Piper's Single Reviews: Issue 1

This is the inaugural installment of Piper's Single Reviews. Each post, I will review six songs by various indie and alternative bands and rate them on a scale from 1 to 10.

Let us begin.

Silversun Pickups - Panic Switch
I've long waited for the return of Los Angeles neo-shoegazers Silversun Pickups, who made one of 2006's best albums, Carnavas. At first listen, "Panic Switch", the first single from their upcoming sophomore release Swoon, sounds like a James Bond theme gone psychedelic. Like most of their songs, it is dominated by two things: the vocals of guitarist Brian Aubert and the bass playing of Nikki Monniger, who plays "lead bass", a style of bass playing many thought died with John Entwhistle (not that i'm comparing Monniger to Entwhistle). Anyway, the song is - like most of the band's music - a mixture of Slowdive and the Smashing Pumpkins that is extremely enjoyable, but it's not as good as "Kissing Families" or "Little Lover's So Polite"
8.5/10


Art Brut - Alcoholics Unanimous
Art Brut has been often slagged in the press and being a ripoff of the Fall. Unlike the Fall, they have a somewhat stable lineup revolving around Mark E. Smith impersonator Eddie Argos. The band's best song, "Formed a Band" was their first single and despite several other highlights like "Modern Art" and "Direct Hit", its been downhill ever since. Case in point, "Alcoholics Unanimous", the first single from their third album Art Brut vs. Satan. The song is decent, but like most of Art Brut's songs, you won't remember how it goes an hour after you hear it, and if you do, you'll remember that the song's bridge sounds too similar to the Human League's 1979 single "Empire State Human".
5/10


Depeche Mode - Wrong
Depeche Mode are one of only a select group of early alternative rock bands to continuously be wildly successful since their formation and never break up (in fact, the Cure is the only other band I can think of). However, this has its down side. DM have been around so long that you pretty much know exactly how their new songs are going to sound like before you've even heard them. Case in point, before I ever heard "Wrong", the first single from the band's four billionth album Sounds of the Universe, I knew it was going to be dark, synth heavy and have a chorus consisting of the title repeated over and over again (if it even appeared in the lyrics at all). This doesn't mean its a terrible song. Like Foo Fighters, Depeche Mode have fallen into the class of alt rock bands that make great singles that are of so much better quality than their album tracks that you can pick out which songs will be released as singles before they are because they're better than anything else on the album.
7/10

The Dead Weather - Hang You From the Heavens
The Dead Weather is a supergroup that consists of Alison Mosshart of the Kills on vocals and guitar, Jack White of the White Stripes and the Raconteurs on drums, that dude with the glasses from the Raconteurs on bass and some guy from the Queens of the Stone Age on lead guitar. For a band that consists of two of my favorite people in alternative rock today, the Dead Weather's first single "Hang You from the Heavens" is gloriously unmemorable. There's no real hook and the song sounds like its trying too hard to be heavy. Despite this, Mosshart's vocals truly shine, but she seems lost in the sludge without Kills partner Jamie Hince. I really hope their upcoming album Horehound has better songs to offer than this.
5/10

The Horrors - Sea Within A Sea
The Horrors burst onto the UK music scene in late 2006 with their strobelight laden video for "Sheena Is A Parasite", a song about how punk rock ("Sheena" referring to the Ramones' "Sheena is a Punk Rocker") has over stayed its then 29-year-long welcome on British shores. The band soon won fans with their semi-gothy and gloriously sloppy garage rock. Coming a year and a half after their debut album Strange House, "Sea Within a Sea" is the first single from their second album Primary Colours. It is very different from anything else the band has ever done. For one, the song just barely under 8 minutes long (amazing, since the aforementioned "Parasite" buzzes along in under 90 seconds). "Sea" builds satisfyingly and sounds like late period Joy Division/very early New Order, which may alienate some of the bands' fans. It seems that the band took the time off to actually learn their instruments (which sometimes can spell the death for bands that find genius in their inability to play) and they sound alot tighter as a unit. The second part of the song sounds a bit like "The Rip" by Portishead, which makes sense since Primary Colours was produced by Portishead's Geoff Barrow. The song actually takes a few plays to warm up to, but once it does, it's a nice little gem from a pretty alright band.
8/10

The Decemberists - The Rake's Song
The Decemberists are kind of like They Might Be Giants in how they constantly make upbeat happy tunes about terrible, terrible things. On "The Rake's Song", the first single from the band's latest offering The Hazards of Love, the narrator kills his three surviving children after he loses both his wife and newborn daughter in child birth. The Rake (a part sung by the band's leader Colin Meloy) how he kills his children (one is fed foxglove, another is drowned and the last is presumably beaten to death), ending with "Expect you think that I should be haunted/But it never really bothers me" (don't worry, the Rake gets what's coming to him later in the concept album's narrative). The horrible events of the lyrics are juxtaposed over a shiny happy acoustic guitar and a chorus which consists of the word "alright". Whereas the some of the songs on The Hazards of Love don't make much sense outside of the album, "The Rake's Song" is not only good as a stand-alone, but it's also its album's highlight
9/10

That's all for now. Oh, I should take this opportunity to plug my blog, which is linked here.