Although Jeniferever probably deserve a higher profile, Silesia won’t be the album to swell their fan base. They’ve never exactly redefined the post-rock paradigm, but even against their own track record, there’s a distinct lack of freshness to their third full-length. They seem to be attempting to broaden their profile by following the genre’s manual as closely as possible, but they’re expert enough to smuggle in moments of excellence: for example, the guitar lick that closes Waifs and Strays or the title track’s sparkling malevolence.
Such beauty is offset by the tedium of Drink to Remember’s over-egged emoting and the bland The Beat of Our Own Blood. Compare Jeniferever with a band like Mew – with whom they share certain similarities – and the disparity is acute: where the Danes satisfied subverted expectations on 2009’s No More Stories, Jeniferever sound like they’re still playing catch up two years later.Out 11th April
Future Songs was first released as a low-quality, self-mastered cassette last summer. It looked destined to remain in such rough form when Pat Jordache’s laptop was tea-leafed from a cafe, till an old Mediafire account containing the original files was exhumed. They’ve been given a wipe-down and a tune-up for this re-release, and praise Constellation for ensuring this remarkable record didn’t languish as the preserve of Montreal hipsters.
It’s a fascinating listen, its peculiarities encapsulated by the unclassifiable closer ukUUU: six and a half minutes of string bending, field recordings, machine song and Jordache’s idiosyncratic croon. Yet despite its unorthodoxies, Future Songs remains ‘pop’, albeit in the same sense that John Maus or tUnE-YArDs (Merrill Garbus and Jordache previously played together in the also-ace Sister Suvi) are pop, with accessible melodies filtered through layers of hiss, fuzz and reverb. The results are comfortingly familiar, yet innovative and rather special.Out 25th April
Adam Goldberg is The Hebrew Hammer, director of I Love Your Work, Julie Delpy’s squeeze in Two Days in Paris – oh, and Chandler Bing’s nutty roommate. The Goldberg Sisters is destined to join his portfolio of projects that, to the world at large, remain less well-known than a stint on Friends fifteen years ago, but such is the legacy of a recurring role in the nineties behemoth (it took Paul Rudd years to lose the tag, “y’know, Pheobe’s husband”).
As with former act LANDy, The Goldberg Sisters delivers dreamy pysch-pop; a natural fit given his fandom and friendship with the Flaming Lips (Goldberg crops up in both The Fearless Freaks documentary and Christmas on Mars). But the results feel largely wan, sitting too comfortably in the shadow of more daring practitioners. In the end, this is The One Where Goldberg Came Close to Something Awesome, But Fell Ever-So-Slightly Short. We still have hope.Out 11th April
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