2012 Review Round-Up: October

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

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

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

Ultraísta
s/t

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

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

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

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

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

Django Django
s/t
[Brit-Pop]

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

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

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

Daphni
Jiaolong
[Dance/Electronic]

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

Miguel
[R&B]
concert preview

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

Le1f/Das Racist
[Hip-Hop]
concert preview

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

Willis Earl Beal
[Soul/Folk]
concert preview

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

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

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

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

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

Jeffrey Lewis
[Singer-Songwriter]
concert preview

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

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

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

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

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

Calexico
[Rock/Roots]
concert preview

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

Kimbra
[Pop]
concert preview

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

MNDR
[Pop]
concert preview

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

2012 Review Round-Up: August

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

and here we have august.  some pretty nice writing here, i think, especially in some o the citypaper concert previews down below.  but we'll start off with something a bit less riveting, although the cover's pretty nice.
Ombre
Believe You Me

In 2011, Roberto Lange "remixed" Julianna Barwick's typically lovely, diaphanous "Vow" under his Helado Negro alias; essentially borrowing a few tightly-looped clusters of dense, amorphous sound as a foundation on which to construct an entirely new song in his own free-floating electro-folk-pop style, complete with laconic Spanish vocal. While it offered a fine general indication of the aesthetic commonalities the two Asthmatic Kitty labelmates would later investigate in their collaboration as OMBRE, they manage to find a more equitable, and more rewarding meeting point on the full-length Believe You Me, which was recorded as they were just getting to know one another as friends. It feels that way: loose, exploratory, warmly generous and open-minded, eager to share and learn, but still with a slight sense of polite restraint. They're good influences on each other too. Working together seems to soften and moderate, rather than augment, each artist's distinctive qualities – Lange's playful looseness helps enliven Barwick's somewhat somber, unruffled calm just as, conversely, her penchant for almost ascetic sparsity tempers his tendency for stuffing his productions with curious sonic clutter – but they still emerge with plenty of idiosyncrasies intact. Since the ethereal purity of Barwick's solo work is probably the more singular and easily adulterated of their two aesthetics – and since Lange is already by nature a collage artist (and, relatively speaking, a mild maximalist) – the album is perhaps inevitably closer in sound and structure to an Helado effort, but Barwick's voice is still unmistakably present throughout, both literally – if at times substantially muffled and refracted – and evocatively. With its dappled, Sunday-afternoon sonics and occasional flirtations with bossa nova (on "Weight Those Words" and "Tormentas," perhaps the most straightforward things here), Believe You Me calls to mind similarly dreamy, bi-lingual collaborative efforts by the likes of Amor de Dias, Smokey & Miho and Savath y Savalas (of which Lange is a sometime member.) But this is also much more of abstract, "experimental" affair than a pop one, as friendly and approachable as it is – only a fraction of the selections could properly be described as songs, and even those tend to spiral off down unexpected textural avenues. Lange and Barwick employ an impressive array of instrumental (and electronic) means throughout the album's soundscapes, beyond judicious use of Barwick's inimitable one-woman chorale – from the muted trumpet and slow nylon strums of the bookending "Noche Brilla" to the numbing piano-based micro-loops of "Sense," "Dawning"'s billowing soundclouds and sussurrating harp, and "The Nod"'s motley assortment of plucked strings, ambient rustlings, vibraphone, slippery upright bass, and harmonium. But it all serves the same spacious, softly meditative and (as you might imagine from some of those titles) satisfyingly sleepy end.
originally published at AllMusic.com

∆ [Alt-J]
An Awesome Wave

For a group geeky enough to name themselves after a Greek character and/or a Mac keyboard shortcut (albeit erroneously: the actual keystrokes for typing ∆ are option+J – so there!) and to give their debut the horrifically dorky title "An Awesome Wave," Alt-J (as I guess we call them) play it pretty cool. Sure, the lyrics, if you catch them, tend toward bookish brainsplatters of poetic quasi-abstraction ("broom-shaped pleasure, deep greedy and Googling every corner"...?), but sonically speaking it's all smooth surfaces and achingly artful sophistication. And while much has been made, in the breathless Britpress, of their genre-hopping unpinnability, the album's sound is actually fairly constant – conjoining the elegant moodiness of Wild Beasts, the xx and TV on the Radio (particularly on slyly erotic standouts "Tesselate" and "Dissolve Me") to the acoustic earnestness of England's neo-folk throng (and anchored by Thom Green's oddly tinny jitter-funk drumming.) As with both of these camps, the Cantabridgian quartet flourish largely on the merits of their vocal prowess, which – if you can forgive frontman Joe Newman's mildly cloying, Corganish cragginess – is considerable: layered, blended and swoony in broad, cleverly-deployed harmony. Still, for all its filigree, Awesome remains firmly on the polite side of prog – it could really use more of the inspired quirkiness they flash in the OCD plainsong of the album's first untitled interlude. It's all very impressive (and, well, pretty), but that doesn't necessarily mean it leaves much of an impression. [6/10]

The Darkness
Hot Cakes

The Darkness suddenly seem a lot less outrageous than when they last put an album out, some seven years ago,. Maybe it's just the times: we've come a long way toward working out our collective irony issues – and have certainly grown desensitized to any and all '80s-revivalism ticklishness – since they and their zebra-print spandex catsuits first touched down in the early '00s. The once-inescapable line of inquiry – "Wait, are they serious?" –– now just seems irrelevant, and boring besides. Hence: Justin Hawkins' falsetto remains in full, preposterous, glorious effect throughout, but Hot Cakes – title notwithstanding – isn't really trying to be funny so much as just plain fun. And it is. Genre affectations aside – and by now they've been nailing their target aesthetic for so long that they've probably got as much claim to it as anyone – The Darkness have always been champs at penning solid, tuneful rock-pop, and they manage a small tackle-box worth of hooks here, ditching their second album's baroque (faux?) pretensions to reboot their debut's uncluttered directness. Plus, if it is novelty you're after, there's the blistering, shred-heavy overhaul of Radiohead's "Street Spirit," which succeeds, mostly, because it's hardly a stretch – it was practically a Kansas song to begin with.
originally published in Magnet Magazine

Christian Löffler
A Forest
[Electronic]

Like park-ranger-turned-beat-wrangler Dominik Eulberg and, especially, the peerless Pantha du Prince (to whom he bears a conspicuous, undeniable resemblance), Cologne producer Christian Löffler has a rare gift for collapsing the metaphorical distance between electronic music and the natural world. The modestly luxuriant productions comprising A Forest (Ki) are nothing revolutionary – dubby, wintry, melodic, essentially ambient house – but they pulse and glow almost like living, breathing things; effortlessly gliding, meticulously ordered, but with a wondrous, immersive ebb and flow that makes for an emotional balm as pure and soothing as a secluded woodland stroll.

Grasscut
Unearth
[Electronic/Acoustic]

Every bit as fragrant as their rustically redolent moniker suggests, Brighton duo Grasscut cultivate a characteristically British blend of wist and whimsy on their lush, poetic second outing, Unearth (Ninja Tune), meandering through pastures left largely unplowed since the fertile days of early-aughts lap-pop and evoking the genteel art-pop eccentricity of Robert Wyatt (who also makes a cameo), the lavender longueur of the Clientele, a smidge of the Chap's cheekiness, all refracted through a gently cinematic glitch-pop pastoralism highly reminiscent of the underappreciated Tunng (imagine a more earnest, more English read on the Books' electro-folk cut-ups.)

Antony and the Johnsons
Cut The World
[Live/Antony]

There's no applause until the very end; nothing, excepting the eight-minute Wiccan/eco-political/gender-philosophical monologue "Future Feminism" (a sui generis tone-setter if there ever was one) marking Cut The World (Secretly Canadian) as a live document. But it's evident anyhow, as the album achieves the seemingly impossible by actually magnifying the intimacy of Antony & the Johnsons' previous, studio efforts. We know the voice, of course – ineffable, indelible; as comforting by now in its familiarity as its elementality – and the orchestrations here only underscore its potency, rendering the songs (ten old, one new) both more tender and newly, magnificently expansive.

Ry Cooder
Election Special
[Roots/Protest]

Ry Cooder's second political record in as many years, Election Special (Nonesuch) is an unbridled blast of caustically satirical left-wing invective. It's also just a blast, period: his riffs are as righteous as his fury; his frets as compelling as his ever-luminous fretwork. Channeling his unsurpassed mastery of American vernacular forms – two-step country; swampy Delta blues; gloriously ragged rock'n'roll; mandolin-flecked folk – the wry ol' coot variously impersonates a frisky RNC conventioneer, a literally Faustian Charles Koch, a woe-begotten Obama, and Mitt's infamously roof-racked pooch, while just-so-happening to mention Jim Crow on roughly half the songs, and also gives us a great sing-along Occupy anthem.

Sofrito
International Soundclash
[World/Dance]

A globe-trotting crate-digging compilation from London-based Sofrito collective (DJ Hugo Mendes and producer Frankie Francis) International Soundclash (Strut) is crammed with raw, gritty and above-all propulsive grooves stemming from the Carribean to West and Central Africa and points beyond, and from 1976 to 2012 (though in most cases you'd be hard-pressed to tell which was which.) There's plenty of reliably smoking soca, cumbia, zouk and Afrobeat, but better still are cross-pollinated oddities like Bell'a Njoh's wibbly Cameroonian disco and Concept Neuf's steel pans 'n' vibraslaps take on blaxploitation funk.

Why?
Sod In The Seed EP
[Indie]

Yoni Wolf has relegated some mighty fine work to EPs in the past (check 2005's Sanddollars), and the quick six-track Sod in the Seed (Anticon) – WHY?'s rust-free, revved-into-gear re-entry after a three-year absence – fully follows suit, rife with conflicted off-the-cuff mission statements, logorrheic confessionals, and Wolf's trademarked, succulently serpentine nested rhymes ("rehearsing slow lewd winks nude at the mens' room sink") set atop some of the band's richest, most playful musical textures yet (bongos, glockenspiels, scat-sample chorales.) Makes you wonder what wonders they're saving up for their Fall-slated full-length.

Dirty Projectors
Swing Lo Magellan
[Indie Rock/Pop]

What's gotten into the Dirty Projectors? For a band that never met an "interesting," awkwardly arty digression they didn't like, Dave Longstreth and co. (whose scheduled date Saturday was scrapped presumably, annoyingly, to bolster their Made in America draw) seem to have made their peace with palatability on Swing Lo Magellan (Domino): they've hardly shed their endemic quirks (that off-kilter rhythmic twitchiness, those rickety-lush harmonies), but in embracing a newfound simplicity – cresting with "Impregnable Question"'s sublime, disarming directness: "You're my love, and I want you in my life" – those eccentricities seem suddenly, satisfyingly unforced, and take on their own sort of normalcy.

Divine Fits
A Thing Called Divine Fits
[Rock/Pop]

What is this Thing Called Divine Fits? (Merge) It's the sort of record Britt Daniel could probably knock out in his sleep: effortlessly stylish; textural and terse; flat-out terrific-sounding. Yeah, Wolf Parader/Handsome Fur Dan Boeckner gets equal writing/vocal billing and brings the (sometimes downright Baba O'Riley) synthesizer substrata, and New Bomb Turk Sam Brown mans the skins nimbly, but the Spoon frontman's tragically hip fingerprints are all over this album's steely tough-guy pop, striking all the right poses from noisy puncher ("What Gets You Alone") to pretty, acoustic one ("Civilian Stripes"), plus an atypically emo cover tune ("Shivers.")

Yeasayer
Fragrant World
[Psych/Pop]

In a world – heck, a borough – crammed with sorta-electronic, sorta-groovy bands camping out at the nebulous intersection between pop and art, Yeasayer have managed to stake out a peculiar timbre – just the right blend of groggy, squirmy synth patches and earnest, earthy vocals – that remains unmistakable despite their near-constant musical evolution. Fragrant World (Secretly Canadian) is their slyest, most satisfying work yet, a smoother synthesis of the world-beat and R&B elements that still loom in their DNA, mostly eschewing big pop moments in favor of lots of nifty little ones.

Teengirl Fantasy
Tracer
[Electronic]

Teengirl Fantasy seem to average one glimmer of dancefloor transcendence for every album's worth of woozy, implacable New Age-tinted synth-goop. 7AM had solid-gold soul/house scorcher "Cheaters"; Tracer (True Panther), for all its wibbly electro burbles, panflute presets and acid-laced jello shots (and fine vocal spots by Panda Bear, R&B thrush Kelela and weirdtronica fellow-traveller Laurel Halo) only really gets down to business on the hard-jacking "Do It"; tapping Daft Punk's "One More Time" crooner Romanthony, brashly aiming for that anthem's immortal, hedonistic euphoria, and just about nailing it.

Carsie Blanton
[Folk/Pop]
concert preview

Philly-based songstress (and local swing dance scene-queen) Carsie Blanton might not look like the type to inspire much trepidation, but when the curly-headed, "cute as a kidney bean" charmer advises a timid suitor, midway through her excellent new album, "I ain't gonna hurt you honey/I ain't even half your size," it's clear enough why he might need the reminder. This is a woman who does not mince words. Throughout the self-released Idiot Heart, Blanton waxes unblushingly frank about exactly what (and who) she wants (when not detailing the sometimes less sanguine consequences of getting what she wished for), atop a groove-rich musical landscape that spans her typical jazz-inflected folk-pop and digs deeper into loose acoustic funk but also manages to live up to maybe her least-likely avowed inspiration, Elvis Costello: "Together Too Long" could pass for one of his Blood & Chocolate kiss-offs, while "All We Got" loosely rewrites Trust's "Lovers Walk."

Alvarius B
[Folk/Absurdism]
concert preview

Now here's what I call freak folk. Alvarius B., less fancifully known as Alan Bishop of long-running weirdo kings Sun City Girls, snarls and warbles with an inspired dementia that recalls Captain Beefheart in mystical troubadour mode, or maybe Dylan at his most sneering and surrealistic, but there's really nothing that can compare to his snaggle-toothed, near-tourettic and thoroughly filthy fingerpicked phantasies. His second self-titled album, originally released as a double-LP in 1998 and now reissued on the Girls' Abduction imprint, finds him scrawling his way across the fretboard on forty-five cuts of warped, droney blues such as "Seeing-eye Latte" and "Sex cult from university," while raving about, for instance, a grandpa who "sucked all of Arabia from a herbivore's labia." It sets a pretty definitive upper limit of weirdness for music made by just one guy with an acoustic guitar.

Hundred Waters
[New Age/Neo-Classical]
concert preview

They're called Hundred Waters, but it's abundantly evident that – elementally speaking – this Gainesville, FL quintet is far better represented by Air. (In Ayurvedic terms – which feels appropriate somehow – they're clearly Vatas.)  It's in their spacious, gracefully hushed arrangements, wherein stately neo-baroque faerie folk commingles with the gentlest of lap-pop glitchery and sputtering digital twinkles; in their gauzy juxtaposition of the cerebral and the fantastical; in the effortless way they drift through nigh-unchartable time signatures; and especially in Nicole Miglis breathy, frequently choralized whipped-cream wisp of a voice (a dead ringer for Twin Sister's Andrea Estella, with a dollop of Regina Spektor loopiness and a whiff of Joanna Newsom.) And now, after initially releasing their self-titled debut on the tiny Elestial Sound, they've signed with Skrillex – a fiery, Pitta sort if ever there was one, with seemingly zero musical commonalities save that they both own computers – for a remix EP and forthcoming rerelease on his Owsla imprint. Well, here's to seeking balance in all things.

Meek Mill
[Hip-Hop]
concert preview

Meek Mill may sport the least hard-sounding moniker in the game, but he seems well-positioned to become arguably the biggest-deal rapper out of Philadelphia in ages, if not ever. He's got a name-making deal with the absurdly uncrushable Rick Ross' Maybach Music Group, a lauded string of mixtapes culminating in May's guest-studded Dreamchasers 2 – a solid showcase of his canny knack for cadence, unflaggingly exuberant if somewhat monochromatic delivery, and easy facility with the brash, aspirational tropes of modern street rap – and even a tailor-made bit of buzz-stirring beef with North Philly pastor Jomo Johnson over breezily sacreligious summer jam "Amen" (the Reverend's argument seemed relatively fatuous, though he may have had a point aesthetically speaking.) True to big-league hip-hop form, Mill's now got a delayed release date for his forthcoming Warner Bros. debut (pushed back from next week to Halloween), but album-hawking or not these hometown shows – likely his last at this intimate a venue for a while – promise to be a major event.

Big Freedia
[Bounce/Hip-Hop]
concert preview

You can read about Big Freedia – for example, in the 2010 New York Times feature that helped introduce New Orleans' gender-flouting, booty-bobbling "sissy bounce" phenomenon to the asses of the masses, or in the web's-worth of breathless testimonials that've ensued since then as she's traversed the nation setting untold behinds quivering in her wake. You can listen to her music – most recently the "God Save the Queen Diva" mixtape, which in true gutter-bounce appropriationist style slices up Little Richard, Diana Ross, and Freddie Mercury (not a bad triangulation of her onstage persona), plus the "Rocky" theme (which should play well here) atop relentlessly reupping stutter-step booty-beats. And you should absolutely watch her videos, particularly last year's epic "Y'all Get Back Now." But if you haven't experienced firsthand the euphorically sweaty spectacle of a Big Freedia show (and, ideally, gotten up to shake what you've got yourself), well... you might want to do yourself a favor this Friday night.

Kitty Pryde
[Hip-Hop/Meme]
concert preview

Thinkpiece lightning-rod, anonymous-comment hater-bait, rap game co-sign collector... – freckle-faced Daytona Beach teen Kitty Beckwith's been having quite a summer. Since inadvertently touching off a hype-wave – and backlash counter-current – back in May with the giggling, sweetly swoony "Okay Cupid" (and its endearingly homespun video), and with twitterati scrambling to pinpoint her on a scale from Rebecca Black to Lil B, the part-time salesclerk (and evidently, almost unbelievably, bio-daughter of esoterica icon David Tibet) is plainly just having fun and enjoying the improbable ride: "I just wanted a Betsey J dress/and some time off from Claire's," she spits on insta-fame shrug-off "smiledog.jpg." (FTR: she got it.) Self-conscious kneejerk preemption notwithstanding (her tumblr proclaims: "My Music Suxx"), her genuinely fluent, filter-free rhymes and very funny, smartly referential wit – and not merely her totes adorbs, "very youtubeable" awkward charm – totally justify the attention. Scoff all you want: just don't think she's not in on the joke.

Janes Addiction/Die Antwoord
[Rock/Rap]
concert preview

Jane's Addiction first broke up in 1991, but it's hard to feel like they've really left – they spent nearly as much of the last twenty years reunited as disbanded. So their second attempt at a comeback album, last year's The Great Escape Artist (Capitol), wasn't exactly the event it might have been, but it's a solid listen regardless, with moody blues and sugar-rush pop-metal trifles nicely balanced by crushing, swirling, psuedo-mystical jams. As for their fittingly misfit tourmates, South African rave-rap duo Die Antwoord – well, the world's known them only two short years, but their bizarrely grotesque, cartoonishly vulgar "zef" schtick seemed destined to wear out its welcome (and novelty value and, er, artistic potential) after a single album (besides, wasn't it supposed to be just an elaborate conceptual art project/joke anyway?) Ten$ion (Downtown), however, reveals that Ninja and Yo-Landi Vi$$er (who're actually better rappers than they get credit for) have further depths to plumb. Nothing's shocking, perhaps, but they're certainly trying.

Marina and the Diamonds
[Pop]
concert preview

Marina Diamantis attempts an odd, fraught, and rather confusing conceptual tight-rope walk on Electra Heart (679/Atlantic), endeavoring to critique the vapidity and corruption of American popular culture by symbolically/theatrically embodying those very qualities, in the guise of an overtly constructed, superficial pop-star persona – the titular character, whom she describes as "the antithesis of everything that I stand for." Anybody familiar with the fantastically loudmouthed, overreaching spectacle of her debut probably won't be surprised that she fails to pull it off with anything resembling finesse or coherence. But at least she got the archetypal pop part right: with a little help from certified pop "manufacturers" Dr. Luke, Greg Kurstin and Stargate (the architects of depravity behind the likes of Ke$ha, Katy Perry, Lily Allen and Rihanna), the result is a fizzy, brashly modern album that sounds pretty much like her first one, except with less piano and more dance beats, lashed together with her majestic, morally righteous, mock-operatic voice.

The Very Best
[African/Pop]
concert preview

The Very Best, improbably enough, managed to live up to their preposterous moniker on their early releases by fusing together some of the giddiest, least self-conscious sounds in the world – African marabi, highlife, and kwaito; Western synth-pop and electronica, and further strains of pan-global dance music – creating not necessarily the best music ever made, but a glorious, musically utopian encapsulation of humanity's greatest potential. Now down to a duo – irrepressible Malawian singer Esau Mwamwaya, whose voice still feels like a distillation of pure, liquid joy, and Swedish beatsmith Johan Hugo – they come close to recapturing that lightning on MTMTMK (Cooperative/Moshi Moshi), a technicolor funhouse of a sophomore effort that flirts with harder-edged African beats while also inching closer to chart-friendly electro pop'n'B candy-gloss.
 
Sidi Toure
[African/Folk]
concert preview

Malian guitarist Sidi Touré's first widely available recording – released last year, rather improbably, by post-rock/indie stronghold Thrill Jockey – bore the simple, descriptive title "Sahel Folk," perhaps partly in contradistinction to the "desert blues" tag applied to his countrymen like the late Ali Farka Touré (no relation) and reigning champs Tinariwen. Indeed, the album's lilting, gently droning strains were about as folksy as it gets: fully acoustic, unvarnished and intimate, all reportedly recorded over tea at his sister's house. Koïma, Touré's second outing for the label, was cut in a studio with a full band featuring sokou (folk violin), calabash, and a second guitarist, and shows considerably more versatility and rhythmic energy, but it's every bit as enchantingly homely and heartfelt.

Gruff Rhys
[Indie/Pop]
concert preview

Gruff Rhys is capricious sort of chap at the best of times, gallivanting affably from project to project with a trick in his eye and a twinkle up his sleeve. Having logged nearly two decades with the unstoppable Super Furry Animals, plus numerous collaborative side-ventures and three lovably low-key psych-pop solo albums, most recently the dappled and bubbly Hotel Shampoo (Wichita), he's now launched an "investigative concert tour" as part of his second documentary film project. Like 2010's "Separado!," this one also involves a search for a long-lost ancestor: John Evans, said to have come to America in 1792 looking for a rumored tribe of Welsh-speaking Natives, and to have led a series of adventures that are the stuff of acid-laced tall tales. Rhys is encouraging "anyone with clues regarding Evans's unknown burial place; imaginary volcanos; wandering tribes of Welsh Speakers, or lingering river reptiles" to come share what they know – presumably there will be some music as well.

Ava Luna
[Indie Rock/R&B]
concert preview

Stitching together a similar rag-bag of mismatched musical scraps to their fellow Brooklynites Dirty Projectors and TV on the Radio – '90s radio R&B, fragmentary art-rock, girl group doo-wop harmonies, stiff-limbed no wave funk – but coming up with a whole different sort of quilt, screwball septet Ava Luna spend the eight tracks and just over half an hour of their fairly blindsiding debut LP Ice Level (Infinite Best) endeavoring to derail just about any expectations you might have considered developing. It's bracing, bewildering, compelling stuff – spazz-out synth-soul? purple punk-prog? – a twitchy, unruly noisefield shot through with honeyed crooning and dense patches of groove, and laced up with the half-cornball, half-unhinged, wholy sincere soulman stylings of Carlos Hernandez.

Horse Meat Disco
[Disco/DJ]
concert preview

This disco-obsessive DJ collective, whose namesake Sunday night parties in South London – self-professedly "dedicated to the industry of human happiness" – have been drawing a legendarily diverse, pan-sexual crowd for eight years now, are purists only in the sense that they embrace their chosen genre's proud tradition of inclusivity. As evidenced by their thoroughly delightful compilation series on Strut records (Horse Meat Disco III dropped last summer; volume IV is due in November), they're perfectly happy to slot '70s-vintage cuts from Idris Muhammad, Gino Soccio and Sylvester right alongside the contemporary disco freaks like Mungolian Jetset and Tom Trago – or better yet, confound chronology with fresh re-edits (often their own handiwork) of shoulda-been-classics from the vault. More importantly, they negate any whiff of in-the-know elitism by digging up plenty of easy-to-spot, dancer-friendly cover versions – but even if you can't quite place the melody, you've probably heard that bassline in your dreams.
originally published in Philadelphia City Paper

AMG review round-up, volume XXI: 2010 second quarter (misses), plus bonus strays

three more from second quarter '10 - decided non-favorites, which didn't make the last batch due to per-post label character limits (wha?) - then six pretty great ones from 2009, reviewed this year (incl. one reviewed for citypaper) - then three more recent-ish AMG reviews of even older things, including one of my very favorite albums of the decade (well, ok, #96 according to my list. still pretty fave.) and this, i am pretty sure, brings me completely up to date in terms of reposting all of my review output here (!!) for the first time in maybe ever. except for the two reviews i wrote last week. so stay tuned...

-------2010

We Are The World: Clay Stones review

L.A. art freaks We Are the World make no bones about the fact that they are not really a band -- they prefer the term "outfit," which seems vague enough to encompass an undertaking whose modes of operation include choreography, elaborate costuming, video, and all-around immersive visual spectacle in addition to their music. In any case, it's clear that the fullest expression of the group's project is to be found in the aesthetically adventurous, quasi-political performance art of their live shows, rather than on a piece of plastic or some digital files. That makes it difficult to know how to properly assess this debut album, which by the same token is clearly meant as more than a mere soundtrack or souvenir. Taken unto itself, divorced from its visual/experiential counterpart, Clay Stones still delivers plenty of visceral intensity: it's a breathless 45 minutes of violently propulsive electronic rhythms and stark, eerie atmospherics. Engaging but hardly easy listening, it's melodically minimal (beyond the throbbing bass, blank-eyed vocals, and scattered twitchy synth lines, harmonic content is typically scant) and emotionally monochromatic (even when the kinetic energy slackens, the mood remains relentlessly dark and edgy) but far from monotonous: primary musical instigator Robbie Williamson wrests an impressive textural and polyrhythmic array from a palette of black and grey, culling his constantly shifting sounds from industrial, minimal house, electro-clash (fellow techno-visual spectacularists Fischerspooner come readily to mind), and the twisted synth pop of the Knife. One frustrating weak point: Megan Gold is not by any means a tremendous vocal presence -- she adds a nicely bluesy, sub-Polly Harvey yowl to the pummeling title track and the glam-thrash stomp of "Goya Monster," but her vapid singsonging elsewhere (and flimsy nursery-rhyme rapping on "Fight Song") tends to detract somewhat from the album's dramatic drive where a more commanding vocalist could have helped transform it into something truly remarkable. Despite a promising start (the insistent yet inscrutable rallying cries of the first few tracks) and some inspired programming throughout (check the jittery tech-funk instrumental "Sweet Things Are So Hard"), Clay Stones remains conceptually intriguing and admirably sculpted, but a bit too stony to fully embrace on its own terms -- though it's easy and enticing to imagine how this could be tremendously effective stuff in person.

First Aid Kit: Drunken Trees and The Big Black and the Blue reviews

Suburban Stockholm's Söderberg sisters put their best foot forward on this, their first full-length outing as First Aid Kit: the album opens nearly a cappella, with a few slow strums and then a full minute of nothing but the haunting close harmonies that are the duo's strongest and most distinctive musical asset. In the 40-odd minutes that follow, the sisters' simplistic, repetitious song structures may start to grow stale, and their fine but unfussy folk instrumentalism may seem less than inspiring, but those harmonies are never far from hand, ensuring that The Big Black and the Blue is never less than an entirely pleasant listening experience. And it has potential to be much more than that -- taken individually, many and even most of these tunes have ample charms to offer, among them the sweetly melodic "Waltz for Richard," the wistful "Heavy Storm," and the intriguing "I Met Up with the King" (which bears a striking resemblance to Neko Case). Taken as a whole album, though, the songs lose a lot of their distinctiveness, and the uninterrupted loveliness can start to feel oddly dreary. The Big Black certainly doesn't dash the promise suggested by the duo's Drunken Trees EP (which in its final form was only four songs and 14 minutes shorter than this album) -- although that release's mild, playful experimentalism and small inklings of stylistic range are scrapped here for a more sober-minded American folk traditionalism that's perhaps commendable but not altogether compelling -- but it leaves that promise yet to be completely fulfilled. It feels entirely probable that they'll get there: the Söderbergs are still (astonishingly) young -- 20 and 17 at the time of this album's release -- and they've shown clear evidence of their raw talent and artistry. Their level of engagement is admirable: in addition to their genuinely prodigious vocal gifts and their more than competent handling all of the varied instrumentation here, save for the drums on several tracks, the sisters are credited with co-production and mixing, and they're also responsible for album's stunning, antiquarian-styled artwork. If they want to secure their place in this young century's burgeoning classicist folk wave (see also: Laura Marling, the Tallest Man on Earth), they'll merely need to come up with some songs that can truly make good on their otherwise considerably distinguished overall package.

Here We Go Magic: Pigeons review

Here We Go Magic made waves in early 2009 with an eponymous debut that was the one-man home recording project of indie folker Luke Temple; a curious, sonically hazy album essentially divided between sketchy ambient noise instrumentals and simple, tuneful, loosely tribal-feeling folk-pop nuggets. A little more than a year later, HWGM is now a full-fledged five-piece band with extensive touring behind them and a deal with big-league indie Secretly Canadian, but while their follow-up effort, Pigeons, varies from its predecessor in plenty of ways, the band's musical approach remains puzzlingly, if not unpleasantly, undefined. The most substantial through-line from the first album is one of sound, which remains dirty, dreamy, psychedelic, and swirling -- produced and recorded by the band in a house in the Catskills, Pigeons offers no substantial increase in recording fidelity, which turns out to be a good thing. More surprisingly, this album essentially jettisons both of the primary stylistic modes explored on the debut: the white-noise instrumentals are gone (and scarcely missed) but, with a few exceptions, so are the ambiguously ethnic, gentle world-pop vibes and much of the mantra-like melodic minimalism that contributed so much to the first album's appeal. Opener "Hibernation" floats fragmentary vocals atop a dense, stuttering Afro-beat lope, while the final two tracks, the circular chant "Vegetable or Native" and wordless, herky-jerky "Herbie I Love You," are built on layers of skeletal, intriguingly polyrhythmic percussion -- but that's about the extent of this album's global grooving. The eight intervening tracks form a motley, unfocused assemblage of eclectic indie pop, sometimes with a worked-up rhythmic drive -- the jaunty single "Collector" and the submerged-feeling "Moon" suggest either the mechanistic intensity of Krautrock or, less charitably, tepidly frenetic, warmed-over post-punk -- sometimes more ethereally floating. "Bottom Feeder" is vaguely countryish, making fine use of Temple's thin, overstrained pipes (shades of Neil Young reediness), while the curiously carnivalistic "Old World United," definitely the oddest thing on here, recalls the debut's old-timey waltz "Everything's Big." There's nothing particularly wrong with any of this, but despite this expanded stylistic and instrumental palette (and some notably lush, lovely vocal harmonies), it's hard to escape the sense that this album is, ironically, even more of an indulgently dabbling affair than its home four-tracked predecessor, which at least had an appealing simplicity and directness of approach. In the words of this album's prettiest tune: "it's casual, not mindshaking." And that's just OK.

-------2009

Think About Life: Family review

No points for guessing what this well-named Montreal threesome thinks about life -- at least assuming that listeners can judge from the sound of this humbly hewn but highly enjoyable sophomore album, the band's outlook and overall aesthetic are unmistakably vibrant, messy, enthusiastic, and riotously colorful. At their best, Think About Life marry the sort of hyperactive, upbeat kitchen-sink pop purveyed by the likes of Junior Senior and the Go! Team to a more guitar-centric indie rock foundation, occasionally bringing a muscular, dance-punky edge to the proceedings. With live drums carrying the groove on every track but one (the New Order-ish electro-pop of "Nueva Nueva"), Family maintains a loose, live, almost ramshackle vibe throughout, although the band also makes fairly prominent use of electronics, with all manner of buzzy keyboards and a handful of cleverly integrated samples. There are flirtations with Afro-pop and Motown (the lovely, laid-back "The Veldt," whose chorus interpolates "My Girl"), a splash of hip-hop (the opening moments of "Set You on Fire," before it settles into more of a pedestrian indie-dance jam), and some frenzied neo-new wave ("The Wizzzard"), several of which come with a curious midsong breakdown of some sort. The grooves are typically on point, Martin Cesar's throaty vocals -- split between impassioned midrange warbles and a Princely falsetto with strong shades of TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe -- are pleasantly distinctive, and the whole album feels comfortably crammed with ear-catching trinkets and inventive arranging ideas, even if the band can't always come up with the melodic goods to make its sonic concoctions fully stick. The first four tracks form the most consistent stretch, with top marks going to the slinky disco strut and touching teenage love soap of "Sweet Sixteen" and the herky-jerky, horn-assisted funk-rock of "Johanna," which features a particularly gritty, determined vocal turn from Cesar as well as a brief, unexpected detour into polyrhythmic trombone Dixie. While the rest of Family doesn't always stand up to those high points, it does always sound like the bandmembers are enjoying themselves, and for the most part that sense of fun is infectious. And sure, it can also grow tiresome and overly familiar at times -- as with so many things, it's mostly a question of perspective. But if Family doesn't make you think about life, at the very least it ought to make you think about dancing.

An Horse: Rearrange Beds review

An Horse's tuneful, classically crunchy two-person indie rock fits in well alongside engagingly personable contemporaries like Wye Oak, Mates of State, and their sometime tourmates Tegan and Sara (who were largely responsible for introducing the band to American audiences), but it also owes a great deal to the meatier old-guard indie duos of the 1990s, groups like the Spinanes, Quasi, and Royal Trux. Like most if not all of these acts, An Horse derive a certain scrappy urgency and directness from their stripped-down, no-frills lineup: it's just Kate Cooper on guitar and lead vocals, Damon Cox on drums and backgrounds, but their limited numbers don't stop them from kicking up plenty of racket. The approach -- gritty and muscular but too melodic to come off as especially tough -- is wonderfully well-suited to the frank, up-front songwriting on their debut, packing a wallop of nervous energy that mirrors the emotional immediacy of Cooper's heart-sleeved relationship confessionals while moving briskly enough from hook to hook to preclude too much wallowing in earnestness. (The few exceptions, "Listen" and "Little Lungs," wherein the pace momentarily slackens, function just fine -- and even explicitly -- as breathers.) Opening shot "Camp Out" is the clear highlight, a bouncy four-chord jumble of sexual angst and exultantly hopeful confusion that builds to anthemic proportions, but the remainder of the album, which follows in a largely similar vein, is nearly up to that level. Ultimately, it's the sound as much as the songs that make Rearrange Beds so thoroughly enjoyable, that warmly familiar, tried but true indie rock buzz that An Horse seem to have offhandedly mastered, capturing all the necessary torment and jubilation of adolescence and rock & roll, and almost always coming out smiling on the other side.

Javelin: Javelin review

This limited-edition 12" EP -- packaged in screen-printed, re-purposed thrift-store LP sleeves -- distills the irrepressibly fun-loving, sample-based shenanigans that Javelin unleashed on their self-issued Jamz 'n' Jemz CD-R (and would soon extend to their Luaka Bop debut, No Más) into a highly concentrated five-track party. There are vocals here -- disembodied snatches of throaty R&B interjected into the bass-popping slo-mo funk of "Unforgettable Super Lady"; a brattily incanted schoolyard rhyme and a fluttery bit of goofball rapping buried in "Soda Popinski"'s 8-bit hip-hop hoe-down; even a full-fledged sung melody on the half-baked "Radio" -- but it's really all about the grooves, which are fairly bursting with kaleidoscopic cut-n-paste charm all on their own. In fact, it's probably just as well that the preposterously named "Lindsey Brohan" (a holdover from Jamz) is instrumental; its sugary day-glo electro cake could hardly handle any more frosting. Snatch it fast.

Joe Goddard: Harvest Festival review

Joe Goddard's solo debut, recorded for his own Greco-Roman imprint, is a largely instrumental, wholly electronic set that finds the chipper Hot Chipper displaying much the same affable good humor and nifty, nuanced knob-twiddling that he brings to his main band. The album's fruit-based titling scheme is an apt one: alongside their generally frisky, frivolous feel, these tracks have an analog warmth and inbred musicality that make them far juicier and more flavorful than your typical faceless techno fare, even sticking within a fairly limited, simple, and at times rather tinny-sounding sonic range. Hot Chip fans looking for an extra serving of the group's full-spectrum emotional electro-pop may find it wanting -- the only proper vocal song, "Lemons and Lime (Home Time)," is likably lush and croony, and makes a nice palate-cleanser in context, but it's fairly slight by the band's standards -- but Harvest Festival offers plenty of its own delights, with its nicely balanced track list spanning fully club-appropriate material and several mellower and/or murkier pieces. "Apple Bobbing" opens the album somewhere in the middle of that range and is an instant highlight, gradually layering one sweetly burbling synth melody over another as a classically styled Chicago house drum track jacks slinkily in the background. The grooves deepen through the disc's dancy first half, nodding to dubstep's woozy bass wobble and twitchy syncopations as they build toward the full-on thumping goofiness of the Biggie-biting "Go Bananas." The back half of the album is more abstract (i.e., not particularly danceable) and moodier, if not necessarily less playful, with a tendency to feel slightly unformed and unfinished -- though "Sour Grapes," with its serene churchy organ figures atop a rolling sea of dubbed-out liquid clicks, is headed in an intriguing direction. Nothing here suggests Goddard ought to consider leaving his day job, but it's a worthy diversion that should please most fans and onlookers curious enough to seek it out.

Pink Skull: Endless Bummer review

Endless Bummer is the second album-length Pink Skull release, but even though it has plenty in common with the woolly, chameleonic onslaught of 2008's Zeppelin 3 -- lots of percussion-happy, mainly instrumental disco-rock workouts, a pronounced psychedelic bent, nutty non sequitur track titles -- it feels somehow less like a straightforward follow-up than its own discrete venture, or even something of a reset. Perhaps that's due to Pink Skull's fluidity as a musical entity (live band/DJ collective/recording project), which has veered more in the full band direction in the intervening year and a half, or to the D.I.Y., project-like distinctness of each of their releases. (This one, for instance, was issued only on MP3 and vinyl, with an initial run of 1,000 copies in unique handmade letterpressed sleeves each emblazoned with a different "bummer" -- "Ingrown Toenail," "Fake Orgasm," "Ethnic Cleansing," "Emo," etc.) Arguably even less accurately named than Zeppelin 3, Endless Bummer is in fact both relatively concise and a considerably more positive-spirited and agreeable affair than its predecessor, with markedly less electronic wankery and only one true foray into all-out inscrutability (the noodly "Fast Forward to Bolivia"). Opener "Peter Cushing" is about the closest thing imaginable to a Pink Skull pop single, foregrounding Julian Grefe's self-harmonized vocals and a cheery flute riff with a simple sprightly beat and rubbery bassline harking back to the heyday of dance-punk. Predictably, things get a bit weirder and more expansive from there on out, but the basic template of organically fluid, disco-infused live-band grooves -- best exemplified by the hard-driving title track -- remains fairly constant, with just enough variety (skronking sax and chipper scatted doo wop vocals on "Chicken Dream Inside Egg"; glitchy electronic interjections on "The Inconsiderate Neighbor...") to keep things interesting. The flip side to this approach -- the album's other primary mode -- is the spacy, beatless synth exploration assayed on "Wheet" and "Fired So Fired," and on the two longer, more preposterously named bonus tracks, which achieve true ambient restfulness (another first for these guys) with no small debt to '70s kosmische musik. Pink Skull may not be doing anything all that new, but it's still a delight to hear the confidence and openness they've achieved here, settling into a groove without losing their appealing looseness and devilish sense of fun. If Zeppelin 3's itchy, dizzying eclecticism seemed desperate to make a statement and wound up barely skirting incoherence, Endless Bummer feels like it has less at stake but, paradoxically, something more to say.

Cornershop: Judy Sucks a Lemon for Breakfast review

Back in 1997: Cornershop felt like real envelope-pushers with their simmering Anglo-Indian curry of breakbeat chop-ups, Filmi-flavored funk and sunny guitar pop. Back to basics: After a seven-year recording hiatus, they're staunch Brit-pop old-guardists, lacing their reincarnated riffs with sacred cowbell, goopy gospel singers and scads of sitar (which is pretty darn classic rock when you think about it), and covering both the Kinks and Manfred Mann (who knew "The Mighty Quinn" sounded so much like "Brimful of Asha"?) Back in business: Still sounding most fundamentally like themselves, with quirks sanded down only slightly, the 'Shop can still churn out an unbeatable summer soundtrack.

-------2008

A Mountain of One: Collected Works review

As singular and imposing as their name foretells, U.K. trio A Mountain of One wholeheartedly embody the spirit of transcendent psychedelia, with all the beauty, lushness, grandiosity, pomposity, and ridiculosity that entails. The cosmic forefathers conjured in these grooves -- Tangerine Dream, Pink Floyd, Ash Ra Tempel -- may be fairly oft-cited as influences, but rarely have they been echoed with such solemn, magisterial fervor. The group's links to the space-case electronic purveyors of the Scandinavian neo-Balearic wave (artists like Lindstrøm, Low Motion Disco, Meanderthals, and, in particular, balmy noodle-meisters Studio, who've remixed their "Brown Piano") are readily evident as well, but despite the burbling disco grooves lazily coursing through many of these cuts, and the synth-kissed cover of Ginny's 1985 Italo-disco slow burn "Can't Be Serious," Mountain of One aren't exactly a dance act. It doesn't seem quite right to call them a full-fledged rock band, either (for one thing, all three core members are credited with programming in addition to various live instruments), but perhaps that's because moody, spacious synth odysseys, epically extended guitar explorations, and somberly intoned, quasi-spiritual vocals just aren't the sorts of things we expect from rock bands anymore. The "works" collected here -- two five-track EPs and a pair of new songs -- span driving, flamenco-assisted Latin-psych bombast ("Ride"), unabashedly soppy soft pop schmaltzballs ("Your Love Over Gold"), hypnotically free-floating flights of cosmic fancy ("Warping of the Clocks," "Arc of Abraham"), and even a few properly vocal-driven songs (the beatless, blearily blissed-out "Freefall" and the sublimely soaring "Innocent Line," whose gossamer disco-rock amble is stretched out to more than double its length with the Air-ish instrumental reprise) whose potently simple melodies slowly wend their way into your skull. Whether this is just the stuff to fuel your personal rocketship, or whether you find it all a bit too bloated and overbearing to handle, ultimately comes down to a question of taste -- not, clearly, these dudes' chief preoccupation -- but for those willing to climb aboard, Collected Works makes for a spectacularly smooth ride. Either way, it's hard to deny that A Mountain of One are an exceptional band, working with a level of ambition that doesn't come along nearly often enough and -- equally rare -- the chops and the commitment to see it fully realized.

Adem: Takes review

A covers album of a particularly personal stripe, Adem Ilhan's third solo record has all the intimacy and hand-crafted charm of a beloved mixtape, bringing the warmth of spirit and imaginative acoustic palette of his earlier works to bear on a handful of his favorite songs from the formative period (for Adem himself and for indie music in general) between 1992 and 2001. Anyone who was an ardent follower of the burgeoning "alternative" scene during these years should find something to smile at among Adem's song choices, which cover many of the era's big names (Smashing Pumpkins, PJ Harvey, Björk) but steer clear of familiar hits in favor of more obscure single sides and album tracks. Despite a fair breadth of source material (given the constraints of time and milieu), Takes functions quite cohesively on its own terms, and there's plenty to enjoy here whether or not listeners are familiar with the original versions. Many of the picks play to Adem's strengths in obvious (and thoroughly effective) ways -- the fluid, melodic guitar lines of Pinback ("Loro") and Bedhead ("Bedside Table") translate naturally to his layered acoustic picking style, while the spare, serenely transcendent emotionalism of Low's "Laser Beam" and Yo La Tengo's "Tears Are in Your Eyes" make a fine fit for his achingly rich, just-slightly-gritty voice (which, if anything, is perhaps a tad forceful for these utterly delicate songs.) Other selections involve a bit more reinvention -- it's no surprise to see Tortoise on the track listing, given Adem's post-rock backstory with Fridge, but he twists the lengthy rarity "Gamera" to his own unexpected ends, using the original track's introductory guitar figure as a launch-pad for a fast-and-loose free-folk excursion. Most intriguing, and perhaps the album's standout moment, is his Aphex Twin homage, which combines two tracks off The Richard D. James Album, smoothing out the freakish vocals of "To Cure a Weakling Child" and grafting them onto an impressively detailed acoustic transcription of "Girl/Boy Song," with surprisingly mellow, cheerful results. Elsewhere, dEUS ("Hotellounge") and the Breeders ("Invisible Man") get stripped of their rougher, grungier elements in favor of lusciously thick arrangements replete with glockenspiel, harmonium, piano, and an array of plucked string instruments -- all of which, along with dulcimer, Autoharp, violin, and assorted found percussion, make up the bountiful sonic trick bag from which Adem draws intuitively and judiciously throughout the album. Not an especially consequential offering, but a tremendously lovable one, Takes may be aptly and cleverly titled (punning on at least three senses of the word), but it's absolutely an act of giving on multiple levels as well: a showcase for the considerable musical gifts of its creator, a sincere token of tribute to his inspirations, and a generous treat for his listeners.

-------2005

Why?: Elephant Eyelash review

There were some glimmers of articulate clarity and likably wry charm amid the mumblings and meanderings of Why?'s first full-length, Oaklandazulasylum, but they hardly anticipated the dramatic leap forward into approachability that marked their second. ("Their" because, between the two albums, Why? had mutated from an arty quasi-rap solo project alias to a full-fledged if hardly conventional indie rock band) Though still far from easily digestible, the challenges Elephant Eyelash presents aren't so much about trying to piece together a head-scratchingly oblique, willfully incomplete puzzle as simply taking the time to process and integrate its veritable flood of musical and, especially, lyrical content, an outpouring suggestive of a long-withdrawn, self-absorbed introvert who's suddenly become desperate to communicate with the world. What gets communicated -- in essence, the manifold nooks and crannies of Yoni Wolf's psyche -- is by turns playful, philosophical, insecure, morbid, and sentimental, and while that communication is still happening on Wolf's own terms -- which means reams of voluble verbiage peppered with nerdy absurdities, cleverly convoluted wordplay, and free-associative filigree, usually delivered in a nasal, over-articulated singsong that was really his only viable remaining link to hip-hop (and a pretty tenuous one at that) -- the upshot is a singularly striking set of images and insights well worth the scrutiny. Somewhere between intimate journal entries and free-form poetry, these songs float from factual, anecdotal snapshots -- like a vivid depiction (in the opening verse of "Sand Dollars") of watching a water-based graffito dissolve in the rain, or the casual specificity of "Yo Yo Bye Bye"'s scene-setting opening lines: "I was walking through San Antonio before soundcheck/looking for some pole to do pull-ups on" -- to probing meditations on aging and mortality (brooding closers "Act Five" and "Light Leaves"), inscrutable phantasmagoric whimsy ("The Hoofs"), and coded but no-less-heartfelt ruminations on love, loss, memory, and the alarming intensity of human connection (perhaps most affectingly on the wonderfully imagistic "Gemini (Birthday Song)." The subject matter can get fairly weighty, sure, but it's tempered by Wolf's deft balance of wit and sincerity, and by the delicately skewed indie pop backing of his bandmates. Indeed, Elephant Eyelash's music is nearly as remarkable and distinctive as its words; wispy, crunchy, structurally off-kilter compositions that are difficult to classify but favor a certain ramshackle charm and melodic sweetness, and in a few cases -- among them "Rubber Traits," "Gemini," and especially "Sanddollars" -- wind up feeling oddly, downright anthemic.