Issue #66 Album Reviews

Reviews of the latest from Kylie, Mogwai, Procedure Club and Wolf Parade.

Kylie
Aphrodite
Capitol
The beauty of what sets Kylie Minogue’s 20-year career apart from that of other decade-spanning pop icons like Madonna is that while Madge and co. have radically reinvented themselves for every comeback, Kylie has fought all conventional wisdom and stuck to what she does best: dance. (Dance! DANCE!) When she did experiment—with Body Language’s R&B flavour, or X’s scattershot of electro, disco and conventional radio bait—her unrepentant club beats lacked their usual luster. But Aphrodite is as precisely and distinctively Kylie as we’ve seen since Fever—catchy, heart pumping, love struck pop. Kylie sums up her 11th album in its title track (over a primal Rhythm Nation-style drum line): “It’s the truth / It’s a fact / I was gone and now I’m back.” It’s an auspicious return that hits every note longtime fans want their nouveau-disco queen to hit. Pop-rock “Cupid Boy” is a characteristically exuberant love song, and “All the Lovers,” the lead single whose music video has Kylie writhing in a 15-story-high dogpile of half-naked models (think Human Centipede meets the video for “Slow”—don’t fight it, you know it sounds hot), is simply euphoric synthpop. And “Get Outta My Way,” the album’s pièce de résistance, marks Kylie’s throwdown dance floor hit, every bit as infectious as “In Your Eyes” or “Love at First Sight.”
-Nojan Aminosharei

Mogwai
Special Moves
Rock Action
Mogwai are a cute, fuzzy, little chipmunk things that you buy from secret underground shops in Chinatown. They make delightful pets, multiply in numbers if you get them wet and turn into fiendish gremlins if fed after midnight. Mogwai is also a band from Scotland. They do really long, really pretty, cinematic sounding songs. Their live album is an elegant sampling of their best work. It comes with a DVD of the concert. As far as live albums go, there’s nothing absolutely mind blowing here. That said, Mogwai themselves are mindblowing. This might be a good introduction for the unfamiliar or a good way to revisit them if you haven’t paid attention to them in a while. -Kellen Powell

Procedure Club
Doomed Forever
Slumberland
Like
Halley’s Comet or a successful Oakland Raiders season, noise pop is a thing again for the first time in decades and we’re all paying attention. The best part about the genre is the idea that the melody is the Aspirin you require to ease the pain while the unearthly tones and production are the jam to spoon-feed to the contrarian music fan. If Procedure Club’s Doomed Forever was stripped down the songs would be more akin to Shonen Knife’s than they are to Prolapse’s. But with 8-bit drums and guitars referencing the out-of-tune stylings of Chin Chin (an excellent re-release by Slumberland Records, by the way) the band becomes both catchy to the easy summer listener and respected by the stubborn I-Hate-All-Pop-Music art house fatty. Add the fact that the song structures range from the waltzy finger waggling of “Rather” to the sludgy butt-rock crawl of “Nautical Song” and you’ve got yourself a record to give you late night cred at a gallery opening while you secretly smooch it goodnight before you place it in a lavender scented box under your bed next to a copy of The Gentle Waves’ The Green Fields of Foreverland.
-Trevor Risk

Wolf Parade
Expo 86
Sub Pop
A sentence I hear more and more lately is, “(band name) had to make (mediocre album) so that they could make (clearly superior album).” I’ve heard it said about Ariel Pink’s latest. I’ve heard it said about the last two or three Animal Collective releases. I am hoping beyond hope to hear it when the next Strokes album is released. However, I may have to use that sentence to talk about Expo 86. At Mount Zoomer, Wolf Parade’s previous release, fell short of my ridiculously high expectations. However, Wolf Parade brought the sprawling, ass-kicking aspects of Zoomer into the fold with the flawless hooks and energy of Apologies to the Queen Mary. On Expo 86, it no longer seems that the primary songwriters, Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug, are dueling with each other. Rather, they seemed to work that relationship out on Zoomer and their respective side projects. What we are left with is a more cohesive, focused album that seems more representative of the talent involved. Plus, the album art is effing amazing.
-Ian Urbanski