Album Reviews - Pitchfork

Jam City: Classical Curves

Mike Powell — Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:04 -0500

Classical Curves is the first full-length album by Jack Latham, a young English electronic producer who goes by the name Jam City. Some claimed influences for the album are marble, trenchcoats, and "oily black Jeep windows." These are opaque things, hard things, things that reflect and conceal. The music isn't much different. Latham's previous releases for the Night Slugs label-- two EPs and the one-off "Arpjam"-- were flat, glaring, and high-tech. Classical Curves isn't much different, only more distilled. Some electronic musicians strive to make their sound as humanistic as possible; Classical Curves is basically disinfectant set to a beat. It borrows its jazz chords from artists like Prince and the 1980s electro-soul group Zapp-- artists who found glamor in the cleanliness of machines. It's an album of bangers, though less in the vernacular sense than in the sense that it often sounds like stuff banging together.

About a minute into the album's intro, we hear the sound of breaking glass. Then more glass. Then a little more. Then, as it transitions into "Her", a drum machine that sounds like a jackhammer and a flurry of camera shutters. "The Courts"-- a single Latham released in advance of the album-- is built on a web of what sounds like new sneakers being streaked across freshly waxed wood. Later on, dogs bark over some more broken glass. In all likelihood you'll know whether this album will repulse you within about two minutes. There's a good chance it may. Latham's single-mindedness, though, is a rare and admirable quality-- a quality that makes Classical Curves sound more like one long, continuous idea than a series of discrete tracks.

As with all Night Slugs' best releases, Classical Curves creates a world that belongs to the music-- a visual world, a world of ideas. The album's cover is a slick little motorbike lying on its side in a marble atrium in front of a huge fern, with a silky yellow piece of fabric draped over a wall behind the bike. It's a seductive image, an image of perfect objects in an imperfect, disarrayed scene. During a recent email exchange, Latham didn't share with me exactly where the shot-- or some accompanying videos-- were taken, but he mentioned that a year ago he worked for a company "stealing and selling information about their rivals," a job that forced him to spend a lot of time hanging out in similar kinds of lobbies, spaces he calls "glamorous looking in a kind of... corporate, rich-people way, I suppose... but pretty lonely and alienating and not the safest career option." At another point in his career, he produced chrome prostheses for fashion shows. One track here is called "How We Relate to the Body." Latham's answer, I imagine, is "with ambivalence and heavy machinery."

Beauty, bodies, science fiction, ideas of cleanliness and perfection-- it's all suggested here in sound. In a lot of ways, this album is more conceptually in touch with prime-era Kraftwerk or, as previously mentioned, early industrial music: music that highlights its own sense of soul by being as comprehensively soulless as possible. This is music that achieves as much of its effect through silence as through sound: Between every beat, the space is so absolute and empty that getting to the next piece of solid ground is a kind of perpetual thrill. Not a warm one, not a nice one, just a perpetual one, one that mechanically follows the one before it, no variation, no room for error.

Slugabed: Time Team

Andrew Gaerig — Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:03 -0500

Given that the rallying cry for progressive bass music in 2012 amounts to "Not another shitty house album," it's difficult to remember that as recently as 2010 there was a third avenue available to producers not inclined to four-on-the-floor kickdrum patterns or wubs'n'dubs moshing. Sometimes referred to as "bitstep," there was a handful of producers-- including early Zomby and Philadelphia's Starkey (an example), even James Blake's outré moments-- that were constructing bold, mechanistic dub-funk. Slugabed's Ultra Heat Treated EP was one of the ripest examples of this style, which, in drawing from dubstep, American hip-hop, grime, and hard techno, offered a more robust sound palette than most anything else being released. If Detroit techno was, as Derrick May famously said, George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator, this was Dr. Dre pumping out of Optimus Prime's speakers. To quote the title of a track from Slugabed's Time Team: "It's When the Future Falls Plop on Your Head".

The shame is that neither that track-- which closes Time Team on a slight note-- nor the rest of Slugabed's debut long-player sounds much like the future at all. Since Ultra Heat Treated, Slugabed has released two EPs of increasingly glossy synth turbulence, refining his sound by sanding off the edges that made it-- and anything that came into contact with-- bleed. Slugabed can thank London's recent fascination with house music for the fact that he has rarely sounded further askew from his particular generation of bass producers. Time Team has as much in common with Scuba as it does Skrillex, which is to say very little (though Sluga's bold, manic productions are a purer interpretation of Aphex Twin's legacy than Skrillex's widely praised "I also like melody"-devotion).

His default mode now is a slow, saccharine boogie-- dubstep filtered through a g-funk lean-- that still relies on his alien sound palette. He favors call-and-response synth figures, overseeing cat-and-mouse games between timorous whistles and black-rubber bass. Rhythms that used to forcefully contort his melodies are more cooperative now; the busy latter half of "Dragon Drums" is an afternoon shower compared to the gale-force storms he used to summon, but he's never so inattentive as to let his drums fall into gridlocked kicks or lazy boom-bap.

There's still a sense of discovery, now paired with playfulness. Sluga's vocal samples aren't ashen divas but wishful, chiming children, like he's borrowed Boards of Canada's pastoral naivety but transposed their nostalgia into sci-fi galavanting. On the mid-album "Mountains Come Out of the Sky" and "Grandma Paints Nice" he offers faraway vistas, the likes of which you might find on a fantasy novel's cover: the sky is purple, there are a half-dozen visible moons, endless possibilities presented in comfortable, familiar ways.

But looking out at eight moons would be really beautiful, so I can lose myself in the tasteful aphorisms of "Unicorn Suplex" and "Climbing a Tree"'s Books-y niceties. I wish Slugabed dropped the hammer more often on Time Team, but sometimes the future plops on your head when you wish it would bash it in.

TALWST: Alien Tentacle Sex EP

Andrew Ryce — Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:02 -0500

This singer (pronounced "tall waist") not only shares a hometown (Toronto) and producer (Illangelo) with the Weeknd's Abel Tesfaye, but the same subject matter, vibe, and eerily similar vocal melodies. But instead of an intriguing side project from an obviously talented producer (in addition to the Weeknd, Illangelo had a hand in Drake's "Crew Love"), the EP turns out to be a disappointing facsimile of his more famous projects. Alien Tentacle Sex basically feels like Illangelo twiddling his thumbs nervously while he waits for the Weeknd tour to finish.

The record starts strong with a lush production job in "I'd Die", musically as strong as anything on the Weeknd's Echoes of Silence. The slinking metallic beat is embellished with groaning synths, eerie chimes, and all manner of weird samples. But then the vocal comes in. There's something about TALWST's cadences that sound too close to a sandpaper-throated Tesfaye, and the heavy processing that replicates the headier moments of the Weeknd catalog doesn't help the case. The unwise similarity is further explored on "Mercy Me", a nonsense mope-glam number that sounds like it was based off a discarded Tesfaye guide vocal. These comparisons may be unfair, but there's just no escaping them here.

TALWST doesn't have the most distinctive or powerful voice, but that shouldn't be enough to dismiss him wholesale-- plenty have done great with much less. Unfortunately, his lyrics are far, far worse: Gems like "passport inked like Lil Wayne's face" are outdone by the mid-album wading pool "Lonely Guy", an unbearably self-pitying track where his reedy warble actually manages to croon the phrase "Lonely guy/ He is I." TALWST's self-analyzation feels like empty narcissism, backed up by a completely unconvincing persona.

Alien Tentacle Sex isn't all Weeknd rip-offs. "Woman" chops up spoken-word and gasps of melody into an alien assemblage that sounds neat even if the lyrical content is embarrassing, while the brief "Peace Tonight" is easily the highlight. It's just too bad his gruff rap is interrupted by cries of "please no nuclear bombs." The only thing worse than the unnecessary politicization is his flagrant mispronunciation of "nuclear." The melodramatic closer "No Stones" seems to want to recreate the subtle magic of Usher's "Climax", from the honeyed tones to the gently elongated phrasing, but it lacks even a modicum of subtlety, its ham-shaped fist too salty for even the most naive of palettes.

R&B is largely personality-driven stuff, and outside of what he misguidedly tries to borrow from more established artists, TALWST has very little to sell. Having come so far so fast, Illangelo's name now carries some serious weight, but even that proven pedigree isn't enough to build a fortress out of toothpicks. Whatever the intent was with Alien Tentacle Sex (even the title hints at an intriguing dimension unexplored by the pedestrian music), it seems like they lost the plot at some point along the way.

Future of the Left: The Plot Against Common Sense

Ian Cohen — Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:01 -0500

Andy Falkous is something of a personal hero, and if he ever decides to give up on music, I just hope an institution of higher learning allows him an emeritus professorship based on the philosophical principles set forth by Mclusky's Do Dallas. Our children deserve it. I say all of this because the corporate-slick production on Future of the Left's third album makes me wonder if this is still the guy who made the music of "To Hell With Good Intentions" and "You Need Satan More Than He Needs You" as sharp as their wit. And what about the cover and the goddamn title of The Plot Against Common Sense? What in god's name is the author of "Fuck This Band" doing stealing ideas from unpublished John Stossel books?

As it turns out, those fears aren't fully realized on The Plot Against Common Sense, though they are definitely warranted. Little has changed musically for the always-contradictory Future of the Left. The constituent parts are primitively composed but played with vice-tight musicianship, while the blindingly bright, major-key synth riffs still come off as abrasive as anything produced by an atonal noise band. In terms of tempo and texture, The Plot hangs a little bit more loosely than the trim Travels With Myself and Another, with "Goals in Slow Motion" inching toward a legit alt-rock chorus and the jaw harp-like sample of "Anchor" raising the possibility that they're secretly fans of "A Milli". But even if the mockup of punk commodification on "Sheena Is a T-Shirt Salesman" is more entry-level ("dumb is the new black," ugh) than the aforementioned "pop" maneuvers, the music itself rips hard. And it's still so rare to hear a band this caustic and aggressive that manages to be so intelligible.

But the sound is still there to support Falkous' hectoring. This is usually a good thing-- no one else is coming up with lines like "I have seen into the future/ Everyone is slightly older" and "Civilized people don't fuck bears/ Civilized people don't play fair" that function as good jokes and good hooks. It can make Future of the Left seem damn near necessary at times. After all, humor is often seen as coming from a less authentic place than anger, heartbreak, or joy, and most bands who try to be funny often make it a point to counterbalance it with an equal and oppositely sensitive show of humanity. Not these guys; an emotionally complex song on The Plot Against Common Sense happens to be both cynical and sarcastic. When it works, it opens up an almost unlimited world of songwriting possibilities.

But while Falkous has long been adept at connecting with an audience via snark, man, do things take a wicked, face-shielding turn about halfway through Common Sense. For the most part, you just wish Falkous would pick on someone his own size. Shit like plastic surgery ("Polymers Are Forever", held over from 2011's EP), Trustafarians ("Sorry Dad, I Was Late For the Riots") and Alcoholics Anonymous ("Anchor") make for unfair fights, and Falkous can only barely muster the effort. And I'm not sure we needed another Future of the Left song exploring the politics of pagan orgies ("A Guide to Men").

But the point of no return is clearly "Robocop 4-- Fuck Off Robocop". Look, Battleship: The Movie is in theaters and we clearly need a "Burn Hollywood Burn" to reflect the times. But I can say with a fair degree of certainty that 2012 will not see a more stupendously awesome song title or a worse song attached to it. Why it's even a song to begin with is beyond me, as its musical values are pretty much nil. And then Falkous half-raps the following: "George Lucas won't be kicking his heels 'til he makes some money from Howard the Duck." That's the part I chose to quote at length, when a line about Billy Corgan starring as a Harry Potter villain was readily available. Let that sink in.

It's a shame that Falkous is playing to the cheap seats on The Plot Against Common Sense, since, to paraphrase one of their best songs, we need Falkous more than he needs us. But I suppose if any teen comes for the "Diff'rent Strokes" and Russell Brand jokes and finds his way toward Travels With Myself and Another and Do Dallas, I can't deny him any more than I could my teenage self that bought overproduced and hamfisted Bad Religion records like The Gray Race and Stranger Than Fiction and thought they were the shit because of all the big words. But I also thought guys like Lewis Black and David Cross were the shit at the time too, and by a certain point, either due to laziness or just a tremendous misunderstanding of their talents, they ditched any semblance of cleverness or comedy for straight-up ranting. It's hard to watch. I'm hoping Falkous doesn't go there, but on The Plot Against Common Sense, he's threatening to become the kind of willfully delusional lunkhead that Mclusky songs eviscerated.

The Walkmen: Heaven

Jayson Greene — Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:00 -0500

"I was the Duke of Earl, but it couldn't last/ I was the pony express, but I ran out of gas." This is the first thing Hamilton Leithauser sighs on the Walkmen's new album, Heaven. It is a distinctly un-rock'n'roll sentiment. In fact, it sounds like the sort of thing your grandpa might say. Ten years ago, the Walkmen were a magnetic, messy young rock band, and they did all the things we expect young rock bands to do: swung in unexpectedly on friends, drunk-dialed exes, pleaded pathetically that things would get better with zero evidence that they would. But over the course of their last two albums, they began receding gracefully into sepia tone: Both You & Me and Lisbon felt like more breezy postcards from abroad than seething dispatches from here. Heaven, their gloriously pretty sixth studio record, marks the moment they shuffle off into that 4x6-sized sunset forever. The title they've chosen says it all: Look where they ended up! We all know that's not where rock bands go.

Heaven, as Talking Heads famously defined it, "is a place where nothing ever happens." For most sentient people, that sounds like the definition of hell, which Byrne's lyrics admitted: "It's hard to imagine how nothing at all/ Could be so exciting/ Could be so much fun." Similarly, it might not thrill longtime Walkmen fans to picture the band as a bunch of rumpled, beaming dads slotting recording time in between play dates. But on Heaven, they've made a bewildered, giddy paean to their own happiness. Heaven feels infectiously drunk on its own good fortune and kicks out a barstool for you to drink alongside it.

It helps that Hamilton Leithauser, with his oddly aristocratic presence, remains a magnetic frontman even when he's basically taking a song to make goo-goo noises at his one-year-old daughter (the lovely if borderline-saccharine "Song for Leigh"). There was always something airily entitled in Leithauser's on-record persona; he was the rich kid who didn't have to do his homework, because he knew you'd do it if he asked. That this kid had feelings too was a fundamental dramatic premise of the Walkmen. To hear this former kid now ruminating on big-picture stuff, like the statistical improbability of lasting love ("Love Is Luck") or the emptiness of perfection ("We Can't Be Beat") is to hear the band's purview expand quietly. On "Southern Heart", he even plays a pleasantly tired cuckold, like the Leonard Cohen of "Famous Blue Raincoat": "Tell me again how you loved all the men you were after," he mutters.

Some longtime fans might not like their Walkmen like this. They were great, after all, at being sexily unstable. But this retro-yearning tendency has been there since the beginning if you looked for it. So to hear them ease out of sturm-und-drang and into something resembling durable adulthood is to witness a great rock band evolve along a logical path. In what may be a tacit acknowledgement of this shift, Heaven glows with nostalgic pre-rock'n'roll sounds: "Jerry Jr.'s Tune" is one-and-a-half moonlit minutes of classic doo-wop; "No One Ever Sleeps" has a faint mariachi-sounding horn section; "Love Is Luck" is a sparkling calypso song. "Heartbreaker" echoes the chords, melody and rhythm of "Be My Baby".

All of the Walkmen's albums have been recorded with meticulous, stone-cutting care; by now, listening to them is like entering a room where you can tap your foot in corners to test its resonance. "We Can't Be Beat", one of a few songs on Heaven rounded out with harmonies from Fleet Foxes' Robin Pecknold, eases into a full-band march after about two minutes of wry, twinkling acoustic guitar. On "Line By Line", Leithauser croons tenderly over a single rippling guitar until a string section gradually soaks in at the song's edges. The beery, cock-eyed "No One Ever Sleeps" transforms the Walkmen into a schmaltzy gypsy band serenading the outdoor tables at a white-tablecloth restaurant.

This group has always been able to carve out dramatic gestures like this, and even at this end of the spectrum-- far beyond personal explosions and exclamation-pointed delivery-- they continue to craft music of wry vitality. It may be that they can no longer convincingly deliver tortured, existential desperation, and if so, that's just as well. With Heaven, they've turned out a record that finds a thousand affecting variations on contented hum.

Reptar: Body Faucet

Ian Cohen — Thu, 24 May 2012 00:00:04 -0500

Having blown way more money at 4o Watt, Nowhere Bar, and Schoolkids Records than I care to mention, I can say from personal experience that everything you've heard about Athens, Ga., being a wonderland of fluid indie rock collectives, Southern hospitality, and dirt cheap rent is true. But want to know what band's been most consistently holding the Classic City down for the past decade? Not R.E.M., they were coasting on cred even before they went defunct. of Montreal? Please, you're thinking too hard. Drive-By Truckers? Definitely a contender. But the answer here would be jam-band warhorses Widespread Panic.

I use this exercise as a reminder that Athens is an artistic utopia but also essentially a suburb of Atlanta, and like any major college town, many of the 30-40,000 kids who call it home seriously like nothing more than to throw the fuck down. This explains why Athens is every bit as likely to spawn a band like Reptar as it is Pylon, and it's not just because their press photos look like surveillance footage from an AEPi hazing ritual. With all the indiscriminate enthusiasm and unearned confidence of young adults on the precipice of self-discovery, Reptar uses their debut Body Faucet as a vat in which to hastily dump the past five years of top shelf indie into some kind of frat party-stoking jungle juice.

But if Body Faucet indeed replaces the likes of "That Was a Crazy Game of Poker" during at least one keg bust, it's done a tremendous service, right? Seems kinda churlish to harsh the vibes since Reptar are clearly friendly guys not trying to put one over on us: This isn't fronting like a replacement for the likes of Vampire Weekend or Passion Pit or Yeasayer or Animal Collective and Reptar are likely just as excited for those bands' new albums as you are. Besides, even if everything about the band screams that it wasn't a matter of if they were going to name themselves after a kitschy 90s reference, but which one, the fact a remarkably similar but exponentially more awful band named Coolrunnings exists means we could do a lot worse.

Still, Body Faucet proudly manifests its influence on about as basic of a level as possible, right down to the hiring of Ben H. Allen. We're still obligated to mention he produced Merriweather Post Pavilion, but his C.V.'s getting awful crammed with the likes of Fanfarlo and Bombay Bicycle Club, starched-shirt indie-pop bands looking for an extreme "Summertime Clothes" makeover. Reptar was always pretty tie-dye to begin with, but they fit in that lineage, since Body Faucet operates on fairly standard melodic progressions that could be strummed out by any acoustic-toting dorm rover. But under Allen's guidance, they're doubled by plinky electric guitar runs, tripled by keyboards, and if that's not enough, hey, we got these kids here, let’s have them sing the hook. This extends what otherwise might've been punchy songs past five minutes, but it's all there, the jumpy polyrhythms and wiggled guitar runs and buzzing synth riffs shellacked to a blinding sheen so it'll play just as good to people who think King Sunny Ade is a juice stand at Lenox Square Mall.

But so what if their Afro-tribal-electro-twee-pop is indeed all sugar and no roughage; is it a crime to make Annuals look like they were actually ahead of their time? No, but all of the above means essentially little since every time Graham Ulicny opens up his throat, you just wanna yell "this is all your fault!" at the nearest .jpeg of Panda Bear and Avey Tare. I mean, it really is: I've always considered Merriweather Post Pavilion to be The Soft Bulletin of its decade and 10 years ago, the Reptars of the indiesphere sported a mewling, no-attack whine decked out by saturated synth strings and drums redlining with distortion. But Animal Collective understood the relationship between form and function, and the visceral shrieking of their earlier work was meant as a conveyance for the primal, occasionally unspeakable urges contained therein. But despite attempts at lyrical heft detailing a too-vague sexual awakening ("Sebastian") and an encomium for a friend ("Ghost Bike"), Ulicny undermines himself on a second-by-second basis by finding no lyric that can't be subjected to at least six different forms of contortion regardless of its content. Is there any reason for a line such as "Daniel left you for another boy/ Indeed he did you like a windup toy/ Oh why-o, why-o" to be sung like you're trying to one-up Dave Longstreth in a vocal game of H.O.R.S.E.? I mean, if you're going to stuff a song called "Orifice Origami" with four octaves of goosed-up pitch exaggeration and reserve your most strangulated affectations to deliver the title of "Please Don't Kill Me", does that mean you have all the self-awareness in the world or absolutely none at all?

Not that gravitas should be expected from a band whose name instantly inspires memories of raspy cartoon toddlers in awe of a monster dinosaur. And from most accounts, Reptar are "known" for their "fun live show," understandable because they are nothing if not insistent: Body Faucet as a whole clocks in at damn near an hour, which would be wholly indefensible, but then again, you come from a place like Athens, 35 minutes is not gonna give a Caledonia crowd enough time to get as liquored up as they want. I have to admit, sometimes I wonder if I resent Body Faucet for making me feel way older than my years, but then I mostly realize I don't envy college kids in the age of Twitter, because Reptar is their kind of band: accessible to way more information than they can fully process, desperate for attention, and prone to the most public of embarrassments.

Advance Base: A Shut-In's Prayer

Larry Fitzmaurice — Thu, 24 May 2012 00:00:03 -0500

Owen Ashworth is familiar with nostalgia. His work as Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, an often lo-fi, not-always-Casiotone-based indie pop project that officially came to an end in 2010, encompassed a range of emotions that often tasted more "bitter" than "sweet." Regret, longing, desire, scorn, and jealousy frequently featured on the menu, but what made those feelings resonate was the presence of memory in his songwriting, the idea that even the most painful experiences are worth remembering. That's why his earliest material was so diaristic, as well as why he once chose to write a song reminiscing on when bridge tolls amounted to no more than "one single crisp clean dollar bill." 2009's final Casiotone album, the anti-procreation treatise Vs. Children, is perhaps his most cynical work to date, but the concluding song "White Jetta" punctuated ruminations on sick mothers and unstable bloodlines with a mantra about staying young forever: "To stay the same/ To never change."

Three years removed, and Owen Ashworth's shell has cracked. A Shut-In's Prayer is the proper debut from his new project, Advance Base, and it's easily the most wistful work he's committed to tape. Couched in the most immediate and affecting melodies of his career, many of the stories told on A Shut-In's Prayer look back at the past mainly to remember its contents. Ashworth's flair for narrative detail is in top form, achieving a level so microscopic that, at one point, he zooms in while ruminating on familial ennui to describe a scene in a horror movie that several characters are watching together. Sometimes, as on the album highlight "Riot Grrrls", these trips down memory lane end with resolution-- or, at least, as much resolution that you could get from two college-age outcasts "Wondering if we ran/ Who'd miss us." Elsewhere, memories take on the form of child runaways and faded filial relationships, as Ashworth is left with disconnected threads between the past and present and not much more.

As a songwriter and, by proxy, as a human being, Ashworth's certainly grown since he started plinking out tape-hiss anti-anthems back in 1998. You can hear his musical progression in the pretty, at-times lush instrumentation on display here, a logical progression from the baroque figures of Vs. Children with added intimacy. He's made leaps and bounds as a singer, too: For all its warm mid-fi glow and quaint arrangements, A Shut-In's Prayer retains its affecting strength thanks to Ashworth's vocal performances. It still feels like a stretch to call him a "singer" by most mainstream standards, but the occasional sullen sneer of his earlier work has been smoothed out.

He's found a nice pocket of resonance in his low-pitched voice, and his higher register is pleasant and sing-songy. Ashworth uses the latter disarmingly on "More Trouble", the album's most easygoing and upbeat tune that, upon closer inspection, is about the grim inevitability of waiting for bad news from a doctor. There are a few songs on A Shut-In's Prayer that deal with such weighty subject matter-- "New Gospel"'s advice to a substance-addled depressive, the troubled sibling relationship detailed in "My Sister's Birthday"-- but the album otherwise largely carries the type of fuzzy sadness that you'd get from looking at old pictures of past (and, possibly, better) times. That such an openly nostalgic album is seeing release on Caldo Verde is a humorous coincidence, given that its founder, Red House Painters/Sun Kil Moon mastermind Mark Kozelek, recently waxed nostalgic on "Sunshine in Chicago", a gorgeous cut from SKM's forthcoming album Among the Leaves. If 2012 is the year that downer-music veteran loner types finally start to express some sort of happiness, out of their fondness of the past or otherwise, then so be it.

A Shut-In's Prayer is arguably the strongest album of Owen Ashworth's career thus far, and it arrives at a time when the influence of his former project looms over specific spheres of indie music. The trapped-in-suburbia haze of Youth Lagoon's Trevor Powers carries Casiotone's torch of homespun intimacy; Mike Hadreas takes the project's raconteurish flair to new, bruising depths as Perfume Genius; and South Carolina songwriter Mat Cothran's Coma Cinema project possesses the cynicism of Ashworth's youth. As those young artists continue to grow, so does Owen Ashworth, and this new chapter of his 15-year run carries such promise that fixating on the past almost seems pointless, since the future potentially holds so much more in store.

Exitmusic: Passage

Grayson Currin — Thu, 24 May 2012 00:00:02 -0500

Much of the press Brooklyn duo Exitmusic garnered for its 2011 EP, From Silence, depended as much on the pair's backstory as their tension-dependent sound. The tale of Aleksa Palladino and Devon Church, after all, is more than a good narrative hook; it's a real-life manifestation of the kind of woozy, romantic arch you've either seen in your daydreams, on the silver screen, or in paperbacks filed in the young-adult or classic literature sections. The daughter of a New York opera singer, Palladino met the relatively agrarian Church in the smoking car of a train while backpacking across Canada. They were teenagers. The new friends tried to watch a meteor shower from the train's observation car, failed, and soon bid adieu; Church wrote her letters, bid for her affection, and eventually just moved to New York and in with her. They got married on Mulholland Drive, she found success as an actress, and they since started an interesting indie rock band together. "As they share a cigarette on the walk to their apartment, they think about their coming week," read a 2011 profile for The Stool Pigeon. "The Emmys, New York Fashion Week, the season premiere of 'Boardwalk Empire'." Yes, then, sometimes love can be like the movies.

But Palladino and Church's shared past is more than simple star-laced bait; it's essential to the drama and radiance of their music. If their story sounds like one to be written into a movie, the 10 songs on their Secretly Canadian full-length debut, Passage, feel like scores for pictures not yet made. Insurgent, cinematic, and sometimes brilliant, Passage is an emotionally evocative record bearing sharp hooks, driven deep by heavy textures and broad dynamics. Suggesting Berlin and Bowie, Bedhead and Portishead, Exitmusic's third release continues and catalyzes the pair's stepwise progression, which began with their muted, self-released start in 2007 and last year's refined if stylistically cramped four-track re-introduction. Produced at home by Church but mixed and mastered by the phenomenal Nicolas Vernhes, these songs sound incredible, with their tessellated instrumental layers and intricately woven effects. All at once, it's a sudden move from short films and home movies to a proper, feature-length production. For Palladino and Church, this next level works wonders.

True to her classical pedigree, Palladino is an incredibly versatile singer, able to hurtle gracefully from a Victoria Legrand whisper at the start of "The Modern Age" to a strident command by the time she strangles the tune's final refrain. She sends up smoke during weird waltz "The Night" and plumes of grey during the appropriately named "Storms". Above the outwardly building patter of "White Noise", she shadows the unwavering cool of Zola Jesus; "The Modern Age", the album's lone From Silence holdover, sports the steely glint of the National, just remixed for the fading hours between the dance club's and the bed's rest. During the opening title track, they split her sound open, using her wail as an ornate thread in much the way Sigur Rós once did with Jónsi Birgisson's croon. On "The Wanting", her singing and the treatment the pair give it again mirror Birgisson's alien tone. It becomes the all-encompassing gauze around, above, and beneath a piano-and-bass plod. Both multi-instrumentalists, she and Church weave these vocals into deft thickets of occasionally abrasive electronics, chime-to-roar guitars, wobbly organs, and drums that help conjure the melodrama. But Palladino's adaptability is clearly Exitmusic's anchor, the unifying characteristic that allows the band to scatter from film to dance music, from post-rock heights to mellow-gold lows.

In the wake of so many Silver Lake indie hitmakers and Williamsburg careerists, it's tempting to dismiss Exitmusic as the vain time-sink of two well-to-do adults suspended in artistic adolescence. Perhaps you assume that the indie rock aspirations of a starlet who once acted opposite Scarlett Johansson must somehow smack of condescension. But to Exitmusic's great credit, Church is no Pete Yorn, and there's very little that's precious or reserved about this music or the way Palladino sings. Instead, it's audacious and ambitious, twisting lyrics about depravity and loneliness into shared anthems meant for overcoming both. More than a cash-in or credibility play, Passage simply pulls several familiar objects into one detailed picture, a predictably good look from a pair whose script seems every bit as written as much as lived.

Mutilation Rites: Empyrean

Brandon Stosuy — Thu, 24 May 2012 00:00:01 -0500

When I interviewed the Brooklyn black metal group Mutilation Rites, vocalist/guitarist George Paul said he was "a guitar player first," and that he doesn't think of himself as a lyricist: "I'm not a poet. What I write about is very personal, and it's almost entirely about depression, vices, suicide, substance abuse." He goes as far as to "slur" his words "to make it more monotone sounding," and therefore indecipherable. In the same discussion, drummer Justin Ennis, who used to play in the New York City trio Tombs, explains that the band's music is their "catharsis," and shouldn't be looked at as positive or negative: "To us, it's all feelings at once, good and bad." Live, Mutilation Rites don't talk to the crowd between songs; instead, they play loudly, and burrow into themselves: "The volume is part of how we and the listener become immersed in the moment. It's so loud that if you're not feeling us, you will leave the room. Either you want to be there with us or you don't."

Black metal bands often come with any number of agendas; the above statements help establish this group as one who doesn't. And unlike other black metal groups in their borough, the quartet's approach sticks to the old-school black metal template: They stuff crust, d-beat, and a love of Dissection into their sound, but in a way that doesn't ask to be called "post" or "avant." They're just very adept at reviving a structure and making it breathe again.

This year, Mutilation Rites released a couple of EPs of earlier material, but Empyrean is their first proper studio album. On it, they forgo ambient intros, ponderous samples, and endless riffing in favor of a tight 35 minutes that manages to feel expansive courtesy of layers of dual guitars, multiple in-song shifts, and an ongoing push and pull. It's a mix of raw black metal, dark doom, and punk that rocks, but that also offers plenty of prettier surprises. Think of late-period Darkthrone vomiting the youthful version of themselves onto the crowd at a filthy DIY space. (Since recording Empyrean, they fittingly added bassist Ryan Jones of noise-rock icons Today Is the Day.) It's stately and epic, but booze-soaked, filthy, and feral.

They're smart songwriters with ears for catchy, compelling guitar parts. The gorgeous opener "A Season of Grey Rain" offers angular, spiraling riffs that locate dark beauty amid buzzing tremolo-picks. The galloping start of "Realms of Dementia" has a loping rhythm before the song grows angrier, complete with George Paul hocking spit. (He may not consider himself a vocalist, but his maniacal ranting and raving is as essential to what Mutilation Rites do as is their snails-pace mosh parts, dense atmosphere, and d-beat gallop.) They offer plenty of variety without resorting to "fusion." The almost 8-minute "Ancient Bloodoath" introduces a snails-pace doom vibe. Following the storm of "Dead Years", a song that mixes furious blast beats with a stately crawl, the final track "Broken Axis" ends the record with two-minutes of incrementally slower doom and drone. It's a proper set-cap, not a curve ball.

Empyrean's cover art is based on one of 19th-century artist Gustave Doré's illustrations for Dante's The Divine Comedy; the image depicts the highest realm of heaven, a "paradise" of fire or light. I like that a band digging into vices, drugs, and self-mutilation-- issues of the body-- offer a bright, celestial, otherworldly, spiritual image to depict their music. Throughout this record, it does feel like they're reaching for those sorts of heights musically, even if they're hanging out in the gutter.

Paul McCartney / Linda McCartney: Ram

Jayson Greene — Thu, 24 May 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Flipping through the booklet to Paul McCartney's Ram reissue, you'll find no scholarly liner-notes essay. This is odd. Usually the reissue-packaging gods demand the positioning of an eager critic between you and the product, dispensing wisdom on how you might experience the music they're standing in front of. What you find instead is a McCartney family-photo scrapbook: Paul draping himself playfully around monkey bars with his infant Stella. Mary, about three years old, hoisting fat headphones above her tiny head; on the opposite page, Linda nuzzling Paul, those same headphones ringed around his neck. In the photos, Paul looks dazed, as if he were smacked in the face with a pillow seconds before the shutter clicked. It drives the point home: Ram is a domestic-bliss album, one of the weirdest, earthiest, and most honest ever made. No wonder critics loathed it so passionately.

Or at least, some critics did. Sometimes an album gets a review so resoundingly negative that it lurks forever like a mournful spirit in its rear view mirror: Jon Landau, writing for Rolling Stone, claimed to hear in Ram "the nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock thus far." Which is intense. But people wanted impossible things from Beatles solo albums-- closure, healing, apologies, explanations for what to do with their dashed expectations. John Lennon tried telling everyone outright "The dream is over" on Plastic Ono Band's "God", but that still wasn't a cold-water jet hard enough to prepare people, apparently, for the whimsical pastoral oddity that was Ram.

Landau was right, however, that it did spell the end of something, which might be a clue to the vitriol: If "60s rock" was defined, in large part, by the existence of the Beatles, then Ram made it clear in a new, and newly painful, way that there would be no Beatles ever again. To use a messy-divorce metaphor: When your parents are still screaming red-faced at each other, it's a nightmare, but you can still be assured they care. When one of them picks up and continues on living, it smarts in an entirely different way.

Ram, simply put, is the first Paul McCartney release completely devoid of John's musical influence. Of course, John wiggled his way into some of the album's lyrics-- in those fresh, post-breakup years, the two couldn't quite keep each other out of their music. But musically, Ram proposes an alternate universe where young Paul skipped church the morning of July 6, 1957, and the two never crossed paths. It's breezy, abstracted, completely hallucinogen-free, and utterly lacking grandiose ambitions. Its an album whistled to itself. It's purely Paul.

Or actually, "Paul and Linda." This was another one of Paul's chief Ram-related offenses: He not only invited his new photographer bride into the recording studio, he included her name on the record's spine. Ram is the only album in recorded history credited to the artist duo "Paul and Linda McCartney," and in the sense that Linda's enthusiastically warbling vocals appear on almost every song, it's entirely accurate. Some read Paul's decision as the ultimate insult to his former partner: I've got a new collaborator now! Her name is Linda, and she never makes me feel stupid. In the album's freewheeling spirit, however, the decision scans more like guilelessness and innocence. The songs don't feel collaborative so much as cooperative: little schoolhouse plays that required every hand on deck to get off the ground. Paul had the most talent, so naturally he was up front, but he wanted everyone behind him, banging pots, hollering, whistling-- whatever it is you did, make sure you're back there doing it with gusto.

It is exactly this homemade charm that has caught on with generations of listeners as the initial furor around the album subsided. What 2012's ears can find on Ram is a rock icon inventing an approach to pop music that would eventually become someone else's indie pop. It had no trendy name here; it was just a disappointing Beatles solo album. But when Ben Stiller's fussy, pedantic "Greenberg" character painstakingly assembles a mix for Greta Gerwig intended to display the breadth and depth of his pop-culture appreciation, he slides Ram's "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" on there. It's the song we see her singing along to enthusiastically in the following montage.

Critics hated "Uncle Albert". "A major annoyance," Christgau opined. Again, from the current moment we can only plead ignorance, assume that some serious shit had to be going down to clog everyone's ears. Because "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" is not only Ram's centerpiece, it is clearly one of McCartney five greatest solo songs. As the slash in the title hints, it's a multi-part song, starring two characters. To put its accomplishments in an egg-headed way: It fuses the conversational joy listeners associated with McCartney's melodic gift to the compositional ambition everyone assumed was Lennon's. To put it a simpler way: Every single second of this song is joyously, deliriously catchy, and no two seconds are the same. Do you think early Of Montreal, the White Stripes at their most vaudevillian, or the Fiery Furnaces took any lessons from this song?

What a lot of people thought they heard on "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey", and everywhere else on the album, is cloying cuteness. But it turns out you can say a lot of things-- things like "go fuck yourself" ("3 Legs"), "everything is fucked" ("Too Many People"), and even "let's go fuck, honey" ("Eat At Home)"-- with a big, dimpled grin on your face. "It's just the critics who say, 'Well, John was the biting tongue; Paul's the sentimental one,'" Linda observed shrewdly in a dual Playboy interview from 1984. "John was biting, but he was also sentimental. Paul was sentimental, but he could be very biting. They were more similar than they were different."

The joy of paying close attention to Ram is gradually discovering that Paul was humming darker things under his breath than it seemed. "Smile Away", for instance, is a messy, romping slab of Buddy Holly rock. Paul makes a joke about his stinky feet. The chorus goes "Smile away, smile away, smile away, smile away, smile away." But it's not just "smile," a brief, cost-free act that can last a second. It's "Smile Away", keeping a fixed grin as conversation grows unpleasant. In interviews of the period, Paul was asked repeatedly if he felt lost without his collaborating partner, if he was motivated solely by commercial success, how he felt about being "the cute Beatle." The backing vocal chant behind "Smile Away" goes, by turns, "Don't know how to do that" and "Learning how to do that." "Smile away horribly, now," Paul slurs over the song's fadeout. Yes, he's fine. No, he and Linda will not become the next "John and Yoko." But thanks so much for asking. If you tell a dog it's a brainless fleabag with the same tone of voice you use to say "Good boy," it will still wag its tail.

The album is riddled with dark grace notes like this: "Monkberry Moon Delight" has an absolutely unhinged vocal take, Paul gulping and sobbing right next to your inner ear. The imagery is surrealist, but anything but whimsical: "When a rattle of rats had awoken/ The sinews, the nerves, and the veins," he bellows. It could be a latter-day Tom Waits performance. "Too Many People" opens with Paul warbling "piece of cake," but the lyrics themselves wag their finger at societal injustices, former bandmates-- basically everybody. The lyrics to "3 Legs" are full of hobbling animals with missing limbs.

The almost-title song "Ram On", could serve as the album's redeeming spirit: A haunting, indelible little tune drifts past on ukulele as Paul croons, "Ram on, give your heart to somebody/ Soon, right away." The title is a play on his old stage name "Paul Ramon," which makes the song a private little prayer; a mirror image, perhaps, to John Lennon's "Hold On". The song is reprised, late in the record, functioning like a calming breeze. "I want a horse, I want a sheep/ Want to get me a good night's sleep," Paul jauntily sings on "Heart of the Country", a city boy's vision of the country if ever there was one, and another clue to the record's mindstate. For Paul, the country isn't just a place where crops grow; it's "a place where holy people grow." Now that American cities everywhere are having their Great Pastoral Moment, full of artisans churning goat's-milk yogurt and canning their own jams, Ram feels like particularly ripe fruit.

This reissue comes with a disc of extras from the period, which hardcore McCartney fans will already know well. They are lovely, an extension of the album's mood and world without interrupting it or diluting it. Songs like "Another Day" and "Hey Diddle" feel like a cracked-open door onto the kind of records Paul could have conceivably gone on making forever. A few years later, he had returned, presumably chastened, to crafting over-arching concept records about fictitious bands, the sort of thing he'd gotten a lot of applause for in the past. But the bracingly pure and simple air of Ram has resonated further.

Hauschka / Hilary Hahn: Silfra

Jayson Greene — Wed, 23 May 2012 00:00:04 -0500

The 32-year-old violinist Hilary Hahn has been at the lonely pinnacle of the classical A-list since she was all of 16 years old. It's not exactly a sphere that rewards, or even encourages, curiosity: The language used to assess soloists in Hahn's rarefied air comes disturbingly close the the kind used to appraise prize ponies, and the city-to-city nature of the violin-concerto circuit can make for a life that is almost as cloistered and repetitive. But Hahn has resisted stagnation, recording with alt-country singer/songwriter Josh Ritter, the folk singer Tom Brosseau, and even ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead (that's her on Worlds Apart's "To Russia My Homeland"). She never seems to be insisting on a strident break from the world of orchestral tours, commissions, and Tchaikovsky concertos with any of these new projects -- just looking for something fresh and interesting to do. It has made her career one of the most refreshingly graceful ones in classical music. No project she has undertaken has felt forced, and that includes her decision to hole up in Iceland for two months to make a record with Hauschka.

Hauschka (real name: Volker Bertelmann) is a German pianist and indie classical composer who plays his piano "prepared," i.e., with small things placed on the piano's strings to produce new tones, à la John Cage. Over a series of albums filled with wistful miniature sketches, he's built a weird little sound world where the grotesque walks arm-in-arm with the twee. His pieces evoke a world of broken, rickety instruments, populated entirely by small, limping things. They can be nerve-rendingly cute and cloying, but at their best, they evoke the peculiar sadness you might feel when looking at, say, a toy-strewn suburban lawn.

Silfra is the result of Hahn and Hauschka's disappearing into an Iceland studio, feeling their way around each other, and recording an album based on their resulting improvisations. This sounds like a recipe for an undercooked mess, but Silfra succeeds where Hauschka's solo records haven't always, in part because his world sounds fuller and more inviting with collaborators in it. Silfra feels and sounds like two serious-minded musicians growing increasingly comfortable with each other, allowing themselves to be playful and silly. Together, they have managed to build a livelier, more bustling version of Hauschka's winsome snowglobe universe.

Hahn, for her part, does something that could be considered shocking for violinists in her circle: she willfully drains her million-dollar tone of most of its prettiness. Her playing on Silfra is often sickly, wheezing or shrill, in keeping with the slightly damaged sound of Hauschka's piano. On "North Atlantic", she plays a mournful melody with a breathy, anemic tone, while Hauschka's piano produces a dry "skree" sound that pokes the eardrum like a needle. She begins "Draw a Map" with a forceful gypsy dance that starts hobbling shortly after it gets started: The two of them doodle all over the melody's pristine surface with pockmarks and scribbles. If there's a dance being done here, it's on at least one bad leg.

In the album's liner notes, Hauschka and Hahn lay out specific stories and characters for each track, and a lot of them, it turns out, involved human meddling with existing structures: "Adash", for instance, is "the name of a boy who loves music and scratches lines into his CDs to create unpredictable catches, so that he can hear a section over and over again before it skips ahead to the next part." "Clock Winder" notes: "Some mechanisms still need human interaction to function." This gleeful tinkerer's spirit is what animates Silfra. It is music about fiddling around happily with music's guts, and it's most absorbing when heard through a fat pair of high-quality headphones, where you can register every scrape, plunk, creak, and twang.

The Trypes: Music for Neighbors

Marc Masters — Wed, 23 May 2012 00:00:03 -0500

It's tempting to call 1980's New Jersey band the Trypes a Feelies side project. All five current Feelies were involved at some point, and the only record the Trypes ever released-- 1984's 4-song The Explorers Hold EP-- has a distinct Feelies vibe. It's filled with the Zen strumming and Moe Tucker-ish beats of late-80s Feelies albums The Good Earth and Only Life. One song, the rolling "The Undertow", even showed up later in very similar form on Only Life.

But the Trypes were more than an offshoot. They started as a quartet with no Feelies members, and when Feelies guitarist/singer Glenn Mercer joined, his other band had technically broken up and he was just looking to play drums. More importantly, the Trypes were part of an overlapping circle of N.J. outfits-- including the Feelies, Yung Wu, and the Willies-- whose work had a casual, familial feel. Often it sounded like they were making music for each other rather than an audience.

That's why the title Music for Neighbors-- taken from a series these bands put on at Haledon, N.J., bar the Peanut Gallery-- is such a perfect name for Acute's selection from the Trypes archives. Alongside The Explorers Hold EP, the LP-plus-digital-download set collects demos, live performances, and practice sessions at Hoboken's legendary Maxwell's club. This previously unreleased material is compelling mostly because of its personal, homemade aura. Unpolished and unassuming, it creates an apt portrait of a band that, as Mercer explains in the liner notes, "sprung out of a series of weekly, informal, neighborhood gatherings, playing sparse and simple music on a local level for our own enjoyment."

Sparseness and simplicity permeate all of the Trypes' songs, which were often built on a two-chord strum, up-down organ chords, or a repetitive beat. Mercer cites the group's fusing of "the harder, New York edge of the Velvet Underground and the softer, West Coast vibe of the psychedelic bands," and you can hear that combo throughout, plus some baroque folk leanings. But more interesting than the Trypes' genre mixing is their knack for making every note sound intimate and lived-in. It helps that these recordings are rather lo-fi, giving Music for Neighbors a personal atmosphere not far from Half Japanese or the chord-organ tunes of Daniel Johnston. But this isn't primitive music-- the Trypes prove equally adept at gentle ballads, grinding dirges, classic-rock covers, and a seven-minute jam called "Life History" that sounds like the Feelies channeling Can.

Such range was apparently easy for musicians so familiar with each other. As Elbrus Kelemet sings on "Force of Habit", "We get together everyday at this time/ It has been so long now it's hard to say why/ Must be a habit or we wouldn't go on." They actually didn't go on that long, ending when the Feelies reformed and the original members morphed into the still-active Speed the Plough. But at its best, Music for Neighbors evokes a parallel world, one in which the Trypes still meet up regularly to make more songs for each other.

Spacin': Deep Thuds

Evan Minsker — Wed, 23 May 2012 00:00:02 -0500

There's a Philadelphia band called Birds of Maya, who released two must-listen albums of extremely lo-fi rock'n'roll with plentiful shredding: 2008's Vol. 1 and 2010's Ready to Howl offered up guitar riffs that could've been lifted from 1970s hard-rock radio, but they sounded smothered, and, in the case of Ready to Howl, were stretched out over 20-minute songs. Both Birds of Maya albums rule, but more importantly, they offer essential context for the band's two offshoots: Mike Polizze's Purling Hiss, and most recently, Jason Killinger's Spacin'.

Spacin' is Killinger, Sean Hamilton on bass, Paul Sukeena on lead guitar, and Killinger's wife Eva on drums. While Purling Hiss' sound doesn't stray far from the aesthetic presented on the Birds of Maya albums (except for more direct hooks and warblier production), the debut Spacin' album, Deep Thuds, offers two distinct sounds: extremely direct rock'n'roll with muddy production and spacier tracks that stretch out for several minutes. Killinger's implementation of both techniques makes Deep Thuds compulsively listenable. "Chest of Steel", for example, is driven by a sunny, catchy, triumphant guitar solo, so even while the lyrics are semi-unintelligible, the hook dominates. Compare that to the second track on the album, "Some Future (Burger)"-- over five minutes of quiet, meditative, melody-free atmosphere, which is satisfying in its subtlety.

Impressively, the album never sounds stilted or uneven. The moment "Some Future" ends, we get "Wrong Street", which features a thudding bassline and a ripping, psychedelic guitar solo (and a brief, two-bar guest appearance from Polizze). Then there's the quiet jungle groove of "Oh, Man", which features intricate, subtle guitar tinges over its almost seven minutes. The album has seven tracks; each one offers a different soundscape, and somehow, the songs never clash with one another or sound out of place. That's a testament to how beautifully arranged Deep Thuds is.

Here's the other thing about this album: When Killinger delivers a song that's led by a dominant hook, it hits every time. Sometimes, it comes from a bare bones three- or four-chord melody, like the driving power chords of "Chest of Steel" and "Empty Mind". And sometimes, it's from a central guitar solo that pulls an entire song's weight. "Ego-go", for example, rides a hypnotic riff that creates an atmosphere akin to the Stooges' "Gimme Danger", and similarly, the song culminates in a huge guitar solo. "Sunshine, No Shoes" offers a breezy melody, crunching guitar, and verse to match the track title. And because those songs are bookended by some palate-cleansing atmospheric tracks, stuff like that riff from "Chest of Steel" get a much deserved spotlight.

But honestly, how can an album called Deep Thuds by a band called Spacin' with a drippy Rolling Stones logo on its cover not be remotely funny? Everything about the band's presentation says the album should be frontloaded with irony or snotty humor, but there's nothing like that here. Instead, it's a record that's patient, flows beautifully, offers sludgy production, and is packed with killer hooks. It's an album that uses fuzzed-out guitar for bursts of gutter shredding ferocity. It's a record that sounds like it could owe as much to Grouper as it does to the Velvet Underground or Hawkwind or the Stooges. No, it's not a nonstop shredfest like Birds of Maya's albums, but each deep thud rules.

Rye Rye: Go! Pop! Bang!

Carrie Battan — Wed, 23 May 2012 00:00:01 -0500

There are a handful of jarring moments on Rye Rye's long-delayed debut that remind us of the music industry's comically strange state of artist development limbo. The passage of time is sometimes palpable here. Three tracks in, "DNA" hits you like a Red Bull and vodka-drunken brick, stamped with producer RedOne's unmistakable Eurodance throb. On the next track, "Crazy Bitch", Akon delivers an awkward chorus of "She's a craaaaa-zzzyyy bitch/ That's why I love her/ That's why I love her" over a guitar-strummy hook that could've easily been a Travie McCoy throwaway. Later, a nondescript male voice drops in, rapping, "Lookin' at your behind/ Pull your pants down/ Baby, it's hammer time." Who's that? Oh, sure-- it's Tyga, YMCMB underachiever-turned-"Rack City" star.

Go! Pop! Bang!, whose release was pushed back for a solid three or four years for a litany of likely reasons, is peppered with these marks of 11th-hour cramming and last-minute attempts to achieve broader marketability and relevance. If that sounds familiar, it's probably because the parallel struggles of Nicki Minaj's Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded are fresh in your mind. Female rappers are often unjustly tasked with additional pop-star duties in order to gain commercial viability, and the crossover terrain is understandably tricky to navigate.

Luckily Rye Rye's stacked the album with songs that fit more naturally in her catalog, and she makes a valiant experimental effort in the space between. The 21-year-old proves that she was ahead of the curve as a young teenager performing in Baltimore, and that M.I.A. was smart to recruit her when she assembled her (now possibly defunct?) N.E.E.T. team long ago. Much of the record's best material has been around for years: Rye Rye broke out with the Blaqstarr-produced "Shake It to the Ground", and the song's minimal Baltimore club beat and plucky schoolyard taunts sound fresher than ever in 2012 (and the more central her distinct bubblegum flow, the more capable and engaging Rye Rye sounds as a rapper).

M.I.A. appears as a welcome-- if sometimes unnecessary-- cheerleader throughout the record, from 2008's frenetic and aptly-titled "Bang" (appearing as a bonus track here) to a newer-sounding "Better Than You". On that track, the duo repurposes the classic Annie Get Your Gun tune "Anything You Can Do" for an anthem that blasts conformity in characteristic M.I.A. fashion. And then there's "Sunshine", another M.I.A.-Rye Rye pairing from 2010 whose sepia-warm playground visual probably deserves another look as spring clicks into summer. The young rapper adjusts smoothly to a hodgepodge of sounds, from a Vengaboys sample on "Boom Boom" to a lurking, futuristic Bangladesh beat on "Hotter". Warmth and color fill most of the deluxe edition's (admittedly bloated) 60 minutes, an assortment of bubbly beats forming in gleeful, block party-ready disarray.

For a long time it looked like a shelved Go! Pop! Bang! would go quietly into the night, and no one would have paid much attention if it had. For all of the false starts the record took last year (including a collaboration with Robyn and RYEot PowRR, an incredibly fun mixtape meant as an appetite-whetting preview), there's been virtually no fuss made for the album's ultimate release date. No new videos, tour announcements, or dramatic tracklist unveils. Instead the album's arrived as a pleasant surprise, better late than never.

Saint Etienne: Words and Music by Saint Etienne

Marc Hogan — Wed, 23 May 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The way pop interacts with our lives is as ripe for interrogation as ever. Late last year, Drake wrote a blog post criticizing Tumblr, at a time when acts from Dirty Beaches to Grimes could be seen as building specific tastes (David Lynch, K-pop) into their aesthetic identities almost as overtly as if they were re-blogging a YouTube video. The gap between how records sound and the personal experiences they can bring to mind is also a crucial theme of one of my favorite albums of 2012, Europe, by Allo Darlin'.

This idea of pop as personal has been integral to Saint Etienne for more than two decades. With a pair of former music journalists in their ranks (Bob Stanley has written for Pitchfork, Uncut, and more), the London trio can't help but comment on pop even as they're brilliantly making it, from early singles like 1992's Lovin' Spoonful-invoking "Join Our Club" to the Red Hot Chili Peppers-dissing penultimate track on 2005's Tales From Turnpike House. The group's first proper album since then, Words and Music by Saint Etienne, is a sterling affirmation that relating pop music to your life doesn't have to grow more difficult as you get older.

It's not as if Saint Etienne have been standing still all these years. When not serving in a year-long artists' residency at London's Royal Festival Hall, putting together a documentary called This Is Tomorrow, or working on an upcoming book (Stanley's Do You Believe in Magic?), these pop savants have also reissued their back catalog, put out a highly recommended compilation (London Conversations, which in some formats included two new songs), and tapped producer Richard X to remix their entire 1991 debut album as Foxbase Beta, among too many other projects to list.

All this looking back appears to have reminded Saint Etienne what they loved about pop in the first place. The perennially chic voice of singer Sarah Cracknell can be heard paying tribute to the wonders of portable listening ("I've Got Your Music"), of embracing a loved one while the right song plays ("DJ"), and even, hilariously, of chatting on a pop-music blog that happens to be run by Pitchfork contributor Tom Ewing ("Popular"). The execution is mostly impeccable, with crystal-clear yet memorably idiosyncratic lyrics, and slick electro-pop production from the murderer's row of Richard X, Ian Catt, Nick Coler, and Tim Powell.

"I will surrender to the sound/ And look at all the kids around," Cracknell sings on advance single "Tonight", a soaring, wonderfully vivid encapsulation of the giddiness you feel before seeing a favorite band. This use of "kids" is crucial, because it's a word that often pops up in songs intended for actual kids, but it also captures the truth of going to shows and festivals where the crowds seem to get younger every year. Saint Etienne have grappled with maturity before, particularly in the stylish return-to-the-nightlife of 2002's Finisterre, but Words and Music excels by realizing that there's no inherent conflict between youthful enthusiasm and adult perspective, if you put them together the right way.

Part of what's appealing about Words and Music is the way it maintains a contemporary Top 40 sheen without lowering itself to pandering, but it isn't all uptempo dance-pop. "Heading for the Fair" is the type of piano-house comedown that isn't so far off from the best of the Rapture's latest album, while "Record Collector" continues Saint Etienne's increasing use of harmonies for a sumptuously doo-wop a cappella vocal that could nestle in a playlist beside Drake's "The Ride" or Jens Lekman's "Kanske Är Jag Kär I Dig". The airier moments, such as the waltzing Euro-folk of "I Threw It All Away" or the Bacharach-lush "Answer Song", aren't quite as immediate as the dancefloor-oriented numbers, but they nicely balance the album.

It would be easy to go on and on about every cut on the record, which gracefully clears the admittedly ambiguous bar to become Saint Etienne's best LP since 1994 masterpiece Tiger Bay. But the group's Stanley, Cracknell, and Pete Wiggs, always their own sharpest critics, sum up Words and Music most eloquently on the two tracks that bookend it. The finale, like "Teenage Winter" seven years ago, uses spoken-word narration to describe a life lived with music, only this time in an optimistic sense. But it's the opening "Over the Border", with its loving reflections on youthful music fandom, that perfectly distills the album's theme: "I used 'Top of the Pops' as my world atlas." Past Saint Etienne albums have paid loving homage to London. This time, as the album art reinforces, they've wisely realized their real home town is global pop culture. In other words, they're your neighbors.

Choir of Young Believers: Rhine Gold

Eric Harvey — Tue, 22 May 2012 00:00:04 -0500

Up-and-coming songwriters wanting to make a Big Art-Rock Album with broad appeal are faced with a number of quandaries, apart from how to get the 12-piece synthesizer rig into the tour van. How to balance grandiosity and chops with catchiness? It's no easy task: The four-plus decades after Procol Harum and Soft Machine are littered with countless failed attempts to merge pomp and pop. But it's one that Copenhagen group Choir of Young Believers are up to on their second LP, Rhine Gold, a hook-laden prog-pop opus for indie rock's post-"Holocene" moment. Sure, they may have a moniker seemingly derived from a Sufjan Stevens band name generator and a swollen lineup that necessitates two adjoining tables at between-gig truck stops. But they've created a set of songs that successfully bridges whatever currently falls under the heading of "post rock" with the flanneliest of the past five years of American indie, and doesn't take itself too seriously along the way.

I'm speculating here, but it seems obvious to me that singer and songwriter Jannis Noya Makrigiannis starts his process by writing straightforward melodies, then stretches them out with brief detours and production flourishes without abandoning the simple core idea. On the gently psychedelic highlight "Sedated", for instance, a punchy, taut bassline and clip-clopping percussion are overlaid with a lead guitar line and vocal that gently ripple like sheets on a clothesline. This gives way to the hook: a gently eerie thing in which Makrigiannis floats above it all, gently buffeted by staccato piano plinks, before a quick string stab segues us back to do it all over again. You only have to listen once to understand this, but it ends with one of the more well-earned thunderclap sound effects you're bound to hear this year. Trust me: If you loved Midlake's "Roscoe" and Yeasayer's "2080", go ahead and drag this one to your "best of 2012" playlist.

In the context of the album, "Sedated" comes right after the slick "Patricia's Thirst", which both shows CYB's range and solidifies their recognizable sound. The spooky, quasi-Orientalist synth lines are uncanny-valley early MTV (not unlike those of the band's Ghostly International peers School of Seven Bells), but then Makrigiannis' soft tenor pilots the refrain heavenward again. It's a wonderful, perfectly executed pop moment that still manages to sneak up on me every time. Moments like these are in no short supply on Rhine, which is both exquisitely produced and has personality to spare. If you hear "Paralyze" and assume it's locking into the umpteenth motorik rehash, stick around for a few minutes (you do have 10 minutes, after all) as the band playfully tweaks the form a few times. I don't think I've ever heard a band successfully rev back onto the Autobahn quite like this.

Speaking of tweaking recognizable ideas, there's the matter of Makrigiannis' singing voice. It's a boyish, woodstained yowl that instantly suggests Ben Bridwell and Jim James, particularly when he lets it loose, which he does fairly often. As a result, about a third of Rhine Gold sounds pretty damn American, in the best possible way. The late-album one-two punch of "Nye Nummer Et" and "Paint New Horrors" surround the sepia-toned expansiveness of "The Funeral" and "Wordless Chorus" with sighing strings and off-kilter arrangements to great effect. Album opener "The Third Time" slowly takes shape over the first minute and a half of Rhine like a time-lapse sunrise rising through two mountain peaks, and when I initially heard Makrigiannis' voice appear without knowing his Danish address, I hurriedly typed down "Americana Sigur Rós." Copenhagen is separated from Reykjavik by about 1,300 miles of chilly sea, but like their Hopelandish bretheren, Choir of Young Believers have created a singular sonic world all their own. They don't let you get comfortable for too long at a stretch, but their itchy curiosity is its own reward.

Simian Mobile Disco: Unpatterns

Jess Harvell — Tue, 22 May 2012 00:00:03 -0500

The middle ground is dangerous territory when it comes to dance music. Simian Mobile Disco have existed there, uneasily, for over five years now. Making things difficult for themselves, SMD try to borrow from both ends of the spectrum without ever fully embracing lowbrow or highbrow, all-grins fun or fearsomely precise grooves. 2007's debut, Attack Decay Sustain Release, is their only album to really tackle the combination head-on, and probably not so coincidentally, it's also still their best. On Attack, SMD brought the underground's attention to detail and bubblegum dance's playfulness to what might have otherwise been churned-out bangers. They remembered the starkest acid tracks and the most cavernous bleep experiments were once played alongside stupid-fresh (or plain dumb-assed) hip-house foolishness.

If you haven't heard a thing SMD's done since Attack, you might think Unpatterns is the work of a completely different act. It's probably the most low-key and dazzle-averse SMD album yet. Gone are the sassy rollerskate-jam vocals and fat-bottomed rhythm tracks, along with any hint of rock-band bombast or hip-hop swagger. If all those sound like things that make life worth living, you may wish to proceed with caution. These 10 tracks build slowly, each crisp element added to the mix with a watchmaker's patience, and at their most energetic they're still pretty laid-back. SMD want part of the pleasure to be hearing that ingenuity in action, how you can build from just a rustle of synthetic snare drum to complex climax, all without going for obvious crowd-pleasing moves. It's not minimalism, at least in sense of your more acetic art-techno types, all scrawny sonics and inhibited groove. It's more like populist forms-- banging jack tracks on "Put Your Hands Together", lush deep house on "Seraphim"-- stripped back to the most essential parts.

When it works, it's thrilling because SMD can provoke an emotional response, make you swoon or tense up or bust in-seat dance moves, with almost nothing, as if trying to one-up all those other producers who need luscious chord changes, rude basslines, over-the-top diva interjections, etc. But while these tracks want your total attention, they're just as often best appreciated as ambient with a lingering taste of club music, something that passes the time pleasantly enough without really sticking. SMD want these subtle shifts in beat and synth to sound momentous, but their desire for nuance sometimes get the better of them, the results crisply rendered but without any visceral hook or ear-engaging compositional oddness, the extras that makes even the most intellectual-minded dance music compulsively replayable. When disconnected bleeps on "Cerulean" finally resolve themselves into an astringent hook, just in time for the gentle beat to drop, it's clearly meant to be a nerve-tingling dancefloor epiphany, even if you're parked on your keester nowhere near a club. But the whole thing's so dainty and fussy that it provokes a shrug rather than a shudder, and it's too beholden to DJ formula to go anywhere surprising, to play with the really out-there kids in art-techno's first-rank.

The lackluster stuff on Unpatterns isn't a chore, the way smarty-pants dance can be when producers mistake restraint or difficult as intrinsically interesting qualities. But it does make you realize that one of SMD's gifts, as a rock band that defected into the dance world, was a fearlessness at incorporating elements (singing, bridges, dynamics) shrugged off by techno aesthetes who too often confuse monotonous with hypnotic. (It's not surprising that your ears will perk up every time a vocal drops in on Unpatterns.) The last few SMD discs have gone either all-pop or all-weird, with wildly different results, quality-wise and otherwise. 2009's Temporary Pleasure erred by making the duo's crass hunger to crossover a little too overt for comfort, stuffing itself with limp performances by ringer guest singers and trying to pass off over-fussed loop music as radio-ready. (You know, just minus the songs.) 2010's Delicacies could almost be heard as a band recoiling from an obvious mistake. The darker, stranger tracks offered few concessions to SMD's original dance-curious rock fanbase, even if the album occasionally tipped into the kind of rote "stripped-down" groove-making that's been everywhere in the last decade.

And that's where they've decided to stay, apparently, even if Unpatterns backs away from the darkness and moves tentatively toward the pleasure principle once again. This album may lack the wonky heights of Delicacies. It also stays far, far away from the cheeseball lows that stunk up Temporary Pleasure, something for which I guess we should be thankful. SMD are still stuck in the middle, and if they've finally happened on a formula that goes down smoothly for the length of a whole album, you may still find yourself missing the slick tricks and rough edges, all that dance-as-rock oomph and crap rapping, that once made them so endearing.

Grass Widow: Internal Logic

Lindsay Zoladz — Tue, 22 May 2012 00:00:02 -0500

San Francisco trio Grass Widow borrow from a number of proudly retro sounds: surf rock, post-punk, and minimalist indie pop. But the band's most distinct, and even quietly innovative, quality is its vocals: Guitarist Raven Mahon, bassist Hannah Lew, and drummer Lillian Maring all sing, their voices colliding in off-kilter, prismatic harmonies. This vocal approach gives their songs a diffuse, uncanny atmosphere: At times, their bouncy tunes sound like Raincoats songs that have become lost in a hall of mirrors.

Since 2009, Grass Widow have honed this technique on a couple of increasingly solid albums-- the best being their 2010 Kill Rock Stars release Past Time-- but their latest, Internal Logic, is the first where they sound in total command of their sound. Past Time songs like "Tuesday" had a gleeful, teetering dynamism about them, vocal melodies and guitar lines jutting out in all directions. On Internal Logic, though, all the moving parts work together with the barebones utility of a go-kart. Mahon's riffs have a motorik, low-end grumble, Maring's drumming a steady sputter, and a rubbery propulsion to Lew's basslines; the harmonies float up around these tight arrangements like exhaust, woozy-sweet. "Flying past the buildings," they sing on the album's first single, "Milo Minute", and you can almost feel the wind mussing up your hair.

There's evidence all over Internal Logic that Grass Widow have spent the two years since Past Time tightening up their sound. The angular, warbling energy that animates lead-off track "Goldilocks Zone" or the strolling, mid-tempo vibe of "Under the Atmosphere" suggest a band that isn't interested in adding new and extraneous elements to its sound; instead, they're engaged in smart, subtle tune-ups, in learning how to make more with less. And if that sounds like DIY 101, it's not off the mark: Internal Logic is also the first release on their own label HLR (Hannah Lillian Raven) Records.

The songs on Internal Logic are like triple-exposed photographs, their nebulous, hazy qualities occasionally belying the acute skill with which they've been composed. "It's not right/ Woke up in a different time," goes the three-part harmony on the buoyant "Disappearing Industries", and the line's sense of displacement is a fitting description of their sound. It feels fortunate that Grass Widow arrived on the scene a few years too late to be lumped in with the mid-aughts post-punk revival, because they've honed an approach that feels more personal and self-contained than it does trendy. Grass Widow pluck from the sounds of the past and then piece them back together with a logic all their own.

Andrew Weatherall: Masterpiece

Nick Neyland — Tue, 22 May 2012 00:00:01 -0500

Some artists fall ass-backwards into the zeitgeist, ending up there due to the singularity of their vision instead of any desire to remain abreast of current trends. The career of Andrew Weatherall is a product of his instinctual way of hearing, of feeling out sounds and slotting them together in unexpected ways. This is true of his work as a DJ, remixer, producer, and as a musician. Whenever he's surfaced at the forefront of a movement-- working with label and zine Boys Own in the early acid house days, helping indie and dance seep into one another via his seminal production on Primal Scream's "Loaded"-- he always played a part in actively devising those worlds. His career is marked by a continual reinvention as the most unassuming type of leader, although Weatherall would probably regard that description as a pejorative term, especially given the haste with which he flees from anything that could be described as a "scene." Usually he doesn't even wait until his ideas reach critical mass, instead choosing to disappear in a puff of smoke, already lost deep in a broad range of new fascinations.

Masterpiece is a 3xCD set in a series of the same name devised by Ministry of Sound, which allows artists ample space to mix up past and present favorites. Weatherall chose to theme his mixes around his most recent club venture, A Love from Outer Space, conducted with his long-term accomplice Sean Johnston at a tiny dive bar in Stoke Newington in London. The simple manifesto of the club, "never knowingly exceeding 122bpm," is roughly adhered to here, and has partially led to a coining of the term "cosmic disco" to describe the music played within its sweat-soaked walls. There's something about the whole package that neatly ties together Weatherall's approach to his work, from his bemusement in the sleeve notes about the "cosmic disco" moniker to the not inconsiderable fact that the club just ended its residency in Stoke Newington. Once again he's moved on just as the outside world is catching up, although we do at least have this memento to chew on and the promise of isolated ALFOS club nights across the globe.

The name of the club is pulled from the A.R. Kane "i" cut "A Love From Outer Space", and versions of the track bookend this compilation. The opener is from Weatherall's new band with producer Timothy J. Fairplay, the Asphodells, and the third disc closes out with the A.R. Kane original. It's a fitting way to seal up both ends of Masterpiece, because the influence of the semi-legendary dreampop outfit continually bobs to the surface, whether it's in the skysawing guitars of the Horrors' "Wild Eyed" (presented here in its Weatherall remix) or through the sunken astral-dub of Aquarius Heaven's reworking of "Decontrol" by the Subs. It speaks highly of Weatherall's intuitive way of detecting musical sea changes that his club has been obsessing over A.R. Kane for the past two years. It's not hard to hear their influence weaving in and out of a number of acts (Peaking Lights, Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland, Tame Impala) currently flitting between similar light and dark pop impulses on both sides of the Atlantic.

So Weatherall's radar remains firmly intact, but all three mixes here additionally demonstrate his broad pallet and his idiosyncratic way of forging links between the underground and more populist fare. Weatherall is a big-picture thinker, who can step back from tightly clustered musical cliques to find common ground in the impeccable glide of Todd Terje's "Ragysh", the ragged rock of Glasgow quartet Sons & Daughters, and the watery psych passages of Wooden Shjips' "Crossing". Anyone taking a cursory glance at the track listing might be befuddled at how it all works together, but that's a Weatherall trademark, a feeling he's often distilled when his name is affixed to record labels belonging to acts as diverse as the Twilight Sad, James, and My Bloody Valentine. Like all the best mixes, the joins rarely show, and familiar tracks act as gateways into unexplored worlds, such as the impeccable slide from Weatherall's glacial reworking of Cut Copy's "Sun God" into Bulgarian producer Bogdan Irkük's raw minimalism on "My Weakness".

For Weatherall, all good DJ sets offer some form of education, whether it's being introduced to someone like Irkük or hearing a new twist on an older track, such as the reggae-ified version of Primal Scream's "Uptown" from the largely forgotten-about Beautiful Future. "It's pompous to expect a history lesson when you go out [to a club], but that's how it should be," Weatherall says in the sleeve notes. Masterpiece also offers a few lessons on the current. Fairplay, in particular, offers a couple of impressive tracks, notably on a remix of "The Final Reel" that plays out like an instrumental version of New Order indulging all their Death in Vegas circa "Dirt" fantasies. "The Final Reel" is balanced on the kind of line Weatherall frequently likes to tread, with its roots firmly in the underground he inhabits, but strung out with so many hooks that it could easily court a wider audience with the right push behind it.

In a sense, that's the path Weatherall's talent has led him on throughout his career, causing demand to far outstrip supply in the intimate club experiences he cultivates. Small nights he's worked (Shoom, Sabersonic, A Love from Outer Space) blossom because of the sense of community and inclusion they create, where audio secrets don't remain that way for long and are excitedly shared with the wider world by those lucky enough to get through the door. It's why we're left with Masterpiece offering us further in-roads into Weatherall's current mindset, and it's why ALFOS was destined to end up overflowing with people banging down its door from the moment it was conceived. But this is the best kind of way to quit, before the buzz starts to fade, before the flab starts to show, before a sense of trading on past glories begins to kick in. Weatherall knows it's time to say goodbye when it feels like the rest of the world is looking over his shoulder. At least this album made sure we got some generous signposts left behind.

Mount Eerie: Clear Moon

Jayson Greene — Tue, 22 May 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Phil Elverum, the force behind the Microphones and Mount Eerie, lives in a small town of just under 20,000 people town called Anacortes in Washington, about 64 miles outside of Seattle. As he told Brandon Stosuy in last week's Pitchfork interview, he recently took an extended break from touring to record two albums there, and he speaks of it as a calming, recentering time: "The songs and the ideas came from a more slowed-down attention to this particular place, this town, walking from my house to the studio and back every day," Elverum told him. The second album of the pair, to be called Ocean Roar, will be out later this year; Elverum calls it "more challenging and weird and darker and heavier." For now, however, he has given us Clear Moon, an album that makes a vast, cool sanctuary of itself and quietly beckons you in. Inscrutable and transfixing, plainspoken and unknowable, it feels like a collection of secrets Elverum has cupped in his palm to pour directly, and privately, into your ear alone, a rich meditation on the many meanings of the word "home."

"I go on describing this place/ And the way it feels to live and die" is how Elverum summarizes his task on Clear Moon in the album's opening song, "Through the Trees, Pt. 2". The line also neatly serves as any great writer's ultimate mission statement: Your backyard is a gateway to the universe, if you look hard enough. Note the song title's tricky numerology: We seem to be joining Elverum in the middle of an ongoing, possibly endless cataloging task. (Elverum, of course, has a documented fondness for "Pt. 2's".) The song names all have the quality of bullet points in some strange thesis: "The Place Lives", the second song, is followed by "The Place I Live", and it feels like Elverum is using these phrases to draw some obscure distinctions that are very important to him. "If I look/ Or if I don't look/ Clouds are always passing over," he sings on "The Place I Live". It's a statement that can read as perversely comforting or profoundly depressing-- the universe doesn't disappear when I blink, on the one hand, and the universe wouldn't blink if I disappeared, on the other. Elverum's sighed inflection cradles both of these meanings with equal gentleness.

The album's sound, meanwhile has the misty-but-tactile feeling of a sense memory. Every sound echoes from side to side of the mix, and the effect isn't so much "panning" as it is a shimmering omnipresence. Acoustic guitars, light keyboards, muted but persistent drums-- the sounds on Clear Moon feel like anxious, living beings that are trying to whisper something to you that you don't want to know. "Lone Bell" is the moment where Elverum's existential quandaries suddenly sprout fangs and grow frightening: Sharp horn blats and insistently hammering guitars evoke fight-or-flight dread, danger, encroaching panic. The bassline keeps crawling up a modal minor scale in the center of the song, posing the same uneasy question, over and over.

What that question is remains deliciously out of verbal range, but Clear Moon's brought a sharp memory into relief for me: It reminded me of standing outside of my house as a child, on a cold night. From the street, the house, broadcasting its fragile comfort out to me, looked a little unreal: Elverum calls a song on the album "House Shape". You know you will be allowed back in, but you stand for a prolonged moment, looking into the lit windows, and tasting something uneasy in your mouth. Clear Moon summons, inhabits, and distends this moment for 42 consecutive minutes.

Pinkish Black: Pinkish Black

Grayson Currin — Mon, 21 May 2012 00:00:04 -0500

Drummer Jon Teague and vocalist Daron Beck have been conjuring darkness together for years. After playing separately in a series of heavy Texas bands, they formed the fantastic shape-shifting doom-jazz group the Great Tyrant. The trio finished its sole album, There's a Man in the House, in 2008, but didn't unveil it until late last year via a largely overlooked limited vinyl release. That was too late for bassist Tommy Atkins, who killed himself in February 2010, leaving Teague and Beck to rearrange and relaunch their vicious blend of heavy metal and chamber rock as a duo. Pinkish Black is the debut from their new sans-bass duo of the same name, itself a tender if morbid tribute to the color of the blood-spattered bathroom walls where Atkins' body was found. Still, despite the long-running and tangled partnership of its makers, this seven-track LP feels like a fresh start-- for better and worse.

Pinkish Black revolves around a convincing core identity of dense themes and dark imagery. At their best, these songs are thick, powerful thuds, with rubber band-like distorted bass from a keyboard growling between dynamic drums, teasing synthesizer lines, and vocals that push between operatic majesty and guttural infamy. "Fall Down" is the most systemic and convincing embrace of all of those features, with a sinister swing that recalls vintage Swans. The duo thrusts in the verses beneath lines about inevitable failure, appropriately delivered with the fervor of an apocalypse prophet. In the chorus, there's a sense of relief that borders on Walker Brothers grandiosity; Teague eases back against the drums, and Beck lifts his voice, like a young Bruce Dickinson calling for help from a basement. "Tell Her I'm Dead" evokes a similar whiplash, snapping time and again between a hypnotic, stoner-metal groove; spasmodic Naked City bursts; and a shrieking, knotty drone. Especially here, Teague and Beck sound impressively developed, especially for a relatively new duo. Their tones and timing are excellent, the work of two people who've collaborated long enough to know how they sound together in a room and, subsequently, on record.

But Teague and Beck seem uncommitted to that aforementioned anchor, a symptom that's perhaps a holdover from the Great Tyrant's stylistic sprawls. They pepper these tracks with distractions, as if to provide either a little levity or disruption on a set of songs that gain the most ground when they grind a tempo and tune into it. "Tastes Like Blood", for instance, opens with a piano-and-voice dirge about giving up, creating an unnecessary impasse between the perfectly belligerent "Tell Her I'm Dead" and the song's massive, nearly symphonic coda. It professes Pinkish Black's Scott Walker adoration explicitly, even though the band remains more compelling when that's a surprising accent of prettiness within the mire, not a substitute for it. "Everything Went Dark" begins with a short tape collage-- perhaps a Frank Zappa nod, but nevertheless a pointless hindrance to the genuinely hooky two-minute hit that follows. If the interlude has a purpose, it must be to convince Pinkish Black newcomers that they're more than an Om cover band; the mantric march that opens the album, "Bodies in Tow", might have suggested otherwise.

What's best about Pinkish Black, then, is also what's least successful about the record: It plays like a music-nerd game of Name That Influence, where the proper answers range from Suicide and Rapeman to Gary Numan and Throbbing Gristle. It's a good LP with a lot of great moments, then, an album by a band that exudes promise and, in just one attempt, almost fulfills it. Think of these 34 minutes as a first trip to a cool new friend's house. They try to impress you with their cared-for record collection. The thrill of hearing new sounds, however, will almost inevitably be beset when the new pal overreaches or undershoots, mixing some stuff that doesn't actually belong with songs you've already heard plenty. In the end, maybe it will finally be be the start of something great.

Jimmy Edgar: Majenta

Larry Fitzmaurice — Mon, 21 May 2012 00:00:03 -0500

The sound of bass music is constantly mutating, and the UK label Hotflush has certainly played a part in that over the last nine months. While many of its recent singles still toy with big grooves, crisp hi-hats, and deep rumble, its releases have taken on a sonic guise that's straightforwardly melodic and, at times, pink-hued and romantic. Last year saw the release of Braille and Machinedrum's self-titled debut LP as Sepalcure, an adventurous record that explored sensual depths while appropriating sonic signifiers from assorted dance sub-genres; this year has brought the open-hearted second album from label head Paul Rose's Scuba project, Personality, as well as Scottish producer Beaumont's Never Love Me EP, which threw lush Italo synths into the mix and came adorned with the kind of artwork that Drive fetishists could get airbrushed onto the back of a leather jacket.

It makes sense, then, that Detroit producer and fashion photographer Jimmy Edgar is releasing his latest record, Majenta, on Rose's label, even if the team-up itself wasn't premeditated. (Edgar says this move came about after a dinner conversation with Rose and Sepalcure's Travis Stewart and Praveen Sharma.) As an under-30 with a career spanning more than a decade, Edgar's music strays just about as far from bass music proper as you can get. He works with a variety of sounds, from the type of techno that's closely associated with his hometown, to seedy, dank electro, to window-fogging, pitched-vocal R&B. Dance music by definition is made to move bodies, and so is Edgar's-- only, in his case, in the type of way that could get someone slapped with lewdness charges.

That is to say, Jimmy Edgar is insatiable. He loves talking about sex, singing about sex, referencing sex. This is a man whose most notable track in his eight years with Warp was titled "I Wanna Be Your STD", and who called his last album XXX (only after he decided to change it from its working title, Deeper). Majenta is similarly soaked in low-art sleaze; just scanning the tracklist ("Sex Drive", "Touch Yr Bodytime", "Hrt Real Good", "In Deep") is enough to make you question whether you really want to hear what the Majenta cut "This One's for the Children" is all about. (Not to worry: it's just your run-of-the-mill "Up with people, down with the system" slice of Detroit techno.)

Suffice to say, Edgar really overdoes it on the sex stuff, moreso than on the other albums he's put out in the last decade. It's not that dance music can't be carnal, but that everyone's idea of what's "sexy" isn't the same, so presenting a specific expression of sexuality as a universal representation is a dangerous tightrope walk. At his core, Jimmy Edgar is a hippie, if a bit of a ridiculous-sounding one (he claims in the album's press release that he's recently "made galactic contact with the community"), but the only way Majenta could bring people together is if they were convening to nervously giggle at Edgar's various trying-too-hard vocal turns, which come across as erotic as reading Fifty Shades of Gray on the subway.

Musically, Majenta initially seems better than XXX, only because the lack of uniformity that plagued the latter LP means that the former's standouts-- the warm, skipping vocal house of "Let Yrself Be", electro-bass near-twins "Indigo Mechanix (3D)", and "In Deep"-- stand out that much more. Unfortunately, more than mediocre tracks or throaty sexual goofs, what does in Majenta is its scattershot nature. There's no flow to the way the album's sequenced, to the point where it seems purely arbitrary. Furthermore, Edgar seems so concerned about skipping between genres that he neglects to refine any one specific sound; even the strongest cuts rarely rise above "nice try." Edgar is clearly aiming for some sort of climax-- spiritually, musically, sexually-- but by the time Majenta sputters to a close, all he's left with is a mess on his hands.

Baio: Sunburn EP

Hari Ashurst — Mon, 21 May 2012 00:00:02 -0500

For all the big hooks and pop appeal, Vampire Weekend have always shown more than a few interesting sides to their music, including West African keyboard tones, hyper-lyrical twists, and percussion that is more likely to interlock than simply keep time. Chris Baio's bass playing is a key part of the band's signature rhythmic palette and always has a jaunty bounce to it. His first solo outing in the form of a short EP titled Sunburn not only feels connected to his playing in Vampire Weekend but also extends far from anything on his 9-to-5 band's records.

"Sunburn Modern" relocates Vampire Weekend's staple West-African influence to somewhere around the Balearic islands. The skeleton of the song is made from a trio of lightly tapped bongos, balmy vocal stabs, and an electronic bassline that leaves heavy footprints. That bedrock is rhythmic with Baio teasing out all sorts of neat interplay around a 4/4 beat. The rest follows a deceptively simple format; keys track the slow but purposeful movements of the bass while whispering synth-strings provide a touch of melancholy for shading. The song isn't too far away from the ideas Air France were mining on No Way Down, and Baio achieves a similar vibe of sun-bleached bliss.

Despite the brevity of Sunburn (just three tracks) it's impressive how easily Baio puts down a marker. That he spends most of his time playing bass makes total sense in this context, too: each element on this record is consumed with rhythm and pacing. Even the big melody lines come from percussive instruments or sounds. Consider highlight "Tanto", for example: Steel drums drive its early momentum before Chilean vocalist and experimenter Matias Aguayo opens things up with a characteristically choppy, rhythmic take full of depth and motion. Aguayo might not be singing anything in particular, but the gentle, precise movement of his chant-like vocal is both fun and strangely euphoric. The song truly approaches the point of bliss when Baio sweeps away the clutter halfway through, allowing those vocals, a dewy keyboard, and finger snaps to hang in the air for just a minute.

Baio's rhythmic approach comes undone on the EP's one weak spot, "Anonymity", showing there's still a little way to go for his solo efforts: The beats fall too straight, and the whole thing ends up feeling undercooked. That said, it's difficult to draw many conclusions from such a slim set of songs, and most of the time the humid fun of Sunburn's best moments make for enjoyable, nicely transportive stuff.

Dope Body: Natural History

Aaron Leitko — Mon, 21 May 2012 00:00:01 -0500

On their debut album, Nupping, Dope Body hit loft-show paydirt by splicing noise-rock with melodies salvaged from the junkyard of 1990s FM radio. That may sound like an unpalatable combo, but the Baltimore four-piece used each genre to subvert the other's worst tendencies. A swatch of Red Hot Chili Peppers homage could complicate the menace from a song stacked with splintering feedback. A few atonal squelches helped tweak a pummeling riff's macho momentum. The result was heavy music that possessed moments of levity but avoided parody. Now, perhaps weary of having Anthony Kiedis comparisons lobbed at them, Dope Body have backed away from the butt-rock influences.

On their follow up, Natural History, they've chilled out a bit. Maybe some of the mystical neo-Americana vibes championed by their new label, Drag City, have rubbed off on them. The first sound on the album isn't a blast of feedback but the tingling of wind chimes. That song, "Shook", lilts back and forth on a languid two-chord vamp with frontman Andrew Laumann grunting quasi-mystical pronouncements, striking closer to Lungfish's Daniel Higgs than Zack de la Rocha. "Crystallize the eyes/ Let them know you can feel it/ I feel it all around," he grunts.

Even in its most jittery, Nintendo-nostalgic moments, Natural History is a roomier effort than its predecessor. On Nupping, guitarist Zach Utz loaded songs with sonic belches and abstract gurgles. This time he's more selective with the audio-graffiti. His playing has taken a more melodic turn, incorporating elements from Holy Ghost Party, his tropical-psych guitar side project with Dope Body drummer David Jacober. On "Weird Mirror" he plots out a pattern of robot-rock riffs that make the band sound like the Cars channeling San Francisco sci-fi proto-punk duo, Chrome.

Brutishness is still Dope Body's forte, though, and they haven't abandoned it. During the chorus to "Road Dog", Laumann gets inspirational, chanting the lines, "Do what you want to do... Be who you want to be." But he barks the words like a gym teacher on the edge of blowing his anger-management course, commanding listeners to either self-actualize or drop and give him 20. "Out of My Mind" churns like an off-center cement mixer, with a bassline that probably owes a few royalties to Soundgarden's "Slaves and Bulldozers".

It's one of the only flickers of 90s worship on Natural History, but there are still plenty of moments when the line between goofball antics and freakish punk-rock blowouts gets blurred. They may have changed up their game, but Dope Body still nail the sweet spot between savagery and self-awareness.

El-P: Cancer for Cure

Jeff Weiss — Mon, 21 May 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Even the best relationships acquire baggage. Circa 1999, Def Jux forged a fiefdom from the ashes of vinyl champs Fondle 'Em and the soon-to-be-ruined promise of Rawkus. "Independent as fuck" was the mantra, and for those wondering why MF Doom and the Roots couldn't get airplay, it may well have been a war cry.

Until Russell Simmons took a temporary sabbatical from model mongering to threaten a trademark-infringement lawsuit, even Def Jux's name riffed on (Darth) Def Jam, the rap overlord at its greased-up and growling Ruff Ryders, Jigga, and Ja Rule apex. But back when the "Underground" was tagged in capital letters, the promise of an alternate subterranean grid seemed infinite. Fat Beats did booming business. Hip-hop culture mags cropped up to survey the soundbombing. Clinton was President. Gas was $1 per gallon. A Bellevue-certified eccentric like Kool Keith could get Doctor Octagon dough from Dreamworks to squander in and around the West Hollywood IHOP.

During that last spring of the 20th Century, Rawkus Records released Soundbombing II-- an Underground Now That's What I Call Music!-- that banged incessantly in dorm rooms across America and England. It marked the first and only time Eminem and El-P shared space on wax. Yet it didn't feel that weird at the time. People still used the phrase "on wax" and Shady had only recently signed to Interscope. To balance his quality time with Dr. Dre, Marshall Mathers also worked with people like Thirstin Howl III and Outsidaz. As the demented fan from "Stan" said: "I like that shit you did with Rawkus too, that shit was phat." Not only did people still use the word "phat," they opted to build clothing lines around it.

You can trace the genesis of El-P's solo career back to Soundbombing II's "Patriotism". A five-minute fulguration to American culture and the military-industrial complex, it was credited to Company Flow, but his one-time rhyme partner Bigg Jus sat on the sidelines. The next year, the group released its final single, "DPA". It was the second release on the fledgling Def Jux and doubled as a mission statement. This is "heart of darkness," El-P fulminated and as if to prove his point, George W. Bush "won" the Electoral College several months later. He may have been referencing Joseph Conrad, but the Brooklyn bomber soon received a bête noire worthy of Richard Nixon and Raoul Duke. The new imprint existed to chronicle the fear and loathing. And by 2007's I'll Sleep When You're Dead, he confessed to "a gonzomatic fear turning [him] Hunter S. Thompson."

At least that was the image that took root. The reality was more and less sophisticated. Bizarro attempts to break the mold with funk-fusionists Chin Chin and the original Lonely Island, Party Fun Action Committee, rarely received the attention they deserved. Nor did the mutant howls of Camu Tao, whose genre-clobbering experimentation influenced Kid Cudi, Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire, and Danny Brown. Luck didn't lend itself to the Def Jux enterprise. Rjd2 could have re-made Deadringer a half-dozen times, and both label and artist could have reaped that soccer mom Moby licensing money. Instead, he ditched turntables for the microphone, signed to XL, and offered prayers to the mustache of John Oates. Meanwhile, meal tickets Cannibal Ox couldn't get it together for a sophomore album and were last seen wandering lost around the Gardens of Asgard.

That's a lot to deal with for any label head, let alone one tasked to redesign the Delorean every five years. It's hard enough to rap and make beats professionally, never mind having to worry about C-Rayz Walz wanting help with his 401(k). Factor in the ravages of online piracy and the tragic death of Camu Tao, and bombing the system seemed like the only obvious option. Yet what might've been most damning was that Def Jux became imprisoned by ideals that belonged to a different era. Even if most of their artists had long outgrown the "Us vs. Them" mentality, outside perception didn't always chart the progression.

By now, Eminem was making 12-step anthems for trailer trash. Soundbombing II star Common was allowed to wear angora and cinematically woo Queen Latifah with his low-post moves. But El-P and by proxy Definitive Jux were stereotyped with opinions like the one A$AP Worldwide co-founder Yams offered earlier this year: Company Flow fans don't buy A$AP Rocky records. Maybe that was true 10 years ago (if A$AP Rocky been out of Junior High), but the truth had become closer to El-P's response: I'm in Company Flow and I listen to A$AP. It was the rap equivalent of the Battle of New Orleans. The cease-fire had been signed, but there was one last conflict before putting the era to sleep.

With the exception of the Jay-Z/Kanye/Young Money/Rozay axis, the rap game has largely flattened out (or bottomed out, depending on your angle). A guy like Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire can get a deal from Universal after releasing a free mixtape over old Necro and El-P beats. Waka Flocka fronts this month's XXL, but Killer Mike and El-P get second billing alongside Chief Keef, Curren$y, and Slaughterhouse. 2Chainz is playing Rock the Bells. Things are more similar than they've seemed in a long time.

Cancer 4 Cure is both reinvention and inversion. El-P's first album since putting Def Jux on hiatus in early 2010 marks a break from the old order and another call to arms. Whereas Fantastic Damage served as a Def Jux coming out party and I'll Sleep When You're Dead synthesized the sweaty jitters of the mid-Dubya daze, Cancer 4 Cure consciously creates its own iron galaxy. None of the Def Jukies appear, save for Despot. In their stead are eXquire, Danny Brown, and a snarling Killer Mike, whose El-P produced R.A.P. Music is already the front-runner for rap album of the year. Any one of their guest spots could be a hip-hop quotable, if we still lived at a time when people cared about the Hip Hop Quotable. But my vote goes to Danny Brown, self-described as "Ric Flair/ With thick hair/ Yelling out 'woo'/ Getting head in the director's chair."

Cancer 4 Cure's closest analogue may be Portishead's Third: the textures and tones are distinctly different from past releases, but it's unimaginable that it could be made by anyone else. El-P has described the record as fight music abstracted. To be more specific, it's fight or flight music. Primal response mechanism rap. And like any good storyteller, his narratives are rooted in conflict. On "Tougher Colder Killer", El-P inhabits the mindset of a soldier haunted by post-traumatic stress, who made "his enemy dig his own grave at the point of a gun." "For My Upstairs Neighbor" finds the protagonist getting grilled by cops about a domestic violence situation in his apartment building. He tells "Columbo" nothing, but later confronts the abuse victim in the stairwell and whispers to her, "do the thing you have to and I swear I'll tell them nothing." Meanwhile, "Works Every Time" is a drug dealer dialectic between the urge to self-medicate and the consequences of the obliteration.

The closest thing the record has to a love song is "The Jig Is Up", where the hook uses the words of Groucho Marx to describe a relationship: "I wouldn't want to be a part of any club that would have me." Even "Sign Here", a song grappling with sexual power issues uses an interrogation room as a metaphorical backdrop. You don't need me tell you that it's heavy. It's a record from El-P, a man who could make Pollyanna see poltergeists. But to balance out the hangman's tension, there's "Drones over BKLYN" and "The Full Retard", two clavicle-cracking rants reminiscent of the old El-P, with rhymes "short and fat like Joe Pesci" that would "slap you out of your fucking shit."

The beats. The synths sound like they've been stolen from a bargain bin on Alpha Centauri, stocked with futuristic workout anthems for robot soldiers. Listening to it in daylight hours can make you feel allergic to sunlight. Most rumble at 130 to 140 BPM and feel uniquely congruent with and ahead of the times. After all, the producers at L.A.'s Low End Theory and the early London dubstep architects all owe a small but significant debt to El's experiments with negative space and bone-chipping bass.

What grounds the record is a scarcely subliminated obsession with death. Dedicated to Camu Tao, whose demise directly preceded its creation, the characters are forever warring with some imminent end, whether creative, romantic, or literal. It's rare when re-inventions seem so deliberate but unselfconscious. And through the struggle it gains a certain scarred freedom. It's simultaneously able to stand alone but alongside that trademark blend of sneering New York City skepticism. It sheds the bullshit of the past and is stained with the weary residue of an incalculable number of cigarettes, weed deliveries, bodega runs, and blind turns. It's the best kind of tribute El-P could make: a record that you can pump like they do in the future.