It's distressing how poorly the release of Gossip's Music for Men was handled stateside. Months separated the digital and physical releases of the album for no apparent reason. I saw these guys at Terminal 5, a venue that can seem to sometimes swallow performers. As expected, Beth Ditto and her crew delivered big time. All killer, no filler from this group. Their underground club hits like Standing in the Way of Control will last far beyond the aughts, but I really wanted some of the tracks from this record to break onto radio. Heavy Cross was the right choice for a promotional single, but Love Long Distance had the potential to be a summer game-changer.
Finally, Asobi Seksu's Hush was just a fantastic record. Drawing away from the reverb of their big hit Citrus, Asobi Seksu did a "mature" album in a way that didn't feel trite. Unfortunately, reception to the record was weird. Watch this clip of the band talking about it. Singer Yuki sums it up perfectly: Hush achieves this great balance between wall-0f-noise and sonic clarity but "people didn't want clarity."
The motivation for releasing their late end-of-year acoustic Rewolf may have been financial, but it was still a good way to complement Hush and a great record on its own. It's inspiring that the reaction to the poor reception to their most melodic record to date was an immediate follow-up that stripped out all of the reverb--nothing but the melodies remained. It was the perfect ending to this band's great year (product-wise if not commercially). I think the the melodies of Hush and the whispers of Rewolf might be just a passing phase and not just because of the Hush's failure to match the critical/commercial success of Citrus. I saw them a few months ago and walked out feeling like I'd just been to a Nine Inch Nails show. My ears rang for hours.
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