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Worm Ouroboros

Come the Thaw

Metal

Grayson Currin

Worm Ouroboros is a hit-and-miss name: The handle sounds frightening, of course, with its image of an annelid stretching into a circle to engulf its own tail. It's the sort of moniker that suggests a gang of crusty punks or a band of black metal bros, all loud and mean and vile. But Worm Ouroboros is actually guitarist/singer Jessica Way and bassist/keyboardist Lorranie Rath, accompanied on each of their two albums by a different drummer. The Bay Area group plays as softly as the two sing, their ethereal harmonies luxuriating above musical atmospheres that shift shapes like thick white clouds. Wading between waters of doom metal and gossamer atmospherics, Way and Rath's music moves with a wonderfully graceful menace that's far less terrifying than the name might indicate. But as "Worm Ouroboros" rightly suggests, the eight-minute drifts and builds that this band makes are borne of persistence, diligence, and care. Their sense of restraint turns the rare trick of making 4AD-adherent epics stop just short of maudlin. The band's second album Come the Thaw sharpens the focus of their 2010 self-titled debut by giving each instrumental part what essentially amounts to more respect. Like recent records by the blues-crawling Earth, Worm Ouroboros makes layered music that doesn't sound overly dense or distracted, so that each player is able not only to convey shades of meaning but also to push each song along in unexpected ways. Though never very loud, Rath's remarkable bass playing shakes the frame. On "Further Out", her thick lines dart beneath Way's languid guitar, not only shouldering the melody but also serving as the tonal anchor. Way's playing during "Withered" is marvel of dynamics, each steely note refracted as if through a crystal. She finally climbs into a riff, though, and like a spartan Crazy Horse, the rest of the band follows, lashing hard against its back. Its hard-won redemption, the sort of coda that feels deserved. Drummer Aesop Dekker proves Worm Ouroboros' perfect complementary third. If you've heard his 1990s punk bands or his current black-metal benders Agalloch and Ludicra, you know playing heavy isn't a worry for him. Last year, he wrote about his favorite jazz albums for NPR. By splitting the meter during "Withered" and darting (slowly) around the beat of "Further Out", he proves that such talk isn't a feint, but is instead a tool. Here, he's constantly on the boundary of heavy-- insistent but not impatient, always present but never upstaging. He breaks through only when necessary, adding dimension and weight to the nebulous movement. All the space on Come the Thaw simply galvanizes those bigger moments, affording simple rock-trio-taking-a-solo moments a rare kind of majesty and power. That feeling is appropriate, too, since Come the Thaw lyrically focuses on processes that take months, years or lifetimes to reach-- birth, blossoming, death, discovering-- but only an instant to fulfill. "We feed our days on measured hours," Rath reassures at one point, singing with such softness and slowness that it feels as if these units of time are only foreign abstractions. During "When We Are Gold", Rath opens with a question. "What have we won/ when all is won?" she sings, pulling at each syllable like strips of gauze as feather-light guitar, bass, and drums wind through each other. This track is not only the album's best but its loudest, pushing from a place close to stillness and silence into, after nine minutes, the sort of near-roar that might fit between two Agalloch bursts or on any record that attempts to truss post and hard rock. But the climax matters here less than that opening credo; in the context of Come the Thaw, an album that's very much concerned with the slow cycles of nature and life, it seems a subtle indictment of music that mistakes volume and motion for emotion and substance. Worm Ouroboros are more concerned with the core of their music than the crescendos that that might propel. It's a good thing, too, because these songs-- however quiet or calm they become-- bear a great weight with remarkable elegance.

Artist: Worm Ouroboros, Album: Come the Thaw, Genre: Metal, Score (1-10): 7.4 Album review: "Worm Ouroboros is a hit-and-miss name: The handle sounds frightening, of course, with its image of an annelid stretching into a circle to engulf its own tail. It's the sort of moniker that suggests a gang of crusty punks or a band of black metal bros, all loud and mean and vile. But Worm Ouroboros is actually guitarist/singer Jessica Way and bassist/keyboardist Lorranie Rath, accompanied on each of their two albums by a different drummer. The Bay Area group plays as softly as the two sing, their ethereal harmonies luxuriating above musical atmospheres that shift shapes like thick white clouds. Wading between waters of doom metal and gossamer atmospherics, Way and Rath's music moves with a wonderfully graceful menace that's far less terrifying than the name might indicate. But as "Worm Ouroboros" rightly suggests, the eight-minute drifts and builds that this band makes are borne of persistence, diligence, and care. Their sense of restraint turns the rare trick of making 4AD-adherent epics stop just short of maudlin. The band's second album Come the Thaw sharpens the focus of their 2010 self-titled debut by giving each instrumental part what essentially amounts to more respect. Like recent records by the blues-crawling Earth, Worm Ouroboros makes layered music that doesn't sound overly dense or distracted, so that each player is able not only to convey shades of meaning but also to push each song along in unexpected ways. Though never very loud, Rath's remarkable bass playing shakes the frame. On "Further Out", her thick lines dart beneath Way's languid guitar, not only shouldering the melody but also serving as the tonal anchor. Way's playing during "Withered" is marvel of dynamics, each steely note refracted as if through a crystal. She finally climbs into a riff, though, and like a spartan Crazy Horse, the rest of the band follows, lashing hard against its back. Its hard-won redemption, the sort of coda that feels deserved. Drummer Aesop Dekker proves Worm Ouroboros' perfect complementary third. If you've heard his 1990s punk bands or his current black-metal benders Agalloch and Ludicra, you know playing heavy isn't a worry for him. Last year, he wrote about his favorite jazz albums for NPR. By splitting the meter during "Withered" and darting (slowly) around the beat of "Further Out", he proves that such talk isn't a feint, but is instead a tool. Here, he's constantly on the boundary of heavy-- insistent but not impatient, always present but never upstaging. He breaks through only when necessary, adding dimension and weight to the nebulous movement. All the space on Come the Thaw simply galvanizes those bigger moments, affording simple rock-trio-taking-a-solo moments a rare kind of majesty and power. That feeling is appropriate, too, since Come the Thaw lyrically focuses on processes that take months, years or lifetimes to reach-- birth, blossoming, death, discovering-- but only an instant to fulfill. "We feed our days on measured hours," Rath reassures at one point, singing with such softness and slowness that it feels as if these units of time are only foreign abstractions. During "When We Are Gold", Rath opens with a question. "What have we won/ when all is won?" she sings, pulling at each syllable like strips of gauze as feather-light guitar, bass, and drums wind through each other. This track is not only the album's best but its loudest, pushing from a place close to stillness and silence into, after nine minutes, the sort of near-roar that might fit between two Agalloch bursts or on any record that attempts to truss post and hard rock. But the climax matters here less than that opening credo; in the context of Come the Thaw, an album that's very much concerned with the slow cycles of nature and life, it seems a subtle indictment of music that mistakes volume and motion for emotion and substance. Worm Ouroboros are more concerned with the core of their music than the crescendos that that might propel. It's a good thing, too, because these songs-- however quiet or calm they become-- bear a great weight with remarkable elegance."

The Atlas Moth

The Old Believer

Metal,Rock

Grayson Haver Currin

The Atlas Moth's success has always come from compelling composites. Though they began as a formidable sludge outfit, the Chicago band’s old mold had broken by the time they recorded their second album, 2011’s An Ache for the Distance, which turned black metal torment into post-rock splendor, mid-tempo marches into alternate-universe alternative rock, and late-album comedowns into psychedelic dreamstates. Even the band’s personnel confirmed those polyglot tendencies; screamer Stavros Giannopoulos and singer David Kush traded guttural yells and grand refrains, conjuring incredible tension through variety and unpredictability. On An Ache for the Distance, you could hear the Atlas Moth sorting through a few dozen passions and touchstones on every song—from Deftones and My Bloody Valentine to the Allman Brothers Band and Neurosis. At any moment, their next move was always a question mark. The Old Believer, their first following three years of personal and professional turmoil, embraces many of those same sounds. “Collider” pivots between a great burst of swollen, righteous groove rock and prismatic psych, with elements of metals both blackened and doom at work, too. “City of Light” puts neon electronics beneath a stuttering, snapping beat, synthesizers undulating beneath the hook in a wonderful kosmiche haze. More than ever, the Atlas Moth depend upon the dynamic between Giannopoulos and Kush; they alternately take separate verses, nest opposing lyrics inside of one another’s voices and, during the album’s most dramatic moments, even sing together. The two-frontman approach suits The Old Believer’s the album’s fraught, searching content. Since An Ache for the Distance, Giannopoulos lost his mother and his girlfriend, Kush his grandfather, producer and guitarist Andrew Ragin his hips, and the band veteran drummer Anthony Mainiero. They explore self-doubt and existential quandaries, wondering about any afterlife and searching for an escape in the liquid drugs of South America. Near the end of the album’s most emblematic track, “The Sea Beyond”, Giannopoulos and Kush cycle around one another, Giannopoulos lamenting loss as Kush repeats “I know you’re always with me” as a maxim of self-assurance. Giannopoulos eventually joins him, the shouting and the singing perfectly and unexpectedly balancing despair and hope. But by and large, the Atlas Moth’s variety seems to have begot its own homogeny here, so that each move the band makes now feels like one you’ve either heard before or would have imagined upon prompting. Perhaps to accompany the more somber subject material, the Atlas Moth drift deeper into the shoegaze interests that have previously been only dalliances. The guitars hang low and loud, and twinkling keyboards fill cracks that spiderweb throughout the sound. More often than not, though, the softness mitigates the heaviness, or at least couches the blows until the impact all but disappears. Even when Giannopoulos is seething about dejection above surging guitars during “Halcyon Blvd”, the power seems padded, and the slow, steady wallop of “Hesperian” feels like a choice between the distortion of shoegaze and doom gone unmade, leaving the song to linger in the ineffectual middle distance. After the heavy touring cycle behind An Ache for the Distance, The Atlas Moth split with Mainiero, a dynamo capable of meeting and adding power to the band’s stylistic shifts. But part of the flat-line predictability here stems from Daniel Lasek, the new drummer who loves to find a mid-tempo beat and rarely leave it. For a band that’s flourished through a sense of whiplash, he’s an overly steady, cautious chauffer. The cover of The Old Believer depicts an alabaster-skinned woman in a matching white dress, blending into the walls like a camouflaged angel. She’s seated, staring calmly at the camera. But if you hold the cover beneath water for a few seconds, the scene goes hellish: The black walls of some dim chamber appear. She grows horns, and her eyes become black pits, a sanguine stain shaping a thin V beneath them, from her neck to her waist. For Profound Lore, the relatively scheme-free label that’s released the last two albums by The Atlas Moth, the trickery is tantamount to a picture disc or a limited-edition release. Designed by Ryan Clark, both images are beautiful, and the effect is chilling. It’s too bad, then, that the metaphor feels so off for The Old Believer. The Atlas Moth hope to be heavy and heavenly, aggressive and accessible, to exist in worlds of light and dark simultaneously. In this instance, they wind up in the shadows of their own intentions, hidden in flat gray instead of beautiful white or harrowing black.

Artist: The Atlas Moth, Album: The Old Believer, Genre: Metal,Rock, Score (1-10): 6.7 Album review: "The Atlas Moth's success has always come from compelling composites. Though they began as a formidable sludge outfit, the Chicago band’s old mold had broken by the time they recorded their second album, 2011’s An Ache for the Distance, which turned black metal torment into post-rock splendor, mid-tempo marches into alternate-universe alternative rock, and late-album comedowns into psychedelic dreamstates. Even the band’s personnel confirmed those polyglot tendencies; screamer Stavros Giannopoulos and singer David Kush traded guttural yells and grand refrains, conjuring incredible tension through variety and unpredictability. On An Ache for the Distance, you could hear the Atlas Moth sorting through a few dozen passions and touchstones on every song—from Deftones and My Bloody Valentine to the Allman Brothers Band and Neurosis. At any moment, their next move was always a question mark. The Old Believer, their first following three years of personal and professional turmoil, embraces many of those same sounds. “Collider” pivots between a great burst of swollen, righteous groove rock and prismatic psych, with elements of metals both blackened and doom at work, too. “City of Light” puts neon electronics beneath a stuttering, snapping beat, synthesizers undulating beneath the hook in a wonderful kosmiche haze. More than ever, the Atlas Moth depend upon the dynamic between Giannopoulos and Kush; they alternately take separate verses, nest opposing lyrics inside of one another’s voices and, during the album’s most dramatic moments, even sing together. The two-frontman approach suits The Old Believer’s the album’s fraught, searching content. Since An Ache for the Distance, Giannopoulos lost his mother and his girlfriend, Kush his grandfather, producer and guitarist Andrew Ragin his hips, and the band veteran drummer Anthony Mainiero. They explore self-doubt and existential quandaries, wondering about any afterlife and searching for an escape in the liquid drugs of South America. Near the end of the album’s most emblematic track, “The Sea Beyond”, Giannopoulos and Kush cycle around one another, Giannopoulos lamenting loss as Kush repeats “I know you’re always with me” as a maxim of self-assurance. Giannopoulos eventually joins him, the shouting and the singing perfectly and unexpectedly balancing despair and hope. But by and large, the Atlas Moth’s variety seems to have begot its own homogeny here, so that each move the band makes now feels like one you’ve either heard before or would have imagined upon prompting. Perhaps to accompany the more somber subject material, the Atlas Moth drift deeper into the shoegaze interests that have previously been only dalliances. The guitars hang low and loud, and twinkling keyboards fill cracks that spiderweb throughout the sound. More often than not, though, the softness mitigates the heaviness, or at least couches the blows until the impact all but disappears. Even when Giannopoulos is seething about dejection above surging guitars during “Halcyon Blvd”, the power seems padded, and the slow, steady wallop of “Hesperian” feels like a choice between the distortion of shoegaze and doom gone unmade, leaving the song to linger in the ineffectual middle distance. After the heavy touring cycle behind An Ache for the Distance, The Atlas Moth split with Mainiero, a dynamo capable of meeting and adding power to the band’s stylistic shifts. But part of the flat-line predictability here stems from Daniel Lasek, the new drummer who loves to find a mid-tempo beat and rarely leave it. For a band that’s flourished through a sense of whiplash, he’s an overly steady, cautious chauffer. The cover of The Old Believer depicts an alabaster-skinned woman in a matching white dress, blending into the walls like a camouflaged angel. She’s seated, staring calmly at the camera. But if you hold the cover beneath water for a few seconds, the scene goes hellish: The black walls of some dim chamber appear. She grows horns, and her eyes become black pits, a sanguine stain shaping a thin V beneath them, from her neck to her waist. For Profound Lore, the relatively scheme-free label that’s released the last two albums by The Atlas Moth, the trickery is tantamount to a picture disc or a limited-edition release. Designed by Ryan Clark, both images are beautiful, and the effect is chilling. It’s too bad, then, that the metaphor feels so off for The Old Believer. The Atlas Moth hope to be heavy and heavenly, aggressive and accessible, to exist in worlds of light and dark simultaneously. In this instance, they wind up in the shadows of their own intentions, hidden in flat gray instead of beautiful white or harrowing black."

Six Organs of Admittance

For Octavio Paz

Experimental

Johnny Loftus

Six Organs of Admittance has always found peace in patience, even when that peace is meted out only after fingers have been jabbed in eyes or a bag of crazy pills emptied. With For Octavio Paz, single chair Organist Ben Chasny lingers on the path to redemption, but it's a quieter route this time out, and where it goes, there's neither electricity nor the need for human voices. The all-acoustic recording was originally released in late 2003 by Time-Lag as limited vinyl. Now released on CD, non-vinyl junkies are given the chance to hear Chasny emoting through his fingers. On Paz, he's discovered a handful of melodies in a rusty Hills Bros can, buried under the humus in a leafy green clearing. They still smell like coffee a little bit, but that aroma mixes with the smell of the woods, and carries them on humidity over the graves of caterpillars. After an introduction of sustaining notes and solemn bells, "When You Finally Return" establishes Paz's gentle, pastoral tone. The melody isn't direct; it hangs as smoke does in shafts of light. But with the aid of a few plucked overdubs and his own wordless vocal sighs (the only voice heard on the entire record), Chasny insistently and effectively molds both song and mood. The result sticks around like memories of summer evenings. "Elk River" is equally evocative, its sway somehow gorgeous and forlorn all at once. The cut's quiet pauses keep fooling you into thinking that the slide show is ending, but Chasny keeps coming back to tell another sad tale. "They Fixed the Broken Windmill Today"-- its title alone an entire short story-- runs on a consistent whisper of nylon strings as deft, vaguely Eastern-tinged fills undulate over the low rumble like ribbons in a breeze. Though they vary from melancholy to warm memory in between notes, the emotions Chasny creates on For Octavio Paz are always stark and imagistic. The recording's first portion becomes a meditation in acts, with each track summoning some other piece of Chasny's skill as a player to speak without lines. But all of this is mere setup for the lengthy finale, a 28-minute one-man show of steel string poetics called "The Acceptance of Absolute Negation". It could be a soundtrack to a murder in the Badlands: Spiraling lead notes echo through a petrified forest as the deed is done, followed by a moment of solitary meditation. But mad from the heat and the smell of blood, the realization becomes sudden and painful, and there's nothing left to do but run. Notes tumble over one another, trying to put ground between them and the act. Things slow then to a pensive crawl. There's a pause, and then another section of contemplation. It's an incredible piece, ably and intently drawing on the album's spectrum of moods. This summer, ride the darker wave to a place of quiet light.

Artist: Six Organs of Admittance, Album: For Octavio Paz, Genre: Experimental, Score (1-10): 8.0 Album review: "Six Organs of Admittance has always found peace in patience, even when that peace is meted out only after fingers have been jabbed in eyes or a bag of crazy pills emptied. With For Octavio Paz, single chair Organist Ben Chasny lingers on the path to redemption, but it's a quieter route this time out, and where it goes, there's neither electricity nor the need for human voices. The all-acoustic recording was originally released in late 2003 by Time-Lag as limited vinyl. Now released on CD, non-vinyl junkies are given the chance to hear Chasny emoting through his fingers. On Paz, he's discovered a handful of melodies in a rusty Hills Bros can, buried under the humus in a leafy green clearing. They still smell like coffee a little bit, but that aroma mixes with the smell of the woods, and carries them on humidity over the graves of caterpillars. After an introduction of sustaining notes and solemn bells, "When You Finally Return" establishes Paz's gentle, pastoral tone. The melody isn't direct; it hangs as smoke does in shafts of light. But with the aid of a few plucked overdubs and his own wordless vocal sighs (the only voice heard on the entire record), Chasny insistently and effectively molds both song and mood. The result sticks around like memories of summer evenings. "Elk River" is equally evocative, its sway somehow gorgeous and forlorn all at once. The cut's quiet pauses keep fooling you into thinking that the slide show is ending, but Chasny keeps coming back to tell another sad tale. "They Fixed the Broken Windmill Today"-- its title alone an entire short story-- runs on a consistent whisper of nylon strings as deft, vaguely Eastern-tinged fills undulate over the low rumble like ribbons in a breeze. Though they vary from melancholy to warm memory in between notes, the emotions Chasny creates on For Octavio Paz are always stark and imagistic. The recording's first portion becomes a meditation in acts, with each track summoning some other piece of Chasny's skill as a player to speak without lines. But all of this is mere setup for the lengthy finale, a 28-minute one-man show of steel string poetics called "The Acceptance of Absolute Negation". It could be a soundtrack to a murder in the Badlands: Spiraling lead notes echo through a petrified forest as the deed is done, followed by a moment of solitary meditation. But mad from the heat and the smell of blood, the realization becomes sudden and painful, and there's nothing left to do but run. Notes tumble over one another, trying to put ground between them and the act. Things slow then to a pensive crawl. There's a pause, and then another section of contemplation. It's an incredible piece, ably and intently drawing on the album's spectrum of moods. This summer, ride the darker wave to a place of quiet light."

Grace Jones

Warm Leatherette

Electronic,Rock

T. Cole Rachel

Few human beings have so fully embodied the notion of a “singular artist” more so than Grace Jones. In the annals of pop music and fashion, there has simply never been anyone else on earth quite like her—strong, severe, and otherworldly in every way, Jones has blazed a trail through popular culture over the past four decades that remains unrivaled in terms of boldfaced originality. Warm Leatherette, Jones’ career-shifting 1980 release, gives a glimpse of the artist just as her true genius was coming into sharp focus. Having spent the ’70s essentially exploding the fashion world as a model for Wilhemina and serving as muse for the likes of Yves St. Laurent and Helmut Newton, Jones’ career as a musician was still something of a novelty. Her first three albums—Portfolio, Fame, and Muse—were fun but somewhat facile, cover-filled reflections of the druggy hedonism of the disco era, which itself was already on the wane. For someone whose very image was seen as somehow deeply transgressive, Jones’ music had not yet caught up. So it was that, while stepping into the 1980s, Jones sought about drastic change and creative rebirth. In doing so, her next body of work would also reflect the blossoming radicalism of pop’s new wave—music that would upend the staid conventions of nightlife, feminist politics, and tired ideas about sexuality. Released in May of 1980, Warm Leatherette was the first release in what is known as Jones’ Compass Point Trilogy. Recorded at Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas, the album finds Jones working alongside Island Records’ then president, Chris Blackwell, and producer Alex Sadkin. Her backing band—which she would lovingly describe as “the united nations in the studio’’—included Sly and Robbie as her rhythm section, as well as a crack team of session musicians that involved keyboardist Wally Badarou, guitarists, Mikey “Mao” Chung and Barry “White” Reynolds, and percussionist Uziah “Sticky” Thompson. Dubbed the Compass Point All Stars, this crew of ace musicians would go on to provide chill vibes for everyone from Tom Tom Club to Joe Cocker, but it was the group’s groundbreaking work with Grace Jones—and the dubby, Caribbean aesthetic they immersed her with—that would make for some of the most defining music of her career. Stripped of disco’s goofier affectations, Warm Leatherette was alternately more sanguine and more severe—a bracing confluence of reggae, new-wave, and post-punk that showcased Jones’ range as a performer and her uncanny, occasionally perverse vision as an interpreter of other people’s songs. Of the three records that Jones recorded at Compass Point, it would ultimately be 1981’s Nightclubbing that would rightly go down as the stone cold classic, but Warm Leatherette, while perhaps not as pioneering, still sets a high mark in terms of both inventiveness and musicality. Of the album’s eight tracks, seven are covers, though the material covered couldn’t ostensibly be more schizophrenic. Songs by the Pretenders (“Private Life”), the Marvelettes (“The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game”), Tom Petty (who actually contributed an additional verse for Jones to sing on her version of “Breakdown”), and Roxy Music (“Love Is the Drug”) all get reworked here, with mostly excellent results. The album opens with Jones’ take on the Normal’s “Warm Leatherette”—a J.G. Ballard inspired narrative about sex as car crash that, in Jones’ hands, manages the weird feat of being both abjectly funky and oddly frightening. It’s a trope that carries throughout the record, with Jones’ unmistakable sing/speak imbuing every track with an intense gravitas—equal parts self-assurance and menace. Leatherette’s most defining characteristic is the way that the power dynamics in these songs are neatly subverted, particularly in regards to the songs that were previously sung by men. “Love Is the Drug” loses its original blasé chicness to become something entirely more urgent and potently literal, while Jones’ take on “Breakdown” deflates the somewhat creepy male-delivered directive of the original (“Breakdown, go ahead and give it to me”) and replaces it with something altogether more empowered. Hearing Jones purr the lyric, “I'm not afraid of you running away/Honey, I’ve got the feeling you won’t” the line becomes more than a simple observation, it carries the weight of an implied threat. The album track that most compellingly predicts the genius to come on Nightclubbing is Jones’ take on the Pretenders’ “Private Life.” The original, which served as Chrissie Hynde’s punk-informed take on reggae, is perfect fodder for Jones, who ratchets up the drama in the lyrics and turns the whole thing into fine art. “Yes, your marriage is a tragedy,” she growls, “But it’s not my concern/I’m very superficial/I hate anything official.” The spectral dub provided by the Compass Point All Stars points in the direction of Nightclubbing’s best tracks and the “My Jamaican Guy” swagger of 1985’s Island Life. What sells the song so effectively is not necessarily the power of Jones’ voice, but rather the power of Grace Jones herself. As she would go on to prove in later efforts, it was the monolithic force of her personality—imperious, feral, queer in the truest sense of the word—that would make these songs so compelling. She is, to put it simply, impossible to ignore. In regards to this particular reissue, the extras provided on the two-disc set are nice but hardly essential. Mostly we just get “long versions,” “single versions,” and the occasional “dub versions” of the existing album tracks, none of which stray too far from the originals— other than that they are much longer. (Still, hearing eight-minute long, tripped out versions of “Private Life” and “Love is the Drug” is hardly a bad thing). One of the reissue’s best treats, however, is the inclusion of Jones’ fantastically demented cover of Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control,” presented here in three different versions. It might have been deemed too weird to be included on the album at the time, but you’d be hard pressed to find another recorded document that so thoroughly exhibits Grace Jones’ particular form of genius. Originally released as a B-side to “Private Life” in 1980, “Control” is gloriously unhinged. Taking the liberty of changing the lyrics to first person, Jones transforms the song from a document of unraveling into a statement of defiance: “To the voice that told her when and where to act/She said, I’ve lost control.” Ironically, even in a song about losing your shit completely, Grace Jones is always the one in calling the shots.

Artist: Grace Jones, Album: Warm Leatherette, Genre: Electronic,Rock, Score (1-10): 8.5 Album review: "Few human beings have so fully embodied the notion of a “singular artist” more so than Grace Jones. In the annals of pop music and fashion, there has simply never been anyone else on earth quite like her—strong, severe, and otherworldly in every way, Jones has blazed a trail through popular culture over the past four decades that remains unrivaled in terms of boldfaced originality. Warm Leatherette, Jones’ career-shifting 1980 release, gives a glimpse of the artist just as her true genius was coming into sharp focus. Having spent the ’70s essentially exploding the fashion world as a model for Wilhemina and serving as muse for the likes of Yves St. Laurent and Helmut Newton, Jones’ career as a musician was still something of a novelty. Her first three albums—Portfolio, Fame, and Muse—were fun but somewhat facile, cover-filled reflections of the druggy hedonism of the disco era, which itself was already on the wane. For someone whose very image was seen as somehow deeply transgressive, Jones’ music had not yet caught up. So it was that, while stepping into the 1980s, Jones sought about drastic change and creative rebirth. In doing so, her next body of work would also reflect the blossoming radicalism of pop’s new wave—music that would upend the staid conventions of nightlife, feminist politics, and tired ideas about sexuality. Released in May of 1980, Warm Leatherette was the first release in what is known as Jones’ Compass Point Trilogy. Recorded at Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas, the album finds Jones working alongside Island Records’ then president, Chris Blackwell, and producer Alex Sadkin. Her backing band—which she would lovingly describe as “the united nations in the studio’’—included Sly and Robbie as her rhythm section, as well as a crack team of session musicians that involved keyboardist Wally Badarou, guitarists, Mikey “Mao” Chung and Barry “White” Reynolds, and percussionist Uziah “Sticky” Thompson. Dubbed the Compass Point All Stars, this crew of ace musicians would go on to provide chill vibes for everyone from Tom Tom Club to Joe Cocker, but it was the group’s groundbreaking work with Grace Jones—and the dubby, Caribbean aesthetic they immersed her with—that would make for some of the most defining music of her career. Stripped of disco’s goofier affectations, Warm Leatherette was alternately more sanguine and more severe—a bracing confluence of reggae, new-wave, and post-punk that showcased Jones’ range as a performer and her uncanny, occasionally perverse vision as an interpreter of other people’s songs. Of the three records that Jones recorded at Compass Point, it would ultimately be 1981’s Nightclubbing that would rightly go down as the stone cold classic, but Warm Leatherette, while perhaps not as pioneering, still sets a high mark in terms of both inventiveness and musicality. Of the album’s eight tracks, seven are covers, though the material covered couldn’t ostensibly be more schizophrenic. Songs by the Pretenders (“Private Life”), the Marvelettes (“The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game”), Tom Petty (who actually contributed an additional verse for Jones to sing on her version of “Breakdown”), and Roxy Music (“Love Is the Drug”) all get reworked here, with mostly excellent results. The album opens with Jones’ take on the Normal’s “Warm Leatherette”—a J.G. Ballard inspired narrative about sex as car crash that, in Jones’ hands, manages the weird feat of being both abjectly funky and oddly frightening. It’s a trope that carries throughout the record, with Jones’ unmistakable sing/speak imbuing every track with an intense gravitas—equal parts self-assurance and menace. Leatherette’s most defining characteristic is the way that the power dynamics in these songs are neatly subverted, particularly in regards to the songs that were previously sung by men. “Love Is the Drug” loses its original blasé chicness to become something entirely more urgent and potently literal, while Jones’ take on “Breakdown” deflates the somewhat creepy male-delivered directive of the original (“Breakdown, go ahead and give it to me”) and replaces it with something altogether more empowered. Hearing Jones purr the lyric, “I'm not afraid of you running away/Honey, I’ve got the feeling you won’t” the line becomes more than a simple observation, it carries the weight of an implied threat. The album track that most compellingly predicts the genius to come on Nightclubbing is Jones’ take on the Pretenders’ “Private Life.” The original, which served as Chrissie Hynde’s punk-informed take on reggae, is perfect fodder for Jones, who ratchets up the drama in the lyrics and turns the whole thing into fine art. “Yes, your marriage is a tragedy,” she growls, “But it’s not my concern/I’m very superficial/I hate anything official.” The spectral dub provided by the Compass Point All Stars points in the direction of Nightclubbing’s best tracks and the “My Jamaican Guy” swagger of 1985’s Island Life. What sells the song so effectively is not necessarily the power of Jones’ voice, but rather the power of Grace Jones herself. As she would go on to prove in later efforts, it was the monolithic force of her personality—imperious, feral, queer in the truest sense of the word—that would make these songs so compelling. She is, to put it simply, impossible to ignore. In regards to this particular reissue, the extras provided on the two-disc set are nice but hardly essential. Mostly we just get “long versions,” “single versions,” and the occasional “dub versions” of the existing album tracks, none of which stray too far from the originals— other than that they are much longer. (Still, hearing eight-minute long, tripped out versions of “Private Life” and “Love is the Drug” is hardly a bad thing). One of the reissue’s best treats, however, is the inclusion of Jones’ fantastically demented cover of Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control,” presented here in three different versions. It might have been deemed too weird to be included on the album at the time, but you’d be hard pressed to find another recorded document that so thoroughly exhibits Grace Jones’ particular form of genius. Originally released as a B-side to “Private Life” in 1980, “Control” is gloriously unhinged. Taking the liberty of changing the lyrics to first person, Jones transforms the song from a document of unraveling into a statement of defiance: “To the voice that told her when and where to act/She said, I’ve lost control.” Ironically, even in a song about losing your shit completely, Grace Jones is always the one in calling the shots."

Lil Wayne

The Leak EP

Rap

Tom Breihan

Lil Wayne is a tease. Even though he's spent the past couple of years flooding the market with mixtapes, he hasn't released a proper solo album since Tha Carter 2 in 2005. Tha Carter 3, his long-awaited follow-up, should've arrived months ago, but Wayne keeps pushing it back. He says he's keeping demand up by making us wait, while message-board gadflies speculate that he just isn't cut out to make a classic full-length album. Late in 2007, he said that he'd end the year with a compilation album called The Leak, clearing away all the best tracks that have trickled past the lax security at Cash Money's offices in preparation for the real thing. But The Leak never came; instead, we got a new solo album from Birdman, Wayne's shitty half-rapping father figure. And then, on Christmas, a new Lil Wayne EP hit online stores like iTunes and Amazon with zero fanfare, without even Wayne's face on the cover. The Leak EP is a meager offering: five songs, ranging in quality from absolute bangers to intriguing sketches, which tell us little about how The Carter 3 might eventually sound. One of the common critical complaints against Wayne is that he can rap but that he doesn't know how to make songs. His weeded-out free-associative signature doesn't need to conform to old ideas about song structure to do its work; on last year's double-mixtape bonanza Da Drought 3, he mostly just followed his muse over every half-decent recent beat he could find, letting the overblown boasts and batshit similes flow freely. He'd sacrifice none of his demonic magnetism if he just kept rapping at that level forever. But by the end of the year, he appeared to be losing steam; on the November mixtape The Drought Is Over, he busied himself playing around obnoxiously with T-Pain's autotuner effects, and the actual rapping was, by Wayne's high standards, exhausted and uninspired. So it's oddly reassuring to hear Wayne deign to finish a few actual songs, complete with verses and choruses and intros and everything. And even if every song on The Leak finds Wayne sticking to his usual talking points, finding even more clever and circuitous ways to let us know how fly he is, his voice has more urgency and determination than he's shown in recent months. And even at his laziest, he's still riveting. But first the great. Opener "I'm Me" starts with tinkling ominous piano and stray vocal samples from past Wayne hits ("Go DJ", "Fireman"). And when the titanically jittery drums kick in, the string of possessed one-liners that follows puts the song in the same league as those older ones. Some are perfectly succinct and elegantly constructed: "I know the game is crazy, it's more crazy than it's ever been/ I'm married to that crazy bitch, call me Kevin Federline." Some are borderline nonsensical: "I'm a monster, I tell you, monster Wayne/ I have just swallowed the key to the house of pain." But throughout, there's a strident sense of purpose in his gurgling croak of a voice, like he finally has something at stake. And the third track, "Gossip", brings that purpose into focus. The first time anyone heard it was when he did a fiery rendition of it at the BET Hip Hop Awards a few months ago, and it's rumored to be the response to 50 Cent's recent string of underhanded jabs against Wayne. Over the track's huge, epic chopped-up soul and heart-monitor beeps, Wayne sounds genuinely heated: "Stop analyzing, criticizing/ You should realize what I am and start epitomizing." The next three tracks never bring back that sense of breathless urgency, but all of them would've made for perfectly acceptable album-tracks on Tha Carter 2. "Kush" is a happy, stoned little dip into Wayne's immense supply of weed-based punchlines. "Love Me or Hate Me" starts Wayne breathing his nonsense over epic swelling strings, no drums in sight. When it kicks in, he brings a guttural sung chorus that works as a distant cousin to his immortal hook on Playaz Circle's "Duffle Bag Boy", but his boasts never cohere into anything concrete. And on "Talkin' About It", he brings an evilly assured singsong flow over a heavy organic bounce track. But those last three tracks are just practice. Or maybe they're victory laps after the apocalyptic openers. Either way, The Leak is an encouraging sign that Wayne's managed to keep himself sharp even after all the material he's already churned out in recent months. Now it's time for him to make good on its promise.

Artist: Lil Wayne, Album: The Leak EP, Genre: Rap, Score (1-10): 7.7 Album review: "Lil Wayne is a tease. Even though he's spent the past couple of years flooding the market with mixtapes, he hasn't released a proper solo album since Tha Carter 2 in 2005. Tha Carter 3, his long-awaited follow-up, should've arrived months ago, but Wayne keeps pushing it back. He says he's keeping demand up by making us wait, while message-board gadflies speculate that he just isn't cut out to make a classic full-length album. Late in 2007, he said that he'd end the year with a compilation album called The Leak, clearing away all the best tracks that have trickled past the lax security at Cash Money's offices in preparation for the real thing. But The Leak never came; instead, we got a new solo album from Birdman, Wayne's shitty half-rapping father figure. And then, on Christmas, a new Lil Wayne EP hit online stores like iTunes and Amazon with zero fanfare, without even Wayne's face on the cover. The Leak EP is a meager offering: five songs, ranging in quality from absolute bangers to intriguing sketches, which tell us little about how The Carter 3 might eventually sound. One of the common critical complaints against Wayne is that he can rap but that he doesn't know how to make songs. His weeded-out free-associative signature doesn't need to conform to old ideas about song structure to do its work; on last year's double-mixtape bonanza Da Drought 3, he mostly just followed his muse over every half-decent recent beat he could find, letting the overblown boasts and batshit similes flow freely. He'd sacrifice none of his demonic magnetism if he just kept rapping at that level forever. But by the end of the year, he appeared to be losing steam; on the November mixtape The Drought Is Over, he busied himself playing around obnoxiously with T-Pain's autotuner effects, and the actual rapping was, by Wayne's high standards, exhausted and uninspired. So it's oddly reassuring to hear Wayne deign to finish a few actual songs, complete with verses and choruses and intros and everything. And even if every song on The Leak finds Wayne sticking to his usual talking points, finding even more clever and circuitous ways to let us know how fly he is, his voice has more urgency and determination than he's shown in recent months. And even at his laziest, he's still riveting. But first the great. Opener "I'm Me" starts with tinkling ominous piano and stray vocal samples from past Wayne hits ("Go DJ", "Fireman"). And when the titanically jittery drums kick in, the string of possessed one-liners that follows puts the song in the same league as those older ones. Some are perfectly succinct and elegantly constructed: "I know the game is crazy, it's more crazy than it's ever been/ I'm married to that crazy bitch, call me Kevin Federline." Some are borderline nonsensical: "I'm a monster, I tell you, monster Wayne/ I have just swallowed the key to the house of pain." But throughout, there's a strident sense of purpose in his gurgling croak of a voice, like he finally has something at stake. And the third track, "Gossip", brings that purpose into focus. The first time anyone heard it was when he did a fiery rendition of it at the BET Hip Hop Awards a few months ago, and it's rumored to be the response to 50 Cent's recent string of underhanded jabs against Wayne. Over the track's huge, epic chopped-up soul and heart-monitor beeps, Wayne sounds genuinely heated: "Stop analyzing, criticizing/ You should realize what I am and start epitomizing." The next three tracks never bring back that sense of breathless urgency, but all of them would've made for perfectly acceptable album-tracks on Tha Carter 2. "Kush" is a happy, stoned little dip into Wayne's immense supply of weed-based punchlines. "Love Me or Hate Me" starts Wayne breathing his nonsense over epic swelling strings, no drums in sight. When it kicks in, he brings a guttural sung chorus that works as a distant cousin to his immortal hook on Playaz Circle's "Duffle Bag Boy", but his boasts never cohere into anything concrete. And on "Talkin' About It", he brings an evilly assured singsong flow over a heavy organic bounce track. But those last three tracks are just practice. Or maybe they're victory laps after the apocalyptic openers. Either way, The Leak is an encouraging sign that Wayne's managed to keep himself sharp even after all the material he's already churned out in recent months. Now it's time for him to make good on its promise."

Architecture in Helsinki

Fingers Crossed

Rock

Amanda Petrusich

Paper plates have been liberally smeared with bright yellow icing. Blue cocktail napkins, sticky and balled, float in partially consumed cups of apple juice. Shreds of wrapping paper and ribbon dot the lawn, abandoned sacks of loot topple over into the flower bed, candy necklaces and pink rubber balls slowly spill into the topsoil. Children run at full speed, in every direction. And on a cheap portable stereo, Architecture in Helsinki's debut, Fingers Crossed, starts to spin, each bit of gleefully bizarre pop somehow blending perfectly into the haphazard hollers of cake-stuffed toddlers, mirroring their soft mania, providing what might be the only appropriate soundtrack to a throwdown attended exclusively by knee-high tots no longer wearing their shoes. While goofy backyard birthday parties have long been rendered formulaic, chalked up as another standardized offshoot of American minivan culture, Fingers Crossed is an oddly surprising invention, curiously unparalleled and quietly compelling: In a rapidly changing landscape, it's rare to stumble onto a record that actually sounds new, and Architecture in Helsinki have managed to take "neo-psych" to entirely unforeseen levels of blippy eccentricity. Ultimately, what's most disarming about the band's brand of blissful musing is that it's so stupidly pleasant to listen to: Melding lilting harmonies, sweet, high-pitched synthesizers, tittering percussion, and assorted woodwinds, Architecture lay out a weird and whimsical electro-pop buffet, effortless yet perplexing. A collective of eight Australians (five men, three women), Architecture tote around a massive pile of gear-- xylophone, flute, four different kinds of guitar, glockenspiel, trumpet, tuba, trombone, assorted synths, melodica, thumb piano, clarinet, recorder, bass, and various drums, their tinny din augmented only by a mess of vocals (including contributions by some craggy-voiced kids), handclaps, tap dancers, and finger snaps. It's impossible to understand the group without understanding their pile of stuff and the penchant for tinkles and beeps it so blatantly implies; despite employing more than thirty noisemakers and a diverse choir of age-ranged voices, Fingers Crossed manages to end up sounding excessive and slight at the very same time. The combination is beautifully baffling. Credit the band's songwriting prowess: "The Owl's Go" is Fingers Crossed's brilliant creative apex, an insane and addictive menagerie of sounds, melodies, and gleeful circus bits-- listening feels a little like cracking open the mind of a manic-depressive in full-on hysteria, climbing inside while he shakes with joy, elated to the point of drooling. The track starts with a whispered two-voice countdown, figures tap-shoes-and-finger-clicks-as-percussion, and then positions flute, jangly guitar, finger snaps, xylophone, a smattering of boy/girl voices, shouting children, and sighs as prominently as possible. While the rest of Fingers Crossed never quite matches this high, there are other notable moments: "Fumble" is a goofy-but-engaging tuba-heavy celebration, and "Like a Call", with its muted beats and meandering bassline, is an inadvertently touching promise. But just as benign backyard clowns have earned a spot in pre-adolescent nightmares, there's something sort of terrifying about Architecture in Helsinki's strung-out ecstasy. The band's incessant squeaking could make Fingers Crossed become vaguely unbearable, overwhelming in its promise of total, uncompromised happiness. Still, like any good birthday binge or uncanny high, it's worth the hangover. You might swear you'll never touch it again. But you so will.

Artist: Architecture in Helsinki, Album: Fingers Crossed, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 8.2 Album review: "Paper plates have been liberally smeared with bright yellow icing. Blue cocktail napkins, sticky and balled, float in partially consumed cups of apple juice. Shreds of wrapping paper and ribbon dot the lawn, abandoned sacks of loot topple over into the flower bed, candy necklaces and pink rubber balls slowly spill into the topsoil. Children run at full speed, in every direction. And on a cheap portable stereo, Architecture in Helsinki's debut, Fingers Crossed, starts to spin, each bit of gleefully bizarre pop somehow blending perfectly into the haphazard hollers of cake-stuffed toddlers, mirroring their soft mania, providing what might be the only appropriate soundtrack to a throwdown attended exclusively by knee-high tots no longer wearing their shoes. While goofy backyard birthday parties have long been rendered formulaic, chalked up as another standardized offshoot of American minivan culture, Fingers Crossed is an oddly surprising invention, curiously unparalleled and quietly compelling: In a rapidly changing landscape, it's rare to stumble onto a record that actually sounds new, and Architecture in Helsinki have managed to take "neo-psych" to entirely unforeseen levels of blippy eccentricity. Ultimately, what's most disarming about the band's brand of blissful musing is that it's so stupidly pleasant to listen to: Melding lilting harmonies, sweet, high-pitched synthesizers, tittering percussion, and assorted woodwinds, Architecture lay out a weird and whimsical electro-pop buffet, effortless yet perplexing. A collective of eight Australians (five men, three women), Architecture tote around a massive pile of gear-- xylophone, flute, four different kinds of guitar, glockenspiel, trumpet, tuba, trombone, assorted synths, melodica, thumb piano, clarinet, recorder, bass, and various drums, their tinny din augmented only by a mess of vocals (including contributions by some craggy-voiced kids), handclaps, tap dancers, and finger snaps. It's impossible to understand the group without understanding their pile of stuff and the penchant for tinkles and beeps it so blatantly implies; despite employing more than thirty noisemakers and a diverse choir of age-ranged voices, Fingers Crossed manages to end up sounding excessive and slight at the very same time. The combination is beautifully baffling. Credit the band's songwriting prowess: "The Owl's Go" is Fingers Crossed's brilliant creative apex, an insane and addictive menagerie of sounds, melodies, and gleeful circus bits-- listening feels a little like cracking open the mind of a manic-depressive in full-on hysteria, climbing inside while he shakes with joy, elated to the point of drooling. The track starts with a whispered two-voice countdown, figures tap-shoes-and-finger-clicks-as-percussion, and then positions flute, jangly guitar, finger snaps, xylophone, a smattering of boy/girl voices, shouting children, and sighs as prominently as possible. While the rest of Fingers Crossed never quite matches this high, there are other notable moments: "Fumble" is a goofy-but-engaging tuba-heavy celebration, and "Like a Call", with its muted beats and meandering bassline, is an inadvertently touching promise. But just as benign backyard clowns have earned a spot in pre-adolescent nightmares, there's something sort of terrifying about Architecture in Helsinki's strung-out ecstasy. The band's incessant squeaking could make Fingers Crossed become vaguely unbearable, overwhelming in its promise of total, uncompromised happiness. Still, like any good birthday binge or uncanny high, it's worth the hangover. You might swear you'll never touch it again. But you so will."

Isaac Hayes

Hot Buttered Soul

Pop/R&B

Nate Patrin

Think about how crazy this is for a moment: Stax loses Otis Redding and the Bar-Kays to a plane crash and the rights to their back catalog (and, later, Sam & Dave) to Atlantic. Without their biggest stars and their best session group, Stax executive Al Bell takes a desperate but necessary gamble: in an attempt to build an entirely new catalog out of scratch, he schedules dozens of all-new albums and singles to be recorded and released en masse over the course of a few months. And out of all of those records, the album that puts the label back on the map is a followup to a chart dud, recorded by a songwriter/producer who wasn't typically known for singing, where three of its four songs run over nine and a half minutes. And this album sells a million copies. If it weren't for the New York Mets, Isaac Hayes' Hot Buttered Soul would be the most unlikely comeback story of 1969. Since then, the album's had an odd reevaluation process: it hit #8 on the pop charts and #1 on the R&B charts, but also hit #1 on Billboard's Top Jazz Albums chart-- which alarmed partisans of Miles Davis and Sly Stone alike. After another couple of albums in its crossover-friendly, string-drenched vein, Rolling Stone declared Isaac Hayes an enemy of all that was good about soul music in the early 1970s; decades later, a generation reared on hip-hop reverse-engineered the beats on Pac's "Me Against the World" or PE's "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" and discovered an original brilliance. Now, after a listen to this new reissue 40 years later, Hot Buttered Soul might still seem a little historically counterintuitive. It stood as a newer, funkier phase of Southern soul, but it hinged on a sound more opulent than the most sharp-suited Motown crossover bid. It's an exercise in melodrama and indulgence that lays it on so heavy it's impossible not to hear it as anything but the stone truth. And it's an album whose edited-down singles-- both of which went top 40 pop-- sounded more like trailers for the real thing. (Said single edits are included here and can be safely ignored.) Yet the success of Hot Buttered Soul owed a bit to a classic crossover formula: start with an easy-listening-friendly pop staple, keep the orchestral sweetness, but layer on a shining veneer of psychedelic R&B, then stretch it out with some soul-jazz vamping and nail it down with a voice that hits like a velvet sledgehammer. Hayes demanded full creative control for this album, and his auteurism resulted in a luxurious rawness that soul artists would scramble to catch up with for years. It wasn't exactly an unprecedented sound, however, and in its own extravagant way Hot Buttered Soul might be to the end of the 60s what Ray Charles' Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music was seven years previous: an album that redrew the parameters for R&B's high-class populism. It's just that it hadn't been quite this audacious before-- not to the extent of Hayes' cover of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", all 18-plus sprawling minutes of it. Here we have a song that turns the idea of a slow build into something monumental: with a monologue he developed as a way to get apathetic club patrons to pay attention to where he was about to go, Hayes spends the first eight and a half minutes actually setting the stage for the scenario behind the song, from the wife's cavalier attitude and how the husband caught her cheating to the specific year and make of car he finally drove off for good in (a '65 Ford). It should be noted that all this time the band's been churning along with this hypnotic, minimalist swaying organ/bass/hi-hat drone that changes imperceptibly if at all; again, this is eight and a half minutes here. And when it finally does transition from Hayes' conversational murmur to the first actual sung line from the Jimmy Webb composition he's covering, it's the beginning of a metamorphosis that gradually transforms the dynamic of the song from sweet-stringed orchestration into full-fledged, brass-packed, explosively-cresting soul. But where "Phoenix" is all slow build, the album-opening version of "Walk on By" throws almost everything it has at you right away, nailing you to the floor with those first two drumbeats. Hayes takes the restrained sorrow of Bacharach and David's composition as made famous by Dionne Warwick and chucks it out the window, replacing it with an arrangement that is the absolute antithesis of hiding the tears and sadness and grieving in private. And it's goddamned devastating at every turn: its go-for-broke opening, with those weeping strings and that stinging guitar building to their gigantic crescendo; that moment when it collapses and sinks into Michael Toles' famous slinky guitar riff, which then warps its way into psychedelic keening more Hendrix than Cropper; every hitch and moan and heart-wracked ad-lib from Hayes' deep bass voice ("you put the hurt on me, you socked it to me, mama"). The entire last half of the song's twelve minutes is an exercise in seeing just how long you can not only maintain but build on a frenzied finale, where Toles' guitar sounds like it's ripping itself apart and Hayes' Hammond organ trembles and growls and stammers like a panicking tiger. It might be the most intense six minutes of soul recorded in the confines of a studio the entire decade. The remainder of Hot Buttered Soul isn't quite as ambitiously excessive, though the other two songs still have an indelible presence. Hayes' version of Charles Chalmers' and Sandra Rhodes' "One Woman" is affecting if short-- "short" in this case meaning a hair over five minutes. As breathers go, it works wonders in proving Hayes' way with a mellow ballad could still have an emotional impact in a more confined space. And Hayes' sole songwriting credit is the linguistically convoluted masterpiece "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic," a straight-up slick-as-hell funk jam which gets a lot of mileage out of humorously-deployed latin phrases and five-dollar words ("My gastronomical stupensity is really satisfied when you're loving me"). Even if it's his only lyrical contribution, he subsequently if unintentionally caricaturizes the ornate but down-to-earth personality of the entire album: it's all self-consciously complicated, but man, the meaning's right there in front of you. And it can't help but hit you right where you feel it.

Artist: Isaac Hayes, Album: Hot Buttered Soul, Genre: Pop/R&B, Score (1-10): 9.2 Album review: "Think about how crazy this is for a moment: Stax loses Otis Redding and the Bar-Kays to a plane crash and the rights to their back catalog (and, later, Sam & Dave) to Atlantic. Without their biggest stars and their best session group, Stax executive Al Bell takes a desperate but necessary gamble: in an attempt to build an entirely new catalog out of scratch, he schedules dozens of all-new albums and singles to be recorded and released en masse over the course of a few months. And out of all of those records, the album that puts the label back on the map is a followup to a chart dud, recorded by a songwriter/producer who wasn't typically known for singing, where three of its four songs run over nine and a half minutes. And this album sells a million copies. If it weren't for the New York Mets, Isaac Hayes' Hot Buttered Soul would be the most unlikely comeback story of 1969. Since then, the album's had an odd reevaluation process: it hit #8 on the pop charts and #1 on the R&B charts, but also hit #1 on Billboard's Top Jazz Albums chart-- which alarmed partisans of Miles Davis and Sly Stone alike. After another couple of albums in its crossover-friendly, string-drenched vein, Rolling Stone declared Isaac Hayes an enemy of all that was good about soul music in the early 1970s; decades later, a generation reared on hip-hop reverse-engineered the beats on Pac's "Me Against the World" or PE's "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" and discovered an original brilliance. Now, after a listen to this new reissue 40 years later, Hot Buttered Soul might still seem a little historically counterintuitive. It stood as a newer, funkier phase of Southern soul, but it hinged on a sound more opulent than the most sharp-suited Motown crossover bid. It's an exercise in melodrama and indulgence that lays it on so heavy it's impossible not to hear it as anything but the stone truth. And it's an album whose edited-down singles-- both of which went top 40 pop-- sounded more like trailers for the real thing. (Said single edits are included here and can be safely ignored.) Yet the success of Hot Buttered Soul owed a bit to a classic crossover formula: start with an easy-listening-friendly pop staple, keep the orchestral sweetness, but layer on a shining veneer of psychedelic R&B, then stretch it out with some soul-jazz vamping and nail it down with a voice that hits like a velvet sledgehammer. Hayes demanded full creative control for this album, and his auteurism resulted in a luxurious rawness that soul artists would scramble to catch up with for years. It wasn't exactly an unprecedented sound, however, and in its own extravagant way Hot Buttered Soul might be to the end of the 60s what Ray Charles' Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music was seven years previous: an album that redrew the parameters for R&B's high-class populism. It's just that it hadn't been quite this audacious before-- not to the extent of Hayes' cover of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", all 18-plus sprawling minutes of it. Here we have a song that turns the idea of a slow build into something monumental: with a monologue he developed as a way to get apathetic club patrons to pay attention to where he was about to go, Hayes spends the first eight and a half minutes actually setting the stage for the scenario behind the song, from the wife's cavalier attitude and how the husband caught her cheating to the specific year and make of car he finally drove off for good in (a '65 Ford). It should be noted that all this time the band's been churning along with this hypnotic, minimalist swaying organ/bass/hi-hat drone that changes imperceptibly if at all; again, this is eight and a half minutes here. And when it finally does transition from Hayes' conversational murmur to the first actual sung line from the Jimmy Webb composition he's covering, it's the beginning of a metamorphosis that gradually transforms the dynamic of the song from sweet-stringed orchestration into full-fledged, brass-packed, explosively-cresting soul. But where "Phoenix" is all slow build, the album-opening version of "Walk on By" throws almost everything it has at you right away, nailing you to the floor with those first two drumbeats. Hayes takes the restrained sorrow of Bacharach and David's composition as made famous by Dionne Warwick and chucks it out the window, replacing it with an arrangement that is the absolute antithesis of hiding the tears and sadness and grieving in private. And it's goddamned devastating at every turn: its go-for-broke opening, with those weeping strings and that stinging guitar building to their gigantic crescendo; that moment when it collapses and sinks into Michael Toles' famous slinky guitar riff, which then warps its way into psychedelic keening more Hendrix than Cropper; every hitch and moan and heart-wracked ad-lib from Hayes' deep bass voice ("you put the hurt on me, you socked it to me, mama"). The entire last half of the song's twelve minutes is an exercise in seeing just how long you can not only maintain but build on a frenzied finale, where Toles' guitar sounds like it's ripping itself apart and Hayes' Hammond organ trembles and growls and stammers like a panicking tiger. It might be the most intense six minutes of soul recorded in the confines of a studio the entire decade. The remainder of Hot Buttered Soul isn't quite as ambitiously excessive, though the other two songs still have an indelible presence. Hayes' version of Charles Chalmers' and Sandra Rhodes' "One Woman" is affecting if short-- "short" in this case meaning a hair over five minutes. As breathers go, it works wonders in proving Hayes' way with a mellow ballad could still have an emotional impact in a more confined space. And Hayes' sole songwriting credit is the linguistically convoluted masterpiece "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic," a straight-up slick-as-hell funk jam which gets a lot of mileage out of humorously-deployed latin phrases and five-dollar words ("My gastronomical stupensity is really satisfied when you're loving me"). Even if it's his only lyrical contribution, he subsequently if unintentionally caricaturizes the ornate but down-to-earth personality of the entire album: it's all self-consciously complicated, but man, the meaning's right there in front of you. And it can't help but hit you right where you feel it."

Ivan Smagghe

Fabric23

Electronic

Jess Harvell

Ivan the Terrible is almost too perfect a poster boy for the current state of electrowhatever, what with his long black hair and cigarette ash beard and general air of swarthy French sleaziness. As one half of Black Strobe, he forced EBM (aka "industrial disco," aka "stuff my goth ex liked") and electro to fuck, and then fed the baby steroids in its milk. (In other words, it's electro. But, like, really fucking loud and ugly electro.) As a DJ he's defined his strain of electrohouse (better names on a postcard, as always) as a kind of heads-down, gray surge-- house stripped of the euphoria or maybe techno with the male equivalent of camel toe. (What is that, frog eyes?) Fabric23 doesn't deviate from the plan too broadly, though converts are quick to hail it as "NEW STYLE FROM IVAN, 16TH NOTE DELICIOUSNESS" in true shop-blurb style. As my boy Phil noted a few Months in Techno ago, everyone is worshipping the riff as if they've all grown Troggs haircuts and are dragging their knuckles down. Ivan does know a bassline when he hears it, usually in short blurts of boom that occasionally reach out to slap you awake in case you're nodding off behind the wheel. The whole of the mix kinda sags, like a hammock filled with rainwater, or a humid fog oppressing a coastal town in mid-July. Aswefall's "Ride (Der Schmeisser Lovelysplinter Remix)" (jesus guys, edit) is fetid with low end, and Ada's remix of Booka Shade's "Vertigo Vs. Cha!" is thick and gloopy in the now accepted Areal style. Michael Mayer's "Heiden" fills the requisite Kompakt spot on a 2005 mix, though I'm surprised he went with the clicking melodies of DJ Koze's "The Geklöppel Continues" rather than the sewer-funk of the expected "Brutalga Square". Towards the end he even throws in the Kills' "No Wow", which isn't quite as incongruous as it may appear. Sandwiched between the colonoscopic grumble of Tekel's "Snake Tartare" (title!) and the matte techno of Konrad Black's "Jefferson and Braeside", the Kills track might as well be any of the other is-it-techno-that-wants-to-be-rock-or-vice-versa? that makes up the bulk of the mix. Fabric23 is smoking, yes, but it's also kind of a bummer. I am all for dance music which steals a little a little swagger from cock rock. Maybe not all the time, mind you, but it's a healthy corrective against the twin black holes of good taste and excessive abstraction. Unfortunately, it's a weird kind of rock purism Smagghe leans on, not all that different from the excessive abstraction of minimal techno when it comes right down to, just with a biker's build instead of a heroin addict's. Is one anthem too much to ask Ivan? Or am I missing the point?

Artist: Ivan Smagghe, Album: Fabric23, Genre: Electronic, Score (1-10): 7.2 Album review: "Ivan the Terrible is almost too perfect a poster boy for the current state of electrowhatever, what with his long black hair and cigarette ash beard and general air of swarthy French sleaziness. As one half of Black Strobe, he forced EBM (aka "industrial disco," aka "stuff my goth ex liked") and electro to fuck, and then fed the baby steroids in its milk. (In other words, it's electro. But, like, really fucking loud and ugly electro.) As a DJ he's defined his strain of electrohouse (better names on a postcard, as always) as a kind of heads-down, gray surge-- house stripped of the euphoria or maybe techno with the male equivalent of camel toe. (What is that, frog eyes?) Fabric23 doesn't deviate from the plan too broadly, though converts are quick to hail it as "NEW STYLE FROM IVAN, 16TH NOTE DELICIOUSNESS" in true shop-blurb style. As my boy Phil noted a few Months in Techno ago, everyone is worshipping the riff as if they've all grown Troggs haircuts and are dragging their knuckles down. Ivan does know a bassline when he hears it, usually in short blurts of boom that occasionally reach out to slap you awake in case you're nodding off behind the wheel. The whole of the mix kinda sags, like a hammock filled with rainwater, or a humid fog oppressing a coastal town in mid-July. Aswefall's "Ride (Der Schmeisser Lovelysplinter Remix)" (jesus guys, edit) is fetid with low end, and Ada's remix of Booka Shade's "Vertigo Vs. Cha!" is thick and gloopy in the now accepted Areal style. Michael Mayer's "Heiden" fills the requisite Kompakt spot on a 2005 mix, though I'm surprised he went with the clicking melodies of DJ Koze's "The Geklöppel Continues" rather than the sewer-funk of the expected "Brutalga Square". Towards the end he even throws in the Kills' "No Wow", which isn't quite as incongruous as it may appear. Sandwiched between the colonoscopic grumble of Tekel's "Snake Tartare" (title!) and the matte techno of Konrad Black's "Jefferson and Braeside", the Kills track might as well be any of the other is-it-techno-that-wants-to-be-rock-or-vice-versa? that makes up the bulk of the mix. Fabric23 is smoking, yes, but it's also kind of a bummer. I am all for dance music which steals a little a little swagger from cock rock. Maybe not all the time, mind you, but it's a healthy corrective against the twin black holes of good taste and excessive abstraction. Unfortunately, it's a weird kind of rock purism Smagghe leans on, not all that different from the excessive abstraction of minimal techno when it comes right down to, just with a biker's build instead of a heroin addict's. Is one anthem too much to ask Ivan? Or am I missing the point?"

Armand Hammer

ROME

Rap

Phillip Mlynar

Stratify today’s hip-hop scene in broad terms and you’ll find a commercial crop of reality TV graduates and Soundcloud poster boys mirrored by a huddled mass of hardscrabble rappers making up an oversized underground. The New York-based Billy Woods and Elucid, who form together as Armand Hammer, are often plotted as part of their city’s underground—but for ROME, which follows 2013’s Race Music and 2014’s Furtive Movements, the two emcees have delved deeper and burrowed further into the leftfield, carving out a shadowy nook that not only shuns the commercial trappings of the mainstream but also moves on from the boom-bap theology that can plague these kinds of records. ROME sounds like two outcast preachers delivering cocksure homilies from the duskiest hip-hop margins, a siren call from the subterranean. Geographically, Billy Woods and Elucid ready their work in Brooklyn. Elucid crafts music in “a proudly-crumbling East New York brownstone” situated in an area he says is the borough’s last holdout from gentrification. Woods, who ran with Vordul Mega of indie rap heroes Cannibal Ox in the early-2000s, is based in Bushwick where he writes rhymes inspired by the rugged facade of New York City culture. This grounding anchors Armand Hammer’s music. On “Tread Lightly,” Woods swaggers into action like the unofficial mayor of his block. “Words stolen from neighbors in bodegas when I cop my paper,” he announces. “Now you know where I got my flavor.” Across social media and press photos, Woods hides his face. His lyrics express a healthy distrust of the world that sometimes bleeds into paranoia. He barks with a punk attitude. “Microdose,” which features a guest verse from Quelle Chris, captures Woods in full force. Time-traveling through war-torn worlds while weaving in personal history via street-cosigned walkie-talkie, he spits, “Gonna need both those barrels, kid/Nextel chirp/My ancestors: ‘You’re gonna need more than bows and arrows, ya dig?’” Woods’s impactful style combines smartly with Elucid’s flow, which has a beguiling serpentine quality to it. As an emcee, his words seethe and coil around the beats. Raised in a religious household, he balances scriptural imagery with political commentary. “Made a bed of black orchids in the Leviathan’s fortress/It’s 2017 and Flint still ain’t got clean water,” he vents on the percussion-heavy “It Was Written.” Over the low-slung gumbo of Messiah Musik’s “Dead Money,” he throws out a call to arms: “Built to destroy, not self-destruct/There’s a time and place to not give a fuck/Right now seems so critical/I wanna see everyone who’s been made invisible.” Befitting its protagonist’s words, ROME is an unapologetically heavy listen. It can batter the brain as densely-packed lyrics fly forth, especially during the album’s mid-section where the production escalates into a cacophonous funk on “Shammgod,” a track that announces itself with screeching siren-like synths and is produced by Anti-pop Consortium’s High Priest. Throughout ROME, light relief comes only in the form of sardonic quips like on “Dead Money” where Woods shrugs, “If God made the world, motherfucker was wearing gloves.” But hold on for the ride and ROME successfully settles into a gentle ending. Just like Ka and DJ Preservation’s Days With Dr. Len Yo experiment from 2015—or parts of MIKE’s May God Bless Your Hustle from earlier this year—the closing trio of songs dispel the charge that so much underground New York City hip-hop apes ‘90s production styles; instead, atmospheric tones and sonic ticks are used to give tracks rhythm and momentum. The second half of “Pergamum” marries Woods’ voice to a rustling bed of static; “Barbarians” dissolves Elucid’s vocals into a slurry of fractured ambience. The closing cut, “Overseas (Epilogue),” has Woods imploring someone lay him to rest out at sea while playing Thug Life’s “Bury Me a G,” with his sentiments backed by a haunting saxophone riff and crystalline wind chimes. It’s serene and it’s powerful—it’s the sound of being beneath the underground.

Artist: Armand Hammer, Album: ROME, Genre: Rap, Score (1-10): 8.1 Album review: "Stratify today’s hip-hop scene in broad terms and you’ll find a commercial crop of reality TV graduates and Soundcloud poster boys mirrored by a huddled mass of hardscrabble rappers making up an oversized underground. The New York-based Billy Woods and Elucid, who form together as Armand Hammer, are often plotted as part of their city’s underground—but for ROME, which follows 2013’s Race Music and 2014’s Furtive Movements, the two emcees have delved deeper and burrowed further into the leftfield, carving out a shadowy nook that not only shuns the commercial trappings of the mainstream but also moves on from the boom-bap theology that can plague these kinds of records. ROME sounds like two outcast preachers delivering cocksure homilies from the duskiest hip-hop margins, a siren call from the subterranean. Geographically, Billy Woods and Elucid ready their work in Brooklyn. Elucid crafts music in “a proudly-crumbling East New York brownstone” situated in an area he says is the borough’s last holdout from gentrification. Woods, who ran with Vordul Mega of indie rap heroes Cannibal Ox in the early-2000s, is based in Bushwick where he writes rhymes inspired by the rugged facade of New York City culture. This grounding anchors Armand Hammer’s music. On “Tread Lightly,” Woods swaggers into action like the unofficial mayor of his block. “Words stolen from neighbors in bodegas when I cop my paper,” he announces. “Now you know where I got my flavor.” Across social media and press photos, Woods hides his face. His lyrics express a healthy distrust of the world that sometimes bleeds into paranoia. He barks with a punk attitude. “Microdose,” which features a guest verse from Quelle Chris, captures Woods in full force. Time-traveling through war-torn worlds while weaving in personal history via street-cosigned walkie-talkie, he spits, “Gonna need both those barrels, kid/Nextel chirp/My ancestors: ‘You’re gonna need more than bows and arrows, ya dig?’” Woods’s impactful style combines smartly with Elucid’s flow, which has a beguiling serpentine quality to it. As an emcee, his words seethe and coil around the beats. Raised in a religious household, he balances scriptural imagery with political commentary. “Made a bed of black orchids in the Leviathan’s fortress/It’s 2017 and Flint still ain’t got clean water,” he vents on the percussion-heavy “It Was Written.” Over the low-slung gumbo of Messiah Musik’s “Dead Money,” he throws out a call to arms: “Built to destroy, not self-destruct/There’s a time and place to not give a fuck/Right now seems so critical/I wanna see everyone who’s been made invisible.” Befitting its protagonist’s words, ROME is an unapologetically heavy listen. It can batter the brain as densely-packed lyrics fly forth, especially during the album’s mid-section where the production escalates into a cacophonous funk on “Shammgod,” a track that announces itself with screeching siren-like synths and is produced by Anti-pop Consortium’s High Priest. Throughout ROME, light relief comes only in the form of sardonic quips like on “Dead Money” where Woods shrugs, “If God made the world, motherfucker was wearing gloves.” But hold on for the ride and ROME successfully settles into a gentle ending. Just like Ka and DJ Preservation’s Days With Dr. Len Yo experiment from 2015—or parts of MIKE’s May God Bless Your Hustle from earlier this year—the closing trio of songs dispel the charge that so much underground New York City hip-hop apes ‘90s production styles; instead, atmospheric tones and sonic ticks are used to give tracks rhythm and momentum. The second half of “Pergamum” marries Woods’ voice to a rustling bed of static; “Barbarians” dissolves Elucid’s vocals into a slurry of fractured ambience. The closing cut, “Overseas (Epilogue),” has Woods imploring someone lay him to rest out at sea while playing Thug Life’s “Bury Me a G,” with his sentiments backed by a haunting saxophone riff and crystalline wind chimes. It’s serene and it’s powerful—it’s the sound of being beneath the underground."

KTL

V

Metal

Grayson Currin

From the start, the logo of KTL featured a thin inverted cross, intersected toward its bottom by a large "X" and paralleled by an arrow that broke open at one side. On the covers of the first several releases by the international drone-doom duo of Sunn O)))'s Stephen O'Malley and Peter "Pita" Rehberg, that insignia forced some shade of dark against another. On 2006's KTL, for instance, it was big and black, centered and dominant against a faded gray-to-grayer gradient. Two years later, for 2, it had been bronzed and almost swallowed by a sea of blacks and browns, suggesting a steady wash of inescapable darkness. O'Malley and Rehberg began KTL, after all, in order to score Kindertotenlieder (which shares a name with a Mahler piece and translates as "songs on the death of children"), a sort of hyper-reality play in which "a group of teenagers get together for a death ritual in the form of a black metal concert." Darkness doesn't only become KTL; it actually begat them. The cover of V, then, looks a little bit like a mission statement: Against a white background, the excellent digital musician and artist Mark Fell adds fluorescence to the X, the arrow, and the cross, turning them green, pink, electric blue, and yellow. He then thickens the lines, so that, when they intersect, the thicket of color bleeds again toward black, light and relief escaping back toward KTL's typically despondent aesthetic. The five tracks on the pair's first record in three years fit that multivalent image perfectly: With what's best described as a heavy glow, the first four pieces of V strip away most of the metal discord of those previous albums without turning the volume down or slimming the sound's saturation. The album's suffocating stunner, "Tony", wobbles in before a complex, textural hum-- a high, thin murmur countered by a low, slowly oscillating tone beneath-- floods the speakers. Across its 14 minutes, clipped sheets of noise occasionally mount the massive drone, pocking the veneer with tiny teeth of abrasion. Never quite still, "Tony" is a study in subtle motion above and beneath the surface, with shifts in the hum up top countered by sonar-like events and echoes bouncing throughout the bottom. The less stable "Study A" shares the same liminal qualities, constantly working to exist across boundaries-- motion feels like stasis, harsh feedback blurs into harmonious resonance, luminosity eclipses itself. Stylistically transgressive, these tracks offer a surprising junction of various musical outfields: Those interested in the warped radiance of Tim Hecker, Christian Fennesz, or Yellow Swans should find entry points here, while the more minimal maneuvers of Thomas Köner and Keith Fullerton Whitman seem but a few slow steps away. And if it's the gravity of Sunn O))) that pulls you toward KTL (O'Malley is a co-founder, of course, while Rehberg has frequently collaborated with the band), these pieces are actually more monolithic than some of KTL's previously fragmented recordings. Impressively, V is expansive and sprawling, somehow lighter without being at all slighter. All of these strains converge most clearly and contrastingly for the last two pieces, both collaborations with very different performers. On "Phill 2", Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson lends his steady grace to KTL's stately brood, resulting in a quarter-hour span that hovers between spaces both empyrean and abysmal. Strings grind downward while horns lift skyward, girded together by an inescapable but sometimes barely perceptible web of electronics. It's like watching two equal forces attempt to move in opposite directions, unaware that they are intrinsically and immortally linked-- a tragicomedy of divested best intentions. During the final piece here, "Last Spring: A Prequel", O'Malley and Rehberg finally give into that darkness at the center of V's cover. The piece takes the name of the latest collaboration between American author Dennis Cooper and French puppeteer and playwright, Gisèle Vienne, the pair responsible for Kindertotenlieder-- and so, KTL. "Last Spring" slices and scrambles the prurient voice of Jonathan Capdevielle as he reads a bit of Cooper text from the show in French. Beyond eerie, it's the sound of all the light being squeezed from the previous hour, a 21-minute arrow back into KTL's customary core of blacks.

Artist: KTL, Album: V, Genre: Metal, Score (1-10): 8.1 Album review: "From the start, the logo of KTL featured a thin inverted cross, intersected toward its bottom by a large "X" and paralleled by an arrow that broke open at one side. On the covers of the first several releases by the international drone-doom duo of Sunn O)))'s Stephen O'Malley and Peter "Pita" Rehberg, that insignia forced some shade of dark against another. On 2006's KTL, for instance, it was big and black, centered and dominant against a faded gray-to-grayer gradient. Two years later, for 2, it had been bronzed and almost swallowed by a sea of blacks and browns, suggesting a steady wash of inescapable darkness. O'Malley and Rehberg began KTL, after all, in order to score Kindertotenlieder (which shares a name with a Mahler piece and translates as "songs on the death of children"), a sort of hyper-reality play in which "a group of teenagers get together for a death ritual in the form of a black metal concert." Darkness doesn't only become KTL; it actually begat them. The cover of V, then, looks a little bit like a mission statement: Against a white background, the excellent digital musician and artist Mark Fell adds fluorescence to the X, the arrow, and the cross, turning them green, pink, electric blue, and yellow. He then thickens the lines, so that, when they intersect, the thicket of color bleeds again toward black, light and relief escaping back toward KTL's typically despondent aesthetic. The five tracks on the pair's first record in three years fit that multivalent image perfectly: With what's best described as a heavy glow, the first four pieces of V strip away most of the metal discord of those previous albums without turning the volume down or slimming the sound's saturation. The album's suffocating stunner, "Tony", wobbles in before a complex, textural hum-- a high, thin murmur countered by a low, slowly oscillating tone beneath-- floods the speakers. Across its 14 minutes, clipped sheets of noise occasionally mount the massive drone, pocking the veneer with tiny teeth of abrasion. Never quite still, "Tony" is a study in subtle motion above and beneath the surface, with shifts in the hum up top countered by sonar-like events and echoes bouncing throughout the bottom. The less stable "Study A" shares the same liminal qualities, constantly working to exist across boundaries-- motion feels like stasis, harsh feedback blurs into harmonious resonance, luminosity eclipses itself. Stylistically transgressive, these tracks offer a surprising junction of various musical outfields: Those interested in the warped radiance of Tim Hecker, Christian Fennesz, or Yellow Swans should find entry points here, while the more minimal maneuvers of Thomas Köner and Keith Fullerton Whitman seem but a few slow steps away. And if it's the gravity of Sunn O))) that pulls you toward KTL (O'Malley is a co-founder, of course, while Rehberg has frequently collaborated with the band), these pieces are actually more monolithic than some of KTL's previously fragmented recordings. Impressively, V is expansive and sprawling, somehow lighter without being at all slighter. All of these strains converge most clearly and contrastingly for the last two pieces, both collaborations with very different performers. On "Phill 2", Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson lends his steady grace to KTL's stately brood, resulting in a quarter-hour span that hovers between spaces both empyrean and abysmal. Strings grind downward while horns lift skyward, girded together by an inescapable but sometimes barely perceptible web of electronics. It's like watching two equal forces attempt to move in opposite directions, unaware that they are intrinsically and immortally linked-- a tragicomedy of divested best intentions. During the final piece here, "Last Spring: A Prequel", O'Malley and Rehberg finally give into that darkness at the center of V's cover. The piece takes the name of the latest collaboration between American author Dennis Cooper and French puppeteer and playwright, Gisèle Vienne, the pair responsible for Kindertotenlieder-- and so, KTL. "Last Spring" slices and scrambles the prurient voice of Jonathan Capdevielle as he reads a bit of Cooper text from the show in French. Beyond eerie, it's the sound of all the light being squeezed from the previous hour, a 21-minute arrow back into KTL's customary core of blacks."

Midwest Product

Specifics

Electronic,Rock

Rob Mitchum

Thank goodness for the In Betweeners. For all us old foges still wary of this newfangled 'electronic music,' it's nice to have a few bands here and there to hold our hand while we wade into the shallow end with our water wings on. To lead those of us with terminal rockism towards the flickering LCD monitor glow, it's necessary to have a few artists that will meet us halfway, mixing in safe, comfortable, 'actual' instruments to make us feel at home before hitting us with the subliminal digital trickery. Which is where a band like Midwest Product comes in: one of those acts that's not a rock band, not yet an electronic act. One peek at the liner notes says all you need to know, as all three cats listed are right-slash utilitymen covering both an old-fashioned musicmaker (guitar, bass, drums) and the willfully mysterious task of "electronics." What that information translates to is a solid base of organic drums and bass guitar with a walk-in closet's worth of keyboard gizmos playing hopscotch over the top and through the holes. Sure, it's not an entirely groundbreaking formula, but I rather enjoy how Midwest Product falls smack dab in the middle between the rock and electronic leagues. With their predominantly instrumental arrangements and now-it's-live/now-it's-Memorex drums, the more recent or remixed work of Tortoise springs to mind, albeit with less vibra-phoniness smoothing out the rocky edges. A varied effort, Specifics swings from the shimmery guitar atmospherics of "Reminder" with its restrained electronic twinklings and machine buzzes, to the almost entirely circuit-based "Alternator," a twilight exploration of microhouse's sweeps and clicks. But it's the in-between stuff that hits harder; songs like "Still Love in the Midwest" and "Vitamin" that skillfully straddle genre boundaries. Most strikingly, the three boys of Midwest Product know that computers still can't replicate the deep groove of a bonafide rhythm section, and the bass of Drew Schmeiding and drums of Chad Pratt create a solid continuity for the knob-twiddling antics of Mr. Ben Mullins. Throughout the album, Mullins' drum loops and lower-end synthesizers do a nice happy frolic with the output of his fellow band members, generally avoiding the crowded-elevator toe-stepping that all too often occurs from these sort of man/computer collabs. A warning, though: due in part to its instrumental nature, Specifics might not quite have the goods to win over the guitar loyalist crowd, as the album's fifty minutes have the usual electronic album side effect of not planting enough head-sticking melodies to prevent its fading into background music for casual listeners. Even the dark synth-pop of "Pigeons," the one vocal-fortified track here, isn't quite jingle material and disappointingly resorts to the tired vocoder trick, a device that hasn't been scary since Superman III and hasn't been kitschy cool since Moon Safari. Recording for Michigan-based electronic label Ghostly International isn't going to help win over the rock hordes either, as Midwest Product will most likely be marketed as six-string escapism for the laptop crowd, rather than vice versa. But Ghostly International is also based out of the woody landscapes of suburban Detroit-- though, between us, don't tell Ann Arbor I called it a Detroit suburb-- and the moniker Midwest Product is more than just a (um, not especially) catchy name. For Detroit, with its Rock City status and decidedly retro 'automobile' industry, might just be the right place for a successful merging of the electronic with the electric, from which Middle America can be gently nudged towards a Tron-like future. To appeal to Joe Midwest, you've gotta have a backbeat that rattles the hatchback, and by providing such a feature alongside their electronic musings, Midwest Product has downright Moses potential.

Artist: Midwest Product, Album: Specifics, Genre: Electronic,Rock, Score (1-10): 7.4 Album review: "Thank goodness for the In Betweeners. For all us old foges still wary of this newfangled 'electronic music,' it's nice to have a few bands here and there to hold our hand while we wade into the shallow end with our water wings on. To lead those of us with terminal rockism towards the flickering LCD monitor glow, it's necessary to have a few artists that will meet us halfway, mixing in safe, comfortable, 'actual' instruments to make us feel at home before hitting us with the subliminal digital trickery. Which is where a band like Midwest Product comes in: one of those acts that's not a rock band, not yet an electronic act. One peek at the liner notes says all you need to know, as all three cats listed are right-slash utilitymen covering both an old-fashioned musicmaker (guitar, bass, drums) and the willfully mysterious task of "electronics." What that information translates to is a solid base of organic drums and bass guitar with a walk-in closet's worth of keyboard gizmos playing hopscotch over the top and through the holes. Sure, it's not an entirely groundbreaking formula, but I rather enjoy how Midwest Product falls smack dab in the middle between the rock and electronic leagues. With their predominantly instrumental arrangements and now-it's-live/now-it's-Memorex drums, the more recent or remixed work of Tortoise springs to mind, albeit with less vibra-phoniness smoothing out the rocky edges. A varied effort, Specifics swings from the shimmery guitar atmospherics of "Reminder" with its restrained electronic twinklings and machine buzzes, to the almost entirely circuit-based "Alternator," a twilight exploration of microhouse's sweeps and clicks. But it's the in-between stuff that hits harder; songs like "Still Love in the Midwest" and "Vitamin" that skillfully straddle genre boundaries. Most strikingly, the three boys of Midwest Product know that computers still can't replicate the deep groove of a bonafide rhythm section, and the bass of Drew Schmeiding and drums of Chad Pratt create a solid continuity for the knob-twiddling antics of Mr. Ben Mullins. Throughout the album, Mullins' drum loops and lower-end synthesizers do a nice happy frolic with the output of his fellow band members, generally avoiding the crowded-elevator toe-stepping that all too often occurs from these sort of man/computer collabs. A warning, though: due in part to its instrumental nature, Specifics might not quite have the goods to win over the guitar loyalist crowd, as the album's fifty minutes have the usual electronic album side effect of not planting enough head-sticking melodies to prevent its fading into background music for casual listeners. Even the dark synth-pop of "Pigeons," the one vocal-fortified track here, isn't quite jingle material and disappointingly resorts to the tired vocoder trick, a device that hasn't been scary since Superman III and hasn't been kitschy cool since Moon Safari. Recording for Michigan-based electronic label Ghostly International isn't going to help win over the rock hordes either, as Midwest Product will most likely be marketed as six-string escapism for the laptop crowd, rather than vice versa. But Ghostly International is also based out of the woody landscapes of suburban Detroit-- though, between us, don't tell Ann Arbor I called it a Detroit suburb-- and the moniker Midwest Product is more than just a (um, not especially) catchy name. For Detroit, with its Rock City status and decidedly retro 'automobile' industry, might just be the right place for a successful merging of the electronic with the electric, from which Middle America can be gently nudged towards a Tron-like future. To appeal to Joe Midwest, you've gotta have a backbeat that rattles the hatchback, and by providing such a feature alongside their electronic musings, Midwest Product has downright Moses potential."

DJ Python

Dulce Compañia

Electronic

Andy Beta

The Ridgewood, Queens, producer Brian Piñeyro seemingly has a different DJ handle for every mood, which can make keeping up with his productions tricky. “I don’t want to forcefully be anonymous,” Piñeyro said in an interview earlier this year. “But I also don’t want to forcefully fit into one cool package.” So you may have encountered Piñeyro’s productions as DJ Wey, Luis, Deejay Xanax, or DJ Python. The latter alias takes as its jump-off point the skipping dembow riddim, that telltale boom-ch-boom-chick that is the foundation of everything from Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina” to El Alfa el Jefe’s “Banda De Camion.” Underpinning dancehall and reggaeton since the early 2000s, it’s a sound that Piñeyro heard booming out of every car and club during a stint living in Miami. “I knew that I wanted to make music like this and recontextualize it,” he said of this particular beat, and dembow has led Piñeyro’s first full-length to heady, sweaty results. Just don’t call Dulce Compañia moombahton. While Piñeyro does slow down the beat to a near crawl, he also suffuses it with a hazy sensibility quite unlike the crisp contours of moombahton’s 110-BPM snap. During the album’s most sublimely smoky moments, DJ Python brings to bear shoegaze’s gauziness, new age music’s interiority, and deep house’s sense of time suspended. Take the opening track, “Las Palmas,” which reveals each aspect of Piñeyro’s concerns. It opens with chime-like tones that verge on the vertiginous, their metallic edges slipping out of focus. A stuttering drum figure comes in, making everything feel coherent and grounded, but even that is a transitory state: Piñeyro soon loops small snippets of bells again, loosening them from the grid and allowing them to ripple outward and overtake the rhythm. Every component feels slippery as riverbed rocks. Dulce Compañia standout “Cuál” best exemplifies Piñeyro’s penchant for in-between states, striking a balance of tropical rhythm and ambient wooziness. The dembow rhythm gets pushed into the red, with echoing hand percussion dribbled across it. But between the beats, one can just make out small ambient sounds, like crickets and frogs, suggesting a swampy locale. A synth line bubbles up two minutes in, which Piñeyro then dubs out, and as the track’s arpeggios gurgle along, that once-heavy dembow beat now seems to float and bob atop the surface. The track that might hew closest to its reggaeton forbears, “q.e.p.d.,” foregrounds that boom-ch-boom-chick meter. But as quickly as it’s established, Piñeyro starts to pull at its edges, allowing all manner of wooden clacks, rattles, and mechanical whirrs to fall in between the cracks, and a wafting synth line makes the track feel light and airy. A similar sense of drift infuses “Esteban,” in which tick-tocking percussion just barely keeps the track tethered. The walloping thump of “Acostados” moves towards synchronizing with house’s kick, but with the rattles that wriggle around it, DJ Python more than lives up to his serpentine namesake. Drums get dubbed out, a voice mewls wordlessly, a synth line fidgets and twitches; Piñeyro keeps every component shifting, never letting the tracks follow a predetermined pattern. While the dembow riddim arises throughout Dulce Compañia, it’s never left as-is. In Piñeyro’s hands, it proves to be just as slippery and versatile as it is booming out of cars every summer. “I like DJ Python being one thing, slithering around, letting itself be known eventually,” Piñeyro said of his low-key approach. With this debut, it proves to be a sound well worth knowing.

Artist: DJ Python , Album: Dulce Compañia, Genre: Electronic, Score (1-10): 7.6 Album review: "The Ridgewood, Queens, producer Brian Piñeyro seemingly has a different DJ handle for every mood, which can make keeping up with his productions tricky. “I don’t want to forcefully be anonymous,” Piñeyro said in an interview earlier this year. “But I also don’t want to forcefully fit into one cool package.” So you may have encountered Piñeyro’s productions as DJ Wey, Luis, Deejay Xanax, or DJ Python. The latter alias takes as its jump-off point the skipping dembow riddim, that telltale boom-ch-boom-chick that is the foundation of everything from Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina” to El Alfa el Jefe’s “Banda De Camion.” Underpinning dancehall and reggaeton since the early 2000s, it’s a sound that Piñeyro heard booming out of every car and club during a stint living in Miami. “I knew that I wanted to make music like this and recontextualize it,” he said of this particular beat, and dembow has led Piñeyro’s first full-length to heady, sweaty results. Just don’t call Dulce Compañia moombahton. While Piñeyro does slow down the beat to a near crawl, he also suffuses it with a hazy sensibility quite unlike the crisp contours of moombahton’s 110-BPM snap. During the album’s most sublimely smoky moments, DJ Python brings to bear shoegaze’s gauziness, new age music’s interiority, and deep house’s sense of time suspended. Take the opening track, “Las Palmas,” which reveals each aspect of Piñeyro’s concerns. It opens with chime-like tones that verge on the vertiginous, their metallic edges slipping out of focus. A stuttering drum figure comes in, making everything feel coherent and grounded, but even that is a transitory state: Piñeyro soon loops small snippets of bells again, loosening them from the grid and allowing them to ripple outward and overtake the rhythm. Every component feels slippery as riverbed rocks. Dulce Compañia standout “Cuál” best exemplifies Piñeyro’s penchant for in-between states, striking a balance of tropical rhythm and ambient wooziness. The dembow rhythm gets pushed into the red, with echoing hand percussion dribbled across it. But between the beats, one can just make out small ambient sounds, like crickets and frogs, suggesting a swampy locale. A synth line bubbles up two minutes in, which Piñeyro then dubs out, and as the track’s arpeggios gurgle along, that once-heavy dembow beat now seems to float and bob atop the surface. The track that might hew closest to its reggaeton forbears, “q.e.p.d.,” foregrounds that boom-ch-boom-chick meter. But as quickly as it’s established, Piñeyro starts to pull at its edges, allowing all manner of wooden clacks, rattles, and mechanical whirrs to fall in between the cracks, and a wafting synth line makes the track feel light and airy. A similar sense of drift infuses “Esteban,” in which tick-tocking percussion just barely keeps the track tethered. The walloping thump of “Acostados” moves towards synchronizing with house’s kick, but with the rattles that wriggle around it, DJ Python more than lives up to his serpentine namesake. Drums get dubbed out, a voice mewls wordlessly, a synth line fidgets and twitches; Piñeyro keeps every component shifting, never letting the tracks follow a predetermined pattern. While the dembow riddim arises throughout Dulce Compañia, it’s never left as-is. In Piñeyro’s hands, it proves to be just as slippery and versatile as it is booming out of cars every summer. “I like DJ Python being one thing, slithering around, letting itself be known eventually,” Piñeyro said of his low-key approach. With this debut, it proves to be a sound well worth knowing."

Elvis Costello

The River in Reverse

Rock

Jason Crock

So now that he just did an art-jazz project, it's time for another rock record from Elvis Costello, right? Alas, The River in Reverse, a collaboration with New Orleans r&b legend Allen Toussaint, is another genre dalliance intended to showcase Costello's supposed versatility. Well, here he throws himself headlong into Toussaint's back catalog, naturally selecting more obscure cuts (the guy did write "Working in a Coalmine"), backed by the Imposters and augmented by Toussaint himself and NOLA horn players. Yes, that's New Orleans, but this isn't a cash-in on recent tragedy: Costello has worked with the legendary Toussaint more than once before (notably on the piano part for Spike's "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror"). And while there is some back and forth concerning songwriting, it's meant to be a "Costello Sings the Songs of Toussaint" songbook record-- a voice-meets-pen LP like those in vogue before the rock era. Costello sings every song but one, Toussaint's "Who's Gonna Help a Brother Get Further". And that's actually sort of a shame: Costello's proven himself effective in plenty of contexts outside of rock, but all his vibratos and melismas and belted notes seem like so much flailing compared to Toussaint's effortless croon. He has a sharp ear for choosing songs that remain relevant, but this is one genre that eludes him as a performer. Granted, he's never seemed entirely at home on jazz and classical records, but the pairing has never been as jarring as it is here, with new Costello songs standing directly next to the traditionals. While he belabors notes on the deep cuts from Toussaint's catalog, the Costello-sung covers that frontload the album fall short. Listen to the Costello-Toussaint collaboration "Ascension Day" to hear just how nimble Costello's voice can be, alternately skipping across and gluing together the fluid notes of the piano line. And looking past its crushing self-awareness as an anthem for Hurricane Katrina victims, "The River In Reverse" really works. Penned entirely by Costello, when it hits the line, "There must be something better than this/ I don't see how it can get much worse," the song shifts from a percussive acoustic guitar pattern to a resigned sigh from the horns. Meanwhile, Toussaint's slightly dissonant piano dances low in the mix, Costello cramming in syllables with his usual verve-- all hinting at a range of frustration and discontent bubbling underneath. These, however, are exceptions. Most of these tracks merely feel professional or workmanlike, sincere recordings that sadly lack inspiration. The River in Reverse could have been vastly improved with more collaboration and fewer ostentatious performances, giving the two big names on the marquee more moments to shine than to strain.

Artist: Elvis Costello, Album: The River in Reverse, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 6.1 Album review: "So now that he just did an art-jazz project, it's time for another rock record from Elvis Costello, right? Alas, The River in Reverse, a collaboration with New Orleans r&b legend Allen Toussaint, is another genre dalliance intended to showcase Costello's supposed versatility. Well, here he throws himself headlong into Toussaint's back catalog, naturally selecting more obscure cuts (the guy did write "Working in a Coalmine"), backed by the Imposters and augmented by Toussaint himself and NOLA horn players. Yes, that's New Orleans, but this isn't a cash-in on recent tragedy: Costello has worked with the legendary Toussaint more than once before (notably on the piano part for Spike's "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror"). And while there is some back and forth concerning songwriting, it's meant to be a "Costello Sings the Songs of Toussaint" songbook record-- a voice-meets-pen LP like those in vogue before the rock era. Costello sings every song but one, Toussaint's "Who's Gonna Help a Brother Get Further". And that's actually sort of a shame: Costello's proven himself effective in plenty of contexts outside of rock, but all his vibratos and melismas and belted notes seem like so much flailing compared to Toussaint's effortless croon. He has a sharp ear for choosing songs that remain relevant, but this is one genre that eludes him as a performer. Granted, he's never seemed entirely at home on jazz and classical records, but the pairing has never been as jarring as it is here, with new Costello songs standing directly next to the traditionals. While he belabors notes on the deep cuts from Toussaint's catalog, the Costello-sung covers that frontload the album fall short. Listen to the Costello-Toussaint collaboration "Ascension Day" to hear just how nimble Costello's voice can be, alternately skipping across and gluing together the fluid notes of the piano line. And looking past its crushing self-awareness as an anthem for Hurricane Katrina victims, "The River In Reverse" really works. Penned entirely by Costello, when it hits the line, "There must be something better than this/ I don't see how it can get much worse," the song shifts from a percussive acoustic guitar pattern to a resigned sigh from the horns. Meanwhile, Toussaint's slightly dissonant piano dances low in the mix, Costello cramming in syllables with his usual verve-- all hinting at a range of frustration and discontent bubbling underneath. These, however, are exceptions. Most of these tracks merely feel professional or workmanlike, sincere recordings that sadly lack inspiration. The River in Reverse could have been vastly improved with more collaboration and fewer ostentatious performances, giving the two big names on the marquee more moments to shine than to strain."

Food for Animals

Scavengers EP

Rap

Jonathan Zwickel

When does a piece of experimental music move beyond unlistenable noise, past the point of defiant curiosity, to the realm of unparalleled genius? Hard to quantify, even for the most mathematical at heart, but you know it when you hear it. Certain elements must be accounted for-- most importantly, an emotional ballast is essential to keep any twangy wigouts from veering into self-indulgent, alienating miasmic slop. In hip-hop-- a genre defined primarily by its rigid rhythmic orientation-- the channels of experimentation are actually a bit more open, though maybe somewhat more predictable. That is, fuck with rhythm and you're fucking with the foundation of hip-hop. But inject that aforementioned depth of emotion into a shattered and rebuilt rhythmic template, and you might arrive at something vital. Food for Animals step up to the plate and mostly obliterate the rhythmic conventions we've come to expect from hip-hop. This isn't skittering, hiccuped eski beat or minimalist schiz-hop pong hits; what remains after DJ/producer Ricky Rabbit goes Rick James all over his ProTools setup sounds like a field recording from a sheet metal factory getting flattened by a herd of bulldozers. In fact, it isn't until two minutes into this 20-minute sound test that any semblance of a beat settles for MC Vulture Voltaire to rap over. But once he rolls through Rabbit's swarm of killer beats with a brassy, heavyweight tone, the gravity is difficult to ignore. Don't be misled: You have to be in the mood for this sometimes withering assault. When Voltaire comes in over the twisted strings and stuttering drums of "Brand New", all semblance of dance floor contrivance and headphone filler are laid to waste. Rock Scavengers while flipping through Vice in the waiting room of your local body piercing shop with Jim Beam and bad powder on hand as your only anesthetic. After several early tunes are burnt up with Rabbit's short jagged percussion stabs and Voltaire's soulful, low-in-the-mix rage, the final 12 minutes show the blood-quickening power this duo is capable of. The whole album is a rant against Bush's stolen presidency, but "Cut and Paste" and the title track are especially sweltering with Voltaire's pointed lyrical barbs. His voice, bristling with clipped urgency, is clear, aggressive and angry, yet possessed with the self-aware humor of the most articulate political MCs. It's the anchor that pulls the ear down through Rabbit's torrential beat smashing and the means by which Food for Animals manages to strike a teetering balance of chaos and focus that prods a second listen. By the time the instrumental "TTFN" closes the album, you've probably been suckered into the band's abrasive, unlikely funk. I can't imagine too many hip-hop heads cranking Scavengers this summer, but grizzled fans of dark art-hop like Kid 606 and Dälek will likely grit their teeth in a joyful agony as Food for Animals blasts into some well-muscled noise. Recommended only for those with a high tolerance for serial grime and a taste for the sharper, harder edge of hip-hop.

Artist: Food for Animals, Album: Scavengers EP, Genre: Rap, Score (1-10): 7.0 Album review: "When does a piece of experimental music move beyond unlistenable noise, past the point of defiant curiosity, to the realm of unparalleled genius? Hard to quantify, even for the most mathematical at heart, but you know it when you hear it. Certain elements must be accounted for-- most importantly, an emotional ballast is essential to keep any twangy wigouts from veering into self-indulgent, alienating miasmic slop. In hip-hop-- a genre defined primarily by its rigid rhythmic orientation-- the channels of experimentation are actually a bit more open, though maybe somewhat more predictable. That is, fuck with rhythm and you're fucking with the foundation of hip-hop. But inject that aforementioned depth of emotion into a shattered and rebuilt rhythmic template, and you might arrive at something vital. Food for Animals step up to the plate and mostly obliterate the rhythmic conventions we've come to expect from hip-hop. This isn't skittering, hiccuped eski beat or minimalist schiz-hop pong hits; what remains after DJ/producer Ricky Rabbit goes Rick James all over his ProTools setup sounds like a field recording from a sheet metal factory getting flattened by a herd of bulldozers. In fact, it isn't until two minutes into this 20-minute sound test that any semblance of a beat settles for MC Vulture Voltaire to rap over. But once he rolls through Rabbit's swarm of killer beats with a brassy, heavyweight tone, the gravity is difficult to ignore. Don't be misled: You have to be in the mood for this sometimes withering assault. When Voltaire comes in over the twisted strings and stuttering drums of "Brand New", all semblance of dance floor contrivance and headphone filler are laid to waste. Rock Scavengers while flipping through Vice in the waiting room of your local body piercing shop with Jim Beam and bad powder on hand as your only anesthetic. After several early tunes are burnt up with Rabbit's short jagged percussion stabs and Voltaire's soulful, low-in-the-mix rage, the final 12 minutes show the blood-quickening power this duo is capable of. The whole album is a rant against Bush's stolen presidency, but "Cut and Paste" and the title track are especially sweltering with Voltaire's pointed lyrical barbs. His voice, bristling with clipped urgency, is clear, aggressive and angry, yet possessed with the self-aware humor of the most articulate political MCs. It's the anchor that pulls the ear down through Rabbit's torrential beat smashing and the means by which Food for Animals manages to strike a teetering balance of chaos and focus that prods a second listen. By the time the instrumental "TTFN" closes the album, you've probably been suckered into the band's abrasive, unlikely funk. I can't imagine too many hip-hop heads cranking Scavengers this summer, but grizzled fans of dark art-hop like Kid 606 and Dälek will likely grit their teeth in a joyful agony as Food for Animals blasts into some well-muscled noise. Recommended only for those with a high tolerance for serial grime and a taste for the sharper, harder edge of hip-hop."

Ronnie Spector

The Last of the Rock Stars

Rock

Marc Hogan

Ronnie Spector, she of Ronettes/"Be My Baby" fame, is here again lookin' for a new "baby", baby. If all that sounds like another Hollywood summer remake, it's not too far off. Ronnie's done the 1971 reunion with all four broken-up Beatles, the 1976 Billy Joel/Bruce Springsteen treatment, something with Eddie Money, and even a Joey Ramone-guesting 1999 EP on Kill Rock Stars. It never gets even half as good as the great old days, depending of course on your feelings re: Eddie Money. One cash-in celebritython leads to another. The Last of the Rock Stars carts in Keith Richards, Patti Smith and (again) the late Ramone, backing Spector on a reheated run-through of Johnny Thunders' "You Can't Put Your Arms Round a Memory", which was also on the 1999 EP. What's new includes Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner on jitter-by-numbers rocker "Hey Sah Lo Ney", the Raveonettes helping out on "Ode to L.A." (which, yeah, also appears-- with Ronnie-- on the Ravers' '05 Pretty in Black), and Ronnie and Keith do campy lover's chit-chat on Ike Turner's "Work Out Fine" ("You do the work, baby!" Keith hams). Just in case you were wondering what Spector has in mind, Loretta Lynn's career-resuscitating backers the Greenhornes are featured on a pair of tracks, one of which appeared with Holly Golightly in the Ronnie role on the 'Hornes' own 2005 Sewed Soles. If The Last of the Rock Stars shows anything other than that the former Mrs. Spector has a laughably high opinion of herself, it's that she remains primarily a singles artist. The one you want is the Amy Rigby-penned "All I Want", a bouncy, believable grown-up teenage symphony about just wanting "something to show me that you care/ Whether I live or die". Opener "Never Gonna Be Your Baby" at least boasts a big, self-referential hook, even if the wannabe-tough-guy guitars and lifelong-smoker-voiced "wet thoughts of you" mature pr0n come-ons diminish what suits call "replay value". Despite all the guests, The Last of the Rock Stars also suffers from a weird confusion about where ex-hubby Phil's "Wall of Sound" meets the here/now. Listeners who can't get past Morrissey's sessionmen should hear the stiff "Girl From the Ghetto", which also shares some of that miserabilist's caustic venom: "I hope your cell is filled with magazines/ And on every one is a picture of me," Spector expectorates. Any question who that gun is pointed at?

Artist: Ronnie Spector, Album: The Last of the Rock Stars, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 3.7 Album review: "Ronnie Spector, she of Ronettes/"Be My Baby" fame, is here again lookin' for a new "baby", baby. If all that sounds like another Hollywood summer remake, it's not too far off. Ronnie's done the 1971 reunion with all four broken-up Beatles, the 1976 Billy Joel/Bruce Springsteen treatment, something with Eddie Money, and even a Joey Ramone-guesting 1999 EP on Kill Rock Stars. It never gets even half as good as the great old days, depending of course on your feelings re: Eddie Money. One cash-in celebritython leads to another. The Last of the Rock Stars carts in Keith Richards, Patti Smith and (again) the late Ramone, backing Spector on a reheated run-through of Johnny Thunders' "You Can't Put Your Arms Round a Memory", which was also on the 1999 EP. What's new includes Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner on jitter-by-numbers rocker "Hey Sah Lo Ney", the Raveonettes helping out on "Ode to L.A." (which, yeah, also appears-- with Ronnie-- on the Ravers' '05 Pretty in Black), and Ronnie and Keith do campy lover's chit-chat on Ike Turner's "Work Out Fine" ("You do the work, baby!" Keith hams). Just in case you were wondering what Spector has in mind, Loretta Lynn's career-resuscitating backers the Greenhornes are featured on a pair of tracks, one of which appeared with Holly Golightly in the Ronnie role on the 'Hornes' own 2005 Sewed Soles. If The Last of the Rock Stars shows anything other than that the former Mrs. Spector has a laughably high opinion of herself, it's that she remains primarily a singles artist. The one you want is the Amy Rigby-penned "All I Want", a bouncy, believable grown-up teenage symphony about just wanting "something to show me that you care/ Whether I live or die". Opener "Never Gonna Be Your Baby" at least boasts a big, self-referential hook, even if the wannabe-tough-guy guitars and lifelong-smoker-voiced "wet thoughts of you" mature pr0n come-ons diminish what suits call "replay value". Despite all the guests, The Last of the Rock Stars also suffers from a weird confusion about where ex-hubby Phil's "Wall of Sound" meets the here/now. Listeners who can't get past Morrissey's sessionmen should hear the stiff "Girl From the Ghetto", which also shares some of that miserabilist's caustic venom: "I hope your cell is filled with magazines/ And on every one is a picture of me," Spector expectorates. Any question who that gun is pointed at?"

The Howling Hex

1-2-3

Rock

William Bowers

Didn't the U.S. government recently pass a financial-institution-authored bankruptcy thingamajig to make it more difficult for people to abuse credit lines? Why isn't Neil Michael Hagerty skeert? No, this review will not mention his four other past and present bands, because to do so would only encourage him, and at the risk of sounding ungroovy, what he needs right now is a corpulent high school guidance counselor whose breast pockets are stocked with pamphlets about "motivational horizons." Which is not to slander Hagerty's energy as an author, video artist, and musician-- even the least guitar-smitten Pitchfork typist could assemble an anthology of selections from his works that would earn a 9.5 or higher. Problem is, that'd be like spending a day looking for a Fiero bumper in the acreage of an infuriatingly uncomputerized junkyard while the proprietor muttered in his sleep over abrasive loudspeakers. 1-2-3 at least has an excuse for its incoherence; it's a sometimes edited, blended, remixed, retitled, and re-ordered repackaging of three (ahem) vinyl-only Hex products from 2003 and 2004, and yes, it plays like three EPs on shuffle. Roughly one-third offers great Midwestern psych voiced by NMH, with his John Fogerty-trying-to exorcise-Roky Erickson yawp that seems both studied and natural. These songs contain chuggy solos and lyrics that are either fascinatingly free-associative and wordplayful or that construct and then abandon narratives or scenes, similar to the prose on Hagerty's if-McSweeneys-was-run-by-Graham Greene blog. 1-2-3's second mode features his sidekick, whom I'll call Strepp Throat because of the pleasantly almost-impassioned femaleness and the conspiratorial anonymity. The backing tracks on these tunes sound invariably like sloppy demos of a bored experimentalist angry that his interior genius slums afternoons in Versechorusverseburg. The album's third flavor consists of its noise collages-- note that I did not say noise sculptures. Some of these are a real trip! You will never want to hear some of them again! Yeah, so, this thing kind of just has to be sweated out. By the bongteenth track, its fealty-to-nothing aesthetic inspires both devotion and rage. Hagerty's a ye-olde-traditionalist cooking up an American style goulash that happens to reek of Bookforum and conservatory chops, which can be awesome, but if you can't just relax about it, you'll collapse from thesis-fatigue trying to discern grand purpose in his high-minded low-balling. A fine, finished-sounding piece such as "Imaginary Saints" becomes a sort of tragic tease, like a beautiful foot hanging out of a basin of Country Crock.

Artist: The Howling Hex, Album: 1-2-3, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 6.1 Album review: "Didn't the U.S. government recently pass a financial-institution-authored bankruptcy thingamajig to make it more difficult for people to abuse credit lines? Why isn't Neil Michael Hagerty skeert? No, this review will not mention his four other past and present bands, because to do so would only encourage him, and at the risk of sounding ungroovy, what he needs right now is a corpulent high school guidance counselor whose breast pockets are stocked with pamphlets about "motivational horizons." Which is not to slander Hagerty's energy as an author, video artist, and musician-- even the least guitar-smitten Pitchfork typist could assemble an anthology of selections from his works that would earn a 9.5 or higher. Problem is, that'd be like spending a day looking for a Fiero bumper in the acreage of an infuriatingly uncomputerized junkyard while the proprietor muttered in his sleep over abrasive loudspeakers. 1-2-3 at least has an excuse for its incoherence; it's a sometimes edited, blended, remixed, retitled, and re-ordered repackaging of three (ahem) vinyl-only Hex products from 2003 and 2004, and yes, it plays like three EPs on shuffle. Roughly one-third offers great Midwestern psych voiced by NMH, with his John Fogerty-trying-to exorcise-Roky Erickson yawp that seems both studied and natural. These songs contain chuggy solos and lyrics that are either fascinatingly free-associative and wordplayful or that construct and then abandon narratives or scenes, similar to the prose on Hagerty's if-McSweeneys-was-run-by-Graham Greene blog. 1-2-3's second mode features his sidekick, whom I'll call Strepp Throat because of the pleasantly almost-impassioned femaleness and the conspiratorial anonymity. The backing tracks on these tunes sound invariably like sloppy demos of a bored experimentalist angry that his interior genius slums afternoons in Versechorusverseburg. The album's third flavor consists of its noise collages-- note that I did not say noise sculptures. Some of these are a real trip! You will never want to hear some of them again! Yeah, so, this thing kind of just has to be sweated out. By the bongteenth track, its fealty-to-nothing aesthetic inspires both devotion and rage. Hagerty's a ye-olde-traditionalist cooking up an American style goulash that happens to reek of Bookforum and conservatory chops, which can be awesome, but if you can't just relax about it, you'll collapse from thesis-fatigue trying to discern grand purpose in his high-minded low-balling. A fine, finished-sounding piece such as "Imaginary Saints" becomes a sort of tragic tease, like a beautiful foot hanging out of a basin of Country Crock. "

Clem Snide

You Were a Diamond

Rock

Chris Dahlen

When I first checked out Clem Snide, it was on the recommendations of a gig flier from a favorite, underrecorded Boston band, the Pee Wee Fist. Fist leader Pete Fitzpatrick had a longtime friendship with the band-- he's now their full-time guitarist-- and listening to their debut, You Were a Diamond, it was easy to hear the similarities. Stylistically, both bands remained just outside any standard indie rock and alt-country conventions. Their leaders wrote and sung with deep but matter-of-fact expressiveness, cut with clever wordplay and imagery and just enough humor. And there was the use of non-rock instruments to make their sound more intriguing: in Clem Snide it was Jason Glasser on cello, whose playing here-- which can sound whisperingly soft, sandpaper rough or decorously smooth-- is a striking complement to Eef Barzelay's raspy, harsh singing. You Were a Diamond-- just reissued by spinART, with two bonus tracks-- is starker and coarser than anything else the band has done, with less of the irony and pop culture references that Barzelay now employs in his writing. Their songs also have darker, almost folky arrangements that are effectively atmospheric. At times, the album's as sad as watching an old woman drive alone to a cemetery. Barzelay emotes himself hoarse on "Uglier Than You", one of his most harrowing songs; and on "Row", he aches his way through the lyrics as Glasser and guest saw player Sue Weston bend and whisper as cooly as wind through a pile of leaves. Here, the band-- and Glasser in particular-- are grim colorists, playing more loosely and spontaneously than on their later, more polished records. Other songs are hopeful, and even blissful: for example, the convincingly crooned take on Hank Williams' "Lost on the River", with Pete Fitzpatrick soloing on banjo. And just when you were sick to death of songs about driving the highways late into the night, "I Can't Stay Here Tonight" captures the mood perfectly, with Barzelay's weary vocals nicely balanced by the light use of bells between the verses. But best of all is "Nick Drake Tape", written around memories of listening to mixtapes and being with a troubled girlfriend. Barzelay is gifted at indulging in sentiment while cutting straight through it, and on this track, he puts a beautiful tune and some of his most vulnerable singing together with increasingly dark verses. Glasser's gently scraped bowing in the outro is a perfect close. You Were a Diamond includes one of Clem Snide's first singles, the waltz "Your Night to Shine", and even a bonus video of the song. (The visuals aren't too exciting, but Barzelay looks just like a sullen Buddy Holly.) This song is closer to the later Snide: with the addition of a full-time drummer on their next album, the band began to make catchier and livelier music-- their latest album, The Ghost of Fashion, even has a horn section. Of the three records, Your Favorite Music may be their best, but this debut is a close second: it's a beautiful and gently melancholy album that crawls under your skin, and this is a welcome re-release.

Artist: Clem Snide, Album: You Were a Diamond, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.9 Album review: "When I first checked out Clem Snide, it was on the recommendations of a gig flier from a favorite, underrecorded Boston band, the Pee Wee Fist. Fist leader Pete Fitzpatrick had a longtime friendship with the band-- he's now their full-time guitarist-- and listening to their debut, You Were a Diamond, it was easy to hear the similarities. Stylistically, both bands remained just outside any standard indie rock and alt-country conventions. Their leaders wrote and sung with deep but matter-of-fact expressiveness, cut with clever wordplay and imagery and just enough humor. And there was the use of non-rock instruments to make their sound more intriguing: in Clem Snide it was Jason Glasser on cello, whose playing here-- which can sound whisperingly soft, sandpaper rough or decorously smooth-- is a striking complement to Eef Barzelay's raspy, harsh singing. You Were a Diamond-- just reissued by spinART, with two bonus tracks-- is starker and coarser than anything else the band has done, with less of the irony and pop culture references that Barzelay now employs in his writing. Their songs also have darker, almost folky arrangements that are effectively atmospheric. At times, the album's as sad as watching an old woman drive alone to a cemetery. Barzelay emotes himself hoarse on "Uglier Than You", one of his most harrowing songs; and on "Row", he aches his way through the lyrics as Glasser and guest saw player Sue Weston bend and whisper as cooly as wind through a pile of leaves. Here, the band-- and Glasser in particular-- are grim colorists, playing more loosely and spontaneously than on their later, more polished records. Other songs are hopeful, and even blissful: for example, the convincingly crooned take on Hank Williams' "Lost on the River", with Pete Fitzpatrick soloing on banjo. And just when you were sick to death of songs about driving the highways late into the night, "I Can't Stay Here Tonight" captures the mood perfectly, with Barzelay's weary vocals nicely balanced by the light use of bells between the verses. But best of all is "Nick Drake Tape", written around memories of listening to mixtapes and being with a troubled girlfriend. Barzelay is gifted at indulging in sentiment while cutting straight through it, and on this track, he puts a beautiful tune and some of his most vulnerable singing together with increasingly dark verses. Glasser's gently scraped bowing in the outro is a perfect close. You Were a Diamond includes one of Clem Snide's first singles, the waltz "Your Night to Shine", and even a bonus video of the song. (The visuals aren't too exciting, but Barzelay looks just like a sullen Buddy Holly.) This song is closer to the later Snide: with the addition of a full-time drummer on their next album, the band began to make catchier and livelier music-- their latest album, The Ghost of Fashion, even has a horn section. Of the three records, Your Favorite Music may be their best, but this debut is a close second: it's a beautiful and gently melancholy album that crawls under your skin, and this is a welcome re-release."

The Fucking Champs

V

Rock

Dominique Leone

You know the story, right? In the mid-90s, Nation of Ulysses guitarist Tim Green joined forces with sympathetic San Francisco souls Tim Soete and Josh Smith (who has been known to shred a few with über-black metal outfit Weakling), and immediately commenced to answer the question of what happens when you combine the strengths of Iron Maiden, Metallica and King Crimson and thrust that ornery beast upon indie rock audiences. The guys' first releases were independent cassettes, recorded as The Champs, which were available only at live shows. Soon after, they were pressured to change the bandname by the 60s group of the same name who'd had a hit with "Tequila," so they opted instead to be known as C4AM95. C4AM95's first official full-length, the double-album III, hit stores in 1997 on Frenetic Records, and witnessed an already fully developed band at the height of their powers dropping not only mind-numbing cock-prog adventures, but also a few electronic vignettes that might not have sounded out of place on the Flash Gordon soundtrack. 2000's IV cut the length in half, but retained the concept entirely-- and it only won them more props. So, in the grand album tradition of Led Zeppelin and, well, Chicago, we now have V. The good news: nothing has changed; the bad news: uh, you like prog-metal, right? Hey, it could be worse (two words: Dream Theater). Besides, I defy anyone to find an ounce of pretension or bloated self-indulgence on this record. Wanky? Maybe, but probably less so than recent collaborators Trans Am, and anyway, the Fucking Champs own pretty much everyone in the super-rock department. There's a school of thought that says you have to make excuses for listening to stuff like this, but that kind of bullshit comes up limp in the face of the Champs' ability to ram a riff down your throat, not to mention their sheer sincerity. The two-part "Never Enough Neck" starts things off subtly, with a soft synth chord that crescendos into the crashing, distorted drums and guitars. They hit riffs one right after another, the tempo relentlessly quick and drummer Soete's dexterity stunning. The first part of the tune is fairly melodic, if full of typical Champs' crunch; the second switches up to a decidedly proggy tip, odd time signatures and all. The majestic (or as much as can be said of this band) "Children Perceive the Hoax Cluster" is actually a live track, replete with drunken screams and featuring Smith's considerable synthesizer atmospherics. The track forgoes percussive fury in lieu of pure 80s sci-fi mysticism (remember Ladyhawke?). This leads directly into another 80s trip, "I Am the Album Cover," which is something like the shameful instrumental meeting of Iron Maiden and Survivor. To my ears, even though that kind of stuff might get the Champs' more press, I think it could potentially lead to novelty-band status. The track sounds like it may have been an old four-track experiment (the music on this disc dates as far back as '93), so maybe they're focusing on a more idiosyncratic sound now. The best tracks on V are the ones that throw caution and 80s kitsch out the window in favor of chops-ahoy-- like the up-tempo "Happy Segovia," or the epic "Aliens of Gold," which may be the best-ever example of trying to fuse the words 'prog' and 'metal,' while never uttering the word 'sux.' And yes, there is a metal version of a Bach tune here (\xA91723, so say the liner notes), so I suppose even the Fucking Champs aren't above the occasional Spinal Tap move. But you know, it fits right in with the other stuff. So I guess the moral is that if a band is good enough, plays hard enough, and does it without the slightest hint of irony, they can find people who'll love them regardless of the genre. Either that, or resurrecting the ghost of Randy Rhoads is the magic formula for making cool records. What do you think?

Artist: The Fucking Champs, Album: V, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 8.1 Album review: "You know the story, right? In the mid-90s, Nation of Ulysses guitarist Tim Green joined forces with sympathetic San Francisco souls Tim Soete and Josh Smith (who has been known to shred a few with über-black metal outfit Weakling), and immediately commenced to answer the question of what happens when you combine the strengths of Iron Maiden, Metallica and King Crimson and thrust that ornery beast upon indie rock audiences. The guys' first releases were independent cassettes, recorded as The Champs, which were available only at live shows. Soon after, they were pressured to change the bandname by the 60s group of the same name who'd had a hit with "Tequila," so they opted instead to be known as C4AM95. C4AM95's first official full-length, the double-album III, hit stores in 1997 on Frenetic Records, and witnessed an already fully developed band at the height of their powers dropping not only mind-numbing cock-prog adventures, but also a few electronic vignettes that might not have sounded out of place on the Flash Gordon soundtrack. 2000's IV cut the length in half, but retained the concept entirely-- and it only won them more props. So, in the grand album tradition of Led Zeppelin and, well, Chicago, we now have V. The good news: nothing has changed; the bad news: uh, you like prog-metal, right? Hey, it could be worse (two words: Dream Theater). Besides, I defy anyone to find an ounce of pretension or bloated self-indulgence on this record. Wanky? Maybe, but probably less so than recent collaborators Trans Am, and anyway, the Fucking Champs own pretty much everyone in the super-rock department. There's a school of thought that says you have to make excuses for listening to stuff like this, but that kind of bullshit comes up limp in the face of the Champs' ability to ram a riff down your throat, not to mention their sheer sincerity. The two-part "Never Enough Neck" starts things off subtly, with a soft synth chord that crescendos into the crashing, distorted drums and guitars. They hit riffs one right after another, the tempo relentlessly quick and drummer Soete's dexterity stunning. The first part of the tune is fairly melodic, if full of typical Champs' crunch; the second switches up to a decidedly proggy tip, odd time signatures and all. The majestic (or as much as can be said of this band) "Children Perceive the Hoax Cluster" is actually a live track, replete with drunken screams and featuring Smith's considerable synthesizer atmospherics. The track forgoes percussive fury in lieu of pure 80s sci-fi mysticism (remember Ladyhawke?). This leads directly into another 80s trip, "I Am the Album Cover," which is something like the shameful instrumental meeting of Iron Maiden and Survivor. To my ears, even though that kind of stuff might get the Champs' more press, I think it could potentially lead to novelty-band status. The track sounds like it may have been an old four-track experiment (the music on this disc dates as far back as '93), so maybe they're focusing on a more idiosyncratic sound now. The best tracks on V are the ones that throw caution and 80s kitsch out the window in favor of chops-ahoy-- like the up-tempo "Happy Segovia," or the epic "Aliens of Gold," which may be the best-ever example of trying to fuse the words 'prog' and 'metal,' while never uttering the word 'sux.' And yes, there is a metal version of a Bach tune here (\xA91723, so say the liner notes), so I suppose even the Fucking Champs aren't above the occasional Spinal Tap move. But you know, it fits right in with the other stuff. So I guess the moral is that if a band is good enough, plays hard enough, and does it without the slightest hint of irony, they can find people who'll love them regardless of the genre. Either that, or resurrecting the ghost of Randy Rhoads is the magic formula for making cool records. What do you think?"

The Go-Betweens

G Stands for Go-Betweens: Volume 1, 1978-1984

Pop/R&B

Douglas Wolk

The Go-Betweens were their own favorite band, and there's a lot to be said for that. Robert Forster and Grant McLennan met as teenaged boys at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, as Forster explains in the book that's the centerpiece of this anthology of their first seven years together. (His 70-page history of that period is written in the third person; count on the Go-Betweens for a touch of the impersonal where it's least expected.) They had their own ideas of what pop might be, and especially of what Australian pop might be. The very end of the book names their influences: Abba, Bowie, Creedence, Dolenz, Easybeats, Fellini, and then themselves. The two of them bonded over their enthusiasm for film and literature at least as much as they did over music. Young men of that era didn't become filmmakers or novelists together, because that couldn't yield Jules et Jim, so Forster taught McLennan how to play guitar, and they started the group. (Forster described their partnership as "platonic homosexuality.") Between 1978 and 1989, they made a small mountain of records but never made much of a ripple commercially; their 2000-2006 reunion was cut short by McLennan's death. Forster's essay, though, disputes the received wisdom that they "were 'unsuccessful' and had little luck. It is a view Forster and McLennan never shared, having taken a two-piece Brisbane bedroom band out to the world." The Go-Betweens have tried to organize and reassess their chaotic early period a few times now: There have been a few greatest-hits sets, 1985's semi-bootlegged Very Quick on the Eye, 1999's '78 Til '79: The Lost Album, the expanded 2002 reissues of their early albums. G Stands for Go-Betweens includes new vinyl remasters of Send Me a Lullaby (1982), Before Hollywood (1983) and Spring Hill Fair (1984), and an LP called The First Five Singles, which is just that. There are also four CDs: three discs' worth of demos, compilation tracks, B-sides and oddities, and a live set from April, 1982, which features a few songs that mutated or disappeared before they could be recorded. This is, in other words, aimed at Go-Betweens superfans, but most of their fans were always superfans anyway. They were a singles band more than they tended to let on—a lot of their songs are best experienced one or two at a time. The First Five Singles, released one a year from 1978 to 1982, is the most immediately delightful of these eight discs, although the very early Go-Betweens were callow, awkward, and a little uncomfortable with women, in the way that bookish young men can be. Both sides of their first single are paeans to unattainable women, one of them Lee Remick and the other a librarian who "helps me find Genet, helps me find Brecht, helps me find Chandler... she's my god, she's my G-O-D." "People Say", from 1979, is a homemade homage to the garage singles of a dozen years earlier; the next year's skittish "I Need Two Heads" made them the only non-Scottish band to release music on Postcard Records, thanks to a trip to the UK whose charming details Forster explains in the book. Forster has noted that people shouldn't buy the Go-Betweens' first album "without at least owning three others," and he's probably right. (The 1999 Go-Betweens retrospective Bellavista Terrace didn't include anything from it.) *Send Me a Lullaby—*the LP included here is the 12-song British version that came out in early 1982, rather than the eight-song 1981 Australian version—is the kind of arch, dry post-punk that sat itchily next to, say, Essential Logic or James Chance records (the occasional blurts of James Freud's saxophone are a reminder that that was the flavor of the underground at that particular moment). Forster and McLennan weren't yet comfortable with their voices; "Midnight to Neon" sounds like Forster wasn't even sure how its melody was supposed to go. Lullaby's main contribution to the band's history is introducing drummer/occasional vocalist Lindy Morrison, who was also dating Forster at the time, and who would be the backbone of the band until the end of its first incarnation in 1989. Morrison was never a showy musician, but she gracefully navigated the eccentric rhythms and time signatures that were starting to appear in both songwriters' work. Before Hollywood from 1983 was the first time the Go-Betweens really sounded like they would for the rest of their initial run: a little bit off to the side of the pop mainstream's commercial-alternative tributary, looking skeptically at it as it rushed alongside them. The distinction between Forster's writing (acidic, bristling) and McLennan's (tender, playful) was starting to become clearer; McLennan's first real jewel of a song, "Cattle and Cane", is a self-consciously poetic reminiscence of his youth, set to a gorgeous mesh of acoustic and electric guitar tones in 11/8 time; Forster's songs are the album's tougher rockers, especially "By Chance", which sounds more than a bit like the early Smiths (both bands were releasing records on Rough Trade at the time). By the time they made 1984's Spring Hill Fair, on which McLennan switched to guitar and Robert Vickers, who'd met them at their first show, took over on bass, the Go-Betweens had apparently made peace with prettiness. Its single "Bachelor Kisses" was McLennan's sweetest-sounding song yet—although, naturally, its lyrics bit harder than his delivery suggested. The band's reach still exceeded its grasp sometimes, and their stabs at funk and spoken-word vers libre are stumbles (although not disasters); a remake of the "Man O' Sand to Girl O' Sea" single doesn't match the frantic nervousness of the original. But you can also hear them successfully assimilating what they'd picked up through their engagement with other people's music. "The Old Way Out" is effectively the Fall translated into the Go-Betweens' own idiom, and Forster's "Part Company" is Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks refracted through Australian rehearsal room windows. Dylan's idea of a "thin wild mercury sound" was an obvious ancestor of what McLennan and Forster had called "that striped sunlight sound," a phrase from the sleeve of their first single that reappeared as the title of their 2005 live album. You don't come up with something like that unless you're very interested in figuring out how to mythologize yourself. But why shouldn't they have? The Go-Betweens' endless enthusiasm for their own work is what propelled them out of that Brisbane bedroom in the first place, and the richness of context that this box provides makes it a deeper pleasure than its

Artist: The Go-Betweens, Album: G Stands for Go-Betweens: Volume 1, 1978-1984, Genre: Pop/R&B, Score (1-10): 8.2 Album review: "The Go-Betweens were their own favorite band, and there's a lot to be said for that. Robert Forster and Grant McLennan met as teenaged boys at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, as Forster explains in the book that's the centerpiece of this anthology of their first seven years together. (His 70-page history of that period is written in the third person; count on the Go-Betweens for a touch of the impersonal where it's least expected.) They had their own ideas of what pop might be, and especially of what Australian pop might be. The very end of the book names their influences: Abba, Bowie, Creedence, Dolenz, Easybeats, Fellini, and then themselves. The two of them bonded over their enthusiasm for film and literature at least as much as they did over music. Young men of that era didn't become filmmakers or novelists together, because that couldn't yield Jules et Jim, so Forster taught McLennan how to play guitar, and they started the group. (Forster described their partnership as "platonic homosexuality.") Between 1978 and 1989, they made a small mountain of records but never made much of a ripple commercially; their 2000-2006 reunion was cut short by McLennan's death. Forster's essay, though, disputes the received wisdom that they "were 'unsuccessful' and had little luck. It is a view Forster and McLennan never shared, having taken a two-piece Brisbane bedroom band out to the world." The Go-Betweens have tried to organize and reassess their chaotic early period a few times now: There have been a few greatest-hits sets, 1985's semi-bootlegged Very Quick on the Eye, 1999's '78 Til '79: The Lost Album, the expanded 2002 reissues of their early albums. G Stands for Go-Betweens includes new vinyl remasters of Send Me a Lullaby (1982), Before Hollywood (1983) and Spring Hill Fair (1984), and an LP called The First Five Singles, which is just that. There are also four CDs: three discs' worth of demos, compilation tracks, B-sides and oddities, and a live set from April, 1982, which features a few songs that mutated or disappeared before they could be recorded. This is, in other words, aimed at Go-Betweens superfans, but most of their fans were always superfans anyway. They were a singles band more than they tended to let on—a lot of their songs are best experienced one or two at a time. The First Five Singles, released one a year from 1978 to 1982, is the most immediately delightful of these eight discs, although the very early Go-Betweens were callow, awkward, and a little uncomfortable with women, in the way that bookish young men can be. Both sides of their first single are paeans to unattainable women, one of them Lee Remick and the other a librarian who "helps me find Genet, helps me find Brecht, helps me find Chandler... she's my god, she's my G-O-D." "People Say", from 1979, is a homemade homage to the garage singles of a dozen years earlier; the next year's skittish "I Need Two Heads" made them the only non-Scottish band to release music on Postcard Records, thanks to a trip to the UK whose charming details Forster explains in the book. Forster has noted that people shouldn't buy the Go-Betweens' first album "without at least owning three others," and he's probably right. (The 1999 Go-Betweens retrospective Bellavista Terrace didn't include anything from it.) *Send Me a Lullaby—*the LP included here is the 12-song British version that came out in early 1982, rather than the eight-song 1981 Australian version—is the kind of arch, dry post-punk that sat itchily next to, say, Essential Logic or James Chance records (the occasional blurts of James Freud's saxophone are a reminder that that was the flavor of the underground at that particular moment). Forster and McLennan weren't yet comfortable with their voices; "Midnight to Neon" sounds like Forster wasn't even sure how its melody was supposed to go. Lullaby's main contribution to the band's history is introducing drummer/occasional vocalist Lindy Morrison, who was also dating Forster at the time, and who would be the backbone of the band until the end of its first incarnation in 1989. Morrison was never a showy musician, but she gracefully navigated the eccentric rhythms and time signatures that were starting to appear in both songwriters' work. Before Hollywood from 1983 was the first time the Go-Betweens really sounded like they would for the rest of their initial run: a little bit off to the side of the pop mainstream's commercial-alternative tributary, looking skeptically at it as it rushed alongside them. The distinction between Forster's writing (acidic, bristling) and McLennan's (tender, playful) was starting to become clearer; McLennan's first real jewel of a song, "Cattle and Cane", is a self-consciously poetic reminiscence of his youth, set to a gorgeous mesh of acoustic and electric guitar tones in 11/8 time; Forster's songs are the album's tougher rockers, especially "By Chance", which sounds more than a bit like the early Smiths (both bands were releasing records on Rough Trade at the time). By the time they made 1984's Spring Hill Fair, on which McLennan switched to guitar and Robert Vickers, who'd met them at their first show, took over on bass, the Go-Betweens had apparently made peace with prettiness. Its single "Bachelor Kisses" was McLennan's sweetest-sounding song yet—although, naturally, its lyrics bit harder than his delivery suggested. The band's reach still exceeded its grasp sometimes, and their stabs at funk and spoken-word vers libre are stumbles (although not disasters); a remake of the "Man O' Sand to Girl O' Sea" single doesn't match the frantic nervousness of the original. But you can also hear them successfully assimilating what they'd picked up through their engagement with other people's music. "The Old Way Out" is effectively the Fall translated into the Go-Betweens' own idiom, and Forster's "Part Company" is Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks refracted through Australian rehearsal room windows. Dylan's idea of a "thin wild mercury sound" was an obvious ancestor of what McLennan and Forster had called "that striped sunlight sound," a phrase from the sleeve of their first single that reappeared as the title of their 2005 live album. You don't come up with something like that unless you're very interested in figuring out how to mythologize yourself. But why shouldn't they have? The Go-Betweens' endless enthusiasm for their own work is what propelled them out of that Brisbane bedroom in the first place, and the richness of context that this box provides makes it a deeper pleasure than its "

Palomar

II

Rock

Brad Haywood

My personal musical continuum allows for wide-range emotional expression. On one end of the continuum lies rage; at the other, joy. Everything else-- from sadness or humor, to apathy or longing-- falls somewhere between. It is a broad, canyonesque continuum, spanning genres as diverse as black metal, slow-core, space-funk, post-punk, and many others. But alas, there a few limited avenues of expression which find themselves on an entirely different plane, excluded from this continuum of toleration. One of them is cuteness. Palomar is cute. Not perpetually cute, thank god, but in spurts, Palomar are Nermal to my Garfield-- almost intolerable, and a major hurdle toward my enjoyment of the album-- or most adults', for that matter. The basic cuteness construct Palomar employs here is a spin on pop/punk, with a heavy emphasis on the 'pop' part, and the 'spin' displaying all of the symptoms of an indie-polka. The polka-line isn't just a toss-off critique, either; tunes like "Knockout" or the beginning of "Lesion" had me tasting pierogies. None of this is to say that Palomar aren't talented. Quite the contrary-- wade your way through the Hello Kitty delivery and you have a good slab of catchy, competent songwriting. One of the band's talents is orchestrating spunky, energetic vocal melodies. It sounds like at least three, if not all four band members, chip in once in a while to sing lead, enrich choruses, add counterpoint, or complete a four-part harmony. Tonally, the band remains fairly consistent, with treble-heavy bass, two guitars (one with a warm electric tone, the other overdriven), and a nasal vocal lead. The music itself is nowhere near as stagnant as most pop-punk, though, as Palomar sensibly modulates tempo and intensity, like on "Evening Falls at the Buffalo Bar," which shifts from a slow, one-horse trot to a full-band gallop. "Up!," featuring two guys from the Strokes (!) on background vocals (not Julian), builds through a standard punk verse to a super-catchy Grease-like theatrical chorus and denouement. Demographics are probably about as much of a concern for Palomar as an arena tour. But supposing this band had thought about demographics, it would be plainly evident that they'd reached some sort of consensus about females under the age of 22. I say this because Palomar plays fun, youthful music-- the kind of stuff you'd expect your 16-year-old girlfriend to put on a summertime mixdisc (your 16-year-old girlfriend-- mine is 17, thanks very much). The youngsters will probably enjoy this record most, but this doesn't mean you won't, too (provided you're over 22). If you have the stomach for a cute, carnival-fun atmosphere, Palomar just may be your very own orgasmic version of Whack-A-Mole. If you don't, then the Tilt-a-Whirl may be a better analogy, with this review playing the part of 'ominous wafting barf aroma.'

Artist: Palomar, Album: II, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 6.8 Album review: "My personal musical continuum allows for wide-range emotional expression. On one end of the continuum lies rage; at the other, joy. Everything else-- from sadness or humor, to apathy or longing-- falls somewhere between. It is a broad, canyonesque continuum, spanning genres as diverse as black metal, slow-core, space-funk, post-punk, and many others. But alas, there a few limited avenues of expression which find themselves on an entirely different plane, excluded from this continuum of toleration. One of them is cuteness. Palomar is cute. Not perpetually cute, thank god, but in spurts, Palomar are Nermal to my Garfield-- almost intolerable, and a major hurdle toward my enjoyment of the album-- or most adults', for that matter. The basic cuteness construct Palomar employs here is a spin on pop/punk, with a heavy emphasis on the 'pop' part, and the 'spin' displaying all of the symptoms of an indie-polka. The polka-line isn't just a toss-off critique, either; tunes like "Knockout" or the beginning of "Lesion" had me tasting pierogies. None of this is to say that Palomar aren't talented. Quite the contrary-- wade your way through the Hello Kitty delivery and you have a good slab of catchy, competent songwriting. One of the band's talents is orchestrating spunky, energetic vocal melodies. It sounds like at least three, if not all four band members, chip in once in a while to sing lead, enrich choruses, add counterpoint, or complete a four-part harmony. Tonally, the band remains fairly consistent, with treble-heavy bass, two guitars (one with a warm electric tone, the other overdriven), and a nasal vocal lead. The music itself is nowhere near as stagnant as most pop-punk, though, as Palomar sensibly modulates tempo and intensity, like on "Evening Falls at the Buffalo Bar," which shifts from a slow, one-horse trot to a full-band gallop. "Up!," featuring two guys from the Strokes (!) on background vocals (not Julian), builds through a standard punk verse to a super-catchy Grease-like theatrical chorus and denouement. Demographics are probably about as much of a concern for Palomar as an arena tour. But supposing this band had thought about demographics, it would be plainly evident that they'd reached some sort of consensus about females under the age of 22. I say this because Palomar plays fun, youthful music-- the kind of stuff you'd expect your 16-year-old girlfriend to put on a summertime mixdisc (your 16-year-old girlfriend-- mine is 17, thanks very much). The youngsters will probably enjoy this record most, but this doesn't mean you won't, too (provided you're over 22). If you have the stomach for a cute, carnival-fun atmosphere, Palomar just may be your very own orgasmic version of Whack-A-Mole. If you don't, then the Tilt-a-Whirl may be a better analogy, with this review playing the part of 'ominous wafting barf aroma.'"

Alex Smoke

Love Over Will

Electronic

Kevin Lozano

Glaswegian producer/DJ Alex Smoke (aka Alex Menzies) has never made techno you were supposed to dance to. In his more than decade-long career, his mixes and productions have veered far from the main drag of club and dancefloor appeal. More important for Smoke, in all of his work, was emotional exploration. It’s obvious that he has the disposition of a sensitive soul, and on his first outing with R&S Records, Love Over Will, Smoke swings for the fences, trying to complete a vision which could really create a puncturing and memorable experience. Apparently the title of the album is a playful inversion of British occultist Aleister Crowley’s law of Thelema, a thoroughly ambiguous holy writ. In similarly opaque and broad terms, Smoke has described the album as "a statement on the times we are living in, but with an optimism relating to ways forward that are possible." But does he deliver on such lofty statements? Probably not, but in over 13 tracks and 33 minutes, Smoke tightly packs a myriad of concepts and ideas, ranging from ontology, loss love, the carceral state, and Edward Snowden. The resulting project is contemplative, relaxing, and elegant on a sonic level, but often uneven and clunky lyrically. The unevenness comes from Smoke’s heavy reliance on his singing, which cannot carry the album's thematic weight.  His vocals dominate, featuring in eight of the 13 songs. Throughout, he sings in a low register, mostly in a monotone, and his voice is always Auto-Tuned or pitch-adjusted. Sometimes the vocals are the perfect complement to his sparse, buoyant productions, and at other times they are far too brittle and inflexible to match the rich sounds around him. The freezingly tender and liquid wall of sound in the album’s opener, "Fair Is Foul," favorably recalls Mica Levi’s palette of quavering synths for Under the Skin, but the track is nearly ruined by the interjection of lines like "I never really care about you anyway/ You’re always on the way." When his songwriting and singing fit together, Smoke comes very close to the emotional resonance he is striving for. In "LossGain," as he whispers "Don’t tell me how I feel when I’m myself," there is an aching sense of strength and affirmation amidst the melancholy. When he sings "All my atoms/ Struggling to fight them" in "All My Atoms," the blunt lyrics propel the energy of the song’s bright keys. Smoke is a sentimentalist at heart, and in the album’s best track, "Dust," he submits to old desires and calls out to a lover: "Don’t want to be with anyone else/ Don’t want to be separate." Like Holly Herndon and Jam City, Smoke attempts to politically radicalize his music. Unlike the other two artists, he is hesitant to go full hog, and only devotes two tracks to explicitly political themes: "Fall Out" and "Yearning Mississippi." "Fall Out" is partially inspired by the trials and tribulations of hacker folk hero Edward Snowden. As he sings "you’ll never know they’re watching you...you’ll never even see," his voice is drowned out by a landscape of computer sounds, not unlike the ones featured in Laura Poitras' film about Snowden, Citizenfour. As the album’s final track, it serves as an almost cheerful acquiescence to the grand scariness of the surveillance state, in favor of ruminating on less dizzying concerns. For "Yearning Mississippi," he explored ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s Cultural Equity Archive and sampled prison songs from Mississippi. This is an interesting detail, but it would be impossible to notice on its own, making the potential critique of the prison system miss its mark. Overall, Smoke still gets over on his ability to craft rich, moody soundscapes, although almost all the tracks on the album would have worked better as standalone instrumentals. Unlike his last project, Wraetlic, a woefully dreary and depressive piece, Love Over Will projects a hopeful sense of growth for Smoke. The sadness here is somehow more buoyant and more comforting. It leaves a kernel of warmth on otherwise very cold days.

Artist: Alex Smoke, Album: Love Over Will, Genre: Electronic, Score (1-10): 7.0 Album review: "Glaswegian producer/DJ Alex Smoke (aka Alex Menzies) has never made techno you were supposed to dance to. In his more than decade-long career, his mixes and productions have veered far from the main drag of club and dancefloor appeal. More important for Smoke, in all of his work, was emotional exploration. It’s obvious that he has the disposition of a sensitive soul, and on his first outing with R&S Records, Love Over Will, Smoke swings for the fences, trying to complete a vision which could really create a puncturing and memorable experience. Apparently the title of the album is a playful inversion of British occultist Aleister Crowley’s law of Thelema, a thoroughly ambiguous holy writ. In similarly opaque and broad terms, Smoke has described the album as "a statement on the times we are living in, but with an optimism relating to ways forward that are possible." But does he deliver on such lofty statements? Probably not, but in over 13 tracks and 33 minutes, Smoke tightly packs a myriad of concepts and ideas, ranging from ontology, loss love, the carceral state, and Edward Snowden. The resulting project is contemplative, relaxing, and elegant on a sonic level, but often uneven and clunky lyrically. The unevenness comes from Smoke’s heavy reliance on his singing, which cannot carry the album's thematic weight.  His vocals dominate, featuring in eight of the 13 songs. Throughout, he sings in a low register, mostly in a monotone, and his voice is always Auto-Tuned or pitch-adjusted. Sometimes the vocals are the perfect complement to his sparse, buoyant productions, and at other times they are far too brittle and inflexible to match the rich sounds around him. The freezingly tender and liquid wall of sound in the album’s opener, "Fair Is Foul," favorably recalls Mica Levi’s palette of quavering synths for Under the Skin, but the track is nearly ruined by the interjection of lines like "I never really care about you anyway/ You’re always on the way." When his songwriting and singing fit together, Smoke comes very close to the emotional resonance he is striving for. In "LossGain," as he whispers "Don’t tell me how I feel when I’m myself," there is an aching sense of strength and affirmation amidst the melancholy. When he sings "All my atoms/ Struggling to fight them" in "All My Atoms," the blunt lyrics propel the energy of the song’s bright keys. Smoke is a sentimentalist at heart, and in the album’s best track, "Dust," he submits to old desires and calls out to a lover: "Don’t want to be with anyone else/ Don’t want to be separate." Like Holly Herndon and Jam City, Smoke attempts to politically radicalize his music. Unlike the other two artists, he is hesitant to go full hog, and only devotes two tracks to explicitly political themes: "Fall Out" and "Yearning Mississippi." "Fall Out" is partially inspired by the trials and tribulations of hacker folk hero Edward Snowden. As he sings "you’ll never know they’re watching you...you’ll never even see," his voice is drowned out by a landscape of computer sounds, not unlike the ones featured in Laura Poitras' film about Snowden, Citizenfour. As the album’s final track, it serves as an almost cheerful acquiescence to the grand scariness of the surveillance state, in favor of ruminating on less dizzying concerns. For "Yearning Mississippi," he explored ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s Cultural Equity Archive and sampled prison songs from Mississippi. This is an interesting detail, but it would be impossible to notice on its own, making the potential critique of the prison system miss its mark. Overall, Smoke still gets over on his ability to craft rich, moody soundscapes, although almost all the tracks on the album would have worked better as standalone instrumentals. Unlike his last project, Wraetlic, a woefully dreary and depressive piece, Love Over Will projects a hopeful sense of growth for Smoke. The sadness here is somehow more buoyant and more comforting. It leaves a kernel of warmth on otherwise very cold days."

Piano Magic

Opencast Heart EP

Electronic,Rock

Mark Richardson

A few years ago, I read a message board thread that asked if there was a band that felt like a combination of Boards of Canada and the Sundays. Someone suggested Piano Magic, which made some sense. No matter what cast of characters surrounds Piano Magic's Glen Johnson on a given record, he has a knack for organically incorporating technology and sound processing to compliment the songs, which are typically gentle, sometimes ethereal, and always dour. If that BoC + Sundays idea once felt vaguely true, the four-song Opencast Heart EP confirms it. A sticker on the outside of the CD quotes Johnson as saying this the most electronic record has made, and who am I to argue? I certainly don't hear identifiable guitars or other conventional instruments. Actually, I don't hear much of anything-- this is an unusually subtle and quiet record, with most tracks consisting of some ghostly synth drifts and perhaps one or two slow percussion sounds. The lone exception is "The Heart Machinery", which-- while not exactly a burner-- rises to mid-tempo and has Johnson doing a neu-romantic croon at the upper end of his range, suggesting a contemporary affinity with Junior Boys or Styrofoam. Beyond that, you'll need snowshoes to negotiate one of Piano Magic's most wintry landscapes. "Echoes on Ice" sets the mercury falling, with some barely-there chord wisps and slight crackles of static to back the hushed whispers of rotating member Angéle David-Gillou. "Echoes on ice on a blue winter night," she sings, "from the spikes of your bike in sub-Fahrenheit." Brrrrr. Her voice is suddenly thrown into reverse for the last couplet, ending the song on a haunting note. "The Journal of a Disappointed Man" is one of Johnson's spoken-word-over-soundscape pieces, and not a bad one as those go, though these ultimately have little replay value. Lines like "I took a position at the Natural History Museum, but left after only three months due to allergies" show he can have a chuckle at himself, at least. Best of all is the dry, minimal, and lovely "I Didn't Get Where I Am Today", which starts with David-Gillou saying she "stayed home, snowed in" and ends with "the only light's a cigarette, the bed feels cold as ice." Appropriately, she harmonizes with herself, alone to the end. After so much inconsistency, Piano Magic sounds best in small doses, and this tight unified EP shows that Johnson is still capable of creating interesting records.

Artist: Piano Magic, Album: Opencast Heart EP, Genre: Electronic,Rock, Score (1-10): 7.2 Album review: "A few years ago, I read a message board thread that asked if there was a band that felt like a combination of Boards of Canada and the Sundays. Someone suggested Piano Magic, which made some sense. No matter what cast of characters surrounds Piano Magic's Glen Johnson on a given record, he has a knack for organically incorporating technology and sound processing to compliment the songs, which are typically gentle, sometimes ethereal, and always dour. If that BoC + Sundays idea once felt vaguely true, the four-song Opencast Heart EP confirms it. A sticker on the outside of the CD quotes Johnson as saying this the most electronic record has made, and who am I to argue? I certainly don't hear identifiable guitars or other conventional instruments. Actually, I don't hear much of anything-- this is an unusually subtle and quiet record, with most tracks consisting of some ghostly synth drifts and perhaps one or two slow percussion sounds. The lone exception is "The Heart Machinery", which-- while not exactly a burner-- rises to mid-tempo and has Johnson doing a neu-romantic croon at the upper end of his range, suggesting a contemporary affinity with Junior Boys or Styrofoam. Beyond that, you'll need snowshoes to negotiate one of Piano Magic's most wintry landscapes. "Echoes on Ice" sets the mercury falling, with some barely-there chord wisps and slight crackles of static to back the hushed whispers of rotating member Angéle David-Gillou. "Echoes on ice on a blue winter night," she sings, "from the spikes of your bike in sub-Fahrenheit." Brrrrr. Her voice is suddenly thrown into reverse for the last couplet, ending the song on a haunting note. "The Journal of a Disappointed Man" is one of Johnson's spoken-word-over-soundscape pieces, and not a bad one as those go, though these ultimately have little replay value. Lines like "I took a position at the Natural History Museum, but left after only three months due to allergies" show he can have a chuckle at himself, at least. Best of all is the dry, minimal, and lovely "I Didn't Get Where I Am Today", which starts with David-Gillou saying she "stayed home, snowed in" and ends with "the only light's a cigarette, the bed feels cold as ice." Appropriately, she harmonizes with herself, alone to the end. After so much inconsistency, Piano Magic sounds best in small doses, and this tight unified EP shows that Johnson is still capable of creating interesting records."

Calla

Televise

Rock

Eric Carr

2001's Scavengers marked Calla's departure from the amorphous reaches of their debut, and they've been driving steadily songward ever since. Once the sublimation of their old tendencies toward hiss manipulation and feedback resulted in such a startling transformation as "Fear of Fireflies", there was no turning back, and why should there have been? Scavengers was a clear demonstration that their talents lay elsewhere: In the crafting of radiant slow-motion scenes, miniature dramas playing out behind rain-slicked windowpanes. Televise carries them even farther down the same lonely streets, under the same gray skies; they rarely deviate from form, keeping closer to traditional song structures than ever before. It's often a beautiful ride, but it's also a long one. You might want to bring something to read, just in case. The record peaks early, with the unrivaled rush of "Strangler", infusing their delicate slowcore antics with a compelling hint of aggression. Caustic bass and guitar interplay seethes at its heart, only barely restrained by the muddled resignation of Aurelio Valle's whispers. Despite the underlying tension, it doesn't stray far from Calla's comfortably faded aesthetic, and even brings to mind some of the simple glory of Scavengers' "Fireflies". As with their previous album, they score big on the opener, but the beginning is somewhat misleading; the tension subsides before long, leaving hollow subtlety in its stead. Televise settles down almost immediately after "Strangler"; "Monument" still shows traces of the first track's unresolved anger, but by "Astral", it has dissipated entirely. A numbing chill sets in as the gloomy, weathered beauty of this album begins to come to the fore. Valle's voice chokes and cracks breathlessly just above the mix; cymbal washes slowly tranquilize the listener. This is undeniably what Calla does best, but to a certain extent, the neural anesthesia becomes stultifying. From a certain vantage this isn't a problem-- each track is dutifully calming, a simple matter of getting lost in the fog-- but these lush arrangements seem content to simply drift by, never truly engaging the listener, and making it difficult to fully appreciate the album if you aren't in the mood to be put under. They do eventually call it quits on the hypnotist act, late in the album. The sly grooves of "Televised" break stride as aggressive drum patterns keep pace with a stutter-stepping bassline. It recaptures some of the frustration embodied in the opener, undercut by a single, desperate guitar refrain rattling around somewhere in the depths. The disc then closes with "Surface Scratch", a gloriously shaky bit of piano minimalism that owes more than a nod to Howe Gelb's finer empty-air desert wanderings. Together, these unique pieces are an impressive reward after clearing the cobwebs and surfacing from the recesses of the album's languorous middle works. It's truly a grand finale, but Televise could have used a mild shot in the arm a bit sooner.

Artist: Calla, Album: Televise, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.5 Album review: "2001's Scavengers marked Calla's departure from the amorphous reaches of their debut, and they've been driving steadily songward ever since. Once the sublimation of their old tendencies toward hiss manipulation and feedback resulted in such a startling transformation as "Fear of Fireflies", there was no turning back, and why should there have been? Scavengers was a clear demonstration that their talents lay elsewhere: In the crafting of radiant slow-motion scenes, miniature dramas playing out behind rain-slicked windowpanes. Televise carries them even farther down the same lonely streets, under the same gray skies; they rarely deviate from form, keeping closer to traditional song structures than ever before. It's often a beautiful ride, but it's also a long one. You might want to bring something to read, just in case. The record peaks early, with the unrivaled rush of "Strangler", infusing their delicate slowcore antics with a compelling hint of aggression. Caustic bass and guitar interplay seethes at its heart, only barely restrained by the muddled resignation of Aurelio Valle's whispers. Despite the underlying tension, it doesn't stray far from Calla's comfortably faded aesthetic, and even brings to mind some of the simple glory of Scavengers' "Fireflies". As with their previous album, they score big on the opener, but the beginning is somewhat misleading; the tension subsides before long, leaving hollow subtlety in its stead. Televise settles down almost immediately after "Strangler"; "Monument" still shows traces of the first track's unresolved anger, but by "Astral", it has dissipated entirely. A numbing chill sets in as the gloomy, weathered beauty of this album begins to come to the fore. Valle's voice chokes and cracks breathlessly just above the mix; cymbal washes slowly tranquilize the listener. This is undeniably what Calla does best, but to a certain extent, the neural anesthesia becomes stultifying. From a certain vantage this isn't a problem-- each track is dutifully calming, a simple matter of getting lost in the fog-- but these lush arrangements seem content to simply drift by, never truly engaging the listener, and making it difficult to fully appreciate the album if you aren't in the mood to be put under. They do eventually call it quits on the hypnotist act, late in the album. The sly grooves of "Televised" break stride as aggressive drum patterns keep pace with a stutter-stepping bassline. It recaptures some of the frustration embodied in the opener, undercut by a single, desperate guitar refrain rattling around somewhere in the depths. The disc then closes with "Surface Scratch", a gloriously shaky bit of piano minimalism that owes more than a nod to Howe Gelb's finer empty-air desert wanderings. Together, these unique pieces are an impressive reward after clearing the cobwebs and surfacing from the recesses of the album's languorous middle works. It's truly a grand finale, but Televise could have used a mild shot in the arm a bit sooner."

Maria Taylor

Lynn Teeter Flower

Folk/Country,Pop/R&B

David Raposa

The last time Maria Taylor released an album, Pitchfork was in a zingy sort of mood, classifying her "somber, gooey" efforts as the sort of stuff you'd see abetting some tender & verbose moment from "Gilmore Girls". Two years later, and her latest offering of somber goo finds itself stuck in the middle of poignant scenes from a slightly more popular television drama, "Grey's Anatomy". A recent episode actually utilized two tracks from Lynn Teeter Flower. "Clean Getaway", featuring Taylor's frail croak and the sparse acoustic veneer listeners come to expect from her work, was a perfect fit for its associated scenes of antiseptic regret and recrimination. The full-rock-band moves of "Good Start", on the other hand, clash with the poignant moments it was meant to soundtrack, just as Taylor's sad-sack ruminations on the track slap clumsily against the instrumentation that tries its best to coax some catchiness from the song's melody. It's hard to keep toes tapping, though, when you sound like Eeyore's mother on an ether binge. Suffice it to say that if you're a fan of Taylor's first album, then you're going to find similar stuff on Flower. Whether she's giving the rhythm section a cigarette break, trying to approximate the sound of an anesthetized New Pornographers, or adding the same sort of pseudo-dancey Casio flourishes that have colored her work since the first Azure Ray album, Taylor never fails to instill the same sense of inescapable inertia throughout. Unless you're drinking gallons of the street team Kool-Aid, repeated exposure will only make each subsequent listen even more of a chore, and whatever charms her music might possess get washed away. A voice that might sound haunting or weary in a charming fashion at first quickly becomes a mewling sigh afraid of its own volume. Her melodic knack is apparent, but there's only so much morose mid-tempo pop one can take, and it'll take a lot more than a fleeting dalliance with some Mellotrons to cover that up. Once upon a time, this sort of bait-and-switch was accomplished thanks to her Azure Ray partner, Orenda Fink. As lugubrious as Taylor's music might seem at times, Fink's own despondent dolorous haze made her partner in crime seem like a spastic pixie. Without Fink to play Sadder Cop to Taylor's own Sad Cop, the jig is most definitely up. Given the alternative to the M.O. that's presented on this album, though, I'm all for Taylor turning her modest niche into a shallow grave. "Irish Goodbye" presents a peppier version of Taylor's block-rocking beat manifesto, but it gets waylaid by an awful rap (indie style, of course) that would probably turn even the most ardent backpackers against the stuff. If that's what this record could have been, then by all means, Maria, please trot out more deathly songs about clichéd devil dreams and self-recriminating passive-aggressive relationships (and feel free to close with some clip of a younger you singing the name of the album over and over in an awkward and winning fashion). However, if given my druthers, I'd rather have an album full of songs like "The Ballad of Sean Foley", Taylor's collaboration with Saddle Creek sugar daddy Conor Oberst. Though Oberst is officially given a co-writing credit, the song's word-per-minute rate, and its folky obsession with naming landmarks and cities, makes me think he should be given at least three-quarters credit. His presence as a back-up singer also flatters the song, as well as Taylor's performance. Taylor doesn't necessarily snap out of the tortoise-like torpor she's painstakingly established throughout this album, but for a few minutes, you can see some light at the end of the tunnel, and imagine what it would sound like if she finally did.

Artist: Maria Taylor, Album: Lynn Teeter Flower, Genre: Folk/Country,Pop/R&B, Score (1-10): 4.7 Album review: "The last time Maria Taylor released an album, Pitchfork was in a zingy sort of mood, classifying her "somber, gooey" efforts as the sort of stuff you'd see abetting some tender & verbose moment from "Gilmore Girls". Two years later, and her latest offering of somber goo finds itself stuck in the middle of poignant scenes from a slightly more popular television drama, "Grey's Anatomy". A recent episode actually utilized two tracks from Lynn Teeter Flower. "Clean Getaway", featuring Taylor's frail croak and the sparse acoustic veneer listeners come to expect from her work, was a perfect fit for its associated scenes of antiseptic regret and recrimination. The full-rock-band moves of "Good Start", on the other hand, clash with the poignant moments it was meant to soundtrack, just as Taylor's sad-sack ruminations on the track slap clumsily against the instrumentation that tries its best to coax some catchiness from the song's melody. It's hard to keep toes tapping, though, when you sound like Eeyore's mother on an ether binge. Suffice it to say that if you're a fan of Taylor's first album, then you're going to find similar stuff on Flower. Whether she's giving the rhythm section a cigarette break, trying to approximate the sound of an anesthetized New Pornographers, or adding the same sort of pseudo-dancey Casio flourishes that have colored her work since the first Azure Ray album, Taylor never fails to instill the same sense of inescapable inertia throughout. Unless you're drinking gallons of the street team Kool-Aid, repeated exposure will only make each subsequent listen even more of a chore, and whatever charms her music might possess get washed away. A voice that might sound haunting or weary in a charming fashion at first quickly becomes a mewling sigh afraid of its own volume. Her melodic knack is apparent, but there's only so much morose mid-tempo pop one can take, and it'll take a lot more than a fleeting dalliance with some Mellotrons to cover that up. Once upon a time, this sort of bait-and-switch was accomplished thanks to her Azure Ray partner, Orenda Fink. As lugubrious as Taylor's music might seem at times, Fink's own despondent dolorous haze made her partner in crime seem like a spastic pixie. Without Fink to play Sadder Cop to Taylor's own Sad Cop, the jig is most definitely up. Given the alternative to the M.O. that's presented on this album, though, I'm all for Taylor turning her modest niche into a shallow grave. "Irish Goodbye" presents a peppier version of Taylor's block-rocking beat manifesto, but it gets waylaid by an awful rap (indie style, of course) that would probably turn even the most ardent backpackers against the stuff. If that's what this record could have been, then by all means, Maria, please trot out more deathly songs about clichéd devil dreams and self-recriminating passive-aggressive relationships (and feel free to close with some clip of a younger you singing the name of the album over and over in an awkward and winning fashion). However, if given my druthers, I'd rather have an album full of songs like "The Ballad of Sean Foley", Taylor's collaboration with Saddle Creek sugar daddy Conor Oberst. Though Oberst is officially given a co-writing credit, the song's word-per-minute rate, and its folky obsession with naming landmarks and cities, makes me think he should be given at least three-quarters credit. His presence as a back-up singer also flatters the song, as well as Taylor's performance. Taylor doesn't necessarily snap out of the tortoise-like torpor she's painstakingly established throughout this album, but for a few minutes, you can see some light at the end of the tunnel, and imagine what it would sound like if she finally did."

Various Artists

American Hardcore: The History of American Punk Rock 1980-1986

Zach Baron

By 1979, punk rock was a decadent parody of itself. As Sid Vicious was doing his best to off himself by heroin, many punks-- glue-sniffers, murderers, rabid leather spikers-- were on their way to joining him. Ronald Reagan and cocaine were ascending, disco was reaching its commercial peak, and the nascent post-punk genre hardcore was, to the extent that a bunch of 15-year-old boys were capable of articulating it, a response to both the musical and cultural moment in which they found themselves-- a music and movement in negation of damn near everything. So there's some irony to the current wave of hardcore punk adoration and excruciatingly thorough documentation: Though Henry Rollins and Keith Morris are now, finally, inviting you to feel their quarter-century-old pain, the music to which they wistfully reminisce is vehemently anti-neophyte. But the music was, at best, half the story; the rest was something more vague, an amorphous mix equal parts camaraderie, radical politics, and geography. Hardcore bands were inseparable from the scenes from which they hailed. D.C. was the intellectual and moral epicenter, L.A. its confrontational, aggro twin. The Midwest became the working-class wing of the movement, while New York and Boston offered its thugs and enforcers. Canada and Texas provided the scene's scant sense of humor. And compilations sprang up from each like anarchist manifestos. From its inception, D.C. Hardcore was synonymous with Dischord's Flex Your Head set, and when the city of Boston announced to the world that it too had a vibrant hardcore scene, it did so through a record deliberately titled This Is Boston Not L.A. American Hardcore, a soundtrack culled from the film of the same name, is a very different kind of compilation than those founding documents. Rather than strive to represent a specific scene, the curators of the film aim to represent the entire movement, tracing the broad arc of hardcore's musical and geographical progression. And if the soundtrack feels a bit clinical to those already familiar with the story, it's nevertheless an invaluable summary of a scene that did its best to defy easy categorization. The soundtrack begins, slyly, with a debate. Who wrote the first hardcore song? Was it Black Flag's "Nervous Breakdown" (track one); Middle Class's "Out of Vogue" (track two); or Bad Brains' "Pay to Cum" (track three)? Of the three, two are essential, whether primary or not: "Nervous Breakdown", from the Keith Morris era of Black Flag-- before Henry Rollins joined and Morris went on to form the Circle Jerks after being evicted from the band-- is arguably the group's finest moment, but "Pay to Cum" might be the greatest track to ever emerge from the genre as a whole. Bad Brains were older, smarter, and vastly more musically gifted than Black Flag or Middle Class, and they were inspired to the point of possession. At a minute-and-a-half, "Pay to Cum" is the quintessential hardcore document: impossible speed, raging, adenoidal vocals, a fantastically apt, melodic and urgent three-chord riff, a chorus worth repeating for days, and not a single wasted second. D.O.A. bat cleanup as the band that minted the genre's name (they titled their second record Hardcore '81) and the Circle Jerks round out the primordial bands. Then, joining Bad Brains and Black Flag as the godless third of hardcore's holy trinity, come Minor Threat. Bad Brains' protégés, articulators of the lifestyle choices that came to be associated with the music (read: straight edge), and led by Ian MacKaye, a guy more intelligent than most of the rest of his hardcore brethren combined, Minor Threat boast a discography that remains the gateway into a genre in which their greatness was (and still is) the one thing everybody agreed on. "Filler", with its "What happened to you?" sneer and repudiation of kids lost to mindless religion and loveless fucking, was the blueprint for a thousand goodbyes aimed at the larger world that dwelled beneath hardcore's exacting, self-contradictory standards. The rest of American Hardcore brilliantly walks the tightrope between scene and chronology. There's a prolonged stop in Boston-- cherry-picked from Boston Not L.A., and featuring Gang Green, the Freeze, Jerry's Kids, and SSD's still classic "Boiling Point"-- a town notorious for being the most backward, close-minded, and violent of the early hardcore scenes: One episode in the movie has some knucklehead talking about staying at a kid's house on tour and threatening him with a baseball bat before robbing him blind; another has SSD calling out "new wave faggots." The city's sound brimmed with testosterone and metal-like chugging. New York would soon follow its lead (represented here, mercifully briefly, by an early Cro-Mags demo). Equally thorough is the compilation's trip through the Midwest (Negative Approach, Articles of Faith, and Die Kreuzen), then one of the scene's most political stomping grounds, and Texas (Big Boys, Really Red, D.R.I., and MDC-- but oddly, no Dicks), a violently punked-up area often ignored in histories of the genre. And last comes Flipper, a nod to San Fran, as well as a knowing implication of things to come; their grungy sludge augured both Nirvana (Dave Grohl's early band Scream also makes a cameo elsewhere on the comp) and a virulent strain of noise-rock. The film's curation is impeccable, but that doesn't mean there aren't omissions-- notably, the Necros, the Fix, Code of Honor, SOA, NegativeFX, and all of the borderline punk-to-hardcore bands, such as the Germs, Dead Kennedys, Hüsker Dü, the Minutemen, and the Dicks. Purists could also argue song selection for days (why not a better 7 Seconds track than "I Hate Sports", or "My Father's Dreams" instead of "Bad Attitude" by Articles of Faith?). And of course, the exciting coherence of early hardcore comps that repped scenes and held together both deep local friendships and common ideals is entirely absent here. But if American Hardcore, as a collection, fails to paint the whole picture, it does have one thing working in its favor: It contains more great music than any other post-punk-era document short of Wanna Buy a Bridge?, meaning there's little chance of finding a better summation of the music itself.

Artist: Various Artists, Album: American Hardcore: The History of American Punk Rock 1980-1986, Genre: None, Score (1-10): 9.3 Album review: "By 1979, punk rock was a decadent parody of itself. As Sid Vicious was doing his best to off himself by heroin, many punks-- glue-sniffers, murderers, rabid leather spikers-- were on their way to joining him. Ronald Reagan and cocaine were ascending, disco was reaching its commercial peak, and the nascent post-punk genre hardcore was, to the extent that a bunch of 15-year-old boys were capable of articulating it, a response to both the musical and cultural moment in which they found themselves-- a music and movement in negation of damn near everything. So there's some irony to the current wave of hardcore punk adoration and excruciatingly thorough documentation: Though Henry Rollins and Keith Morris are now, finally, inviting you to feel their quarter-century-old pain, the music to which they wistfully reminisce is vehemently anti-neophyte. But the music was, at best, half the story; the rest was something more vague, an amorphous mix equal parts camaraderie, radical politics, and geography. Hardcore bands were inseparable from the scenes from which they hailed. D.C. was the intellectual and moral epicenter, L.A. its confrontational, aggro twin. The Midwest became the working-class wing of the movement, while New York and Boston offered its thugs and enforcers. Canada and Texas provided the scene's scant sense of humor. And compilations sprang up from each like anarchist manifestos. From its inception, D.C. Hardcore was synonymous with Dischord's Flex Your Head set, and when the city of Boston announced to the world that it too had a vibrant hardcore scene, it did so through a record deliberately titled This Is Boston Not L.A. American Hardcore, a soundtrack culled from the film of the same name, is a very different kind of compilation than those founding documents. Rather than strive to represent a specific scene, the curators of the film aim to represent the entire movement, tracing the broad arc of hardcore's musical and geographical progression. And if the soundtrack feels a bit clinical to those already familiar with the story, it's nevertheless an invaluable summary of a scene that did its best to defy easy categorization. The soundtrack begins, slyly, with a debate. Who wrote the first hardcore song? Was it Black Flag's "Nervous Breakdown" (track one); Middle Class's "Out of Vogue" (track two); or Bad Brains' "Pay to Cum" (track three)? Of the three, two are essential, whether primary or not: "Nervous Breakdown", from the Keith Morris era of Black Flag-- before Henry Rollins joined and Morris went on to form the Circle Jerks after being evicted from the band-- is arguably the group's finest moment, but "Pay to Cum" might be the greatest track to ever emerge from the genre as a whole. Bad Brains were older, smarter, and vastly more musically gifted than Black Flag or Middle Class, and they were inspired to the point of possession. At a minute-and-a-half, "Pay to Cum" is the quintessential hardcore document: impossible speed, raging, adenoidal vocals, a fantastically apt, melodic and urgent three-chord riff, a chorus worth repeating for days, and not a single wasted second. D.O.A. bat cleanup as the band that minted the genre's name (they titled their second record Hardcore '81) and the Circle Jerks round out the primordial bands. Then, joining Bad Brains and Black Flag as the godless third of hardcore's holy trinity, come Minor Threat. Bad Brains' protégés, articulators of the lifestyle choices that came to be associated with the music (read: straight edge), and led by Ian MacKaye, a guy more intelligent than most of the rest of his hardcore brethren combined, Minor Threat boast a discography that remains the gateway into a genre in which their greatness was (and still is) the one thing everybody agreed on. "Filler", with its "What happened to you?" sneer and repudiation of kids lost to mindless religion and loveless fucking, was the blueprint for a thousand goodbyes aimed at the larger world that dwelled beneath hardcore's exacting, self-contradictory standards. The rest of American Hardcore brilliantly walks the tightrope between scene and chronology. There's a prolonged stop in Boston-- cherry-picked from Boston Not L.A., and featuring Gang Green, the Freeze, Jerry's Kids, and SSD's still classic "Boiling Point"-- a town notorious for being the most backward, close-minded, and violent of the early hardcore scenes: One episode in the movie has some knucklehead talking about staying at a kid's house on tour and threatening him with a baseball bat before robbing him blind; another has SSD calling out "new wave faggots." The city's sound brimmed with testosterone and metal-like chugging. New York would soon follow its lead (represented here, mercifully briefly, by an early Cro-Mags demo). Equally thorough is the compilation's trip through the Midwest (Negative Approach, Articles of Faith, and Die Kreuzen), then one of the scene's most political stomping grounds, and Texas (Big Boys, Really Red, D.R.I., and MDC-- but oddly, no Dicks), a violently punked-up area often ignored in histories of the genre. And last comes Flipper, a nod to San Fran, as well as a knowing implication of things to come; their grungy sludge augured both Nirvana (Dave Grohl's early band Scream also makes a cameo elsewhere on the comp) and a virulent strain of noise-rock. The film's curation is impeccable, but that doesn't mean there aren't omissions-- notably, the Necros, the Fix, Code of Honor, SOA, NegativeFX, and all of the borderline punk-to-hardcore bands, such as the Germs, Dead Kennedys, Hüsker Dü, the Minutemen, and the Dicks. Purists could also argue song selection for days (why not a better 7 Seconds track than "I Hate Sports", or "My Father's Dreams" instead of "Bad Attitude" by Articles of Faith?). And of course, the exciting coherence of early hardcore comps that repped scenes and held together both deep local friendships and common ideals is entirely absent here. But if American Hardcore, as a collection, fails to paint the whole picture, it does have one thing working in its favor: It contains more great music than any other post-punk-era document short of Wanna Buy a Bridge?, meaning there's little chance of finding a better summation of the music itself."

Kevin Gates

By Any Means 2

Rap

Sheldon Pearce

Just as Kevin Gates became rap’s most unlikely star, his reality caught up to him. From October to March, Gates served 180 days for battery after kicking a woman in the audience at a Florida show. As authorities were processing his release, they discovered a pending weapons charge, and he was sentenced to another 30 months for felony gun possession. Gates has never been shy about being crude or obscene, and he seems to value publicly reconciling with the uglier aspects of his life. Songs wrestle with his limitations and see perseverance as its own form of progress. In a recent letter from prison, he seemed to suggest as much: “A great person is measured by all of the great tests they can undergo and still remain true to who they are. With that being said ‘I’m Him.’” What greater test is there than staying relevant out of sight, in a climate where people think and consume at the speed of Twitter? His message is clear: Not even prison can stifle his workflow. The new Kevin Gates mixtape, a sequel to 2014’s By Any Means, is a reminder that the Baton Rouge rapper is still a fearsome MC in his prime, and that his voice still rings out even from behind bars. Compiled by his wife and manager Dreka with his blessings, the tape scans the entire Kevin Gates gamut, from plunges into melody to crisp scene-setting and bittersweet storytelling. By Any Means 2 cuts the distance between his singsongy, hook-driven punches and his cold, levelheaded lessons (“These scriptures what I’m telling Khaza/Don’t let nobody know that you a monster/Keep it on the tuck and then surprise ‘em”). But perhaps because Dreka curated the project, there is a focus on softer moments and sex jams. There aren’t any songs as visceral and gripping as something like “4:30 AM,” and that feels like a conscious choice. The tape trades in these graphic episodes for several worthwhile surprises: the Joan Osborne -interpolating “What If” turns “One of Us” into a modern rap delight. The R&B crawl on “Fucking Right” pushes his raspy croon to its limits. “D U Down” is a playful bedroom romp. “In here layin’ in my chest/Teeth twinkle in the dark/She asleep and I’m awake/And I’m reminiscin’ in my thoughts,” he raps, relishing all the little details, showing off the intuition that makes him unique. There are some flashes that seem like reflections of Gates’ current situation, particularly the opening passage on “Attention”: “Walk without an entourage in which I won’t discuss/Killers in New York in the clink, they know enough/My celly spit in the sink, one blink, I’m sheddin’ blood/If we was in the street, one squeeze would wet him up/Acceptin’ no disrespect, wait, who am I to budge?” References to prison stints are hidden throughout, as a nod to this term. Then there’s “Came Up,” which tracks his arc. “Gotta write Gucci, tell him hold his head,” he raps ironically, given their current role reversal. “Received no fundin’ from the label/Two strikes against me, no room for flakin’.” Every inflection enriches his tale, which rings true in the present context. Proximity is crucial to the way Gates views the world. He’s constantly thinking about people, places, and things in terms of distance, both in relation to him and to others, and these juxtapositions add layers to his flashbacks. On “Jus Wanna,” he explores the mythos of “Plug Daughter,” recounting how a childhood learning to make and sell coke in Colombia led to his earliest romance. What seems like a second verse digression slowly weaves back into the main trafficking narrative, adding a nostalgic tint. This is all a valiant effort to avoid being forgotten on the inside. By Any Means 2 seems to build around “Imagine That,” a heartfelt remembrance of humble beginnings. The video features home footage of Dreka, their daughter Islah, and their son Khaza. In the open, Gates tells Islah he’s going to miss her birthday. It ends with a hopeful shot of the rapper’s family standing under a “Welcome Home” banner. His kids rap along with his voice. These snapshots raise the stakes; they’re reminders that his world never stops turning, even when he’s not here to live in it.

Artist: Kevin Gates, Album: By Any Means 2, Genre: Rap, Score (1-10): 7.5 Album review: "Just as Kevin Gates became rap’s most unlikely star, his reality caught up to him. From October to March, Gates served 180 days for battery after kicking a woman in the audience at a Florida show. As authorities were processing his release, they discovered a pending weapons charge, and he was sentenced to another 30 months for felony gun possession. Gates has never been shy about being crude or obscene, and he seems to value publicly reconciling with the uglier aspects of his life. Songs wrestle with his limitations and see perseverance as its own form of progress. In a recent letter from prison, he seemed to suggest as much: “A great person is measured by all of the great tests they can undergo and still remain true to who they are. With that being said ‘I’m Him.’” What greater test is there than staying relevant out of sight, in a climate where people think and consume at the speed of Twitter? His message is clear: Not even prison can stifle his workflow. The new Kevin Gates mixtape, a sequel to 2014’s By Any Means, is a reminder that the Baton Rouge rapper is still a fearsome MC in his prime, and that his voice still rings out even from behind bars. Compiled by his wife and manager Dreka with his blessings, the tape scans the entire Kevin Gates gamut, from plunges into melody to crisp scene-setting and bittersweet storytelling. By Any Means 2 cuts the distance between his singsongy, hook-driven punches and his cold, levelheaded lessons (“These scriptures what I’m telling Khaza/Don’t let nobody know that you a monster/Keep it on the tuck and then surprise ‘em”). But perhaps because Dreka curated the project, there is a focus on softer moments and sex jams. There aren’t any songs as visceral and gripping as something like “4:30 AM,” and that feels like a conscious choice. The tape trades in these graphic episodes for several worthwhile surprises: the Joan Osborne -interpolating “What If” turns “One of Us” into a modern rap delight. The R&B crawl on “Fucking Right” pushes his raspy croon to its limits. “D U Down” is a playful bedroom romp. “In here layin’ in my chest/Teeth twinkle in the dark/She asleep and I’m awake/And I’m reminiscin’ in my thoughts,” he raps, relishing all the little details, showing off the intuition that makes him unique. There are some flashes that seem like reflections of Gates’ current situation, particularly the opening passage on “Attention”: “Walk without an entourage in which I won’t discuss/Killers in New York in the clink, they know enough/My celly spit in the sink, one blink, I’m sheddin’ blood/If we was in the street, one squeeze would wet him up/Acceptin’ no disrespect, wait, who am I to budge?” References to prison stints are hidden throughout, as a nod to this term. Then there’s “Came Up,” which tracks his arc. “Gotta write Gucci, tell him hold his head,” he raps ironically, given their current role reversal. “Received no fundin’ from the label/Two strikes against me, no room for flakin’.” Every inflection enriches his tale, which rings true in the present context. Proximity is crucial to the way Gates views the world. He’s constantly thinking about people, places, and things in terms of distance, both in relation to him and to others, and these juxtapositions add layers to his flashbacks. On “Jus Wanna,” he explores the mythos of “Plug Daughter,” recounting how a childhood learning to make and sell coke in Colombia led to his earliest romance. What seems like a second verse digression slowly weaves back into the main trafficking narrative, adding a nostalgic tint. This is all a valiant effort to avoid being forgotten on the inside. By Any Means 2 seems to build around “Imagine That,” a heartfelt remembrance of humble beginnings. The video features home footage of Dreka, their daughter Islah, and their son Khaza. In the open, Gates tells Islah he’s going to miss her birthday. It ends with a hopeful shot of the rapper’s family standing under a “Welcome Home” banner. His kids rap along with his voice. These snapshots raise the stakes; they’re reminders that his world never stops turning, even when he’s not here to live in it."

Shlohmo

Dark Red

Electronic

Jonah Bromwich

Last year was a hard one for Henry Laufer. The Los Angeles native, who records and performs as Shlohmo, saw a collaborative EP with Jeremih delayed for months by mismanagement at Def Jam. In July, the two artists gave up and released the record for free, only to receive lukewarm reviews. Laufer also suffered through some personal losses, ones that he’s done his best to keep private. He’s spoken of hospital visits and funerals, of partying too hard and feeling like shit whenever he took the time to make music. His second full-length, Dark Red, channels that heavy energy. The album is jarringly different from Laufer’s past work and a difficult, oft-deafening listen. The emotional anguish contained in many of these tracks was hinted at on his 2013 solo EP, Laid Out, but some internal dial has spun from "ennui" to "cold rage." The album’s third track, "Buried", is most representative, a near seven-minute piece of what could be called abyss-core. Its engine is a yearning sample, distorted into fragments and underscored with menacing guitar progressions. Shlohmo has always been a fan of distortion, but on Dark Red he’s beating his synths to hell, from the opening chords of "Meet Ur Maker", which contains a recognizable Shlohmo melody ripped to shreds, to the steel-drum-like plinks of  "Remains". Shlohmo has testified many times recently that he is looking to avoid the trappings of his more pop-leaning projects. Once, he made an avant-garde R&B that resembled the production of mainstream foils like Drake and the Weeknd. Now he’s dabbling in ambient noise and prog with dashes of drum’n’bass and allusions to footwork. Vocals are gone, samples chopped and buried. Collaborations have largely been nixed: "I just want to do my own fucking thing," Laufer said in a recent profile. Fans of the producer’s older work may blanche at the aggression of the first three tracks here, which function as an aural "Beware of Dog" sign, warning the faint of heart away. Yet after repeated listens, the front trio reveals some of the best moments on the album, demanding attention but also meriting it. Those who want the old Shlohmo will have to wait for the final two tracks, "Fading" and "Beams", which concede to fans, and constitute a kind of middle ground between the producer’s past work and the new album. If Dark Red were another EP, all that fury boiled down to a manageable five or six tracks might make an impressive statement. At an hour run-time, Shlohmo’s change in tenor loses its shock value and becomes a slog. The four tracks that make up the album’s mid-section are unmemorable, a fact that their names—"Apathy", "Relentless", "Ditch", "Remains"—seem to acknowledge explicitly. When the album’s rhythm finally picks up again on the drum and bass influenced "Fading", it comes as a major relief. Los Angeles’s Low End Theory club was an early site of the alchemical process that has melded hip-hop kids and beatheads together into a formidable coalition. Laufer was a frequent attendee and in response he formed the Wedidit collective, a group of producers including RL Grime, Groundislava, Salva, and Ryan Hemsworth. All of these artists were early in working with modern electronic dance genres that share the musical vocabulary and dynamism of hip-hop. But the rest of the world has caught up with this style of music-making, so on Dark Red, Laufer is scrawling furiously outside the lines. Early in his career, before he dropped out of art school, he talked about music as a diversion, something that was less serious and less restrictive than learning how to paint the right way. His experiences with the mainstream and the colonization of his own genre seem to have had a similar effect. With Dark Red, he’s taken another turn, slipping out of the pop-shadowing path he was on in exchange for something darker and bolder, but compromised by its own disorder.

Artist: Shlohmo, Album: Dark Red, Genre: Electronic, Score (1-10): 5.9 Album review: "Last year was a hard one for Henry Laufer. The Los Angeles native, who records and performs as Shlohmo, saw a collaborative EP with Jeremih delayed for months by mismanagement at Def Jam. In July, the two artists gave up and released the record for free, only to receive lukewarm reviews. Laufer also suffered through some personal losses, ones that he’s done his best to keep private. He’s spoken of hospital visits and funerals, of partying too hard and feeling like shit whenever he took the time to make music. His second full-length, Dark Red, channels that heavy energy. The album is jarringly different from Laufer’s past work and a difficult, oft-deafening listen. The emotional anguish contained in many of these tracks was hinted at on his 2013 solo EP, Laid Out, but some internal dial has spun from "ennui" to "cold rage." The album’s third track, "Buried", is most representative, a near seven-minute piece of what could be called abyss-core. Its engine is a yearning sample, distorted into fragments and underscored with menacing guitar progressions. Shlohmo has always been a fan of distortion, but on Dark Red he’s beating his synths to hell, from the opening chords of "Meet Ur Maker", which contains a recognizable Shlohmo melody ripped to shreds, to the steel-drum-like plinks of  "Remains". Shlohmo has testified many times recently that he is looking to avoid the trappings of his more pop-leaning projects. Once, he made an avant-garde R&B that resembled the production of mainstream foils like Drake and the Weeknd. Now he’s dabbling in ambient noise and prog with dashes of drum’n’bass and allusions to footwork. Vocals are gone, samples chopped and buried. Collaborations have largely been nixed: "I just want to do my own fucking thing," Laufer said in a recent profile. Fans of the producer’s older work may blanche at the aggression of the first three tracks here, which function as an aural "Beware of Dog" sign, warning the faint of heart away. Yet after repeated listens, the front trio reveals some of the best moments on the album, demanding attention but also meriting it. Those who want the old Shlohmo will have to wait for the final two tracks, "Fading" and "Beams", which concede to fans, and constitute a kind of middle ground between the producer’s past work and the new album. If Dark Red were another EP, all that fury boiled down to a manageable five or six tracks might make an impressive statement. At an hour run-time, Shlohmo’s change in tenor loses its shock value and becomes a slog. The four tracks that make up the album’s mid-section are unmemorable, a fact that their names—"Apathy", "Relentless", "Ditch", "Remains"—seem to acknowledge explicitly. When the album’s rhythm finally picks up again on the drum and bass influenced "Fading", it comes as a major relief. Los Angeles’s Low End Theory club was an early site of the alchemical process that has melded hip-hop kids and beatheads together into a formidable coalition. Laufer was a frequent attendee and in response he formed the Wedidit collective, a group of producers including RL Grime, Groundislava, Salva, and Ryan Hemsworth. All of these artists were early in working with modern electronic dance genres that share the musical vocabulary and dynamism of hip-hop. But the rest of the world has caught up with this style of music-making, so on Dark Red, Laufer is scrawling furiously outside the lines. Early in his career, before he dropped out of art school, he talked about music as a diversion, something that was less serious and less restrictive than learning how to paint the right way. His experiences with the mainstream and the colonization of his own genre seem to have had a similar effect. With Dark Red, he’s taken another turn, slipping out of the pop-shadowing path he was on in exchange for something darker and bolder, but compromised by its own disorder."

Shearwater

Palo Santo

Rock

Jason Crock

If you've previously written off Shearwater as an Okkervil River side project, now is the time to reevaluate that stance. The band once split the difference between OR's frontman Will Shelf and keyboardist Jonathan Meiburg, each pulling 50/50 songwriting duties. You may wonder where Sheff has gone on this record, but you won't miss him. The push-pull between Sheff's croaking and Meiburg's lilting falsetto is gone, forcing the less-experienced vocalist to dial it up and find newfound strength in his vocals. With Meiburg in charge, Shearwater make several leaps from their previous albums: Did you want stark backwater hymns with PJ Harvey-levels of catharsis? Palo Santo has that (opener "La Dame at La Licorne"). Hiss-soaked tributes to some heretofore lost or imagined side of the radio dial à la M. Ward? That's here, too ("Palo Santo" and "Sing, Little Birdie"). Even if mid-tempo Bruce Hornsby piano ballads are your bag, Meiburg has that nailed down ("Seventy-four, Seventy-five" and "Johnny Viola".) Those aren't even the highlights of Palo Santo. The records puts its best feet forward early: The banjo-plucked folk of "Red Sea, Black Sea" is overwhelmed by a strange backward pulse of keyboards throughout the verses, recalling the Southern Gothic twinge of R.E.M.'s early material. It's then lifted by sparse but stern percussion and Meiburg's ranting vocal turn in the chorus, powerful but frayed on every edge. That keyboard throb pushes the song one notch further into uncomfortability, building a sense of impending danger, but it's Meiburg's voice that makes you want to hear it again (and again). "White Waves" is perhaps where Sheff could have sat in on a duet, but instead makes for a rather catchy moment of schizophrenia. Meiburg's falsetto promises he "won't go traveling tonight," and more chillingly, "there's something singing in the ice in the deepest part of the wood." That's before the song sprouts an unexpected riff, a few chords lurching back and forth in syncopation, while his voice bursts and implores himself not to go over the guitars that rise and vanish at the whim of Meiburg's wavering delivery. While Meiburg's voice and a guitar, piano or banjo are at the center of most of these tracks, the instrumentation has suddenly fallen into place, intuitive now where it once diverted attention from previous albums' monotonous mood. Palo Santo is no less dark, certainly, but the songs breathe and swell much more naturally, with some of Meiburg's sharpest melodies yet. The more fragile arrangements from the Shearwater of old appear now and again, but where you'd once expect an intimate performance, songs like "Palo Santo" hint at empty space beneath that's nearly bottomless. Will Sheff has been writing narrative songs for years, but Jonathan Meiburg has written the soundtrack worthy of his own, or anyone's, images.

Artist: Shearwater, Album: Palo Santo, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.6 Album review: "If you've previously written off Shearwater as an Okkervil River side project, now is the time to reevaluate that stance. The band once split the difference between OR's frontman Will Shelf and keyboardist Jonathan Meiburg, each pulling 50/50 songwriting duties. You may wonder where Sheff has gone on this record, but you won't miss him. The push-pull between Sheff's croaking and Meiburg's lilting falsetto is gone, forcing the less-experienced vocalist to dial it up and find newfound strength in his vocals. With Meiburg in charge, Shearwater make several leaps from their previous albums: Did you want stark backwater hymns with PJ Harvey-levels of catharsis? Palo Santo has that (opener "La Dame at La Licorne"). Hiss-soaked tributes to some heretofore lost or imagined side of the radio dial à la M. Ward? That's here, too ("Palo Santo" and "Sing, Little Birdie"). Even if mid-tempo Bruce Hornsby piano ballads are your bag, Meiburg has that nailed down ("Seventy-four, Seventy-five" and "Johnny Viola".) Those aren't even the highlights of Palo Santo. The records puts its best feet forward early: The banjo-plucked folk of "Red Sea, Black Sea" is overwhelmed by a strange backward pulse of keyboards throughout the verses, recalling the Southern Gothic twinge of R.E.M.'s early material. It's then lifted by sparse but stern percussion and Meiburg's ranting vocal turn in the chorus, powerful but frayed on every edge. That keyboard throb pushes the song one notch further into uncomfortability, building a sense of impending danger, but it's Meiburg's voice that makes you want to hear it again (and again). "White Waves" is perhaps where Sheff could have sat in on a duet, but instead makes for a rather catchy moment of schizophrenia. Meiburg's falsetto promises he "won't go traveling tonight," and more chillingly, "there's something singing in the ice in the deepest part of the wood." That's before the song sprouts an unexpected riff, a few chords lurching back and forth in syncopation, while his voice bursts and implores himself not to go over the guitars that rise and vanish at the whim of Meiburg's wavering delivery. While Meiburg's voice and a guitar, piano or banjo are at the center of most of these tracks, the instrumentation has suddenly fallen into place, intuitive now where it once diverted attention from previous albums' monotonous mood. Palo Santo is no less dark, certainly, but the songs breathe and swell much more naturally, with some of Meiburg's sharpest melodies yet. The more fragile arrangements from the Shearwater of old appear now and again, but where you'd once expect an intimate performance, songs like "Palo Santo" hint at empty space beneath that's nearly bottomless. Will Sheff has been writing narrative songs for years, but Jonathan Meiburg has written the soundtrack worthy of his own, or anyone's, images."

Sadgiqacea

False Prism

Kim Kelly

Sadgiqacea is a two-man band comprised of multi-instrumentalists Evan Schaefer and Fred Grabosky who, when necessary, can summon enough energy and enthusiasm to power a goddamn electric psychedelic orchestra. The Philadelphia duo cut their teeth in the city’s unforgiving DIY scene, playing their balls off in every grimy basement, awkwardly located club, and dodgy South Philly mafia bar they could. They built up their reputation with an unflinching work ethic and unwavering positive attitude as well as renown for their crushing, complex tunes, eventually catching the eye of Candlelight Records. At hometown shows, their unwieldy name (pronounced “sad-juh-kay-sha”) never really held them back; everyone just wanted to see Fred and Evan play, regardless of what was scrawled across the flyer. And all that hard graft paid off. After releasing a handful of demos and splits with other Philly bands Ominous Black and Grass, Sadgiqacea powered onwards and upwards to ink a deal with semi-local indie powerhouse Candlelight. The result, False Prism, is an impressive debut album, and a beginning to this next chapter in the tale of a little band that could. Sadgiqacea make no bones about their love for all things trippy and psychedelic, and those leanings color many of the spacey, serpentine riffs that make up the bulk of False Prism. The raw, crackling energy of their live show bleeds through, thanks to Chris Grigg’s hands-off recording technique and the album’s warm, breathable mix. Album opener “False Segments” starts off strong, zig-zagging into a churning neckbreaker of a riff. The next eight minutes unfold slowly and deliberately, channeling the best moments of early Baroness and elemental fury of Neurosis without parroting either. The weeping violin at the end is a nice touch, and ripples smoothly into “False Cross”, with its spare, tribal drums and lurching sludge riff. It’s one of the longest tracks on False Prism, clocking nearly 11 minutes, but also its most engaging; it ebbs and flows in waves of distortion, and both members share vocal duties, alternating between a litany of hoarse shouts, painful rasps, and mellow, almost chanted clean singing. It’s an epic and a funeral dirge, at once grandiose and terribly sad. The title track feels tame in comparison, with its muted chords, blastbeats, and cold black metal overtones. Even with its mid-song break into downtuned, downtrodden doom, it’s the most straightforward song on here, and the most unexpected for those who’ve not yet learned that Sadgiqacea aren’t much in the habit of playing things straight. They’re a sludgy doom band at heart, but are bursting with far too many ideas to allow them to fester inside any one constricting genre tag. “True Darkness” drives the point home with nearly 15 minutes of tightly controlled, clever drumming and heavyweight riffs that crawl between a simple chug and frenetic, melodic tremolo. The vocalist is livid, howling into the wind, his words torn from his lips faster than he can form their shape. Halfway through, he breaks down, and all goes quiet; a solitary guitar picks out a couple of notes, an ominous tune with the most minimal beat in the background. It builds, then collapses into heaving rubble, cut through with spacey effects and crashing ride cymbals overpowering it all. They ride out leaving nothing but chaos in their wake, snickering over the shock that flashed across your face when it all came crashing down. The final moments of “True Darkness” make for an intense ending to an intense journey, and False Prism is one hell of a good beginning. One gets the feeling that Sadgiqacea have only just begun their voyage to the stars.

Artist: Sadgiqacea, Album: False Prism, Genre: None, Score (1-10): 6.5 Album review: "Sadgiqacea is a two-man band comprised of multi-instrumentalists Evan Schaefer and Fred Grabosky who, when necessary, can summon enough energy and enthusiasm to power a goddamn electric psychedelic orchestra. The Philadelphia duo cut their teeth in the city’s unforgiving DIY scene, playing their balls off in every grimy basement, awkwardly located club, and dodgy South Philly mafia bar they could. They built up their reputation with an unflinching work ethic and unwavering positive attitude as well as renown for their crushing, complex tunes, eventually catching the eye of Candlelight Records. At hometown shows, their unwieldy name (pronounced “sad-juh-kay-sha”) never really held them back; everyone just wanted to see Fred and Evan play, regardless of what was scrawled across the flyer. And all that hard graft paid off. After releasing a handful of demos and splits with other Philly bands Ominous Black and Grass, Sadgiqacea powered onwards and upwards to ink a deal with semi-local indie powerhouse Candlelight. The result, False Prism, is an impressive debut album, and a beginning to this next chapter in the tale of a little band that could. Sadgiqacea make no bones about their love for all things trippy and psychedelic, and those leanings color many of the spacey, serpentine riffs that make up the bulk of False Prism. The raw, crackling energy of their live show bleeds through, thanks to Chris Grigg’s hands-off recording technique and the album’s warm, breathable mix. Album opener “False Segments” starts off strong, zig-zagging into a churning neckbreaker of a riff. The next eight minutes unfold slowly and deliberately, channeling the best moments of early Baroness and elemental fury of Neurosis without parroting either. The weeping violin at the end is a nice touch, and ripples smoothly into “False Cross”, with its spare, tribal drums and lurching sludge riff. It’s one of the longest tracks on False Prism, clocking nearly 11 minutes, but also its most engaging; it ebbs and flows in waves of distortion, and both members share vocal duties, alternating between a litany of hoarse shouts, painful rasps, and mellow, almost chanted clean singing. It’s an epic and a funeral dirge, at once grandiose and terribly sad. The title track feels tame in comparison, with its muted chords, blastbeats, and cold black metal overtones. Even with its mid-song break into downtuned, downtrodden doom, it’s the most straightforward song on here, and the most unexpected for those who’ve not yet learned that Sadgiqacea aren’t much in the habit of playing things straight. They’re a sludgy doom band at heart, but are bursting with far too many ideas to allow them to fester inside any one constricting genre tag. “True Darkness” drives the point home with nearly 15 minutes of tightly controlled, clever drumming and heavyweight riffs that crawl between a simple chug and frenetic, melodic tremolo. The vocalist is livid, howling into the wind, his words torn from his lips faster than he can form their shape. Halfway through, he breaks down, and all goes quiet; a solitary guitar picks out a couple of notes, an ominous tune with the most minimal beat in the background. It builds, then collapses into heaving rubble, cut through with spacey effects and crashing ride cymbals overpowering it all. They ride out leaving nothing but chaos in their wake, snickering over the shock that flashed across your face when it all came crashing down. The final moments of “True Darkness” make for an intense ending to an intense journey, and False Prism is one hell of a good beginning. One gets the feeling that Sadgiqacea have only just begun their voyage to the stars."

Xiu Xiu

Chapel of the Chimes EP

Experimental,Rock

Chris Dahlen

Angst. Some bands hit you with it like a blunt object; Xiu Xiu wields theirs like a supersharp wakizashi. The Asian percussion, junkyard chimes and jagged electronics that surround Jamie Stewart's overwrought vocals are so over-the-top distressed, they'll either rivet you or fray your last nerve. There are many ways to hate Xiu Xiu. You can criticize the sincerity of Stewart's performance. Nobody gets that depressed: in our culture, we experience unhappiness but we don't (figuratively) vomit all over ourselves to express it, so it's partly his fault if he seems somewhat insincere. Then there's the aesthetic problem: the piercing first tracks of their debut, Knife Play, drove some people out of the room before they even cared where Stewart was coming from. And while some would find them too noisy, noise geeks play harder stuff than this at Sunday brunch. But to sweat all that is to forget that sometimes, it's fun just to bang on stuff and shriek, and that's where Xiu Xiu excels. Their sonic palette won't make waves in the new music world, but it sounds exhilarating in this brutally expressive, and often catchy, avant-pop context. Now, only months after the release of their debut, Xiu Xiu has issued an EP, Chapel of the Chimes, and once again, they deftly mix chaos with concentration to create pieces that sound spontaneous, yet are intensely precise. And the emotional extremes are cathartic in their own theatrical, witch doctored-way. On "I Am Center of Your World", Stewart sings like Bryan Ferry after twelve hours of torture. It's like they just yanked the electrodes off his privates and handed him the mike. He eeks out the lyrics in a faltering voice that's strained, believable, and yet also, strangely, romantically expressive. He's helped by the music, which is darkly fragile and fleetingly beautiful. A low, rapid-heartbeat bassline runs under the song, and a staggering piano and flourishes of chimes break out of the near-silence like a burst of light before he passes out. In contrast, "Jennifer Lopez (Sweet Science Mix)" is blaringly loud and single-mindedly abrasive. Raw-bowed cello, a drum kit and piercing electronics burn around Stewart's indecipherable exclamations. The song's multi-layered arrangement melts down to a concise attack. But the middle tracks flag. "10-Thousand-Times-A-Minute", solid but less remarkable, delivers its melody through an echoed, blatting sound like farting into a cistern. Stewart again sounds pained and strained, but he's at odds with the mushy context. The next track is career-record quiet: "King Earth, King Earth", a thin watercolor where the different tones float through too easily. It's subtle and nearly peaceful, but too vague to make an impression. So, after all that, who couldn't use a nice cover song? Xiu Xiu closes with Joy Division's "Ceremony", the most ecstatic track on the album. They maintain the tempo and spirit of the original, but boldly replace the guitars and drums with-- guess what!-- harsh electronics and a crateful of percussion. Stewart, keyed up to shrieks, seems to act out everything that might have been going on in a morose Ian Curtis' head. If nothing else, it's a confident reworking. I can't speak for whether Joy Division fans would find this creative or repellant, but I think it's a raucous, chimy good time. Sure, Curtis was more convincingly miserable-- but look what happened to him.

Artist: Xiu Xiu, Album: Chapel of the Chimes EP, Genre: Experimental,Rock, Score (1-10): 7.4 Album review: "Angst. Some bands hit you with it like a blunt object; Xiu Xiu wields theirs like a supersharp wakizashi. The Asian percussion, junkyard chimes and jagged electronics that surround Jamie Stewart's overwrought vocals are so over-the-top distressed, they'll either rivet you or fray your last nerve. There are many ways to hate Xiu Xiu. You can criticize the sincerity of Stewart's performance. Nobody gets that depressed: in our culture, we experience unhappiness but we don't (figuratively) vomit all over ourselves to express it, so it's partly his fault if he seems somewhat insincere. Then there's the aesthetic problem: the piercing first tracks of their debut, Knife Play, drove some people out of the room before they even cared where Stewart was coming from. And while some would find them too noisy, noise geeks play harder stuff than this at Sunday brunch. But to sweat all that is to forget that sometimes, it's fun just to bang on stuff and shriek, and that's where Xiu Xiu excels. Their sonic palette won't make waves in the new music world, but it sounds exhilarating in this brutally expressive, and often catchy, avant-pop context. Now, only months after the release of their debut, Xiu Xiu has issued an EP, Chapel of the Chimes, and once again, they deftly mix chaos with concentration to create pieces that sound spontaneous, yet are intensely precise. And the emotional extremes are cathartic in their own theatrical, witch doctored-way. On "I Am Center of Your World", Stewart sings like Bryan Ferry after twelve hours of torture. It's like they just yanked the electrodes off his privates and handed him the mike. He eeks out the lyrics in a faltering voice that's strained, believable, and yet also, strangely, romantically expressive. He's helped by the music, which is darkly fragile and fleetingly beautiful. A low, rapid-heartbeat bassline runs under the song, and a staggering piano and flourishes of chimes break out of the near-silence like a burst of light before he passes out. In contrast, "Jennifer Lopez (Sweet Science Mix)" is blaringly loud and single-mindedly abrasive. Raw-bowed cello, a drum kit and piercing electronics burn around Stewart's indecipherable exclamations. The song's multi-layered arrangement melts down to a concise attack. But the middle tracks flag. "10-Thousand-Times-A-Minute", solid but less remarkable, delivers its melody through an echoed, blatting sound like farting into a cistern. Stewart again sounds pained and strained, but he's at odds with the mushy context. The next track is career-record quiet: "King Earth, King Earth", a thin watercolor where the different tones float through too easily. It's subtle and nearly peaceful, but too vague to make an impression. So, after all that, who couldn't use a nice cover song? Xiu Xiu closes with Joy Division's "Ceremony", the most ecstatic track on the album. They maintain the tempo and spirit of the original, but boldly replace the guitars and drums with-- guess what!-- harsh electronics and a crateful of percussion. Stewart, keyed up to shrieks, seems to act out everything that might have been going on in a morose Ian Curtis' head. If nothing else, it's a confident reworking. I can't speak for whether Joy Division fans would find this creative or repellant, but I think it's a raucous, chimy good time. Sure, Curtis was more convincingly miserable-- but look what happened to him."

Lil Baby

Too Hard

Rap

Evan Rytlewski

Ever since he was released from prison last winter after serving two years on a drug charge, Lil Baby has been making up for lost time. The 22-year-old only began rapping in February, but he already has four mixtapes, the backing of the taste-making Atlanta incubator Quality Control, and a major street hit, “My Dawg,” that just got the star remix treatment with verses from Quavo and Kodak Black. By March, Gucci Mane was already trying to sign him. Even in a city that breeds overnight successes faster than any other, Baby’s ascent has looked almost too easy. Credit Young Thug for fast-tracking Baby to the city’s inner circle. An old friend from the neighborhood, Thug cosigned the melodic rapper right out of the gate and appeared on some of his earliest tracks. As Baby tells it, even before he began rapping, he spent days in the studio watching Thug do his thing, internalizing his work ethic. Inevitably, he picked up a little bit of Thug’s singsong lilt, too, but his own delivery is considerably more subdued than the typical Thug performance. He sings in a slack, Auto-Tuned murmur, with an intrinsic tunefulness that suggests he could probably be a decent R&B singer if he put the work in. Despite his embrace of the word “hard” on the titles of his last solo mixtape, Harder Than Hard, and his latest, Too Hard, his voice is soft around the edges, almost pretty. Most of Too Hard finds Baby in a contemplative mood, still processing his sudden good fortune. “I went to prison, it made me a better me,” he croons on “Money Forever,” opposite Gunna, another singing rapper specializing in florid trap serenades. There are a lot of them right now. This is one of the most crowded lanes in rap, but Lil Baby distinguishes himself with a rare command over his voice. The quieter he goes, the more emotion he conveys. That delivery heightens his already-sharp storytelling. On the tape’s most vividly written track, “Best of Me,” he relays a close call. “Remember that shootout we had that time we thought a kid died?/Only thing I know is when we pulled up, everybody hopped out fine/I remember on the way back, everybody in the car quiet,” he raps somberly. He goes on to recall watching news coverage of the shooting and hoping the kid survived, knowing the ramifications if he didn’t. The chorus’ assurance that he isn’t embellishing—”Ain’t no facade, no cap in my raps, everything that I say is the real me”—is almost redundant. His voice is so sullen, so shaken, that there’s never any doubt whether he’s making any of it up. Tracks like that make it almost impossible to believe Baby’s been at this for less than a year. He’s got clear talent, and considering how much he’s improved just in the months since his first mixtape, Perfect Timing, his ceiling is potentially massive (even Young Thug’s earliest projects weren’t nearly this assured). Too Hard also has a potential hit in “All of a Sudden,” where Baby and an electric Moneybagg Yo ping-pong speedy bars off of one another, putting maximum spin on each. It’s one of the tape’s few outright bangers. What Baby still lacks, though, is an original vision—he’s skilled at parroting popular styles, but hasn’t yet honed his own. He isn’t helped in that regarded by Too Hard’s production, which is as refined and professional as you’d expect from the Quality Control stable, but also completely undistinguished, almost stubborn in its refusal to deviate from the most established sounds. He’s got time to figure it out, but for now Baby faces the same problem as many of his peers in Atlanta’s overcrowded rap scene: Talent can only take you so far when you sound so much like everybody else.

Artist: Lil Baby, Album: Too Hard, Genre: Rap, Score (1-10): 6.4 Album review: "Ever since he was released from prison last winter after serving two years on a drug charge, Lil Baby has been making up for lost time. The 22-year-old only began rapping in February, but he already has four mixtapes, the backing of the taste-making Atlanta incubator Quality Control, and a major street hit, “My Dawg,” that just got the star remix treatment with verses from Quavo and Kodak Black. By March, Gucci Mane was already trying to sign him. Even in a city that breeds overnight successes faster than any other, Baby’s ascent has looked almost too easy. Credit Young Thug for fast-tracking Baby to the city’s inner circle. An old friend from the neighborhood, Thug cosigned the melodic rapper right out of the gate and appeared on some of his earliest tracks. As Baby tells it, even before he began rapping, he spent days in the studio watching Thug do his thing, internalizing his work ethic. Inevitably, he picked up a little bit of Thug’s singsong lilt, too, but his own delivery is considerably more subdued than the typical Thug performance. He sings in a slack, Auto-Tuned murmur, with an intrinsic tunefulness that suggests he could probably be a decent R&B singer if he put the work in. Despite his embrace of the word “hard” on the titles of his last solo mixtape, Harder Than Hard, and his latest, Too Hard, his voice is soft around the edges, almost pretty. Most of Too Hard finds Baby in a contemplative mood, still processing his sudden good fortune. “I went to prison, it made me a better me,” he croons on “Money Forever,” opposite Gunna, another singing rapper specializing in florid trap serenades. There are a lot of them right now. This is one of the most crowded lanes in rap, but Lil Baby distinguishes himself with a rare command over his voice. The quieter he goes, the more emotion he conveys. That delivery heightens his already-sharp storytelling. On the tape’s most vividly written track, “Best of Me,” he relays a close call. “Remember that shootout we had that time we thought a kid died?/Only thing I know is when we pulled up, everybody hopped out fine/I remember on the way back, everybody in the car quiet,” he raps somberly. He goes on to recall watching news coverage of the shooting and hoping the kid survived, knowing the ramifications if he didn’t. The chorus’ assurance that he isn’t embellishing—”Ain’t no facade, no cap in my raps, everything that I say is the real me”—is almost redundant. His voice is so sullen, so shaken, that there’s never any doubt whether he’s making any of it up. Tracks like that make it almost impossible to believe Baby’s been at this for less than a year. He’s got clear talent, and considering how much he’s improved just in the months since his first mixtape, Perfect Timing, his ceiling is potentially massive (even Young Thug’s earliest projects weren’t nearly this assured). Too Hard also has a potential hit in “All of a Sudden,” where Baby and an electric Moneybagg Yo ping-pong speedy bars off of one another, putting maximum spin on each. It’s one of the tape’s few outright bangers. What Baby still lacks, though, is an original vision—he’s skilled at parroting popular styles, but hasn’t yet honed his own. He isn’t helped in that regarded by Too Hard’s production, which is as refined and professional as you’d expect from the Quality Control stable, but also completely undistinguished, almost stubborn in its refusal to deviate from the most established sounds. He’s got time to figure it out, but for now Baby faces the same problem as many of his peers in Atlanta’s overcrowded rap scene: Talent can only take you so far when you sound so much like everybody else."

Trans Am

Thing

Metal,Rock

Joe Tangari

Trans Am turn 20 this year-- the original trio of Nathan Means, Philip Manley, and Sebastian Thomson is still together. It's hard for a band that operates on their level-- semi-prominent in certain circles with the odd stab of almost-fame here and there, such as when they opened for Tool-- to keep people interested for that long. They seemed sort of on their way in the late 1990s, when they were at their peak, making records that in hindsight anticipated some of the trends of the following decade at the crossroads of rock and electronic music. A couple of substandard albums in the early to mid-00s seemed to kill their momentum, but 2007's Sex Change was a strong return to form, and now we have the band's ninth proper album, Thing, which isn't quite as solid as its predecessor but still plays to the band's strengths. They've backed off the very up-front and straight vocals that helped Sex Change sound so fresh for them-- on the only two tracks with vocals, Means hides inside a vocoder cocoon that works well but still feels like a retreat to their comfort zone, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. So you get your sci-fi post-rock like "Space Dock", which would fit neatly on the Tron soundtrack, and "Naked Singularity", which is like the "Knight Rider" theme turned inside out and remixed with heavy metal drums. For a band that never seemed to take itself all that seriously, the aesthetic decisions Trans Am made ages ago fit with remarkably well with what's going on in music now. The nods to funk, the krautrock rhythms, the hints of electro, the occasional glitch in the beat-- all are just part of indie rock these days. There are times when Trans Am does it better than anyone-- fractured and funky "Arcadia", with its storm of delayed guitar set against locked-in drums and sequencer, is a good example, while "Interstellar Drift" does something similar, only with an insistent motorik bass and drum pulse. And so Trans Am are in an odd place. The band is the oblivious kid that that never paid attention to fashion who suddenly finds that the look he's always had is cool. They still gets bogged down in places, padding the album with go-nowhere interludes and a six-minute centerpiece that's mostly too chaotic to make any impact, but on the album's best tracks, it's great to hear them again, doing what they do best.

Artist: Trans Am, Album: Thing, Genre: Metal,Rock, Score (1-10): 6.7 Album review: "Trans Am turn 20 this year-- the original trio of Nathan Means, Philip Manley, and Sebastian Thomson is still together. It's hard for a band that operates on their level-- semi-prominent in certain circles with the odd stab of almost-fame here and there, such as when they opened for Tool-- to keep people interested for that long. They seemed sort of on their way in the late 1990s, when they were at their peak, making records that in hindsight anticipated some of the trends of the following decade at the crossroads of rock and electronic music. A couple of substandard albums in the early to mid-00s seemed to kill their momentum, but 2007's Sex Change was a strong return to form, and now we have the band's ninth proper album, Thing, which isn't quite as solid as its predecessor but still plays to the band's strengths. They've backed off the very up-front and straight vocals that helped Sex Change sound so fresh for them-- on the only two tracks with vocals, Means hides inside a vocoder cocoon that works well but still feels like a retreat to their comfort zone, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. So you get your sci-fi post-rock like "Space Dock", which would fit neatly on the Tron soundtrack, and "Naked Singularity", which is like the "Knight Rider" theme turned inside out and remixed with heavy metal drums. For a band that never seemed to take itself all that seriously, the aesthetic decisions Trans Am made ages ago fit with remarkably well with what's going on in music now. The nods to funk, the krautrock rhythms, the hints of electro, the occasional glitch in the beat-- all are just part of indie rock these days. There are times when Trans Am does it better than anyone-- fractured and funky "Arcadia", with its storm of delayed guitar set against locked-in drums and sequencer, is a good example, while "Interstellar Drift" does something similar, only with an insistent motorik bass and drum pulse. And so Trans Am are in an odd place. The band is the oblivious kid that that never paid attention to fashion who suddenly finds that the look he's always had is cool. They still gets bogged down in places, padding the album with go-nowhere interludes and a six-minute centerpiece that's mostly too chaotic to make any impact, but on the album's best tracks, it's great to hear them again, doing what they do best."

Roky Erickson & The Aliens

The Evil One (Plus One)

William Bowers

I hate to reduce the suffering of the mentally ill to spectacle, but damn they're entertaining! Every place I've lived in the lumpy American South has sustained a disproportionate number of tenured schizophrenics. Where I live now, on any given day-- in fact, every day-- one may spot some poor souls under compulsion to conduct counterintuitive acts in the streets, as if hexed into being involuntary performance artists. One fellow 'sieg-heils' at intersections. Another puts his head inside the Free Real Estate Guide dispenser and bellows, "Bushels of wheat everywhere!" One covers the city in magic marker formulas such as "CBS minus HMO equals TAMPA." A man resembling Christopher Lloyd wraps his right arm in electrical tape and calls everyone "Honeypardner." Asymmetrical women engage in heated arguments with themselves on every other public bench. Yesterday, a man grabbed my hand and tried in a series of abrupt tugs to drag me down the street with him, asking, "I know you know me! Where my trees at? You going to get me some more trees, dawg?" And just this morning, returning a book to the downtown library, I witnessed a screaming man trying to shake something only he could see out of a huge tree, like a live-action Bosch variation on the remote-island strandees of comics and cartoons. To be a jerk and evaluate their suffering aesthetically, though, I find it odd that much of the personal mythologies of the schizophrenics I've met are really unoriginal. Often, the sufferers just inflict upon themselves some conspiracy involving proper nouns from the three most obvious powers-at-hand: the government, the Bible, and-- strangest of all, I think-- pop culture. I know a schizophrenic who posits that we all live in the Starship Enterprise, and another who believes that the world is controlled by the original MTV VJs. Advocate for the mentally ill Ken Steele admits in his posthumous memoir The Day the Voices Stopped that TV and the radio tortured him the most, as demon voices would join in commercials, or the chorus of "na-na-na-na, hey-hey-hey, goodbye." Even pop genius Daniel Johnston's lore is populated by copywritten entities like Casper the Friendly Ghost and Captain America. And who runs former Thirteenth Floor Elevator Roky Erickson's shadow government? Silly B-movie monsters. Roky isn't bothered by the fact that old movie monsters were bipedal failures of the imagination (ever consider what a true abomination of nature would look like?) with tacked-on social messages (venereal disease, puberty, nukes are bad). Sympathy for the Record Industry is putting that White Stripes money to good use and re-releasing Roky's best post-breakdown album, offered in many forms and under many names since it was produced by Creedence bassist Stu Cook in 1980. You heard it here first: after Ron Howard's impish brother gets Jack Black to play Roky in the film An Unbeautiful Mind, this album will be huge, and showcased in a mega-display right beside White Blood Cells at your local Best Buy. Accompanied by wailing, plasticky guitars and tight, propulsive drumming, a meth-sparked Roky warns his listeners of the monsters' power in a passionate, authoritative Texan drawl. Inarguably strong hooks abound, whether Roky is running from the gut-throwing "Creature with the Atom Brain" or demanding that you "Stand for the Fire Demon." The atmospheric slo-momentum of "Night of the Vampire" even gives CCR's "Bad Moon Rising" a run for its blood money. But the undisputed showstopper is "I Think of Demons," a contagious love ballad on which Roky dedicates all of his Luciferian dialogues to a certain special someone: "I think of demons-- [pause]-- for you." Close on that killer track's heels is the uncanny "I Walked with a Zombie," on which Roky and the band do a call-and-response affirmation of the fact that he and the undead co-stroll, which accumulates to some authentically stirring Caucasian doo-wop. The bonuses on disc two (interviews, demos, rarities) are dandy, but the album is treasure enough. Its retro-metal chops have more kaboom than the irony-diluted pap of current poseurs, and its bent lyrics mop the floor with wannabe-kooks like Jad Fair. Some savvy touches-- such as Roky's progressive pre-PC designation that the swamp monsters are "alligator-persons"-- hint that Roky was more lucid than he let on. Maybe this record was his metaphorical way of communicating that he'd foreseen that the Reagan administration would reduce Americans to extras in a poorly acted horror film. If you can get past Roky's benevolent-Manson persona and ignore the extratextual psychodrama, there's a lot of rock to love here-- especially if you find yourself getting bonkers during the last hour of an interstate road trip. The Evil One is a dashboard-pounding salve for those moments when the deer on the roadside start levitating and whispering backwards lullabies.

Artist: Roky Erickson & The Aliens, Album: The Evil One (Plus One), Genre: None, Score (1-10): 8.0 Album review: "I hate to reduce the suffering of the mentally ill to spectacle, but damn they're entertaining! Every place I've lived in the lumpy American South has sustained a disproportionate number of tenured schizophrenics. Where I live now, on any given day-- in fact, every day-- one may spot some poor souls under compulsion to conduct counterintuitive acts in the streets, as if hexed into being involuntary performance artists. One fellow 'sieg-heils' at intersections. Another puts his head inside the Free Real Estate Guide dispenser and bellows, "Bushels of wheat everywhere!" One covers the city in magic marker formulas such as "CBS minus HMO equals TAMPA." A man resembling Christopher Lloyd wraps his right arm in electrical tape and calls everyone "Honeypardner." Asymmetrical women engage in heated arguments with themselves on every other public bench. Yesterday, a man grabbed my hand and tried in a series of abrupt tugs to drag me down the street with him, asking, "I know you know me! Where my trees at? You going to get me some more trees, dawg?" And just this morning, returning a book to the downtown library, I witnessed a screaming man trying to shake something only he could see out of a huge tree, like a live-action Bosch variation on the remote-island strandees of comics and cartoons. To be a jerk and evaluate their suffering aesthetically, though, I find it odd that much of the personal mythologies of the schizophrenics I've met are really unoriginal. Often, the sufferers just inflict upon themselves some conspiracy involving proper nouns from the three most obvious powers-at-hand: the government, the Bible, and-- strangest of all, I think-- pop culture. I know a schizophrenic who posits that we all live in the Starship Enterprise, and another who believes that the world is controlled by the original MTV VJs. Advocate for the mentally ill Ken Steele admits in his posthumous memoir The Day the Voices Stopped that TV and the radio tortured him the most, as demon voices would join in commercials, or the chorus of "na-na-na-na, hey-hey-hey, goodbye." Even pop genius Daniel Johnston's lore is populated by copywritten entities like Casper the Friendly Ghost and Captain America. And who runs former Thirteenth Floor Elevator Roky Erickson's shadow government? Silly B-movie monsters. Roky isn't bothered by the fact that old movie monsters were bipedal failures of the imagination (ever consider what a true abomination of nature would look like?) with tacked-on social messages (venereal disease, puberty, nukes are bad). Sympathy for the Record Industry is putting that White Stripes money to good use and re-releasing Roky's best post-breakdown album, offered in many forms and under many names since it was produced by Creedence bassist Stu Cook in 1980. You heard it here first: after Ron Howard's impish brother gets Jack Black to play Roky in the film An Unbeautiful Mind, this album will be huge, and showcased in a mega-display right beside White Blood Cells at your local Best Buy. Accompanied by wailing, plasticky guitars and tight, propulsive drumming, a meth-sparked Roky warns his listeners of the monsters' power in a passionate, authoritative Texan drawl. Inarguably strong hooks abound, whether Roky is running from the gut-throwing "Creature with the Atom Brain" or demanding that you "Stand for the Fire Demon." The atmospheric slo-momentum of "Night of the Vampire" even gives CCR's "Bad Moon Rising" a run for its blood money. But the undisputed showstopper is "I Think of Demons," a contagious love ballad on which Roky dedicates all of his Luciferian dialogues to a certain special someone: "I think of demons-- [pause]-- for you." Close on that killer track's heels is the uncanny "I Walked with a Zombie," on which Roky and the band do a call-and-response affirmation of the fact that he and the undead co-stroll, which accumulates to some authentically stirring Caucasian doo-wop. The bonuses on disc two (interviews, demos, rarities) are dandy, but the album is treasure enough. Its retro-metal chops have more kaboom than the irony-diluted pap of current poseurs, and its bent lyrics mop the floor with wannabe-kooks like Jad Fair. Some savvy touches-- such as Roky's progressive pre-PC designation that the swamp monsters are "alligator-persons"-- hint that Roky was more lucid than he let on. Maybe this record was his metaphorical way of communicating that he'd foreseen that the Reagan administration would reduce Americans to extras in a poorly acted horror film. If you can get past Roky's benevolent-Manson persona and ignore the extratextual psychodrama, there's a lot of rock to love here-- especially if you find yourself getting bonkers during the last hour of an interstate road trip. The Evil One is a dashboard-pounding salve for those moments when the deer on the roadside start levitating and whispering backwards lullabies."

Doug Martsch

Now You Know

Rock

Rob Mitchum

NEWSFLASH! Indie guitar godhead Doug Martsch, having grown tired of the fast-paced corporate Idaho lifestyle, has relocated to the backwoods of Lou'sana (or Mizzou, depending on your sources), and decided to re-learn his chosen instrument from scratch. To accomplish this feat, he has studied under a succession of colorfully nicknamed Delta bluesman like "No-Toes" Willie Green and "Hodag" Rufus Dillingham. Martsch was last seen wearing denim overalls and a straw hat, sitting on a log in an undisclosed swampy location, plucking on a banjo with a half-empty jug marked "XXX" resting by his side. Indeed, Doug Martsch has made his blues album. Since 1993, Martsch has been kicking out poptastic classic rock with his full-time unit Built to Spill, crafting crazily infectious hooks and ripping Malmsteen solos that'd fit nicely between The Who and Styx on your local oldster-demographic FM stop. In accordance with this image, it should surprise no one that Martsch has made this record-- the solo blues album is a textbook 70s move. So, those of you who've been waving those DOUG MARTSCH IS THE NEW CLAPTON signs for the last ten years can finally take your bow. Fortunately, Now You Know is a different brand of blues homagery from Clapton's From the Cradle; this isn't your usual 12-bar cookie-cutter "my baby done me wrong" pretend-mourning. Instead, Martsch test-drives a Delta blues sound-- a style closer to the point in musical evolution where country/western and blues went their separate, segregated ways. His weary rasp is minimally accompanied. For the most part, we're offered only acoustic guitar, on which Martsch delivers beer-bottle slides and gooey bends played dirty enough to draw a clatter-rattle from the occasional string section. Drums? Sometimes, but always kept unobtrusively distant in the mix. Electric guitar? A few times in the record's second half, and sparsely implemented even then. In short, this record is about as intimate an impression as we're likely to get of Martsch outside of the short tour he's launching in support of it. The music, of course, is strictly Blooze for Dummies-- or in this case, indie rockers-- and thus is probably best dealt with through comparison to the Built to Spill catalog. Through that lens, Martsch continues the sub-greatness trend of his recent work, releasing another record that fails to carry the weight of the canonical two-fer that lies at the center of his career. The blues outfit switches off and on from gimmick status (the thematically and sonically overweight "Woke Up This Morning With My Mind on Jesus") to clever twist, but never seems to be the thesis statement of the album. Nearly every track begins with bluesy intentions, but only a handful (the pace-setter "Offer", and the gritty faux-field recording "Stay") stick with that dynamic for their duration. Instead, the fretboard whines mostly serve as a contrast tool for segments that sound like, well, stripped-down acoustic Built to Spill-- and not just because Martsch's double-tracked nose-singing is too easily identifiable to allow for a complete departure. Witness the smooth segue from the almost bluegrassy hoedown finger-picking of "Window" into a more poppy electric segment a la "Time Trap"; or the Casio bubbling under the Delta-flavored first movement of "Lift" before it implodes into gentle There's Nothing Wrong with Love-style pop. But hell, who's to bitch about Doug doing solo BTS-type stuff? Anyone who's heard the beautifully aching b-side loner version of "Kicked It in the Sun" can attest that it's Martsch's songs and delivery, not the raging guitars and drumkit, that gives the band's music its gladiatorial impact. And sure enough, the more familiar-sounding material is what really sticks amongst these eleven tracks. "Heart (Things Never Shared)" is a haunting, drumless rumination spiked with Mellotron orchestra and plunky vibraphone, while the double guitar slides of the instrumental "Instrumental" (straight shooter, that Doug) is a more rugged interpretation of recent BTS fare. Most impressive, though, is "Impossible", the first Martsch composition in years to give me that Perfect From Now On feeling, partially due to the cello accompaniment (why did he ever stop using that cello?), but mostly because of its slow build through multiple movements into cathartic, majestic guitar wank. So what do we now know from Now You Know? Well, as is the norm for the publicity-shy Martsch, very little. Only Doug would release an experiment with new influences as the first record under his Christian name (not to mention that he admits picking up said influences only recently). But judging from the album's tendency to lapse into traditionally Spill-ish moments, even Doug realizes that the restrictive nature of the blues isn't the Southern faith healer he needs to shake off his creative rut. As a result, Now You Know remains a mere temporary dalliance with the Delta sound, nowhere near as uncomfortably colonialist as the blues workouts of his guitar deity ancestors, but not a particularly bona fide new direction, either.

Artist: Doug Martsch, Album: Now You Know, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.3 Album review: "NEWSFLASH! Indie guitar godhead Doug Martsch, having grown tired of the fast-paced corporate Idaho lifestyle, has relocated to the backwoods of Lou'sana (or Mizzou, depending on your sources), and decided to re-learn his chosen instrument from scratch. To accomplish this feat, he has studied under a succession of colorfully nicknamed Delta bluesman like "No-Toes" Willie Green and "Hodag" Rufus Dillingham. Martsch was last seen wearing denim overalls and a straw hat, sitting on a log in an undisclosed swampy location, plucking on a banjo with a half-empty jug marked "XXX" resting by his side. Indeed, Doug Martsch has made his blues album. Since 1993, Martsch has been kicking out poptastic classic rock with his full-time unit Built to Spill, crafting crazily infectious hooks and ripping Malmsteen solos that'd fit nicely between The Who and Styx on your local oldster-demographic FM stop. In accordance with this image, it should surprise no one that Martsch has made this record-- the solo blues album is a textbook 70s move. So, those of you who've been waving those DOUG MARTSCH IS THE NEW CLAPTON signs for the last ten years can finally take your bow. Fortunately, Now You Know is a different brand of blues homagery from Clapton's From the Cradle; this isn't your usual 12-bar cookie-cutter "my baby done me wrong" pretend-mourning. Instead, Martsch test-drives a Delta blues sound-- a style closer to the point in musical evolution where country/western and blues went their separate, segregated ways. His weary rasp is minimally accompanied. For the most part, we're offered only acoustic guitar, on which Martsch delivers beer-bottle slides and gooey bends played dirty enough to draw a clatter-rattle from the occasional string section. Drums? Sometimes, but always kept unobtrusively distant in the mix. Electric guitar? A few times in the record's second half, and sparsely implemented even then. In short, this record is about as intimate an impression as we're likely to get of Martsch outside of the short tour he's launching in support of it. The music, of course, is strictly Blooze for Dummies-- or in this case, indie rockers-- and thus is probably best dealt with through comparison to the Built to Spill catalog. Through that lens, Martsch continues the sub-greatness trend of his recent work, releasing another record that fails to carry the weight of the canonical two-fer that lies at the center of his career. The blues outfit switches off and on from gimmick status (the thematically and sonically overweight "Woke Up This Morning With My Mind on Jesus") to clever twist, but never seems to be the thesis statement of the album. Nearly every track begins with bluesy intentions, but only a handful (the pace-setter "Offer", and the gritty faux-field recording "Stay") stick with that dynamic for their duration. Instead, the fretboard whines mostly serve as a contrast tool for segments that sound like, well, stripped-down acoustic Built to Spill-- and not just because Martsch's double-tracked nose-singing is too easily identifiable to allow for a complete departure. Witness the smooth segue from the almost bluegrassy hoedown finger-picking of "Window" into a more poppy electric segment a la "Time Trap"; or the Casio bubbling under the Delta-flavored first movement of "Lift" before it implodes into gentle There's Nothing Wrong with Love-style pop. But hell, who's to bitch about Doug doing solo BTS-type stuff? Anyone who's heard the beautifully aching b-side loner version of "Kicked It in the Sun" can attest that it's Martsch's songs and delivery, not the raging guitars and drumkit, that gives the band's music its gladiatorial impact. And sure enough, the more familiar-sounding material is what really sticks amongst these eleven tracks. "Heart (Things Never Shared)" is a haunting, drumless rumination spiked with Mellotron orchestra and plunky vibraphone, while the double guitar slides of the instrumental "Instrumental" (straight shooter, that Doug) is a more rugged interpretation of recent BTS fare. Most impressive, though, is "Impossible", the first Martsch composition in years to give me that Perfect From Now On feeling, partially due to the cello accompaniment (why did he ever stop using that cello?), but mostly because of its slow build through multiple movements into cathartic, majestic guitar wank. So what do we now know from Now You Know? Well, as is the norm for the publicity-shy Martsch, very little. Only Doug would release an experiment with new influences as the first record under his Christian name (not to mention that he admits picking up said influences only recently). But judging from the album's tendency to lapse into traditionally Spill-ish moments, even Doug realizes that the restrictive nature of the blues isn't the Southern faith healer he needs to shake off his creative rut. As a result, Now You Know remains a mere temporary dalliance with the Delta sound, nowhere near as uncomfortably colonialist as the blues workouts of his guitar deity ancestors, but not a particularly bona fide new direction, either."

Various Artists

Blank Field

Matthew Murphy

In 2002, the nomadic Montreal electronic arts collective Champ Libre enlisted maverick composer Francisco López as musical curator for its multimedia "Cité des Ondes" event. For the occasion López assembled a formidable international roster of experimental sound artists that included such disparate talents as Japanese noise mainstay Merzbow, Australian avant-garde guitarist Oren Ambarchi, and Portland, Ore.-based sound sculptor Daniel Menche. Now López has edited and mixed Blank Field, a compilation of live performances from the event. And despite the inherent limitations of this decontextualized format, the collection proves to be a remarkable, frequently stupefying artifact that veers madly from one sonic extremity to another. Performed and recorded live at Montreal's Craig pumping station-- a structure built in 1887 to help control the floodwaters of the St. Lawrence River-- this music was created as just one aspect of a program that also showcased various electronic, architectural, and video art installations. In his own work, López has advocated an immersive listening environment, sometimes going as far as issuing blindfolds to his audience members in order to enhance their focus on the music. Here it's left unspecified whether or not these performances were originally accompanied by any other visual presentations, but nevertheless each of these outwardly diverse pieces share a certain sense of open-ended space that grants them a vaguely unfinished character, as if they're intended to be just another vibrant feature of an active urban landscape. The six solo artists represented here were selected by López for what he obliquely refers to as the "physicalization" of their sound, placing little importance on instrumental technique or process as they each formulate their own aural universe. First up is a relatively brief electronic track by France's Manon Anne Gillis, followed by a more prolonged piece from U.S.-based composer Michael Northam. These tracks are both finely textured sequences of tiny, enigmatic occurrences, with Northam's in particular making such extensive use of prolonged silence and barely-audible drones that if you've got a moderately busy household it's only through intense concentration that you'll be able to detect whether anything is happening at all. Things pick up considerably with Ambarchi's piece, an exquisite lattice of humming, gently plucked guitar tones that compares favorably to some of Loren Connor's most lyrical solo work. From there it's a rather abrupt segue into the digital anthill of Japan's Shunichiro Okada, who presents an itchy, beatless series of scrapes and buzzes with little regard for listener comfort. After that, prepare yourself to be deafened by the brutal one-two sucker punch of Merzbow and Menche, especially if you've still got your speakers cranked from trying to hear the Northam track. Though predictably noisy, Merzbow's contribution is actually a reasonably tempered affair, its grainy, unsettled lurch providing one of the collection's only instances of discernable rhythm. And Menche furnishes the album a fittingly radical capper with his droning symphonic swells and amplified organic contortions. Throughout it all, López does his best to create in these pieces some semblance of continuity, allowing each track to bleed into the next with a cinematic slow dissolve. But for the most part he has wisely chosen to leave himself out of the frame, realizing that it's the bewildering multiplicity of these distinctive voices that gives Blank Field its strange and potent juice.

Artist: Various Artists, Album: Blank Field, Genre: None, Score (1-10): 7.0 Album review: "In 2002, the nomadic Montreal electronic arts collective Champ Libre enlisted maverick composer Francisco López as musical curator for its multimedia "Cité des Ondes" event. For the occasion López assembled a formidable international roster of experimental sound artists that included such disparate talents as Japanese noise mainstay Merzbow, Australian avant-garde guitarist Oren Ambarchi, and Portland, Ore.-based sound sculptor Daniel Menche. Now López has edited and mixed Blank Field, a compilation of live performances from the event. And despite the inherent limitations of this decontextualized format, the collection proves to be a remarkable, frequently stupefying artifact that veers madly from one sonic extremity to another. Performed and recorded live at Montreal's Craig pumping station-- a structure built in 1887 to help control the floodwaters of the St. Lawrence River-- this music was created as just one aspect of a program that also showcased various electronic, architectural, and video art installations. In his own work, López has advocated an immersive listening environment, sometimes going as far as issuing blindfolds to his audience members in order to enhance their focus on the music. Here it's left unspecified whether or not these performances were originally accompanied by any other visual presentations, but nevertheless each of these outwardly diverse pieces share a certain sense of open-ended space that grants them a vaguely unfinished character, as if they're intended to be just another vibrant feature of an active urban landscape. The six solo artists represented here were selected by López for what he obliquely refers to as the "physicalization" of their sound, placing little importance on instrumental technique or process as they each formulate their own aural universe. First up is a relatively brief electronic track by France's Manon Anne Gillis, followed by a more prolonged piece from U.S.-based composer Michael Northam. These tracks are both finely textured sequences of tiny, enigmatic occurrences, with Northam's in particular making such extensive use of prolonged silence and barely-audible drones that if you've got a moderately busy household it's only through intense concentration that you'll be able to detect whether anything is happening at all. Things pick up considerably with Ambarchi's piece, an exquisite lattice of humming, gently plucked guitar tones that compares favorably to some of Loren Connor's most lyrical solo work. From there it's a rather abrupt segue into the digital anthill of Japan's Shunichiro Okada, who presents an itchy, beatless series of scrapes and buzzes with little regard for listener comfort. After that, prepare yourself to be deafened by the brutal one-two sucker punch of Merzbow and Menche, especially if you've still got your speakers cranked from trying to hear the Northam track. Though predictably noisy, Merzbow's contribution is actually a reasonably tempered affair, its grainy, unsettled lurch providing one of the collection's only instances of discernable rhythm. And Menche furnishes the album a fittingly radical capper with his droning symphonic swells and amplified organic contortions. Throughout it all, López does his best to create in these pieces some semblance of continuity, allowing each track to bleed into the next with a cinematic slow dissolve. But for the most part he has wisely chosen to leave himself out of the frame, realizing that it's the bewildering multiplicity of these distinctive voices that gives Blank Field its strange and potent juice."

Elf Power

Back to the Web

Experimental,Rock

Stephen M. Deusner

Could that title be a statement of direction from Elf Power, an acknowledgment that they stumbled instead of strutted on their previous album, 2004's Walking With the Beggar Boys? Could Back to the Web represent a retreat to their Athens lair, hidden dark in the recesses of Elephant 6 psych-pop or perhaps buried deep beneath Orange Twin, the group's 150-acre land conservation project? Could this album be a dramatic regrouping, a realigning of priorities and personnel to better capture their early, hazy pop bliss? Doubtful. Certainly Back to the Web is the best and most confident Elf Power have sounded in years. The band has finally managed to integrate its 1960s folk fetish with its 70s rock jones-- two elements that are encoded in the group's collective DNA but have been squarely at odds with each other most of the time. Elf Power are doing something right, but interpreting the album title as career commentary might be giving them more credit that they deserve. For all the record's improvement on the band's sound, Elf Power remain completely unself-aware, with little to no idea of their strengths and weaknesses, which, admittedly, have shifted subtly since their last outing. Back to the Web starts strong: "Come Lie Down with Me (and Sing My Song)" provides a low-key yet confident introduction, with Heather McIntosh's cello carrying an elegantly subdued melody. As the opener flows into the more upbeat "An Old Familiar Scene", the tempo remains checked and consistent-- unfortunately, it doesn't change much at all across these dozen tracks-- the same regulated rush of sound, lead by Andrew Rieger's curiously dry vocals, on song after song. Making the most of a generally undistinguished voice, he places one syllable squarely on each beat, with minimal syncopation. Reminiscent of Donovan at his Donovanest and 60s Ren-fest pop in general, this strategy is most pronounced on the darkly pastoral "Rolling Black Water" and "King of Earth", but throughout the album, Rieger rarely leaves his vocal comfort zone or abandons his meditative, slightly detached evenness. Because he is the primary songwriter-- and because Elf Power's music has always served the lyrics-- Rieger's vocals restrain the band considerably, which seems especially unimaginative when the music sounds this nimble and emphatically evocative. With the addition of McIntosh on cello, Olivia Tremor Control's John Fernandes on violin and clarinet, Jimmy Hughes on guitar, and Josh Lott taking over drums, the lineup has expanded in interesting directions, giving the Elf even more Power. Together the band-- also including mainstays Laura Carter and bassist Brian Poole-- crafts sweeping scores for Rieger's songs, creating a psychedelic pastoral that's equally sunny and sinister. They pepper these tracks with beguiling sonic flourishes, like Julien Derocher's banjo on "23rd Dream" and McIntosh's cello drones adding low, ominous rumble to "Forming". Featuring Rieger's most lushly melodic hook and loosest vocal performance, "Peel Back the Moon, Beware!" is a sweetly shambling mid-album highlight, as Carter's accordion and Poole's bouncy bass dance around each other. These are moments that work despite the limitations of the album, proving the band is capable of much more than is captured on Back to the Web. Too bad the songs aren't as adventurous as the music. This lack of songwriterly imagination severely limits the band's range. "King of Earth" sets a tone that sounds like it's leading somewhere, but despite the layering of instruments-- mostly reeds and guitars-- it never quite fulfills its promise to burst forth dramatically, instead fading at the end with little to show for its three minutes. Even on "Somewhere Down the River" and the closing title track, when they try to cut loose and kick up some real noise, Elf Power sound restrained and muted. As the album progresses and each song falls into the same lockstep, the repetitiveness becomes increasingly noticeable and tiresome, and even the band's freshly enthusiastic inventiveness can't entirely disguise or alleviate it. As a result, Back to the Web becomes, very much unintentionally, an album of unresolved tensions and undeveloped builds-- not a welcoming web, but a house full of identical rooms and steep stairs that lead into blank walls.

Artist: Elf Power, Album: Back to the Web, Genre: Experimental,Rock, Score (1-10): 6.4 Album review: "Could that title be a statement of direction from Elf Power, an acknowledgment that they stumbled instead of strutted on their previous album, 2004's Walking With the Beggar Boys? Could Back to the Web represent a retreat to their Athens lair, hidden dark in the recesses of Elephant 6 psych-pop or perhaps buried deep beneath Orange Twin, the group's 150-acre land conservation project? Could this album be a dramatic regrouping, a realigning of priorities and personnel to better capture their early, hazy pop bliss? Doubtful. Certainly Back to the Web is the best and most confident Elf Power have sounded in years. The band has finally managed to integrate its 1960s folk fetish with its 70s rock jones-- two elements that are encoded in the group's collective DNA but have been squarely at odds with each other most of the time. Elf Power are doing something right, but interpreting the album title as career commentary might be giving them more credit that they deserve. For all the record's improvement on the band's sound, Elf Power remain completely unself-aware, with little to no idea of their strengths and weaknesses, which, admittedly, have shifted subtly since their last outing. Back to the Web starts strong: "Come Lie Down with Me (and Sing My Song)" provides a low-key yet confident introduction, with Heather McIntosh's cello carrying an elegantly subdued melody. As the opener flows into the more upbeat "An Old Familiar Scene", the tempo remains checked and consistent-- unfortunately, it doesn't change much at all across these dozen tracks-- the same regulated rush of sound, lead by Andrew Rieger's curiously dry vocals, on song after song. Making the most of a generally undistinguished voice, he places one syllable squarely on each beat, with minimal syncopation. Reminiscent of Donovan at his Donovanest and 60s Ren-fest pop in general, this strategy is most pronounced on the darkly pastoral "Rolling Black Water" and "King of Earth", but throughout the album, Rieger rarely leaves his vocal comfort zone or abandons his meditative, slightly detached evenness. Because he is the primary songwriter-- and because Elf Power's music has always served the lyrics-- Rieger's vocals restrain the band considerably, which seems especially unimaginative when the music sounds this nimble and emphatically evocative. With the addition of McIntosh on cello, Olivia Tremor Control's John Fernandes on violin and clarinet, Jimmy Hughes on guitar, and Josh Lott taking over drums, the lineup has expanded in interesting directions, giving the Elf even more Power. Together the band-- also including mainstays Laura Carter and bassist Brian Poole-- crafts sweeping scores for Rieger's songs, creating a psychedelic pastoral that's equally sunny and sinister. They pepper these tracks with beguiling sonic flourishes, like Julien Derocher's banjo on "23rd Dream" and McIntosh's cello drones adding low, ominous rumble to "Forming". Featuring Rieger's most lushly melodic hook and loosest vocal performance, "Peel Back the Moon, Beware!" is a sweetly shambling mid-album highlight, as Carter's accordion and Poole's bouncy bass dance around each other. These are moments that work despite the limitations of the album, proving the band is capable of much more than is captured on Back to the Web. Too bad the songs aren't as adventurous as the music. This lack of songwriterly imagination severely limits the band's range. "King of Earth" sets a tone that sounds like it's leading somewhere, but despite the layering of instruments-- mostly reeds and guitars-- it never quite fulfills its promise to burst forth dramatically, instead fading at the end with little to show for its three minutes. Even on "Somewhere Down the River" and the closing title track, when they try to cut loose and kick up some real noise, Elf Power sound restrained and muted. As the album progresses and each song falls into the same lockstep, the repetitiveness becomes increasingly noticeable and tiresome, and even the band's freshly enthusiastic inventiveness can't entirely disguise or alleviate it. As a result, Back to the Web becomes, very much unintentionally, an album of unresolved tensions and undeveloped builds-- not a welcoming web, but a house full of identical rooms and steep stairs that lead into blank walls."

Arbouretum

Long Live the Well-Doer

Electronic,Rock

Brian Howe

From Ned Oldham's Box Tree Records imprint comes Arbouretum, a recording project by his brother Will's erstwhile backing guitarist Dave Heumann. Since the Long Live the Well-Doer was created, Arbouretum have developed into a touring band with a full roster; they're recording a group album now. But this record is primarily the work of Heumann and drummer David Bergander, and the skimpy lineup contributes to its clarity of vision and lucid specificity. The record rings with the quiet purity of a pin dropped on tile, locating its force in translucence and strategic omission. Long Live the Well-Doer is rather unusually divided into two distinct songwriting styles-- austere yet richly detailed instrumentals and majestic, lo-fi indie folk anthems. The demarcation is clear: Heumann doesn't allow the two modes to blur together; he deliberately counterpoises one against the other in precarious, hypnotic equilibrium. The most striking antecedent is Dave Pajo's Papa M project, particularly the instrumental/lyrical dichotomy and mirage-like shimmer of Whatever, Mortal. Long Live the Well-Doer immediately sets about conjuring the wilderness it wearily traverses with "Sands and Sands", with its intermittent cascades of clattering percussion, the ebb and flow of slithering arpeggios, and distant chimes. On "I Am a Somnambulist", a baroque acoustic guitar figure morphs into a ramshackle dirge of shuffling electric guitar and patchwork strings, as if a DJ were crossfading Six Organs of Admittance into Califone. "Early Bird Gets the Worm" changes gears, collapsing the other instrumentals' spacious atmospheres into linear articulations of forward momentum, with its clicking drums, rigid wire of guitar, lyrical bass line, and squealing electric leads. The savage blankness of the instrumentals is tempered by vocal tracks that ascend like beacons, their brightness amplified by the murky distances between them. "Sands Upon Sands" bleeds into "Jonas Got a Tooth", a (smog)gy four-track epic that unveils Heumann's matter-of-fact baritone-- it's a long crescendo described via muted, incremental shifts in intensity and rhythm. "Don't Let It Show" is a staticky, coasting lament that seems always on the verge of grinding to a halt-- like melancholic moans drizzling over a plodding folk ballad. And on "All That Has Come Isn't Gone", Heumann parades up and down his range, his voice cracking and stretching through crisply enunciated vocal glissandos. Profiting from the tension between these two modes, Long Live the Well-Doer is a startlingly fine (if discomfortingly barren) expanse of windswept aridity, a haunted and piercingly simple desert music limned in stark silhouettes and sepia tones.

Artist: Arbouretum, Album: Long Live the Well-Doer, Genre: Electronic,Rock, Score (1-10): 7.5 Album review: "From Ned Oldham's Box Tree Records imprint comes Arbouretum, a recording project by his brother Will's erstwhile backing guitarist Dave Heumann. Since the Long Live the Well-Doer was created, Arbouretum have developed into a touring band with a full roster; they're recording a group album now. But this record is primarily the work of Heumann and drummer David Bergander, and the skimpy lineup contributes to its clarity of vision and lucid specificity. The record rings with the quiet purity of a pin dropped on tile, locating its force in translucence and strategic omission. Long Live the Well-Doer is rather unusually divided into two distinct songwriting styles-- austere yet richly detailed instrumentals and majestic, lo-fi indie folk anthems. The demarcation is clear: Heumann doesn't allow the two modes to blur together; he deliberately counterpoises one against the other in precarious, hypnotic equilibrium. The most striking antecedent is Dave Pajo's Papa M project, particularly the instrumental/lyrical dichotomy and mirage-like shimmer of Whatever, Mortal. Long Live the Well-Doer immediately sets about conjuring the wilderness it wearily traverses with "Sands and Sands", with its intermittent cascades of clattering percussion, the ebb and flow of slithering arpeggios, and distant chimes. On "I Am a Somnambulist", a baroque acoustic guitar figure morphs into a ramshackle dirge of shuffling electric guitar and patchwork strings, as if a DJ were crossfading Six Organs of Admittance into Califone. "Early Bird Gets the Worm" changes gears, collapsing the other instrumentals' spacious atmospheres into linear articulations of forward momentum, with its clicking drums, rigid wire of guitar, lyrical bass line, and squealing electric leads. The savage blankness of the instrumentals is tempered by vocal tracks that ascend like beacons, their brightness amplified by the murky distances between them. "Sands Upon Sands" bleeds into "Jonas Got a Tooth", a (smog)gy four-track epic that unveils Heumann's matter-of-fact baritone-- it's a long crescendo described via muted, incremental shifts in intensity and rhythm. "Don't Let It Show" is a staticky, coasting lament that seems always on the verge of grinding to a halt-- like melancholic moans drizzling over a plodding folk ballad. And on "All That Has Come Isn't Gone", Heumann parades up and down his range, his voice cracking and stretching through crisply enunciated vocal glissandos. Profiting from the tension between these two modes, Long Live the Well-Doer is a startlingly fine (if discomfortingly barren) expanse of windswept aridity, a haunted and piercingly simple desert music limned in stark silhouettes and sepia tones."

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists

The Brutalist Bricks

Electronic,Rock

Paul Thompson

Cred is essentially goodwill borne of good instincts. Ted Leo's got some fine instincts, and over the course of his career he's built up cred at an enviable rate. Lifers like Leo, unafraid of inserting passionate personal politics into ebullient guitar rock, don't come around too often, and few can boast a track record like his. The ease with which he synthesizes punk and its many roots and branches into something distinctly his own has only occasionally shown signs of slowing down. Still, you couldn't be blamed for being a little worried about Leo's dedication in the wake of his flimsiest full-band effort to date, 2007's Living With the Living. Living had its moments, for sure, but it was an overlong, unbalanced, occasionally sluggish record, one that felt especially weary in the wake of 2004's vitriol-guided Shake the Sheets. It felt almost instantly like one of those long, all-over-the-place punk records you admire and namecheck but don't ever pull out; the kind of thing that's historically ushered in the sunset of a once-firebrand career. The Brutalist Bricks, the first Pharmacists LP for the increasingly punk-leaning Matador, feels like a massive corrective to Living's letdowns. It runs 20 minutes shorter and has tauter, better tunes. After the bitter Shake the Sheets and the resigned Living, Bricks feels hopeful, purposeful, direct-- a mood helped along by the Pharmacists' most [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| impressive musical showing on wax since 2003's masterful Hearts of Oak. One never doubted Leo's passion, but Bricks finds him sounding rejuvenated, a refugee from the Bush regime poking his head above ground after lying low for Living and finding that now's the time to get to work. Bricks kicks off with the throat-grabbing "The Mighty Sparrow", and from there, the stink of shrapnel hangs in the air through the rest of the proceedings. Leo, ceasing to shout only to peel off a blistering solo, sounds plenty invigorated, but it's the Pharmacists-- new bassist Marty Key, longtime drummer Chris Wilson and jack of many trades James Canty-- who seem to be straightening Leo's spine and providing these tunes with a solid backbone. Leo's sound, so expansive in The Tyranny of Distance days, has been pared down further with each subsequent record, and despite a few dubby touches and a bit more acoustic guitar, Bricks follows that path. These tunes feel distilled to their very essence, and the first half of the record feels more like one long earworm. The middle third of Bricks is where you'll find its best bits, none better than "Bottled in Cork". Leo's long been a master of the travelogue; this one details the experience of being an Jerseyite overseas through the Bush era, and providing tips on how not to come off as an American idiot. The lightly funky "One Polaroid a Day" finds an unusually husky Leo him bemoaning the loss of true experience to constant documentation; take note, bloggers. The more breathless "Where Was My Brain?" and "Gimme the Wire" manage to stick despite their breakneck paces, thanks to Leo's insistence here on piling hooks on top of hooks; largely gone are the long expository verses from the Hearts/Sheets era and the never-ending choruses of Living. But in distilling everything down to their essence, some of Leo's lyrical directness comes across a bit blunt-- not all, mind but there's a distinct lean towards sandwich-board fodder rather than the carefully constructed, metaphor-laced screeds of old. Few songwriters could kick off their best tune in years with a line like "There was a resolution pending on the United Nations floor" without inspiring either a yawn or a giggle, but Leo does it here with "Bottled"; he pulls it off okay, but there are a few more metaphor-eschewing moments like these where Leo goes way literal. "We all got a job to do and we all hate God" is how he kicks off "Woke Up Near Chelsea", and it reads better than it sounds on record. The otherwise lovely "Ativan Eyes" begins with a too-clever nod to Marx: "The industry's out of touch. The means of production are now in the hands of the workers" just isn't a line that belongs in a pop tune, particularly one that implores someone to lay their hands on Leo just a couple stanzas later. Leo's still exceptionally adept at saying a lot in a small space but there are more than a few lines that feel a little too forceful no matter how many times you run into them, sitting slightly askew next to the richer images and more pointed jabs here. That occasional obtuseness is really the only thing keeping Bricks from the absolute upper-tier of Leo records; well, that, and "Tuberculoids Arrive in Hop", an unfocused, murky number that's serves as little more than a breather amidst the LP's hyperkinetic back end. Still, you hit play on Brutalist Bricks and these things seem, at best, like secondary concerns; weak spots and strained metaphors aside, the passionate, instinctual Bricks is the finest record from one of the greats in six rocky years.

Artist: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Album: The Brutalist Bricks, Genre: Electronic,Rock, Score (1-10): 7.9 Album review: "Cred is essentially goodwill borne of good instincts. Ted Leo's got some fine instincts, and over the course of his career he's built up cred at an enviable rate. Lifers like Leo, unafraid of inserting passionate personal politics into ebullient guitar rock, don't come around too often, and few can boast a track record like his. The ease with which he synthesizes punk and its many roots and branches into something distinctly his own has only occasionally shown signs of slowing down. Still, you couldn't be blamed for being a little worried about Leo's dedication in the wake of his flimsiest full-band effort to date, 2007's Living With the Living. Living had its moments, for sure, but it was an overlong, unbalanced, occasionally sluggish record, one that felt especially weary in the wake of 2004's vitriol-guided Shake the Sheets. It felt almost instantly like one of those long, all-over-the-place punk records you admire and namecheck but don't ever pull out; the kind of thing that's historically ushered in the sunset of a once-firebrand career. The Brutalist Bricks, the first Pharmacists LP for the increasingly punk-leaning Matador, feels like a massive corrective to Living's letdowns. It runs 20 minutes shorter and has tauter, better tunes. After the bitter Shake the Sheets and the resigned Living, Bricks feels hopeful, purposeful, direct-- a mood helped along by the Pharmacists' most [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| impressive musical showing on wax since 2003's masterful Hearts of Oak. One never doubted Leo's passion, but Bricks finds him sounding rejuvenated, a refugee from the Bush regime poking his head above ground after lying low for Living and finding that now's the time to get to work. Bricks kicks off with the throat-grabbing "The Mighty Sparrow", and from there, the stink of shrapnel hangs in the air through the rest of the proceedings. Leo, ceasing to shout only to peel off a blistering solo, sounds plenty invigorated, but it's the Pharmacists-- new bassist Marty Key, longtime drummer Chris Wilson and jack of many trades James Canty-- who seem to be straightening Leo's spine and providing these tunes with a solid backbone. Leo's sound, so expansive in The Tyranny of Distance days, has been pared down further with each subsequent record, and despite a few dubby touches and a bit more acoustic guitar, Bricks follows that path. These tunes feel distilled to their very essence, and the first half of the record feels more like one long earworm. The middle third of Bricks is where you'll find its best bits, none better than "Bottled in Cork". Leo's long been a master of the travelogue; this one details the experience of being an Jerseyite overseas through the Bush era, and providing tips on how not to come off as an American idiot. The lightly funky "One Polaroid a Day" finds an unusually husky Leo him bemoaning the loss of true experience to constant documentation; take note, bloggers. The more breathless "Where Was My Brain?" and "Gimme the Wire" manage to stick despite their breakneck paces, thanks to Leo's insistence here on piling hooks on top of hooks; largely gone are the long expository verses from the Hearts/Sheets era and the never-ending choruses of Living. But in distilling everything down to their essence, some of Leo's lyrical directness comes across a bit blunt-- not all, mind but there's a distinct lean towards sandwich-board fodder rather than the carefully constructed, metaphor-laced screeds of old. Few songwriters could kick off their best tune in years with a line like "There was a resolution pending on the United Nations floor" without inspiring either a yawn or a giggle, but Leo does it here with "Bottled"; he pulls it off okay, but there are a few more metaphor-eschewing moments like these where Leo goes way literal. "We all got a job to do and we all hate God" is how he kicks off "Woke Up Near Chelsea", and it reads better than it sounds on record. The otherwise lovely "Ativan Eyes" begins with a too-clever nod to Marx: "The industry's out of touch. The means of production are now in the hands of the workers" just isn't a line that belongs in a pop tune, particularly one that implores someone to lay their hands on Leo just a couple stanzas later. Leo's still exceptionally adept at saying a lot in a small space but there are more than a few lines that feel a little too forceful no matter how many times you run into them, sitting slightly askew next to the richer images and more pointed jabs here. That occasional obtuseness is really the only thing keeping Bricks from the absolute upper-tier of Leo records; well, that, and "Tuberculoids Arrive in Hop", an unfocused, murky number that's serves as little more than a breather amidst the LP's hyperkinetic back end. Still, you hit play on Brutalist Bricks and these things seem, at best, like secondary concerns; weak spots and strained metaphors aside, the passionate, instinctual Bricks is the finest record from one of the greats in six rocky years."

School of Seven Bells

Put Your Sad Down EP

Rock

Eric Harvey

School of Seven Bells' 2012 LP Ghostory was loosely structured around the character Lafaye, who finds herself consistently confronted by ghosts, but not of the "boo!" variety. For singer/lyricist Alejandra Deheza, ghosts represent the very real emotions that arise from deeply personal past events-- particularly those that aren't blessed with a sense of closure-- and which manifest themselves bodily as stress, or a general sense of unease. Not anything near the leap forward that 2010's Disconnect from Desire, was from 2008's Alpinisms, Ghostory was more Deheza and Ben Curtis doubling down on the group's foundational conceit: a meditative confrontation with the shackles of guilt-- what Depeche Mode called "a halo in reverse." From its title alone, it's tempting to view the 5 track tour EP Put Your Sad Down as a too-literal evocation of Ghostory's conceit-- like the highly-regarded therapist going all in and aiming for the top of the self-help bestseller chart. Indeed, Sad's title track is the most outlandish thing they've ever done: a nearly 13-minute excursion into *Miami Vice-*style synth thumps and the monasterial echo of Violator, that takes an off-ramp into a lengthy drone section halfway through before reprising the central theme. "All I wanna do/ Is make you forget/ Forget that you feel so bad," Deheza chants, echoing the mystical empathy that suffuses all of SVIIB's music, but with a fervor more in line with the euphoria of disco-style escapism. When she suggests "tonight, just feel with your body," however, it's less a suggestion to give in to unfettered eros than to heed a personal fulfillment mantra. In essence, it's the perfect lead track for a tour EP, a release genre that typically collects castaways and one-offs as a reward to fans who come out to live dates. There are some orphans on Sad, though tracks like "Secret Days" and "Faded Heart" merge Deheza's trademark yearning with production that respectively recall the earthy circa 2008 Brooklyn syncopations of Alpinisms and a more outré version of Disconnect's take on 90s club music. A dream-pop update of Silver Apples' hypnotic proto-electro track "Lovefingers" would certainly stick out on the band's carefully drawn LPs, but in an interstitial context, the song affectionately traces a direct line back to one of the preeminent pioneers of SVIIB's own sound. Particularly with the departure of Deheza's twin Claudia from the group before the release of Ghostory, SVIIB has gone through some significant changes over the past year. Perhaps this release is their own way of dispensing with some lingering ghosts before moving on to something new.

Artist: School of Seven Bells, Album: Put Your Sad Down EP, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 6.3 Album review: "School of Seven Bells' 2012 LP Ghostory was loosely structured around the character Lafaye, who finds herself consistently confronted by ghosts, but not of the "boo!" variety. For singer/lyricist Alejandra Deheza, ghosts represent the very real emotions that arise from deeply personal past events-- particularly those that aren't blessed with a sense of closure-- and which manifest themselves bodily as stress, or a general sense of unease. Not anything near the leap forward that 2010's Disconnect from Desire, was from 2008's Alpinisms, Ghostory was more Deheza and Ben Curtis doubling down on the group's foundational conceit: a meditative confrontation with the shackles of guilt-- what Depeche Mode called "a halo in reverse." From its title alone, it's tempting to view the 5 track tour EP Put Your Sad Down as a too-literal evocation of Ghostory's conceit-- like the highly-regarded therapist going all in and aiming for the top of the self-help bestseller chart. Indeed, Sad's title track is the most outlandish thing they've ever done: a nearly 13-minute excursion into *Miami Vice-*style synth thumps and the monasterial echo of Violator, that takes an off-ramp into a lengthy drone section halfway through before reprising the central theme. "All I wanna do/ Is make you forget/ Forget that you feel so bad," Deheza chants, echoing the mystical empathy that suffuses all of SVIIB's music, but with a fervor more in line with the euphoria of disco-style escapism. When she suggests "tonight, just feel with your body," however, it's less a suggestion to give in to unfettered eros than to heed a personal fulfillment mantra. In essence, it's the perfect lead track for a tour EP, a release genre that typically collects castaways and one-offs as a reward to fans who come out to live dates. There are some orphans on Sad, though tracks like "Secret Days" and "Faded Heart" merge Deheza's trademark yearning with production that respectively recall the earthy circa 2008 Brooklyn syncopations of Alpinisms and a more outré version of Disconnect's take on 90s club music. A dream-pop update of Silver Apples' hypnotic proto-electro track "Lovefingers" would certainly stick out on the band's carefully drawn LPs, but in an interstitial context, the song affectionately traces a direct line back to one of the preeminent pioneers of SVIIB's own sound. Particularly with the departure of Deheza's twin Claudia from the group before the release of Ghostory, SVIIB has gone through some significant changes over the past year. Perhaps this release is their own way of dispensing with some lingering ghosts before moving on to something new."

Gorillaz

The Fall

Electronic,Rock

Stephen M. Deusner

"It can be anything you want it to be. This is the nearest we have got to seeing what I would call a universal machine." That's British artist David Hockney talking about the iPad. Hockney does sketches on his, using an app called Brushes, and several of his works are already hanging this month in an exhibition at the Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation in Paris. Hockney is presumably drawn to the novelty as much as to the functionality of Apple's curious device, which is like a big iPhone that won't make calls, or like a small laptop without a keyboard. Rather than render it redundant or limited, those disabilities have made it as universal as Hockney attests, attracting hundreds of thousands of users ranging from my mom to Damon Albarn, who recorded the new Gorillaz album on his iPad. The Fall, released for free on Christmas, is a nice marketing gimmick and the product of Albarn's restlessness on tour. While Hockney's sketches clearly look like they were done on some kind of computer, nothing about Albarn's songs reveals their origins. Instead, The Fall possesses the crisply eccentric production value of a typical Gorillaz album, which may be a testament to the iPad's ability to manipulate and combine sound files with little loss of fidelity or complexity. On the other hand, it doesn't appear to handle hip-hop very well. The Fall contains opens stretches of loping, belching beats that are painstakingly crafted yet often sound like they've been created as backdrops for MC cameos. But there's only one guest, a barely recognizable Bobby Womack on "Bobby in Phoenix"; otherwise, it's Albarn singing and creating songs, which gives The Fall the feel of a solo album. At times it needs other voices to liven up some of these long stretches. Even so, it's fitting that Albarn has released it under the Gorillaz moniker. For one thing, that band has always had a strong visual component that makes the cartoon/hologram characters seem like they were meant to be up- and downloaded, so it's not hard to imagine them trapped in an iPad like General Zod at the end of Superman II. Songs like "Revolving Doors" and "Detroit" have the same hazily martial beats that have marked the Gorillaz' output since "Clint Eastwood", which makes The Fall slot neatly into the Gorillaz catalog. It's less a proper album like Demon Days or Plastic Beach-- more an auxiliary item like that live album or that G-Sides comp or that remix album (or, in Albarn's career as a whole, like his lowkey, homemade Democrazy set.) Albarn's mode may be somber and road-weary, but there's not a whole lot of heft here, which means it sounds like a unified outtakes record rather than a major statement. Thematically, it's a tour album, leaving behind the Pacific Ocean trash island of Plastic Beach for the highways of America, evoked in songs named after Phoenix, Aspen, Dallas, Detroit, Seattle, and Amarillo. With its rangey beats and garbled transmission noises, "The Parish of Space Dust" imagines a Texas as expansive as the cosmos, but it's just enough to make you wish Albarn had incorporated some southwestern influences the way Plastic Beach used island rhythms to bolster its setting. Despite the emphasis on atmosphere that pervades the album and that seems like a necessary byproduct of its creative technology, The Fall may be the most earthbound Gorillaz album yet-- and at times, therefore, the most banal. At his best, Albarn manages to create an alien ambience, as if visiting America has made him feel as out-of-place as certain travelers must have felt around Roswell. Still, he's always passing through, never stopping for a visit, and as a result, The Fall is a blur. Whether as an album or as a touring document, it doesn't add up to much of a statement, which means the particulars of its creation will probably always overshadow whatever life this album may find.

Artist: Gorillaz, Album: The Fall, Genre: Electronic,Rock, Score (1-10): 5.8 Album review: ""It can be anything you want it to be. This is the nearest we have got to seeing what I would call a universal machine." That's British artist David Hockney talking about the iPad. Hockney does sketches on his, using an app called Brushes, and several of his works are already hanging this month in an exhibition at the Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation in Paris. Hockney is presumably drawn to the novelty as much as to the functionality of Apple's curious device, which is like a big iPhone that won't make calls, or like a small laptop without a keyboard. Rather than render it redundant or limited, those disabilities have made it as universal as Hockney attests, attracting hundreds of thousands of users ranging from my mom to Damon Albarn, who recorded the new Gorillaz album on his iPad. The Fall, released for free on Christmas, is a nice marketing gimmick and the product of Albarn's restlessness on tour. While Hockney's sketches clearly look like they were done on some kind of computer, nothing about Albarn's songs reveals their origins. Instead, The Fall possesses the crisply eccentric production value of a typical Gorillaz album, which may be a testament to the iPad's ability to manipulate and combine sound files with little loss of fidelity or complexity. On the other hand, it doesn't appear to handle hip-hop very well. The Fall contains opens stretches of loping, belching beats that are painstakingly crafted yet often sound like they've been created as backdrops for MC cameos. But there's only one guest, a barely recognizable Bobby Womack on "Bobby in Phoenix"; otherwise, it's Albarn singing and creating songs, which gives The Fall the feel of a solo album. At times it needs other voices to liven up some of these long stretches. Even so, it's fitting that Albarn has released it under the Gorillaz moniker. For one thing, that band has always had a strong visual component that makes the cartoon/hologram characters seem like they were meant to be up- and downloaded, so it's not hard to imagine them trapped in an iPad like General Zod at the end of Superman II. Songs like "Revolving Doors" and "Detroit" have the same hazily martial beats that have marked the Gorillaz' output since "Clint Eastwood", which makes The Fall slot neatly into the Gorillaz catalog. It's less a proper album like Demon Days or Plastic Beach-- more an auxiliary item like that live album or that G-Sides comp or that remix album (or, in Albarn's career as a whole, like his lowkey, homemade Democrazy set.) Albarn's mode may be somber and road-weary, but there's not a whole lot of heft here, which means it sounds like a unified outtakes record rather than a major statement. Thematically, it's a tour album, leaving behind the Pacific Ocean trash island of Plastic Beach for the highways of America, evoked in songs named after Phoenix, Aspen, Dallas, Detroit, Seattle, and Amarillo. With its rangey beats and garbled transmission noises, "The Parish of Space Dust" imagines a Texas as expansive as the cosmos, but it's just enough to make you wish Albarn had incorporated some southwestern influences the way Plastic Beach used island rhythms to bolster its setting. Despite the emphasis on atmosphere that pervades the album and that seems like a necessary byproduct of its creative technology, The Fall may be the most earthbound Gorillaz album yet-- and at times, therefore, the most banal. At his best, Albarn manages to create an alien ambience, as if visiting America has made him feel as out-of-place as certain travelers must have felt around Roswell. Still, he's always passing through, never stopping for a visit, and as a result, The Fall is a blur. Whether as an album or as a touring document, it doesn't add up to much of a statement, which means the particulars of its creation will probably always overshadow whatever life this album may find."

Jesca Hoop

Hunting My Dress

Folk/Country,Pop/R&B

Stephen M. Deusner

Jesca Hoop was raised in a Mormon household in Northern California, where she grew up singing harmony with her siblings. Later, she worked as a nanny for Tom Waits' kids. Her songs have been heralded by KCRW's Nic Harcourt and Elbow's Guy Garvey, who took her on tour as an opening act. But recently she moved from California to Manchester, and it is this, perhaps the most mundane aspect of her biography, which turns out to be most crucial, at least in regard to her second album, Hunting My Dress. That transatlantic relocation deeply informs her music, which blends British pastoral folk with earthy American blues and roots traditions. Evoking both the sylvan glen and the swampy delta, Hoop sets lilting melodies against gritty guitar licks, which lope through the songs with dogged repetitions-- as if she's excerpted only a few minutes of an infinite loop. It's a bracing combination of styles, one that underscores the drama of her lyrics and emboldens her idiosyncrasies. There's a disarming personality at work in these songs. How many other musicians would bother to write about hearing a DJ play one of her tunes off her debut? And how many could do so without sounding self-impressed? On "Angel Mom", Hoop compares that feeling of professional accomplishment to the joy of her mother coming home: "I haven't felt that way since I was a child," she sings with a measured nostalgia, her voice careening over the syllables softly. Her own past is fodder for these songs, but Dress never sounds beholden to rock history (and certainly not to Manchester's). Rather than simply revive these old British and American styles, Hoop plays around with them, deconstructing and reassembling them in odd ways. She half-raps the verses of "Four Dreams" in a child's sing-song melody, then breaks into the kind of carefree chorus Liz Phair has been trying to write for a decade. "Feast [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| of the Heart" dirties up her vocals to gritty, claustrophobic effect, but she sounds liveliest on the more straightforward songs, especially "Murder of Birds", a plaintively acoustic duet with Elbow's Guy Garvey. Hoop constantly foregrounds her eccentricities on Hunting My Dress, and her plucky precocity can be alienating at times. She begins "Whispering Light" with a trill of vocal birdsong-- a strange freak-folk scat-singing that's a questionable introduction and a hurdle to overcome. Her songs veer purposefully into digressions, studiously avoiding verse-chorus-verse structures and twisting themselves into unexpected and not always graceful shapes. The esoteric quality of Hunting My Dress occasionally sounds willful, as if that free-spirited personality were itself a careful construct-- a particularly studious and insistent one. Hoop is an undeniably charismatic musician, but her music will benefit from a more natural and organic absorption of these impulses. In other words, she doesn't need to work so hard to prove anything.

Artist: Jesca Hoop, Album: Hunting My Dress, Genre: Folk/Country,Pop/R&B, Score (1-10): 6.9 Album review: "Jesca Hoop was raised in a Mormon household in Northern California, where she grew up singing harmony with her siblings. Later, she worked as a nanny for Tom Waits' kids. Her songs have been heralded by KCRW's Nic Harcourt and Elbow's Guy Garvey, who took her on tour as an opening act. But recently she moved from California to Manchester, and it is this, perhaps the most mundane aspect of her biography, which turns out to be most crucial, at least in regard to her second album, Hunting My Dress. That transatlantic relocation deeply informs her music, which blends British pastoral folk with earthy American blues and roots traditions. Evoking both the sylvan glen and the swampy delta, Hoop sets lilting melodies against gritty guitar licks, which lope through the songs with dogged repetitions-- as if she's excerpted only a few minutes of an infinite loop. It's a bracing combination of styles, one that underscores the drama of her lyrics and emboldens her idiosyncrasies. There's a disarming personality at work in these songs. How many other musicians would bother to write about hearing a DJ play one of her tunes off her debut? And how many could do so without sounding self-impressed? On "Angel Mom", Hoop compares that feeling of professional accomplishment to the joy of her mother coming home: "I haven't felt that way since I was a child," she sings with a measured nostalgia, her voice careening over the syllables softly. Her own past is fodder for these songs, but Dress never sounds beholden to rock history (and certainly not to Manchester's). Rather than simply revive these old British and American styles, Hoop plays around with them, deconstructing and reassembling them in odd ways. She half-raps the verses of "Four Dreams" in a child's sing-song melody, then breaks into the kind of carefree chorus Liz Phair has been trying to write for a decade. "Feast [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| of the Heart" dirties up her vocals to gritty, claustrophobic effect, but she sounds liveliest on the more straightforward songs, especially "Murder of Birds", a plaintively acoustic duet with Elbow's Guy Garvey. Hoop constantly foregrounds her eccentricities on Hunting My Dress, and her plucky precocity can be alienating at times. She begins "Whispering Light" with a trill of vocal birdsong-- a strange freak-folk scat-singing that's a questionable introduction and a hurdle to overcome. Her songs veer purposefully into digressions, studiously avoiding verse-chorus-verse structures and twisting themselves into unexpected and not always graceful shapes. The esoteric quality of Hunting My Dress occasionally sounds willful, as if that free-spirited personality were itself a careful construct-- a particularly studious and insistent one. Hoop is an undeniably charismatic musician, but her music will benefit from a more natural and organic absorption of these impulses. In other words, she doesn't need to work so hard to prove anything."

Tara Jane O’Neil

Where Shine New Lights

Folk/Country

Paul Thompson

"What you love is made of wind," Tara Jane O'Neil muses a little more than halfway through Where Shine New Lights, her first solo LP in five years. The deeply naturalistic Lights finds O'Neil—ex-Rodan bassist, painter, constant collaborator, and tireless solo experimenter—carving scenery out of sound. Yet it's the record's very next line that really gets to the heart of Lights: "you will not be this shape again." Lights, her first LP for Kranky, is quite possibly the finest merging of the chameleonic O'Neil's song-based work and her more experimental side. But combing through the catalog for comparison-points doesn't quite get at what makes Lights so striking. Lights is a peculiar thing: impeccably designed, with every thrum positioned just so, yet entirely malleable, different every time you come across it. Lights, like much of O'Neil's solo work, occupies a space between traditional songcraft and more experimental fare, weaving ghostly drones and incidental noises through hushed, unhurried post-folk. Throughout Lights, O'Neil brings the two sides as close as they've ever come before, meticulously plotting out every earthy strum and faraway clatter. Swirling opener "Welcome" bleeds a increasingly ominous whoosh into the heavy-lidded, borderline groovy "Wordless in Woods", which makes its way into the slowpoke folk-pop of "This Morning Glory". Each move is unhurried, each note is placed just so. But, for all the precision of the arrangements, Lights is the farthest thing from rigid. O'Neil's been careful to leave space in these songs, to let them unfurl at a ruminative pace, to burrow secrets way down in the mix. It leaves Lights feeling practically habitable, a good place to get some thinking done. O'Neil casts an optimstic glow over much of Lights, but its tone is always in flux. "Bellow Below as Above" is an ominous, shapeshifting, just-before-sunrise dirge that slowly climbs its way into a gnarled sort of beauty. Little instrumental exhalations complicate the haunting Brit-folk of "Elemental Finding", while the oblong near-slowcore of "The Signal, Lift" unwinds over a bed of whispering cymbals, growing more intense by the minute. O'Neil's a fine lyricist—look no further than "Elemental Finding"—but much of Lights' vocalizing is wordless, evoking feelings rather than spelling them out. Lights is rarely less than beautiful, but between the often-sparse arrangements and impressionistic singing, these abstractions require patience on the listener's part. Give Lights your total concentration, and it opens up completely; start flipping through your phone, and it vanishes into the air. But it's that very pliancy that makes the album so easy to return to; it's harmoniously balanced, yet as liable to change along with the quality of the light, a distressed folk record on one listen, and a sumptuous, swirling exploratory drone record the next. O'Neil's certainly made her share of enrapturing, enveloping music. But I'm not sure she's ever made one quite as transportive—or, for that matter, as alive—as Where Shine New Lights.

Artist: Tara Jane O’Neil, Album: Where Shine New Lights, Genre: Folk/Country, Score (1-10): 7.9 Album review: ""What you love is made of wind," Tara Jane O'Neil muses a little more than halfway through Where Shine New Lights, her first solo LP in five years. The deeply naturalistic Lights finds O'Neil—ex-Rodan bassist, painter, constant collaborator, and tireless solo experimenter—carving scenery out of sound. Yet it's the record's very next line that really gets to the heart of Lights: "you will not be this shape again." Lights, her first LP for Kranky, is quite possibly the finest merging of the chameleonic O'Neil's song-based work and her more experimental side. But combing through the catalog for comparison-points doesn't quite get at what makes Lights so striking. Lights is a peculiar thing: impeccably designed, with every thrum positioned just so, yet entirely malleable, different every time you come across it. Lights, like much of O'Neil's solo work, occupies a space between traditional songcraft and more experimental fare, weaving ghostly drones and incidental noises through hushed, unhurried post-folk. Throughout Lights, O'Neil brings the two sides as close as they've ever come before, meticulously plotting out every earthy strum and faraway clatter. Swirling opener "Welcome" bleeds a increasingly ominous whoosh into the heavy-lidded, borderline groovy "Wordless in Woods", which makes its way into the slowpoke folk-pop of "This Morning Glory". Each move is unhurried, each note is placed just so. But, for all the precision of the arrangements, Lights is the farthest thing from rigid. O'Neil's been careful to leave space in these songs, to let them unfurl at a ruminative pace, to burrow secrets way down in the mix. It leaves Lights feeling practically habitable, a good place to get some thinking done. O'Neil casts an optimstic glow over much of Lights, but its tone is always in flux. "Bellow Below as Above" is an ominous, shapeshifting, just-before-sunrise dirge that slowly climbs its way into a gnarled sort of beauty. Little instrumental exhalations complicate the haunting Brit-folk of "Elemental Finding", while the oblong near-slowcore of "The Signal, Lift" unwinds over a bed of whispering cymbals, growing more intense by the minute. O'Neil's a fine lyricist—look no further than "Elemental Finding"—but much of Lights' vocalizing is wordless, evoking feelings rather than spelling them out. Lights is rarely less than beautiful, but between the often-sparse arrangements and impressionistic singing, these abstractions require patience on the listener's part. Give Lights your total concentration, and it opens up completely; start flipping through your phone, and it vanishes into the air. But it's that very pliancy that makes the album so easy to return to; it's harmoniously balanced, yet as liable to change along with the quality of the light, a distressed folk record on one listen, and a sumptuous, swirling exploratory drone record the next. O'Neil's certainly made her share of enrapturing, enveloping music. But I'm not sure she's ever made one quite as transportive—or, for that matter, as alive—as Where Shine New Lights."

Flying Lotus

Until the Quiet Comes

Electronic

Mark Richardson

Steven Ellison called his breakthrough album as Flying Lotus Los Angeles, and his music still has a strong metaphorical connection to the city. He's an admirer of producers like Dr. Dre, but Ellison's vision mixes the pulse of contemporary urban life with an extra dose of sci-fi futurism. He has his ear to the ground in terms of what's happening now and what's real, but his mind is fixated on what might happen tomorrow-- part Boyz n the Hood, part Blade Runner. And since Ellison's musical palette always circles back to the Eastern-tinged textures that infiltrated jazz when his great aunt Alice Coltrane was helping set the pace (assorted bells, harp plucks, the pings of steel and knock of wood), his music feels cosmic, bound to L.A. as a geographic idea but not necessarily of this earth. In the last five years, Flying Lotus has become a standard-bearer for 21st-century beat construction by looking forward and backward simultaneously and making music that feels like an exploration. So what happens when such an artist reaches a cul-de-sac? After Flying Lotus' 2010 landmark Cosmogramma, further density was not an option. That album was packed so tightly with rhythms, instruments, and textures that adding more to the mix would have meant risking identity; just a few more samples could have turned the music into an indistinct mush that contains every color at once. Cosmogramma felt like an end game, and the new Flying Lotus album, Until the Quiet Comes, finds Ellison lighting out in a new direction. He's thinking in terms of air, mood, and simplicity. In an interview with the UK magazine The Wire, Ellison described Quiet as his attempt at "a children's record, a record for kids to dream to." While there's nothing cute or naive on the album, you get a sense of what Ellison might mean when it comes to dreaming. The album's opening section, including "Until the Colours Come", "Heave(n)", and "All In", functions as a sort of miniature suite of downtempo jazz. This is Flying Lotus at its most vibe-heavy and mystical, where rooms are thick with purple incense and it's always 3 a.m. The sound is not new-- tracks like these were a cornerstone of 1990s trip-hop of the Headz comp/Ninja Tune variety-- but the sheer beauty of Ellison's design sets his music apart. This is a quality he shares with the very different Ricardo Villalobos: By pulling back and giving his meticulously-constructed elements room to breathe, Ellison allows us to hear them as if for the first time. "Tiny Tortures" begins with a rhythm that's all bones-- a simulated wood block, snare, and hissy cymbal tracing out an off-kilter beat. Against this backdrop the bass guitar of Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner enters, and the contrast between his gliding, harmonically rich runs and the spare opening is breathtaking. Thundercat's expressive bass work also adds character to the comparatively thick title track, as a gong and handclaps flow continuously like water over rocks while an unstable Dilla-fied keyboard wedges in between the beats. But even here, when there's more going on, the ear can fixate on any one sound and extract feeling from it. As the album progresses, it changes in feel, but the shifts are organic. If the tracks in the opening section bring to mind an abstraction of spaced-out jazz, elsewhere Ellision conjures the blocky colors of videos games. See the thick 8-bit synths in "Sultan's Request", the curlicue melody in "Putty Boy Strut", the simple refrain of the title track, which makes me think of a digital hero on a quest. These lighter moments are careful and reserved. You can feel Ellison putting a smaller frame around each individual part. The hushed world Ellison has constructed here is hermetic and internally focused, even for him, and the album's guests don't break the spell. The featured players meet Ellison on his turf and adapt to the landscape of the record. Erykah Badu's connection to Flying Lotus' broader aesthetic is readily apparent, as her sense of mystical earthiness is grounded in tradition but free to wander outside of it. On "See Thru to U", she does away with soul singing in its formal sense and allows herself to become an instrument. The result is a satisfying melding of creative personalities but it wouldn't work on an Erykah Badu album-- it's too vaporous, too unconcerned with personality. The same goes for Thom Yorke's contribution on "Electric Candyman"; Ellison turns him into a ghost, which makes perfect sense. Following the shattering Cosmogramma, Until the Quiet Comes is disarming at first. It sometimes feels like an experiment in how much can be stripped away while still sounding like Flying Lotus, but the reduction offers a new perspective into what Ellison is about. Los Angeles and Cosmogramma brought to mind the L.A. that thrives on acceleration. The energy here is just as strong, but it's concentrated into a smaller space. So while this might be Flying Lotus' most accessible record, it's less about being pleasant and more about deep focus. Each of these 18 tracks tends to introduce one or two emotional or musical elements and meditate on them for a brief time before easing back into silence. Quiet is a series of suggestions or clues and it always feels just out of reach, but that leaves a lot of room for the listener. The surface is a gorgeous invitation to return and see if you can figure out what it all means.

Artist: Flying Lotus, Album: Until the Quiet Comes, Genre: Electronic, Score (1-10): 8.5 Album review: "Steven Ellison called his breakthrough album as Flying Lotus Los Angeles, and his music still has a strong metaphorical connection to the city. He's an admirer of producers like Dr. Dre, but Ellison's vision mixes the pulse of contemporary urban life with an extra dose of sci-fi futurism. He has his ear to the ground in terms of what's happening now and what's real, but his mind is fixated on what might happen tomorrow-- part Boyz n the Hood, part Blade Runner. And since Ellison's musical palette always circles back to the Eastern-tinged textures that infiltrated jazz when his great aunt Alice Coltrane was helping set the pace (assorted bells, harp plucks, the pings of steel and knock of wood), his music feels cosmic, bound to L.A. as a geographic idea but not necessarily of this earth. In the last five years, Flying Lotus has become a standard-bearer for 21st-century beat construction by looking forward and backward simultaneously and making music that feels like an exploration. So what happens when such an artist reaches a cul-de-sac? After Flying Lotus' 2010 landmark Cosmogramma, further density was not an option. That album was packed so tightly with rhythms, instruments, and textures that adding more to the mix would have meant risking identity; just a few more samples could have turned the music into an indistinct mush that contains every color at once. Cosmogramma felt like an end game, and the new Flying Lotus album, Until the Quiet Comes, finds Ellison lighting out in a new direction. He's thinking in terms of air, mood, and simplicity. In an interview with the UK magazine The Wire, Ellison described Quiet as his attempt at "a children's record, a record for kids to dream to." While there's nothing cute or naive on the album, you get a sense of what Ellison might mean when it comes to dreaming. The album's opening section, including "Until the Colours Come", "Heave(n)", and "All In", functions as a sort of miniature suite of downtempo jazz. This is Flying Lotus at its most vibe-heavy and mystical, where rooms are thick with purple incense and it's always 3 a.m. The sound is not new-- tracks like these were a cornerstone of 1990s trip-hop of the Headz comp/Ninja Tune variety-- but the sheer beauty of Ellison's design sets his music apart. This is a quality he shares with the very different Ricardo Villalobos: By pulling back and giving his meticulously-constructed elements room to breathe, Ellison allows us to hear them as if for the first time. "Tiny Tortures" begins with a rhythm that's all bones-- a simulated wood block, snare, and hissy cymbal tracing out an off-kilter beat. Against this backdrop the bass guitar of Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner enters, and the contrast between his gliding, harmonically rich runs and the spare opening is breathtaking. Thundercat's expressive bass work also adds character to the comparatively thick title track, as a gong and handclaps flow continuously like water over rocks while an unstable Dilla-fied keyboard wedges in between the beats. But even here, when there's more going on, the ear can fixate on any one sound and extract feeling from it. As the album progresses, it changes in feel, but the shifts are organic. If the tracks in the opening section bring to mind an abstraction of spaced-out jazz, elsewhere Ellision conjures the blocky colors of videos games. See the thick 8-bit synths in "Sultan's Request", the curlicue melody in "Putty Boy Strut", the simple refrain of the title track, which makes me think of a digital hero on a quest. These lighter moments are careful and reserved. You can feel Ellison putting a smaller frame around each individual part. The hushed world Ellison has constructed here is hermetic and internally focused, even for him, and the album's guests don't break the spell. The featured players meet Ellison on his turf and adapt to the landscape of the record. Erykah Badu's connection to Flying Lotus' broader aesthetic is readily apparent, as her sense of mystical earthiness is grounded in tradition but free to wander outside of it. On "See Thru to U", she does away with soul singing in its formal sense and allows herself to become an instrument. The result is a satisfying melding of creative personalities but it wouldn't work on an Erykah Badu album-- it's too vaporous, too unconcerned with personality. The same goes for Thom Yorke's contribution on "Electric Candyman"; Ellison turns him into a ghost, which makes perfect sense. Following the shattering Cosmogramma, Until the Quiet Comes is disarming at first. It sometimes feels like an experiment in how much can be stripped away while still sounding like Flying Lotus, but the reduction offers a new perspective into what Ellison is about. Los Angeles and Cosmogramma brought to mind the L.A. that thrives on acceleration. The energy here is just as strong, but it's concentrated into a smaller space. So while this might be Flying Lotus' most accessible record, it's less about being pleasant and more about deep focus. Each of these 18 tracks tends to introduce one or two emotional or musical elements and meditate on them for a brief time before easing back into silence. Quiet is a series of suggestions or clues and it always feels just out of reach, but that leaves a lot of room for the listener. The surface is a gorgeous invitation to return and see if you can figure out what it all means."

The Party of Helicopters

Please Believe It

Metal,Rock

Andrew Bryant

Raising the headphones to my skull for my first listen to My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, I was struck by the taste of a heavy mousse or a rich pastry: I discovered the capacity of directed sound to inform an otherwise disconnected gustatory sensation. I searched out other experiences, finding that classical music whets my appetite for small portions of vegetable dishes and rare Japanese cuisine served on an asymmetrical jade plate. Jazz makes my mouth dry with the odor of cigarettes and a hard drink. Rock 'n' roll-- and nearly all of its substituents-- leaves an aftertaste of mostly carnal delights; a bleeding porterhouse, or at times a more elegant filet, wrapped in bacon and topped with horseradish sauce. There are notable exceptions to these corporal delicacies though, as rock 'n' roll has also given birth to the bubblegum-and-marshmallow-flavored emo-core scene, the Spam-laden rock/punk-revival and the saltwater taffy of electro/electro pop. Counted among its differing offspring of rock is shoegaze, a sub-genre from which nearly any composition lends itself directly to savory desserts-- small portions of dense pleasure that are lovely in moderation, but can be more than slightly off-putting if consumed in mass quantities. Loveless, the Pitchfork-endorsed exemplar shoegazer album, serves as the crème brule-- the mark by which all others should be measured. This leads to a problem: the watermark of excellence having been set, the only thing left for its musical legacy is the tweaking of the established order in hopes of arriving at something new, if not necessarily better. This has led to all manner of ghastly cuisine, but occasionally it yields something palatable. Initially, the thought of joining shoegaze and heavy metal-- a la Black Sabbath and Judas Priest-- is as off-putting an idea as combining dark chocolate and sweetbread, but the Party of Helicopters nearly prove otherwise on their aptly titled Please Believe It. Flexing hard riffs over a constant wall of feedback, Jamie Stillman leads his troupe through the album in a manner befitting the former drummer of post-hardcore group Harriet the Spy: upgrading that group's sound with vocalist Joe Dennis' roots in the shoegazer outfit The Man I Fell in Love With, Party of Helicopters push forward to pull off an amalgamation yielding some memorable tracks. Sounding like an early-Shudder to Think, "The Good Punk" delivers layered falsetto choruses atop a fuzzed-out bass and pummeling percussion. The song spans a progressive length of over six minutes, providing chromatic runs and time signature switch-ups that serve to highlight the irony of the line, "this ain't punk rock enough for my ears." Further down the Craig Wedren and Nathan Larson ladder, "The Toucher" builds on a catchy hook that tightens and releases like a kinetic block-on-a-spring, over a distant hum and trite lyrics regarding a love triangle between a moustache, a little brother, and a loved one. The heavy string-work of Hum is later apparent, on "Cover Me" and "Science Reasons", as are the stop/start, dense variations of Polvo, which rise on "Rising Up Is Hard Work (Let's Just Sit Here)". PoH wade into the dance-friendly waters of a swinging Dismemberment Plan with "Delta '88", and to a lesser extent the frantic bass of No Kill No Beep Beep-era Q and Not U on "Never Ending Cycle", which also features acoustic elements buried in the mix, giving the song an enjoyable organic base. Unfortunately-- despite a handful of soundalike respites-- the music tends towards an equilibrium that doesn't entertain beyond the initial shock of its conjoined parts. Like most Epicurean experiments, novelty soon fades away to reveal that, from the beginning, the varying musical concepts were tacked onto a weaker-than-anticipated structure. Like sausage steeped in syrup and served up warm with French toast, Please Believe It sounds like a good idea at first but the thought of having it every day-- or even every week-- makes my stomach quiver. Another marriage of frayed guitar layering and weighty riffs is marred by its own overwrought fusion, a dish whose varied and potent flavors never resolve, spoiling what could have turned out a fine meal had it been prepared by chefs less eager to impress.

Artist: The Party of Helicopters, Album: Please Believe It, Genre: Metal,Rock, Score (1-10): 6.5 Album review: "Raising the headphones to my skull for my first listen to My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, I was struck by the taste of a heavy mousse or a rich pastry: I discovered the capacity of directed sound to inform an otherwise disconnected gustatory sensation. I searched out other experiences, finding that classical music whets my appetite for small portions of vegetable dishes and rare Japanese cuisine served on an asymmetrical jade plate. Jazz makes my mouth dry with the odor of cigarettes and a hard drink. Rock 'n' roll-- and nearly all of its substituents-- leaves an aftertaste of mostly carnal delights; a bleeding porterhouse, or at times a more elegant filet, wrapped in bacon and topped with horseradish sauce. There are notable exceptions to these corporal delicacies though, as rock 'n' roll has also given birth to the bubblegum-and-marshmallow-flavored emo-core scene, the Spam-laden rock/punk-revival and the saltwater taffy of electro/electro pop. Counted among its differing offspring of rock is shoegaze, a sub-genre from which nearly any composition lends itself directly to savory desserts-- small portions of dense pleasure that are lovely in moderation, but can be more than slightly off-putting if consumed in mass quantities. Loveless, the Pitchfork-endorsed exemplar shoegazer album, serves as the crème brule-- the mark by which all others should be measured. This leads to a problem: the watermark of excellence having been set, the only thing left for its musical legacy is the tweaking of the established order in hopes of arriving at something new, if not necessarily better. This has led to all manner of ghastly cuisine, but occasionally it yields something palatable. Initially, the thought of joining shoegaze and heavy metal-- a la Black Sabbath and Judas Priest-- is as off-putting an idea as combining dark chocolate and sweetbread, but the Party of Helicopters nearly prove otherwise on their aptly titled Please Believe It. Flexing hard riffs over a constant wall of feedback, Jamie Stillman leads his troupe through the album in a manner befitting the former drummer of post-hardcore group Harriet the Spy: upgrading that group's sound with vocalist Joe Dennis' roots in the shoegazer outfit The Man I Fell in Love With, Party of Helicopters push forward to pull off an amalgamation yielding some memorable tracks. Sounding like an early-Shudder to Think, "The Good Punk" delivers layered falsetto choruses atop a fuzzed-out bass and pummeling percussion. The song spans a progressive length of over six minutes, providing chromatic runs and time signature switch-ups that serve to highlight the irony of the line, "this ain't punk rock enough for my ears." Further down the Craig Wedren and Nathan Larson ladder, "The Toucher" builds on a catchy hook that tightens and releases like a kinetic block-on-a-spring, over a distant hum and trite lyrics regarding a love triangle between a moustache, a little brother, and a loved one. The heavy string-work of Hum is later apparent, on "Cover Me" and "Science Reasons", as are the stop/start, dense variations of Polvo, which rise on "Rising Up Is Hard Work (Let's Just Sit Here)". PoH wade into the dance-friendly waters of a swinging Dismemberment Plan with "Delta '88", and to a lesser extent the frantic bass of No Kill No Beep Beep-era Q and Not U on "Never Ending Cycle", which also features acoustic elements buried in the mix, giving the song an enjoyable organic base. Unfortunately-- despite a handful of soundalike respites-- the music tends towards an equilibrium that doesn't entertain beyond the initial shock of its conjoined parts. Like most Epicurean experiments, novelty soon fades away to reveal that, from the beginning, the varying musical concepts were tacked onto a weaker-than-anticipated structure. Like sausage steeped in syrup and served up warm with French toast, Please Believe It sounds like a good idea at first but the thought of having it every day-- or even every week-- makes my stomach quiver. Another marriage of frayed guitar layering and weighty riffs is marred by its own overwrought fusion, a dish whose varied and potent flavors never resolve, spoiling what could have turned out a fine meal had it been prepared by chefs less eager to impress."

Oozing Wound

Whatever Forever

Saby Reyes-Kulkarni

The third album from Chicago trio Oozing Wound begins with a backwards guitar wail that puts a fresh twist on the technique Metallica used in the iconic intro to their ...And Justice for All leadoff track “Blackened.” True to form, of course, the prelude gives way to a muscular, uptempo chug as the song, “Rambo 5 (Pre-Emptive Strike)” achieves liftoff, announcing that “okay, now we’re really getting shit started” in stereotypical metal fashion. More importantly, on “Rambo 5” Oozing Wound manage to recapture the energy of classic Slayer, Left Hand Path-era Entombed, and skate punk-rooted metal like Suicidal Tendencies and Excel all in the same riff. In purely musical terms, Whatever Forever is bound to attract thrash, stoner rock, doom, and punk loyalists as well as people arriving at those particular strains of heaviness for the first time. Metalheads will no doubt recognize how frontman/guitarist Zack Weil howls like a cross between Exodus vocalist Steve “Zetro” Souza and Kreator’s Mille Petrozza. Likewise, now-departed drummer Kyle Reynolds’ fills and thumpa-thumpa-thumpa beats recall genre luminaries like Dave Lombardo and Charlie Benante. By the same token, though, Oozing Wound exude an attitude that immediately distinguishes them from the music they reference—and update—with such convincing skill. Oozing Wound play with undeniable passion. They also shift gears between tempos with uncanny ease, and their ability to incorporate slower sections gives the faster material an explosiveness it wouldn't otherwise have. As the lava-like churn of “Eruptor” bubbles to a boil and segues into “Tachycardia,” for example, Oozing Wound not only channel High on Fire at their most infernal but also manage to sustain the buildup over both songs. Additionally, engineer Matt Russell’s rendering of bassist Kevin Cribbin’s tone should serve as the ultimate reference for how to capture low end that’s Godzilla-huge—full and imposing, but most of all clear. All that said, it’s hard to listen to this album and not get the feeling that these guys are making fun of their influences while also honoring them. Despondency, hopelessness, and even outright nihilism can certainly make for engaging music. But when those emotions are worn on the sleeve as affectations, they ring hollow. With Oozing Wound, it’s hard to tell. On their own, the lyrics on Whatever Forever contain vague but nevertheless thought-provoking undercurrents. When Weil sings that “peace is a lie” and that “tonight we will track, and identify spies” on “Rambo 5,” one gets the distinct sense he might be talking about more than the outward silliness that the song title lets on. The same goes for Weil’s lyrics on “Mercury in Retrograde Virus,” where he sings “Conscious killing keeps the planet spinning.../Can’t fight that kind of breeding/The facts a mask revealing.” But Weil also plays up a fuck-it-all malaise that comes off as a posture and begs you not to care about what he’s saying. As he sneers his way through self-defeatist headbanger anthems like “Diver” and “Everything Sucks, and My Life Is a Lie,” the band’s raucous delivery sounds better suited for the upbeat mood of keg party. On paper, the contrast should make for rich juxtaposition. Instead, Weil and company end up looking like they lack the courage of their convictions. Oozing Wound deserve credit for standing apart from purist thrash revivalists like Bonded by Blood and Mantic Ritual. Clearly, they intend for their music to serve as a beefier, decidedly modern take on classic forms. But by hiding behind detachment, the music's underlying power ends up getting smothered by its bluster. As engaging as that bluster is at first, over the course of ten songs Whatever Forever begins to grate not unlike a person who tries too hard to look nonchalant when they would hold your attention longer if they just opened up a bit more.

Artist: Oozing Wound, Album: Whatever Forever, Genre: None, Score (1-10): 6.6 Album review: "The third album from Chicago trio Oozing Wound begins with a backwards guitar wail that puts a fresh twist on the technique Metallica used in the iconic intro to their ...And Justice for All leadoff track “Blackened.” True to form, of course, the prelude gives way to a muscular, uptempo chug as the song, “Rambo 5 (Pre-Emptive Strike)” achieves liftoff, announcing that “okay, now we’re really getting shit started” in stereotypical metal fashion. More importantly, on “Rambo 5” Oozing Wound manage to recapture the energy of classic Slayer, Left Hand Path-era Entombed, and skate punk-rooted metal like Suicidal Tendencies and Excel all in the same riff. In purely musical terms, Whatever Forever is bound to attract thrash, stoner rock, doom, and punk loyalists as well as people arriving at those particular strains of heaviness for the first time. Metalheads will no doubt recognize how frontman/guitarist Zack Weil howls like a cross between Exodus vocalist Steve “Zetro” Souza and Kreator’s Mille Petrozza. Likewise, now-departed drummer Kyle Reynolds’ fills and thumpa-thumpa-thumpa beats recall genre luminaries like Dave Lombardo and Charlie Benante. By the same token, though, Oozing Wound exude an attitude that immediately distinguishes them from the music they reference—and update—with such convincing skill. Oozing Wound play with undeniable passion. They also shift gears between tempos with uncanny ease, and their ability to incorporate slower sections gives the faster material an explosiveness it wouldn't otherwise have. As the lava-like churn of “Eruptor” bubbles to a boil and segues into “Tachycardia,” for example, Oozing Wound not only channel High on Fire at their most infernal but also manage to sustain the buildup over both songs. Additionally, engineer Matt Russell’s rendering of bassist Kevin Cribbin’s tone should serve as the ultimate reference for how to capture low end that’s Godzilla-huge—full and imposing, but most of all clear. All that said, it’s hard to listen to this album and not get the feeling that these guys are making fun of their influences while also honoring them. Despondency, hopelessness, and even outright nihilism can certainly make for engaging music. But when those emotions are worn on the sleeve as affectations, they ring hollow. With Oozing Wound, it’s hard to tell. On their own, the lyrics on Whatever Forever contain vague but nevertheless thought-provoking undercurrents. When Weil sings that “peace is a lie” and that “tonight we will track, and identify spies” on “Rambo 5,” one gets the distinct sense he might be talking about more than the outward silliness that the song title lets on. The same goes for Weil’s lyrics on “Mercury in Retrograde Virus,” where he sings “Conscious killing keeps the planet spinning.../Can’t fight that kind of breeding/The facts a mask revealing.” But Weil also plays up a fuck-it-all malaise that comes off as a posture and begs you not to care about what he’s saying. As he sneers his way through self-defeatist headbanger anthems like “Diver” and “Everything Sucks, and My Life Is a Lie,” the band’s raucous delivery sounds better suited for the upbeat mood of keg party. On paper, the contrast should make for rich juxtaposition. Instead, Weil and company end up looking like they lack the courage of their convictions. Oozing Wound deserve credit for standing apart from purist thrash revivalists like Bonded by Blood and Mantic Ritual. Clearly, they intend for their music to serve as a beefier, decidedly modern take on classic forms. But by hiding behind detachment, the music's underlying power ends up getting smothered by its bluster. As engaging as that bluster is at first, over the course of ten songs Whatever Forever begins to grate not unlike a person who tries too hard to look nonchalant when they would hold your attention longer if they just opened up a bit more."

Ben Lee

Awake Is the New Sleep

Rock

Marc Hogan

Like the class moron who turns out to be developmentally disabled, Ben Lee's no fun to pick on anymore. A vengeful, hype-smiting deity has already rained down the toughest punches: rejection both by the majors and ex-girlfriend Claire Danes, best days past at 26, bottom billing in quasi-supergroup the Bens (and don't tell me it was alphabetical). On Awake Is the New Sleep, the former wunderkind decides the best way to exorcise his post-Danes demons is more syrupy, anonymous light pop. Lee's "album about waking up" is as refreshing as a decades-old Nike slogan. "Just do it, whatever it is," the young Aussie advises amid the repetitive finger-picking of opener "Whatever It Is". On "We're All in This Together", he philosophizes 20-plus times that we're all just that ("yeah!"), so "open your heart" and let the "Hey Jude" coda in. "The Debt Collectors" shoots for Up-era R.E.M., Lee's vocals breaking with tender emotion over rhymes like "We can make a deal, everything is real" and similes stolen from Built to Spill album titles. Vapid is the new deep! Mostly, Lee really really misses his girlfriend. He aches for her in "Ache for You", feels far away on "Close I've Come", gets spurned by would-be rebounds on "Get Gotten". The "Roxanne" rocksteady of Australian single "Gamble Everything for Love" is at least bearable, but its "you can go your own way" lyric makes Lee's Fleetwood Mac-pillaging on "No Right Angles" that much more obvious ("Dreams", bitches!). Let the healing start with soft-rocker "Begin", which could be this year's "Cigarettes Will Kill You" if it ever rose above seventh-grade poetry: "It's OK for you to care, 'cause I can feel you in the air." Dumb is the new sensitive! Like a washed-up athlete, Lee's stuck reliving his glory years. Perky U.S. radio hit "Catch My Disease" proudly (and ironically) brandishes the obsolete badge of 90s indiedom: "They don't play me on the radio/ And that's the way I like it." Lee big ups Good Charlotte, too, and revisits lyrical coup "open your heart,"-- this time as a chorus. Fellow 90s phenom Brad Wood produces, vainly drenching the lackluster songwriting in the dentist's-office electronica of Lee's 1999 Breathing Tornadoes-- which "Into the Dark" name-checks in the most pathetic self-allusion you'll hopefully never hear. The new Ben Lee is the old Ben Lee is every LSAT-flunking strummer in the fraternity of your choice-- and cute, too!

Artist: Ben Lee, Album: Awake Is the New Sleep, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 2.9 Album review: "Like the class moron who turns out to be developmentally disabled, Ben Lee's no fun to pick on anymore. A vengeful, hype-smiting deity has already rained down the toughest punches: rejection both by the majors and ex-girlfriend Claire Danes, best days past at 26, bottom billing in quasi-supergroup the Bens (and don't tell me it was alphabetical). On Awake Is the New Sleep, the former wunderkind decides the best way to exorcise his post-Danes demons is more syrupy, anonymous light pop. Lee's "album about waking up" is as refreshing as a decades-old Nike slogan. "Just do it, whatever it is," the young Aussie advises amid the repetitive finger-picking of opener "Whatever It Is". On "We're All in This Together", he philosophizes 20-plus times that we're all just that ("yeah!"), so "open your heart" and let the "Hey Jude" coda in. "The Debt Collectors" shoots for Up-era R.E.M., Lee's vocals breaking with tender emotion over rhymes like "We can make a deal, everything is real" and similes stolen from Built to Spill album titles. Vapid is the new deep! Mostly, Lee really really misses his girlfriend. He aches for her in "Ache for You", feels far away on "Close I've Come", gets spurned by would-be rebounds on "Get Gotten". The "Roxanne" rocksteady of Australian single "Gamble Everything for Love" is at least bearable, but its "you can go your own way" lyric makes Lee's Fleetwood Mac-pillaging on "No Right Angles" that much more obvious ("Dreams", bitches!). Let the healing start with soft-rocker "Begin", which could be this year's "Cigarettes Will Kill You" if it ever rose above seventh-grade poetry: "It's OK for you to care, 'cause I can feel you in the air." Dumb is the new sensitive! Like a washed-up athlete, Lee's stuck reliving his glory years. Perky U.S. radio hit "Catch My Disease" proudly (and ironically) brandishes the obsolete badge of 90s indiedom: "They don't play me on the radio/ And that's the way I like it." Lee big ups Good Charlotte, too, and revisits lyrical coup "open your heart,"-- this time as a chorus. Fellow 90s phenom Brad Wood produces, vainly drenching the lackluster songwriting in the dentist's-office electronica of Lee's 1999 Breathing Tornadoes-- which "Into the Dark" name-checks in the most pathetic self-allusion you'll hopefully never hear. The new Ben Lee is the old Ben Lee is every LSAT-flunking strummer in the fraternity of your choice-- and cute, too!"

Don Caballero

World-Class Listening Problem

Experimental,Metal,Rock

Matt LeMay

To many people, the name "Don Caballero" is more or less synonymous with the dubious music sub-genre known as "math rock." While the pejorative connotations of the term itself are not necessarily unwarranted, it seems unfair that such an awesome band would be forever tied to such a lame style of music. Sure, Don Caballero make use of looped, minimalistic guitar figures, and irregular time signatures, but every meticulous pattern gets pushed well past its logical conclusion, transformed, sped up, slowed down, broken up, and/or reassembled. A good Don Cab song is every bit as much "meth-rock" as it is "math-rock." While drummer Damon Che has always been Don Cab's main attraction, guitar duo Ian Williams and Mike Banfield were a crucial part of the band's signature sound-- best represented by 1998's incredible What Burns Never Returns. Unfortunately, the Don Caballero we all know and love broke up in 2001. Aside from Che, the band responsible for World-Class Listening Problem is entirely Non Caballero, assembled instead from fellow Pittsburgh natives Creta Bourzia. Given that band's metal leanings, and the fact that Relapse is releasing this record, it's not surprising that World-Class Listening Problem is harder and crunchier than its predecessors. Underneath that crunch, however, there isn't really all that much going on. Which isn't to say that there's a shortage of complicated rhythmic and melodic permutations on World-Class Listening Problem. Structurally, these are definitely Don Caballero songs. The difference, really, comes down to the quality and feel of the album's ongoing shifts and modulations. For lack of a better description, World-Class Listening Problem just doesn't sound as intuitive as its predecessors. Changes come and go, but very little sticks. Even Che's drumming seems less inspired than usual-for whatever reason, World-Class Listening Problem realizes very little of the dramatic potential that comes with a drummer who can play faster and harder than should be humanly possible. Amidst the relative lack of excitement, there are some pretty cool moments to be found. "Palm Trees in the Fecking Bahamas" borders on catchy, but never quite makes it there. Album closer "I'm Goofballs for Bozzo Jazz" actually hints at some of the humor in its title, but outstays its welcome as it approaches the four minute mark. Yes, Damon Che is still an awesome drummer, but World-Class Listening Problem does little to emphasize the strength or the energy of his playing. Long story short, this is Don Caballero's first math-rock album.

Artist: Don Caballero, Album: World-Class Listening Problem, Genre: Experimental,Metal,Rock, Score (1-10): 5.3 Album review: "To many people, the name "Don Caballero" is more or less synonymous with the dubious music sub-genre known as "math rock." While the pejorative connotations of the term itself are not necessarily unwarranted, it seems unfair that such an awesome band would be forever tied to such a lame style of music. Sure, Don Caballero make use of looped, minimalistic guitar figures, and irregular time signatures, but every meticulous pattern gets pushed well past its logical conclusion, transformed, sped up, slowed down, broken up, and/or reassembled. A good Don Cab song is every bit as much "meth-rock" as it is "math-rock." While drummer Damon Che has always been Don Cab's main attraction, guitar duo Ian Williams and Mike Banfield were a crucial part of the band's signature sound-- best represented by 1998's incredible What Burns Never Returns. Unfortunately, the Don Caballero we all know and love broke up in 2001. Aside from Che, the band responsible for World-Class Listening Problem is entirely Non Caballero, assembled instead from fellow Pittsburgh natives Creta Bourzia. Given that band's metal leanings, and the fact that Relapse is releasing this record, it's not surprising that World-Class Listening Problem is harder and crunchier than its predecessors. Underneath that crunch, however, there isn't really all that much going on. Which isn't to say that there's a shortage of complicated rhythmic and melodic permutations on World-Class Listening Problem. Structurally, these are definitely Don Caballero songs. The difference, really, comes down to the quality and feel of the album's ongoing shifts and modulations. For lack of a better description, World-Class Listening Problem just doesn't sound as intuitive as its predecessors. Changes come and go, but very little sticks. Even Che's drumming seems less inspired than usual-for whatever reason, World-Class Listening Problem realizes very little of the dramatic potential that comes with a drummer who can play faster and harder than should be humanly possible. Amidst the relative lack of excitement, there are some pretty cool moments to be found. "Palm Trees in the Fecking Bahamas" borders on catchy, but never quite makes it there. Album closer "I'm Goofballs for Bozzo Jazz" actually hints at some of the humor in its title, but outstays its welcome as it approaches the four minute mark. Yes, Damon Che is still an awesome drummer, but World-Class Listening Problem does little to emphasize the strength or the energy of his playing. Long story short, this is Don Caballero's first math-rock album."

Son Volt

A Retrospective: 1995-2000

Rock

Stephen M. Deusner

In 1995, I would have put money on Jay Farrar having a more celebrated post-Uncle Tupelo career than Jeff Tweedy. After the back-to-back releases of Wilco's lackluster A.M. and Son Volt's lived-in Trace, Farrar seemed destined for greatness, and Tweedy destined for obscurity. A few years later, I saw how wrong I was: It wasn't simply that Being There was that great a follow-up, but that Straightaways was such a fatally dull second album. Full of bland retreads of Trace songs, it started off ho-hum and went downhill from there, backloaded with so many downtempo, amelodic tracks that even Farrar couldn't seem to muster a committed performance. As Wilco became one of the most critically celebrated bands in America, Son Volt tried to broaden its sound on Wide Swing Tremolo, but they were so stuck in a rut they could only disband, and Farrar released a couple of solo records that re-established a core audience without attracting much attention. Now, amid a softening nostalgia for the mini-movement Uncle Tupelo helped define and plans for a new Son Volt album this summer, Rhino is issuing A Retrospective: 1995-2000. Making absolutely no promise of definitiveness, the title says it all: It's 20 tracks culled from the band's three albums, along with a handful of covers and live takes. Right off the bat, something seems askew: A Retrospective begins with "Drown" instead of "Windfall", which is both the lead-off track on Trace and the quintessential alt-country song, a perfect summation of the genre's aesthetic as it fuses travel, a.m. radio, steel guitar, and a driving desire to connect to something larger and older than yourself. That it has been relegated to second-track position seems an oversight, as are the omissions of Trace's Ron Wood cover "Mystifies Me", Straightaways's opener "Caryatid Easy", and Wide Swing Tremolo's "Dead Man's Clothes". "Drown" (or, as I called it in college, "You're Cousin It") is perhaps the band's most recognizable track, but in the context of A Retrospective, it sounds nearly indistinguishable from songs like "Picking Up the Signal", "Creosote", and "Driving the View", all of which utilize the same formula: tight mid-tempo rhythm section with no drum fills; wide-open guitar sound; a big, low voice delivering lyrics that don't always bother to make sense. The number of such tracks on A Retrospective makes it surprisingly monotonous, especially for a best-of comp that has so much material from which to cull. Aside from the live acoustic versions of a few songs, the added extras on A Retrospective are six covers that exhibit a greater diversity than the album tracks. Son Volt's late-90s take on the Del Reeves trucker anthem "Looking Through a Windshield" has aged about as well as early-00s trucker caps, and Farrar can't muster the excitability on Springsteen's "Open All Night" to sell lines like "I'm goin' out tonight/ I'm gonna rock that joint." But his hangdog vocals contrast dramatically with Kelly Willis's sharp croon on Townes Van Zandt's "Rex's Blues", and Farrar sounds like a drunk staggering down the hall-- in the best way possible-- on Alex Chilton's "Holocaust". I don't begrudge Son Volt their modesty of sound and scope, nor do I hold it against them that they weren't Uncle Tupelo or Wilco. There is something refreshing, if only briefly so, about the band's unalterably limited range, especially when compared with Tweedy's self-consciously aggressive innovation. If nothing else, A Retrospective at least marks the moment when these three bands have diverged so dramatically from each other that any comparison between them becomes more nostalgic than musical.

Artist: Son Volt, Album: A Retrospective: 1995-2000, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 6.7 Album review: "In 1995, I would have put money on Jay Farrar having a more celebrated post-Uncle Tupelo career than Jeff Tweedy. After the back-to-back releases of Wilco's lackluster A.M. and Son Volt's lived-in Trace, Farrar seemed destined for greatness, and Tweedy destined for obscurity. A few years later, I saw how wrong I was: It wasn't simply that Being There was that great a follow-up, but that Straightaways was such a fatally dull second album. Full of bland retreads of Trace songs, it started off ho-hum and went downhill from there, backloaded with so many downtempo, amelodic tracks that even Farrar couldn't seem to muster a committed performance. As Wilco became one of the most critically celebrated bands in America, Son Volt tried to broaden its sound on Wide Swing Tremolo, but they were so stuck in a rut they could only disband, and Farrar released a couple of solo records that re-established a core audience without attracting much attention. Now, amid a softening nostalgia for the mini-movement Uncle Tupelo helped define and plans for a new Son Volt album this summer, Rhino is issuing A Retrospective: 1995-2000. Making absolutely no promise of definitiveness, the title says it all: It's 20 tracks culled from the band's three albums, along with a handful of covers and live takes. Right off the bat, something seems askew: A Retrospective begins with "Drown" instead of "Windfall", which is both the lead-off track on Trace and the quintessential alt-country song, a perfect summation of the genre's aesthetic as it fuses travel, a.m. radio, steel guitar, and a driving desire to connect to something larger and older than yourself. That it has been relegated to second-track position seems an oversight, as are the omissions of Trace's Ron Wood cover "Mystifies Me", Straightaways's opener "Caryatid Easy", and Wide Swing Tremolo's "Dead Man's Clothes". "Drown" (or, as I called it in college, "You're Cousin It") is perhaps the band's most recognizable track, but in the context of A Retrospective, it sounds nearly indistinguishable from songs like "Picking Up the Signal", "Creosote", and "Driving the View", all of which utilize the same formula: tight mid-tempo rhythm section with no drum fills; wide-open guitar sound; a big, low voice delivering lyrics that don't always bother to make sense. The number of such tracks on A Retrospective makes it surprisingly monotonous, especially for a best-of comp that has so much material from which to cull. Aside from the live acoustic versions of a few songs, the added extras on A Retrospective are six covers that exhibit a greater diversity than the album tracks. Son Volt's late-90s take on the Del Reeves trucker anthem "Looking Through a Windshield" has aged about as well as early-00s trucker caps, and Farrar can't muster the excitability on Springsteen's "Open All Night" to sell lines like "I'm goin' out tonight/ I'm gonna rock that joint." But his hangdog vocals contrast dramatically with Kelly Willis's sharp croon on Townes Van Zandt's "Rex's Blues", and Farrar sounds like a drunk staggering down the hall-- in the best way possible-- on Alex Chilton's "Holocaust". I don't begrudge Son Volt their modesty of sound and scope, nor do I hold it against them that they weren't Uncle Tupelo or Wilco. There is something refreshing, if only briefly so, about the band's unalterably limited range, especially when compared with Tweedy's self-consciously aggressive innovation. If nothing else, A Retrospective at least marks the moment when these three bands have diverged so dramatically from each other that any comparison between them becomes more nostalgic than musical."

Varnaline

Songs in a Northern Key

Brad Haywood

She don't use Linkous. She don't use Tweedy. She don't use the Jayhawks, or any of these. She uses Varnaline. Varnaline. Varnaline, the brainchild of singer/songwriter Anders Parker, former member of indie-rockers Space Needle is what she uses, and she uses them for a reason. Varnaline fills her need for vocal twang and conflicted self-expression that she can only find in the alt-country genre, except Varnaline delivers the goods with significantly less friction. Less grit, more moisture. Warm, soothing moisture. Like a salve. A salve that soon anesthetizes. Numbing. Soporific. Unexciting, unremarkable and passive. More Ben Gay than Vaseline. But certainly not coarse, and certainly inoffensive. Easy to digest. But engaging, no. Briefly, an overview of what you'll be missing when you don't buy this album: "Still Dream" features Parker singing in a hushed/muffled voice about how he "still dreams." It's got some double-bass, some mandolin, a steel-stringed acoustic guitar, a birdie chirping, and a little drummer boy towards the end. Very drab, despite the birdie's best efforts. Then comes the requisite gritty-rocker called "Song," which 'isn't good' in the same way the Steve Miller Band 'isn't good.' The song after that is nondescript. Proceeding to track four, "Blackbird Fields," something in Parker's bag of tricks begins to click. It opens with nifty production, all feedbacky and such, then settles into pure, fingerpicked mope. Parker revisits his hushed/muffled voice, to greater effect this time, and raises the hopes of the listener (just a little bit). Track five, "Blue Flowers on the Highway," dashes those hopes. Parker lays down hackneyed übertwang, replete with übertwangy stringed something-or-other (Dobro? Lap steel? Tell me your name). It's got a pop song structure, and had me thinking I hadn't listened to Chris Isaak's Baja Sessions in a while (meaning three years). Do you have the idea yet? The slow learners say no, so let us plod further along this 15 track boulevard: "The Drunkard's Wish" is a brief banjo solo played by a retard. The not-that-horrible "Difference" cuts the retard off short, then sets into a predictable folk/slow-core stylee (probably not composed by a retard, unless said retard were highly functional). "Anything from Now" does not improve the album. No, wait-- it actually does. It sort of rocks. But "Down the Street" definitely doesn't. Horrendous lyrics, a ridiculous use of a glottal vocal flair (see: Britney Spears), and a shameless rehashing of the shitty melody Parker already used once on "Song." As track nine comes to a close, I have had it, and I'm checking out. No more Varnaline for Haywood. Six more tracks and I'll be kicking my dog, whom I love and who, as of now, still loves me back. The warm, moist soothing has officially reached my nerve endings. Numbing.

Artist: Varnaline, Album: Songs in a Northern Key, Genre: None, Score (1-10): 5.6 Album review: "She don't use Linkous. She don't use Tweedy. She don't use the Jayhawks, or any of these. She uses Varnaline. Varnaline. Varnaline, the brainchild of singer/songwriter Anders Parker, former member of indie-rockers Space Needle is what she uses, and she uses them for a reason. Varnaline fills her need for vocal twang and conflicted self-expression that she can only find in the alt-country genre, except Varnaline delivers the goods with significantly less friction. Less grit, more moisture. Warm, soothing moisture. Like a salve. A salve that soon anesthetizes. Numbing. Soporific. Unexciting, unremarkable and passive. More Ben Gay than Vaseline. But certainly not coarse, and certainly inoffensive. Easy to digest. But engaging, no. Briefly, an overview of what you'll be missing when you don't buy this album: "Still Dream" features Parker singing in a hushed/muffled voice about how he "still dreams." It's got some double-bass, some mandolin, a steel-stringed acoustic guitar, a birdie chirping, and a little drummer boy towards the end. Very drab, despite the birdie's best efforts. Then comes the requisite gritty-rocker called "Song," which 'isn't good' in the same way the Steve Miller Band 'isn't good.' The song after that is nondescript. Proceeding to track four, "Blackbird Fields," something in Parker's bag of tricks begins to click. It opens with nifty production, all feedbacky and such, then settles into pure, fingerpicked mope. Parker revisits his hushed/muffled voice, to greater effect this time, and raises the hopes of the listener (just a little bit). Track five, "Blue Flowers on the Highway," dashes those hopes. Parker lays down hackneyed übertwang, replete with übertwangy stringed something-or-other (Dobro? Lap steel? Tell me your name). It's got a pop song structure, and had me thinking I hadn't listened to Chris Isaak's Baja Sessions in a while (meaning three years). Do you have the idea yet? The slow learners say no, so let us plod further along this 15 track boulevard: "The Drunkard's Wish" is a brief banjo solo played by a retard. The not-that-horrible "Difference" cuts the retard off short, then sets into a predictable folk/slow-core stylee (probably not composed by a retard, unless said retard were highly functional). "Anything from Now" does not improve the album. No, wait-- it actually does. It sort of rocks. But "Down the Street" definitely doesn't. Horrendous lyrics, a ridiculous use of a glottal vocal flair (see: Britney Spears), and a shameless rehashing of the shitty melody Parker already used once on "Song." As track nine comes to a close, I have had it, and I'm checking out. No more Varnaline for Haywood. Six more tracks and I'll be kicking my dog, whom I love and who, as of now, still loves me back. The warm, moist soothing has officially reached my nerve endings. Numbing."

Edwyn Collins

Understated

Rock

Nick Neyland

Last time we heard from Edwyn Collins, on 2010's Losing Sleep, he was surrounded by an auspicious array of accompanying musicians. Johnny Marr, Roddy Frame, and Alex Kapranos and Nick McCarthy from Franz Ferdinand were among the guests who provided the musical assistance Collins needed during his ongoing recovery from the cerebral hemorrhages he suffered in 2005. His condition means he still requires the help of others in fleshing out his songwriting, but Understated plays out like a crucial step toward finding his muse again. The guests here fill important roles, but are lesser known; it's released on Collins' own label, the newly-formed AED Records; and the predominant lyrical theme is one of triumphant return. There's a sense of fight here, of Collins drawing musical strength from his hell-and-back experiences. Collins has always liked to juxtapose ostensibly jarring styles, famously matching Chic-style guitars to post-punk sharpness in Orange Juice. His best-known song, "A Girl Like You", found a place where 60s pop, Motown, and the Velvet Underground could co-exist. He's returned to a familiar set of influences for Understated, working in arrangements that have Paul Riser's name all over them, throwing in jangly guitar lines that hark back to the Orange Juice days, constructing grooves that resemble lost Northern Soul workouts. Collins' voice is a little more world-weary with every passing record, giving ballads like "It's a Reason" an extra dose of pathos, in an album already dripping in poignancy and self-reflection. Still, there are signs that some of the material is a stretch for him to reach, such as certain lines in the countryfied "Down the Line". But even there it's impossible not to be moved by his malaise. "Just understand, I've lost some ground," he croons at one point. So this is a stark record, full of uncomplicated sentiment. It's also one fuelled by a dual feeling of nostalgia, partly abetted by the backward-looking arrangements, and Collins' attempt to address where he is in the world. "Forsooth" and "In the Now" are likely paired together for a reason; the former might be the most spiritual Collins has ever gotten in song, a direct address about being alive and reborn. The latter is the most strident song here, building a deliberate buffer between his past and present selves. In a sense, Understated feels like a course-setter for how things are going to be in Collins' career from this point onward. He's certainly shed some of the wit and self-deprecation of yore, although when he does get back there it provides respite, a deviation from the healing he's clearly keen to address in song. "I’m a singer, of sorts," is the most welcome line here when it comes, all wrapped up in the humble title track, returning to something resembling the old Edwyn we all fell in love with on that first listen to "Falling and Laughing". But it's important to recognize that he’s not in that place anymore, not even close to it. Orange Juice's debut You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever is beautiful because of its innocence, whereas Understated is bruised by the many experiences that came afterward. It's no lesser record for it, just one that feels like a part in the purging process rather than a place where Collins feels fully at ease.

Artist: Edwyn Collins, Album: Understated, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 6.8 Album review: "Last time we heard from Edwyn Collins, on 2010's Losing Sleep, he was surrounded by an auspicious array of accompanying musicians. Johnny Marr, Roddy Frame, and Alex Kapranos and Nick McCarthy from Franz Ferdinand were among the guests who provided the musical assistance Collins needed during his ongoing recovery from the cerebral hemorrhages he suffered in 2005. His condition means he still requires the help of others in fleshing out his songwriting, but Understated plays out like a crucial step toward finding his muse again. The guests here fill important roles, but are lesser known; it's released on Collins' own label, the newly-formed AED Records; and the predominant lyrical theme is one of triumphant return. There's a sense of fight here, of Collins drawing musical strength from his hell-and-back experiences. Collins has always liked to juxtapose ostensibly jarring styles, famously matching Chic-style guitars to post-punk sharpness in Orange Juice. His best-known song, "A Girl Like You", found a place where 60s pop, Motown, and the Velvet Underground could co-exist. He's returned to a familiar set of influences for Understated, working in arrangements that have Paul Riser's name all over them, throwing in jangly guitar lines that hark back to the Orange Juice days, constructing grooves that resemble lost Northern Soul workouts. Collins' voice is a little more world-weary with every passing record, giving ballads like "It's a Reason" an extra dose of pathos, in an album already dripping in poignancy and self-reflection. Still, there are signs that some of the material is a stretch for him to reach, such as certain lines in the countryfied "Down the Line". But even there it's impossible not to be moved by his malaise. "Just understand, I've lost some ground," he croons at one point. So this is a stark record, full of uncomplicated sentiment. It's also one fuelled by a dual feeling of nostalgia, partly abetted by the backward-looking arrangements, and Collins' attempt to address where he is in the world. "Forsooth" and "In the Now" are likely paired together for a reason; the former might be the most spiritual Collins has ever gotten in song, a direct address about being alive and reborn. The latter is the most strident song here, building a deliberate buffer between his past and present selves. In a sense, Understated feels like a course-setter for how things are going to be in Collins' career from this point onward. He's certainly shed some of the wit and self-deprecation of yore, although when he does get back there it provides respite, a deviation from the healing he's clearly keen to address in song. "I’m a singer, of sorts," is the most welcome line here when it comes, all wrapped up in the humble title track, returning to something resembling the old Edwyn we all fell in love with on that first listen to "Falling and Laughing". But it's important to recognize that he’s not in that place anymore, not even close to it. Orange Juice's debut You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever is beautiful because of its innocence, whereas Understated is bruised by the many experiences that came afterward. It's no lesser record for it, just one that feels like a part in the purging process rather than a place where Collins feels fully at ease."

The Spook School

Could It Be Different?

Rock

Madison Bloom

In 2015, Scottish quartet the Spook School met with Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace to discuss the realities facing transgender artists in the music industry. Spook School singer/guitarist Nye Todd, who had come out as transgender about a year earlier, was eager to ask Grace how fans reacted to her 2012 revelation. “People have been very supportive of me in general,” Grace said. It was a crucial conversation: For Nye, whose Twitter bio notes that he “writes songs about gender and being v queer,” the politics of the marginalized are inseparable from the music he makes. The rest of Spook School, comprising guitarist/vocalist Adam Todd (Nye’s brother), singer/bassist Anna Cory, and drummer Niall McCamley, accepts this as a shared cause. At another point in the video, McCamley insists that when attempting to understand members of the trans community, “the most important thing is to listen... to let these people have a voice.” The Spook School take that mission literally. Their 2013 debut, Dress Up, and their 2015 follow-up, Try to Be Hopeful, were full of similarly progressive dialogues about LGBTQ hardships. And while the music on those albums felt optimistic, the production retained enough grit to balance their rose-tinted melodies. They were frill-free and raw records, allowing the Spook School’s songwriting to sparkle through the scuzz. The production on the group’s third LP, Could It Be Different?—the band’s second collaboration with producer Matthew Johnson of Hookworms—buffs out that grit, leaving a record so shiny it’s blinding. Opening track “Still Alive” starts the LP off with cloying guitar riffs and squealing feedback that sound borrowed from Epitaph Records’ back catalog. Even with the Spook School’s sloppy charm scrubbed away, though, the songwriting holds up: “Still Alive” is a feisty anthem taking aim at haters, particularly the bigots that want to make you “feel small.” It’s criminally catchy, and if it doesn’t make your brain sing “Fuck you, I’m still alive!” for days, your hippocampus may be in need of a tune-up. The Spook School excel at crafting irresistible power-pop moments like this. “Less Than Perfect” and “I Hope She Loves You” could inspire even the most rigid crowd to pogo as one. The latter song opens with a drumroll before bursting directly into its sing-along chorus (“And I hope she loves you/Like I couldn’t do”). The bizarre “Best of Intentions” winks at the Buzzcocks and XTC, with a tangy lead guitar part and Nye’s pitchy, half-spoken delivery providing one of the few times on this album that the band’s delightful quirks aren’t shellacked beyond recognition. Occasionally, the Spook School’s influences are too on-the-nose—like when the record gets tangled up in “High School” and “teenage hopes.” Singing about adolescence may have worked for the Undertones 40 years ago (as it worked for Nirvana and Blink 182 in later decades), but in 2018, coming from musicians in their mid-twenties, it feels hackneyed. As lyricists, the Spook School are most effective when they tackle the bleak and routine. On the glum ballad “Alright (Sometimes),” Nye offers self-imposed ignorance as a coping mechanism for reality. “I said let’s pretend the world’s all right/Let’s pretend we’re doing fine,” he suggests before (almost) finding comfort in a companion: “But with you I feel all right/Sometimes.” It’s one of the record’s most candid moments, and yet the song itself is bit of a snoozer, following a verse/chorus/bridge/coda recipe with little energy or improvisation. A similar problem plagues “Bad Year,” which does a fine job of verbally rendering despondence; unfortunately, the melody sounds worn out, too. “I admire your optimism/But sometimes I just need to feel it,” Nye shrugs, his words floating atop a diluted indie slow dance. These few duds are missing both the honesty and the dynamite hooks of the band’s best work, like the trans-positive “Body,” where the brothers Todd get personal: “Do you like the way you look naked?/I don’t know if any of us do/And I still hate my body/But I’m learning to love what it can do.” The Spook School are idealists at heart. Their inclusive lyrics and perky guitar pop mirror the change they hope to summon in the world. Adam Todd has said that Could It Be Different? was written “from a place of feeling like everything definitely isn’t alright now.” Perhaps they figured dark times call for bright music, but this overly polished record often feels like a missed opportunity.

Artist: The Spook School, Album: Could It Be Different?, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 6.8 Album review: "In 2015, Scottish quartet the Spook School met with Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace to discuss the realities facing transgender artists in the music industry. Spook School singer/guitarist Nye Todd, who had come out as transgender about a year earlier, was eager to ask Grace how fans reacted to her 2012 revelation. “People have been very supportive of me in general,” Grace said. It was a crucial conversation: For Nye, whose Twitter bio notes that he “writes songs about gender and being v queer,” the politics of the marginalized are inseparable from the music he makes. The rest of Spook School, comprising guitarist/vocalist Adam Todd (Nye’s brother), singer/bassist Anna Cory, and drummer Niall McCamley, accepts this as a shared cause. At another point in the video, McCamley insists that when attempting to understand members of the trans community, “the most important thing is to listen... to let these people have a voice.” The Spook School take that mission literally. Their 2013 debut, Dress Up, and their 2015 follow-up, Try to Be Hopeful, were full of similarly progressive dialogues about LGBTQ hardships. And while the music on those albums felt optimistic, the production retained enough grit to balance their rose-tinted melodies. They were frill-free and raw records, allowing the Spook School’s songwriting to sparkle through the scuzz. The production on the group’s third LP, Could It Be Different?—the band’s second collaboration with producer Matthew Johnson of Hookworms—buffs out that grit, leaving a record so shiny it’s blinding. Opening track “Still Alive” starts the LP off with cloying guitar riffs and squealing feedback that sound borrowed from Epitaph Records’ back catalog. Even with the Spook School’s sloppy charm scrubbed away, though, the songwriting holds up: “Still Alive” is a feisty anthem taking aim at haters, particularly the bigots that want to make you “feel small.” It’s criminally catchy, and if it doesn’t make your brain sing “Fuck you, I’m still alive!” for days, your hippocampus may be in need of a tune-up. The Spook School excel at crafting irresistible power-pop moments like this. “Less Than Perfect” and “I Hope She Loves You” could inspire even the most rigid crowd to pogo as one. The latter song opens with a drumroll before bursting directly into its sing-along chorus (“And I hope she loves you/Like I couldn’t do”). The bizarre “Best of Intentions” winks at the Buzzcocks and XTC, with a tangy lead guitar part and Nye’s pitchy, half-spoken delivery providing one of the few times on this album that the band’s delightful quirks aren’t shellacked beyond recognition. Occasionally, the Spook School’s influences are too on-the-nose—like when the record gets tangled up in “High School” and “teenage hopes.” Singing about adolescence may have worked for the Undertones 40 years ago (as it worked for Nirvana and Blink 182 in later decades), but in 2018, coming from musicians in their mid-twenties, it feels hackneyed. As lyricists, the Spook School are most effective when they tackle the bleak and routine. On the glum ballad “Alright (Sometimes),” Nye offers self-imposed ignorance as a coping mechanism for reality. “I said let’s pretend the world’s all right/Let’s pretend we’re doing fine,” he suggests before (almost) finding comfort in a companion: “But with you I feel all right/Sometimes.” It’s one of the record’s most candid moments, and yet the song itself is bit of a snoozer, following a verse/chorus/bridge/coda recipe with little energy or improvisation. A similar problem plagues “Bad Year,” which does a fine job of verbally rendering despondence; unfortunately, the melody sounds worn out, too. “I admire your optimism/But sometimes I just need to feel it,” Nye shrugs, his words floating atop a diluted indie slow dance. These few duds are missing both the honesty and the dynamite hooks of the band’s best work, like the trans-positive “Body,” where the brothers Todd get personal: “Do you like the way you look naked?/I don’t know if any of us do/And I still hate my body/But I’m learning to love what it can do.” The Spook School are idealists at heart. Their inclusive lyrics and perky guitar pop mirror the change they hope to summon in the world. Adam Todd has said that Could It Be Different? was written “from a place of feeling like everything definitely isn’t alright now.” Perhaps they figured dark times call for bright music, but this overly polished record often feels like a missed opportunity."

Madonna

Ray of Light

Pop/R&B

Alex Frank

Today is Madonna Day in the Pitchfork Reviews section; in honor of her birthday, we reviewed four of her key records. There was no reason Ray of Light should’ve been such a hit. After the collapse of grunge in the mid-90s, the music industry had begun to lean into the perky pubescence of Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC. 1998 was the year that “TRL” launched on MTV, and soon after, Britney Spears would release her teasing teen debut, ...Baby One More Time, catalyzing a string of young women—like fellow teens Christina Aguilera and Mandy Moore—to overrun the charts with coy love songs. But in the eye of this gathering storm of adolescence, Madonna, then 39 years old, released Ray of Light—and it became the best selling studio album of her career since Nielsen began tracking retail, a record it still holds. How did a monastic and austere album about emotional and spiritual maturity by a woman and new mother strike such a chord? Madonna was still in full control of the serpentine pop instincts that had helped her masterfully navigate more than 15 years in the business. Her last studio album had been 1994’s Bedtime Stories, an alluring and accessible collection of mostly R&B, produced, in part, by Dallas Austin and Babyface. Bedtime Stories had been its own soft reinvention after the fetishistic and controversial era of Erotica, and it was a big deal: the Babyface-produced “Take a Bow” spent seven weeks atop the Billboard charts, her longest-ever run at No. 1. Presumably hoping to recreate that magic, Madonna turned to Babyface again at the outset of the Ray of Light sessions. But past success never presumes future performance for Madonna, and she abandoned Babyface after, as he put it diplomatically to Q, she “changed her idea about the album’s direction.” It was another song on Bedtime Stories that offered the biggest clue into the Ray of Light to come: the Bjӧrk-assisted title track, “Bedtime Story,” a new age song on which she sings of relaxing “in the arms of unconsciousness,” and her deepest yet exploration of avant-garde electronica. After ditching Babyface, Madonna sought out William Orbit, an English producer best known for a smattering of understated ambient albums. Madonna liked Orbit, as she said in an unfortunately clumsy way, for “fusing a kind of futuristic sound but also using lots of Indian and Moroccan influences and things like that.” He would end up co-producing every song on Ray of Light but one. Orbit’s work throughout gives Ray of Light a unified tonal consistency, a kind of cohesion that masterworks are made of. He has a light touch with techno textures, both relaxed (flashes of acoustic guitar ground some of the most digitized moments) and danceable—after all, it can’t be a Madonna album if it can’t work in the club. “Drowned World/Substitute for Love” opens the album with bleary sound effects that pulse like the sound of sonar. This submerged quality of sound will become the bleary canvas for the album’s philosophical manifesto, as clear a declaration as can be imagined of the new Madonna that we will meet on the album. Here, she not just embodies her reinvention, as she had done with previous creative shifts, but goes ahead and describes it in full detail. There is no missing the point. In the hangover from the hedonism that was her early ’90s era, Madonna gave birth to her first child, Lourdes and had begun to embrace yoga and the Jewish mystical practice of Kabbalah. Gone is the wry kinkiness and, at least according to her, the addiction to the spotlight, replaced with wisdom and patience and a powerful maternal instinct. “I traveled ’round the world, looking for a home/I found myself in crowded rooms, feeling so alone,” she sings on “Drowned World.” “Now I find I’ve changed my mind/This is my religion.” It is a moving song, arguably the album’s best. In the music video, as she says these last words, she is seen smiling and hugging a toddler who has her back to the camera, a girl we assume to be Lourdes. Maybe those pulsating beats that open the album evoke not so much a world under the sea, but a child’s heartbeat heard through amniotic fluid, or even the sound of this new version of Madonna being gestated. Whatever they mean to you, Madonna, once more likely to embrace a near-naked man in one of her clips, manifests as a publically doting mother right before our eyes. Reinvention, thanks to the template that Madonna set, is almost a cliché ritual in pop, like a motion that must be gone through for every star who needs a hook upon which to hang their new album. So too is self-discovery: How many times have you heard an artist claim that this album, the newest one, is her or his “most personal one yet”? But on Ray of Light, Madonna is so all-in committed to her metamorphosis that it’s hard not to believe her. “Nothing Really Matters” is a Buddhist-lite song about living in the moment and discarding the selfish motives of stardom. Even the notable love songs on the album, like the transcendent “The Power of Good-Bye,” are about turning away from the chaotic romantic entanglements that once characterized her public life and lyrics. “You were my lesson I had to learn,” she sings, as if all the turmoil she sang of on past albums had just melted away. With what’s happened to the culture since, it’s easy to bemoan Madonna opening up the floodgates of this airy, sacred lifestyle: Ray of Light has to be in some ways to blame for Goop and the countless other millionaire celebrities—everyone from Jessica Alba to Dr. Oz—who preach the gospel of wholeness and wellness, sanctimonious and Instagram spirituality. And yet, on Ray of Light, Madonna sounds so confident and alluringly in control of her powers, you might be able to overlook the more dubious moments, like “Shanti/Ashtangi,” in which she recites a hymn in Sanskrit over a techno-pop beat. Madonna had recently taken voice lessons for her role in the musical Evita and, as she put it about her work prior to improving her technique, “There was a whole piece of my voice I wasn’t using. And I was going to make the most of it.” Her newly trained voice explodes out of the speakers on the title track, the character of her upper register suddenly like crystal. Though “Ray of Light” is “a mystical look at the universe and how small we are,” it’s also just one of the strangest songs in history to ever become a radio smash, a sugar-high piece of acid-club psychedelia. She also exposes a certain vulnerability that had not been on display in the heady days of Erotica. “Mer Girl,” which closes the album, is a tender psalm about the deat

Artist: Madonna, Album: Ray of Light, Genre: Pop/R&B, Score (1-10): 8.1 Album review: "Today is Madonna Day in the Pitchfork Reviews section; in honor of her birthday, we reviewed four of her key records. There was no reason Ray of Light should’ve been such a hit. After the collapse of grunge in the mid-90s, the music industry had begun to lean into the perky pubescence of Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC. 1998 was the year that “TRL” launched on MTV, and soon after, Britney Spears would release her teasing teen debut, ...Baby One More Time, catalyzing a string of young women—like fellow teens Christina Aguilera and Mandy Moore—to overrun the charts with coy love songs. But in the eye of this gathering storm of adolescence, Madonna, then 39 years old, released Ray of Light—and it became the best selling studio album of her career since Nielsen began tracking retail, a record it still holds. How did a monastic and austere album about emotional and spiritual maturity by a woman and new mother strike such a chord? Madonna was still in full control of the serpentine pop instincts that had helped her masterfully navigate more than 15 years in the business. Her last studio album had been 1994’s Bedtime Stories, an alluring and accessible collection of mostly R&B, produced, in part, by Dallas Austin and Babyface. Bedtime Stories had been its own soft reinvention after the fetishistic and controversial era of Erotica, and it was a big deal: the Babyface-produced “Take a Bow” spent seven weeks atop the Billboard charts, her longest-ever run at No. 1. Presumably hoping to recreate that magic, Madonna turned to Babyface again at the outset of the Ray of Light sessions. But past success never presumes future performance for Madonna, and she abandoned Babyface after, as he put it diplomatically to Q, she “changed her idea about the album’s direction.” It was another song on Bedtime Stories that offered the biggest clue into the Ray of Light to come: the Bjӧrk-assisted title track, “Bedtime Story,” a new age song on which she sings of relaxing “in the arms of unconsciousness,” and her deepest yet exploration of avant-garde electronica. After ditching Babyface, Madonna sought out William Orbit, an English producer best known for a smattering of understated ambient albums. Madonna liked Orbit, as she said in an unfortunately clumsy way, for “fusing a kind of futuristic sound but also using lots of Indian and Moroccan influences and things like that.” He would end up co-producing every song on Ray of Light but one. Orbit’s work throughout gives Ray of Light a unified tonal consistency, a kind of cohesion that masterworks are made of. He has a light touch with techno textures, both relaxed (flashes of acoustic guitar ground some of the most digitized moments) and danceable—after all, it can’t be a Madonna album if it can’t work in the club. “Drowned World/Substitute for Love” opens the album with bleary sound effects that pulse like the sound of sonar. This submerged quality of sound will become the bleary canvas for the album’s philosophical manifesto, as clear a declaration as can be imagined of the new Madonna that we will meet on the album. Here, she not just embodies her reinvention, as she had done with previous creative shifts, but goes ahead and describes it in full detail. There is no missing the point. In the hangover from the hedonism that was her early ’90s era, Madonna gave birth to her first child, Lourdes and had begun to embrace yoga and the Jewish mystical practice of Kabbalah. Gone is the wry kinkiness and, at least according to her, the addiction to the spotlight, replaced with wisdom and patience and a powerful maternal instinct. “I traveled ’round the world, looking for a home/I found myself in crowded rooms, feeling so alone,” she sings on “Drowned World.” “Now I find I’ve changed my mind/This is my religion.” It is a moving song, arguably the album’s best. In the music video, as she says these last words, she is seen smiling and hugging a toddler who has her back to the camera, a girl we assume to be Lourdes. Maybe those pulsating beats that open the album evoke not so much a world under the sea, but a child’s heartbeat heard through amniotic fluid, or even the sound of this new version of Madonna being gestated. Whatever they mean to you, Madonna, once more likely to embrace a near-naked man in one of her clips, manifests as a publically doting mother right before our eyes. Reinvention, thanks to the template that Madonna set, is almost a cliché ritual in pop, like a motion that must be gone through for every star who needs a hook upon which to hang their new album. So too is self-discovery: How many times have you heard an artist claim that this album, the newest one, is her or his “most personal one yet”? But on Ray of Light, Madonna is so all-in committed to her metamorphosis that it’s hard not to believe her. “Nothing Really Matters” is a Buddhist-lite song about living in the moment and discarding the selfish motives of stardom. Even the notable love songs on the album, like the transcendent “The Power of Good-Bye,” are about turning away from the chaotic romantic entanglements that once characterized her public life and lyrics. “You were my lesson I had to learn,” she sings, as if all the turmoil she sang of on past albums had just melted away. With what’s happened to the culture since, it’s easy to bemoan Madonna opening up the floodgates of this airy, sacred lifestyle: Ray of Light has to be in some ways to blame for Goop and the countless other millionaire celebrities—everyone from Jessica Alba to Dr. Oz—who preach the gospel of wholeness and wellness, sanctimonious and Instagram spirituality. And yet, on Ray of Light, Madonna sounds so confident and alluringly in control of her powers, you might be able to overlook the more dubious moments, like “Shanti/Ashtangi,” in which she recites a hymn in Sanskrit over a techno-pop beat. Madonna had recently taken voice lessons for her role in the musical Evita and, as she put it about her work prior to improving her technique, “There was a whole piece of my voice I wasn’t using. And I was going to make the most of it.” Her newly trained voice explodes out of the speakers on the title track, the character of her upper register suddenly like crystal. Though “Ray of Light” is “a mystical look at the universe and how small we are,” it’s also just one of the strangest songs in history to ever become a radio smash, a sugar-high piece of acid-club psychedelia. She also exposes a certain vulnerability that had not been on display in the heady days of Erotica. “Mer Girl,” which closes the album, is a tender psalm about the deat"

Bullfrog

Bullfrog

Pop/R&B

David M. Pecoraro

In the new issue of Chunklet, comedian/angry guy Lewis Black discusses why his proposed sitcom never got off the ground. "The only thing that kept us off the air was that they wanted to do it with a laugh track, and I wanted to do it with a live audience. That was the only way they were going to sell me," he says. "What would have happened was you'd make that exchange; the writing of that character becomes broader... because I'm pushing the envelope to get laughs, because instinctively I know how to work an audience, I know where to go." To some, it might seem like Black is being a little picky, yet another victim of the ages-old beggars-can't-be-choosers rhetoric. But anyone who's ever stood before a crowd of onlookers-- be they eight or 800-- and performed, knows the difference an audience makes. For many, the audience is a terrifying factor; one they'll do almost anything to avoid. But for a select few, the audience is as necessary to the creative process as watermelons and giant hammers are to Gallagher (to stick with the stand-up theme). It's the catalyst that kicks them into gear, starts the adrenaline pumping, and allows them to tell jokes, play music, dance, act, or do whatever it is they do on a level they'd be incapable of reaching otherwise. Bullfrog, a Canadian band gaining crazy-style exposure thanks to their turntablist, Eric "Kid Koala" San, would seem to fit into this latter category. Ever since I came to the conclusion a while back that Koala is God's gift to the turntable, I've made a point of collecting recordings and catching him wherever I can. And I must say, that when it comes to live performance, his band Bullfrog puts on a hell of a show, stepping up from their backing role on Koala's Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and generally holding their own. Bullfrog's music isn't anything stupendously original (they function as a laid-back combination of hip-hop, funk, R&B;, and Phish-y hippie music, not unlike, say, G. Love and Special Sauce), nor are their lyrics particularly demanding (despite song titles like "Ya Ya" and "Ababa" which might suggest otherwise), and the content rarely elevates above standard party-rockin', good-time-havin' fare. By all logic, Bullfrog should suck royally. But something about the live performance galvanizes the band. Live, they're on top of their game, a great party band, and ready to start the motors of even the most initially indifferent crowd. But when it comes to recorded music... well, maybe Bullfrog should've taken a cue from Lewis Black. Try though they might to capture the spirit of their live performances, the generally lackluster nature of Bullfrog's self-titled debut proves that the band just isn't the same without an audience to play to. Sure, Bullfrog has its moments. "Slow Down" is nice enough, teetering between a cappella 50s-pop and laid-back reggae-inspired jam-band fare; "Bullfrog Theme" carries a certain confidence not present elsewhere in the album; and Kid Koala's collage intermission "Extra Track II" is a fun mockery of music industry politics. Unfortunately, these are the exceptions, not the rule. Though all six members of the group remain technically proficient or better, they generally lack the energy and passion in a recording session that makes their live show so much fun. One gets the feeling that someone at Atlantic realized this at some point as-- presumably to capture some of the energy of the live show-- someone has taken the liberty of peppering this recipe with various clips from live performances. However, the recording quality of Bullfrog's live content is, to put it gently, fucking terrible. Many of the live tracks stop or start at awkward moments in the middle of songs, vocals echo across rooms, much of the content sounds canned and muffled, and Koala's contributions are often mixed far too low, making them impossible to hear over rollicking drums. Rather than adding spice to the flavor, these tracks stand out like an ugly hair at the bottom of your soup. Ultimately, this package reeks of having been thrown together on the run (no doubt in an attempt to capitalize on Koala's Touring-With-Radiohead status before the Yorke groupies forgot his name). And while its tough to criticize a band for attempting to grab hold at what's likely their best bet for success, it's a damned shame it had to go like this. They may not be the most amazing band in the world, but Bullfrog deserves better than this. Maybe the future will bring us a proper live album from this band, but in the meantime, potential listeners would be better suited holding their breath till the band rolls into town.

Artist: Bullfrog, Album: Bullfrog, Genre: Pop/R&B, Score (1-10): 5.6 Album review: "In the new issue of Chunklet, comedian/angry guy Lewis Black discusses why his proposed sitcom never got off the ground. "The only thing that kept us off the air was that they wanted to do it with a laugh track, and I wanted to do it with a live audience. That was the only way they were going to sell me," he says. "What would have happened was you'd make that exchange; the writing of that character becomes broader... because I'm pushing the envelope to get laughs, because instinctively I know how to work an audience, I know where to go." To some, it might seem like Black is being a little picky, yet another victim of the ages-old beggars-can't-be-choosers rhetoric. But anyone who's ever stood before a crowd of onlookers-- be they eight or 800-- and performed, knows the difference an audience makes. For many, the audience is a terrifying factor; one they'll do almost anything to avoid. But for a select few, the audience is as necessary to the creative process as watermelons and giant hammers are to Gallagher (to stick with the stand-up theme). It's the catalyst that kicks them into gear, starts the adrenaline pumping, and allows them to tell jokes, play music, dance, act, or do whatever it is they do on a level they'd be incapable of reaching otherwise. Bullfrog, a Canadian band gaining crazy-style exposure thanks to their turntablist, Eric "Kid Koala" San, would seem to fit into this latter category. Ever since I came to the conclusion a while back that Koala is God's gift to the turntable, I've made a point of collecting recordings and catching him wherever I can. And I must say, that when it comes to live performance, his band Bullfrog puts on a hell of a show, stepping up from their backing role on Koala's Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and generally holding their own. Bullfrog's music isn't anything stupendously original (they function as a laid-back combination of hip-hop, funk, R&B;, and Phish-y hippie music, not unlike, say, G. Love and Special Sauce), nor are their lyrics particularly demanding (despite song titles like "Ya Ya" and "Ababa" which might suggest otherwise), and the content rarely elevates above standard party-rockin', good-time-havin' fare. By all logic, Bullfrog should suck royally. But something about the live performance galvanizes the band. Live, they're on top of their game, a great party band, and ready to start the motors of even the most initially indifferent crowd. But when it comes to recorded music... well, maybe Bullfrog should've taken a cue from Lewis Black. Try though they might to capture the spirit of their live performances, the generally lackluster nature of Bullfrog's self-titled debut proves that the band just isn't the same without an audience to play to. Sure, Bullfrog has its moments. "Slow Down" is nice enough, teetering between a cappella 50s-pop and laid-back reggae-inspired jam-band fare; "Bullfrog Theme" carries a certain confidence not present elsewhere in the album; and Kid Koala's collage intermission "Extra Track II" is a fun mockery of music industry politics. Unfortunately, these are the exceptions, not the rule. Though all six members of the group remain technically proficient or better, they generally lack the energy and passion in a recording session that makes their live show so much fun. One gets the feeling that someone at Atlantic realized this at some point as-- presumably to capture some of the energy of the live show-- someone has taken the liberty of peppering this recipe with various clips from live performances. However, the recording quality of Bullfrog's live content is, to put it gently, fucking terrible. Many of the live tracks stop or start at awkward moments in the middle of songs, vocals echo across rooms, much of the content sounds canned and muffled, and Koala's contributions are often mixed far too low, making them impossible to hear over rollicking drums. Rather than adding spice to the flavor, these tracks stand out like an ugly hair at the bottom of your soup. Ultimately, this package reeks of having been thrown together on the run (no doubt in an attempt to capitalize on Koala's Touring-With-Radiohead status before the Yorke groupies forgot his name). And while its tough to criticize a band for attempting to grab hold at what's likely their best bet for success, it's a damned shame it had to go like this. They may not be the most amazing band in the world, but Bullfrog deserves better than this. Maybe the future will bring us a proper live album from this band, but in the meantime, potential listeners would be better suited holding their breath till the band rolls into town."

Shintaro Sakamoto

Let's Dance Raw

Rock

Eric Harvey

There’s a particular kind of freedom many Japanese rock musicians enjoy, a weird side-benefit of inheriting Elvis from post-WWII American GI radio and never much worrying about fealty to blues or folk traditions. It’s a freedom from the burdens of authenticity, in other words, that makes an artist like Shintaro Sakamoto possible. The raunchy psych-rock Sakamoto played with his band Yura Yura Teikoku was, through its origins in San Francisco and London and Detroit, a authentic product of psychedelic and narcotic influence. Yet as Julian Cope explains in his study of Japanese psychedelia Japrocksampler, the Japanese heads who built upon and translated the post-Nuggets era into their own language, laying the groundwork for Sakamoto himself, most often eschewed drugs completely, opting for other avenues through which to get to the same dizzying musical highs. As a solo artist, Sakamoto is so unconcerned with authenticity to a musical tradition that on record, he quite nearly disappears completely. On the 2012 LP How to Live With a Phantom, he mastered an ersatz lounge-pop that skewed as much portmortem as postmodern. The lightest, oft-cheesiest products of Western '50s and '60s pop—from the Free Design to French yé-yé and Martin Denny’s “exotica” soundscapes—have long appealed to Japanese record nerds for whom “soul” is often a very foreign concept, and Sakamoto is no exception. On his second solo album Let’s Dance Raw, he doubles down on his love for such sounds, assembling them into a whole that suggests as much the heady late '90s as the go-go '60s. A slight shift from Phantom’s chippy disco guitar licks and smoky organs, Raw finds Sakamoto immersing himself in Hawaiian steel guitar, Brazilian cuica, and banjo—an instrument which, he suggests on “You Can Be a Robot, Too”, can be plucked and looped in a way that sounds like thousands of tiny gears operating in perfect concert. If there's any recognizable Western spirit animals for Raw (other than “Sleep Walk”), it's Beck—the heavy-lidded proto-serious iteration, that is, from 1998’s Mutations—and indie-pop gadabout and arranger-for-hire Sean O’Hagan with the High Llamas, whose '90s LPs Santa Barbara and Hawaii absorbed the Americana ambitions of Van Dyke Parks and ironed out the quirks, creating a heavily-stamped, pristine musical passport. Like Beck’s “Tropicalia”, Raw is a perfectly executed version of what Westerners might call global kitsch: a series of evocative tourist postcards showing sunny scenes from Rio and Honolulu. What makes Sakamoto unique, though, is not simply his knack for turning the exotic West into a glimmering watercolor, or his capacity to craft a simple groove redolent of Steely Dan’s gaudy disco swan song Gaucho—though “Like an Obligation” more than qualifies—but doing so with the kind of fashionable indifference mastered by predecessors like Beck, Grace Jones, and the dazed, obsessive Yokohama teenagers wandering through Memphis in Mystery Train. Yes, Sakamoto digs into countercultural sociology on “Obligation” and “Birth of the Super Cult”, two blunted treatises against the staid social structures that still dog much of Japanese society. But before we call him a prophet, let’s keep in mind his alternative: sliding “a small chip between your eyebrows” and becoming a robot. Sakamoto has an odd way of working, sure, but it's also liberating: when you disregard authenticity as your compass, it’s amazing how far you can travel.

Artist: Shintaro Sakamoto, Album: Let's Dance Raw, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.1 Album review: "There’s a particular kind of freedom many Japanese rock musicians enjoy, a weird side-benefit of inheriting Elvis from post-WWII American GI radio and never much worrying about fealty to blues or folk traditions. It’s a freedom from the burdens of authenticity, in other words, that makes an artist like Shintaro Sakamoto possible. The raunchy psych-rock Sakamoto played with his band Yura Yura Teikoku was, through its origins in San Francisco and London and Detroit, a authentic product of psychedelic and narcotic influence. Yet as Julian Cope explains in his study of Japanese psychedelia Japrocksampler, the Japanese heads who built upon and translated the post-Nuggets era into their own language, laying the groundwork for Sakamoto himself, most often eschewed drugs completely, opting for other avenues through which to get to the same dizzying musical highs. As a solo artist, Sakamoto is so unconcerned with authenticity to a musical tradition that on record, he quite nearly disappears completely. On the 2012 LP How to Live With a Phantom, he mastered an ersatz lounge-pop that skewed as much portmortem as postmodern. The lightest, oft-cheesiest products of Western '50s and '60s pop—from the Free Design to French yé-yé and Martin Denny’s “exotica” soundscapes—have long appealed to Japanese record nerds for whom “soul” is often a very foreign concept, and Sakamoto is no exception. On his second solo album Let’s Dance Raw, he doubles down on his love for such sounds, assembling them into a whole that suggests as much the heady late '90s as the go-go '60s. A slight shift from Phantom’s chippy disco guitar licks and smoky organs, Raw finds Sakamoto immersing himself in Hawaiian steel guitar, Brazilian cuica, and banjo—an instrument which, he suggests on “You Can Be a Robot, Too”, can be plucked and looped in a way that sounds like thousands of tiny gears operating in perfect concert. If there's any recognizable Western spirit animals for Raw (other than “Sleep Walk”), it's Beck—the heavy-lidded proto-serious iteration, that is, from 1998’s Mutations—and indie-pop gadabout and arranger-for-hire Sean O’Hagan with the High Llamas, whose '90s LPs Santa Barbara and Hawaii absorbed the Americana ambitions of Van Dyke Parks and ironed out the quirks, creating a heavily-stamped, pristine musical passport. Like Beck’s “Tropicalia”, Raw is a perfectly executed version of what Westerners might call global kitsch: a series of evocative tourist postcards showing sunny scenes from Rio and Honolulu. What makes Sakamoto unique, though, is not simply his knack for turning the exotic West into a glimmering watercolor, or his capacity to craft a simple groove redolent of Steely Dan’s gaudy disco swan song Gaucho—though “Like an Obligation” more than qualifies—but doing so with the kind of fashionable indifference mastered by predecessors like Beck, Grace Jones, and the dazed, obsessive Yokohama teenagers wandering through Memphis in Mystery Train. Yes, Sakamoto digs into countercultural sociology on “Obligation” and “Birth of the Super Cult”, two blunted treatises against the staid social structures that still dog much of Japanese society. But before we call him a prophet, let’s keep in mind his alternative: sliding “a small chip between your eyebrows” and becoming a robot. Sakamoto has an odd way of working, sure, but it's also liberating: when you disregard authenticity as your compass, it’s amazing how far you can travel."

The Legends

Up Against The Legends

Rock

Stephen M. Deusner

A quick Google search for Up Against The Legends only reveals how little is out there on the upstart Swedish nonet The Legends. The few early online reviews of the group's debut, Up Against The Legends, reveal none of the band members' names, and websites for their American and European labels are similarly mum on the group's background. This we know: There are nine individual Legends (although some sources and photographs claim only eight). The band formed in early 2003. They had a gig opening for Stockholm-based Radio Dept. before they even had a committed line-up. The principle players-- Johan Angeråld of Club 8 may or may not be among them-- recruited friends, and friends of friends, some of whom had no musical experience and had to learn to play their instruments. It's unclear which band members, how many, and which instruments; there's a big difference between teaching yourself guitar or drums and learning tambourine. Obviously, The Legends are a concept-driven band. The group was born as an idea that had to be fleshed out with actual flesh, so taking the name The Legends is apparently not an act of Hives-like audacity, nor does it appear to be a forward-looking mission statement. Hiding behind their collective identity and withholding biographical information and even their individual names, The Legends live up to that name in the most mythological sense of the word. Even the pictures of the musicians on the album cover are collages, rendering them literally as cardboard cutouts. Whatever ends this strategy serves are debatable, but The Legends' rigorous anonymity, however suspicious, would seem to blur into the music, at least superficially. Up Against The Legends traffics in a brand of retro-minded indie pop that borrows just enough from current garage-rock trends to put movement in the music, but not enough to garner any meaningful comparisons to fellow Swedes like The Hives or Sahara Hotnights. They're more beholden to The Jesus & Mary Chain's fuzzed-out style and Phil Spector's Wall of Sound than to Nuggets or The Stooges. Still, given these sketchy outlines, their debut should be at best merely forgettable and at worst actively bad. After all, pop doesn't always reward the DIY ethic the way punk does. And songs like "There and Back Again" and "Trouble Loves Me", on first listen, do sound too trendy and maybe a little generic-- the product of genre formula rather than musical imagination. The atmosphere of "When the Day Is Done" (featured on the Wicker Park soundtrack) sounds too studied to be as chilly as intended. Seemingly handicapped, Up Against The Legends could have been lost in this year's overflow of surprisingly good albums by like-minded artists like The Concretes, Jens Lekman, Camera Obscura, and Saturday Looks Good to Me. The first impression is that of an acceptable, if not stellar, example of a particular style-- maybe a high 6 on the Pitchfork rating scale. So then, what separates it from the pack? Perhaps it's due to Up Against The Legends incredible resilience: It grows on you like ivy. With each subsequent listen, the album reveals more and more of itself through small, unexpected flourishes of sound that gradually accrue more than enough personality to fill the band-shaped hole. Up Against The Legends is heavily layered with hand claps, tambourines, soft-focus background vocals, and melodies that never seem to go where you might expect. Someone's subtle, pulsing organ races alongside someone else's one-note bassline throughout "There and Back Again", adding a nice tension to the 50s-romantic guitar riff and the pleading, static vocals. Whoever's playing the acoustic guitar theme on "When the Day Is Done" drops in a few extra notes at the end of each line, turning the melody back on itself. Coupled with lyrics that describe the aftermath of a petty romantic argument, that small filigree drops the temperature a degree with each listen-- and the album is crammed with similar enlivening flourishes. Up Against The Legends is that rare pop album that doesn't immediately pop: It's less concerned with the present than with the future. And who knows? Perhaps whatever success attends this album's release will prompt the individual Legends to leave their hiding places and introduce themselves to their listeners. But then, who The Legends are is so much less important than what their debut is: a solid, surprising album whose rewards are commensurate with the time you spend with it.

Artist: The Legends, Album: Up Against The Legends, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 8.0 Album review: "A quick Google search for Up Against The Legends only reveals how little is out there on the upstart Swedish nonet The Legends. The few early online reviews of the group's debut, Up Against The Legends, reveal none of the band members' names, and websites for their American and European labels are similarly mum on the group's background. This we know: There are nine individual Legends (although some sources and photographs claim only eight). The band formed in early 2003. They had a gig opening for Stockholm-based Radio Dept. before they even had a committed line-up. The principle players-- Johan Angeråld of Club 8 may or may not be among them-- recruited friends, and friends of friends, some of whom had no musical experience and had to learn to play their instruments. It's unclear which band members, how many, and which instruments; there's a big difference between teaching yourself guitar or drums and learning tambourine. Obviously, The Legends are a concept-driven band. The group was born as an idea that had to be fleshed out with actual flesh, so taking the name The Legends is apparently not an act of Hives-like audacity, nor does it appear to be a forward-looking mission statement. Hiding behind their collective identity and withholding biographical information and even their individual names, The Legends live up to that name in the most mythological sense of the word. Even the pictures of the musicians on the album cover are collages, rendering them literally as cardboard cutouts. Whatever ends this strategy serves are debatable, but The Legends' rigorous anonymity, however suspicious, would seem to blur into the music, at least superficially. Up Against The Legends traffics in a brand of retro-minded indie pop that borrows just enough from current garage-rock trends to put movement in the music, but not enough to garner any meaningful comparisons to fellow Swedes like The Hives or Sahara Hotnights. They're more beholden to The Jesus & Mary Chain's fuzzed-out style and Phil Spector's Wall of Sound than to Nuggets or The Stooges. Still, given these sketchy outlines, their debut should be at best merely forgettable and at worst actively bad. After all, pop doesn't always reward the DIY ethic the way punk does. And songs like "There and Back Again" and "Trouble Loves Me", on first listen, do sound too trendy and maybe a little generic-- the product of genre formula rather than musical imagination. The atmosphere of "When the Day Is Done" (featured on the Wicker Park soundtrack) sounds too studied to be as chilly as intended. Seemingly handicapped, Up Against The Legends could have been lost in this year's overflow of surprisingly good albums by like-minded artists like The Concretes, Jens Lekman, Camera Obscura, and Saturday Looks Good to Me. The first impression is that of an acceptable, if not stellar, example of a particular style-- maybe a high 6 on the Pitchfork rating scale. So then, what separates it from the pack? Perhaps it's due to Up Against The Legends incredible resilience: It grows on you like ivy. With each subsequent listen, the album reveals more and more of itself through small, unexpected flourishes of sound that gradually accrue more than enough personality to fill the band-shaped hole. Up Against The Legends is heavily layered with hand claps, tambourines, soft-focus background vocals, and melodies that never seem to go where you might expect. Someone's subtle, pulsing organ races alongside someone else's one-note bassline throughout "There and Back Again", adding a nice tension to the 50s-romantic guitar riff and the pleading, static vocals. Whoever's playing the acoustic guitar theme on "When the Day Is Done" drops in a few extra notes at the end of each line, turning the melody back on itself. Coupled with lyrics that describe the aftermath of a petty romantic argument, that small filigree drops the temperature a degree with each listen-- and the album is crammed with similar enlivening flourishes. Up Against The Legends is that rare pop album that doesn't immediately pop: It's less concerned with the present than with the future. And who knows? Perhaps whatever success attends this album's release will prompt the individual Legends to leave their hiding places and introduce themselves to their listeners. But then, who The Legends are is so much less important than what their debut is: a solid, surprising album whose rewards are commensurate with the time you spend with it."

Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele

The Good Feeling Music of Dent May and His Magnificent Ukulele

Rock

Joe Colly

By now you may have heard that young throwback crooner Dent May was discovered by Animal Collective during the recording of Merriweather Post Pavilion in Oxford, Miss., and subsequently signed to the group's Paw Tracks imprint. That fact has a lot of folks excited about the newcomer, but May is not your typical A.C.-related artist. In fact, on the wide spectrum of musical styles he's probably as far away from labelmates Black Dice and Excepter as, um, David Banner or Taylor Swift. The Mississippi native offers here a kind of modern-day lounge act-- approaching his material as part sentimentalist, part jokester-- and sings in a manner closely reminiscent of indie pop vocalists like Stephin Merritt and Jens Lekman. May shares those gents' strong grasp of melody (his songs are nothing if not hook-laden) but unlike them he is a strict genre specialist. For this record, at least (allegedly there's a dance project in the works under his Dent Sweat alter ego), he functions entirely within the boundaries of the schmaltzy barroom pop and suburbanized island music of the 1950s and 60s. ("Meet Me in the Garden", all tiki torches and umbrella drinks, might as well be the soundtrack to a backyard cookout thrown by Mad Men 's Betty Draper.) Combined with his tongue-in-cheek lyrics, it can be a lot of shtick to swallow at once. Since it's inseparable from the album's content, one really has to buy into the persona May is selling in order to enjoy The Good Feeling Music of Dent May and His Magnificent Ukulele . That's much easier to do with a fellow like Jonathan Richman (with whom May shares an innocent-guy outlook and is often compared to), because his naiveté comes across as genuine and is leavened with humor. But May's attempts at winking cultural criticism often undercut his authenticity. On "College Town Boy", he awkwardly pokes fun at the academic set, singing, "Since graduation day he feels like a fraud, he still regrets he never studied abroad." Yikes. Prompting more winces on "You Can't Force a Dance Party", May revisits a hipster get-together gone awry: "All the way from Brooklyn, Sally came to see me", he says, but laments spoiling the fun by being "in the corner reading poetry and prose." If you can look past these cringe-inducing moments, The Good Feeling Music occasionally lives up to its title. One of the record's most charming cuts is "Oh Paris!", which finds May doing his best Morrissey atop strumming ukulele (yes, it is omnipresent) and "shoo-be doo-be" backing vocals. Just as pleasant is his reverential take on the Four Preps' 1957 classic "26 Miles (Catalina)", a wise cover choice since it fits snugly within his aesthetic. Alongside "Meet Me in the Garden", these songs represent a sufficiently enjoyable portion of the record. But to compare May again to one of his peers, there's nothing on par with Lekman's "Black Cab" or "Maple Leaves" here. At this early point in his career, May's tunes, while positively catchy and at times a lot fun, just don't have that kind of depth. They also lack heart, and that seems harder to forgive.

Artist: Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele, Album: The Good Feeling Music of Dent May and His Magnificent Ukulele, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 5.5 Album review: "By now you may have heard that young throwback crooner Dent May was discovered by Animal Collective during the recording of Merriweather Post Pavilion in Oxford, Miss., and subsequently signed to the group's Paw Tracks imprint. That fact has a lot of folks excited about the newcomer, but May is not your typical A.C.-related artist. In fact, on the wide spectrum of musical styles he's probably as far away from labelmates Black Dice and Excepter as, um, David Banner or Taylor Swift. The Mississippi native offers here a kind of modern-day lounge act-- approaching his material as part sentimentalist, part jokester-- and sings in a manner closely reminiscent of indie pop vocalists like Stephin Merritt and Jens Lekman. May shares those gents' strong grasp of melody (his songs are nothing if not hook-laden) but unlike them he is a strict genre specialist. For this record, at least (allegedly there's a dance project in the works under his Dent Sweat alter ego), he functions entirely within the boundaries of the schmaltzy barroom pop and suburbanized island music of the 1950s and 60s. ("Meet Me in the Garden", all tiki torches and umbrella drinks, might as well be the soundtrack to a backyard cookout thrown by Mad Men 's Betty Draper.) Combined with his tongue-in-cheek lyrics, it can be a lot of shtick to swallow at once. Since it's inseparable from the album's content, one really has to buy into the persona May is selling in order to enjoy The Good Feeling Music of Dent May and His Magnificent Ukulele . That's much easier to do with a fellow like Jonathan Richman (with whom May shares an innocent-guy outlook and is often compared to), because his naiveté comes across as genuine and is leavened with humor. But May's attempts at winking cultural criticism often undercut his authenticity. On "College Town Boy", he awkwardly pokes fun at the academic set, singing, "Since graduation day he feels like a fraud, he still regrets he never studied abroad." Yikes. Prompting more winces on "You Can't Force a Dance Party", May revisits a hipster get-together gone awry: "All the way from Brooklyn, Sally came to see me", he says, but laments spoiling the fun by being "in the corner reading poetry and prose." If you can look past these cringe-inducing moments, The Good Feeling Music occasionally lives up to its title. One of the record's most charming cuts is "Oh Paris!", which finds May doing his best Morrissey atop strumming ukulele (yes, it is omnipresent) and "shoo-be doo-be" backing vocals. Just as pleasant is his reverential take on the Four Preps' 1957 classic "26 Miles (Catalina)", a wise cover choice since it fits snugly within his aesthetic. Alongside "Meet Me in the Garden", these songs represent a sufficiently enjoyable portion of the record. But to compare May again to one of his peers, there's nothing on par with Lekman's "Black Cab" or "Maple Leaves" here. At this early point in his career, May's tunes, while positively catchy and at times a lot fun, just don't have that kind of depth. They also lack heart, and that seems harder to forgive."

Frankie Sparo

My Red Scare

Experimental

Mark Richard-San

Montreal is the Chicago of the Great White North. I'm not talking about the buildings or the baseball teams or the median waistline, but the tone of their respective independent music scenes. The parallels are striking. A handful of influential labels in each town have supported artists making an effort to expand the boundaries of rock. Both have embraced recent developments in electronic music. Both have vibrant improv scenes with members teaming up in innumerable combinations to experiment. Montreal draws a bit more from film music, and Chicago makes good use of its German imports, but there are common threads, no question. The Montreal/Chicago comparison occurred to me while listening to this album by Frankie Sparo; he's like the Canadian Califone. His songs are painfully slow, and sung in a gruff, downcast voice. They also draw upon the music traditions of the distant past (some folk and blues, even more vaudeville) and the technology of the future (there all sort of wonderfully processed sounds on My Red Scare) to offer a portrait of urban desolation and despair. The production was the first thing that really got to me. Recorded at the now-legendary Hotel2Tango by some folks from Godspeed, Sparo surrounds his songs with some beautiful noise. To extend my earlier comparisons a bit further, the music sounds much more like a Brian Deck production than anything you might imagine from the Godspeed camp. The drums used to hold 55 gallons of oil, cymbals are bowed or left out altogether, and evocative noises of every stripe waft about in the cobwebbed rafters. The guitar ranges from the latter-day Crazy Horse snarl of "Send for Me" to the spare, lonesome 50s-style vibrato of the opening "Bastard Heart." But there's one essential ingredient lacking from My Red Scare, and its absence is glaring: melody. Sparo goes so far in conjuring an effective mood that he forgets to craft tunes. As I said before, his song structure owes less to folk and blues and more to the bleak vaudeville so loved by Tom Waits in the 80s. But the songs are so incredibly slow and the melodies so vague that Sparo's voice, which is interesting enough at first listen, loses its power. A word combination like "feeling glamorous" is sung as "fee-ling glam-or-ous," and takes about five seconds to complete. Annoying, I'm sorry. I can handle it with a band like Low because the melodies reveal their beauty with each new syllable, but songcraft doesn't seem to be a major priority for Sparo. There are some exceptional moments, though. The aforementioned line comes from a track called "Diminish Me New York" that I imagine Sparo is getting some good mileage out of these days. Lines like, "It's so hard to feel tall/ Everything is tall/ Magnificent New York" are hard to hear now, but somehow, wrapped as they are in the spacious junkyard production, they're moving. "The Loneliest Mademoiselle" combines Sparo's reverberating guitar with some affecting layered violin work by Jessica Moss, and it achieves its poignant aim. But these moments where Sparo transcends the limitations of his songs don't come quite often enough, and My Red Scare remains an interesting artifact that never fascinates.

Artist: Frankie Sparo, Album: My Red Scare, Genre: Experimental, Score (1-10): 6.1 Album review: "Montreal is the Chicago of the Great White North. I'm not talking about the buildings or the baseball teams or the median waistline, but the tone of their respective independent music scenes. The parallels are striking. A handful of influential labels in each town have supported artists making an effort to expand the boundaries of rock. Both have embraced recent developments in electronic music. Both have vibrant improv scenes with members teaming up in innumerable combinations to experiment. Montreal draws a bit more from film music, and Chicago makes good use of its German imports, but there are common threads, no question. The Montreal/Chicago comparison occurred to me while listening to this album by Frankie Sparo; he's like the Canadian Califone. His songs are painfully slow, and sung in a gruff, downcast voice. They also draw upon the music traditions of the distant past (some folk and blues, even more vaudeville) and the technology of the future (there all sort of wonderfully processed sounds on My Red Scare) to offer a portrait of urban desolation and despair. The production was the first thing that really got to me. Recorded at the now-legendary Hotel2Tango by some folks from Godspeed, Sparo surrounds his songs with some beautiful noise. To extend my earlier comparisons a bit further, the music sounds much more like a Brian Deck production than anything you might imagine from the Godspeed camp. The drums used to hold 55 gallons of oil, cymbals are bowed or left out altogether, and evocative noises of every stripe waft about in the cobwebbed rafters. The guitar ranges from the latter-day Crazy Horse snarl of "Send for Me" to the spare, lonesome 50s-style vibrato of the opening "Bastard Heart." But there's one essential ingredient lacking from My Red Scare, and its absence is glaring: melody. Sparo goes so far in conjuring an effective mood that he forgets to craft tunes. As I said before, his song structure owes less to folk and blues and more to the bleak vaudeville so loved by Tom Waits in the 80s. But the songs are so incredibly slow and the melodies so vague that Sparo's voice, which is interesting enough at first listen, loses its power. A word combination like "feeling glamorous" is sung as "fee-ling glam-or-ous," and takes about five seconds to complete. Annoying, I'm sorry. I can handle it with a band like Low because the melodies reveal their beauty with each new syllable, but songcraft doesn't seem to be a major priority for Sparo. There are some exceptional moments, though. The aforementioned line comes from a track called "Diminish Me New York" that I imagine Sparo is getting some good mileage out of these days. Lines like, "It's so hard to feel tall/ Everything is tall/ Magnificent New York" are hard to hear now, but somehow, wrapped as they are in the spacious junkyard production, they're moving. "The Loneliest Mademoiselle" combines Sparo's reverberating guitar with some affecting layered violin work by Jessica Moss, and it achieves its poignant aim. But these moments where Sparo transcends the limitations of his songs don't come quite often enough, and My Red Scare remains an interesting artifact that never fascinates."

Corin Tucker Band

Kill My Blues

Rock

Jessica Hopper

At what age does your feminist anger stop being qualified as "riot grrrl rage"? Kill My Blues, the Corin Tucker Band's sophomore album, is being heralded as the former Sleater-Kinney bandleader's default to her '91 Olympia factory settings. This is a fantastic prospect surely stoking our 1990s nostalgia and wiping the weird taste of her previous album off our palates, but it doesn't quite hold. Tucker is now a grown-azz, 39-year-old woman, and on Kill My Blues she tackles topics that weren't on her riot girl radar at 20: mortality, the joy of conception, how she could use a vacation. She is singing from the perspective of her life as the mother of two kids who's maybe a little wistful for days when her life was a little more carefree and Joey Ramone was still above ground. Her rage is no more than that of any American who's paying attention in 2012. It's only natural that we'd want Tucker to stay put in her Revolution Girl Style, Now! pose. Who wants our rock stars to get old? To change? Rock'n'roll is the province of the young. Therein lies the discomfort of our icons' maturing and making records that reflect their evolving ken. Fandom would be so much tidier if they could keep neatly fitting the nostalgic niche we hold for them in our hearts. ("My old life is dead," sings Tucker, joyful on "Blood Bones and Sand", her song about the maternal tether.) Tucker is at the fore of the generation of post-grunge boom indie rockers, punks who were close enough to glean the sad lessons of heroin and major label deals from a safe distance, and subsequently they are still alive and fortified by the same communities that fostered them making music in the first place; it might be a while before we see any of these folks "age out" of the DIY scene. And so there we are with Kill My Blues, on the heels of Tucker's solo debut, 1,000 Years, a record the sounded better on paper than in real life (it turned out Tucker's Joni-phase produced her Hejira rather than her Blue). On tour, Tucker saw how drumless balladry wasn't energizing her fans that live and love for her scream and guitar sheroics-- and so begat this return to form. The good news is the Corin Tucker of Kill My Blues is not the Corin of Heavens to Betsy, nor is she the same woman we knew from that year when Dig Me Out forever blared from the stereo. The range of her voice is more expansive, and there is an absolute control here that she's never had before; when she goes full-throttle, the effect is stunning. Perhaps she's outgrown some Olympia-born punk shame about being a full-fledged rock singer; no longer aiming for raw and ragged and instead giving us the full Benetar. It's Tucker's voice that gives Kill My Blues its thrills. On album opener "Groundhog Day", Tucker sings of coming to after years busy with raising her young family, amid the GOP's War on Women, confronting the same battles for women's lives and bodies that riled her two decades ago. She points the rhetorical finger at herself, asking, "Did I fall asleep/ On the backs of the women that come before me?" Musically, it's the closest thing to a Sleater-Kinney moment on the record, spirited and gnashing. Tucker's band are formidable old hands all-- onetime Unwound drummer Sara Lund, one of the underground's great distinctive players and Seth Lorinczi of Circus Lupus (if you are old) and Golden Bears (if you aren't) and Mike Clark, the spare guy in the Jicks-- they give the pensive album some thrust. The strange part is that Tucker still plays as if Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss were at her side; there is a space around her that feels like it needs to be filled, her antic rhythm and tempo don't always settle with Lund's in-the-pocket playing. The album starts strong, but is uneven, dragging toward the end. The high points are the "Teen Spirit"-bite and twinkling keys of "Constance", and Tucker's blistering tribute to Natalie Cox, "I Don't Wanna Go". The album's best moment-- the bridge and solo flourish on "Joey"-- happens two minutes into a song that otherwise goes nowhere. The cutesy "Summer Jams" feels long at four minutes and Tucker employs a string of clichés that are below her faculties. The album is self-produced and at times it seems they could have benefitted from some outside ears to help tighten things up. Tucker is unquestionably at the height of her power as a vocalist, but there are times where even that can't buoy Kill My Blues.

Artist: Corin Tucker Band, Album: Kill My Blues, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 6.5 Album review: "At what age does your feminist anger stop being qualified as "riot grrrl rage"? Kill My Blues, the Corin Tucker Band's sophomore album, is being heralded as the former Sleater-Kinney bandleader's default to her '91 Olympia factory settings. This is a fantastic prospect surely stoking our 1990s nostalgia and wiping the weird taste of her previous album off our palates, but it doesn't quite hold. Tucker is now a grown-azz, 39-year-old woman, and on Kill My Blues she tackles topics that weren't on her riot girl radar at 20: mortality, the joy of conception, how she could use a vacation. She is singing from the perspective of her life as the mother of two kids who's maybe a little wistful for days when her life was a little more carefree and Joey Ramone was still above ground. Her rage is no more than that of any American who's paying attention in 2012. It's only natural that we'd want Tucker to stay put in her Revolution Girl Style, Now! pose. Who wants our rock stars to get old? To change? Rock'n'roll is the province of the young. Therein lies the discomfort of our icons' maturing and making records that reflect their evolving ken. Fandom would be so much tidier if they could keep neatly fitting the nostalgic niche we hold for them in our hearts. ("My old life is dead," sings Tucker, joyful on "Blood Bones and Sand", her song about the maternal tether.) Tucker is at the fore of the generation of post-grunge boom indie rockers, punks who were close enough to glean the sad lessons of heroin and major label deals from a safe distance, and subsequently they are still alive and fortified by the same communities that fostered them making music in the first place; it might be a while before we see any of these folks "age out" of the DIY scene. And so there we are with Kill My Blues, on the heels of Tucker's solo debut, 1,000 Years, a record the sounded better on paper than in real life (it turned out Tucker's Joni-phase produced her Hejira rather than her Blue). On tour, Tucker saw how drumless balladry wasn't energizing her fans that live and love for her scream and guitar sheroics-- and so begat this return to form. The good news is the Corin Tucker of Kill My Blues is not the Corin of Heavens to Betsy, nor is she the same woman we knew from that year when Dig Me Out forever blared from the stereo. The range of her voice is more expansive, and there is an absolute control here that she's never had before; when she goes full-throttle, the effect is stunning. Perhaps she's outgrown some Olympia-born punk shame about being a full-fledged rock singer; no longer aiming for raw and ragged and instead giving us the full Benetar. It's Tucker's voice that gives Kill My Blues its thrills. On album opener "Groundhog Day", Tucker sings of coming to after years busy with raising her young family, amid the GOP's War on Women, confronting the same battles for women's lives and bodies that riled her two decades ago. She points the rhetorical finger at herself, asking, "Did I fall asleep/ On the backs of the women that come before me?" Musically, it's the closest thing to a Sleater-Kinney moment on the record, spirited and gnashing. Tucker's band are formidable old hands all-- onetime Unwound drummer Sara Lund, one of the underground's great distinctive players and Seth Lorinczi of Circus Lupus (if you are old) and Golden Bears (if you aren't) and Mike Clark, the spare guy in the Jicks-- they give the pensive album some thrust. The strange part is that Tucker still plays as if Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss were at her side; there is a space around her that feels like it needs to be filled, her antic rhythm and tempo don't always settle with Lund's in-the-pocket playing. The album starts strong, but is uneven, dragging toward the end. The high points are the "Teen Spirit"-bite and twinkling keys of "Constance", and Tucker's blistering tribute to Natalie Cox, "I Don't Wanna Go". The album's best moment-- the bridge and solo flourish on "Joey"-- happens two minutes into a song that otherwise goes nowhere. The cutesy "Summer Jams" feels long at four minutes and Tucker employs a string of clichés that are below her faculties. The album is self-produced and at times it seems they could have benefitted from some outside ears to help tighten things up. Tucker is unquestionably at the height of her power as a vocalist, but there are times where even that can't buoy Kill My Blues."

Tarkio

Omnibus

Rock

Stephen M. Deusner

You would have lived the rest of your years completely and perhaps blissfully unaware of Tarkio if it weren't for the fact that the band's singer and primary songwriter was Colin Meloy, now president-for-life of the Decemberists. And honestly you wouldn't have been missing very much. Omnibus, Tarkio's two-disk catch-all wrap-up from Kill Rock Stars (now the Decemberists' former home), is full of the kind of well-meaning, basically bland acoustic rock that all college towns seem to produce in bulk. In fact, the music is so rooted in a very particular strain of college rock that it could conceivably have been recorded ten years earlier with ambitions to sit on student playlists alongside Guadalcanal Diary, the Ocean Blue, and Bread and Circus-era Toad the Wet Sprocket. Tarkio formed in Missoula, Montana, in 1996, after Meloy returned from a few semesters at the University of Oregon with a mind to change his major to English. Once settled, he recruited banjo player Gibson Hartwell, bassist Louis Stein, and drummer Brian Collins, and the band took its name from a nearby ghost town. Over just a few years, Tarkio recorded a few EPs-- most self-released, but one via Barcelona Records-- all of which are collected on Omnibus, along with a few previously unreleased tracks. Predictably, there's a lot of institutional guitar jangle in every song, along with some polite strumming, decent drumming, and Meloy's studious wordplay and lit-class allusions to Camus and The Sheltering Sky. Then as now, Meloy stands out. His now-familiar vocals and brainy lyrics elevate the group above the mass of uncelebrated college bands past and present, even if he sounds like an impressionable student just out of a stimulating lit class. There are intimations of the scamp he would become with the Decemberists; Omnibus even contains an early, less animated version of "My Mother Was a Chinese Trapeze Artist" from the latter band's 5 Songs EP. But this is definitely Meloy in his formative years, before all the sea shanties and chimbley sweeps and military homoeroticism, when he was just getting control of his humor and intelligence. In the liner notes, he dismisses these songs with a half-interested "feh," preferring to think of them as a soundtrack to memories of camaraderie and teeth cutting. Meloy's greatest flaw was his apparent inability to self-edit. The 27 songs on Omnibus are uniformly overlong, most approaching or surpassing the five-minute mark when barely a handful have cause to exceed three minutes. You have to wash the dishes and put on your pajamas before these songs take the hint. This may seem like a minor gripe, but it seriously compromises the individual and cumulative effect of these songs. "Caroline Avenue", for instance, has a catchy chorus saddled to Hartwell's galloping as well as some of the band's cleverest lyrics (although I don't believe Meloy when he claims he's "chasing shots of whiskey with everclear"), but drawn out to nearly six minutes, these elements lose their power and ultimately test your patience. Hartwell even admits as much in the liner notes that "on some level maybe what works about these recordings is not what they are but, what they could have been." They could have been shorter. Some songs, mostly from the 1998 release I Guess I Was Hoping for Something More, hint strongly at what the band could have become with a few more years to refine their chops. "Helena Won't Get Stoned" is a buoyant sing-along that must have been a blast at their live shows (especially in, ahem, Helena), but "Candle" was probably the closer, with its ambitious and dour guitar coda. "Your Own Kind" is a tongue-in-cheek, yet suspiciously persuasive, approximation of easy listening, and "Standing Still" cribs shamelessly but fairly successfully from R.E.M. Omnibus isn't arranged chronologically, which is a big check in the minus column. Presenting these tracks out of order severely skews the true story of the band, which seems like it should be a priority for such an artifact. This decision also means the second disc is weighed down with molasses-slow demos and live tracks like "Tristan and Isolde", which bears comparison to Dire Straits' much more piquant "Romeo and Juliet". The disc continues its dirge-like pace with tracks like "Never Will Marry" and "Following Camden Down", which seem to be sequenced to stop any momentum dead. On the other hand, these songs weren't recorded for this type of release, and bands like Tarkio aren't mean for widespread scrutiny. There's a reason every college town has their own acoustic rock group: They don't export well. Their appeal is entirely local-- not so much the music itself, which is easily reproducible, but the unique thrill of seeing people you know or could know up there on stage playing music. I'm not knocking it. For many budding musicians, writers, lovers, fans, and students, that connection can be just as inspiring as any motivational speaker or activist theatre troupe. As such, Tarkio fulfilled a specifically local function, and if you weren't enrolled at the University of Montana seven or eight years ago, listening to Omnibus may be disappointing, perhaps even a little intrusive. You may not get it, but it wasn't meant for you.

Artist: Tarkio, Album: Omnibus, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 5.7 Album review: "You would have lived the rest of your years completely and perhaps blissfully unaware of Tarkio if it weren't for the fact that the band's singer and primary songwriter was Colin Meloy, now president-for-life of the Decemberists. And honestly you wouldn't have been missing very much. Omnibus, Tarkio's two-disk catch-all wrap-up from Kill Rock Stars (now the Decemberists' former home), is full of the kind of well-meaning, basically bland acoustic rock that all college towns seem to produce in bulk. In fact, the music is so rooted in a very particular strain of college rock that it could conceivably have been recorded ten years earlier with ambitions to sit on student playlists alongside Guadalcanal Diary, the Ocean Blue, and Bread and Circus-era Toad the Wet Sprocket. Tarkio formed in Missoula, Montana, in 1996, after Meloy returned from a few semesters at the University of Oregon with a mind to change his major to English. Once settled, he recruited banjo player Gibson Hartwell, bassist Louis Stein, and drummer Brian Collins, and the band took its name from a nearby ghost town. Over just a few years, Tarkio recorded a few EPs-- most self-released, but one via Barcelona Records-- all of which are collected on Omnibus, along with a few previously unreleased tracks. Predictably, there's a lot of institutional guitar jangle in every song, along with some polite strumming, decent drumming, and Meloy's studious wordplay and lit-class allusions to Camus and The Sheltering Sky. Then as now, Meloy stands out. His now-familiar vocals and brainy lyrics elevate the group above the mass of uncelebrated college bands past and present, even if he sounds like an impressionable student just out of a stimulating lit class. There are intimations of the scamp he would become with the Decemberists; Omnibus even contains an early, less animated version of "My Mother Was a Chinese Trapeze Artist" from the latter band's 5 Songs EP. But this is definitely Meloy in his formative years, before all the sea shanties and chimbley sweeps and military homoeroticism, when he was just getting control of his humor and intelligence. In the liner notes, he dismisses these songs with a half-interested "feh," preferring to think of them as a soundtrack to memories of camaraderie and teeth cutting. Meloy's greatest flaw was his apparent inability to self-edit. The 27 songs on Omnibus are uniformly overlong, most approaching or surpassing the five-minute mark when barely a handful have cause to exceed three minutes. You have to wash the dishes and put on your pajamas before these songs take the hint. This may seem like a minor gripe, but it seriously compromises the individual and cumulative effect of these songs. "Caroline Avenue", for instance, has a catchy chorus saddled to Hartwell's galloping as well as some of the band's cleverest lyrics (although I don't believe Meloy when he claims he's "chasing shots of whiskey with everclear"), but drawn out to nearly six minutes, these elements lose their power and ultimately test your patience. Hartwell even admits as much in the liner notes that "on some level maybe what works about these recordings is not what they are but, what they could have been." They could have been shorter. Some songs, mostly from the 1998 release I Guess I Was Hoping for Something More, hint strongly at what the band could have become with a few more years to refine their chops. "Helena Won't Get Stoned" is a buoyant sing-along that must have been a blast at their live shows (especially in, ahem, Helena), but "Candle" was probably the closer, with its ambitious and dour guitar coda. "Your Own Kind" is a tongue-in-cheek, yet suspiciously persuasive, approximation of easy listening, and "Standing Still" cribs shamelessly but fairly successfully from R.E.M. Omnibus isn't arranged chronologically, which is a big check in the minus column. Presenting these tracks out of order severely skews the true story of the band, which seems like it should be a priority for such an artifact. This decision also means the second disc is weighed down with molasses-slow demos and live tracks like "Tristan and Isolde", which bears comparison to Dire Straits' much more piquant "Romeo and Juliet". The disc continues its dirge-like pace with tracks like "Never Will Marry" and "Following Camden Down", which seem to be sequenced to stop any momentum dead. On the other hand, these songs weren't recorded for this type of release, and bands like Tarkio aren't mean for widespread scrutiny. There's a reason every college town has their own acoustic rock group: They don't export well. Their appeal is entirely local-- not so much the music itself, which is easily reproducible, but the unique thrill of seeing people you know or could know up there on stage playing music. I'm not knocking it. For many budding musicians, writers, lovers, fans, and students, that connection can be just as inspiring as any motivational speaker or activist theatre troupe. As such, Tarkio fulfilled a specifically local function, and if you weren't enrolled at the University of Montana seven or eight years ago, listening to Omnibus may be disappointing, perhaps even a little intrusive. You may not get it, but it wasn't meant for you."

Bobby Conn

King for a Day

Electronic,Rock

Mark Richardson

Around the time of his 1998 album Rise Up! Bobby Conn discussed his musical goals with the print zine Puncture. Paul McCartney's "Live and Let Die" inspired him, especially how each section was it's own thing-- first it's a piano ballad, then there's a little reggae section in the bridge. He hoped that one day his own catalog might serve as a complete history of Western pop in miniature, with every possible subgenre covered in at least part of one track. You have to take everything a trickster like Conn says to an interviewer with a grain of salt, of course, but three full-lengths, a live album, and some EPs later, he's certainly covered a tremendous amount of ground. Conn's albums tend to orbit around a single theme lyrically-- wealth and success on Golden Age, the politics of fear in The Homeland-- but musically they usually jump from glam rock sleaze to show music pomp to pseudo-confessional singer/songwriter tenderness to classic rock boogie to soulful r&b croon, often within a single song. If Conn's bombastic turns and stylistic ping-ponging sounded daring and unusual in the late 1990s, when prog was lying dormant and Jim Steinman's name was still spoken through clenched teeth, it now seems perfectly normal. In this post-Fiery Furnaces age we expect our quirky and ambitious indie pop artists to play around with genre. So Conn's newest, King for a Day, is as restless as you'd expect, which makes it easier to enjoy as an album. Setting aside the element of surprise, we're left with a dozen widely varying songs about celebrity, ego, and the distorting effects of show business. While he approaches his subject with a typically smug edge befitting his over-the-top "showman" persona, Conn also cuts that quality with impressive wit and a ceaseless dedication to musical craft. This is a very big sounding record, sharply arranged for Conn's band the Glass Gypsies and assorted guests. The eight-minute opener "Vanitas" begins with a clear acoustic guitar pattern and vaguely Middle Eastern violin from Monica Boubou, but after some chanting the electric guitars kick in and all of a sudden everything is all rock'n'roll animal. The crunch continues as a phalanx of layered voices conjure images of King Arthur on Ice-levels of excess-- did I mention that the lyrics are in Latin? The first English we hear form Conn is the words "I feel old-fashioned when we fuck in the dark" on "When the Money's Gone", which follows the glorious opener without a pause. So we know he's still got a dirty mind and, with the song's bouncy melody and bumping little guitar riff, that he's still writing some catchy songs. Having spent his entire career thinking in concept album terms, Conn is by now a master of structure and pacing, as he weaves conventional songs that run the gamut with instrumentals (the marching and proggy "A Glimpse of Paradise") and spoken-word goofs ("Punch the Sky", which seems to riff on Scientology). The falsetto-voiced "Twenty One" alludes to Philly-soul's proto-disco, while "Love Let Me Down" is jaunty, swinging baroque pop-- my wife walked in on the chorus and thought it might be Belle & Sebastian. King for a Day ranks with Rise Up! as Conn's best. Still, as good as the record sounds and as capably as he immerses himself in assorted flavors pop, there remains an odd sense of distance to Conn on record. Between his persona, his themes, the piles of instruments, and the thick arrangements, Conn's music is deliberately structured without a discernible center. There's nothing easy to grab onto. Which, viewed another way, is a strength. There seems little chance that Conn's music will ossify; his perpetual reinvention and undeniable talent suggest that he'll continue to make compelling records as long as the format still interests him. But for all their charms, his records are made for either quick infatuation or distant admiration; King for a Day is classic Conn, because it's hard to fall in love with.

Artist: Bobby Conn, Album: King for a Day, Genre: Electronic,Rock, Score (1-10): 6.5 Album review: "Around the time of his 1998 album Rise Up! Bobby Conn discussed his musical goals with the print zine Puncture. Paul McCartney's "Live and Let Die" inspired him, especially how each section was it's own thing-- first it's a piano ballad, then there's a little reggae section in the bridge. He hoped that one day his own catalog might serve as a complete history of Western pop in miniature, with every possible subgenre covered in at least part of one track. You have to take everything a trickster like Conn says to an interviewer with a grain of salt, of course, but three full-lengths, a live album, and some EPs later, he's certainly covered a tremendous amount of ground. Conn's albums tend to orbit around a single theme lyrically-- wealth and success on Golden Age, the politics of fear in The Homeland-- but musically they usually jump from glam rock sleaze to show music pomp to pseudo-confessional singer/songwriter tenderness to classic rock boogie to soulful r&b croon, often within a single song. If Conn's bombastic turns and stylistic ping-ponging sounded daring and unusual in the late 1990s, when prog was lying dormant and Jim Steinman's name was still spoken through clenched teeth, it now seems perfectly normal. In this post-Fiery Furnaces age we expect our quirky and ambitious indie pop artists to play around with genre. So Conn's newest, King for a Day, is as restless as you'd expect, which makes it easier to enjoy as an album. Setting aside the element of surprise, we're left with a dozen widely varying songs about celebrity, ego, and the distorting effects of show business. While he approaches his subject with a typically smug edge befitting his over-the-top "showman" persona, Conn also cuts that quality with impressive wit and a ceaseless dedication to musical craft. This is a very big sounding record, sharply arranged for Conn's band the Glass Gypsies and assorted guests. The eight-minute opener "Vanitas" begins with a clear acoustic guitar pattern and vaguely Middle Eastern violin from Monica Boubou, but after some chanting the electric guitars kick in and all of a sudden everything is all rock'n'roll animal. The crunch continues as a phalanx of layered voices conjure images of King Arthur on Ice-levels of excess-- did I mention that the lyrics are in Latin? The first English we hear form Conn is the words "I feel old-fashioned when we fuck in the dark" on "When the Money's Gone", which follows the glorious opener without a pause. So we know he's still got a dirty mind and, with the song's bouncy melody and bumping little guitar riff, that he's still writing some catchy songs. Having spent his entire career thinking in concept album terms, Conn is by now a master of structure and pacing, as he weaves conventional songs that run the gamut with instrumentals (the marching and proggy "A Glimpse of Paradise") and spoken-word goofs ("Punch the Sky", which seems to riff on Scientology). The falsetto-voiced "Twenty One" alludes to Philly-soul's proto-disco, while "Love Let Me Down" is jaunty, swinging baroque pop-- my wife walked in on the chorus and thought it might be Belle & Sebastian. King for a Day ranks with Rise Up! as Conn's best. Still, as good as the record sounds and as capably as he immerses himself in assorted flavors pop, there remains an odd sense of distance to Conn on record. Between his persona, his themes, the piles of instruments, and the thick arrangements, Conn's music is deliberately structured without a discernible center. There's nothing easy to grab onto. Which, viewed another way, is a strength. There seems little chance that Conn's music will ossify; his perpetual reinvention and undeniable talent suggest that he'll continue to make compelling records as long as the format still interests him. But for all their charms, his records are made for either quick infatuation or distant admiration; King for a Day is classic Conn, because it's hard to fall in love with."

Built to Spill

There Is No Enemy

Rock

Jayson Greene

In the 1990s, they produced some of the most ambitious and resonant indie rock ever made, but in the 2000s, Built to Spill seemed content with merely existing. Following the high-water marks of Perfect From Now On and Keep It Like a Secret, they went into a sort of low-grade creative hibernation, issuing records every three or four years containing a few flashes of genuine inspiration ("Strange", "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss", "Goin' Against Your Mind") surrounded by increasingly aimless jamming. Doug Martsch, the lead singer, guitarist, and creative force behind the band, was beginning to sound like a guy with nothing particularly important left to tell us-- we could stick around, if we wanted, to hear him play his guitar, but the lack of purpose was disconcerting. "Something is wrong/ Something invisible is gone," Martsch crooned on Ancient Melodies of the Future's "The Host", and with each successive release, it was hard not to revisit their earlier work in attempts to puzzle out anew what that "something" was. On the unexpectedly terrific There Is No Enemy, it becomes immediately clear what had been missing, and sure enough, it was invisible: While Enemy technically sounds just like every Built to Spill record since Keep It Like a Secret-- the pinwheeling guitar fantasias, the ambling tempos, and the wayward vocal lines are all here-- it is buoyed by a fresh sense of emotional stakes, an urgency that puts wind back in the band's sails. For the first time in almost 10 years, it seems that Martsch might actually have something he wants to say. "Saying something," of course, is always a loaded concept with regard to Doug Martsch: He has spent years telling every interviewer who asks that his lyrics contain no personal meaning, that they are chosen more for their meter and suggestiveness than anything else. Ironically, he often seems to be pondering the impossibility of clear communication: "This strange sound you said I said/ You're not listening or I'm not saying it right," he fretted on "Strange". "If there's a word for you, it doesn't mean anything," he insisted on Perfect From Now On's "Velvet Waltz". All of this misdirection only makes the disarmingly candid, even open-hearted tone of There Is No Enemy more startling. Whether or not the words carry personal weight, Martsch is singing convincingly from the perspective of someone thoroughly humbled by loss. "Like anyone assuming they know what makes us tick, I was just as wrong as I could be," he shrugs on "Tomorrow". His shit-eating grin is almost visible when he sings "Finally decided, and by decide I mean accept/ I won't need all those other chances I won't get" on "Life's a Dream". The loss, of course, remains unspecified-- the only clue we get is "Pat", which eulogizes a lost friend-- but its impact can be felt everywhere on Enemy. "Good Ol' Boredom" celebrates the arrival of its titular emotional state as a sign that life is returning to normal, a place where "not so bad/ Seems so great." On the wounded, fragile ballad "Things Fall Apart", meanwhile, Martsch sings "Stay out of my nightmares, stay out of my dreams/ You're not even welcome in my memories" in a subdued mutter before delivering a simple, devastating clincher: "It doesn't matter if you're good or smart-- goddammit, things fall apart." The inspiration for this sentiment could have come from any number of places-- in the press run-up to this album, Martsch mentioned being influenced by soul music, for example-- but it rings with powerful truth regardless, and produces very real goosebumps. In this context, even their well-worn and comfortable indie jamming feels revitalized. The core lineup of Martsch, Brett Nelson, and Scott Plouf remains unchanged, and they produce the same sound: a majestic, heavy-footed thud, held aloft by Martsch's transcendent guitar work and weightless tenor. But within this framework, they are pushing harder than ever before: witness the cooing "ooh-la-la" backup harmonies in "Life's a Dream", or the outbreak of horn charts at the song's bridge. Three-quarters of the way into "Things Fall Apart", a mariachi trumpet wanders in, seemingly from a Calexico album. "Pat", meanwhile, is a blistering, two-and-a-half-minute burst of anger that hearkens back to Martsch's days in Treepeople. But even the straightforward Built to Spill songs are some of the best ones we've heard in a long time: "Nowhere Lullabye" and "Life's a Dream" are two of the most gorgeously dreamy ballads Martsch has written since "Else" or "Kicked It in the Sun", and on "Good Ol' Boredom", when Martsch finally fires up his shimmering, multihued guitar, the following extended solo workout feels both thrilling and earned. The end result is easily the best Built to Spill album of the decade-- an improbable late-career reawakening and heartening evidence that becoming dependable doesn't mean having to settle for being predictable.

Artist: Built to Spill, Album: There Is No Enemy, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.9 Album review: "In the 1990s, they produced some of the most ambitious and resonant indie rock ever made, but in the 2000s, Built to Spill seemed content with merely existing. Following the high-water marks of Perfect From Now On and Keep It Like a Secret, they went into a sort of low-grade creative hibernation, issuing records every three or four years containing a few flashes of genuine inspiration ("Strange", "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss", "Goin' Against Your Mind") surrounded by increasingly aimless jamming. Doug Martsch, the lead singer, guitarist, and creative force behind the band, was beginning to sound like a guy with nothing particularly important left to tell us-- we could stick around, if we wanted, to hear him play his guitar, but the lack of purpose was disconcerting. "Something is wrong/ Something invisible is gone," Martsch crooned on Ancient Melodies of the Future's "The Host", and with each successive release, it was hard not to revisit their earlier work in attempts to puzzle out anew what that "something" was. On the unexpectedly terrific There Is No Enemy, it becomes immediately clear what had been missing, and sure enough, it was invisible: While Enemy technically sounds just like every Built to Spill record since Keep It Like a Secret-- the pinwheeling guitar fantasias, the ambling tempos, and the wayward vocal lines are all here-- it is buoyed by a fresh sense of emotional stakes, an urgency that puts wind back in the band's sails. For the first time in almost 10 years, it seems that Martsch might actually have something he wants to say. "Saying something," of course, is always a loaded concept with regard to Doug Martsch: He has spent years telling every interviewer who asks that his lyrics contain no personal meaning, that they are chosen more for their meter and suggestiveness than anything else. Ironically, he often seems to be pondering the impossibility of clear communication: "This strange sound you said I said/ You're not listening or I'm not saying it right," he fretted on "Strange". "If there's a word for you, it doesn't mean anything," he insisted on Perfect From Now On's "Velvet Waltz". All of this misdirection only makes the disarmingly candid, even open-hearted tone of There Is No Enemy more startling. Whether or not the words carry personal weight, Martsch is singing convincingly from the perspective of someone thoroughly humbled by loss. "Like anyone assuming they know what makes us tick, I was just as wrong as I could be," he shrugs on "Tomorrow". His shit-eating grin is almost visible when he sings "Finally decided, and by decide I mean accept/ I won't need all those other chances I won't get" on "Life's a Dream". The loss, of course, remains unspecified-- the only clue we get is "Pat", which eulogizes a lost friend-- but its impact can be felt everywhere on Enemy. "Good Ol' Boredom" celebrates the arrival of its titular emotional state as a sign that life is returning to normal, a place where "not so bad/ Seems so great." On the wounded, fragile ballad "Things Fall Apart", meanwhile, Martsch sings "Stay out of my nightmares, stay out of my dreams/ You're not even welcome in my memories" in a subdued mutter before delivering a simple, devastating clincher: "It doesn't matter if you're good or smart-- goddammit, things fall apart." The inspiration for this sentiment could have come from any number of places-- in the press run-up to this album, Martsch mentioned being influenced by soul music, for example-- but it rings with powerful truth regardless, and produces very real goosebumps. In this context, even their well-worn and comfortable indie jamming feels revitalized. The core lineup of Martsch, Brett Nelson, and Scott Plouf remains unchanged, and they produce the same sound: a majestic, heavy-footed thud, held aloft by Martsch's transcendent guitar work and weightless tenor. But within this framework, they are pushing harder than ever before: witness the cooing "ooh-la-la" backup harmonies in "Life's a Dream", or the outbreak of horn charts at the song's bridge. Three-quarters of the way into "Things Fall Apart", a mariachi trumpet wanders in, seemingly from a Calexico album. "Pat", meanwhile, is a blistering, two-and-a-half-minute burst of anger that hearkens back to Martsch's days in Treepeople. But even the straightforward Built to Spill songs are some of the best ones we've heard in a long time: "Nowhere Lullabye" and "Life's a Dream" are two of the most gorgeously dreamy ballads Martsch has written since "Else" or "Kicked It in the Sun", and on "Good Ol' Boredom", when Martsch finally fires up his shimmering, multihued guitar, the following extended solo workout feels both thrilling and earned. The end result is easily the best Built to Spill album of the decade-- an improbable late-career reawakening and heartening evidence that becoming dependable doesn't mean having to settle for being predictable."

Otis Redding

Live at the Whiskey A Go Go: The Complete Recordings

Pop/R&B

Stephen Thomas Erlewine

“We’re hoping that this be one of the greatest albums that ever come out.” Otis Redding says these words just before launching into “Respect” on April 8, 1966, wrapping up the first of seven sets he’d play over the course of three days at Los Angeles’ Whisky A Go Go. A few songs earlier, he first informed the crowd that they were recording the concert with plans of releasing it as an album, playing the newly-written “Good to Me” for the second time in nine songs simply because it was the single and they needed to get it right. For his ’66 stint at the Whisky A Go Go, he was backed by his road band, the Otis Redding Revue—a ten-piece group similar to the bands who supported him whenever he toured the south. This is the residency that is captured in its entirety on Stax’s six-disc box Live at the Whisky A Go Go: the Complete Recordings. Redding’s residency was a deliberate attempt on the part of the singer and his management to move him out of the Chitlin Circuit and into the mainstream. The idea wasn’t to have Otis record pop music, but rather bring his act straight to the rock audience. So they set up shop right on the Sunset Strip, home to such hip rock‘n’rollers as the Byrds, Love, the Turtles and the Doors, figuring there was no better place to introduce Redding to a white audience. Otis managed that crossover but not at the Whisky. It happened later at the Monterey International Pop Festival in ’67—backed then by Stax/Volt house band Booker T. & the M.G.’s—because he benefitted from the festival setting. In the open air, excitement spreads like fire. Indoors there is a different dynamic, particularly if it’s a crowd confronted with something they’ve never seen before, which was certainly the case of the Los Angelinos that headed to the Whisky to see Otis Redding that April weekend in 1966. Once Otis hit the stage on April 8, the applause was polite but not enthusiastic. He had to work to win that crowd, which he does by the end of the set, by which point they’re cheering “Respect.” At that point, Redding wasn’t unknown, particularly in R&B quarters—he had three Billboard R&B Top 10s, with a fourth soon to follow—but such gutbucket soul shows simply weren’t played in mainstream rock venues like the Whisky A Go Go. That alone made the three nights at the Whisky a step forward from Redding, who was hungry to become a star on his own terms. But the concerts alone weren’t the main thing: These shows were designed to be the primary source for an album, one that could capture the raw power of Redding on wax and hopefully bring in a wider audience. Throughout the seven full sets captured on Live at the Whisky A Go Go: the Complete Recordings—a box that doubles Stax’s 2010 set Live on the Sunset Strip, which contains about half of the sets from that April ’66 stint—Redding reminds the audience they’re cutting a record and, in a way, the sets are structured as recording sessions. Over the course of the seven shows, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” is played no fewer than *ten *times, a sure sign that Redding wanted to be sure he nailed this song for the album. A few other songs appear nearly that often (“I Can’t Turn You Loose,” “Good to Me”) but he also made sure to play almost every song he and his Revue knew, throwing in covers of James Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” along the way—anything that could snag new listeners. Once Volt/Atco heard the tapes, they decided the performances were too raw to release. Not only was fidelity poor, but the band sometimes seemed ragged, veering out of tune and maybe not locking in on a groove. Stax/Volt founder Jim Stewart decided to shelve the record for reason, bringing out a version of it ’68 called *In Person at the Whisky A Go Go *only after Otis had died and the market demanded more Otis. The Whisky A Go Go tapes served that very purpose over the years, popping up on vinyl in 1982 as Recorded Live and almost a decade later on CD as Good to Me: Live at the Whisky A Go Go, Vol. 2, with some tracks popping up as bonus tracks on a 2008 deluxe edition of 1965’s Otis Blue. The double-disc Live on the Sunset Strip seeming like the last word in 2010. Live at the Whisky A Go Go: the Complete Recordings, however, trumps them all. It simultaneously emphasizes the consistency of Redding and his Revue along with their quirks. Listening to the sets back to back, it’s hard to hear where the band allegedly strays off path: Whatever flaws that may exist in a given track tend to melt away in the context of a full set. There’s an electricity to the performances even when they bring the tempo down for the slow-burners, and a great thing about this box is that there’s plenty of space for the band to play. On the 1968 LP, the longest number topped out just over five minutes but here performances routinely clock in between six and eight minutes, giving the band room to vamp while Otis works the crowd. It’s not only invigorating, but it suggests how Redding’s southern soul was tied to James Brown’s nascent funk. Listen to how he closes out Saturday’s first set with a marathon eight-minute “Satisfaction” then picks up the next set with the same song, stretching this version out to nine minutes via interlocking horn solos—it’s nearly 17 minutes of white-hot down-home vamping that is earthier than Brown and the J.B.’s but undoubtedly comes from the same source. Nevertheless, the greatest thing Live at the Whisky A Go Go: the Complete Recordings* *offers is so much vital live soul from an era where the sound was in its prime but was rarely recorded. Perhaps Booker T & the M.G.’s were a tighter outfit than the Otis Redding Revue, but the rawness heard on Live at the Whisky A Go Go: the Complete Recordings has its own singular virtues, particularly because so little of these southern soul acts were recorded in the ’60s. That alone would make this a worthy historical document but, better still, it remains exceptional because it captured a moment when a premiere showman worked his hardest to win over new fans. Decades later, these 1966 concerts at the Whisky A Go Go still possess the power to convert skeptics so seems that Otis Redding did indeed get his wish: He made one of the greatest albums that ever came out.

Artist: Otis Redding, Album: Live at the Whiskey A Go Go: The Complete Recordings, Genre: Pop/R&B, Score (1-10): 9.0 Album review: "“We’re hoping that this be one of the greatest albums that ever come out.” Otis Redding says these words just before launching into “Respect” on April 8, 1966, wrapping up the first of seven sets he’d play over the course of three days at Los Angeles’ Whisky A Go Go. A few songs earlier, he first informed the crowd that they were recording the concert with plans of releasing it as an album, playing the newly-written “Good to Me” for the second time in nine songs simply because it was the single and they needed to get it right. For his ’66 stint at the Whisky A Go Go, he was backed by his road band, the Otis Redding Revue—a ten-piece group similar to the bands who supported him whenever he toured the south. This is the residency that is captured in its entirety on Stax’s six-disc box Live at the Whisky A Go Go: the Complete Recordings. Redding’s residency was a deliberate attempt on the part of the singer and his management to move him out of the Chitlin Circuit and into the mainstream. The idea wasn’t to have Otis record pop music, but rather bring his act straight to the rock audience. So they set up shop right on the Sunset Strip, home to such hip rock‘n’rollers as the Byrds, Love, the Turtles and the Doors, figuring there was no better place to introduce Redding to a white audience. Otis managed that crossover but not at the Whisky. It happened later at the Monterey International Pop Festival in ’67—backed then by Stax/Volt house band Booker T. & the M.G.’s—because he benefitted from the festival setting. In the open air, excitement spreads like fire. Indoors there is a different dynamic, particularly if it’s a crowd confronted with something they’ve never seen before, which was certainly the case of the Los Angelinos that headed to the Whisky to see Otis Redding that April weekend in 1966. Once Otis hit the stage on April 8, the applause was polite but not enthusiastic. He had to work to win that crowd, which he does by the end of the set, by which point they’re cheering “Respect.” At that point, Redding wasn’t unknown, particularly in R&B quarters—he had three Billboard R&B Top 10s, with a fourth soon to follow—but such gutbucket soul shows simply weren’t played in mainstream rock venues like the Whisky A Go Go. That alone made the three nights at the Whisky a step forward from Redding, who was hungry to become a star on his own terms. But the concerts alone weren’t the main thing: These shows were designed to be the primary source for an album, one that could capture the raw power of Redding on wax and hopefully bring in a wider audience. Throughout the seven full sets captured on Live at the Whisky A Go Go: the Complete Recordings—a box that doubles Stax’s 2010 set Live on the Sunset Strip, which contains about half of the sets from that April ’66 stint—Redding reminds the audience they’re cutting a record and, in a way, the sets are structured as recording sessions. Over the course of the seven shows, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” is played no fewer than *ten *times, a sure sign that Redding wanted to be sure he nailed this song for the album. A few other songs appear nearly that often (“I Can’t Turn You Loose,” “Good to Me”) but he also made sure to play almost every song he and his Revue knew, throwing in covers of James Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” along the way—anything that could snag new listeners. Once Volt/Atco heard the tapes, they decided the performances were too raw to release. Not only was fidelity poor, but the band sometimes seemed ragged, veering out of tune and maybe not locking in on a groove. Stax/Volt founder Jim Stewart decided to shelve the record for reason, bringing out a version of it ’68 called *In Person at the Whisky A Go Go *only after Otis had died and the market demanded more Otis. The Whisky A Go Go tapes served that very purpose over the years, popping up on vinyl in 1982 as Recorded Live and almost a decade later on CD as Good to Me: Live at the Whisky A Go Go, Vol. 2, with some tracks popping up as bonus tracks on a 2008 deluxe edition of 1965’s Otis Blue. The double-disc Live on the Sunset Strip seeming like the last word in 2010. Live at the Whisky A Go Go: the Complete Recordings, however, trumps them all. It simultaneously emphasizes the consistency of Redding and his Revue along with their quirks. Listening to the sets back to back, it’s hard to hear where the band allegedly strays off path: Whatever flaws that may exist in a given track tend to melt away in the context of a full set. There’s an electricity to the performances even when they bring the tempo down for the slow-burners, and a great thing about this box is that there’s plenty of space for the band to play. On the 1968 LP, the longest number topped out just over five minutes but here performances routinely clock in between six and eight minutes, giving the band room to vamp while Otis works the crowd. It’s not only invigorating, but it suggests how Redding’s southern soul was tied to James Brown’s nascent funk. Listen to how he closes out Saturday’s first set with a marathon eight-minute “Satisfaction” then picks up the next set with the same song, stretching this version out to nine minutes via interlocking horn solos—it’s nearly 17 minutes of white-hot down-home vamping that is earthier than Brown and the J.B.’s but undoubtedly comes from the same source. Nevertheless, the greatest thing Live at the Whisky A Go Go: the Complete Recordings* *offers is so much vital live soul from an era where the sound was in its prime but was rarely recorded. Perhaps Booker T & the M.G.’s were a tighter outfit than the Otis Redding Revue, but the rawness heard on Live at the Whisky A Go Go: the Complete Recordings has its own singular virtues, particularly because so little of these southern soul acts were recorded in the ’60s. That alone would make this a worthy historical document but, better still, it remains exceptional because it captured a moment when a premiere showman worked his hardest to win over new fans. Decades later, these 1966 concerts at the Whisky A Go Go still possess the power to convert skeptics so seems that Otis Redding did indeed get his wish: He made one of the greatest albums that ever came out."

The Howling Hex

The Best of the Howling Hex

Rock

Stuart Berman

Neil Hagerty has been doing a bang-up job of ensuring Royal Trux remain the one 1990s indie-rock institution that never reforms. He's reportedly turned down multiple reunion tour offers, opted out of participating in Drag City's recent Trux reissue campaign, and declared his utter disinterest in the prospect whenever the question pops up in interviews. His recent choice of homes-- New Mexico and, currently, Colorado-- keep him well insulated from music-industry machinations; Rather than stage, say, a Royal Trux comeback at an ATP festival, Hagerty would sooner play sparsely attended weekly residencies in Denver dives. All the while, he's been pushing his post-Trux outfit the Howling Hex further and further away from his previous band's bell-bottomed boogie, favouring a scrappy, norteño-spiced tack that, since the release of 2007's XI, has done away with drums altogether. Given his strident don't-look-back ethos, it was something of a shock when, last December, Hagerty announced he would be performing Royal Trux's 1990 mind-fucking masterwork Twin Infinitives in its entirety at a New York City show, albeit with an unknown female vocalist filling the high-heeled cowboy boots of Hagerty's former foil and flame, Jennifer Herrema (currently of Black Bananas). This news was soon followed by the announcement of a new Howling Hex album that, for the first time in six years, would employ the services of a drummer. Taken together, these developments prompted speculative hints that Hagerty was more eager this time out to, if not outright retrace his Trux tracks, at least recapture some of his old band's mystique and muscle. But listening to The Best of the Howling Hex, you're reminded not so much of Royal Trux's music as their second-most viewed YouTube video. In the infamous bootlegged clip, the band -- fresh off from signing an ill-fated deal with Virgin Records in 1995-- are being subjected to one of the least glamorous aspects of major-label patronage: having to record a soul-destroying succession of station IDs for generically named local music video shows. But a funny thing happens on the way to Alternavision: while Herrema's disdain for the process intensifies with each cigarette puff, Hagerty gets really into it, and becomes increasingly obsessed with getting each take just right, giving his partner instructions with the fussy impatience of a movie director running over-budget. You get the same sense listening to The Best of the Howling Hex: the album is maddeningly repetitive to the point of seeming like some cruel joke, but there's something admirable and charming about Hagerty's determination to make it work. The most hilarious thing about The Best of the Howling Hex isn't the faux greatest hits title-- the album features all new material, natch-- but the fact that Hagerty recruited a new drummer only to have him play the exact same beats throughout the entire record, as if he were a human Casio preset. The album cover may list eight tracks, but there are really only two songs here: The slow ones play out like some bizarro reggae/polka/acid rock fusion scraped from Ween's old four-track; the fast ones keep double-time pace with cowpunk dust-ups of yore, like the Meat Puppets' "Lost" or the Minutemen's "Corona." Atop both are Hagerty's circular, repetitive melodies and his furious fretwork, which can dazzle in any context. But rather than provide points of distinction, his brain-scrambling, six-string swirls are consistently mixed so low as to be overshadowed by the chintzy, clipped, one-note rhythm guitar accents. "Variations on a theme" is an understatement for what transpires here; choruses mostly follow the same patterns as the verses, time changes are practically non-existent. But the album's title starts to make a little more sense if you view The Best of the Howling Hex as an ongoing process through which Hagerty is trying to refine and perfect a particular song form. As wearing as it is to hear the same arrangements over and over again, the songs do get better and more engaging as the album chugs along: In this unwavering setting, the subtle, soothing synth line that buttresses the congenial melody of "The General Prologue" hits with all the splendour of a meteor shower, and heralds the album's most ebullient guitar hook; by the time we reach "Green Limousine", the Hex's default oompa-oompa gait has acquired a more frantic energy and, in the process, goads Hagerty into his most urgent and spirited vocal performance. And if the closing "Trashcan Bahamas" starts out like yet another trip to the bionic hee-haw, it suddenly detours into an ascendant, arpeggiated grand finale that sees Hagerty achieve his own version of "Beck's Bolero". But that sense of triumph is as much as ours as it is his-- a parting reward for those of us who manage to stay sane while the songs remain the same.

Artist: The Howling Hex, Album: The Best of the Howling Hex, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 6.1 Album review: "Neil Hagerty has been doing a bang-up job of ensuring Royal Trux remain the one 1990s indie-rock institution that never reforms. He's reportedly turned down multiple reunion tour offers, opted out of participating in Drag City's recent Trux reissue campaign, and declared his utter disinterest in the prospect whenever the question pops up in interviews. His recent choice of homes-- New Mexico and, currently, Colorado-- keep him well insulated from music-industry machinations; Rather than stage, say, a Royal Trux comeback at an ATP festival, Hagerty would sooner play sparsely attended weekly residencies in Denver dives. All the while, he's been pushing his post-Trux outfit the Howling Hex further and further away from his previous band's bell-bottomed boogie, favouring a scrappy, norteño-spiced tack that, since the release of 2007's XI, has done away with drums altogether. Given his strident don't-look-back ethos, it was something of a shock when, last December, Hagerty announced he would be performing Royal Trux's 1990 mind-fucking masterwork Twin Infinitives in its entirety at a New York City show, albeit with an unknown female vocalist filling the high-heeled cowboy boots of Hagerty's former foil and flame, Jennifer Herrema (currently of Black Bananas). This news was soon followed by the announcement of a new Howling Hex album that, for the first time in six years, would employ the services of a drummer. Taken together, these developments prompted speculative hints that Hagerty was more eager this time out to, if not outright retrace his Trux tracks, at least recapture some of his old band's mystique and muscle. But listening to The Best of the Howling Hex, you're reminded not so much of Royal Trux's music as their second-most viewed YouTube video. In the infamous bootlegged clip, the band -- fresh off from signing an ill-fated deal with Virgin Records in 1995-- are being subjected to one of the least glamorous aspects of major-label patronage: having to record a soul-destroying succession of station IDs for generically named local music video shows. But a funny thing happens on the way to Alternavision: while Herrema's disdain for the process intensifies with each cigarette puff, Hagerty gets really into it, and becomes increasingly obsessed with getting each take just right, giving his partner instructions with the fussy impatience of a movie director running over-budget. You get the same sense listening to The Best of the Howling Hex: the album is maddeningly repetitive to the point of seeming like some cruel joke, but there's something admirable and charming about Hagerty's determination to make it work. The most hilarious thing about The Best of the Howling Hex isn't the faux greatest hits title-- the album features all new material, natch-- but the fact that Hagerty recruited a new drummer only to have him play the exact same beats throughout the entire record, as if he were a human Casio preset. The album cover may list eight tracks, but there are really only two songs here: The slow ones play out like some bizarro reggae/polka/acid rock fusion scraped from Ween's old four-track; the fast ones keep double-time pace with cowpunk dust-ups of yore, like the Meat Puppets' "Lost" or the Minutemen's "Corona." Atop both are Hagerty's circular, repetitive melodies and his furious fretwork, which can dazzle in any context. But rather than provide points of distinction, his brain-scrambling, six-string swirls are consistently mixed so low as to be overshadowed by the chintzy, clipped, one-note rhythm guitar accents. "Variations on a theme" is an understatement for what transpires here; choruses mostly follow the same patterns as the verses, time changes are practically non-existent. But the album's title starts to make a little more sense if you view The Best of the Howling Hex as an ongoing process through which Hagerty is trying to refine and perfect a particular song form. As wearing as it is to hear the same arrangements over and over again, the songs do get better and more engaging as the album chugs along: In this unwavering setting, the subtle, soothing synth line that buttresses the congenial melody of "The General Prologue" hits with all the splendour of a meteor shower, and heralds the album's most ebullient guitar hook; by the time we reach "Green Limousine", the Hex's default oompa-oompa gait has acquired a more frantic energy and, in the process, goads Hagerty into his most urgent and spirited vocal performance. And if the closing "Trashcan Bahamas" starts out like yet another trip to the bionic hee-haw, it suddenly detours into an ascendant, arpeggiated grand finale that sees Hagerty achieve his own version of "Beck's Bolero". But that sense of triumph is as much as ours as it is his-- a parting reward for those of us who manage to stay sane while the songs remain the same."

The Music

Strength In Numbers

Electronic,Rock

Ian Cohen

The Music were never going to be a good band. Ever since they decided that dumbshit alpha and omega name was going to stick and titled their first EP You Might as Well Try to Fuck Me, they were dead set on greatness, even if it was the kind of greatness that meant "big or immense, used in the pejorative sense." Funny part is, due to the 2007 maelstrom of blog-house/nu-rave/what-have-yous, someone might look back at these guys-- basically Kasabian with less interesting interviews-- and think they were onto something with heaters like "Take the Long Road and Walk It" and "Breakin'"? Whatever claim to prescience they had was forfeited, however, when they slinked back into classic rock riffery with producer Brendan O'Brien on 2004's Welcome to the North. But the truth is, they're more of a risible band than a bad one, suffering critical barbs usually reserved for the unlistenable. Call it incremental progress if you need to, but Strength in Numbers is far from unlistenable-- I don't know if your free time is spent sorting through stacks and stacks of charmless indie rock CDs that have the nerve to call themselves "pop," but when the chorus of the title track hits with the subtlety of a latter-day Nas album title, it's damn refreshing to hear a group bound for glory as shamelessly as the Music. But as the saying goes, those who are good with hammers see nothing but nails, and despite recruiting Orbital's Paul Hartnoll to slim them down to a slithery club-rock hybrid, Strength in Numbers is more like a musical montage retelling the legendary Slam Dunk Contest performance of Chris "Birdman" Andersen-- it's all in good fun when you tank a tomahawk throwdown the first two or three tries, but 10 times of screwing up the same exact way...? Whatever surface differences exist between this and anything else the band's done in the past, it's still Music music-- one-word titles that could pass for "American Gladiator" names ("Spike", "Drugs", "Fire"), Adam Nutter running his guitar through the past three decades of pedal technology, and the same wallop of sound greeting every single hook, as if the only thing they culled from O'Brien is an admiration for Stone Temple Pilots. But hey, at least the relatively serene verses sound like "Miami Vice" incidental music, or at least the best electronica rock 1998 had to offer. Of course, there's vocalist Robert Harvey, who previously conjured an unholy union of Richard Ashcroft's egoist shamanism with Geddy Lee's range, and to an extent, he still does. But the story behind Strength in Numbers is that Harvey spent its four-year incubation period struggling badly with addiction, getting clean, and eventually cutting off his Elijah Wood locks. In a way, the music reflects a sense of sobriety, even if Harvey still traffics in dope/guns/fucking in the street flashpoints. But it's a sobriety where "harder, better, faster, stronger" or "I can't go on, I'll go on" gets snatched off the dance floor and shouted by a spinning class instructor. "Idle" isn't necessarily stronger than anything surrounding it, but at least it's different, relatively restrained with hard-panned acoustics, a sinuous, Elbow-like chorus, and whatever Harvey is blathering about obscured by a cloudbank of dubby reverb. But whatever thrill one can get out of glitzed-up bangers like "The Spike" is cancelled out by the sheer relentlessness-- Hartnoll's wall-banging production raises serious questions about whether human hands actually made anything on Strength in Numbers, and this is most obvious with Phil Jordan, who's saddled with riding nearly the same hi-hat swish/snare on the 2 and 4 that's been played out for almost a quarter of his 25 years. And really, that's why the Music have fallen on deaf ears for many since the beginning in spite of their crushing volume. Awesome, they seek greatness, but that title-- they only find power in a fabricated sense of populism that feels more assumed than earned and frankly feels a bit ridiculous after 10 minutes. So yeah, I guess in 2008, those Verve comparisons really do make sense.

Artist: The Music, Album: Strength In Numbers, Genre: Electronic,Rock, Score (1-10): 5.1 Album review: "The Music were never going to be a good band. Ever since they decided that dumbshit alpha and omega name was going to stick and titled their first EP You Might as Well Try to Fuck Me, they were dead set on greatness, even if it was the kind of greatness that meant "big or immense, used in the pejorative sense." Funny part is, due to the 2007 maelstrom of blog-house/nu-rave/what-have-yous, someone might look back at these guys-- basically Kasabian with less interesting interviews-- and think they were onto something with heaters like "Take the Long Road and Walk It" and "Breakin'"? Whatever claim to prescience they had was forfeited, however, when they slinked back into classic rock riffery with producer Brendan O'Brien on 2004's Welcome to the North. But the truth is, they're more of a risible band than a bad one, suffering critical barbs usually reserved for the unlistenable. Call it incremental progress if you need to, but Strength in Numbers is far from unlistenable-- I don't know if your free time is spent sorting through stacks and stacks of charmless indie rock CDs that have the nerve to call themselves "pop," but when the chorus of the title track hits with the subtlety of a latter-day Nas album title, it's damn refreshing to hear a group bound for glory as shamelessly as the Music. But as the saying goes, those who are good with hammers see nothing but nails, and despite recruiting Orbital's Paul Hartnoll to slim them down to a slithery club-rock hybrid, Strength in Numbers is more like a musical montage retelling the legendary Slam Dunk Contest performance of Chris "Birdman" Andersen-- it's all in good fun when you tank a tomahawk throwdown the first two or three tries, but 10 times of screwing up the same exact way...? Whatever surface differences exist between this and anything else the band's done in the past, it's still Music music-- one-word titles that could pass for "American Gladiator" names ("Spike", "Drugs", "Fire"), Adam Nutter running his guitar through the past three decades of pedal technology, and the same wallop of sound greeting every single hook, as if the only thing they culled from O'Brien is an admiration for Stone Temple Pilots. But hey, at least the relatively serene verses sound like "Miami Vice" incidental music, or at least the best electronica rock 1998 had to offer. Of course, there's vocalist Robert Harvey, who previously conjured an unholy union of Richard Ashcroft's egoist shamanism with Geddy Lee's range, and to an extent, he still does. But the story behind Strength in Numbers is that Harvey spent its four-year incubation period struggling badly with addiction, getting clean, and eventually cutting off his Elijah Wood locks. In a way, the music reflects a sense of sobriety, even if Harvey still traffics in dope/guns/fucking in the street flashpoints. But it's a sobriety where "harder, better, faster, stronger" or "I can't go on, I'll go on" gets snatched off the dance floor and shouted by a spinning class instructor. "Idle" isn't necessarily stronger than anything surrounding it, but at least it's different, relatively restrained with hard-panned acoustics, a sinuous, Elbow-like chorus, and whatever Harvey is blathering about obscured by a cloudbank of dubby reverb. But whatever thrill one can get out of glitzed-up bangers like "The Spike" is cancelled out by the sheer relentlessness-- Hartnoll's wall-banging production raises serious questions about whether human hands actually made anything on Strength in Numbers, and this is most obvious with Phil Jordan, who's saddled with riding nearly the same hi-hat swish/snare on the 2 and 4 that's been played out for almost a quarter of his 25 years. And really, that's why the Music have fallen on deaf ears for many since the beginning in spite of their crushing volume. Awesome, they seek greatness, but that title-- they only find power in a fabricated sense of populism that feels more assumed than earned and frankly feels a bit ridiculous after 10 minutes. So yeah, I guess in 2008, those Verve comparisons really do make sense."

Tennis

Young and Old

Rock

Marc Hogan

The title of Tennis' second album could almost as easily describe the first. The music on last year's Cape Dory bobbed sweetly between Brill Building tunefulness and classic indie pop production values, and the basic lyrical themes were at least as old as jazz standard "A Sailboat in the Moonlight", hold the moonlight. But the sailing trip that inspired the Colorado-based band's debut also fulfilled something newer: the internet's need for easily digestible narrative. Luckily, core married couple Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley had a real knack for breezy, deceptively simple beach-pop that could get lodged in your head and inspire your own seafaring daydreams. Or at least make you jealous. Another story would seem to apply to Young and Old, and it's the one about the "difficult" sophomore record. Musically, Tennis have broadened their horizons just the right amount, adding rock'n'roll muscle and a more purely pop clarity under the oversight of the Black Keys' drummer Patrick Carney, who produced. A few songs still hit at the sense of love-drunk reverie that turned older tracks like "Marathon" and "South Carolina" into blog and college-radio hits. But Tennis couldn't keep writing sailing songs forever, and the new batch doesn't pull us into their world quite as easily-- and it's not only for lack of convenient biographical shorthand. They've gone from under the boardwalk to stuck in the middle. For all that, a whole lot of what's new here improves on the debut. Under Carney's direction, Tennis upgrade their sonics without losing the fuzz. In fact, sometimes there's even more fuzz, such as in the nicely clanging lead riff on the album's first advance mp3, sprightly piano-popper "Origins". Moore's full-throated lilt and multi-hued keyboard, along with Riley's lissome guitar lines, still aren't that far down the innocent coast from Beach House's supine dream-pop, and now there are extra layers of vocal harmonies, such as the appealingly Free Design-jazzy sha-la-las on "Petition". But Carney especially brings life to the percussion, whether it's the huge handclaps on "My Better Self", a swooning standout reminiscent of the Owls' underrated mid-2000s indie-pop gem "Air", or the snapping snares on "High Road". "Paradise is all around, but happiness is never found," Moore sings on that last song, which might've been a strong unifying theme for the sophomore album-- a melancholy flipside to the debut's paradise-is-paradise uplift. Sure, the songs on Young and Old occasionally bring back the romance of movement (optimistic "Traveling"), and they're often introspective, but instead the effect tends to be too confused, stilted, or generic to really pack the same wallop. The album's first words, on mellow strummer "It All Feels the Same", are "took a train," a potentially intriguing counterpart to sailing that isn't properly explored elsewhere on the record. Rather than at sea or on the railroad, the lyrics lean toward awkward abstraction: "Will you make my children bear the consequences everywhere?" asks "Origins". Even on "My Better Self", Moore philosophizes clumsily, "What is innate, I do not know/ But meaning comes and it goes." She sort of has a point, though. As easy as it is to criticize acts that come to us with a ready-built narrative alongside their music, storytelling and image-making have always been crucial elements of pop. What matters isn't whether a record comes with extra-musical buzz attached, but whether the music is good enough to capitalize on that buzz. Cape Dory, to my ears, was; Young and Old is another example of a promising young act that found an audience quickly on the internet before fully coming into its own powers. In other words, it's pretty good, but also a bit disappointing. There's still plenty of time, though, and by album three, the duo that never originally set out to make music will have something else that can be invaluable for a working band: a little more experience in the trenches.

Artist: Tennis, Album: Young and Old, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 6.3 Album review: "The title of Tennis' second album could almost as easily describe the first. The music on last year's Cape Dory bobbed sweetly between Brill Building tunefulness and classic indie pop production values, and the basic lyrical themes were at least as old as jazz standard "A Sailboat in the Moonlight", hold the moonlight. But the sailing trip that inspired the Colorado-based band's debut also fulfilled something newer: the internet's need for easily digestible narrative. Luckily, core married couple Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley had a real knack for breezy, deceptively simple beach-pop that could get lodged in your head and inspire your own seafaring daydreams. Or at least make you jealous. Another story would seem to apply to Young and Old, and it's the one about the "difficult" sophomore record. Musically, Tennis have broadened their horizons just the right amount, adding rock'n'roll muscle and a more purely pop clarity under the oversight of the Black Keys' drummer Patrick Carney, who produced. A few songs still hit at the sense of love-drunk reverie that turned older tracks like "Marathon" and "South Carolina" into blog and college-radio hits. But Tennis couldn't keep writing sailing songs forever, and the new batch doesn't pull us into their world quite as easily-- and it's not only for lack of convenient biographical shorthand. They've gone from under the boardwalk to stuck in the middle. For all that, a whole lot of what's new here improves on the debut. Under Carney's direction, Tennis upgrade their sonics without losing the fuzz. In fact, sometimes there's even more fuzz, such as in the nicely clanging lead riff on the album's first advance mp3, sprightly piano-popper "Origins". Moore's full-throated lilt and multi-hued keyboard, along with Riley's lissome guitar lines, still aren't that far down the innocent coast from Beach House's supine dream-pop, and now there are extra layers of vocal harmonies, such as the appealingly Free Design-jazzy sha-la-las on "Petition". But Carney especially brings life to the percussion, whether it's the huge handclaps on "My Better Self", a swooning standout reminiscent of the Owls' underrated mid-2000s indie-pop gem "Air", or the snapping snares on "High Road". "Paradise is all around, but happiness is never found," Moore sings on that last song, which might've been a strong unifying theme for the sophomore album-- a melancholy flipside to the debut's paradise-is-paradise uplift. Sure, the songs on Young and Old occasionally bring back the romance of movement (optimistic "Traveling"), and they're often introspective, but instead the effect tends to be too confused, stilted, or generic to really pack the same wallop. The album's first words, on mellow strummer "It All Feels the Same", are "took a train," a potentially intriguing counterpart to sailing that isn't properly explored elsewhere on the record. Rather than at sea or on the railroad, the lyrics lean toward awkward abstraction: "Will you make my children bear the consequences everywhere?" asks "Origins". Even on "My Better Self", Moore philosophizes clumsily, "What is innate, I do not know/ But meaning comes and it goes." She sort of has a point, though. As easy as it is to criticize acts that come to us with a ready-built narrative alongside their music, storytelling and image-making have always been crucial elements of pop. What matters isn't whether a record comes with extra-musical buzz attached, but whether the music is good enough to capitalize on that buzz. Cape Dory, to my ears, was; Young and Old is another example of a promising young act that found an audience quickly on the internet before fully coming into its own powers. In other words, it's pretty good, but also a bit disappointing. There's still plenty of time, though, and by album three, the duo that never originally set out to make music will have something else that can be invaluable for a working band: a little more experience in the trenches."

Terrestrial Tones

Blasted

Experimental,Rock

Brandon Stosuy

Terrestrial Tones are a Brooklyn duo comprised of Animal Collective's Dave Porter (aka Avey Tare) and Black Dice's Eric Copeland. On Blasted, these roomies pull from a sonic palette that wholly evokes their nom de feedback and fashion a 33-minute subterranean landscape of gargling mud baths inhabited by the robotic chirps of rusted aviary grubs. The album displays less joyful humanity/beauty than Animal Collective's Beach-Boy campfire jams and swivels less raucously than early day Black Dice; pinpointing an ambient equator, it loosely resembles Danse Manatee dry humping Beaches & Canyons. Looking outside the band's apartment complex, they're closest to the criminally forgotten Vancouver noise crew Pork Queen-- well, if those Canadians reformed to cover swatches of Throbbing Gristle sauerkraut, extracting porno evil, and presenting preternatural industrial howl as pedestrian video game music. OK, it doesn't really sound that cool; much of Blasted conjures wordy imagery but feels sluggish, lacking the liveliness of Porter/Copeland's main projects. Opener "Gorilla In The Woods" bequeaths a drowning sailor's glug to guitar-like creaking, depth-buried entropic repetitions, sprung rhythm, and reverb katydid swirls. If commissioned by Nintendo, imagine digital grubs eating ones-and-zeros roots. The track ends with humanoid bird caws and laughter of its participants, hosing off the anonymity of what came before it. "Our Single" is drumpad plus buried vocals, and it equals an auto-asphyxiated Xiu Xiu suffocating inside a house of cellophane. "West Indian Day Parade" samples the event that gave it a name, but the low hum of celebratory language and spicy vegetable patties are inter-spliced with a marching band jump cut into a typewriting Burroughs fusion. "Heavy Angel"'s rumbling percussion has the same soft corners as "Gorilla in the Woods" and really, this is all very gentle, somehow submerged and cushioned, a game of padded Pong played by termites. In addition to the titled compositions, there are a handful of untitled maggot granules begging listeners to loop/expand elsewhere: clock chiming and/or unwinding, loose cables spelling "SOS", a sand-dollar concertina stuck in the receding ocean jetsam. But let's put it in perspective: Terrestrial Tones is often referred to in reviews as a "super group" but although Porter and Copeland are in popular bands, they're also roommates; and as any musician who's lived with other musicians knows, each music house supports about 30,000 bands depending on the night and who's around. So instead of naively reading Blasted as a meeting of indie-rock power brokers, it helps to strip away the distance and funnel the sounds through the framework of two friends getting together in the comfort of their own home and putting some fairly modest abstractions to tape. Still, despite its low-key nature, Blasted is certainly Psych-o-Path's highest profile album to date, though the New York City label's released stronger work including two Space Is No Place Big Apple noise samplers and the shimmering, often painfully beautiful stringed buzz-quake of SF trio Axolotl's eponymous debut. Especially impressive is Mouthus' locked-groove of a self-titled debut, which along with Loam, a mesmerizing follow-up just released by Ecstatic Peace!, establishes the scruffy NYC duo as the most combustible new-school heirs to Dead C's free-range soft-black feedback (as reinvigorated by Lighting Bolt's punky broke-drum tribalism). But whatever, if it takes Terrestrial Tones' middling underwater cricket opera to put Psych-o-Path on the map then Copeland and Porter should rest well knowing they've transcended the skeletal patchiness of this fun but undistinguished offering.

Artist: Terrestrial Tones, Album: Blasted, Genre: Experimental,Rock, Score (1-10): 5.7 Album review: "Terrestrial Tones are a Brooklyn duo comprised of Animal Collective's Dave Porter (aka Avey Tare) and Black Dice's Eric Copeland. On Blasted, these roomies pull from a sonic palette that wholly evokes their nom de feedback and fashion a 33-minute subterranean landscape of gargling mud baths inhabited by the robotic chirps of rusted aviary grubs. The album displays less joyful humanity/beauty than Animal Collective's Beach-Boy campfire jams and swivels less raucously than early day Black Dice; pinpointing an ambient equator, it loosely resembles Danse Manatee dry humping Beaches & Canyons. Looking outside the band's apartment complex, they're closest to the criminally forgotten Vancouver noise crew Pork Queen-- well, if those Canadians reformed to cover swatches of Throbbing Gristle sauerkraut, extracting porno evil, and presenting preternatural industrial howl as pedestrian video game music. OK, it doesn't really sound that cool; much of Blasted conjures wordy imagery but feels sluggish, lacking the liveliness of Porter/Copeland's main projects. Opener "Gorilla In The Woods" bequeaths a drowning sailor's glug to guitar-like creaking, depth-buried entropic repetitions, sprung rhythm, and reverb katydid swirls. If commissioned by Nintendo, imagine digital grubs eating ones-and-zeros roots. The track ends with humanoid bird caws and laughter of its participants, hosing off the anonymity of what came before it. "Our Single" is drumpad plus buried vocals, and it equals an auto-asphyxiated Xiu Xiu suffocating inside a house of cellophane. "West Indian Day Parade" samples the event that gave it a name, but the low hum of celebratory language and spicy vegetable patties are inter-spliced with a marching band jump cut into a typewriting Burroughs fusion. "Heavy Angel"'s rumbling percussion has the same soft corners as "Gorilla in the Woods" and really, this is all very gentle, somehow submerged and cushioned, a game of padded Pong played by termites. In addition to the titled compositions, there are a handful of untitled maggot granules begging listeners to loop/expand elsewhere: clock chiming and/or unwinding, loose cables spelling "SOS", a sand-dollar concertina stuck in the receding ocean jetsam. But let's put it in perspective: Terrestrial Tones is often referred to in reviews as a "super group" but although Porter and Copeland are in popular bands, they're also roommates; and as any musician who's lived with other musicians knows, each music house supports about 30,000 bands depending on the night and who's around. So instead of naively reading Blasted as a meeting of indie-rock power brokers, it helps to strip away the distance and funnel the sounds through the framework of two friends getting together in the comfort of their own home and putting some fairly modest abstractions to tape. Still, despite its low-key nature, Blasted is certainly Psych-o-Path's highest profile album to date, though the New York City label's released stronger work including two Space Is No Place Big Apple noise samplers and the shimmering, often painfully beautiful stringed buzz-quake of SF trio Axolotl's eponymous debut. Especially impressive is Mouthus' locked-groove of a self-titled debut, which along with Loam, a mesmerizing follow-up just released by Ecstatic Peace!, establishes the scruffy NYC duo as the most combustible new-school heirs to Dead C's free-range soft-black feedback (as reinvigorated by Lighting Bolt's punky broke-drum tribalism). But whatever, if it takes Terrestrial Tones' middling underwater cricket opera to put Psych-o-Path on the map then Copeland and Porter should rest well knowing they've transcended the skeletal patchiness of this fun but undistinguished offering."

Lapalux

Ruinism

Electronic

Saby Reyes-Kulkarni

Until now, the music that Stuart Howard has put out as Lapalux has masked his tendency to labor over details until he’s achieved perfection. The London producer built his previous two full-lengths and four EPs on a solid foundation of beats and melodies. On Ruinism, his third full-length, Howard abandons his trademark emphasis on grooves, vocals, R&B, hip hop, and jazz in favor of a less immediately listener-friendly blend of abstract sounds. This move isn’t as drastic as, say, Amon Tobin’s like-minded shift from jazz breaks to Foley-based sound sources on his 2007 album The Foley Room. Still, Lapalux fans will likely be scratching their heads wondering where the meat of his sound went. Whether or not those fans take a shine to Ruinism, Howard’s determination should be applauded. Lapalux’s debut full-length, 2013’s Nostalchic, and preceding EP, 2012’s When You’re Gone, also drew from Foley sources and field recordings, but they weren’t the main focus. Howard appeared content to make sultry, soulful songs that owed a great debt to groups like Zero 7 and Morcheeba. Lapalux’s mix of tentativeness and a strong pulse made it the ideal soundtrack for that headspace when you’re either getting ready to go out clubbing or just coming back—this decade’s answer to chillout with a kick of adrenaline. The time, the mood shifts dramatically. Howard’s last album, 2015’s Lustmore, gets a jump-start from singer Andreya Triana right off the bat, her smoky voice as full-bodied and looming as a pipe organ resounding in a church. By contrast, the first sounds to take center stage on Ruinism track opener “Reverence” are a repeating loop (a kind of digital version of a railway station bell) and a bouquet of strings. The strings increase in tension and come to a near-boil, but the track simply dissipates, never developing into a hook or even a form. Singer GABI makes an entrance at the outset of the next track, “Data Demon,” her wordless, operatic chants blending with strings to mimic the sound of a theremin or musical saw. GABI’s voice soars to the uppermost reaches of the human register (at least it sounds that way), but again no hook emerges. And when Howard adds some bass drops, he does so as a harsh counterpoint, a kind of punching-bag effect in the middle of a classical concert hall. By this point, it becomes obvious that Howard isn’t making a pop record here. Several of the new tunes feature guest vocalists—JFDR, Louisahhh, Talvi, Raphaelle Standell-Preston, Camella Lobo, and Szjerdene Mulcare all appear—but few of them supply a conventional “lead” vocal. Similarly, Howard’s beats don’t ever quite cohere into grooves, while the overwhelming majority of the album pushes the fabric of its sounds in front of everything else. Other than the Talvi feature “4EVA,” it’s even fair to say that Ruinism doesn’t actually consist of songs. Which leaves little left but Howard’s attention to detail, now strikingly and undeniably apparent from start to finish. Following "4EVA," Howard’s dance side tentatively returns on the holographic house groove of “Essex Is Burning.” From there, the album features beats more prominently. But even then, Ruinism lingers in a state somewhere between classical and a kind of post-electro mindset characterized by non-functional beat-making, as if the stuttering pulse of the songs were emanating from broken pieces of machinery. It is to Howard’s enormous credit that he is able to make this music flow given the secondary role that rhythm, harmony, and structure take. Though far less accessible than his previous material, Ruinism isn’t the clinical listen it could have turned into. Its performers are never spotlit and yet its textures never lack a human soul. It is the kind of album that tends to frustrate a fanbase while cementing its maker as an artist for that very willingness to alienate the faithful. You could say that Ruinism is Howard’s coming-out party as a composer, but even that incorrectly implies an adherence to tradition. With Ruinism, Howard sets out on a whole new path to conceiving his music.

Artist: Lapalux, Album: Ruinism, Genre: Electronic, Score (1-10): 7.2 Album review: "Until now, the music that Stuart Howard has put out as Lapalux has masked his tendency to labor over details until he’s achieved perfection. The London producer built his previous two full-lengths and four EPs on a solid foundation of beats and melodies. On Ruinism, his third full-length, Howard abandons his trademark emphasis on grooves, vocals, R&B, hip hop, and jazz in favor of a less immediately listener-friendly blend of abstract sounds. This move isn’t as drastic as, say, Amon Tobin’s like-minded shift from jazz breaks to Foley-based sound sources on his 2007 album The Foley Room. Still, Lapalux fans will likely be scratching their heads wondering where the meat of his sound went. Whether or not those fans take a shine to Ruinism, Howard’s determination should be applauded. Lapalux’s debut full-length, 2013’s Nostalchic, and preceding EP, 2012’s When You’re Gone, also drew from Foley sources and field recordings, but they weren’t the main focus. Howard appeared content to make sultry, soulful songs that owed a great debt to groups like Zero 7 and Morcheeba. Lapalux’s mix of tentativeness and a strong pulse made it the ideal soundtrack for that headspace when you’re either getting ready to go out clubbing or just coming back—this decade’s answer to chillout with a kick of adrenaline. The time, the mood shifts dramatically. Howard’s last album, 2015’s Lustmore, gets a jump-start from singer Andreya Triana right off the bat, her smoky voice as full-bodied and looming as a pipe organ resounding in a church. By contrast, the first sounds to take center stage on Ruinism track opener “Reverence” are a repeating loop (a kind of digital version of a railway station bell) and a bouquet of strings. The strings increase in tension and come to a near-boil, but the track simply dissipates, never developing into a hook or even a form. Singer GABI makes an entrance at the outset of the next track, “Data Demon,” her wordless, operatic chants blending with strings to mimic the sound of a theremin or musical saw. GABI’s voice soars to the uppermost reaches of the human register (at least it sounds that way), but again no hook emerges. And when Howard adds some bass drops, he does so as a harsh counterpoint, a kind of punching-bag effect in the middle of a classical concert hall. By this point, it becomes obvious that Howard isn’t making a pop record here. Several of the new tunes feature guest vocalists—JFDR, Louisahhh, Talvi, Raphaelle Standell-Preston, Camella Lobo, and Szjerdene Mulcare all appear—but few of them supply a conventional “lead” vocal. Similarly, Howard’s beats don’t ever quite cohere into grooves, while the overwhelming majority of the album pushes the fabric of its sounds in front of everything else. Other than the Talvi feature “4EVA,” it’s even fair to say that Ruinism doesn’t actually consist of songs. Which leaves little left but Howard’s attention to detail, now strikingly and undeniably apparent from start to finish. Following "4EVA," Howard’s dance side tentatively returns on the holographic house groove of “Essex Is Burning.” From there, the album features beats more prominently. But even then, Ruinism lingers in a state somewhere between classical and a kind of post-electro mindset characterized by non-functional beat-making, as if the stuttering pulse of the songs were emanating from broken pieces of machinery. It is to Howard’s enormous credit that he is able to make this music flow given the secondary role that rhythm, harmony, and structure take. Though far less accessible than his previous material, Ruinism isn’t the clinical listen it could have turned into. Its performers are never spotlit and yet its textures never lack a human soul. It is the kind of album that tends to frustrate a fanbase while cementing its maker as an artist for that very willingness to alienate the faithful. You could say that Ruinism is Howard’s coming-out party as a composer, but even that incorrectly implies an adherence to tradition. With Ruinism, Howard sets out on a whole new path to conceiving his music."

MS MR

Candy Bar Creep Show

Electronic

Katherine St. Asaph

It's hard to know what to make of New York duo MS MR at first. Partly it's deliberate. Like more and more would-be breakout acts, they've been as generous with biographical details as eyedroppers are with water, down to their photographss and names: Lizzy Plapinger of boutique pop label Neon Gold is the MS, and Max Hershenow her corresponding MR. Partly it's because the context around them swirls as thick as their music's atmospherics. They've been associated with Tumblr primarily on grounds of using it, which can lose you an hour or so among their Addams Family screencaps and photographed pills, but it's meaningless when it comes to the music. Distribution methods and single-art tastes don't constitute a genre. Everything on Candy Bar Creep Show, MS MR's first proper EP, has been released before. (Yes, via Tumblr.) But that's not the only reason these songs sound instantly familiar. The bands they've been compared to are somewhat more telling, although none fits exactly. A little more sashay and they'd be Poliça; more rapture and they'd be Florence; throw in some trolling and they'd be Lana. Their closest analogue, in fact, might be Toni Halliday's solo project Chatelaine, even if "Bones" didn't so closely echo their "Broken Bones". Every song is steeped in gloom, yet not so much as to sully their hooks. Plapinger's vocals are shaded brittle, confident, or spooky as is called for. She'll turn a folk curtsy for a sparrow metaphor, strut her melisma through a verse like the Sugababes' Siobhan Donaghy, or give up words entirely; the one commonality is that they're always a shade too vulnerable, too clear in a busy mix, or too hesitant where she'd otherwise be belting. She's the figure lit like a spotlight amid the dusk, lost but compelling. This effect works best when the lyrics merit such illumination, as on "Hurricane", the band's breakout and the most fully formed track here. The strings are churning up something, specifically a relationship wrecked out of fear. "Welcome to the inner workings of my mind, so dark and foul I can't disguise," Plapinger sings, and if it's melodramatic, the fog of reverb certainly backs her up. There's more levity on "Ash Tree Lane", a march set to brass and a wordless hook that'd be exuberant in any other context, but then Plapinger gets to singing again about plagues and wrong choices, eventually cutting the whole thing off with a gasp after--again-- "my mind's a mess." "Bones" isn't as strong; the pile of fractured guitar and strings works well enough, but it's unclear whether "dark twisted fantasy" is a Kanye reference (or whether it'd be preferable if so), and the lyrical admission "marinate in misery like a girl of only 17" doesn't excuse the clichés of teenage misery: empty churches, broken dreams paired with silent screams, madness paired with sadness. A good way to tell whether a group's succeeding on style or substance is to see how they handle a concept that could be bigger than them. On Candy Bar Creep Show, that's "Dark Doo Wop", a title that might as well have been kept on reserve behind glass labeled "Break in Case of Aesthetic Drought". The throughline is simple, a mainstay of pop through the ages: This world is gonna burn, so you might as well stick around. It's simple enough to execute, too; all you need are a few diffident doo-wops and coquetry on "that's my man," and as for the part where the world burn, burn, burns, the juxtaposition's obvious on its own. But it only works if it's delivered with a preacher's passion, or at least with Skeeter Davis' pathos. MS MR deliver, ratcheting up the rapture to near-thunderstorm levels: seething percussion, steely vocals, and a sonic fog that buries any lingering pleasantries.

Artist: MS MR, Album: Candy Bar Creep Show, Genre: Electronic, Score (1-10): 7.4 Album review: "It's hard to know what to make of New York duo MS MR at first. Partly it's deliberate. Like more and more would-be breakout acts, they've been as generous with biographical details as eyedroppers are with water, down to their photographss and names: Lizzy Plapinger of boutique pop label Neon Gold is the MS, and Max Hershenow her corresponding MR. Partly it's because the context around them swirls as thick as their music's atmospherics. They've been associated with Tumblr primarily on grounds of using it, which can lose you an hour or so among their Addams Family screencaps and photographed pills, but it's meaningless when it comes to the music. Distribution methods and single-art tastes don't constitute a genre. Everything on Candy Bar Creep Show, MS MR's first proper EP, has been released before. (Yes, via Tumblr.) But that's not the only reason these songs sound instantly familiar. The bands they've been compared to are somewhat more telling, although none fits exactly. A little more sashay and they'd be Poliça; more rapture and they'd be Florence; throw in some trolling and they'd be Lana. Their closest analogue, in fact, might be Toni Halliday's solo project Chatelaine, even if "Bones" didn't so closely echo their "Broken Bones". Every song is steeped in gloom, yet not so much as to sully their hooks. Plapinger's vocals are shaded brittle, confident, or spooky as is called for. She'll turn a folk curtsy for a sparrow metaphor, strut her melisma through a verse like the Sugababes' Siobhan Donaghy, or give up words entirely; the one commonality is that they're always a shade too vulnerable, too clear in a busy mix, or too hesitant where she'd otherwise be belting. She's the figure lit like a spotlight amid the dusk, lost but compelling. This effect works best when the lyrics merit such illumination, as on "Hurricane", the band's breakout and the most fully formed track here. The strings are churning up something, specifically a relationship wrecked out of fear. "Welcome to the inner workings of my mind, so dark and foul I can't disguise," Plapinger sings, and if it's melodramatic, the fog of reverb certainly backs her up. There's more levity on "Ash Tree Lane", a march set to brass and a wordless hook that'd be exuberant in any other context, but then Plapinger gets to singing again about plagues and wrong choices, eventually cutting the whole thing off with a gasp after--again-- "my mind's a mess." "Bones" isn't as strong; the pile of fractured guitar and strings works well enough, but it's unclear whether "dark twisted fantasy" is a Kanye reference (or whether it'd be preferable if so), and the lyrical admission "marinate in misery like a girl of only 17" doesn't excuse the clichés of teenage misery: empty churches, broken dreams paired with silent screams, madness paired with sadness. A good way to tell whether a group's succeeding on style or substance is to see how they handle a concept that could be bigger than them. On Candy Bar Creep Show, that's "Dark Doo Wop", a title that might as well have been kept on reserve behind glass labeled "Break in Case of Aesthetic Drought". The throughline is simple, a mainstay of pop through the ages: This world is gonna burn, so you might as well stick around. It's simple enough to execute, too; all you need are a few diffident doo-wops and coquetry on "that's my man," and as for the part where the world burn, burn, burns, the juxtaposition's obvious on its own. But it only works if it's delivered with a preacher's passion, or at least with Skeeter Davis' pathos. MS MR deliver, ratcheting up the rapture to near-thunderstorm levels: seething percussion, steely vocals, and a sonic fog that buries any lingering pleasantries."

Gucci Mane

Woptober

Rap

Israel Daramola

Prison can change anyone. Enough time isolated from the world, treated as subhuman and discarded like garbage is soul-breaking and creatively stifling; it would be hard for anyone to maintain sanity or balance, regardless of a strong belief that one day you’ll be back on the outside. When Gucci Mane was finally freed from the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana back in May, it was a joyous moment for his fans but it was unclear what effect being gone since 2013 would have on the rapper and the music. Seeing his dramatic weight loss and new healthy regimen on Snapchat was a shock but a welcome one, if it meant avoiding the vices that had nearly destroyed him. During that time in prison, the one thing that kept Gucci’s name relevant in music—beyond the success of the younger artists he had supported, like Young Thug and Migos—was the steady stream of mixtapes that were able to come out using his unreleased music. Since being freed, he’s taking over the reins and is making up for lost time with the release of Woptober, three months after his first post-prison album Everybody Looking. Woptober is more attuned to the classic Gucci Mane aesthetic than Everybody Looking; The production is colder, murkier and with heavier bass, with Gucci slinking and swimming through it with precision and clearheaded insight. Songs like “Wop” and “Hi-Five” highlight this with an icy, brooding sound; and Gucci feels perfectly at home there. Despite the newfound clearness of his voice, likely a result of those shed pounds, it still has that guttural allure. On Woptober, Gucci can be fun and playful, grimy or poignant and thoughtful and sometimes he’s all of these things at once. Woptober gets off to a great start with “Intro: Fuck 12”: the Phantom Of The Opera piano keys giving the song a ghostly, demented air while Gucci comes in strong, focused and charismatic: “I ain't never been embarrassed, I ain't never felt fear/I got post-traumatic stresses like I can't shed tears,” The album proceeds with this laser focus and thoughtfulness throughout. Everybody Looking, while a good record, was more celebratory, a big “welcome back” party for Gucci. Woptober goes back to the dirtier, oddball style that Gucci became successful with but this time, it’s more disciplined and perceptive. On the album’s best track “Dirty Lil N***a”, Gucci takes a moment to relate to the fictionalized street kid he’s spent the song rapping about. “The streets don't kill him, then the law gon' get him/Better listen to me kid, it's a fucked-up system/Y'all might don't feel him but I damn sure feel him/Cause I was just in a jail cell fucked up with him.” It’s the same avenue that Boosie has always taken—somber but not preachy or self-righteous, and it suits Gucci Mane well as a rapper who’s always been good at reaching out to young artists and understanding youth culture. The album’s first single “Bling Blaww Burr” is a much brighter affair, a club record more memorable for its infectious ad-libs than anything else. It is the stale kind of party record Gucci can make in his sleep and a Young Dolph feature can only do so much for it. “Money Machine” is boosted by a better beat and a guest appearance from Rick Ross. Woptober slogs towards the end, but it moves too quickly to feel like a chore to sit through. It has all the markings of what we’ve come to expect from Gucci’s music only this time—rather than drowning in his addictions—he’s found a way to integrate drugs and violence into his new outlook. new life outlook. It’s a great strategy and, if he plans to continue pushing music out at such an accelerated clip, it’s hopefully just a taste of what’s to come.

Artist: Gucci Mane, Album: Woptober, Genre: Rap, Score (1-10): 7.5 Album review: "Prison can change anyone. Enough time isolated from the world, treated as subhuman and discarded like garbage is soul-breaking and creatively stifling; it would be hard for anyone to maintain sanity or balance, regardless of a strong belief that one day you’ll be back on the outside. When Gucci Mane was finally freed from the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana back in May, it was a joyous moment for his fans but it was unclear what effect being gone since 2013 would have on the rapper and the music. Seeing his dramatic weight loss and new healthy regimen on Snapchat was a shock but a welcome one, if it meant avoiding the vices that had nearly destroyed him. During that time in prison, the one thing that kept Gucci’s name relevant in music—beyond the success of the younger artists he had supported, like Young Thug and Migos—was the steady stream of mixtapes that were able to come out using his unreleased music. Since being freed, he’s taking over the reins and is making up for lost time with the release of Woptober, three months after his first post-prison album Everybody Looking. Woptober is more attuned to the classic Gucci Mane aesthetic than Everybody Looking; The production is colder, murkier and with heavier bass, with Gucci slinking and swimming through it with precision and clearheaded insight. Songs like “Wop” and “Hi-Five” highlight this with an icy, brooding sound; and Gucci feels perfectly at home there. Despite the newfound clearness of his voice, likely a result of those shed pounds, it still has that guttural allure. On Woptober, Gucci can be fun and playful, grimy or poignant and thoughtful and sometimes he’s all of these things at once. Woptober gets off to a great start with “Intro: Fuck 12”: the Phantom Of The Opera piano keys giving the song a ghostly, demented air while Gucci comes in strong, focused and charismatic: “I ain't never been embarrassed, I ain't never felt fear/I got post-traumatic stresses like I can't shed tears,” The album proceeds with this laser focus and thoughtfulness throughout. Everybody Looking, while a good record, was more celebratory, a big “welcome back” party for Gucci. Woptober goes back to the dirtier, oddball style that Gucci became successful with but this time, it’s more disciplined and perceptive. On the album’s best track “Dirty Lil N***a”, Gucci takes a moment to relate to the fictionalized street kid he’s spent the song rapping about. “The streets don't kill him, then the law gon' get him/Better listen to me kid, it's a fucked-up system/Y'all might don't feel him but I damn sure feel him/Cause I was just in a jail cell fucked up with him.” It’s the same avenue that Boosie has always taken—somber but not preachy or self-righteous, and it suits Gucci Mane well as a rapper who’s always been good at reaching out to young artists and understanding youth culture. The album’s first single “Bling Blaww Burr” is a much brighter affair, a club record more memorable for its infectious ad-libs than anything else. It is the stale kind of party record Gucci can make in his sleep and a Young Dolph feature can only do so much for it. “Money Machine” is boosted by a better beat and a guest appearance from Rick Ross. Woptober slogs towards the end, but it moves too quickly to feel like a chore to sit through. It has all the markings of what we’ve come to expect from Gucci’s music only this time—rather than drowning in his addictions—he’s found a way to integrate drugs and violence into his new outlook. new life outlook. It’s a great strategy and, if he plans to continue pushing music out at such an accelerated clip, it’s hopefully just a taste of what’s to come."

Carlos Giffoni

"Evidence" 12"

Experimental

Nick Neyland

In Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton's Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, the authors point out how the earliest acid-house tracks produced in Chicago in the late 1980s had more ties with the avant-garde than with the house sound that was getting Top 40 attention in certain parts of the globe. Listening back to Phuture's epic "Acid Tracks" outside of a club environment can push you into a cold, harsh, solitary state of mind. It's not quite the sound of dance music retreating from its inclusionary vibe, as packed dancefloors spread out over innumerable acid revivals can testify. But early acid tracks like Lil' Louis' "Video Clash" and Armando's "Downfall" point inward more than they do outward, accelerating away from the hands-in-the-air solidarity of club culture and into a far more isolated space. Most of the acid revivals over the years have disengaged from that side of the genre-- Fatboy Slim and the big beat movement of the mid-to-late 1990s took all the slippery twists of the Roland TB-303 and funneled them into happier, stadium-filling anthems. But lately there's been a small band of musicians picking up on the raw, untrammeled nihilism of the earliest acid house tracks, singling out the sheer brute force of its core components and fusing them with outside influences. Factory Floor are the most high profile among them, single-handedly creating their own new acid underground with additional nods to pop, industrial, and the clear-lines aesthetic of their partial namesakes, Factory Records. In New York, the Venezuelan electronic musician Carlos Giffoni, mostly known for his excursions into noise, has spent the last few years digging into a similar set of influences. His No Fun Acid project, named by mashing up components of his No Fun festival and record label with his obvious debt to the sound of DJ Pierre and his cohorts, was flooded with tinny pitter-patter drum patterns and the burbling screeches of a thoroughly agitated 303. On "Evidence", a two-song 12" for Ford & Lopatin's Software label, Giffoni takes the next logical step in the evolution of that sound, imprinting more of his personality on the work by cloaking it in the nebulous textures of his prior output. In a recent installment of the Out Door, Marc Masters highlighted how a number of mainstays in the noise scene have retreated from all-out sonic assault, turning to quieter corners for inspiration. "Evidence" ties into that trend, beginning with a simple piano and vocal piece that mirrors the feeling his label boss, Daniel Lopatin, as Oneohtrix Point Never, conjured up with Antony on "Returnal" in 2010. From there, Giffoni coats the track in an inflexible block of acidic sound and his detached, colorless vocal, creating a jarring juxtaposition between delivery and verse ("it would be so easy to fall in love with you"). It's sparse and unrelentingly downbeat, with a few cracks of light hacked into the murk by guest player Laurel Halo, credited with "manually mechanized piano and synth riffage." The other track here, "Desire in the Summer", is similarly drained of emotion, sounding like the slashed-up noise passages from Giffoni's Arrogance slowly sinking into battle with his new acid impulses. Again, his bone-dry delivery percolates throughout, positioning him as a survivor standing in the rubble as two genres go to war around him. This is a departure for Giffoni, even from the more club-friendly No Fun Acid project. But it feels like a natural space for him to land in, a way to align the abandon of his noise projects with the avant side of club culture that has obviously inspired him. "Change is good," Giffoni said, in a 2010 interview with the Quietus. On "Evidence", that desire for change has thrown key restraints on his sound, galvanizing him to create his most unique and bullish musical statement to date.

Artist: Carlos Giffoni, Album: "Evidence" 12", Genre: Experimental, Score (1-10): 7.6 Album review: "In Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton's Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, the authors point out how the earliest acid-house tracks produced in Chicago in the late 1980s had more ties with the avant-garde than with the house sound that was getting Top 40 attention in certain parts of the globe. Listening back to Phuture's epic "Acid Tracks" outside of a club environment can push you into a cold, harsh, solitary state of mind. It's not quite the sound of dance music retreating from its inclusionary vibe, as packed dancefloors spread out over innumerable acid revivals can testify. But early acid tracks like Lil' Louis' "Video Clash" and Armando's "Downfall" point inward more than they do outward, accelerating away from the hands-in-the-air solidarity of club culture and into a far more isolated space. Most of the acid revivals over the years have disengaged from that side of the genre-- Fatboy Slim and the big beat movement of the mid-to-late 1990s took all the slippery twists of the Roland TB-303 and funneled them into happier, stadium-filling anthems. But lately there's been a small band of musicians picking up on the raw, untrammeled nihilism of the earliest acid house tracks, singling out the sheer brute force of its core components and fusing them with outside influences. Factory Floor are the most high profile among them, single-handedly creating their own new acid underground with additional nods to pop, industrial, and the clear-lines aesthetic of their partial namesakes, Factory Records. In New York, the Venezuelan electronic musician Carlos Giffoni, mostly known for his excursions into noise, has spent the last few years digging into a similar set of influences. His No Fun Acid project, named by mashing up components of his No Fun festival and record label with his obvious debt to the sound of DJ Pierre and his cohorts, was flooded with tinny pitter-patter drum patterns and the burbling screeches of a thoroughly agitated 303. On "Evidence", a two-song 12" for Ford & Lopatin's Software label, Giffoni takes the next logical step in the evolution of that sound, imprinting more of his personality on the work by cloaking it in the nebulous textures of his prior output. In a recent installment of the Out Door, Marc Masters highlighted how a number of mainstays in the noise scene have retreated from all-out sonic assault, turning to quieter corners for inspiration. "Evidence" ties into that trend, beginning with a simple piano and vocal piece that mirrors the feeling his label boss, Daniel Lopatin, as Oneohtrix Point Never, conjured up with Antony on "Returnal" in 2010. From there, Giffoni coats the track in an inflexible block of acidic sound and his detached, colorless vocal, creating a jarring juxtaposition between delivery and verse ("it would be so easy to fall in love with you"). It's sparse and unrelentingly downbeat, with a few cracks of light hacked into the murk by guest player Laurel Halo, credited with "manually mechanized piano and synth riffage." The other track here, "Desire in the Summer", is similarly drained of emotion, sounding like the slashed-up noise passages from Giffoni's Arrogance slowly sinking into battle with his new acid impulses. Again, his bone-dry delivery percolates throughout, positioning him as a survivor standing in the rubble as two genres go to war around him. This is a departure for Giffoni, even from the more club-friendly No Fun Acid project. But it feels like a natural space for him to land in, a way to align the abandon of his noise projects with the avant side of club culture that has obviously inspired him. "Change is good," Giffoni said, in a 2010 interview with the Quietus. On "Evidence", that desire for change has thrown key restraints on his sound, galvanizing him to create his most unique and bullish musical statement to date."

M.E.S.H.

Hesaitix

Electronic

Thea Ballard

“For me, music is a different place,” said DJ and producer M.E.S.H. in a 2016 interview. As a resident with the Berlin collective Janus, James Whipple—aka M.E.S.H.—has been instrumental in developing the splintered, genre-bending sound for which Janus’ club nights (and its members’ productions) have come to be known. Though engaged with club tropes, his own productions stray outside the formal bounds of dance music, developing oblique narratives that circle around the weird underbelly of life with technology. His second full-length Hesaitix offers a loamy sonic futurism that breaks from the digitized universes we’ve come to expect of these kinds of projects. Though a sly sense of humor runs through Whipple’s productions, there’s also an unwavering sincerity. On Piteous Gate, this quality felt distinctly cinematic—interested, maybe, in its own artifice—but with Hesaitix he builds a world that lives and breathes. Though the album is anchored by percussive epics, Whipple uses uneasy ambient passages to carve out the environment in which Hesaitix takes place. Opener “Nemorum Incola” (whose title, per a rough translation from the Latin, means “forest dweller”), layers a rippling metallic phrase over a sample of insects, birds, and burbling water. “Blurred Cicada I” and “Blurred Cicada II” each recall the warbling sound of bells or an organ, stretched to woozy effect. These songs open up strange corners, lending a sense of the cavernous: the place we’ve entered seems to exist beyond what we can hear. Elsewhere, ideas assume a more tumultuous pace, held together by sharply designed percussion that’s made to physically engage the listener. With Janus, Whipple and his associates find links between sounds beyond genre or BPM. In their arrangements, they speak to a kind of contemporary listening that’s delocalized in appetite, but still somehow hyper-located in the enthusiasm it digests. Those omnivorous tendencies motivate this collection of tracks, and where previous M.E.S.H. releases might have had a deconstructed aesthetic, here it feels slippery but solid. The claustrophobic “Coercer” offers a mutant take on drum ‘n’ bass, hissing and sputtering as textures rub against one another; “Search. Reveal.” paints synthesizer impasto over a galloping dry rattle (and its melodic refrain proves as sticky as that of Whipple’s 2014 “Imperial Sewers,”). When Hesaitix’s pace picks up, an urgent kind of heaviness envelops the listener, mooring you to M.E.S.H.’s world. I think of video games as a touchstone for Whipple’s high-definition world-building—the environments he creates often glossy and fantastical—but the organic realism of landscape painting also comes to mind. Work that’s technologically engaged often equates the organic with the real and the synthetic with imaginary; Whipple seems unconcerned with such binaries, locating a lucid unreality throughout. Hesaitix contains some of the earthiest dance music I’ve encountered, but that’s not to say that listening to it is a particularly human experience. And yet, this release has a strong sense of a center: a thoughtfulness comes from both its moments of fury and its more level interludes, as with “Ihnaemiauimx,” the sweet note on which the album concludes. It’s peaceful in a dark-night kind of way, the kind of serenity that can only be achieved through some comfort with the unknown. Though there’s an impulse to process this sort of sonic radicality in ideological terms (take, for instance, a recent editorial for Resident Advisor that charted the popularity of CDJs among Whipple and his peers along a Jamesonian conception of postmodernity), I can’t help but believe that the implications of the forms mapped here are somehow more mysterious. Rooted somewhere in the corporeal fantasies that have always propelled dance music, Hesaitix unravels an imaginary realm that feels genuinely new in form.

Artist: M.E.S.H., Album: Hesaitix, Genre: Electronic, Score (1-10): 7.6 Album review: "“For me, music is a different place,” said DJ and producer M.E.S.H. in a 2016 interview. As a resident with the Berlin collective Janus, James Whipple—aka M.E.S.H.—has been instrumental in developing the splintered, genre-bending sound for which Janus’ club nights (and its members’ productions) have come to be known. Though engaged with club tropes, his own productions stray outside the formal bounds of dance music, developing oblique narratives that circle around the weird underbelly of life with technology. His second full-length Hesaitix offers a loamy sonic futurism that breaks from the digitized universes we’ve come to expect of these kinds of projects. Though a sly sense of humor runs through Whipple’s productions, there’s also an unwavering sincerity. On Piteous Gate, this quality felt distinctly cinematic—interested, maybe, in its own artifice—but with Hesaitix he builds a world that lives and breathes. Though the album is anchored by percussive epics, Whipple uses uneasy ambient passages to carve out the environment in which Hesaitix takes place. Opener “Nemorum Incola” (whose title, per a rough translation from the Latin, means “forest dweller”), layers a rippling metallic phrase over a sample of insects, birds, and burbling water. “Blurred Cicada I” and “Blurred Cicada II” each recall the warbling sound of bells or an organ, stretched to woozy effect. These songs open up strange corners, lending a sense of the cavernous: the place we’ve entered seems to exist beyond what we can hear. Elsewhere, ideas assume a more tumultuous pace, held together by sharply designed percussion that’s made to physically engage the listener. With Janus, Whipple and his associates find links between sounds beyond genre or BPM. In their arrangements, they speak to a kind of contemporary listening that’s delocalized in appetite, but still somehow hyper-located in the enthusiasm it digests. Those omnivorous tendencies motivate this collection of tracks, and where previous M.E.S.H. releases might have had a deconstructed aesthetic, here it feels slippery but solid. The claustrophobic “Coercer” offers a mutant take on drum ‘n’ bass, hissing and sputtering as textures rub against one another; “Search. Reveal.” paints synthesizer impasto over a galloping dry rattle (and its melodic refrain proves as sticky as that of Whipple’s 2014 “Imperial Sewers,”). When Hesaitix’s pace picks up, an urgent kind of heaviness envelops the listener, mooring you to M.E.S.H.’s world. I think of video games as a touchstone for Whipple’s high-definition world-building—the environments he creates often glossy and fantastical—but the organic realism of landscape painting also comes to mind. Work that’s technologically engaged often equates the organic with the real and the synthetic with imaginary; Whipple seems unconcerned with such binaries, locating a lucid unreality throughout. Hesaitix contains some of the earthiest dance music I’ve encountered, but that’s not to say that listening to it is a particularly human experience. And yet, this release has a strong sense of a center: a thoughtfulness comes from both its moments of fury and its more level interludes, as with “Ihnaemiauimx,” the sweet note on which the album concludes. It’s peaceful in a dark-night kind of way, the kind of serenity that can only be achieved through some comfort with the unknown. Though there’s an impulse to process this sort of sonic radicality in ideological terms (take, for instance, a recent editorial for Resident Advisor that charted the popularity of CDJs among Whipple and his peers along a Jamesonian conception of postmodernity), I can’t help but believe that the implications of the forms mapped here are somehow more mysterious. Rooted somewhere in the corporeal fantasies that have always propelled dance music, Hesaitix unravels an imaginary realm that feels genuinely new in form."

Weyes Blood

Cardamom Times EP

Rock

Brandon Stosuy

Weyes Blood is the project of multi-instrument folk musician Natalie Mering. She recorded the four-song Cardamom Times EP on a reel-to-reel deck in her Rockaway, N.Y., home studio; it sounds like a lush, pristine folk-rock gem rescued from the 1960s. The playing is patient and assured, and you can't say enough about her voice, a dusky, soulful soprano that draws you into her world as well as into a larger tradition. She has the kind of voice that’s both distinctive and familiar, and it fits perfect with her style: the arrangements are at once classic, sneakily innovative, and entirely her own. Cardamon Times follows Mering's second album, 2014's The Innocents. It's more pure, and the overall sound is less composed. Instead of a complex studio creation, it comes off like an overheard monologue in the woods. The rural, solitary video for the stunning five-and-a-half-minute closer "In the Beginning", which was shot on Super 8 film in Northern Canada and finds Mering wandering the countryside by herself, captures this feel. Cardamom sounds a bit like an archival folk collection but it's filled with suprising details. The lengthy "Take You There" opens with a minute of melancholic organ drone; for the rest of the track, she sings over the fluctuating keys without any percussion. Opener "Maybe Love" has pretty, Sundays-like guitar strums and eventually, at songs's end, noise is layered beneath ghostly multi-tracked voices. On "Cardamom", her voice is almost distorted beside crystal clear guitar picking and a piping flute. As you listen more closely, subtle touches distance Mering's music from the purely nostalgic. Her lyrics feel personal. Cardamom Times mostly focuses on love, lost and found and lost again. "Maybe Love" includes the touching, realistic detail: "I like seeing you notice me/ When I’m feeling better about/ You and me." The old-timey sounding "Cardamom" snaps into the present when she sings: "I like your band, can I hold your hand this time?/ Do you find what I do kind of cool?/ Would we last a minute or two?" Nothing seems permanent here, even when the music is timeless. "In the Beginning", her best song to date, features a melancholic but catchy melody and an arrangement of guitars and organs and her voice. She sings about a field of stars. She sings about suffering and changing, of bittersweet meetings that happen at the wrong time. She asks "Have you ever walked in on a Queen before?" She admits she's not trying to relate at the moment. And she just keeps going, and it's astonishing. Her music seems so simple at first, but it keeps deepening.

Artist: Weyes Blood, Album: Cardamom Times EP, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.7 Album review: "Weyes Blood is the project of multi-instrument folk musician Natalie Mering. She recorded the four-song Cardamom Times EP on a reel-to-reel deck in her Rockaway, N.Y., home studio; it sounds like a lush, pristine folk-rock gem rescued from the 1960s. The playing is patient and assured, and you can't say enough about her voice, a dusky, soulful soprano that draws you into her world as well as into a larger tradition. She has the kind of voice that’s both distinctive and familiar, and it fits perfect with her style: the arrangements are at once classic, sneakily innovative, and entirely her own. Cardamon Times follows Mering's second album, 2014's The Innocents. It's more pure, and the overall sound is less composed. Instead of a complex studio creation, it comes off like an overheard monologue in the woods. The rural, solitary video for the stunning five-and-a-half-minute closer "In the Beginning", which was shot on Super 8 film in Northern Canada and finds Mering wandering the countryside by herself, captures this feel. Cardamom sounds a bit like an archival folk collection but it's filled with suprising details. The lengthy "Take You There" opens with a minute of melancholic organ drone; for the rest of the track, she sings over the fluctuating keys without any percussion. Opener "Maybe Love" has pretty, Sundays-like guitar strums and eventually, at songs's end, noise is layered beneath ghostly multi-tracked voices. On "Cardamom", her voice is almost distorted beside crystal clear guitar picking and a piping flute. As you listen more closely, subtle touches distance Mering's music from the purely nostalgic. Her lyrics feel personal. Cardamom Times mostly focuses on love, lost and found and lost again. "Maybe Love" includes the touching, realistic detail: "I like seeing you notice me/ When I’m feeling better about/ You and me." The old-timey sounding "Cardamom" snaps into the present when she sings: "I like your band, can I hold your hand this time?/ Do you find what I do kind of cool?/ Would we last a minute or two?" Nothing seems permanent here, even when the music is timeless. "In the Beginning", her best song to date, features a melancholic but catchy melody and an arrangement of guitars and organs and her voice. She sings about a field of stars. She sings about suffering and changing, of bittersweet meetings that happen at the wrong time. She asks "Have you ever walked in on a Queen before?" She admits she's not trying to relate at the moment. And she just keeps going, and it's astonishing. Her music seems so simple at first, but it keeps deepening."

Moving Units

Dangerous Dreams

Electronic,Rock

Sam Ubl

Now that the dance-punk revolution has passed into trend obsolescence, it's easier to assess its fallout from a more objective standpoint. Moving Units were, in fact, there from the beginning. That is, the Los Angeles trio started making danceable post-punk way back in 2001, before "House of Jealous Lovers" was helping turn any Brooklyn dive bar willing to buck the Cabaret Laws into a slapdash club. But while Moving Units' style falls in close proximity to their brethren, they've always managed to exude a more anachronistic vibe. Dangerous Dreams is dance-punk, simple and unabashed, and the album wins points for its sincerity. Opener "Submission" thrives on understated vocals (Nic Offer take note) and facile mixing. If anything, the band owe more to jam rock than the DFA in both their instrumentation and recording techniques, avoiding excessive digital adornments and laying down loose, man-made grooves. "Going for Adds" follows a similar tack, dry-heaving angular guitar riffs over an accommodating bassline. Again, each instrument is performed live and the song is seemingly unalloyed by digital processing or other tinkering. But this approach can wear tiresome, as the ensuing 10 tracks prove. Texturally, the group only does so much with their stabbing rhythmic guitars and faux-slapbass grooves, and most of the time their melodies aren't strong enough to sustain the monotonous instrumental tracks and lack of textural variety. By comparison, !!! are vastly more successful at creating and sustaining intrigue through an insatiable penchant for sonic experimentation. "Hello? Is This Thing On?" may be static for the majority of its 7\xBD-minute runtime, but its devolution into a placid synth build behind Offer's discomfiting caterwauls is a refreshing take on the genre's increasingly rigid standards. By contrast, Moving Units are dishearteningly buttoned-up and their bass-heavy romps quickly lose their vigor and grow oppressive. Of these 12 songs, only on "Between Us and Them" do Moving Units churn out an indelible pop hook. Sadly, it's the album's sole glimmer of emotion. And choruses like "Emancipation"'s "You control me/ I'm your slave" will probably never sound sweet without at least a tinge of irony. Dangerous Dreams is plagued by a pervasive feeling of been there/done that, and the album ultimately sounds like the same two or three tracks on repeat. Moving Units may not be directly responsible for dance-punk's fustiness, but they can't help but suffer from it.

Artist: Moving Units, Album: Dangerous Dreams, Genre: Electronic,Rock, Score (1-10): 5.8 Album review: "Now that the dance-punk revolution has passed into trend obsolescence, it's easier to assess its fallout from a more objective standpoint. Moving Units were, in fact, there from the beginning. That is, the Los Angeles trio started making danceable post-punk way back in 2001, before "House of Jealous Lovers" was helping turn any Brooklyn dive bar willing to buck the Cabaret Laws into a slapdash club. But while Moving Units' style falls in close proximity to their brethren, they've always managed to exude a more anachronistic vibe. Dangerous Dreams is dance-punk, simple and unabashed, and the album wins points for its sincerity. Opener "Submission" thrives on understated vocals (Nic Offer take note) and facile mixing. If anything, the band owe more to jam rock than the DFA in both their instrumentation and recording techniques, avoiding excessive digital adornments and laying down loose, man-made grooves. "Going for Adds" follows a similar tack, dry-heaving angular guitar riffs over an accommodating bassline. Again, each instrument is performed live and the song is seemingly unalloyed by digital processing or other tinkering. But this approach can wear tiresome, as the ensuing 10 tracks prove. Texturally, the group only does so much with their stabbing rhythmic guitars and faux-slapbass grooves, and most of the time their melodies aren't strong enough to sustain the monotonous instrumental tracks and lack of textural variety. By comparison, !!! are vastly more successful at creating and sustaining intrigue through an insatiable penchant for sonic experimentation. "Hello? Is This Thing On?" may be static for the majority of its 7\xBD-minute runtime, but its devolution into a placid synth build behind Offer's discomfiting caterwauls is a refreshing take on the genre's increasingly rigid standards. By contrast, Moving Units are dishearteningly buttoned-up and their bass-heavy romps quickly lose their vigor and grow oppressive. Of these 12 songs, only on "Between Us and Them" do Moving Units churn out an indelible pop hook. Sadly, it's the album's sole glimmer of emotion. And choruses like "Emancipation"'s "You control me/ I'm your slave" will probably never sound sweet without at least a tinge of irony. Dangerous Dreams is plagued by a pervasive feeling of been there/done that, and the album ultimately sounds like the same two or three tracks on repeat. Moving Units may not be directly responsible for dance-punk's fustiness, but they can't help but suffer from it."

Califone

Heron King Blues

Rock

Amanda Petrusich

Inevitably, at some point in late summer, the landscape becomes vaguely obscene: August air gets thick and throbbing, heavy with a richness that's almost menacing. The sun hovers, uncomfortably plump. Lawn crickets yawn and twitter in double speed, their collective whispers slowly spinning into a single, disembodied howl. Everything else turns way too green. Listening to Califone's sweaty, blues-heavy scrap-rock is not an entirely dissimilar sensory experience: devious, fertile, and dangerously pretty, Califone records sound as futuristic as they do ancient, and as familiar as they do strange. With loops dredged from riverbeds and vocals rolled in salt, Califone spew a hoarse mix of synthesized sounds, sweeping guitars, and bizarre, snickering percussion, an enigmatic mix of real and imagined sounds. The band's latest, Heron King Blues, is no less curious-- it's impossible to tell if the record's echoing pings were tapped out on drums, programmed into laptops, or snatched from a dripping basement sink, each gleaming, viscous plop caught, unknowingly, on tape. Thus, the serendipity of Califone: the accidental orchestration, the mysterious creaks, the bits of poetry, the eerie omnipresence, the perfect, unnamable noise. Although not exactly a concept album, Heron King Blues was inspired, at least tangentially, by frontman Tim Rutili's recurring dream about a half-man, half-bird creature (check the freaked-out cover art), and brought into gritty fruition on the heels of Rutili's subsequent epiphany: the character his subconscious had (presumably) spun from nothing boasted inexplicable roots in ancient Druid legend. The story, as Rutili tells it, goes like this: a mischievous band of Roman soldiers discovered, in the final days of an otherwise pitiful siege against England, that their enemy lived in perpetual fear of a half-man, half-bird creature known as the Heron King. Hoisting a Roman solider onto stilts and slapping a heron mask over his face, the Romans sent a tipsy Heron King decoy careening into the middle of a British camp, watching as lines of English soldiers scurried off in terror. There are other Heron King fables circulating, and loads of half-man, half-bird deities nesting snug in leather-bound history books, but the actual circumstances of the King's story are mostly irrelevant: what matters is that Heron King Blues is possessed by the same kind of sweeping, metaphysical realization that goes hand-in-hand with discovering that you are, in fact, dreaming legends. The resulting album is haunting, nervous, and shaking with catharsis. On Califone's last studio LP, 2003's Quicksand/Cradlesnakes, Rutili and longtime percussionist Ben Massarella were joined by guitarist Jim Becker and drummer Joe Adamik, exchanging their revolving lineup (previous guests included former Red Red Meat percussionist Brian Deck, Fruit Bats Eric Johnson and Gillian Lisee, and Eleventh Dream Day's Rick Rizzo) for a more static stable of players. Now returning as a four-piece, Heron King Blues reflects the efforts of a tight, cohesive unit, despite the band's admission that most of the songs were improvised (see also Deceleration One and Deceleration Two) or written in the studio. With Califone's penchant for extemporaneous creation finally being properly indulged, Heron King Blues is an appropriately loose and sprawling record, requiring a bit more patience than some of the band's previous projects. Still, its weight is majestic. Opener "Wingbone" stacks gaping guitar and backroom percussion like bricks, building a spare wall of sad, groaning sounds. Rutili's careful vocal melody is what ultimately carries "Wingbone", his soft, throaty promises somehow both desperate and vacant; when Rutili gently mumbles, "Fill my belly with your whispering," it's obvious that he could be speaking directly to his own songs. Inching close to eight minutes long, "Sawtooth Sung a Cheater's Song" is near-epic in scope, swinging from dusty country blues to sweeping orchestral laments, while the backwards disco-funk of "Two Sisters Drunk on Each Other" carries along a small army of drum machines, bleating elephant-horns, pump organ, keyboards, loops and squawking guitars. Individually, these songs may flutter from style to style, but each of Heron King's seven (eight counting an uncredited outro) tracks perfectly embody Rutili's increasingly perverse sense of self-discovery. If you pump Califone through a decent pair of headphones, it's alarmingly easy to synchronize your body to their songs: inhalations become bowed strings, heartbeats mimic steady, muted drums. It's the idea of being over-alive, too tuned in to the blood and gore of the universe. Sweltering and beautiful, Heron King Blues is a triumphant exploration of quiet excess.

Artist: Califone, Album: Heron King Blues, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 8.4 Album review: "Inevitably, at some point in late summer, the landscape becomes vaguely obscene: August air gets thick and throbbing, heavy with a richness that's almost menacing. The sun hovers, uncomfortably plump. Lawn crickets yawn and twitter in double speed, their collective whispers slowly spinning into a single, disembodied howl. Everything else turns way too green. Listening to Califone's sweaty, blues-heavy scrap-rock is not an entirely dissimilar sensory experience: devious, fertile, and dangerously pretty, Califone records sound as futuristic as they do ancient, and as familiar as they do strange. With loops dredged from riverbeds and vocals rolled in salt, Califone spew a hoarse mix of synthesized sounds, sweeping guitars, and bizarre, snickering percussion, an enigmatic mix of real and imagined sounds. The band's latest, Heron King Blues, is no less curious-- it's impossible to tell if the record's echoing pings were tapped out on drums, programmed into laptops, or snatched from a dripping basement sink, each gleaming, viscous plop caught, unknowingly, on tape. Thus, the serendipity of Califone: the accidental orchestration, the mysterious creaks, the bits of poetry, the eerie omnipresence, the perfect, unnamable noise. Although not exactly a concept album, Heron King Blues was inspired, at least tangentially, by frontman Tim Rutili's recurring dream about a half-man, half-bird creature (check the freaked-out cover art), and brought into gritty fruition on the heels of Rutili's subsequent epiphany: the character his subconscious had (presumably) spun from nothing boasted inexplicable roots in ancient Druid legend. The story, as Rutili tells it, goes like this: a mischievous band of Roman soldiers discovered, in the final days of an otherwise pitiful siege against England, that their enemy lived in perpetual fear of a half-man, half-bird creature known as the Heron King. Hoisting a Roman solider onto stilts and slapping a heron mask over his face, the Romans sent a tipsy Heron King decoy careening into the middle of a British camp, watching as lines of English soldiers scurried off in terror. There are other Heron King fables circulating, and loads of half-man, half-bird deities nesting snug in leather-bound history books, but the actual circumstances of the King's story are mostly irrelevant: what matters is that Heron King Blues is possessed by the same kind of sweeping, metaphysical realization that goes hand-in-hand with discovering that you are, in fact, dreaming legends. The resulting album is haunting, nervous, and shaking with catharsis. On Califone's last studio LP, 2003's Quicksand/Cradlesnakes, Rutili and longtime percussionist Ben Massarella were joined by guitarist Jim Becker and drummer Joe Adamik, exchanging their revolving lineup (previous guests included former Red Red Meat percussionist Brian Deck, Fruit Bats Eric Johnson and Gillian Lisee, and Eleventh Dream Day's Rick Rizzo) for a more static stable of players. Now returning as a four-piece, Heron King Blues reflects the efforts of a tight, cohesive unit, despite the band's admission that most of the songs were improvised (see also Deceleration One and Deceleration Two) or written in the studio. With Califone's penchant for extemporaneous creation finally being properly indulged, Heron King Blues is an appropriately loose and sprawling record, requiring a bit more patience than some of the band's previous projects. Still, its weight is majestic. Opener "Wingbone" stacks gaping guitar and backroom percussion like bricks, building a spare wall of sad, groaning sounds. Rutili's careful vocal melody is what ultimately carries "Wingbone", his soft, throaty promises somehow both desperate and vacant; when Rutili gently mumbles, "Fill my belly with your whispering," it's obvious that he could be speaking directly to his own songs. Inching close to eight minutes long, "Sawtooth Sung a Cheater's Song" is near-epic in scope, swinging from dusty country blues to sweeping orchestral laments, while the backwards disco-funk of "Two Sisters Drunk on Each Other" carries along a small army of drum machines, bleating elephant-horns, pump organ, keyboards, loops and squawking guitars. Individually, these songs may flutter from style to style, but each of Heron King's seven (eight counting an uncredited outro) tracks perfectly embody Rutili's increasingly perverse sense of self-discovery. If you pump Califone through a decent pair of headphones, it's alarmingly easy to synchronize your body to their songs: inhalations become bowed strings, heartbeats mimic steady, muted drums. It's the idea of being over-alive, too tuned in to the blood and gore of the universe. Sweltering and beautiful, Heron King Blues is a triumphant exploration of quiet excess."

Diplo, M.I.A.

Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1

Electronic,Global,Pop/R&B

Nick Sylvester

Santa Claus, the Virgin Mary, and Terrence "Turkeytime" Terrence just got the shaft this holiday season. Why bother with presents? 2005's Tickle Me Elmo was supposed to be a chicken-legged Sri Lankan with so much sex in her self-spun neons you might as well get wasted off penicillin with Willie Nelson at a secret Rex the Dog show. But guess what? On Halloween she showed up in Philadelphia for her Fader gig, sat herself under a big fucking Christmas tree, and dished out free copies of Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1, the mixtape masterpiece she and Diplo Hollertronix had spent the 10 previous days putting together in his apartment. Batteries included! So a large portion of her forthcoming debut, Arular, has willfully gone leaky boat here. Many of her tracks sound similar to one another: A 505 Groovebox queefs out splatty, farty beats and M.I.A. shouts lyrics of varying snark over them, sometimes even singing them. (Sometimes.) She's been irresistible in single land, but M.I.A.'s full-length runs the risk of seeming limited and discrediting her misleading but awesome "female Dizzee Rascal" tag, replacing that description with "Neneh Cherry, Mk. II"-- a label that has likely dawned on anyone who has seen the "Buffalo Stance"-like "Galang" video. That is why this mixtape kills: The format fits M.I.A. perfectly. Her songs benefit greatly from Diplo's recent baile funk fetish (confer his recent Favela On Blast tape), some choice dub and American hip-hop cuts to break up the blaze to blaze and razorblades, and some flat-out brilliant mashups. On the upstroke, "Galang" goes reggaeton; on the down, Diplo cops the song a Lil Vicious beat and a lil keyboard hook, and it's so whoa you'll have to punch yourself in the face to stop smiling. "Fire Fire" goes bam bam then walks like an Egyptian in a telling Bangles mashup-- the two songs play so nicely together they could be siamese, until Diplo misdemeans "Pass That Dutch" with M.I.A.'s snakey music box schwarma. M.I.A.'s "Amazon" coupled with Ciara's radio-friendly microcrunk squelch is an early highlight, though that squirmy synth on Clipse's "Definition of a Roller" makes for good freak, too, packing just enough snaggletooth funk to forgive those recent Neptunes missteps. For a tape whose initial appeal was the instant and gratifying relief it brought to everyone waiting for M.I.A.'s full-length, Diplo ironically saves M.I.A.'s best cuts for last. "URAQT" is a jittery mess of flirting, territory-marking, and text-messaging (!): "You fuckin with my man and you text him all the time/ You mighta had him once but I have him all the time," and later, "U-R-A-Q-T/ Is your daddy dealer, cause you're dope to me!" For dessert, Diplo brings "Big Pimpin'" out of retirement to back M.I.A.'s raspy "Bingo": "Do you know what is on? Do you know what is on? Do you know how this beat is made in fucking Lon-d-d-don?" The song's obviously great, but between M.I.A.'s fierce deliveries and the braggart beat, it sounds weird and ominous, a black-hole closer to an album brimming with life. Last week, Sasha Frere-Jones profiled M.I.A. in The New Yorker, spraypainting her as a consummate and naturally "world" artist. M.I.A. is silly, dancey, cheap, expensive, truthful, and utterly serious all at once-- just like the world (!). She's not exactly rags-to-riches (yet), but her pop carries unwittingly significant weight, and to potentially far more people than just a few hundred ecstatic MP3 blog readers. It's one thing for M.I.A. to be a "world" pop star; it will be another thing for her to release an album that reflects that backstory. For now, Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1 takes that burden off of Arular: Diplo has actualized our hopes for M.I.A. qua world pop star, and we didn't even have to leave him cookies.

Artist: Diplo, M.I.A., Album: Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1, Genre: Electronic,Global,Pop/R&B, Score (1-10): 8.5 Album review: "Santa Claus, the Virgin Mary, and Terrence "Turkeytime" Terrence just got the shaft this holiday season. Why bother with presents? 2005's Tickle Me Elmo was supposed to be a chicken-legged Sri Lankan with so much sex in her self-spun neons you might as well get wasted off penicillin with Willie Nelson at a secret Rex the Dog show. But guess what? On Halloween she showed up in Philadelphia for her Fader gig, sat herself under a big fucking Christmas tree, and dished out free copies of Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1, the mixtape masterpiece she and Diplo Hollertronix had spent the 10 previous days putting together in his apartment. Batteries included! So a large portion of her forthcoming debut, Arular, has willfully gone leaky boat here. Many of her tracks sound similar to one another: A 505 Groovebox queefs out splatty, farty beats and M.I.A. shouts lyrics of varying snark over them, sometimes even singing them. (Sometimes.) She's been irresistible in single land, but M.I.A.'s full-length runs the risk of seeming limited and discrediting her misleading but awesome "female Dizzee Rascal" tag, replacing that description with "Neneh Cherry, Mk. II"-- a label that has likely dawned on anyone who has seen the "Buffalo Stance"-like "Galang" video. That is why this mixtape kills: The format fits M.I.A. perfectly. Her songs benefit greatly from Diplo's recent baile funk fetish (confer his recent Favela On Blast tape), some choice dub and American hip-hop cuts to break up the blaze to blaze and razorblades, and some flat-out brilliant mashups. On the upstroke, "Galang" goes reggaeton; on the down, Diplo cops the song a Lil Vicious beat and a lil keyboard hook, and it's so whoa you'll have to punch yourself in the face to stop smiling. "Fire Fire" goes bam bam then walks like an Egyptian in a telling Bangles mashup-- the two songs play so nicely together they could be siamese, until Diplo misdemeans "Pass That Dutch" with M.I.A.'s snakey music box schwarma. M.I.A.'s "Amazon" coupled with Ciara's radio-friendly microcrunk squelch is an early highlight, though that squirmy synth on Clipse's "Definition of a Roller" makes for good freak, too, packing just enough snaggletooth funk to forgive those recent Neptunes missteps. For a tape whose initial appeal was the instant and gratifying relief it brought to everyone waiting for M.I.A.'s full-length, Diplo ironically saves M.I.A.'s best cuts for last. "URAQT" is a jittery mess of flirting, territory-marking, and text-messaging (!): "You fuckin with my man and you text him all the time/ You mighta had him once but I have him all the time," and later, "U-R-A-Q-T/ Is your daddy dealer, cause you're dope to me!" For dessert, Diplo brings "Big Pimpin'" out of retirement to back M.I.A.'s raspy "Bingo": "Do you know what is on? Do you know what is on? Do you know how this beat is made in fucking Lon-d-d-don?" The song's obviously great, but between M.I.A.'s fierce deliveries and the braggart beat, it sounds weird and ominous, a black-hole closer to an album brimming with life. Last week, Sasha Frere-Jones profiled M.I.A. in The New Yorker, spraypainting her as a consummate and naturally "world" artist. M.I.A. is silly, dancey, cheap, expensive, truthful, and utterly serious all at once-- just like the world (!). She's not exactly rags-to-riches (yet), but her pop carries unwittingly significant weight, and to potentially far more people than just a few hundred ecstatic MP3 blog readers. It's one thing for M.I.A. to be a "world" pop star; it will be another thing for her to release an album that reflects that backstory. For now, Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1 takes that burden off of Arular: Diplo has actualized our hopes for M.I.A. qua world pop star, and we didn't even have to leave him cookies."

Ólafur Arnalds

Now I Am Winter

Rock

Brian Howe

It isn't rare for classically trained musicians to cross into indie, but moving the other way is trickier. Icelandic pianist Ólafur Arnalds, a young composer of shadowy, wistful, slow-paced chamber music, is making it work. He began as a teenaged hardcore drummer with an illicit love of classical and film music. His efforts in that vein earned him a solo deal with Erased Tapes, home to likeminded artists such as Peter Broderick. Touring with Sigur Rós raised his public profile, and in recent years, Ólafur has shown signs of breaking free from indie-classical limbo, securing elite commissions (a score for the great choreographer Wayne McGregor) and signing with Mercury Classics, a new classical label that lacks the prestige of Decca or Deutsche Grammophon but adjoins them via parent company Universal. He achieved all this off the conservatory track, which may account for the composer's ample immediacy and wanting complexity alike. Ólafur works in blacks and whites. His musical atmospheres might be fairly abridged with the images "night" and "snow;" his releases swing from casual song-a-day EPs to hermetic, formal LPs and back again. The established foundations are intact on For Now I am Winter: the bitterly romantic strings melting over sparsely chorded rows of simple, chiming piano intervals; the faintly dated electronic production nicked from trip-hop and IDM. The album recalls Valgeir Sigurðsson's Architecture of Loss, except with the dense harmonic storminess blown off. But you can certainly hear major label resources at work. Ólafur handles the laptop and keyboard instruments but contracts out a group of strings, winds, and brass from the Iceland Symphony Orchestra; the porcelain voice of Arnór Dan; and orchestral arrangements by Nico Muhly, who reasonably responds to Ólafur’s material with dramatic yet musically cautious accompaniment. If you crave morose, impressive beauty, it's here. But for a statement on a new classical label, this sounds a lot like a stirring score in search of its ballet or film. There is startlingly little virtuosity written in the compositions, especially in the piano, where it can be hard to distinguish minimalist profundity from undeveloped themes. The strings and winds are more mobile, but Ólafur still keeps his players working through routine harmonic progressions at a pace so stately it's almost robotic. The biggest change here is the addition of Arnór Dan's vocals on four songs, which like the music are beautiful and pristine to a numbing degree, at least in this low-contrast context. Making his first appearance over a glacial piano and shimmering pads, he sounds like Antony Hegarty evacuated of wildness and swing-- though he does free up as the arrangement flourishes. He turns in some terrific ornaments halfway through "Old Skin", a pretty indie-pop tune that sounds like Lost in the Trees with a sultry-chaste dash of Tom Krell. He's a talented guy, and can seem to be addressing his talent more than the listener. Whereas singers you can really feel make their voices a medium something passes through, Dan's voice here is more of a carefully wrought thing unto itself-- a very fine vase on a very high shelf. This may all sound grimmer than it is. For Now I am Winter is competent, reasonably varied, and efficiently rousing. Muhly effectuates some pleasing motion in the strings and winds. Opening track "Sudden Throw" is compelling, and while its intrigue fades in the driving cinematic wallpaper of "Brim", that darkly shining sinuousness rises again in "Only the Winds". "Reclaim" is a dashing highlight, leaving behind airless dirges and minimalist ice sculptures for a welcome dance tempo. But the lingering impression that there's not a lot to grasp emotionally becomes stark in the thinnest tracks. My takeaway from "Words of Amber" is that it sounds really nice to pick a winding path through piano scales in a coldly reflective room, while "We (Too) Shall Rest" is a funeral dirge without a subject, a feeling without a focus.

Artist: Ólafur Arnalds, Album: Now I Am Winter, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 5.5 Album review: "It isn't rare for classically trained musicians to cross into indie, but moving the other way is trickier. Icelandic pianist Ólafur Arnalds, a young composer of shadowy, wistful, slow-paced chamber music, is making it work. He began as a teenaged hardcore drummer with an illicit love of classical and film music. His efforts in that vein earned him a solo deal with Erased Tapes, home to likeminded artists such as Peter Broderick. Touring with Sigur Rós raised his public profile, and in recent years, Ólafur has shown signs of breaking free from indie-classical limbo, securing elite commissions (a score for the great choreographer Wayne McGregor) and signing with Mercury Classics, a new classical label that lacks the prestige of Decca or Deutsche Grammophon but adjoins them via parent company Universal. He achieved all this off the conservatory track, which may account for the composer's ample immediacy and wanting complexity alike. Ólafur works in blacks and whites. His musical atmospheres might be fairly abridged with the images "night" and "snow;" his releases swing from casual song-a-day EPs to hermetic, formal LPs and back again. The established foundations are intact on For Now I am Winter: the bitterly romantic strings melting over sparsely chorded rows of simple, chiming piano intervals; the faintly dated electronic production nicked from trip-hop and IDM. The album recalls Valgeir Sigurðsson's Architecture of Loss, except with the dense harmonic storminess blown off. But you can certainly hear major label resources at work. Ólafur handles the laptop and keyboard instruments but contracts out a group of strings, winds, and brass from the Iceland Symphony Orchestra; the porcelain voice of Arnór Dan; and orchestral arrangements by Nico Muhly, who reasonably responds to Ólafur’s material with dramatic yet musically cautious accompaniment. If you crave morose, impressive beauty, it's here. But for a statement on a new classical label, this sounds a lot like a stirring score in search of its ballet or film. There is startlingly little virtuosity written in the compositions, especially in the piano, where it can be hard to distinguish minimalist profundity from undeveloped themes. The strings and winds are more mobile, but Ólafur still keeps his players working through routine harmonic progressions at a pace so stately it's almost robotic. The biggest change here is the addition of Arnór Dan's vocals on four songs, which like the music are beautiful and pristine to a numbing degree, at least in this low-contrast context. Making his first appearance over a glacial piano and shimmering pads, he sounds like Antony Hegarty evacuated of wildness and swing-- though he does free up as the arrangement flourishes. He turns in some terrific ornaments halfway through "Old Skin", a pretty indie-pop tune that sounds like Lost in the Trees with a sultry-chaste dash of Tom Krell. He's a talented guy, and can seem to be addressing his talent more than the listener. Whereas singers you can really feel make their voices a medium something passes through, Dan's voice here is more of a carefully wrought thing unto itself-- a very fine vase on a very high shelf. This may all sound grimmer than it is. For Now I am Winter is competent, reasonably varied, and efficiently rousing. Muhly effectuates some pleasing motion in the strings and winds. Opening track "Sudden Throw" is compelling, and while its intrigue fades in the driving cinematic wallpaper of "Brim", that darkly shining sinuousness rises again in "Only the Winds". "Reclaim" is a dashing highlight, leaving behind airless dirges and minimalist ice sculptures for a welcome dance tempo. But the lingering impression that there's not a lot to grasp emotionally becomes stark in the thinnest tracks. My takeaway from "Words of Amber" is that it sounds really nice to pick a winding path through piano scales in a coldly reflective room, while "We (Too) Shall Rest" is a funeral dirge without a subject, a feeling without a focus."

SJ Esau

Small Vessel

Rock

Evan McGarvey

SJ Esau started his career as a barely adolescent MC in the late 1980s Bristol scene before becoming an electronic/indie songwriter, and Small Vessel is his second album for anitcon. When Esau (given name Samuel Wisternoff), keeps his head and his guitar here on earth, Small Vessel produces more than a few cute, quixotic songs. He merges his sophomoric, not-taking-himself-too-seriously approach to lyrics-- "I can only be reasonable for some," he mews-- with modest (by his standards) studio tinkering: only a few fuzzy loops and peeled strings haunt the background ("Bastard Eyes", the album's best song), and there's often only a bloated bassline and crackling, steady drum machine for company ("What Happen'd"). These few songs are far from outstanding, but they're at least strong enough to hint at a face behind the sonic experiments. Like hundreds of other paint-, sound-, or word-flingers, Esau in fact does his most resonant and reasonable work when he puts himself inside the neat bounds of convention. It's when Esau indulges himself, and turns his internal aesthetic notches to "challenging," that his strengths and charms run into each other and then run aground, churning out maddening scraps of would-be tracks less than a minute long, compositions sliding into a sort of tweedy discursiveness where parcels of bells and re-wound loops glare like catchphrases repeated and then repeated louder. Esau is smart enough to at least tailor his lyrics to this almost manic obsession with rebooting-- "The catalyst/ I-den-tify/ And kill!" But skit-length fragments, no matter how self-aware or tongue-in-jowls they may be, do not an album make. As refreshing as the title track's Decemberists-cum-Why? shanty chant is, it's still only 18 seconds of refreshment. Esau is neither Wire nor J Dilla (though, to be fair, who is?). His attempts to conjure songs or collages of sound in 90 seconds simply will not stick. These shards fall into two categories: microscopic, rote guitar riffs or the DJ doodle that attempts to weld a looped infant cry, the sound of pouring water, and what sounds like a gasp in reverse. The four or five songs actually carried to term have nothing to prop them up. Begging for shape, denaturing under the sheer plethora of contributors (the liner notes have close to a dozen other drummers, cellists, singers, violists-- most of whom stop by for a single song), Small Vessel instead is passively sequenced, naked of thematics (nautical images and self-loathing would be the closest), and does everything in it's power to bury its moments of tranquil success ("Depth Perception Lack", "Bastard Eyes", "Under Certain Things") under heaps of artiste futzing. But even those caveats feel inaccurate. Small Vessel's strengths aren't unique; you can find dozens of whimsical, pseudo-surreal songwriters of this ilk (Why?, The Guillemots, Thee More Shallows, to start) who clutter their discs with fewer scribbles and less back-handed flippancy.

Artist: SJ Esau, Album: Small Vessel, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 3.6 Album review: "SJ Esau started his career as a barely adolescent MC in the late 1980s Bristol scene before becoming an electronic/indie songwriter, and Small Vessel is his second album for anitcon. When Esau (given name Samuel Wisternoff), keeps his head and his guitar here on earth, Small Vessel produces more than a few cute, quixotic songs. He merges his sophomoric, not-taking-himself-too-seriously approach to lyrics-- "I can only be reasonable for some," he mews-- with modest (by his standards) studio tinkering: only a few fuzzy loops and peeled strings haunt the background ("Bastard Eyes", the album's best song), and there's often only a bloated bassline and crackling, steady drum machine for company ("What Happen'd"). These few songs are far from outstanding, but they're at least strong enough to hint at a face behind the sonic experiments. Like hundreds of other paint-, sound-, or word-flingers, Esau in fact does his most resonant and reasonable work when he puts himself inside the neat bounds of convention. It's when Esau indulges himself, and turns his internal aesthetic notches to "challenging," that his strengths and charms run into each other and then run aground, churning out maddening scraps of would-be tracks less than a minute long, compositions sliding into a sort of tweedy discursiveness where parcels of bells and re-wound loops glare like catchphrases repeated and then repeated louder. Esau is smart enough to at least tailor his lyrics to this almost manic obsession with rebooting-- "The catalyst/ I-den-tify/ And kill!" But skit-length fragments, no matter how self-aware or tongue-in-jowls they may be, do not an album make. As refreshing as the title track's Decemberists-cum-Why? shanty chant is, it's still only 18 seconds of refreshment. Esau is neither Wire nor J Dilla (though, to be fair, who is?). His attempts to conjure songs or collages of sound in 90 seconds simply will not stick. These shards fall into two categories: microscopic, rote guitar riffs or the DJ doodle that attempts to weld a looped infant cry, the sound of pouring water, and what sounds like a gasp in reverse. The four or five songs actually carried to term have nothing to prop them up. Begging for shape, denaturing under the sheer plethora of contributors (the liner notes have close to a dozen other drummers, cellists, singers, violists-- most of whom stop by for a single song), Small Vessel instead is passively sequenced, naked of thematics (nautical images and self-loathing would be the closest), and does everything in it's power to bury its moments of tranquil success ("Depth Perception Lack", "Bastard Eyes", "Under Certain Things") under heaps of artiste futzing. But even those caveats feel inaccurate. Small Vessel's strengths aren't unique; you can find dozens of whimsical, pseudo-surreal songwriters of this ilk (Why?, The Guillemots, Thee More Shallows, to start) who clutter their discs with fewer scribbles and less back-handed flippancy."

Wolf Parade

Apologies to the Queen Mary

Rock

Brandon Stosuy

Considering the amount of pre-release talk surrounding Apologies to the Queen Mary, it's inevitable that reviews of Wolf Parade's debut will contain bad wolf puns, Modest Mouse references (Isaac Brock recorded much of the album), riffs on Montreal's music scene by those who couldn't locate the city on a map, and namechecks of the quartet's pals, the Arcade Fire and Frog Eyes. Amid the noise, what Apologies might not receive is the close listening it deserves. There's no question the lonesome crowded sound is here, but when Wolf Parade dig in and dust off their influences, the band rolls like a Ritalin-deprived power-Bowie or 70s Eno flexing piano-based hooks over Pixified rhythms. Component ingredients include electronics, keyboards, guitar, drums, and two spastically surging, forever tuneful vocalists (Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug), but there are also surprises: A theremin cries in the slow-poke "Same Ghost Every Night"-- one of the longer tracks, it grows in pageantry as it swells to the six-minute mark-- and a spot of noise-guitar echoes throughout Krug's windy "Dinner Bells". And unlike most participants in indie rock's million-band march, Wolf Parade makes familiar elements mesh in special ways. Groups like Neutral Milk Hotel and the Arcade Fire inspire listeners to both feel their music and listen closely to what's being said. Wolf Parade's Boeckner and Krug sing so energetically it can be difficult transcribing, but as lyrics reveal themselves on multiple listens, Apologies is populated by ghosts, crumbled brick, haunted technology, Marcel Dzama animals, fathers and mothers, off-kilter love songs, rusted gold, and endtime/brand new world scenarios that furnish the album's ornate instrumentation and clever arrangements with an inspired if elliptical story arc. The album's roughly split between Boeckner and Krug, their tracks often alternating to a tee. But there is a non-cut/dry bleed between them, with both showing up on the same song, backing each other, screaming at the same time. I wouldn't want to inspire a quarterback controversy, but I tend to be a Krug man-- to my ear, he's the more intriguing lyricist, a Bowie-inflected guy tackling nonstandard song constructions. On the other hand, Boeckner is more traditionally palatable, which may make him the favorite by consensus: His work is often less unhinged or unpredictable, and this focus allows for some of the album's most immediate standouts. Apologies starts with Krug's mousy "You Are a Runner and I Am My Father's Son"-- also included on the band's self-titled EP-- and Boeckner's "Modern World", but it really takes off with "Grounds for Divorce". Honing in on one of the album's main themes, the track finds a momentary beauty and romanticism within potentially alienating technology: "You said you hate the sound of the buses on the ground/ You said you hate the way they scrape their brakes all over town/ I said, 'Pretend it's whales, keeping their voices down.'" Spiraling behind Krug's vocals, Boeckner mingles his guitar splashes with textured keys and a distant shout of affirmation. Boeckner's best are the anthemic "Shine a Light" and his lovely, ragged closer, "This Heart's on Fire", which induces thoughts of the Boss in full grease-monkey Valentino mode. Krug's key tracks also come toward the album's end: the regal swagger of the Frog-Eyed "Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts"-- note its absolutely sublime vocal cadences and group hug-- and "I'll Believe in Anything", one of my favorite tunes of the year. (Diehards can scope out an eviscerated take on Krug's Sunset Rubdown album, but in either hip-shaking form it's unexpectedly moving.) Tangy video-game synth, half-Moon drums, and pretty guitar reps embrace a maniacally charming Krug come-on: "Give me your eyes, I need sunshine/ Your blood, your bones/ Your voice, and your ghost." Boeckner's guitar distorts, the keys trill, Krug somehow finds even more energy in his pocket, and the fucker continues for another two-and-a-half blissful minutes with a shopping list of promises of escape and hope that culminates with: "I'd take you where nobody knows you/ And nobody gives a damn either way." On paper this all could sound average, but Wolf Parade's true talent is transforming the everyday into the unprecedented. Fittingly, then, the record isn't going to change the direction of modern music, but it will enrich small moments of your life-- lying in bed alone or with a loved one, the morning commute, the dancefloor, a house party. If you can, block out the baggage of its built-in hype machine and take this stuff for what it is. I still remember the excitement felt when I first heard Modest Mouse more than a decade ago. At the time, my friend and I talked about how it sounded like this or like that or whatever, but beneath the snobbery and geeky influence-detecting, we were excited, and so obviously into what the band was doing. If given the chance, Wolf Parade should engender similar scenarios: In a few years, other folks will still remember where they were when they first heard Apologies to the Queen Mary.

Artist: Wolf Parade, Album: Apologies to the Queen Mary, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 9.2 Album review: "Considering the amount of pre-release talk surrounding Apologies to the Queen Mary, it's inevitable that reviews of Wolf Parade's debut will contain bad wolf puns, Modest Mouse references (Isaac Brock recorded much of the album), riffs on Montreal's music scene by those who couldn't locate the city on a map, and namechecks of the quartet's pals, the Arcade Fire and Frog Eyes. Amid the noise, what Apologies might not receive is the close listening it deserves. There's no question the lonesome crowded sound is here, but when Wolf Parade dig in and dust off their influences, the band rolls like a Ritalin-deprived power-Bowie or 70s Eno flexing piano-based hooks over Pixified rhythms. Component ingredients include electronics, keyboards, guitar, drums, and two spastically surging, forever tuneful vocalists (Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug), but there are also surprises: A theremin cries in the slow-poke "Same Ghost Every Night"-- one of the longer tracks, it grows in pageantry as it swells to the six-minute mark-- and a spot of noise-guitar echoes throughout Krug's windy "Dinner Bells". And unlike most participants in indie rock's million-band march, Wolf Parade makes familiar elements mesh in special ways. Groups like Neutral Milk Hotel and the Arcade Fire inspire listeners to both feel their music and listen closely to what's being said. Wolf Parade's Boeckner and Krug sing so energetically it can be difficult transcribing, but as lyrics reveal themselves on multiple listens, Apologies is populated by ghosts, crumbled brick, haunted technology, Marcel Dzama animals, fathers and mothers, off-kilter love songs, rusted gold, and endtime/brand new world scenarios that furnish the album's ornate instrumentation and clever arrangements with an inspired if elliptical story arc. The album's roughly split between Boeckner and Krug, their tracks often alternating to a tee. But there is a non-cut/dry bleed between them, with both showing up on the same song, backing each other, screaming at the same time. I wouldn't want to inspire a quarterback controversy, but I tend to be a Krug man-- to my ear, he's the more intriguing lyricist, a Bowie-inflected guy tackling nonstandard song constructions. On the other hand, Boeckner is more traditionally palatable, which may make him the favorite by consensus: His work is often less unhinged or unpredictable, and this focus allows for some of the album's most immediate standouts. Apologies starts with Krug's mousy "You Are a Runner and I Am My Father's Son"-- also included on the band's self-titled EP-- and Boeckner's "Modern World", but it really takes off with "Grounds for Divorce". Honing in on one of the album's main themes, the track finds a momentary beauty and romanticism within potentially alienating technology: "You said you hate the sound of the buses on the ground/ You said you hate the way they scrape their brakes all over town/ I said, 'Pretend it's whales, keeping their voices down.'" Spiraling behind Krug's vocals, Boeckner mingles his guitar splashes with textured keys and a distant shout of affirmation. Boeckner's best are the anthemic "Shine a Light" and his lovely, ragged closer, "This Heart's on Fire", which induces thoughts of the Boss in full grease-monkey Valentino mode. Krug's key tracks also come toward the album's end: the regal swagger of the Frog-Eyed "Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts"-- note its absolutely sublime vocal cadences and group hug-- and "I'll Believe in Anything", one of my favorite tunes of the year. (Diehards can scope out an eviscerated take on Krug's Sunset Rubdown album, but in either hip-shaking form it's unexpectedly moving.) Tangy video-game synth, half-Moon drums, and pretty guitar reps embrace a maniacally charming Krug come-on: "Give me your eyes, I need sunshine/ Your blood, your bones/ Your voice, and your ghost." Boeckner's guitar distorts, the keys trill, Krug somehow finds even more energy in his pocket, and the fucker continues for another two-and-a-half blissful minutes with a shopping list of promises of escape and hope that culminates with: "I'd take you where nobody knows you/ And nobody gives a damn either way." On paper this all could sound average, but Wolf Parade's true talent is transforming the everyday into the unprecedented. Fittingly, then, the record isn't going to change the direction of modern music, but it will enrich small moments of your life-- lying in bed alone or with a loved one, the morning commute, the dancefloor, a house party. If you can, block out the baggage of its built-in hype machine and take this stuff for what it is. I still remember the excitement felt when I first heard Modest Mouse more than a decade ago. At the time, my friend and I talked about how it sounded like this or like that or whatever, but beneath the snobbery and geeky influence-detecting, we were excited, and so obviously into what the band was doing. If given the chance, Wolf Parade should engender similar scenarios: In a few years, other folks will still remember where they were when they first heard Apologies to the Queen Mary. "

Hello Seahorse!

Bestia

Rock

Mike Orme

Okay, don't laugh. I just finished David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, a brilliant thousand-page tome of postmodern, apocalyptic indulgence that, to over-simplify, requires almost as much pretense to read as it might have taken to write. The book, published in 1996, foresaw the rise in Bush-era thick-headedness and ubiquitous on-demand entertainment, all set in a unified North America. Thing is, most of the action takes place between Americans and a conflicted Canada (get this: Québécois terrorists seek to distribute an American film so entertaining, it will literally kill you), while Mexico dutifully bows to the American President's whim. Just about the most vibrant picture of Mexico is the ironically re-imagined presidential seal where the eagle wears a sombrero. Point is, America often views (some might say "stereotypes") Mexico through the filter of its rich tradition rather than its current culture. However, globalization having done its thing, the new generation of young Mexicans is making art with increasingly international roots, including indie rock. While Canada has already gotten its share of attention (cf. Jest's killer entertainment; in real life, they've got Arcade Fire), Mexican exports like Juan Son, Seamus, and Hello Seahorse! (whose new record, Bestia, is out now)-- who weave their Anglo-Continental influences into sublimated Latin textures-- still await American adoption. In fact, Hello Seahorse!'s best known song could just as easily have come out of Montreal or Stockholm as la Ciudad de México. "Won't Say Anything", sung in English, affects the anthemic twee of Los Campesinos! or (at their best) I'm From Barcelona, repeating the eponymous refrain into the ether on the group's last record Hoy a las Ocho. Bestia contains no English language singing, and also nothing quite on the level of "Won't Say Anything", but it's a drastically darker and more complex effort. Opener "Bestia" crescendos into an explosion of overdriven drums and synthesizer lines before hitting Lo Blondo's icily recorded vocals. Blondo told webzine "Al Borde" the band desired to create a record that communicated their emotions, and it doesn't take a degree in Spanish to get the conflict in those feelings. Even seemingly upbeat cuts like "Criminal" are pregnant with the seeds of minor-key melancholy underneath their peppy Casio lines. The urge to get something, anything off their chest is so palpable, it can undercut the elegant melodies the band honed on Hoy A Las Ocho. The near-classic moments here, "Bestia" and "Oso Polar", combine melodic complexity with the relative simplicity of rapid-fire verse-chorus-verse interplay and the reliable signifiers of simple wonky synthesizers. The band's fussiest cuts, on the other hand, sound like the same brilliant lines sung in agonizing slow motion. Of course, I risk judging a record whose language I barely understand too rigorously by the standards of twee and indie, sounds largely formed by British art-school kids. Likewise, there's a potential danger that the appearance of these young Mexican groups signals cultural co-optation, kind of like a musical analogue to the ubiquity of McDonalds in foreign countries. But wherever Hello Seahorse! planted their musical roots, their heartfelt take on the (assumedly) complicated emotions that accompany melodic elegance places them amongst the continent's most exciting current young groups. The band seems inexorably tied with the fortunes of a youth culture radiating out of Mexico City that seeks an additive effect on their nation's musical identity. And hey, Bestia may not be lethally entertaining, but it'll sure kill a lot of stereotypes.

Artist: Hello Seahorse!, Album: Bestia, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.1 Album review: "Okay, don't laugh. I just finished David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, a brilliant thousand-page tome of postmodern, apocalyptic indulgence that, to over-simplify, requires almost as much pretense to read as it might have taken to write. The book, published in 1996, foresaw the rise in Bush-era thick-headedness and ubiquitous on-demand entertainment, all set in a unified North America. Thing is, most of the action takes place between Americans and a conflicted Canada (get this: Québécois terrorists seek to distribute an American film so entertaining, it will literally kill you), while Mexico dutifully bows to the American President's whim. Just about the most vibrant picture of Mexico is the ironically re-imagined presidential seal where the eagle wears a sombrero. Point is, America often views (some might say "stereotypes") Mexico through the filter of its rich tradition rather than its current culture. However, globalization having done its thing, the new generation of young Mexicans is making art with increasingly international roots, including indie rock. While Canada has already gotten its share of attention (cf. Jest's killer entertainment; in real life, they've got Arcade Fire), Mexican exports like Juan Son, Seamus, and Hello Seahorse! (whose new record, Bestia, is out now)-- who weave their Anglo-Continental influences into sublimated Latin textures-- still await American adoption. In fact, Hello Seahorse!'s best known song could just as easily have come out of Montreal or Stockholm as la Ciudad de México. "Won't Say Anything", sung in English, affects the anthemic twee of Los Campesinos! or (at their best) I'm From Barcelona, repeating the eponymous refrain into the ether on the group's last record Hoy a las Ocho. Bestia contains no English language singing, and also nothing quite on the level of "Won't Say Anything", but it's a drastically darker and more complex effort. Opener "Bestia" crescendos into an explosion of overdriven drums and synthesizer lines before hitting Lo Blondo's icily recorded vocals. Blondo told webzine "Al Borde" the band desired to create a record that communicated their emotions, and it doesn't take a degree in Spanish to get the conflict in those feelings. Even seemingly upbeat cuts like "Criminal" are pregnant with the seeds of minor-key melancholy underneath their peppy Casio lines. The urge to get something, anything off their chest is so palpable, it can undercut the elegant melodies the band honed on Hoy A Las Ocho. The near-classic moments here, "Bestia" and "Oso Polar", combine melodic complexity with the relative simplicity of rapid-fire verse-chorus-verse interplay and the reliable signifiers of simple wonky synthesizers. The band's fussiest cuts, on the other hand, sound like the same brilliant lines sung in agonizing slow motion. Of course, I risk judging a record whose language I barely understand too rigorously by the standards of twee and indie, sounds largely formed by British art-school kids. Likewise, there's a potential danger that the appearance of these young Mexican groups signals cultural co-optation, kind of like a musical analogue to the ubiquity of McDonalds in foreign countries. But wherever Hello Seahorse! planted their musical roots, their heartfelt take on the (assumedly) complicated emotions that accompany melodic elegance places them amongst the continent's most exciting current young groups. The band seems inexorably tied with the fortunes of a youth culture radiating out of Mexico City that seeks an additive effect on their nation's musical identity. And hey, Bestia may not be lethally entertaining, but it'll sure kill a lot of stereotypes."

The Concretes

Layourbattleaxedown

Rock

Marc Hogan

On their excellent self-titled 2004 album, the Concretes cloaked the girl-group pop of Phil Spector and Motown in the narcotic haze of the Velvet Underground and the Jesus and Mary Chain, weaving traces of country alongside their warbling horns, ecstatic strings, and droning distortion. Now here's Layourbattleaxedown, a surprisingly consistent B-sides and rarities disc. Opener "Forces" tips listeners off that this set, like earlier EP collection Boyoubetterrunnow or side project Heikki, leans more toward spare, country-tinged songwriting than their breakthrough's candy-store pop, lush sleigh ride "Lady December" proving the primary exception. Even if you're not as big on the band's more countrified efforts, don't miss their version of "Miss You". Like many of the Rolling Stones' hits, this one always seemed like basically just a riff, albeit a killer one-- plus "disco sucks" man, amiright? But the Concretes' version concentrates on the lyrics' stiff-lipped heartbreak, replacing Jagger's preening yowl with Victoria Bergsman's slight, dispassionate vocals, hauntingly multi-tracked for the wordless hook. "Oh, baby," one wonders, "why you wait so long?" After all, saxophones are dying, electric guitars crumbling like a decrepit imperial capitol. The pace and mood rarely alter throughout this collection, but the mournful "Oh Baby", complacent "Free Ride", and string-drenched "The Warrior" all would have been strong enough for The Concretes. Arboreal lullabies "Branches" and "Under Your Leaves" err toward preciousness, but they're (stop me now) growers. "Seems Fine", from the full-length, captures the idée fixe of the Concretes-- or most great pop songs, for that matter-- in that it's all about appearances, or rather, all about the disjunction between crystalline, perfect exteriors and uncontrollable emotion. "Seems Fine Shuffle" gives the original a bluegrass makeover, and it turns out to be an improvement. Here, as throughout, Layourbattleaxedown strips bare the moody, terse melancholy that gives even the Concretes' peppier material its emotional resonance.

Artist: The Concretes, Album: Layourbattleaxedown, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.3 Album review: "On their excellent self-titled 2004 album, the Concretes cloaked the girl-group pop of Phil Spector and Motown in the narcotic haze of the Velvet Underground and the Jesus and Mary Chain, weaving traces of country alongside their warbling horns, ecstatic strings, and droning distortion. Now here's Layourbattleaxedown, a surprisingly consistent B-sides and rarities disc. Opener "Forces" tips listeners off that this set, like earlier EP collection Boyoubetterrunnow or side project Heikki, leans more toward spare, country-tinged songwriting than their breakthrough's candy-store pop, lush sleigh ride "Lady December" proving the primary exception. Even if you're not as big on the band's more countrified efforts, don't miss their version of "Miss You". Like many of the Rolling Stones' hits, this one always seemed like basically just a riff, albeit a killer one-- plus "disco sucks" man, amiright? But the Concretes' version concentrates on the lyrics' stiff-lipped heartbreak, replacing Jagger's preening yowl with Victoria Bergsman's slight, dispassionate vocals, hauntingly multi-tracked for the wordless hook. "Oh, baby," one wonders, "why you wait so long?" After all, saxophones are dying, electric guitars crumbling like a decrepit imperial capitol. The pace and mood rarely alter throughout this collection, but the mournful "Oh Baby", complacent "Free Ride", and string-drenched "The Warrior" all would have been strong enough for The Concretes. Arboreal lullabies "Branches" and "Under Your Leaves" err toward preciousness, but they're (stop me now) growers. "Seems Fine", from the full-length, captures the idée fixe of the Concretes-- or most great pop songs, for that matter-- in that it's all about appearances, or rather, all about the disjunction between crystalline, perfect exteriors and uncontrollable emotion. "Seems Fine Shuffle" gives the original a bluegrass makeover, and it turns out to be an improvement. Here, as throughout, Layourbattleaxedown strips bare the moody, terse melancholy that gives even the Concretes' peppier material its emotional resonance."

The Rosebuds

Night of the Furies

Rock

Eric Harvey

The Rosebuds' 2003 debut, The Rosebuds Make Out, emerged within the small-but-noisy couplecore movement, situating the duo amongst Mates of State, Quasi, the White Stripes, and later, Matt & Kim. The thematic, and possibly autobiographical, trajectory of Ivan Howard and Kelly Crisp's records since, however, have set them a shade apart from their contemporaries. Their two subsequent records-- including their latest and best release, Night of the Furies-- have collectively traced the path of a boy/girl relationship with rich detail and no shortage of passion. Make Out's version of lust was colored with the silly joy of youthful infatuation; chipper and hooky, its organ-laden songs extolled the virtues of playgrounds, hanging out with friends, and kissing. 2005's Birds Make Good Neighbors followed its predecessor's frolicking with songs about adult responsibilities and building a life together. The most appealing (and overlooked) aspect of Neighbors, however, was the melodramatic urgency the duo employed to elevate a set of songs about domesticity to the realm of a housebound West Side Story. Songs like "Outnumbered", "The Lovers' Rights", and irresistable opener "Hold Hands and Fight" peppered their version of Paul and Linda's McCartney with pep-rally cheers and handclaps, all delivered with the playful fervency of a campfire singalong. Settling down seldom sounds as much fun. For its part, Night of the Furies retains the urgency and emotional mobilization of Neighbors, but with a darker edge. The record chronicles the melodramatic relationship stage when misunderstandings and differences are fended off with an impassioned hope for a mutual future. Neighbors' chants are back, but with a different, less playful tone. Perhaps the most significant weapon in Ivan and Kelly's arsenal this time around is their pallette. The songs themselves are similar to, if not more emotionally and musically complex than, those on Neighbors, but they're presented with a stylistic left turn that in itself is an act of bravery. The genre classification "new romantic" certainly wasn't coined to refer to musicians who themselves were experiencing a fresh relationship, but Furies' omnipresent (and indeed surprising) use of synthesizers, echoed vocals, and drum machines lend it a gravity and immediacy that it wears very well. Different listeners will no doubt disagree on which synth-pop predecessor, or combination thereof, is the most fitting point of comparison-- there is definitely plenty of Pet Shop Boys, Roxy Music's Avalon, Duran Duran, New Order, Spandau Ballet, and Simple Minds on this record for days of deliberation-- but like Lansing-Dreiden's The Dividing Island, Furies is no retro-fetishistic pastiche. The darkly drawn glamour of early 80s synth-pop is the perfect fit for this cinematically inclined collection of songs. Furies is well-sequenced, and bookended with its two finest songs. On album-opener "My Punishment for Fighting" (the chorus of which is a sax-refrain away from "Careless Whisper", and this is not a bad thing), Howard alternates a dinner-club baritone on the verse with his more recognizable high-register croon on the chorus, as a percolating synth bubbles underneath, and lonely piano plinks mirror the lyrical regret of a man who has seemingly thrown in the towel: "I could never be all you need me to, my punishment is living without you." The title track that closes the record is its finest moment, however; a stark, poetic, tuxedoed lament masquerading as mythology. A skittering, funky hi-hat and snare patter pecks at Howard's impeccably smooth tenor, which consistently echoes and interupts itself. The idleness of a stable life have triggered uncomfortable recollections for him, and he intones: "There's calm in these banquet years, so I tend to obsess about youth, before the guilt appeared. But I need to forget." In between these two high points, Howard and Crisp navigate the choppy waters of romance with introspection, sentimentality, and barely restrained flamboyance, using Crisp's placid, hollow vocals to spooky effect. "Cemetery Lawns" is a great example of Furies' dark theatre, a raved-up battle emerging from a wedding gone wrong. Crisp plays the role of the bloodied bride there, before turning paranoid on "I Better Run" and "When the Lights Went Dim" after realizing, respectively, that an expected inheritance from a relative might hold more trouble than it's worth, and that a lover may not have survived a mysterious calamity. With Night of the Furies, the Rosebuds have cemented their knack for interpretation and their continued willingness to imaginatively explore all facets of romantic relationships. Their two prior LPs progressed in the exaggerated manner of a dramatic serial, with each record increasing the emotional and creative stakes, and Furies feels like the culmination of an extended narrative.

Artist: The Rosebuds, Album: Night of the Furies, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.7 Album review: "The Rosebuds' 2003 debut, The Rosebuds Make Out, emerged within the small-but-noisy couplecore movement, situating the duo amongst Mates of State, Quasi, the White Stripes, and later, Matt & Kim. The thematic, and possibly autobiographical, trajectory of Ivan Howard and Kelly Crisp's records since, however, have set them a shade apart from their contemporaries. Their two subsequent records-- including their latest and best release, Night of the Furies-- have collectively traced the path of a boy/girl relationship with rich detail and no shortage of passion. Make Out's version of lust was colored with the silly joy of youthful infatuation; chipper and hooky, its organ-laden songs extolled the virtues of playgrounds, hanging out with friends, and kissing. 2005's Birds Make Good Neighbors followed its predecessor's frolicking with songs about adult responsibilities and building a life together. The most appealing (and overlooked) aspect of Neighbors, however, was the melodramatic urgency the duo employed to elevate a set of songs about domesticity to the realm of a housebound West Side Story. Songs like "Outnumbered", "The Lovers' Rights", and irresistable opener "Hold Hands and Fight" peppered their version of Paul and Linda's McCartney with pep-rally cheers and handclaps, all delivered with the playful fervency of a campfire singalong. Settling down seldom sounds as much fun. For its part, Night of the Furies retains the urgency and emotional mobilization of Neighbors, but with a darker edge. The record chronicles the melodramatic relationship stage when misunderstandings and differences are fended off with an impassioned hope for a mutual future. Neighbors' chants are back, but with a different, less playful tone. Perhaps the most significant weapon in Ivan and Kelly's arsenal this time around is their pallette. The songs themselves are similar to, if not more emotionally and musically complex than, those on Neighbors, but they're presented with a stylistic left turn that in itself is an act of bravery. The genre classification "new romantic" certainly wasn't coined to refer to musicians who themselves were experiencing a fresh relationship, but Furies' omnipresent (and indeed surprising) use of synthesizers, echoed vocals, and drum machines lend it a gravity and immediacy that it wears very well. Different listeners will no doubt disagree on which synth-pop predecessor, or combination thereof, is the most fitting point of comparison-- there is definitely plenty of Pet Shop Boys, Roxy Music's Avalon, Duran Duran, New Order, Spandau Ballet, and Simple Minds on this record for days of deliberation-- but like Lansing-Dreiden's The Dividing Island, Furies is no retro-fetishistic pastiche. The darkly drawn glamour of early 80s synth-pop is the perfect fit for this cinematically inclined collection of songs. Furies is well-sequenced, and bookended with its two finest songs. On album-opener "My Punishment for Fighting" (the chorus of which is a sax-refrain away from "Careless Whisper", and this is not a bad thing), Howard alternates a dinner-club baritone on the verse with his more recognizable high-register croon on the chorus, as a percolating synth bubbles underneath, and lonely piano plinks mirror the lyrical regret of a man who has seemingly thrown in the towel: "I could never be all you need me to, my punishment is living without you." The title track that closes the record is its finest moment, however; a stark, poetic, tuxedoed lament masquerading as mythology. A skittering, funky hi-hat and snare patter pecks at Howard's impeccably smooth tenor, which consistently echoes and interupts itself. The idleness of a stable life have triggered uncomfortable recollections for him, and he intones: "There's calm in these banquet years, so I tend to obsess about youth, before the guilt appeared. But I need to forget." In between these two high points, Howard and Crisp navigate the choppy waters of romance with introspection, sentimentality, and barely restrained flamboyance, using Crisp's placid, hollow vocals to spooky effect. "Cemetery Lawns" is a great example of Furies' dark theatre, a raved-up battle emerging from a wedding gone wrong. Crisp plays the role of the bloodied bride there, before turning paranoid on "I Better Run" and "When the Lights Went Dim" after realizing, respectively, that an expected inheritance from a relative might hold more trouble than it's worth, and that a lover may not have survived a mysterious calamity. With Night of the Furies, the Rosebuds have cemented their knack for interpretation and their continued willingness to imaginatively explore all facets of romantic relationships. Their two prior LPs progressed in the exaggerated manner of a dramatic serial, with each record increasing the emotional and creative stakes, and Furies feels like the culmination of an extended narrative."

T. Hardy Morris

Dude, the Obscure

Rock

Stephen M. Deusner

T. Hardy Morris may have chosen the title of his new album simply for the pun, but perhaps he really did recognize himself in Jude Fawley, the doomed protagonist of Thomas Hardy’s 1895 novel Jude the Obscure. Both men are products of the provinces, Jude hailing from the fictional English county of Wessex and T. Hardy from the Deep South. Just as his fictional counterpart dreamed of fame as a scholar, the musician strove to invade the rock mainstream with his band Dead Confederate. Jude went through marriages the way T. Hardy goes through musical acts, including the super-ish-group Diamond Rugs and his recent backing band the Hard Knocks. However it was intended, the title evokes long and futile toil toward an unrealized dream. Fortunately, Dude, the Obscure is neither a book report nor a history lesson, neither a concept album about professional disappointment nor a literary song cycle. Rather, it plays like a meditation on rock’n’roll in midlife, by an artist who might be nursing lowered expectations or even gaping emotional wounds but not diminished artistic ambitions. This may be Morris’ best record; it’s certainly his most complex and compelling statement, surveying his tangled personal history and the uncertain future that awaits. “I have only death ahead of me, I have only life behind,” he muses on the opener “Be.” “My one and only certainly, and the feeling is sublime.” Considering its subject matter, Dude could be a real downer. What light breaks through the darkness comes from the music itself, which generally avoids the Southern rock riffs of Dead Confederate in favor of a more distinctive and wide-ranging sound—call it Southern glam rock. Morris doesn’t rely on the guitar as much as he has in the past; it’s there, of course, strumming solemnly on “Cheating Life, Living Death” and stabbing relentlessly on “When the Record Skips.” More often, it provides texture and fanfare, leaving ample room for other instruments. On “The Night Everything Changed,” a travelogue of wasted and forgotten nights, the pedal steel sounds like a synth. The rhythm section borrows a drum-and-fife snare beat to give “Be” the feel of a procession through harsh territory, then adds a queasy pulse to the redemption-seeking closer, “Purple House Blues.” It’s a quiet album that inhabits the weird headspace of a person who’s just waking up or has begun to nod off—a space where memory gets dodgy and submerged worries bubble up to the surface. Morris’ reedy twang sounds comfortable in this strange territory, even when he’s facing down hard truths about marriage, music, life, death, and obscurity. “Homemade Bliss” is an unabashed love song (“Wherever it is that you are standing, that is the center of the earth”), but even its cries of devotion are freighted with a sense that these bonds are only temporary, that they’re fading even as he sings. That undertone makes the song’s hook—a sharp, shouted “And I love you!”—come across as desperate and triumphal at once, the battle cry of the romantic as well as the skeptic. Especially after 2015’s Drownin on a Mountaintop, with its hurried production, meta asides, and half-baked lyrics, the sharp focus of Dude is refreshing. If the album makes for an occasionally uneasy listen, that only speaks to its authenticity: Anyone who’s ever lain awake at night wondering where their life is going will feel a cringe of recognition in these songs.

Artist: T. Hardy Morris, Album: Dude, the Obscure, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.6 Album review: "T. Hardy Morris may have chosen the title of his new album simply for the pun, but perhaps he really did recognize himself in Jude Fawley, the doomed protagonist of Thomas Hardy’s 1895 novel Jude the Obscure. Both men are products of the provinces, Jude hailing from the fictional English county of Wessex and T. Hardy from the Deep South. Just as his fictional counterpart dreamed of fame as a scholar, the musician strove to invade the rock mainstream with his band Dead Confederate. Jude went through marriages the way T. Hardy goes through musical acts, including the super-ish-group Diamond Rugs and his recent backing band the Hard Knocks. However it was intended, the title evokes long and futile toil toward an unrealized dream. Fortunately, Dude, the Obscure is neither a book report nor a history lesson, neither a concept album about professional disappointment nor a literary song cycle. Rather, it plays like a meditation on rock’n’roll in midlife, by an artist who might be nursing lowered expectations or even gaping emotional wounds but not diminished artistic ambitions. This may be Morris’ best record; it’s certainly his most complex and compelling statement, surveying his tangled personal history and the uncertain future that awaits. “I have only death ahead of me, I have only life behind,” he muses on the opener “Be.” “My one and only certainly, and the feeling is sublime.” Considering its subject matter, Dude could be a real downer. What light breaks through the darkness comes from the music itself, which generally avoids the Southern rock riffs of Dead Confederate in favor of a more distinctive and wide-ranging sound—call it Southern glam rock. Morris doesn’t rely on the guitar as much as he has in the past; it’s there, of course, strumming solemnly on “Cheating Life, Living Death” and stabbing relentlessly on “When the Record Skips.” More often, it provides texture and fanfare, leaving ample room for other instruments. On “The Night Everything Changed,” a travelogue of wasted and forgotten nights, the pedal steel sounds like a synth. The rhythm section borrows a drum-and-fife snare beat to give “Be” the feel of a procession through harsh territory, then adds a queasy pulse to the redemption-seeking closer, “Purple House Blues.” It’s a quiet album that inhabits the weird headspace of a person who’s just waking up or has begun to nod off—a space where memory gets dodgy and submerged worries bubble up to the surface. Morris’ reedy twang sounds comfortable in this strange territory, even when he’s facing down hard truths about marriage, music, life, death, and obscurity. “Homemade Bliss” is an unabashed love song (“Wherever it is that you are standing, that is the center of the earth”), but even its cries of devotion are freighted with a sense that these bonds are only temporary, that they’re fading even as he sings. That undertone makes the song’s hook—a sharp, shouted “And I love you!”—come across as desperate and triumphal at once, the battle cry of the romantic as well as the skeptic. Especially after 2015’s Drownin on a Mountaintop, with its hurried production, meta asides, and half-baked lyrics, the sharp focus of Dude is refreshing. If the album makes for an occasionally uneasy listen, that only speaks to its authenticity: Anyone who’s ever lain awake at night wondering where their life is going will feel a cringe of recognition in these songs."

Wu-Block

Wu-Block

Jayson Greene

You don't tune into a D-Block and Ghostface Killah collaborative project expecting surprises, so here's the good news: There are absolutely none on Wu-Block. Neither Ghost nor the LOX have switched up their style in over a decade, which makes listening to Wu-Block feel a little like watching a late-period Woody Allen film; before anyone opens their mouth, you already know exactly how everyone will sound, what they will talk about, what the surroundings will look like. If you're drawn to Wu-Block, it's probably at least in part for the way it promises, for 50 minutes or so, to shut the door on surprises. Luckily, it's coming out, as all Ghostface-related projects do, right before the holiday season, a moment when we're all a little fonder of hoary old institutions and a little more susceptible to nostalgia. Ghost and D-Block are mascots of an unchanging NYC, as reliable as a  beloved slice joint. But there's a blurry line where "reliable" fades into "stagnant," and mileage will vary for rap fans where Wu-Block falls. (Me, I still can't quite shake the memory that one of these guys, Ghost, was one of the most constantly surprising to ever do it.) The tone is established from the opening seconds: The first song is called “Crack Spot Stories". It opens with the sound of Raekwon, Jadakiss, Ghost, and Sheek arguing over who has the remote, and the production is a faded soul loop. Sheek Louch nails the project's slightly-too-comfy vibe in one line: "Fiends at the door, I'm too lazy to let 'em in/ Turkey sandwich, barbecue chips, ESPN." Ghost is "chillin' in his robe," while Raekwon is sitting with his "leg back, examining choices." The scene is less crack-spot than man-cave, a bunch of grouchy old guys cracking each other up with the door closed to the outside world. All of them sound great, though, and it's nice to hear them settle comfortably into their roles as older heads. Ghost is still finding vivid notes within his coke-sniffing kingpin fantasy persona, which is more than a decade old. "If I sneeze, the left side of my nose might rip," he yelps on "Comin For Ya Head". In that same verse, he gives us some home potency remedies ("You eat seal meat, dick stay up for a fuckin' week") and takes us to "a brutal rap battle in Zaire." On "Take Notice", he says "I do hood yoga/ I pull muscles counting money, need a new shoulder," and in a club-scene verse on "Pull Tha Cars Out", he shows off his still-sharp flair for imagery: "A baby ghost appeared from the blunt smoke/ It lingered through her hair and set into her clothes." Neither Sheek Louch nor Styles P ever had golden ages like Ghost's to live up to: They've been endearing knuckleheads pretty much since Day One, and they're as enjoyable, more or less, as always. Sheek Louch's "winded touch-football participant" flow tends to make his dumb jokes hit harder than they should (see "My chain lower than your GPA," from "Take Notice"),  but they make his unintentionally funny lines even funnier: "My bars is prenatal!" he yells on "Comin For Ya Head". Styles P has always flowed like steel shavings (one of the most quotable lines of his career is still "I don't give a fuck who you are/ So fuck who you are"), and his best line here is when he sneers  the line "probably in the crib getting high watching Fargo" with a fierceness all out of proportion to the act of watching the movie Fargo. There are other familiar faces, too: Cappadonna, yelling about a girl with a "thunder butt" on "Pour Tha  Martini"; GZA working out an over-labored "life-as-car" metaphor on "Drivin Round", a song that also features a lightly crooning Erykah Badu. Raekwon sounds amazing, always, but his cadences and slang have budged so little over the years that everything he says has started to sound the same, giving his lines a "pull-string Raekwon" feel: "Sit back, laughin' with a stack and a clapper." See? You know exactly how that sounds. But again, that familiarity is the point of Wu-Block. Everyone on the album sounds engaged and happy to be in the room. There are a handful of goofy skits, and a lot of hilarious cross-chatter in the album's margins: after  the song "All in Together" ends, they stick around to make fun of people who wear fake jewelry. On "Take Notice", Ghost yells about the cold he has, acting grumpy and pulling the covers around him in the booth. "He's tellin' me to throw onions and garlic in my socks-- I ain’t with all that! Hand me some TheraFlu, some NyQuil or something." Small joys, but real ones that give Wu-Block a rap Statler-and-Waldorf feel. The conversation has long since passed these guys by, so they're having their own. You can visit whenever you like, but close the door on your way out.

Artist: Wu-Block, Album: Wu-Block, Genre: None, Score (1-10): 6.5 Album review: "You don't tune into a D-Block and Ghostface Killah collaborative project expecting surprises, so here's the good news: There are absolutely none on Wu-Block. Neither Ghost nor the LOX have switched up their style in over a decade, which makes listening to Wu-Block feel a little like watching a late-period Woody Allen film; before anyone opens their mouth, you already know exactly how everyone will sound, what they will talk about, what the surroundings will look like. If you're drawn to Wu-Block, it's probably at least in part for the way it promises, for 50 minutes or so, to shut the door on surprises. Luckily, it's coming out, as all Ghostface-related projects do, right before the holiday season, a moment when we're all a little fonder of hoary old institutions and a little more susceptible to nostalgia. Ghost and D-Block are mascots of an unchanging NYC, as reliable as a  beloved slice joint. But there's a blurry line where "reliable" fades into "stagnant," and mileage will vary for rap fans where Wu-Block falls. (Me, I still can't quite shake the memory that one of these guys, Ghost, was one of the most constantly surprising to ever do it.) The tone is established from the opening seconds: The first song is called “Crack Spot Stories". It opens with the sound of Raekwon, Jadakiss, Ghost, and Sheek arguing over who has the remote, and the production is a faded soul loop. Sheek Louch nails the project's slightly-too-comfy vibe in one line: "Fiends at the door, I'm too lazy to let 'em in/ Turkey sandwich, barbecue chips, ESPN." Ghost is "chillin' in his robe," while Raekwon is sitting with his "leg back, examining choices." The scene is less crack-spot than man-cave, a bunch of grouchy old guys cracking each other up with the door closed to the outside world. All of them sound great, though, and it's nice to hear them settle comfortably into their roles as older heads. Ghost is still finding vivid notes within his coke-sniffing kingpin fantasy persona, which is more than a decade old. "If I sneeze, the left side of my nose might rip," he yelps on "Comin For Ya Head". In that same verse, he gives us some home potency remedies ("You eat seal meat, dick stay up for a fuckin' week") and takes us to "a brutal rap battle in Zaire." On "Take Notice", he says "I do hood yoga/ I pull muscles counting money, need a new shoulder," and in a club-scene verse on "Pull Tha Cars Out", he shows off his still-sharp flair for imagery: "A baby ghost appeared from the blunt smoke/ It lingered through her hair and set into her clothes." Neither Sheek Louch nor Styles P ever had golden ages like Ghost's to live up to: They've been endearing knuckleheads pretty much since Day One, and they're as enjoyable, more or less, as always. Sheek Louch's "winded touch-football participant" flow tends to make his dumb jokes hit harder than they should (see "My chain lower than your GPA," from "Take Notice"),  but they make his unintentionally funny lines even funnier: "My bars is prenatal!" he yells on "Comin For Ya Head". Styles P has always flowed like steel shavings (one of the most quotable lines of his career is still "I don't give a fuck who you are/ So fuck who you are"), and his best line here is when he sneers  the line "probably in the crib getting high watching Fargo" with a fierceness all out of proportion to the act of watching the movie Fargo. There are other familiar faces, too: Cappadonna, yelling about a girl with a "thunder butt" on "Pour Tha  Martini"; GZA working out an over-labored "life-as-car" metaphor on "Drivin Round", a song that also features a lightly crooning Erykah Badu. Raekwon sounds amazing, always, but his cadences and slang have budged so little over the years that everything he says has started to sound the same, giving his lines a "pull-string Raekwon" feel: "Sit back, laughin' with a stack and a clapper." See? You know exactly how that sounds. But again, that familiarity is the point of Wu-Block. Everyone on the album sounds engaged and happy to be in the room. There are a handful of goofy skits, and a lot of hilarious cross-chatter in the album's margins: after  the song "All in Together" ends, they stick around to make fun of people who wear fake jewelry. On "Take Notice", Ghost yells about the cold he has, acting grumpy and pulling the covers around him in the booth. "He's tellin' me to throw onions and garlic in my socks-- I ain’t with all that! Hand me some TheraFlu, some NyQuil or something." Small joys, but real ones that give Wu-Block a rap Statler-and-Waldorf feel. The conversation has long since passed these guys by, so they're having their own. You can visit whenever you like, but close the door on your way out."

dvsn

Sept. 5th

Pop/R&B

Ryan Dombal

There's power in quiet, strength in silence. You can find it in the yawning spaces between beats on D'Angelo's "Untitled (How Does It Feel)"; in the skeletal longing of Prince's "When Doves Cry"; in the flickering throb of Depeche Mode's suitably named "Enjoy the Silence"; in Elliott Smith's "Angeles," which countered music industry excess with stark strums and whispered venom. Bits and pieces of Smith's cautionary tale are woven into "Angela," the penultimate track from dvsn's debut album, Sept. 5th, and though the depressive singer/songwriter doesn't seem like an obvious reference point for this lusty R&B project, the sonic nod makes a certain kind of sense. They both know emptiness. They both allow for holes in which listeners can fill in their dreams, desires, sorrows. In his book Every Song Ever, music critic Ben Ratliff makes note of the intimacy that can arise from spareness. "Open space, whether in a park or a poem or a song, is first an element of design," he writes. "And then it is a sign, a signifier, or a symbol." Part of Drake's OVO Sound roster, dvsn—pronounced "division"—take this idea of austerity-as-symbol to several extremes: in their gaping slow jams, yes, but also in their artwork, which is dominated by big division signs, and their public face, which has thus far been almost entirely faceless. No videos. No press photos. No needy guest shots from their famous boss. But even following in the fog of one-time enigma and fellow Torontonian the Weeknd, dvsn's elusiveness doesn't seem like a gimmick. It feels assured. It understands that, in the face of digital endlessness, restraint is just as important as creation. We do know a few things about dvsn. Sept. 5th was executive produced by two of Drake's most vital collaborators, Paul "Nineteen85" Jefferies and his mentor, Noah "40" Shebib, and also marks the the proper debut of Toronto vocalist Daniel Daley. All three men are around 30 years old, and the album speaks to their experience as artists—and their resoluteness as R&B innovators who come from a city that still has trouble sustaining a contemporary urban radio station. Which is to say: The dvsn sound did not come together overnight. Jeffries and Daley have worked together for at least six years, and their early collaborations are flimsy Usher knock-offs, gaudy and green. "Early on in my producing, I would just layer on every single sound I wanted to hear," Jeffries recently told Fader. "Getting all my dreams out on just one song." Compared to those tracks, dvsn's songs sound like photo negatives, selfless and vast. Daley's delivery has matured as well, trading in "Idol"-style runs for sturdy melody lines that service nothing but the song. All of this can be heard on "Hallucinations," in which Daley's featherlight falsetto is often screwed down with effects to literally halt any extraneous embellishments while also offering up more breathing room. On "Too Deep," which lovingly references Timbaland and Ginuwine's 1999 hit "So Anxious," an unnamed female choir gets most of the spotlight, with Daley chiming in for whispered accents here and there. This grown-up musical strategy is also reflected in the way dvsn approach their songwriting raison d'être: sex. Sept. 5th uses contemporary sounds to explore the positive and meaningful aspects of carnality. This puts the album in a sort of limbo: It feels much more adult compared to the casual, hip-hop-indebted come ons of R&B up-and-comers Tory Lanez and Bryson Tiller, but it's not as indebted to the genre's traditions as artists like Anthony Hamilton or Jill Scott. If neo-soul found 1990s artists taking inspiration from '70s masters, dvsn's neon soul puts a Blade Runner sheen on '90s and 2000s classics by the likes of R. Kelly, Aaliyah, and Ciara. There's no rapping here; the word "bitch" is never uttered. Some of the album's best moments also feature female voices along with Daley's. This is not corny music, but it is respectful, even sweet at times. It treats sex not as a social transaction but a serious act—something that can make you see things that aren't there, that can be a balm for life's rough edges, that can make you realize the worth of looking beyond yourself. These songs are consensual in every sense of the word. And in that sense, Sept. 5th can be read as a kind of romantic guide for people who are beginning to stare down their twenties in the rearview, who are considering investing a big chunk of themselves into another person. As dvsn tell it, there will be plenty of heat—the languid "In + Out" is exactly what you think it is—but also a few complications. "Try / Effortless" has Daley struggling to put his pride aside as he considers a commitment; "Another One" is a cheating song that only deals with the act's existential aftermath; grand finale "The Line" is a seven-minute proposal that lingers in the comfort and ecstasy that love can bring. "At the end of it all I'm coming back to you," Daley concludes, as a woman's voice echoes in the cavernous expanse around him. The project's purposeful anonymity has a few drawbacks. Though Prince is a clear influence, dvsn barely hint at the idiosyncratic kinkiness or sense of play that drives so much of that icon's music. And aside from the album's title, there's a slightly frustrating lack of specificity to be found in these songs; perhaps this is meant as a generous sign of universality, but it can also come across as unimaginative. Then again, considering the unseemly baggage R&B fans are presented with while listening to R. Kelly or Chris Brown, dvsn's namelessness can offer its own relief. "In art, the confident gesture, loud or quiet, is of highest importance," Ratliff writes in his book. "By extension, the acknowledgement of the human behind it… is secondary, if relevant at all." This group is wise and capable enough to eschew nearly every shortcut of today's personality-first music culture and dial into the silence between the noise. It's what confidence sounds like.

Artist: dvsn, Album: Sept. 5th, Genre: Pop/R&B, Score (1-10): 8.3 Album review: "There's power in quiet, strength in silence. You can find it in the yawning spaces between beats on D'Angelo's "Untitled (How Does It Feel)"; in the skeletal longing of Prince's "When Doves Cry"; in the flickering throb of Depeche Mode's suitably named "Enjoy the Silence"; in Elliott Smith's "Angeles," which countered music industry excess with stark strums and whispered venom. Bits and pieces of Smith's cautionary tale are woven into "Angela," the penultimate track from dvsn's debut album, Sept. 5th, and though the depressive singer/songwriter doesn't seem like an obvious reference point for this lusty R&B project, the sonic nod makes a certain kind of sense. They both know emptiness. They both allow for holes in which listeners can fill in their dreams, desires, sorrows. In his book Every Song Ever, music critic Ben Ratliff makes note of the intimacy that can arise from spareness. "Open space, whether in a park or a poem or a song, is first an element of design," he writes. "And then it is a sign, a signifier, or a symbol." Part of Drake's OVO Sound roster, dvsn—pronounced "division"—take this idea of austerity-as-symbol to several extremes: in their gaping slow jams, yes, but also in their artwork, which is dominated by big division signs, and their public face, which has thus far been almost entirely faceless. No videos. No press photos. No needy guest shots from their famous boss. But even following in the fog of one-time enigma and fellow Torontonian the Weeknd, dvsn's elusiveness doesn't seem like a gimmick. It feels assured. It understands that, in the face of digital endlessness, restraint is just as important as creation. We do know a few things about dvsn. Sept. 5th was executive produced by two of Drake's most vital collaborators, Paul "Nineteen85" Jefferies and his mentor, Noah "40" Shebib, and also marks the the proper debut of Toronto vocalist Daniel Daley. All three men are around 30 years old, and the album speaks to their experience as artists—and their resoluteness as R&B innovators who come from a city that still has trouble sustaining a contemporary urban radio station. Which is to say: The dvsn sound did not come together overnight. Jeffries and Daley have worked together for at least six years, and their early collaborations are flimsy Usher knock-offs, gaudy and green. "Early on in my producing, I would just layer on every single sound I wanted to hear," Jeffries recently told Fader. "Getting all my dreams out on just one song." Compared to those tracks, dvsn's songs sound like photo negatives, selfless and vast. Daley's delivery has matured as well, trading in "Idol"-style runs for sturdy melody lines that service nothing but the song. All of this can be heard on "Hallucinations," in which Daley's featherlight falsetto is often screwed down with effects to literally halt any extraneous embellishments while also offering up more breathing room. On "Too Deep," which lovingly references Timbaland and Ginuwine's 1999 hit "So Anxious," an unnamed female choir gets most of the spotlight, with Daley chiming in for whispered accents here and there. This grown-up musical strategy is also reflected in the way dvsn approach their songwriting raison d'être: sex. Sept. 5th uses contemporary sounds to explore the positive and meaningful aspects of carnality. This puts the album in a sort of limbo: It feels much more adult compared to the casual, hip-hop-indebted come ons of R&B up-and-comers Tory Lanez and Bryson Tiller, but it's not as indebted to the genre's traditions as artists like Anthony Hamilton or Jill Scott. If neo-soul found 1990s artists taking inspiration from '70s masters, dvsn's neon soul puts a Blade Runner sheen on '90s and 2000s classics by the likes of R. Kelly, Aaliyah, and Ciara. There's no rapping here; the word "bitch" is never uttered. Some of the album's best moments also feature female voices along with Daley's. This is not corny music, but it is respectful, even sweet at times. It treats sex not as a social transaction but a serious act—something that can make you see things that aren't there, that can be a balm for life's rough edges, that can make you realize the worth of looking beyond yourself. These songs are consensual in every sense of the word. And in that sense, Sept. 5th can be read as a kind of romantic guide for people who are beginning to stare down their twenties in the rearview, who are considering investing a big chunk of themselves into another person. As dvsn tell it, there will be plenty of heat—the languid "In + Out" is exactly what you think it is—but also a few complications. "Try / Effortless" has Daley struggling to put his pride aside as he considers a commitment; "Another One" is a cheating song that only deals with the act's existential aftermath; grand finale "The Line" is a seven-minute proposal that lingers in the comfort and ecstasy that love can bring. "At the end of it all I'm coming back to you," Daley concludes, as a woman's voice echoes in the cavernous expanse around him. The project's purposeful anonymity has a few drawbacks. Though Prince is a clear influence, dvsn barely hint at the idiosyncratic kinkiness or sense of play that drives so much of that icon's music. And aside from the album's title, there's a slightly frustrating lack of specificity to be found in these songs; perhaps this is meant as a generous sign of universality, but it can also come across as unimaginative. Then again, considering the unseemly baggage R&B fans are presented with while listening to R. Kelly or Chris Brown, dvsn's namelessness can offer its own relief. "In art, the confident gesture, loud or quiet, is of highest importance," Ratliff writes in his book. "By extension, the acknowledgement of the human behind it… is secondary, if relevant at all." This group is wise and capable enough to eschew nearly every shortcut of today's personality-first music culture and dial into the silence between the noise. It's what confidence sounds like."

Loose Tooth

Big Day

Rock

Zoe Camp

Philadelphia’s Loose Tooth entered into existence as an item on one woman’s bucket list. In the summer of 2013, Larissa Sapko, the group’s eventual bassist, took it upon herself to enlist her friends in a rock group that “sounded like Yo La Tengo,” as she admitted to Nylon. Four years, two releases, and a host of line-up changes later, Loose Tooth have amassed a reputation as one of the rowdiest, most unpredictable bands in the Philly underground, hopscotching between post-hardcore, midwestern emo, scuzz-rock, and slacker pop. That the band’s delirious din now bears little resemblance to Yo La Tengo’s music is a blessing in disguise; overt fan-service only gets you so far in such a glutted scene. Loose Tooth do right by eccentricity on their sophomore full-length Big Day, a nine-track joyride where the only constant is stylistic inconsistency. In its 24 minute runtime, the band covers a remarkable amount of ground. Peppy buzz-bin choruses explode into thorny breakdowns; red-meat grunge morphs into math rock, recedes into an ambient interlude, then circles back to punk. And that’s just the first four tracks. The album’s B-side proves just as wide-reaching, albeit noticeably sunnier. The bubbly “Dog Year” recalls Pinback, and the midtempo ballad “Day Old Glory” is a collaboration with showstopping vocalist and fellow Philadelphian Abi Reimold. But the storm clouds come rushing back in for “Fish Boy,” the crunchy, seething closer. Vocalist and guitarist Kian Sorouri soothes his bandmates’ queasy racket somewhat with plainly-sung melodies, delivered in his lazy, nasal tenor, occasionally punctuated by a deadpan joke or a full-throated yelp. Still, the frontman’s lyrics are anything but pedestrian. “Garlic Soup” frames the conflict between self-control and catharsis as a literal stomach-churner: “Remain totally in control of the things you spew/Releasing totally unconsciously/Feel the shame you spew.” The chorus ramps up the gross-out further, zooming in on an image of the speaker going for a dip in “a river made of [their] own waste” and transmogrifying it into a stomping sing-along, all sweeping chords and roiling bass. Whether intentional or not, every aspect of *Big Day—*its brisk pacing, its disjointed arrangements, its thematic frisson—hinges on the undertow of its creators’ stream-of-consciousness. That makes for a potentially tenuous listen, considering the fine line between endearing quirkiness and directionless excess. Barring the occasional missteps—like the underwhelming opener “Sleep With the State Concept,” which buckles under the weight of its lumbering parts—Loose Tooth fall into the former camp. For a band with seemingly limitless ideas, they’re notably disciplined, but on Big Day, less proves to be more.

Artist: Loose Tooth, Album: Big Day, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 6.6 Album review: "Philadelphia’s Loose Tooth entered into existence as an item on one woman’s bucket list. In the summer of 2013, Larissa Sapko, the group’s eventual bassist, took it upon herself to enlist her friends in a rock group that “sounded like Yo La Tengo,” as she admitted to Nylon. Four years, two releases, and a host of line-up changes later, Loose Tooth have amassed a reputation as one of the rowdiest, most unpredictable bands in the Philly underground, hopscotching between post-hardcore, midwestern emo, scuzz-rock, and slacker pop. That the band’s delirious din now bears little resemblance to Yo La Tengo’s music is a blessing in disguise; overt fan-service only gets you so far in such a glutted scene. Loose Tooth do right by eccentricity on their sophomore full-length Big Day, a nine-track joyride where the only constant is stylistic inconsistency. In its 24 minute runtime, the band covers a remarkable amount of ground. Peppy buzz-bin choruses explode into thorny breakdowns; red-meat grunge morphs into math rock, recedes into an ambient interlude, then circles back to punk. And that’s just the first four tracks. The album’s B-side proves just as wide-reaching, albeit noticeably sunnier. The bubbly “Dog Year” recalls Pinback, and the midtempo ballad “Day Old Glory” is a collaboration with showstopping vocalist and fellow Philadelphian Abi Reimold. But the storm clouds come rushing back in for “Fish Boy,” the crunchy, seething closer. Vocalist and guitarist Kian Sorouri soothes his bandmates’ queasy racket somewhat with plainly-sung melodies, delivered in his lazy, nasal tenor, occasionally punctuated by a deadpan joke or a full-throated yelp. Still, the frontman’s lyrics are anything but pedestrian. “Garlic Soup” frames the conflict between self-control and catharsis as a literal stomach-churner: “Remain totally in control of the things you spew/Releasing totally unconsciously/Feel the shame you spew.” The chorus ramps up the gross-out further, zooming in on an image of the speaker going for a dip in “a river made of [their] own waste” and transmogrifying it into a stomping sing-along, all sweeping chords and roiling bass. Whether intentional or not, every aspect of *Big Day—*its brisk pacing, its disjointed arrangements, its thematic frisson—hinges on the undertow of its creators’ stream-of-consciousness. That makes for a potentially tenuous listen, considering the fine line between endearing quirkiness and directionless excess. Barring the occasional missteps—like the underwhelming opener “Sleep With the State Concept,” which buckles under the weight of its lumbering parts—Loose Tooth fall into the former camp. For a band with seemingly limitless ideas, they’re notably disciplined, but on Big Day, less proves to be more."

Hayden

Live at Convocation Hall

Rock

William Bowers

Celebrate freedom, freedom-style! Choose your favorite attempt to begin this review! 1. If you had an iffy voice, wrote really simple songs, and were fresh from a stunning full-band effort, would you hurl a 'stripped-down,' 22-track concert recording at the world? Would it seem logical that folks would clamor for a stunning showcase of performance and sound, with Hayden reducing his favorites to an "unplugged" acoustic guitar or solo piano format? Well, it's the equivalent of Achilles showing off his new stirrup pants, as... 2. Yawn. O Canada, where is thy sting? Bowling for Columbine might have made a skewed argument for your level-headedness, and Destroyer and Hot Hot Heat may be recent proof that you have a musical pulse, but damn if Hayden's live-in-Toronto double-disc doesn't further the U.S. view of our northern neighbor as an MOR wasteland. This concert teems with kinda-okayness, betraying the extra-special cloud-folk of Hayden's last studio release. The merely passable pre-Skyscraper National Park lyrics, when combined with this show's cute live banter and cute photos, result in an album too precious to soundtrack a rightfully complicated relationship, but too humble and likable to accuse Hayden of being a self-serving document of snowed fans' worship..." 3. Dear Diary: Lookin' good! Hey, I have questions tonight. Does a world charged with the confident riffage of Liars or the hurry-up-and-do-me bounce of "electroclash"-- among a zillion other pyrotechnic would-be revolutions-- still have a place for authors of imploding ballads about holding hands? What did Schoenberg mean when he said, "If it is art it is not for all, and if it is for all it is not art?" What did Sibelius mean when he said, "No one ever put up a statue of a critic..." 4. Hayden's been successfully scraping off his silly baby fat over the course of his recording career. The early records were immaturely earnest and "sensitive," with bizarre outbursts of death-howls: the instant we heard his crazy, screaming song, sung from the vantage point of murderous South Carolina mom Susan Smith's drowning children, some friends and I spent an evening blasting it from a convertible pickup, then sat down to record a spoof. The Closer I Get boasted a pretty good hit-to-sap ratio, and then, like whoa, Hayden's Skyscraper National Park was revelatory-- an ideal album for anyone not yet bored with the sound of an act tiptoeing around alt-country's pit of despair. No kidding, Skyscraper came in at sweet 16 on my personal Top 20 of 2002, an important list which hangs framed in the room where my stuffed animals and I convene as the United Nations of Rock, trying to embargo that wily Cobra Commander into disarmament... 5. "Until Skyscraper National Park, Hayden's work had been comparable to a blah veggie: not unhealthy, kind of beautiful in its lumpiness, hard to love, and hard to hate. The monotonous stretches of this concert package make it difficult to feel anything about him at all. The proceedings lack a transporting element; if this disc is playing while one is stuck in traffic, one will feel very much stuck in traffic... 6. A guy installed a heater at my house today. His skin was pachyderm-wrinkled. He told me stories about gas explosions. His assistant told me about working in paper mills, about people getting dismembered by steam leaks, about a lancer whose back melted because he worked without an asbestos suit. An acquaintance that works as a corrections officer told me about a riot he had to help suppress. Reviewing CDs is wimp's work, yo, especially if I'm supposed to be summarizing a puss like Hayden... 7. Stay on the scene like a stats machine: Number of songs from Skyscraper National Park: 8 Because these are the best songs Hayden has written, these are the best songs here, though they're robbed of their warm drums and rich tones. "Bass Song" is a tense charmer, a well-told tale of being broken in on and beaten. Number of songs from The Closer I Get: 3 Watch out for that dreadful part about teaching the girl to play guitar ("Between Us to Hold"): it's more about the speaker than the girl. Opening line: "I taught you to play guitar last night." Last lines: "I held your arm as you hit the strings/ I pressed your fingers down and started to siii-hiiiing/ Siii-hiii-hiiing." The listener can picture Hayden's arms around this girl like those of a randy tennis instructor from an 80s movie. The crowd eats this one up. Number of songs from Moving Careful: 2 Decent genre soundalikes. Number of songs from Everything I Long For: 4 "Bad as They Seem" is the one about the sixteen-year-old, y'all. Let whosoever is without sin, etc. Number of Neil Young covers: 1 The high voice that frequents Skyscraper tipped me off that Neil's dogs had treed Hayden, but good. Julie Doiron and Howie Beck join the junior shakey on a frumpy "Tell Me Why". Number of songs featured in films: 1 Trees Lounge was a nice fit for Hayden's penchant for blending sloth and heart. I mean, the guy sings like Cat Stevens abusing muscle relaxants. Number of new songs: 3 "Holster" (about a duel) and "Woody" (even though it's about Hayden's cat) rule the show, along with the dark stuff from Skyscraper. These unstoppably catchy tunes will yank your beltloop, promise. 8. Hayden has his uses. Everybody gets crippled by nostalgia or romantic curiosity, I reckon. Everybody needs some music for those moments when they can't muster the energy to poke a straw into a Capri-Sun. And most males have been guilty of mythologizing their obsessive behavior in their apartment building, as Hayden does. He's just so bald about it, so self-explanatory. He's unpretentious to the point of being laundromat-common. And if, in that laundromat, the Snuggle fabric softener mascot was a stalker and a dour troubadour...

Artist: Hayden, Album: Live at Convocation Hall, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 6.3 Album review: "Celebrate freedom, freedom-style! Choose your favorite attempt to begin this review! 1. If you had an iffy voice, wrote really simple songs, and were fresh from a stunning full-band effort, would you hurl a 'stripped-down,' 22-track concert recording at the world? Would it seem logical that folks would clamor for a stunning showcase of performance and sound, with Hayden reducing his favorites to an "unplugged" acoustic guitar or solo piano format? Well, it's the equivalent of Achilles showing off his new stirrup pants, as... 2. Yawn. O Canada, where is thy sting? Bowling for Columbine might have made a skewed argument for your level-headedness, and Destroyer and Hot Hot Heat may be recent proof that you have a musical pulse, but damn if Hayden's live-in-Toronto double-disc doesn't further the U.S. view of our northern neighbor as an MOR wasteland. This concert teems with kinda-okayness, betraying the extra-special cloud-folk of Hayden's last studio release. The merely passable pre-Skyscraper National Park lyrics, when combined with this show's cute live banter and cute photos, result in an album too precious to soundtrack a rightfully complicated relationship, but too humble and likable to accuse Hayden of being a self-serving document of snowed fans' worship..." 3. Dear Diary: Lookin' good! Hey, I have questions tonight. Does a world charged with the confident riffage of Liars or the hurry-up-and-do-me bounce of "electroclash"-- among a zillion other pyrotechnic would-be revolutions-- still have a place for authors of imploding ballads about holding hands? What did Schoenberg mean when he said, "If it is art it is not for all, and if it is for all it is not art?" What did Sibelius mean when he said, "No one ever put up a statue of a critic..." 4. Hayden's been successfully scraping off his silly baby fat over the course of his recording career. The early records were immaturely earnest and "sensitive," with bizarre outbursts of death-howls: the instant we heard his crazy, screaming song, sung from the vantage point of murderous South Carolina mom Susan Smith's drowning children, some friends and I spent an evening blasting it from a convertible pickup, then sat down to record a spoof. The Closer I Get boasted a pretty good hit-to-sap ratio, and then, like whoa, Hayden's Skyscraper National Park was revelatory-- an ideal album for anyone not yet bored with the sound of an act tiptoeing around alt-country's pit of despair. No kidding, Skyscraper came in at sweet 16 on my personal Top 20 of 2002, an important list which hangs framed in the room where my stuffed animals and I convene as the United Nations of Rock, trying to embargo that wily Cobra Commander into disarmament... 5. "Until Skyscraper National Park, Hayden's work had been comparable to a blah veggie: not unhealthy, kind of beautiful in its lumpiness, hard to love, and hard to hate. The monotonous stretches of this concert package make it difficult to feel anything about him at all. The proceedings lack a transporting element; if this disc is playing while one is stuck in traffic, one will feel very much stuck in traffic... 6. A guy installed a heater at my house today. His skin was pachyderm-wrinkled. He told me stories about gas explosions. His assistant told me about working in paper mills, about people getting dismembered by steam leaks, about a lancer whose back melted because he worked without an asbestos suit. An acquaintance that works as a corrections officer told me about a riot he had to help suppress. Reviewing CDs is wimp's work, yo, especially if I'm supposed to be summarizing a puss like Hayden... 7. Stay on the scene like a stats machine: Number of songs from Skyscraper National Park: 8 Because these are the best songs Hayden has written, these are the best songs here, though they're robbed of their warm drums and rich tones. "Bass Song" is a tense charmer, a well-told tale of being broken in on and beaten. Number of songs from The Closer I Get: 3 Watch out for that dreadful part about teaching the girl to play guitar ("Between Us to Hold"): it's more about the speaker than the girl. Opening line: "I taught you to play guitar last night." Last lines: "I held your arm as you hit the strings/ I pressed your fingers down and started to siii-hiiiing/ Siii-hiii-hiiing." The listener can picture Hayden's arms around this girl like those of a randy tennis instructor from an 80s movie. The crowd eats this one up. Number of songs from Moving Careful: 2 Decent genre soundalikes. Number of songs from Everything I Long For: 4 "Bad as They Seem" is the one about the sixteen-year-old, y'all. Let whosoever is without sin, etc. Number of Neil Young covers: 1 The high voice that frequents Skyscraper tipped me off that Neil's dogs had treed Hayden, but good. Julie Doiron and Howie Beck join the junior shakey on a frumpy "Tell Me Why". Number of songs featured in films: 1 Trees Lounge was a nice fit for Hayden's penchant for blending sloth and heart. I mean, the guy sings like Cat Stevens abusing muscle relaxants. Number of new songs: 3 "Holster" (about a duel) and "Woody" (even though it's about Hayden's cat) rule the show, along with the dark stuff from Skyscraper. These unstoppably catchy tunes will yank your beltloop, promise. 8. Hayden has his uses. Everybody gets crippled by nostalgia or romantic curiosity, I reckon. Everybody needs some music for those moments when they can't muster the energy to poke a straw into a Capri-Sun. And most males have been guilty of mythologizing their obsessive behavior in their apartment building, as Hayden does. He's just so bald about it, so self-explanatory. He's unpretentious to the point of being laundromat-common. And if, in that laundromat, the Snuggle fabric softener mascot was a stalker and a dour troubadour..."

Cex

Starship Galactica

Electronic

Malcolm Seymour III

19-year-old Ryan Kidwell suffers from a textbook Jekyll-and-Hyde complex. By day, mild-mannered Mr Kidwell leads a typical adolescent lifestyle, attending college classes, interacting with his peers, and exhibiting a healthy level of comfort with members of the opposite sex. Ryan earns good grades, gets along with his parents and enjoys making music. Weird music. Enter the alter-ego, Cex. Cex is a trash-talking IDM superstar who does funny dances. Cex is the self-proclaimed Number One Electronic Musician in the world. Cex removes his clothes on stage. Cex once remixed the Dismemberment Plan. Cex writes battle raps for the haters that criticize his style. Cex posts MP3s of these raps on his website. Cex co-runs his own label, Tigerbeat6. Cex flames other labels on their own bulletin boards. Cex once appeared in an Urb magazine article profiling America's best new electronic artists. Cex takes every available opportunity to remind others of his appearance in Urb magazine. Cex has been quoted as saying, "Snoop Dogg has his shit together. I think he and I would get along really well if we hung out at the MTV Beach House." Cex is pronounced "sex." And the list goes on. It's a strange duality, indeed. At times, Kidwell comes off as a quintessential bedroom composer-- the alienated, frail-looking but lovable nerd we see pictured against a backdrop of flames on the cover of his latest EP, Starship Galactica. Cex's early records took on a similar personality: reserved, cerebral and typically inaccessible. These days it's different. Catch him at one of his live shows, in which he scarcely plays any of his released material, and he's a raving savage. He spends most of his airtime at the mic, either freestyling to the crowd, or decrying the pretenses of the IDM scene. Cex accuses other musicians of cloaking their music in a false sense of mysticism-- building up a cult of personality by shutting themselves off from their fans, keeping their interviews terse and periodically issuing press photos of themselves in cryptic chin-stroking postures. On a mission to subvert the scene that spawned him, Cex lays himself bare on his website, recording his thoughts in a daily journal that he keeps on public display. This diary has grown into a 12-month catalog of Cex's preposterous bragging and Ryan's self-aware, insecure rants; it often feels as if the two are fighting for control of the same body. It's juvenile, humorous, endearing and admirable all at once. It also leads me to conclude that Cex has established a unique persona of his own. He's a geeky teenager with an ear for music and an identity crisis; he's been thrust into the spotlight and doesn't quite know how to cope. A departure from his previous studio efforts, the latest Cex release sees Kidwell reconciling some of the disparities between his various selves. Starship Galactica presents us with his most accessible yet accomplished output to date, interspersed with amateurish comedy skits that take cues from Big Pun and Outkast. The musical offerings on this platter run the stylistic gamut, from the squelchy electro of "Cal and Brady Style," to the organic and acoustic Kraut-rock leanings of "Get in Yr Squads." The pieces never stray too far from their influences; and though no individual song pushes the envelope, it's uncommon to find such a motley array of mastered styles on the same album. Starship Galactica matches the instant, flamboyant appeal of Cex's live show with the quirkiness and complexity of his early releases. The charm of his new material reaches beyond novelty, and the sublime innocence of songs like "Your Handwriting When You Were a Child in the Winter" profits from each successive listen. "Tattoo of a Barcode" and "Cex Can Kiss My Soft Sensuous Lips" (the name is a play on the infamously titled Kid606 song "Luke Vibert Can Kiss My Indiepunk Whiteboy Ass") hearken back to the Cex sound of old, breaking from the conventional pop logic that the rest of the record follows. Both are brilliant, and their presence on this release indicates that Kidwell might think twice before he abandons his upbringing as an avant-garde laptop jockey. Cex maintains that he's an entertainer, not an artist. But the rounded feel of Starship Galactica suggests that, against all his protestations, he's thankfully still a bit of both.

Artist: Cex, Album: Starship Galactica, Genre: Electronic, Score (1-10): 8.3 Album review: "19-year-old Ryan Kidwell suffers from a textbook Jekyll-and-Hyde complex. By day, mild-mannered Mr Kidwell leads a typical adolescent lifestyle, attending college classes, interacting with his peers, and exhibiting a healthy level of comfort with members of the opposite sex. Ryan earns good grades, gets along with his parents and enjoys making music. Weird music. Enter the alter-ego, Cex. Cex is a trash-talking IDM superstar who does funny dances. Cex is the self-proclaimed Number One Electronic Musician in the world. Cex removes his clothes on stage. Cex once remixed the Dismemberment Plan. Cex writes battle raps for the haters that criticize his style. Cex posts MP3s of these raps on his website. Cex co-runs his own label, Tigerbeat6. Cex flames other labels on their own bulletin boards. Cex once appeared in an Urb magazine article profiling America's best new electronic artists. Cex takes every available opportunity to remind others of his appearance in Urb magazine. Cex has been quoted as saying, "Snoop Dogg has his shit together. I think he and I would get along really well if we hung out at the MTV Beach House." Cex is pronounced "sex." And the list goes on. It's a strange duality, indeed. At times, Kidwell comes off as a quintessential bedroom composer-- the alienated, frail-looking but lovable nerd we see pictured against a backdrop of flames on the cover of his latest EP, Starship Galactica. Cex's early records took on a similar personality: reserved, cerebral and typically inaccessible. These days it's different. Catch him at one of his live shows, in which he scarcely plays any of his released material, and he's a raving savage. He spends most of his airtime at the mic, either freestyling to the crowd, or decrying the pretenses of the IDM scene. Cex accuses other musicians of cloaking their music in a false sense of mysticism-- building up a cult of personality by shutting themselves off from their fans, keeping their interviews terse and periodically issuing press photos of themselves in cryptic chin-stroking postures. On a mission to subvert the scene that spawned him, Cex lays himself bare on his website, recording his thoughts in a daily journal that he keeps on public display. This diary has grown into a 12-month catalog of Cex's preposterous bragging and Ryan's self-aware, insecure rants; it often feels as if the two are fighting for control of the same body. It's juvenile, humorous, endearing and admirable all at once. It also leads me to conclude that Cex has established a unique persona of his own. He's a geeky teenager with an ear for music and an identity crisis; he's been thrust into the spotlight and doesn't quite know how to cope. A departure from his previous studio efforts, the latest Cex release sees Kidwell reconciling some of the disparities between his various selves. Starship Galactica presents us with his most accessible yet accomplished output to date, interspersed with amateurish comedy skits that take cues from Big Pun and Outkast. The musical offerings on this platter run the stylistic gamut, from the squelchy electro of "Cal and Brady Style," to the organic and acoustic Kraut-rock leanings of "Get in Yr Squads." The pieces never stray too far from their influences; and though no individual song pushes the envelope, it's uncommon to find such a motley array of mastered styles on the same album. Starship Galactica matches the instant, flamboyant appeal of Cex's live show with the quirkiness and complexity of his early releases. The charm of his new material reaches beyond novelty, and the sublime innocence of songs like "Your Handwriting When You Were a Child in the Winter" profits from each successive listen. "Tattoo of a Barcode" and "Cex Can Kiss My Soft Sensuous Lips" (the name is a play on the infamously titled Kid606 song "Luke Vibert Can Kiss My Indiepunk Whiteboy Ass") hearken back to the Cex sound of old, breaking from the conventional pop logic that the rest of the record follows. Both are brilliant, and their presence on this release indicates that Kidwell might think twice before he abandons his upbringing as an avant-garde laptop jockey. Cex maintains that he's an entertainer, not an artist. But the rounded feel of Starship Galactica suggests that, against all his protestations, he's thankfully still a bit of both."

Coldcut

Let Us Replay!

Electronic,Jazz

James P. Wisdom

The marketing guys of yer average modern megaconglomerate love to talk about something called brand equity. They wring their thin, pale little hands and devise new and interesting ways to separate us from our money before our competitors do. Brand equity is business- speak for the nebulous feeling that consumers get when they buy/ eat/ smell/ hear/ watch a product. It's a vague representation for the idea that people will buy a product if they think it's good, even if it ain't. Looking around, I see more than a few companies resting on their brand equity laurels. Perceived value is almost as good at the bank these days as real cash, but when it comes to music, brand equity stops here, with your Pitchfork reviewer. We don't get no money, so you can rest easy that we're not only unbiased, but also completely disinterested in the careers of the artists we review. For example, I'm not afraid to tell you now that after six months of Coca-Cola addiction, my eyes looked like pissholes in the snow, my skin was a pale shade of yellow, and I lost all feeling in my testicles. Has Pepsi sponsored me? No, I just tells it like it is, kidz. Which brings me to Coldcut's Let Us Replay!. I am pleased to announce that Coldcut has built up a brand equity among both my peers and myself that is almost unmatched among electroids. Since their release of 1989's critically lauded and just plain phat What's That Noise?, then 1997's Let Us Play!, not to mention the barrage of remix discs (Timber, More Beats + Pieces and Boot The System/ Atomic Moog 2000), they have consistently generated groundbreaking and just plain cool toonz for the electrically eclectic. Let Us Replay! is no exception. Germinated from the seeds of Let Us Play!, Let Us Replay! is so much more than yer standard remix disc that I hesitate to mention the connection here. However, the Coldcut- initiated will indeed recognize "Atomic Moog 2000," "Panopticon," "More Beats + Pieces" and others, if in name only, for these trax recall their predecessors like a whiff of smoke recalls a cigarette. And the names! Oh, the names! I feel myself moistening as I look over the tracklist! Mmmmoooohh. Did you say DJ Food, Grandmaster Flash, Silent Poets, Irresistible Force and Carl Craig? Hell yessits! Not to mention the introduction of new(ish) tracks "Last Night A Cliche Saved My Life," "Border" and "The Tale of Miss Virginia Epitome," which features Salina Saliva telling a grizzly tale of re-grown hymens. All in all, Let Us Replay! makes the grade, and then some, including a demo disc (for free) of Coldcut's new video/ audio editing software! Now that's value! Brand equity, kids! Moore & Black, the jammers, the rippers, the mixmasters, they rule! Brand equity!

Artist: Coldcut, Album: Let Us Replay!, Genre: Electronic,Jazz, Score (1-10): 8.9 Album review: "The marketing guys of yer average modern megaconglomerate love to talk about something called brand equity. They wring their thin, pale little hands and devise new and interesting ways to separate us from our money before our competitors do. Brand equity is business- speak for the nebulous feeling that consumers get when they buy/ eat/ smell/ hear/ watch a product. It's a vague representation for the idea that people will buy a product if they think it's good, even if it ain't. Looking around, I see more than a few companies resting on their brand equity laurels. Perceived value is almost as good at the bank these days as real cash, but when it comes to music, brand equity stops here, with your Pitchfork reviewer. We don't get no money, so you can rest easy that we're not only unbiased, but also completely disinterested in the careers of the artists we review. For example, I'm not afraid to tell you now that after six months of Coca-Cola addiction, my eyes looked like pissholes in the snow, my skin was a pale shade of yellow, and I lost all feeling in my testicles. Has Pepsi sponsored me? No, I just tells it like it is, kidz. Which brings me to Coldcut's Let Us Replay!. I am pleased to announce that Coldcut has built up a brand equity among both my peers and myself that is almost unmatched among electroids. Since their release of 1989's critically lauded and just plain phat What's That Noise?, then 1997's Let Us Play!, not to mention the barrage of remix discs (Timber, More Beats + Pieces and Boot The System/ Atomic Moog 2000), they have consistently generated groundbreaking and just plain cool toonz for the electrically eclectic. Let Us Replay! is no exception. Germinated from the seeds of Let Us Play!, Let Us Replay! is so much more than yer standard remix disc that I hesitate to mention the connection here. However, the Coldcut- initiated will indeed recognize "Atomic Moog 2000," "Panopticon," "More Beats + Pieces" and others, if in name only, for these trax recall their predecessors like a whiff of smoke recalls a cigarette. And the names! Oh, the names! I feel myself moistening as I look over the tracklist! Mmmmoooohh. Did you say DJ Food, Grandmaster Flash, Silent Poets, Irresistible Force and Carl Craig? Hell yessits! Not to mention the introduction of new(ish) tracks "Last Night A Cliche Saved My Life," "Border" and "The Tale of Miss Virginia Epitome," which features Salina Saliva telling a grizzly tale of re-grown hymens. All in all, Let Us Replay! makes the grade, and then some, including a demo disc (for free) of Coldcut's new video/ audio editing software! Now that's value! Brand equity, kids! Moore & Black, the jammers, the rippers, the mixmasters, they rule! Brand equity!"

Damon Albarn

Everyday Robots

Rock

Mike Powell

Blur singer Damon Albarn has had 20 years of practice perfecting a certain kind of song. It’s a sad song but comfortable in its sadness, the kind of song that might make might you stop in a crowded bar and remember that even beautiful things come to an end. It is grand, but rumpled and a little isolated, too. It has quieter places to be. For someone who has performed in front of a crowd of 200,000 people, Damon Albarn never seems to be far from his next nap. Blur has been on and off hiatus since 2003. Since then, Albarn has made 12 albums, including four with the downturned pop collage project Gorillaz, who came on like an afterthought and ended up selling millions of records anyway. He has co-written two film soundtracks and two operas. He has collaborated with folk musicians in Mali and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and with the rigorously buttoned-up English composer Michael Nyman. He has also partnered in a label called Honest Jon’s that specializes in curiosities like London is the Place for Me, a four-volume set of Calypso, jazz, and highlife. He is your dog-eared friend who never seems to be doing much and yet gets more done than anyone. All the Albarns appear on Everyday Robots. It is sleepy music, with the looseness of reggae and the bittersweet grace of gospel and soul. It connects the globetrotting Albarn to the fashionably moody one who sang Blur songs like "Badhead" and "This Is a Low" and "Tender", without Blur’s reluctant grandeur. Most of its songs are anchored by drum-machine heartbeats down low and plinking acoustic sounds up top, with a big warm hole in the middle. (Robots was produced by both Albarn and XL Recordings owner Richard Russell, who Albarn has previously worked with on Gil Scott-Heron's I'm New Here and Bobby Womack's The Bravest Man in the Universe, albums with a similarly old-soul quality.) Albarn is famous whether he cares about fame or not, but has tended to set his own name to the side. Robots is actually the first time an album has been credited to Damon Albarn and Damon Albarn alone. There he is on the cover, sitting in the middle of an indefinite gray space, hanging his head and smirking at some private joke, the boy who refuses to look at the camera even when it’s time for his close up. Robots relishes in alienation, and specifically in the way technology facilitates it. Cultural concerns like this are important but can feel pedantic when turned into art. Parts of Robots—the lyrics of “Lonely Press Play” and the title track, for example—are obvious statements made in obvious ways, right-on but one-dimensional, melancholy rendered melancholically. More interesting is when Albarn manages to graze the side of his subject matter in a way that knocks it into place. Robots starts with a sample from the British comedian Lord Buckley talking about the explorer Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca: “They didn’t know where they was goin’ but they knew where they was wasn’t it.” Removed from its literal context the line becomes a comment about society writ large. “Mr. Tembo”, a sweet, upbeat song Albarn originally sang for a baby elephant he met in Tanzania, keeps returning to the refrain, “It’s where he is now but it wasn’t what he planned”—a reminder that unfortunate circumstances are less important than how you deal with them. The album’s best songs, “Photographs (You Are Taking Now)” and “You and Me”, mention Albarn’s hot-button topics but set them to the side, frames about other kinds of stories more than the stories themselves. Albarn has often been compared to English writers like Ray Davies but has always seemed more like Paul Simon, a heavy-hearted and moody person who nevertheless manages to bring a room together. A lot of pressure rests on an album like this but it would seem out of character for him to rise to it. Robots is decidedly lowercase music, more a piece of his puzzle than a picture on its own.

Artist: Damon Albarn, Album: Everyday Robots, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.0 Album review: "Blur singer Damon Albarn has had 20 years of practice perfecting a certain kind of song. It’s a sad song but comfortable in its sadness, the kind of song that might make might you stop in a crowded bar and remember that even beautiful things come to an end. It is grand, but rumpled and a little isolated, too. It has quieter places to be. For someone who has performed in front of a crowd of 200,000 people, Damon Albarn never seems to be far from his next nap. Blur has been on and off hiatus since 2003. Since then, Albarn has made 12 albums, including four with the downturned pop collage project Gorillaz, who came on like an afterthought and ended up selling millions of records anyway. He has co-written two film soundtracks and two operas. He has collaborated with folk musicians in Mali and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and with the rigorously buttoned-up English composer Michael Nyman. He has also partnered in a label called Honest Jon’s that specializes in curiosities like London is the Place for Me, a four-volume set of Calypso, jazz, and highlife. He is your dog-eared friend who never seems to be doing much and yet gets more done than anyone. All the Albarns appear on Everyday Robots. It is sleepy music, with the looseness of reggae and the bittersweet grace of gospel and soul. It connects the globetrotting Albarn to the fashionably moody one who sang Blur songs like "Badhead" and "This Is a Low" and "Tender", without Blur’s reluctant grandeur. Most of its songs are anchored by drum-machine heartbeats down low and plinking acoustic sounds up top, with a big warm hole in the middle. (Robots was produced by both Albarn and XL Recordings owner Richard Russell, who Albarn has previously worked with on Gil Scott-Heron's I'm New Here and Bobby Womack's The Bravest Man in the Universe, albums with a similarly old-soul quality.) Albarn is famous whether he cares about fame or not, but has tended to set his own name to the side. Robots is actually the first time an album has been credited to Damon Albarn and Damon Albarn alone. There he is on the cover, sitting in the middle of an indefinite gray space, hanging his head and smirking at some private joke, the boy who refuses to look at the camera even when it’s time for his close up. Robots relishes in alienation, and specifically in the way technology facilitates it. Cultural concerns like this are important but can feel pedantic when turned into art. Parts of Robots—the lyrics of “Lonely Press Play” and the title track, for example—are obvious statements made in obvious ways, right-on but one-dimensional, melancholy rendered melancholically. More interesting is when Albarn manages to graze the side of his subject matter in a way that knocks it into place. Robots starts with a sample from the British comedian Lord Buckley talking about the explorer Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca: “They didn’t know where they was goin’ but they knew where they was wasn’t it.” Removed from its literal context the line becomes a comment about society writ large. “Mr. Tembo”, a sweet, upbeat song Albarn originally sang for a baby elephant he met in Tanzania, keeps returning to the refrain, “It’s where he is now but it wasn’t what he planned”—a reminder that unfortunate circumstances are less important than how you deal with them. The album’s best songs, “Photographs (You Are Taking Now)” and “You and Me”, mention Albarn’s hot-button topics but set them to the side, frames about other kinds of stories more than the stories themselves. Albarn has often been compared to English writers like Ray Davies but has always seemed more like Paul Simon, a heavy-hearted and moody person who nevertheless manages to bring a room together. A lot of pressure rests on an album like this but it would seem out of character for him to rise to it. Robots is decidedly lowercase music, more a piece of his puzzle than a picture on its own."

New York Dolls

One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This

Rock

Stuart Berman

And number one on the list of phrases we'd never expect to see in the liner notes of a New York Dolls album: "String samples courtesy of Vienna Symphonic Library." But its appearance in the fine print on One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This is only slightly less surprising than the existence of the album itself. Even after the glam-punk pioneers' triumphant, Morrissey-goaded reunion performance at London's Meltdown festival in June 2004, the concept of a new New York Dolls album seemed unfathomable, given that their star guitarist Johnny Thunders had been dead for 13 years and drummers Jerry Nolan and Billy Murcia had checked out long before that; with the sudden, leukemia-related death of bassist Arthur Kane coming just weeks after the reunion gig, the surviving Dolls were barely holding on to their plural status. But if there are only two original Dolls still alive to make a new record, they may as well be the ones who wrote all the songs (guitarist Sylvain Sylvain) and the one whose voice gave them personality (David Johansen). No strangers to prescient album titles (see 1974's career-killing Too Much Too Soon), with One Day, the Dolls play with a humble restraint that suggests they're just grateful to be here. While the Dolls' songwriting was always smart enough to transcend their image, the initial shock of the latter is what ultimately secures their place in the pre-punk canon. Beyond their gender-bending veneer-- more of a theatrical device than a political one-- the Dolls' intent was regressive rather than progressive, shamelessly asserting their love of antiquated forms like rockabilly and doo-wop in a post-hippie era preoccupied with 20-minute guitar solos and multi-sectional prog suites. Though an essential text for the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and Ramones, the Dolls' self-titled debut is really no more threatening than 1972's other ragged rock'n'roll masterwork, Exile on Main Street. So it follows then that One Day sounds less like the work of punk provocateurs than a Keith Richards solo album: grizzled rock vets backed by a nominally gritty if too-well-rehearsed troupe of young(er) hired guns (guitarist Steve Conte, bassist Sami Yaffa, keyboardist Brian Koonin, and drummer Brian Delaney). In a sense, the Dolls personify the changes their hometown has undergone in the past three decades; the streets still bustle with tension and excitement, but the fear of getting mugged has subsided considerably. One thing working in the new New York Dolls' favor is that the band's most enduring songs ("Personality Crisis", "Trash") weren't confined to the typical preoccupations of young men looking to get laid. So where Mick Jagger still tries to play the sympathetic devil, Johansen is happy playing the sentimental fool. His voice has ripened considerably over the years-- evidence of his years belting out blues standards with his band the Harry Smiths-- but as charismatic a frontman Johansen remains, much of the new repertoire never rises far above sub-Stones pub-rock ("Runnin' Around", "Take a Good Look at My Good Looks") or self-tribute ("Dance Like a Monkey" revives both the "ooh ooh" harmonies from "Trash" and the safari rumble of "Stranded in the Jungle"). Aside from the spirited soda-shop strut of "Rainbow Store", it's actually the bittersweet ballads that fare best: the Tom Waitsian stroll of "Maimed Happiness" and the Springsteen-sized climax "Dancing on the Lip of the Volcano" (featuring effective backing vocals from Michael Stipe) both bear evidence of the wounded blue-eyed soul that always lurked behind the Dolls' mascara'd lashes. But more importantly, they're genuine displays of vulnerability from former bad boys who are wise enough to know you can't put your arms around a memory.

Artist: New York Dolls, Album: One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 6.0 Album review: "And number one on the list of phrases we'd never expect to see in the liner notes of a New York Dolls album: "String samples courtesy of Vienna Symphonic Library." But its appearance in the fine print on One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This is only slightly less surprising than the existence of the album itself. Even after the glam-punk pioneers' triumphant, Morrissey-goaded reunion performance at London's Meltdown festival in June 2004, the concept of a new New York Dolls album seemed unfathomable, given that their star guitarist Johnny Thunders had been dead for 13 years and drummers Jerry Nolan and Billy Murcia had checked out long before that; with the sudden, leukemia-related death of bassist Arthur Kane coming just weeks after the reunion gig, the surviving Dolls were barely holding on to their plural status. But if there are only two original Dolls still alive to make a new record, they may as well be the ones who wrote all the songs (guitarist Sylvain Sylvain) and the one whose voice gave them personality (David Johansen). No strangers to prescient album titles (see 1974's career-killing Too Much Too Soon), with One Day, the Dolls play with a humble restraint that suggests they're just grateful to be here. While the Dolls' songwriting was always smart enough to transcend their image, the initial shock of the latter is what ultimately secures their place in the pre-punk canon. Beyond their gender-bending veneer-- more of a theatrical device than a political one-- the Dolls' intent was regressive rather than progressive, shamelessly asserting their love of antiquated forms like rockabilly and doo-wop in a post-hippie era preoccupied with 20-minute guitar solos and multi-sectional prog suites. Though an essential text for the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and Ramones, the Dolls' self-titled debut is really no more threatening than 1972's other ragged rock'n'roll masterwork, Exile on Main Street. So it follows then that One Day sounds less like the work of punk provocateurs than a Keith Richards solo album: grizzled rock vets backed by a nominally gritty if too-well-rehearsed troupe of young(er) hired guns (guitarist Steve Conte, bassist Sami Yaffa, keyboardist Brian Koonin, and drummer Brian Delaney). In a sense, the Dolls personify the changes their hometown has undergone in the past three decades; the streets still bustle with tension and excitement, but the fear of getting mugged has subsided considerably. One thing working in the new New York Dolls' favor is that the band's most enduring songs ("Personality Crisis", "Trash") weren't confined to the typical preoccupations of young men looking to get laid. So where Mick Jagger still tries to play the sympathetic devil, Johansen is happy playing the sentimental fool. His voice has ripened considerably over the years-- evidence of his years belting out blues standards with his band the Harry Smiths-- but as charismatic a frontman Johansen remains, much of the new repertoire never rises far above sub-Stones pub-rock ("Runnin' Around", "Take a Good Look at My Good Looks") or self-tribute ("Dance Like a Monkey" revives both the "ooh ooh" harmonies from "Trash" and the safari rumble of "Stranded in the Jungle"). Aside from the spirited soda-shop strut of "Rainbow Store", it's actually the bittersweet ballads that fare best: the Tom Waitsian stroll of "Maimed Happiness" and the Springsteen-sized climax "Dancing on the Lip of the Volcano" (featuring effective backing vocals from Michael Stipe) both bear evidence of the wounded blue-eyed soul that always lurked behind the Dolls' mascara'd lashes. But more importantly, they're genuine displays of vulnerability from former bad boys who are wise enough to know you can't put your arms around a memory."

Jackson and His Computerband

Smash

Electronic

Dominique Leone

Jackson Fourgeaud doesn't write songs. He builds ridiculously elaborate toys that run on their own silicon-plated gears. Perhaps he starts with something very small, takes it apart, inserts tiny robots, let's them play around awhile until new parts spring up around the old ones. Jackson's melodies might have begun as everyday melodies, but after he's done tinkering, reassembling, and tinkering again, they sound like musical engines, designed not for ease of use but for speed and precision. If his songs were sold individually on store racks, only the richest kids would ever own them, and even then, they'd probably end up in a closet with the junior chemistry set and last year's iPod model. There are a lot of people who will tell you that these kinds of toys are pointless because of their exclusivity and built-in obsolescence. I'd agree that the shelf life of your average glitch-core, robo-pop CD is distressingly short, and wonder if I'll ever see the day when all of the technique that goes into this stuff ever actually produces something "accessible". But that's okay if it doesn't: Jackson's debut LP Smash, featuring a dubious "Computer Band", is interesting not so much for what it does, but for what it could have done. Two years ago, when he released "Utopia", Jackson briefly seemed like the next great hope for IDM, somehow finding a way to balance insanely detailed production with a hook that refused to dislodge itself from many of the electro-heads who heard it. This song had it all: enigmatic intro, expertly crafted beat, spooky background drones and otherworldly female vocal harmonies that even now make me stop what I'm doing to marvel. As Smash's opening track, it sets a pretty high bar for the rest of the record. Unfortunately, in the years since the song's first appearance, Jackson appears to have lost interest in creating tracks like this. Most of the rest of the album is far less "pretty" and far more "impressive". That is, it's hard to say he isn't progressing as an artist, but even harder to remember a lot of these tunes. The new single "Rock On" is an admirable stab at straightforward dance-oriented pop, perhaps the nerdy cousin of Daft Punk's "Robot Rock", but trades any melodic momentum for an almost constantly shifting rhythmic base. Snares turn into handclaps, drums fall in and out of the mix, the beat sounds like it's running backwards-- to which Jackson responds by singing wordless falsetto over the top. It's a dizzying experience, but one I'd argue takes a step-and-a-half back for every step-and-a-fourth it moves forward. "Arpeggio" is slightly more manageable, mostly due to the semi-consistent beat, and is in fact a pretty good take on Akufen-styled trickery. I might also mention Mouse on Mars, but where the German duo are experts at crafting melodies from the barest hint of actually melodic movement, Jackson usually lets his firework machinery handle things by itself-- there's little quarter given to listeners accustomed to being handed choruses on platters. However, there are signs of genius: "Hard Tits" lurches along with a deceptively simple piano figure, doubled by more wordless, heavily reverbed falsetto, that should put Moby out of business once and for all. The overall effect is angelic (similar to parts of "Utopia" in that respect), and suggests that he may yet produce music whose complexity not only doesn't overwhelm the vibe, it sends into the stratosphere. Of course, it's preceded by a goth-cinematic track narrated by a little girl ("TV Dogs"), and followed by strained-CPU glam ("Teen Beat Ocean"), so there probably isn't much danger of a crossover soon. And, really, that's fine with me, as is the video game powered "Tropical Metal. Under all the layers of electronics and broken beats, this is pop: I can put up with haters telling me you can't dance to this stuff as long as Jackson keeps things interesting.

Artist: Jackson and His Computerband, Album: Smash, Genre: Electronic, Score (1-10): 7.8 Album review: "Jackson Fourgeaud doesn't write songs. He builds ridiculously elaborate toys that run on their own silicon-plated gears. Perhaps he starts with something very small, takes it apart, inserts tiny robots, let's them play around awhile until new parts spring up around the old ones. Jackson's melodies might have begun as everyday melodies, but after he's done tinkering, reassembling, and tinkering again, they sound like musical engines, designed not for ease of use but for speed and precision. If his songs were sold individually on store racks, only the richest kids would ever own them, and even then, they'd probably end up in a closet with the junior chemistry set and last year's iPod model. There are a lot of people who will tell you that these kinds of toys are pointless because of their exclusivity and built-in obsolescence. I'd agree that the shelf life of your average glitch-core, robo-pop CD is distressingly short, and wonder if I'll ever see the day when all of the technique that goes into this stuff ever actually produces something "accessible". But that's okay if it doesn't: Jackson's debut LP Smash, featuring a dubious "Computer Band", is interesting not so much for what it does, but for what it could have done. Two years ago, when he released "Utopia", Jackson briefly seemed like the next great hope for IDM, somehow finding a way to balance insanely detailed production with a hook that refused to dislodge itself from many of the electro-heads who heard it. This song had it all: enigmatic intro, expertly crafted beat, spooky background drones and otherworldly female vocal harmonies that even now make me stop what I'm doing to marvel. As Smash's opening track, it sets a pretty high bar for the rest of the record. Unfortunately, in the years since the song's first appearance, Jackson appears to have lost interest in creating tracks like this. Most of the rest of the album is far less "pretty" and far more "impressive". That is, it's hard to say he isn't progressing as an artist, but even harder to remember a lot of these tunes. The new single "Rock On" is an admirable stab at straightforward dance-oriented pop, perhaps the nerdy cousin of Daft Punk's "Robot Rock", but trades any melodic momentum for an almost constantly shifting rhythmic base. Snares turn into handclaps, drums fall in and out of the mix, the beat sounds like it's running backwards-- to which Jackson responds by singing wordless falsetto over the top. It's a dizzying experience, but one I'd argue takes a step-and-a-half back for every step-and-a-fourth it moves forward. "Arpeggio" is slightly more manageable, mostly due to the semi-consistent beat, and is in fact a pretty good take on Akufen-styled trickery. I might also mention Mouse on Mars, but where the German duo are experts at crafting melodies from the barest hint of actually melodic movement, Jackson usually lets his firework machinery handle things by itself-- there's little quarter given to listeners accustomed to being handed choruses on platters. However, there are signs of genius: "Hard Tits" lurches along with a deceptively simple piano figure, doubled by more wordless, heavily reverbed falsetto, that should put Moby out of business once and for all. The overall effect is angelic (similar to parts of "Utopia" in that respect), and suggests that he may yet produce music whose complexity not only doesn't overwhelm the vibe, it sends into the stratosphere. Of course, it's preceded by a goth-cinematic track narrated by a little girl ("TV Dogs"), and followed by strained-CPU glam ("Teen Beat Ocean"), so there probably isn't much danger of a crossover soon. And, really, that's fine with me, as is the video game powered "Tropical Metal. Under all the layers of electronics and broken beats, this is pop: I can put up with haters telling me you can't dance to this stuff as long as Jackson keeps things interesting."

Mincemeat or Tenspeed

Strange Gods

Marc Masters

For something so simply designed and constructed, the music of Philadelphia's David Harms-- aka Mincemeat or Tenspeed-- is pretty tricky. Harms uses only effects pedals and a mixer to make rhythms so repetitive they suggest artistic OCD. But within those parameters, he also creates impressively diverse textures. As his mono-beats roll forward, he piles on layers of gritty, tactile sound, the sonic equivalent of a character in the video game Katamari Damacy gathering sticky debris with his growing ball. In the process, Harms evokes big-beat dance, abstract IDM, harsh noise, psych-rock, even death metal, all while sticking to his simple A/B rhythms. Which is probably why Dan Deacon, another artist with a knack for mixing abstraction and structure, told Pitchfork in 2007 that Harms "is my favorite performer right now. He is the master of his domain. More human than human." Strange Gods definitely sounds both fleshy and mechanistic, both monotonous and body-moving. It's as if Harms grafted the squall of Prurient or John Wiese onto the pound of Aphex Twin or Mouse on Mars (that is, if they made their beats without synths or drum machines). You could also shorthand Mincemeat or Tenspeeed as a more extreme version of Black Dice or Fuck Buttons, but Harms' purism sets him apart. The first beat he picks is the one he's sticking with, and he doesn't seem to care much if you stick with it, too. Sometimes it even sounds like he wants to outlast you. That's definitely the case on Strange Gods' longest tracks, such as the relentlessly bouncy "Hulot", the cuttingly metallic "Points and Lines", and the buzzsaw warp of "Throw Hands". Throughout these marathons, the rhythms can get swallowed by the bulging sounds-- distortion, feedback, a high-pitched din akin to a brutal metal guitar solo. But inevitably the beat returns, stronger and more repetitive than ever. Such stubbornness may seem tedious, but there's something indelibly hypnotic about the way Harms slowly changes the sonic envelope around his oscillations. It's like watching time-lapse footage of a city skyline, as the changing light and motion color the buildings but never erase their immovable presence. Whether or not that sounds like fun, it's hard to imagine being turned off by Strange Gods, since Harms always cuts his noise with a beat that's easy to hang onto. When he lets that beat take over, like during the catchy first half of "Padre Iscand (Colonization)", you can easily picture him performing inside the kind of ecstatic crowd circles that Deacon often attracts. But don't count on it-- my guess is that Harms is less interested in attracting fans than finding a personal nirvana inside his endless repetitions.

Artist: Mincemeat or Tenspeed, Album: Strange Gods, Genre: None, Score (1-10): 7.0 Album review: "For something so simply designed and constructed, the music of Philadelphia's David Harms-- aka Mincemeat or Tenspeed-- is pretty tricky. Harms uses only effects pedals and a mixer to make rhythms so repetitive they suggest artistic OCD. But within those parameters, he also creates impressively diverse textures. As his mono-beats roll forward, he piles on layers of gritty, tactile sound, the sonic equivalent of a character in the video game Katamari Damacy gathering sticky debris with his growing ball. In the process, Harms evokes big-beat dance, abstract IDM, harsh noise, psych-rock, even death metal, all while sticking to his simple A/B rhythms. Which is probably why Dan Deacon, another artist with a knack for mixing abstraction and structure, told Pitchfork in 2007 that Harms "is my favorite performer right now. He is the master of his domain. More human than human." Strange Gods definitely sounds both fleshy and mechanistic, both monotonous and body-moving. It's as if Harms grafted the squall of Prurient or John Wiese onto the pound of Aphex Twin or Mouse on Mars (that is, if they made their beats without synths or drum machines). You could also shorthand Mincemeat or Tenspeeed as a more extreme version of Black Dice or Fuck Buttons, but Harms' purism sets him apart. The first beat he picks is the one he's sticking with, and he doesn't seem to care much if you stick with it, too. Sometimes it even sounds like he wants to outlast you. That's definitely the case on Strange Gods' longest tracks, such as the relentlessly bouncy "Hulot", the cuttingly metallic "Points and Lines", and the buzzsaw warp of "Throw Hands". Throughout these marathons, the rhythms can get swallowed by the bulging sounds-- distortion, feedback, a high-pitched din akin to a brutal metal guitar solo. But inevitably the beat returns, stronger and more repetitive than ever. Such stubbornness may seem tedious, but there's something indelibly hypnotic about the way Harms slowly changes the sonic envelope around his oscillations. It's like watching time-lapse footage of a city skyline, as the changing light and motion color the buildings but never erase their immovable presence. Whether or not that sounds like fun, it's hard to imagine being turned off by Strange Gods, since Harms always cuts his noise with a beat that's easy to hang onto. When he lets that beat take over, like during the catchy first half of "Padre Iscand (Colonization)", you can easily picture him performing inside the kind of ecstatic crowd circles that Deacon often attracts. But don't count on it-- my guess is that Harms is less interested in attracting fans than finding a personal nirvana inside his endless repetitions."

Katy B

On a Mission

Electronic,Rock

Nate Patrin

Last year, Katy B was widely credited for bringing vocal finesse and feminine pop appeal to an increasingly aggro dubstep-crossover arena. She dropped a fantastic Benga-backed debut single, "Katy on a Mission", that vocally wrung out both elation and longing over his abrasive, buzzing stutter-step. And she kept that streak going with a couple of guest spots on Magnetic Man's self-titled record: The eerie come-on "Crossover" and the ecstatic jungle throwback "Perfect Stranger" were album highlights that proved her voice could breach the barrier of heavy-duty bass and plant its feet firmly atop it. Two UK top 5 hits later-- "Katy on a Mission" and the Ms. Dynamite collaboration "Lights On"-- and members of the English music press started to peg her as the next singer to bring crossover legitimacy to bass music. Turns out that'd be selling her a bit short. After pairing up with Rinse FM's tastemaker station head Geeneus and co-producer Zinc, Katy B has used On a Mission as a chance to posit herself as a genre-spanning pop singer who isn't tied down to a single thing, no matter how well it suits her. It's a move that makes a lot of sense, since versatility is the key to a good dance album-- let the voice establish itself, and the niche will either find itself or get broadened in the process. "Katy on a Mission", "Lights On", and "Perfect Stranger" reappear here in radio-edit lengths, and these three tracks help define her as someone who can play off dubstep and funky basslines with a tone that drips with cool defiance, stings with melancholy, and still grabs at you when it's being reduced to a skeletal echo. But there's enough stylistic extension here that Katy finds a way to transcend enough signifiers to call herself pop above anything else. The big standout here is "Broken Record", a four-on-the-floor thump with electro underpinnings and a breakdown that perks up longtime dance fans with a judiciously dropped "Amen" break. It's one of those club-tested/radio-ready tracks that sounds good anywhere, not out of focus-grouped button-pushing but the way Katy sells it: coyly yearning and melodically sweet on the verse, intense and swooping on the chorus, wracked with ambiguity throughout. And then she finds another gear when the song finally shifts into the titular hook near the end-- the way she rolls her delivery of the line "like-a-bro-ken rec-ooooord" is the stuff that song-length buildups were made for. And there's more of that going around on the other new tracks, laid out in a number of different modes-- the trapped yet defiant punchback of opener "Power on Me", the sour resentment of "Why You Always Here", the slyly perilous seduction that drives "Witches Brew". It's a repertoire that gives her the appeal of a 1990s rave diva with contemporary pop-R&B refinement, minus the Auto-Tune. That alone would make her another noticeably talented if semi-anonymous vocalist. But she also provides a breather from pop's current fascination with vacant navel-gazing. It's not just the nods to decades-old house and jungle that provide a perspective on dance-music culture that predates the tyranny of the David Guetta era-- though Geeneus and Zinc get all the credit in the world for following up Katy's early breakthroughs with a first-rate collection of beats that reunite the disparate splinters of bass music culture past and present. What puts On a Mission over the top is Katy's way of expressing herself with emotions that extend past "wooo, druuunk" into more nuanced and detailed relationships with booming systems and the people who flock to them. As danceable as these tracks can be, the undercurrents of nuanced frustration and uncertainty in Katy's tone-- especially in the surrender of "Power on Me" and the torn-up estrangement of "Go Away"-- amplify the tricky dynamics of relationships and hook-ups to rarefied levels, creating a tension to the music that makes epics out of dissatisfaction. And when she withdraws just a bit for one of the more introspective cuts, a haunting mid-tempo meditation on love and identity called "Disappear", her caught-up bewilderment says softly and resonantly what lesser singers couldn't accomplish with overblown histrionics. A genre-bound narrative might still see Katy B slotted into a narrow role that can't quite contain her, but her voice is doing its best to prove otherwise.

Artist: Katy B, Album: On a Mission, Genre: Electronic,Rock, Score (1-10): 8.1 Album review: "Last year, Katy B was widely credited for bringing vocal finesse and feminine pop appeal to an increasingly aggro dubstep-crossover arena. She dropped a fantastic Benga-backed debut single, "Katy on a Mission", that vocally wrung out both elation and longing over his abrasive, buzzing stutter-step. And she kept that streak going with a couple of guest spots on Magnetic Man's self-titled record: The eerie come-on "Crossover" and the ecstatic jungle throwback "Perfect Stranger" were album highlights that proved her voice could breach the barrier of heavy-duty bass and plant its feet firmly atop it. Two UK top 5 hits later-- "Katy on a Mission" and the Ms. Dynamite collaboration "Lights On"-- and members of the English music press started to peg her as the next singer to bring crossover legitimacy to bass music. Turns out that'd be selling her a bit short. After pairing up with Rinse FM's tastemaker station head Geeneus and co-producer Zinc, Katy B has used On a Mission as a chance to posit herself as a genre-spanning pop singer who isn't tied down to a single thing, no matter how well it suits her. It's a move that makes a lot of sense, since versatility is the key to a good dance album-- let the voice establish itself, and the niche will either find itself or get broadened in the process. "Katy on a Mission", "Lights On", and "Perfect Stranger" reappear here in radio-edit lengths, and these three tracks help define her as someone who can play off dubstep and funky basslines with a tone that drips with cool defiance, stings with melancholy, and still grabs at you when it's being reduced to a skeletal echo. But there's enough stylistic extension here that Katy finds a way to transcend enough signifiers to call herself pop above anything else. The big standout here is "Broken Record", a four-on-the-floor thump with electro underpinnings and a breakdown that perks up longtime dance fans with a judiciously dropped "Amen" break. It's one of those club-tested/radio-ready tracks that sounds good anywhere, not out of focus-grouped button-pushing but the way Katy sells it: coyly yearning and melodically sweet on the verse, intense and swooping on the chorus, wracked with ambiguity throughout. And then she finds another gear when the song finally shifts into the titular hook near the end-- the way she rolls her delivery of the line "like-a-bro-ken rec-ooooord" is the stuff that song-length buildups were made for. And there's more of that going around on the other new tracks, laid out in a number of different modes-- the trapped yet defiant punchback of opener "Power on Me", the sour resentment of "Why You Always Here", the slyly perilous seduction that drives "Witches Brew". It's a repertoire that gives her the appeal of a 1990s rave diva with contemporary pop-R&B refinement, minus the Auto-Tune. That alone would make her another noticeably talented if semi-anonymous vocalist. But she also provides a breather from pop's current fascination with vacant navel-gazing. It's not just the nods to decades-old house and jungle that provide a perspective on dance-music culture that predates the tyranny of the David Guetta era-- though Geeneus and Zinc get all the credit in the world for following up Katy's early breakthroughs with a first-rate collection of beats that reunite the disparate splinters of bass music culture past and present. What puts On a Mission over the top is Katy's way of expressing herself with emotions that extend past "wooo, druuunk" into more nuanced and detailed relationships with booming systems and the people who flock to them. As danceable as these tracks can be, the undercurrents of nuanced frustration and uncertainty in Katy's tone-- especially in the surrender of "Power on Me" and the torn-up estrangement of "Go Away"-- amplify the tricky dynamics of relationships and hook-ups to rarefied levels, creating a tension to the music that makes epics out of dissatisfaction. And when she withdraws just a bit for one of the more introspective cuts, a haunting mid-tempo meditation on love and identity called "Disappear", her caught-up bewilderment says softly and resonantly what lesser singers couldn't accomplish with overblown histrionics. A genre-bound narrative might still see Katy B slotted into a narrow role that can't quite contain her, but her voice is doing its best to prove otherwise."

Paul Simon

So Beautiful or So What

Rock

Stephen M. Deusner

On Graceland, "the bomb in the baby carriage was wired to the radio"; it's a "bomb in the marketplace" on So Beautiful or So What. The shift in strategy is minor, but those rhyming images speak to the 25 years separating these two albums: 1986 could be eons ago, or it could be yesterday. Those were the days of miracles and wonder, as Paul Simon entered his forties with humor and curiosity intact. These days, however, haven't been too kind: Even as his influence has grown, his output has suffered. After opening the millennium with the dull-by-obligation You're the One, he hired Brian Eno for 2006's Surprise, whose true surprise was that one of the most careful and rigid pop songwriters of the last 50 years could be just as rambling and self-indulgent as any other aging Baby Boomer. To his considerable credit, however, Simon has never succumbed to a record with Rick Rubin or a Great American Songbook album, perhaps because his standards aren't pre-rock pop tunes. While there was a period when his South African and Brazilian excursions in the late 1980s were derided as exploitative, both Graceland and The Rhythm of the Saints have proved enormously influential to a new generation of indie-pop songwriters from the Shins' James Mercer to Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig. Simon, who turns 70 this year, is still forging his own path even this deep into his career and remains devoted to and fascinated by old R&B, gospel, and world music. So Beautiful or So What blends them all into a pop sound that's simultaneously laidback and spry, almost self-consciously alluding to his past triumphs. Replacing Brian Eno, long-time cohort Phil Ramone co-produces, and the pairing is comfortable, if not complacent. They've corralled a small band to suggest a live-in-the-room intimacy and spontaneity, and "Rewrite" and "Love Is an Eternal Sacred Light" crackle with energy. Some of the ambient elements from Surprise remain, but they're couched in the earthy rhythms of the percussion and the spidery guitars. His voice still strong, Simon shows off his own fretwork more prominently, especially on the short, sweet instrumental "Amulet". Only the sampled sermon on "Getting Ready for Christmas Day" sounds out of place; contemporary listeners may be more likely to connect it to Moby's pre-millennial techno-folk than to its true source material, a 1941 sermon by Reverend J.M. Gates. Even as his band gets smaller, Simon's ideas grow larger. He's addressing enormous spiritual matters, specifically the nature of God. In "Love and Hard Times", He and Jesus show up for a surprise inspection of Earth, and it's a bit too precious until Simon interrupts and turns it into a sweet love song about love songs. God Himself narrates "Love Is an Eternal Sacred Light", bemoaning that humanity doesn't get his jokes, and Simon sounds more at home in His head than in those of the various New Yorkers who narrate "Getting Ready for Christmas Day" and "Rewrite". So Beautiful or So What can be stodgy in its emotions and a bit too devoted to its motifs, but there's something humanizing about the album's shortcomings. It is, thank God, no attempt to get his affairs in order, an approach that turns so many older artists' albums into solemn, end-of-life affairs. Simon's not worrying over redemption on these spiritual inquests; he's much more concerned about what he'll do in heaven once he gets there. Turns out, he'll be listening to his favorite American tunes. In "The Afterlife", "Be-Bop-a-Lula" and "Ooo Poo Pah Doo" form a celestial language, which may be the album's most satisfying revelation. Those reference points-- Gene Vincent and Jessie Hill, not to mention Ramone, Graceland, and King's assassination on the title track-- all well predate Y2K, which is not unexpected for an artist who spent half of the previous century making music. Simon's too preoccupied with the 20th century to settle into the 21st, but here's the thing: It suits him. After foundering when he tried to sound new and modern, Simon comes across as much more at ease and compelling in this familiar setting. He's like a novelist revisiting the particulars of his youth; like Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, he wants to take in his times, and like John Updike, Simon cherishes small epiphanies, which resound like bombs in the marketplace. So perhaps the epiphany of So Beautiful or So What is that Paul Simon turns out to be a character in a Paul Simon song: An aging songwriter still struggling to connect, still figuring it all out, and still cranking the Dixie Hummingbirds.

Artist: Paul Simon, Album: So Beautiful or So What, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 6.7 Album review: "On Graceland, "the bomb in the baby carriage was wired to the radio"; it's a "bomb in the marketplace" on So Beautiful or So What. The shift in strategy is minor, but those rhyming images speak to the 25 years separating these two albums: 1986 could be eons ago, or it could be yesterday. Those were the days of miracles and wonder, as Paul Simon entered his forties with humor and curiosity intact. These days, however, haven't been too kind: Even as his influence has grown, his output has suffered. After opening the millennium with the dull-by-obligation You're the One, he hired Brian Eno for 2006's Surprise, whose true surprise was that one of the most careful and rigid pop songwriters of the last 50 years could be just as rambling and self-indulgent as any other aging Baby Boomer. To his considerable credit, however, Simon has never succumbed to a record with Rick Rubin or a Great American Songbook album, perhaps because his standards aren't pre-rock pop tunes. While there was a period when his South African and Brazilian excursions in the late 1980s were derided as exploitative, both Graceland and The Rhythm of the Saints have proved enormously influential to a new generation of indie-pop songwriters from the Shins' James Mercer to Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig. Simon, who turns 70 this year, is still forging his own path even this deep into his career and remains devoted to and fascinated by old R&B, gospel, and world music. So Beautiful or So What blends them all into a pop sound that's simultaneously laidback and spry, almost self-consciously alluding to his past triumphs. Replacing Brian Eno, long-time cohort Phil Ramone co-produces, and the pairing is comfortable, if not complacent. They've corralled a small band to suggest a live-in-the-room intimacy and spontaneity, and "Rewrite" and "Love Is an Eternal Sacred Light" crackle with energy. Some of the ambient elements from Surprise remain, but they're couched in the earthy rhythms of the percussion and the spidery guitars. His voice still strong, Simon shows off his own fretwork more prominently, especially on the short, sweet instrumental "Amulet". Only the sampled sermon on "Getting Ready for Christmas Day" sounds out of place; contemporary listeners may be more likely to connect it to Moby's pre-millennial techno-folk than to its true source material, a 1941 sermon by Reverend J.M. Gates. Even as his band gets smaller, Simon's ideas grow larger. He's addressing enormous spiritual matters, specifically the nature of God. In "Love and Hard Times", He and Jesus show up for a surprise inspection of Earth, and it's a bit too precious until Simon interrupts and turns it into a sweet love song about love songs. God Himself narrates "Love Is an Eternal Sacred Light", bemoaning that humanity doesn't get his jokes, and Simon sounds more at home in His head than in those of the various New Yorkers who narrate "Getting Ready for Christmas Day" and "Rewrite". So Beautiful or So What can be stodgy in its emotions and a bit too devoted to its motifs, but there's something humanizing about the album's shortcomings. It is, thank God, no attempt to get his affairs in order, an approach that turns so many older artists' albums into solemn, end-of-life affairs. Simon's not worrying over redemption on these spiritual inquests; he's much more concerned about what he'll do in heaven once he gets there. Turns out, he'll be listening to his favorite American tunes. In "The Afterlife", "Be-Bop-a-Lula" and "Ooo Poo Pah Doo" form a celestial language, which may be the album's most satisfying revelation. Those reference points-- Gene Vincent and Jessie Hill, not to mention Ramone, Graceland, and King's assassination on the title track-- all well predate Y2K, which is not unexpected for an artist who spent half of the previous century making music. Simon's too preoccupied with the 20th century to settle into the 21st, but here's the thing: It suits him. After foundering when he tried to sound new and modern, Simon comes across as much more at ease and compelling in this familiar setting. He's like a novelist revisiting the particulars of his youth; like Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, he wants to take in his times, and like John Updike, Simon cherishes small epiphanies, which resound like bombs in the marketplace. So perhaps the epiphany of So Beautiful or So What is that Paul Simon turns out to be a character in a Paul Simon song: An aging songwriter still struggling to connect, still figuring it all out, and still cranking the Dixie Hummingbirds."

Active Child

Curtis Lane EP

Rock

Paul Thompson

Pat Grossi's a harpist, an ex-choirboy, an Active Child; precious, no? Nah, not really. Grossi's gauzy, twinkly Active Child songs feel at once rather humble and astronomically huge. Bits of Animal Collective's stacked harmonies, Dazzle Ships' askew shimmer, and M83's post-New Order epic pulse coalesce in Grossi's tidy yet titanic sound, stretched out over six songs and 30 minutes on the Curtis Lane EP. Precious? More like prodigious. Tracks here comes in a couple of varieties: there's the hazier, sultrier, slower numbers, and the ones you can dance to. Grossi's smart to keep the two sides in balance, but while the thumpier numbers have their charms, they seem a bit timid next to the others' sky-streaking grandeur. "I'm in Your Church at Night" seems to stretch on forever, matching Grossi's heaven-sent falsetto to a lush rumble not unlike a screwed'n'chopped "In the Air Tonight". His compositional skill is really something, moving beats and harp plinks and negative space in and out without disrupting the majestic scope of the tunes. His falsetto, a touch meek on its own, has a dreamy incandescence when piled on top of itself. The harp's far from the focus here, but coupled with his voice, it provides a organic counterpoint to the synthetic sounds constantly shuffling underneath him. Grossi's hand as a dance producer isn't quite as steady; deft as he is at matching sounds, there's a reason you don't hear much harp in house music, and the throb he throws under half the tunes here never quite seems to knock hard enough to actually enter the realm of the danceable. Perhaps that's not the point, but the reedy "Take Shelter" doesn't have quite as much vitality as the stretchier stuff, sounding at times like any number of bedroom Bernard Sumner. A stuttery sample of Grossi's voice makes head-nodder "When Your Love Is Safe" the best of the dancier bunch, but "Weight of the World" is bogged down by too much thump and a sharp vocal downshift; his falsetto's lovely, his tenor not so much. It's not that Grossi oughta give up trying to get people to move, but his dance music's just a smudge too cerebral, and besides, the more extravagant numbers are moving enough as is. Grossi's limited means seem to have pushed the cosmic, stately side of these tracks to the forefront; these tunes might be huge in effect, but they're fairly modest in execution, and one hopes Grossi can maintain that homespun feel should bigger and better things befall him. And they oughta; lord knows if I were charged to soundtrack the big smooch in a teen movie I'd snatch up the rights to "Wilderness" or "I'm in Your Church at Night" post-haste. These songs just feel climactic, durable, far greater than the sum of their parts. If this guy can almost get you to dance to harp songs, just imagine what he might be capable of creating.

Artist: Active Child, Album: Curtis Lane EP, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.7 Album review: "Pat Grossi's a harpist, an ex-choirboy, an Active Child; precious, no? Nah, not really. Grossi's gauzy, twinkly Active Child songs feel at once rather humble and astronomically huge. Bits of Animal Collective's stacked harmonies, Dazzle Ships' askew shimmer, and M83's post-New Order epic pulse coalesce in Grossi's tidy yet titanic sound, stretched out over six songs and 30 minutes on the Curtis Lane EP. Precious? More like prodigious. Tracks here comes in a couple of varieties: there's the hazier, sultrier, slower numbers, and the ones you can dance to. Grossi's smart to keep the two sides in balance, but while the thumpier numbers have their charms, they seem a bit timid next to the others' sky-streaking grandeur. "I'm in Your Church at Night" seems to stretch on forever, matching Grossi's heaven-sent falsetto to a lush rumble not unlike a screwed'n'chopped "In the Air Tonight". His compositional skill is really something, moving beats and harp plinks and negative space in and out without disrupting the majestic scope of the tunes. His falsetto, a touch meek on its own, has a dreamy incandescence when piled on top of itself. The harp's far from the focus here, but coupled with his voice, it provides a organic counterpoint to the synthetic sounds constantly shuffling underneath him. Grossi's hand as a dance producer isn't quite as steady; deft as he is at matching sounds, there's a reason you don't hear much harp in house music, and the throb he throws under half the tunes here never quite seems to knock hard enough to actually enter the realm of the danceable. Perhaps that's not the point, but the reedy "Take Shelter" doesn't have quite as much vitality as the stretchier stuff, sounding at times like any number of bedroom Bernard Sumner. A stuttery sample of Grossi's voice makes head-nodder "When Your Love Is Safe" the best of the dancier bunch, but "Weight of the World" is bogged down by too much thump and a sharp vocal downshift; his falsetto's lovely, his tenor not so much. It's not that Grossi oughta give up trying to get people to move, but his dance music's just a smudge too cerebral, and besides, the more extravagant numbers are moving enough as is. Grossi's limited means seem to have pushed the cosmic, stately side of these tracks to the forefront; these tunes might be huge in effect, but they're fairly modest in execution, and one hopes Grossi can maintain that homespun feel should bigger and better things befall him. And they oughta; lord knows if I were charged to soundtrack the big smooch in a teen movie I'd snatch up the rights to "Wilderness" or "I'm in Your Church at Night" post-haste. These songs just feel climactic, durable, far greater than the sum of their parts. If this guy can almost get you to dance to harp songs, just imagine what he might be capable of creating."

De Novo Dahl

Cats & Kittens

Rock

Joe Tangari

A band's ambition can be measured many ways-- concepts, scope of ideas, innovation, eclecticism, musicianship, songwriting, commercial aims. De Novo Dahl's first record is about as boldly ambitious as a band's first steps can get, and while it's not exactly a masterpiece, it's certainly not for lack of trying. De Novo Dahl are so eager to make an impact with their debut that they give it to you twice-- once in relatively straightforward, though never mundane, pop-rock arrangements (*Cats) and again in a remixed, resequenced and retitled form (*Kittens). The LP consists of 16 songs each presented twice in wildly divergent forms; as such, it takes a couple of listens for the full impact of it to sink in. Heck, the first time I listened I didn't even notice the remix conceit, so different are the remixes from their counterparts, though it was clear something was up based on the crazy mix of styles and sounds on Kittens relative to the unified, focused Cats. By the second listen, I had cheated and consulted the one-sheet and since then it's been fun determining which tracks correspond to which, not to mention taking in the dizzying array of sounds the band cooks up to throw at you. For the sake of quick reference, I'd say the best aesthetic precedent for Cats & Kittens, at least in terms of the mix of styles, is Super Furry Animals' Guerrilla, an album that similarly tossed big-hooked guitar pop, electronic weirdness, and anglo funk into the same salad. Like I said, Cats is a fairly unified, focused album in its own right, though the band's sense of weirdness does burst through on occasions like the spontaneous burst of laughter on "Monday Morning". Mostly, though, Cats is stuffed with cranking indie pop anchored by a solid rhythm section and topped by keyboards and the spirited interaction of three different vocalists. Highlights from the first disc include the opener, "All Over Town", which follows infectious, pumping verses with a huge chorus backed by grinding lead guitar phrases. The band's great sense of dynamics is on full display on "I Woke Up Late", with verses full of boy-boy-girl harmonies and bouncing bass alternating with big, surprising multi-tracked choral passages and sections where the beat mostly drops out, leaving behind only tambourine to keep the time. Elsewhere, "The Funk" swerves between brightly melodic disco and crunchy rock without trying to be dance-punk, "Piggy's Adventure" sports David Carney's most ridiculously sweet bassline to back up Serai Zaffiro's spoken vocal, "Be Your Man" is all-out power pop stuffed with Marc Bolan-esque "oh-oh-oh"s and flurrying keyboards, and "Conquest at Midnight" is a loopy duet sung over Joey Andrews' propulsive drums and insistent piano rhythms. It's a lot to take in, especially considering that there's a whole second disc we haven't even addressed yet. The Kittens material ranges from exhilarating oddness to confounding electro-pop, but it's never boring or predictable. The rocketing, strutting power pop of "Be Your Man" becomes "Wanna Beer Man?", the crispy guitars stripping away in favor of efficient Teutonic synthpop, while "Dinosaurs!" discos up "Jeffrey" for something that sounds like the Flaming Lips backing a Travolta throw-down on a lighted floor. "Magic" is like ELO colliding with Trio, while "Rhythm, phd." is a straight is a thumping dancefloor raver that shows the band can be convincing even when dabbling. The net impression left by the two discs of Cats & Kittens is one of a confident, talented band letting its collective imagination run wild, deconstructing it own ideas and recycling them into something new. It's functionally two albums for the price of one and different people will prefer different discs, but at any rate it's a damn impressive debut overflowing with mostly realized ambition.

Artist: De Novo Dahl, Album: Cats & Kittens, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 7.5 Album review: "A band's ambition can be measured many ways-- concepts, scope of ideas, innovation, eclecticism, musicianship, songwriting, commercial aims. De Novo Dahl's first record is about as boldly ambitious as a band's first steps can get, and while it's not exactly a masterpiece, it's certainly not for lack of trying. De Novo Dahl are so eager to make an impact with their debut that they give it to you twice-- once in relatively straightforward, though never mundane, pop-rock arrangements (*Cats) and again in a remixed, resequenced and retitled form (*Kittens). The LP consists of 16 songs each presented twice in wildly divergent forms; as such, it takes a couple of listens for the full impact of it to sink in. Heck, the first time I listened I didn't even notice the remix conceit, so different are the remixes from their counterparts, though it was clear something was up based on the crazy mix of styles and sounds on Kittens relative to the unified, focused Cats. By the second listen, I had cheated and consulted the one-sheet and since then it's been fun determining which tracks correspond to which, not to mention taking in the dizzying array of sounds the band cooks up to throw at you. For the sake of quick reference, I'd say the best aesthetic precedent for Cats & Kittens, at least in terms of the mix of styles, is Super Furry Animals' Guerrilla, an album that similarly tossed big-hooked guitar pop, electronic weirdness, and anglo funk into the same salad. Like I said, Cats is a fairly unified, focused album in its own right, though the band's sense of weirdness does burst through on occasions like the spontaneous burst of laughter on "Monday Morning". Mostly, though, Cats is stuffed with cranking indie pop anchored by a solid rhythm section and topped by keyboards and the spirited interaction of three different vocalists. Highlights from the first disc include the opener, "All Over Town", which follows infectious, pumping verses with a huge chorus backed by grinding lead guitar phrases. The band's great sense of dynamics is on full display on "I Woke Up Late", with verses full of boy-boy-girl harmonies and bouncing bass alternating with big, surprising multi-tracked choral passages and sections where the beat mostly drops out, leaving behind only tambourine to keep the time. Elsewhere, "The Funk" swerves between brightly melodic disco and crunchy rock without trying to be dance-punk, "Piggy's Adventure" sports David Carney's most ridiculously sweet bassline to back up Serai Zaffiro's spoken vocal, "Be Your Man" is all-out power pop stuffed with Marc Bolan-esque "oh-oh-oh"s and flurrying keyboards, and "Conquest at Midnight" is a loopy duet sung over Joey Andrews' propulsive drums and insistent piano rhythms. It's a lot to take in, especially considering that there's a whole second disc we haven't even addressed yet. The Kittens material ranges from exhilarating oddness to confounding electro-pop, but it's never boring or predictable. The rocketing, strutting power pop of "Be Your Man" becomes "Wanna Beer Man?", the crispy guitars stripping away in favor of efficient Teutonic synthpop, while "Dinosaurs!" discos up "Jeffrey" for something that sounds like the Flaming Lips backing a Travolta throw-down on a lighted floor. "Magic" is like ELO colliding with Trio, while "Rhythm, phd." is a straight is a thumping dancefloor raver that shows the band can be convincing even when dabbling. The net impression left by the two discs of Cats & Kittens is one of a confident, talented band letting its collective imagination run wild, deconstructing it own ideas and recycling them into something new. It's functionally two albums for the price of one and different people will prefer different discs, but at any rate it's a damn impressive debut overflowing with mostly realized ambition."

Various Artists

Peoples Potential Family Album

Nate Patrin

The early 1980s was a strange period for funk, an unstable zone between the impending decline of disco at the tail end of 1979 and the skyrocketing mega-blockbuster ascendance of Thriller and 1999 in the winter months of 1982-83. For every group that managed to adapt to the Linn Drum era and score some actual hits, there were a dozen others that learned the hard way how tricky it was to maintain their funk credentials while adapting to the new sounds that the market demanded. These were the groups that stayed in their own local orbits, putting out independent and private-label releases that attempted to negotiate the disco/funk split with a foot on each dancefloor before finally clicking with the synthesized future. This is the realm that Peoples Potential Unlimited operates in, and Peoples Potential Family Album is a fine collection of the D.C. label's most interesting rediscoveries so far. Label operator Andrew Morgan is one of those curator types who takes pains to not only license his finds but track down the originators and give them their due. And this first compilation is a labor of crate-digger love that doubles as a look into the ground-level versions of vintage 80s funk archetypes from roller-boogie to go-go, recorded with garage-band looseness and studio polish alike. The first few tracks in the collection stand firmly on the side of the former. These are bands that, in an earlier era, would have fit in well with the lo-fi, J.B.'s-influenced woodshedder aspirants featured on collections of early- and mid-70s nuggets like The Funky 16 Corners and Jazzman's regional compilations. The gritty, disco-informed soul of tracks like Minority Band's "Live" and T.M.S.'s "Get the Feelin" are raw without being sloppy. There's actually something kind of rearview-looking about this stuff-- even through all the fat analog keyboards and Nile Rodgers-informed guitar, you can tell these bands were reaching back to the early-70s likes of B.T. Express and the Ohio Players even as they surged toward a rejuvenated new incarnation of funk. Then again, there's actually a song here called "Rejuvenate the Fonk", by the Oklahoma group Satellite Band, and its slap bass, squiggly keyboards, and handclap-heavy backbeat could place it as this compilation's figurehead. The core of Peoples Potential Family Album is the gleaming, synthesized boogie that personified the times, and if it's maybe a half-step below the best moments of Rick James or the Gap Band, that still puts these discoveries in a pretty impressive class. The crisp, sophisticated bounce of Midnight Express' "Danger Zone", Caprice's coolly seductive "Candy Man" (featuring Apollonia's sister Larnette Winston on vocals), and Checker Kabb's rubbery jam "By My Side" could've been R&B hits with a little more polish, luck, and distribution. As they turned out here, they're simply good examples of how smaller regional groups fit in to the bigger picture of an era in exciting stylistic flux. Like most rare groove compilations, there are just enough examples of weird, amateurish novelty to provide a bit of off-kilter personality. NoLa group Crunch's 1982 split "Cruise"/"Funky Beat" and the dub of Mix-O-Rap's "All Party People" drizzle wandering, frequently off-beat keyboard noodling over their supple percussion, and it feels like everything starts ricocheting at odd angles after a point. Stranger still is the Ballplayers, the circa-1980 musical side project of MLB journeymen Lenny Randle and Thad Bosley, whose instrumental "Universal Language" is a slice of wah-wah disco-funk that falls somewhere between Denny McLain's late-60s lounge-Hammond LPs and the 1986 single "Get Metsmerized" on the baseball-player-as-musician quality scale. But that's just the kind of label PPU is: championing gems and oddities alike, unearthing finds that shouldn't have been buried in the first place, and elevating long-lost coulda-beens into a new generation's under-heard heritage.

Artist: Various Artists, Album: Peoples Potential Family Album, Genre: None, Score (1-10): 8.0 Album review: "The early 1980s was a strange period for funk, an unstable zone between the impending decline of disco at the tail end of 1979 and the skyrocketing mega-blockbuster ascendance of Thriller and 1999 in the winter months of 1982-83. For every group that managed to adapt to the Linn Drum era and score some actual hits, there were a dozen others that learned the hard way how tricky it was to maintain their funk credentials while adapting to the new sounds that the market demanded. These were the groups that stayed in their own local orbits, putting out independent and private-label releases that attempted to negotiate the disco/funk split with a foot on each dancefloor before finally clicking with the synthesized future. This is the realm that Peoples Potential Unlimited operates in, and Peoples Potential Family Album is a fine collection of the D.C. label's most interesting rediscoveries so far. Label operator Andrew Morgan is one of those curator types who takes pains to not only license his finds but track down the originators and give them their due. And this first compilation is a labor of crate-digger love that doubles as a look into the ground-level versions of vintage 80s funk archetypes from roller-boogie to go-go, recorded with garage-band looseness and studio polish alike. The first few tracks in the collection stand firmly on the side of the former. These are bands that, in an earlier era, would have fit in well with the lo-fi, J.B.'s-influenced woodshedder aspirants featured on collections of early- and mid-70s nuggets like The Funky 16 Corners and Jazzman's regional compilations. The gritty, disco-informed soul of tracks like Minority Band's "Live" and T.M.S.'s "Get the Feelin" are raw without being sloppy. There's actually something kind of rearview-looking about this stuff-- even through all the fat analog keyboards and Nile Rodgers-informed guitar, you can tell these bands were reaching back to the early-70s likes of B.T. Express and the Ohio Players even as they surged toward a rejuvenated new incarnation of funk. Then again, there's actually a song here called "Rejuvenate the Fonk", by the Oklahoma group Satellite Band, and its slap bass, squiggly keyboards, and handclap-heavy backbeat could place it as this compilation's figurehead. The core of Peoples Potential Family Album is the gleaming, synthesized boogie that personified the times, and if it's maybe a half-step below the best moments of Rick James or the Gap Band, that still puts these discoveries in a pretty impressive class. The crisp, sophisticated bounce of Midnight Express' "Danger Zone", Caprice's coolly seductive "Candy Man" (featuring Apollonia's sister Larnette Winston on vocals), and Checker Kabb's rubbery jam "By My Side" could've been R&B hits with a little more polish, luck, and distribution. As they turned out here, they're simply good examples of how smaller regional groups fit in to the bigger picture of an era in exciting stylistic flux. Like most rare groove compilations, there are just enough examples of weird, amateurish novelty to provide a bit of off-kilter personality. NoLa group Crunch's 1982 split "Cruise"/"Funky Beat" and the dub of Mix-O-Rap's "All Party People" drizzle wandering, frequently off-beat keyboard noodling over their supple percussion, and it feels like everything starts ricocheting at odd angles after a point. Stranger still is the Ballplayers, the circa-1980 musical side project of MLB journeymen Lenny Randle and Thad Bosley, whose instrumental "Universal Language" is a slice of wah-wah disco-funk that falls somewhere between Denny McLain's late-60s lounge-Hammond LPs and the 1986 single "Get Metsmerized" on the baseball-player-as-musician quality scale. But that's just the kind of label PPU is: championing gems and oddities alike, unearthing finds that shouldn't have been buried in the first place, and elevating long-lost coulda-beens into a new generation's under-heard heritage."

Sentridoh

Lou B's Wasted Pieces: 87-93

Rock

Mark Richardson

Cassette-only releases available via mail order from companies known only through zine advertisements... there's something so wonderfully quaint about the whole notion. What was it like to search so hard to find music during this time, when economy of scale meant investing in a dual-well deck and dubbing a run of tapes in your spare time? It really wasn't so long ago that such tapes were a path to a genuine underground, but it feels like another lifetime. I was there, I guess, but somehow it seems like something my parents told me about. In this marginal world of indie cassette releases, a world that has never registered even the slightest blip on the radar of the average pop culture consumer, Lou Barlow was king. Barlow first released cheaply recorded and mastered four-track material as Sebadoh, chose the name Sentridoh for his solo material once Sebadoh became a proper band, and also dabbled under his given name. All told, Barlow released a lot of material on cassettes and singles in the late 80s and early 90s, during the time before he obtained any kind of profile with The Folk Implosion or Sebadoh after it became a proper indie rock band. I'm only now starting to get a handle on how prolific Barlow was. I consider myself a fan, but after listening to Lou B's Wasted Pieces '87-'93, a collection of stray tracks and the previously released Wasted Pieces cassette, I realize I don't know the half of it. I was amazed to find zero overlap with either The Original Losing Losers or Lou Barlow and His Sentridoh, two long albums that have something like 55 songs between them. All this Sentridoh material is in addition to the four-track stuff Lou released as the pre-rock Sebadoh-- and to think that there are at least two other full-length Sentridoh CDs out there somewhere. How did Barlow do it? Well, the trick was, most of what he released wasn't very good. A significant portion of the songs that found release during this time were either unformed, one-take songs, or dippy tape experiments. The usual method for putting together records, this idea of combing through a stack of recordings, working to find the quality tracks, and mulling how they might best be presented, was of no interest to Barlow whatsoever with Sentridoh. His four-track aesthetic during this time was the musical equivalent of automatic writing: just fling every last scrap out into zineland and let the listener do the work of making sense of it. It might sound careless and indulgent, but it was an aesthetic that happened to yield some oddly arresting artifacts. There's a "1 + 1 = 3" kind of thing happening with Lou Barlow's home recorded music, and I've always enjoyed this stuff more than I should. Part of it is the powerful melancholy mood that floats through the recordings. No matter what sort of songs Barlow is doing-- joke tracks, misguided attempts at avant-garde sound manipulation, heartfelt confessional ballads-- they wind up sounding like the work of a lonely, depressive guy who smokes entirely too much weed. Barlow was obsessed with bodily fluids and disgusted with himself, and the records tended to have the dank, poorly lit atmosphere of a lived-in room in need of care. If you've ever spent a sad evening alone and thought to yourself, "Maybe I'll feel better if I take a hit and put on some music," you can understand the world of Lou Barlow. Lou B's Wasted Pieces '87-'93 has the cotton-mouthed, blunted folk vibe that Barlow essentially perfected, but the ratio of memorable songs to failed experiments is even lower than usual. There are 31 tracks here, but you would have to live with this CD for a hell of a long time before you could pick more than a couple out of a lineup. "Nitemare" is a great little song, the kind of simple acoustic pop that shows Barlow really did listen closely to Joni Mitchell's Blue. And I honestly think the shockingly effective "Organ", which later found release on the Kids soundtrack as "Raise the Bells" (there is a different song here with the same title), is a brilliant piece of drone music as dreamy and potent as any Boards of Canada instrumental. There are a few other highlights, but mixed between are too many mangled tape collages, too many spoken word interludes, and too many songs that don't so much go nowhere as not "go" period. Lou B's Wasted Pieces is an interesting time capsule, perhaps, but it's well down the list of Barlow's four-track product.

Artist: Sentridoh, Album: Lou B's Wasted Pieces: 87-93, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 4.6 Album review: "Cassette-only releases available via mail order from companies known only through zine advertisements... there's something so wonderfully quaint about the whole notion. What was it like to search so hard to find music during this time, when economy of scale meant investing in a dual-well deck and dubbing a run of tapes in your spare time? It really wasn't so long ago that such tapes were a path to a genuine underground, but it feels like another lifetime. I was there, I guess, but somehow it seems like something my parents told me about. In this marginal world of indie cassette releases, a world that has never registered even the slightest blip on the radar of the average pop culture consumer, Lou Barlow was king. Barlow first released cheaply recorded and mastered four-track material as Sebadoh, chose the name Sentridoh for his solo material once Sebadoh became a proper band, and also dabbled under his given name. All told, Barlow released a lot of material on cassettes and singles in the late 80s and early 90s, during the time before he obtained any kind of profile with The Folk Implosion or Sebadoh after it became a proper indie rock band. I'm only now starting to get a handle on how prolific Barlow was. I consider myself a fan, but after listening to Lou B's Wasted Pieces '87-'93, a collection of stray tracks and the previously released Wasted Pieces cassette, I realize I don't know the half of it. I was amazed to find zero overlap with either The Original Losing Losers or Lou Barlow and His Sentridoh, two long albums that have something like 55 songs between them. All this Sentridoh material is in addition to the four-track stuff Lou released as the pre-rock Sebadoh-- and to think that there are at least two other full-length Sentridoh CDs out there somewhere. How did Barlow do it? Well, the trick was, most of what he released wasn't very good. A significant portion of the songs that found release during this time were either unformed, one-take songs, or dippy tape experiments. The usual method for putting together records, this idea of combing through a stack of recordings, working to find the quality tracks, and mulling how they might best be presented, was of no interest to Barlow whatsoever with Sentridoh. His four-track aesthetic during this time was the musical equivalent of automatic writing: just fling every last scrap out into zineland and let the listener do the work of making sense of it. It might sound careless and indulgent, but it was an aesthetic that happened to yield some oddly arresting artifacts. There's a "1 + 1 = 3" kind of thing happening with Lou Barlow's home recorded music, and I've always enjoyed this stuff more than I should. Part of it is the powerful melancholy mood that floats through the recordings. No matter what sort of songs Barlow is doing-- joke tracks, misguided attempts at avant-garde sound manipulation, heartfelt confessional ballads-- they wind up sounding like the work of a lonely, depressive guy who smokes entirely too much weed. Barlow was obsessed with bodily fluids and disgusted with himself, and the records tended to have the dank, poorly lit atmosphere of a lived-in room in need of care. If you've ever spent a sad evening alone and thought to yourself, "Maybe I'll feel better if I take a hit and put on some music," you can understand the world of Lou Barlow. Lou B's Wasted Pieces '87-'93 has the cotton-mouthed, blunted folk vibe that Barlow essentially perfected, but the ratio of memorable songs to failed experiments is even lower than usual. There are 31 tracks here, but you would have to live with this CD for a hell of a long time before you could pick more than a couple out of a lineup. "Nitemare" is a great little song, the kind of simple acoustic pop that shows Barlow really did listen closely to Joni Mitchell's Blue. And I honestly think the shockingly effective "Organ", which later found release on the Kids soundtrack as "Raise the Bells" (there is a different song here with the same title), is a brilliant piece of drone music as dreamy and potent as any Boards of Canada instrumental. There are a few other highlights, but mixed between are too many mangled tape collages, too many spoken word interludes, and too many songs that don't so much go nowhere as not "go" period. Lou B's Wasted Pieces is an interesting time capsule, perhaps, but it's well down the list of Barlow's four-track product."

Doomtree

All Hands

Rap

Nate Patrin

To put on a Doomtree record is to commit to a certain amount of intense collective energy. Anything much more than that—left-field lyricism, hooks that sink their claws into you, a collection of beats that cohere into some loose future-is-now synthesis of electronic hip-hop—is a bonus, if an expected one. They fly banners in defiance of hierarchies: No Kings embodied that "the biggest thing we rule is ourselves" ethos, where calls to get on their level meant promises of camaraderie more than challenges for competition. And yet they pull weight when they make those calls to arms omnidirectional, ricocheting off each member and filling the room with all these different levels of signal-obscuring noise that make even the matter-of-fact stuff feel enigmatic. In other words, it's kind of an inner-circle sort of approach, no matter how big that circle's designed to get. A big-in-Minnesota cult act that's taken both local roots and global possibilities to heart, Doomtree's hard-earned success has built-in safeguards against complacency and predictability. For one thing, the youth-movement energy in their music remains even as their early thirties are settling in; last December's tenth annual weeklong Twin Cities-wide "Doomtree Blowout" was declared their last not out of encroaching middle-age burnout but because "we got to thinking about how incredibly lame and boring the idea of ever throwing a Blowout 11 sounded." And their new album All Hands bears out some of that urge to hit a reset button that doubles as a fast-forward. Written in a cabin with dicey-at-best cellular reception, All Hands feels cut off from most of the world outside their own universe. It's a blessing and a curse keeping a collaborative relationship between seven different artists—with five of them being MCs, and two of those MCs contributing beats alongside their two regular producers, it's both kind of amazing and really understandable how they've all been able to both maintain and move ahead without imploding after more than a decade. The complementary pieces are all keystones here, and stylistic variety—the focused punk-vibe grit-and-grind of P.O.S., Dessa's smooth venom, Cecil Otter reining in agitation, Sims and Mike Mictlan rounding out the rewind-demanding punchline barrage—is what keeps the album alive even when the words start to blur. Which they do, often. You can pick out the mood-setting references if you want: "Final Boss" has Sims paraphrasing The Karate Kid and finding stressed empathy with decline-era Kobe; P.O.S steers the vigilante study ".38 Airweight" with the art-imitates-life-imitates-art invocation of Bernhard Goetz and Charles Bronson (the latter not for the first time); Dessa rattles through a breathless itinerary on "The Bends" that sounds like instructions to an undercover fugitive. But each line feels more like a disconnected thought strung together in a more allusive whole, where you get the gist but still have to coax out the depth. "Gray Duck" alone is layers upon injokes upon regionalisms—the title's a reference to the Minnesota-specific variant on the childrens' game "duck duck goose", which in itself stands for their own ready-to-bolt restlessness, and it's filtered through everything from P.O.S.'s strength-through-confrontation approach ("All the fuck in your station/ All up in your dark/ Awkward in your Marc Maron conversations/ Call 'em out the park") to Dessa's elemental momentum ("Sparks on the pavement, dragging the chain/ Anchor's off, man, lost it again") to Sims' dichotomy-driven jokes ("I'm really real, half Built to Spill half Kill at Will"). So as you draw in messages that are more atmospheric than direct, there's still the allure of soaking in this music as music, all those contrasting voices turning comfortable truisms into uncomfortable knots. Voices harmonize in pop-punk-adjacent indie-anthem hooks. Lazerbeak and Paper Tiger (alongside Cecil and P.O.S.) deliver serrated, drum-splintering minor-key threat-beats fresh from the Neo Geo Orchestra. And the whole thing doesn't relieve the pressure on your chest until the vapor-trail comedown of closer "Marathon", which pares back the hovering-mothership menace just enough to reveal that this isn't music made to be stripped for parts: "When it all boils down, there's nothin' but bones left."

Artist: Doomtree, Album: All Hands, Genre: Rap, Score (1-10): 7.1 Album review: "To put on a Doomtree record is to commit to a certain amount of intense collective energy. Anything much more than that—left-field lyricism, hooks that sink their claws into you, a collection of beats that cohere into some loose future-is-now synthesis of electronic hip-hop—is a bonus, if an expected one. They fly banners in defiance of hierarchies: No Kings embodied that "the biggest thing we rule is ourselves" ethos, where calls to get on their level meant promises of camaraderie more than challenges for competition. And yet they pull weight when they make those calls to arms omnidirectional, ricocheting off each member and filling the room with all these different levels of signal-obscuring noise that make even the matter-of-fact stuff feel enigmatic. In other words, it's kind of an inner-circle sort of approach, no matter how big that circle's designed to get. A big-in-Minnesota cult act that's taken both local roots and global possibilities to heart, Doomtree's hard-earned success has built-in safeguards against complacency and predictability. For one thing, the youth-movement energy in their music remains even as their early thirties are settling in; last December's tenth annual weeklong Twin Cities-wide "Doomtree Blowout" was declared their last not out of encroaching middle-age burnout but because "we got to thinking about how incredibly lame and boring the idea of ever throwing a Blowout 11 sounded." And their new album All Hands bears out some of that urge to hit a reset button that doubles as a fast-forward. Written in a cabin with dicey-at-best cellular reception, All Hands feels cut off from most of the world outside their own universe. It's a blessing and a curse keeping a collaborative relationship between seven different artists—with five of them being MCs, and two of those MCs contributing beats alongside their two regular producers, it's both kind of amazing and really understandable how they've all been able to both maintain and move ahead without imploding after more than a decade. The complementary pieces are all keystones here, and stylistic variety—the focused punk-vibe grit-and-grind of P.O.S., Dessa's smooth venom, Cecil Otter reining in agitation, Sims and Mike Mictlan rounding out the rewind-demanding punchline barrage—is what keeps the album alive even when the words start to blur. Which they do, often. You can pick out the mood-setting references if you want: "Final Boss" has Sims paraphrasing The Karate Kid and finding stressed empathy with decline-era Kobe; P.O.S steers the vigilante study ".38 Airweight" with the art-imitates-life-imitates-art invocation of Bernhard Goetz and Charles Bronson (the latter not for the first time); Dessa rattles through a breathless itinerary on "The Bends" that sounds like instructions to an undercover fugitive. But each line feels more like a disconnected thought strung together in a more allusive whole, where you get the gist but still have to coax out the depth. "Gray Duck" alone is layers upon injokes upon regionalisms—the title's a reference to the Minnesota-specific variant on the childrens' game "duck duck goose", which in itself stands for their own ready-to-bolt restlessness, and it's filtered through everything from P.O.S.'s strength-through-confrontation approach ("All the fuck in your station/ All up in your dark/ Awkward in your Marc Maron conversations/ Call 'em out the park") to Dessa's elemental momentum ("Sparks on the pavement, dragging the chain/ Anchor's off, man, lost it again") to Sims' dichotomy-driven jokes ("I'm really real, half Built to Spill half Kill at Will"). So as you draw in messages that are more atmospheric than direct, there's still the allure of soaking in this music as music, all those contrasting voices turning comfortable truisms into uncomfortable knots. Voices harmonize in pop-punk-adjacent indie-anthem hooks. Lazerbeak and Paper Tiger (alongside Cecil and P.O.S.) deliver serrated, drum-splintering minor-key threat-beats fresh from the Neo Geo Orchestra. And the whole thing doesn't relieve the pressure on your chest until the vapor-trail comedown of closer "Marathon", which pares back the hovering-mothership menace just enough to reveal that this isn't music made to be stripped for parts: "When it all boils down, there's nothin' but bones left.""

Junip

Rope and Summit EP

Rock

Ian Cohen

José González cashes paystubs from Mute and is best known for covering Joy Division, the Knife, and Massive Attack, but his low-key charms as a singer-songwriter are never going to be considered "edgy." The building blocks of his music-- lightly plucked guitar, unhurried vocals, the occasional anti-establishment lyric-- makes it understandable for skeptics to paint him as merely a dorm-room fave. But even though it sounds strange to say, "there's more beyond the surface," to his unadorned music, at points Veneer and In Our Nature felt like what Krautrock or even minimal techno might sound like if they consisted solely of acoustic guitars. While it wasn't a sound that gave him a lot of room to maneuver, there always was underlying rhythmic force that could be hypnotic and haunting at the same time. And it's a quality that his reformed band Junip amplifies, quite literally, on Rope and Summit. "Got a rope and summit," González sings repeatedly at the outset, and while it's an economically evocative lyric, it's a bit of misdirection as to how Junip works. Theirs is a sound that doesn't move upward so much as downhill, accumulating its mass with sheer momentum. What's interesting is how little González needs to be pushed. A solo version of "Rope and Summit" might have been the most propulsive thing on any of his prior albums, but Elias Araya's drumwork gives it a vital pulse, while Tobias Winterkorn's drafty synths put meat on the bones. The rhythm section plays with a steady hand throughout Rope, favoring simplicity and shade while retaining the uncluttered sonic arranging that so often serves as a trademark of González's. But while the first half of Rope and Summit seems to suggest that Junip could very well be González songs hooked up to jumper cables, "At the Doors" and "Loops" show that they can go slack without falling apart or falling asleep. The former rides its dank bassline and rumbling tom fills for eight mesmerizing minutes, feeling like it was effortlessly unearthed from a jam session that could've gone on for twice as long. And when González gently sings "disconnect the loops" on Rope's gorgeous final track, it reflects on a looseness that fits somewhere between the late Talk Talk's more exploratory compositions (its central riff does have a passing resemblance to "Taphead") and the supine sungazing of Brightblack Morning Light. I'll concede that the actual "rock" factor of "Jose González's rock band" is overplayed: The only distortion on Rope pops up as a light dusting on González's vocals. But what can't be overstated is that this is a band, and one that plays with a sympathy toward each member's sounds, so that Rope comes off like the work of a band that's been together for a decade rather than off and on. We won't have to wait long to hear more from Junip-- a full-length drops in September, and if it holds serve from Rope, the only disappointment will be that González could've been holding out on us for too long.

Artist: Junip, Album: Rope and Summit EP, Genre: Rock, Score (1-10): 8.0 Album review: "José González cashes paystubs from Mute and is best known for covering Joy Division, the Knife, and Massive Attack, but his low-key charms as a singer-songwriter are never going to be considered "edgy." The building blocks of his music-- lightly plucked guitar, unhurried vocals, the occasional anti-establishment lyric-- makes it understandable for skeptics to paint him as merely a dorm-room fave. But even though it sounds strange to say, "there's more beyond the surface," to his unadorned music, at points Veneer and In Our Nature felt like what Krautrock or even minimal techno might sound like if they consisted solely of acoustic guitars. While it wasn't a sound that gave him a lot of room to maneuver, there always was underlying rhythmic force that could be hypnotic and haunting at the same time. And it's a quality that his reformed band Junip amplifies, quite literally, on Rope and Summit. "Got a rope and summit," González sings repeatedly at the outset, and while it's an economically evocative lyric, it's a bit of misdirection as to how Junip works. Theirs is a sound that doesn't move upward so much as downhill, accumulating its mass with sheer momentum. What's interesting is how little González needs to be pushed. A solo version of "Rope and Summit" might have been the most propulsive thing on any of his prior albums, but Elias Araya's drumwork gives it a vital pulse, while Tobias Winterkorn's drafty synths put meat on the bones. The rhythm section plays with a steady hand throughout Rope, favoring simplicity and shade while retaining the uncluttered sonic arranging that so often serves as a trademark of González's. But while the first half of Rope and Summit seems to suggest that Junip could very well be González songs hooked up to jumper cables, "At the Doors" and "Loops" show that they can go slack without falling apart or falling asleep. The former rides its dank bassline and rumbling tom fills for eight mesmerizing minutes, feeling like it was effortlessly unearthed from a jam session that could've gone on for twice as long. And when González gently sings "disconnect the loops" on Rope's gorgeous final track, it reflects on a looseness that fits somewhere between the late Talk Talk's more exploratory compositions (its central riff does have a passing resemblance to "Taphead") and the supine sungazing of Brightblack Morning Light. I'll concede that the actual "rock" factor of "Jose González's rock band" is overplayed: The only distortion on Rope pops up as a light dusting on González's vocals. But what can't be overstated is that this is a band, and one that plays with a sympathy toward each member's sounds, so that Rope comes off like the work of a band that's been together for a decade rather than off and on. We won't have to wait long to hear more from Junip-- a full-length drops in September, and if it holds serve from Rope, the only disappointment will be that González could've been holding out on us for too long."