — a gothic playground where monogamy is for wankers and everyone’s diary is wide open, including his own. Now, though the twosome may have cheered up a bit, as evidenced by the richer and more organic instrumentation, they’ve lost much of the eerie charm that made Scottish romance seem every bit as dreary and unpredictable as the weather.

—John MacDonald