The Corin Tucker Band’s mellow debut 1,000 Years lacked the trademark vocal rawness of Tucker’s Sleater-Kinney days, but the singer’s uninhibited wailings and breaks return in Kill My Blues. She opens with the line, “Que paso? I’ve just woken up / like Rip Van Winkle in a denim miniskirt,” suggesting awareness of the previous album’s reception and promising more fierceness this time around.

Tucker recently portrayed UK punk legend Poly Styrene in a music video, but her lower tone and propensity for storytelling are more reminiscent of X’s Exene Cervinka. Tucker also shares Cervinka’s problem of going a little flat when she gets carried away, most notably on the track I Don’t Want to Go. The authenticity of emotion is preferable to dehumanizing autotune, but the flat moments can be jarring. Having said that, most the singing sounds incredible.

Groundhog Day’s wandering guitar and twinkling bells create a compelling atmosphere as Tucker introduces herself. As it picks up with a countrified punk riff, Tucker lets loose with feminist fulminations, asking, “Instead of going forward / Where the hell are we going now?” Feminist views also appear in the very catchy Neskowin (“Darling, I know / I don’t go like the other girls”) and Outgoing Message, a song with a nifty irregular shifting melody (“We’re not making songs for suburban little girls”).

Escape is another theme, found in Constance, and the rockabilly tracks No Bad News Tonight and Summer Jams. Tucker is in a transitional stage right now, trying to balance her career with motherhood, and these songs may relate to that part of her personal life.

Other tracks are eclectic. The slightly spooky None Like You starts like an Irish folk song: “Come gather, children, gather around,” and best showcases Tucker’s storytelling talents and trademark wailing. Blood, Bones and Sand, the one consistently slow song, has a heavy, 1940s blues feel. Tiptoe exemplifies the band’s soft and loud dichotomy with the lyrics: “Tiptoe through my own bedroom / bombs going off.”

Like the best punk albums, Kill My Blues is simultaneously current and evergreen — feminist lyrics address the women’s issues discussed in politics today, yet contain an ideology that will resonate with unconventional girls in any era.

-Chrissy Spallone-

Glowing Mouth is the debut album from Milagres, a Brooklyn based project previously self releasing as The Secret Life of Sofia. This ambient indie album includes psychedelic and baroque-pop influence, which have blended pretty well with the ambient-customary reverb soaked synths and vocals.

There are some effective baroque-pop moments to be found – the mysterious flutes in title track Glowing Mouth work well and there is a sense of weight added by the military drums and English folk influenced vocal harmonies. The lazy vocal style is somewhat reminiscent of Coldplays’ Chris Martin, although Milagres’ lead singer Kyle Wilson’s falsetto is sweet and fitting to the other-worldy mood of the album. His lower vocal register sounds rich and authoritative, especially in ‘Fright of Thee’ – we wish there was more of it. Yet it is when the baroque vibe is taken to its creepiest that the albums works best. Check out the ominous chanting and violin stabs in ‘Moon on the Sea’s gate.’

The band have one vision which is working for them – but we’re unsure if it’s doing it for us here at Bowlegs. Feeling over-arranged at times, there are sections in every song that really pull us in (we love the moody chorus on ‘Gentle Beast’) only to be left confused by the next transition. ‘Here to Stay’ has got good energy and a driving groove, but the psychedelic styled lyrics seem contrived and pointedly surreal. There is a similar feeling from the super-weird key changes and accidentals, reminding us of 60′s band Love – but too much focus is brought to them.

The lyrical style can bemuse – and you may be unsure how seriously to take a band with a song about the ‘Emperor of Ice Cream’. But we can’t say that the album hasn’t interested us – we’ll just wait and see what they put out next.

-Megan Clifton-

This release is a merging of two unique song-writers, Thao of Thao with the Get Down Stay Dow’ joins forces with solo artist Mirah. This alone would be enough to grab our attention, but when we heard that Merill Garbus of Tune-Yards would be co-producing we knew this was a record we needed. These uncannily inventive women reap the very best from the art of collaboration to create a new sound.

The first track, ‘Eleven’, was co-written by and features Merill, who brings in her own joyous bang-crash vibrancy – it sounds just huge, with anthemic synths and a choir of raucous harmonies being driven by carefully crafted rhythm orchestra.

The real love we have for this album comes from its personality; there is so much life present, every song is buzzing with it. A large portion of the album is made up of acoustic instruments: horns, finger picked guitars and vocal harmonies all helping the record to breathe. The arrangement of the tracks takes nothing for granted. Percussion is handled in a startlingly imaginative way, with mouth noises, clapping, bashing and tapping making each track sound unique and home-made.

With Thao & Mirah you fly through a spectrum of human emotions. Like the two sides of a single mind, this album is loving and pure one minute and downright crude the next. The blend of the two voices and styles is stunning, Mirah’s sweet warmth (see the delicate ‘Little Cup’) contrasts with Thao’s lazy, earthier tones (check out the provocative ‘Squareneck’) to create something with range and depth. This is a record with a soul – listening to each little story on the album, it is clear that these artists write from their hearts. MC

Garage and post-punk are such useless, exhausted terms now. ‘Past Time’ is so much more than these descriptions, yet they will doubtless still be applied. San Francisco’s Grass Widow are chasing the sense of the new, and this band is born of the desire to avoid all that’s been said before; they crave the essence, rather than it’s hack simulation. Chords are largely out, and so are frills. Guitars are at lower volume settings –it’s too easy to use fuzz to hide behind. Production technique is so crushingly overwhelming for most bands at the moment yet Grass Widow seem to leap away from all such encumbrances. Insistent and wiry overlapping lines build until you are lost in a spaghetti of counter-rhythms. The pace is tightly controlled, the music taut, spartan. Every musical gesture counts. It reminds us of early Fall in its unadorned tetchy clatter. The brevity of many of the songs has a magnetic effect upon your listening.

The album is over very quickly, but you wonder what just hit you such is its strength.  There’s this push pull effect between the spiky instrumentation and the warm wash of vocal harmony, the two elements providing a central tension on the album. This group singing is a gesture of strength, of a challenge more to themselves than us maybe. As the elements entwine, as complex as a circuit, the effect recalls certain Moondog ‘rounds’. A further delight is the string quartet, in particular on ‘Uncertain Memory’, which stirs the soul while retaining an uncomfortable edge. Also worth mentioning is the undeniable folky flavouring to certain tracks, such as ‘Give Me Shapes’, although it’s more like Nico’s ‘The Marble Index’ folk than any pastoral cosiness.

The sound of the album is tangible; the roominess invites the listener in. It feels like you can touch the edges of the sound somehow. And in this space you can discover for yourselves a soundtrack to two new, more helpful terms – unlearn and rebuild. JT