The Single Life: Panic! At The Disco, Birds Of Tokyo & More

23 April 2015 | 1:44 pm | Ross Clelland

Things can tend from the brilliant, through the merely curious, to fairly inexcusable crap.

It’s been a little odd to watch a backlash to something that seemed as mostly harmless as Record Store Day. It tends to boil down as to whether a way of encouraging people into one of those increasingly rare bricks-and-mortar emporiums to feel the joy of stumbling across something in the racks you didn’t know existed has turned into a commercial exercise, for the vinyl equivalent of a ticket scalper to vacuum up the day’s rarities and flog them at inflated prices on eBay the following week.

The quality of the offered collector’s items has varied as well. Sure, there’s likely to be more than a few worthies in the flood of 45s Jack White shovels out to the world every mid-April, but outside his trainspotter spirit things can tend from the brilliant, through the merely curious, to fairly inexcusable crap beyond even novelty value.

Where you want to place things on that spectrum is entirely up to the consumer (or the person who leaves the music in the shrinkwrap never to be touched - let alone listened to…). Do you need to know a younger Dave Grohl yelped through Kim Wilde’s Kids In America as he worked out how to be a frontman, as the nascent Foo Fighters got it together – not even in a garage, but as Songs From A Laundry Room (Roswell)? The RSD special release has long gone, unless you want to take out a second mortgage to get a hold of one, but as is the way of most things, it’s now more widely available.

The cover version seems to be a typical currency of the event. Even ‘our’ Courtney Barnett jumped aboard, the other side of the surprisingly dark Kim’s Caravan limited edition is her typically-lugubrious take on John Cale’s just magnificent Close Watch (Milk!). The deadpan delivery might confuse the purists (Cales’, not hers), but the often underrated/under-noticed part of the Barnett’s art is the guitar atmospheres that underpin many of her tunes, as happens here. She really is a bit special. 

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Others used Record Store Day to announce they still exist, or maybe exist again. Witness Slayer, a brand name that will bring a tear to the eye of many an old enthusiast of the once ‘new’ metal – or maybe they’re just wincing in pain as their 1993 lip-piercing turns septic. When The Stillness Comes (Nuclear Blast) precursors their return to activity, the beards a bit thicker and/or greyer, but still looking for a message in the static of the TV left on overnight. 

Weezer at least rewarded their loyalists by making Everybody Needs Salvation (Republic) available as a fanclub special offer rather than a straight-out grab for the collectors market, to at least make the longtermers feel a bit special. Doesn’t stray much from the pop blueprint they’ve mostly always worked from – but Rivers Cuomo is still the geek’s geek, and this follows on nicely from resurrection album Everything Will Be Alright In the End, which it appears it actually might be. 

Another absent for some little time, Panic! At The Disco. First new material since 2013, and the loss of their drummer in the interim, is titled Hallelujah (Fueled By Ramen). Please do not confuse this for the covered-way-too-often Leonard Cohen hymn (Memo: kids of a certain generation – no, Floater Buckley didn’t write it…). Panic!’s Brendon Urie appears attempting make some sort of synthetic gospel with this - handclaps and backing choir callbacks ahoy. Anthemic, in that bloodless Las Vegas kinda way.

‘Bloodless’ is never a term that could be associated with Jack Ladder & the Dreamlanders. Although letting the band’s most singular guitar player Kirin Callinan (aka ‘Kalimariman’ for the purpose of this exercise…) loose in a video editing suite has provided something like you’ve never seen before. Unless you happen to be a fan of the worst excesses of 1980s primary-coloured band wardrobe and mulletry. If you can get past the optical horror, Reputation Amputation (Self-Portrait) is Jack having a reasonable swipe at the many – OK, I may number among the guilty – who used the easy ‘deep voice/dark romance’ interface to namecheck one Nicholas Cave as an lazy reference point as to what Mr Ladder was about. Try not to be too alarmed by the use of slap-bass in the visuals. 

Anchor (EMI) is a postcard from a band not lost in America, but at least still trying to work out what that country - and trying to be a creative and successful band there - might be. Birds Of Tokyo are still making a music that seems designed for the international market, but whether they – like many before them – get dragged under in the attempt is perhaps the point now reached. 

Finding a place in the USA is a conundrum perhaps solved by Unknown Mortal Orchestra. Ruban Nielson’s journey from his safe New Zealand home to settle in Portland (naturally…) appears to have worked. The band’s reputation grows across a world of certain websites telling you what you should be listening to if sporting the correct beard and low-crotched pants, but Can’t Keep Checking My Phone (Jagjaguwar) could be the gateway to a broader appeal, as it somehow sits on a line where you can both dance to it, or sit angstily in a corner staring at the floor. Neat trick that.