New music round up

August is always a good month for indie rock. Because many of the year’s major releases are scheduled for the fall months leading up to the Christmas buying season, promos typically start flooding in towards the end of July and peak in the middle of August. This year is no exception. After a few relatively slow months, there’s now simply so much great music that’s made its way through my speakers that I’ve had trouble keeping up. However, the following are some of the highlights.

Death Cab for Cutie: Plans – I’ve already written about this album, but after only a few days of listening I’ve become severely attached to it. Once again, Ben Gibbard, Chris Walla and the rest of the Cabbers have created a gently rocking pop confection of the first order. While they’ve dropped some of the melancholic grandeur of Airplanes and Facts, they’ve honed their melodic lines and smoothed Gibbard’s vocals into the sweetest thing this side of Hershey’s.

John Vanderslice: Pixel Revolt – Vanderslice has long been one of my favorite artists, one of the few working artists who can blend pop melodies and structures with disarmingly original instrumentation. With his penchant for layering analog sounds into classic pop song structures, he creates a stratified pop-rock that manages to be both experimental and accessible. Pixel Revolt is more subdued than some of his recent albums, and includes nothing so immediately endearing as Cellar Door’s opener “Pale Horse,” but it still displays the same sort of witty, bemused rock-storyteller sensibility that’s made Vanderslice’s other releases so imminently listenable.

Constantines: Tournament of Hearts - Pitchfork, in one of its best rhetorical cross-breedings, once described Constantines as Fugazi meets Bruce Springsteen. The Canadian rockers have always leaned a little more towards the DC post punk championed by Dischord’s number one draw, but on TOH, the anthemic glory rock seems to be pushing for dominance. The opener, “Draw Us Lines,” is a slow, driving build for which rest of the album attempts, with much success, to deliver an appropriate string of climaxes. Not as angular or ballsy as their previous albums, it’s still a solid outing that delivers both the zig-zag guitars of post-punk and Boss style calls to arms.

Criteria: When We Break – Speaking of anthemic, it’d be borderline impossible to write about Criteria without using that word. The newest additions to the Saddle Creek roster don’t do anything that hasn’t been done before – crunchy riffs, start-stop guitar lines, punchy grooves and soaring choruses abound – but they do it with so much energy that it’s hard not to let loose with an old fashioned Billy Idol arm throw and scream “Hell yeah!” Possibly a guilty pleasure; possibly just really good.

The Narrator: Such Triumph & Joan of Arc: Presents Guitar Duets – It’s tough to be a Joan of Arc fan. I’ll never actually find the interview, but at one point, one of the Kinsellas who frequents the band and its many spin offs said something to the effect of, “We’re always trying to find new ways to disappoint our fans.” From the ambient indie glitch of A Portable Model of… to the antagonistic strangeness of Dick Cheney, Mark Twain, Joan of Arc, the band has moved from experimental idols to oft-hated eccentrics. But in one of their slew of new side projects, The Narrator, they’ve finally released a straight up rock album (or as close as they can come to it) that should please even their harshest critics. Manic and barely contained, Such Triumph lives up to its titular billing. The band’s other recent release, a collection of guitar duets by frequent JOA members, is equally stunning in a wholly different way. Anyone who’s seen the band live will know that, besides being really, really strange, the JOA legion is also made up of surprisingly good instrumentalists, and on Duets, Sam Zurick, Matt Clark, Bobby Burg, a slew of Kinsellas and several more sometime JOA contributors offer up a series of instrumental guitar pieces that showcase their technical skills and their gifts for interlocking virtuoso licks. Not a true JOA album, but what really is?