But for all of these generally positive associations, Astro Coast comes off as merely workmanlike. The performances feel sluggish, and while the songs are well-written, they’re also a bit generic. The only way I can understand Pitchfork’s choice to bestow their Best New Music status on them would be from the dual perspectives of nostalgia and potential: here’s a band that sounds like a throwback to 90’s indie-rock but with some contemporary production touches, and they may be a little green but they have the skills to be good at some point in the future. And that may be true. But that doesn’t change my feelings that Astro Coast is just a pumped-up demo from a band that hasn’t yet decided what it wants to be when it grows up.

But sadly, no: no such surprises here. Contra is pretty much what you’d expect it to be. Because it’s a Vampire Weekend album, it’s full of gentle, peppy, tasteful, and ultimately harmless pop songs. And because it’s a follow-up to a successful debut, it tries a little too hard sometimes, which unfortunately works against the easygoing vibe that is the band’s strongest suit.

Weirdly enough, VW seem to want to play right into the hands of their detractors with Contra’s opening tracks: “Horchata”’s chorus is nice enough, but the structure of the song the surrounds it is disjointed, making those self-consciously clever rhymes stick out like a sore thumb. And is the point of “White Sky” to justify all of the constant annoying comparisons to Graceland? It was as if the band was saying, “Oh, you think that last album ripped off Graceland? Well, we’ll show you what it sounds like when we really try to rip off Graceland.”

Thankfully, apart from the occasional WTF moment (what’s up with the Autotune on “California English”? Is the end of “Run” supposed to have all those off-sounding harmonies?), the rest of Contra is pretty good. One can only hope that “Holiday” and “Cousins” represent the vanguard of fourth-wave ska— after all, who best to revive it than NYC hipsters? If not that, then perhaps the electro-tinged reggae of “Diplomat’s Son” might spark something. The increased presence of keyboard burbles and flourishes is generally welcome, although they do go overboard with “Giving Up The Gun”, which comes off as the kind of post-Postal Service moody techno-pop tailor-made for mall PAs, banking commercials, and middling teen-movie soundtracks. It’s a pretty naked crossover bid, the most radio-friendly (and least VW-like) song on the album.

Because its missteps are a little more egregious than on Vampire Weekend, Contra doesn’t hang together as an album quite so well. But that’s not such a crime these days, and anyway, VW seems more like a singles band that only happened to luck into a ridiculously solid first album. So as long as they keep churning out great singles (more “Cousins” and less “Horchata”, if you please), I’ll be happy.

Boston Spaceships, “The Town That’s After Me” from The Planets Are Blasted
Averkiou, “The South Wall” from Throwing Sparks
Point Juncture, WA, “New Machine” from Heart to Elk
The Invisible Cities, “The Only Reason The Club Was Made” from Houses Shine Like Teeth
Here We Go Magic, “Tunnelvision” from Here We Go Magic
Washed Out, “Belong” from High Times
These Are Powers, “Glass Blocks” from All Aboard Future
Polvo, “Beggar’s Bowl” from In Prism
Teenage Cool Kids, “Speaking In Tongues” from Foreign Lands
Built to Spill, “Hindsight” from There Is No Enemy
The Hunches, “Not Invited” from Exit Dreams
Tune-Yards, “Hatari” from Bird-Brains
Sholi, “Dance for Hours” from Sholi
The Whitest Boy Alive, “Intentions” from Rules
Dirty Projectors, “Stillness Is The Move” from Bitte Orca
Real Estate, “Beach Comber” from Real Estate

Where Bitte Orca is an example of a great album made exceptional by its track ordering, Heart to Elk is an example of a really good album made merely okay by its track ordering. Point Juncture, WA have been working on refining a dreamy/noisy sound of the Yo La Tengo/Broken Social Scene variety since their 2004 Juxtapony EP, and the opening three tracks of Heart to Elk feel like a breakthrough, with the band finally able to wrangle all of their elements into a cohesive, thoughtfully arranged whole. Rising melodic lines from horns and vibes transform “Rocks & Sand” into a languid reveille; after a similarly mellow beginning, “Once Tasted Ever Wanted” bursts open with nervous clattering drums and noisy guitars; “New Machine”’s whispery ache is punctuated by a surprising bari-sax solo that briefly transforms it into a Menomena song (fellow Portland bands represent!).

But then comes the dark, distorted, drum-machine-abetted “Biathalon”, which sounds a bit like a Metric B-side. It comes as a jarring stylistic changeup in what I usually consider to be the cleanup spot in the tracklist (yes, I do think of tracklists the same way I think of batting lineups in baseball. Am I wrong?), so it feels like a bit of an anticlimax leading into the middle stretch of the album. However! If “Biathalon” were to switch places with “Sick on Sugar”— a more upbeat, straightforwardly pop tune that’s buried down in the number eight spot— then suddenly things start sounding a lot better. “Sick on Sugar” becomes the killer single that caps Heart to Elk’s opening run of excellent tracks, and then fifth track “Sioux Arrow” turns into the changeup track: something a little moodier and more plodding, but still dreamy in an Autolux-like sort of way. Likewise, “Biathalon” becomes more of a palate cleanser, shifting gears for the equally driving (though in a Krautrockier way) “Melon Bird” in slot number nine.

The other tracklist adjustment I have is one I feel a little bad about, because it involves throwing out tracks. But every time I listen to Heart to Elk, I feel like it ought to end on “Fleet and Small”. It doesn’t, though; two more tracks follow, and neither of them feel necessary. “Viking Mission to Mars” tries to be as light and breezy as “Sick on Sugar” but comes off as awkward and unfinished; “The Easy Winners”, with its tinny drum loop, shakers, watery organ, and “ba-ba”s, is too blatantly derivative of YLT circa And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. (Although I will say that it’s difficult to entirely dismiss a song that references Helicopter String Quartet). The upside of removing them entirely from the tracklist, however, means that the album now ends on “Fleet & Small” where it ought, and the album then clocks in at a pleasantly concise 42 minutes. Despite these minor issues, though, Heart to Elk is exactly the kind of album that gets me excited about Point Juncture, WA; they sound like a band on the verge of something really incredible.

2009 feels like the year that I finally got old. It’s been at least five years in coming, but barely anything from the recent crop of Pitchblogosphere-pimped bands/trends is making any kind of lasting impression (except for “glo-fi” which is such a great neologism that I have to give it respect). My listening habits of late have sharply regressed to my salad days in college radio. What stuff have I been the most excited about over the past couple of months? Among other things, a reunion album from a not-very-well-known (even in indie circles) band that broke up eleven years ago. Look, I could shrug it off when Mission of Burma started making music again, because I was too young to know about them the first time around, and then it was ok that the Pixies reunited since I had never got to see them play live. But now Pavement is reuniting for shows and Terror Twilight just turned ten years old— what’s next, a Jawbox reunion? (Answer: apparently, yes.) Is there an aging-indie-rocker version of the state-fair circuit that I can go hang at?

Look. Polvo were one of the first “indie” bands I discovered in the early 90s, when I was in high school in Redding, California and there were exactly three ways to learn about good music: 1) smart friends giving me cassette dubs of stuff like Pretty Hate Machine and No Pocky For Kitty; 2) 120 Minutes on MTV (Sunday nights midnight to 2 am! Dave Kendall! Way too many shitty English haircut bands!); and 3) hanging out at the bookstore reading through copies of Alternative Press, Ray Gun and Spin and secretly making notes of stuff that sounded interesting and then having to mail-order it because no record store within a hundred miles carried it. (Holy shit I can’t believe how this sounds so Dark Ages uphill-in-the-snow-both-ways. Back then I had just enough spare cash to buy maybe two CDs a month at the Camelot Music in the mall. This morning? Downloaded five albums while sitting on the toilet. It’s the goddamn future, and to quote Louis C.K., everything is amazing and nobody’s happy.)

So yes, I mail-ordered Today’s Active Lifestyles after reading about it in fucking Ray Gun magazine in 1993, and it instantly blew out the back of my head. I had never heard anything like it before (or since, really). It didn’t sound like pop, or rock, or punk, or world music, or any other genre that I knew of. Even with the most standard rock-band lineup, I could not fit Polvo into any kind of recognizable idiom. It was kind of jammy, but not in the annoying Grateful Dead sort of way; there weren’t solos so much as structured instrumental passages that initially seemed to wander but would snap back into focus just as quickly. It made just enough sense to keep me listening, to try to decipher what they were about. How important is Today’s Active Lifestyles to me? I listened to it the first time I ever took mushrooms. That kind of experience would enshrine any album in one’s own personal Hall of Fame.

Of course, even with nostalgia clouding up my hindsight, I know in my heart that Today’s Active Lifestyles isn’t actually that great of an album. It’s good in places, but as is the case with the entirety of Polvo’s 90s output, there are plenty of dull stretches and failed experiments. Polvo were actually tagged as a “mid-fi” band for a while, which is pretty much the insult that it sounds like: they were kind of rocking the slacker, security-through-obscurity angle that Pavement and Guided By Voices eventually cashed in on, but their recording quality was just a notch better. Which is to say, their albums sounded muddy and mediocre, especially in relation to the genuinely intriguing and off-kilter nature of their music. By the time they broke up in 1998, I had come to think of them as a band that was still clearly talented but never figured out how to focus that talent.

So fast forward to now, and here’s the good news: In Prism is Polvo’s best album, no kidding. Like Mission of Burma and Wire before them, this is the sound of a band doing a reunion right: with a renewed sense of purpose, ripping out jams that are tighter, fiercer, and more confident than anything they did before. And the key thing, I think, is that they needed to go away in order to come back like this. During the interim, guitarist Dave Brylawski and bassist Steve Popson formed Black Taj, in which they brought to the forefront the boogie/psych/classic-rock influences lurking beneath Polvo’s surface. Black Taj’s second album Beyonder was a favorite of mine last year, though now it feels more like a dry run, a blueprint for how Polvo might sound within a more familiar, conventionally “rock”-like milieu. In Prism takes that blueprint and goes all the way with it.

Yes, Polvo rocks now, seriously, in a way they only hinted at before. The hard-hitting new drummer helps, as do the much-improved production values, but most of all, they sound like a band looking to prove that they can connect on a gut level without conceding anything aesthetically. Even Ash Bowie’s vocals, previously buried in the mix to be made as cloaked and anonymous as possible (in typical 90s-indie fashion), now have some emotive heft and personality to them. I have to stop myself from writing at length on every single track here, but I do at least want to point to “Beggar’s Bowl” as the apotheosis of Polvo’s comeback. It’s like every guitar texture they’ve toyed with in their career is in here, but presented anew, and updated for the modern era. It’s the kind of the song that gives me hope for the inevitable 90s revival.

Dirty Projectors are likewise talented and ambitious, but their back catalog is so full of heavy conceptual exercises and wilfully obtuse artiness that I just assumed they would never even be interested in making anything catchy and accessible. Not only am I crow-eatingly shocked by Bitte Orca’s manic pop thrills, I’m absolutely gobsmacked at the ease at which bandleader Dave Longstreth balanced his established idiosyncracies with a mastery of pop-song expectations. And part of that mastery is what I feel is Bitte Orca’s best and most capital-I Important trait: it’s one of the year’s strongest arguments for the preservation of the full-length album format.

And to think, it’s not even a concept album— at least not in the press-friendly way that previous Dirty Projectors albums were, where writers could pad their pieces gosh-golly-wowing at Rise Above’s idea of covering an entire Black Flag album from memory, or whatever The Getty Address was “about”. I’ve always found the mere existence of “concept” on an album to be an inevitable distraction from the issue of whether or not the album is actually any good. Unlike said predecessors, Bitte Orca thankfully has no such baggage coming out of the gate, which gives overanalyzing bores like me license to impose our own imaginary frameworks on it. So yes I’m totally allowing for the possibility that I’m full of crap here, but I’m convinced that the Bitte Orca’s track ordering is what elevates it from a really good album to a damn near brilliant one. The sequencing forms an honest-to-god suite full of thematic and emotional arcs both micro and macro in scope; I can’t imagine hearing this group of songs played in a different order and having quite the same effect.

The album kicks off with three tracks that provide an opening statement of purpose, establishing the Dirty Projectors’ sound as a shiny refinement of Rise Above’s Afro-pop leanings: nimble sparkling guitars, sparse staggered percussion, David Longstreth’s weird croon/wail (mostly kept within the bounds of tastefulness), and Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian’s backing vocals that trade off between complex harmonizing and call-and-response syncopation. After that, Longstreth steps away from the mic and lets Coffman and Deradoorian handle the lead vocal duties on “Stillness is the Move” and “Two Doves”. It’s also during these two tracks that a string quartet makes its first appearance, and I love the way that it only appears during the very end of “Stillness” to provide a lead-in to “Doves”. I also love that these two tracks, while linked by these similarities in arrangement, are stylistically very different: “Stillness” is a summertime R&B single, whereas “Doves” is a soothing Sufjan-esque folk ditty.

Longstreth returns to the mic and the strings depart for the album’s climax, the six-and-a-half-minute “Useful Chamber”, which piles on electro-glitchiness and production tricks only hinted at previously: keening pitch-bended synths, autotuned-to-death (or possibly just cut-up) backing vocals, and a fuzzed-out maelstrom of a chorus complete with a ridiculous guitar-hero solo capper. After that, there’s not really anywhere for Bitte Orca to go but down, but the remaining tracks provide a pleasant coast to the finish line. It’s tough for “No Intention” to do anything but be a bit of a comedown from “Useful Chamber” and a reversion to the status quo, coming off as a weaker version of parts of previous songs, although it does have its laid-back charms. The strings of “Stillness” and “Two Doves” return for the final two tracks: “Remade Horizon”, on which the pingponging call-and-responses reach their logical extreme— not only do the guitars get in on the action, sounding jumpier than ever, but Coffman’s and Deradoorian’s rapid-fire parts interlocking into a single melody at the three-minute mark is nothing short of magical— and the watery slow-jam “Flourescent Half Dome”, little more than a soothing extended outro, but a well-earned one.

Bitte Orca clocks in at a modest 41 minutes, close to an ideal pop-album length— enough to feel substantial but also leaving the listener wanting more. I bring that up to reiterate my awe of the Dirty Projectors’ unexpected mastery of even the smallest little details of what makes good pop music: pacing, conciseness, brevity, and most of all, confidence.

Lo-fi needn’t equal unlistenable. Case in point: Exit Dreams, a gnarled slab of brainpan-rattling garage-rock that, despite remaining faithful to a genre that often prides itself on being musically and sonically one-dimensional, not only never wears out its welcome but is actually one of the best-sounding albums of its kind I’ve heard in a long time. On their previous, more conventionally produced albums, The Hunches seemed little more than backbenchers on In The Red’s roster; Exit Dreams ought to elevate them to the level of first-stringers, with a messier, more vibrant sound that pokes holes in garage’s wall of sound to expose the larger, airier spaces that surround it.

While dirty fuzzbomb guitars, clanging reverb, and a singer whose hollers and screams can barely heard above the din are required elements for any garage band, The Hunches have thankfully grown out of using that formula to merely bash out two-minute blitzkriegs. Instead they channel their short attention span disorder into song structures and arrangements that are&;mdash; well, words like complex or elaborate may be overstating the case somewhat, unless compared with the average Jay Reatard track. “Actors” kicks off the album with a queasy, lurching riff that caveman-stomps its way through about two-thirds of its running time before breaking into a noisy motorik sprint to the finish; “Deaf Ambitions”‘ opening tantrum barely lasts a minute before dissolving into a drowsy, dreamy bit of strummy (semi-)acoustic psychedelia.

While there’s nothing wrong with their more straightforward songs (“Your Sick Blooms” and “Pinwheel Spins” pack as many hooks as busted amplifier parts), my favorite tracks end up being more laid-back ones: “Not Invited”’s sunny jangle is tempered by its stumbling, bleary, morning-after hangover feel; “Fall Drive” sounds uncannily like the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind” reincarnated as a thunderstorm; and the epic “Unraveling” sports a similarly damp, drizzly vibe that can’t help but remind me of the Hunches’ hometown of Portland. It’s a shame that Exit Dreams is supposedly the Hunches’ final album— they’re reportedly calling it quits after a handful of West Coast shows in June— but they’re going out on the kind of high note that any band ought to be proud of.

Preview the entirety of The Subtle Politics of the Public Hammock here, buy it here.

The Weather Machines (Portland)

The Crosswalks (Portland)

Pillow Army (Seattle)

Grand Hallway (Seattle)

Beestings (Seattle)

The Very Most (Boise)

A Crowd of Small Adventures (Las Vegas)

Summer Darling (Los Angeles)

Gray Ghosts (San Diego)

The Moviegoers (San Diego)

Lily White (San Diego)

Honorable mentions (i.e. bands I couldn’t find youtube clips of but you should still check them out): The Awkward Years (Spokane), Olaf Olaf Olaf (Spokane), Dept. of Energy (Seattle), Collapsichord (Seattle), Alligators (Seattle), Alligators (Salt Lake City)

I’ve been tempted to describe Sholi’s sound as some sort of ongoing conflict of personalities— their dark romantic Blonde Redhead art-rock side as represented by singer/guitarist Payam Bavafa and bassist Eric Ruud, and their muscley Burning Airlines/Faraquet math-rock side as represented by drummer Jon Bafus— and indeed, album opener “All That We Can See” would seem to bear this out, with its elegant minor-key guitar chimes and plaintive vocals sprinkled across a roiling landscape of broken drum equipment. But more often than not, these two sides tend to complement and blur into each other rather than contrast. I’ve compared Jon’s drumming to that of Hella’s Zach Hill before, but honestly, that’s a lazy comparison based more on vague geographic similarities and general ability/willingness to spray percussive shrapnel in all directions. Actually I think Jon is a much more graceful and varied drummer than Hill, taking a more jazz-like approach to kit dismemberment and exhibiting a surprising grasp of the dark art of dynamics— his impressionistic performance on “Spy in the House of Memories” as a good example of such.

Jon’s flashiness tends to overshadow the contributions of the melodic instruments, especially in a live setting; I hope it doesn’t come off as diminishing when I say that Payam and Eric play the straight men in the band. It’s just that their playing styles tend towards the economical, getting a lot of mileage out of ringing arpeggios and snarling drones, and on an emotional level they would seem to be a bit more restrained and deadpan. But by no means does economical imply “simple”, nor should deadpan imply “flat”; Payam’s songs are complex without being flashy, and he and Eric do pull off some pretty great vocal harmonies. And when they do cut loose, they can match Jon flourish for flourish, as on the dizzying, terrifying “Dance For Hours”.

Ah, “Dance For Hours”. It’s the only song on this record that completely crushes, and accurately captures the power of their live show. I’ve been present for performances of “Tourniquet” and “November Through June” where I was convinced that the world was about to end, and while the recorded versions probably sound amazing to virgin ears, I am all too aware of how much better those songs have sounded. To compound my terminal case of Too Much Information Syndrome, I know how long the band spent recording and mixing this album, and I have the nagging feeling that they may have overthought things, overtweaked bits, possibly second-guessed some stuff, and overall might have leached a bit of vitality out of the end product. But please, if you’re hearing Sholi for the first time, don’t take any of this negativity to heart. Instead, look at it this way: if you think the album is good, just wait until you see them live.