CELEBRATION THE MODERN TRIBE (4AD)
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The Modern Tribe, the second full-length from the Baltimore trio Celebration, is clearly the work of a band camped out at the base of Cookie Mountain. Guitarless on the new disc, save for a couple cameos from Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Celebration are fundamentally different from TVOTR in instrumental makeup—it’s mostly Sean Antanaitas playing keys (including a guitorgan, a guitar modified to produce analog organ sounds) and bass through Moog foot pedals, Katrina Ford singing, and David Bergander on drums. And while TVOTR plays luxuriant, expansive space rock, Celebration’s fire-walking postpunk maintains a tight, terse focus, anxiously tromping locked grooves that are occasionally pocked by a solo or a shriek. But still, when you cue up The Modern Tribe it instantly brings to mind one band, and it’s not Celebration. Thanks to Sitek’s work as producer, a constellation of TVOTR’s signature sounds rules the record: the syrupy midrange muddle of the production (a sweet swamp of which Sitek is currently liege lord), the womby bong-hit reverb, the wind chimes, the horn section borrowed from Antibalas. And to drive the last nail in, every single member of TV on the Radio puts in a guest appearance.
Of course, there aren’t any women in TVOTR, which puts Ford—previously Antanaitas’s musical partner in Jaks and Love Life—in a good position to assert herself in the face of this pervasive influence. She’s long been a bit of an icon in the microscene where cool goth and posthardcore intersect, and over the past decade she’s expanded her range record by record, coming into full command of her strange and fabulous voice. On The Modern Tribe she sounds like a cross between a 1,000-year-old junkie and a witch you’d love to fuck. Her voice sweeps between extremes, from wispy and delicate to forceful and harsh, but it’s swabbed of all tenderness—even though many of her lyrics are run-of-the-mill romantic barf, she’s abandoned the torchy style of her earlier records. Usually when multiple songs on an album talk about “hearts” you can assume you’re listening to music made by and for teenagers, but here there’s at least one such tune—”Tame the Savage,” with its chorus about the “savage hearts of men”—that might be about the environmental apocalypse foretold by Al Gore, which would make it forgivable. On “Pony” Ford gasps in breathless petit mort staccato, then calls upon the spirit of “White Horse” by Laid Back, asking “Can your pony ride?” The word ride comes out “rhiiiy-duh,” and she lands hard on the h—giddyup, indeed. Her spooky voice is what separates Celebration from all the other bands out there—no other singer can hold a candelabra to that ghost-girl yawp.
For more on music, see our blogs Crickets and Post No Bills at chicagoreader.com.
