The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.
Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.
Eerie, warped, and endless.
This one sure split the base when it came out. Fuzz rock aficionados teaming up with the notoriously exacting Jacknife Lee and his polished production and coming out with an album more skeletal than shoegaze, aesthetically themed after horror films, all synths, dry guitars, tambourines, and eerie harmonies. The gamble paid off in the end, but Silversun's real sonic identity, their tendency towards the explosive and large scale, was never in danger. That winds up being its (slight) downfall as well as its greatest asset; Neck of the Woods feels like the first Pickups record that could use a radio edit.
Not a single song here falls short of four-and-a-half minutes. A lot of that time is used for excellent buildups and sonic mayhem: "Make Believe" has this awesome aggressive guitar strumming leading into a bridge of bent strings and banging snares, "Here We Are"'s sighing vocals and cold drum machines build a fittingly awkward and uncomfortable atmosphere, and "Mean Spirits" is a robotic stampede to soundtrack mutual romantic aggression. Other times, like "The Pit"'s unnecessary fake-out ending or the sonically wonked but musically aimless "Busy Bees", you wish they knew when to call it. Neck of the Woods isn't quite back-to-front flawless like their earlier albums--but that's still head and shoulders above most bands.
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Skin Graph", "Make Believe", "Here We Are (Chancer)" | "Simmer" | "Busy Bees" |  |
Release what's brewing underneath.
I take the haziness of the earliest Pickups work to be a sort of sonic naivete--the Pickups before success as a band was even vaguely a consideration, off in their own world segregated from the larger L.A. music scene, let alone the world. With the focus on riffage, effected but not drowsy, Swoon sounds like an escalation. Silversun recorded this one after a world tour that turned them into strangers back home, and you can hear the alienation in the music. That's not to say Silversun get confessional or anything--but compared to Carnavas, this is a much sharper block of moody rock pieces that sprawl less and slam harder.
Silversun really explore the dark, overwhelmed confines of heavy pop rock on this one. There's a small orchestra that cradles the edges of the softer tracks and provides an urgent, cinematic pulse behind the band on others. The drone that Swoon exhibits is more fuzz than delay, like the thick rumble on the phenomenal closer "Surrounded" or the appropriately-named "Draining". "Substitution" steps off the fuzz entirely, and the sonic meltdown on "Panic Switch" (giving the band their second wind at radio) layers three solos to chaotic effect. This album is a nervous breakdown in musical form, and with the quality so high, Silversun proves they are one of the finest bands the 2000s gave us--and no, they really don't sound like the Pumpkins.
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "It's Nice to Know You Work Alone", "Draining", "Surrounded" | "The Royal We" | ... |  |
As twinkly and cloudy as the cover art.
Abusing sleep aids to visit dead friends? Par for the course for Carnavas, the 2006 debut full-length from Silver Lake's Silversun Pickups. The aforementioned "Melatonin" is a perfect introduction, laying out a bed of decaying guitar fuzz for guitarist Brian Aubert and bassist Nikki Monninger to harmonize over. Dark and moody, heavy in the mix (even if the master is brickwalled enough to lose the snare at times, sadly) and tightly sequenced, Carnavas knows when to shoot sparks right in your face ("Well Thought Out Twinkles") and when to let the desolation of Silversun's soundscapes speak for themselves ("Rusted Wheel"). It's no surprise "Lazy Eye" took off how it did; it's effectively this entire album in six iconic minutes.
This album is a real electrical storm of guitars, delayed ("Common Reactor"), skipping ("Checkered Floor"), and absolutely frayed ("Future Foe Scenarios"), a surface-level detour off Pikul, but really its sound taken to the logical extreme. The whole band does their part to conjure up that suffocating cloud, though; Joe Lester's samplers are as big a component of the sound as the pedalboard, Nikki's basslines and self-conscious vocals (like on the bridge to the excellent "Little Lover's So Polite") are always a highlight, and Chris Guanlao's drumming is both angular and rudimentary, primal enough for rock but complex enough to drive "Waste it On"'s odd time signatures. This album makes a statement, and at an hour long, it takes all the time it needs to make it. Pop a tablet and say hi.
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Checkered Floor", "Little Lover's So Polite", "Three Seed" | "Lazy Eye" | Mmmmmmmnone | |
Springtime misery.
I have cried to this EP. "All the Go Inbetweens", a long, aching piece of guitar pop about seeking reassurance in a world long past the point where you can make a difference, is one of my favorite songs ever written. To those looking for a full-frontal guitar assault, Pikul might seem docile. These songs were recorded piecemeal while Silversun's lineup was still in flux: "The Fuzz" features their original second guitarist Kennedy, and "Go Inbetweens" was before drummer Chris Guanlao entered the picture, yet Pikul plays cohesive, a package deal. Part of that is the homebrew recordings (courtesy of the captain of The Ship, Aaron Espinoza), but what really ties things together is the band's mastery of mood from day one.
These seven tracks are loaded up with occasionally-fuzzed semi-acoustics, springy basslines (check the lumbering groove on "Booksmart Devil"), and singer-guitarist Brian Aubert's breathy, pointed rasp. Remarkably light on the palate, as cool as mint but textured as earth, while keyboards and cellos pop up from time to time, it's really the vocals you're listening for. Each shows Brian at a different stage in his development; "Go Inbetweens" sounds the shiest of the lot, while "Kissing Families" is a screaming match backed by a Sheraton. "Creation Lake", a cover of fellow L.A. indie poppers The Movies, is maybe the most striking song on the entire EP, not just because bassist Nikki Monninger sings it instead, but because it's the first time Silversun have ever actually seemed at peace.
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Booksmart Devil", "The Fuzz", "All the Go Inbetweens" | "Kissing Families" | "Sci-Fi Lullaby" | |
INDEX | CHANGELOG | CONTACT
ART | MODDING | MUSIC | WRITING
GAME REVIEWS | MUSIC REVIEWS
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