Review Round-Up: August-December 2014

The 2 Bears
The Night Is Young

The music that Raf Rundell and Hot Chip's Joe Goddard make as The 2 Bears draws deeply and lovingly on classicist dance forms – house music, most emphatically, but also UK garage, dub and dancehall reggae – with enough soul, variety and cheery playfulness to win over the staunchest technophobes.  The Night Is Young (Southern Fried), album number two for the London duo, packs in a tremendous array of sounds, styles and voices (toasters, divas, psychotropic ramblers and the sweet-voiced South African Sbusiso, to name a few); an almost Basement Jaxx-like level of polychromatic sonic detailing which makes it rather more disjointed than its superb predecessor, despite comparable highs.  Even the seemingly straight-ahead dance-pop banger "Angel (Touch Me)," built around an indelibly tasty piano lick, somehow manages a detour into tribal African village ambience.  While things get a touch unfocused in the final stretch, the Hot Chip chaps are always good for a grandly uplifting closing statement, and the gently expansive, marimba-led title track fits that bill beautifully.

Basement Jaxx
Junto

Junto is a jolt; a juggernaut; an absolute joyride.  Per the sleek, white-dominated cover, it's the most streamlined, frill-free BJaxx album ever: not without its allotment of sound-stuffed, multi-culti diversions – check Mykki Blanco-featuring breakbeat-ragga detour "Buffalo," or "Mermaid of Salinas"' delirious Carnaval vibes – but otherwise a relatively uncluttered mainline of diva-house bangers and soulful dance-pop, complete with the requisite arms-in-the-air comedown closer.  It's also the closest they've come to the ecstatic, hedonistic rush of their holy initial trinity in the decade since.  Simon Ratcliffe and Felix Buxton never really went away – they've maintained a steady trickle of singles while engaging in go-to career dalliances (a film score, an orchestral collaboration) – but it's been five years since their last proper full-length, during which their influence – on post-dubstep "maximalists" Rustie and TNGHT and, especially, pop-friendly dance acts like Disclosure, Rudimental, Calvin Harris and Hercules & Love Affair – has never been easier to spot.  So this return feels perfectly timed, with only one major quibble: the album's not out until late August, when by rights it should be soundtracking beach-bound cruises and poolside fiestas all summer long.

The Juan MacLean
In A Dream

The Juan Maclean play the long game; they won't be rushed.  Now by some margin DFA's longest-running act, this is only their third album since their debut singles helped inaugurate the label back in 2002 – and, per their usual habit, its high points are all epics.  Indeed, there's practically an inverse relationship here between track length and quality.  The album opens with eight drama-filled minutes of Moroderesque robo-disco and closes with ten of darkly romantic, pillowy-soft tech-house; both bookends are majestically expansive and inviting.  Atypically fluid, almost Balearic slo-mo funker "Running Back To You" and the burbling, crisply catchy "A Simple Design" – one of several showcases for Nancy Whang's always-captivating vocals – are seven minutes and pretty great.  Most of the sub-6:30-cuts, though – some relatively undistinguished synthpop stabs, plus "Here I Am"'s improbably handbaggy house – fall weirdly flat,.  It's not that these guys can't do tight, compelling pop hooks – the longer cuts here have some great ones – it's just the kind they craft seem to work best with plenty of room to wriggle and stretch.

Simian Mobile Disco
Whorl

From the era-defining, indie-friendly electro-house of their debut to Temporary Pleasure's misbegotten populism, Delicacies' hard techno turn and Unpatterns' subtler, spirit-ridden shadings – not to mention their freewheeling DJ mixes and last year's fantastic, career-glossing Live – Simian Mobile Disco have, stylistically speaking, more than lived up to the middle third of their name.  Whorl, also essentially an in-concert recording – cut before an audience in the California desert using a small, all-analog hardware setup – is yet another marked departure.  It's easily the duo's most abstract and exploratory work yet, building on and veering beyond their recent focus on acid-flecked techno, and their first outing unambiguously geared toward listening rather than body-moving.  Which isn't to say it doesn't get there: "Hypnick Jerk"'s sinuous minimalism and "Dervish"'s filtered, martial stutter-funk offer two of their most infectious, nuanced grooves.  But it's a patient, meandering journey, punctuated by spacey synth-wash ambience (it's almost ten minutes before the first beat drops.)  Where Unpatterns was an assured culmination, this is a fresh, auspicious strike into new territory from a group that deserves far more recognition.

JJ
V

jj – as they were then styled – emerged mid-2009 with a fully-formed, fascinating aesthetic: all white everything (save the occasional blood splatter), a hazy, tenderly oblique indie-pop sound built around scintillating synths, billowing acoustic guitars and unpredictable samples, and an unabashed, twee-style infatuation with thuggish US hip-hop, all wrapped around Elin Kastlander's drowsy, druggy, offhandedly luscious vocals.  Within 18 months, they'd mined two delicate, magical albums from this inimitable template, plus the deliriously plunderphonic/swag-jacking Kills mixtape, but several ensuing years of intermittent singles largely failed to point a way forward.  Third album V brings some new ideas to the JJ playbook – a level of bombast vaguely befitting their newfound capitalization; a runtime (considerably) longer than half an hour; one half of an almost-rock song – but it plods across ultimately familiar ground, still as plush and pillowy as ever (on rave-flecked dance beats and string-draped, auto-tuned ballads alike), still rhyming "drugs" with "hugs."  The duo's intoxicating sense of endless sonic possibility remains, but the many lovely moments rarely amount to memorable songs, and several pointed shout-outs to their still-enchanting debut feel like cruel teases.

various artists
Beck Song Reader

Never meant to exist – yet probably always inevitable – the record-album [evidently] entitled Beck Song Reader couldn't hope to match the charm and fascination of Beck's Song Reader, the 2012 album (as in loose-leaf folio) of turn-of-last-century-styled sheet music that remains his finest achievement of the past decade – but it's a valiant and enjoyably varied attempt, by a seriously stacked cast of contributors.  As with any V/A grab-bag, not everything's gold (Beck's own offering, "Heaven's Ladder," is hardly a highlight – plus he gets half the words wrong!), but a respectable percentage truly is.  Many renditions veer rootsy and reverent, ranging from quite nice (Norah Jones' country-pop "Just Noise") to just ok – but (perhaps not bespeaking highly of the songs themselves) the best ones furnish more distinctive personality, predictably or otherwise: "I'm Down"'s an unsurprisingly great fit for Jack White's current mad scientist-Americana mode, while David Johansen does well by "Rough on Rats"' Tom Waits-isms, but less-likely candidates Swamp Dogg, Jarvis Cocker and fun. make their selections lovingly their own, while Juanes' sparkling, subversive translation – into Spanish and synth-pop – of "Don't Act Like Your Heart Isn't Hard" may be best of all.

originally published in Magnet Magazine


Music Go Music
Impressions
[Pop]

There are several moments on Impressions (Thousand Tongues), this slightly-ineffable LA outfit's magnificent second LP, when they go out of their way to sound like ABBA.  Take the glorious "Shine Down Forever," which handily elevates "Gimme Gimme Gimme..."'s godless desperation to pure, pious romantic rapture ("you are the sun to me/shine on me always with gentle beams of empathy...") – well before they actuall tease the riff.  Most of the time, though, it happens completely naturally.  But don't think of them as copyists – it's just that, evidently, more bands should make brilliantly melodic almost-funk disco-pop with a curious surfeit of harpsichords. [A]

Jenny Lewis
The Voyager
[Pop-Rock]

Polished and pristine as a SoCal sunset, The Voyager (Warner Brothers) does double duty as one of the summer's breeziest, most easy-pleasing pop records and one of its subtlest, wryest heartbreakers.  Jenny Lewis' not-at-all-difficult third album passes over roots and country (to say nothing of "indie") in favor of a luxuriously crafted '70s L.A. soft-rock throwback (hey there, Haim) – complete with a cast of celebs and studio pros (Ryan Adams and Beck swap out behind the boards) – that's all achingly sunny melody and equally aching, smarting narratives of romantic regret and nagging displacement. [B+]

Spoon
They Want My Soul
[Rock/Pop]

They Want My Soul (Loma Vista) kicks off with decisively Stonesy strut, which is refreshing and anomalous since the remaining 35 minutes are as inimitably, unrelentingly Spoony as Spoony can be, ticking all the band's paradoxical boxes – tidy grit, substantial stylishness, effortless propulsion, layered minimalism, dispassionate rocking-out (in spots, the hardest they have in ages) – all of which, coming after a four-year hiatus, is more than enough to generate the thrill of reuniting with an old friend.  It breaks approximately zero new ground, but then again Spoon don't have to bend – the universe bends to them. [B+]

The New Pornographers
Brill Bruisers
[Pop/Rock]

The hydra-headed indie perennials' previous LP, 2010's Together, was underrated (or overlooked) simply for being more of the (superlative) same; their fifth-straight master class in oblique-angled power-pop euphorics.  The intriguingly synth-heavy Brill Bruisers (Matador) – their sixth, and the closest they've come to a stumble – seems poised to be overrated by way of correction.  Though it ends strong (as usual) and adds a few firecrackers to the repertoire – the vocodey "Backstairs," "Dancehall Domine," some fine Bejar chuggers – it's the first time that treading largely familiar ground has yielded less than thrilling results, with the melody lines too often terse and truncated, the nonsense verse oddly inelegant, the productions shruggably overblown. [C+]

Land Observations
The Grand Tour
[Instrumental]

Following the marvelously meditative, highly thematic albeit instrumental compositions making up his solo debut, Roman Roads IV-XI, visual artist and post-post-rocker James Brooks – who means his musical moniker quite seriously – returns with a second set of geo-historically minded European peregrinations: The Grand Tour (Mute), informed by the post-collegiate Continental gallivants of all those 19th-century English novel protagonists.  Once again, Brooks imbues his solitary electric guitar with a clean, gently crisp tone, shaping it into tidy, meticulously layered metronomic reveries; placid and measured but softly searching. [B+]

Caribou
[Electronic]
concert preview

An obvious career culmination and one of the year's most beautiful albums, Our Love (Merge) swirls together virtually every facet of Dan Snaith's constantly evolving output – the delicate, prismatic electro-acoustic hybrids of his early days as Manitoba, Andorra's psychedelic soft-pop, the genial house and acid bangers of his Daphni alias – raises the stakes with the most personal songs he's ever written, and enlists some help from fellow Ontarians Jessy Lanza (who also opens tonight's show) and Owen Pallett just for good measure. 

Zammuto
[Pop/Experimental]
concert preview

Nick Zammuto's post-Books operation isn't quite as restlessly inventive and cerebral as his old band, but they're no less singular and, in their quiet way, just as playful.  (They also have a ridiculously good drummer.)  Probably the Vermonter's most plainly accessible work yet, Anchor (Temporary Residence) feels like a friendlier (and funnier) take on latter-day Radiohead/Thom Yorke, balancing crisp, gently mathy metronomics with low-key, curiously affecting and slightly folky song-craft.

Steve Gunn
[Folk/Rock]
concert preview

Hot on the heels of last year's quietly luxuriant Time Out and his great recent duo summit with Mike Cooper, rapidly rising six-stringer Steve Gunn's wide-ranging Way Out Weather (Paradise of Bachelors) unfurls at an elastic, easygoing pace that belies his rate of productivity; translating the meditative mentality of American Primitivist ragas into ragged-edged (and at times surprisingly Stones-y) folk-rock.

Rock*A*Teens
[Indie Rock]
concert preview

Atlanta, GA's Rock*A*Teens represent a generally little-remembered chapter of Merge records' (and '90s indie rock) history, though this summer – which marks their first public activity as a band since 2002 – has somewhat improbably seen the release of not one but two live recordings from their heyday: one a stand-alone cheekily entitled A Major Motion Picture (Chunklet), the other packaged as a bonus disc with a reissue of the band's 2000 swan song, Sweet Bird of Youth.  The available evidence presents them as a hard-hitting but surprisingly versatile outfit who were both ahead of and very much of their time, trafficking in everything from gothy rockabilly and woozy, soon-to-be-vogueish carnivalesque psych to tortuous, semi-baroque lit-rock reminiscent of Quasi and Destroyer, while predicting the raggedly earnest likes of Okkervil River (frontman Chris Lopez is an clear influence on Will Sheff) and The Arcade Fire (who cut their first record for Merge four years after R*A*Ts cut their last.)

originally published in Philadelphia City Paper

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: June 2013

Here's my output for June – minus the two reviews you already saw (Disclosure and Jon Hopkins.)  Not much that's too super amazing stuff, but plenty of good stuff nonetheless.  Magnet stuff seems to no longer be available online, so no links for those.

Tunng
Turbines

Tunng have made it through five full-lengths and a full decade as a band without ever really coming across as professional musicians.  Not that music on Turbines (or any of its excellent predecessors) is in any way sloppy or amateurish – indeed, the delicacy of its craftsmanship is evident and enviable – but they've managed to retain a sense of innocence, freshness and pure joy in the act of creation that's well-conveyed by the name of their long-time record label, Full Time Hobby.  Some of that has to do with their chosen musical approach: fingerpick-friendly folk-pop which lends itself well (and frequently) to whole-group singalongs, crossbred with gently playful electronica that's less about banging beats than subtle, whimsical sonic inventions and interventions.  Turbines doesn't offer anything vastly new or different for the British six-piece, but it's a welcome consolidation of their crafty communal vibe, a reminder that novelty can be overrated when there's so much pleasure to be gleaned from simply reexamining (or gently tweaking) the wondrousness of the everyday.

Zomby
With Love

Where were U in 2008?  Zomby was juggling the dubstep-rooted explorations of his early singles with a gaze cast back to the past, darkly, on the hardcore rave throwback of his first full-length.  Five years on, that initial, promise-filled "post-dubstep" moment – Hyperdub's late-decade heyday – feels strangely, insurmountably distant, but the residue of its grainy, grimy, grayscale ethos still looms large for the idiosyncratic producer, underlying a faltering futurism that's still streaked with plenty of backwards glances.  As a 33-track double album, With Love (which is technically short enough to fill a single CD) has space for a small village's worth of memory lanes, including manic drum'n'bass ("Overdose," "777"), 8-bit video game twinkles ("Shiva"), airhorns'n'breakbeats ragga-jungle ("It's Time"), bleary-eyed sample-soul ("Rendezvous") and ravey 808 tech-house ("This One,") while the more somber, unified back half is dominated (almost oppressively) by the tense, trendier twitchery of trap music (though none of its joyous abandon.)  Zomby remains resolutely uninterested in coherent presentation – these all-too-brief tracks jam awkwardly into one another when not fading out unceremoniously like so many Amazon.com preview samples, and the arbitrarily alphabetical track-listing suggests a wanton approach to sequencing, track titling, or both – but he's got life in him yet; maybe even a bit of love.

Emika
DVA

You can practically hear Emika's resumé – classical piano and composition training, a degree in Music Technology, work as a sound designer for Native Instruments, ample time in the club scenes of Bristol and Berlin, collaborations with the likes of Pinch, Mala and Amon Tobin – in her music, which is every bit as moody, stylish, ominous and immaculate as you'd expect from her life experience.  On the other hand, an album like DVA could be equally well explained as the product of having spent an unhealthy amount of time internalizing Massive Attack's Mezzanine (perhaps with Portishead's self-titled as a palate-cleanser.)  Even with all the ample production prowess in her corner, Emika seems to struggle for a way truly forward.  Her classical credentials come to the fore on haunting orchestral fare like "Dem Worlds" and the opening "Hush Interlude" (with an almost throwaway cameo from Czech soprano Michaela Šrůmová), and her icy diva-wails sound even lonelier and more Beth Gibbons-ish than ever, but the more intriguing, harder-edged dubstep inflections of her eponymous debut have largely receded.  The results are gorgeous but frustratingly circumspect: twitchy, mournful, would-be futuristic dark-pop that's almost comforting in its claustrophobia.
originally published in Magnet Magazine

Eleanor Friedberger
Personal Record
[Pop/Indie]

While her brother Matthew constructs his solo albums as abstruse, hermitic wormholes of weirdness, Eleanor Friedberger's are quirky and personal in an entirely different, decidedly more approachable way.  Personal Record (Merge), the second set of sweet, chatty, retro-minded pop from the Fiery Furnaces' distaff half, practically doubles as a short story collection; reflecting on love and loss, friendship and solitude in a life lived through music (with characters including several oddly bewitching chanteuse types – "how could anyone resist a girl with such a big setlist," runs one pertinent punchline), in songs packed with wit and diaristic narrative detail set against  '50s-tinged balladry and warmly breezy classic rock riffs.

Safety Scissors
In A Manner Of Sleeping
[Pop/Electronic]

Little wonder, perhaps, that Safety Scissors' first album in eight years is most reminiscent of music made a decade ago: Morr records and microhouse; the plush, tender lap-pop of Styrofoam and the Notwist and the moist, gnomic skitter-twitches of Herbert and Schneider TM.  Not that it feels derivative or even outdated – with its chipper analog squiggles and whimsically heartfelt songcraft (interspersed with dreamily curious 'ludes like the well-named "Lemon-Scented Moist Pillowette"), In A Manner of Sleeping (BPitch Control) plays like the photo-positive inverse of Baths' weighty Obsidian, arriving right on time to herald the micro-pop revival we didn't know we were missing.

Kölsch
1977
[House]

1977 is Kölsch's first full-length for Kompakt, following numerous contributions (all collated here) to the dance-inclined Speicher sub-imprint – but it's a fine example of what the label has always done best: even-keeled, warmly melodic tech-house full of rounded synth tones and cheerful thudding grooves, hotwiring the chassis of trance without all the filter-y filigree and emotionally manipulative theatrics.  No, the emotional manipulation here is refreshingly guileless and straightforward.  While you can definitely dance to it, somehow the drumbeats never hit as hard as those heart-tugging pianos and soft synths, particularly on lavishly sentimental dad-disco centerpiece (and sole vocal cut) "All That Matters."

various artists
After Dark 2
[Electronic/Disco]

Moving from strength to strength, NJ's Italians Do It Better label follow 2012's epic Symmetry and Chromatics LPs with After Dark 2, a sequel to their ethos-defining 2007 compilation.  By now we know what to expect: eighty generous minutes of languorously leaden disco, seedy synth atmospherics, and dispassionate vocals, typically delivered through vocoders, thick accents and/or blank-eyed stares – basically, it's music for sad, haunted discotheques (although Glass Candy's contributions, at least, take on a brighter-than-usual cast.)  It's another decadent, indulgently lush bounty; expansive yet distinctly unified thanks to the potent, pervasive production aesthetic of Johnny Jewel.

Chvrches
[Pop]
concert preview

Chvrches' Lauren Mayberry leaves you with basically no choice but to envy her: she's smarter than you (she holds both a law degree and a journalism masters – and she's only 25), cute as a pint-sized pixie button with an abominably adorable Glaswegian accent to boot, and – oh yeah – she's also in one of the shit-hottest bands on the planet right about now.  But just look at all the things she and her bandmates (thirty-something veterans of broody Scottish rockers Aerogramme and The Twilight Sad) have done for you.  They put that "V" in their name, not to be all consonantal and hip, but just to help you search for them on the internet (okay, that one's really a win-win – but it does make their name more fun to say!)  Then they gave us "Gun," the most immaculate, deceptively effortless electro-pop single of the year, complete with rewind-worthy lyrics (it's basically 2013's answer to Chairlift's "Sidewalk Safari") and enough discrete, icy-cool hooks to keep your serotonin receptors flooded all summer long.  Jerks!

Baths/Houses
[Art-Pop/Electronic]
concert preview

Will Weisenfeld introduced Baths with the beguiling glitch-hop/lap-pop of 2010's texturally-oriented Cerulean.  Three years (and one severely debilitating bout of e. coli) later, he's back with Obsidian (Anticon), and the difference mirrors the stark contrast between those titular hues.  The new record pairs a striking lyrical focus on mortality and bodily concerns – unflinching, brutely poetic treatments of sex, suicide and the general abjection of human relationships – with a huge leap forward in musical inventiveness, self-assurance and charisma.  You'll hear stately, ethereal classicism a la Active Child and echoes of Jimmy Tamborello's work with Dntel and the Postal Service alongside clattering shards of metal and industrial – "No Eyes" brilliantly jacks the seedy thump of Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" – but is truly an album without clear precedents.  Similarly domestically-inclined (and domestically partnered) tourmates Houses made a comparable (albeit less traumatic) shift between albums; translating their debut's demure, atmospheric electro-pop into more organic, song-based slowcore/space-rock territory.  The aptly-named A Quiet Darkness (Downtown) has the low-key, loop-friendly earnestness of a bonsai Joshua Tree; it also – fun fact! – incorporates field recordings of actual (abandoned) houses.

Quadron/Barbarossa
[Soul/R&B]
concert preview

Quadron's members seem to network as expertly as they make music: jazzy-voiced chanteuse Coco O. has been turning up everywhere from Odd Future records to the Great Gatsby soundtrack, while Robin Hannibal, probably best known as the producer/instrumentalist half of indie-soul sensations Rhye, is an ever-prolific collaborator.  The Danish duo's second LP together, Avalanche (Vested in Culture/Epic), finds them at the tipping point of a burgeoning wave of (quasi-)indie R&B, brightening up their debut's moody, smoke-filled grooves with standouts like the summery Motown/disco-touched "Hey Love," which has the potential for Adele-style mega-success (only partly due to a piano riff that's recycled pretty much whole-cloth from Rhye's bedroom killer "The Fall.")  Hopefully, should that comes to pass, opener Barbarossa (aka James Mathé) will be right behind them: Bloodlines, the excellent debut from the London-based soulslinger/guitarist (and sometime sideman to headliners Junip), which is due in August on Memphis Industries, takes Rhye's sensitive-guy sultriness in a slightly rockier, electro-funky and tremendously hooky direction.

Tricky
[Trip-Hop]
concert preview

Unlike his Bristol trip-hop progenitor peers, Adrian Thaws has rarely gone more than a few years between records, so there's no way False Idols – Tricky's tenth album, on his newly minted label of the same name – could approximate the comeback impact of, say, Portishead's Third.  Still, it's being widely touted as a return to form; Tricky himself having gone so far as to assert its superiority to his career-defining 1995 landmark/albatross, Maxinquaye.  And it's certainly a resounding return to the spirit – that dark, existentially brooding spookysexycool – of that album (and perhaps equally, the tension-spiked R&B of his true coming-out party, Massive Attack's Blue Lines), as well as its sparse, gritty breakbeat loops and samples.  Idols initially seems to practically broadcast a dearth of new ideas – opener "Someone's Sins" cribs hard from Patti Smith; two cuts later "Valentine" recycles perhaps Chet Baker's most recognizable phrase – but then again he's frequently at his best when riffing off and (re)contextualizing the work of others, via samples, cover versions and vocal collaborations (ideally with haunting, airy-voiced females to contrast his deep, mumbly rasp, still a solid formula.)  Tricky is, above all, an auteur of moods; it's been ages since his bad vibes have felt this good.

Mikal Cronin
[Rock/Pop]
concert preview

Mikal Cronin may be a charter member of San Francisco's feverishly fertile garage/psych posse – readily spotted as sideman and collaborator to high school pal Ty Segall, among others – but as his second solo venture should make crystal clear to anyone within earshot, there's a lot more to the longhaired twenty-something than fuzzboxes and freakouts.  The simply titled (sidestepping a too-easy relativity pun) MCII (Merge) posits Cronin as heir apparent to the line of sweetly trepidatious West Coast power-pop auteurs (Jason Falkner, Jon Brion, Elliott Smith), while equally recalling hook-happy grunge-era holdouts like Weezer and Sloan.  Cronin, who's responsible for nearly all the playing (and singing) here, has no problems kicking in some well-targeted guitar crunch when the moment calls for it, but he's just as likely to stick to sunny, stress-free strums, sneak in some string orchestration or plop down at an unadorned piano – all the better for his ambivalence-ridden lyrical quarter-life crisis come through in mellifluous, multi-tracked harmony.

Patty Griffin
[Folk/Americana]
concert preview

The title of American Kid (Columbia/New West) – Patty Griffin's first set of original material since 2007 – refers to her father, a WWII vet and high school teacher whose impending passing in 2009 inspired many of these songs.  But it doesn't need to: while the album comes across as a touching tribute, reflecting on the fullness of his life as much as mortality and loss, Griffin's language, as imagistic as it is (potentially) biographical, is never so narrow as to suggest that this story, these experiences and emotions, are her dad's alone.  It's ultimately irrelevant which details are specifically his and which belong to the broader, all-American 20th century "greatest generation" history/mythology that's evoked equally vividly in the music's loose, natural interweaving of blues, gospel, country, and melting-pot folk.  Griffin's powerhouse of a voice is, as always, phenomenal throughout, but it's perhaps most dynamic (and fun) on the numbers where she adopts a male character's perspective, including scene-setting swamp-stomper "Don't Let Me Die in Florida," teeth-gritting piano balled "Irish Boy" and the good-naturedly bawdy wedding night waltz "Get Ready Marie."

Glenn Jones
[Folk/Instrumental]
concert preview

Glenn Jones' genial, gossamer, contemplative pieces for solo acoustic guitar and banjo are so effortlessly casual and fluid as to feel practically improvisatory.  Indeed, some of them – including several on his latest, Jersey-honoring opus My Garden State (Thrill Jockey) – apparently were extemporized in the studio – but catch him playing them live and you'll realize just how meticulous a player and composer he is, with not a single note out of place from the recorded versions.  And while Jones' albums feature the spiffy bonus of artwork culled from his collection of antique German postcards of animals (and in this case plants) playing stringed instruments, what you do miss out on is his between-song storytelling, which is as nearly as memorable and folksy as the music itself.  This being Philadelphia, he'll probably spin a few yarns about his dearly beloved buddy and fellow American Primitivist virtuoso Jack Rose.  Ask him to tell the one about the time they brushed their teeth with shaving cream.

Steve Gunn
[Folk/Rock]
concert preview

Steve Gunn is a busy man: an active player in numerous groups, all amply prolific, which happen to bear his name – Golden Gunn, Gunn-Truscinski Duo, GHQ – as well as a collaborator with the likes of Meg Baird and Magik Markers, and, most recently, a touring member of (and opener for) Kurt Vile's mighty Violators.  If we're to take the title of his new trio record as a leader – whose release Saturday's gig celebrates – at face value, even his Time Off (Paradise Of Bachelors) effectively amounts to a busman's holiday, although this music is so preternaturally warm and blissful it's hard to imagine it feeling much like work to make it.  The album's six tunes stretch out to fill nearly forty minutes with patient, dappled semi-acoustic drone-folk jams; Gunn's modestly masterful American Primitivist roots commingling with raga undertones, bottleneck blues and a loose, beneficent Grateful Dead vibe – but each also stands as a fully serviceable song, in an indie-friendly, sing-along-ready sense, thanks to his appealingly low-key vocals and subtle, chiming hooks.

Peals
[Instrumental/Post-Rock]
concert preview

The two members of Peals play in two of Baltimore's noisiest, most boisterous art-rock outfits – William Cashion in Future Islands; Bruce Willen in the recently defunct Double Dagger – but the music they make together, as showcased on their Thrill Jockey debut Walking Field, feels very far removed the world those groups inhabit.  It's also considerably more varied and engrossing than you'd expect from a record of utterly relaxed, even-keeled instrumental meditations.  Performed primarily on ringing, clean-toned guitars, but sometimes using actual bells (true to their moniker; the difference isn't always immediately obvious), as well as one languorous visiting cello, these open-hearted sound-surges range from elegant, slow-moving drones to pointillist stipples reminiscent of their scene-mate Dustin Wong and the curiously juicy/metallic sonics of NJ guitarist "Delicate Steve" Marion, but – unlike much music made in this vein – the duo's textural explorations are balanced by an equally prominent focus on melody, which is abundant, typically multi-layered and often delivered with a pleasantly country-ish feel.

originally published in Philadelphia City Paper