Review Round-Up: June 2014

Bis
data Panik, etc.
[Punk/Pop]

If data Panik, etc. (Do Yourself In), the surprise fourth album from Scotland's most adorable revolutionaries, had appeared a decade ago, following the electropop left turn/dead end of 2001's Return to Central, its jittery angularity, neo-new wave bounce and gummy punk-funk grooves might have been, for once, right in step with a zeitgeist that they had unwittingly prefigured.  Instead, the '90s cult heroes' signature candy-coated agit-pop feels as gloriously iconoclastic as ever, and this unexpected return, more than making up for lost time, delivers a hook-stuffed, sugary shock to the system that's not so much cutesy as just plain, spunky fun. [A-]

Diamond Version
CI
[Electronic]

File under "things you didn't know you needed in your life": a dubby, pitch-dark industrial rendition of the hymn "Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord"), sung by the Pet Shop Boys' Neil Tennant.  The other voices (guests and samples) populating CI (Mute), the first LP from these German avant-techno auteurs, offer a barrage of repurposed corporate-speak soundbites – mostly (voicemail directories...pharmaceutical ad copy...Gillian Welch lyrics?) – which range from aptly, blankly menacing to über-ironic almost-gimmickry – but the duo's throbbing, jerkily syncopated machine funk is never less than pummelingly potent.  Sometimes it causes me to tremble.  [B]

Robyn and Royksopp
Do It Again
[Electronic/Pop]

Those hoping for a re-up of Body Talk's instant-crush hyperpop magik may be let down: of the five cuts (35 minutes) comprising Robyksopp's Do It Again "mini-album" (Interscope), only the majestically punchy glitter-disco title track really satisfies on that score.  While "Every Little Thing" revives the Swede's less-heralded genius for heart-tugging balladry, the rest – one sinewy, acid-house Speak'n'Spell duet and two expansive slabs of sumptuous, swirling electronica (one instrumental, almost Reichian; the other a sneakily addictive epic of gracefulness and poise) – is more in Röyksopp's wheelhouse, and up there with the Norwegian duo's finest work.  [A-]

Ela Stiles
Ela Stiles
[A Cappella/Experimental]

Whether or not you're comfortable considering the spellbinding seventeen minutes of this Sydney-based singer's self-titled, purely a cappella debut release (Bedroom Suck) to be an album, there's no question it is something special: soothing and haunting, ancient and alien.  These seven songs – varying in length from twenty seconds to over ten minutes, yet still somehow unmistakable as songs; timeless expressions of universal experience – present Stiles as something like a Celtic Julianna Barwick (even though she's actually Australian), patiently weaving together tendrils of drone, devotional music and British Isles folk, refreshingly unbound by any recognizable tradition. [B+]

Taylor McFerrin
Early Riser
[Electronic/Jazz]

This Brooklyn producer/composer/multi-instrumentalist's music is subtler and, on the surface, less playful than his father, Bobby's, but it's just as colorful, idiosyncratic and inventive, casually blurring the lines between jazz, R&B, hip-hop and electronica.  His long-gestating debut, a natural fit on Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder label, suggests he's also equally talented, handling every instrument himself on most cuts, and coordinating a diverse but simpatico cast of collaborators (Robert Glasper, Thundercat, Brazilian icon César Mariano – plus an understated turn from his pops.)  But Early Riser's most impressive feat is how impossibly warm, fluid and organic it feels despite all that legwork. [B+]

Jack White
Lazaretto
[Rock]

As unpredictable and endlessly intriguing as White himself, Lazaretto (Third Man) is fairly overstuffed with both pathos and pastiche, often side by side.  It finds the impish, ineffable guitar hero/antiquarian, with a cast of dozens, at both his darkest and most playful, and generally following his abundant, aberrant whims – whether that means reviving mid-'90s rap-rock (Jon Spencer-meets-Chili Peppers style) on the unhinged title cut, scraping out back-porch country ballads alongside fiddler Lillie Mae Rische, lurching into searing, vengeful melodrama or hot-wiring Willie McTell's delta blues for the digital age, it's always well worth the puzzle. [A-]

Steve Gunn and Mike Cooper
Cantos de Lisboa
[Folk/Experimental]

Part of the fun of RVNG Intl's FRKWYS series, which pairs artists with their senior influences, is imagining what a trip each installment must've been to make.  Envisioning, for instance, in-demand Brooklyn guitar-slinger (and Kurt Vile associate) Gunn and experimental cult hero Cooper (whose fantastic '70s folk-rockers were just reissued by Paradise of Bachelors) linking up in Lisbon to cut Vol. 11: Cantos de Lisboa, a breezily discursive six-string summit that settles in with some languid, intermittently vocal folk-blues but is unafraid to venture down decidedly weirder, noisier ambient alleyways as things warm up.

v/a
C86
[Indie/Rock]

First released – on cassette, via mail order – in the titular year, now lavishly reissued (Cherry Red) with fifty (!) additional cuts furnished by the original compilers, C86 is, now more than ever, UK indie's Rosetta Stone.  Much like Nuggets, it captures a moment – this one ten years after, not before, the explosion of punk – when energetic amateurs were gleefully rescripting the parameters of guitar-based music, yielding – yes – ample tuneful, jangly (though only occasionally precious) indie-pop, but also tough'n'scraggly rock'n'roll, fuzzed-out proto-shoegaze and noise-pop, and surprising amounts of skronky, twitchy, experimental weirdness.  [B+]

Kishi Bashi
[Indie/Pop]
concert preview

K. Ishibashi's brilliant – terrifically good, but also, more specifically, jewel-like – new album is titled after (i.e. with) Aram Saroyan's minimalist poem Lighght (Joyful Noise).  Even with the (silently) gargle-inducing doubled consonants, though, that's probably underselling it: the sometime Jupiter One/of Montreal fiddleman traffics in only the most giddily buoyant of musical substances, with his swooping, ever-looping violin frippery and boyish, helium-laced falsetto both equally liable to zip into the stratosphere like a loosed balloon, while synths, harp and possibly a hurdy-gurdy flesh out the generalized syrupy gloss.  It's about the furthest thing from minimalist, packing in plenty of wispy folk and thumping electro-disco amongst the candy-coated indie-pop and flights of neo-classicist fancy, while hearkening frequently, unabashedly, to the sunny prog of Yes, Kansas (one thickly harmonized refrain, rather suggestively, repeats "carry on") and the Electric Ligh(or should that be Lighgh)t Orchestra.

La Roux
[Pop]
concert preview

Five long years later, and just in the nick of time for summer, here comes flame-haired electro-pop ice queen Elly Jackson – now actually the solo act everybody always mistook her for – bursting back on the scene and trading the crisp, clinical perfection of her earlier material for something a bit, well, bubblier.  Broadening the scope of her '80s dance-pop influences without abandoning her trademark laser synths – think Madonna and Wham, not just Erasure and Yaz – Trouble in Paradise (Polydor), due next month, doesn't quite pull a full Random Access Memories, but there's a human-after-all refreshingness, not to mention plenty of funky, decidedly Nile-y guitar licks, to atypically jaunty earworms like "Uptight Downtown" and "Sexotheque," while "Tropical Chancer" gets all Club Tropicana and "Let Me Down Gently," the earnestly brooding taster single, turns out to be pretty much a feint.

Evian Christ
[Electronic]
concert preview

This young Brit isn't exactly the most prolific producer out there: his recorded output to date consists of two fifteen-minute EPs over three years, plus one short experimental ambient piece that's categorized on Discogs.com as "non-music."  But he more than compensates in terms of sheer sonic impact.  2012's Kings and Them EP wove hip-hop vocal fragments through disorienting, intoxicating cloud-trap vaporscapes, warm and spacious yet hard-hitting enough to induce Kanye West to tap him for a Yeezus production assist.  This year's Waterfall EP (Tri Angle) drops the sampled rap braggadocio but cranks up the intensity several-fold, putting a decidedly bleaker twist on the headrush maximalism of Rustie and Hudson Mohawke with brutally crushing artillery blasts and ping-ponging bleeps and skitters evoking a demonically possessed wind-up toy.

Young & Sick
[Pop/Electronic]
concert preview

If the customary injunction against judging by covers might be relaxed when the same party – in this case, Dutch-born multidisciplinarian Nick Van Hofwegen – is responsible for both musical content and accompanying visuals, the fantastical, eye-catching cityscape adorning Young & Sick's self-titled debut (Harvest) merits some quick formal analysis.  The record, like the drawing, is cheery and stylized; vaguely urban but not remotely edgy; packed with quirky little details that are subsumed into a tidily composed whole, and, perhaps, just a tad monochrome (albeit definitely not in such a White Stripes-y way.)  Coincidentally or not, his past cover-art clients – Foster the People, Maroon 5, Robin Thicke – form an excellent set of reference points for the album's glossy, accessible blue-eyed pop-soul, although Y&S veers rather synthier, taking a more upbeat spin on the recent wave of moody indie electro-R&B.

GOAT
[World/Rock/Psych]
concert preview

Of all the random recent additions to Sub Pop's rapidly diversifying portfolio, this has to be one of the weirdest:

an enigmatic, mask-wearing troupe of (allegedly) Voodoo-practicing villagers hailing (we are told) from the tiny town of Korpilombolo in far-Northern Sweden.  The very idea of signing to a record label seems like an impossibly mundane concept for such an ensemble, but then I guess even shadowy, self-mythologizing collectives of remote Scandinavian (oc)cultists have got to eat somehow.  They've already got one absolute corker of a shaggy, psychedelic, ambiguously ethnic rock record – 2012's infectious, heavy-grooving World Music – under their (bone-studded, reindeer-leather, etc.) belts, amply documenting their appeal even though it's probably a mere taster compared to what they get into as a live act. 

Jungle
[R&B/Soul/Pop]
concert preview

The forthcoming self-titled debut (XL) from these UK newcomers – in particular, aptly-named lead track "The Heat" – vibes and breathes like a run-down resort town on a torpid, too-hot-to-move August afternoon: sweaty, seductive and a little seedy, with more than a whiff of nostalgia.  Sound design helps set the scene – the album opens with a radio DJ's brief invocation and a welter of police sirens; later we hear clinking bottles and the squeak of sneakers on blacktop – but the feeling's all there in the band's sultry, lazily strutting grooves, and you can take your pick of wistfully evocative aural referents: '70s slo-mo disco-funk and smooth, Bee Gees-style twinned falsettos; '80s soft-pop and styrofoam soul; hints of '90s G-funk and silky R&B crooning, all filtered through the past half-decade of post-dubstep electro-smarts.

Lust For Youth
[Electronic/Pop]
concert preview

Over four albums in a little more than three years, Lust for Youth – the brainchild of Swedish-born, Copenhagen-based musician Hannes Norrvide; long a solo project but currently a trio – has traced a linear yet radical evolution, from the grimy, minimalist darkwave and lo-fi industrial noise of 2011's Solar Flare to the equally atmospheric but far brighter, almost unthinkably lush International (Sacred Bones).  The new album's sleek, shimmering synth-pop slots surprisingly comfortably alongside Norrvide's countrymen like The Embassy and Radio Dept., even gesturing toward the diffuse Balearic blissiness of Studio and Air France, though even as his vocals edge closer to the forefront of mix, they retain the blunt, dispassionate affectlessness favored by gothically-inclined electro-miserablists from New Order to Cold Cave.

Lee Fields
[Soul]
concert preview

Lee Fields cut his first '45 – a smoldering gospel-soul scorcher with a nimble, James Brown-style funk flip – in 1969, he's hardly looked back since; carrying on as a fervent funkateer and sweet soul belter through some mighty lean years before emerging as a central figure in the genre's late-'90s true-school renaissance.  Following several sides and one album for Desco – the Brooklyn-based, revival-catalyzing label co-founded by future Daptone helmsman Gabriel Roth – he's loosed a basically faultless series of LPs, backed by the Expressions, for off-shoot label Truth and Soul – most recently the superb, crisply arranged Emma Jean (named for his mother) – which present the North Carolina native as a deep soul gentleman in the tradition of Bobby Womack and Otis Redding: passionate but understated, with a richly-grained delivery less inclined toward excitable vocal fireworks than a slow, sure, gritty burn.

Fucked Up
[Punk/Rock]
concert preview

Glass Boys (Matador) scales back considerably from this Canadian punk troupe's previous sprawling, concept-heavy outings – notably, 2011's 80-minute, 18-song rock opera David Comes To Life – but its ten gut-punching tracks form no less of a furious, surging onslaught.  They find the band recommitting to the vital spirit of '80s hardcore – Pink Eyes' guttural, full-throttle howls are as viciously visceral as ever – but pushing forward sonically with dense, hyper-saturated production (Jonah Falco's drums are allegedly, outrageously, triple-tracked) and textural flourishes like "Warm Change"'s organ and fuzz-tone psych-out coda and the almost-buried, improbably beachy harmonies limning "Sun Glass."  The album comes across as a tender but conflicted love letter to their bygone youth and genre of origin – something like hardcore's answer to The Hold Steady.

Paramore/Fall Out Boy
[Pop/Rock]
concert preview

These bands both released debuts a decade ago via pop-punk proving ground Fueled by Ramen, summarily epitomized mid-'00s emo and, following a several-year hiatus, controversial line-up reshuffle and/or near-implosion, reemerged last year (like a phoenix, to cite one of Pete Wentz's more literal-minded title conceits) with arguably their most vital work yet.  Which makes this, the hideously named "Monumentour," both a nostalgia package for a certain demographic and also about as cutting-edge as arena rock gets 2014.  If Fall Out Boy's deliriously excessive Save Rock and Roll fell forgivably short of its cheeky billing, it sure had fun doing so – reveling in Queenly glam-prog excess with Courtney Love and Elton John along for the ride.  Paramore's utterly incandescent self-titled opus, meanwhile, remains nothing short of a masterpiece: a seventeen-song set with a dozen potential hit singles, packing in everything from ukulele interludes to gospel choirs – on delayed-reaction song-of -the-summer contender "Ain't It Fun" – to an extended doom-metal finale, all without feeling the least bit overblown.

originally published in Philadelphia City Paper

Review Round-Up: April 2013

After a somewhat monochrome March, April has been practically bursting with color, musically speaking: most dramatically, the Knife's noxious, fluorescent habit-shaking pink and green; but also the brightly shining blue and yellow of Kurt Vile's always-sunny-in-Philadelphia daze (the building is much yellower in my imagination) and the bold, somehow garish gray and, i suppose, peach of Phoenix's very entertaining, still-percolating Bankrupt! (which I'll get to soon enough.)  Plus there were the pastels'n'posteriors of Chrissy Murderbot's latest goofiness (see below); Neon Neon (in name if not cover art); and even the (sexual) chocolate and silver of Breakbot's really fantastic By Your Side, which just came out domestically and has been on repeat quite a bit around here, though it seems to have gotten more or less overlooked by the tastemakers both times around... particularly poor form, i'd say, in light of all the hoopla around Daft Punk's return (power-color: burnt orange, a good choice.)

Which...jury's out on that one. "Get Lucky" is perfectly catchy and double-plus groovin', but it's also kinda overpowered by the "guest contributors" (as others have suggested, I could do with more of the parts that don't have Pharrell, though his singing is perfectly fine.  also, what's with the "verse" being about a quarter as long as both the intro and the pre-chorus?)  will be interested to hear the album version.  and the whole album, of course.  in the mean time it already feels like there's a French Touch revival going on, between the super-stylin' Breakbot record, Phoenix, and fake-French OG Jacques Lu Cont bacque in acquetion as well (still gotta get my hands on that.)  more broadly, just around the corner in May, some sweet synth-poppin'-off from Classixx, Little Boots and the highly excellent Dungeonesse among others...basically what i'm saying is we are being well primed for another Summer of Dance-Pop - i can feel it in the musical climate almost more than in the actual weather (which is sunny and super-springy but still surprisingly chilly from time to time.)

As it turned out, my review quota for April was cut quite short – in fact, I didn't have a single review published in CP during April; I'm cheating a little bit with my inclusions below – so I didn't manage to actually write about most of the above (nor the also very worthwhile Iron & Wine, Shuggie Otis, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Kalabrese albums.)  I did write some stuff, but mostly it was on weird, lame old-people music, like jazz and punk and folk and rock and roll.  ew, who listens to rock and roll??

Marc Ribot's Cermamic Dog
Your Turn

The title of album number two from guitarist Marc Ribot's gonzo jazz-punk power trio Ceramic Dog is mostly a visual gag: the cover shows a hastily scribbled tic-tac-toe board, eight of its nine spaces scrawled with Xs.  Your Turn.  The music contained within isn't quite that perversely sadistic – most of the time – but it's at least as blackly humorous.  Vocal cuts (about half the record) find them railing with grim sarcasm against inequities political (a furious, Occupy-inspired take on labor anthem "Bread and Roses"), bodily (the pained, Morphine-esque blues "Lies My Body Told Me") and cyber-economic (sardonically self-abasing pro-download screed "Masters of the Internet.")  There's just as much caustic comedy to be found in the instrumentals, replete with Ribot's ribald, axe-throttling skronk and the equally redoubtable, amped-up frenetics of bassist Shahzad Ismaily and drummer Ches Smith: oblique, Naked City-style freakouts; an unhinged "Take 5" takedown; a squalling noise dirge pointedly entitled "Prayer."  While making space for everything from Beasties-indebted rap ("We Are The Professionals"), earnest, reggae-flecked protest folk ("Ain't Gonna Let Them Turn Us Round") and a swinging, deliciously twisted faux-standard ("The Kid Is Back"), Your Turn feels less self-consciously eclectic than 2008's Party Intellectuals; it's bolder, more focused (nothing pushes past six minutes), and just all-around more rocking.  Decidedly unlike that pathetically futile game of tic-tac-toe, it's great, great fun.

Dump
Superpowerless and I Can Hear Music

In his review of their gently majestic, habitually exalted thirteenth album this January (in MAGNET #95) Brian Howard described Yo La Tengo's perhaps-improbable perseverance as a form of quietly determined resistance.  But it's instructive to remember that their approach to music-making – pointedly personal; passionate yet decidedly low-key – was once simply a way of life, for them and many in the nascent days of "indie rock."   For James McNew, who became the band's bassist in 1991, at age 21, playing in other people's groups wasn't enough, so he initiated his own project: recording to a 4-track cassette deck under the suitably smirky, self-effacing moniker Dump.

His first two LPs, recorded in piecemeal fashion throughout the early '90s alongside myriad singles and EPs (of which, for some reason, only one – a self-titled 1992 five-song 7" – is included among the bonus tracks on these Morr Music reissues) were issued in 1993 and 1995, respectively – exactly concurrent with YLT's seminal, ascendant early Matador run (Painful, Electr-O-Pura) – and they offer a fascinating, emphatically casual alternate perspective on that era.  They're full of the spirited eclecticism that soon defined his main band – bucketloads of jangly pop butting up against droning feedback, sweetly folksy ditties, grungy rockers, sputtering "jazzy" instrumentals, churning two-chord slow-burns, and covers covers covers (which tended to receive somewhat more care than his plenty-winsome originals) – but with an almost aggressively laissez-faire attitude toward musicianship (vocal intonation included), let alone "recording quality."  The point being, as any true indie knows, that none of that stuff ultimately matters: if you can get across a song, communicate a feeling, the more efficiently the better, well, you've got something worthwhile.  Here are three hours, almost sixty tunes, and if it takes a little trash-picking to get there, there's something to treasure in nearly every one.

originally published in Magnet Magazine

Chrissy Murderbot
Greatest Hits ★★★★★
[Electronic/Juke/Future Bass]

There's not necessarily much logic to how Chrissy Murderbot operates.  The Chicago DJ/producer/dance music savant's latest release consists of seven entirely new cuts and seven wide-ranging remixes, and – for no particular reason – it's entitled Greatest Hits ★★★★★ (Murder Channel).  That gleeful, extravagant absurdity carries over into the music, which piles on the goofball catchphrases ("after the party it's the Waffle House..."), sci-fi lazer FX ("Pew Pew") and incongruously emotive soul vocals atop skittering, hyper-BPM juke and jackhammering jungle breaks.  When it comes to moving bodies, dude's as no-nonsense as they come.

Neon Neon
Praxis Makes Perfect
[Pop]

Praxis Makes Perfect (Lex), the second straight synth-pop bio-opera from Neon Neon – Super Furry Animal Gruff Rhys plus avant-hip-hop producer Boom Bip – takes on the life of Italian publisher and communist activist Giangiacomo Feltrinelli.  It's not quite as natural a fit as their eighties-steeped homage to John DeLorean – most of the sounds here post-date the subject's 1972 death – but it works, both as an offbeat lefty history lesson (check the eyebrow-raising "Hoops With Fidel") and as a sweet batch of yacht-friendly soft-pop and endearingly stiff, cheeky eurodisco.

Kacey Musgraves
Same Trailer Different Park
[Country/Pop]

Nashville newbie Kacey Musgraves' breakthrough single "Merry Go Round," while not half as clever as she probably thought, was still striking for its frank, pointedly skeptical slice-of-life storytelling.  Same Trailer Different Park (Mercury Nashville) – actually her fourth LP – confirms that she can throw together cliches with the best of 'em, often in an endearingly (even – for Nashville – radically) empowering manner, and have it come out improbably fresh; even building a hook around the word "stupid" that manages not to sound it.  Musically, Musgraves' sweet, simple country-pop – never veering too far either way – recalls Taylor Swift's first album; lyrical-maturity-wise, Swift'll hopefully get there on her next one.

Ólafur Arnalds
For Now I Am Winter
[Classical/Ambient]

Ólafur Arnalds is an Icelandic neo-classical/ambient/new age composer (the lines get pretty blurry, and who needs 'em?) and yes, his music lives up to whatever stock images and stereotypes (glaciers, ethereality, Northern lights...) that may conjure up.  But if it's predictably gorgeous, unabashedly palatable stuff – plangent pianos; alternately sprightly and keening strings; gently burbly electronic undercurrents – it's far from rote and practically never maudlin.  Titular pomposity and spectacularly faulty seasonal timing aside, And Now I Am Winter (Mercury) is an especially delicate effort; even the potentially risky incorporation of indie-pop-flavored vocals turns out typically tasteful, thanks to Arnór Dan's sweetly stoic falsetto and some downright catchy tunes.

Billy Bragg
[Folk]
concert preview

Billy Bragg opens his ninth album by declaring "I'm so tightly wound in tension."  He hardly sounds it, though: this is easily the sometime firebrand's mellowest LP to date, a warm, burnished Americana set bearing all the tasteful hallmarks of producer Joe Henry (including Greg Leisz's always-lovely pedal steel inflections.)  Continuing the newfound lyrical directness of 2008's similarly understated Mr. Love & Justice (which feels practically aggressive by comparison), Tooth and Nail (Cooking Vinyl) makes good on Bragg's longstanding Woody Guthrie fixation with earnestly populist homilies like "Do Unto Others," plus one wistfully reverent cover reading.  But despite "There Will Be A Reckoning" – the album's sole, stirred-up rocker – and a few other choice words for the "misbegotten, misanthropic merchants of gloom," the most impassioned pleas here are generally of the romantic variety.  For lefty rabble-rousing, you're better off with 2011's website-only compilation Fight Songs – or the witty, heartfelt between-song tirades that are a staple of his live sets.

John Medeski
[Jazz/Improvisation]
concert preview

In his twenty-plus years of blazing incendiary new trails for the contemporary jazz piano/organ trio alongside compadres Billy Martin and Chris Wood, John Medeski has supplied keys for everyone from John Zorn to Iggy Pop, Robert Randolph, Trey Anastasio and, most recently (wow), Coheed and Cambria.  But he's only now gotten around to cutting a record of his solo playing, displaying a radically different approach from the eclectic grooves beloved of jam-happy MMW heads.  A Different Time – the first new release on long-defunct, newly-revived classic jazz imprint/Sony sublabel OKeh – is a beautifully spacious, ruminative, largely improvised nocturnal affair in the tradition of Bill Evans and, particularly, Keith Jarrett.  While there's considerable virtuosity and classically-informed technique on display here – especially as it was recorded on a difficult-to-control 1924 French-made piano, the Gaveau – it's above all a masterclass in delicacy, expressiveness and restraint.

William Tyler
[Instrumental/Folk/Americana]
concert preview

Solo guitar records can be engrossing, meditative, gorgeously textural – and, to be sure, Impossible Truth (Merge) is all of the above – but it's rare to find one as exuberantly vivid and lush as the second full-length opus from Nashville-based virtuoso William Tyler, whose playing has previously supported Lambchop, Bonnie Billy and the Silver Jews.  Strictly speaking, it's not an entirely solo affair: pedal steel, trombone, vibraphone, bowed bass and even drums crop up in a few of these warmly expansive compositions, though they generally feel like subtle, nearly inconspicuous shadings against the foreground of Tyler's rippling, luminescent picking.  The album was inspired by a stack of weighty non-fiction texts on American symbolic geography, and you can hear reverberations of the vast, mythic West in pieces like "Cadillac Desert" and "Country of Illusion," while the raga-like drones and pedals elsewhere gesture, equally evocatively, toward the imagined East.

Goat
[Psych/Worldbeat]
concert preview

The deliberately shadowy Goat maintain an epic, absurd and presumably largely fabricated (or at least heavily mythologized) backstory involving a generations-old tradition of voodoo worship, communal living and collective music-making in the tiny, extreme-North Swedish village of Korpilombolo.  The group's three "core members" (the specific number and identities of the musicians involved are kept characteristically vague) do indeed hail from there. . . probably.  Either way the narrative feels less like attention-seeking puffery than a legitimate (if grandiose) means to sever their music from conventional contexts and expectations which would hardly suit it anyway.  Thankfully, their album, World Music (Rocket Recordings) – the title is simultaneously impish and self-evidently apt – doesn't feel the least bit pretentious or put-on.  Instead it's a total blast, a swirl of Afro-beat, droney psych-rock squalls, instrumental acoustic folk and polyrhythmic Middle Eastern grooves that does for worldbeat what fellow Swedish fantasists Dungen did for classic rock, unleashing a celebration of wailing storm surges ("Goathead"), ritual incantations ("Goatlord") and party jams ("Disco Fever," which interleaves kraut-funk and Ethiopian jazz) replete with hand-drums, hammond-organ fever-dreams, tribalistic chanting and, of course, that most universal of instruments, the electric guitar.

Jamie Lidell
[R&B/Pop]
concert preview

Jamie Lidell's 2005 breakout LP, Multiply, was something of a eureka moment, unleashing his freaky, fearless falsetto against a backdrop of IDM-reared production chops and uncovering newfound possibilities for smooshing up old-school soul with mod-podge electronica.  These days he's hardly the only electro-soul game in town (Autre Ne Veut, Quadron and Little Dragon all owe him some debt), although he remains in high demand as a vocalist (this month alone he's turned up on tracks by Atom™ and Brandt Brauer Frick.)  Under his own auspices, Lidell's self-titled fifth full-length (Warp) tightens up the technicolor sprawl of 2010's Compass into something equally elastic but more narrowly focused, even reverent: a laser-lit homage to the original electronic/R&B interminglings of 1980s synth-funk, recasting the plushly poppy, machine-abetted boogie of Cameo, Bootsy Collins, P-Funk et. al., with the electronica wayback dials set to Lovesexy-style zap'n'twitch.

Bonobo
[Electronic]
concert preview

Electronic music has changed a lot since his first forays into playful lounge-jazz chill-out back around the turn of the millennium, but British producer Simon Green – alias Bonobo – has somehow kept his music fresh and relevant without ever dramatically changing his approach.  The North Borders (Ninja Tune) continues down the moodier, more sophisticated path signaled by 2010's excellent Black Sands, displaying an increasingly masterful ear for composition and intriguing, lushly organic sounds, but also well-attuned to the recent rhythmic tendencies emanating from London, Los Angeles and beyond.  While it'd still rest mostly comfortably within the well-worn, all-but-outmoded umbrella of triphop/downtempo, this is also Green's most diverse, body-friendly work yet.  "Know You" is a gorgeously sculpted dancefloor detonator, all stuttering, slowly cresting two-step syncopations; the kalimba-studded "Cirrus" is an idealized intersection of Pantha du Prince and Rounds-era Four Tet, while "Heaven For The Sinner" invites Erykah Badu along for a deep nodding groover recalling her pal Flying Lotus – and yet, it's all patently, undeniably Bonobo.

Lianne Le Havas
[Folk/Soul]
concert preview

Is Your Love Big Enough? (Warner/Nonesuch) introduced Lianne La Havas as, by and large, a rank and file member of the UK folk'n'soul brigade; crooning like an understated Adele, fingerpicking like a calmer, bluesier Laura Marling, and generally following alongside Michael Kiwanuka and Corrine Bailey Rae in the largely forgotten footsteps of forebears like Joan Armatrading.  It's all tasteful stuff; smooth, smoky and readily gratifying if not massively memorable.  But among the dapperly dusky torch ballads (one of which has already turned up as an under-the-radar Simian Mobile Disco sample), there are glimmers of something bolder and more distinctive, particularly in the scrappy, funk-looping grit of "Forget" (produced by Dave Sitek), the Supremes-y sophistication of "Au Cinema" and the ice cream-loving title track's exuberant, 6/4-time throwback swagger.  That song, Wikipedia notes incidentally, "is considered to have sexual connotations, relating to male genitalia."  Hmm, sounds suggestive.

The Mavericks
[Rock/Latin/Americana]
concert preview

Miami's Mavericks formed back in the late '80s, and if their name has taken on an additional connotation or two since then, it still suits them perfectly as they continue operating proudly outside of Music Row conventions, or indeed any other expectations you might have of a Nashville-ensconced outfit who've scored fourteen singles on the Billboard country charts.  In Time (Valory) the re-reunited group's first studio album in ten years, dispenses with country music, per se, almost entirely.  (For one thing, Raul Malo, whose melodramatic tenor warblings are as lusty and magnificent as ever – Roy Orbison remains the singular, almost inevitable point of comparison – is singing with much less of a twang these days.)  Turning a typically blind eye to established musical boundaries, the album amounts to a vigorous, accordion-kissed aural argument for immigration reform, swirling together elements of cumbia, norteño, surf-rock, tango, rumba and ska with juke-joint swing and '50s-style rock'n'roll balladry to create a delirious, Tejano-rockabilly melting pot.

Redd Kross
[Rock]
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Between The Clean, Imperial Teen and Teenage Fanclub, Merge Records has made itself quite the respectable home for aging power-poppers over the years, and they managed an unexpected and especially sweet feat last year when Redd Kross, the long-dormant SoCal brotherhood of amped-up Beatlitude, turned up on their roster for their first album since 1997.  Researching The Blues, despite what its studious-sounding title may suggest, is no mild-mannered, reticent reemergence: it finds the grunge progenitors (and one-time suburban teenage snot-punks) still retaining plenty of the power part of the equation – check the title track's snarling punk-blues stomp, for instance – while balancing it with a bevy of bouncy, Byrdsy janglers which manage to stuff an impressive amount of melodic invention into three minutes or less.

Iceage/Metz/White Lung
[Punk]
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Hotly tipped hell-raisers hailing from points across the industrialized, socially democratic global North – Copenhagen, Toronto and Vancouver, respectively – this trifecta of neo-hardcore bruisers all share the time-honored punk value of brevity.  You could fit each band's most recent full-length – Metz's seething, brutally efficient s/t Sub Pop debut; Iceage's style-refining, nuance-courting (but still plenty reckless and ramshackle) growth-spurt You're Nothing (Matador) and White Lung's sneering, electrifying, Riot Grrl-checking blitzkrieg Sorry (Deranged) – onto a single CD-R, with room to spare.  Proceeding to actually listen to said pile-up, however, would be a bracing, pummeling, existentially exhausting undertaking – nasty, brutish and short, indeed – and it's hard to even fathom the impact of seeing them all live in quick succession, though at least you'll get the set breaks to catch your breath and wipe off some sweat.

originally published in Philadelphia City Paper

FIDLAR
[Punk]
concert preview

This L.A. punk band's name is an acronym, a sort of bro YOLO, which stands, in part, for "...it dog, life's a risk."  It's a mantra they seemingly take as an injunction to partake of as much risky behavior as possible including – just to run down the tracklist of their ass-kicking self-titled debut (Mom + Pop), cheap beer (the raison d'être espoused in their signature, sing-along rallying cry), cocaine, cheap cocaine, and smoking (presumably also cheap) weed.  Plus, waking, baking, skating, and not being able to surf – which in particular should endear them to tourmate/labelmate/SoCal compatriot and beach-scum Wavves (whose own new Mom + Pop bow, Afraid of Heights, is his most earnest slab of grunge revivalism to date.)  Along the way, the FIDLARs make their way through a couple hard'n'fast quasi-thrash bursts, but also some of the sweetest heroin bubblegum since the Ramones, and a surprising amount of Nashville twang to boot.