Review Round-Up: July 2015

Miguel
Wildheart

In “What’s Normal Anyway?,” a sort of misfit’s miscellany, Miguel Pimentel touchingly enumerates his internal contradictions: “too opinionated for the pacifists,” “too far out for the in crowd,” etc.  He’s a mess of them – a sensitive dreamer, a flamboyant bad boy, a wide-eyed romantic (he and Taylor Swift would find plenty common ground), a wantonly lascivious horndog.

Wildheart is darker than its immaculately crafted predecessor, toughening up Kaleidoscope Dream’s paisley swirl of bedroom R&B and blissy pop with snarling rock guitars and hard-edged funk, but its palette remains expansive.  Take the back-to-back sex jams which are – respectively – sweet enough to sing for your grandma (the luxuriously creamy “Coffee”) and filthy enough to make Prince blush (“the valley.”)  Speaking of the Purple One – well, it’s hard not to, and hard to overstate his overarching influence on Miguel’s entire fearlessly polymorphic mien, which also makes it tempting to mentally position this set alongside his own similarly audacious, inventive and dirty-minded third, and dream wild dreams about what’s still in store.  For now, if he’s still too hippie-dippy for the bad-asses, too edgy for the soul heads, too smooth for the punks, whatever – well, that’s their loss.

The Chemical Brothers
Born In The Echoes

2015 seems like a good time to be the Chemical Brothers.  Their familiar flavor of broad-minded psychedelic techno is worming its long way back toward hipness via spiritual successors like James Holden and Daniel Avery, even as the ever-more-vertiginous drops of the EDM boom make their iconically block-rocking bombast seem unthinkably subtle by comparison.  Following 2010’s streamlined synth-fantasia powerhouse Further, Echoes revisits the rockier, guest-studded template that elevated their classic ‘90s LPs but also marred much of their ‘00s output, enlisting a crew of alt-rock vocalists (St. Vincent, Beck, Cate Le Bon) who contribute a bit of personality without overwhelming (or even dominating) their respective tracks.  (The same can’t be said for Q-Tip, whose rote, hokey “Go” is a clear nadir – couldn’t they have gotten an even marginally vital rapper?)  But vocals, despite appearing in some form on nearly every track, are rarely the focus – tellingly, this album’s ritual swirling, acid-washed “Setting Sun“ analogue/“Tomorrow Never Knows” homage (“I’ll See You There”) is largely instrumental.  Two decades after their debut, the Chems remain committed to their singular vision, still plying those heady, slamming breakbeats and reverently swooning synths, continuing to breathe new life from the echoes.

originally published in Magnet Magazine

Laura Marling/Marika Hackman
[Singer-Songwriter]
concert preview

Short Movie (Ribbon), Marling’s fifth feature-length opus and fifth straight stunner, may be the preternaturally poised Brit-folk goddess’ “goes electric” moment, but it’s hardly the stylistic swerve that might suggest – for that, you’ll need the recent “Director’s Cut” expansion, with its bombastically rumbling alternate versions.  Rather, take it as continued (albeit richly redundant) confirmation of her forbidding lyrical and instrumental prowess, in just-slightly looser, more personal form.  Come out early for Hackman, whose poetic, slyly macabre We Slept At Last (Dirty Hit) is one of the year’s most haunting debuts.

Happyness
[Rock/Pop]
concert preview

However much this UK trio hearkens to a redolent, just-distant-enough era of quirky, vaguely rootsy alt-rock – across their excellent 2014 debut, Weird Little Birthday (Bar/None), they echo early Sparklehorse’s whispery scraggle, emulate several mid-period Wilco tunes, and generally manifest a marked debt to Sebadoh, Pavement, etc. – they never feel like revivalists, maybe because of how fully and authentically they embody that peculiar poppy/punky/funny/lo-fi slacker aesthetic.  Or maybe it’s just cause this is a killer bunch of tunes, with strong melodies, surreally poignant lyrics, and just the right balance of catchy, fuzzed-up rockers and beautifully loping ballads.

Mekons
[Rock/Punk/Folk]
concert preview

This venerable English outfit of raggedy outsider art-punks are touring not in support of a new album – their latest was 2011’s wide-ranging, conceptually ambitious Ancient and Modern: 1911-2011 – but rather a documentary, Revenge of the Mekons, which somewhat unhelpfully screened at the International House last Friday.  If that means the band’s in a retrospective mood, they’ve got countless incarnations to revisit, spanning their nearly four active decades – as class-of-1977 agit-punks, unhinged alt-country progenitors, wily communitarian folkies, rave-up noise-rockers, and more.

Ducktails
[Indie Pop]
concert preview

You might dismiss Matthew Mondanile’s mostly-solo project as the lesser, ugly (duckling) stepbrother to his better-known (albeit newer) band Real Estate, but the two outfits have historically fulfilled distinct, if similarly chill, niches; the former’s loose, hazy experimentation neatly complementing the latter’s meticulous perfection.  2013’s eclectic Flower Lane – a big bright breakout after half a decade of noodly bedroom-psych hometapes – muddied that distinction somewhat, and St. Catherine (Domino) threatens to break it down altogether, boasting Ducktails’ cleanest production and most precise (and downright baroque) arrangements to date, but the overall off-the-cuff, pleasantly sleepy daze abides.

Girlpool
[Indie/Pop]
concert preview

There’s girlishness, and there’s grrl-power, but the two are rarely paired as ably as in the work of Harmony Tividad and Cleo Tucker; two LA teens who recently relocated to West Philly.  The duo’s startlingly spare guitar/bass miniatures and blunt-sweet, affably bratty vocals (always twinned, either in unison or harmony) evoke the heady strangeness and nostalgic potency of childhood – per the title of their captivating, all-too-fleeting debut, Before The World Was Big (Wichita) – in a way that’s neither regressive nor sentimental, but honest: reflecting how adulthood can feel just as bewildering.

Mr. Twin Sister
[Indie Pop/Electronic]
concert preview

This Long Island outfit have always been musically chameleonic – their 2011 LP as Twin Sister hopscotched from wispy dream pop to retro spy-soundtrack and spaghetti western pastiche to full-bore disco-funk – so the most striking shift accompanying last year’s name change and eponymous re-debut LP (Infinite Best) was less about sound than attitude: Mr. Twin Sister’s elegant, streamlined excursions into laid-back lounge-pop, torchy electro-soul and dark, stylish house reveal a matured, much less cutesy (though still playful) band brimming with confidence, sophistication and poise.  You can call them sir now.

Skylar Spence
[Dance-Pop/Electronic]
concert preview

Ryan DeRobertis first made a name for himself as St. Pepsi, dispensing shiny sample-based “future funk” that, as these things go, generally looked more to the sounds of the past: French touch filter-disco; chillwave; the primordial 1980s.  Lest the multinational soft-drink behemoth not take kindly to being canonized, he’s now re-branded himself, while also adding more vocals to the formula, though the product – as on the slick, blindingly neon-hued forthcoming Prom King (Carpark) – is as fizzy, saccharine and rapidly gratifying as ever.

Tanlines/Mas Ysa
[Dance-Pop/Electronic]
concert preview

Tanlines specialize in summery, eminently pleasant indie dance-pop that’s somehow distinctive despite seeming almost deliberately generic.  More jangly/less jungly second album Highlights (True Panther), for all its watered-down New Order basslines and re-fried New Wave drumbeats, is naggingly difficult to deny.  Befuddlingly-monikered Montrealer Mas Ysa, meanwhile, takes a decidedly different approach to the same general genre umbrella on his strange, effortful debut LP Seraph (Downtown), hammering home the melodramatics and dynamic shifts, and frequently raising his unpretty, Oberstian voice from a quavering whisper to a strangulated yowl.

Memory Tapes/School Dance
[Electronic Pop]
concert preview

We haven’t heard much from dreamy Jersey synth-pop loner Davye Hawk since 2012’s fluidly expansive Grace/Confusion, but he sidled back into the active column this spring with a single, “Fallout”/“House On Fire” (Carpark), suggesting two intriguingly disparate paths forward: the former a sharp, post-punky anxiety-blast; the latter a gentle, softly glowing flashback to the patient guitar lines and sub-tropical vibes of his celestial early work.  Fellow former Philly duo School Dance (now based in Denver) bring their similarly atmospheric, slightly spooky indie-pop along for the ride.

originally published in Philadelphia City Paper

¿donde viven los bangers?

breaking from normal practice to post a couple of reviews ahead of schedule – these were slated to run in city paper (and online) today, but got bumped back due to space constraints... but i wanted to share b/c for once it seems i am (semi-inadvertently) in lockstep with the daily pitchforkgeist, in the sense that these albums both got Best New Music, today and yesterday respectively.  (and now it will maybe look like i was trailing hype trends by a week behind...oh well whatevs.)  sweet tunes, lame covers, check it:

Disclosure - Settle

Daft Punk can keep their randomly accessed analog memories; British brother duo Disclosure are using much more precise, calibrated means – pinprick-crisp digital beats, icy smart-missile synth hooks – to summon a very specific place (London – the predominant home turf of their myriad guest vocalists: Jessie Ware, Jamie Woon, AlunaGeorge...) and time (the turn-of-the-century heyday of sleek, syncopated UK Garage.)  No slight on our beloved Parisian disco-bots, but Settle (PMR/Island) – a crossover-ready club thumper that plays like Basement Jaxx's Remedy as reimagined by two-step maven MJ Cole – is looking like the dance party album to beat this summer.

Jon Hopkins - Immunity

Jon Hopkins is no stranger to warmly inviting, ambient-leaning soundscapes, as his collaborations with Brian Eno, Coldplay and Scottish folkie King Creosete all attest, but the producer's fourth solo album finds him aiming for something a bit rougher.  Just a little bit.  Six of Immunity (Domino)'s eight cuts are solidly beat-based; most of them appreciably danceable, many of them more expansive takes on The Field's lush, feathery minimal trance, commingled with Dntel's warmed-over glitch techno.  It all sounds pretty glorious, but it's the glacially-paced, nearly beatless, title track – the most luxuriantly billowing bliss-out Four Tet never made – that's perhaps most heartmeltingly resonant.

No big surprise that Disclosure got the BNM status (though impressive that they leap-frogged Daft Punk on the score – more on that later); seems like a third of the tracks on the album were already being heavily hyped, and anyway it's just an obviously great album.  Though I haven't completely decided if I really think they're the second coming of early-period Basement Jaxx, which seems to be everyone else's go-to comparison (and mine) – if only because it's a lack we've been feeling for so long (if their next album gets as wild and wide-ranging as Rooty I'll be truly impressed; so far they seem to be mostly fitting their guest vocalists to their specific mold/choosing from within a narrow range, rather than letting collaborations broaden their approach – which is a totally reasonable approach, at least for now...anyway...)  But the Hopkins review was a bit of a surprise; as much as I'd been enjoying the record it seemed like the kind of thing that p4k might sniff at.  I guess you never know.  Anyway (as I wrote), it's the closing title track that really does it for me – precisely because it sounds almost exactly like one of the slow/gentle cuts on There Is Love In You.  It's the kind of perfect that could be stretched to an hour long and be all the better for it.

so anyway, yeah – as nate asked me recently (in english) – where do bangers live?  if you'll notice my unusually up-to-date "2013 scene" sidebar, i'm developing a pretty sturdy canon of 2013 hits.  i'll probably fashion these into a summer jams mixtape before too long (probably with that as a title) but in the mean time i thought i'd share a few of the most notable.  oh hey soundcloud (apparently that's the answer.)

  
most recently, i've been crushing super hard on this song by CHVRCHES (are we allowed to call them Chrvches in polite company?) – actually overplaying it to the point where I feel like I'm in danger of wearing it out.  not so far, though.  still sounds like crystal clear summertime sprinkles.  i guess i still need to fully parse the lyrics, but in the mean time it hits a whole bunch of tried-and-true electro-pop marks just so meticulously, and often with a little twinge of something extra... one of my favorites is the slightly martial (definitely live-sounding) re-entry of the drums after the breakdown (around 2:40)   dance with me?


not sure i can fully explain why this song has stuck with me so strongly – the rest of caitlin rose's album is good but this is a head-and-shoulders stand-out – but it just feels like utterly perfect pop.  i connected with it immediately when i saw her play live (before hearing the record), so that probably helped.  lyrics are great too, even the loose tennessee williams references which could so easily feel forced.  also great for such a sweet sounding song to be about such a dark destructive impulse.

 
so this is a "minimix" of all the different remixes on the 12", which is especially fun b/c it's exactly the kind of goofiness i would get up to. (qv my treatment of "mixed bizness" on superstar djs and "dancing on my own" on the 2010 mix.)  been banging this all year but it's clearly built for summer.


so i'm just hearing this remix for the first time now... nice stuff! reminds me a lot of the avalanches treatment of "i'm a cuckoo" (one of the all-time greats.)  i'm not gonna say it's better than the original, but it does a good job of translating the song's gooey saccharine sweetness into something very different.  hard to beat those super-chimey chirrupy mandolins, but hyperactive multi-tracked slap bass is a pretty good approach if you're gonna try.  what do you think?


I'm sure this song will get its due time to shine (VW don't like to go about things orderly, which is just fine), but as far as i'm concerned this is far and away the banger from MVOTC.  (It obviously doesn't come close to "Giving Up The Gun," which is one way, at least, in which the new album is a let-down – but it's a solid shot.)  I always want the blazing pianos to kick ("I know I love you...") when the bottom drops out instead ("I'm not excited...").  Why they gotta hold back like that?  (I do like the handclaps in this live version.)  Meanwhile "Obvious Bicycle" is so utterly beautiful, and "Hannah Hunt" works so well that it's really tough to pick a favorite track from the album as a whole...



feels so cheap (not to mention clunky! - i know it's supposed to feel casual but omg those dubbed-out curse words are just sloppy – even if actually including the curse words would be 10x worse) but dammit it works.  #on repeat.

as for Daft Punk...i didn't mean to pick on them in my Disclosure review, it was just an easy target.  I'm taking my time with Random Access Memories, have only given it three or maybe four listens thru so far.  So I don't feel ready to make a definitive statement.  there's a lot of fun stuff there, for sure, but it is clear that sequencing is a major issue – "Giorgio by Moroder" would make so much more sense later in the album rather than killing momentum on track three.  and what's up with putting a slow-jam second (in the "Aerodynamic" slot, if you will.)  a lot of the best stuff is in the middle of the album - esp. "Instant Crush" (Julian!!) and "Lose Yourself To Dance" although that song is just begging to be sped up a good ten clicks.  I guess I'm a little undecided on "Giorgio" but some of the other epics do work pretty well, especially "Touch."  (also "Get Lucky" is much improved at this length and with proper song structure.)  anyhow, i'll keep on living with it, gettin comfy.

2012 Review Round-Up: October

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

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

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

Ultraísta
s/t

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

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

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

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

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

Django Django
s/t
[Brit-Pop]

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

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

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

Daphni
Jiaolong
[Dance/Electronic]

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

Miguel
[R&B]
concert preview

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

Le1f/Das Racist
[Hip-Hop]
concert preview

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

Willis Earl Beal
[Soul/Folk]
concert preview

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

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

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

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

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

Jeffrey Lewis
[Singer-Songwriter]
concert preview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SXSW 2012: Thursday

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