If Justin Townes Earle’s sophomore effort, Midnight at the Movies, falls short in any way, mentioning his Old Man would only serve to exonerate another tiresome venture into music from a kid with a loaded last name. While most country-influenced twenty-somethings craft their lovesick songs inside a familiar bottle of wine, JTE bounces seamlessly from genre to genre, welding the Ink Spots to Hank Williams (“What I Mean to You”, “Poor Fool”), or Louis Jordan and Norman Blake (“Walk Out”, “Black Eyed Suzy”). With a voice that sounds like a farm-spliced Bing Crosby and Strangers Almanac-era Ryan Adams, nothing seems forced, his lyrical savvy therefore all the more accessible.

But what aids Midnight At The Movies in becoming not just a crammed collection of dog-eared influences from the last 80 years of modern music, but rather a complete album, are the songs that sound like, well, Justin Townes Earle. The two standout numbers (aside from the mandolin driven cover of “Can’t Hardly Wait”), the title track and “Mama’s Eyes”, sound so effortless, the immediate thought is that he must be a terrible athlete. Natural ability is specific: No matter how many late nights he tried, Kobe Bryant could not write a song like this. Earle picks the guitar like Richard Thompson on a jug of corn liquor, he has a voice like a Yosemite stream, and he kills a ‘Mats cover with a mandolin. I’m not asking him to play touch football. I’m just asking him to keep making records.

— Colin Thompson

Damn overachievers. Grizzly Bear are those kids whose parents never let them watch television or drink Coke, the ones who had their homework finished right as they got off the bus and still had time for their Suzuki violin lessons before dinner. The walls of their bedrooms are lined with blue ribbons, award certificates and any matter of plaques and medals, but no one would ever know it, because no one’s ever been invited over. They’re the quiet kids who stay to themselves, reveling in their reserved genius and leaving the rest of us to wonder just what exactly goes on inside those heads. Veckatimest is their latest A+, another flawless, carefully executed effort to hang on the fridge.

The bombast employed on this collection provides a heady compliment to the relative airiness of 2006’s Yellow House. The guitars have gotten fuzzier, the drums are a vivid cannon, and the vocals soar just close enough to the sun to allow the boys to stay adrift on their harmonies. The chunky bottom end of “Cheerleader” is brilliantly offset by the ethereal Brooklyn Youth Chorus, who appear on three of the album’s tracks. The Gershwin-aping “I Live With You” is cushioned by lush strings and horns, an honest-to-goodness rhapsody in Brooklyn. Ed Droste’s vocals are as pristine as ever, but Daniel Rossen gets to shine a bit on “Fine For Now” – you follow him down to every syllable of the raspy “we’re all fal-ter-ing.” And though the record slows here and there, the whole set feels complete and is easy to get lost in. It’ll take several listens to pick out every calculated detail, but since Veckatimest is an infinitely repeatable affair, it shouldn’t be that unpleasant a task.

—Joseph Tirabassi

The evolution of the female solo artist over the past fifteen years has been a curious one. My generation grew up on solid, strong voices with apparent themes and lyrical twists. Tori Amos, Beth Orton, and Bjork were wildly different, but carried about them an obvious gravity; even Liz Phair’s sexual irreverence was rooted in the serious problem of sexual inequality.
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I’ve heard my favorite record thus far of 2009.

Casiotone For the Painfully Alone’s Vs. Children is the most personal record I’ve heard this year. After the stellar compilation Advance Base Battery Life, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect with Casiotone’s new material. Would it be more of the same? Or was the backlog cleared out with the intention of throwing down something new? As it turns out, this record is pretty in line with the general aesthetic of Etiquette (2006): a little more refined perhaps; a little more sparse on instrumentation (most notably, actually, sparse on the Casio tones), but still very much the Owen Ashworth we’ve come to know and love and from whom we’ve waited so anxiously for new material since 2006.
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In the world of downloadable music, the 40-minute album is obsolete. It took six years and the latest Illinois release to make me realize this, but here I am. In fact, with the deterioration of radio along with the eradication of physical properties entirely, pop music’s ties to tradition are the demons of the art itself to slay. Simply said, if you make a 3+ minute pop tune nowadays, you only did it because everyone else did so before you. By this logic, the sans-time music world should allow unstoppable song-making machines like Prince to release an album (or whatever could be quantified as an “album” now) every week. It also makes me question the motives of artists today: Why do they wait until they have 40 minutes of material to release a “full” record any more? Can they only fill 40 minutes? Or were those just the best 40 minutes of 80? Are they happy for the resurgence of vinyl, so they can have a physical limiter of their material? The whole system is in flux and it’s freaking me out.
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