Review Round-Up: June 2014

Bis
data Panik, etc.
[Punk/Pop]

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

Diamond Version
CI
[Electronic]

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

Robyn and Royksopp
Do It Again
[Electronic/Pop]

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

Ela Stiles
Ela Stiles
[A Cappella/Experimental]

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

Taylor McFerrin
Early Riser
[Electronic/Jazz]

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

Jack White
Lazaretto
[Rock]

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

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

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

v/a
C86
[Indie/Rock]

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

Kishi Bashi
[Indie/Pop]
concert preview

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

La Roux
[Pop]
concert preview

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

Evian Christ
[Electronic]
concert preview

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

Young & Sick
[Pop/Electronic]
concert preview

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

GOAT
[World/Rock/Psych]
concert preview

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

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

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

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

Lust For Youth
[Electronic/Pop]
concert preview

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

Lee Fields
[Soul]
concert preview

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

Fucked Up
[Punk/Rock]
concert preview

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

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

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

originally published in Philadelphia City Paper

Review Round-Up: May 2014

Lily Allen
Sheezus

His fans may not like it, but Kanye's actually a pretty fair point of comparison for Lily Beatrice Rose Cooper née Allen.  Both are artists whose work is in consistent, complicated tension with their broader media-personality status; both are uncensored loudmouths, lightning rods for controversy, and outsized jumbles of vulnerability, arrogance and creativity.  Sheezus gives us all three off the bat in a title track portraying pop as a title fight, with Allen confiding her insecurities before summarily demanding the crown.  She means business too: perky electro-burst "L8 CMMR" is her shiniest, most radio-ready cut yet (notwithstanding the verses' come-lately auto-tune slather), and the sweetest, giddiest celebration of marital love since "Countdown" – naturally, from the author of "Not Big" and "It's Not Fair," the titular entendre is the highest praise possible.  Producer Greg Kurstin ensures a familiarly sparkly synth-pop sheen throughout, with enough sonic left-turns – Zydeco accordion and bottleneck blues on the "Faith"-riffing "As Long As I Got You"; soft-touch throwback R&B on the pisstaking "Insincerely Yours" and convincingly slinky sex jam "Close Your Eyes" – to maintain Allen's magpie reputation.  The singer's achilles heel, popwise, is also her most defining trait: her bent for unfiltered snarkiness, which rears its head increasingly as the album progresses, most troublingly on the mean-spirited, 'netizen-skewering wobble-step of "URL Badman" and the petulant class politics of "Silver Spoon."  As with Kanye, it can be tricky keeping track of which lyrical clunkers are deliberately dumb, in-character satire and which are merely failed attempts at wit.  The humor's appreciated, but – as Allen probably learned from the inane kerfuffle over this album's first preview video [see sidebar] – you can't be too subtle sometimes.

[sidebar]

From her 2006 emergence as the first MySpace breakout star, visuals have always played a major role in Allen's output.  Not counting the nifty Nintendo-inspired lyric video for "L8 CMMR," Sheezus has spawned three promo clips to date:

"Hard Out Here"

Pop-rap parody qua feminist empowerment anthem: hardly groundbreaking, and certainly problematic (since when are ass and brains mutually exclusive?), but straightforward enough.  The clip extends the spoof and critique visually, juggling familiar rap-video tropes including, natch, a cadre of twerking booty dancers (also, a memorable skewering of "Blurred Lines"' mylar balloons.)  Light-hearted satire aside, with so much freighted imagery crammed into three minutes, it's little wonder folks got upset.

"Air Balloon"

An appealingly insubstantial nonsense jingle with gently loopy visuals to match: Allen in candy-raver chic, basking in the South African countryside, chilling with cheetahs among magic toadstools while the camera loops-the-loop into the stratosphere and beyond, eventually culminating in a Gravity-style free-float.

"Our Time"

A fully serviceable mindless party-time anthem that's also a gentle send-up of mindless party-time anthems; a point made only slightly more evident by the video wherein four separate Lily Allens (one wearing a hot dog costume) "enjoy" a sloppy night out in London (without ever leaving their taxi.)

originally published in Magnet Magazine

Robyn/Röyksopp
Do It Again
[Pop/Electronic]

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

Sylvan Esso
s/t
[Pop]

This Durham-based duo – Amelia Meath of Mountain Man and Megafaun bassist Nick Sanborn – marry their infectious indie-pop playfulness (feistier than Feist; more toned-down than tourmates-to-be tUnE-yArDs) and fresh, crunchy DIY synth grooves (somewhere between The Blow and Purity Ring) with the urbane slinkiness of '90s girl-group R&B and the communality and casualness of kids' songs and sing-a-longs (they manage to interpolate both "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" and Tommy James' "Hanky Panky" and without it seeming at all gimmicky.)  All told, it's a pretty lovable combination of things, and their self-titled debut (Partisan) is utterly swoon-worthy. [A-]

tUnE-yArDs
Nikki Nick
[Pop/Experimental]

Merrill Garbus is a one-woman carnival, and Nikki Nack (4AD) is her wildest, thrillingest ride yet.  Seemingly nothing is off limits in her technicolor DIY-pop playground: she interpolates Busta Rhymes, Bill Haley, Jonathan Swift; impersonates Coco-Cola® (I think?); calls out life by name; conflates counting rhymes with civics lessons, bloody satire with bubblegum funk, diatribes with dance parties.  The sheer volume of musical information here – tribal chanting! fiddle tunes! field hollers! clattery junkyard drum circles! slinky showchoir R&B! lazers! – makes the album feel like a continuously erupting fountain of confetti, as delirious as it is disorienting. [B+]

Lykke Li
I Never Learn
[Singer-Songwriter]

Sweden's favorite dreamy, doomed romantic has spent much of her career fusing the nakedly intimate with the brazenly anthemic; little wonder, then, that her bleakest, sparsest record to date also boasts her biggest choruses yet.  I Never Learn (LL/Atlantic) pares back the singer's wall of sound, swapping handclaps for strummed acoustics (but retaining the strings and massive drumbeats) to yield something at once lush, spacious and majestically chilly.  Title notwithstanding, she's well-schooled in the classic pop art of misdirection: proclaiming "I'm never gonna love again" – in full-on, no-fooling powerballad mode – like it's the most joyous, triumphant sentiment imaginable. [A-]

La Sera
Hour of the Dawn
[Indie Pop/Rock]

While the first two LPs from "Kickball" Katy Goodman's solo(ish) guise were relatively restrained, dreamily downcast affairs, Hour of the Dawn (Hardly Art) warrants its title: it's easily the erstwhile Vivian Girl's liveliest, jauntiest outing yet; ideally suited for the fast-approaching summer.  Musically, at least – "The sun's gone away/die young; get replaced" is not an entirely unrepresentative lyric.  There's a gratifying newfound looseness and punky muscle to the album's bouncy surf jangles and power-pop jams – not to mention frequent, surprisingly blistering guitar solos – while Goodman's Zooey Deschanelish sweetness is tempered by just a hint of Corin Tucker wail. [B-]

Fatima
Yellow Memories
[Soul/Electronic]

This London-based Senegalese-Swedish soul sister is clearly a fervent disciple in the church of Baduizm, evoking Ms. Erykah in both her smoked honey pipes and gritty, simmering, Dilla-fied grooves.  Her sneakily addictive debut Yellow Memories (Eglo), though crafted in collaboration with a small army of forward-thinking producers (Floating Points, Oh No, Flako, Theo Parrish...), asserts a distinct identity within its musically omnivorous array of stripped-down jazzy funk, airy kalimba-kissed shuffles, multi-tracked a cappella canticles and, especially, the punchy polyrhythms of commanding, groove-hopping centerpiece "La Neta." [B+]

Tori Amos
Unrepentant Geraldines
[Singer-Songwriter]

Unrepentant Geraldines (Mercury Classics) is neither a conceptual opus nor a foray into classical or theater music.  But its ostensible return to "pop" still proceeds very much on Tori's terms, which means quirky, suite-like songs, slyly experimental arrangements, sumptuous piano ballads, willfully affected English diction and tangled, poetic ruminations on family, aging, relationships and contemporary politics refracted through art, history, fairy tales and mythological metaphor.  Like her spiritual and aesthetic predecessor Kate Bush, Amos has sacrificed precisely none of her restless, iconically idiosyncratic artistic ambition with middle age, and her vision hasn't felt this lucid or approachable in some time. [B]

Owen Pallett
[Indie Pop/Experimental]
concert preview

Owen Pallett's new album, In Conflict (Domino), is sumptuously orchestrated – we'd expect nothing less from a first-call arranger to the indie stars (and beyond) – but it's also the first time the loop-loving violinist has cut many of his basic tracks live with a band.  Synths and drums are as central to these dozen baroque-pop vignettes as are the strings and brass of the Czech Philharmonic (or Brian Eno's several choral cameos), and they lend the florid, ever-shifting backdrops beneath Pallett's increasingly magnificent tenor – he'd be equally thrilling as a church chorister or a Broadway belter – a dramatic urgency that underpins the album's title.  Thematically, Pallett trades his earlier work's self-reflexive fantasy realms for the boundless emotional topography and neurodiversity of real life: we get a poignant glimpse of our hero as a young, cosmically conscious sci-fi nerd, in thrall to "the terror of the infinite," and, later, a childless, gin-guzzling thirty-something cynic one only hopes isn't entirely autobiographical.

Daniel Avery
[Electronic/Techno]
concert preview

Daniel Avery's phenomenally enjoyable debut album, Drone Logic (Phantasy Sound), got compared a lot to the Chemical Brothers when it came out last year – something you really don't hear enough in discerning electronic music circles – which nails its conspicuously accessible appeal, epic emotional scale, acid-soaked aesthetic and unabashedly Big (like they used to say) Beats.  Indeed, these tracks could've slotted easily into, say, the magnificent back half of Surrender.  But where the Chems are all-embracing, Beatles-besotted, pop-minded polyglots, Avery's much more of a purist: a classicist in construction – not a drop or build out of place – with an almost ascetic devotion to writhing acid synths lines, infinitely syncopated hemiolas and tech-house thump, limiting his vocal inclusions to the odd spoken phrase or two.  (Sometimes very odd: whatever the hell "water jump" is supposed to mean, Avery's deliriously deep, slurred intonation makes it downright anthemic.)

Chromeo
[Pop/Dance]
concert preview

Synthpop music slid, early this century, from cheesy '80s-throwback novelty to burgeoning revivalist subculture to mainstream, even dominant, cultural force, relatively free of "retro" baggage.  The not-dissimilarly once-dated "vintage" styles of electro-funk and slick, blue-eyed plastic soul (cf. the lately rehabilitated Hall & Oates) may be undergoing a similar shift in status, with everyone from Phoenix and Cherub to Mayer Hawthorne and Robin Thicke taking part.  Montreal's Dave 1 and P-Thugg have been it for over a decade now, and four albums in – White Women (Atlantic) drops next week – what was once unabashedly schticky now just plays like great pop: expertly crafted (the humorous but almost radically sincere opener "Jealous" should make Katy Perry, say, jealous indeed); lovingly packed with old-school reference points but still breezily modern-feeling; winkingly witty; utterly committed to a stylistically apt sensitive-loverman persona ("our love's too great to attenuate"), but no less genuinely seductive because of it.

Mø
[Pop/Electronic]
concert preview

Especially compared to what we expect from Scandinavian women in their mid-20s, MØ – the moniker derives from Karen Marie Ørsted's initials, and sounds approximately like an apathetic cow – makes a curious kind of pop.  The hooks are there, on the Dane's debut No Mythologies to Follow (RCA), but they're the sort that wait for you to come to them rather of lunging out, over-excitedly, to snare you on first listen.  The production is synth-based, and generally danceable, but it's far from the bubbly, disco-derived electro-pop of, say, Robyn: it's denser, slinkier, a little bit murky, drawing heavily from trap and dubstep, combining with MØ's dusky, expressive vocals to suggest a more thugged-out crosspollination of Lana's smoldering neo-trip-hop and Lykke Li's mournful torch balladry.

Fear of Men/Pains of Being Pure at Heart
[Indie Pop]
concert preview

I'll confess: I was initially put off Fear of Men by the name, which, especially coupled with the album title Loom (Kanine), makes the British quartet seem way more angsty and post-punky and generally (gender-)troubled than their music actually sounds.  Granted, all that stuff's probably still there in the lyrics.  And you could hardly call them sunny – at best: blissfully bleak.  But Jessica Weiss has a voice like melted butter, the band absolutely nails that pristine, shimmery guitar and those haunting angelic plainsong harmonies (cf. Veronica Falls), and theirs is the prettiest, dreamiest indie-pop debut in some time.  Nothing to fear!  The headlining – and, likewise, painless – Pains... just dropped the super-duper-shiny Days of Abandon (Yebo) – amazeballs sample song title: "Masokissed" – which reconciles their debut's C86 giddiness with its successor's major-league alt-rock muscularity, upping the ante with utterly irresistible Cure-at-their-poppiest bounce and just a pinch of Lovelessy smear.

The Both
[Pop/Rock]
concert preview

Aimee Mann and Ted Leo are well-matched in wit, stature, and partiality to good old-fashioned pop/rock tunefulness (not to mention goofy videos), but they still seem like a fairly odd couple, less for stylistic reasons than energetic ones: Leo's scrappy, perennially excitable exuberance vs. Mann's wry, cucumber-cool dispassion.  Initially, The Both (SuperEgo) seems to tip the scales toward Mann's more reserved M.O. – Leo's presence doesn't, for instance, magically jolt her back into long-forgotten rock'n'roll mode (á la 1995's I'm With Stupid) – and, as often with her output, it takes a few spins to really reveal itself.  Just a few though, and ultimately it feels just like it should: an elegantly balanced collaboration, with Teddy's fingerprints abundantly evident on jaunty, deliciously hooky highlights like "Volunteers of America" and "Milwaukee" (whose video was partially shot at Boot & Saddle), in the album's mild political bent (particularly the lovely environmental protest tune "Hummingbird") and in the choice of a Thin Lizzy cover (the pensive "Honesty Is No Excuse" – also tackled recently by Cass McCombs) and plenty of sprightly, Lizzy-esque guitar solos.

Wye Oak/Braids
[Rock/Pop/Electronic]
concert preview

After a draining two years of touring behind the well-received Civilian, Wye Oak songwriter/guitarslayer/frontwoman Jenn Wasner took a breather from her mainstay indie rock duo – and from six-strings altogether – with the fun, retro-leaning electronic pop/R&B side project Dungeonesse.  What then seemed like an unabashed (and delightful) lark turns out to be a significant signpost for the direction Wassner has now taken her main band on their new, fourth, full-length.  Shriek (Merge) fits somewhere vaguely between that outfit and the Wye Oak of old, but it still registers as a major, dramatic shift, recasting Wassner's subtle, emotionally potent songwriting and ever-more-evocative alto onto nuanced, layered electronic art-pop soundscapes that will impose even more improbable demands on their already intricate two-person stage setup.  It also makes them, suddenly, unusually apt touring partners for Montreal's Braids, whose stunningly lovely Flourish//Perish (Arbutus) traverses similarly delicate Kate Bush-via-Kid A territory; alternately lush, droning and jittery, with the added otherworldliness of Raphaelle Standell-Preston's breathy, fairy-like vocals.

Reigning Sound
[Rock/Pop]
concert preview

Greg Cartwright, rock'n'roll true believer and man of infinitely many bands (Compulsive Gamblers, Parting Gifts, Detroit Cobras...) got his gritty, stripped-down stomp on last year with the blistering on-record return of proto-neo garage punks the Oblivians, but the forthcoming Merge debut from his more rootsily-inclined Reigning Sound – that group's first outing in five years – finds his retro-rocking pendulum swinging hard in the other direction.  Shattered, despite the title, is a wonderfully warm, surprisingly polished ride – several cuts feature strings – blending country with organ-drenched, Stax-style R&B like only a born Tennesseean could (though Cartwright pays homage to his current home-state – and his label's – on funky country strut "North Cackalacky Girl") and generally hearkening to the peerless, pop-minded blue-eyed soul of the Rascals or, especially, fellow Memphian Alex Chilton's Box Tops.

Guided By Voices
[Rock]
concert preview

Magnet Magazine, publishing in Philly since 1993, have long trumpeted their endearingly objectivity-free adoration for all things Guided by Voices.  So it's no shocker in Gloomtown that they'd tap the Ohioan juggernauts to keynote their 21st birthday bash, alongside two bands – Jersey's Titus Andronicus and Florida's Surfer Blood – who surfaced during the magazine's several-year print hiatus but share its decidedly '90s-steeped sensibilities.  GbV, who likewise emerged from hibernation c. 2011 – and who should probably consider a subscription-based model themselves – earned a general best-post-reunion-effort consensus for February's Motivational Jumpsuit (it certainly takes best-title honors) but they've already moved on: the polar vortex-inspired Cool Planet (GBV Inc.) marks their sixth full-length since 2012 – at this rate, this new incarnation will eclipse the original's two-decade, sixteen-album run in just four more years.  It's a tad ballad-heavy, but still has its share of chirpy hits and glamtastic riffs, though tonight's lovefest will likely skew toward moldy oldies anyway.

Swans
[Rock/Experimental]
concert preview

How do Michael Gira and his unrelentingly resurgent Swans follow up The Seer, the intimidatingly massive 2012 opus that Gira described as the culmination of all his musical efforts over the past three decades?  Well, certainly not by scaling anything back.  To Be Kind (Young God) is another double-disc behemoth, if anything even more extreme than the last.  Dark (to say the least), but far from monochromatic; its two uncompromising, utterly compelling hours encompass dread-steeped cosmic blues, furiously churning riffage, glacial death-folk dirges, nightmarish incantations, demented devil-horn funk (the surprisingly dance-punky "Oxygen") and endless, pummeling, primordial rhythms, with Gira spouting mystic declamations atop the maelstrom like an unholy composite of Iggy Pop, Jim Morrison, and Lucifer.

Slint
[Rock/Post-Rock]
concert preview

Slint occupy a weird place in the alt-rock cosmology: little heard during their brief initial lifespan ('86-'91), eventually elevated via murmur and myth to critical preeminence as secret forefathers of the 1990s indie rock movement, but it's still not like their name comes up all that often.  Which makes sense.  Spiderland (Touch and Go), the 1991 sophomore LP and swan song, now lavishly reissued, upon which their classic status essentially rests, is a pretty weird album: slow to reveal itself, seemingly instrumental in spirit if only because Brian McMahan's enigmatic, softly spoken narratives are mixed almost too low to register.  It's more exploratory than exclamatory; wending its dark, brooding way through oblique, quirky compositional avenues.  Those roads, starting from nearly nowhere (Louisville KY, geographically, but also the splintering tail-end shards of the '80s' hardcore and college rock demiverses) eventually seemed to lead almost everywhere in the ensuing decades of underground rock: slowcore, emo, math rock, doom metal, post-punk and most especially the fertile expanse of post-rock; the band's breadcrumb trail leading equally to the intricate jazzy restraint of Tortoise (who once counted Slint's David Pajo as a member) and the epic bombast of Mogwai and Godspeed You Black Emperor!

A Minor Forest
[Rock/Experimental]
concert preview

Following last week's visit from reunited/reissued/revered alt-rock harbingers Slint comes another band of resurgent '90s nonconformists who were among that Louisville group's most direct early influencees.  At once jagged and meticulous, this San Francisco outfit homed in on the mostly-latent traces of hardcore punk haunting Slint's ineffable, crudely cinematic proto-post rock.  They interspersed their knotty but somehow meditative guitar-work with episodes of overt aggression that made them an anomalously screamy outlier on Chicago post-rock hub Thrill Jockey (who reissued their two albums – 1996's awesomely named Flemish Altruism and 1998's Inindependence – for Record Store Day.)  The established pigeonhole is "math rock," but while they had (and presumably retain) the requisite technical dizziness, compositional instability and penchant for jokey and/or esoteric song titles – "Jacking Off George Lucas," "Putting the Gay Back in Reggae" – the term suggests a clinical dispassion that's decidedly absent here.

†††
[Rock/Electronic]
concert preview

The early buzz on ††† – the side project super-trio of The Deftones' Chino Moreno, fellow '90s alt-rock survivor Shaun Lopez (of the band Far) and the enigmatic Chuck Doom – linked the band to the murky, oft-mocked electronic semi-genre of witch house, but that connection is mostly limited to generalized gothiness and a commitment to using typographical daggers in place of the letter "T" – †hus, na†urally, no† a soli†ary †rack †i†le on †heir eponymous debu† (Sumerian) omi†s †ha† le††er.  (Incidentally, you can pronounce their name as "Crosses," although "the typographical daggers" would be way radder.)  What we get instead is a particularly palatable, moderately adventurous take on semi-heavy, semi-electronic industrial arena rock, a la mid-90s Depeche Mode or any-era Nine Inch Nails.  Now, where's the keyboard shortcut for a backward "N"?

originally published in Philadelphia City Paper

robyn + rye rye

hmm...just came across this. apparently it just appeared yesterday. (so, doing ok on the insta-blog-reaction tip, for once.) two of my fave genius poplets of the last while...together at last(!?):



worth a watch or ten, obv, for the clothes alone... rye's green jaguar jacket + turquoise illuminati dress combo is particularly amazing, but really nobody's wearing anything less than stunning here.

and the song? hm... well i think it successfully avoids tarnishing "be mine"'s delicate everlasting perfect magical tenderness, tho it hardly adds anything that the original song was missing. and ryeisha's spitting is on point as ever. but: i'm not at all sure that this is what i want/need to be hearing from either party here... rye can do so much better than what's basically a lazy whole-hog hook interpolation. [though if that's what it's gonna be, it's possibly preferable to something like this miley cyrus interp – which i previously didn't know existed – why did I not know there was a Rye Rye mixtape!?! – notwithstanding that the Philly flamethrower DJ Sega gutter club action is def closer to where I want her to be energetically. may or may not be preferable to this other brand-new rye rye jawn, which is a bit too rote of a banger – she quotes m.i.a. but it actually reminds me more of spiss' goofball, go-nowhere bloodshy-produced "my slang."]

it's also just sad to realize that "ft. robyn" doesn't mean what it once did [i.e. guaranteed utter brilliance] – see also teddybears' hokay-but-lackluster sub-dragonette fluff "cardiac arrest," which album i just reviewed for amg. even though it's good to hear her back in sensitive/ballad mode, which she does so beautifully but was mostly absent from her 2010 mega-output.

still: for a summery, easy-going pop'n'b trifle, it'll do just fine. [i guess time will tell if this has the staying power of "your love," but i kinda doubt it – that song at least had its own hook to offer too.] and it can't help but make me smile.

reminds me i need to get on de-warping my copy of the "bang (ft. m.i.a.)" 12". also, rye rye needs to put out an album already.

also, there better be some big summer pop hits pervading my consciousness right soon, cuz so far that has not happened. can we work on that?

re:stocking

the annually rejiggered pitchfork readers poll (now closed) – which somewhat arbitrarily requested five songs and albums of the year, yet a full top ten of favorite songs out of from their best of the 1990s list [a fun and interesting task..i ended up with the magnetic fields' "the book of love" on top, but it might have been different another year] – also asked us to pick the year's top three live acts.

that's always a hard one, and maybe even more so since i saw more live music this year than possibly ever, thanks to a steady stream of CP assignments. robyn came pretty quickly to mind – her august show with kelis at the trocadero was the apotheosis of an emphatically summer-pop-summer, and a great reminder that she's as much of an effortless bad-ass as a performer as she is as a record-maker. (one particularly brilliant bit of stagecraft: eating a banana during the lengthy build-up of "don't fucking tell me what to do" – finishing in time to deliver just the title hook vocal live – in, if this is possible, a relatively non-sexualized, or other-than-sexualized fashion.) it also showed a fairly dramatic progression from the intimacy and simplicity of the first time i saw her into a dazzling, larger-than-life-feeling pop-star spectacle, though the difference was as much about a clear shift in her way of relating to the stage and the audience as added production fireworks (not to mention the perhaps-unfortunately ballad-free setlist.) will be interesting to see how that evolves when she comes back to play an even larger venue, the electric factory, in february. anywhow, a world-class performer, no question.

i'd thought about lcd soundsytem (whom, like fellow top-tenners joanna newsom and vampire weekend, i saw for both the first and second time this year) until i remembered about mayer hawthorne [& the county], from this vantage point easily my favorite new artist of 2009 [and that's not even accounting for the weirdly lackluster live performances of jj and the very best], whom i saw for the first-through-fourth times this year, at four substantially different venues [the most recent time, regrettably and frustratingly preventably, occasioned my missing a chance to see easily my favorite new artist of 2010, allo darlin', for the second time – but first real-full time – all in one day...], and he consistently killed it every time. the mayer hawthorne show is a well-oiled, spit-polished thing of beauty, and those four performances were far more similar than they were distinct [though the latest included some very exciting sneak previews of his new material], but i hardly minded the chance to re-experience it.

for the third slot, i picked a band i'd just seen, and really only recently listened to: stornoway, about whom i wrote this preview for city paper. the first two (and best) songs on their debut album, beachcomber's windowsill – which probably oversell the extent to which they can be categorized as "indie-pop" – bookended a set that demonstrated both rock-solid chops (instrumental and vocal) and considerable musical range, from moody, arty chamber-ish pieces (some of it verging on slightly tedious) to straight-up (and very british) folk (including a really lovely new one, "november song," performed solo and acoustic by frontman brian briggs) to a surprising amount of rocking out, particularly on the big swelling codas to a few songs. there was also briggs' endearingly nervous/nerdy banter, including recitations of inventions made in philadelphia (the slinky, lemon meringue pie...) but the best part was almost certainly the two-song encore, performed entirely unplugged and un-mic'd, which elicited some of the most genuinely enthusiastic crowd-love i've witnessed in a while. [videos of the encore songs are here and here, thanks to my cp compadres.] it was truly a heartwarming feeling to be in that crowd.

let alone recapping the year in live music, this past week alone has been stellar. last friday i watched two fake-local groups – my buddy tom's band via audio and their piano-popping pals jukebox the ghost [aka cutebox the most] – sock-rock a fun-happy beatles-loving crowd that seemed to consist primarily of teens and their parents, some of them in white astro-jumpsuits, with (respectively) songs about slacking, godzilla, pitch-corrected divas, and babymaking, as well as some lovably dopey banter and a frenzied rendition of "what's this" from the nightmare before christmas (also glad i stuck around for the night-closing panda-monium-inducing team-up cure cover.)

on sunday i saw the utterly ineffable nellie mckay kick some life into the bewilderingly all-over-the-place tunes from her new album – from the latin-kitsch/broadway melodrama "¡bodega!" to the meat-is-murder "unknown reggae" – as well as a bunch of the doris day numbers (and some other assorted jazz standards), a few old faves ("dog song"! "sari"!), a possibly new (?), typically beautiful/insane seasonal political number – an anti-christmas tree eco-rant inexplicably wrapped around a broken-hearted love song – and a wtf tom waits cover (awesomely, if unsurprisingly, she can do a pitch-perfect waitsian growl.) i think this was the first time i'd seen her play with a band, a trio of game if non-smiling jazzbos who set a highly amusing contrast to her preposterous, precociously giddy/girlish and befuddlingly anachronistic stage presence. her albums may be (increasingly) hit-or-miss, but her performances never fail to remind me of her truly limitless talent, eccentricity and charm. it's hard to put it words.

finally, last tuesday i trekked up to hoboken with rae to catch night seven of yo la tengo's annual 8 nights of hanukkah at maxwells [ira's account is there], something i hadn't done since 2002, when the band were very memorably joined by ray davies (whom, incidentally, i would have seen in boston over thanksgiving if hadn't, very sadly had to cancel for health reasons...) this show was similarly a pretty transcendent experience, if only because it reminded me how much i dearly love this band (you wouldn't think i'd forget something like that, having written something like this, and i didn't, really, but i maybe hadn't thought about it in a while...)

this is what they played:

HOME = "feels like going home," from ...beat your ass, a really sweet gentle one which i really should have included on home, why did i not do that? [wasn't] BORN 2 FOLLOW is a carole king cover that i didn't know, but almost of the others were familiar YLT favorites, really a solid setlist of classics, if maybe a tad obvious, but just perfect for not having seen them in a while... definitely heavy on the soft pretty ones (season of the shark, last days of disco, shadows, little eyes, black flowers) but that's kinda how i like it, and helped set off the totally awesome noise/drone freakouts that bookended the set (the last and first tunes, respectively from the last two albums.)

they were joined for their entire set (except for "tom courtenay," since he broke a string wailing out during the late-set punk-out patch) by the amazing mr. nels cline (of wilco, nels cline singers, and assorted out-jazz excursions), in a rad eyeball t-shirt, which made the whole thing all that much more awesome, even if he sometimes made it hard to see georgia. then they came back and played two ramones covers – "pet sematary" (james on vox!) and "sheena is a punk rocker") – and were joined by openers bonnie prince billy + the cairo gang (who were also awesome! even though i barely recognized any of the songs they played...need to brush up on billy's last half-decade) to close the night with lou reed's "heavenly arms" (which tbh i only know from el perro del mar's closer.) heavenly indeed...

sxsw roundup pt. 3: i'm not that into music

friday

started off (musically) where thursday had ended - with billy bragg, this time doing a quick three-song set for live broadcast on "free yr radio," though i'm still not sure what that is despite the considerable amount of time i spent in contact with their promotional machinery. this time nava was even awake. there was a delicious soundcheck tease of "to have and have not," and maybe something else, but the set was mostly a repeat of two new songs he'd done last night - the not-quite-xtc-ish "farmboy" and the allegedly title-less clash one - and some of the same stories to boot, but he did treat us with an awesome "waiting for the great leap forward," which he introduced as a sing-along despite then changing nearly every line from the recorded version, including some special "sxsw exclusive" versions. good man good man. oh yeah, we also heard/saw she & him (m. ward and zooey deschanel) play there, though we were mostly too busy making buttons to notice. (i made robyn and jens buttons.)

and then we saw jens! (lekman). well, first peter moren, of björn & john sxsw ubiquity fame. was cute - he did one pb+j song, "paris 2004" - but also just kind of odd as a solo performer. he just walked off stage towards the end of his last song. was hoping for a full-band lekman set, but he just had one female accompanist (on bongos) instead of five. that turned out to be just fine though, making it a little more intimate and off-the-cuff feeling. he's just as charismatic and endearing a performer as bragg is, maybe even more so, and his banter feels less stagy and scripted - he tells the same stories over and over too of course, but he at least acknowledges it, in the unmistakably jonathan richman-esque self-dialogue intro to "postcard to nina" ("tell that story just one more time, jens." besides "nina," he did most of the highlights from kortedala (though not my faves, "shirin" and, what i was really hoping for, "your arms around me,") as well as "black cab" and the so-so "hammer hill." best part, maybe, was the sparse, kalimba-accompanied arthur russell cover ("a little lost"), though bobby didn't like it. but the set list is really beside the point, since just watching him smile to himself is as subtly thrilling as about anything you could hope hear.

had promised nava we'd take it easy on the music, or at least the rushing-around, for the afternoon, so after finishing up our semi-free beers and failing to win shoes playing washers (?) there at club de ville we headed to a parking garage cross-town to see about getting some ice cream and swimming pool action. of course. well turned out the ice cream cost and the pool line was daunting, so we stayed in the shade and played some shuffleboard - five games of it in fact, of three rounds each, which was enough to convince them we deserved free shoes even though we couldn't quite squeak out three wins in a row (even playing against bobby who was attempting to throw his games.) the vaunted santogold was also playing in the parking lot (as well as szwerogold), but we didn't really pay any attention to her, so i can't comment on that.

it was a pretty low-key evening musically as well, though i did bop around a bit at the beginning - catching five or six songs from jeff hanson (including my hands-down favorite, "this time it will"), whose impossibly high, frail, angelic voice (sadly, no match for the bar conversation and street noise wafting into emo's iv) makes for a pretty unsettling disconnect with his fairly pedestrian, quite burly, decidedly non-female physical presence; a couple extended jams from kelley stoltz, who may have some decent pop writing chops (i wouldn't know, as they weren't on display in the last ten-fifteen minutes of his set) but isn't quite good enough to justify so much aimless rocking out, harmonica-slide or no; and a perplexing tune or two from the ruby suns, who dressed like frolicking hippy schoolchildren (basically, like my twelve-year-old self - complete with flowing tie-dye shirts and a plastic bone necklace - n.b. the photo above is actually from a different show), acted like they hadn't quite grasped the concept of performing for an audience, and played as though they could have used a few more band members, multitasking instruments and sometimes switching mid-song for no apparent reason. well, i'll withhold judgment until i hear the record, i guess.

i'm ready to pass judgment, however, on the ballyhooed MGMT, whose 10pm set at stubb's was probably the most disappointing of the acts i was somewhat actively anticipating. actually i guess my expectations weren't too high, since the album had so far failed to excite me much. in fairness, i think the sound was pretty poorly mixed, as you could barely hear the keyboard parts (which are definitely the group's strongest point), but they seemed pretty content being a parody of a big-hair arena rock band (this must have been one of the biggest crowds they'd ever played to.) they seemed so young up there, like a bunch of play-acting kids - which is all well and good, but the songs just didn't seem to be there. "time to pretend" and "electric feel," pretty much the only songs i recognized, sounded good enough, but the wankery:melody ratio everywhere else was way off-balance. and they pointedly, it seemed to me, didn't play their best song, "kids," which would have gone a long way to appeasing me (since i was more or less counting on it as pay off for a hard hour or standing on my feet.) on the other hand, the beer-swigging dudes in front of me said the band was awesome, so what do i know?

from there we hedged our bets and lost out both at getting into dr. dog/tapes and tapes (way-long line) and a-trak/cool kids (could maybe have made it, but not in time to be worth it), though i did run into aaron of inflight rock band/throw me the statue. anyway, we made sure to be at pangaea early enough to avoid the rush for robyn that, as far as i could tell, never quite materialized. like amy phillips, we rolled into the (creepily glitzy) club just as the vines were hammering out a clueless cover of "ms. jackson" that after a minute came of less as painful than just plain hilarious. then they yammered something about just wanting to make a lot of money and get all the girls, played one final song (whether it was one of their hits i really couldn't tell ya), during which at one point the lead singer sort of fell over or threw himself into the drum set or something. and you know, i've gotta say i like their style of rocking out a lot more than i like mgmt's - at least it's got some pop, some pep, some rhythmic propulsion, and the songs are short.

but whatever. we were there for robyn, robyn robyn robyn. mmhm. they futzed around with her equipment for a long time, and then she started playing. not sure if the tech issues had truly been fixed - it sounded okay mostly though her vox were too quiet (in her monitor too, after several requests), and one on song ("handle me"?) the bass was suddenly chest-shakingly intense, but she still seemed kinda distracted and annoyed about it, or about something. yeah, robyn's a total pro, and she still put on a great show and got everybody riled up and smiled up, and i'm sure if there were any doubters there they were converted, so in that sense she did what she came there for, but it still seemed like a shamefully badly organized affair. this was her only showcase (though she also played at an invite-only day party in cedar street where apparently she had to do much of the set without the electronics, and at the perez hilton party - i wonder how well the tech worked there), and they couldn't even get her to soundcheck properly or figure out in advance how to make her (seemingly quite involved) setup work?

eh, i know i'm just spoiled for having gotten to see her at her first u.s. gig in new york, but there was strikingly little of the mutual warmth and magic that marked that show here - she barely talked to us, for one thing. no major changes to the set list either, though the mid-set covers medley was pretty nice, including not just "push it" and "sexual eruption" but a few more too that i can't think of now, though the latter was definitely the highlight, as she reworded it: "i'm gonna take my time...i'm gonna get mine before he gets his." i did notice that "dream on" was on the set list, but they cut it due to time constraints (presumably.) too bad... i know, i shouldn't complain, right?

the night was not quite over: we bundled up our energy and headed a little ways away to the blender magazine party, a decidedly hip affair that was going down in a warehouse in an unassuming residential area. the free drinks (pineapple vanilla vodka) and assorted schwag were nice enough, but what we really went for was the dance party, and although the notoriously reserved sxsw crowd did take a little warming up, they did eventually get into it. as well they better damn well should have, considering who was rocking the decks: diplo (philly's own!) and a-trak (maybe my fave dj, both live and on the stellar dirty south dance mixtape), trying out a one-time-only (?) experiment of switching back and forth after one track apiece. i quickly lost track of who was playing what, and it really didn't matter, as it all flowed gorgeously, with plenty of my own favorites getting aired (notably lrd's "jacques your body," stone roses' "fools' gold," de la soul's "saturdays," missy's "pass the dutch") along with lots more i didn't recognize. sadly, this party too had to be cut short, ending at 4am, maybe an hour and fifteen after d and a had taken the stage (and by which point they'd been joined by, in addition to the pottymouthed emcee blaqqstar, kid sister and a host of others whose relevance it was difficult to gauge.) damn. good to shake it with those guys.

GirlPop SuperWeekendbeginning

Miley Megaplex and Robyn RSS: Carlsson and Cyrus mug for cameras in the bluescreen limelight

I was in SuperNYC, home of the just-crowned SuperGiant SuperBowlers, for the SuperEst pair of weekdays in recent memory, at least in terms of sibling-friendly girl-pop Event events: SuperMonday (formerly known as monday) and SuperTuesday (also known as SuperStalemate-day.)

In order of SuperAwesomeness and reverse chronology, ST was the day of Robyn's FIRST EVER U.S. PERFORMANCE, which was, yeah, wow, has already been written about on all those blogs that people actually read (that's just one but it links to all the others), and you can also watch videos of it there and here. It's a little weird to be so in sync with the blogosphere like this - basically they already said most of the things I would say: she's adorable and darling and immensely charismatic and funny and sexy and her voice is fantastic; the crowd was tremendously pumped up and giddy and cheered her every step and sang along with every word (Lillie and my sister and I were standing less than ten feet from the stage, roughly the third row back and center); and Robyn in return was clearly very genuinely touched by our enthusiasm (and seemingly pretty surprised by the extent of it), so the whole thing was basically a big 'ol love fest.

All of that you can glean from the videos and endless stream of photos (we were standing right next to the guy who took those, who turns out to be this idolator poll artist-category jokester) - I took some too, including pretty good footage of her getting down and freaky in the latter half of "Cobrastyle" (after this part), so maybe I'll post those, but maybe not b/c my camera pretty much sucks.

I dunno, if you haven't liked listening to her music (and you've at least tried), and if watching her dance and sing and vamp and giggle doesn't convince you that she's SuperSpecial, I guess you just don't get it, in which case I'm sorry for you but I don't wanna argue. I don't necessarily love her visual aesthetic these days, though the hardcore hairstyle is admittedly kinda cute - "pixie-ish" as people seem to be saying - in person. Her outfit was, as you'll have seen, nothing particularly outstanding, but she did make excellent use of her kind of odd two-shirt setup to emphasize her impressive ribcage-isolation dancing and to mime heartbeats (on "With Every...", but also, between-songs, to indicate the intensity of her fan-love and/or adrenaline.) Also, her skirt occasioned an amusingly non-rhyming lyric alteration to "Konichiwa Bitches" - like many of her songs (notably "you won't get with this you see..."), that one has lots of opportunities for demonstrative body-clutching show-and-tell.

Predictably, goofs like that song and her Prince and Teddybears covers were crowd-pleasers (and snagged most of the YouTube coverage), and of course I loved 'em too, though to me they're actually the least interesting aspect of her music (I still don't really get why "Konichiwa Bitches" has been the lead single in English-speaking lands, jokily literal viral video notwithstanding. It's just too tossed-off, too close to SuperFicial Fannypack territory to even work as a particularly good novelty hit, despite the inspired "Close to Me" rip.) The monstrous, vitriolic straight-up dance bangers ("Crash and Burn Girl," "Handle Me" - she said "nazi" forward in case you were wondering, lyrically paranoid "Who's That Girl") were also predictably huge and awesome, and though I still haven't quite warmed to the electro rework of "Bum Like You" (inspired by Bukowski, she said) it was still all good. And previous album highlight "Keep This Fire Burning" was an unexpected treat.

Of course the two (hyper)ballad(esque)--singles - the album's actual real hits - made appearances, and were stunningly gorgeous: "With Every Heartbeat" hitting hard even though she mostly sang it to a backing track (those heavenly mid-section strings mostly obscured by crowd noise but whatever), while "Be Mine!" (such a stupid/clever grammatical joke that title is!) was, now-famously, aired twice, once with guitar (!) and then, in the encore, just piano - I'd thought it was going to be "Eclipse" at first, the chorus progression being similar. But otherwise the quieter, sweeter side of her repertoire was mostly absent - no "Robotboy" (not even in its electro two-step reconstruction), much to Martha's dismay, none of the heartfelt closing trio (I'd been singing the heartbreaking "Eclipse" on my way to the venue, but a souled-out "Should Have Known" would have been great too.)

Of course, these are just petty gripes - I really, really can't say anything bad about the show; it didn't even feel especially short (and it almost was, at just shy of an hour include three-song encore.) The highest highlight, if there was one - and I wouldn't have expected this - may well have been the slyly minimal blip-blop reworking of her '97 smash "Show Me Love." (The screen's blurry and the audio's pretty awful, but You can at least get a sense of it here.) I was also surprised and impressed by how much of the audience seemed to be fans from a decade ago (when she first came to the U.S., but didn't actually perform - I believe is what she said) who were expecting to hear more of her old stuff.

Basically - the reason why I wasn't gonna blog too much about the show, and also why I've ended up doing it anyway - all the hoopla is beside the point. It's just her, yknow - like Marit and Devon and Cex and JoJo Richman and other performers who have absolutely and completely charmed me concert, the greatness of her music doesn't exactly necessarily entail the magnitude of her personal magnetism (it's still plenty great on its own), but seeing her in person does make you realize how much that charisma elevates and imbues her music - making it so seemingly irresistable that I'm at a loss to understand why all people aren't instantly won over by her, genre preferences notwithstanding.

[ETA: Just one more bit about Robyn, which oddly hasn't been the topic of much blog speculation lately: I think it's time to start speculating about Robyn's chances for actual crossover success here in the states. She's obviously got a lot of momentum going for her right now - it was more than palpable Tuesday night. She recently signed to Cherry Tree, the sub-label of Interscope which also boasts Feist, The Fratellis, The Feeling, Rooney, and The Pipettes, among others. Not sure how actually-successful those last couple have been 'round these parts, but at least the first gained some major notoriety in oh-seven. Seems the Cherry Tree folks have a knack for getting their artists hott licensing deals, at least in iPod spots - "Handle Me" would be a natural, no? In any case, if quirky Brits like Lily and Amy can make it (and now maybe the Knash?), seriously, what's to stop Robyn, who's already conquered the hearts of the UK without a homefield advantage, and who's already had major hits here, and is already reaching out to about five audiences at once via collabs with Snoop Dogg, Britney, etc. I mean, just saying.]

Speaking of Cex, opener Drop the Lime, whom none of the blogs seem to be mentioning, was distinctly reminiscent of that occasionally-missed Baltimorean badboy, particularly in his physical mannerisms and campy haughty-hotty performance style (they're also - former? - labelmates on Tigerbeat6.) He was admittedly an odd choice for this show, and I can't say the crowd was entirely with him, but I enjoyed his set considerably. He announced at the beginning that he'd be playing "bass music" - I guess you could call it that, but it was also more varied and inventive than that maybe suggests - hard-hitting breakbeats and fuzzed out bassy spasms, sure (which he was manipulating live via laptop, i think entirely, but using turntables and a fair amount of mixer EQ-tweaking), but with enough pop-eared flourishes to keep it interesting, and intermittently (every other song, maybe more), live, unexpectedly soulful vocals: too "scene-y" said my sis, and admittedly strained in a potentially obnoxious way, but still with an appealing R&B grit'n'growl.

Somewhere between Cex and Jamie Lidell, then - perhaps triangulated with some particularly poppy dubstep/grime producer - but more dancey than either - and just possibly more melodic too in his song-inclined moments (the vocals were mixed a little too quiet for them to really dominate, and I wish I could have heard his sincere-seeming, even sentimental lyrics better, but there seemed to be some serious hooks in there.) Definitely interested to check out his recordings. And the SuperSuave, head-to-ankle black formal wear plus white shoes look was pretty killer.

One final note - the brand-new Highline Ballroom was a very nice place indeed, but what absolutely clinched it as a fantastic venue was the fact that, rather than turning on the lights and ushering us out after the show, like pretty much every concert I've ever been to, the red-haired lady DJ kept right on spinning and a good half of the crowd stuck around to dance, to gleefully glitchily remixes of "Glamorous," "Umbrella," "D.A.N.C.E." (still not too overplayed for NYC? wow!), that 'use your love tonight' song (whose recent ubiquity continues to befuddle me, especially as I can never remember who it's by [The Outfield?], though that factoid-dense wiki-stub graf offers some clues), a thankfully un-mixed "Piece of Me," and an inspired live (pretty sure) mash-up of "Miura" and "When Doves Cry." ok.

MEANWHILE.........nothing much was happening in the primary results. big whoop. BUT, on SuperMonday, whilst my hunny and her bro were watching possibly-already-legendary writerless talk-show throwdown tussle at the Daily Show taping, me and my sis went to the probably-definitely-already-legendary, record-breaking, ridiculously-championed, even impressively-reviewed Digital THREE-D spectacular that is Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert. The movie, that is.

Oh man, it was SuperGood! I mean, I'm not going to pretend that it would absolutely appeal to everyone, as I do/will w/r/t Robyn. But, like...it is actually good, no joke. And you might like it even if you think you wouldn't. It's got a lot to offer - top-notch, grade-A examples of all of the following:

1. Bubblegum-catchy but still hard-rocking power-pop (and the occasional countryish ballad)
2. Sweet, wholesome, charismatic young women (Miley's got a tiny bit of rebellion in her persona, sure - this is rock'n'roll after all - but neither as herself nor [much less] as Hannah Montana is she particularly sexualized - refreshingly and not a little surprisingly) and men (the Jonas brothers, who show up for a couple songs in the middle to compete goodnaturedly [along with Miley, naturally] for the hearts of the girls in the crowd, which is to say effectively everybody in the crowd)
3. Actually well-conceived concert filmmaking
4. Flashy, high-tech audio-visual spectacles that actually seem fresh and innovative (at least if you haven't seen the small handful of digital 3D films that have been released - the stuff's pretty impressive), and are only partially reliant on gimmickry
5. Mass cultural phenomena

If any of those things sound appealing, you would almost certainly find something to enjoy here. I like them all, roughly in that order, and so does my sister - at least, she likes the first two, which are the most important part - and it's great to have at least somebody who'll come with me to revel in them - driving to NYC all the way from Rochester no less. Maybe if I'd given out more copies of the three-volume (and counting) Ladies Love girl-pop mix series (of which she's been the sole consistent recipient) I would have a few more converts... but I'm not quite sure. (If you're interested let me know... I might just custom-tailor you a copy.)

There's lots more to be said about Miley/Hannah - who, by the way has just jumped up to #17 on the billboard hot 100 with her "underground" smash "See You Again" - but I'm not up to saying it right now. If you're at all interested, I highly recommend the movie, even given its admittedly outrageous ticket price (on the upside, it's a rare opportunity to see a movie in New York City that's not any more expensive than it would be anywhere else in the country.) It was supposed to close its limited one-week run tonight, but unsurprisingly I guess it has been extended. So we shall see.

dancing about arkitektur

i've spent the last day and a half, roughly (while frank kogan was looking at taylor swift's dresses) listening to, investigating and writing about the ark, a swedish glam-rock/pop group who are just possibly one of the greatest bands of the decade. i don't particularly want to say anything about them right now, since i've just written well over two-thousand words, cumulatively, about their four excellent full-length albums and one mediocre pre-fame EP. not at all a bad way to make a hundred bucks, though not an especially efficient one. those links don't work yet - that is, my reviews aren't up - but they should be soon (although with amg's buggy and byzantine navigational system it's hard to be too sure about anything - supposedly the url "tokens" change from time to time, which just seems totally bizarre to me.)

they are fascinating, though, and as usual it's interesting to find out what sort of things their fans have to say about them. their third album (in my opinion their absolute masterpiece, though maybe just because it's what i heard and loved first) was a partial stylistic departure, while their most recent was either a retreat or a regression or a return-to-form, depending on your point of view - i'd go with the former but a lot of fans feel the opposite. i'm still not entirely sure how i feel about it, but considering it in the context of their whole career definitely changes things. it's interesting to try to reconcile that in an 'authoritative' review. a lot conditional clauses. (obviously my opinions hold ultimate sway in the reckoning, but i think it's good to represent other prevalent perspectives.)

also, i must say that ola salo, the ark's iconic, idiosyncratic, palindromic, perfervid, bisexual, brilliant, flamboyant firebrand of a lead singer and songwriter, is a truly amazing guy - why don't we have superstars like that in our country? (any more? mostly?) i highly recommend the interview with him here, for anybody interested in gaining insight into the band. (clicking will download as a pdf.)

incidentally salo is evidently best known to wikipedia (to americans generally?) for once having made a throwaway joke about george bush. he's probably best known to readers of pitchfork and stylus (who have never reviewed an ark album!) or to listeners of my ¡OhSiX! mix as the guy in this song (by robyn, though actually by christian falke - and cowritten by k. åhlund - original/video is here but they're not in it), in which he is totally underused and wasted, singing in an uncharacteristically low register and masked by robyn's vocal the whole time.

here they both are:


speaking of robyn, who is the other absolute visionary genius of pop music that sweden has produced this century ... except wait i forgot about dreijer & dreijer and karlsson & windbag [remember?]... okay well, anyway, did i ever mention that she's coming to america?? and i'm gonna see her, in, um, a week and a half. and there are still tickets available for her new york show - wtf, i thought ny'ers were supposed to be hip or something. well i'll guess i'll have more to say about that later. (in the meantime, you can help her throw red things at bees here - while listening to electro remix of "bee mine"...get it??)

sparks & spears & sophie & so on (cont.)

a couple more things, still riffing on jordin sparks.

first, to correct an oversight (you might want to read the last post first if you haven't...if you care...if you dare): even though it was mentioned on the teenpop thread, i neglected to note/recognize that "see my side," which i mentioned as by far the sweetest (almost wrote sweedest, ha) of the recent bloodshy/avant crop, was written not just by karlsson/winnberg and åhlund, but also by r. carlsson. which is of course (not me, though i am also r, carl's son!) but robyn, of robyn fame. (of whom discogs has more images than it has credits - well, under that version of her name.) (sorry tapestore - is that someone i know? - but i'm pretty sure the connection probably came via bloodshy and windbag, er, i mean, since apparently they'd already submitted the track to britney. nice thought though - let's keep working on that.)

which, come to think of it, makes perfect sense, because it has an extremely similar sensibility to robyn's heartbreaking closing trilogy, particularly "eclipse" and "anytime you like" - it's not quite as achingly gorgeous as those two, but it's close, and i can imagine robyn doing a pretty stunning rendition of it. (actually, as long as we're getting particular, robyn didn't write "eclipse" - she didn't write "robotboy" or "handle me" either; åhlund did. she does have the third co-credit on "anything you like" with two people i don't know - how significant do we think order of credits is? but the point holds.)

meanwhile, "young and in love" is (in addition to b&a and their frequent crony h. jonback) by cathy dennis, who is a bona fide legend in this game - behind hits from basically everyone in uk chartpop starting with spice girls and s club 7, peaking with kylie, and recently sugababes ("about you now" - with dr. luke!), sophie ellis-bextor ("catch you") and roisin m. (non-album tracks only) and a legit artist in her own right. her previous co-writes with b&a include rach stevens' "sweet dreams (my lax)" and, oh yeah, "toxic."

besides jordin's album, i've been following the links and connecting the dots for sophie la-bex's trip the light fantastic and for kylie's x, both of which i've only started to listen to recently, and about which i feel much greater capacity to care. which is partly because they're almost certainly better albums; partly because i have a much better sense of who sophie and kylie are, as artists and people - tho you can blame that on the no tv if you like i guess. how much those two factors are linked is a crucial question i want to get into a little bit later. anyway, trip has cathy dennis/greg kurstin (who till has no wiki entry, amazingly), pascal gabriel and hannah robinson, xenomania, the guys from sneaker pimps, the feeling, and the b-52s...though, imporantly, sophie has a co-credit on every song except the dennis/kurstin "catch you." x, with minogue credits on just over half the tracks, has dennis, hansen/jeberg, calvin harris, freemasons, karlsson/winnberg with karen poole (of alisha's attic), kurstin/minogue/poole, and, if wikipedia is to be believed, which i doubt, kurstin producing a bloodshy/avant/poole/minogue/quant co-write.

also kat mcphee's album, which in stark contrast to sparks' has no scandinavian names - and the difference is quite audible - but does have six kara dioguardi credits and six nate hills credits (five overlap.) and "open toes" is written/produced by the clutch (along with those two and kat herself), who also did "ice box," "like a boy," dave's two favorite keke palmer songs, and blackout's "radar" and "freakshow" (the latter, interestingly, britney's only writing credit on the album)... both of which are bloodshy/avant tracks, not danja tracks.

which is interesting, because it means the scandinavians electro-pop crew were working together with the american r&b crew (the clutch, which seems to be a slightly loose collective, are timbaland proteges or something; at least they include keri hilson.) though knows how directly they were working together - actually, the liners reveal that all of the bloodshy tracks were recorded partly in the states as well as in stockholm. well whatever.

it's really hard to say what any of this means. how do these songs get written? how much of the way credits are presented is based on legal/contractual considerations that don't necessarily accurately reflect the creative process? in the vast majority of the cases i've been looking at, the producer or producers are credited as among the writers of a given song. which in plenty of cases probably makes sense, especially for sonically inventive/electronic-based music where so much of the song's essence comes from the production rather than the writing per se. but to what extent are songs usually finished before they go into the studio; or to what extent do "'songs" sometimes get fleshed out after the creation of the beats and backing arrangements (which counts as "production.")

i've been fairly focused on songwriting credits lately, in my amg pieces as well as these posts here - calling attention to it, for various reasons, in my reviews of albums by the veronicas, rachel stevens, skye sweetnam, and marit larsen - and while it makes sense as an interpretive key of sorts, it also feels strange to be so fixated on. i do feel in some ways that my interest in pop has been taking a turn for the academic ... that at least a lot of the recent stuff i've been listening to hasn't managed to excite me quite as much on a musical level as some things in the past - or, certainly, to engage me on an emotional level.

indeed, as much as i enjoyed listening to and familiarizing myself with the skye and 'ronnies albums for review - and i stand by my (respectively) generally positive and enthusiastic assessments of them - neither has shown exceptional sticking power. certainly neither has compelled me (so far anyway) to keep listening and re-examining the way rachel and marit's albums have (in both cases i came to fundamentally new shades of understanding in these most recent revisitations.) meanwhile there's been this whole series of teen-pop and dance-pop albums - most of which, admittedly, i only have as itunes playlists - that i've been enjoying, to a greater or lesser extent, but that have so far largely failed to stand out as especially distinctive. that'd include the new ones by sugababes, roisin murphy, keke palmer, ashley tisdale, amy diamond, vanessa hudgens, and the aforementioned sparks, mcphee, kylie and sophie e-b, and aly + aj (though that one is making major strides - probably shouldn't be on this list anymore.)

admittedly many of these will require more listening, though some are simply not going to be worth the effort - my overwhelming impression of a lot of this is that it's, well, overwhelming - just too much, too fast, that's all impressively good but not quite great. and though of course there are some stylistic distinctions among these various albums, i'm struggling to distinguish them more fully. so i guess i may be delving into the minutiae of credit information, in part, as a shortcut to understanding them.

but i'm also on some level trying to link these lackluster impressions to the effect of having too many cooks, as it were. as fascinating as it is to realize how incestuous and intertangled the world of mainstream pop/r&b/dance/etc. can be - especially when the behind-the-scenes players intermingle internationally (well, across scandinavia, the u.k. and the u.s.) even though the public personas often don't - it grows increasingly harder to know what to make of all this prodigious cross-collaborative output, let alone to keep the endless but recurring array of practitioners straight.

many of the albums i listed above have quite a hodge-podge of writers and producers working on various tracks, as i've sort of demonstrated in exhaustive detailed. insomniatic is a clear exception, and is decidedly stronger for it - as are the veronicas and skye album's (though the latter is pretty scattershot even with the same producers/writers on 9/12 tracks) - though it should be noted that all of these are much more pop/rock than anything else on the list, despite their dancy frills. (same goes for ashlee's two albums, primarily the work of the sorely missed simpson/dioguardi/shanks trifecta.)

some other (slightly less recent) albums that are primarily written and produced by the same people: linda sundblad's oh my god [all songs sundblad/karlsson - a different one - with a couple adding others - max martin on one, klas åhlund on "lose you"], sally shapiro's disco romance [the possibly fictional sally herself doesn't write anything, but mr. johan agebjörn wrote all but two songs and produced everything], and the work of bertine zetlitz, especially her last two albums, which were produced entirely by fred ball [aka pleasure] and written entirely by zetlitz/ball. (two people...made the whole album? is that even possible?) the shapiro album and zetlitz's rollerskating are two of my absolute favorite albums at them moment - and the sundblad's pretty great too - i'll hopefully have reviews for all three up on amg shortly.

so those are some scandinavians (there's also annie and robyn, both of whom are starting to get seriously overdue for new albums - but though they do co-write most of their material, neither of them write all of it, and both of their celebrated albums had a fair range of different producers involved, which is interesting to note in light of how auteurist their public personae tend to be.) then there's madonna's confessions on a dancefloor [all madge co-writes; all with stuart price and/or mirwais except for two bloodshy/avant tracks] and hilary duff's dignity [a handful of producers, including, hilariously, richard "humpty" vission, but 12 out of 14 cuts are by dioguardi/duff, often with the producer as a third co-credit] - both solid if not amazing, but certainly stylistically cohesive.

and then there's blackout. it's telling that this album has, by far, fewer producers (or, maybe more relevantly, fewer production teams) than any of spears' albums since her debut - either five or six, depending on how you count the clutch, but basically only two for 3/4 of the album. to recap: four tracks are produced by bloodshy and avant (two with the clutch co-producing) and five are produced by danja. that leaves one by the neptunes, one - "heaven on earth," very possibly my favorite track - with music by onetime (?) ambient electronica duo freescha and vocal production by kara dioguardi, and one - consensus weakest-link "ooh ooh baby" (though i kinda like it; possibly too bad they didn't actually sample the turtles) by dioguardi and "fredwreck" nasser, who also did something on the mcphee album. anyway, as i think i've established, it's quite cohesive sonically and consistent song-wise, and, well, it just keeps growing on me, even though my interest in it has relatively little to do with britney herself.

i'm happy to continue absenting myself from the controversy over the extent of her actual involvement, as fascinating as it is. as far as i'm concerned, as long as the job is done and done well, i'm not going to complain - and whoever it is that's behind blackout has accomplished something pretty remarkable, just by virtue of creating an album that stands out from this season's teeming pack. i will point out, however, that there is only one person listed as executive producer for this album. and that's britney, bitch.

one disclaimer, and one final question. just to be clear, i certainly wouldn't want to contend that a record needs to have a reasonably consolidated writing/production crew to work well as an album. my review of rachel stevens' come and get it - which just might be my personal yardstick for the entire genre - should make that evident enough (even though it's definitely not the album-iest album.) similarly, kylie's fever - an obvious touchstone of an '00s pop album if there ever was one - is cobbled together from a surprising array of talent (truly, surprising - i'd always assumed it wasn't so much, because the sound is so consistent, but nope.) and then, of course, i'll always have paris ... the presence of many sets of writers and producers did little to stop me from erecting a grand glittering interpretive edifice to its conceptual perfection. and i don't think i need to say any more about that.

but as a general rule - and as one would imagine - albums with fewer writers and producers do tend to hold together better as albums. the exceptions generally have some other overarching unifying element - a clear shared stylistic approach, or a front-person with enough individuality, vocal/lyrical distinctness, or sheer force of personality to make everything hold together.

so my question is this: what is the historical context for albums with songs by many different writers and producers? i know it's a longstanding pop tradition in some ways (tin-pan-alley, brill building, motown, what-have-you), but it seems like there's been a resurgence and an intensification, probably just within the last 15-20 years, and possibly increasingly over that span. it seems at least partly related to the rise of hip-hop and r&b (and even in those genres it has gotten far more pronounced - even when the black album came out it was a big deal that each track was by a different producer, which i guess would still be noteworthy today, but i think less so.) if there are discernable trends along these lines, can we link them to other trends in the nature of pop albums?

and, more broadly, what else can be said about the historical development of the pop album? admittedly, it's a somewhat academic, limited question - in pop, albums will always be secondary to singles and songs - but as both a confirmed poptimist and albumist, it speaks to a very present tension in my musical exploration, and as year-end album list time grows ever nearer, it's also timely one - and i'm gonna keep on teasing it out.