Gloomy Friday

To put a dent in the massive (and ever-growing) stack of CDs currently accumulating in my kitchen, here are a few quick reviews of albums that aren't quite good enough to merit full-length reviews, but aren't bad enough to be ignored entirely.



First up, Place. Their first proper EP, We Are So Little, would be great if the band were just an instrumental group. As "Whale" and the title track show, for example, the band knows how to make ominous-sounding melodies, and given their bleak-looking album cover/Myspace, that seems to be the point.

Unfortunately, they aren't just an instrumental group, and as songs like "Runways" shows, that's not a good thing. As strong as they may be musically, the effect is diminished somewhat by the vocals, which sound, at various times, like the guy from the B-52s, Ian Curtis, and Antony (minus the Johnsons). There's enough here musically to suggest that Place could be an interesting band in a few years, but at the moment, they have a long way to go.



In fact, given a few years they'll probably sound a lot like Cities -- or, to be more accurate, a lot Cities' remix album, Variations. The album's music is equally dark, but, as the Ladytron remix of "Writing On The Wall" (available on the band's Myspace) shows, they're able to add vocals to the music that are equally ominous, and they're able to underlay it all with a decent beat. Most importantly, Cities (and their remixers) understand that to be truly dark, you need to sound a bit majestic in doing so -- and, as the Mike Westbrook version of "A Theme" shows, they're more than capable of achieving that end.



Somewhere between these two extremes of quality are Scanners. Violence Is Golden is certainly well-made; frontwoman Sarah Daly is able to be dramatic in her vocals without shooting into hysterical histrionics, while the music around her strikes a good balance between Interpol-esque post-punk and radio-friendly rock. There's the odd good melody here -- "Lowlife" and "Air 164", in particular, are fun in their own ways -- but there's nothing here that really stands out. It all may be enough to make Scanners achieve some small level of fame...though it wouldn't be shocking if you never hear from them again, either.



And finally, if iLiKETRAiNS are never heard from ever again, it'd be a very good thing. Pretty much every song on Progress Reform, from "Terra Nova" onwards, follows the same pattern -- boring, turgid moaning over an acoustic guitar to start off, before finishing up in a flurry of ridiculously overblown post-rock. The only exception to the rule is "The Beeching Report", which sounds like Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie, if Bowie had been absolutely horrible and had a thing for including, uh, monk chants. I suppose someone may enjoy iLiKETRAiNS if they have a thing for music that's easy to make fun of, but otherwise, stay far away from this.