Album Review: !!! - Myth Takes

Rating: 8 out of 10

I've been patiently waiting for an album to hit me over the head this year and scream "THIS is a serious contender for Album of the Year!" I ended up giving Menomena a higher rating than I'd originally intended, but that's only because it grew on me. What I wanted was something immediate. If you'd told me that what I was waiting for was the new album by !!!, I would have laughed at you. I liked Let Us Never Speak of It Again, the last (and final) release by these guys' sister band Out Hud, but it didn't hit me over the head. And I'd never read anything about !!! that led me to think they were going to provide the goods either.

Well, let's just say it: Myth Takes is fantastic. The album manages to push enough genre boundaries to be interesting, without ever sacrificing its infectious grooviness. It's danceable, and every song is built on a killer bass line that will have you nodding your head in time - but it's wonderfully varied and even occasionally unpredictable without ever being ostentatious. And, it's sequenced brilliantly: the first three songs slowly build in intensity; the middle four are a seamless peak; and then the final three songs steadily wind down.

I can't think of a more pleasurable way to spend 20 minutes than those middle four songs. "A New Name" starts out a bit jagged on the verses, segues into a woozy bridge with insistent drum fills, and then throws an indelible falsetto over an instantly-memorable guitar riff for the chorus. "Heart of Hearts" is built on restless guitar notes and rattling cymbals duking it out with a sinister looping bass. The arch, processed female vocals on the chorus remind me of My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult - which in present context is totally a compliment. "Sweet Life" (my favorite song on the album) starts out simply with vocalist Nic Offer singing breathily over a jangly guitar. With zero warning the choruses explode out of your speakers: enter the bass line over a sea of percussion while Offer urgently intones nonsense syllables a la Deerhoof. (It sounds like he might be spelling something, actually, but damned if I know what it is). The song winds down to a single buzzing synth, and then the stomping greatness of "Yadnus" kicks in - 5 minutes of loping bass, jangly dancepunk guitar and a jawdropping percussive breakdown at the 3:20 mark. After that, it's an increasingly dreamy drift through the final three songs, closing out with the sedate and ballad "Infinifold."

There are a few missteps on Myth Takes, most notably the self-consicous hip hop parody "Must be the Moon," whose lyrics tritely recount a club hookup and subsequent sexual conquest. Offer pretty much shoots himself in the foot with the meta-ness of a line like "It's all beginning to sound like a rap song" on the only song where he attempts - poorly - to rap. But the all-around awesomeness of the album more than compensates for this one bad choice.

It's early in the year still; I'll probably get even more excited about other albums in 2007. But Myth Takes' impressive mix of the familiar and unexpected, on top of its overwhelming grooviness and sheer fun, have definitely made it the one to beat at this point.