New Track Roundup: Diminished Returns Edition
By: Christian Hagen
It’s hard not to be extraordinarily excited by the prospect of the new music coming out in 2011. Just this month, new albums from indie favorites The Arctic Monkeys and Death Cab for Cutie will keep many college students’ stereos rumbling, while Modest Mouse famously debuted two new songs at their much-lauded Sasquatch Festival performance.
Yet for all the excitement, 2011 has proven to be an extremely unpredictable year, with longtime favorites falling short and newcomers totally blindsiding the industry with exciting sounds.
Here are a few examples of some new songs that are just not up to snuff:
The Arctic Monkeys, “Don’t Sit Down ‘Cause I’ve Moved Your Chair”
When the brit-punk spitfires teamed up with Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age on Humbug, I took a “wait-and-see” approach to their future. After debuting with one of the biggest albums in UK rock history and failing to re-capture the magic on disc two, the band needed some kind of fire to light their sound, to bring back some of the explosions of their earliest work. And Homme’s hand guided them with some semblance of logic into dirtier, dustier territory that still retained their “British-kids-out-for-the-night” aesthetic.
If “Don’t Sit Down” is any indication, Homme may have ultimately just killed The Arctic Monkeys and replaced them with his own band. Nothing about this sounds remotely like the Monkeys; this is as close to a flat-out grunge track as I’ve heard from anyone in years. The lyrics have lost any personality the band might have once carried (I can’t decide which rhyme is worse: “Go into business with a grizzly bear” or “Do the macarena in the devil’s lair”). Worse, singer Alex Turner has decided to do some sort of mentally challenged Layne Staley impression. The guitars are in full “turn it up to eleven” mode, while the drums couldn’t carry less finesse.
This is the kind of jam that would be laughed off your local hard rock station for being too over-the-top. I don’t know what happened to the kids from Sheffield running from the cops for a laugh, but I know they aren’t the desert-punching, hot-rod-driving whiskey swillers on this song.
Death Cab For Cutie, “You Are a Tourist”
Have you heard the new Cloud Cult? It’s this semi-uplifting track with the U2 guitar riff and some nonsense about a “burning in your heart.” I’m a bit disappointed by it. I mean, I know they’re always experimenting with sounding as big as possible, but this song is shapeless, meandering, and sadly a bit dull.
What’s that? It’s Death Cab for Cutie? Oh.
Well that’s almost more of a shame than the overall boredom of the song itself. Because anyone who’s followed Death Cab’s career from young emo romantics to slightly older emo romantics would likely be disappointed to hear that the progress made on 2008’s excellent, slightly experimental Narrow Stairs was a precursor not to a new era of success for an already respected band but rather to the sort of amiable style-biting that gets them hits on the adult contemporary stations for all the folks who’ve never listened to Cloud Cult (seriously, it sounds so much like them I can’t shake it).
It’s not a terrible song, but for a band with as strong a following as Death Cab’s, it’s unfortunate that they would make a song that’s so vanilla I forget the melody as soon as it stops playing.
Modest Mouse, “Lampshades on Fire”
This one doesn’t quite fit the pattern here, as I can’t outright make a criticism of a song that hasn’t been officially released. But with as much press as this track has gotten, I feel compelled to make some sort of statement on it. At this stage in its existence, “Lampshades on Fire” could be a good song, with some polish. It could even be great. But right now, it’s a bit of a mess, a slap-dash amalgam of all the band’s identities over nearly two decades of music.
It jumps mindlessly from the lighter pop tracks that dotted Good News and We Were Dead into some of the harder guitar rock of Lonesome Crowded West with some of the twisting affability of This is a Long Drive without ever really justifying the existence of any of these elements on their own, let alone together.
Obviously, in a fuller production (the new album is supposedly being produced by Big Boi, which, if this is true, is absolutely insane, but potentially brilliant), “Lampshades on Fire” could still come out like a champion, and with Modest Mouse, it’s almost impossible to discount their talents. And the other new song they debuted, “Poison,” may be the strongest throwback track the band has made in years. All in all, there’s still potential for this one. But, as it exists now, “Lampshades” is patchwork, and not especially well-done patchwork at that.