QUICK SPINS: Django Django, Nai Harvest, Refused
By Tankboy in Arts & Entertainment on Jul 15, 2015 2:45PM
Django Django, photo by Fiona Garden
Summer is here! Summer is here! Please don't leave us again, summer! And while summer is here, we've got a few albums perfectly suited to the warm air and bright sunshine we're all (finally) basking in.
Django Django
Born Under Saturn
Simultaneously airy and heavy, Django Django builds their songs out of heavily layered vocals and aggressively laid-back rhythmic beds. The breezy side of summer keeps creeping in at the sides and the sound could be categorized as sophisticatedly sunny.
There's a precision at work throughout the album, and you can feel that every note in each song has been carefully placed, and each vocal part and counterpart has an exacting feel. That means Born Under Saturn feels like a jigsaw puzzle that is solved and locked together tightly as a whole. The neat trick here is that this approach does not lead to the songs lying dormant or feeling hermetically sealed. Instead this strong and self-assured approach actually creates space for the music to sway to and fro, creating a loose summer vibe. To make an art school analogy, one must master one's craft in order to make it look effortless. And Django Django makes their breezy indie pop feel so effortless your hips won't lie as they also sway to and fro.
Just try to stop them.
Django Django plays Lollapalooza during the day on July 31, and that evening they play Thalia Hall.
Fuzzy, buzzy, big and bouncy, Nai Harvest is one of those bands that seems to have extracted and carbonated the essence of youth. I’ve been sitting on this one because I didn’t want to recommend such a blisteringly great summer album while an off-season autumnal chill held Chicago hostage in its grasp. But now the heat seems to be settling in and the time is right to drip sweat as you twist and turn, thrashing and dancing to the ten cuts on Nai Harvest’s debut LP Hairball. How these two twenty-somethings—singer/guitarist vocalist Ben Thompson and drummer Lew Currie—manage to pull out such a fully-formed ball of noise that feels like a full band attack instead of a scrappy duo will always mystify these ears. But pull it off, they do.
Once you drop the needle on the adrenalized first track “Sick On My Heart,” the rest of the album hurtles by so quickly, and is so fulfilling, you’ll be flipping the disc over and over again, dropping that needle so often the groves may threaten to wear through to the turntable underneath (or, in our digital age, run the risk of cracking the screen underneath the replay icon on your choice of portable device). We’d call this power-pop, but only if you like you’re power-pop driven over a cliff and into a rainbow by an eight-cylinder engine.
Refused's last album was 1998's The Shape of Punk to Come, a mixture of noise and aggression fueled by the collision between hardcore fury and experimental freewheeling jazz-metal. It's one of those albums that still not only holds up, but surprises and thrill upon every listen. It's the sound of danger not just seeping into the cracks of society around you; it's the battering ram decimating the doors of decorum to expose the raw network of nerves that lie just behind. It seemed as good a place as any for Refused to hang their legacy, because they weren't going to top it. And for 14 years they let it stand as their final statement.
When the band regrouped to play a handful of shows a few years ago, new music didn't seem to be on the menu at all. Instead the core members just appeared to be really enjoying themselves, taking a late victory lap to take advantage of the respect that had grown in their absence. So when Freedom, the band's first new album in almost a decade and a half, popped up it was a bit of a surprise. But not as much a surprise as the album's sound.
Freedom is the sound of Refused going pop. Vocalist Dennis Lyxzén still sounds like his throat is about to shred from the inside out, and the band's attack is still tight and furious, but there are hummable choruses here, and melodies, and, at times, even horn sections! Refused has taken their shredding fury and kept its white hot heat intact while channeling it into music that sneakily threads their subversions into a more mainstream shell. It's a neat trick, and it works, making Freedom an excellent starting place for new listeners while providing a challenging new direction for longtime fans.