Review Round-Up: July 2014

Beverly
Careers

Frankie Rose's lush, luminous alto has become one of the most reliably bewitching sounds in indiedom, as she's fed us a steady stream of hazy, shimmering pop records – including two great full-lengths in the last two years – that are atmospheric, dynamic and catchy in equal measure. Beverly, the Brooklyn badass/scene linchpin's team-up with singer-guitarist Drew Citron (who also plays in Rose's band), is cut from extremely similar cloth: there are no synths here, less overall sheen, and definitely a bit more noise and rock'n'roll crunch to the guitars – particularly on the spiky beach-punk instrumental "Ambular" – but any additional grit or post-punky darkness is nicely balanced by that familiar gleaming, underlying warmth. (Although Citron wrote most of the material, the duo's voices, twinned in harmony almost throughout, are nearly indistinguishable.) Coming so quickly in the wake of Rose's truly magical solo work, this project carries a slight whiff of routine, businesslike productivity – they did title it Careers, after all – but there's nothing wrong with punching the clock when the results are so dependably swoony.

Honeyblood
Honeyblood

The honey, in the music of this Glaswegian two-piece – the awesomely named Stina Tweeddale and Shona McViccar – comes in the viscous richness of Stina's cooed, frequently self-harmonized vocals; the blood's in the meaty, vital churn of her guitarwork and the steady, forceful thump of Shona's drums. There's blood spit (and spilt) in snarly choruses like "Why won't you just grow up?" and "Super Rat"'s just-so-we're-clear tirade: "I will hate you forever/scumbag sleaze slimeball grease/You really do disgust me" – but then we find Stina "wishing I was waking up in my boy's arms," with all the melty sweetness of Best Coast at their gooiest. (They have their more insightful moments too, like noting that "cynics never fall in love/they just blame it on lust.") Point being, these lasses have some range. Starting from a debut that spans crunchy, punky indie-pop hookfests ("Killer Bangs"); smart, Speedy Ortiz-style grunge revivalism, and retro-ey hints of country and surf, Honeyblood have plenty of possibilities, and a ton of potential – but they're also pretty darn potent already. originally published in Magnet Magazine



Lana Del Rey
Ultraviolence
[Pop/Singer-Songwriter]

Ultraviolence (Interscope) strips all of the hip-hop, and much of the Hollywood (though not the cinema, per se), out of Lana Del Rey's signature vibe, making it less magnificently fantastical but not necessarily any more realist; less sonically striking – that unmistakable breathy, languorous alto aside – but hardly less rapturously absorbing.  Nothing sounds like a single – or else, they all do – so it all just sinks deep into a bluesy, glam-tinted wallow – call it bummertime sadness – blurring into a continuous, elegantly framed soft-focus, slow-motion montage. [B+]

Soft Pink Truth
Why Do The Heathen Rage?
[Electronic/Conceptual]

Drew Daniel – Shakespeare scholar and half of merrie electronic meta-pranksters Matmos – is no stranger to epically conceptual goofiness, but Why Do The Heathen Rage? (Thrill Jockey) is his most brilliantly, gleefully demented project yet.  Subtitled “Electronic Profanations of Black Metal Classics,” it drags Venom, Mayhem and Darkthrone songs, kicking and screaming, through a frothy miasma of breakbeat rave, acid techno, industrial glitch-core and full-on diva house, riddled with queer theory and impishly Satanic irreverence.  Metal devotees and EDM purists should proceed with extreme caution and (antithetical) open-mindedness; fans of fun – and utter, manic absurdity – should dive right in, especially those who think as hard as they party. [A-]

Craig Leon
Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol I: Nommos/Visiting
[Electronic/Ambient]

Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 1 (RVNG Intl.) unearths (and precisely replicates) two utterly fascinating albums of early, private synthesizer music – Nommos (1980) and Visiting (1982) – envisioned by this NYC composer (and producer of seemingly every seminal punk debut) as emulating the extra-terrestrial musical transmissions central to the star-gazing cosmology of Mali's Dogon people.  The music – full of ritualistic repetition and otherworldly texture; warm, entrancing drones and subtle, curious rhythmic shifts – is as strange, timeless, ancient and alien as its labyrinthine backstory suggests, but it compels on so many levels largely through its uncanny, unassuming simplicity. [A-]

Deru
1979
[Ambient]

It's tough doing more justice to the prevailing vibe of 1979 (Friend of Friends), this LA composer/producer's latest offering (which also comes with an interactive visual/video counterpart), than the titles he's given to its murky, melancholic instrumentals: "Addictive Yearning." "Let The Silence Float." "Drink It In." They don't feel like compositions so much as ebbing, flowing fields of sound; rich, thick yet subtly muted jazzy ambience centered around drippy, soft-edged electric piano clusters, awash in analog pop and hiss; beatless – or nearly so – but never quite static; suffused with some deep-set but not-quite-expressible emotion. [A-]


Brian Eno • Karl Hyde
High Life
[Pop/Experimental]

The second full-length collaboration in just three months between avant-overlord Eno and Underworld frontman Hyde, the loose, vibrant High Life (Warp) unexpectedly resurrects the African-inspired, texture-jamming groove language first established in the former's foundational early-'80s explorations with David Byrne and Talking Heads, with Hyde's bright, glassy guitar work (and occasional vocals) highlighting a high-summer romp through terse, jittery chop-up funk and softly beaming, uplifting long-form pop.  It's the most vital – and flat-out fun – Eno has sounded in ages.
[B+]

DJ Dodger Stadium
Friends of Mine
[Electronic]

Jerome LOL and Samo Sound Boy – two LA beatsters with terrible taste in monikers – join forces on Friend of Mine (Body High), an understated but emphatically heart-sleeved house record that recalls Moby’s Play in its ready, bubbly accessibility and unabashed (indeed, incessant) foregrounding of soulful vocal loops.  It also evokes

Fatboy Slim’s excitable filter work, gospel predilection and

transcendently thumping repetition.  Such reference points are hardly enticements to today’s taste-conscious technophiles, but this stuff’s so beautifully constructed – with its focused, just-busy-enough beatwork and keen sense of build and release – that it’ll win them over right along with the rest of us. [B]

RiFF RAFF
Neon Icon
[Hip-Hop]

Kitchen-sink pop culture references + Mad Lib rhyme games + sports-nerd free-association + multiple personality mania + absurdly eclectic braggadocio (“hot like five saunas; my shoelaces are iguana”; “I can shoot a BB through a frosted Cheerio”; “no kids, no wife, no

child support“) + absurdly exploded expectations + absurdly divided Metacritic scores + Rick Ross x Soulja Boy ÷ Big Sean - Vanilla Ice + “the white [insert random black celebrity]” + Versace Versace Versace [wifebeater; glock; sleeping bag] + Swishahouse ratchet-trap + Cypress

Hill G-funk + bubblegum electro-R&B + Jonny Greenwood guitar flutters + hallucinatory autotune gloss-pop + (Diplo-produced; B-52s-esque) surf-rap [why is this not a thing??] + aw-shucks tearjerker hick-hop + dolphin noises... = NEON iCON (Mad Decent) [B]

Big Freedia
Just Be Free
[Bounce/Dance]

The NoLA bounce monarch's unflagging, Herculean campaign to liberate and oscillate the asses of the planet – via tireless touring; vividly viral booty-twerk vids; reality television – hasn't left much time for pedestrian concerns like making albums, but Just Be Free (Queen Diva), unsurprisingly, approaches that proposition with the same imperious sass and aplomb she brings to everything else: it's a delirious, non-stop tear through rump-wiggling anthemics, spiked with enough sonic tweaks – funky horns, intergalactic stutters, ghetto-house breakbeats, insta-coined catchphrases – to stay fresh without deflecting the prime, pious directive of keeping those cheeks clapping. 

[B+]

Bleachers
[Pop/Rock]
concert preview

Finally, some freaking summer jams!  In a season that’s been woefully thin on windows-down fist-pumpers, fun. guitarist Jack Antonoff brings the goods with a mostly-solo side project that’s lousy with instant anthems and equally potent deep cuts.  Strange Desire (RCA) – which has the exultant gang-chanted choruses, martial stomp and giddy, maximalist production ethos of his meal-ticket band, but only about a third of the gloss – is a thrilling and unabashed homage to New Wave synth-rock of the “Dancing With Myself“/“Dancing In The Dark” era (see also: Big Country, Tears for Fears, Modern English...) but it’s got far too much idiosyncratic heart, and too many surprises up its sleeve (Grimes! Yoko Ono! Kid A/Múm-level electro-skitters!), to reduce to mere retro-pop pastiche.

Temples
[Rock/Pop]
concert preview

Per the handle, Kettering, UK’s Temples are a reverent lot, taking their place alongside Holland’s Jacco Gardner, Sweden’s Dungen and Australia’s Tame Impala and – in their less ravey moments – Jagwar Ma in an international monastic order devoted to ritually summoning the precise spirit and sound of a sunny, swirly day in 1967.  Sun Structures (Fat Possum), the band’s buoyant, Byrds-besotted debut, is duly and lovingly lavished with twelve-strings and Mellotrons, drippily phased vocals and fuzz-tone bass, offering a particularly crisp and tidy psych-pop simulacrum – with some slightly revisionist 21st-century boom and crunch to the drum sounds – one that airbrushes out most of the era’s darker, trippier excesses without ever stinting on the melody or mysticism.

Kitten/Kitty
[Pop/Dance/Hip-Hop]
concert preview

And this week's prize for most absurdly apt bandname combo – besting White Hills/Pink Mountaintops; on par with last month's Potty Mouth/Swearin' pairing – goes to... two spunky mid-'90s babies, both among the most endearing live performers in recent memory, each of whom manifests her own distinct aspect of felinity.  Daytona Beach rapper/tumblr-princess Kitty (fka Kitty Pryde) – whose Impatiens EP re-clinches both her ear for innovative sparkle-thump and her deftly breezy mic smartz – is all frisky-smug "totes adorbs, but still sorta way too hip for you," but like, nice about it – whereas Chloe Chaidez, frontlady and raison d'être of LA glam-popsters Kitten, and a total spitfire on stage, has more of a husky, feral, cat-in-heat vibe.  Her band's pretty-great eponymous debut (Elektra) shelves their punkier tendencies for an emo '80s gloss not far removed from recent tourmate Charli XCX, though the semi-acoustic closer indicates there's some Alanis in the DNA too.  Now, where's Chan Marshall at?'

Hospitality
[Pop/Rock]
concert preview

This Merge-signed, Brooklyn-based trio charmed us two years back with the effortless indie-pop of their debut, but their fuller richness took some time to sink in: the album went down so sweet and breezy it was easy to miss its smart, subtle adventurousness and the undercurrent of wistful restraint beneath Amber Papini's clear-eyed, elegantly winsome vocals.  This year's Trouble – despite the band's unmistakable late-summer shimmer, they keep dropping records in January – announced itself, title on down, as a darker, more grown-up affair, venturing variably into spikier, synthier, grittier and generally more new wave-tinted territory, without losing its predecessor's delectably light touch – but most of those seemingly new developments were really there all along, if you were listening close enough.

Fat Creeps
[Rock]
concert preview

Last summer, these beloved Boston lady-rockers toured with Philly faves Bleeding Rainbow, which makes a lot of sense since the two bands share a lot of the same punky-sweet DNA and have a similar scrappy, lo-fi charm; equally given to scuffed-up riffs, dreamily drony haze

and pretty swooning melodies.  This time they’re making the rounds behind super-infectious debut long-player Must Be Nice (Sophomore Lounge), which balances out their self-styled “lazy” garage-rock crunch with plenty of dark, moody spaciness, Mariam Saleh and Gracie Jackson’s dead-eyed close-harmony coos and Saleh’s deliciously loose-slung surf-pop basslines.

Viet Cong
[Rock]
concert preview

Two of Viet Cong's four members were in the belated, beloved Calgary band Women, and they carry forward many recognizable strands of that group's dour, textural post-punk.  But the seven songs – demos, theoretically – comprising their 2013 debut release Cassette (first presented in the titular format and reissued this week, semi-confusingly, on vinyl, by Mexican Summer) contain more divergent musical directions, and possibly more color and melody, than Women's entire output: from the crisp, Jam-flavored power-pop of "Throw It Away" to dissonant, shape-shifting kraut-punk closer "Select Your Drone," with a couple scraggly, Lilys-ish paisley psych ditties and a full-throttle Bauhaus cover along the way.  Per their great performances at this year's SXSW, the band is also tremendous fun to watch, with an engrossing and surprisingly playful onstage dynamic.

Pink Mountaintops
[Rock]
concert preview

It's probably fair – and, I think, no slander – to say that Vancouver's Stephen McBean specializes in record-collector rock, both in his "day job" band – the psych/prog/proto-metal-updating, all-around Zeppelin-worshipping Black Mountain – and, perhaps especially, with this (ostensibly) lighter, (decidedly) lower-fi, (theoretically) solo side-outlet.  Let's see: Get Back(Jagjaguwar) – the first 'Tops outing since '09's relatively polished Outside Love – is titled after a Beatles tune; the first cut quotes Bowie in its chorus and the second enshrines 1987's "second summer of love," while lyrical allusions to "teenage kicks," "fascination street," etc. abound throughout.  Even so, the referents, and the reverences, are predominantly musical, from fuzz-drenched Jesus and Mary Chain janglefests and dingy, dinged-up Springsteenisms to post-punk rave-ups and scuzzball psych comparable to the kraut-damaged headspace of recent Primal Scream.

Dub Thompson
[Rock/Experimental]
concert preview

Like their quasi-labelmates and spiritual big brothers in Foxygen – whose Jonathan Rado produced their recklessly rickety debut – this LA duo of teenage noiseniks work in a sort of manic adolescent piecemeal pastiche.  But where the Foxys favor a sunny, '60s-steeped retro-rock palette that, even at its most sprawling, still tends to foreground melody, these guys plunge headfirst into the darkest, scraggliest reaches of post-punk and bad-trip psychedelia.  9 Songs (Dead Oceans) contains eight songs (jerks!!) and only about two and a half hooks – most of which are contained in the tense reggae scorcher "No Time" (Rado on organ), and another quarter or so in the prerecorded Casio demo that serves as "Dograces"' goof of an outro.  Not so much enfants terribles as full-on child terrors.

O O I O O
[Experimental]
concert preview

Japan's O O I O O (pronounce it by saying each letter aloud) – the mercurial, all-female quartet led by the ineffable Yoshimi P-We – started life as a side-line to the similarly unpredictable sound-rock experiments she conducts with the Boredoms, but as of this century they've actually been somewhat more active than their ostensible "parent" band – even though their new, seventh album, Gamel (Thrill Jockey), is their first in five years.  Per its title, the record incorporates the microtonal dings, clangs and bongs of Indonesian gamelan metallophones as a central component in its candy-coated craziness, augmenting a typically odd concatenation of chants, thumps, bursts of choral harmony and feral-guitar squawks for a serpentine sonic melee that is maddening and exhilarating, exotic and chaotic in equal measure.

Laura Cantrell
[Singer-Songwriter/Folk]
concert preview

Laura Cantrell sports something of a dual lineage: a bona-fide Nashville native whose last album was a tribute to country queen Kitty Wells, she's also a Brooklynite veteran of WFMU and Matador Records, and a favorite of the late John Peel.  So it fits that she's touring with Camera Obscura, Scottish indie-poppers whose fine 2013 effort Desire Lines found them tacking increasingly toward Americana – and whose Tracyanne Campbell, incidentally, co-wrote one of the dozen near-perfect tunes on Cantrell's new record; her first set of originals since 2005 (Franklin Bruno co-wrote two others.)  No Way There From Here (Thrift Shop) is a warm, affectionate, poignantly personal set striking a country/folk/roots-pop sweet spot similar to Kelly Hogan, Devon Sproule, Caitlin Rose (who provides some harmonies) or Neko Case at her most direct.

originally published in Philadelphia City Paper

2012 Review Round-Up: August

it's december! here's the plan: as i work my way toward year-end musical festivities (listing! mixing! feasting!), i'm rounding up all (or nearly all) of my writerly output from 2012 with a series of posts, one per day, one for each month, over the next eleven (or twelve?) days. or bust!

and here we have august.  some pretty nice writing here, i think, especially in some o the citypaper concert previews down below.  but we'll start off with something a bit less riveting, although the cover's pretty nice.
Ombre
Believe You Me

In 2011, Roberto Lange "remixed" Julianna Barwick's typically lovely, diaphanous "Vow" under his Helado Negro alias; essentially borrowing a few tightly-looped clusters of dense, amorphous sound as a foundation on which to construct an entirely new song in his own free-floating electro-folk-pop style, complete with laconic Spanish vocal. While it offered a fine general indication of the aesthetic commonalities the two Asthmatic Kitty labelmates would later investigate in their collaboration as OMBRE, they manage to find a more equitable, and more rewarding meeting point on the full-length Believe You Me, which was recorded as they were just getting to know one another as friends. It feels that way: loose, exploratory, warmly generous and open-minded, eager to share and learn, but still with a slight sense of polite restraint. They're good influences on each other too. Working together seems to soften and moderate, rather than augment, each artist's distinctive qualities – Lange's playful looseness helps enliven Barwick's somewhat somber, unruffled calm just as, conversely, her penchant for almost ascetic sparsity tempers his tendency for stuffing his productions with curious sonic clutter – but they still emerge with plenty of idiosyncrasies intact. Since the ethereal purity of Barwick's solo work is probably the more singular and easily adulterated of their two aesthetics – and since Lange is already by nature a collage artist (and, relatively speaking, a mild maximalist) – the album is perhaps inevitably closer in sound and structure to an Helado effort, but Barwick's voice is still unmistakably present throughout, both literally – if at times substantially muffled and refracted – and evocatively. With its dappled, Sunday-afternoon sonics and occasional flirtations with bossa nova (on "Weight Those Words" and "Tormentas," perhaps the most straightforward things here), Believe You Me calls to mind similarly dreamy, bi-lingual collaborative efforts by the likes of Amor de Dias, Smokey & Miho and Savath y Savalas (of which Lange is a sometime member.) But this is also much more of abstract, "experimental" affair than a pop one, as friendly and approachable as it is – only a fraction of the selections could properly be described as songs, and even those tend to spiral off down unexpected textural avenues. Lange and Barwick employ an impressive array of instrumental (and electronic) means throughout the album's soundscapes, beyond judicious use of Barwick's inimitable one-woman chorale – from the muted trumpet and slow nylon strums of the bookending "Noche Brilla" to the numbing piano-based micro-loops of "Sense," "Dawning"'s billowing soundclouds and sussurrating harp, and "The Nod"'s motley assortment of plucked strings, ambient rustlings, vibraphone, slippery upright bass, and harmonium. But it all serves the same spacious, softly meditative and (as you might imagine from some of those titles) satisfyingly sleepy end.
originally published at AllMusic.com

∆ [Alt-J]
An Awesome Wave

For a group geeky enough to name themselves after a Greek character and/or a Mac keyboard shortcut (albeit erroneously: the actual keystrokes for typing ∆ are option+J – so there!) and to give their debut the horrifically dorky title "An Awesome Wave," Alt-J (as I guess we call them) play it pretty cool. Sure, the lyrics, if you catch them, tend toward bookish brainsplatters of poetic quasi-abstraction ("broom-shaped pleasure, deep greedy and Googling every corner"...?), but sonically speaking it's all smooth surfaces and achingly artful sophistication. And while much has been made, in the breathless Britpress, of their genre-hopping unpinnability, the album's sound is actually fairly constant – conjoining the elegant moodiness of Wild Beasts, the xx and TV on the Radio (particularly on slyly erotic standouts "Tesselate" and "Dissolve Me") to the acoustic earnestness of England's neo-folk throng (and anchored by Thom Green's oddly tinny jitter-funk drumming.) As with both of these camps, the Cantabridgian quartet flourish largely on the merits of their vocal prowess, which – if you can forgive frontman Joe Newman's mildly cloying, Corganish cragginess – is considerable: layered, blended and swoony in broad, cleverly-deployed harmony. Still, for all its filigree, Awesome remains firmly on the polite side of prog – it could really use more of the inspired quirkiness they flash in the OCD plainsong of the album's first untitled interlude. It's all very impressive (and, well, pretty), but that doesn't necessarily mean it leaves much of an impression. [6/10]

The Darkness
Hot Cakes

The Darkness suddenly seem a lot less outrageous than when they last put an album out, some seven years ago,. Maybe it's just the times: we've come a long way toward working out our collective irony issues – and have certainly grown desensitized to any and all '80s-revivalism ticklishness – since they and their zebra-print spandex catsuits first touched down in the early '00s. The once-inescapable line of inquiry – "Wait, are they serious?" –– now just seems irrelevant, and boring besides. Hence: Justin Hawkins' falsetto remains in full, preposterous, glorious effect throughout, but Hot Cakes – title notwithstanding – isn't really trying to be funny so much as just plain fun. And it is. Genre affectations aside – and by now they've been nailing their target aesthetic for so long that they've probably got as much claim to it as anyone – The Darkness have always been champs at penning solid, tuneful rock-pop, and they manage a small tackle-box worth of hooks here, ditching their second album's baroque (faux?) pretensions to reboot their debut's uncluttered directness. Plus, if it is novelty you're after, there's the blistering, shred-heavy overhaul of Radiohead's "Street Spirit," which succeeds, mostly, because it's hardly a stretch – it was practically a Kansas song to begin with.
originally published in Magnet Magazine

Christian Löffler
A Forest
[Electronic]

Like park-ranger-turned-beat-wrangler Dominik Eulberg and, especially, the peerless Pantha du Prince (to whom he bears a conspicuous, undeniable resemblance), Cologne producer Christian Löffler has a rare gift for collapsing the metaphorical distance between electronic music and the natural world. The modestly luxuriant productions comprising A Forest (Ki) are nothing revolutionary – dubby, wintry, melodic, essentially ambient house – but they pulse and glow almost like living, breathing things; effortlessly gliding, meticulously ordered, but with a wondrous, immersive ebb and flow that makes for an emotional balm as pure and soothing as a secluded woodland stroll.

Grasscut
Unearth
[Electronic/Acoustic]

Every bit as fragrant as their rustically redolent moniker suggests, Brighton duo Grasscut cultivate a characteristically British blend of wist and whimsy on their lush, poetic second outing, Unearth (Ninja Tune), meandering through pastures left largely unplowed since the fertile days of early-aughts lap-pop and evoking the genteel art-pop eccentricity of Robert Wyatt (who also makes a cameo), the lavender longueur of the Clientele, a smidge of the Chap's cheekiness, all refracted through a gently cinematic glitch-pop pastoralism highly reminiscent of the underappreciated Tunng (imagine a more earnest, more English read on the Books' electro-folk cut-ups.)

Antony and the Johnsons
Cut The World
[Live/Antony]

There's no applause until the very end; nothing, excepting the eight-minute Wiccan/eco-political/gender-philosophical monologue "Future Feminism" (a sui generis tone-setter if there ever was one) marking Cut The World (Secretly Canadian) as a live document. But it's evident anyhow, as the album achieves the seemingly impossible by actually magnifying the intimacy of Antony & the Johnsons' previous, studio efforts. We know the voice, of course – ineffable, indelible; as comforting by now in its familiarity as its elementality – and the orchestrations here only underscore its potency, rendering the songs (ten old, one new) both more tender and newly, magnificently expansive.

Ry Cooder
Election Special
[Roots/Protest]

Ry Cooder's second political record in as many years, Election Special (Nonesuch) is an unbridled blast of caustically satirical left-wing invective. It's also just a blast, period: his riffs are as righteous as his fury; his frets as compelling as his ever-luminous fretwork. Channeling his unsurpassed mastery of American vernacular forms – two-step country; swampy Delta blues; gloriously ragged rock'n'roll; mandolin-flecked folk – the wry ol' coot variously impersonates a frisky RNC conventioneer, a literally Faustian Charles Koch, a woe-begotten Obama, and Mitt's infamously roof-racked pooch, while just-so-happening to mention Jim Crow on roughly half the songs, and also gives us a great sing-along Occupy anthem.

Sofrito
International Soundclash
[World/Dance]

A globe-trotting crate-digging compilation from London-based Sofrito collective (DJ Hugo Mendes and producer Frankie Francis) International Soundclash (Strut) is crammed with raw, gritty and above-all propulsive grooves stemming from the Carribean to West and Central Africa and points beyond, and from 1976 to 2012 (though in most cases you'd be hard-pressed to tell which was which.) There's plenty of reliably smoking soca, cumbia, zouk and Afrobeat, but better still are cross-pollinated oddities like Bell'a Njoh's wibbly Cameroonian disco and Concept Neuf's steel pans 'n' vibraslaps take on blaxploitation funk.

Why?
Sod In The Seed EP
[Indie]

Yoni Wolf has relegated some mighty fine work to EPs in the past (check 2005's Sanddollars), and the quick six-track Sod in the Seed (Anticon) – WHY?'s rust-free, revved-into-gear re-entry after a three-year absence – fully follows suit, rife with conflicted off-the-cuff mission statements, logorrheic confessionals, and Wolf's trademarked, succulently serpentine nested rhymes ("rehearsing slow lewd winks nude at the mens' room sink") set atop some of the band's richest, most playful musical textures yet (bongos, glockenspiels, scat-sample chorales.) Makes you wonder what wonders they're saving up for their Fall-slated full-length.

Dirty Projectors
Swing Lo Magellan
[Indie Rock/Pop]

What's gotten into the Dirty Projectors? For a band that never met an "interesting," awkwardly arty digression they didn't like, Dave Longstreth and co. (whose scheduled date Saturday was scrapped presumably, annoyingly, to bolster their Made in America draw) seem to have made their peace with palatability on Swing Lo Magellan (Domino): they've hardly shed their endemic quirks (that off-kilter rhythmic twitchiness, those rickety-lush harmonies), but in embracing a newfound simplicity – cresting with "Impregnable Question"'s sublime, disarming directness: "You're my love, and I want you in my life" – those eccentricities seem suddenly, satisfyingly unforced, and take on their own sort of normalcy.

Divine Fits
A Thing Called Divine Fits
[Rock/Pop]

What is this Thing Called Divine Fits? (Merge) It's the sort of record Britt Daniel could probably knock out in his sleep: effortlessly stylish; textural and terse; flat-out terrific-sounding. Yeah, Wolf Parader/Handsome Fur Dan Boeckner gets equal writing/vocal billing and brings the (sometimes downright Baba O'Riley) synthesizer substrata, and New Bomb Turk Sam Brown mans the skins nimbly, but the Spoon frontman's tragically hip fingerprints are all over this album's steely tough-guy pop, striking all the right poses from noisy puncher ("What Gets You Alone") to pretty, acoustic one ("Civilian Stripes"), plus an atypically emo cover tune ("Shivers.")

Yeasayer
Fragrant World
[Psych/Pop]

In a world – heck, a borough – crammed with sorta-electronic, sorta-groovy bands camping out at the nebulous intersection between pop and art, Yeasayer have managed to stake out a peculiar timbre – just the right blend of groggy, squirmy synth patches and earnest, earthy vocals – that remains unmistakable despite their near-constant musical evolution. Fragrant World (Secretly Canadian) is their slyest, most satisfying work yet, a smoother synthesis of the world-beat and R&B elements that still loom in their DNA, mostly eschewing big pop moments in favor of lots of nifty little ones.

Teengirl Fantasy
Tracer
[Electronic]

Teengirl Fantasy seem to average one glimmer of dancefloor transcendence for every album's worth of woozy, implacable New Age-tinted synth-goop. 7AM had solid-gold soul/house scorcher "Cheaters"; Tracer (True Panther), for all its wibbly electro burbles, panflute presets and acid-laced jello shots (and fine vocal spots by Panda Bear, R&B thrush Kelela and weirdtronica fellow-traveller Laurel Halo) only really gets down to business on the hard-jacking "Do It"; tapping Daft Punk's "One More Time" crooner Romanthony, brashly aiming for that anthem's immortal, hedonistic euphoria, and just about nailing it.

Carsie Blanton
[Folk/Pop]
concert preview

Philly-based songstress (and local swing dance scene-queen) Carsie Blanton might not look like the type to inspire much trepidation, but when the curly-headed, "cute as a kidney bean" charmer advises a timid suitor, midway through her excellent new album, "I ain't gonna hurt you honey/I ain't even half your size," it's clear enough why he might need the reminder. This is a woman who does not mince words. Throughout the self-released Idiot Heart, Blanton waxes unblushingly frank about exactly what (and who) she wants (when not detailing the sometimes less sanguine consequences of getting what she wished for), atop a groove-rich musical landscape that spans her typical jazz-inflected folk-pop and digs deeper into loose acoustic funk but also manages to live up to maybe her least-likely avowed inspiration, Elvis Costello: "Together Too Long" could pass for one of his Blood & Chocolate kiss-offs, while "All We Got" loosely rewrites Trust's "Lovers Walk."

Alvarius B
[Folk/Absurdism]
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Now here's what I call freak folk. Alvarius B., less fancifully known as Alan Bishop of long-running weirdo kings Sun City Girls, snarls and warbles with an inspired dementia that recalls Captain Beefheart in mystical troubadour mode, or maybe Dylan at his most sneering and surrealistic, but there's really nothing that can compare to his snaggle-toothed, near-tourettic and thoroughly filthy fingerpicked phantasies. His second self-titled album, originally released as a double-LP in 1998 and now reissued on the Girls' Abduction imprint, finds him scrawling his way across the fretboard on forty-five cuts of warped, droney blues such as "Seeing-eye Latte" and "Sex cult from university," while raving about, for instance, a grandpa who "sucked all of Arabia from a herbivore's labia." It sets a pretty definitive upper limit of weirdness for music made by just one guy with an acoustic guitar.

Hundred Waters
[New Age/Neo-Classical]
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They're called Hundred Waters, but it's abundantly evident that – elementally speaking – this Gainesville, FL quintet is far better represented by Air. (In Ayurvedic terms – which feels appropriate somehow – they're clearly Vatas.)  It's in their spacious, gracefully hushed arrangements, wherein stately neo-baroque faerie folk commingles with the gentlest of lap-pop glitchery and sputtering digital twinkles; in their gauzy juxtaposition of the cerebral and the fantastical; in the effortless way they drift through nigh-unchartable time signatures; and especially in Nicole Miglis breathy, frequently choralized whipped-cream wisp of a voice (a dead ringer for Twin Sister's Andrea Estella, with a dollop of Regina Spektor loopiness and a whiff of Joanna Newsom.) And now, after initially releasing their self-titled debut on the tiny Elestial Sound, they've signed with Skrillex – a fiery, Pitta sort if ever there was one, with seemingly zero musical commonalities save that they both own computers – for a remix EP and forthcoming rerelease on his Owsla imprint. Well, here's to seeking balance in all things.

Meek Mill
[Hip-Hop]
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Meek Mill may sport the least hard-sounding moniker in the game, but he seems well-positioned to become arguably the biggest-deal rapper out of Philadelphia in ages, if not ever. He's got a name-making deal with the absurdly uncrushable Rick Ross' Maybach Music Group, a lauded string of mixtapes culminating in May's guest-studded Dreamchasers 2 – a solid showcase of his canny knack for cadence, unflaggingly exuberant if somewhat monochromatic delivery, and easy facility with the brash, aspirational tropes of modern street rap – and even a tailor-made bit of buzz-stirring beef with North Philly pastor Jomo Johnson over breezily sacreligious summer jam "Amen" (the Reverend's argument seemed relatively fatuous, though he may have had a point aesthetically speaking.) True to big-league hip-hop form, Mill's now got a delayed release date for his forthcoming Warner Bros. debut (pushed back from next week to Halloween), but album-hawking or not these hometown shows – likely his last at this intimate a venue for a while – promise to be a major event.

Big Freedia
[Bounce/Hip-Hop]
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You can read about Big Freedia – for example, in the 2010 New York Times feature that helped introduce New Orleans' gender-flouting, booty-bobbling "sissy bounce" phenomenon to the asses of the masses, or in the web's-worth of breathless testimonials that've ensued since then as she's traversed the nation setting untold behinds quivering in her wake. You can listen to her music – most recently the "God Save the Queen Diva" mixtape, which in true gutter-bounce appropriationist style slices up Little Richard, Diana Ross, and Freddie Mercury (not a bad triangulation of her onstage persona), plus the "Rocky" theme (which should play well here) atop relentlessly reupping stutter-step booty-beats. And you should absolutely watch her videos, particularly last year's epic "Y'all Get Back Now." But if you haven't experienced firsthand the euphorically sweaty spectacle of a Big Freedia show (and, ideally, gotten up to shake what you've got yourself), well... you might want to do yourself a favor this Friday night.

Kitty Pryde
[Hip-Hop/Meme]
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Thinkpiece lightning-rod, anonymous-comment hater-bait, rap game co-sign collector... – freckle-faced Daytona Beach teen Kitty Beckwith's been having quite a summer. Since inadvertently touching off a hype-wave – and backlash counter-current – back in May with the giggling, sweetly swoony "Okay Cupid" (and its endearingly homespun video), and with twitterati scrambling to pinpoint her on a scale from Rebecca Black to Lil B, the part-time salesclerk (and evidently, almost unbelievably, bio-daughter of esoterica icon David Tibet) is plainly just having fun and enjoying the improbable ride: "I just wanted a Betsey J dress/and some time off from Claire's," she spits on insta-fame shrug-off "smiledog.jpg." (FTR: she got it.) Self-conscious kneejerk preemption notwithstanding (her tumblr proclaims: "My Music Suxx"), her genuinely fluent, filter-free rhymes and very funny, smartly referential wit – and not merely her totes adorbs, "very youtubeable" awkward charm – totally justify the attention. Scoff all you want: just don't think she's not in on the joke.

Janes Addiction/Die Antwoord
[Rock/Rap]
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Jane's Addiction first broke up in 1991, but it's hard to feel like they've really left – they spent nearly as much of the last twenty years reunited as disbanded. So their second attempt at a comeback album, last year's The Great Escape Artist (Capitol), wasn't exactly the event it might have been, but it's a solid listen regardless, with moody blues and sugar-rush pop-metal trifles nicely balanced by crushing, swirling, psuedo-mystical jams. As for their fittingly misfit tourmates, South African rave-rap duo Die Antwoord – well, the world's known them only two short years, but their bizarrely grotesque, cartoonishly vulgar "zef" schtick seemed destined to wear out its welcome (and novelty value and, er, artistic potential) after a single album (besides, wasn't it supposed to be just an elaborate conceptual art project/joke anyway?) Ten$ion (Downtown), however, reveals that Ninja and Yo-Landi Vi$$er (who're actually better rappers than they get credit for) have further depths to plumb. Nothing's shocking, perhaps, but they're certainly trying.

Marina and the Diamonds
[Pop]
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Marina Diamantis attempts an odd, fraught, and rather confusing conceptual tight-rope walk on Electra Heart (679/Atlantic), endeavoring to critique the vapidity and corruption of American popular culture by symbolically/theatrically embodying those very qualities, in the guise of an overtly constructed, superficial pop-star persona – the titular character, whom she describes as "the antithesis of everything that I stand for." Anybody familiar with the fantastically loudmouthed, overreaching spectacle of her debut probably won't be surprised that she fails to pull it off with anything resembling finesse or coherence. But at least she got the archetypal pop part right: with a little help from certified pop "manufacturers" Dr. Luke, Greg Kurstin and Stargate (the architects of depravity behind the likes of Ke$ha, Katy Perry, Lily Allen and Rihanna), the result is a fizzy, brashly modern album that sounds pretty much like her first one, except with less piano and more dance beats, lashed together with her majestic, morally righteous, mock-operatic voice.

The Very Best
[African/Pop]
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The Very Best, improbably enough, managed to live up to their preposterous moniker on their early releases by fusing together some of the giddiest, least self-conscious sounds in the world – African marabi, highlife, and kwaito; Western synth-pop and electronica, and further strains of pan-global dance music – creating not necessarily the best music ever made, but a glorious, musically utopian encapsulation of humanity's greatest potential. Now down to a duo – irrepressible Malawian singer Esau Mwamwaya, whose voice still feels like a distillation of pure, liquid joy, and Swedish beatsmith Johan Hugo – they come close to recapturing that lightning on MTMTMK (Cooperative/Moshi Moshi), a technicolor funhouse of a sophomore effort that flirts with harder-edged African beats while also inching closer to chart-friendly electro pop'n'B candy-gloss.
 
Sidi Toure
[African/Folk]
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Malian guitarist Sidi Touré's first widely available recording – released last year, rather improbably, by post-rock/indie stronghold Thrill Jockey – bore the simple, descriptive title "Sahel Folk," perhaps partly in contradistinction to the "desert blues" tag applied to his countrymen like the late Ali Farka Touré (no relation) and reigning champs Tinariwen. Indeed, the album's lilting, gently droning strains were about as folksy as it gets: fully acoustic, unvarnished and intimate, all reportedly recorded over tea at his sister's house. Koïma, Touré's second outing for the label, was cut in a studio with a full band featuring sokou (folk violin), calabash, and a second guitarist, and shows considerably more versatility and rhythmic energy, but it's every bit as enchantingly homely and heartfelt.

Gruff Rhys
[Indie/Pop]
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Gruff Rhys is capricious sort of chap at the best of times, gallivanting affably from project to project with a trick in his eye and a twinkle up his sleeve. Having logged nearly two decades with the unstoppable Super Furry Animals, plus numerous collaborative side-ventures and three lovably low-key psych-pop solo albums, most recently the dappled and bubbly Hotel Shampoo (Wichita), he's now launched an "investigative concert tour" as part of his second documentary film project. Like 2010's "Separado!," this one also involves a search for a long-lost ancestor: John Evans, said to have come to America in 1792 looking for a rumored tribe of Welsh-speaking Natives, and to have led a series of adventures that are the stuff of acid-laced tall tales. Rhys is encouraging "anyone with clues regarding Evans's unknown burial place; imaginary volcanos; wandering tribes of Welsh Speakers, or lingering river reptiles" to come share what they know – presumably there will be some music as well.

Ava Luna
[Indie Rock/R&B]
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Stitching together a similar rag-bag of mismatched musical scraps to their fellow Brooklynites Dirty Projectors and TV on the Radio – '90s radio R&B, fragmentary art-rock, girl group doo-wop harmonies, stiff-limbed no wave funk – but coming up with a whole different sort of quilt, screwball septet Ava Luna spend the eight tracks and just over half an hour of their fairly blindsiding debut LP Ice Level (Infinite Best) endeavoring to derail just about any expectations you might have considered developing. It's bracing, bewildering, compelling stuff – spazz-out synth-soul? purple punk-prog? – a twitchy, unruly noisefield shot through with honeyed crooning and dense patches of groove, and laced up with the half-cornball, half-unhinged, wholy sincere soulman stylings of Carlos Hernandez.

Horse Meat Disco
[Disco/DJ]
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This disco-obsessive DJ collective, whose namesake Sunday night parties in South London – self-professedly "dedicated to the industry of human happiness" – have been drawing a legendarily diverse, pan-sexual crowd for eight years now, are purists only in the sense that they embrace their chosen genre's proud tradition of inclusivity. As evidenced by their thoroughly delightful compilation series on Strut records (Horse Meat Disco III dropped last summer; volume IV is due in November), they're perfectly happy to slot '70s-vintage cuts from Idris Muhammad, Gino Soccio and Sylvester right alongside the contemporary disco freaks like Mungolian Jetset and Tom Trago – or better yet, confound chronology with fresh re-edits (often their own handiwork) of shoulda-been-classics from the vault. More importantly, they negate any whiff of in-the-know elitism by digging up plenty of easy-to-spot, dancer-friendly cover versions – but even if you can't quite place the melody, you've probably heard that bassline in your dreams.
originally published in Philadelphia City Paper