Review Round-up: August 2013

Sarah Neufeld
Hero Brother

Instrumental solo violin albums aren't typically a huge sell in the indie music marketplace, although being a full-time member of Arcade Fire and Bell Orchestre ought to give Sarah Neufeld a considerable leg up.  However they find their audience though, the eleven gorgeous pieces making up Hero Brother richly deserve it.  These are nuanced, intrepid explorations of melody, texture and emotion that make just as much sense approached as "pop" as they do when apprehended as "modern classical" or avant-garde music; drawing equally on post-rock, Reichian minimalism and the violin's dual lineage as a vessel for both art music and folk tunes (check the Appalachian-style fiddle threnody winding its way through "Right Thought.")  Neufeld has toured with saxophonist Colin Stetson, which is fitting on numerous levels (the two musicians share a city (Montreal), label (Constellation), and an enviable sideperson-to-the-indie-stars status) but especially so in musical terms.  Her playing, while technically impressive especially in its masterfully controlled expressiveness, may not have quite Stetson's jaw-dropping virtuosity, but her pieces have a highly comparable mesmeric, minimalist intensity and a similarly broad emotional range in spite of their deliberately restrained compositional means.

Moderat
II

Apparat and Modeselektor were never an intuitive match.  The Teutonic troika's self-portmanteau'd 2009 debut (following a 2003 EP) sounded like a tug-of-war between the former's inward-looking synthgaze and the latter duo's bass desires and twitchy, punch-drunk monkey business, with intriguingly wide-ranging if somewhat inconclusive results.  Their charming third-time regrouping manages a newly tenable truce, staking out a middle ground between dancefloors and dreamscapes akin to the one Jon Hopkins established on his billowy Immunity, wherein club-friendly thumpers are imbued with an uncommon warmth and emotionalism.  There are still a lot of styles and sounds surveyed here, with the prevailing aesthetic core – dub-leaning techno, digital shoegaze blanketry and the reggae-flecked residue of post-Burial dubstep – variably augmented by glitch, broken-beat, wobble-skank, whispery ambience and bouts of improbably po-faced pop-soul.  (About that... Apparat (a.k.a. Sascha Ring) has a surprisingly buttery croon for an avant-electro auteur, and while singlehandedly replacing the first album's circus of guest vocalists is mostly a smart move, his full-on, filter-free turns on "Bad Kingdom" and "Damage Done" could be a bit jarring for some sensibilities.)  If there's a complaint to be leveled it's that the odd threesome might have smoothed out their differences a little too much.  But it works: refreshingly, II never feels confused about where it wants to be, nor in a hurry to get someplace else.

originally published in Magnet Magazine

Jagwar Ma
Howlin'
[Rock/Pop/Dance]

Madchester – the ravey turn-of-the-'90s UK scene that prefigured big beat's fusion of acid house with rock'n'roll – doesn't get much love (or thought) nowadays.  But Aussie duo Jagwar Ma carry a bright, burning torch for the era on their tremendously fun, surprisingly fresh-sounding debut, finding equal space for chunky breakbeat loops and drowsy, sweetly harmonized choruses; hook-infested garage-pop and Simian Mobile Disco-style bleep workouts.  Sharing some DNA with their countrymen Tame Impala, and more with Primal Scream's recent output – though looser and dancier than either – Howlin'  (Mom+Pop) is an electrified flower-power feel-good freak-out par excellence.  Bring on the Andrew Weatherall remixes!

Robbie Fulks
Gone Away Backwards
[Country]

Robbie Fulks is a staunchly "alternative" country artist primarily in that his back-catalog is fairly rife with irreverence – sneering swipes at the Nashville establishment as well as goofball comedic posturing.  Musically, he's long been a traditionalist, even downright retro.  Gone Away Backwards (Bloodshot), the Chicagoan's first proper album in eight years, runs the gamut from bluegrass to Bakersfield, boasting crackerjack harmonies and some seriously mean pickin'.  And Fulks' songs follow suit with uncharacteristic earnestness, tackling archetypal country themes (nostalgia for bygone, simpler times; doomed romance; mortality; alcohol) with wit, poignancy and style, but – even at their most thickly-twanged and sentimental – nary a wink.  

Horse's Ha
Waterdrawn
[Folk]

The Horse's Ha – the intermittent folk concern of Chicago-based multi-taskers Janet Bean (Freakwater) and James Elkington (The Zincs, Brokeback) – pack their second full-length with plenty enough curious tales and anthropomorphic diversions to make good on their funny-sounding moniker.  But Waterdrawn (Fluff & Gravy), which flits between British and American idioms; jovial and haunting overtones, is best when the duo's spry whimsy is countered by a stark, fragile beauty, particularly when (as often) Elkington's dry, Bonnie Billy-ish baritone balances Bean's angelic soprano in sublime, delicate duet.

Dawn of Midi
Dysnomia
[Experimental]

Jazzers by background and, at least ostensibly, instrumentation – upright bass, piano, drums; all treated as fundamentally percussive objects – Brooklyn trio Dawn of Midi are really more like avant-garde minimalists with some seriously mind-bending chops, while their music, with its metronomic lock-grooves and precise, incremental builds, feels like an acoustic transposition of abstract, sparsely mechanistic techno.  Throughout the continuous nine-part suite that comprises Dysnomia (Thirsty Ear), the tension ratchets up from crisp Reichian calm to ominous, palpable agitation, while the mesmeric onomatopoeia of drips, clicks, blats and blips just churns ever steadily ahead.

Marek Hemman
Bittersweet
[House/Techno]

German producer Marek Hemman performs a decidedly unshowy but still, somehow, magnificent balancing act on his excellent second full-length, Bittersweet (Freude Am Tanzen); ten tracks of matter-of-fact tech-house that's studiously detailed but never dry, cheerful but not aggressively upbeat, pleasantly melodic but never at the expense of a trusty underlying thump and wiggly, quantized syncopations.  He has a light touch with coloration, deftly weaving in a dollop of churchy organ, a stray vocal sample or two, some strums for the comedown.  More than any other straight-ahead electronic record I've heard this year, this one is just a pure, consistent, quiet joy.

AlunaGeorge
Body Music
[Pop/R&B]

Thin-but-potent-voiced chanteuse Aluna Francis and two-step/Timbaland-loving producer George Reid – collectively known as (wait for it...) AlunaGeorge – combine '90s-style diva-soul with crisp, sophisticated techno-pop rather more artfully than they combine their names.  Body Music (Vagrant), making good on several monstrously hooky early singles, slots easily in between several other 2013 breakouts –Chvrches' electro-pop perfectionism; Autre Ne Veut's arty R&B throwbacks; the neon neo-garage of their London-based pals Disclosure – although the particular combination they nail here most readily recalls a spunkier, femme-fronted update of Junior Boys circa 2004.

v/a (Greco-Roman)
We Make Colourful Music Because We Dance In The Dark
[Dance/Electronic]

The title of wrestling-obsessed London/Berlin party crew/de facto record label Greco-Roman's first compilation offers a (longish) shorthand for sort of good-natured house and sparkly tech-pop they typically favor.  We Make Colourful Music Because We Dance In The Dark fills two bulging discs (hits; remixes) with spine-loosening goodies, encompassing Disclosure's divafied neo-garage, Hackman's cheeky, twitchy R&B re-tweaks and Grovesnor's joyriding yacht-soul.  Fittingly, many highlights come from mainstay/Hot Chipper Joe Goddard, including 2011's still-epic "Gabriel," Four Tet's playfully sweeping overhaul of "Apple Bobbing" and several recent collaborative thumpers, plus stray slow-jam "Home Time."

Honey Ltd.
The Complete LHI Recordings
[Pop/Reissue]

Following their great Lee Hazlewood campaign, the reissue champions at Light in the Attic records turn their attention to the Hazlewood-endorsed one-album wonder Honey Ltd.: four brassy-voiced, Detroit-bred knockouts who somehow managed to condense all that's great about the era's music – Motown-derived soul-funk intensity; a fiery counter-culture spirit; rapturously ornate baroque-pop arrangements; surprisingly spacey, far-out production, and intricate girl-group harmonies as rich and luscious as their namesake (sort of like the Mamas sans Papas) – into the dozen high-quality originals and imaginatively rendered contemporary standards (Laura Nyro's "Eli's Coming"; a brassy, funked-up "Louie Louie") on their criminally forgotten 1968 opus, unearthed with several attendant singles on The Complete LHI Recordings.

Belle & Sebastian
The Third Eye Center
[Pop/Indie]

While Belle & Sebastian's early singles and EPs were aesthetically discrete entities, every bit as canonical as the albums themselves, those from the period collated on The Third Eye Centre (Matador) – roughly  2003-2011 – felt, at the time, decidedly more ancillary.  But that doesn't make these nineteen B-sides (including three remixes) any less delightful.  This was, remember, the era when the band really loosened up and started having fun, and the spirit running through these bold, colorful takes on '60s pop, blue-eyed soul, funk, ska, bossa-nova, euro-disco, country, etc. is too infectious to remain solely the province of die-hards.

Octopus Project
Fever Forms
[Indie Rock/Electronic]

Bleepy, happy Austinites The Octopus Project – who'll bring their theremins, modular synths and other assorted carnival machinery to Johnny Brenda's this Tuesday – make music that's sort of electronic, sort of math-rock – if all their word problems involved counting sugary candies and cartoon characters – and all-the-way new-wavey weirdo pop, filled with the playfully manic spirit of Enon and Deerhoof.  Fever Forms (Peek-a-Boo), their album number five, stretches their typically instrumental approach to include several winsome, Stereolabby vocal numbers, making the proceedings all the more goofily infectious.

Run The Jewels (El-P + Killer Mike)
[Rap]
concert preview

Coming from a pair of decade-deep hip-hop vets who notched two of last year's fiercest full-lengths – El-P's Cancer4Cure and Killer Mike's El-produced R.A.P. Music – the thirty-minute internet freebie Run The Jewels (Fool's Gold) could've been a breezy, low-stakes victory lap.  Instead it's a slam-dunk: ten all-killer cuts of beats, rhymes and righteous fury that actually betters those twin 2012 career highs.  It's a master class in goonishly gory trash talk and no-sell-out truth-saying; a touching display of buddy-buddy tag-team synergy; a chest-rattling (anti-)Watch the Throne for the 99%.  The phrase "run the jewels," reiterated mantra-like throughout the record, is an LL Cool J reference betokening the duo's old-school-head bona-fides – but it could also be taken as a sly side-glance at that gilded 2011 Jay/Kanye luxury pageant.  Yeah, Yeezus and Magna Carta... have their moments, for sure, but they look pretty lumbering next to these guys.

Justin Timberlake/Jay-Z
[Pop/Hip-Hop]
concert preview

All hail, your (self-appointed) Summer Legends draw near.  Frankly, Jay Z (whose recent dehyphenization will hopefully last no longer than his putative "retirement") probably overstates his season-specific iconicity, "Dear Summer" notwithstanding: in fact, ten of his dozen albums have dropped in autumn.  If anything, he's a legend for all seasons.  He's not exactly ruling this one though; at least not on the merits of the fluent, familiar, pace-holding Magna Carta...Holy Grail (Def Jam), a perfectly proficient effort – though thematically conflicted and curiously free of obvious single fodder – that pointedly fails to validate its hubristic billing.  [(Incidentally, if he wants to convince us his "interest in art" transcends crass consumptionism and celebrity worship, he might want to learn the names of some artists besides Warhol, Basquiat and "Picasso Baby" – the Italian vacay itinerary he runs down on typically charming "Fuckwithmeyouknowigotit" notably omits mention of any museum visits.)]  As for Mr. Timberlake, who gave us the indubitably beach-ready likes of "Señorita" and "Summer Love," then promptly left us cold for six summers running: the lavish eight-minute suites of his still-simmering 20/20 Experience (RCA) campaign are distinctly improved by the present swelter, though there's nothing to rival, say, "Blurred Lines" (in the optometry pop sweepstakes?)  Does the fact that he's already courting controversy with pre-release singles from Vol. 2 mean that "Let The Groove Get In" – summer-jam-wise, the under-aired, Jacko-jocking highlight of Vol. 1 – won't get its time to properly shine in the sun?  But hey little lady: one summer don't make a legend, and there's no denying these two have the hits to last us well past winter.

Shuggie Otis
[Soul/Funk]
concert preview

Shuggie Otis' third and (to date) final album, the psychedelic-soul reverie Inspiration Information, was overlooked in 1974 – either despite or because of a singularity of vision that put it in a class with Sly and Stevie's contemporaneous efforts; nodding equally to Love and electric-era Miles while presaging Prince's similarly idiosyncratic tinkerings.  Decades of semi-reclusive obscurity later, a groundswell of crate-digger interest and a ballyhooed 2001 Luaka Bop reissue made it a widely-regarded if retroactive classic (even though Otis remains best known – and certainly best-paid – for the Brothers Johnson's cover of his peerless "Strawberry Letter 23." )  It's one of pop's great underdog-triumphant stories, and this year's added some surprising new chapters: a second high-profile reissue (this time on Epic/Legacy) came bundled with Wings of Love, a fascinating assemblage of cuts recorded between 1975 and 1990 (plus one live, potent acoustic slide-blues tune from 2000) veering from scorching funk-rock to treacly synth-prog to epic, flowery power ballads, plus a few Information-caliber groovers.  Better still, Otis is touring, for the first time in forty years (!) – by all accounts knocking 'em dead with his storied instrumental prowess (and sartorial finery), and generally making up for lost time.

Bad Rabbits
[Funk/R&B]
concert preview

You don't get too much call for plush, freaky booty-funk these days, which is why Bad Rabbits might initially come off as hopelessly out of step, or else like an overgrown, frat-friendly bar band.  But the Boston-based funk squad, who hearken equally to the heyday of Zapp, Parliament, Cameo et. al. and the libidinous strut of New Jack Swing, have the confidence and the chops to do their own thing, and do it damn right.  Their recently self-released party-starter American Love is a more than serviceable showcase for frontman Dua Boakye's gritty falsetto and good-natured sleaze, and the band's thick, nasty grooves, with nary a synth squiggle, bass slap, or chuckle-worthy come-on out of place.  But you know it's just a teaser for the kind of ruckus they can kick up in person.

Diarrhea Planet
[Rock/Punk]
concert preview

A lot of the fun of this Nashville sextet's sophomore album, I'm Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams (Infinity Cat), comes from never knowing precisely which strain, or era, of hard rock the band is going to draw from next: classic '70s punk or power-pop, '80s hair metal or underground noise-rock; '90s grunge and alt-rock or turn-of-the-'00s pop-punk and emo...  Not too many bands can pull off sounding like Thin Lizzy or Van Halen one minute, Sonic Youth or Dinosaur Jr. the next and Blink-182 or Green Day a third (this particularly, thanks to Hodan Dickie's joyously snotty vocal style) – in this case it involves a deceptive level of craft and songwriting versatility, plus a heaping ton of raw, fun-loving attitude, plus a line-up featuring no fewer than four guitarists.  "Skeleton Head" even proves they can get kinda pretty when the occasion calls for it.  Meanwhile, they've managed to make a name for themselves with their raucous, no-holds-barred live shows that comes astonishingly close to eclipsing the name they've made for themselves by, well, naming themselves "Diarrhea Planet."

Speedy Ortiz
[Indie Rock]
concert preview

The dream of the alternative slacker '90s is alive and smirking in Western MA, where Speedy Ortiz' Sadie Dupuis (I'm hoping that rhymes) wrangles her wry poet's diction and girly-tough, conversational coo – the kind that can't help but recall Liz Phair, Tracy Bonham, and/or Mary Timony – around whip-smart, self-skewering lyrics ("my mouth is a factory/for every toxic part of speech I spew") while her bandmates carve out scraggly, sinewy art-pop shapes redolent of – take your pick: Sebadoh, Built to Spill, Bettie Serveert, Sleater-Kinney...  But while Major Arcana (Carpark) is an undeniably fun excuse for hip nostalgists of a certain age to drop knowing college-rock name-checks, it's also a huge amount of fun full stop, packed with enough personality, caustically hilarious verse and grungy-melodic hooks to preempt any potential accusations of stock retro posturing as just so whatever, dude.

Daughn Gibson
[Country/Rock]
concert preview

Daughn Gibson has the kind of voice that almost sounds like a parody of itself: a big, booming, Johnny Cash-caricature of a baritone, which he doesn't shy away from using to maximum swooping, drunken-Elvis effect.  Me Moan (Sub Pop) the Carlisle, PA native's follow-up to last year's breakout debut, is chock-full of twangy guitars and blustery, borderline campy barroom crooning, but this isn't your granddad's country music, or even your hip uncle's alt-country.  It's more like the sort of thing Beck might make if he decided to indulge his found-sound sample-hop tendencies and his Lee Hazlewood-inspired troubadour fantasies equally on the same record; all misty-eyed honky-tonk balladeering and spooky, rough-hewn backwoods menace peppered with rickety drum loops, eerie vocal samples and weird, snaky guitar licks, plus one particularly resonant bagpipe riff.

Valerie June
[Folk/Blues/Americana]
concert preview

As you might expect from an album produced by a Black Key (the in-demand Dan Auerbach), Pushin' Against A Stone – Valerie June's mainstream debut following three self-released efforts – makes it clear that the Tennessee native can knock out some swampy, riff-driven modern blues-rock with the best of 'em.  But that's hardly all: she also takes on a hypnotic acoustic folk lament ("Workin' Woman Blues") that's curiously laced with Afrobeat-style horns; a sparse, creaky Appalachian lullaby ("Somebody To Love") with tattered fiddle and banjo accompaniment; a loose '60s girl-group shuffle ("The Hour") complete with wall-of-sound glockenspiels and ghostly gospel back-ups – and that's just the first three tracks.  While her voice, a reedy, high lonesome sounding thing, is potent enough, it won't knock you flat like, say, Alabama Shakes' Brittany Howard (June's hairstyle – a massive, Medusa-like nest of dreads – is another matter.)  But not too many singers can hopscotch between styles and decades, running down the whole damn Americana gamut from bluegrass to gospel, fiddle tunes to funk, and make it sound so artless, ageless and achingly truthful.

Laura Marling
[Folk]
concert preview

"I will not be a victim of romance," Laura Marling asserts early on Once I Was An Eagle (Ribbon Music), the fourth full-length of her young career.  But the evidence calls that declaration into question, as – not for the first time – she spends much of this sixty-minute song cycle poring over the ashes of a failed relationship (or several), imbuing it with an obsessive, allegorical weight.  Not that she casts herself as a victim, exactly: here she is a master hunter; there the titular bird of prey – to her erstwhile lover's dove, no less – trysting with Satan, conversing with water spirits, spinning bewitching but ineffectual love-spells... before winding her way toward guardedly optimistic reflections on lost childhood innocence and, ultimately, the uselessness of language itself: "words are sleazy/my love is better dumb."  The album's heady mixture of ferocity, bitterness, mysticism, rumination, nostalgia and joy come across musically too; building on her last record's florid jazz-folk explorations with stark, raga-influenced open-tuned meditations, often spiked with forceful Middle Eastern percussion and organ flourishes.  Of course, her guitar prowess is as formidable as ever, and she remains an utterly distinctive, continually astonishing vocalist.  While all of Marling's albums to date have included the first person pronoun in their titles, she's never made one this deeply, uncompromisingly personal.

Pure Bathing Culture
[Dream-Pop/Indie]
concert preview

Pure Bathing Culture's moniker (inspired by a Swiss spa), and the title (Moon Tides) and sun-streaked, coastal cover photo of their debut album (Partisan) all suggest a strong aesthetic link with the beach-suffused blog zeitgeist of 2009-10; a high tide for both chillwave's glazed retro-electronia and the shimmery slacker indie-pop of bands like Real Estate and Beach Fossils.  It's an apt connection: this is indeed luscious, langorous music, a swooning, semi-synthetic soundtrack for both nostalgia and indolence.  But several things set the Portland duo apart from the keyboard-toting, surf-evoking dream-pop throngs.  There's the shiny yet soft-focus production, with a crispness rendering their music as gleaming as it is swirly (and earns them countless Cocteau Twins comparisons.)  There's their memorable, strongly classicist way with melody, which makes their songs as distinctive as their sound (and helps earn them equally many comparisons to Fleetwood Mac. )  And then there's Sarah Versprille's voice: a bewitchingly rich soprano that frequently launches into fluid, semi-operatic quaver, placing her in the same soft-synth-pop lineage as Frankie Rose, Twin Sister's Andrea Estella, Austra's Katie Stelmanis and even Stereolab's Lætitia Sadier.

Ducktails
[Indie Pop/Psych]
concert preview

Across countless cassette recordings and his first three full-lengths as Ducktails, Matthew Mondanile gradually weaned himself from offhand, chillwavey bedroom sketches toward more "proper," conventionally presented indie-pop songs.  The Flower Lane (Domino), his most populous, populist foray thus far (featuring, among other pals, full-band contributions from fellow Jerseyites Big Troubles), is easily the most emphatic manifestation of that trajectory.  While brushing undeniably close to the sedate, suburban shimmer of the guitarist's better-known "day job" band, Real Estate – one could easily imagine the jangle-filled likes of "Ivy Covered House" or "Academy Avenue" among their property listings – it also ventures into frillier, colorful lite-pop and psych territory, scoping out some loose, chewy electric piano space-funk, patchouli-tinged sax solos, and a couple of spiffy, retro-redolent boy-girl duets.

Shigeto/Heathered Pearls/Beacon
[Electronic]
concert preview

From Matthew Dear to Gold Panda, School of Seven Bells and Adult., the better-known artists on Ghostly International – the Michigan label that's arguably the most visible face of American electronic music – tend to be relatively danceable, or at least reasonably energetic.  This package tour is a showcase for the imprint's softer side, beginning with the submerged, soporific soundscapes of Heathered Pearls – aka Ghostly A&R man Jakub Alexander, whose 2012 full-length Loyal is a naptime-ready study in aqueous textures and hypnotic, minutely-shifting loops – and the crisply moody, whisper-soft electro-soul of Brooklyn duo Beacon.  Topping the bill, Detroit native (Zachary) Shigeto (Saginaw) should liven things up a little, although his music is mellower than you'd expect from a producer who's also a percussionist.  No Better Time Than Now, his latest foray into jazzy IDM/instrumental hip-hop hybridity – looking to LA beatsmiths Flying Lotus and Daedelus as much as hometown heroes like Dilla and Dabrye – is his most vibrant, musically expansive outing yet, incorporating layers upon layers of his own impressively deft drumming (it'll be interesting to see how that works out live) while toeing an amiable line between head-nodding and nodding off.

Ulrich Schnauss
[Electronica]
concert preview

Between Boards of Canada's triumphal return and Jon Hopkins' breakthrough Immunity, it's been a good year for fans of broadly palatable, darkly atmospheric electronica.  You might credit Ulrich Schnauss with getting that particular ball rolling back in January, when he released A Long Way To Fall (Domino).  His first full-length in six years (discounting several recent collaborations), it finds the Berlin-based, New Age-indebted producer peeling back much of his familiarly enveloping shoegaze haze to reveal sweet, shiny-clean, laser-guided synth melodics that hearken to prime '90s IDM and '80s darkwave electro-pop; from the candy-coated pseudo-industrial churn of "The Weight of Darkening Skies" – his titles here have a distinct flair for the melodramatic – to the cheerfully chintzy Tinseltown traipse of "Like A Ghost In Your Own Life."

Maurice Fulton
[Disco/DJ/Electronic]
concert preview

A heavy-hitting House Nation lifer with mounds of cred and a perennial, boundary-blurring wandering eye, Maurice Fulton's rap sheet reaches back to Crystal Waters' 1994 mega-smash "100% Pure Love" (he's credited with "additonal drum programming") and encompasses solo ventures under a dizzying array of goofy aliases (Boof, Sticky People, Eddie and the Eggs, Ladyvipb...) and production work behind German neo-disco diva Kathy Diamond, Tanzanian-British Afro-soul funkster Mim Suleiman and uber-weird aggro-dance duo Mu (with his wife, Mutsumi Kanamori.)  In nearly all of the above instances, as well as his innumerable remixes (particularly for circa-2004 indie-approved dance revivalists like The Rapture, Annie and !!!), you're more or less guaranteed bucketloads of thick, rubbery basslines, scattered showers of playground-style percussion, and plenty of generally unpredictable fun.  A Blink Of An Eye (Running Back), released earlier this year under the sobriquet Syclops (ostensibly the work of three fictional Finnish ladies) runs a typically loopy gamut from quirky, percussion-stuffed disco-funk to squelchy acid techno and Squarepusher-esque prog-fusion, any or all of which could be up the Melbourne-based DJ's sleeve tomorrow night.

originally published in Philadelphia City Paper

Review Round-up: July 2013

Mayer Hawthorne
Where Does This Door Go?

As brilliant and uncanny as his earlier work's spot-on Motown evocations were, Mayer Hawthorne's too savvy to get stuck in a revivalist rut.  True to its venturesome title, the tux-rocking soulster's third opus keeps pushing things forward, in a backward-looking sort of way: retaining his old-school suavity while blowing up the retro rulebook; mix-and-matching the sort of blue-eyed Doobie Brothers yacht-soul broached on his previous album with smartly contemporary, hip-hop-edged production (complete with 2013's most fun-having guest artist, Kendrick Lamar.)  Another modernizing touch – a sprinkling of rap-style skits (one entitled "Problematization") contextualizing the easy elision between debonair courtship and booze-fueled hook-up culture – offers a perhaps unfortunately retrograde wrinkle to Hawthorne's dubiously chivalrous ladies man persona (see also: the man-eating anti-heroine of the deliciously grooving "The Innocent.")  But these are quibbles: Hawthorne's songwriting, crisply appointed arrangements and effortlessly gratifying croon – especially that gleaming falsetto – feel more casually confident than ever, making This Door a third straight slam-dunk.  Extra credit for a robot-themed love song that gleans fresh mileage out of an overused metaphor.
originally published in Magnet Magazine

Chance the Rapper
[Hip-Hop]
concert preview

Twenty-year-old Chancelor Bennett, alias Chance the Rapper ("please say 'the Rapper,'" he entreats, making even his no-brainer moniker into a catchy couplet) is having more infectious fun than just about anyone in hip-hop since the Pharcyde or maybe prime Ludacris.  His colorfully eclectic Acid Rap mixtape bounces between sounds like the DJ at a multi-generational block party, from throwback horns, hammonds and harmonies to chilled-out jazzy psychedelia, Chicago juke-style beats and crowd-friendly classic soul samples.  He's not joking about the rapper part either: the kid can spit, his deft, generously witty flow (punctuated by rowdy, excitable yelps) recalling a goofier Kendrick, a more level-headed Wayne, a slightly more relatable Danny Brown.  And while he keeps things mostly light-hearted he's not afraid to get deep; transcending weed-rap platitudes with some real talk on the complex emotional fall-out of Chiraq's summertime street carnage, and also tackling one of hip-hop's rarest commodities with several legitimately affecting love songs.

Future Bible Heroes
[Pop]
concert preview

Stephin Merritt, indiedom's very own curmudgeonly Cole Porter, is on a tear.  He steered his flagship Magnetic Fields back to electropop-land last year, which could make the return of long-running synth-pop sideline Future Bible Heroes feel slightly anticlimactic.  But Partygoing (Merge), if slight, is an utter delight; his most satisfying batch of songs since the Fields' 2008 Distortion.  The titular concern (presumably one of Merritt's least favorite activities) is dispatched with some brio, but we also get abundant wit (and atrocious advice) on such topics as parenting ("Keep Your Children in a Coma"), suicide ("Let's Go To Sleep (And Never Come Back)") and, naturally, alcoholism ("Drink Nothing But Champagne," featuring goofy caricature voices – of David Bowie and Aleister Crowley, no less!)  That most Merritt fans could probably imagine these numbers quite accurately based on their titles alone makes them no less worthy additions to the canon.  The twist with this tour is that Merritt himself isn't actually along for the ride – leaving us in the capable hands of veteran TMF vocalists Claudia and Shirley, plus Christopher Ewen, whose ever-sparkling synth arrangements have been sorely missed.  Honestly, though, he'd probably just spoil the fun anyway.

Camera Obscura/She and Him
[Indie Pop/Retro]
concert preview

Camera Obscura decamped from Merge to 4AD around the time of She & Him's 2008 debut, so the two retro-steeped indie-pop outfits never lined up as labelmates, but they're as well-matched on tour together as strawberries and whipped cream on a picnic blanket, and just as sweetly irresistible.  All the more so coming off two of this summer's most satisfying helpings of musical comfort food: the Glaswegian veterans returned after a fraught four-year absence with the typically enchanting Desire Lines, while the West Coast twosome carry on with their third numbered installment of reliably breezy cream-puff retro-pop.  Popular perception might, not inaccurately, differentiate between the groups as, respectively bookishly brooding and blithely bubbly; leaning toward literary introversion on one hand and Hollywood romance on the other – but they've definitely got more in common than not, from their deft, casually graceful understanding of '60s pop sophistication to the softly twangy altos of their respective doe-eyed frontwomen: She's Zooey Deschanel, whose pitch-perfect evocations of Patsy, Skeeter, Lesley and Lulu both affirm and transcend her readily-stereotyped quirky hipness, and Camera's perennially moony Traceyanne Campbell, whose bewitchingly heartbroken croon makes her, at least in certain circles, just as much of an icon.

Smith-Westerns
[Rock/Pop]
concert preview

Listeners who checked out after the raucous, no-fidelity Nuggets-isms of the Smith Westerns' gleefully scuzzy debut may have trouble recognizing the  sun-glazed shimmer of their third long-player, Soft Will (Mom + Pop), as the work of the same band.  Granted, the Chicago threesome have come a ways since 2009 in several respects – for one, they've long since exited their teens – and the glammy rave-ups on 2011's  Dye It Blonde (which now seems explicitly transitional) represented a roughly equidistant midpoint between them.  Still, it's tough to think of another band who've made such a dramatic, decisive sonic transformation after just three records (though it's fun to try: Liars come to mind; Primal Scream, maybe Talking Heads, arguably Radiohead...)  Who knows where they'll end up next, but the hazy, almost country-ish psych-pop mode they've arrived at for now feels more genuine and lived-in than simply another costume change: nostalgically redolent but not too overly retro, recalling the warmth of Big Star's sweetest jangles; the lushest moments of The Wrens' Meadowlands, and even (as on soaring instrumental "XXIII") classic Pink Floyd.

Savages
[Punk/Rock]
concert preview

If punk rock classically operates on a spectrum between abandon and austerity – arguably, its greatest moments are carved out of the tension between those two poles – the scuttlebutt on Savages places them squarely toward latter end.  There's a cultivated emphasis on discipline and restraint all over the London foursome's self-presentation, from the emphatic anti-cellphone/camera policy at their live shows to the grandly worded political poetry of their manifestos and the moody, monochrome design of their tersely titled Matador debut: Silence Yourself.  Yet this is ultimately a self-abnegation of life-affirmation; austerity as a means toward truer, more complete abandon – after all, what is abandon but a rejection, a literal discarding of those infinite seductive mundanities interfering with actually experiencing your life, right here, right now.  While the album displays a masterful control of post-punk dynamics, from visceral fury to controlled, smoldering contemplation, it's also not hard to hear why they've described their sound as "written for the stage."  And while the writing they've inspired is, like their music itself, notably full of angles, Savages are undeniably, above all, a band with a point; sharp, burnished and vital: if you want to feel it, you'll just have to be there.

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists/Waxahatchee
[Rock/Folk]
concert preview

Ted Leo hasn't gifted us with a Pharmacists album since 2010's typically excellent The Brutalist Bricks (Matador), although he has lately been making moves with something called #BOTH – a duo project with fellow '90s-vintage pop'n'roll lifer Aimee Mann which, as a songwriting team alone, sounds like straight fire.  Then again it's not like we ever need an excuse to catch New Jersey's beloved indie rock patron saint in action.  If you do, well, there's always the unbeatable "it's free."  Better, it's an opportunity to catch Waxahatchee, aka recent West Philly transplant Katie Crutchfield, who takes a similar array of DIY punk, pop and folk ingredients to create something just as vital and charismatic filtered through her own sweetly affecting, curiously (Southern?) accented voice (she shares her musical moniker with the creek beside her parents' Alabama lake house.)  After the sparse acoustic intimations of last summer's roughly recorded, Cat Power-ish American Weekend – which still cuts like a faint whispering breeze through stifling heat – she stretched out on the equally personal but just-cleaner-enough Cerulean Salt (Don Giovanni), which includes the band-enhanced, more conventionally summery fuzz-pop of "Coast to Coast" and jaunty shuffle "Lips and Limbs."

Jamaican Queens
[Art-Pop/Indie]
concert preview

Right off the bat, Jamaican Queens' debut album, Wormfood (Notown), gives the impression that it'll be something of a downer; from the blood-dripping cover model to the mordant humor of its title.  (The corresponding eponymous tune is, indeed, a fittingly macabre would-be nursery rhyme.)  But the Detroit-based trio (a new project from former members of the bands Prussia and Our Delay) are not the types to let things get quite so straightforward.  Yes, they've professed a strong affinity for the grisly Southern rap of Gucci Mane and Three Six Mafia, to the point of labeling their music "trap-pop" – a tag which may be slightly overstating the case, although it's certainly one ingredient in the group's rather erratic post-industrial beatscape.  While mortality and violence are indeed frequent concerns here, along with unflinchingly frank sexuality, the overall effect is less that of a bloodbath or a morbid wallow than a sort of emo-glam confessional, a sometimes tortured, decidedly cynical ("I've begun to think of love as an impossibility/I've begun to think of sex the way I do money"), yet still ultimately affecting set of observations on modern love and friendship.  Musically speaking, that leads to delightful cognitive disconnects like the standout "Kids Get Away," whose peppy sunshine strums and eruptive electro-bubblegum breakbeats intercept a quizzical lyric seemingly following the aftermath of a violent assault (and perhaps burglary) which somehow leads to the come-on "I wanna get in your shower."  The band's open-eared experimental-pop playground incorporates subtly-deployed samples from an astonishingly broad array of sources – from Odetta, Roy Orbison and ELO to D'Angelo, Portishead and fellow Detroiter Matthew Dear – although it'd be hard to peg any of them as direct influences on their sound.  Save for some undeniable echoes of Bowie's Thin White Duke in Ryan Spencer's vocals (particularly at their most dramatically soulful and strangulated) the most readily viable stylistic reference points are a roll-call of inveterate indie inscrutables: Islands, Phedré, Black Moth Super Rainbow, maybe Yeasayer at their screwiest.  It's a scraggly heap of misfits, but these Queens are laying a strong claim to wear the crown.

Julia Holter/Jessica Pratt
[Art-Pop/Folk]
concert preview

Classically-informed chamber-pop chanteuse Julia Holter made waves among academically-inclined listeners with last year's fascinating if rather chilly Ekstasis, which drew on both ancient and high modern literary sources.  Loud City Song (Domino), her third album in as many years, seems to poised to carve her a slightly larger niche when it sees release next month – while no less arrestingly strange, it's notably warmer, more outgoing and rhythmically dynamic.  For now, Saturday's performance should preview the album's inclinations toward mid-century pop, dreamy ambience (sometimes both at once, as on a velvety cover of Brenda Lee's torch classic "Hello Stranger") and Joni Mitchell-esque collaborative excursions into modern jazz.  In contrast, the placid finger-picking and sweetly affectless alto of her fellow Californian Jessica Pratt feels practically artless.  Pratt's self-titled debut (Birth) would pass with nary a squint as a lost, turn-of-the-'70s pastoral folk gem – Vashti Bunyan being the nearly inescapable point of comparison, though you'll also hear a far less jumpy Milk-Eyed-era Joanna Newsom.

Lenka
[Pop]
concert preview

After the effervescent, piano-led chamber-pop confections of Lenka's self-titled debut – with its cutie-pie breakout hit/licensing goldmine "The Show" – and the zingy, electronic leanings of 2011's more eclectic but equally winsome Two, the odds were stacked pretty high against the breathy-voiced Australian pop-sprite suddenly turning to dark, moody art-rock, or even mildly miserable balladeering.  Indeed, despite its title, Shadows (Skipalong), turns out to be her most good-natured, sentimental outing yet.  Inspired in part by her newborn son, Quinn (whose in utero heartbeat thumps softly under one track), it's an album of lullabies, sweetly swaddled with a mixture of orchestration and gentle electronics: elegantly crafted but nevertheless resoundingly soporific.  Consider bringing a pillow and curling up on the World Cafe Live floor – at least it's (partially) carpeted.

When Saints Go Machine
Infinity Pool
[Pop/Electronic]

Danish electro-art-pop outfit When Saints Go Machine approach their third album as if determined to out-weird themselves – and they do a pretty convincing job; bookending Infinity Pool (!K7) with an incongruous (if head-nodding) Killer Mike feature and eighty out-of-nowhere seconds of trebly breakbeat rave.  In between comes a maze of meandering melody and textural abstraction (limned with Nikolaj Vonsild’s elusive, vaguely Kermit-ish falsetto) that only occasionally approaches the sublimity of 2011's curiously elegant Konkylie.  But there's real beauty to be found, underneath all that woozy circuitry – and, bizarrely, hooks too.  Besides, can you really deny a song called "System of Unlimited Love"?

Bitchin' Bajas
Bitchitronics
[Drone/Psych]

The word "bitchin'" probably isn't the first thing that comes to mind when you think of ambient music.  Neither are ripping distortion solos.  But that's how Chi-town dronemeisters Bitchin Bajas roll; shredding righteously through the heart of the gooey, synthy unfurlery pervading the expansive opening cut ("Transcendance," natch) on Bitchitronics (Drag City).  Later it's flutes and Frippertronics ("Inclusion"), tambura-esque Alice Coltrane hat-tips ("Turiya") and other, less discernible shoals of cosmic resonance – the basic gist being these cats take an active, full-throttle approach to spiritual surrender and serenity, and piff on the pure-minded, chin-stroking beauty of your typical, mincing ambient clinicians.

Walton
Beyond
[Electronic/Bass]

The recent UK bass/post-dubstep trend of warped/ghostly R&B vocal samples has yielded some killer singles, especially at its 2011 peak (cf. Jacques Greene, Blawan), but no real album-length explorations to speak of.  Beyond (Hyperdub), the debut LP from Manchester-based producer Walton, fills that void and then some, weaving hauntingly down-pitched snippets of Adina Howard and Mary J Blige in and among an omnivorous spread of deep, nocturnal house, acid techno flashbacks, nasty garage workouts and precision-tooled glitch-funk; finding cohesion in the face of his pointedly genre-blind eclecticism by maintaining a consistent, darkly seductive mood.

The-Drum
Contact
[Electronic]

Floating in a parallel new age/sci-fi netherworld to the slippery, wooze-inducing likes of Teengirl Fantasy, Nguzunguzu and James Ferraro, the debut LP from recombinant Chicago production duo The-Drum has the forbidding look and feel of a recondite critical-theory treatise (complete with wholly extraneous dystopian framing concept.)  But it doesn't feel that way: abstract, elusive and unpredictable as it is, Contact (Audraglint) is also consistently, curiously alluring on a sensual level, playfully sifting through several decades of digital audio detritus (chintzy synth presets, liquid percussion shards, splutters of metal-coil slap bass) while splicing footwork and dub techno with the acid-washed hand-me-downs of slow-rolling crunk hip-hop, to somewhat queasily narcotic effect.

Congo Natty
Jungle Revolution
[Jungle/Reggae]

Ragga jungle doesn't get much play, but it birthed some of the most thrillingly vibrant sounds of the early '90s, whose echoes still reverberate loudly.  Congo Natty (aka Rebel MC, aka Conquering Lion...), arguably the genre's chief instigator, comes roaring back with Jungle Revolution (Big Dada), his first proper album in forever, to show us how it's done (ludicrous rewinds, pure-adrenaline breakbeats, guest drops from a bonafide whos-who of toasters); school us on some vital roots of the UK bass/dance music continuum (nodding to everything from drum'n'bass and rave through autotune and dubstep, with flashes of unadulterated roots reggae) and just basically throw one killer party.  Bombaclaat!

Primal Scream
More Light
[Rock]

Perennially plucky Brit-rock underdogs/serially self-reinventing Stones fetishists Primal Scream seem to average one truly killer album every ten years.  If the ambitiously epic More Light (Ignition) isn't an unequivocal jawdropper on the level of Screamadelica or XTRMNTR, it's more than enough to satisfy as this decade's allotment; echoing both of those landmarks (the former, most blatantly/gleefully, on rapturous feel-good finale "It's Alright, It's Okay") amidst a super-saturated, back-catalog-blenderizing psych/blues/punk/gospel/orchestral/acid-funk melting pot of ecstatic, full-throttle jams.  Spring for the deluxe edition if you can: even the bonus tracks kick!

Mavis Staples
One True Vine
[Soul/Gospel]

Alongside a few public domain gospel numbers and one refurbished, fuzzed-up Staple Singers chestnut, Mavis Staples' One True Vine (Anti-) includes such seemingly improbably selections as a months-old Low tune, an early Funkadelic jam, and an obscure Wilco single (less surprising given Jeff Tweedy's presence here as producer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and drummer-father) – but it never has the grab-bag "songbook" feel of, say, Bettye Lavette's recent efforts.  In the hands (and still-electrifying, if generally understated voice) of the Philly-born, septuagenarian soul legend, each song becomes subtly and inimitably personal; the whole a moving, thoughtful personal exploration of faith, doubt and redemption.

Van Dyke Parks
Songs Cycled
[Pop/Americana]

Songs Cycled (Bella Union), Van Dyke Parks' first (more or less) proper full-length outing in a quarter-century, is a triumphant return for the legendary, lately-resurgent arranger/composer and inveterate musical fantasist/archivist.  Rummaging through a gleeful grab-bag of new originals, far-ranging covers and re-recorded selections from across his catalog, it's an excellent (re)introduction to his quaint, quirky, polymathic style, full of characteristically lavish and rickety shoe-string symphonies, drawing on ragtime, chanson, tango, calypso, shape note folk-gospel and 19th-century Impressionism to craft a wistful (and slyly polemical) patchwork travelogue connecting his "Missippi" boyhood, Parisian reveries, 9/11 Wall Street and other sundry points along our collective memory lane.

originally published in Philadelphia City Paper

Review Round-up: June 2013

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

Tunng
Turbines

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

Zomby
With Love

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

Emika
DVA

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

Eleanor Friedberger
Personal Record
[Pop/Indie]

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

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

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

Kölsch
1977
[House]

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

various artists
After Dark 2
[Electronic/Disco]

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

Chvrches
[Pop]
concert preview

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

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

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

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

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

Tricky
[Trip-Hop]
concert preview

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

Mikal Cronin
[Rock/Pop]
concert preview

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

Patty Griffin
[Folk/Americana]
concert preview

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

Glenn Jones
[Folk/Instrumental]
concert preview

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

Steve Gunn
[Folk/Rock]
concert preview

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

Peals
[Instrumental/Post-Rock]
concert preview

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

originally published in Philadelphia City Paper