Dan DaranciangPixel Revolt
Grade: 3.5 stars
Bottom Line: An expansive album that soars when it rocks.
Tracks to Download: “Exodus Damage,” “Radiant with Terror,” “Continuation”
Released four years after September 11th, John Vanderslice’s “Pixel Revolt” is by no means the first sophisticated pop album to explicitly discuss American politics and foreign relations. Bruce Springsteen did it with “The Rising,” and Steve Earle with “Jerusalem,” to name a couple. Where these albums focused more on New York City and Afghanistan, respectively, Vanderslice’s newest moves on to the new battlefield – Iraq. The result is an expansive album that shows his range as an artist: condemnatory in its politics and often lovely in its harmonies.
Vanderslice, who is a producer as well, gained significant acclaim for his 2004 album “Cellar Door,” an album that also explores themes of violence and war. In “Pixel Revolt,” though, Vanderslice has produced a much tighter album, lyrically and musically. The album vacillates between his more customary sound of drum machines and loud acoustic guitars and an uncharacteristic sparseness. Whereas in “Cellar Door,” angry lyrics were met with equally angry vocals and loud instruments, “Pixel Revolt” exhibits mixtures of volume and theme. In the musically gentle “Plymouth Rock,” Vanderslice analogizes 17th century British settlers thrown into war with Native Americans with the war in Iraq. “When we jumped off the deck / white bullets tore right through my neck,” one lyric goes. “I lost the reason / I lost the reason, I’m here,” Vanderslice sings in the chorus.
References to Iraq are frequent throughout the album. “Trance Manual,” another musically spacious song, is about a journalist soliciting an Iraqi prostitute (“I’ll have my editors arrange for payment”). In “Exodus Damage,” one of the stronger tracks on the album – and one that includes a very tasteful use of a vibraphone – he goes back to September 11th with one of the more potent lines of the event in pop music yet. “So the second plane hit at 9:02,” the second verse begins. “I saw it live on a hotel tv, talking on my cell with you / you said this would happen, and just like that, it did / wrong about the feeling, wrong about the sound.”
The lively, energetic songs like “Exodus Damage” are where the album truly becomes exceptional. “Radiant with Terror,” a track based on a Robert Lowell poem, is a short and powerfully apocalyptic statement about life in the post-September 11th age. On “Continuation,” Vanderslice proves he can do apolitical indie-rock just as well as anyone else.
Indie-rock is a good thing and the one shortcoming of the album is that there is not enough of it. Though the slower, mood-setting songs are often the ones with the most potent lyrics, they unfortunately are also the most boring. Vanderslice is a dynamic producer of sound, and a proven, excellent lyricist. It is when he puts the two together that “Pixel Revolt” really shines.