Tally Hall - Good & Evil

Tally Hall - Good & Evil
2011, Quack! Media

Tally Hall had it all in 2008.  A major record deal to release their 2005 Indie smash, Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum had been signed with Atlantic Records.  Expectations were for Tally Hall to catch fire throughout the Western Hemisphere the way they had in the Upper Midwest of the United States.   Atlantic seemingly signed Tally Hall with the expectation of quick profit from a regional powerhouse with a ready fan base and a proven album.  Consequently, little or no push ever materialized, and the major label release essentially tanked.  This is no reflection on the album, which remains one of the most creative and original musical creations of its decade. Tally Hall recently emerged with their second full-length album, Good & Evil.  Produced by Tony Hoffer (Beck, Depeche Mode, Belle & Sebastian) and originally funded by Atlantic Records, Good & Evil finds Tally Hall stepping back into the Indie world.

Tally Hall's mix of Beatles-esque melodies and arrangements, humor, and unusual perspective enhanced their distinctive blend of pop, classic rock and rap and helped make them one of the best known bands in Middle America over the past five years.  Those elements remain on Good & Evil, but with a bit more subtlety and maturity than in the past.  "Never Meant To Know" opens Good & Evil with a quasi-spiritual perspective on the wider world.  It's an acknowledgement of place for humanity, trimmed in a wonderfully compact pop/rock arrangement built on melody that will stay with you.  "&" is classic Tally Hall, a story song that starts somewhere in the middle and challenges the listener to catch up.  Big vocal harmonies and a quietly irresistible melody will grab and hold your attention across multiple repeats. 

The first single from Good & Evil, "You & Me", builds its chorus piece by piece, into a deliciously catchy and simple construction with 1970's AM pop influences.  This has real commercial potential, particularly in the licensing realm, and serves as a solid reminder that for Tally Hall, melody is always a distinct consideration.  "Cannibal" uses melody and harmony as a weapon, buttressing one of the catchiest tunes to cross this desk in 2011.  Release this as a single, and you'll have a moderate hit at the very least.  Given the right timing and backup, "Cannibal" could garner Tally Hall all of the recognition they deserve.

"Sacred Beast" is a catchy, off-the-wall pop tune with an infectious melody.  The combination of quirky pop structure, gentle humor and a tune you simply can't get out of your head might deceive you into thinking this is pure fluff, but there's actually some fairly insightful allusions to human behavior and imperfection woven deep within.  "A Hymn For A Scarecrow" has an almost epic pop feel to it, exploring a quirky spiritualistic embodiment of the song's subject in a beautifully constructed number that takes liberties with traditional pop song structure ala The Beatles.  "The Trap" is a meandering musical exploration of the powerful nature of expectations to hem us in.  Playing almost like a run-on thought, Tally Hall builds in sonic surprises along the way to keep it fresh.

"Turn The Lights Off" is a driven, quirky pop number with an unforgettable chorus.  Kudos if you can sit/stand still through this number, which gives "Cannibal" a run for its money, and fits in sonically with latter day Barenaked Ladies material.  "Misery Fell" is built on the sort of melody and simple pop arrangement that made McCartney such a success with the Beatles and afterward.  After all that, it's also a song that will make you think, particularly in light of the difficulties the world faces in the present day.  "Out In The Twilight" would have been a major hit in the late 1970's or early 1980's, showing a bit of Alan Parsons influence in the songwriting and sound.  The vocal triads layered over the arrangement create a glorious sound that is an aural treat.  "You" shows the band's contemplative side, an almost melancholy song of devotion that stands out for its utter singularity on the album.  "Fate Of The Stars" is a sonically gorgeous song written in non-traditional structure.  This is Tally Hall at their most creative, stitching together musical ideas into a sonic quilt that is both surprising and refreshing in its originality and continuity.

Good & Evil took six years to make, and shows both the distinctive musical and compositional talents Tally Hall showed on Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum and a growing maturity and subtlety that is the sign of artists growing in the confidence of their craft.  Both more and less than their previous work, Good & Evil will continue to build the Tally Hall mystique, on a road that seems destined to have Tally Hall one day headlining tours in major amphitheatres and stadiums across the country.  While perhaps a reflection of the current state of Tally Hall's collective muse, the rap components infused in their prior work served to broaden the band's sonic appeal, and the absence here is notable.  Nevertheless, Good & Evil shows that Tally Hall has managed to bypass the dreaded sophomore slump.

Rating: 4 Stars (Out of 5)

Learn more about Tally Hall at www.tallyhall.com, where you can also watch all ten episodes of  Tally Hall's Internet Show.  Good & Evil is available from Amazon.com as a CD or Download.  The album is also available via iTunes.

Brian Eno and the words of Rick Holland - Drums Between The Bells

Brian Eno and the words of Rick Holland - Drums Between The Bells

2011, Warped Records

Brian Eno has long been acknowledged as one of the founding fathers of ambient music.  His roots lie in the glam rock era, starting with the band Roxy Music.  As a soloist, his progressive tendencies grew from art rock to the early experimental days of Electronica.  Along the way Eno collaborated with such icons as Robert Fripp and Genesis, creating a body of work that is impressive in both its scope and quality.  As a producer, Eno has worked with acts such as U2, Coldplay, Depeche Mode, Paul Simon, Slowdive and Grace Jones.  Eno first discovered Rick Holland during a collaborative effort of the Royal College, the Guildhall School of Music, the Royal Academy of Music, the National Youth Orchestra (UK) and the English National Ballet entitled the Map-Making Project.  Eno first collaborated with Holland in 2003, and the two have worked together on and off since that time.  In 2011, Eno made the jump to Warped Records with the release of Small Craft on a Milk Sea.  Drums Between The Bells, featuring the words of Rick Holland, follows quickly on its heels, dropping on July 5, 2011.

Drums Between The Bells is an aural treat, with Eno drawing stylistically from his vast body of work to create musical backdrops that are esoteric in beauty and vital in their energy.  The album ranges from dance-oriented Electronica to avant garde, with stops at seemingly pastoral, cinematic and meditative musical spaces along the way.  "Glitch", the lead single, is a modernist obsession that will play well as a low-key club number, full of recursive synth and percussion and the robotized spoken word craft of Grazyna Goworek.  "Pour It Out" is a thing of pure beauty, from the Eno's seamless composition to the smooth soliloquy of Laura Spagnuolo.  "Fierce Aisles Of Light" features Rick Holland himself in his sole appearance on the album, offering his poetry in unaffected voice alongside Nick Robertson and Anastasia Afonina, to the ebb and flow of gentle industrial sounds.  There is a hopeless feel of automation here that is perhaps as much of a statement as the words themselves.

"A Title" has a space-age, cinematic feel to it that wraps around the listener like a shawl on a chilly night.  The school-marm voice of Caroline Wildi (we love the name) is both soothing and stern.  Eno gets percussive on the stimulating "Sounds Alien", a lesson in the power of rhythm in music.  Eno uses his own voice to create a sort of digital-age Gregorian Chant to the power of money and stock markets on "Dow".  "Cloud 4" sounds like the music of a child's demented wind-up toy, an answer, perhaps, to Pink Floyd's "Goodbye Blue Skies".  Drums Between The Bells settles in the shades of night with "Breath Of Crows", a musical landscape in oils, that mimics lonely madness on the edge of the periphery of darkness.  Holland's words reveal an utter loneliness bordering on insanity, delivered against a wonderfully bleak backdrop of sound that includes the machination of wind chimes and the ghosts of voices that only arrive to waking souls in the deepest hours of darkness.

There really is no tying Brian Eno down.  There is no one genre or style that you can attribute to the man, although much of modern Electronic music owes a debt of gratitude to his creativity and progressive musical nature.   The music on Drums Between The Bells vacillates between artful and creative to downright masterpieces of sound and vision.  Eno wraps up Rick Holland's poetic muse in clothing so well-fit it becomes impossible to separate the two.  Holland's work itself tends toward the pessimistic and bleak as often as not, and may be a tough read, but his words come to life across the soundscapes that Eno has created.

Rating: 4 Stars (Out of 5)

Learn more about Brian Eno at www.brian-eno.net or www.warp.net/brian-eno.  Drums Between The Bells drops on July 5, 2011.  The album is available from Amazon.com as a CD, a Limited Edition CD, on Vinyl and as a Download.  

OMD - History Of Modern

OMD - History Of Modern
2010, Bluenoise/ILG

British rockers OMD (Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark) returns with the first new album in fourteen years on September 28, 2010. History Of Modern finds OMD getting back to their 1980’s routes, when along with Depeche Mode and Pet Shop Boys they helped define the sound of the decade. The influence of bands such as OMD is pervasive in an era where electronic music has simply become “pop”, but it’s very clear that OMD retains the vim and vigor that made them such a dynamic force in 1980’s pop music. It’s not out of bounds to say that History Modern might be among their best work to date.

History Of Modern opens with "New Babies: New Toys", bringing an influx of classic new wave synth pop sounds. This is highly danceable as is, and with the right remix should haunt the dance clubs of Europe and the US into the spring. The song examines the circular relationship between materialism and emptiness and the spiral it can incur. "If You Want It" bears the message that opportunity exists for all who would take a chance and step outside themselves. Heard on another level it could also be a love song of sorts. Andy McCluskey provides one of his best vocal performances on the album here. "History Of Modern (Part I)" is a catchy mellow pop tune built a singular keyboard riff. While not overly creative this is a solid pop tune that takes a positive view of the past from the perspective of where he stands today.

"History Of Modern (Part II)" plays devil's advocate to the perspective espoused in Part I, striving to forget the past for its lesser qualities. Part II is built around a keyboard riff that's really just a variation of the riff that drives Part I. OMD takes an unfortunate side trip on the muddled "Sometimes", co-opting the chorus of the spiritual Motherless Child as its own. The melody itself is pleasant, but the song comes across as a composite constrained by this calculated mash-up of original and borrowed tunes. "New Holy Ground" is a bit repetitive but pretty, emphasizing courage to remake yourself in the wake of tragedy or loss. The imagery here is a bit more refined than you might here in your typical pop ballad. OMD balances this off with the trite but entertaining "The Future", which is built on a mellow dance groove remarkably similar to the one that drives Golden Earring's "Twilight Zone".

Faith gets a good working over in "Sister Marie Says", a cynical song that questions what the narrator would do if all the things he learned in parochial school came true. The most intriguing part of this song is that beneath the irony and cynicism seems to be a desire, or at least a wish for those things to be true, as McCluskey seems to leave the door open even while putting these ideas in their place. OMD goes for pure sensuality in the sexually charged light dance groove "Pulse". This one's pure ear candy, and well done at that. OMD fills in with two or three middle of the road tunes before closing with the fiery "Save Me", featuring special guest vocalist Aretha Franklin. Franklin's vocal performance is a true highlight, and this danceable tune seems likely to garner OMD some serious attention going forward.

OMD proves they still have it on History Of Modern. Synth pop perhaps doesn't carry cultural weight it did in OMD's heyday, but in an era of over-complicated pop music built on complexities of sound it is refreshing to hear a band getting back to the pop basics of melody and simplicity. OMD was on the cutting edge in their heyday. They're there once again as the pendulum swings back the other way.

Rating: 3.5 Stars (Out of 5)

You can learn more about OMD at http://www.omd.uk.com/ or www.myspace.com/officialomdmyspace.  History Of Modern drops in the US on September 28, 2010.  You can pre-order the CD through Amazon.com.  Digital pre-orders are available from iTunes.  A vinyl edition will be released on October 5, 2010.