Constantines

Kensington Heights

(Arts & Crafts)

3 1/2 Stars

Better make that “Consistentines.” Kensington Heights finds the Toronto-based band striving in subtle ways to build upon the churning, anthemic rock they’ve nailed down on three previous albums—but you still wouldn’t mistake this disc for the work of anyone else. Singer/guitarist Bry Webb, whose gruff, urgent vocals evoke Strummer, Springsteen, and Peters Gabriel through Townshend, has mastered slow-burn passion just as the band has mastered the distinctively simmering rhythm, wheezy keys, and tangled guitars behind his voice. 

The album also tosses a female vocalist, Jennifer Castle, into the mix on four songs and minimizes the compositional and vocal contributions of guitarist Steve Lambke, which never really seemed like album highlights in the past. The crystalline production enables you to appreciate how skillfully the band assembles the elements of their songs into mechanisms of righteous momentum. You can almost feel yourself reaching for your lighter on songs like “Our Age” and the swaying “Time Can Be Overcome,” while the jittery “Credit River” is a textbook example of the controlled tension-and-release that makes the band so mesmerizing in a live setting. Kensington Heights gives you that live energy in a bottle, though the pacing flags a bit toward the end. Best of all, a new album presages a summer tour that will bring the band here in June. And Constantines in concert is the best kind of Constantines there is. 

SCOTT LINGLEY

m83

Saturdays=Youth

(Mute)

4 1/2 Stars

The Saturdays that the title of M83’s new album refers to belong to the weekends of 20 years ago—those teenage days when you felt invincible yet depressed, living in circumscribed surroundings but feeling panoramic emotions. And if you were M83’s Anthony Gonzalez, you were watching The Breakfast Club, listening to your Cocteau Twins albums, and dreaming of making music that sounded just like them—only, you know, more epic.

With Saturdays=Youth, that day has arrived for Gonzalez, who’s even working with Cocteau Twins producer Ken Thomas. The results are sublime, especially the achingly pretty “Skin of the Night” and the uptempo headfiller “Couleurs.” Even “Midnight Souls Still Remain”—11 minutes of slow, repetitive Enoisms—haunts more than it annoys. Saturdays=Youth is a nerdily nostalgic project, not unlike the elephant lamp Anthony Michael Hall talks about making in The Breakfast Club, but with one big difference. This one lights up.

PAUL MATWYCHUK 

Autechre

Quaristice

(Warp)

3 1/2 Stars

Man, exploring an Autechre album is trippy business. Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu once compared his approach to making music as a painstaking journey through a garden, taking time to explore every leaf of every plant. Well, Autechre is the sound of Rob Brown and Sean Booth exploring the circuitry of their computer nanometer by nanometer.

Brown and Booth like funk, but don’t stay in a groove too long. They like big, warm sounds, but not always nice ones—some of the noise on Quaristice could accompany a prison escape in an avant-garde sci-fi movie.

The standout track, “The PLC,” evolves from angular booty bass into old-school cluttered chatter, bigging up the cybernetic MCs at the end. There are a lot of confounding experiments here, but for every atonal blizzard there’s an admirable beat collage, and nothing that goes on for their usual 10, 15, or 20 minutes of wankery—making this Autechre’s most accessible album in a decade.

PROSPER PRODANIUK 

The Black Keys

Attack & Release

(Nonesuch)
4 Stars

Having heard the Black Keys’ 2003 album Thickfreakness, I knew that no matter what critics said, this minimalist blues duo was no ersatz version of The White Stripes, but creators of their own raw reinvention of the blues. The Keys’ new disc is just as singular: it departs from their traditional lo-fi sound, balancing their crunchy blues with soft alien flourishes courtesy of producer Danger Mouse. 

“All You Ever Wanted” kicks the album off with an unexpected smack of organ, while the flute in “Same Old Thing” is cheekily playful—the same goes for the ethereal xylophone in “So He Won’t Break.” For anyone lamenting the Keys’ concession to a more polished, produced sound, the final track “Things Ain’t Like They Used To Be” is a gentle reminder of their lonesome tones. If anything, Danger Mouse’s hip-hop background has prevented the Akron pair from stagnating in old habits while preserving everything that made their sound so sultry in the first place.

CHRIS LEWIS