Review Round-Up: July 2014

Beverly
Careers

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

Honeyblood
Honeyblood

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



Lana Del Rey
Ultraviolence
[Pop/Singer-Songwriter]

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

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

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

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

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

Deru
1979
[Ambient]

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


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

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

DJ Dodger Stadium
Friends of Mine
[Electronic]

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

Fatboy Slim’s excitable filter work, gospel predilection and

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

RiFF RAFF
Neon Icon
[Hip-Hop]

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

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

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

Big Freedia
Just Be Free
[Bounce/Dance]

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

[B+]

Bleachers
[Pop/Rock]
concert preview

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

Temples
[Rock/Pop]
concert preview

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

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

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

Hospitality
[Pop/Rock]
concert preview

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

Fat Creeps
[Rock]
concert preview

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

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

Viet Cong
[Rock]
concert preview

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

Pink Mountaintops
[Rock]
concert preview

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

Dub Thompson
[Rock/Experimental]
concert preview

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

O O I O O
[Experimental]
concert preview

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

Laura Cantrell
[Singer-Songwriter/Folk]
concert preview

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

originally published in Philadelphia City Paper

2012 Review Round-Up: February

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!

carrying on with february, when i seem to have been enjoying plenty of mostly smooth, dreamy electronic music, although this first one (still one of my favorites from the year, even if a lot of folks might beg to differ) was a rather different sort of dream altogether:

Lindstrøm
Six Cups Of Rebel

Whoa there, Hans-Peter!  Lindstrøm's back once again with what's technically only his second "proper" solo album – implausible as that seems – and it is a feisty one. The beloved, unpredictable Norwegian discombobulater seems to be taking some cues here from his labelmates (and sometime remix cronies), the prog pranksters Mungolian Jet Set. Six Cups of Rebel (whose Mung-like, noggin-scratching title is recycled from an old, stylistically unrelated production alias) is chock full of the kind of bizarre, cartoonish sci-fi lunacy and cheekily maximalist gonzo musical odysseys they've made their stock-in-trade. In particular (and in a major departure for Lindstrøm), the album is animated by a virtual armada of goofy, muppetlike voices; most or all of which are actually Lindstrøm's own, tweaked and twisted in ways even The Knife might find extreme. It's certainly recognizable as the work of the same artist – his sense of pacing, patient and playful in equal measure, remains as masterful as ever – and features a similarly unified, suite-like structure (Cups' seven tracks are divided evenly into two seamlessly connected halves or sides), but this is a far cry from the understated elegance and monumental minimalism of 2008's Where You Go I Go Too.

It doesn't start out that, however: the album opens in relative stillness and churchlike solemnity, with a single, spiraling organ figure gradually augmented by a swelling, skyward agglutination of additional organs, until the sudden rug pull of "De Javu" launches us into full-on demento disco mode for the next twenty-odd minutes. Here's where the loopy vocal phantasmagoria really holds sway – from the bug-eyed bluesman yowling "I can't get no release" to a curmudgeonly fellow muttering "all I want is a quiet place to live" (not too likely, 'round these parts) to a chorus line of scatting space-creatures demanding "what kind of magik do you do?" – interwoven into a string of suitably capricious, labyrinthine, strutting mutant dance jams which seem to invite comparably absurdist and freewheeling dancefloor activity. After hitting reset with a quick, lurching MIDI spazz-out, the less vocally-oriented second side embarks on a slippery, percolating, arpeggio-thon that meanders between textures like an extended, prog-tinted jam session, featuring some spirited, improvisatory drumming, quoting obliquely from "Here Comes The Sun" at one point, and passing through the twitchy, zapping acid-funk of the title track en route to the glittery, expansive synthesizer fantasia of "Hina," which comes full circle with a swooning, celestial susurration of voices. This is the closest this album comes to the streamlined majesty of "Where You Go," and it's also the first time we feel, if not exactly a resolution, at least a satisfying sense of prolonged suspension. There's so much constantly happening that it's hard to notice at first, but the album is in a near-constant state of masterfully sustained harmonic and rhythmic tension – not for nothing is the first track called "No Release." And just when you thought it couldn't possibly last, that swirling organ line reappears like a devilish deus ex machina, and sends the whole thing circling around again. Ever get the feeling you've been here before?


Terranova
Hotel Amour

The highly mutable Terranova, who emerged in the 1990s as an eclectically funky pan-European trip-hop/hip-hop/techno collective, reinvented themselves for the second decade of the 21st century after a lengthy absence from the scene, signing with Cologne kingpin Kompakt for a pair of well-received 2011 12"s and following with Hotel Amour, their fifth full-length and first since 2004. Still essentially the province of Berlin-born, Paris-based producer/DJ Fetisch, now with the Ghanaian-German &ME as his primary co-conspirator (and the only other official group member at this point), Terranova remain as restless and collaboration-prone as ever, although the stylistic blueprint has shifted quite a bit.

Basically everything on Hotel Amour could be described as house of some sort, and although there's a range from the title track's swanky French coos and jazzy vibraphone plinks to the sparser, tech-y throwback of "I Want To Go Out" to the murky, clattering noir dub of "Take My Hand," it's all pretty smooth, sleek and, for the most part, fairly subdued. Except perhaps the tougher, vaguely punky electro schaffel of "Ain't No Thing" (probably the biggest outlier here), any of these cuts could fit right in on the sort of turn-of-the-century downtempo compilation evoked by the album's rather unfortunate title (which unwittingly suggests a garden-variety knock-off of Stéphane Pompougnac's Hôtel Costes series.) Which isn't to suggest that this music is utterly drab and faceless (or strictly for lounging – indeed, much of it is quite pumping.) In typical Terranova fashion, every track here features a vocalist, most of whom acquit themselves in fine style. Top marks must go to Tomas Høffding of WhoMadeWho, whose dulcet, elegantly soulful falsetto is simply a revelation on the achingly lovely, perfectly constructed "Question Mark," and who also turns in a more than passable Justin Timberlake on "Paris is for Lovers," a somewhat curious tech-house recasting of "My Love" (which bizarrely omits every other line.) Longtime out-Kraut fellow-traveller Khan shows up four times, helping to elaborate the album's shadier undercurrents with his darkly understated vocals, the best being a sinister, whispery turn on the funky, minimalist "Boogie For The Dollar." Darkest, strangest and most stylish of all, the closing "Prayer" boasts a couple of minor German media icons – a torchy vocal from actress/model Nicolette Krebitz (who also featured on Terranova's first album, thirteen years earlier) and a campy voiceover from horror/exploitation actor Udo Kier.

Loops Of Your Heart
And Never Ending Nights

Mere months after Looping State of Mind, the gently exploratory third full-length installment of Axel Willner's celebrated work as The Field, the Cologne-transplanted Swede is back with a brand new project, bundled in typically evocative language: And Never Ending Nights, his debut album under the name Loops of Your Heart. As the nomenclature would suggest, there's hardly a radical shift in tone here – this music is patient, contemplative, and calmly expansive: like The Field, but even more so. But the approach represents a considerable break with Willner's standard working methods, foregoing his usual micro-clipped samples and loops (ironically enough) for a set of largely beatless (and sometimes entirely non-rhythmic), aesthetically "pure," analog synth-based drones and pulsations. Basically, he's abandoning a uniquely distinctive (if by now rather familiar) sound and style all his own in order to explore something that's been done and done, time and again, from Germany's Kosmiche Musik pioneers of the 1970s to the most recent clutch of hipster-approved sine-wave surfers – Arp, Emeralds, Oneohtrix Point Never, and the like. Which isn't to say that Willner doesn't manage to wring some effective music out of these wheezy old synthesizers; spinning an impressively broad emotional palette from a sparse economy of means – from the woozy, pulsing amniotic warmth of opener "Little You, You Should Develop" to the yawning, forebodingly sinister "Neukölln" and "Broken Bow" (the latter of which eventually evolves the album's only proper beat: a stark, robotic tech-thump tethered to layers of restless, writhing arpeggiation) to the utter, meditative calm of "Cries." The latter – eleven minutes of slowly billowing, shifting analog drones eventually joined by distant percussion almost too faint too leave a conscious impression, like the empty, incidental thud of far-off fireworks – is both the most potent and seemingly the simplest thing here. It's hardly as remarkable or distinctive as the soft shimmering magic of The Field, or even as purely refreshing as the lovely "Riding the Bikes," Loops of Your Heart's contribution to Kompakt's Pop Ambient 2012 compilation (whose soft guitar-looping approach is almost entirely jettisoned here) – but it would still make for a fine, welcome, warming (and occasionally, slightly, chilling) soundtrack to never ending nights, or any other eternity you might have handy.

John Talabot
ƒin

Appearing a leisurely few years after his initial breakout successes – the 2009 single "Sunshine"; his remix of Delorean's "Sea Sun" – and the cresting wave of interest in "neo-Balearic" dance music they fortuitously rode, the first full-length from Spanish producer John Talabot bears the mixed blessing of being a little bit late for its moment; trading the freshness and excitement it might have had for a warm, still welcome familiarity. The sound remains mostly the same – brightly blurry, detuned synth-disco and slow-motion deep house – although there are definitely some changes afoot here. For one thing, "sun," a key component of Talabot's original aesthetic, in a metaphoric but still very tangible (and audible) sense, is conspicuously absent from the tracklist (not to mention the black, tortuous cover art), and the album's contents reflect that, coming across as almost uniformly moody – wistful, brooding, even mournful – with minor keys predominating throughout. Arriving as a singular, solitary work rather than a representative of a coherent larger "scene" (although there are certainly plenty of similar sounds buzzing in the air) allows fIN to fail or fly more strictly on its own merits, which are considerable: Talabot makes this stuff sound easier than it really is, which is probably the surest sign of his meticuluous, sophisticated craftsmanship. In any case, the delay is only fitting: patience has always been the name of the game with Talabot – those early singles and remixes would typically billow and sway at length before blossoming into full frothy flower, routinely stretching upwards of seven minutes – and patience rewards the listener here too, albeit in a slightly different manner. Save for the lengthier bookending tracks – the slow-moving, slightly sinister electro-disco of "Depak Ine," replete with jungle (not Jungle) sounds, and the lavish "So Will Be Now...," an expansive, edit-like elaboration on an anonymous rendition of "Just My Imagination" (the title is a willful slippage from "soon we'll be married") – everything is in the three to five minute range, and considerably less epic than we've come to expect. And while there's a decent amount of variety within Talabot's well-established sonic wheelhouse, there are few standouts to speak of (and even fewer of those moments of glorious, exultant release on which he made his name), so the album functions most successfully as a fifty-minute whole. But if fIN is never less than pleasant, it's rarely much more than that. It's hard to say what's wrong with anything here – and probably nothing is: the woozily soulful "Destiny" (co-produced with Madrid's Pional, as is the aforementioned "So Will Be Now") is a solid synth-pop earworm; "Journeys" (featuring Delorean's Ekhi Lopategi) is an enjoyable return to the buoyant simplicity of Talabot's past; the album as a whole abounds with effective, intriguing atmospherics. It's just that, for all its potential, fIN is merely fine.

various artists
DJ-Kicks: The Exclusives

In 2006, after ten years and twenty-five volumes of their celebrated DJ-Kicks mix series, !K7 ran a well-deserved victory lap with DJ-Kicks: The Exclusives, collecting many of the bespoke original tracks customarily included in each of the mix-makers' sets. A mere six years and thirteen (going on fourteen) volumes later, they're repeating the feat with a release confusingly also titled DJ-Kicks: The Exclusives, this time including exclusive cuts from all but one of the intervening compilations (for some reason Booka Shade's 2007 installment is shut out.) The results work somewhat surprisingly well as a full-length listening experience (the selections are simply sequenced chronologically), and less surprisingly as an excellent survey of the last half-decade of forward-thinking dance music. Moody, soulful, gently jazzy downtempo house (most evident in the Henrik Schwarz and Motor City Drum Ensemble selections) feels like the most common denominator, but we also get snappy, funky two-step grooves (Kode9, Photek), cheerily smooth vocal dance-pop (Hot Chip, Chromeo's delectably cheezy talkboxed Eagles cover), as well as Scuba's dark tech-step, Holden's lovely, meandering pastoral electronica and an extended disco/house workout from the Juan MacLean. (The latter two, in particular, are expanded considerably from the versions that appeared on their respective mixes.) All told, it's an inessential but highly enjoyable piece of work, an excellent aural scrapbook for fans of the series, and (save for the nauseous-robot voice in Wolf + Lamb Vs. Soul Clap's slightly painful "Lonely C," definitely the sorest thumb here) just a good time all around.
originally published at AllMusic.com

VV Brown
Lollipops & Politics
Kicking off your second album with the ice cream truck MIDI twinkle of "Do Your Ears Hang Low" probably isn't the best way to broadcast your maturity, but despite the chirpy "Children" (dubiously featuring career regressivist Chiddy, of Bang fame), and while still skewing decidedly toward the first half of its title, Lollipops and Politics finds the 27-year-old V.V. Brown – something like a spunkier, punkier, UK Jazmine Sullivan – fumbling towards adulthood, dropping the retro/rockabilly schtick of her charmingly clunky debut, and generally growing into her own as a capital-P pop capital-A artist. Already a maven, brazen mish-mash magpie, she filches here from all over the spectrum: "Wonderwall" strums, "Be My Baby" drums; glitch-hop squelch, headbang riffage and piano-ballad anthemism stuffed into a single track. "Tough Like Glue" connects the dots from Sesame Street to the Pussycat Dolls, while her serviceable entry in pop's endless "Heartbeat" sweepstakes pits sub-Rihanna Eurothump'n'Autotune against manic stutter handclaps a la Joe's "Claptrap." But Brown's own eminently capable voice – the throwback R&B wailing on "Be Yours" does Ronnie proud – is too often lost amidst the glitz; her signature breezy simplicity ("Shark in the Water," "Everybody") is largely absent, and sorely missed.
originally published in Magnet Magazine

Lana Del Rey
Born To Die
[Pop]

Forget the haters. Screw the hype. Lana Del Rey is a goddamn American original. Naturally she's a magpie, paraphrasing the great poets of our 20th century (Nabokov, Springsteen, Betty Boop) in languorous, honey-thick alto, atop looming, luxuriant strings and syrupy trip-hop beats; smart, funny, sexy as apple pie. Born To Die (Interscope) doesn't diversify her vocabulary much (though she does rap – no joke), but it maps, in detail, her highly stylized vision of Americana – triangulated somewhere between Hollywood, the 'hood, and archetypal Anytown, USA (imaginary spaces, all) – while plotting a familiar course across nothing grander or more mundane than the well-trodden topography of the human heart. So, why all the fuss?

Air
Le Voyage Dans Le Lune
[Soundtrack/Instrumental]

It's hard to imagine a more utterly perfect project for über-cinematic, über-Frenchy space-cadets Air than soundtracking George Méliès' groundbreaking 1902 classic Trip To The Moon – of newfound Hugo-related fame – this is a duo, remember, who actually named their debut album Moon Safari. While it may not reach those heights, Le Voyage Dans Le Lune (Astralwerks) is some of their oddest and most readily enjoyable work in a while, indulging their habitual proggy '70s jones but ditching the flimsily lightweight pop of their last few records for something a bit more cosmic and freaky.

Lilacs and Champagne
s/t
[Sampledelica/Trip-Hop]

Lilacs and Champagne – two members of the Portland band Grails, moonlighting as concocters of acid-laced sample-based noir ephemera – conjure a ripe, heady fragrance on their self-titled debut (Mexican Summer); like a musty old perfume whose sweetness grows queasy as it lingers. Somewhere in between Rjd2's monster-movie trip-hop, Portishead associates Malachai's cut-n-paste freakshow psych-rock, and the recycled-kitsch downtempo of Quiet Village, the duo weave together all manner of exhumed dollar-bin artefacts into a swampy, surreal mood record that muddles the distinction between chilling out and just plain chilling.

Porcelain Raft
Strange Weekend
[Dream-Pop]

Have there been any chillwave records of actual songs yet? i.e., songs of at least equal importance to sounds, with words you might conceivably sing, or notice (or even discern)? Strange Weekend, the Secretly Canadian debut of Porcelain Raft – Italian-born Brooklynite Mauro Remiddi – isn't that, exactly, but it suggests how such a thing could work. It's warm, wispy and woozy in all the requisite ways, but there's also plenty of lazy folk-pop strumming and Remiddi's lovably accented mumble-croon, equally recalling Memory Tapes and The War on Drugs.


Jim White
Where It Hits You
[Folk/Americana]

Much of Where It Hits You, Jim White's fifth album and first for Yep Roc, finds the vagabonding Georgia songwriter at his most stoically somber, ruminating on rural hard-luck and heartache amid suitably languid country-noir soundscapes. But he hasn't lost that twinkle in his eye, or his penchant for, as he once sang, "gleaning solace from pain" – maybe more than ever, he comes off like a slightly screwy backwoods preacher, reminding us "when life rustles up dilemmas, it's time to make dilemmanade."


Dustin Wong
Dreams Say, View, Create, Shadow Leads
[Experimental/Noise]

Guitarist Dustin Wong (formerly of Ponytail and Ecstatic Sunshine) is certainly no slouch at the six-string, but he's an absolute wizard of the looping pedal. With Dreams Say, View, Create, Shadow Leads (Thrill Jockey), he continues using these simple tools to construct music as abstract, fragmented, mystical and redolent as the album's title. Like its predecessor, though even more wildly colorful, it's a single, unified but protean piece; a kaleidoscope of bright, pointillistic sound-shards bouncing and refracting off one another in uncanny symmetry.

The Darkness/Foxy Shazam
[Rock]
concert preview

Hard to believe it's been a decade since The Darkness first splashed down, troubling the "irony-is-dead" waters of the early '00s with their zebra-print spandex catsuits and polished-chrome riffage – and swiftly nullifying any questions of taste through sheer anthemic bombast (not to mention the sky-high falsetto lunacy of Justin Hawkins' self-professed "truth larynx") on power-ballad paragon "Love is Only A Feeling" and the still-deathless "I Believe In A Thing Called Love." They'd long since splintered into a pair of pale but worthy spin-offs – Hawkins' Hot Leg; the other guys' Stone Gods – but the boys are back together again and ready to rock us. Meanwhile, across the pond, Cincinnati's Foxy Shazam have been gunning hard to perfect their own brand of reverently righteous heavy-glam excess; several promising albums in, their new, all-killer, Hawkins-produced Church of Rock and Roll (IRS) hits it out of the park. Freddie Mercury should be very proud.
Veronica Falls
[Rock/Pop]
concert preview

UK popscene cadets Veronica Falls (made up of former members of The Royal We and Sexy Kids – but you anorak types probably already knew that) are fundamental, dyed-in-the-wool inheritors of the jangly post-punk Postcard/Smiths/Pastels indie pop lineage. Their buzz-building early singles and massively buzz-justifying eponymous debut (Slumberland) shows off all the right moves: a bit of fuzz, a bit of scruff; a loose, sproingy guitar sound; insistent, almost fierce pummeling drums; winsome, girlish vocals, and shiny, sweet-sounding songs about bad bad feelings (and also, falling in love with ghosts.) But they don't just embody the sound, they manage to fashion it into something truly fresh and surprising. Mostly, it's in the way they set off the music's inherent scrappiness with the somewhat aloof, austere beauty and purity of their madrigal-like group harmonies. Of course, it doesn't hurt that they seem incapable of writing a less than killer hook.

Asteroids Galaxy Tour
[Pop]
concert preview

Since when do Danes have the right to sound this funky? There's more than couple moments on Out Of Frequency (BMG Rights), the new sunburst-in-album-form from these oddly-named Copenhagen cool cats, which give the Dap-Kings a run for their retro-soul money-maker-shakin'. They've also got the fizzy suavity of Pizzicato Five and the day-glo giddiness of The Go! Team, and a surprisingly versatile blue-eyed soul siren in vocalist Mette Lindberg. Of course, when you boil down all the paisley psychedelics and technicolor spy-soundtrack spangles, this is basically just pop music, simple and pure, and these are Scandinavians we're talking about – we probably shouldn't be too surprised that they can dole out 21st century space-age bachelor-pad party pop just as perfect as any other kind.

Explorer's Club/Honeychurch
[Indie Pop/Folk Rock]
concert preview

Back in 2008, when seemingly everybody in indiedom was falling over themselves to venerate and emulate the mid-to-late-period Beach Boys, South Carolina's Explorers Club cut a sweet little record so unabashed in its homage to early Beach Boys – the clean-cut, good-times, surf's-up edition of the group – that it bordered on outright mimicry. Their follow-up, Grand Hotel (Rock Ridge), is equally brimming with sunshine, harmonies, and adorably blatant sixtiesisms, but it's a much more wide-ranging wayback machine experience, revisiting an era when "psychedelic" bubblegum pop, blue-eyed soul, Bacharachian sophistication, and south-of-the-border exotica all rubbed shoulders along the AM dial (the Herp Alpert-style cover is a big tip-off) – all the while proving that it's never (merely) pastiche if you've got the tunes and the chops. Meanwhile, Doylestown's gentle Americana mavens Honeychurch – who've had a long, dry eight years between albums – return at last with the wonderfully warm, autumnal Will You Be There With Me?; eleven gorgeous folk-pop nuggets slathered in pedal steel, lush harmonies and stately woodwinds, which should fit snugly alongside your favorite Jayhawks and Pernice Brothers discs.

Ha Ha Tonka
[Rock]
concert preview

Funny moniker aside, Missouri's Ha Ha Tonka (who borrowed the name from a state park in the Ozarks) come across as some pretty serious-minded fellas, infusing their work with socio-political consciousness, a pervasive interest in regional identity, and an unrepentant literary streak (their ponderously titled 2009 opus Novel Sounds of the Nouveau South was inspired by a 1907 Harold Bell Wright novel.) But that doesn't stop 'em from flat-out rocking – last year's mandolin-laced, harmony-rich Death Of A Decade (Bloodshot), in particular, finds the foursome proudly waving a torch for what they used to call "insurgent country," all punk muscle, pop smarts, and roots-rocking heart.

Zola Jesus/Meg Baird
[Art-Pop/Folk]
concert preview

There are some definite tensions at play here, between world-conquering neo-goth siren Zola Jesus (Nika Roza Danilova) and humble Philadelphia folk-scene mainstay Meg Baird (our 2011 Local Artist of the Year.) The former's steely, uncompromising ultimate art-pop – distilled excellently in the skittering sweep of last year's Conatus (Sacred Bones), and the latter's timeless Brit-folk simplicity – encapsulated on her equally albeit more quietly stunning Seasons on Earth (Drag City). Danilova's thick, intoxicating force-of-nature wail and the airy purity of Baird's soprano. And yet, and yet...both women work their magic through an oddly comparable combination of intimacy and icy austerity, yielding an alchemical undercurrent of almost elemental necessity. Should be an interesting show.

Marit Larsen/Teitur
[Folk/Pop]
concert preview

Scandinavians aren't especially known for their gushy sentimentality, but both Teitur Lassen (who hails from the remote Faroe Islands – also the source of "oe," the best-ever Scrabble word) and the pixieish Norwegian Marit Larsen (who, once upon a time, was the blonde half of world-conquering teen-pop duo M2M), are big, sappy softies. Larsen – who's been known to pick a mean bluegrass mandolin on the side – continues to make like a Nordic Taylor Swift on her newest album, Spark (EMI), all Hollywood-ready pop gloss and sly country undertones; picture-perfect melodies and preternatural sweetness with a barely-disguised miserablist streak. Teitur's often pegged as the Faroese John Mayer (Mayer's a huge fan), but the charming, waggish Let The Dog Drive Home (Playground), which feels like his LA album, equally recalls Ben Folds.

Aeroplane
[Electronic/Disco]
concert preview

Though he's got an impressively wide-ranging full-length under his belt – 2010's We Can't Fly – as well as a number of top-notch DJ mixes, including last year's very fun and playful In Flight Entertainment (both on Eskimo Recordings), Aeroplane – originally a duo, now the solo-flying nom du disko of Belgian producer Vito De Luca – is still perhaps best known for remix work, including celebrated versions for Friendly Fires, Grace Jones, Lindstrøm, and Au Revoir Simone. Whatever the mode though – and certainly for tonight's live DJ set as well – the name of the game is disco, generally of an elegant, modern, European (Italo, Balearic, French touch...), sleek, synthy, and gently eclectic variety.
originally published in Philadelphia City Paper

2012: born 2 be strong

and we're off to the races! or the watering hole, i guess, to go by my basically arbitrary alcohol-themed sidebar ranking metaphor for the year*

2012! @)!@ [that's "2012" in "caps"] good stuff! after a kinda lackluster 2011 – at least, until the very end when i figured out what i'd been missing (though even then pretty much just singles, mostly in the dance/hiphop/rnb singles dept..) kinda feel like i and music alike are coming back a little refreshed. good things poppin' all over. it feels so good, it almost feels like 2010 all over again.

specifically, there are my two absolute hands-down favorite albums of the year so far – both of which i was already completely smitten with as of late january (both released 1/31, as it happens), and there's no real competition in sight. and the nominees for let's-just-call-it-a-wrap best album of 2012, yes already: be strong by the 2 bears**, and born to die by lana del rey

the 2 bears!! the 2 bears!! oh, my, god, the 2 bears. well. i know i'm a little weird and all, but why is nobody else running around the internet proclaiming this album the best thing since whatever? srsly. (yup, i've got officially the highest critical opinion in meta-land, by a solid 10 %pts.) (and lets not mince tapes here: this album is unquestionably a 10 in my book, but amg writers are basically not allowed to rate anything newly released at more than four and a half stars.) (and, ok, yes, pretty much every reviewer out there gave this 80% or at least 70%, but they're talking about "fun" like it's some kind of "novelty" or something. people, FUN is at the core of being don't you get it?)

but forget numbers. on the one hand, i basically already said everything i needed to say about be strong in my review. on the other hand, that review is just a lot of words put together, and words are pretty much boring. be strong is the opposite of boring. it has words, most of which are about music (and/or life, usually at the same time), but it says things about music (and/or life) that i couldn't hope to put to pixel with one whit of the oomph. and when it doesn't have words, it says those same things even better. okay, i need to stop this paragraph. just dance with me, ok?

[i just thought of: joe goddard's middle name should be "puts the god in"] [also: i had a fantasy of meeting hot chip, and telling joe and alexis how amazingly awesome i think they both are, but also having to tell joe, still in alexis' presence – after first, of course, telling him that i want to give him a bear hug – that he is the awesomest of the awesome. in fact, that he is hands-down my favorite person in music. especially now that james murphy is out of the running. though i guess that's not technically true.]

born to die, on the other hand... well, i said almost nothing i needed to say about it in my review. because, well, what can you really say in 75 words about something this ambiguously complex (/complexly ambiguous... that is: it's unclear whether it's really simple or really not simple.) [or even 90, since i totally went over word count and got cut; i'll post the full version hear when i get around to a round-up; we're about do.]

mostly, it's a hard album to write about. or, i should say, i have a lot of feelings about it which are hard to express. naturally i was pretty predisposed to like it (or, at least, have feelings about it) considering that it contains my #1 and #2 favorite songs of 2011. that's a pretty improbable head-start on my heart.

and i didn't know what to expect from the rest of it; "born to die" suggested it would be more like "blue jeans" than "videogames" – which turned out to be true, and which, to some extent, seems to be at the heart of the problem some people seem to have with the album. i can sympathize with that: an album more in the mode of "videogames" – one focused primarily around a smart, powerful, poetic songwriting voice – a voice with the degree of nuance and insight that song seemed/seems to contain – could have been something pretty incredibly great.

that's not really what born to die is. lizzie grant is, of course, a songwriter, and i would say a pretty good one, perhaps better, and she definitely has a hell of a voice (writerly that is, not to mention singerly) which is plenty powerful – or at least effective – in its way; which is full of – if not poetry, exactly, certainly poetics, and which, i am gonna say, is smart enough to know that there's more to being smart than being smart. (nuance and insight? i'll let that one slide for now.) but no, she isn't chan marshall. (which, honestly, i guess i'm just not a cat power person.) or whoever else "videogames" might have suggested. (in a weird way – in the way it discourses with melancholy, devotion, and indifference, perhaps – might i propose edith frost?)

instead, she wrote every song on the album with a collaborator – including "videogames," it turns out. (apparently, he supplied the chord progression. we'll probably never know how much of the lyrics on the album are solely hers, though it's certainly conceivable that most or even all of them are.) (which isn't to say that songwriters, of any caliber, can't collaborate while still maintaining their voice and self – that's probably a good hobblehorse to poke a few holes in one of these years.) (besides, forget "videogames" – after all, it was only my second favorite song of 2011. and it came to me at such a different time and with such a different set of associations that it doesn't really feel of a piece with the album anyway, yet, still.)

and, instead, born to die is an album of aesthetics, rather than an album of songwriting. damn is it ever. a super-pow wham-whomp aesthetic, full and fleshy and forceful – a musical aesthetic and a lyrical/linguistic aesthetic and a symbolic/poetic/conceptual aesthetic (not to mention visual, and also vocal) all of which fit together almost seamlessly, in a so-uncanny-it-seems-obvious way, though they could also stand separately, i think.

and basically, to get specific for a second, i think it's doing something really original, just in purely musical terms (setting aside, for now, any question of persona/content/context/subtext): there is nothing that sounds like this album. (is there?) really. it seems like such a basic, obvious formula – slow hip-hop beats, big gushing orchestral bits, and pop songs – but i can't think of anybody who's really made anything like it.

[matt proposed portishead and garbage, and yes i can see how those are prefigurations to some extent – and plus, it would be totally awesome if more bands decided to sound like those bands (and were actually able to do it) – but, no, not really, no way: portishead are spooky and alien and/or utterly detached/monotonically depressed, plus they don't really write pop songs; garbage are edgy and punkish and also schmaltzy and effusive and urgent, plus they are an electronic/rock band – lana del rey is none of these things, and more importantly she is hardly anything like either shirley manson or beth gibbons.] [here's one though: fiona apple. should have thought of that before, maybe. but i never completely loved her either...]

it's big, lavish, "produced," "pop," but it's not "pop" in any kind of familiar, narrow sense – it certainly doesn't sound like anything "on the radio" these days – the beats are sort of hip-hop (or possibly, if you like, trip-hop), as is some of the production personnel, but this is obviously not hip-hop music (even if, i will assert, lana does rap at numerous points throughout the album.) so, it's ...pop-by-default, i guess (cuz it's clearly not rock or folk.)

more interestingly though – and i have a little suspicion that this is lurking somewhere behind the issues/confusion/difficulty some people seem to have around the album, it's neither self-evidently "indie" nor clearly "mainstream" – in its sound, signifiers, anything. it's not readily recognizable as belonging to any particular established world/scene/concept. [<<it came from the internet....>>] even to hear her sing "i'm playing on the radio" feels weirdly incongruous (as in, how is this music that can coexist alongside other music?) – even if she probably actually is. (though, obviously, that's not the point... she is not actually telling us to "love [her] because she's playing on the radio." right? are you with me there?)

oh yeah, the words. i probably need to talk about the words. to be honest, i'm more interested in the lyrics of the album (or rather, they have, as yet, mostly presented themselves to me) as a collection of images; a lexicon of tropes; a bright smattering of clichés both old and newly-turned; a piecemeal articulation of an aesthetic or worldview (not, to be clear, one i would presume to ascribe to lizzy grant), than as direct, literal, content.

i would agree, sure, that there are some potentially substantially troubling things going on in these songs from a feminist/gender/sexual politics standpoint (not to mention from an emotional health standpoint.) and, yes, extremely similar lyrical themes are repeated quite frequently, ad nauseum perhaps (if you're prone to lyrical nausea) throughout the album. (in general, the album is extremely samey in most respects – something that definitely ties in with it having a strong, emphatic aesthetic – though that's not to say that the similar songs don't distinguish themselves as more individual – and some stronger, some weaker – with repeated listens.)

somehow, though, those things don't really bother me too much when i'm listening. maybe it's because almost nothing here comes across as "real": the album is so wholeheartedly wrapped up in fantasy, fantasies, of various kinds (wealth, fame, love, sex, youth, glamor, misery, hollywood...american dreams), it feels more like an exploration of fantasy worlds within worlds than anything really relevant to lived reality. (though, arguably, issues of sexual politics have as much to do with what's in our heads and dreams as anything else.)

anyway. forget the haters. screw the hype. i like it.

------
* not exactly sure how i arrived at that, or how "cheers (drink to that)" became the theme tune for it either – maybe i should switch it to "tubthumper"? – tho i do rather like it. but anyway h/t to bedbugs for the format; glad to see he's still using it. but why so samey, ernold?

**i called this "my favorite album of 2012, so far," and my roommate turned to me and said "um... it's like january 10th."