Pitchfork: Track Reviews Page 1 of 7 Search REVIEWS | TRACK REVIEWS ADVANCED SEARCH http://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/11087-morning-light/ 3/9/2009 Pitchfork: Track Reviews Page 2 of 7 forkcast tracks sunday, march 8, 2009 St. Vincent: "The Strangers" Gliss Ghostface Killah, Novel: "Message From Ghost" "Morning Light" Crooked Fingers, Neko Case: "Your Control" 6 Sonic Youth: The Eternal mashup Aesop Rock, Busdriver, Why?: FREEHoudini excerpt Beach House: "Play the Game" (Queen cover) MF DOOM: "Cellz" Art Brut: "Catch" (The Cure cover) EMAIL LINK Tinted Windows: "Kind of a Girl" Gliss make no secret of their affinity for the Smashing Pumpkins. They've opened for them, Crystal Antlers: "Andrew" covered "Rhinoceros" on a tribute album-- even their name could be mistaken for a long-lost Pitchfork's Best New Music - Tracks B-side. Fortunately for Gliss, they seem a lot more in touch with the Smashing Pumpkins' strengths than Billy Corgan does these days. "Morning Light", the opening track from their forthcoming sophomore effort, Devotion Implosion, is firmly rooted in the Siamese Dream era, when Corgan's band struck a fine balance between shoegazer insularity and American arena rock bombast. Predictably, the feedback is molten-- the guitars fed through an untold assortment of pedals and blown amps. The volume alone is nearly enough to carry it, but "Light" also critically maintains momentum, surging forward instead of sinking beneath its own weight. A sycophantic tribute perhaps, but it sure beats anything the Silversun Pickups have dreamt up. MP3:> Gliss: "Morning Light" — Jonathan Garrett most read most recent Phoenix "1901" 8 1. "1901" 2. "Desert Fun" EMAIL LINK 3. "Morning Light" It's hard for artists to teeter on the fence of change between albums-- between refining your 4. "Glass" sound and getting stuck in stasis, between growth and overreach. Unless you're Phoenix, 5. "Young Hearts Spark Fire" in which case you make it look really, really easy, and crank out more effortless pop-rock. 6. "Tunnelvision" While there are more pronounced synths on this preview of their upcoming album, "1901" 7. "Echononecho" sounds like a logical extension of It's Never Been Like That, and is just as smooth and 8. "Now We Can See" spirited and dementedly catchy as any of their best singles. That last record endeared them 9. "Wind Phoenix" to many, and it's worth noting that they don't sound especially daunted by following up their 10. "Lay It Down (The Golden Filter Remix)" last big success. Whatever new touches are added here-- the singeing keyboard chords that 11. "Yeahhh" dominate the first few bars before taking a backseat to that clean guitar, or the percussive 12. "My Girls" marble-down-the-drain echo-- it takes effort to pick them out, as this track is as seamless as 13. "Counterpoint" the top of the peanut butter when you first open the jar. Remember "12:51"? Me neither. 14. "Never Had Nobody Like You" 15. "M.A.G.I.C." 16. "Crabapples" 17. "The Breeze/My Baby Cries" (Kath Bloom cover) 18. "Black Lake" 19. "Catholicked" 20. "False Knight on the Road" MP3:> Phoenix: "1901" — Jason Crock recently The Mayfair Set "Desert Fun" News 7 Ryan Adams Writes Yet Another Book Reviews Cursive Brother Ali Franco & le Tout Puissant OK Jazz Arbouretum http://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/11087-morning-light/ 3/9/2009 Pitchfork: Track Reviews Page 3 of 7 Monday, March 9 Features Heaven and Hell Sunday, Reviews March 8 Madlib Money Will Ruin Everything: The Second Edition Friday, Aleks and the Drummer March 6 Lithops Thursday, March 5 Features EMAIL LINK Rokia Traoré This may very well be the biggest threat to one-person bedroom projects that we've seen Wednesday, yet. Brooklyn's one-girl Dum Dum Girls have reached across the aisle (or perhaps vice March 4 versa) to L.A.'s one-boy Blank Dogs to create a two-person supergroup (a supergroup by News lo-fi standards, mind you) they're calling the Mayfair Set. However, if you do the math, it Tuesday, The 2009 Pitchfork Music Festival checks out: If you already have one band that's garnering a lot of buzz and you then add March 3 Starting Lineup! another, what are you left with? In this case, maybe something that's greater than the sum Peter Bjorn and John to Open for Depeche Mode of its parts. Monday, Kanye to Teach American Idol How to March 2 Sing If you're already familiar with Blank Dogs and Dum Dum Girls, the Mayfair Set shouldn't Devo | Mark Sultan | Daedelus | Soft surprise you, sounding like equal parts of both separate projects. DDG's Dee Dee and BD's Pack Mr. Blank Dog (they're big on anonymity: Mr. Dog doesn't show his face, and the Mayfair Beasties, Jane's, Depeche for MySpace boasts a few tracks and virtually nothing else) trade off on vocals, with each song Lollapalooza? leaning more towards either the Dogs' rapturous urgency or the Girls' blissful brattiness. Reviews "Desert Fun", which will appear on the band's upcoming debut 7" on Captured Tracks, is The Boy Least Likely To Rio en Medio definitely the poppiest of the known MS tracks, playing like the soundtrack to a pleasantly The Sight Below stoned Sunday drive to the shore, equally luminous and bored. Mr. Blank Dog's Ian Curtis- Selected + Collected: An eMusic in-an-echo-chamber warble warns us that it will be a "very long drive" to finally get to Dee Selects Compilatio Dee's promised "fun in the desert sun", and that's totally fine with me. Woodpigeon News Dakota Fanning = Cherie Currie in Runaways Pic Department of Eagles to Debut Video at MP3:> The Mayfair Set: "Desert Fun" MOMA Depeche Mode Finalize Tour Details — Zach Kelly Sonic Youth | Riceboy Sleeps | Lil Wayne | far Radiohead Suffer the Wrath of Miley Cyrus Reviews thursday, march 5, 2009 Wavves J Spaceman and Matthew Shipp Bat For Lashes Isaac Hayes "Glass" Surf City Gringo Star 8 Features Tindersticks News Pitchfork.tv Teams Up With NPR Music Yeah Yeah Yeahs | Richard Thompson | EMAIL LINK Dengue Fever Wilco/Feist Collab News Blows P4k Scripture quotes! Split personalities! Gothy art-rock climaxes! From Fur & Gold to "Glass", Circuit Breaker Bat for Lashes haven't gotten much more transparent. But the Brighton, England-based Coyne on Arcade Fire: "They're Pricks, band's Scott Walker-ft.ing Two Suns has an ambitiously ornate opener-- you could almost So Fuck 'Em say it's crystalline, if you're not sick of crystal bands yet. Main woman Natasha Khan's Grizzly Bear Announce Summer Tour Reviews voice is the first thing we hear, slow and haunting as she recites from the biblical Song of Solomon. "I will rise now," she intones, and she does, hitting eerily high notes on the chorus Neko Case Abe Vigoda as she describes a dream of being made out of glass. Shrag Split-panned percussion helps introduce the album's dualistic conceit. Maybe I've been Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele Longwave listening too much to the new Fever Ray album, but I can hear a resemblance in the frosty rhythms and chilly, wordless harmonies. Organ peals, guitars strum shimmering minor chords, and a methodical fuzz bass line holds it all aloft-- this is moody, atmospheric News concept music. There's also something about an "emerald city", so when the whole thing Neil Young Reveals Fork in the Road comes out I'm gonna NetFlix The Wizard of Oz; we've been to The Dark Side of the Moon, Details but Two Suns is some Star Wars shit (speaking of hallowed texts). Mars Volta Dude Works With Hella, Juliette Lewis Interpol's Carlos D Makes Film, Blathers About Fam Mastodon to Play New Album in Its Entirety on Tour Oasis vs. China 2: The Reckoning Reviews — Marc Hogan U2 Malajube Here We Go Magic Grandmaster Flash Manda Rin wednesday, march 4, 2009 http://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/11087-morning-light/ 3/9/2009 Pitchfork: Track Reviews Page 4 of 7 "Young Hearts Spark Fire" Japandroids "Young Hearts Spark Fire" Features 9 Fucked Up News Prince to Sell Three-CD Set Through Target "Do You Realize??" Named Oklahoma State Song T.V. Eye: March 2-8, 2009 Science Sez: Lil Wayne Makes You EMAIL LINK Stupid, Sufjan an Japandroids are two guys from Vancouver who make distortion-cranked garage-rock Scion Rock Fest: Photos, Nachtmystium Controversy anthems about fleeting youth: the boys leaving town, drinking, hurting, French kissing some French girls, and then quitting girls altogether. Their debut album, Post-Nothing, was originally going to be self-released last fall, but now it's set to come out this spring, in Canada only, on Unfamiliar. "Young Hearts Spark Fire" is just one of the raggedly emotive standouts on the record, young hearts igniting the duo's stripped-down drums-and-guitar setup into an explosive thing, equal parts insolence and grandeur. "We used to dream/ Now we worry about dying," members Brian King and David Prowse cry out, in the kind of doomed-romantic instant quotable we used to get from fellow Canadians the Constantines. The whole song hinges on this contrast between innocence and destruction. It's tuneful and universal enough to have been produced as a radio-ready pop- punk single, but it has the kind of volatile churn you'd expect from a band known to cover Mclusky's "To Hell With Good Intentions", which helps to make all its conflicted emotions sound-- for lack of a less controversial word-- real. "I don't wanna worry about dying/ I just wanna worry about those sunshine girls," Japandroids conclude.