Datasets:

statworx

/

pitchfork_album_reviews

like 0

Mobb Deep

Blood Money

Rap

Tom Breihan

On paper, Mobb Deep's decision to sign to G-Unit wasn't all that insane. For one thing, it's not like they had anything else going on; the Queens duo peaked years ago, they hadn't been taken seriously since Jay-Z bashed them, and they were getting clumsier and more desperate every year. For another, the duo's stark, nihilistic early work was a pretty clear influence on fellow Queens native 50 Cent, whose Get Rich or Die Tryin' was the bleakest, most violent big-selling rap album since DMX debuted. The big difference between the two camps was always in surliness. For all his gun-talk, 50 Cent is an optimist at heart, and his good-natured sing-songy hooks have a goofy, self-satisfied warmth. Mobb Deep have never been warm or optimistic, and their wispily claustrophobic mid-90s output set new standards for bloody paranoia. For this to work, they'd have to find some happy medium between two fundamentally opposed dispositions. Mobb Deep only pull off that balance once, on "Pearly Gates", a sunny track by Exile. Over a gorgeously lilting gospel sample, 50 Cent stays happy and congenial even when he's rapping about how everyone wants him in prison and then delivering a perfect little chorus: "Got a gift, I'm special with the flow, I'm good/ Shit, I done talked my way up out the hood." Havoc has a nice verse about redemption and Prodigy, the Mobb's craggily hoarse frontman, changes everything with one about how he hates God; it's stunning in its vicious rage ("For leaving us out to dry in straight poverty/ For not showing me no signs they watching over me"). It's a great moment, but you wouldn't know it from Blood Money's commercial release. Some Interscope bean-counter decided the song was too volatile and blurred out all the fuck-God stuff, rendering a potentially powerful song toothless. The rest of the time, Prodigy sabotages himself, leaving behind his harsh gutter-speak for clubbed-up money-talk. That's not a bad thing in itself, but Mobb Deep can't pull off triumphant, and so their boasts sound empty and joyless, and their misogyny is mechanistic-- just as boring as it is objectionable. Worse, Havoc and Prodigy can barely ride their own beats anymore; they sound beaten-down and defeated. Blood Money works when the two look back to times when G-Unit money wasn't on the table, remembering themselves as poor Queens kids longing for dirtbikes on "Daydreamin'", talking about getting their first guns on "The Infamous". Musically, some of the tracks are breathtaking; on "Click Click" and "Its Alright", Havoc takes G-Unit club-rap and makes it harsh and queasy, signifiers of smoothness rubbing up against each other just wrong. And Prodigy can still be truly menacing when he offers chilling specificity: "Gunpowder resi on the sleeve of my Pelle." But too much of Blood Money represents something sad and fascinating-- two demons domesticated, two artists who have willfully transformed themselves into hucksters.

Artist: Mobb Deep, Album: Blood Money, Genre: Rap, Score (1-10): 4.6 Album review: "On paper, Mobb Deep's decision to sign to G-Unit wasn't all that insane. For one thing, it's not like they had anything else going on; the Queens duo peaked years ago, they hadn't been taken seriously since Jay-Z bashed them, and they were getting clumsier and more desperate every year. For another, the duo's stark, nihilistic early work was a pretty clear influence on fellow Queens native 50 Cent, whose Get Rich or Die Tryin' was the bleakest, most violent big-selling rap album since DMX debuted. The big difference between the two camps was always in surliness. For all his gun-talk, 50 Cent is an optimist at heart, and his good-natured sing-songy hooks have a goofy, self-satisfied warmth. Mobb Deep have never been warm or optimistic, and their wispily claustrophobic mid-90s output set new standards for bloody paranoia. For this to work, they'd have to find some happy medium between two fundamentally opposed dispositions. Mobb Deep only pull off that balance once, on "Pearly Gates", a sunny track by Exile. Over a gorgeously lilting gospel sample, 50 Cent stays happy and congenial even when he's rapping about how everyone wants him in prison and then delivering a perfect little chorus: "Got a gift, I'm special with the flow, I'm good/ Shit, I done talked my way up out the hood." Havoc has a nice verse about redemption and Prodigy, the Mobb's craggily hoarse frontman, changes everything with one about how he hates God; it's stunning in its vicious rage ("For leaving us out to dry in straight poverty/ For not showing me no signs they watching over me"). It's a great moment, but you wouldn't know it from Blood Money's commercial release. Some Interscope bean-counter decided the song was too volatile and blurred out all the fuck-God stuff, rendering a potentially powerful song toothless. The rest of the time, Prodigy sabotages himself, leaving behind his harsh gutter-speak for clubbed-up money-talk. That's not a bad thing in itself, but Mobb Deep can't pull off triumphant, and so their boasts sound empty and joyless, and their misogyny is mechanistic-- just as boring as it is objectionable. Worse, Havoc and Prodigy can barely ride their own beats anymore; they sound beaten-down and defeated. Blood Money works when the two look back to times when G-Unit money wasn't on the table, remembering themselves as poor Queens kids longing for dirtbikes on "Daydreamin'", talking about getting their first guns on "The Infamous". Musically, some of the tracks are breathtaking; on "Click Click" and "Its Alright", Havoc takes G-Unit club-rap and makes it harsh and queasy, signifiers of smoothness rubbing up against each other just wrong. And Prodigy can still be truly menacing when he offers chilling specificity: "Gunpowder resi on the sleeve of my Pelle." But too much of Blood Money represents something sad and fascinating-- two demons domesticated, two artists who have willfully transformed themselves into hucksters."

Light Pollution

Apparitions

Rock

Ian Cohen

Due to the eccentric roster that Carpark Records has accumulated over the years, Chicago's Light Pollution stand out amongst their labelmates because they seem completely normal. On their debut LP, Apparitions, they serve up a good old-fashioned helping of ascendant song structure, washed-out synthesizer textures, and new wave basslines, all swaddled in heavy reverb. And by "good old-fashioned," I mean circa early 2005. In the wake of Funeral's success, this was the kind of thing you probably called "indie rock" with no qualifiers. This style isn't as prevalent as it was in years past, but that's not necessarily an obstacle. There's an undeniable potency when this stuff's done right: Antlers rode it to plenty of 2009 best-of lists. But rather than putting emotional resonance or compelling melodies at the forefront, Apparitions more often simply assumes its own grandiosity, and ultimately comes off like self-fulfilling prophecy instead of genuine drama. There are plenty of Big Moments here: Opener "Good Feelings" empties all of its chambers with a portentous fade-in, stately drumbeat, and rafter-reaching choruses; "Witchcraft" breaks into a waltz-time chorale meant to serve as Apparitions' show-stopping climax. But Light Pollution simply dive in when they should build. Perhaps it would be less of an issue if James Michael Cicero brought more distinction and command to his vocals, his voice often overwhelmed by its surroundings. That Apparitions never quite peaks the way it aims to makes its slower numbers total momentum killers instead of contextual turning points. "Deyci, Right On" and "Ssslowdreamsss" both slog through seven minutes of interminable lazer-Floyd atmosphere, stopping Apparitions dead in its tracks. Unsurprisingly, Apparitions fares best when it actually is freed from its ambitions. The swinging piano pop of "Oh, Ivory!" stresses its verse melody to great effect, while there's a tension between the sleek, aerodynamic verse of "Fever Dreams" and a chorus that captures the band's potential in miniature. "Fever Dreams" would otherwise be something of a standout, but Light Pollution once again get into their own way, succumbing to a zero-gravity fade-out indicative of the many moments where the band takes their name too literally: Nearly the entirety of Apparitions feels covered by some haze that's equal parts car exhaust and glitter.

Artist: Light Pollution, Album: Apparitions, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 5.4 Album review: "Due to the eccentric roster that Carpark Records has accumulated over the years, Chicago's Light Pollution stand out amongst their labelmates because they seem completely normal. On their debut LP, Apparitions, they serve up a good old-fashioned helping of ascendant song structure, washed-out synthesizer textures, and new wave basslines, all swaddled in heavy reverb. And by "good old-fashioned," I mean circa early 2005. In the wake of Funeral's success, this was the kind of thing you probably called "indie rock" with no qualifiers. This style isn't as prevalent as it was in years past, but that's not necessarily an obstacle. There's an undeniable potency when this stuff's done right: Antlers rode it to plenty of 2009 best-of lists. But rather than putting emotional resonance or compelling melodies at the forefront, Apparitions more often simply assumes its own grandiosity, and ultimately comes off like self-fulfilling prophecy instead of genuine drama. There are plenty of Big Moments here: Opener "Good Feelings" empties all of its chambers with a portentous fade-in, stately drumbeat, and rafter-reaching choruses; "Witchcraft" breaks into a waltz-time chorale meant to serve as Apparitions' show-stopping climax. But Light Pollution simply dive in when they should build. Perhaps it would be less of an issue if James Michael Cicero brought more distinction and command to his vocals, his voice often overwhelmed by its surroundings. That Apparitions never quite peaks the way it aims to makes its slower numbers total momentum killers instead of contextual turning points. "Deyci, Right On" and "Ssslowdreamsss" both slog through seven minutes of interminable lazer-Floyd atmosphere, stopping Apparitions dead in its tracks. Unsurprisingly, Apparitions fares best when it actually is freed from its ambitions. The swinging piano pop of "Oh, Ivory!" stresses its verse melody to great effect, while there's a tension between the sleek, aerodynamic verse of "Fever Dreams" and a chorus that captures the band's potential in miniature. "Fever Dreams" would otherwise be something of a standout, but Light Pollution once again get into their own way, succumbing to a zero-gravity fade-out indicative of the many moments where the band takes their name too literally: Nearly the entirety of Apparitions feels covered by some haze that's equal parts car exhaust and glitter."

Fear of Men

Fall Forever

Rock

Evan Rytlewski

Well, nobody will be calling Fear of Men twee anymore. On the Brighton band’s debut album Loom, Jessica Weiss voiced some seriously dark, at times even-morbid sentiments, but they were undercut by disarming jangle-pop guitars and sprightly rhythms that made it difficult to take her at her word. Thirty years of conditioning have taught us to associate these sounds with levity—after all, if Morrissey was mostly just being dramatic, surely Weiss was, too? On their follow-up Fall Forever, though, the band eliminates the disconnect between Weiss’ bleak prose and their delivery system. Any element with even the slightest whiff of Camera Obscura has been replaced by extraterrestrial synths, ominously bowed bass, and guitars distorted beyond recognition. It’s fitting the trio recorded it in a repurposed slaughterhouse, because Fall Forever is the work of a band gutting its sound and watching it bleed out. “Vesta” introduces the album with a jolt of warped, digitally manipulated noise, a throat clearing of sorts meant to announce the new direction. Like many of the album’s highlights, it’s thrillingly modern. Fear of Men could have easily pulled a lateral when making the shift from guitars to synthesizers, modeling the record after ’80s synth-pop roughly contemporaneous to the indie-pop of their debut, but instead they set their sights forward. In spirit, “Erase (Aubade)” has the clear, glassy directness of the best Sundays or Cranberries singles, but the song’s arrangement is glitchy, austere, and modern. The track runs just two minutes, leaving the sense that something crucial has been cropped; it denies the closure of a traditional pop song. The seemingly sweet “Until You” is thrown off course midway through its run by an outbreak of retching electronics, a detour from which it never returns. Even the album’s most straightforward dream-pop tunes are battered by sharp, militaristic snares. They create a sense of flagellation that’s driven home by Weiss’ relentless lyrical focus on how much pain and punishment she can withstand, and her repeated assertions that she doesn’t need the intimacy that’s withheld from her. “I’m like an island,” she sings, “I don’t need to feel your arms around me.” Nonetheless, she internalizes the rejection. It manifests itself in a resentment of her own “vile body,” which she describes variously as made of wax and stone, or feeble bones and useless flesh. “I burn my body on the fire/...Breathing deeper now I am free from the crowd/I’m as clean as the shame will allow,” she sings on “Trauma.” Perversely, it’s the album’s poppiest number. Weiss fills Fall Forever with lyrics like that, fantasies about shedding her skin, becoming one with the elements, leaving the physical world behind and transcending morality. That tight thematic focus means that the songs sometimes bleed together—many feel like minor rewrites of the one that came directly before it—yet the repetition feels deliberate, like part of a calculated do-over. “Without a body, I am free to dissolve,” she sang on Loom. She wasn’t heard the first time around, so it’s as if she’s vowed to repeat herself until the words sink in. This time they do.

Artist: Fear of Men, Album: Fall Forever, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 6.7 Album review: "Well, nobody will be calling Fear of Men twee anymore. On the Brighton band’s debut album Loom, Jessica Weiss voiced some seriously dark, at times even-morbid sentiments, but they were undercut by disarming jangle-pop guitars and sprightly rhythms that made it difficult to take her at her word. Thirty years of conditioning have taught us to associate these sounds with levity—after all, if Morrissey was mostly just being dramatic, surely Weiss was, too? On their follow-up Fall Forever, though, the band eliminates the disconnect between Weiss’ bleak prose and their delivery system. Any element with even the slightest whiff of Camera Obscura has been replaced by extraterrestrial synths, ominously bowed bass, and guitars distorted beyond recognition. It’s fitting the trio recorded it in a repurposed slaughterhouse, because Fall Forever is the work of a band gutting its sound and watching it bleed out. “Vesta” introduces the album with a jolt of warped, digitally manipulated noise, a throat clearing of sorts meant to announce the new direction. Like many of the album’s highlights, it’s thrillingly modern. Fear of Men could have easily pulled a lateral when making the shift from guitars to synthesizers, modeling the record after ’80s synth-pop roughly contemporaneous to the indie-pop of their debut, but instead they set their sights forward. In spirit, “Erase (Aubade)” has the clear, glassy directness of the best Sundays or Cranberries singles, but the song’s arrangement is glitchy, austere, and modern. The track runs just two minutes, leaving the sense that something crucial has been cropped; it denies the closure of a traditional pop song. The seemingly sweet “Until You” is thrown off course midway through its run by an outbreak of retching electronics, a detour from which it never returns. Even the album’s most straightforward dream-pop tunes are battered by sharp, militaristic snares. They create a sense of flagellation that’s driven home by Weiss’ relentless lyrical focus on how much pain and punishment she can withstand, and her repeated assertions that she doesn’t need the intimacy that’s withheld from her. “I’m like an island,” she sings, “I don’t need to feel your arms around me.” Nonetheless, she internalizes the rejection. It manifests itself in a resentment of her own “vile body,” which she describes variously as made of wax and stone, or feeble bones and useless flesh. “I burn my body on the fire/...Breathing deeper now I am free from the crowd/I’m as clean as the shame will allow,” she sings on “Trauma.” Perversely, it’s the album’s poppiest number. Weiss fills Fall Forever with lyrics like that, fantasies about shedding her skin, becoming one with the elements, leaving the physical world behind and transcending morality. That tight thematic focus means that the songs sometimes bleed together—many feel like minor rewrites of the one that came directly before it—yet the repetition feels deliberate, like part of a calculated do-over. “Without a body, I am free to dissolve,” she sang on Loom. She wasn’t heard the first time around, so it’s as if she’s vowed to repeat herself until the words sink in. This time they do."

The Seven Fields Of Aphelion

Periphery

Electronic

Brian Howe

Pittsburgh's Black Moth Super Rainbow make thick, sticky sounds that flirt with contradiction: Naturalism through technology. Judging from the surplus of overdriven machine noise in which their hippie-folk tunes are mired, you'd think the trees in Pittsburgh came equipped with electrical outlets. They insist on texture over definition, and as a consequence, their albums invariably sound warm, inviting, and homogenous. With Periphery, the third solo release by a member of the band (Maux Boyle), you begin to suspect that the tendency to favor timbre over songwriting is a function of the band's dynamic, and not the inclination of the individual members. Tobacco's Fucked Up Friends, a largely instrumental hip-hop record released on Anticon, retained BMSR's shaggy atmosphere, but drew it into focus with spirited beats. As the Seven Fields of Aphelion, Boyle strikes a similar bargain between her main group's fetish for analog unpredictability and a more precise method of composition. Working with synthesizer and lightly treated piano, she has produced an album of more comprehensible sounds, which seems plainly indebted to certain Eno collaborations-- with Harold Budd, on the piano-led numbers, and with Robert Fripp on the synth-led ones. There is, however, some pussyfooting. The sounds here are almost too comprehensible, and at times, deployed too tentatively. Music that treads the ambient/new age line can't stint on mystery, and these tracks, while always very pretty, can feel too obvious to draw us below the surface. On "Slow Subtraction", we hear some reversed synth hums and delayed piano keys-- there's never a "Wow, what am I hearing?" moment. A big challenge for this kind of music is to make soothing sounds we've heard many times interesting. Across this album, mostly stock tricks are deployed: chimes and drones on "Pale Prophecy", detuned wobbles on "Cloud Forest (The Little Owl)", gradually encroaching static on "Saturation: Arrhythmia". These effects feel moderately effective yet entirely familiar. Even though the building blocks are well-known, Boyle often manages to animate them persuasively and creatively. The bass that sweeps through "Slow Subtraction" has a grand upward shift, and "Grown" gets exciting when spacey synthesizers come corkscrewing out of the piano line. In fact, the record is almost always more attractive when Boyle lets her synths do more than sculpt the background, like on "Mountain Mary" and "Michigan Icarus", where they disrupt the linear slog with a sense of height and freedom. Periphery has all the right moves in place to deliver a pleasurable experience, and it delivers one: I'll certainly break this album out once in awhile. But it's missing an intangible quality-- the depth of Budd/Eno's The Pearl, or the force of Fripp/Eno's Evening Star-- that makes the best ambient music outstrip its scanty means.

Artist: The Seven Fields Of Aphelion, Album: Periphery, Genre: Electronic, Score (1-10): 5.8 Album review: "Pittsburgh's Black Moth Super Rainbow make thick, sticky sounds that flirt with contradiction: Naturalism through technology. Judging from the surplus of overdriven machine noise in which their hippie-folk tunes are mired, you'd think the trees in Pittsburgh came equipped with electrical outlets. They insist on texture over definition, and as a consequence, their albums invariably sound warm, inviting, and homogenous. With Periphery, the third solo release by a member of the band (Maux Boyle), you begin to suspect that the tendency to favor timbre over songwriting is a function of the band's dynamic, and not the inclination of the individual members. Tobacco's Fucked Up Friends, a largely instrumental hip-hop record released on Anticon, retained BMSR's shaggy atmosphere, but drew it into focus with spirited beats. As the Seven Fields of Aphelion, Boyle strikes a similar bargain between her main group's fetish for analog unpredictability and a more precise method of composition. Working with synthesizer and lightly treated piano, she has produced an album of more comprehensible sounds, which seems plainly indebted to certain Eno collaborations-- with Harold Budd, on the piano-led numbers, and with Robert Fripp on the synth-led ones. There is, however, some pussyfooting. The sounds here are almost too comprehensible, and at times, deployed too tentatively. Music that treads the ambient/new age line can't stint on mystery, and these tracks, while always very pretty, can feel too obvious to draw us below the surface. On "Slow Subtraction", we hear some reversed synth hums and delayed piano keys-- there's never a "Wow, what am I hearing?" moment. A big challenge for this kind of music is to make soothing sounds we've heard many times interesting. Across this album, mostly stock tricks are deployed: chimes and drones on "Pale Prophecy", detuned wobbles on "Cloud Forest (The Little Owl)", gradually encroaching static on "Saturation: Arrhythmia". These effects feel moderately effective yet entirely familiar. Even though the building blocks are well-known, Boyle often manages to animate them persuasively and creatively. The bass that sweeps through "Slow Subtraction" has a grand upward shift, and "Grown" gets exciting when spacey synthesizers come corkscrewing out of the piano line. In fact, the record is almost always more attractive when Boyle lets her synths do more than sculpt the background, like on "Mountain Mary" and "Michigan Icarus", where they disrupt the linear slog with a sense of height and freedom. Periphery has all the right moves in place to deliver a pleasurable experience, and it delivers one: I'll certainly break this album out once in awhile. But it's missing an intangible quality-- the depth of Budd/Eno's The Pearl, or the force of Fripp/Eno's Evening Star-- that makes the best ambient music outstrip its scanty means."

God Mother

Vilseledd

Metal

Zoe Camp

As in life itself, a proper introduction to the Swedish wrecking crew God Mother and their new album, Vilseledd, starts with a well-rounded breakfast. The video for “Weak,” the LP’s potent, whiplash-inducing centerpiece, puts a nightmarish spin on the typical Scandinavian spread. Its menu features toast and pancakes slathered with neon goop, pork and beans drowning in sludge, and a bag of cereal dumped haphazardly on the table, among other delights, all served up by people with a melting faces. God Mother’s music is the sonic equivalent of this hellish Nordic feast. Although the band draw heavily from locally-sourced styles like black metal, d-beat, and death’n’roll, they’d rather contort tradition than kowtow to it. On their 2015 debut Maktbehov, God Mother spliced together the aforementioned genres with an all-American, Frankensteined approach: Pig Destroyer’s sludgy grind, Converge’s melodramatic hardcore, and especially the Dillinger Escape Plan’s freewheeling math rock are prominent in their DNA. Many groups would buckle under the pressure of such an explosive juggling act, but not God Mother. They toggle between bone-crushing barnstormers and slow-churned stoner metal with remarkable technical proficiency. That Ben Weinman, Dillinger Escape Plan’s soon-to-be-former guitarist, signed them to his Party Smasher Inc. label (with the bold cosign “Torch, officially passed”) is fitting considering the two groups’ mutual, attention-challenged mindsets. But God Mother don’t explore enough uncharted territory on Vilseledd to fully justify their characterization as next-generation freak-metal luminaries. To wit, the quartet are miles ahead of their peers where well-rounded cruelty is concerned. From 30-second, hyper-condensed grindcore (“Enkla Svar,” “Dödfödd”) to rabid hard rock (“Caved In”) to tormented sludge (“Burdenless”), God Mother’s arsenal here runs deep and diverse, their fearsome chemistry amplified further by the punishing mix. Sebastian Campbell’s larynx-lacerating screams periodically pierce guitarist Max Lindström’s pointed riffs like a bayonet dipped in poison, threatened all the while by bassist Daniel Noring and drummer Michael Dahlström’s bifurcated percussion. “De Ovälkomna” and “By the Millions” are less songs than warzones: cramped, chaotic spaces where friendly fire is embraced with open arms and ample blast beats. The main problem with this thrilling firefight is that we’ve heard much of it before, however unpredictable the arrangements seem at first. “By the Millions” and “No Return” play out as hot-wired Converge songs, the lurching arrangements and staggered riffs shamelessly plucked from the grooves of 2001’s Jane Doe. The tremolo licks that open “Acrid Teeth” and “Charlatan” are nearly indistinguishable from each other: the kind of Darkthrone-esque noodling you’d expect from a garden-variety black metal band. Vilseledd might not paint God Mother as agents of the hardcore zeitgeist, but it does offer the occasional glimpse of greatness. “Burdenless,” the album’s five-minute shape-shifting closer, traps the album’s disparate influences in a mucky web, where they promptly fester like A-grade Neurosis. Besides providing a much-needed respite from God Mother’s bludgeoning zig-zags and recurrent fake outs, the song provides convincing evidence that the band’s protean tricks may be more unified than they let on. A little bit of discipline goes a long way.

Artist: God Mother, Album: Vilseledd, Genre: Metal, Score (1-10): 6.4 Album review: "As in life itself, a proper introduction to the Swedish wrecking crew God Mother and their new album, Vilseledd, starts with a well-rounded breakfast. The video for “Weak,” the LP’s potent, whiplash-inducing centerpiece, puts a nightmarish spin on the typical Scandinavian spread. Its menu features toast and pancakes slathered with neon goop, pork and beans drowning in sludge, and a bag of cereal dumped haphazardly on the table, among other delights, all served up by people with a melting faces. God Mother’s music is the sonic equivalent of this hellish Nordic feast. Although the band draw heavily from locally-sourced styles like black metal, d-beat, and death’n’roll, they’d rather contort tradition than kowtow to it. On their 2015 debut Maktbehov, God Mother spliced together the aforementioned genres with an all-American, Frankensteined approach: Pig Destroyer’s sludgy grind, Converge’s melodramatic hardcore, and especially the Dillinger Escape Plan’s freewheeling math rock are prominent in their DNA. Many groups would buckle under the pressure of such an explosive juggling act, but not God Mother. They toggle between bone-crushing barnstormers and slow-churned stoner metal with remarkable technical proficiency. That Ben Weinman, Dillinger Escape Plan’s soon-to-be-former guitarist, signed them to his Party Smasher Inc. label (with the bold cosign “Torch, officially passed”) is fitting considering the two groups’ mutual, attention-challenged mindsets. But God Mother don’t explore enough uncharted territory on Vilseledd to fully justify their characterization as next-generation freak-metal luminaries. To wit, the quartet are miles ahead of their peers where well-rounded cruelty is concerned. From 30-second, hyper-condensed grindcore (“Enkla Svar,” “Dödfödd”) to rabid hard rock (“Caved In”) to tormented sludge (“Burdenless”), God Mother’s arsenal here runs deep and diverse, their fearsome chemistry amplified further by the punishing mix. Sebastian Campbell’s larynx-lacerating screams periodically pierce guitarist Max Lindström’s pointed riffs like a bayonet dipped in poison, threatened all the while by bassist Daniel Noring and drummer Michael Dahlström’s bifurcated percussion. “De Ovälkomna” and “By the Millions” are less songs than warzones: cramped, chaotic spaces where friendly fire is embraced with open arms and ample blast beats. The main problem with this thrilling firefight is that we’ve heard much of it before, however unpredictable the arrangements seem at first. “By the Millions” and “No Return” play out as hot-wired Converge songs, the lurching arrangements and staggered riffs shamelessly plucked from the grooves of 2001’s Jane Doe. The tremolo licks that open “Acrid Teeth” and “Charlatan” are nearly indistinguishable from each other: the kind of Darkthrone-esque noodling you’d expect from a garden-variety black metal band. Vilseledd might not paint God Mother as agents of the hardcore zeitgeist, but it does offer the occasional glimpse of greatness. “Burdenless,” the album’s five-minute shape-shifting closer, traps the album’s disparate influences in a mucky web, where they promptly fester like A-grade Neurosis. Besides providing a much-needed respite from God Mother’s bludgeoning zig-zags and recurrent fake outs, the song provides convincing evidence that the band’s protean tricks may be more unified than they let on. A little bit of discipline goes a long way."

Naomi Punk

Television Man

Rock

Mike Powell

Television Man is a tough, grimy album made by three young men who sound like they could use more "outside time" in their lives. Its province is the damp basement, the dirty aquarium, dreamy half-places of strange light and no easy egress. No surprise that Naomi Punk are from the Pacific Northwest, a region legendarily devoid of sun but graced with persistent, almost prehistoric lushness—somewhere that feels both forbidding and overgrown at the same time. This is a band with a narrow idea of what it wants to do and a firm confidence in doing it. Most of Television's songs—and most the songs on 2012's The Feeling, for that matter—are slow and grunge-like, anchored by vaguely radioactive-sounding guitars and vocals mumbled to the point of unintelligibility. They are heavy and romantic but sour end-to-end, the ballads of a teenage swamp thing preening in the dark. They're also unexpectedly pretty, filled with twists of melody and structure far more sophisticated than they need to be to fly in the realms of punk and underground rock. Even on my fourth and fifth listen, I couldn't see all the way to the end of "Television Man" or "Linoleum Tryst #19", which have the psychedelic quality of a yawn that peels open to yet some improbably bigger yawn, stretching for a resolution always just out of reach. In that respect, one obvious touchstone is Nirvana, who among other feats wrote noisy, guitar-based rock songs around chord changes so beautiful and labyrinthine that on first listen they somehow seem wrong. (If you haven't listened to "Lithium" in the past year, treat yourself.) At root, this is basic but deceptively simple stuff about the way two chords can sit next to each other like two familiar flavors paired in some revelatory way. The wit is not in the ingredients, per se, but in the contrast between them. My introduction to Naomi Punk was through Parquet Courts' 2013 mixtape, which has continued to serve as a reliable map of underground bands marrying the simplicity and aggression of punk with the opacity of "art," by which I generally mean "things that aren't obvious." Television isn't an album I listen to all the time—I value a positive outlook on life—but when I do listen to it, I savor it by the minute. Its style is limited, but the band manages to spread out within it, discovering their own idiosyncratic little vocabulary without ever exhausting it. And at bottom, that's what I find so attractive about the album: Despite its dimness and introversion, it always suggests a horizon.

Artist: Naomi Punk, Album: Television Man, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.9 Album review: "Television Man is a tough, grimy album made by three young men who sound like they could use more "outside time" in their lives. Its province is the damp basement, the dirty aquarium, dreamy half-places of strange light and no easy egress. No surprise that Naomi Punk are from the Pacific Northwest, a region legendarily devoid of sun but graced with persistent, almost prehistoric lushness—somewhere that feels both forbidding and overgrown at the same time. This is a band with a narrow idea of what it wants to do and a firm confidence in doing it. Most of Television's songs—and most the songs on 2012's The Feeling, for that matter—are slow and grunge-like, anchored by vaguely radioactive-sounding guitars and vocals mumbled to the point of unintelligibility. They are heavy and romantic but sour end-to-end, the ballads of a teenage swamp thing preening in the dark. They're also unexpectedly pretty, filled with twists of melody and structure far more sophisticated than they need to be to fly in the realms of punk and underground rock. Even on my fourth and fifth listen, I couldn't see all the way to the end of "Television Man" or "Linoleum Tryst #19", which have the psychedelic quality of a yawn that peels open to yet some improbably bigger yawn, stretching for a resolution always just out of reach. In that respect, one obvious touchstone is Nirvana, who among other feats wrote noisy, guitar-based rock songs around chord changes so beautiful and labyrinthine that on first listen they somehow seem wrong. (If you haven't listened to "Lithium" in the past year, treat yourself.) At root, this is basic but deceptively simple stuff about the way two chords can sit next to each other like two familiar flavors paired in some revelatory way. The wit is not in the ingredients, per se, but in the contrast between them. My introduction to Naomi Punk was through Parquet Courts' 2013 mixtape, which has continued to serve as a reliable map of underground bands marrying the simplicity and aggression of punk with the opacity of "art," by which I generally mean "things that aren't obvious." Television isn't an album I listen to all the time—I value a positive outlook on life—but when I do listen to it, I savor it by the minute. Its style is limited, but the band manages to spread out within it, discovering their own idiosyncratic little vocabulary without ever exhausting it. And at bottom, that's what I find so attractive about the album: Despite its dimness and introversion, it always suggests a horizon."

Armand Hammer

Paraffin

Rap

Paul A. Thompson

One summer in the mid-1990s, a young woman from Santa Cruz was renting an apartment in Harlem, off 139th Street. Earlier that same summer, she’d introduced her boyfriend—who had just finished his freshman year at a nearby college and who often stayed at the apartment with her—to a 16-year-old rapping prodigy who was evidently very into comic books. The two young men became fast friends. One day, burglars broke down the door to that apartment and stole, among other things, the young woman’s entire collection of CDs and tapes. The home invasion would be unremarkable if it hadn’t been recounted at the start of one of the pivotal records in underground rap, Cannibal Ox’s 2001 opus The Cold Vein. The rapping prodigy turned out to be Ox’s Vordul Mega. The older friend, who Vordul encouraged to rap, would kick around the fringes of the scenes in New York and D.C. for years after the fact. It wasn’t until 2012 that billy woods, armed with decades of trial-and-error and with many lifetimes’ worth of baggage, re-emerged with an album, History Will Absolve Me, that indicated he was finally, fully formed. Since History, woods has dropped three distinct, excellent solo albums—two of which were produced by Blockhead who, years earlier, was as responsible for Def Jux’s sound as any producer not named El-P. But the work woods has done with the rapper and producer Elucid as Armand Hammer is even more daring. They’ve made four releases together, including last fall’s ROME, which dealt with the nature of power and the way digital and corporeal life pick at and morph one another. Their latest, Paraffin, is their most kinetic effort, the one that feels the most like it’s made of sinew and instinct. Armand Hammer records are not unlike The Cold Vein: the writing is jam-packed with naturalist detail and esoteric asides, so dense that you can at times get lost in it, fully immersed, or let it wash over you and begin to miss things. But like Vast Aire and Vordul Mega, woods and Elucid are musically gifted enough to enmesh their vocals with the beats in a way that invites close attention but allows breathing room for those ebbs and flows of focus. They construct songs the way a good film editor will direct viewers’ eyes back and forth across the screen. Paraffin is extremely well-paced, on both micro and macro levels—see the way “ECOMOG” rises and falls, or the way the tension in the first three songs is paid off by the chanted release of “No Days Off.” The verses return, time and time again, to the dark comedy of Western capitalism (“You don’t work, you don’t eat”), to the particulars of American racism (“I elect ‘Nature of the Threat’ as the new black national anthem”), to cutting words from relatives at tense wakes (“Still remember something foul my uncle said/Yeah, I’ma carry that to the end”). The production, from Willie Green, Kenny Segal, August Fanon, Messiah Musik, Ohbliv, and Elucid himself, skews distorted and dissonant, toward the black-and-white of the album cover. Elucid, who in the past several years has issued his major, confrontational work in 2016’s Save Yourself, along with a series of shorter dispatches from Cape Town and East New York, opens the album alone. At first, his verse works on a mostly percussive level but ends with a missive for “the mamas locked behind the prison.” Few rappers working today are better at wringing substance from style; Elucid is comfortable sinking into the ether and rattling off a list of disconnected images, then synthesizing them into something thoughtful in the matter of a couple bars. His style is less outwardly conventional than woods’, but the two take turns tethering the other one back to the here and now. What makes their working relationship fascinating is that on a given song, their verses will have deep thematic connections, but little direct interplay, as if they exist on parallel planes. On “Hunter,” for instance, Elucid raps about bodies as moving targets in American killing fields, while woods writes about the way heroin dealers crane their necks to catch the ambient light. Given the weight of some topics, it helps that both rappers are genuinely funny and brimming with personality. On “Black Garlic,” for instance, Elucid calls YouTube provocateur DJ Vlad the “big boss at the end of the internet”; on “VX,” woods raps, “The money imaginary—I’ll send it to your phone” then mocks the collections agent who’s badgering him: “wiping cappuccino foam out the beard like, ‘How do you reckon?’” And a thread that runs through not only Paraffin, but the rest of the Armand Hammer catalog, is the foolishness of anyone to cast himself as a wise old sage. Paraffin will not bring about a sea change in rap the way The Cold Vein did; it is, by sensibility and by economic reality, something that needs to exist on the fringes. Regardless, both woods and Elucid find themselves with few peers in rap today, each in the midst of a five-plus year hot streak that shows no signs of cooling down. This is a record that’s uniquely attuned to the political, physical, and ethical realities of 2018 without being weighed down by its pop culture arcana or its attendant industry concerns.

Artist: Armand Hammer, Album: Paraffin, Genre: Rap, Score (1-10): 8.1 Album review: "One summer in the mid-1990s, a young woman from Santa Cruz was renting an apartment in Harlem, off 139th Street. Earlier that same summer, she’d introduced her boyfriend—who had just finished his freshman year at a nearby college and who often stayed at the apartment with her—to a 16-year-old rapping prodigy who was evidently very into comic books. The two young men became fast friends. One day, burglars broke down the door to that apartment and stole, among other things, the young woman’s entire collection of CDs and tapes. The home invasion would be unremarkable if it hadn’t been recounted at the start of one of the pivotal records in underground rap, Cannibal Ox’s 2001 opus The Cold Vein. The rapping prodigy turned out to be Ox’s Vordul Mega. The older friend, who Vordul encouraged to rap, would kick around the fringes of the scenes in New York and D.C. for years after the fact. It wasn’t until 2012 that billy woods, armed with decades of trial-and-error and with many lifetimes’ worth of baggage, re-emerged with an album, History Will Absolve Me, that indicated he was finally, fully formed. Since History, woods has dropped three distinct, excellent solo albums—two of which were produced by Blockhead who, years earlier, was as responsible for Def Jux’s sound as any producer not named El-P. But the work woods has done with the rapper and producer Elucid as Armand Hammer is even more daring. They’ve made four releases together, including last fall’s ROME, which dealt with the nature of power and the way digital and corporeal life pick at and morph one another. Their latest, Paraffin, is their most kinetic effort, the one that feels the most like it’s made of sinew and instinct. Armand Hammer records are not unlike The Cold Vein: the writing is jam-packed with naturalist detail and esoteric asides, so dense that you can at times get lost in it, fully immersed, or let it wash over you and begin to miss things. But like Vast Aire and Vordul Mega, woods and Elucid are musically gifted enough to enmesh their vocals with the beats in a way that invites close attention but allows breathing room for those ebbs and flows of focus. They construct songs the way a good film editor will direct viewers’ eyes back and forth across the screen. Paraffin is extremely well-paced, on both micro and macro levels—see the way “ECOMOG” rises and falls, or the way the tension in the first three songs is paid off by the chanted release of “No Days Off.” The verses return, time and time again, to the dark comedy of Western capitalism (“You don’t work, you don’t eat”), to the particulars of American racism (“I elect ‘Nature of the Threat’ as the new black national anthem”), to cutting words from relatives at tense wakes (“Still remember something foul my uncle said/Yeah, I’ma carry that to the end”). The production, from Willie Green, Kenny Segal, August Fanon, Messiah Musik, Ohbliv, and Elucid himself, skews distorted and dissonant, toward the black-and-white of the album cover. Elucid, who in the past several years has issued his major, confrontational work in 2016’s Save Yourself, along with a series of shorter dispatches from Cape Town and East New York, opens the album alone. At first, his verse works on a mostly percussive level but ends with a missive for “the mamas locked behind the prison.” Few rappers working today are better at wringing substance from style; Elucid is comfortable sinking into the ether and rattling off a list of disconnected images, then synthesizing them into something thoughtful in the matter of a couple bars. His style is less outwardly conventional than woods’, but the two take turns tethering the other one back to the here and now. What makes their working relationship fascinating is that on a given song, their verses will have deep thematic connections, but little direct interplay, as if they exist on parallel planes. On “Hunter,” for instance, Elucid raps about bodies as moving targets in American killing fields, while woods writes about the way heroin dealers crane their necks to catch the ambient light. Given the weight of some topics, it helps that both rappers are genuinely funny and brimming with personality. On “Black Garlic,” for instance, Elucid calls YouTube provocateur DJ Vlad the “big boss at the end of the internet”; on “VX,” woods raps, “The money imaginary—I’ll send it to your phone” then mocks the collections agent who’s badgering him: “wiping cappuccino foam out the beard like, ‘How do you reckon?’” And a thread that runs through not only Paraffin, but the rest of the Armand Hammer catalog, is the foolishness of anyone to cast himself as a wise old sage. Paraffin will not bring about a sea change in rap the way The Cold Vein did; it is, by sensibility and by economic reality, something that needs to exist on the fringes. Regardless, both woods and Elucid find themselves with few peers in rap today, each in the midst of a five-plus year hot streak that shows no signs of cooling down. This is a record that’s uniquely attuned to the political, physical, and ethical realities of 2018 without being weighed down by its pop culture arcana or its attendant industry concerns."

Pallers

The Sea of Memories

Pop/R&B

Joshua Love

Through assorted projects and roles, Johan Angergård of the Legends, Club 8, and Acid House Kings-- not to mention the head of Labrador Records-- has built a cottage industry out of mining fragile, lovely corners of pop's past. His newest endeavor, the synth-pop duo Pallers, has really hit the nail on the head. Joined by longtime friend Henrik Mårtensson, the group's debut album, The Sea of Memories, couldn't be more aptly titled-- these two wistful romantics are drowning in it. Not only is Pallers' music exquisitely beholden to the 1980s, the duo's songs are also lyrically obsessed with gazing backwards. In their melancholic Scandinavian way, Pallers find a way to ache about every kind of reminiscence. They can conjure up an old mistake or missed opportunity and wallow in regret, yet just as easily fixate on a moment of bliss from the past and then mourn the fact that it's gone. Even as a wonderful thing is in the process of happening, the seed of its loss seems to be lurking just beneath the surface. Fortunately, Pallers know the right kind of musical accompaniment to make all of these retrospective bum trips feel beautifully poignant rather than drearily whiny. Taking ample pages from New Order's playbook, the duo sculpts soundscapes that are sufficiently moody to suit their sad-eyed lyrics, yet feature enough insistent beats and squirming synths to maintain a brisk, sometimes even heart-rushing pace. The album's second track, "Humdrum", sets this template, wedding nimble synths to plangent guitars, while the whispered lovesick vocals rue the fact that "You're in my head/ Not my bed." The congruently titled pair "Come Rain, Come Sunshine" and "Years Go, Days Pass" maintains this delicately percolating momentum, complete with the sort of terminally sighing lyrics that wonder, "If we had the chance to do it over again would we let it be?" or opine, "Hearts are cold in the rain." Better still is "The Kiss", a naked, lovestruck declaration heralded by the refrain, "If it wasn't a kiss/ Then I don't know what it was." Admittedly, the album's moves are exceedingly well-worn, yet like fellow 21st century synth-poppers Junior Boys, Pallers' precise craftsmanship means they're also able to elicit many of the same deeply affecting moods and sensations as their forbears. To their credit, Pallers also hit on a way to diversify their portfolio-- namely by turning over "Wicked" to guest vocalist Elise Zalbo. Not only does the song break up the duo's lovely but same-y mooning, it also works as a canny, self-aware rebuke to some of the rehashing and ruminating that precedes it. Bright and lively, ready to embrace the possibilities of what lies ahead, Zalbo forcefully declares, "I don't care about this pain tonight."

Artist: Pallers, Album: The Sea of Memories, Genre: Pop/R&B, Score (1-10): 7.1 Album review: "Through assorted projects and roles, Johan Angergård of the Legends, Club 8, and Acid House Kings-- not to mention the head of Labrador Records-- has built a cottage industry out of mining fragile, lovely corners of pop's past. His newest endeavor, the synth-pop duo Pallers, has really hit the nail on the head. Joined by longtime friend Henrik Mårtensson, the group's debut album, The Sea of Memories, couldn't be more aptly titled-- these two wistful romantics are drowning in it. Not only is Pallers' music exquisitely beholden to the 1980s, the duo's songs are also lyrically obsessed with gazing backwards. In their melancholic Scandinavian way, Pallers find a way to ache about every kind of reminiscence. They can conjure up an old mistake or missed opportunity and wallow in regret, yet just as easily fixate on a moment of bliss from the past and then mourn the fact that it's gone. Even as a wonderful thing is in the process of happening, the seed of its loss seems to be lurking just beneath the surface. Fortunately, Pallers know the right kind of musical accompaniment to make all of these retrospective bum trips feel beautifully poignant rather than drearily whiny. Taking ample pages from New Order's playbook, the duo sculpts soundscapes that are sufficiently moody to suit their sad-eyed lyrics, yet feature enough insistent beats and squirming synths to maintain a brisk, sometimes even heart-rushing pace. The album's second track, "Humdrum", sets this template, wedding nimble synths to plangent guitars, while the whispered lovesick vocals rue the fact that "You're in my head/ Not my bed." The congruently titled pair "Come Rain, Come Sunshine" and "Years Go, Days Pass" maintains this delicately percolating momentum, complete with the sort of terminally sighing lyrics that wonder, "If we had the chance to do it over again would we let it be?" or opine, "Hearts are cold in the rain." Better still is "The Kiss", a naked, lovestruck declaration heralded by the refrain, "If it wasn't a kiss/ Then I don't know what it was." Admittedly, the album's moves are exceedingly well-worn, yet like fellow 21st century synth-poppers Junior Boys, Pallers' precise craftsmanship means they're also able to elicit many of the same deeply affecting moods and sensations as their forbears. To their credit, Pallers also hit on a way to diversify their portfolio-- namely by turning over "Wicked" to guest vocalist Elise Zalbo. Not only does the song break up the duo's lovely but same-y mooning, it also works as a canny, self-aware rebuke to some of the rehashing and ruminating that precedes it. Bright and lively, ready to embrace the possibilities of what lies ahead, Zalbo forcefully declares, "I don't care about this pain tonight.""

You Am I

Deliverance

Rock

Chris Dahlen

You Am I are beloved in their native Australia, and, without being too glib about it, it seems fair to posit that they actually sound exactly like that kind of band: polished, palatable, and boasting the quasi-confident swagger that comes from nabbing three number- one records in your homeland but enjoying relative anonymity almost everywhere else-- especially the market-saturated States. Because despite some fairly rousing recommendations from members of Sonic Youth (Lee Renaldo helped produce their 1993 debut, Sound As Ever, which, curiously, was recorded in Canon Falls, Minnesota) and smiley kudos from the kids in Soundgarden and the Strokes, You Am I have suffered a Robbie Williams-style, collective "Eh?" from insular American listeners since the band's inception over a decade ago. It's weird, because on Deliverance, their fifth full-length, You Am I seem so blatantly influenced by elements of classic, early 70s Americana-rock and moody, southeastern alt-country that it's hard to imagine their songs being more instantly applicable to any other landscape. You Am I's questionable band name is fairly funny in the proper context (it was plucked from the well-wet mouth of a rambling fan who was caught spouting broad philosophical treatises at a YAI show), but that's not especially helpful to anyone without a press kit or band biography. Instead, You Am I bank on the songwriting proficiency of frontman Tim Rogers, who consistently crafts catchy rock songs with big, singalong choruses and easily air-guitarable riffs. For the most part, You Am I are a noodle-heavy outfit willing to take the occasional detour toward catchy pop hooks or porch-country bellows. Deliverance evidences all of the band's sonic tendencies, from acoustic ballads to modern rock singles to wild electric romps, brought to fruition-- the record is a varied, occasionally scattered bit of tight-pants guitar rock in the grand tradition of albums by the Black Crowes, or, in the band's better moments, the Allman Brothers. You Am I don't break much new ground here, but Deliverance is still a solid showcase for Rogers' innate songwriting knack, and a carefully crafted, well-realized rock record. "One Trick Tony" sees Rogers' high, straining vocals and ample wah-wah swinging back and forth, boisterous and bluesy; "The Wrong Side Now" is a gentle acoustic lament, subdued and sweet (check the acoustic breakdowns and shimmery chimes!) "Nifty 'Lil Number Like You" is all country twang, dynamic vocal teasing, and foot-tapping prances. Mostly, You Am I just seem oddly well-suited for a Cameron Crowe soundtrack (seriously, think Jason Lee and Almost Famous' Stillwater) or for filling an amphitheater on a late and lazy summer afternoon. The world might not be in desperate need of more proficiently played, bluesy rock and roll, but, you know, here it is.

Artist: You Am I, Album: Deliverance, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.1 Album review: "You Am I are beloved in their native Australia, and, without being too glib about it, it seems fair to posit that they actually sound exactly like that kind of band: polished, palatable, and boasting the quasi-confident swagger that comes from nabbing three number- one records in your homeland but enjoying relative anonymity almost everywhere else-- especially the market-saturated States. Because despite some fairly rousing recommendations from members of Sonic Youth (Lee Renaldo helped produce their 1993 debut, Sound As Ever, which, curiously, was recorded in Canon Falls, Minnesota) and smiley kudos from the kids in Soundgarden and the Strokes, You Am I have suffered a Robbie Williams-style, collective "Eh?" from insular American listeners since the band's inception over a decade ago. It's weird, because on Deliverance, their fifth full-length, You Am I seem so blatantly influenced by elements of classic, early 70s Americana-rock and moody, southeastern alt-country that it's hard to imagine their songs being more instantly applicable to any other landscape. You Am I's questionable band name is fairly funny in the proper context (it was plucked from the well-wet mouth of a rambling fan who was caught spouting broad philosophical treatises at a YAI show), but that's not especially helpful to anyone without a press kit or band biography. Instead, You Am I bank on the songwriting proficiency of frontman Tim Rogers, who consistently crafts catchy rock songs with big, singalong choruses and easily air-guitarable riffs. For the most part, You Am I are a noodle-heavy outfit willing to take the occasional detour toward catchy pop hooks or porch-country bellows. Deliverance evidences all of the band's sonic tendencies, from acoustic ballads to modern rock singles to wild electric romps, brought to fruition-- the record is a varied, occasionally scattered bit of tight-pants guitar rock in the grand tradition of albums by the Black Crowes, or, in the band's better moments, the Allman Brothers. You Am I don't break much new ground here, but Deliverance is still a solid showcase for Rogers' innate songwriting knack, and a carefully crafted, well-realized rock record. "One Trick Tony" sees Rogers' high, straining vocals and ample wah-wah swinging back and forth, boisterous and bluesy; "The Wrong Side Now" is a gentle acoustic lament, subdued and sweet (check the acoustic breakdowns and shimmery chimes!) "Nifty 'Lil Number Like You" is all country twang, dynamic vocal teasing, and foot-tapping prances. Mostly, You Am I just seem oddly well-suited for a Cameron Crowe soundtrack (seriously, think Jason Lee and Almost Famous' Stillwater) or for filling an amphitheater on a late and lazy summer afternoon. The world might not be in desperate need of more proficiently played, bluesy rock and roll, but, you know, here it is."

Larkin Grimm

Harpoon

Folk/Country

Matthew Murphy

If nothing else, Larkin Grimm's solo debut, Harpoon, stands as quiet testament to how quickly the alien can transform into the familiar. Had this collection appeared just a few short years ago, Grimm's idiosyncratic form of rustic Appalachian folk might've sounded like a garbled transmission from another century, if not another world. As it stands, however, Harpoon is instead at risk of seeming downright commonplace, submerged beneath the onrushing tide of similarly constructed free-folk deviations. Yet it would be a mistake to overlook Grimm's wondrous, exotic creations simply due to the unfortunate timing of her album's arrival, just as it would be to dismiss this transfixing album as the work of a carpetbagger. Based in Providence, R.I., Grimm is a former member of the Dirty Projectors-- information that does little to prepare the listener for the delicate, highly stylized folk of Harpoon. Guiding her way with little more than guitar, dulcimer, and multi-tracked vocals, Grimm here quilts together Born Heller's icy, backwoods songcraft, Jana Hunter's homespun, lo-fi shimmer, and the ecstatic vocal peaks of Christina Carter. Thanks in part to Sophie Dixon's ornate, hand-drawn artwork, Harpoon also bears marked resemblance to the gothic folk of musician and comic artist Dame Darcy. And though the album is comprised entirely of original material, the influence of Grimm's roots in the Georgia foothills frequently creep through, lending the music a deep-set, handed-down fiber that sounds at once staunchly traditional yet still somehow quite unearthly. On "Pigeon Food", Grimm puts down a melody as pure and ancient as rainwater; sung in the sweet, artless manner of someone out hanging wash on the line, with only her eccentric multi-tracked chorus to date it as a modern recording. Things soon come decidedly more unraveled on the lengthy "Future Friend", when her layered encircling vocals descend like a flock of barn swallows and carry off the back-porch. Stranger still is "Harpoon Baptism", a incisive portrait of heartsick longing that eventually culminates with Grimm channeling various animal noises, witch cackles, and spirited inhuman howls. Music this singular and possessed seems to demand lyrics to match, but unfortunately the slim narratives of Grimm's ballads and ill-starred romantic chronicles often fail to meet the mark. Cryptic, out-of-time pieces like the opening "Entrance", shudder to a halt behind such earthbound lines as "I would follow him anywhere he wants me to/ And I would sing for him in a crowd of New York hipsters." Throughout the album, Grimm's lyrics are too consistently forlorn and lovestruck to doubt their sincerity, and as such she proves able to deliver them with an extraordinary breadth of conflicting passions. One only hopes that next time her themes prove ageless enough to better equal the live-wire magic inherent within her radiant music.

Artist: Larkin Grimm, Album: Harpoon, Genre: Folk/Country, Score (1-10): 7.6 Album review: "If nothing else, Larkin Grimm's solo debut, Harpoon, stands as quiet testament to how quickly the alien can transform into the familiar. Had this collection appeared just a few short years ago, Grimm's idiosyncratic form of rustic Appalachian folk might've sounded like a garbled transmission from another century, if not another world. As it stands, however, Harpoon is instead at risk of seeming downright commonplace, submerged beneath the onrushing tide of similarly constructed free-folk deviations. Yet it would be a mistake to overlook Grimm's wondrous, exotic creations simply due to the unfortunate timing of her album's arrival, just as it would be to dismiss this transfixing album as the work of a carpetbagger. Based in Providence, R.I., Grimm is a former member of the Dirty Projectors-- information that does little to prepare the listener for the delicate, highly stylized folk of Harpoon. Guiding her way with little more than guitar, dulcimer, and multi-tracked vocals, Grimm here quilts together Born Heller's icy, backwoods songcraft, Jana Hunter's homespun, lo-fi shimmer, and the ecstatic vocal peaks of Christina Carter. Thanks in part to Sophie Dixon's ornate, hand-drawn artwork, Harpoon also bears marked resemblance to the gothic folk of musician and comic artist Dame Darcy. And though the album is comprised entirely of original material, the influence of Grimm's roots in the Georgia foothills frequently creep through, lending the music a deep-set, handed-down fiber that sounds at once staunchly traditional yet still somehow quite unearthly. On "Pigeon Food", Grimm puts down a melody as pure and ancient as rainwater; sung in the sweet, artless manner of someone out hanging wash on the line, with only her eccentric multi-tracked chorus to date it as a modern recording. Things soon come decidedly more unraveled on the lengthy "Future Friend", when her layered encircling vocals descend like a flock of barn swallows and carry off the back-porch. Stranger still is "Harpoon Baptism", a incisive portrait of heartsick longing that eventually culminates with Grimm channeling various animal noises, witch cackles, and spirited inhuman howls. Music this singular and possessed seems to demand lyrics to match, but unfortunately the slim narratives of Grimm's ballads and ill-starred romantic chronicles often fail to meet the mark. Cryptic, out-of-time pieces like the opening "Entrance", shudder to a halt behind such earthbound lines as "I would follow him anywhere he wants me to/ And I would sing for him in a crowd of New York hipsters." Throughout the album, Grimm's lyrics are too consistently forlorn and lovestruck to doubt their sincerity, and as such she proves able to deliver them with an extraordinary breadth of conflicting passions. One only hopes that next time her themes prove ageless enough to better equal the live-wire magic inherent within her radiant music."

Tei Shi

Verde EP

Pop/R&B

Minna Zhou

Verde begins in low light. A single bass frequency pulses for a full eight bars before a voice croons from the dark: "I can’t be sure of it." Its echo follows close behind, and then its echo’s echo, twinning around each other, filling the grotto (complete with dripping noises) like waves at high tide. The track, "Can’t Be Sure", is the embodiment of what Tei Shi calls "mermaid music," and an intermittent heartbeat suggests that the "it" the voice sings of is likely a matter of the heart. The song, like the rest of the EP, explores the exposed, liminal spaces: between certainty and uncertainty, desire and apathy, wanting and needing. Tei Shi is the moniker of New York City-based singer/songwriter and producer Valerie Teicher. She released her first EP, Saudade, in 2013 with collaborator and producer Luca (who also helped produce Verde). The project introduced her to the world as a skilled and fluid vocalist, the kind who can create waves with nothing but her voice and loops. Born in Buenos Aires to Colombian parents, Teicher's family uprooted and moved to Canada and then she left for music school in Boston. "When your environment changes so much around you, you have to make yourself the constant," she said in a 2014 interview with Rookie. Teicher's music shares some overlap with the dreamy, future soul/alt-R&B sphere of Kelela or Tinashe, and she also brings to mind the similarly water-obsessed Rahel, or an '80s-pop-leaning Shura. But while her voice can fit anywhere she flexes it, she's still finding the best context for it. Verde is in one sense a series of experiments exploring how an artist maintains an individual voice across genres. The EP’s first single and second track, "Bassically", for instance, takes the form of a synthy '80s pop ballad. While the lyrics themselves fall a bit flat, Teicher sells them with her delivery, and over the course of a couple verses, she builds into some serious siren-level wails. "Go Slow", the pop gem of the EP, is a sweet, if guarded, invitation to get closer, with a groove that is part boom bap, part trap-lite, but swathed in electropop. "See Me", meanwhile, is a more direct line to Teicher’s indie roots. Atmospherically, it's kind of like a cross between the lushness of Bat for Lashes and the minimalism of the xx. It works beautifully, but the xx guitars in particular sound a little too close to the original, and you sense that Teicher is still figuring out who she is as a producer. She may still be coming into her own in that regard, but Verde glows with unmistakable and appealing confidence. On record, Teicher radiates a quiet self-possession, someone conscious of her desires and unafraid of vulnerability. There are a few possible directions mapped out on this EP, and hopefully whichever one she takes next, she’ll bring the same kind of magnetism and musical responsiveness with her.

Artist: Tei Shi, Album: Verde EP, Genre: Pop/R&B, Score (1-10): 7.0 Album review: "Verde begins in low light. A single bass frequency pulses for a full eight bars before a voice croons from the dark: "I can’t be sure of it." Its echo follows close behind, and then its echo’s echo, twinning around each other, filling the grotto (complete with dripping noises) like waves at high tide. The track, "Can’t Be Sure", is the embodiment of what Tei Shi calls "mermaid music," and an intermittent heartbeat suggests that the "it" the voice sings of is likely a matter of the heart. The song, like the rest of the EP, explores the exposed, liminal spaces: between certainty and uncertainty, desire and apathy, wanting and needing. Tei Shi is the moniker of New York City-based singer/songwriter and producer Valerie Teicher. She released her first EP, Saudade, in 2013 with collaborator and producer Luca (who also helped produce Verde). The project introduced her to the world as a skilled and fluid vocalist, the kind who can create waves with nothing but her voice and loops. Born in Buenos Aires to Colombian parents, Teicher's family uprooted and moved to Canada and then she left for music school in Boston. "When your environment changes so much around you, you have to make yourself the constant," she said in a 2014 interview with Rookie. Teicher's music shares some overlap with the dreamy, future soul/alt-R&B sphere of Kelela or Tinashe, and she also brings to mind the similarly water-obsessed Rahel, or an '80s-pop-leaning Shura. But while her voice can fit anywhere she flexes it, she's still finding the best context for it. Verde is in one sense a series of experiments exploring how an artist maintains an individual voice across genres. The EP’s first single and second track, "Bassically", for instance, takes the form of a synthy '80s pop ballad. While the lyrics themselves fall a bit flat, Teicher sells them with her delivery, and over the course of a couple verses, she builds into some serious siren-level wails. "Go Slow", the pop gem of the EP, is a sweet, if guarded, invitation to get closer, with a groove that is part boom bap, part trap-lite, but swathed in electropop. "See Me", meanwhile, is a more direct line to Teicher’s indie roots. Atmospherically, it's kind of like a cross between the lushness of Bat for Lashes and the minimalism of the xx. It works beautifully, but the xx guitars in particular sound a little too close to the original, and you sense that Teicher is still figuring out who she is as a producer. She may still be coming into her own in that regard, but Verde glows with unmistakable and appealing confidence. On record, Teicher radiates a quiet self-possession, someone conscious of her desires and unafraid of vulnerability. There are a few possible directions mapped out on this EP, and hopefully whichever one she takes next, she’ll bring the same kind of magnetism and musical responsiveness with her."

Curren$y

New Jet City

Rap

Mike Madden

Here was Curren$y, with about as much conviction as he's ever managed, on 2011's "Car Talk": "Critics say that he flow only 'bout weed/ They don't know about me." The NOLA native had reason to be defensive, as he's long been written off by some as a weed-rapper and not much more. It's a conclusion drawn from his lyrics, of course, but also from his penchant for beats that ooze thick grooves and soul-rooted instrumentation similar in spirit to other sounds that have characterized druggy music for decades. Curren$y is nothing if not prolific, however, and while he's never made a hard left stylistically, he's tweaked his formula at least slightly each time out over the past couple years, taking on everything from Hell Hath No Fury-aping crawl (#The1st28 EP's "Billions") to prismatic boom-bap (the Alchemist-produced Covert Coup EP) to live funk-rock (last year's Muscle Car Chronicles). That willingness to shake things up is usually pretty subtle-- not the case with New Jet City. Structurally, the tape is similar to 2011's Verde Terrace, totaling 45 minutes while split between full-length songs and briefer, chorus-free excursions. But it's more varied than any other Curren$y release, making stops for Stones Throw bricolage ("Living for the City"), Lex Luger ricochet ("Choosin'"), RZA-indebted rumble ("Moe Chettah"), and Kush and Orange Juice drift ("Three 60"). Obviously, pieces as disparate as these could never form a cohesive tape, but New Jet City doesn't really suffer from its lack of ebb and flow. Instead, it's a piecemeal unpacking of why we should continue to follow Curren$y even as he refuses to show up with anything truly new. This starts, inevitably, with the guy's rapping. Nobody's mistaking Curren$y's for much of a technician, and nothing here will change that; as ever, he sounds like he's just barely trying out there. But while plenty of Curren$y releases have more savory lines than this one, the 31-year-old's charisma and vocal quirks are on full display here. He embeds that enervated, sticky voice of his no problem in all the beats that come his way, sounding great even if he's nowhere near the most quotable he's ever been. (Maybe the best bars on the whole tape: "Gucci gloves on my fingers/ I'm pointing at the man and I see him in the mirror." Not bad.) Knowing that there is a minor shortage of Curren$y's linguistic gifts here, though, it would be reasonable to expect New Jet City to be lacking on the rapping front. Thankfully, the stocked guest selection is strong enough to redeem that and then some. In addition to big names like Wiz Khalifa, Rick Ross, Juicy J, and French Montana, former stars like Jadakiss and Juvenile appear alongside Curren$y's Jet Life copilots Trademark Da Skydiver and Young Roddy. None of these diverging personalities sticks out as unwelcome. Every last visitor trusts in his strengths to make things come together just right: Lloyd waxes euphoric for his hook on "Purple Haze", while Juicy choppily says things like "I shine like a UV ray/ And I get head like a new toupee" for "Three 60". Some of the collaborations work because of chemistry, some actually benefit from contrast; they all work one way or another, and that's the mark of both these guys as individual talents and of Curren$y's grasp of what will or won't mesh with him. New Jet City has already racked up more DatPiff downloads than Curren$y's last tape, the blaxploitation-based Priest Andretti. But even though there are moments here suggesting that Curren$y is switching up his style to appeal to a broader range of listeners (don't be surprised if the Wiz- and Ross-featuring "Choosin'", for instance, turns out to be his biggest song of the year), I'd like to think that he took a go at all these sounds in order to prove just how adaptable he is. For a guy who releases not particularly ambitious music as often as he does (three releases a year, minimum), the idea that he can still be hungry to do things a little different is a pleasing one.

Artist: Curren$y, Album: New Jet City, Genre: Rap, Score (1-10): 6.9 Album review: "Here was Curren$y, with about as much conviction as he's ever managed, on 2011's "Car Talk": "Critics say that he flow only 'bout weed/ They don't know about me." The NOLA native had reason to be defensive, as he's long been written off by some as a weed-rapper and not much more. It's a conclusion drawn from his lyrics, of course, but also from his penchant for beats that ooze thick grooves and soul-rooted instrumentation similar in spirit to other sounds that have characterized druggy music for decades. Curren$y is nothing if not prolific, however, and while he's never made a hard left stylistically, he's tweaked his formula at least slightly each time out over the past couple years, taking on everything from Hell Hath No Fury-aping crawl (#The1st28 EP's "Billions") to prismatic boom-bap (the Alchemist-produced Covert Coup EP) to live funk-rock (last year's Muscle Car Chronicles). That willingness to shake things up is usually pretty subtle-- not the case with New Jet City. Structurally, the tape is similar to 2011's Verde Terrace, totaling 45 minutes while split between full-length songs and briefer, chorus-free excursions. But it's more varied than any other Curren$y release, making stops for Stones Throw bricolage ("Living for the City"), Lex Luger ricochet ("Choosin'"), RZA-indebted rumble ("Moe Chettah"), and Kush and Orange Juice drift ("Three 60"). Obviously, pieces as disparate as these could never form a cohesive tape, but New Jet City doesn't really suffer from its lack of ebb and flow. Instead, it's a piecemeal unpacking of why we should continue to follow Curren$y even as he refuses to show up with anything truly new. This starts, inevitably, with the guy's rapping. Nobody's mistaking Curren$y's for much of a technician, and nothing here will change that; as ever, he sounds like he's just barely trying out there. But while plenty of Curren$y releases have more savory lines than this one, the 31-year-old's charisma and vocal quirks are on full display here. He embeds that enervated, sticky voice of his no problem in all the beats that come his way, sounding great even if he's nowhere near the most quotable he's ever been. (Maybe the best bars on the whole tape: "Gucci gloves on my fingers/ I'm pointing at the man and I see him in the mirror." Not bad.) Knowing that there is a minor shortage of Curren$y's linguistic gifts here, though, it would be reasonable to expect New Jet City to be lacking on the rapping front. Thankfully, the stocked guest selection is strong enough to redeem that and then some. In addition to big names like Wiz Khalifa, Rick Ross, Juicy J, and French Montana, former stars like Jadakiss and Juvenile appear alongside Curren$y's Jet Life copilots Trademark Da Skydiver and Young Roddy. None of these diverging personalities sticks out as unwelcome. Every last visitor trusts in his strengths to make things come together just right: Lloyd waxes euphoric for his hook on "Purple Haze", while Juicy choppily says things like "I shine like a UV ray/ And I get head like a new toupee" for "Three 60". Some of the collaborations work because of chemistry, some actually benefit from contrast; they all work one way or another, and that's the mark of both these guys as individual talents and of Curren$y's grasp of what will or won't mesh with him. New Jet City has already racked up more DatPiff downloads than Curren$y's last tape, the blaxploitation-based Priest Andretti. But even though there are moments here suggesting that Curren$y is switching up his style to appeal to a broader range of listeners (don't be surprised if the Wiz- and Ross-featuring "Choosin'", for instance, turns out to be his biggest song of the year), I'd like to think that he took a go at all these sounds in order to prove just how adaptable he is. For a guy who releases not particularly ambitious music as often as he does (three releases a year, minimum), the idea that he can still be hungry to do things a little different is a pleasing one."

DJ Spinn

Off That Loud EP

Electronic

Leor Galil

Off That Loud is billed as as the first EP for Hyperdub from DJ Spinn, but this designation obscures the footwork producer's long history in the Chicago underground electronic scene. Spinn, born Morris Harper, has been pressing energetic, beguiling footwork onto record for decades, even if only a fraction of those releases have featured his name on the title. Back in the '90s, he dropped tracks on cassette with longtime collaborator and Teklife co-founder, the late DJ Rashad. He squeezed through the closing doors of vaunted ghetto house label Dance Mania before it shuttered in the early '00s, releasing a raw, crackling track in 1998 called "Mutha Fuc*a" that Dance Mania misattributed to DJ Thadz. He also had a hand in eight of the 14 songs on Rashad's masterpiece, 2013's Double Cup, and this year alone appeared on a slew of Teklife and Rashad-related releases. Spinn's lack of marquee status often seems due to his eagerness to work with others, but he finally takes center stage on Off That Loud. It's his first solo release since Rashad passed away in April 2014, and the EP comes during a particularly rich year for footwork. Massive opener "Throw It Back" delivers megaton drops between scorching acid synths and sprightly, rapid-fire kicks. Footwork remains a niche concern—Planet Mu honcho Mike Paradinas recently told Dummy Magazine footwork albums sell so poorly he can only afford to drop two a year—but "Throw It Back" could chameleon its way onto a playlist of arena-sized EDM songs as easily as it could provide a soundtrack for dancers facing off at Battlegroundz on Chicago's South Side. Spinn handles two of the EP's four tracks on his own—"The Future Is Now", with its cross-stitching rhythms, is the hardest of the four, and the title track marries rich Rhodes organ with sputtering vocal samples and twitching patterns of percussion. But the best of the bunch is a tune Spinn made with Rashad, the previously released "Dubby", which showcases the pair's penchant for experimentation while keeping footwork grounded in its idiosyncratic pulse. Spinn and Rashad marry jungle breaks to footwork's syncopated drum and bass, and then pass the mic to Danny Brown, who raps: "I don't know 'bout where you from but this is how my hood work." Brown's squawk has colored downtrodden tales about growing up in Detroit, but he sounds utterly at home on "Dubby". As Spinn adeptly blends foreign sounds into a distinctly Chicago genre, Off That Loud shows his ability to help footwork thrive outside its birthplace. Spinn earned his veteran bona fides years ago, but Off That Loud feels like a new beginning.

Artist: DJ Spinn, Album: Off That Loud EP, Genre: Electronic, Score (1-10): 7.3 Album review: "Off That Loud is billed as as the first EP for Hyperdub from DJ Spinn, but this designation obscures the footwork producer's long history in the Chicago underground electronic scene. Spinn, born Morris Harper, has been pressing energetic, beguiling footwork onto record for decades, even if only a fraction of those releases have featured his name on the title. Back in the '90s, he dropped tracks on cassette with longtime collaborator and Teklife co-founder, the late DJ Rashad. He squeezed through the closing doors of vaunted ghetto house label Dance Mania before it shuttered in the early '00s, releasing a raw, crackling track in 1998 called "Mutha Fuc*a" that Dance Mania misattributed to DJ Thadz. He also had a hand in eight of the 14 songs on Rashad's masterpiece, 2013's Double Cup, and this year alone appeared on a slew of Teklife and Rashad-related releases. Spinn's lack of marquee status often seems due to his eagerness to work with others, but he finally takes center stage on Off That Loud. It's his first solo release since Rashad passed away in April 2014, and the EP comes during a particularly rich year for footwork. Massive opener "Throw It Back" delivers megaton drops between scorching acid synths and sprightly, rapid-fire kicks. Footwork remains a niche concern—Planet Mu honcho Mike Paradinas recently told Dummy Magazine footwork albums sell so poorly he can only afford to drop two a year—but "Throw It Back" could chameleon its way onto a playlist of arena-sized EDM songs as easily as it could provide a soundtrack for dancers facing off at Battlegroundz on Chicago's South Side. Spinn handles two of the EP's four tracks on his own—"The Future Is Now", with its cross-stitching rhythms, is the hardest of the four, and the title track marries rich Rhodes organ with sputtering vocal samples and twitching patterns of percussion. But the best of the bunch is a tune Spinn made with Rashad, the previously released "Dubby", which showcases the pair's penchant for experimentation while keeping footwork grounded in its idiosyncratic pulse. Spinn and Rashad marry jungle breaks to footwork's syncopated drum and bass, and then pass the mic to Danny Brown, who raps: "I don't know 'bout where you from but this is how my hood work." Brown's squawk has colored downtrodden tales about growing up in Detroit, but he sounds utterly at home on "Dubby". As Spinn adeptly blends foreign sounds into a distinctly Chicago genre, Off That Loud shows his ability to help footwork thrive outside its birthplace. Spinn earned his veteran bona fides years ago, but Off That Loud feels like a new beginning."

Distal

Civilization

Nate Patrin

It's both helpful and a little disorienting that the term "bass music" has grown to identify the general cross-genre hybridization of post-dubstep/funky/wonky/juke. It's helpful because it's good not to have to invoke a description with that many slashes. It's disorienting because there already was a movement called "bass music" decades back, modified by qualifiers like "Miami" or "booty." So the simultaneous incorporation of both bass musics feels a bit like some kind of inevitable "well, duh" streamlining. Frenetic 808s know no borders, and it's not like the connection was ever deliberately obscured. When Distal emerged from Atlanta with a grip of Southern hip-hop-tinged releases smartly engineered to connect those dots-- "Apple Bottom", "Eel", "Boss of the South"-- the only real surprise about his M.O. was how quick he could evolve. Civilization, Distal's first full-length for Tectonic, is one of those albums that feels like a rapid succession of new-direction singles gathered together as an overarching summary of a growing artist. It's also expectation-defying in a very deliberate way. From the outset, leadoff track "The Sun" pushes a red-herring swath of blatant throwback acid house that nimbly clambers its way toward something more gauzy and abstract and modern. It feels like some kind of good-natured poke at the idea of hitting one obvious signifying nostalgia button, especially in following that bit with a whole album dedicated to seamless juxtapositions. Paying homage without preserving everything in amber has been par for the course in bass music, refreshing an outlook as that might be. So there's other things that set Distal's music apart as its own thing worth isolating and following. His drum programming is often nothing short of diabolical, riding off crisp snare/kick/bass interplay that never feels overstuffed. At its best, it splits the difference between rock-solid, danceable beat programming and the percussive transcript of a wushu swordfight, steady momentum switched up with fake-out feints and advantageous jabs into open space. And while there's a lot of pull to the tracks that go all-out one way or another -- the space-horror lurch of "Gorilla"; the tense, cavernous footwork of "Boca Ratawan"; the ghettotech jackhammer "Drop Like This"; the LTD/Lincoln Town Car/Eldorado funk of "Feed Me"-- the tracks that really jump out are the ones where polarized moods are pitted against each other. Or with each other, more accurately. Coating its trunk-rattle beat with soaring Orb-caliber ambient whooshes makes "Preach on Hustle" sound both amped up and daydream-prone. While "Temple People" is otherwise occupied with signifying deadpan cool via Rakim samples and intensely choppy kicks, a tinkly electric piano riff sneaks in to add some lightheartedness. And it's a hell of a capper to dredge up some sax-and-Rhodes smooth jazzisms for "She Wears Pearls", then slyly revealing the percussive element to be a torrential downpour of drumline rolls. Civilization is a record that evokes so many eras and moods at once in parallel that there's a deliberate possibility of the listener losing track of all the sonic attributions. Is that drum pattern in "House Party Five" closer to UGK or Boxcutter? Are those sweeping, oscillating synths in "Not Cool" meant to pay homage to vintage techno or recent "purple" dubstep? Is that subtle integration of the "Funky Drummer" break in "Venom" inspired by 1988 hip-hop or 1993 jungle? Where do we set the dance music wayback machine, anyways? None of those questions gets a clear answer, but if you ask whether that stylistic lineage even matters, the response is a question in itself: Won't you have an easier time dancing after you pull that stick out your ass?

Artist: Distal, Album: Civilization, Genre: None, Score (1-10): 7.7 Album review: "It's both helpful and a little disorienting that the term "bass music" has grown to identify the general cross-genre hybridization of post-dubstep/funky/wonky/juke. It's helpful because it's good not to have to invoke a description with that many slashes. It's disorienting because there already was a movement called "bass music" decades back, modified by qualifiers like "Miami" or "booty." So the simultaneous incorporation of both bass musics feels a bit like some kind of inevitable "well, duh" streamlining. Frenetic 808s know no borders, and it's not like the connection was ever deliberately obscured. When Distal emerged from Atlanta with a grip of Southern hip-hop-tinged releases smartly engineered to connect those dots-- "Apple Bottom", "Eel", "Boss of the South"-- the only real surprise about his M.O. was how quick he could evolve. Civilization, Distal's first full-length for Tectonic, is one of those albums that feels like a rapid succession of new-direction singles gathered together as an overarching summary of a growing artist. It's also expectation-defying in a very deliberate way. From the outset, leadoff track "The Sun" pushes a red-herring swath of blatant throwback acid house that nimbly clambers its way toward something more gauzy and abstract and modern. It feels like some kind of good-natured poke at the idea of hitting one obvious signifying nostalgia button, especially in following that bit with a whole album dedicated to seamless juxtapositions. Paying homage without preserving everything in amber has been par for the course in bass music, refreshing an outlook as that might be. So there's other things that set Distal's music apart as its own thing worth isolating and following. His drum programming is often nothing short of diabolical, riding off crisp snare/kick/bass interplay that never feels overstuffed. At its best, it splits the difference between rock-solid, danceable beat programming and the percussive transcript of a wushu swordfight, steady momentum switched up with fake-out feints and advantageous jabs into open space. And while there's a lot of pull to the tracks that go all-out one way or another -- the space-horror lurch of "Gorilla"; the tense, cavernous footwork of "Boca Ratawan"; the ghettotech jackhammer "Drop Like This"; the LTD/Lincoln Town Car/Eldorado funk of "Feed Me"-- the tracks that really jump out are the ones where polarized moods are pitted against each other. Or with each other, more accurately. Coating its trunk-rattle beat with soaring Orb-caliber ambient whooshes makes "Preach on Hustle" sound both amped up and daydream-prone. While "Temple People" is otherwise occupied with signifying deadpan cool via Rakim samples and intensely choppy kicks, a tinkly electric piano riff sneaks in to add some lightheartedness. And it's a hell of a capper to dredge up some sax-and-Rhodes smooth jazzisms for "She Wears Pearls", then slyly revealing the percussive element to be a torrential downpour of drumline rolls. Civilization is a record that evokes so many eras and moods at once in parallel that there's a deliberate possibility of the listener losing track of all the sonic attributions. Is that drum pattern in "House Party Five" closer to UGK or Boxcutter? Are those sweeping, oscillating synths in "Not Cool" meant to pay homage to vintage techno or recent "purple" dubstep? Is that subtle integration of the "Funky Drummer" break in "Venom" inspired by 1988 hip-hop or 1993 jungle? Where do we set the dance music wayback machine, anyways? None of those questions gets a clear answer, but if you ask whether that stylistic lineage even matters, the response is a question in itself: Won't you have an easier time dancing after you pull that stick out your ass?"

Empire of the Sun

Walking on a Dream

Electronic,Rock

Mike Orme

Anyone who calls Australia's Empire of the Sun an unlikely collaboration needs a lesson in aplomb. In fact, it's tough by now to be surprised by much of anything these guys do. Luke Steele of the high concept pysch-pop outfit Sleepy Jackson and Nick Littlemore of dance duo Pnau, while taking divergent paths to Down Under pop stardom, are essentially kindred spirits bound by flamboyance and an odd idealism. Inspired by untold numbers of late nights and acid trips, at their indulgent best they strike a trenchant middle ground between fantasy and historical revisionism. Steele's big orchestras and Littlemore's whiz-bang saccharine samples both aspire to a grand sense of scale. A hundred bucks says each of these guys had a psychedelic 1970s country-disco epic on his back-burner anyway. The title track, with its clubby beat and falsetto hook, seems like the kind of hit Steele has always wanted to write, but here he's found the right editor. Littlemore has evidently cleared a path for his partner, cutting through the relentless elaborations that adorned and perhaps encumbered the two Sleepy Jackson records. Steele may be his own worst enemy, his finger always poised at the ready on the overdub button at the chance of adding jangle to his overwrought jangle-pop. The addition of a co-composer has helped forge a bit of an uneasy truce in his frenzied psyche. Some cuts might even give rise to such simplistic fits of impulse as dancing. Of course, let's not forget who we're talking about here. Luke Steele still effortlessly reminds everyone within earshot that he's really into himself. Like, really. He's the guy on the cover of the Sleepy Jackson's last record Personality as the bare-chested angel perched atop an Arctic ice field, austerely bearing in his arms the fetal, bare-chested figure of… himself. This delusion of grandeur manifesests itself on Walking's ridiculous cover, the epic spawn of Star Wars and "Zoobilee Zoo" raised straight out of promo poster hell. It seems a career spent in such indulgence can't just be streamlined overnight, because although Empire tries mightily, they collapse underneath too many ideas before the record is even half over. Same beast, new duds: instead of packing the arrangements with Personality's meaningless little fills, countermelodies, and interludes, the duo try their hand at genres they've apparently always wanted to do, like booty bass or yacht rock ballads. No wonder people buy individual tracks rather than full albums these days-- few buzzes die so abruptly as in the transition of the complex, ethereal melodies of "We Are the People" into the following cut "Delta Bay", which sounds like "Thriller" sung by cats. If a metaphor could describe such an utterly puzzling sense of scale, it would surely fall somewhere in between throwing pasta at the wall and hunting the White Whale. Steele and Littlemore both seem incapable of diverging from their relentless quest for epic Meaning, but while some material is about as sublime and immediate as anything either has done, just as much crashes and burns. Thankfully, "Tiger by My Side" bulldozes the second-half wreckage with Station to Station swagger and a pounding, jammy Neu! beat. The song's impenetrable lyrics reference a fitting thematic menagerie of real and imagined beasts, and also may or may not have influenced the naming of Steele's six month old daughter Sunny Tiger, his first child with wife Snappy Dolphin. Seriously, you can't make this stuff up.

Artist: Empire of the Sun, Album: Walking on a Dream, Genre: Electronic,Rock, Score (1-10): 6.4 Album review: "Anyone who calls Australia's Empire of the Sun an unlikely collaboration needs a lesson in aplomb. In fact, it's tough by now to be surprised by much of anything these guys do. Luke Steele of the high concept pysch-pop outfit Sleepy Jackson and Nick Littlemore of dance duo Pnau, while taking divergent paths to Down Under pop stardom, are essentially kindred spirits bound by flamboyance and an odd idealism. Inspired by untold numbers of late nights and acid trips, at their indulgent best they strike a trenchant middle ground between fantasy and historical revisionism. Steele's big orchestras and Littlemore's whiz-bang saccharine samples both aspire to a grand sense of scale. A hundred bucks says each of these guys had a psychedelic 1970s country-disco epic on his back-burner anyway. The title track, with its clubby beat and falsetto hook, seems like the kind of hit Steele has always wanted to write, but here he's found the right editor. Littlemore has evidently cleared a path for his partner, cutting through the relentless elaborations that adorned and perhaps encumbered the two Sleepy Jackson records. Steele may be his own worst enemy, his finger always poised at the ready on the overdub button at the chance of adding jangle to his overwrought jangle-pop. The addition of a co-composer has helped forge a bit of an uneasy truce in his frenzied psyche. Some cuts might even give rise to such simplistic fits of impulse as dancing. Of course, let's not forget who we're talking about here. Luke Steele still effortlessly reminds everyone within earshot that he's really into himself. Like, really. He's the guy on the cover of the Sleepy Jackson's last record Personality as the bare-chested angel perched atop an Arctic ice field, austerely bearing in his arms the fetal, bare-chested figure of… himself. This delusion of grandeur manifesests itself on Walking's ridiculous cover, the epic spawn of Star Wars and "Zoobilee Zoo" raised straight out of promo poster hell. It seems a career spent in such indulgence can't just be streamlined overnight, because although Empire tries mightily, they collapse underneath too many ideas before the record is even half over. Same beast, new duds: instead of packing the arrangements with Personality's meaningless little fills, countermelodies, and interludes, the duo try their hand at genres they've apparently always wanted to do, like booty bass or yacht rock ballads. No wonder people buy individual tracks rather than full albums these days-- few buzzes die so abruptly as in the transition of the complex, ethereal melodies of "We Are the People" into the following cut "Delta Bay", which sounds like "Thriller" sung by cats. If a metaphor could describe such an utterly puzzling sense of scale, it would surely fall somewhere in between throwing pasta at the wall and hunting the White Whale. Steele and Littlemore both seem incapable of diverging from their relentless quest for epic Meaning, but while some material is about as sublime and immediate as anything either has done, just as much crashes and burns. Thankfully, "Tiger by My Side" bulldozes the second-half wreckage with Station to Station swagger and a pounding, jammy Neu! beat. The song's impenetrable lyrics reference a fitting thematic menagerie of real and imagined beasts, and also may or may not have influenced the naming of Steele's six month old daughter Sunny Tiger, his first child with wife Snappy Dolphin. Seriously, you can't make this stuff up."

Bardo Pond

Cypher Documents I

Rock

Cameron Macdonald

Slapstick mystic Tom Robbins wrote that human bodies are actually vehicles for water to travel on land. There could be a grain of truth there, as understood from listening to hours of Bardo Pond in one sitting. The Philadelphians cannot kick their habit of playing blues that floats among the streets after the Earth sunk underneath the sea. The Brothers Gibbons don't strum their guitars as much as shaking off distortion to let their notes dry; Ed Farnsworth's trapkit desperately flails a waterfall and gasps for air; Clint Takeda's two-chord basslines ground the chaos on earth in a codeine slumber; and Isobel Sollenberger gives CPR breaths with her prayers in tongue. Cypher Documents I amasses six MP3s that Bardo Pond released monthly on its Hummingbird Mountain website for free between 1999 and 2000. Neophytes now have the opportunity to pay $13.95 for the goods. These tracks are mainly jams that gaze at their fingernails, but what the music beholds can barely be described by the King's English. There are almost no peaks or resolutions save for when the thinly-oiled machines collapse from entropy. In a way, Cypher marks a transition between Set and Setting and Dilate, although the band stills recycles its cauldron-boiled thrash-blues formula. Little progression here, but that doesn't matter. Opener "Living Testament" (released on the 2002 comp, Get Your Pots Out) is vintage Bardo Pond. Takeda and the Gibbons cough up soot while delivering their ohms to the heavens as Sollenberger murmurs and agonizes over migraines. One curious tune is "Slag"-- a near-marvel of fumigation-rock. The guitars mechanically blow steam, grind out a downer blues, blow steam, grind, and so on. It is a great idea for a hit-and-run minute, but grows rather cumbersome over four. The best from the mire is "Black Turban", featuring a guitar solo that stumbles around in circles to see God's thousand faces, while another guitar shimmers a drone that tell the onlookers to not worry as the good Lord is working in mysterious ways. One of the Gibbons then spends the final three minutes tapping his strings as if trying to slap the divine one awake. Cypher's finest moments are when the band simply breathes. "Nomad" is a pleasant stroll across a moonless plain with specks of yellow phospherent lights on the horizon. Sollenberger's violin veers by like a distant train, while Takeda's low bass tones are akin to covering your ears to hear your bloodstream. "Quiet Tristin" is just as haunting where the guitars are left to dangle on a lone tree surrounded by draught-cracked pools. The finale, "From the Sky" is a 31-minute psych-blues sketch projected on a two-story wall that can be a public safety hazard when played on a freeway drive. The auto-pilot groove floats in midair, while the guitars bite the surface, draw blood and skitter away-- all capable of knocking you into a daze. It's a peculiar sound.

Artist: Bardo Pond, Album: Cypher Documents I, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.8 Album review: "Slapstick mystic Tom Robbins wrote that human bodies are actually vehicles for water to travel on land. There could be a grain of truth there, as understood from listening to hours of Bardo Pond in one sitting. The Philadelphians cannot kick their habit of playing blues that floats among the streets after the Earth sunk underneath the sea. The Brothers Gibbons don't strum their guitars as much as shaking off distortion to let their notes dry; Ed Farnsworth's trapkit desperately flails a waterfall and gasps for air; Clint Takeda's two-chord basslines ground the chaos on earth in a codeine slumber; and Isobel Sollenberger gives CPR breaths with her prayers in tongue. Cypher Documents I amasses six MP3s that Bardo Pond released monthly on its Hummingbird Mountain website for free between 1999 and 2000. Neophytes now have the opportunity to pay $13.95 for the goods. These tracks are mainly jams that gaze at their fingernails, but what the music beholds can barely be described by the King's English. There are almost no peaks or resolutions save for when the thinly-oiled machines collapse from entropy. In a way, Cypher marks a transition between Set and Setting and Dilate, although the band stills recycles its cauldron-boiled thrash-blues formula. Little progression here, but that doesn't matter. Opener "Living Testament" (released on the 2002 comp, Get Your Pots Out) is vintage Bardo Pond. Takeda and the Gibbons cough up soot while delivering their ohms to the heavens as Sollenberger murmurs and agonizes over migraines. One curious tune is "Slag"-- a near-marvel of fumigation-rock. The guitars mechanically blow steam, grind out a downer blues, blow steam, grind, and so on. It is a great idea for a hit-and-run minute, but grows rather cumbersome over four. The best from the mire is "Black Turban", featuring a guitar solo that stumbles around in circles to see God's thousand faces, while another guitar shimmers a drone that tell the onlookers to not worry as the good Lord is working in mysterious ways. One of the Gibbons then spends the final three minutes tapping his strings as if trying to slap the divine one awake. Cypher's finest moments are when the band simply breathes. "Nomad" is a pleasant stroll across a moonless plain with specks of yellow phospherent lights on the horizon. Sollenberger's violin veers by like a distant train, while Takeda's low bass tones are akin to covering your ears to hear your bloodstream. "Quiet Tristin" is just as haunting where the guitars are left to dangle on a lone tree surrounded by draught-cracked pools. The finale, "From the Sky" is a 31-minute psych-blues sketch projected on a two-story wall that can be a public safety hazard when played on a freeway drive. The auto-pilot groove floats in midair, while the guitars bite the surface, draw blood and skitter away-- all capable of knocking you into a daze. It's a peculiar sound."

Oneida

Happy New Year

Rock

Jason Crock

A funny thing happened on the way from The Wedding: Oneida's triumphant 2005 release was ridiculously slept-on, the band's studio space was razed to make room for condos, and rumored plans for a sprawling three-disc follow-up called Thank Your Parents ended up as a measly 11 tracks. Tough year. But while the band is throwing up drywall at a new recording space, Happy New Year reflects the mixed blessings and emotions and makes the most of them. Critics love to reach for multiple hyphens and obscure garage acts to namedrop when summing up Oneida's sound. Happy New Year lives up to both the band's own cross-genre daring and the critics' idea of Oneida more than any of their previous albums; accordingly, it's all over the place. Opener "Distress", a formless sketch of medieval choir-like vocals and toneless instrumental gurgling, could be another band entirely. "Happy New Year" is, if there's such a thing, Oneida-by-numbers, as a midtempo distorted organ tears through the fabric of the song while guitars jangle and wail around the corners. Singer Fat Bobby's plaintive lament anchors it all, moving from psychedelic phrases to concrete urban details of cups of coffee and bus rides home, all leading to a decision not to decide anything: "The sun withheld its light from me/ I said a prayer, a 'We shall see.'" "The Adversary" picks up the pace, spinning upwards on its deep and steady groove like a tilt-a-whirl broken free from its hinges, with a simple but glorious three-chord release. But it lifts listeners higher just so "Up With People" can pull them down towards hell: With nearly eight minutes of disco drums and grinding, percussive, filthy guitar and organ, it's one of Oneida's closest calls to recreating their live sound. Predictably, it's also a monster and the highlight of the record. The pinball plink of "History's Great Navigators" similarly stretches and comes close to that delirious peak, and closer "Happy New Year" weaves druggily to the album's finale on a two-finger piano part and half-speed drums-- one of the band's most successful mood pieces. The rest of Happy New Year's second half, however, is heavy with melancholy and contains some pretty safe moves for such an adventurous band. "Busy Little Bee" buzzes with Eastern scales and humming drones, a pleasant but obvious psychedelic nod; same with the militant rhythm and droning vocals of "You Never Can Tell". "Reckoning" is a huge surprise just for being so gentle and earnest in its acoustic soft-rock update. "Chameleon" artists get a lot of love, but that's often because we can find the thread that holds them together-- there's always some indelible section of their personalities that binds their eclecticism and makes each track distinctively theirs. But while Oneida is indisputably versatile and has cred for miles, perpetually tearing their way through disparate styles in sweaty dives across the globe, there's no unifying principal here-- just songs that are kinda psychedelic, kinda groove-oriented, and kinda long. While not exactly a disappointment, Happy New Year is a whole lot of "kinda," a record built around hesitancy that clutches the payoff tight in its arms.

Artist: Oneida, Album: Happy New Year, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.2 Album review: "A funny thing happened on the way from The Wedding: Oneida's triumphant 2005 release was ridiculously slept-on, the band's studio space was razed to make room for condos, and rumored plans for a sprawling three-disc follow-up called Thank Your Parents ended up as a measly 11 tracks. Tough year. But while the band is throwing up drywall at a new recording space, Happy New Year reflects the mixed blessings and emotions and makes the most of them. Critics love to reach for multiple hyphens and obscure garage acts to namedrop when summing up Oneida's sound. Happy New Year lives up to both the band's own cross-genre daring and the critics' idea of Oneida more than any of their previous albums; accordingly, it's all over the place. Opener "Distress", a formless sketch of medieval choir-like vocals and toneless instrumental gurgling, could be another band entirely. "Happy New Year" is, if there's such a thing, Oneida-by-numbers, as a midtempo distorted organ tears through the fabric of the song while guitars jangle and wail around the corners. Singer Fat Bobby's plaintive lament anchors it all, moving from psychedelic phrases to concrete urban details of cups of coffee and bus rides home, all leading to a decision not to decide anything: "The sun withheld its light from me/ I said a prayer, a 'We shall see.'" "The Adversary" picks up the pace, spinning upwards on its deep and steady groove like a tilt-a-whirl broken free from its hinges, with a simple but glorious three-chord release. But it lifts listeners higher just so "Up With People" can pull them down towards hell: With nearly eight minutes of disco drums and grinding, percussive, filthy guitar and organ, it's one of Oneida's closest calls to recreating their live sound. Predictably, it's also a monster and the highlight of the record. The pinball plink of "History's Great Navigators" similarly stretches and comes close to that delirious peak, and closer "Happy New Year" weaves druggily to the album's finale on a two-finger piano part and half-speed drums-- one of the band's most successful mood pieces. The rest of Happy New Year's second half, however, is heavy with melancholy and contains some pretty safe moves for such an adventurous band. "Busy Little Bee" buzzes with Eastern scales and humming drones, a pleasant but obvious psychedelic nod; same with the militant rhythm and droning vocals of "You Never Can Tell". "Reckoning" is a huge surprise just for being so gentle and earnest in its acoustic soft-rock update. "Chameleon" artists get a lot of love, but that's often because we can find the thread that holds them together-- there's always some indelible section of their personalities that binds their eclecticism and makes each track distinctively theirs. But while Oneida is indisputably versatile and has cred for miles, perpetually tearing their way through disparate styles in sweaty dives across the globe, there's no unifying principal here-- just songs that are kinda psychedelic, kinda groove-oriented, and kinda long. While not exactly a disappointment, Happy New Year is a whole lot of "kinda," a record built around hesitancy that clutches the payoff tight in its arms."

Grace Period

Dynasty

Mark Richard-San

The first Aphex Twin track I ever loved was "Flim," from the Come to Daddy EP. There's not much to it-- some one-handed piano, a single synthesizer swell, and programmed drums. The spare beauty of the piano melody is certainly to be admired (it's one of many Aphex tracks inspired by Satie), but the real kicker for me has always been the beats. "Flim" looms large in my personal listening history because it's the first track I remember hearing where the percussion carries the bulk of the emotional content. Its drums are loaded with tension, constantly feeling as though they might be moving just a bit too fast for the tune, in danger of falling over themselves. But they never lose their footing and continue to drop into place with precision, providing serious catharsis at the end of every 16th bar. I've come across music where the feelings hinge on the percussion since I first discovered "Flim," but I've not heard a band pursue the notion as relentlessly over the course of an album as Boston's the Grace Period. Dynasty is an album of subtle touches and rare warmth, filled with interesting melodic fragments and memorable sounds. But the drums are what make these songs special. Just as Alan Sutherland of Land of the Loops used live bass to provide both the foundation and sonic signature for his work, Grace Period main-man (and former Pitchfork writer) Chris Ott's drums are the heart and soul of this record. "Paris Au Printemps" begins the album with a sexy bit of French dialog, and then one spoken line is plucked and set into looping motion. The drumming on the track is loose and relaxed, like it's guiding the listener slowly into a dream, a feeling enhanced by the velvety synthesizer chords. Thick, round keyboard drones are a recurring theme throughout Dynasty, serving as a blurry pastel background for the brush strokes of the percussion. "Best of Boston" begins with some of the warmest such drones on the record, which are in contrast to the crisp cymbal hits that set the track in motion. "My Girlfriend" is one of the few songs to plainly incorporate an outside sample, looping a section of a wordless three-note falsetto vocal and burying it beneath determined drumming and a looped acoustic guitar pattern, all to sublime effect. The militaristic rudiments that make up the rhythm of "Et in Arcadia Ego" compliment the coldest synths on Dynasty, providing some interesting contrast to the generally congenial tone. Occasionally, the Grace Period's experiments with drum texture don't quite hit, as on the bombastic Bonham-isms that encompass the annoying "Boring Arial Layout." But these occasional misfires aren't what keep me from loving this album. Dynasty comes up a bit short for me in its over-reliance on the looped fragment as a basis for composition. These songs are evocative, well-crafted and emotional, but some of them are also too repetitive, a quality with potential to limit repeat playability in the distant future. For the time being, though, I am digging this record. It's fair to lump the Grace Period with sample-driven outfits on labels like Slabco or My Pal God, but the similarity is primarily in the mode of production. There's nothing even remotely kitschy about Dynasty. You never get the feeling that somebody spent 500 hours in front of the television, flipping channels with one hand with a finger on the VCR's record button. The Grace Period is softer, more reflective, and ultimately more human; what voice samples there are might be recordings of friends who happened to be hanging around. Instead of a pop culture travelogue, the Grace Period feels more like a diary-- one open-ended enough to apply to anybody.

Artist: Grace Period, Album: Dynasty, Genre: None, Score (1-10): 7.4 Album review: "The first Aphex Twin track I ever loved was "Flim," from the Come to Daddy EP. There's not much to it-- some one-handed piano, a single synthesizer swell, and programmed drums. The spare beauty of the piano melody is certainly to be admired (it's one of many Aphex tracks inspired by Satie), but the real kicker for me has always been the beats. "Flim" looms large in my personal listening history because it's the first track I remember hearing where the percussion carries the bulk of the emotional content. Its drums are loaded with tension, constantly feeling as though they might be moving just a bit too fast for the tune, in danger of falling over themselves. But they never lose their footing and continue to drop into place with precision, providing serious catharsis at the end of every 16th bar. I've come across music where the feelings hinge on the percussion since I first discovered "Flim," but I've not heard a band pursue the notion as relentlessly over the course of an album as Boston's the Grace Period. Dynasty is an album of subtle touches and rare warmth, filled with interesting melodic fragments and memorable sounds. But the drums are what make these songs special. Just as Alan Sutherland of Land of the Loops used live bass to provide both the foundation and sonic signature for his work, Grace Period main-man (and former Pitchfork writer) Chris Ott's drums are the heart and soul of this record. "Paris Au Printemps" begins the album with a sexy bit of French dialog, and then one spoken line is plucked and set into looping motion. The drumming on the track is loose and relaxed, like it's guiding the listener slowly into a dream, a feeling enhanced by the velvety synthesizer chords. Thick, round keyboard drones are a recurring theme throughout Dynasty, serving as a blurry pastel background for the brush strokes of the percussion. "Best of Boston" begins with some of the warmest such drones on the record, which are in contrast to the crisp cymbal hits that set the track in motion. "My Girlfriend" is one of the few songs to plainly incorporate an outside sample, looping a section of a wordless three-note falsetto vocal and burying it beneath determined drumming and a looped acoustic guitar pattern, all to sublime effect. The militaristic rudiments that make up the rhythm of "Et in Arcadia Ego" compliment the coldest synths on Dynasty, providing some interesting contrast to the generally congenial tone. Occasionally, the Grace Period's experiments with drum texture don't quite hit, as on the bombastic Bonham-isms that encompass the annoying "Boring Arial Layout." But these occasional misfires aren't what keep me from loving this album. Dynasty comes up a bit short for me in its over-reliance on the looped fragment as a basis for composition. These songs are evocative, well-crafted and emotional, but some of them are also too repetitive, a quality with potential to limit repeat playability in the distant future. For the time being, though, I am digging this record. It's fair to lump the Grace Period with sample-driven outfits on labels like Slabco or My Pal God, but the similarity is primarily in the mode of production. There's nothing even remotely kitschy about Dynasty. You never get the feeling that somebody spent 500 hours in front of the television, flipping channels with one hand with a finger on the VCR's record button. The Grace Period is softer, more reflective, and ultimately more human; what voice samples there are might be recordings of friends who happened to be hanging around. Instead of a pop culture travelogue, the Grace Period feels more like a diary-- one open-ended enough to apply to anybody."

Simian Mobile Disco

Sample and Hold

Electronic

Mark Pytlik

With all due respect to "Songs Inspired by," "Mark Ronson Edit," and "ft. Wil.i.Am", I'm hard pressed to come up with any phrases that invoke my insta-cynic as definitively as "remix album." After years of being duped, continually, against mounting odds, into hoping that a remix record of [insert artist here] might actually turn out to be great, or least sort of kind of enjoyable, or at least not a dog's breakfast, I'm pretty much ready to give up on the format as a whole. With a handful of exceptions (and even those are EPs), pretty much every remix record that comes to mind felt more like a play at cred points, a contractual obligation, or a self-congratulatory exercise than anything I'd actually put on for pleasure. The remix game is pretty Darwinian anyway; the best ones always do the rounds. Maybe these things just don't work. Sample and Hold is a remix album from someone you'd think would know better: Bristol's Simian Mobile Disco, who, lest we forget, have racked up some pretty impressive remixes for others over the years. With a discography that peaked with high-profile work for Klaxons, the Rapture, Air, CSS, Ladytron, and Bjork, you'd think these guys would have at least enough appreciation for the form not to sully what was, in retrospect, a sort-of underrated debut (2007's Attack Decay Sustain Release, undercut by the pre-release over-familiarity of some of its biggest singles and overshadowed by Justice's concurrently released †) with a posthumous release of warmed over, go-nowhere remixes from a cast of unknowns, b-level producers and the weirdly resilient Cosmo Vitelli. Sadly, Sample and Hold is a depressingly phoned-in thing, right down to its cover art, which-- you guessed it-- consists of a slightly re-modified version of the debut's. The misses start early: Simon Baker's opening remix of "Sleep Deprivation" wrinkles the original's rushy pulses into a twerked out tech-house epic that has the audacity to pulse along for 10 minutes without burdening itself with anything remotely resembling a second idea; the Invisible Conga People color over the exuberant, filtered 80s pop of "I Got This Down" with stately piano tinkles and, uh, congas; the Oscillation re-imagine the acid workout "Tits & Acid" as a noirish, proto-big beat clunker in the vein of early Fluke; even Silver Apples, as welcome as they are on this roster, deface the pleasantly billowy closer "Scott" with some detuned synth grunts and a purposely off-kilter drum track. The few submissions that aren't completely skippable come courtesy the album's more recognizable contributors. DFA's Shit Robot transforms the sleek, liquid-sounding "It's the Beat" into a serviceable grinder, unleashing its titular one-liner in at least some of the right moments, while Studio !K7's Joakim imagines "Hustler" against an entertaining-enough procession of different sounds and techniques. Elsewhere, the album's best moment comes from Erol Alkan, whose sturdily crafted "Beyond the Wizard's Sleeve" remix of "Love" outclasses everything around it by half. In the end, though, those middling highlights hardly amount to much. What's worse is that one of the album's more interesting initial features-- the fact that it's a track-for-track remix record rather than a collection of available leftovers-- ends up working against it. From here on out, it's going to be tough to listen to Attack Decay Sustain Release without flashing on its mutant twin brother. It should have finished him off in the womb.

Artist: Simian Mobile Disco, Album: Sample and Hold, Genre: Electronic, Score (1-10): 3.0 Album review: "With all due respect to "Songs Inspired by," "Mark Ronson Edit," and "ft. Wil.i.Am", I'm hard pressed to come up with any phrases that invoke my insta-cynic as definitively as "remix album." After years of being duped, continually, against mounting odds, into hoping that a remix record of [insert artist here] might actually turn out to be great, or least sort of kind of enjoyable, or at least not a dog's breakfast, I'm pretty much ready to give up on the format as a whole. With a handful of exceptions (and even those are EPs), pretty much every remix record that comes to mind felt more like a play at cred points, a contractual obligation, or a self-congratulatory exercise than anything I'd actually put on for pleasure. The remix game is pretty Darwinian anyway; the best ones always do the rounds. Maybe these things just don't work. Sample and Hold is a remix album from someone you'd think would know better: Bristol's Simian Mobile Disco, who, lest we forget, have racked up some pretty impressive remixes for others over the years. With a discography that peaked with high-profile work for Klaxons, the Rapture, Air, CSS, Ladytron, and Bjork, you'd think these guys would have at least enough appreciation for the form not to sully what was, in retrospect, a sort-of underrated debut (2007's Attack Decay Sustain Release, undercut by the pre-release over-familiarity of some of its biggest singles and overshadowed by Justice's concurrently released †) with a posthumous release of warmed over, go-nowhere remixes from a cast of unknowns, b-level producers and the weirdly resilient Cosmo Vitelli. Sadly, Sample and Hold is a depressingly phoned-in thing, right down to its cover art, which-- you guessed it-- consists of a slightly re-modified version of the debut's. The misses start early: Simon Baker's opening remix of "Sleep Deprivation" wrinkles the original's rushy pulses into a twerked out tech-house epic that has the audacity to pulse along for 10 minutes without burdening itself with anything remotely resembling a second idea; the Invisible Conga People color over the exuberant, filtered 80s pop of "I Got This Down" with stately piano tinkles and, uh, congas; the Oscillation re-imagine the acid workout "Tits & Acid" as a noirish, proto-big beat clunker in the vein of early Fluke; even Silver Apples, as welcome as they are on this roster, deface the pleasantly billowy closer "Scott" with some detuned synth grunts and a purposely off-kilter drum track. The few submissions that aren't completely skippable come courtesy the album's more recognizable contributors. DFA's Shit Robot transforms the sleek, liquid-sounding "It's the Beat" into a serviceable grinder, unleashing its titular one-liner in at least some of the right moments, while Studio !K7's Joakim imagines "Hustler" against an entertaining-enough procession of different sounds and techniques. Elsewhere, the album's best moment comes from Erol Alkan, whose sturdily crafted "Beyond the Wizard's Sleeve" remix of "Love" outclasses everything around it by half. In the end, though, those middling highlights hardly amount to much. What's worse is that one of the album's more interesting initial features-- the fact that it's a track-for-track remix record rather than a collection of available leftovers-- ends up working against it. From here on out, it's going to be tough to listen to Attack Decay Sustain Release without flashing on its mutant twin brother. It should have finished him off in the womb."

Mario Diaz de Leon

The Soul Is the Arena

Experimental

Seth Colter Walls

If you don't follow classical music, it might surprise you to hear a living composer professing admiration for metal, noise, and ambient drones. But that's how things have been for decades now—going back to the early 1980s, when guitar-centric composers like Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham started fusing underground rock with post-minimalism. Today, it's common for young conservatory talents to name-check alt-derived noise artists alongside modernists like Karlheinz Stockhausen. In that respect, Columbia University composition grad Mario Diaz de Leon is on-trend: the promotional material for his latest release of chamber pieces cites both Stockhausen as well the abrasion specialists in Wolf Eyes. (Diaz de Leon comes by the latter reference point honestly, having collaborated with group member Nate Young in a duo that goes by the name Standard Deviance One.) When he's not working in chamber-music mode, Diaz de Leon also sometimes goes by the moniker Oneirogen—a guise which finds him splitting his attention between an electric guitar and a synth setup, ultimately creating a wash of doomy chords and spacey soundscapes. It's a sound that can make sense on a Liturgy bill. What makes Diaz de Leon stand out from his peers, though, is his ability to distill these influences into a balanced aesthetic. Plenty of people can write a one-off "amplified" piece for chamber musicians, but few artists have built a language as stable and rewarding as Diaz de Leon's. His first solo-composer album, Enter Houses Of, was released in 2009 on John Zorn's Tzadik label, and showed him to be adept at weaving opulently distorted electronics with virtuoso acoustic-instrumental parts, written for players drawn from the International Contemporary Ensemble. The noise throbbed with snarling exuberance; the woodwinds doled out haunting harmonies. The Soul Is the Arena is Diaz de Leon's latest chamber-music album since Enter Houses Of, and it's both shorter and more all-encompassing. In three different pieces that collectively stretch just over 40 minutes, he gives listeners two riff-rollercoaster duos and a 20-minute, chamber-band essay of grim, beguiling beauty. The opener, "Luciform", is a duo between Diaz de Leon's electronics and flutist Claire Chase (a recent MacArthur "Genius Grant" awardee). Over the course of its 13-and-a-half minutes, Chase's flute sometimes often carries the melodic line, while the electronics swoop in big, sine-wave-surfing curves behind her. At other points, Chase's breathy sound is just a complement to the rampaging crunch of the composer's programming. The fast switches are what keep the piece interesting. The second duo piece is the album's title track, and it asks for Joshua Rubin's bass clarinet to go into reed-squawk mode. (Rubin manages this risky, awkward move with impressive grace.) Later on, the instrumentalist and the pre-engineered sounds partner up for a memorably precise and glitchy passage. The work packs a hell of a lot into nine-and-a-half minutes—so much so that you might need a little bit of a breather. Diaz de Leon has you covered on that count with the album-closing "Portals Before Dawn" (on which he plays synths alongside a sextet of instrumentalists from the International Contemporary Ensemble). The composer tried a similar strategy to close out Enter Houses Of, but this longer, more gradually surging and receding composition gets more out of the composer's ambient fascinations. Diaz de Leon hasn't put out an uninteresting release yet, but this compact and wide-ranging album is now the best introduction to his refined feel for instrumental extremity.

Artist: Mario Diaz de Leon, Album: The Soul Is the Arena, Genre: Experimental, Score (1-10): 8.0 Album review: "If you don't follow classical music, it might surprise you to hear a living composer professing admiration for metal, noise, and ambient drones. But that's how things have been for decades now—going back to the early 1980s, when guitar-centric composers like Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham started fusing underground rock with post-minimalism. Today, it's common for young conservatory talents to name-check alt-derived noise artists alongside modernists like Karlheinz Stockhausen. In that respect, Columbia University composition grad Mario Diaz de Leon is on-trend: the promotional material for his latest release of chamber pieces cites both Stockhausen as well the abrasion specialists in Wolf Eyes. (Diaz de Leon comes by the latter reference point honestly, having collaborated with group member Nate Young in a duo that goes by the name Standard Deviance One.) When he's not working in chamber-music mode, Diaz de Leon also sometimes goes by the moniker Oneirogen—a guise which finds him splitting his attention between an electric guitar and a synth setup, ultimately creating a wash of doomy chords and spacey soundscapes. It's a sound that can make sense on a Liturgy bill. What makes Diaz de Leon stand out from his peers, though, is his ability to distill these influences into a balanced aesthetic. Plenty of people can write a one-off "amplified" piece for chamber musicians, but few artists have built a language as stable and rewarding as Diaz de Leon's. His first solo-composer album, Enter Houses Of, was released in 2009 on John Zorn's Tzadik label, and showed him to be adept at weaving opulently distorted electronics with virtuoso acoustic-instrumental parts, written for players drawn from the International Contemporary Ensemble. The noise throbbed with snarling exuberance; the woodwinds doled out haunting harmonies. The Soul Is the Arena is Diaz de Leon's latest chamber-music album since Enter Houses Of, and it's both shorter and more all-encompassing. In three different pieces that collectively stretch just over 40 minutes, he gives listeners two riff-rollercoaster duos and a 20-minute, chamber-band essay of grim, beguiling beauty. The opener, "Luciform", is a duo between Diaz de Leon's electronics and flutist Claire Chase (a recent MacArthur "Genius Grant" awardee). Over the course of its 13-and-a-half minutes, Chase's flute sometimes often carries the melodic line, while the electronics swoop in big, sine-wave-surfing curves behind her. At other points, Chase's breathy sound is just a complement to the rampaging crunch of the composer's programming. The fast switches are what keep the piece interesting. The second duo piece is the album's title track, and it asks for Joshua Rubin's bass clarinet to go into reed-squawk mode. (Rubin manages this risky, awkward move with impressive grace.) Later on, the instrumentalist and the pre-engineered sounds partner up for a memorably precise and glitchy passage. The work packs a hell of a lot into nine-and-a-half minutes—so much so that you might need a little bit of a breather. Diaz de Leon has you covered on that count with the album-closing "Portals Before Dawn" (on which he plays synths alongside a sextet of instrumentalists from the International Contemporary Ensemble). The composer tried a similar strategy to close out Enter Houses Of, but this longer, more gradually surging and receding composition gets more out of the composer's ambient fascinations. Diaz de Leon hasn't put out an uninteresting release yet, but this compact and wide-ranging album is now the best introduction to his refined feel for instrumental extremity."

Son Volt

American Central Dust

Rock

Stephen M. Deusner

In the late 1980s, the members of Uncle Tupelo were checking out the entire country and folk sections from their local library and passing them around like bootlegs, which exposed them to many of the artists and styles that would inform their sound. A few of the records they cite as inspirations-- including 1975's High Atmosphere: Ballads and Banjo Tunes from Virginia and North Carolina-- were compiled and released on Rounder Records, which at one time specialized more in old acts than new. It's not especially surprising that Son Volt, Jay Farrar's post-Tupelo band, have finally signed with the venerable label, placing them alongside acts as diverse as Nanci Griffith, Rhonda Vincent, and Farrar's hero Woody Guthrie. That might sound like a circle finally completed if Farrar sounded today as galvanized as he did 20 years ago. Son Volt's label debut, American Central Dust, is some of the sleepiest protest music ever made: Every song saunters by at a slow tempo, Farrar's voice sounds increasingly inexpressive, and John Agnello's production makes everything sound real purdy but lifeless. Of course Farrar is never going to rock out again-- and the muddy electric guitars on the 25-mph "When the Wheels Don't Move" doesn't count-- but this folksier sound he has settled into during this decade rarely works up a sweat or even rouses you from a light doze. His deep, commanding voice-- perhaps one of the most imitated sounds of the alt-country movement-- has mellowed considerably over the years, such that at times he sounds a little wooden and disengaged. Occasionally he'll hit a high note ("Roll On") or sustain a syllable into a strange vocal buzz ("Down to the Wire"), but he can't sell his sympathy for Keith Richards on "Cocaine and Ashes" or work up much bluster on "Pushed Too Far". Lyrically, these songs prove slightly more straightforward and coherent than much of his '00s output, but even this directness sounds like an effort. On "Sultana", about the steamboat that exploded near Memphis in 1865, he approaches the history lessons with dry matter-of-factness and clunky phrasing that's made all the more egregious by the absence of details or point. "The worst American disaster on water," he sings. "The Titanic of the cold Mississippi was the Sultana." For the most part, however, Farrar's subject matter is much more contemporary. As always, he's concerned with social injustice, corporate manipulation, job loss, the little guy vs. the fat cats, but in recent years his lyrics have tended toward the poetical and cryptic, dulling the sharp edges of his outrage. Perhaps it all goes back to those Rounder comps: As he has aged, Farrar has grown increasingly reverent toward his source material, learning his entire moral code-- at least the one expressed in his music-- from the singers of coal-mining and union songs. They are undeniably great and knowledgeable teachers, yet his faith in them has become not simply unshakable, but unexamined and unquestioned. His outrage once took instrumental form-- in the roar of guitars and the boom of that voice-- but now the music feels safe and deferential. Dissent can sound quiet or twangy or even laidback, but it should never sound so compulsory.

Artist: Son Volt, Album: American Central Dust, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 3.7 Album review: "In the late 1980s, the members of Uncle Tupelo were checking out the entire country and folk sections from their local library and passing them around like bootlegs, which exposed them to many of the artists and styles that would inform their sound. A few of the records they cite as inspirations-- including 1975's High Atmosphere: Ballads and Banjo Tunes from Virginia and North Carolina-- were compiled and released on Rounder Records, which at one time specialized more in old acts than new. It's not especially surprising that Son Volt, Jay Farrar's post-Tupelo band, have finally signed with the venerable label, placing them alongside acts as diverse as Nanci Griffith, Rhonda Vincent, and Farrar's hero Woody Guthrie. That might sound like a circle finally completed if Farrar sounded today as galvanized as he did 20 years ago. Son Volt's label debut, American Central Dust, is some of the sleepiest protest music ever made: Every song saunters by at a slow tempo, Farrar's voice sounds increasingly inexpressive, and John Agnello's production makes everything sound real purdy but lifeless. Of course Farrar is never going to rock out again-- and the muddy electric guitars on the 25-mph "When the Wheels Don't Move" doesn't count-- but this folksier sound he has settled into during this decade rarely works up a sweat or even rouses you from a light doze. His deep, commanding voice-- perhaps one of the most imitated sounds of the alt-country movement-- has mellowed considerably over the years, such that at times he sounds a little wooden and disengaged. Occasionally he'll hit a high note ("Roll On") or sustain a syllable into a strange vocal buzz ("Down to the Wire"), but he can't sell his sympathy for Keith Richards on "Cocaine and Ashes" or work up much bluster on "Pushed Too Far". Lyrically, these songs prove slightly more straightforward and coherent than much of his '00s output, but even this directness sounds like an effort. On "Sultana", about the steamboat that exploded near Memphis in 1865, he approaches the history lessons with dry matter-of-factness and clunky phrasing that's made all the more egregious by the absence of details or point. "The worst American disaster on water," he sings. "The Titanic of the cold Mississippi was the Sultana." For the most part, however, Farrar's subject matter is much more contemporary. As always, he's concerned with social injustice, corporate manipulation, job loss, the little guy vs. the fat cats, but in recent years his lyrics have tended toward the poetical and cryptic, dulling the sharp edges of his outrage. Perhaps it all goes back to those Rounder comps: As he has aged, Farrar has grown increasingly reverent toward his source material, learning his entire moral code-- at least the one expressed in his music-- from the singers of coal-mining and union songs. They are undeniably great and knowledgeable teachers, yet his faith in them has become not simply unshakable, but unexamined and unquestioned. His outrage once took instrumental form-- in the roar of guitars and the boom of that voice-- but now the music feels safe and deferential. Dissent can sound quiet or twangy or even laidback, but it should never sound so compulsory."

My Way My Love

Hypnotic Suggestion:01

Rock

Nick Sylvester

With this disc I was hoping for a Chinese Brainiac or French Fushitsusha; somehow though I got (yet another) Japanese Jesus Lizard. Hey, at least these guys are better than Mexican Radiohead. Kid Aye! There's plenty to like about My Way My Love. This Tokyo trio rocks sludgy basslines and squirmy could-be-brilliant chromatic guitar riffs like the best Sonic Youth rips out there. Lovers will enjoy "Captain"-- textbook hard 90s college rock, tuneless but with a drummer who's confident as fuck, as well as "Sports", which is he same song as "Captain" but with klaxon sirens and heavy-handed quiet-loud, and "Sound Of Gold", an accidental tribute to the Slint reunion tour. Haters will hate these tracks, for essentially the same reasons. Come on haters, aren't you at least somewhat charmed by this trans-Pacific indie rock/J-rock romance, a thing I may have just made up? Maybe you just don't like guitars anymore? Forget you. If the heavy stuff's too much grief-- definitely can't dance to it, eww neww-- MWML also have several short, fast songs to keep your attention. One song, "Nanisuru?", is six seconds long. Another, "Jinxxxxxxxxxxsix", is 16. Both are pretty amazing, all things considered, and very danceable. In fact, if someone heard these songs and said the band reminded him of Devo or (wait for it) Ex Models, I wouldn't protest. On songs slightly less short and fast, this band can and will kill things. "Reykjavik 69"-- a steadily compounding mache with thick sheets of dense drum circlejerk percussion-- is the only Gang Gang Dance track you'll ever need to hear (kidding). Granted, the guitar parts on tracks like "Ovo" and "Superfresh" sell tough without the kickass traps behind it, but hey, indie rock's a fickle mistress, and she only sleeps with drummers. And so as not to spite me completely, My Way My Love do include a fake Brainiac song, and obviously it's the best song on the record. The big riff on "Un" stays with the song across tempo changes, and the wet production and mids-only bass make good on us nostalgics-- almost as good as when the lead singer works in his mightiest Tim Taylor robot voice. Hey, I'll take what I can get.

Artist: My Way My Love, Album: Hypnotic Suggestion:01, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 6.5 Album review: "With this disc I was hoping for a Chinese Brainiac or French Fushitsusha; somehow though I got (yet another) Japanese Jesus Lizard. Hey, at least these guys are better than Mexican Radiohead. Kid Aye! There's plenty to like about My Way My Love. This Tokyo trio rocks sludgy basslines and squirmy could-be-brilliant chromatic guitar riffs like the best Sonic Youth rips out there. Lovers will enjoy "Captain"-- textbook hard 90s college rock, tuneless but with a drummer who's confident as fuck, as well as "Sports", which is he same song as "Captain" but with klaxon sirens and heavy-handed quiet-loud, and "Sound Of Gold", an accidental tribute to the Slint reunion tour. Haters will hate these tracks, for essentially the same reasons. Come on haters, aren't you at least somewhat charmed by this trans-Pacific indie rock/J-rock romance, a thing I may have just made up? Maybe you just don't like guitars anymore? Forget you. If the heavy stuff's too much grief-- definitely can't dance to it, eww neww-- MWML also have several short, fast songs to keep your attention. One song, "Nanisuru?", is six seconds long. Another, "Jinxxxxxxxxxxsix", is 16. Both are pretty amazing, all things considered, and very danceable. In fact, if someone heard these songs and said the band reminded him of Devo or (wait for it) Ex Models, I wouldn't protest. On songs slightly less short and fast, this band can and will kill things. "Reykjavik 69"-- a steadily compounding mache with thick sheets of dense drum circlejerk percussion-- is the only Gang Gang Dance track you'll ever need to hear (kidding). Granted, the guitar parts on tracks like "Ovo" and "Superfresh" sell tough without the kickass traps behind it, but hey, indie rock's a fickle mistress, and she only sleeps with drummers. And so as not to spite me completely, My Way My Love do include a fake Brainiac song, and obviously it's the best song on the record. The big riff on "Un" stays with the song across tempo changes, and the wet production and mids-only bass make good on us nostalgics-- almost as good as when the lead singer works in his mightiest Tim Taylor robot voice. Hey, I'll take what I can get."

Fridge

EPH Reissue

Electronic,Rock

Rob Mitchum

I've become convinced that the best way of marketing an album is to make it as scarce as humanly possible. Were I the head of a record label (star light, star bright!), I'd connive all manner of misfortune to justify ultra-low press runs. "The album was found to contain dangerously high frequencies and/or seizure-inducing strobe rhythms; we had to recall it." "John Ashcroft has seized the majority of our inventory and shipped it to Guantanamo Bay under suspicions of anti-Americanism." Or maybe tell the band the album is "too experimental", drop them from my label, leak the music to the Internet, and re-sign them under a different imprint... oh, wait, that one's already been done. Steve Case, you magnificent evil bastard! Whichever story I choose, I'd cast it out there, wait a couple years while the hype train builds to immense speed, then BAM!, reissue the album and watch the bank account swell. I'm not accusing the assumedly fine lads at Temporary Residence Ltd of such unsavory practices, nor am I suspicious of London post-rock-ish trio Fridge. But hey, the story fits the mold, as the press kit makes clear: EPH was released in 1999 on British label Go!Beat, but only using the highly unpopular, hard-to-find, and absurdly expensive rollout plan. Now it's being reissued for all us neglected statesiders and poor people, with the added attraction of a bonus disc featuring EPs of that same pre-millennial era, plus a couple new remixes. This mini-Fridge has been converted into a Kegerator! Haw haw, thanks folks, I'll be here all week! Unfortunately, the music world might've passed EPH by while it languished in high-priced import bin obscurity. Back in 1999, when Tortoise's TNT was a mere one year old, this disc probably sounded like some fresh dope shiznit, what with its atmospheric instrumental rock sound laced with chopped-up reel-to-reel drums and a veritable genus of keyboard species. Much of the album has that movie score quality that many of the band's peers were also flogging at the time, Krautishly named tracks like "Ark" and "Aphelion" riding hypnotic grooves for upwards of eight minutes at a time. It's too bad it kinda sounds dated these days, since Fridge had the goods to be considered one of the top performers of the genre. The band excels at crafting a happy medium between organics and electronics (guitarist Kieran Hebden is aka Four Tet), with compositions like "Transience" and the horn-stuffed "Bad Ischi" maintaining a fluid, improvised vibe rather than the overly calculated constructions of other post-rock acts. EPH isn't quite past its expiration date ("Meum" has a delicate musicbox sound that would fit right in with recent Björk fare), but it's got just a small, distracting whiff of sourness in a genre has since proven distinctly limited. Holding up better is the bonus second disc, compiling the "Kinoshita Terasaka" single, the Of EP, and remixes of EPH tracks by Matthew Herbert and P Pulsinger. The single might be the highlight of the set, coupling a short piece propelled by a tentatively booty-shaking bassline with a long, trancy groove set that rewards the patient of heart... before kicking sand in the eyes of said patient of heart with a completely gratuitous outro drum solo. The Of EP features four dull versions of the EPH track of the same name, but stay tuned for the remixes, which do Fridge the favor of updating their songs to the conventions of the modern day. Herbert's take on "Ark" radically reconstructs the Very Serious original as thinking man's dancefloor anthem, adding minor-key piano chords and a chopped-up diva vocal. P Pulsinger, meanwhile, distorto-amplifies the bassline of "Bad Ischi" into a window-rattling irregular skip-hop that Scott Herren would be proud of. Too bad these two reworkings emphasize how dated the actual reissued album sounds today, when cutting edge electronica seems to have rediscovered its sense of humor while overcoming its love/hate relationship with the club scene. But don't worry your pretty little head about the boys of Fridge, as they've already moved on to more electronic and experimental pastures with last year's Happiness. So while EPH doesn't quite cause the ripples it might've caused back in '99, the record still nobly stands as pivot of Fridge's musical development. Too bad it may have been kept in the cryogenic containment unit just a smidge too long.

Artist: Fridge, Album: EPH Reissue, Genre: Electronic,Rock, Score (1-10): 6.8 Album review: "I've become convinced that the best way of marketing an album is to make it as scarce as humanly possible. Were I the head of a record label (star light, star bright!), I'd connive all manner of misfortune to justify ultra-low press runs. "The album was found to contain dangerously high frequencies and/or seizure-inducing strobe rhythms; we had to recall it." "John Ashcroft has seized the majority of our inventory and shipped it to Guantanamo Bay under suspicions of anti-Americanism." Or maybe tell the band the album is "too experimental", drop them from my label, leak the music to the Internet, and re-sign them under a different imprint... oh, wait, that one's already been done. Steve Case, you magnificent evil bastard! Whichever story I choose, I'd cast it out there, wait a couple years while the hype train builds to immense speed, then BAM!, reissue the album and watch the bank account swell. I'm not accusing the assumedly fine lads at Temporary Residence Ltd of such unsavory practices, nor am I suspicious of London post-rock-ish trio Fridge. But hey, the story fits the mold, as the press kit makes clear: EPH was released in 1999 on British label Go!Beat, but only using the highly unpopular, hard-to-find, and absurdly expensive rollout plan. Now it's being reissued for all us neglected statesiders and poor people, with the added attraction of a bonus disc featuring EPs of that same pre-millennial era, plus a couple new remixes. This mini-Fridge has been converted into a Kegerator! Haw haw, thanks folks, I'll be here all week! Unfortunately, the music world might've passed EPH by while it languished in high-priced import bin obscurity. Back in 1999, when Tortoise's TNT was a mere one year old, this disc probably sounded like some fresh dope shiznit, what with its atmospheric instrumental rock sound laced with chopped-up reel-to-reel drums and a veritable genus of keyboard species. Much of the album has that movie score quality that many of the band's peers were also flogging at the time, Krautishly named tracks like "Ark" and "Aphelion" riding hypnotic grooves for upwards of eight minutes at a time. It's too bad it kinda sounds dated these days, since Fridge had the goods to be considered one of the top performers of the genre. The band excels at crafting a happy medium between organics and electronics (guitarist Kieran Hebden is aka Four Tet), with compositions like "Transience" and the horn-stuffed "Bad Ischi" maintaining a fluid, improvised vibe rather than the overly calculated constructions of other post-rock acts. EPH isn't quite past its expiration date ("Meum" has a delicate musicbox sound that would fit right in with recent Björk fare), but it's got just a small, distracting whiff of sourness in a genre has since proven distinctly limited. Holding up better is the bonus second disc, compiling the "Kinoshita Terasaka" single, the Of EP, and remixes of EPH tracks by Matthew Herbert and P Pulsinger. The single might be the highlight of the set, coupling a short piece propelled by a tentatively booty-shaking bassline with a long, trancy groove set that rewards the patient of heart... before kicking sand in the eyes of said patient of heart with a completely gratuitous outro drum solo. The Of EP features four dull versions of the EPH track of the same name, but stay tuned for the remixes, which do Fridge the favor of updating their songs to the conventions of the modern day. Herbert's take on "Ark" radically reconstructs the Very Serious original as thinking man's dancefloor anthem, adding minor-key piano chords and a chopped-up diva vocal. P Pulsinger, meanwhile, distorto-amplifies the bassline of "Bad Ischi" into a window-rattling irregular skip-hop that Scott Herren would be proud of. Too bad these two reworkings emphasize how dated the actual reissued album sounds today, when cutting edge electronica seems to have rediscovered its sense of humor while overcoming its love/hate relationship with the club scene. But don't worry your pretty little head about the boys of Fridge, as they've already moved on to more electronic and experimental pastures with last year's Happiness. So while EPH doesn't quite cause the ripples it might've caused back in '99, the record still nobly stands as pivot of Fridge's musical development. Too bad it may have been kept in the cryogenic containment unit just a smidge too long."

U.S. Girls

Half Free

Pop/R&B

Stuart Berman

Three tracks into the new U.S. Girls album, Meghan Remy is awoken by a phone call from a girlfriend. She tells her about the bad dream she just had, in which her father emailed her a digital folder containing nude images of Remy taken when she was a child. But the really weird thing about it was—as Remy notes with a combination of embarrassment and pride—"I was kinda hot stuff. I mean, I don't know, I looked good—so it was kind of confusing." What follows is a brief conversation about the peculiar relationship dynamic between fathers and daughters compared to moms and sons—Remy's friend concludes that if she had been born a boy, she'd be "one of those sons that turns into a fascist dictator," while Remy retorts, "instead of just another woman with no self-esteem." Her sardonic punchline is punctuated by a burst of canned sitcom laughter—and, much like that infamous Rodney Dangerfield scene in Natural Born Killers, the device elicits more squirms than chuckles. But on Half Free, that bizarre exchange counts as comic relief. And even though this interlude—titled "Telephone Play No. 1"—appears just six minutes into the record, it's still a necessary respite. By that point, we've already heard from the unhappily married wife of a man who had previously bedded her two sisters ("Sororal Feelings"), and a widow grieving her soldier husband's death over a riotous reggae groove ("Damn That Valley"). And there are several more tales of women with no self-esteem to come—unflinching portraits of ladies reeling from inattentive, cheating, or absentee lovers. So the seemingly random appearance of "Telephone Play No. 1" actually makes more sense as the album plays out. It's simply a verbal manifestation of what Remy's proper songs do musically: take us into the spaces that are supposed to provide us with solace—home, family, relationships—and make them feel awkward and uncomfortable. (As the dejected narrator of "Sororal Feelings" declares through a deceptively sunny harmony: "Now I'm going to hang myself/ Hang myself from my family tree.") Likewise, Remy's music has always thrived on the conflict between the familiar and foreign. On previous U.S. Girls releases, her pop and experimental sensibilities—part Shangri-Las, part Sun Ra—were often at war with one another. (Take 2011's U.S. Girls on KRAAK, where the Ronettes-style romp "State House (It's a Man's World)" gets rudely elbowed into the free-form subterranean skronk of "Sinkhole", as if two opposing spirits were fighting for control of Remy's soul.) But, by building upon the grotto-bound R&B introduced on 2013's Free Advice Column EP (whose hip-hop-schooled producer, Onakabazien, returns here), Half Free further fortifies the common ground between Remy's diamond-cut melodies and avant-garde urges. The album sounds like your favourite golden-oldies station beamed through a pirate-radio frequency, seamlessly fusing '60s-vintage girl-group serenades and smooth '70s disco into dubby panoramas and horror-movie atmospherics. But even as its backdrop mutates from deep-house throbs to psych-rock guitar solos, Half Free always focuses your attention to where it should be: on Remy's radiant voice and vivid storytelling. She's the sort of songwriter who can set a 3D scene in a single line that simmers with suggestion—the first words we hear on the record are "Well there were a four of us in a real small space/ Sharing more than just a family name," and you can immediately feel all the humidity and unease hanging in the room. The cinematically scaled production on Half Free only intensifies the domestic dramas playing out within her lyrics: the steady, string-swept build of disco reverie "Window Shades" mirrors the emotional breakthrough of its protagonist, a woman scorned who finally summons the courage to confront her philandering partner; the drizzling, slow-percolating beat of "Red Comes in Many Shades" provides the gray-skied ambience for Remy's tale of a doomed affair with an older paramour, all while her "tears fall like rain." And though "Sed Knife"—an upbeat power-pop revision of a 2012 B-side—may seem like an outlier here, its images of kitchen-table tensions fit right into the album's theme. The women at the center of these songs are indeed half free: they're prisoners to bad choices, cruel circumstances, and duplicitous men—but they're starting to take control of their situation. And with the epic closer "Woman's Work", Remy leaves them with a neon-tinted, mirror-ball-twirling anthem to herald their impending liberation. "You arrived in your mother's arms/ But you will leave riding in a black limousine," Remy seethes at a departing ex who's off to live the high life—or the afterlife—without her, but the defiance in her voice suggests she's richer for it. "A woman's work is never done/ She doesn't sleep 'til the morning comes," chimes the Greek chorus behind her—and when applied to a creatively restless, audacious voice like Remy, it sounds less like a complaint than a promise.

Artist: U.S. Girls, Album: Half Free, Genre: Pop/R&B, Score (1-10): 8.0 Album review: "Three tracks into the new U.S. Girls album, Meghan Remy is awoken by a phone call from a girlfriend. She tells her about the bad dream she just had, in which her father emailed her a digital folder containing nude images of Remy taken when she was a child. But the really weird thing about it was—as Remy notes with a combination of embarrassment and pride—"I was kinda hot stuff. I mean, I don't know, I looked good—so it was kind of confusing." What follows is a brief conversation about the peculiar relationship dynamic between fathers and daughters compared to moms and sons—Remy's friend concludes that if she had been born a boy, she'd be "one of those sons that turns into a fascist dictator," while Remy retorts, "instead of just another woman with no self-esteem." Her sardonic punchline is punctuated by a burst of canned sitcom laughter—and, much like that infamous Rodney Dangerfield scene in Natural Born Killers, the device elicits more squirms than chuckles. But on Half Free, that bizarre exchange counts as comic relief. And even though this interlude—titled "Telephone Play No. 1"—appears just six minutes into the record, it's still a necessary respite. By that point, we've already heard from the unhappily married wife of a man who had previously bedded her two sisters ("Sororal Feelings"), and a widow grieving her soldier husband's death over a riotous reggae groove ("Damn That Valley"). And there are several more tales of women with no self-esteem to come—unflinching portraits of ladies reeling from inattentive, cheating, or absentee lovers. So the seemingly random appearance of "Telephone Play No. 1" actually makes more sense as the album plays out. It's simply a verbal manifestation of what Remy's proper songs do musically: take us into the spaces that are supposed to provide us with solace—home, family, relationships—and make them feel awkward and uncomfortable. (As the dejected narrator of "Sororal Feelings" declares through a deceptively sunny harmony: "Now I'm going to hang myself/ Hang myself from my family tree.") Likewise, Remy's music has always thrived on the conflict between the familiar and foreign. On previous U.S. Girls releases, her pop and experimental sensibilities—part Shangri-Las, part Sun Ra—were often at war with one another. (Take 2011's U.S. Girls on KRAAK, where the Ronettes-style romp "State House (It's a Man's World)" gets rudely elbowed into the free-form subterranean skronk of "Sinkhole", as if two opposing spirits were fighting for control of Remy's soul.) But, by building upon the grotto-bound R&B introduced on 2013's Free Advice Column EP (whose hip-hop-schooled producer, Onakabazien, returns here), Half Free further fortifies the common ground between Remy's diamond-cut melodies and avant-garde urges. The album sounds like your favourite golden-oldies station beamed through a pirate-radio frequency, seamlessly fusing '60s-vintage girl-group serenades and smooth '70s disco into dubby panoramas and horror-movie atmospherics. But even as its backdrop mutates from deep-house throbs to psych-rock guitar solos, Half Free always focuses your attention to where it should be: on Remy's radiant voice and vivid storytelling. She's the sort of songwriter who can set a 3D scene in a single line that simmers with suggestion—the first words we hear on the record are "Well there were a four of us in a real small space/ Sharing more than just a family name," and you can immediately feel all the humidity and unease hanging in the room. The cinematically scaled production on Half Free only intensifies the domestic dramas playing out within her lyrics: the steady, string-swept build of disco reverie "Window Shades" mirrors the emotional breakthrough of its protagonist, a woman scorned who finally summons the courage to confront her philandering partner; the drizzling, slow-percolating beat of "Red Comes in Many Shades" provides the gray-skied ambience for Remy's tale of a doomed affair with an older paramour, all while her "tears fall like rain." And though "Sed Knife"—an upbeat power-pop revision of a 2012 B-side—may seem like an outlier here, its images of kitchen-table tensions fit right into the album's theme. The women at the center of these songs are indeed half free: they're prisoners to bad choices, cruel circumstances, and duplicitous men—but they're starting to take control of their situation. And with the epic closer "Woman's Work", Remy leaves them with a neon-tinted, mirror-ball-twirling anthem to herald their impending liberation. "You arrived in your mother's arms/ But you will leave riding in a black limousine," Remy seethes at a departing ex who's off to live the high life—or the afterlife—without her, but the defiance in her voice suggests she's richer for it. "A woman's work is never done/ She doesn't sleep 'til the morning comes," chimes the Greek chorus behind her—and when applied to a creatively restless, audacious voice like Remy, it sounds less like a complaint than a promise."

Warehouse

super low

Rock

Quinn Moreland

Between Atlanta and Athens, Northern Georgia historically has a knack for churning out some truly freaky, funky acts that can create and innovate outside the claustrophobic East Coast hype bubble. Atlanta quintet Warehouse have existed in this world since first meeting in part at elementary school and then in full years later at Georgia State University. Less than a year after forming, they were receiving recognition from notable local Bradford Cox, who told Pitchfork that one of his best moments of 2013 was “Seeing the band Warehouse play live: They are a new cool young art-punk group from Atlanta. They evoke Pylon but are very much doing their own thing.” Those outside of Atlanta were able to hear what he meant once Warehouse quietly self-released their first album, Tesseract, in 2014. Tesseract’s complex-but-pleasing harmonies  quickly caught the eye of blooming Brooklyn label Bayonet and in 2015 it was re-released as a cassette for the masses to consume. super low is Warehouse’s sophomore effort, taking the strengths of its predecessor and building on them like the Robert Rauschenberg works they mention as inspiration. Like Rauschenberg’s thick collages, Warehouse’s reliance on improvised collaboration results in gems buried amongst their dischord. Ben Jackson and Alex Bailey are responsible for laying each track’s foundation with twisting, jangly guitars, then bassist Josh Hughes and drummer Doug Bleichner add subtle, but strong, flourishes. Finally, there’s the voice of Elaine Edenfield, which stretches and snaps like a rubber band, scratches like Janis Joplin’s howl, and, occasionally, sinks to a mournful murmur. It’s Edenfield’s voice that elevates Warehouse beyond that vague, empty label of “art-punk” and fills them with accessible emotion. super low opener “Oscillator” kicks things off with a groovy reverie. Immediately after “Oscillator” ends, Edenfield rips into “Exit Only,” her voice seesawing between a commanding rasp and a disheartened mutter. All the while, the instruments are marathoning behind her, remaining in tight conversation that manages to sound effortless. “Audrey Horne,” a clear reference to the sassy “Twin Peaks” character, jumps back and forth between opposites, both in terms of the contrasting tight shredding and loose breaks and lyrically: “Like the prefix and the suffix/There is a before and an after/And it is not here nor there.” Penultimate track “Modifier Analog” chugs along in a similarly composed fashion as the rest of super low but its concluding Broadcast-like swirling breakdown destroys any feelings of monotony before the album gets too comfortable. super low’s biggest banger is “Simultaneous Contrasts,” a growling track about disparities that surfs down the guitar neck to ride a quick riff. “You and I/We come from separate worlds,” Edenfield groans before hiccuping “The fevered eyes/They’re ruining my life.” The so-called “fevered eyes” float through super low like ghosts in addition to images of purgatory and fading away. The undercurrent of super low is that of loss, a supreme feeling of heartache. The title track reaches a place of resolution, “I can’t destroy the things/They keep me alive/And I can’t destroy the things/That lead to where you lie.” Shortly after, “Reservoir” continues to search for control in a relationship amidst tragedy. Originally intended to be a simple love song a la Belle and Sebastian, “Reservoir” instead results in a difficult embrace of reality—in its own way, it’s more romantic than any traditional ballad. Edenfield chokes through reassurances like “And when all your smoke and veils fall/I am with you/And never leaving” and “I can tell we’re heading towards the apex/Or the end/And either way/It will be fine.” Warehouse surpass any art-punk labeling through careful, deliberate construction and vulnerability. While some might feel that their complex melodies become a little repetitive, I urge you to listen closer and find the devil in the details. They have planted many careful embellishments just below the surface, and if you find them, it will make glorious sense out of their chaos.

Artist: Warehouse, Album: super low, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.4 Album review: "Between Atlanta and Athens, Northern Georgia historically has a knack for churning out some truly freaky, funky acts that can create and innovate outside the claustrophobic East Coast hype bubble. Atlanta quintet Warehouse have existed in this world since first meeting in part at elementary school and then in full years later at Georgia State University. Less than a year after forming, they were receiving recognition from notable local Bradford Cox, who told Pitchfork that one of his best moments of 2013 was “Seeing the band Warehouse play live: They are a new cool young art-punk group from Atlanta. They evoke Pylon but are very much doing their own thing.” Those outside of Atlanta were able to hear what he meant once Warehouse quietly self-released their first album, Tesseract, in 2014. Tesseract’s complex-but-pleasing harmonies  quickly caught the eye of blooming Brooklyn label Bayonet and in 2015 it was re-released as a cassette for the masses to consume. super low is Warehouse’s sophomore effort, taking the strengths of its predecessor and building on them like the Robert Rauschenberg works they mention as inspiration. Like Rauschenberg’s thick collages, Warehouse’s reliance on improvised collaboration results in gems buried amongst their dischord. Ben Jackson and Alex Bailey are responsible for laying each track’s foundation with twisting, jangly guitars, then bassist Josh Hughes and drummer Doug Bleichner add subtle, but strong, flourishes. Finally, there’s the voice of Elaine Edenfield, which stretches and snaps like a rubber band, scratches like Janis Joplin’s howl, and, occasionally, sinks to a mournful murmur. It’s Edenfield’s voice that elevates Warehouse beyond that vague, empty label of “art-punk” and fills them with accessible emotion. super low opener “Oscillator” kicks things off with a groovy reverie. Immediately after “Oscillator” ends, Edenfield rips into “Exit Only,” her voice seesawing between a commanding rasp and a disheartened mutter. All the while, the instruments are marathoning behind her, remaining in tight conversation that manages to sound effortless. “Audrey Horne,” a clear reference to the sassy “Twin Peaks” character, jumps back and forth between opposites, both in terms of the contrasting tight shredding and loose breaks and lyrically: “Like the prefix and the suffix/There is a before and an after/And it is not here nor there.” Penultimate track “Modifier Analog” chugs along in a similarly composed fashion as the rest of super low but its concluding Broadcast-like swirling breakdown destroys any feelings of monotony before the album gets too comfortable. super low’s biggest banger is “Simultaneous Contrasts,” a growling track about disparities that surfs down the guitar neck to ride a quick riff. “You and I/We come from separate worlds,” Edenfield groans before hiccuping “The fevered eyes/They’re ruining my life.” The so-called “fevered eyes” float through super low like ghosts in addition to images of purgatory and fading away. The undercurrent of super low is that of loss, a supreme feeling of heartache. The title track reaches a place of resolution, “I can’t destroy the things/They keep me alive/And I can’t destroy the things/That lead to where you lie.” Shortly after, “Reservoir” continues to search for control in a relationship amidst tragedy. Originally intended to be a simple love song a la Belle and Sebastian, “Reservoir” instead results in a difficult embrace of reality—in its own way, it’s more romantic than any traditional ballad. Edenfield chokes through reassurances like “And when all your smoke and veils fall/I am with you/And never leaving” and “I can tell we’re heading towards the apex/Or the end/And either way/It will be fine.” Warehouse surpass any art-punk labeling through careful, deliberate construction and vulnerability. While some might feel that their complex melodies become a little repetitive, I urge you to listen closer and find the devil in the details. They have planted many careful embellishments just below the surface, and if you find them, it will make glorious sense out of their chaos."

Tortoise

A Lazarus Taxon

Experimental,Rock

Jess Harvell

In a 2004 The Village Voice review of the group's It's All Around You, Jeff Chang called Tortoise a hip-hop band. What might seem like craziness on the surface is actually a perfectly logical statement. Like most hip-hop artists, Tortoise put groove and texture out front-- and groove and texture were a lot of listener's primary obsessions in the 1990s. For a few insane years people were actually arguing that the song should be left for dead. Back then, Tortoise appeared on comps like Headz 2 and Macro Dub Infection, surrounded by jungle, techno, and trip-hop artists. When the odd, oblong, bass-forward grooves of Tortoise dropped in 1994, Kurt Cobain had recently, uh, retired. Two years later, it was hard not to feel like the band's Millions Now Living Will Never Die-- and a billion other things-- had finally killed grunge dead. Premature and bullshit in retrospect, of course, but excuse us for getting excited. So here we are a decade later with A Lazarus Taxon, a 3xCD/DVD box set collecting singles, B-sides, and remixes originally created between 1995 and 2001. Wrapped in beautiful grayscale, the box has a definite, if unfortunate, tombstone vibe. Tortoise continue to tour and release records, of course, but in many ways they remain emblematically tied to the mid- to late-1990s, a time when indie rock remixes were a real mind blower and everyone was scrimping for their own marimba. In fact, A Lazarus Taxon is an inadvertent lesson in how indie rock has changed in the last 10 years. Onstage in 1996 on the DVD, the band locks into its intricate, multi-part music with the implacable faces of tenured calculus professors. The wide-eared listening habits Tortoise helped to foster remain active in 2006, but it's hard to imagine a sweaty, bearded Dan Bitney striding across the stage in a stained babydoll dress any more than John McEntire changing his name to Moonchild McFlowerpot or Koala Bear. And though bookish indie heartthrobs can now make a mint singing about the Cook County chamber of commerce over Steve Reich pastiches, Tortoise offered no such easy ins. At their best Tortoise were either anthemic or hypnotic; the first disc of Lazarus opens with 1995's "Gamera", which hits the anthemic/hypnotic axis dead center and is still the band's high point and American post-rock's most epic 11 minutes. "Gamera" begins with John Fahey-esque picking so intimate you can hear the squeak of fingers on the frets. A beat somewhere between the funky drummer break and Neu! builds and crests for a small eternity, finding room for both country twang and Edge-like harmonics. The bass modulates constantly between rhythm and melody, one of the band's favorite tricks. Much of Tortoise's material from this era has a slight drum'n'bass feel, twisted just enough to avoid dating itself. "The Source of Uncertainty" is dance music played on empty tin cans and Coke bottles dangling from twine, abandoning the good stuff kids go for like hooks and melody and drawing lines between then-current jungle's polyrhythmic motion and shit like Can, This Heat, and Miles' On the Corner. You know-- dance music you can't dance to. Earlier singles like "Why We Fight" and "Whitewater", both from the same 1995 7", have the same spectral, late-night quality-- all muted xylophones and lonesome guitars and the hum of orange street lamps. Later tracks veer between pure electronica, outright jazz, and the band's most rocking moments. In between, 1998's "Madison Ave." and "Madison Area" turn out radically different versions of the same material, another favorite Tortoise trick, Jeff Parker's guitar melodies on one song becoming puddles of abstract color on another. Tortoise were notoriously promiscuous with their own work, a very 90s philosophy that said just because a song had been finished didn't really mean it was "finished." The best of the box's versions is Nobukazu Takemura's remix of the title track from 1998's TNT. A kind of jazz-lite take on "Gamera's" krautrock groove thang-- complete with Rob Mazurek's watery, tremulous trumpet-- Takemura adds a glossy spray of digital sparkle, the difference between his "TNT" and Tortoise's earliest records being something like the difference between computer animation and a daguerreotype. Lazarus also includes two typically bristling Autechre remixes, "To Day Retrieval" and "Adverse Camber", Rob Booth and Sean Brown applying their lateral, chattering machine logic to Tortoise's organic forward momentum. Missing in action: The whole of 1996's Remixed, featuring two astounding Oval remixes where Markus Popp and crew shatter Tortoise into a million pieces and then refashion the shards into wind chimes. The third disc is given over to the whole of the band's long out-of-print 1995 remix EP Rhythms, Resolutions, and Clusters, the title of which is perfectly chosen. John McEntire's "Alcohall" is a series of cymbal crashes, tumbles on his tom toms, stereopanning snare cracks, drumrolls, and cowbell fed through an echo chamber. (There's also some wooshy stuff in the background, as was the style at the time.) Some of the tracks aren't so big on the "resolutions." Rick Brown's "Your New Rod" isolates a Tortoise bass twang and irregularly repeats it over a drum machine that sounds like all sorts of leaves and debris would fall out if you shook it. Casey Rice's "Cobwebbed" sounds a bit like an Aphex circa Selected Ambient Works II DAT discovered a few decades later in a storage unit out by the highway. But it's also on RRAC that Tortoise most live up to Chang's hip-hop take. "Not Quite East of the Ryan", by Bundy K. Brown, features not only a hard, shuffling breakbeat, but Minnie Ripperton and A Tribe Called Quest samples, stabbing funk guitar, echoing horns weaving through the mix. Only the vibes, which sound more Bobby Hutcherson than Pete Rock, would keep an enterprising DJ from throwing an a capella on top. The bonus is a previously lost Mike Watt remix of "Cornpone Brunch" that doubles the already doubly bass heavy Tortoise sound. Aside from disc three, the contents of A Lazarus Taxon are chronologically jumbled, but the DVD provides an inadvertent trajectory, the stern, black-and-white footage from UK rock toilets circa Millions Now Living eventually giving way to color clips of the band performing a big jazz/world music style festival, the kind of thing where men unashamedly wear fanny packs. There's also a great TV segment with the band performing (miming?) "Seneca" while dressed in matching Devo-style janitor's suits and monkey masks for an audience of grade schoolers, lest anyone claim they lack

Artist: Tortoise, Album: A Lazarus Taxon, Genre: Experimental,Rock, Score (1-10): 9.2 Album review: "In a 2004 The Village Voice review of the group's It's All Around You, Jeff Chang called Tortoise a hip-hop band. What might seem like craziness on the surface is actually a perfectly logical statement. Like most hip-hop artists, Tortoise put groove and texture out front-- and groove and texture were a lot of listener's primary obsessions in the 1990s. For a few insane years people were actually arguing that the song should be left for dead. Back then, Tortoise appeared on comps like Headz 2 and Macro Dub Infection, surrounded by jungle, techno, and trip-hop artists. When the odd, oblong, bass-forward grooves of Tortoise dropped in 1994, Kurt Cobain had recently, uh, retired. Two years later, it was hard not to feel like the band's Millions Now Living Will Never Die-- and a billion other things-- had finally killed grunge dead. Premature and bullshit in retrospect, of course, but excuse us for getting excited. So here we are a decade later with A Lazarus Taxon, a 3xCD/DVD box set collecting singles, B-sides, and remixes originally created between 1995 and 2001. Wrapped in beautiful grayscale, the box has a definite, if unfortunate, tombstone vibe. Tortoise continue to tour and release records, of course, but in many ways they remain emblematically tied to the mid- to late-1990s, a time when indie rock remixes were a real mind blower and everyone was scrimping for their own marimba. In fact, A Lazarus Taxon is an inadvertent lesson in how indie rock has changed in the last 10 years. Onstage in 1996 on the DVD, the band locks into its intricate, multi-part music with the implacable faces of tenured calculus professors. The wide-eared listening habits Tortoise helped to foster remain active in 2006, but it's hard to imagine a sweaty, bearded Dan Bitney striding across the stage in a stained babydoll dress any more than John McEntire changing his name to Moonchild McFlowerpot or Koala Bear. And though bookish indie heartthrobs can now make a mint singing about the Cook County chamber of commerce over Steve Reich pastiches, Tortoise offered no such easy ins. At their best Tortoise were either anthemic or hypnotic; the first disc of Lazarus opens with 1995's "Gamera", which hits the anthemic/hypnotic axis dead center and is still the band's high point and American post-rock's most epic 11 minutes. "Gamera" begins with John Fahey-esque picking so intimate you can hear the squeak of fingers on the frets. A beat somewhere between the funky drummer break and Neu! builds and crests for a small eternity, finding room for both country twang and Edge-like harmonics. The bass modulates constantly between rhythm and melody, one of the band's favorite tricks. Much of Tortoise's material from this era has a slight drum'n'bass feel, twisted just enough to avoid dating itself. "The Source of Uncertainty" is dance music played on empty tin cans and Coke bottles dangling from twine, abandoning the good stuff kids go for like hooks and melody and drawing lines between then-current jungle's polyrhythmic motion and shit like Can, This Heat, and Miles' On the Corner. You know-- dance music you can't dance to. Earlier singles like "Why We Fight" and "Whitewater", both from the same 1995 7", have the same spectral, late-night quality-- all muted xylophones and lonesome guitars and the hum of orange street lamps. Later tracks veer between pure electronica, outright jazz, and the band's most rocking moments. In between, 1998's "Madison Ave." and "Madison Area" turn out radically different versions of the same material, another favorite Tortoise trick, Jeff Parker's guitar melodies on one song becoming puddles of abstract color on another. Tortoise were notoriously promiscuous with their own work, a very 90s philosophy that said just because a song had been finished didn't really mean it was "finished." The best of the box's versions is Nobukazu Takemura's remix of the title track from 1998's TNT. A kind of jazz-lite take on "Gamera's" krautrock groove thang-- complete with Rob Mazurek's watery, tremulous trumpet-- Takemura adds a glossy spray of digital sparkle, the difference between his "TNT" and Tortoise's earliest records being something like the difference between computer animation and a daguerreotype. Lazarus also includes two typically bristling Autechre remixes, "To Day Retrieval" and "Adverse Camber", Rob Booth and Sean Brown applying their lateral, chattering machine logic to Tortoise's organic forward momentum. Missing in action: The whole of 1996's Remixed, featuring two astounding Oval remixes where Markus Popp and crew shatter Tortoise into a million pieces and then refashion the shards into wind chimes. The third disc is given over to the whole of the band's long out-of-print 1995 remix EP Rhythms, Resolutions, and Clusters, the title of which is perfectly chosen. John McEntire's "Alcohall" is a series of cymbal crashes, tumbles on his tom toms, stereopanning snare cracks, drumrolls, and cowbell fed through an echo chamber. (There's also some wooshy stuff in the background, as was the style at the time.) Some of the tracks aren't so big on the "resolutions." Rick Brown's "Your New Rod" isolates a Tortoise bass twang and irregularly repeats it over a drum machine that sounds like all sorts of leaves and debris would fall out if you shook it. Casey Rice's "Cobwebbed" sounds a bit like an Aphex circa Selected Ambient Works II DAT discovered a few decades later in a storage unit out by the highway. But it's also on RRAC that Tortoise most live up to Chang's hip-hop take. "Not Quite East of the Ryan", by Bundy K. Brown, features not only a hard, shuffling breakbeat, but Minnie Ripperton and A Tribe Called Quest samples, stabbing funk guitar, echoing horns weaving through the mix. Only the vibes, which sound more Bobby Hutcherson than Pete Rock, would keep an enterprising DJ from throwing an a capella on top. The bonus is a previously lost Mike Watt remix of "Cornpone Brunch" that doubles the already doubly bass heavy Tortoise sound. Aside from disc three, the contents of A Lazarus Taxon are chronologically jumbled, but the DVD provides an inadvertent trajectory, the stern, black-and-white footage from UK rock toilets circa Millions Now Living eventually giving way to color clips of the band performing a big jazz/world music style festival, the kind of thing where men unashamedly wear fanny packs. There's also a great TV segment with the band performing (miming?) "Seneca" while dressed in matching Devo-style janitor's suits and monkey masks for an audience of grade schoolers, lest anyone claim they lack"

The Coctails

Popcorn Box

Pop/R&B

Joe Tangari

The Coctails were one of the more unusual musical packages of the past 20 years: four talented multi-instrumentalists from Kansas City-- John Upchurch, Barry Phipps, Mark Greenberg, and Archer Prewitt-- whose music didn't fit any category even when it veered close to one. They dressed in matching yellow tuxedos, designed and printed their own ultra-retro concert posters, and wrapped their releases in packaging that looked alternately like something from the 50s Blue Note catalog or something from the coolest thrift store in the universe. The garish tuxes eventually became more stylish suits and the band uprooted for Chicago, where they established themselves as regulars at the legendary Lounge Ax venue (R.I.P.) and convinced the old Wax Trax! record store (R.I.P.) to let them erect three-foot-tall effigies of themselves in the front display window to promote their first album. (Those same papier mache figures now overlook the bar at Empty Bottle.) From their loft space, they ran two record labels-- Hi-Ball for their vinyl releases, Carrot Top for their CDs-- and recorded on old analog equipment with a menagerie of instruments that would make any instrument fetishist plotz. They were equally comfortable playing weddings or opening for Shellac or the Skatalites-- among the many great concert posters included in the liners of Popcorn Box Box, their new three-disc round-up of rarities, unreleased material, and select album cuts, is one that shows them opening for some band named Corndolly, with Liz Phair third on the bill. What's really remarkable about the Coctails, as this set amply demonstrates, is that in a decade when facelessness and a supposed lack of affect ruled the underground, and anonymous post-rock collectives lumbered their way to shining reviews, they made their faces into Beatlesque icons, wore their personalities on their sleeves, embraced comic book art and toys as promotional devices, and exuded humor, unfettered creativity, and high spirits. People try to point to the Coctails as a precedent for the regrettable lounge revival, but as this compilation attests, they aren't so easily pigeonholed: These guys interpreted Sun Ra, took the occasional turn into garage mayhem, recorded a superb album of alternately weird and elegiac jazz (Long Sound), cut holiday and children's records, covered Raymond Scott's cartoon scores, and set an excerpt of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot to music. Popcorn Box takes in most of this over the course of its three-plus hour runtime, cleaning out the vaults of worthy unreleased stuff and filling in the blanks for fans who can't locate the limited-run vinyl-only EPs and numerous compilation tracks the Coctails released in their six years together. It also does a nice job of not duplicating the band's other set of rarities and album tracks, The Early Hi-Ball Years, and offers just about anything you could reasonably ask of liner notes: archival photographs, album art, comic strips, concert posters, tracks notes with comments from the band, and a couple of heartfelt essays from Coctails associates and admirers. Though it does an excellent job of scraping together a huge amount of often difficult to find material, Popcorn Box is obviously not for everyone-- some people will find the abstract jazz that dominates disc three impossible to sit through, while others with be put off by the guileless goofing off of tracks like "Donut Shoppe" ("Pirates run the donut shoppe.../ They used to have a pirate ship but it sank") and "Abba-Dabba-Do-Dance", a truly weird surf blues featuring lead vocals by a friend of the group that ends with the band collapsing in laughter. But lovers of pure sound will find plenty to embrace, from the interesting horn arrangements that populate the majority of the tracks to the heavenly bowed vibraphone of "City Sun" to the pretty jazz ballad "Marseilles" to the bastard klezmer touches that color much of disc two. Previously unreleased tracks like the crazy percussion, marimba, and sax (two of which Upchurch plays simultaneously) pile-up "Skeleton Bones", or the great surf-inflected pop song "Hey Ho", recorded at a "beach party" in the band's loft space, should be all the incentive fans of the band need to drop dime on this-- though there's plenty of added value for those who still need some convincing. The six-song EP of freaky, richly detailed instrumentals they recorded for John Flansburgh's Hello Records Club has been out of print for ages and makes a welcome return in its original running order at the beginning of disc one. It's actually one of their most solid, cohesive releases, immediately illustrating that the band's utilization of theremin, marimba, banjo, musical saw, and bass clarinet was never a gimmick, but rather a means to an end. That end is some of the most memorably loopy music in recent memory, a good time that wasn't afraid to play with dissonance or experiment with free jazz-based open melodic structure. Newcomers (most likely curious fans of Prewitt's solo work or the Sea & Cake) probably shouldn't start by tackling this box, which seems aimed at established fans-- Peel or The Early Hi-Ball Years are better starting points, or Long Sound for those more interested in the band's jazz leanings. For those who try it with open and eager ears, though, Popcorn Box is a rewarding look back at a truly singular band.

Artist: The Coctails, Album: Popcorn Box, Genre: Pop/R&B, Score (1-10): 7.4 Album review: "The Coctails were one of the more unusual musical packages of the past 20 years: four talented multi-instrumentalists from Kansas City-- John Upchurch, Barry Phipps, Mark Greenberg, and Archer Prewitt-- whose music didn't fit any category even when it veered close to one. They dressed in matching yellow tuxedos, designed and printed their own ultra-retro concert posters, and wrapped their releases in packaging that looked alternately like something from the 50s Blue Note catalog or something from the coolest thrift store in the universe. The garish tuxes eventually became more stylish suits and the band uprooted for Chicago, where they established themselves as regulars at the legendary Lounge Ax venue (R.I.P.) and convinced the old Wax Trax! record store (R.I.P.) to let them erect three-foot-tall effigies of themselves in the front display window to promote their first album. (Those same papier mache figures now overlook the bar at Empty Bottle.) From their loft space, they ran two record labels-- Hi-Ball for their vinyl releases, Carrot Top for their CDs-- and recorded on old analog equipment with a menagerie of instruments that would make any instrument fetishist plotz. They were equally comfortable playing weddings or opening for Shellac or the Skatalites-- among the many great concert posters included in the liners of Popcorn Box Box, their new three-disc round-up of rarities, unreleased material, and select album cuts, is one that shows them opening for some band named Corndolly, with Liz Phair third on the bill. What's really remarkable about the Coctails, as this set amply demonstrates, is that in a decade when facelessness and a supposed lack of affect ruled the underground, and anonymous post-rock collectives lumbered their way to shining reviews, they made their faces into Beatlesque icons, wore their personalities on their sleeves, embraced comic book art and toys as promotional devices, and exuded humor, unfettered creativity, and high spirits. People try to point to the Coctails as a precedent for the regrettable lounge revival, but as this compilation attests, they aren't so easily pigeonholed: These guys interpreted Sun Ra, took the occasional turn into garage mayhem, recorded a superb album of alternately weird and elegiac jazz (Long Sound), cut holiday and children's records, covered Raymond Scott's cartoon scores, and set an excerpt of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot to music. Popcorn Box takes in most of this over the course of its three-plus hour runtime, cleaning out the vaults of worthy unreleased stuff and filling in the blanks for fans who can't locate the limited-run vinyl-only EPs and numerous compilation tracks the Coctails released in their six years together. It also does a nice job of not duplicating the band's other set of rarities and album tracks, The Early Hi-Ball Years, and offers just about anything you could reasonably ask of liner notes: archival photographs, album art, comic strips, concert posters, tracks notes with comments from the band, and a couple of heartfelt essays from Coctails associates and admirers. Though it does an excellent job of scraping together a huge amount of often difficult to find material, Popcorn Box is obviously not for everyone-- some people will find the abstract jazz that dominates disc three impossible to sit through, while others with be put off by the guileless goofing off of tracks like "Donut Shoppe" ("Pirates run the donut shoppe.../ They used to have a pirate ship but it sank") and "Abba-Dabba-Do-Dance", a truly weird surf blues featuring lead vocals by a friend of the group that ends with the band collapsing in laughter. But lovers of pure sound will find plenty to embrace, from the interesting horn arrangements that populate the majority of the tracks to the heavenly bowed vibraphone of "City Sun" to the pretty jazz ballad "Marseilles" to the bastard klezmer touches that color much of disc two. Previously unreleased tracks like the crazy percussion, marimba, and sax (two of which Upchurch plays simultaneously) pile-up "Skeleton Bones", or the great surf-inflected pop song "Hey Ho", recorded at a "beach party" in the band's loft space, should be all the incentive fans of the band need to drop dime on this-- though there's plenty of added value for those who still need some convincing. The six-song EP of freaky, richly detailed instrumentals they recorded for John Flansburgh's Hello Records Club has been out of print for ages and makes a welcome return in its original running order at the beginning of disc one. It's actually one of their most solid, cohesive releases, immediately illustrating that the band's utilization of theremin, marimba, banjo, musical saw, and bass clarinet was never a gimmick, but rather a means to an end. That end is some of the most memorably loopy music in recent memory, a good time that wasn't afraid to play with dissonance or experiment with free jazz-based open melodic structure. Newcomers (most likely curious fans of Prewitt's solo work or the Sea & Cake) probably shouldn't start by tackling this box, which seems aimed at established fans-- Peel or The Early Hi-Ball Years are better starting points, or Long Sound for those more interested in the band's jazz leanings. For those who try it with open and eager ears, though, Popcorn Box is a rewarding look back at a truly singular band."

Yoko Ono, John Lennon

Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins

Experimental,Rock

Seth Colter Walls

Courting confusion is part of the job description for anyone working in the avant-garde. Some experimenters meet this requirement with the equivalent of a shrug, while others take to the task with more evident relish. For over half a century, the singer and visual artist Yoko Ono has found herself in the latter camp, gleefully scrawling her new approaches into the official ledgers of cultural production. The editors of the recent volume Fluxbooks credit Ono’s 1964 Grapefruit as being “one of the first works of art in book form.” Ono’s early short films likewise helped expand cinematic practices. In the years before she started dating a Beatle, Ono sang with one of John Cage’s most trusted musical interpreters, and turned a New York loft space into a contemporary-art destination that drew the likes of Marcel Duchamp to her door. Yet this multimedia artist’s most notorious act of provocation was her approach to becoming tabloid fodder. She took one of the world’s most popular musicians and hurried along his engagement with the experimental fringe (an attraction already evident in John Lennon’s work, as early as 1966’s Revolver). In some quarters, she’s never been forgiven for this. But Ono’s radical influence on pop history has also inspired generations of visionary artists. The Lennon/Ono collaborative albums were a critical part of their take on celebrity coupledom. Their first two LPs carried the series title “Unfinished Music,” a conceptual gambit with deeper roots in the aesthetic of the Fluxus art movement than in that of the British Invasion. The first set to be issued, subtitled Two Virgins, was a sound-collage set reportedly produced during their first night together. The album’s name, and the full-frontal nudity of its cover, referenced the couple’s sense of innocence in approaching a new beginning—as well as the fact that the recording took place just prior to the consummation of their relationship. As the product of a first date, Two Virgins is fascinating. As a sound artifact from the initial decade of Fluxus-inspired activity, it has plenty of competition. Casual clips of the couple’s conversations—mixed in alongside Lennon’s tape loops—blur the distinction between the private and the public-facing. This approach recalls efforts by some of Ono’s contemporaries, like Charlotte Moorman and Benjamin Patterson. But what makes Two Virgins distinct is the range of Ono’s voice. In the opening moments, she contributes some pure-tone humming, which sounds downright companionable amid Lennon’s meandering keyboard motifs and reverb tape-effects. Four-and-a-half-minutes in, Ono unleashes the first of her extended yelps, from the top of her range. Even if you know it’s coming, this sound always registers as shocking. This aspect of Ono’s musicianship confused (and enraged) large portions of Lennon’s audience. Despite her purposeful variations of timbre and her ability to hit notes cleanly, Ono’s recourse to this proto-punk wail was often decried as unmusical. And after the White Album’s “Revolution 9”—a much tighter collage created by Lennon, Ono and George Harrison, now sometimes interpreted by classical musicians—she was often accused of being the driving agent behind the Beatles’ breakup. Tensions from Beatlemania carry over into the couple’s second, less idyllic “Unfinished Music” release, subtitled Life With the Lions. Corporate tussles between the Beatles and their record label provide some of the inspiration for “No Bed for Beatle John,” a piece recorded in Ono’s hospital room, following a miscarriage. The album’s dominant track, though, is the side-length workout “Cambridge 1969,” a live recording driven by Lennon’s guitar feedback and Ono’s harshest vocalizations. In failing to create much interest over its 26 minutes, “Cambridge 1969” reveals something important about Ono’s art. The performances of hers that work don’t do so merely because she can kick up a unique noise. Instead, the takes that have true liftoff usually find her switching up those extreme textures with greater frequency. Unlike some of the composers she hung out with, circa 1961, Ono is not a drone artist. She’s an expert in subtle variations, carved from blocks of seeming chaos. Her 1970 album Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band is a triumph, in part, because it sounds fully aware of this reality. It’s also iconic because it contains some of Lennon’s most aggressive guitar work. Opener “Why” hurtles from its needle-drop opening, with slide guitar swoops and febrile picking that anticipate the variety of Ono’s vocal lines. When the singer enters, she wastes no time in applying a range of approaches to her one-word lyric sheet. Long expressions full of vibrato give way to shorter exhalations, rooted in the back of the throat. Spates of shredded laughter communicate the absurdist good humor that’s often present in Ono’s work. The minimalist pounding of drummer Ringo Starr and bassist Klaus Voormann is there as a foil, propped against all the invention on offer from Ono and Lennon. “Why Not” inverts this script by arranging similar licks inside a slower tempo. Ono’s voice becomes more pinched and childlike, while Lennon’s guitar lines have a bluesier profile. Elsewhere, Ono puts a new spin on an “instruction” piece from her Grapefruit book, with the echo-laden “Greenfield Morning I Pushed an Empty Baby Carriage All Over the City.” Here, in another surprise, Ono’s voice sounds stolid and more traditionally “correct.” That feel is subsequently obliterated by the noisy middle section of “AOS,” a track Ono recorded in ’68 with saxophonist Ornette Coleman’s band. The Lennon-led backing group returns for the final two pieces of the original LP configuration, which have a comparatively calmer air. Like Lennon’s ’70 solo album of the same name (and near-identical cover), Ono’s Plastic Ono Band initially scans as acerbic, yet manages to create a supple variety of song-forms from that opening template. Ono’s absorption of her new husband’s sonic language was only beginning to pay dividends, too. As Sean Lennon’s Chimera imprint and the Secretly Canadian label continue to reissue her catalog, Ono’s subsequent experiments with rock and pop formats will come into clearer view for audiences that have only heard rumors about her craft. Still, these opening reissues—which come complete with era-appropriate B-sides and outtakes—all manage to reflect a key aspect of Ono’s broader artistic intentions, as defined in a 1971 artist’s statement: “I like to fight the establishment by using methods that are so far removed from establishment-type

Artist: Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Album: Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, Genre: Experimental,Rock, Score (1-10): 6.8 Album review: "Courting confusion is part of the job description for anyone working in the avant-garde. Some experimenters meet this requirement with the equivalent of a shrug, while others take to the task with more evident relish. For over half a century, the singer and visual artist Yoko Ono has found herself in the latter camp, gleefully scrawling her new approaches into the official ledgers of cultural production. The editors of the recent volume Fluxbooks credit Ono’s 1964 Grapefruit as being “one of the first works of art in book form.” Ono’s early short films likewise helped expand cinematic practices. In the years before she started dating a Beatle, Ono sang with one of John Cage’s most trusted musical interpreters, and turned a New York loft space into a contemporary-art destination that drew the likes of Marcel Duchamp to her door. Yet this multimedia artist’s most notorious act of provocation was her approach to becoming tabloid fodder. She took one of the world’s most popular musicians and hurried along his engagement with the experimental fringe (an attraction already evident in John Lennon’s work, as early as 1966’s Revolver). In some quarters, she’s never been forgiven for this. But Ono’s radical influence on pop history has also inspired generations of visionary artists. The Lennon/Ono collaborative albums were a critical part of their take on celebrity coupledom. Their first two LPs carried the series title “Unfinished Music,” a conceptual gambit with deeper roots in the aesthetic of the Fluxus art movement than in that of the British Invasion. The first set to be issued, subtitled Two Virgins, was a sound-collage set reportedly produced during their first night together. The album’s name, and the full-frontal nudity of its cover, referenced the couple’s sense of innocence in approaching a new beginning—as well as the fact that the recording took place just prior to the consummation of their relationship. As the product of a first date, Two Virgins is fascinating. As a sound artifact from the initial decade of Fluxus-inspired activity, it has plenty of competition. Casual clips of the couple’s conversations—mixed in alongside Lennon’s tape loops—blur the distinction between the private and the public-facing. This approach recalls efforts by some of Ono’s contemporaries, like Charlotte Moorman and Benjamin Patterson. But what makes Two Virgins distinct is the range of Ono’s voice. In the opening moments, she contributes some pure-tone humming, which sounds downright companionable amid Lennon’s meandering keyboard motifs and reverb tape-effects. Four-and-a-half-minutes in, Ono unleashes the first of her extended yelps, from the top of her range. Even if you know it’s coming, this sound always registers as shocking. This aspect of Ono’s musicianship confused (and enraged) large portions of Lennon’s audience. Despite her purposeful variations of timbre and her ability to hit notes cleanly, Ono’s recourse to this proto-punk wail was often decried as unmusical. And after the White Album’s “Revolution 9”—a much tighter collage created by Lennon, Ono and George Harrison, now sometimes interpreted by classical musicians—she was often accused of being the driving agent behind the Beatles’ breakup. Tensions from Beatlemania carry over into the couple’s second, less idyllic “Unfinished Music” release, subtitled Life With the Lions. Corporate tussles between the Beatles and their record label provide some of the inspiration for “No Bed for Beatle John,” a piece recorded in Ono’s hospital room, following a miscarriage. The album’s dominant track, though, is the side-length workout “Cambridge 1969,” a live recording driven by Lennon’s guitar feedback and Ono’s harshest vocalizations. In failing to create much interest over its 26 minutes, “Cambridge 1969” reveals something important about Ono’s art. The performances of hers that work don’t do so merely because she can kick up a unique noise. Instead, the takes that have true liftoff usually find her switching up those extreme textures with greater frequency. Unlike some of the composers she hung out with, circa 1961, Ono is not a drone artist. She’s an expert in subtle variations, carved from blocks of seeming chaos. Her 1970 album Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band is a triumph, in part, because it sounds fully aware of this reality. It’s also iconic because it contains some of Lennon’s most aggressive guitar work. Opener “Why” hurtles from its needle-drop opening, with slide guitar swoops and febrile picking that anticipate the variety of Ono’s vocal lines. When the singer enters, she wastes no time in applying a range of approaches to her one-word lyric sheet. Long expressions full of vibrato give way to shorter exhalations, rooted in the back of the throat. Spates of shredded laughter communicate the absurdist good humor that’s often present in Ono’s work. The minimalist pounding of drummer Ringo Starr and bassist Klaus Voormann is there as a foil, propped against all the invention on offer from Ono and Lennon. “Why Not” inverts this script by arranging similar licks inside a slower tempo. Ono’s voice becomes more pinched and childlike, while Lennon’s guitar lines have a bluesier profile. Elsewhere, Ono puts a new spin on an “instruction” piece from her Grapefruit book, with the echo-laden “Greenfield Morning I Pushed an Empty Baby Carriage All Over the City.” Here, in another surprise, Ono’s voice sounds stolid and more traditionally “correct.” That feel is subsequently obliterated by the noisy middle section of “AOS,” a track Ono recorded in ’68 with saxophonist Ornette Coleman’s band. The Lennon-led backing group returns for the final two pieces of the original LP configuration, which have a comparatively calmer air. Like Lennon’s ’70 solo album of the same name (and near-identical cover), Ono’s Plastic Ono Band initially scans as acerbic, yet manages to create a supple variety of song-forms from that opening template. Ono’s absorption of her new husband’s sonic language was only beginning to pay dividends, too. As Sean Lennon’s Chimera imprint and the Secretly Canadian label continue to reissue her catalog, Ono’s subsequent experiments with rock and pop formats will come into clearer view for audiences that have only heard rumors about her craft. Still, these opening reissues—which come complete with era-appropriate B-sides and outtakes—all manage to reflect a key aspect of Ono’s broader artistic intentions, as defined in a 1971 artist’s statement: “I like to fight the establishment by using methods that are so far removed from establishment-type"

Travis Scott, Quavo

Huncho Jack, Jack Huncho

Rap

Brian Josephs

Last year’s palatable string of album-length collaborations from the South featured Future and Young Thug dropping Super Slimey as a welcome surprise following their cold war, while Offset, 21 Savage, and Metro Boomin’s Without Warning was a Halloween gorefest that transcended its gimmick. Huncho Jack, Jack Huncho—Travis Scott and Quavo’s much ballyhooed team-up—was slated to be just as formidable, if only because the duo’s working relationship goes back longer than most of their contemporaries. Quavo has been appearing on Travis’ projects since his 2014 mixtape Days Before Rodeo. Their big payoff came on the Young Thug-featuring jewel “Pick Up the Phone,” with Travis returning the favor by hopping on Culture’s oddly majestic “Kelly Price.” The two highlights didn’t place the stars on equal footing, but using Travis’ gothic bent to ornament Quavo’s colorful presence was a solid formula. That dynamic, combined with the sheer momentum of their careers, gave some confidence in the possibilities of Huncho Jack, which was teased all throughout last year. But instead of being the trap-and-Auto-Tune “Auld Lang Syne” it ought to be by its December release, Huncho Jack is lethargic even for a victory lap. The potential is squandered on a 41-minute runthrough that rarely feels much more than extracurricular. Quavo and Travis don’t carry themselves as pals who’ve been working together for years. Rather, they have about the same amount of chemistry as two strangers attempting to draw some pleasantries out of dead air. Quavo features work best when the surrounding cast and production mirror his natural effervescence. But here, he’s on autopilot, slowing himself down to match Travis’ staid presence, which creates some uncharacteristic clunkers; on “Eye 2 Eye,” Quavo chants, “Real nigga, I/We see eye to eye” with the clumsy precision of a samurai who hasn’t realized his sword is no longer sharp. Meanwhile, Travis too frequently settles for throwing echoes and ad-libs at Quavo, which is unfortunate because his “It’s lit” signature is an acquired taste at best. They pop up like nervous ticks to ruin possible hits on the slithering “Dubai Shit” and the rugged “Motorcycle Patches,” adding irritation with every appearance Joint projects often work best when the collaborators complement each other in ways that accentuate their abilities. Without Warning was compelling because 21 Savage’s deadpan voice was a catapult for Offset’s acrobatics. On his albums, Travis covers his shortcomings by curating and cloaking himself in this kind of nocturnal sensibility, like a kid wearing a cape. But Huncho Jack’s star co-billing casts him as more of a frontman, where the spotlight continuously highlights his mediocre rhyming. That he’s shooting banalities like, “Jump out this bitch: pogo, yeah” and, “Take that bar, no 3G” with lackadaisical delivery also shows a plain lack of ambition. Huncho Jack’s saving grace is often the supporting players. Offset and Quavo are joyously vain in their shared verse on “Dubai Shit,” and Takeoff provides some welcome relief on “Eye 2 Eye” (“Flip it like it’s Five Guys, I’m Tupac, get all eyes”). But like any Travis Scott album, it’s the sterling production that carries the project. The beats are as elegant as they are variegated, kicking off with Buddah Bless’ Otis Redding chop on “Modern Slavery” and veering into unexpected oceanic keys that add emotional depth to “Huncho Jack” and the crystalline “Saint Laurent Mask,” which both feature Mike Dean’s touch. In a fatal irony, Huncho Jack’s liveliness tends to come from everywhere except Quavo and Travis Scott. The protean energy that buoy their respective works are sadly absent.

Artist: Travis Scott, Quavo, Album: Huncho Jack, Jack Huncho, Genre: Rap, Score (1-10): 6.3 Album review: "Last year’s palatable string of album-length collaborations from the South featured Future and Young Thug dropping Super Slimey as a welcome surprise following their cold war, while Offset, 21 Savage, and Metro Boomin’s Without Warning was a Halloween gorefest that transcended its gimmick. Huncho Jack, Jack Huncho—Travis Scott and Quavo’s much ballyhooed team-up—was slated to be just as formidable, if only because the duo’s working relationship goes back longer than most of their contemporaries. Quavo has been appearing on Travis’ projects since his 2014 mixtape Days Before Rodeo. Their big payoff came on the Young Thug-featuring jewel “Pick Up the Phone,” with Travis returning the favor by hopping on Culture’s oddly majestic “Kelly Price.” The two highlights didn’t place the stars on equal footing, but using Travis’ gothic bent to ornament Quavo’s colorful presence was a solid formula. That dynamic, combined with the sheer momentum of their careers, gave some confidence in the possibilities of Huncho Jack, which was teased all throughout last year. But instead of being the trap-and-Auto-Tune “Auld Lang Syne” it ought to be by its December release, Huncho Jack is lethargic even for a victory lap. The potential is squandered on a 41-minute runthrough that rarely feels much more than extracurricular. Quavo and Travis don’t carry themselves as pals who’ve been working together for years. Rather, they have about the same amount of chemistry as two strangers attempting to draw some pleasantries out of dead air. Quavo features work best when the surrounding cast and production mirror his natural effervescence. But here, he’s on autopilot, slowing himself down to match Travis’ staid presence, which creates some uncharacteristic clunkers; on “Eye 2 Eye,” Quavo chants, “Real nigga, I/We see eye to eye” with the clumsy precision of a samurai who hasn’t realized his sword is no longer sharp. Meanwhile, Travis too frequently settles for throwing echoes and ad-libs at Quavo, which is unfortunate because his “It’s lit” signature is an acquired taste at best. They pop up like nervous ticks to ruin possible hits on the slithering “Dubai Shit” and the rugged “Motorcycle Patches,” adding irritation with every appearance Joint projects often work best when the collaborators complement each other in ways that accentuate their abilities. Without Warning was compelling because 21 Savage’s deadpan voice was a catapult for Offset’s acrobatics. On his albums, Travis covers his shortcomings by curating and cloaking himself in this kind of nocturnal sensibility, like a kid wearing a cape. But Huncho Jack’s star co-billing casts him as more of a frontman, where the spotlight continuously highlights his mediocre rhyming. That he’s shooting banalities like, “Jump out this bitch: pogo, yeah” and, “Take that bar, no 3G” with lackadaisical delivery also shows a plain lack of ambition. Huncho Jack’s saving grace is often the supporting players. Offset and Quavo are joyously vain in their shared verse on “Dubai Shit,” and Takeoff provides some welcome relief on “Eye 2 Eye” (“Flip it like it’s Five Guys, I’m Tupac, get all eyes”). But like any Travis Scott album, it’s the sterling production that carries the project. The beats are as elegant as they are variegated, kicking off with Buddah Bless’ Otis Redding chop on “Modern Slavery” and veering into unexpected oceanic keys that add emotional depth to “Huncho Jack” and the crystalline “Saint Laurent Mask,” which both feature Mike Dean’s touch. In a fatal irony, Huncho Jack’s liveliness tends to come from everywhere except Quavo and Travis Scott. The protean energy that buoy their respective works are sadly absent."

Ty Segall

Freedom’s Goblin

Rock

Stuart Berman

Near the end of last year, Ty Segall put a bunch of new songs out online, which is a bit like saying water is wet. But even for a guy who has spent the last decade setting the pace for indie-rock prolificacy, releasing 20 albums and more than 30 singles and EPs, these tracks stood out. They sounded like strange one-off experiments, from the heaving hardcore of “Meaning” (featuring lead shrieking from Segall’s wife Denée) to a straight-up cover of Hot Chocolate’s 1978 disco warhorse “Every 1’s a Winner” (with guest percussion from Fred Armisen to boot). It turns out these songs weren't just a stream of orphaned outtakes. Rather, they were setting the far-flung aesthetic goalposts for Segall’s most freewheeling and free-ranging album to date, Freedom’s Goblin. A year ago, you could’ve said the same thing about the Ty Segall album, which pit some of his most deranged material against his most unabashedly romantic, yielding the scatterbrained folk-punk/psych-jazz suite “Freedom”/”Warm Hands (Freedom Returned).” As the title suggests, Freedom’s Goblin sounds like that 12-minute epic’s evil offspring, spreading its lawlessness across an hour and a quarter. It’s Segall’s second double album to date, but the first one to truly embrace and exploit the possibilities of the four-sided medium. In essence, this is Segall’s White Album moment, a scrapbook of the singer’s many guises, along with a few new ones, too—check the sleazy drum-machine disco of “Despoiler of Cadaver” or the T. Rex-goes-to-E.-Street swoon of “My Lady’s on Fire.” Recorded piecemeal with various line-up configurations in five different cities, its most remarkable quality isn’t the whiplash-inducing, track-to-track variation—it’s that each song works as both a crucial unifying thread in the overall patchwork and as a stand-alone statement. In marveling at the sheer volume of Segall’s discography, it’s easy to overlook his growth as a writer. He’s often slotted alongside peers like Thee Oh Sees and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard in the pantheon of garage-rockers with exploratory impulses and little regard for traditional promo cycles. But it’s more apt to mention him in the same breath as musicians like Robert Pollard, Ted Leo, or Elliott Smith—expert melody-makers who borrow liberally from the classic-rock canon, but reshape and demystify it in their own eccentric image. And on Freedom’s Goblin, the tuneful sensibility that Segall has been nurturing since 2011’s Goodbye Bread fully blossoms into sky-high hooks and rich, resonant lyricism, all while keeping his primordial spirit intact. With the grandiose grunge of “Alta,” Segall delivers an ode to Mother Nature with all the valor of a superhero flick, while the opening “Fanny Dog” could be the most badass song ever dedicated to a household pet, summoning a brass section to pummel its rumbling riff into submission. But the album’s ugliest moments only enhance its prettiest: The burning fury of “Meaning” is immediately extinguished by the wistful George Harrison tribute “Cry, Cry, Cry”; the lecherous fuzz of “Shoot You Up” is chased by the cosmic, falsetto-cooed folk-rock of “You Say All the Nice Things.” As the latter song unsubtly suggests, Freedom’s Goblin is an album made by a guy who’s clearly head-over-heels in love—Segall and Denée married just over a year ago, and through that lens, the “Every’s 1 a Winner” cover sounds less like a cheeky lark than a genuine expression of devotion. But if Freedom’s Goblin was born of a honeymoon period, it’s one where the room-service trolley becomes food-fight ammo, and TVs get tossed out into swimming pools. Even the album’s most unruly turns—like the guitar solo on the motorik metal of “She”—project an exhilarated, anarchic joy that sustains the album’s momentum until its great payoff: the penultimate “5 Ft Tall.” Here, Segall delivers the totemic power-pop knockout that he’s been working toward his entire career, the sort of hair-raising, roller-coaster rocker that you could imagine a contented Kurt Cobain writing. Following that glorious peak, you can forgive Segall for indulging in an extended comedown. As the closing “And, Goodnight” begins its slack, Crazy-Horsed lurch, it appears we’re in for 12 minutes of improvised guitar skronk. But when Segall’s vocal comes in just before the three-minute mark, it’s revealed that this is no random jam, but an extended, electrified cover of the title track to his 2013 psych-folk opus, Sleeper. It’s a song Segall originally wrote for Denée one night as she was dozing off, but it served as the surreal, dreamlike portal into a deeply meditative album where Segall addressed the death of his adoptive father and subsequent estrangement from his mother. This new version feels even less like a romantic reverie and more like all the intervening years of pent-up sadness and frustration being unleashed through Segall’s scorching fretboard runs. It’s an intensely sobering conclusion to an otherwise intoxicating album and a reminder that Segall’s ascent from garage-punk hellraiser to consummate rock craftsman over the past 10 years hasn’t been without its trying times. But Freedom’s Goblin is ultimately a celebration of Segall’s aesthetic and emotional freedom—a definitive capstone to the first decade of a scuzzy, heartfelt songwriter nonpareil.

Artist: Ty Segall, Album: Freedom’s Goblin, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 8.1 Album review: "Near the end of last year, Ty Segall put a bunch of new songs out online, which is a bit like saying water is wet. But even for a guy who has spent the last decade setting the pace for indie-rock prolificacy, releasing 20 albums and more than 30 singles and EPs, these tracks stood out. They sounded like strange one-off experiments, from the heaving hardcore of “Meaning” (featuring lead shrieking from Segall’s wife Denée) to a straight-up cover of Hot Chocolate’s 1978 disco warhorse “Every 1’s a Winner” (with guest percussion from Fred Armisen to boot). It turns out these songs weren't just a stream of orphaned outtakes. Rather, they were setting the far-flung aesthetic goalposts for Segall’s most freewheeling and free-ranging album to date, Freedom’s Goblin. A year ago, you could’ve said the same thing about the Ty Segall album, which pit some of his most deranged material against his most unabashedly romantic, yielding the scatterbrained folk-punk/psych-jazz suite “Freedom”/”Warm Hands (Freedom Returned).” As the title suggests, Freedom’s Goblin sounds like that 12-minute epic’s evil offspring, spreading its lawlessness across an hour and a quarter. It’s Segall’s second double album to date, but the first one to truly embrace and exploit the possibilities of the four-sided medium. In essence, this is Segall’s White Album moment, a scrapbook of the singer’s many guises, along with a few new ones, too—check the sleazy drum-machine disco of “Despoiler of Cadaver” or the T. Rex-goes-to-E.-Street swoon of “My Lady’s on Fire.” Recorded piecemeal with various line-up configurations in five different cities, its most remarkable quality isn’t the whiplash-inducing, track-to-track variation—it’s that each song works as both a crucial unifying thread in the overall patchwork and as a stand-alone statement. In marveling at the sheer volume of Segall’s discography, it’s easy to overlook his growth as a writer. He’s often slotted alongside peers like Thee Oh Sees and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard in the pantheon of garage-rockers with exploratory impulses and little regard for traditional promo cycles. But it’s more apt to mention him in the same breath as musicians like Robert Pollard, Ted Leo, or Elliott Smith—expert melody-makers who borrow liberally from the classic-rock canon, but reshape and demystify it in their own eccentric image. And on Freedom’s Goblin, the tuneful sensibility that Segall has been nurturing since 2011’s Goodbye Bread fully blossoms into sky-high hooks and rich, resonant lyricism, all while keeping his primordial spirit intact. With the grandiose grunge of “Alta,” Segall delivers an ode to Mother Nature with all the valor of a superhero flick, while the opening “Fanny Dog” could be the most badass song ever dedicated to a household pet, summoning a brass section to pummel its rumbling riff into submission. But the album’s ugliest moments only enhance its prettiest: The burning fury of “Meaning” is immediately extinguished by the wistful George Harrison tribute “Cry, Cry, Cry”; the lecherous fuzz of “Shoot You Up” is chased by the cosmic, falsetto-cooed folk-rock of “You Say All the Nice Things.” As the latter song unsubtly suggests, Freedom’s Goblin is an album made by a guy who’s clearly head-over-heels in love—Segall and Denée married just over a year ago, and through that lens, the “Every’s 1 a Winner” cover sounds less like a cheeky lark than a genuine expression of devotion. But if Freedom’s Goblin was born of a honeymoon period, it’s one where the room-service trolley becomes food-fight ammo, and TVs get tossed out into swimming pools. Even the album’s most unruly turns—like the guitar solo on the motorik metal of “She”—project an exhilarated, anarchic joy that sustains the album’s momentum until its great payoff: the penultimate “5 Ft Tall.” Here, Segall delivers the totemic power-pop knockout that he’s been working toward his entire career, the sort of hair-raising, roller-coaster rocker that you could imagine a contented Kurt Cobain writing. Following that glorious peak, you can forgive Segall for indulging in an extended comedown. As the closing “And, Goodnight” begins its slack, Crazy-Horsed lurch, it appears we’re in for 12 minutes of improvised guitar skronk. But when Segall’s vocal comes in just before the three-minute mark, it’s revealed that this is no random jam, but an extended, electrified cover of the title track to his 2013 psych-folk opus, Sleeper. It’s a song Segall originally wrote for Denée one night as she was dozing off, but it served as the surreal, dreamlike portal into a deeply meditative album where Segall addressed the death of his adoptive father and subsequent estrangement from his mother. This new version feels even less like a romantic reverie and more like all the intervening years of pent-up sadness and frustration being unleashed through Segall’s scorching fretboard runs. It’s an intensely sobering conclusion to an otherwise intoxicating album and a reminder that Segall’s ascent from garage-punk hellraiser to consummate rock craftsman over the past 10 years hasn’t been without its trying times. But Freedom’s Goblin is ultimately a celebration of Segall’s aesthetic and emotional freedom—a definitive capstone to the first decade of a scuzzy, heartfelt songwriter nonpareil."

Sleater-Kinney

The Woods

Rock

Stephen M. Deusner

By now you probably don't need to be told the particulars of Sleater-Kinney's new album, The Woods: about how they signed with Sub Pop, making it their first album since 1995's Call the Doctor not released by Kill Rock Stars; about how they hired Dave Fridmann to produce and recorded it in rural New York instead of Washington State; about how they wanted a heavier sound that mines classic rock like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and Jimi Hendrix for inspiration; about how one song is more than 11 minutes in length. So it should come as no surprise that The Woods marks a significant transformation for the band-- one they first hinted at on 2000's All Hands on the Bad One, and crept closer toward on 2002's One Beat. Nor should anyone be shocked that, despite the new song structures, guitar solos, and drum fills, Brownstein's guitar still roars wildly, Weiss's drums still thunder, and Tucker still wails with a primal urgency that is one of the most compelling sounds in rock music today. What hasn't necessarily been made explicitly clear is that, even in the face of its cock-rock trappings, The Woods most closely recalls the righteous fury of their first great albums, Call the Doctor (1995) and Dig Me Out (1996). The brash economy of punk, for Sleater-Kinney at least, has always been just a short step away from the lumbering behemoth of hard rock. "The Fox", however, seems to say otherwise. Opening the album, this piece of Aesop rock is about a fox and a duck, and I think it just might be allegorical. But it's loud and it thrashes and Tucker shouts to be heard over the din. It's ferociously uninviting, but it works both as a context-providing preface to the nine songs that follow and as a deterrent for weak-eared listeners. Those who make it to "Wilderness" will have passed a test of sorts. "Wilderness" and most of "What's Mine Is Yours" sound like prime Sleater-Kinney, as does much of the rest of The Woods. Fridmann's presence is far from disruptive; you can hardly hear him in the mix, except for a little sludge in the low end-- a nice substitution for a bass player. Instead of weighing them down with single-mic'd Flaming Lips drums or Delgados density, he simply steps out of the way and allows them to sound larger, louder, and looser. Turning their crosshairs away from the overt political issues of One Beat, Sleater-Kinney's amplification here sounds like a reaction to the current wave of backwards-looking boys-club bands that idolize post-punk dramatists like Joy Division and the Cure and abstractors like Gang of Four and Wire. (And anyway, weren't the women of Elastica working this same nostalgia, like, 10 years ago?) On "Entertain"-- the first single, no less-- Brownstein chides the eyeliner brigade righteously: "You come around looking 1984/ You're such a bore, 1984/ Nostalgia, you're using it like a whore/ It's better than before." But Sleater-Kinney are looking backwards too, albeit to a different time in rock history and to different styles, as well as with a greater open-mindedness and self-awareness. Many of the hard-rock trappings of The Woods sound self-conscious: Leading into the album-closing "Night Light", the 11-minute guitar solo on "Let's Call It Love" is just that-- an 11-Minute Guitar Solo. The badass breakdown on "What's Mine Is Yours" is just that-- a Badass Breakdown. But the point of "Let's Call It Love" is the equation of music and sex as Brownstein sings, "I've got a long time for love" and then proves it with her guitar. And the point of "What's Mine Is Yours" is, as the lyrics reveal, not the breakdown but the recovery: As Brownstein's guitar squawks boisterously and arrhythmically, Tucker stitches it together with a low Led Zep riff and Weiss wraps it up with a big drum beat, all three of them literally creating music from chaos. In other words, this hard-rock transformation sounds like an extension of all the meta songs they've been writing since before "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone"-- rock-about-rock songs that chronicle their experience as an all-woman band and that deploy that self-reflexivity as a weapon against industry double standards and general ignorance. In the past, this self-awareness often resulted in songs that sounded closed-off, each with its own extremely precise meaning that related but didn't always connect to other songs around it. The Woods, on the other hand, is their most album-like album since The Hot Rock, each song building on the previous and leading to the next. With its artificially sweetened melody, "Modern Girl", for instance, almost sounds saccharine ("My whole life is like a picture of a sunny day"), but coming after "Jumpers", a song so empathetic it considers suicide a viable act of defiance, "Modern Girl" takes on deeper meanings. The pair are two sides of the same woman, the ultimate predicament: To survive these days, you have to be either suicidal or superficial. Sleater-Kinney, meanwhile, get by simply sounding fucking supersonic.

Artist: Sleater-Kinney, Album: The Woods, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 9.0 Album review: "By now you probably don't need to be told the particulars of Sleater-Kinney's new album, The Woods: about how they signed with Sub Pop, making it their first album since 1995's Call the Doctor not released by Kill Rock Stars; about how they hired Dave Fridmann to produce and recorded it in rural New York instead of Washington State; about how they wanted a heavier sound that mines classic rock like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and Jimi Hendrix for inspiration; about how one song is more than 11 minutes in length. So it should come as no surprise that The Woods marks a significant transformation for the band-- one they first hinted at on 2000's All Hands on the Bad One, and crept closer toward on 2002's One Beat. Nor should anyone be shocked that, despite the new song structures, guitar solos, and drum fills, Brownstein's guitar still roars wildly, Weiss's drums still thunder, and Tucker still wails with a primal urgency that is one of the most compelling sounds in rock music today. What hasn't necessarily been made explicitly clear is that, even in the face of its cock-rock trappings, The Woods most closely recalls the righteous fury of their first great albums, Call the Doctor (1995) and Dig Me Out (1996). The brash economy of punk, for Sleater-Kinney at least, has always been just a short step away from the lumbering behemoth of hard rock. "The Fox", however, seems to say otherwise. Opening the album, this piece of Aesop rock is about a fox and a duck, and I think it just might be allegorical. But it's loud and it thrashes and Tucker shouts to be heard over the din. It's ferociously uninviting, but it works both as a context-providing preface to the nine songs that follow and as a deterrent for weak-eared listeners. Those who make it to "Wilderness" will have passed a test of sorts. "Wilderness" and most of "What's Mine Is Yours" sound like prime Sleater-Kinney, as does much of the rest of The Woods. Fridmann's presence is far from disruptive; you can hardly hear him in the mix, except for a little sludge in the low end-- a nice substitution for a bass player. Instead of weighing them down with single-mic'd Flaming Lips drums or Delgados density, he simply steps out of the way and allows them to sound larger, louder, and looser. Turning their crosshairs away from the overt political issues of One Beat, Sleater-Kinney's amplification here sounds like a reaction to the current wave of backwards-looking boys-club bands that idolize post-punk dramatists like Joy Division and the Cure and abstractors like Gang of Four and Wire. (And anyway, weren't the women of Elastica working this same nostalgia, like, 10 years ago?) On "Entertain"-- the first single, no less-- Brownstein chides the eyeliner brigade righteously: "You come around looking 1984/ You're such a bore, 1984/ Nostalgia, you're using it like a whore/ It's better than before." But Sleater-Kinney are looking backwards too, albeit to a different time in rock history and to different styles, as well as with a greater open-mindedness and self-awareness. Many of the hard-rock trappings of The Woods sound self-conscious: Leading into the album-closing "Night Light", the 11-minute guitar solo on "Let's Call It Love" is just that-- an 11-Minute Guitar Solo. The badass breakdown on "What's Mine Is Yours" is just that-- a Badass Breakdown. But the point of "Let's Call It Love" is the equation of music and sex as Brownstein sings, "I've got a long time for love" and then proves it with her guitar. And the point of "What's Mine Is Yours" is, as the lyrics reveal, not the breakdown but the recovery: As Brownstein's guitar squawks boisterously and arrhythmically, Tucker stitches it together with a low Led Zep riff and Weiss wraps it up with a big drum beat, all three of them literally creating music from chaos. In other words, this hard-rock transformation sounds like an extension of all the meta songs they've been writing since before "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone"-- rock-about-rock songs that chronicle their experience as an all-woman band and that deploy that self-reflexivity as a weapon against industry double standards and general ignorance. In the past, this self-awareness often resulted in songs that sounded closed-off, each with its own extremely precise meaning that related but didn't always connect to other songs around it. The Woods, on the other hand, is their most album-like album since The Hot Rock, each song building on the previous and leading to the next. With its artificially sweetened melody, "Modern Girl", for instance, almost sounds saccharine ("My whole life is like a picture of a sunny day"), but coming after "Jumpers", a song so empathetic it considers suicide a viable act of defiance, "Modern Girl" takes on deeper meanings. The pair are two sides of the same woman, the ultimate predicament: To survive these days, you have to be either suicidal or superficial. Sleater-Kinney, meanwhile, get by simply sounding fucking supersonic. "

Sarah Neufeld

The Ridge

Experimental

Winston Cook-Wilson

The level of pure athleticism required to play the violin reveals the pained rock faces of the classic rock axe-slingers to be a dramatic ruse. The touch it takes to make an electric guitar sing is unbelievably light, and there’s a strap to hold it in place. Violinists (and violists and string bassists, for that matter) not only must hold a not-insignificantly heavy wooden body up for an extended period of time, they also have to maintain a steady bowing arm and pivot carefully to maintain control of the sound. Composer and violinist Sarah Neufeld — a career-long touring and recording member of Arcade Fire — delivers her fair share of grimaces in the band’s energetic live show, and she’s clearly earning them. In her compositions as a solo artist, the relentless physicality of her technique is part of the listening experience, and immediately central to its appeal. In the short pieces that make up Neufeld’s latest album The Ridge, the sound of her bow moving frenetically back and forth across the bridge of her violin often settles into a blur. There is a sharp contradiction between the gossamer blocks of sound we hear, and the limber, near-constant motion that makes them possible. Neufeld presses down on the strings to create a whistle-like harmonic that surges in between notes and chords; it’s the violin equivalent of the otherworldly-sounding tones her comrade-in-arms Colin Stetson (who appears here playing lyricon) favors in his sax playing. Reverb and delay effects enhance the atmospheric effect of Neufeld’s playing, creating moments where sound seems to be coming from another room. While Neufeld’s previous solo outing Hero Brother daringly explored the overlap between classical minimalism and regional American fiddling techniques, The Ridge’s musical vocabulary is more familiar and less transportive. It starts unconvincingly with the title track, a piece of high-dramatic "chamber rock" which recalls the Arcade Fire-related instrumental unit Bell Orchestre in which Neufeld participated in during the '00s. Wringing out a few unsurprising chords for maximal self-importance, it’s a propulsive, amelodic piece which seems like it could work better on traditional rock instruments, or with a denser ensemble. Neufeld largely avoids linear melodies  — her feathery, very intermittent vocals add little in this regard — in favor of rhythmic cells in the Philip Glass tradition. Often, with the help of effects, these are reduced to synthetic-sounding pulsations. Like a good several-times-removed disciple of the minimalists, her writing is best when it revels in contradictory rhythms overlaid on top of each other -- when complexity is more of a focal point. The appealing, fractured Afrobeat cadence of "We’ve Got a Lot" gradually falls together like gears locking into place, and the explosive pizzicato of "The Glow" experiment with unsteady meter changes. Though compositionally The Ridge feels less exploratory than Neufield’s previous work, it is still a moving document of her engaging, virtuosic playing. It’s hard to make strings-based, indie-rock-tinged instrumental music in this vein sound fresh. But as in her past work, Neufeld’s focused, restless recordings invite the listener to share in the intensity of her ritual as a performer, creating a necessary and refreshing air of intimacy.

Artist: Sarah Neufeld, Album: The Ridge, Genre: Experimental, Score (1-10): 6.9 Album review: "The level of pure athleticism required to play the violin reveals the pained rock faces of the classic rock axe-slingers to be a dramatic ruse. The touch it takes to make an electric guitar sing is unbelievably light, and there’s a strap to hold it in place. Violinists (and violists and string bassists, for that matter) not only must hold a not-insignificantly heavy wooden body up for an extended period of time, they also have to maintain a steady bowing arm and pivot carefully to maintain control of the sound. Composer and violinist Sarah Neufeld — a career-long touring and recording member of Arcade Fire — delivers her fair share of grimaces in the band’s energetic live show, and she’s clearly earning them. In her compositions as a solo artist, the relentless physicality of her technique is part of the listening experience, and immediately central to its appeal. In the short pieces that make up Neufeld’s latest album The Ridge, the sound of her bow moving frenetically back and forth across the bridge of her violin often settles into a blur. There is a sharp contradiction between the gossamer blocks of sound we hear, and the limber, near-constant motion that makes them possible. Neufeld presses down on the strings to create a whistle-like harmonic that surges in between notes and chords; it’s the violin equivalent of the otherworldly-sounding tones her comrade-in-arms Colin Stetson (who appears here playing lyricon) favors in his sax playing. Reverb and delay effects enhance the atmospheric effect of Neufeld’s playing, creating moments where sound seems to be coming from another room. While Neufeld’s previous solo outing Hero Brother daringly explored the overlap between classical minimalism and regional American fiddling techniques, The Ridge’s musical vocabulary is more familiar and less transportive. It starts unconvincingly with the title track, a piece of high-dramatic "chamber rock" which recalls the Arcade Fire-related instrumental unit Bell Orchestre in which Neufeld participated in during the '00s. Wringing out a few unsurprising chords for maximal self-importance, it’s a propulsive, amelodic piece which seems like it could work better on traditional rock instruments, or with a denser ensemble. Neufeld largely avoids linear melodies  — her feathery, very intermittent vocals add little in this regard — in favor of rhythmic cells in the Philip Glass tradition. Often, with the help of effects, these are reduced to synthetic-sounding pulsations. Like a good several-times-removed disciple of the minimalists, her writing is best when it revels in contradictory rhythms overlaid on top of each other -- when complexity is more of a focal point. The appealing, fractured Afrobeat cadence of "We’ve Got a Lot" gradually falls together like gears locking into place, and the explosive pizzicato of "The Glow" experiment with unsteady meter changes. Though compositionally The Ridge feels less exploratory than Neufield’s previous work, it is still a moving document of her engaging, virtuosic playing. It’s hard to make strings-based, indie-rock-tinged instrumental music in this vein sound fresh. But as in her past work, Neufeld’s focused, restless recordings invite the listener to share in the intensity of her ritual as a performer, creating a necessary and refreshing air of intimacy."

The Music Tapes

1st Imaginary Symphony for Nomad

Experimental,Rock

Brent DiCrescenzo

Can any record with baby noises really ever be any good? Okay, how about a record with baby noises, car honks, steamship blurts, banjo plucking, tape hiss, a heartbeat, crackling ocean waves, a Muppet- voiced guy whispering into a four track, and a man declaring "Beware the Ocean of Faces!" Okay, how about all of those elements in one song? I'm here to proclaim, "No." Up to this point, indie rock had never seen its "Intolerance," "Heaven's Gate," or "Cutthroat Island"-- massive economic and artistic failures. But the Music Tapes' 1st Imaginary Symphony for Nomad is that overwrought beast nobody has been waiting for. Recorded over the course of four years, and taken over the Atlantic to Abbey Road for mixing, the Music Tapes' debut full length is a document in uncontrolled '60s pop fetishism. Think about this: My Bloody Valentine's Loveless took less than three years to craft. Airfare could have been spared, because this sounds like it was recorded inside the utility closet of Abbey Road... with tools from inside the utility closet at Abbey Road. But perhaps this album will be the sledgehammer blow to the back of the heads of Elephant 6 junkies and musicians, where upon they'll sit back, peel off their boob- sized headphones, look in the mirror, and realize, "Jesus, I think this has gone far enough." There's a disturbed obsessive nature in someone who would fly to another continent just so they could mix on the "original EMI desk and limmiter" that the Beatles and George Martin used. The Elephant 6's worship of the Beach Boys and, primarily, the Beatles has clouded their vision to such a point that they've forgotten what those deified bands were really about-- writing amazing songs. Sure, there was a backwards guitar solo on "I'm Only Sleeping" and backwards handclaps on "It's All Too Much," but they only served to give weird experimental qualities to already great music. 1st Symphony is a fitting album to close out this selfish decade, or rather, to put the final nail in its coffin. For here we have the zenith of artistic onanism and sonic wankery. This record weaves such a dense web of inside jokes, uncontrolled indulgences, and obtuse statements that it can only be frustrating, annoying, and disturbing for any listener who wasn't involved in its creation. Even the packaging comes in an admittedly creative, yet befuddling and fragile mess of pop-ups and comics. 1st Symphony can be a fascinating listen, but not for any musical reasons. When looked at as not an "album," but as an audible comic strip or sonic collage, the Music Tapes becomes somewhat more tolerable. Yet it's never rewarding or comprehensible. One can't help but question the sanity and motives of the juvenile idiot savant behind the cacophony, Neutral Milk Hotel's Julian Koster. The analog junk throughout echoes the dawn of recording with wax-paper pops, fuzzing speakers, and sepia tones. Imagine if Thomas Edison had made an album's worth of the Olivia Tremor Control's most unbearable noodlings. Surely, Koster is fascinated with the recording process and the history of pop. But unfortunately, the hodge- podge result of his obsession doesn't inspire any sympathy in the listener.

Artist: The Music Tapes, Album: 1st Imaginary Symphony for Nomad, Genre: Experimental,Rock, Score (1-10): 2.7 Album review: "Can any record with baby noises really ever be any good? Okay, how about a record with baby noises, car honks, steamship blurts, banjo plucking, tape hiss, a heartbeat, crackling ocean waves, a Muppet- voiced guy whispering into a four track, and a man declaring "Beware the Ocean of Faces!" Okay, how about all of those elements in one song? I'm here to proclaim, "No." Up to this point, indie rock had never seen its "Intolerance," "Heaven's Gate," or "Cutthroat Island"-- massive economic and artistic failures. But the Music Tapes' 1st Imaginary Symphony for Nomad is that overwrought beast nobody has been waiting for. Recorded over the course of four years, and taken over the Atlantic to Abbey Road for mixing, the Music Tapes' debut full length is a document in uncontrolled '60s pop fetishism. Think about this: My Bloody Valentine's Loveless took less than three years to craft. Airfare could have been spared, because this sounds like it was recorded inside the utility closet of Abbey Road... with tools from inside the utility closet at Abbey Road. But perhaps this album will be the sledgehammer blow to the back of the heads of Elephant 6 junkies and musicians, where upon they'll sit back, peel off their boob- sized headphones, look in the mirror, and realize, "Jesus, I think this has gone far enough." There's a disturbed obsessive nature in someone who would fly to another continent just so they could mix on the "original EMI desk and limmiter" that the Beatles and George Martin used. The Elephant 6's worship of the Beach Boys and, primarily, the Beatles has clouded their vision to such a point that they've forgotten what those deified bands were really about-- writing amazing songs. Sure, there was a backwards guitar solo on "I'm Only Sleeping" and backwards handclaps on "It's All Too Much," but they only served to give weird experimental qualities to already great music. 1st Symphony is a fitting album to close out this selfish decade, or rather, to put the final nail in its coffin. For here we have the zenith of artistic onanism and sonic wankery. This record weaves such a dense web of inside jokes, uncontrolled indulgences, and obtuse statements that it can only be frustrating, annoying, and disturbing for any listener who wasn't involved in its creation. Even the packaging comes in an admittedly creative, yet befuddling and fragile mess of pop-ups and comics. 1st Symphony can be a fascinating listen, but not for any musical reasons. When looked at as not an "album," but as an audible comic strip or sonic collage, the Music Tapes becomes somewhat more tolerable. Yet it's never rewarding or comprehensible. One can't help but question the sanity and motives of the juvenile idiot savant behind the cacophony, Neutral Milk Hotel's Julian Koster. The analog junk throughout echoes the dawn of recording with wax-paper pops, fuzzing speakers, and sepia tones. Imagine if Thomas Edison had made an album's worth of the Olivia Tremor Control's most unbearable noodlings. Surely, Koster is fascinated with the recording process and the history of pop. But unfortunately, the hodge- podge result of his obsession doesn't inspire any sympathy in the listener."

Add N to (X)

Add Insult to Injury

Electronic,Experimental

Matt LeMay

There was a time when I sneered at analog purists. Tucked away in my room, with my computer, CD player, and digital Casio keyboard, I laughed at the fools who wasted their cash on fuzzy-sounding crap that can be almost perfectly replicated by software. I would chuckle to myself whenever I saw some poor sap dropping a grand on a vintage keyboard. After all, for a mere 200 smackeroos, all the sounds on that big, bulky keyboard, along with many others, can be compacted onto a small, friendly CD-ROM. This summer, all that changed. I was at a Guitar Center in New Jersey, and I spotted a compact, odd-looking keyboard from across the room. That day, I fell in love with a 1985 Korg Poly-800, a bizarre digital-analog hybrid made immensely popular by its powerful circuitry and affordable price. That, and the pitch bend joystick. Mmmmm... As soon as I brought my new love object home, I immediately understood the appeal of analog, especially as it relates to the creation of bizarre, quirky sounds. Something about knob-twiddling, or even compulsive button-pushing, just seems much more conducive to creative sound creation than sitting in front of a computer and clicking repeatedly. If you don't believe me, check out Add N to (X)'s debut album, On the Wires of Our Nerves, or to a lesser extent, their second album, Avant Hard. On these two albums, especially the former, the three members of Add N to (X) seemed to have a complete grasp over the infinite orgasmic joy of the analog synthesizer. On these albums, abrasive, insane sounds were extracted from a variety of analog synth sources, making for some of the damned coolest electronic music to grace the 1990s. Unfortunately, the appeal of the analog synthesizer, like so many other toys, can't last forever. There are only so many parameters that can be edited, so many filters that can be applied, and so many oscillators that can be, uh, oscillated, before the newness wears off, and you find yourself seeking out "new directions." Uh-oh. Add Insult to Injury is the first Add N to (X) record to sound in the least bit forced. On both of their previous records, the plethora of amazing sounds incorporated, combined with some completely crazy "songwriting," made for a truly exciting listen. Here, we see the group at a loss for new ideas and recycling strikingly similar melodies, sounds, and song structures over the course of 12 tracks. Add Insult to Injury's greatest weakness comes with the formula which seems to have generated about 1/3 of the songs on the album-- a vaguely surfish bassline, drums that would sound at home in cheesy 70's soundtracks, and sadly ambiguous synthesizer sounds. Yes, it's a cute formula, and it's in some ways more accessible than Add N to (X)'s earlier works. But there is a huge structural problem with this formula: by applying the same bass and drum backbone to slightly different songs, the awesome analog synthesizer noises that once constituted the bread and butter of the group's sound now seem to float aimlessly over the song, resulting in a disjointed mess. Despite this giant flaw, Add Insult to Injury does have a few exceptional moments. The funky "Pokerole" is one of the finest songs the group has penned, as is the album's single, the Bruce Haack-esque "Plug Me In." The album's closing track, "The Regent is Dead," is also pretty cool, utilizing a fucked-up analog marching band sound and some high-pitched, squelching blasts of pure analog joy. So it turns out that Add Insult to Injury may be a more apt title than the group had planned. For those of you disappointed by Avant Hard, this record may very well be the final straw. It's sad to hear a group that once had so much potential descend on a slippery slope towards mediocrity. Thus, Add Insult to Injury serves as a disappointing reminder that sounding cool can only get you so far.

Artist: Add N to (X), Album: Add Insult to Injury, Genre: Electronic,Experimental, Score (1-10): 5.9 Album review: "There was a time when I sneered at analog purists. Tucked away in my room, with my computer, CD player, and digital Casio keyboard, I laughed at the fools who wasted their cash on fuzzy-sounding crap that can be almost perfectly replicated by software. I would chuckle to myself whenever I saw some poor sap dropping a grand on a vintage keyboard. After all, for a mere 200 smackeroos, all the sounds on that big, bulky keyboard, along with many others, can be compacted onto a small, friendly CD-ROM. This summer, all that changed. I was at a Guitar Center in New Jersey, and I spotted a compact, odd-looking keyboard from across the room. That day, I fell in love with a 1985 Korg Poly-800, a bizarre digital-analog hybrid made immensely popular by its powerful circuitry and affordable price. That, and the pitch bend joystick. Mmmmm... As soon as I brought my new love object home, I immediately understood the appeal of analog, especially as it relates to the creation of bizarre, quirky sounds. Something about knob-twiddling, or even compulsive button-pushing, just seems much more conducive to creative sound creation than sitting in front of a computer and clicking repeatedly. If you don't believe me, check out Add N to (X)'s debut album, On the Wires of Our Nerves, or to a lesser extent, their second album, Avant Hard. On these two albums, especially the former, the three members of Add N to (X) seemed to have a complete grasp over the infinite orgasmic joy of the analog synthesizer. On these albums, abrasive, insane sounds were extracted from a variety of analog synth sources, making for some of the damned coolest electronic music to grace the 1990s. Unfortunately, the appeal of the analog synthesizer, like so many other toys, can't last forever. There are only so many parameters that can be edited, so many filters that can be applied, and so many oscillators that can be, uh, oscillated, before the newness wears off, and you find yourself seeking out "new directions." Uh-oh. Add Insult to Injury is the first Add N to (X) record to sound in the least bit forced. On both of their previous records, the plethora of amazing sounds incorporated, combined with some completely crazy "songwriting," made for a truly exciting listen. Here, we see the group at a loss for new ideas and recycling strikingly similar melodies, sounds, and song structures over the course of 12 tracks. Add Insult to Injury's greatest weakness comes with the formula which seems to have generated about 1/3 of the songs on the album-- a vaguely surfish bassline, drums that would sound at home in cheesy 70's soundtracks, and sadly ambiguous synthesizer sounds. Yes, it's a cute formula, and it's in some ways more accessible than Add N to (X)'s earlier works. But there is a huge structural problem with this formula: by applying the same bass and drum backbone to slightly different songs, the awesome analog synthesizer noises that once constituted the bread and butter of the group's sound now seem to float aimlessly over the song, resulting in a disjointed mess. Despite this giant flaw, Add Insult to Injury does have a few exceptional moments. The funky "Pokerole" is one of the finest songs the group has penned, as is the album's single, the Bruce Haack-esque "Plug Me In." The album's closing track, "The Regent is Dead," is also pretty cool, utilizing a fucked-up analog marching band sound and some high-pitched, squelching blasts of pure analog joy. So it turns out that Add Insult to Injury may be a more apt title than the group had planned. For those of you disappointed by Avant Hard, this record may very well be the final straw. It's sad to hear a group that once had so much potential descend on a slippery slope towards mediocrity. Thus, Add Insult to Injury serves as a disappointing reminder that sounding cool can only get you so far."

PJ Harvey

White Chalk

Rock

Joshua Klein

If there's been a constant in Polly Jean Harvey's 15-year career it's that she seems uncomfortable in her own skin-- which may explain why she sheds it so often. Harvey has a penchant for self-correction, to an almost compulsive degree: After To Bring You My Love made her a marquee act, Harvey released the dark, more atmospheric Is This Desire? When her 2000 album Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea accidentally captured the tenor of the times (its songs had an eerily prescient relationship to post-9/11 paranoia), Harvey responded with the stripped-down and studiously raw Uh Huh Her. In recent years, reports even swirled that Harvey was considering retiring, and in at least one regard she temporarily has: White Chalk-- Harvey's most radical self-correction to date-- finds her setting aside the guitar and the blues touches that marked past releases in favor of chamber-gloom, a ghostly piano her tool of choice. In Uh Huh Her's liner notes, there's a scribbled note from Harvey which reads, "TOO NORMAL? TOO P J H?" On White Chalk, there might be more Polly Jean Harvey than we've ever heard before-- if not quite enough of what traditionally falls under the "PJ Harvey" moniker. One problem is that Harvey isn't nearly as creative a pianist as she is a guitarist. However, the instrument switch has forced her to alter the way she composes as well as the way she sings. From opener "The Devil" on down, she's singing almost exclusively near the top of her range, using the piano as much as for percussion as melody. There are very few distracting trills on "Dear Darkness" or "Grow Grow Grow", where every note rings with loneliness, and the simple repetitive pattern that gently drives "When Under Ether" drips with menace. The rest of the album's instrumentation is equally spare and strictly old-fashioned, with such mood-setters as broken harp fleshing out (ahem) "Broken Harp"; when some (fake) brass enters the song, it's somber and subdued. Even the scant use of drums is largely intended to accent the songs. While there's probably more room than usual for Jim White, only "The Piano" finds him playing with any force. Lyrically, White Chalk is oppressively bleak. Harvey's songs never seem as if they come easily; they instead sound like the product of much effort, rigor, and even some pain. Her music is so raw it's a far cry from fun, even when she's trying to be funny; when she commanded Robert De Niro to "sit on my face" in 1993's "Reeling", she made it sound part dare, part threat. But there are no chuckles to be had on White Chalk, which is dark and austere, the songs striking an uneasy balance between indulgence and confrontation. Despite the presence of regular collaborators John Parish, Captain Beefheart alum Eric Drew Feldman, and producer Flood, White Chalk sounds as lonely and isolated as any album Harvey has made. There is a rich history of depressing British folk that Harvey taps into here, but without a hint of catharsis, much of White Chalk's miserablism just hangs in the air like a noose. On the right day, at the right time, the album's powerfully claustrophobic intimacy is more palatable; on the wrong day, at the wrong time, in the wrong frame of mind, White Chalk may be the longest half-hour in the world.

Artist: PJ Harvey, Album: White Chalk, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 6.8 Album review: "If there's been a constant in Polly Jean Harvey's 15-year career it's that she seems uncomfortable in her own skin-- which may explain why she sheds it so often. Harvey has a penchant for self-correction, to an almost compulsive degree: After To Bring You My Love made her a marquee act, Harvey released the dark, more atmospheric Is This Desire? When her 2000 album Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea accidentally captured the tenor of the times (its songs had an eerily prescient relationship to post-9/11 paranoia), Harvey responded with the stripped-down and studiously raw Uh Huh Her. In recent years, reports even swirled that Harvey was considering retiring, and in at least one regard she temporarily has: White Chalk-- Harvey's most radical self-correction to date-- finds her setting aside the guitar and the blues touches that marked past releases in favor of chamber-gloom, a ghostly piano her tool of choice. In Uh Huh Her's liner notes, there's a scribbled note from Harvey which reads, "TOO NORMAL? TOO P J H?" On White Chalk, there might be more Polly Jean Harvey than we've ever heard before-- if not quite enough of what traditionally falls under the "PJ Harvey" moniker. One problem is that Harvey isn't nearly as creative a pianist as she is a guitarist. However, the instrument switch has forced her to alter the way she composes as well as the way she sings. From opener "The Devil" on down, she's singing almost exclusively near the top of her range, using the piano as much as for percussion as melody. There are very few distracting trills on "Dear Darkness" or "Grow Grow Grow", where every note rings with loneliness, and the simple repetitive pattern that gently drives "When Under Ether" drips with menace. The rest of the album's instrumentation is equally spare and strictly old-fashioned, with such mood-setters as broken harp fleshing out (ahem) "Broken Harp"; when some (fake) brass enters the song, it's somber and subdued. Even the scant use of drums is largely intended to accent the songs. While there's probably more room than usual for Jim White, only "The Piano" finds him playing with any force. Lyrically, White Chalk is oppressively bleak. Harvey's songs never seem as if they come easily; they instead sound like the product of much effort, rigor, and even some pain. Her music is so raw it's a far cry from fun, even when she's trying to be funny; when she commanded Robert De Niro to "sit on my face" in 1993's "Reeling", she made it sound part dare, part threat. But there are no chuckles to be had on White Chalk, which is dark and austere, the songs striking an uneasy balance between indulgence and confrontation. Despite the presence of regular collaborators John Parish, Captain Beefheart alum Eric Drew Feldman, and producer Flood, White Chalk sounds as lonely and isolated as any album Harvey has made. There is a rich history of depressing British folk that Harvey taps into here, but without a hint of catharsis, much of White Chalk's miserablism just hangs in the air like a noose. On the right day, at the right time, the album's powerfully claustrophobic intimacy is more palatable; on the wrong day, at the wrong time, in the wrong frame of mind, White Chalk may be the longest half-hour in the world."

Firewater

Psychopharmacology

Rock

Jonny Pietin

There are some records whose awesomeness can only be measured in a very special way: on the Patented Personal Performance Listener Fantasy Scale. Basically, if an album, or even a particular song on it, can inspire me to fantasize myself performing it, it is automatically awesome. If the fantasy involves singing the song as a kiss-off to my high school (which I graduated from over a half-decade ago) and the people in it, then I know that, while it's still an awesome song, its shelf-life is short, as high school fantasies are usually only good for a quick, angry masturbation session. If the fantasy takes place in the present day, with me as a band member in a club I'm familiar with, then I know the song has staying power, because that fantasy still has a chance of coming true. One of the first song-fantasies I had that didn't involve those cheerleaders who now worshipped me was with Firewater's "I Still Love You, Judas," off their last record, The Ponzi Scheme. That daydream involved a rehearsal space, a recording studio, and accomplished backing musicians who were very impressed by my raw, yet focused, musical talents. The songs just poured out of me-- the drama burned a hole in my chest and climbed out, and bile poured out of my eyes like tears. I was a brilliant, untapped suburban prodigy. And my Judas would want me back. The rest of The Ponzi Scheme was pretty good, but none of the other songs put me in a state of ecstasy like "Judas." What was so good about it? Well, there were the slow-build verses. There were the phlegmy guitar hooks. There was Tod A.'s prison laundry spoon-shiv pipes. And there was that chorus. My God, that chorus. So huge, it was. Transcendence as a liquor-soaked biblical-sized "fuck you." So how could Firewater make me like their new album? Well, they could just take the elements that made "I Still Love You, Judas" my bloody-toothed grin of a fantasy, and reassemble them ten times. Did they do that? Well, eight times. And that's more then I could have hoped for. Each one of the first eight tracks on Psychopharmacology is a pureblood home run; the title song rides in on the keyboard riff from Three Dog Night's "One," and rides out on a cloud of crushed prescription pills; "Car Crash Collaborator" looks at the world through the eyes of Edward Norton's Fight Club character if he'd had a phalanx of bitchin' horns backing him up; and "Get Out of My Head" makes me the premier rock star of my inner world. What's weird about my "Get Out of My Head" fantasy, though, is that I imagine myself fronting a band featuring my brother on lead guitar and my sister on keyboards. A family-oriented rock star fantasy is something I've never had before, yet in this album's case, it seems strangely appropriate. Psychopharmacology has largely abandoned the exotic forays into Eastern European traditionalism that characterized the first two Firewater efforts, and to good effect. This record brings everything home that has ever made this band any good: (1) The big, poppy choruses; (2) Fabulous melodrama; and (3) A sense of family. That's right, family. This band had previously been a rag-tag collection of Tod A. collaborators, hanging out and helping him achieve his musical vision. On Psychopharmacology, however, for the first time, there is a real, solid Firewater lineup, where everyone is comfortable. And it feels that way. Just like the way I feel with my siblings. For staking out new ground on my Patented Personal Performance Listener Fantasy Scale, this record gets mucho points and praise. You may not hear a better pop/rock release this month. And you definitely won't find one that will make you want to play make-believe more. Thanks for your time. Now, I've got some serious pretending to get to.

Artist: Firewater, Album: Psychopharmacology, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 8.6 Album review: "There are some records whose awesomeness can only be measured in a very special way: on the Patented Personal Performance Listener Fantasy Scale. Basically, if an album, or even a particular song on it, can inspire me to fantasize myself performing it, it is automatically awesome. If the fantasy involves singing the song as a kiss-off to my high school (which I graduated from over a half-decade ago) and the people in it, then I know that, while it's still an awesome song, its shelf-life is short, as high school fantasies are usually only good for a quick, angry masturbation session. If the fantasy takes place in the present day, with me as a band member in a club I'm familiar with, then I know the song has staying power, because that fantasy still has a chance of coming true. One of the first song-fantasies I had that didn't involve those cheerleaders who now worshipped me was with Firewater's "I Still Love You, Judas," off their last record, The Ponzi Scheme. That daydream involved a rehearsal space, a recording studio, and accomplished backing musicians who were very impressed by my raw, yet focused, musical talents. The songs just poured out of me-- the drama burned a hole in my chest and climbed out, and bile poured out of my eyes like tears. I was a brilliant, untapped suburban prodigy. And my Judas would want me back. The rest of The Ponzi Scheme was pretty good, but none of the other songs put me in a state of ecstasy like "Judas." What was so good about it? Well, there were the slow-build verses. There were the phlegmy guitar hooks. There was Tod A.'s prison laundry spoon-shiv pipes. And there was that chorus. My God, that chorus. So huge, it was. Transcendence as a liquor-soaked biblical-sized "fuck you." So how could Firewater make me like their new album? Well, they could just take the elements that made "I Still Love You, Judas" my bloody-toothed grin of a fantasy, and reassemble them ten times. Did they do that? Well, eight times. And that's more then I could have hoped for. Each one of the first eight tracks on Psychopharmacology is a pureblood home run; the title song rides in on the keyboard riff from Three Dog Night's "One," and rides out on a cloud of crushed prescription pills; "Car Crash Collaborator" looks at the world through the eyes of Edward Norton's Fight Club character if he'd had a phalanx of bitchin' horns backing him up; and "Get Out of My Head" makes me the premier rock star of my inner world. What's weird about my "Get Out of My Head" fantasy, though, is that I imagine myself fronting a band featuring my brother on lead guitar and my sister on keyboards. A family-oriented rock star fantasy is something I've never had before, yet in this album's case, it seems strangely appropriate. Psychopharmacology has largely abandoned the exotic forays into Eastern European traditionalism that characterized the first two Firewater efforts, and to good effect. This record brings everything home that has ever made this band any good: (1) The big, poppy choruses; (2) Fabulous melodrama; and (3) A sense of family. That's right, family. This band had previously been a rag-tag collection of Tod A. collaborators, hanging out and helping him achieve his musical vision. On Psychopharmacology, however, for the first time, there is a real, solid Firewater lineup, where everyone is comfortable. And it feels that way. Just like the way I feel with my siblings. For staking out new ground on my Patented Personal Performance Listener Fantasy Scale, this record gets mucho points and praise. You may not hear a better pop/rock release this month. And you definitely won't find one that will make you want to play make-believe more. Thanks for your time. Now, I've got some serious pretending to get to."

Funki Porcini

Fast Asleep

Electronic,Jazz

Eric Carr

Marco di Dominicis is fluent in Italian; I am, to date, not. Consequently, I find myself largely unable to decipher his liner notes to Fast Asleep, a fact which would normally cause me some degree of distress, owing to my megalomaniacal desire to know everything at all times. That, however, is the true beauty of James Bradell's fourth release as Funki Porcini; it makes me not want to learn Italian. In fact, over the album's duration and some time thereafter, I don't feel the need to pick up any of the Romance languages, or do much of anything else for that matter. Instead, for a few brief moments, simply sitting and listening seems pretty great all by itself. Bradell, in his own subtly inimitable fashion, has created here an exceptionally personal album, though not in a particularly "revelatory" sense. Rather, this is an album most easily enjoyed in quiet solitude, as an entity all its own. Since becoming one of the original South London Ninja masters in 1995, Bradell's take on classic ambient downbeat has fallen in step with that of labelmates Amon Tobin and Coldcut, but now the emphasis is sharply on "ambient." Heavily treated vocal samples are the sounds of the outside world slipping away, or trying in vain to intrude into this almost accidentally cool dream state. There's still a fair share of jazz-infused breaks hiding out in the sweetly atonal fog, but they never arrive without warning or stay long enough to get the blood up; the last thing Bradell wants to do is quicken a pulse. Nevertheless, Fast Asleep isn't nearly as soporific as the title would imply, creating the sensation of a restful state somewhere in the nebulous territory between sleep and wakefulness. Even though his loungy breakbeats have been relaxed, the trip-hop technician that produced the genre marker Hed Phone Sex hasn't disappeared. Now song structures drift in and out like afterthoughts or mild hallucinations, dissolving back to component particles rather than merely concluding. It's actually difficult not to feel very slightly disappointed when the more impressive compositions, from the slithering, Tobin-esque vibe of "50,000 Ft. Freefall" to the crystalline breaks of "Weow", simply disappear into the ambiance, or are resculpted into the next track. The continuous morphing from point to point doesn't allow real closure, but still reinforces the flow of the album as a single, massive arrangement, which is the whole idea anyway. A few of these tunes are fully realized animals, though, like the astonishing centerpiece, "The Great Drive-By", which throws some question on the effectiveness of this album-centric release. Deep, dark currents of near-tuneless noise are instant reminders of a Boards of Canada arrangement along the lines of "Everything You Do Is a Balloon" or "The Beach at Redpoint", right down to the slow-motion breakbeat. Alternately uplifting and unnerving, "Drive-By" is a brilliant testament to what Bradell can do when he focuses on crafting a single track (instead of an entire album) from start to finish. Like every other song on Fast Asleep, it's slick and evocative, but, unlike many of the others, it's also more capable of supporting itself while bolstering the album as a whole. So, is it really necessary that an impressive monument to relaxation like this also be comprised of impressive individual songs, even when it works so well as a unit? Well, no, but if the excellence of "Drive-By" is any indication, it couldn't hurt.

Artist: Funki Porcini, Album: Fast Asleep, Genre: Electronic,Jazz, Score (1-10): 7.7 Album review: "Marco di Dominicis is fluent in Italian; I am, to date, not. Consequently, I find myself largely unable to decipher his liner notes to Fast Asleep, a fact which would normally cause me some degree of distress, owing to my megalomaniacal desire to know everything at all times. That, however, is the true beauty of James Bradell's fourth release as Funki Porcini; it makes me not want to learn Italian. In fact, over the album's duration and some time thereafter, I don't feel the need to pick up any of the Romance languages, or do much of anything else for that matter. Instead, for a few brief moments, simply sitting and listening seems pretty great all by itself. Bradell, in his own subtly inimitable fashion, has created here an exceptionally personal album, though not in a particularly "revelatory" sense. Rather, this is an album most easily enjoyed in quiet solitude, as an entity all its own. Since becoming one of the original South London Ninja masters in 1995, Bradell's take on classic ambient downbeat has fallen in step with that of labelmates Amon Tobin and Coldcut, but now the emphasis is sharply on "ambient." Heavily treated vocal samples are the sounds of the outside world slipping away, or trying in vain to intrude into this almost accidentally cool dream state. There's still a fair share of jazz-infused breaks hiding out in the sweetly atonal fog, but they never arrive without warning or stay long enough to get the blood up; the last thing Bradell wants to do is quicken a pulse. Nevertheless, Fast Asleep isn't nearly as soporific as the title would imply, creating the sensation of a restful state somewhere in the nebulous territory between sleep and wakefulness. Even though his loungy breakbeats have been relaxed, the trip-hop technician that produced the genre marker Hed Phone Sex hasn't disappeared. Now song structures drift in and out like afterthoughts or mild hallucinations, dissolving back to component particles rather than merely concluding. It's actually difficult not to feel very slightly disappointed when the more impressive compositions, from the slithering, Tobin-esque vibe of "50,000 Ft. Freefall" to the crystalline breaks of "Weow", simply disappear into the ambiance, or are resculpted into the next track. The continuous morphing from point to point doesn't allow real closure, but still reinforces the flow of the album as a single, massive arrangement, which is the whole idea anyway. A few of these tunes are fully realized animals, though, like the astonishing centerpiece, "The Great Drive-By", which throws some question on the effectiveness of this album-centric release. Deep, dark currents of near-tuneless noise are instant reminders of a Boards of Canada arrangement along the lines of "Everything You Do Is a Balloon" or "The Beach at Redpoint", right down to the slow-motion breakbeat. Alternately uplifting and unnerving, "Drive-By" is a brilliant testament to what Bradell can do when he focuses on crafting a single track (instead of an entire album) from start to finish. Like every other song on Fast Asleep, it's slick and evocative, but, unlike many of the others, it's also more capable of supporting itself while bolstering the album as a whole. So, is it really necessary that an impressive monument to relaxation like this also be comprised of impressive individual songs, even when it works so well as a unit? Well, no, but if the excellence of "Drive-By" is any indication, it couldn't hurt."

Various Artists

I Said No Doctors!

Grayson Haver Currin

For Tom Tolleson, the fourteen-track compilation I Said No Doctors! began with a personal fascination. The founder of oddball record label Dymaxion Groove, Tolleson began tinkering with ways to manipulate his guitar, making it sound strange and unpredictable. He soon encountered the famed Dutch luthier Yuri Landman, who has long built unorthodox guitars and instruments for experimental stars. Several gear purchases and years later, Tolleson started assembling I Said No Doctors!, an hour-long survey of such eccentric instruments used in wildly different contexts, from meditative free jazz and surf rock to folk hokum and total noise. It is an exhibition of instrumental diversity, an attempt to showcase the possibilities of sound and song when the sources are no longer standard. There’s plenty of intrigue and some inevitable filler here, all bound together by instruments that, as Tolleson puts it, are “only in tune with [themselves] by the way [they’re] made.” Dan Deacon’s MIDI triggers a trillion tiny notes from a grand piano on “Opal Toad Segment,” while a bowed Indonesian plough on Senyawa’s “Anak Kijang” conjures a militia of aging cellos. David Grubbs doctors his guitar until its notes ring like hiccups and gurgles. The synthesizer builder Peter Blasser wields his invention, the Deerhorn, to reshape a lovely torch song into a lonely transmission from an alien jukebox. And Simeon Coxe uses the Simeon—the amorphous electronic namesake that’s been the core of his Silver Apples for fifty years—to create a soundscape that crawls with creepiness. Tolleson himself plays a mutated kalimba made by Landman here, while Landman’s own band, Bismuth, contributes a simmering, Sonic Youth-like instrumental. Deacon’s stunning “Opal Toad Segment” is the true standout, making good on his professed love of daring composer Conlon Nancarrow by turning a storm of fast piano notes into billowing clouds of sound. It comforts with cacophony, and its busy structure somehow soothes. Likewise, Oval’s “ISND” lands perfectly between the prickly and the pleasant, with chimes and drums dissolving into one another like ripples from raindrops on a lake. Both tracks suggest new possibilities for their composers—one point, after all, of such technical innovation. The diversity of I Said No Doctors!, though, stalls out at sound. There are more prepared guitars and novel programming arrangements here than women. In fact, there’s only one, Pauline Kim Harris, whose adventurous, cliffhanging turn with scrambled classical duo String Noise should have served as a potent reminder to build the roster’s gender balance. The compilation’s one concession to diversity—the radical Javanese duo Senyawa, whose contribution is an acoustic uproar—smacks of exotic fetishism, given its total outlier status. The realm of making and using experimental instruments isn’t a white men’s club, but *I Said No Doctors! *presents it as such. Hell, a quip from Theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore inspired the design of the Deerhorn, deployed on one of this compilation’s most interesting tracks, “Deer Biphenyl.” That the past and present of experimental sound brim with and depend on both women and people of color should be obvious enough. The potential roster for a more-balanced survey is astounding, from guitarist Mary Halvorson and harpist Mary Lattimore to pedal steel master Susan Alcorn and synthesizer legend Laurie Spiegel. Their omission here lands less like mere oversight, then, than an insulting insinuation that instrumental innovation stems only from boys with toys. For a compilation so concerned with possibility, I Said No Doctors! overlooks more than half a world of it. Ultimately, Tolleson’s fascination yields the musical equivalent of a coffee-table book, the kind of record you keep around as a conversation piece when friends come over or pick up from time to time for a scan when you’ve finished a better book. You keep it around for a spell because of its curios (remember, a bowed plough!) or its genuine accomplishments (like the radiant pieces from Deacon, Oval, and String Noise) before passing it along to a used bookstore, finally realizing it was out of date before it even went to print.

Artist: Various Artists, Album: I Said No Doctors!, Genre: None, Score (1-10): 6.2 Album review: "For Tom Tolleson, the fourteen-track compilation I Said No Doctors! began with a personal fascination. The founder of oddball record label Dymaxion Groove, Tolleson began tinkering with ways to manipulate his guitar, making it sound strange and unpredictable. He soon encountered the famed Dutch luthier Yuri Landman, who has long built unorthodox guitars and instruments for experimental stars. Several gear purchases and years later, Tolleson started assembling I Said No Doctors!, an hour-long survey of such eccentric instruments used in wildly different contexts, from meditative free jazz and surf rock to folk hokum and total noise. It is an exhibition of instrumental diversity, an attempt to showcase the possibilities of sound and song when the sources are no longer standard. There’s plenty of intrigue and some inevitable filler here, all bound together by instruments that, as Tolleson puts it, are “only in tune with [themselves] by the way [they’re] made.” Dan Deacon’s MIDI triggers a trillion tiny notes from a grand piano on “Opal Toad Segment,” while a bowed Indonesian plough on Senyawa’s “Anak Kijang” conjures a militia of aging cellos. David Grubbs doctors his guitar until its notes ring like hiccups and gurgles. The synthesizer builder Peter Blasser wields his invention, the Deerhorn, to reshape a lovely torch song into a lonely transmission from an alien jukebox. And Simeon Coxe uses the Simeon—the amorphous electronic namesake that’s been the core of his Silver Apples for fifty years—to create a soundscape that crawls with creepiness. Tolleson himself plays a mutated kalimba made by Landman here, while Landman’s own band, Bismuth, contributes a simmering, Sonic Youth-like instrumental. Deacon’s stunning “Opal Toad Segment” is the true standout, making good on his professed love of daring composer Conlon Nancarrow by turning a storm of fast piano notes into billowing clouds of sound. It comforts with cacophony, and its busy structure somehow soothes. Likewise, Oval’s “ISND” lands perfectly between the prickly and the pleasant, with chimes and drums dissolving into one another like ripples from raindrops on a lake. Both tracks suggest new possibilities for their composers—one point, after all, of such technical innovation. The diversity of I Said No Doctors!, though, stalls out at sound. There are more prepared guitars and novel programming arrangements here than women. In fact, there’s only one, Pauline Kim Harris, whose adventurous, cliffhanging turn with scrambled classical duo String Noise should have served as a potent reminder to build the roster’s gender balance. The compilation’s one concession to diversity—the radical Javanese duo Senyawa, whose contribution is an acoustic uproar—smacks of exotic fetishism, given its total outlier status. The realm of making and using experimental instruments isn’t a white men’s club, but *I Said No Doctors! *presents it as such. Hell, a quip from Theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore inspired the design of the Deerhorn, deployed on one of this compilation’s most interesting tracks, “Deer Biphenyl.” That the past and present of experimental sound brim with and depend on both women and people of color should be obvious enough. The potential roster for a more-balanced survey is astounding, from guitarist Mary Halvorson and harpist Mary Lattimore to pedal steel master Susan Alcorn and synthesizer legend Laurie Spiegel. Their omission here lands less like mere oversight, then, than an insulting insinuation that instrumental innovation stems only from boys with toys. For a compilation so concerned with possibility, I Said No Doctors! overlooks more than half a world of it. Ultimately, Tolleson’s fascination yields the musical equivalent of a coffee-table book, the kind of record you keep around as a conversation piece when friends come over or pick up from time to time for a scan when you’ve finished a better book. You keep it around for a spell because of its curios (remember, a bowed plough!) or its genuine accomplishments (like the radiant pieces from Deacon, Oval, and String Noise) before passing it along to a used bookstore, finally realizing it was out of date before it even went to print."

Erik Sanko

Past Imperfect, Present Tense

Matt LeMay

Once upon a time, Erik Sanko was the frontman for a band called Skeleton Key. Skeleton Key was pretty cool. They wrote good rock songs and banged on garbage cans. Capitol Records took notice. They signed Skeleton Key. And then, as often happens in the music industry, they fucked the band thoroughly and vigorously. Skeleton Key's one proper album, Fantastic Spikes Through Balloon, got less than no promotion, failed to gain the kind of support it no doubt would've garnered from an indie label, and was later yanked out of print. Skeleton Key lost their limbs on the battlefield of alternative music, and it turned out to be a fatal wound. In the military, they have the Purple Heart for people who meet such a fate. A thoughtful, kind token to say, "Hey, dude, sorry we sent you to have your knee blown off in 'Nam"-- a gesture of appreciation for someone who was screwed over in service. The music industry has never been particularly good about showing appreciation for its soldiers. Unless you consider Jethro Tull "fuckin' hardcore," the Grammy is essentially a joke. Awards are only given to the so-called heroes of the business. But what of the wounded? What recognition do the poor souls who have been reduced to collateral damage by the thoughtless machinations of the record industry receive? Erik Sanko and his bandmates should have, at the very least, each received a medal, depicting in fine bronze and gold engraving a musician being brutally raped by a smiling record exec. Fortunately, a little piece of metal probably wouldn't have mattered all that much to the boys of Skeleton Key, who have since gone on to plenty of other projects. Junk percussionist Rick Lee and drummer Steve Calhoon formed Enon with ex-Brainiac guitarist John Schmersal. And now, frontman Erik Sanko has returned with a pleasant, if not terribly exciting, solo record on a friendly little label. Past Imperfect, Present Tense is a solo album in the truest sense of the term-- every single note on the album is composed and played by Sanko himself. Given that Erik is primarily a guitarist with an interest in keyboards and strange noises, it makes sense that this record would be a more subdued effort than the tattered junkyard jams of Skeleton Key. Indeed, Sanko's guitar and voice, with some additional atmospherics provided by subtle effects and keyboard flourishes, constitute the album's core. Sanko is, without question, a talented man, both as a performer and a songwriter. But, despite the fact that Past Imperfect sprung entirely from the loins of a single creator, it only occasionally registers as particularly affecting. When it does register, however, it does so with remarkable elegance and style-- there are a few moments here that are absolutely intriguing. The shaky, slithery synthesizer part that appears throughout "The Perfect Flaw" is utterly entrancing, and the track is this incarnation of Sanko at his finest-- subtle, downcast, and vaguely haunting. Hints of this run through the album as a whole, but are rarely developed enough to yield truly potent results. Much of Past Imperfect seems to rely on a similar formula-- a sparse, usually minor guitar figure, a shaky vocal melody, and some atmospherics thrown in for good measure. Sanko manages to use this recipe to pretty good effect, too, on occasion, such as in "While You Were Out," a song that occasionally bears an uncanny resemblance to the live version of Radiohead's "Like Spinning Plates." With "That Train," Sanko picks up the pace a bit, but the Spartan arrangement and lack of change in dynamics tethers the song to the tag "pretty good." Aside from a few deeply hypnotic moments, Sanko's isolation doesn't really seem to help Past Imperfect much. A more diverse range of sounds would have benefited the album greatly. As Sanko surely knows, the music world can be a cruel, horribly unfair place. It's best not to face such things alone.

Artist: Erik Sanko, Album: Past Imperfect, Present Tense, Genre: None, Score (1-10): 6.4 Album review: "Once upon a time, Erik Sanko was the frontman for a band called Skeleton Key. Skeleton Key was pretty cool. They wrote good rock songs and banged on garbage cans. Capitol Records took notice. They signed Skeleton Key. And then, as often happens in the music industry, they fucked the band thoroughly and vigorously. Skeleton Key's one proper album, Fantastic Spikes Through Balloon, got less than no promotion, failed to gain the kind of support it no doubt would've garnered from an indie label, and was later yanked out of print. Skeleton Key lost their limbs on the battlefield of alternative music, and it turned out to be a fatal wound. In the military, they have the Purple Heart for people who meet such a fate. A thoughtful, kind token to say, "Hey, dude, sorry we sent you to have your knee blown off in 'Nam"-- a gesture of appreciation for someone who was screwed over in service. The music industry has never been particularly good about showing appreciation for its soldiers. Unless you consider Jethro Tull "fuckin' hardcore," the Grammy is essentially a joke. Awards are only given to the so-called heroes of the business. But what of the wounded? What recognition do the poor souls who have been reduced to collateral damage by the thoughtless machinations of the record industry receive? Erik Sanko and his bandmates should have, at the very least, each received a medal, depicting in fine bronze and gold engraving a musician being brutally raped by a smiling record exec. Fortunately, a little piece of metal probably wouldn't have mattered all that much to the boys of Skeleton Key, who have since gone on to plenty of other projects. Junk percussionist Rick Lee and drummer Steve Calhoon formed Enon with ex-Brainiac guitarist John Schmersal. And now, frontman Erik Sanko has returned with a pleasant, if not terribly exciting, solo record on a friendly little label. Past Imperfect, Present Tense is a solo album in the truest sense of the term-- every single note on the album is composed and played by Sanko himself. Given that Erik is primarily a guitarist with an interest in keyboards and strange noises, it makes sense that this record would be a more subdued effort than the tattered junkyard jams of Skeleton Key. Indeed, Sanko's guitar and voice, with some additional atmospherics provided by subtle effects and keyboard flourishes, constitute the album's core. Sanko is, without question, a talented man, both as a performer and a songwriter. But, despite the fact that Past Imperfect sprung entirely from the loins of a single creator, it only occasionally registers as particularly affecting. When it does register, however, it does so with remarkable elegance and style-- there are a few moments here that are absolutely intriguing. The shaky, slithery synthesizer part that appears throughout "The Perfect Flaw" is utterly entrancing, and the track is this incarnation of Sanko at his finest-- subtle, downcast, and vaguely haunting. Hints of this run through the album as a whole, but are rarely developed enough to yield truly potent results. Much of Past Imperfect seems to rely on a similar formula-- a sparse, usually minor guitar figure, a shaky vocal melody, and some atmospherics thrown in for good measure. Sanko manages to use this recipe to pretty good effect, too, on occasion, such as in "While You Were Out," a song that occasionally bears an uncanny resemblance to the live version of Radiohead's "Like Spinning Plates." With "That Train," Sanko picks up the pace a bit, but the Spartan arrangement and lack of change in dynamics tethers the song to the tag "pretty good." Aside from a few deeply hypnotic moments, Sanko's isolation doesn't really seem to help Past Imperfect much. A more diverse range of sounds would have benefited the album greatly. As Sanko surely knows, the music world can be a cruel, horribly unfair place. It's best not to face such things alone."

Mission of Burma

The Obliterati

David Raposa

I guess we're at a point where Mission of Burma's post-reunion accomplishments shouldn't be met by shock and amazement. But, considering how fantastic The Obliterati sounds, I'm tempted to offer the sort of breathless hyperbole that press agents would love to quote, something along the lines of "every band in the world would die to make this record" or "makes onOFFon sound like a barber-shop quartet afflicted with food poisoning." If you get enough beers in me, I'll probably even claim that it's their best LP to date. Suffice it to say that this record is very, very good. One thing The Obliterati has over its post-reunion predecessor is continuity and cohesiveness. As good as onOFFon is, it's still the work of three guys who hadn't played together for nearly 20 years. The tongue-in-cheek title acknowledged as much, as did the vinyl-referencing 15 seconds of silence separating the first eight tracks and the final seven on the CD version of that record. That there were more than a few dips into the past (both in Burma's catalog, and in Roger Miller's own songbook) also speaks to this hesitancy. In retrospect, the album sounds less like a coherent statement and more like a disparate (albeit excellent) collection of songs. Contrast that with The Obliterati, the work of a group that's totally comfortable, and confident, within its own skin. It takes chutzpah to title a song "Donna Sumeria" and, smack dab in the middle of the song, quote (with all due respect) Ms. Summer's "I Feel Love". It takes skill to make it work. Burma offer a fitting epigram for their plan of attack via the title "Careening With Conviction", and as soon as Peter Prescott kicks off "2wice" with his free-wheeling drum kit abuse, the album puts the pedal to the floor. The absurd and haunting cut-and-paste imagery of "1001 Pleasant Dreams" ("You said my name was hyper-allergenic/ You said I was not hyper-real") abuts the bare-bones Big Blackness of "Good, Not Great". Another Consonant-sounding track from Clint Conley ("Is This Where?") is right at home preceding the gloriously crotchety Prescott rant ("Period"). Roger Miller's "13" has enough room for cello, patented Burma bam-thwok, and glistening harmonics. While the album's closer, "Nancy Reagan's Head", has enough room for references to mesomorphs and the sacroiliac, loops of faux-Gregorian chants, and the soon-to-be-classic couplet, "And I'm haunted by the freakish size of Nancy Reagan's head/ No way that thing came with that body." As for the group's aforementioned conviction, it's to its credit it can make a statement without the need of a soapbox or a bully pulpit. Sure, the band were proud supporters of John Kerry's failed run for the White House, its been known to take the stage with a banner proudly proclaiming NO NEW MCCARTHY ERA, and the LP contains references to the Reagans, the Middle East, and planes falling out of the sky. The message here, however, isn't a proselytizing one, but an inspiring one. One of the reasons the sound of marching feet has such an allure is because it's the sound of people doing something for a cause. Whether that cause is personal or political is immaterial-- it's the act of putting your weight behind something that's key, and that's what Mission of Burma are doing. They're making their noise their way, the same way they did some two decades ago. And it's a sound as vital and inspirational as ever.

Artist: Mission of Burma, Album: The Obliterati, Genre: None, Score (1-10): 8.3 Album review: "I guess we're at a point where Mission of Burma's post-reunion accomplishments shouldn't be met by shock and amazement. But, considering how fantastic The Obliterati sounds, I'm tempted to offer the sort of breathless hyperbole that press agents would love to quote, something along the lines of "every band in the world would die to make this record" or "makes onOFFon sound like a barber-shop quartet afflicted with food poisoning." If you get enough beers in me, I'll probably even claim that it's their best LP to date. Suffice it to say that this record is very, very good. One thing The Obliterati has over its post-reunion predecessor is continuity and cohesiveness. As good as onOFFon is, it's still the work of three guys who hadn't played together for nearly 20 years. The tongue-in-cheek title acknowledged as much, as did the vinyl-referencing 15 seconds of silence separating the first eight tracks and the final seven on the CD version of that record. That there were more than a few dips into the past (both in Burma's catalog, and in Roger Miller's own songbook) also speaks to this hesitancy. In retrospect, the album sounds less like a coherent statement and more like a disparate (albeit excellent) collection of songs. Contrast that with The Obliterati, the work of a group that's totally comfortable, and confident, within its own skin. It takes chutzpah to title a song "Donna Sumeria" and, smack dab in the middle of the song, quote (with all due respect) Ms. Summer's "I Feel Love". It takes skill to make it work. Burma offer a fitting epigram for their plan of attack via the title "Careening With Conviction", and as soon as Peter Prescott kicks off "2wice" with his free-wheeling drum kit abuse, the album puts the pedal to the floor. The absurd and haunting cut-and-paste imagery of "1001 Pleasant Dreams" ("You said my name was hyper-allergenic/ You said I was not hyper-real") abuts the bare-bones Big Blackness of "Good, Not Great". Another Consonant-sounding track from Clint Conley ("Is This Where?") is right at home preceding the gloriously crotchety Prescott rant ("Period"). Roger Miller's "13" has enough room for cello, patented Burma bam-thwok, and glistening harmonics. While the album's closer, "Nancy Reagan's Head", has enough room for references to mesomorphs and the sacroiliac, loops of faux-Gregorian chants, and the soon-to-be-classic couplet, "And I'm haunted by the freakish size of Nancy Reagan's head/ No way that thing came with that body." As for the group's aforementioned conviction, it's to its credit it can make a statement without the need of a soapbox or a bully pulpit. Sure, the band were proud supporters of John Kerry's failed run for the White House, its been known to take the stage with a banner proudly proclaiming NO NEW MCCARTHY ERA, and the LP contains references to the Reagans, the Middle East, and planes falling out of the sky. The message here, however, isn't a proselytizing one, but an inspiring one. One of the reasons the sound of marching feet has such an allure is because it's the sound of people doing something for a cause. Whether that cause is personal or political is immaterial-- it's the act of putting your weight behind something that's key, and that's what Mission of Burma are doing. They're making their noise their way, the same way they did some two decades ago. And it's a sound as vital and inspirational as ever."

Edwyn Collins

Home Again

Rock

Stephen Trouss

Edwyn Collins' indefatigably eccentric recording career began in 1980 with "Falling and Laughing", Orange Juice's debut single for Glasgow's Postcard label. It was a giddy, ramshackle joyride of a song, and with its willingness to find amusement in infatuation and consolation in wit-- at the precise moment that Joy Division were approaching their spectacular dead end-- it may even have been a tipping point for British pop after punk. Over a quarter of a century later Collins returns with his sixth solo album, and a closing track that might as well have been called "Falling and Crying". On the face of it, Home Again fits right into one the 21st century's most unexpectedly rewarding genres: the post-punk Euro-soulboy midlife redemption record; to be filed alongside Scritti Politti's White Bread, Black Beer and Roddy Frame's Western Skies. Right on schedule (Collins' pop career has operated on the elliptical, cosmic timetable of an errant comet), 12 years after "A Girl Like You" and 24 years since "Rip It Up", it could even offer him his third proper hit single in "You'll Never Know (My Love)". Like the original Euro-soulboy midlife redemption record-- Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy-- it begins midway in the journey of life, lost in the woods. "I'd ask for directions, but my memory is shot and full of holes," he sings on "Written in Stone". "But my recall's near perfection when compared to the condition of my soul." And like Dante (I hope to god I'm speaking allegorically), Edwyn Collins had to go through hell to get back on track. Home Again was written and recorded in 2004-- just as Collins' critical stock was at a 20-year high, with Simon Reynolds borrowing an OJ title for his comprehensive post-punk survey Rip It Up and Start Again, and the release of the definitive The Glasgow School compilation. It was mixed in 2006. In the year in between, Collins suffered two cerebral hemorrhages and an equally threatening bout of the hospital "superbug" MRSA. Even after he was discharged, he and his family were encouraged to try and "live within the limitations." Consequently, it's impossible to review the album with a dry eye, or without hearing an ominous subtext to every song. In a year when we've already lost Lee Hazlewood and Tony Wilson (and I wonder whether Collins isn't spiritually a kind of missing link between the two), it's tempting just to be grateful that he's still with us. And though it's not a perfect record, and a couple of tunes feel like sketches that have still to be properly realized, Home Again is nevertheless undeniably one of the most affecting records of the year. Opening track "One Is a Lonely Number" is a spooky ode to failing better in an indifferent world: "If life breaks your heart, you needn't fall apart, cos you've still got your mind..." Collins sings, his croon cracked with unusually direct sincerity. It's driven by banjo and sitar, swathed in spooky harmonies and Theremin, in that Joe Meek-goes-plastic-soul style he perfected on 1994's Gorgeous George. As such it's untypical of the album. Because though "You'll Never Know (My Love)" is a chill, autumn breeze take on the Isley Brothers, Home Again is mostly an odd kind of folk record. "It's in Your Heart" and "Liberteenage Rag" have the acoustic lilt of Collin's childhood pop idol, Donovan, and strike a note of nostalgia for the Scotland of his youth. And the eerie, foreboding "Leviathan", all troubled seas and furious skies, seems to hark further back, to the folk revival of the 1950s and 60s and corny but effective groups like the Corries. The title track walks a similar line with heart-breaking results. A simple, delicate acoustic ballad, in a certain light you could almost mistake it for a rueful Jim Reeves song all about straying, betraying, and belatedly coming to your senses. I interviewed Collins at his home in west London a couple of weeks ago, and though his recovery has exceeded all expectations, he was still frustrated with getting his words to work as fluently as they once did. A lot of the time he was happier singing to me: because of the structure of brain injuries, people recovering from strokes can often sing sentences impeccably they might have trouble simply speaking. So he started crooning "Home Again", over a cup of coffee and some fig rolls. Once started, he soon realized he was having too much fun to stop. "Outside on the street, I heard somebody singing/ And I heard the music ringing/ Rrom some clapped-out pirate station/ It was my unholy salvation." At the end he burst out laughing. "I've still got it, haven't I?" And you know what? He really does.

Artist: Edwyn Collins, Album: Home Again, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 8.0 Album review: "Edwyn Collins' indefatigably eccentric recording career began in 1980 with "Falling and Laughing", Orange Juice's debut single for Glasgow's Postcard label. It was a giddy, ramshackle joyride of a song, and with its willingness to find amusement in infatuation and consolation in wit-- at the precise moment that Joy Division were approaching their spectacular dead end-- it may even have been a tipping point for British pop after punk. Over a quarter of a century later Collins returns with his sixth solo album, and a closing track that might as well have been called "Falling and Crying". On the face of it, Home Again fits right into one the 21st century's most unexpectedly rewarding genres: the post-punk Euro-soulboy midlife redemption record; to be filed alongside Scritti Politti's White Bread, Black Beer and Roddy Frame's Western Skies. Right on schedule (Collins' pop career has operated on the elliptical, cosmic timetable of an errant comet), 12 years after "A Girl Like You" and 24 years since "Rip It Up", it could even offer him his third proper hit single in "You'll Never Know (My Love)". Like the original Euro-soulboy midlife redemption record-- Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy-- it begins midway in the journey of life, lost in the woods. "I'd ask for directions, but my memory is shot and full of holes," he sings on "Written in Stone". "But my recall's near perfection when compared to the condition of my soul." And like Dante (I hope to god I'm speaking allegorically), Edwyn Collins had to go through hell to get back on track. Home Again was written and recorded in 2004-- just as Collins' critical stock was at a 20-year high, with Simon Reynolds borrowing an OJ title for his comprehensive post-punk survey Rip It Up and Start Again, and the release of the definitive The Glasgow School compilation. It was mixed in 2006. In the year in between, Collins suffered two cerebral hemorrhages and an equally threatening bout of the hospital "superbug" MRSA. Even after he was discharged, he and his family were encouraged to try and "live within the limitations." Consequently, it's impossible to review the album with a dry eye, or without hearing an ominous subtext to every song. In a year when we've already lost Lee Hazlewood and Tony Wilson (and I wonder whether Collins isn't spiritually a kind of missing link between the two), it's tempting just to be grateful that he's still with us. And though it's not a perfect record, and a couple of tunes feel like sketches that have still to be properly realized, Home Again is nevertheless undeniably one of the most affecting records of the year. Opening track "One Is a Lonely Number" is a spooky ode to failing better in an indifferent world: "If life breaks your heart, you needn't fall apart, cos you've still got your mind..." Collins sings, his croon cracked with unusually direct sincerity. It's driven by banjo and sitar, swathed in spooky harmonies and Theremin, in that Joe Meek-goes-plastic-soul style he perfected on 1994's Gorgeous George. As such it's untypical of the album. Because though "You'll Never Know (My Love)" is a chill, autumn breeze take on the Isley Brothers, Home Again is mostly an odd kind of folk record. "It's in Your Heart" and "Liberteenage Rag" have the acoustic lilt of Collin's childhood pop idol, Donovan, and strike a note of nostalgia for the Scotland of his youth. And the eerie, foreboding "Leviathan", all troubled seas and furious skies, seems to hark further back, to the folk revival of the 1950s and 60s and corny but effective groups like the Corries. The title track walks a similar line with heart-breaking results. A simple, delicate acoustic ballad, in a certain light you could almost mistake it for a rueful Jim Reeves song all about straying, betraying, and belatedly coming to your senses. I interviewed Collins at his home in west London a couple of weeks ago, and though his recovery has exceeded all expectations, he was still frustrated with getting his words to work as fluently as they once did. A lot of the time he was happier singing to me: because of the structure of brain injuries, people recovering from strokes can often sing sentences impeccably they might have trouble simply speaking. So he started crooning "Home Again", over a cup of coffee and some fig rolls. Once started, he soon realized he was having too much fun to stop. "Outside on the street, I heard somebody singing/ And I heard the music ringing/ Rrom some clapped-out pirate station/ It was my unholy salvation." At the end he burst out laughing. "I've still got it, haven't I?" And you know what? He really does."

Alex Bleeker and the Freaks

Alex Bleeker and the Freaks

David Bevan

The men of Real Estate are very generous about backing one another's likeminded creative adventures. Bassist Alex Bleeker's first solo EP is in front of the Freaks, a gang that's more Crazy Horse than Galaxie 500, and one that happens to include Real Estate frontman Martin Courtney and guitarist Matthew Mondanile. (The former has taken over bass duty, while the latter bangs drums.) The sonics are similarly submerged, but the pop format is much different: this is Strumming Country, tone trumps texture. Bleeker's got a fantastic ear for steering his crew's floating-mattress sensibility toward the classic rock side of things. As instrumental (duh) opener "Summer" winds its way into "Epilogue", Bleeker signals the shift with some chord-slamming. When the volume jumps, Bleeker begins to whinny in a register as Neil Young-like as the crispy guitar Julian Lynch jabs throughout. That said, the guitar interplay clearly comes from the gut in a way that allows for the kind of total freedom that these dudes and their many stripes of song seem to hold so dear. Lyrically, Bleeker keeps his songs in familiar territory. There's summer and there's spring, and everybody's either hanging out or remembering times when they did. On "Prisoner of the Past", Bleeker gets old-timey as he sings about a friendship that's run its course. It's a really short verse before the guitar starts squaking, but in a few lines he (probably inadvertently) bottles up the hypernostalgic vibes that bleed into all of bandmates work, together or alone. It's hard not to notice all the fun that's being had messing around with the rock grid here, the ways in which you can make a trusted blueprint your own simply by stamping it so. When Real Estate jam, they do so in a way that's flush with Courtney's indie rock vision. When Mondanile runs off on his hypnogogic spirit journeys as Ducktails, he solos his way to infinity. Even though each of Bleeker's songs here are ultimately interchangeable in layout, their warmth is not. On "Animal Tracks", a blistering cover of a song by Vermont's Mountain Man, the Freaks sing in unison of sipping Barq's root beer and hanging out on a set of backstairs. It quickly recalls Real Estate's "Suburban Beverage", a song most easily identified by the chant, "Budweiser, Sprite, do you feel alright?" The drink may be different, but the buzz comes from the very same place.

Artist: Alex Bleeker and the Freaks, Album: Alex Bleeker and the Freaks, Genre: None, Score (1-10): 7.3 Album review: "The men of Real Estate are very generous about backing one another's likeminded creative adventures. Bassist Alex Bleeker's first solo EP is in front of the Freaks, a gang that's more Crazy Horse than Galaxie 500, and one that happens to include Real Estate frontman Martin Courtney and guitarist Matthew Mondanile. (The former has taken over bass duty, while the latter bangs drums.) The sonics are similarly submerged, but the pop format is much different: this is Strumming Country, tone trumps texture. Bleeker's got a fantastic ear for steering his crew's floating-mattress sensibility toward the classic rock side of things. As instrumental (duh) opener "Summer" winds its way into "Epilogue", Bleeker signals the shift with some chord-slamming. When the volume jumps, Bleeker begins to whinny in a register as Neil Young-like as the crispy guitar Julian Lynch jabs throughout. That said, the guitar interplay clearly comes from the gut in a way that allows for the kind of total freedom that these dudes and their many stripes of song seem to hold so dear. Lyrically, Bleeker keeps his songs in familiar territory. There's summer and there's spring, and everybody's either hanging out or remembering times when they did. On "Prisoner of the Past", Bleeker gets old-timey as he sings about a friendship that's run its course. It's a really short verse before the guitar starts squaking, but in a few lines he (probably inadvertently) bottles up the hypernostalgic vibes that bleed into all of bandmates work, together or alone. It's hard not to notice all the fun that's being had messing around with the rock grid here, the ways in which you can make a trusted blueprint your own simply by stamping it so. When Real Estate jam, they do so in a way that's flush with Courtney's indie rock vision. When Mondanile runs off on his hypnogogic spirit journeys as Ducktails, he solos his way to infinity. Even though each of Bleeker's songs here are ultimately interchangeable in layout, their warmth is not. On "Animal Tracks", a blistering cover of a song by Vermont's Mountain Man, the Freaks sing in unison of sipping Barq's root beer and hanging out on a set of backstairs. It quickly recalls Real Estate's "Suburban Beverage", a song most easily identified by the chant, "Budweiser, Sprite, do you feel alright?" The drink may be different, but the buzz comes from the very same place."

Greg Davis

Arbor

Electronic

Kevin Adickes

Travel agents worldwide have long speculated as to why Canada suffers from such an anemic tourist industry. After all, the country is absolutely gorgeous, rich in natural resources, and offers the best health care system known to man. How could anyone stay away from the place? Well, you see, Canada is plagued by what we in the business call "sameness." Yes, its true that each respective city is built from a different ilk of lumber, and that wayward ice flows occasionally interrupt daily life, but there's simply not enough topographic diversity to warrant the bursting tourist industry Canadians so desire. Similar criticisms can be made of uninspired music, which often finds an artist reiterating a particular sonic trick one time too many. Which is why its painful to call the music of Greg Davis uninspired. The kid's certainly got some talent and originality up his sleeve, but no matter how many subtle variations in accompaniment garnish Arbor, his debut for New York's Carpark label, its songs tend to bleed into one another like those indistinguishable Canadian territories. Music critics will revel in such horrible headliners as "Múm's the Word" or "Aphex's Twin" when reviewing Arbor. The latter being a catch-all, a last resort for any and all electronic music artists to have the unfortunate role of being reviewed by an unimaginative writer. While it's true that Davis and Múm both conjure up glitchy meditations of very similar moods, Davis' instrumentation is confined to his laptop, guitar, and the occasional sampling of an iconic folk legend. And though he does manages to explore a fair amount of sonic territory in spite of this, there's not enough compositional diversity to sustain repeated listens. But Arbor isn't without its merits. The opening track alone, "Submersion Tank Part One (V.2)," justifies the record's release and makes for a gorgeous introduction into Greg's world of escapist musical montage. Here-- and nearly everywhere else on the album-- he employs deftly struck vibraphones, small flourishes of muted white noise, and the occasional interjection of computer-generated beeping as foundation for his valium-induced haze of sound. Elsewhere, the album's title track finds Greg plucking out a desperate and unadorned acoustic melody for nearly nine minutes. And in fact, the song manages to remain engaging for the majority of its duration. Yet, at other moments, Davis' experiments fall short. "Nicholas" is the worst offender here. It samples the fragile refrain of Nick Drake's "Introduction" before mutating into a big beat-cum-IDM number and dousing Drake's original material in gauzy phaser effects. Though it does lend the album some much-needed diversity, its pandering and derivative performance is awfully weak, making "Nicholas" an awkward inclusion on an otherwise decidedly down-tempo affair. Regardless of its flaws, Arbor pulls off a rare feat: a promising debut. In fact, Davis' more concentrated efforts often rival-- and occasionally better-- his contemporaries, based purely on originality. But until his tendency to wander aimlessly about is firmly inhibited, I'd wait on investing my hard-earned money in his music.

Artist: Greg Davis, Album: Arbor, Genre: Electronic, Score (1-10): 7.9 Album review: "Travel agents worldwide have long speculated as to why Canada suffers from such an anemic tourist industry. After all, the country is absolutely gorgeous, rich in natural resources, and offers the best health care system known to man. How could anyone stay away from the place? Well, you see, Canada is plagued by what we in the business call "sameness." Yes, its true that each respective city is built from a different ilk of lumber, and that wayward ice flows occasionally interrupt daily life, but there's simply not enough topographic diversity to warrant the bursting tourist industry Canadians so desire. Similar criticisms can be made of uninspired music, which often finds an artist reiterating a particular sonic trick one time too many. Which is why its painful to call the music of Greg Davis uninspired. The kid's certainly got some talent and originality up his sleeve, but no matter how many subtle variations in accompaniment garnish Arbor, his debut for New York's Carpark label, its songs tend to bleed into one another like those indistinguishable Canadian territories. Music critics will revel in such horrible headliners as "Múm's the Word" or "Aphex's Twin" when reviewing Arbor. The latter being a catch-all, a last resort for any and all electronic music artists to have the unfortunate role of being reviewed by an unimaginative writer. While it's true that Davis and Múm both conjure up glitchy meditations of very similar moods, Davis' instrumentation is confined to his laptop, guitar, and the occasional sampling of an iconic folk legend. And though he does manages to explore a fair amount of sonic territory in spite of this, there's not enough compositional diversity to sustain repeated listens. But Arbor isn't without its merits. The opening track alone, "Submersion Tank Part One (V.2)," justifies the record's release and makes for a gorgeous introduction into Greg's world of escapist musical montage. Here-- and nearly everywhere else on the album-- he employs deftly struck vibraphones, small flourishes of muted white noise, and the occasional interjection of computer-generated beeping as foundation for his valium-induced haze of sound. Elsewhere, the album's title track finds Greg plucking out a desperate and unadorned acoustic melody for nearly nine minutes. And in fact, the song manages to remain engaging for the majority of its duration. Yet, at other moments, Davis' experiments fall short. "Nicholas" is the worst offender here. It samples the fragile refrain of Nick Drake's "Introduction" before mutating into a big beat-cum-IDM number and dousing Drake's original material in gauzy phaser effects. Though it does lend the album some much-needed diversity, its pandering and derivative performance is awfully weak, making "Nicholas" an awkward inclusion on an otherwise decidedly down-tempo affair. Regardless of its flaws, Arbor pulls off a rare feat: a promising debut. In fact, Davis' more concentrated efforts often rival-- and occasionally better-- his contemporaries, based purely on originality. But until his tendency to wander aimlessly about is firmly inhibited, I'd wait on investing my hard-earned money in his music."

Shackleton, Vengeance Tenfold

Sferic Ghost Transmits

Electronic

Daniel Martin-McCormick

Among club artists as well as experimental composers, Sam Shackleton has few peers. Since his Skull Disco label closed shop in 2008, he has continually broken down and reformed his template of North African percussion, paranoid atmospheres, and crushing sub bass, drifting beyond the outer-reaches of the dubstep galaxy that tangentially gave him his start. The sound that has emerged, especially on his more recent Woe to the Septic Heart! label, places him in a legacy of UK artists adept at pulling from jarringly disparate corners of music to create an evocative, dour, strangely mystical body of work that transcends the sum of its parts. The specters of two such groups—Coil and This Heat—loom large on Sferic Ghost Transmits, the outstanding new album from Shackleton and on-again-off-again collaborator Vengeance Tenfold. Coil’s sense of tense foreboding, cultish incantations, and slithering sensuality are mirrored in the album’s headtrip spoken word and Shackleton’s drifting pads. Meanwhile, Vengeance’s occasionally glum vocal melodies, and the grim sense of survival amid a collapsing neoliberal hellscape, could be cribbed directly from This Heat’s playbook. What these groups have in common is a fluid sense of experimentation that channels technical virtuosity into raw, punk gestures, startling textures, and hypnotic grooves rather than flash. Still, the music on Sferic Ghost Transmits firmly establishes its own space. The album opens with twisting gamelan percussion and builds layers of oozing drones, choral pads, and lithe percussion figures into a sprawling voyage. Shackleton’s compositions of late have foregone traditional structures, swerving instead through byzantine, suite-like movements. Except for the closer “The Prophet Sequence,” these tracks hover around the 10-minute mark, can go as long as 16, and are built with the intricacy of a puzzle box. The cover art Shackleton has favored since the beginning telegraphs something critical, too: this is stoner music of the highest order. The intonations on “Seven Virgins” could pass for a lost archival recording of a sea shanty jammed through a flanger. Vengeance sounds quietly epic while Shackleton lays back, focusing mostly on setting thick, opium den moods for over seven minutes. Then a burned synth rips a gnarly solo, occasioning perhaps the first air guitar moment in his extensive discography. Equally druggy is the way the tracks bleed together. In using a largely consistent sonic palette from song to song, Shackleton has written an album that can wash over you if you’re not listening closely. The tracks demand your attention, but they also reward it. Check for the fidgety organ motif buried in the back of “Sferic Ghost Transmits/Fear the Crown,” tucked beneath Vengeance’s throat singing, or the opening gong of “Five Demiurgic Options”; each moment of this album drips with mood. This is the kind of record that can appeal widely, and may actually find more detractors among its intended audience of electronic music heads precisely because of its lack of traditional club touchstones. Speaking with Resident Advisor in 2010, Shackleton expressed a certain exasperation. “I just make [music] until it sounds right and that’s as simple as it is,” he said. “I know some people say, ‘You can’t fucking dance to that shit.’ When I’m making something, I’m imagining myself dancing to it and I get off on that.”

Artist: Shackleton, Vengeance Tenfold, Album: Sferic Ghost Transmits, Genre: Electronic, Score (1-10): 8.0 Album review: "Among club artists as well as experimental composers, Sam Shackleton has few peers. Since his Skull Disco label closed shop in 2008, he has continually broken down and reformed his template of North African percussion, paranoid atmospheres, and crushing sub bass, drifting beyond the outer-reaches of the dubstep galaxy that tangentially gave him his start. The sound that has emerged, especially on his more recent Woe to the Septic Heart! label, places him in a legacy of UK artists adept at pulling from jarringly disparate corners of music to create an evocative, dour, strangely mystical body of work that transcends the sum of its parts. The specters of two such groups—Coil and This Heat—loom large on Sferic Ghost Transmits, the outstanding new album from Shackleton and on-again-off-again collaborator Vengeance Tenfold. Coil’s sense of tense foreboding, cultish incantations, and slithering sensuality are mirrored in the album’s headtrip spoken word and Shackleton’s drifting pads. Meanwhile, Vengeance’s occasionally glum vocal melodies, and the grim sense of survival amid a collapsing neoliberal hellscape, could be cribbed directly from This Heat’s playbook. What these groups have in common is a fluid sense of experimentation that channels technical virtuosity into raw, punk gestures, startling textures, and hypnotic grooves rather than flash. Still, the music on Sferic Ghost Transmits firmly establishes its own space. The album opens with twisting gamelan percussion and builds layers of oozing drones, choral pads, and lithe percussion figures into a sprawling voyage. Shackleton’s compositions of late have foregone traditional structures, swerving instead through byzantine, suite-like movements. Except for the closer “The Prophet Sequence,” these tracks hover around the 10-minute mark, can go as long as 16, and are built with the intricacy of a puzzle box. The cover art Shackleton has favored since the beginning telegraphs something critical, too: this is stoner music of the highest order. The intonations on “Seven Virgins” could pass for a lost archival recording of a sea shanty jammed through a flanger. Vengeance sounds quietly epic while Shackleton lays back, focusing mostly on setting thick, opium den moods for over seven minutes. Then a burned synth rips a gnarly solo, occasioning perhaps the first air guitar moment in his extensive discography. Equally druggy is the way the tracks bleed together. In using a largely consistent sonic palette from song to song, Shackleton has written an album that can wash over you if you’re not listening closely. The tracks demand your attention, but they also reward it. Check for the fidgety organ motif buried in the back of “Sferic Ghost Transmits/Fear the Crown,” tucked beneath Vengeance’s throat singing, or the opening gong of “Five Demiurgic Options”; each moment of this album drips with mood. This is the kind of record that can appeal widely, and may actually find more detractors among its intended audience of electronic music heads precisely because of its lack of traditional club touchstones. Speaking with Resident Advisor in 2010, Shackleton expressed a certain exasperation. “I just make [music] until it sounds right and that’s as simple as it is,” he said. “I know some people say, ‘You can’t fucking dance to that shit.’ When I’m making something, I’m imagining myself dancing to it and I get off on that.”"

Neil Michael Hagerty

The Howling Hex

Rock

Scott Hreha

Of all the obvious potshots one might be tempted to take at Neil Hagerty, he's got at least one thing going for him: a sense of determination so stubborn, it puts the "pathetic" in "apathetic". After my esteemed colleague Mark Richardson essentially wrote the man's career epitaph over the course of reviewing his first two solo outings, the former king of the Royal Trux monarchy shows that he can not only stick to a record-a-year release schedule, but that he also doesn't give much of a fuck about what anybody thinks of his inability to deliver a cohesive statement. Physical Graffiti fans take note: like Neil Michael Hagerty and Plays That Good Old Rock and Roll, Hagerty's latest disc is all over the stylistic map, even upping the ante by sprawling out to the length of a double-LP. But where those previous records couldn't really offer much in the way of a good song, The Howling Hex is surprisingly chock-full of 'em. And believe it or not, this record succeeds where its predecessors failed so miserably: actually drawing the listener in with nearly an entire side's worth of straightforward, well-written tunes before veering off into the usual inconsistency. "Firebase Ripcord", the first of several blue-eyed boogie numbers recorded in Chicago with a full band and minimal overdubs, finds Hagerty in a Phil Lynott state of mind as he offers a gravelly confession of nothing in particular. From there it's off to what could be an awfully contagious outtake from Accelerator ("Out of Reach"), a sloppy soul tune that's also about nothing in particular ("Watching the Sands"), and a fragile acoustic folk ballad ("Gray")-- all of which are equal parts concise and engaging. The end of the equivalent to LP side one is the disc's turning point, where people are either going to succumb to its schizophrenia or depart without a backward glance. "Rockslide" is one of two (well, three if you count the studio-enhanced "Energy Plan") live recordings from some March 2002 shows that showcase Hagerty's mercurial guitar freakout mode, aided by Tim Barnes' tribal propulsion and Dan Brown's liquid bass. These drastic rearrangements of songs from the previous solo records are far beyond the semi-organized chaos that reigns elsewhere on this one, basically coming back to what we've been saying all along-- if you enjoy the sound of Hagerty finding his inner Joe Walsh (James Gang-era, that is), there's a lot to love; if not, well, you know where the skip button is. Shifts in polarity aside, the first half of The Howling Hex is still quite outstanding-- with or without the lazy tape composition piece "Clermont Heights"-- begging the question of whether this might've been best left at a single LP's length. Because once side three hits, it's straight downhill with few exceptions: other than a shitkicking preamble to the closing "Energy Plan" ("AEP1") and a couple of similarly minded acoustic tunes, there's really not much worth going back to. As active as he's been since the Royal Trux "hiatus" or "breakup" or whatever-- three solo records in addition to the Weird War and Drag City Supersession projects-- it's starting to look as if Hagerty's a bit lost without Jennifer Herrema's yin/yang of intolerability and tragic brilliance. But as long as his former partner remains MIA, it seems we have to take what we can get, along with all the lapses into mediocrity that entails.

Artist: Neil Michael Hagerty, Album: The Howling Hex, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 6.6 Album review: "Of all the obvious potshots one might be tempted to take at Neil Hagerty, he's got at least one thing going for him: a sense of determination so stubborn, it puts the "pathetic" in "apathetic". After my esteemed colleague Mark Richardson essentially wrote the man's career epitaph over the course of reviewing his first two solo outings, the former king of the Royal Trux monarchy shows that he can not only stick to a record-a-year release schedule, but that he also doesn't give much of a fuck about what anybody thinks of his inability to deliver a cohesive statement. Physical Graffiti fans take note: like Neil Michael Hagerty and Plays That Good Old Rock and Roll, Hagerty's latest disc is all over the stylistic map, even upping the ante by sprawling out to the length of a double-LP. But where those previous records couldn't really offer much in the way of a good song, The Howling Hex is surprisingly chock-full of 'em. And believe it or not, this record succeeds where its predecessors failed so miserably: actually drawing the listener in with nearly an entire side's worth of straightforward, well-written tunes before veering off into the usual inconsistency. "Firebase Ripcord", the first of several blue-eyed boogie numbers recorded in Chicago with a full band and minimal overdubs, finds Hagerty in a Phil Lynott state of mind as he offers a gravelly confession of nothing in particular. From there it's off to what could be an awfully contagious outtake from Accelerator ("Out of Reach"), a sloppy soul tune that's also about nothing in particular ("Watching the Sands"), and a fragile acoustic folk ballad ("Gray")-- all of which are equal parts concise and engaging. The end of the equivalent to LP side one is the disc's turning point, where people are either going to succumb to its schizophrenia or depart without a backward glance. "Rockslide" is one of two (well, three if you count the studio-enhanced "Energy Plan") live recordings from some March 2002 shows that showcase Hagerty's mercurial guitar freakout mode, aided by Tim Barnes' tribal propulsion and Dan Brown's liquid bass. These drastic rearrangements of songs from the previous solo records are far beyond the semi-organized chaos that reigns elsewhere on this one, basically coming back to what we've been saying all along-- if you enjoy the sound of Hagerty finding his inner Joe Walsh (James Gang-era, that is), there's a lot to love; if not, well, you know where the skip button is. Shifts in polarity aside, the first half of The Howling Hex is still quite outstanding-- with or without the lazy tape composition piece "Clermont Heights"-- begging the question of whether this might've been best left at a single LP's length. Because once side three hits, it's straight downhill with few exceptions: other than a shitkicking preamble to the closing "Energy Plan" ("AEP1") and a couple of similarly minded acoustic tunes, there's really not much worth going back to. As active as he's been since the Royal Trux "hiatus" or "breakup" or whatever-- three solo records in addition to the Weird War and Drag City Supersession projects-- it's starting to look as if Hagerty's a bit lost without Jennifer Herrema's yin/yang of intolerability and tragic brilliance. But as long as his former partner remains MIA, it seems we have to take what we can get, along with all the lapses into mediocrity that entails."

Sufjan Stevens

Songs for Christmas

Folk/Country

Rob Mitchum

In the photo-negative world of indie rock morality, Christmas might be the most obscene concept possible, combining as it does the taboos of family, Christianity, commerce, and happiness. Sufjan Stevens, then, is something like the bizarro G.G. Allin, unabashedly reveling in the glory of Christmas with such warmth it pretty much obliterates the word "irony" from the English language. And now, the boxset Songs for Christmas, collecting five EPs of seasonal music recorded over the last five years, represents the songwriter's ultimate obscenity to date, even down to titling each disc with scenester swears: Noel, Hark!, Ding! Dong!, Joy, and Peace. Yet for all the squirming induced by Stevens' brazen faith, the talents that elevate him above your run-of-the-mill coffee-shop folkie are crucially linked to the characteristics that inform his faith: empathy, optimism, and a love of ceremonial pomp. Not coincidentally, all of these qualities are to be found, as well, in the best Christmas songs, with their exultant melodies and earnest words, and it's no great detective work to hear their influence on Stevens' own songbook, secular and otherwise. Better still, Yuletide classics have proven through exhaustive interpretation to be highly malleable, suited for portrayals either stirringly intimate (think Vince Guaraldi) or triumphantly gaudy (think Boston Pops)-- two modes of arrangement in which Sufjan has proven himself well versed. But Sufjan didn't metamorphize from open-mic strummer to chamber-pop bandleader overnight, and that progression is nicely documented by Songs for Christmas. The first EP, recorded way back in December 2001, shows a simpler, folksier Stevens, assembling a circle of friends to casually dash off seven songs of banjo-plucking and broken harmonies. Twelve months later, on the second disc, the singer has already begun to spread his clip-on angel wings, most notably on a nearly seven-minute long version of "What Child is This?" led by a tweaked Rhodes to an early version of the choral peaks he would perfect with Illinois. In some ways, the mission of recording a Christmas EP every year is almost as conceptually audacious as Stevens' Fifty States Project, given how few seasonal songs are worthy of interpretation. Thus, Songs for Christmas contains a lot of repetition, another method by which to chart the progress of Sufjan as performer and arranger. For instance, you won't be surprised to find the melancholy "O Come O Come Emmanuel" appearing three times in this box, but each version at least attempts variety: A recorder and banjo Ren-fair take, and two solo piano versions (separated by three years) that are testimony to Stevens' development as a producer. Similarly, "Once in Royal David's City", obscure enough to be a hymnal B-side, is transformed from a fireside jam session on the first disc into a gorgeous reverb-laden music-box variation on the fifth. Stevens also fleshes out the set with a hefty helping of exclamation-point-laden original songs, 17 in all; although none of them are likely to make it into the caroling repertoire anytime soon, the set mostly reveals that Stevens' arrangement skills to have evolved more rapidly than his composition talents. Early efforts are either ragged or strangely depressing in the Guaraldi vein, like the Danielson-sounding "It's Christmas! Let's Be Glad!" or the more resurrection-focused tracks (wrong holiday?) of the third EP. But by the last two discs, the songwriter finds more success in being less reverent, with the Pixies dynamics of "It's Christmas Time!" or the goofy Boston-derived organ and handclap charm of "Get Behind Me, Santa!" more in the spirit of the holiday. The fifth disc also excels through appropriate application of the ultra-lush sound of Illinois to December themes, with "Sister Winter" and "Star of Wonder" ranking alongside his non-holiday catalog's highlights. These moments of thick orchestration may be sufficient for the box to sneak into the parents' Christmas music rotation, allowing Stevens to give the greatest gift of all: momentary relief from Mannheim Steamroller. They also chart a path that's been both rewarding and troubling in Sufjan's career, a progression towards larger and larger arrangements that's beginning to move beyond refreshingly ambitious to redundancy. But in the service of Christmas, the one time of year where it's okay for even sad hipsters to enjoy excess and earnest feeling, Stevens' ornamentation is excusable, and more consistently successful than the set's earlier, humbler moments, proving that if you're going to commit indie blasphemy, you might as well go all the way.

Artist: Sufjan Stevens, Album: Songs for Christmas, Genre: Folk/Country, Score (1-10): 7.5 Album review: "In the photo-negative world of indie rock morality, Christmas might be the most obscene concept possible, combining as it does the taboos of family, Christianity, commerce, and happiness. Sufjan Stevens, then, is something like the bizarro G.G. Allin, unabashedly reveling in the glory of Christmas with such warmth it pretty much obliterates the word "irony" from the English language. And now, the boxset Songs for Christmas, collecting five EPs of seasonal music recorded over the last five years, represents the songwriter's ultimate obscenity to date, even down to titling each disc with scenester swears: Noel, Hark!, Ding! Dong!, Joy, and Peace. Yet for all the squirming induced by Stevens' brazen faith, the talents that elevate him above your run-of-the-mill coffee-shop folkie are crucially linked to the characteristics that inform his faith: empathy, optimism, and a love of ceremonial pomp. Not coincidentally, all of these qualities are to be found, as well, in the best Christmas songs, with their exultant melodies and earnest words, and it's no great detective work to hear their influence on Stevens' own songbook, secular and otherwise. Better still, Yuletide classics have proven through exhaustive interpretation to be highly malleable, suited for portrayals either stirringly intimate (think Vince Guaraldi) or triumphantly gaudy (think Boston Pops)-- two modes of arrangement in which Sufjan has proven himself well versed. But Sufjan didn't metamorphize from open-mic strummer to chamber-pop bandleader overnight, and that progression is nicely documented by Songs for Christmas. The first EP, recorded way back in December 2001, shows a simpler, folksier Stevens, assembling a circle of friends to casually dash off seven songs of banjo-plucking and broken harmonies. Twelve months later, on the second disc, the singer has already begun to spread his clip-on angel wings, most notably on a nearly seven-minute long version of "What Child is This?" led by a tweaked Rhodes to an early version of the choral peaks he would perfect with Illinois. In some ways, the mission of recording a Christmas EP every year is almost as conceptually audacious as Stevens' Fifty States Project, given how few seasonal songs are worthy of interpretation. Thus, Songs for Christmas contains a lot of repetition, another method by which to chart the progress of Sufjan as performer and arranger. For instance, you won't be surprised to find the melancholy "O Come O Come Emmanuel" appearing three times in this box, but each version at least attempts variety: A recorder and banjo Ren-fair take, and two solo piano versions (separated by three years) that are testimony to Stevens' development as a producer. Similarly, "Once in Royal David's City", obscure enough to be a hymnal B-side, is transformed from a fireside jam session on the first disc into a gorgeous reverb-laden music-box variation on the fifth. Stevens also fleshes out the set with a hefty helping of exclamation-point-laden original songs, 17 in all; although none of them are likely to make it into the caroling repertoire anytime soon, the set mostly reveals that Stevens' arrangement skills to have evolved more rapidly than his composition talents. Early efforts are either ragged or strangely depressing in the Guaraldi vein, like the Danielson-sounding "It's Christmas! Let's Be Glad!" or the more resurrection-focused tracks (wrong holiday?) of the third EP. But by the last two discs, the songwriter finds more success in being less reverent, with the Pixies dynamics of "It's Christmas Time!" or the goofy Boston-derived organ and handclap charm of "Get Behind Me, Santa!" more in the spirit of the holiday. The fifth disc also excels through appropriate application of the ultra-lush sound of Illinois to December themes, with "Sister Winter" and "Star of Wonder" ranking alongside his non-holiday catalog's highlights. These moments of thick orchestration may be sufficient for the box to sneak into the parents' Christmas music rotation, allowing Stevens to give the greatest gift of all: momentary relief from Mannheim Steamroller. They also chart a path that's been both rewarding and troubling in Sufjan's career, a progression towards larger and larger arrangements that's beginning to move beyond refreshingly ambitious to redundancy. But in the service of Christmas, the one time of year where it's okay for even sad hipsters to enjoy excess and earnest feeling, Stevens' ornamentation is excusable, and more consistently successful than the set's earlier, humbler moments, proving that if you're going to commit indie blasphemy, you might as well go all the way."

Blackout Beach

Light Flows the Putrid Dawn

Experimental

Nick Sylvester

Imagine you're drifting off to sleep after having just performed for two hours to sweaty indie freaks in a smoky, rundown venue when a stout, woodsy Canadian shoves The Odyssey in your face again and forces you to keep reading. An unlikely scenario, to be sure, but it apparently happened repeatedly to Dan Bejar this past spring when Carey Mercer and his band Frog Eyes supported Destroyer on tour: hyper-literate (though not in any rigid academic sense), Mercer almost religiously takes every possible chance to digest the classics and proclaim their greatness to others, as if the works were his own personal discoveries. His enthusiasm, for all the quirky ways it manifests itself, is very genuine-- 500 years from now, I can imagine someone touting The Beatles, who by then will surely be relegated to historical academia, with the same intensity. We're given some vague sense of Mercer's high-pitched Homeric fervor on his Frog Eyes recordings, but on Light Flows the Putrid Dawn, his solo debut as Blackout Beach, it's very clear that the British Canadian bard has internalized a distinctly classical vocabulary and all its accompanying metaphors. Combine these anachronisms with Mercer's fragmented, imagistic approach to lyrics and his feral, operatic delivery, and Light Flows the Putrid Dawn proceeds like some dense Delphic prophecy-- for our own sake, we can't keep ourselves from deciphering it. The album's brief runtime (less than 24 minutes) is more than compensated for by the overwhelming density of the music. Opener "If I Were Not Alexander..." proceeds slowly, but remains impossibly disorienting: Mercer's impenetrable Central Park soothsaying competes with his equally cryptic guitar soloing, to which tickles of piano and accordion are distantly allied. "The Swineherd Sings..." follows as the more melodic and intelligible counterpart, as Mercer sings of Stalin, "I ain't no great fan of men/ It is men that built this damn pen." Mercer switches gears for the psycho-waltzes "Krull Courtship" and "The Stuttered XXX Breeze XXX", two songs that aptly justify the frequent Bowie comparisons. Elsewhere on Light Flows the Putrid Dawn, Mercer situates himself firmly on the Rock Side of the burgeoning freak-folk movement: Sparse, overdubbed guitar tracks like "The Putrid Dawn Is Only for Us Baby" and "New Soft and Shimmering Motherhood Alliance" might draw comparisons to the San Francisco noise-pop outfit Iran, and especially on "Meadows and Pleasant Madames...", Mercer's lupine croons and the accompanying hellish miasma are closely reminiscent of Tim Buckley. On the relatively stiff closing march "The Quiet Merchant Gets His Song Too", Mercer tries his best to rhythmically mask the intense pain with which he wrings out alcohol's often devastating consequences: "Oh mothers, I feel for you." For all Putrid Dawn's musical merits, Mercer's voice is still admittedly a tough sell. On Frog Eyes' past releases, he's sometimes sounded incongruous, either because the instrumentation didn't match his bravado, or because the accompaniment simply disregarded it. It's a well-warranted reservation to harbor when approaching Blackout Beach (which was recorded prior to 2003's The Golden River), but one that may safely be put to rest. Mercer is simply never out-of-sync with himself here, and his vocal melodies benefit from his bizarre but undeniably singular orchestrations. As listeners, we can tell Mercer clearly knows what he wants out of these songs-- even if we don't know exactly what that entails.

Artist: Blackout Beach, Album: Light Flows the Putrid Dawn, Genre: Experimental, Score (1-10): 7.9 Album review: "Imagine you're drifting off to sleep after having just performed for two hours to sweaty indie freaks in a smoky, rundown venue when a stout, woodsy Canadian shoves The Odyssey in your face again and forces you to keep reading. An unlikely scenario, to be sure, but it apparently happened repeatedly to Dan Bejar this past spring when Carey Mercer and his band Frog Eyes supported Destroyer on tour: hyper-literate (though not in any rigid academic sense), Mercer almost religiously takes every possible chance to digest the classics and proclaim their greatness to others, as if the works were his own personal discoveries. His enthusiasm, for all the quirky ways it manifests itself, is very genuine-- 500 years from now, I can imagine someone touting The Beatles, who by then will surely be relegated to historical academia, with the same intensity. We're given some vague sense of Mercer's high-pitched Homeric fervor on his Frog Eyes recordings, but on Light Flows the Putrid Dawn, his solo debut as Blackout Beach, it's very clear that the British Canadian bard has internalized a distinctly classical vocabulary and all its accompanying metaphors. Combine these anachronisms with Mercer's fragmented, imagistic approach to lyrics and his feral, operatic delivery, and Light Flows the Putrid Dawn proceeds like some dense Delphic prophecy-- for our own sake, we can't keep ourselves from deciphering it. The album's brief runtime (less than 24 minutes) is more than compensated for by the overwhelming density of the music. Opener "If I Were Not Alexander..." proceeds slowly, but remains impossibly disorienting: Mercer's impenetrable Central Park soothsaying competes with his equally cryptic guitar soloing, to which tickles of piano and accordion are distantly allied. "The Swineherd Sings..." follows as the more melodic and intelligible counterpart, as Mercer sings of Stalin, "I ain't no great fan of men/ It is men that built this damn pen." Mercer switches gears for the psycho-waltzes "Krull Courtship" and "The Stuttered XXX Breeze XXX", two songs that aptly justify the frequent Bowie comparisons. Elsewhere on Light Flows the Putrid Dawn, Mercer situates himself firmly on the Rock Side of the burgeoning freak-folk movement: Sparse, overdubbed guitar tracks like "The Putrid Dawn Is Only for Us Baby" and "New Soft and Shimmering Motherhood Alliance" might draw comparisons to the San Francisco noise-pop outfit Iran, and especially on "Meadows and Pleasant Madames...", Mercer's lupine croons and the accompanying hellish miasma are closely reminiscent of Tim Buckley. On the relatively stiff closing march "The Quiet Merchant Gets His Song Too", Mercer tries his best to rhythmically mask the intense pain with which he wrings out alcohol's often devastating consequences: "Oh mothers, I feel for you." For all Putrid Dawn's musical merits, Mercer's voice is still admittedly a tough sell. On Frog Eyes' past releases, he's sometimes sounded incongruous, either because the instrumentation didn't match his bravado, or because the accompaniment simply disregarded it. It's a well-warranted reservation to harbor when approaching Blackout Beach (which was recorded prior to 2003's The Golden River), but one that may safely be put to rest. Mercer is simply never out-of-sync with himself here, and his vocal melodies benefit from his bizarre but undeniably singular orchestrations. As listeners, we can tell Mercer clearly knows what he wants out of these songs-- even if we don't know exactly what that entails."

DJ Khaled

We the Best

Rap

Tom Breihan

Miami's DJ Khaled doesn't really do much. He doesn't rap. He doesn't sing. He doesn't cut or scratch. He does produce tracks under his Beat Novocain alias, but not that often; he's responsible for only two of the tracks on We the Best, his sophomore album. Mostly, he just incessantly screams dumb catchphrases, and he doesn't even do that particularly well; one of the reasons that Lil Wayne and Khaled's Da Drought 3 is the best mixtape in years is Lil Wayne's decision to leak it to the internet before Khaled had a chance to yell all over it. Still, for someone so markedly devoid of talent, Khaled managed to throw together a surprisingly decent debut album last year. Listennn...The Album was a state-of-the-art rap compilation. Khaled apparently has ins with half of rap's biggest stars, and his disc probably could've coasted by on star-power alone. But he also employed most of Florida's better production teams, including Cool & Dre and the Runners. And since these guys all work from the same basic sonic templates, Listennn was satisfyingly cohesive for a thrown-together mixtape of its kind, and it made a strong case for the epically plastic Miami synth-rap sound that was ascendant at the time. We the Best plainly attempts to follow up on the formula established by Listennn. First single "We Takin' Over" is every bit the equal of its Listennn predecessor, the worldbeating posse cut "Holla At Me". The new single wrangles an all-star lineup, boasting an ebulliently overblown Akon chorus and sandwiching a few just-OK verses from Rick Ross and Fat Joe and Birdman between two bravura star-turns. T.I. starts things off with brisk efficiency, and Lil Wayne masterfully caps the song off with deranged verve. The track builds beautifully to Wayne's climactic verse, and his performance would've been star-making if he weren't already a star: "I am the beast/ Feed me rappers or feed me beats..." If only the rest of We the Best held up to that song's enormous promise. Instead, we get a rapidly diminishing series of rote posse cuts, every guest claiming to be harder and richer than everyone else. When these sorts of swaggering egocentric brag-raps are done with the exhilarated glee of "We Takin' Over", they can be great, even transcendent. But when they're thrown-together and half-assed, as most of the tracks here are, they quickly become oppressively dull. "Brown Paper Bag" thinks it's a drug-dealing epic, but its tinny tuba-fart synths and wailing Bee Gees interpolation feel like overkill, and even Lil Wayne sounds bored and unmotivated. "I'm So Hood" wastes a monstrous Runners sandworm synth-wriggle and an awesomely overblown T-Pain chorus on a bunch of thoroughly anonymous rap verses. "Hit Them Up" is a standard-issue Paul Wall filler-track two years after that might mean something. "New York" recruits the same lineup as the great 2004 Ja Rule single of the same name and fails to capture a single iota of that song's urgency and electricity. The mind-numbing six-minute Bone Thugs-N-Harmony showcase "The Originators" somehow manages to make those great Cleveland sing-rappers sound flat and boring. And when Rick Ross shows up on the first four songs on your album, you're in trouble. The big problem with We the Best is its inert repetition; things get old fast when virtually every guest posits himself as an indestructible ghetto superhero. And so the album's few non-"We Takin' Over" highlights come in those rare moments when the guest-rappers allow themselves to become human beings. On "Before the Solution," Beanie Sigel bitterly vents frustration about his jail term, sounding powerfully angry and flawed in the process: "What up with State Prop, the crew, are they not there?/ The moment that they heard it, the verdict, when it was declared/ Your boy had the city, yeah/ Did they disappear?/ Did Jay really not visit there?" And "I'm From the Ghetto" has a nicely sentimental lilt, with a chorus of kids singing inspirational nonsense and fond but conflicted childhood reminisces from the Game and Jadakiss and Trick Daddy. And so We the Best, it turns out, is indicative of one of the major problems with mainstream rap lately: too many rappers seem unwilling to drop their defenses and speak plainly. In any case, it was probably too much to expect two consistently listenable albums from motherfucking DJ Khaled; we're lucky we even got one.

Artist: DJ Khaled, Album: We the Best, Genre: Rap, Score (1-10): 4.8 Album review: "Miami's DJ Khaled doesn't really do much. He doesn't rap. He doesn't sing. He doesn't cut or scratch. He does produce tracks under his Beat Novocain alias, but not that often; he's responsible for only two of the tracks on We the Best, his sophomore album. Mostly, he just incessantly screams dumb catchphrases, and he doesn't even do that particularly well; one of the reasons that Lil Wayne and Khaled's Da Drought 3 is the best mixtape in years is Lil Wayne's decision to leak it to the internet before Khaled had a chance to yell all over it. Still, for someone so markedly devoid of talent, Khaled managed to throw together a surprisingly decent debut album last year. Listennn...The Album was a state-of-the-art rap compilation. Khaled apparently has ins with half of rap's biggest stars, and his disc probably could've coasted by on star-power alone. But he also employed most of Florida's better production teams, including Cool & Dre and the Runners. And since these guys all work from the same basic sonic templates, Listennn was satisfyingly cohesive for a thrown-together mixtape of its kind, and it made a strong case for the epically plastic Miami synth-rap sound that was ascendant at the time. We the Best plainly attempts to follow up on the formula established by Listennn. First single "We Takin' Over" is every bit the equal of its Listennn predecessor, the worldbeating posse cut "Holla At Me". The new single wrangles an all-star lineup, boasting an ebulliently overblown Akon chorus and sandwiching a few just-OK verses from Rick Ross and Fat Joe and Birdman between two bravura star-turns. T.I. starts things off with brisk efficiency, and Lil Wayne masterfully caps the song off with deranged verve. The track builds beautifully to Wayne's climactic verse, and his performance would've been star-making if he weren't already a star: "I am the beast/ Feed me rappers or feed me beats..." If only the rest of We the Best held up to that song's enormous promise. Instead, we get a rapidly diminishing series of rote posse cuts, every guest claiming to be harder and richer than everyone else. When these sorts of swaggering egocentric brag-raps are done with the exhilarated glee of "We Takin' Over", they can be great, even transcendent. But when they're thrown-together and half-assed, as most of the tracks here are, they quickly become oppressively dull. "Brown Paper Bag" thinks it's a drug-dealing epic, but its tinny tuba-fart synths and wailing Bee Gees interpolation feel like overkill, and even Lil Wayne sounds bored and unmotivated. "I'm So Hood" wastes a monstrous Runners sandworm synth-wriggle and an awesomely overblown T-Pain chorus on a bunch of thoroughly anonymous rap verses. "Hit Them Up" is a standard-issue Paul Wall filler-track two years after that might mean something. "New York" recruits the same lineup as the great 2004 Ja Rule single of the same name and fails to capture a single iota of that song's urgency and electricity. The mind-numbing six-minute Bone Thugs-N-Harmony showcase "The Originators" somehow manages to make those great Cleveland sing-rappers sound flat and boring. And when Rick Ross shows up on the first four songs on your album, you're in trouble. The big problem with We the Best is its inert repetition; things get old fast when virtually every guest posits himself as an indestructible ghetto superhero. And so the album's few non-"We Takin' Over" highlights come in those rare moments when the guest-rappers allow themselves to become human beings. On "Before the Solution," Beanie Sigel bitterly vents frustration about his jail term, sounding powerfully angry and flawed in the process: "What up with State Prop, the crew, are they not there?/ The moment that they heard it, the verdict, when it was declared/ Your boy had the city, yeah/ Did they disappear?/ Did Jay really not visit there?" And "I'm From the Ghetto" has a nicely sentimental lilt, with a chorus of kids singing inspirational nonsense and fond but conflicted childhood reminisces from the Game and Jadakiss and Trick Daddy. And so We the Best, it turns out, is indicative of one of the major problems with mainstream rap lately: too many rappers seem unwilling to drop their defenses and speak plainly. In any case, it was probably too much to expect two consistently listenable albums from motherfucking DJ Khaled; we're lucky we even got one."

The Delgados

The Complete BBC Peel Sessions

Rock

Stuart Berman

The Delgados were the designated drivers of the mid-1990s Scottish pop uprising. While their friends were busy becoming indie rock heavyweights (Mogwai) or fielding record deals from the Beastie Boys (Bis), the Delgados were the responsible ones who woke up early in the next morning to mail out those other bands’ promos-- just one part of their daily duties running the redoubtable Chemikal Underground label. But it’s no understatement to say that without the Delgados’ guiding hand, those bands would’ve been hard-pressed to get heard outside out of Glasgow; remember, this was at the height of Britpop-- Alex Kapranos was just a guy playing keyboards part time in Urusei Yatsura, while London major-label A&R reps were looking for the next Oasis in Wales. But if the Delgados’ fanbase was relatively modest in size, it did include the most important fan a fledgling indie act could ask for: late BBC broadcaster John Peel, who-- judging by this impressive 2xCD, 29-song Peel Session collection-- seemed to invite the band to his Maida Vale studios whenever The Fall weren’t available. The spirit of the Peel Session-- the opportunity for bands to test-drive new material prior to release or mess around with cover versions-- serves the Delgados’ music especially well, and The Complete BBC Peel Sessions provides valuable insight to their eight-year, five-album evolution from typical Sonic Youth/Pavement-worshipping distorto-rock junkies to soft-rock sophisticates. The first disc shows that the aesthetic leap from the adrenalized noise-pop of 1996’s Domestiques to the highlands pastorales of 1998’s Peloton was not nearly as unexpected as it seemed at the time: from the first session here (actually recorded for a Radio Scotland program before being rebroadcast on Peel’s show), Alun Woodward and Emma Pollock’s signature lilting melodies and wry vocal interplay-- like Steve Malkmus trying to pick up Kim Deal-- were already in full effect; the difference between Domestiques’ “Primary Alternative” and Peloton’s jolly “The Arcane Model” is the latter has less fuzz and more flutes. As Woodward recounts in his winsome liner notes, it was a July 1997 Peel Session-- an experiment with acoustic arrangements and string players-- that inspired the Delgados to trade in noise for nuance. And it’s the Peloton-era songs (comprising the bulk of disc one) that provide this collection with its most inspired moments, capturing a band hitting its stride and brimming with confidence with each new song; the superior takes of “Everything Goes Around the Water” and “The Weaker Argument Defeats the Stronger” possess a forcefulness that their more reserved album versions only hint at. The Delgados’ next album, 2000’s Dave Fridmann-produced The Great Eastern, was arguably their greatest, so it’s somewhat disappointing that it’s only represented by a single four-song session (though the versions of “No Danger” and “Aye Today” prove those songs don’t need Fridmann’s Bonham-esque bombast to connect). The Delgados would continue on the orchestro-rock trajectory with 2002’s Hate before scaling back for 2004’s uneven Universal Audio, but the second disc here bears little evidence of these developments. As The Delgados’ music grew more serious, their Peel Sessions seemed to get more silly: the September 2002 set shows them to be the rare band that can cover ELO (“Mr. Blue Sky”), Dead Kennedys (“California Uber Alles”), and Cat Stevens (“Matthew and Son”) with equal abandon. However, the final Universal Audio-era session in September 2004-- highlighted by Woodward’s affectingly stark “Is This All That I Came For?” and a stern cover of Ewan MacColl’s “Ballad of Accounting”-- feels almost presciently somber: Peel would pass away a month later; bassist Stewart Henderson would leave the Delgados the following April, portending the dissolution of the band. Though The Complete BBC Sessions is not a definitive Delgados collection-- there’s no “Monica Webster” or “Akumulator” or “American Trilogy” or “All You Need Is Hate”-- it stands as a lovingly compiled tribute to two greatly admired and greatly missed UK pop institutions.

Artist: The Delgados, Album: The Complete BBC Peel Sessions, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 8.5 Album review: "The Delgados were the designated drivers of the mid-1990s Scottish pop uprising. While their friends were busy becoming indie rock heavyweights (Mogwai) or fielding record deals from the Beastie Boys (Bis), the Delgados were the responsible ones who woke up early in the next morning to mail out those other bands’ promos-- just one part of their daily duties running the redoubtable Chemikal Underground label. But it’s no understatement to say that without the Delgados’ guiding hand, those bands would’ve been hard-pressed to get heard outside out of Glasgow; remember, this was at the height of Britpop-- Alex Kapranos was just a guy playing keyboards part time in Urusei Yatsura, while London major-label A&R reps were looking for the next Oasis in Wales. But if the Delgados’ fanbase was relatively modest in size, it did include the most important fan a fledgling indie act could ask for: late BBC broadcaster John Peel, who-- judging by this impressive 2xCD, 29-song Peel Session collection-- seemed to invite the band to his Maida Vale studios whenever The Fall weren’t available. The spirit of the Peel Session-- the opportunity for bands to test-drive new material prior to release or mess around with cover versions-- serves the Delgados’ music especially well, and The Complete BBC Peel Sessions provides valuable insight to their eight-year, five-album evolution from typical Sonic Youth/Pavement-worshipping distorto-rock junkies to soft-rock sophisticates. The first disc shows that the aesthetic leap from the adrenalized noise-pop of 1996’s Domestiques to the highlands pastorales of 1998’s Peloton was not nearly as unexpected as it seemed at the time: from the first session here (actually recorded for a Radio Scotland program before being rebroadcast on Peel’s show), Alun Woodward and Emma Pollock’s signature lilting melodies and wry vocal interplay-- like Steve Malkmus trying to pick up Kim Deal-- were already in full effect; the difference between Domestiques’ “Primary Alternative” and Peloton’s jolly “The Arcane Model” is the latter has less fuzz and more flutes. As Woodward recounts in his winsome liner notes, it was a July 1997 Peel Session-- an experiment with acoustic arrangements and string players-- that inspired the Delgados to trade in noise for nuance. And it’s the Peloton-era songs (comprising the bulk of disc one) that provide this collection with its most inspired moments, capturing a band hitting its stride and brimming with confidence with each new song; the superior takes of “Everything Goes Around the Water” and “The Weaker Argument Defeats the Stronger” possess a forcefulness that their more reserved album versions only hint at. The Delgados’ next album, 2000’s Dave Fridmann-produced The Great Eastern, was arguably their greatest, so it’s somewhat disappointing that it’s only represented by a single four-song session (though the versions of “No Danger” and “Aye Today” prove those songs don’t need Fridmann’s Bonham-esque bombast to connect). The Delgados would continue on the orchestro-rock trajectory with 2002’s Hate before scaling back for 2004’s uneven Universal Audio, but the second disc here bears little evidence of these developments. As The Delgados’ music grew more serious, their Peel Sessions seemed to get more silly: the September 2002 set shows them to be the rare band that can cover ELO (“Mr. Blue Sky”), Dead Kennedys (“California Uber Alles”), and Cat Stevens (“Matthew and Son”) with equal abandon. However, the final Universal Audio-era session in September 2004-- highlighted by Woodward’s affectingly stark “Is This All That I Came For?” and a stern cover of Ewan MacColl’s “Ballad of Accounting”-- feels almost presciently somber: Peel would pass away a month later; bassist Stewart Henderson would leave the Delgados the following April, portending the dissolution of the band. Though The Complete BBC Sessions is not a definitive Delgados collection-- there’s no “Monica Webster” or “Akumulator” or “American Trilogy” or “All You Need Is Hate”-- it stands as a lovingly compiled tribute to two greatly admired and greatly missed UK pop institutions."

Norfolk & Western

If You Were Born Overseas

Rock

Rachel Khong

Not sure if Norfolk & Western frontman Adam Selzer's Thomas Hobbes references ("We were both reading Leviathan/ Not necessarily your best seller") signify any more than some shared cross-café literacy, but it's probable. In its seven-year run, the band appears to have drawn up a commonwealth-through-social-contract type deal: Selzer's the sovereign, and citizens suspend sleepiness in exchange for the loveliest of songs, both gorgeous and soporific. Earlier albums (Dusk in Cold Parlours, in particular) were lulling and understated-- they portended great things, but lacked immediacy: If Selzer would swap reservation for liberties maybe he'd be onto something. N&W; now outdo themselves effortlessly-- maybe inadvertently-- with the tour-only If You Were Born Overseas (originally sold on recent treks with M. Ward, the CD is now available on N&W;'s website). "The Shortest Stare" uncannily channels the Decemberists: Selzer croons unlike Dean Wareham, for once, and sounds as nose-jammed as Colin Meloy, as assured as Mark Kozelek. It's not any less authentic than usual, though, and the likeness makes sense: multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Rachel Blumberg is sometimes-drummer for the Decemberists, Selzer plays bass for M. Ward, and though the album's nothing exotic, it's still beautiful in its traditional grounding (itinerancy, rather). Norfolk & Western's tradition is in railroad tracks, Adam Selzer's great-grandpa, Adam Selzer, was the first conductor of coal trains across Virginia. Selzer and Blumberg deny themselves standard vehicular luxuries of modern transport, and insist on touring exclusively by train. Only so much shit can go down on trains, but Norfolk & Western's progressed from busted, kinda-boring boxcar moods to forward locomotion-- pushing their hallmark folksy envelope to span wider, with Overseas waxing and waning but mostly waxing poetical-- sometimes a stalled Polar Express shipping kids to snowier places, and others the jaunty engines to Anywhere, U.S.A.; they could've easily run out of steam, but pick it up instead: Even songs that don't fall far from the tree of previous work still move charmingly. "She Won't Be Famous" accrues strings and drums in a simple, perfect crux of resignation; a girl who's "timid and shy, doesn't try" only lets a privileged few hear her songs, but when Selzer eavesdrops ("On Sunday morning, I hear through the walls/ the prettiest voice"), it's bliss, more or less. Spotted with songs like these (see also "Porch Destination"), Overseas moves beautifully-- the voices of Blumberg and Selzer fit as perfect as usual-- but still stalls too often. Cinched tighter, their forthcoming A Gilded Age EP (which will include different versions of Overseas tracks, and others) seems terribly promising.

Artist: Norfolk & Western, Album: If You Were Born Overseas, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.5 Album review: "Not sure if Norfolk & Western frontman Adam Selzer's Thomas Hobbes references ("We were both reading Leviathan/ Not necessarily your best seller") signify any more than some shared cross-café literacy, but it's probable. In its seven-year run, the band appears to have drawn up a commonwealth-through-social-contract type deal: Selzer's the sovereign, and citizens suspend sleepiness in exchange for the loveliest of songs, both gorgeous and soporific. Earlier albums (Dusk in Cold Parlours, in particular) were lulling and understated-- they portended great things, but lacked immediacy: If Selzer would swap reservation for liberties maybe he'd be onto something. N&W; now outdo themselves effortlessly-- maybe inadvertently-- with the tour-only If You Were Born Overseas (originally sold on recent treks with M. Ward, the CD is now available on N&W;'s website). "The Shortest Stare" uncannily channels the Decemberists: Selzer croons unlike Dean Wareham, for once, and sounds as nose-jammed as Colin Meloy, as assured as Mark Kozelek. It's not any less authentic than usual, though, and the likeness makes sense: multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Rachel Blumberg is sometimes-drummer for the Decemberists, Selzer plays bass for M. Ward, and though the album's nothing exotic, it's still beautiful in its traditional grounding (itinerancy, rather). Norfolk & Western's tradition is in railroad tracks, Adam Selzer's great-grandpa, Adam Selzer, was the first conductor of coal trains across Virginia. Selzer and Blumberg deny themselves standard vehicular luxuries of modern transport, and insist on touring exclusively by train. Only so much shit can go down on trains, but Norfolk & Western's progressed from busted, kinda-boring boxcar moods to forward locomotion-- pushing their hallmark folksy envelope to span wider, with Overseas waxing and waning but mostly waxing poetical-- sometimes a stalled Polar Express shipping kids to snowier places, and others the jaunty engines to Anywhere, U.S.A.; they could've easily run out of steam, but pick it up instead: Even songs that don't fall far from the tree of previous work still move charmingly. "She Won't Be Famous" accrues strings and drums in a simple, perfect crux of resignation; a girl who's "timid and shy, doesn't try" only lets a privileged few hear her songs, but when Selzer eavesdrops ("On Sunday morning, I hear through the walls/ the prettiest voice"), it's bliss, more or less. Spotted with songs like these (see also "Porch Destination"), Overseas moves beautifully-- the voices of Blumberg and Selzer fit as perfect as usual-- but still stalls too often. Cinched tighter, their forthcoming A Gilded Age EP (which will include different versions of Overseas tracks, and others) seems terribly promising."

Robert Beatty

Soundtracks for Takeshi Murata

Marc Masters

Lately it’s not difficult to find a record with Robert Beatty’s name on it. His art's adorned the cover of scores of albums in the past few years, from the underground electronics of the Spectrum Spools label to bigger indie releases by Oneohtrix Point Never and Peaking Lights. His solo project Three Legged Race put out an excellent debut full-length called Persuasive Barrier earlier this year, followed by another strong effort from his long-term noise trio Hair Police. But until now nothing featuring Beatty’s own music has been released under his given name. It’s interesting, then, that he chose Soundtracks for Takeshi Murata to be the first official Robert Beatty album, since it’s essentially a collaboration. He made all the music himself, but crafted it to accompany the films of “digital video glitch pioneer” Takeshi Murata. Having to keep Murata’s images in mind would presumably force Beatty to react and stretch, depriving him of complete control. To some extent that is the case: the music here has a less defined and distinct personality than that of Three Legged Race. But in a way, that’s why it makes sense to label it as the work of Robert Beatty. Where Three Legged Race focuses on a narrower range, Soundtracks for Takeshi Murata gives a greater sense of what Beatty is capable of sonically and thematically. And where Persuasive Barrier was often about restraint, the music here is bigger and broader, painting aural images in bolder, thicker colors. There are solid drones, dense atmospheres, undulating synths, and sound effect-like events that grab attention. There is some restraint too–one track, “Escape Spirit Videoslime”, plays like distant space transmissions–but most of Soundtracks is right up front, ready to fill your ears. It’s also ready to fill your eyes, or at least the ones in your mind. Beatty, who also makes films and installations along with his prolific cover artwork, has a visual sensibility that’s as strong as his musical instincts. Here that comes across in the way images and motion seem to leap from his sounds. In opener “Cone Eater”, whirring tones and low rumbles conjure a silvery, metallic skyline, while on “Untitled (Silver)” (whose Murata film can be seen here) voice-like echoes and jolts of noise evoke a surreal, burned-out war zone. What’s particularly impressive about that vividness is the way Beatty achieves it without mimicking Murata. It must’ve been tempting to cut up sound busily in response to Murata’s glitches, but Beatty opts to dole it out in waves, responding more to the fluidity of Murata’s films than their activity. That’s clearest in the album’s centerpiece, a 20-minute accompaniment to Murata’s “Untitled (Pink Dot)”. Starting with a simple, nursery-rhyme-like pattern of notes, Beatty slowly fills the track with ripples and repetitions until it becomes epic, somewhere between the expanses of a deep-space sci-fi film and the sleepless minimalism of Terry Riley. That kind of vast sound makes Soundtracks one of Beatty’s most widescreen works, but it’s also–paradoxically, perhaps–relatively limited in its potential appeal. Where Three Legged Race often offers hooks here and there to latch onto, Soundtracks is more suited for listeners inclined toward abstraction. But as an indication of how limitless Beatty’s palate is–and how much further he could take his music–Soundtracks for Takeshi Murata is as valuable as anything he’s done.

Artist: Robert Beatty, Album: Soundtracks for Takeshi Murata, Genre: None, Score (1-10): 6.9 Album review: "Lately it’s not difficult to find a record with Robert Beatty’s name on it. His art's adorned the cover of scores of albums in the past few years, from the underground electronics of the Spectrum Spools label to bigger indie releases by Oneohtrix Point Never and Peaking Lights. His solo project Three Legged Race put out an excellent debut full-length called Persuasive Barrier earlier this year, followed by another strong effort from his long-term noise trio Hair Police. But until now nothing featuring Beatty’s own music has been released under his given name. It’s interesting, then, that he chose Soundtracks for Takeshi Murata to be the first official Robert Beatty album, since it’s essentially a collaboration. He made all the music himself, but crafted it to accompany the films of “digital video glitch pioneer” Takeshi Murata. Having to keep Murata’s images in mind would presumably force Beatty to react and stretch, depriving him of complete control. To some extent that is the case: the music here has a less defined and distinct personality than that of Three Legged Race. But in a way, that’s why it makes sense to label it as the work of Robert Beatty. Where Three Legged Race focuses on a narrower range, Soundtracks for Takeshi Murata gives a greater sense of what Beatty is capable of sonically and thematically. And where Persuasive Barrier was often about restraint, the music here is bigger and broader, painting aural images in bolder, thicker colors. There are solid drones, dense atmospheres, undulating synths, and sound effect-like events that grab attention. There is some restraint too–one track, “Escape Spirit Videoslime”, plays like distant space transmissions–but most of Soundtracks is right up front, ready to fill your ears. It’s also ready to fill your eyes, or at least the ones in your mind. Beatty, who also makes films and installations along with his prolific cover artwork, has a visual sensibility that’s as strong as his musical instincts. Here that comes across in the way images and motion seem to leap from his sounds. In opener “Cone Eater”, whirring tones and low rumbles conjure a silvery, metallic skyline, while on “Untitled (Silver)” (whose Murata film can be seen here) voice-like echoes and jolts of noise evoke a surreal, burned-out war zone. What’s particularly impressive about that vividness is the way Beatty achieves it without mimicking Murata. It must’ve been tempting to cut up sound busily in response to Murata’s glitches, but Beatty opts to dole it out in waves, responding more to the fluidity of Murata’s films than their activity. That’s clearest in the album’s centerpiece, a 20-minute accompaniment to Murata’s “Untitled (Pink Dot)”. Starting with a simple, nursery-rhyme-like pattern of notes, Beatty slowly fills the track with ripples and repetitions until it becomes epic, somewhere between the expanses of a deep-space sci-fi film and the sleepless minimalism of Terry Riley. That kind of vast sound makes Soundtracks one of Beatty’s most widescreen works, but it’s also–paradoxically, perhaps–relatively limited in its potential appeal. Where Three Legged Race often offers hooks here and there to latch onto, Soundtracks is more suited for listeners inclined toward abstraction. But as an indication of how limitless Beatty’s palate is–and how much further he could take his music–Soundtracks for Takeshi Murata is as valuable as anything he’s done."

Cults

Cults

Rock

Joe Tangari

When Cults' "Go Outside" first appeared on the web last year, it spread like wildfire. It was catchy and sweet, the kind of sing-along that felt like it was pulled from the air, with a sentiment perfect for anyone stuck in an office or addicted to the Internet. But how many communal sing-alongs can a band make before the approach goes stale? Cults have opted not to find out. "Go Outside" is on their debut album, and it still gives you your entire recommended daily allowance of vitamin D, but its dreamy drift is just one side of a band that proves it has the dexterity and songwriting chops to make a varied and memorable album. Much has been made about the speed with which Cults signed to Columbia, as if they're the first group to release a debut album on a major. That kind of rapid ascent isn't anything new, but the speculation that came with it-- online chatter pronouncing them destined for the one-hit-wonder bin-- now looks grossly off the mark. At the center of the band's appeal is singer Madeline Follin's youthful alto. She has a tone that creates the impression you're listening to a precocious tween fronting a band well versed in Phil Spector's Back to Mono and three decades of climactic indie pop. The 1960s girl-pop element of their sound is pretty evident on the surface-- "You Know What I Mean" even borrows its verse melody from the Supremes' "Where Did Our Love Go"-- but what they've done with it is pure 21st century, cutting it with synths, guitars, and softly integrated samples. The samples, of cult leaders speaking to their followers, could have been a distraction had they chosen to make a big deal out of them, but they're woven tightly into the album's sonic fabric and processed to varying degrees of decipherability, which turns them into an effective textural element. Those voices bounce around in the intro to "Oh My God", originally released last year as part of Adult Swim's singles program, but subtly remixed for the LP. The music hasn't changed here but the beat is amped up, and the bass has been moved forward in the mix, giving the song a much more powerful groove to support its melody. And if Follin's lyrics aren't necessarily deep-- "I can run away and leave you anytime/ Please don't tell me you know the plans for my life"-- she delivers them with relatable and affecting conviction. This taps into a vein of petulance that runs through the album. "I don't need anyone else," from "Never Saw the Point", may read as a tossed-off line, but in a strangely positive way, it feels like the record's main message. Even the eternally sunny "Go Outside" ends on the lyric, "I think I want to live my life and you're just in my way." These are teenage sentiments, the kind of things you feel dumb for saying and thinking once you've navigated into your mid-twenties, but they're also universal sentiments during that stage of life when you're trying to figure out what kind of person you're going to be. Cults' use of elements borrowed from traditionally teen music-- girl groups, 50s prom-pop, bedroom indie pop-- plays along with the lyrics to create a little world where one minute Follin is singing a frustrated "fuck you" ("Never Heal Myself") and dreaming of escaping the next. Even the more formal pop explorations play to teen melodrama. The surging Spector pop of the record's anthemic opener "Abducted" compares falling in love to being kidnapped, and gives the other Cult, Brian Oblivion, a brief lead vocal to play the abductor. At just over a half hour, Cults feels like the perfect length-- just long enough for the bus ride to school (or to work). But more importantly, it executes what it sets out to do masterfully while allowing the group room to grow and mature. They've also set themselves up to take their sound and subject matter in any number of possible directions in the future, and that's a good position for a young band to find itself in. Cults built up a lot of goodwill last year on the strength of just three tracks; on their debut album, they've rewarded it.

Artist: Cults, Album: Cults, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 8.5 Album review: "When Cults' "Go Outside" first appeared on the web last year, it spread like wildfire. It was catchy and sweet, the kind of sing-along that felt like it was pulled from the air, with a sentiment perfect for anyone stuck in an office or addicted to the Internet. But how many communal sing-alongs can a band make before the approach goes stale? Cults have opted not to find out. "Go Outside" is on their debut album, and it still gives you your entire recommended daily allowance of vitamin D, but its dreamy drift is just one side of a band that proves it has the dexterity and songwriting chops to make a varied and memorable album. Much has been made about the speed with which Cults signed to Columbia, as if they're the first group to release a debut album on a major. That kind of rapid ascent isn't anything new, but the speculation that came with it-- online chatter pronouncing them destined for the one-hit-wonder bin-- now looks grossly off the mark. At the center of the band's appeal is singer Madeline Follin's youthful alto. She has a tone that creates the impression you're listening to a precocious tween fronting a band well versed in Phil Spector's Back to Mono and three decades of climactic indie pop. The 1960s girl-pop element of their sound is pretty evident on the surface-- "You Know What I Mean" even borrows its verse melody from the Supremes' "Where Did Our Love Go"-- but what they've done with it is pure 21st century, cutting it with synths, guitars, and softly integrated samples. The samples, of cult leaders speaking to their followers, could have been a distraction had they chosen to make a big deal out of them, but they're woven tightly into the album's sonic fabric and processed to varying degrees of decipherability, which turns them into an effective textural element. Those voices bounce around in the intro to "Oh My God", originally released last year as part of Adult Swim's singles program, but subtly remixed for the LP. The music hasn't changed here but the beat is amped up, and the bass has been moved forward in the mix, giving the song a much more powerful groove to support its melody. And if Follin's lyrics aren't necessarily deep-- "I can run away and leave you anytime/ Please don't tell me you know the plans for my life"-- she delivers them with relatable and affecting conviction. This taps into a vein of petulance that runs through the album. "I don't need anyone else," from "Never Saw the Point", may read as a tossed-off line, but in a strangely positive way, it feels like the record's main message. Even the eternally sunny "Go Outside" ends on the lyric, "I think I want to live my life and you're just in my way." These are teenage sentiments, the kind of things you feel dumb for saying and thinking once you've navigated into your mid-twenties, but they're also universal sentiments during that stage of life when you're trying to figure out what kind of person you're going to be. Cults' use of elements borrowed from traditionally teen music-- girl groups, 50s prom-pop, bedroom indie pop-- plays along with the lyrics to create a little world where one minute Follin is singing a frustrated "fuck you" ("Never Heal Myself") and dreaming of escaping the next. Even the more formal pop explorations play to teen melodrama. The surging Spector pop of the record's anthemic opener "Abducted" compares falling in love to being kidnapped, and gives the other Cult, Brian Oblivion, a brief lead vocal to play the abductor. At just over a half hour, Cults feels like the perfect length-- just long enough for the bus ride to school (or to work). But more importantly, it executes what it sets out to do masterfully while allowing the group room to grow and mature. They've also set themselves up to take their sound and subject matter in any number of possible directions in the future, and that's a good position for a young band to find itself in. Cults built up a lot of goodwill last year on the strength of just three tracks; on their debut album, they've rewarded it."

Obie Trice

Cheers

Pop/R&B,Rap

Choppa Moussaoui, with help from Mullah Omar, Ethan P, and

With a piece as awkward and poorly realized as this, it's hard to know even where to begin-- one feels like the gourmet food critic at a free casino buffet, each neon-lit steam section of lard-coated Frenchbread pizza, pitifully cold "hot" wings and possibly fatal under-iced shrimp demand their own uniquely grotesque attention. Why, in 2003, does he pander to the sickeningly ironic? Why even attempt the self-referential, in a format so attractive to the indolent and trend-hungry that it's already been done there a thousand times before? And why, for Christ's sake, on the very website where all the earlier Pitchfork scavengers at least reached postmodernism's corpse before it was just the dry, greasy bones being artlessly propped up here. These supposed "journeys" into the writers creative mind (where, as even Joyce wrongly thought, we apparently think without correct punctuation) are as uninsightful and lame as diaryish writing-about-writing can be, and a truly awful dramatic exercise between forgotten early-90s novelty rappers "Kid'N'Play" comes off as wholly unmoving even under the low, ironic standards of this sort of dialogue. Honestly, why do it?? Is he flailing in the ultimate impotence of the worried music critic, cowardly preempting his own inevitable criticism?? Is he that much in love with the ugly mental voice of his own feeble writing process that he feels he must proudly share it with us all, instead of actually working to produce coherent journalism? Or, as I suspect is probably the case, is he simply incapable of any coherent product, unable to produce anything in the proper, accepted form, and so resorts to this self-satisfied mishmash of uninformed genre dabbling and faux-confession. Perhaps the author believes that in the present enviroment of near-inescapable postmodernist criticism he can provide some definitive statement by reheating that same old dish once more, but the horse having been long-dead already doesn't make one's self-conscious flogging any more interesting. An utter failure. -- Mullah Omar Bare interior. Grey light. K: What is this? Is this the Eminem song? P: Yeah."Drips". K: Do you actually like this? P: Yeah, of course I do... what, do you? Okay, just got home, a few hours before my deadline, and once again it comes down to this-- is Obie Trice worth an actual paragraph?? Fuck, I honestly don't know if I can bring myself to plod through it. Right, okay, so: "Got Some Teeth" (track title) is the single (background information) with a bouncy, cartoonish beat (does that tell you enough?) by Eminem (identifying the producer, important), though Obie's (truncuation of artist's name) jokey rhymes (lyrical content) come off as sub-Eazy E (reference to previous artist who "did it better"), especially considering (ooh! burn!!) he's meant to be the "clown" of Shady/Aftermath (I am not fooled by this artist's marketing). K: I dunno, I just don't really, I don't like that, offensive shit, you know. Whenever something is like, all dirty and misogynist, I just think of Marcus, you know, how he liked all that... P: Yeah this isn't a Marcus thing, it's just really funny... K: Well, that's what he said, like all the time, isn't it? "Oh, this rap stuff is so fucking funny, it's fucking hilarious!!"... It shouldn't bother me still, but it does. P: Yeah but you seem to use him as an excuse to not like any real hiphop... sorry, not "real" but you know what I mean. K: No, it's like, I just can't give in to that part of myself, I know thats dumb but it seems like a betrayal to, the music and, like, to us, and just everything is... Look, I know this is unpleasant but it's easy enough to ignore, it's not the lead review, you don't care about Obie Trice, it's not the end of the world. Eventually it'll creep down the page and by next week no one will ever think about it again. Really, there's no false humility here. I know how bad it is. It's really bad. If you're reading now, and thinking about becoming a music writer for Pitchfork or anywhere else, my only advice (after "just don't") would be: Always Write About Yourself. Go on!! Write about how you're writing that review, about how your bitchy editor doesn't understand you, about the media format of the website or free weekly or whatever. If the article is due that night, write about the tail of the "Q" in the fucking font on your word processor. Make up terrible dialogues between characters and have them repeat discussions you had earlier that day. Why do I suggest this? Because I'm not a real writer. P: Did I tell you I saw Marcus downtown today? K: No, oh... Christ, what was he doing? P: Well, I dunno, he was with... they were just, I mean, she, you know... K: Fuck, don't tell me that! What were they doing?! P: Just, like, walking around, I said hi, but I don't really know either of them that well... K: Yeah, Jesus, that's just... I fucking, ugh... P: Yeah I know dude... I didn't mean to bring it up. I just think maybe, going back to what we were talking about, maybe you just can't get into more of the sort of, like, perverse stuff, just for now, because of... it's too soon, you know, like, for that kind of playful, sexualized stuff... K: You're right. I'm going to die alone and unloved. P: That's not what I said! We should just talk about something else, how was work today? K: No, I'm serious, I really am. P: Kid, how am I meant to take these requests... no, these outright CRAVINGS for sympathy, considering your absolute refusal to offer sympathy to anything else in the world? K: .... It always seems so disposible, but so what if it is?? Why should we aspire to, as Lawrence Sterne said, "swim down the gutter of Time"? (thats right you assholes, not Brent DiBenzino nor Barth nor Barthelme nor Thomas fucking Pynchon-- Tristam Shandy invented the pure horror of neurotic, self-referential writing!! He's stuck a novel called Tristam Shandy!!! It collapses into a descending spiral of self-reflexive bullshit!!! It's NOT FUCKING FUNNY!!). P: Okay, so the whole point of art, and subsequently criticism, is to have faith in things you wouldn't normally, I mean, suspension of disbelief is cliché for a reason, right? And look at America now, George Bush as dumb-but-honest, George Bush as strong-willed hero... the place for cynicism is fucking politics!! Ignore the "machinations" of the record industry, please!! Believe every spoken intent of the artists, wrap yourself in their lyrics, you critics need to reserve that spiteful, precocious cynicism for reality!! K: Why do you keep awkwardly bringing George Bush into our conversation

Artist: Obie Trice, Album: Cheers, Genre: Pop/R&B,Rap, Score (1-10): 5.1 Album review: "With a piece as awkward and poorly realized as this, it's hard to know even where to begin-- one feels like the gourmet food critic at a free casino buffet, each neon-lit steam section of lard-coated Frenchbread pizza, pitifully cold "hot" wings and possibly fatal under-iced shrimp demand their own uniquely grotesque attention. Why, in 2003, does he pander to the sickeningly ironic? Why even attempt the self-referential, in a format so attractive to the indolent and trend-hungry that it's already been done there a thousand times before? And why, for Christ's sake, on the very website where all the earlier Pitchfork scavengers at least reached postmodernism's corpse before it was just the dry, greasy bones being artlessly propped up here. These supposed "journeys" into the writers creative mind (where, as even Joyce wrongly thought, we apparently think without correct punctuation) are as uninsightful and lame as diaryish writing-about-writing can be, and a truly awful dramatic exercise between forgotten early-90s novelty rappers "Kid'N'Play" comes off as wholly unmoving even under the low, ironic standards of this sort of dialogue. Honestly, why do it?? Is he flailing in the ultimate impotence of the worried music critic, cowardly preempting his own inevitable criticism?? Is he that much in love with the ugly mental voice of his own feeble writing process that he feels he must proudly share it with us all, instead of actually working to produce coherent journalism? Or, as I suspect is probably the case, is he simply incapable of any coherent product, unable to produce anything in the proper, accepted form, and so resorts to this self-satisfied mishmash of uninformed genre dabbling and faux-confession. Perhaps the author believes that in the present enviroment of near-inescapable postmodernist criticism he can provide some definitive statement by reheating that same old dish once more, but the horse having been long-dead already doesn't make one's self-conscious flogging any more interesting. An utter failure. -- Mullah Omar Bare interior. Grey light. K: What is this? Is this the Eminem song? P: Yeah."Drips". K: Do you actually like this? P: Yeah, of course I do... what, do you? Okay, just got home, a few hours before my deadline, and once again it comes down to this-- is Obie Trice worth an actual paragraph?? Fuck, I honestly don't know if I can bring myself to plod through it. Right, okay, so: "Got Some Teeth" (track title) is the single (background information) with a bouncy, cartoonish beat (does that tell you enough?) by Eminem (identifying the producer, important), though Obie's (truncuation of artist's name) jokey rhymes (lyrical content) come off as sub-Eazy E (reference to previous artist who "did it better"), especially considering (ooh! burn!!) he's meant to be the "clown" of Shady/Aftermath (I am not fooled by this artist's marketing). K: I dunno, I just don't really, I don't like that, offensive shit, you know. Whenever something is like, all dirty and misogynist, I just think of Marcus, you know, how he liked all that... P: Yeah this isn't a Marcus thing, it's just really funny... K: Well, that's what he said, like all the time, isn't it? "Oh, this rap stuff is so fucking funny, it's fucking hilarious!!"... It shouldn't bother me still, but it does. P: Yeah but you seem to use him as an excuse to not like any real hiphop... sorry, not "real" but you know what I mean. K: No, it's like, I just can't give in to that part of myself, I know thats dumb but it seems like a betrayal to, the music and, like, to us, and just everything is... Look, I know this is unpleasant but it's easy enough to ignore, it's not the lead review, you don't care about Obie Trice, it's not the end of the world. Eventually it'll creep down the page and by next week no one will ever think about it again. Really, there's no false humility here. I know how bad it is. It's really bad. If you're reading now, and thinking about becoming a music writer for Pitchfork or anywhere else, my only advice (after "just don't") would be: Always Write About Yourself. Go on!! Write about how you're writing that review, about how your bitchy editor doesn't understand you, about the media format of the website or free weekly or whatever. If the article is due that night, write about the tail of the "Q" in the fucking font on your word processor. Make up terrible dialogues between characters and have them repeat discussions you had earlier that day. Why do I suggest this? Because I'm not a real writer. P: Did I tell you I saw Marcus downtown today? K: No, oh... Christ, what was he doing? P: Well, I dunno, he was with... they were just, I mean, she, you know... K: Fuck, don't tell me that! What were they doing?! P: Just, like, walking around, I said hi, but I don't really know either of them that well... K: Yeah, Jesus, that's just... I fucking, ugh... P: Yeah I know dude... I didn't mean to bring it up. I just think maybe, going back to what we were talking about, maybe you just can't get into more of the sort of, like, perverse stuff, just for now, because of... it's too soon, you know, like, for that kind of playful, sexualized stuff... K: You're right. I'm going to die alone and unloved. P: That's not what I said! We should just talk about something else, how was work today? K: No, I'm serious, I really am. P: Kid, how am I meant to take these requests... no, these outright CRAVINGS for sympathy, considering your absolute refusal to offer sympathy to anything else in the world? K: .... It always seems so disposible, but so what if it is?? Why should we aspire to, as Lawrence Sterne said, "swim down the gutter of Time"? (thats right you assholes, not Brent DiBenzino nor Barth nor Barthelme nor Thomas fucking Pynchon-- Tristam Shandy invented the pure horror of neurotic, self-referential writing!! He's stuck a novel called Tristam Shandy!!! It collapses into a descending spiral of self-reflexive bullshit!!! It's NOT FUCKING FUNNY!!). P: Okay, so the whole point of art, and subsequently criticism, is to have faith in things you wouldn't normally, I mean, suspension of disbelief is cliché for a reason, right? And look at America now, George Bush as dumb-but-honest, George Bush as strong-willed hero... the place for cynicism is fucking politics!! Ignore the "machinations" of the record industry, please!! Believe every spoken intent of the artists, wrap yourself in their lyrics, you critics need to reserve that spiteful, precocious cynicism for reality!! K: Why do you keep awkwardly bringing George Bush into our conversation"

Tombs

Winter Hours

Metal,Rock

Tom Breihan

Well, here's a sensation I don't get to experience much: Hearing a new metal album and wishing the songs were longer. Winter Hours, the second album from Brooklyn doom power-trio Tombs, arguably peaks with "Merrimack", an epically lacerating blast of animosity that abruptly ends before it hits the four-minute mark. It opens with a really pretty, scratchy, warm guitar haze, but it doesn't stay there long. Pretty soon, everything flares up into a thundering groove, which pounds and pounds and pounds and then just stops. "Merrimack" could be three times as long as it is and nobody would blink. And even though it's become a massive cliché in underground metal to run a track like this into the ground, I can't help but wish Tombs would've spent a little more time digging in and zoning out on something like this. But no: four minutes, and then it's off to the next all-climax roar. Right now, a pretty huge chunk of the American metal underground labors under the twin shadows of Neurosis and Isis, two bands that slowly build these monoliths of ire, songs that start out soft and pile on effects until they become blurry, gale-force maelstroms of fuzzed-out guitar and floor-tom thud. There's even a name for it: the Neur-Isis sound, logically enough. Even when this stuff is great (like when Neurosis does it), it can't help but smack of formula. Tombs take that formula and do something interesting with it: They start with the blistering climax, and they stay there. No windswept atmospheric intros, no drawn out outros. It's full-blast all the time. Only a couple of songs on Winter Hours soldier on past the five-minute mark, and most burn out way before. And only a couple of quick sculpted-feedback interludes give us a chance to catch our breaths. In a way, that's sort of a brilliant approach. And it sure helps that Tombs are at home within their own sound. The grooves feel totally intuitive, even when they lurch into pseudo-black metal so-fast-they're-slow blurs. Frontman and Boston hardcore veteran Mike Hill has a great vein-bulging bellow that only really loses its impact when he stops shouting and tries to sing, which he rarely does. And he spends as much time doing these sort of vaseline-smeared Dick Dale hummingbird/bumblebee chattering guitar noises as he does playing actual riffs, knowing exactly when to snap from one to the other. But the locked-in thunder of Winter Hours can get a bit exhausting. Staying in constant bombast mode keeps Tombs from letting much dynamic range creep into their attack, and they barely offer anything in the way of melody or structure. If you're in the right mood for that sort of cathartic, omnidirectional animosity, it's great. They have that sound down absolutely cold, and they never sound anything less than demonic. But I can't help but think that these tracks would hit so much harder if they came attached to actual songs, if Tombs developed their sound beyond the narrow but suffocating crunch they offer here. Theirs is a sound you can get totally lost in, when they let you.

Artist: Tombs, Album: Winter Hours, Genre: Metal,Rock, Score (1-10): 7.1 Album review: "Well, here's a sensation I don't get to experience much: Hearing a new metal album and wishing the songs were longer. Winter Hours, the second album from Brooklyn doom power-trio Tombs, arguably peaks with "Merrimack", an epically lacerating blast of animosity that abruptly ends before it hits the four-minute mark. It opens with a really pretty, scratchy, warm guitar haze, but it doesn't stay there long. Pretty soon, everything flares up into a thundering groove, which pounds and pounds and pounds and then just stops. "Merrimack" could be three times as long as it is and nobody would blink. And even though it's become a massive cliché in underground metal to run a track like this into the ground, I can't help but wish Tombs would've spent a little more time digging in and zoning out on something like this. But no: four minutes, and then it's off to the next all-climax roar. Right now, a pretty huge chunk of the American metal underground labors under the twin shadows of Neurosis and Isis, two bands that slowly build these monoliths of ire, songs that start out soft and pile on effects until they become blurry, gale-force maelstroms of fuzzed-out guitar and floor-tom thud. There's even a name for it: the Neur-Isis sound, logically enough. Even when this stuff is great (like when Neurosis does it), it can't help but smack of formula. Tombs take that formula and do something interesting with it: They start with the blistering climax, and they stay there. No windswept atmospheric intros, no drawn out outros. It's full-blast all the time. Only a couple of songs on Winter Hours soldier on past the five-minute mark, and most burn out way before. And only a couple of quick sculpted-feedback interludes give us a chance to catch our breaths. In a way, that's sort of a brilliant approach. And it sure helps that Tombs are at home within their own sound. The grooves feel totally intuitive, even when they lurch into pseudo-black metal so-fast-they're-slow blurs. Frontman and Boston hardcore veteran Mike Hill has a great vein-bulging bellow that only really loses its impact when he stops shouting and tries to sing, which he rarely does. And he spends as much time doing these sort of vaseline-smeared Dick Dale hummingbird/bumblebee chattering guitar noises as he does playing actual riffs, knowing exactly when to snap from one to the other. But the locked-in thunder of Winter Hours can get a bit exhausting. Staying in constant bombast mode keeps Tombs from letting much dynamic range creep into their attack, and they barely offer anything in the way of melody or structure. If you're in the right mood for that sort of cathartic, omnidirectional animosity, it's great. They have that sound down absolutely cold, and they never sound anything less than demonic. But I can't help but think that these tracks would hit so much harder if they came attached to actual songs, if Tombs developed their sound beyond the narrow but suffocating crunch they offer here. Theirs is a sound you can get totally lost in, when they let you."

Jan Jelinek Avec the Exposures

La Nouvelle Pauvreté

Mark Richardson

Every musician wants his own sound. I would imagine that in electronic music, the desire to carve a unique sonic identity into the endless wall of digital possibilities is even stronger. Simply put, with the amount of music being produced today, it's difficult to stand out, and the number of people who have created a distinct musical fingerprint in the last few years is relatively small. You can always tell Pole when you hear him (although, judging by his new EP, that's about to change). Same goes for Boards of Canada, Gas, Drexciya, and Aphex Twin. And way up on that list of laptoppers with an immediately identifiable sound is Jan Jelinek. Whether he's recording as Farben, Gramm, or under his own name, Jelinek always jumps out of the speakers. I reckon the laptop set has roughly equal access to all the sound design and processing software out there, but Jelinek is doing things with his programs that other artists haven't considered. He has an almost preternatural ability to burrow inside glitches and surface noise and emerge with the emotional heart of the sound. His fondness for jazz, which becomes more apparent with each record, is not a love of live improvisation, despite his recent Computer Soup collaboration's indications to the contrary; it's a love for the stacks of dusty, grimy, crackly vinyl artifacts of the post-bop era, a record collector's view of jazz history. One imagines Jelinek getting chills from a chewed-up copy of some late 60s combo featuring electric piano, that something in the hisses, pops and wavering tone of an unsteady turntable must have touched his soul. Jelinek's record referencing continues with La Nouvelle Pauvreté, his follow-up to 2001's Loop-finding-jazz-records after last year's Textstar, a stunning collection of Farben EPs. (Jelinek's addition of the fictional "Exposures" finds him indulging in the dry German humor shared by Atom Heart and Burnt Friedman.) The record begins with the two-minute "Introducing", a gradually swelling gurgle of dread that ends abruptly with the sound of applause, and then "Music to Interrogate By" quickly drops into a groove. It's a classic Jelinek track in a housey, Farben-esque vein, driven by an acoustic bass riff, sampled ride cymbals, and a spacey electric piano melody. On the one hand, it almost seems as though a band could be playing, but Jelinek has a way of distorting the sonic signifiers in a way that makes you unsure of exactly what you're hearing. The mix is weird-- odd pops seem to bump the instruments aside, and the acoustic space just doesn't seem of this earth. The applause that starts the track reappears twice, at the end of what could be considered "solos." It's a brilliant and funny device, suggesting with a wink that "Music to Interrogate By" is the work of some band working a Village Vanguard in a parallel universe. When I listened to La Nouvelle Pauvreté for the first time, halfway through "Music to Interrogate By", I decided that this was my album of the year. This was premature, though, as the rest of the record, while still very strong, doesn't make my jaw drop like that second track. What the album is, though, is a surprisingly varied work, incorporating new sounds and elements while remaining identifiably Jelinek. He's clearly experimenting, trying to figure out how to build on his already considerable accomplishments, and more often than not he succeeds. The most noticeable addition here is Jelinek's voice, which appears in some form on about half the tracks. "Facelift" features an oddly processed doubled vocal, an octave apart, mumbling something I can't quite understand. Underneath are a series of metallic taps, some clicks, and a deceptively funky acoustic bass. "There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of)" has Jelinek sculpting feedback in a tuned, rhythmic drone as his dark vocals intone the title, singing this time. It's actually quite effective and borders on great-- if Coil invented gothic glitch, Jelinek brings it into the 21st Century. "Trust the Words of Stevie" is less successful, with Jelinek deadpanning, "Do I love you/ I swear I do," in a kind of pseudo-soul loverman voice that doesn't quite work as either parody or the real thing, even if the backing music is typically fantastic. Two more standout instrumentals ensure La Nouvelle Pauvreté's greatness. "If's, And's and But's" uses some primo 70s soul samples-- primarily some disco strings, flute and an electric bass-- that Jelinek shapes into a nimble, bubbly pattern. The sublime "Davos S (Trio 'Round Midnight)" employs guitar samples to construct an homage to the gentle, reflective jazz of someone like Jim Hall. There are more odd string samples, which, when combined with drum programming that sounds like a digital ghost of a bongo, turns the piece into a Lynchian dream of the 50s West Coast sound. La Nouvelle Pauvreté is not a perfect album and doesn't poke its head out quite the way either Loop-finding-jazz-records or Textstar did, but I'm glad to hear Jelinek shuffling the deck a bit. His conception of sound, which is one of the most breathtakingly original and creative going, also proves itself to be robust and adaptable to experiment.

Artist: Jan Jelinek Avec the Exposures, Album: La Nouvelle Pauvreté, Genre: None, Score (1-10): 8.3 Album review: "Every musician wants his own sound. I would imagine that in electronic music, the desire to carve a unique sonic identity into the endless wall of digital possibilities is even stronger. Simply put, with the amount of music being produced today, it's difficult to stand out, and the number of people who have created a distinct musical fingerprint in the last few years is relatively small. You can always tell Pole when you hear him (although, judging by his new EP, that's about to change). Same goes for Boards of Canada, Gas, Drexciya, and Aphex Twin. And way up on that list of laptoppers with an immediately identifiable sound is Jan Jelinek. Whether he's recording as Farben, Gramm, or under his own name, Jelinek always jumps out of the speakers. I reckon the laptop set has roughly equal access to all the sound design and processing software out there, but Jelinek is doing things with his programs that other artists haven't considered. He has an almost preternatural ability to burrow inside glitches and surface noise and emerge with the emotional heart of the sound. His fondness for jazz, which becomes more apparent with each record, is not a love of live improvisation, despite his recent Computer Soup collaboration's indications to the contrary; it's a love for the stacks of dusty, grimy, crackly vinyl artifacts of the post-bop era, a record collector's view of jazz history. One imagines Jelinek getting chills from a chewed-up copy of some late 60s combo featuring electric piano, that something in the hisses, pops and wavering tone of an unsteady turntable must have touched his soul. Jelinek's record referencing continues with La Nouvelle Pauvreté, his follow-up to 2001's Loop-finding-jazz-records after last year's Textstar, a stunning collection of Farben EPs. (Jelinek's addition of the fictional "Exposures" finds him indulging in the dry German humor shared by Atom Heart and Burnt Friedman.) The record begins with the two-minute "Introducing", a gradually swelling gurgle of dread that ends abruptly with the sound of applause, and then "Music to Interrogate By" quickly drops into a groove. It's a classic Jelinek track in a housey, Farben-esque vein, driven by an acoustic bass riff, sampled ride cymbals, and a spacey electric piano melody. On the one hand, it almost seems as though a band could be playing, but Jelinek has a way of distorting the sonic signifiers in a way that makes you unsure of exactly what you're hearing. The mix is weird-- odd pops seem to bump the instruments aside, and the acoustic space just doesn't seem of this earth. The applause that starts the track reappears twice, at the end of what could be considered "solos." It's a brilliant and funny device, suggesting with a wink that "Music to Interrogate By" is the work of some band working a Village Vanguard in a parallel universe. When I listened to La Nouvelle Pauvreté for the first time, halfway through "Music to Interrogate By", I decided that this was my album of the year. This was premature, though, as the rest of the record, while still very strong, doesn't make my jaw drop like that second track. What the album is, though, is a surprisingly varied work, incorporating new sounds and elements while remaining identifiably Jelinek. He's clearly experimenting, trying to figure out how to build on his already considerable accomplishments, and more often than not he succeeds. The most noticeable addition here is Jelinek's voice, which appears in some form on about half the tracks. "Facelift" features an oddly processed doubled vocal, an octave apart, mumbling something I can't quite understand. Underneath are a series of metallic taps, some clicks, and a deceptively funky acoustic bass. "There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of)" has Jelinek sculpting feedback in a tuned, rhythmic drone as his dark vocals intone the title, singing this time. It's actually quite effective and borders on great-- if Coil invented gothic glitch, Jelinek brings it into the 21st Century. "Trust the Words of Stevie" is less successful, with Jelinek deadpanning, "Do I love you/ I swear I do," in a kind of pseudo-soul loverman voice that doesn't quite work as either parody or the real thing, even if the backing music is typically fantastic. Two more standout instrumentals ensure La Nouvelle Pauvreté's greatness. "If's, And's and But's" uses some primo 70s soul samples-- primarily some disco strings, flute and an electric bass-- that Jelinek shapes into a nimble, bubbly pattern. The sublime "Davos S (Trio 'Round Midnight)" employs guitar samples to construct an homage to the gentle, reflective jazz of someone like Jim Hall. There are more odd string samples, which, when combined with drum programming that sounds like a digital ghost of a bongo, turns the piece into a Lynchian dream of the 50s West Coast sound. La Nouvelle Pauvreté is not a perfect album and doesn't poke its head out quite the way either Loop-finding-jazz-records or Textstar did, but I'm glad to hear Jelinek shuffling the deck a bit. His conception of sound, which is one of the most breathtakingly original and creative going, also proves itself to be robust and adaptable to experiment."

Owen Pallett

A Swedish Love Story EP

Pop/R&B

Ian Cohen

Even in the indulgent world of concept albums, Owen Pallett's Heartland was out there: On that record, Pallett created Spectrum, a fictional universe where a misanthropic, "ultra-violent farmer" named Lewis tended the land, and each of the album's songs were his monologues. Sometimes they were even addressed to Pallett himself. Despite this, Heartland managed to be Pallett's most accessible album to date. The four-track EP A Swedish Love Story is a continuation of Heartland, and reflects Pallett's new live setup, which features multi-instrumentalist Thomas Gill augmenting Pallett's once-solo performances. Gill's presence provides Pallett more flexibility onstage, and apparently in the studio too, as this EP nudges Pallett's sound into slightly less familiar territory. While Heartland opened up his previously razor-thin aesthetic to electronics and percussion, the most noticeable addition here is the increased use of synthetic drum sounds. Pallett mostly crafts fussy orchestral pop, and the addition of beats (albeit polite ones) hints that his elegant but forceful stringwork wouldn't be out of place in a more danceable setting. The shift is most pronounced on "Don't Stop", which rigs a juddering hip-hop beat to slightly dissonant violin in service of Pallett's graceful melodies-- which, by the way, are every bit as anthemic as those of his Arcade Fire colleagues. Despite the EP title, A Swedish Love Story is nowhere as cohesive or fluid as Heartland. Pallett usually works in set pieces, but here the lyrics leave a little too much to the imagination-- you'd need a libretto, or at least a productive gchat with Pallett himself, to fill in the blanks. Perhaps the biggest revelation is one that should've been clear all along-- that Pallett's blanched vocal tone isn't far removed from the mid-80s bedsit pop it's sometimes compared to. "Honour the Dead, or Else" is evidence enough of that, with its Morrissey-level misery situated amongst flanged guitars, hollowed kettle drums, and a plucked violin that veers ever so close to a synthesizer string tone. Still, if you were hoping this sort of low-stakes venture would find Pallett taking wilder chances, it may be a minor disappointment. Even with the apparent shifts and changes, all four of Swedish's songs would have fit snugly on Heartland. But Pallett is hardly running in place, either. In fact, he's created such a comparison-resistant framework for his unique sensibilities that no matter where he takes his sound, he'll sound like no one other than himself.

Artist: Owen Pallett, Album: A Swedish Love Story EP, Genre: Pop/R&B, Score (1-10): 7.4 Album review: "Even in the indulgent world of concept albums, Owen Pallett's Heartland was out there: On that record, Pallett created Spectrum, a fictional universe where a misanthropic, "ultra-violent farmer" named Lewis tended the land, and each of the album's songs were his monologues. Sometimes they were even addressed to Pallett himself. Despite this, Heartland managed to be Pallett's most accessible album to date. The four-track EP A Swedish Love Story is a continuation of Heartland, and reflects Pallett's new live setup, which features multi-instrumentalist Thomas Gill augmenting Pallett's once-solo performances. Gill's presence provides Pallett more flexibility onstage, and apparently in the studio too, as this EP nudges Pallett's sound into slightly less familiar territory. While Heartland opened up his previously razor-thin aesthetic to electronics and percussion, the most noticeable addition here is the increased use of synthetic drum sounds. Pallett mostly crafts fussy orchestral pop, and the addition of beats (albeit polite ones) hints that his elegant but forceful stringwork wouldn't be out of place in a more danceable setting. The shift is most pronounced on "Don't Stop", which rigs a juddering hip-hop beat to slightly dissonant violin in service of Pallett's graceful melodies-- which, by the way, are every bit as anthemic as those of his Arcade Fire colleagues. Despite the EP title, A Swedish Love Story is nowhere as cohesive or fluid as Heartland. Pallett usually works in set pieces, but here the lyrics leave a little too much to the imagination-- you'd need a libretto, or at least a productive gchat with Pallett himself, to fill in the blanks. Perhaps the biggest revelation is one that should've been clear all along-- that Pallett's blanched vocal tone isn't far removed from the mid-80s bedsit pop it's sometimes compared to. "Honour the Dead, or Else" is evidence enough of that, with its Morrissey-level misery situated amongst flanged guitars, hollowed kettle drums, and a plucked violin that veers ever so close to a synthesizer string tone. Still, if you were hoping this sort of low-stakes venture would find Pallett taking wilder chances, it may be a minor disappointment. Even with the apparent shifts and changes, all four of Swedish's songs would have fit snugly on Heartland. But Pallett is hardly running in place, either. In fact, he's created such a comparison-resistant framework for his unique sensibilities that no matter where he takes his sound, he'll sound like no one other than himself."

Ms. John Soda

No P. or D.

Electronic

Eric Carr

Like food that includes the word "food" in its name, anything calling itself a "project" sets off alarms. "Here, try some of this genetically modified beef-- it's a little project of mine." Alarms. "Hey! You haven't met my new wife yet? She's downstairs... it's sort of a project I've been working on." And the word seldom bodes well for music: Alan Parsons Project, anyone? So I was naturally taken aback at finding the self-described part-time "pop project" of Couch keyboardist Stefanie Bohm and Notwist bassist Micha Acher to be better than most bands' "full-time" work; No P. or D. greeted me with serene vocals, rich, deep melodies, and nary an alarm in earshot. The aim here is deceptively simple: a blessed union of the classic and the modern gives birth to blissful pop. Glitches and clicks lie beneath calmly plucked strings, while a lone piano quietly navigates a sea of hisses and hums; the organic and inorganic pieces flow together in crests and troughs, but the whole is never less than seamless. The concept is nothing new-- The Notwist, Lali Puna, and Dntel have also worked wonders with this dynamic-- but comparisons only obfuscate the purpose of No P. or D.. This project is no experiment; it's a fantastically accessible pop outing flaunting IDM lingerie. The joy and deception of this album lies beneath a mild, melodic veneer. Like most great pop works, No P. or D. can be enjoyed with as much or as little of the brain as desired. The thought-averse among you will be lulled into glorious insulin shock, allowing the girls' crisp, phonetic vocals and soothing tones to cascade and break over you, but the intricacy lying in wait cannot be ignored. The detail and subtlety slowly, inexorably worms its way into the mind, no matter how passively the album is approached. To dissect these melodies is not a complicated procedure, but neither is it a quick one, as each song builds slowly and deliberately, layering elements atop one another, and leisurely anti-climaxing before pausing to restructure again and again. Even as the pacing of the album varies across fairly vast emotional terrain, No P. or D. develops as though it had all the time in the world. There's a practiced, almost Taoist ease throughout-- depth without being Deep, simplicity without being Simple-- and it's hard not to walk away from the album without a sense of well-being. By way of example, "Solid Ground" is effortlessly grand: a slight piano refrain and angelic vocals leave no mystery as to the song's sentiment. Its heart is on its sleeve, but such immediate accessibility doesn't begin to foretell the comparative depth of the multi-layered beep sequences floating underneath. It's not by any means an intellectual overload, but again, it offers itself up to any attentive listener like a gift. Incredibly, though, "Solid Ground" is merely first among equals. Every track on No P. or D. reveals itself with breathtaking assuredness. For one song to be so striking is worthy of acclaim; that the majority of the album can be similarly described is a testament to its wonder in no uncertain terms.

Artist: Ms. John Soda, Album: No P. or D., Genre: Electronic, Score (1-10): 8.8 Album review: "Like food that includes the word "food" in its name, anything calling itself a "project" sets off alarms. "Here, try some of this genetically modified beef-- it's a little project of mine." Alarms. "Hey! You haven't met my new wife yet? She's downstairs... it's sort of a project I've been working on." And the word seldom bodes well for music: Alan Parsons Project, anyone? So I was naturally taken aback at finding the self-described part-time "pop project" of Couch keyboardist Stefanie Bohm and Notwist bassist Micha Acher to be better than most bands' "full-time" work; No P. or D. greeted me with serene vocals, rich, deep melodies, and nary an alarm in earshot. The aim here is deceptively simple: a blessed union of the classic and the modern gives birth to blissful pop. Glitches and clicks lie beneath calmly plucked strings, while a lone piano quietly navigates a sea of hisses and hums; the organic and inorganic pieces flow together in crests and troughs, but the whole is never less than seamless. The concept is nothing new-- The Notwist, Lali Puna, and Dntel have also worked wonders with this dynamic-- but comparisons only obfuscate the purpose of No P. or D.. This project is no experiment; it's a fantastically accessible pop outing flaunting IDM lingerie. The joy and deception of this album lies beneath a mild, melodic veneer. Like most great pop works, No P. or D. can be enjoyed with as much or as little of the brain as desired. The thought-averse among you will be lulled into glorious insulin shock, allowing the girls' crisp, phonetic vocals and soothing tones to cascade and break over you, but the intricacy lying in wait cannot be ignored. The detail and subtlety slowly, inexorably worms its way into the mind, no matter how passively the album is approached. To dissect these melodies is not a complicated procedure, but neither is it a quick one, as each song builds slowly and deliberately, layering elements atop one another, and leisurely anti-climaxing before pausing to restructure again and again. Even as the pacing of the album varies across fairly vast emotional terrain, No P. or D. develops as though it had all the time in the world. There's a practiced, almost Taoist ease throughout-- depth without being Deep, simplicity without being Simple-- and it's hard not to walk away from the album without a sense of well-being. By way of example, "Solid Ground" is effortlessly grand: a slight piano refrain and angelic vocals leave no mystery as to the song's sentiment. Its heart is on its sleeve, but such immediate accessibility doesn't begin to foretell the comparative depth of the multi-layered beep sequences floating underneath. It's not by any means an intellectual overload, but again, it offers itself up to any attentive listener like a gift. Incredibly, though, "Solid Ground" is merely first among equals. Every track on No P. or D. reveals itself with breathtaking assuredness. For one song to be so striking is worthy of acclaim; that the majority of the album can be similarly described is a testament to its wonder in no uncertain terms."

Various Artists

Back and 4th

Andrew Gaerig

After an initial burst of creativity, dubstep has splintered into a number of camps. There's "brostep," of which nothing more need be said. Some artists took the "dub" mandate literally and constructed a world of midnight, alienated electronic music, best exemplified by the Hyperdub label. A third, diffuse group borrowed the movement's rhythmic syncopations and set upon exploring the vast stylistic implications of bass in electronic music. Some of the finest music in the latter camp has found a home on Paul Rose's UK-based Hotflush Recordings; Back and 4th is Hotflush's second label compilation, featuring a disc of unmixed hits of and another of new material from its still-small roster. The big names here will be recognizable to anyone paying a modicum of attention to UK electronic music: Mount Kimbie, Joy Orbison (now Joy O), and Untold all feature, as well as less prominent but still productive names like Scuba (Rose himself) and Pangaea. Hotflush's output has always felt warmer than their more claustrophobic peers, and Back and 4th is inviting-- full of bobbing, circular rhythms and august synths. On the whole, it's more immediate than Hyperdub's excellent (and similarly constructed) 5; the mood is glum and contemplative, but you won't need to uncrate your personal paranoia to best enjoy it. The hits disc cuts a limited swath through Hotflush's catalog, but it's a boon both to those who haven't diligently collected tracks like Mount Kimbie's "Maybes (James Blake Remix)" and Joy Orbison's "Hyph Mngo" and anyone who hasn't been replaying them faithfully. A homespun mix of ashy, melodic techno would hardly do better, and the slightest bit of hindsight reveals [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| that these tracks have as much in common with late 1990s Warp and, say, Tricky as anything that could rightfully be called dubstep. The disc of new material is a mixed bag. Thematically similar, the new tracks rely more heavily on corroded vocal samples and brisk tempos. Disappointingly, there's nothing fresh from Mount Kimbie, Untold, or Joy O. Instead, Hotflush showcases newer talent and signees, rolling out tracks from dBridge (an artist involved in the awesomely named Autonomic movement that purports to be re-imagining drum and bass), FaltyDL ("Regret"'s widescreen arbors are a career highlight), and the promising George FitzGerald. Like Scuba's work, the new material leans heavily on deep house conventions: sturdy, insistent kick drums and lean, melodic hooks. Incyde's "Axis" and Boxcutter's "LOADtime" play like dance music set through a brush of heavy burrs, bristling and itching their way to release (a natural progression, perhaps, from Joy O's dense loops). The disc is a letdown only inasmuch as none of these tracks are likely to migrate to a "hits" disc on a theoretical future compilation. Not anchored by history, the new disc meanders. Hyperdub's equivalent compilation was a synthesis, something to rally around; Back and 4th promises something more-- a roster of expressionists redefining bass music-- but delivers less. Instead, it reminds us just how formative and vital tracks like "Maybes" were, but it only hints from where Hotflush's next breakthrough will come.

Artist: Various Artists, Album: Back and 4th, Genre: None, Score (1-10): 7.2 Album review: "After an initial burst of creativity, dubstep has splintered into a number of camps. There's "brostep," of which nothing more need be said. Some artists took the "dub" mandate literally and constructed a world of midnight, alienated electronic music, best exemplified by the Hyperdub label. A third, diffuse group borrowed the movement's rhythmic syncopations and set upon exploring the vast stylistic implications of bass in electronic music. Some of the finest music in the latter camp has found a home on Paul Rose's UK-based Hotflush Recordings; Back and 4th is Hotflush's second label compilation, featuring a disc of unmixed hits of and another of new material from its still-small roster. The big names here will be recognizable to anyone paying a modicum of attention to UK electronic music: Mount Kimbie, Joy Orbison (now Joy O), and Untold all feature, as well as less prominent but still productive names like Scuba (Rose himself) and Pangaea. Hotflush's output has always felt warmer than their more claustrophobic peers, and Back and 4th is inviting-- full of bobbing, circular rhythms and august synths. On the whole, it's more immediate than Hyperdub's excellent (and similarly constructed) 5; the mood is glum and contemplative, but you won't need to uncrate your personal paranoia to best enjoy it. The hits disc cuts a limited swath through Hotflush's catalog, but it's a boon both to those who haven't diligently collected tracks like Mount Kimbie's "Maybes (James Blake Remix)" and Joy Orbison's "Hyph Mngo" and anyone who hasn't been replaying them faithfully. A homespun mix of ashy, melodic techno would hardly do better, and the slightest bit of hindsight reveals [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| that these tracks have as much in common with late 1990s Warp and, say, Tricky as anything that could rightfully be called dubstep. The disc of new material is a mixed bag. Thematically similar, the new tracks rely more heavily on corroded vocal samples and brisk tempos. Disappointingly, there's nothing fresh from Mount Kimbie, Untold, or Joy O. Instead, Hotflush showcases newer talent and signees, rolling out tracks from dBridge (an artist involved in the awesomely named Autonomic movement that purports to be re-imagining drum and bass), FaltyDL ("Regret"'s widescreen arbors are a career highlight), and the promising George FitzGerald. Like Scuba's work, the new material leans heavily on deep house conventions: sturdy, insistent kick drums and lean, melodic hooks. Incyde's "Axis" and Boxcutter's "LOADtime" play like dance music set through a brush of heavy burrs, bristling and itching their way to release (a natural progression, perhaps, from Joy O's dense loops). The disc is a letdown only inasmuch as none of these tracks are likely to migrate to a "hits" disc on a theoretical future compilation. Not anchored by history, the new disc meanders. Hyperdub's equivalent compilation was a synthesis, something to rally around; Back and 4th promises something more-- a roster of expressionists redefining bass music-- but delivers less. Instead, it reminds us just how formative and vital tracks like "Maybes" were, but it only hints from where Hotflush's next breakthrough will come."

Pep Llopis

Poiemusia La Nau Dels Argonautes

Experimental

Philip Sherburne

Some of the best reissue labels, like Soul Jazz, Numero Group, and Light in the Attic, made their mark by unearthing sounds that most of us never knew existed. They give names to them and put frames around them—a taxonomical project that has brought us essential compendiums of Ohio proto-punk, private-press new age music, and psychedelic country from the early ’70s, to name just a few pins in our ever-expanding musical atlas. RVNG Intl.’s Freedom to Spend imprint takes the opposite tack. Instead of creating alternative canons, it’s plucking obscure records from the ether and presenting them as standalone curios. Co-founders Pete Swanson, Jed Bindeman, and Matt Werth are interested, they say, in confusing the timeline, in sidestepping the historical frame to engage strangeness and wonder head-on. For its first few releases since re-launching earlier this year, after a trial run nearly a decade ago, Freedom to Spend has swung its lens widely. First there was Eye Chant, a 1986 album of synthesizer music recorded in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania by Michele Mercure (aka Michele Musser); then came the Seattle electronic musician Marc Barreca’s Music Works for Industry, a 1983 cassette of sleek electro and wry anti-capitalism. The label’s third release stems from the same time period and thousands of miles to the east: the Mediterranean city of Valencia, Spain. Pep Llopis’ 1987 album Poiemusia La Nau Dels Argonautes makes for a good opportunity to meet the label’s challenge of listening without prejudice. Mixing the sounds of classical minimalism with period electronics, folk melodies, and chanted poetry in Catalan, it’s the most unusual thing they’ve put out yet. Long a sought-after prize by record collectors, the album is, fittingly enough, driven by the spirit of the quest. Llopis began writing the music after the dissolution of his previous band, the progressive rock group Cotó-en-Pèl, sent him sailing across the Mediterranean, island-hopping from Menorca to Crete, Lesbos, and Santorini. Inspiration from Wim Mertens and Philip Glass spun in his head along with the Greek music he had brought back from the Aegean; it was an encounter with the Valencian poet Salvador Jàfer’s collection Navegant obscur that pointed him toward the final form of the piece, in which Jàfer’s poetry—not so much spoken as chanted—infused the music with the dark, swirling pulse of the open sea. Llopis and his ensemble performed a version of the piece at Valencia’s Poiemusia, a 1986 festival of contemporary composition and poetry, and he recorded the album in early 1987, utilizing a limited set of instruments—cello, flute, clarinet, vibraphone, marimba, and keyboards—and with Jàfer himself reciting the text, accompanied by the late actress Montse Anfruns. The album was released later that year on Madrid’s Grabaciones Accidentales, home also to the Iberian Fourth World sounds of Finis Africae. All these points of reference can help orient you within Poiemusia’s waters, but the listening experience itself requires few footnotes. Llopis’ work makes no secret of its debt to composers like Glass, Mertens, and Steve Reich: Throughout most of the album’s five tracks, contrapuntal arpeggios spin like wheels within wheels, with diverse acoustic and electronic timbres fusing into a sumptuous sound as dynamic as the play of light on choppy water. (The lone exception is “Nits de Cristall,” a beautiful, piano-led piece that brings Satie and Debussy to mind.) Minimalism’s sense of moving while standing still is balanced by a forceful compositional hand that emphasizes major shifts from passage to passage—not unlike jibing and tacking in the wind. Both individually and as a set, the five tracks have a strong narrative feel, with chapter-like arrangements and mirroring sections. “El Vell Rei De La Serp” begins with a lengthy passage of bowed cello and gentle flute before shifting into tumbling pulse-minimalism mode; after five minutes of rising pitch and growing complexity, all the instruments drop out save a faint whistle, and a two-minute coda brings us back to the flute-and-cello theme of the opening. In a similar maneuver, the whole album is bookended by the drifting synths that suggest the stillness of the harbor that lies on either side of the journey. The text, however, is not narrative. Jàfer’s impressionistic poetry emphasizes striking visual imagery—“Bees and slugs, honey and liquefied wax”; “Mysteries, algae, lips”—and its incantations begin to assume an almost liturgical feel. You don’t need to understand Catalan to appreciate the sonority of the voices, particularly when they are subtly processed through vocoder-like effects. Swirled into the music, the voices contribute to an overall effect that is like painting in sound and word, and just enough of the text cuts through to trigger unexpected associations in the listener’s mind. (“Moriré amb l’enyorança/De no ser un jaguar,” goes one particularly potent line which is bound to resonate, whatever your degree of exposure to various Romance languages.) Poiemusia La Nau Dels Argonauts is an album of oceanic currents, of cultural exchange, with a shape dictated by the rhythms of both the sea and the journey. Despite its late-’80s provenance, it still sounds both futuristic and faintly medieval. It might as well be a message in a bottle washed up with no returning address—a fine example of Freedom to Spend’s vision of historical music that strikes home like a bolt from the blue.

Artist: Pep Llopis, Album: Poiemusia La Nau Dels Argonautes, Genre: Experimental, Score (1-10): 7.6 Album review: "Some of the best reissue labels, like Soul Jazz, Numero Group, and Light in the Attic, made their mark by unearthing sounds that most of us never knew existed. They give names to them and put frames around them—a taxonomical project that has brought us essential compendiums of Ohio proto-punk, private-press new age music, and psychedelic country from the early ’70s, to name just a few pins in our ever-expanding musical atlas. RVNG Intl.’s Freedom to Spend imprint takes the opposite tack. Instead of creating alternative canons, it’s plucking obscure records from the ether and presenting them as standalone curios. Co-founders Pete Swanson, Jed Bindeman, and Matt Werth are interested, they say, in confusing the timeline, in sidestepping the historical frame to engage strangeness and wonder head-on. For its first few releases since re-launching earlier this year, after a trial run nearly a decade ago, Freedom to Spend has swung its lens widely. First there was Eye Chant, a 1986 album of synthesizer music recorded in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania by Michele Mercure (aka Michele Musser); then came the Seattle electronic musician Marc Barreca’s Music Works for Industry, a 1983 cassette of sleek electro and wry anti-capitalism. The label’s third release stems from the same time period and thousands of miles to the east: the Mediterranean city of Valencia, Spain. Pep Llopis’ 1987 album Poiemusia La Nau Dels Argonautes makes for a good opportunity to meet the label’s challenge of listening without prejudice. Mixing the sounds of classical minimalism with period electronics, folk melodies, and chanted poetry in Catalan, it’s the most unusual thing they’ve put out yet. Long a sought-after prize by record collectors, the album is, fittingly enough, driven by the spirit of the quest. Llopis began writing the music after the dissolution of his previous band, the progressive rock group Cotó-en-Pèl, sent him sailing across the Mediterranean, island-hopping from Menorca to Crete, Lesbos, and Santorini. Inspiration from Wim Mertens and Philip Glass spun in his head along with the Greek music he had brought back from the Aegean; it was an encounter with the Valencian poet Salvador Jàfer’s collection Navegant obscur that pointed him toward the final form of the piece, in which Jàfer’s poetry—not so much spoken as chanted—infused the music with the dark, swirling pulse of the open sea. Llopis and his ensemble performed a version of the piece at Valencia’s Poiemusia, a 1986 festival of contemporary composition and poetry, and he recorded the album in early 1987, utilizing a limited set of instruments—cello, flute, clarinet, vibraphone, marimba, and keyboards—and with Jàfer himself reciting the text, accompanied by the late actress Montse Anfruns. The album was released later that year on Madrid’s Grabaciones Accidentales, home also to the Iberian Fourth World sounds of Finis Africae. All these points of reference can help orient you within Poiemusia’s waters, but the listening experience itself requires few footnotes. Llopis’ work makes no secret of its debt to composers like Glass, Mertens, and Steve Reich: Throughout most of the album’s five tracks, contrapuntal arpeggios spin like wheels within wheels, with diverse acoustic and electronic timbres fusing into a sumptuous sound as dynamic as the play of light on choppy water. (The lone exception is “Nits de Cristall,” a beautiful, piano-led piece that brings Satie and Debussy to mind.) Minimalism’s sense of moving while standing still is balanced by a forceful compositional hand that emphasizes major shifts from passage to passage—not unlike jibing and tacking in the wind. Both individually and as a set, the five tracks have a strong narrative feel, with chapter-like arrangements and mirroring sections. “El Vell Rei De La Serp” begins with a lengthy passage of bowed cello and gentle flute before shifting into tumbling pulse-minimalism mode; after five minutes of rising pitch and growing complexity, all the instruments drop out save a faint whistle, and a two-minute coda brings us back to the flute-and-cello theme of the opening. In a similar maneuver, the whole album is bookended by the drifting synths that suggest the stillness of the harbor that lies on either side of the journey. The text, however, is not narrative. Jàfer’s impressionistic poetry emphasizes striking visual imagery—“Bees and slugs, honey and liquefied wax”; “Mysteries, algae, lips”—and its incantations begin to assume an almost liturgical feel. You don’t need to understand Catalan to appreciate the sonority of the voices, particularly when they are subtly processed through vocoder-like effects. Swirled into the music, the voices contribute to an overall effect that is like painting in sound and word, and just enough of the text cuts through to trigger unexpected associations in the listener’s mind. (“Moriré amb l’enyorança/De no ser un jaguar,” goes one particularly potent line which is bound to resonate, whatever your degree of exposure to various Romance languages.) Poiemusia La Nau Dels Argonauts is an album of oceanic currents, of cultural exchange, with a shape dictated by the rhythms of both the sea and the journey. Despite its late-’80s provenance, it still sounds both futuristic and faintly medieval. It might as well be a message in a bottle washed up with no returning address—a fine example of Freedom to Spend’s vision of historical music that strikes home like a bolt from the blue."

Steve Wynn

What I Did After My Band Broke Up

Rock

Matthew Murphy

Although Steve Wynn's former band Dream Syndicate was one of the most influential and terminally underrated groups to emerge from the nascent American independent rock movement of the early 1980s, the title to this collection of Wynn solo material from the past 15 years seems like something of a wry joke. By this point, the length and productivity of Wynn's solo career completely dwarfs that of Dream Syndicate, and over the past few years he's logged more gigs with his current combo the Miracle 3 than he's managed with any other lineup. And, as this well-rendered, 17-track compilation illustrates, the argument could be made that Wynn's more recent solo work bests his earlier group's output in both ambition and consistency. Throughout his career, Wynn has done little to disguise his ardor for the Bob Dylan/Lou Reed/Neil Young pantheon. A gifted tunesmith and raconteur, like his heroes Wynn has always made the most of his rather unremarkable vocal range, and his best songs are frequently detail-packed narratives which chart as close to prose as to poetry. By his own admission in this set's liner notes, Wynn was left somewhat adrift in the immediate aftermath of Dream Syndicate's breakup, and the middling nature of glossy albums like Kerosene Man and Dazzling Display reflected this uncertainty. But in 1996, his career took a revitalizing turn with the release of Melting in the Dark, a collaboration with Boston's Come, whose Thalia Zedek and Chris Brokaw provided Wynn a much-welcomed injection of raw punk energy. This was a beginning of a fruitful alliance with Brokaw that extended through Wynn's landmark 2001 double album Here Come the Miracles. So it should come as no surprise that this collection is wisely weighted in favor of Wynn's more recent material, as it steers the listener immediately into the buzz saw of "Amphetamine", from 2003's Static Transmission. This opening track is a near-perfect collision of primal VU thump and serrated, Ragged Glory guitar, and should be ranked alongside the Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner" as an ideal soundtrack for a long distance driving. From there the album moves unceremoniously from strength to strength without regard for chronology (or continuity, for that matter). Other highlights include two raucous tracks with Come-- "Shelley's Blues, Pt 2" and "Why"-- the pounding, atmospheric "Death Valley Rain", and the somber, Lennon-like balladry of "What Comes After". As with most collections there are sins of omission and inclusion (personally I would've chosen the Byrdsian jangle of Dazzling Display 's "Tuesday" over "Conspiracy of the Night", which features a typically overbearing cameo by the infernal Johnette Napolitano) but What I Did After My Band Broke Up should not only serve as a valuable introduction for latecomers but also as evidence that Wynn's near future may very well prove as valuable as his recent past. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Visitation Rights, a bonus disc included with What I Did... that consists of old Wynn songs reinterpreted for piano and vocal. Featuring keyboard assistance from Green on Red's Chris Cacavas, this set finds Wynn playing against type, stripping tunes like "Crawling Misanthropic Blues" and "My Family" down to spare, cocktail lounge arrangements. And though this method proves songs such as "Drought" and "Mandy Breakdown" to be virtually indestructible, this format does not (to say the least) display Wynn's reedy vocals in the most flattering light. Variations like the bouncy strut of "For All I Care" do nothing to improve upon the originals, and in fact could likely make you cherish the previous versions all the more. Though Wynn's career has been pockmarked with enjoyable detours and one-offs (such as 1998's acoustic Take Your Flunky and Dangle) perhaps Visitation Rights is one cul-de-sac best left unexplored.

Artist: Steve Wynn, Album: What I Did After My Band Broke Up, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 8.0 Album review: "Although Steve Wynn's former band Dream Syndicate was one of the most influential and terminally underrated groups to emerge from the nascent American independent rock movement of the early 1980s, the title to this collection of Wynn solo material from the past 15 years seems like something of a wry joke. By this point, the length and productivity of Wynn's solo career completely dwarfs that of Dream Syndicate, and over the past few years he's logged more gigs with his current combo the Miracle 3 than he's managed with any other lineup. And, as this well-rendered, 17-track compilation illustrates, the argument could be made that Wynn's more recent solo work bests his earlier group's output in both ambition and consistency. Throughout his career, Wynn has done little to disguise his ardor for the Bob Dylan/Lou Reed/Neil Young pantheon. A gifted tunesmith and raconteur, like his heroes Wynn has always made the most of his rather unremarkable vocal range, and his best songs are frequently detail-packed narratives which chart as close to prose as to poetry. By his own admission in this set's liner notes, Wynn was left somewhat adrift in the immediate aftermath of Dream Syndicate's breakup, and the middling nature of glossy albums like Kerosene Man and Dazzling Display reflected this uncertainty. But in 1996, his career took a revitalizing turn with the release of Melting in the Dark, a collaboration with Boston's Come, whose Thalia Zedek and Chris Brokaw provided Wynn a much-welcomed injection of raw punk energy. This was a beginning of a fruitful alliance with Brokaw that extended through Wynn's landmark 2001 double album Here Come the Miracles. So it should come as no surprise that this collection is wisely weighted in favor of Wynn's more recent material, as it steers the listener immediately into the buzz saw of "Amphetamine", from 2003's Static Transmission. This opening track is a near-perfect collision of primal VU thump and serrated, Ragged Glory guitar, and should be ranked alongside the Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner" as an ideal soundtrack for a long distance driving. From there the album moves unceremoniously from strength to strength without regard for chronology (or continuity, for that matter). Other highlights include two raucous tracks with Come-- "Shelley's Blues, Pt 2" and "Why"-- the pounding, atmospheric "Death Valley Rain", and the somber, Lennon-like balladry of "What Comes After". As with most collections there are sins of omission and inclusion (personally I would've chosen the Byrdsian jangle of Dazzling Display 's "Tuesday" over "Conspiracy of the Night", which features a typically overbearing cameo by the infernal Johnette Napolitano) but What I Did After My Band Broke Up should not only serve as a valuable introduction for latecomers but also as evidence that Wynn's near future may very well prove as valuable as his recent past. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Visitation Rights, a bonus disc included with What I Did... that consists of old Wynn songs reinterpreted for piano and vocal. Featuring keyboard assistance from Green on Red's Chris Cacavas, this set finds Wynn playing against type, stripping tunes like "Crawling Misanthropic Blues" and "My Family" down to spare, cocktail lounge arrangements. And though this method proves songs such as "Drought" and "Mandy Breakdown" to be virtually indestructible, this format does not (to say the least) display Wynn's reedy vocals in the most flattering light. Variations like the bouncy strut of "For All I Care" do nothing to improve upon the originals, and in fact could likely make you cherish the previous versions all the more. Though Wynn's career has been pockmarked with enjoyable detours and one-offs (such as 1998's acoustic Take Your Flunky and Dangle) perhaps Visitation Rights is one cul-de-sac best left unexplored."

Alias and Tarsier

Brookland/Oaklyn

Brian Howe

Working with a vocalist-- that is, a singer, not an MC-- might be the best thing that's ever happened to Alias. His skill as a producer has never been in doubt, but the Deep Puddle Dynamics alum's good ideas don't always cohere into music that exceeds the sum of its parts. His craft isn't lacking, but his songcraft sometimes is-- like other Anticon soundscapers, he tends to lose focus and meander, obscuring core song ideas with dense layers of distracting detail. Of course, for the Anticon faithful, this "difficulty" represents everything that's best about the music. Listeners of the poppier persuasion, who prefer to be lulled with lucid rhythms and melodies instead of floundering through murk, will prefer the immediate pleasures of Brookland/Oaklyn to the gradual ones of Lillian or Muted. This bicoastal collaboration with vocalist Tarsier, assembled slowly as the two participants traded music and vocals back and forth via the Internet, takes the form of glacial shoegaze-hop. Tasier's vocals are languorous and pretty to the point of nearly vanishing-- in a different context, they might be dull, but here, they're the ideal silvery complement to Alias's ice-blue keyboard surges and sputtering drums. The songs move with elegant deliberation, and are captivating in a sort of remote way; they possess the serenity of objects dusted with snow. The twinkling piano and staticky percussion of "Cub" pulse toward a gentle crescendo beneath Tarsier's sweet nothings, and "Dr. C" pairs Telephone Jim Jesus's bright acoustic guitar with a nervous drum track and melting synths. These same anxious drums, lolling crazily on busted springs, meet Kirsten McCord's saturated strings on "5 Year Eve", building to a brief yet tempestuous electro-pop finale. Of course, this being an Anticon project, there are cameos. Besides the aforementioned Telephone Jim Jesus, Subtle's Dax Pierson adds subtle textural keyboards to the silken arpeggios of "Picking the Same Lock", and Doseone shows up on "Luck and Fear". Offset by Tarsier's always-relaxed purr and Alias's rapid-fire, careering drums, Dose's Micro-Machine-Man stammer sounds more impossible than ever, alternating between a sing-songy slalom remindful of Eminem's chorus on "Drama Setter" and Dose's trademarked linguistic overload. If his turn threatens to derail the album's temperate thrust, it's redeemed by sheer verve, and ironically, the only "cameo" that does dilute the album is Alias's own vocal appearance on "Last Nail". The track revolves like an iridescent drill, gradually picking up force-- until suddenly, Alias is doing that generic fast-rapping thing all over the place, squandering the tension and dark allure. It's the only time when the album's hypnotic lull is disrupted; for the bulk of it, Alias stays behind the boards and Tarsier behind the mic, resulting in the most enjoyable music to which the producer's name has ever been attached.

Artist: Alias and Tarsier, Album: Brookland/Oaklyn, Genre: None, Score (1-10): 7.0 Album review: "Working with a vocalist-- that is, a singer, not an MC-- might be the best thing that's ever happened to Alias. His skill as a producer has never been in doubt, but the Deep Puddle Dynamics alum's good ideas don't always cohere into music that exceeds the sum of its parts. His craft isn't lacking, but his songcraft sometimes is-- like other Anticon soundscapers, he tends to lose focus and meander, obscuring core song ideas with dense layers of distracting detail. Of course, for the Anticon faithful, this "difficulty" represents everything that's best about the music. Listeners of the poppier persuasion, who prefer to be lulled with lucid rhythms and melodies instead of floundering through murk, will prefer the immediate pleasures of Brookland/Oaklyn to the gradual ones of Lillian or Muted. This bicoastal collaboration with vocalist Tarsier, assembled slowly as the two participants traded music and vocals back and forth via the Internet, takes the form of glacial shoegaze-hop. Tasier's vocals are languorous and pretty to the point of nearly vanishing-- in a different context, they might be dull, but here, they're the ideal silvery complement to Alias's ice-blue keyboard surges and sputtering drums. The songs move with elegant deliberation, and are captivating in a sort of remote way; they possess the serenity of objects dusted with snow. The twinkling piano and staticky percussion of "Cub" pulse toward a gentle crescendo beneath Tarsier's sweet nothings, and "Dr. C" pairs Telephone Jim Jesus's bright acoustic guitar with a nervous drum track and melting synths. These same anxious drums, lolling crazily on busted springs, meet Kirsten McCord's saturated strings on "5 Year Eve", building to a brief yet tempestuous electro-pop finale. Of course, this being an Anticon project, there are cameos. Besides the aforementioned Telephone Jim Jesus, Subtle's Dax Pierson adds subtle textural keyboards to the silken arpeggios of "Picking the Same Lock", and Doseone shows up on "Luck and Fear". Offset by Tarsier's always-relaxed purr and Alias's rapid-fire, careering drums, Dose's Micro-Machine-Man stammer sounds more impossible than ever, alternating between a sing-songy slalom remindful of Eminem's chorus on "Drama Setter" and Dose's trademarked linguistic overload. If his turn threatens to derail the album's temperate thrust, it's redeemed by sheer verve, and ironically, the only "cameo" that does dilute the album is Alias's own vocal appearance on "Last Nail". The track revolves like an iridescent drill, gradually picking up force-- until suddenly, Alias is doing that generic fast-rapping thing all over the place, squandering the tension and dark allure. It's the only time when the album's hypnotic lull is disrupted; for the bulk of it, Alias stays behind the boards and Tarsier behind the mic, resulting in the most enjoyable music to which the producer's name has ever been attached."

Sea Wolf

White Water, White Bloom

Rock

Joshua Love

L.A.-based pop-rockers Sea Wolf snagged a spot on the soundtrack for the newest Twilight film, New Moon, and while the band's inclusion certainly didn't cause as much of a stir as that of, say, Thom Yorke or Grizzly Bear, appearing on the chart-topping compilation may prove to be a bigger boon to this group's career than to any of the other acts that participated. That's not just because the soundtrack is selling well and getting Sea Wolf's name out to the listening public in general, but more because the kind of person who is most likely to be voraciously devouring the album is also exceedingly susceptible to becoming smitten with the rest of Sea Wolf's oeuvre-- specifically, young people (mostly girls) with a weakness for moody romance and natural imagery. Should any of these Twilight acolytes be compelled by Sea Wolf's New Moon offering, "The Violet Hour", to seek out the band's newest album, White Water, White Bloom, they'll be welcomely rewarded with a collection of swoony, melodic songs delivered with aching sincerity by lead singer and songwriter Alex Brown Church, and featuring more sighingly idealized poetic images and symbols than you can shake a stick at-- orchards in the snow, morning dew, constellations, and "a pheasant's feather," just to name a few. Presumably, anyone a bit older and perhaps musically savvier will hear Sea Wolf and immediately recognize that, sonically at least, they've already heard this all before from Bright Eyes and the Arcade Fire, as White Water, White Bloom, the band's second full-length LP (and first as a proper band and not simply a solo endeavor for Church), breaks no new ground. Opener "Wicked Blood" bites the Arcade Fire's exact aesthetic (chugging guitars, swelling strings, quavering vocals, simple but weighty piano melody) to an almost litigious extent, and while the remainder of the album is perhaps not quite as egregious, virtually every song is blatantly beholden to something that's going to be incredibly familiar to any halfway-avid fan of indie-rock. "Orion & Dog", "The Orchard", and the title track are the cuts most overtly indebted to Conor Oberst (particularly from a vocal standpoint), but Sea Wolf actually pillages inspiration from throughout the entire family tree of literate folk-rock, echoing not only Oberst mentors like Tom Petty ("Turn the Dirt Over") and R.E.M. (the intro to the title track) but even the granddaddies of the form, the Byrds, on the album-closing "Winter's Heir". I can't deny Church is a solid craftsman capable of cranking out extremely inviting pop-rock hooks, but this ground is so well-trod that it's hard to find anything to get even a little bit excited about here unless you're relatively new to indie-rock patronage. A friend of mine who saw Sea Wolf in concert recently testified to the abundance of young attendees who seemed pretty obviously to have been turned on to the band via New Moon. If nothing else, White Water, White Bloom ought to convince plenty of those kids to join Team Alex.

Artist: Sea Wolf, Album: White Water, White Bloom, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 5.0 Album review: "L.A.-based pop-rockers Sea Wolf snagged a spot on the soundtrack for the newest Twilight film, New Moon, and while the band's inclusion certainly didn't cause as much of a stir as that of, say, Thom Yorke or Grizzly Bear, appearing on the chart-topping compilation may prove to be a bigger boon to this group's career than to any of the other acts that participated. That's not just because the soundtrack is selling well and getting Sea Wolf's name out to the listening public in general, but more because the kind of person who is most likely to be voraciously devouring the album is also exceedingly susceptible to becoming smitten with the rest of Sea Wolf's oeuvre-- specifically, young people (mostly girls) with a weakness for moody romance and natural imagery. Should any of these Twilight acolytes be compelled by Sea Wolf's New Moon offering, "The Violet Hour", to seek out the band's newest album, White Water, White Bloom, they'll be welcomely rewarded with a collection of swoony, melodic songs delivered with aching sincerity by lead singer and songwriter Alex Brown Church, and featuring more sighingly idealized poetic images and symbols than you can shake a stick at-- orchards in the snow, morning dew, constellations, and "a pheasant's feather," just to name a few. Presumably, anyone a bit older and perhaps musically savvier will hear Sea Wolf and immediately recognize that, sonically at least, they've already heard this all before from Bright Eyes and the Arcade Fire, as White Water, White Bloom, the band's second full-length LP (and first as a proper band and not simply a solo endeavor for Church), breaks no new ground. Opener "Wicked Blood" bites the Arcade Fire's exact aesthetic (chugging guitars, swelling strings, quavering vocals, simple but weighty piano melody) to an almost litigious extent, and while the remainder of the album is perhaps not quite as egregious, virtually every song is blatantly beholden to something that's going to be incredibly familiar to any halfway-avid fan of indie-rock. "Orion & Dog", "The Orchard", and the title track are the cuts most overtly indebted to Conor Oberst (particularly from a vocal standpoint), but Sea Wolf actually pillages inspiration from throughout the entire family tree of literate folk-rock, echoing not only Oberst mentors like Tom Petty ("Turn the Dirt Over") and R.E.M. (the intro to the title track) but even the granddaddies of the form, the Byrds, on the album-closing "Winter's Heir". I can't deny Church is a solid craftsman capable of cranking out extremely inviting pop-rock hooks, but this ground is so well-trod that it's hard to find anything to get even a little bit excited about here unless you're relatively new to indie-rock patronage. A friend of mine who saw Sea Wolf in concert recently testified to the abundance of young attendees who seemed pretty obviously to have been turned on to the band via New Moon. If nothing else, White Water, White Bloom ought to convince plenty of those kids to join Team Alex."

Santogold

Santogold

Pop/R&B

Tom Ewing

Santi White used to work in A&R, which gives her put-downs on debut single "Creator" a professional air: "Sit tight I know what you are/ Mad bright but you ain't no star." As Santogold, White is putting her knowledge of star quality into practical effect. At its best, her album's cross-genre confidence is dazzling, combining dub, new wave, and hip-hop to create some of the year's freshest pop. At its worst, it feels annoyingly overthought. The central questions of Santogold's first single, "Creator" (who's real and who's fake?), seem to nag at her, but its stunning follow-up, "L.E.S. Artistes", returns to the topic of creativity, hype, and integrity, with the singer sinking her teeth into Lower East Side poseurs and wannabes. White's also walking a line herself: She's a professional songwriter, and talked to the BBC earlier this year about writing for Ashlee Simpson. "It's like two different hats that I have to wear. It's like the difference between writing fiction and writing ad copy. It's like a formula versus your art." That's fair enough. It's not unlike the age-old compromise of film directors-- a movie for the studio, and a movie for me. The problem is that when you compartmentalize formula and art, you risk creating a formula for your art, defining it by what it isn't rather than what it is. Santogold's second half seems to fall into this trap, with a series of tepid dub-influenced tracks that kick her obvious pop gifts-- melody, hooks, and bounce-- to the curb. On "Anne", the usually fiery White sounds muted and apathetic; "Starstruck" is a patience-eroding mess of keyboard fuzz; and the grating "Unstoppable" feels like being lectured by a parrot. "Unstoppable" is also the track which sounds closest to White's friend and collaborator M.I.A. Hers is the name you'll think of first when you hear Santogold: They share co-producers Diplo and Switch, as well as a taste for bass and a forthright vocal style. The more you listen, though, the shallower the resemblance seems: Santi White can do M.I.A.'s tongue-swallowing bark if she wants to, but she's just as comfortable with the gentler registers her melodies require. And while M.I.A. uses global club music to project a future pop blueprint, Santogold explores how they integrate with renegade music of the past. For much of Santogold, White is channeling and recombining a series of indie icons: Debbie Harry, Kim Deal, Ari Up, Joe Strummer, and Karen O. On "My Superman" she captures the imperious swoop of Siouxsie Sioux and drapes it over the kind of stern electro Goldfrapp used to make. "I'm a Lady" marries ska-pop verses to a strutting Elastica chorus. "Lights Out" finds a fascinating middle ground between the Pixies and the Go-Go's. This could turn the record into a spot-the-reference game, but White glues it together first with the backing harmonies she uses to sweeten most tracks, and second with her love of space and echo. The early 1980s fascinate her, and I'd guess a big part of why has to do with the era's cross-breeding of rock, punk, and reggae. A trio of songs-- "You'll Find a Way", "Shove It", and "Say Aha"-- evoke that moment when rock's aggression met reggae's drive and depth, and it makes for Santogold's most thrilling sequence. "Say Aha" in particular is perfect new wave bubblegum-- 2 Tone keyboards, phaser effects, a stomp-ready chorus, and a surf guitar solo to finish. As if to ward off accusations of revivalism, it leads into "Creator", a grimy arcade funk jam that's Santogold's heaviest and most successful electronic move. "Creator" has already soundtracked more than one commercial, and if "L.E.S. Artistes", Santogold's best song, gets similar exposure it could be inescapable. It already sounds huge, with its soaring chorus that should resonate with anyone facing change: "I can say I hope it will be worth what I give up." In Santi White's case "it" is stardom, and "L.E.S. Artistes" might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The irony of this song about compromise is that, like the other great tracks on Santogold, it shows exactly why she's in demand with Ashlee or Lily Allen: She's a consummate pop songwriter. Santogold might try to separate formula and art, but her album catches fire when she blasts that distinction into irrelevance.

Artist: Santogold, Album: Santogold, Genre: Pop/R&B, Score (1-10): 7.1 Album review: "Santi White used to work in A&R, which gives her put-downs on debut single "Creator" a professional air: "Sit tight I know what you are/ Mad bright but you ain't no star." As Santogold, White is putting her knowledge of star quality into practical effect. At its best, her album's cross-genre confidence is dazzling, combining dub, new wave, and hip-hop to create some of the year's freshest pop. At its worst, it feels annoyingly overthought. The central questions of Santogold's first single, "Creator" (who's real and who's fake?), seem to nag at her, but its stunning follow-up, "L.E.S. Artistes", returns to the topic of creativity, hype, and integrity, with the singer sinking her teeth into Lower East Side poseurs and wannabes. White's also walking a line herself: She's a professional songwriter, and talked to the BBC earlier this year about writing for Ashlee Simpson. "It's like two different hats that I have to wear. It's like the difference between writing fiction and writing ad copy. It's like a formula versus your art." That's fair enough. It's not unlike the age-old compromise of film directors-- a movie for the studio, and a movie for me. The problem is that when you compartmentalize formula and art, you risk creating a formula for your art, defining it by what it isn't rather than what it is. Santogold's second half seems to fall into this trap, with a series of tepid dub-influenced tracks that kick her obvious pop gifts-- melody, hooks, and bounce-- to the curb. On "Anne", the usually fiery White sounds muted and apathetic; "Starstruck" is a patience-eroding mess of keyboard fuzz; and the grating "Unstoppable" feels like being lectured by a parrot. "Unstoppable" is also the track which sounds closest to White's friend and collaborator M.I.A. Hers is the name you'll think of first when you hear Santogold: They share co-producers Diplo and Switch, as well as a taste for bass and a forthright vocal style. The more you listen, though, the shallower the resemblance seems: Santi White can do M.I.A.'s tongue-swallowing bark if she wants to, but she's just as comfortable with the gentler registers her melodies require. And while M.I.A. uses global club music to project a future pop blueprint, Santogold explores how they integrate with renegade music of the past. For much of Santogold, White is channeling and recombining a series of indie icons: Debbie Harry, Kim Deal, Ari Up, Joe Strummer, and Karen O. On "My Superman" she captures the imperious swoop of Siouxsie Sioux and drapes it over the kind of stern electro Goldfrapp used to make. "I'm a Lady" marries ska-pop verses to a strutting Elastica chorus. "Lights Out" finds a fascinating middle ground between the Pixies and the Go-Go's. This could turn the record into a spot-the-reference game, but White glues it together first with the backing harmonies she uses to sweeten most tracks, and second with her love of space and echo. The early 1980s fascinate her, and I'd guess a big part of why has to do with the era's cross-breeding of rock, punk, and reggae. A trio of songs-- "You'll Find a Way", "Shove It", and "Say Aha"-- evoke that moment when rock's aggression met reggae's drive and depth, and it makes for Santogold's most thrilling sequence. "Say Aha" in particular is perfect new wave bubblegum-- 2 Tone keyboards, phaser effects, a stomp-ready chorus, and a surf guitar solo to finish. As if to ward off accusations of revivalism, it leads into "Creator", a grimy arcade funk jam that's Santogold's heaviest and most successful electronic move. "Creator" has already soundtracked more than one commercial, and if "L.E.S. Artistes", Santogold's best song, gets similar exposure it could be inescapable. It already sounds huge, with its soaring chorus that should resonate with anyone facing change: "I can say I hope it will be worth what I give up." In Santi White's case "it" is stardom, and "L.E.S. Artistes" might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The irony of this song about compromise is that, like the other great tracks on Santogold, it shows exactly why she's in demand with Ashlee or Lily Allen: She's a consummate pop songwriter. Santogold might try to separate formula and art, but her album catches fire when she blasts that distinction into irrelevance."

Tape

Opera

Electronic,Rock

Andy Beta

In honor of Henry Miller and his devout love of watercolors, I've decided to augment my music-writing artistry by taking up soft-lead pencils and doing artistic renderings of all my favorite albums. I started off with some white sleeve promos and gradually worked my way through The Beatles and TNT. I'm cramping a little bit on Rudimentary Peni's Death Church and Terry Riley's Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band All Night Flight, but the icepacks are doing wonders. At the last International Starving Artist's Swap Meet at Joe Freeman Coliseum, I started trading with the Berthling brothers, Johan and Andreas, and their Swedish buddy, Tomas Hallonsten. The three called themselves Tape and wrote out the title of their latest creation as Opera, the graphite tactile on an exquisitely textured paper. They do a mighty nice rendition of the pastoral plucking and counter-current circuitry of Faust's IV, I must say, in addition to the charcoal cubism of Gastr del Sol's Camofleur, done without any sort of preciousness that can hang over such electronic and acoustic rubbings. "Bell Mountain" opens with chiming guitar strings and a processed gurgle echoing from deep inside the wood, an elegant contrast between the two aforementioned albums. "Return to Ship" traces the beautiful figures of Five Leaves Left, with warm feedback drifting through those Drake-draped branches like an arctic sun. When the harmonica comes in, the weird objects drawn on the front cover-- including curiously curled leaves, stones, and plant life-- recall the world tree on Talk Talk's Laughing Stock in their more amorphous states of sound, before the voice of Mark Hollis would enter. "Longitude" drifts in and out of percolating rainfall, breathing harmonium breezes, and metallophones, perfectly matching yet another gray, washed-out, still-not-summer weekend outside. What's perhaps their most awe-inspiring cover adaptation is that they capture the family vacation photo processing of Fennesz's Endless Summer. With an instrumental list that includes guitar, harmonium, laptop, field recordings, zither, piano, flute, glockenspiel, accordion, trumpet, and styrofoam, to name but a few, they move between the two extremes of unadulterated sound and sound processing. Tracks like "Feeler" and "Radiolaria" will be familiar to anyone already enamored with "Caecilia" or "Shisheido". While the guitar ambles along, moving in a drawn-out fashion that can be a little bit too extended, little sound events puff and gust around it, sometimes sympathetic and subdued, other times randomly contrasting with the melodic figures and standing out, the colors of all the various instruments vibrant even when mixed together. Culling such deeply nuanced and singular sounds as the quoted covers above, Tape, while evoking brief instances of recollected sounds, manage to carve out a distinct, albeit more mild space of their own, drawing forth the most distinct elements and reworking it as their specific, spacious sound.

Artist: Tape, Album: Opera, Genre: Electronic,Rock, Score (1-10): 7.6 Album review: "In honor of Henry Miller and his devout love of watercolors, I've decided to augment my music-writing artistry by taking up soft-lead pencils and doing artistic renderings of all my favorite albums. I started off with some white sleeve promos and gradually worked my way through The Beatles and TNT. I'm cramping a little bit on Rudimentary Peni's Death Church and Terry Riley's Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band All Night Flight, but the icepacks are doing wonders. At the last International Starving Artist's Swap Meet at Joe Freeman Coliseum, I started trading with the Berthling brothers, Johan and Andreas, and their Swedish buddy, Tomas Hallonsten. The three called themselves Tape and wrote out the title of their latest creation as Opera, the graphite tactile on an exquisitely textured paper. They do a mighty nice rendition of the pastoral plucking and counter-current circuitry of Faust's IV, I must say, in addition to the charcoal cubism of Gastr del Sol's Camofleur, done without any sort of preciousness that can hang over such electronic and acoustic rubbings. "Bell Mountain" opens with chiming guitar strings and a processed gurgle echoing from deep inside the wood, an elegant contrast between the two aforementioned albums. "Return to Ship" traces the beautiful figures of Five Leaves Left, with warm feedback drifting through those Drake-draped branches like an arctic sun. When the harmonica comes in, the weird objects drawn on the front cover-- including curiously curled leaves, stones, and plant life-- recall the world tree on Talk Talk's Laughing Stock in their more amorphous states of sound, before the voice of Mark Hollis would enter. "Longitude" drifts in and out of percolating rainfall, breathing harmonium breezes, and metallophones, perfectly matching yet another gray, washed-out, still-not-summer weekend outside. What's perhaps their most awe-inspiring cover adaptation is that they capture the family vacation photo processing of Fennesz's Endless Summer. With an instrumental list that includes guitar, harmonium, laptop, field recordings, zither, piano, flute, glockenspiel, accordion, trumpet, and styrofoam, to name but a few, they move between the two extremes of unadulterated sound and sound processing. Tracks like "Feeler" and "Radiolaria" will be familiar to anyone already enamored with "Caecilia" or "Shisheido". While the guitar ambles along, moving in a drawn-out fashion that can be a little bit too extended, little sound events puff and gust around it, sometimes sympathetic and subdued, other times randomly contrasting with the melodic figures and standing out, the colors of all the various instruments vibrant even when mixed together. Culling such deeply nuanced and singular sounds as the quoted covers above, Tape, while evoking brief instances of recollected sounds, manage to carve out a distinct, albeit more mild space of their own, drawing forth the most distinct elements and reworking it as their specific, spacious sound."

Mogwai

The Hawk Is Howling

Rock

Grayson Currin

In 2003, Mogwai released their fourth full length, Happy Songs for Happy People, and its reception ranged from middling to favorable. Some praised the band's scope, grandeur, and willingness to explore beyond the bounds of the quiet-loud-louder dynamic it had mastered; others lamented a lack of the same, alternately calling Happy Songs too soft, too small, or too stiff. Happy Songs now feels like a summation of Mogwai's past, graced with good ideas for its future. Unfortunately, the music that led to that nexus has been much more compelling than what has emerged from it. Mogwai's new album, The Hawk Is Howling, is the next iteration of the sound that began with Happy Songs. You get a handful of abbreviated heavy tracks, an equitable batch of somnolent drifts, and the occasional suggestive-of-the-future curveball. Just like 2006's Mr. Beast, Hawk follows an unevenly stacked 10-song structure, opening with a stately piano build ("Auto Rock" versus "I'm Jim Morrison, I'm Dead"), a ferocious follow ("Glasgow Mega-Snake" versus "Batcat"), and a drifting reverie ("Acid Food" versus "Danphe and the Brain") before allowing the middle sag into vacuity. The last three tracks of both records form suites of sorts: Track eight offers a hint of menace, which is reined in on a gentle follow-up before the closer amplifies it all. It's a sensible strategy, and The Hawk Is Howling is ultimately listenable, understandable, and vaguely likable. Like the songs that shape it, though, the album just feels redundant and tenuous, like the last empty cloud trailing behind a fierce storm. Part of the problem, it seems, is that at its frequent best Mogwai's music is more than the sum of its instrumental parts. While the band's musicianship feels competent enough, the components themselves are rarely intricate or involved. Instead, the feeling pushed the songs through-- an unspoken understanding, it seems, that the band is arriving at some indefinable place, and we're just lucky enough to listen in. Neither the eerie majesty of "2 Rights Make 1 Wrong" nor the exhausting force of "Like Herod" are difficult to understand musically, but-- atmospherically-- they're brilliant, elusive, and mysterious. This partly explains why so many bands have pilfered Mogwai's trademark intervals and itinerant epic structures, even if they've gotten it wrong: Mogwai sound grand, but the stuff's not too hard to play. I mean, how many imitation Orthrelm's do you know? But over the band's six full-lengths, there's been a steady increase in production value, in making the parts sound better or more perfectly tough and mean. So, while "Batcat" boasts viscous guitars and, in general, good mixing, its "savage" parts sound too self-conscious, almost as though the song's been flooded with alternate guitar takes that are mostly just pedals being twisted and turned to maximize cacophony. Unlike "Mogwai Fear Satan", for instance, it seems less the product of letting go and more the waste of deliberately meeting old expectations. The appropriately named "The Precipice" is a seven-minute ascent through a simple guitar pattern, vaguely resembling Rhys Chatham's Guitar Trio. It sounds great, but it also sounds exactly like what you'd expect. Frustratingly, Mogwai don't seem dexterous enough to take chances within their old meme. So, of course, the band tries new sounds, which is where Hawk really slips. Mid-album pair "The Sun Smells Too Loud" and "Kings Meadow" lean heavily on electronics, and they fail epically. "Sun" begins smartly enough, pitting a slim, serrated little guitar riff against wide, low bass tones. But a tinny synthesizer overruns the track, its frivolous notes rattling across everything. The track goes nowhere. In fact, Mogwai miss with most of the electronics on Hawk: The static whirs beneath the opening piano bars of "I'm Jim Morrison, I'm Dead" are trite enough to be a Christian Fennesz plug-in for GarageBand. "Kings Meadow" adds a layer of paint-by-numbers digital synthesis beneath chiming piano and guitar. It's texturally boring, distracting from the song's pleasant sway in favor of a bastardized Oval plea. Mogwai don't do this stuff well, and here they try to do it beneath structures they've used for more than a decade. At the risk of contrition, I wish this wasn't the case. Mogwai-- for me and for many-- have meant an awful lot. There have been moments that I've wished all music would sound more like Mogwai-- brazen, strong, and redemptive or atmospheric, reserved, and cool. But the only reason I keep listening to The Hawk Is Howling is because Mogwai's name is attached. Hawk makes marginal stylistic advances that it could stand to omit, and it lightly retreads stuff that needs no recapitulation. I hope Mogwai make another great album soon, and I hope it sounds nothing like EP+2, Young Team, or Rock Action. Really, I wish Mogwai could just forget what "Mogwai" sounds like. Maybe then, they'd finally make another record that doesn't glance backward at outdated obligations. Mostly, though, I hope Mogwai doesn't make another album that sounds like Mr. Beast or The Hawk Is Howling-- that is, another bland reduction of splendid antecedents.

Artist: Mogwai, Album: The Hawk Is Howling, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 4.5 Album review: "In 2003, Mogwai released their fourth full length, Happy Songs for Happy People, and its reception ranged from middling to favorable. Some praised the band's scope, grandeur, and willingness to explore beyond the bounds of the quiet-loud-louder dynamic it had mastered; others lamented a lack of the same, alternately calling Happy Songs too soft, too small, or too stiff. Happy Songs now feels like a summation of Mogwai's past, graced with good ideas for its future. Unfortunately, the music that led to that nexus has been much more compelling than what has emerged from it. Mogwai's new album, The Hawk Is Howling, is the next iteration of the sound that began with Happy Songs. You get a handful of abbreviated heavy tracks, an equitable batch of somnolent drifts, and the occasional suggestive-of-the-future curveball. Just like 2006's Mr. Beast, Hawk follows an unevenly stacked 10-song structure, opening with a stately piano build ("Auto Rock" versus "I'm Jim Morrison, I'm Dead"), a ferocious follow ("Glasgow Mega-Snake" versus "Batcat"), and a drifting reverie ("Acid Food" versus "Danphe and the Brain") before allowing the middle sag into vacuity. The last three tracks of both records form suites of sorts: Track eight offers a hint of menace, which is reined in on a gentle follow-up before the closer amplifies it all. It's a sensible strategy, and The Hawk Is Howling is ultimately listenable, understandable, and vaguely likable. Like the songs that shape it, though, the album just feels redundant and tenuous, like the last empty cloud trailing behind a fierce storm. Part of the problem, it seems, is that at its frequent best Mogwai's music is more than the sum of its instrumental parts. While the band's musicianship feels competent enough, the components themselves are rarely intricate or involved. Instead, the feeling pushed the songs through-- an unspoken understanding, it seems, that the band is arriving at some indefinable place, and we're just lucky enough to listen in. Neither the eerie majesty of "2 Rights Make 1 Wrong" nor the exhausting force of "Like Herod" are difficult to understand musically, but-- atmospherically-- they're brilliant, elusive, and mysterious. This partly explains why so many bands have pilfered Mogwai's trademark intervals and itinerant epic structures, even if they've gotten it wrong: Mogwai sound grand, but the stuff's not too hard to play. I mean, how many imitation Orthrelm's do you know? But over the band's six full-lengths, there's been a steady increase in production value, in making the parts sound better or more perfectly tough and mean. So, while "Batcat" boasts viscous guitars and, in general, good mixing, its "savage" parts sound too self-conscious, almost as though the song's been flooded with alternate guitar takes that are mostly just pedals being twisted and turned to maximize cacophony. Unlike "Mogwai Fear Satan", for instance, it seems less the product of letting go and more the waste of deliberately meeting old expectations. The appropriately named "The Precipice" is a seven-minute ascent through a simple guitar pattern, vaguely resembling Rhys Chatham's Guitar Trio. It sounds great, but it also sounds exactly like what you'd expect. Frustratingly, Mogwai don't seem dexterous enough to take chances within their old meme. So, of course, the band tries new sounds, which is where Hawk really slips. Mid-album pair "The Sun Smells Too Loud" and "Kings Meadow" lean heavily on electronics, and they fail epically. "Sun" begins smartly enough, pitting a slim, serrated little guitar riff against wide, low bass tones. But a tinny synthesizer overruns the track, its frivolous notes rattling across everything. The track goes nowhere. In fact, Mogwai miss with most of the electronics on Hawk: The static whirs beneath the opening piano bars of "I'm Jim Morrison, I'm Dead" are trite enough to be a Christian Fennesz plug-in for GarageBand. "Kings Meadow" adds a layer of paint-by-numbers digital synthesis beneath chiming piano and guitar. It's texturally boring, distracting from the song's pleasant sway in favor of a bastardized Oval plea. Mogwai don't do this stuff well, and here they try to do it beneath structures they've used for more than a decade. At the risk of contrition, I wish this wasn't the case. Mogwai-- for me and for many-- have meant an awful lot. There have been moments that I've wished all music would sound more like Mogwai-- brazen, strong, and redemptive or atmospheric, reserved, and cool. But the only reason I keep listening to The Hawk Is Howling is because Mogwai's name is attached. Hawk makes marginal stylistic advances that it could stand to omit, and it lightly retreads stuff that needs no recapitulation. I hope Mogwai make another great album soon, and I hope it sounds nothing like EP+2, Young Team, or Rock Action. Really, I wish Mogwai could just forget what "Mogwai" sounds like. Maybe then, they'd finally make another record that doesn't glance backward at outdated obligations. Mostly, though, I hope Mogwai doesn't make another album that sounds like Mr. Beast or The Hawk Is Howling-- that is, another bland reduction of splendid antecedents."

Purity Ring

Shrines

Electronic

Mark Richardson

In early 2011 a song called "Ungirthed" by a group called Purity Ring started circulating online. There wasn't much information about them out there; they had a member that used to be in something called Gobble Gobble, which momentarily seemed notable. But everything you needed to know was contained in the song itself. It mixed the kind of ghostly pitch-shifted vocals, reminiscent of the Knife and Burial, that had spent the previous year haunting witch house; it had warped, surging, Dilla-derived synth chords that popular online remixers like Star Slinger were on the verge of turning into a cliché. And it had the stuttering start-stop drum machine patterns that highlighted how much the pulse of Southern rap had invaded indie music the last few years. But where these production touches were often held up as ends in themselves, "Ungirthed" was a well-constructed and fully realized pop song, with an infectious vocal hook and a melody that went places. This was novel. It was the kind of tune you took notice of immediately. Eventually we learned that "Ungirthed" was the work of Megan James (vocals) and Corin Roddick (production), two young musicians from Edmonton, Alberta. Wisely, they didn't rush out an album, but other songs trickled out: "Belispeak" surfaced in the fall and "Obedear" emerged this spring. Along the way, Purity Ring polished up their live show, outfitting the stage with lanterns synchronized to the music, which Roddick triggered via MIDI using drumsticks. They built an audience with very little recorded music to share with it. And now, a year and a half later, they've issued their debut album, Shrines. Since those early singles all mined such similar sounds, it was an open question how Purity Ring might mix things up over the course of an 11-song, 38-minute full-length. But Shrines is not about range, instead offering subtly different versions of a single, near-perfect idea. You might think of the album as a sculpture, and each track offers a different vantage point. "Ungirthed" is how you see it head on; "Fineshrine" is what it looks like from a low angle, with a bit of shadow from the overhang providing an extra touch of darkness; "Crawlersout", with its sharper percussive edges and extra portion of ghosted vocals, is the view from 90 degrees to the left; and then "Grandloves", with unwelcome guest vocals from Isaac Emmanuel of Young Magic, is like having a guy standing between you and the work, and he won't stop talking on his cell. "Grandloves" is the one moment in which Purity Ring seem common, but that's one truly weak song out of 11. Not a bad ratio for a new band. And the consistent quality makes it easy to forgive the feeling that occasionally creeps in the first few times you hear the album straight through: "Didn't I just hear this one a couple of minutes ago?" A quality that further elevates Shrines is the lyrics, and that's something that could be easily missed, since James' vocals are often heavily processed. They, too, offer variations on a theme. "Sea water's flowing from the middle of my thighs," are the first words we here on the opening track, "Crawlersout", and the focus on the body never lets up. From "Dig holes in me with wooden carved trowels," on "Grandloves" to "The crawling animals will seek all things warm all things moist, I will relentlessly shame myself," on "Saltkin", the words are impressionistic but always come back to sweat, skin, and bones. Fluids ooze in sympathy with the chords; hearts are given away by being ripped from ribcages. The lyrics are vivid and striking, even if it takes some work to parse them out. And the contrast between their bloody earthiness and music born of 1s and 0s gives the record an appealing push/pull and provides the album with some additional staying power. These songs, so instantly catchy, have more to offer over time. The band that Purity Ring most reminds me of is High Places. The dubbed-out retro-futuristic approach to sound, the male/female duo, the connection to the earlier iterations of indie pop, the experiments with live spectacle. And High Places also emerged more or less fully formed, with the singles and EPs collected on 03/07 - 09/07 pulling together au courant influences into something that felt personal and new. But ever since, High Places have had some difficulty figuring out where to go next. Once you own a sound and make it your own, it's not always easy to leave it behind. We'll see how that plays out with Purity Ring. For now, the compulsively listenable Shrines stands quite well on its own. Most bands never manage a statement this forceful.

Artist: Purity Ring, Album: Shrines, Genre: Electronic, Score (1-10): 8.4 Album review: "In early 2011 a song called "Ungirthed" by a group called Purity Ring started circulating online. There wasn't much information about them out there; they had a member that used to be in something called Gobble Gobble, which momentarily seemed notable. But everything you needed to know was contained in the song itself. It mixed the kind of ghostly pitch-shifted vocals, reminiscent of the Knife and Burial, that had spent the previous year haunting witch house; it had warped, surging, Dilla-derived synth chords that popular online remixers like Star Slinger were on the verge of turning into a cliché. And it had the stuttering start-stop drum machine patterns that highlighted how much the pulse of Southern rap had invaded indie music the last few years. But where these production touches were often held up as ends in themselves, "Ungirthed" was a well-constructed and fully realized pop song, with an infectious vocal hook and a melody that went places. This was novel. It was the kind of tune you took notice of immediately. Eventually we learned that "Ungirthed" was the work of Megan James (vocals) and Corin Roddick (production), two young musicians from Edmonton, Alberta. Wisely, they didn't rush out an album, but other songs trickled out: "Belispeak" surfaced in the fall and "Obedear" emerged this spring. Along the way, Purity Ring polished up their live show, outfitting the stage with lanterns synchronized to the music, which Roddick triggered via MIDI using drumsticks. They built an audience with very little recorded music to share with it. And now, a year and a half later, they've issued their debut album, Shrines. Since those early singles all mined such similar sounds, it was an open question how Purity Ring might mix things up over the course of an 11-song, 38-minute full-length. But Shrines is not about range, instead offering subtly different versions of a single, near-perfect idea. You might think of the album as a sculpture, and each track offers a different vantage point. "Ungirthed" is how you see it head on; "Fineshrine" is what it looks like from a low angle, with a bit of shadow from the overhang providing an extra touch of darkness; "Crawlersout", with its sharper percussive edges and extra portion of ghosted vocals, is the view from 90 degrees to the left; and then "Grandloves", with unwelcome guest vocals from Isaac Emmanuel of Young Magic, is like having a guy standing between you and the work, and he won't stop talking on his cell. "Grandloves" is the one moment in which Purity Ring seem common, but that's one truly weak song out of 11. Not a bad ratio for a new band. And the consistent quality makes it easy to forgive the feeling that occasionally creeps in the first few times you hear the album straight through: "Didn't I just hear this one a couple of minutes ago?" A quality that further elevates Shrines is the lyrics, and that's something that could be easily missed, since James' vocals are often heavily processed. They, too, offer variations on a theme. "Sea water's flowing from the middle of my thighs," are the first words we here on the opening track, "Crawlersout", and the focus on the body never lets up. From "Dig holes in me with wooden carved trowels," on "Grandloves" to "The crawling animals will seek all things warm all things moist, I will relentlessly shame myself," on "Saltkin", the words are impressionistic but always come back to sweat, skin, and bones. Fluids ooze in sympathy with the chords; hearts are given away by being ripped from ribcages. The lyrics are vivid and striking, even if it takes some work to parse them out. And the contrast between their bloody earthiness and music born of 1s and 0s gives the record an appealing push/pull and provides the album with some additional staying power. These songs, so instantly catchy, have more to offer over time. The band that Purity Ring most reminds me of is High Places. The dubbed-out retro-futuristic approach to sound, the male/female duo, the connection to the earlier iterations of indie pop, the experiments with live spectacle. And High Places also emerged more or less fully formed, with the singles and EPs collected on 03/07 - 09/07 pulling together au courant influences into something that felt personal and new. But ever since, High Places have had some difficulty figuring out where to go next. Once you own a sound and make it your own, it's not always easy to leave it behind. We'll see how that plays out with Purity Ring. For now, the compulsively listenable Shrines stands quite well on its own. Most bands never manage a statement this forceful."

Egyptian Hip Hop

Good Don't Sleep

Hari Ashurst

There are no hard and fast rules for growing up; unless you're extremely assured, it's not until your early 20s that most people really find out who they are and what they truly like. To expect a band in their mid teens-- as in the case of Egyptian Hip Hop a few years ago-- to have the answer to much bigger questions about their future direction was always going to be somewhat unreasonable. Nonetheless, the initial buzz around the band here in the UK was fevered, and with their weird, colorful hair and strange name, the Manchester band certainly looked the part in early magazine coverage. The band's debut full-length, Good Don't Sleep, appears after two years of lying low following their first tentative step-- an EP called Some Reptiles Developed Wings, made while they were between the age of 16 and 17. That short collection was produced by Hudson Mohawke, whose trademark maximal touch helped bring them out of themselves. At the time the band played the sullen teenager routine to a T: skulking around on stage, not bothering too much about chores like interviews with national press. Their influences matched this outlook too, and despite HudMo's sparkly sonics, the EP ultimately felt too bogged down by a debt to the Cure and Klaxons. Still, that time with Mohawke, plus previous work with members of Late of the Pier, and most recently, electronic label R&S, seems to have stood them in good stead. Most impressively on Good Don't Sleep, Egyptian Hip Hop find a sonic world of their own. A song like "Snake Lane West" feels furthest removed from the dance-punk lite that they made at first. Rubbery bass and off-kilter guitar twist around each other, creating a sinister backdrop for Alex Hewett's barely-there vocals. Hewett intensifies the dread much as Liars' Angus Andrew would, singing clashing notes and teasing out melodic contrasts that feel as striking as they are strange. "One Eyed King" plays in similar murk too, unafraid of letting an ugly sound sit for just a little too long. Here, though, the grime morphs into something undeniably pretty and engaging, with unexpected flashes of Nirvana at their most stoned, or White Pony-era Deftones minus the distortion. There are a few more straightforward songs to be found here. Opener "Tobago" is gorgeous in its own way; looping guitar pattens rub against plenty of open air and static bass, while Hewett's voice anchors the movement, tightly harmonizing in the chorus for one of the record's prettiest moments. Singles "SYH" and "Yoro Diallo" carry more urgency, the latter sounding like Foals bent slightly out of shape. Again, well-knitted vocal harmonies help the song feel easier to love on first listen, without compromising on the screwed sonics they mine so effectively elsewhere. Occasionally, though, Good Don't Sleep drifts too far in the wrong direction and coasts too much on vibe. And if there's one thing Egyptian Hip Hop aren't yet, it's good editors. But what the record lacks in brevity and nous it just about makes up for in the thrill of not quite knowing where Egyptian Hip Hop are leading you. Good Don't Sleep finds them holding a mirror up to their early work, eager to reverse any youthful misstep. Where Hewett once impersonated an interesting voice (namely that of Robert Smith) he now sounds older and more confident. Their early, punky tunes carried flourishes of post-DFA dance music, whereas the songs here are now imbued with modern electronic music's more liquid, experimental spirit. Egyptian Hip Hop now sound like the band they dressed up so well as at first: weird, otherworldly, and exciting.

Artist: Egyptian Hip Hop, Album: Good Don't Sleep, Genre: None, Score (1-10): 7.5 Album review: "There are no hard and fast rules for growing up; unless you're extremely assured, it's not until your early 20s that most people really find out who they are and what they truly like. To expect a band in their mid teens-- as in the case of Egyptian Hip Hop a few years ago-- to have the answer to much bigger questions about their future direction was always going to be somewhat unreasonable. Nonetheless, the initial buzz around the band here in the UK was fevered, and with their weird, colorful hair and strange name, the Manchester band certainly looked the part in early magazine coverage. The band's debut full-length, Good Don't Sleep, appears after two years of lying low following their first tentative step-- an EP called Some Reptiles Developed Wings, made while they were between the age of 16 and 17. That short collection was produced by Hudson Mohawke, whose trademark maximal touch helped bring them out of themselves. At the time the band played the sullen teenager routine to a T: skulking around on stage, not bothering too much about chores like interviews with national press. Their influences matched this outlook too, and despite HudMo's sparkly sonics, the EP ultimately felt too bogged down by a debt to the Cure and Klaxons. Still, that time with Mohawke, plus previous work with members of Late of the Pier, and most recently, electronic label R&S, seems to have stood them in good stead. Most impressively on Good Don't Sleep, Egyptian Hip Hop find a sonic world of their own. A song like "Snake Lane West" feels furthest removed from the dance-punk lite that they made at first. Rubbery bass and off-kilter guitar twist around each other, creating a sinister backdrop for Alex Hewett's barely-there vocals. Hewett intensifies the dread much as Liars' Angus Andrew would, singing clashing notes and teasing out melodic contrasts that feel as striking as they are strange. "One Eyed King" plays in similar murk too, unafraid of letting an ugly sound sit for just a little too long. Here, though, the grime morphs into something undeniably pretty and engaging, with unexpected flashes of Nirvana at their most stoned, or White Pony-era Deftones minus the distortion. There are a few more straightforward songs to be found here. Opener "Tobago" is gorgeous in its own way; looping guitar pattens rub against plenty of open air and static bass, while Hewett's voice anchors the movement, tightly harmonizing in the chorus for one of the record's prettiest moments. Singles "SYH" and "Yoro Diallo" carry more urgency, the latter sounding like Foals bent slightly out of shape. Again, well-knitted vocal harmonies help the song feel easier to love on first listen, without compromising on the screwed sonics they mine so effectively elsewhere. Occasionally, though, Good Don't Sleep drifts too far in the wrong direction and coasts too much on vibe. And if there's one thing Egyptian Hip Hop aren't yet, it's good editors. But what the record lacks in brevity and nous it just about makes up for in the thrill of not quite knowing where Egyptian Hip Hop are leading you. Good Don't Sleep finds them holding a mirror up to their early work, eager to reverse any youthful misstep. Where Hewett once impersonated an interesting voice (namely that of Robert Smith) he now sounds older and more confident. Their early, punky tunes carried flourishes of post-DFA dance music, whereas the songs here are now imbued with modern electronic music's more liquid, experimental spirit. Egyptian Hip Hop now sound like the band they dressed up so well as at first: weird, otherworldly, and exciting."

Dead Can Dance

Anastasis

Experimental

Ned Raggett

Dead Can Dance, the long-running project of Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard, are inextricably linked to the 4AD that defined a different generation. Not the current one of Bon Iver or Grimes, but the one of Bauhaus, This Mortal Coil, and the Cocteau Twins-- 1980s art goth of a particular kind. But neither label nor their bands sought that tag. And since Dead Can Dance's music incorporated sounds from around the globe and across the centuries, the description seems particularly limiting. Anastasis, the duo's first new album together in 16 years (following a variety of solo works and collaborations as well as a retrospective 2005 tour), finds Dead Can Dance firmly in their comfort zone, at a time when neither Gerrard nor Perry should feel they have anything left to prove. Dead Can Dance always avoided a curatorial or purist approach to global music, and that trend continues here. They're as open to new technologies and recording possibilities as they are to ancient instruments like the yangqin and the bodhrán, but they also eschew the collision of samples and beats that often defines other experimenters in the field. But over time, the influence of Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard has reached far and wide. From Future Sound of London's early techno landmark "Papua New Guinea", which samples Gerrard's voice, to cover versions by bands such as arty metal types the Gathering and the more experimentalist impulses of recent bands like Prince Rama-- not to mention Gerrard's own now extensive work on a wide variety of film soundtracks -- Dead Can Dance's approach to sound has resonated widely. Despite the long layoff, Anastasis is a logical progression from the band's mid-90s albums as well as Brendan and Gerrard's respective solo work since. There's nothing here quite as jawdroppingly melodramatic or proclamatory as old classics such as "Anywhere Out of the World" or "Host of Seraphim", where Perry and Gerrard's vocal strengths were matched with the sense of vast spaces, agog and in awe. But Anastasis often comes close, especially with the concluding "Return of the She-King" and "All in Good Time". Gerrard's breathtaking vocal range remains strong, while Perry's deeper, ruminative voice still feels less like a singing brogue than a calm invocation of ancient knowledge. The split between Perry and Gerrard's singing parts remains distinct not only vocally, but for the different subjects each explores. That could be a stumbling block in other hands, but always seems to bring out the best where these two are concerned. Perry's forthright mysticism on songs like "Amnesia" and "All in Good Time" return to the origin of the band's name, the idea of awakening a greater consciousness. On strong opening "Children of the Sun", strings, crisp rolling drums, and elegant keyboards suggest an ancestral, courtly ritual, though lyrically Perry runs the risk of creating a naive paean to flower power. Yet it's precisely his controlled delivery and lack of irony-- even with a nursery-rhyme nodding couplet like "All the queen's horses and all the king's men/ Will never put these children back together again"-- that transforms the song into something with palpable force. Gerrard's vocal ability is fully intact, and her instrument makes most singers seem limited, or at least unadventurous. The other key element in her singing-- employing glossolalia, substituting comprehensive language with a melodic, exploratory rapture conveyed by her range alone-- defines her lead performances in turn, first appearing to the full on "Anabasis", her rich warmth flowing across everything from strings that suggest Egyptian orchestras to electric guitar to, at one breathtaking moment, near silence. There's a suffused steadiness that steers the album, but with time, the individual strengths of each song manifest; the slow vocal and instrumental raptures toward the conclusion of "Agape", the beguiling sway of "Opium", where Perry sings about being unable to choose a way forward. And "Return of the She-King", one of the band's very few duets, sums up the exact reason Dead Can Dance retain their appeal. It's the kind of impact and elegance that can be hard to put into words, but searching for a perfect expression is arguably exactly what Dead Can Dance have always strived to achieve. Here, they find it more often than not.

Artist: Dead Can Dance, Album: Anastasis, Genre: Experimental, Score (1-10): 8.0 Album review: "Dead Can Dance, the long-running project of Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard, are inextricably linked to the 4AD that defined a different generation. Not the current one of Bon Iver or Grimes, but the one of Bauhaus, This Mortal Coil, and the Cocteau Twins-- 1980s art goth of a particular kind. But neither label nor their bands sought that tag. And since Dead Can Dance's music incorporated sounds from around the globe and across the centuries, the description seems particularly limiting. Anastasis, the duo's first new album together in 16 years (following a variety of solo works and collaborations as well as a retrospective 2005 tour), finds Dead Can Dance firmly in their comfort zone, at a time when neither Gerrard nor Perry should feel they have anything left to prove. Dead Can Dance always avoided a curatorial or purist approach to global music, and that trend continues here. They're as open to new technologies and recording possibilities as they are to ancient instruments like the yangqin and the bodhrán, but they also eschew the collision of samples and beats that often defines other experimenters in the field. But over time, the influence of Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard has reached far and wide. From Future Sound of London's early techno landmark "Papua New Guinea", which samples Gerrard's voice, to cover versions by bands such as arty metal types the Gathering and the more experimentalist impulses of recent bands like Prince Rama-- not to mention Gerrard's own now extensive work on a wide variety of film soundtracks -- Dead Can Dance's approach to sound has resonated widely. Despite the long layoff, Anastasis is a logical progression from the band's mid-90s albums as well as Brendan and Gerrard's respective solo work since. There's nothing here quite as jawdroppingly melodramatic or proclamatory as old classics such as "Anywhere Out of the World" or "Host of Seraphim", where Perry and Gerrard's vocal strengths were matched with the sense of vast spaces, agog and in awe. But Anastasis often comes close, especially with the concluding "Return of the She-King" and "All in Good Time". Gerrard's breathtaking vocal range remains strong, while Perry's deeper, ruminative voice still feels less like a singing brogue than a calm invocation of ancient knowledge. The split between Perry and Gerrard's singing parts remains distinct not only vocally, but for the different subjects each explores. That could be a stumbling block in other hands, but always seems to bring out the best where these two are concerned. Perry's forthright mysticism on songs like "Amnesia" and "All in Good Time" return to the origin of the band's name, the idea of awakening a greater consciousness. On strong opening "Children of the Sun", strings, crisp rolling drums, and elegant keyboards suggest an ancestral, courtly ritual, though lyrically Perry runs the risk of creating a naive paean to flower power. Yet it's precisely his controlled delivery and lack of irony-- even with a nursery-rhyme nodding couplet like "All the queen's horses and all the king's men/ Will never put these children back together again"-- that transforms the song into something with palpable force. Gerrard's vocal ability is fully intact, and her instrument makes most singers seem limited, or at least unadventurous. The other key element in her singing-- employing glossolalia, substituting comprehensive language with a melodic, exploratory rapture conveyed by her range alone-- defines her lead performances in turn, first appearing to the full on "Anabasis", her rich warmth flowing across everything from strings that suggest Egyptian orchestras to electric guitar to, at one breathtaking moment, near silence. There's a suffused steadiness that steers the album, but with time, the individual strengths of each song manifest; the slow vocal and instrumental raptures toward the conclusion of "Agape", the beguiling sway of "Opium", where Perry sings about being unable to choose a way forward. And "Return of the She-King", one of the band's very few duets, sums up the exact reason Dead Can Dance retain their appeal. It's the kind of impact and elegance that can be hard to put into words, but searching for a perfect expression is arguably exactly what Dead Can Dance have always strived to achieve. Here, they find it more often than not."

Sigur Rós

Takk

Rock

Amanda Petrusich

When Sigur Rós' second full-length record, Agetis Byrjun, landed stateside in 2001, its extraterrestrial oozing was so unfamiliar (and, subsequently, unnerving) to American ears that it managed to finagle a staggering number of meticulously rendered comparisons to glaciers and fjords and icebergs: By year-end, it seemed oddly plausible to presume that Sigur Rós' songs were actually being mouthed by giant mounds of snow. Something about Agetis Byrjun-- its celestial groping, its shimmers, its weird vastness-- seemed handcuffed to the landscape from which it was born. Thus, the mythology of Iceland-- of staggering literacy and longevity, of Björk, of Reykjavik, of volcanoes and fisheries and giant slabs of ice-- became the mythology of Sigur Rós. Unsurprisingly, domestic intrigue peaked almost immediately: The record's liner notes and cover-- a silver alien-baby hybrid boasting angel wings-- revealed precious little about its creation, and vocalist Jonsi Birgisson openly admitted to howling in an entirely self-fabricated language. In 2001, Sigur Rós were deliciously strange, the only sensible soundtrack to post-millennial comedowns, all future and faith, bones and blood and ice and sun, culled gently from an island far, far away. In the years that followed, Sigur Rós released three EPs, reissued their debut, and popped out another full-length, the ever-contentious, unspeakable ( ). With each new record, the band dutifully maintained their trademark swells, bowing consistently before the altar of ebb and flow, until Sigur Rós began to sound less like an icecap melting and more like Sigur Rós. The mystery melted, the fascination faltered, and the animated, barstool retellings of The Sigur Rós Story died down. Still, Sigur Rós are more than just a conversation piece, meatier than their reputation, better than the otherworldly blubbers they're so casually accused of: With Takk, the songcraft that once made Agetis Byrjun everyone's favorite sunrise record re-emerges intact. Melodies stick, songs coalesce, and Sigur Rós lay off the grim theatrics, reminding listeners everywhere that they intend to play theaters, not funeral homes. Ultimately, Takk is a warmer, more orchestral take on the band's defining sound, and easily their most instantly accessible record to date (shockingly, over a third of the album's songs clock in at under five minutes each.) The cheerless drones of ( ) are replaced by more bass, drums, piano, horns, and samples, strings are more prominent than ever before, and Birgisson's lyrics are especially incidental, all barely-audible squeals and sighs. Mostly, Takk is ecstatic, constantly erupting in funny little waves of joy. Dissenters who rejected Sigur Rós as the soundtrack to wrist-slittings everywhere might be temporarily perplexed by the band's new, wide-eyed giggles-- but mostly, Takk just sounds like Sunday morning Sigur Rós, all yawns and sleepy grins and quick yanks at the curtains. "Glosoli" is the record's shining center, a rapturous, tinkling swirl, with Birgisson's high, squeaky howls (sounding perfectly thin and kitten-y) shooting through a thick, stomping mess of chimes and echoing guitar. The song builds slowly, finally bursting in a deafening explosion of heavily-distorted guitar slams (think, oddly, of Coldplay-- particularly the end of A Rush of Blood to the Head's "Politik"). "Glosoli" manages to be both ethereal and concrete at the same time, which is Sigur Rós most effective trick: "Glosoli" tempers its fRóst with curls of hot human breath, a tongue on an icicle, frozen and warm all at once. "Gong" is all antsy drums and careering guitar, while the steamy "Saeglopur" tiptoes from piano and tinny glockenspiel to a breathtaking vocal harmony, and, finally, an ominous swell of full-band noise, just deep enough to inspire some vicious head-nods, if not full-hip dancing. Elsewhere, the band falters. "Se Lest" and "Milano", the record's longest cuts, are both vaguely hollow-- "Se Lest" is too preoccupied with its own atmospherics, while "Milano" meanders without meaning. Takk proves that Sigur Rós can, in fact, transcend their own legend: The tendency to descend into new age goo is still present, and Takk, like all of Sigur Rós' discography, is not for the viscerally-minded. Regardless, the record is more than just meaningless wisps. Crank it in the late summer heat and see if it melts.

Artist: Sigur Rós, Album: Takk, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.8 Album review: "When Sigur Rós' second full-length record, Agetis Byrjun, landed stateside in 2001, its extraterrestrial oozing was so unfamiliar (and, subsequently, unnerving) to American ears that it managed to finagle a staggering number of meticulously rendered comparisons to glaciers and fjords and icebergs: By year-end, it seemed oddly plausible to presume that Sigur Rós' songs were actually being mouthed by giant mounds of snow. Something about Agetis Byrjun-- its celestial groping, its shimmers, its weird vastness-- seemed handcuffed to the landscape from which it was born. Thus, the mythology of Iceland-- of staggering literacy and longevity, of Björk, of Reykjavik, of volcanoes and fisheries and giant slabs of ice-- became the mythology of Sigur Rós. Unsurprisingly, domestic intrigue peaked almost immediately: The record's liner notes and cover-- a silver alien-baby hybrid boasting angel wings-- revealed precious little about its creation, and vocalist Jonsi Birgisson openly admitted to howling in an entirely self-fabricated language. In 2001, Sigur Rós were deliciously strange, the only sensible soundtrack to post-millennial comedowns, all future and faith, bones and blood and ice and sun, culled gently from an island far, far away. In the years that followed, Sigur Rós released three EPs, reissued their debut, and popped out another full-length, the ever-contentious, unspeakable ( ). With each new record, the band dutifully maintained their trademark swells, bowing consistently before the altar of ebb and flow, until Sigur Rós began to sound less like an icecap melting and more like Sigur Rós. The mystery melted, the fascination faltered, and the animated, barstool retellings of The Sigur Rós Story died down. Still, Sigur Rós are more than just a conversation piece, meatier than their reputation, better than the otherworldly blubbers they're so casually accused of: With Takk, the songcraft that once made Agetis Byrjun everyone's favorite sunrise record re-emerges intact. Melodies stick, songs coalesce, and Sigur Rós lay off the grim theatrics, reminding listeners everywhere that they intend to play theaters, not funeral homes. Ultimately, Takk is a warmer, more orchestral take on the band's defining sound, and easily their most instantly accessible record to date (shockingly, over a third of the album's songs clock in at under five minutes each.) The cheerless drones of ( ) are replaced by more bass, drums, piano, horns, and samples, strings are more prominent than ever before, and Birgisson's lyrics are especially incidental, all barely-audible squeals and sighs. Mostly, Takk is ecstatic, constantly erupting in funny little waves of joy. Dissenters who rejected Sigur Rós as the soundtrack to wrist-slittings everywhere might be temporarily perplexed by the band's new, wide-eyed giggles-- but mostly, Takk just sounds like Sunday morning Sigur Rós, all yawns and sleepy grins and quick yanks at the curtains. "Glosoli" is the record's shining center, a rapturous, tinkling swirl, with Birgisson's high, squeaky howls (sounding perfectly thin and kitten-y) shooting through a thick, stomping mess of chimes and echoing guitar. The song builds slowly, finally bursting in a deafening explosion of heavily-distorted guitar slams (think, oddly, of Coldplay-- particularly the end of A Rush of Blood to the Head's "Politik"). "Glosoli" manages to be both ethereal and concrete at the same time, which is Sigur Rós most effective trick: "Glosoli" tempers its fRóst with curls of hot human breath, a tongue on an icicle, frozen and warm all at once. "Gong" is all antsy drums and careering guitar, while the steamy "Saeglopur" tiptoes from piano and tinny glockenspiel to a breathtaking vocal harmony, and, finally, an ominous swell of full-band noise, just deep enough to inspire some vicious head-nods, if not full-hip dancing. Elsewhere, the band falters. "Se Lest" and "Milano", the record's longest cuts, are both vaguely hollow-- "Se Lest" is too preoccupied with its own atmospherics, while "Milano" meanders without meaning. Takk proves that Sigur Rós can, in fact, transcend their own legend: The tendency to descend into new age goo is still present, and Takk, like all of Sigur Rós' discography, is not for the viscerally-minded. Regardless, the record is more than just meaningless wisps. Crank it in the late summer heat and see if it melts."

8ULENTINA

Eucalyptus EP

Electronic

Thea Ballard

Nimble movement between genres and the decentering of Western cultural narratives are hallmarks of the Oakland-based club night, radio show, and label Club Chai, run by 8ULENTINA and the producer FOOZOOL. Linking dance music to ritual, the event is named for the tea ceremonies familiar to both from their respective backgrounds, and the sounds the pair and their associates embrace run the gamut from lo-fi electronic dance music to all manner of non-Western pop. The collective aesthetic can be a bit kitchen-sink, but this range is tied together by a forward-thinking DIY ethos that involves both fostering real community ties and challenging listeners to engage actively and mindfully. 8ULENTINA’s work in various media distills these qualities, sometimes to manic effect. In this collection of tracks—the artist’s debut release as a producer, and Club Chai’s third as a label—their measured curiosity and embrace of interiority grounds this squall in a singular perspective. 8ULENTINA’s approach to sound is sculptural, rounding or sharpening samples without erasing their raw materials’ links to particular places and times (whether drum programming pulled from Middle Eastern music or original recordings of objects or vocals). “Metal Clip,” the opening track, lays down a tempered metallic beat, off of which spin muddled string and flute melodies. It’s a lovely listen on headphones; the titular clip sounds lend subtle textural bite to its spacious melodic arcs. “Wander Flute” centers on a dulled but pummeling heartbeat of a rhythm that leads to a single flute tone, fluid and clear. 8ULENTINA’s tracks parse ideas in phases, injecting thoughtfulness into a compositional process that could just as easily be gleefully accumulative. Though there is room to breathe throughout, the energy of Eucalyptus cycles, relaxing and then tensing. “Soiled” is built around a clipped breakbeat, its pacing made all the more frenetic as those drums, interlaced with little synthesizer squelches, assault and recede. Such intensity never overwhelms, nor does it prize the dancing body over the wandering mind. The EP concludes with the keyboard-driven “Mint T,” with vocals from Organ Tapes, a standout and marked downbeat shift. The scratchy distance of Organ Tapes’ laconic vocals belies the gentle complexity of 8ULENTINA’s production, which is warm and evocative. 8ULENTINA invokes processes of self-care and healing in their notes on the release—concepts that make sense in context of the greater Club Chai project, but that are perhaps more elusive within sound itself. How might, or can, such a framework exist within a club track? This idea has circulated loosely around experimental subcultures the past few years, perhaps too often in the form of cheap verbiage produced by corporate promoters and publications. But Eucalyptus is a compelling and elegantly scaled (which is to say, only ever-so-lightly conceptually driven) argument for the possibility of music containing and even generating such practices of care. Genuinely experimental in form, the EP nonetheless seems distinctly attentive to the ever-looming possibility of exhaustion for both listener and maker and the small-scale practices of aesthetic sustainability that keep us running—an unusually generous creative offering.

Artist: 8ULENTINA, Album: Eucalyptus EP, Genre: Electronic, Score (1-10): 7.5 Album review: "Nimble movement between genres and the decentering of Western cultural narratives are hallmarks of the Oakland-based club night, radio show, and label Club Chai, run by 8ULENTINA and the producer FOOZOOL. Linking dance music to ritual, the event is named for the tea ceremonies familiar to both from their respective backgrounds, and the sounds the pair and their associates embrace run the gamut from lo-fi electronic dance music to all manner of non-Western pop. The collective aesthetic can be a bit kitchen-sink, but this range is tied together by a forward-thinking DIY ethos that involves both fostering real community ties and challenging listeners to engage actively and mindfully. 8ULENTINA’s work in various media distills these qualities, sometimes to manic effect. In this collection of tracks—the artist’s debut release as a producer, and Club Chai’s third as a label—their measured curiosity and embrace of interiority grounds this squall in a singular perspective. 8ULENTINA’s approach to sound is sculptural, rounding or sharpening samples without erasing their raw materials’ links to particular places and times (whether drum programming pulled from Middle Eastern music or original recordings of objects or vocals). “Metal Clip,” the opening track, lays down a tempered metallic beat, off of which spin muddled string and flute melodies. It’s a lovely listen on headphones; the titular clip sounds lend subtle textural bite to its spacious melodic arcs. “Wander Flute” centers on a dulled but pummeling heartbeat of a rhythm that leads to a single flute tone, fluid and clear. 8ULENTINA’s tracks parse ideas in phases, injecting thoughtfulness into a compositional process that could just as easily be gleefully accumulative. Though there is room to breathe throughout, the energy of Eucalyptus cycles, relaxing and then tensing. “Soiled” is built around a clipped breakbeat, its pacing made all the more frenetic as those drums, interlaced with little synthesizer squelches, assault and recede. Such intensity never overwhelms, nor does it prize the dancing body over the wandering mind. The EP concludes with the keyboard-driven “Mint T,” with vocals from Organ Tapes, a standout and marked downbeat shift. The scratchy distance of Organ Tapes’ laconic vocals belies the gentle complexity of 8ULENTINA’s production, which is warm and evocative. 8ULENTINA invokes processes of self-care and healing in their notes on the release—concepts that make sense in context of the greater Club Chai project, but that are perhaps more elusive within sound itself. How might, or can, such a framework exist within a club track? This idea has circulated loosely around experimental subcultures the past few years, perhaps too often in the form of cheap verbiage produced by corporate promoters and publications. But Eucalyptus is a compelling and elegantly scaled (which is to say, only ever-so-lightly conceptually driven) argument for the possibility of music containing and even generating such practices of care. Genuinely experimental in form, the EP nonetheless seems distinctly attentive to the ever-looming possibility of exhaustion for both listener and maker and the small-scale practices of aesthetic sustainability that keep us running—an unusually generous creative offering."

Andy Partridge

Fuzzy Warbles 5

Pop/R&B

Chris Dahlen

These two releases mark the halfway point of Andy Partridge's Fuzzy Warbles series, a self-released collection of b-sides, four-tracks, and castoffs from both his solo career and his days with XTC. Luckily, these two most recent volumes are as random a mess as the first four. Imagine if Andy Partridge had carefully curated these Warbles albums by theme, chronology, or quality instead of just digging them out from under his bed. As it is-- even though he saved us the work of snatching up cassettes, singles, and mp3s in order to collect all of this stuff-- die-hard XTC completists still have to slog through his scattered piles. Volumes five and six are another mixed bag: About half of the tracks are demos of songs you've already heard on XTC records, but only a few are worth listening to in this form: The skiffle version of "Dear God" beats the portentous final version, "Human Alchemy" has more nervous energy and a better bass line, "Earn Enough For Us" actually works better in a rougher, struggling demo. Diehards will enjoy the behind-the-scenes listen to the making of "Mermaid Smiling", on which Partridge mocks up the arrangement at home and finds ways to beat the back of his guitar or inject white noise as he imagines the orchestrations to come. But the miracle of modern home recording allows Partridge to simulate Nonsuch's "Rook" and "Omnibus" so completely that they mirror the final versions. And speaking of inessential, do we need these (unlistenable) demos from Big Express? I buy these collections for their new material, like Fuzzy Warbles 6's Nonsuch leftovers-- the dense lyrics of buttoned-up regret on "End Of the Pier" and the jumbled "Prince of Orange", on which the keyboard riff hits as unexpectedly as a broken seconds hand. "I Can't Tell What Truth Is Anymore" and "The Tiny Circus of Life" are solid XTC tracks, and the albums are also littered with perfect ideas in half-sturdy containers: images like "the angel that fell for me," from 5's "Defy You Gravity" deserve a more permanent home. The sixth volume, which begins and ends in laughter, has the smoothest sequencing and most consistent quality level of any Warbles collection so far. But 5 contains more revealing material, including mid-80s leftovers from Mummer, Big Express, and Skylarking. Those albums followed Partridge as he ditched the glitz and anxiety of touring to come home, and wrote more reflective songs about England, the challenge of supporting a family, and the pitfalls of marriage. On XTC's most famous record, Skylarking, he and Colin Moulding even pulled these themes into a song cycle about nothing less than the circle of life and death. But the castoffs are more intriguing. For all the songs Partridge has written about man's destruction of nature (see: Apple Venus Vol. 1), none spilled oil across more pastures than the clanking rhythms and WD-40 guitar on "Motorcycle Landscapes", with its seared riff and lyrics like, "Glued up youths in high spirits throw kittens on the fire/ And down molester alley, the stabbed all roll in bliss." By contrast, the lyrics of "Broomstick Rhythm" anticipate Skylarking's "Season Cycle", and the sweet melody describes Partridge's fall into the bliss of domesticity. Volume five actually starts with Partridge's finest rarity-- the Mummer reject "Young Cleopatra". It's an ecstatic portrait of a 14-year-old regent of the schoolyard, a kid who irresistably draws the boys to "be [her] dogs." The kids will do anything, the teachers can't look away, and Partridge shows the kind of love that lets parents pull one child out of the throng and call it special, when he sings, "Your school uniform looks grey on others but silver on you." When I first found the song, in an even rougher demo where you can't make out the lyrics, I actually thought Partridge was singing about his own daughter. Instead, he tells us that "I'm glad your father is my friend/ And now that school is at an end/ He's only an excuse for me to wait here at your palace gates." In that sense, this is a Lolita song. But it's also the purest Lolita song ever recorded. In spite of the reference to The Police's "Don't Stand So Close To Me", Partridge sings about the girl without lust: He's observing her from afar, celebrating her sexuality without molesting it, and what you hear in his voice is pride. And though I was wrong about his being the dad, the mistake makes more sense if you listen to the song that best complements this one-- Wasp Star's "Playground", on which his real daughter sings regal back-up vocals. If you spend enough time with Partridge's demos, you realize he's thrown away better songs than most people have written. He only doles out a few of them on each Warbles discs, but six discs in, it's still enough for fans to remain interested, try to figure out why he left them out, analyze what they can tell us about Partridge, and-- more than anything-- to play with them ourselves, at home, projecting our own song cycles onto these scraps.

Artist: Andy Partridge, Album: Fuzzy Warbles 5, Genre: Pop/R&B, Score (1-10): 6.6 Album review: "These two releases mark the halfway point of Andy Partridge's Fuzzy Warbles series, a self-released collection of b-sides, four-tracks, and castoffs from both his solo career and his days with XTC. Luckily, these two most recent volumes are as random a mess as the first four. Imagine if Andy Partridge had carefully curated these Warbles albums by theme, chronology, or quality instead of just digging them out from under his bed. As it is-- even though he saved us the work of snatching up cassettes, singles, and mp3s in order to collect all of this stuff-- die-hard XTC completists still have to slog through his scattered piles. Volumes five and six are another mixed bag: About half of the tracks are demos of songs you've already heard on XTC records, but only a few are worth listening to in this form: The skiffle version of "Dear God" beats the portentous final version, "Human Alchemy" has more nervous energy and a better bass line, "Earn Enough For Us" actually works better in a rougher, struggling demo. Diehards will enjoy the behind-the-scenes listen to the making of "Mermaid Smiling", on which Partridge mocks up the arrangement at home and finds ways to beat the back of his guitar or inject white noise as he imagines the orchestrations to come. But the miracle of modern home recording allows Partridge to simulate Nonsuch's "Rook" and "Omnibus" so completely that they mirror the final versions. And speaking of inessential, do we need these (unlistenable) demos from Big Express? I buy these collections for their new material, like Fuzzy Warbles 6's Nonsuch leftovers-- the dense lyrics of buttoned-up regret on "End Of the Pier" and the jumbled "Prince of Orange", on which the keyboard riff hits as unexpectedly as a broken seconds hand. "I Can't Tell What Truth Is Anymore" and "The Tiny Circus of Life" are solid XTC tracks, and the albums are also littered with perfect ideas in half-sturdy containers: images like "the angel that fell for me," from 5's "Defy You Gravity" deserve a more permanent home. The sixth volume, which begins and ends in laughter, has the smoothest sequencing and most consistent quality level of any Warbles collection so far. But 5 contains more revealing material, including mid-80s leftovers from Mummer, Big Express, and Skylarking. Those albums followed Partridge as he ditched the glitz and anxiety of touring to come home, and wrote more reflective songs about England, the challenge of supporting a family, and the pitfalls of marriage. On XTC's most famous record, Skylarking, he and Colin Moulding even pulled these themes into a song cycle about nothing less than the circle of life and death. But the castoffs are more intriguing. For all the songs Partridge has written about man's destruction of nature (see: Apple Venus Vol. 1), none spilled oil across more pastures than the clanking rhythms and WD-40 guitar on "Motorcycle Landscapes", with its seared riff and lyrics like, "Glued up youths in high spirits throw kittens on the fire/ And down molester alley, the stabbed all roll in bliss." By contrast, the lyrics of "Broomstick Rhythm" anticipate Skylarking's "Season Cycle", and the sweet melody describes Partridge's fall into the bliss of domesticity. Volume five actually starts with Partridge's finest rarity-- the Mummer reject "Young Cleopatra". It's an ecstatic portrait of a 14-year-old regent of the schoolyard, a kid who irresistably draws the boys to "be [her] dogs." The kids will do anything, the teachers can't look away, and Partridge shows the kind of love that lets parents pull one child out of the throng and call it special, when he sings, "Your school uniform looks grey on others but silver on you." When I first found the song, in an even rougher demo where you can't make out the lyrics, I actually thought Partridge was singing about his own daughter. Instead, he tells us that "I'm glad your father is my friend/ And now that school is at an end/ He's only an excuse for me to wait here at your palace gates." In that sense, this is a Lolita song. But it's also the purest Lolita song ever recorded. In spite of the reference to The Police's "Don't Stand So Close To Me", Partridge sings about the girl without lust: He's observing her from afar, celebrating her sexuality without molesting it, and what you hear in his voice is pride. And though I was wrong about his being the dad, the mistake makes more sense if you listen to the song that best complements this one-- Wasp Star's "Playground", on which his real daughter sings regal back-up vocals. If you spend enough time with Partridge's demos, you realize he's thrown away better songs than most people have written. He only doles out a few of them on each Warbles discs, but six discs in, it's still enough for fans to remain interested, try to figure out why he left them out, analyze what they can tell us about Partridge, and-- more than anything-- to play with them ourselves, at home, projecting our own song cycles onto these scraps."

AFI

AFI (The Blood Album)

Rock

Ian Cohen

Stick around long enough, and once-popular bands will experience a critical reassessment completely independent of their new music. To wit, AFI: their 2003 major-label debut went platinum in 2006 on the strength of teens now old enough to give Sing the Sorrow its due props as some kind of alt-rock masterpiece, one that unified Fuse-punks, emo theater kids, mall-goths, and glam metalheads in a food court flashmob. Tilt your ears a certain way and you can hear Sing the Sorrow’s echoes in contemporaries like Touché Amoré, White Lung, and Deafheaven. During their surprising 2014 Coachella appearance, a sizable crowd witnessed a limber, vigorous performance of their hits that attested to frontman Davey Havok’s wholesome lifestyle choices. And while it’s been over a decade since they’ve appealed to anyone outside their core audience, the same could be said of peers like Jimmy Eat World, Deftones, and even Taking Back Sunday, who all made vital additions to their catalogs in 2016. With a self-titled record whose artwork is a blatant callback to *Sing the Sorrow, *the timing could not be better for AFI’s similarly triumphant comeback. Instead, they just sorta came back. It’s a shame that *The Blood Album *missed the Vine era by three days, as it can be *very *seductive if you catch the right six-second frame: witness the call-and-response gang vocals that burst out of a very special goth episode of *High School Musical, *at least five choruses that scribble within the framework set by 2003’s “Girl’s Not Grey,” Havok’s “*do *try this in study hall” flights of poetry, the parts of Jade Puget’s solos that remind you that he has the name and the chops of a guy who’d have graced many a *Guitar World *cover in the ’90s. Of course, those parts are going to be awesome. You know what else is awesome? Pretty much everything about the video for “The Leaving Song Pt. 2”—the whole Prom of the Living Dead dress code, the capoeira/circle pit choreography, every *totally necessary *behind-the-back guitar twirl, the close-ups on Havok’s lip ring. This is a clip that *gets *AFI. If *The Blood Album *is going to convince anyone who’s checked out since “Miss Murder,” it needs to likewise feel like expert stunt work or at least “*The Crow *goes crossfit”—we all know when the chorus is gonna come, but Havok needs to bring in the chorus with a *roundhouse *kick. Still, at least half of The Blood Album’s songs feel virtually interchangeable and the other half sound like AFI wrote this stuff in the time it takes to play it. Even if all of the reflexively satisfying moments are consolidated into a highlight reel, that still leaves 40 minutes worth of custodial verses, downstroked basslines, and palm-muted chugging that never feel the need to justify their existence. When Havok’s words aren’t doused in purple highlighter, they’re exposed as basically meaningless, or, worse, like any Cure-inspired, vague song about introspection or sputtering relationships you can hear on any average indie rock record. “Am I coy enough? Am I boy enough?,” he whinges, and given that it slow dances to the same mannered waltz, “Snow Cats” could impart the blood oath devotion of “Silver and Cold” if delivered with any kind of flair or dynamics. Produced in-house with the assistance of KROQ-core vet Matt Hyde, nearly everything on *The Blood Album *plays at nearly the same exact drive-time volume and tempo. Maybe that was the point. On every album since their commercial heyday, AFI have tried to challenge diehards: *Crash Love *was a brazen *pop *record, while 2013’s *Burials *diversified their wardrobe. *The Blood Album *presumably promises some kind of “back to basics” operating principle, but it’s a “basics” that doesn’t serve them, let alone recall the pulpier early phase on which they made their name. AFI shouldn’t be expected to resurrect the late, great *Sing the Sorrow *producer Jerry Finn, nor do they need to hire Marc Webb to blow a video budget that no longer exists for bands like them. The Blood Album just isn’t allowed to be boring. If AFI wanted to reinvent themselves with streamlined and sober pop-rock, more power to them, but that’s not what *The Blood Album *does. There are still *those *moments that simultaneously speak to their strengths (“Hidden Knives”), but also bring up the question, why listen to AFI? This band doesn’t work in any specific musical genre so much as they do smeared-guyliner dramatics that never go out of style yet are in dire short supply right now, the developing of which is its own kind of craft. Without them, *The Blood Album *is virtually indistinguishable from any of the regrettably-fronted pop-metalcore bands playing in threes at a House of Blues near you. Perhaps it’s all worth it if *The Blood Album *spurs a rejuvenated interest in *Sing the Sorrow *and *Black Sails on the Sunset, *but the triumphant return of AFI is still ready when they are.

Artist: AFI, Album: AFI (The Blood Album), Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 5.0 Album review: "Stick around long enough, and once-popular bands will experience a critical reassessment completely independent of their new music. To wit, AFI: their 2003 major-label debut went platinum in 2006 on the strength of teens now old enough to give Sing the Sorrow its due props as some kind of alt-rock masterpiece, one that unified Fuse-punks, emo theater kids, mall-goths, and glam metalheads in a food court flashmob. Tilt your ears a certain way and you can hear Sing the Sorrow’s echoes in contemporaries like Touché Amoré, White Lung, and Deafheaven. During their surprising 2014 Coachella appearance, a sizable crowd witnessed a limber, vigorous performance of their hits that attested to frontman Davey Havok’s wholesome lifestyle choices. And while it’s been over a decade since they’ve appealed to anyone outside their core audience, the same could be said of peers like Jimmy Eat World, Deftones, and even Taking Back Sunday, who all made vital additions to their catalogs in 2016. With a self-titled record whose artwork is a blatant callback to *Sing the Sorrow, *the timing could not be better for AFI’s similarly triumphant comeback. Instead, they just sorta came back. It’s a shame that *The Blood Album *missed the Vine era by three days, as it can be *very *seductive if you catch the right six-second frame: witness the call-and-response gang vocals that burst out of a very special goth episode of *High School Musical, *at least five choruses that scribble within the framework set by 2003’s “Girl’s Not Grey,” Havok’s “*do *try this in study hall” flights of poetry, the parts of Jade Puget’s solos that remind you that he has the name and the chops of a guy who’d have graced many a *Guitar World *cover in the ’90s. Of course, those parts are going to be awesome. You know what else is awesome? Pretty much everything about the video for “The Leaving Song Pt. 2”—the whole Prom of the Living Dead dress code, the capoeira/circle pit choreography, every *totally necessary *behind-the-back guitar twirl, the close-ups on Havok’s lip ring. This is a clip that *gets *AFI. If *The Blood Album *is going to convince anyone who’s checked out since “Miss Murder,” it needs to likewise feel like expert stunt work or at least “*The Crow *goes crossfit”—we all know when the chorus is gonna come, but Havok needs to bring in the chorus with a *roundhouse *kick. Still, at least half of The Blood Album’s songs feel virtually interchangeable and the other half sound like AFI wrote this stuff in the time it takes to play it. Even if all of the reflexively satisfying moments are consolidated into a highlight reel, that still leaves 40 minutes worth of custodial verses, downstroked basslines, and palm-muted chugging that never feel the need to justify their existence. When Havok’s words aren’t doused in purple highlighter, they’re exposed as basically meaningless, or, worse, like any Cure-inspired, vague song about introspection or sputtering relationships you can hear on any average indie rock record. “Am I coy enough? Am I boy enough?,” he whinges, and given that it slow dances to the same mannered waltz, “Snow Cats” could impart the blood oath devotion of “Silver and Cold” if delivered with any kind of flair or dynamics. Produced in-house with the assistance of KROQ-core vet Matt Hyde, nearly everything on *The Blood Album *plays at nearly the same exact drive-time volume and tempo. Maybe that was the point. On every album since their commercial heyday, AFI have tried to challenge diehards: *Crash Love *was a brazen *pop *record, while 2013’s *Burials *diversified their wardrobe. *The Blood Album *presumably promises some kind of “back to basics” operating principle, but it’s a “basics” that doesn’t serve them, let alone recall the pulpier early phase on which they made their name. AFI shouldn’t be expected to resurrect the late, great *Sing the Sorrow *producer Jerry Finn, nor do they need to hire Marc Webb to blow a video budget that no longer exists for bands like them. The Blood Album just isn’t allowed to be boring. If AFI wanted to reinvent themselves with streamlined and sober pop-rock, more power to them, but that’s not what *The Blood Album *does. There are still *those *moments that simultaneously speak to their strengths (“Hidden Knives”), but also bring up the question, why listen to AFI? This band doesn’t work in any specific musical genre so much as they do smeared-guyliner dramatics that never go out of style yet are in dire short supply right now, the developing of which is its own kind of craft. Without them, *The Blood Album *is virtually indistinguishable from any of the regrettably-fronted pop-metalcore bands playing in threes at a House of Blues near you. Perhaps it’s all worth it if *The Blood Album *spurs a rejuvenated interest in *Sing the Sorrow *and *Black Sails on the Sunset, *but the triumphant return of AFI is still ready when they are."

Mazzy Star

Seasons of Your Day

Rock

Mark Richardson

Mazzy Star went away in 1996 and even a few years ago there was no reason to think they would return. They made three very solid records that explored a small handful of musical ideas and those records seemed to say all the group had to to say. In that sense (and a few others—both were on Rough Trade in 1991), they bring to mind Galaxie 500, another band that created slow, expansive, and gorgeously atmospheric music. In each case, their brief arc was complete; for anyone interested in that Mazzy Star feeling, She Hangs Brightly, So Tonight That I Might See, and Among My Swan were still there, ready to provide a distinctive mix of of psych-tinged folk, blues, Laurel Canyon glide, and Hope Sandoval’s captivating voice, which expressed hushed, lean-in intimacy and aloof distance simultaneously. In the years since, the sound of those albums proved surprisingly influential, though in an appropriately small-scale way, and that influence crested in the last few years. Mazzy Star may have benefited retroactively from a renewed interest in the darkly sexy side of David Lynch’s aesthetic; their first three records captured that feeling perfectly and artists from Beach House to Widowspeak to Lana Del Rey have offered variations on that particular theme. But they did come back, and unlike recent records from other bands that made their names in the 1980s and 90s, they haven’t lost a thing in the interim. Seasons of Your Day is so faithful to Mazzy Star’s established sound and is rendered so perfectly that it’s almost hard to believe. There is no sign of age or intrusion of an additional influence; if word emerged that this record was actually recorded in 1997, a year after the release of Among My Swan, there would be no reason to doubt it. The tone and phrasing of Sandoval’s voice are exactly where we left them when Bill Clinton was seeking a second term as President. The slide guitar, brushed drums, and tambourine hits are all recorded beautifully, and there is enough space around every element to suggest a lack of sonic trickery. David Roback, Mazzy Star’s musical driving force and a veteran of 1980s L.A. bands from Rain Parade to Opal, hasn’t been in the public eye since Among My Swan, but whatever he’s been up to, he remembers how to make a record sound good and how to write simple and effective chord changes. The craftsmanship of the songs—their mix of longing, weary resignation, and dusty cracks of sunlight—remains at a high level. To hear this Mazzy Star record is to understand why the modest and enjoyable Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions never really took off; Roback studied the work of Lou Reed, Neil Young, and Jagger/Richards in their prime, and he’s retained those lessons all these years later. The reverb forming a halo around Sandoval’s voice on “California” is warm and haunted, Roback’s guitar tone on “Common Burn” is impossibly lonesome and beautiful, and the acoustic slide imparting a sense of “Wild Horses” blusiness on “Sparrow” and “Does Someone Have Your Baby Now” cuts through yawning canyons of silence. The record is sonically impressive in an elemental way, and the songs are memorable and distinct. But if Mazzy Star have done amazingly well bringing back their initial sound and spirit, they also haven’t done anything to transcend its limitations. As gorgeous as the music can be, it still tends to work best in the background, a mood or vibe to give a dim room a nice tint. “Fade Into You”, their one hit and the only song most of the world has heard by them, with its “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” progression and pronounced romantic ache, did manage to connect with a lot of people on a deeply emotional level, but that wasn't necessarily the point of Mazzy Star as a whole. There was always some remove to the project, a certain formalism; still, to my ear, none of these qualities detract from what makes Mazzy Star so listenable and appealing. Those first three albums have always been easy to put on and enjoy, and now we have a fourth to go with them.

Artist: Mazzy Star, Album: Seasons of Your Day, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.8 Album review: "Mazzy Star went away in 1996 and even a few years ago there was no reason to think they would return. They made three very solid records that explored a small handful of musical ideas and those records seemed to say all the group had to to say. In that sense (and a few others—both were on Rough Trade in 1991), they bring to mind Galaxie 500, another band that created slow, expansive, and gorgeously atmospheric music. In each case, their brief arc was complete; for anyone interested in that Mazzy Star feeling, She Hangs Brightly, So Tonight That I Might See, and Among My Swan were still there, ready to provide a distinctive mix of of psych-tinged folk, blues, Laurel Canyon glide, and Hope Sandoval’s captivating voice, which expressed hushed, lean-in intimacy and aloof distance simultaneously. In the years since, the sound of those albums proved surprisingly influential, though in an appropriately small-scale way, and that influence crested in the last few years. Mazzy Star may have benefited retroactively from a renewed interest in the darkly sexy side of David Lynch’s aesthetic; their first three records captured that feeling perfectly and artists from Beach House to Widowspeak to Lana Del Rey have offered variations on that particular theme. But they did come back, and unlike recent records from other bands that made their names in the 1980s and 90s, they haven’t lost a thing in the interim. Seasons of Your Day is so faithful to Mazzy Star’s established sound and is rendered so perfectly that it’s almost hard to believe. There is no sign of age or intrusion of an additional influence; if word emerged that this record was actually recorded in 1997, a year after the release of Among My Swan, there would be no reason to doubt it. The tone and phrasing of Sandoval’s voice are exactly where we left them when Bill Clinton was seeking a second term as President. The slide guitar, brushed drums, and tambourine hits are all recorded beautifully, and there is enough space around every element to suggest a lack of sonic trickery. David Roback, Mazzy Star’s musical driving force and a veteran of 1980s L.A. bands from Rain Parade to Opal, hasn’t been in the public eye since Among My Swan, but whatever he’s been up to, he remembers how to make a record sound good and how to write simple and effective chord changes. The craftsmanship of the songs—their mix of longing, weary resignation, and dusty cracks of sunlight—remains at a high level. To hear this Mazzy Star record is to understand why the modest and enjoyable Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions never really took off; Roback studied the work of Lou Reed, Neil Young, and Jagger/Richards in their prime, and he’s retained those lessons all these years later. The reverb forming a halo around Sandoval’s voice on “California” is warm and haunted, Roback’s guitar tone on “Common Burn” is impossibly lonesome and beautiful, and the acoustic slide imparting a sense of “Wild Horses” blusiness on “Sparrow” and “Does Someone Have Your Baby Now” cuts through yawning canyons of silence. The record is sonically impressive in an elemental way, and the songs are memorable and distinct. But if Mazzy Star have done amazingly well bringing back their initial sound and spirit, they also haven’t done anything to transcend its limitations. As gorgeous as the music can be, it still tends to work best in the background, a mood or vibe to give a dim room a nice tint. “Fade Into You”, their one hit and the only song most of the world has heard by them, with its “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” progression and pronounced romantic ache, did manage to connect with a lot of people on a deeply emotional level, but that wasn't necessarily the point of Mazzy Star as a whole. There was always some remove to the project, a certain formalism; still, to my ear, none of these qualities detract from what makes Mazzy Star so listenable and appealing. Those first three albums have always been easy to put on and enjoy, and now we have a fourth to go with them."

Guillemots

Walk the River

Rock

Marc Hogan

In a recent video, Guillemots lead singer Fyfe Dangerfield and drummer Greig Stewart play live "in a little woodland, by a disused railway line" in north London. Wrens and robins chirp. Standing against a graffiti-emblazoned gray brick wall, the scruffily bearded Dangerfield strums an acoustic guitar casually, almost haphazardly. Stewart, wearing a pair of white-rimmed shades you might see on one of Biff's henchmen in Back to the Future, runs his drumstick along the bars of an iron gate-- gently, almost tenderly. Dangerfield's formidable falsetto soars through the space's cavernous reverb, dexterously communicating heartache. If you're in the right mood, it can be powerful stuff: an affecting mix of traditional earnestness and experimental impulses. This uneasy balance between balladeer sentimentality and avant-garde adventurousness runs through the Guillemots' discography. On 2006 debut Through the Windowpane, which earned the four-piece a Mercury Music Prize nomination, these competing urges resolved themselves gloriously in songs like fragile opener "Little Bear", romantic ode "Made-Up Lovesong #43", and northern soul shimmy "Trains to Brazil". But 2008's Red meandered through ambitious yet unremarkable Britpop. And Dangerfield's 2009 solo nod, Fly Yellow Moon, suggested the band's schmaltzy side had conquered all. Never mind that Billy Joel cover: Walk the River shows Guillemots still have a few eccentricities up their sleeves, though they remain a long way from their mid-2000s peak. Guillemots' third album is mournful, lushly arranged, and conflicted as ever about whether it wants to be singer-songwriter comfort food or forward-thinking pop. The song from the video, "I Don't Feel Amazing Now", feels overdone, muddling its unspectacular, melancholy lyrics with the full studio gamut of strings and choral backing vocals. But first single "The Basket" is a lot more effective, simultaneously a cryptic love song ("You knock me over/ Come on and do it again") and a propulsive, kaleidoscopic assault on a culture where there's "a masterpiece that no one bothered painting/ Everybody's too busy with those baskets of theirs." Think of a grown-up Supergrass (there's theremin). The ominously ornamented title track is a sample-ready testament of survival, while the electronic sunshine of "I Must Be a Lover" offers a needed break from all the gloom. For a band that once stood out for its too-much-ness, Walk the River now gives us too much of the wrong things: too many midtempo songs, too many minor-key acoustic strums, too many codas that outstay their welcome without really connecting. But Stewart's bustling drum work, MC Lord Magrão's rippling guitar, and Aristazabal Hawkes' sensuous bass-- even Dangerfield's supple voice, which might suit the band's namesake seabird-- ensure there's something interesting happening beneath even the most mawkish sentiment or the baggiest quasi-epic. Just not always something particularly new or vital, the way Through the Windowpane and its predecessor EP felt. That woodland video comes closest so far, so maybe the fresh air will do them some good.

Artist: Guillemots, Album: Walk the River, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 5.9 Album review: "In a recent video, Guillemots lead singer Fyfe Dangerfield and drummer Greig Stewart play live "in a little woodland, by a disused railway line" in north London. Wrens and robins chirp. Standing against a graffiti-emblazoned gray brick wall, the scruffily bearded Dangerfield strums an acoustic guitar casually, almost haphazardly. Stewart, wearing a pair of white-rimmed shades you might see on one of Biff's henchmen in Back to the Future, runs his drumstick along the bars of an iron gate-- gently, almost tenderly. Dangerfield's formidable falsetto soars through the space's cavernous reverb, dexterously communicating heartache. If you're in the right mood, it can be powerful stuff: an affecting mix of traditional earnestness and experimental impulses. This uneasy balance between balladeer sentimentality and avant-garde adventurousness runs through the Guillemots' discography. On 2006 debut Through the Windowpane, which earned the four-piece a Mercury Music Prize nomination, these competing urges resolved themselves gloriously in songs like fragile opener "Little Bear", romantic ode "Made-Up Lovesong #43", and northern soul shimmy "Trains to Brazil". But 2008's Red meandered through ambitious yet unremarkable Britpop. And Dangerfield's 2009 solo nod, Fly Yellow Moon, suggested the band's schmaltzy side had conquered all. Never mind that Billy Joel cover: Walk the River shows Guillemots still have a few eccentricities up their sleeves, though they remain a long way from their mid-2000s peak. Guillemots' third album is mournful, lushly arranged, and conflicted as ever about whether it wants to be singer-songwriter comfort food or forward-thinking pop. The song from the video, "I Don't Feel Amazing Now", feels overdone, muddling its unspectacular, melancholy lyrics with the full studio gamut of strings and choral backing vocals. But first single "The Basket" is a lot more effective, simultaneously a cryptic love song ("You knock me over/ Come on and do it again") and a propulsive, kaleidoscopic assault on a culture where there's "a masterpiece that no one bothered painting/ Everybody's too busy with those baskets of theirs." Think of a grown-up Supergrass (there's theremin). The ominously ornamented title track is a sample-ready testament of survival, while the electronic sunshine of "I Must Be a Lover" offers a needed break from all the gloom. For a band that once stood out for its too-much-ness, Walk the River now gives us too much of the wrong things: too many midtempo songs, too many minor-key acoustic strums, too many codas that outstay their welcome without really connecting. But Stewart's bustling drum work, MC Lord Magrão's rippling guitar, and Aristazabal Hawkes' sensuous bass-- even Dangerfield's supple voice, which might suit the band's namesake seabird-- ensure there's something interesting happening beneath even the most mawkish sentiment or the baggiest quasi-epic. Just not always something particularly new or vital, the way Through the Windowpane and its predecessor EP felt. That woodland video comes closest so far, so maybe the fresh air will do them some good."

Erykah Badu

Mama’s Gun

Pop/R&B

Daphne A. Brooks

From the moment Prince’s party ran out of time and the ball dropped in Times Square to signal a new millennium, people were waiting. They were waiting in the wee moments of the new year for ominous, Y2K catastrophe to hit, for worldwide web grids to collapse, for large scale chaos of another order to afflict the globe. That the calamity didn’t drop in the form of a Roland Emmerich summer blockbuster sparked an initial sigh of relief. But the phenomenon of collective waiting—to see whether the recent impeachment of a president would lead to the end of the Clinton good-times era, to see whether the courts would order the family of six-year-old Elian Gonzalez to return him to Cuba across the Cold War divide, to see whether the officers who fired 41 shots into unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo would do any time at all, to see whether hanging chads would tip the balance of a presidential election—all that waiting would roll out across the entire year in waves of succession. Long spells of anxiety and watchfulness would punctuate the year 2000, a pivotal period that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle when trying to pinpoint the origins of new millennium unrest and epic uncertainty. When she stepped into New York’s historic Electric Lady studios in 1999 and began recording her much-anticipated sophomore album, Erykah Badu had her finger to the wind. The tracks she was laying down extended what had quickly become her trademark vibe: that of deep-groove tarrying, wrestling with time, pushing up against and pulling at the beat but also lingering in the pocket while delivering pithy observations about temporal lag and the will to move. Her music brimmed with the suggestion—albeit a conflicted one—to wait for it. “On & On,” Badu’s breakthrough single from her 1997 smash debut Baduizm, became an anthem for this kind of indelible, cool-breeze, fitfulness. “Oh my my my I’m feeling high,” she sings with the distinct horn-like phrasings that brought Billie Holiday comparisons, “my money’s gone, I’m all alone/The world keeps turning…” It all came together in Badu’s sound and style: the image of a sister who couldn’t be bothered, who couldn’t care less about the time (“I think I need a cup of tea…”), yet who simultaneously recognized and paid reverence to black time, that which is past and that which is still to come. Her many references to the Five Percent Nation and Afrocentric cosmologies on Baduizm announced the arrival of new black nationalist soul, steeped in astrologically configured wisdom (“My cypher keeps moving like a rolling stone”) and headed toward an Afrofuturist destination to be determined. To be rooted in the here and now while also resolutely and speculatively elsewhere—this was Erykah Badu’s distinct gambit early in her career. But Mama’s Gun turned an important page as she set out to pair songs that evoked the art of exquisite and romantically-charged lingering and hanging (the “urban hang suite,” as Maxwell would call it on his own debut album from 1996) alongside songs about being fed up with stasis, isolation, restriction and aborted dreams. In contrast to Baduizm, Mama’s Gun offers a more pointed, sustained, and grounded statement about what it means to get tired of waiting out and wading through the wretchedness of urban blight, the perpetual threat of police brutality and lethal force, the baggage from bad relationships and the sometimes oppressive voices inside one’s own head. Those voices open the record’s first side in a cacophony of whispers as Badu admonishes herself about a laundry-list of unfinished tasks, nagging fears, and floating enigmas swirling through her mind (“I have to write a song… I have to remember to turn on the oven… warm up the apartment… Malcolm… Malcolm… I need to take my vitamin”). What cuts through the noise is a burst of sonic muscle—pure soul energy compressed into 10 initial seconds: the joyful ensemble (Chinah Blac and YahZarah) bellowing in Rufus-meets-Brand New Heavies unison as longtime collaborators Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson on drums, James Poyser on piano, Pino Palladino on bass, and Jeff Lee Johnson on guitar lay down a robust opening riff that sounds definitive and defiant. The opening moments of Mama’s Gun sound much less like anything off of Badu’s first record and instead resonate unmistakably in the vein of two other releases from earlier that year, Common’s fourth studio album, Like Water for Chocolate, and D’Angelo’s game-changing Voodoo. All three albums were recorded simultaneously at Electric Lady. All three benefitted from the skilled hand of legendary engineer Russell Elevado, who mixed each LP and drew on vintage recording techniques to evoke the ghosts of venerable albums past. And most crucially, all three featured MVP player Questlove acting improvisationally at the center of an alternative black pop universe at the turn of the millennium, one with clearly nostalgic tenets that nonetheless held fast to present communal concerns and future Wonder-inflected aspirations. This was neo soul at arguably its most prolific and thrilling moment of growth and possibility. Innovated by black Gen-Xers who ardently valued and sought to revive their parents’ and their older siblings’ music and the albums that soundtracked their childhood, neo soul runs best on a seductive combination of cultural nostalgia, black solidarity dreams, and the will to couple sensually with an ideal partner while paying attention (somewhat but not always) to the politics of gender equality. And the list of remarkable artists who broke onto the scene alongside of Badu working this sound in the year of and leading up to 2000 underscores what a busy, passionate, and productive time it was. From 1993, when Me’shell NdegéOcello stepped out ahead of everyone with Plantation Lullabies on Madonna’s Maverick label to D’Angelo’s 1995 first effort Brown Sugar (often erroneously referred to as the first in the genre) a year later to Maxwell’s debut (Urban Hang Suite) to Lauryn Hill’s insta-classic Miseducation in ’98 to oddball soulster Macy Gray’s one-hit smash On How Life Is in ’99, to the year 2000 when Jill Scott made her first LP (Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Volume I), these were exciting times when black singer-songwriter musicians were referencing Black Panther memoirs, African-American Studies history books, and deep cuts from reluctant soul icons like Bill Withers. In the days after Voodoo dropped into the world, New York Times critic Ben Ratliff would famously describe the genre as “a mature music, and a family music, for living rooms, rather than

Artist: Erykah Badu, Album: Mama’s Gun, Genre: Pop/R&B, Score (1-10): 9.4 Album review: "From the moment Prince’s party ran out of time and the ball dropped in Times Square to signal a new millennium, people were waiting. They were waiting in the wee moments of the new year for ominous, Y2K catastrophe to hit, for worldwide web grids to collapse, for large scale chaos of another order to afflict the globe. That the calamity didn’t drop in the form of a Roland Emmerich summer blockbuster sparked an initial sigh of relief. But the phenomenon of collective waiting—to see whether the recent impeachment of a president would lead to the end of the Clinton good-times era, to see whether the courts would order the family of six-year-old Elian Gonzalez to return him to Cuba across the Cold War divide, to see whether the officers who fired 41 shots into unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo would do any time at all, to see whether hanging chads would tip the balance of a presidential election—all that waiting would roll out across the entire year in waves of succession. Long spells of anxiety and watchfulness would punctuate the year 2000, a pivotal period that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle when trying to pinpoint the origins of new millennium unrest and epic uncertainty. When she stepped into New York’s historic Electric Lady studios in 1999 and began recording her much-anticipated sophomore album, Erykah Badu had her finger to the wind. The tracks she was laying down extended what had quickly become her trademark vibe: that of deep-groove tarrying, wrestling with time, pushing up against and pulling at the beat but also lingering in the pocket while delivering pithy observations about temporal lag and the will to move. Her music brimmed with the suggestion—albeit a conflicted one—to wait for it. “On & On,” Badu’s breakthrough single from her 1997 smash debut Baduizm, became an anthem for this kind of indelible, cool-breeze, fitfulness. “Oh my my my I’m feeling high,” she sings with the distinct horn-like phrasings that brought Billie Holiday comparisons, “my money’s gone, I’m all alone/The world keeps turning…” It all came together in Badu’s sound and style: the image of a sister who couldn’t be bothered, who couldn’t care less about the time (“I think I need a cup of tea…”), yet who simultaneously recognized and paid reverence to black time, that which is past and that which is still to come. Her many references to the Five Percent Nation and Afrocentric cosmologies on Baduizm announced the arrival of new black nationalist soul, steeped in astrologically configured wisdom (“My cypher keeps moving like a rolling stone”) and headed toward an Afrofuturist destination to be determined. To be rooted in the here and now while also resolutely and speculatively elsewhere—this was Erykah Badu’s distinct gambit early in her career. But Mama’s Gun turned an important page as she set out to pair songs that evoked the art of exquisite and romantically-charged lingering and hanging (the “urban hang suite,” as Maxwell would call it on his own debut album from 1996) alongside songs about being fed up with stasis, isolation, restriction and aborted dreams. In contrast to Baduizm, Mama’s Gun offers a more pointed, sustained, and grounded statement about what it means to get tired of waiting out and wading through the wretchedness of urban blight, the perpetual threat of police brutality and lethal force, the baggage from bad relationships and the sometimes oppressive voices inside one’s own head. Those voices open the record’s first side in a cacophony of whispers as Badu admonishes herself about a laundry-list of unfinished tasks, nagging fears, and floating enigmas swirling through her mind (“I have to write a song… I have to remember to turn on the oven… warm up the apartment… Malcolm… Malcolm… I need to take my vitamin”). What cuts through the noise is a burst of sonic muscle—pure soul energy compressed into 10 initial seconds: the joyful ensemble (Chinah Blac and YahZarah) bellowing in Rufus-meets-Brand New Heavies unison as longtime collaborators Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson on drums, James Poyser on piano, Pino Palladino on bass, and Jeff Lee Johnson on guitar lay down a robust opening riff that sounds definitive and defiant. The opening moments of Mama’s Gun sound much less like anything off of Badu’s first record and instead resonate unmistakably in the vein of two other releases from earlier that year, Common’s fourth studio album, Like Water for Chocolate, and D’Angelo’s game-changing Voodoo. All three albums were recorded simultaneously at Electric Lady. All three benefitted from the skilled hand of legendary engineer Russell Elevado, who mixed each LP and drew on vintage recording techniques to evoke the ghosts of venerable albums past. And most crucially, all three featured MVP player Questlove acting improvisationally at the center of an alternative black pop universe at the turn of the millennium, one with clearly nostalgic tenets that nonetheless held fast to present communal concerns and future Wonder-inflected aspirations. This was neo soul at arguably its most prolific and thrilling moment of growth and possibility. Innovated by black Gen-Xers who ardently valued and sought to revive their parents’ and their older siblings’ music and the albums that soundtracked their childhood, neo soul runs best on a seductive combination of cultural nostalgia, black solidarity dreams, and the will to couple sensually with an ideal partner while paying attention (somewhat but not always) to the politics of gender equality. And the list of remarkable artists who broke onto the scene alongside of Badu working this sound in the year of and leading up to 2000 underscores what a busy, passionate, and productive time it was. From 1993, when Me’shell NdegéOcello stepped out ahead of everyone with Plantation Lullabies on Madonna’s Maverick label to D’Angelo’s 1995 first effort Brown Sugar (often erroneously referred to as the first in the genre) a year later to Maxwell’s debut (Urban Hang Suite) to Lauryn Hill’s insta-classic Miseducation in ’98 to oddball soulster Macy Gray’s one-hit smash On How Life Is in ’99, to the year 2000 when Jill Scott made her first LP (Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Volume I), these were exciting times when black singer-songwriter musicians were referencing Black Panther memoirs, African-American Studies history books, and deep cuts from reluctant soul icons like Bill Withers. In the days after Voodoo dropped into the world, New York Times critic Ben Ratliff would famously describe the genre as “a mature music, and a family music, for living rooms, rather than"

Sam Prekop

Old Punch Card

Electronic

Mark Richardson

In January 2007 Sam Prekop talked to Pitchfork about an upcoming album by the Sea and Cake, the Chicago band he fronts. He also mentioned that someday he wanted to make an electronic record inspired in part by Plux Quba, an obscure late-1980s album by Portuguese composer Nuno Canavarro that got a second life when it was reissued a decade later by Jim O'Rourke's Mokai imprint. "That's the high-water mark, in my opinion, of electronic music," Prekop said. "It's a really delicate, beautiful, and really weird record." I can remember reading that quote and getting excited. Plux Quba is indeed a very special record that is also hard to pin down, and it's a good feeling when you find out that someone else hears what you were hearing in an album-- especially one that never really got around. A record inspired by Plux Quba was promising to say the least. Three years later, Prekop returns with Old Punch Card, an instrumental album that's very different from his two song-based solo records. Whether or not this is the album Prekop was thinking about in early 2007, to my ears it shares a spirit with Plux Quba and brings with it some of the same slippery qualities. In describing the record, it's easier to begin with what it's not: It's almost all electronic, but it's not drone, not really ambient, and doesn't conform to the structures of pop. It's not cinematic, not minimal, and not focused on the sound of technology as an end in itself. It's an album that thrives in the gaps between established categories, with music that can come over as cool and cerebral or tinged with longing and melancholy, depending on what the listener brings to it. Though it is abstract, Old Punch Card is playful. It's like the sound of a guy bumping around in a room filled with weird noisemakers, trying out one and then another until he finds one that sounds especially interesting. At which point he sticks with it for a while to see what it does and what sort of feelings might be coaxed out of it. So the first three minutes of a track called "Array Wicket" consist of static and a warbly organ line that doesn't go anywhere in particular, and then in the last two a pulsing synthesizer line out of an early Tangerine Dream record comes marching through, conveying something sonically clear and direct in contrast to earlier ambiguity. These sharp movements from one sound to the next happen a lot on Old Punch Card, but the overall effect is soothing rather than jarring. There are passages of quiet noise, retro-sounding sequencers, indiscernible electronics that sound vaguely like broken music boxes, bits of guitar. A mood of thoughtful contemplation mixed with blurry flecks of sadness and joy is maintained throughout. Since the music on Old Punch Card isn't trying to do anything in particular and the rules of composition are pretty loose, the guiding principle seems to be to maintain a careful sense of balance that reinforces the music's curious Zen-like character. Prekop is also a painter, and you can imagine these pieces being assembled like canvases-- this one needs a little color in this corner, maybe, and that one could use a little more prickly texture in the center. The subtle and seemingly simple music that comes from such an approach is easy to overlook, and it's not going to appeal to everyone. But it can also lead to records like Plux Quba, records you can return to for years and never get tired of, in part because you can never quite "solve" them. I'm hearing some of that open-ended mystery in Old Punch Card; we'll see what it grows into.

Artist: Sam Prekop, Album: Old Punch Card, Genre: Electronic, Score (1-10): 7.6 Album review: "In January 2007 Sam Prekop talked to Pitchfork about an upcoming album by the Sea and Cake, the Chicago band he fronts. He also mentioned that someday he wanted to make an electronic record inspired in part by Plux Quba, an obscure late-1980s album by Portuguese composer Nuno Canavarro that got a second life when it was reissued a decade later by Jim O'Rourke's Mokai imprint. "That's the high-water mark, in my opinion, of electronic music," Prekop said. "It's a really delicate, beautiful, and really weird record." I can remember reading that quote and getting excited. Plux Quba is indeed a very special record that is also hard to pin down, and it's a good feeling when you find out that someone else hears what you were hearing in an album-- especially one that never really got around. A record inspired by Plux Quba was promising to say the least. Three years later, Prekop returns with Old Punch Card, an instrumental album that's very different from his two song-based solo records. Whether or not this is the album Prekop was thinking about in early 2007, to my ears it shares a spirit with Plux Quba and brings with it some of the same slippery qualities. In describing the record, it's easier to begin with what it's not: It's almost all electronic, but it's not drone, not really ambient, and doesn't conform to the structures of pop. It's not cinematic, not minimal, and not focused on the sound of technology as an end in itself. It's an album that thrives in the gaps between established categories, with music that can come over as cool and cerebral or tinged with longing and melancholy, depending on what the listener brings to it. Though it is abstract, Old Punch Card is playful. It's like the sound of a guy bumping around in a room filled with weird noisemakers, trying out one and then another until he finds one that sounds especially interesting. At which point he sticks with it for a while to see what it does and what sort of feelings might be coaxed out of it. So the first three minutes of a track called "Array Wicket" consist of static and a warbly organ line that doesn't go anywhere in particular, and then in the last two a pulsing synthesizer line out of an early Tangerine Dream record comes marching through, conveying something sonically clear and direct in contrast to earlier ambiguity. These sharp movements from one sound to the next happen a lot on Old Punch Card, but the overall effect is soothing rather than jarring. There are passages of quiet noise, retro-sounding sequencers, indiscernible electronics that sound vaguely like broken music boxes, bits of guitar. A mood of thoughtful contemplation mixed with blurry flecks of sadness and joy is maintained throughout. Since the music on Old Punch Card isn't trying to do anything in particular and the rules of composition are pretty loose, the guiding principle seems to be to maintain a careful sense of balance that reinforces the music's curious Zen-like character. Prekop is also a painter, and you can imagine these pieces being assembled like canvases-- this one needs a little color in this corner, maybe, and that one could use a little more prickly texture in the center. The subtle and seemingly simple music that comes from such an approach is easy to overlook, and it's not going to appeal to everyone. But it can also lead to records like Plux Quba, records you can return to for years and never get tired of, in part because you can never quite "solve" them. I'm hearing some of that open-ended mystery in Old Punch Card; we'll see what it grows into."

Wire

The Black Session: Paris, 10 May 2011

Rock

Douglas Wolk

Thirty-five years into their start-and-stop career, Wire are not short on live albums. This is the 15th they've released since 2004 through their own Pinkflag imprint, covering all three incarnations of the band: the brittle, brainy punks who hurtled artward from 1976 to 1980, the poppy, brainy "beat-combo" that branched out toward both alternative radio tunes and monomaniacal hammer-drone from 1985 to 1992, and the tough, brainy old guys who reconvened in 2000 and have been bearing down hard ever since. But the only really significant live Wire discs are the out-of-print Document and Eyewitness-- a bootleg-quality set centered on an abrasive 1980 gig that featured almost entirely new material-- and 1989's It's Beginning to and Back Again, which was so heavily reworked in the studio that it's barely a live album at all. That shortlist hasn't changed with the new addition to the pile. The formal distinction of The Black Session is that it's the first recording to feature Wire's most recent stage lineup. (For those who haven't been following closely, founding guitarist Bruce Gilbert left in the mid-2000s; Margaret Fielder McGinnis of Laika replaced him on tour for a few years, and, since 2010, Matt Simms has augmented the remaining trio of original members on tour.) The days when Wire would turn up for gigs with a set of material the audience had never heard before, or save the throwbacks for the encore, are behind them. At this gig, they run through the better part of 2011's Red Barked Tree, basically ignore everything else from the past 24 years except for 2002's hardcore-velocity "Comet", and toss in a couple of old favorites. It's particularly unsettling to hear "Map Ref. 41ºN 93ºW", one of their most precisely constructed studio singles, in a sloppy garage-band rendition-- metronomic drummer Robert Grey struggles to keep the tempo steady, and singer/guitarist Colin Newman sounds uncomfortably exposed when nobody joins him for harmonies on the chorus. The final encore is one that rejoined their repertoire in 2000 and stayed there: "Pink Flag", with its original two-chord structure replaced by a single blaring E chord at which they hammer for seven minutes or so until it disintegrates into end-of-show chaos. For Wirephiles, the value of The Black Session is the live treatments of the Red Barked Tree tracks. As elegantly textured as that album was, it also sounded reserved and unconvinced in places, and tried to pass off some old Wire ideas as new ones. These versions have more fire and bite to them, even on slow numbers like "Down to This" and "Adapt", and the band has rearranged "Clay" to not sound quite so much like a faint carbon copy of 1978's "I Am the Fly". There's no getting over the resemblance of "Moreover" to Wire's 1979 single "A Question of Degree", but it's mostly an excuse for them to stomp hard, and for Simms and Newman to contrast a tightly wound little riff with a high-pressure spray of noise. In the context of Wire's catalog, this is just another document of incremental change, and not even the best live recording they've made lately (that would be their gorgeous Daytrotter session from 2008). Still, if this were the only Wire record in existence-- a debut album by a new quartet, three of them in their late 50s, captured live on French radio-- it'd be bracingly new even in 2012, an original take on punk minimalism, guitar sound, singing technique, tunefulness vs. dissonance, and so on. "My God! They're so gifted!" Newman yells in "Two People in a Room", and as usual he could be referring to himself and his collaborators.

Artist: Wire, Album: The Black Session: Paris, 10 May 2011, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 6.3 Album review: "Thirty-five years into their start-and-stop career, Wire are not short on live albums. This is the 15th they've released since 2004 through their own Pinkflag imprint, covering all three incarnations of the band: the brittle, brainy punks who hurtled artward from 1976 to 1980, the poppy, brainy "beat-combo" that branched out toward both alternative radio tunes and monomaniacal hammer-drone from 1985 to 1992, and the tough, brainy old guys who reconvened in 2000 and have been bearing down hard ever since. But the only really significant live Wire discs are the out-of-print Document and Eyewitness-- a bootleg-quality set centered on an abrasive 1980 gig that featured almost entirely new material-- and 1989's It's Beginning to and Back Again, which was so heavily reworked in the studio that it's barely a live album at all. That shortlist hasn't changed with the new addition to the pile. The formal distinction of The Black Session is that it's the first recording to feature Wire's most recent stage lineup. (For those who haven't been following closely, founding guitarist Bruce Gilbert left in the mid-2000s; Margaret Fielder McGinnis of Laika replaced him on tour for a few years, and, since 2010, Matt Simms has augmented the remaining trio of original members on tour.) The days when Wire would turn up for gigs with a set of material the audience had never heard before, or save the throwbacks for the encore, are behind them. At this gig, they run through the better part of 2011's Red Barked Tree, basically ignore everything else from the past 24 years except for 2002's hardcore-velocity "Comet", and toss in a couple of old favorites. It's particularly unsettling to hear "Map Ref. 41ºN 93ºW", one of their most precisely constructed studio singles, in a sloppy garage-band rendition-- metronomic drummer Robert Grey struggles to keep the tempo steady, and singer/guitarist Colin Newman sounds uncomfortably exposed when nobody joins him for harmonies on the chorus. The final encore is one that rejoined their repertoire in 2000 and stayed there: "Pink Flag", with its original two-chord structure replaced by a single blaring E chord at which they hammer for seven minutes or so until it disintegrates into end-of-show chaos. For Wirephiles, the value of The Black Session is the live treatments of the Red Barked Tree tracks. As elegantly textured as that album was, it also sounded reserved and unconvinced in places, and tried to pass off some old Wire ideas as new ones. These versions have more fire and bite to them, even on slow numbers like "Down to This" and "Adapt", and the band has rearranged "Clay" to not sound quite so much like a faint carbon copy of 1978's "I Am the Fly". There's no getting over the resemblance of "Moreover" to Wire's 1979 single "A Question of Degree", but it's mostly an excuse for them to stomp hard, and for Simms and Newman to contrast a tightly wound little riff with a high-pressure spray of noise. In the context of Wire's catalog, this is just another document of incremental change, and not even the best live recording they've made lately (that would be their gorgeous Daytrotter session from 2008). Still, if this were the only Wire record in existence-- a debut album by a new quartet, three of them in their late 50s, captured live on French radio-- it'd be bracingly new even in 2012, an original take on punk minimalism, guitar sound, singing technique, tunefulness vs. dissonance, and so on. "My God! They're so gifted!" Newman yells in "Two People in a Room", and as usual he could be referring to himself and his collaborators."

His Name Is Alive

Tecuciztecatl

Rock

T. Cole Rachel

Of all the bands to call British label 4AD home in the early '90s, none are as inscrutable—or wholly unpredictable—as His Name Is Alive. While the band’s early peers (the Breeders, Red House Painters) spent the better part of that decade honing singular aesthetics, His Name Is Alive were intent on doing the opposite. Early albums like Livonia and Stars on E.S.P. flirted with everything from shoegazey ephemera to sun-bleached California dream pop, but never lighted long enough on any one style to truly embody it. Warren Defever—the Michigan-based musician, songwriter, and mercurial heart of the band—embraces a kind of gleeful wanderlust, a predisposition that only intensified after the band parted ways with 4AD in the early 2000s. In the years since, Defever’s output has become even more of a willfully mixed bag, encompassing everything from spooky R&B, blown-out psych rock, meandering instrumental compositions, and—on 2007’s Sweet Earth Flower—an album-length tribute to free jazz saxophonist Marion Brown. Some 20 years deep into their career the only single thread twisting through all of His Name Is Alive’s music has been Defever’s own peculiar force of vision, which makes exploring the band’s now expansive back catalog both a satisfying and weirdly schizophrenic experience. It should come as no surprise, then, that Tecuciztecatl—the band’s 14th full-length—is a thing both wonderful and extraordinarily strange. A concept record that comes with the worrisome descriptor of "psychedelic rock opera," Tecuciztecatl involves a proggy narrative about a young woman who discovers she is pregnant with twins—one good, one evil—and must seek the help of a demon-hunting librarian. Each of the album’s nine tracks is written from the perspective of a different character and the whole melodrama is set to play out like the soundtrack to a gothic psych-rock horror movie that never actually was. (Additionally, every edition of the record—be it on vinyl, CD, or digital download—is unique, each with different mixes and tracklists.) Most records would surely collapse under the weight of this kind of conceptual pretense—the struggle of good versus evil as played out from within the womb! —but Tecuciztecatl succeeds due to the strength of the songs, all of which still operate nicely outside the confines of the album’s bloody narrative. The album opens with “The Examination”, a 13-minute opus comprised of simmering, Yes-era synthscapes, a chorus of flutes, and—most flamboyantly—an arsenal of fuzzy, overdriven guitar lines twisting around each other. As the song morphs from prog-rock anthem into something resembling a messy garage-funk jam, vocalist Andrea Morici’s plaintive vocals provide a calming counterpoint: "Look into my eyes/ Look into the light all around you/ Make yourself at home." As opening salvos go, it’s a doozy…and something the rest of the album never quite lives up to. Still, tracks like "Reflect Yourself" and "See You In a Minute" play around with classic rock power riffing in ways that are both ridiculous and kind of perfect. Employing harmonious guitar solos that were apparently perfected by practicing along to an edit that Defever created of every Thin Lizzy guitar solo recorded between 1973 and 1983 (It’s a real thing. You can check it out on YouTube), much of Tecuciztecatl plays like a celebration of the kind of bombastic, gatefold double-album sonic excess that marked '70s bands like King Crimson and Emerson Lake and Palmer. It would be easy for these sorts of rock opera theatrics to come across as jokey or ironically reverential, but Defever's earnest commitment never wavers. Psych-rock noodlings aside, it’s the more subdued tracks—the splish-splashy "African Violet Casts a Spell" and the pastoral vibes of album closer "The Cup"—that not only sound the most like classic His Name Is Alive, but also save the record from simply being a conceptual goof. Divorced from the album’s bizarro storyline, "I Believe Your Heart Is No Longer Inside This Room" would still rank as one of His Name Is Alive’s most inspired tracks—a song that manages to simultaneously address birth and death while also incorporating an orchestral snippet of "Joy to the World" in a way that somehow makes total sense. No small feat. In the end Tecuciztecatl is an unusual treat because it manages to have it both ways. As an aspiring rock opera, the album is sufficiently bombastic, but it’s also surprisingly emotional. That the record can be both is a testament to Warren Defever’s kooky dexterity and his continued willingness to take big, weird conceptual risks—something that gets celebrated less and less within the increasingly homogenous landscape of what has come to be known as indie rock. Tecuciztecatl will certainly not be everybody’s cup of demon twin tea—and as albums go it is the very definition of a "grower"—but those willing to spend time with it will are to be rewarded with what is a sometimes challenging but ultimately strangely beautiful listen.

Artist: His Name Is Alive, Album: Tecuciztecatl, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.6 Album review: "Of all the bands to call British label 4AD home in the early '90s, none are as inscrutable—or wholly unpredictable—as His Name Is Alive. While the band’s early peers (the Breeders, Red House Painters) spent the better part of that decade honing singular aesthetics, His Name Is Alive were intent on doing the opposite. Early albums like Livonia and Stars on E.S.P. flirted with everything from shoegazey ephemera to sun-bleached California dream pop, but never lighted long enough on any one style to truly embody it. Warren Defever—the Michigan-based musician, songwriter, and mercurial heart of the band—embraces a kind of gleeful wanderlust, a predisposition that only intensified after the band parted ways with 4AD in the early 2000s. In the years since, Defever’s output has become even more of a willfully mixed bag, encompassing everything from spooky R&B, blown-out psych rock, meandering instrumental compositions, and—on 2007’s Sweet Earth Flower—an album-length tribute to free jazz saxophonist Marion Brown. Some 20 years deep into their career the only single thread twisting through all of His Name Is Alive’s music has been Defever’s own peculiar force of vision, which makes exploring the band’s now expansive back catalog both a satisfying and weirdly schizophrenic experience. It should come as no surprise, then, that Tecuciztecatl—the band’s 14th full-length—is a thing both wonderful and extraordinarily strange. A concept record that comes with the worrisome descriptor of "psychedelic rock opera," Tecuciztecatl involves a proggy narrative about a young woman who discovers she is pregnant with twins—one good, one evil—and must seek the help of a demon-hunting librarian. Each of the album’s nine tracks is written from the perspective of a different character and the whole melodrama is set to play out like the soundtrack to a gothic psych-rock horror movie that never actually was. (Additionally, every edition of the record—be it on vinyl, CD, or digital download—is unique, each with different mixes and tracklists.) Most records would surely collapse under the weight of this kind of conceptual pretense—the struggle of good versus evil as played out from within the womb! —but Tecuciztecatl succeeds due to the strength of the songs, all of which still operate nicely outside the confines of the album’s bloody narrative. The album opens with “The Examination”, a 13-minute opus comprised of simmering, Yes-era synthscapes, a chorus of flutes, and—most flamboyantly—an arsenal of fuzzy, overdriven guitar lines twisting around each other. As the song morphs from prog-rock anthem into something resembling a messy garage-funk jam, vocalist Andrea Morici’s plaintive vocals provide a calming counterpoint: "Look into my eyes/ Look into the light all around you/ Make yourself at home." As opening salvos go, it’s a doozy…and something the rest of the album never quite lives up to. Still, tracks like "Reflect Yourself" and "See You In a Minute" play around with classic rock power riffing in ways that are both ridiculous and kind of perfect. Employing harmonious guitar solos that were apparently perfected by practicing along to an edit that Defever created of every Thin Lizzy guitar solo recorded between 1973 and 1983 (It’s a real thing. You can check it out on YouTube), much of Tecuciztecatl plays like a celebration of the kind of bombastic, gatefold double-album sonic excess that marked '70s bands like King Crimson and Emerson Lake and Palmer. It would be easy for these sorts of rock opera theatrics to come across as jokey or ironically reverential, but Defever's earnest commitment never wavers. Psych-rock noodlings aside, it’s the more subdued tracks—the splish-splashy "African Violet Casts a Spell" and the pastoral vibes of album closer "The Cup"—that not only sound the most like classic His Name Is Alive, but also save the record from simply being a conceptual goof. Divorced from the album’s bizarro storyline, "I Believe Your Heart Is No Longer Inside This Room" would still rank as one of His Name Is Alive’s most inspired tracks—a song that manages to simultaneously address birth and death while also incorporating an orchestral snippet of "Joy to the World" in a way that somehow makes total sense. No small feat. In the end Tecuciztecatl is an unusual treat because it manages to have it both ways. As an aspiring rock opera, the album is sufficiently bombastic, but it’s also surprisingly emotional. That the record can be both is a testament to Warren Defever’s kooky dexterity and his continued willingness to take big, weird conceptual risks—something that gets celebrated less and less within the increasingly homogenous landscape of what has come to be known as indie rock. Tecuciztecatl will certainly not be everybody’s cup of demon twin tea—and as albums go it is the very definition of a "grower"—but those willing to spend time with it will are to be rewarded with what is a sometimes challenging but ultimately strangely beautiful listen."

Le Car

Auto-Reverse

Electronic

Kevin Lozano

Adam Lee Miller and Ian Clarke met as art students in Detroit in the late 1990s, and from ’96 to ’98, they released four projects as the electro/techno group Le Car. The titles of those releases betrayed their vehicular interest: Auto-Fuel, Auto-Graph, Automatic, and Auto-Motif. Le Car’s entrance into the city’s nightlife came a full decade after the Belleville Three (Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May) invented Detroit techno, which May once colorfully described as “like George Clinton and Kraftwerk caught in an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company.” In that sense, Clarke and Miller (later of the electronic duo ADULT.) draw influence from this local lineage. Le Car, if it is not obvious in their choice of names, are heavily inspired by the sleek, robot automation and cybernetic tendencies of Kraftwerk. In practice, Le Car’s work demonstrates an almost endearingly uncool attempt to reinterpret “The Robots,” if they were reborn in the bodies of Detroit area art students. And if that either sounds bad or good to you, both the worst and best outcomes are available in Clone Records’ new compilation and survey of their discography, Auto-Reverse. The opening track, “Car Scene One,” begins with a question. A helium-inflected voice pulls up to a stranger and asks if they’d like a ride. The stranger, with a deeper, metallic, but equally inhuman baritone, cheerfully agrees. Then they turn on the radio, and a brief gurgle of electric noise plays. It’s percussive, vaguely groovy, but rigid: the kind of music the robot overlords in *The Matrix might play at parties. The car stalls, the radio stops—barely a minute and half in, *it is immediately clear things are not what they seem to be. This gesture of artistic malfunction makes their connection to Kraftwerk even more apparent. It recalls the German group’s own 1970s electronic epiphany: During one show, Ralf Hütter put so much weight down on his keyboard that the wild crowd just kept on dancing “to the machine.” The compilers of this collection cleverly recognize that so much of Le Car’s music feels like the afterglow of such a moment. The cheeky loops of “Aluminum Rectangles” or “Warm Humans” conjure up seconds of late-night sound that unintentionally hang in the air, playing out when no one is behind the board. That’s not to say that Le Car’s songs are shapeless, but they are in so many ways formulaic. There is something about the music of Le Car that is distinctly campy, simple, and repetitive in the way arcade games are. Even though their synthesizer loops sometimes lose steam, and some of the tracks feel more like fragmentary studies than club-oriented experiences, their music represents an earnest attempt to make real life feel virtual. But as the endless march of technology can attest, their experiments feel hilariously anachronistic in the light of the present day. While there are a number of standouts in the 20 tracks—including the triumphant early chiptune of “Malice,” and the acidic beat of “Audiofile 10”—the compilation presents Le Car in an incidentally satirical light, like a caricature of techno. But the exuberance of Miller and Clarke is undeniable. There is a relentlessly cheery aspect to their music that makes it hard to hate. Even if *Auto-Reverse *might just be a curio, it documents a brief pocket of time that feels feels quaint, fun, and fresh today, like that pair JNCO jeans hidden deep in your closet.

Artist: Le Car, Album: Auto-Reverse, Genre: Electronic, Score (1-10): 6.8 Album review: "Adam Lee Miller and Ian Clarke met as art students in Detroit in the late 1990s, and from ’96 to ’98, they released four projects as the electro/techno group Le Car. The titles of those releases betrayed their vehicular interest: Auto-Fuel, Auto-Graph, Automatic, and Auto-Motif. Le Car’s entrance into the city’s nightlife came a full decade after the Belleville Three (Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May) invented Detroit techno, which May once colorfully described as “like George Clinton and Kraftwerk caught in an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company.” In that sense, Clarke and Miller (later of the electronic duo ADULT.) draw influence from this local lineage. Le Car, if it is not obvious in their choice of names, are heavily inspired by the sleek, robot automation and cybernetic tendencies of Kraftwerk. In practice, Le Car’s work demonstrates an almost endearingly uncool attempt to reinterpret “The Robots,” if they were reborn in the bodies of Detroit area art students. And if that either sounds bad or good to you, both the worst and best outcomes are available in Clone Records’ new compilation and survey of their discography, Auto-Reverse. The opening track, “Car Scene One,” begins with a question. A helium-inflected voice pulls up to a stranger and asks if they’d like a ride. The stranger, with a deeper, metallic, but equally inhuman baritone, cheerfully agrees. Then they turn on the radio, and a brief gurgle of electric noise plays. It’s percussive, vaguely groovy, but rigid: the kind of music the robot overlords in *The Matrix might play at parties. The car stalls, the radio stops—barely a minute and half in, *it is immediately clear things are not what they seem to be. This gesture of artistic malfunction makes their connection to Kraftwerk even more apparent. It recalls the German group’s own 1970s electronic epiphany: During one show, Ralf Hütter put so much weight down on his keyboard that the wild crowd just kept on dancing “to the machine.” The compilers of this collection cleverly recognize that so much of Le Car’s music feels like the afterglow of such a moment. The cheeky loops of “Aluminum Rectangles” or “Warm Humans” conjure up seconds of late-night sound that unintentionally hang in the air, playing out when no one is behind the board. That’s not to say that Le Car’s songs are shapeless, but they are in so many ways formulaic. There is something about the music of Le Car that is distinctly campy, simple, and repetitive in the way arcade games are. Even though their synthesizer loops sometimes lose steam, and some of the tracks feel more like fragmentary studies than club-oriented experiences, their music represents an earnest attempt to make real life feel virtual. But as the endless march of technology can attest, their experiments feel hilariously anachronistic in the light of the present day. While there are a number of standouts in the 20 tracks—including the triumphant early chiptune of “Malice,” and the acidic beat of “Audiofile 10”—the compilation presents Le Car in an incidentally satirical light, like a caricature of techno. But the exuberance of Miller and Clarke is undeniable. There is a relentlessly cheery aspect to their music that makes it hard to hate. Even if *Auto-Reverse *might just be a curio, it documents a brief pocket of time that feels feels quaint, fun, and fresh today, like that pair JNCO jeans hidden deep in your closet."

Sd Laika

That's Harakiri

Nate Patrin

It seems like there should be a little more perplexing mystery to Sd Laika than there actually is: Peter Runge is basically a guy from Milwaukee with a low-key social media presence and enough of a distinct game plan to wind up on the same label as Forest Swords and Evian Christ. But Runge's music possesses an unnerving sense of man-machine fusion that sends viscera burbling out your speakers—the kind of glitched-out muck that leaves a permanent stain on everything in hearable radius and makes one thankful that you can't actually smell music. It's gruesomely tactile, dank stuff, the kind of keyboard gut-ripping that primarily resembles grime in the "Crime scene clean-up" sense of the word. Two years ago, Runge put out the Unknown Vectors EP, which took the more abrasive qualities of grime and bass music, sharpened their edges to the border of discomfort, and kicked their surefooted steps out from beneath them to leave their rhythms scrambling. Since then, he's only pushed that discomfort further, something that his new LP That's Harakiri brings to deeper fruition. There's some real agitation on this thing—beats that rattle like a loose drive belt, ambient percussion that sounds sourced from the static left after Earth's last radio transmission, gurgling drones on some "all glory to the Hypnotoad" shit—and there's no real accessible way into it. The sick stuff's enough to shake off the unwary, and the opening one-two of "Peace" and "Great God Pan" put the most difficult aspects of Runge's music right up front. The former's a scrambled broadcast that pits trebly squeaks of inside-out digital strings against heaving meat-slab synth, resembling less a beat than a creeping caustic ooze. The latter track throws out the pastoral flute-tootling its title might imply in favor of glo-fi catatonia; there's analog hisses that give off enough neon heat to leave blisters, while a machine shop's worth of misfiring pistons plays percussion. While there are signs of order to grab on to—the straightforward 808 boom-clap beat that marches through closer "Percressing," or the batterram 4/4 kicks that churn through the loud-yet-minimalist "Remote Heaven"—the sense of short-circuit disorder is never far away, which gives That's Harakiri the feel of pulling order through chaos. Noise interference is ramped up, as are counterintuitive rhythms and ugly chords, only to tie them all together into an unexpected sort of cohesion. The mutated-grime signifiers give his songs a bit of grounding; there are these juddering Wiley-style Eski beats and bleeps in "I Don't" and "You Were Wrong" that move a little funny because they've lost a few toes to frostbite. And the pulse really does get insistently catchy once you've given in to the havoc: for all the moaning buzzes and Tesla-coil sparks that scorch its surface, "Meshes" also has a remarkably supple and intricate chattering beat down beneath that could goe toe-to-toe with your favorite Major Lazer cut for ass-shaking potential. There's a sense here that Runge is reacting to the clockwork sleekness and futurist warmth of Grime 2.0 and Night Slugs/Fade to Mind bass music with deliberate violence—not out of hostility, just a fascination with what happens when all those parts start malfunctioning. In the case of That's Harakiri, that malfunction just turns out to be another kind of fine working order.

Artist: Sd Laika, Album: That's Harakiri, Genre: None, Score (1-10): 7.1 Album review: "It seems like there should be a little more perplexing mystery to Sd Laika than there actually is: Peter Runge is basically a guy from Milwaukee with a low-key social media presence and enough of a distinct game plan to wind up on the same label as Forest Swords and Evian Christ. But Runge's music possesses an unnerving sense of man-machine fusion that sends viscera burbling out your speakers—the kind of glitched-out muck that leaves a permanent stain on everything in hearable radius and makes one thankful that you can't actually smell music. It's gruesomely tactile, dank stuff, the kind of keyboard gut-ripping that primarily resembles grime in the "Crime scene clean-up" sense of the word. Two years ago, Runge put out the Unknown Vectors EP, which took the more abrasive qualities of grime and bass music, sharpened their edges to the border of discomfort, and kicked their surefooted steps out from beneath them to leave their rhythms scrambling. Since then, he's only pushed that discomfort further, something that his new LP That's Harakiri brings to deeper fruition. There's some real agitation on this thing—beats that rattle like a loose drive belt, ambient percussion that sounds sourced from the static left after Earth's last radio transmission, gurgling drones on some "all glory to the Hypnotoad" shit—and there's no real accessible way into it. The sick stuff's enough to shake off the unwary, and the opening one-two of "Peace" and "Great God Pan" put the most difficult aspects of Runge's music right up front. The former's a scrambled broadcast that pits trebly squeaks of inside-out digital strings against heaving meat-slab synth, resembling less a beat than a creeping caustic ooze. The latter track throws out the pastoral flute-tootling its title might imply in favor of glo-fi catatonia; there's analog hisses that give off enough neon heat to leave blisters, while a machine shop's worth of misfiring pistons plays percussion. While there are signs of order to grab on to—the straightforward 808 boom-clap beat that marches through closer "Percressing," or the batterram 4/4 kicks that churn through the loud-yet-minimalist "Remote Heaven"—the sense of short-circuit disorder is never far away, which gives That's Harakiri the feel of pulling order through chaos. Noise interference is ramped up, as are counterintuitive rhythms and ugly chords, only to tie them all together into an unexpected sort of cohesion. The mutated-grime signifiers give his songs a bit of grounding; there are these juddering Wiley-style Eski beats and bleeps in "I Don't" and "You Were Wrong" that move a little funny because they've lost a few toes to frostbite. And the pulse really does get insistently catchy once you've given in to the havoc: for all the moaning buzzes and Tesla-coil sparks that scorch its surface, "Meshes" also has a remarkably supple and intricate chattering beat down beneath that could goe toe-to-toe with your favorite Major Lazer cut for ass-shaking potential. There's a sense here that Runge is reacting to the clockwork sleekness and futurist warmth of Grime 2.0 and Night Slugs/Fade to Mind bass music with deliberate violence—not out of hostility, just a fascination with what happens when all those parts start malfunctioning. In the case of That's Harakiri, that malfunction just turns out to be another kind of fine working order."

Roomrunner

Super Vague EP

Experimental,Rock

Aaron Leitko

Roomrunner love everything about grunge, but they break from Cobain and co. in at least one respect: They don't miss the comfort of feeling sad. The Baltimore quartet-- led by Denny Bowen, drummer of the recently defunct post-punk trio Double Dagger-- makes a conscious effort to revive the fuzz and feedback-laden churn of early-1990s indie rock, taking the opening riff of Nirvana's "Negative Creep" as an urtext and extrapolating all other details from there. But theirs is a more ebullient take on the genre. The filling-rattling rave-ups stay, but the bad vibes are mostly jettisoned. And the Chris Cornell-style shirtless heaving, well, that gets left to their alterna-riffing buddies and Charm City neighbors, Dope Body. Super Vague is Roomrunner's second release, following a self-titled cassette and download-only EP that arrived late last year, also on Fan Death. The needle hasn't moved much during the interim. From a sonic standpoint, Super Vague is virtually identical to its predecessor. Dan Frome, who recorded both releases and also plays guitar, has made a careful study of Bleach-era production, cranking up the guitars and keeping the low-end frequencies brittle. But Bowen, who writes the songs and plays the majority of the music on the recordings, has tightened up his approach. On Super Vague, Roomrunner ping-pong between their grimy riffs with newly tour-honed panache. The title track careens face-first into a nest of power chords. "Undo" makes maximal use of the loud-quiet-loud dynamic change, pivoting from a thin and detuned guitar riff to full-on noise-rock gristle. "No Wait" re-engineers the band's pounding rhythms and knotty math-rock moves. "Petrified" is a blown-out rehearsal tape that could have slotted comfortably into the second disc of Sonic Youth's Dirty reissue. More than anything, Bowen knows how to stack up the notes to get the heaviest chords. Major and minor tonalities are irrelevant. Roomrunner wear their grunge debts proudly, even going so far as to spoof an old-school Sub Pop promo ad to promote their tour behind Super Vague. But the band's take on the 90s is more of a fantasy reboot than a strict recreation. Several elements of their hometown sound have dripped into the mix, from eerily processed vocals to the blurry guitar slop and proggy rhythmic sensibility. Ideas harvested straight from the Pacific Northwest are retro-fit with weirder impulses-- a youth spent cherishing The Colour and the Shape smacking straight into an adulthood spent jamming to U.S. Maple's atonal squiggles. The element that's most noticeably absent from Roomrunner's throwback pallete is rage. Not that it's totally missed. Angst and bitterness were a potent part of grunge, but were often wearying when plied by anybody who wasn't named Kurt Cobain. Besides, Mudhoney had an awesome sense of humor. And in concert Roomrunner destroy. Literally. The band's sets are frequently brought to a close in a fit of vintage-amp and drumset torture. At the freaky arm-waving height of charismatic church services, sometimes worshippers will jump out of their pews to sprint a few spirit-fueled laps around the pulpit. It's kind of a tragedy that this isn't where the band's name comes from (it's actually taken from the Japanese term for "treadmill"). But a secular version of this ecstatic freak-out moment is more or less Roomrunner's constant destination. Were it 1991, Geffen would be paying attention.

Artist: Roomrunner, Album: Super Vague EP, Genre: Experimental,Rock, Score (1-10): 7.9 Album review: "Roomrunner love everything about grunge, but they break from Cobain and co. in at least one respect: They don't miss the comfort of feeling sad. The Baltimore quartet-- led by Denny Bowen, drummer of the recently defunct post-punk trio Double Dagger-- makes a conscious effort to revive the fuzz and feedback-laden churn of early-1990s indie rock, taking the opening riff of Nirvana's "Negative Creep" as an urtext and extrapolating all other details from there. But theirs is a more ebullient take on the genre. The filling-rattling rave-ups stay, but the bad vibes are mostly jettisoned. And the Chris Cornell-style shirtless heaving, well, that gets left to their alterna-riffing buddies and Charm City neighbors, Dope Body. Super Vague is Roomrunner's second release, following a self-titled cassette and download-only EP that arrived late last year, also on Fan Death. The needle hasn't moved much during the interim. From a sonic standpoint, Super Vague is virtually identical to its predecessor. Dan Frome, who recorded both releases and also plays guitar, has made a careful study of Bleach-era production, cranking up the guitars and keeping the low-end frequencies brittle. But Bowen, who writes the songs and plays the majority of the music on the recordings, has tightened up his approach. On Super Vague, Roomrunner ping-pong between their grimy riffs with newly tour-honed panache. The title track careens face-first into a nest of power chords. "Undo" makes maximal use of the loud-quiet-loud dynamic change, pivoting from a thin and detuned guitar riff to full-on noise-rock gristle. "No Wait" re-engineers the band's pounding rhythms and knotty math-rock moves. "Petrified" is a blown-out rehearsal tape that could have slotted comfortably into the second disc of Sonic Youth's Dirty reissue. More than anything, Bowen knows how to stack up the notes to get the heaviest chords. Major and minor tonalities are irrelevant. Roomrunner wear their grunge debts proudly, even going so far as to spoof an old-school Sub Pop promo ad to promote their tour behind Super Vague. But the band's take on the 90s is more of a fantasy reboot than a strict recreation. Several elements of their hometown sound have dripped into the mix, from eerily processed vocals to the blurry guitar slop and proggy rhythmic sensibility. Ideas harvested straight from the Pacific Northwest are retro-fit with weirder impulses-- a youth spent cherishing The Colour and the Shape smacking straight into an adulthood spent jamming to U.S. Maple's atonal squiggles. The element that's most noticeably absent from Roomrunner's throwback pallete is rage. Not that it's totally missed. Angst and bitterness were a potent part of grunge, but were often wearying when plied by anybody who wasn't named Kurt Cobain. Besides, Mudhoney had an awesome sense of humor. And in concert Roomrunner destroy. Literally. The band's sets are frequently brought to a close in a fit of vintage-amp and drumset torture. At the freaky arm-waving height of charismatic church services, sometimes worshippers will jump out of their pews to sprint a few spirit-fueled laps around the pulpit. It's kind of a tragedy that this isn't where the band's name comes from (it's actually taken from the Japanese term for "treadmill"). But a secular version of this ecstatic freak-out moment is more or less Roomrunner's constant destination. Were it 1991, Geffen would be paying attention."

M. Ward

End of Amnesia

Rock

Ryan Kearney

Amnesia always seemed to me a condition without any contemporary relevance-- like, say, consumption-- that is more characteristic of the fin-de-siecle, when Freud analyzed it and Kafka's fiction embodied it. But recently, with the century having turned again, amnesia has come roaring back into the artistic consciousness. The only difference is that (supposedly) it's been spurned by a technological boom rather than an industrial one. Or so Radiohead would have us believe. M. Ward's here to say, "Fuck that!" Or something like that. Whether it's an old girlfriend who broke his heart or a musical devotion to deceased folk, country and blues artists, he's not about to forget the past. The opening, titular track is a perfect example of the latter. A piano stumbles through the same three notes before bowing to a folk guitar which Ward calmly picks in a pleasant, traditional manner. It's the kind of bucolic song you'd expect from a romantic Italian movie of the fifties. "Color of Water," meanwhile, opens with a cheery, nearly Southern acoustic trot before descending into a wistful, pedal steel-infused mood straight out of Neil Young's Harvest Moon. "Well, I was all geared up and ready to go," Matt Ward croaks, soon harmonizing with a very Young-esque, high-pitched backup for the line, "The color of the water was green." The remaining lyrics overflow with imagery, as if Ward's only purpose is to prove the effectiveness of his memory. The past surfaces again, musically speaking, with "Half Moon," which opens with either a sample or impressive replication of a Sarah Vaughn-like jazz tune, led by what sounds like an oboe. But a thumping kickdrum and snare combo fade in quickly, as do some quiet guitar squelches. Ward again seems to be singing solely for the sake of remembering: "Felt a dark night/ No starlight to light the room/ And no, no/ No, no/ No, no half moon." But he does so in such a compelling, broken way-- admittedly, aided by vertiginous vocal effects-- that listening to his non-story is by no means a tedious a experience. "So Much Water" is a rare, but unfortunate misstep. Both lyrically and musically, it sounds like a song by that college kid in the subway station-- the one in Diesel jeans boisterously strumming his acoustic guitar and pretending he's homeless. As earlier, "Bad Dreams" opens with a scratchy jazz intro, but this time restrained feedback clears the palette for a listless number in which Ward, his voice at it's crackling worst-- cough up that phlegm, dammit!-- sings, "Oh, every night I dreaming of you/ We're weaving through a crowded room/ I asked you to be my best friend, too/ And then I lose ya." No, he doesn't forget ever, it seems. But he rebounds soon enough with "Silverline," which is largely responsible for the comparisons made between Ward and the influential, iconoclastic folk guitarist John Fahey, who died earlier this year. The blues-style track is a scorching, 12-string romp with subtle horns and deft guitarwork that's so aggressive as to make the listener imagine the ceaselessly vibrating strings being thwacked, pulled, and otherwise tweaked in a blurring manner. Although it's not nearly as irreverent and genre-bending as most of Fahey's work, it ends much too soon. "Flaming Heart" holds the pace, opening with carnival-esque clanging in the background. A bluesy electric guitar and hall piano ramble in, over which Ward sings with a heretofore unseen alacrity. As if sensing that the raucous mood is almost too much to bear, Ward slows it down for "Carolina." One of the most straightforward tracks here, it opens with easy strumming and the clearly delivered lines, "Oh, where are you going for the two-hundred and fiftieth time?" Through a radio transistor, he responds, "Well, I'm waiting for a sign." It's the neat, unexpected turn you'd expect from Mark Linkous, and Ward keeps them coming throughout the song. The comparison to Sparklehorse's lone creative force seems quite obvious, as both Linkous and Ward are country- and folk-influenced artists who scratch unavoidable, but nominally disruptive marks on the traditional blueprint. The major difference, as epitomized by "From a Pirate Radio Sermon, 1989," is that Ward's effects exhibit better production. Giant Sand's Howe Gelb-- a big supporter of Ward's-- is another obvious signpost. Just listen to Ward's breathless delivery and erratic changes on "Ella," which provides a piano quietude similar to that which dominated Giant Sand's most recent effort, last year's inimitable The Chore of Enchantment. The seven-minute closer, "O'Brien/O'Brien's Nocturne," solidifies Ward's singular voice-- both figuratively and literally. The first half is a stripped-down folk story about how "O'Brien blew my mind." Alone, it would have made for a great end, but it's improved upon with the instrumental second half, which evolves from a soft electric guitar and distant rumblings into a clear mix of thick and thin guitars, an urban drumbeat, and even some well-placed handclaps. This is what makes Ward's recollections worth hearing: in sound and word, he's intent on remembering the past, but he's too modern to let it define him.

Artist: M. Ward, Album: End of Amnesia, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.6 Album review: "Amnesia always seemed to me a condition without any contemporary relevance-- like, say, consumption-- that is more characteristic of the fin-de-siecle, when Freud analyzed it and Kafka's fiction embodied it. But recently, with the century having turned again, amnesia has come roaring back into the artistic consciousness. The only difference is that (supposedly) it's been spurned by a technological boom rather than an industrial one. Or so Radiohead would have us believe. M. Ward's here to say, "Fuck that!" Or something like that. Whether it's an old girlfriend who broke his heart or a musical devotion to deceased folk, country and blues artists, he's not about to forget the past. The opening, titular track is a perfect example of the latter. A piano stumbles through the same three notes before bowing to a folk guitar which Ward calmly picks in a pleasant, traditional manner. It's the kind of bucolic song you'd expect from a romantic Italian movie of the fifties. "Color of Water," meanwhile, opens with a cheery, nearly Southern acoustic trot before descending into a wistful, pedal steel-infused mood straight out of Neil Young's Harvest Moon. "Well, I was all geared up and ready to go," Matt Ward croaks, soon harmonizing with a very Young-esque, high-pitched backup for the line, "The color of the water was green." The remaining lyrics overflow with imagery, as if Ward's only purpose is to prove the effectiveness of his memory. The past surfaces again, musically speaking, with "Half Moon," which opens with either a sample or impressive replication of a Sarah Vaughn-like jazz tune, led by what sounds like an oboe. But a thumping kickdrum and snare combo fade in quickly, as do some quiet guitar squelches. Ward again seems to be singing solely for the sake of remembering: "Felt a dark night/ No starlight to light the room/ And no, no/ No, no/ No, no half moon." But he does so in such a compelling, broken way-- admittedly, aided by vertiginous vocal effects-- that listening to his non-story is by no means a tedious a experience. "So Much Water" is a rare, but unfortunate misstep. Both lyrically and musically, it sounds like a song by that college kid in the subway station-- the one in Diesel jeans boisterously strumming his acoustic guitar and pretending he's homeless. As earlier, "Bad Dreams" opens with a scratchy jazz intro, but this time restrained feedback clears the palette for a listless number in which Ward, his voice at it's crackling worst-- cough up that phlegm, dammit!-- sings, "Oh, every night I dreaming of you/ We're weaving through a crowded room/ I asked you to be my best friend, too/ And then I lose ya." No, he doesn't forget ever, it seems. But he rebounds soon enough with "Silverline," which is largely responsible for the comparisons made between Ward and the influential, iconoclastic folk guitarist John Fahey, who died earlier this year. The blues-style track is a scorching, 12-string romp with subtle horns and deft guitarwork that's so aggressive as to make the listener imagine the ceaselessly vibrating strings being thwacked, pulled, and otherwise tweaked in a blurring manner. Although it's not nearly as irreverent and genre-bending as most of Fahey's work, it ends much too soon. "Flaming Heart" holds the pace, opening with carnival-esque clanging in the background. A bluesy electric guitar and hall piano ramble in, over which Ward sings with a heretofore unseen alacrity. As if sensing that the raucous mood is almost too much to bear, Ward slows it down for "Carolina." One of the most straightforward tracks here, it opens with easy strumming and the clearly delivered lines, "Oh, where are you going for the two-hundred and fiftieth time?" Through a radio transistor, he responds, "Well, I'm waiting for a sign." It's the neat, unexpected turn you'd expect from Mark Linkous, and Ward keeps them coming throughout the song. The comparison to Sparklehorse's lone creative force seems quite obvious, as both Linkous and Ward are country- and folk-influenced artists who scratch unavoidable, but nominally disruptive marks on the traditional blueprint. The major difference, as epitomized by "From a Pirate Radio Sermon, 1989," is that Ward's effects exhibit better production. Giant Sand's Howe Gelb-- a big supporter of Ward's-- is another obvious signpost. Just listen to Ward's breathless delivery and erratic changes on "Ella," which provides a piano quietude similar to that which dominated Giant Sand's most recent effort, last year's inimitable The Chore of Enchantment. The seven-minute closer, "O'Brien/O'Brien's Nocturne," solidifies Ward's singular voice-- both figuratively and literally. The first half is a stripped-down folk story about how "O'Brien blew my mind." Alone, it would have made for a great end, but it's improved upon with the instrumental second half, which evolves from a soft electric guitar and distant rumblings into a clear mix of thick and thin guitars, an urban drumbeat, and even some well-placed handclaps. This is what makes Ward's recollections worth hearing: in sound and word, he's intent on remembering the past, but he's too modern to let it define him."

M.I.A.

AIM

Global,Pop/R&B

Kevin Lozano

When revisiting the culture that informed her 2005 debut album Arular, Maya Arulpragasam painted the 2000s with a rose-colored tint. “We had way better fucking music. People were having way better sex. People were eating way better food. It’s like we had progression,” she told Rolling Stone last year. She concluded that in 2015, broadly speaking, art was boring and safe, due to the lack of “fireworks,” the repetition, and the disappearance of the “new.” It was a recalcitrant comment, sure, but also unsurprising coming from M.I.A. What felt unnatural was all this nostalgia. M.I.A. has always been an artist interested in constant reinvention—the past, it seemed to her, was nothing compared to the future. Her music, her art, her years of public confrontation were once prophetic. But today it’s increasingly clear that many pieces of her creative legacy, from the caustic inhuman sheen of Maya* *to the bullet casings that litter “Paper Planes,” have either been plundered or misinterpreted. The fake patois of Drake’s “One Dance” blaring from car windows all around the world, the ubiquity of greasy synths and rattling gun-shot samples in dance music (see any of the artists in NON or Fade to Mind), and the globalization of American and European pop music all can trace a thread back to M.I.A.’s experiments, both failed and successful. Her evaluation of art in the present was another middle finger pointed at watchful eyes, and now, with the release of her fifth album, *AIM, *it’s become an unintended self-criticism of her own inability to light the fuse. The lead-up to *AIM *was not without expected provocation. Before the album had a name there was a music video. It was searing and combative, an addictive piece of agitprop that once again aligned M.I.A. as one of our best political artists. The video for “Borders” depicted a dramatization of border crossing that was at once complicated, blunt, and grandly rendered. The song was empathetic about the global refugee crisis, (“We’re solid and we don’t need to kick them/This is North, South, East and Western”) yet it was also a polemic against media saturation and the endless panoply of issues both serious and inane (borders, politics, identities, privilege, being bae, breaking the internet) that made any action impossible. When she summons these topics through the course of the song, she cooly punctures them with a simple question, “What’s up with that?” Overall, it was the type of sobering political gesture that was much needed in the music discourse. Then the controversies started. She was dropped as the headliner for London’s upcoming Afropunk Festival after clumsily targeting Black Lives Matter and the activist inclinations of musicians like Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé, asking if questions like “Muslim Lives Matter? Or Syrian Lives Matter? Or this kid in Pakistan matters?" would function into the dominant conversation in pop music. Then she got mad about MTV overlooking “Borders” for this year’s VMAs, accusing the media corporation of “racism, classism, sexism, elitism” and essentially policing what kind of voices were institutionally sanctioned. And naturally, she threatened to leak *AIM *(which she also threatened to do with her last album), and claimed that Interscope refused to clear samples for a Diplo-produced version of “Bird Song.” After the predictably rocky months of rollout, the 17 songs of *AIM *read as a disappointment, lacking bite and bounce, and presenting only glimmers of what once was. For what went wrong, look no further than what might’ve been the big pop hit of the album, “Freedun,” a collaboration with smoldering One Direction malcontent Zayn Malik. The song was apparently written over Whatsapp, and it certainly contains all the half-baked charm of a group text thread. “I’m a swagger man/Rolling in my swagger van/From the People’s Republic Of Swaggerstan,” she begins, extremely inauspiciously. It’s the forgivable brick from someone with a history of lyrics that are at the very least provocative or allusive. But this specific brand of poor writing haunts the album. In “Bird Song,” her avian puns are grating: “I believe like R. Kelly, we can fly/But toucan fly together/Staying rich like an ostrich.” Her voice seems flatter, inelastic, and without her early inventiveness. At the same time, *AIM *isn’t saved by some world-beating or state-of-the-art production. Neither M.I.A. nor or her collaborators (including Skrillex and longtime producer Blaqstarr) come close to the vibrancy of her previous work. Take “Foreign Friend,” with its half-hearted drum beat, sleepy progression, and clunky construction. Its pallid form turns the song’s sharp narrative about cultural assimilation into a trying slog. This has never been a problem with her music before—even when it didn't work, it was wild and freewheeling, intelligently and deftly compacting rhythms from around the world under a single flag. But these songs are diffuse, thin on hooks, and often recycle through old warhorses of polyrhythmic percussion and splattered sampling. It’s telling that “Visa” samples her debut single “Galang” in its back half. It creates a bizarre effect, like listening to M.I.A. do karaoke over her own music. “Visa” also heavily references—almost eulogizes—her past work (“They call me Arular, trendsetter, making life feel better/Breaking order like a leader now follow”). It’s as if she is well aware of how newness has escaped her, as much she feels it has escaped the world at large. This recursive comment would work better if the album were explicitly framed as a referendum on her career up to this point: the boredom and frustration of the present as an endless reflection of the past. Instead, whatever grand vision *AIM *is hoping for becomes muddled. While the highlights offer glimmers of hope, like “Ali R U OK”—an incisive narrative about capitalism’s degradation of immigrant hustle—*AIM *is in desperate need of a clear identity or throughline. Diplo once said, “Albums now are a hit song and 11 other songs that are attached to it.” “Borders” will live on as one of many crown jewels in some future retrospective of M.I.A.’s music, but AIM is otherwise her dullest album. For all the accusations that she’s been blithe, unaware, or plain reckless with her messaging, there has never been a more crucial time for pop music that wrestles with globalization, transnational suffering, and the plight of immigrants. While she may never have been the most articulate and thoughtful messenger, in *AIM, *M.I.A. demonstrates her legacy as an artist eager to tackle issues tha

Artist: M.I.A., Album: AIM, Genre: Global,Pop/R&B, Score (1-10): 5.9 Album review: "When revisiting the culture that informed her 2005 debut album Arular, Maya Arulpragasam painted the 2000s with a rose-colored tint. “We had way better fucking music. People were having way better sex. People were eating way better food. It’s like we had progression,” she told Rolling Stone last year. She concluded that in 2015, broadly speaking, art was boring and safe, due to the lack of “fireworks,” the repetition, and the disappearance of the “new.” It was a recalcitrant comment, sure, but also unsurprising coming from M.I.A. What felt unnatural was all this nostalgia. M.I.A. has always been an artist interested in constant reinvention—the past, it seemed to her, was nothing compared to the future. Her music, her art, her years of public confrontation were once prophetic. But today it’s increasingly clear that many pieces of her creative legacy, from the caustic inhuman sheen of Maya* *to the bullet casings that litter “Paper Planes,” have either been plundered or misinterpreted. The fake patois of Drake’s “One Dance” blaring from car windows all around the world, the ubiquity of greasy synths and rattling gun-shot samples in dance music (see any of the artists in NON or Fade to Mind), and the globalization of American and European pop music all can trace a thread back to M.I.A.’s experiments, both failed and successful. Her evaluation of art in the present was another middle finger pointed at watchful eyes, and now, with the release of her fifth album, *AIM, *it’s become an unintended self-criticism of her own inability to light the fuse. The lead-up to *AIM *was not without expected provocation. Before the album had a name there was a music video. It was searing and combative, an addictive piece of agitprop that once again aligned M.I.A. as one of our best political artists. The video for “Borders” depicted a dramatization of border crossing that was at once complicated, blunt, and grandly rendered. The song was empathetic about the global refugee crisis, (“We’re solid and we don’t need to kick them/This is North, South, East and Western”) yet it was also a polemic against media saturation and the endless panoply of issues both serious and inane (borders, politics, identities, privilege, being bae, breaking the internet) that made any action impossible. When she summons these topics through the course of the song, she cooly punctures them with a simple question, “What’s up with that?” Overall, it was the type of sobering political gesture that was much needed in the music discourse. Then the controversies started. She was dropped as the headliner for London’s upcoming Afropunk Festival after clumsily targeting Black Lives Matter and the activist inclinations of musicians like Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé, asking if questions like “Muslim Lives Matter? Or Syrian Lives Matter? Or this kid in Pakistan matters?" would function into the dominant conversation in pop music. Then she got mad about MTV overlooking “Borders” for this year’s VMAs, accusing the media corporation of “racism, classism, sexism, elitism” and essentially policing what kind of voices were institutionally sanctioned. And naturally, she threatened to leak *AIM *(which she also threatened to do with her last album), and claimed that Interscope refused to clear samples for a Diplo-produced version of “Bird Song.” After the predictably rocky months of rollout, the 17 songs of *AIM *read as a disappointment, lacking bite and bounce, and presenting only glimmers of what once was. For what went wrong, look no further than what might’ve been the big pop hit of the album, “Freedun,” a collaboration with smoldering One Direction malcontent Zayn Malik. The song was apparently written over Whatsapp, and it certainly contains all the half-baked charm of a group text thread. “I’m a swagger man/Rolling in my swagger van/From the People’s Republic Of Swaggerstan,” she begins, extremely inauspiciously. It’s the forgivable brick from someone with a history of lyrics that are at the very least provocative or allusive. But this specific brand of poor writing haunts the album. In “Bird Song,” her avian puns are grating: “I believe like R. Kelly, we can fly/But toucan fly together/Staying rich like an ostrich.” Her voice seems flatter, inelastic, and without her early inventiveness. At the same time, *AIM *isn’t saved by some world-beating or state-of-the-art production. Neither M.I.A. nor or her collaborators (including Skrillex and longtime producer Blaqstarr) come close to the vibrancy of her previous work. Take “Foreign Friend,” with its half-hearted drum beat, sleepy progression, and clunky construction. Its pallid form turns the song’s sharp narrative about cultural assimilation into a trying slog. This has never been a problem with her music before—even when it didn't work, it was wild and freewheeling, intelligently and deftly compacting rhythms from around the world under a single flag. But these songs are diffuse, thin on hooks, and often recycle through old warhorses of polyrhythmic percussion and splattered sampling. It’s telling that “Visa” samples her debut single “Galang” in its back half. It creates a bizarre effect, like listening to M.I.A. do karaoke over her own music. “Visa” also heavily references—almost eulogizes—her past work (“They call me Arular, trendsetter, making life feel better/Breaking order like a leader now follow”). It’s as if she is well aware of how newness has escaped her, as much she feels it has escaped the world at large. This recursive comment would work better if the album were explicitly framed as a referendum on her career up to this point: the boredom and frustration of the present as an endless reflection of the past. Instead, whatever grand vision *AIM *is hoping for becomes muddled. While the highlights offer glimmers of hope, like “Ali R U OK”—an incisive narrative about capitalism’s degradation of immigrant hustle—*AIM *is in desperate need of a clear identity or throughline. Diplo once said, “Albums now are a hit song and 11 other songs that are attached to it.” “Borders” will live on as one of many crown jewels in some future retrospective of M.I.A.’s music, but AIM is otherwise her dullest album. For all the accusations that she’s been blithe, unaware, or plain reckless with her messaging, there has never been a more crucial time for pop music that wrestles with globalization, transnational suffering, and the plight of immigrants. While she may never have been the most articulate and thoughtful messenger, in *AIM, *M.I.A. demonstrates her legacy as an artist eager to tackle issues tha"

The Frames

Burn the Maps

Rock

Jason Crock

On their well-received 2001 LP--the Steve Albini-recorded For the Birds-- Ireland's the Frames got miles of melodrama out of only a couple of guitar chords. Unfortunately, on their latest release, Burn the Maps, they're far more ambitious. The tracks here frequently sounds as intimate as those on For the Birds, but don't stay that way for long, often ballooning into sweeping arrangements and choruses that find singer Glen Hansard screaming to the cheap seats. It can make for awkward listening. Lost amidst the large-scale production, Hansard sounds particularly bare. On the earnest "Finally"-- the record's best tune-- the Frames strike the right balance between strangled, melodramatic notes and Hansard's sincere vocals. But most other songs on Burn the Maps suffer from bloated arrangements: The delicate folk of "Trying" gives way to U2 stadium-scraping guitar, and "Fake" leaps from three-week-overdue pauses in its verse into a swaggering chorus. "Dream Awake" and "Keepsake" also reach overwrought climaxes they never deserved. Please, guys, please-- one song without strings in the chorus! Just one. I know you have a violinist in your midst, but there has to be another way to bring the bombastitude. "Ship Caught in the Bay" is an interesting experiment, with an Eastern-tinged drum loop and whispered, suspenseful lyrics. Like every track on the LP, it loudens and widens, but this time it's into a hard drum loop and electronic soundscapes rather than stadium rock. "Underglass"-- the only track that sounds like a rocker from beginning to end-- provides some well-needed catharsis. The Frames could have used more tracks with consistent, engaging tones. Instead Burn the Maps often sounds like simplicity transformed into bloat in an attempt to sound interesting. It rarely works: Most of these tracks simply move from captivating to frustrating to regrettable.

Artist: The Frames, Album: Burn the Maps, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 4.7 Album review: "On their well-received 2001 LP--the Steve Albini-recorded For the Birds-- Ireland's the Frames got miles of melodrama out of only a couple of guitar chords. Unfortunately, on their latest release, Burn the Maps, they're far more ambitious. The tracks here frequently sounds as intimate as those on For the Birds, but don't stay that way for long, often ballooning into sweeping arrangements and choruses that find singer Glen Hansard screaming to the cheap seats. It can make for awkward listening. Lost amidst the large-scale production, Hansard sounds particularly bare. On the earnest "Finally"-- the record's best tune-- the Frames strike the right balance between strangled, melodramatic notes and Hansard's sincere vocals. But most other songs on Burn the Maps suffer from bloated arrangements: The delicate folk of "Trying" gives way to U2 stadium-scraping guitar, and "Fake" leaps from three-week-overdue pauses in its verse into a swaggering chorus. "Dream Awake" and "Keepsake" also reach overwrought climaxes they never deserved. Please, guys, please-- one song without strings in the chorus! Just one. I know you have a violinist in your midst, but there has to be another way to bring the bombastitude. "Ship Caught in the Bay" is an interesting experiment, with an Eastern-tinged drum loop and whispered, suspenseful lyrics. Like every track on the LP, it loudens and widens, but this time it's into a hard drum loop and electronic soundscapes rather than stadium rock. "Underglass"-- the only track that sounds like a rocker from beginning to end-- provides some well-needed catharsis. The Frames could have used more tracks with consistent, engaging tones. Instead Burn the Maps often sounds like simplicity transformed into bloat in an attempt to sound interesting. It rarely works: Most of these tracks simply move from captivating to frustrating to regrettable."

DM Stith

Curtain Speech EP

Rock

Stephen M. Deusner

"Around the Lion Legs", the first track off DM Stith's debut EP, contains an intriguing morsel of artist bio. "You asked me why all these years, all these years I've held everything from you," he sings over a slicing acoustic guitar line and quiet bursts of staticky snare rolls. That line is crucial: A graphic designer pursuing a graduate degree, the Rochester native has been writing songs all of his life. But due to what his real artist bio describes as a "harrowing performance of Phantom of the Opera at a school assembly" (I submit that all such performances are harrowing), he has been reluctant to release his work, much less publicize it. Aside from a handful of tracks here and there within the past year or so (including one on Help Me to Sing, which accompanied the soundtrack to Awake, My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp), the Curtain Speech EP is his first real release, serving as both a preview of his 2009 full-length and his first opportunity to make a real statement. He doesn't waste time: "Around the Lion Legs" crescendos to a swooning finale, on which he and a choir sing "These things cannot be taken back/ I know know." Stith doesn't just release material, the song suggests. He relinquishes it. That Sufjan Stevens and My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden both sing back-up only hammers that point home. Suf and Shara are there for a couple of reasons: First, they're his labelmates at Asthmatic Kitty, and second, he played on past My Brightest Diamond albums and even contributed to the packaging design. The string quartet Osso, also new to Asthmatic Kitty, appears on one track, and Rafter plays bass and cymbals. Perhaps not entirely comfortable with this endeavor, Stith gets by with a little help from his friends. If he's worried about issues of ownership, authorial intent, and mass production, I can't really help him there. But if it's a simple case of stage fright, he should relax a bit. Curtain Speech reveals a new artist with an already highly developed compositional and vocal style. His songs move organically and patiently, building in unexpected-- but in retrospect, inevitable-- directions, and he carefully molds his vocals into arcs, hiccups, sighs, and coos, which individually have as much impact as his words. Even so, Curtain Speech makes clear that his approach demands a longer form than the EP. Of the five songs here, two are atmosphere-establishing instrumentals, one is a short vocal doodle, and only two feel fully fleshed out. Stith plays piano on the instrumental title track, banging out a single chord with varying tempo and recalling Philip Glass in the process. As an interstitial on a longer player, the ethereal, wordless harmonies might add more to the overall ambience, but on an EP, the song is a wobbly support pole. "Hoarse Sorrows and the Whole Blind Earth..." is likewise lyric-less, but its instrumentation proves as grandiose as its ridiculous title, barely redeemed by its whistled melody. "Around the Lion Legs" and "Just Once" sound much more purposeful, and not merely because they are anchored to words. The former is the stand-out track here, Stith at his most musically assertive and lyrically self-questioning, and "Just Once" is, well, a bit exasperating. This seven-minute centerpiece begins quietly, with Osso plucking out a subdued theme and Stith singing softly, as if to make you lean in to hear. The tempo remains steady, collecting instruments in its flow: handclaps, bowed strings, insectoid buzzing, curlicues of clarinet. Midway though, however, the song explodes into a loud second act that doesn't expand on this subdued palette of sounds, but simply amplifies them. Garish and unnecessary, this section leavens rather than intensifies the song's careful unease. Curtain Speech ends with "Abraham's Song (Firebird)", the collection's sparsest track. It's just Stith and an acoustic guitar, but it concisely demonstrates the moodiness of his vocals and the fluidity of his melodies. This EP may stumble, but it does exactly what it's supposed to do: It makes you want to hear even more from this curious talent.

Artist: DM Stith, Album: Curtain Speech EP, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 6.6 Album review: ""Around the Lion Legs", the first track off DM Stith's debut EP, contains an intriguing morsel of artist bio. "You asked me why all these years, all these years I've held everything from you," he sings over a slicing acoustic guitar line and quiet bursts of staticky snare rolls. That line is crucial: A graphic designer pursuing a graduate degree, the Rochester native has been writing songs all of his life. But due to what his real artist bio describes as a "harrowing performance of Phantom of the Opera at a school assembly" (I submit that all such performances are harrowing), he has been reluctant to release his work, much less publicize it. Aside from a handful of tracks here and there within the past year or so (including one on Help Me to Sing, which accompanied the soundtrack to Awake, My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp), the Curtain Speech EP is his first real release, serving as both a preview of his 2009 full-length and his first opportunity to make a real statement. He doesn't waste time: "Around the Lion Legs" crescendos to a swooning finale, on which he and a choir sing "These things cannot be taken back/ I know know." Stith doesn't just release material, the song suggests. He relinquishes it. That Sufjan Stevens and My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden both sing back-up only hammers that point home. Suf and Shara are there for a couple of reasons: First, they're his labelmates at Asthmatic Kitty, and second, he played on past My Brightest Diamond albums and even contributed to the packaging design. The string quartet Osso, also new to Asthmatic Kitty, appears on one track, and Rafter plays bass and cymbals. Perhaps not entirely comfortable with this endeavor, Stith gets by with a little help from his friends. If he's worried about issues of ownership, authorial intent, and mass production, I can't really help him there. But if it's a simple case of stage fright, he should relax a bit. Curtain Speech reveals a new artist with an already highly developed compositional and vocal style. His songs move organically and patiently, building in unexpected-- but in retrospect, inevitable-- directions, and he carefully molds his vocals into arcs, hiccups, sighs, and coos, which individually have as much impact as his words. Even so, Curtain Speech makes clear that his approach demands a longer form than the EP. Of the five songs here, two are atmosphere-establishing instrumentals, one is a short vocal doodle, and only two feel fully fleshed out. Stith plays piano on the instrumental title track, banging out a single chord with varying tempo and recalling Philip Glass in the process. As an interstitial on a longer player, the ethereal, wordless harmonies might add more to the overall ambience, but on an EP, the song is a wobbly support pole. "Hoarse Sorrows and the Whole Blind Earth..." is likewise lyric-less, but its instrumentation proves as grandiose as its ridiculous title, barely redeemed by its whistled melody. "Around the Lion Legs" and "Just Once" sound much more purposeful, and not merely because they are anchored to words. The former is the stand-out track here, Stith at his most musically assertive and lyrically self-questioning, and "Just Once" is, well, a bit exasperating. This seven-minute centerpiece begins quietly, with Osso plucking out a subdued theme and Stith singing softly, as if to make you lean in to hear. The tempo remains steady, collecting instruments in its flow: handclaps, bowed strings, insectoid buzzing, curlicues of clarinet. Midway though, however, the song explodes into a loud second act that doesn't expand on this subdued palette of sounds, but simply amplifies them. Garish and unnecessary, this section leavens rather than intensifies the song's careful unease. Curtain Speech ends with "Abraham's Song (Firebird)", the collection's sparsest track. It's just Stith and an acoustic guitar, but it concisely demonstrates the moodiness of his vocals and the fluidity of his melodies. This EP may stumble, but it does exactly what it's supposed to do: It makes you want to hear even more from this curious talent."

Seth Bogart

Seth Bogart

Pop/R&B

Jeremy Gordon

"My name is Brittoni, I'm 22 years old, and I could not live without eating makeup," begins a testimony on an episode of TLC’s "My Strange Addiction." She continues, "You can kind of imagine it just coating your insides with whatever color you’re eating. It’s just like a craving of your favorite kind of candy bar." Consider, if you can, the feeling of those metallic and muted colors sliding down your esophagus, dripping a Pollockian masterpiece onto your stomach lining. The feeling might be queasy—and most likely dangerous for your health—but you’d look beautiful on the inside. Queasy, vaguely illicit, and beautiful on the inside: This is a good way to describe Seth Bogart’s self-titled debut. After releasing three album as sweaty hedonist Hunx (two with His Punx, one by himself), Bogart has taken back his own name, trading the leather jacket for a hot pink suit and a sharply parted haircut. The fried garage pop and retro balladry of albums past has been swapped for a club-ready sound that plays like a fever dream set inside an episode of "Miami Vice": bright colors, buzzing synthesizers, chipmunked vocals, the smooth confidence of adults on the prowl for meaningful sex. Bogart nods at the trendiness of his genre change on "Eating Makeup," which was inspired by the TLC episode, where he enlists Kathleen Hanna to sing about her growing preoccupation with the titular subject. What begins as a lick or a curiosity turns into a full-blown obsession, and all of a sudden, you’re sprawled in the center of Sephora, covered in opened concealer. Eventually, Bogart concludes gleefully, "everybody’s eating makeup." It sounds like an appealing fantasy, though much of the album concerns how such fantasies can ultimately turn hollow. "Hollywood Squares" has the energy of a cheerleader rally, but its bombast masks a more tender sentiment as Bogart sings about his fascination with a celebrity culture he recognizes as poisonous: "And I can’t believe that I could be this/ Desperate for a lick of something that doesn’t exist." Elsewhere, he sings about being in love with a phony ("Plastic!"), his fascination with someone who he only sees on the screen ("Smash the TV"), and his failure to fulfill someone’s needs ("Forgotten Fantazy"). The latter is built around a restrained synthesizer melody ripped from the waiting screen of some old Nintendo game, as Bogart, his voice no longer gleeful, considers how his actual self has been consumed by another’s idealized vision: "It’s hard for me to know what you need/ I’m your forgotten fantazy." The tension between artifice and reality is what gives Seth Bogart most of its conceptual heft, but it obviously helps that the album is very fun to listen to. (The neon synth-pop of "Club With Me," which shines like a cocaine-dusted disco ball, is a highlight.) Not all of the guest singers are as prominent as Kathleen Hanna, but they’re no less successful. Chela’s confident vocal on "Flurt," which is about a tug-of-war with a romantic tease, brims with concealed sadness juxtaposed against the upbeat tempo. I thought about Pool, the new record by Porches, which similarly traded guitars for synthesizers on an album that pondered the worth of going out. The difference here is that Bogart is doing his thinking after going out. The greater depths follow the sparkle of immediate pleasure—a dynamic that reflects the real life process of getting delirious at the disco before contemplating in a more private moment what that was really all about. The most affecting moments come when Bogart starts off in a quieter mode. "Lubed" rides a hypnotic synthesizer line over piano and melodic distortions as Bogart makes a sensuous offer for some good, consensual fun in the bedroom. The first time we saw Bogart, his greased-up crotch was smack dab in the middle of his album cover, but outsized eroticism (I want to fuck) and burning bedroom eyes (Do you want to fuck?) aren’t mutually exclusive. Then, there’s "Barely 21," the sugar-sweet duet with Rookie founder Tavi Gevinson whose premise—an inconvenient but genuine affair with someone who’s "barely 21"—is loaned an ironic wink by the fact that Gevinson is 19-years-old. But Gevinson’s voice is as pure as the driven snow, temporarily dispelling the real world context. "Cry, baby," they sing, over and over, a reminder that despite appearances, some things just hit you in the heart.

Artist: Seth Bogart, Album: Seth Bogart, Genre: Pop/R&B, Score (1-10): 8.0 Album review: ""My name is Brittoni, I'm 22 years old, and I could not live without eating makeup," begins a testimony on an episode of TLC’s "My Strange Addiction." She continues, "You can kind of imagine it just coating your insides with whatever color you’re eating. It’s just like a craving of your favorite kind of candy bar." Consider, if you can, the feeling of those metallic and muted colors sliding down your esophagus, dripping a Pollockian masterpiece onto your stomach lining. The feeling might be queasy—and most likely dangerous for your health—but you’d look beautiful on the inside. Queasy, vaguely illicit, and beautiful on the inside: This is a good way to describe Seth Bogart’s self-titled debut. After releasing three album as sweaty hedonist Hunx (two with His Punx, one by himself), Bogart has taken back his own name, trading the leather jacket for a hot pink suit and a sharply parted haircut. The fried garage pop and retro balladry of albums past has been swapped for a club-ready sound that plays like a fever dream set inside an episode of "Miami Vice": bright colors, buzzing synthesizers, chipmunked vocals, the smooth confidence of adults on the prowl for meaningful sex. Bogart nods at the trendiness of his genre change on "Eating Makeup," which was inspired by the TLC episode, where he enlists Kathleen Hanna to sing about her growing preoccupation with the titular subject. What begins as a lick or a curiosity turns into a full-blown obsession, and all of a sudden, you’re sprawled in the center of Sephora, covered in opened concealer. Eventually, Bogart concludes gleefully, "everybody’s eating makeup." It sounds like an appealing fantasy, though much of the album concerns how such fantasies can ultimately turn hollow. "Hollywood Squares" has the energy of a cheerleader rally, but its bombast masks a more tender sentiment as Bogart sings about his fascination with a celebrity culture he recognizes as poisonous: "And I can’t believe that I could be this/ Desperate for a lick of something that doesn’t exist." Elsewhere, he sings about being in love with a phony ("Plastic!"), his fascination with someone who he only sees on the screen ("Smash the TV"), and his failure to fulfill someone’s needs ("Forgotten Fantazy"). The latter is built around a restrained synthesizer melody ripped from the waiting screen of some old Nintendo game, as Bogart, his voice no longer gleeful, considers how his actual self has been consumed by another’s idealized vision: "It’s hard for me to know what you need/ I’m your forgotten fantazy." The tension between artifice and reality is what gives Seth Bogart most of its conceptual heft, but it obviously helps that the album is very fun to listen to. (The neon synth-pop of "Club With Me," which shines like a cocaine-dusted disco ball, is a highlight.) Not all of the guest singers are as prominent as Kathleen Hanna, but they’re no less successful. Chela’s confident vocal on "Flurt," which is about a tug-of-war with a romantic tease, brims with concealed sadness juxtaposed against the upbeat tempo. I thought about Pool, the new record by Porches, which similarly traded guitars for synthesizers on an album that pondered the worth of going out. The difference here is that Bogart is doing his thinking after going out. The greater depths follow the sparkle of immediate pleasure—a dynamic that reflects the real life process of getting delirious at the disco before contemplating in a more private moment what that was really all about. The most affecting moments come when Bogart starts off in a quieter mode. "Lubed" rides a hypnotic synthesizer line over piano and melodic distortions as Bogart makes a sensuous offer for some good, consensual fun in the bedroom. The first time we saw Bogart, his greased-up crotch was smack dab in the middle of his album cover, but outsized eroticism (I want to fuck) and burning bedroom eyes (Do you want to fuck?) aren’t mutually exclusive. Then, there’s "Barely 21," the sugar-sweet duet with Rookie founder Tavi Gevinson whose premise—an inconvenient but genuine affair with someone who’s "barely 21"—is loaned an ironic wink by the fact that Gevinson is 19-years-old. But Gevinson’s voice is as pure as the driven snow, temporarily dispelling the real world context. "Cry, baby," they sing, over and over, a reminder that despite appearances, some things just hit you in the heart."

Voices From the Lake

Voices From the Lake

Electronic

Andrew Ryce

Since its inception, Munich's Prologue label and its stable of artists have been associated with a brand of techno focused on deep wells of subterranean rumbling and liquid synth washes, an ambient, texture-oriented sound once dubbed "headfuck techno" and that has become ubiquitous. Prologue has a secret weapon in Donato Dozzy, whose own productions could range from relatively chugging techno ("Menta"), pastoral daydreams (his remix of Tin Man's "Nonneo"), and any manner of ambient synth kosmische material. His Voices From the Lake project is a collaboration with fellow Italian Neel, and solves Prologue's predictability problem by reinventing typical techno structures wholesale. Voices From the Lake emerged in 2010 as the name for a semi-anonymous Neel mix, proffering up more than an hour of elegantly paced ambient techno. The moniker appeared on Prologue last year with a four-track EP of spiritually throbbing techno. Their self-titled album is the fruit of a live set worked up by the duo played at Japan's infamous Labyrinth, the mountain-set festival with which Dozzy has long been associated, and removes most of the conventional techno signifiers of both contributors' past work in favor of a webbed crawl that takes trance's steady chug and applies it to a new-agey palette of discrete, delicate textures. Kick drum? What's that? The first thing you'll notice about Voices From the Lake is that it seems to be made out of meticulously detailed glass shards, a brittle and dissolute sort of rhythm that forms out of synchronous elliptical patterns rather than the rigid time signatures of techno. There's a pulse there, but it's soft and hidden, like you'd have to peel back a thousand layers to get closer to these songs' beating heart. The result is something that sounds strangely alive and heavily dynamic, where patterns shift and forms morph so subtly and patiently that it's hard to tell exactly what's going on at any moment, like a fractal that actually changes shape as you go further down to its core. This gives the album an unusual flow that feels like stationary floating in space, 70 minutes of beautifully constructed breathing music so painstaking you can't tell where one track begins and another ends if you aren't watching your music player: It just is. That's not to say Voices From the Lake doesn't change over its running time, because dip your fingers into the world music vortex of "Vega" and then look to the submerged rave of "Twins in Virgo", and you'll find yourself in two very different wading pools of bubbling beats. There is one defining moment on Voices that stands out above all others, the pair's rework of the previously-released Dozzy track "S.T.".  After almost 30 minutes of percolation and vibration, a single bassline emerges, a gently ascending and descending chord progression that harbors an unusual impact for something that sounds so airy and ephemeral. Those particulate low frequencies flood the canvas of a work painted mostly in dot matrix with broad strokes of emotion. In terms of taking "techno" to unconventional extremes of sound design and structure, Voices From the Lake most immediately recalls Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer's exhaustive Re: ECM double album from last year, but Voices has more emotional resonance and a rhythmic plot that feels more inviting, even if it's no less difficult to figure out. But barring that mid-album explosion of melody, this is a record that eschews the politics of techno linearity, replacing the rise-rise-rise-rise-peak-blowout-descend progression with one that puts all the tension and shift into pockets and sounds so small that it sounds more like a vibrant ecosystem of microorganisms than "beats." Voices From the Lake is a triumph of care and exactitude, the kind of well-executed work of art that feels effortless despite its obvious complexity. Rarely can an album be this intimidatingly detailed, warmly inviting, and totally indifferent. In its seeming quest to map out rhythm to an unimaginable infinity, Voices From the Lake manages to be everything at once: It's some of the most inventive techno in ages, it's some of the prettiest ambient you'll hear on any German techno label, and it's a unique kind of entrancing that would feel hokey if it weren't so undeniably attractive.

Artist: Voices From the Lake, Album: Voices From the Lake, Genre: Electronic, Score (1-10): 8.2 Album review: "Since its inception, Munich's Prologue label and its stable of artists have been associated with a brand of techno focused on deep wells of subterranean rumbling and liquid synth washes, an ambient, texture-oriented sound once dubbed "headfuck techno" and that has become ubiquitous. Prologue has a secret weapon in Donato Dozzy, whose own productions could range from relatively chugging techno ("Menta"), pastoral daydreams (his remix of Tin Man's "Nonneo"), and any manner of ambient synth kosmische material. His Voices From the Lake project is a collaboration with fellow Italian Neel, and solves Prologue's predictability problem by reinventing typical techno structures wholesale. Voices From the Lake emerged in 2010 as the name for a semi-anonymous Neel mix, proffering up more than an hour of elegantly paced ambient techno. The moniker appeared on Prologue last year with a four-track EP of spiritually throbbing techno. Their self-titled album is the fruit of a live set worked up by the duo played at Japan's infamous Labyrinth, the mountain-set festival with which Dozzy has long been associated, and removes most of the conventional techno signifiers of both contributors' past work in favor of a webbed crawl that takes trance's steady chug and applies it to a new-agey palette of discrete, delicate textures. Kick drum? What's that? The first thing you'll notice about Voices From the Lake is that it seems to be made out of meticulously detailed glass shards, a brittle and dissolute sort of rhythm that forms out of synchronous elliptical patterns rather than the rigid time signatures of techno. There's a pulse there, but it's soft and hidden, like you'd have to peel back a thousand layers to get closer to these songs' beating heart. The result is something that sounds strangely alive and heavily dynamic, where patterns shift and forms morph so subtly and patiently that it's hard to tell exactly what's going on at any moment, like a fractal that actually changes shape as you go further down to its core. This gives the album an unusual flow that feels like stationary floating in space, 70 minutes of beautifully constructed breathing music so painstaking you can't tell where one track begins and another ends if you aren't watching your music player: It just is. That's not to say Voices From the Lake doesn't change over its running time, because dip your fingers into the world music vortex of "Vega" and then look to the submerged rave of "Twins in Virgo", and you'll find yourself in two very different wading pools of bubbling beats. There is one defining moment on Voices that stands out above all others, the pair's rework of the previously-released Dozzy track "S.T.".  After almost 30 minutes of percolation and vibration, a single bassline emerges, a gently ascending and descending chord progression that harbors an unusual impact for something that sounds so airy and ephemeral. Those particulate low frequencies flood the canvas of a work painted mostly in dot matrix with broad strokes of emotion. In terms of taking "techno" to unconventional extremes of sound design and structure, Voices From the Lake most immediately recalls Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer's exhaustive Re: ECM double album from last year, but Voices has more emotional resonance and a rhythmic plot that feels more inviting, even if it's no less difficult to figure out. But barring that mid-album explosion of melody, this is a record that eschews the politics of techno linearity, replacing the rise-rise-rise-rise-peak-blowout-descend progression with one that puts all the tension and shift into pockets and sounds so small that it sounds more like a vibrant ecosystem of microorganisms than "beats." Voices From the Lake is a triumph of care and exactitude, the kind of well-executed work of art that feels effortless despite its obvious complexity. Rarely can an album be this intimidatingly detailed, warmly inviting, and totally indifferent. In its seeming quest to map out rhythm to an unimaginable infinity, Voices From the Lake manages to be everything at once: It's some of the most inventive techno in ages, it's some of the prettiest ambient you'll hear on any German techno label, and it's a unique kind of entrancing that would feel hokey if it weren't so undeniably attractive."

Martha Wainwright

Martha Wainwright

Rock

Stephen M. Duesner

In the song "Matapedia", from Kate and Anna McGarrigle's 1996 album of the same name, Kate describes a tense meeting between her then-17-year-old daughter, Martha, and an older man, presumably Martha's father, Loudon Wainwright. Kate notes how "he looked her in the eyes/ Just like a boy of 19 would do." And even though Martha is facing someone who is a stranger, relative, and musical forebear, "she was not afraid/No, she was not afraid." It's only one of innumerable songs the Wainwright clan has written about each other, but nine years later, "Matapedia" sounds particularly prescient. Martha Wainwright's fearlessness has not abated with age, but has found an outlet in the family business. Like her parents and brother, Martha writes candidly and often hostilely about the people around her, be they lovers, friends, or family. She has her father's name (as well as an album cover that mimics his 1975 Unrequited), is blessed with her mother's gracefully lilting voice, and borrows her older brother Rufus's witty frankness. She generally composes in the 70s folk singer-songwriter mode: Every song seems to have originated with only her voice and acoustic guitar. Some songs remain in this bare-bones state, but she elaborates on most tracks with enough rock, pop, and even country elements that they never sound like exercises in nostalgia. But it's her lyrics and vocals that are the focus of this debut. Martha doesn't write hooks so much as she inflects them with a versatile voice that moves fluidly from intimate exhalations ("Don't Forget") to angry exhortations ("Ball & Chain") to florid cascades of backing oohs and aahs ("Far Away"). The refrain of "Factory"-- "I'll take the coast from factory to factory"-- remains in your head not because of the words' inherent rhythms, but because Martha rushes the first two, draws out the long o in "coast," then rushes the last phrase as her voice rises excitably. Lyrically, she has a penchant for sly wordplay and frank confession, addressing romantic masochism and what she calls "sexual psychology" in "Ball & Chain". But her forthrightness can be highly deceptive. On "TV Show", she sings, "So when you touch me there I'm scared you'll see/ Not the way that I don't love you/ But the way I don't love myself." Deciphering those double negatives couldn't be more difficult: On first listen, it sounds like she loves the song's subject, but hates herself, but that extra "don't" between the "I" and the "love you" muddies the meaning. It's all a question of syntax, yet that one extra word thoroughly complicates the song while directly, even intimately involving the listener in her drama. Of course, family plays a strong role on these songs. In addition to appearances by Kate (playing banjo on "Factory" and piano on "Don't Forget") and Rufus (singing on "The Maker"), she writes about their tumultuous family with a candor that would be more remarkable if it weren't a genetic trait. Martha's song about her father is called "Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole", and the pun of the title in no way detracts from the cathartic defiance of the lyrics: "I will not pretend/ I will not put on a smile/ I will not say I'm all right for you." Yet, despite the endless comparisons these family dramas provoke, Martha Wainwright proves Martha Wainwright has a strong, distinct, fully formed musical identity, which would be just as impressive by any other name.

Artist: Martha Wainwright, Album: Martha Wainwright, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.8 Album review: "In the song "Matapedia", from Kate and Anna McGarrigle's 1996 album of the same name, Kate describes a tense meeting between her then-17-year-old daughter, Martha, and an older man, presumably Martha's father, Loudon Wainwright. Kate notes how "he looked her in the eyes/ Just like a boy of 19 would do." And even though Martha is facing someone who is a stranger, relative, and musical forebear, "she was not afraid/No, she was not afraid." It's only one of innumerable songs the Wainwright clan has written about each other, but nine years later, "Matapedia" sounds particularly prescient. Martha Wainwright's fearlessness has not abated with age, but has found an outlet in the family business. Like her parents and brother, Martha writes candidly and often hostilely about the people around her, be they lovers, friends, or family. She has her father's name (as well as an album cover that mimics his 1975 Unrequited), is blessed with her mother's gracefully lilting voice, and borrows her older brother Rufus's witty frankness. She generally composes in the 70s folk singer-songwriter mode: Every song seems to have originated with only her voice and acoustic guitar. Some songs remain in this bare-bones state, but she elaborates on most tracks with enough rock, pop, and even country elements that they never sound like exercises in nostalgia. But it's her lyrics and vocals that are the focus of this debut. Martha doesn't write hooks so much as she inflects them with a versatile voice that moves fluidly from intimate exhalations ("Don't Forget") to angry exhortations ("Ball & Chain") to florid cascades of backing oohs and aahs ("Far Away"). The refrain of "Factory"-- "I'll take the coast from factory to factory"-- remains in your head not because of the words' inherent rhythms, but because Martha rushes the first two, draws out the long o in "coast," then rushes the last phrase as her voice rises excitably. Lyrically, she has a penchant for sly wordplay and frank confession, addressing romantic masochism and what she calls "sexual psychology" in "Ball & Chain". But her forthrightness can be highly deceptive. On "TV Show", she sings, "So when you touch me there I'm scared you'll see/ Not the way that I don't love you/ But the way I don't love myself." Deciphering those double negatives couldn't be more difficult: On first listen, it sounds like she loves the song's subject, but hates herself, but that extra "don't" between the "I" and the "love you" muddies the meaning. It's all a question of syntax, yet that one extra word thoroughly complicates the song while directly, even intimately involving the listener in her drama. Of course, family plays a strong role on these songs. In addition to appearances by Kate (playing banjo on "Factory" and piano on "Don't Forget") and Rufus (singing on "The Maker"), she writes about their tumultuous family with a candor that would be more remarkable if it weren't a genetic trait. Martha's song about her father is called "Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole", and the pun of the title in no way detracts from the cathartic defiance of the lyrics: "I will not pretend/ I will not put on a smile/ I will not say I'm all right for you." Yet, despite the endless comparisons these family dramas provoke, Martha Wainwright proves Martha Wainwright has a strong, distinct, fully formed musical identity, which would be just as impressive by any other name."

Richard Swift

The Novelist

Rock

Stephen M. Deusner

Richard Swift sure sounds like a bedroom auteur. He penned all the songwriterly songs and wrote all the whimsical interludes on his first two mini-albums, The Novelist and Walking Without Effort, and handled engineering and artwork duties, and played most of the instruments. He even self-released both of them before signing with Secretly Canadian, which is collecting them as one release, immodestly subtitled The Richard Swift Collection, Vol. 1. That canonical title heralds more to come, and I wouldn't be surprised if he already has his next six albums written and recorded (in fact, his next is planned for early 2006). Just to bring these two records into existence requires a forceful willpower and an unflagging self-confidence, and for better or worse, the two albums reflect a serious perfectionist streak. The Novelist is the more distinctive of the two: as the title suggests, the album wears its concept on its sleeve, even spelling it out on the title track: "I try to write a book each time I speak." As if to conjure visions of the cardigan-wearing artist toiling at his trusty typewriter, Swift dolls up the songs in dapper pre-rock accessories that suggest a Roaring Twenties setting. "Lady Day" floats on a subdued samba and lofty vocals, "Sadsong St." features a ukulele, and "Lovely Night" is dark cabaret pop bristling with spiky clarinets. Yet for all the trappings, Swift sounds a little indistinct, like a straight Rufus Wainwright. That pop scion's entire identity is bound up in the musical styles he appropriates to express gay desire-- or re-appropriates, since many of these genres originally expressed gay desire. The Novelist never sounds like Swift has that immense an investment in these styles: they're just novelties. So by the mini-album's final chapter, the motif has grown superfluous and even tiresome. Fortunately, for *Walking Without Effort, Swift leaves the creaky prewar radio he's been singing from and takes a few steps toward the present day. Less self-consciously ambitious but more dramatically realized, *Walking Without Effort collects all the urbane lyrics and drawn-out choruses of The Novelist, but loses the glued-on razzmatazz. Sounding like both Jakob Dylan and Randy Newman, Swift seems much more at home among the 70s-pop guitars, Brian Wilson wood-block percussion, and Jon Brion reeds. He wastes no time proving his mettle on "Half Lit" and "As I Go", two diagonal rays of sunny pop whose horns and handclaps make their dark, desperate lyrics sound casual. Before closing with the refined valedictions of "Not Wasting Time" and "Beautifulheart", Swift hits his peak with "Losing Sleep", which handily achieves all of Swift's ambitions, not so much for its lush backing vocals or its sophisticated, crescendoing arrangement than for its elegant melody and heartfelt lyrics-- the two elements to anticipate most on the inevitable Vol. 2.

Artist: Richard Swift, Album: The Novelist, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 6.9 Album review: "Richard Swift sure sounds like a bedroom auteur. He penned all the songwriterly songs and wrote all the whimsical interludes on his first two mini-albums, The Novelist and Walking Without Effort, and handled engineering and artwork duties, and played most of the instruments. He even self-released both of them before signing with Secretly Canadian, which is collecting them as one release, immodestly subtitled The Richard Swift Collection, Vol. 1. That canonical title heralds more to come, and I wouldn't be surprised if he already has his next six albums written and recorded (in fact, his next is planned for early 2006). Just to bring these two records into existence requires a forceful willpower and an unflagging self-confidence, and for better or worse, the two albums reflect a serious perfectionist streak. The Novelist is the more distinctive of the two: as the title suggests, the album wears its concept on its sleeve, even spelling it out on the title track: "I try to write a book each time I speak." As if to conjure visions of the cardigan-wearing artist toiling at his trusty typewriter, Swift dolls up the songs in dapper pre-rock accessories that suggest a Roaring Twenties setting. "Lady Day" floats on a subdued samba and lofty vocals, "Sadsong St." features a ukulele, and "Lovely Night" is dark cabaret pop bristling with spiky clarinets. Yet for all the trappings, Swift sounds a little indistinct, like a straight Rufus Wainwright. That pop scion's entire identity is bound up in the musical styles he appropriates to express gay desire-- or re-appropriates, since many of these genres originally expressed gay desire. The Novelist never sounds like Swift has that immense an investment in these styles: they're just novelties. So by the mini-album's final chapter, the motif has grown superfluous and even tiresome. Fortunately, for *Walking Without Effort, Swift leaves the creaky prewar radio he's been singing from and takes a few steps toward the present day. Less self-consciously ambitious but more dramatically realized, *Walking Without Effort collects all the urbane lyrics and drawn-out choruses of The Novelist, but loses the glued-on razzmatazz. Sounding like both Jakob Dylan and Randy Newman, Swift seems much more at home among the 70s-pop guitars, Brian Wilson wood-block percussion, and Jon Brion reeds. He wastes no time proving his mettle on "Half Lit" and "As I Go", two diagonal rays of sunny pop whose horns and handclaps make their dark, desperate lyrics sound casual. Before closing with the refined valedictions of "Not Wasting Time" and "Beautifulheart", Swift hits his peak with "Losing Sleep", which handily achieves all of Swift's ambitions, not so much for its lush backing vocals or its sophisticated, crescendoing arrangement than for its elegant melody and heartfelt lyrics-- the two elements to anticipate most on the inevitable Vol. 2."

Ortolan

Time on a String

Pop/R&B,Rock

Stephen M. Deusner

Stephanie Cottingham was just 13 when she started writing songs and performing, and she was still a teenager when her band Ortolan recorded their debut LP with Daniel Smith for Sounds Familyre, and toured two continents with Danielson. Her years inform her craft but do not limit its scope. As the band-- which includes her sisters and sister-in-law-- backs her up with sympathetic arrangements built on early rock and contemporary indie pop, Cottingham expresses misgivings and uncertainties that accompany any person's search for self, no matter their age: "I need the answers for this," she sings on the deceptively sunny "Opposites", "but nobody knows how I'm supposed to say things when I don't even know how they go." Such concerns, especially when expressed by a young woman not old enough to drink, are sometimes dismissed as naïve and inconsequential (see also: Taylor Swift, a fine songwriter often derided for lyrics that convey a similar perspective). While Cottingham may not have settled into her songwriting voice just yet, she definitely has something to say about her own insecurities and confusions, and moreover she has a seemingly contradictory means of saying it. Ortolan's most distinctive trait may be her deeply mannered vocals, which imply that, for her, performing means indulging certain protective eccentricities. Listen to her chew on a syllable like it's a pen cap, or stretch her vowels out like taffy. There's no way to spell out her pronunciation of the pronoun "I" phonetically. She's not an especially powerful singer-- she doesn't have much range or force-- but Cottingham manages to convey personality in her vocals. Her tics may turn off some listeners, but they reveal a confidence that Cottingham swears she doesn't have. "If I hit the wrong chord, please don't take offense," she sings on "Mirror Image". "I'm doing this more, but I don't mean to do the things that I do." Despite her protestations, the music itself contains no such flubs, though it lacks the rawness of her songwriting. As produced by Smith, Ortolan can be resourceful and a bit too controlled. "Once" sounds like a sped-up "Earth Angel (Will You Be Mine)", which underscores the fairy-tale quality of the lyrics, while the rising keyboard line on "Just Like Me" is as much a hook as the vocal melody. Ortolan never really cut loose on Time on a String, which means they don't risk quite as much as Cottingham does, but they do provide a bubbly backdrop for her inner conflict, so that when her songwriting wavers-- as on "Insist for More", about a bratty child, or on "Be So Bold", about her own bookishness-- her family has her back, another protective scrim against the world. Even so, an intriguing friction between boldness and hesitation illuminates most of these songs, which makes closer "Anything" sound all the more triumphant when Cottingham sings, "I'm ready for anything you give me, I'm ready for everything."

Artist: Ortolan, Album: Time on a String, Genre: Pop/R&B,Rock, Score (1-10): 6.4 Album review: "Stephanie Cottingham was just 13 when she started writing songs and performing, and she was still a teenager when her band Ortolan recorded their debut LP with Daniel Smith for Sounds Familyre, and toured two continents with Danielson. Her years inform her craft but do not limit its scope. As the band-- which includes her sisters and sister-in-law-- backs her up with sympathetic arrangements built on early rock and contemporary indie pop, Cottingham expresses misgivings and uncertainties that accompany any person's search for self, no matter their age: "I need the answers for this," she sings on the deceptively sunny "Opposites", "but nobody knows how I'm supposed to say things when I don't even know how they go." Such concerns, especially when expressed by a young woman not old enough to drink, are sometimes dismissed as naïve and inconsequential (see also: Taylor Swift, a fine songwriter often derided for lyrics that convey a similar perspective). While Cottingham may not have settled into her songwriting voice just yet, she definitely has something to say about her own insecurities and confusions, and moreover she has a seemingly contradictory means of saying it. Ortolan's most distinctive trait may be her deeply mannered vocals, which imply that, for her, performing means indulging certain protective eccentricities. Listen to her chew on a syllable like it's a pen cap, or stretch her vowels out like taffy. There's no way to spell out her pronunciation of the pronoun "I" phonetically. She's not an especially powerful singer-- she doesn't have much range or force-- but Cottingham manages to convey personality in her vocals. Her tics may turn off some listeners, but they reveal a confidence that Cottingham swears she doesn't have. "If I hit the wrong chord, please don't take offense," she sings on "Mirror Image". "I'm doing this more, but I don't mean to do the things that I do." Despite her protestations, the music itself contains no such flubs, though it lacks the rawness of her songwriting. As produced by Smith, Ortolan can be resourceful and a bit too controlled. "Once" sounds like a sped-up "Earth Angel (Will You Be Mine)", which underscores the fairy-tale quality of the lyrics, while the rising keyboard line on "Just Like Me" is as much a hook as the vocal melody. Ortolan never really cut loose on Time on a String, which means they don't risk quite as much as Cottingham does, but they do provide a bubbly backdrop for her inner conflict, so that when her songwriting wavers-- as on "Insist for More", about a bratty child, or on "Be So Bold", about her own bookishness-- her family has her back, another protective scrim against the world. Even so, an intriguing friction between boldness and hesitation illuminates most of these songs, which makes closer "Anything" sound all the more triumphant when Cottingham sings, "I'm ready for anything you give me, I'm ready for everything.""

Beach House

Devotion

Rock

Brian Howe

Baltimore is as musically diverse as anywhere else, but in 2008, indie rockers associate the city with colorful, energetic music, from the expatriated Animal Collective to Dan Deacon's Wham City crew. The music of Beach House, the Baltimore-based duo of multi-instrumentalist Alex Scally and vocalist/organist Victoria Legrand, is a shadow narrative running parallel to this trend: Their delicate, lovelorn pop comes in the form of deathly waltzes and dark pastoral dirges on which Legrand sings about desire, loss, and dreams as if telling a ghost story, splitting the difference between lovely and creepy. For pristine pop, Beach House's self-titled 2006 debut was awfully raw: Legrand downplayed her classical piano and voice training in a humble negation of virtuosity. The organs sounded like something thick and coarse being pulled through a small, jagged opening; chord structures were simply suggestions; imperfections were kept intact. That balance of beauty and imprecision made inspired songs like "Saltwater", "Tokyo Witch", "Apple Orchard", and "Master of None" easy to fall in love with. The duo's songwriting hasn't fundamentally changed on Devotion; they've simply cleaned up their act. These are crisper, brighter, bolder songs, retaining Beach House's sense of elegant decay while sweeping up the debris. "Gila" is a funeral on a sunny day; its shimmering organs are controlled, never bleeding chaotically as they did on the debut, and are complemented by frilly but steadfast guitar. "Turtle Island" reaffirms Beach House's preference for simple, skeletal percussion, but its dense melody is a marked advancement. The result of this pre-spring cleaning is that Devotion lacks some of the immediate highs of the first album-- you no longer get the sense of rooting for an embattled underdog-- but winds up consistently stronger. Even though it's tidier and more streamlined, the music surrenders none of its autumnal charm, and there's still a sense of eavesdropping on a private, ongoing dialogue between Legrand and a ghost. Of course, we only get to hear her side of the story. As on the first album, which began with the words "Love you all the time, even though you're not mine," she favors second-person assertions that speak of self-effacement, dependence, and sinister dream-world conversations. "Your wish is my command," she intones on "Wedding Bell", becoming a genie in a puff of smoke. And on "Gila", she sings in a world-weary wheeze, "Man, you've got a lot of jokes to tell." But instead of the punch line, we get the sort of jarring shift that characterizes dreams: "So you throw your baby's banners down the well." "Invite your sister into the garden," she drones on the wind-up waltz "You Came to Me", concurrently inviting us into the murky depths of her romantic consciousness. There's a sense of latent danger in the invitation, like a siren song luring us toward sharp clusters of rock. Portals into mysterious spaces pockmark Devotion; none of them promise a way out. Perhaps this explains why an album that takes its title and concept from a superficially sweet concept has such a subtle bite: Legrand's devotion is a dungeon into which she tosses her own desires like coins into a wishing well, a one-way conduit from which only echoes return.

Artist: Beach House, Album: Devotion, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 8.5 Album review: "Baltimore is as musically diverse as anywhere else, but in 2008, indie rockers associate the city with colorful, energetic music, from the expatriated Animal Collective to Dan Deacon's Wham City crew. The music of Beach House, the Baltimore-based duo of multi-instrumentalist Alex Scally and vocalist/organist Victoria Legrand, is a shadow narrative running parallel to this trend: Their delicate, lovelorn pop comes in the form of deathly waltzes and dark pastoral dirges on which Legrand sings about desire, loss, and dreams as if telling a ghost story, splitting the difference between lovely and creepy. For pristine pop, Beach House's self-titled 2006 debut was awfully raw: Legrand downplayed her classical piano and voice training in a humble negation of virtuosity. The organs sounded like something thick and coarse being pulled through a small, jagged opening; chord structures were simply suggestions; imperfections were kept intact. That balance of beauty and imprecision made inspired songs like "Saltwater", "Tokyo Witch", "Apple Orchard", and "Master of None" easy to fall in love with. The duo's songwriting hasn't fundamentally changed on Devotion; they've simply cleaned up their act. These are crisper, brighter, bolder songs, retaining Beach House's sense of elegant decay while sweeping up the debris. "Gila" is a funeral on a sunny day; its shimmering organs are controlled, never bleeding chaotically as they did on the debut, and are complemented by frilly but steadfast guitar. "Turtle Island" reaffirms Beach House's preference for simple, skeletal percussion, but its dense melody is a marked advancement. The result of this pre-spring cleaning is that Devotion lacks some of the immediate highs of the first album-- you no longer get the sense of rooting for an embattled underdog-- but winds up consistently stronger. Even though it's tidier and more streamlined, the music surrenders none of its autumnal charm, and there's still a sense of eavesdropping on a private, ongoing dialogue between Legrand and a ghost. Of course, we only get to hear her side of the story. As on the first album, which began with the words "Love you all the time, even though you're not mine," she favors second-person assertions that speak of self-effacement, dependence, and sinister dream-world conversations. "Your wish is my command," she intones on "Wedding Bell", becoming a genie in a puff of smoke. And on "Gila", she sings in a world-weary wheeze, "Man, you've got a lot of jokes to tell." But instead of the punch line, we get the sort of jarring shift that characterizes dreams: "So you throw your baby's banners down the well." "Invite your sister into the garden," she drones on the wind-up waltz "You Came to Me", concurrently inviting us into the murky depths of her romantic consciousness. There's a sense of latent danger in the invitation, like a siren song luring us toward sharp clusters of rock. Portals into mysterious spaces pockmark Devotion; none of them promise a way out. Perhaps this explains why an album that takes its title and concept from a superficially sweet concept has such a subtle bite: Legrand's devotion is a dungeon into which she tosses her own desires like coins into a wishing well, a one-way conduit from which only echoes return."

Dean Blunt

The Redeemer

Experimental

Nick Neyland

Dean Blunt is heartbroken, possibly. The Redeemer is his break-up album, a relatively straightforward affair after numerous releases that seemed to reveal as little about him as possible-- or maybe they revealed everything. His prior work, both on his own and with sometime partner Inga Copeland, varied wildly in quality, finally reaching a dead end with last year's The Narcissist II, a half-assed tribute to half-assedness. Where do you go from there? For Blunt, the answer is to lose the dopey feel of his prior records, strip away the layers of fuzz, and etch out a set of short ballads that form something resembling a relationship crisis album. There are occasional diversions-- distraught voicemail messages, clocks chiming ominously-- but much of The Redeemer assimilates the feel of someone slumped over a bar, reading the last rites on a romance. The most interesting thing this album does is pose a few questions about substance and how it's ascribed. Does Dean Blunt now come with added "weight" due to sad horn solos, sweeping strings, and the sound of hands running up and down harp strings? No, not really. Often it sounds like someone keenly aware of the trappings of music that reads as "heartbroken," and how to manipulate them. At least it occasionally seems like there's genuine hurt there, sometimes from a twist in Blunt's voice, or a passage of particularly weepy piano playing. But most of the songs are half-formed and barely able to gain any momentum, strangled by track lengths that clock in around the one- or two-minute mark. There's a strong sense of something as transient as the Narcissist material, just dressed up in different clothing. Fortunately, The Redeemer isn't just an elongated comment on how heavily certain devices have been leaned on throughout music history. On a song like "Demon", tellingly one of the longest here, Blunt ties together vocal manipulations, sound collage, pounding drums, and even a softly tooting trumpet solo. It finds room to bridge between Blunt's prior inclinations for haze and the roomier ones he works in here. His work as an arranger is often skilled, even if the end result either can't or won't get beyond feeling like a simple exercise. "All Dogs Go to Heaven" is his attempt at a Histoire de Melody Nelson cut; "Make It Official" briefly dips into woozy David Sylvian territory. Even Inga Copeland, possibly the person cast as Blunt's subject matter, surfaces on the title track, although her appearance lacks any dramatic élan. The Redeemer is too cynical an enterprise for that, always stopping short of actually feeling very much. There is some worth in giving common musical tropes a kicking, although Blunt's approach-- essentially swilling the dregs of balladry around in his mouth and spewing them out-- too often ends up more flaccid than the style he's referencing. The Redeemer ends up somewhere between sarcasm and sensitivity, but can't dig deep enough in either direction to provide something that's worth returning to. The fragmented nature of the tracks, where ideas are set in motion and just trail off into insubstantial thought, can't get to the genesis of what makes material like this work. Pop that comments on pop needs to have a thorough understanding of the form in order to function. As a consequence, it doesn't really matter whether this is Blunt making a genuine attempt at recording a break-up album or using it as a framework to illustrate how vacuous such a gesture can be. Whatever he was looking for, he hasn't found it here.

Artist: Dean Blunt, Album: The Redeemer, Genre: Experimental, Score (1-10): 6.1 Album review: "Dean Blunt is heartbroken, possibly. The Redeemer is his break-up album, a relatively straightforward affair after numerous releases that seemed to reveal as little about him as possible-- or maybe they revealed everything. His prior work, both on his own and with sometime partner Inga Copeland, varied wildly in quality, finally reaching a dead end with last year's The Narcissist II, a half-assed tribute to half-assedness. Where do you go from there? For Blunt, the answer is to lose the dopey feel of his prior records, strip away the layers of fuzz, and etch out a set of short ballads that form something resembling a relationship crisis album. There are occasional diversions-- distraught voicemail messages, clocks chiming ominously-- but much of The Redeemer assimilates the feel of someone slumped over a bar, reading the last rites on a romance. The most interesting thing this album does is pose a few questions about substance and how it's ascribed. Does Dean Blunt now come with added "weight" due to sad horn solos, sweeping strings, and the sound of hands running up and down harp strings? No, not really. Often it sounds like someone keenly aware of the trappings of music that reads as "heartbroken," and how to manipulate them. At least it occasionally seems like there's genuine hurt there, sometimes from a twist in Blunt's voice, or a passage of particularly weepy piano playing. But most of the songs are half-formed and barely able to gain any momentum, strangled by track lengths that clock in around the one- or two-minute mark. There's a strong sense of something as transient as the Narcissist material, just dressed up in different clothing. Fortunately, The Redeemer isn't just an elongated comment on how heavily certain devices have been leaned on throughout music history. On a song like "Demon", tellingly one of the longest here, Blunt ties together vocal manipulations, sound collage, pounding drums, and even a softly tooting trumpet solo. It finds room to bridge between Blunt's prior inclinations for haze and the roomier ones he works in here. His work as an arranger is often skilled, even if the end result either can't or won't get beyond feeling like a simple exercise. "All Dogs Go to Heaven" is his attempt at a Histoire de Melody Nelson cut; "Make It Official" briefly dips into woozy David Sylvian territory. Even Inga Copeland, possibly the person cast as Blunt's subject matter, surfaces on the title track, although her appearance lacks any dramatic élan. The Redeemer is too cynical an enterprise for that, always stopping short of actually feeling very much. There is some worth in giving common musical tropes a kicking, although Blunt's approach-- essentially swilling the dregs of balladry around in his mouth and spewing them out-- too often ends up more flaccid than the style he's referencing. The Redeemer ends up somewhere between sarcasm and sensitivity, but can't dig deep enough in either direction to provide something that's worth returning to. The fragmented nature of the tracks, where ideas are set in motion and just trail off into insubstantial thought, can't get to the genesis of what makes material like this work. Pop that comments on pop needs to have a thorough understanding of the form in order to function. As a consequence, it doesn't really matter whether this is Blunt making a genuine attempt at recording a break-up album or using it as a framework to illustrate how vacuous such a gesture can be. Whatever he was looking for, he hasn't found it here."

Sunn O)))

Oracle EP

Experimental,Metal

Brandon Stosuy

A couple of years back, nobody had an inkling our favorite drone duo would become Artforum regulars. Yet Black One, Sunn O)))'s crowning achievement, initiated a fascinating crossover, and Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley's subsequent stream of releases-- both Sunn O))) and non-- along with O'Malley's ongoing art and theatre collaborations, solidified and extended things beyond the influence of a New York Times Magazine piece. (The 2005 album also provided U.S. black metal "outfits" Xasthur and Leviathan/Lurker of Chalice with their biggest audience to date, leading to a number of other, very different tremors in the underground. Note, for instance, that Xasthur's forthcoming Defective Epitaph will be Malefic's second for Hydra Head.) Of all of Sunn O)))'s work with visual artists, the most important and ongoing is O'Malley's collaborations with "bad boy" NYC sculptor Banks Violette, which recently culminated, for the time at least, in concurrent shows at Team and Gladstone galleries. Pretty big deal. A precursor took place at Maureen Paley in London last June. Oracle, described as an EP, was birthed directly from that piece: Violette cast salt'n'resin reproductions of Sunn O)))'s amplifiers, instruments, and effects (i.e. the backline); he also built, in his signature black lacquered style, a stage platform, as well as sound panels, for Sunn O)))'s actual set up. Oracle's first half is comprised of the 18-minute "Orakulum" and the 16-minute "experiment" "Belürol Pusztít", which are described as "Sunn O)))'s interpretation" of that Maureen Paley show. The live lineup of Mark Deutrom (on bass), Mayhem vocalist Attila Csihar, Tos Nieuwenhuizen (Beaver, God) on moog, and the Sunn O))) core performed on the Violette-built stage at the opening. Much like Malefic's claustrophobic performance on "Báthory Erzsébet", Csihar was sealed in a coffin, incanting tracts in old Hungarian, sort of speeches for the dead. The big twist at the peformance-- much to curiosity seekers' chagrin-- was that the gallery goers weren't allowed to see it. The band, decked in robes et al, were in a sealed part of the gallery, basically trapped within their own coffin. As stated in the liner notes, they hoped this style of staging would create, "a feeling of absence, loss and a phantom of what once was." (Judging from some art rag reviews, it also pissed folks off...) The resulting CD was sold (in an edition of 2,000) during live shows-- Sunn O)))'s 2007 "Pacific Rim" tour and the Southern Lord "West Coast 777" tour. The vinyl version was released in July in an addition of 7,777 copies. (Very 07/07.) As the liner notes detail, the Oracle recordings are not a recording of the live performance. O'Malley explained to me via email: "There is no live recording of the action, although the tracks were written and sketch recorded (mixes were done later) beforehand for the collaboration." Instead, the recorded versions are Sunn O))) proper along with Boris' Atsuo, Csihar, and Joe Preston. On the brittle, angular "Belürol Pusztít"-- "destroys from the inside," or thereabouts, in Hungarian-- Preston puts his back into a jackhammer solo and Atsuo rattles some cymbals/smashes drums, but Csihar's low, throaty, scowling/growling and then instantly high-pitch/nails-on-a-chalkboard vocals are the focus (check the tiny tinkling at times from from beneath the drone). "Orakulum", the composition that was played at the opening, is a more sumptuous, standard Sunn O))) affair: Lots of slow, heavy guitar resonances and Csihar's anguished tones emerging from the background like an echo-chambered Hobbit (or, really, the dude from Inquisition). Eventually he's multi-tracked, consuming the notes around him. For the CD version of Oracle, a second disc is given over to the 46-minute "Helio)))Sophist", "an audial collage of performances in Europe from July 2005." The performers here are Anderson, O'Malley, Oren Ambarchi, Csihar, and Nieuwenhuizen. It builds and intensifies with Csihar's vocals, which are at first a low growl and eventually turn crackling, witchy, rumbling until they temporarily cut-out or are subsumed at the 20-something minute mark, making room for the milky drone of the instrumentalists, all GrimmRobe style. Occasionally the crowd cheers, reminding you that the shit's live, that Sunn remains especially important and effective (to say the least) in the live realm. So yeah, Sunn O)))'s work with Violette has led to interesting material; it also raises age-old questions about the art world dealing with and fetishizing "outsiders." Interesting, for instance, to see Violette's fascination with black metal described as a fascination with "death metal," that folks think (or wish?) Snorre Ruch from Thorns is still in prison (I visited his Norway home last year; dude's definitely not behind bars...but it makes a juicier story). These seem like minor slips, but hint at a larger misunderstanding (willful? confusion? disinterest?) in the subculture from which Violette's pulling some of his ideas. This sort of uneasy, half-baked relationship isn't new, but Sunn O))) have managed a level of art-realm success/integration that's currently unparalleled even by Gang Gang Dance, Forcefield, Lightning Bolt, Matmos, Japanther, etc. Congrats to 'em, I say: Oracle includes some excellent Sunn O))) material, and for all my obsessive detailing above and below, as long as you get what dudes are doing, who really cares how the fuck it came about?

Artist: Sunn O))), Album: Oracle EP, Genre: Experimental,Metal, Score (1-10): 7.8 Album review: "A couple of years back, nobody had an inkling our favorite drone duo would become Artforum regulars. Yet Black One, Sunn O)))'s crowning achievement, initiated a fascinating crossover, and Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley's subsequent stream of releases-- both Sunn O))) and non-- along with O'Malley's ongoing art and theatre collaborations, solidified and extended things beyond the influence of a New York Times Magazine piece. (The 2005 album also provided U.S. black metal "outfits" Xasthur and Leviathan/Lurker of Chalice with their biggest audience to date, leading to a number of other, very different tremors in the underground. Note, for instance, that Xasthur's forthcoming Defective Epitaph will be Malefic's second for Hydra Head.) Of all of Sunn O)))'s work with visual artists, the most important and ongoing is O'Malley's collaborations with "bad boy" NYC sculptor Banks Violette, which recently culminated, for the time at least, in concurrent shows at Team and Gladstone galleries. Pretty big deal. A precursor took place at Maureen Paley in London last June. Oracle, described as an EP, was birthed directly from that piece: Violette cast salt'n'resin reproductions of Sunn O)))'s amplifiers, instruments, and effects (i.e. the backline); he also built, in his signature black lacquered style, a stage platform, as well as sound panels, for Sunn O)))'s actual set up. Oracle's first half is comprised of the 18-minute "Orakulum" and the 16-minute "experiment" "Belürol Pusztít", which are described as "Sunn O)))'s interpretation" of that Maureen Paley show. The live lineup of Mark Deutrom (on bass), Mayhem vocalist Attila Csihar, Tos Nieuwenhuizen (Beaver, God) on moog, and the Sunn O))) core performed on the Violette-built stage at the opening. Much like Malefic's claustrophobic performance on "Báthory Erzsébet", Csihar was sealed in a coffin, incanting tracts in old Hungarian, sort of speeches for the dead. The big twist at the peformance-- much to curiosity seekers' chagrin-- was that the gallery goers weren't allowed to see it. The band, decked in robes et al, were in a sealed part of the gallery, basically trapped within their own coffin. As stated in the liner notes, they hoped this style of staging would create, "a feeling of absence, loss and a phantom of what once was." (Judging from some art rag reviews, it also pissed folks off...) The resulting CD was sold (in an edition of 2,000) during live shows-- Sunn O)))'s 2007 "Pacific Rim" tour and the Southern Lord "West Coast 777" tour. The vinyl version was released in July in an addition of 7,777 copies. (Very 07/07.) As the liner notes detail, the Oracle recordings are not a recording of the live performance. O'Malley explained to me via email: "There is no live recording of the action, although the tracks were written and sketch recorded (mixes were done later) beforehand for the collaboration." Instead, the recorded versions are Sunn O))) proper along with Boris' Atsuo, Csihar, and Joe Preston. On the brittle, angular "Belürol Pusztít"-- "destroys from the inside," or thereabouts, in Hungarian-- Preston puts his back into a jackhammer solo and Atsuo rattles some cymbals/smashes drums, but Csihar's low, throaty, scowling/growling and then instantly high-pitch/nails-on-a-chalkboard vocals are the focus (check the tiny tinkling at times from from beneath the drone). "Orakulum", the composition that was played at the opening, is a more sumptuous, standard Sunn O))) affair: Lots of slow, heavy guitar resonances and Csihar's anguished tones emerging from the background like an echo-chambered Hobbit (or, really, the dude from Inquisition). Eventually he's multi-tracked, consuming the notes around him. For the CD version of Oracle, a second disc is given over to the 46-minute "Helio)))Sophist", "an audial collage of performances in Europe from July 2005." The performers here are Anderson, O'Malley, Oren Ambarchi, Csihar, and Nieuwenhuizen. It builds and intensifies with Csihar's vocals, which are at first a low growl and eventually turn crackling, witchy, rumbling until they temporarily cut-out or are subsumed at the 20-something minute mark, making room for the milky drone of the instrumentalists, all GrimmRobe style. Occasionally the crowd cheers, reminding you that the shit's live, that Sunn remains especially important and effective (to say the least) in the live realm. So yeah, Sunn O)))'s work with Violette has led to interesting material; it also raises age-old questions about the art world dealing with and fetishizing "outsiders." Interesting, for instance, to see Violette's fascination with black metal described as a fascination with "death metal," that folks think (or wish?) Snorre Ruch from Thorns is still in prison (I visited his Norway home last year; dude's definitely not behind bars...but it makes a juicier story). These seem like minor slips, but hint at a larger misunderstanding (willful? confusion? disinterest?) in the subculture from which Violette's pulling some of his ideas. This sort of uneasy, half-baked relationship isn't new, but Sunn O))) have managed a level of art-realm success/integration that's currently unparalleled even by Gang Gang Dance, Forcefield, Lightning Bolt, Matmos, Japanther, etc. Congrats to 'em, I say: Oracle includes some excellent Sunn O))) material, and for all my obsessive detailing above and below, as long as you get what dudes are doing, who really cares how the fuck it came about?"

Jonwayne

Rap Album Two

Rap

Sheldon Pearce

In 2014, Los Angeles rapper/producer Jonwayne had a crisis of faith. His suddenly-realized rap dreams were the impetus for his own implosion. A battle with alcoholism waged in part because of a crippling fear of flying, and the harshness of his lifestyle threatened to ruin him. He canceled his shows, parted ways with his label Stones Throw, and retreated from the rap scene. The next year, he released an EP called Jonwayne is Retired. “When I’m grieving I stay up writing these masterpieces,” he rapped. His second full-length rap album seems to prove that assertion. It’s an introspective journal that uses self-critique as a lens through which to examine the fragility of rap celebrity on any scale. It considers what it means to be a rapper and it considers the cost. Rap Album Two deconstructs Jonwayne to build him back up. Jonwayne has always been a master craftsman and talented technician, but in the past, his raps didn’t really have any function. It was rapping for the sake of it. He had plenty of knotty, syllable-twisting wordplay pivoting on slant rhymes and internal schemes, but much of the content was filler. His full-length debut as a lyricist, Rap Album One, was bogged down by his inability to get out of his own head, rattling off series after series of pointless puzzlers and long-winded (albeit fun) workarounds for rap cliches aiming to show how clever he was. Instilled with purpose, Rap Album Two weighs every sentence carefully. He isn’t interested in constructing complex lyrical miracle word exhibitions. He's too busy wondering if rap is even worth it. Much of Rap Album Two is about rap as both an instrument of destruction and a vehicle for redemption. It finds Jonwayne navigating his own downward spiral, seeking the answer to his most important question: What do you do when rap is both your living and a fuel for your vices? His writing, which was once so heady, is now sobering. He’s rapping more deliberately, and the bars all mean more, carrying bigger burdens but bringing bigger rewards. There’s literally a song called “These Words Are Everything.” Songs like the existentialist daydream “Human Condition” and the punching “City Lights” explore the consequences of addiction, especially when pursuing a rap career (“There's a price to it youngin’/You most likely don’t invite the kind of vices we brung in/Be it poison of the body or the kind you can’t see ‘cause it's creeping up behind”). The album uses a beatpack with snappy, slow-rolling drums, minor piano chords, soul hymnals, and sunless tones to depict an ongoing recalibration, as Jonwayne finds his way back to rap. On “LIVE from the Fuck You,” one of the album’s keenest moments, a stranger approaches the rapper in public asking for an impromptu concert for a girl he’s with (“She says she knows who you are, I think she's a big fan”) before tagging on a dismissal: “She says you rap and I’m not really seeing it, dog.” Jonwayne finally indulges his request for on-the-spot raps with a verse dismantling the “fan” and his actions: “So here’s a little story bout the way I make it hurt/The way I make you learn how not to approach a man who’s suffering for his work like a monkey in the circus.” The observations aren’t exactly revelatory but they are cleverly articulated, and the sharpness with which they’re delivered makes them potent. The most telling moment on Rap Album Two is “The Single,” a chest-beating song he botches several times before scrapping. The title of the song and his inability to complete it best exemplify the album’s primary lesson: the pursuit of stardom can be punishing, both on mind and body. Rap Album Two is easily the most fulfilling project Jonwayne has ever made loaded with the most thoughtful writing of his career. It isn’t just the gravity of subjects, it’s the carefulness with which he’s willing to examine them. Every candid, incredibly personal line contains some form of catharsis. Alcoholism drove him into isolation and loneliness only led to further self-sabotage. But this record is a triumph over that. These raps don’t just exist for posterity; they, too, are a part of the healing process. As Jonwayne rethinks his “order of operations,” he becomes closer to whole.

Artist: Jonwayne, Album: Rap Album Two, Genre: Rap, Score (1-10): 7.6 Album review: "In 2014, Los Angeles rapper/producer Jonwayne had a crisis of faith. His suddenly-realized rap dreams were the impetus for his own implosion. A battle with alcoholism waged in part because of a crippling fear of flying, and the harshness of his lifestyle threatened to ruin him. He canceled his shows, parted ways with his label Stones Throw, and retreated from the rap scene. The next year, he released an EP called Jonwayne is Retired. “When I’m grieving I stay up writing these masterpieces,” he rapped. His second full-length rap album seems to prove that assertion. It’s an introspective journal that uses self-critique as a lens through which to examine the fragility of rap celebrity on any scale. It considers what it means to be a rapper and it considers the cost. Rap Album Two deconstructs Jonwayne to build him back up. Jonwayne has always been a master craftsman and talented technician, but in the past, his raps didn’t really have any function. It was rapping for the sake of it. He had plenty of knotty, syllable-twisting wordplay pivoting on slant rhymes and internal schemes, but much of the content was filler. His full-length debut as a lyricist, Rap Album One, was bogged down by his inability to get out of his own head, rattling off series after series of pointless puzzlers and long-winded (albeit fun) workarounds for rap cliches aiming to show how clever he was. Instilled with purpose, Rap Album Two weighs every sentence carefully. He isn’t interested in constructing complex lyrical miracle word exhibitions. He's too busy wondering if rap is even worth it. Much of Rap Album Two is about rap as both an instrument of destruction and a vehicle for redemption. It finds Jonwayne navigating his own downward spiral, seeking the answer to his most important question: What do you do when rap is both your living and a fuel for your vices? His writing, which was once so heady, is now sobering. He’s rapping more deliberately, and the bars all mean more, carrying bigger burdens but bringing bigger rewards. There’s literally a song called “These Words Are Everything.” Songs like the existentialist daydream “Human Condition” and the punching “City Lights” explore the consequences of addiction, especially when pursuing a rap career (“There's a price to it youngin’/You most likely don’t invite the kind of vices we brung in/Be it poison of the body or the kind you can’t see ‘cause it's creeping up behind”). The album uses a beatpack with snappy, slow-rolling drums, minor piano chords, soul hymnals, and sunless tones to depict an ongoing recalibration, as Jonwayne finds his way back to rap. On “LIVE from the Fuck You,” one of the album’s keenest moments, a stranger approaches the rapper in public asking for an impromptu concert for a girl he’s with (“She says she knows who you are, I think she's a big fan”) before tagging on a dismissal: “She says you rap and I’m not really seeing it, dog.” Jonwayne finally indulges his request for on-the-spot raps with a verse dismantling the “fan” and his actions: “So here’s a little story bout the way I make it hurt/The way I make you learn how not to approach a man who’s suffering for his work like a monkey in the circus.” The observations aren’t exactly revelatory but they are cleverly articulated, and the sharpness with which they’re delivered makes them potent. The most telling moment on Rap Album Two is “The Single,” a chest-beating song he botches several times before scrapping. The title of the song and his inability to complete it best exemplify the album’s primary lesson: the pursuit of stardom can be punishing, both on mind and body. Rap Album Two is easily the most fulfilling project Jonwayne has ever made loaded with the most thoughtful writing of his career. It isn’t just the gravity of subjects, it’s the carefulness with which he’s willing to examine them. Every candid, incredibly personal line contains some form of catharsis. Alcoholism drove him into isolation and loneliness only led to further self-sabotage. But this record is a triumph over that. These raps don’t just exist for posterity; they, too, are a part of the healing process. As Jonwayne rethinks his “order of operations,” he becomes closer to whole."

Entrance

Wandering Stranger

Rock

Derek Miller

You know the tale: White boys snuck away with the blues, hollowed it out with shrill teeny-bopper mania and a vaguely emergent counter-culture, and created the shiny, deltaless gleam of rock. And yet, over the past few years, there has been increased interest in the blues-- mostly from white midwesterners who were introduced to it via Jimmy Page and Keith Richards. Of these new blues fetishistis, The White Stripes are the success story and The Black Keys are riding shotgun. Another Fat Possum artist, Guy Blakeslee-- the lightning-haired hippie-throwback from Entrance-- is also helping to reform a genre that has largely been forsaken since Page and Richards were clean. After tours with Devendra Banhart and Cat Power, Blakeslee began to make a small underground clamor in 2003 with his Honey Moan EP. That disc showed potential, but Blakeslee has quickly blossomed. Using a peculiar guitar style-- he flips a right-handed guitar and plays it with his left-- Blakeslee creates a sound with enough feverish cacophony to raise Robert Johnson from his eternal deal. His second LP as Entrance, Wandering Stranger, picks up on the gutty Leadbelly-era moans of his first, tracing the eternal welcome in age-old standards while creating novel originals steeped in the form's history. "Rex's Blues" is the re-telling of a song by cult country-rock troubadour Townes Van Zandt. Blakeslee's straight depression-era accompaniment-- from slow guitar-picking to a moaning, despondent fiddle-- makes the track sound like a camp-fire hymn crumpled under the faded lore of histories and proclamations that "the South will rise again". His voice is a high-pitched moan/beg that aches with a sense of dusty misfortune, and is reminiscent of the husky country-folk voacls of Van Zandt contemporary Ry Cooder. As his voice gives way to a rumbling piano, Blakeslee confesses a historic allegiance to the blues but, more importantly, makes them seethe again. On the title track, Blakeslee asks his production crew to dim the lights, setting an appropriate mood for the blistering acoustic blues jam that follows. "Wandering Stranger" begins with a simple guitar roll before gaining steam and storming through mournful tambourine hits and Elmore James production. Though it spends a bit too much time repeating its titular phrase, Blakeslee manages to hold your attention with his hypnotic guitar picking and vagabond desperation. At times, Blakeslee mixes the experimental leanings of the Velvet Underground and Tim Buckley into his country-blues, and he does so to mesmerizing effect. "Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor" has the same sort of claustrophobic beauty heard on Starsailor or Astral Weeks. Borrowing Buckley's airy, off-key vocals and rumbling spitfire guitar strokes, Blakeslee-- frayed and torn by the sterility of modernity-- perfects the drunken torch song. "Please Be Careful in New Orleans" tracks the same dwindling night. Pulsing with release and forlorn grace, its swampy, lovelorn quality contributes as much to the blues as it borrows. Ending with the weathered river-bent jam "Happy Trails", Blakeslee closes an album that should delight blues purists and neo-delta enthusiasts alike. His unconventional stylings meld into the time-honored necessities of repetition and stark resurgence with a grace that belies his 23 years.

Artist: Entrance, Album: Wandering Stranger, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.9 Album review: "You know the tale: White boys snuck away with the blues, hollowed it out with shrill teeny-bopper mania and a vaguely emergent counter-culture, and created the shiny, deltaless gleam of rock. And yet, over the past few years, there has been increased interest in the blues-- mostly from white midwesterners who were introduced to it via Jimmy Page and Keith Richards. Of these new blues fetishistis, The White Stripes are the success story and The Black Keys are riding shotgun. Another Fat Possum artist, Guy Blakeslee-- the lightning-haired hippie-throwback from Entrance-- is also helping to reform a genre that has largely been forsaken since Page and Richards were clean. After tours with Devendra Banhart and Cat Power, Blakeslee began to make a small underground clamor in 2003 with his Honey Moan EP. That disc showed potential, but Blakeslee has quickly blossomed. Using a peculiar guitar style-- he flips a right-handed guitar and plays it with his left-- Blakeslee creates a sound with enough feverish cacophony to raise Robert Johnson from his eternal deal. His second LP as Entrance, Wandering Stranger, picks up on the gutty Leadbelly-era moans of his first, tracing the eternal welcome in age-old standards while creating novel originals steeped in the form's history. "Rex's Blues" is the re-telling of a song by cult country-rock troubadour Townes Van Zandt. Blakeslee's straight depression-era accompaniment-- from slow guitar-picking to a moaning, despondent fiddle-- makes the track sound like a camp-fire hymn crumpled under the faded lore of histories and proclamations that "the South will rise again". His voice is a high-pitched moan/beg that aches with a sense of dusty misfortune, and is reminiscent of the husky country-folk voacls of Van Zandt contemporary Ry Cooder. As his voice gives way to a rumbling piano, Blakeslee confesses a historic allegiance to the blues but, more importantly, makes them seethe again. On the title track, Blakeslee asks his production crew to dim the lights, setting an appropriate mood for the blistering acoustic blues jam that follows. "Wandering Stranger" begins with a simple guitar roll before gaining steam and storming through mournful tambourine hits and Elmore James production. Though it spends a bit too much time repeating its titular phrase, Blakeslee manages to hold your attention with his hypnotic guitar picking and vagabond desperation. At times, Blakeslee mixes the experimental leanings of the Velvet Underground and Tim Buckley into his country-blues, and he does so to mesmerizing effect. "Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor" has the same sort of claustrophobic beauty heard on Starsailor or Astral Weeks. Borrowing Buckley's airy, off-key vocals and rumbling spitfire guitar strokes, Blakeslee-- frayed and torn by the sterility of modernity-- perfects the drunken torch song. "Please Be Careful in New Orleans" tracks the same dwindling night. Pulsing with release and forlorn grace, its swampy, lovelorn quality contributes as much to the blues as it borrows. Ending with the weathered river-bent jam "Happy Trails", Blakeslee closes an album that should delight blues purists and neo-delta enthusiasts alike. His unconventional stylings meld into the time-honored necessities of repetition and stark resurgence with a grace that belies his 23 years."

My Morning Jacket, Songs: Ohia

Split EP

Rock

Jason Nickey

Split EPs. What's the point? Not eclectic enough to be enjoyed as a sampler, too confining to be much of an extended statement, and too long to highlight the strength of a single song like a seven-inch could, they tend to come off like pathetic time-stalling ploys between albums or repositories for second-rate (or worse) material. But, as with all things, there are exceptions. And this, my friends, is a big one. Within the realm of country-leaning indie rock, one will be hard pressed to find three better songs from My Morning Jacket than the three they lead this record off with. And the lone Songs: Ohia track, though more of a completist affair typical to these kinds of releases, is nothing to scoff at, either. What My Morning Jacket confronts us with here is a band on top of its game. Though any discussion of these guys will almost assuredly bring up their sounding like somewhere been Neil Young and the Flaming Lips, the whole truth is they sound like a lot of classic bands and artists-- ranging from the Allman Brothers to Television-- but in the final summation, they sound like no one but themselves. "O Is the One That Is Real" is the kind of song a well-wishing fan would hope they'd release as a college radio single from an album, instead of on a split EP that'll likely be overlooked at the end of the day. It's a song that positively could break the band to a wider audience, easily bettering anything the band has recorded so far. It has the mark of a classic stamped all over it: a catchy but slippery guitar riff, slightly anthemic lyrics, and powerful, confident delivery. An attention-grabbing snare crack kicks off the song before singer/guitarist Jim James wails, in his reverb-drenched, honey-n'-whiskey-soaked voice, "Always leave your television on/ Always keep your answers by the phone..." By the time the song's reached its peak, with James singing his guts out, "The radio will play" over and over again, you find yourself un-self-consciously singing along, and maybe even dusting off the old air guitar. In one fell swoop, it eliminates years of indie rock indoctrination forbidding all non-ironic displays of enjoyment and identification. And it's a beautiful and liberating thing. "How Do You Know" is a quasi-ballad with amazing if perplexing lyrics that manage to be evocative despite themselves: "Who fanned the fire that burned down the lake? One, two, three, four things I'd rather forget." The songs builds in a similar fashion to the first, with a great dual guitar solo and a classic-rockish drum fill bridge that comes off as completely necessary. "Come Closer" is a full-on ballad with no apologies, and though it may sound more like a Neil Young song than anything of My Morning Jacket's previous work, they pull it off like Crazy Horse-- I can say with a fair amount of confidence that it would have made a great b-side for "Heart of Gold," had that space not already been occupied by "Sugar Mountain." The subject is love and longing (what else?), and James has never sounded more genuinely forlorn. And that's no small statement for a man who once sung, "When dark touches your skull, you can dump that on me." After a 2\xBD-minute palette-cleansing track which sounds like the first three songs sped up and reversed, Songs: Ohia evens out the EP with a 10-minute version of "Be Your Own Guide," a song that appeared as an untitled track in a vastly different form on last year's live album, Me Sei Apparso Come Un Fantasma. A sparse, acoustic jam session captured to tape by Paul Oldham at his studio in Shelbyville, Kentucky, it's notable for featuring his brother, the Bonnie Prince himself, and Appendix Out's Ali Roberts. But, before you wet yourself, it should be noted that Will Oldham's backup vocals are mixed low in the background (we're talking the next room here) and his words are few and far between. Even so, his voice is unmistakable, even at a distance, and his harmonizing with Ohia frontman Jason Molina on the Emersonian title/refrain is stark and moving. It may not be the dream match-up fans have envisioned since Songs: Ohia released its first single on Palace records so long ago, but it is far more affecting than you might expect. And so, what we end up with is a split EP of another breed-- one on which actual talent meets top-shelf songwriting, rather than the usual we-found-this-one-in-the-closet contributions. Showcasing both bands at what is, thus far, their artistic apexes, the record is well worth its $7.49 sticker price. And that's a hell of a lot more than you could say for Rancid and NOFX's BYO Split Series, Vol. III.

Artist: My Morning Jacket, Songs: Ohia, Album: Split EP, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 8.5 Album review: "Split EPs. What's the point? Not eclectic enough to be enjoyed as a sampler, too confining to be much of an extended statement, and too long to highlight the strength of a single song like a seven-inch could, they tend to come off like pathetic time-stalling ploys between albums or repositories for second-rate (or worse) material. But, as with all things, there are exceptions. And this, my friends, is a big one. Within the realm of country-leaning indie rock, one will be hard pressed to find three better songs from My Morning Jacket than the three they lead this record off with. And the lone Songs: Ohia track, though more of a completist affair typical to these kinds of releases, is nothing to scoff at, either. What My Morning Jacket confronts us with here is a band on top of its game. Though any discussion of these guys will almost assuredly bring up their sounding like somewhere been Neil Young and the Flaming Lips, the whole truth is they sound like a lot of classic bands and artists-- ranging from the Allman Brothers to Television-- but in the final summation, they sound like no one but themselves. "O Is the One That Is Real" is the kind of song a well-wishing fan would hope they'd release as a college radio single from an album, instead of on a split EP that'll likely be overlooked at the end of the day. It's a song that positively could break the band to a wider audience, easily bettering anything the band has recorded so far. It has the mark of a classic stamped all over it: a catchy but slippery guitar riff, slightly anthemic lyrics, and powerful, confident delivery. An attention-grabbing snare crack kicks off the song before singer/guitarist Jim James wails, in his reverb-drenched, honey-n'-whiskey-soaked voice, "Always leave your television on/ Always keep your answers by the phone..." By the time the song's reached its peak, with James singing his guts out, "The radio will play" over and over again, you find yourself un-self-consciously singing along, and maybe even dusting off the old air guitar. In one fell swoop, it eliminates years of indie rock indoctrination forbidding all non-ironic displays of enjoyment and identification. And it's a beautiful and liberating thing. "How Do You Know" is a quasi-ballad with amazing if perplexing lyrics that manage to be evocative despite themselves: "Who fanned the fire that burned down the lake? One, two, three, four things I'd rather forget." The songs builds in a similar fashion to the first, with a great dual guitar solo and a classic-rockish drum fill bridge that comes off as completely necessary. "Come Closer" is a full-on ballad with no apologies, and though it may sound more like a Neil Young song than anything of My Morning Jacket's previous work, they pull it off like Crazy Horse-- I can say with a fair amount of confidence that it would have made a great b-side for "Heart of Gold," had that space not already been occupied by "Sugar Mountain." The subject is love and longing (what else?), and James has never sounded more genuinely forlorn. And that's no small statement for a man who once sung, "When dark touches your skull, you can dump that on me." After a 2\xBD-minute palette-cleansing track which sounds like the first three songs sped up and reversed, Songs: Ohia evens out the EP with a 10-minute version of "Be Your Own Guide," a song that appeared as an untitled track in a vastly different form on last year's live album, Me Sei Apparso Come Un Fantasma. A sparse, acoustic jam session captured to tape by Paul Oldham at his studio in Shelbyville, Kentucky, it's notable for featuring his brother, the Bonnie Prince himself, and Appendix Out's Ali Roberts. But, before you wet yourself, it should be noted that Will Oldham's backup vocals are mixed low in the background (we're talking the next room here) and his words are few and far between. Even so, his voice is unmistakable, even at a distance, and his harmonizing with Ohia frontman Jason Molina on the Emersonian title/refrain is stark and moving. It may not be the dream match-up fans have envisioned since Songs: Ohia released its first single on Palace records so long ago, but it is far more affecting than you might expect. And so, what we end up with is a split EP of another breed-- one on which actual talent meets top-shelf songwriting, rather than the usual we-found-this-one-in-the-closet contributions. Showcasing both bands at what is, thus far, their artistic apexes, the record is well worth its $7.49 sticker price. And that's a hell of a lot more than you could say for Rancid and NOFX's BYO Split Series, Vol. III."

Modest Mouse

This Is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About

Rock

Brian Howe

The Modest Mouse of the 2000s was very of its time, when indie rock was turning more porous and mainstream. The Moon and Antarctica from 2000 clothed their decrepit strains in major label finery and production by someone outside of their local bubble, Califone's Brian Deck. The record also let in influences that were not yet entirely indie-approved, such as dance music on "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes". Morbid lyrics and backmasked guitars notwithstanding, "Gravity Rides Everything" was catchy enough to sell Nissan Quest minivans. Moon, though clearly a classic now, caused debates over whether Modest Mouse had "sold out," something people still earnestly fretted about as the Internet was upsetting old hierarchies. This commercial openness was quite a shift for a band defined by a sense of isolation in its own secret world. The Modest Mouse of the '90s had also been very much of its time, when indie rock was less of a popular genre than a refuge from them. Weird bands from nowhere places strained their quirks through a punk filter, and their styles were narrower but, perhaps, deeper than those of their polyglot descendants. Modest Mouse fit the mold. Formed by singer and guitarist Isaac Brock, drummer Jeremiah Green, and bassist Eric Judy in the Washington suburb of Issaquah, they had a kind of insular, visionary oddness. Modest Mouse quickly found purchase in the Pacific Northwest scene. In 1994, they made their first EP with Calvin Johnson in Olympia for his twee-punk label K Records, as well as a single for Seattle's Sub Pop. They also recorded the album Sad Sappy Sucker, which sat on the shelf until 2001, when it did indeed turn out to be their most K-style record—bright, baggy, and loose at the seams. During this time they veered off into a wilderness of their own devising, debuting with the darker and tauter This Is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About on Up Records in 1996. That and their second Up album, 1997's The Lonesome Crowded West, have just been reissued by Brock's Glacial Pace label. Both are excellent, but it's the more fully formed Lonesome that consummates an era. From the start, Modest Mouse were instantly recognizable: Judy's ropy bass and Green's drumming, heaving from a caveman bash to a disco skip, are indispensable to the rangy, volatile sound. But it's the guitars that really define it, so strange and particular—Brock's hearty riffs, string bends, harmonics, and whammy-bar tremolo push up toward trebly extremes of panicked intensity. The songs break down into wheezes and coughs as the band pounds the ends of bars until they curl up like sheet metal. But they weren't completely ex nihilo. Like other '90s indie groups, Modest Mouse reflected their region before pulling free from it on later albums. There's grunge in the whisper-scream dynamics here, metal and punk in sections of breakneck thrash, twee in the richly jangling acoustic guitars and in Brock's voice, always petulant and pleading. There are also outlying indie touchstones—"Might" sounds like Built to Spill if someone had knocked Doug Martsch on the head, other songs evoke the Pixies by way of Pink Floyd. Even alt-rock is absorbed in the patchwork pop of "Lounge", a medley of surf-rock, hot jazz, and chamber music with shout-rapped lyrics. But Modest Mouse were already fortifying their hermetic island on Long Drive, where they pitted the jarring against the lulling in diverse ways. The great theme of both albums is travel, or more essentially, how motion through space feels. This is also intricately bound up with the physical geography Modest Mouse inhabited. The urban paranoia of post-punk seeps into wide-open rural, looming industrial and encroaching suburban vistas, all alike in their sinister, hypnotic repetition. With the first words of Long Drive, "traveling swallowing Dramamine," a sense of drugged conveyance through some grand monotony settles over us. We seem to glimpse empty landscapes with twisty bits of things blowing through them in the window of a train. Strip malls and parking lots, monuments and steeples, empty fields and dark forests scroll by in a purgatorial loop. This becomes overt on "Convenient Parking", a dusty practice riff with broken springs. For Brock, these enclosing physical confines are tantamount to mental ones; he's always moving forward without getting anywhere different, and he confronts this existential emergency with disdain and terrified awe. The music cultivates its particular urgency by devising and then breaking free from psychic traps. "From the top of the ocean/ From the bottom of the sky/ Well, I get claustrophobic," Brock bellows on Lonesome's "Teeth Like God's Shoeshine", an image that would return in different form a few years later on "Ocean Breathes Salty". The earth and heavens are not mediums but inescapable masses, crushing us in the seam where they meet. The feeling of being stuck in a small town inflates to cosmological proportions. Home-schooled in religious hippie communes, Brock was primed for this visionary vocation. His lyrics are marked by a war between militant atheism and kind of crypto-Christian mysticism, a tension that twists his perspective into strange shapes. On these records, the pavement is steadily encroaching on the wild in ways that feel spiritually symbolic. Brock wants to wrench apart ground and sky, prefabricated towns and consumer culture, to find an exit hatch into some deeper, more meaningful state of being which, as he suspects on "Exit Does Not Exist", is a fantasy. Modest Mouse never captured their particular rural paranoia better than on Lonesome's "Cowboy Dan", a minor key dirge that takes us to a jet-black desert rustling below the occasional shooting star. It's a folkloric tale of a cowboy who tries to shoot down God as revenge for mortality, with eerie calls and groans floating out of a vast, breathing darkness. "I didn't move to the city, the city moved to me," he cries, via Brock's rabid goblin croak, "and I want out desperately," a theme that first began to develop on Long Drive's "Beach Side Property". It's all about inverted insides and outsides: huge landscapes that feel like small cages, civilizations that breed a savage misanthropy, disbelief that feels like religion. "Doin' the Cockroach" begins with the elusive dichotomy, "I was in heaven, I was in Hell/ Believe in neither but fear them as well." Brock excoriates riders on the Amtrak for "talking 'bout TV," punctuating his condemnations with pleas to "please shut up." He also slips in one of the best of the obscure aphorisms that would come to

Artist: Modest Mouse, Album: This Is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 8.5 Album review: "The Modest Mouse of the 2000s was very of its time, when indie rock was turning more porous and mainstream. The Moon and Antarctica from 2000 clothed their decrepit strains in major label finery and production by someone outside of their local bubble, Califone's Brian Deck. The record also let in influences that were not yet entirely indie-approved, such as dance music on "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes". Morbid lyrics and backmasked guitars notwithstanding, "Gravity Rides Everything" was catchy enough to sell Nissan Quest minivans. Moon, though clearly a classic now, caused debates over whether Modest Mouse had "sold out," something people still earnestly fretted about as the Internet was upsetting old hierarchies. This commercial openness was quite a shift for a band defined by a sense of isolation in its own secret world. The Modest Mouse of the '90s had also been very much of its time, when indie rock was less of a popular genre than a refuge from them. Weird bands from nowhere places strained their quirks through a punk filter, and their styles were narrower but, perhaps, deeper than those of their polyglot descendants. Modest Mouse fit the mold. Formed by singer and guitarist Isaac Brock, drummer Jeremiah Green, and bassist Eric Judy in the Washington suburb of Issaquah, they had a kind of insular, visionary oddness. Modest Mouse quickly found purchase in the Pacific Northwest scene. In 1994, they made their first EP with Calvin Johnson in Olympia for his twee-punk label K Records, as well as a single for Seattle's Sub Pop. They also recorded the album Sad Sappy Sucker, which sat on the shelf until 2001, when it did indeed turn out to be their most K-style record—bright, baggy, and loose at the seams. During this time they veered off into a wilderness of their own devising, debuting with the darker and tauter This Is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About on Up Records in 1996. That and their second Up album, 1997's The Lonesome Crowded West, have just been reissued by Brock's Glacial Pace label. Both are excellent, but it's the more fully formed Lonesome that consummates an era. From the start, Modest Mouse were instantly recognizable: Judy's ropy bass and Green's drumming, heaving from a caveman bash to a disco skip, are indispensable to the rangy, volatile sound. But it's the guitars that really define it, so strange and particular—Brock's hearty riffs, string bends, harmonics, and whammy-bar tremolo push up toward trebly extremes of panicked intensity. The songs break down into wheezes and coughs as the band pounds the ends of bars until they curl up like sheet metal. But they weren't completely ex nihilo. Like other '90s indie groups, Modest Mouse reflected their region before pulling free from it on later albums. There's grunge in the whisper-scream dynamics here, metal and punk in sections of breakneck thrash, twee in the richly jangling acoustic guitars and in Brock's voice, always petulant and pleading. There are also outlying indie touchstones—"Might" sounds like Built to Spill if someone had knocked Doug Martsch on the head, other songs evoke the Pixies by way of Pink Floyd. Even alt-rock is absorbed in the patchwork pop of "Lounge", a medley of surf-rock, hot jazz, and chamber music with shout-rapped lyrics. But Modest Mouse were already fortifying their hermetic island on Long Drive, where they pitted the jarring against the lulling in diverse ways. The great theme of both albums is travel, or more essentially, how motion through space feels. This is also intricately bound up with the physical geography Modest Mouse inhabited. The urban paranoia of post-punk seeps into wide-open rural, looming industrial and encroaching suburban vistas, all alike in their sinister, hypnotic repetition. With the first words of Long Drive, "traveling swallowing Dramamine," a sense of drugged conveyance through some grand monotony settles over us. We seem to glimpse empty landscapes with twisty bits of things blowing through them in the window of a train. Strip malls and parking lots, monuments and steeples, empty fields and dark forests scroll by in a purgatorial loop. This becomes overt on "Convenient Parking", a dusty practice riff with broken springs. For Brock, these enclosing physical confines are tantamount to mental ones; he's always moving forward without getting anywhere different, and he confronts this existential emergency with disdain and terrified awe. The music cultivates its particular urgency by devising and then breaking free from psychic traps. "From the top of the ocean/ From the bottom of the sky/ Well, I get claustrophobic," Brock bellows on Lonesome's "Teeth Like God's Shoeshine", an image that would return in different form a few years later on "Ocean Breathes Salty". The earth and heavens are not mediums but inescapable masses, crushing us in the seam where they meet. The feeling of being stuck in a small town inflates to cosmological proportions. Home-schooled in religious hippie communes, Brock was primed for this visionary vocation. His lyrics are marked by a war between militant atheism and kind of crypto-Christian mysticism, a tension that twists his perspective into strange shapes. On these records, the pavement is steadily encroaching on the wild in ways that feel spiritually symbolic. Brock wants to wrench apart ground and sky, prefabricated towns and consumer culture, to find an exit hatch into some deeper, more meaningful state of being which, as he suspects on "Exit Does Not Exist", is a fantasy. Modest Mouse never captured their particular rural paranoia better than on Lonesome's "Cowboy Dan", a minor key dirge that takes us to a jet-black desert rustling below the occasional shooting star. It's a folkloric tale of a cowboy who tries to shoot down God as revenge for mortality, with eerie calls and groans floating out of a vast, breathing darkness. "I didn't move to the city, the city moved to me," he cries, via Brock's rabid goblin croak, "and I want out desperately," a theme that first began to develop on Long Drive's "Beach Side Property". It's all about inverted insides and outsides: huge landscapes that feel like small cages, civilizations that breed a savage misanthropy, disbelief that feels like religion. "Doin' the Cockroach" begins with the elusive dichotomy, "I was in heaven, I was in Hell/ Believe in neither but fear them as well." Brock excoriates riders on the Amtrak for "talking 'bout TV," punctuating his condemnations with pleas to "please shut up." He also slips in one of the best of the obscure aphorisms that would come to "

K-X-P

K-X-P

Electronic

Larry Fitzmaurice

Some music resists characterization, such as the self-titled debut from the quixotically named K-X-P. The Finnish sorta-trio comes with good bona fides: two drummers, Anssi Nykänen and Tomi Leppanen plus Annie producer/co-songwriter Timo Kaukolampi, and all are good friends with the inimitable DJ duo Optimo, who invited them to perform at one of their last Sunday club nights at Glasgow's Sub Club earlier this year. To an extent, you can understand K-X-P's appeal to dance floor-friendly artists; their music is incredibly rhythmic, their grooves-- paranoid dark disco and motorik-- deep. The pulsing beat that kicks off "Mehu Moments", for example, is so nerve-wracking that you can practically see a red-flashing siren while you're listening to it. And yet this record manages to sound loose and off-the-cuff, positively alive and experimental. New elements within these eight compositions seem to arise out of thin air, like the ripples of melody that erupt throughout "Mehu Moments" or the streaks of weeping keyboard sounds stretching out "Aibal Dub". Sometimes it all sounds delightfully improvisational. Thing is, though, these songs are way too self-contained to be the result of compiled-together jam sessions. While K-X-P can get a little rote and samey-sounding at times, every song feels compact despite their running time (only the brightly-humming "Epilogue" makes it under the four-minute mark). That structural conciseness could ostensibly be attributed to Kaukolampi's pop pedigree; thing is, though, it's pretty much the only discernible trace that any member of K-X-P's worked with more conventional forms of music. The two most conceivably "straightforward" cuts here, "18 Hours (of Love)" and "Pockets", are also the two most menacing. The former uses Gary Glitter drums and low-bellowed vocals to create what sounds like a Satanic romantic ballad, while the latter's spangled disco touches are offset by maniacal post-punk howls. Take a listen to Kaukolampi's rework of "Pockets" featuring redone vocals from Annie herself, then, and you'll wonder whether or not there's a big beating pop heartbeat (not "Heartbeat") lying under each and every song on this album, which is a shape-shifting puzzle that is as fun to pick apart as it is to simply take in and enjoy.

Artist: K-X-P, Album: K-X-P, Genre: Electronic, Score (1-10): 7.8 Album review: "Some music resists characterization, such as the self-titled debut from the quixotically named K-X-P. The Finnish sorta-trio comes with good bona fides: two drummers, Anssi Nykänen and Tomi Leppanen plus Annie producer/co-songwriter Timo Kaukolampi, and all are good friends with the inimitable DJ duo Optimo, who invited them to perform at one of their last Sunday club nights at Glasgow's Sub Club earlier this year. To an extent, you can understand K-X-P's appeal to dance floor-friendly artists; their music is incredibly rhythmic, their grooves-- paranoid dark disco and motorik-- deep. The pulsing beat that kicks off "Mehu Moments", for example, is so nerve-wracking that you can practically see a red-flashing siren while you're listening to it. And yet this record manages to sound loose and off-the-cuff, positively alive and experimental. New elements within these eight compositions seem to arise out of thin air, like the ripples of melody that erupt throughout "Mehu Moments" or the streaks of weeping keyboard sounds stretching out "Aibal Dub". Sometimes it all sounds delightfully improvisational. Thing is, though, these songs are way too self-contained to be the result of compiled-together jam sessions. While K-X-P can get a little rote and samey-sounding at times, every song feels compact despite their running time (only the brightly-humming "Epilogue" makes it under the four-minute mark). That structural conciseness could ostensibly be attributed to Kaukolampi's pop pedigree; thing is, though, it's pretty much the only discernible trace that any member of K-X-P's worked with more conventional forms of music. The two most conceivably "straightforward" cuts here, "18 Hours (of Love)" and "Pockets", are also the two most menacing. The former uses Gary Glitter drums and low-bellowed vocals to create what sounds like a Satanic romantic ballad, while the latter's spangled disco touches are offset by maniacal post-punk howls. Take a listen to Kaukolampi's rework of "Pockets" featuring redone vocals from Annie herself, then, and you'll wonder whether or not there's a big beating pop heartbeat (not "Heartbeat") lying under each and every song on this album, which is a shape-shifting puzzle that is as fun to pick apart as it is to simply take in and enjoy."

The Dodos

Visiter

Rock

Ian Cohen

To understand where San Francisco's Dodos are coming from, just check the weekend itinerary from their most recent visit to L.A. On a Friday, they did a campus show for USC students; but when a miscommunication foiled their next day's plan to play at the Smell-- the venue at the epicenter of the local scene-- they ended up joining a bill with Thee Oh Sees and the Crystal Antlers at a birthday party at the Silverlake Lounge, an intimate, cozy space where you can't see a thing if you're more than five feet from the stage. It's within those coordinates (campus-quad pop, art-punk, and communal, lo-fi folk) that their Frenchkiss debut Visiter exists; an acoustic-and-percussion duo at their core, Dodos manage to hit with a full-band force that's even more pronounced in their astounding live sets. On Visiter, Dodos guitarist Meric Long alternates between fingerpicking and breakneck strumming while playing in confounding alternate tunings. Logan Kroeber's clattering, locomotive percussion (which includes shoes outfitted with tambourines) is every bit a lead instrument as Long's guitar, and a big reason the band's music has garnered comparisons to the less abstract moments of Animal Collective and the output of other new-primitivist bands like High Places and Yeasayer. The first quarter of Visiter marries those impulses with fantastic results. The banjo playing and female harmonies on opener "Walking" echo Michigan-era Sufjan, but the connection ends at Long's stridently confident vocal delivery. That song immediately segues into the maniacal "Red & Purple", a bewilderingly worded love song accompanied by a toy piano and fuzzy bass. And after the brief "Eyelids" comes "Fools", which has been bouncing around the web in some form for months, and is fast becoming the Dodos' signature tune-- although it may soon be eclipsed by the rollicking, Feelies-esque "Jodi". From that point on, Visiter alternates between longer, more improvisatory material and near-interludes, which can leave a slightly spotty impression on its first few listens. With more exposure, the record reveals the celebratory acoustics of Led Zeppelin III or a more song-oriented take on tourmates Akron/Family. Playing with infectious fervor, Long runs through tricky blues-boxing and molten slide riffs on the galloping "Paint the Rust" and the second half of the epic "Joe's Waltz". Visiter's second half is anchored by "The Season" and "God?", two massive shapeshifters that help define the record. Long and Kroeber here don't seem wedded to power duo minimalism-- and it's intriguing to wonder how they could incorporate their backgrounds in metal, African Ewe drumming, and gamelan beyond a sense of rhythmic intensity. These possibilities could also make more streamlined, Magnetic Fields-like numbers "Winter" and "Undeclared" seem vanilla by comparison to some, but by making room for both, Visiter ends up being one of the most welcoming (and welcome) records of 2008 so far.

Artist: The Dodos, Album: Visiter, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 8.5 Album review: "To understand where San Francisco's Dodos are coming from, just check the weekend itinerary from their most recent visit to L.A. On a Friday, they did a campus show for USC students; but when a miscommunication foiled their next day's plan to play at the Smell-- the venue at the epicenter of the local scene-- they ended up joining a bill with Thee Oh Sees and the Crystal Antlers at a birthday party at the Silverlake Lounge, an intimate, cozy space where you can't see a thing if you're more than five feet from the stage. It's within those coordinates (campus-quad pop, art-punk, and communal, lo-fi folk) that their Frenchkiss debut Visiter exists; an acoustic-and-percussion duo at their core, Dodos manage to hit with a full-band force that's even more pronounced in their astounding live sets. On Visiter, Dodos guitarist Meric Long alternates between fingerpicking and breakneck strumming while playing in confounding alternate tunings. Logan Kroeber's clattering, locomotive percussion (which includes shoes outfitted with tambourines) is every bit a lead instrument as Long's guitar, and a big reason the band's music has garnered comparisons to the less abstract moments of Animal Collective and the output of other new-primitivist bands like High Places and Yeasayer. The first quarter of Visiter marries those impulses with fantastic results. The banjo playing and female harmonies on opener "Walking" echo Michigan-era Sufjan, but the connection ends at Long's stridently confident vocal delivery. That song immediately segues into the maniacal "Red & Purple", a bewilderingly worded love song accompanied by a toy piano and fuzzy bass. And after the brief "Eyelids" comes "Fools", which has been bouncing around the web in some form for months, and is fast becoming the Dodos' signature tune-- although it may soon be eclipsed by the rollicking, Feelies-esque "Jodi". From that point on, Visiter alternates between longer, more improvisatory material and near-interludes, which can leave a slightly spotty impression on its first few listens. With more exposure, the record reveals the celebratory acoustics of Led Zeppelin III or a more song-oriented take on tourmates Akron/Family. Playing with infectious fervor, Long runs through tricky blues-boxing and molten slide riffs on the galloping "Paint the Rust" and the second half of the epic "Joe's Waltz". Visiter's second half is anchored by "The Season" and "God?", two massive shapeshifters that help define the record. Long and Kroeber here don't seem wedded to power duo minimalism-- and it's intriguing to wonder how they could incorporate their backgrounds in metal, African Ewe drumming, and gamelan beyond a sense of rhythmic intensity. These possibilities could also make more streamlined, Magnetic Fields-like numbers "Winter" and "Undeclared" seem vanilla by comparison to some, but by making room for both, Visiter ends up being one of the most welcoming (and welcome) records of 2008 so far."

Torche

Songs for Singles

Metal

Tom Breihan

There should be more bands like Torche. The Miami trio sits near the top of the underground-metal heap, but they're also the rare underground-metal band happy to come off as regular dudes rather than medieval warriors or swamp monsters. They churn out fuzz-rock bangers with mechanistic precision, never betraying any signs of pretension or mystique. Since the departure of guitarist Juan Montoya, they're an entirely short-haired band, and frontman Steve Brooks sings in a beer-belly bellow, not an elemental rasp. The band take as many cues from ragged 1990s indie as they do from bongwater-dripping 70s crunch-rock, and you can hear echos of Guided By Voices and Superchunk reverberating around in there. They never sacrifice melody for volume, or vice versa-- and somehow, that quality makes them exceptional. Two years ago, the band came out hard with Meanderthal, which the metal mag Decibel called their album of the year while admitting that it sometimes sounds like the Foo Fighters. On Songs for Singles, their new eight-song EP, there's nothing that leaves as deep an impression as some of the best Meanderthal moments. Instead there's an intense focus on brevity, as the first six songs stick as tightly as possible to a very basic formula, sort of like the Ramones did. These songs never get far beyond the two-minute mark. The band plays with heads down, never taking time for solos or anything that registers as a chorus. If you're not paying much attention, the tracks bleed into one another and feel like one long rush of effects-pedal rumble and chunky riffage. Nothing during these first few songs is all that memorable, but it's always impressive that they're able to work up such furious grooves in such confined spaces, hardly even altering the tempos. This is fun, assured heavy rock, and it gets the job done. But the last two tracks-- the ones where Torche give themselves room to stretch out-- are where Songs for Singles really takes off. "Face the Wall" and "Out Again" are still very much wheelhouse songs for this band, but they slow down their attack noticeably, letting space and dynamics creep [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| into the guitar-storm. "Out Again" is six minutes of relentless pounding, and the band spends its back half abandoning the song-form stuff completely and just vamping hard. It sounds awesome. With that title, Songs for Singles practically announces itself as a stopgap release, a breather after the breakthrough. If it doesn't shake the earth the way Meanderthal did, it's not really supposed to. But the EP does show that this band remains in fine working condition, and another full-on album from these guys would be a welcome thing indeed. Until then, this will do just fine.

Artist: Torche, Album: Songs for Singles, Genre: Metal, Score (1-10): 7.4 Album review: "There should be more bands like Torche. The Miami trio sits near the top of the underground-metal heap, but they're also the rare underground-metal band happy to come off as regular dudes rather than medieval warriors or swamp monsters. They churn out fuzz-rock bangers with mechanistic precision, never betraying any signs of pretension or mystique. Since the departure of guitarist Juan Montoya, they're an entirely short-haired band, and frontman Steve Brooks sings in a beer-belly bellow, not an elemental rasp. The band take as many cues from ragged 1990s indie as they do from bongwater-dripping 70s crunch-rock, and you can hear echos of Guided By Voices and Superchunk reverberating around in there. They never sacrifice melody for volume, or vice versa-- and somehow, that quality makes them exceptional. Two years ago, the band came out hard with Meanderthal, which the metal mag Decibel called their album of the year while admitting that it sometimes sounds like the Foo Fighters. On Songs for Singles, their new eight-song EP, there's nothing that leaves as deep an impression as some of the best Meanderthal moments. Instead there's an intense focus on brevity, as the first six songs stick as tightly as possible to a very basic formula, sort of like the Ramones did. These songs never get far beyond the two-minute mark. The band plays with heads down, never taking time for solos or anything that registers as a chorus. If you're not paying much attention, the tracks bleed into one another and feel like one long rush of effects-pedal rumble and chunky riffage. Nothing during these first few songs is all that memorable, but it's always impressive that they're able to work up such furious grooves in such confined spaces, hardly even altering the tempos. This is fun, assured heavy rock, and it gets the job done. But the last two tracks-- the ones where Torche give themselves room to stretch out-- are where Songs for Singles really takes off. "Face the Wall" and "Out Again" are still very much wheelhouse songs for this band, but they slow down their attack noticeably, letting space and dynamics creep [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| into the guitar-storm. "Out Again" is six minutes of relentless pounding, and the band spends its back half abandoning the song-form stuff completely and just vamping hard. It sounds awesome. With that title, Songs for Singles practically announces itself as a stopgap release, a breather after the breakthrough. If it doesn't shake the earth the way Meanderthal did, it's not really supposed to. But the EP does show that this band remains in fine working condition, and another full-on album from these guys would be a welcome thing indeed. Until then, this will do just fine."