Preview Round-Up: January/February 2015

Natalie Prass
[Folk/Soul/Pop]
concert preview

On their own, this Nashvillean's songs are quiet, intimate, love-troubled things, and her impossibly sweet voice a vulnerable, elfin wisp.  But bolstered – as they are on her self-titled debut LP (Spacebomb), and as they will be on stage tonight – by the luxurious fantasy-throwback orchestrations of producer/collaborators Matthew E. White and Trey Pollard, they emerge as improbable beacons of modern-day countrypolitan R&B: calmly jubilant, buoyed by a graceful, grown-and-sexy elegance and steeped in deep Southern swamp-gospel soul.

Justin Townes Earle
[Folk]
concert preview

September's Single Mothers and its recently-released companion Absent Fathers (Vagrant) are, as their titles suggest, not exactly feel-good albums: each offers ten torn-and-tender, pedal-steel-draped tunes on all-too-autobiographical themes of abandonment, struggle and uncertain redemption.  There's solace to be had here too, but it's mostly in the sound – a little bit soul-searing country, a little rock'n'roll – of one of our most promising songwriters settling into a comfortable groove that at this rate (he's only 33) could sustain him for decades, though one hopes it doesn't have to.

Ariel Pink
[Psycho/Pop]
concert preview

A decade after his Animal Collective-abetted emergence as home-taping neo-lo-fi hero (and improbable chillwave forerunner), Ariel Pink has somehow morphed into indiedom's reigning king of the freaks; a cartoonish mutant-pop ringmaster and a relentlessly trolling social media instigator.  Last year's powderpuff-pink pom pom (4AD) is his twisted, taste-defying magnum opus: an overstuffed seventeen-track schlocktacular that plays like Frank Zappa by way of John Waters – several of its campy/creepy hyper-retro goof-offs were co-written with ur-L.A.-misfit Kim Fowley (R.I.P.), whose spirit looms large here – but somehow manages space for some effortlessly pretty psych-pop ballads too.

Hundred Waters
[Experimental/Indie]
concert preview

This Gainesville FL band take their name from Austrian architect (Friedensreich) Hundertwasser, whose whimsically fluid, boldly colorful and environmentally-minded buildings defy the stuffy grandiloquence of his native Vienna in much the same way their music sticks out from the context of circa 2015 "indie rock," and, certainly, from the typical purview of their label boss Skrillex.  Last year's sophomore set The Moon Rang Like A Bell (OWSLA) is all rounded edges and dreamy pastel textures; mystical post-classical pop forged at the intersection of polished instrumentalism and subdued but sprightly electronics.

Zola Jesus
[Pop]
concert preview

"I thought fear brought me closer to the truth," sings Nika Danilova midway through 2014's Taiga (Mute) – which may explain some things about the art-gothery and foreboding that so dominated her past oeuvre, and why this, her fifth album as Zola Jesus, pushes so emphatically past it.  There are breakbeats; there are brass chorales; there is some serious affirmation and emotional empowerment afoot.  Pop goes the ego.

Kishi Bashi String Quartet
[Pop/Chamber Music]
concert preview

Twee-prog whiz kid K. Ishibashi routinely loops and layers his ever-frolicsome fiddle-work into the equivalent of at least a quartet, so hearing him accompanied by four more string players at this "special seated show" should approach chamber orchestra territory.  It'll be interesting to hear how the giddy-goofy dance-pop of cuts like "The Ballad of Mr. Steak" (from last year's irrepressible Lighght (Joyful Noise)) translate – if they're doing it right, the show shouldn't remain seated for long.

Elisa Ambrogio
[Singer-Songwriter]
concert preview

Elisa Ambrogio's markedly song-oriented solo debut, The Immoralist (Drag City), feels like a distant cousin, at best, to both the noisenik skronk she spearheads in Magik Markers and the sleepy-sparse folk of 200 Years, her duo with Ben Chasny. These ten tunes have their share of clangor and drone, but also an understated sweetness (see, especially, the chiming "Superstitious"), and rough-edged naturalism recalling Waxahatchee and Torres in their commingling of grit and grace.

Damien Jurado
[Singer-Songwriter]
concert preview

Eleven albums into what was once a relatively demure indie-folk career, things are getting mighty interesting for this Seattle songsmith.  Last year's Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Sun (Secretly Canadian), Jurado's third straight collaboration with neo-psych production MVP Richard Swift, got about as far out as he could get without jettisoning the "singer-songwriter" umbrella entirely – a murky, mystical psycho-spiritual concept opus with bombastically plush, dub-touched sonic whizbangery to match.

Jeffrery Lewis/Diane Cluck
[Folk/Anti-Folk]
concert preview

West Philly house/gallery Eris Temple Arts is a suitably scruffy and intimate setting for these veterans of New York's loose "anti-folk" scene (basically, songwriters unaverse to personality, topicality and humor – kinda like what folk used to mean.)  Lewis is an endearingly muppetish, ever-personable performer and a top-notch cartoonist (fingers crossed he brings along some of his illustrated "low-budget music video" flip-books); the Lancaster-bred, self-described "intuitive" Cluck tends more to the poetic, even austere, as on last year's brief-but-affecting Boneset (Important),but she's got her quirks for sure, and a magnificent warble of a voice.

Until The Ribbon Breaks
[Rock/Electronic]
concert preview

Not many acts would seem equally at home sharing stages with heavy-lidded lounge-poppers London Grammar – tomorrow night's headliners – and the flat-out heavy rap duo Run The Jewels (with whom they've traded album guest spots), but this Welsh trio fits the bill.  Their assured if rather forbiddingly sober debut, A Lesson Unlearnt (Cobalt) somehow synthesizes the past half-decade's trends in electro-pop, lushly moody avant-R&B, indie rock anthemism and egghead hip-hop, with precisely the kind of fluid fluency their cassette-tape-referencing moniker lacks.

RiFF RAFF
[Hip-Hop]
concert preview

If Riff Raff didn't exist, Mad Decent, who signed the Houston rapper/freakazoid to an eight-album deal (two down, as of last summer's Neon Icon) may have had to invent him – he shares head homeboy Diplo's gonzo maximalism and tireless hustle, but with a gleeful, improbably ingenuous absurdism with which the globetrotting label boss could only dream of keeping pace.

Kölsch
[Electronic/House]
concert preview

Rune Reilly Kölsch hails not from Köln – though his label, Kompakt, is there – but from Denmark's autonomous hippie "freetown" of Christiania, where he may have learned something about utopian visions.  2013's 1977 (titled, T-Swift/FlyLo-style, after his birth year) was a masterclass in warmly enveloping, straightforward-but-not-simplistic house, unafraid of sentimentality; last month's mix for the Balance series accomplished similar things in slightly whooshier fashion, imbued (via the likes of Radiohead, Caribou and Coldplay) with an almost hymn like serenity and a big-tent populism that transcends his counter-cultural roots.

originally published in Philadelphia City Paper

2012 Review Round-Up: October

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

continuing with october, the king of months; action-packed, full of dynamic, fascinating characters and unexpected plot twists.  i mostly just remember the goofy promo videos for it (like the one which showed them making the cover art...live action collage!) but i think i'm gonna have to go back and listen to this why? album again; this review makes it sound pretty good!
Why?
Mumps, Etc.

Returning to the brighter, bolder strokes of 2008's much-beloved Alopecia after its relatively somber sibling record (and follow-up), Eskimo Snow, the fifth album from Yoni Wolf and company is their most assured work to date; the sharpest expression of an aesthetic that remains undeniably, wholly their own. It's also probably their most balanced offering, with equal weight given to emotional heft, melodic sweetness, Wolf's deft, rap-like lyricism and the band's richly colorful arrangements. Mumps, Etc. doesn't entirely break new ground in any of those areas, except perhaps the latter – beyond the now-familiar layers of keyboards and mallet percussion, they called in orchestral musicians and a choir to further flesh out the album's sonics. Indeed, pretty much everything here could easily have fit on Alopecia. In other words, you can expect reams of Wolf's witty, diaristic verse, peppered with wry quotables and frequently dazzling internal rhymes, set against lovely, unpredictable backdrops full of instrumental ear-candy – this time out they're positively sumptuous, with an abundance of harps, marimbas, strings, flutes, and female harmonies, plus a bit more boom-bap in the percussion department. As for Wolf, he's in top form throughout. Riffing on malady and disease (per the album's title; both mental and physical); death and aging (he is, after all, "pushing past thirty"); life's absurd detritus (from "G4 motherboards with '90s porn in their cache" to "the angular Etruscan tchotchke mom-mom got me at the Met gift shop"); a bit of sex, and his music career (as well as the prospect of retirement – he envisions himself, like your mom, smoking weed and listening to "that Garrison Keilor"), he is, by turns, bleak, sardonic, bemused and humbly, philosophically hopeful. He also lays out his (typically downbeat) themes in a series of atypically straightforward chorus hooks: "I am not okay, boys." "I'll never shirk this first world-curse: a steady hurt and a sturdy purse." "I know with no uncertainty/that I'm uncertain and I don't know." That last is from "Kevin's Cancer," one of several lyrics wherein Wolf grapples with religion more directly than he has in the past – a natural enough topic for the mortality-obsessed son of a rabbi, though interestingly there are nearly as many Christian references here as Jewish ones. Opener "Jonathan's Hope" finds him addressing the Lord directly: "Will you spell out love in the lashes life serves up/or am I just a red bump in the rash of cash worship?" He also comes up with a handful of excellent new epithets for himself: "the blundering braggart," "the doctor of ramble and world scramble." Sure, you could call it solipsistic – a word that's crying out for a labyrinthine Yoni rhyme, if ever there was one – if self-deprecatingly so – but Wolf is as honest and, in a greater sense, as generous a songwriter as we have, and Mumps, Etc. may be his finest gift yet.

Ultraísta
s/t

A trio of inevitably unequal proportions, Ultraísta consists of London-based artist/singer-songwriter Laura Bettinson (whose other musical endeavors include Femme and Dimbleby & Capper) and Los Angeleno session drummer Joey Waronker (Walt Mink, Ima Robot, Beck, R.E.M.) along with the headline-stealing Nigel Godrich – longtime producer for (and sometimes-designated "honorary member" of) Radiohead. The easy and obvious comparisons (and the pre-release anticipation from Radiohead fans) are readily borne out by the music on Ultraísta's self-titled debut, whose dense, dreamy matrix of buzzing synths, precise but bloodless drumming, digital stutters and liquid clicks immediately recalls the similarly dominant textures on The King of Limbs and, to a lesser extent, Kid A and Thom Yorke's The Eraser. (Waronker and Godrich, who've previously crossed paths on projects with Air, Beck and Paul McCartney among others, also play together in the Yorke-led Atoms for Peace.) That's not to underplay Bettinson's contributions to the project, which, according to interviews, was conducted as a full three-way collaboration. Her vocals, while not always the most prominent element of a given track – the clearest indication that this is undeniably a producer's record – definitely help give the album its distinctive character, one which hearkens back to the '90s-era arty ennui of Broadcast, Stereolab, and early Goldfrapp. Like those groups' singers, Bettinson's presence here is human and personable but not overly demonstrative, equally able to step forward, on more melodically inclined pieces like "Bad Insect," "Static Light" and the bewitching "Smalltalk" (not coincidentally, the same three cuts that were made available prior to the album's release), or to blend in to the shimmering expanse of sound, as with the drifting, incantatory fragments permeating "You're Out." As a collection of songs, and particularly as a "pop" record (inspirations for the group reportedly included Rye Rye and Whigfield, which seems far-fetched at best), Ultraísta feels a bit unfulfilled, but as a work of sound and atmosphere it's captivating, predictably excellent work, worthy of attention not only from fans of Godrich's better-known buddies (and especially those who might have found The King of Limbs to be slightly too distant or understated), but anyone with an interest in the still-fertile interstices between atmospheric electronica and indie rock.
originally published at AllMusic.com

Crime & The City Solution
A History Of Crime, Berlin 1987-1991: An Introduction to Crime & The City Solution

This Australian post-punk group's entry in Mute's idiosyncratic, artist-selected "An Introduction To…" series – timed to coincide with an unexpected revival/resurgence – opts, per its title, to focus on only the final, most fertile incarnation of the long-running ('77-'91) band – one which shared members with both Einstürzende Neubauten and Nick Cave's Bad Seeds. A History of Crime includes the lion's share of material from their last three albums, and it's an abundance of riches, especially for such a short period, from the gothic, funereal drone of "The Bride Ship" to the surprisingly bouncy, driving, quasi-country of "On Every Train" and "I Have The Gun"; from 1988's brooding, incantatory "All Must Be Love" to the slightly warmer, wider-ranging material from 1990's Paradise Discotheque. This was clearly a fiercely adventurous and unusually inspired outfit, weaving together musical and conceptual strands that would later be picked up by acts as disparate as Pulp, Morphine, Afghan Whigs, Tindersticks and their compatriots Dirty Three, with the expressive, slyly theatrical vocals of frontman/songwriter Simon Bonney serving as a magnetic, incandescent focal point. [8]
originally published in Magnet Magazine

Wanda Jackson
Unfinished Business
[Rock'n'Roll/Country]

There probably aren't too many septuagenarians who go around telling off fast-talking "boys" with "come-hither stares," or warning women that she'll steal their men in her smooth-riding Cadillac. Thank goodness no-one told Wanda Jackson. The once-and-future rockabilly queen – who'll be 75 next week – reaffirms her crown on Unfinished Business (Sugar Hill) a ripping set of rock'n'roll chestnuts, classy country stylings and a heartfelt touch of gospel. Justin Townes Earle, producer (and occasional duet partner) here, keeps things considerably looser than last year's rather overcooked Jack White-helmed date.

Django Django
s/t
[Brit-Pop]

Django Django's buzz-stoking (and Mercury Prize-nominated) self-titled debut (Ribbon Music) – which opens with two of the year's funnest, catchiest rock singles – sounds a bit like XTC and Hot Chip on holiday in the highlands with Super Furry Animals and Tunng, all singing and dancing round about the campfire. Yep, it's another bunch of UK art-school lads (Scotsmen in this case) having their wiry, whimsical way with us, mingling pastoral folk and fizzy pop into a patchwork of their own design, replete with woodsy harmonies, bleeping synths and peppery acoustic riffs. Jolly good show Djangos, jolly good.

Woolfy Vs. Projections
The Return of Love
[Balearic/Downtempo]

Drifting on an endless luke-warm lilt; awash in acoustic strums, steel drums and starry-eyed synth pads; so fragrantly lush and fluffy you could sink right through it (even the uptempo funk numbers are smooth enough to nap to) – Californian slow-disco dreamers Woolfy vs. Projections' second album is practically dreary in its loveliness. What saves The Return of Love (Permanent Vacation) from utter anhedonia – and separates it from the vast majority of modern Balearica – is a batch of songs that actually manage penetrate the haze, even if they have to quote Steely Dan to do it.

Daphni
Jiaolong
[Dance/Electronic]

A far cry from the pastoral paisley flourishes and kraut-fuzz of his early Caribou days, Dan Snaith's full-length bow as Daphni is less a wholesale reinvention than the logical extension of 2010's EDM-embracing Swim. Basically, he's just been having way too much fun with vintage synths. The dancefloor-primed cuts on JIAOLONG (Merge) – Afrobeat recastings, slow-burn swingstep shuffles, acid-zapped hard house – are more impulsive than anything he's done; fresh, zingy and a little dangerous. But while melody takes a definite backseat, Snaith's instinctive musicality gets filtered through gut-busting soul-horn samples, Eastern-tinged noodles and angry-robot blurts.

Miguel
[R&B]
concert preview

Miguel's arsenal of lines ranges from pseudo-erudite ("let my love adorn you") to obliquely salacious ("arch your back; point your toes") to bluntly calculating ("how many drinks will it take...") to flat-out dopey ("do you like love?...me too!") But it hardly matters what he's actually saying – his delivery's so throbbingly smooth he could be crooning the proverbial phonebook. Plus he's clearly a total softy – invoking God in the feminine, interpolating the freaking Zombies (and William DeVaughn, almost) plus the album's called Kaleidoscope Dream – and if Prince taught us anything it's that sensitive types are the true freaks. (And, yeah, the beautiful ones will hurt you every time.) Stuff it: you can keep yr Weeknds, your Frank Oceans, even (the mixtape was better anyway) – I'm going home with Miguel.

Le1f/Das Racist
[Hip-Hop]
concert preview

They might not appear to have too much in common – well, apart from killer mic skills and identities that run defiantly counter to established hip-hop conventions. But Das Racist – everyone's favorite multi-culti trickster-hipster "not joking/just joking" rap group – and Le1f – a flamboyantly gay electro-rap diva with strong connections to New York's drag ball scene – go way back. To Wesleyan University, in fact, where Das Racist's Himanshu Suri and Victor Vasquez met in a "Students of Color for Social Justice" dorm, and where Le1f – a.k.a. Khalif Diouf – produced the beat for the duo's name-making hit/meme "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell." Four years and three full-lengths later, DR (who've been keeping busy with a steady stream of guest spots and solo mixtapes) issued Le1f's debut Dark York mixtape via their Greedhead imprint: a soupy, intergalactic beatscape that feels simultaneously cartoonish and sinister. It also boasts the tremendously catchy "Wut," whose one-note bari-sax snap beat and lightning tongue-waggling scream for "Combination"-level virality.

Willis Earl Beal
[Soul/Folk]
concert preview

The anomalous means by which Willis Earl Beal came to attention – a crudely-drawn flier that made its way to the cover of Found Magazine; a colorfully improbable, oft-repeated personal backstory – have generated an inevitable focus, bordering on fetishization, on the 28-year-old Chicagoan's outsider oddball status. And the scratchy, years-old home recordings presented on Acousmatic Sorcery (Hot Charity/XL) hardly discourage that emphasis. But while there's no denying Beal's eccentricity, there's real artistry here, not just a freak show. Even with the makeshift instrumentation, rudimentary musicianship and nonexistent production values – Beal's professed some justifiable embarrassment about his songs seeing wide release in this form – his impressive stylistic range (raw, field-holler-like blues; gently poppy strummers; seasick Tom Waits surrealism; glinting lap-harp instrumentals; sing-song proto-hip-hop) and his commanding, richly soulful singing voice shine right through. His live show, if hopefully more deliberate in presentation, should be every bit as intimate – and it's our best chance, for now, to glimpse beyond the reductive folk-art savant caricature.

The Mountain Goats/Matthew E. White
[Singer-Songwriter]
concert preview

John Darnielle's fourteenth-ish Mountain Goats album bursts open with surging strums, seething intensity, and a lyric – "Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive..." – that grits teeth in the face of near-unendurable circumstances. It's characteristic almost to the point of self-parody, instantly recalling the raw urgency of classic MGs anthems like "This Year," and it's potent as hell. The rest of Transcendental Youth (Merge) follows suit, rife with the darkness and desperation that is Darnielle's richest métier – though the characters given voice in these songs, mostly sufferers of some form of mental illness, are particularly troubled even by his standards. The proceedings are augmented (or perhaps tempered) by several sumptuous, chorale-like horn charts penned by Richmond, VA's Matthew E. White, who'll be on hand tonight to share some of the gentle, devotional folk-soul epics from his debut Big Inner (Spacebomb/Hometapes) – an unlikely intermingling of Van Dyke Parks, Curtis Mayfield and Spiritualized – which occupies almost precisely the opposite end of the emotional spectrum.

Jens Lekman/Taken By Trees
[Indie/Pop]
concert preview

In the half-decade (to the day, almost) since his previous album, Swedish softy Jens Lekman spent several years in Melbourne, Australia, where he engaged in his usual regimen of romance and heartbreak; to judge from the barely-veiled poignancy which permeates his characteristically charming I Know What Love Isn't (Secretly Canadian), it was mostly the latter. Meanwhile, his labelmate and fellow globetrotting Gothenberger (and former Concrete) Victoria Bergsman seems to have had a somewhat easier time of it elsewhere in the Pacific: to follow up her overlooked 2009 gem East of Eden, which she recorded in Pakistan, she teamed with Henning Fürst of Balearic electro-popsters The Tough Alliance and traveled to Hawaii, emerging with the suitably sunkissed, blissfully woozy and positively love-drunk Other Worlds.

Jeffrey Lewis
[Singer-Songwriter]
concert preview

Jeffrey Lewis' songs have grown more nuanced and poetic since his debut; his themes have gotten more philosophical (although lovelorn loneliness still features most prominently), but the waggish wit, quirky topicality and earnestly conversational sensibility that reached fuller flower on last year's "A Turn in the Dream-Songs" and 2009's great, mortality-oriented "'Em Are I" were already fully established by his charmingly scruffy earliest official release. The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane (and Other Favorites), a compilation of DIY cassette recordings issued by Rough Trade in 2001, is now available on vinyl for the first time, in a ten-year anniversary edition (well, almost) from Don Giovanni Records. It's as good as any excuse for a tour, not that we need any justification for a chance to catch New York's most entertaining (and most endearingly neurotic) songwriter-cartoonist in action. Hopefully he brings along some of his ingenious "low budget videos" – large-format lyric-illustrating flip-books – which are perhaps the best expression of his twin supertalents.

Cuddle Magic
[Chamber Folk/Art-Pop]
concert preview

Semi-local acoustic chamber ensemble Cuddle Magic manage the neat trick of being utterly adorable in a way that doesn't make you take their warmly cerebral, obliquely poignant classical-jazz-folk-pop – they don't exactly play any of these kinds of music, but they don't exactly not play them either – any less seriously. Their third full-length, Info Nympho (Fyo), includes compositions by fully half of the band's ten members, and while its title is an apt idiom for our contemporary instant-gratification search-engine culture, and there is indeed the occasional hint of internet-era supersaturation here – the terse, touching "Hoarders," or "Disgrace Note," which scans like a Wikipedia page ("Category: Suicides by Creative Curmudgeons") set to verse – they generally operate at a deliberate, old-fashioned pace that invites and occasions some welcome mental readjustments.

The Sea and Cake/Matthew Friedberger
[Indie Rock]
concert preview

On parts of Runner (Thrill Jockey), their ninth LP in almost twenty years (tenth if you count last year's concise Moonlight Butterfly), The Sea and Cake hew closer to conventional indie rock/post-punk archetype than ever before, augmenting their typical cleanly fluid structures with almost shoegazy guitar noise – without ever ceasing to sound entirely like themselves. Their labelmate and fellow Chicagoan Matthew Friedberger – best known as the Fiery Furnaces' fraternal half – is as erratic and willfully difficult as they are affably dependable; he, by contrast, has released nine-or-ten LPs in the last two years (!), the latest of which, Matricidal Sons of Bitches, stretches four mostly-instrumental "suites" across forty-five mostly minute-or-so tracks. With buckets of wheezing synths which sound about a hundred years old, and snatches of creaky old jazz and misterioso beatbox ballroom, it's expectably quirk-heavy, but surprisingly listenable – it'd work equally well as a soundtrack for a comically heroic silent film or for cleaning your cuckoo-clock collection.

Calexico
[Rock/Roots]
concert preview

The big story with Calexico's seventh proper full-length is that Joey Burns and John Convertino decamped from their long-time home base of Tucson – evidently, at least in part, to escape the distractions of new fatherhood – to record the album in New Orleans, more specifically the sleepy West bank neighborhood which gives the album its name. It's good copy, but Algiers (Anti-) turns out to have almost no audible connection to the City that Care Forgot (even if that nickname has a distinctly Calexican ring to out.) In fact, it's just as steeped in the romance and mystery of the Southwest as anything they've done; moody, slow-rolling desert rock laced with Norteño, Mariachi and dusky, dusty blues.

Kimbra
[Pop]
concert preview

Kimbra is every bit as much of a pop chameleon as her duet-partner and fellow Antipodean Gotye, whose "Somebody That I Used To Know" has served as her international (musical) calling card. The quiet intensity she deployed so effectively on that song, however, is markedly little in evidence on Vows (Warner Bros), which instead flits from sound to sound, alternately recalling Janelle Monae, Feist (the domestically-inclined doo-wop of "Settle Down" is basically an even scattier "Mushaboom") and sunshine-pop glitter-princesses like Lenka or the Bird and the Bee's Inara George. She's not afraid to layer on the Disneyfied sonic excess – strings and chimes, harpsichords and xylophones, funhouse samples and backing vocals galore – and her approach to retro (frequent injections of swing, soul and sixties pop) is more glitzy Broadway revival than historical re-enactment. And she's got both the gumption to cover Nina Simone and the poise (and voice) to pull it off.

MNDR
[Pop]
concert preview

Amanda Warner may draw lyrical inspiration from Patty Hearst, Marina Abromovic, Henry Ford, and the Chinese economy, but Feed Me Diamonds (Ultra Records) is ultimately brainy only in the manner of the best pop art – she (and MNDR cohort Peter Wade) are smart enough to engineer bright shiny electro-dance confections, with just the right ratio of polish to crunch; layer them with Warner's equally heady, sugar-rush vocals, with just enough personality to keep us interested; and pretty much leave it at that. For all the vibrancy and variety in their fizzy, fuzzy productions – eurodisco, electroclash, flashes of dubstep and diva house, and loads of lushly Romantic, '80s-soaked synth-pop – the Brooklyn duo aren't striving for anything that the likes of Robyn, La Roux and Yelle haven't already mastered in recent years. But they nail it – for twelve whole tracks – and that's a rare and precious thing in itself.
originally published in Philadelphia City Paper

review round-up XV: 2011 second half, vol. 2 [singer-songwriters and indie rock bands]

Devon Sproule: I Love You, Go Easy review

Devon Sproule's sixth album opens in typically bucolic fashion, with the limber-voiced songwriter musing mellifluously on the mossy, terrapin-filled pond of her childhood commune (perhaps the very same "goose-poop pond" referenced at the start of her previous album), but the record on the whole finds Sproule -- an Ontario-born lifelong Virginian, freshly transplanted to Berlin, who's probably best beloved in the U.K. -- traveling musically and thematically further afield from her rustic roots. I Love You, Go Easy, which feels every bit as warm, thoughtful, and generously gentle as the twofold sentiment contained in its title, was recorded in her native Canada with a fresh batch of collaborators -- free-thinking Toronto producer Sandro Perri (Polmo Polpo) and experimental folk-pop trio the Silt -- who work some small wonders with the album's breezily expansive textural palette, making tasteful use of flutes, clarinets, saxophones, brass, and a few unobtrusively burbling synthesizers alongside Sproule's trusty Gibson. The result is considerably removed from the country-informed folk that dominated (but never completely encapsulated) her earlier work; it's both her subtlest and jazziest effort to date, certainly sonically but also in its songwriting, which tends more than ever toward long, fluid melodic lines and loose, open-ended structures. And the songs, if not necessarily her most immediately captivating or endearingly winsome, are as artful, personable, elegant, and finely crafted as ever, revealing abundant charms and quirks with familiarity. They're also frankly, unapologetically personal, vehicles for Sproule to explore the nuances of her relationships and emotions but also to sort through her life and career goals (though the two tend to intersect, particularly when it comes -- as it often does -- to her husband, fellow singer/songwriter Paul Curreri).

Twin Sister: In Heaven review

Twin Sister's most singular asset – and, apart from a general sonic softness which could be described as "twee," In Heaven's only really consistent attribute – is Andrea Estella's singing voice: a supple, adorable coo that's got a soupçon of Lætitia Sadier, a playful pinch of Judy Garland – by way of Nellie McKay, and, particularly when layered and harmonized, a warm, velvety mellifluence akin to underrated California popsters Simone Rubi and Terri Loewenthal (Rubies/Call and Response.) True, the band's carved out a distinctive, likable, retro-indebted yet minty-fresh baseline sound: dappled, spacey lounge-pop which calls to mind Baudelaire's "luxe, calme et volupté" (also, incidentally, the mantra of romanticist Canadian lushes Stars), and is perhaps best exemplified by opening ditty "Daniel," with its glowing, drifting Tortoise-shell veneer of vibraphone and organ and its gently zippy beatbox bossa. (Call it The Sea and Cupcake – with Estella as the gooey frosting – or, alternatively: Coctail Twins.) But In Heaven, if anything, only ramps up the genre-hopping of Twin Sister's early EPs, rendering it a rather diffuse, perplexing miscellany. Viz., infectious funk-slice "Bad Street" struts into kewpie disco territory (somewhere in the suburbs of "Funkytown"); aptly-named "Space Babe" ushers in the synth-washed and ponderous dream-pop of "Kimmi in a Ricefield" and "Luna," whose gauzy solemnity is then undercut by a spate of campy weirdness: "Spain" (torchy spy-theme pastiche), "Gene Ciampi" (Spaghetti Western clip-clop) and "Saturday Sunday" (easy-listening bubblegum? Petula Clark takes on Rebecca Black?), which largely dial back the synths in favor of screwball guitar. So: Heaven? or Las Vegas? or, more probably, (c. late 90s) Chicago? Hard to predict quite where Twin Sister will end up, but it's a lovely, leisurely, labile journey all the same.

Kathryn Calder: Bright & Vivid review

For an album titled Bright and Vivid, Kathryn Calder's sophomore solo effort sure starts out pretty murky. With its thick, squalling guitars, thudding drumbeat, and smeared, muffled vocals, "One Two Three" initially suggests that Calder is taking a page from the voguish, lo-fi girl group playbook (Dum Dum Girls, Vivian Girls, et al), but that soon turns out to be a bit of a miscue. There's a sense of polish and deliberateness in spite of all the hazy, swirling sonics; what emerges here, and throughout the album, is indeed quite vivid and bright -- but on the order of a lush, richly saturated Impressionist painting (or, perhaps, the album's autumnal-hued cover), an aesthetic far removed from the crisp, neatly delineated formalism of her work with the New Pornographers and Immaculate Machine. While Calder's relatively intimate, understated solo debut demonstrated a keen awareness of texture and a solid understanding of arrangement, those impulses come to the fore here in a considerably fuller and more conspicuous way, becoming as much of a focus as the songs themselves, if not more; take for instance the epically evolving, almost suite-like "All the Things," which is instrumental for more than half of its six-minute run time, and features Calder's voice, when it does come in, positively drowned in reverb. That voice -- warm, confident, girlishly pure, more richly developed than ever --still serves as the sublime vehicle for melody it has long been, rising brilliantly above the gentle haze on "Right Book," or tenderly harmonizing on "City of Sounds," but it's also sometimes treated as just one more, albeit integral, element in the album's lavish, layered tapestry of texture. For all the considerable volume of sound on the album -- which Calder recorded in her living room with her producer-engineer husband Colin Stewart (head of Vancouver's Hive Creative Labs), working at a leisurely pace and enlisting a generous cast of collaborators -- it never feels overstuffed. And while the songs, in general, tend not to announce themselves loudly, but rather blossom gradually, taking time to reveal their ample hooks and charms, they show just as much care and craft as the album's expansive soundscape. Even at their most immediately, infectiously accessible -- the glorious, electro-poppy earworm "Who Are You?," which has all the makings of an indie-night dance anthem, or the catchy, rocking "Walking in My Sleep" (the closest the album comes to New Pornos-style power pop) -- these are thoughtful, complex pieces of songwriting. A firm step forward on all fronts, Bright and Vivid is a thoroughly engaging listen and establishes Calder as a creative force and pop craftsperson every bit as worthy as her big-deal bandmates.

Darren Hayman: Essex Arms review

For the second installment in his planned "Essex Trilogy," Darren Hayman shifts his focus from the suburban, middle-class "new town" Harlow – the subject and setting of 2009's Pram Town – to a broader view of the East Anglian county's rural, working-class communities. Like its predecessor, Essex Arms is full of highly specific geographic and cultural references which effectively function as a backdrop to Hayman's usual assortment of love songs, character sketches and wistful ruminations. This time there's no attempt to cement the album's concept through a grand connecting narrative (or even a modest one), but the songs still hang together nicely to evoke a clear sense of place, with linchpins including "Dagenham Ford" – a touchingly bittersweet eulogy to a shuttered auto plant (and perennial football underdogs West Ham United) – and the languorous "Two Tree Island" (an ode to a former sewage works and landfill, now partially a nature reserve), with its vision of the countryside commingled with litter and waste. Sweetness and decadence run hand and hand throughout these songs, with references to semi-public sex and reckless (and sometimes fatal) joyriding intermingling with heartfelt declarations of love (none more pure and guileless than "Super Kings"' earnest refrain.) Perhaps the most winning moment (which is reprised en passant throughout the album, for good measure) comes with "Winter Makes You Want Me More," whose central sentiment is as poetic as it is self-evident; a cold-weather love song that's as universal as pawprints in the snow, shivering smokers and candy-striped flannelette sheets. Throughout, Hayman and a particularly strong incarnation of the Secondary Modern (including contributions from Fanfarlo, The Wave Pictures and – on the scene-setting "Calling Out Your Name Again," a duet with Emmy the Great) infuse the proceedings with a loose but decidedly folksy, countrified air, flush with pedal steel, harmonica, fiddle, mandolin and more. That musical modus may or may not be strictly relevant to the countryside in question, but it works marvelously well with Hayman's increasingly soulful songwriting, both on the hushed, melancholic tunes which make up the majority of this collection (starting right off the bat with the sad-sack "Be Lonely") and the handful of upbeat offerings, including the atypically rocky scrabble-playing closer "Nothing You Can Do About It." While it's not quite the uniquely charming statement Pram Town was, Essex Arms is yet another excellent addition to Hayman's ever-expanding discography.

Jeffrey Lewis: A Turn In The Dream-Songs review

Following the splendid career highlight Em Are I, and after a couple of collaborative detours – the uneven-at-best The Bundles with Kimya Dawson, and the delightfully loopy Come On Board with weirdo-folk icon Peter Stampfel – lovably quirky New York songwriter/cartoonist Jeffrey Lewis returns with a highly likable sixth album full of his characteristic wit, whimsy, sardonic self-deprecation and transcendental musings. Lewis' regular backing band the Junkyard are absent here (under that billing, at least), as are the occasional bursts of electrified rowdiness they've provided in the past. In their place are a clutch of mostly British indie-folk players (including the Wave Pictures' Franic Rozycki, who provides some fine mandolin work throughout), and a bevy of guests – members of The Vaselines, Dr. Dog, Au Revoir Simone, Misty’s Big Adventure and Schwervon – who help flesh out the album's pleasantly loose, vaguely psych-folky vibe, particularly on the tone-setting "To Go And Return," whose spacey, surreal lyric (a somewhat Seussian nonsense rhyme about the cosmic metaphysics of wish-making) is the source of the album's peculiar title. Despite all the friends he's amassed here, Lewis remains an archetypal loner, a condition which informs many of the album's sharpest numbers, from the lovelorn lambast "How Can It Be?" (featuring peppy, '60s-style backing vocals by the Dr. Dog boys) and the goofy "Cult Boyfriend" (which likens Lewis' romantic boom-and-bust cycles to a rapid-fire list of pop-culture obscurities) to "I Got Lost"'s gentle, plain-spoken disquisition on disconnection and "When You're By Yourself"'s wryly tender dissection of the practical logistics of loneliness – not to mention the hyperbolic shaggy-dog suicide saga "So What If I Couldn't Take It Anymore." (As usual – though still impressively – these songs rarely if ever come across as bitter or overly self-pitying; Lewis hasn't lost his knack for balancing depressed and depressing subject matter with insightfulness, sincerity, levity and charm.) All that time alone must give Lewis plenty of opportunity for deep thinking, which might explain the homespun, slightly stoned philosophizing of songs like the de facto centerpiece "Krongu Green Slime" – which uses the odd conceit of a pre-historic novelty manufacturing corporation to reimagine the entirety of evolution, over six protracted minutes of spare acoustic picking – and, perhaps more cogently, the touching "Time Trades," which moves beyond theorizing to offer some practical advice about long-term life planning. Songs like this – imaginative, contemplative, densely wordy, slightly silly but unflinchingly earnest – are arguably Lewis' strongest suit, especially in his recent work, and if the instances on A Turn In The Dream-Songs aren't quite as striking as those on its predecessor, the album still ranks right up there among his best.

Wu Lyf: Go Tell Fire To The Mountain review

British foursome World Unite Lucifer Youth Foundation – amusingly tempting to confuse with their rather distant Stateside counterparts World/Inferno Friendship Society (both bands are, at least, similarly fervent, unruly and rabble-rousing) – craft music that's every bit as elemental, emphatic and willfully enigmatic as their album's title. On its own terms, stripped of the hyped-to-hell/anti-hype vortex of its appealingly mythic but all-too-familiar backstory, Go Tell Fire offers both considerable beauty – lots of chiming, churchy organ, lots of gorgeously liquid, lucid guitar – and considerable ugliness (including some brutish, pounding grooves, but especially Ellery Roberts' instantly divisive choked, guttural caterwaul, which is potent in chunks – especially in exhortative chant mode – but dreadfully wearisome at unremitting album-length full-throttle), neither of which feel like ends in themselves (nor a purpose-driven juxtaposition) so much as value-neutral vehicles striving, straining, yearning toward pure, pummeling visceral emotion. And, to the (inconsistent) extent that they keep things abstract (read: post-rock-ish), and avoid sounding like any other bunch of dull, drudgy indie-rock also-rans (most of the bits invoking their self-conception as "heavy pop," a rather sour, chore-like description), it mostly works.

Zee Avi: Ghostbird review

A pint-sized, ukulele-strumming, vintage dress-wearing Malaysian-born songbird who rose to prominence via YouTube videos, Zee Avi fairly screams cute, quirky whimsy. If that description raises any warning flags or cynical twitches, ghostbird might just not be your glass of agave-sweetened hibiscus tea. (Should it be held against her that both she and her music are the stuff of marketing directors' dreams? It's an open question...) But you'd have to be at least a little cold-hearted not to be pleasantly lulled by the warm, gentle breeziness of Avi's music; its evident charm, predictably familiar though it might be, is modest enough never to feel cloying. If nothing else, the album consistently sounds wonderful: helmed by longtime Beastie Boys associate Mario Caldato Jr. (Bebel Gilberto, Jack Johnson) with a genially eclectic textural expansiveness – drawing freely from folk, swing jazz and soundtrack-friendly pop, with a twist of South Pacific tropicalia – it boasts a particularly vivid variety of percussion elements (shakers, fingersnaps, crisply mic'd congas, brushed snare drums, bullfrogs, rhythmic vocal chanting and discreet turntable scratches.) As for Avi herself, her personality often takes a comfortable backseat to the sound – and her lyrics, save for the occasional pithy sun-dappled observation ("every good fisherman has a pelican watching over him") tend to stand out for vague syntactic awkwardness ("even my lover's no longer enamored by me") or blatant factual inaccuracy ("thirty-one days in June" – from a song whose refrain also asserts "my love will pay the rent") if at all – but her voice, a gorgeously honeyed, legitimately jazzy warble (recalling The Bird and the Bee's Inara George) that belies her 25 years, is simply beyond reproach.

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Jens Lekman: Having An Argument With Myself EP review

Oh so silent oh so long (four years!), Mr. Jens Lekman reminds us just what we've been missing with the delectably dense An Argument With Myself EP (Secretly Canadian.) Over some of the sparkliest, most lovingly detailed grooves of his career – effervescent Afro-pop, plasticine twee-funk, soupy yacht-reggae – the gallant Göthenburger peruses and ponders the debatably ethical society of his hometown (and this world over: Melbourne; Santiago) via personal anecdotes, romantic professions, driving directions, absent-minded small talk, socio-political critique and – of course – plenty of jokes.

Gillian Welch The Harrow and the Harvest review

It's been a long, dry spell since last we heard from Gillian Welch – eight years; though the ten sterling originals comprising The Harrow and the Harvest feel, characteristically, far far older than that. If anything, Welch and her indispensable partner (in songwriting, harmonizing, and stunningly meticulous picking) David Rawlings sound more artlessly natural than ever inhabiting these deeply bluesy (and sometimes gothically gloomy) Appalachian folk strains, any of which could slot right in at your next backwoods campfire.

Tom Waits: Bad As Me review

Saying someone sounds like Tom Waits has become a lazy rock critic cliché trotted out for any singer who's a bit growly or guttural. Bad As Me (Anti-), the man's seventeenth album, besides being an all-around marvelous return after the longest recording gap of his career, is a spectacular reminder that, in actuality, nobody sings like Ol' Tom, whose larynx unleashes everything from weary, warbled moans to feral, splenetically spluttering yowls to an eerily husky falsetto croon across a tight set of his inimitable juke-joint rumbles, junkyard blues and bleary, beery ballads.

Steve Malkmus + The Jicks: Mirror Traffic review

Sorta a shame he didn't stick with the wry working title Madonna in Love, but otherwise it's hard to fathom a legit complaint against Mirror Traffic (Matador), Stephen Malkmus's fifth album with the Jicks, first since last year's world-conquering victory lap with that other band of his, and most instantly, consistently approachable in ages. Spanning gorgeously warm countryfied lopes, smirking spazz-outs, and bulls-eye riff-fests, these fifteen cuts are spry, tuneful, funny and touching: nothing but gold, gold sounds.

Laura Marling: A Creature I Once Knew review

Third time out and the spryest, most striking work yet from the fiercely prodigious Laura Marling, A Creature I Don't Know (Virgin) finds the steely-eyed, still-implausibly-youthful songstress toughening up her nimble, classically refined folk with hard-boiled jazz, blues and (surprisingly bruising) rock inflections; following her increasingly inimitable voice (both literary and literal) into ever more dramatic, elementally mythic themes and haunting, heart-wrenching idiosyncrasies; and also — just showing off — penning her most immediate, ear-catching batch of tunes yet.

Kate Bush: 50 Words for Snow review

Kate Bush – art-pop's high priestess; iconoclast icon who's the inspiration for at least one generation of would-be "eccentrics" – returns to show 'em all how it's done. Except, it's never been done quite like this: 50 Words for Snow (Fish People), her second album this year (but only third this century!) tackles its titular promise with zestful aplomb (and a little assist from Stephen Fry) – "phlegm de neige"..."whippoccino"...psychohail" – but also achieves subtler, equally prodigious feats of imagination and expressiveness throughout its seven mesmerizing, glistening-gentle, white-flurried powder-puffs of song.

The Dø: Both Ways Open Jaws review

There's much that's curious about Franco-Finnish twosome The Dø: the baffling bandname (pronounced "dough," incidentally); the ineffable charisma of Olivia Merilahti's potent, versatile soprano; the way their simple-seeming but naggingly elusive folky/poppy/bluesy tinker-toy tunes flit from gypsy jazz to junkyard electronica and somehow feel at once sparse and texturally teeming. Both Ways Open Jaws (Six Degrees), their modest, ambitious second effort, dances its bohemian dances with a Feist-y, casually effortless sophistication that seems primed to court mainstream attention, but without sacrificing a quark of their subtle, innate quirk.

Brite Futures: Dark Past review

Maybe Seattle electro-popsters Brite Futures' named Dark Past (Turnout), their debut-as-such, in reference to their somewhat notorious, decidedly dubious original moniker, about which the less said the better. It certainly couldn't be about the music, which is as day-glo bright as all get-out: glamtastic party-rocking power-pop with mirrorball glimmers of everybody from Queen and The Cars to Weezer, Phoenix and Daft Punk. It's blatantly mindless fun that, for once, is genuinely fun. Not bad for a buncha goofs who used to call themselves Natalie Portman's Shaved Head. Oh, wait, whoops.

Beirut: The Rip Tide review

Zach Condon's toponym fixation is alive and well in the tracklist of The Rip Tide (Pompeii), Beirut's quietly assured third full-length, but his old-world musical wanderlust is far less dominant than it once was: the defining Balkan, French chanson and Mexican folk currents of past efforts are synthesized here into a broader, more refined aesthetic; the characteristic barrage of trumpets, accordions, string bands and martial snares is more than ever in the service of these nine compact, comfortable songs.

Björk: Biophilia review

She may never recapture the synthesis of uncompromising artiness and pop accessibility which blessed her peerless '90s peak, but the music on Biophilia (One Little Indian), Björk's often arresting, occasionally impenetrable sixth (proper) full-length – in non-trivial danger of being overshadowed by the album's truly ambitious accessorizing (app-based interactivity, exhaustive conceptual exegesis, multi-media overload) – reveals that, when she wants to, she's still able to engage as well as merely dazzle, through concise melodicism, sheer sonic prettiness, and the occasional bad-ass drill'n'bass freakout.

Sam Phillips: Solid State review

Of the increasingly many industry-dispossesed critics-darling songsmiths to go the self-released, fan-financed route (see also: Jill Sobule, Juliana Hatfield), smart-pop lifer Sam Phillips must be among the more ambitious – Solid State: Songs from the Long Play is merely a compact, physical distillation of a long-running subscription-based online project which yielded, in full, forty-three new tunes. The ones compiled here should amply satisfy more casual fans that her rich, Beatles-indebted songcraft and wryly bittersweet vocals (often distinctively close-harmonized) remain as singular and effective as ever.

Feist: Metals review

Metals (Interscope) is Leslie Feist's calmest, plainest record yet; despite the occasional string-laden swelling of sound, group-chanted refrain, or Colin Stetson saxophone murmuration, it basically never deviates from her mossy-soft luxe pop métier, and it will serve comfortably as more-than-adequate background music for just about any demographic. Listen closer, though, and it's rarely if ever dull: Feist may have grown complacent but she's still a smart, thoughtful songcrafter whose subtle way with mood and melody are as meticulous as they come.

The Bees: Every Step's A Yes review

As though still stuck in a starry-eyed, pastoral post-Brit-Pop groove the rest of us have rudely tumbled out of, A Band of Bees (just The Bees to their fellow Britons) have been churning out sunny, amorphously Sixties-referencing psych-pop (and the odd samba detour) for nearly a decade now. The lovely, leisurely Every Step's A Yes (Fiction/ATO), which reaches our shores a year late, is their gentlest, folkiest excursion yet, recalling forgotten soft-pop sophisticates like the Mamas and the Papas (covered quite faithfully here) and The Association.

Baby Dee: Goes Down To Amsterdam review

For anyone who caught up with her classy, largely instrumental suite Regifted Light earlier this year, or the far-too-many who haven't had the pleasure, Baby Dee Goes Down To Amsterdam (Tin Angel) offers a quick and dirty tromp through the highlights of the big-hearted, crazy-voiced harpist/pianist's songwriting oeuvre, sampling both the unabashed tenderness and the chillingly dark, twisted recesses of her catalog, with lots of gleeful cackling along the way. Make a date with one of the most utterly singular talents of our times...and go Dutch.

Bon Iver: Bon Iver review

Superficially, the eponymous second Bon Iver album (Jagjaguwar) is a radically different beast from Justin Vernon's rapturously admired debut – texturally expansive and opulent where its predecessor was solitary and sparse; trading wispy folk for gooey, Oldenburgian Soft Pop. But the music's fundamental allure remains conspicuously unchanged: in a word, vibe. Befitting his work's preoccupation with environments (here, a litany of real and surreal place-names), and extrapolating from an ineffable voice which conveys (or evokes) reams more in sound than it ever does in actual sense, Vernon is, essentially, indiedom's preeminent purveyor of ambience.