As this most prolific summer of local album releases stretches into August, it’s getting hard to keep up. With new discs from Cindy Bullens, Darien Brahms, and Dominic and the Lucid on the near horizon, we have to cram ’em in. So here are three discs being released over the next two weeks, getting slightly shorter reviews than they deserve.
Over two fun and up-beat pop-punk records from Local Nothing, drummer Adam Tranchemontagne, frontman Pete Vachon, and bassist Adam Croteau proved themselves more than capable of getting heads bobbing and having lots of fun, but they’ve gotten a level more interesting with the addition of vocalist and guitarist Jeff Roberts to their new band, Pinsky. Their debut EP, Two for the Road, shows significantly more texture and nuance than Local Nothing’s work.
“Beverly” might masquerade as a fun-and-games summer radio hit, but there’s a touch of disturbed obsession there, too. Fun: “I don’t want to play games/I just want to play doctor.” Disturbed: “I’ll hide you on the East Coast/Maybe Portland, Maine/Maybe Beverly, Mass.” (I mean, who would ever want to go to Beverly?) Later, they clip a great line from the art flick Chumscrubber: “It’s not that I don’t like talking. No. It’s just that I don’t like talking to you.” I wouldn’t mind looking through their DVD collection.
Vachon and Roberts trade off vocal duties nicely, alternatingly straining the vocal chords on emo-style screamers and providing good-guy background support. “Sailor Song” is a great little ballad, full of piano and strings and an aggressive acoustic guitar strummed with a vengeance. With its “I’ll be there for you” sentiment, it’s too bad The OC isn’t around anymore, but maybe the new 90210 is still looking for soundtrack material.
The final track on Pinsky’s six-song, 20-minute effort, “What We’re Doing,” is the most interesting cut. It opens with inane party talk you think will go away, but doesn’t, for a solid minute and a half, while we’re buffeted by an electric guitar and lyrics like, “You and I are gonna be/Alone again/So let’s try to think/Of something new.”
Then, just when you thought it was a kind of bad live recording from a bar where people don’t care about the music much, the song opens way up with huge guitars and tantalizing piano.
“I don’t want,” we’re told in repetition, “the same old response.”
No, people should respond even more to this.
Now that they’ve established themselves as the premier crew in Portland, Labseven, like any good hip-hop collective, have solo projects to focus on. First up is Mello the Verbal Wonder, an MC fond of old soul and R&B and smooth as a great shave — a mix of Al Green and the Pharcyde, who drops Open Doors next weekend with a big show at the Big Easy.
Produced by Autonomous, this CD’s an extension of the 2006 band effort North Winds, with focus tightened to feature Mello’s particular strengths: Courvoisier-slurred sung verses you can wrap around you and quick, low-riding efforts like the falling green letters of the Matrix. “I’ll Be” is the former, a love song, Mello promising, “I’ll be for you what you wanted/What you never even knew.” The tune also features the kind of weird, jarring transition that populated North Winds, here even seeming like it’s mastered at a different level in the song’s last minute.
“Tree Tops” is Mello at his best, with an eerie, building horn sample at its core, and bludgeoning quick verbal play leading it into a strings piece that is its polar opposite, soaring and optimistic. He knocks the a cappella finish to the opening “Touch Something” straight out of the park, too.
At 12 tracks, there’s plenty of content here, about a third of it provided by the larger Labseven crew. This album could be tighter and more Mello focused, but the rest is more than filler and a nice bonus.
Richard Fortin has been tinkering around the edges of the Maine music universe for a few years now, designing Web sites here, promoting bands there, recording digital/techno projects around the corner. He’s got both a great eye and a great ear, and in Alias Grace he’s helped create a band that is pleasing to both, with an aesthetic that runs through everything they do, slightly off-putting but pretty and grand in their own way.
The debut disc, Bottles and Bones, is the culmination of guitarist/songwriter Fortin’s search for like-minded performers and his success found in Jon Assam, a singer-songwriter who fits with Fortin and generates manic energy with the best of them. Produced and recorded by Noah Cole, Sean Morin’s collaborator on Daro, the album actually shares more sounds with Morin’s full-time gig, Cambiata, than it does with that warm alt-country effort, with touches like tortured talking behind impassioned vocals that just about push you aside with their bulging neck muscles.
The band, rounded out by guitarist Glen Capen, bassist Jason Elvin, and drummer Aaron Lachance, never quite let you get comfortable, with the guitars buzzing around each other and never settling into anything purely rock or pop, and the drums firing out snares and cymbals just when you’re getting settled. I love the muted drums in the right channel of “Co-pilot,” with everything caught up in a bit of a fog, the vocals doubled and buffeted by falsetto backing: “Make pretend/The perfect 10/To all you love letters/Make amends/ With all your friends/ Who love you much better.”
There is passion here, and art, and a mind toward the progressive, though the raw sounds are in many ways the polar opposite of prog-rock’s structured underpinnings. There’s a raw nerve present that’s attractive and a reminder to keep listening for new things and to never be satisfied.
