Review Round-Up: January 2013

i've got a different crush every other week...

And we're off...  to a pretty good start there, lil' 2013!  even better, maybe, this has been a month of some pretty exciting developments vis-a-vis what's to come later in the year...among other things, i've got my eyes on Vampire Weekend, Neon Neon, Billy Bragg, Low, Phoenix and DJ Koze, but most of all, of course, The Knife – I've just experienced their new single/video, "Full of Fire," which...hm hm hm, first of all: huge, massive, uncompromising, wow, every bit as much as you'd expect from the dreijers...  expectations properly stoked.  can't say love is the first thing it inspires (fear might be closer), though i'm definitely excited to spend more time with it.

(the song at least... the video will probably require some more views as well, there's definitely a lot in there.  in some ways it feels almost too on-the-nose in terms of their distinctive if continually envelope-pushing aesthetic; unflinchingly arty and odd, punk and severe; intensely gender-political without a whole of actual specificity to anything that's happening.  the heavy (and possibly a little dated??) arty/feminist tone, emphasis on mundane domestic scenes intercut with unexpected violence, and the northern Euro setting all put me in mind of Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which i still sometimes cite as one of my favorite movies even though i slept through some parts of the one time i saw it...should really watch that again sometime...)

as for January's musical harvest, we got plenty of slow, spacious, meditative tones and drones – highly suitable for this seasons' extremes of chilliness and coziness (and just the thing to accompany reading, massages, and long snowy walks) – from the likes of mountains, pantha du prince, nosaj thing, toro y moi (even if this is allegedly his "pop" record), four tet, faltydl (in spots at least), not to mention the umpteenth installment of kompakt's pop ambient series – and also, waiting in the wings, grouper, darkstar, tosca, ulrich schnauss, and the extremely nice-sounding úlfur.  (plus bee mask, a late '12 hold-out.)  and similarly gentle, sweetly retro-tinged indie stuff from amor de dias, yo la tengo, christopher owens and foxygen.  on the other hand, some enjoyably scrappy punkish guitar (etc) noise from buke and gase, FIDLAR and the neato parquet courts.

and then, having very little to do with any of that, there was the second album by long-haired philly underdogs free energy...which turned out to be surprisingly controversial (actually, i'm a little surprised nobody gave it better than 8/10.)  on january 2nd i announced that it was my favorite album of 2013, so far... and while i don't expect that to last i think it just might still be holding onto that title, a month later.  so, a good way to kick off my first round-up 2013.

(oh: here's a Spotify mixtape (mixlist?) that's a bit multipurpose, with some faves from January, some previews of what's up next, a couple straggling 2012 tracks that I've been getting into more heavily, and some sample tracks from upcoming concerts I'm planning to attend.  but it includes cuts from most of the albums reviewed below, so listen along!  starts out big and silly, gets a little sleepy by the end.

)


Free Energy
Love Sign

At first blush, Love Sign feels like a solid, dependable retread of Free Energy's fabulous 2010 effort, Stuck On Nothing – certainly, nothing to sniff at.  It's not until you spin them back to back that it's clear how much this album preserves, even perfects, the spirit of their delirious debut, while fashioning it into something even bigger: brighter, tighter, better, more.  The Philly fivesome's cowbell-smacking, riffs-blazing reclamation of bygone rock'n'roll glory days rages on, but it's like the scruffy, all-American small-town dreamers of the first record got their big major-label break (in fact, times being what they are, they've taken the self-release route this time) and teamed with some hotshot producer (ditching that has-been fogy James Murphy) to add some polish – a couple horns, even some of them new-fangled synthesizers – to their raggedly earnest anthems.  Every damn song sounds like a single.  But their hearts are truer than ever: the seventies-jocking swagger is matched pound for pound by a disarmingly cheery, transcendental softness that deflects any dint of untoward classic-rock machismo.  Per the blazing "Electric Fever," the album's self-evident statement of purpose, still ringing golden nearly a year after its initial release:  "Turn it on.  Turn it up.  Let the moment breathe."  Amen. [8.5]

originally published in Magnet Magazine

Yo La Tengo
Fade
[Indie Rock]

Scaling back the stylistic hopscotch of their recent outings, Yo La Tengo's thirteenth album is their softest and most unified work since 2003's Summer Sun (also, notably, their shortest in over two decades) and it shares that underdog's ineffably low-key charms.  Nothing on Fade (Matador) sounds like hall-of-fame material, but that's not the point – these ten tunes, as much mood pieces as songs, are as glowingly, cozily familiar as the sun on a bright winter day.  And if the title can't help recalling that chestnut about the fate of aging rockers, rest assured that Hoboken's finest won't be burning out any time soon.

Retribution Gospel Choir
3
[Rock]

Low have an album due in March, but that won't keep axe-slinging main man Alan Sparhawk from a quickie on the side.  Retribution Gospel Choir, his other, decidedly louder band, follow last year's hooky lil Revolution EP with 3 (Chaperone), which comprises merely two monolithic, twenty-minute sides.  It's a definite yin-yang affair.  "Can't Walk Out" is the expected onslaught, all portentous sludge-riffage and scrawled, desperate skronk.  It's epic, and fairly interminable (also, it's in 9/4.)  "Seven" is the payoff:  bleary-eyed but surprisingly sweet, full of shimmering, Pinback-y layering and a veritable lullaby chorale, with sideman-to-the-stars Nels Cline joining in the inexorable six-string-wringing glory.

Petra Haden
Petra Goes To The Movies
[Vocal/Movie Music]

Following her tour de force all-acapella rendering of The Who Sell Out in 2005, LA music biz fixture/multi-instrumentalist Petra Haden gets back to the vocal multitracking reinterpretation game with Petra Goes To The Movies (Anti), featuring her one-woman choral renderings of film music both iconic (Psycho; Goldfinger; Superman – alone worth the price of admission) and otherwise.  The novelty factor is obviously high, but this is also carefully crafted, surprisingly affecting music; gorgeously lush, with a wide-ranging emotional potency, although a few rather sudsy "vocal" (i.e. lyrical) numbers diminish the effect slightly.

Pantha Du Prince & the Bell Laboratory
Elements of Light
[Electronic/Instrumental]

Bells, chimes, carillon, crotales...if it rings, pings, dings or dongs, Pantha du Prince wants it in his music.  In a logical apotheosis of that obsession, and a revelatory expansion of his working approach beyond his typical track-oriented, techno-based approach, the Hamburg-based producer teamed up with Norwegian ringing squad The Bell Laboratory to devise the highly immersive Elements of Light (Rough Trade), an album-length "symphony" of tintinnabulation which runs the gamut from glockenspiels to gamelan, sounding by turns gossamer and ominous, meditative and scintillating.  Edgar Allen Poe would be proud.

FaltyDL
Hardcourage
[Electronic]

An unpredictable, hard-to-quantify New Yorker with strong sonic ties to the UK bass scene, Drew Lustman's third LP as FaltyDL finds the producer downplaying his dubstep-derived tics in favor of more overtly jazzy, house-based smoothness.  Belying its title but befitting its cheerily colorful cover art, Hardcourage (Ninja Tune) is heavily melodic but light on its feet, sustaining a rosy, twinkling softness even while stepping up the syncopation for subtle twists on glitchy electro and vocal-flecked tech-soul, plus some deep, plush funk that could pass for prime late-'90s chillout.

Mountains
Centralia
[Ambient/Electroacoustic]

Vastly expansive yet far from remote or inaccessible, the long-form abstract ruminations of Brooklyn duo Mountains behave and function similarly to much ambient/drone, but with an unusual amount of personality and visceral presence for music so simultaneously placid and formalist.  That's never been more true than on Centralia (Thrill Jockey), their self-evident magnum opus, which follows the burbling, buzzily analog Air Museum with an even richer integration of synthetic and organic layers, interweaving electroacoustic swells with sweetly pastoral fingerpicking as if to conjure at once the geological and human-sized scale of their ever-evocative namesake landforms.

Nosaj Thing
Home
[Electronic]

The austere, chilly architectonics of LA beatscaper Nosaj Thing's debut LP, Drift, evoked pristine spaces starkly devoid of human presence – though still capable of poignant, near-spiritual resonance – but his return to the format on Home (Innovative Leisure), while feeling as tidily meticulous as ever, traverses terrain that's decidedly less rarefied and more, well, habitable.  The rather ghostly vocal presence of Kazu Makino (Blonde Redhead) and Chaz Bundick (Toro y Moi) plays a role there, but it's mostly an overall sense of warming and softening, plus the suggestion of more bodily forms of movement in gestures toward 2-step and fractured, skeletal funk.

James Ferraro
Sushi
[Electronic]

James Ferraro, absurdly productive producer/absurdist, doesn't exactly do serious, but it's neat to hear how he sounds minus the conceptual scaffolding of elaborately appointed conversation pieces like last year's consumer electronics-inspired Far Side Virtual.  Sushi (Hippos in Tanks) offers, as advertised, eleven individually-wrapped morsels of raw, squishy IDM: cartoon glitch; chipmunk-bounce; smirking revamps of 2012-style machine-soul R&B, all doused in Ferraro's typical hyper-sheeny digital glop.  These could (and should) be scene-stealing springboards for any of your more outré cloud-rappers, but they're also plenty tasty a la carte.

Memory Tapes
[Electronic/Indie Pop]
concert preview

Maybe it's because he's a local boy – a rural New Jerseyan who spent the mid-'00s fronting Philly dance-punk faves Hail Social – or the endearingly modest, almost painfully insular homebody persona he presents in his disarmingly candid interviews – but it's been particularly gratifying to follow Davye Hawk's musical development and progression in his work as Memory Tapes.  Following a shimmering, revelatory 2009 debut (Seek Magic) and 2011's more overtly song-oriented but less surefooted and somewhat anemic Player Piano, Hawk returned in December with Grace/Confusion (Carpark), an aptly titled set of six serenely sprawling, shapeshifting tracks that stretch and reconfigure his familiar array of soft-focus sonics (drawn from indie rock, dream-pop, gently fluid electronic dance music and all manner of warmly gleaming synths) into richly detailed miniature suites.

Purity Ring/Young Magic
[Electronic/Indie Pop]
concert preview

It's been an unthinkable seven years since The Knife – whose impending return to the active column is one of 2013's most exciting musical developments to date – last graced us with an album.  But there've been no shortage of artists since then exploring the haunted, vocal-warping electro-pop otherworlds they thrust open, and perhaps none more intriguingly and satisfyingly than Canadian twosome Purity Ring, whose slinky, surreally intoxicating confections draw equally on glitch, R&B and hip-hop (q.v. their recent collaborations with Danny Brown.)  One wrinkle among many on their wondrous 4AD bow, Shrines, was a nodding, quasi-rapped interjection (on "Grandloves") from Australia-via-NYC-via-everywhere vagabonds Young Magic, whose own 2012 debut, Melt (Carpark), proffered warmly woozy world-indie vibes, like a soft-focus Yeasayer; their pleasantly sloppy, vaguely stoned tribalism nicely complementing Purity Ring's more meticulous, witchy mystique.

Parquet Courts
[Rock]
concert preview

Light Up Gold, the debut LP proper from these Texas-via-NYC punk goofs, is a jittery burst of non-stop slacker-pop thrills, sharp enough to stand among the finest albums of both 2012 (when it was first issued, on bandcamp and vinyl, via Dull Tools) and 2013 (a repress and broader release on What's Your Rupture is due next week.)  It's garnered deserved comparisons to myriad post-punk/DIY icons, from The Modern Lovers to The Fall to The Dead Milkmen – perhaps most pointedly, it recalls the gonzo glee of Camper Van Beethoven and pithy efficiency of classic Guided by Voices – but while the band's wiry riffs and the wrily detached vocals of Andrew Savage (also of the similarly perverse-minded Fergus & Geronimo) certainly have their forbears, there's enough invention here to cast Parquet Courts as true American originals, whether they're recounting a nostalgic North Dakota travelogue (via a gorgeous, Silver Jews-like country ballad), making sardonic commentary on the fast-shrinking American dream ("Careers in Combat"), or getting the munchies in Queens ("Stoned and Starving.")

Buke & Gase
[Indie Rock]
concert preview

Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez play the sui generis home-built instruments which give their two-person band its name: respectively, a modified six-string baritone ukelele and a hybrid guitar/bass made of scrap metal – along with a battery of comparably crafty foot-triggered percussion.  That may sound like so much gimmicky novelty, and it does engender some rather specific aesthetic parameters, but it's really just a starting point for the inventiveness and nonconformist self-sufficiency that permeates the duo's work – particularly their sparse, sparky songwriting, which was impressive on their earlier outings and comes into fuller flower on the riveting new General Dome (Brassland.)  Making potent use of repetition and polyrhythmic overlay, pitting Dyer's forceful but heartily melodic vocals against a barrage of ritualistic stomping and gritty, gut-plucky riffage, maintaining a punkish intensity that manages to feel celebratory rather than off-putting, they project a fierce, arty exuberance that evokes Deerhoof and St. Vincent and, especially, like-minded DIY-ers tUnE-yArDs in attitude, although they almost can't help sounding like nobody but themselves.

Christopher Owens
[Folk/Rock]
concert preview

On the slight, winsome Lysandre (Fat Possum), San Fran flower child Christopher Owens emerges from the dissolution of his beloved Girls last year – an otherwise unfortunate break-up that was, however, well-timed to avoid any Lena Dunham-related confusion – with a fresh start echoing the slightly daffy, adventurous spirit of many a classic-rock-era solo debut.  Recasting the sixties-indebted stylistic diversity of Girls' great Father, Son, Holy Ghost on a more intimate scale, and slathering on the paisley-dappled flutes and saxophones, Owens doesn't stray far from his typical palette of heart-tugging acoustic ballads and bouncy rockers, and while the songs do form a loosely narrative cycle (just your typical wide-eyed rock'n'roll coming-of-age love story) complete with recurring musical motifs, the bigger aesthetic risks are less conceptual than tonal – particularly on overtly precious fare like the self-directed pep-talk "Love is in the Ear of the Listener," the irrepressibly smiley "New York City" and cornball lite-reggae interlude "Riviera Rock."

The Walkmen
[Rock]
concert preview

Ten years into a surprisingly sturdy career, The Walkmen have gotten awfully soft in the middle.  Last year's Heaven (Fat Possum/Bella Union), the ever-more-anachronistically named New York City outfit's sixth full-length, feels breezily, blissfully inconsequential compared to the blistering broadsides of their earlier days – but it's hard to complain when they make it all sound so gosh-darn pleasant; tinting their clean-lined jangle with faint, nostalgic shadings of surf and doo-wop, and finding plenty of content in their collective contentment.  Incidentally, by way of atonement for their cancelled Electric Factory date in October, the band will reportedly be serving homemade spaghetti and meatballs before tomorrow's show (fittingly enough, given the venue's previous incarnation) while sound-checking "half-assed" Coldplay covers.

A Sunny Day in Glasgow
[Dream-Pop/Experimental]
concert preview

Deconstructive haze-pop darlings A Sunny Day in Glasgow may dream of their misdirective moniker's twee-mecca Scotland, but they actually live right here in always-sunny Philly.  That doesn't mean we get to see too much of them, sadly – tonight's highly intriguing lineup at I-house, curiously billed as a "Spring Arts Preview!", will be their first performance since 2010.  At least they'll be returning in style; playing against the backdrop of microcinematographic science films by Roman Vishniac (1897-1990), and providing accompaniment to one of the three Kenneth Anger films on the program.  Entrancingly lovely as they are, ASDiG's recordings tend to drift by in a memory-muddling, consciousness-clouding mist of sleepy siren-song, amorphous jangle, melodic vapor trails and detuned drum machines, but maybe they'll clue us in to which fragments are among those destined for their in-the-works fourth full-length.

Jessie Ware
[Soul/Pop]
concert preview

Jessie Ware – elegantly understated smooth-soul songstress, good Jewish girl, and one seriously classy lady – is a charmer.  First she won over the UK electronic/bass music community – like Lisa Stansfield, Tracey Thorn and Beth Orton before her; lending her dulcet pipes to collaborations with Joker, SBTRKT and, most recently, fellow dubstep diva Katy B, and inspiring the most inordinate glut of remixes since Lana Del Rey.  Next, the international indie blogosphere – no mean feat for music so unerringly polite and polished – and the British record-buying public – her sterling debut LP, Devotion, went top five in August.  Now comes her assault on the US.  Her label here, Cherrytree, are evidently plotting a (fittingly) restrained, time-biding campaign, leading with an album-sampling EP with "If You're Never Gonna Move" – a song re-titled (from "110%") and re-recorded due to, of all things, a sample-clearing scuffle with Big Pun – as the featured/title cut, which means they're holding the real firepower (pure-pop miracle "Wildest Moments," among other choice cuts) in abeyance for the chart domination hopefully soon to follow.

originally published in Philadelphia City Paper

AMG review round-up, volume XV: sleepytronix

well, speaking of nosaj thing, that review i linked to is nearly nine months old at this point, and i have fallen way behind in my amg review rounding-up. no wonder, looks like i only did five last calendar year. my project for the month of february is to write a record-review-a-day (falling behind there too: only 15 for the first 24 days, though it's actually 27 if you count all publish-able pieces of writing – bios and cp previews – so that's not too shabby – or alternately it's only 18 days if you don't count the weekends, fewer for snow days and holidays...) but i thought as a corollary to that i could get up-to-date on these round-ups. so, here's one.

in something like ascending order of mellowness:

Nosaj Thing: bio and Drift review

California has long been a prime breeding ground for instrumental hip-hop, from DJ Shadow's pioneering work in the form through Madlib's tireless explorations and iterations, and that's never been more true than in the late 2000s, as a cresting wave of interest in the work of the late J Dilla helped to spark something of a stylistic resurgence, while a handful of Los Angeles-based producers coalesced into a recognizable local scene centered around the venue Low End Theory. That scene's first prominent breakout star was Steve Ellison, aka Flying Lotus, who earned widespread notice with his 2008 Warp debut Los Angeles, but 24-year-old Jason Chung (Nosaj Thing) followed shortly thereafter, dropping his aptly named LP, Drift, the subsequent spring. As with FlyLo's work, Nosaj pushes well beyond the customary bounds of hip-hop into glitchy IDM, ambient, and even dubstep territory, foregrounding highly abstract electronic textures more reminiscent of artists like Prefuse 73, Aphex Twin, and Burial than the beatmakers referenced above, with hip-hop's rhythmic drive never entirely absent but often reduced to a spare, skeletal framework. But despite some clear stylistic parallels, Drift is a notably more austere, measured work that feels classically restrained in comparison to the fragmentary, static-soaked clutter of Los Angeles. With a distinctive sonic palette of muted squelchy synths, wordless vocals, and largely inorganic-sounding percussion, the album is curiously playful in spite of its somber, almost funereal tone, as it floats from the airy twinkles and reverberant handclaps of the opening "Quest" to the denser, menacingly murky electro-funk of "Coat of Arms" and the sinuous "1685/Bach." The album's latter half takes on an unexpectedly spiritual cast, partially due to Nosaj's use of decidedly churchy, organ-like textures. Though brooding, minor-key tonality and middle-range tempos remain dominant nearly throughout, the brief, nearly beatless "2222" and hazily serene "Us" introduce a welcome note of warmth and reassurance, before the murmurs and heartbeats of "Voices" usher in "Lords"' climactic, doom-laden choral fantasia. It's quite a stunning sequence, and evidence of the breadth of Nosaj Thing's compositional prowess, which extends from a fine ear for minute detail to a rare sense of album-length sweep.

Hess is More: bio and Hits review

An impish musical humorist -- though by no means a novelty artist -- Mikkel Hess makes his U.S. bow with this career retrospective, drawn from his three albums and a couple of singles, whose very title, though seemingly straightforward, comes off as somewhat smirking: he may have reached number 11 in his native Denmark with the perky instrumental "Ssshhhh," but he's still hardly anyone's idea of a hitmaker. The most striking and memorable thing here is probably the occasionally anthologized "Yes Boss," a provocative curiosity that manages to be at once droll, seductive, and unsettling: over a sultry, percolating electronic groove, punctuated with torpid, dub-inflected brass outbursts, a deadpan Hess conducts an enigmatic but sordid-seeming "job interview" with vocalist Bang Chau, who responds in lush and suggestively breathy harmonies. It's a fantastic and fascinating track, equally effective as a work of conceptual comedy and an alluring piece of music. Though it takes an entirely different approach, the goofy, hooky electro-pop jingle "The Magic Invention from the Divine Business Research Center" similarly satisfies on multiple levels. Most of the collection's other vocally based inclusions fall somewhat short of these highlights, either because their humor is a bit too one-note (as on the cabaret-style waltz "In the Fridge," which grows a bit stale despite a delightfully hammy R&B turn from the incomparable Dean Bowman) or simply because the music overshadows the lyrical content. But Hess' considerable compositional and production abilities are on display throughout, from the jokey, meandering house pastiche "Would Would You Like to Disco" to the beguiling "Piano Waltz" (not actually a waltz, but rather an oddly fluid conglomeration of a haunting, lopsided piano figure with a reggae-ish bass groove, assorted percussion fragments, and other unexpected sounds). Oddly enough, the instrumental and near-instrumental selections tend to be just as humorous, and certainly just as quirky, as the tracks with lyrics, employing a skewed, lightheartedly kitschy sensibility (making prominent use of whistling, for instance) that calls to mind the work of Arling & Cameron and child-minded musical cartoonists like Plone, Komeda, isan, and Norway's Toy. That said, Hess is very much a distinct individual, and Hits offers a highly enjoyable glimpse into his idiosyncratic world.

Meanderthals: bio and Desire Lines review

Desire lines are undesignated paths created by foot-traffic erosion simply because they're where people want to go. Desire Lines walks -- strolls, ambles, struts (occasionally), and yes, meanders -- down well-trodden and welcoming musical trailways, toward no destination in particular, just for the simple pleasures of the journey. The routes are familiar and instinctually inviting, even if the signage is vague and imprecise: dub, psychedelic, downtempo, ambient, post-rock, folk, with occasional spur trails pointed toward the Tropics, or the discotheque, or into outer space. (Because Meanderthals are a triumvirate of dance producers, the road map reads "electronica," even if most of the sounds come from instruments being played in a room -- an Oslo studio to be specific -- during a handful of loosely convened live recording sessions.) The clearest, newest-looking signpost is marked "Balearic Disco," and indeed, mirrored shards of diasporic disco fallout are littered liberally along the way, though rarely are they spiky enough to spur feet into action. Mostly we glide by, basking in the sun-drenched acoustic strums and steel-pan patters of "Kunst or Ars," wallowing in the murky bass and intoxicating haze of "1-800-288-Slam," lingering amid the languid pulse and pianistic ruminations of "Bugges of Room." Fussless and fluid, loose but never lazy, Desire Lines is another fine feather in the caps of Rune Lindbaek and Idjut Boys, who now take their place alongside fellow travelers Studio, Hatchback, and Quiet Village as creators of some of the finest, hippest, and coolest chillout music of the late 2000s.

Nite Jewel: bio and Good Evening review

The home recording project of an L.A.-based multimedia artist/philosophy student who wields an eight-track cassette recorder and cites freestyle divas Lisa Lisa and Debbie Deb as among her primary influences, Nite Jewel's effectively self-released debut album holds the potential to be many things, few of them particularly promising: dryly intellectual, artily indulgent, self-consciously ironic, vapidly modish, unlistenably amateurish. Indeed, it can be a bit off-puttingly stuffy, with an occasionally discernible whiff of pretension that may incline some more critical-minded and discriminating listeners to dismiss it out of hand, and its production values are undeniably negligible, but taken on its own terms Good Evening is a good deal more singular, intriguing, and difficult to characterize than one might initially suspect. A perplexing conflation of rudimentary electronic dance-pop with wobbly lo-fi experimentalism, it lacks the energy and melodic distinctiveness to be effective as either pop or dance, but it works quite nicely as mood music, maintaining a similarly beguiling, woozy atmosphere across its ten tracks. Ramona Gonzalez's analog synthesizers and high, swooning vocals, swathed in tape hiss and bleary-eyed reverb, offer a warmth and tenderness that are largely absent from her darker, moodier cohorts in the Italians Do It Better camp, and though she may have all the right '80s signifiers in place to evoke that label's achingly stylish post-disco mode, there's something guilelessly genuine and personable about her approach, knowing as it may be. (The inimitable, idiosyncratic Arthur Russell has been tossed around as a reference point, and while she can't measure up to his uncanny appeal, it's a surprisingly relevant comparison in terms of both sonics and overall effect.) Good Evening's weakest point, aside from the non-issue of its non-danceability, is its songs: as an undifferentiated half-hour mass they're perfectly fine, but apart from the meekly melodic "Artificial Intelligence " and a wormy synth line or two on "What Did He Say," nary a hook pokes out from the haze, and not simply because Gonzalez keeps her vocals smothered and distant. So it's a welcome change of pace when the album concludes with a cover of Roxy Music's "Lover," which might qualify as the album's best track simply by dint of having a perceptible tune and structure.

Infantjoy: With review

Infantjoy's With is part appendix, part follow-up to the duo's well-praised debut, Where the Night Goes, featuring several remixes of that album's tracks (variably referred to as "revisions," "reflections," and "adjustments") and several new original pieces that were apparently inspired by these reworked versions. In any case, it's a companion piece that also stands well enough on its own, a fluid whole ably inhabiting an elegant, cinematically ambient space, with only one truly jarring disruption. The new tracks are largely effective mood pieces, taking up the first album's Erik Satie fixation in their gently musing piano lines but introducing a darker undercurrent of anxiety and urgency in their rhythms and intermittent electronic bleeps. The subtle but pervasive eeriness fits into the album's vague preoccupation with ghosts and spirits, as evidenced by Paul Morley's spoken ruminations on the supernatural in "A Haunted Space" and "Absence" and the Sarah Nixey-sung cover of Japan's "Ghosts" (reprised here in a hovering, skeletal remix by Populous). While generally in keeping with the prevailing mood, the reworkings (which are interspersed throughout the running order) tend to stand somewhat more apart from the pack, both for better -- isan's typically glistening take on "Composure," which they've liberally sprinkled with flittering shards of crystal, and Tunng's application of folksy pluckings and queerly muttered interjections to the closing "Arrival" -- and for worse -- Handshake's mix of "Someone," which sounds haunted all right, but in a violent, glitchified way (at least relative to its surroundings). It's not an unmitigated assault, but it definitely feels disconcerting and somewhat baffling in this context, and (perhaps along with the nifty but decidedly beat-driven Lodge remix "Exposure") prevents With from functioning as a fully cohesive ambient work. Program out that track and you've got a smooth, intriguing, and decidedly pleasurable journey.

Dntel: Early Works For Me If It Works For You, Something Always Goes Wrong,
Early Works For Me If It Works For You II, and This Is The Dream of Evan and Chan EP reviews

From the glitchy, careening beats and hauntingly melodic synth flutters of Early Works for Me If It Works for You's striking opener "Loneliness Is Having No One to Miss," it's clear that Jimmy Tamborello, in this early phase of his electronica career, was taking his cues from the towering British figures at the forefront of 1990s IDM: Autechre, Aphex Twin, µ-ziq, and so on. At the same time, perhaps ascribable to his Californian context or his emo bass-playing background, his tracks lack the distancing austerity and arty abrasiveness that mark much of those artists' work, instead embodying, in embryonic form, the elements that would become hallmarks of later Dntel releases: an understated melodic sweetness, hazy, dreamlike textures, and above all an undeniably human, organic warmth. These qualities tend to be somewhat overshadowed here by playfully fidgety beat programming, which doesn't necessarily play at cross-purposes so much as it forms a striking counterpoint to the underlying moodiness, with results that aren't nearly as meandering and restless as they may seem at first. A superb aural research project from a student of the abstract electronic greats, and a fine start to an enjoyably inventive career.

Susumu Yokota: Mother review [plus others here]

The 2000s were a staggeringly productive period for Susumu Yokota. Starting off the decade by releasing one of his most gorgeous and enduring works, the majestically serene Sakura, he continued issuing albums at a rate of more than one per year, the majority of them forming a loose series of kindred but conceptually distinct explorations of similarly organic, generally hushed musical territory. As the decade drew to a close, the ever-industrious producer came up with yet another way to traverse that same terrain with Mother, his fifth release on Lo. It's not too much of a shakeup from his recent ways of doing things: for one thing, much of it continues his subtle preoccupation with triple-meter time signatures; for another, like much of his late-2000s output, it's an album of collaborations with vocalists, among them his Lo/Leaf labelmates Nancy Elizabeth, Casper Clausen of Efterklang, and Claire Hope and Panos Ghikas of the Chap, as well as Japanese singer Kaori and Yokota's frequent partner Caroline Ross. But despite being perhaps his most vocal-based and song-oriented record to date, it's also perhaps his calmest, most fully ambient outing since Sakura. Some tracks feel more than others like proper fully formed songs: the loungy bossa-like opener "Love Tendrilises," the Chap's subdued but typically curious "Tree Surgeon," and Nancy Elizabeth's "A Flower White," whose reliance on a looped acoustic guitar figure makes it one of the more pedestrian things here. But even on these more vocally overt pieces, Yokota's focus on texture and utterly relaxed pacing tends to eclipse the centrality of melody or compositional structure, making for a masterful sympathetic fusion of song and ambience. And without taking anything away from the fine contributions of his collaborators, Mother's most satisfying moments are those where the vocals are most fully subsumed into Yokota's hazy, limpid sonic meanderings, becoming just one textural strand among many. The album closes with its only fully instrumental piece, a Harold Budd-like solo piano meditation that resonates marvelously in its simplicity, in the way that even a fully enjoyable evening of socializing can make a later moment of solitude feel infinitely precious.

King of Woolworths: Rediffusion review

Jon Brooks' third album as King of Woolworths finds him continuing to explore his fascinations with vintage film soundtracks and library music, analog synths, and 1960s lounge exotica. The lovingly crafted and unfailingly pleasant results are reminiscent of similarly inspired acts like Air and Stereolab, and of fellow downtempo electronica artists like Lemon Jelly and Boards of Canada. That may make Brooks seem like an imitator of already derivative artists, but he clearly has a flair for the material and his own remarkably authentic approach to it, as well as a knack for sweet if forgettable melodies. Although whooshes and burbles and all manner of grainy synth textures abound, he tends to downplay any electronic elements that sound more recent than the mid-'70s. Only a few tracks ("Big Sur" and the mildly menacing "Yellow World") have beats big enough to overtly reference dance-based electronic forms (most notably trip-hop), while much of the album, starting with the lovely two-part clarinet-led opener "Coccolo," is almost wholly organic in feel, if not in substance, hitting many of the primary reference points (vibraphones, harpsichords, wordless vocals, lush string orchestration, Latin percussion) of his target styles without seeming especially corny or gimmicky. In all, an enjoyably chilled-out and cohesive effort. "The Loner" is a cover of the theme to the 1970s British TV series Budgie.

various artists: Teaism review

A compilation album celebrating the "art and culture" of tea? Leave it to the quaint, whimsical Brits at Static Caravan records to come up with such a quaint, whimsical, British idea. And why not, indeed? The collection opens, fittingly, with the click of a stove burner and the wail of a tea kettle, accompanied by Max de Wardener's meditative autoharp. Beyond that, most of these tracks have relatively little overt, audible connection to the subject at hand -- somewhat disappointing, but not overly surprising since this is a primarily instrumental affair. However, as several of the song titles suggest, many of the artists involved claim to have prepared their contributions while sipping a particular tea, or to have attempted evoking the feeling of drinking a certain variety. The result, especially in the album's first half, is a whole lot of calm, soothing, slow-moving pastoral electronica, from the grayscale drones and flutters of the Break-Ups' "Assam" to project coordinator Inch-Time's chiming, ISAN-esque "Snow Jewel" and AM/PM's expansive, vaguely Asian-tinged "Shennong," named for a Chinese emperor. The always-intriguing Tunng shake things up with the album's first proper song, a cut-and-paste shanty about the Boston Tea Party, complete with a computer voice reciting the names of the participants, entitled "Shove It." Also of especial interest are the sax-and-trombone-led microtonal jazz of Root70's "Immaculate Conception" and the peppy, playful glitch-IDM of Qua's "Lapsang Souchong (Iced Tea Mix)," whilst "Dollboy" sing restfully of the proper way to brew and Cibelle and Josh Weller reimagine Earl and Lady Grey as a disillusioned, fortune-seeking couple in their jaunty, folky closing duet. Nothing here is terribly riveting or dynamic, but it does make for an exceedingly pleasant, relaxing listen -- a perfect accompaniment, no doubt, to drinking a nice warm cup of tea -- as well as an appealing way to explore a loosely connected group of mostly British and Australian artists (only a handful of whom have previously recorded for Static Caravan) who are engaged in gently exploring the intersection of folk, electronic, and avant-garde composition. A nice bonus are the droll line drawings by Roy Ananda, which notes the similarity of a teaspoon to a catapult and a tea bag to a yoyo, and imagines a teapot as the hybrid of a watering can and a piggy bank.

Yuichiro Fujimoto: Komorebi review

Yuichiro Fujimoto's debut album is a quiet marvel, an intriguing, peculiar, and ultimately delightful work of minimalist construction. These home-recorded pieces, most of them two to three minutes in length, feel more like tentative exploratory sketches than compositions per se. Suffused with a simplicity and ephemerality that recall the elegant spirit of Japanese ink-brush painting, they find an equally resonant visual counterpart in Fujimoto's own crude, childlike drawings and curiously arbitrary, hazily graceful photographs that adorn the booklet. Pieces typically consist of one or sometimes two instruments (piano, acoustic guitar, thumb piano, toy piano, glockenspiel) played in an improvisatory and sometimes strikingly rudimentary (but generally consonant) fashion, occasionally with a slight amount of electronic sound processing, and sometimes accompanied by a backdrop of found sound (children's voices, birdsong, ambient rustling). The audible evidence of the recording process seems to be as significant and at least as deliberate as the strictly musical content, ranging from the relative cleanliness of the bell-and-shaker duet "See Water" (the only piece with any real discernible structure, in the form of a gradual accretion of sonic density and digital delay) to a slight, soothing analog hiss beneath the spare guitar meditation of "Slow Boat" to the heavy, churning tape hum and almost painfully distorted piano meanderings of "Kujira." While Komorebi is, on the whole, a calming and delicate album comparable to the gentle likes of Fujimoto's countrymen Motohiro Nakashima and Lullatone (all of whom share a penchant for bell-like tones), its primary motivating concern seems to be not tranquility in itself but rather a patient, deliberate attunement to momentary experience and the detritus of the everyday, with results that can be contemplative, innocent, whimsical, unsettling, or simply indeterminate.

Johan Agebjörn: bio and Mossebo review

The material on Johan Agebjörn's debut album, much of which predates his work with Sally Shapiro, is a good distance from the melodic dance-pop of that project, which was overtly influenced by early-'80s Italo-disco -- although Shapiro's instrumental album closer "Sleep in My Arms" suggested something of what was in store. In a sense this is another sort of throwback, to the even earlier ambient explorations of Brian Eno and Tangerine Dream, but this kind of music arguably has little use for concepts like progress and timeliness, and Mossebo's lush, limpid soundscapes are equally redolent of contemporary artists like Susumu Yokota. Agebjörn himself cites the celebrated early-'90s work of Autechre, Aphex Twin, and Future Sound of London, as well as his fellow Swede Krister Linder (Yeti) and the Norwegian Biosphere, as primary influences, which gives a good idea of what to expect here, though Mossebo definitely rests on the more placid and soothing end of things. As suggested by song titles like "The Sound of Snowflakes Touching the Ground" and "Putting More Wood in the Fire," there is something palpably Scandinavian and wintry about the album's tone, less due to icy twinkling synths (as in his work with Shapiro) than a gentle, glacial sweep that suggests the quiet grandeur of the Northern lights. Sonically, there's an even blend between electronic sounds (hazy synthesizer washes, gently pulsing clicks and hums) and organic ones (most notably Lisa Barra's entrancing wordless vocalizing, but also occasional pianos and field-recorded sound effects.) A handful of the pieces are entirely beatless, while only the vaguely electro "Ambient Computer Dance" has anything approaching a danceable groove. Mossebo functions well as a fluid but slightly varied whole, although the two-part "Siberian Train" offers something of a respite from the unmitigated new age serenity -- the first half, which Agebjörn record in 1996, has a darker, foreboding cast that sets it apart from the rest of the album. It's accomplished, if not entirely distinctive mood music, and well worth experiencing, though clearly a different animal from the Agebjörn of Disco Romance.

Eluvium: Similes review

For an artist whose primary emotional touchstones are stillness and serenity, Matthew Cooper refuses to stay in one place for very long. Starting from the leap between the hazy textural washes of his first album and the unvarnished solo piano meditations of his second, the ambient composer/producer has taken a departure, slight or striking, with each new release, seemingly making an exercise of finding continually new and different sonic and compositional approaches to similar spiritual terrain. Similes, Cooper's fifth full-length as Eluvium, and first since 2007's sumptuous, symphonic Copia (discounting the like-minded, limited-release “solo album” he issued under his birth name in 2008), is no exception, as his first foray into working with two elements whose heretofore conspicuous absence has largely defined his output: percussion and vocals. If the arrival of that news prompted any consternation among the Eluvium faithful, the results ought to lay any fears to rest: Cooper's unerring instincts have always been among his greatest assets (along with the genuineness and utter conviction that mark everything he’s done), and he’s hardly made his first false move here. Neither, by any means, has he made a beat-driven pop record. The “percussion” takes the form of soft, gentle clicks and pops (and a few distant, barely-there thuds) which turn up on half of these tracks and bear, for the most part, only a casual resemblance to anything that might be called a “beat” (the primary exception being “The Motion Makes Me Last,” whose soft but insistently galloping pulse does indeed create a stirring, quietly exuberant sense of motion beneath the prevailing calm.) The vocals, though nearly as unobtrusive (and relatively sparse), are a striking, almost magical development – long-time listeners may find the emergence of Cooper’s voice after so many years of silence to be particularly affecting and even revelatory, even though it’s as understated an instrument as we might have expected all along: he sings in a sober, pensive near-monotone, with slight Ian Curtis echoes tempered by the baritone richness and introspective, bruised-heart resonance of Lou Barlow and Bill Callahan. Cooper’s cerebral, abstractly insightful way with language has long been evident in his well-turned if rather fussy song and album titles; those qualities are certainly present in his lyrics as well, but hearing him intone his own words renders them somehow less ponderous, more yearning and introspective, as well as gently, wittily self-aware, especially since many of the lyrics here feel like glosses (similes, perhaps?) for the ineffable, absorbingly ruminative experience of listening to Eluvium’s music (“overanalyzing how the leaves eclipse the light/constantly find meaning and naivete inside”) and the perhaps not dissimilar sensation of creating it (“I'm a vessel between two places I've never been.”) And that experience has never been more absorbing, ineffable, or rewarding than it is here. Despite its innovations, Similes is entirely grounded in the ambient compositional techniques that Cooper has spent his career mastering – not just on the three shorter instrumental cuts but also the vocal pieces, which even at their “poppiest” (the stately, baroque “Weird Creatures”) feel more like laconic meditations than proper songs. Copia’s lush, variegated organic textures, Accidental Memory’s tenderly tinkling pianos (albeit more heavily processed and ring-modulated than ever before), and even the softly whirring guitars of Lambent Material all turn up here, but the closest reference point is invitingly warm, expansively droning Talk Amongst The Trees (whose title is referenced in one of this album’s first lyrics) which up until now was arguably Cooper’s zenith. With Similes, he’s made his most touching, certainly his most engaging work yet, and against the odds, somehow the most quintessentially Eluvium release to date.

signs of livestock: feb '10

my show-going's been slow-going for a minute – been doing a fair amount of preview coverage for cp, but, until last week, hadn't really managed to see much live music at all this year.

[though that's discounting the obvious live musical highlight of the year so far, the 69 love songs cover party (that link leads to PW, the sworn enemy, but there are some pretty nice pix there - check the skeptical stair-sitters in #16) masterminded by sam and adam, which was a righteous blast. i got to sing three of my faves too: "i think i need a new heart," "long-forgotten fairy tale," and "busby berkeley dreams," plus impromptu group vox on "i'm sorry i love you." it only took us around four hours to get through, by my count, 57 out of the 69 – no "two kinds of people," alas – pretty damn freaking awesome.]

otherwise, i was foiled in attempts to see nneka and tape because of the snow (the former i just couldn't convince myself or anyone else to brave the blizz for; the latter was canceled but i didn't realize that until i'd trudged all the way there, listening to the utterly lovely new eluvium flutter all over me with the flakes), and to see la roux (about whom i wrote a "one track mind" that didn't even make it to the web, or not yet at least) due to crazy incomprehensible booking/cancellation/rebooking shenanigans (ok, technically i could have gone to see her/them/whatevs at the roxxy nightclub "shred your ex" party on valentine's friday, but $20 cover + 1:00am set time + dubious delaware ave setting are a pretty rough sell, even for me.) and i missed pink skull and memory tapes too, though i particularly enjoyed blurbing the latter.

ok, but: did see the shy, pseudonymous swedish mope sisters (kinda like the musical moron twins), taken by trees and el perro del mar (not actual sisters, but sisters from another mister), on a valen'sdate. not sure why it took me so long to realize (and it wasn't necessarily extra great shakes live), but that taken album (east of eden – should have taken a hint from it being named after my quasi-favorite book) is really pretty lovely stuff, and quite upfront and accessible too (as opposed to the somewhat floaty and indistinct love is not pop, which i do also like quite a bit, but is difficult to even grasp onto enough to really love.) sarah a. is, however, a more interesting presence than victoria b. she's kinda weird in fact. looks like this:

better: saw british retro-pop goofball v.v. brown, who has been making significant inroads on my heart, at the somewhat unpromising (but potentially up-and-coming as a half-decent west-of-the-schuylkil venue? hm...) marbar.

she didn't have a parasol, or lighting that was at all decent; she was wearing what she describes as "geisha hat" that hid her hair and to some extent her face, and lit from below by a frantic color-flashing light (once they rigged it up, about halfway into the set) that did cool and disorienting things to her plaid pants. this felt like a very silly show – there were only maybe twenty people in the crowd, for one thing – but she was loving it, bubbly, alternately endearing for her giddy showmanship and her enthusiastically genuine personability – anyway completely lovable. she seemed just tickled to be here, her first time in philly, asked us what she should do (i wish i knew how to answer that question... somebody shouted out "standard tap" and then explained that they had "pub food," which made her just light up, and ask if she could get a good cup of english tea anywhere) and seemed almost as surprised that we didn't respond with unbridled enthusiasm when she asked about drake (before turning in a kick-ass cover of "best i ever had" – "i thought you loved hip-hop in philadelphia!?") as she was that we had come there to see her and actually knew her songs (she was going to skip "crying blood," but made the mistake of mentioning it and then the crowd wouldn't let her not do it – complete with a reggae "remix" recap.) she opened with my current fave "everybody" (sung thru a megaphone) and closed with "shark in the water," what an undeniable feel-good hit, don't know how i was so tentative about it at first...

and, last night, i faced the rains and trains to see nosaj thing and daedelus (and jogger too, but i only ended up catching the last two numbers of their unwieldy drill'n'bass/screamo/psych/folk/glitch-pop/whatever weirdness....guess i'll puzzle that out later.) it was the "magical properties tour (check out this v. awesome poster), a celebration of daedelus' new label, which doesn't seem to be very well organized as far as having any sort of web presence, or any actual releases, current or future, apart from the jogger debut and even that only barely seems to exist (if it makes it into the amg database, it'll only be thanks to my persistent nagging), but good on them putting the tour together, good idea, good work.

nosaj (whose name seems to be pronounced somewhat differently by his various friends/tourmates) was unbelievably sick. and slick. he played mostly his own music, including the bulk of drift, but with copious amounts of live tweaking and twiddling, amping it up with a brilliant sense of dancefloor pacing, and moving fluidly and almost imperceptibly from one track to the next, occasionally slipping in some other nuggets by the likes of busta rhymes, portishead ("wandering star"), wu tang, flying lotus (i think?), and what must have been zapp (or possibly dâm-funk...need to get my ears on that.) all pretty excellent to move to (better if i hadn't been clutching my coat under my arm) but the best part might have been just watching young mr. thing, aka jason chung (who was wearing a similar if not the same plaid button-down as in this picture, and snazzy-looking watch), as he tended to his knobs and sampler pads with a nonchalant precision, making understated but palpably pleasurable effect-twisting wrist-flicks with off-hand grace. sweet sweet.

alfred daedelus darlington weisberg-roberts was up next and last. strange sort of feeling to be seeing him in the flesh, this funny little fellow who's done so much to charm me over the past decade, through his distinctly unique presentation (visual and verbal as well as musical) as much as anything – with his records too, for sure (invention and, particularly, of snowdonia), though somewhat troublingly less so starting around 2006's denies the days demise. i can't quite put my finger on what's changed in my appreciation for his music (even as my amg compatriots continue to rave over it) – sure, his style has developed in some identifiable ways, but i'm not quite sure why it doesn't do it for me as much now.

it is nice that he seems to have more friends to play with now. for a long time it felt like he seemed sort of off in his own world; occasionally setting-up slightly incongruous rendezvous with the cali undie rap world, anticon and ilk (q.v. the weather), but mostly content (and at his best) as a lone operator. but these days he's (apparently) something of a linchpin of a bona-fide scene, even an elder-statesmen of sorts, perhaps, and now with his own label to boot. (again, apparently.) well. his introductory statement to the crowd, made some flusteredly, was rather touching: "i just want to let you know, if you don't already, that everybody who's up here really means it...terribly so."

he announced that he'd play "some fun stuff and then some dirty stuff and then back to fun stuff." "what's the difference" someone shouted, and he smiled meek assent, but in fact i couldn't really figure out what he meant, as his set felt relatively consistent in tone throughout, building fairly quickly to a level of activity that, while fun for a while and intermittently, mostly felt closer to dirty – in the messy sense, and not the fun one. he was using the monome...his monome – actually, two of them, one smaller one (which he only picked up occasionally and rotated around to make the LEDs all slide to one side and the sound go all squelchy) and the big 256-button one, which he had angled toward us (like in the picture, though he wasn't quite so snazzily dressed last night.) it was certainly mesmerizing to watch him dance his fingers around the grid, and try to figure out all the sequences he was setting in motion.

frankly, though, the music coming out of the speakers just got to be too much to handle. it felt sort of like an especially unhinged girl talk set, except that only a small fraction of the samples were recognizable. stylistically it was all over the place, though heavily electronic, but ranging from dubstep to disco to hip-hop to synth-cheese to doo-wop to soul. i'm pretty sure there was a beirut song in there, one of the few instances of the polyrhythmic juxtapositions (a 6/8 strum pattern against the steady 4/4) that make some of his early productions so tantalizing. i only recognized a handful of his own tracks (i haven't spent all that much time with his latest, love to make music to, but i would have expected to know more from that if nothing else), though he did drop in one of my very favorites, "something bells," butting it up against some early stevie wonder (was it "uptight"? can't remember now), but it left before the real climax.

eh, it was at least interesting, for a while, and maybe it would have been more fun if i'd been dancing more (though, i did try and couldn't really get into it), but on the whole it felt like the (admittedly very cool) technical aspects of using the monome as a performance tool were getting in the way of the musicality that's been so pivotal in his past work. oh well...