Keepers, sleepers and coasters

The Utmost
GREAT AMERICAN DEATH POP
(Self-released)

There's the music to talk about, but first, what's up with all the Green Day in the cover art? It can't be coincidence that the Bay Area act's American Idiot and the Utmost's Great American Death Pop share the word "American," a crooked-line style, and a love/violence motif conveyed by cartoonish blood or bones together with explosive, heart-themed objects set at identically jaunty angles. Either this is calculated mimicry, or someone in the Utmost has the American Idiot cover painted on the ceiling over his bed. Maybe both.

That's the surface of Great American Death Pop. Underneath, there's a disc that sounds something like Green Day's punk-pop, but with more whimsy, like the Presidents of the United States of America. Singer/guitarist Donato Faoro harmonizes with himself, Corky Gainsford drums and all the danger implied by the album's title comes courtesy of bassist Sprinkle's "death growls": long, throaty and always mixed back to marketable levels. It's true these three are practiced musicians, and that the 17 songs here are tightly crafted and recorded; regimented power chords and crisp voice harmonies run throughout, along with clever, carefully waggish lyrics about troublesome young women and feeling like things just aren't working out. "Records on the Stereo" and "She Don't Know" are high points, with their changing energy and catchy choruses. The quiet closer, "Mr. Hippo," has Faoro breaking it down in gravelly David Lee Roth fashion.

Beyond that, there's not a lot that's new or exciting about an album this safe, but the Utmost aren't going for innovation. They're going for fun, fame, fortune and Panic! Maybe they'll get there, maybe they won't, but for now there's Great American Death Pop, and it's at least good enough to warrant more than one listen, even among fans of far deadlier music. (For more info, visit Utmostmusic.com)

DAVE SURRATT

The Bleachers
SUSPICION
(Self-released)

Note to all Vegas rock bands: You've got less than six months to record your masterpiece. The leading candidate thus far for best local album of the year is the Bleachers' debut longplayer, Suspicion. Exquisite in its compositions, atmosphere and overall production, Suspicion is the sort of record where its listener is torn between savoring each nuance and losing himself in its often dream-like euphony. It's also one of those you'd-never-guess-it's-local albums, as professional sounding as it is artistically pleasing.

Part of the credit goes to Don C. Tyler, an L.A. engineer who has formerly worked with R.E.M. and Elliott Smith. But considering the album was fully conceived, performed and mixed by the band, its grandeur is all the more remarkable. This isn't your standard guitars-bass-drum affair. All sorts of instrumental ephemera floats in and out of Suspicion, not so much juggled or programmed as it is interlocked and coalesced, as if to allow for both intentional and accidental sonic experiments.

Even as Suspicion represents, and is best served by, a start-to-finish experience, highlights abound. "Invitation" lives up to its name, immediately drawing you in with its part-retro, part-updated shoegazer allure. "Slumberjack #2" combines the martial rhythms of U2, the modern psychedelica of the Verve and the chugging guitar boogie of the Kills so well, you overlook its melodic void. "Let Me Down Easy" begins like a latter-era Beatles strummer, evolving into a stomper not unlike Mercury Rev's more assertive output.

Suspicion is so well-melded, even singer Joe Maloney -- channeling both Ian Brown and Jeremy Enigk -- feels more like an equal partner within the arrangements than the standard vocalist trying to rise above them, and not out of insecurity, either. Then again, the entire album exudes confidence -- as well it should. (Bleachersmusic.net)

MIKE PREVATT

12 Volt Sex
FIX
(TVS Industries)

In these days when labels are grabbing at Vegas acts like so much pinata candy, one local band tale seems like a quaint anecdote from a smaller town: how, once upon a time in the '90s, 12 Volt Sex came thiiiis close to the brass ring -- and crashed.

After a few years of licking wounds and kicking around songs, 12 Volt Sex is back -- in an older, wiser, more laidback incarnation. As the band tells it, its latest self-released album Fix was happily written minus major-label pressure, corporate hustle and any unabashed thirst for success. The result? Well, at the very least, it offers a glimpse into what perhaps inspired 12 Volt Sex to write such good songs back in the day: major-label pressure, corporate hustle and an unabashed thirst for success. Drive from your mind the tart, cunningly crafted power-pop 12 Volt Sex was once known for; the fumbling Fix marks a band unmoored from the creativity that characterized its brief glory days in the '90s. The opener "Goodnight" tips you off that something's awry. Whoa. Did some Triple-A radio signal zap your CD player? Indeed, Fix's tunes seesaw between stilted, strummy soft-hits fuzz -- "Hold Me Now," "Monica" and "Some Sweet Love" (which reads less like a love song than a stalker's missive: "Soon as I get home, I'm gonna spill it/ No need to get yourself off, 'cause I can fill it") -- and passable pop numbers that nonetheless lack the compact urgency that was the band's trademark. Sure, skip around and you'll find a few keepers, such as the chilly groove of "Pictures" and the scorching keyboard anthem "Mutual." And let's not forget title track "Fix," which, with its catchy march-and-whisper, suggests a fix indeed: something to tide you over until the real score comes along. (12voltsex.net)

ANDREW KIRALY

Mind Pop
WAR STRIFE AND EVERYTHING NICE
(Self-released)

War Strife and Everything Nice, the debut album by Mind Pop, might seem like just another digitally tossed-off work by another bedroom musician. However, the one-man-band -- also known as J.R. formerly of local breakbeat/tech duo CorruptData -- displays a knack for heavily multilayered compositions with glimpses of (gasp!) conventional songwriting. Processed vocals, ambient washes and semblances of melody -- all pointedly eschewed in CorruptData's almost nihilistic, yet still hypnotic electro-tech -- join the cursory breakbeats, glitchy cuts and sinister synth lines, if not for the entirety of a single song. Sometimes a track starts with the unnerving atmosphere of a late-night, junkyard rave, only to tease moments of light and harmony at various points. It's a way of making typically ascetic electronic music -- like, say, drum 'n' bass -- feel a little more human.

Take a song like "No Future," which might've been your standard jungle inclusion had J.R. not applied a veneer of keyboard sheen over it, creating a mood slightly less end-times than the title might imply. "Play Game" introduces a slow breakbeat pattern and a digital effect mimicking the scratching of a fretboard, giving way to lighter synth vibes and even playful-sounding, digitized vocals (think Daft Punk).

And then there's the closer, "Temporal Fixation," an epic anti-anthem that runs the gamut of e-music niches and components -- buzzy chord progressions, ambient waves, robotic loops, simulated cymbal taps, foundation breaks, barely intelligible vocal mantras -- harnessed nearly as well, and almost as accessible, as a Chemical Brothers production. Which is to say that after all the alternating dark and light, there's something of a happy ending. J.R.'s former work had the "war strife" part down pat, so the "everything nice" part is a welcome development. (Mindpop.net)

M.P.

The Objex
BOUND & GAGGED
(Self-released)

Punk Band Axiom #228: It never hurts when your singer resembles a flailing, drunken Seoul hooker from the year 3025. Indeed, there was mohawked Objex frontwoman Felony Melanie at a recent Cheyenne Saloon show, threatening to spill out of her bustier with each quake, stomp, shudder and spazz. It was hot and heartwarming at the same time, and no doubt many intense, drunken crushes materialized on the spot.

The band's new five-song demo, Bound and Gagged, makes the same kind of strong first impression with opening track "Fun in Your Funeral," a glorious, clanging, 90-second mess that not only features Felony on throat, but even manages a guitar solo that sounds remarkably like a cat getting dipped in pool acid. Little fuck-all frills quite confidently thrown in -- sinister chant-alongs, stinger guitar lines -- let you know you're in the hands of some experienced punks. How could they possibly follow up on this song?

That's the part of the problem. They don't. Downshifting noticeably on the next four tracks, the Objex proceed to turn in crafted, studied punk rock that hits all the right points but fails to fully engage. Song decrying stereotypes? Check. Song about thinking for yourself? Check. Post-feminist, sex-positive song about being horny all the time? Check. The fun factor remains in a boozy, bar-band kinda way -- "Kill Your Stereotypes" is destined to be a jukebox classic, and the ooh-ahhhs of "Gotta Get Some" are the best moaning you're likely to hear in a two-minute quickie -- but with your mind still on track one, in this unlikely case, you'll much prefer death over sex. (Myspace.com/theobjex)

A.K.

Jacob Smigel
EAVESDROP: A WEALTH OF FOUND SOUND
(Self-released)

Enough time has passed since cassette tapes were in wide use that even tech heads need no longer cringe when magnetic tape does occasionally reappear. Others, like sound-scavenger Jacob Smigel, live for their accidental surfacing. None of the 80 minutes of music and spoken word on Eavesdrop: A Wealth of Found Sound is Smigel's; he's simply the driven curator of material culled from old answering machines, personal recordings, audio missives, and kitschy commercial items plucked from attics and dumpsters over the many years he's been hunting it down.

Track 36 is from the first cassette he ever found, a tape-letter made decades ago by an anonymous and very senile old Reno woman for her son. Homemade jingles about Sunrise City Shopping Center and other Vegas locales make up track 14. Sometime in the '80s, a pair of young girls recorded themselves singing, dancing and cursing. That one made it to track 21, while number 29 features a marching band competition announcer critiquing on field choreography with terms like "tonguing" and "rhythmic articulation."

All 40 bits are exhaustively annotated by Smigel in an accompanying booklet that also offers background on what he calls the "Golden Age (1965-1986) of personal recording." The variety of moods presented is striking (fights, sweet nothings, cheers, karaoke, depressive diatribes), and the enclosed commentary is essential, although Smigel does become a little too conjectural at times when the beauty really lies in a recording's ambiguity. This is clearly a labor of love, yet he does get oddly snide on occasion, as in his assessment of the two young, questionably talented rappers of track 34. These are personal, found recordings never intended to entertain anyone but the creators -- why snipe?

Still, Smigel has done a very cool thing with Eavesdrop. Hear it once through, then random-shuffle it along with a few music discs forever after. (Jacobsmigel.com)

D.S.

The Fratellis
FIST FULL OF DYNAMITE
(Self-released)

The very first shout-out in these liner notes goes to the Double Down Saloon. That checks out. The Vegas dive has been a dark little nursery to scores of projects like this one, and the Sabbath-tinged metal-punk on Fist Full of Dynamite is just the kind of wail that's been eating at the venue's muraled walls for a long time now.

The Fratellis took their name from the criminal family of Steven Spielberg's The Goonies, and they're modern punk purists -- no more, no less. Guitarist Joe Wiehl was added last year to thicken up an original trio of singer/guitarist Dave Ramirez, bassist Larry Cole and drummer Tony Murillo. Now they're four burly, tatted-up local guys who've been around in some incarnation for the last seven years (one for each song on this 20-minute EP), over which time repeated exposure to A.F.I., Rancid and Screeching Weasel has left front man Ramirez with a penchant for tough love, as opposed to the wobbly stuff of emo or punk-pop.

"Mourning Letter" and "Take It Back" rock dutifully, while "Stop Whining" is one of the only tracks that doesn't launch an instant four-chord attack. That one begins cleanly, almost romantically, then goes double-time with sentiments like "I don't care about the way you live your life/ Just don't drag me into it and we'll be fine." In other words, "Hey there sourpuss, I know what you need. To shut up!" It's a protest harsh on its surface, yet coming so often from the shaky throats of rockers who'd surely have your back much sooner than the "I'm here for you, baby, if you'll just let me in" types. If that doesn't capture punk's modern essence, what does? (Thefratellis.net)

D.S.