New Releases Tuesday

Welcome to New Releases Tuesday on WERS. Every Tuesday we’ll take a look around the music scene and bring you updates on, you guessed it, the new albums coming out this week.

Animal Collective, Centipede Hz – 2009′s Merriweather Post Pavilion might have made you think Animal Collective were softening up. Not so. Their latest album is by far their hardest and heaviest. It’s glitchy, anxious, and spastic from the very beginning, conjuring up a sort of paranoia-inducing urban jungle. Animal Collective have mastered the art of layering noise upon noise upon noise to produce suddenly catchy choruses, and somehow, even at their darkest, there are still tracks here that make great singalongs.

Bob Dylan, The Tempest – Thirty-five albums in and Bob Dylan is still pushing boundaries. This is one of the darkest albums of his career (which is saying quite a lot), as well as being lyrically breathtaking. The title track, for instance, tells the story of the sinking of the Titanic with the specificity of images that he excels at, not to mention a Leonardo DiCaprio reference. His voice is croaky and raw, but he still delivers his words with venom or, as the case may be, a wink. Good to know one of America’s all-time best songwriters isn’t going anywhere soon.

Stars, The North – Stars have bounced back with a vengeance from their last album, 2010′s lackluster The Five Ghosts. Their latest release shows how far they can push themselves within their usual spectrum of harmonic indie-pop electronica. They go straight pop with “The Theory Of Relativity,” then stark and experimental with “The 400″ and heartwrenching on “Do You Want To Die Together.” Male-female shared vocals are increasingly common these days, but these guys are the reigning champions of the back-and-forth ballad. Overall, The North sparkles.

By Ella Zander

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