Review Round-Up: February 2013

pretty good month.  pretty good year, so far.  couple of minor trends i'm noticing/tracking, though it's a little silly to be generalizing from just 2.5 months...

indie r&b (rhye, inc., autre ne veut, jamie lidell)
retro-'60s-psych (foxygen, unknown mortal orchestra, jacco gardner, christopher owens, tame impala ?darkstar?)
alt-country revival! (mount moriah, night beds, phosphorescent, the men, mavericks)
atmospheric/ambient folk (sondra sun-odeon, grouper, benoit pioulard)

and of course, there's always indie pop.  i think i may have underrated this...at least, the title track is still standing strong as probably my favorite song of 2k13 thus far.  on the other hand, i can't really speak to the rest of the album, as i've pretty much just been listening to the title track!

Veronica Falls
Waiting For Something To Happen

Veronica Falls have a sound. It's not necessarily the most original sound, as indie-pop goes, but it works, and it's theirs: a pert mix of primness and jangle; cleanly chiming guitars, a brisk, determined tambourine-on-floor-tom backbeat, and those harmonies – oh, the harmonies – open and airy, full-throated and rich but with an oddly affectless, madrigal-like austerity. When first introduced, on their early singles and excellent 2011 debut LP (wherein they sang of ghosts and graveyards, misery and other bad bad feelings, and included an honest-to-goodness Elizabethan round), it was frequently thrilling. That's still often true on album number two, which buffs their scruffier, punkier inclinations into something a bit warmer though still awfully plaintive, and scraps the goth tack (excepting one peppy plea to be buried alive) to hone in on themes of adolescent listlessness and romance. But here's where the studied monochrome consistency thing starts to plague them. Great as they can be taken individually – "Falling Out," "Tell Me" (shades of early R.E.M. in its guitar interplay) and, especially, the title track, are among the sharpest pop offerings of our young year – hearing these songs all in a row, most sharing the same basic beat and harmonic structure, can make the title feel uncomfortably prophetic. [6.5]


Sally Shapiro
Somewhere Else

Four years after a sound-alike sophomore set (2009's My Guilty Pleasure) that made for a safe, sterile follow-up to an utterly delightful debut, Sally Shapiro's ready for some variety. As advertised, Somewhere Else finds the pseudonymous Swedish chanteuse, and producer/counterpart Johan Agebjörn, inching (further) away from their studiously reverential, deliberately faceless Italo-disco reenactment, toward a more generically faceless, broadly '80s-influenced electro-pop. Not that things have really changed all that much. Shapiro's singing is as wispy and wafer-thin as ever; her limp, love-lorn lamentations (sample chorus lyrics: "you were never intended for me"; "please don't go/I love you/nevermind") just as piteously plaintive. Your call whether that's charming or cloying, but it's not exactly the most versatile approach, functioning similarly whether paired with thumping electro-house, elevator smooth-jazz or vague bucolia. The standouts tend to have a bit more spunk – the Annie-ish "This City's Local Italo Disco DJ Has A Crush On Me" (which still can't live up to its several-ways-wishful title) – and, occasionally, company: Shapiro's notoriously shy, retiring ways, notwithstanding, she's gotten downright social; teaming with Drive soundtrack stars Electric Youth for the fun (if decidedly sub-Bowie) "Starman," and, er, Drive soundtrack cash-in tour stars Anoraak for a spot of uncharacteristically warm-blooded, Phoenix-ish lite-funk. [6]
originally published in Magnet Magazine

Matmos
The Marriage of True Minds
[Mentalism/Experimentalism]

Matmos have made a career of translating highly improbable concepts into witty, astonishing, utterly singular music, and with The Marriage of True Minds (Thrill Jockey) it's fair to say they have outdone themselves.  What they've actually done is harder to quantify – the process involved interpreting "scores" gleaned telepathically from experimental subjects (including such august subconsciousnesses as Dan Deacon and Keith Fullerton Whitman); the results are by turns meditative, unsettling, absurdly goofy and (surprisingly often) funky.  It's a welcome reaffirmation that these guys are capable of basically anything, including E.S.P. (possibly?) as well as the strangest Buzzcocks cover you will ever hear (guaranteed.)


Atoms For Peace
AMOK
[Pop/Electronic]

No surprises: Amok (XL) is, at least on the surface, standard-issue latter-day Thom Yorke product.  Imagine The Eraser's mannered moodiness with an extra helping of jittery King of Limbs percussion and you've got a workable shorthand.  What distinguishes it is the extent to which Atoms For Peace are truly a band; comprising not just Yorke's left-hand soundwiz Nigel Godrich but also a trio of truly world-class groovemakers (Mauro Refosco; Joey Waronker; Flea), atop whose gorgeously sinuous and sometimes intriguingly Brazilian-tinged throwdowns Thom's familiar million-dollar murmur functions as mere, miraculous window dressing.


Darkstar
News From Nowhere
[Electronic/Pop]

Drifting beyond their early singles' post-dubstep futurism and their first LP's muted cyborg noir sucker-punch, News from Nowhere (Warp) finds seasoned bafflers Darkstar swerving even further into uncharted territory.  And the news is good: "Nowhere" turns out to be a pillowy paisley wonderland which perfectly matches the album cover's dreamlike, hypercolor pastoralism; an unexpectedly pretty patchwork with swathes of rosy electro-tinted somnambulance woven around aptly-named vocalist James Buttery's tweaked and dappled coos, and bedazzled with psyche-pop jewels like "Amplified Ease" (a suitable description of the overall effect) that suggest a better-medicated Animal Collective.


Foxygen
We Are The 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic
[Pop/Rock]

The psychedelic '60s have rarely not been a fertile fount of inspiration, but this winter's seen a particularly Aquarian resurgence, between Chris Owens' flowery Lysandre and Jacco Gardner's whole-cloth lysergic refabulations.  LA's Foxygen who hit a sold-out First Unitarian Friday with similarly tuned-in/turned-on tourmates Unknown Mortal Orchestra, are the schtickiest of the bunch, but also maybe the stickiest.  We Are The 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic (Jagjaguwar), title on down, plays like an elaborate pop-historical dress-up pageant, mix-n-matching baroque-pop brocade and bell-bottom blues; glam-Velvets jean jackets with Sgt. Pepper epaulets, a Shuggie soul-patch and a Dylanish sneer.  I know it's only po-mo indie-pop pastiche – but I like it.


When Nalda Became Punk
A Farewell To Youth
[Indie Pop]

With a goofy, impossibly twee moniker – When Nalda Became Punk – and a genre-legendary producer (Ian Catt) and label (Shelflife) behind their debut album, this Galician duo have about as solid an indie-pop pedigree as you could desire.  A Farewell To Youth, therefore, offers plenty of delights, but few surprises, except perhaps its refusal to prioritize either guitars or synthesizers, opting instead for both, full-throttle, simultaneously; festooning its classically cuddly melodies – some giddy, some wistful – with both jangles and twinkles, gleefully scrappy (and, yes, punkish) power-chord churning and equally urgent, go-for-broke drum machines.  "I wanna build a factory of happiness," croons earnest, lightly-accented frontlady Elena Sestelo; she's got her foundation set already.


Amor De Dias
The House At Sea
[Indie Pop/Folk]

Anyone still sighing softly over the dissolution of delicately refined English pastoralists The Clientele will find no shortage of solace in The House at Sea (Merge), the second full-length fruit of erstwhile retiring frontman Alisdair MacLean's partnership with sprightly Spanish-born sweetie Lupe Núñez-Fernández (of Pipas) as Amor de Dias.  It's a fuller and more assured effort than their debut, with stronger, more varied songwriting applied to the same gracefully insubstantial palette of mood and memory, lush with wispy nylon-string guitars, whispery vocals and a sun-faded bossa-based lilt.


Grouper
The Man Who Died In His Boat
[Ambient/Folk]

There are songs on The Man Who Died In His Boat (Kranky) – but only barely.  As on her 2008 high water mark, Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill (which is also being reissued alongside it), this collection of previously unheard five-year-old recordings finds Grouper (Portland-based ambient-folk musician Liz Harris) circling around an elusive melting point between song and sound – between drowsy, fingerpicked canticles and pure, purring abstraction – where her endlessly thrumming acoustic guitars and sumptuously reverbed vocals slough off any definable substance and evanesce into a ghostly, inchoate murmur, lingering just beyond conscious grasp.


Dawn McCarthy and Bonnie "Prince" Billy
What The Brothers Sang
[Folk/Roots]

Those who balked at the mild Nashville slickness of Bonnie "Prince" Billy's self-covering Greatest Palace Music record may take similar issue with his latest interpretation project, a collection of Everly Brothers duets sung with Faun Fables' Dawn McCarthy.  But while What The Brothers Sang (Drag City) is certainly earnest, it's not entirely the straightforward troubadour's tribute you might imagine.  For one thing, it largely ignores the duo's beloved '50s hits in favor of obscurities and B-sides from their late '60s output (including one particularly heartfelt, hippy-dippy John Denver cover.)  If they can't always recapture the Everlys' sublime vocal alchemy, they imbue this overlooked oeuvre with a delightfully understated back-porch looseness.


inc.
[Soul/R&B]
concert preview



Given the recent, openly flirtatious state of affairs between the indie world and mainstream R&B, the emergence of a group like inc. – two Los Angeles brothers specializing in seductive, buttery-smooth slow jams – feels like an almost preordained consummation.  Even two years ago, an indie institution like 4AD releasing an album as lustfully luscious as No World – or a Making Time performer this unabashedly well-suited for, well, making time – would've been practically unimaginable (or at least greeted with foregone presumptions of irony-mongering.)  It's not like they're reinventing any wheels here: Andrew Aged's doe-eyed, smolderingly earnest vocals could pass for any number of bedroom crooners down the decades, while his brother Daniel’s equally voluptuous bass playing, Timbaland-style electro skitters and minimal-minded stutter-step beats would've slotted right in on late-'90s radio (or, perhaps, a more organic variant of the first Junior Boys album.)  But it's revelatory – and frankly, just plain hot – to hear indie-soul this forthright and unapologetic, with none of the Weeknd's fashionably faded mumblings, How To Dress Well's arty lo-fi, nor the XX's distancing post-punk twitches. 

Autre Ne Veut
[Electronic Pop/R&B]
concert preview


Like his sometime labelmates and fellow experimental/pop line-straddlers D'eon, James Ferraro and Ford & Lopatin, Arthur Ashin – a.k.a. Brooklyn-based recovering enigma Autre Ne Veut – harbors a fondness for garishly plasticine 1980s production tropes: big soupy synth washes; blindingly bright gated snares; ersatz-new age shimmers; twinned metal-tone guitars.  But it's no good pegging him for an ironist: Ashin's singing voice, in its own way at least as excessive as his production style, is a searing, Prince-indebted falsetto that broadcasts an earnestness you just can't fake.  Cutting back significantly on the artier oddball extremes of his self-titled debut – though fear not, it's still plenty weird – Anxiety (Software) is a tight, polished and deviously hooky set of breathless electro-soul that pushes past insular leftfield-R&B tinkerers like How To Dress Well to suggest an affinity with latter-day stadium-pop contenders like Gotye and Twin Shadow.  Aside from being maybe a quarter-century late, it feels improbably convincing (though still utterly implausible) as a legitimate mainstream bid.

James Hunter Six
[Soul]
concert preview


Back when he debuted in the mid '90s – and when the burgeoning retro-soul audience caught up with him a decade later for his excellent 2006 breakthrough, People Gonna Talk – James Hunter's buttery-smooth vocal stylings and svelte, dapper '50s-style arrangements made him a double-take-worthy dead ringer for Sam Cooke.  On Minute By Minute (Go/Fantasy), his fifth album in two decades and the first to acknowledge his crackerjack backing combo (in number, at least), he sounds, if anything, even less like what you'd expect from an unassuming-looking Englishman, trying on a smokier, Ray Charles-via-Jackie Wilson vocal grittiness to match his band's harder-edged, horn-heavy throwdowns.  With Gabriel Roth, Daptone Records' soul-revival kingpin, behind the boards, Hunter and the Six dip into chicken-shack funk, "Tequila"-style Latin-tinged acoustic groovers, and the title track's hard-swinging organ-led strut, alongside their more refined, jazzier supper-club fare – all on original tunes that'd handily pass a smell test as unearthed turn-of-the-'60s chestnuts.

Mac DeMarco
[Indie Pop/Rock]
concert preview


He's got precursors, sorta – Kurt Vile, Ariel Pink, and Daniel Johnston come variably to mind – but Mac De Marco is definitely his own special, befuddling mix of defiantly casual and deceptively crafty.  He's got this impossibly tangy, crystalline guitar tone that doesn't feel the least bit fussed over, but's just too luscious and idiosyncratic not to be.  He writes seemingly knocked-off, borderline inane slice-of-life lyrics – mostly about cigarettes, boredom and girls (preferably denim-clad) – then sets them to tight, heartbreakingly winsome little melodies.  His whole presentation pretty much screams amiable goofball slacker, but in the right light he comes off effortlessly, enviably hip and art-damaged – imagine someone bridging the improbable affective disjunct between the young Jonathan Richman and his icon/would-be prototype, Lou Reed.  He's also promisingly prolific, dropping two full-lengths in 2012: 2 (Captured Tracks) was certainly the more lucid – it kicked off with the year's finest riff, with plenty more to follow – but its weirder, scruffier predecessor, Rock and Roll Night Club, was nearly as intriguing.

Bleeding Rainbow
[Indie Pop/Rock]
concert preview




Two minutes into the gently epic opening cut of Yeah Right (Kanine), album #3 from the local fuzz-pop lovelies formerly known as Reading Rainbow, the drums kick in, the pace ratchets up a few notches and there's a shift from warm organ-drone and sweetly harmonized boy-girl vocals to a growling, pummeling guitar-smear directly evoking a certain other noise-obsessed band with a blood-related (and seasonally appropriate) moniker who, hey hey, also happened to release their third album last week!  That feels like the moment, symbolically, when the band becomes Bleeding Rainbow, transforming from our vaguely cuddly neighborhood duo named for a PBS show to a sharp, aspirational four-piece with an unmitigated allegiance to the turn-of-the-'90s shoegaze-to-grunge continuum.  From there on out, it's a hearty, good-natured assault playing both sides of the noise/pop dichotomy, with Sarah Everton's charmingly plain-jane vocals channeling indie everywomen from Bilinda Butcher to Georgia Hubley to Frankie Rose.

Efterklang
[Indie/Orchestral]
concert preview


In the ten years since they first emerged as a brooding, expansive, ten-piece symphonics-plus-electronics post-rock ensemble, Copenhagen's Efterklang have slowly undergone a curious evolution, contracting in size and sound enough to resemble a more pedestrian atmospheric indie-rock band, but without fully losing the evocative majesty that earned them so many early Sigur Rós comparisons.  While last year's Piramida (4AD) still boasted a robust roster of contributors (including the Andromeda Mega Express Orchestra and the South Denmark Girls Choir), they're officially down to a trio, with vocalist Casper Clausen's burnished croon (a less melodramatic echo of Tindersticks frontman Stuart Staples' eternal baritone) now forming the clear focal point to their compositions.  And despite taking inspiration (and field recorded ambience) from a visit to the Arctic Circle ghost town that provided the album's title, these compact, sound-stuffed fantasias tend to evoke wistful domestic tranquility rather than your typical resplendent Nordic mountainscapes.  Call it Danish Modern chamber pop; in this case, it feels like it could actually fit inside a chamber.

Toro Y Moi
[Electronic/Indie Pop]
concert preview



Chazwick Bundick gets pegged as a shape-shifter; his releases indexed via such-and-such stylistic dalliance du jour, but the tonal throughline of his output as Toro Y Moi easily overshadows those dabbling shifts in musical approach, which – not unlike the music's charms – tend to be subtle ones.  So if Anything in Return (Carpark) breaks from Underneath The Pine's relatively organic baroque-pop fever-dream to revisit the synthetic mod-R&B and muted electro-funk of 2010's Causers of This (why is he so atrocious at naming things?) and boasts increasingly prominent vocal hooks that help make it his stickiest album to date, the cumulative effect is still that familiarly hazy, dappled soft-prog mood, comfily padded in a cushion of (ironic? oneiric?) distance.  While chillwave has demonstrated more staying power as a joke than a genre, Toro's assembled discography may be the strongest case for it as a specific, surprisingly versatile aesthetic; it's vaguely lush, vaguely poppy, and you can vaguely dance to it.  After all, what's French for "wave," again?

Daedelus/Salva/Ryan Hemsworth
[Electronic/Dance]
concert preview


Much as Four Tet's Kieren Hebden and Manitoba/Caribou/Daphni's Dan Snaith have traced an improbable trajectory from producing gently bucolic "folktronica" early last decade to their current status as central figures in the thriving UK/international EDM scene, Californian neo-dandy Alfred Darlington – alias Daedelus – has lately emerged from his perennial, quaintly whimsical IDM tinkerings as a similarly unlikely de facto elder statesman of LA's burgeoning beat underground.  His historically prodigious release schedule may have tapered off slightly – his last full-length was 2011's overstuffed, guest-studded Bespoke – but he seems busier than ever, collaborating and sharing remixes with the likes of Nosaj Thing, Sepalcure, Teebs and Gaslamp Killer, plus curating his own Magical Properties imprint, which has been less active as a label per se than a semi-annual live electronica roadshow/revue.  This fourth installment features SF>LA bass-head Salva, who just dropped his hyped-up, hip-hop-jacking Odd Furniture EP (Friends of Friends), and hotly-tipped, Halifax-born cloud-rap beatsmith Ryan Hemsworth.

Aesop Rock
[Hip-Hop]
concert preview


Aesop Rock's ultra-dense, symbol-strewn, sesquipedalian raps aren't for everyone, and even his truest heads may be thankful he takes some space between releases – time for him to breathe and us to digest – but the half-decade gap before last summer's Skelethon (Rhymesayers) was a rough one.  It was evidently even rougher for Aes himself, however; he spent it contending with divorce, a close friend's death, and the apparent dissolution of longtime label Def Jux.  All of this gets excavated, in typically allusive, semi-absurdist stream-of-(self)-consciousness fashion, atop a truckload of menacingly potent firework drum breaks.  But such ostensibly mature, mortal concerns get juxtaposed with (and filtered through) a recurrent focus on the smart-alecky melodrama of impish, Calvin-and-Hobbes-style kidhood – dorky haircuts, roman candles, homemade mummies, godlike donuts, carving "Zoso" into a school desk, and a particularly epic account of refusing to eat your green beans – which helps make the hyperbolic verbosity on display here unusually semi-scrutable, yielding simultaneously his funniest and most poignant work to date.

Lady Gaga
[Pop/Theater]
concert preview


Hey, remember Lady Gaga?  It's tough, I know.  It's been nearly two years since the relentless Eurothump and Glee-friendly electro-metal of Born This Way, the towering (if paradoxically somewhat insular-feeling) manifesto of unfettered inclusivity that consummated her improbably triumphant campaign of complete saturation.  After three albums in as many years, she hasn't even dropped a single since 2011.  Apparently she's been traveling: the Born This Way Ball Tour spent 2012 giant-striding its way across five continents.  (And who exactly was keeping us company in her absence?  Carly Rae Jepsen?)  So here's the victorious homecoming, fingers crossed that we haven't just forgotten her.  To be clear, this isn't really even pop music anymore; we're talking full-on gonzo, symbolist, Brechtian musical theater (-cum-Armani-appointed fashion show.)  An excerpt from Wikipedia's nearly thousand-word "synopsis" of the tour's "plot": "...she emerges from the stage sitting on a meat couch with her gun bra and green trousers.  Mother G.O.A.T. flies around the castle lip-syncing the words to "Paparazzi" until Gaga returns to kill her with her new disco stick."  Good luck.

originally published in Philadelphia City Paper

AMG review round-up, volume XVIII: the rest of 2009

{didn't quite make the list}

Y∆CHT: See Mystery Lights review
See Mystery Lights is YACHT's first album as a duo -- vocalist Claire Evans is now a full-fledged member alongside beatmaker/primary instigator Jona Bechtolt -- and their first for DFA Records. Though initially surprising, their shift from a tiny Portland indie to N.Y.C.'s premier independent dance label was in many ways eminently logical: YACHT's playful electronic beats, party-friendly eclecticism, off-kilter poppiness, and array of male/female, spoken/sung (mostly spoken) vocals already had a lot in common with the DFA sound, and particularly with the label's flagship act, LCD Soundsystem. (Their previous album's "Platinum," for instance, bore a more than passing resemblance to LCD's "Get Innocuous.") Musically speaking, the differences between See Mystery Lights and its predecessor are hardly dramatic: the songs are lengthier and fewer, the beats are tighter and more dance-oriented, but the same fundamental elements and energy are all still in place. And energy is key: if most of the DFA stable draws on a hip, wryly detached downtown aesthetic, YACHT's outlook is typically a good deal sunnier, embracing an ethos of childlike innocence and personal affirmation (with just a slight shading of artily ironic distance). Concurrent with this album (which was named for the paranormal optical phenomenon haunting their adopted home base of Marfa, TX), Bechtolt and Evans made things considerably more complicated (or, arguably, just more distracting) in that regard: declaring YACHT to be just a band, but also a Belief System; inviting anyone to "join" (via the online "YACHT trust"); issuing cryptic manifestos online and in print; displaying a conspicuous obsession with triangles; and propagating a series of aphoristic mantras (including one borrowed from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and, perhaps the most worrisome, "YACHT is not a cult") -- all adding an inscrutable, somewhat sinister undertone to their positivity.

Despite the mass of verbiage and iconography, it's hardly clear what they're getting at with all the quasi-occult trappings, apart from creating some marginally intriguing art, but thankfully understanding it is completely unnecessary for enjoying the music. The only album cuts with an overt lyrical connection to this pseudo-spiritual business are the first two numbers (both built around repeated nursery rhyme-like incantations about the afterlife) and "Don't Fight the Darkness," which turns the Maharishi's mantra into a loopy bit of sparse, Timbaland-ish IDM. Despite some reasonably inventive beat programming, they're probably the least interesting things here, sounding dry and labored in comparison to the freewheeling fun of obvious party jams like the cheeky "I'm in a Love with a Ripper," with its T-Pain-jacking Auto-Tune hook, and the very-DFA "Summer Song," an affectionate if derivative disco-punk homage built on a solid foundation of cowbells, handclaps, and an all-mighty bassline. Though the album as a whole makes for an enjoyably unpredictable hodgepodge of summery, celebratory, and frequently quirky sounds, individual numbers often suffer from a sort of ambivalence of form, as though they couldn't decide whether they wanted to be pop songs or dance tracks -- it's telling that the two most effective moments both feature a clear and engaging structure, albeit very different approaches. The biggest earworm is "Psychic City," a laid-back groover that borrows the curious verse lyrics (and linear song form) of a 1987 song-poem by K Records' Rich Jensen, adding the self-evident refrain "Ay-Ya-Ya-Ya!"

But See Mystery Lights' biggest leap, and most surprising success, is the two-parter "It's Boring/You Can Live Anywhere You Want," which abandons pop linearity altogether in favor of an extended, expansive beat workout, kicking off with unprecedented guitar-driven punk-funk intensity, then delving into a hypnotic, Afro-tinged groove powered by frenetic drumming and swirling, chanted vocals. It's by far the album's longest cut and also the clearest indication of why DFA is an appropriate home for YACHT -- to the extent that it could almost be written off as a mere LCD Soundsystem/Juan Maclean ripoff (which, perhaps, if you want to be a real killjoy, makes it in turn an Arthur Russell/Brian Eno ripoff...) if it weren't so compelling and enjoyable in its own right. YACHT focus most of their (musical) energies on making goofy, offbeat pop in the frivolously fun vein of good-vibes heroes Tom Tom Club, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that -- it's their best quality, and that certainly remains true on See Mystery Lights -- but this track in particular demonstrates that, when they so choose, they can be equally adept at channeling the fearlessly adventuresome spirit of Talking Heads, and there's definitely nothing wrong with that either.

OMO: bio and The White Album review

The London/Berlin-based duo Omo have a good deal in common with their willfully weird Lo Recordings labelmates the Chap, which comes as little surprise considering that one-half of the duo, Berit Immig, also serves as a vocalist and keyboardist in that band (and, in fact, both members of Omo previously played with Chap main man Johannes Von Weizsäcker in the group Karamazov). The two outfits share a deliciously warped sensibility, characterized by a wry, steely-eyed humorousness that seems at once decidedly English and also rather incongruous and alien, as though something were being lost (or deliberately mangled) in translation. Whereas the Chap typically deliver a fairly muscular, mutant electro-rock sound, Omo's musical approach on this debut LP is calmer and gentler but perhaps even quirkier, combining cheap-sounding synths and beatboxes with languidly plucked guitars and an array of electronic burbles, whistles, wordless vocalizing, and other odd noises to craft sparse but amiable compositions recalling the retro-minded stylings of groups like Plone and Stereolab as well as the strangely lucid sonic abstractions of the Books. As curious and endearing as Omo's music might be, however, its primary function is clearly to serve as a backdrop for the duo's vocal and lyrical shenanigans. Typically delivered in spoken or half-sung phrasing (bearing out occasionally cited comparisons to Laurie Anderson) and often subjected to electronic vocal manipulations whose effect is, on the whole, more whimsical than off-putting, The White Album's lyrics focus in on the minutia of various facets of everyday life: the hours of the clock ("2 PM"), a tennis game ("Advantage"), some fish in a tin ("Fish in the Tin"), and, of course, teatime ("Tea Break"), along with occasional forays into biology ("Her Body," a found-text description of a bird laying an egg) and fantasy ("König," sung by a theramin-voiced queen with a crown of "real stars"). There's an occasional whiff of overarching commentary on the culture of consumerist consumption -- in the general preoccupation with material objects and in more specific instances like the music industry vignette "Live Show," the bland ad-copy language of "ROV," and especially standout track "Oversized," which features some folderol about eating tarts (over a perky, chintzy bossa-nova beat) followed by the comically unsettling refrain "Will you be surprised when I'm oversized?" By and large, though, Omo offer arch absurdism of an elemental and purely conceptual stripe, rendering any inklings of interpretation more or less gleefully futile.

Caspa: Everybody's Talking, Nobody's Listening! review

Highly touted dubstep scenemaker (DJ, producer, label head, ostensible great white hope) Caspa opens his debut album, Everybody's Talking, Nobody's Listening!, with, ironically enough, some talking: the legendary U.K. reggae DJ David Rodigan asserting that "it's all about the music" and sketching an implied sonic and cultural lineage leading directly back to "King Tubby's echo chamber in western Kingston." It's an odd choice for a keynote, and a rather dubious connection, because the music that follows lands pretty squarely on the least roots-oriented end of the dubstep continuum. Despite a vague Jamaican flavor imparted by guest MCs on a few cuts (most notably Roni Size compatriot MC Dynamite, always a likable presence, though he's more of a grime/hip-hop hypeman than a true ragga toaster) and the genre's de facto half-time skank undergirding about two-thirds of the set, there's relatively little reggae influence discernible here, and almost none of the organic, reverberant, dubby haze favored by producers like Burial. Instead, Caspa's productions are cold and mechanical, often strident and occasionally somewhat sterile-feeling, but nonetheless brutally effective dance music, albeit dance music of a curiously sluggish strain. There may be hints of heat and humanity in these grooves, and moments of woozy intoxication, but they derive strictly from the interplay of rhythms themselves, while the textures remain resolutely forbidding and industrial. Caspa's sound is presented at its most potent, elemental form in the instrumental cuts: the spare, ominous "Low Blow," with its trademark midrange wobbles and pummeling bass; the strobed, colorless zapping of "Marmite." The bleepy "I Beat My Robot" and "The Terminator" hit just as hard while offering just slightly more musical range, which could almost be taken for playfulness. Elsewhere, the vocal cuts are decent if fairly undistinguished musically (though "The Takeover" does amusingly feature its own screwed-and-chopped remix outro), while a handful of stylistic experiments reaching beyond Caspa's comfort zone (slick R&B on "Lon-Don City," downtempo acid jazz on "Victoria's Secret") are passable in themselves but feel out of place. He leaves listeners with a final pair of curiosities: the jittery, obnoxious Streets-like pop-grime-house oddity "Disco Jaws" and an evidently nostalgic tribal-ambient excursion titled "Back to '93," which is the album's longest and probably most incongruous cut. Taken together with the aggrandizing intro track, it seems there is some attempt being made here at a statement about U.K. urban dance culture/history, and, presumably, Caspa's place within it. The album itself is hardly strong enough of a musical statement to make much of that premise (notwithstanding the foolhardiness of historicizing yourself on your own debut album), but it's certainly got a lot of energy.

Hanne Hukkelberg: bio and Blood From A Stone review

Is Blood from a Stone Hanne Hukkelberg's difficult third album? Actually, on the surface it may be her most direct work so far, slotting more neatly and readily into a recognizable genre type -- call it dark, shoegazey, post-punk-derived art rock -- than either of her previous albums, and making prominent and comparatively conventional use of electric guitars, without abandoning her distinctive found-object approach to orchestration. Hukkelberg's music has always been difficult, requiring repeated and attentive listening for the nuances of its elliptical melodies and intimate sound-worlds to seep through. She's always been an artist who works in shades of gray. But if Little Things was silvery: blithe, wispy, evanescent; Rykestraße 68 more of a wizened, smoky charcoal, mottled and murky; Blood is closer to a gunmetal smear: drab, dense, and frequently oppressive. Drawing explicit inspiration here from the likes of Sonic Youth, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and PJ Harvey, Hukkelberg seems less interested in those artists' visceral urgency than their sonic grittiness. Blood gestures toward post-punk's primal edginess, particularly in its brutalist percussion tactics (freezers and stoves, clogs and rocks, no traditional drum kits), but it fails to approach the traction and immediacy of, for instance, the previous album's gripping, revelatory Pixies cover. Part of the trouble is that her remarkable voice is put to notably less expressive use this time around. More to the point, though: most of the songs just aren't that compelling. Things start out strong, with the lush, gauzy "Midnight Sun Dream," the swaggering title track, and the driving "Bandy Riddles," which boasts the album's most sprightly melody. From there on it's heavy going, as the songs seem to devolve into a dreary, largely undistinguished mass, respectable and even potent on a tonal and textural level, with some undeniable moments of beauty and strangeness, but weirdly laborious to actually listen to. No one should have expected getting Blood from a Stone to be easy, but it's a shame it had to be this much of a chore.

Sally Shapiro: Miracle review

If the most striking feature of Disco Romance, Sally Shapiro's utterly charming debut album, was its uncannily meticulous evocation of early-'80s Italo disco in all its fragile, intimate glory, the most notable thing about this follow-up set may be how fully and faithfully it replicates its predecessor. Save for an occasionally perceptible updating and subtle toughening of their sound, and a marginally poppier writing approach (thanks largely to the increased involvement of Nixon/Cloetta Paris songsmith Roger Gunnarsson), Johan Agebjörn and his still-secretive chanteuse have hardly altered their working template, so album number two feels mostly like a déjà vu whirlwind of glistening synths and icily insistent beats, laden with sweetly cooed romantic disclosures and hushed spoken asides. It's a rather less uncanny feat the second time around, certainly, and My Guilty Pleasure can't help but feel like something of a letdown after the starry-eyed singularity and surprise of Shapiro's initial appearance, but more of the same is, in this case, far from a horrible thing. To some extent, it's hard to say what else could have been expected -- the two discs' worth of largely reverent remixes that followed Disco Romance were surprisingly scant on potential new directions (that said, the one remixer who crops up again here, Tensnake, does provide a loose, poppy highlight in "Moonlight Dance," even if it's less distinctive than his dubby, percussive mix of "I'll Be By Your Side"). Excepting perhaps wholesale retreads like "Looking at the Stars" and "My Fantasy" (dead ringers for the first album standouts "Hold Me So Tight" and "I Know"), the sameness of the sound isn't necessarily such a problem in itself; more disappointing is that nothing here follows up on the charismatic songwriting promise of the stellar inter-album singles "He Keeps Me Alive" and "Jackie Jackie" (which appeared on the North American release of Disco Romance and the European edition of this album) -- even with Gunnarsson aboard, nothing here approaches the personable nature of those songs or of his work for Cloetta Paris (whose overlooked 2008 debut is a far more worthy next step for Shapiro admirers). The closest are probably "Love in July" (featuring an almost imperceptible vocal cameo from Paris), whose electro-tinged warmth does indeed inject a bit of summer into Shapiro's decidedly wintry vibe, and "Save Your Love," a simple but touching blast of quasi-Hi-NRG dance. The lushly arranged album closer, (and first single), "Miracle" is a nicely effective piece of overwrought emotionalism, complete with fake thunderstorm. A little variety goes a long way -- here's hoping the next album will continue to explore further afield. In the meantime, this may be a holding pattern, but it's one worth holding on to. Diminishing results are, after all, still results.

Montt Mardié: Skaizerkite review

By the time of his third album -- fourth if you count the disparate double-set Clocks/Pretender as two; fifth if you include the half-re-recorded compilation Introducing...The Best Of (whose several new tunes are very much in keeping with his work here) -- Montt Mardié, still only 25, had long since left behind the endearing adolescent idiosyncrasy of his debut for a distinctly sophisticated brand of classically inflected indie pop. That's not to suggest that he's abandoned his deep-seated sentimental streak (a sensibility which feels at once youthfully idealistic and somewhat improbably nostalgic and wistful) or his penchant for giddy exuberance. On the contrary, Skaizerkite is packed full of peppy, danceable, and dramatically heartfelt soul-pop, from trumpet-blaring opener "Welcome to Stalingrad" to the Motown-ish groover "Bang, Bang," the tense New Romantic fashionista strut "Click, Click," the string-laden stomper "I Love You Annie," and the majestically melancholy lead single "Dancing Shoes," a perfectly pitched ode to dancing through your tears. Mardié's familiar lyrical concerns, including (most chiefly) lovesickness and (as a glance at the track list suggests) European travel, are all here, and the album is practically dripping with schmaltzy romanticism, inflated both by his impassioned falsetto delivery and by lavish semi-orchestral arrangements that hearken in equal measure to the '40s, the '60s, the '80s, and the more recent likes of Camera Obscura. It's accomplished stuff, to be sure -- fans of Mardié's past work or the chamber pop genre in general are likely to be pleased -- but it can feel fairly overwrought and overwhelming when taken as a whole, so the handful of gentler, more stripped-down numbers (including the tender portrait-ballad "Elisabeth by the Piano" and geek-love farewell "Dungeons and Dragons") come as a welcome change of pace, even if the latter's combination of nerdy references and heart-on-sleeve emotionalism verge on parody. It may not have quite as many obvious stand-out songs as his past work, but Skaizerkite still stands as a consolidation of Mardié's many strengths, and the most self-assured and unified statement thus far from one of Sweden's finest young popsmiths.

Thunderheist: bio and Thunderheist review

An admirable attempt to shake up hipster dance music formulas that doesn't quite come off, Thunderheist's self-titled debut combines the decent if derivative talents of Isis -- a real-deal MC who mostly limits herself here to dumbed-down good-times party rhymes -- and Grahm Zilla, whose synth-laced productions take in Moroder-esque disco, old-school electro, stuttering crunk and B-more club, and brittle tech-funk. It's a promising merger, but the results are frustratingly uneven. While the blank-voiced Isis occasionally makes for an intriguing presence on the mic, as on the minimal, electro-flavored "Slow Roll" and "Cruise Low," too many of her ostensible hooks come off as tired and oddly dispassionate rehashes of the frank sex rap perfected by the likes Peaches and Spank Rock, not to mention Missy and Lil' Kim. That's particularly true of the duo's early singles ("Jerk It," "Bubblegum") and several of the other tracks packed towards the front of the album, where Zilla's beats are too plodding and one-note to provide much spark, either. Things get somewhat more colorful, or at least varied, in the album's latter half, with "The Party After"'s curiously murky booty-groove and "Space Cowboy"'s gleaming disco/R&B, which demonstrates -- along with the surprisingly soulful early standout "Nothing 2 Step 2" -- that Isis is far more engaging as a singer than as an MC. A few notably weak tracks notwithstanding, most of this material would be pretty enjoyable, or at least reasonably effective, in a club context -- taken as an album, though, it's an unfortunately tepid, shruggable listen with a small handful of highlights.

Black Devil Disco Club: In Dub, Eight Oh Eight and The Strange New World of Bernard Fevre reviews

"What could be more devilish than a decently atmospheric but insipidly monotonous and ultimately fairly tepid techno record? How about that same record again...twice! That's not exactly what Bernard Fevre is offering here on this companion release to his 2006 "comeback" album, 28 After, but it's distressingly not far off."

Bernard Fevre may have been largely inactive in the quarter-century between the little-heard initial release of his 1978 Black Devil opus Disco Club and its 2004 re-release (and attendant critical plaudits), but he's certainly been making up for lost time since then. In the ensuing years, he's toured, cut a handful of remixes, issued a follow-up LP of uncertain provenance (28 After), a remixed version of same (In Dub), and another similarly styled album (Eight Oh Eight) of evidently new material, which was presented as the third and final item in the Black Devil oeuvre. Honoring that notion (at least for the time being) while still keeping the ball rolling, Fevre has now turned to his pre-1978 output -- several albums of electronic library music (i.e., generic-use soundtrack cues) -- for source material. Neither a wholly new outing nor a straight reissue, this release is a curious amalgam: it contains about half of the tracks from 1975's The Strange World of Bernard Fevre -- two of which had surfaced more recently on the crate-trawling library music compilations Further Nuggets and Space Oddities -- all of them newly spruced up with richer, fuller production and extended a good minute or more past their original one- to two-minute snippet length. The remaining half of the tracks are previously unreleased, though it's hard to know for sure whether they're wholly new or just salvaged from '70s scraps. It's certainly an unorthodox approach to constructing an album, but it's a sensible one for this material, which benefits from the expanded focus. The results are enjoyably old-fangled but not overbearingly so, making for an engaging, immersive experience and arguably a more rewarding one than the latter-day Black Devil efforts. The sound palette is familiar -- nothing but deliciously musty analog synths -- but the emphasis is on mood-alteration rather than dancefloor incitement, spanning an emotional range from seedy to spacy to spooky and, of course, campy. Strangely delightful.

also reviewed for AMG:
Baby Teeth, Fanfarlo, Fischerspooner, Nite Jewel, Throw Me The Statue, John Vanderslice, Susumu Yokota

also previewed/reviewed for CP:
The Field, Issa, Junior Boys, Lady Sovereign, Micachu, NOMO, Paramore, Sian Alice Group, Telekinesis, Keith Urban

{reissued '09}

The Boy Least Likely To: The Best B-Sides Ever review

The Boy Least Likely To were one of the most delightful indie pop outfits of the 2000s, but hardly one of the most prolific, so it's a great boon to fans of their ramshackle twee to have the loose ends of their output to date compiled here -- especially so since most of it is first-rate stuff, entirely in keeping with the style and quality of their albums. As its title suggests, this disc (which was initially bundled with pre-ordered copies of their sophomore album, The Law of the Playground, and later made available at independent record shops) collects the B-sides of the singles from their debut, The Best Party Ever, with one perhaps wise omission: the highly improbable Armand Van Helden remix of "Monsters" (it's more listenable than you might expect, but it would certainly disrupt the flow here). There's also "Faith," a rendition of the George Michael chestnut that first appeared on a Q magazine freebie disc of '80s covers -- it might sound a bit funny on paper but it works marvelously, a sweet and relatively straight reworking (albeit swapping the original's Bo Diddley groove for a simple plodding two-step), at least until the recorders, glockenspiel, and toy percussion kick in for an instrumental bridge. The other cover here, of the Field Mice's somewhat dour acoustic ballad "Between Hello and Goodbye" (itself a B-side to begin with) is more reverent and less revelatory, though nice enough. The originals, however, are all prime Boy, deploying the full arsenal of banjos, xylos, synthesizers, and assorted kiddie instrumentation; spanning the spectrum from bouncy ("Oddballs") to tender ("Cuddle Me"); and boasting melodies that in some cases rank among their finest work -- particularly the jubilant "Rock Upon a Porch with You" and wistful "When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Boy Again," both of which seek to shortcut the gap between childhood and old age, though working from opposite ends of the equation. Simply put, anybody who has treasured the Boy Least Likely To's superb albums will find there's that much more to love on this brief but satisfying collection.

Pax Nicholas and the Nettey Family: bio and Na Teef Know De Road Of Teef review

A virtually unknown Afro-funk rarity, deservedly rescued from obscurity by the good people of Daptone Records, Na Teef Know de Road of Teef is the work of Fela Kuti sideman Nicholas Addo Nettey, featuring several of his Africa 70 bandmates and recorded at the same Lagos studio (run by Cream's Ginger Baker) where Kuti cut many of his prime '70s sides. It's no great surprise, then, that Kuti's output of this era is the obvious touchstone here, and Fela fans will find this material immediately familiar, right down to the format of the album: four lengthy, intricately rhythmic, jam-heavy grooves, alternating between gritty call-and-response vocals and extended instrumental passages. That said, these recordings feel particularly raw and stripped-down, sacrificing some of Fela's horn-heavy punch (even though there are certainly horns here, along with plenty of percussion) for a slinkier, burbling vibe, dominated throughout by a reedy organ that recalls the chicken-shack jazz-funk of Jimmy Smith and the Meters. Soulfully grooving, if sometimes more hypnotic than danceable, and handsomely presented with the eye-popping original sleeve art intact, Na Teef Know de Road of Teef makes a welcome addition both to the Daptone catalog and to the shelf of any discerning Afro-beat collector.

{release date confusion: '08 France, '09 UK, '10 US}
The Dø: A Mouthful review

The Dø -- the Parisian duo of Dan Levy and Olivia B. Merilahtin, whose moniker (pronounced like "dough") derives from both member's initials, but also refers to the first (and last) note of the solfege scale, as well as the Norwegian and Danish words for "die" -- stake out their unconventional indie folk-hip-pop territory with A Mouthful. It's all over the map, both musically and emotionally, and can be a lot to take in ("A Handful" might have been more appropriate), but they manage to strike a quirky yet affecting through-line that mediates between their frisky playfulness, fiery brashness, and tenderly sentimental sincerity, and helps to integrate the album's stylistic hodge-podge so that its eclecticism feels improbably natural rather than forced or gimmicky (or simply schizophrenic.) To be sure, the album's success rests largely on the duo's high-caliber musicianship -- in particular, multi-instrumentalist Levy's dextrous, sophisticated arrangements (which reflect, among other things, both his jazz influences and the pair's past collaborations on a handful of film soundtracks), and Merilahtin's distinctive, versatile singing voice -- which allows them to tackle an idiosyncratic assortment of genres with uncanny ease and coherence.

For the bulk of its running time -- roughly two-thirds of the tracks, give or take -- A Mouthful doesn't stray terribly far from relatively familiar, primarily guitar-centric folk/pop/rock fare, with a particular focus on breezy balladry (including the autumnal "Song for Lovers" and the sublime, elegantly bluesy "At Last") and a few tougher-edged roots-pop nuggets ("On My Shoulders," "The Bridge Is Broken.") Often, especially on the more aggressive cuts toward the album's end, this material recalls the artier side of '90s alternative and indie rock -- a comparison brought home by Merilahtin's passing vocal resemblance to prettily gritty singers like PJ Harvey, Liz Phair, and Nina Persson (specifically her work with A Camp). Even on these comparatively pedestrian offerings, the Dø offer far more compositional and instrumental nuance than your typical songwriterly outfit. Elsewhere, they hop through genres with gleeful abandon, calling to mind the infectious precocity of early Nellie McKay, the capriciousness of Beck, and perhaps even Björk's limitless ingenuity. Not that anything here feels remotely like a derivative genre exercise. "Stay (Just a Little Bit More)" is a cute bit of retro-pop whimsy polka-dotted with ukulele, whistling, strings, and carnivalesque organ; "Queen Dot Kong" is a shockingly credible but utterly demented stab at hip-hop with a swaggering horn section, all manner of cartoonish musical left turns, and its own expansively grooving instrumental-fusion coda. And the album's hidden gem is "Unissassi Laulelet," an all-too-brief curiosity that blends bewitchingly harmonized a cappella vocals (sung in Finnish) with polyrhythmic, quasi-ethnic "tribal" percussion to truly enchanting effect. Then there's the downright off-the-wall opener, "Playground Hustle," a sort of nursery rhyme-war chant by an army of disgruntled, gender-norm-disrupting youngsters, set to a spasmodically funky found-sound beat, which sounds like the Go! Team skirmishing with Le Tigre in a schoolyard scrap-heap with Matmos (circa The Civil War) providing the arsenal. Or something. Anyway, it doesn't really sound like anything else out there, or for that matter like anything else on this album -- which makes it a pretty appropriate calling card. The Dø's debut may be a mouthful, but it's deliciously sweet, tangy, and zestful, and definitely well worth biting into.

{#7 - songs list} The Sound of Arrows: Danger! and M.A.G.I.C. review

If the Sound of Arrows' debut single "Danger!" described the world as a dark and scary place (not that it necessarily sounded that way), this follow-up presents entirely the opposite outlook -- instead of the exhortations of a neurotic parent, it's an unbridled expression of lightness and childlike wonder: "The W.O.R.L.D. is full of M.A.G.I.C." That utterly exuberant chorus (with definite shades of Justice's "D.A.N.C.E.") is even chanted by a bunch of kids -- conveniently or confusingly, "W" is pronounced in Swedish like "V," which may make them seem like a bunch of kid vampires. Rarely has a song's message been so perfectly suited to its sound; a giddy, gushy confection of synths, strings, twinkles, and beats that launches this Swedish duo right into the forefront of prime 2000s regressionist-pop, alongside the Go! Team and Architecture in Helsinki. A trio of glitchified electronic reworkings -- Let's Get Invisible's jumpy, '80s-happy take (subtitled "Reading Is Fundamental"), a spastic synth pop slice-up by Spain's Cof Cof, and a muted breakbeat infusion from Alaska's Curtis Vodka -- do interesting but inessential things, diluting the song's primal innocence somewhat without entirely obscuring its joyful essence, nor making it necessarily any better or worse for the dancefloor, whereas Japan's Ice Cream Shout manage to re-envision the song entirely (this time with harp, glockenspiel, a plodding tuba, and a battery of marching-band percussion) for a fittingly tender and warmhearted new reading. The mellow, meandering "Smalltown Lullaby," a somewhat Christmas-y quasi-instrumental which comes complete with storybook narration, closes out this entirely delightful EP.

it's blizz!

playlist for a snowday. snowlist for a playday. it snew many
many inches yesterday, and west philly was blanketed (28.5?)
and transformed into a fairyplaygroundland, snow day play for
everybody, yay! i left home at 11 for yoga and ended up out and
about all day long, which was the best the best, but it would have
been lovely to be at home and listen to some snowy sounds too...
this is some of the music that was snowing in my head all day:

sally shapiro, disco romance, cuz, 'course, just look at it.
mmmm snowy eyelash stars. i did however listen to the
very excellent permanent vacation selected label works
volume 1, or at least disc one, which has two s.s. remixes.

pantha du prince, black noise. just reviewed this for amg.
not quite as magical as this bliss, perhaps, but still super
lovely and wintry, even tho the cover looks autumnal. hm.

lemon jelly, '64-'95. not sure why, maybe because i always
think the song "the slow train" sounds like "the snow day"

the roots, phrenology, but mostly "sacrifice," which i think
i heard in my head coming out of the guitars of a different
lemon jelly song. also, i haven't listened to it in a long time.

i was reading the resident advisor best-of-decade jawns,
which has me v. excited about electronica at the moment
(& will probably make me buy some soon) but especially
their top 50 mixes list, which i was pleasantly surprised
to see this included on, and even more surprised to see
the dixon body language mix at #5, so i listened to that
the other day. nice to remember how good dj mixes are...

i was walking down the snowy street and got "hoe-down"
horns in my head. bip-bop (bip-bop)! bip-bop (bip-bop)!

because when do i not want to listen to walking wounded?
especially "before today." oh my god. sweet god of music.
i bet if i were going to do a revised favorite-'90s-albums list
(don't tempt me) this would rank shockingly high. oh my.

cuz you want some gentle warm cuddly quiet guitar sounds
too. i was bored by this one at first but have been listening
again and it is pretty sweet after all, at least in the middle
ground. maybe see them play a secret set next week? in the
evening we didn't hear this but we did sing and then listen
to a bunch of simon and garfunkel, which is kinda similar.

four tet, just generally. i think "hands," maybe, in partic?
(but i forgot it got so beaty.) this is the new one, which at
first didn't quite grab me, but i had in my ears while i was
walking thru the snowstreets, just past dusk, two beers in
me, and those angel voices chiming chiming chiming that
"there's love in you" just made me melt melt melt.
oh kieran...

also, not to forget:

ye olde wintry mix... not that it was in my head per se,
but certainly would have been the day for it... also, this
mix which i haven't thought about in ages (and i guess
you can't actually listen to it there anymore, but now it's
reuploaded here, so check it out y'all: wintry jangles from
the '60s and the faux-'60s, got me psyched for a sock hop.
sometime? soontime? springtime?

AMG review round-up, volume V

at long last... this installment contains, essentially, the remainder of my output from april and may, before i went away for a month and abandoned you all (and also a couple few pieces i wrote since returning.) it's all either disco, or pop, or (more often) some combination of the two, and a good portion of it is Scandinavian...! interspersed throughout are various nuggets of genre theory, historiography, and general pontificating that you'd otherwise be getting from me here unfiltered. before moving on to some of my very fave recent releases (though not cloetta paris, who i'm just reviewing now, and who certainly belongs here), gonna kick it off with three different sortsa compilations from three of the best best scandi artists there are:

Lindstrøm: It's A Feedelity Affair review

"It's a Feedelity Affair, the debut solo album from Hans-Peter Lindstrøm, is the soundtrack to an unrealized mystical science fiction/action epic directed by Wong Kar-Wai. Handily, it also functions as a greatest-hits compilation for the celebrated Norwegian dance producer, collecting most of the sides from his single releases on his own Feedelity Recordings imprint between 2003 and 2006. Arranged roughly chronologically in the order of their release, these productions run the gamut from the brisk, cheerful robotic disco of aptly named early single "Fast and Delirious" to the slinky, vaguely sinister disco strut of "Limitations" to the meandering, tripped-out cosmic disco of "Further Into the Future" (a Prins Thomas co-production) to the balmy, downtempo equatorial disco of "Arp She Said." Yep, it's all disco in some way or another, including more or less any way you can imagine as long as it's instrumental and least vaguely electronic (actually not everything here is instrumental: the supremely dubbed-out "Music [In My Mind]," Lindstrøm's first Feedelity single, boasts some druggy, disorienting spoken/sung vocals courtesy of Christabelle, aka Isabelle Sandoo.) Otherwise, these tracks are united by a sense of adventurous musicality and a pervasive playfulness that is rarely so pronounced in electronic dance music -- dig the myriad extended noodley keyboard solos, the dizzying sequence of chord changes toward the end of "Fast and Delirious," or the endless restless mutations that compose the stately, epic-length "There's a Drink in My Bedroom and I Need a Hot Lady." The compilation's undeniable peak and centerpiece is also Lindstrøm's signature tune, the epochal "I Feel Space," which nods to Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder's Italo disco blueprint "I Feel Love" in its title and agitated, arpeggiated bassline, but looks toward the cosmos with its mesmerizing, gracefully yearning portamento synthesizer melody."

Robyn: Robyn's Best review

A shamelessly misleading and essentially worthless release that seems misguided even as a straight-up cash-grab attempt (because where was Robyn's audience in 2004?), this is not so much a "compilation" as a repackaging of Robyn's 1997 debut album -- minus three tracks. Those three -- curiously, the only three that the then-teenaged Swedish singer wrote herself (though she has at least a co-credit on every track) -- are not even the weakest cuts on Robyn Is Here, although like the bulk of the album they are relatively slight, generic pop-R&B. Indeed, the only conceivable advantage of this release is that it front-loads all three of the album's strongest tracks: the three singles. But what makes Robyn's Best actively insulting instead of just obnoxiously harmless is that at the time of its release -- although she had yet to embark on the full-scale artistic and commercial renaissance that would begin the following year with the Swedish release of Robyn -- she already had two more excellent, Europe-only full-lengths under her belt that this compilation pointedly ignores.

Bertine Zetlitz: Sweet Injections, Rollerskating, My Italian Greyhound, and In My Mind: 1997-2007 - Best of reviews

"One of Norway's most popular artists - predictably, unjustly, obscure in the rest of the world - Bertine Zetlitz gets a well-deserved career retrospective in this consistently excellent collection that compiles all of her singles to date. In My Mind, which arrived during a performing hiatus following the birth of her first child, is somewhat inexplicably titled after a good but unexceptional ballad from her debut, which is not included here - a more appropriate title might have been "Twisted Little Star," which apart from being possibly the most gorgeous song she's ever written is also an apt description of her perverse, cryptic lyrical tendencies.... Her 1998 debut Morbid Latenight Show (the only of her five albums to be released in the U.S., under the far less distinctive name Bertine) is well represented by four tracks of jazzy lounge-pop, which have aged reasonably well, while the more complex, decidedly darker albums Beautiful So Far and Sweet Injections yield three cuts apiece - several trip-hop-inflected gems and twisted dance-pop nuggets, and the lovely ballad "Fate" (presented in the fuller, more radio-friendly Disclab version.) If there's any quibble to had with the selection, it's that the two fantastic albums Zetlitz made with Fred Ball (a.k.a. Pleasure), 2004's Rollerskating and 2006's My Italian Greyhound, are shortchanged, with only two tracks apiece.... Zetlitz was on a tremendous roll in the years leading up to this compilation, and that's reflected in two new songs (perhaps modestly slotted at the end of the track list) which, in contradistinction to typical wisdom about these things, are as strong as anything else on the disc: the unsettling, melodically ethereal "Ashamed," which sets the fears and anxieties of motherhood to a slinky electro groove, and the artlessly bittersweet, resigned ballad "Bubble Bursts." Unlike fellow Scandinavians pop trailblazers Robyn and Annie, who have at least made some inroads towards international awareness, Bertine remains a virtual unknown outside of Europe, but her work is every bit as inventive, idiosyncratic, personable, accomplished and worth seeking out.

"Continuing a gradual progression from the cosmopolitan singer-songwriter pop of her debut (and only U.S. release to date) Morbid Latenight Show and the moody, trip-hop inflected Beautiful So Far towards the more fully electronic dance pop of her later work, Bertine Zetlitz's third album contains her brightest and catchiest pop songs to date, as well as with plenty of typically dark, cryptic material. Where Zetlitz is concerned, there's no great divide between darkness and pop - just take a look at those adorably sinister barbed candy-cane vines threatening to encircle her on the cover and you'll get the idea. Her characteristic juxtaposition of girlish sweetness with subtly psychological menace pervades much of the album, as if to confirm her softly cooed assertion that she's "the sickest girl you'll ever find." Even the album's glossiest moment, the spun-sugar synth-disco of "Girl Like You" (produced by Richard X), involves the disquieting mind games of a needy, manipulative, obsessive lover. Other standouts include the start-stop funk of opener "For Fun," which offers even more unsettling promises ("I will make your soft hands tremble/I will make your ego burst"), and the stunningly gorgeous "Twisted Little Star," which, title notwithstanding, is relatively genuine in its sweetness."

"Bertine Zetlitz's fantastic fifth album continues the inspired pairing with Pleasure's Fred Ball that produced the utterly masterful Rollerskating two years earlier, making it her first album not to involve a wholesale change-up in collaborators. Although her earlier albums, made with a series of distinguished pop and electronic producers, were frequently brilliant, and certainly established the strength and consistency of her musical identity, Zetlitz seems to have found an exceptionally sympathetic confederate in Ball - in any case, their partnership to date has produced some of the very finest and most uniquely realized pop music of its day, bar none. Essentially following a similar template to Rollerskating - casually sophisticated dance-pop that blends lush organic instrumentation with understated electronics, recalling '70s funk, AM pop-rock, and disco while still sounding effortlessly modern - Greyhound is notably warmer and breezier, scaling back some of the icy anxiety that had made her earlier work so simultaneously alluring and unsettling, and allowing more genuine sweetness to shine through than ever before. "Never Let You Go," a rare foray into major key tonality, wields its titular phrase, on balance, as more of a promise than a threat; "Get What You Deserve" is easy-going, Fleetwood Mac-styled country-pop with endearingly shaken-up lyrics about being caught off-guard by love, and even "Obsession," a twitchy electro groover whose title would seem to imply lyrics riddled with Zetlitz's trademark psychosexual melodrama, offers unexpectedly candid declarations of affection. It's not that Zetlitz has gone soft - there's still darkness and heartbreak here, though it's less likely to be shrouded in cryptic imagery - but she has relaxed and opened up somewhat, making this her most engagingly human work to date, even if it's far from sunny. Musically too, Greyhound is her most vibrant and forceful album, with only one ballad to speak of (the almost schmaltzy "This Time") and several of her finest dance tunes - the stellar singles "Midnight" (a sleek, sophisticated disco burner) and "500" (a quirky, minimal bump-and-grind featuring glorious harmonies and the memorable line "I have been sweet on you forever/that's why I have been stealing all your stuff"), but also the funky, slinky "Draggin' Me Down," among others. Stylish, sensitive, complex and compelling, My Italian Greyhound is, all told, a second straight masterstroke from Norway's greatest underappreciated pop auteur."

Sophie Ellis-Bextor: Shoot From the Hip and Trip The Light Fantastic reviews

"...of course, "respectable" doesn't necessarily count for much in pop terms, although Ellis-Bextor has mastered a knack for exuding sophistication without being off-putting and stuffy -- she's so posh (viz. her unmistakable accent) that the slickness of the production complements her personality rather than diluting it. Still, the songs have to be there, and the songs on Shoot From The Hip rarely rise above the merely pleasant..."

"A welcome return from one of the most sophisticated and distinctive voices in British dance-pop, Trip The Light Fantastic is easily Sophie Ellis-Bextor's most dynamic album to date. Markedly more consistent than its enjoyable-but-spotty predecessors, but also -- more importantly -- far more gutsy, varied and vital, its many strong points are the most exciting of her career. It had been four years since her previous album -- a considerable span in pop terms -- but Ellis-Bextor's music has always hearkened to smartly classicist, new wave-informed synth-disco, even in the days when the Pet Shop Boys were practically the sole remaining practitioners of the style, so it didn't require much alteration for her to sound right in step with eighties-resuscitation that was in full swing by 2007. Even so, she sounds dramatically reinvigorated here, with a notable infusion of rock guitars and often a forceful, even menacing, electro edge to the productions, both evident right out the gate in the strident, barnstorming first single "Catch You." The highlights follow fast and furious: the immaculate disco glide of "Me And My Imagination" (whose canny lyrics advise an overeager suitor to play harder to get), the robotic, strobing "New York City Lights," the Xenomania-esque, Emma Goldman-quoting stomp of "If I Can't Dance" (the actual Xenomania contribution, "If You Go," is nearly as good), and the lovely pop ballad "Today The Sun's On Us," Ellis-Bextor's entrant in the late-2000s "Time After Time"-homage sweepstakes. Amazingly, despite that practically flawless opening sequence, the latter half of the album is nearly as strong, boasting the bouncy, fun-loving pop of "Love Is Here" and the twitchy electro of "China Heart," while the brashly optimistic disco-schmaltz apotheosis "Only One" stands as the album's most triumphantly over-the-top, life-affirming moment. In a banner year for British, female-fronted electronic chart pop, which saw excellent albums by Sugababes, Girls Aloud, Roisin Murphy, Siobhan Donaghy, Tracey Thorn and Kylie Minogue among others, Ellis-Bextor more than held her own with a classy, romantic, and, above all, tremendously enjoyable record which stands as a shining example of the state of the art."

Amy Diamond: bio, This Is Me Now, Still Me, Still Now, and Music in Motion review

"Amy Diamond's third album in just over three years isn't dramatically different from her first two, but as its title suggests - in direct distinction to its place-holding predecessor - it does show definite signs of forward momentum. Still barely into her teens (fifteen to be precise), she's already beginning to drop the kiddie trappings that have marked her work to date - nobody's going to mistake her for an "adult" artist just yet, but as she starts to make that always-awkward transition (which she'll probably complete in about another year, the way pop works these days) she's already a force to be reckoned with. Growing pains are already evident in the album's musical lopsidedness, stretched as it is between sleekly modern dance/R&B ("Domino," "Speed of Light," the cheekily Cyndi-Lauper-ish "So 16") and dimpled schmaltz like "We Could Learn a Lot" (which is about aliens), "Sleepy Sunday" (unusually peppy for a song about laziness), and the over-orchestrated playground retort "Takes One To Know One." Both tendencies have always been present in Diamond's music, but they seem especially polarized and disparate here, though her always-potent pipes and general perkiness keep things from feeling too incongruous. The by-now obligatory lite-ska grooves turn up on the impressively slinky "Looks Like We Made It" - which slathers on the reverb and actual horns before changing gears midcourse with a double-time pep-pop chorus - as well as the enjoyably frothy lead single "Is It Love?," a slight slice of blippy electro-pop. Better is second single "Stay My Baby," a chunky, funky collaboration with Max Martin that sounds nostalgic for the sort of teen-pop he pioneered ten years earlier with Britney and the Backstreet Boys; better still is "Thank You," Diamond's entry in the 2008 Melodifestivalen contest (it won her 8th place), which cribs the electro schaffel glide most often associated with Goldfrapp. Added to the album upon its early 2008 re-release, "Thank You" is classic Diamond in the over-the-top giddiness and subtle snarkiness of its lyrical kiss-off ("Thank you for all that you've done for me/Now I know what real love is supposed to be" - too bad she doesn't sing "done to me" like it says on the lyric sheet) - and arguably her finest single to date. And pretty soon it will even be age-appropriate!

Juvelen: bio, 1 review

"From the opening seconds of "Don't Mess" - two crisp snare hits and a sudden blast of syncopated, celebratory synth-funk - it's clear that Juvelen is aiming for pop's big leagues. Crucially - because modern popstardom is nothing if not a self-fulfilling prophecy - Jonas Pettersson has the cocksure, charismatic swagger, and the songs (also important), to make you think he's already there. Look no further than the banal but still perhaps slyly boastful title of the suave Swede's first full-length. 1's stunning kick-off track "Don't Mess" has all the excitement of a vintage Michael Jackson floor-filler (think "Wanna Be Starting Something"), while "Hanna," among others, channels classic Prince in its terse funk-pop, histrionic falsetto and pure-heart/dirty-mind confessional lyrics. Sidestepping the inevitable anxiety of obvious influence, Juvelen's work here could be described simply as "traditionalist" electronic dance-pop, but he has enough personality to make it both impressively fresh and surprisingly heartfelt. His unfiltered sentimentality and infectious positivity shine through on additional party-time contenders like the easy-going disco charmer "Facts of Life" and especially the propulsive "Money Don't Talk," which contains the defining couplet "I never made any money/always preferred to make love." The album's several quieter moments - not quite ballads, they're more like slow jams - are somewhat less musically distinctive, though often touching (notably the lush "A Dream"), the striking exception being the understated, gorgeously lovelorn minimalism of "Watch Your Step," reprised from Juvelen's debut EP. Apart from a few slightly less memorable cuts (and what would a great pop album be without its filler?) the only real potential sticking point to enjoyment here is Pettersson's voice, which shifts ably enough between song, speak-singing, whisper and falsetto, but frequently strays into an oddly strained, throaty timbre that can come off as forced and insincere (a serious problem for such a soulful singer), and which some listeners may well find inescapably grating. For the most part though, it's easy enough to acclimate to this vocal quirk in view of the record's other merits, and well worth it; it's the lone notable flaw in a nearly impeccable pop debut."

Sally Shapiro: Bio, Disco Romance, Remix Romance Vol. 1 and Remix Romance Vol. 2 reviews

"The cover photo for the North American edition of Sally Shapiro's Disco Romance depicts the Swedish singer in winter, her cheeks rosy, her blond hair and eyebrows dusted with snowflakes, smiling to herself in spite of the chill. It's a fitting image for this undeniably wintry album, conjuring not just the glacial sweep and frosty twinkle of producer Johan Agebjörn's synthesizer fantasias, but also the faint but glowing presence in the heart of the blizzard: Shapiro's soft, fragile voice, which is so thin and devoid of inflection that it ought to be impenetrably icy, but is somehow instead as warm and enticing as a cozy fire in the dead of February. A closer examination of that cover image reveals that what look like snowflakes are in fact tiny stars, computer-generated pentagrams (though they almost look hand-drawn) that could be read as a subtle reminder that the intimacy and poignant sincerity of these songs came about, in a sense, only through layers of artifice. For one thing, Shapiro herself -- or more precisely, the anonymous singer behind that alias -- remains something of a cipher. Who can say for sure whether her oft-discussed shyness (she has yet to perform live or offer an in-person interview, and reportedly she will only record vocals when alone in the room) is completely genuine or a clever piece of image manipulation. If it's the latter, that might in a roundabout way to lend some authenticity to the project. As the playfully retro, knowingly garish design of the original European cover for the album makes clear, Disco Romance is a conscious effort to recall -- indeed, to reproduce -- the sound and style of 1980s Italo disco, a genre built on cheap synthesizers, recyclable dance grooves, and interchangeable faceless vocalists reciting inane or even nonsensical lyrics. Which isn't to suggest that it wasn't great music. And this album pulls out all the right tricks to faithfully evoke Italo at its best -- vocoded vocals, spacey synth washes, squelchy electronic squiggles, octave-jumping ostinato basslines -- while also incorporating just enough variety in tempo and rhythm to avoid the genre's propensity for monotonous excess. But it also transcends mere genre exercise -- for all its facelessness and artificiality, Disco Romance is unabashedly a product of love, and it contains unexpected beauty and a depth of humanity that should appeal not only to nostalgic Italo fans, although it is undeniably suffused with nostalgia in a broader sense. Crucially, the songwriting, though essentially simple, is vivid and often penetrating in its evocations of love (sought; found; lost; unrequited). The clearest standouts on that count are the couple of numbers borrowed from Swedish indie pop one-man band Nixon (notably "Anorak Christmas," an adorable tale of new love with an indelible synth hook to match), but Agebjörn's originals are nearly as potent, particularly the warmly reassurance of "I'll Be by Your Side" -- the would-be one-off single that started it all -- and the tortured ambivalence of "I Know," whose run-on sentence of a chorus veers from hope to despair with each protracted turn of phrase ("I know you're my love/Even though/Sometimes/I believe/I will wake up from this dream...").

"Following their North American reissue/revamp of Sally Shapiro's debut, Disco Romance, Toronto-based Paper Bag Records worked with the album's creators to put together not one but two sets of remixes, collecting several, though not all, previously existing mixes of the material and amassing a bounty of newly solicited versions. Given the recent emergence of 1980s electronic Italo disco as a newly hip commodity in the late 2000s, and Disco Romance's superlative and uncannily accurate re-creation of that style, it's not surprising that plenty of artists would jump at the chance to get involved and pay their respects, nor that a majority of them would turn in renditions that hew fairly close to the original templates. Most of the bigger names on Remix Romance, Vol. 1, including the Juan Maclean, Junior Boys, Lindstrøm, and the hotly tipped German producer Tensnake, offer remixes that carry their distinct fingerprints while upholding the sense of reverent allegiance to vintage electronic disco -- in other words, mixes that aren't too far removed from their own work...

On the less electronic side of things, Canadians Woodhands, Holy Fuck, and the Cansecos each add some amount of live instrumentation, edging Shapiro's electro closer to danceable indie pop territory; the best of these might be the Cansecos' percussion-heavy reading of "Hold Me So Tight," which is strikingly reminiscent of Annie's "Heartbeat." The only real wild card is Jon Brooks' (of Advisory Circle and King of Woolworths) stately, Air-ish reworking of "Skating in the Moonshine," which eschews percussion and all but the most atmospheric electronics in favor of understated electric piano, acoustic guitar, and mournful, oddly archaic-sounding flutes. It would probably flow more naturally if Shapiro had re-recorded her vocals with this stripped-down approach in mind, but it's still an effective reminder of how much strong songwriting contributed to the original album's success. Needless to say, Remix Romance lacks the coherence and conceptual singularity of Disco Romance, but for a remix album it delivers impressively, both in terms of track-for-track hit rate and overall listenability. Considering its welcome but not gratuitously overabundant variety, it's just possible that some listeners will find themselves preferring this version of Romance.

[Various Artists]: Milky Disco review

Like Ghostly International's groundbreaking Tangent 2002: Disco Nouveau compilation five years earlier, London-based Lo Recordings offers an excellent survey of recent trends in disco-based electronica on the intriguingly titled Milky Disco. Compiler and label head Jon Tye (who appears here as part of Black Mustang) records under the alias Milky Globe, but "milky" is also an apt, if ambiguous, description of the luscious music contained here, which might be more straightforwardly labeled "space disco." The underlying, unifying concept of electronic disco grooves overlaid with dubby, psychedelic, and otherwise "cosmic" elements may not be anything particularly new - the disc opens with a blithe, genteelly floating track by Daniel Wang (who, curiously enough, also kicked off the Disco Nouveau comp) which dates back to 2001 and sounds like it could have appeared two decades earlier - but by the late 2000s it was coalescing in a burgeoning international movement. Certainly, there is a sense that many of these artists are working with an awareness of each other (a number of the included cuts are collaborations or remixes), as well as a shared appreciation for the (suddenly, it seems) venerable tradition of electronic disco, and in particular the recently celebrated Italo-disco of the late '70s and early '80s which, though not an exact template for the tracks contained here, is nonetheless a palpable influence. The compilation does contain at least one direct link to the music of that era in the form of a dense, dubby remix of up-and-comers In Flagranti by mythic French producer Bernard Fevre, a.k.a. Black Devil Disco Club. Otherwise, the track list is deceptively unassuming.

Milky Disco features an impressive array of artists from various sectors of electronica working under unfamiliar, in some cases one-off aliases. Luke Vibert appears as Kerrier District, Metro Area's Morgan Geist gets bongo-happy under the cheeky moniker Jersey Devil Social Club, and Jon Brooks (King of Woolworths, Advisory Circle) offers some spirited orchestral thumping disguised as Georges Vert. There's also a disparate trio of cuts licensed from London's DC Records (including a moody, minimal piece by Quiet Village, a duo including Matt Edwards, a.k.a Radio Slave), and three selections from noted Swedish acts: Johan Agebjörn, best known as the producer for Sally Shapiro -- she sings on "Spacer Woman from Mars" -- contributes the most explicitly space-themed inclusion, though it's also notably faster and poppier than anything else here, while Studio and Hans Peter Lindstrøm (the scene's putative figurehead, if it has one), along with San Francisco's Sorcerer (represented by his debut 12" "Surfing at Midnight"), hold down the disc's blissfully airy and relaxed final section, the former with the epic "Life's a Beach," a defining release of the 2007 Balearic trend; the latter, under the odd pseudonym Six Cups of Rebel, with the short, uncharacteristically near-ambient swooner "Dubbe Ditten." Tracing a loose trajectory from the just-barely-earthbound confines of the dancefloor to expansively cosmic, nearly beatless reverie (from the disco towards the milky end of the spectrum), Milky Disco covers considerable stylistic range within its broadly delimited purview while offering a handful of rare or exclusive cuts and maintaining an impressively high level of quality, with plenty to interest both attuned collectors and curious new listeners.

[Various Artists]: After Dark review

A limited-edition CD-R that functioned as both an introductory label sampler and a roundup of the first several 12" releases on the fledgling Italians Do It Better imprint, After Dark presents a sleekly sinister style of synthetic dance music that recalls the decadent overtones of early-2000s electroclash but finds a more direct stylistic referent in vintage electronic disco from around 25 years prior. The name of the New Jersey-based label (run by Mike Simonetti of Troubleman Unlimited) suggests a link with Italo disco, a genre that was very much coming into vogue when these sides were released in 2007, but despite a preponderance of relentless robotic synthesizers, the music here is a far cry from the giddy sentimentality and synth pop melodicism often associated with that style (and as heard, for instance, in the classicist Italo revivalism of Sally Shapiro, among others). The tracks collected here turn instead on haunted minor-key vamps, torpid tempos, cheap-sounding synths, and stripped-down, almost rudimentary percussion, creating a consistent, rather dour atmosphere that feels anachronistically musty but not quite retro. This sharply defined aesthetic must be credited in large part to producer Johnny Jewel, who has a hand in the music of three of the five artists represented here. He's a member of both Glass Candy and Chromatics (each of which had existed as post-punk-styled rock bands before effecting this transformation into what could be tagged post-disco), and he also produces here for Farah, a Plano, TX-based vocalist/lyricist who doesn't sing so much as intone, in both English and Farsi, with a devastating dispassion. Her "Law of Life," a dead-eyed, post-apocalyptic sermon declaimed over Jewel's spare, unrelenting jittery thud, is the compilation's most bleakly nihilistic moment, though it has some competition from Chromatics' standout "In the City," a dreamier but no less creepy track whose soporifically dripping synths, muted guitar glimmers, and fluid string lines induce a sweet-but-deadly hypnosis beneath singer Ruth Radelet's bleary croons of "shining violence." Glass Candy's kickoff, "Rolling Down the Hills," is a crackly, horn-fueled strut that could pass for straight-up old-school disco, at least if it were sped up a few notches, while the contributions by Professor Genius and Mirage skew closest to classic Italo -- the former offering up a pair of Moroder-esque synthesizer workouts; the latter gilding their midtempo keyboard fantasias with menacingly alien vocoders. Mirage also turn in an excellent, understated, robotified rework of Indeep's classic "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life," which, alongside a generous selection of covers (three of them by Glass Candy, including a beguiling take on Kraftwerk's "Computer Love"), helps to establish a strong sense of reverence for and continuity with dance music's disco and not-quite-disco past. Boasting a strong sense of cohesion but a decent amount of variety, and plenty of highlights, After Dark amply demonstrates that electronic disco is alive and flourishing in the late 2000s, and that Italians -- at least these wanna-be Italians -- do it very well.

Chromatics: Night Drive review

"Nearly unrecognizable as the work of the one-time punk rock outfit, Night Drive is effectively Chromatics third debut album in a row, following a wholesale transformation in sound and style and yet another lineup change: Adam Miller is again the sole constant member; vocalist Ruth Radelet is a new addition even since the 2006 teaser Nite, replacing Lena Okazaki, while Glass Candy's Johnny Jewel, who produced that single, is now a full-fledged member. Actually, this seems to be Jewel's record more than anyone's - in the silver-screen conceit of the liner notes he's listed as director to Miller's screenwriter, though he also has a writing credit on all the record's originals, only four of which (the vocal songs) Miller co-wrote - indeed, Jewel is emerging as the primary musical force behind much of the Italians Do It Better label. Among that camp of synthesizer-disco revivalists, Chromatics stand out as the most lush and cinematic, drawing on the more languorous, atmospheric aspects of 1980s electronica to fashion a hazy imaginary soundtrack to a stylish, decadent noir film (as the album's visual presentation suggests) or just a lonely late night drive (as per the opening "Telephone Call.") (One is reminded that Giorgio Moroder is almost as celebrated for his film work as his dancefloor material.) Sounding somehow stark and sensuous at the same time, the album evokes widescreen opulence with a sonic palette that extends beyond the bedrock of synths, guitars and drum machines to include touches of organ, strings, flutes and so on, but it's always used sparingly, rarely outstepping the group's meticulously minimal, carefully-controlled arrangements.... Jewel's compositions and production are certainly effective, and the arrangements, whether his or the band's, are undeniably tasteful, but Night Drive could have been a much more offputting, lonelier affair - not that that would necessarily be a bad thing - if it weren't for Radelet, whom liners rightly list as the album's star. She's not exactly overtly emotive, but there's enough warmth in her breathy voice to create a sense of palpable, relatable humanity, just enough to distinguish her from the glassy-eyed alienation of so many dark post-disco vocalists (Glass Candy's Ida No, for one.) That's crucial, especially, on the stirring Kate Bush cover "Running Up That Hill" - chalk it up to the unassailable songwriting, if you like, but it just might be the finest moment on a consistently engrossing record that, if it can't quite claim the title, is as distinctive and striking as a great debut."

Glass Candy: B/E/A/T/B/O/X review

"A freewheeling electronic pop album that's goofy and glamorous in roughly equal measure, B/E/A/T/B/O/X is Glass Candy's first full-length as a duo, following an electro-disco makeover that has effectively cut the rock out of the group's dancepunk/no-wave equation, and their first album for the disco-revivalist label Italians Do It Better. Markedly lighter and more colorful than the label's prevailing aesthetic as presented on the widely-championed After Dark compilation, it plays to some extent like the daylit flipside of Chromatics' dark, atmospheric Night Drive, which was released around the same time and likewise produced by shared member (and Italians driving force) Johnny Jewel. Though it still projects a strong sense of decadence and a distinct air of the unattainable, B/E/A/T/B/O/X is earthier and more inviting than most of the label's output to date - significantly, this is unquestionably music for dancing, as opposed to dance music that's probably a bit too cool to actually dance to. Kicking off with an aerobics instructor's spoken invocation to the DJ and "the heavenly beat," just about every track here is aimed squarely at the dancefloor (save for the brooding, beatless instrumental "Last Nite I Met a Costume," which would have sounded more at home on Night Drive.) The duo's so-retro-it's-modern sound points, no surprises here, straight back to the early '80s, recalling not so much the robotic Italo disco with which the label is often linked (though there are traces of it, particularly on the cosmic strut "Life After Sundown") as plain-old regular disco, the kind that at some point evolved out of funk (check out those full-blooded horn parts, synthesized though they may be, on "Candy Castle" and the punchy "Rolling Down The Hills"), and went on to inspire the new wave art-punk likes of Blondie and Tom Tom Club (both palpable influences here: Debbie Harry, and perhaps "Rapture" in particular, are unmistakable in Ida No's slightly kooky, slightly chilly delivery.) But that's not to suggest that this is straightforward stylistic revivalism - for one thing, although 4/4 thumps carry them through a sizable chunk of the album, the duo also venture freely beyond the well-established neo-disco template, on the weird, stuttering "Etheric Device," scintillating, silky-smooth Kraftwerk cover "Computer Love" (a clear highlight) and the sparse, throbbing, nearly industrial closer "Digital Versicolor." There's nothing here that feels like a mere genre exercise, and for all its readily evident signifiers there's ultimately not much to which it can sustain particularly close comparisons. B/E/A/T/B/O/X may be unabashedly a triumph of style over substance, but Glass Candy have at least managed to concoct a familiar-seeming, versatile, and enjoyable style, or set of styles, that's more or less all their own."

Cut Copy: In Ghost Colors review

In Ghost Colours announces itself, calmly but majestically, with a wash of hazy voices and fluttering keyboards giving way to crystal-clear acoustic strums, languid indie pop vocals, a sturdy dance-rock groove, pulsating electro-disco synths, swirling Caribou-style psychedelics, and an ethereal, vocoded chorus melody. Squeezing all of that into one song -- the effervescent "Feel the Love" -- is an ambitious move: in most hands it would come out sounding like a bewildering mess, or at least a hammy, hyperactive pastiche, but Cut Copy manage to keep it light, breezy, and utterly ebullient. Even more impressive is that they're able to replicate the trick repeatedly across this remarkably assured sophomore album. Colours boasts at least a half-dozen potential summer anthems for dancefloors and headphones alike, seamlessly strung together with subdued interstitial mood pieces that help make it more of a nuanced work than a straightforward collection of relentlessly upbeat dance jams. Undeniably, though, the dance jams are at the throbbing heart of the album, from the unstoppably glittery opening trio (leading up to the anthemic slow-burn disco of single "Lights and Music") to the rough-edged rock drive of "So Haunted" to the pure synth pop bliss of "Far Away." Indeed, this is in many ways a perfect summation of the dynamic, multifaceted, hipster-associated independent dance music of the 2000s, a motley interweaving of pop, rock, and electronic dance elements into a kaleidoscopic array of interconnected styles, some strands of which have been summarily, imprecisely tagged ("disco-punk," "electro-house," "new rave,") but which as a whole remain resolutely, gloriously nebulous and undefined. (Though nevertheless undeniably prevalent, and never more so than in 2008, following triumphant runs by LCD Soundsystem, Justice, and Simian Mobile Disco; the months just preceding In Ghost Colours' release saw eminently enjoyable new albums by Hot Chip, Hercules and Love Affair, Neon Neon, and Does It Offend You, Yeah?, to name a few.)

Cut Copy's music bears all the prominent hallmarks of its era: giddily omnivorous stylistic appropriation, a sensuous, sybaritic (though not, in their case, seedy) demeanor, and the distinct evocation of bygone decades, most palpably the ubiquitous post-punk/post-disco '80s, without succumbing to the pitfalls of overzealous eclecticism, empty hedonism, sugary glut, and blatant derivativeness. Or rather, they do show traces of all of these things, but they play each one off as a strength, always in moderation, and never to the detriment of the music. The eclecticism is there but it's fluid and cohesive rather than distractingly showy; their influence-dogging plays like affectionate homage rather than pointless mimicry; there's an abundance of gleaming, even gaudy surfaces, but they're just too rapturously enticing to entertain qualms about superficiality. It surely helps that they have one of the primary architects of this sprawling scene, the DFA's Tim Goldsworthy, on board as a producer and mixer. More importantly though, beneath its perfectly formed surfaces this is truly an album of songs -- a surprisingly rare thing in this milieu -- with simple but resonant melodies, carried by Dan Whitford's appealingly casual delivery, which help alleviate a slight tendency toward sonic sameness. This is evident not only on the gentler guitar-based numbers, like the loping "Unforgettable Season" and the oddly country-inflected "Strangers in the Wind," which temporarily scale back the dancefloor euphorics, but the out-and-out burners as well, combining with the peppy basslines and nagging chorus hooks to create something all the more transcendent. To be sure, In Ghost Colours is a triumph of craftsmanship rather than vision -- a synthesis and refinement of existing sounds rather than anything dramatically new and original -- but it is an unalloyed triumph nonetheless, and one of the finest albums of its kind.

Rubies: bio, Explode From The Center review

"A light and breezy trifle of a debut album, Explode from the Center belies its swollen, attention-grabbing guest list -- including members of Kings of Convenience, the Concretes, and (most notably) Feist, among a couple dozen others -- with a consistently relaxed, unassuming vibe. Rubies enlist most of those folks to sing and/or play guitar, and there is certainly plenty of pretty singing and guitar playing on this record, though few listeners will be bothered to figure out exactly who's doing what. Core members Simone Rubi and Terri Loewenthal are fine singers themselves, but their mellifluous voices do work especially well blended together and with others, as amply demonstrated in their days with Call & Response, a sort of latter-day Mamas & the Papas for the indie pop set. Explode makes a lot of sense, as they mine the same vein of sophisticated, folky pop with which does a good job of carrying forward that band's late-'60s, late summer, California aesthetic (never mind that most of the album was recorded in Scandinavia), adding occasional electronic flourishes, although the gentler, folkier numbers tend to come off better than the would-be dance jams. "I Feel Electric," the Feist-featuring lead single, is actually one of the least successful moments on the album, its insistently bouncy sore-thumb synth/disco sounding stilted and overdetermined by comparison to the surrounding material, although mediocre lyrics and a negligible chorus hook don't help matters, either. The less blatantly dance-oriented "Stand in a Line," with a twitchy low synth part and scratchy guitar work courtesy of ex-bandmate Dan "Sorceror" Judd, fares a bit better, as does the chunky pop of "Diamonds on Fire," but the most satisfying grooves here are those mellow enough to feel like organic frameworks over which the songs are lazily, casually draped.... Rubies' friendship with Leslie Feist makes a lot of sense, as they mine the same vein of sophisticated, folky pop with which Feist struck gold on -- in particular -- The Reminder (whose cover, incidentally, was designed by Rubi) -- and Feist fans will find a lot to enjoy here, although Rubies' actual songs make less of an impression than their overall sound. There's nothing especially wrong with that -- it just means this is an album better suited for soundtracking laid-back summer afternoons than for focused, introspective close listening."

Bloodshy and Avant: bio

(well, you can read it if you like, though it's mostly just a list of tracks and collaborators, and the text is messed up at the end. i mostly just wanted to post this picture of b+a with britney spears...[source: wikipedia])