CD Releases: Thom Yorke, Peaches, Muse And More!
Tuesday July 11, 2006 @ 02:00 PM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff

THE ADORED A New Language (V2/Sony BMG)
Hailing from the famed and farmed lands of southern California, The Adored are a feisty pop-punk outfit who come ready to rock, radio style. Pristine production and big meaty hooks immediately recall acts like Simple Plan and The All-American Rejects, yet, if you can get past the sameness, there are some decent tunes. "Savage Youth" and "Ethical Drug" sear like good summer tunes should, while "Less I Know" adds just the right amount of keyboards, reaching a vaguely new wave plateau in the process. Otherwise, there's nothing overly unique or extraordinary about The Adored. They're good at what they do, but it's the same thing that hundreds of other bands worldwide are already doing. Check it out if your iPod's not already brimming with this kind of stuff. Cameron Gordon

BURY YOUR DEAD Beauty And The Breakdown (Victory/Universal)
If you've given up on metalcore over the last few years, Bury Your Dead are giving you a reason to pick up that bandana and jump in the pit one more time. The band aren't revolutionizing metalcore, they're just making it more fun, and that's exactly what the genre needs. Instead of focusing on the tough-guy aesthetic most bands overuse, Bury Your Dead have a more malleable rock approach and keep things interesting by incorporating more riffs than chunky chords. The album still puts muscle over mind, as there's a healthy amount of ham-fisted aggression, but the equal doses of brains and brawn keep the album afloat. Beauty And The Breakdown makes throwing down seem appealing, and that's an accomplishment in itself. Shehzaad Jiwani

BRUCE COCKBURN Life Short Call Now (True North/Universal)
Like an old friend you never forget — no matter how long it's been since you last connected — Bruce Cockburn returns to the themes he knows best on his 29th disc. The record is one of the most arresting listens of Cockburn's storied career. Here, the songwriter covers a lot of musical ground. He returns to his jazz roots and also includes strings for the first time on this mostly acoustic offering. After the all-instrumental record, Speechless, Life Short Call Now also returns the Canuck songsmith to familiar lyrical territory — a place filled with longing and loneliness, references to George Dubya and spiritual wanderings. Cockburn still includes a few instrumentals for good measure, inlcuding "Nude Descending A Staircase" and "Peace March." Life Short Call Now shows that Cockburn's gift for songwriting, 40 years on, is still strong. David McPherson

CUT CHEMIST The Audience's Listening (Warner)
The first sample on Cut Chemist's debut states, "Start remembering what you hear." Fortunately for the Jurassic 5 DJ, that's exactly what the listener does after hearing his carefully crafted record. The Audience's Listening stands out among the DJ Shadows and Mr. Scruffs because of Lucas MacFadden's ability to force the listener to remember a beat, melody or exotic sample. Like his predecessors, he has skills and the album sounds cool, but Macfadden's extensive and worldly record collection combined with his dance floor aspirations give the Chemist an important edge. Some tracks mix Brazilian sounds and cowbell with hip-hop and futuristic electronica. By creatively molding every musical style under the sun, this album will make you chill, dance, freak, bob and, most importantly, listen. Phil Villeneuve

DR. OCTAGON The Return Of (OCD International)
If Kool Keith weren't rapping on your car stereo system, he'd probably be stealing it. Seriously, the dude's a crackhead. On his second album under the lauded Dr. Octagon moniker, the former Ultramagnetic MC covers alien abductions, sex with turtles, PCP-smoking superheroes and truck-driving gorillas (on a bizarre Tom Waits-ian spoken word piece appropriately titled "A Gorilla Driving A Pick-Up Truck"). As if that's not enough, he also seems to be under the impression that elephants are extinct. But sense and style are two different things, and the good doctor has the latter in spades. Octagon's imaginatively skewed rhymes and futuristic electro-funk beats (provided by Berlin production trio One Watt Sun) are more flavourful than a goldfish in the heel of George Clinton's platform boot. James Simons

RAMBLIN' JACK ELLIOTT I Stand Alone (Anti/Epitaph/FAB)
One of the most influential performers of the past half century, Ramblin' Jack Elliott is a mythological musician. Bob Dylan has called him his "long lost father." The stories about this curious cowboy and his extraordinary exploits could fill a library. With the solid backing of musicians such as Lucinda Williams and Red Hot Chili Pepper Flea — who slings the bass on four tracks, including album closer "Woody's Last Ride" — this is a typically eclectic Elliott effort that tackles songs from a variety of genres. With a mix of old-time classics (A.P. Carter's "Engine 143") and old-time blues (Leadbelly's "Jean Harlow"), I Stand Alone shows the wandering cowboy at his best. David McPherson

GREG GRAFFIN Cold As The Clay (Anti/Epitaph/FAB)
Best known for politicking and agitating with SoCal punk stalwarts Bad Religion, vocalist Greg Graffin has unplugged his guitar, hired The Weakerthans as his backing band and recorded a roots and country album. Cold As The Clay is a hodgepodge of Graffin's original compositions and his interpretations of traditional banjo and guitar standards. He contorts his usual overtly political lyrical approach into the intimate logic of a grizzled storyteller. But on this rough and ragged record, many of the originals come off as pretty direct facsimiles of an already well explored roots sound. Graffin does, however, acquit himself admirably while covering the classics, exercising seldom-used muscles to create a solid — if unspectacular — tribute to the sounds of the American heartland. Pras Rajagopalan

MUSE Black Holes And Revelations (Warner)
In their early days, Muse were often accused of imitating Radiohead. By now, I don't think anybody could accuse Muse of sounding like any other band out there. Is their newest offering grandiose? Yes. Over the top? Quite possibly. Pretentious? No — because Muse know exactly what they're doing and exactly how to pull it off. "Take A Bow" may actually be about George W. Bush, but with the epic way the song's presented, it might as well be about the Dark Lord Sauron. And with Muse being Muse, there's no skimping on the techno-gimmickry, so it's hard to realize that there are three real guys behind this music instead of, say, robots (or, at the very least, Pro-Tools). It's ironic, then, that their most stripped-down tunes, like "Soldier's Poem," are nowhere near as impressive as the full sonic bombast of "Map Of The Problematique" or "Supermassive Black Hole." This is a big summer blockbuster of a rock album, all sci-fi space adventures and laser battles with a lyrical touch of simple promises and triumphs. Caitlin Hotchkiss

ONEIDA Happy New Year (Jagjaguwar/Outside)
Following 2005's orchestral masterpiece, The Wedding, Oneida are getting back to basics on Happy New Year. Well, as basic as Oneida can get. This is a band whose growth you can hear on every record they release. If the Wedding experiment did anything for the trio, it's made them far more adventurous within the confines of their typical arrangements. "The Adversary" is one of the band's most uplifting and expansive tracks to date. The lynchpin, however, is "Up With People," a positively hypnotic psych-disco track that captures both the essence of their early work and incorporates the expert ability they've acquired since then. It may be somewhat less inclusive than The Wedding, but Happy New Year is no less magnificent. Noah Love

PEACHES Impeach My Bush (XL/Beggars)
Yes, Impeach My Bush is a rather awesome Dubya double entendre, and Peaches even kicks things off with the introductory mantra, "I'd rather fuck who I want/Than kill who I am told to." But don't worry, Canada's electroclash smut queen mostly sticks to the sexual politics on her third outing. The fuzzy one plays sex-ed teacher on "Rock The Shocker," describes what can only be a Canadian bedmate with "Give'er" and further hones her knack for inventive euphemisms. Her ongoing themes of gender equality continue, with "Two Guys (For Every Girl)" turning "Surf City" on its head, and "Get It" evolving as perhaps her most straightforward thesis yet ("You wanna get it? Give it. Got it?"). Meanwhile, some of the simple beats are gone in favour of rock riffs, and Peaches continues to rack up an impressive list of collabs (Josh Homme, pal Feist). Sadly, though, a Joan Jett drop-in doesn't yield anything as fun as Fatherfucker's Iggy Pop shouting match. David McDougall

RHYMEFEST Blue Collar (J/Sony BMG)
Rhymefest's probably the most unknown Grammy winner ever, aside from the losers in the new age category. But the Chicago native — who co-wrote Kanye West's "Jesus Walks" — aims to change that with his J debut. Like West, Fest positions himself as an everyman. But in contrast to College Dropout's disillusioned white-collar-poppers, Blue Collar casts its subject as a hip-hop Springsteen. Rhymefest is also as multi-faceted as his predecessor. Unfortunately, his occasional tough guy poses seem more like lazy acceptances of hip-hop cliches than honest expressions of human complexities. Musically, Blue Collar is similarly uneven. While "Stick" turns "Take Me To The Mardi Gras" — a sample used in numerous hip-hop classics, including Run DMC's "Peter Piper" — into a Drop-It-Like-It's-Tepid sex jam, the Strokes-sampling "Devil's Pie" suggests Rhymefest won't be unknown for long. James Simons

SUFJAN STEVENS The Avalanche: Outtakes & Extras From The Illinois Album (Asthmatic Kitty/Sonic Unyon)
Sufjan Stevens had about an album's worth of material after Michigan, but wisely chose to let the tracks float around the internet rather than officially release them. We weren't so lucky this time around. The Avalanche isn't terrible by any stretch of the imagination, but a 21-track opus of songs, most of which are definite B-sides, isn't the way to follow your career-best effort. Especially not when three of those tracks are reinterpretations of "Chicago," a track that acts as a centrepiece to Illinois and hardly needed more than one different version, if that. There are some truly impressive pieces here, though. "Dear Mr. Supercomputer" stirs up a substantial amount of operatic swirls and offbeat time signatures and could be the sinister twin to Illinois' "The Man Of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts." In the second half, however, the quality fades and the songwriting gets too same-y to make an impression. Cramming nine of the best tracks on an EP would certainly have been more effective. Noah Love

THOM YORKE The Eraser (XL/Beggars)
Bored and frustrated with the process of writing Radiohead's new record, Thom Yorke decided to compile some of his more abstract ideas and take them into Nigel Godrich's studio. On first listen, some of the songs have problems distinguishing themselves, but that's what people said about Kid A, now considered by many to be Radiohead's best work. Repeated listening uncovers some of Yorke's best lyric-writing to date. Add to this that his voice has never sounded sharper and you have a piece of work that can hold its own against most of Radiohead's catalogue. "Black Swan" and "Skip Divided" are desolate, haunting tracks that highly reflect the best parts of Amnesiac (I'm not talking about "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" for those worried about the comparison). The verses in "And It Rained All Night" tone down Yorke's nasal whine and force the vocals so viscerally into the foreground that he almost sounds like a different singer. There are a couple of grating points, but nothing so off-putting as to hurt the overall quality of this excellent disc, which should easily tide Radiohead fans over until next spring. Noah Love

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