review round-up XV: 2011 second half, vol. 2 [singer-songwriters and indie rock bands]

Devon Sproule: I Love You, Go Easy review

Devon Sproule's sixth album opens in typically bucolic fashion, with the limber-voiced songwriter musing mellifluously on the mossy, terrapin-filled pond of her childhood commune (perhaps the very same "goose-poop pond" referenced at the start of her previous album), but the record on the whole finds Sproule -- an Ontario-born lifelong Virginian, freshly transplanted to Berlin, who's probably best beloved in the U.K. -- traveling musically and thematically further afield from her rustic roots. I Love You, Go Easy, which feels every bit as warm, thoughtful, and generously gentle as the twofold sentiment contained in its title, was recorded in her native Canada with a fresh batch of collaborators -- free-thinking Toronto producer Sandro Perri (Polmo Polpo) and experimental folk-pop trio the Silt -- who work some small wonders with the album's breezily expansive textural palette, making tasteful use of flutes, clarinets, saxophones, brass, and a few unobtrusively burbling synthesizers alongside Sproule's trusty Gibson. The result is considerably removed from the country-informed folk that dominated (but never completely encapsulated) her earlier work; it's both her subtlest and jazziest effort to date, certainly sonically but also in its songwriting, which tends more than ever toward long, fluid melodic lines and loose, open-ended structures. And the songs, if not necessarily her most immediately captivating or endearingly winsome, are as artful, personable, elegant, and finely crafted as ever, revealing abundant charms and quirks with familiarity. They're also frankly, unapologetically personal, vehicles for Sproule to explore the nuances of her relationships and emotions but also to sort through her life and career goals (though the two tend to intersect, particularly when it comes -- as it often does -- to her husband, fellow singer/songwriter Paul Curreri).

Twin Sister: In Heaven review

Twin Sister's most singular asset – and, apart from a general sonic softness which could be described as "twee," In Heaven's only really consistent attribute – is Andrea Estella's singing voice: a supple, adorable coo that's got a soupçon of Lætitia Sadier, a playful pinch of Judy Garland – by way of Nellie McKay, and, particularly when layered and harmonized, a warm, velvety mellifluence akin to underrated California popsters Simone Rubi and Terri Loewenthal (Rubies/Call and Response.) True, the band's carved out a distinctive, likable, retro-indebted yet minty-fresh baseline sound: dappled, spacey lounge-pop which calls to mind Baudelaire's "luxe, calme et volupté" (also, incidentally, the mantra of romanticist Canadian lushes Stars), and is perhaps best exemplified by opening ditty "Daniel," with its glowing, drifting Tortoise-shell veneer of vibraphone and organ and its gently zippy beatbox bossa. (Call it The Sea and Cupcake – with Estella as the gooey frosting – or, alternatively: Coctail Twins.) But In Heaven, if anything, only ramps up the genre-hopping of Twin Sister's early EPs, rendering it a rather diffuse, perplexing miscellany. Viz., infectious funk-slice "Bad Street" struts into kewpie disco territory (somewhere in the suburbs of "Funkytown"); aptly-named "Space Babe" ushers in the synth-washed and ponderous dream-pop of "Kimmi in a Ricefield" and "Luna," whose gauzy solemnity is then undercut by a spate of campy weirdness: "Spain" (torchy spy-theme pastiche), "Gene Ciampi" (Spaghetti Western clip-clop) and "Saturday Sunday" (easy-listening bubblegum? Petula Clark takes on Rebecca Black?), which largely dial back the synths in favor of screwball guitar. So: Heaven? or Las Vegas? or, more probably, (c. late 90s) Chicago? Hard to predict quite where Twin Sister will end up, but it's a lovely, leisurely, labile journey all the same.

Kathryn Calder: Bright & Vivid review

For an album titled Bright and Vivid, Kathryn Calder's sophomore solo effort sure starts out pretty murky. With its thick, squalling guitars, thudding drumbeat, and smeared, muffled vocals, "One Two Three" initially suggests that Calder is taking a page from the voguish, lo-fi girl group playbook (Dum Dum Girls, Vivian Girls, et al), but that soon turns out to be a bit of a miscue. There's a sense of polish and deliberateness in spite of all the hazy, swirling sonics; what emerges here, and throughout the album, is indeed quite vivid and bright -- but on the order of a lush, richly saturated Impressionist painting (or, perhaps, the album's autumnal-hued cover), an aesthetic far removed from the crisp, neatly delineated formalism of her work with the New Pornographers and Immaculate Machine. While Calder's relatively intimate, understated solo debut demonstrated a keen awareness of texture and a solid understanding of arrangement, those impulses come to the fore here in a considerably fuller and more conspicuous way, becoming as much of a focus as the songs themselves, if not more; take for instance the epically evolving, almost suite-like "All the Things," which is instrumental for more than half of its six-minute run time, and features Calder's voice, when it does come in, positively drowned in reverb. That voice -- warm, confident, girlishly pure, more richly developed than ever --still serves as the sublime vehicle for melody it has long been, rising brilliantly above the gentle haze on "Right Book," or tenderly harmonizing on "City of Sounds," but it's also sometimes treated as just one more, albeit integral, element in the album's lavish, layered tapestry of texture. For all the considerable volume of sound on the album -- which Calder recorded in her living room with her producer-engineer husband Colin Stewart (head of Vancouver's Hive Creative Labs), working at a leisurely pace and enlisting a generous cast of collaborators -- it never feels overstuffed. And while the songs, in general, tend not to announce themselves loudly, but rather blossom gradually, taking time to reveal their ample hooks and charms, they show just as much care and craft as the album's expansive soundscape. Even at their most immediately, infectiously accessible -- the glorious, electro-poppy earworm "Who Are You?," which has all the makings of an indie-night dance anthem, or the catchy, rocking "Walking in My Sleep" (the closest the album comes to New Pornos-style power pop) -- these are thoughtful, complex pieces of songwriting. A firm step forward on all fronts, Bright and Vivid is a thoroughly engaging listen and establishes Calder as a creative force and pop craftsperson every bit as worthy as her big-deal bandmates.

Darren Hayman: Essex Arms review

For the second installment in his planned "Essex Trilogy," Darren Hayman shifts his focus from the suburban, middle-class "new town" Harlow – the subject and setting of 2009's Pram Town – to a broader view of the East Anglian county's rural, working-class communities. Like its predecessor, Essex Arms is full of highly specific geographic and cultural references which effectively function as a backdrop to Hayman's usual assortment of love songs, character sketches and wistful ruminations. This time there's no attempt to cement the album's concept through a grand connecting narrative (or even a modest one), but the songs still hang together nicely to evoke a clear sense of place, with linchpins including "Dagenham Ford" – a touchingly bittersweet eulogy to a shuttered auto plant (and perennial football underdogs West Ham United) – and the languorous "Two Tree Island" (an ode to a former sewage works and landfill, now partially a nature reserve), with its vision of the countryside commingled with litter and waste. Sweetness and decadence run hand and hand throughout these songs, with references to semi-public sex and reckless (and sometimes fatal) joyriding intermingling with heartfelt declarations of love (none more pure and guileless than "Super Kings"' earnest refrain.) Perhaps the most winning moment (which is reprised en passant throughout the album, for good measure) comes with "Winter Makes You Want Me More," whose central sentiment is as poetic as it is self-evident; a cold-weather love song that's as universal as pawprints in the snow, shivering smokers and candy-striped flannelette sheets. Throughout, Hayman and a particularly strong incarnation of the Secondary Modern (including contributions from Fanfarlo, The Wave Pictures and – on the scene-setting "Calling Out Your Name Again," a duet with Emmy the Great) infuse the proceedings with a loose but decidedly folksy, countrified air, flush with pedal steel, harmonica, fiddle, mandolin and more. That musical modus may or may not be strictly relevant to the countryside in question, but it works marvelously well with Hayman's increasingly soulful songwriting, both on the hushed, melancholic tunes which make up the majority of this collection (starting right off the bat with the sad-sack "Be Lonely") and the handful of upbeat offerings, including the atypically rocky scrabble-playing closer "Nothing You Can Do About It." While it's not quite the uniquely charming statement Pram Town was, Essex Arms is yet another excellent addition to Hayman's ever-expanding discography.

Jeffrey Lewis: A Turn In The Dream-Songs review

Following the splendid career highlight Em Are I, and after a couple of collaborative detours – the uneven-at-best The Bundles with Kimya Dawson, and the delightfully loopy Come On Board with weirdo-folk icon Peter Stampfel – lovably quirky New York songwriter/cartoonist Jeffrey Lewis returns with a highly likable sixth album full of his characteristic wit, whimsy, sardonic self-deprecation and transcendental musings. Lewis' regular backing band the Junkyard are absent here (under that billing, at least), as are the occasional bursts of electrified rowdiness they've provided in the past. In their place are a clutch of mostly British indie-folk players (including the Wave Pictures' Franic Rozycki, who provides some fine mandolin work throughout), and a bevy of guests – members of The Vaselines, Dr. Dog, Au Revoir Simone, Misty’s Big Adventure and Schwervon – who help flesh out the album's pleasantly loose, vaguely psych-folky vibe, particularly on the tone-setting "To Go And Return," whose spacey, surreal lyric (a somewhat Seussian nonsense rhyme about the cosmic metaphysics of wish-making) is the source of the album's peculiar title. Despite all the friends he's amassed here, Lewis remains an archetypal loner, a condition which informs many of the album's sharpest numbers, from the lovelorn lambast "How Can It Be?" (featuring peppy, '60s-style backing vocals by the Dr. Dog boys) and the goofy "Cult Boyfriend" (which likens Lewis' romantic boom-and-bust cycles to a rapid-fire list of pop-culture obscurities) to "I Got Lost"'s gentle, plain-spoken disquisition on disconnection and "When You're By Yourself"'s wryly tender dissection of the practical logistics of loneliness – not to mention the hyperbolic shaggy-dog suicide saga "So What If I Couldn't Take It Anymore." (As usual – though still impressively – these songs rarely if ever come across as bitter or overly self-pitying; Lewis hasn't lost his knack for balancing depressed and depressing subject matter with insightfulness, sincerity, levity and charm.) All that time alone must give Lewis plenty of opportunity for deep thinking, which might explain the homespun, slightly stoned philosophizing of songs like the de facto centerpiece "Krongu Green Slime" – which uses the odd conceit of a pre-historic novelty manufacturing corporation to reimagine the entirety of evolution, over six protracted minutes of spare acoustic picking – and, perhaps more cogently, the touching "Time Trades," which moves beyond theorizing to offer some practical advice about long-term life planning. Songs like this – imaginative, contemplative, densely wordy, slightly silly but unflinchingly earnest – are arguably Lewis' strongest suit, especially in his recent work, and if the instances on A Turn In The Dream-Songs aren't quite as striking as those on its predecessor, the album still ranks right up there among his best.

Wu Lyf: Go Tell Fire To The Mountain review

British foursome World Unite Lucifer Youth Foundation – amusingly tempting to confuse with their rather distant Stateside counterparts World/Inferno Friendship Society (both bands are, at least, similarly fervent, unruly and rabble-rousing) – craft music that's every bit as elemental, emphatic and willfully enigmatic as their album's title. On its own terms, stripped of the hyped-to-hell/anti-hype vortex of its appealingly mythic but all-too-familiar backstory, Go Tell Fire offers both considerable beauty – lots of chiming, churchy organ, lots of gorgeously liquid, lucid guitar – and considerable ugliness (including some brutish, pounding grooves, but especially Ellery Roberts' instantly divisive choked, guttural caterwaul, which is potent in chunks – especially in exhortative chant mode – but dreadfully wearisome at unremitting album-length full-throttle), neither of which feel like ends in themselves (nor a purpose-driven juxtaposition) so much as value-neutral vehicles striving, straining, yearning toward pure, pummeling visceral emotion. And, to the (inconsistent) extent that they keep things abstract (read: post-rock-ish), and avoid sounding like any other bunch of dull, drudgy indie-rock also-rans (most of the bits invoking their self-conception as "heavy pop," a rather sour, chore-like description), it mostly works.

Zee Avi: Ghostbird review

A pint-sized, ukulele-strumming, vintage dress-wearing Malaysian-born songbird who rose to prominence via YouTube videos, Zee Avi fairly screams cute, quirky whimsy. If that description raises any warning flags or cynical twitches, ghostbird might just not be your glass of agave-sweetened hibiscus tea. (Should it be held against her that both she and her music are the stuff of marketing directors' dreams? It's an open question...) But you'd have to be at least a little cold-hearted not to be pleasantly lulled by the warm, gentle breeziness of Avi's music; its evident charm, predictably familiar though it might be, is modest enough never to feel cloying. If nothing else, the album consistently sounds wonderful: helmed by longtime Beastie Boys associate Mario Caldato Jr. (Bebel Gilberto, Jack Johnson) with a genially eclectic textural expansiveness – drawing freely from folk, swing jazz and soundtrack-friendly pop, with a twist of South Pacific tropicalia – it boasts a particularly vivid variety of percussion elements (shakers, fingersnaps, crisply mic'd congas, brushed snare drums, bullfrogs, rhythmic vocal chanting and discreet turntable scratches.) As for Avi herself, her personality often takes a comfortable backseat to the sound – and her lyrics, save for the occasional pithy sun-dappled observation ("every good fisherman has a pelican watching over him") tend to stand out for vague syntactic awkwardness ("even my lover's no longer enamored by me") or blatant factual inaccuracy ("thirty-one days in June" – from a song whose refrain also asserts "my love will pay the rent") if at all – but her voice, a gorgeously honeyed, legitimately jazzy warble (recalling The Bird and the Bee's Inara George) that belies her 25 years, is simply beyond reproach.

philadelphia city paper reviews:

Jens Lekman: Having An Argument With Myself EP review

Oh so silent oh so long (four years!), Mr. Jens Lekman reminds us just what we've been missing with the delectably dense An Argument With Myself EP (Secretly Canadian.) Over some of the sparkliest, most lovingly detailed grooves of his career – effervescent Afro-pop, plasticine twee-funk, soupy yacht-reggae – the gallant Göthenburger peruses and ponders the debatably ethical society of his hometown (and this world over: Melbourne; Santiago) via personal anecdotes, romantic professions, driving directions, absent-minded small talk, socio-political critique and – of course – plenty of jokes.

Gillian Welch The Harrow and the Harvest review

It's been a long, dry spell since last we heard from Gillian Welch – eight years; though the ten sterling originals comprising The Harrow and the Harvest feel, characteristically, far far older than that. If anything, Welch and her indispensable partner (in songwriting, harmonizing, and stunningly meticulous picking) David Rawlings sound more artlessly natural than ever inhabiting these deeply bluesy (and sometimes gothically gloomy) Appalachian folk strains, any of which could slot right in at your next backwoods campfire.

Tom Waits: Bad As Me review

Saying someone sounds like Tom Waits has become a lazy rock critic cliché trotted out for any singer who's a bit growly or guttural. Bad As Me (Anti-), the man's seventeenth album, besides being an all-around marvelous return after the longest recording gap of his career, is a spectacular reminder that, in actuality, nobody sings like Ol' Tom, whose larynx unleashes everything from weary, warbled moans to feral, splenetically spluttering yowls to an eerily husky falsetto croon across a tight set of his inimitable juke-joint rumbles, junkyard blues and bleary, beery ballads.

Steve Malkmus + The Jicks: Mirror Traffic review

Sorta a shame he didn't stick with the wry working title Madonna in Love, but otherwise it's hard to fathom a legit complaint against Mirror Traffic (Matador), Stephen Malkmus's fifth album with the Jicks, first since last year's world-conquering victory lap with that other band of his, and most instantly, consistently approachable in ages. Spanning gorgeously warm countryfied lopes, smirking spazz-outs, and bulls-eye riff-fests, these fifteen cuts are spry, tuneful, funny and touching: nothing but gold, gold sounds.

Laura Marling: A Creature I Once Knew review

Third time out and the spryest, most striking work yet from the fiercely prodigious Laura Marling, A Creature I Don't Know (Virgin) finds the steely-eyed, still-implausibly-youthful songstress toughening up her nimble, classically refined folk with hard-boiled jazz, blues and (surprisingly bruising) rock inflections; following her increasingly inimitable voice (both literary and literal) into ever more dramatic, elementally mythic themes and haunting, heart-wrenching idiosyncrasies; and also — just showing off — penning her most immediate, ear-catching batch of tunes yet.

Kate Bush: 50 Words for Snow review

Kate Bush – art-pop's high priestess; iconoclast icon who's the inspiration for at least one generation of would-be "eccentrics" – returns to show 'em all how it's done. Except, it's never been done quite like this: 50 Words for Snow (Fish People), her second album this year (but only third this century!) tackles its titular promise with zestful aplomb (and a little assist from Stephen Fry) – "phlegm de neige"..."whippoccino"...psychohail" – but also achieves subtler, equally prodigious feats of imagination and expressiveness throughout its seven mesmerizing, glistening-gentle, white-flurried powder-puffs of song.

The Dø: Both Ways Open Jaws review

There's much that's curious about Franco-Finnish twosome The Dø: the baffling bandname (pronounced "dough," incidentally); the ineffable charisma of Olivia Merilahti's potent, versatile soprano; the way their simple-seeming but naggingly elusive folky/poppy/bluesy tinker-toy tunes flit from gypsy jazz to junkyard electronica and somehow feel at once sparse and texturally teeming. Both Ways Open Jaws (Six Degrees), their modest, ambitious second effort, dances its bohemian dances with a Feist-y, casually effortless sophistication that seems primed to court mainstream attention, but without sacrificing a quark of their subtle, innate quirk.

Brite Futures: Dark Past review

Maybe Seattle electro-popsters Brite Futures' named Dark Past (Turnout), their debut-as-such, in reference to their somewhat notorious, decidedly dubious original moniker, about which the less said the better. It certainly couldn't be about the music, which is as day-glo bright as all get-out: glamtastic party-rocking power-pop with mirrorball glimmers of everybody from Queen and The Cars to Weezer, Phoenix and Daft Punk. It's blatantly mindless fun that, for once, is genuinely fun. Not bad for a buncha goofs who used to call themselves Natalie Portman's Shaved Head. Oh, wait, whoops.

Beirut: The Rip Tide review

Zach Condon's toponym fixation is alive and well in the tracklist of The Rip Tide (Pompeii), Beirut's quietly assured third full-length, but his old-world musical wanderlust is far less dominant than it once was: the defining Balkan, French chanson and Mexican folk currents of past efforts are synthesized here into a broader, more refined aesthetic; the characteristic barrage of trumpets, accordions, string bands and martial snares is more than ever in the service of these nine compact, comfortable songs.

Björk: Biophilia review

She may never recapture the synthesis of uncompromising artiness and pop accessibility which blessed her peerless '90s peak, but the music on Biophilia (One Little Indian), Björk's often arresting, occasionally impenetrable sixth (proper) full-length – in non-trivial danger of being overshadowed by the album's truly ambitious accessorizing (app-based interactivity, exhaustive conceptual exegesis, multi-media overload) – reveals that, when she wants to, she's still able to engage as well as merely dazzle, through concise melodicism, sheer sonic prettiness, and the occasional bad-ass drill'n'bass freakout.

Sam Phillips: Solid State review

Of the increasingly many industry-dispossesed critics-darling songsmiths to go the self-released, fan-financed route (see also: Jill Sobule, Juliana Hatfield), smart-pop lifer Sam Phillips must be among the more ambitious – Solid State: Songs from the Long Play is merely a compact, physical distillation of a long-running subscription-based online project which yielded, in full, forty-three new tunes. The ones compiled here should amply satisfy more casual fans that her rich, Beatles-indebted songcraft and wryly bittersweet vocals (often distinctively close-harmonized) remain as singular and effective as ever.

Feist: Metals review

Metals (Interscope) is Leslie Feist's calmest, plainest record yet; despite the occasional string-laden swelling of sound, group-chanted refrain, or Colin Stetson saxophone murmuration, it basically never deviates from her mossy-soft luxe pop métier, and it will serve comfortably as more-than-adequate background music for just about any demographic. Listen closer, though, and it's rarely if ever dull: Feist may have grown complacent but she's still a smart, thoughtful songcrafter whose subtle way with mood and melody are as meticulous as they come.

The Bees: Every Step's A Yes review

As though still stuck in a starry-eyed, pastoral post-Brit-Pop groove the rest of us have rudely tumbled out of, A Band of Bees (just The Bees to their fellow Britons) have been churning out sunny, amorphously Sixties-referencing psych-pop (and the odd samba detour) for nearly a decade now. The lovely, leisurely Every Step's A Yes (Fiction/ATO), which reaches our shores a year late, is their gentlest, folkiest excursion yet, recalling forgotten soft-pop sophisticates like the Mamas and the Papas (covered quite faithfully here) and The Association.

Baby Dee: Goes Down To Amsterdam review

For anyone who caught up with her classy, largely instrumental suite Regifted Light earlier this year, or the far-too-many who haven't had the pleasure, Baby Dee Goes Down To Amsterdam (Tin Angel) offers a quick and dirty tromp through the highlights of the big-hearted, crazy-voiced harpist/pianist's songwriting oeuvre, sampling both the unabashed tenderness and the chillingly dark, twisted recesses of her catalog, with lots of gleeful cackling along the way. Make a date with one of the most utterly singular talents of our times...and go Dutch.

Bon Iver: Bon Iver review

Superficially, the eponymous second Bon Iver album (Jagjaguwar) is a radically different beast from Justin Vernon's rapturously admired debut – texturally expansive and opulent where its predecessor was solitary and sparse; trading wispy folk for gooey, Oldenburgian Soft Pop. But the music's fundamental allure remains conspicuously unchanged: in a word, vibe. Befitting his work's preoccupation with environments (here, a litany of real and surreal place-names), and extrapolating from an ineffable voice which conveys (or evokes) reams more in sound than it ever does in actual sense, Vernon is, essentially, indiedom's preeminent purveyor of ambience.

review round-up XV: 2011 second half, vol. 1 [electronic]

about time? i've been, apparently, much too busy writing about music this year (as you'll see) to post any writing about music up here. now, in one massive lump that probably completely undermines the whole point of the concept of blogging, i present to you just about all the record reviews i wrote from july through december 2011, for All Music Guide, Cowbell Magazine (R.I.P.), Magnet Magazine, and (a regular outlet for record reviews for the first time since i started writing for them) Philadelphia City Paper.

in three installments, sorted by "genre," broadly speaking. within each installment, i've set the shorter, blurby CP reviews apart from the longer AMG and magazine reviews, and each grouping is in rough order of how much i liked em...

Ada: Meine Zarten Pfoten review

Like Isolée's Pampa Records bow in January, Meine Zarten Pfoten (which translates, brilliantly, to "My Tender Paws") marks the fervently-awaited follow-up to one of mid-decade "minimal" electronica's most appealing and personable documents, in this case 2004's phenomenal Blondie. Pfoten, true to its title, veers far from that album's Teutonic bleep-and-thump backbone in search of gentler, plusher, sensual pastures: bossa-tinged, witchily cooed opener "Faith" (a Luscious Jackson cover, of all things); the Cornelius-like chime and sway of "On the Mend"; "Happy Birthday"'s cheery throb and playfully warped vocals. It's only after the delectably burbling synthesizer "Intro" (which arrives, quirkily enough, at the album's midpoint) that we get something properly house-derived and dancefloor-plausible with "At The Gate"'s moody dark-disco whirr, and then it's perhaps the least distinguished thing here. But "going soft" doesn't mean Michaela Dippel's lost her edge. Don't equate organic delicacy and vocal abundance with a lapse into feeble easy-listening: there's as much spunk, production clarity, and inventiveness here as ever. And, as demonstrated by a sparkling, unlisted transformation of Little Joy's "Keep Me In Mind," she hasn't lost her knack for surprising indie-rock covers either.

Hercules & Love Affair: Blue Songs review

It's second-album time for Andy Butler's shape-shifting, fervently classicist dance-music troupe, and the big stories seem to be that there've been some change-ups in the vocal department (farewell Antony; welcome newcomers Shaun Wright and Aerea Negrot) and that the retro-revivalist reference points have been updated from '70s golden-era disco to jacking turn-of-the-'90s house (which is really only half-true; peep the stately, string-laden strut of "Painted Eyes" for proof.) Oh, and that there's no single to match the epoch-making rapture that was "Blind." So be it: Butler's production prowess remains as magnificent (and, despite his manifest reverence for past masters from Patrick Cowley to Marshall Jefferson to Arthur Russell, as distinctive) as ever, and the slightly wider net he casts here (lest we forget, the debut was plenty varied too) simply makes for more facets to his mirrorball – including, perhaps dubiously positioned at the album's center, a pair of flat-out gorgeous ballads. True blue is more like it.

Dixon: Live At Robert Johnson review

The last installment in the Live at Robert Johnson mix series -- only the eighth in a brief but fruitful two-year run for the eponymous Frankfurt nightclub -- was announced as not only the end of the line for the still-young series, but also, more regrettably, the final mix offering from the masterful DJ Dixon, whose past efforts have included the excellent Body Language 4 and (in collaboration with Âme and Henrik Schwarz) The Grandfather Paradox. In any event, Live at Robert Johnson, Vol. 8 finds both the series and Dixon's mix career going out on a high note, with a very satisfying, beautifully paced, highly personal, and idiosyncratic selection. Probably the mix's most notable idiosyncrasy -- aside from its penchant for sometimes-effective, sometimes-distracting, earnestly intoned spoken vocals -- is its extreme patience: although a nominal pulse gradually emerges after the first few tracks, it's not until over 20 minutes in -- partway through Agoria's genially shuffling "For One Hour" -- that we get anything which could be properly called a beat, and (strangely for a so-called "live" set) a full 45 before the overarching moody languor fully gives way to dancefloor release. Don't think of it as merely an extended build-up though, but as a necessary and integral part of the journey: Ursula Bogner's embryonic dabblings, Barnt's kosmische clusters, Dominique's languid, drifting lounge noodles, and Hauschka's elegant, prepared-piano fantasia calmly giving way to Scalde's soulful-operatic wailing, Hatikvah's dubbed-out rumination, and the slow-moving, gently epic majesty of star-studded Kraut-techno supergroup Cologne Tape's "Render 2." All that brooding and spaciousness make the final emergence of a full-on house groove, in a bespoke edit of Mark E's warmly uplifting "Call Me" (featuring yet another spoken vocal, an interpolation of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough") all the more magical, priming us for the thumping disco jack and percolating synths of Roman Flugel's "Dishes and Wishes" and (after one last dip into moody, melancholic murk with Bruno Gauthier's darkly dubby "Existing Reality") the peerless, purely pleasure-inducing finale of Osunlade's fiercely funky deep-soul cut "Envision" (in a Dixon edit of Âme's remix), and Todd Terje's joyous, synth-dappled anthem "Snooze 4 Love." It's a shame the party has to end so soon, but such is life; with Live, Dixon leaves us fully living it and beckoning us to do the same.

Four Tet: FabricLive 59 review

In contrast to Kieran Hebden's previous DJ mix efforts as Four Tet, such as his kaleidoscopically genre-jumping DJ-Kicks installment, his entry in the Fabriclive series plays things surprisingly straight, largely limiting his selections to a narrow stripe of electronic dance music, and for the most part linking them together in a reasonably smooth, utilitarian fashion. The set's relative focus and club-mindedness is perhaps less of a surprise coming in the wake of 2010's There Is Love in You, Hebden's most floor-friendly record to date, although here he swaps that album's gentle house explorations for a headfirst plunge into U.K. garage and 2-step, with a bucketload of hopelessly obscure, decade-old tracks unearthed and cleverly slotted alongside strikingly simpatico cuts of more recent and wide-ranging vintage: Floating Points' slinky, samba-fied "Sais"; Burial's poignantly percolating "Street Halo." (Hebden even manages to sneak in a tiny bite of his pal Dan Snaith's early twee IDM, sandwiched between Apple's propulsive U.K. funk and Big Bird's sinewy old-school garage.) Most of the tracks here are texturally minimal and strictly beat-focused, and nearly all of them feature at least a handful of distinct percussive lines set up in opposition to create complex, hypnotic, ineffably funky polyrhythms, keying into Hebden's signature love of repetition and organically off-kilter rhythmic overlap. Not content to completely just let things ride out, Hebden paces the proceedings (and pays homage to Fabric the club, a key inspiration for this London-centric affair) with crowd-chatter field recordings sourced from the club itself, bookending the mix and separating it into halves that are each additionally prefaced (somewhat incongruously) by a small palate-cleansing dose of 1980s Euro-synth ambience. The flow is further broken up by occasional (and somewhat distracting) dropouts and near fades, but the set still manages to build up a decent head of steam, particularly in the final stretch anchored by Active Minds' phenomenal "Hobson's Choice," a monstrously groovy slice of 2-step soul. But two of the strongest (and longest) moments here come courtesy of Four Tet himself: dappled, bonus-like closer "Locked," which would have fit right in on his last album; and "Pyramid," which lashes an intoxicating matrix of vocal samples (actually a vastly pitched-down, sped-up Jennifer Lopez) to a foundation of deep, fluid, Villalobosian microhouse.

The Field: Looping State of Mind review

Axel Willner brought this all on himself. The Swedish loopster's early singles and 2007 debut were so ineffably – not to put too fine a point on it – Sublime: where does he Go from there? Commendably enough, his answer hasn't been toward simple recursion (much as he adores it) but expansion: album two tinkeringly broadened his original approach, and the inanely literalistic Looping State of Mind magnifies that trend, offering seven mutations (transformations, perversions, degradations) of his trademark sound, in (for instance) a newly expansive array of tempos – though, interestingly, nothing quite as quick as his consistently zippy early work. So: "Is This Power" feels like a Sublime track pitched down and smeared, to somewhat nauseous effect; the misnamed "Arpeggiated Love" glides along harmlessly, while "Sweet Slow Baby" is utterly numbing. Yeah, there's more going on: more live instrumentation (the limber, funky "It's Up There"; the warmly hypnotic, fully immersive title track), more vocals drifting in and out of the mix (druggy and dripping on the placid, torpid "Then It's White"; distorted and blank – à la Matthew Dear's recent seediness – on the murky "Burned Out.") It's all so much gum in the works; mussing Willner's pearly ultra-glide smoothness for the sake of some vague, psychedelic interest-added – and yet, mostly, the feeling remains.

Class Actress: Rapprocher review

The "actress" in question would be ex-folkie (and "former drama major") Elizabeth Harper, who indeed seems to have some class; her voice projects both hi-gloss glamour and a personable, almost-casual geniality, a slightly paradoxic conjunction mirrored by the balance of sheeny synthetic elegance and homespun imperfection in Mark Richardson's electro-purist productions. That vaguely amateurish analog wobbliness – the result of a dogmatically anti-MIDI M.O. and/or steadfast fealty to the standard slate of '80s synthpop forebears (it's chickens and eggs, really) – gives full-length bow Rapprocher an impressive period authenticity, sometimes at the risk of dulling its melodic hooks (already of variable sharpness) and muddying its dancefloor potential. Especially in today's digital context, the album feels torn between big-P Pop à la La Roux, or happy-mode Goldfrapp (or at least Annie c. 2004) and the darkier, broodier likes of Ladyton; between the euphoric, frontloaded Vince Clarke-isms of "Weekend" and "Keep You" and the draggy, druggy back end. (Tellingly, they've shared stages with both Little Boots and Washed Out.) It feels like a while since indiedom's given us such a pure, resolutely classicist synth-pop act. Even if, vision-wise, Actress don't hold a classy candle to class-of-'11 counterparts Austra, it's still good to hear electromusic as made by fallible humans.

K-S.H.E.: Routes Not Roots review

Routes Not Roots is the debut album from Kami-Sakunobe House Explosion aka K-S.H.E., one in a lengthy string of monikers adopted by Midwest-bred, Tokyo-based transgendered thinker/scholar/DJ/producer Terre Thaemlitz. Initially released in Japan in 2006 on Thaemlitz's private Comatonse label, and made more widely available through a 2011 reissue, it serves as something of a companion piece to Midtown 120 Blues, Thaemlitz's acclaimed 2008 album as DJ Sprinkles, offering a similar mixture of trenchant (if sometimes oblique) social critique and sterling, smooth deep house grooves. (Both albums also share a recurring train motif.) As Midtown 120 Blues made explicit, Thaemlitz is interested in exposing and investigating the frequently obscured and erased history of house music's development -- specifically, its roots in queer, black, urban subcultures -- through the medium of house music itself, but as this album's title points up, he's less concerned with origin stories per se than with contexts and journeys, and the intermingling cultural, social, political, and economic factors that resonate within those stories. And it's quite some intermingling he's got here. The album's adventures in identity politics range from an interview with Japanese "hermaphrodite" Saki-Chan, set amid absurdly lush harp runs and recorder beeps, to "Stand Up"'s harrowing spoken account of tranny-on-tranny violence (involving a gang of "flaming" Puerto Rican queens), delivered against a pointedly callous, canned laugh track. But these interstitial curiosities (which also include, for no readily apparent reason, a solemn synthesized rendition of folk standard "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair") merely form the backdrop for the real meat of the album: five extended house workouts, ranging from seven to fourteen minutes, which operate on multiple musical and textual levels. Expansively bleak opener "Down Home Kami-Sakunobe" gets the multi-cultural stew simmering, dressing up its deep, mournful post-disco grooves with incongruous (but emotionally kindred) country-style fiddling and intermittent, discordant piano clusters. The similarly constructed locomotive shuffle, "Hobo-Train," eventually reveals the source of its seemingly club-minded driving utterance ("work, sisters!") to be a rabble-rousing sermon about unemployment (sampled, oddly enough, from an episode of "Good Times"), while the taut, propulsive "B2B" lets the insinuations of its numbingly incessant refrain ("brother to brother, brother to brother") speak for themselves, or, perhaps, in conversation with the openly gay African-American voices heard on the Stevie Wonder-sampling "Crosstown." Perhaps most effective, both as commentary and dance music, is the uncharacteristically cheerful, buoyant "Infected," which takes on HIV drug trials by way of frothy filter-disco and corny sampled dialogue. Clearly there's a lot to take in here, but Roots' wide-flung, omnivorous approach is seemingly a crucial part of its socio-political purpose. Alternately, with a few sore thumbs excised, it works equally well as a collection of mellow, moody, late-night groovers.

Motor City Drum Ensemble: DJ-Kicks review

For the 36th edition of their venerable DJ Kicks series, K7 Records tapped producer/DJ Danilo Plessow, alias Motor City Drum Ensemble, an individual who hails not from Detroit but from the German automotive center of Stuttgart (home to Mercedes and Porsche). Though his fondness for the manifold classic grooves of America's Motown is amply evident in his own productions and remixes -- including, notably, the jazzy, funky Moodymann-indebted house workouts of his Raw Cuts series -- that's hardly the extent of his inspirations, as this mix makes clear. Indeed, Plessow's brought together a dizzying array of tracks in nearly as many different styles: after an opening invocation from Sun Ra, he leads us on a freewheeling trip through soul (New Zealand's Electric Wire Hustle, via an irresistibly slinky Scratch 22 remix), dub (Rhythm & Sound), Afro-beat (Tony Allen, Geraldo Pino), classic Chicago acid trax (Mr. Fingers), and Detroit techno (Robert Hood), deep house (Fred P.), funky disco (a Walter Gibbons mix of Arts & Crafts' "I've Been Searching"), jazz (Timo Lassy), film music (Philippe Sarde's chugging "Le Cortège et Course"), and even an unexpectedly funky, early Aphex Twin "ambient" work. Of course, genre names are just so many words, and these cuts all basically have more in common than they do differentiating them: shared roots in African-American musical vernacular, of course, for one thing, but above all, in a word: groove. As you might imagine, Plessow simply finds that shared groove (at least, he makes it sound simple) and runs with it, keeping his transitions fluid, clean, and remarkably smooth. Actually, if there's a complaint to be lodged here it's that the mix is a little too seamless: too few tracks really manage to stick out above the generally high-quality, head-nodding flow, especially after about 20 minutes when things really start to simmer. In fact, perhaps the most startling, ear-catching moment here -- the acid-squelch synth that unexpectedly burbles up in Isolée's monstrously funky mix of Recloose's "Cardiology" -- turns out to belong to the original track. In keeping with DJ Kicks tradition, MCDE also contribute a bespoke new production, "L.O.V.E.," a no-nonsense funky strutter that effectively distills the essence of the entire affair, minimal and a bit murky, but still grittily satisfying. Perhaps most readily comparable to Henrik Schwarz's 2006 installment in the series (though it doesn't quite reach that mix's level of soulful spirituality, focusing more exclusively on groove and moody ambience), Plessow clinches yet another feather in K7's towering cap: one that's smartly assembled, artfully sequenced, impeccably tasteful, and indelibly tasty.

DJ Diamond: Flight Muzik review

The first widely released album from 24-year-old Chicago footwork veteran DJ Diamond -- he's been producing since the age of 13 -- is the fourth full-length installment in Planet Mu's seemingly almost single-handed campaign to bring the music of the Windy City's quick-stepping juke and footwork scenes to a wider audience following 2010 albums by DJ Nate and DJ Roc, and the first Bangs & Works compilation. While Flight Muzik essentially adheres to the hallmarks of genre's instantly recognizable formula -- hyperactive, minutely sliced samples repeated incessantly, almost numbingly, against manically jittery rhythms, to dizzying and disorienting entrancing effect. Diamond's productions stand somewhat apart from those of his peers as sonically richer and fuller, less aggressive (if still decidedly tough, at least in rhythmic terms) and generally more varied. He's at least as likely to employ thick, nauseous synths as thuggish hip-hop-style vocal clips (à la the brief "Down Bitch") -- plenty of these tracks feature both -- and regularly works in snippets of jazz and soul ("Snare Fanfare"; the majestic Willie Hutch-flipping closer "I Choose You"), bursts of discordant brass or orchestral bombast ("Burn Dat Boy"; the Santogold-sampling "Go Hard"), and plenty of stranger, less identifiable sounds. Even the percussion here (often more nuanced and abstract than in much footwork) leans heavily toward the treble end of the spectrum. The result, especially in the texturally lusher tracks toward the beginning of the album, is to heighten the hypnotic, perversely lulling effect of the repetition in a way that feels slightly warmer and woozier than the genre's typically ferocious non-stop bluster. Which isn't to suggest that Diamond is a big softie. Just take the menacingly sparse, gutterball fuzz-bass of "Torture Rack," with its unpredictable and unnerving array of percussive sounds, or the cinematically epic, constantly shape-shifting album highlight "Decoded," which combines snaky, insistent, Eastern-tinged video game synths, over-the-top metallic guitar, and probably the album's fiercest low-end beat drubbing. If Flight Muzik is perhaps less direct and immediate than DJ Roc's awesomely hard-hitting The Crack Capone -- and possibly, at least in spots, less overtly dancefloor-minded -- it's probably a good deal more appealing to actually listen to, and more broadly accessible, emphasizing footwork's commonalities with the likes of dubstep, glitch, techno, and grime. Fans of those genres, or anyone interested in truly radical, cutting-edge dance music, will find this well worth checking out.

Bullion: You Drive Me To Plastic review

Bullion is West London sample-slinger Nathan Jenkins, who first turned heads with 2007's Beach Boys/J Dilla-blending Pet Sounds: In the Key of Dee, a rare instance of an album-length mash-up project that more than rewarded its blatantly gimmicky premise. Since then, he's issued a couple of tantalizing singles and one EP; You Drive Me to Plastic is his debut for Young Turks (SBTRKT, El Guincho, Holy Fuck) and at least on some level, his first "proper" release. It's essentially presented as an album, although at nine quick cuts in a maddeningly brief 20 minutes, it hovers in a grey zone between LP and EP. That's appropriate enough, since the Plastic also resists classification on just about every level: there may be aspects of disco, funk, hip-hop, acid jazz, old-school electro, chillout, and cosmic psychedelia (and more: bluegrass fiddles? flamenco guitar? tribal chanting? whinnying horses?) all present and accounted for, but it still feels erroneous to describe this music in terms of genre at all, beyond the broad umbrella category of "sample-based music." Despite his omnivorous, unabashedly maximalist approach -- and although he sometimes resembles a more soulful, less spastic Jason Forrest -- Bullion's musical aesthetic has less to do with the past decade or so of ADD-addled, digital mash-up mischief than with pioneers like Coldcut, Steinski, and, in particular, the Avalanches. Similar to their still-unparalleled Since I Left You, probably Plastic's closest point of reference, this is effectively one single piece of music; a fluid, constantly fluctuating kaleidoscopic suite that meanders from sound to sound and groove to groove with enviable smoothness. Each cut remains distinct -- "Magic Was Ruler" and "Pressure to Dance," for instance, stand out as the obvious dancefloor-primed pleasers -- but the whole is much more than than the sum of its countless, unpredictable, intricately interwoven parts. Impeccably seamless, surprisingly listener-friendly (as dense and volatile as it is, it never feels truly overwhelming), You Drive Me to Plastic is above all playful, inventive and fun.

Modeselektor: Monkeytown review

About a decade and a half into their career, and four busy years since the maximalist pleasure-seeking of 2007's Happy Birthday!, the Berlin-based knob-twiddlers of Modeselektor return, ditching Bpitch Control for their own Monkeytown label to release their third proper full-length, which shares the appropriately simian name of said imprint. As that title suggests, Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary have not abandoned their characteristic, merrily deviant ways: monkeying with the staid conventions of German techno, muddling the lines of genre and good taste, and enlisting a motley assortment of co-conspirators to assist them in these deeds. As with earlier efforts, Monkeytown filches fitfully from glitch, techno, IDM, hip-hop, rave, bass music, and (more prominently here) dreamy, textural electro-pop, often seemingly sequenced for maximum disorientation. Take the four-song run that opens the album: the genial, gently twitchy ambient-crunk of "Blue Clouds"; the all-out bloop-rap cartoonery of "Pretentious Friends" (which gives the always entertaining Busdriver -- filling a role frequently assumed by TTC -- a chance to poke hilariously absurdist fun at snooty high-society trend-chasers, while Modeselektor warp and tweak his vocals just as mercilessly); the fluttery, floating Thom Yorke feature "Shipwreck" (offering enough warmly woozy, stuttered somnolence to pass for a King of Limbs castoff); and the nutty, glitched-out darkwave bass throb of "Evil Twin," bolstered by Otto Von Schirach's leering house-style pronouncements. While the diversity of this sequence might suggest that these cuts derive most of their meat and personality from their respective guest vocalists, the truth is that Modeselektor's colorful, chameleonic, and detail-oriented productions are just as crucial to their improbably wide-ranging effectiveness. That said, Monkeytown is definitely at its least distinctive when Bronsert and Szary are left to their own devices: "German Clap"'s popcorn lurch and "Grillwalker"'s crispy squelch-hop, while flavorful enough, amount to little more than rote palate-cleansers. Meanwhile, fans of past albums' manic, party-ready energy may be dismayed to find that, even counting the nodding, plushly soulful tech-funk of "Berlin" at the midpoint, there's nothing overtly danceable in the album's back half, even though it does feature some of the finest moments here: a second, more fully formed (and fragment-flecked) Yorke collaboration, "This," and the even lovelier "Green Light Go," which blends whirring, wordless vocals and tastefully busy live drumming with an earnest, melodic pop core (courtesy of post-rockers PVT). The very notion of "maturity" might seem like anathema to Modeselektor, but these two tunes, in particular, suggest that the M-word might not be such a dire prospect after all (not that they're quite there yet). And while nobody expects cohesiveness from these guys, Monkeytown is at least commendably concise -- their leanest and tightest offering yet.

Pictureplane: Thee Physical review

Thee Physical, the second widely-distributed album from Denver-based producer Pictureplane, is a dirty, murky, delirious mess. There's a lot going on here, and it all tends to happen at the same time. Take the first few seconds of album opener "Body Mod": brightly chintzy house piano stabs in a faltering rhythmic loop; a crudely cut-and-pasted, instantly recognizable hip-hop vocal snippet (the same sample that powered Fatboy Slim's block-rockin' 1998 remix of Wildchild's "Renegade Master"); some churning, fuzz-toned synth throbs; a pinging Nintendo bassline; a distant, warped, diva-esque wail. All this hangs in vague, uneasy suspension for half a minute; then come the manic rushing snares, jump-starting a syncopated, jacking breakbeat that suddenly harnesses everything into a tight lockgroove, making the next three-plus minutes feel as propulsive and inevitable as they are disorienting. It's a striking, effective collage and – better – a bluntly obvious dancefloor killer. It's also, by some distance, the most immediate thing here, though not necessarily a misleading introduction.
Like just about everybody making electronic music at this point, Pictureplane's Travis Egedy is an unabashed nostalgiast: every element of "Body Mod," like the rest of Thee Physical, hearkens more or less explicitly to the popular dance music of the 1990s – diva house, Hi-NRG, hip-house, rave, big beat, drum'n'bass, two-step garage – not coincidentally the last time, until recently, that electronica had anything to do with this country's cultural mainstream. But he's not, by any means, a revivalist, at least in any straightforward sense. Besides slap-chopping all of these styles together in an ecstatically sloppy, anti-formalist jumble, just about every sound that passes through Egedy's decks comes out grimy, roughed up and sonically distressed, hearkening to the same impulses fueling the amorphous chillwave movement. Adding to the general sense of woozy bewilderment and stylistic abstraction, most of these grooves are surprisingly slow – closer to dubstep than disco, tempo-wise – rendering them less oddly danceable than they feel like they should be, though allowing for some thrilling double-time freakout moments. Throw in occasional bouts of wobbly, manifestly non-mechanical imprecision – like the just-slightly-off bass breakdown midway through "Black Nails" – and a certain political/critical subtext starts to emerge. If all electronic music functions, on some level, as a mediation of the endlessly mutable relationship between human and machine, the thrust here seems to be "retain the throbbing, emotive heart of '90s club music, while utterly fraying and distorting its vapid, faceless façade."
For all the mileage Egedy gets from this premise, though, Physical's best moment is also its most conformist, at least structurally. "Real is a Feeling," named for Egedy's ongoing Denver DJ night, reins in the chaos for a blissful outpouring of grubbily shimmering synth-pop; the album's sole, shining club anthem. Elsewhere, for better and worse, this album often can't quite decide if it wants to be music for the mind or the body. On the other hand, if "we are all post physical" – as Egedy intones, breathily, amidst typically dark, sweaty electronic churn – then perhaps it shouldn't matter anyway.

Memory Tapes: Player Piano review

For the product of a self-described socially awkward homebody, Memory Tapes' 2009 debut album, Seek Magic, sounded remarkably expansive and exploratory, bubbling its way through seemingly limitless sonic tangents and stylistic intersections to forge something at once fresh-feeling and immensely nostalgic. Like its predecessor, Player Piano was created in Dayve Hawk's New Jersey home studio, and it plows a similar if somewhat narrower musical swath: dreamy, texture-heavy electronic indie pop, dripping with reverb and lousy with synthesizers, commingled with elements of dance, rock, and new age that are in this case considerably toned down, if still discernible. This time, though, the visceral effect of the music more closely matches the insularity of its origins; these tracks feel simpler, smaller in scope, less adventurous, and more inward-focused. Having nailed a sprawling but undeniably evocative sound the first time out, Hawk's evident focus here is on the songs themselves: save for a few relatively brief instrumentals, his vocals are notably more prominent than ever before. "Sunhits" is the most blatant of the album's big pop stabs, with its clean, sheeny new wave guitar hook, midtempo New Order synth beat, and warmly harmonized refrain full of caustically double-edged positivity ("life is a dream if we never wake up..."). "Worries" and "Today Is Our Life" are equally vibrant in spots, though both tend to lose focus and momentum beyond their choruses (the latter in particular can't seem to stay in one genre for more than a minute, squeezing in a razor-sharp, out-of-nowhere guitar solo and a church organ/sitar breakdown along the way). While these aural color bursts are at least decently interesting (unlike, say, the drab, plodding "Yes I Know" or the rote-feeling "Offers"), few of them make for particularly great pop songs, whether that's due to overly distracting arrangements, Hawk's thin, lackluster singing (which is often distorted through layering and textural manipulation, but in any case typically the least compelling sound here), or the nagging similarity of many of his melodies. (The sparsely folky "Fell Thru Ice" is appealing but slight, leaving the genial, sweetly patient "Wait in the Dark" as perhaps the best of the lot.) Player Piano offers enough of Hawk's characteristically inventive sonic tinkering -- including, the title notwithstanding, an intriguing emphasis on organ sounds -- to merit repeated listens, even if these productions do sound worrisomely flat at times. But juxtaposed with the singular alchemy he achieved on Memory Tapes' debut, it's hard not to hope Hawk focuses his energies a little differently next time out.

Philadelphia City Paper reviews:

Chrissy Murderbot: Women's Studies review

Genre-trawling stunt-blogging DJ (check the awesome yearofmixtapes.blogspot.com) turned puckishly polyglot dance producer, Chicagoan Chrissy Murderbot flips maybe the year's most breathlessly giddy party record with his Planet Mu debut. Fitfully grounded in the manic stutters and off-the-chart BPMs of his adopted hometown's footwork and juke scenes, but borrowing just as liberally from dancehall, ragga jungle and rave, Women's Studies pairs cartoonishly crude humor – "Heavy Butt" comes complete with "we're here to explore Uranus" sample – and populist hands-in-the-air anthemism with dizzyingly refined beat-fusing prowess, to thoroughly deliriously effect.

Pallers: Sea of Memories review

He's given us one minor masterpiece already this year (Acid House Kings' strummy, sunny Music Sounds Better With You) but that's hardly stopped insatiable Swedish popsmith Johan Angergård (Club 8, The Legends) from gearing his shy, whispery croon right back up and teaming with longtime pal Henrik Mårtensson for The Sea of Memories (Labrador), their full-length bow as Pallers and a swirling, sterling set of atmospheric, autumnal electro-pop brimming with elegance and muted melancholy but also boasting, in the female-sung "Wicked," at least one club-ready dark-disco anthem-to-be.

Rustie: Glass Swords review

In an improbably overcrowded UK "bass music" field, Glaswegian producer Rustie manages to stake out a defiantly singular identity on Glass Swords, his exuberantly over-the-top Warp debut, marrying the label's archetypal "intelligence" and chin-stroker-friendly compositional density with poptastic hypercolor euphoria and a zany, go-for-baroque aesthetic embracing all things bright and booty-full: fruity robo-funk, digital headsnap hip-hop, pixelated videogame sunbursts, cartoon slap bass, chipmunk vocal splices, proggish polyrhythms, glowstick trance. Oh yeah, there's even some dubstep in there.

M+A: things.yes review

M + A is Michele Ducci and Alessondro Degli Angioli, two Italian twenty-year-olds whose things.yes (Monotreme), feels less like a debut album than a magical mechanical music-box, stuffed with surprises, curiosities, sunny clutter and uncloying cuteness. It's a funny, beguiling little record that's tough to place in a contemporary context (distant cousins to Bibio, or perhaps a quieter, gentler take on Rustie's giddy every-genre maximalism?) but would've made perfect sense a decade ago, sandwiched somewhere between the tunefully glitchy IDM of Plaid and Plone and the so-called lap-pop of the long-lost Notwist and Lali Puna.

Mungolian Jet Set: Schlungs review

There are your humdrum, workaday cosmic disco epics, and then there are your mega mutant bongos'n'lazers boogiethons about being abducted by actual space alien disco freakazoids, which is pretty much how it feels to listen to Mungolian Jet Set, a couple Norwegian knuckleheads with some seriously screwy musical superpowers. Schlungs (Smalltown Supersound), their third debut album in a row (see?), boasts their tightest, most comprehensible compositions yet, but it's best when their penchant for deliriously proggy absurdist kitsch excess is left fully unfettered.

Basement Jaxx: Vs. Metropole Orkest review

Basement Jaxx Vs. Metropole Orkest (Atlantic Jaxx) – wherein a seventy-strong Dutch symphony takes on the UK maximalist-house duo's catalog (plus bespoke offerings like "Mozart's Tea Party," which sounds precisely how you'd imagine) – is basically ludicrous in both concept and ultra-bombastic execution. In other words: roughly par for the Jaxxian course, but surprisingly fun even by that token, especially when spotlighting the group's forays into Samba, Balkan, swing jazz and Middle Eastern music. Who knew "Where's Your Head At?" could benefit from a good harpsichord solo?

Sepalcure: Sepalcure review

Much like last year's quietly enchanting debut by their Hotflush labelmates Mount Kimbie (and, to a lesser extent, that of Gold Panda), the eponymous bow from Brooklyn post-dubstep duo Sepalcure – polymathic beat luminaries Praveen Sharma (aka Braille) and Travis Stewart (aka Machinedrum) – filters the diffuse diaspora of UK-bass micro-genres into a focused, delicately detailed set of gently fluid, pointillistic grooves, frayed vocal fragments, and warmly woozy atmospheres, whose slightly faceless air of politeness and familiarity hardly diminishes its ample, unassuming charms.

Elite Gymnastics: Ruin review

Minnesota-by-way-of-Tumblr duo Elite Gymnastics – rare Stateside inhabitants of that fertile breeding-ground of Balearic dance beats and indie-pop sweetness (plus a healthy dollop of new age kitsch) pioneered by St. Etienne and lately colonized by Swedes like Air France (both bands are seemingly referenced in the title of their "Minneapolis Belongs to You") – get viscerally physical on Ruin (Acephale), which consolidates a pair of web-issued mirror-image EPs; one side's glitzy, jungle-tinged breakbeats sanded down and repurposed for side two's lumberous, mood-enhancing slow jams.

SBTRKT: SBTRKT review

The South London-based SBTRKT isn't quite as reductionistic in his approach to production as he is about spelling, but his eponymous first LP (Young Turks) is frankly straightforward, even workmanlike, in its pursuit of palatable yet fully contemporary electronic pop. Enlisting a bevy of future-soul vocalists, and drawing more on two-step and smooth R&B than dubstep's jaggeder edge, this set is friendlier (and livelier) than James Blake but just as gently majestic, even if its coloring stays mainly within the lines.

Zomby: Dedication review

Zomby's somber, suitelike 4AD debut finds the inscrutable dubstepper squeezing sixteen fleeting tracks into thirty-five minutes riddled with frustratingly premature fades and abrupt breaks. He makes the seconds count though: Dedication (named in tribute to his deceased father) offers enough evocation and invention; pathos and dread – bleary 8-bit bleeps, burnt-out riddims, spectral alien ambience – that it could have been just as satisfying and intriguing at twice this length.

Washed Out: Within and Without review

Arriving, in suitably leisurely fashion, two years after the much-buzzed "summer of chillwave" he was instrumental in touching off, Ernest Greene's luxuriantly lush full-length debut as Washed Out comes across as resolutely classicist (or, said otherwise, impeccably generic); delivering all the requisite fluttery warmth and thrumming daydream grooves, slightly shellacked of their wobbly analog charm. It's not that Within and Without (Sub Pop) is boring – at least, not in a bad way – but there's such a thing as being too well washed.

pickin' n' scratchin'

While we're on the subject of old, silly themed party mixes... how about this very special, very silly mix I cooked up this past May for the awesomely successful, never-to-be-repeated Spring Chicken Dance Party at the Roost (in West Philly.)


Penny vs. Penny

It's pretty self-explanatory. You may have realized, but then again you may not, just how funky chicken music can get. One thing I certainly didn't realize until I started putting this thing together, is that there is apparently an entire genre of Polish chicken techno music that exists on YouTube. (of course there is.) Tell me what it tastes like?

download it here

Chicken - Mississippi John Hurt
Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens - Louis Jordan
Bird Flu - M.I.A.
Super Chicken - Cee-Lo
I Move Chickens - Gucci Mane
Fry Dat Chicken - Ms Peachez
Crow Black Chicken - Ry Cooder
Truncated Life of a Modern Industrialized Chicken - Herbert
Chicken Grease - D'Angelo
Little Red Rooster - Sam Cooke
Ham 'n' Eggs - A Tribe Called Quest
Fried Chicken - Busta Rhymes
Chicken Noodle Soup - DJ Webstar ft. Young B
Chicken Dance - The Emeralds
Thunder Chicken - The Mighty Imperials
Chicken Strut - The Meters
Barnyard Boogie - Louis Jordan
Chicken Shack Boogie - Amos Milburn
Know Your Chicken - Cibo Matto
The Rooster - Big Boi
Do The Funky Chicken - Rufus Thompson
Chicken Half - Sugarman 3
Thousand Year Egg - Simian Mobile Disco
Chicken and Meat - Das Racist
Chicken Lady - Vitalic
?some techno thing?
Chicken Walk - Hasil Adkins
Chicken Dream Inside Egg - Pink Skull
random youtube chicken techno track #1 (Oli Chang?)
Chicken With Its Head Cut Off - The Magnetic Fields
random Polish youtube chicken techno track #2
Chicken Dance - Jack Fetterman and the In Hi-Fi Music Direction
Chicken Payback - The Bees
Chicken Soup With Rice - Carole King

oh, and I'm kinda bumming about not having included the thoroughly righteous Sly Stone song, "Chicken" – so you should listen to it here (and ignore the visual weirdness):


[h/t to Tom 'n' Jojo for hepping me to that one along with The Bees' "Chicken Payback"]

bonjour. bonjour. bonjour. bonjour. bonjour. bonjour. comment-allez-vous?

allo allo! about a year ago (sheesh!) j'ai DJed une trés swanky function pour le Gershman Y dans Philadelphia, part of le Jewish Film Festival, aprés d'une screening of le film Gainsbourg. which, by the way, i thought was pretty fun but also super weird and too long. hm, maybe i should give it another viewing. anyway. basically i played a whole heap of french musique, vintage et moderne, for theoretical (and to some extent actual) dancing purposes.

alors! le traque-listé c'est below. and you can download the whole dang (fairly silly, and, unsurprisingly, rather serge-heavy, but still super fun) set [1 hr 37 m] right here, parfait for your next froo-froo frenchy soirée [try right-clicking if it gives you trouble].

also, this joke/img is still pretty great:
Serge Gainsbourg, «Pauvre Lola»
Dimitri from Paris, «Sacre Francais»
Jane Birkin, «Orang Outan»
Serge Gainsbourg, «Requiem Pour Un Con»
Serge Gainsbourg, «Initials B.B.»
Clothilde, «Saperlipopette»
France Gall, «Jazz a GoGo»
Air, «Love»
Serge Gainsbourg, «Bonnie & Clyde» [Herbert's Fred and Ginger Mix]
Saint Germain, «Rose Rouge»
Phoenix, «If I Ever Feel Better»
Komeda, «It's Alright Baby»
Serge Gainsbourg, «Eurotico-tico» [Instrumental]
Charlotte Leslie, «Les filles c'est fait pour faire l'amour»
Stereolab, «Emperor Tomato Ketchup»
Cosette, «Idealisation»
France Gall, «Poupee de Cire, Poupee de Son»
Holden, «Je Te Reconnais»
Serge Gainsbourg, «Cannabis»
Serge Gainsbourg, «Aux Armes Et Caetera»
Serge Gainsbourg, «Shu Ba Du Ba Loo Ba»
Francoise Hardy, «Tout Ce Qu' On Dit»
Serge Gainsbourg, «Mambo Miam Miam»
Stone, «Fille ou Garcon»
Johnny Hallyday, «Itsy Bitsy P'tit Bikini»
Johnny Hallyday, «Noir C'est Noir»
Frank Alamo, «Heureux Tous Les Deux»
Serge Gainsbourg, «New York USA»
The End, «Les Sambassadeurs»
Dimitri from Paris, «Le Rythme et La Cadence»
Daft Punk, «Crescendolls»
Vitor Hublot, «Aller Simple»
Cerrone, «Supernature»
Yelle, «A Cause de Garçons»
Les Rythmes Digitales, «Jacques Your Body» [Cassius Remix]
Johnny Hallyday, «T'Aimer Follement»
Daft Punk, «Around The World»
Francoise Hardy, «Je Veux Qu'il Revienne»
Justice, «DVNO»
Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin, «Je T'aime...Moi Non Plus»
Air, «Playground Love»
Francoise Hardy, «Tous Les Garcons Et Les Filles»

AMG + Cowbell review mega-round-up, volume XXIV: 2011 first half, vol. II [symfisyzers]

okay, here are twenty-four reviews i wrote in the last six months, all on more-or-less electronic-type-music. though who knows if julianna barwick really counts. roughly inorder of how much i think i like them, best first.

Clive Tanaka Y Su Orquesta: Jet Set Siempre Nº 1 review

Available only on cassette when it was initially released in 2010, with vinyl and digital editions following in early 2011 -- both tape and vinyl in an eye-catching blue-green -- the debut offering from the shadowy Clive Tanaka y Su Orquesta arrived carrying the distinct whiff of novelty. Add in the generically beachy, soft-focus artwork and the archly hokey moniker and album title -- recalling the leisure-lounge vibe of swinging-'90s shibuya-kei acts like Pizzicato Five and Fantastic Plastic Machine, not to mention Atom Heart's shticky electro-Latin "outfit" Señor Coconut y Su Conjunto -- and the strawberry daiquiri-scented stench of kitsch is downright impossible to miss. Meanwhile, the deliberate mysteriousness of the whole business -- available details on Tanaka are scant and sketchy -- makes it all that much more exotic and/or gimmicky. Setting all that aside, though, there is some truly terrific, phenomenally enjoyable music to be found here. Certainly, Jet Set Siempre Nº 1 is a highly playful affair, with loads of fun, familiar retro-futuristic touches: cheesy-sounding, heavily filtered synths, "robotic" talkbox and vocoderized vocals, occasional snatches of wah-wah guitar and Latin beatbox percussion, plus some baldly corny lyrics. But none of this feels nearly as cutesy or affected as it might. Maybe, a decade on from Daft Punk's Discovery, the sugary, semi-gloss sounds of early, analog Euro-disco have largely been drained of their camp factor, or perhaps it's simply the strength of Tanaka's considerable melodic and compositional gifts, which absolutely merit inclusion in the same sentence as the aforementioned landmark. Besides enhancing the album's very zeitgeisty artifactual and textural appeal (while hardly lo-fi, the music does have a certain handmade graininess to it), the restriction to tape and vinyl formats makes more sense in light of the clear, utilitarian division between the album's two sides: one "for dance," the other "for romance." Both halves fulfill their functions exceedingly well. The former blasts off with a delirious disco workout, cools down with a midtempo groover and closes strong with a moodier, more modern-sounding electro shape shifter, although the absolute stunner is the impossibly catchy, inscrutably titled "Neu Chicago," a marvelously warm, sunny, disco-ey pop tune. The largely vocal-less flipside is a prime example of what was once termed "chill-out" and would more recently have been tagged as "balearic"; a set of gently expansive, easy flowing organic/electronic tracks recalling dubbed-out Swedish duo Studio and the exotica-sampling Quiet Village. The album comes full circle (and the vocoders reemerge) on the slightly more active final track, a completely transformed, washed-out recapitulation of the opening "All Night, All Right."

When Saints Go Machine: Konkylie review

"Konkylie" is Danish for "conch shell," but it sounds like the fantastical portmanteau of an obscure 1980s NYC art-funk group and a world-famous electro-pop princess. Which is probably as good a reference point as any (The Knife? Wild Beasts? Kate Bush?) for the breathtaking, unclassifiable second album by this awkwardly yet uncannily well-named Copenhagen outfit, which drifts from gauzy, ethereal choral fantasias to roiling slow-mo falsetto tech-soul to intricate, world-flecked new age pop. And then there's "Kelly," a breezy, intoxicating synth-disco paean to young love which could make your entire summer.

[this review written for city paper, and too short to work in this format, so here's some extra text to make it look better on the page. this really is a phenomenal album that i feel like i'm still just getting a handle on, but mostly just enjoying how ineffably pretty it sounds, without worrying too much about trying to explain it. "kelly" is at 23 last.fm plays and counting, very possibly my favorite song of the year so far...]

Art Department: The Drawing Board review

Canadian house duo Art Department -- longtime Toronto club scene veterans Jonny White and Kenny Glasgow -- made a massive splash in the dance music world with their 2010 debut single, "Without You." A mind-numbing slice of stark, minimal tech-house sporting a crushingly bleak, bleary-eyed vocal from Glasgow, sounding like he was on the brink of utter depravity, the track met with tremendous acclaim and, it's safe to say, ratcheted up considerable anticipation for the duo's debut album. And rightly so: The Drawing Board is a near-flawless work of deep, dark, moody modern house; an expansive, atmospheric odyssey equally primed for wee-hours dancefloors and late-night headphone sessions. (You could try listening to it during daylight hours too, but somehow that just seems perverse; this is, indisputably, nocturnal music.) In general, most of these tracks follow the basic template of "Without You," settling into a propulsive but deceptively low-key groove -- nothing too flashy, but complex enough to sustain interest and dynamism for anywhere from six to ten minutes -- and carefully layering on a few judicious melodic elements, allowing ample breathing space for each. There's a hypnotically squirmy synth riff on "Much Too Much"; ping-pong bass blips and gospel-touched organ stabs on "We Call Love," and "Without You"'s irresistibly sproingy robo-toms. From there it's all up to the vocals, frequently in Glasgow's deadpan croon, though it's not all anguish and devastation: "We Call Love" drafts in soulful, deep house vet Osunlade to deliver a soul-searing plea for romantic guidance, while quasi-celeb DJ Seth Troxler turns up on "Living the Life" to drop a motivational self-help sermon in classic Chicago house style, and then returns on "Vampire Nightclub" to litter cornball utterances ("straight gangsta...") in and among Glasgow's woozy, creepily sinister dancefloor incantations ("I like to watch your body get down.") Art Department switch things up toward the end, trying out a brief R&B-flavored tune over a slow, shuffling breakbeat ("In the Mood"), a downtempo synth-reggae track ("Roberts Cry"), instrumental save for few wordless, hair-raising diva wails, and a jazzed-up sequel to stand-out "Tell Me Why" boasting some tasty keyboard noodles. There's nothing wrong with these diversions, which don't disrupt the mood but rather augment it in fairly unexpected ways. But when Art Department stick with their signature sound, even though it might not be exactly unique -- it's easy enough to trace a lineage through seminal Chicago jack tracks, early-'90s disco house and the sleeker end of electro-clash to contemporary peers like Soul Clap and Benoit & Sergio -- the results are nothing short of mesmerizing.

Wolfram: Wolfram review

Majestically maned Austrian producer/gadabout Wolfram Eckert has been a key player in the zealous resurgence of Euro-disco since at least 2005, when he launched his Diskokaine imprint, first issuing his own productions and collaborations (under the sneakily reversible marfloW moniker) and soon introducing the world to the immaculate Italo disco simulacra of Sweden's Sally Shapiro. But anyone still dubious of his Euro-dance bona fides need only glance at the guest list for his fantastic first artist full-length, which plays less like a debut album than a star-studded coming-out party. The parade of vocalists and co-writers includes not only a veritable who's who of contemporary disco torchbearers -- Hercules and Love Affair, Holy Ghost!, Legowelt, and Shapiro (plus her producer, Johan Agebjörn) -- but also a couple of Hi-NRG OGs: Paul Parker, who scored a number one dance hit in 1982 (the year before Eckert was born) with the Patrick Cowley-penned "Right on Target," and early-'90s sensation Haddaway, who posed the immortal musical question, "What Is Love?" With friends like that, you know Eckert's gotta be doing something right, but then it takes more than a loaded Rolodex to make a memorable album. Credit all of the aforementioned for bringing their A games in their vocal performances; credit Wolfram for crafting a seamless but restlessly diverse and wildly entertaining batch of tracks, suiting each one to the particular style and sensibility of each guest, and honoring the fun-loving spirit of 1970s and '80s electronic disco, neither coming off as overly reverent or self-serious nor crossing the boundary into excessive campiness or pastiche. Highlights include Parker's adrenalized turn on "Out of Control," whose undeniable Van Halen vibes are tied with the epically emo electro-rock of "Norway" (sung by Heartbreak's equally throaty Sebastian Muravchik) for the album's glammiest moment; the soulfully subdued "Thing Called Love," which pits Haddaway's smooth-as-ever croon against a brilliantly cheap-sounding casio riff; and the taut, tidy synth pop of "Hold My Breath," which appears three times -- bookending the album as the loosest, most playful Holy Ghost! cut yet and as a suitably sparkly Shapiro feature, then again in an extended two-part bonus instrumental -- but never wears out its welcome. The ten-minute "Teamgeist," a funky midtempo acid house workout with countryman Patrick Pulsinger, demonstrates that Wolfram can be just as colorful and charismatic working wordless (and long-form), and the stately, soaring, mildly melancholy instrumental "Roshi" shows that he can also do it all on his own. Then again, why opt for solitude when you can throw a party like this?

Nôze: Dring review

The incorrigibly flamboyant, unpredictably freewheeling jazz-techno-cabaret twosome Nôze would probably come off as smirking, wryly irreverent misfits in just about any context, but the Paris-based Circus Company (which is co-run by the duo's Nicolas Sfintescu, and which released their first two long-players) at least seemed like an appropriate match. Since they jumped ship to join the big boys at Berlin's more classically house-oriented Get Physical, the group's musical output has grown ever more gleefully Frenchy and circus-like, while its relationship to conventional electronic dance forms has grown increasingly tenuous. Hence, Dring, their second effort for the label (and fourth overall) seems in some ways utterly out of place – probably just the way they like it – even though it's also by some measure the smoothest, straightest and most broadly appealing full-length statement they've made yet. It could also be guardedly described as their most "mature" – keeping in mind that it's not without its share of characteristically nutty, salty bathroom humor (q.v. the warped, low-key masturbation blues of closer "Willi Willi," which comes complete with toilet flushing sounds), often delivered in Sfintescu's earthy, Beefheartian growl. But while hardly lacking in personality or playfulness, Dring largely tones down the overt goofiness (vocal and otherwise) in favor of a rich, polyglot musicality that draws fluidly and fluently from klezmer, Dixieland, Balkan brass music, cocktail piano balladry, chanson and musette, Broadway showtunes, reggae, samba, cinematic scores, West coast cool jazz and even, on occasion, house music (the slinky, Latin-tinged "Nubian Beauty," which includes perhaps Sfintescu's most unhinged, lecherous, Serge Gainsbourg-by-way-of-Tom Waits yammering on the record, also works in a submerged synth bassline that seems to wink at label buddies Booka Shade and M.A.N.D.Y. via their 2005 smash "Body Language.") It's a broad, far-reaching but well-integrated palette that could lend itself equally well to a hearty multi-cultural dance party or a sophisticated (but never stodgy) coffeeshop soundtrack, and Dring would work admirably in either setting. Anyone seeking more of the quirky disco-house of earlier singles like "Remember Love" and "Love Affair" is liable to be disappointed here – indeed, Dring works so well as a big, lavish whole that few of its tracks are quite as effective when taken out of context (though bouncy, brassy opener "C'era Una Volta," with its infectious, curiously loping 3/4 groove, serves as an ideal tone-setter and calling card, notwithstanding its liberal "borrowing" of saxophone figures from Moondog's "Bird's Lament") – but it's hard to imagine anybody not getting swept up in the album's bacchanalian outpouring of buoyant brass, sinuously smokey reeds, exuberantly nonsensical scatting and wordless choral chants; sometimes more moody than body-moving, but always tethered to a generous groove.

Julianna Barwick: The Magic Place and Florine reviews

On her third, highest-profile release to date -- her first truly "full-length" outing after an album and an EP which both clocked in under 25 minutes -- sound sculptor Julianna Barwick continues to explore and subtly refine the techniques that made her earlier work so utterly singular and transcendent. Barwick's methods are simple and seemingly straightforward: her music consists of her vocals -- looped and layered, layered and looped, to a sometimes dizzying degree, and swaddled in cavernous, mist-making reverb -- and generally little else. So it can be difficult to account for the immensely captivating, evocative potency of the results. Perhaps it relates to her ability to craft something fundamentally new and unique out of the oldest, most elemental musical sound imaginable; transforming the human voice into something abstracted, even alien, without erasing its humanity. The Magic Place enhances that effect by giving her music its clearest, most sonically vibrant presentation yet, these recordings are still necessarily hazy, but they make Barwick's voice(s) sound purer and clearer than ever before, especially in the moments when she allows one particular vocal line to shine through the heavenly thicket. The album also finds her augmenting her one-woman choir with an unprecedented amount of instrumentation, an expanded color palette to accompany the expanding size of her musical canvas. Especially in its first half -- as if to emphasize upfront that the vocals are still far and away the focal point -- the instruments often don't emerge until several minutes of a cappella development, and when they do, they're relatively minimal: there's a warm synth drone on the aptly named "Envelop," and a marvelously integrated, barely perceptible church organ submerged beneath the vocal swells of rapturous highlight "White Flag." The instrumentation, always treated with the same suffusive, softening reverb as the vocals, grows more pronounced as the album progresses -- persistently plinky piano and a hint of accordion underscore the lilting "Vow"; "Prizewinning" emerges from a spare bass pulse and builds toward a clattering, martial percussion cadence; "Bob in Your Gait" opens instrumentally and offers a rare departure from the looped/layered approach with its more straightforward (if still lavishly echo-laden) singing, and the gentle, vaguely folky "Flown" closes the album with a bit of ringing, Harold Budd-like piano. Impressively, these myriad accretions manage to complement the fragile glory of Barwick's inimitable choral effects while never overshadowing or diminishing them. Her music may have vaguely discernible precedents in minimalism, new age, and Eno's ambient works, and a few tangential contemporary peers including Grouper and How to Dress Well, but her sound has a comfortingly homespun, unfussy quality, and a patient, uplifting serenity, that remain uniquely her own.

Ford & Lopatin: Channel Pressure review

Childhood friends Daniel Lopatin (the esoterically inclined synth/noise producer Oneohtrix Point Never) and Joel Ford (of the electro-pop band Tigercity) introduced their musical partnership in 2010, issuing several releases under the moniker Games. For their full-length bow the following June, the duo switched their handle to a more businesslike pairing of surnames, but that doesn't mean they've quit playing games with their art. To the contrary: Channel Pressure's impishly playful, retro-futuristic sci-fi sensibility is evident right off the bat, with smirking song titles like "Too Much MIDI (Please Forgive Me)" and particularly the perfectly pitched cover image of a boy sleeping in the neon green glow of a giant glossy screen, in a bedroom crammed full of outmoded hi-tech gizmos, his outstretched arm reaching for a joystick. That visual key to the album's overarching conceptual framework based on a loose narrative set in the year 2082 about a teenager named Joey Rogers who succumbs to sinister subliminal voices transmitted through his TV while he's asleep. But the image also works more generally as an analog (pun fully intended) to the scintillating, synth-tastic sounds within these grooves. The Donnie Darko-ish details of the story line may remain fuzzy and elliptical (even with the lyric-sheet transcription of Ford's woozily robotified vocals), but the vibe is crystal clear and dead on: this is a precise aural equivalent of '80s future shock as filtered through the experience of a geeky, fantasy-prone teenager; presumably not unlike the boys Messrs. Ford and Lopatin once were. Musically, Channel Pressure evokes a wide range of the era's most plasticine sounds, blurring the boundaries between brittle digi-funk, gooey, soft-focus R & B, wonky fusion jazz, noodly electro-prog, and chintzy new age, but its primary mode is plush, pillowy, synth pop occasionally suitable for dancefloors (as on the dynamite single contenders "World of Regret," "Emergency Room," and "Joey Rogers"), but often more dreamy and cinematic (the swoony, mesmerizing "The Voices.") Obviously, revisiting the sounds of the '80s is hardly a new idea circa 2011 -- the approach here variously calls to mind contemporaries like M83, Dâm-Funk, and Com Truise, as well as any number of 8-bit, chillwave, and kosmiche-disco artists -- but Ford and Lopatin manage to make them feel surprisingly fresh, thanks to their obvious affection for the material and their equally devoted attention to songs (all the aforementioned numbers are, above all, massively catchy pop tunes) and sounds (Lopatin's amply demonstrated facility with evocative, granular, analog synth textures is definitely put to good use here, and a mixing assist from Prefuse 73's Guillermo Scott Herren probably doesn't hurt either.) Like another recent '80s-obsessed conceptually driven collaboration -- Neon Neon's woefully overlooked Stainless Style album -- Channel Pressure is equally enjoyable as a painstaking period re-creation drenched in neon nostalgia and nylon nausea, and as a piece of sterling (if decidedly warped) electronic pop music in its own right.

YACHT: Shangri-La review

Following the artistic breakthrough of 2009's See Mystery Lights, Yacht's second album as a duo (and second outing for DFA Records) continues to mine a fruitful blend of new wave, dance-punk, and playful electro-pop, this time with a slightly tighter, poppier focus. Effectively a stylistic extension of its predecessor -- which is certainly nothing to complain about -- Shangri-La benefits from a marginally more song-oriented, vocal-centered approach, informed by the loose lyrical theme suggested by the title. As laid out in songs like the opening diptych of "Utopia" and "Dystopia" (also issued as two sides of a 7" single prior to the album's release), the basic position here is that all the potential for paradise (or hell) exists right here on Earth, and lies within us: "there's nothing in the future, it's up to us to build utopia." It's a stance that falls right in line with Yacht's familiar brand of ambiguously earnest/ironic sermonizing and sloganeering, toeing the line between rosily sincere, communitarian self-empowerment and pseudo-mystical mumbo-jumbo, and Claire Evans mounts that pulpit with gusto throughout, breathlessly declaiming that "the future exists first in our imagination, then in our will, then in reality." Sneakily, pointedly, the same song ("Paradise Engineering") also features lyrics paraphrased from infamous cult-leader Jim Jones ("If you want me to be your god, I will be your god"), echoing Evans' impersonation of a sleazy self-styled prophet on the anti-clerical "Holy Roller" (with its worrisome reference to "drown[ing] fears in napalm"), as well as the tantalizing flirtation with transgression explored on "One Step." So, as with the band's black-and-white color scheme (and the triangular happy/sad faces they've recently added to their iconography), there's room for both darkness and light in Yacht's vision of paradise ("and even in Arcadia, ego ego ego!" Evans wittily/nerdily interjects at one point.) Musically however, Shangri-La keeps things fairly light and upbeat, with plenty of memorable, chanted vocal hooks and a satisfying mixture of live and sequenced instrumentation. Standouts include the zippy disco-punk of "Utopia," with its hyper-kinetic rubbery bassline, and "I Walked Alone," which evolves from bouncy, midtempo funk (featuring ample cowbell and some goofy, octave-shifted vocals) to breezily infectious piano house. Things get a bit bogged down with the plodding, murky "Love in the Dark," while the lengthy "Tripped and Fell in Love" sadly fails to redeem the promise of See Mystery Lights' excellent epic "It's Boring," opting instead for an overly polite seven minutes of static Motorik disco. But on the whole, Shangri-La is far more heavenly than it is hellish, and Yacht save the best for last with the lilting, largely electronics-free title-track, a dreamy, gently anthemic evocation of earthly paradise complete with strings, cooed choral vocals, and wispy, tastefully deployed strings.

SebastiAn: Total review

Seemingly influenced just as much by Daft Punk's work ethic as their musical M.O., the hard-partying gallic hordes at Ed Banger records may be capable of some massively adrenalized, barnstorming electro-house, but they're sure in no hurry about it. In 2011, four years after Justice's watershed debut album, a follow-up from that label flagship was only beginning to appear on the horizon (see also Germany's like-minded Digitalism); meanwhile, the shadowy SebastiAn, who'd been issuing singles (and at least one compilation's worth of remixes) on Ed Banger since 2005, was just getting around to his first full-length. At least he took the "full" part seriously enough: Total boasts a staggering 22 tracks. True, a third of them are brief, spurt-like interludes under a minute long, and SebastiAn could theoretically have crammed almost another half-hour of music on here, but anybody not ready to cry for mercy after 50 minutes is made of steely stuff indeed. The experience is a bit like somebody scanning slowly across a radio dial, catching snatches of classic rock, soul, disco, funk, punk, metal, and even classical music (check the harpsichord trills on the delectable, too-short "Tetra," produced with Justice's Gaspard Auge), all with the equalizer settings permanently stuck on hyper-compressed bombast, and occasionally lingering on the static between stations just for the sheer agony and ecstasy of it all. Especially with the interludes ensuring a total dearth of silence between tracks, Total can feel pretty monolithic, and certainly, nothing here strays too far from the sort of scuzzy, overdriven, body-slamming rock-techno that's pretty much synonymous with Ed Banger, but there are some intriguing diversions along the way. Lead single "Embody" is a smooth, strutting, electro-R&B confection boasting woozily crooned talk-box vocals, and several other stand-outs feature a similarly soulful vibe, including the atypically breezy lounge-pop cut-up "Arabest" and the swaggering paisley chug of "Love in Motion" (featuring retro-soulster Mayer Hawthorne in a vocal performance so processed and mixed-down it might as well be a sample.) Elsewhere, Total cleaves to SebastiAn's more familiar, trashy, glitch-funk maximalism, including a few retooled old singles (the name-making 2006 spazzfest "Ross Ross Ross," the petulant whine and grind of "Motor") and a few similarly styled new productions. The most brutal barrages, though, come with "Doggg"'s screamo-disco and the fairly tepid electro-punk M.I.A. collabo "C.T.F.O." ("chill the fuck out," ironically enough.) Whether you'll want to cherry-pick favorites or wade through the whole unwieldy mess may depend on context (and your personal level of tolerance), but there's no denying that, a half-decade late or not, SebastiAn has delivered.

Junior Boys: It's All True review

If only because the first two Junior Boys LPs set an impossibly high bar – especially the peerless, debonair So This Is Goodbye – the still-excellent Begone Dull Care couldn't help feeling like a slight comedown; the songcraft stumbling even as the productions grew increasingly nuanced and streamlined. Album number four is at once a corrective and a reorientation: excepting the tender, lovelorn "Playdate" – daringly (or perhaps teasingly) slotted second – it's their catchiest, most outgoing outing yet. (I'm almost tempted to say "sunniest," though these are relative terms: Jeremy Greenspan's hushed, wistful croon remains indelibly nocturnal.) Though it finds the duo successfully branching out without disrupting their core sonic identity (and it's neat to hear Care's numbed, tech-y lockgrooves – revisited here on the terse "Kick the Can" – blossom into something more chromatic and engaging), It's All True also veers ticklishly toward an outright evocation of plastic '80s pop-soul (q.v. Grovesnor, if not quite Chromeo), troublingly for a band that's always felt effortlessly modern. Infectiously epic closer "Banana Ripple" even busts out the synthetic disco-samba horn stabs, practically the antithesis of the JBs' trademark restraint. Then again, it's easily the best thing here.

[unfortunately, this album is doomed to disappoint because none of it is nearly as good as the tracey thorn song of the same title.]

WhoMadeWho: Knee Deep review

True musical omnivores, Copenhagen's WhoMadeWho have always been far too slippery a beast to be encapsulated by the standard-issue genre tags -- dance-punk; disco-rock -- they're often saddled with. To wit, even before completely overhauling their self-titled 2005 debut into a set of beatless, acoustic psych-folk (Green Versions), they'd already sprinkled a surprising number of gentler, guitar-led tunes among its party-starting electro jams. And 2009's The Plot was a wily, wayward amalgam of strutting glam rock, slo-mo space pop, blistering techno-boogie, and goofy instrumental funk. So if the markedly moody, downcast turn the trio take on their third proper album (and Kompakt debut), Knee Deep, comes as a slight surprise, attentive followers should at least realize they're no strangers to the unexpected. Actually, this is easily the band's most cohesive, streamlined outing yet, not just due to its relatively sleek length (it's technically billed as a mini-album, though it's a generous one at 38 minutes, not counting a bonus instrumental which plays like the intersection of Daft Punk and Explosions in the Sky) but because it sustains a consistent, though hardly monochromatic, air of melancholy and doubt, tapping into the darker aspects of their moniker's wry, pithy existentialism. "There's an Answer" sets the tone, with sinuous bass clarinet, ominous strings, and choral accompaniment bolstering Jeppe Kjellberg's restrained, world-weary vocal -- "now the man is not so sure of what he feels," he muses blankly -- and only an intermittent, submerged 4/4 thump gesturing toward the kinetic dynamism of the band's earlier work. That sense of alienated uncertainty grows even more marked on the brooding, throbbing darkwave of "Every Minute Alone," which can't even muster up a refrain more confident than a weak, bewildered "should I call you up," question mark left ambiguously unexpressed. WhoMadeWho haven't entirely lost their interest in moving bodies, though: the pulsing syncopated blips of "All That I Am" (think Booka Shade circa Movements) offer plenty of dancefloor potential -- especially if it's goth night -- to say nothing of the viciously strobing synths and thunderous disco-funk groove of the powerhouse "Two Feet Off Ground." Despite the bleakness and gloom that permeate the album, it never feels timid or insular; both musically and emotionally, Knee Deep is far weightier than its title implies. WhoMadeWho have been accomplished, even inspired, in the past, but here they emerge on a whole new level, displaying a subtle command of tension and release and an assured, seamless blending of rock and electronics, suffused with unfeigned emotionalism, which calls to mind the confidence and mastery of marquee acts like LCD Soundsystem and Radiohead. It turns out depth is a good look for these guys.

Hatchback: Zeus & Apollo review

From this vantage point, the scintillating, Kraut-induced cosmic disco of Sam Grawe's debut feels like a hedged bet. On his second opus as Hatchback, the San Franciscan synth-aesthete (and Dwell magazine editor) stretches luxuriously beyond commonly perceived boundaries of taste, proudly proclaiming the emergence of "the new age of New Age." That canny, if charged, catchphrase, hip-to-be-square provocations aside, seems intended to grant him – and us – greater freedom to indulge in this sumptuous music (which could also be comfortably, less contentiously labelled ambient electronica) on the level of pure, experiential beauty. And Zeus & Apollo is an exceptionally, unabashedly beautiful work, if – per its Classically-informed title, and Grawe's design inclinations – more focused on forms than feelings. But its formalism is far from minimalist or reductive: these six tracks – averaging over twelve minutes apiece – are serenely slow-moving, but they're constantly evolving; never static. Indeed, it's a marvel how much color and character Grawe can introduce without disrupting his music's fundamental clarity and calm.

Malachai: Return To The Ugly Side review

By giving their second album a title that explicitly positions it as a sequel to their exceptional, eye-popping debut, Ugly Side of Love, the pigeonhole-defying Bristol duo Malachai set up a curious set of expectations. Besides suggesting a general similarity between the two efforts, the implication seems to be that this is, if not necessarily a lesser work, one that shouldn't or can't quite stand on its own merits. Return to the Ugly Side might indeed be most charitably considered as a companion piece -- and more of a supplement than a necessary complement -- but it's not exactly a retread. The overall feel of the album is comparable, with the same phantasmagoric, slightly seedy vibe, and a similar off-beat evocation of dusty, decades-old records. But this a much more subdued, streamlined affair than the gaudy, kaleidoscopic pastiche of its predecessor: if not a maturation, certainly a mellowing. Generally speaking, Return hearkens mostly to the debut's slower, murkier side -- cuts like "Fading World" and the drowsy, Geoff Barrow-assisted "Only for You" -- resulting in a set that hews much closer to the '90s trip-hop typically associated with Malachai's hometown. The genre's cinematic obsession is immediately foregrounded by the steamrolling soundtrack strings of the opening "Monsters" (an overture which turns out to be essentially an instrumental version of searing, Portishead-y album highlight "Monster"), while the gently eerie "Rainbows" invites singer Katy Wainwright for the obligatory haunted chanteuse turn. There are still moments vividly redolent of turn-of-the-'70s British rock, pop, and soul -- the crunchy hard rock guitars on "Mid Antarctica (Wearin' Sandals)"; the jaggedly funky drum beats on "Anne," and the kinetic "(My) Ambulance," although these elements feel somehow more oppressive, less sprightly, in this context. But there's a conspicuous lack of the outright rockers which lent some seriously spiky punch to the first album's paisley patchwork. An emphasis on sustained mood and texture over individuated songs isn't a terrible sound for these guys -- and they haven't entirely lost their knack for simple, effective songwriting, as demonstrated by the wry "No More Rain No Maureen" and standout "Let 'Em Fall," a deliciously spooky, menacing showcase for Gee Ealey's potently throaty R&B crooning -- although a disappointing proportion of this brief set (including its two longest cuts) winds up feeling sparse, dreary, and weirdly rudderless. That said, Malachai remain a fascinating, worthwhile, and essentially unique proposition, and there's still plenty to enjoy, for fans and newcomers alike, even in this somewhat diminished Return.

Siriusmo: Mosaik review

Most mosaics are designed with some amount of general visual coherence in spite of their inherently cobbled-together nature. Siriusmo's Mosaik -- the full-length album debut of a German producer (birth name Moritz Friedrich) who's been steadily releasing EPs, singles, and remixes for over a decade -- hardly deigns to bother with such matters, stringing together an unpredictable jumble of sounds and styles and generally wreaking playful, pranksterish havoc across the board with no regard for overarching sense or structure. Hardly any strain of vaguely beat-based electronic music is safe, from the tuneful, Röyksopp-ish synth-disco of "High Together" and the aggressive hardcore dubstep of "Bad Idea," to the cartoonish glitch-funk of "Lass Den Vogel Frei!," the mechanical tech-house of "Feromonikon," and the jittery Atari bleeps of "123." Of course, Siriusmo's tracks -- which rarely exceed the four-minute mark -- don't necessarily stay in any one subgenre for long: witness "Goldene Kugel"'s gradual transformation from restrained, Ellen Allien-ish Berlin minimal into a burbling, xylophone-happy, Latin-tinged groover, or "Sirimande"'s slickly executed out-of-nowhere about-face from snakily stark, menacing body music to bongos 'n' lounge piano chill-out exotica, or the twinkling prog-jazz breakdown in the midst of "Feed My Meatmachine"'s squelchy, computer-voiced robo-funk. The latter two highlights, along with the relatively straight-ahead, smooth-cruising synth pop of "Nights Off," appear only on the CD and download versions of Mosaik: the album's LP edition features not only four alternative exclusive cuts, but also a completely reshuffled track listing, which speaks either to Siriusmo's carefully considered curation of his material to suit each format or, more probably, his general disregard for considerations of sequencing and format altogether. Either way, each of his tracks is so distinct and singular that they'd probably be just as enjoyable in any arbitrary order, although as it happens, the CD version does settle into a somewhat refreshingly less manic, more melodic groove (or perhaps a relative lull, depending on your perspective) in its midsection, before the metallic yowls of the brief, Beefheart-ian absurdity "Peeved" send things spiraling off again. If there's a unifying thread here, apart from Siriusmo's obvious playful irreverence and kaleidoscopic eclecticism -- which call to mind his label bosses and longtime pals Modeselektor as well as freewheeling artists as disparate as Norway's Bjørn Torske and Japan's Com.a. -- it's that with all of his shenanigans, he never loses sight of musicality and groove. If Siriusmo wasn't so darn good at putting these things together, with a solid melodic sense backing up his infectiously cheerful inventiveness, Mosaik might have been a hopeless, unlistenable mess. Instead, it's an utterly exhilarating, albeit exhausting, mess.

Yelle: Safari Disco Club review

Not quite the wild, equatorial jungle party its title suggests, Safari Disco Club doesn't trek terribly far afield from the sweet 'n spunky synth-pop of Yelle's 2007 debut. Which is just fine, considering that Pop-Up remains one of the most gleeful, infectious party-starting records in recent memory. If anything, Safari is actually less animalistic than its predecessor, lacking the harder edge of that album's gritty, electro-laced hip-hop cuts – the trio's eponymous vocalist generally sticks to singing rather than rapping, though she's still as sprightly as ever. The newly polished, more melodically-focused approach makes a decently effective trade-off, yielding pleasantly fluffy roller-disco gems like the sparkle-eyed "J'ai Bu" (strangely reminiscent of Sally Shapiro), even if the best cuts here – the enjoyably loopy title song; the pumping fidget-house of "Comme Un Enfant" – are often the leanest and meanest. Still, despite an occasional over-saturation of generically glossy, faceless synths, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more propulsive, exuberant set of icily retro electro-pop this side of La Roux. And those poseurs aren't even French!

Diskjokke: Sagara review

This third album from quietly prolific Norwegian producer Joachim Dyrdahl was inspired, in a somewhat roundabout way, by a trip he took to Indonesia to fulfill a 2009 commission for a new work; not, as originally envisioned, by the time he spent with a Javanese gamelan group, whose music he'd planned to intermingle with his own electronic dance stylings, but rather by a final week in Bali which, he reported, "changed his perspective on music forever." Certainly, Sagara seems to stem from a decidedly different set of impulses than the pair of party-friendly, groove-oriented Diskjokke albums that preceded it. Although it shares the same undeniable warmth and good feeling that have marked his work all along, it ventures into entirely new stylistic territory: languid, almost entirely beatless ambient music, or, you might say, new age. Not that the underlying musical sensibilities of this approach are all that far removed from the late 2000s/early-2010s brand of spacy, Scandinavian cosmic disco (Dyrdahl typical mode); the two have long co-existed happily on the Smalltown Supersound's roster, and indeed Sagara fits right in alongside the label's prior release, Pechenga's Helt Borte, as well as more recent fare from acts like Arp and Meanderthals, with its full, rich, slowly shifting billows of pure synthesized softness and haze. Amid a few more distinctive keyboard textures (such as "Golotrok"'s dreamy, organ-like fanfare and coda, which bookend many lovely minutes of subtle, lilting bass pulse and synth drift), Dyrdahl also makes magnificently sparing use of a few gentle melodic elements -- muted bell-like tones (most notably on the vaguely ominous "Mandena"), a tiny sprinkling of xylophones -- presumably the fruit of his sessions with the gamelan. The album's transcendent moment, though, comes with the final piece, "Panutup," which gradually meanders its way from amniotic haze into celestially chiming, Vangelis-esque synthesizer pop and then, unexpectedly, into a few blissful minutes of full-on 4/4 electronic disco that feels, on arrival, like the aural equivalent of a tropical sunrise, as though the whole album had been a build-up to that moment. Which is not to suggest, incidentally, that the rest of the album feels like it's missing anything, or is in any way inferior to Diskjokke's dance-oriented output. On the contrary, Sagara shows the Norwegian to be an equally effective mood painter without his trusty beats, and in some respects, his accomplishment here is his most adept and impressive yet.

Pechenga: Helt Borte review

Making as good on the label's name as conceivably possible, in 2011, Smalltown Supersound reissued this obscure 2007 album by a duo from Vardø, a tiny fishing village at the northern tip of Norway. Regardless of the cosmic significance -- or not -- of this seemingly improbable event (it might have something to do with the fact that one of the duo is noted electro/disco producer Rune Lindbaek, who happens to have released a similarly minded album as one-half of Meanderthals, also on Smalltown Supersound), it's certainly a boon for fans of slow, spacy, ambient synth music (Biosphere, Stars of the Lid, Tangerine Dream). In tritely predictable but nevertheless redolent fashion, Helt Borte sounds about as wintry, primordial, elemental, glacially paced, and remote as you would expect of sounds emanating from such a distant, arctic locale. Titling one track "Snowflakes" and filling it with placidly twinkling synthetic bell-tones may be pushing things a bit far -- or maybe not -- but suffice to say this music will stand up to any sort of slumbering snowdrift/Aurora Borealis imagery you want to throw at it. So yes: Pechenga's music may not be boundary-pushing, cerebrally stirring, or in any way original. At the same time it is, absolutely, haunting, entrancing, and lush, and not in a cheap or facile way, either. The basic musical methodology, throughout, rests on sinuous, slow-moving melodies and deep, thick synthesizer drones, often eerily dark and brooding ("Ununoktium," "Pechenga," "My Frozen Spirit"), sometimes ethereal and serene ("Ultima Thule"; "Hamningberg," which is named for another, even tinier town in northern Norway). Sometimes other elements flit their way through, as with the languid, almost bluesy guitar figure which makes "Gitaro" ("guitar" in Esperanto) probably the most distinctive and memorable thing here, or the shards of harp splintering the title track, or even the occasional pan flute. The California-based producer Hatchback recently proclaimed the dawning of a "New Age of New Age." You could argue about whether it ever really went away in the first place, but in any case, Helt Borte suggests that new age had in fact already returned, at least a few years earlier than he might have realized.

Pictureplane: Thee Physical review [forthcoming in July issue of Cowbell]

Thee Physical, the second widely-distributed album from Denver-based producer Pictureplane, is a dirty, murky, delirious mess. There's a lot going on here, and it all tends to happen at the same time. Take the first few seconds of album opener "Body Mod": brightly chintzy house piano stabs in a faltering rhythmic loop; a crudely cut-and-pasted, instantly recognizable hip-hop vocal snippet (the same sample that powered Fatboy Slim's block-rockin' 1998 remix of Wildchild's "Renegade Master"); some churning, fuzz-toned synth throbs; a pinging Nintendo bassline; a distant, warped, diva-esque wail. All this hangs in vague, uneasy suspension for half a minute; then come the manic rushing snares, jump-starting a syncopated, jacking breakbeat that suddenly harnesses everything into a tight lockgroove, making the next three-plus minutes feel as propulsive and inevitable as they are disorienting. It's a striking, effective collage and – better – a bluntly obvious dancefloor killer. It's also, by some distance, the most immediate thing here, though not necessarily a misleading introduction.

Like just about everybody making electronic music at this point, Pictureplane's Travis Egedy is an unabashed nostalgiast: every element of "Body Mod," like the rest of Thee Physical, hearkens more or less explicitly to the popular dance music of the 1990s – diva house, Hi-NRG, hip-house, rave, big beat, drum'n'bass, two-step garage – not coincidentally the last time, until recently, that electronica had anything to do with this country's cultural mainstream. But he's not, by any means, a revivalist, at least in any straightforward sense. Besides slap-chopping all of these styles together in an ecstatically sloppy, anti-formalist jumble, just about every sound that passes through Egedy's decks comes out grimy, roughed up and sonically distressed, hearkening to the same impulses fueling the amorphous chillwave movement. Adding to the general sense of woozy bewilderment and stylistic abstraction, most of these grooves are surprisingly slow – closer to dubstep than disco, tempo-wise – rendering them less oddly danceable than they feel like they should be, though allowing for some thrilling double-time freakout moments. Throw in occasional bouts of wobbly, manifestly non-mechanical imprecision – like the just-slightly-off bass breakdown midway through "Black Nails" – and a certain political/critical subtext starts to emerge. If all electronic music functions, on some level, as a mediation of the endlessly mutable relationship between human and machine, the thrust here seems to be "retain the throbbing, emotive heart of '90s club music, while utterly fraying and distorting its vapid, faceless façade."

For all the mileage Egedy gets from this premise, though, Physical's best moment is also its most conformist, at least structurally. "Real is a Feeling," named for Egedy's ongoing Denver DJ night, reins in the chaos for a blissful outpouring of grubbily shimmering synth-pop; the album's sole, shining club anthem. Elsewhere, for better and worse, this album often can't quite decide if it wants to be music for the mind or the body. On the other hand, if "we are all post physical" – as Egedy intones, breathily, amidst typically dark, sweaty electronic churn – then perhaps it shouldn't matter anyway.

Pantha du Prince: XI Versions of Black Noise review

A year on from the release of Black Noise, one of 2010's most masterful and celebrated electronic releases, Hamburg techno maven Hendrik Weber issued this straightforwardly titled revisitation, boasting an enviable roster of A-list remixers that reflects his unique position straddling both the mainstream of European minimal electronica (Basic Channel pioneer Moritz von Oswald; Weber's erstwhile Dial labelmates Efdemin, Lawrence, and Carsten Jost) and the wider well of broadly indie-friendly acts (Four Tet, Animal Collective). Fully eight of these "versions" are based on a mere two of Black Noise's 11 cuts, with "Stick to My Side" alone accounting for five. Still, even though these are largely respectful reworkings, altering musical content but rarely the underlying emotional tone -- nobody effects a transformation nearly as striking, for instance, as the shift from the picturesque painted landscape on the original album cover to the stark, elegant, abstraction adorning XI Versions -- the resulting collection manages to be just as pleasantly varied and cohesively listenable as Black Noise, while distinct enough to be worth investigating on its own right. The three renderings of "Welt Am Draht" -- not necessarily a highlight of the original album, but nevertheless a lovely specimen of Pantha's fluidly floating yet rigorously rhythmic style -- are an illustrative example. Von Oswald turns in a typically entrancing, atmospheric dub, stripping the track down and refitting it with an airier, gently syncopated pulse and reams of open space. Animal Collective preserve Pantha's ever-twinkling bells and chimes but sub in more basic "tribal" drumming for the rhythm and add a wash of their familiarly fractured, woozy vocals. And Hamburg-based duo Die Vögel, in the most remarkable mutation here, offer up a pulsating, densely layered live-brass-and-flutes opus recalling the oompah-flavored experiments of Nôze or Ricardo Villalobos, which shares only its basic rhythmic undercarriage with Weber's original (and only after a full two minutes of stuttered, harmonically rich brass chorale). None of these three tracks sounds anything alike, but they work remarkably well together since each in its own way picks up on Pantha's predominant aesthetic cues, by and large remaining elegantly smooth and subdued, yet subtly, sinuously propulsive. The same goes for the five "Stick" remixes, although they tend to be less adventurous and, save for the endlessly spiraling synths and cheerful thump of Four Tet's version and Walls' beatless, lushly reverberant take, can feel somewhat formalist and occasionally overly static. Hieroglyphic Being's unrecognizable, incongruously mechanical mix of "Satellite Sniper" is the only real misstep (albeit a minor one), and all told this is one of the most rewarding remix albums in recent memory.

Black Devil Disco Club: Circus review

When Bernard Fevre, the soi-disant Black Devil, released 2008's Eight Oh Eight, it was allegedly the capstone to an increasingly redundant trilogy of electro-disco albums he'd begun 30 years earlier. Some might have assumed he'd slink back into his accustomed obscurity, his diabolical mission accomplished. But little about the Frenchman's career trajectory to date has been straightforward, so it's not all that surprising that now, following 2009's cobbled-together The Strange New World of Bernard Fevre, we're presented with a fourth Black Devil Disco Club album. This time, though, he's learned a few new tricks: instead of six five-minute dance tracks, Circus consists of ten three-minute pop songs, each featuring a different vocalist. For an artist who's never before enlisted collaborators, Fevre's amassed an impressive roster of guests here, among them Nancy Sinatra, Afrika Bambaataa, Jon Spencer, the Horrors' Faris Badwan, and Claire Evans of YACHT. There's a lot of personality on that list -- something that's been fairly lacking in most of Fevre's output -- but it's also noteworthy how well-matched each of these contributors is to the playfully sinister Black Devil aesthetic. And while none of the big-name guests (or the lesser-knowns for that matter) make an especially outsized impression, they all fit remarkably well into Fevre's familiarly dark, squelchy, mechanical, Moroder-esque grooves. Spencer kicks things off with some ominously intoned mumbo-jumbo on the pleasantly jumpy "Fuzzy Dream"; Poni Hoax's Nicolas Kerr sneers with unhinged, glammy decadence on the creepy "My Screen," and English up-and-comer CocknBullKid brings an intriguing hint of chart-soul polish to her turn on "In Doubt." Sinatra is somewhat overpowered by the aptly titled, overly cluttered "Too Ardent," but her airy, witchy croon is a treat nonetheless. And Bambaataa, an old pro at this stuff, works up a credible bit of spooked sermonizing on "Magnetic Devil," although he's rather rudely forced to share space with an uncredited "ft. MacTalk." Surprisingly, YACHT's Evans -- who knows a thing or two about cockamamie occultism, and who sings perhaps Circus' only legitimately blasphemous lyric -- might actually be the album's biggest vocal presence, if only because she's mixed the highest. Throughout, there's a well-maintained balance between the vocalists -- who bring just enough individuality and presence to keep things engaging, never to fully dominate -- and Fevre's energetically synthetic productions. Which may, admittedly, be somewhat rote, and monomaniacally thumping, and extravagantly bongo-laden (are bongos meant to be spooky?), and generally much more goofy than actually menacing, but nevertheless offer more variety and interest than they often have in the past. Maybe he should have been a ringmaster all along.

Teddybears: Devil's Music review

It took Stockholm-based party mongers Teddybears a while to follow up their 2006 U.S. debut, Soft Machine -- itself a hodge-podge of reworked tracks from the group's earlier, punkier efforts -- with the similarly styled Devil's Music, which was issued in Europe in 2010 and appeared stateside a year later in remixed and slightly reshuffled form. But they hadn't entirely been silent during the intervening years: Joakim Åhlund was active with his '60s-inspired garage rock/power-pop outfit Caesars, while his brother, Klas, maintained a busy schedule of songwriting and production work for major-league pop artists like Kesha, Sugababes, and, most frequently and notably, Robyn. Both brothers' extracurricular ventures are relevant reference points for the Teddybears' sound, an unabashedly sugary mixture of rock & roll and fizzy electronic dance-pop centered around big, crunchy guitars, equally big, crunchy synthesizers, bluntly energetic beats, and a healthy smattering of hip-hop, reggae, punk, and techno. Both ridiculously stylistically diverse and surprisingly distinctive and cohesive in all its gleeful dumbness, Teddybears' music frequently recalls the hard-partying eclecticism and shameless hookiness of late-'90s, big beat electronica. Very much like its predecessor, Devil's Music derives most of its noteworthiness and novelty (and arguably, for better or worse, much of its musical interest) from an impressive, sometimes head-scratching roster of guest vocalists drawn from pop, rock, rap, and reggae. Most acquit themselves perfectly well: the long-largely-dormant Eve kicks things off (after a vocoded bit of Charles Bukowski nonsense) on an appropriately goofy and swaggering tip with the ironically titled "Rocket Science," declaring "I am the robot Elvis rockin' my bionic pelvis," while the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne contributes a characteristically appealing turn on the gently trippy "Crystal Meth Christians." But a few of the most promising collaborations fall a bit flat. Robyn's appearance on chugging electro-pop nugget "Cardiac Arrest" is fun enough but fairly rote (blame it on the material, which isn't long on melody or personality), and "Cho Cha," featuring both Cee-Lo and the B-52's (!!) feels like a truly wasted opportunity; an odd, rather forced '50s/'80s-pastiche with unfunny zero-entendre lyrics about a cat (hmmm), and, inexplicably, Fred Schneider only gets to sing about half a stanza. Still, the inevitable self-recycling aside (see "Get Fresh with You," which re-does "Louie Louie" via Caesars' wonder hit "Jerk It Out"; it's shocking that there's not a more blatant "Cobrastyle" re-tread here) the Åhlunds have proven themselves time and again as ham-fisted masters of ear-wormy, marketing-friendly pure pop confections (the delightfully dippy B.o.B. feature "Get Mama a House" has already been used to sell Swedish real estate), and it's hard to complain too much about another cheap and dirty dozen of their trademark trashy trifles.

Jason Forrest: The Everything review

It only took Jason Forrest a year to follow the hyper-maximalist, sample-mad sugar surge of his 2004 debut, The Unrelenting Songs of the 1979 Post Disco Crash, with the equally dazzling and demented Shamelessly Exciting -- both albums which can be summed up remarkably well by the cheekily unabashed descriptors in their titles. But excepting 2010's brief Utopia EP -- which can't -- it was a quiet six years until he resurfaced with this third proper full-length. Once again, The Everything tries mightily to live up to its title, cramming what might seem like every sound imaginable -- elegantly atmospheric symphonics, heavy metal guitar shredding, electro-acoustic drones, chintzy soft pop keyboards, brass bands, ghostly choirs, hand claps, harpsichords, bongos, squeaky hinges, crackly field recordings -- into its dense, micromanaged collages. Of course, that doesn't really mean the album has Everything. Never mind that one could easily list whole strata of the musical universe Forrest skipped over (most varieties of international/ethnic music, for one thing, not to mention almost any vocals beyond a couple of spoken snippets.) There's also the quibble that encyclopedic content (sound) is not the same thing as encyclopedic form (structure): most of these tracks -- which tend to fall, at any given moment, anywhere along Forrest's typical rhythmic continuum from stiff, chopped-up electro-funk to spastic breakcore -- are arranged in a similar cobbled-together way that feels both highly deliberate and almost entirely arbitrary. And, predictably, there's little evidence of fashionable musical attributes like harmonic coherence, emotional expressiveness, and restraint (well, there is the closing "Isolation, Too," whose sparse, muted piano clusters and relatively minimal percussive interference seem to exist mostly for completeness' sake, viz the disclaimer-like title.) Truth in advertising aside, there's the major caveat to Forrest fans that this album contains few, if any, recognizable samples, so despite many stylistic similarities to his earlier work it's a considerably different sort of listening experience; less like a candy-coated culture-jamming spree (except, perhaps, conceptually) and more like an iconoclastic updating of the Ninja Tune stable's millennial cut'n'paste adventures. Which isn't necessarily to suggest this is a difficult album to enjoy. Two tracks in particular -- the nimble, Meters-like funk of "New Religion" and the swampy lurch of "Raunchy" (built around a bluesy, Link Wray-style guitar lick, and reminiscent of Unrelenting's CCR-sampling "Satan Cries Again") -- stand out as both the catchiest and, not coincidentally, most precise in their genre-glossing gestures. But there are other pleasures too -- "Crime of the Century"'s slinky, half-time stutter-step; "Keys to the Door"'s ersatz Steely Dan wankery; plenty of interspersed cartoonish, Carl Stalling-esque giddiness. Even if Forrest doesn't manage to be quite as deliriously exciting this time out, it's good to know that he remains shamelessly unrelenting.

French Horn Rebellion: The Infinite Music of French Horn Rebellion review

The Infinite Music of French Horn Rebellion is not infinite (though it is admittedly overlong), it's not particularly rebellious, and it features disappointingly few french horns. Apparently the Williamsburg-via-Wisconsin Perlick-Molinari brothers actually wish to rebel against the french horn (on which score this is, again, only a partial success), and more specifically against Robert P-M's classical music career, but it's not entirely clear what they'd like instead. The foundation here is workaday but well-executed electro-dance – a little bit sparkly neo-disco, a little bit glitchy blogfodder tech-pop – infused with a cheery, Fountains of Wayne/OKGO-style power-pop sensibility, with the occasional spacey chamber-psych diversion (where the horns come in, usually) tacked on, presumably, misguidedly, to bolster a sense of artful, album-like weight. You could cite the usual run of "nostalgic" '80s forebears, but really it feels like these guys are just imitating their contemporaries (Passion Pit, MGMT), and though their ambitiousness is appealing and the classical chops serve them well, true greatness in this vein (q.v. Cut Copy's In Ghost Colors) requires heart as well as craft.

Isolée: Well Spent Youth review

The last Isolée album, Wearemonster, was a watershed for minimal techno, and a richly deserving crossover success, injecting unprecedented warmth, melody and personality into the genre's steely sphere and presaging the so-called "maximalist" likes of Gui Boratto. Six years on, Rajko Müller's third full-length reverts to the comparatively mild, mannered microhouse of his first (2000's Rest), but it's markedly chillier and far less engaging. Despite the intriguingly woozy claustrophobia and jagged, intermittent funk bass incursions of opener "Paloma Triste" – a twisted Prince allusion in both title and sound – there's maddeningly little to hold on to here. Müller hasn't lost his attentiveness to fine detail – his sonic fingerprinting is still readily recognizable – but, at least in this context, these tracks mostly seem to meander aimlessly, with too little of his trademark tunefulness – the Monster-lite of "Taktell" and the wanly pretty "Celeste" are paltry exceptions – to save Youth from being a competent but ultimately drab, generic drag.