Sister act with a fresh sound
Haim
“Days Are Gone”
(Columbia) ★★★ 1⁄2
The long-haired sisters of L.A.’s Haim look as if they’re from the 1960s, crib lyrics from the 1970s and prize musical tricks from the 1980s. Yet the trio’s major-label debut, “Days Are Gone,” may be the freshest-sounding album you’ll hear all year.
Background and context figure into it. Este, Danielle and Alana Haim grew up playing in a cover band with their parents, who taught them to love — and to study — songwriting by the Beatles and the Eagles. They eventually folded more into the mix — Prince, the Cars, Eurythmics — and that gave the sisters an abiding devotion to the sonic signatures of early ’80s pop ‘n’ rock: slap bass, mechanized percussion, palm-muted one-string guitar chug. As Danielle puts it in “Falling”: “I’m a slave to the sound.”
Fast-forward to 2013, when everyone else in pop is in love with that sound too. By cleverly pulling from the past, Haim now seems utterly on time. There’s no denying the sisters’ appealingly breathy voices or their delightfully idiosyncratic delivery. (More singers should pronounce “naturally” as Alana does in “The Wire.”) Savvy recyclers committed to their own era, they make what worked yesterday work again today.
— Mikael Wood
Cage the Elephant
“Melophobia”
RCA
★★★
It’s hard to think of many peers for Cage the Elephant. They’re a young Kentucky rock band riffing on Zep and garage-punk without retro nostalgia; whip-smart songwriters un-beloved by hipsters; rock-radio hitmakers who play with the unhinged mania of a warehouse set. On “Melophobia” they’re in a class of their own among big, unit-shifting rock bands who can play with the scrap and imagination of van-tour vermin.
“Melophobia” is a bit more stoned and mellow than their raucous breakthrough “Thank You, Happy Birthday,” but daydreams suit them just fine. “Spiderhead” is a great blast of paranoia, and “teeth” comes the closest of any contemporaries to evoking to ghosts of Jack & Meg White. “Take It or Leave It” breaks ESG’s punk sass down to its parts and rebuilds it as a loopy, fractured funk.
How do you peg all this on the bombed-out major label landscape? Who knows. Let’s just be glad to have such imagination on our drive time rock radio again.
— August Brown Albums are rated on a scale of four stars (excellent), three stars (good), two stars (fair) and one star (poor).