Noel Murray

Record stores have been exciting places lately, with “gotta hear” bands springing up almost daily. Some have been nowhere near as good as the hype, others are better than the limitations of their genre. Count Interpol in the latter category. The morose band join the New York trend of consciously appropriating angular guitars and staccato rhythms from British post-punk to make a musical comment on the paranoia and isolation of a modern metropolis. Interpol’s debut disc, Turn on the Bright Lights (Matador), earns the inevitable Joy Division comparisons, though Interpol have a lighter lilt to their bass and percussion, and the guitarists’ chiming patterns set the group off on the kind of positive exploration that the grimly minimalist Joy Division wouldn’t have cared to attempt. They unfurl from pinched openings to wide-open codas, and on the album’s highlight, “Say Hello to the Angels,” break from separate stabbing guitar riffs and a freight-train drum roll into a spry, bass-driven bit of alt-pop reminiscent of The Smiths and Brian Eno. What had seemed initially chilly and obsessive reveals a surprising versatility.

Interpol’s fellow New Yorkers the Liars also rest their punkish art-rock in the pale, beat-for-beat’s-sake of the early ’80s, but the band have a more slashing, less expansive sound. Liars’ debut, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top (Mute), has as much in common with the aggressive likes of Les Savy Fav as it does with U.K. pop deconstruction. In spite of mouthful titles like “Nothing is Ever Lost or Can Be Lost My Science Friend,” Liars’ songs tend to be short, skeletal and tuneless, deriving hooks from sudden, martial drum bursts, repetitive four- or five-note guitar signatures and the scratchy, distorted howl of singer Angus Andrew. They’re mostly attitude and bludgeon.

Much kickier is French Kicks, new New Yorkers whose edginess sometimes seems like an afterthought. Their brisk debut album, One Time Bells (Star Time), shines brightest when the quartet slip in a little soul, as on the curiously insistent ballad “Where We Went Off” and the lightly swinging, terraced “Close to Modern” (which has a backbeat and a falsetto over the chorus, not to mention some cheery “ooo-ooo-ooo”s). At times, French Kicks try too hard to give their catchy songs eccentric arrangements, but better a surfeit of imagination than a deficit. When the band’s adventurousness meets a full-bodied composition, as on the propulsive, stuttering “Crying Just for Show” and “Trying Whining,” the kicks keep coming.

French Kicks have been compared most frequently to Spoon, the Austin rock group whose fourth LP, Kill the Moonlight (Merge), synthesizes their influences into something like an aesthetic. The process began on last year’s mighty Girls Can Tell, which pulled apart the rhythms and textures of danceable rock music and left only the snappiest beats and notes. Kill the Moonlight shows the core duo of singer/songwriter/guitarist Britt Daniel and drummer Jim Eno demonstrating less interest in hooks with surface appeal. In “The Way We Get By,” Daniel lays his modulated, raspy voice over a bare track of piano, drums, bass and hand claps, singing about a string of teenage high jinks performed to the music of Iggy Pop. The bouncy, precise music and his half-weary, half-joyous vocals establish a feeling of grand times made smaller with hindsight. In that spirit, Daniel diminishes his melodies to fit the demands of arty cadence throughout Moonlight’s first half, which makes the more generously melodic second side—highlighted by the skittish, plaintive “Don’t Let It Get You Down” and “All the Pretty Girls Go to the City”—not just welcome, but inspiring.

In the midst of all the post-post-punk excitement, three of the best-respected troubadours in modern pop released records on the same day. Ryan Adams’ Demolition (Lost Highway) compiles songs from a handful of the “pocket albums” he’s been known to knock out in a week and stick on a shelf. The title implies that the disc’s 13 tracks are demos, but the album-opening “Nuclear” sounds pretty full, with bass, drums, a light synth wash and two guitars (one picked, one sliding). The song builds to semi-cacophony, but the tone remains genteel and tuneful, with a minor lyrical idea (the explosive end of a relationship) given an added dimension by Adams’ sweetly reedy voice and his rumpled presence. That pretty well describes the rest of Demolition. Its songs are sketchy but affable—especially the textured gospel honky-tonk track “Hallelujah,” the lovely acoustic number “You Will Always Be the Same,” the spare ballad “Cry on Demand” and the pointed, jazzy “Tennessee Sucks”—with a confidence that makes the half-hooks sound almost indelible.

Much more shocking is the high quality of Old 97’s co-leader Rhett Miller’s debut solo release, The Instigator (Elektra). Miller’s band hit a lull last year with Satellite Rides, the flat follow-up to their tuneful 1999 breakthrough Fight Songs, and the rush to shrug off the Old 97’s name for at least one album seemed an indicator of long-term creative bankruptcy...or at least a portent of dreary singer-songwriter indulgences. But The Instigator, despite minimal instrumentation and production by arch L.A. hurdy-gurdy man Jon Brion, is a surprisingly joyous, rocked-up affair, enhanced by lyrics that point to some kind of spiritual rebirth by Miller. “My friend is trapped in a shame spiral,” he sings on the giddy, tongue-partly-in-cheek self-help roller “Point Shirley,” and elsewhere he points to a “World Inside the World” and begs us not to put stock in “Things That Disappear.” The Instigator hits its apex in the next-to-last song, the power chord-driven “I Want to Live,” which is a nice capper for the feel-good rock record of the year.

Even more shocking than Miller’s great work is the majesty of Beck’s Sea Change (Geffen), which finds the hip-hop folkie ironist focusing his talent on a set of slow, string-drenched songs that sound like they could’ve been written by Joe Pernice in collaboration with Christine McVie. The album was reportedly inspired by a breakup, which explains songs like the dirge “Already Dead” (chorus completed with the words “to me now”). But though the pervasive melancholy seems to have forced Beck to try sincerity as a lifestyle choice, he hasn’t abandoned his instrumental inventiveness. The second song on the record, “Paper Tiger,” has one of Beck’s formerly kitschy disco arrangements stretched, lowered and chopped up until it practically racks the nerves. Even the ballads, like the pinched lament “End of the Day,” take a base of droning acoustic guitar and add clavinet, melodic bass lines, concrete percussion and a lavish net of plucked and moaning strings. Sea Change may be the most beautiful expression of personal pain since the death of Nick Drake.