REASONS TO LIVE
Thee Oh Sees, Floating Coffin (Castle Face). Thee Oh Sees put out an astonishing amount of music — Floating Coffin is the fourth full-length to bear its name since May of 2011 — and yet there seems to be no lapse in quality imminent. The records just keep coming and, if anything, they keep getting better. And it’s not like Thee Oh Sees keep repeating themselves, either. Each new album release has its own distinct character, despite also asserting itself as the unmistakable work of Thee Oh Sees. Floating Coffin is a far more violent and furious beast even than 2011’s breathless Carrion Crawler/The Dream, sporting some of the San Francisco quintet’s thickest, heaviest and meanest material yet in the form of numerous walloping, slightly evil low-end fuzz epics such as “Toe Cutter — Thumb Buster,” “Strawberries 1 & 2” and “Night Crawler.” There’s not a band making the rounds today that does a woolly-bully garagepunk rave-up better than Thee Oh Sees, and the ones that made the cut here — “Tunnel Time,” “Floating Coffin” and opener “I Come from the Mountain” among them — are flat-out ferocious. Although this began as a solo thing for frontman John Dwyer, everyone’s pulling their weight these days, particularly bassist Petey Dammit and keyboardist Brigid Dawson, whose high harmonies with Dwyer now function as essentially one weird voice. This isn’t a band. This is a machine.
Young Galaxy, Ultramarine (Paper Bag). Swoony Montrealers Young Galaxy have bounced around just enough stylistically over their first three albums to pick up a slightly different crowd of new listeners each time around. That refusal to sit still has left them perpetually drifting at the edge of the radar, but it’s paid off: on Ultramarine, the quintet has brought those years of exploration to bear on the Young Galaxy album that finally gets all the details perfect, the album that should turn the Young Galaxy cult into a super-cult. Dan Lissvik, the gifted Swedish producer who hammered the band’s raw materials into final form from a distance on 2011’s striking Shapeshifting, was actually in the studio this time, so the results play out, unsurprisingly, like a more refined extrapolation of that album’s heat-flushed electronic ideas into a confident and highly tuneful present. Young Galaxy gets its booty out on the floor a bit more here, though; the Soft Cell-esque “What We Want” and the Balearic-flavoured “Privileged Poor” are as close to pure club music as the band has yet come, while snaky synth-pop grooves dominate everywhere else, exerting irresistible pressure to move on “Fever” and the almost Reznor-esque “In Fire.” Vocalist Catherine McCandless has never sounded so poised, flitting appropriately between earnest earth mother and ice-queen personas where the material demands it, and evoking a young Sinead O’Connor fronting New Order-ish on the effervescent opener “Pretty Boy.” Pretty major.
Twin Tigers, Death Wish (Old Flame). When last I crossed paths with Twin Tigers in February of 2011, the Athens, Ga., quartet was still in shock from spinning out on the 401en route to an El Mocambo gig during the middle of a snowstorm. Fortunately, one near-death experience wasn’t enough to put the band off making music for good, and it’s just followed up 2010’s fine Grey Waves with a blackhearted beast of a second LP. The Twin Tigers of 2013 is louder, Goth-ier and decidedly deeper in the throes of malcontentment. It’s also maybe a little more tuneless, as parts of the record blur into what feels like one long song where Matthew Rain shouts his head off in Robert Smith fashion behind a wall of keys and blistering guitar effects. Still, the menacing “Opana,” and the 8.5-minute “Holiday” are grim keepers and even the weaker parts get by on hair-raising anti-socialism alone. Keep your eyes on this band.