Best New Albums - Pitchfork

Waxahatchee: Cerulean Salt

Lindsay Zoladz — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0600

Last year's American Weekend, Katie Crutchfield's piercing debut as Waxahatchee, got passed around like a secret. On the surface, it was a modest record-- 11 lo-fi acoustic songs written and recorded in the span of a week while snowed in at her parents' neighborless Alabama home near the body of water from which the project takes its name. Chronicling missed connections and cell phones smashed in moments of frustration, it was an album-length meditation on the modern allure of going off the grid (the first song was called "Catfish", but it wasn't about that). But what gutted you was a voice that cut through the murk like infomercial shower cleaner. Crutchfield sang frankly ("I think I love you, but you'll never find out") and without inhibition, as if she desperately wanted but didn't expect to be heard.

Cerulean Salt, Crutchfield's new album, is going to be heard. But from its opening moments, you get the sense that she's ready for it, the newfound assurance, steadiness, and clarity of her voice immediately obvious. "We are late, we are loud, we remain connected as you're reading out loud," she sings on the smolderingly evocative opener, "Hollow Bedroom". Like American Weekend, it begins with just a guitar and a voice, though this time the instrument's plugged in and the recording sounds more professional. (It was still recorded at home, this time in the Philadelphia house she shares with her sister and bandmates.) But it's no less intimate-- if anything, the clean recording only brings you in tighter. Crutchfield's voice rises to be heard over the distortion that kicks in during the song's final minute. "And I don't believe that I care at all," she sings with quiet defiance. "What they hear through these walls."

Since her early teens, Crutchfield has been a precocious, prolific songwriter, and now that she's in her early 20s, she's already a veteran of a number of short-lived projects: an early solo act called King Everything, plus a few melodic punk bands she played in with her twin sister, Swearin' frontwoman Allison, including Bad Banana, the Ackleys, and P.S. Eliot. Crutchfield hails from Alabama-- a fact that's stamped all over her voice's twangy swagger-- but her songs have a drifter's perspective that suggest that, in a sense, she's also come from everywhere. Her music is partially about being young and on the road, what happens in those rare cases when teenage wanderlust is not a suburban daydream, but an everyday reality.

Cerulean Salt is full of vagrant wisdom and people who might once have hitchhiked across the country but were born into a moment when they could just join a punk band instead. They crash on shitty group house floors, cram their gear and bodies into vans with questionable, unexplained "blood on the back seat," and shirk from commitment whenever feelings are anything more than fleeting. "I'll try to embrace the lows," she sings on "Coast to Coast", a song whose buoyant static makes the most of her new band members (Kyle Gilbride and Keith Spencer from Swearin' add bass and drums).

Crutchfield has a way of delivering a line so casually that it takes a half-dozen listens to fully realize how devastating it is. "I had a dream last night, we had hit separate bottoms," she sings, a brilliant, crushing line hidden in the middle of the gently strummed "Lively". Her songs paint scenes in quick, deft strokes thanks to her knack for knowing exactly which physical details will carry emotional resonance. There's something almost unbearably poignant about the wedding reception she describes where "make-up sets on [the bride's] face like tar" and "the champagne flutes poorly engineered, employ dixie cups and jars."

Marriage, tradition, and lineage are all sources of great anxiety in a Waxahatchee song. There was a track on American Weekend about a grandmother, with the repeated refrain, "You got married when you were 15," uttered with disbelief, as though Crutchfield were trying to imagine how different her own life would be had the same been true for her. These themes are explored in more depth on Cerulean Salt; in "Swan Dive" she confesses that "dreams about loveless marriage and regret" keep her up at night, while she presents a peer's wedding as more of a "tragic epilogue" than a celebration on "Dixie Cups and Jars" (which feels like a slightly more harrowing take on Built to Spill's "Twin Falls"). "You’ll remain," she says to her, "I will find a way to leave gracefully, or I'll escape." Where she'll go isn't clear, but it's these free-floating desires and unanswered questions that give Crutchfield's songs their haunting power.

"This place is vile, and I'm vile too," Crutchfield howls on the stunning closer, "You're Damaged". In the hands of a lesser singer, a line like that might feel too exposed. But Crutchfield's characters can't help but be exactly who they say they are: they're catfish in a Catfish world. And as they squirm, flop, and clumsily make their way through their lives, their specific experiences become something universal. "For me, the only way to write lyrics is not to think about other people at all," Crutchfield said in a recent interview. "You just have to write stuff for you and only you, and not worry about how people are going to take it. It'll be inevitably relatable because it's true to you." It’s that blazingly honest, hyper-personal quality that places Cerulean Salt in the tradition of Elliott Smith, early Cat Power, or Liz Phair's free-flowing Girlysound tapes-- the work of a songwriter skilled enough to make introspection seem not self-centered, but generous.

Rhye: Woman

Miles Raymer — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0600

Rhye's short history is marked by serendipity and mystery. A couple of years ago, after being tapped by Hannibal's Copenhagen-based electronic group Quadron, producer/vocalist Mike Milosh flew to Denmark to work with the group and they hit it off. Eventually, Quadron producer Robin Hannibal moved to L.A. in pursuit of a woman, and Milosh coincidentally relocated there as well, and started his own serious relationship (which has since evolved into a marriage) before they reconnected musically.

From what Milosh has said, Rhye's primary goal is to pay tribute to this type of world-tilting romantic experience, but so far the pair have delivered their interpretations of this very personal phenomenon from behind a veil of secrecy. They released their first single, "Open", anonymously, and promoted it in a deliberately opaque fashion, like a YouTube video of Milosh serenading his wife with a solo piano rendition of the song, shot in a way where you can barely make him out in silhouette. Even after revealing their identities, the pair refuse to say where the group's name comes from or what it means, and their full names don't appear anywhere in the liner notes to their debut album, Woman.

Even without a face to attach it to, Rhye's music itself feels deeply intimate. Much of this comes from Hannibal and Milosh's deft arrangements-- each of Woman's 10 songs makes its point with a bare minimum of moving parts. Beats, basslines, and Milosh's voice are at the center of nearly all of them; although a majority of the tracks boast arrangements for horns and strings, most of these are so subtle that you might not even realize they're there until you read the liner notes afterward. The lean production leaves little space between the listener and the songs, and they feel almost touchably close.

And then of course there's Milosh's voice itself, a gorgeous and graceful countertenor that many listeners have mistaken for a woman's, especially in the days before the group unmasked themselves. He's a subtle performer, but also canny. The restraint that the pair shows in their arrangements also carries over to his singing, which rarely rises above the volume of a conversation. It's gentle, soothing, and easy to get lost in.

That voice has drawn a number of comparisons to Sade, and the music behind it only underlines those similarities. Woman offers few sounds or ways of deploying them that wouldn't be familiar to an R&B fan in the 90s, especially if they were into the British wing of the genre that at the time was focused on making gently bumping, slightly jazzy bedroom music.

And although Milosh is an outspoken critic of what he considers a trend of crass sexualization in pop music, the album still embraces the physical aspects of the romantic experience it intends to glorify. Its sensual aspects may share the same sense of self-control (it's sexy without being overtly sexual, erotic but not lascivious). As well-mannered as its carnal side may be, Woman is bound to become fodder for a tasteful boudoir soundtrack, something to be slotted next to the xx, another band Rhye's been frequently compared to.

The satin-sheets sensuality and Milosh's vocals are impressive enough that they could save an otherwise unremarkable album, but the pair are also gifted songwriters who seem even stronger as a pair than as they did separately. Woman has only one bad song on it, though it should be noted that it's seriously bad: "One of Those Summer Days" is boring and hook-free, and it not only dives face-first into the kind of sickly cloying sentimentality that they studiously avoid on the rest of the songs, but does so to the accompaniment of a drippy smooth-jazz alto sax solo.

But a good number of the remaining songs come breathtakingly close to their own kind of perfection, at least close enough that it's hard to imagine how anyone could improve them. "Open" may be so derivative of Sade that you may as well call it an homage, but considering that the closest point of comparison would be Sade's "By Your Side"-- one of the few truly perfect songs in pop history-- that's hardly a complaint. And I'd be surprised if Justin Timberlake and the members of Phoenix aren't holding their new singles up to the lithe, clean-lined modern disco sound of "The Fall" and frowning at the results.

Music about happy, successful relationships is always a tougher sell than music about romance gone bad, for the same reason that tragedies are more compelling than stories where everything works out fine for everyone. Bad fortune is naturally fascinating and contentment isn't, and unless you're in a happy, successful relationship you don't want to hear about someone else's. But Woman somehow gets to break those rules, in large part because the music itself is so easy to fall in love with.

Youth Lagoon: Wondrous Bughouse

Ian Cohen — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0600

Trevor Powers doesn't come off as older and wiser than his 23 years: just look at any picture of him, with his slight build and cherubic mop of curls, or take one listen to his nasal, keening voice. Likewise, his heartfelt 2011 debut The Year of Hibernation dealt more in truth and honesty than profundity or authority, skirting cliché while affecting people in meaningful ways. These qualities are about the only things that haven't changed for Youth Lagoon on Wondrous Bughouse. This record broadens Powers' musical and lyrical scope into something universal in a literal and figurative sense, evoking the cosmos, heaven, and hell. But Powers sounds curious and awestruck rather than naïve, someone who explores this lush and frightening soundworld instead of explaining it.

The cosmetic changes are obvious. If you've been paying attention to sonics over the past couple of years, you'll recognize the saturated, bottom-heavy production as that of Ben H. Allen. After hearing Allen give a subwoofer shape-up to previously brittle bands like Deerhunter, Animal Collective, and Washed Out, the pairing seems almost inevitable. But while the production is an upgrade, the real growth is thematic. Hibernation obsessed over escape and became defined by its limitations, whether it was its meager recording budget or just the sense that Powers felt trapped by his surroundings in Boise. But Bughouse looks inward and discovers the endless possibilities of imagination and introspection.

Youth Lagoon is still very much an internally-focused project and, with its abundance of effect pedals and stereo panning tricks, Wondrous Bughouse will likely be branded as a headphones album. Don't believe it. As with Hibernation, this is a record that's meant to be cranked as loud as possible; for one, volume decompresses these thick songs, amplifying the crucial addition of live drums on "Raspberry Cane" and "Mute". More importantly, Wondrous Bughouse needs room to breathe from a songwriting standpoint. With Powers' lyrics and Allen's production striving to create a celestial whole, Bughouse is meant to conjure infinite space.

This much is conveyed by the sonar blips that take up the three-minute opener "Through Mind and Back" before fading into the spellbinding "Mute". Nearly every song on Hibernation began quietly, so it's jarring to hear Youth Lagoon take a more widescreen turn-- echoing drums, gleaming peals of delayed guitar, all washed by ocean spray reverb. This lasts for one minute before a detuned loop of bells recasts "Mute" as a juggernaut, a steady, booming drum beat framing a strident vocal performance from Powers, a guitar solo that recalls Doug Martsch's expressive, longing leads, a minor-key piano loop that appears ready to take the song to a completely different plateau before cruelly cutting out.

These songs are all bigger and bolder without being unnecessarily complicated. While Powers' melodies are simple and immediately memorable like nursery rhymes, everything surrounding him is in flux. The songs on Wondrous Bughouse are continually subjected to flange and phase effects, and it's not the gentle, headswimming "whoosh" that typified recent records such as Lonerism or mbv. The cranked oscillation gives these songs a proper sense of danger and hyper-alertness. The combination of the processing and Powers' devious lyrics ("'I won't die easily'/ That's what they say when I erupt into laughter") gives the calliope-like melody of "Attic Doctor" a fitting, monstrous overtone. The synth progression that emerges during the anthropomorphic grotesquerie "Pelican Man" would be a perfect evocation of Elephant 6's Beatles obsession, but the pulsing modulations turn into something closer to slasher-flick fare.

It's often scary stuff, more reminiscent of Syd Barrett's bad-trip fairy tales. Though Powers isn't dealing with death in a manner that conveys gravitas or experience, Wondrous Bughouse is very much about mortality, albeit filtered through surrealism, parable, and metaphor. Rather than a simple longing for the past, Powers feels obsessed with human frailty and decay. Similarly, the songs of Bughouse aren't subject to tangents so much as following a dream logic working where any thought, regardless of how awesome or fearsome it is, doesn't end until it reaches a conclusion it sees fit.

Powers' choice to write most of these fanciful flights in waltz time gives everything a properly anachronistic feel. The hopscotch melody on "Dropla" makes it sound like a playground chant and the lyrics see its narrator dealing with death in a selfish, forgivably childlike way, hanging on to faint hope ("you'll never die, you'll never die") and lashing out when the prayers go unanswered ("you weren't there when I needed"). Between the threatening taunts of "Attic Doctor", we hear vast stretches of music for the Peanuts gang to ice skate to: "Third Dystopia" refracts a sea shanty through multiple funhouse mirrors; the submerged second half of "The Bath" places Powers somewhere between a baptism and a drowning. On "Raspberry Cane", Powers sees himself as irredeemable ("I'm polluted by my blood/ So help me cut it out and rinse it down the drain") and while closer "Daisyphobia" views humanity as "mortals on the run" from an all-seeing God, Wondrous Bughouse slinks towards an disturbing and unresolved conclusion, a slow fade of distant synth whinnies and stumbling, inexact beats.

Though unnerving, it is familiar, albeit in a style of indie rock that was prominent when Powers was, by his own admission, listening to Bad Boy records Allen might've played a part in. Think of the Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, Grandaddy, Sparklehorse, Modest Mouse, Built To Spill, all bands who in some way combined a projected naivety with grand designs: adolescent vocals picking at metaphysical mysteries, an insatiable curiosity with the capabilities of the studio. But Youth Lagoon is also a spiritual progeny in terms of geography. All these bands emerged far from media centers-- Oklahoma City, upstate New York, Modesto, central Virginia, Issaquah, Wash., and of course, Powers' own Boise. Listeners often try to discern something special about creating art in places like these, whether the scarcity of live shows and bands makes music more important or a lack of urban stimuli allows for deeper meditation on the big picture. Though the songs themselves are wonderful, that's the powerful source Powers taps into here: if you feel like the dark center of the universe or simply need a little space, Wondrous Bughouse obliges.

Autre Ne Veut: Anxiety

Ian Cohen — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0600

Autre Ne Veut's self-titled debut was the epitome of fringe back in 2010: someone with an unwieldy handle and a staunch commitment to anonymity making warped approximations of 1980s and 90s R&B on a label that primarily trafficked in lo-fi curiosities. By the time Arthur Ashin revealed himself in 2012, all of those characteristics had become basic tools of indie rock buzzmaking. Though prevailing trends have positioned Autre Ne Veut closer to the center of discussion, he remains quite outré on new album Anxiety. The cover no longer bears a replication of Edvard Munch's The Scream, but he kept Anxiety as the album title; you can't say he didn't warn you about him losing his cool time and time again on his marvelous and moving second LP.

While by far his most accessible work to date, Ashin's busy hands keep Anxiety off-kilter throughout. The touches of dissonance help convey the message of each song: brash sax honks evoke the morbid discomfort of "Counting"; the yearning "Don't Ever Look Back" hitches on sharp feedback before giving into harmonized hair-metal guitars; as "Play by Play" restlessly prepares for its massive chorus, Ashin's voice is layered and deformed with sudden fits of pitch-shifting. While Ashin's past as a jingle writer manifests in focusing every song with a melody that sticks, they're not the kind of tunes I imagine being belted out by the kids chorus at PS 22. His melodic sense feels more intuitive, looping and darting perilously. They can initially come off as harsh before the warmth courses through; repeat the experience four or five times and you might want to go hug someone.

That much is played out in Anxiety's bookends, songs that are structured to deliver tremendous codas with extremely different effects. Opener "Play by Play" has a "Purple Rain"-like gospel build, as oddly juxtaposed harmonies rising and crashing with every round; it's conceivable that Anxiety could buckle under the weight of its impact after only five minutes. The comparatively sedate closer "World War" fizzles into electronic static mid-way through, easing out into a resigned duet that thematically connects with "Play by Play" to give Anxiety a sense of cycle. The message of "Play by Play" was "don't ever leave me alone," on "World War," he pleads, "no way you'll ever be my baby."

In between, that polarity of desire and disappointment is fully explored by Ashin's erratic and ecstatic voice. Describing its tone doesn't quite convey its appeal, nor does it demonstrate how much of an acquired taste it is. His glass-shattering falsetto runs and chesty bleats transform Anxiety from a great pop record into something powerfully therapeutic, more about casting off inhibitions than actually hitting those high notes.

It's the sort of performance typically ascribed to the hyper-emotive subgenres of rock, so it's no surprise it works splendidly on unhinged songs like "Ego Free Sex Free" and "I Wanna Dance With Somebody". The latter doesn't quote Whitney Houston like his recent solo rendition of "World War" did; he simply captures the unchecked desires conveyed in the title. The enduring surprise of Anxiety is that Ashin's nervy approach works just as well on the ballads, his voice lending an edge to songs that might otherwise slip into filler territory. His performance is toned down only somewhat on "A Lie", "Gonna Die", and "World War", the titles of which give you an idea of the phenomenal stakes Ashin can create vocally. There's sadness in these songs, certainly-- but while they sound like slow dances, they feel like the entire universe caving in on Ashin.

It could certainly be a turn-off, or at least criticized as "oversinging." But the demonstrative nature of Autre Ne Veut is pretty much the point, and as with collaborator and peer How to Dress Well, it has as much in common with Broadway as it does with R&B; you imagine he's drawn to this style of music because it's a means to a kind of spiritual transcendence that most rock music isn't particularly interested in. So it's understandable that "Ego Free Sex Free" becomes something of a mantra for Anxiety. On its face, it's a curious slogan-- typically, we prefer pop stars to indulge in ego and certainly avail themselves of carnality. But judging from Ashin's explanation regarding the song's inspiration, you can see what he means by it, how the neediness of the self can stand in the way of true and meaningful connection. Yes, it's completely corny and I'm pretty sure it's the reasoning behind every nudist colony. And yet, it fits within the context of Anxiety, an album where Ashin fearlessly reveals himself as a person and an artist and dares you to open up in the same way.

Iceage: You're Nothing

Brandon Stosuy — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0600

When Iceage released their excellent 2011 debut, New Brigade, a large part of the discussion was dedicated to the nihilistic but crush-worthy Danish punk group's ages (at the time, ranging from 18 to 19), and the fact that they sounded much older than that. You also got stories about their bloody live shows and, later, online handwringing about them baiting controversy Joy Division-style by apparently flirting with fascist gestures at one of those shows. In the beginning, though, people were most interested in the part about four young dudes exploding out of "nowhere" (the Copenhagen DIY scene) fully formed and going on to release one of the best punk collections in recent memory. Their shows during that time were powerful in a very messy, very punk way. Two years later, they're a different band, one capable of more than shambling atmospherics and stage dives. Iceage write brilliant songs; on You're Nothing, they've found a way to clarify these compositional skills without stripping away their power.

Iceage's self-produced second album is even better than their debut. It's the quartet's first offering for the larger label Matador (the album's still being released by Escho in Denmark) and they come off even wilder and more chaotic than they did in 2011, but also more experienced and nuanced. They've honed the uncanny sense of classic punk songwriting-- the guitar sound's huge, the hooks more present, the charisma of dead-eyed, out-of-breath vocalist Elias Bender Rønnenfelt even greater. When you listen to the two records in tandem, you realize how brittle New Brigade was: "brittle" in an excellently fuzzed, rancid way, but You're Nothing is a heftier experience.

Unlike some groups who sign to a bigger label and beef up their sound in the wrong ways, Iceage used the new resources to hone what they already did well without abandoning what made them interesting in the first place. You can hear the shift on the industrial/ambient instrumental "Interlude", which helps to make Nothing darker and danker, and on "Morals", a mid-tempo piano-flecked track based on the 1960s Italian singer Mina's "L'Ultima Occasione". The odd reference fits here, building into a frenzy that finds Rønnenfelt hoarsely screaming "Where's your morals?" over militaristic rhythms. And, even with these slight tweaks, they don't fuck around: New Brigade offered 12 songs in 24 minutes, You're Nothing 12 songs in 28-and-a-half.

On the more typical Iceage songs, you get their mix of dirty punk and pulsing hardcore wrapped in an ink-black atmosphere, and Rønnenfelt's existential musings come in more powerful doses. The brilliant opener "Ecstasy", which sounds like a punk anthem mid-melt, strings together furious tempo changes, with, Rønnenfelt howling "I can't take this pressure" in the final implosion. "Coalition" is a classic rager, but you've never heard them doing doubled Sonic Youth guitar hooks like this. From "In Haze"'s clipped and twangy d-beat to the heavy bass of "Everything Drifts" to the spiraling anthemics of the title track, there are no weak spots. They chiseled things down for a reason: Great punk comes in spurts.

Rønnenfelt has said You're Nothing was inspired in part by his readings of Bataille, Genet, and the like. On these off-kilter anthems, you also imagine them reading Rimbaud, and get the sense that the group has taken Richard Hell and the Voidoids' "Blank Generation" to heart with lines like the title track's "Thats right, you're nothing/ Feel the void grow" and "Ecstasy"'s "But bliss is momentary anyhow/ Yet worth living for," along with the romantic surrealism of lines like "If I could/ Leave my body then I would/ Bleed into a lake/ Dashing away/ Disappear" from from "Morals". These are the sentiments of early 70s NYC punk made by kids who can look back on hardcore and post-punk to add fuel to it.

There was a moment at last year's Pitchfork Festival in Chicago that crystallized part of what makes Iceage fascinating: During their set, a bass head blew, then another, and then another. This is something that would usually cause a group to apologize, or blush, or throw a tantrum. But Iceage kept playing, didn't seem to sweat it, and calmly did their thing until someone else fixed the problem. Bassist Jakob Tvilling Pless looked around and shrugged it off. Rønnenfelt also kept going. In a way, it hardly registered. (Blank Generation, indeed.) It was my favorite moment of the weekend, and the most real: Iceage are a band who do these things honestly, and without thinking too much about it, and that's a big part of their power. That they back the attitude up with songs of this quality is what makes them unstoppable on You're Nothing.

My Bloody Valentine: mbv

Mark Richardson — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0600

"When can we hear some new material?," someone asked Kevin Shields in an AOL chat interview published by the San Francisco zine Cool Beans!. "Definitely sometime this year or I'm dead..." he answered, later driving the point home with, "I really am dead if I don't get my record out this year. Nobody's threatening me, BTW I just have to."

That chat took place exactly 16 years ago tomorrow and Kevin Shields is still alive. And now, almost 22 years after My Bloody Valentine's last album, Loveless, we finally have that record. For those of us whose relationship to music and maybe even the act of hearing has been changed by Loveless, it's hard to believe. I'd grown comfortable with the idea that there would never be another My Bloody Valentine album. Even as recently as two months ago, I figured it would never happen. "But he said it was mastered," people said to me. The last time a master of an MBV album was completed it took four years for it to come out. And that was music that had already been released. An alleged master of a new release? Plenty of time to pull the plug. But no, it happened, by surprise, last Saturday night. And many 403 errors later, we finally have this thing on our hard drives. mbv. 2013. This Is Our Bloody Valentine.

Like a few people I know, I was initially afraid to listen, but there was no need to be. My Bloody Valentine have taken the precise toolkit of Loveless-- layered Fender Jaguar guitars made woozy through pedals and tremolo, hushed androgynous vocals way down in the mix-- and made another album with it, one that is stranger and darker and even harder to pin down. Where Loveless felt effortless, mbv strains, pushing at its boundaries with a sense of pensive gloom. If the guy spending all those years in the studio felt trapped by the experience, like the walls might be closing in and that he was dead if he didn't finish, the music here reflects it. mbv is an album of density with very little air or light. But it doesn't forgo the human touches that have made this band so special.

The nine-song mbv can be divided into thirds and the first three-song section, consisting of "She Found Now", "Only Tomorrow", and "Who Sees You", finds Shields exploring the untapped textural possibilities of the guitar. The last several years have been bad ones for the instrument. In independent music circles, the guitar has become synonymous with regression, a symbol used to evoke something from the past. And that might seem at first equally true here, since the tone of Shields' guitar is so clearly connected to the sounds he pioneered two decades ago. But no one believes more deeply than Kevin Shields in the expressive power of the processed guitar, and the music here turns out to be more about feeling than style.

"She Found Now" is an opener of daring subtlety, a ballad in the vein of "Sometimes" that consists mostly of deep strumming and Shields' singing in a tone near a whisper. There's a bit of percussion, a few more layers of distortion, but no announcement of anything earth-shattering or even particularly different. It's My Bloody Valentine making the kind of noises they invented and perfected. As the chords cycle through in the following "Only Tomorrow", Shields sets up a situation where the repetition and familiarity lulls you into a kind of trance and small gestures hit with great force. On "Only Tomorrow" that spine-tingling moment is a dead simple screeching high-end refrain that repeats toward the end, while on the following "Who Sees You", it's a section halfway through where a rush of trebly chords coats the entire song in another layer of textured fuzz. When it comes to Shields and guitars, the small details do a tremendous amount of work.

The second trio of songs feature the lead vocals of My Bloody Valentine singer/guitarist Bilinda Butcher. The push and pull of her singing next to Shields' is, along with the wavy "glide guitar" effect, My Bloody Valentine's other defining characteristic. Their voices are the essence of the the band's strangely androgynous and non-specific sensuality. "Is This and Yes" is just Butcher's voice and an unusual organ pattern that hangs in space at the end of the progression and never resolves itself; "New You" is the only track on the record that sounds even remotely like a single, and it shows that Shields' melodic impulses have not left him.

In another sense, "New You" points out how much has changed since MBV last released a full-length. In 1991, they were still a pop band, the kind that made videos and appeared on magazine covers and were on a fashionable record label. As such, there was at least some pressure for them to fit in, for their music to have context in the popular music landscape. So they released singles and probably hoped they'd become hits. Even if "Soon" had, as Brian Eno stated at the time, set a "new standard," that didn't change that fact that it was in fact still pop. But those days are gone. My Bloody Valentine fit in exactly nowhere and the commercial expectations of a release like mbv are minimal. Whatever the cause, mbv is the weirdest album My Bloody Valentine have made by some margin. Some of the record's otherworldly quality is up to frequency range. There's very little on this album in the treble range but there's endless detail in the bass and mid, which makes the record feel more closed in and insular. But some of it is in the arc of the record.

Through the 1990s Kevin Shields often talked about jungle, what it meant to him, and how some of the ideas behind it were making their way into a new My Bloody Valentine album. He was not alone in this, but mixing drum'n'bass' whooshing walls of percussion with oceanic shoegaze seemed a natural pairing (it was so natural, in fact, that artists like Third Eye Foundation beat Shields to the punch). Whether or not the final three songs on mbv are related to Shields' experiments of that time, on mbv, where Shields presumably had time to make the drum parts he wanted, it's clear that he doesn't really hear percussion the way most of us do. Drums are mostly distant, often muddy, serving as an underpinning or textural contrast to the guitar instead of driving the rhythm on their own. In this sense they mirror the 8-bit snatches of sound caught by crude samplers in the 90s. But since Isn't Anything, drums have been down on the list of concerns for MBV, which is one way the final third is so surprising and ultimately powerful.

"In Another Way", another Butcher lead, begins to tilt the balance between noise and melodic beauty as the tempo increases, and by the following instrumental "Nothing Is" the mood has changed considerably. A track of heavy bass drums and pounding guitar, it feels militaristic and even a touch grim, with just faint glimmers of beauty inside the barrage. And then by the final "Wonder 2" the album has become something else. This is MBV's version of an album-closing "L.A. Blues"-like Stooges freak-out, where they stop worrying about structure and fill every inch of tape with noise. The heavy flanging evokes choppers buzzing overhead, and somehow, through it all, there are wispy voices, buried and being shoved around by the din. It's a disquieting end. Where Loveless, despite its complexity, sounded as natural as breathing, mbv sounds like the product of great effort, of meticulous work to get every sound in place. And that exertion is especially apparent in the final third, as Shields tries and ultimately succeeds in taking the project somewhere it's never gone. All this work gives mbv its own quality, simultaneously intimate and detached.

Like its predecessor, mbv feels like an album in part about love, but it approaches the grandest of human emotions from an unusual angle. Kurt Cobain, another iconic songwriter of the 1990s who never got a chance to grow old and figure out how to maintain his creativity in the wake of game-changing masterpieces, had a song called "Aneurysm" and it had a refrain that went, "Love you so much, makes me sick." That's how My Bloody Valentine's deeply destabilizing queasiness, amplified here to a frightening degree, has always struck me: There's a rush of feeling inside their music so intense it creates a kind of paralysis. Music swirls and moves in and out of phase, voices float by, half memory and half anticipation, and you're never quite sure how all the parts fit together. You get lost in it, and if you're wired a certain way that mixture of desire and confusion is easy to map on to the wider world. For 22 years, the only way to get there was through Loveless and its associated EPs; now there's another path, one many of us never expected to find. That it's this successful in spite of it all is something we never had a right to expect.

Grouper: The Man Who Died in His Boat

Mark Richardson — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0600

Always different, always the same. This phrase was used by the late John Peel to describe his favorite band, the Fall. His observation about the Fall captures a broader idea about music fandom, describing what it's like to follow along with a gifted artist who has created her own style but is no hurry to move outside of it. Always different, always the same. It's a phrase that comes to mind for me when I listen to the charred ambient music of Liz Harris' Grouper. Her body of work is of a piece. She layers ethereal vocals that feel less like floating in the clouds and more like sinking into the dark earth, possibly while inside of a coffin; her music is a downcast mix of strummed acoustic guitar and defiantly analog sounding drone and noise-makers. With this small clutch of elements, she's made more than a half-dozen full-lengths and a number of singles and EPs, all of which sound like they could come from no one else. Indeed, the distinctiveness of Grouper is easy to take for granted. There are so many people making music that could fall under the broad heading of "dream pop," but nobody sounds like Grouper.

There is one record in the Grouper catalog that, while certainly cut from the same frayed cloth, stands just slightly outside of the rest. Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, first released in 2008, mostly forgoes the drones and minimalist experiments of her other work and focuses on Harris' voice and strummed guitar. It's her "folk" record, in a way, even though it slots in easily next to her more drawn-out and noisy releases. It is also her best album, a classic of subtly devastating songwriting (it's also an album Pitchfork initially underrated). Around the same time she was recording Deer, Harris cut a handful of songs in a similar vein for a planned album that was never released. Five years on comes The Man Who Died in the Boat, a companion record to Deer (which Kranky is also reissuing on vinyl) that shares many of its characteristics and essential appeal.

Grouper's most obvious contemporary is Julianna Barwick, but while the latter's music has a certain formality and sense of communal ritual, Grouper is disconcertingly interior, as if you're listening in on something private. That feeling is reinforced by the more abstract moments here, which often feel like something tinkered with over many hours in a dark room. The opening "6" finds Harris' voice on a damaged tape, bubbling up from the depths and mixing with swirls of feedback. The haunted "Vanishing Point" consists only of warbly metallic pings over a deep bed of tape hiss. The instrumental interludes aren't necessarily much to listen to on their own (and Harris' personal stamp on them is not as strong), but they do serve a purpose on the album, mixing up the flow of acoustic songs that might otherwise start to bleed together. But placed in relief by the abstracted bits, the individual character of the acoustic songs becomes apparent.

Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill had one of the more striking album covers in recent memory. It's a photo of Harris as a small child, wearing heavy makeup and a black dress that could look like a witch's costume. Though she doesn't generally seem interested in conveying the exact meaning of her songs and leaves a certain amount of that to the listener, the unsettling side of childhood innocence is a pervasive theme in her music. On the best of the songs here, like "Clouds in Places", the title track, "Cover the Long Way", Harris sounds very much like she's taking sing-song rhymes from childhood and running them through a cracked and ashen filter. They radiate a beauty that is simultaneously light and dark, with bright melodies draped with the inevitability of death.

The title of this release extends that idea, alluding to a scene from Harris' childhood where she and her father came upon an empty boat that drifted to shore after the person in it disappeared. It's one of those flashes from long ago that stays with you, an early brush with the idea of mortality at a time when you're not capable of understanding exactly what it means. That sense of confusion, the difficulty of processing and articulation, seems built into Grouper's art. Talking to people about her music, people who are typically ready to share half-formed opinions about music of any kind, I find they often have trouble coming up with words; when it really hits, as it often does here, the music of Grouper creates a feeling that can only be defined as awe, an uncanny mixture of wonder and dread that nobody does better.

Foxygen: We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic

Jayson Greene — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0600

Before you play a note, your band begins as a series of decisions: Which bands inspire us? Who do we want to sound like? What are we going to call ourselves? These early triangulations often lead to everything else falling into place: bass lines, vocal affectations, guitar tones, production, album-art style. They say a lot about the band you intend to become. Sam France and Jonathan Rado, a duo from L.A., decided at some point that they would be called Foxygen. Yes, they were still in high school at the time. But when you pair that name with the unwieldy title We Are The 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic, you get a certain picture: goofily endearing, kid-brother types, the kind of guys who will probably embarrass you in public if you let them. Which makes the assured and witty We Are that much more surprising.

France and Rado have been playing together for years, and they've apparently spent that time working through their relationships to their record collections. Faced with the terrifying bounty of the rock menu on their 2012 EP Take The Kids Off Broadway, they seemingly shut their eyes and ordered everything at once: The songs stumbled through styles like there was a demented drill-sergeant producer in the background yelling, "OK now, Memphis soul! Now, when I say, Merseybeat-era Beatles! GO!"

We Are, by contrast, has more poise, rifling with effortless cool through retro-rock quotes and mannerisms-- France's gulps and sobs draw directly from the Mick Jagger of "Let's Spend the Night Together" at one moment and channel the thousand-ton boredom of Lou Reed the next. Meandering organ pokes through on "No Destruction"; flecks of "Under My Thumb"-style guitars pop up on "On Blue Mountain". In the lovely "San Francisco", France paints the city as a place where "the forest meets the bridge," and the grass scent of the Kinks' We Are the Village Green Preservation Society wafts by (even their album title is an echo of that one). Having a great record collection and having some idea what to do with it are two different things, and on We Are The Ambassadors Foxygen have internalized enough of the music they love to start toying with it.

As you spend more time with We Are, you begin to notice some of that playfulness manifesting itself, like the pitched-down vocals counting in the opening of "On Blue Mountain", a song that rattles through multiple tempo and key changes without seeming disjointed. The warbly "Oh Yeah" can't seem to decide what kind of homage it is, veering between a yearning Captain Fantastic falsetto chorus, Blood Sweat & Tears symphonic soul, and an "aww-yeah" breakdown that is a near-direct quote of "Mr. Big Stuff". The echoes are blurred further by producer Richard Swift, a talented singer-songwriter with a meticulous ear for period detail. He follows the band's songwriting cues wherever they lead, and Ambassadors seems to be reporting from three simultaneous decades of rock history.

France, meanwhile, has become a sharp storyteller and lyricist, reeling off lines that feel like insults even if you can't parse them: "I caught you sipping milkshakes in the parlor of the hotel," he yawns on "No Destruction", before delivering the piercingly direct (and already heavily quoted) stinger "There's no need to be an asshole, you're not in Brooklyn anymore." On "Shuggie", he sighs "I met your daughter the other day, that was weird/ She had rhinoceros-shaped earrings in her ears," an arresting image that in context evokes an odd sense of sadness. The call-and-response chorus of "San Francisco"-- "I left my love in San Francisco/ (That's okay, I was born in L.A.)"-- hits like a joke even if the target isn't clear.

Slipped between the air quotes are proclamations that ring with personal truth: "We can live on blue mountain like livin' in a sunset/ We can live honestly and true," goes the chorus to "On Blue Mountain". On "Shuggie", France sings "If you believe in yourself, you can free your soul." He sings it in a warbly, affected voice, pulling a face at the sentiment slightly, a trick he repeats at the album's coda, where he keens in an off-key choirboy voice: "If you believe in love/ Everything you see is love/ So try to be what God wants you to be/ And say that I love you/ Again." It's one thing to give your band and your album a silly name, and to play dress-up with rock history while tweaking the formula. It's another thing entirely to mean it; the more time you spend with Ambassadors, the more clearly that commitment and joy comes through.

Burial: Truant / Rough Sleeper

Mark Richardson — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0600

From the time of his first single in 2005 until he revealed his identity in August 2008, Burial maintained a carefully cultivated anonymity, arguably inventing the idea of the unknown but well-branded producer in the age of too much information. After the release of the landmark Untrue in 2007, Burial went quiet for almost two years. There was a lot of talk then about where his music might go next, about whether there was anywhere left for it to go. It's become a familiar problem in electronic music: when you create and own a sound completely, how do you continue to grow? Does growth matter? Until his first 12" collaboration with Four Tet in 2009, it seemed like the man born William Bevan might just avoid addressing the question at all. The steady series of collaborative and solo 12"s he's released since are an inspiring example of how to re-draw the borders of one's aesthetic. He's still Burial, and he still owns this sound, but he's slowly and surely expanding the idea of what Burial means.

Bevan has accomplished this, in part, through his creative use of the 12" format. If Untrue was an album that sometimes felt like a single masterful song, Burial's best work since consists of long tracks that feel like miniature albums. "Truant", the A-side of his latest 12", is nearly 12 minutes long and unfolds in distinct sections that, taken together, form a riveting narrative. The track immediately establishes itself as prototypical Burial: It moves from a brief opening drone to the familiar clattering snare; the crackles, the mournful synths, and the brief vocal sample are all there. Then, the idea of "prototypical Burial" is taken on a journey. Four minutes in, the tempo and rhythm shifts completely, the vocals change, and the mood moves away from bleary contemplation towards sharp-edged anxiety. When garbled orchestral samples enter in the final third, Burial is exploring completely new territory with fanfare-like music that feels almost celebratory. This is not the stuff of empty 5 a.m. streets, the echoing sense of comedown and loss. The music feels deep and wide and grand, and yet it still sounds like no one else. "Truant" is the Burial track as wide-ranging suite, and the progression from Untrue's "Archangel" to here is staggering.

The B-side, "Rough Sleeper", covers just as much territory. Shifting into an up-tempo beat, the track folds in organ chords, pitch-shifted vocals, and, ultimately, a repeating music-box refrain that sounds like a bummed-out and broken version of a Latin-inflected piano refrain from a house track. The word "soulful" means different things to different people, but this earns that designation; there's a touch of gospel warmth to it, something that feels even optimistic. Usually, when Burial samples a voice saying something like, "There's a light surrounding you," it sounds like a dying memory. Here, it sounds like an acknowledgement of the glory of the here-and now. "Rough Sleeper"'s emotional world is quite different from that of "Truant"; where the latter feels deep and wide, it oozes intimacy.

Truant/Rough Sleeper doesn't have the intensity of last year's Kindred EP, and it leans closer to the classic Burial sound, but its subtlety is its own reward. Who knows if or when a full-length follow-up to Untrue will arrive, but as long as Bevan continues to release smaller missives of this quality, it hardly matters. Taken together, this 12" and the Kindred EP are roughly the same length as Untrue; the form and content are in perfect sync.

A$AP Rocky: LongLiveA$AP

Jayson Greene — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0600

A few months ago, A$AP Rocky's career seemed mired in purgatory. The 24-year-old Harlem rapper had a spectacular 2011, snagging a still-crazy $3 million deal with RCA based on early buzz and then silencing skeptics with his breakout LiveLoveA$AP mixtape. But throughout 2012, LongLiveA$AP repeatedly failed to materialize. It was slated for July 4th, then September 11th, October 31, and eventually, sometime in December. When the final pushback happened, into the dead zone just after the new year, it began to feel like RCA was attempting to quietly jettison their investment from the corporate hull.

But LongLiveA$AP delivers on and even exceeds the promise of LiveLoveA$AP. Like that mixtape, the album is a triumph of craft and curation, preserving Rocky's immaculate taste while smartly upgrading his sound. A third of the record remains close in style to LiveLoveA$AP while most of the collaborations follow in the steps of last spring's "Goldie", which stamped producer Hit-Boy's signature Mini-Boss Musik with a screwed-up hook and gumball-spitting flow that marked it as unmistakably Rocky's. Plenty of rap-industry heavies appear on LongLiveA$AP, and they mix well with Rocky's younger comrades. More importantly, the French-braid gold-teeth kid named after Rakim never cedes the center. For someone often criticized for his lack of depth, A$AP Rocky keeps delivering in the face of skepticism.

Even the most dubious ideas succeed on LongLiveA$AP. For example, A$AP Rocky's team-up with Skrillex, "Wild for the Night", bombs your cortex with screaming lasers, stadium-sized reverb, and a reggae-derived organ lope, and the beat feels like being on the receiving end of a perfectly executed Tekken chain combo. It seems like it should be impossible to rap over, but Rocky’s sweat-free double-dutch is an easy fit. Santigold handles the chorus hook on “Hell”, one of two Clams Casino beats on the album, and it feels just as unforced.

A$AP Rocky sounds natural in every setting; along with his command of rhythm and cadence, this is his greatest gift. Whether he's showing off double- and triple-time bounce in the T-Minus-produced "PMW (All I Really Need)" or dodging RZA-styled string chops on "1 Train" alongside a collision of hot rappers including Action Bronson, Big K.R.I.T., and Kendrick Lamar, Rocky sounds utterly at home. Even when he stomps through a queasy Odd Future-style battlefield on “Jodye”, he fully owns the mold. That kind of malleability is crucial to pop stardom, and make no mistake, pop stardom is what Rocky's gunning for. His lyrics, a riot of lifestyle brands and other desirables, can feel like standing in front of a closet of prohibitively expensive designer goods: There isn't much to feel unless you consider "like three million bucks" a feeling. But besides the Girbaud jeans with hologram straps and reflectors, the Margielas with no laces, the Escada and Balenciaga and Audemars Piguet, there's a lot going on in Rocky's head.

Late-album track "Suddenly" bears a co-producing credit from "Lord Flacko," aka Rocky himself. In it, a drumless vocal sample fights its way to the surface through layers of aquatic muffling, teasing a titanic beat-drop that keeps not arriving. The song is almost all intro: When the beat finally hits, it only lingers for a few bars before disappearing again. Over this master class in tension and release, Rocky summons childhood memories in calm, expansive strokes: "Everybody have roaches, but our roaches ain't respect us," he cracks, flashing a previously unseen storytelling flair: "We had cookouts and dirt bikes and dice games and fist fights/ And fish fries and shootouts like one Sig with two rounds/ In one clip, left two down, that's four kids/ But one lived, left three dead but one split/ That one missed, that one snitched." The song is a forceful reminder of his birthplace and heritage.

Rocky’s New York story has partly been a story of how there is no coherent New York story anymore: Bay Area rappers like the Jacka convincingly channel the gray Queensbridge fatalism of Mobb Deep and Cormega while in Harlem, Rocky soaked up styles happening hundreds of miles away-- Houston screw music, UGK, Bone Thugs. But beneath the 90s-baby trappings, Rocky is a certain breed of Harlem rapper incarnate-- flashy, ambitious, and affably determined to cross over. The flamboyance and singsong rhyme patterns of the Diplomats are an obvious primary color. But reaching further back, to another Harlemite with a deceptively catchy flow, agreeable air, and penchant for colorful clothing, and you find another kindred spirit in Ma$e. Like Ma$e, Rocky tucks steely edges behind a goofy smile. He has the same unerring instinct for balancing pop smarts and street edge and a similar disregard for New York orthodoxy. He’s also consistently dismissed as a lightweight. It's true, Rocky may not be the answer to New York rap's savior complex. But he is undeniably a hit-maker and a major new rap star for a city that sorely needs one. And with LongLiveA$AP, he's beaten expectations twice.

Mac DeMarco: 2

Sam Hockley-Smith — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Making honest art can be terrifying; with 2, Montreal-based Mac DeMarco's second release this year, it feels like he's jumping into the deep end. On DeMarco's other 2012 record, the EP Rock and Roll Night Club, he tinkered with yacht rock, AM radio gold, and Bowie-like glam. The mixture injected an unsettling sleaziness into a funny, occasionally creepy collection of songs that walked the line between irony and sincerity.

In contrast, 2 goes right for the gut. DeMarco writes about life-- both the heavy moments and the mundane ones-- with economy and newfound grace. He's still not entirely upfront, but he has a knack for building songs where the realness of his subject matter lies just below the surface. In a Pitchfork guest list from earlier in October, DeMarco cites Jonathan Richman as a role model, mostly because he felt that Richman had "a very enjoyable time his whole life." Richman is an expert at writing entire worlds into his songs, an approach that DeMarco nails on 2.

Opening track "Cooking Up Something Good" is a strong example of his approach. A loose instrumental vamp slides into a greasy guitar line, as his laconic, sleepy voice delivers subtly heartbreaking observations. "Mommy's in the kitchen, cooking up something good/ And daddy's on the sofa, pride of the neighborhood". When the chorus comes in ("Oh, when life moves this slowly/ Oh, just try and let it go"), it's blindsiding, and his sense of defeat is palpable.

As the song progresses it becomes clear that what initially felt like an ode to the frustrating teenage days of struggling against your suburban surroundings is actually about a father figure manufacturing drugs in the basement. "Cooking Up Something Good" is about boredom and sadness and our skewed perception of time, but it's also about family secrets and how we construct emotional escape hatches to get away from the inescapable realities of blood ties. This careful world-building continues across the entire album, sometimes with a lighter touch. DeMarco's thinly veiled honesty shows up prominently on "Ode to Viceroy" where, over an unsettling guitar flange that fizzles into a flat shimmer, he sings about how much he loves smoking cigarettes. His voice skirts the edge of disinterest, but never quite gets there.

After spending time with 2, DeMarco's vocal deadpan starts to sound weary and wise. On "My Kind of Woman", he effectively makes a prom love song that will never get played at any actual prom-- it oozes beautifully simple and direct sentiment: "You're my kind of woman/ And I'm down on my hands and knees begging you please, baby, show me your world." That last line, "show me your world," returns to the concept that DeMarco and the people he sings about are all living, breathing entities, not blank slates to project emotion on. When they're gone from DeMarco's life, they still exist. It doesn't really get more honest than that.

Andy Stott: Luxury Problems

Mark Richardson — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Andy Stott took his time getting here. The Manchester producer spent a good part of the last decade turning out solid tracks under his own name and under the alias Andrea. Though he always returned to dub techno, he flirted with a range of genres, from juke to house to dubstep, and some of his music was very good. But Stott never quite zeroed in on a unique voice. That changed in 2011 with the release of two short albums, Passed Me By and We Stay Together. Stott left behind the quicker tempos of dance proper, and slowing down allowed him to sink deeper into his music, where he found a new world of atmosphere and texture. Passed and Stay were heavy records that highlighted something new about the expressive power of bass. Dub techno, stretching back to its origins with the early-1990s Berlin project Basic Channel, tends to view the low end as a mysterious black sludge. Where bass in Skrillex-style EDM is a precision weapon, with drops punctuating the tracks and jacking up the mood in an instant, the bottom octave in dub techno is more of an enveloping presence. It's murkier, more oppressive, colder, something you wade through and push against. Which is why the inertia of the relentless 4/4 beat signifies energy whatever the tempo.

On his two 2011 releases, Stott found an unusual musicality in deep, foreboding bass. His music throbbed with the sooty remnants of industry and had obvious appeal for those interested in dark ambiance of any stripe; its all-consuming nature gave him a new audience beyond the realm of dance music. With his new album, Luxury Problems, he adds a few more wrinkles, and his music has become simultaneously more complex and more accessible. Working with operatically trained vocalist Alison Skidmore (Stott met her as a student when she taught him piano), he's humanized his sound, made it more beautiful and richer on the surface while further accentuating its dark heart. The new dynamic leads to another big leap forward for the producer.

Skidmore's voice is a versatile instrument in its own right, but Stott's looping and processing gives it even more flexibility. Though Luxury Problems has a consistent overall mood, the feel and structure of the individual tracks vary quite a bit, and the pieces featuring Skidmore find her singing pulled into all kinds of interesting shapes. The album opens with her in her most glassy and ethereal, as repetitions of her singing a single word, "touch," float through space like soap bubbles. The "ch" phoneme is looped and becomes the hi-hat on the track, and gradually the sounds assemble themselves into a ghosted version of a conventional dance rhythm. But when Stott's machine bass pulse enters just under halfway through, we realize we're in for a world of serious contrasts: "Numb" is delicate and gorgeous but has an undercurrent of menace, and the tension between these qualities is the record's essence.

If "Numb" is Skidmore at her most spectral, "Hatch the Plan" finds her sounding more grounded, almost in the mode of a singer-songwriter. The choral-like layering on "Plan" brings to mind School of Seven Bells and even Throwing Muses. But it's the longest track on the record and is purely instrumental-- mostly a deeply unsettling mix of bass churn and machine noises-- for its first two minutes. That it moves from pure soundscape to something close to a proper song is further evidence of Stott's confidence; none of these tracks feel like they have to be any one thing, they're always growing and changing and defying expectations.

"Lost and Found" has a similarly melodic approach, unspooling in a Middle Eastern mode and bringing to mind Dead Can Dance at their most subtle. We can hear Stott drawing lines between 4AD-style gothic new wave and dub techno, building bridges between sounds and ideas based on his understanding of the elements and moods that connect them. Elsewhere, on "Expecting", he goes further into abstraction, constructing an intensely dark and ominous atmosphere that bring to mind the ice-cold isolationist drone of Thomas Köner. The excavation of electronic music history takes a more unusual turn on "Up the Box", which plays with a snippet of what sounds like the "Amen" break. But the familiar splash of jungle snares and cymbals is transformed by Stott into something of his own own, as he mixes the tricky rhythms with his now undeniable bass signature, a groaning maw flecked with distortion that feels like it's rattling everything within earshot. Stott has a rare ability to pull sounds from different places and fit them into his album conception.

Two records from the past offer antecedents for Stott's breakthrough: Luomo's Vocalcity and Burial's Untrue. It's not that Luxury Problems sounds like either of these releases-- the mood and textures are vastly different in each case. But there's a spiritual connection between the three, all of which found producers working within the confines of a specific genre of electronic music discovering a way to turn their music inside and out and broaden its appeal through the manipulated voice. But if Vocalcity was a digital refraction of house music and Untrue took early UK dubstep as a jumping-off point to express post-club emptiness and yearning, Luxury Problems is more internally focused, an evocative and immersive soundtrack for a sustained look within. It's the headphones album of the year from a producer with a long history who has come into his own.

Kendrick Lamar: good kid, m.A.A.d city

Jayson Greene — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The first sound we hear on good kid, m.A.A.d. city is a prayer: "Thank you, Lord Jesus, for saving us with your precious blood," voices murmur, evoking a family dinner gathering. The album's cover art, a grubby Polaroid, provides a visual prompt for the scene: Baby Kendrick dangles off an uncle's knee in front of a squat kitchen table displaying a 40-ounce and Lamar's baby bottle. The snapshot is such an unvarnished peek into the rapper's inner life that staring at it for too long feels almost invasive. This autobiographical intensity is the album's calling card. Listening to it feels like walking directly into Lamar's childhood home and, for the next hour, growing up alongside him.

Lamar has subtitled the record "A Short Film by Kendrick Lamar", and the comparison rings true: You could take the album's outline and build a set for a three-act play. It opens on a 17-year-old Kendrick "with nothing but pussy stuck on my mental," driving his mother's van to see a girl named Sherane. As his voice darts and halts in a rhythm that mimics his over-eager commute, Lamar explores the furtiveness of young lust: "It's deep-rooted, the music of being young and dumb," he raps. The song is interrupted by the first of several voice mail recordings that delineate the album's structure: Kendrick's mother, rambling into his phone and pleading for him to return her car. These voicemails appear through the record, reinforcing that good kid, m.A.A.d city is partly a love letter to the grounding power of family. In this album's world, family and faith are not abstract concepts: They are the fraying tethers holding Lamar back from the chasm of gang violence that threatens to consume him.

All this weighty material might make good kid, m.A.A.d city sound like a bit of a drag. But the miracle of this album is how it ties straightforward rap thrills-- dazzling lyrical virtuosity, slick quotables, pulverizing beats, star turns from guest rappers-- directly to its narrative. For example, when "Backseat Freestyle" leaked last week, its uncharacteristic subject matter ("All my life I want money and power/ Respect my mind or die from lead shower") took some fans by surprise. But on the album, it marks the moment in the narrative when young Kendrick's character first begins rapping, egged on by a friend who plugs in a beat CD. Framed this way, his "damn, I got bitches" chant gets turned inside out: This isn't an alpha male's boast. It's a pipsqueak's first pass at a chest-puff. It's also a monster of a radio-ready single, with Kendrick rapping in three voices (in double- and triple-time, no less) over an insane Hit-Boy beat.

Lamar grew up in Compton, and ghosts of West Coast gangsta-rap haunt this album's edges, casting shadows on Kendrick's complicated relationship with his hometown. When "The Art of Peer Pressure" brings Kendrick and his friends to Rosecrans Ave., the music downshifts into menacing G-funk mode as a salute to hallowed ground. Ice Cube’s “Bird in the Hand” is invoked to set up “m.A.A.d city” (“Fresh of out school, 'cause I was a high-school grad..."), which appropriately marks the moment when real violence erupts. Here, Kendrick sounds like a terrified kid: "I made a promise to see you bleeding," he raps, his voice pitched at a pleading, near-hysterical sob. In response, the voice of Compton's Most Wanted rapper MC Eiht leers, "Wake yo' punk ass up," like a father figure of the Darth Vader variety.

Which brings us to the album's most visible benefactor and most unsettled presence: Dr. Dre. In recent months, Dre has availed himself of the fresh-career oxygen Kendrick's rise has pumped into his atmosphere, lumbering out of his corporate airlock to stand with Lamar on magazine covers. But the role he plays in Lamar's story feels muddled and unresolved. On an album that manages to seamlessly work a smirking Drake and a highly recognizable Janet Jackson sample ("Poetic Justice") into the fabric of a larger narrative, it is only Dre's appearance, on the final track "Compton", that feels like an uneasy outlier.

"Compton" is the victory lap, the coronation. Coming after the stunning 12-minute denouement "Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst", in which Lamar delivers a verse from a peripheral character that is the album's most dazzling stroke of empathy, it can't help but be a small deflation. The moment of arrival in any artist's story is always less interesting than their journey, and there's a disconnect in hearing Lamar and Dre stunt over Just Blaze's blaring orchestral-soul beat. Dre's music is part of the landscape that Kendrick grew up in but his actual appearance has a certain Truman Show feel to it.

But the true ending of good kid, m.A.A.d. city takes place at the end of the previous song, "Real", which represents the spiritual victory that the album's story has thrashed its way towards. Finally grasping that "none of that shit"-- money, power, respect, loving your block-- "make me real," Lamar embraces what does, as his parents put the album's central concerns to bed: "Any nigga can kill a man," his father admonishes. "That don't make you a real nigga. Real is responsibility. Real is taking care of your motherfucking family." And his mother: "If I don't hear from you by tomorrow, I hope you come back and learn from your mistakes. Come back a man... Tell your story to these black and brown kids in Compton... When you do make it, give back with your words of encouragement. And that's the best way to give back to your city. And I love you, Kendrick."

Bat For Lashes: The Haunted Man

Marc Hogan — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Natasha Khan has said her third album as Bat for Lashes is partly inspired by studying her own family history. This is informative. Her father, a trainer for the Pakistani national squash team, left suddenly when she was 11, and his departure casts a shadow on the fairytale drama of Bat for Lashes' debut, 2006's Fur and Gold. Yeah, but one of the guys Khan's dad coached? Her cousin, Jahangir Khan? He went on to become a six-time world champion and basically his sport's equivalent of a Pelé or Michael Jordan. You don't need Natasha's Ancestry.com password to know there's competitive drive in her blood.

That's her up there in The Haunted Man cover art. Naked, un-retouched, and un-made-up, with a similarly naked man draped around her shoulders. The suggestion is that her follow-up to 2009's lavishly sensual Two Suns is more intimate and stripped bare, and sure enough, there's less reverb on Khan's voice, and the lyrical concerns have moved from an otherworldly New York to the English countryside. But what the Ryan McGinley-shot art most closely shares with the music you'll find within is that it's at once striking and enigmatic-- and artfully constructed.

Some albums sound effortless. The Haunted Man sounds like effort magnificently realized. The rawness of feeling is achieved through equally raw ambition. Bat for Lashes' sophisticated blend of art-rock grandeur and synth-pop directness again carries echoes of 1980s luminaries like Kate Bush and the Cure, gleaming with autoharp, Abbey Road-recorded strings, and a continuing exploration of electronics. Spacious, boldly orchestrated, and emotionally rich, Khan's latest is another step forward for the multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter, and one of the year's most beguiling albums.

Two Suns' sublime, Karate Kid-nodding "Daniel" won Britain's Ivor Novello songwriting award. The potential hits here are just as overpowering. "Let's Get Lost", the sumptuous slab of goth-bubblegum Khan did with Beck for 2011's Twilight: Eclipse OST, was a promising sign of what to expect. On slinky, guitar-centric "All Your Gold", Khan is the one who's haunted, but it only takes a few listens before Gotye's awfully similar smash sounds fleshless in comparison. "Marilyn" adapts the 1950s matinee-idolatry of Lana Del Rey to a dream-pop production worthy of its "silver screen," with a staggering, spectral bridge-- and several instrumental contributions from Beck (plus arranging by ex-Ash member Charlotte Hatherley).

Though sometimes over-reaching, the less likely singles here are as darkly enigmatic, sonically curious, and thematically textured as their equivalents on Two Suns. The centerpiece is the title track, with its "Scarborough Fair"-tinged male choir marching up that distant hill. "Yes, your ghosts have got me, too/ But it's me and you," Khan replies, summing up the album's main conceit: the way previous experiences can twist our current relationships. On M83-gauzy, Dave Sitek-assisted opener "Lilies", though, "the figure of a man" answers a life-affirming, womanly prayer. Druid-like male voices on "Oh Yeah" introduce the poised yet passionate exultation of a narrator "in bloom." As on the album cover, Khan's music can acknowledge the female body without reducing it to sex-kitten cliché.

In fact, if the last album was about contrasts-- between two suns, two lovers, even two sides of the narrator's persona-- then The Haunted Man is defined by balance, between the bare and the polished, between the communal and the personal, and between the respective ghosts haunting our personal interactions. Compromises can lead to breakthroughs: "Where you see a wall, I see a door," Khan sings on "A Wall", another Sitek-backed, baroque synth-pop anthem. By the restrained yet intricate closing lullaby "Deep Sea Diver", which meets the bar set by Two Suns' collaborative finale with famously reclusive crooner Scott Walker, Khan finds a compromise for two people separated by masks: "Darling if you can't see out/ You know that I can hear you shout." They're together, alone, shaking through.

The most overtly naked track here, "Laura", is also the most transcendent. With a gently orchestra-kissed piano-and-voice arrangement, this goosebump-inducing collaboration with the former Lizzy Grant's "Video Games" co-writer Justin Parker is the clearest example of how Bat for Lashes perches on the fulcrum between indie-associated sincerity and pop-oriented savvy. We'll never know Laura, really, but we can feel what it might be like to know her. On an album with more names in the credits than Khan could ever use for song titles (also including Portishead's Adrian Utley, among many others), the greatest testament to her strength of will might be just this: She has added a new unforgettable character to pop's family tree.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!

Mark Richardson — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Around the turn of the millennium, Godspeed You! Black Emperor were the right band at the right time. They arrived with their debut album, F#A#∞, in 1997, when the speed of technology was accelerating, genres were being shuffled, and people were thinking about where music might go. Godspeed, a loose and mysterious collective from Canada (guitarist Efrim Menuck seemed like the leader, but they preferred to be received as a unit) with an anarchist political bent who fused Ennio Morricone, minimalism, found sound, and metal-inflected noise, presented one intriguing possibility.

The group stayed busy during its initial run-- by 2002, when they released Yanqui U.X.O., they had put out three expansive full-lengths and a long EP-- and then they put Godspeed on the shelf and went away for a while. If they'd never gotten back together and had never released another note of music, it wouldn't have mattered. Their legacy was secure. But Godspeed started playing live again in 2010 and, just as it was when they first came on the scene, they filled a hole in music that we either didn't know existed or had forgotten about. Then, two weeks ago, came the surprise announcement of a new album, Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!, their first in exactly 10 years. Once again, their timing is impeccable. If Godspeed around the turn of the millennium felt like a band of the moment, now, in a time of rapid cultural turnover and bite-sized music consumption, they feel out of step in a very necessary way.

It's tempting to look at Allelujah! through the lens of politics, especially since Godspeed themselves have so often encouraged this viewpoint. When we last heard from them on record, it was a year after 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan was well underway, and the war in Iraq was just around the corner. We were settling into a decade that was, from an American perspective, defined by two wars started by an increasingly unpopular president and an inflating economic bubble that would pop just as he was leaving office. Their music and presentation drew some of its energy from this anxiety. So listening to new music from Godspeed now-- during an election season, when the wars and the aftermath of that economy are still being argued every day by two presidential candidates grappling with the legacy of the early 2000s-- you can't help but allow the political moment to shape how it's heard.

But the focus on the band's politics obscures something important: Godspeed You! Black Emperor are making art, not writing editorials. And the fact that they are making art gives them leeway to do things that wouldn't work in the context of pure rhetoric. It allows them to find magnificence in destruction and build an aesthetic out of decay and loss. So for all their political slogans, pointed titles, and references to global doom, engagement with Godspeed's music can feel exceedingly personal. When listening to their music, I'm not necessarily thinking about the downtrodden transcending their place in the capitalist hierarchy or the end of the world; I'm thinking about the idea of transcendence, the raw grace of noise, and the tragedy of endings. Godspeed's music works so brilliantly because it can be abstracted and scaled, blown up into an edifice that towers over a continent or shrunk down to something that feels at home in a bedroom. So mapping the contours of their grand music onto your own ordinary life can feel both natural and inspiring.

The two lengthy tracks on Allelujah!, "Mladic" and "We Drift Like Worried Fire", have been part of the band's live repertoire since 2003. So the record feels in one sense like Godspeed taking care of unfinished business, presenting existing music from their influential run in a context that showcases its full force and power. Taken together, those tracks serve as a 40-minute summary of everything that made this band great. "Mladic" is all gloom and menace, building from an opening vocal snippet, adding pings of guitar, strings that saw away in a Middle Eastern mode, and dark clouds of feedback. This is the Godspeed that learned so much from the pummeling repetition of Swans and the fiendish drama of metal. There's not exactly hope in a track like "Mladic", but there is a kind of darkly shaded catharsis. Godspeed have never sounded quite this heavy, and it's especially impressive in how far it can veer from the themes that hold it together without losing the thread.

"We Drift Like Worried Fire" is the flip-side of "Mladic", both literally and figuratively. For all their grim black-and-white roadside imagery and scenes of destruction, it can be easy to overlook just how joyful Godspeed's music can be. Built around a simple guitar motif consisting of just a few notes, "Worried Fire" is one of those accruing pieces that gathers one element after another for 10 minutes until it's so gorgeous you almost can't take it. And at exactly that moment, Godspeed pause and then push the music over the top with an explosion of guitar that snaps everything that came before into focus. "Worried Fire" is music that makes you forget about politics and the machinations of the record business and the bullshit of internet chatter and brings you into singularity with the sheer beauty of their sound, music to make you cry with a smile on your face. When it's playing, the rest of the world goes away for 20 minutes.

"Worried Fire" is also the kind of song that Godspeed's early peers (Mogwai, Dirty Three) as well as the bands that followed (Explosions in the Sky, Mono) write with some regularity, but they never quite hit these heights. Godspeed have always been about more than volume, more than just addition and subtraction. And if Yanqui found them getting a little too close to their descendants, Allelujah! makes clear that Godspeed will always own this sound. Few can match their feel for arrangement or sense of structure. And the two shorter tracks on this album, "Their Helicopters' Sing" and "Strung Like Lights at Thee Printemps Erable", are evidence of their infallible ear for texture. They're both rich, dense drones, "Helicopter" an especially thick mix of feedback and accordion while "Strung Like Lights" is airier and more unstable, not unlike the locked groove that came at the second side of their debut F#A#∞.

In one of the many inserts that came with the vinyl version of that debut, there's a diagram that takes the form of an architectural blueprint. It's called "Faulty Schematics of Ruined Machine [to Scale]" and it contains a drawing with four axes marked as Fear, Hope, Desire, and Regret and text describing elements of the diagram in cryptic and desperate language. One paragraph highlights a drawing of a tape loop connected between a distant satellite and a broken tape machine, a loop "so long it was rocketed thru atmosphere by wigged-out Soviet Cosmonaut... it will take three lifetimes to hear in its entirety." Godspeed use tape loops, both live and on record, and the key visual element of their shows involves the projection of 16mm film loops by collective member Karl Lemieux. For this band, there's always been something appealing about repeating cycles and rituals-- sounds and images that vanish over the horizon and then come back around again, like the trains that roll by their practice space at Hotel 2 Tango. Planets orbit, people are born and die, and music has a moment and then vanishes before returning again. And so it goes with Allelujah!, an album of music that is both new and old from a band that we thought we might never hear from again, one we should appreciate while we can.

Converge: All We Love We Leave Behind

Brandon Stosuy — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The brilliant hardcore band Converge have been around a long time, though you might not guess it from the manic energy crammed into their eighth album, All We Love We Leave Behind. If you go beyond the amped, break-neck intensity and listen to the compositions, it becomes clear the Boston band is nearing the 25-year mark: You don't just show up and write songs like this.

One of the quartet's not-so-secret weapons is Kurt Ballou, the guitarist (and backing vocalist, bassist, keyboardist, etc.), who happens to be one of the most well-regarded engineers in heavy music and an endless tinkerer who'd build a snare from scratch if it meant getting the sound he needed. The central core of vocalist/in-house artist Jacob Bannon and Ballou-- along with bassist Nate Newton and drummer Ben Koller, who both joined in 1999-- have been together long enough to know each other very well, and to play almost entirely to their own strengths. As such, there's never a dull moment across AWLWLB's 38 minutes. It's all peaks.

The record is the logical followup to 2009's Axe to Fall, my favorite record that year. Axe included a large supporting cast of friends and fellow travelers from Cave In, Disfear, Genghis Tron, the Red Chord, and Neurosis. It ended with a seven-minute song that seemed to include them all. When I spoke with Converge frontman Jacob Bannon a few weeks ago about AWLWLB, he said Axe to Fall had been the "collaborative concept taken to the extreme." This time, it's just the band and the watchful ear of Ballou. As Bannon put it, "There's no artificial distortion, triggers, or Auto-Tune on this album. It's all organic, it's real sounds that capture the way the band performs live."

From opener (and first single) "Aimless Arrow" onward, the music here is mostly fast, compact, and coiled. That's Converge in general, but they've distilled the elements to even tauter extremes this time. The technical mastery is mind-blowing, as is the way they manage to squeeze in brutal melodies and hooks. The vocal lines seem to be woven into the guitars, to which they've also added a bluesier feel, a detail that reminds me of the classic post-Negative Approach Touch and Go band Laughing Hyenas-- or even the Jesus Lizard. It's a streamlined, live-sounding collection that can feel like one giant kick to the head. But they know when to give, take, and plop in a slow-grind blues riff. Tracks overlap and echo. When they slow things down to a momentary crawl with the album's longest song, the five-minute doom ballad "Coral Blue", it's like a chair's been pulled out from behind you. You get that in the middle of the two-minute "Empty on the Inside" as well as the instrumental "Precipice", an interstitial piece with piano, clean guitars, psychedelic soloing guitars, and deep-factory/chain-gang percussion. "All We Love We Leave Behind" picks all of that up gorgeously.

As overwhelming as AWLWLB may be on first listen, it's really not all speed. There's a thing people say about young professional quarterbacks, about how they need experience before the game "slows down." You get that on this album, too. In my interview with Bannon, he said: "I feel that the current generation of listeners of heavy music are progressing a bit past their gateway bands and are digging deeper than they used to and understanding more abrasive and complex music and art. It's like being around an unfamiliar language long enough that it eventually begins to make sense." I agree with this, and it's the reason why Converge are a band with plenty of fans who weren't close to being born when the band formed in 1990.

Of course, there's plenty for older audiences, too-- aging, death, decisions, punk as a way of life, and the way these things preoccupy you when you go past 30 are largely what this album is about. (It all opens with "Aimless Arrow"'s "To live the life you want/ You've abandoned those in need"). Bannon describes the grizzled two-minute anthem "Shame in the Way" as a song about "feeling fragmented from the traditional concept of family." He adds, "As I've gotten older, I've worked on mending the things I can, while being conscious of the things I can't repair." You get this on the genuinely moving title track, too. Bannon calls it "an open letter to the things that I feel I've left behind in order to pursue an artistic and musical direction in my life." He says it was inspired in part by the death of his beloved dog, Anna Belle, but there's a lot more than that here: It's a classic hardcore anthem, one that looks at the decision to live a life in a particular way, and it might bring you to tears if you hear it right. Really, more than the past couple of Converge albums, AWLWLB feels like a hardcore record.

We live in a period of compression, where there's more stimulation and less time for reflection-- but we're also continually presented with a repackaged, slightly off past. Nostalgia is music's biggest seller, it seems. The thing is, underground bands that formed in 1990 are often getting back together in 2012 for reunion tours, not eighth albums. The irony of the title, of course, is that Converge are also a lesson in not leaving behind what matters. "Predatory Glow" ends the record with the lines: "Let the future know/ I won't be there tomorrow/ Let the past know/ I gave them my all/ I'm aching for an end/ Grown thinner every day/ I bow down to you/ Extinguished youth." When I asked about the song, Bannon explained: "I am far from an 'old' person in human terms, however I've spent over half my life immersed in the punk rock and hardcore community. I am not wholly defined by that as a person, but it is something that has been part of me for a long time."

And it will be, until he dies. AWLWLB is an example of building on and mastering the music you loved when you were younger-- something that became more than music, ultimately-- so that it has a chance to grow old with you without becoming any less vital.

Metz: Metz

Stuart Berman — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The biggest lie about punk rock is that anyone can do it. Sure, anyone can do crap punk rock, but there is a fine to art to taking a music fueled by destructive impulses and building it to last. Toronto power trio Metz played their first show in late 2007, and since then, they've effectively applied Malcolm Gladwell's theory about the Beatles-- i.e., that it takes a good 10,000 hours of practice to become them-- to a subgenre not exactly known for its studiousness: post-hardcore sludge-punk. That five-year gap between their live and recorded debuts is not a product of laziness, but rather precision; while Metz quickly established themselves as the most brutalizing band in the city, the process of translating that essence into a record that would sound every bit as devastating and disorienting outside the confines of a circle pit was more protracted and deliberate. After a couple of small-run 7"'s, and a series of sessions helmed by producers including Owen Pallett/Dusted associate Leon Taheny, Crystal Castles engineer Alex Bonenfant, and Graham Walsh of Holy Fuck, they've distilled their set-list standards into 29 minutes of pure but artfully rendered chaos.

From Cloud Nothings' In Utero'd pop-punk to Japandroids' Superchunk-gone-Springsteen heroics to the Men's My Bloody Dinosaur overdrive, 2012 has seen no lack of artists revamping 1990s-vintage indie rock with a more anthemic accessibility and better mastering jobs. Metz pull off the same trick, but work with more angular, insoluble materials: namely, the muscular menace of the Jesus Lizard and the relentless, power-drill discord of Drive Like Jehu. Metz songs tend to start with an isolated element-- Hayden Menzies' thundering, hammer-of-the-gods drum salvos, Alex Edkins' solitary guitar screech-- that immediately triggers a ticking time-bomb countdown for the moment when the band erupts in unison. You can see the storm coming from a mile atway, and yet, when Menzies, Edkins, and bassist Chris Slorach launch into the merciless, firestorm battering of "Negative Space" or the wrecking-ball swing of "Knife in the Water", it still startles like a sneak attack.

But while it ably captures the band's ferocity, Metz is less a recreation of the band's live shows than a surveillance-video document of it, one that's been edited and manipulated to maximize dynamic impact. There's a surface graininess that amplifies the corrosive qualities of the band's sound and the strep-throat rawness of Edkins' voice, but also serves to accentuate some of the more surprising elements in the mix-- like the ascendant "ahhhhh" harmonies that provide a two-second respite from the village-pillaging assault of "Headache". The title of that song and others like "Rats", "Nausea", and "Sad Pricks" provide a handy summation of Edkins' bleak lyrical concerns, but that misanthropy never weighs the album down. Instead, like a pre-fame Kurt Cobain, Edkins channels his anxieties into manic release with a certain insolent swagger: In "Wasted", you get a glimpse of what Nirvana would've sounded like had they recorded their follow-up to Bleach for Touch and Go instead of Geffen.

Though unafraid to temper their inherent ugliness with piano taps and tambourine shakes, Metz stop short of embracing traditional pop-song melody. But they do understand pop-song economy, carefully arranging their riffs, rhythms, and screams in two-to-three-minute bursts that still feel immediate and catchy in the absence of proper sing-along hooks. Live, "Wet Blanket"'s psych-damaged fuzz-bass breakdown often gets stretched out, "You Made Me Realise"-style; on record, it emerges as a tightly wound beast, with a white-knuckled finale that craftily blurs the line between the band's natural, primal energy and studio-tweaked trickery. Recent history is rife with home-recording prodigies who get thrust onto the stage before learning how to perform, or promising live acts who rush-release their albums so that they have something to sell at the merch table, or at least a Soundcloud link to pimp. But while evidence suggests great concerts and great records are becoming mutually exclusive ideals for aspiring artists, Metz prove that, with a little patience, you can still have it both ways.

Tame Impala: Lonerism

Ian Cohen — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0500

If their debut was any indication, Tame Impala's second full-length, Lonerism, will once again be compared to albums from the late 1960s and early 70s. But if their intent was to make a record that sounds like it came from that era, they've failed and ended up with something more fascinating. Sure, there's merit to the countless groups and scenes that seek out the right tube amps and compressors and microphones in order to create flawless period pieces. They're often called "revivalists," even though the actual term is wasted on them. Are they really breathing new life into this form by keeping it cryogenically frozen in ideas nearly a half-century old? Tame Impala prove far more exciting because, by maximizing the use of the available technology, they tap into the progressive and experimental spirit of psychedelic rock, and not just the sound.

Tame Impala did something similar on 2010's Innerspeaker, and they might be open to "Same Impala"-type jokes if the expanse of psychedelic rock were something you'd be expected to move on from after one record. Lonerism does make the kind of tune-ups that typically generate a lot of second LP plaudits: It's leaner, more propulsive, more confident, and less beholden to its influences. But Lonerism's genius manifests itself in Tame Impala's ability to figure out a way to integrate the concepts of electronic music-making without resorting to ripping off the breakbeat/Beatles template of "Setting Sun".

Leader Kevin Parker doesn't sound like an electronic producer, he just thinks like one. He sees his songs as blank canvases rather than boxed-in verse/chorus structures while emphasizing fluidity, constant motion, and textural evolution. You could spend the entirety of opener "Be Above It" letting your ears luxuriate in the diversity of tactile sensations-- the subliminal whisper of the title becomes a rhythm track, a barreling drum break is severely tweaked to sound like an oncoming rush of bison, a flanged guitar wobbles like neon Jello, and Parker's laconic, slightly echoed vocals pulls the whole thing together. Lonerism could go anywhere from that point, which is confirmed by the majestic song that follows, "Endors Toi". Follow the regal path of the lead synth or tilt your ears towards the righteously loud drum rolls that sound like masterfully chopped Bonham/Moon samples. I'm reminded of Radiohead's stated goal on "Airbag", which was to recreate Endtroducing..... in real time, or what DJ Shadow himself has been trying to do ever since in terms of merging the rarest vinyl grooves with your stony older brother's record collection.

Those are the first two songs on Lonerism, and it's bold to lead off with seven minutes of mostly instrumentals. Yet for all of the sonic trickery, Tame Impala are anchored by the righteous aspects of classic rock. They're throwbacks in the sense that they operate from a pre-punk perspective where each musician has the chops and confidence to be capable of soloing, and the singer and the drummer were cranked loud as hell. Yes, Parker does sound like John Lennon. Many athletes pattern their golf swings after Tiger Woods, their batting stance on Barry Bonds, or stick out their tongue while taking a jump shot like Michael Jordan. It means little if you don't have the skills to connect and perform.

More important is how Parker writes melodies that are instantly memorable, that rise and fall with beautiful simplicity and give what are fairly basic and relatable sentiments heft. Lonerism lacks a chorus that instantly pops like "Solitude Is Bliss", which is an issue only if you think the best melodies necessarily need to appear in the middle of the song. You'd be hard-pressed to find hooks as catchy as the verses during the run that spans "Music to Walk Home By" through "Elephant", and while none initially stands out as the kind of hit that might push Tame Impala to bigger festival stages, the cumulative effect means Lonerism might.

So, the above is all well and good for the people who might use Lonerism to EQ their hi-fis. Does it make you feel anything? On Innerspeaker, Parker sang, "You will never come close to how I feel," so what's the emotional component to Lonerism? Though Parker's lyrics are plainspoken and occasionally a little elusive, Tame Impala's two records are called Innerspeaker and Lonerism, some of their songs go by titles like "Solitude Is Bliss", "Why Won't They Talk to Me?", "Island Walking", and "Mind Mischief". You get the idea of where Parker's head is at, or more to the point, that Parker's head is where he's at.

That's a fairly common concern in this realm. You think about most of the technophile, prog-rock opuses of recent decades and most sound like spiritual heirs of King Crimson, Pink Floyd, or Black Sabbath; records like Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Kid A, and The Moon & Antarctica tell the listener that their state of being is forced upon them, by shadowy governments, by heartless technology, by an uncaring god. It justifies the headphones-bound quarantine. What distinguishes Tame Impala is how they are able to explore the emotional difference between being alone and being isolated. Jayson Greene described Parker's voice vividly as "like someone trapped John Lennon's vocal take from 'A Day in the Life' in a jar and taught it to sing new songs." In terms of a mentality, to me it's more along the lines of "I'm Only Sleeping", embodying and advocating a wakeful and passive state of psychedelia.

Lonerism derives much of its philosophical and musical pleasure from this interaction of micro and macro. Tame Impala stack vocal and guitar harmonies on the loveably hungover "Mind Mischief", and then Parker and co-producer Dave Fridmann take control of the mixing consoles and shake the whole thing up like a snowglobe. A similarly fun trick happens on "Apocalypse Dreams", which builds the momentum of a bouncy Northern Soul groove up to a peak before the mix abruptly cuts off and spits them back into a panoramic, HD jam.

All these rich sounds serve as an alternate take on anticipating technological encroachment, that humanity and technology aren't necessarily at war. You feel small while listening to Lonerism, but in a way that makes you appreciate how man, machine, and Mother Nature can harmonize. Lonerism is portable and joyous in an unforced way, a soundtrack for the times when you're walking downtown and look up at a collection of skyscrapers, or driving through a mountain pass on an interstate or even looking at a Ferris wheel next to an ocean thinking, "Holy shit, how did this all get here?"

Miguel: Kaleidoscope Dream

Andrew Ryce — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Since his debut in 2010 with the outstanding "Sure Thing", the young Los Angeles singer/songwriter Miguel has been something of a for-the-R&B-heads-only sleeper star. He showed up armed with a guitar, an endearing croon that is both virtuosic and everyman, a coiffed haircut, and a slightly retro sensibility. His voice is an elastic thing that's rarely used to excessive effect; he avoids the histrionic R. Kelly worship of so many of his compatriots in favor of the school of smooth Sam Cooke ad-libs. And though his lyrics are full of silly puns and earnest platitudes, he takes sex very seriously: He's a happily-married man in a genre full of lascivious bachelors, and his best music radiates maturity, self-assured and confident but rarely showy. But despite his obvious talent, he hasn't quite been able to break through to a wider audience.

Miguel's 2010 debut album, All I Want Is You, was flanked with some stellar singles but weighed down by a lack of identity as he flitted from producer to producer. It sounded like he couldn't decide whether he wanted to be a Salaam Remi faux-nostalgia crooner or a smart hip-hop crossover star, and the indecision hung over the record like a cloud (it didn't perform well commercially either). He returned earlier this year with a free trio of EPs under the self-conscious title of Art Dealer Chic, showing a newfound entrepreneurial sensibility and a streak of independence. Those mostly self-produced songs at times sounded like rough sketches, but they made it up for it by sounding personal and liberated from the demands of the industry. Free and widely available, they earned him some well-deserved re-examination. They also contained his best songs to date. And now, with his second full-length, he's delivered on that early promise.

Kaleidoscope Dream starts off with "Adorn", also found on the first Art Dealer Chic EP. It's one of the giddiest love songs of the year, a track where ecstatic infatuation is hemmed in by Miguel's understated vocal dexterity, and this album feels like its proper context. He rockets off into falsetto for irresistibly brief moments, and a new outro spirals elegant, trained vocal gymnastics around the song's chorus. "Adorn" also showcases Miguel's secret weapon: modesty. It's definitively, deceptively simple, a nugget of concentrated sunshine, and not necessarily all that original. But I'll be damned if it doesn't pull you in and make you feel it.

That touch of modesty colors most of Kaleidoscope Dream. There's the tender "Use Me" where he admits being nervous about having sex with the lights on. Even more affecting is the acoustic murmur "Pussy Is Mine", which deflates masculinized hip-hop tropes with insecurity, pleading, "Tell me that the pussy is mine/ 'Cause I don't wanna believe that anyone is just like me." The sentiment turns sardonic on the Ryan Leslie-like jaunt of "How Many Drinks?", where gorgeous falsetto verses are offset by uncertain pleas of "I don't wanna waste my time."

The plush, lightly psychedelic production buffers the record's more barebones moments, and Miguel's precocious vocals take flight on the bombast rather than drowning in it. Standout "Do You..." unfolds in an ethereal cloud of synth, voices streaming like angelic choirs before stumbling into a verse buoyed by its own euphoria. Not many singers could get away with lines like "What about matinee movies/ Pointless secrets/ Midnight summer swim, private beaches/ Rock, paper, scissors/ Wait! best outta three!" It's the stuff of unbearable rom-com montages, but Miguel's playful delivery brings it over. He's the rare vocalist who makes you feel what he's singing about, even when his lyrics can be transparent. When he wants to sound deadly serious, he's on the verge of tears; when he's happy, he's practically laughing as he sings.

Kaleidoscope Dream has elements of the sort of tasteful R&B record that the Grammys love, but much like Beyoncé's 4, it cuts through its own statuesque stateliness with raw emotion reined in by an ever-present sense of professionalism. And it succeeds in part because it sounds like Miguel's album and no one else's. There are no intrusive guest appearances, and the record sounds even less of its time than the first, reveling in its own contextual vacuum with abandon. Though there are some unexpected choices. Like "Don't Look Back", which is propped up by grand synth runs before melting into an interpolation of the Zombies' "Time of the Season". That song's musky psychedelia is a good example of the record's overarching theme, the highly sexualized seen through the lens of the eager and innocent.

When Miguel isn't accompanied by glossy synths, the music is all about intimacy. Take "Arch & Point"-- with a simple rasp, strum, and metronome, it sounds like it was recorded in the very bedroom it's ostensibly taking place in. "When it feels this good then it just comes natural," he insists, and there's not a better ethos for where his career stands at this point. Emerging unscathed from middling mainstream performance, Kaleidoscope Dream sounds, at its utmost, natural and easy, an artist set free to do what he wants and proving himself every bit the unique voice his debut seemed to deny. It's respectful of tradition, quietly ambitious, and deeply personal, a wonderfully considered album from an artist who was starting to seem a lot like a forgotten gem in the wake of mishandled promotion.

Flying Lotus: Until the Quiet Comes

Mark Richardson — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Steven Ellison called his breakthrough album as Flying Lotus Los Angeles, and his music still has a strong metaphorical connection to the city. He's an admirer of producers like Dr. Dre, but Ellison's vision mixes the pulse of contemporary urban life with an extra dose of sci-fi futurism. He has his ear to the ground in terms of what's happening now and what's real, but his mind is fixated on what might happen tomorrow-- part Boyz n the Hood, part Blade Runner. And since Ellison's musical palette always circles back to the Eastern-tinged textures that infiltrated jazz when his great aunt Alice Coltrane was helping set the pace (assorted bells, harp plucks, the pings of steel and knock of wood), his music feels cosmic, bound to L.A. as a geographic idea but not necessarily of this earth.

In the last five years, Flying Lotus has become a standard-bearer for 21st-century beat construction by looking forward and backward simultaneously and making music that feels like an exploration. So what happens when such an artist reaches a cul-de-sac? After Flying Lotus' 2010 landmark Cosmogramma, further density was not an option. That album was packed so tightly with rhythms, instruments, and textures that adding more to the mix would have meant risking identity; just a few more samples could have turned the music into an indistinct mush that contains every color at once. Cosmogramma felt like an end game, and the new Flying Lotus album, Until the Quiet Comes, finds Ellison lighting out in a new direction. He's thinking in terms of air, mood, and simplicity. In an interview with the UK magazine The Wire, Ellison described Quiet as his attempt at "a children's record, a record for kids to dream to." While there's nothing cute or naive on the album, you get a sense of what Ellison might mean when it comes to dreaming.  

The album's opening section, including "Until the Colours Come", "Heave(n)", and "All In", functions as a sort of miniature suite of downtempo jazz. This is Flying Lotus at its most vibe-heavy and mystical, where rooms are thick with purple incense and it's always 3 a.m. The sound is not new-- tracks like these were a cornerstone of 1990s trip-hop of the Headz comp/Ninja Tune variety-- but the sheer beauty of Ellison's design sets his music apart. This is a quality he shares with the very different Ricardo Villalobos: By pulling back and giving his meticulously-constructed elements room to breathe, Ellison allows us to hear them as if for the first time. "Tiny Tortures" begins with a rhythm that's all bones-- a simulated wood block, snare, and hissy cymbal tracing out an off-kilter beat. Against this backdrop the bass guitar of Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner enters, and the contrast between his gliding, harmonically rich runs and the spare opening is breathtaking. Thundercat's expressive bass work also adds character to the comparatively thick title track, as a gong and handclaps flow continuously like water over rocks while an unstable Dilla-fied keyboard wedges in between the beats. But even here, when there's more going on, the ear can fixate on any one sound and extract feeling from it.

As the album progresses, it changes in feel, but the shifts are organic. If the tracks in the opening section bring to mind an abstraction of spaced-out jazz, elsewhere Ellision conjures the blocky colors of videos games. See the thick 8-bit synths in "Sultan's Request", the curlicue melody in "Putty Boy Strut", the simple refrain of the title track, which makes me think of a digital hero on a quest. These lighter moments are careful and reserved. You can feel Ellison putting a smaller frame around each individual part.

The hushed world Ellison has constructed here is hermetic and internally focused, even for him, and the album's guests don't break the spell. The featured players meet Ellison on his turf and adapt to the landscape of the record. Erykah Badu's connection to Flying Lotus' broader aesthetic is readily apparent, as her sense of mystical earthiness is grounded in tradition but free to wander outside of it. On "See Thru to U", she does away with soul singing in its formal sense and allows herself to become an instrument. The result is a satisfying melding of creative personalities but it wouldn't work on an Erykah Badu album-- it's too vaporous, too unconcerned with personality. The same goes for Thom Yorke's contribution on "Electric Candyman"; Ellison turns him into a ghost, which makes perfect sense.

Following the shattering Cosmogramma, Until the Quiet Comes is disarming at first. It sometimes feels like an experiment in how much can be stripped away while still sounding like Flying Lotus, but the reduction offers a new perspective into what Ellison is about. Los Angeles and Cosmogramma brought to mind the L.A. that thrives on acceleration. The energy here is just as strong, but it's concentrated into a smaller space. So while this might be Flying Lotus' most accessible record, it's less about being pleasant and more about deep focus. Each of these 18 tracks tends to introduce one or two emotional or musical elements and meditate on them for a brief time before easing back into silence. Quiet is a series of suggestions or clues and it always feels just out of reach, but that leaves a lot of room for the listener. The surface is a gorgeous invitation to return and see if you can figure out what it all means.

Dum Dum Girls: End of Daze EP

Lindsay Zoladz — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0500

It makes sense that Dum Dum Girls thrive in short form. Though they've turned into a versatile band comfortable in an array of styles, their roots are in garage rock, a sound that has a long history of mining the potential of brevity: It's a genre built on a foundation of singles, whose holy text is aptly titled "Nuggets", and whose philosophy is summarized by a song that went "I hope I die before I get old." Though Dum Dum Girls' latest EP, End of Daze, has a handful of gothic influences, its all-killer-no-filler concision feels like a tribute to the spirit that they've have been riffing on since their debut, I Will Be. Unhurried but not a beat too long, End of Daze is a confident and comprehensive showcase for everything Dum Dum Girls do well, from luxuriant, moody ballads to driving, melodic guitar pop-- and after 18 minutes, it punches the time clock like somebody who just declared checkmate: Your move, every other band trying to sound like this.

This isn't the first time an EP has marked a turning point in the Dum Dum Girls' run. Last year's terrific, four-song He Gets Me High EP introduced a newfound Chrissie Hynde-like depth to Dee Dee's voice and new-car glimmer to the Girls' formerly lo-fi sound. It was a collection of cheery, upbeat songs about infatuation, except for the closing track -- a cover of the Smiths classic "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out". Bold is the band that thinks it can bring something new to the song that's launched a million mascara tears, but Dum Dum Girls pulled it off in grand style. Sandy's kick drum towered 10-stories high and Dee Dee sold the track's jet-black drama, uttering her chilling delivery of "I want to see people and I want to see life" like a member of the walking dead. Now, on End of Daze, they're now penning some dark gems of their own.

"I've dreamed a death/ It's mine tonight," Dee Dee drawls on the opener "Mine Tonight", which smolders slowly and purposefully for a minute and a half before bursting into a panoramic blaze. Like Only in Dreams, Daze is an exploration of the feelings triggered by the recent death of Dee Dee's mother. But while many of the songs on Dreams painted grief with a palette of simple descriptors and easy rhymes ("There's nothing to say/ At the end of the day/ I'm wasting away"), Daze expresses these emotions with more depth. Tears fall "from desert eyes," home is "a sweet prison," and both Satan and Icarus make cameo appearances. The lush, cavernous sonics produced by loyal Dum Dum Girls collaborators Richard Gottehrer and Sune Rose Wagner echo this step forward, too. Sonically and lyrically, Daze does Dreams one better by blowing personal sorrow up to a mythic scale.

From "Mine Tonight" to the wonderfully brooding cover of Scottish new wave duo's Strawberry Switchblade's "Trees and Flowers" ("I hate the trees and I hate the flowers, and I hate the buildings, the way they tower over me"), there's not a weak song in the bunch. But the last two in particular are perhaps the best Dee Dee's ever written. Dripping with conviction, longing and remorse (and set off by an instantly transfixing opening line: "I want to live a pure life"), "Lord Knows" has a melody so perfectly gratifying that you'd swear you've heard it before. And in some ways, you have; it quotes the chord progression of "Crimson and Clover", right down to the chiming riff that punctuates the end of each line in the verse. But "Lord Knows" inhabits its influences so fully and with such conviction that this familiarity only makes it that much more magnetic. It taps into the strange sorcery of the greatest rock'n'roll songs, possessed with the power to set the world in slow motion for four commanding minutes.

"Season in Hell", on the other hand, kicks earth back into its orbit. A distorted riff quivers, and then Sandy's echoey, galloping beat drives the song forward. It is a song about the moment when your grief becomes portable, the necessity of continuing to mourn but also carrying on. It's a simple, emotionally sophisticated line from a band not generally lauded for their lyrics, but, coming at the end of a smartly sequenced narrative about darkness and redemption, its conclusion is that much more affecting: "Doesn't dawn look divine?"

Garage rock is also a genre of quick burnouts, its best compilations scattered with one- or no-hit wonders whose most explosive fireworks burned bright for three minutes before vanishing altogether. So perhaps the most profound way that the Dum Dum Girls have transcended their influences is the simple fact that they've stuck around, pushed past their limits, and gotten that much better. End of Daze is their best release. Much more than a stop-gap between LPs, it's succinct but irrefutable proof that this band's dynamite has a long fuse.

How to Dress Well: Total Loss

Ian Cohen — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Tom Krell has never been shy about naming his influences. On Love Remains, his How to Dress Well debut, they were pop and R&B acts like Ready For the World, Shai, Michael Jackson, and Bobby Brown. He's no less forthcoming about the inspirations behind his heartbreaking second LP, Total Loss. During the penultimate apologia "Set It Right", he provides a roll call: Ryan, Dan, Mama, Grandma, Francey, Robbie, Nicky, and the list goes on. None of them are famous, none are musicians. They're real people in Krell's life. Some have died (his uncle and best friend), others are living but have slipped out of view, many including himself are struggling with depression. So the title Total Loss gives you fair warning about what to expect. Where Love Remains drew much of its power from emotional suggestion and tactile sensation, Total Loss uses the common tools of pop expression-- four-minute songs, autobiography, choruses, confession-- to create a work of poignant and devastating art.

The cruel irony of Total Loss is that it finds Krell striving for directness and candor with family members who've become unavailable to him through breakups, depression, addiction, or death. The record's first lyric-- "You were there for me when I was in trouble/ You could understand for me that life was a struggle"-- is addressed to Krell's mother and reprised later on. Otherwise, the listener is in the position of the "you" populating so many of Krell's thoughts.

The sleek, alabaster sound of Total Loss is a far cry from the heavily distorted and distant Love Remains. That album wasn't considered a drug record for the same reasons Ambien isn't considered recreational, but its shrouded production mimicked the effect the drug can have when it starts to kick in: the sensation of controlling yourself in an out-of-body experience. That feeling is foreign to Total Loss. It's still flooded with reverb, but the anesthetic is gone.

As a result, Total Loss feels subject to heightened sensitivity both sonically and lyrically, and the effect is made more unnerving by the sharp, sudden movements of its elements-- harp plucks, ticking hi-hats, slapped snares and, of course, Krell's own voice. It's high, thin, and boyish, but in no way timid. His quavering falsetto creates an intriguing friction against the newly aggressive, seething tone of his lyrics, particularly when he grapples with the self-blame, hopelessness, and betrayal that survivors of suicide victims often experience. "Say My Name or Say Whatever" begins with a recording of a homeless teen from the 1984 documentary Streetwise describing the freeing effects of flight. "The only bad part about flying," he says, "is having to come back down to the fuckin' world," a projection of Krell's own idealism and disillusionment.

Though it contains Total Loss's most visceral, even sexual music, "Cold Nites" sounds downright angry. The hook boasts, "But I keep on doing it/ Ain't gonna stop until we're through with this," and it's an anger born from Krell's perception of his own shortcomings-- "Tell me what I've got to do to get better." Album opener "When I Was in Trouble" is a piano hymn that takes its cues from William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, decaying in real time. Krell moans, "Dear Mama, didn't you try to tell me everything was going to be safe?" and then repeats the line in a rare lower register. The effect is chilling, and indicative of the confusion that permeates Total Loss: Whether Krell is trying to find relief in hurting himself or others is left open-ended.

Fortunately, How to Dress Well's malleability prevents Krell from getting too ponderous. If you found his orchestral direction on last year's Just Once promising, there's the string interlude of "World I Need You, Won't Be Without You (Proem)" which is reprised on the emotive centerpiece "Talking to You". "& It Was U" pulls a similar deception, as Krell's accumulating harmonies disguise an imploding relationship over joyous new jack swing. It maybe lacks the shock of his earliest singles, and that's fine: Coming from someone discovering that his love for a style of music and his ability to pay it homage are starting to intersect, it's every bit as promising.

The rhythmic backbone of Total Loss's second half slackens a little, which can make the album feel frontloaded on the first few passes. Though Love Remains was more of a compilation than a proper album, its highlights were spread out judiciously. Total Loss doesn't fully compensate for its lack of clear standouts like "Decisions" or "Ready for the World", but it does benefit from a narrative cohesion that Love Remains lacked. Its path of grief follows psychology's Kübler-Ross model in chronology, from denial to bargaining to something resembling acceptance-- the lyric sheet even shows a smiley-face emoticon appending the "Set It Right" line, "as far as love goes, it's one step at a time." "Struggle" revisits Krell's love for blown-out reverb, obscuring gut-punch lyrics that attempt to reconcile the joys of reckless behavior with that sort of action's deadly, consumptive attraction: "I remember drinking with you in your bed… But in the morning we'd go and start again." And while "Ocean Floor for Everything" wasn't a stunning first single, erring too close to melodies Krell has used before, it's an apt sendoff for Total Loss, the point where the pain has settled in. But any hope here is implied. It's not explicitly a happy ending.

It's a fitting conclusion to a record that is very lonely for Krell and risky for How to Dress Well. In light of the "PBR&B" digs that initially circled Love Remains, it's notable that many of the most exciting artists to arrive in its wake (the Weeknd, Jessie Ware, AlunaGeorge) are nominally "indie" but incorporate modernist R&B in a similar manner. Krell hasn't benefited much from that swell of momentum, operating in a space that's far more niche and less overtly "pop," in both genre and populism. But Total Loss is similar to the xx's Coexist in retreating to further minimalism and introspection after a groundbreaking debut. It feels like more of a success because there's no dissonance between its artistic intent and its optimal home-alone listening experience. Its effectiveness is a result of its intimacy-- or, as Krell puts it on "Set It Right", being "true to you, I'm true to me, too."

Grizzly Bear: Shields

Lindsay Zoladz — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0500

"This is a foreground." That was the last lyric left hovering in the mist of Grizzly Bear's breakout 2009 album, Veckatimest, and it's a pretty good image to describe what it's like to listen to one of their records. The key word there is "a," signifying one of many. Whether it's the ethereal, friendly-ghost vibes of Yellow House or Veckatimest's pristine chamber pop, Grizzly Bear create music in deep focus; what's going on in the margins of their songs is just as important and expressive as the center. Taking cues from artists like Talk Talk and Van Dyke Parks, the Brooklyn four-piece make pop music with an ear for the ambient, asking us to notice the importance in detail, the beauty of texture, and the foregrounds that exist all across our spectrum of perception.

While there's no question that Grizzly Bear's last two records have sounded gorgeous, critics of the band have wondered if that's enough. Shields, the band's fourth and most compositionally adventurous record, should put those concerns to bed. Though full of baroque, detail-rich production and latticework melodies, Shields also offers an emotionally resonant core. The album is an excavation of loneliness, melancholy, and self-reliance. It's also a demanding record, without an instantly gratifying single like "Knife" or "Two Weeks" to hook restless ears. But the rewards that come from immersing yourself in it are odd and profound. Shields feels like a summation of Grizzly Bear's strengths, drawing a line from the muddy, minor key sonic palette of Ed Droste's home-recorded Horn of Plenty and stringing it to the heels of boundless ambition.

Shields' spectacular opener, "Sleeping Ute", is the lone track retained from an aborted early session in Marfa, Tex., and it feels like a continuation down the path Daniel Rossen ambled on his 2012 solo EP, Silent Hour/Golden Mile, which sought solace from a busy life in the elements. "If I could be still as that gray hill," Rossen pines, before giving into an admission of humanness: "But I can't help myself." Chris Bear's drum rolls emulate thunder while chords crest with the rhythm of waves. "Sleeping Ute" moves so evocatively and theatrically like water that it sounds like a big-budget radio play of The Tempest. But as grandiose as it often gets, "Ute", like Shields itself, always retains a certain intimacy. These are dark and anxious waters, the choppy and tumultuous movement of the sea inside.

Grizzly Bear have acquired a reputation for politeness; maybe it was the bow ties, maybe it was the passive-aggressive inflection of their most famous lyrics ("Would you always? Maybe sometimes? Make it easy?"), maybe it was just that Michael McDonald collaboration. But Shields serves as a visceral reminder of how unsettled and uncanny Grizzly Bear's music often feels. (Remember that superbly creepy video for "Two Weeks," full of smiles pulled tight enough to induce nightmares?) The pair of lead-off singles, "Sleeping Ute" and "Yet Again", each find a way of transcending the tension of "putting on appearances," one of Grizzly Bear's favorite themes. The lyrics of the Droste-led "Yet Again" detail repression and repose ("Take it all in stride/ Speak, don't confide"), which makes the payoff-- a final minute of instrumental fury lead by the torrent of Chris Bear's percussion and the squiggling lightning strikes of Rossen's guitar-- that much more cathartic. Dynamic shifts like this give the record an air of uncertainty that contrasts with the sheer beauty of the arrangements.

Grizzly Bear is a democracy. They stand in a horizontal row on stage, and you get this sense of intra-band egalitarianism from their records, too. By now, each of the four members has cultivated his own unique and expressive vocabulary, and each feels integral to the sound of Shields. Chris Bear's drumming is lyrical and swift, moving from delicately timed details to big, booming ruckuses (check out the way his percussive rumbles in the background of the verses of "Yet Again" foreshadow its avalanche of a conclusion), while Chris Taylor's penchant for haunting effects and gently buoyant grooves adds an otherworldly weightlessness to these soundscapes. Droste's voice resounds with ache and longing, and there's a newfound and welcome gravel to his vocals that add a raw, unvarnished quality to songs like "The Hunt" and "Speaking in Rounds".

But Shields showcases Rossen's growth most of all. The songs that sounded distinctly his on Yellow House-- "Little Brother" and "On a Neck, On a Spit" in particular-- were grounded in a familiar folk sound. But from the rollicking strums that propel "Speaking in Rounds" to the creaking, rusted textures he teases out of "The Hunt", Rossen's playing on Shields is a seamless blend of folksy textures, jazzy fluidity, and proggy imagination that feels downright inimitable. Joni Mitchell has called her own idiosyncratic tunings as "chords of inquiry," and this feels like an apt term for the tones and inflections that Rossen conjures too. They're stirring precisely because they're unresolved: the progression that ends "Speaking in Rounds"' chorus, for example, chirps like a series of unanswered questions, each one a little more urgent and insoluble than the last.

And that's a great part of Shields' emotional pull: The album reverberates with a sense of irresolution. This was present before with Grizzly Bear-- Yellow House's "Colorado" concludes with a fireworks display of unanswered pleas: "What now? What now? What now?"-- but never to such a degree. And it's that tension that makes returning to Shields so rewarding. The final one-two punch is a stunner, where the poignant grace of "Half-Gate" gives way to the magnificently epic "Sun in Your Eyes". If "Sleeping Ute" was the start of a sojourn from society, "Sun" ends not with a return but a transcendent kiss-off: "So long, I'm never coming back."

This closing pair of songs speaks to the album's complexity. Despite the formalism and easy-to-love production, Shields' best moments inflict a sense of unease that wriggles under the skin and lingers after the final crescendo. But this collection of unvarnished shipwreck-spirituals is after something more challenging than a feel-good ending. With Shields, Grizzly Bear make certain demands--hold still, listen closely-- that seem downright radical in a busy and impatient world.

Wild Nothing: Nocturne

Ian Cohen — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0500

"You want to know me? Well, what's to know?" asks Jack Tatum on the title track of Wild Nothing's Nocturne. The album's subtly addictive nature is such that only after a dozen listens did this anti-revelation strike me as its most revealing lyric. Tatum really does view himself as a facilitator. He drove that point home during our interview last month, debunking any attempts made in the past two years to classify him as a "personality." This seems self-defeating for a guy who works in a style of lovelorn, Anglophilic indie rock that never goes in style because it never really goes out of style, and tends to favor extreme recluses or extroverts for its breakout artists. Fortunately, Nocturne distinguishes itself from the perrennial crowd of dream-pop nostalgists for the same reason Wild Nothing's 2010 debut Gemini did: Tatum is simply one of the best songwriters in this field, and Nocturne's significant upgrade in fidelity makes that point more clearly than ever.

Whether it's better than Gemini or its EP follow-up, Golden Haze, only matters in the event you have room for just one Wild Nothing album in your life, and you probably shouldn't limit yourself. It's hard to imagine anyone who dug Gemini jumping ship here-- Nocturne is a richer, comparatively luxurious listening experience, but it doesn't sound flashy or ostentatious. Even while recording with one of Brooklyn's classiest sonic interior decorators in Nicolas Vernhes, Tatum granted himself only basic amenities-- live strings, a human drummer, better microphones.

Nocturne is painted with the same colors as Gemini, but the resolution is much higher. When the songs on Gemini wanted to convey vitality or physicality, they were charmingly ramshackle, stuffed with busy drum machines and insistently strummed guitar. If Nocturne wants for anything, it's the sense of immediacy that marked highlights such as "Chinatown" and "Summer Holiday". This record is more about craftsmanship. Lead singles "Shadow" and "Paradise" feel newly urgent in a holistic way, going places Tatum couldn't access in his Blacksburg dorm room two years ago. "Shadow" allows itself brief asides between verses to let those lustrous strings moan and swoon, "Paradise" interrupts its glistening downer-disco for an indulgent ambient build-up. The full-bodied sound means the softer side of Nocturne gets fleshier too. Gemini relied on reverb to convey texture and depth, and while there's still plenty on "Through the Grass", the rhythmic complexity of the song's delicate, interwoven arrangement plays a bigger role in making it one of the loveliest thing to be done with guitars this year.

Entire labels and local scenes are dedicated to preserving the era Nocturne evokes-- lacquering the malaised vocals, getting the right reverb plates, and hoping that aesthetic identification is more important than writing melodies that stick. Tatum, however, is a songwriter first who just happens to work in this medium. His vocals are put to the forefront to give the listener a clearly marked place to return, and his melodies are smoothly curved, like a small divot at which the rest of the arrangements can dig deeper. The hopscotch verse melody of "Shadow" works in tandem with an insistent, four-note motif doubled on lead guitar and violin. On "Counting Days", a simonized harmony serves as the chorus, but the little guitar countermelody that darts around it is the hook. Tatum understands the semantics of this stuff.

Which makes it strange that his ambitions as a melodic tunesmith aren't matched by his lyrics. Successfully writing like Robert Smith can be just as tricky as doing a decent Morrissey, which becomes clear every time Nocturne crosses an invisible line where a tiny bit of editing would pay off: "Paradise" contains the sensible-sounding, yet bafflingly mixed metaphor "velvet tongue so sweet", while "Only Heather" rhymes first and asks questions later: "I couldn't explain it/ I won't even try/ She is so lovely she makes me feel high."

Or maybe that's the only kind of lyric that really matters on Nocturne. If there's a Heather in your life, that song might be the centerpiece of your next mix. Or you might just listen to it hoping you'll meet a Heather, in which case, Wild Nothing is invested in the concept of wish fulfillment. This is called dream-pop for a reason, and there's no logic for what drives adults to lie out on the grass staring at the sun for hours or write songs about girls with fantastical names like "Rheya". Nocturne gives a voice to those feelings, and damn if it isn't lovely to listen to.

Swans: The Seer

Mike Powell — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Swans are a band that conjure primal forms of power: thunder and lightning, fire and brimstone, master over slave, predator over prey. Their earliest albums came out in the wake of New York's no wave scene, a loose, radical contest to see who could make rock'n'roll sound as ugly as possible while still retaining the rhythms and forms that made it rock'n'roll. Swans, not central to the scene, countered with the possibility of wiping out rock altogether. The result was something that sounds sort of like monks chanting in front of a jet engine. Frontman Michael Gira once compared being in the band to "trudging up a sand hill wearing a hair shirt, being sprayed with battery acid, with a midget taunting you"-- a description that could just as easily describe listening to them.

During the late 1980s and early 90s, Swans went through a goth phase, incorporating sparkly synths, reverb, acoustic guitars, and other signposts of what most people would call "music." But whenever things felt too comfortable, Gira would flatly drop lines like, "You never say you know me when I'm inside you," or, "I'm so glad I'm better than you are." Beauty and ugliness have never been as relevant to their music as the possibility of turning music into a space of confrontation. In the parlance of reality television, Swans aren't-- and never have been-- here to make friends.

After a nearly 15-year break during which Gira focused on the dark Americana project Angels of Light, Swans reformed. Since then, they've released two albums, one studio (2010's My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky) and one live (2012's We Rose From Your Bed With the Sun in Our Head). "[The reunion] is not repeating the past," Gira said in 2010. He is currently 58 years old and often photographed in a cowboy hat, not smiling. At two hours, The Seer is among the group's longest studio albums and, in a sweeping gesture that only the most confident and egocentric artists can pull off, it manages to expand on their sound while simultaneously summarizing everything they've ever recorded before.

The band's current palette includes a whole trunkload of acoustic instruments: bells, accordion, clarinet, dulcimer, a chorus of bagpipes, and what's referred to cryptically as "handmade violin thing." With the exception of some amplifier distortion, the album puts incredible emphasis on the human body's capacity to beat the shit out of an instrument in a far more satisfying way than machines ever could. (As an instructive gesture, Gira spends the first four-and-a-half minutes of "Mother of the World" panting in rhythm.) Noise has never been as much of a concern in Swans' music as pure dissonance; of the way certain combinations of notes literally cause the air to vibrate more violently than others. At its most chaotic, like the climax of "The Seer", the band doesn't just sound aggressive, it sounds like it's bursting apart.

The tracks on The Seer aren't songs but incantations, riffs piled on riffs shifting and evolving for as long as half an hour at a time. Sometimes Gira sings; often, there's a zombie-like chorus behind him. One section fades into the next in ways more reminiscent of a soundtrack than an album, and even relatively contained tracks like "Lunacy" start and end with winding, immersive passages as the band comes to a boil. Like airplanes, Swans take their taxiing and descent as seriously as their flight.

Stylistically, the album draws a jagged line through a universe of serious, apocalyptic music, from country blues to free jazz to drone and the brutal, hypnotic guitar rock Glenn Branca and Sonic Youth made while Gira was still moaning into the void. A big group of guests are important here. Former Swan Jarboe contributes, as do Karen O, and Ben Frost on my personal favorite credit, "fire sounds (acoustic and synthetic)." The bigger the group, the more familial the feeling and the more heightened the illusion is that the music is not coming from inside its players but existing, like a spirit, somewhere outside and between them.

In the same way it would be hard to get the full experience of a good movie by only watching half of it, The Seer demands its two hours. To paraphrase something the author Ben Marcus said in a trenchant conversation with Jonathan Franzen about the value of experimental fiction, it is not a record for someone deciding whether or not they'd rather be listening to music or playing paintball. Of course this doesn't mean you need to peel off your own skin while listening to enjoy it. It has made my experience of cleaning the house, for example, feel very, very consequential.

At each step of Swans' career, they've been somehow tied to whatever "dark" genre was most culturally prominent, but The Seer affirms what they really are and what their legacy will probably be: A psychedelic band that rejects the musical template of psychedelia the 60s gave us. Vision has always been a metaphor for both political counterculture and religious mysticism. Prophets, pulling back the veil, "seeing through" things in an interest of revealing what they believe to be the raw, burning truth-- this is what Swans have always been about, and what The Seer seems more explicitly occupied with than anything they've ever done before.

Gira had come out of art school, and even Swans' most mature sounding music is rooted in the kind of catharsis through self-negation that was at the conceptual heart of 70s performance and body art. One piece from his student days involved him being blindfolded and led naked into a roomful of strangers with a tape player strapped to his body, playing a prerecorded confession of his sexual desires. The piece's coordinators had found women willing to do the same. The crux of the piece was Gira and the stranger crawling around in the room until they found each other, at which point, they'd have sex.

In the world of Swans, the pain of catharsis is always in service of elevating to some higher plane of being. Granted, most people probably prefer to find this in exercise and not public sex, but when sifting through Swans' apparent bleakness, it's important to recognize that their goals are and always have been to remind us of the ways extreme states of being, however intense, a unique kind of blessing. One of their live albums was called Feel Good Now, which is as succinct a self-summary as any artist could offer: Later, Swans bluntly suggest, you'll be dead.

Is this music primal? Yes. Intense? Absurdly so. On "A Piece of the Sky", Gira sings that "the sun fucks the dawn." Why the sun can't just come out normally is unclear. But there's still room for music like this, music that claws its way unapologetically toward wherever it thinks answers might be hiding. After all, without Icarus and his wings, we might never know how high the sky went or how hot the sun got. For 30 years Swans have challenged the boundaries between beauty and ugliness, music and noise, catharsis and abuse. To borrow a verb from their own violent, polarized world, The Seer is the album that transcends them.