Review Round-Up: November/December 2013

i'm probably not writing anything else that'll be published in 2013 (save for year-end list blurbs and such), so i'll cap off what was probably my most active year of reviewing yet with a two month (well, six week?) double-shot.  it's been a year!  [sorry bout the nsfw, silly sky!]

Sky Ferreira
Night Time, My Time

Sky Ferreira has accumulated such a scattered portfolio that even her followers (real or virtual) might have trouble telling who, exactly, she is.  If prime bubblegum robo-pop single "One" (cut when she was 17) offered one answer, last year's stylistically everywhere Ghost EP suggested about five others (country chanteuse? pathos-stricken balladeer? neo-Shirley Manson?), while endearing her to the ears of indiedom with the understated, sneakily durable appeal of "Everything is Embarrassing."  (All this, incidentally, without changing record labels.)

Now she's 21, that long-frustrated full-length is finally here, and she's trying on more new looks – but things are finally drawing into focus.  Assured and assertive, Night Time, My Time plays like the darker, dirtier counterpart to fellow category-confounders Haim – a tough, twitchy slab of hooks and heartache that blithely shrugs off distinctions of rock vs. pop, indie vs. mainstream, retro vs. timely.  It's practically overflowing with possibilities – there's equal space for the gleaming melodies and breezy riffs of "You're Not The One" (her biggest earworm yet) and a squalling, krauty rocker titled with a decidedly impolite Japanese anatomical term – but, for the first time in her young career, it feels more like a real, lasting accomplishment than just another indication of potential.

semi-self-paraphrase for City Paper concert preview:

Sky Ferreira epitomizes, perhaps better than anybody else, the category confusion of the present pop/indie/mainstream landscape.  After five years of collaborating with everyone from A-list chart doctors like Bloodshy & Avant and Ryan Tedder (yielding a couple of bright, shiny, go-nowhere electro-pop baubles) to arty indie impresario Dev Hynes (resulting in last year's invitingly understated fluke quasi-hit "Everything is Embarrassing"), she's racked up plenty of one-off singles, a pair of genre-hopping EPs and a respectable slate of modeling and acting gigs, yet it remains a glaring open question what she's actually all about.  But she's finally ready for her close-up – or so the title of her long-developmentally-delayed debut album would suggest.  Night Time, My Time (Capitol), which was produced by and co-written with 2013 golden boy Ariel Reichstad (his streak this year has also included helming LPs from Haim, Charli XCX, and Vampire Weekend), and it finally, fully crystallizes Ferreira's aesthetic – at least for moment – in a single, magnificent electronic glam-punk smartbomb: the would-be it-girl whose love of dirty rock fuzz, snarling crunch and bad decisions turns out to mesh perfectly with gorgeous, gleaming radio-pop hooks.

Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs
Under the Covers Vol. 3

Pure-pop true-believers Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs aren't out to win any points for edginess, or even obscurity.  The first installments in their ongoing covers album series – canvassing the 1960s and '70s, respectively – were strictly for fun: happily inessential niche affairs that found the honey-voiced sometime Bangle and the indubitably named Sweet applying their candied harmonies, twelve-string jangle and squeaky-clean sheen to a slew of generally recognizable pop-rock nuggets, equally apt to inspire smiles or shrugs.  Volume Three treads a similar path through the 1980s, with the duo's customarily polished, treble-heavy production – for better or worse – adding an extra dose of era-appropriate fidelity.  Understandably, the song selection here is rather more idiosyncratic: this was the decade when both Sweet and Hoffs came of musical age (and launched their careers), but it was also a decade when the kind of guitar-based pop they so fervently worship was more apt to be flourishing underground (and on college radio, especially) than ruling the airwaves.  So while we get a few headsmack-obvious blockbusters ("Free Fallin'," "Our Lips Are Sealed," "More Than This" – all fine if questionably necessary airings), the collection is dominated by left-of-the-dial pioneers, including numerous Byrds-indebted janglers – R.E.M., the dBs, the Bongos – and their UK counterparts: XTC ("Towers of London" – an odd, somewhat unfortunate choice), the Pretenders and Dave Edmunds ("Kid" and "Girls Talk," respectively, both given curiously Elvis-ish readings by Hoffs.)  Sweet also tries his hand at the moodier romanticism of Echo and the Bunnymen ("Killing Moon," naturally) and the Smiths ("How Soon Is Now"), injecting just a whiff of darkness among all the relentlessly shiny happy sonics.  It's a mild stretch that pays off just fine: like everything these two touch, the results are hardly astonishing, but they're just as pleasant as you please.

originally published in Magnet Magazine

William Onyeabor
Who Is William Onyeabor?
[Funk/African]

Who is William Onyeabor? asks the newest chapter in Luaka Bop Records' occasional "World Psychedelic Classics" series.  Good question.  These days, reportedly, he's a born-again Christian flour mill operator and civic leader in his native Nigeria who wants nothing to do with his musical past.  But these nine generous cuts, culled from his 1977-85 string of self-released LPs, document an era when he was an analog-synth-inclined counterpart to Fela Kuti, offering his own brand of righteous politicking and (incidentally, hardly un-Christian) moralizing atop extended, curiously rigid but still deeply funky afrobeat, disco and electro-funk grooves, often coming across as Africa's one-man answer to Kraftwerk and Bambaata.

Alsarah/Débruit
Aljawal الجوال
[World/African/Electronic]

A meeting of the minds between freaky French electro-funk/hip-hop producer Débruit and classical Sudanese singer Alsarah, Aljawal الجوال (Soundway) offers an astonishingly fluid, readily addictive fusion that, even in a musical climate overrun with trans-cultural and inter-genre cross-pollinations, feels legitimately surprising and truly exotic.  Neatly balancing between traditionally-rooted and several-ways futuristic sounds, Débruit's gooey, bleepy, analog productions find a curious resonance with Alsarah's arresting, dusky alto melismatics and the homely 'oud and hand percussion of Nubian folk.  Who knew how natural and satisfying it could be to connect the dots between whirling dervish music and the similarly kinetic, ecstatic stutterings of Chicago footwork? (Hint: think handclaps!)

Livity Sound
Livity Sound
[Bass/Techno]

The players behind Livity Sound – a sprawling, monumental two-disc compilation of tracks recorded and released over the past few years via the eponymous boutique imprint – are three Bristol, UK bass/post-dubstep producers, Asusu, Kowton and (label head/ringleader) Peverelist.  But the sounds it contains – spooky, skeletal, hypnotic, addictively syncopated; hybridizing minimal techno and dub reggae in unremittingly sparse but continually surprising ways – seem elemental and otherworldly in a way that makes the Maori glyphs on the cover (for which Peverelist's been fielding accusations of cultural appropriation) feel entirely appropriate.

Special Request
Soul Music
[Electronic/Breakbeat/Jungle]

If the quarter-century-plus lineage of UK urban dance music has a soul, it exists in the kind of discrete, iconic sound-signatures – pirate-radio rewinds, 303 acid throbs, grimey gun-cocks, and breakbeats breakbeats breakbeats – that form the nucleus of Paul Woolford's productions as Special Request.  Where some producers might slip in an Amen break as a gimmicky, nostalgic aural shorthand, the monolithic bounty of Soul Music (Houndstooth) exhibits Woolford's pious, unswerving dedication to these mystically encoded sonic incantations, layering breaks upon breaks not to recreate the form of classic jungle but to probe its many evocative possibilities, from cold steely violence to fluid, nuanced funk.

Cut Copy
Free Your Mind
[Electronic/Dance]

There's some serious aesthetic boundary-testing happening on Free Your Mind (Modular.)  In less perfectly calibrated hands, the album's unmitigated day-glo positivity could've easily trainwrecked into treacly insipidity, full of psychonautic pseudo-spiritualism and empty affirmations.  But Cut Copy are exactly the kind of expert electro-pop technicians to pull off an all-in, over-the-top reincarnation of circa-1988 acid house, with every bongo, every breakbeat, each chunky piano riff, 303 squelch, diva wail and analog birdcall perfectly in place.  Turns out that big, throbbing, blithely bombastic smears of sunshine, rainbows and perpetual fluorescent dancefloor euphoria are all about the little subtle details.

Milosh
Jetlag
[R&B/Pop/Electronic]

Michael Milosh's tenderly passionate, introverted croon first bewitched many listeners earlier this year via his work with Rhye, and Jetlag [eOne/Deadly] – the fourth solo full-length the Canadian has produced under his surname – should hopefully, deservingly benefit from the increased exposure.  This album favors a more modern flavor of electro-soul over Rhye's classicist throwback touches, and the songs, on the whole, aren't quite as distinctive, but it's every bit as elegant, emotive, lush and, simply said, beautiful; swirling soft, shimmering bleeps and blips (a la the Notwist or mid-period Radiohead) with the organic warmth of harp, organ, and that undeniable, ineffable voice.

Nils Frahm
Spaces
[Modern Classical/Ambient]

As the music industry settles in for its winter's nap, it's hard to imagine a richer hibernation soundtrack than Spaces (Erased Tapes), an engrossing compilation of performances by Berliner Nils Frahm.  Performed on acoustic and electric pianos (sometimes several at once), these improvisations and reworked compositions range from placid but evocative zone-outs to ecstatic space-drones to visceral, Keith Jarrett-like flights of pianistic flash (like the aptly named "Hammers.")  Since they're live recordings, Frahm's extended reveries are interspersed with (rather vigorous) bursts of applause, creating the odd, jarring sensation that you're being cheered on for relaxing.  But hey, go ahead – you've earned it.

Arcade Fire
Reflektor
[Rock/Dance]

The Arcade Fire jump on 2013's disco bandwagon in typically grandiose fashion on Sprawl III: Electric Boogaloo...er, a.k.a. Reflektor (Merge).  Even if most of these epic, James Murphy-abetted jams are, like that harbinging Suburbs highlight (and "Get Lucky" itself), almost too slow to dance to, it's still a surprisingly apt, afterlife-fixated Halloween afterparty  – complete with Win and Régine in costume as Orpheus & Eurydice (though, wouldn't Echo & Narcissus better emblematize "love in a reflective age"?) – from the title track's haunted hall of internet mirrors to "Here Comes the Nighttime"'s voodoo carnival to the Stepfordian horror of "Normal Person," until the daybreaking, Timberlake-mirroring "Supersymmetry" fades in a glorious swirl of arpeggios and particle-physics metaphors.

Courtney Barnett
The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas
[Folk/Rock]

Courtney Barnett is a saucy Aussie slacker-type who'll charm you with a single, slyly casual turn of phrase – say, the precise yet offhanded way she mutters "asthma puffer" on instant winner "Avant Gardener" – about as readily as she'll get out of bed.  Even if you can't be bothered to follow the narrative nuances of all the drolly drawled shaggy-dog story-songs collected on her carefully titled debut non-album, The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas (Marathon Artists), the music underpinning them is equally shaggy and beguiling, all Velvets-y, countrified, couple-chord drones and gamely goofy backup gang vocals.

Kurt Vile
Jamaica Plain/it's a big world out there and i'm scared
[Rock/Psych]

Kurt Vile's pretty daze just keeps on rolling.  The beatific Fishtown rocker, who returns to Union Transfer this Saturday for his fourth hometown gig of the year – including a record-setting city hall courtyard appearance which took place on his own personal, mayorally-decreed holiday – is capping his unstoppable 2013 with a fourth quarter re-boot of his widely-dug third Matador LP, dubbed Deluxe Daze (Post Haze).  In a typically righteous, kindly gesture, the appended bonus material will also be available separately (digitally and vinylly) as "it's a big world out there (and i am scared)".  Alongside a couple fine if relatively negligible, self-explanatory revamps (e.g. "Snowflakes Extended") and three increasingly electronified mutations of "Never Run Away," the EP boasts two previously unaired six-minute outtakes – one dark, fingerpicked and folky, the other fuller and rangier – that fit right in with the album's languorous shimmer.

First up though is the Jamaica Plain EP (Care in the Community), a collaboration with palindromic New England psych-popper (and one-time Violator) Sore Eros, named for the neighborhood that's kinda the Boston equivalent of West Philly.  These three recordings – two lazy, meandering instrumental shape-shifters and one briefer but equally spacey vocal cut – date back about a decade, and offer solid, satisfying evidence that Vile has long been well acquainted with the delights of dazedness.

Swearin'
Surfing Strange
[Indie Rock/Punk]

Do identical twins usually sound really similar to each other?  Google suggests no, but it is definitely the case with the Crutchfield sisters, Alison and Katie, who rose to DIY punk notoriety with their band P.S. Eliot and, since relocating from Brooklyn last year, have become two of the brightest recent additions to the West Philly scene.  Anyone who's fallen for the casual Alabama twang and deep-set fidelity to '90s indie archetypes evinced by Katie's solo endeavor, Waxahatchee, should find similar things to love about Swearin', the decidedly noisier (if equally raw) outfit fronted by her sister.  Surfing Strange (Salinas), recorded at the Hazel Ave house the Crutchfields share with their bandmates and boyfriends, is less peppy and melodically direct than its eponymous predecessor, but it finds the band – in which Alison shares vocal duties with guitarist Kyle Gilbride – stretching out a bit, expanding both their grungy, heavier side and their gifts for softer, vaguely folky (and, well, Waxahatchee-esque) moments – frequently both in the same song – while also trying out some keyboards (and making good on their album title) with the psych-damaged "Glare of the Sun."

Bongos
Phantom Train
[Rock/Pop]

They may take a close second to The Feelies when it comes to Hoboken indie rock luminaries (pre-Yo La Tengo division), but the recently reunited Bongos offered their own sharp, gutsy brand of '80s jangle-pop that's too good to be forgotten.  Let Phantom Train (Jem) – a "lost" LP recorded in 1985 but unreleased until now – serve as exhibit A: an unmistakably vintage but still plenty fresh set of catchy, treble-heavy tunes and muscular grooves capped with Richard Barone's potent vocals, plus a kickin' Donovan cover.

Lucius
[Indie Pop/Folk/Soul]
concert preview

Brooklyn up-and-comers Lucius put a lot of effort into their appearance, with the band's blond, could-be-sisters frontwomen, Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, dressing up as symmetrical twinsies on stage in brightly colored mod-soul outfits and thick eyeliner, and the three gentlemen in the band typically appearing equally well-coordinated and stylish.  That look, sharp and singular as it is, functions as an apt analog for the band's equally potent, equally distinctive sound: similarly retro and crisp, similarly meticulous and infectious; similarly built around Wolfe and Laessig's soulful close harmonies and twinned unison crooning.  It's a sound that, nearly a decade after the vocalists first hooked up at Berklee College of Music, finally exists in the form of full-length album: the excellent Wildewoman (Mom+Pop) – that's four syllables, by the way; "Wilde" pronounced as in "-beest", not Oscar – which adds some country and a bit of synth-pop to their versatile fusion of throwback girl-group R&B and big, strummy indie folk-pop, and which seems to feature a massive, searing, potentially world-conquering chorus on just about every song.

Howe Gelb
[Americana/Singer-Songwriter]
concert preview

Howe Gelb has been the primary force behind something like forty albums since the mid-'80s, including upwards of twenty with the long-running Giant Sand, ten or more under his own name and others under monikers like Arizona Amp & Alternator and the Band of Blacky Ranchette.  It's a lot for even a devoted fan to keep track of, and certainly daunting for neophytes – especially since, apart from some fortuitous overlap with the alt-country/Americana heyday of the late '90s, he's rarely made much sense as part of a broader scene or movement.  Still, its the kind of catalog that rewards and encourages the occasional, informal dip in, full of quiet, oddball gems to discover (like 2006's gospel choir foray 'Sno Angel Like You.) Indeed, since his records never feel particularly urgent or imperative – they are almost uniformly loose, collaborative, and unfussy, sporting his ever-relaxed, half-spoken vocals over some murky, cock-eyed stew of folk, country, rock, weirdo jazz and Southwestern ambience – it's kind of hard to approach them any way other than casually.  Anyhow, The Coincidentalist (New West) – whose title seems to reflect that particular aspect of his appeal – marks (yet another) fine occasion to stop in for a look-see; another sweet, quizzical, low-key set of songs with another fine cast of supporting players and guests (M. Ward, A. Bird, W. Oldham, KT Tunstall.)  

Alice Smith
[Singer-Songwriter/R&B]
concert preview

Alice Smith popped up in 2006 as a fully-formed, fully formidable talent: For Lovers, Dreamers & Me, her assured and slyly addictive debut, introduced her as both a knockout vocalist (with a tremendous four-octave range) and, more singularly, a promising new addition to the woefully disregarded pantheon of female African-American songwriters, hopscotching between elements of soul, rock, blues, pop and funk without seeming the least bit formulaic or overreaching.  And then... nothing.  For almost seven years, despite a Grammy nomination and a deal with Epic records, her career suffered the hiccuping indignity of major label limbo, as she shelved a series of recordings, became a mother, and relocated to LA without issuing another note of new material.  Finally, this spring, Smith reemerged with She (Rainwater), a collection of smooth, soulful, sometimes theatrical not-quite-R&B that's a bit more polished than her debut but at least as accomplished, with her typically tender and thoughtful compositions balanced by a brassy, show-stopping cover of Cee-Lo Green's "Fool For You."

Cults
[Pop/Rock]
concert preview

Some things have changed for Cults since they first won us over with the glockenspieled insouciance of their calling-card single, "Go Outside," and the sweetly winsome debut album that followed.  The band's golden couple, Madeline Follin and Brian Oblivion, called things off romantically last year, though they've thankfully decided to stick together – musically speaking – for the kids.  Oblivion also took some impressive strides toward living up to his moniker; embarking on a drug-addled sojourn to Japan and developing a fascination with broken television sets that informed the title and prevailing imagery of the duo's second LP.  But much has also stayed the same: given that backstory, Static (Columbia), almost defiantly mirrors its predecessor in its presentation (similar cover, similarly concise construction), and it boasts exactly the same sort of smart, yearning, indelible melodies (rendered in Follin's entrancing, alternately dusky and girlish coo); the same blend of fastidious, '60s girl-group-style craft and artily atmospheric coloration that made their first album so refreshing.  It's a bigger, bolder, richer restaking of their unique stylistic terrain; harder-rocking and more poignantly swooning: basically, it's everything you'd want from the follow-up to a great debut.

MGMT
[Pop/Rock/Psych]
concert preview

MGMT spelled out their epic rock-star fantasies in "Time to Pretend," the title track of a self-released EP they were hawking in the Unitarian church basement way back in 2005 (as openers for of Montreal) – well before the blockbuster success of their 2008 debut started bringing those mythic ambitions absurdly (or at least improbably) close to fruition; well before they began furiously backpedalling against that album's genial synth-pop with 2010's self-consciously strange Congratulations.  The song was mostly a waggish joke from the start, but it's accrued increasingly complex layers of irony over the years, as they've occasionally, winkingly played into its outlandish conceits – a recent David Letterman appearance saw them sporting star-shaped glasses and konking a comically oversized cowbell – even while sliding into a more sustainable if less glamour-courting artistic niche for themselves.  Their self-titled third album (Columbia) – which finds their early penchant for playful silliness thankfully intact – is nothing more or less than an eminently enjoyable little psych-pop record, neither pandering nor melody-averse, whose production budget just happens to accommodate Dave Fridmann's iconically trippy production tweaks and lavishly surreal music videos starring Omar from The Wire.

Guardian Alien
[Psychedelic/Experimental/Improvisation]
concert preview

If Guardian Alien were nothing more than a vehicle for the torrential force-of-nature drumming of Greg Fox – formerly of black metal iconoclasts Liturgy; also a member of hardcore NY avant-gardeists Zs – that'd be more than reason enough to tune in.  But it's becoming something quite a bit woolier and harder to define, as the single, restlessly unfurling 38-minute blurt of instrumental psych/metal/drone/jam circle mayhem that constituted the project's debut for Thrill Jockey earlier this year (See the World Given to a One Love Entity) turns out to be merely a taster for the kind of virtuoso conceptual acrobatics they have in store.  Spiritual Emergency – out next month – tries on an even wider array of approaches across its five cuts, culminating in a mind-bending, incantatory free-jazz maelstrom inspired by (and audibly incorporating) the theories of psycho-spiritual psychiatrist Stanislav Grof.  And even that's probably just a taster for what the group – for now, a trio comprising Fox, guitarist Bernard Gann and Alexandra Drewchin on electronics and vocals – can rustle up live.

My Bloody Valentine
[Rock/Shoegaze]
concert preview

2013 has been well established as a banner year for triumphant musical returns, from Justin Timberlake, Boards of Canada, The Knife and The Blow [[see above/below]] dropping their first albums since 2006 to Daft Punk, David Bowie, Mazzy Star, Luscious Jackson and the Dismemberment Plan breaking even longer silent streaks.  But nothing could really top shoegaze-crystallizing demi-gods My Bloody Valentine, who kicked off the trend back in early February by returning, almost suddenly, after an absurd twenty-two years, with the follow-up to their widely beloved 1991 album, Loveless.  Even more miraculously, they actually managed to satisfy the long-marinating, mythically-proportioned expectations of their faithful; carefully balancing fondly familiar sonic territory (Kevin Shields' dense, druggy excursions through the outer limits of processed guitar texture; Bilinda Butcher's edgeless, ethereal coos) with deft, dignified expansions of their stylistic reach.  Self-released with little overt fanfare or advance notice, mbv is by turns smoother (the organ-draped, Stereolab-ish midsection) and much much rougher (the blown-out, apocalyptically percussive final third) than its vaunted predecessor.  Ultimately, thankfully, and perhaps most improbably of all, nothing about the album's context or its makers' fanatical perfectionism can interfere with the simple, primal pleasure of just diving in, and turning it up.

Crocodiles
[Rock/Pop]
concert preview

San Diego's Crocodiles are dependable sorts.  They've turned out four solidly enjoyable if ultimately unspectacular albums in just over four years, and while they haven't exactly made any great leaps beyond the buzzy, noirish jangle-rock that made their name and earned them thousands of shrugging Jesus and Mary Chain comparisons, they've steadily brightened and broadened their approach with each release.  Album #4 is no exception – its bright pink cover doesn't lie: Crimes of Passion (Zoo Music/Frenchkiss) is the duo's poppiest, most immediate work yet, occasionally taking a few beat-looping, gospel-infused cues from the Madchester-reviving likes of Jagwar Ma (or, more likely, they've just been adding some Primal Scream and Stone Roses records to their usual steady diet of Echo and Spacemen 3), the better to illuminate the tuneful blend of sweetness and nihilism that, any year now, is gonna be distinctive enough to call their very own.

The Blow/Love Inks
[Indie-Pop/Electronic]
concert preview

Khaela Maricich is in love.  That's probably the most conspicuous message of The Blow's new, self-titled album (Kanine).  Sure, she penned one of the past decade's most enduring, endearing statements of indie-pop affection ("Parentheses," from the last Blow album, way back in 2006), and once made a record subtitled "Love Songs" – but, she suggests, she was only faking it then.  This time is for real.  "A kiss was just something to do with my tongue/until you kissed me," she offers in her sweet, stilted alto.  Clothes, she now realizes, were "invented for the single purpose of you taking them off me."  Pretty sexy stuff, in its nerdy, insecure, self-consciously arty way – especially imagining those lyrics directed toward Melissa Dyne, Maricich's partner in art and life, who constructed the album's brightly minimal, intriguingly handmade-sounding electro-pop.  But don't expect an evening of moonstruck crooning: Maricich's a tricky one, and Blow shows are closer to performance art than traditional concerts.  If the duo's conceptual abstractions get to be too much, the gently krauty synthscapes and placid coos of Austin trio Love Inks – showcased on their lovely Generation Club (Monofonus Press) – should offer a smooth, warmly glowy antidote.

Benoit & Sergio
[Dance/Electronic]
concert preview

This Washington DC/Berlin production duo has, since roughly 2010, issued a string of strange, subtle, almost perfectly-formed singles that occupy an aesthetic world entirely their own: lush but sparing, nostalgic and crisp, inviting and cryptic, somewhere between deep, disco-indebted house and bookishly understated synth-pop.  The ingredients seem simple enough – skipping, lightly syncopated trebly grooves; hypnotically looping samples; playful sproingy basslines – but they're fit together with an uncommon, uncanny deftness.  What seals the deal are the duo's blankly wistful, slightly processed vocals, which make unlikely dancefloor mantras of wryly heartbreaking phrases like "My baby does K all day," or "I love girls who never say they're sorry."  Also: "You need poetry to turn these girls on."  Benoit and Sergio have got that, in spades (they've also been known to crib lyrics from Barrett Browning and T.S. Eliot), and they're nothing if not comfortable with contradictions.  Take "Adjustments," their most recent 12" (which may or may foreshadow the debut album they've promised us next year): the wan, woozy title cut harbors some major hesitance about current dance culture ("Sometimes I think that DJs don't understand...") even as the frisky flipside "Shake Shake" sees them scratching their most buoyant disco itch to date.

Nightmares on Wax
[Electronic]
concert preview

Nightmares on Wax debuted in 1989 with some of the earliest singles (and the second ever album) for the still mighty Warp Records, playing a large part in defining the label's brittle, bleepy UK take on Detroit techno and acid house while also exploring playful undercurrents of hip-hop and jazzy funk.  By 1995, the Leeds-born DJ/producer George Evelyn – long the project's sole member – was pushing those elements to the forefront for the eclectic, lushly organic trip-hop of  Smoker's Delight, which helped set the template for the countless (and often far more faceless) "chill-out" records swamping the turn of the century market.  Since then Evelyn has kept right on grooving: the latest, seventh NoW album (and first in five years) finds him still on Warp, still swirling together a blunted assortment of smooth downtempo beats – dub, disco, reggae, funk, gospel, easy-listening R&B – while infusing his productions with guest vocalists and more live instrumentation than ever before, and just generally, as the title says: Feelin' Good.

WinterWaltz Festival
[!!!, Vacationer, YACHT, Washed Out...]
concert preview

This two-day mini-festival, curated by local promoter Deathwaltz Media, nestles cozily in the intersection of dance-friendly indie rock and rockist-friendly electronica.  Basically, it's just an all-around friendly line-up.  It's also a handy summation of the past decade's middle-ground sounds, from early-'00s dance-punk progenitors !!! (whose recent, awesomely titled Thr!!!er (Warp) funks along in fine, typically jammy style) to late-'00s chillwave progenitors Washed Out (the festival's de-facto headliner, who hit the Electric Factory Friday.)  None of it is music you'd necessarily associate with Winter per se (not for nothing does the bill include acts named YACHT and Vacationer) – though maybe that's the point – and I almost guarantee nobody will play anything you can actually waltz to.  But there is a bevy of local talent on hand, including live electronics band Damn Right!, cosmic disco production trio Les Professionnels and – playing live tonight and DJing tomorrow – the excellent, underappreciated electro-dream-pop outfit Vacationer, whose lovely, lushly melodic 2012 debut, Gone (Downtown), had the misfortune of arriving too fashionably late in a long line of languorous, indie-tronic tropical travelogues.

originally published in Philadelphia City Paper

AMG review round-up, volume XXII: 2010 third quarter, -ish

gotta wrap it up. here's a bunch of records, mostly from july-september 2010 (with a few secret stragglers, including some a year or two late), roughly in order of what they're like and how much i like them.

Allo Darlin': Allo Darlin' review

Allo Darlin' are a quintessential, dyed-in-the-wool twee pop band (and a pedigreed one at that – frontwoman Elizabeth Morris plays in Tender Trap with twee icon Amelia Fletcher, while bassist Bill Botting is a member of Darren Hayman's Secondary Modern) but their potential appeal extends far beyond the typically homespun, insider-y indie pop scene, since their music conveys all the genre's sweetness and enthusiasm without (or at least without too much of) the sappy infantilism and amateurish shambling that turn off most listeners of the genre. On the basis of their self-titled 2010 debut, it's not hard to imagine this London outfit finding the kind of widespread devotion enjoyed by leading lights like Camera Obscura, the Lucksmiths, or even Belle & Sebastian. Certainly, Allo Darlin' is most reminiscent of these artists' earlier, scrappier efforts, but the sophistication is there, most crucially, in Morris' songs, which strike just the right balance of clever and heartfelt, wittily specific, and broadly relatable. And, without exception, magnificently tuneful. Vocally, she's got all the charm of, say, Camera Obscura's Tracyanne Campbell, but with a much more upbeat, outgoing personality (and her Aussie-via-London accent – even just her pronunciation of the word "telephone" – is worth melting for). The band never stray far from the Platonic template of crisp, vibrantly produced '60s-style guitar pop, with tinges of soul, country, and Afro-pop, generous use of ukulele and lap steel, and a healthy sprinkling of ba-bas and sha-la-las. The playing is consistently strong and, with a few tender-hearted exceptions, briskly bouncy and grooving – particularly apt for the first three songs, which are about going out dancing (though they're also about heavenly embraces, Polaroid photographs, and youthful cash deficiency, respectively.) Other pivotal topics covered include falling in love (in an amusement park; whilst making chili) and listening (and making references) to pop music. In the time-honored tradition of the Pooh Sticks, Morris fills her songs with canny cultural nods: lifting lines from Weezer, quoting Johnny Cash and Doris Day, citing fellow twees the Just Joans. (Meanwhile "Woody Allen" – which switches to film references for a change – is melodically reminiscent of the Magnetic Fields' "Strange Powers," while the blissfully lovely "Let's Go Swimming" lyrically echoes their "All the Umbrellas in London.") Maybe best of all, "My Heart Is a Drummer" reps for Paul Simon's Graceland: "we know it's everybody's favorite/deep down in the place where music makes you happiest." Clearly, that's a place that Morris and Allo Darlin' know extremely well.

The Books: The Way Out review

"Welcome to a new beginning" declares a voice at the start of The Way Out, and this album does indeed mark a fresh new chapter for the Books: a return to record-making five years after the fantastic Lost and Safe, on a new label, with a newly open-ended, wide-ranging approach to their work. It may not initially sound that way: opener "Group Autogenics I," one of several pieces that draw on guided meditation-style self-help recordings, feels almost like Books-by-numbers, with a gently humorous, disorienting oddness, juxtaposed with genuinely deeply relaxing sonics, that will be immediately familiar to fans of their past albums. After that, though, the duo stretches beyond its comfort zone in multiple directions at once, pushing at the boundaries of an already utterly singular style. The acoustic strings (primarily guitar and cello) that dominated their earlier output are still present, but they share space with a dizzying array of instrumental and quasi-instrumental sounds, from twinkling music boxes to a full-scale sample-generated orchestra of archaic brass and woodwinds. And while scavenged spoken word samples remain the most defining element of the Books' music, anchoring each of these cuts save for the four sung, lyric-based "proper songs" (including the gloriously geeky, math-worshiping chorale "Beautiful People," which announces, slightly disingenuously: "We genuflect before pure abstraction"), they're less concerned with constructing linguistic puzzles out of their samples here – cleverly editing them to evince a sublimely witty illogic and absurdity – than with exploring their emotional nuances and often surreal humanity. Most tracks focus on a small number of voices, creating a sense of context and resonance without necessarily allowing for full comprehension. Hence, we get a tentative, intimate series of answering machine messages; a nonsensical bedtime tale about a Peter Rabbit-like character named Hip Hop; an inexplicably prickly grammarian vehemently insisting that "I Am Who I Am." "A Cold Freezin' Night" is a hilarious, slightly chilling tour de force built around a battle of (increasingly violent) words between a young brother and sister, set to a thumping disco beat. "I Didn't Know That" is even more striking musically – the closest thing yet to a Books pop hit, and definitely the funkiest they've ever been, recalling Squarepusher's nimble bass playing and Akufen's micro-sampled funk barrages. The stated intention for The Way Out was for each track to be "its own rabbit hole," and the album does indeed manage to survey an impressively disparate set of worlds and modes. Still, each one remains readily recognizable as belonging to the Books' own unique, unequivocal universe, which, happily, seems to be expanding at least twice as rapidly as our own.

ceo: White Magic review

ceo is Eric Berglund, one half of the Tough Alliance and co-CEO of Gothenburg's Sincerely Yours label; his first solo venture is another clear winner from that inscrutable but highly dependable camp. While its brightly colorful melting pot of indie pop, ersatz tropicalia, chintzy new age, and electronic dance-pop doesn't stray far from the distinctive, neon-hued sound of TTA, White Magic feels tighter, lusher, and more polished (especially vocally) than most of the duo's output, with an earnest, romantic emotional outlook far from TTA's typically enigmatic, performative sneering. Berglund wastes no time announcing his ambitions here, starting with the swaying orchestral expanse of "All Around," over which he declares: "I'm coming home to face the demons on my own." It's a grand opening statement, but it's only one part of the ceo equation: alongside weightier material like the ruminative "Oh God Oh Dear" and a solemn, churchy rendition of "Den Blomstertid Nu Kommer" (a hymnlike ode to summertime that's traditionally sung at the close of the Swedish school year) that ends the album with the same string figures that opened it, the balance of White Magic's eight tracks consists of cheerfully melodic dance-pop. "Illuminata" and "Love and Do What You Will," in particular, are about as buoyant as they come, and "Come with Me" is widescreen Balearic pop at its glistening, tuneful best. The title track shades slightly darker, with its vaguely sinister, pulsing tribal techno punctuated by jungle noises, steely guitar flourishes, and percolating pan flutes, while TTA's recurrent hip-hop-inflected fascination with violence rears its head on the otherwise blithe-sounding "No Mercy" with an excellently deployed knife-sharpening sample (the song also features offhand lyrical references to bondage, incarceration, and smoking crack). Without shortchanging Berglund's melodic abilities and his knack for sharp, effective mood juxtapositions, ceo's greatest attribute is his fearlessly inventive, highly detailed approach to arrangement, bringing together an unpredictable assortment of sounds on nearly every track, and somehow making these largely synthetic productions feel dynamic and vibrantly alive. Phil Spector and Brian Wilson come to mind – the baroque strings and clip-clop percussion of "Oh God Oh Dear," specifically, suggest discreet nods to each – and, indeed, pace Wilson, the whole affair might be aptly summed up as a "quarter-life symphony to God." At under 30 minutes, White Magic could feel painfully brief, but it's so dense with creativity, melody, and life that it seems churlish to want more.

Clubfeet: Gold on Gold review

At first blush, Clubfeet seem like yet another of the countless faceless bands plying the intersection of rock, pop, dance, and electronic music in the early 2010s, but this Capetown-via-Melbourne trio is slightly more of a puzzle than its "sounds like" list suggests. For one thing, despite the band's floor-friendly moniker and appearance on the dance-oriented Plant label – and despite its sleek, synthy sheen and plethora of electronic beats – Gold on Gold feels too restrained and contemplative to really come off as a dance album. You could probably dance to most of these tracks if you had to, but on the whole it's more of a mood-setter than a floor-filler, recalling fellow Melburnians Cut Copy at their less vigorous (but still lushly anthemic), suggesting a sprightlier, fleshier take on the xx's darkly stylish veneer and updating the epic romanticism of early U2 (specifically their guitar textures) and early Stars. For a band so centrally concerned with tone and texture, Clubfeet's most impressive feat here – and what sets them apart from many of their contemporaries – is the amount of personality they're able to convey while maintaining a consistent dominant mood. It operates in subtle ways – never overbearing, nearly genteel – but their distinctive charm is nevertheless apparent throughout, often in the touches of humor and lightness they bring to what's largely a sober-minded affair: an oddly chipper tropical beatbox undercutting the lavish melancholy of "Fall from Up Here," a sweet, simple piano figure running through the achingly languorous "Six Days," or the spoken word group chants in both "Teenage Suicide (Don't Do It)" (which, Heathers-referencing aside, seems essentially straight-faced about its titular subject, making for a noble message of perhaps dubious utility in a dance-pop song) and "D.I.E. Yuppie Scum" (which, contrarily, is pretty plainly a gag). The latter two songs are the album's most immediate, attention-getting standouts and most likely dance jams, mostly by virtue of those chanted hooks, but ultimately neither one measures up to "Count Your Lovers," which gets by on pure melody and prettiness. Another highlight is a candy-sweet synth pop rendition of James' "Say Something" which, in addition to being a well-chosen and beautifully executed cover, is one of few moments where Clubfeet set aside their guitars entirely, meaning that perhaps the most electronic thing on the album is a version of a rock song. Who needs pigeonholes anyway?

Dragonette: Fixin' To Thrill review

It's telling that Dragonette titled their second album Fixin to Thrill, and not just straight-up Thrillin', even if it absolutely makes good on that stated intention. Notwithstanding the band's uber-stylish panache and the dangerously glitzy, fabulously sordid rock & roll lifestyle their music projects, there's no denying that the frequently fantastic fun and giddy thrills to be found here are the upshot of some serious craftsmanship. Dragonette are, above all, pop perfectionists, carefully culling all the shiniest bits from '80s new wave (from Duran Duran to the Go-Go's), '90s alt pop (they bear a passing resemblance to No Doubt, a more striking one to the sweet 'n' dirty electro-rock crunch of Garbage), and full-throttle '00s teen pop to concoct an obviously familiar but still effortlessly modern sound to match their punky-spunky energy. But that wouldn't count for much if not for the earworm-y melodies this album boasts in spades, with almost every cut packed full of naggingly catchy synth riffs, vocal hooks, and guitar lines. Fixin may lack a clear, massive standout to match Galore's "I Get Around" (the title track's a decent attempt, but it falls a bit short) but otherwise it marks a slight but noticeable improvement on the band's already-pretty-great debut, a more consistent batch of songs paced so that the highlights keep on coming. For the most part, the odd-numbered songs tend to be the strongest, including the sinuous, sinister "Liar," the goofy, superhero-themed "We Rule the World," and the irresistibly bouncy "Okay Dolore," quasi-cheerleader pop with enough (synthetic) handclaps to do Toni Basil proud. While the band's tendency for oddball stylistic detours is toned down here next to Galore's unscheduled excursions to Bollywood and Tin Pan Alley, the peppy banjos on "Gone Too Far," the kids choir breakdown on "Stupid Grin," and gentle cabaret stylings of "You're a Disaster" keep that sense of playfulness alive in a somewhat more integrated fashion. But the most striking and promising new development here may be an emotional one. "Easy," by some margin the album's best song, is an unusually tender expression of doomed, devoted love with a slinky, sparsely funky electro groove that drops out partway through for a rare moment of vulnerability from the normally all-sass Martina Sobrara: a sweetly harmonized, awkwardly phrased plea imploring her lover not to play games with her fragile heart. It's a total sucker move coming from these guys, an arresting, affecting moment regardless of whether you hear it as unfettered emotionalism or simply a top-notch example of how true pop greatness is to be found in the small details, a lesson that these crafty popsters have definitely taken to heart.

Copy: bio and Hard Dream review

Though he restricts himself to a palette of retro-sounding synths and straitlaced, reasonably dancefloor-friendly drum programming, never straying too far from the distinctive (if hardly earth-shattering) instrumental techno-pop vibe he's made his signature, Copy (alias Portland beatmaker Marius Libman) still covers considerable ground, emotionally, and stylistically. Hard Dream, Copy's third full-length, is titled after and loosely conceived as a score for an unrealized horror movie concept – for a flick about mysteriously televised nightmares – and, fittingly, it has its share of dark, moody, and menacing passages. But it's got plenty of pep and sweetness too, thanks to Libman's unrepentant tunefulness and full-color approach to composition; his synthesizers, which often manage to sound gleaming and gritty at the same time, are just as likely to sparkle and soar as to burble and brood. At the album's frequent best, he's often got multiple synthetic strands of melody going at once, layered into a dense, satisfying analog stew, as on the eight-minute opener "One Less Time"– a slow-building, slow-motion disco epic which might not quite live up to its Daft Punk-baiting title, but still finds some frothy, intoxicating territory to explore – or the sunnier, rather ornate "Breakfast." Copy also does well in sparser settings – "Real Scared," juxtaposing music box arpeggios and archly Baroque synth leads against a spare, swaggering, hip-hop beat – is a clear standout (and one of a few tracks to blatantly recall sometime-confederates Ratatat), while "Stay Away from It"'s herky-jerky, 8-bit bleep-thrash closes the album on a particularly fun, frenetically chirpy note. Only a few tracks are functionally devoid of melody, and they're the weakest links here: the murky, fairly generic dubstep foray "I Didn't Know" and the jittery, Kraftwerk-ian autopilot chase scene music of "It Could Have Been More" make for fine-enough mood shifters in the context of the album, but mostly they seem like rote genre exercises whose failings can be summed up by the latter's title. Generally, though, Libman's compositional gifts don't steer him wrong, and Hard Dream is much more nuanced and engagingly listenable than its stylistic trappings initially suggest. Deliberately or not, Copy's music tends to come off as primarily party fodder, well-crafted but essentially superficial, trading heavily on novelty and kitschy '80s nostalgia, but it's equally possible to see it in the tradition of thoughtful, palatable electronic "listening music," of the sort once peddled by µ-ziq and Plaid, and lately revived by Copy's West coast peers like Eliot Lipp and Nosaj Thing.

Restless People: bio and Restless People review

Restless people indeed, the members of this Brooklyn foursome cycled through several permutations and projects together – as three-quarters of dance-punk second-stringers Professor Murder; as the neotropical production/remix duo Tanlines – before emerging with this concise but emphatic statement of purpose, which can be seen as a synthesis of all that came before it. Taking Tanlines' lighthearted, percolating electronics as a jumping-off point, Restless People add an equally upbeat, accessible pop/rock songwriting slant, arriving at a very 2010 middle ground between the poppy, globe-trotting indie dance of Delorean, Cut Copy, and El Guincho, and the danceable, globe-trotting indie pop of Vampire Weekend, Foreign Born, and Yeasayer – think of them, perhaps, as Williamsburg's answer to the Very Best. At first blush, the album feels even slicker and poppier than any of the above, bursting out of the gate with the Day-glo synths and air horns of "Days of Our Lives," a glossy, euphoric club cut with a relentless stream of simple, continually recycling vocal hooks. "Constant Panic" is even more insistently kinetic – high-NRG neo-disco with a Caribbean lilt, canned handclaps, chopped vocals, and a couple of well-placed percussion breaks. Even the relative breather "Little Sky," which brings down the pace with a nostalgically poignant lyric ("I was born under a great big sky/Now I look up and see a little sky"), is a gleaming, widescreen synth epic that would've been a sure-fire radio staple were it released 25 years earlier, in the age of Peter Gabriel and "In a Big Country." Even with considerable rhythmic variety – "Don't Back Down" crossbreeds new wave piano pop with hiccuping ska; "Practical Magic" shapeshifts from half-time reggae to a frenetic soca jump-up – Restless People has a tendency toward sonic samey-ness: it might all seem like so much faceless, peppy prettiness if not for Eric Emm's enthusiastically earnest vocals. Though not a conventionally great singer, Emm sounds clear-eyed and charismatic, urging on the crowd with a motivational energy pitched somewhere between dancehall toaster and positive hardcore frontman. His intermittent shouts of "Ay, Restless people! Okay!" comes across as both a rallying cry to his bandmates and a sincere, if slightly lackadaisical, life-affirming call to arms for anyone within earshot. That mostly latent punkish energy comes to the forefront on closer "Victimless Crime," the album's only serious misstep (or at least misfit), whose cheerful mess of synth squiggles and incoherent chanting atop a crunched, chugging groove can hardly keep pace with the streamlined pancultural effervescence that preceded it.

Tanlines: Settings and Volume On reviews

A short list of artists for whom Tanlines have provided remix work – El Guincho, the Tough Alliance, Memory Tapes – gives an almost too-perfect snapshot of the stylistic terrain this Brooklyn duo traverses. Along with their True Panther labelmates Delorean, these acts are at the forefront of a particular late-2000s approach to electronic music that's decidedly poppy and danceable but without the formal rigidity of dance-pop proper, featuring plush, treble-heavy synths, thickly burbling percussion, and warmly layered, tropical-flavored grooves. That's a fairly straight-ahead description of what you can expect to find on Settings, a highly enjoyable release that nevertheless tends to blend into its surroundings (both aurally and stylistically) rather than asserting its individuality. The clearest standouts, or at least the most memorable moments, come with "Real Life" and "Policy of Trust," both enhanced (though not exactly dominated) by Eric Emm's appealingly low-key vocals, which ruminate on life's unknowable roads ("For a minute I was lost/I looked away/My destination was unknown") and make sideways nods to Depeche Mode. The third vocal cut, "Bees," is less melodically engaging, flirting with slightly more aggressive, calypsonian rhythm, while the closing "Z" is a lovely, more electro-leaning showcase for the glassy, wordless vocals of labelmate Glasser. At six songs and 24 minutes, Settings comes off as a reasonably generous EP, not least because it seems like about the limit for what these guys are able to accomplish without in some way broadening the parameters of what they do – any longer and its commendable cohesiveness might start to seem more tiresome. A true full-length effort from these two could be a very appealing prospect; they might just have to vary up their portfolio a bit to pull it off.

Arp: The Soft Wave review

Alexis Georgopoulos' debut as Arp, 2007's In Light, was an almost forbiddingly minimal collection of glacially paced analog synth excursions and sparse, meandering drones. The Soft Wave follows that outing with a set that's equally subdued and nearly as restrained in its compositional approach, yet feels strikingly rich in comparison to the utter starkness of its predecessor. There are a few obvious departures here, including an expanded sonic palette – featuring electric guitars and basses, pianos, beatboxes, and even (on one track) vocals in addition to the expected array of vintage synthesizers (which occasionally veer into patches of fuzz and abstract noise instead of remaining clinically pure) – and the fact that many of these pieces boast what could legitimately called melodies, or at least melodic motifs. But the biggest change is more than anything one of mood: while both albums are calm and contemplative, there's a warmth and restfulness to Wave that was distinctly absent from the sometimes naggingly unsettled, sometimes downright chilly In Light. It's right there in the track list: titles like "Catch Wave," "High Life," and "Summer Girl" evoke a pretty specific vibe, and they're not lying – the latter two in particular offer a hazy tunefulness that makes them, along with the groovily fluid guitar-looping "White Light," the first Arp tracks that could be considered infectious. You're probably unlikely to jam them on your way to the beach, but they're perfect for laying back and dreaming about summer, regardless of the actual outdoor temperature (well, as long as you don't mind the occasional squall). The same is equally true of the lengthier pieces that make up The Soft Wave's two poles: the stately, gently triumphant two-part opener "Pastoral Symphony," which is the closest this album comes to In Light's hermetic analog purity, and the blissfully languid slow-motion bossa "From a Balcony Overlooking the Sea" (the aforementioned vocal number, reminiscent of "rock album" Brian Eno and, curiously, the Sea and Cake), clearly the farthest thing here from Arp's established wheelhouse. Though these two pieces don't sound very much like one another, the feeling they create is surprisingly comparable. Much as Georgopoulos' compositions gradually evolve and mutate out of an initial sense of stasis, he's found a way to vary his approach – if only, in the scheme of things, fairly slightly – that moves it forward, slowly but surely, from simple clarity toward a rare luminescence.

Drivan: bio and Disko review

Norwegian producer Kim Hiorthøy has a knack for cobbling together small scraps of sound and melody in a careful but seemingly arbitrary fashion that can make the simple and familiar seem oddly curious and make the coarse and unexpected feel innocently sweet. Disko, the first output from Drivan – a group consisting of Hiorthøy and three female performance artists who serve here primarily as vocalists and co-architects – is the least overtly electronic recording he has been involved in, although most of its tracks do feature his typically low-key, rough-hewn, hip-hop-styled beats for at least a portion of their running time. For the most part, the album uses the melodic but not particularly song-based linear structures familiar from his solo work. Tracks tend to build from a basic rudimentary riff, melody, or chord progression, typically picked out on acoustic guitar or a slightly out of tune piano, with the vocals – exclusively in Swedish, usually solo or in unison, and tending toward a plain, uninflected tone that sometimes takes on a childlike, singsong cast – layered on top. Beats filter in and out, tracks develop and disintegrate in fluid but unpredictable ways, and Hiorthøy tacks on little bits of incidental noise and sonic detritus: the ambient sounds of talking, laughing, scuffling of papers; spectral, unidentified samples of this and that; whistling and squeaking electronic toys and synthetic strings and cheap-sounding keyboard organ solos. There's one clear standout and centerpiece in the six-minute "Det Gör Ingenting," which is the fullest-sounding and most melodically compelling piece here, its sweetly hypnotic throb suggesting an epic, pulsating dance track as performed by children, or heard from several rooms away through slightly worn-out speakers. (It's the only time the album comes close to the danceability suggested by its devious title, though it's still probably a bit too mellow for that.) Otherwise, it's all gently shambolic, mildly folky, slightly inscrutable, and generally quite likable. One gets the sense that Hiorthøy and his cohorts could easily continue turning out these strange, sweet, and satisfying songs in similar fashion for quite some time, if they so chose, and it would be hard to complain if they did.

K-X-P: K-X-P review

A good deal heavier and murkier than the electronic prog-disco fare sometimes associated with Smalltown Supersound – though far from unrelated to that aesthetic – K-X-P is the first fruit of the eponymous project fronted by Op:l Bastards' Timo Kaukolampi. Effectively a synth-bass-drums power trio – with the slight twist that the lineup alternates between a pair of drummers – K-X-P specialize in dark, elemental, monolithic grooves with an obvious debt to your typical slate of gritty, texture-oriented post-punk minimalists (Suicide, Spacemen 3, This Heat) and motorik Krautrockers (Can, Neu!). Each of these eight cuts has its own distinct rhythmic flavor – "Mehu Moments" sports a simple, steady jazz-funk beat; "Elephant Man" rides a hypnotic, herky-jerky tribal pounding; standout "18 Hours (Of Love)" is a stomping T. Rex/Goldfrapp/Battles shuffle – but they maintain a fairly consistent tone and approach, with plenty of groaning, throbbing drones, noisy squalls of synth noodling, and other bits of psychedelic electro-sonic detritus. Vocals crop up occasionally on three or four of the songs, but they're typically too distorted to make much of an impression – the exception being "Pockets," wherein they're intelligible as English and recognizably melodic though fairly grating (after grappling, largely successfully, with conventional song form, the track's second half retreats into an unexpected morass of fluttering, electro-disco synth arpeggios). As the album progresses, it grows more heavily electronic and increasingly spacy, with the gauzy soundtrack synths of "New World" offering a more subdued moment of cosmic reverie and "Epilogue" closing things out with some beatless, meandering organ drones and wispy wordless vocals. Despite its general seedy overtones and occasional moments of harshness, K-X-P is far from an unpalatable or unpleasant record; indeed, its relentless intensity can even feel oddly calming.

Eddy Current Suppression Ring: Primary Current review

Eddy Current Suppression Ring's second album is essentially of a piece with their self-titled debut, meaning here are ten more blasts of direct, primitive, tuneful punk from the bowels of Melbourne. Rough and scrappy but too giddily enthusiastic to come off as snotty or sneering, ECSR tap in to the primal, fun-loving energy of frill-free rock & roll, a spirit that feels every bit as immediate and relevant as it is familiar and timeless. Their sound may be derivative (of any number of past clatter-masters – perhaps most notably the Stooges, but also Wire, the Fall, the Feelies, and on and on), but it's not formulaic, and certainly not monotonous: Primary Colours employs a fair amount of rhythmic and textural variety within its basic template of straightforward lock-grooves and minimalist guitar shredding. So for every all-out skronkfest like "Sunday's Coming" and "Which Way to Go," which maintain a fairly steady barrage of thick guitar noise, there's a sleeker, spindlier cut like "Memory Lane" or the bored anti-media rant "Colour Television" ("Another Wheel of Fortune/Another million tortured") to keep their squalls in check for just the right moment of release. Punk love song "Wrapped Up" is bouncy and infectious with a strong, slinky riff, the Feelies-esque instrumental "That's Inside of Me" finds a herky-jerky funk groove, and "We'll Be Turned On" loosens up even further with some sloppy organ pounding and a righteously bashed-out rhythm track. That song also features a particularly goofy turn from frontman Brendan Suppression who, with his affable Aussie twang and unpretentious reflections on ordinary stuff like relationships and modern life (or, in this case, sex and television), comes across like a far more relatable version of Mark E. Smith.

Kathryn Calder: Are You My Mother? review

The most striking moment on Kathryn Calder's solo debut comes early. Halfway through the prettily subdued opener, "Slip Away," the song bursts unexpectedly free of its gently dappled piano tones and measured calm, the drums kick into rollicking gear, and Calder lets loose a joyous, irresistible, wordless vocal line strikingly like the ones her uncle, Carl Newman, used to write for Neko Case to sing with the New Pornographers. But those glorious, fleeting seconds (the eruption happens again later in the song) are the closest Are You My Mother? comes to the unbridled power pop/rock favored both by that group (of which Calder has become an increasingly active member) and by Immaculate Machine, the band of high-school chums turned indie rock pros that was until recently her primary outfit. Somewhere between a "traditional" singer/songwriter album and an exercise in one-woman popcraft à la Newman's band-based solo records, Mother finds Calder alternating between rhythmically driven uptempo numbers (the peppy, noodly two-step "Castor and Pollux"; the frantic, somewhat slapdash-sounding "A Day Long Past Its Prime") and mellower, more introspective fare. She strikes a happy medium on the folksy, metrically quirky "If You Only Knew," a jaunty singalong complete with handclaps and shambling, desultory group percussion, and on the breezy "Follow Me into the Hills," which manages to suggest both loping acoustic country and tiki-lounge exotica with its mandolin breaks, swaying tropical beat, and big twangy guitar. But by and large, in spite of Calder's rocking pedigree, Mother is generally most effective at its most restrained. With repeated listens, cuts like the autumnal, string-laden "Down the River" and the wistful waltzes "Arrow" and "So Easily" (the former a piano-based lilt, the latter stripped down to the sparsest picked acoustic guitar notes and featuring an understated harmony from Case) stand out as the album's most resonant, if only because their sparer settings allow Calder's finest gifts – the strength of her melodies and the girlish sweetness of her winsome vocals – to shine through most clearly. Despite its poignant back-story – Calder recorded the album at her family home in Victoria while caring for her ailing mother, who died a year before its release – Mother's emotional impact tends to be more indirect and evocative than specific and tangible. Its varied but always thoughtful musical character, as much as its nuanced, sometimes ambiguous lyrics, make it feel like an understated, vital reminder to bring a gentle approach to life's struggles.

Jenny Wilson: Hardships! review

The second album by this acclaimed Swedish songstress largely jettisons the appealing if skewed pop sensibility of her debut, along with most of that album's electronic underpinnings, for a prickly, nebulously political collection of songwriterly art-pop, emphasis firmly on the "art." While Love and Youth wasn't exactly light listening, it could somewhat reasonably be mentioned in the same breath as Wilson's friends and collaborators (and compatriots) Robyn and The Knife; Hardships!, though, plods a portentous path far from the Scandinavian synth-pop superhighway, evoking instead the idiosyncratic likes of Kate Bush and Tori Amos. Wilson's curious, powerfully theatrical soprano has earthy hints of gospel and soul, while the piano-led chamber arrangements offer occasional flashes of levity, particularly in the percussion department – though the album's menagerie of handclaps and xylophones can just as easily sound sinister as cheerful. But most of the interest here (human or otherwise) derives from the lyrics, which deal explicitly with domesticity and motherhood, forming a loose song cycle/concept album that addresses those topics primarily through themes of struggle, escape and disillusionment. Wilson combines narrative details redolent of rural poverty (strong-willed horses, threadbare socks, burnt soup and potatoes) with military, maritime, natural world and nursery-rhyme imagery to create vivid, uneasy juxtapositions, not unlike the rifle she wields with such impassive poise on the album's cover. The dinner-time escalation in "Pass me the Salt" is typical: "Come on now eat your food/cartridges, fried and stewed/this table has become a combat zone." The title song likewise compares the trials of motherhood to the stuff of bloody battlefields, bemoaning the unheralded heroism involved in an implacable, oddly antagonistic tone that reduces a well-reasoned feminist viewpoint to bleak, heartless logic. Wilson adopts a similarly chilly, queasily pragmatic, almost resentful view of family relationships throughout, with partners and children alike: when she wails, by way of a lullaby, "I wanna leave you baby/but our veins are entwined," you get the sense she really does want to leave her infant. The final two songs represent something of a thaw, musically as well as lyrically (one features a loose-limbed sax solo) – tellingly, they're the only ones save for the surreal memoiristic opener "The Path" ("I wanted to be born, so I crawled out of my mother") to contain the word "love." Love does not come easily in a world filled with hardships. And Hardships! is not an easy affair on any level.

chemical colors

blog block, where to start. some concerts i've seen lately...

cut copy (& the presets) @ the troc, 25 september
the band who made my ostensibly maybe favorite album of 2008 (?), in ghost colors, (except that i haven't really listened to it all that much), and who i'd previously narrowly missed seeing, more or less, twice so far this year (once at sxsw, once at making time.) was in a kind of a bad mood going in, and by myself. openers/bill-sharers(?) the presets were almost-danceable, but not quite enough for enough of the time, and were just way too dark and intense for me, at least at that moment. they kept reminding me of devo, but not in a good way. some of their songs seemed kind of good. (and they definitely had some serious fans in the audience.)

between sets they played steely dan's "peg," which was much more fun to dance to than the presets. before cut copy i jostled my way forward to get a good spot, but wound up too focused on the crowd manoeuverings to enjoy the music at all, so after several songs (including my fave, "far away," way too early) i drifted to the back of the room and finally started to actually enjoy it a little bit, when they played, i think, "strangers in the wind." the next song, dan (main guy) said something like "ok, here's the part of the show where it gets really good." then towards the end of the song ("saturdays," maybe?) he said "ok, here's the part where everybody goes completely crazy," and he counted off, 1, 2, 1 2 3 4. and it wasn't even necessarily the greatest part, but suddenly the whole room really got lighter and freer, and we were all bouncing and floating as one giant mass, the way it sometimes happens, all smiles, and that was brilliant. then, i think, "feel the love" and "out there on the ice," the brilliant 1-2 that opens the album. and i even hugged the girls i had been bedgrudgingly dancing to the presets with, and we reached out to each other for "hearts on fire." okay, happyfuntimes after all. still, they're sort of just a band, you know. hmmm.

stereolab, back @ the troc, 1 october
at that show i signed up to win tickets to see stereolab the following week, and somehow i kind of knew i would end up winning them, which i did. which is great, because i definitely wouldn't have gone otherwise, even though i've vaguely wanted to see stereolab for a long time now. what a fun show!

totally different vibe from the cut copy/presets gig a week prior - much sparser crowd, and a good deal older and less excitable, which is not a bad thing. not enough of them were dancing, but sara and i and some other folks near us made up for it, gettin silly and rocking out. the band really seemed to be enjoying themselves too - laetitia sadier is about as charming as you might expect, but in a very understated way, and unfortunately i couldn't really hear what she was saying half the time (quiet+accent.) for some reason i never expect them to be a normal rock band, like with a drummer and bassist and everything, but of course they are - they just happen to also have two full-time keyboard players (plus laetitia, sometimes.) some old stuff (opened with "percolator" from emperor tomato ketchup, and also did a handful of others i recognized but couldn't necessarily place - incl. "ping pong") and lots of new stuff, probably mostly from their new chemical chords, which i totally should have gotten there, and need to get sometime. very poppy, very sixties, soul/motown influence. yum.

fleet foxes @ starlight ballroom, 2 october
and the very next night i somehow found myself in another crowd, checking out [the] fleet foxes [as they seem to be called a lot], whom i hadn't really heard thus far. i could definitely understand the appeal... i would probably enjoy it a fair amount myself listening to an lp record... but being exposed to it for the first time in at least that particular live context, i couldn't really get into it as much more than entirely pleasant. pretty harmonies (though they kind of use the same ones a lot, no?) and a couple of melodies that stuck out - also nicely structured songs. but you know, it's just hard to get too excited about that way. clearly, they are related to crosby stillsenash.

i was actually more interested by the opener, frank fairfield, a totally anachronistic old-timey young man, who seems to be very much "for real," whatever that means. does period/style-appropriate dress/hair-styling (marked without being so pronounced as to really fall into novelty/parody schtick) make him more authentic (it seems like it does) or less? would be curious to learn his real story, how he comes to this stuff. of course there's no myspace blog bio. hard one to puzzle out. he walked on stage carrying four stringed instruments (i think?) - fiddle, banjo, and two guitars - and proceeded to play about six songs, and then carefully picked them all up again and carried them off. hum. good stuff.

and then,

jonathan richman @ the sanctuary of the church, 12 october.
eve of my birthday - it felt right. brought some pals. sat on the floor. this was i guess my fourth time seeing jojo - after rochester in high school, san francisco in 2001, the khyber in 2005. i kind of thought i'd seen him at johnny brenda's (and josh marcus opened for him there so i know he's played there) but i don't think i actually did.

he seemed more with it than the last time i saw him and got vaguely depressed by it, though he didn't quite sparkle the way he does in my memory and on the take me to the plaza dvd i'd watched a few nights before and got really excited by. frankly, a lot of it was that i didn't think the new songs were quite up to his best - mostly kind of too-typical takes on his familiar themes ("because her beauty is raw and wild") though he's got an interesting, very strongly-felt humanist/anti-conformist argument going in "when we refuse to suffer" and "our drab ways," which are sort of lifestyle protest music. he did a song about how he doesn't [want to] have a cellphone, which was bratty and snotty in a way that felt like a big throwback to early modern lovers style, pretty funny. and, of course, he did "picasso" and "lesbian bar" (got us all up and dancing, though he only did about a verse and a half.) and closed with "that summer feeling," interspersed with some stories from his earliest childhood, which was truly sweet.

AMG review round-up, volume V

at long last... this installment contains, essentially, the remainder of my output from april and may, before i went away for a month and abandoned you all (and also a couple few pieces i wrote since returning.) it's all either disco, or pop, or (more often) some combination of the two, and a good portion of it is Scandinavian...! interspersed throughout are various nuggets of genre theory, historiography, and general pontificating that you'd otherwise be getting from me here unfiltered. before moving on to some of my very fave recent releases (though not cloetta paris, who i'm just reviewing now, and who certainly belongs here), gonna kick it off with three different sortsa compilations from three of the best best scandi artists there are:

Lindstrøm: It's A Feedelity Affair review

"It's a Feedelity Affair, the debut solo album from Hans-Peter Lindstrøm, is the soundtrack to an unrealized mystical science fiction/action epic directed by Wong Kar-Wai. Handily, it also functions as a greatest-hits compilation for the celebrated Norwegian dance producer, collecting most of the sides from his single releases on his own Feedelity Recordings imprint between 2003 and 2006. Arranged roughly chronologically in the order of their release, these productions run the gamut from the brisk, cheerful robotic disco of aptly named early single "Fast and Delirious" to the slinky, vaguely sinister disco strut of "Limitations" to the meandering, tripped-out cosmic disco of "Further Into the Future" (a Prins Thomas co-production) to the balmy, downtempo equatorial disco of "Arp She Said." Yep, it's all disco in some way or another, including more or less any way you can imagine as long as it's instrumental and least vaguely electronic (actually not everything here is instrumental: the supremely dubbed-out "Music [In My Mind]," Lindstrøm's first Feedelity single, boasts some druggy, disorienting spoken/sung vocals courtesy of Christabelle, aka Isabelle Sandoo.) Otherwise, these tracks are united by a sense of adventurous musicality and a pervasive playfulness that is rarely so pronounced in electronic dance music -- dig the myriad extended noodley keyboard solos, the dizzying sequence of chord changes toward the end of "Fast and Delirious," or the endless restless mutations that compose the stately, epic-length "There's a Drink in My Bedroom and I Need a Hot Lady." The compilation's undeniable peak and centerpiece is also Lindstrøm's signature tune, the epochal "I Feel Space," which nods to Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder's Italo disco blueprint "I Feel Love" in its title and agitated, arpeggiated bassline, but looks toward the cosmos with its mesmerizing, gracefully yearning portamento synthesizer melody."

Robyn: Robyn's Best review

A shamelessly misleading and essentially worthless release that seems misguided even as a straight-up cash-grab attempt (because where was Robyn's audience in 2004?), this is not so much a "compilation" as a repackaging of Robyn's 1997 debut album -- minus three tracks. Those three -- curiously, the only three that the then-teenaged Swedish singer wrote herself (though she has at least a co-credit on every track) -- are not even the weakest cuts on Robyn Is Here, although like the bulk of the album they are relatively slight, generic pop-R&B. Indeed, the only conceivable advantage of this release is that it front-loads all three of the album's strongest tracks: the three singles. But what makes Robyn's Best actively insulting instead of just obnoxiously harmless is that at the time of its release -- although she had yet to embark on the full-scale artistic and commercial renaissance that would begin the following year with the Swedish release of Robyn -- she already had two more excellent, Europe-only full-lengths under her belt that this compilation pointedly ignores.

Bertine Zetlitz: Sweet Injections, Rollerskating, My Italian Greyhound, and In My Mind: 1997-2007 - Best of reviews

"One of Norway's most popular artists - predictably, unjustly, obscure in the rest of the world - Bertine Zetlitz gets a well-deserved career retrospective in this consistently excellent collection that compiles all of her singles to date. In My Mind, which arrived during a performing hiatus following the birth of her first child, is somewhat inexplicably titled after a good but unexceptional ballad from her debut, which is not included here - a more appropriate title might have been "Twisted Little Star," which apart from being possibly the most gorgeous song she's ever written is also an apt description of her perverse, cryptic lyrical tendencies.... Her 1998 debut Morbid Latenight Show (the only of her five albums to be released in the U.S., under the far less distinctive name Bertine) is well represented by four tracks of jazzy lounge-pop, which have aged reasonably well, while the more complex, decidedly darker albums Beautiful So Far and Sweet Injections yield three cuts apiece - several trip-hop-inflected gems and twisted dance-pop nuggets, and the lovely ballad "Fate" (presented in the fuller, more radio-friendly Disclab version.) If there's any quibble to had with the selection, it's that the two fantastic albums Zetlitz made with Fred Ball (a.k.a. Pleasure), 2004's Rollerskating and 2006's My Italian Greyhound, are shortchanged, with only two tracks apiece.... Zetlitz was on a tremendous roll in the years leading up to this compilation, and that's reflected in two new songs (perhaps modestly slotted at the end of the track list) which, in contradistinction to typical wisdom about these things, are as strong as anything else on the disc: the unsettling, melodically ethereal "Ashamed," which sets the fears and anxieties of motherhood to a slinky electro groove, and the artlessly bittersweet, resigned ballad "Bubble Bursts." Unlike fellow Scandinavians pop trailblazers Robyn and Annie, who have at least made some inroads towards international awareness, Bertine remains a virtual unknown outside of Europe, but her work is every bit as inventive, idiosyncratic, personable, accomplished and worth seeking out.

"Continuing a gradual progression from the cosmopolitan singer-songwriter pop of her debut (and only U.S. release to date) Morbid Latenight Show and the moody, trip-hop inflected Beautiful So Far towards the more fully electronic dance pop of her later work, Bertine Zetlitz's third album contains her brightest and catchiest pop songs to date, as well as with plenty of typically dark, cryptic material. Where Zetlitz is concerned, there's no great divide between darkness and pop - just take a look at those adorably sinister barbed candy-cane vines threatening to encircle her on the cover and you'll get the idea. Her characteristic juxtaposition of girlish sweetness with subtly psychological menace pervades much of the album, as if to confirm her softly cooed assertion that she's "the sickest girl you'll ever find." Even the album's glossiest moment, the spun-sugar synth-disco of "Girl Like You" (produced by Richard X), involves the disquieting mind games of a needy, manipulative, obsessive lover. Other standouts include the start-stop funk of opener "For Fun," which offers even more unsettling promises ("I will make your soft hands tremble/I will make your ego burst"), and the stunningly gorgeous "Twisted Little Star," which, title notwithstanding, is relatively genuine in its sweetness."

"Bertine Zetlitz's fantastic fifth album continues the inspired pairing with Pleasure's Fred Ball that produced the utterly masterful Rollerskating two years earlier, making it her first album not to involve a wholesale change-up in collaborators. Although her earlier albums, made with a series of distinguished pop and electronic producers, were frequently brilliant, and certainly established the strength and consistency of her musical identity, Zetlitz seems to have found an exceptionally sympathetic confederate in Ball - in any case, their partnership to date has produced some of the very finest and most uniquely realized pop music of its day, bar none. Essentially following a similar template to Rollerskating - casually sophisticated dance-pop that blends lush organic instrumentation with understated electronics, recalling '70s funk, AM pop-rock, and disco while still sounding effortlessly modern - Greyhound is notably warmer and breezier, scaling back some of the icy anxiety that had made her earlier work so simultaneously alluring and unsettling, and allowing more genuine sweetness to shine through than ever before. "Never Let You Go," a rare foray into major key tonality, wields its titular phrase, on balance, as more of a promise than a threat; "Get What You Deserve" is easy-going, Fleetwood Mac-styled country-pop with endearingly shaken-up lyrics about being caught off-guard by love, and even "Obsession," a twitchy electro groover whose title would seem to imply lyrics riddled with Zetlitz's trademark psychosexual melodrama, offers unexpectedly candid declarations of affection. It's not that Zetlitz has gone soft - there's still darkness and heartbreak here, though it's less likely to be shrouded in cryptic imagery - but she has relaxed and opened up somewhat, making this her most engagingly human work to date, even if it's far from sunny. Musically too, Greyhound is her most vibrant and forceful album, with only one ballad to speak of (the almost schmaltzy "This Time") and several of her finest dance tunes - the stellar singles "Midnight" (a sleek, sophisticated disco burner) and "500" (a quirky, minimal bump-and-grind featuring glorious harmonies and the memorable line "I have been sweet on you forever/that's why I have been stealing all your stuff"), but also the funky, slinky "Draggin' Me Down," among others. Stylish, sensitive, complex and compelling, My Italian Greyhound is, all told, a second straight masterstroke from Norway's greatest underappreciated pop auteur."

Sophie Ellis-Bextor: Shoot From the Hip and Trip The Light Fantastic reviews

"...of course, "respectable" doesn't necessarily count for much in pop terms, although Ellis-Bextor has mastered a knack for exuding sophistication without being off-putting and stuffy -- she's so posh (viz. her unmistakable accent) that the slickness of the production complements her personality rather than diluting it. Still, the songs have to be there, and the songs on Shoot From The Hip rarely rise above the merely pleasant..."

"A welcome return from one of the most sophisticated and distinctive voices in British dance-pop, Trip The Light Fantastic is easily Sophie Ellis-Bextor's most dynamic album to date. Markedly more consistent than its enjoyable-but-spotty predecessors, but also -- more importantly -- far more gutsy, varied and vital, its many strong points are the most exciting of her career. It had been four years since her previous album -- a considerable span in pop terms -- but Ellis-Bextor's music has always hearkened to smartly classicist, new wave-informed synth-disco, even in the days when the Pet Shop Boys were practically the sole remaining practitioners of the style, so it didn't require much alteration for her to sound right in step with eighties-resuscitation that was in full swing by 2007. Even so, she sounds dramatically reinvigorated here, with a notable infusion of rock guitars and often a forceful, even menacing, electro edge to the productions, both evident right out the gate in the strident, barnstorming first single "Catch You." The highlights follow fast and furious: the immaculate disco glide of "Me And My Imagination" (whose canny lyrics advise an overeager suitor to play harder to get), the robotic, strobing "New York City Lights," the Xenomania-esque, Emma Goldman-quoting stomp of "If I Can't Dance" (the actual Xenomania contribution, "If You Go," is nearly as good), and the lovely pop ballad "Today The Sun's On Us," Ellis-Bextor's entrant in the late-2000s "Time After Time"-homage sweepstakes. Amazingly, despite that practically flawless opening sequence, the latter half of the album is nearly as strong, boasting the bouncy, fun-loving pop of "Love Is Here" and the twitchy electro of "China Heart," while the brashly optimistic disco-schmaltz apotheosis "Only One" stands as the album's most triumphantly over-the-top, life-affirming moment. In a banner year for British, female-fronted electronic chart pop, which saw excellent albums by Sugababes, Girls Aloud, Roisin Murphy, Siobhan Donaghy, Tracey Thorn and Kylie Minogue among others, Ellis-Bextor more than held her own with a classy, romantic, and, above all, tremendously enjoyable record which stands as a shining example of the state of the art."

Amy Diamond: bio, This Is Me Now, Still Me, Still Now, and Music in Motion review

"Amy Diamond's third album in just over three years isn't dramatically different from her first two, but as its title suggests - in direct distinction to its place-holding predecessor - it does show definite signs of forward momentum. Still barely into her teens (fifteen to be precise), she's already beginning to drop the kiddie trappings that have marked her work to date - nobody's going to mistake her for an "adult" artist just yet, but as she starts to make that always-awkward transition (which she'll probably complete in about another year, the way pop works these days) she's already a force to be reckoned with. Growing pains are already evident in the album's musical lopsidedness, stretched as it is between sleekly modern dance/R&B ("Domino," "Speed of Light," the cheekily Cyndi-Lauper-ish "So 16") and dimpled schmaltz like "We Could Learn a Lot" (which is about aliens), "Sleepy Sunday" (unusually peppy for a song about laziness), and the over-orchestrated playground retort "Takes One To Know One." Both tendencies have always been present in Diamond's music, but they seem especially polarized and disparate here, though her always-potent pipes and general perkiness keep things from feeling too incongruous. The by-now obligatory lite-ska grooves turn up on the impressively slinky "Looks Like We Made It" - which slathers on the reverb and actual horns before changing gears midcourse with a double-time pep-pop chorus - as well as the enjoyably frothy lead single "Is It Love?," a slight slice of blippy electro-pop. Better is second single "Stay My Baby," a chunky, funky collaboration with Max Martin that sounds nostalgic for the sort of teen-pop he pioneered ten years earlier with Britney and the Backstreet Boys; better still is "Thank You," Diamond's entry in the 2008 Melodifestivalen contest (it won her 8th place), which cribs the electro schaffel glide most often associated with Goldfrapp. Added to the album upon its early 2008 re-release, "Thank You" is classic Diamond in the over-the-top giddiness and subtle snarkiness of its lyrical kiss-off ("Thank you for all that you've done for me/Now I know what real love is supposed to be" - too bad she doesn't sing "done to me" like it says on the lyric sheet) - and arguably her finest single to date. And pretty soon it will even be age-appropriate!

Juvelen: bio, 1 review

"From the opening seconds of "Don't Mess" - two crisp snare hits and a sudden blast of syncopated, celebratory synth-funk - it's clear that Juvelen is aiming for pop's big leagues. Crucially - because modern popstardom is nothing if not a self-fulfilling prophecy - Jonas Pettersson has the cocksure, charismatic swagger, and the songs (also important), to make you think he's already there. Look no further than the banal but still perhaps slyly boastful title of the suave Swede's first full-length. 1's stunning kick-off track "Don't Mess" has all the excitement of a vintage Michael Jackson floor-filler (think "Wanna Be Starting Something"), while "Hanna," among others, channels classic Prince in its terse funk-pop, histrionic falsetto and pure-heart/dirty-mind confessional lyrics. Sidestepping the inevitable anxiety of obvious influence, Juvelen's work here could be described simply as "traditionalist" electronic dance-pop, but he has enough personality to make it both impressively fresh and surprisingly heartfelt. His unfiltered sentimentality and infectious positivity shine through on additional party-time contenders like the easy-going disco charmer "Facts of Life" and especially the propulsive "Money Don't Talk," which contains the defining couplet "I never made any money/always preferred to make love." The album's several quieter moments - not quite ballads, they're more like slow jams - are somewhat less musically distinctive, though often touching (notably the lush "A Dream"), the striking exception being the understated, gorgeously lovelorn minimalism of "Watch Your Step," reprised from Juvelen's debut EP. Apart from a few slightly less memorable cuts (and what would a great pop album be without its filler?) the only real potential sticking point to enjoyment here is Pettersson's voice, which shifts ably enough between song, speak-singing, whisper and falsetto, but frequently strays into an oddly strained, throaty timbre that can come off as forced and insincere (a serious problem for such a soulful singer), and which some listeners may well find inescapably grating. For the most part though, it's easy enough to acclimate to this vocal quirk in view of the record's other merits, and well worth it; it's the lone notable flaw in a nearly impeccable pop debut."

Sally Shapiro: Bio, Disco Romance, Remix Romance Vol. 1 and Remix Romance Vol. 2 reviews

"The cover photo for the North American edition of Sally Shapiro's Disco Romance depicts the Swedish singer in winter, her cheeks rosy, her blond hair and eyebrows dusted with snowflakes, smiling to herself in spite of the chill. It's a fitting image for this undeniably wintry album, conjuring not just the glacial sweep and frosty twinkle of producer Johan Agebjörn's synthesizer fantasias, but also the faint but glowing presence in the heart of the blizzard: Shapiro's soft, fragile voice, which is so thin and devoid of inflection that it ought to be impenetrably icy, but is somehow instead as warm and enticing as a cozy fire in the dead of February. A closer examination of that cover image reveals that what look like snowflakes are in fact tiny stars, computer-generated pentagrams (though they almost look hand-drawn) that could be read as a subtle reminder that the intimacy and poignant sincerity of these songs came about, in a sense, only through layers of artifice. For one thing, Shapiro herself -- or more precisely, the anonymous singer behind that alias -- remains something of a cipher. Who can say for sure whether her oft-discussed shyness (she has yet to perform live or offer an in-person interview, and reportedly she will only record vocals when alone in the room) is completely genuine or a clever piece of image manipulation. If it's the latter, that might in a roundabout way to lend some authenticity to the project. As the playfully retro, knowingly garish design of the original European cover for the album makes clear, Disco Romance is a conscious effort to recall -- indeed, to reproduce -- the sound and style of 1980s Italo disco, a genre built on cheap synthesizers, recyclable dance grooves, and interchangeable faceless vocalists reciting inane or even nonsensical lyrics. Which isn't to suggest that it wasn't great music. And this album pulls out all the right tricks to faithfully evoke Italo at its best -- vocoded vocals, spacey synth washes, squelchy electronic squiggles, octave-jumping ostinato basslines -- while also incorporating just enough variety in tempo and rhythm to avoid the genre's propensity for monotonous excess. But it also transcends mere genre exercise -- for all its facelessness and artificiality, Disco Romance is unabashedly a product of love, and it contains unexpected beauty and a depth of humanity that should appeal not only to nostalgic Italo fans, although it is undeniably suffused with nostalgia in a broader sense. Crucially, the songwriting, though essentially simple, is vivid and often penetrating in its evocations of love (sought; found; lost; unrequited). The clearest standouts on that count are the couple of numbers borrowed from Swedish indie pop one-man band Nixon (notably "Anorak Christmas," an adorable tale of new love with an indelible synth hook to match), but Agebjörn's originals are nearly as potent, particularly the warmly reassurance of "I'll Be by Your Side" -- the would-be one-off single that started it all -- and the tortured ambivalence of "I Know," whose run-on sentence of a chorus veers from hope to despair with each protracted turn of phrase ("I know you're my love/Even though/Sometimes/I believe/I will wake up from this dream...").

"Following their North American reissue/revamp of Sally Shapiro's debut, Disco Romance, Toronto-based Paper Bag Records worked with the album's creators to put together not one but two sets of remixes, collecting several, though not all, previously existing mixes of the material and amassing a bounty of newly solicited versions. Given the recent emergence of 1980s electronic Italo disco as a newly hip commodity in the late 2000s, and Disco Romance's superlative and uncannily accurate re-creation of that style, it's not surprising that plenty of artists would jump at the chance to get involved and pay their respects, nor that a majority of them would turn in renditions that hew fairly close to the original templates. Most of the bigger names on Remix Romance, Vol. 1, including the Juan Maclean, Junior Boys, Lindstrøm, and the hotly tipped German producer Tensnake, offer remixes that carry their distinct fingerprints while upholding the sense of reverent allegiance to vintage electronic disco -- in other words, mixes that aren't too far removed from their own work...

On the less electronic side of things, Canadians Woodhands, Holy Fuck, and the Cansecos each add some amount of live instrumentation, edging Shapiro's electro closer to danceable indie pop territory; the best of these might be the Cansecos' percussion-heavy reading of "Hold Me So Tight," which is strikingly reminiscent of Annie's "Heartbeat." The only real wild card is Jon Brooks' (of Advisory Circle and King of Woolworths) stately, Air-ish reworking of "Skating in the Moonshine," which eschews percussion and all but the most atmospheric electronics in favor of understated electric piano, acoustic guitar, and mournful, oddly archaic-sounding flutes. It would probably flow more naturally if Shapiro had re-recorded her vocals with this stripped-down approach in mind, but it's still an effective reminder of how much strong songwriting contributed to the original album's success. Needless to say, Remix Romance lacks the coherence and conceptual singularity of Disco Romance, but for a remix album it delivers impressively, both in terms of track-for-track hit rate and overall listenability. Considering its welcome but not gratuitously overabundant variety, it's just possible that some listeners will find themselves preferring this version of Romance.

[Various Artists]: Milky Disco review

Like Ghostly International's groundbreaking Tangent 2002: Disco Nouveau compilation five years earlier, London-based Lo Recordings offers an excellent survey of recent trends in disco-based electronica on the intriguingly titled Milky Disco. Compiler and label head Jon Tye (who appears here as part of Black Mustang) records under the alias Milky Globe, but "milky" is also an apt, if ambiguous, description of the luscious music contained here, which might be more straightforwardly labeled "space disco." The underlying, unifying concept of electronic disco grooves overlaid with dubby, psychedelic, and otherwise "cosmic" elements may not be anything particularly new - the disc opens with a blithe, genteelly floating track by Daniel Wang (who, curiously enough, also kicked off the Disco Nouveau comp) which dates back to 2001 and sounds like it could have appeared two decades earlier - but by the late 2000s it was coalescing in a burgeoning international movement. Certainly, there is a sense that many of these artists are working with an awareness of each other (a number of the included cuts are collaborations or remixes), as well as a shared appreciation for the (suddenly, it seems) venerable tradition of electronic disco, and in particular the recently celebrated Italo-disco of the late '70s and early '80s which, though not an exact template for the tracks contained here, is nonetheless a palpable influence. The compilation does contain at least one direct link to the music of that era in the form of a dense, dubby remix of up-and-comers In Flagranti by mythic French producer Bernard Fevre, a.k.a. Black Devil Disco Club. Otherwise, the track list is deceptively unassuming.

Milky Disco features an impressive array of artists from various sectors of electronica working under unfamiliar, in some cases one-off aliases. Luke Vibert appears as Kerrier District, Metro Area's Morgan Geist gets bongo-happy under the cheeky moniker Jersey Devil Social Club, and Jon Brooks (King of Woolworths, Advisory Circle) offers some spirited orchestral thumping disguised as Georges Vert. There's also a disparate trio of cuts licensed from London's DC Records (including a moody, minimal piece by Quiet Village, a duo including Matt Edwards, a.k.a Radio Slave), and three selections from noted Swedish acts: Johan Agebjörn, best known as the producer for Sally Shapiro -- she sings on "Spacer Woman from Mars" -- contributes the most explicitly space-themed inclusion, though it's also notably faster and poppier than anything else here, while Studio and Hans Peter Lindstrøm (the scene's putative figurehead, if it has one), along with San Francisco's Sorcerer (represented by his debut 12" "Surfing at Midnight"), hold down the disc's blissfully airy and relaxed final section, the former with the epic "Life's a Beach," a defining release of the 2007 Balearic trend; the latter, under the odd pseudonym Six Cups of Rebel, with the short, uncharacteristically near-ambient swooner "Dubbe Ditten." Tracing a loose trajectory from the just-barely-earthbound confines of the dancefloor to expansively cosmic, nearly beatless reverie (from the disco towards the milky end of the spectrum), Milky Disco covers considerable stylistic range within its broadly delimited purview while offering a handful of rare or exclusive cuts and maintaining an impressively high level of quality, with plenty to interest both attuned collectors and curious new listeners.

[Various Artists]: After Dark review

A limited-edition CD-R that functioned as both an introductory label sampler and a roundup of the first several 12" releases on the fledgling Italians Do It Better imprint, After Dark presents a sleekly sinister style of synthetic dance music that recalls the decadent overtones of early-2000s electroclash but finds a more direct stylistic referent in vintage electronic disco from around 25 years prior. The name of the New Jersey-based label (run by Mike Simonetti of Troubleman Unlimited) suggests a link with Italo disco, a genre that was very much coming into vogue when these sides were released in 2007, but despite a preponderance of relentless robotic synthesizers, the music here is a far cry from the giddy sentimentality and synth pop melodicism often associated with that style (and as heard, for instance, in the classicist Italo revivalism of Sally Shapiro, among others). The tracks collected here turn instead on haunted minor-key vamps, torpid tempos, cheap-sounding synths, and stripped-down, almost rudimentary percussion, creating a consistent, rather dour atmosphere that feels anachronistically musty but not quite retro. This sharply defined aesthetic must be credited in large part to producer Johnny Jewel, who has a hand in the music of three of the five artists represented here. He's a member of both Glass Candy and Chromatics (each of which had existed as post-punk-styled rock bands before effecting this transformation into what could be tagged post-disco), and he also produces here for Farah, a Plano, TX-based vocalist/lyricist who doesn't sing so much as intone, in both English and Farsi, with a devastating dispassion. Her "Law of Life," a dead-eyed, post-apocalyptic sermon declaimed over Jewel's spare, unrelenting jittery thud, is the compilation's most bleakly nihilistic moment, though it has some competition from Chromatics' standout "In the City," a dreamier but no less creepy track whose soporifically dripping synths, muted guitar glimmers, and fluid string lines induce a sweet-but-deadly hypnosis beneath singer Ruth Radelet's bleary croons of "shining violence." Glass Candy's kickoff, "Rolling Down the Hills," is a crackly, horn-fueled strut that could pass for straight-up old-school disco, at least if it were sped up a few notches, while the contributions by Professor Genius and Mirage skew closest to classic Italo -- the former offering up a pair of Moroder-esque synthesizer workouts; the latter gilding their midtempo keyboard fantasias with menacingly alien vocoders. Mirage also turn in an excellent, understated, robotified rework of Indeep's classic "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life," which, alongside a generous selection of covers (three of them by Glass Candy, including a beguiling take on Kraftwerk's "Computer Love"), helps to establish a strong sense of reverence for and continuity with dance music's disco and not-quite-disco past. Boasting a strong sense of cohesion but a decent amount of variety, and plenty of highlights, After Dark amply demonstrates that electronic disco is alive and flourishing in the late 2000s, and that Italians -- at least these wanna-be Italians -- do it very well.

Chromatics: Night Drive review

"Nearly unrecognizable as the work of the one-time punk rock outfit, Night Drive is effectively Chromatics third debut album in a row, following a wholesale transformation in sound and style and yet another lineup change: Adam Miller is again the sole constant member; vocalist Ruth Radelet is a new addition even since the 2006 teaser Nite, replacing Lena Okazaki, while Glass Candy's Johnny Jewel, who produced that single, is now a full-fledged member. Actually, this seems to be Jewel's record more than anyone's - in the silver-screen conceit of the liner notes he's listed as director to Miller's screenwriter, though he also has a writing credit on all the record's originals, only four of which (the vocal songs) Miller co-wrote - indeed, Jewel is emerging as the primary musical force behind much of the Italians Do It Better label. Among that camp of synthesizer-disco revivalists, Chromatics stand out as the most lush and cinematic, drawing on the more languorous, atmospheric aspects of 1980s electronica to fashion a hazy imaginary soundtrack to a stylish, decadent noir film (as the album's visual presentation suggests) or just a lonely late night drive (as per the opening "Telephone Call.") (One is reminded that Giorgio Moroder is almost as celebrated for his film work as his dancefloor material.) Sounding somehow stark and sensuous at the same time, the album evokes widescreen opulence with a sonic palette that extends beyond the bedrock of synths, guitars and drum machines to include touches of organ, strings, flutes and so on, but it's always used sparingly, rarely outstepping the group's meticulously minimal, carefully-controlled arrangements.... Jewel's compositions and production are certainly effective, and the arrangements, whether his or the band's, are undeniably tasteful, but Night Drive could have been a much more offputting, lonelier affair - not that that would necessarily be a bad thing - if it weren't for Radelet, whom liners rightly list as the album's star. She's not exactly overtly emotive, but there's enough warmth in her breathy voice to create a sense of palpable, relatable humanity, just enough to distinguish her from the glassy-eyed alienation of so many dark post-disco vocalists (Glass Candy's Ida No, for one.) That's crucial, especially, on the stirring Kate Bush cover "Running Up That Hill" - chalk it up to the unassailable songwriting, if you like, but it just might be the finest moment on a consistently engrossing record that, if it can't quite claim the title, is as distinctive and striking as a great debut."

Glass Candy: B/E/A/T/B/O/X review

"A freewheeling electronic pop album that's goofy and glamorous in roughly equal measure, B/E/A/T/B/O/X is Glass Candy's first full-length as a duo, following an electro-disco makeover that has effectively cut the rock out of the group's dancepunk/no-wave equation, and their first album for the disco-revivalist label Italians Do It Better. Markedly lighter and more colorful than the label's prevailing aesthetic as presented on the widely-championed After Dark compilation, it plays to some extent like the daylit flipside of Chromatics' dark, atmospheric Night Drive, which was released around the same time and likewise produced by shared member (and Italians driving force) Johnny Jewel. Though it still projects a strong sense of decadence and a distinct air of the unattainable, B/E/A/T/B/O/X is earthier and more inviting than most of the label's output to date - significantly, this is unquestionably music for dancing, as opposed to dance music that's probably a bit too cool to actually dance to. Kicking off with an aerobics instructor's spoken invocation to the DJ and "the heavenly beat," just about every track here is aimed squarely at the dancefloor (save for the brooding, beatless instrumental "Last Nite I Met a Costume," which would have sounded more at home on Night Drive.) The duo's so-retro-it's-modern sound points, no surprises here, straight back to the early '80s, recalling not so much the robotic Italo disco with which the label is often linked (though there are traces of it, particularly on the cosmic strut "Life After Sundown") as plain-old regular disco, the kind that at some point evolved out of funk (check out those full-blooded horn parts, synthesized though they may be, on "Candy Castle" and the punchy "Rolling Down The Hills"), and went on to inspire the new wave art-punk likes of Blondie and Tom Tom Club (both palpable influences here: Debbie Harry, and perhaps "Rapture" in particular, are unmistakable in Ida No's slightly kooky, slightly chilly delivery.) But that's not to suggest that this is straightforward stylistic revivalism - for one thing, although 4/4 thumps carry them through a sizable chunk of the album, the duo also venture freely beyond the well-established neo-disco template, on the weird, stuttering "Etheric Device," scintillating, silky-smooth Kraftwerk cover "Computer Love" (a clear highlight) and the sparse, throbbing, nearly industrial closer "Digital Versicolor." There's nothing here that feels like a mere genre exercise, and for all its readily evident signifiers there's ultimately not much to which it can sustain particularly close comparisons. B/E/A/T/B/O/X may be unabashedly a triumph of style over substance, but Glass Candy have at least managed to concoct a familiar-seeming, versatile, and enjoyable style, or set of styles, that's more or less all their own."

Cut Copy: In Ghost Colors review

In Ghost Colours announces itself, calmly but majestically, with a wash of hazy voices and fluttering keyboards giving way to crystal-clear acoustic strums, languid indie pop vocals, a sturdy dance-rock groove, pulsating electro-disco synths, swirling Caribou-style psychedelics, and an ethereal, vocoded chorus melody. Squeezing all of that into one song -- the effervescent "Feel the Love" -- is an ambitious move: in most hands it would come out sounding like a bewildering mess, or at least a hammy, hyperactive pastiche, but Cut Copy manage to keep it light, breezy, and utterly ebullient. Even more impressive is that they're able to replicate the trick repeatedly across this remarkably assured sophomore album. Colours boasts at least a half-dozen potential summer anthems for dancefloors and headphones alike, seamlessly strung together with subdued interstitial mood pieces that help make it more of a nuanced work than a straightforward collection of relentlessly upbeat dance jams. Undeniably, though, the dance jams are at the throbbing heart of the album, from the unstoppably glittery opening trio (leading up to the anthemic slow-burn disco of single "Lights and Music") to the rough-edged rock drive of "So Haunted" to the pure synth pop bliss of "Far Away." Indeed, this is in many ways a perfect summation of the dynamic, multifaceted, hipster-associated independent dance music of the 2000s, a motley interweaving of pop, rock, and electronic dance elements into a kaleidoscopic array of interconnected styles, some strands of which have been summarily, imprecisely tagged ("disco-punk," "electro-house," "new rave,") but which as a whole remain resolutely, gloriously nebulous and undefined. (Though nevertheless undeniably prevalent, and never more so than in 2008, following triumphant runs by LCD Soundsystem, Justice, and Simian Mobile Disco; the months just preceding In Ghost Colours' release saw eminently enjoyable new albums by Hot Chip, Hercules and Love Affair, Neon Neon, and Does It Offend You, Yeah?, to name a few.)

Cut Copy's music bears all the prominent hallmarks of its era: giddily omnivorous stylistic appropriation, a sensuous, sybaritic (though not, in their case, seedy) demeanor, and the distinct evocation of bygone decades, most palpably the ubiquitous post-punk/post-disco '80s, without succumbing to the pitfalls of overzealous eclecticism, empty hedonism, sugary glut, and blatant derivativeness. Or rather, they do show traces of all of these things, but they play each one off as a strength, always in moderation, and never to the detriment of the music. The eclecticism is there but it's fluid and cohesive rather than distractingly showy; their influence-dogging plays like affectionate homage rather than pointless mimicry; there's an abundance of gleaming, even gaudy surfaces, but they're just too rapturously enticing to entertain qualms about superficiality. It surely helps that they have one of the primary architects of this sprawling scene, the DFA's Tim Goldsworthy, on board as a producer and mixer. More importantly though, beneath its perfectly formed surfaces this is truly an album of songs -- a surprisingly rare thing in this milieu -- with simple but resonant melodies, carried by Dan Whitford's appealingly casual delivery, which help alleviate a slight tendency toward sonic sameness. This is evident not only on the gentler guitar-based numbers, like the loping "Unforgettable Season" and the oddly country-inflected "Strangers in the Wind," which temporarily scale back the dancefloor euphorics, but the out-and-out burners as well, combining with the peppy basslines and nagging chorus hooks to create something all the more transcendent. To be sure, In Ghost Colours is a triumph of craftsmanship rather than vision -- a synthesis and refinement of existing sounds rather than anything dramatically new and original -- but it is an unalloyed triumph nonetheless, and one of the finest albums of its kind.

Rubies: bio, Explode From The Center review

"A light and breezy trifle of a debut album, Explode from the Center belies its swollen, attention-grabbing guest list -- including members of Kings of Convenience, the Concretes, and (most notably) Feist, among a couple dozen others -- with a consistently relaxed, unassuming vibe. Rubies enlist most of those folks to sing and/or play guitar, and there is certainly plenty of pretty singing and guitar playing on this record, though few listeners will be bothered to figure out exactly who's doing what. Core members Simone Rubi and Terri Loewenthal are fine singers themselves, but their mellifluous voices do work especially well blended together and with others, as amply demonstrated in their days with Call & Response, a sort of latter-day Mamas & the Papas for the indie pop set. Explode makes a lot of sense, as they mine the same vein of sophisticated, folky pop with which does a good job of carrying forward that band's late-'60s, late summer, California aesthetic (never mind that most of the album was recorded in Scandinavia), adding occasional electronic flourishes, although the gentler, folkier numbers tend to come off better than the would-be dance jams. "I Feel Electric," the Feist-featuring lead single, is actually one of the least successful moments on the album, its insistently bouncy sore-thumb synth/disco sounding stilted and overdetermined by comparison to the surrounding material, although mediocre lyrics and a negligible chorus hook don't help matters, either. The less blatantly dance-oriented "Stand in a Line," with a twitchy low synth part and scratchy guitar work courtesy of ex-bandmate Dan "Sorceror" Judd, fares a bit better, as does the chunky pop of "Diamonds on Fire," but the most satisfying grooves here are those mellow enough to feel like organic frameworks over which the songs are lazily, casually draped.... Rubies' friendship with Leslie Feist makes a lot of sense, as they mine the same vein of sophisticated, folky pop with which Feist struck gold on -- in particular -- The Reminder (whose cover, incidentally, was designed by Rubi) -- and Feist fans will find a lot to enjoy here, although Rubies' actual songs make less of an impression than their overall sound. There's nothing especially wrong with that -- it just means this is an album better suited for soundtracking laid-back summer afternoons than for focused, introspective close listening."

Bloodshy and Avant: bio

(well, you can read it if you like, though it's mostly just a list of tracks and collaborators, and the text is messed up at the end. i mostly just wanted to post this picture of b+a with britney spears...[source: wikipedia])